Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind

How does life arise from inanimate matter? How does consciousness arise from life? Is consciousness of the universe an illusion? Or is mind itself an illusion?The British authors of this book are a mathematician and biologist pair who boldly tackle these classic questions in philosophy with some original approaches. Maintaining that life, consciousness, and culture cannot understood by reducing them to the material elements from which they arise, the authors deftly develop a set of interesting concepts. Some of these are not especially original, but they are presented in an unusual light particularly as the authors ably illustrate them with very accessible descriptions of complex biochemical pathways of living matter.A key concept is that of emergence - well established in philosophy and roughly equated to the popular idea of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. The authors couple this concept with one of their own - complicity, or the interaction of different things which lead them to become entirely new things. A third, among several others, is that of extelligence which arises from the interaction of the intellegences of individuals and is rooted in human culture. Using these and other concepts, the book, which is at the nexus of science and philosophy, seeks to explain how life, consciousness, culture, and reality arise and the relationship between them.Be prepared to wade through these pages slowly to enjoy the masterful exposition of this book. Or, if you find this tedious, enjoy the elegant prose which uses the lens of science and philosophy to describe events which we might normally frame in different language. In the four-page prologue, a graphic sequence of events unfolds which chart the creation of the universe to the emergence of the symbolic literary creatures which constitute the human species: QUOTE Fifteen thousand million years ago the universe was no bigger than the dot at the end of this sentence......today, the two descendants of those tiny creatures are busy delineating their own limited version of the entire story in strange, angular geometric symbols impressed in contrasting pigment upon sheets of impressed white vegetable matter. UNQUOTE Having long forgotten more than half the courses I took in college, this book allowed me to relive and reinforce the pleasures of two wonderful philosophy seminars - on theories of mind and philosophy of science. Expect, if you get through the book cover to cover, to see the world a little differently from when you start at the prologue.

Okay, okay, I admit it; I should never argue with Steven Haines about a book. I had first discovered the title Figments of Reality while reading another author. When I finally got the book, though, I discovered that I really couldn't get into it, but Steven Haines' review was so enthusiastic that it suggested that the book might be worth the extra effort, so I tried again. I'm glad I did; it's a wonderful book. It is however, very dense with information, and like D. C. Dennett's books, requires a lot of active participation in the learning process. Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen are a biologist and a mathematician team who have worked together to write a book on evolution; and not just biological evolution either. They discuss the origin of life, intelligence, consciousness, concepts of reality, social order, cities, and global civilization all within a 299 page volume. Each chapter is opened with a charming quote, usually drawn from the lore of the behavioral sciences, that illustrates in capsule the content of the chapter. My favorites were the woman scientist and her chimpanzee subject, the viper with its "dead snake" pose, and the parrot whose protest over going through a boring word list made his intelligence far more apparent than reciting the list ever could.Addressed in these chapters were some pretty heavy duty concepts. It's not that I hadn't come across them before in my reading, but that the authors' approach was novel, at least to me. Their treatment of the statistics of evolution and especially their analysis of the "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis were particularly enlightening. Until they likened it to the opening and ending moves of a chess game, with it's myriads of potential moves between beginning and end, I had not given much thought to how misleading are the cladal diagrams of evolutionary trees. They point out that the reductionist view, that looks for a core and a root to everything, is misleading because it neglects the total picture of what is going on in the environment and the emergent aspects of the interactive parts. In the instance of the mitochondrial studies, they point out that a breeding population would probably have been at least 100,000 individuals, and the theory of 1 Eve and 99999 Adams, doesn't make much sense. As they note, it's much more likely that there were 50,000 of each gender, some of whom carried a particular stretch of DNA. Pointing out that there is a difference between the descent of a molecular sequence and the descent of a species they write, "Possibly there did exist a Mitochondrial Eve, but she is not the Mother of Us All: she represents a particular molecular sequence for mitochondrial DNA, embodied in a population of women possessing the molecule, from whom all modern mitochondrial DNA molecules descend (p. 88)." More intriguing still was their discussion of complicity, which is a synergy among constituent parts that gives rise to unexpected results, sort of the old saw "the

How could a game with such simple rules, such as evolution by natural selection, produce such complexity? Well, chess has simple rules and we still don't know a sure-fire way to play and win every game. The idea that simple rules may interact to produce wonderful complexity-"simplexity"-is only one of the brain-bending ideas authors Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart gush forth with in this rich and entertaining popular science book. The flip side of "simplexity" is "complicity"-a game where the very act of playing the game changes the rules. Hmm...this looks like evolution again! It's a wonderful exploration of the science behind evolution cast into many different allegories and scenarios, including comical heated discussions among the eight-sexed Zarathustrans, an invention of the authors that does beautifully at reflecting our own egocentric assumptions about the nature of reality -- and the figments of reality. --Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

A thoroughly enjoyable synthesis of many views concerning the evolution of mind, consciousness, free will etc.Clearly written, with wit and parody where appropriate. There are dialogs which recall Goedel Escher Bach (although with perhaps fewer levels of meaning), and depth.The authors clearly distinguish between facts and their opinions, and confess to less than absolute certainty on occasion, which is refreshing.Highly recommended.

Who said the whole Universe should be comprensible to humans? Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen explain "flowlike" that Mind is not a thing, it's a process. In order to represent the real World surrounding us, Minds are producing Figments of Reality. Modells or mappings of our objective outer world. They represent it in a coded and imperfect form, but consciousness is dynamically reshaping those maps in an ever adapting game of complexity and simplicity that change context dependent and not in a reductionistic(hierarchical- ) space-of-the-possible. Evolution is Nature's armsrace, selecting within the coevolving complexity and themfore creating higher forms of order, higer structures, new phase spaces. Nature improves itself. Creating new technologies, more flexible ones more adaptable ones, more able to co-evolve and withstand changes. It is in this phase-space -of-the-possible that senses evolved and with them the brain-mind system. You can only get intelligent if there is something about to get intelligent. So, a complicit(evolving together) evolution of senses(smell, eyes, sound,..) and mind, was needed to produce the signals and to process them, creating a loop of dynamic evolution with a constant feedback reaching continously higer degrees of complexification but also of better "mapping" of the real world. An always adapting and improving Figment of the Real World like our Conscious Brain-. These feedback loops got intelligence to new phase changes and higer degrees of sofistication. It was a special set of circunstances that triggered an Intelligence/Extelligence co-evolution. It is just these fedback loops that drive faster the race of evolution to our Cultures. They are flexible in their own way, reshaping, adapting, further evolving to higher levels of complexity and order to keep themself existing. It is this spreading out of culture-knowledge to a higer degree that closes the loop. The Universe started as simple, evolved its matter to complex systems like us, that try now to recreate it inside tiny-highly-organized masses of "that" matter into "Our Figments of Reality".