This was my favorite non-fiction book, mainly because it reads easy as if it was fiction, and extremely interesting to me.
It was recommended by my philosophy teacher because I wanted to learn more about the philosophy of mind, and the book did its job by leaving my with more questions and answers. The book was split up in half in a way. It started out very philosophy heavy, talking about how many abstract questions about consciousness and intelligence, how it emerges out of our material brains. Then it goes into concrete topics after setting up all the big-picture abstractions and talks about how we design artificial intelligence and what we dont know about the brain. He ends it perfectly by going big-picture again and talk about why there is intelligence in our universe in the first place.
Churchland somehow explains four very complicated fields of study (philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science) intermingling without the reader needing any prior knowledge. He does all of that in less than 300 pages.
needless to say, I highly recommend anyone interested in philosophy of mind, machine learning, neuroscience, or even just interested on how thinking works.
