Figments of Reality

Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind (1997) is a book about the evolution of the intelligent and conscious human mind by biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart.

Figments of Reality
Hardcover edition
AuthorJack Cohen and Ian Stewart
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SubjectSociobiology
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherCambridge University Press
Publication date
1997
Pages339 pp.
ISBN0-521-57155-3
OCLC36017160
153.4/2 21
LC ClassBF311 .S679 1997

Overview

In this book Cohen and Stewart give their ideas on how the sentient human being evolved. Various chapters discuss scientific and philosophical ideas such as emergence and chaos, free will, perception versus reality, objectivity versus subjectivity, self-awareness, the ego and id, groupthink, and extelligence. A theme is that the traditional reductionist approach of trying to understand things as interaction of simpler things can not alone explain such complex concepts as intelligence or culture. To better understand them one has to consider also the context in which they have evolved and the fact that the evolution is a recursive process, often changing the context so that previously unseen evolutionary paths became available. The authors claim that intelligence is an inevitable result of letting evolution progress for long enough.

Topics are illustrated with humorous science fiction snippets dealing with a hypothetical alien intelligence, the Zarathustrians, whom Cohen and Stewart use as metaphors of the human mind itself, an alternative evolution story, and various philosophical concepts.

gollark: I still run it manually, but it works.
gollark: My arguably-evil scheme is running perfectly, by the way.
gollark: It seems like they just had the wrong idea.
gollark: "Bug" would imply that they had some idea in mind but got it wrong when translating it to code.
gollark: Maybe you could have an "emergency bailout" thing by manually asking moderators or something.

References
  • Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart: Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-57155-3


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