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In January, David Sloan Wilson published a fascinating article in the online magazine This View of Life. It is called, " On the Concept of Paradigms and a New Paradigm for Evolving Cooperative Systems" and it outlined a new way of looking at the world while also providing important tools from two scientific fields to really help with this view. The essay served as a short target article that has…
With so much talk of AI flying about in the news these days, I thought it would be really helpful to look more deeply into the natural, rather than the artificial, version of intelligence. Neuroscientist and tech mogul Jeff Hawkins is a fascinating guy for this exploration via his book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. I first heard Hawkins discuss this idea on an episode of Ginger…
Finally, I’ve reached the end of my detailed review for this 466-page book. As a reminder, Sapiens is divided into four parts, plus a brief afterward: Part One: The Cognitive RevolutionPart Two: The Agricultural RevolutionPart Three: The Unification of HumankindPart Four: The Scientific RevolutionAfterword: The Animal that Became a God The first four parts of my review (1, 2, 3, 4) have…
Time now for the penultimate review of Sapiens. In the first three parts, we saw the emergence of our species, its spreadaround the globe, and some of the unifying forces that have made human culture truly global. Now it’s time for the discovery that helped humans totally transform the planet and which could one day transform our species itself. It’s time to cover the Scientific…
I’m back now for part three of my detailed review of Sapiens. As a reminder, the book is subdivided into these main sections: Part One: The Cognitive RevolutionPart Two: The Agricultural RevolutionPart Three: The Unification of HumankindPart Four: The Scientific RevolutionAfterword: The Animal that Became a God I’m roughly following the shape of this outline for my review, so in my…
Hello again. I’m back for part two of my detailed review of Sapiens. In part one, we started with the emergence of several hominid species appearing a couple of million years ago. That was then followed by “the Cognitive Revolution” about 70,000 years ago, which brought Homo sapiens from a place of relative obscurity to the cusp of global dominance. That dominance would be built…
In my last blog post reviewing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, I mentioned that I wanted to review two books that I had read during the research for my recently submitted epistemology paper. While the first one was directly related to that topic, this second book was just one that I have regularly received a lot of questions about and I absolutely had to read and digest.…
Last week, I finally submitted an epistemology paper for publication that I’ve been working on for several years. It’s very ambitious and I can’t wait to share it when/if it gets accepted. But in the meantime, I have some thoughts to share on a couple of books that I read during the research on that project. The first is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific…
Hi all! It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here but that’s because I’ve been hard at work on a major project. Over the last few years, I’ve been preparing my epistemology thoughts for a peer-reviewed publication. That process has gone through several starts and stops but I’m finally ready to share a rough draft. My proposals are quite ambitious (to say…
(Photo by Ven Tenzin Jamphel on the Dalai Lama Facebook page) Okay, I’m back for part 2 of the Dalai Lama’s book Beyond Religion. As I covered in my last post, part 1 of this fascinating book offered a vision for “secular ethics for a whole world”, which I was inspired to read because this goal matches ProSocial World's purpose statement as well as my own views on…