An enlightening, accessible science roundup combined with an intriguing metaphysical exploration.
Sattari recaps key advances in our understanding of physical reality and contends that consciousness both influences and completes the picture.
The author argues that the methodology for studying nature that arose during the 15th and 16th centuries created a “schism” that blew apart the ancient world’s previous holistic “natural philosophy.” The change split science from philosophy once practitioners, now called “scientists,” started “placing emphasis on physical phenomena, quantitative analysis, and material objects” and leaving out “the ‘subjective observer,’ the one at the center of reality experiencing and interacting with it.” In this book, the first in a projected trilogy, Sattari launches his mission to create a new “ontology that bridges the material and immaterial” by reviewing the major findings of the scientific revolution (the source of “the core ideas we have circulated in the human vernacular to understand the nature of things”) and beyond, then discussing how metaphysical elements—including consciousness, biases, and belief systems—affect the supposedly deterministic, machinelike world that’s often promulgated by traditional science. Key elements of this discussion include the author’s musing upon the more probabilistic findings of quantum science (including the fact that light and matter act as waves or particles seemingly in relation to the observer measuring them) and the ways behaviors can change how human genes work. Sattari, who provides few details about himself aside from expressing a long-held interest in his topic, offers an excellent and engaging overview of milestones and key discoveries in science, covering Newton, Einstein, Planck, and many others, and he explicates confounding concepts with clarity and drama. While skeptics might argue that some current mysteries will someday be mechanically explained via future scientific discoveries, the author effectively tees up his compelling metaphysical premise (presumably to be expanded upon in his series’ next installment) that “conscious experience is not spooky or mysterious. It is part of the natural order.”
An enlightening, accessible science roundup combined with an intriguing metaphysical exploration.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2023
ISBN: 979-8989627509
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Pragda Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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