Jeremy Sherman.
Neither Ghost nor Machine: the emergence and nature of selves.
Columbia University Press. 2017
All organisms try to achieve what matters to them. Inanimate things don’t.
How to explain this difference? In Neither Ghost nor Machine,
Jeremy Sherman distills Terrence Deacon’s breakthrough natural science hypothesis
for the emergence of agents and agency, selves and aims in an otherwise aimless universe.
The theory cuts a new path through the dualistic spirit vs. mechanism debate,
unifying the hard and soft sciences, explaining how mattering emerges from matter,
and suggesting new solutions to philosophical mysteries
that have perplexed humanity for millennia.