Our minds on media.

George Scialabba at Boston.com wrote up an interesting comparison between Marvin Minsky’s new book, The Emotion Machine and B. Alan Wallace’s new tome Contemplative Science. I’m not sure I see the value in the comparison. In the general field of cognitive science (and in a very broad interpretation that would include AI and neuorscience), I don’t think Minsky and Wallace could be farther apart. But the comparison did make me think of one of my favorite sentences in literature written by one Philip K. Dick in Paycheck and Other Classic Stories, “It meditated.”