Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

Tom’s life is not what it once was. His marriage is on the rocks and his writing career has stalled. Then his best friend, Neil, returns from teaching neurology in California. But all is not what it seems—Neil has been working for the U.S. government cracking the minds of suspected terrorists and has disappeared, leaving behind evidence that he has been employing his unique skills on civilians. And it’s only when Neil gets closer to his ultimate target—Tom—that the full horror of his plan is revealed.

Genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Psychology

320 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Richard Scott Bakker, who writes as R. Scott Bakker and as Scott Bakker, is a novelist whose work is dominated by a large series informally known as the The Second Apocalypse which Bakker began developing whilst at college in the 1980s.

The series was originally planned to be a trilogy, with the first two books entitled The Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor. However, when Bakker began writing the series in the early 2000s, he found it necessary to split each of the three novels into its own sub-series to incorporate all of the characters, themes and ideas he wished to explore. Bakker originally conceived of seven books: a trilogy and two duologies. This later shifted to two trilogies, with the acknowledgement that the third series may yet also expand to a trilogy.

The Prince of Nothing trilogy was published between 2003 and 2006. It depicts the story of the Holy War launched by the Inrithi kingdoms against the heathen Fanim of the south to recover the holy city of Shimeh for the faithful. During the war, a man named Ansurimbor Kellhus emerges from obscurity to become an exceptionally powerful and influential figure, and it is discovered that the Consult, an alliance of forces united in their worship of the legendary No-God, a nihilistic force of destruction, are manipulating events to pave the way for the No-God's return to the mortal world.

The sequel series, The Aspect-Emperor trilogy, picks up the story twenty years later with Kellhus leading the Inrithi kingdoms in directly seeking out and confronting the Consult. The first novel in this new series is due for publication in 2009.

Whilst working on the Prince of Nothing series, Bakker was given a challenge by his wife to write a thriller. To answer this, he produced a science fiction thriller based around a serial killer who can control and influence the human mind. This book, Neuropath, was eventually published in 2008. Inspired, he wrote a second thriller titled The Disciple of the Dog in 2009.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is pointless; it is deceptive, illusory and filled with meaningless rationalizations. Yet I’ve become conscious to the fact that I am writing it. Or I believe at least that writing it is an act of my own volition. Now that I’ve lost my entire audience with my incoherent ramblings, I can assure you that I haven’t descended into philosophical lunacy or decided to embrace my inner nihilist. (I’m all for spanking one’s inner nihilist, by the way.) Instead, I find myself slowly coming to grips with Scott Bakker’s unsettling new novel, “Neuropath”. And “unsettling” may just be a drastic understatement!

“Neuropath” is closer to an extreme paradigm shift in which what you think you know is utterly transformed into something else, something unknowable. It’s Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” reworked for the postmodern crowd; a book that drags us out of our illusions kicking and screaming into the light provided by cognitive psychology and neurology. It strips everything it means to “be human” including the definition of “human”. It’s an amazing and brilliant must-read thriller that will resonate through you long after you’ve finished reading it. But ignore all this; it’s just my rationalization module working overtime.

Thomas Bible is a professor of psychology at Columbia University. Suffering from the failure of his marriage, he finds solace in being a father to his two children, Frankie and Ripley. One night, his best friend since his college days, Neil Cassidy, a brilliant neuroscientist, arrives on his doorstep. (Bearing booze, an ex-college roommate’s duty, of course.) As the two of them get drunk that night, talking, Neil finally reveals to Tom that he has been lying about his job. For the past few years, Neil has been working for the NSA, interrogating terror suspects through the use of invasive neurosurgery. By flicking off certain neural switches in the brain, Neil has discovered that he can get the terrorists to tell him everything he needs to know. Thomas is horrified by this revelation, only reassured by Neil claiming that he has recently quit the NSA.

As Thomas arrives at work the next morning, he is greeted by FBI agents. The agents play for Tom a disturbing video sent anonymously to them. The film details a neurosurgery in which the patient, who is conscious throughout the procedure, feels either pleasure or pain when the unseen neurosurgeon flicks a switch in her brain. Thomas is appalled at the video, struggling to comprehend what he has witness, when the FBI agents shock him even further—his buddy Neil is believed to be the neurosurgeon responsible. Soon, Thomas finds himself helping a beautiful FBI agent, Samantha Logan, track down Neil as he continues to commit further atrocities. Struggling to uncover Neil’s motivations for the mutilations, Thomas finally decides Neil is engaging him in “The Argument”, a discussion from their college days about free will being an illusion and the dire consequences that follow from that fact. At the same time, Tom finds himself falling in love with Agent Logan.

While chasing after Neil, Thomas discovers his life spinning out of control. Surprise twists and turns lurk around ever corner. Just when Thomas thinks he understands Neil’s motivations, circumstances shift to show him how truly clueless he is, and when his son Frankie is abducted, his desperation nearly leads him over the edge. Will Tom be able to save Frankie in time?

Bakker’s novel is so intriguing it is almost impossible to put down. The action flows from one shocking incident to the next, filled in between with profound and disturbing insights. This elevates “Neuropath” above other contemporary thrillers in that it is an intellectual powerhouse of a novel. Bakker offers interesting observations and questions on selfhood, consciousness, love, morality, and government regulation. It’s impossible to read the novel and not reflect on it, as it shakes the very foundation of what we conceive of as humanity.

Bakker’s descriptions are beautiful and poetic, lovingly crafted and fresh. For example in describing Manhattan, he writes: “t once archeological, like a vast inscription with Central Park the indent of some God-King’s seal, and yet statistical, like a great 3-D bar graph, charting the sum of human hopes against the GDP of nations—a Powerpoint presentation frozen in monumental stone.” Or a simpler example in describing a forest blocking Thomas’ view of Neil’s cabin: [t:]he trees defeated the distances, obscuring any glimpse of the cottage.” This is evidence of a mature artist’s hand at work, filling his words with both beauty and thought. It’s an irresistible combination for the reader, and Bakker works it masterfully.

Last Word:
What Scott Bakker did for the fantasy genre with the “Prince of Nothing” trilogy, he also does here for the futuristic thriller: namely, set the bar for greatness. For fans of science fiction or thrillers, “Neuropath” is a must-read classic, chilling, original and truly disturbing. It grabs you by your mind, and shakes you hard, never relenting, never apologizing, leaving you shattered by the end. Whether you hate it or love it, you are guaranteed to feel it.

[Emelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neuropath is a book that is labeled as "Suspense", however in my humble opinion it is a far cry from suspense. It blew me away. Yes it has the brilliant serial killer playing games with the world as well as the FBI chasing down the bad, but brilliant villain, murder and mayhem, graphic scenes etc; however it is "The Argument" that was the most intriguing part of the book and what this review focuses on.

A Columbia University psychology professor Thomas Bible is approached in his office by a pair of FBI agents. They show him a gruesome video of a missing porn star's apparent self-mutilation, and tell him that his old college buddy Neil Cassidy is responsible for it and enlist Bible to help them track down Cassidy. "The Argument" is something that Thomas and Neil have been discussing since their undergraduate days. And this is what is most interesting.

Yes, there are thriller moments and the book is not short on suspense. (I would call it a scientific, physiological, techno-thriller.) But as I said Cassidy and Bible's old discussions are what fried my brain and made me think and rethink the whole concept of perception and consciousness. In Bakker's Neuropath "The Argument" is that perception and consciousness are nothing more than crude chemical and electrical processes inside our brain and that everything we think and feel and do is meaningless, that no choice is ever made, and nothing ever known; that consciousness and all that goes with it , such as free will, is an illusion that our brains trick us into believing. It is a scary concept that perhaps everything we think has been preprogrammed and that there is nothing such as a truly independent thought.

If you are a fan of philosophy and deep intellectual debate, then I suggest you read this book. Since reading it I have lost a few hours of sleep and spent a few hours on the phone with friends discussing "The Argument" and all of its disturbing implications and it's horrific potential. Even discussing it brings up further ideas and debatable spaces that can really take the mind to places that are strange and bizarre, and down right frightening. Needless to say I had to put the book down a few times and had several WTF moments. (I usually would not use that phrase but in this case there is no other phrase I can substitute.)

At some points the book lags, but overall I liked it, a lot. It is a book that I will continue to discuss for awhile and a book with concepts that I am sure will wake me up in the middle of the night saying "Ah ha! But what if....." It is well worth reading if for no other reason than to make you think, rethink.......and think again.

*Christopher, you have ruined my restful nights. Thanks for the rec.......I think ;)

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes, no matter how much I like an author, their latest book ends up being a disappointment. NEUROPATH, by R. Scott Bakker, fit that description for me. I love Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series, and I firmly believe his writing--in terms of quality--is some of the best in the fantasy genre. With NEUROPATH, Bakker attempts to put his spin on the thriller genre.

I really wanted to like this book. Seriously, I tried hard. It just didn't happen.

NEUROPATH follows the PoV of Tom Bible, a psychologist. If you have read Bakker before, the profession of the PoV should come as no surprise. Tom is divorced with two kids, and his relationship with his ex-wife is seriously strained. The main plot of the story focuses on Tom helping the FBI find his friend Neil, who has been working with the NSA on the study and implementation of manipulating people's brains. Neil has apparently gone off the deep-end, and is abducting and torturing people by messing with their cerebral functions.

Yeah, it's a cool concept. The novel's tag-line, "You are not what you think you are," serves as the central theme of the novel, and is also its greatest flaw. Half of the novel involves near maid-and-butler scenes where one character spends pages explaining a concept to another character. The first time it happened, I could forgive it, because it was well written. After happening a few dozen times, however, it tended to rub me wrong. Essentially, it’s as if we the readers are reading a transcribed conversation between a psychology professor and his unconvinced student. The concepts are explained well, and the writing is fantastic, but the simple fact that Bakker is "telling vs. showing" is extremely problematic.

The novel, and its main characters, take a very strong nihilistic view on life. We are machines. We have no free will. There is no God. Our brains are organic computers that automatically react to variables and cause our reactions. Since all of the preceding are "fact," nothing in this life matters. Nothing. The main PoV, Tom, and his buddy Neil are major advocates of this belief system. There are a few token moments where Tom acts as if he doesn’t want to believe this philosophy, but they are really just that: token moments with no real power behind them. As readers, the constant reiteration of those points takes on a preachy-feel. By the end of the novel, I felt like I was a dead horses being beaten. Hard. What’s more, is that most of the side characters fall into automatically believing this philosophy without being given any real evidence of anything. Essentially, the PoV’s take is, “Hey this is fact. Since I say so, you need to believe me. What? Of course I won’t give you evidence. You’re not smart enough for that.”

Another issue that Bakker has is making females into over-sexualized objects. You know the instant a female main character shows up that she will be involved in some sort of sexual relationship with the main PoV. The scenes are graphic, but unlike the Prince of Nothing series, they don't seem to have much point other than shock-value. His characters in NEUROPATH seem to end up in porn-movie scenarios. They are, in a word, absurd.

As for the actual thriller aspect of the novel? Because, you know, that’s kind of the point of reading a novel--either for the characters or the story. It's horribly cliché. A majority of the novel’s actual plotting is terribly predictable, and the novel is full of the dumb character behavior that is typical of the thriller genre. In many cases Tom's decisions are just plain idiotic, and are leaned on like a crutch to provide more conflict. Tom has two kids (the kids were the only stand-out goodness of the novel), and his decisions regarding them are idiotic. Sorry, but I just don’t like a character’s stupidity to be the main cause for movement in a novel. I get enough of that from Dan Brown. There is also a separate, thin side story going on about a serial killer called the Chiropractor. He has no real purpose in the novel other than as an excuse why FBI resources are spread so thin. What he does isn't really explained, and when he inevitably shows up, it is for pure convenience and border-line Deus Ex.

The tone of the novel is VERY bleak. Much more so than any of Bakker's other works. There is a line in the novel where a character states, "I don't like happy endings." That is a pretty clear indicator of how things are going to go. Don’t get me wrong, I like grim and gritty. NEUROPATH, however, was just too bleak for me. The abductions and murders that happen are very well done, and they lend perfectly to the thin story, but the ending of the novel has no redeeming quality in any sense of the word. When you match all that with the hopeless nihilistic philosophy saturating the novel, it's hard to like it. In the end, this caused my personal dislike.

I didn't hate the novel, I just didn't like it. Bakker is a seriously gifted writer. He manages to explain everything amazingly clear. Considering the deep topics, his writing makes them easily understandable, and makes the pace move along fantastically. I just couldn't like the tone or the execution of a terrific premise. But really, it all comes down to a really poor story. It does nothing but give clichéd plotting and clichéd twists under a thin veil of a psychological and philosophical preaching. Terry Goodkind gave the world enough of that, we don’t need it from Bakker.

If you really dig psychological and philosophical debates and concepts, you may enjoy this novel. Especially if you are really into Bakker. But this is easily his weakest effort at story-telling. Not to mention, the graphic content will turn off a majority of people.

Content: If you are at all offended by sex, violence, language, or character stupidity as a plot device, you should avoid this novel.

[Kirstine · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Have you an arm like God?"

This was not as big of a mindfuck as I thought it'd be.

In the not-so distant, but slightly vague future Tom is tasked with helping the FBI apprehend his best friend Neil, who's started brutally murdering people to prove that meaning and love aren't real and only illusions of the brain.

'Neuropath' is extra interesting because it's based on actual research about the brain - Neil's fantasies about consciousness aren't as fantastical and fake as you'd like to believe as a reader.

It's a violent, unpleasant, unrelenting book about the very worst lengths humans will go to when meaning leaves them. It's at times cruel and heartless, but constantly thought-provoking. If you've ever read anything by Bakker, either this or his fantasy series you know he's bleak. He revels in the meaningless, the dark, the grimy, the dirty, the evil. He asks hard questions and rakes his characters through bloody mud full of pointy, rusty nails.

In person, however, he's awfully pleasant, soft spoken and just plain nice. He visited my university in the spring of 2015 for a lecture titled "Writing after the death of meaning", a lot of it went over my head, I admit, I'm not nearly as intelligent as he is, and philosophy is hard on my brain, but it was immensely interesting. And he mentioned this book. He talked about it as a book that changed people, in a bad way. He mentioned he'd had a friend who'd sort of stopped talking to him after reading it. I understand that, I understand that to some people this might make them honestly sad and depressed. You shouldn't read it if you're prone to paranoia or shit like that. It's a hard book.

It asks this (very simplified): what if we're nothing but brains responding to other brains? What if there's no self, no I controlling our actions? If free will is boogus? What if the brain can be manipulated? What if reality is nothing, if it's an empty shell, if all is, essentially, meaningless?

Not fun, friends.

Apart from the very philosophical themes, it's a pretty good thriller. It's complex, it's surprising, and it had me constantly on the edge of my seat, hoping against hope that all would end well.

I liked it. I liked it a lot. Perhaps because I wasn't very affected by it, and thus felt no need to throw myself in a ditch and perish. I understood the point he was trying to make - or maybe I should say the question he wanted to ask, and I found it incredibly interesting. It's fueled many debates since, and I keep bringing the ideas I got from reading this up in conversation (and I feel okay doing it, because it's, as I said, based on actual research). In that regard it served its purpose; it expanded my horizon and it made me think, really, really think about some very fundamental things.

It's not a book for everyone, and parts of it were perhaps unnecessarily unpleasant, but on the other hand, it wouldn't have made such an impact otherwise.

I believe R. Scott Bakker also said this isn't a book he'd ever recommend to anyone. I wouldn't either. Read it if you find the premise interesting or if - like me - you're really into R. Scott Bakker, but be warned it's somewhat depressing. He wrote it before he had kids, and stated he never could have written it after. The level of cynicism he needed to tap into to present the worldviews of these characters simply wasn't accessible after having kids. When you've read it you get what he means.

The reason it wasn't as big a mindfuck as I expected is probably that I'm very stubborn. To the whole question of "what if we're just brains responding to outside stimuli, what if we don't have a self?" I answer: Who cares. We're in this world and we must make the most of it. Whatever I am, I will do my damnedest to be the best I can be. Don't care if I'm deciding it or my brain is. The result is the same. Be kind, people, and don't hide your douchebag behaviour behind science.

[Neil Pearson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a good example of how authors can be great in one genre and terrible in another. I'm a massive fan of Bakker's "second apocalypse" fantasy series and thought I may as well check out his other work. In hindsight I probably shouldn't have. This is his take on a blockbuster thriller and in that sense it almost works - especially the cringe-worthy elements that he later reveals are intentional. There are also some horrific scenes, the type you could imagine David Fincher would love to adapt. The problem is in "the argument". I have no issue with the concept of the brain and the illusion of free will etc but I don't need to listen to it incessantly. It's the reading equivalent of being stuck with a friend who's had a little too much to drink and will not let a subject drop. I think If there were variations on the theme every time it was revisited it would be more bearable but in essence it's the same argument and set of observations over and over again. It's curious how I've heard others level the same complaint at his fantasy work but I never noticed it there or I found it worked within the story better (I think the extra point-of-view characters at least varies things). It may boil down to me not being a fan of this genre but I'll certainly think twice before trying another non-fantasy book by this author.

[Luther Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Semantic Apocalypse... If this book doesn't freak you out I don't know what will. Seriously: reader beware. Go look on the internet, you'll find reviewers who recommend against reading it... not because it's a bad book (I read it compulsively)...but because it cuts the legs out from under our most cherished notions of what it means to be a person. On the surface it's a thriller about a divorced psychologist and a serial killer. And on that level, it's compelling and disturbing. But its "Argument" is what is really scary...Bakker suggests (if that's the right word for this positively obsessed book) that science is showing (and will ultimately force us to accept) that our sense of ourselves as conscious "persons" -- moving through life making free choices -- is an illusion created by our brains. Indeed sometimes the book seems like an essay (or rather a polemic), with the characters just ranting Bakker's Argument. But the fact is that the story and the characters are compelling, and even though I sometimes thought "this person would not be going into the details of an argument for a worldview at a time like this", I still found it compelling -- because both the actual polemic speeches AND the plot AND the characters go toward the same point: "be dismayed...we are but brains...". Bakker presents a compelling case for the proposition that our conscious "selves" are largely devoted to rationalizations, that our sense of autonomy and personhood are brain processes going on in a small part of our brains -- meanwhile the larger part of our brain runs on as a meaningless machine, creating illusions like time, morality, love for our children....seriously: reader beware.

[Chris Gousopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bakker confirmed to me a suspicion I had while reading his long epic fantasy series. That despite "appearances" he can, if he wants, write in a blockbuster way.
Neuropath is a near future tech crime story that feels like a modern guidebook to many of the themes he explores in the mind blowing Second Apocalypse series. The fact that he could make his controversial arguments about free will, conscience, behaviour etc in such a thrilling, full of tension and disturbing implications, modern thriller, fascinated me. The parallels with his much densier, abstract, philosophical, disturbing epic, thrilled me even more. While I read this book I felt like more answers and questions surfaced concerning the endless contemplating I have about the Second Apocalypse.
The universe that Bakker is building with his books might be bleak and ominous but it is so captivating that I just cant stand not thinking about them all the time. Well done!

[Lightreads · Rating 2 out of 5]

Soundbyte: Read Peter Watts's Blindsight instead.

Psychology professor is drawn into the FBI pursuit of his best friend, the sociopath who tortures through neurosurgery. It's a thriller about the implications of the brain as a physical substrate, how love for one's offspring, friendship, empathy are all physical processes that can be hacked and repurposed. It always surprises me how few people really know these facts, and are disturbed by them, because to me they are both obvious and kind of reassuring in a complicated way, but that's a topic for another time.

Mostly it's a book about the blindness of the conscious self known as "I," how we don't ever really have a grasp on sensory data, on other people, on our own decisions. Case in point: the consciousness known as "me" managed to strategically forget again that, oh yeah, I hate thrillers long enough for me to decide to read this one. This book embodies most things I hate about thrillers – unrelentingly awful people, twists made deliberately unfair, that vague desire to shoot myself in the head when it's all over. And it also didn't redeem itself through the treatment of modern consciousness research. Like I said, Peter Watts does a much more thorough, interesting job with this because he takes it to the next logical step – asking what consciousness is actually for, if it's so functionally useless.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

My pre-ordering and reading "Neuropath" was a result of my following the hype behind it on a few book blogs and deciding to jump on early. Ever since I worked at a used bookstore (back in high school: it was my dream job at the time), I've tried to keep up with new books and new authors. Book blogs such as Fantasy Book Critic are, of course, great for this kind of thing, and once I started reading them I was hooked. It was only a matter of time before some of the mania that precedes some releases infected me.

I mention this because all of the lead-up to this book's release raised my expectations way up there--which, in turn, contributed to my less than favorable reaction to the actual story herein. You see, I went into this expecting it to mess with my head, to disturb my sense of human boundaries and capabilities--to just really fuck with me, like some bloggers said it did to them. I also looked forward to excellent prose and deep ideas, as these are both hallmarks of R. Scott Bakker's work in his fantasy repertoire ("The Prince of Nothing", etc).

This book did not rock my world; Bakker's prose did not impress me. The gadgets and tech that Bakker posits are neat, but his take on them comes across as alarmist. "They are going to read your mind, man!" The nature of this subject is sinister enough without laying it on thick. The mastermind super-villain that drives the story is your usual mix of know-how and loony, and the fact that I can't remember anything specific about his character suggests that there isn't enough there worth remembering. If someone promises a really dark and disturbing villain who has depth, then I am expecting someone like Gerald Tarrant, or Raistlin Majere, or the creepy it-girl from "Battle Royale" (the amazing book, not the silly film adaptation); in other words, there are some rich characters in my reading history, and a new one has to step it up to stand out.

I'm taking Goodread's rating scale literally and giving this the "it was ok," because that's how I felt about "Neuropath" while reading it and upon putting it down. With lower-to-no expectations, I might have enjoyed the book more. Such are the consequences of tapping in to hype.

[Ethan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those books that's not nearly so clever as it thinks it is. The debate about freedom and determinism is one that everyone seems to have an opinion about, but this doesn't mean that all of those opinions are well thought-out. I was hoping for a thriller with some interesting neuroscience and philosophy mixed in, but the positions on the debate presented in Bakker's book aren't very interesting or philosophically sophisticated (I'm not sure about the neuroscience, since that's not my field). However, while the philosophy is disappointing, the "thriller" aspect is kind of fun, which is the only thing that makes me give this two as opposed to one star.

[Andreas · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Because neurology is a natural science,' he replied after a glutinous cough. 'It looks at human behavior and consciousness as natural processes like any other process in the natural world. It actually provides causal explanations for what we are.'
'And psychology doesn't?''Not really, no. Psychology also involves something called "intentional explanations", which are pretty tricky from a scientific point of view.' He found himself breathing deeply, as though steeling himself for some arduous task. 'For instance, why did you take a sip of your beer just now?'
Samantha frowned, shrugged. 'Because I wanted to,' she said lamely.
'There you go. That's an intentional explanation. A psychological explanation. This is largely how human beings explain and understand themselves: in terms of intentions, desires, purposes, hopes, and so on. We use intentional explanations.'
'And they're not scientific?'
Her foot brushed his leg and a jolt passed through him. She was just kicking off her shoes, he realized.
'Not comfortably,' he replied, 'no. Before science, we largely understood the world in intentional terms. From the dawn of recorded history pretty much all of our explanations of the world were psychological. Then along comes science and bang: where storms were once understood in terms of angry gods and the like, they're understood in terms of high pressure cells and so on. Science has pretty much scrubbed psychology from the natural world.'
The disenchantment of the world. In his classes Thomas was always at pains to convey just how extraordinary this transformation was—is. Homeric Greece, Vedic India, biblical Israel: in terms of structure, these worlds were cut from the same cloth as Tolkien's Middle-earth. Sanctioned by tradition, yes, anchored in the assent of masses, certainly, but projections of human conceit all the same. Magical. What fact could be more extraordinary? The entire human race had spent the bulk of its tenure living in various fantasy worlds, pleading, kneeling, murdering, avenging, all in the name of make-believe. The whole of humanity deluded. And if Neil was right, precious little had changed.
'Until science,' he continued, 'we humans really had no way of distinguishing good claims from bad claims outside of tradition and self-interest. So why not confabulate? Make stuff up? Why not elaborate belief systems that cater to our vanity, to our need to keep everyone in line? It's no accident we've cooked up thousands of different religions, each peculiar to some distinct culture.'
Sam paused to take a drink, and to reorient herself, Thomas supposed. 'So then why have I always thought psychology was a science?'
'Because it is, in a sense. It uses many of the same tools and standards. It proceeds by hypothesis. The problem lies primarily in its subject matter.'
'The mind.'
'Yep. To put it bluntly, the mind's, well, spooky. The ancient Greek roots of "psychology" are psūkē and logos, literally "the discourse of the soul". The roots of "neurology", on the other hand, are neuron and logos, or "the discourse of the sinew". This pretty much sums up the crucial difference: neurology deals with the mechanics of the meat, whereas psychology deals with the syntax of the ineffable. You tell me which is more scientific.'


'Remember how I said science had scrubbed the world of purpose? For some reason, wherever science encounters intention or purpose in the world, it snuffs it out. The world as described by science is arbitrary and random. There's innumerable causes for everything, but no reasons for anything.'


'The "will of God" or what have you is indistinguishable from dumb luck. That's why car insurance companies don't give a damn how much you pray—let alone to whom. It often seems otherwise, but once you factor in our penchant for self-serving interpretation and cherry-picking, it becomes painfully clear that we're deluding ourselves.'
'You mean with religion?'
Thomas paused over his beer. People were painfully credulous, capable of believing anything. And once they did believe, they had innumerable strategies for skewing and dismissing, all the while convinced they were the most open-minded and even-handed person they knew. They rewrote memories. They made up rationalizations, then believed them with religious conviction. When they didn't miss counter-evidence altogether, they warped it into further proof of their own cherished views. The brain was a spin doctor, plain and simple. The experimental evidence for this was out and out incontrovertible, but thanks to a culture bent on pseudo-empowerment, scarcely a peep could be heard above the self-congratulatory roar. Nobody, from truck drivers to cancer researchers, wanted to hear how self-absorbed and error-prone they were. Why bother with a scientific tongue-lashing when you could have a corporate hand-job?
'Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery, Agent Logan.'
'Which is?'
He nodded at the parade of passers-by beyond the plate-glass window. 'Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system.'
Her face crooked into a rueful smile. 'I've seen my fair share of delusions, trust me. The people we hunt burn them for fuel.'
'Not just the people you hunt, Agent Logan. All of us.'
'All of us?' she repeated. Something about her tone told Thomas that the distinction between her and her quarry was important to her. No surprise there, given the things she must have witnessed over the years.
He leaned back, holding her gaze. 'You do realize that every thought, every experience, every element of your consciousness is a product of various neural processes? We know this because of cases of brain damage. All I have to do is press a coat hanger past your eye, wriggle it around a little, and you'd be utterly changed.' This description never failed to provoke expressions of disgust in his classroom, but Agent Logan seemed unimpressed.
'So?'
'You're right. In a sense it's a trivial point. Every time you take an aspirin you're assuming you're a biomechanism, something that can be tweaked with chemicals. But think about what I said. Your every experience is a product of neural processes.'
'I'm not following you, professor.'
Thomas hooked his shoulders and palms in a professorial you're-not-going-to-like-this gesture. 'Well, how about free will? That's a kind of experience, isn't it?'
'Of course.'
'Which means free will is a product of neural processes.'
A wary pause. 'It has to be, I guess.'
'So then how is it free? I mean, if it's a product, and it is a product—I could show you case studies of brain damaged patients who think they will everything that happens, who think they command the clouds on the horizon, the birds in the trees. If the will is a product of neural functioning then how could it be free?'
She gasped and said, 'I just chose to drink, didn't I?'
'I don't know. Did you?'
For the first time her face crinkled into a look that was openly incredulous. 'Of course. What else could it be?'
'Well, as a matter of fact—fact, unfortunately, not speculation—your brain simply processed a chain of sensory inputs, me yapping, then generated a particular behavioral output, you drinking.'
'But…' She trailed.
'That's not the way it feels,' Thomas said, completing her sentence. 'It's pretty clear that our sense of willing things is… well, illusory. It started with a variety of experiments showing how easy it is to fool people into thinking that they're willing things they actually have no control over. That laid the groundwork. Then, when the costs of neuro-imaging began to plummet—remember all the hoopla about low-field MRIs several years back?—more and more researchers demonstrated they could actually determine their subject's choices before they were conscious of making them. Willing, it turns out, is an addon of some kind, something that comes to us after the fact.'
Now she seemed genuinely troubled. Thomas had seen the same look on a thousand undergraduate faces, the look of a brain, Neil would have said, at odds with itself—one whose knowledge could not be reconciled with its experience.
The brain, it turned out, could wrap itself around most everything but itself, which was why it invented minds… souls.
'But that can't be…' Sam started. 'I mean, if we don't really make choices, then how could…'
Thomas grimaced in sympathy. 'How could anything be right or wrong? Good or evil?'
'Exactly. Morality. Doesn't morality mean we have to have free will?'
'Who said morality was real?'
She worked her bottom lip for a moment, then added, 'Bullshit. It's gotta be…'
'I mean, I make decisions, all the time.'
She was arguing now, Thomas realized, not simply entertaining academic claptrap for the purposes of tracking down Neil. The Argument had a way of doing that to people. He could remember the horror it had engendered in him years ago in Skeat's class. The sense that some kind of atrocity had been committed, though without date or location. More than a few times he and Neil had made the mistake of debating it while catastrophically stoned—a mistake for Thomas, anyway. He had simply sat rigid, crowded by paranoias, his eyes poking and probing the tissue that had once been his thoughtless foundation, while Neil had laughed and chortled, pacing the room as if it were a cage. Thomas could see him, hair askew, ducking to peer into his face. 'Whoa, dude… Think about it. You're a machine—a machine!—dreaming that you have a soul. None of this is real, man, and they can fucking prove it.'
Thomas rubbed his eyes. 'In controlled circumstances, researchers can determine the choices we make before we're even conscious of making them. The first experiments were crude and hotly contested—pioneered by a guy called Libet. But over the years, as techniques improved and the fidelity of neuro-imaging increased, so did the ability to pin down the precursors of decision making. Now…' Thomas trailed with an apologetic shrug. 'What can I say? People still argue, of course—they always will when it comes to cherished beliefs.'
'Free will is an illusion,' Sam said in a strange tone. 'Even now, everything I'm saying…'
Thomas swallowed, suddenly apprehensive. He had been carefully folding his napkin as he talked; now he set it like a tiny white book on the table before him. 'Only a small fraction of your brain is involved in conscious experience, which is why so much of what we do is unconscious. The bulk of your brain's processing falls outside what you can experience; it simply doesn't exist for your consciousness, not even as an absence. That's why your thoughts simply come out of nowhere, apparently uncontrolled, undetermined… Yours and yours alone.'
Samantha yanked her hands out in a warding gesture, shook her head. 'Come on, professor, this is just too crazy.'
'Oh, it goes deeper, trust me. Everything falls apart, Agent Logan. Absolutely everything.'
Sam watched the streamers of bubbles in her beer. 'So it has to be wrong, doesn't it?'
Thomas simply watched her.
'Doesn't it?' she repeated, her tone somewhere between wonder and irritation.
He shrugged for what seemed the hundredth time. 'Free will is an illusion, that much is certain. As for other psychological staples like the now, selfhood, purpose, and so on, the evidence that they are all fundamentally deceptive continues to pile up. And if you think about it, perhaps this is what we should expect. Consciousness is young in evolutionary terms, a jury-rigged response to a perfect storm of environmental circumstances. We're stuck with the beta-version. Less even. It only seems slick because it's all we know.'
'You mean,' Sam said drily, 'as far as science is.concerned.'
Thomas took a long drink, exhaled heavily out his nose. In his freshman classes, attacking science was hands down the most common response to the threat posed by the Argument—as well as the weakest.
'And science is a mess, sure. But it's the only mess in recorded history that has had any success at generating and deciding between theoretical claims—not to mention making everything around us possible as a result. In historical terms, it is absolutely unprecedented. What are you going to believe? A four-thousand-year-old document bent on tribal self-glorification? Your own flattering intuitions on the fundamental nature of things? Some hothouse philosophical interpretation that takes years of specialized training just to understand? Or an institution that makes things like computers, thermonuclear explosions, and cures for small-pox possible?'
Samantha Logan stared at him for a long and lovely moment. Someone jacked up the volume on the flat-screen above the bar. A silky whisper fanned across the tables, extolling the wonders of Head & Shoulders.
'Because when your hair shines, you shine…'
'But there're truths outside of science.'
'Are there? I mean, there's a lot of non-scientific claims floating around, that's for sure. But truths? Is the Bible more true than the Quran? Is Plato more true than Buddha? Maybe, maybe not. The fact is we have no way of knowing, even though billions of us jump up and down screaming otherwise. And the more science teaches us, the more it seems we're just duping ourselves altogether. Our internal yardstick is bent, Agent, we know that for a fact. Why should we trust any of our old measurements?'
Most people simply nodded and dismissed the Argument. Most people found their fables too flattering to seriously challenge. A thousand sects, cults, religions, and philosophers agreeing on nothing, and yet each thought their ticket held the winning number of beliefs. Why? Because they held it. Somehow their personal experience of speaking in tongues, of remembering past lives, of having this prayer answered or that premonition come true was the only experience that mattered, the only one that made true…
So few could crawl into the Argument's belly and truly comprehend. The trick was crawling back out again.

'You know how many religions we humans have cooked up over the ages? Thousands… Thousands! Doesn't that worry you? Embarrass you? Think of that feeling you have, that sense of self-righteous indignation that you're struggling to hold onto right now, that you're using to squash the fact of your confusion and fear. I hate to break this to you, buddy, but it's as cheap as fucking dirt. Everybody uses it. Everybody thinks the great captain in the sky has picked them for the winning team, and why not? In the absence of evidence, all we have is our psychology, our needs, to anchor our beliefs. To feel safe. To feel special. You can stomp your foot all you want, wave your hands, pray and pray and pray, but in the end, you're just one more fucking Christian-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist-Jew, just another hapless, dim-witted human, crying out, "Me-fucking-me-me! I'm the special one!"'

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to admit, I was one of the people lured in by how depressing Neuropath is supposed to be and how ruthlessly it makes its case. My expectation was that I wouldn't want to like this book, but end up doing so anyway. Take a look at my rating; I obviously didn't do the latter.

The first problem with this book is that both setting and characters are dull. The setting is pretty much the world during the time the book was written, except that climate change ruined the world, the US law enforcement and intelligence community has become fully authoritarian instead of somewhat-authoritarian and there are t-shirts with animated pictures on them. Also, neuroscience and its practical applications are far advanced. Sadly, the ramifications of this technology end at more authoritarianism and more opportunities for philosophical rants. As far as worldbuilding goes, Neuropath is one of the weakest sci-fi books I ever picked up. This is made worse by it trying to be prophetic, when all it did was capture contemporary fears (of terorrism, the Bush-administration and climate change) and exaggerate them.

The characters are slightly better than the setting, but not by much. The main villain of the story, Neil, is the lovechild of your stereotypical edgy atheist and the jerk that stole your girlfriend. He's charming, ruthless, cruel, and highly intelligent. The protagonist, Thomas Bible, is Neil's best friend, and an apathetic loser who spends most of the book contemplating how awesome Neil is. It gets bland sometime after page 30, but goes on and on and on for the rest of the book. Neither of these characters is very compelling, and taken together, they don't make for a good story. Neil is simply overpowered and basically drives the entire plot, with Thomas as his mouthpiece. And these are the two best-written characters in the story. At least they appear like real people, which is more than can be said of anyone else in this story. Save for Thomas' children, especially his daughter, but they can hardly carry this piece nor are they supposed to.

The philosophy is mostly carried through dialogues, I'll deal with the latter first. A typical exchange goes like this: Neil does something horrible, to prove a philosophical point; someone expresses his outrage over this point; Thomas tells them that Neil is right; they lose their shit and storm out of the run, intellectually vanquished by Neil. That third person can be any character in the book besides Neil and Thomas, but the reaction always stays the same (which is part of the reason why the characters suck so hard). It's not even like there was a fundamentally different philosophical view that was being discussed each time. No, it all ties back into Neil's radical materialism and nihilism, something I'll come back to later. In general, all the dialogue - even the one that differs from this format - only serves to make a philosophical argument, or just any argument. At one point, a man is knocked out with a roundhouse kick, and Thomas' contemplates that this could cause long-term brain damage or even turn out lethal. Yeah, no shit, a roundhouse kick directly to the face is dangerous?! I already knew that, and I don't want to be reminded by it for the sheer sake of ruining everything that's fun!

Now, to finally let the cat out of the bag: The philosophy of Neuropath. Was it as good as everyone says it is? Well... no. Not at all. Basically, you're nothing but your brain (or rather the processes going on inside it), you have no soul and not even a real essence. Everything you love and care about is an illusion, including religion and morality. That's interesting to hear about, but it cannot carry an entire book by itself, not when it's presented in such a redundant manner and with all the good counter-arguments left out. Neil makes his case that individuals have no soul or essence and no free will by rewiring their brains, hence you could easily create a counter-argument based on a difference between internal processes of the brain and external interference. That would at the very least spice the book up, so that I could appreciate it as a philosophical tract.

As it is, Neuropath simply isn't fun. It's overly long, the story and all its elements are bland, the action is forced and uninspired, and the philosophy just isn't that great. Part of the reason why it gets two stars (with a tendency towards three stars, even) is because of the end scene, where Neil presents "the argument", as it's called in the story, most effectively, and in the most gruesome and harrowing manner imaginable. This scene was genuinely very good and would've made for an exciting short story and a decent philosophical work, as I don't expect a short story to deal with every argument and counter-argument under the sun. In short, these last twenty to fourty pages are everything that's good in Neuropath condensed and refined. Too bad it was just a torture to get there.

If you want to get a taste of Bakker's radical determinism and materialism, read Peter Watts. His books are both more sophisticated (even though I eventually ended up disagreeing with a lot of his philosophical ideas) and far more fun to read than Neuropath. He even got an addendum where he explains the science behind his works, with footnotes no one ever reads and shit like that. That's my personal recommendation, but as Neuropath is a very polarizing work, take it with a grain of salt. Maybe you'll enjoy it, even though I didn't.

[Жанна Пояркова]

Как-то я ожидала от Бэккера большего, чем дрочерский слэшер на тему того, что люди - биологические автоматы. Начало очень многообещающее, но дальше все сходит с рельсов. И я подозреваю, что его дарк теперь не смогу читать так же, как раньше =)

[Lotus.Lua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un libro realista, crudo y filosófico.
Vale la pena introducirte en sus paginas.
Cada capitulo es una discusión; sobre moralidad, religión, amor, fidelidad y existencia.
¡Es una locura! rompe con cualquier peculiaridad, es siniestro porque la historia muestra un mundo guiado por la impersonalidad de la ciencia, sin sentimientos; un mundo guiado por la mente, sin justificaciones solo actos, solo fines.

[Cam 💕🌸]

The story could’ve been interesting but the amount of sexism in just the 10% I read… That’s one of the occurrences where you can tell a book was written by a man 💀 So, it’s a DNF for me 🤷🏻‍♀️

[Julia Szczygielska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, po prostu wow. Ta książka jest PRZEPEŁNIONA wiedzą o neurologii i psychologii, co jest wielkim plusem ode mnie. Czułam, jakby ktoś przekazywał mi wiedzę w bardzo ciekawy sposób, opowiadając historię. Nie traktowałam tego jak klasyczny thriller, który czyta się na wakacjach na plaży, a bardziej jako źródło wiedzy o temacie, który akurat bardzo mnie interesuje. Historia sama w sobie również jest ciekawa, nie ma momentu nudy, ciągle coś się dzieje. Przyznaję jednak, że w niektórych momentach musiałam wejść na internet, aby zrozumieć niektóre zagadnienia, ale dla mnie to jeszcze lepiej - więcej ciekawostek ;p.
Książka ta pomogła mi zrozumieć, że wszystko jest w naszej głowie, niezmiernie ułatwiło mi to ostatni czas, który pełny był wywrotów w moim życiu na poziomie psychologicznym. Oczywiście nie obyło się bez mnóstwa filozoficznych pytań typu "czyli czym my właściwie jesteśmy?". Obudziło się we mnie wiele mindfucków związanych z egzystencjalnymi przemyśleniami i skłamałabym jeśli powiedziałabym, że ta książka mnie nie poruszyła.
Wielkie polecenie dla fanów zwiedzania zakamarków naszego umysłu, mózgu, psychologii itp :)

[Kyle · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you've never heard of the consciousness is fake debate, it might be interesting for some of the science behind it, but if you have, then there's no good reason to read this book. Read Blindsight by Peter Watts instead. This book is more poorly plotted and characterized, has way more misogyny, and does the opposite of justice to the genre style (for a sci-fi/fantasy author going out-genre check out Melville's hardboiled "The City and the City"). It is also contains faaaar too much science as an ideology, despite the characters assurances of "raitonalism" and "empiricism."

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Tim Sharp · Rating 2 out of 5]

A grimly depressing read, hampered by a rote thriller narrative, with some long sections where it felt more like Bakker was, in a Randian/Stephensonesque fashion, just spouting his perspective verbatim rather than inhabiting the perspective of his characters.

Whether one subscribes to Bakker's conception of human consciousness or not seems to largely determine how most people have responded to the work, but my issues are more with the book itself, which seemed to me to somewhat needlessly cruel, awkwardly plotted, and filled with info-dump after info-dump, which interrupted the flow of the mystery/drama.

There were definitely elements of a good story here, and without a doubt the concept of neural hacking and brain states being used by the government and corporations is rich ground for narrative, but the serial killer/psycho-with-a-point structure seemed to unnecessarily hamper the more interesting ideas in play, (I was reminded somewhat of Broken Monsters at times, which also marries its pitch-black worldview with a crime/thriller plot). More damningly, Thomas, the central character, is such an obvious patsy that you spend the bulk of the novel screamingly aware of how Bakker has made the man into little more than a clumsy torture-doll in order to drive home his points. He exists to suffer, and not in a wry Liggotti-esque fashion, more like some kind of avatar of cluelessness in order that we the audience may have a come-to-brain-blindness moment in the face of his obliviousness. Indeed, there were moments where I felt as if I were reading Pilgrim's Progress, or some other such faith-infused screed. I have nothing against literature being used to make deeper points about the nature of humanity, but I do mind if it's being done clumsily.

It speaks to the reason that I regard Iain M. Banks as one of the great synthesizers in science fiction, because his political and social perspectives, whilst never opaque, were hard-coded into the structure of the stories themselves. You never felt like his characters were mere puppets on a stage for him to write a manifesto (an ironic statement in the context of this book), they lived, they bled, they desired, and they experienced more things in their worlds than simply a litany of cruelties in order for Banks to let us know how he felt about anarchism or religion or whatever.

I enjoy reading Bakker's blog, and his perspective holds a certain fascination for those inclined to indulge in a more pessimistic reading of the world from time to time, but this seemed to me a less-than-ideal way for him to make his points.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as psycho thrillers go, I feel like I grew out of the genre years ago, but I picked this up because I had faith that Bakker would deliver something worthwhile. After all, this is the man who gave me the "The Prince of Nothing" trilogy.

While "Neuropath" isn't near as compelling and awe-inspiring as those three books, it's certainly well-written and throughly thought provoking. A lot of it follows typical, well-worn patterns in the genre -- a little "Silence of the Lambs," a little "Seven." But then Bakker sets the tale around 30 years in the future, in an age wrecked by poor environmental policies, a pornography-eroded culture and a post-war-on-terror police state.

The core of the book? A mild sci-fi take on cutting -edge neuroscience and psychology. And, of course, Bakker spreads his own philosophical ponderings throughout. The heart of the novel deals with the nature -- and perhaps the illusion -- of human consciousness. The neurological content in the book really floored me at times, made me ponder self (as well as the faces on MARTA) in an entirely new and unsettling light.

Bakker says that with this book he set out to write a psycho thriller that was both viscerally and intellectually disturbing -- he certainly delivers on the later.

(I was really torn between giving this a three and a four. I have issues with some of the choices Bakker made in terms of the storyline, but thought the characters were solid and the subject matter utterly enthralling. So consider this something more like a 3.5 or 3.75.)

[Eva Labancová · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel utterly fooled. When I read the reviews at the beginning I thought that they were exaggerated, that the book was really not as bad ad people had written. And this was actually true, the first 200 pages were really interesting. The questions about human mind, consciousness and free will were interestingly incorporated in the story and even though I disliked the main character I could somehow understand where he was standing in the story. Many reviewers said that the second half of the book was better, because the pace of the case had sped up, but from my point of view, this is not the case. The second half of the book was TERRIBLE (I had to write it in capitals, to emphasize). The author repeats the same sentences on every other page, then when some "action" scene comes, he incorporates the same bull**** all over again, which ruins the scene whatsoever. While, this could be understandable all the scenes that actually have some movement and not just dialog are written lousily. Reader does not understand what is happening, who shot who, how did someone get from restrains etc. And what makes me soooo mad, is that while the book was written in a way, that the reader should be terrified because something like this could actually happen one day, the logic, science, everything is there, on the other hand, the legislative, how could one person have all of that technical gadgets and all that stuff is not logically explained at all. So the book, changes into a total sci-fi, which would not be bad, if the writer purposely wanted to do that.

[Daniel Bensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know the smart guy who sneers at happy people? They must not be smart enough to understand how bad the world really is. It isn't a position I respect.
There is a lot of edgy two-thousands nihilism here, from predictions of a frozen Europe to preoccupations with sociopaths, terrorists, and MRI studies. Thank goodness for the Replication Crisis.
I like R. Scott Bakker's work, but this is his worst book by far. It doesn't seem he had any fun writing it. I only finished it because I was in the bath and wanted to find out if the kids were okay. They weren't, and the author seems to suggest that that doesn't matter.

[Kassie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate this book. It's complicated beyond what is useful and in the end it felt like a student in psychology wrote a bad story about cops and bad guys and tried to make it interesting with an awful plot twist. It was painful to read, slow and the little action there is falls flat. None of the characters were credible. And starting from chapter 24 or something it just goes everywhere and nowhere. It completely loses the little sense it had. It was sooo painful to read I don't know why I finished it.

[KeAnne · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was...words on pages and little more

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5

Bakker knocks it out of the park again.

[Frank Kool · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there's one piece of folk wisdom that I love to disagree with, it's the notion that "you can't judge a book by its cover". Because if there is any skill that a ferocious reader will pick up over the years, it is to make more and more accurate predictions on what qualities a book has(n't) by merely looking at the cover. Aside from obvious matters of fact such a title, author, language, and synopsis, books have a way of revealing themselves in more subtle ways, such as the use of font, colour scheme, the placing of text, and the things left unsaid in the cover blurb.

But I gotta say, Neuropath is not what I expected based on its superficial appearance. I picked it up because it's use of pale-as-death white background colours overlayed with fading capital letters warning me about "A KILLER WHO WILL GET INSIDE YOUR HEAD. LITERALLY." peaked my interest. My somewhat adolescent love for relentless gore and suffering interest, to be precise.
But even the few pages I read while still inside the second-hand book store showed me the errors of my prejudgmental ways. Neuropath is not your typical, cheap paperback splatterfest. Instead, it quickly proves itself to be more of a thinky-read than a scary-read. Especially the first hundred or so pages are filled to the brim with exposition, as the main character, a psychology professor, shares endless bits of social science trivia with the FBI agent tasked with hunting a serial killer. These conversations have the inevitable quality of being less organic, real-life dialogue but ever so much more exposition on the author's part. Being a cognitive science graduate myself, I both appreciated the scope of the scientific knowledge put on display, while simultaneously doubting its depth. By that I mean that, interesting though it all may be, the book sometimes veers into that obnoxious Dan Brown territory where it tries to dazzle the unsuspecting reader with fresh-man level knowledge.

The book would have been just another example of the Dan Brown mill of thriller, had it not been for the fact that it's actually very well written. Bakker not only has a nice eye for detail but also knows how to weave sentences with flow while carving settings and characters that are more than just cardboard cut-outs. An example of he ways in which he makes us see a place through the eyes of the main character:

"The place had a quaint tea-house atmosphere that not only belied its name, Blowhards, but all the telltale signs of hardcore barroom crowds: the cracked panes of glass, the carved initials distressing the already 'distressed' decor, and the smell of spilled booze and - oddly enough - cigar smoke. In theory-speak he would have said that its identity-claim contradicted its behavioral residu. In normal speak he would have said that it looked like a place where the high and mighty got down and dirty."

Most of the philosophical musings concern the struggle against nihilism in the face of the disenchantment of the world by natural science. Cognitive science wreaks havoc on the belief, the ever so strongly held belief, that our experience of reality actually responds to reality, and even more damning, its discoveries lead some to think that free will doesn't exist and that everything we think and feel is just a meaningless by-product of the evolutionary processes that 'designed' us. Man is but a bundle of reflexes, and the experience of free will, no matter how convincing, is an illusion. Needless to say, this worldview leaves little room for grandeur.

"According to Neil, men were bullets, fired from pussies at pussies."

Personally, I was not entirely convinced by these ideas, seeing that the book neither touches on the is/ought fallacy, nor on the possibility of free will (just like consciousness itself) being an emergent property of the nervous system.
Moreover, the narrative betrays itself at times in subtle ways, such as a chapter wherein the main character convinces the FBI agent that our perception of the world around us so deeply flawed that it approximates an illusion, all while she is maneuvering the car they're in across a highway filled with other supposedly deluded drivers. It's not entirely sure whether this blatant contradiction is the author showing the cracks of the grand theory around which revolves the plot, or whether this is a blind spot for those who doubt certainty, namely that they are all too certain of it.

Though I'm very much of the opinion that it's best not to confuse the art with the artist, it's difficult to read the book without wondering whether or not this piece of (science-)fiction is a reflection of the author's personal views. Through the novel, Bakker comes across as both a prophet of doom and an advocate for the bleak, reductionist view of humans as mere input-output machines, biomechanisms who are sock-puppets in the hands of evolution's kill-fuck-die realpolitik. Fortunately there is an after-word wherein he states that he is neither an eliminativist nor a nihilist, though he admits that, much like the main character, he struggles to defend himself (and by extension, humanity) against the onslaught of scientific insights that tear away at the grand statue of man's noble nature.

At the end of the day, Neuropath is a well-written page-turner that can be enjoyed as just a gory serial killer tale, or as a scientific/philosophical exploration of the human condition. Either way, it's has its ways of terrifying you.

[Tragic · Rating 3 out of 5]

«¿Acaso tienes tú un brazo como el de Dios, y truenas con una voz como la suya?».

Bakker aquí prueba que si quiere puede escribir lo que sea. Tiene el talento y la voz, es un genio de las palabras.

Aunque es un Thriller con todos los elementos propios, es en las ideas del propio autor donde destaca. Si has leído su saga del Segundo Apocalipsis muchos temas te serán familiares, especialmente cosas como el determinismo, el Apocalipsis semántico, la conciencia, la existencia de las almas, y el cerebro ciego a sí mismo. Sugiere sobre todo que los humanos no somos alma ni conciencia solo cerebros «eso piensa, luego yo fui», somo meras ilusiones cerebrales… Y todo carece de sentido si el cerebro puede manipularse.

¿Y cómo seria un ser humano sin la conciencia, un vehículo sin el «yo», un «alma» que se mueve por sí misma, algo capaz de anteceder a todo? Un Neuronauta.

Y a pesar de todo, el libro no logra destacar tanto como esperaba. Muchas partes parecen más un ensayo que una novela, y la constante ida y vuelta del autor sobre el mismo tema dejan esto como un soliloquio. La historia que Bakker desenvuelve aquí es interesante pero también algo plana y el final es abrupto. Tiene momentos brillantes, sangrientos y enternecedores como solo él sabe escribir y eso ya es suficiente para mi.

¿«Yo» escribí esta mini-reseña o fue «mi» cerebro?… Es la [mi] muerte del significado…

[Andy B · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is more a modern philosophy / neuroscience sci-fi horror than a crime novel. The crime is garish, bright, and dangled as a lure; the lever of the plot is elsewhere. The crime's just a prod to move the Argument between Thomas and his conversational antagonists. That's for the best, as the crime investigation figures aren't that interesting and the reader always has the sense that events will move according to the antagonist rather than the narrator. If you aren't scared off by gory horror, speculative science fiction, and getting into 'whoa dude' arguments with your buddies, you will probably enjoy Neuropath.

[Rodney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neuropath is a work of futuristic serial killer fiction that ignores all moral limits in order to propose some disturbing hypotheses about the nature of human consciousness and the limits of free will.

I was not enamored by the style or prose. The plot mechanics are straight out of a movie or a tv show and the characterizations are awkwardly broad (I guess there's a logic to that). The attractions here are the core ideas that propel the story and the numerous philosophical ruminations-or digressions--surrounding those ideas. The book is informed by the writer's knowledge of/background in neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and philosophy. The depth of the author's knowledge and complexity of his thinking about the subject matter really comes through here. People into Thomas Ligotti's Conspiracy Against The Human Race or Eugene Thacker's Horror of Philosophy series might be interested in this nihilistic nightmare of a novel.

[Anirudh Kukreja · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars

How can a book be profound and juvenile simultaneously? The debate between psychology and neurology was interesting but getting a Biology/Psychology lecture every 5 minutes wasn't something that I signed up for. I'm a big fan of dark fiction, but a story can't be dark just for the sake of being dark; and this was one of the most far-fetched books I've ever read. Characterization was practically negligible and don't get me started on the sexist, almost perverse, description of the female characters.