Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves - Softcover

Sherman, Jeremy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231173334 ISBN 13: 9780231173339

Verlag: Columbia University Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

If the universe is aimless, how do selves and aims emerge? Why do living beings have aims when inanimate things do not? Current science encourages us to reject the ghost-in-the-machine explanation—that something called spirit, soul, mind, or will was somehow breathed into matter—and instead accept that selves are just matter, in aimless mechanistic motion like everything else. But what about life’s many emergent qualities, the multifarious purposes that shape actual physical behavior not just in human lives, but in all of life? Even the simplest life forms have adaptive functions, traits that accomplish goals or ends. How can we explain the nature and origin of selves and aims without resorting to supernatural forces or explaining them away as nothing but cause-and-effect mechanisms?

In Neither Ghost nor Machine, Jeremy Sherman explains the emergence of selves and aims in an aimless universe. He distills for a general audience the theory developed by renowned neuroscientist Terrence Deacon, which extends the breakthrough constraint-based insight that inspired evolutionary, information, and self-organization theory. Emergent dynamics theory provides a testable hypothesis for how mattering arose from matter, function from physics, and means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect dynamics. It offers a physics of purpose, demonstrating that there is a strictly physical explanation for the emergence and nature of selves and aims, one that shows our existence in an otherwise inanimate universe is not absurd. Neither Ghost nor Machine bridges the gap between the hard and soft sciences, suggesting fresh and exciting solutions to philosophical mysteries that have perplexed humanity for millennia, from free will to causality to morality.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeremy Sherman is a decision theorist researching and writing about choice from the origin of life to everyday living. He teaches college courses across the social sciences and blogs for Psychology Today. He has studied and collaborated with Terrence Deacon for twenty years.

Terrence Deacon is professor of biological anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997) and Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011).

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All organisms try to achieve what matters to them. Inanimate things don’t. How to explain this difference? In Neither Ghost nor Machine, Jeremy Sherman distills Terrence Deacon’s breakthrough natural science hypothesis for the emergence of agents and agency, selves and aims in an otherwise aimless universe. The theory cuts a new path through the dualistic spirit vs. mechanism debate, unifying the hard and soft sciences, explaining how mattering emerges from matter, and suggesting new solutions to philosophical mysteries that have perplexed humanity for millennia.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0231173334
• ISBN 13: 9780231173339
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland