Mar 15, 2020
Several years ago I interviewed Terrence Deacon about his fascinating book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. His goal was to propose a theory of how purpose evolved in a universe without purpose. His argument was persuasive, but highly technical. In this month’s episode of Books and Ideas I interview his longtime colleague Jeremy Sherman. His book Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves makes Deacon’s ideas highly accessible to a wider audience. Join us as we explore the question: How did purpose arise from a purposeless universe? (Hint: the answer is not supernatural!)
Links and References:
- Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves by Jeremy Sherman
- Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by Terrence W. Deacon
- The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence W. Deacon
- Books and Ideas 47 with Terrence Deacon
- Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
- The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
- Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
- The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Announcements:
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Coming April 28, 2020: a new expanded version of Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty by Virginia “Ginger” Campbell, MD (links coming soon)
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