Like the Zen Buddhist riddle pondering the imponderable - the sound of a single hand clapping - One Hand Clapping asks the seemingly impossible question of how the human mind came to exist within physical reality. In search of this answer, Kukushkin takes readers on a billion-year journey to the roots of “nature’s ideas” which define a human being, from breathing and moving to wanting and liking.
Using gleaming analysis and cutting-edge science alongside doodles from the author, this elegant and absorbing book reaches deep into our oceanic past to show how the evolution of the most basic features of cells and molecules at the dawn of life on Earth ultimately led to the formation our own minds. It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the major event in the life of our ancestors over the last eon was the transformation into worms. One Hand Clapping is the story of humans and our inner worlds, spanning the entire journey from inorganic molecules to the emergence of language - a journey as epic as myth, but true.
Like the Zen Buddhist riddle pondering the imponderable - the sound of a single hand clapping - One Hand Clapping asks the seemingly impossible question of how the human mind came to exist within physical reality. In search of this answer, Kukushkin takes readers on a billion-year journey to the roots of “nature’s ideas” which define a human being, from breathing and moving to wanting and liking. Using gleaming analysis and cutting-edge science alongside doodles from the author, this elegant and absorbing book reaches deep into our oceanic past to show how the evolution of the most basic features of cells and molecules at the dawn of life on Earth ultimately led to the formation our own minds. It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the major event in the life of our ancestors over the last eon was the transformation into worms. One Hand Clapping is the story of humans and our inner worlds, spanning the entire journey from inorganic molecules to the emergence of language - a journey as epic as myth, but true.
‘Brilliant, bold and beautifully articulated’ Karl J. Friston, Professor of Neuroscience, University College London?Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin reveals the miracle by which consciousness evolved out of the natural world, from the birth of the cell to the majesty of our modern minds. Science says that you are nothing but a chemical reaction – a collection of atoms and molecules – like rocks, paperclips and everything else in the physical universe. But if that’s so, where is the place in this world for your consciousness? In a word, why does it feel so special to be you?Like the Zen Buddhist riddle pondering the imponderable – the sound of a single hand clapping – this book asks the seemingly unanswerable question of how the human mind came to exist within the material world. In search of an answer, neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin takes readers on a billion-year journey through time from the roots of our existence to the advent of Homo sapiens, reimagining the story of our evolution. The result is an exhilarating book that embeds our consciousness within a single, unified story of life on Earth. A work of ambitious intellectual scope, One Hand Clapping is distinguished as much by its originality as by the breadth of its imaginative reach – drawing from neuroscience, evolution, philosophy and a rich tapestry of cultural references, all brought to life by the author’s own illustrations. Told with the drama and daring of a mythical epic, it reaches deep into our oceanic past to show for the first time how the entire course of Earth’s history, from the earliest non-living particles, ultimately led to the formation of our own minds.
In One Hand Clapping, we journey from life’s beginnings forward through the eons until we arrive at the stupendous capacities of our own minds, here, now. Our journey will proceed in stages which are not simply geological eras, nor successive branches on the evolutionary tree of life, but are rather stages in the slow crystallization of essences, “nature’s ideas”. With time, they become progressively more specific, nesting into each other like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls: being alive, being animal, being human, being a self. As we move forward through these nested boundaries, it will become clear that the human experience is special not because of any one of them, but because of the complete set.
And then, something curious will happen. When we reveal the entire matryoshka — and thus glimpse the human experience from the vantage point of nature — we will see that what makes you and me different from the rest of the world are the very same things that we contribute to its unified, eternal river of essences. What we think separates us from nature, in fact, makes us inseparable from it.
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