Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind

Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind
by Gerald Edelman

Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind
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Book Summary Information

Author: Gerald Edelman
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1993-06-16
ISBN: 0465007643
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Basic Books

Book Reviews of Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind

Book Review: Want to know the truth? It IS out there--
Summary: 5 Stars

The worst kind of reviewers are those who come when the play is half over. There is no "royal road" to the truth, either in mathematics, as the old tale has it, or in philosophy and science. Ethically, you can struggle through the basics and talk about your conclusions; or you should shut up. If you have no inkling about the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, you have no inkling about consciousness. Go back and do your homework. So Edelman's books are tough going? Did you expect to understand calculus without taking algebra? I read "Neural Darwinism" right after it was published, and gagged. My biology background is thin; one college course. I looked up "natural selection" and found Dawkins; I read all of his books and knew something about genetics. I read "ND" again, understanding a bit more, especially the part about "ground-breaking" ... When "Topobiology" appeared, I read it. I had to reread "ND" to get through it, but I began to understand the vocabulary, the ideas, the logic, the structure. Same thing with "Remembered Present". At that point I was working in a university psychology department (strictly as a hardware specialist, never having had a single psychology course). I mentioned this exciting work to a few professors in developmental psych who might have been expected to look at it; none of them did. Not till 1999, when a visiting professor offered a course in "Consciousness" based on "The Remembered Present", was there any hint that Edelman had some relevance for those researching the development of the mind. Draw your own conclusions. If you're not afraid to know the facts, if you really want to know the answers to the hard questions (What is life? Why is the universe only 4-dimensional? Where does thought come from?), dig for them; they do exist. Start with Edelman.

Summary of Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind

We are on the verge of a revolution in neuroscience as significant as the Galilean revolution in physics or the Darwinian revolution in biology. Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman takes issue with the many current cognitive and behavioral approaches to the brain that leave biology out of the picture, and argues that the workings of the brain more closely resemble the living ecology of a jungle than they do the activities of a computer. Some startling conclusions emerge from these ideas: individuality is necessarily at the very center of what it means to have a mind, no creature is born value-free, and no physical theory of the universe can claim to be a ?theory of everything? without including an account of how the brain gives rise to the mind. There is no greater scientific challenge than understanding the brain. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire is a book that provides a window on that understanding.

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