Several years ago I interviewed Terrence Deacon about his fascinating book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. His goal was to propose a theory of how purpose evolved in a universe without purpose. His argument was persuasive, but highly technical. In this month’s episode of Books and Ideas I interview his longtime colleague Jeremy Sherman. His book Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves makes Deacon’s ideas highly accessible to a wider audience. Join us as we explore the question: How did purpose arise from a purposeless universe? (Hint: the answer is not supernatural!)

Links and References:

• Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves by Jeremy Sherman
• Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by Terrence W. Deacon
• The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence W. Deacon
• Books and Ideas 47 with Terrence Deacon
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
• Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
• The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Announcements:

• Coming April 28, 2020: a new expanded version of Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty by Virginia “Ginger” Campbell, MD (links coming soon)
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