Liflock

Great summary of ice ages

Revisado: 02-19-25

Good, factual description of ice ages. However, the narrator sounded like he was not paying attention to what he was reading, mispronouncing and making pauses at the wrong places.

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Update on current research

Revisado: 01-17-25

Great update on the latest research on the origin of life and the search for extraterrestrial life. I found it curious that they criticize the hydrothermal-vent hypothesis so much - almost ridiculing it — but then do not discuss any alternative hypotheses for the origin of metabolism at all.

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Rambling and unscientific

Revisado: 10-12-23

The author raises a very interesting question at the outset: Assuming that consciousness and sentience serve an evolutionary advantage, there must be some external manifestations of sentience that natural selection can act on. What are those manifestations and can they be detected in animals?

I hoped that the book would unpack and make sense of this question empirically. But unfortunately, the book falls into a rambling, circuitous narrative and does not manage to get to the point. The author uses old-fashioned armchair reasoning to address complex neuroscientific questions and too readily deflects alternative hypotheses and criticisms.

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Interesting but probably wouldn’t convert someone who never thought about the topic

Revisado: 08-21-20

Very fascinating subject, and I think all points raised by the author are valid. I think the book probably doesn’t provide enough background information about neuroscience for readers who don’t know much about the brain. Therefore, perhaps his book won’t convince people who never even thought to question free will.

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Fascinating but unstructured and dissatisfying

Revisado: 08-13-20

The book deals with a fascinating topic! Still, I felt that the book was quite unstructured. Hoffman jumps back and forth between topics as diverse as evolution, sensory perception and quantum mechanics, attacking our interpretation of reality. This is fascinating! But I found myself constantly asking, what exactly is it that he’s attacking — Our perceptions of reality? Or the very notion of reality itself? And until the very last chapter, he gives almost no clue about what he proposes to put in place of our current notion of reality. Not until the very end, when he (in my opinion) pulls a big "deus ex machina" and lays out a pseudoscientific and highly speculative theory that the universe is built out of units of consciousness, which did not at all sound plausible to me. In summary, the book raises a highly interesting question (‘What is reality?’) but in my view does not provide a plausible answer to this question.

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