Quantums of Cognition

We experience the mind as an unbroken stream, a single, indivisible ‘self.’ What if that is an optical illusion? Seen up close, the mind turns out to be made of parts: a small set of elementary units (object, place, number, agent, intention) whose combination is enough to build thoughts, cultures, and institutions. This book follows these grains of cognition first in us, then in minds born on other shores of evolution: the octopus that thinks with its arms, the ant colony with no center, the crow with no mammalian cortex, the orca that hands down a culture without writing, and on to the artificial minds now assembling outside any flesh. A work of popular science that does not profane the mystery of the mind: it reveals its architecture.

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