Between You and the Universe
How Science, Symbols, and Experience Create (Your) Reality
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Narrated by:
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Shanon Weaver
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By:
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Arman Sidhu
About this listen
Reality spans across all the experiences you feel, all the words you communicate with, and all the knowledge you’ve acquired over your lifetime. Reality, in this regard, is quite literally everything. Nothing is out of scope.
But how much of reality do you understand?
Between You and the Universe explores the expansive concept of reality by breaking it into three parts: science, symbols, and experience. You can explore what these distinct parts are and how they interweave to stitch everything around you. The goal is to present three mental models that explain how your reality emerges, from your idea of self to your understandings of the universe.
You’ll probably notice familiar disciplines ranging from physics, neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy. However, this book's particular classifications and arrangement of concepts allow you to structure these separate ideas into comprehensive mental models. By doing so, this book covers a wide breadth of questions:
- How do you become conscious?
- How do your sensations work?
- How does language facilitate your experience?
- What are symbols?
- Why do symbols exist everywhere around you?
- What assumptions exist in our scientific undertakings?
- And, what are the unknowns in reality that we still wish to explain?
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2021 Arman Sidhu (P)2021 Arman SidhuListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
There are a lot of personality tests out there designed to label you and put you in a particular box. But Dr. Caroline Leaf says there's much more to you than a personality profile can capture. In fact, you cannot be categorized! In this fascinating book, she takes listeners through seven steps to rediscover and unlock their unique "you quotient".
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Hands down, the most helpful book I've listened to
- By Rose O'Connor on 07-31-17
By: Dr. Caroline Leaf, and others
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Out of Our Heads
- You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
- By: Alva Noe
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Alva Noë is one of a new breed - part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist - who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the 200-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.
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A bold, yet ultimately unsupported, hypothesis
- By Keith Pyne-Howarth on 01-17-10
By: Alva Noe
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What the Bleep Do We Know
- Discovering the Endless Possibilities for Altering Your Everyday Reality
- By: William Arntz, Betsy Chase, Mark Vicente
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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With the help of 14 leading physicists, scientists, and spiritual thinkers, this book guides listeners on a course from the scientific to the spiritual, and from the universal to the personal. Along the way, it asks such questions as: Are we seeing the world as it really is What is the relationship between our thoughts and our world? How can I create my day every day? What the Bleep answers this question and others through an innovative new approach to self-help and spirituality.
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Attacking straw men
- By Henrik on 08-06-11
By: William Arntz, and others
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Life on the Edge
- The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
- By: Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how did it come to be? Even in an age of cloning and artificial biology, the remarkable truth remains: Nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we still missing a vital ingredient in its creation?
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More woo than new
- By Gary on 09-09-15
By: Johnjoe McFadden, and others
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Consciousness and the Social Brain
- By: Michael S. A. Graziano
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. In Graziano's theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.
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Cutting edge...
- By Douglas on 08-07-14
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Mind in Motion
- How Action Shapes Thought
- By: Barbara Tversky
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas.
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Physically difficult to listen to
- By Claire Hay on 11-08-19
By: Barbara Tversky
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The Ego Tunnel
- The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
- By: Thomas Metzinger
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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We're used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain - an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is "a virtual self in a virtual reality." But if the self is not "real," why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it?
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non-specialist literature at its best
- By Esmeralda on 03-17-10
By: Thomas Metzinger
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What Is Life?
- How Chemistry Becomes Biology
- By: Addy Pross
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrdinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: What is life?. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology?
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Profound & Life Changing...
- By Daegan Smith on 04-06-15
By: Addy Pross
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Autopilot
- The Art & Science of Doing Nothing
- By: Andrew Smart
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Andrew Smart wants you to sit and do nothing much more often - and he has the science to explain why. At every turn we’re pushed to do more, faster, and more efficiently: That drumbeat resounds throughout our wage-slave society. Multitasking is not only a virtue, it’s a necessity. But Andrew Smart argues that slackers may have the last laugh. The latest neuroscience shows that the “culture of effectiveness” is not only ineffective, it can be harmful to your well-being.
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Not worth it.
- By B Lee on 04-30-14
By: Andrew Smart
What listeners say about Between You and the Universe
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joseph
- 02-26-22
Interesting but with some sloppy details.
The author divides our understanding of the world into worldviews of science, symbols and experience and then explains each. I had always thought that science provides an understanding and that experience provides feelings but I had never thought of symbols as another perspective of our world. This was interesting.
Several statements I found to be incorrect or misleading. The most glaring one was a statement of light traveling at 160,000 mi./s in a vacuum. I replayed this several times to make sure I had heard what I heard. This is just plain wrong. It is 186,000 mi./s in a vacuum. It could be that the person reading made a mistake but regardless, it’s wrong.
The statement that there are trillions of galaxies is also incorrect. Today it is estimated to be 100 billion, possibly 200 billion but certainly not trillions. Haphazardly throwing around the terms billions and trillions is commonplace today but it should not be in this book. Comparing billions to trillions is like comparing a collection of dimes to a collection of $100 dollar bills.
The author talks about weak and strong electromagnetic waves but doesn’t define what that means. It is the amplitude of the wave. He leaves the reader with the impression that ultra low frequency waves (that cannot ionize matter, including parts of our bodies) can combine with each other and harm our bodies. The only way that could happen would be if the frequencies are the same and are therefore additive. But even so, the frequency itself would not change and still would not be able to ionize matter. It would instead result in some molecular motion (heat) which could damage cells but it would be very different from ionization. The author does nothing to clarify the difference. It’s a shame because he could use this to help the public understand why data about cell phones use and electrical power have not uncovered harmful effects. Perhaps induced motion could create heat and if the cell phone is held to your head for long periods of time and over long periods of time, damage could occur. But we await data to support this view.
The author presents the scientific community as having two cosmological models relatively equal in their scientific acceptance. One is the “Steady State” and the other is the “Big Bang.” OK, but equal acceptance? Hardly. The “Big Bang” is accepted by 95 to 99% of scientists, depending on their specific fields. The author unfortunately promotes the public’s incorrect idea that there is major disagreement among scientists. There isn’t. Since discoveries made in 1965 of microwave background (predicted by the “Big Bang”) and other observations, the “Steady State” theory has been replaced with the “Big Bang.”
I might also add that scientists don’t “believe“ in the “Big Bang” the way a religious person “believes” in God. Scientists see the “Big Bang” as the best explanation of observations - at least so far.
I found the use of the word “infinite” by the author somewhat annoying when he means an extremely large finite number. Once again this coincides with the public’s misunderstanding and/or misuse of terms.
Towards the end of the book the author talks about “Qualia“ as possibly being a fundamental property. This is intriguing. I have read similar propositions considering “consciousness” as a fundamental property. Declaring something as fundamental certainly would circumvent the problem of trying to explain it. Is it just an easy way out??? I don’t know, but it is interesting.
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