7.8 /10 1 Votes
Country Austria Media type Print (Hardcover) Originally published 1973 Page count 261 | 3.9/5 Goodreads Language German Pages 261 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Original title Die Rückseite des Spiegels Similar Konrad Lorenz books, Psychology books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Behind the mirror, a search for a natural history of human knowledge (German: Die Rückseite des Spiegels, Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens) is a 1973 book by Konrad Lorenz.
Contents
Concept
Lorenz summarizes his life's work into his own philosophy: Evolution is the process of growing perception of the outer world by living nature itself. Stepping from simple to higher organized organisms, Lorenz shows how they gain and benefit from information. The methods mirrored by organs have been created in the course of evolution as the natural history of this organism.
In the book, Lorenz uses the mirror as a simple model of the human brain that reflects the part of the stream of information from the outside world it is able to "see". The backside of the mirror was created by evolution to gather as much information as needed to better survive. The picture in the mirror is what we see within our mind. Within our cultural evolution we have extended this picture in the mirror by inventing instruments that transform the most needed of the invisible to something visible.
The back side of the mirror is acting for itself as it processes the incoming information to improve speed and effectiveness. By that human inventions like logical conclusions are always in danger to be manipulated by these hardwired prejudices in our brain. The book gives a hypothesis how consciousness was invented by evolution.