About the book
Robert Nozick, in the final book he published before he died in 2002, rethinks truth, necessity, objectivity, ethics, contingency and consciousness in light of work in cognitive neuroscience, economics, physics and evolutionary biology. He treats truth as relative to space and time, though not socially relative among humans, and holds that objective facts are those invariant under specified transformations. Necessity shrinks in his account: he denies any important metaphysical necessities and develops the idea of degrees of contingency. Consciousness comes in gradations that let action fit the world better. Ethics, he argues, began as cooperation for mutual benefit, with evolution giving humans a normative module for learning and following norms. The 2001 book is arranged in multi-chapter sections.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb praised it for showing, at a time when science has taken over much of philosophy's ground, that someone still needs to specialize in truth, its structure and its invariance.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Flaneur)
Philosophy has been under severe challenge from science, literally eating up its provinces: philosophy of mind went to neuroscience; philosophy of language to Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science,etc. This book shows that there is a need for someone to just specialize in the TRUTH, its scructure, its accessibility, its INVARIANCE.
Aside from the purely philosophical answers that scientists were grappling with, the book is like a manual for a new regimen in philosophy. It reviews everything from epistemology to the logic of contingency, with insights here and there about such topics as the observer biases (about computing probabilities when our existence has been linked to a particular realization of the process).
I am not a philosopher but a probabilist; I found that this book just spoke to me. It certainly rid me of my prejudice against modern philosophers.
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