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1250272416
| 9781250272416
| 1250272416
| 3.68
| 80
| unknown
| Aug 08, 2023
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really liked it
| I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of t I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of the sensory world.”-------------------------------------- Synesthesia has been incorrectly defined, in my humble opinion, as “crossed wires in the brain” or “mixed-up senses.” In fact, synesthetes have the same primary response to a stimulus as neurotypical people do. If the numeral 5 appears in newsprint, I know that it is black on a white (well, somewhat beige) background. However, simultaneously, I see navy blue around that number and above that number it, like an aura. Therefore, I’ve created what I believe is a much better definition: Synesthesias are traits in which a sensory stimulus yields the expected sensory response plus one or more additional sensory responses.For myself, I have always been on the lower end of the taste/smell sensitivity bell curve, presuming there to be such a thing. I have always attributed this to the DNA luck of the draw. Some of it, though, might be a product of my homemaker mother’s abilities as a cook. There were a few things she made that were mouth-watering, but for the most part, it was said of Mom that she had a close relationship with Chef-Boyardee. Thus, it is no shock that my appreciation for cuisine exists in a narrow range. As smell is closely associated with taste, the two have traveled this low experiential road together. But maybe there is some hope for me and for folks with limitations like mine Maybe there are ways to expand the range of flavors and aromas we can detect and enjoy. (Make real friends with our taste buds?) That possibility is one of the points that Maureen Seaberg makes in her new book, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. There are several others. [image] Maureen Seaberg - image from Amazon Seaberg is a synesthete, gifted with abilities beyond the average. Even within that, she is a tetrachromat, proud possessor of four sets of visual cones to our usual kit of three. She has used this extra-sightedness to help a cosmetics firm produce more pleasing hues. She is also a mirror-touch synesthete, which means that she can feel your pain, really. Patricia Lynne Duffy, a member of the United Nations Staff 1 Percent for Development Fund committee, was safely ensconced in her Manhattan office, but when she read the proposals before her, she felt the pain of the world’s most fragile people.She is the author of multiple books on her personal experience as a sensory anomaly, and others looking into the science of what makes us different. Among these are Tasting the Universe, Struck by Genius, and The Synesthesia Experience. While highlighting the differences in human capacity, Seaberg argues that we are all potentially synesthetes, but that our acculturation has defined limits to what our senses regard as the human range. She says we are capable of much more, and cites sundry studies to show our surprising range. One shows that we can detect light down to a single photon. Is it that we are all, or most of us, or many of us, capable of experiencing, sensing much more of our world that we have to date? Are these tools in our toolbox that we have merely never been trained to use? Seaberg uses the examples of many people who are either synesthetes, or who have naturally enhanced capabilities to argue that we could be experiencing much, much more than we do. She also notes people who, through traumatic events, (a mugging in one case) have subsequently displayed enhanced capacities, supporting the notion that we all may have considerable untapped potential. One surprising element here is her reporting on the benefits of the Montessori teaching method, which encourages multi-sensate learning. She suggests we incorporate into our psychological and medical frameworks the notion of a Perception Quotient, or PQ. Just as we have for our rational processing with the intelligence Quotient, or IQ, and EQ for Emotional abilities. Seaberg spends some time with the question of transhumanism, the notion that people can evolve beyond our current biological constraints by incorporating connections (merging?) with technology. She argues against such, contending that our realized and latent capacities can take us a lot further than we have gone, without the need for electronic enhancement. There’s plenty of evidence that humans are adapting to, even passing, machines by using their senses. Just look at the mind-meld young people have with their personal devices and the manual deftness with which they use them compared to older generations. Maybe the singularity moves in two directions, and we meet somewhere along the way. There’s a human-based component not yet considered. And since we’ve recently learned that human sensory potentials are far greater than we knew, perhaps we have a little more time to think about the value of being Homo sapiens.In a related vein, she notes that there are mirror-touch synesthetes who blur those lines. A very small subset of the neurological outliers known as mirror-touch synesthetes have extreme empathy for machines. They are sometimes able to feel the mechanisms in their own sensitive bodies. I call them machine synesthetes or machine empaths.She touches on some even more esoteric subjects, like the remote viewing program sponsored by the USA military from the 1970s into the 1990s, and the possibility of consciousness permeating more of our biosphere than we may have realized. If you are looking for a how-to re expanding your sensate horizons I would look elsewhere. The prompts offered for that here are introductory at best. Seaberg does offer some other places to go for that. This is more a treatise on the possibility of capacity expansion, not a manual for expanding ourselves. If we are indeed the architects of our own reality, it is clear that some of us have been gifted with a superior toolkit for interpreting what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, in that construction process. Maybe for the rest of us there are some tools in the basement or shed that have been gathering dust all our lives, tools that can be cleaned off, greased up, and maybe even powered up. It may or may not be a widespread opportunity, but it is certainly a hopeful and very interesting one. In trying to make sense of senses, Maureen Seaberg has written a fascinating, accessible work on human possibility that should stimulate your curiosity, whether or not you experience collateral sounds, colors, scents or other incomings. Checking this book out would definitely be sensible. “We genuinely experience scent as the emotion we have attached to it,” one sensory educator said. “Our hearts lift at the aroma that reminds us of a happy day at the beach, or our hearts break a little when we smell the aroma of a long-dead relative’s soap.” Review posted - 10/20/23 Publication date – 8/8/23 I received an ARE of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Audacy - The Science of Synesthesia and Super Sensors - audio - 30 min -----PSIfest 2023 – Curious Realm - Maureen Seaberg @PSIFest 2023 - Video – 27:01 Songs/Music -----Rollingstones - She’s a Rainbow - maybe another form of synesthesia Items of Interest -----Untapped Cities - THE SECRET COLORS OF NYC: HOW MAC’S NEW COLOR TALENT SEES THE CITY DIFFERENTLY THAN YOU by Owen Shapiro -----Charlotte McConaghy’s wonderful novel, Once There Were Wolves, offers a fictional look at someone with mirror-touch synesthesia -----Wiki - Montessori Method -----Wiki - The Stargate Project - remote viewing by the military -----Wiki - Transhumanism -----Optimax - Tetrachromacy: Do you have superhuman vision? ...more |
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Oct 16, 2023
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Oct 18, 2023
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1250272246
| 9781250272249
| 1250272246
| 4.31
| 85
| May 30, 2023
| May 30, 2023
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liked it
| Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion. The formal analysis of this incredible phenomenon has only just begun, but the emerging science reveals that these factors are mere subjugates to our primal instinct to be a member of a tribe. This “Tribe Drive” is an ancient adaptation that has been a prerequisite for survival for 99.9 percent of our species’ evolutionary history. It is a critical piece of cognitive machinery—honed by millions of years of evolution—that gave us the ability to navigate, both cooperatively and competitively, increasingly complex social landscapes. But now that our species spans billions across the globe, does this adaptation continue to serve us, or is it mismatched to its environment? In other words, what happens when humans become either tribeless or destructively consumed by tribalism?-------------------------------------- So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefited our species. — CARL SAGAN AND ANN DRUYAN, 1993There is a reason birds of a feather stick together, that fish swim in schools, and that gnus migrate in large herds. It increases the survival chances for the group, if not necessarily the individuals within it. So it is with people. We do not have the canines of the saber-tooth, the bulk and muscle of the bear, the speed of the leopard, the poison of the snake or many of the other tools available to creatures eager to dine on the special meat. Even our relatively advanced gray cells were not enough to consistently keep us off the dinner menu. But getting together helped, big-time. E pluribus unum, baby. And grouping together allowed us to hunt in packs, which was much more effective than hunting individually. So, how did we shift from independent contractors to company people? [image] David R. Samson - image from his Facebook pages It is obvious to any observer that we are a tribal species today. Samson looks at the elements that make up this trait. He wrestles with the lion of the issue, why are we the way we are? And how what he calls our innate tribal drive, which may have served us well on the savannah, serves us less well in the modern world. The core of the mismatch is that modern society has made us more physically isolated by decreasing our social support; all the while it has made us more mentally unstable by increasing social pressure, tricking us into thinking that low grade online and institutional social interaction is good enough to live a healthy and fulfilling life. In this sense, the people who dwelled in the first tribes were not challenged as much as we are today. Their units were glued together in a common struggle for survival, not the weak ideological grounds many use as the foundation to their tribal social identities today.Samson begins by looking at how our tribal drive causes more trouble than it solves. Then heads off into the history of how human organization evolved. For example, before there could be tribes there had to be camps. (The People’s Front of Judea?) This material is fascinating, as he builds up the structure of prehistoric human grouping. There are organizational layers that needed to develop and join together in order to make up early human tribes. He goes into what early human needs were, the reason for being of groups, the need for food, shelter, and avoidance of incest. And beyond that, there was a need to cope with ill fortune. Stuff happens, and your group can survive such stuff more robustly if it is larger. Thus tribes, which still carry within them the need for assurance about who is trustworthy. This leads to a need for some sort of recognition mechanism. When a group gets beyond the magical Dunbar number, how do we know if someone is safe? If they are one of us and not one of a potentially threatening them. The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship. . . . Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar. — ROBIN DUNBAR, 1996Well, you can see how this might be endlessly fascinating. And it is. Tribalism is what allowed us to survive as a species. When the going got tough, the tough formed tribes. He traces the steps that were needed to achieve tribe-dom, and looks at how they functioned once established. He offers considerable intel on how tribalism changed over time, how it developed diverse forms, how we developed ways to tell tribal friend from foe without knowing them personally. Great stuff. I worked my poor mouse and keyboard down to bare metal copying passages from this book. Part 2 (of two) refocuses on the contemporary. How our need for tribal connection impacts our lives. He talks about how increasing class separation has resulted in the well-to-do being able to buy the social support they need, while us plebes have had to scramble to make do with our declining slices of the national pie. He offers sundry ways in which we can mitigate the impact the world has had on us, how it has deprived us of our tribal needs, primarily of personal contact with a trusted bunch. Samson looks at ways in which we can find a better balance, offering some real-world examples. There were several times, I was pulled up short by Samson’s social analysis. He quotes Robert Putnam on a decline in family togetherness over the ten year period between 1985 and 1994. Yet he does not seem to consider it worth noting that this corresponds roughly with the Age of Reagan, and a turn away from community and toward the individual. He also does not include any significant discussion on the general decline in religious affiliation, which surely would be relevant to stresses on tribal identification. A particularly egregious example of both-siderism entails looking at the different responses to a handwriting expert’s analysis of Donald Trump’s signature. The entirety of that can be found under a spoiler tag in EXTRA STUFF, so you can see for yourself. In focusing on how different groups reacted to the analysis, he does zero follow-up to look at whether one group or another turned out, based on observable real-world facts, to have had a better handle on things. That did not kill the book for me, but it was a red flag. It is often the case that social scientists do a decent job of examining society, ferreting out specific elements that might be causing this or that bad result. But it is just as often the case that the solutions that are proposed fail the political sniff test. Not political as in party affiliation, but political in the sense that any social change has to be applied in a medium that is comprised of human beings. On the other hand, there are myriad nuggets of information in Our Tribal Future that enrich the reading experience, like his look at the basis of ethics, and a dive on how The Dunbar Number came to be. For many, these days, much of our political discourse appears to be driven more by tribal identity than by rational consideration of policy merits or disbenefits. I was able to glean some significant bits of wisdom to apply to this from Samson’s discussion of tribal psychology, but I had hoped he would have done more with it. Where he does go is to examine some ways of social organization that offer opportunities for improving our lot. He is wise in noting that community-level engagement is the best way to not only effect direct change, but to gain links to other nearby people, creating or reinforcing social cohesion, and mental health. But then he ignores what might be done for national issues like abortion, national tax policy, national defense and health care coverage and availability. It is a narrower focus, which is certainly Samson’s right, but there seems to be a pretense that local arrangements exist in a bubble, unimpacted by the larger world. You may have heard of the uncanny valley. The expression refers to the creeped-out feeling one gets when seeing/interacting with an animation or robot that is intended to be very human-like, but is not quite there. (Ron DeSantis?) Likewise, David Samson’s Our Tribal Future tries to be an accessible, pop-science look at a very significant element of contemporary life, particularly in the political sphere. He mostly succeeds when writing about our deep history. But there is some drift into a more academic presentation that shifts towards the science and a bit too far away from the pop. It is when he tries to look past what is to what could be, that the Philistines of reality swarm him. So, if you are academically inclined, by all means, dive in. There is much of value here. But if the hint of textbook makes your blood run cold, you may want to explore elsewhere. A compromise might be to take in Samson’s wonderful presentation on human historical self-organization, then see how you feel moving forward. But if you are looking for a fully accessible pop-science read, you may find yourself in an uncanny valley. When we grow, develop, and live in a world where everything is geared toward the individual, how can we help but view the world with a more narcissistic lens? When we live with other people, share resources within the environment, and work through problems together, the outcome is an individual that is less self-centered and more psychologically flexible. Review posted - 08/18/23 Publication date – 05/30/23 I received an ARE of Our Trtibal Future from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review, and becoming a member of their group. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Samson’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Toronto Star - Creating a better future: How to take our instinct to belong to a group and turn it into a force for good By Brian Bethune’ -----The Power of Us - INTERVIEW: David Samson on OUR TRIBAL FUTURE by Dominic Packer and Jay van Bavel -----The Gray Area - The Future of Tribalism with Sean Illing – podcast – 51:08 Item of Interest from the author -----Excerpt -----CBC Radio - Political tribalism is 'the greatest threat of our species in the 21st century': evolutionary biologist Items of Interest -----The People’s Front of Judea? -----Wikipedia - Uncanny Valley -----Handwriting Analysis(view spoiler)[… example of mirror game psychology. Michelle Dresbold, a handwriting expert who has been trained and worked with the Secret Service, analyzed Donald Trump’s signature. In her analysis, she described his handwriting as “bold, condensed, angular signature shows someone who is rough, tough, aggressive, competitive, can never relax and is not nurturing.”490 She further expounds that his angular writing style with minimal curves shows up in the signatures of some sharp-minded and competitive workaholics that are prone to anger, hostility, and fear. Whether there is truth to her analysis is beside the point. The insight is how people interpreted her observation about Trump’s signature. Dresbold was shocked by the public response, as conservative audiences (corporations, business groups, and entrepreneurs) reacted positively to her analysis of what she considered mostly negative attributes. However, liberals in the academy, at universities, and other progressive hot spots had mirror opposite responses, using the identical data as proof of Trump’s corruption. Dresbold recalls: “When I say something like ‘his check-mark-like stroke, called a tick-mark [in the bottom left-hand corner of the D in Donald], it indicates that Trump has explosive anger and a very bad temper,’ the conservative interpretation is, ‘Of course, he’s angry about what’s happened to America.’ The liberal interpretation is, ‘Yes, he’s a very angry man with childlike temper tantrums.’” Continuing on theme, if Dresbold remarks that his signature is unreadable which indicates that he keeps his feelings hidden from the public, the liberals’ interpretation is that he’s sneaky and untrustworthy, whereas the conservative interpretation is that it he is intelligent because he doesn’t want our enemies to know what is in his mind. Same data, same analysis, two different universes of interpretation. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Aug 08, 2023
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Aug 16, 2023
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1640093982
| 9781640093980
| 1640093982
| 4.37
| 95
| unknown
| Nov 15, 2022
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really liked it
| …it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.-------------------------------------- We don’t live in a cos …it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.-------------------------------------- We don’t live in a cosmos. We live in a cosmogenesis, a universe that is becoming, a universe that established its order in each era and then transcends that order to establish a new order.Cosmos - The universe seen as a well-ordered whole; from the Greek word kosmos ‘order, ornament, world, or universe’, so called by Pythagoras or his disciples from their view of its perfect order and arrangement. – from Oxford reference Genesis - Hebrew Bereshit (“In the Beginning”), the first book of the Bible. Its name derives from the opening words: “In the beginning….” Genesis narrates the primeval history of the world - from the Encyclopedia Britannica [image] Brian Thomas Swimme - image from Journey of the Universe So, Cosmogenesis means, at its root, the beginning of everything. Diverse cultures have come up with diverse understandings of how everything came to be. Where Swimme differs is in seeing the genesis, the beginning, the creation of everything as an ongoing process, not a one-off in deep history. Cosmogenesis tracks Swimme’s journey from math professor to spokesman for a movement that seeks to rejoin science and spirituality. The stations along this route, which runs from 1968 to 1983, consist of people he considers great minds. He gushes like a Swiftie with closeup tickets to an Eras Tour show over several of these genius-level individuals, while relying on his analytical capacity to note shortcomings in some of the theories some others propose. Swimme mixes his approach a bit. It is in large measure a memoir, with a focus on his intellectual (and spiritual) growth, along with descripti0ns of the places where he lived, taught, and studied, and the people who inspired him, providing some background to the theories and ovbservations to which he is exposed. A mathematics PhD, with a long and diverse teaching history, he grounds his work in the scientific. But he does not separate the scientific from the spiritual, from the human. In his view, we are all a part of the ongoing evolution of everything, noting that every subatomic part that make up every atom in our bodies, in our world, was present at the Biggest Bang, then was further refined by the lesser bangs of supernovas manufacturing what became our constituent parts. Even today, we bathe, wallow, bask, and breathe in radiation from that original event. It may have occurred fourteen billion years ago, but in a measurable way it is happening still. And we all remain a part of it. There is a piece of Swimme’s material-cum-spiritual notion that I found very appealing. I have experienced an ecstatic state while perceiving beauty in the world. On telling my son about one such, I remarked that it was like a religious experience. He answered, “why like?” Swimme recruits like experiences to bolster the connection between the humanly internal and the eternal of the cosmos. Bear in mind that Swimme grew up in a Catholic tradition, which clearly impressed him. There is a strong incense scent of religiosity to his work. Not saying that Cosmogenesis is a religion, but I am not entirely certain it is not. As a child I had learned that the Mass was where the sacred lived.I had a very different response to the religious world to which I was exposed as a child through twelve years of Catholic education. There was no connection for me between the Mass and the sacred, whatever that was. Mass represented mostly a burden, a mandatory exercise, communicating nothing about layers of experience beyond the material, while offering hard evidence of the power of institutions to control how I spent my time. I did not, at the time, understand the community building and reinforcing aspect to this weekly tribal ritual, separate from the religious content. I believe that what we think of as spiritual or spectral is the reality that lies beyond our perceptual bandwidth. The ancients did not understand lightning, so imagined a god hurling bolts. With scientific understanding of lightning, Zeus is cast from an imagined home on Mount Olympus to the confines of cultural history. Science expands our effective, if not necessarily our physical, biological bandwidth, and thus captures, making understandable, realities once thought the domain of imagined gods. But what of feeling? The ecstatic state I experience when witnessing the beauty of the world, is that a purely biological state, comprised of hormones and DNA? Or do we assign to that feeling, which can be difficult to explain, a higher meaning because of our inability to define it precisely enough? And, in doing so, are we not following in the path of the ancient Greeks who assigned to extra-human beings responsibility for natural events? So, I am not sure I am buying in to Swimme’s views. It is, though, something, to pique the interest of people like myself who have rejected most forms of organized religion, particularly those that focus on a human-like all-powerful being, (see George Carlin’s routine re this. I’m with George.) but who hold open a lane for a greater, a different understanding of all reality. Where is the line between the material and the spiritual? How did we come to be here? Evolution provides plenty to explain that. But we still get back to a linear understanding of time as an impasse. If the (our) universe began with the big bang, then what came before? Einstein showed with his special theory of relativity that time is not so fixed a concept as we’d thought. Things operate at different speeds, relative to each other, depending on distance and speed. Who is to say that there might not be more fungability to our understanding of time, maybe even radically so? In a way, this is what Swimme is on about, ways of looking at our broader reality, at our origins and ongoing evolution, (not just the evolution of our species, but of the universe itself) through other, more experiential perspectives, (a new Gnosticism?) while still including science. Humans have expressed their faith in a great variety of symbols, many of which have inspired me at one time or another. But today, if you ask for the foundation of my faith, I would say the stone cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades.Overall I found this book brain candy of the first order. Take it as a survey-course primer for the theory he propounds. There are many videos available on-line for those interested in going beyond Cosmo 101. So, Is cosmogenesis one of the ten greatest ideas in human history as is claimed here? That is above my pay grade. Some of the notions presented here seemed a bit much, but there was enough that was worth considering that made this a satisfying, intriguing read. Suffice it to say that it is a fascinating take on, well, everything, and can be counted on to give your gray cells, comprised of materials that have been around for 14 billion years, a hearty jiggle at the very least. Everything is up in the air. We are living in a deranged world where nihilism dominates every major state. The contest today is for the next world philosophy. Review posted – January 13, 2023 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - November 15, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - December 12, 2023 I received a hardcover of Cosmogenesis from Counterpoint in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Twitter and Facebook do not appear to have ever been used you might also try Interviews -----Deeptime Network - Brian Swimme -- What's Next? Planetary Mind and the Future - video – 1:12:41 – from 6:50 -----Sue Speaks - SUE Speaks Podcast: Searching for Unity in Everything - podcast - 31:27 Items of Interest from the author ----- The Third Story of the Universe -----A Great Leap in Being - 28:56 -----Human Energy - Introduction to the Noosphere: The Planetary Minds -----Journey of the Universe Items of Interest -----San Francisco Chronicle - Science doesn’t cover it all, author Brian Thomas Swimme explains ----- George Carlin on religion ...more |
Notes are private!
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0593157532
| 9780593157534
| 0593157532
| 3.81
| 97,234
| Jul 07, 2022
| Jul 12, 2022
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really liked it
| My mother had tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people. What havoc could she wreak—intentionally or throug My mother had tried to edit a few rice paddies and ended up killing two hundred million people. What havoc could she wreak—intentionally or through unintended consequences—by attempting to change something as fundamental as how Homo sapiens think?-------------------------------------- We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.OK, so if you had the chance to upgrade yourself, would you do it? I know I would. There are so many things about me that could be better. But, as we all know from the constant barrage of upgrades offered by the makers of every bloody piece of software, some have downsides. Such as new, bloated code slowing down your app. A feature you liked has been removed. You now have to endure ads. Are the benefits of greater value than the costs? Sometimes, but usually, we won’t actually know until the new version is installed, which can take anywhere from minutes to “really, this fu#%ing thing is still processing?” Sometimes, you have no choice, the app updates whether you want it to or not. [image] Blake Crouch - image from his site I suppose agent Logan Ramsay could tell us something about that last case. On a raid, he walks into a planned trap, which goes boom, and Ramsay is infused with version 1.0 of something, which gets busy rewriting his internal code to produce version 2.0 of Logan. There are upsides and downsides. This is no steroidal enhancement, trading zits and rage for increased muscle mass. A nifty bit of tech called a gene driver, (can’t help but see a tiny Uber with double-helix treads) is busy re-writing his actual DNA. (For a new you, no really, a totally, completely new you, call…1 800 FIX-THIS. Of course, we have a la carte if there are only some minor changes you would like. Operators are standing by.) Logan already had a complicated life. Mom was a geneticist trying to improve crop yields in China when there was a slight bit of collateral damage. Her altered-DNA material went where it was not supposed to. Oopsy. It was known as The Great Starvation. As noted in the quote at top, over two hundred million dead. Junior, who had been working with Mom, dead in the ensuing mess, wound up taking undeserved legal heat in her place, spent time in prison, but was sprung three years in. Now he works as an agent for the federal GPA, or Gene Protection Agency, (too late for Wilder) fiddling with genetic code having become a serious, felonious no-no, and Junior wanting to make amends for his family’s role in the global debacle. He is a geneticist like Mom, now dedicated to seeing that it never happens again. So, what happens in every single film and book in which our hero is altered by some weird outside force? They are dragged into enforced isolation for relentless study. Or base their subsequent actions (FLEE!!!) on the presumption that this is what the powers that be have planned for them. Of course among the changes that have been implanted into Logan is a significant increase in IQ. His perceptions have been enhanced as well, giving him a wider bandwidth for incoming sensory information and a much improved ability to process that new flow. This is both a chase and a pursuit story, as Logan must stay out of the clutches of the government, while searching for a dangerous geneticist, trying to stave off another potential global disaster. His personal upgrades make both running and chasing less of a challenge for him than it might be for an unaugmented person. Crouch offers a steady, if light, sprinkling of tech changes, letting us know we are in the future, if not necessarily the far distant future. Some seem more distant than others. Hyperloop, for example, is a widespread viable transportation mode. There is a mile-high building in Las Vegas. The book is set slightly in the future, because I wanted to accelerate where some of the climate change and more in-the-weeds technology was heading, but it’s a mirror of where we might be five minutes from now. - Time interviewSome of the alignments seemed out of kilter. The story takes place in the 2060s. But delivery drones and driverless taxis hardly seem much of an advance for forty years. Ditto electric cars with greater range. Mention is made of a Google Roadster. Google producing its own car has been a project in the works since 2009. So, maybe only five minutes into the future for a lot of the tech Crouch employs. The five-minutes vs forty-years lookahead was jarringly inconsistent at times, which pulled me out of the story. He also reminds us, with a steady stream of examples, that the underlying issue is humans having screwed up the Earth to the point where the continued viability of Homo Sap is called into question. Lower Manhattan and most of Miami are under water. Glacier National Park no longer features glaciers. Many wildlife species are only memories. It is raining in the Rockies instead of snowing. There are now seven hurricane categories. There are some things about this book that I would change. There is an escape scene in which I found the means of egress a bit far-fetched, given the year in which it takes place. Surely there is better tech available? I kept wondering who got Logan sprung from prison. If it was revealed, I missed it. I wondered, during a flight from hostile forces, at how little pursuit of the runner there was by the pursuing forces. Really? That easy to get away? I don’t think so. A couple of lost family members merited a bit more attention. And there is a decided absence of humor. Expected questions are raised. Things like what is it that makes us human? There are those who believe that enhancing, upgrading humanity’s intelligence-related genes to stave off the potential extinction of our species is the only solution, regardless of what collateral damage that might entail. If we are smarter, goes the theory, we will see that what we are doing is madness, and find more sustainable ways of living. While that notion is appealing, it seems pretty glaring that an intelligence boost alone will not cut it. I mean, so you make people smarter. What could possibly go wrong? Logan addresses this: What if you create a bunch of people who are just drastically better at what they already were. Soldiers. Criminals. Politicians. Capitalists?The notion has been done a fair bit. Forbidden Planet is the classic of this sort. That most of the genetic manipulators in this tale ignore this suggests that maybe they were not so smart as they thought they were, enhanced or not. Might it enhance one’s appreciation of Upgrade if one had read his prior sci-fi thrillers? No idea. Have not read them. Cannot say. My unaugmented research capacities tell me, though, that this is a stand-alone, so at least there is no direct story or character connection to his prior work. Upgrade is a fast-paced thriller that keeps the action charging ahead. I often found myself continuing to read beyond where I had planned to stop. Logan is a decent guy who struggles with moral decisions in a very believable way. There are reasons to relate to him as an everyman, regardless of who his mother may have been. Crouch offers character depth enough for this genre. The tech never gets extreme, a beautiful thing. The concerns raised are very serious. Hopefully, it will boost, if not your muscle mass and speed in the forty, your interest level in the world of genetic manipulation, which, albeit with the best of intentions, could wind up degrading us all. TIME: You did a ton of research on gene editing for Upgrade. Was there anything you learned that stood out? Review posted – August 5, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – July 19, 2022 ----------Trade paperback -June 27, 2023 I received an ARE of Upgrade from Penguin Random House in return for a fair review, and not trying to change too much. Thanks, KQ, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been, or soon will be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages From the book BLAKE CROUCH is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. His novels include Upgrade, Recursion, Dark Matter, and the Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted into a television series for FOX. Crouch also co-created the TNT show Good Behavior, based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. He lives in Colorado. Interviews -----Time - Blake Crouch No Longer Believes in Science Fiction - by Anabel Gutterman -----Paulsemel.com - Exclusive Interview: “Upgrade” Author Blake Crouch Songs/Music -----“Träumerei,” from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood - Noted in chapter 6 as Logan’s favorite tune – if he says so -----Bowie - Changes - a live version from 1999 – just because ----- Yamer Yapchulay - playing a violin cover of Tonight from West Side Story - one was played in Chapter 15 -----Kyla - I Am Changing - you can thank me later Items of Interest -----Carson National Forest - a hideout -----Quantum annealing computing - mentioned in chapter 7 -----LifeCode is mentioned in chapter 9 ...more |
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it was amazing
| …dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the …dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the social brain hypothesis, which is the idea that primates evolved large brains to manage the social challenges inherent in dealing with other members of their highly independent groups.-------------------------------------- …lying is a uniquely human form of social manipulation that requires substantially greater cognitive sophistication. To tell a lie is to intentionally plant a false belief in someone else’s mind, which requires an awareness that the content of other minds differ from one’s own. Once I understand what you understand, I’m in a position to manipulate your understanding intentionally to include falsehoods that benefit me. That is the birth of lying.William Von Hippel’s The Social Leap looks at the crucial importance of our social evolution as we developed from australopithecines to Homo erectus to the Homo sapiens of today. The first phase was cutting out dependence on Trees - come on down, why don’t ya. Of course, it was more like an eviction than an option, as changes in the environment made it necessary to descend to find greener pastures, or savannahs, actually. (Sure sounds like being kicked out of Eden to me, going from top tier predator to prey, leaving a verdant, arboreal life for a world of danger). And once our great-great-grandparents had been forced down, there was a clear advantage to Bipedalism - stay up on those legs, and get a better view over the tall, tall grass, big guy. It might give you a heads up on those incoming lions. Of course, that took many millennia to evolve. Those who succeeded at walking on all twos lived to breed and make more little two-steppers. As we no longer had the need to climb, well, constantly anyway, those lower limbs could be re-focused on locomotion. If we had not become bipedal, we almost assuredly would never have learned to throw so well, in which case the social-cognitive revolution that made us human might not have happened, either.The physical realignment that resulted over hundreds of thousands of years is why we have creatures like Jacob deGrom walking the earth. It allowed them to do something their predecessors could not, throw things, rocks in particular, but I expect whatever was lying about would do, which came in pretty handy when something with large claws and teeth was coming at them. But being able to hit a moving strikezone from a distance was not, in and of itself, sufficient. It took something more to turn this rather huge change into a formidable force, Cooperation - Instead of running in all directions from an incoming large kitty, they learned to join together with their fellow homo saps and throw rocks at the invaders. Voila, y’all get to live another day, or at least until the next predator attack, (and you might even get a nice meal out of the exchange) but that is a lot better than it might have been had you not joined together. This confluence of the ability to throw and the ability to throw as a group at a specific target, allowed humankind to claim the throne (iron?) of apex predator. Think of those films about medieval battles in which a phalanx of archers launches five hundred arrows at the enemy at once. More effective than a single archer, no? The only things we needed to fear, as a group, were other groups of Homo erectus. [image] William von Hoppel - image from Singularity University This combination is a major element in what separates us from our forebears (which sounds uncomfortably ursine in this context) in the primate family tree, cooperation, and learning to kill at a distance. It is not that no other species cooperates, but there is no species that has done so to the astronomical level of Homo sapiens. And that initial cooperation, for self AND group protection has led to a world of change. Also, no other species has mastered the art of long-distance defense, or offense, depending, perhaps the greatest advance in military technology ever. That change is manifest in the considerable size of our brains. Much larger than our Australopithicus, erectus, habilis, and all our early ancestors. Did we gain our cranial advantage from having to invent methods of coping with the world? von Hippel says not. He argues that most of the cause of our sudden boost in gray matter occurred because when we opted for cooperation for self-defense, that blossomed into cooperation across a passel of other matters as well, and created a social species, and that very pact of cooperation forced us to change. …dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the social brain hypothesis, which is the idea that primates evolved large brains to manage the social challenges inherent in dealing with other members of their highly independent groups.Cooperation may have been born out of a need for self-defense, but it broadened to form the basis of a community. Instead of only ever thinking of personal survival, our orientation was changed to having to consider the needs of the group at least as much as our own needs. So cooperation within the group was paramount. Anyone found to be slacking in doing their bit to support the group, piss enough of the group off, for whatever reasons, and you would likely be tossed out on your loincloth, and make a fine meal for a large local predator. Ostracism = death = no more babies for you = how natural selection externalizes those whose behavior leads to their death. But there was still Competition within the group for mates. Von Hippel points out that mate choices were largely driven by females, who had a far greater amount at risk than any male. It is not really so different today, even to the physical characteristics that we find attractive in a mate. And then there was competition with those outside the group, which led to a not groundless Hating/Fearing of the outsider, the other. When we evolved to the apex predator point that the only real threat to the group was from other groups of Homo erectus, we became particularly wary of outsiders. Not only might they attack us militarily, maybe take prey and other foods in our hunting domain, but they could make us ill. One does not need to have a theory of microbes to learn from experience that contact with certain groups is likely to result in illness. This inclination to be wary of anyone outside our group, however that may be defined, has certainly flourished in our DNA and in our social organizations. Thus racism, xenophobia, and bigotry of all sorts. Part of the development of our groups, clans, tribes, et al, was the development of a Theory of Mind, meaning a desire, and some ability to see what is in someone else’s mind, gauge what they are thinking, even if the people of that time had no such grad school terminology. They learned to evaluate what other people were thinking and learned how to turn that knowledge to their advantage. The methods for accomplishing this make considerable use of Lying and Exaggerating But most of our smarts are going be dedicated to jockeying and manipulating our position among others. And if that’s the case, then the truth is only semi-important. If I can convince you of a world that’s actually favorable to me, then I can get you to back down in conflicts or defer to me when you really shouldn’t; that is a form of power. - from the Vox interviewSound like something that might be relevant today? Even with our predilections we are not creatures of instinct. Unlike other animals we do not carry inside us a set of instructions on how to get by in the world. And our brains are not even ready to take in the information until we have been around a relatively long time. So we must be taught. Our urges, our impulses will still be there, but we do not have to yield to them. At least 50% of who we are, what we do, is the product of choice, and education. As a result, our genes may not be able to order us around, but they are ever-present, and bossy. The tale revs up big time when it gets to the beginning of agriculture. I will leave that, and it’s very relevant look at the beginnings of contemporary society, for you to discover for yourself. It explains a lot. Von Hippel certainly makes a strong case for our cranial ballooning being more the result of having to cope with other people, rather than from having to invent things. We are social creatures, who are both inclined toward cooperation, but also primed for competition, for mates and against outsiders. Thus the aphorism All’s fair and love and war. This book was written as an attempt to help explain why we behave today in the ways that we do. What evolutionary basis might there be for those behaviors. …potential ancestors who wandered the woods in the moonlight were less likely to survive and procreate, and thereby less likely to pass on their proclivity for midnight strolls. This is how evolution shapes our psychology, with the end result being that no one needs to tell you to be afraid of the dark; it comes naturally.There are plenty of roots to be found here to the forest of our current world. Many of the ancestral behaviors described in this book were waaaaay too familiar. I found that throughout the book, while the socio-psychological evolution of humans was totally fascinating, I kept flashing specifically to the politics of today. So much of what von Hippel writes of offers an understanding, or at least some insight into the psychology of politics in the time of Trump. Don’t mistake me, I am not saying this is an anti-Trump screed. It is not. But some of what is in here makes understandable what seems singularly opaque about the motivations of any true Trump (or any other demagogue or authoritarian) supporter (those who are not cynically supporting Trump in order to accrue personal gain in some specific way). As in, how can any sane person buy into Trump’s transparent stream of lies, xenophobia, and demagoguery? There are plenty of group-think practitioners on the left as well, but those tend not to have guns, or to bother, ya know, voting, or threatening to kill people. But the innate need for the approval of the group makes it possible that people will believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of objective truth, and that is a very difficult barrier to breach. Von Hippel may make this dynamic more understandable, but it makes it no less frightening and disheartening. The similarities between ancestral and contemporary mate selection preferences was quite interesting, as is his discussion of leadership styles, contrasting the styles of those who rule for all (elephants) with those who rule only for themselves (baboons), as is his discussion of how a division of labor enabled early man a great ability to do well in the world, as is his explanation for the basis of politeness. This is very much a pop-psychology book, aimed at a general audience. It is eminently readable, and offers brain candy of the first order. Von Hippel cites his sources (including his own research) for the sundry opinions offered, without leaving one struggling with obscure charts or mathematical formulae. He is an excellent writer with a friendly, familiar style that will make the information go down very easily. I recommend checking out some of the videos linked in EXTRA STUFF, to get a feel for how he sounds as a lecturer and interviewee. He comes across very much the same in the book. Von Hippel is absolutely the prof you want for your psych classes. You will not have to get an ok from your group to go ahead and check this book out. The Social Leap will expand your brain, without you having to wait a few hundred thousand years. That counts as real progress. Of all the preferences that evolution gave us, I suspect the desire to share the contents of our minds played the single most important role in elevating us to the top of the food chain. Review posted – December 17, 2021 Publication date – November 13, 2018 [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages Von Hippel was born, raised, and educated in the USA. He taught at Ohio State and Williams College for over a decade. He has been teaching and conducting research in evolutionary social psychology in Australia for more than twenty years, since 2006 as a professor at the University of Queensland. He lives in Brisbane with his family Interviews -----Vox - Why humans evolved into such good bullshitters By Sean Illing -----The Covid Tonic - Autism and Innovation - 2:03 Most folks. Because we are inherently social creatures, will seek social solutions to presenting problems. But people who are much less socially adept, those on the autism spectrum, for example, will, as a group, turn more to technical solutions to problems. -----Owltail - There are several audio interviews available here -----Vox - Why humans evolved into such good bullshitters - by Sean Illing -----London Real - What Women Look for in Men - 3:32 -----London Real - WILLIAM VON HIPPEL-THE SOCIAL LEAP: Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy Part 1/2 - 45:37 – begin at 3:20 Items of Interest from the author -----The Evolutionary Origins of Human Culture - Von Hippel offers a lecture on the origins of culture -----The Royal Institute of Australia - Seven Deadly Sins: Lust - Is Love Blind? - Bill von Hippel - 26:38 - on how physical differences between males and females result in psychological differences as well, the impacts of testosterone, selecting long-term mates, and the significance of menopause Just in case the ones linked here are not enough, there are many videos of the author being interviewed or delivering lectures. Item of Interest -----Five Early Hominids - Introduction to Hominids ...more |
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it was amazing
| We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switch We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switched off we are. A country walk should be a deafening, threatening, frantic, exhausting cacophony.-------------------------------------- All humans are Sheherazades: we die each morning if we don’t have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.Up for a bit of time travel? No, no, no, not in the sci-fi sense of physically transporting to another era. But in the mostly imaginary sense of picturing oneself in a prior age. Well, maybe more than just picturing, maybe picturing with the addition of some visceral experience. Charles Foster has written about what life is like for otters, badgers, foxes, deer and swifts, by living like them for a time. He wrote about those experiences in his book, Being a Beast. He wonders, here, how experiencing life as a Paleolithic and a Neolithic person can inform our current understanding of ourselves. I thought that, if I knew where I came from, that might shed some light on what I am…It’s a prolonged thought experiment and non-thought experiment, set in woods, waves, moorlands, schools, abattoirs, wattle-and-daub huts, hospitals, rivers, cemeteries, caves, farms, kitchens, the bodies of crows, museums, breaches, laboratories, medieval dining halls, Basque eating houses, fox-hunts, temples, deserted Middle Eastern cities and shaman’s caravans. [image] Charles Foster - image from Oxford University His journey begins with (and he spends the largest portion of the book on) the Upper Paleolithic (U-P) era, aka the Late Stone Age, from 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, when we became, behaviorally, modern humans. Foster is quite a fan of the period, seeing it as some sort of romantic heyday for humanity, one in which we were more fully attuned with the environments in which we lived, able to use our senses to their capacity, instead of getting by with the vastly circumscribed functionality we have today. Interested in the birth of human consciousness, he puts himself, and his 12 yo son, Tom, not only into the mindset of late Paleolithic humans, but into their lives. He and Tom live wild in Derbyshire, doing their best to ignore the sounds of passing traffic, while living on roadkill (well, I guess they do not entirely ignore traffic) and the bounty of the woods. They deal with hunger, the need for shelter, and work on becoming attuned to their new old world. We’re not making the wood into our image: projecting ourselves onto it. It’s making us. If we let it.In one stretch Foster fasts for eight days, which helps bring on a hallucinatory state (intentionally). Shamanism is a major cultural element in the U-P portrait he paints. It is clearly not his first trip. He recalls an out-of-body experience he had while in hospital, the sort where one is looking down from the ceiling at one’s physical body, seeing this as of a cloth with a broader capacity for human experience. He relates this also to the cave paintings of the era, seeing them, possibly, as the end-product of shamanic tripping. This section of the book transported me back to the 1960s and the probably apocryphal books of Carlos Castaneda. Social grooming was important to ancestors of our species. But, with our enlarged brains able to handle, maybe, a community of 150 people, grooming became too cost-intensive. To maintain a group that size strictly by grooming, we’d have to groom for about 43% percent of our time, which would be deadly. Something else had to make up for the shortfall, and other things have. We have developed a number of other endorphin-releasing, bond-forming strategies that don’t involve touching [social distancing?]. They are…laughter, wordless singing/dancing, language and ritual/religion/story.It sure gives the expression rubbed me the wrong way some added heft. He has theories about religion, communication, and social organization that permeate this exploration. He posits, for example, that late Paleo man was able to communicate with a language unlike our own, a more full-body form of expression, maybe some long-lost form of charades. There is an ancient language, thought to have been used by Neanderthals, called HMMM, or holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and memetic communication. It is likely that some of this carried forward. And makes one wonder just how far back the roots go to contemporary languages that incorporate more rather than less musicality, more rather than less tonality, and more rather than less bodily support for spoken words. He writes about a time when everything, not just people, were seen as having a soul, some inner self that exists separately, although living within a body, a tree, a hare, a blade of grass. This sort of worldview makes it a lot tougher to hunt for reasons that did not involve survival. And makes understandable rituals in many cultures in which forgiveness is begged when an animal is killed. This becomes much more of a thing when one feels in tune with one’s surroundings, an experience Foster reports as being quite real in his Derbyshire adventure. This tells him that Paleo man was better able to sense, to be aware of his surroundings than almost any modern human can. Foster has a go at the Neolithic as well, trying to see what the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture was like, and offers consideration of the longer-term impacts on humanity that emanated from that change. This is much less involved and involving, but does include some very interesting observations on how agriculture revolutionized the relationship people had with their environment. …the first evidence of sedentary communities comes from around 11,000 years ago. We see the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals at about the same time. Yet, it is not for another 7,000 years that there are settled villages, relying on domesticated plants or fixed fields. For 7,000 years, that is, our own model of human life, which we like to assume would have been irresistibly attractive to the poor benighted caveman, was resisted or ignored, just as it is by more modern hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers only become like us at the end of a whip. Our life is a last resort for the creatures that we really are.He notes that even when farming took root, many of those newly minted farmers continued living as hunter-gatherers for part of the year. He finishes up with a glance at the contemporary. More of a screed really. He notes that phonetic writing severed the connection our languages have with the reality they seek to portray. Pre-phonetic languages tend to be more onomatopoeic, the sounds more closely reflecting the underlying reality. He sees our modern brains as functioning mostly as valves, channeling all available sensation through a narrow pipeline, while leaving behind an entire world of possible human experience that we are no longer equipped to handle. To that extent we all have super-powers, of potential awareness, anyway, that lie waiting for someone to open the right valve, presuming they have not been corroded into inutility by disuse. He tells of meeting a French woman in Thailand whose near-death experience left her passively able to disrupt electronic mechanisms. She could not, for example, use ATMs. They would always malfunction around her. He takes a run at what is usually seen to indicate “modern” humanity. I’ve come to wonder whether symbolism is all it’s cracked up to be, and in particular whether its use really is the great watershed separating us from everything else that had gone before.He argues that trackers, for example, can abstract from natural clues the stories behind them, and those existed long before so-called “modern man.” He calls in outside authorities from time to time to fill in gaps. These extra bits always add fascinating pieces of information. For example, Later I wrote in panic to biologist David Haskell, an expert on birdsong, begging him to reassure me that music is ‘chronologically and neurologically prior to language.’ It surely is, he replied. ‘It seems that preceding both is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centers of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from the roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about.Foster is that most common of writers, a veterinarian and a lawyer. Wait, what? Sadly, there is no telling in here (it is present in his Wiki page, though) of how he managed to train for these seemingly unrelated careers. (I can certainly envision a scenario, though, in which we hear lawyer Foster proclaiming to the court, “My client could not possibly be guilty of this crime, your honor. The forensic evidence at the scene clearly shows that the act was committed by an American badger, while my client, as anyone can see, is a Eurasian badger.”) It certainly seems clear, though, from his diatribes against modernity, where his heart is. In the visceral, physical work of dealing with animals, which lends itself to the intellectual stimulation of a truer, and deeper connection with nature. The first time (and one of the only times) I felt useful was shoveling cow shit in a Peak District farm when I was ten. It had a dignity that piano lessons, cub scouts, arithmetic and even amateur taxidermy did not. What I was detecting was that humans acquire their significance from relationship, that relationships with non-humans were vital and that clearing up someone’s dung is a good way of establishing relationships.In that case, I am far more useful in the world than I ever dreamed. GRIPES Foster can be off-putting, particularly to those us with no love of hunting, opening as he does with I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill. (Well, as least it wasn’t haggis.) I can well imagine many readers slamming the book shut at that point and moving on to something else. Will this be a paean to a manly killing impulse? Thankfully, not really, although there are some uncomfortable moments re the hunting of living creatures. Sometimes he puts things out that are at the very least questionable, and at the worst, silly. Our intuition is older, wiser and more reliable than our underused, atrophied senses. Really? Based on what data? So, making decisions by feelz alone is the way to go? Maybe I should swap my accountant for an inveterate gambler? He sometimes betrays an unconscious unkindness in the cloak of humor: The last thing I ate was a hedgehog. That was nine days ago. From the taste of them, hedgehogs must start decomposing even when they’re alive and in their prime. This one’s still down there somewhere, and my burps smell like a maggot farm. I regret it’s death under the wheels of a cattle truck far more than its parents or children possibly do.I doubt it. One stylistic element that permeates is seeing an imaginary Paleo man, X, and his son. Supposedly these might be Foster and Tom in an earlier era. It has some artistic appeal, but I did not think it added much overall. All that said, the overall take here is that this is high-octane fuel for the brain, however valved-up ours may be. Foster raises many incredibly fascinating subjects from the origins of religion, language, our native capabilities to how global revolutions have molded us into the homo sap of the 21st century. This is a stunning wakeup call for any minds that might have drifted off into the intellectual somnolence of contemporary life. There are simply so many ideas bouncing off the walls in this book that one might fear that they could reach a critical mass and do some damage. It is worth the risk. If you care at all about understanding humanity, our place in the world, and how we got here, skipping Being a Human would be…well…inhuman. It is an absolute must-read. We try to learn the liturgy: the way to do things properly; the way to avoid offending the fastidious, prescriptive and vengeful guardians of the place. Everything matters. We watch the rain fall on one leaf, trace the course of the water under a stone, and then we go back to the leaf and watch the next drop. We try to know the stamens with the visual resolution of a bumblebee and the snail slime with the nose of a bankvole and the leaf pennants on the tree masts with the cold eyes of kites. Review posted – 9/17/21 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 8/31/21 ----------Trade paperback - 8/9/22 This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! I received an ARE of Being a Human from Metropolitan Books in return for a modern era review. Thanks, Maia. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages By my count this is Foster’s 39th book Foster’s bio on Wiki Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'Interviews -----The Guardian - Going underground: meet the man who lived as an animal - re Being a Beast by Simon Hattenston -----New Books Network - Defined by Relationship by Howard Burton – audio - 1h 30m Items of Interest from the author -----Emergence Magazine - Against Nature Writing - on language as a barrier to understanding -----Shortform - Charles Foster's Top Book Recommendations Items of Interest -----Wiki on Bear Grylls - a British adventurer – mentioned in Part 1 as an example of someone more interested in the technology of survival than the point of it (p 62 in my ARE) -----Wiki on Yggdrasil - mentioned in Part 1 – humorously (p 85) -----Wiki on the Upper Paleolithic -----Dartmouth Department of Music – a review of a book positing that Neanderthals used musicality in their communications Review Feature - The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen - Foster addresses this in this discussion of the origins of human language -----Wiki on Carlos Castaneda -----Discover Magazine - Paleomythic: How People Really Lived During the Stone Age By Marlene Zuk Like it says – an interesting read ...more |
Notes are private!
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