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Cargando... The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brainspor Joseph LeDoux
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. LeDoux impressively presents the entire story of the evolution of Earth life, but I confined my attention to the preface, the prolog, the epilog, and the last 16 of the 66 chapters. The latter chapters deal with matters of consciousness, including the complicating aspect of emotion. Mentioning -- but not wholly buying into any of -- the standard theories of consciousness such as Integrated Information Theory, he strives to formulate a "multistate hierarchical higher-order model" in which "conscious experiences are higher-order states that depend on memory." He boldly opines that non-human animals do not have emotions or higher-order (self-) awareness. These characteristics are the very ones that raise doubts about whether human-species-level sanity and long-term survival are possible -- wow! This thinking, I'd venture to say, dovetails with the Doomsday Argument and the so-far negative results of SETI. (Please note, esteemed author and publisher, that the plural of "schema" is "schemata", not "schema" itself.) sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Distinciones
"Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human." --Amazon. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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This book is, at least 250 pages long, a real natural history, a very detailed, yet didactic overview of the evolution of life, with a growing complexity as its common thread. LeDoux goes through all the stages and sometimes delves deeper into very specific biological issues, such as how beings transitioned to sexual reproduction, or how they developed a nervous system. Although LeDoux really does his best to explain everything as well as possible, these are pretty tough chunks.
But in the last third, this book rather turns into a completely different one. LeDoux is now diving into the field that is his own specialization, namely the human brain, and more specifically cognition. You notice that this has a completely different slant, and that LeDoux works more apologetically here, presents his own views, and takes a stand against colleagues. For example, he very extensively defends his thesis that human emotions are a by-product of our cognitive abilities, especially language, and that emotions guide our behavior. Unfortunately, he loses sight of his initial purpose, which is to illustrate how the human "building plan" (the author systematically uses the German term ‘Bauplan’) builds on that of previous beings. So, as many other reviewers noted, these are actually two books in one. Both are fascinating, but especially in the second part you get lost a bit more. Anyway, the great merit of this book certainly is an attempt to synthesize natural history. ( )