
The Book of Minds
How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens
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Narrated by:
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James Cameron Stewart
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By:
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Philip Ball
Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human?
Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will?
Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball's brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.
©2022 Philip Ball (P)2022 TantorListeners also enjoyed...




















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The book was like an engrossing conversation but the delivery of
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Feel so badly for the author
Good book. Unlistenable narration.
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Maybe not boring if this is the first book on this topic you have ever read or listened to.
The author's habit of constructing long, convoluted, and digressive sentences didn't combine well with the narrator's style, which tried to emphasize every third or fourth syllable in a kind of singsong that sounds like a mix of a wartime newsreel and an auctioneer.
Works as performance art, I can definitely see having this on at a gallery show, with the right pieces.
A good 2 hour lecture hidden in this 18 hour book
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