Book Review: Building a Brain

I finally finished the "Self-assembling Brain" by Peter R. Hiesinger; it took me way to long. First of all, it's a pretty good book if you're interested in the competing views on how Genetics, Neuroscience, Robotics, and AI view intelligence and the human brain. The author really wants the reader to understand the vantage or viewpoints for each of these domain areas. The book is well-written and accessible to most people with a STEM background. However, at times it's hard to keep track of how these domains were developed by key individuals in the mid to end of the 20th century. For example, I really couldn't follow the author's presentation of what Roger W. Sperry was proposing for how a brain wired itself. 

In the book's second chapter, the author presents a dialogue between 4 different scientists/engineers. There is a roboticist, molecular geneticist, AI engineer, and neuroscientist. The playwright then carries on about the different perspectives about whether artificial neural networks are capable and mimic a human brain. The neuroscientist claims more needs to be drawn from biology in terms of function, i.e., how the brain does what it does. The AI engineer thinks we don't necessarily need to replicate the human brain works in order to achieve artificial general intelligence. The roboticist follows a similar thinking as the AI engineer. The interesting one is the geneticist who seems to propose that there is a significant need to understand how to grow a brain based on genetics, the other three push back.

At first, I thought this style would be a bit silly and somewhat gimmicky however it actually was one of my favorite part of the book because it provides context for someone who is on the outside of these fields. This style of discussion between the main actors continues throughout the book at actually makes it easy to follow the different approaches in the various domain areas. You get a clear image of the tension going on between different fields that focus on the human brain, conscience, and intelligence. The value of this is you see how there is no clear consensus on how the human brain does what it does and how artificial intelligence directly relates.

Overall it's an excellent book to be familiar with the different development and perspectives of how the brain may work. Here is the front cover of the book for reference and a link to where you can buy it.

Princeton Press

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Bringuier, S., Book Review: Building a Brain, Dirac's Student, (2023). Retrieved from https://www.diracs-student.blog/2023/07/book-review-building-brain.html.

  @misc{Bringuier_3JUL2023,
  title        = {Book Review: Building a Brain},
  author       = {Bringuier, Stefan},
  year         = 2023,
  month        = jul,
  url          = {https://www.diracs-student.blog/2023/07/}# 
                 {book-review-building-brain.html},
  note         = {Accessed: 2025-04-14},
  howpublished = {Dirac's Student [Blog]},
  }