Book Reviewed: The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik

Do we create physical reality? The discussion of consciousness and free will involves neuroscience, physics, philosophy, history, and mathematics. It is huge in scope and reaches the core of physical reality itself. This is not a neuroscience book per se but a philosophical one that combines all the relevant fields. Consciousness hinges on two characteristics: the extrinsic world that operates on the laws of physics, and the intrinsic world of life that is related to feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The presumption is that in this world cognition exists and evolves in mobile living beings in parallel with the evolution of life, and the cosmos we observe is real. It is hard to put the two perspectives together in a science of consciousness. Could these two perspectives be reconciled, or whether science will remain incomplete. This is the point at which where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet, that is ontology (what exists for one to know about) and epistemology (how knowledge is created and what is possible to know) becomes meaningful. When they begin to merge and breakdown in their distinctions, something dimensionless and unnamable is formed. This creates a structure that we call "experience” and the standard correlational approach of certain behavior with a part of brain becomes irrelevant. What makes someone or something conscious is described by the integrated information theory (IIT), and consciousness has a physical basis which can be mathematically measured. IIT proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness. Having free will means being an agent that is causally emergent at the relevant level of description for whom recent internal states are causally more relevant than distant past states and they are computationally irreducible. The logical fatalism is a philosophical and abstract argument against free will because everything is predetermined in this world. The opposite is a universe where the future is not dependent on the past, not even randomly, as there is no probability distribution drawn from it, and therefore this looks unappealing. In either case, one must guess how recent and past states play a role in the emergence of free will. The author’s use of bombastic phrases and technical jargon make reading a little challenging, but nevertheless he makes a valiant effort to address issues. My only gripe is that this is an open-ended book that does not draw any conclusions about the existence or nonexistence of free-will.

Book Reviewed: What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

The world of a mysterious bird This book explores the life of owls, the enigmatic birds with their remarkable anatomy, biology, and behavior. Their hunting skills, stealth, and sensory prowess distinguish them from all other birds. Their flight is quiet, and hunting skills are unique. Owls exist on every continent except Antarctica, and in every form one can imagine. Some owls migrate but not in a predictable pattern. Owls eat everything from insects to possums, rabbits, and young deer. The author discusses how owls communicate, court, mate, and raise their young. The book is descriptive, but the discussions are not stimulating. Owls’ flexible necks help them to compensate for immobile, tube-like eyes. Unlike humans, birds can’t move their eyes in their sockets to look around. This is a worthwhile sacrifice for binocular vision, which helps owls to boost their depth of perception. Many species also have ears located at different heights on each side of the head allowing them to find the location of a prey. There is the housekeeping habit of eastern screech owls, which “bring live blind snakes to their nestlings, not just for food, but perhaps to keep their nests tidy and sanitary. The small snakes live alongside the young owlets, eating parasites, insect larvae and other bothersome houseguests. The nestlings with live-in blind snakes are more likely to survive and grow fifty per cent faster than broods without snakes. This is an excellent adaptation to an efficient pest control and protecting the chicks. Burrowing Owls live in underground burrows, sometimes alongside prairie dogs, and when threatened, will hiss like a cornered rattlesnake.

Book Reviewed: Our First One Hundred Years: The Ingleside Book Club of Morgantown, 1923–2023 by Beth Reseter

A women’s’ reading circle The Ingleside Book Club was formed by twenty-one women in 1923 in Morgantown, West Virginia that steadily grew in range and now celebrating their 100th anniversary. This is a great story of women who enjoyed literature, home economics, poetry, opera, music, and social issues. Some of the earliest book clubs in the United States were Bible study groups, which became women's reading circles that focused on education, self-improvement, and friendship. The first two women's clubs in West Virginia that are now extinct were formed in 1892. The early guest speakers at the Ingleside book club spoke about topics such as, "West Virginia Birds," and "Religious Education in the Home." They also made musical presentations, gave book reviews, discussed poetry, and learned about opera. In 1929 the book club members participated in two debates: abolishing the capital punishment, and abolishing Christmas celebrations. Who would have thought women could be so progressive in a rural state like West Virgina? During the 1930s, some program topics included astronomy, comparative religions, governments of nations, and the potential of atomic energy. Some members wanted to discuss the WWII, but they lacked knowledge about the war in Europe. Some of the books exchanged by members included Bess Streeter Aldrich's bestsellers A Lantern in Her Hand and A White Bird Flying; Obscure Destinies by Willa Cather; The Good Earth by West Virginia native Pearl Buck; White Fang by Jack London; and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. There are numerous photographs of the Ingleside book club members of the past and almost all of them are white. It partly reflects the institutional racism that existed among women’s clubs that operated at the total exclusion of native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans. Morgantown is the home of West Virginia University, and the book club could have been a little more inclusive. On a positive note, the Ingleside members successfully participated in a community-wide effort to bring African American poet Langston Hughes and speak to them at the book club in 1944. He was a social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and one of the innovators of the literary art called jazz poetry. He was well known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

Book Reviewed: The Hidden Life of Ice: Dispatches from a Disappearing World by Marco Tedesco and Alberto Flores d'Arcais

The planet in transition This is a personal reflection of the arctic explorer Marco Tedesco and his tribute to Greenland, an inspiring place that is affected by the environment. This is not so much about the impact of the climate but an exploration of the beauty of Greenland formed largely by ice. Greenland is a vista of whiteness interrupted only by scattered ponds of azure-colored melt water. 90 percent of the land is covered by ice sheet that is the largest outside Antarctica. Some of the green color is due to the large number of icebergs that are calved as the result of glacier retreat and ice cap melting. The bottom of the ice sheet was formed 130,000 years ago, before the start of the last ice age. In places like Canada, Scandinavia, New England, and the upper Midwest, the ice melted away at about 10,000 years ago. In Greenland, it remained and in addition, thousands of years of snowfalls, year after year, never melting in the summer, becoming buried under yet more layers of snow. The moulin, the technical name for the hole in the ice through which the lake has vanished is another geological phenomenon in this part of the world. Underneath ice sheets there are numerous highly efficient drainage system that empties into the sea and raises sea levels. The water in the underground tunnels flows and change direction and size constantly. Cryoconite holes are another interesting feature of ice sheets that have microbial oases within the extreme environment of a glacier's surface ice. These holes form when sediment is blown onto the ice and is heated by solar energy, causing it to melt into the glacier's surface. This has micro animals like tardigrades, the water bears or moss piglets. Their genome contains more extraneous DNA than any other animal species known. To put it simply, instead of inheriting its' genes from its ancestors, part of the tardigrade's genetic makeup may come from plants, bacteria, and fungi!. There is also a different kind of life that depends on a process known as bacterial chemosynthesis. Unlike photosynthesis, it exploits the energy generated in chemical reactions to produce organic substances. These creatures are completely autonomous and self-sufficient, living their peaceful existence in complete isolation. The environmental factors in these landscapes of Arctic and Antarctic territories are considered as the closest to what life would be like on other planets like Mars, and icy moons like Europa, a satellite of Jupiter. The author presents an interesting description of how sea levels rise differently in different parts of this planet when Greenland ice melts. The author wrote a similar book about Greenland in 2022 entitled “Ice: Tales from a Disappearing World,” and a related review article in Guardian Newspaper in 2020. This is a short book of 153 pages which read flawlessly.