Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter 1st Edition

by Terrence W. Deacon (Author)

56 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0393049916

ISBN-10: 0393049914

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A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.

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. 12 black-and-white illustrations

Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

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Editorial Reviews

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, Library Journal

“A profound shift in thinking that in magnitude can only be compared with those that followed upon the works of Darwin and Einstein.”
- Robert E. Ulanowicz, author of A Third Window: Natural Life beyond Newton and Darwin

“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.”
- Bruce H. Weber, coauthor of Darwinism Evolving

“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.”
- Stuart Kauffman, author of Investigations

“[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.”
- Kalevi Kull, professor, Department of Semiotics, Tartu University

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.

Product details

Hardcover: 624 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (November 21, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393049914
ISBN-13: 978-0393049916
Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.8 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 56 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #590,747 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #166 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Movements > Phenomenology
- #1014 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Consciousness & Thought
- #1990 in Books > Science & Math > Behavioral Sciences > Cognitive Psychology

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What is missing is what is here to find

October 7, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A book that cannot be summarized since it expresses the most condensed argument of the vast, new concept conceived by Dr. Deacon. A fellow student as undergrads, a life long friend and most amazing thinker, Dr. Deacon has analyzed and restructured the basic axioms of logic and thought. This book expounds the concept of the 'absent' which I cannot describe as I would fail to do it justice. It is detailed and complete while being a working study of this idea, which may become the foundation of an entirely different way of constructing arguments and elucidating the elements of thought itself. Heavy stuff yet Dr. Deacon carries it along carefully and slowly, with the assumption (and my strong urging) that the reader go through the book several times, start to finish, to gather more pieces of the puzzle. Given this work is on the meaning of nothing or the allure of the absent, or perhaps 'what is the meaning of life?' -- all demonstrating our minds boundlessness and pursuit of what is not here, not now, not ever present, but desired.-- there may some pieces to the puzzle missing, no matter how many times you read it. And that, fellow readers, is exactly the point.

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A very important book for the twenty-first century thinkers

June 8, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a book that doesn't insult your intelligence, that makes you use everything you ever learned, from advanced vocabulary and history of philosophy, to physics, biology, statistics, etc. It humbles you with its breath of knowledge and depth of analysis, but it's focused and clear, and so it carries you along. It's up to date scientifically and, in a very intriguing and intellectually rewarding manner, it revises century or millennia old intuitions of great thinkers in its pursuit of finding a unifying theme for inert matter, organisms and mind. It's doing that by shifting the focus of discourse from energy and information to constraint, and constraint preservation and amplification. It's an adventurous journey, pleasant, hard, and full of surprises, but just like Darwin's on the Beagle, methodically setting the seeds of something a lot bigger - in this case, an explanation of how life and mind emerged from matter and how their characteristics, while based on mechanistic, algorithmic principles, cannot be reduced to those.

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The new science of the mind.

December 4, 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This is an in-depth treatment of what philosophers call the big question. "How can we account for consciousness, thinking, ideas, life itself as the product of natural, evolutionary development from the molten, rocky early earth, in a scientific manner, without the benefit of a creator, or infusion of life into our world from an extraterrestrial source." The book is not an easy one, in my case requiring re-reading, consulting other sources, and time to absorb the constant stream of new ideas and vocabulary, often defined, re-defined, or created by Deacon in order to handle concepts that science, thus far has not chosen to develop. If you are interested in the problem of how the world of thinking emerged from inanimate matter, how 3 pounds of tissue is capable of thought, what accounts for the self, and so forth this is the book to look into. I have been reading it for over six months and am in the last chapter at this time. I now understand Deacon's ideas about these questions and think he has set the stage for future scientific study of them.

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April 19, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Mind blowing, still reading, and rereading some parts, and will be for a good while. Awesome, you won't be disappointed

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Difficult read. The author seems to use "big words" ...

November 18, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Difficult read. The author seems to use "big words" where none are needed, but it is WORTH THE READ very interesting ideas.

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September 12, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A very difficult and very important book.

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A Polished Jewel of Thought

December 3, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

One of America's brilliant & original thinker, Terry Deacon, head of UC Berkley's anthropology, with language & cognition his focal research interest. His 97 book "The Symbolic Species," is seminal in neuroscience on language evolution. The remarkable little book documents his agile intellect, written just before his year off the study Harvard's archives from Charles Peirce, where his complete written resides.

The book Incomplete Nature, translates enormously complex issues into easy to follow text. This volume is for people taking the ideas they reflect upon with considered seriousness.

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Urs Boeschenstein

September 13, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

very deep, very important

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Most recent customer reviews

Matthew RapaportTop Contributor: Philosophy

The best speculation on the pathway from physics to mind I have yet read

This is a great book! For years now I've read books by scientists and philosophers addressing the origins of life and consciousness.Read more

Published 5 months ago

Interesting topic but for the love of god

Interesting topic but for the love of god, I tried reading this book over 2-3 times thinking that maybe I'm missing something.Read more

Published 7 months ago

Ambitious, intriguing, but flawed

I'm struggling with how to describe this book.

It was definitely one of the most difficult reads I've ever completed.Read more

Published 1 year ago

Starts strong and then...not so much...DNF

The author seems to be interested in the kind of questions that have always intrigued me. I've tried to write about them, but frankly this author is more articulate and does a...Read more

Published 1 year ago

Published 1 year ago

A must read for developing a unified view of life, mind, and matter

This book really helped me to expand and clarify my conception of the emergent system dynamics that give rise to life and mind.Read more

Published on November 15, 2015

Incomprehensible

The ideas in this book are interesting and provocative, or seem to be, but the writing is terrible. What this book needs is an editor who can turn it into something readable.Read more

Published on October 12, 2015

Published on August 27, 2015

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