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Fantastic

Revisado: 04-08-25

Excellent in every way. Please do yourself a favor and listen to this, and then maybe a few other courses from this professor.

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Good book, flawed arguments

Revisado: 04-03-25

About half of this book discusses the origins of life, vertebrates, animals, brains, etc I found some of these sections quite interesting and appreciated the "deep" history. The book takes a turn when it discusses emotion, which is clearly the author's specialty. Much of this latter part dissects old ideas and provides a rather tedious explanation of various brain regions.

The author argues strenuously that animals do not have emotions. His measure of emotion is... linguistically describing the emotion. Seriously. He acknowledges that this is not a good measure for animals, but claims that other methods simply "sneak up on consciousness" and cannot prove definitively that animals have it. But of course, that also can't prove that humans have it, since linguistic reports are notoriously unreliable. Nothing on this book convinced me that humans are conscious.

Lest animal lovers be offended, he also does not believe that babies have emotions, which seems ludicrous. That is because he defines emotions as cognitively based "pattern completion" schemas based on a person imposing a cognitive construction from their past experience. I guess that's valid, but seems semantic: it seems wrong to say that babies and animals don't have emotion -- only that they don't have *the same* type of emotions as adult humans.

The author also places huge emphasis on autonoetic consciousness, or the ability to view oneself as part of the conscious experience. He claims that all emotion is autonoetic, which seems plainly wrong. When I watch a horror movie, I am not scared because I think something bad will happen to me, but that does not mean I don't feel fear.

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Excellent

Revisado: 03-31-25

This is an excellent drive through physical principles governing biology. The overarching framework was not too constraining, and it was mostly "here are some really interesting aspects of the topic." I enjoyed it.

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Mechanics of Consciousness

Revisado: 12-16-24

This book persuasively argues for a "beast machine" view of consciousness, which arises from continuous top down predictions about internal states. While predictions for external states are meant to accurately predict objective causes of sensory stimuli, predictions of *internal* states are geared towards control. That means that Bayesian priors about how the body*should* be are much stronger, and action is taken to make those predictions come true (active inference). It also means that change blindness of internal changes is used to prevent deviations, creating an illusion of a continuous self.

Overall, I didn't find this theory to replace other theories of consciousness (like global workspace and integrated information theory), but to supplement them in order to explain the mechanics of how the perceptions of a conscious self arise.

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Hilarious and captivating

Revisado: 12-09-24

I have a love-hate relationship with Prof. Greenberg, but when he is good, he is *really* good. He is good here. I laughed out loud multiple times and sat on the edge of my seat for this Mahler biography. And the music! I was only superficially familiar with the symphonies before, but the sheer magnitude and combination of elements (it really does "contain everything") is astounding. This is nearly the perfect music Great Courses.

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Excellent

Revisado: 12-08-24

Terrific book and fascinating topic. Quantum mechanics is endlessly interesting, with seemingly no end of things to think about, even after reading a fair amount about it. Ball does a great job explaining Niehl Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation in a way that takes it seriously and not simply as "shut up and calculate." He himself focuses on an information based interpretation. He also addresses a number of misconceptions of well known principles that I found helpful to my own thinking.

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New perspective after 2024

Revisado: 12-02-24

Listening to this post-2024 election is eye opening, to say the least. Everything written here is true, but many statements would never be made today, by either conservative or liberal politicians, except in "safe" progressive circles. The change itself speaks to the radical shift in "zero sum" thinking the author writes about, which aptly summarizes much of Trump's election strategy. It is remarkable that the author both predicted -- and radically misinterpreted the direction of change -- for this very thinking.

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Low information density

Revisado: 11-24-24

Lots of filler here. There is a style of science writing that focuses on the "people" part on the mistaken assumption that it makes things more approachable. The end result is endless descriptions, like "Person X, whose biography was Y, ran experiment Z, and discovered U." The only thing the reader cares about is the idea, U, but the book forces them to sit through everything else. Worse still, the science is usually from centuries ago, so the final idea is often very familiar and well known.

Writers, please stop doing this! It is not the right way to make people interested in science.

Substance wise, the only idea in this book is about how major changes in structure can come about. Interesting, but more of an article than a book.

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Mixed Feelings

Revisado: 11-17-24

I've been on a "definition of life" kick recently and have read about half a dozen books on the subject. This book seemed like a logical next choice, and it did indeed contribute something new to my understanding: a clear explanation of how "molecular machines" harvest chaos to efficiently perform work.

But it was a rough going. The first two chapters are an almost unrelated history of science for "chance" and "necessity." The three chapters that follow are great, but then there are long discussions of experimental design and step by step analysis of certain machines. For an audiobook to a lay listener, this comes off as a word salad of piconeutons, random biology designations like structure "C" in complex "I," and so on. I was glad when the book was over.

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Very Funny

Revisado: 11-03-24

This is an excellent history of one of the worst times to be alive in western Europe, the latter 14th century, There are two things I liked most about it. First, it is very funny. Tuchman has a dry, acerbic sense of humor that fits the century (with all its absurdities) perfectly. Second, Tuchman gives voice to the common people and repeatedly quotes rebels, peasants, and other riffraff to show the very real class divisions below a seemingly uniform front of "chivalry."

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