Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Conscience of The Machine

Conscience of The Machine

Li, Yunyun
Cato, Brian

Paperback

Literary Fiction

ISBN10: 1453604715
ISBN13: 9781453604717
Publisher: Createspace
Published: May 31 2010
Pages: 150
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.32 Width: 5.24 Depth: 7.99
Language: English
Science is on the cusp of determining that there is a physiological basis for everything we think and feel. It is but a short hop further away from declaring, like Nietzsche of God, that free will is dead. Soon our every impulse will be traced to a neurotransmitter, our will reduced to a biochemical afterthought. CONSCIENCE OF THE MACHINE is both a critique and a defense of our conception of our identity at the precise moment that it comes under sharpest attack by scientific reductionism. The lives of troubled student Bobby Rosen, his ultra-competent teacher Emma Browne, and the brilliant failure Principal Harvey McNair intersect at the surreal implement of punishment known only as The Machine. Each faces a personal crisis that jolts them out of the sleep of habit, the haze of subconscious autopilot in which we persist day by day. As they struggle against the genetics and experiences which have shaped them, each must come to grips with the fact that large swaths of their minds seem beyond their control. Yet each has the opportunity to make a simple decision, to flip the switch like a Tibetan monk meditating over happiness, and remap the biochemical pathways of their brains through sheer will alone. Their intertwined troubles will drive one of them past the brink of sanity, into an impossible conversation with The Machine in which unexpected revelations about where machine ends and man begins unfurl. For each of them, the questions that arise are not mere idle philosophy but matters of life and death, sanity or insanity. Is our identity shaped brick by brick through a series of deliberate conscious decisions or fashioned haphazardly by unconscious, automatic responses? Are we responsible for our choices or merely witness to them?

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