A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination

This is an excellent review of consciousness from the neurobiological point of view. Consciousness has been an interesting topic for study not only for neurobiologists but also for philosophers and physicists. Although consciousness is a highly debated topic because of its close interaction with matter in space and time, it is certainly least understood subject as it is at the borderline of physics, philosophy and neurobiology. Some quantum physicists argue that it is a universal field like space, time or energy, but consciousness does not figure in equations or any mathematical calculations. Secondly consciousness is found only in living beings and not in inanimate objects: Particularly animals that have brain and central nervous system. The book is summarized as follows:Three working assumptions are made as methodological platform; 1) the physics assumption; conventional physical processes are required to explain consciousness or the conscious experience, 2) the evolutionary assumption; consciousness is evolved by natural selection in the animal systems, and 3) qualia assumption; the subjective, qualitative aspects of consciousness, being private, cannot be communicated directly through a scientific theory. The authors do not attempt to explain many forms of perception, imagery, thought, emo¬tion, mood, attention, will, or self-consciousness. Instead, they concentrate on certain fundamental properties of consciousness that are shared by every conscious states, such as the unity of a conscious state experienced as a whole and cannot be subdivided into independent components, and the infor¬mativeness, i.e., where a conscious state is selected from a repertoire of billions of possible conscious states, each with different behavioral consequences within a fraction of a second. The basic assumption in all this is that consciousness is a process that is private, selective, and continually changing. It is strictly a process, and not belonging to a particular section of brain. This means that consciousness is associated with biological structures that produce dynamic processes. Thus both morphology and consciousness are the products of evolutionary selection (natural selection). This assumption about the evolutionary origin of consciousness avoids fruitless efforts to relate consciousness to computer logic or the effect of quantum gravity on neurons or a pure quantum physical process while diminishing the role of brain.Neural substrates of consciousness involve large populations of neurons and no single area of brain is responsible for conscious experience. As the task to be learned is practiced and its performance becomes more and more mechanical then the learning task fades from the memory and the regions for this task becomes smaller. Conscious experience is associated with changes of activity patterns occurring simultaneously in many regions of brain (i.e., activation and inactivation of a population of neurons). It is not how many neurons are active but it is the distribution of groups of neurons that can engage in strong and rapid re-entrant interactions. Further more, the activity patterns of rapidly interacting groups must be constantly changing and sufficiently differentiated from each other: This is called Dynamic Core Hypothesis. Consciousness is an extraordinarily differentiated. At any given time, we experience a particular conscious state selected out of billions of possible states, each of which can lead to different behavioral consequences. The occurrence of a particular conscious state is therefore highly informative in the specific sense that information is the reduction of uncertainty among a number of alternatives. If this is the case the neural processes underlying the conscious experience must also be highly differentiated and informative.Memory is a central brain mechanism that leads to consciousness. Memory does not store inscription or information in any format. In higher organisms it is an act of creation for every act of perception, and every act of memory is an act of imagination. The primary consciousness has the ability to construct an integrated mental scene in the present that does not require language or true sense of self. The integrated neural scene depends on both perceptual categorization of incoming sensor stimuli (the present) and its interaction with categorical memories (the past). The neural mechanisms distinguish primary consciousness and higher order consciousness. Primary consciousness is found in human as well as some higher order animals, but these lack language, analytical skill, and limited symbolic (semantic) capabilities. Still they are capable of constructing a mental scene. The higher-order consciousness found in humans has semantic capability and linguistic capability in most advanced form which provides a sense of self and the ability to construct past and future. The author' main contention is that the consciousness arose from evolutionary innovations in the morphology of the brain and body. The mind arises from the body and its development. Much of the discussion by the authors are theoretical in nature and needs extensive experimental evidences to support this theory.1.  Brain And Being: At The Boundary Between Science, Philosophy, Language, And Arts (Advances in Consciousness Research) 2.  Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge Classics) 3.  The Holographic Universe 4.  Languages of the Brain: Experimental Paradoxes and Principles in Neuropsychology

This brilliant scientist presents much brain information in a clear, concise, accessible way for the non-scientist reader. Highly recommend for the discerning reader. Casts light on just what is meant by consciousness...and how far scientists have gotten with solving this puzzle.

Densely written and packed with technical terms, the book is not an easy read. It also does not excel in making difficult ideas clear and easy to grasp. That said, the book offers an interesting take on how brains work to produce consciousness while reserving the more philosophic issues (which happen to hold more interest for me) to the end. The philosophic questions hinge on how we should think about consciousness (the most accurate way of conceiving of it) and the implications of this for actual scientific research.The bulk of the book is taken up with laying out a theory of how the various parts of the brain work together to produce the features we recognize as consciousness and this may well be the most difficult part for those not familiar with the terminology or some of the underlying science. Only at the end do the authors make explicit the conceptual underpinnings of their research program and basic thesis about how the brain makes the mind.For those unfamiliar with the philosophical disputes, there have been ongoing debates over whether mind is ontologically prior to matter or is co-equal with it or is merely a function of matter. Edelman and Tononi come down firmly on the side of matter being primary and in so doing take their stand firmly in the modern scientific realist camp (though they explain their position later in the book as being one of "qualified realism" because they do not accept that we have direct access to the world as it is). In this they share a view of consciousness with other scientifically minded philosophers including Daniel Dennett ( Consciousness Explained ) and John Searle of "Chinese Room Argument" fame ( Minds, Brains and Science (1984 Reith Lectures) ; Mind, Language, and Society : Philosophy in the Real World ; The  The Mystery of Consciousness , etc.)Edelmen and Tononi go further to conclude that minds must be "embodied" (not only in brains but in the physical linkages that tie brains to the world around them, which is to say they require full bodies or equivalents a la a philosopher like Jerry Fodor); more, like both Dennett and Searle they recognize that brains are the sole seat of consciousness (contra some in the philosophical camp like the so-called panpsychists who theorize that consciousness may be ubiquitous in the universe having a presence at all levels and in all corners of the physical world).Like Dennett, too, but not apparently like Searle (though Searle is very often unclear on this), the authors here see consciousness as an amalgam or array of very distinct processes grading up the scale, from lower levels to higher, and recognize what they call a primary consciousness (one set of processes/functionalities found in lower level animals) and higher order consciousness (recognizable in us and riding on the primary consciousness). They spend a good deal of this book theorizing on which parts of the brain support which functions and by showing how some functions are composites of others (explaining why they say consciousness is not seated in any particular part of the brain but across the broad area of the brain in its entirety).However unlike Dennett, but like Searle, they hold that computers are NOT good candidates for replicating what brains do vis a vis producing consciousness. This is an important distinction because it puts them at odds with computationalists who see in Artificial Intelligence research the key to understanding how brains work. In a nutshell, the authors' argument appears to hinge on a distinction they draw between the organizing principle they term "selection" and logic. It goes something like this:1) Everything at bottom is physical (in the broad, not the 19th century, sense) and, though we may not know (and may never know) all the laws of physics, whatever those laws are control and drive all things that happen in the universe.2) Within the physical universe various self-contained, self-sustaining and self-propagating systems take form (i.e., life) and these systems persist through a process of selection (as in "natural selection") which is to say that, by trial and error, what works survives and what doesn't fades.3) The key factor in selection is the capacity to retain, that is, memory. By "memory" they don't mean our kind, of course, but just a retention capability that takes many forms and is fairly mechanical at its most basic level (as in the way antibodies in the blood "learn" and retain the capacity to affix themselves to invading entities and thereby neutralize them).4) As systems evolve through the selection process, their capacities and their parts (including brains in higher form systems like us) become increasingly more capable of responding to the surrounding environment thanks to the ongoing selection in which they are constantly engaged.5) At a certain point some of these systems develop things like brains and some of the brains develop primary consciousness and some with primary consciousness become increasingly more sophisticated, developing the capacity for self-awareness, intentionality, reasoning, etc., i.e., higher consciousness. All these developments are refinements of the core memory capacity which makes selection work as a driving principle throughout the range of all self-sustaining, self-propagating systems. Thus consciousness is just increasingly refined memory (because the entity with this capacity, or capacities, can do more with what is retained and can retain more, to boot).6) Higher level consciousness in brains yields an array of new features and capacities including language, mathematics, art, logic and, as the authors add, things like the madness of crowds (think Charles MacKay here  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds ). These added capacities operate in a kind of feedback mode with the consciousnesses that create and use them to further amplify the capacities of the relevant consciousnesses.7) Since computers are just instantiated logic, logic in action, they are functions of higher order consciousness (because logic comes from consciousness and does not pre-exist, or co-exist with, it).8) Insofar as computers are logic-driven rather than selection-driven, they are totally different from brains.9) Therefore it makes no sense to suppose they can do what brains can do vis a vis things like producing consciousness.Why not? Because brains, say the authors, don't contain programmed instructions and therefore don't operate computationally. They do run processes which look superficially similar to what computers do (both include electrical firings in various patterns, produced by the physical platform), but their underlying mechanism, their underlying modus operandi, is selectional not logical. The reason this is important is that selection is indeterminate while logic is determinate.Selection happens when some physical system, or aspect of such a system, picks up and retains a change that improves its performance in its environment. There is no pre-determined plan or instruction at work in selection while logic is about order according to set rules and computation is logic driven.Yet, their conclusion concerning the noncandidacy of computers as synthetic brains based on this is open to some serious doubt:1) Whatever it is, logic seems to be as firmly grounded in the physical facts of the world as selection and, indeed, one can describe what happens at the rawest physical level as informational transfer, with a logic component, too. (That is, the distinction between selection and logic they are trying to draw may be more arbitrary than real.) Another way of seeing this: A logical rule like Identity, "A=A", is not just a prescriptive (when THIS is the case, then THIS is the case). It is also expressive of a fundamental physical fact in the universe, i.e., that it is inconceivable that a thing is ever other than itself. Thus one could say "A=A" just expresses the fact "A". As an expression of the physical universe it is no different than selection, itself an aspect of the physical universe.But let's assume that there is a real distinction to be made here:2) It hinges, the authors tell us, on the notion that selection is indeterminate whereas logic is determinate. Now this partly reflects the conflation of logic as a system of explanation (the study of the rules for accomplishing certain verbal or other kinds of tasks) with logic as a system of instructions in a computer program. Certainly a program IS logically based but what makes it determinate is not that fact but that it is designed to be, i.e., the logic is used to achieve a determined purpose. But massively parallel computation (as proposed by Dennett in his model for replicating consciousness) introduces indeterminacy by adding the possibility of real time interaction between parallel processors. The more processors, the more real time interactions. So if brains are structured on an indeterminacy model a la the organizing principle of selection, it is conceivable that sufficient indeterminacy is achievable on computers, too.3) Which leads to the most important point. If, as Edelman and Tononi maintain, consciousness (the array of disparate features we recognize as that) is (as Dennett would have it) a process-based system at bottom, then the issue does not hinge on the platform, necessarily, but on the processes, i.e., on whether they can perform the requisite functions in the requisite way. That is, there is nothing in this view of consciousness that necessarily even requires a particular method of generating the needed processes at all. What matters is whether the features we recognize as constituting what we mean by "consciousness" can be replicated in the system in question, not what the system is made of.On balance this is a good and useful book but its philosophical conclusion, at least with regard to the viability of the computational model is at least suspect. On the other hand the science looks to be pretty good vis a vis the way brains might actually work.SWM

I've come to this book as someone who has been reading about consciousness and the mind-body problem since encountering Descartes and Locke in his university days. Hi-lights along the way have been Dennett's  Consciousness Explained (Penguin Science)  (not) and Chalmers'  The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind Series) . After reading several recent philosophy titles, including Kim's  The Philosophy of Mind (Dimensions of Philosophy) , I was getting the strong impression that the Philosopher's were getting bogged down, with no real progress to show for quite some time now.Edelman and Tononi are writing from the leading edge of neuroanatomy, and present a fascinating and extremely readable account of the architecture of the human brain and indeed monkey and cat brains, which are now being mapped out in very great detail. For this account alone the book gets its five stars. The bulk of the book then builds on this to present a theory of what consciousness, considered as a process, is from a neurological perspective. In brief, the brains of higher mammals who enjoy primary consciousness, that is the conscious experience of their sensory modalities and a range of emotional states, are mostly made up of the cortex and the thalamus. These areas implement hundreds or thousands of tiny modules, all with very specific functions like, identifying colours and lines, orientations and so on. If we now imagine there to be a cloud of such modules and then imagine that each module is connected by a mesh of fibres to some, possibly many of the other modules, we have the essence of the model. It is evidently the case then that when we are awake or dreaming in REM sleep, i.e. experiencing consciousness, the modules are all working away at their allotted tasks, but there is also a vast amount of bi-directional traffic on their mesh of interconnections. However, when we are in deep NREM sleep, or in seizures such as epilepsy, where consciousness is absent, then the modules are all still active but the traffic on the interconnections is absent. The authors are saying then that whatever consciousness is, it is the traffic on these interconnections that distinguishes conscious from unconscious mental states in the brain's physical operation. The system defined by the model operates such that no overall process is in charge but behaviour emerges from the interaction between the dumb modules according to rules not yet understood.The authors work this model and a lot of additional detail up into a theory which they call they Dynamic Core Hypothesis, the first big result of which is that consciousness cannot be identified with particular neurones, types of neurones or areas of the brain. Consciousness arises from the constantly shifting pattern of activation between the many modules along what they call the re-entrant connections between them. When the pattern switches off, or slows down below a certain rate, then so does consciousness. This to me was all fresh knowledge and magnificent stuff.The latter part of the book includes speculations on the evolution of consciousness, including what they call the secondary or higher consciousness which only humans enjoy. This would plausibly seem to have arisen first with language as external signalling to peers, followed by the internalisation of language, a talking to oneself that eventually evolves into thought. This in turn gives rise eventually to the discovery or invention of logic and mathematics. They stress that there was no 'logic', in the formal sense, going on anywhere in the universe until thought arose. This is part of their strongly held position that the brain IS NOT a computer.Here we arrive at the nub of the book. Part of the theory they present is the Theory of Neural Group Selection (TNGS) which is based on observations of the development, over time, of axons and dendrites down in the neurones in response to patterns of stimuli. While TNGS presents the way neurones operate and what the brain needs to be doing as a whole, it doesn't really have much to say about how the changes going on in the neurones are doing what they need to do. Eventually in the book we are at a stage where they declare that the brain is not a computer in the strict sense of not being a Turing machine, but is rather a Selectional system. They make much of the contrast between Turing machines (based on logic) and Selectional systems. However, and I admit I may have missed something here, the workings of Selectional systems, as presented, are not described clearly enough to say whether what they do could or could not be carried out by a Turing machine. To claim that any information processing system IS NOT a Turing machine, I would have thought, requires a formal mathematical description and proof. What does the Selectional system do that a Turing machine cannot? Can a Selectional system tackle classes of problem that are non-computable by Turing machines? Such questions seem to be unanswered.Nonetheless a fascinating read. The first seventy pages or so were very easy going but once we got into the nitty-gritty it became a demanding book, requiring the kind of slow methodical approach that a proper philosophy text demands. I have seen Edelman criticised that his style includes a lot of repetition of terms and definitions. I actually think that this is appropriate because he is trying to be as unambiguous as possible about concepts that are notoriously slippery.A very fine book and it will be a while before I go back to reading a Philosophy of Mind text. Hopefully, when I do the philosophers will have found something new to say. Consciousness Explained (Penguin Science)The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind Series)The Philosophy of Mind (Dimensions of Philosophy)

This is one of the rare books explaining consciousness without entering in metaphysical considerations. The authors describe the neuronal mechanisms taking place in the brain that supports consciousness. These mechanisms cannot be attributed to a particular area of the brain but the interplay of its many components. Consciousness does not arise in the brain alone without the input from the outside world. The dualist approach of Descartes expressed in the Cogito Ergo Sum (Je pense therefore je suis) was found insufficient to justify the existence of the self. The emergence of language, unique to Homo sapiens or its predecessors, can be better understood in the evolutionary context. The authors posit that it is selection – natural and somatic that gave rise to language and to metaphor and it is selection, not logic, which underlines pattern recognition and thinking in metaphorical terms, enhanced by social interactions. The study of the brain is still a work in process and the authors recognize that even with the progress of neuroscience, the formation of idea still cannot be scientifically explained.I expected that a book dealing with consciousness to be technical. However, this aspect has been reduced by a prologue at the beginning of each chapter to give the reader an understanding of the issue being addressed. It is my opinion that this book will remain seminal for many years.

Very cool book... Very mind expanding. Not a fluffy read, quite technical, so if you are looking for pop psych this isn't it.

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