
The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, by Andy Clark, Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $30
For René Descartes, minds were essentially thinking (or feeling) things. For the founding fathers of behaviorism, minds were identical with behaviors—talking, habits, dispositions to act in one way or another. More recently, minds have been imagined as a kind of computer: the software running on the hardware of the brain.