my mind on books

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Try a book search here:

According to Shelf Awareness, Alison Gopnik will be on the Colbert Report on Wednesday Oct 7, talking about her recent book The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

For most of us, having a baby is the most profound, intense, and fascinating experience of our lives. Now scientists and philosophers are starting to appreciate babies, too. The last decade has witnessed a revolution in our understanding of infants and young children. Scientists used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Recently, they have discovered that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined. And there is good reason to believe that babies are actually smarter, more thoughtful, and even more conscious than adults.

This new science holds answers to some of the deepest and oldest questions about what it means to be human. A new baby’s captivated gaze at her mother’s face lays the foundations for love and morality. A toddler’s unstoppable explorations of his playpen hold the key to scientific discovery. A three-year-old’s wild make-believe explains how we can imagine the future, write novels, and invent new technologies. Alison Gopnik – a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother – explains the groundbreaking new psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical developments in our understanding of very young children, transforming our understanding of how babies see the world, and in turn promoting a deeper appreciation for the role of parents.

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (CBC Massey Lecture) by Wade Davis (House of Anansi Press, 2009)
(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Over the past decade, many of us have been alarmed to learn of the rapidly accelerating extinction of our planet’s diverse flora and fauna. But how many of us know that our human cultural diversity is also going extinct at a shocking rate? Biologists estimate that 18% of mammals and 11% of birds are threatened, while botanists anticipate the loss of 8% of flora. Meanwhile, of the 7,000 languages in the world today, 50% will disappear in our lifetime. Languages are merely the canaries in the coalmine: what of the poetry, songs, knowledge, and ways of seeing encoded in these disappearing voices?

In The Wayfinders, acclaimed anthropologist Wade Davis offers a gripping account of this urgent crisis. He leads us on a fascinating tour through a handful of indigenous cultures and worldviews while reminding us of the encroaching dangers posed by unchecked globalization. An enlightening, awe-inspiring, and cautionary look at vanishing cultures and languages from one of the world’s most celebrated and distinguished anthropologists.

Here is Davis’s 2003 TED talk on endangered cultures:

Link to 2008 TED talk on the “worldwide web of belief and ritual”

More on CBC Massey lectures

One of Amazon’s “Season’s (Almost) Best Kept Secrets” in Science is Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (Bradford Books), a new book by Gary Klein from MIT Press.
(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

In making decisions, when should we go with our gut and when should we try to analyze every option? When should we use our intuition and when should we rely on logic and statistics? Most of us would probably agree that for important decisions, we should follow certain guidelines—gather as much information as possible, compare the options, pin down the goals before getting started. But in practice we make some of our best decisions by adapting to circumstances rather than blindly following procedures. In Streetlights and Shadows, Gary Klein debunks the conventional wisdom about how to make decisions. He takes ten commonly accepted claims about decision making and shows that they are better suited for the laboratory than for life. The standard advice works well when everything is clear, but the tough decisions involve shadowy conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Gathering masses of information, for example, works if the information is accurate and complete—but that doesn’t often happen in the real world. (Think about the careful risk calculations that led to the downfall of the Wall Street investment houses.)

Klein offers more realistic ideas about how to make decisions in real-life settings. He provides many examples—ranging from airline pilots and weather forecasters to sports announcers and Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander novels—to make his point. All these decision makers saw things that others didn’t. They used their expertise to pick up cues and to discern patterns and trends. We can make better decisions, Klein tells us, if we are prepared for complexity and ambiguity and if we will stop expecting the data to tell us everything.

See also: Wikipedia on Gary Klein
MIT Press book page

Supplementing a previous list of philosophy of mind titles, here are more books on philosophy of mind published in 2009, with a look ahead at some coming in 2010, based on a WorldCat search. Philosophy of mind may not be the main subject in every case, but it was at least one of the headings used in cataloging these books.

2009

Language, Reality and Mind: A Defense of Everyday Thought by Charles Crittenden (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) (link for UK)

Mental Reality, Second Edition, with a new appendix (Representation and Mind) by Galen Strawson (MIT Press, 2009) [first ed published in 1994] (link for UK)

The Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy) by Michael Tye (Cambridge Univ Pr, 2009) [now in paperback, originally published in 1989] (link for UK)

The Minds of the Moderns: Rationalism, Empiricism, and Philosophy of Mind by Janice Thomas (Montreal ; Ithaca : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009) (link for UK)

The Philosophy of Animal Minds by Robert W Lurz (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) (link for UK)

Physical Realization by Sydney Shoemaker (Oxford Univ Pr 2009) [now in paperback, originally published in 2007](link for UK)

Plural Action: Essays in Philosophy and Social Science (Contributions To Phenomenology) by Hans Bernhard Schmid (Dordrecht; Berlin: Springer, 2009) [on "collective intentionality"] (link for UK)

Predicative Minds: The Social Ontogeny of Propositional Thinking (Bradford Books) by Radu J Bogdan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) (link for UK)

Topics in Early Modern Philosophy of Mind (Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind) by Jon Miller ([Dordrecht] : Springer, 2009) (link for UK)

coming in 2010

Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind by Michel Weber (State University of New York Press, 2010) [Jan 2010] (not found at amazon.co.uk)

The Disordered Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness by George Graham (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2009) [Feb 2010] (link for UK)

Physicalism (New Problems of Philosophy) by Daniel Stoljar (London : Routledge, 2009) [Feb 2010] (link for UK)

Philosophy of Mind (Critical Concepts in Philosophy) by Sean Crawford (London : Routledge, 2009) [April 2010] (link for UK)

Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind by Pete Mandik (Continuum, 2010) [May 2010] (link for UK) (some previews at author’s blog)

The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts by Alan Richardson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) [June 2010] (not found at amazon.co.uk)

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (Little, Brown, 2009).

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Your colleague’s husband’s sister can make you fat, even if you don’t know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Drs. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide.

In CONNECTED, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, CONNECTED overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.

See also: Website for the book

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna is due out on Sept 29 in the US, but is already available in the UK from Bloomsbury.

Product description from the publisher:

This brilliantly illustrated tale of reason, insanity, love and truth recounts the story of Bertrand Russell’s life. Raised by his paternal grandparents, young Russell was never told the whereabouts of his parents. Driven by a desire for knowledge of his own history, he attempted to force the world to yield to his yearnings: for truth, clarity and resolve. As he grew older, and increasingly sophisticated as a philosopher and mathematician, Russell strove to create an objective language with which to describe the world – one free of the biases and slippages of the written word. At the same time, he began courting his first wife, teasing her with riddles and leaning on her during the darker days, when his quest was bogged down by paradoxes, frustrations and the ghosts of his family’s secrets. Ultimately, he found considerable success – but his career was stalled when he was outmatched by an intellectual rival: his young, strident, brilliantly original student, Ludwig Wittgenstein. An insightful and complexly layered narrative, Logicomix reveals both Russell’s inner struggle and the quest for the foundations of logic. Narration by an older, wiser Russell, as well as asides from the author himself, make sense of the story’s heady and powerful ideas. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between pure reason and the persistent flaws of reality, a narrative populated by great and august thinkers, young lovers, ghosts and insanity.

See also:
Website for the book, with a preview

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz (Scribner, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description:

What do dogs know? How do they think? The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human.

Inside of a Dog is a fresh look at the world of dogs — from the dog’s point of view. As a dog owner, Horowitz is naturally curious to learn what her dog thinks about and knows. And as a scientist, she is intent on understanding the minds of animals who cannot speak for themselves.

In clear, crisp prose, Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draws a picture of what it might be like to be a dog. What’s it like to be able to smell not just every bit of open food in the house but also to smell sadness in humans or even the passage of time? How does a tiny dog manage to play successfully with a Great Dane? What is it like to hear the bodily vibrations of insects or the hum of a fluorescent light? Why must a person on a bicycle be chased? What’s it like to use your mouth as a hand? In short, what is it like for a dog to experience life from two feet off the ground, amidst the smells of the sidewalk, gazing at our ankles or knees?

Inside of a Dog explains these things and much more. The answers can be surprising — once we set aside our natural inclination to anthropomorphize dogs. Inside of a Dog also contains up-to-the-minute research — on dogs’ detection of disease, the secrets of their tails, and their skill at reading our attention — that Horowitz puts into useful context. Although not a formal training guide, Inside of a Dog has practical application for dog lovers interested in understanding why their dogs do what they do.

The relationship between dogs and humans is arguably the most fascinating animal-human bond because dogs evolved from wild creatures to become our companions, an adaptation that changed their bodies, brains, and behavior. Yet dogs always remain animals, familiar but mysterious. With a light touch and the weight of science behind her, Alexandra Horowitz examines the animal we think we know best but may actually understand the least. This book is as close as you can get to knowing about dogs without being a dog yourself.

Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity by G.A. Bradshaw (Yale University Press, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Drawing on accounts from India to Africa and California to Tennessee, and on research in neuroscience, psychology, and animal behavior, G. A. Bradshaw explores the minds, emotions, and lives of elephants. Wars, starvation, mass culls, poaching, and habitat loss have reduced elephant numbers from more than ten million to a few hundred thousand, leaving orphans bereft of the elders who would normally mentor them. As a consequence, traumatized elephants have become aggressive against people, other animals, and even one another; their behavior is comparable to that of humans who have experienced genocide, other types of violence, and social collapse. By exploring the elephant mind and experience in the wild and in captivity, Bradshaw bears witness to the breakdown of ancient elephant cultures.

All is not lost. People are working to save elephants by rescuing orphaned infants and rehabilitating adult zoo and circus elephants, using the same principles psychologists apply in treating humans who have survived trauma. Bradshaw urges us to support these and other models of elephant recovery and to solve pressing social and environmental crises affecting all animals, human or not.

The Philosophy of Animal Minds, ed. Robert W. Lurz (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

This volume is a collection of fourteen new essays by leading philosophers on issues concerning the nature, existence, and our knowledge of animal minds. The nature of animal minds has been a topic of interest to philosophers since the origins of philosophy, and recent years have seen significant philosophical engagement with the subject. However, there is no volume that represents the current state of play in this important and growing field. The purpose of this volume is to highlight the state of the debate. The issues which are covered include whether and to what degree animals think in a language or in iconic structures, possess concepts, are conscious, self-aware, metacognize, attribute states of mind to others, and have emotions, as well as issues pertaining to our knowledge of and the scientific standards for attributing mental states to animals.

The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal (Harmony, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Are we our brothers’ keepers? Do we have an instinct for compassion? Or are we, as is often assumed, only on earth to serve our own survival and interests? In this thought-provoking book, the acclaimed author of Our Inner Ape examines how empathy comes naturally to a great variety of animals, including humans.

By studying social behaviors in animals, such as bonding, the herd instinct, the forming of trusting alliances, expressions of consolation, and conflict resolution, Frans de Waal demonstrates that animals–and humans–are “preprogrammed to reach out.” He has found that chimpanzees care for mates that are wounded by leopards, elephants offer “reassuring rumbles” to youngsters in distress, and dolphins support sick companions near the water’s surface to prevent them from drowning. From day one humans have innate sensitivities to faces, bodies, and voices; we’ve been designed to feel for one another.

De Waal’s theory runs counter to the assumption that humans are inherently selfish, which can be seen in the fields of politics, law, and finance, and which seems to be evidenced by the current greed-driven stock market collapse. But he cites the public’s outrage at the U.S. government’s lack of empathy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as a significant shift in perspective–one that helped Barack Obama become elected and ushered in what may well become an Age of Empathy. Through a better understanding of empathy’s survival value in evolution, de Waal suggests, we can work together toward a more just society based on a more generous and accurate view of human nature.

Written in layman’s prose with a wealth of anecdotes, wry humor, and incisive intelligence, The Age of Empathy is essential reading for our embattled times.

Related titles: The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons in Love, Death, and Happiness by Mark Rowlands (link for UK)

The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals by Charles Siebert (link for UK)

Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human by Kelly Oliver (link for UK)

Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce (link for UK)

Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory by Uriah Kriegel (Oxford University Press, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? Uriah Kriegel offers an answer. His aim is a comprehensive theory of the features that all and only conscious mental events have. The key idea is that consciousness arises when self-awareness and world-awareness are integrated in the right way. Conscious mental events differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they may represent, they always also represent themselves, and do so in a very specific way. Subjective Consciousness is a fascinating new move forward towards a full understanding of the mind.

Kriegel is an Associate Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies, where plans for the 2010 Toward a Science of Consciousness conference are underway…

See also: Author’s website

A recent article in Wired alerted me to this book, which is now available: Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell (Dutton Adult, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

THE TOTAL RECALL REVOLUTION IS INEVITABLE.

IT WILL CHANGE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.

IT HAS ALREADY BEGUN.

What if you could remember everything? Soon, if you choose, you will be able to conveniently and affordably record your whole life in minute detail. You would have Total Recall. Authors Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on experience from their MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in the computer world, as a test case, attempting to digitally record as much of his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything he did on his computer was captured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap that logged his bio-metrics, and began recording telephone calls. This experiment, and the system created to support it, put them at the center of a movement studying the creation and enjoyment of e-memories.

Since then the three streams of technology feeding the Total Recall revolution– digital recording, digital storage, and digital search, have become gushing torrents. We are capturing so much of our lives now, be it on the date–and location–stamped photos we take with our smart phones or in the continuous records we have of our emails, instant messages, and tweets–not to mention the GPS tracking of our movements many cars and smart phones do automatically. We are storing what we capture either out there in the “cloud” of services such as Facebook or on our very own increasingly massive and cheap hard drives. But the critical technology, and perhaps least understood, is our magical new ability to find the information we want in the mountain of data that is our past. And not just Google it, but data mine it so that, say, we can chart how much exercise we have been doing in the last four weeks in comparison with what we did four years ago. In health, education, work life, and our personal lives, the Total Recall revolution is going to change everything. As Bell and Gemmell show, it has already begun.

Total Recall provides a glimpse of the near future. Imagine heart monitors woven into your clothes and tiny wearable audio and visual recorders automatically capturing what you see and hear. Imagine being able to summon up the e-memories of your great grandfather and his avatar giving you advice about whether or not to go to college, accept that job offer, or get married. The range of potential insights is truly awesome. But Bell and Gemmell also show how you can begin to take better advantage of this new technology right now. From how to navigate the serious questions of privacy and serious problem of application compatibility to what kind of startups Bell is willing to invest in and which scanner he prefers, this is a book about a turning point in human knowledge as well as an immediate and practical guide.

Total Recall is a technological revolution that will accomplish nothing less than a transformation in the way humans think about the meaning of their lives. “What would happen if we could instantly access all the information we were exposed to throughout our lives?” -Bill Gates, from the Foreword

See also: website for the book

Consciousness Explained Better: Towards an Integral Understanding of the Multifaceted Nature of Consciousness by Allan Combs (Paragon House, 2009).

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

This title offers a thorough and insightful exploration of human consciousness in all its forms. “Consciousness Explained Better” offers readers an insightful, down-to-earth, and above all, easy-to-understand exploration of consciousness in its many facets and forms. Grounded in the author’s thorough understanding of the various aspects and development of consciousness, this superbly written volume examines human consciousness from a wide range of view-points – its historical evolution, its growth in the individual, its mystical dimensions, and the meaning of enlightenment – giving readers a greater understanding of how these aspects of consciousness combine to create the kaleidoscopic yet lucid experience that is the essence of humanity.

Allan Combs is on the faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies.