Terrence William Deacon Libri

This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

Human language is one of the most distinctive behavioural adaptations on the planet. Languages evolved in only one species, in only one way, without precedent, and without parallel. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains, and tens of thousands with complex learning abilities. Only one of these has ever wondered about its place in the whole scheme, because only one - through its language - evolved with the ability to do so. This book aims to alter the understanding of what it means to be human: the universe isn't a soulless, blindly spinning clockwork, but instead nascent hear and mind.

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.

Examines the emergent processes that bridge the gap between organisms that think and have consciousness and those that do not and discusses the origins of life, information, and free will.

A medida que la física elabora una teoría cada vez más completa del universo y que la química molecular desentraña los secretos de la vida, más patente resulta, en esta «teoría de todo», una gran ausencia: nosotros y nuestra mente. En efecto, la relación entre mente y materia sigue siendo una de las cuestiones más enigmáticas y controvertidas, a pesar del asombroso progreso en el conocimiento de cómo funciona el cerebro humano. Todo cuanto nos caracteriza como seres humanos —la creación de significado, las actuaciones basadas en propósitos y valores y el manejo de símbolos— no ha merecido hasta ahora el interés pleno de la física. Terrence W. Deacon llena este vacío teórico estudiando la emergencia de fenómenos inmateriales a partir de sistemas materiales simples. En este libro revolucionario y multidisciplinar, que abarca materias tan dispares como la neurología, la física de los sistemas autoorganizativos, la teoría del conocimiento o la semiótica, deacon nos brinda un nuevo y fascinante modelo explicativo para aclarar la relación entre la experiencia consciente y los procesos físicos, así como los vínculos que existen entre las ideas y los pensamientos —ese elusivo «yo» que somos— y el organismo al que están anclados.