I’ve co-edited 2 books (vol 1, vol 2 of “Ahead of the Curve”) before, but now am actually writing some. Here’s an update, continuing from:
The first one is a trade book for general audiences telling the story of Bioelectricity, co-written with Oné R. Pagán, my good friend and planarian neuroscientist who has written some other cool popular science books.
One day last January, I went out around sunrise to mark the beginning of the book-writing process and get over the daunting first step of starting something like this. My goal was to gather my energy, set aside mental space from all the complexities of everyday work, and start the journey – to sort of connect with the book in its final form and get into the frame of mind needed to do the ideas justice and bring it into the world. I wasn’t yet as obsessed with bowtie architectures as I am nowadays, but I was already thinking of my writing process as the thin middle node between the rich material (which has been rattling around my mind for decades) and the impacts the book and the information might have. As the sun came up, and I was visualizing how the information would flow into the digital pages, this is what I saw in the sky (no editing, no AI – that’s what it actually looked like):
I was pretty stunned and watched the two holes in the sky change colors until they closed back up. It seemed a good omen for starting to write. As of last week, it has been finished and submitted to the publisher! Now, their editing phase begins, though I have no idea how long it will take.
While it’s being reviewed, I’ve started the next one, with a close collaborator (more details once it’s officially started).
After that, if circumstances cooperate, I’ve got 2 more planned:
One will be my major opus, synthesizing new conceptual frameworks, computational models, and experimental results toward a theory of the origin and transformation of minds. It will establish the philosophical basis for a continuum view of diverse intelligence and the agential material of life, and explore its relationship to evolution, computation, teleology, polycomputing, and much more.
The one after that will address issues of Platonic space, consciousness, death/life transitions, and a lot of speculative ideas I don’t talk about curently (being focused on things that interface with testable experimental approaches).
In the meantime, there are a few other things working their way through the process, including fiction (a set of stories based on our research in collaboration with a writer), a kids’ book (about humans, for novel cyborgs coming into our world, and about cyborgs and diverse intelligences, for the humans).
Stay tuned!
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