Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

The Echo Maker

New York

Picador

2006

"He knew the drill: throughout history, the brain had been compared to the highest prevailing level of technology: steam engine, telephone switchboard, computer."

He knew the drill: throughout history, the brain had been compared to the highest prevailing level of technology: steam engine, telephone switchboard, computer. Now, as Weber approached his own professional zenith, the brain became the Internet, a distributed network, more than two hundred modules in loose, mutually modifying chatter with other modules. Some of Weber's tangled subsystems had gained ascendancy over most brain thinking, Weber drifted back to his origins. In what would surely be the final stage of his intellectual development, he now hoped to find, in the latest solid neuroscience, processes that looked like old depth psychology: repression, sublimation, denial, transference. Find them at some level above the module.
(p. 190)

Machine::Steam Engine Machine::Telephone Switchboard Machine::Computer

Reading

Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (New York: Picador, 2006).

06/08/2015