I occasionally get asked “When are you going to write a book?”. This is something I’ve thought about a lot. On the one hand, I often feel like my lab could make more practical impact in biomedicine and basic science if I spent that time doing research, instead of writing a book. I watched my dad write a meticulously-researched book, it was amazing but took years of hard work. Given that working time cannot be stretched indefinitely, and if I focus on a book, many other things will have to drop off. Is it worth it? Some have said yes, as it might inspire others; but I can’t quite shake the feeling that I should be doing my best to do the key things myself, now, instead of hoping someone else will read, get inspired, and someday do them. On the other hand, reading people’s attempts to pull a picture of the world together was a joy of my childhood (which continues to this day, in many ways), and was hugely influential in my academic direction. Here are some of those. So I do also feel that I do need to get down, in book form, some of the ideas I’ve been incubating for a long time now. They are kind of reaching the ready point and it some sense it may not be up to me – some things are kind of irresistible when they are ready to come out.
At this point, my plan is the following. Assuming there will be time and opportunity to get them out, I have 3 books in my head currently.
The first is the story of Bioelectricity. This one going to come out in the next year because I already have a contract for it with Norton publishing. I’m co-writing it with Oné R. Pagán, my good friend and planarian neuroscientist who has written a number of great popular science books. It’s going to be a trade book for a general science-interested audience. The provisional title is “From Spark to Form” and it should be out at end of 2024.
The second book is going to be most likely with an academic press because I want to include a lot of color illustrations, which trade publishers don’t allow (except for the remarkable book by Ginsburg and Jablonka, so maybe there’s hope with MIT Press). It will be the enlarged version of my TAME framework paper, pulling together evolutionary, computational, and developmental perspectives on the Self, basal cognition, and morphogenesis as collective intelligence. It will deal with the origin and scaling of embodied minds, and basically be the culmination of my work over the last decade trying to connect questions of the self-construction of bodies with the self-construction of minds. It’s very likely that it will be developed back to back with the book of Richard Watson, my very close collaborator with whom a lot of new ideas on the topic of diverse intelligence have been worked out.
The third book will contain some forward-looking speculations beyond what our existing data can support. It will cover philosophical aspects of questions of materialism, consciousness, the augmentation of the body and mind, ethical synthbiosis with novel life forms, and the future of humans and beyond (expanding on these topics).
In the meantime, I will continue to push forward the primary papers from our lab. I did have a series of conceptual follow-ups planned, continuing from this plan:
In fact I’ve started a number of big papers in addition to TAME 2.0, including “Booting up the Self” and ones on memory, Platonic Space, and the plasticity of problem-solving machines evolution creates. But it’s not clear to me that working hard to “find a home” for long, conceptual papers in traditional journals (which is not easy), then fighting editors and reviewers over what I want to say and being forced to limit length and references, only to have to pay thousands of $ in page charges, is worth it anymore. I may just save this material for the books, and excerpting some of it on this site as it comes out. We’ll see.
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