The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One

by Riccardo Manzotti

Once we came out of the jungle and found time to think of something besides food, sex, and shelter, we confronted the fundamental what are we? Who are we? Is a person a body, a soul? How do we access the external world if we are nothing but brains encased in bodies?

As neuroscientists map the most detailed aspects of the human brain and its interplay with the rest of the body, they remain baffled by what is essentially our selves. In most of the existing scientific literature, information processing has taken the place of the soul. Yet thus far, no convincing account has been presented of exactly where and how consciousness is stored in our bodies.

In The Spread Mind , Riccardo Manzotti convincingly argues that our bodies do not contain subjective experience. Yet consciousness is real, and, like any other real phenomenon, is physical. Where is it, then? Manzotti's radical hypothesis is that consciousness is one and the same as the physical world surrounding us.

Drawing on Einstein's theories of relativity, evidence about dreams and hallucination, and the geometry of light in perception, and using vivid, real-world examples to illustrate his ideas, Manzotti argues that consciousness is not a ''movie in the head.'' Experience is not in our it is the actual world we move in.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Psychology, Brain

304 pages, Hardcover

Published January 23, 2018

About the author

"Born in Parma, Italy, in 1969, Manzotti received his PhD from the University of Genova in 2001, and is currently a professor of theoretical philosophy at the IULM University (Milan). He has been Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT (Boston).
Manzotti originally specialized in robotics and AI where he started to wonder how can matter have experience of the surrounding world. Eventually he has been a psychologist from 2004 to 2015 and then he has become a full time philosopher."
(From: https://www.riccardomanzotti.com/about/)

Reviews

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Manzotti puts forth a bold and intriguing hypothesis that one’s mental experience is the physical world and not a model or representation of the world. Unfortunately, his book doesn’t make a compelling case for “The Spread Mind” (as he calls it) over its competition. Consciousness is one of those still dim corners of our world that isn’t yet fully understood by anyone, and this has spurred many competing ideas ranging from: a.) it being illusory; b.) it being purely a construct of a complex brain; c.) it hinging on some quantum mechanical action not yet understood; d.) panpsychic (all-pervading consciousness) arguments that may or may not resonate traditional Indian / Eastern conceptions; and e.) this idea that consciousness is identical with the physical world of which one is conscious.

However, for simplicity’s sake, one can contrast Manzotti’s idea with the most widely accepted view offered by science, which is that our brains construct mental models of the world often based on [but not identical to] sensory information they take in. (If my statement isn’t clear, you can check out neuroscientist Anil Seth’s TED Talk on “how our brains hallucinate reality,” which is as diametrically opposed to Manzotti’s hypothesis as one gets – and which, unfortunately for Manzotti, also makes a more cogent argument.)

At first blush, Manzotti’s idea might look appealing. It does, after all, simplify the picture. It eliminates the middle-man of mental models and seemingly solves the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is how to reconcile how the body (wet, physical, objectively observable matter) relates to mind (intangible, subjective, ephemeral thoughts and feelings,) -- if it does. Descartes famously suggested that mind and body were simply two separate things (i.e. dualism), and while that notion has remained popular with homo religiosis it’s all but dead in the world of science. However, there is no one monism that has unambiguously replaced Cartesian dualism. The most popular variant among those who study the brain is that some action in / across neurons creates a series mental imagery, internal monologuing, and emotional sensations that make up our mental experience. The mechanism by which this could happen is still not understood, but it’s an inherently hard problem to peer into because on can’t observe mind states directly and the best tool for studying it – i.e. functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is only a couple decades old (and it’s still looking at brain blood flow and not consciousness, itself.) [I defend that this mechanism isn’t yet explained because one of Manzotti’s points seems to be: neuroscience hasn’t yet explained how neurons produced mental experience so just believe in my hypothesis which offers not even a hint of a mechanism by which it could work.] Manzotti’s is also a physical monist argument, but one that denies the mind is anything more than our experience of the physical world. In other words, there is a spoon, but there’s no mind separate of it.

So, what’s the problem? The reader may have already thought of some challenges confronting Manzotti’s hypothesis, and many of the most common ones the author refutes in the middle portion of the book. Dreams, hallucinations, fantasies, and even memory (certainly false memories, which we know are a wide-spread phenomenon) should utterly destroy the Spread Mind, given the simple definition we’ve given so far. After all, if your mental experience consists entirely of the physical objects that you are exposed to, then how does one explain the doughnut-shaped, sprinkle-breathing dragon that you hallucinated when you did ayahuasca on your trip to Iquitos? OK, you say you’re not such a wild child? Alright, how do you explain your detailed remembrance of putting that water bill into the mailbox, but then finding it under the seat of your car after you got a late notice from the water utility? If our mental experience is identical to the physical objects we experience, mentally experiencing things that don’t exist or events that never happened should never occur.

Manzotti elaborates upon Spread Mind to fend off these crippling attacks to his “theory.” (I use quotes because a theory is usually defined as “a well-substantiated explanation of a phenomenon” and it doesn’t seem to me there’s much in the way of substantiation of this idea.) There are two main prongs to his defense, one of which is unproven but soundly stated and consistent with the thinking of many physicists. The other defense seems to simply be a post-hoc rationalization used to make his “theory” work. Even though these ideas are presented in the opposite order in the book, I’ll deal with the first one I mentioned first because it’s relatively simple to cover. That’s the idea that past and present all exist always and at the same time. That may seem like an out-there idea because we can only ever be in touch with a moment we think of as the present and everything else is memory or fantasy /forecasts. However, it’s not exactly a rogue notion in science, especially once one starts thinking about making sense of Einsteinian Relativity. So, without this idea, if Spread Mind was correct, we could never have that fond memory of Mr. Fluffers, the pet we had in first grade who died decades ago. If our mental experience is Mr. Fluffers and not our mental model of Mr. Fluffers, we can’t have such an experience so long after he passed away. But if all time exist simultaneously, then one can conceive of how such a remembrance could happen. The only thing special about the present in Manzotti’s conception is that it’s the time during which we can interact with objects that also exist in the same time. This may or may not prove to be true. If it proves false it will kill Spread Mind, but if proves true the theory still has many questions to answer to prove itself worthy.

The second, and far less well-supported, defense could actually be divided in two ideas, but I’ll deal with it as a unit for simplicity’s sake. The parts of this defense our: a.) misbelief about our mental experience can happen, somehow [potential mechanisms by which this might occur are not described and that’s a huge problem for the author]; b.) objects we’ve experienced can be reshuffled to make objects appear to be entities that we know do not exist [Again, the mechanism by which this could occur is never explained or even seriously speculated about.] Let me give an example to explain how these defenses work. Say you drop a tab of acid and are having a hallucination of a dragon flying through the sky. Manzotti’s idea is that you are experiencing a reshuffled creature consisting of legs, a serpent, maybe some fire, a backdrop of sky, and you have a misbelief that all these constituent parts are in the present and co-exist together in space and time (as opposed to being disparate objects from varied past times.) This is a very convenient idea for Manzotti’s “theory” but it’s not really clear why we should buy it. In the competing notion that a mental model is built, one can imagine how the mind might construct something that doesn’t exist due to neuronal cross-firing or something like that. (The bigger question, in fact, might be why it doesn’t happen more often.) However, if our experience consists of objects that we’ve shared space-time with at some point, how and why should such weirdness occur? If the author made a compelling attempt to explain how this occurrence is reasonable, one might leave the book thinking his “theory” is – in fact -- a theory and give it equal or superior footing to other approaches to consciousness, but as the book mostly offers gratuitous statements telling us to accept this all as a given, it’s not very powerful.

I’d like to get into one crucial example where I think Manzotti’s thinking is flawed in a way that could prove devastating to the Spread Mind. The author admits that an extraordinary hallucination would kill the Spread Mind. He defines an extraordinary hallucination as one consisting of objects that are non-existent in our world. Earlier, I used the example of a dragon which we know doesn’t exist, and we can be reasonably certain never existed. However, Manzotti would say that it’s just a reshuffling of parts like legs and snakes that we do know exist, combined with a misbelief about when these objects exist and that they co-exist in the same time. Manzotti says that there is no evidence that a hallucination that can’t be explained by reshuffling and misbelief ever existed. I have no doubt that if one read accounts of hallucinations; one could come away with that conclusion. However, I think it’s more convincingly explained by the nature of language as a unit of communication (hence necessitating common vocabulary.)

Example: Let’s assume for a minute that I had an extraordinary hallucination, and I decide to document it. I could take one of two approaches. On one hand, I could describe every completely novel element with a new word. I could say I saw a gruzzy-wug which had three separpals and a florgnak and a long and bushy krungleswam. Of course, I’m not communicating at this point because communication requires common vocabulary. Manzotti would likely argue that I’m just reshuffling letters [linguistic objects] to make up non-sense. On the other hand, as soon as I use a common vocabulary and analogy saying such and such is “kind of like a leg, but sort of with a curly-cue spiral and a mouth on top” Manzotti would say, well it’s a reshuffling of a leg and a pig’s tail and a mouth all of which the individual has seen before.

However, an even more devastating oversight is ignoring vast tracks of what most people would consider their mental experience. It’s the penultimate chapter before the book even touches upon emotion, which most would argue is a huge part of mental experience. Throughout most of the book, one is left wondering whether the author thinks of such things as emotion and language as part of consciousness. One imagines Manzotti’s experience of the world is one physical object after the other (mostly red apples with the occasional pink flying elephant – examples he uses ad nauseam) without any conceptual experience. Manzotti does explain that one must revise one’s conception of an object to think in terms of the Spread Mind, and one can see how this might explain language – which has a huge and powerful role in one’s mental experience and which is left unexplored by the book. But while language could arguable be explained as consisting of objects, emotional experience seems hard to fit Manzotti’s hypothesis.

The book consists of nine chapters. It has graphics and bibliography as one would expect of a scholarly work

I think most readers will find this book to be repetitive and frustrating in its lack of explanation. It’s not that it’s speculative; it’s that it just bludgeons the reader with gratuitous assertions that we expect will pay off in at least a hint of how the Spread Mind could work, but it never does. (For example, I greatly enjoyed Max Tegmark’s “Our Mathematical Universe” that speculates that our world is a mathematical structure – not that it can be described mathematically but that it fundamentally is mathematical.) Spread Mind is an interesting idea, but I can’t say I’d recommend the book unless one is really interested in knowing all of the varied lines of thinking about consciousness that exist out there. I must say it was a beneficial read because it made me consider some interesting ideas, but nothing in it swayed my thinking.

[Ben Shibe · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 stars for the writing. 1 Star for repetitively restating points, probably for clarity but often to distraction. 2 stars for failing to address some of the massive questions and objections that the author must know would leap to the reader’s mind.

5 stars for proposing a plausible answer to life, the universe, and everything. 5 stars for having the courage to make strong and probably testable empirical predictions.

One star deduction for leaving me confused and failing to address (in a way my simple mind could understand) the Grand Canyon chasm in the argument, which will probably be intelligible only to people who have read it : “The functional structures of the human brain...provide the necessary causal circumstances ...” for conscious experience/objects to pop into existence. What are the necessary causal circumstances? Why do I experience some physical things that affect me but not others? Why does blind-sight (addressed in the book) affect the brain but not affect it ENOUGH to cause experience?

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rebuttal to philosophy of mind's physicalist-yet-still-dualist standard position that there are mental states & mental images, that phenomenological properties are "in the mind" and that the brain creates experience. Manzotti argues that none of that is the case, that our experience of something red is identical with the physical properties of whatever we perceive as red. The brain's neurons focus and attend and react and reflect the causal effects of the outside world, but do not create or cause anything about our experience of the outside or imagined world.

He takes this causalist position to a few interesting places - an extreme relativism for objects spread through time and perceivers, a "thick" view of time that rejects differences between "now" and "past" for all but pragmatic reasons - and includes a running thread of reasserting the primacy of our experience (that objects are red, that now includes more than an instantaneous slice of time could mean) over scientific categorization of measurable things. And he spends a lot of time tackling the obvious and well-loved counterarguments to "there are no mental images" of illusion and hallucinations (although in part his response is "some of these simply do not exist as imagined by philosophers rather than as empirically attested").

All that said, the writing here needed a lot of tightening up - the argument is clear enough, there's not too much jargon, but the paragraphs are repetitive and meandering.

[Kent Winward · Rating 5 out of 5]

For addressing the mind-body issue straight on and providing an intriguing hypothesis for how consciousness arises, the book deserved the five stars. Was it repetitive? Yes. Does the theory have holes? Of course.

Yet, the theory incorporates the spatial-temporal disparity in all of our conscious experiences, which gives me the strong sense that Manzotti is on to something. It is all too easy to slip into dualist thinking and if nothing else, the theory prevents that slide.

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am pretty sure I haven't understand most of this book, but if it's true what the author says at the beginning: that my experience of the book it is the book itself (or so I understood - and so it is), I found it interesting but extremely complicated.

Sono abbastanza sicura di aver capito solo una piccola parte di questo libro, ma se é vero quello che dice l'autore all'inizio e cioé che la mia esperienza del libro é il libro stesso (o almeno cosí ho capito io - e quindi é cosí), devo ammettere di averlo trovato interessante, ma estremamente complesso.

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

[Peter Herrmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe 2-stars for originality. 1-star for readability (repetitious - as so many of these kinds of books are: the whole argument can probably be reduced to 2 pages). Also, what would have been helpful is an FAQ sort of section. A few obvious questions that jump out, but are not addressed in this book (or, if they were, they were buried in so much verbiage that I fell asleep before finding them)--> if our experiences are really external, then what is the function of the brain? if the 'apple' - his example - embodies our actual experience of it, then why do multiple people experience the same apple differently? This book reminds me of Samuel Johnson's alleged critique of another writer: ' Your work is both brilliant and original; unfortunately the parts that are brilliant are not original and the parts that are original are not brilliant.'

[YHC · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, the author thinks our consciousness is actually physical, such as an apple. The perception of our vision, if corresponds to the object, then it connects to our mind. If not, we called it hallucination.
Maybe illusion, delusion hallucination all composed part of our mind, with the time, the chemistry reacted in our brain, we form different realities.
quite an interesting hypothesis that we still need more experiments and time to prove it works this way.

[Fabrizio Forlani · Rating 2 out of 5]

L'ennesimo libro geniale sulla natura della coscienza di cui si sarebbe fatto volentieri a meno. Oltre a non citare nessun filosofo precedente che ha espresso idee simili e spacciare tutto per farina del proprio sacco, il tenore del libro è una specie di ritornello con variazioni a tema sempre sul solito discorso per cui la coscienza in realtà è esterna e fisica e quindi non serve alcuna descrizione psicologica o neuroscientifica della stessa in quanto la coscienza è fisica ed esiste realmente. Ovviamente nessuna prova. Solo e sempre lo stesso discorso in odore di metafisica su Laura che guarda questa mela rossa. Non sono un grande appassionato di coscienza, anzi, ma questo testo non presenta praticamente nessuna prova a sostegno della sua ipotesi. Cioè è un lavoro di pura filosofia speculativa, a mio parere banalmente metafisica, che riprende una corrente di pensiero anti-scientifica e che apre le porte al pensiero magico. La prossima volta che vorrò andare a New York, mi basterà pensarci intensamente per esserci. Un bel risparmio sul biglietto!

[Paolo Bernardi · Rating 4 out of 5]

MOI è davvero una teoria affascinante e vera, intorno alla meccanica della coscienza.
Mi dispiace solo che nella MOI non ci sia (ancora) spazio per la relazione interpersonale: la dimensione relazionale è totalmente assente.

Resta il fatto che il ragionamento del professor Manzotti è davvero esaustivo (pur nel ristretto ambito della accezione di coscienza che descrive, ossia quello della relazione Mente-mondo fisico).

[Giacomo Mantani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Advaita Vedanta, riproposta, forse, senza nemmeno che l'autore né sia consapevole. Una lettura che porta a riflettere, quale luce e verso dove, lascio al futuro lettore attestarlo. Un testo, che ho davvero gradito tra le mani.

[Emi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illuminante. Difficile ma illuminante.