A dense inquiry that will challenge readers without a scientific background.
Investigating the mystery of the mind.
Neuroscientist and fiction writer Hoel draws on history, philosophy, mathematics, and neuroscience to examine ways that consciousness has been imagined and investigated. Beginning with an overview of what ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans believed about “the subtleties of the mind,” he considers the distinction between intrinsic phenomena, which came to be associated with religious experience and literature, and extrinsic phenomena, which fell under the purview of science. Neuroscience should be exceptional in being “where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet,” but Hoel offers a sharp critique of the field, which he finds too heavily focused on neuroimaging and mapping—on the quantitative rather than the qualitative. He points out that scientific conclusions often are based on very small samples. “It takes thousands of individuals to achieve reproducible brain-wide associations,” he writes. “This is not a bar most neuroimaging studies pass.” Instead, he has discovered “that findings don’t replicate, that every lab uses a different methodology, that small changes in methodology lead to big changes in outcomes,” and that researchers tend to make up hypotheses to fit their own data. Even research in institutes founded by Nobel laureates in biology Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman falls short, in Hoel’s estimation, because they each focus on correlating brain function to conscious experience. Readers may feel daunted by the author’s explanation of the complexities of integrated information theory, which he helped to develop as a graduate student but now finds inadequate as “an explanation for subjectivity.” More fruitful, for Hoel, is the theory of causal emergence, which posits that “macroscales have more causal influence than their underlying microscales over the exact same events.” Emergence theory, he argues, accounts for “the brain’s entire evolved purpose, it’s very raison d’être—maintaining a stream of consciousness” as well as offering a “scientific justification for free will.”
A dense inquiry that will challenge readers without a scientific background.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781982159382
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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