BOOK REVIEW
Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves
by Terrence Deacon 2018
About the Author
Jeremy Sherman Ph.D. has collaborated for 20 years with Harvard/Berkeley scientist Terrence Deacon trying to solve the biggest mystery in science today: How mattering emerges from matter, life from chemistry, means-to-ends trying from cause-and-effect phenomena.
About the Book
“For those of us who call ourselves religious/spiritual naturalists, this book is sure to become an instant classic. Its narrative of how living beings are and came to be is rigorous, accessible, and lyrical, and will greatly deepen our affinity with the natural world and with one another.” — Ursula Goodenough, Washington University in St. Louis, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature
“Neither Ghost nor Machine is an eloquent manifesto in the movement to reclaim questions of purpose and agency for science. Presenting Terrence Deacon’s account of the natural emergence of living agents, Jeremy Sherman casts aside the stale, old dichotomies to show us a new way of thinking scientifically about life.” — Jessica Riskin, author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
“Jeremy Sherman lucidly explicates the paradigm-changing vision of Terrence Deacon, which addresses the mysteries of the origin of living systems from the nonliving and the emergence of mind and purpose in a nature that is still the the process of evolving.” — Bruce H. Weber, coauthor of Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection
In Neither Ghost nor Machine, 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, explaining how mattering emerges from matter, and suggesting new solutions to philosophical mysteries that have perplexed humanity for millennia.
FOR THE COMPLETE BOOK
GO TO OUR LIBRARY
Read online
Download to read offline
VolumesOfValue 