Joe read and liked Elaine's review of Neuropath:

"You will be enthralled with this book or disgusted by it. It is sensational, and I can see where it could be very gripping to some people. It is certainly not just a thriller, as advertised. It is a philosophical discussion of whether or not we ar...more You will be enthralled with this book or disgusted by it. It is sensational, and I can see where it could be very gripping to some people. It is certainly not just a thriller, as advertised. It is a philosophical discussion of whether or not we are just a bundle of neurocircuitry with brains acting as the controlling station for signals, or whether we trylu have minds and emotions. Much of it reminds me of philosophy, I field I abandoned in sophomore year of college in favor of more data driven knowledge. I have no quarrel with the argument that science has more and more demonstrated the neurological underpinnings of our abilities such as facial recognition and fear. Nor do I have any quarrel with the evolutionary origins of behavior. And, yes, I am sure that love originates in the care that one creature gives another. In other words, one's babies and one's dogs love one originally because you feed them, but that is not the whole story. Does that mean love is only a neurological reaction? If so, how explain that is love is withheld or one's caregiver can no longer give or one becomes independent of him or her, one stil may love that person? Harlow proved long ago that when baby monkeys had all their needs met except for love, they did not thrive. Babies in large, sterile orphanages with all their physical needs met still don't thrive without someone to love. Love is more than a reaction. Okay it developed in evolution because love and bonding better assured the survival of social species, but if evolution is merely a mechanism for survival, then why have social species at all? Why not individual species all fending for themselves with the fittest being the only survivors. This book makes the case that free will is an illusion.
Well, Bakker forgot to look in one area of science, one very concerned with neurocircuitry: linguistics. Even when we uncover all the neural pathways to understanding and speaking, we can't explain that every human has the ability to create words they've never heard, to encode messages they've never heard before, and to think new thoughts and express them using words and syntax differently from everything ever expressed before. Moreover, these novel expressionss may have nothing whatsoever to do with survival. They may be purely in the realm of fantasy, "'twas brillig and the slity toves..." Every language has the means to create new messages, to change its syntax, and to create new words or make old words do new duty. There is no limit on what can be expressed. There is no point in any language at which one can say, nothing new can be said. This infinite creativity of language requires more than preexisting neural pathways. Humans have to have consciousness, intent, desire, and, yes, love. (less) "