The standalone companion to Vision: From Photon to Mind, this essay picks up the visual signal at the threshold where the retina ends and the brain begins — the lamina cribrosa, the "Stargate" — and follows the central visual pathway station by station: the optic nerve and chiasm, where two eye-centred images are re-sorted into halves of a world; the lateral geniculate nucleus, a "relay" that...
Must life be made of anything at all? Where its companion volume The Other Chemistry asked whether life could be built on a different chemistry — silicon rather than carbon — this sister essay climbs one rung higher and asks whether life must be chemistry, or matter, in the first place. It descends a ladder of abstraction through three candidates for what the living fundamentally is: matter...