Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “The Mind Club” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

The Mind Club

Daniel M. Wegner,

Kurt Gray (Goodreads Author)

3.85 · Rating details · 457 ratings · 62 reviews

From dogs to gods, dive into the science of mysterious minds—including your own.

Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the “mind club.” It’s easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of ...more

Get A Copy

Or buy for

Hardcover, 416 pages

Published March 22nd 2016 by Viking

More Details... edit details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about The Mind Club, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about The Mind Club

Lists with This Book

Explaining the Mind

131 books — 41 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

3.85 ·

Rating details

· 457 ratings · 62 reviews

Filter

Sort order

May 02, 2016 Chris Branch rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction

Well, I could be wrong, but I suspect this book is primarily the work of Kurt Gray, rather than Daniel Wegner. Having read a couple of books by Wegner, as well as having taken one of his undergraduate courses back in the 80s, it just seems that the voice and tone here is different. And nothing against Gray, but I don't think this book quite measures up to Wegner's work.

The subject matter is fascinating, and well worth the book treatment. But Gray seems to be trying too hard here to be a comedian Well, I could be wrong, but I suspect this book is primarily the work of Kurt Gray, rather than Daniel Wegner. Having read a couple of books by Wegner, as well as having taken one of his undergraduate courses back in the 80s, it just seems that the voice and tone here is different. And nothing against Gray, but I don't think this book quite measures up to Wegner's work.

The subject matter is fascinating, and well worth the book treatment. But Gray seems to be trying too hard here to be a comedian, and his one liners are not as funny to me as he seems to think they should be. As popular science goes, this book is much more "pop" than science, using cutesy phrasing, vaguely relevant illustrations, and transparent hooks to try to hold the interest of readers with short attention spans.

As for the content, well, I give Gray credit for coming up with thoughtful ideas and exploring them. But I see little evidence for the effective application of his key assertion, that "There are two kinds of perceived minds, each with its own type of morality - thinking doers and vulnerable feelers". (p. 16). I mean, I suppose that might be true, and some of the examples produced in support of it are not too contrived, but it's a bit of a stretch to try to draw any explanatory conclusions from this.

In fact, there seems to be a pattern here: a study is cited, and then the next sentence is a speculative conclusion based on the results of the study, but the study results don't directly imply the conclusion. Sure, it's a possible hypothesis in many cases, but there are other possible explanations that aren't considered. For example, in making the argument that people may be inherent dualists, the author discusses a study involving babies who were shown videos in which a person seemed to teleport, and concludes with "They weren't surprised at all by a teleporting person [citation], perhaps because they expect things with minds to (at least occasionally) disobey the laws of matter [no citation]." (p. 236) Interesting idea,and people may in fact be instinctively dualist, but it's a stretch to conclude the second statement from the first.

It's also interesting and maybe a bit strange that while further elaborating on dualism, the author feels it necessary to state that "With funding from the John Templeton Foundation, our lab has experimentally tested conservation of mind across death..." The mention of Templeton, which is in the business of funding attempts to reconcile science and religion, should be a red flag for anyone interested in science as an unbiased endeavor.

So, although I was interested in the subject matter and had high expectations for this book, it unfortunately came across as rather shallower and overly speculative than I'd hoped for, and was ultimately somewhat disappointing. ...more

flag 13 likes · Like · see review

Apr 23, 2016 Alicea rated it it was amazing

How do you know that your friends and family aren't mindless zombies? Does your cat love you like you love it? Does God ever get hungry?

This book won't answer those questions but it will make you think outside of the box and ask even more questions which in my opinion is awesome. The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray was a fun ride. These two psychologists look at what makes up a 'mind' and who should be entered into the mind club (e.g. plant How do you know that your friends and family aren't mindless zombies? Does your cat love you like you love it? Does God ever get hungry?

This book won't answer those questions but it will make you think outside of the box and ask even more questions which in my opinion is awesome. The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray was a fun ride. These two psychologists look at what makes up a 'mind' and who should be entered into the mind club (e.g. plants wouldn't be included). In the opening chapter, there was a little chart which represented how mind is measured by agency (mental abilities such as self-control, morality, communication, etc) and experience (capacity to feel hunger, pain, desire, pride, etc). I had never looked at the world in this kind of framework before and it was fascinating to see that God has a lot of agency (He is seen as all powerful and knowing) but no experience (God doesn't crave a cheeseburger or a nap). This had never occurred to me before but now it seems obvious that humans consider God to be a member of the mind club but he is not a full member like we are because he has no experience. Each chapter investigates a different mind to see if they warrant entry into the mind club. The chapters cover such topics as animals, the silent (those in vegetative states or locked-in), the dead (yes, dead people), robots (THE SINGULARITY IS NIGH), and at the very end of the book the self (that's us). The book was chock full of data from studies conducted by those that the authors worked with as well as from other academic sources. I liked this because it shows that they weren't just theorizing without anything to back them up. However, if you're going into this looking for concrete answers about what makes up the 'mind' then you're barking up the wrong book. Much like philosophy, the book reads like a thought experiment where many things are posed but nothing has a definitive answer. And that's fine! The book was fun and fascinating. I'm definitely going to comb through the Notes to get some more book recommendations (my one complaint was that the Notes weren't more expansive...it's just a standard bibliography where I'm accustomed to annotations). If you like thought experiments and/or you're interested in the psychology of the mind then this book is right up your alley. XD ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Sep 26, 2016 M rated it really liked it

I really got a kick out of this book.

Maybe it is old news to others, but this was my introduction to the concept (or at least the introduction that stuck) of moral patiency. I feel like the moral agency v. moral patiency dichotomy -- the dyadic nature of morality -- is a major "level-up" for my understanding of moral intuitions.

Also, the book called to my attention the work of Derek Parfit, which I am going to spend some time getting better acquainted with.

The book is largely a tour of some of t ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Oct 18, 2017 Ghalia rated it liked it

A nice and page turning book about how we perceive minds around us starting from animals, computers, deceased people and even our own minds.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Apr 23, 2016 Robert rated it liked it

The central theme of this book is some research about how people feel about different kinds of minds. At it's heart it's a Harvard Business Review style quadrant analysis with the two dimensions being doing and feeling (and doers doing things to feelers). This isn't nearly as interesting (or difficult) as actually trying to understand different minds. This is touched on briefly and mainly via that experiment where people report that they made a decision half a second after their body started doi ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

May 13, 2017 Rita Vo rated it really liked it

Mesmerizing. This book could have you question about your existence and doubt everything you thought you knew. Informative, interesting, yet not actually relaxing to read.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jul 13, 2017 Tim rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017, nonfiction, philosophy, psychology, science

Quiz time. Which of the following have minds?

The family dog
An advanced AI program
A corporation
A fetus
A venus fly trap
A bedbug
A person in a vegetative state
God
An ant colony
A strict religious cult
A person that has been deceased for ten years

The way you answer determines who you think deserves entry into the titular mind club. There is only one entry requirement – you have to have a mind.

This book was a fun, popular treatment of the nebulous concept of mind – what a mind is and what kinds of things Quiz time. Which of the following have minds?

The family dog
An advanced AI program
A corporation
A fetus
A venus fly trap
A bedbug
A person in a vegetative state
God
An ant colony
A strict religious cult
A person that has been deceased for ten years

The way you answer determines who you think deserves entry into the titular mind club. There is only one entry requirement – you have to have a mind.

This book was a fun, popular treatment of the nebulous concept of mind – what a mind is and what kinds of things may or may not have minds.

The authors break mind down into two components: experience and agency. Experience is what it is like from the inside to have a mind. It includes the capacities for hunger, fear, pain, pleasure, rage, and desire, as well as personality, consciousness, pride, embarrassment, and joy. Agency, on the other hand, is less about feeling and more about doing. It includes capacities like memory, planning, communication, morality, self-control, and thought. Experience is opaque – you can only guess at what is going on in the mind of another since the only mind you know from the inside is your own – but agency is far more transparent – you can determine it by observing the actions and reactions of an entity.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of inputs and outputs. Experience is about inputs from sensory data that feed into your brain and produce your experience. Agency is about outputs, the words and actions that come out of your mind to produce change in the environment. The two aspects are then partnered with morality. Anything that experiences, that has an inner life and the potential for suffering, is said to have some degree of moral rights. Anything that has the capacity to plan, carry out their plan, and appreciate the outcome is said to have some degree of moral responsibility. An infant human would be high in experience but low in agency. Indeed, a newborn is arguably entirely experience and no agency. If a baby accidentally discharged a loaded gun and killed someone, we would not hold him or her morally responsible for the loss of life. At the other end of the spectrum, God makes for an interesting case in terms of the agency/experience partnership. An omnipotent being would have an unlimited degree of agency but perhaps not the corresponding degree of experience. God as traditionally conceived knows everything and can do anything but has God experienced everything? Could you prefix 'omni' to His experience like you would many of His other attributes? For example, could it be said that God has or ever will experience fear? If not, that means that if you have experienced fear, there is something you know that God does not know. How about cowardice? The taste of a particularly good bowl of Haagen-Daaz ice cream? You get the point. Knowing about something by observing it from the outside and experiencing it from the inside are two different things.

The book spends a chapter on each of the following in terms of how much agency and experience we may ascribe to them: animals, artificial intelligence, patients, enemies, people in vegetative states, collectives, the deceased, God, and the individual self. Despite the fact that some of the material turns up on a regular basis in books on psychology/philosophy (the Turing Test, p-zombies, the God Helmet, Libet's potential readiness experiments that are believed to have disproved the concept of free will, to name a few), it was still an interesting read. It is a credit to the authors that I didn't get the sense that I was reading the same old thing. And I did learn a few new things – like the fact that people occasionally put animals on trial in human law courts during the middle ages.

If there is one criticism I could level at this book, it would be that the authors give short shrift to alternate points of view. For example, in the chapter on the possibility of life after death, dualism is dismissed with the literary equivalent of a wink and a nod. Intellectual honestly compels me to concede that dualism does have some problems where the empirical data is concerned but that is no less true of a materialist view of mind and the case for dualism has moved on a little bit since Rene Descartes first put pen to paper. Maybe the authors should have taken their excellent summary of the problem of confirmation bias contained herein to heart? ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Apr 14, 2016 Scott Wozniak rated it liked it

This was an interesting philosophical and scientific exploration of what it means to have a mind--and how whether we believe that about another creature has big impact on how we treat them. From slavery to artificial intelligence to abortion, this is at the heart of our choices.

The book gets high marks for identifying two independent variables to a mind: the ability to act as we choose and the ability to experience, especially to suffer. We can believe high or low for each person. For example a ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Apr 03, 2016 Meghan rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2016-to-read, 2016, psychology

The Mind Club is a psychological and philosophical exploration of our perception of minds -- our own minds and the "minds" of others: animals, babies, machines, enemies, "silent minds", groups, the dead, and God. This book provides frameworks for thinking about minds, consciousness, and human behavior more generally, all founded on the principle that we perceive minds through a dyadic lens: they exhibit agency (and are therefore considered agents) and / or have the ability to experience (and are ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jul 24, 2016 Richard Thompson rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

A intriguing look at "mind" and consciousness that I hadn't come across in my other readings. I Wegner's view (and the view of his collaborator, Kurt Gray) mind isn't something that we can observe so we construct and image the minds of those in our environment (including our own). We intuitively sort people, animals, infants, robots, corporations, coma victims and dead people according to how much "mind" we perceive them to have. We also — and this was the interesting twist on the subject — see ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Sep 19, 2016 Gibson rated it liked it

This is a folksy popular psychology book written by erudite authors. The agent/patient duality is an interesting one and provides useful insights in two chapters in particular: the enemy and he group. The patient is quite a good chapter, but the chapter on the animal was thin except where it leant on Peter Singer. The chapters on the dead and God had me skimming over them, but I went back just in case there was something. I was disappointed.
Overall I came away with half a dozen well thought out ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

May 15, 2017 Ryan Young rated it really liked it

what is a mind? who or what qualifies as having a mind? how does granting something or someone a 'mind' change the way we need to treat them? at what point does a creature deserve something on the order of human rights? at what point do we hold a human 100% responsible for its actions? how about 0%? why do humans seek an agent to explain phenomena of all kinds? the mind club explores these questions and more!

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Nov 14, 2018 Rossdavidh rated it liked it

Shelves: green, blue

This book opens with a pretty heavy piece of news. One of the authors, Daniel Wegner, died before it was published. What is more, he died of ALS, and towards the very end of his life, he was essentially a mind only, with his body able to do little more than breathe (and eventually, not even that). It is almost certainly not a complete coincidence that Wegner had become interested in the topic, but since he was a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he must have had an interest in the relations be This book opens with a pretty heavy piece of news. One of the authors, Daniel Wegner, died before it was published. What is more, he died of ALS, and towards the very end of his life, he was essentially a mind only, with his body able to do little more than breathe (and eventually, not even that). It is almost certainly not a complete coincidence that Wegner had become interested in the topic, but since he was a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he must have had an interest in the relations between mind and body long before he became aware that his mind would keep working well long after his body had ceased to. The other author, Kurt Gray, was a student of his, and worked with him completed the book after Wegner's death, at his request.

Well, wow. Welcome to this book. There is not a chapter in it which will not touch on some topic of substantial moral and emotional weight, even the introduction. The subtitle is a pretty good summary of the scope: "Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters". We talk about robots, about animals other than humans, about brain-dead humans, about living humans who have lost part of their mental faculties due to Alzheimer's, about ghosts, about zombies, about infants, about fetuses, about people we regard as enemies. Every one of these topics brings with it substantial moral or psychological questions.

Wegner and Gray assert that we humans tend to want to categorize beings as either Moral Agents, with a capacity for agency and possessing moral responsibility, or Moral Patients, with a capacity for Experiencing and possessing Moral Rights. The more we are able perceive that an entity has the capacity to think and do, the more we think of them in one way, and the more we perceive them as lacking that, the less. So, it is difficult for us to perceive a person as simultaneously a dangerous criminal who does hideously awful things to other people, and the victim of a horrible upbringing full of physical and psychological abuse.

There are a lot of psychological experiments mentioned in this book, many of them very interesting to read about. I did find myself wondering, repeatedly, while reading this book, "did this study effect ever get replicated?" Occasionally I would stop and use my smartphone to look up whether they did (mostly the answer was 'yes, successfully'). It does seem to me that whenever a book written by university academics goes into topics like a belief in God, they have a hard time pretending to be objective. God (or belief in same) gets an entire chapter in this book, and they try as much as one can expect, but were I a devout Christian I would have detected a pretty clear bias. I mean, not Richard Dawkins kind of bias or anything, but Wegner and Gray are coming at some pretty important and emotionally potent topics from a particular point of view, and they are humans, so it is not surprising that they have occasionally allowed some of that point of view to show through.

By and large, I found this to be a good book, that examines important issues about how we think about thinking. I would have liked to see some discussion of how they think their Moral Agent/Moral Patient axis interacts with Moral Foundations Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_f...) as proposed by Jonathan Haidt and others. But, perhaps the way those two interact simply hasn't been examined, and this is most definitely a book that wants to make sure its assertions are backed up by scientific research. There is not a chapter in it which does not make you think more carefully about a topic worth the effort. ...more

flag Like · see review

Sep 17, 2017 Rhiannon rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

More Books Like This, Please!

This was a satisfying sampler of psychology and philosophy. I call it a sampler because it's the first book of its kind that I've read and it whet my appetite for more. While reading this, I supplemented it with Crash Course Philosophy on YouTube and Robert Arp's The Devil and Philosophy. I needed the former to better understand the latter, but watching those videos while reading this book was a winning combination, too. My perception of the world is forever changed. ...more

flag Like · see review

Jun 11, 2018 Wing rated it it was amazing

Anything that is perceived to have both agency and patiency is a mind. However, our perceptions get frequently distorted through anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, machine-state functionalism, egocentrism, dehumanization, objectification, entitativity, intuitive mind-body dualism, and apophenia, to name a few examples. Our propensity to multistable perception renders the simultaneous perception of agency/patiency and mind/body at times difficult, further distorting our views towards sentience. ...more

flag Like · see review

Oct 13, 2018 Suzanne rated it it was ok

Shelves: philosophy, science, wsj-rec

I was quite disappointed in this book. Chris Branch's insightful review below sums up the main reasons why I felt this way. I would only add two comments. First, that I found the authors assumption that psychology is a science, along with their sometimes specious arguments relying on this assumption, problematic. Second, I found the injection of politics into unnecessary realms (usually accompanied by a lack of parallel structure) aggravating and distracting in a book that should have been apoli ...more

flag Like · see review

Feb 04, 2019 Florent Diverchy rated it really liked it

A very comprehensive introduction to all the questions related to mind:
- Which animals do we perceive as having a mind, and why?
- Why, during war, we try to forget that our enemies have mind too?
- When will we be able to say that a machine has a mind?
- When does mind arise in the unborn child
- At which moment of death is the mind disappearing?
- Do people in coma or vegetative state have a mind?
And many more question you were not expecting but who tend to be very interesting and thought provoking ...more

flag Like · see review

Oct 10, 2018 J Crossley rated it liked it

This philosophical book looks at what makes a mind a mind. How do we think about thinking, and how do we see other beings and their minds. People look at minds in two realms. One is the inside mind, which is experience, and the other is the from the outside, which is agency. It seems that there are many ways that we skew other people’s minds. For instance, we see our enemies as having limited or distorted minds, and we see animals that are more like ourselves as having a better mind than animals ...more

flag Like · see review

Oct 30, 2016 Bill Holmes rated it really liked it

Read this to learn more about how your subconscious mind works to explain events and place blame. I was fascinated by discussion of dyadic completion, or how we tend to attribute intentions to the actions of people or things. This book helped me better understand other's behavior as well as my own. It is a nice compliment to Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

flag Like · see review

Jul 08, 2018 David Teachout rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audio, psychology, science

Filled with great research and wit, this is a book you read when you want your intuitive thoughts challenged and sense of self questioned. A careful look at what “mind” is, how we use the concept and it’s implications for how we live our lives. The struggle with what you learn here is worth every moment.

flag Like · see review

Feb 21, 2017 Mehrsa rated it really liked it

There is so much to think about here. Some interesting research and some great questions. There were several pronouncements in there that I thought needed more evidence. The section on free will, in my opinion was the weakest. Or perhaps I just wanted more.

flag Like · see review

Sep 04, 2017 Sam rated it liked it

Shelves: borrowed, brain, philosophy, psychology

An interesting read with a broad range of research areas covered and noted. However, there isn't a clear take-away from this book. I guess that's in no small part due to the fact that understanding the mind itself is difficult and with a lot of open questions.

flag Like · see review

Sep 29, 2017 JP rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

This truly one of the best book in the world
Wow!!
Really enjoyed the journey
It's more like discipline approach by authors to give a neat and clear expression of the topic they discussed
I felt very very bad, when the book got over
Thanks to authors

flag Like · see review

Oct 13, 2018 Antonio rated it really liked it

Great theory about how we perceive and classify minds giving them moral rights based on agency and experience. It provides great insight on human behaviour based on these mind perceptions.

flag Like · see review

May 15, 2017 Meshal Khojah rated it did not like it · review of another edition

As an Audiobook it was hard to follow.

flag Like · see review

Aug 12, 2018 Donna rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018, genre-non-fiction, shelf-audible

A fun, light look at what is mind and how we perceive it.

flag Like · see review

Nov 23, 2017 Raja Annam rated it liked it

Fun and interesting read.

flag Like · see review

Jan 21, 2017 Dan rated it liked it

Shelves: psychology

A popular psychology book for light and casual reading. Ok for those who want to get exposed to the subject of a perception and psychology on mind.

flag Like · see review

Mar 23, 2017 Pamela rated it really liked it

This book about the mind, self, consciousness was well written and thought provoking. Quote of note, "we are a source of perception; all minds rest in perception." Studies confirm that, "there is a high correlation between the mind wandering and unhappiness. People with mind in the here and now are happier.."

flag Like · see review

Sep 30, 2016 Caroline added it

Shelves: non-fiction

Very interesting and comprehensive book about how we perceive our own and other people's minds, and how little we are really aware of how it works, what we think, perceive, etc. and why.... and who we give credit to as having a mind like ours. Do animals have minds, and are they able to think in equivalent ways to us?

flag Like · see review