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Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human?
 
Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will?

Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.

Offers an expansive, unified theory of thought that brings together the vast resources of neuroscience, computation, and cognitive linguistics.

What is an idea, and where does it come from? We experience thought as if it were abstract, but every thought is actually a physical thing, carried out by the neural systems of our brains. Thought does not occur neuron-by-neuron; it happens when neurons come together to form circuits and when simple circuits combine to form complex ones. Thoughts, then, derive their structures from the circuitry we also use for vision, touch, and hearing. This circuitry is what allows simple thoughts to come together into complex concepts, making meaning, creating metaphors, and framing our social and political ideas.

With The Neural Mind, George Lakoff, a pioneering cognitive linguist, and computer scientist Srini Narayanan deftly combine insights from cognitive science, computational modeling, and linguistics to show how thoughts arise from the neural circuitry that runs throughout our bodies. They answer key questions about the ways we make meaning: How does neural circuitry create the conceptual “frames” through which we understand our social lives? What kind of neural circuitry characterizes metaphorical thought, in which ideas are understood in terms of other ideas with similar structures? Lively and accessible, the book shows convincingly that the “metaphors we live by”—to use Lakoff’s famous phrase—aren’t abstractions but deeply embodied neural constructs.

The Neural Mind is the first book of its kind, bringing together the ideas of multiple disciplines to offer a unified, accessible theory of thought. A field-defining work, Lakoff and Narayanan’s book will be of interest not just to linguists and cognitive scientists but also to psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, journalists, sociologists, and political scientists—and anyone who wants to understand how we really think.

The Origins of Self explores the role selfhood plays in defining both human society and each individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialization and language, and the types of selves we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Martin P. J. Edwardes argues that other-awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only nonmodel, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self. Developed in relation to a range of subject areas—linguistics, anthropology, genomics, and cognition, as well as sociocultural theory—The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.
 

Scientism claims that religion has nothing to offer our understanding of reality. But since religion can be subjected to scientific methods of study, it paradoxically becomes part of a reality larger than that investigated by the sciences. Scientism is the belief that the empirical sciences provide the sole methods of knowing the truths about reality, and that anything not scientifically observable cannot be real. Hence, religion, theology, ethics, morality, and the creative arts cannot add to our understanding of reality. Scientism, moreover, maintains that scientific and religious understandings of reality relate to each other in distinctively oppositional ways. Amply informed by philosophical and historical scholarship and by knowledge of evolutionary and neurocognitive methods of research, Bruno G. Breitmeyer offers an in-depth look at the relation between scientism and the sciences of religion. In Part 1 Breitmeyer covers the sciences of religion and of related fields of morality and art. In all fields, scientistic influences are clearly discernable. In Part 2 he looks at “nice” and “pernicious” versions of scientism and, despite the latter version, at how it constitutes an atheistic ersatz-religion, especially among scientifically informed neoatheists. In Part 3 he goes beyond scientism in two ways. He first introduces the concept of technoscientism—the belief that modern technology can address and solve any problem facing humanity—and traces its history back to Promethean and Gnostic philosophies. Second, he proposes a novel theology of science in which God is conceived as Creative Mind. The concept of conscious mind, evident throughout the book, points to the crucial role that human subjective experiences plays in scientific and religious practices. Breitmeyer argues that however resolutely scientism attempts to sever science from religion, a supremely creative and conscious Intelligence unites them. Without such Intelligence—theists call it God—neither science nor religion could exist.