Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind 1st Edition by Ian Stewart (PDF)

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Is the universe around us a figment of our imagination? Or are our minds figments of reality? In this refreshing new look at the evolution of mind and culture, bestselling authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen eloquently argue that our minds necessarily evolved inextricably within the context of culture and language. They go beyond conventional reductionist ideas to look at how the mind is the response of an evolving brain trying to grapple with a complex environment. Along the way they develop new and intriguing insights into the nature of evolution, science and humanity.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Excellent book — I wish I had known about it earlier!

⭐Excellent book on emergence of the human mind. Highly recommended for those who are studying evolutionary computing as it applies to large, complex self-organizing systems.

⭐A previous owner has put biro annotations in the margins of the first180 pages. Distracting, as they seem meaningless to me.

⭐A thoroughly enjoyable synthesis of many views concerning the evolution of mind, consciousness, free will etc.Clearly written, with wit and parody where appropriate. There are dialogs which recall Goedel Escher Bach (although with perhaps fewer levels of meaning), and depth.The authors clearly distinguish between facts and their opinions, and confess to less than absolute certainty on occasion, which is refreshing.Highly recommended.

⭐Scientists advocating a thesis, whether their own or others, tend to adopt a crusader’s approach. Cohen and Stewart here campaign for a new view of the evolution of human thinking. Their technique rests on the idea of recursive development of human cognitive capacity; building from simple foundations through increasing complexity. Their most innovative technique is a comparison of human outlook on nature, the cosmos and humanity with a fictitious alien culture based on eight. The Zarathustrians, who need eight members to be an “individual”, can be equally rigid in their thinking, but the framework is wholly different from ours. The technique provides a compelling means of looking at our evolutionary record from a different viewpoint and allows the posing of questions we should all be asking ourselves about who we are. The technique adds entertainment to a highly original and readable book.Arguing that humans are “in nature but not of it” the authors separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. What makes us different is our mental complexity. We can control our thoughts, make choices, impact the surrounding environment instead of merely responding to it. How did we come to be that way? The record of evolution shows that life’s origins were clearly very simple. Perhaps, as they relate, a beginning as simple as some molecules “hitching a ride” on crystals as a step in learning the process of replication. From such origins, life progressed through building complexity in gradual steps, with some branches able to increase in complexity leading to such as you and i. The mechanism works in “phase space” by combining simple forms in a process they call “complicity.” Complicity is Nature using existing “scaffolding” to build successful features. In short, evolution.The flip side of this captivating book is their crusade against “reductionism.” This straw man is a frequent target for those unable or unwilling to see human beings as an integral part of the animal kingdom, hence, a product of the evolutionary process. You will not find the target of their attack until you peruse the bibliography, but it becomes clear that their aim is Richard Dawkins. His “selfish gene” concept and his proposal on cultural aspects, a major element in their argument, are assaulted or ignored. How did the human mind evolve its distinct characteristics if not through genetic processes? The authors make great show of cultural continuity as an expression of human mental capacity. Yet, they fail to identify the roots of that persistence. The root was postulated by Richard Dawkins as the “meme,” the mind’s equivalent of genetic transmission of characteristics. Given Dawkins’ concept preceded Figments by over a decade, their omission of the term is an astonishing oversight.The great irony here is Cohen and Stewart’s reliance on Daniel C. Dennett as a source for much of their thinking. One can envision that jolly, St Nicholas-like countenance hardening as he read their deviant interpretation of Dennett’s thinking. Figments was published shortly after Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which effectively refutes much of Cohen and Stewart’s thesis. Dennett uses “cranes,” a more active instrument, instead of “scaffolding” to describe evolution’s methods. Likewise, he nods favourably toward memes as the mechanism of cultural transmission, which Cohen and Stewart ignore completely. They rely on the mechanism Dennett considers a perversion of Darwinian thought, the “skyhook” to bring humans to an elevated role in the animal kingdom. Cohen and Stewart are to be commended for their innovative approach and unconstrained imaginations. Still, this highly readable and provocative book must be balanced with Dennett’s more realistic analysis. Buy them both, you’ll gain much insight into who you are.

⭐While there is relatively little about the brain itself in this book, the authors do consider the importance of symmetries in neural processing. Thus, a discussion of the recognition of male and female faces takes advantage of an eigenvector (or eigenface) that embodies the difference between an average him and her. (Enthusiasts of the quantum mind approach to consciousness studies should note that such ideas are the coin of modern nonlinear science, and not at all dependent upon the extrapolation of quantum theory to the macroscopic world: a point that was clearly made by Niels Bohr back in 1933.)Unfortunatly, there is no mention of recent research by Hermann Haken and his colleagues in connection with this work, although this sort of eigenvector analysis is closely related to ideas presented in his book Principles of BrainFunctioning (1996).A short chapter on free will is interesting but ultimately somewhat disappointing because the authors seem to be sitting on both sides of the philosophical fence. Recognizing that the assumption of free will is necessary for the orderly functioning of any culture and scornful of the inflated claims of genetic determinists, they note that theoretical reasons can be imagined for anything that occurs. To me, at least, this is as true as it is unconvincing. It is always possible to cobble together some sort of explanation of whatever transpires after the fact. Does this imply that the future is determined by the present? What might such an assertion mean? This chapter ends with the statement: “Therefore free will is not just an illusion: it is a figment rendered real by the evolutionary complicity of mind and culture” (p.241). Maybe I am dense, but this doesn’t mean much to me. Perhaps the authors would have been wiser to omit this chapter, admitting that they do not know what free will is.Two final chapters deal with some of the details of our many interactions with the surrounding culture, noting that a very large amount of knowledge is presently available to us all through libraries, schools, theater, television, and more recently the World Wide Web. The first of these chapters, entitled Extelligence, considers in some detail the ever increasing pool of information in which we are embedded in by our technological culture. The authors consider their notion of extelligence to be somewhat different from (say) Karl Popper’s World 3, because it involves complicit interactions with individuals in a culture. This is, in my view, such an extremely important aspect of the overall subject of consciousness studies, that it deserves a book of its own. Perhaps the authors will team up with an informed and imaginative ethnologist in the not too distant future and work on such a project. The last chapter – entitled “Simplex, Complex, Multiplex” – describes the relationships between the organization of biological cells and human social systems. From this perspective, the village is analogous to a bacterium, whereas a town is compared to an eukaryote, and a city to a multi-celled organism. The chapter title alludes to increasingly sophisticated ways that individuals have of perceiving the intricacy of their social environments in a human culture.Alwyn Scott[…]

⭐Professor Cohen spoke to Dorset Humanists on 14th May 2011We were greatly entertained, and sometimes a little baffled, by Professor Jack Cohen’s lecture on 14th May entitled Apes, Angels and Ancestors (or, The Ape with the Curious Mind). Not to be defeated, I spent several days of my holiday reading Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind which Cohen co-wrote with mathematician Professor Ian Stewart. This challenging but brilliant and entertaining book sheds a great deal of light on Professor Cohen’s lecture. The question it sets out to answer is this: “How did mind arise from inanimate matter?” – a question of importance to all rationalists and Humanists seeing as millions of religious people think that the mind is ultimately detachable from the brain. Here’s my 12-point summary of Cohen and Stewart’s fascinating story:1. Life came into being as a consequence of perfectly reasonable chemistry. Organic and even inorganic matter has self-organising properties. (To illustrate the point, Professor Cohen treated us to a live Belousov-Zhabotinskii demonstration in which blue rings spontaneously form in a rusty-red cocktail of chemicals.)2. Atoms can produce entirely new molecules by combining in new ways. The most interesting molecules are not just complicated but organised. One type of organised molecule, a replicating molecule, is what got life going.3. To cut a long story short, the complexity we see around us today is a snapshot of a `game’ that has been in progress for five billion years. It is the evolutionary game of `Survival’ which has no fixed rules and countless trillions of players.4. Special creation is ruled out because there are too many examples of `bad design’ such as the way our foodway crosses our airway, and the risky proximity of our excretory and reproductive organs – remnants of our evolutionary history.5. Evolution produced brains because they’re jolly good gadgets to run the sensory and locomotive systems which assist with survival. The brain is essentially a `feature detector’ (`mother’, `food’, `predator’, etc.)6. Mind is not a magic ingredient in the brain. It is an emergent property of the brain. Mind is not a thing. It’s a process.7. Our impressions of reality are not the same as reality itself. Bees and bats see things differently. The mind is a `Virtual Reality Sensorium’ containing vivid impressions like `red’, `bang!’ and `ouch!’. The mind has cleverly created the illusion of an internal observer (that’s you).8. The mind is attracted to symmetry. People whose mates have symmetrical faces have better orgasms.9. Intelligence is generated by the interactive co-evolution of brainy animals and their culture. Many animals have some basic intelligence, including chimps, cats, dolphins and geckos, but not owls which are as thick as two short planks.10. A certain amount of what you are is written in your genes. But without cultural `Make-a-Human-Kits’ (tribal customs, parenting skills and so on) you would not learn language or anything else that makes you a proper human.11. Individual intelligence is now vastly augmented by cultural `extelligence’ (language, writing, the Internet). Cultural extelligence used to be stored in Holy Texts.12. Culture is now a downhill bicycle race with unstoppable momentum and no end in sight. It could all end in global anarchy, violence, and war. Or (a more optimistic scenario) – a global multiculture.

⭐Loved this book. Intelligently written.

⭐Excellent. Thank you.

⭐If you want to learn how complexity came to be in evolution, this is a great start. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

⭐un auteur à connaitre. toutes les oeuvres ne sont pas aisément accessibles. je recommande celle ci

⭐

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