A bold, brilliant must-read that should reach a large audience.
A geneticist and neuroscientist presents a thorough scientific exploration and defense of free will.
Mitchell, author of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are, uses an evolutionary approach to the question of free will in human beings, synthesizing extensive research findings in multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines. The book, he writes, “is not meant to be an exhaustive intellectual history but instead an overview of things as I see them…an extended argument for a way of thinking about the issue of agency.” The author opens his appealing narrative with the beginning of life in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, and he engagingly examines the evolution of living things within the context of evolutionary creativity, positive and negative selection, and signal response in organisms. Mitchell determines that the brain is capable of self-guidance and that free will is an evolved function of biology dependent on neural resources rather than the result of a mystical, intelligent designer. Because the author operates along complex, interdisciplinary planes, readers completely unfamiliar with organic chemistry, biochemistry, and other sciences may need to tread carefully. Yet the dynamic evolutionary processes Mitchell describes and the connections he makes throughout are well worth the effort, and the numerous easy-to-understand illustrations are at once immensely clarifying and edifying. In addition to diving into the hard sciences, Mitchell also discusses the moral, legal, and philosophical ramifications of free will. Human beings, he argues convincingly, must be responsible for their actions. The epilogue about artificial intelligence and its limitations is timely and significant, though the question of whether building an intelligence that approximates agency should be done is left open for now. Mitchell's compelling and absorbing book acts both as a synthesizing primer about evolution and a powerful argument for free will. Its importance and quality are undeniable.
A bold, brilliant must-read that should reach a large audience.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780691226231
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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