Absence of Mind, a small and fiercely concentrated book containing lectures given at Yale….[focuses] on the oddly obsessive urge in various kinds of contemporary thought to dissolve the mind itself, to deny the evidential importance of what it feels like to be a conscious subject.<\/p>\n
Assorted popular scientists and psychologists have insisted that what we think we are doing, what we experience as thinking or judging or deciding, is illusory: we are self-deceived, because we are in fact acting out a script prescribed by genetically driven imperatives, or by the ergonomics of impersonal forces in the psyche.<\/p>\n
This “exclusion of felt life” overflows into wider cultural attitudes and has the effect of lowering our expectations of ourselves \u201d\u201c and so of reducing our imaginative reach. As Robinson puts it starkly at one point: who are “we”, if the entire life of “reflection and emotion” is simply the method adopted by genes for their self-propagation?<\/p>\n