Terrence W. Deacon

This was one of the hardest books I've ever read largely because it presupposes an indepth knowledge of mechanics, chemistry, genetics, biology and physics. Much of it flew right over my head.

It deserves four stars if for nothing else, its impenetrability.

Sarcasm aside, the mystery and the glory of the quest is worthwhile.

Deacon seeks nothing less than to fill the scientific vacancy between mind and matter. A lot of pages in this book are filled with the historical blind alleys that thought has taken us in the quest....too many pages, in my opinion.

Logic and physics tell us that life is impossible, that entropy will drain the universe of thought and meaning. We know, of course, that this isn't entirely true. That there must be something else at work because life exists. What exactly that something else is forms the storyline of this book. It's not an anthropomorphic creature. It's not little green men from space.

Deacon never tries to answers the why question. He creates a framework for the how based on what we do know about how the universe operates, and it is obviously more than the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The key is in the title to the book..."emergence". Matter organizes itself. It doesn't need little green men. Life may have come about in an accident, but the pillars of thought exist in the same realm as biology and mechanics. Perturbance, motion, activity create the same powers in mind as in geology or anything else.

And that's about as far as I got.… (altro)

While the truly "popular science" version of this thesis remains to be written - Deacon's style and use of neologism are too cumbersome for most readers - it is a welcome addition to my library of non-reductive approaches to the major questions of contemporary science. In physics, cosmology, biology, and now in neuroscience, a new view of reality is beginning to emerge. It's summed up by Stuart Kauffman's idea of "order all the way down" or "order from order." Deacon posits that we need to conceive of human consciousness as a kind of negative space - a product of dynamical relations that cannot be reduced to specific material elements or flows of energy, while still being dependent upon their existence for its existence. And once having emerged, phenomena such as life and consciousness clearly become capable of permanently altering material reality in turn, reifying themselves and also producing novelty. That all aspects of reality are entangled and recursive, that "higher" levels are not reducible to a simple pile-up of "lower" levels is a much more promising posture for science to take than the reductive one that has merely led to the current dystopia: extreme alienation of humans from their environment and themselves.… (altro)