Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves

If the universe is aimless, how do selves and aims emerge? Why do living beings have aims when inanimate things do not? Current science encourages us to reject the ghost-in-the-machine explanation-that something called spirit, soul, mind, or will was somehow breathed into matter-and instead accept that selves are just matter, in aimless mechanistic motion like everything else. But what about life's many emergent qualities, the multifarious purposes that shape actual physical behavior not just in human lives, but in all of life? Even the simplest life forms have adaptive functions, traits that accomplish goals or ends. How can we explain the nature and origin of selves and aims without resorting to supernatural forces or explaining them away as nothing but cause-and-effect mechanisms? In Neither Ghost nor Machine, Jeremy Sherman explains the emergence of selves and aims in an aimless universe. He distills for a general audience the theory developed by renowned neuroscientist Terrence Deacon, which extends the breakthrough constraint-based insight that inspired evolutionary, information, and self-organization theory. Emergent dynamics theory provides a testable hypothesis for how mattering arose from matter, function from physics, and means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect dynamics. It offers a physics of purpose, demonstrating that there is a strictly physical explanation for the emergence and nature of selves and aims, one that shows our existence in an otherwise inanimate universe is not absurd. Neither Ghost nor Machine bridges the gap between the hard and soft sciences, suggesting fresh and exciting solutions to philosophical mysteries that have perplexed humanity for millennia, from free will to causality to morality.

Table of Contents:
Foreword, by Terrence Deacon I. Overview 1. The Mystery of Purpose 2. The Biggest Mystery We Ever Ignore 3. Deacon’s Solution in Brief II. Framing the Mystery 4. Two Sources of Change 5. Selves 6. Two Ghosts, Two Machines 7. Interpretation 8. Aims 9. Evolution’s Limited Limiting Role III. Dead Ends, Live Clues 10. The History 11. Evolutionary Theory’s Elusive Self 12. Information About Nothing for Anyone 13. The Engineered Ghosts in Our Machines 14. Small Is Dubious IV. Grounding a Solution 15. Processes of Emergent Elimination 16. Second Law Irregularity 17. Emergent Regularization 18. Emergent Regularization vs. Emergent Self-Regeneration 19. Other Emergent Regularization Dynamics 20. Coupled Regularization Processes V. Deacon’s Solution 21. Autogens: Self-Generators 22. Evolved Autogens 23. Where Is the Self? 24. The Consequences of Self-Regeneration VI. The Interpreting Self 25. Codes, Signs, Interpreters 26. Kinds of Signs VII. Implications 27. A Constraint-Based Approach to Evolutionary Theory 28. Implications for the Free Will Debate? 29. Making Science Safe for Value Acknowledgments Appendix Notes Index

About the Author :
Jeremy Sherman writes about biophilosophy, psychology, and politics. He teaches college courses across the social sciences and blogs for Psychology Today and Alternet. He has studied and collaborated with Terrence Deacon for twenty years. Terrence Deacon is professor of biological anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997) and Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011).

Review :
In Neither Ghost nor Machine, Jeremy Sherman takes on a central mystery: How did the universe get from matter to mattering? Whence purpose? Whence selves? These are topics too easily ignored in our rush to find the molecular stuff of life and not the organizational "what is” of life. With this fine book, and that of Deacon, we are well launched. Neither Ghost nor Machine reckons with the most profound questions one can ask about the nature of the self and of life on earth. It is the work of a fiercely inquisitive and original mind. When the Big Bang banged all there was was just the stuff of basic physics, fermions, bosons, and such. There was neither life nor mind. Now there is life all over the place and some of it is conscious. How is that possible? How could such things as life and mind emerge? Jeremy Sherman has written a clear, clever, witty guide to the new science of emergence championed by Terrence Deacon. This is a philosophical treasure trove that explains how novelty emerges without explanatory gaps and violations of the laws of nature. Finally! A breakthrough approach to fundamental questions that have gone unanswered for so long that many forget to ask them. Fascinating, profound! For those of us who call ourselves religious/spiritual naturalists, this book is sure to become an instant classic. Its narrative of how living beings are and came to be is rigorous, accessible, and lyrical, and will greatly deepen our affinity with the natural world and with one another. Neither Ghost nor Machine is an eloquent manifesto in the movement to reclaim questions of purpose and agency for science. Presenting Terrence Deacon’s account of the natural emergence of living agents, Jeremy Sherman casts aside the stale, old dichotomies to show us a new way of thinking scientifically about life. Jeremy Sherman lucidly explicates the paradigm-changing vision of Terrence Deacon, which addresses the mysteries of the origin of living systems from the nonliving and the emergence of mind and purpose in a nature that is still the the process of evolving. The persistent Western dualism of mind and matter is finally done for, and the burden of proof has shifted. Thanks to books like Neither Ghost Nor Machine, inspired by the work of Terrence Deacon, we are now crossing the threshold to a brave new self-understanding Clearly written and accessible to any reader with an interest in the Big Questions of Life and Mindedness.