Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory (Bradford Books)
A new view of mind is in the air. Teed Rockwell has sensed it and articulated it beautifully in this book. Using a powerful combination of Dewey's pragmatism and dynamical systems theory, he proposes a bold alternative to Cartesian materialism that deserves careful scrutiny.(J. A. Scott Kelso, Glenwood and Martha Creech Chair in Science and Director, Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University)Davies strikes a bold position and argues for it vigorously. His position is clever and original, but nicely connected to currently available theories of biological function, and Davies does a good job of laying out the relationships between his view and the other major theories.(Colin Allen, Professor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Program in Cognitive Science, Indiana University)This book is an essential read for those interested in the nature of mind; for those of us already sympathetic to the project, the book enriches the view with historical antecedents from some unlikely places and offers a progressive scientific program for how to explore the new view of mind empirically.(Journal of Philosophy of Science)If everything else is governed by dynamics, why not mind? Or is the science of mind outside the natural sciences? In recent times, notions of self-organizing, dynamical systems have begun to permeate the social, behavioral, cognitive and brain sciences. With a few notable exceptions, however, dynamical concepts (which embrace nonlinearity, emergence, interactions and context) remain to be explored. This book, full of scientific wisdom, wit, and understanding, is a pleasure to read. Ward brings the full armamentarium of concepts, methods, and modeling tools of dynamical systems -- old and new -- to bear on a wide variety of psychological phenomena. By filling dynamics with content from specific fields of cognitive research, he points the way to a far richer cognitive science in which conceptual content, dynamical modeling, and experiments mutually complement each other. This is a ground-breaking book that bridges the cognitive and the natural sciences. And it's two-way traffic. I suspect, were they around after 300 years, that David Hume and Isaac Newton might just smile.(J. A. Scott Kelso, Glenwood and Martha Creech Chair in Science and Director, Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University)