my mind on books

Evolution: The Human Story by Alice Roberts (DK Publishing, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk – 1 Sep)

Product description from the publisher:

How did we develop from simple animals inhabiting small pockets of forest in Africa to the dominant species on Earth? Traveling back almost eight million years to our earliest primate relatives, Evolution: The Human Story charts the development of our species from tree-dwelling primates to modern humans.

Investigating each of our ancestors in detail and in context, from the anatomy of their bones to the environment they lived in, Evolution: The Human Story profiles every human relative and ancestor discovered to date, and illustrates them in lifelike form.

Amazingly realistic CGI and model reconstructions by the renowned Dutch paleoartists, the Kennis brothers, bring us face-to-face and eye-to-eye with some of our distant ancestors, portraying them as never before.

Drawing on cutting-edge research and the latest theories to reveal new and surprising elements, shining a light on previously inaccessible and unimagined detail, Evolution: The Human Story takes on a depth and fascination that is hard to resist.

Preview from Google books:

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler (Crown Business)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 9 Aug)

Product description from the publisher:

What do Wikipedia, Zip Car’s business model, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and a small group of lobster fishermen have in common? They all show the power and promise of human cooperation in transforming our businesses, our government, and our society at large. Because today, when the costs of collaborating are lower than ever before, there are no limits to what we can achieve by working together.

For centuries, we as a society have operated according to a very unflattering view of human nature:  that, humans are universally and inherently selfish creatures. As a result, our most deeply entrenched social structures – our top-down business models, our punitive legal systems, our market-based approaches to everything from education reform to environmental regulation – have been built on the premise that humans are driven only by self interest, programmed to respond only to the invisible hand of the free markets or the iron fist of a controlling government.

In the last decade, however, this fallacy has finally begun to unravel, as hundreds of studies conducted across dozens of cultures have found that most people will act far more cooperatively than previously believed.  Here, Harvard University Professor Yochai Benkler draws on cutting-edge findings from neuroscience, economics, sociology, evolutionary biology, political science, and a wealth of real world examples to debunk this long-held myth and reveal how we can harness the power of human cooperation to improve business processes, design smarter technology, reform our economic systems, maximize volunteer contributions to science, reduce crime, improve the efficacy of civic movements, and more.

For example, he describes how:

• By building on countless voluntary contributions, open-source software communities have developed some of the most important infrastructure on which the World Wide Web runs
• Experiments with pay-as-you-wish pricing in the music industry reveal that fans will voluntarily pay far more for their favorite music than economic models would ever predict
• Many self-regulating communities, from the lobster fishermen of Maine to farmers in Spain, live within self-regulating system for sharing and allocating communal resources
• Despite recent setbacks, Toyota’s collaborative shop-floor, supply chain, and management structure contributed to its meteoric rise above its American counterparts for over a quarter century.
• Police precincts across the nation have managed to reduce crime in tough neighborhoods through collaborative, trust-based, community partnerships.

A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of cooperation in 21st century life, The Penguin and the Leviathan not only challenges so many of the ways in which we live and work, it forces us to rethink our entire view of human nature.

See also: Author’s website, Santa Fe Institute video “The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Science and Practice of Cooperation” (10/13/2010)

Re-Emergence: Locating Conscious Properties in a Material World by Gerald Vision (MIT Press, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk – 30 Sep)

Product description from the publisher:

The presence of sentience in a basically material reality is among the mysteries of existence. Many philosophers of mind argue that conscious states and properties are nothing beyond the matter that brings them about. Finding these arguments less than satisfactory, Gerald Vision offers a nonphysicalist theory of mind. Revisiting and defending a key doctrine of the once widely accepted school of philosophy known as emergentism, Vision proposes that conscious states are emergents, although they depend for their existence on their material bases. Although many previous emergentist theories have been decisively undermined, Vision argues that emergent options are still viable on some issues. In Re-Emergence he explores the question of conscious properties arising from brute, unthinking matter, making the case that there is no equally plausible non-emergent alternative. Vision defends emergentism even while conceding that conscious properties and states are realized by or strongly supervene on the physical. He argues, however, that conscious properties cannot be reduced to, identified with, or given the right kind of materialist explanation in terms of the physical reality on which they depend. Rather than use emergentism simply to assail the current physicalist orthodoxy, Vision views emergentism as a contribution to understanding conscious aspects. After describing and defending his version of emergentism, Vision reviews several varieties of physicalism and near-physicalism, finding that his emergent theory does a better job of coming to grips with these phenomena.

See also: Works by Gerald Vision at PhilPapers

The Wonder of Consciousness: Understanding the Mind through Philosophical Reflection by Harold Langsam (MIT Press, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk – 30 Sep)

Product description from the publisher:

Consciousness is a wonderful thing. But if we are fully to appreciate the wonder of consciousness, we need to articulate what it is about consciousness that makes it such an interesting and important phenomenon to us. In this book, Harold Langsam argues that consciousness is intelligible–that there are substantive facts about consciousness that can be known a priori–and that it is the intelligibility of consciousness that is the source of its wonder. Langsam first examines the way certain features of some of our conscious states intelligibly relate us to features of the world of which we are conscious. Consciousness is radically different from everything else in the world, and yet it brings us into intimate connection with the things of the world. Langsam then examines the causal powers of some of our conscious states. Some of these causal powers are determined in an intelligible way by the categorical natures of their conscious states: if you know what consciousness is, then you can also know (by the mere exercise of your intelligence) some of what consciousness does. Langsam’s intent is to get the philosophy of mind away from the endless and distracting debates about whether consciousness is physical or not. He shows that there are substantive things that we can discover about consciousness merely through philosophical reflection. The philosopher who takes this approach is not ignoring the empirical facts; he is reflecting on these facts to discover further, nonempirical facts.

On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (and Ourselves) by Jonnie Hughes (Free Press, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Why do some ideas spread, while others die off? Does human culture have its very own “survival of the fittest”? And if so, does that explain why our species is so different from the rest of life on Earth?

Throughout history, we humans have prided ourselves on our capacity to have ideas, but perhaps this pride is misplaced. Perhaps ideas have us. After all, ideas do appear to have a life of their own. And it is they, not us, that benefit most when they are spread. Many biologists have already come to the opinion that our genes are selfish entities, tricking us into helping them to reproduce. Is it the same with our ideas?

Jonnie Hughes, a science writer and documentary filmmaker, investigates the evolution of ideas in order to find out. Adopting the role of a cultural Charles Darwin, Hughes heads off, with his brother in tow, across the Midwest to observe firsthand the natural history of ideas—the patterns of their variation, inheritance, and selection in the cultural landscape. In place of Darwin’s oceanic islands, Hughes visits the “mind islands” of Native American tribes. Instead of finches, Hughes searches for signs of natural selection among the tepees.

With a knack for finding the humor in the quirks of the American cultural landscape, Hughes takes us on a tour from the Mall of America in Minneapolis to what he calls the “maul” of America—Custer’s last stand—stopping at road-sides and discoursing on sandwiches, the shape of cowboy hats, the evolution of barn roofs, the 28.99 wording of jokes, the wearing of moustaches, and, of course, the telling features from tepees of different tribes. Original, witty, and engaging, On the Origin of Tepees offers a fresh way of understanding both our ideas and ourselves.

See also: Author’s website