Currently, my interests include consciousness, the core of why we live and experience joy. Consciousness expands to include the evolution of the universe, a broad enough topic to include the future (and past) of mankind, the ways in which time, evolution, and societies have shaped our minds through language and culture, and why we find ourselves in such peril today. These questions include ethical challenges. What are our responsibilities toward the earth and our fellow creatures? In what ways might today’s problems influence mankind’s future? How can we bend our vast, chaotic social landscape toward prosocial values and behaviors, which may be our only hope for survival?
It covers the broad and often astounding range of animal senses and how they perceive and understand the world they inhabit, their umwelt. Consciousness depends on it, for without senses we would have no path toward self-awareness. While not the same as consciousness, self-awareness is its most important feature.
Dogs and smell, whales and echolocation, bees and ultraviolet light, sharks and electric fields, all shape how differently animals experience their worlds. Knowing this expands our own understanding and appreciation of the one we inhabit. At the same time, it is humbling to acknowledge how the creatures we share the planet with have such different perceptions. In that is great responsibility.
'Wonderful, mind-broadening... a journey to alternative realities as extraordinary as any you'll find in science fiction' The Times, Book of the Week
'Magnificent' Guardian
Enter a new dimension - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
Plants, too, have an umwelt, which makes this a companion to An Immense World.
Plants may not seem like a subject for ethics and philosophy, but the author makes a crucial case for humans changing their behavior toward them. They are neither mute nor static objects; they have senses. They feel things, solve complex problems, communicate with each other in various ways we would call ingenious.
At times, they communicate with animals. Their world is more alien to us than the animals’. I know someone who describes evolution as a story of planimals and aniplants. I initially thought this was a whacky idea, but consider the emerald green sea slug (Elysia chlorotica), a tiny animal that appropriates chloroplasts from algae and photosynthesizes food for the rest of its year-long life.
"teeming with fascinating and enlightening insights" Observer
A narrative investigation into the new science of plant intelligence and sentience, from National Association of Science Writers Award winner and Livingston Award finalist Zoe Schlanger.
Look at the green organism across the room or through the window: the potted plant, or the grass or a tree. Think how a life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing - us included. Many are so ingenious that they…
Diary of a Citizen Scientist
by
Sharman Apt Russell,
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
This book appeared in 1997 and remains controversial today, but its wildly imaginative and intriguing proposal is well worth reading.
Life in the cosmos, he suggests, is like any familiar organism in important ways; it evolves, grows increasingly complex, matures, and reproduces to create the next generation. Thus, it fits into the theme of these books.
Smolin is not a science fiction writer; however, he’s a theoretical physicist. His suggestions, though they seem wild, carry heft. They also offer poetry, a greater achievement.
Imagine that black holes are the children of a universe. Imagine they have the potential to grow into new universes that can, in turn, engender a sufficient number of such ‘light eaters’ (like black holes or plants) to ensure the survival of one or more; it can perpetuate a procession of universes, an evolutionary success. The scale may be immense, but like animals and plants, it creates its own magnificent umwelt!
In The Life of the Cosmos, Lee Smolin offers a theory of the universe that is radically different from anything proposed before. He argues that 'The underlying structure of our world is to be found in the logic of evolution'. He departs from contemporary physicists to explore the idea that the laws of nature we observe may be the partial result a process of natural selection that occurred before the Big Bang.
The late Leslie Allan Combs was a deep thinker about consciousness, a word with a world of definitions.
I would suggest that this small book follows books about the sensoria of animals, plants, and the cosmos into the human umwelt. Consciousness has its own multiple taxonomies, states, structures, functions, hierarchies, and facets. From an individual’s point of view, consciousness is the umwelt because our senses are our only windows onto the so-called exterior world.
Because the subject sprawls like an indolent and unwelcome visitor on the couch, it needs explanation. There is no better primer of the subject than this, which one could describe as an explanation of our umwelt’s umwelt. In other words, this is a delightful entry into our most contentious “hard problem.”
Consciousness Explained Better is a unique contribution. This compact volume represents thousands of years of humanity's struggle to understand consciousness from a wide variety of perspectives. It is an up-to-date digest of the search in bite-sized chapters. Allan Combs has managed to encapsulate and synthesize vast bodies of thought and research without dilution. He has made even the most mind-twisting arguments and questions comprehensible, and he has brought forward scholarship and rigorous inquiry in language that speaks to the heart as well as the head. This book satisfies with its comprehensiveness yet intrigues with all that still remains enigmatic. It…
Anatomy of Embodied Education
by
E. Timothy Burns,
The vast mysterious terrain explored in this book encompasses the embodied human brain, the processes through which humans grow, develop, and learn, and the mystery of consciousness itself. We authors offer this guidebook to assist you in entering and exploring that terrain.
Humans have struggled with uncertainty since the beginning of our species.
We’ve repeatedly tried to reveal secrets of the future, from the flight of birds or cracks in tortoise shells to seances and think tanks. We ask, what challenges does tomorrow hold, and how can we prepare? We answer as best we can. Today, the most common and even occasionally successful method is smart people thrashing out scenarios based on our best contemporary knowledge and mathematical modeling, boosted by imagination. Imagining After Capitalism is a respectable effort to do just that.
Money is the lens through which most contemporary humans look. Money is of course imaginary, a symbolic system of exchange, an arbiter of fairness, and to some, a god that determines destiny. We think of today’s system as “Late Stage” capitalism, which means something is next. Imagining what we want it to be is the first step to getting there. If our umwelt is embedded in society, what will an ethical world’s umwelt look like?
Imagining After Capitalism is the culmination of professional futurist Andy Hines's 10-year exploration of what comes next after capitalism. Drawing on his decades of experience developing foresight methodologies, he offers three "guiding images" for the long-term future.
While a lot is written about what is wrong with capitalism, there is much less on what might replace it. The absence of compelling positive alternatives keeps us stuck in a combination of fear, denial, and false hope.
But Andy Hines found that many ideas about what could be next are being developed by citizens, activists, and scholars worldwide. This book analyzes and…
The Rune Harmonic is the fourth in the Lisa Emmer series of historic thrillers set in Paris. Imagine the Delphic Oracle survived after Theodosius the Great closed it in 394 CE and, though underground, continues to this day to provide reliable strategic advice about the future to governments and companies. Each installment presents a different challenge, historical events, and travel to different countries.
The Rune Harmonic adds a dash of quantum physics to a trove of twelfth-century runic writing on bone, mushroom breeding, and, as always, the struggle to confront climate change.
What's Gotten Into You is a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who…
In this New York Times best-selling book, Theresa Brown, nurse and writer, invites us to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day in a busy teaching hospital’s cancer ward.
