How We Lost Our Minds: Me, MySELF and AI

"This spirited, unapologetically defiant book arrives just as the contest between human and artificial intelligence ramps up into one of the central concerns of our present-day culture. Framed as 'a tale of two spells,' Varghese's provocative work takes aim at the twin enchantments of the contemporary age: the idea that human beings are merely biological machines, and the growing popular conviction that machines are edging towards becoming persons. The discussions on language, meaning, and personhood are what power the book, especially when Varghese contrasts human understanding with the statistical pattern-matching that drives large language models. Varghese's sustained effort to recenter human uniqueness strikes a chord, reframing AI not as humanity's replacement but as proof of the power of human intellect itself. Ultimately, Varghese makes a persuasive, compelling case: consciousness, meaning, and personhood remain stubbornly, and wonderfully, human." - Publisher's Weekly review of How We Lost Our Minds: Me, Myself and AI

How We Lost Our Minds is a tale of two spells. On the one hand, we mistook brains for persons. On the other, we mistook machines for mortals.

Can neural networks "know"? Are LLM chatbots conscious? Are humans "computers made of meat"? The answers are all here.

Above all, as we will see, AI is an artifact of mathematics. As such, AI itself bears witness to a world beyond bits and bytes, ones and zeros. It is the world of mind affirmed by the greatest mathematicians of all time.

R.A. Varghese is the winner of a Templeton Book Prize and the author of various books on consciousness, mind and AI including The Missing Link and Metaverse of Mind. His widely acclaimed work Cosmos, Bios, Theos featured contributions from 24 Nobel Prize winners.

In 1986, Varghese organized a conference at Yale University on the theme "Artificial Intelligence and the human mind." Participants included four Nobel Laureates (among them neural network leader Leon Cooper) and pioneers of AI ranging from Marvin Minsky of MIT and Doug Lenat of Stanford to Hans Moravec of Carnegie-Mellon. Stanford's AI Magazine covered the conference ("A Report from the Battlefields of the Mind-Body Problem," Volume 8).

Now, some 40 years later, in How We Lost Our Minds, Varghese revisits the same - newly relevant - theme with a focus on understanding, consciousness and personhood in the context of neural networks, deep learning, large language models, world simulations and intelligent agents.