Kindle Price: $9.99

Save $5.01 (33%)

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

eBook features:
  • Highlight, take notes, and search in the book
Read with our free app
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Buy for others

Give as a gift or purchase for a team or group.
Learn more

Buying and sending eBooks to others

  1. Select quantity
  2. Buy and send eBooks
  3. Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs

Follow the author

Gerald M. Edelman
+ Follow
More books from this author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by Gerald M. Edelman (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 35 ratings
See all formats and editions
Burgeoning advancements in brain science are opening up new perspectives on how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, it is now possible to explore consciousness—the very center of human concern—by scientific means. In this illuminating book, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman offers a new theory of knowledge based on striking scientific findings about how the brain works. And he addresses the related compelling question: Does the latest research imply that all knowledge can be reduced to scientific description?
Edelman’s brain-based approach to knowledge has rich implications for our understanding of creativity, of the normal and abnormal functioning of the brain, and of the connections among the different ways we have of knowing. While the gulf between science and the humanities and their respective views of the world has seemed enormous in the past, the author shows that their differences can be dissolved by considering their origins in brain functions. He foresees a day when brain-based devices will be conscious, and he reflects on this and other fascinating ideas about how we come to know the world and ourselves.
Read more Read less
Previous page
  1. ISBN-13
    978-0300120394
  2. Edition
    1st
  3. Sticky notes
    Not Enabled
  4. Publisher
    Yale University Press
  5. Publication date
    October 24, 2006
  6. Language
    English
  7. File size
    1244 KB
  8. See all details
Next page
Add a debit or credit card to save time when you check out
Convenient and secure with 2 clicks. Add your card

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Edelman's Second Nature offers the mature synthesis of his reflections on brain and mind. Somehow, it is both intellectually satisfying and wise."-Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes' Error and Looking for Spinoza

"It was William James's dream that physiology, psychology and philosophy be joined into a single discipline, and in Second Nature, the latest volume in Gerald M. Edelman's seminal series of books on Neural Darwinism, this dream of a brain-based epistemology is brought closer than ever to realization. For anyone who is interested in human consciousness, this is required reading. "-Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat




"Dr. Edelman has done something unique in this book. He deals both with the important epistemological issues and the mechanisms in the brain that give rise to them."-Avrum Stroll, University of California, San Diego


"In the tradition of John von Neumann's "The Computer and the Brain" and Erwin Schr???dinger's "What Is Life?" Gerald Edelman summarizes his seminal contributions to our understanding of the human brain and the human mind. The reader is drawn into a conversation with a master, who is at once witty and wise."-Howard Gardner, author of "Changing Minds"

"Until this provocative book, I thought that Gerald Edelman was merely one of our greatest and most original thinkers in neuroscience. But now having read such a remarkable disquisition on the relationship between brain physiology, consciousness and knowledge as he presents here, I have become certain of something about which I had previously only wondered: he is also one of our greatest philosophers."-Sherwin Nuland, Yale University

"A remarkable contribution to the philosophy of the mind, Edelman's Second Nature breaks new ground to an age-old problem by launching brain-based epistemology. Original, lucid, concise, succinct: easily the best in the field."-Apostolos P. Georgopoulos, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota

From the Author

A conversation with Dr. Gerald M. Edelman
 
 
Q:  Is there a single message in Second Nature you want to convey?
 
A:  We are about to understand how consciousness arises in the workings of the brain. I argue that while the scientific picture of the world describes the bases for all phenomena including consciousness, there remain arenas, such as ethics and aesthetics, which cannot be fully described by a scientific approach.
 
 
Q:  What are the most significant advances in brain science that you address in this book?
 
A:  We now understand that the brain is not organized like a computer. A better image is provided by considering it to be a biological system whose form and activity involve pattern recognition rather than logic. This implies that each person’s brain is unique in the history of the universe.
 
 
Q:  Will we ever understand how consciousness arises as a result of brain action?
 
Yes, we will. We are on the brink of understanding how consciousness arises as a result of myriad mutual interactions of nerve cells distributed in our cerebral cortex. Integration of these interactions allows us to make enormous numbers of distinctions that are the hallmark of consciousness. Indeed, someday we may be able to make a conscious artifact.
 
A:  Will knowledge and how we acquire it be reduced completely to a scientific description?
 
No. This is a major point of the book. For example, each brain has a developmental and evolutionary history that is largely irreversible and uniquely individual. Furthermore, creative thought, scientific and otherwise, starts with ambiguity, and only in some instances can it proceed to scientific clarity.
 

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0015AOSKM
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; 1st edition (October 24, 2006)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 24, 2006
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1244 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 203 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 35 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Gerald M. Edelman

Gerald M. Edelman

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
35 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Dr. Richard G. Petty
5.0 out of 5 stars Ingenious, But Not the Whole Story
Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2009
Verified Purchase
Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1972 for his groundbreaking work on immunity. Though most Nobel Laureates either choose - or are forced to - rest on their laurels, Edelman soon began to move his attention to the brain and his first book on his theories was published as The Mindful Brain almost thirty years ago. In recent years he has suggested that the ways in which the complex adaptive system by which the body decides which lymphocytes to stimulate and mobilize may be similar to the way in which the brain functions.

His theory is known as "neuronal group selection" or "Neural Darwinism" and proposes that anatomical connections in the brain are selected during development. Secondly that there is a second selective process that occurs as a result of experiences after birth, and finally that there is a system of what is known as re-entrant signaling.

It is a beautiful and complex theory and over the last twenty years he has explored these ideas in a series of books: In 1987 he published  Neural Darwinism: The Theory Of Neuronal Group Selection  Three years later came  Remembered Present: A Biological Theory Of Consciousness , and then  Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind  in 1992. It was almost a decade before he returned to his theme in  A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination . I have enjoyed all of them, though none is easy reading, and I kept coming away with the uneasy feeling that the work is ingenious, but does not explain quite as much as it seems.

This latest book, Second Nature, is much the most accessible of his works, but left me with a similar feeling: ingenious but lacking.

So what is it about? Edelman skims over the details of his theory of neuronal group selection but on this occasion he does not assume a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader. So he explains the basic ideas very clearly and sets the theory in context in thirteen chapters:
1. The Galilean Arc and Darwin's Program
2. Consciousness, Body, and Brain
3. Selectionism: A Prerequisite for Consciousness
4. From Brain Activity to Consciousness
5. Epistemology and Its Discontents
6. A Brain-Based Approach
7. Forms of Knowledge: The Divorce between Science and the Humanities
8. Repairing the Rift
9. Causation, Illusions, and Values
10. Creativity: The Play between Specificity and Range
11. Abnormal States
12. Brain-Based Devices: Toward a Conscious Artifact
13. Second Nature: The Transformation of Knowledge

He takes the view that any effective theory of consciousness must take a global, whole brain approach and must be based on selection rather than instruction.

In contrast to many books for the public, he emphasizes that "the brain is not a computer, and the world is not a piece of tape." This is important: complex systems are riddled with "noise" and computers have to get rid of it, while brains actively depend on it. The brain uses the enormous and ever-changing variability of sensory inputs - noise - to construct patterned responses.

A problem that has pre-occupied philosophers and scientist for generations is subjectivity or qualia: how do we generate those private experiences of sights and sounds? Edelman thinks that he has the answer: Complex looping neural circuits that make multiple discriminations, and the qualia are those discriminations.

This ingenious idea is hard to prove. It also fails to take into account observations on the continuity of awareness in meditators with negligible neurological activity. Or the hardest nut of all: does this truly help us to create a neurological model of consciousness? For some people such questions are unimportant, and simply await time and technology. But I think that they remain key tests of the theory.

This is a short, but extremely clear and thought provoking book that I recommend highly.

Richard G. Petty, MD, author of  Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life
12 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Dr. Lee D. Carlson
5.0 out of 5 stars A short introduction to brain-based epistemology
Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2007
Verified Purchase
If you take the naturalized epistemology of the philosopher Willard Quine and extend it beyond the role of sense perception, you might arrive at what the author of this book calls "brain-based epistemology." His opinions in this book are very sensible, especially if viewed from the standpoint of what is known in contemporary neuroscience. His expertise in this field is of course well known, but to apply cognitive neuroscience to the understanding of consciousness has only recently been attempted, with some experimental support. Due to its length, the reader will not find a detailed overview of this research in this book, but it will give an introduction to some of the author's essential ideas, which he like to encapsulate in the expression `Neural Darwinism.'

One interesting feature of the author's line of thinking, as in many systems of naturalized epistemology, is that it allows room for both scientific knowledge and knowledge derived from the "humanities". It would seem improbable that evolutionary pressures would not make poetry, art, and literature part of the human survival strategy, given the widespread occurrence of at least one of these areas in all human cultures throughout history. The author would view these areas as expressions of the "pattern recognition" capability of the brain, whereas science and mathematics are more in line with the ability of the brain to indulge itself in logical reasoning. But pattern recognition is the predominant mode for human thinking, with the immediate corollary that metaphors are the tool for which this is done. Scientific reasoning then is a highly specialized (and uncommon) mode of cognition, which is specific in scope and undetermined in justification. This would explain why scientific reasoning does not come as naturally to all as other modes of thought. However, the brain encompasses all of these modes, and so the sciences and the humanities could be viewed as facets of the same brain crystal. To separate them would be fallacious, and therefore the author spends an entire chapter "repairing the rift" between the natural sciences and the humanities.

The author's view of consciousness is one of an unabashed anti-Cartesianism, for he rejects dualism and views consciousness as a purely natural consequence of brain processes, these processes having the nature that they do because of evolutionary pressures. The author also rejects the notion of "brain as computer" but he does believe that it is possible to construct a conscious artifact, and spends a fair amount of time discussing on-going research devoted to this. In addition, and most interestingly, he views language as an "invention" and thus rejects the notion of an innate language mechanism that everyone is born with.

It remains to be seen whether the author's ideas on the origin and nature of consciousness will be justified in further research, but this book does have the virtue that it does not fall into the trap of pure philosophical speculation. This is not to say that such speculation is never of value, but one must know when to stop, when to put down the philosophical drink, lest one become lost in a maze of gigantic conceptual spaces that philosophers love to construct. Experimentation and observation should govern the investigation of consciousness, and artifacts or machines constructed that allow the testing of the more rudimentary ideas proposed. It is refreshing that cognitive neuroscientists have finally given the study of consciousness a genuine place in scientific investigation. No doubt there will be many surprises to come in this investigation in the decades ahead.
7 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

Lessfatman
5.0 out of 5 stars nobody matches Edelman's clarity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2016
Verified Purchase
This person Edelmanwas about three decades ahead of his time when he published the basics of immunology. He did the same thing with the coordinates of sonsciousness only that he was such an ass with the media that finally nobody wanted to know wht he was about to.
Now his laboratory is abandoned. The people he tutored never mention his name.

If you manage to read his text and actually understand what he is saying, nobody will take you for a ride in the question about how consciousness is being made.

He was one of the greats.
Report
Mr. N. Moffatt
3.0 out of 5 stars Not accessible enough
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 26, 2008
Verified Purchase
I suspect strongly that Edelman presents highly significant and radical ideas about consciousness, but I am unable to assimilate them by reading this book.

My fundamental problem is that his attitude and approach in the book seems to have as highest priority his own prowess. His prose is twisted and tortuous, he labours to points, and then you are unclear what the point is. He often using words that I have never encountered in 40 years of reading. He continually revels in his own sense of self importance.

Maybe this book is not aimed at the masses. But the implication is that it is. If it is aimed at the masses, it fails to communicate.

I specifically bought the book on the strength of the first review by a top ten reviewer. I regret buying it.

I give 3 stars because others may find out what he is trying to say and will almost certainly be suitably rewarded. It eludes me, as it will many others.
5 people found this helpful
 Report
Report an issue

Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Report
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Report
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?
Report