Conscience of The Machine

Science is on the cusp of determining that there is a physiological basis for everything we think and feel. It is but a short hop further away from declaring, like Nietzsche of God, that free will is dead. Soon our every impulse will be traced to a neurotransmitter, our will reduced to a biochemical afterthought. CONSCIENCE OF THE MACHINE is both a critique and a defense of our conception of our identity at the precise moment that it comes under sharpest attack by scientific reductionism. The lives of troubled student Bobby Rosen, his ultra-competent teacher Emma Browne, and the brilliant failure Principal Harvey McNair intersect at the surreal implement of punishment known only as The Machine. Each faces a personal crisis that jolts them out of the sleep of habit, the haze of subconscious autopilot in which we persist day by day. As they struggle against the genetics and experiences which have shaped them, each must come to grips with the fact that large swaths of their minds seem beyond their control. Yet each has the opportunity to make a simple decision, to flip the switch like a Tibetan monk meditating over happiness, and remap the biochemical pathways of their brains through sheer will alone. Their intertwined troubles will drive one of them past the brink of sanity, into an impossible conversation with The Machine in which unexpected revelations about where machine ends and man begins unfurl. For each of them, the questions that arise are not mere idle philosophy but matters of life and death, sanity or insanity. Is our identity shaped brick by brick through a series of deliberate conscious decisions or fashioned haphazardly by unconscious, automatic responses? Are we responsible for our choices or merely witness to them?

Brian Cato pursued dual majors in philosophy and chemistry at Brown University. He has twice retired from positions with major pharmaceutical companies. The first time to spend a year teaching English in China, the second to finish CONSCIENCE OF THE MACHINE. In writing it, he has drawn on his unique training in rational thinking and the scientific method as well as his abiding interest in the phenomenon of the mind, consciousness and the genesis of identity.