I came across Sum last year and thought it was a winsome intellectual curio, both striking in its central idea and light in its presentation. Incognito is something else entirely. Popular science is never a great attraction to me but this is fantastic, breezily written and enlightening. Eagleman is most engaging and thought provoking when looking at the actual science which he presents with a winning sense of sober enthusiasm.
There are almost too many points to consider when discussing the subjects he covers but a couple stand out - the complete embodiedness of consciousness - that we seem to be so thoroughly dependent on our physical state of rour sense of identity and being. Secondly that this sense of who we are is not secondary in importance but most definitely in terms of getting to vote on individual decisions. Eagleman does come down fairly solidly on the side of the individual, without much consideration of socialisation or the actual drives that push us to learn or discipline ourselves, although he talks about the actual processes. However, that does not take away from his taking the bonnet off the engine to allow us to peek underneath.
Where he is weakest is in some of the more speculative conclusions he draws, whether about the fact that people are statistically more likely to marry people with similar names or when he is discussing the nature of moral culpability. These arguments are weak (and idealistically naive ) and one shouldn't forget that he is a scientist not a philosopher and so his method is particular to his training. It's not a great sin to be accused of, because at least he's looking for new ideas and explanations to fit the data that we have now.
This book has changed my mind on one key aspect of consciousness - and that is it's reductive deterministic nature. I've been holding out on determinism for more than a decade now and this, coupled with an In Our Time on freewill have pushed me over the line to determinism. However, I've gradually been moving this way as I've studied complexity and network theory in the last couple of years. This final step is the biggest as I think that complexity leading to emergent behaviour still allows for a sense of freedom even when LaPlace's Demon seems to have won the day.
For all of this, and the fact that this is a majestically humane effort I recommend this book wholeheartedly.
Welcome to the light on the determinism front.
ReplyDeleteI thank you. However QM is still central to human consciousness and araft of recent results suggest that a whole host of underlying structures are governed by quantum effects.
ReplyDeleteWhat I think is interesting is that this doesn't lead to randomness at all (consider the fact that some species of bird appear to use quantum entanglement to key into the earth's magnetic field) but allow for interactions with the rest of reality that we've only really guessed at.
David Bohm had the idea of 'Hidden Variables' and although this is applying the concept elsewhere I think we're discovering, bit by bit, that the substrate of much of what we've assumed could be explained by Newton's incorrect equations, is actually more elegantly explained using theories we know to be better and more complete. That and we can now prove that quantum effects DO occur at the macro level.