Tag: science
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The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio (1999)
One difficulty in reviewing popular science is separating the power of the ideas from the communicative skill of the work. Antonio Damasio is among the most influential of this generation’s consciousness researchers. His notion that consciousness is the “feeling of what happens”—a body assessing its internal state, interacting with the environment, utilizing emotion as a…
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Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, Musser (2023)
The measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the hard problem of consciousness, and the challenge of developing general AI are not separate issues. Absorbing that message—understanding its potentially enormous leverage for a revolution in human understanding—is enough to justify picking up George Musser’s Putting Ourselves Back Into the Equation. The book is readable, which is no…
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From Eternity to Here, Carroll (2010)
From Eternity to Here is the best available single-book popular treatment of time and entropy as understood by present-day physics. These are not easy topics. The history of the philosophy of time is byzantine, burdened with both wishful thinking and self-absorbed pessimism; and if there’s one modern topic that’s been thoroughly obfuscated by misuse (by…