incognito the secret lives of the brain review

Thus, 'the conscious you is the smallest bit-player in the brain'.Ĭonsciousness is but one of hundreds of motley mechanisms that have become entangled in the human organism through the long process of evolutionary happenstance. Our conscious selves are composed, Eagleman says (and not just he), of a multitude of 'zombie' neural sub-systems that are both unconscious and beyond conscious control. I love the book's elegant meta-consistency and meta-completeness (the new logic is not deduction but simultaneous satisfaction of conflicting constraints). So the verdict of the chattering classes is foregone: Ignore it, and carry on! These numberless aspects disagree with each other, so the result is messy, inconsistent and hopelessly incomplete, leaving us no human essence to grasp. He portrays accidental aspects of human nature as viewed through cherry-picked scientific investigations into human neuro-mechanisms, their functions and their malfunctions. Intellectual leaders of all sorts will attack the inconsistencies in Eagleman's philosophy of human nature. To all of us living within the reign of the politics of freedom, this book is a missile barrage blasting at our cultural taproot. Our current revolutionary order embraces the undeniable history of both our biological (genetic) and cultural (memetic) evolution.

Intellectual compromise, though rare, is not a new tactic, as proved by Tycho Brahe's compromise (his planets circled both sun and Earth), which long ago failed to thwart the coming scientific revolution. Thinkers of Pinker's stripe offer a compromise (we are free robots). Not divine, but engineered by evolution's Richard Dawkins-dubbed Blind Watchmaker.Įagleman's book is clearly a fusillade at those who, like Pinker and other defenders of our freedom-based moral/social/political/legal order, want to strike a compromise between the status quo and the bio-robotic humankind gathering on the horizon. As I (and everyone aforementioned) see it, the march of science has revealed us for what we truly are: bio-robots. I am a 'Know Thyself' junky, a philosopher of the ancient Greek stripe. I love the book precisely because it reveals so many of the strings and levers of human nature.

Incognito the secret lives of the brain review