Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves
ISBN: 9780231545990
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Philosophy ; Biological Sciences ; General Science ; Ecology & Evolutionary Biology;

Jeremy Sherman distills Terrence Deacon's breakthrough natural science hypothesis for the emergence of agents and agency, selves and aims in an otherwise aimless universe. The theory cuts a new path through the dualistic spirit vs. mechanism debate, unifying the hard and soft sciences and suggesting new solutions to philosophical mysteries.


Jeremy Sherman is a decision theorist researching and writing about choice from the origin of life to everyday living. He teaches college courses across the social sciences and blogs for Psychology Today . He has studied and collaborated with Terrence Deacon for twenty years.

Terrence Deacon is professor of biological anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997) and Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (2011).
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