Synopses & Reviews
As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The Theory of Everything that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most immediate and incontrovertible phenomena are left unexplained by the natural sciences because they lack the physical properties such as mass, momentum, charge, and location that are assumed to be necessary for something to have physical consequences in the world. This is an unacceptable omission. We need a theory of everything that does not leave it absurd that we exist.Incomplete Nature begins by accepting what other theories try to deny: that, although mental contents do indeed lack these material-energetic properties, they are still entirely products of physical processes and have an unprecedented kind of causal power that is unlike anything that physics and chemistry alone have so far explained. Paradoxically, it is the intrinsic incompleteness of these semiotic and teleological phenomena that is the source of their unique form of physical influence in the world. Incomplete Nature meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics, and it demonstrates how specific absences (or constraints) play the critical causal role in the organization of physical processes that generate these properties.The book's radically challenging conclusion is that we are made of these specific absenses such stuff as dreams are made on and that what is not immediately present can be as physically potent as that which is. It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate components of the physical world.
Review
"Contains many rewarding thoughts about life and mind and their place in nature." Nature
Review
"Starred review. Deacon's dense and breathtaking study of the relationship between conscious experience and physical processes offers a new framework to examine how phenomena that are not physically extant...can and do impact physical processes and how physical processes transform into conscious experience. ...Highly recommended." Candice Kall, Columbia Univ. Libraries, New York
Review
"Unprecedentedly comprehensive. . . . Imagine the consequences for science and society of having a physical explanation for functional, meaningful and conscious behavior no less scientific and accessible than our explanation for lightning. I believe Deacon provides just that." Psychology Today
Review
"In his approach to the question of how sentience emerged from 'dumb' and 'numb' matter, Mr. Deacon mobilizes some radically new ideas." Wall Street Journal
Review
"A stunningly original, stunningly synoptic book. With Autogenesis, Significance, Sentience, seventeen insightful and integrated chapters turn our world upside down and finally, as in the Chinese proverb, lead us home again to a place we see anew. Few ask the important questions. Deacon is one of these." Wall Street Journal
Review
"This is a work of science and philosophy at the cutting edge of both that seeks to develop a complete theory of the world that includes humans, our minds and culture, embodied and emerging in nature." Stuart Kauffman, author of < i=""> Investigations <>
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"[Deacon] demonstrates how systems that are intrinsically incomplete happen to be alive and meaning-making. The crux of life--and meaning--is solved. It was worthwhile to wait for this book. The twenty-first century can now really start." Bruce H. Weber, coauthor of < i=""> Darwinism Evolving <>
Review
"A profound shift in thinking that in magnitude can only be compared with those that followed upon the works of Darwin and Einstein." Kalevi Kull, professor, Department of Semiotics, Tartu University
Synopsis
"A tour de force encompassing biology, neurobiology, metaphysics, information theory, physics, and semiotics."--
Synopsis
As scientists study the minutiae of subatomic particles, neural connections, and molecular compounds, their attempts at a "theory of everything" harbor a glaring omission: they still cannot explain us, the thoughts and perceptions that truly make us what we are. A masterwork that brings together science and philosophy, offers a revolutionary, captivating account of how life and consciousness emerged, revealing how our desires, feelings, and intentions can be understood in terms of the physical world.
About the Author
Terrence W. Deacon is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of The Symbolic Species and Incomplete Nature, he lives near Berkeley, California.