I've been writing a book, tentatively called "Mind Out Of Matter" which puts the case for a revived materialist philosophy and sociology, taking in the latest findings of neuroscience and information theory, together with some outside-the-mainstream ideas from philosophers such as Spinoza and Santayana. My goal is to help "legitimise" the emotions as essential, biological and inescapable components of reason - that is, to rescue them from being treated with suspicion by rationalists and fetishised by romantics. The whole work, in two parts, is still under revision, and I'm having a tough time finding a paper publisher given the book's uncategorizable nature. I've therefore decided to release the earlier part, which covers some new ideas about information theory and neurophyisiology, as a separate work via the web, free of charge, just to get the ideas out there. You can download this abridged work, called "Sampling Reality" under a Creative Commons licence, from Scribd here.
