
Sentience
The Invention of Consciousness
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Narrated by:
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Michael Langan
About this listen
The story of a quest to uncover the evolutionary history of consciousness from one of the world's leading theoretical psychologists.
We feel, therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? Weaving together intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, Nicholas Humphrey describes in Sentience his quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind.
The goal is to solve the hard problem: to explain the wondrous, eerie fact of "phenomenal consciousness"—the redness of a poppy, the sweetness of honey, the pain of a bee sting. What does this magical dimension of experience amount to? What is it for? And why has it evolved? Humphrey presents here his new solution. He proposes that phenomenal consciousness, far from being primitive, is a relatively late and sophisticated evolutionary development. The implications for the existence of sentience in nonhuman animals are startling and provocative.
©2023 Nicholas Humphrey (P)2023 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all - from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel.
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All About What We Know About the Universe - ALL
- By J.B. on 02-17-17
By: Michael A. Strauss, and others
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Ranger Confidential
- Living, Working, and Dying in the National Parks
- By: Andrea Lankford
- Narrated by: Julia Motyka
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The real stories behind the scenery of America’s national parks. For 12 years, Andrea Lankford lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world! Fortunately, Andrea survived it.
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Depressing from Cover to Cover
- By Drew (@drewsant) on 04-13-15
By: Andrea Lankford
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Inspired
- How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Second Edition
- By: Marty Cagan
- Narrated by: Marty Cagan
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.
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Great book, terrible audio wanted to ask a refund
- By Srikanth Ramanujam on 11-15-18
By: Marty Cagan
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Cosmic Queries
- StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going
- By: James Trefil, Lindsey N. Walker - editor, Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Narrated by: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating audiobook, Tyson and coauthor James Trefil, a renowned physicist and science popularizer, take on the big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia - How did life begin? What is our place in the universe? Are we alone? - and provide answers based on the most current data, observations, and theories.
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Not worth it
- By Daniel Earl on 03-15-21
By: James Trefil, and others
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What listeners say about Sentience
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- TeeBee
- 10-24-23
Beautiful and thought provoking
Humphries gives the reader an overview of his position on how evolution led to sentience and in doing so leads the reader through beautiful and entertaining anecdotes and thoughtful science.
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- Amos Elroy
- 12-16-24
tour de force work on sentience
this fascinating topic which is going to be come more and more relevant to AI as it gets more and more sophisticated, requires a close consideration of what we have been able to learn from the biological universe and animal studies. this is exactly what the author dedicated his life to do. the book is accessible and interesting.
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- Williamb
- 11-18-23
What it's like to be sentient
Humphrey has taken pain to make the case for what constitutes sentience, why and to some extent, how it exists. Having read many books on this and related topics, I judge that he has aligned the nail squarely with the hammer and struck. Citing several current and recent philosophers and scientists, Humphrey has raised the solid points of their work and exposed the weaker ones. In very readable /listenable style, he explains the case for what sentience is, why it likely evolved, how it might be detected, where in the evolutionary tree it seems to be present. Do read /listen to this book. You will see this topic more clearly because you did.
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- Liflock
- 10-12-23
Rambling and unscientific
The author raises a very interesting question at the outset: Assuming that consciousness and sentience serve an evolutionary advantage, there must be some external manifestations of sentience that natural selection can act on. What are those manifestations and can they be detected in animals?
I hoped that the book would unpack and make sense of this question empirically. But unfortunately, the book falls into a rambling, circuitous narrative and does not manage to get to the point. The author uses old-fashioned armchair reasoning to address complex neuroscientific questions and too readily deflects alternative hypotheses and criticisms.
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- H
- 03-13-24
Audible, please re-record this!
This is a fascinating and accessible book, if not without flaws. But the audiobook is really hard work to get through because of the inappropriate narration style for the material. It’s read as if it was a children’s story, with wildly exaggerated phrasing, feigned shock and excitement, theatrical pauses and the like. He actually does a stage whisper every time something is in parentheses! I’d love a new recording with a better narrator.
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1 person found this helpful