Various Reviews - absence/absence.github.com GitHub Wiki
Book Of The Year: The Return Of Teleology
Written 12/26/2012 by James Farrell in Forbes
Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature, might have been titled Aristotle’s Revenge.
While the book’s subtitle is ‘How Mind Emerged From Matter’, it’s a far more ambitious–and complicated–attempt to show how goal-directed processes, including the origin of life and mind, can arise from purely physical processes.
Deacon is a Professor of biological anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a previous book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. [Technically, his new book was released late last year, but as it's got a © 2012, I'm selecting it as my pick for this year's most notable.]
Link http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2012/12/26/book-of-the-year-the-return-of-teleology/
"Rethinking Thinking - How a lumpy bunch of tissue lets us plan, perceive, calculate, reflect, imagine—and exercise free will"
Published on November 12, 2011 by Raymond Tallis in the Wall Street Journal
Incomplete Nature...his mighty work of scholarship is long, slow-moving and peppered with neologisms, but it is infinitely preferable to the flashy tomes of the Professors of Legerdemain who assure us that the mind could emerge from matter in the brain "just like that" simply because "the brain is the most complex object in the world."
Along the way, Mr. Deacon demolishes fashionable computational theories of the brain. ¬Anyone in the future who is tempted to assert that "the mind is the software of the brain" should reflect on Mr. Deacon's observation that the apparent agency of a computer "is just the displaced agency of some human designer." The use of simplistic analogies to make the mind look machine-like and machines mind-like and thereby solve the mind-brain problem should never again pass unchallenged...
Link
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576642991109496396.html
"Counterintuitive, or the Most Commonsense Ideas Ever?"
Published on October 29, 2011 by Joseph Stussi on Amazon.
For anyone interested in frontiers in the natural and human sciences, and someday reconciling two awkwardly estranged disciplines, I heartily recommend this title. Whatever your current approach to big questions about the universe and our place in it, prepare to incorporate some exciting revelations.
The main exercise of the book is to break out of restrictive and endlessly reductive modes of scientific explanation. Deacon points out, with multidisciplinary examples, that too often we regard scientific explanations as territories when they are in fact maps. Though these maps are more and more carefully redrawn over time, their function is still representational. We need, he argues, to focus on the processes that underlie interpretation.
Publishers Weekly
Published on September 26, 2011
In a tour de force encompassing biology, neurobiology, metaphysics, information theory, physics, and semiotics, Deacon, a neuroscientist and chair of anthropology at UC-Berkeley, attempts to resolve the issue of how life and mind arose from inanimate matter. As he did in his previous book, The Symbolic Species, Deacon asks a very big question and provides the framework for an answer. He argues persuasively that complexity can comfortably emerge as a higher order function from simplicity and extends this point to discuss how nonmaterial entities such as ideas and emotions can generate physical consequences.
Link
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-393-04991-6
"Finally, A Scientific Explanation for the Emergence Of Mattering From Matter"
Published on November 1, 2011 by Dr. Jeremy Sherman in Psychology Today
Are we getting any closer to a scientific explanation for the emergence of mind from matter? According to cognitive scientists Jerry Fodor, "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious."
Fodor's is a minority position. Cognitive scientists are on the whole optimistic. Most would claim that, thanks to advances in life science, complexity theory and information theory, we are fast approaching a fully materialist account of consciousness.
In his new book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerges From Matter (Norton 2011), U.C. Berkeley's Terry Deacon takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Fodor. Deacon argues that the mainstream approach to cognitive science has a lot in common with Zeno's Paradox: In our race to a fully scientific account of consciousness, no matter how finely we dissect neurological processes, or how elaborately we flesh out our algorithmic computational models of complex informational processes, we are getting nowhere nearer to an explanation of consciousness. To Deacon, we need a different approach to the pure physics of consciousness, an approach that parallels the calculus that enabled swift Achilles to ultimately catch the tortoise...
Link
A Scientific Explanation for the Emergence of Mattering from Matter | Psychology Today
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ambigamy/201111/scientific-explanation-the-emergence-mattering-matter
Other Writings
http://www.phf.upenn.edu/11-12/deacon.shtml
http://russian.lifeboat.com/blog/2011/07/no-law-entails-the-evolution-of-the-biosphere
http://uuhk.weebly.com/forum-353423554221312.html
http://esquire.com/the-side/gifts/books-for-men-9#fbIndex9
http://minetowin.com/2011/11/undersimplification/
http://target2025.com/investing-so-the-past-and-the-future-contribute-to-the-present/