Sentience

By Nicholas Humphrey,

Book cover of Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness

Book description

We feel therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are essential to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? To answer these questions we need a scientific…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Sentience as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’ve been waiting twelve years for a new book from this remarkable man, and it’s every bit as brilliant as I had hoped for.

Many years ago, Nicholas Humphrey was decent enough to allow me to dedicate one of my novels to him, owing to a thematic connection with his work. 

This new book offered me so much: a fascinating read, a distillation of his life and work, a passionate defence of human evolution, and a quick-footed opposition to dull philosophers. It explains why our lives matter to us and how, over two hundred million years of evolution, that circumstance…

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