Fire in the mind

the long version

Fire in the Mind is on one level a conventional--albeit exceptionally well-executed--work of science journalism. Johnson provides an up-to-the-minute survey of the most exciting and philosophically resonant fields of modern research. This achievement alone would make his book worth reading. His accounts of particle physics, cosmology, chaos, complexity, evolutionary biology and related developments are both lyrical and lucid. They made me realize, somewhat to my consternation, how poorly I had grasped David Bohm's pilot-wave interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the links between information theory and thermodynamics. What sets Fire in the Mind apart from other science books is its profound questioning of such theories. [...] Fire in the Mind is a subversive work, all the more so because it is so subtle. Johnson's style is less polemical than poetic: he advances his position through analogy, implication, innuendo. That may be why previous reviewers of Fire in the Mind, including the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, seem not to have appreciated just how serious an assault Johnson has mounted against the concept of objective knowledge. Johnson chips away at science's foundations with tools drawn from science itself. Physicists have demonstrated that even some apparently simple systems are chaotic; that is, minute perturbations of nature (the puff of the proverbial butterfly's wing in Iowa) can trigger a cascade of utterly unpredictable consequences (a monsoon in Indonesia). These arguments also apply to our own mental faculties. Neuroscientists often emphasize that the brain, far from being a perfect machine for problem solving, was cobbled together by natural selection out of whatever happened to be at hand. [...] Fire in the Mind serves as a provocation rather than a definitive statement. It challenges readers to reconsider their assumptions about what is true, what merely imagined. [...] [U]nless they are radical relativists to begin with, they are unlikely to finish the book without undergoing a crisis of faith [Excerpted from John Horgan's review, 1995, 2015; see link]