Overview

A startling investigation of what it means to be human. Human beings know how to make machines. But what kind of machine is a human being? And could we ever make one? In order to answer these questions, other questions get in the way: What is it like to be a human being? What is it like to be some other kind of animal? What is reality? What is consciousness? Is there a God? What is love? Why live? The questions proliferate. But all these questions can be viewed as facets of a single question: What is science? In ‘How To Make a Human Being’ Christopher Potter shows how, at every scale of description, human beings escape the net of scientific reductionism. What it is to be human can be glimpsed in the details: in the opening of a window, in a shared joke. But cannot be caught by any reductive scientific description.

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9780007447817

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Reviews

'A sort of commonplace book full of paradox and conflicting ideas, shocking facts and redemptive anecdotes, turbulent with two or three millennia of human thought ... The source material is wonderfully diverse ... ['How To Make A Human Being'] has great fun bringing the work of canonical writers together with a loose philosophical examination of some of the big existential questions ... Very enjoyable.' Gavin Francis, Guardian 'Well-travelled imaginations will enjoy a jaunt with fiery polymath Christopher Potter; How to Make a Human Being is a quirky investigation into our deepest nature, and calls on evidence from PG Wodehouse and Marcel Proust, Christopher Robin and Francis Crick, the Book of Revelation and the Worm Breeder's Gazette.' Hilary Mantel, Guardian 'Potter now focuses inward, turning from physics to neuroscience, biology and philosophy. He asks not where are we? , but who are we? - and finds that science does not have half the answers it thinks. Still, science's best efforts, as gathered here, feel pretty rich and wonderful ... A clever, subtle, enjoyable book. If we are a parliament of selves, this book is a parliament of explanations - and a deeply English one, at that, full of idiosyncrasy and resistance to easy answers.' James McConnachie, Sunday Times 'A quirky and effective way of managing material that has engaged and baffled the greatest minds sine antiquity' New Statesman 'Potter illuminates the human in all its manifestations from single cell to creator of culture ... The scattershot narrative somehow coalesces into a brilliant whole and compelling case for anti-reductionism' Nature Magazine Praise for 'You Are Here': 'One of the most entertaining and thoughtful pop-science books to be published for years' Sunday Times 'A wonderful, miraculous book ...The whole universe bottled for your delight' Stephen Fry 'One of the best popular science books I have ever read' Guardian

Author Information

Christopher Potter was publisher and managing director at the independent publishing house Fourth Estate. He is the author of You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe and How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence.

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