Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

Figments of Reality

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Language
  
English

Pages
  
339 pp.

OCLC
  
36017160

Originally published
  
1997

Genre
  
Non-fiction

Country
  
United Kingdom

4.1/5
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Publication date
  
1997

ISBN
  
0-521-57155-3

Dewey Decimal
  
153.4/2 21

Authors
  
Jack Cohen, Ian Stewart

Subject
  
Sociobiology

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Publisher
  
Cambridge University Press

Similar
  
Jack Cohen books, Non-fiction books

Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind (1997) is a book about the evolution of the intelligent and conscious human mind by biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart.

Contents

Owl city fireflies


Overview

In this book Cohen and Stewart give their ideas on how the sentient human being evolved. Various chapters discuss scientific and philosophical ideas such as emergence and chaos, free will, perception versus reality, objectivity versus subjectivity, self-awareness, the ego and id, groupthink, and extelligence. A theme is that the traditional reductionist approach of trying to understand things as interaction of simpler things can not alone explain such complex concepts as intelligence or culture. To better understand them one has to consider also the context in which they have evolved and the fact that the evolution is a recursive process, often changing the context so that previously unseen evolutionary paths became available. The authors claim that intelligence is an inevitable result of letting evolution progress for long enough.

Topics are illustrated with humorous science fiction snippets dealing with a hypothetical alien intelligence, the Zarathustrians, whom Cohen and Stewart use as metaphors of the human mind itself, an alternative evolution story, and various philosophical concepts.

References

Figments of Reality Wikipedia