Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D.

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D., M.P.P. is a generalist enjoying serious middle-age spread as a professor of social and life sciences. In the past six years he taught over 200,000 college/student hours and wrote over 250 articles(www.mindreadersdictionary.com) with a focus on how to transfer as efficiently as possible the introspective intelligence and doubt management skills that constrain (for personal, social, and political benefit) natural human small-mindedness.

Jeremy does pure research as a core member of U.C. Berkeley professor Terrence Deacon's research team (www.teleodynamics.com) aiming to develop a full scientific account of how causality changes with the emergence of life. Physic's and chemistry's causal explanations don't depend on wants, desires, intentions, functions, good fors, bad fors, purposes, information. Life and consciousness's causal explanations inescapably do. Employing insights into the subtle nature of causality gained recently in classical (not quantum) physics, chemistry, complexity, systems and evolutionary theory, the full scientific account appears to be within reach. Deacon has just completed a somewhat technical book for Norton on the subject. Sherman is on sabbatical now writing a highly accessible account.

To Sherman, the applied and pure research are of a piece. His core research interests include the origins and natural history of decision making, doubt, tough judgment calls, and our adaptive mechanisms for dealing with them, including the capacity to uplevel to meta-cognition (thinking about thinking). He is a pragmatic fallibilist, meaning he believes that we strive to do today what worked tomorrow, but since tomorrow is unavailable to provide guidance today we have to guess what will work. For him, moral dilemmas are more fundamental than moral principles. He treats such concepts as niceness, kindness, love, honesty, authenticity as practical questions not permanent answers, for example asking, what is the kinder thing to do here, be honest or nice?
He is particularly interested in the tension between receptivity and certainty, openness when your deciding what to do, closed-ness once you've decided. This is reflected in the concept of Ambigamy which applies as well to all of life as to love relationships--the balance between conviction (romance) and doubt (skepticism) as one tries to fall into grooves but stay out of ruts. To the extent that we can actively navigate our tough judgment calls, it is largely through the unique human capacity for language. We say what we think we need to hear and must seek the right combination of realism and what Sherman calls "Optimal illusion"--encouraging, if inaccurate interpretations. Or to put it another way, we try to get the right mix of liked and likely stories in pursuit of lucrative stories--ones that will pay off in the long run.

Sherman writes romantiskeptical songs He plays bass (upright, electric) and sings in jazz combos several nights a week. Married once with three children (29, 25,19), he is currently single and experiencing the full effects of Ambigamy.

His PT blog is Ambigamy.