Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter
More ambitious and more difficult than The Symbolic Species, Incomplete Nature tackles a foundational problem: how do purpose, meaning, and consciousness emerge in a universe of physical processes that have none of these properties? Deacon's key concept is "absential" causation -- the idea that what a system does not do, what is absent, can be constitutive of its nature.
A living cell is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it contains.
The argument builds through thermodynamics, self-organisation, and semiotics toward an account of how intentionality arises from dynamics that are themselves non-intentional.
It is a philosopher's book written by a neuroscientist, and it demands patience, but the payoff is a genuinely novel framework for thinking about emergence.