Coming to Our Senses

Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes

By: Viki McCabe

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

In Coming to Our Senses, cognitive scientist Viki McCabe argues that prevailing theories of perception, cognition, and information cannot explain how we know the world around us. Using scientific studies and true stories, McCabe shows that the ecological disasters, political paralysis, and economic failures we now face originate in our tendency to privilege cognitive processes and products over the information we access with our perceptual systems. As a result, we typically default to making decisions using inaccurate information such as mechanistic theories that reduce the world to extractable, exploitable parts. But the world does not function as an assembly of parts; it functions as a coalition of complex systems - from cells to cities - that organize and sustain themselves and cannot be partitioned and retain their purpose. McCabe also argues that we cannot describe such systems using theories and words. Instead, each system reveals itself in fractal-like geometric configurations that emerge from and reflect the structural organization that brings it into existence and determines its functions - a veritable physics of information. Thus, we comprehend phenomena as disparate as neural networks, river deltas, and economies by perceiving the branching geometry that organizes them into distribution systems. McCabe's key point is that form not only follows function, it doubles as information. If we put our theories aside and focus on the information the world displays, our perceptions can block hostile mental takeovers, reconnect us to reality, and bring us back to our senses.

©2014 Oxford University Press (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Startlingly relevant

The narration was a good match for the serious subject matter without making it seem trivial or too complex to follow.

Overview overview

Coming to Out Senses would be easy to hate because it flies in the face of assumptions and ideologies. Given the subject matter, structural knowledge, it could have been thirty six hours longer. It didn’t feel too short though, and it would be great if its brevity would influence more people to consider structural knowledge over ideologies. Thank you for the excellent book, Viki McCabe!

disappointing

How did this book receive so many good reviews? The subject matter gets an A+. Books like this one, which attempt to understand fractal patterns, predictability in the universe (via the patterns it presents), and the heuristics that keep us from understanding those patterns, are always at the very top of my list. I was extremely excited to read this book but quickly became disappointed when I realized this author was using the most amazing scientific discoveries of the last century to promote what basically amounts to pseudoscience. She continually used anecdotal evidence to support her point. worse than that, her arguments -- from chapter one onward-- are logically inconsistent.