Seeing Red
Book review: Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative) by Nicholas Humphrey, This book provides a clear and simple description of phenomena that are often described as...
View ArticleCounting Sheep
Book review: Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams by Paul Martin. This book makes convincing claims that most people give too little thought to an activity that occupies a...
View ArticleGoing Inside
Book review: Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness, by John McCrone. This book improved my understanding of how various parts of the brain interact, and of how long it takes the...
View ArticleThe Ego Tunnel
Book review: The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, by Thomas Metzinger. This book describes aspects of consciousness in ways that are often, but not consistently, clear and...
View ArticleSingularity Hypotheses
Book review: Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment. This book contains papers of widely varying quality on superhuman intelligence, plus some fairly good discussions of what...
View ArticleSelf Comes to Mind
Book review: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio R. Damasio. This book describes many aspects of human minds in ways that aren’t wrong, but the parts that seem novel don’t...
View ArticleOther Minds
Book review: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. This book describes some interesting mysteries, but provides little help at solving them....
View ArticleEms Evolve
Or, why I don’t fear the p-zombie apocalypse. This post analyzes concerns about how evolution, in the absence of a powerful singleton, might, in the distant future, produce what Nick Bostrom calls a...
View ArticleInto the Gray Zone
Book review: Into the Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death, by Adrian Owen. Too many books and talks have gratuitous displays of fMRIs and neuroscience. At last,...
View ArticleSurfing Uncertainty
Book review: Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, by Andy Clark. Surfing Uncertainty describes minds as hierarchies of prediction engines. Most behavior involves interactions...
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