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Neither Ghost Nor Machine
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Book Synopsis Neither Ghost Nor Machine by : Jeremy Sherman (Writer on biophilosophy)
Download or read book Neither Ghost Nor Machine written by Jeremy Sherman (Writer on biophilosophy) and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeremy Sherman distills Terrence Deacon's breakthrough natural science hypothesis for the emergence of agents and agency, selves and aims in an otherwise aimless universe. The theory cuts a new path through the dualistic spirit vs. mechanism debate, unifying the hard and soft sciences and suggesting new solutions to philosophical mysteries.
Book Synopsis Neither Ghost nor Machine by : Jeremy Sherman
Download or read book Neither Ghost nor Machine written by Jeremy Sherman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the universe is aimless, how do selves and aims emerge? Why do living beings have aims when inanimate things do not? Current science encourages us to reject the ghost-in-the-machine explanation—that something called spirit, soul, mind, or will was somehow breathed into matter—and instead accept that selves are just matter, in aimless mechanistic motion like everything else. But what about life’s many emergent qualities, the multifarious purposes that shape actual physical behavior not just in human lives, but in all of life? Even the simplest life forms have adaptive functions, traits that accomplish goals or ends. How can we explain the nature and origin of selves and aims without resorting to supernatural forces or explaining them away as nothing but cause-and-effect mechanisms? In Neither Ghost nor Machine, Jeremy Sherman explains the emergence of selves and aims in an aimless universe. He distills for a general audience the theory developed by renowned neuroscientist Terrence Deacon, which extends the breakthrough constraint-based insight that inspired evolutionary, information, and self-organization theory. Emergent dynamics theory provides a testable hypothesis for how mattering arose from matter, function from physics, and means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect dynamics. It offers a physics of purpose, demonstrating that there is a strictly physical explanation for the emergence and nature of selves and aims, one that shows our existence in an otherwise inanimate universe is not absurd. Neither Ghost nor Machine bridges the gap between the hard and soft sciences, suggesting fresh and exciting solutions to philosophical mysteries that have perplexed humanity for millennia, from free will to causality to morality.
Book Synopsis Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by : Terrence W. Deacon
Download or read book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter written by Terrence W. Deacon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the emergent processes that bridge the gap between organisms that think and have consciousness and those that do not and discusses the origins of life, information, and free will.
Download or read book Whatshisface written by Gordon Korman and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gordon Korman's next stand-alone novel, a fun, funny ghost story about a nobody kid who becomes a somebody while helping a ghost right a wrong from the past. Cooper Vega's family moves so often that he's practically invisible at any school he attends. Now they've relocated to the town of Stratford - where nobody even makes an effort to learn Cooper's name. To them, he's just . . . whatshisface.Cooper's parents feel bad about moving him around so much, so they get him a fancy new phone. Almost immediately, it starts to malfunction. First there's a buzzing. Then there's a weird glare on the screen. Then that glare starts to take on the form of . . . a person?It's not just any person trapped inside Cooper's phone. It's a boy named Roderick, who says he lived in the time of William Shakespeare - and had a very tangled history with the famous playwright. Cooper thinks his phone has gone haywire, but there's nothing he can do to get rid of Roderick. Then, even stranger, Roderick starts helping him. Even though his seventeenth-century advice isn't always the best for a twenty-first century middle school.
Book Synopsis The Ghost in the Machine by : Arthur Koestler
Download or read book The Ghost in the Machine written by Arthur Koestler and published by Penguin (Non-Classics). This book was released on 1990-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the human impulse towards self-destruction suggests that in the course of human evolution, a pathological split between emotion and reason developed
Book Synopsis The Blind Contessa's New Machine by : Carey Wallace
Download or read book The Blind Contessa's New Machine written by Carey Wallace and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-07-08 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An iridescent jewel of a novel that proves love is the mother of invention In the early 1800s, a young Italian contessa, Carolina Fantoni, realizes she is going blind shortly before she marries the town's most sought-after bachelor. Her parents don't believe her, nor does her fiancé. The only one who understands is the eccentric local inventor and her longtime companion, Turri. When her eyesight dims forever, Carolina can no longer see her beloved lake or the rich hues of her own dresses. But as darkness erases her world, she discovers one place she can still see-in her dreams. Carolina creates a vivid dreaming life, in which she can not only see, but also fly, exploring lands she had never known. Desperate to communicate with Carolina, Turri invents a peculiar machine for her: the world's first typewriter. His gift ignites a passionate love affair that will change both of their lives forever. Based on the true story of a nineteenth-century inventor and his innovative contraption, The Blind Contessa's New Machine is an enchanting confection of love and the triumph of the imagination.
Download or read book The Vertical Plane written by Ken Webster and published by Iris Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Vertical Plane: The Mystery of the Dodleston Messages: A unique supernatural detective story.
Book Synopsis Are You Sure? by : Virginia Campbell
Download or read book Are You Sure? written by Virginia Campbell and published by Virginia a Campbell. This book was released on 2020-05 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty explores the implications of one the most surprising recent discoveries in neuroscience. There is overwhelming evidence that most of what our brain does (perhaps as much as 95%) is unconscious. It not just outside our conscious awareness, but much of it is also inaccessible to introspections. Neurologist Robert Burton explored the implications of these discovery in two recent books and in Are You Sure? Dr. Campbell shares and expands on Burton's work. She makes these surprising ideas accessible to readers of all backgrounds. In the second edition, she goes beyond the unconscious origins of certainty to explore what these discoveries might mean to our our understanding of the human mind.
Download or read book Severance written by Ling Ma and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance. "A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org “A satirical spin on the end times-- kind of like The Office meets The Leftovers.” --Estelle Tang, Elle NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * Marie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review (Staff Favorites) * Refinery29 * Bustle * Buzzfeed * BookPage * Bookish * Mental Floss * Chicago Review of Books * HuffPost * Electric Literature * A.V. Club * Jezebel * Vulture * Literary Hub * Flavorwire Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award * Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction * Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award * Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel * A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 * An Indie Next Selection Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.
Download or read book Mind and Cosmos written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Download or read book Endpapers written by Alexander Wolff and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerfully told story of family, honor, love, and truth . . . the beautiful and haunting stories told in this book transcend policy and politics.” —Beto O’Rourke A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed “perhaps the twentieth century’s most discriminating publisher” by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America. Born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. After fleeing Germany in 1933, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, founded Pantheon Books in a small Greenwich Village apartment. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt’s taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.
Book Synopsis Souls in the Great Machine by : Sean McMullen
Download or read book Souls in the Great Machine written by Sean McMullen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2002-12-15 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Souls in the Great Machine is the first volume of Sean McMullen's brilliant future history of the world of Greatwinter. The great Calculor of Libris was forced to watch as Overmayor Zarvora had four of its components lined up against a wall and shot for negligence. Thereafter, its calculations were free from errors, and that was just as well-for only this strangest of calculating machines and its two thousand enslaved components could save the world from a new ice age. And all the while a faint mirrorsun hangs in the night sky, warning of the cold to come. In Sean McMullen's glittering, dynamic, and exotic world two millennia from now, there is no more electricity, wind engines are leading-edge technology, librarians fight duels to settle disputes, steam power is banned by every major religion, and a mysterious siren "Call" lures people to their death. Nevertheless, the brilliant and ruthless Zarvora intends to start a war in space against inconceivably ancient nuclear battle stations. Unbeknownst to Zarvora, however, the greatest threat to humanity is neither a machine nor a force but her demented and implacable enemy Lemorel, who has resurrected an obscene and evil concept from the distant past: Total War. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Book Synopsis William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton's Sleep by : Keith Davies
Download or read book William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton's Sleep written by Keith Davies and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history and philosophy of scientific ideas and the role poiēsis and imagination play in our understanding of science and progress are widely explored in this book. By examining the views of William Blake and other poets in the context of twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt, Jacob Bronowski, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour and Karl Popper, amongst others, the book takes an eclectic approach drawing on examples from biology, history, literature, philosophy and economics, arguing for the reestablishment of imagination as a central attribute of science that may help to resolve some of our most pressing ecological problems as seen in the context of science and technology studies and what is loosely developing into the discipline of environmental humanities. Today, influential scientists looking at consciousness dismiss imagination regarding it at best as a mere epiphenomenon, a ghost in the machine, or at worst non-existent and to be denied. In this book, Keith G. Davies, who sees C. P. Snow’s debate on the separation of the arts and sciences as alive and well, traces the schism back to Plato but more importantly to the seventeenth century and David Hume’s removal of imagination in the conjunction between our observation of causes and their effects. Through extensive research and use of poetry, this book offers an alternate understanding of science with imagination and its continued significance in today’s world. This book is an excellent reference book for postgraduate students, professional researchers, William Blake scholars and the pejoratively labelled interested laymen with concerns in ecology and environmental humanities through offering a new perspective on the history of science and the role of imagination within this field.
Book Synopsis The Message in the Bottle by : Walker Percy
Download or read book The Message in the Bottle written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the National Book Award–winning author of The Moviegoer: “These essays . . . have a way of quickening the spirit and cleansing the sight” (The New Republic). Before winning the National Book Award for fiction in 1962, Walker Percy was an established scholar of science, philosophy, and language. Presented here are his strongest essays in those subjects, offering what he called a “theory of man for a new age.” Ambitious yet readable, The Message in the Bottle encapsulates the philosophical foundations of his groundbreaking novels, perfect for Percy fans and new readers alike. From discussions on the dislocation of man in the twentieth century to theories on why humans talk while other animals do not, thisis an enlightening collection from one of the South’s most celebrated writers.
Book Synopsis The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos by : Walker Percy
Download or read book The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two fascinating philosophical inquiries from the “dazzlingly gifted” New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of The Moviegoer (USA Today). Winner of the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, the Southern writer Walker Percy possessed “an intellectual range and rigor few American novelists can match” (The New York Times Book Review). In these two provocative works, Percy manages to be perceptive and playful as he more directly explores the philosophical foundations of his groundbreaking fiction. The Message in the Bottle: In these profound and passionate essays that “have a way of quickening the spirit and cleansing the sight,” Percy looks to language to answer the question of who we are as humans (The New Republic). He posits that the act of assigning meaning by naming things makes humans unique. Percy develops a theory of language through the example of Helen Keller being stimulated by the feel of water along with the sign for water, and explores questions such as why other animals don’t talk and why humans in technologically advanced, materially comfortable societies are so sad. “A delight . . . a pleasure to read.” —Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post Book World Lost in the Cosmos: “Charming, whimsical, slyly profound,” Lost in the Cosmos is a one-of-a-kind mix of self-help parody and philosophical speculation (The New York Times). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Percy’s guide is a laugh-out-loud spin on a familiar genre that also pushes readers to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions, such as: “Why is it no other species but man gets bored?” and “Explain why Moses was tongue-tied and stagestruck before his fellow Jews but had no trouble talking to God.” “A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke; a chapbook to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
Book Synopsis God, Human, Animal, Machine by : Meghan O'Gieblyn
Download or read book God, Human, Animal, Machine written by Meghan O'Gieblyn and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.
Download or read book Ghost Work written by Mary L. Gray and published by Eamon Dolan Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A startling exposé of the invisible human workforce that powers the web--and how to bring it out of the shadows. Hidden beneath the surface of the internet, a new, stark reality is looming--one that cuts to the very heart of our endless debates about the impact of AI. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri unveil how the services we use from companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast human labor force that is kept deliberately concealed. The people who do 'ghost work' make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech, on-demand piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, transcribing audio, confirming identities, captioning video, and much more. The shameful truth is that no labor laws protect them or even acknowledge their existence. They often earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked in this 'ghost economy,' and that number is growing every day. In this unprecedented investigation, Gray and Suri make the case that robots will never completely eliminate 'ghost work' and the unchecked quest for artificial intelligence could spark catastrophic work conditions if not stopped in its tracks. Ultimately, they show how this essential type of work can create opportunity--rather than misery--for those who do it."--Dust jacket.
