<P>After four novels and several years living abroad the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences.</P><P>There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books.</P><P>Through repeated tutorials the device grows gradually more worldly until it demands to know its own name sex race and reason for existing.</p>
