about this site
This site is the intellectual property of John McCrone -
email: mccrone 'at' dichotomistic.com.
It was
first
published on-line in 2006 but contains material from a previous site,
Going Inside - the Neuronaut's Guide to the Science of Consciousness,
that was mainly about mind science.
The reason it exists is to define a new logic based on
asymmetric dichotomisation or symmetry breaking. This developed out of
25 years
working on the problem of explaining consciousness. It eventually
became obvious that a different model of causality was required. After
long discussions with many people, particularly Stan
Salthe, the
results are presented here. An unexpected result was that a logic
initially developed for modelling complex systems like minds also turns
out to
offer a new way of modelling reality as a whole - the realm of matter
as well.
So this site divides into three general sections. The main bit
is the logic pages.
Then there is a large chunk of material about the
brain~mind. A lot of
this was written before I sorted out the
underpinning logic but is still valid. The section I will then be
adding to most in future will be the matter
pages.
about me
So who am I? I am a science writer. Author of four
books and
many
articles - both popular and scholarly. I started out writing about
technology, then human evolution and neuroscience. Eventually I ended
up working on complexity and causal modelling.
I started out at Auckland University in the 1970s studying psychology
and ecology. Mind science was of course pretty dire back then. Rats in
boxes.
Cognition as a bunch of computational modules. People literally fell
asleep in the neuroscience class.
I was briefly interested in artificial intelligence
but it turned out to be an even bigger load of crock. I mean, conscious
machines! So in the
mid-1980s I took a step back
and asked what seemed to be the most obvious question about the human
mind. How did it evolve? What makes it so different from the animal
mind?
This was quite a few years before the evo-psych bandwagon got going
(another reductionist load of crock by and large). I discovered that
the answer was shockingly simple. The great Russian psychologist, Lev
Vygotsky, had pretty much said it all in the 1920s.
Of course, Vygotsky had an organic view of the way things worked. Which
is why it resonated with me I guess. Anyway, a book emerged out of that
- The Ape That Spoke. The paleoanthropology in it still holds
up. The
psychology and neurology are a little sketchier, although at
least I was into neural networks and co-evolutionary mechanisms right
from the start.
To get a little deeper into the Vygotskean story, and social
constructionism generally, I wrote a second book, The Myth of
Irrationality. Some of the chapters from both my first two books can be
found in the mind
section of this site. The ones on feral children and
Helen Keller have been especially popular with people.
By the early 1990s I was an established science
writer doing articles for the New Scientist and others. Having started
with the story of the
sociocultural development of the human mind -
our psychological evolution - the next
obvious step was to study the biological roots of consciousness, the
much bigger question of how brains can have minds.
Five years of study went into my third book, Going Inside, which
aims
to tell how
the brain generates a single moment of consciousness. I also did an
illustrated schoolbook version called How The Brain Works.
But by now my real goal had become clear. Ordinary logic and
reductionist thinking just seemed to work against you when you are
trying to talk about complex systems with holistic or hierarchical
organisation. So the next step was to identify some more natural brand
of logic.
Cutting a long story short, I found that the people who seemed to have
the most to say about the causality of complex systems were theoretical
biologists like Stan Salthe, Robert
Rosen, Robert Ulanowicz, Humberto
Maturana and Howard Pattee. There were a few
others with a neuroscience
connection, such as Walter Freeman, Karl
Friston, Stephen Grossberg and
Scott Kelso. And thankfully I was
pointed in the direction of some more
ancient thinkers like Peirce and Anaximander.
Fritjof
Capra and Ian
Stewart/Jack Cohen are popular writers that I also
rate highly.
Anyway, this is a brief explanation of how I got to where I am
now - the concerns that motivated my research.
about my books
How the Brain Works, John McCrone (2002)
This is a pocketbook aimed at students and lay-readers. Part of the
Dorling Kindersley Essential Science series, How The Brain Works is a
summary of the story told in Going Inside. It is an excellent place to
start if you really want a basic but up to the moment account of the
brain and consciousness. Lots of explanatory pictures and short
sentences.
How the Brain Works - A Beginner's Guide to the Mind and Consciousness
by John McCrone
Dorling Kindersley, 2002, 72 pages, ISBN 0-7513-3712-9
Going Inside, John
McCrone (1999)
Going Inside tells the story of a single instant of consciousness,
showing how the brain pulls together a state of subjective experience
in about a third of a second. There have been many heavy-duty books on
mind science to chose from over the past few years, but this covers
very different terrain to most. It gets more deeply into the actual
neuroanatomy of brains and the personalities that shape the field. It
also reveals the struggle to break away from old computational and
reductionist ways of thinking about the mind-brain connection, looking
at what it means to take a holistic or complex systems approach to
neuroscience.
Going Inside - A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness
by John
McCrone
UK -Faber & Faber, 1999, 368 pages, ISBN 0-571-17319-5
US- Fromm International, 2001, ISBN 0-8806-4262-9
More about Going Inside
The Myth of
Irrationality, John McCrone (1993)
The Myth of Irrationality is about how language and culture shape the
human mind, giving us all our higher mental powers. This social
constructionist or Vygotskian story stands in stark contrast to the
usual assumption that human mental abilities such as self-awareness,
imagination, creativity, recollective memory and "sophisticated"
emotions are innate. Much of the book actually traces the history of
why we believe what we believe about the mind, focusing especially on
the Romantic myth that the most important parts of us are buried deep
in our unconscious brains (and hearts) rather than being
socially-created in childhood. Read the first chapter. And how feral
children prove the case. Or this paper on freewill. Or this chapter
debunking Freud.
The Myth of Irrationality - The Science of the Mind from Plato to Star
Trek by John McCrone
UK - Macmillan, 1993, 340 pages, ISBN 0-333-57284-X
US - Carroll & Graf, 1994, ISBN 0-7867-0067-X
The Ape That Spoke, John
McCrone (1990)
My first book, The Ape That Spoke, tells the tale of human mental
evolution, asking the question what could have transformed Homo sapiens
almost overnight from a smart ape to a self-aware, abstract-thinking
and complex being? The answer of course is language - the theme I've
developed in all my subsequent books. And while the Ape That Spoke was
pretty sketchy on the neurological underpinings of consciousness (well,
it did require six years to research Going Inside) it has stood up well
in terms of its account of human evolution.
The Ape That Spoke - Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind by
John McCrone
UK - Macmillan, 1990, pages 232, ISBN 0-333-53792-0
US - Morrow, 1991, ISBN 0-688-10326-X