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A review by alexgmcm
The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains by Joseph LeDoux
3.0
The earlier sections on the evolution of the nervous system and the brain are decent.
Similarly, the chapters on cognitive science where it is strictly tied to experimental results are also very good (the results about consciousness from human lesion studies such as split brain patients were fascinating and probably my favourite part of the book).
However, I didn't like the more theoretical and hypothetical chapters on cognitive science and it seemed to become very difficult, if not impossible, to experimentally test the various theories and thus strayed almost into pure philosophy.
Because I didn't really enjoy those chapters at all I feel I can't give it 5/5. It isn't just about the state of the science (after all, it is hardly the fault of the book if the field simply isn't amenable to experimental enquiry with our current tools) - but those chapters also felt very repetitive. It seemed to essentially restate the difficulty of assessing the existence of autonoetic consciousness (or even noetic consciousness) in animals over and over again.
Despite these shortfalls, I enjoyed the book as a whole and would recommend it to readers interested in the evolution of the brain and consciousness.
Similarly, the chapters on cognitive science where it is strictly tied to experimental results are also very good (the results about consciousness from human lesion studies such as split brain patients were fascinating and probably my favourite part of the book).
However, I didn't like the more theoretical and hypothetical chapters on cognitive science and it seemed to become very difficult, if not impossible, to experimentally test the various theories and thus strayed almost into pure philosophy.
Because I didn't really enjoy those chapters at all I feel I can't give it 5/5. It isn't just about the state of the science (after all, it is hardly the fault of the book if the field simply isn't amenable to experimental enquiry with our current tools) - but those chapters also felt very repetitive. It seemed to essentially restate the difficulty of assessing the existence of autonoetic consciousness (or even noetic consciousness) in animals over and over again.
Despite these shortfalls, I enjoyed the book as a whole and would recommend it to readers interested in the evolution of the brain and consciousness.