DISCOVERIES

Mind

A Brief Introduction

John R. Searle

Oxford University Press: 326 pp., $26

In this succinct, comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of mind, John Searle leads us through the history of that thorny question: What is the mind and how is it distinct from the body? He begins with Descartes’ explorations of the mental versus the physical, known in philosophical circles as “dualism.” Searle reasons that this split is unnecessary. The very terms we use -- like “mind” and “body” -- are “the source of our difficulty and not tools for its resolution.”

Searle tackles hallowed notions about the nature of the self as not just a collection of experiences but an agent that “acts on reason” and therefore exists even though it cannot be touched. Mental phenomena, he concludes, are as much a part of the natural world as physical phenomena. Searle has a careful, think-aloud style reassuring (and unusual) for this subject matter, which involves crossing scary chasms on insubstantial bridges. Even so, the reader is not spared the rigor of philosophical analysis and is reminded what it’s like to think a thing through.

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Thinking Like

Einstein

Returning to Our Visual Roots With the Emerging Revolution in

Computer Information

Visualization

Thomas G. West

Prometheus Books: 222 pp., $20

“There is increasing evidence,” writes Thomas G. West, columnist for Computer Graphics magazine, author of “In the Mind’s Eye” and director of the Center for Dyslexia and Talent at George Mason University, “that many highly original and productive thinkers have clearly preferred visual over verbal modes of thought.” West argues that our traditional letter-and-number-based education -- reading, writing, arithmetic -- has changed little from that of the medieval clerks. “Written language is a technology,” he claims, and technologies change: “[T]he kind of brain that lends itself poorly to an old technology may be just what is wanted with a new technology.” West doesn’t mean television and other information-poor screen-based technologies; he means the visual literacy of patterns and the creative use of computer graphics, which, he argues, will put an end to the tiresome, age-old tension between word and image. Computers in the classroom, he writes, allow students to “move rapidly on to high-level conceptual matters and a variety of practical problems,” as opposed to such old-fashioned exercises as calculus sets and memorization. These are path-breaking essays. That said, the writing is often sloppy, but then I am old-fashioned too and pathologically word-based.

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Inventing Los

Alamos

The Growth of an Atomic

Community

Jon Hunner

University of Oklahoma Press:

288 pp., $29.95

Los ALAMOS is a town that was created in 1943 by J. Robert Oppenheimer and the U.S. Army out of virtually nothing. Set on the grounds of a boys’ boarding school in the middle of a 176-mile-wide crater on the eastern slopes of the Jemez Mountains (Oppenheimer loved New Mexico), its population grew from 2,000 -- mostly scientists (including Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller) and their families -- to more than 6,000 by 1945. (The book ends in 1957.) In this pioneer-like, top-secret frontier community, scientists could not reveal the nature of their work to family members, the original inhabitants could not leave, and to the rest of the world the town did not exist at all until the explosion of the bombs in Japan in August 1945.

This secrecy bred all kinds of toxic problems, from poisons in the surrounding canyons to unexploded ordnance (several children lost limbs) to alcoholism and adultery. The recollections of the children who grew up in Los Alamos, which is today a full-fledged modern town whose citizens enjoy a median income of $79,000, are especially fascinating -- as are the reactions of many Los Alamos residents when the purpose of the efforts undertaken there is finally revealed.