Съзнанието като инстинкт: по следите на загадката как мозъкът поражда ум

by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Майкъл С. Газанига, Елена Филипова (Translator)

„Вдъхновяващо и проникновено изследване на науката и философията на съзнанието. Майкъл Газанига дава отговор на някои от най-дълбоките въпроси, които умът е способен да зададе.”
Стивън Пинкър, автор на „Как работи умът” и „Материалът на мисълта”

Как активността на невроните се превръща в съзнание? Как физическата реалност на атомите, молекулите и клетките създава живите и смайващи светове в главите ни? Проблемът за съзнанието ни преследва от хилядолетия. В последното столетие обаче мащабни пробиви пренаписаха науката за мозъка, но много от главоблъсканиците още от времето на древните гърци остават неразрешени.

В „Съзнанието като инстинкт” почитаният като баща на невронауката Майкъл С. Газанига събира всичко, което е постигнал през десетилетната си кариера. Той се опира както на последните научни изследвания, така и на историята на нашето познание, за да разкрие голямата картина на човешкото съзнание.

Идеята за мозъка като машина, предложена преди столетия, отвежда към заключения за зависимостта между него и ума, която провокира и разделя учените и философите до наши дни. Газанига прави истински пробив в тази теория и защитава идеята, че мозъкът е стройна система от независими модули, които работят в синхрон. Съзнанието е трудно да бъде угасено дори при наличието на тежки мозъчни травми и изменения, то няма център и винаги блещука в мрака. Разбирането как то се появява, ще дефинира бъдещето на невронауката и ще предопредели посоката на изследванията за изкуствения интелект.

В „Съзнанието като инстинкт” Майкъл С. Газанига представя не само наследството на живота си, отдаден на науката, но и посочва пътя към бъдещето.

„Най-просто казано, според мен съзнанието е инстинкт. Много организми, не само хората, го притежават в готов вид още с появата си. Тъкмо това са инстинктите – нещо, което организмите притежават още с появата си. Живите същества имат организация, която прави възможно съществуването на живота и в крайна сметка на съзнанието, въпреки че са изградени от същите материали като неживия природен свят около тях.”

Genres: Science, Psychology, Nonfiction, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Brain, Biology

264 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2018

About the author

Michael S. Gazzaniga, one of the premiere doctors of neuroscience, was born on December 12, 1939 in Los Angeles. Educated at Dartmouth College and California Institute of Technology, he is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.

His early research examined the subject of epileptics who had undergone surgery to control seizures. He has also studied Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients and reveals important findings in books such as Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind.

While many of his writings are technical, he also educates and stimulates readers with discussions about the fascinating and mysterious workings of the brain. Books such as The Social Brain and The Mind's Past bring forth new information and theories regarding how the brain functions, interacts, and responds with the body and the environment.

Reviews

[Peter Gelfan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This surprising book took me places I had not at all expected to go. Our sense of self, life, the world, and their meaning all rely on consciousness. While we all sort of know what we mean by “consciousness” and can talk loosely about it, we cannot precisely define it. This is not just a matter of semantics. We can’t quite wrap our conscious minds around the concept. That alone is pretty weird.

Gazzaniga is a brain scientist, and his approach is scientific rather than philosophical. Science’s view of the brain sometimes comes down to regarding it as a sort of machine, one of whose byproducts is the evolutionarily useful illusion we call consciousness. Gazzaniga’s decades of work have convinced him that this is too simplistically reductionist a view. He and a number of other scientists began to see things differently. Machines did not spawn brains, evolution did, and then brains invented machines. “Brains aren’t like machines; machines are like brains with something missing.” This led to reexamining more-basic scientific assumptions, such as the idea that biology, the study of life, is simply an offshoot of physics and chemistry. What if instead physics and chemistry are simpler, neater subsets of the larger world of biology? What if life is a different sort of physical substance than inanimate matter? It certainly acts differently, always busy self-organizing, self-transforming, and self-reproducing rather than just sitting there like, well, a rock.

Gazzaniga has not embraced dualism, the concept of coexisting material and nonmaterial worlds, brains and spirits. He looks instead to complementarity, the idea that matter can exist in two different states at once, such as light being simultaneously both particles and wave. Perhaps living matter must be in two different states at once.

This book too seems to be in two states at once: hard science and the conceptual framework, some of it speculative, needed to make sense of the subject. This complementarity results not in an answer but a far deeper understanding of the question. The quest to explain consciousness may yet transform or crumble all we thought we “knew” about not just ourselves but also the world.

[Francisco M. Juárez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un deslumbrante paseo por las ideas que se han barajado para tratar de comprender qué es y dónde diantres está esa cosa que llamamos conciencia, o más precisamente, autoconciencia. Esa ilusión persistente, al igual que el tiempo, que nos da la sensación de ser nosotros mismos y estar separados del mundo fuera de nuestros cerebros.

Gazzaniga expone una serie de ideas que al parecer no forman parte de la corriente principal en las investigaciones acerca de la conciencia, pero que ofrecen una perspectiva lógica y con muchas posibilidades de ser las correctas.

A saber, que el cerebro está conformado por módulos independientes y en una estructura estratificada, que al trabajar en conjunto y al mismo tiempo como un burbujeante caldo, producen la ilusión de una conciencia única. Que existe una doble naturaleza en la materia viviente, aplicando el principio de complementariedad de Bohr a la biología, uniendo los aspectos materiales con los aspectos simbólicos que definen la vida.

Concluyendo que la biosemiótica es necesaria para comprender la vida. Ya que desde su origen y autorreplicación por medio del código genético, las proteínas y los ácidos nucleícos, la vida es un sistema semiótico, con unidades materiales que obedecen las leyes de la física, pero que son guiadas por símbolos que siguen sus propias reglas:

"La célula es un verdadero sistema semiótico porque contiene todas las características esenciales de tales sistemas, es decir, signos, significados y código, todo ello producido por el mismo codificador".

En este contexto, se da el nombre de cierre semiótico al proceso que vincula el comportamiento simbólico de los constituyentes de la materia viva con sus aspectos puramente fisicoquímicos, la brecha explicativa que finalmente sería el salto de la materia al pensamiento y la autoconciencia.

Fascinante.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good history of consciousnesses studies and introduction to the general scientific perspective on many key topics of Neuroscience. But just like all books in this elusive subject you wont walk away feel any more oriented as to what exactly consciousness is, nevertheless, this was good.

[Edwin Wong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contrasting Viewpoints on Consciousness

Gazzaniga starts by outlining the major theories on consciousness. There are the reductionists and materialists (e.g. Freud and Galen) that believe that mental states and consciousness arise from material interactions between neurons, atoms, and molecules. The reductionist and materialists are deterministic in outlook. Determinists believe that the future follows rigidly or is “determined” by the past. Behaviorists, such as Skinner, form a subset of this worldview.

Then, thanks to Descartes, there are the dualists. To the dualists, mental states, the mind, and the soul are separate from the material body and brain. Dualism, according to Gazzaniga, set back science two thousand years: Aristotle, while he believed in a soul, also believed that the soul dies with the body. According to Descartes, the soul was immortal and immaterial, and being an “essence,” was not subject to scientific scrutiny.

Then, there is a third theory called mentalism. Mentalists such as Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga himself believe that “emergent mental powers must logically exert downward causal control over electrophysiological events in brain activity.” In other words, mental states, the “I,” and consciousness can impact and alter the physical brain. In the 1970s, the mentalist camp was a small minority. Most scientists were materialists.

The New Paradigm

In The Consciousness Instinct, Gazzaniga offers a new paradigm to break free from the old debate between materialists, dualists, and mentalists. His new paradigm of consciousness is based on the latest breakthroughs in understanding how the brain works and also his observations of how people with broken brains function. According to Gazzaniga:

Today we have at our fingertips a vast amount of rapidly accruing new information, and with a little luck, it affords new perspective on how the brain does its magic. The ideas of Descartes and other past thinkers that the mind is somehow floating atop the brain, and the ideas of the new mechanists that consciousness is a monolithic thing generated by a single mechanism or network, are simply wrong. I will argue that consciousness is not a thing. “Consciousness” is the word we use to describe the subjective feeling of a number of instincts and/or memories playing out in time in an organism. That is why “consciousness” is a proxy word for how a complex living organism operates. And, to understand how complex organisms work, we need to know how brains’ parts are organized to deliver conscious experience as we know it.
Descartes believed that consciousness arose from the pineal gland in the brain. Gazzaniga and other neuroscientists understand otherwise. It’s always easier to see how something works by looking at how broken specimens function, and the brain is no different. By looking at people with broken brains, we now know that the brain is a modular organ, built up from many discrete modules, each with its own function and history in the evolution of the species. When one module, or multiple modules are damaged, consciousness remains. What this tells us is that consciousness does not reside in a specific area of the brain. Consciousness is a phenomenon or epiphenomenon that arises from the feedback between the different modules of the brain. It is a deep-rooted function which is incredibly hard to stamp out, even in the most damaged brains.

Split-brain patients offer the strongest testimony to how consciousness is not tied to a specific neural network:

Disconnecting the two half brains instantly creates a second, also independent conscious system. The right brain now purrs along carefree from the left, with its own capacities, desires, goals, insights, and feelings. One network, split into two, becomes two conscious systems.
They used to–and perhaps they still do–perform split-brain surgery to cure epilepsy. The surgery works, and after the nerves between the two cerebral hemispheres are cut, consciousness is also cloven. Here’s an interesting story Gazzaniga shares of Case W.J. After his split-brain surgery, Gazzaniga had tested him to see the results of the surgery:

More crazy yet, in the early months after surgery, before the two hemispheres get used to sharing a single body, one can observe them in a tug-of-war. For example, there is a simple task in which one must arrange a small set of colored blocks to match a pattern sown on a card. The right hemisphere contains visuomotor specializations that make this task a walk in the park for the left hand. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, is incompetent for such a task. When a patient whose brain has recently been split attempts the task, the left hand immediately solves the puzzle; but when the right hand tries to attempt the task, the left hand starts to mess up the right hand’s work, trying to horn in and complete the task. In one such test, we had to have the patient sit on his bossy left hand to allow the right to attempt the task, which it never could accomplish!
If consciousness does not arise from a specific area of the brain, and the dualists and reductionists are mistaken, then from where does it arise? Gazzaniga’s calls his solution complementarity. It’s sort of an awkward word, but I see how he came up with it: the word is a bold rejection of Descartes’ term duality, or the mind – brain split.

Complementarity

The physicists posit that there are two worlds. There is the world of classical physics. This is Newton’s world. The world of objective observers. Processes are deterministic and predictable. Objects in the classical world can be waves or particles, but not waves and particles simultaneously. There is a spooky force over distance (e.g. gravity), but they got over this centuries ago. Classical physics explains the macro world (larger than an atom) quite well. Then there is the world of quantum mechanics. Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and others came up with this model to explain the subatomic world. This is the world where there are no objective observers. Observers, by observing, alter the system. Processes are probabilistic and unpredictable. Reality is spooky as objects in the quantum world exist as a blur, as both particles and waves simultaneously. It is only the law of large numbers that levels out the blur so that material objects appear concrete. Complementarity describes how subatomic objects exist as both particles and waves simultaneously.

The observer plays a crucial role in the quantum world. By observing quantum processes, the observer collapses the complementary reality of the subatomic object into either a wave or a particle. Choose one experiment, light acts like a particle. But choose another experiment, light acts as a wave. Physicists refer to the inescapable separation of a subject (the measurer) from the object (the measured) die Schnitt. It seemed that human consciousness played a role in collapsing quantum wave functions.

But was human consciousness required in breaking down quantum wave functions. Theoretical biologist came up with an amazing breakthrough when he argued that lower levels of consciousness was able to do this. How low?

Pattee proposes that the gap resulted from a process equivalent to quantum measurement that began with self-replication at the origin of life with the cell as the simplest agent. The epistemic cut, the subject/object cut, the mind/matter cut, all are rooted to that original cut at the origin of life. The gap between subjective feeling and objective neural firings didn’t come about with the appearance of brains, it was already there when the first cell started living. Two complementary modes of behavior, two levels of description are inherent in life itself, were present at the origin of life, have been conserved by evolution, and continue to be necessary for differentiating subjective experience from the even itself.
What Pattee claims is that quantum measurements do not require the physicist-observer. Quantum measurements can take place even on a cellular level. For example, enzymes such as DNA polymerases perform quantum measurement during cell replication.

DNA, Materialism, Symbols, and Life

Materialists say that DNA, being made of chains of atoms, must obey the laws of nature. But, according to Pattee, the materialists don’t see that DNA is also a symbol: it contains the description of the organism. And while DNA contains the description of the organism, it is not the organism in itself. To turn DNA into the organism, two separate steps are required: translation and construction. RNA and other proteins and enzymes “read” the DNA to translate DNA and construct the organism. If the physicist-observer is the highest level of consciousness, the simplest level of consciousness, according to Gazzaniga and Pattee, is the RNA reading the DNA. Like how the physicist-observer observes subatomic particles, so too, the RNA observes the DNA sequence. At the very beginning of life, there was observation. And this observation was carried up to higher and higher levels of consciousness by evolution so that, to continue the analogy, the DNA is likened to the physical brain and the RNA likened to the subjective experience of “I.” This is an exceedingly bold claim.

From Whence Consciousness?

So, “consciousness” began with the beginning of life from when RNA and other bondmaker molecules “gazed” onto the DNA template or blueprint. This gaze between RNA and DNA eventually became human consciousness. But where does our consciousness arise? Gazzaniga uses a soda water analogy to illustrate consciousness. Each module of the brain produces conceptual bubbles that rise to the surface. The “I” is what lies at the surface, and whatever bubble happens to have surfaced constitutes the “I.”

The History of Ideas

For those of you interested in the history of ideas, there’s a story on thermodynamics that Gazzaniga relates that reminds me of a question the astrophysicists are tackling today:

Still, even though Newton’s view of things took some getting used to, his laws seemed to describe most observations of the physical world well, and they became entrenched over the next two hundred years. But soon there was a new challenge to Newtonian physics that had to do with a new invention: the steam engine. The first commercial one was patented by Thomas Savery, a military engineer, in 1698 to pump water out of flooded coal mines. Even as the engines’ design improved, one problem continued to plague them: the amount of work they produced was minuscule compared to the amount of wood that had to be burned to produce it.

The early engines were all super inefficient because way too much energy was dissipated or lost. In the wholly determined world that Newton envisioned, this didn’t make much sense, so the theoretical physicists were forced to confront the puzzle of the seemingly lost energy. Soon a new field of study emerged, thermodynamics, and with it a change in theory about the nature of the world.
Does the story of the missing energy remind anyone of the astrophysicists’ search for dark matter? For galaxies to spin and move through galactic superclusters, they would have to contain much, much more matter than that which we can see. It’s been argued that up to 85% of the mass of the universe has not been discovered. Just as the physicists created thermodynamics to explore and find where all the missing energy in engines was going, perhaps we’re on the verge of a new branch of physics that will discover new laws and properties of matter heretofore unknown. What I’m saying is that the history of ideas seems to recur.

The Chicago School

I had known about the Chicago School of economics. I didn’t know there was a Chicago school of biology as well. Gazzaniga relates how the Chicago School of biology is, at bottom, anti-reductionist:

As Rosen, his [Rashevsky, one of the founders of the Chicago School] student describes, “He had asked himself the basic question: “What is life?” and approached it from a viewpoint tacitly as reductionistic as any of today’s molecular biologists. The trouble was that, by dealing with individual functions of organisms, and capturing these aspects in separate models and formalisms, he had somehow lost the organisms themselves and could not get them back.” He came to the realization that “no collection of separate descriptions (i.e. models) of organisms, however comprehensive, could be pasted together to capture the organism itself…Some new principle was needed if this purpose was to be accomplished.” Rashevsky dubbed that pursuit of the new principle relational biology.
Closing Thoughts

Gazzaniga talks about how patients who have undergone split-brain surgery develop two separate consciousnesses. Presumably, if you tied back the nerves between the two hemispheres of split-brain patients, consciousness would merge back into one. Now, what if you were to wire together separate brains. On the split-brain analogy, if you wired together multiple brains, they should form into one consciousness (you could do experiments wiring left and right hemispheres in series or parallel as well). Would brains wired in series or parallel access to more computing horsepower or a higher consciousness? And, if yes, would this brain cluster still be human? Or, what if you hooked up an Intel processor to the brain. You’d think from reading the news they’re getting close to being able to do this. Yes, this would also be an interesting thought experiment for the ethical philosophers.

Gazzaniga also talks about how evolution added more and advanced modules to the brain. It would have been interesting to read his speculations on where evolution is going to take us next. In another two or three hundred thousand years, will we have acquired additional “modules?” And what will these modules give us? Easier access to abstract mathematics? Higher IQ? Nirvana? Or?

And finally, if, as Gazzaniga postulates, the act of RNA and other bondmaker molecules “gazing on” or “interpreting” DNA constitutes the first act of life and consciousness, then another question arises. Was life accidental, or will Nature bring life into being whenever it can? Is consciousness part of the natural order of things? Does consciousness arise as a natural phenomenon like how gravity will coalesce matter together into stars, clusters, and the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy?

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were three parts – the first was a summary of the history of different ideas on the mind and soul, with a good explanation of the distinction between monism and dualism. Unfortunately the author falls into the common modern trap of treating historical ideas with a sort of superciliousness and a chauvinism born of the knowledge we now have that was not known in the past. This idea, that is widely held and rarely challenged, leads one to believe that researchers and thinkers of the past were a bit less intelligent than modern thinkers, whereas in fact the opposite is very often the case.

The second part is a synopsis of some fascinating results in brain science, many of them from the author’s own work in split-brain patient studies. This part is excellent, and the author makes a very strong case that consciousness (however we define it) is not caused locally by a single organ. Rather each module of the brain has its own consciousness, and split-brain patients actually have two independent “minds” in the one brain. The science here is really eye-opening. I previously read another book by the author, Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, where he discusses these results at greater length in pursuit of answers to questions about free will. I highly recommend that book.

The final part of the book is the author’s attempt to use quantum mechanics to resolve the “hard problem” of consciousness. Honestly, it’s a bit disappointing.
First of all, he introduces some of the fundamentals of quantum theory, especially the wave-particle duality of light, but then he latches onto the idea of “complementarity” and proceeds to use it way out of context to explain how consciousness must have arisen at the quantum level at the Cambrian explosion, 550 million years ago. It’s just a bit too hand-wavy for a serious scientist.
He also goes to great lengths to explain the field of bio-semiotics, in which there are finely drawn distinctions between laws and rules, symbols and molecules and computers and brains. I had to go over this part several times – at first I thought it was nonsense, then I thought “okay maybe there is something here”, and then back to “no, what an inane suggestion”, before uneasily alighting on “perhaps what he says makes a kind of sense, but he is muddying the waters a lot with his terminology”.

Chapter 8 is the heart of the author’s thesis, and it took me several attempts to try and understand what exactly he was proposing as it was quite dense. Here is a summary of that chapter:

- In quantum physics, light has been observed to act as both a wave and as a particle. This is referred to as wave-particle duality. The idea of “complementarity” is introduced – this means that two contrasting theories can work together to describe something, with each encapsulating some aspect of that thing. The case in point is the contrast between the wave theory of light and the particle theory of light.

- The Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is described, along with the conundrum of the observer effect in quantum physics. The observer effect is the idea that observation of a quantum system forces it to take on a definite state – this is closely related to the measurement problem, whereby it is impossible to measure a quantum system without affecting it. Schrödinger meant for his thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that this quantum uncertainty can propagate up to the macro-level, i.e. the idea that the cat is both dead and alive until the box is opened and the cat is observed. To avoid this absurdity, there must be a “cut” or a measurement event that collapses the wave function at a micro-level. It should be parenthetically noted that the author is here making an assumption that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. While that is the most popular interpretation, it is by no means definitive, and there are other plausible interpretations.

- The author’s explanation of the measurement problem seems to miss the mark. He gives three reasons why measurement presents a challenge: the first two are i) measurement requires an observer separate from the object being measured, and ii) the measurement process is irreversible and not governed by the classical laws of physics. The third reason given is that measurement is arbitrary. He explains this by suggesting that if I measure you, I would have to pick a subjective set of measurements to do so, such as mass, but there is an inherent ambiguity because the resulting values would change over time, and the measurements themselves would never capture you-ness. This seems a rather different problem to the quantum measurement problem, however. It does not follow that quantum phenomena are present everywhere there is ambiguity or subjectivity.

- He (rather puzzlingly) equates the distinction between observer and observed thing with the subjective vs objective experience of something. I hesitate to criticize the ideas of such an eminent scientist, but I can’t shake the feeling that he is overreaching here. His appeal to quantum physics must be taken with a pinch of salt, as that is not his area of expertise, and he openly admits in the book that he is not great with abstract math. One review on Amazon describes his approach as “quantum quackery”, in which you can “call any pair of qualities you want a ‘duality’ and compare it, unaccountably, to the ‘wave particle duality’”.

- The author proposes that the “measurement” event that collapses a wavefunction can take place at the level of enzymes, and that such a measurement at the dawn of living matter (around the time that RNA replication first began) created a subject/object complementarity that the author associates with the mind/matter complementarity. According to Howard Pattee, the epistemic “cut” between subjective and objective experience is related to the distinction between inanimate and living matter at the origin of life. More specifically, it pertains to the gap between a genotype and a phenotype. Effectively, he is asserting that the whole Hard Problem of subjective experience can also in principle trace its origin to this point. Again, this assertion makes little sense to me. If this “cut” that begat consciousness took place around the start of RNA replication, what are we to make of all the quantum wavefunction collapses that preceded that in the history of the universe? Is every such event the origin of a kind of consciousness? It just sounds nonsensical.

- There is then a segue into the topic of bio-semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signs/symbols, and the author contends that this is another area of complementarity. Specifically he talks about DNA, and how one way of viewing DNA is from the perspective of interacting biochemical molecules, and another is the ATCG notation used to analyze genomic sequences. His point here is that biological cells are semiotic systems – they contain “a triad of signs, meanings and code that are all produced by the same agent, i.e. by the same code-maker.” The code-maker is necessarily part of the system. This gives rise to the idea that cells are “selves” in some primitive form.


The final chapters return to firmer footing. Here he brings back the idea of modularity in the brain and suggests that consciousness is not centralized, but also modular. As the modules activate and deactivate, the consciousness associated with that module is made present. In some complex way these consciousness modules bubble up to the surface of our awareness and blend into a continuous sense of self. This is a much more intelligible idea than the mash of incompatible ideas in Chapter 8. Given his work on split-brain patients and expertise in the functioning of the brain, this hypothesis seems plausible, though his description of *how* this occurs is rather scientifically imprecise.

In summary, there is good content here, though it requires a bit of patience and much re-reading to extract the golden thread of a valuable idea from the car crash of ideas he presents.

[D Reed Whittaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a hard slog. Not too many take-aways. Consciousness is a mystery - fine. It is ever present and has been since there has been life - interesting, maybe. Not sure if it is confused with 'soul', free-will, human essence, or is all three. You may have better luck. The writing is not bad, it may be my inability to understand the subject. If the subject interests you, it may be worth your time. Nicely noted, so it may lead you to further fruitful reading. Good luck.

[Xristos · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book-
Do you ever wonder how a 1,2kg mass of neurons and blood can produce such a rich inner world? Do you also happen to love quantum physics? Then this is the book of your dreams.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite its deeply complex ideas (at least for this reader), author Michael Gazzaniga does a steady and efficient job of helping readers navigate the ideas he presents in favor of the argument that consciousness is an instinct. Key to his argument are the concepts of modularity, layering, and complementarity.

The experiences of everyday life appear to come to us in whole, seamless ways. “Gazillions of electrical, chemical, and hormonal processes occur in our brain every moment, yet we experience everything as a smoothly running unified whole,” says Gazzaniga. He proposes that one feature of brain structure is modularity, in which modules are “specialized and frequently localized networks of neurons that serve a specific function.” He also states that consciousness is going on at the module level, which is supported by the literature on brain injury. Patients who suffer brain injury, sometimes severe, report no loss of consciousness, even though part of the brain may remain damaged.

Layers of neural activity are another structural feature of the brain. This activity is able to take place in layers independently of one another. As an example, Gazzaniga says “your auditory system runs independently from the olfactory system. It gets no information about odors and doesn’t need any to process sound information. You can lose your sense of smell and still hear bees buzzing.” Layers have specific protocols that allow and effect both intra- and inter-layer interactions.

Complementarity presents me with the hardest intellectual challenge, even though Gazzaniga contends it is key to understanding the gap between brain and mind (the uninformed may use these terms interchangeably, implying they are synonymous, but they are not). Drawing from the disciplines of math and physics, complementarity “holds that a single thing can have two kinds of description and reality.” Towards the end of the book, the author suggests that understanding the workings between mind and brain will be achieved through the “language of complementarity.”

Gazzaniga stitches these and many other concepts together in a careful, stepwise, logical explanation that addresses the book’s subtitle, namely, how the brain makes the mind. However, I do feel after about 240 pages, The Consciousness Instinct still leaves us in the middle of an unraveling process, not at the end of an unraveled one—“unraveling,” present continuous tense versus “unraveled,” past tense. Another mild criticism: I feel there are so many places where explanations would benefit hugely from simple diagrams—there isn’t a single one!

Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly enjoyable book, with pleasantly surprising bursts of humor. In the long run, I had something of a fairly big “Aha!” moment in understanding consciousness as an instinct when Gazzaniga stated that “consciousness is part of organismic life. We never have to learn how to produce it or how to utilize it.” Say no more, Mr. Gazzaniga, I’m sold!

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nonfiction book examining the physical brain vs. the soul. What is consciousness and how does it emerge from the physical meat of your brain tissue?

A fascinating question, and of course, we don't know and probably never will, but it's interesting to think about. This book included a wide range of topics, not just in biological but also ancient philosophical theories of what makes humans more self-aware of our situations than other animals (or, are we...?)

I was more interested in the science and less in the history and philosophy aspects, but that's just me. Also, I am increasingly annoyed by the recent plague of science books that aim to bring science to the masses by being humorous. Yes, I do need you, the author, to dumb it down for me, but spare me the stand-up comedy routine.

But it was an interesting read, if you can deal with the frustrating of reading a long book about something that we only know .05% about.

[Tyler Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF in the middle of chapter 6, at 48%. I tried, I really did.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 / 5.0

Very nice intelligent man. Develops readers understanding of his latest theories on the neurobiology of consciousness at a steady easily accessible flow. Simple elucidating analogies are intuitive. My only criticism is with his discussions of the role of evolution. He phrases discussions as if organism had to evolve in a certain way to make full use of systems possibilities rather than than that the organisms that made best use of the systems possibilities out competed those that didn't and evolved accordingly.

Good Stuff!

[Noah Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably wrong
But wrong in interesting ways

[Kunal Sen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very useful and thorough review of the progress that has been made in the last couple of decades in understanding the nature of mind and consciousness from a scientific perspective. There is also a well argued section on why philosophy failed to shed much useful light on this problem for two millennia, other than raising extremely useful questions. Perhaps that is why need philosophy -- to raise good questions, and we should not look at philosophers to explain the world we live in.

The last part of the book tries to connect quantum mechanics and the inherent unpredictability of the microscopic reality to explain why biological systems are qualitatively different from the inanimate world. By extension, the author claims why consciousness is not reducible to simpler mechanisms at a lower level. He is definitely not a mystic, and fully believes that consciousness is a physical phenomenon, but he believes that the physics of it is such that only biological systems can display this property, and therefore a machine can never be conscious. I had a hard time understanding his argument here, but I am not knowledgeable enough in this area to refute it either. A lot of food for thought, and will try to explore this avenue further.

[Ginger Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Brains aren't like machines; machines are like brains with something missing," says the author. The missing elements are the parts that make the brain a living organ, not an inanimate object. We have DNA that reflects billions of years of evolution. Computers have code that reflects whatever the coder happens to need at the moment. 

DNA is a form of code too, of course. But genetic code has been relentlessly channeled by natural selection. It eventually was forced to create an array of instincts and emotions that seem to form the core of consciousness. In humans, the process has gone so far that we in effect have meta-consciousness: We're not only aware, we're aware that we're aware.

So the brain/machine analogy needs to be abandoned, says the author (who, by the way, is a leading cognitive neuroscientist and the guy who discovered the split-brain phenomenon). What will replace the machine model? The author points toward some intriguing possibilities. Much more research will be needed. But that's the fun of science, no?

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

First 3/4 of book was a history of neuroscience, which was rather dry. Last 1/4 was, for me, a confusing race through the jargon of recent neuro-scientific thought. Literally, only the last few pages of the book dealt with the assertion that consciousness is an instinct. Mostly over my head.

[Geoff Walling · Rating 2 out of 5]

You have to wade through this and then wind up not a lot more educated than when you started.

[Paul Bard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only the eponymous last chapter is helpful and up to date now. I recommend Hawkins “On Intelligence” instead.

[د · Rating 4 out of 5]

طريقة الكتابة و تسلسل مواضيع الفصول غاية في النظام و الوضوح و السلاسة

بالنسبة لي الفصل الثامن كان الأصعب و مقدرش أقول إني فهمته تماماً .. لكن بالتأكيد قطعت خلال قرايته شوط كبير في فهم هيكل فيزياء الكم (و اعتقد بعد التجربة دي اني فقدت جزء كبير من حماسي لمعرفة المزيد عنها، أو يمكن نلاقي كتاب حلو زي ده يُعيد هذا الحماس)

يمكن الجزء الأول كان بطيء شوية و ملئ بالفلسفة شويتين، لكن الجزء التاني و التالت ابتدينا ندخل في لب الموضوع.

مش قادرة أحدد مصدر المشكلة، المترجم يبدز متخصص و فاهم و عارف المصطلحات العلمية بس الكتابة العربية من حيث تراكيب الجمل نفسها كانت عجيبة الشكل و المظهر، على أقل تقدير المفروض الحاجات دي تكون استوقفت المُحرر، و لكن بالنظر كمان للغلطات الإملائية و الكلمات المكررة و حاجات تانية على هذه الشاكلة، ف لا تبدو حالة المحرر بأفضل من حالة المترجم .. حقيقي كانت تجربة لغوية عصيبة و مُرهقة، نسختي من الكتاب كلها علامات و تصحيحات للحاجات دي، و دي مش حاجات بسيطة و غلطة واحده في أحد الضمائر كفيلة بتغيير المعنى تماماً. كنت أتمنى يكون فيه اهتمام و تدقيق أفضل من جهة نشر بهذا الحجم.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Aunque la idea de que nuestra conciencia emana de varias fuentes independientes resulta contraria a la intuición, parece ser que tal es el diseño del cerebro. Una vez que este concepto se asimile íntegramente, el verdadero reto será entender cómo los principios de diseño del cerebro permiten que la conciencia surja de ese modo. Este es el futuro desafío para la ciencia que estudia el cerebro."

"Concebir la conciencia como un instinto evolucionado o una secuencia completa de ellos nos indica dónde debemos buscar para saber cómo surgió a partir del frío mundo inanimado. Nos abre los ojos a la interpretación de que cada aspecto de una experiencia consciente es el despliegue de otros instintos que poseen los humanos y que por su propia naturaleza los mecanismos y capacidades que albergan producen el estado sensible de la experiencia consciente."

Michael S. Gazzaniga

[David Barnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent survey of what we know about consciousness, from the historical perspective to today's search for understanding, related in really plain down-to-earth terms.

Started with a historical perspective charting the course our philosophical thinking has taken so far, where it's gotten stuck, and some of the interesting traps and missteps our thinking has fallen into along the way. Then walked through properties of the brain's layered architecture and all the curious neurological findings that shed light on how the mind really works, especially the bizarre ways the brain's two hemispheres can function in isolation or interact to modulate/outvote each other. Then gets into recent investigations into neural correlates of consciousness, and gets a little abstract towards the end with discussions on biosemiotics and parallels from other sciences. I'm excited to go through some citations and find other books in the same vein to dive deeper.

[Pinta Kauce · Rating 4 out of 5]

“just because you don’t like an idea, it doesn’t mean it isn’t the way things are.”

[Tina Aumiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating.

[Marian · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
Buen libro sobre neurosciencia cognitiva. Obviamente si estás en el mundillo se te quedará corto, pero cubre bastante terreno.

[B. Rule · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad I pushed through on this one, because there are some really interesting ideas in the latter half. I almost gave up after the first section, which is whig history of the highest order. Gazzaniga gives a potted history of science/philosophy of mind as a preface to his account of his where the state of knowledge lies now. It's laughably bad, both in terms of accurately representing the thinkers surveyed, and in the catty, chronologically-chauvinist comments sprinkled throughout. Giants of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes get slagged off mercilessly for the temerity of not sharing a contemporary physicalist view of mentation.

Luckily the book perks up significantly once Gazzaniga moves on to his own speculations on current neuroscience. Those ideas don't always seem fully fleshed nor fully satisfactory, but they're fascinating insights from a scientist at the forefront of the field. The framework ideas are: (a) that consciousness inheres not in a specific locus in the brain but arises from the work of multiple modules rising like "bubbles" to the surface of the mind, and (b) complementarity applies to the neural correlates of consciousness and therefore consciousness cannot be reduced to determinist mechanical causation.

The first idea is clearly borne out in some sense by the empirical data, and Gazzaniga gives great examples from his own work with split-brain patients. Patients with brain lesions, a severed corpus callosum, or other trauma demonstrate that consciousness is quite difficult to stamp out entirely. Specific functions may be lost, but the conscious subject often reports no lack. The mind knows only the modules that comprise it. It's not entirely clear whether Gazzaniga acknowledges the limitations of the metaphor though: bubbles rising to the surface of what? He wants to avoid a dualist approach, but his language implicitly treats the "self" as somehow distinct from its constituent building blocks. I suppose this may be a natural artifact of English grammar and not necessarily a true conceptual tell, but Gazzaniga made few efforts to extirpate such talk in a book that ostensibly argues against it. He also leaves largely unanswered the question of how such modules come to make up consciousness: he describes layered architecture but remains silent on how the module layer gets translated into unitive consciousness, or how particular neural circuits win the attentional battle.

The second big point swings for the fences, so I can hardly fault him if it's not knocked out of the park. Gazzaniga attacks the big problem of relating the quantum to the classical world of objects like brains. His answer, fuzzy on the details, is that die Schnitt, the empirical cut between observer and measured system, occurs far lower down the chain of layers than you would expect. It's not fundamentally the action of a rational scientist using his whole brain in a lab, but happens at the molecular level of RNA transcription or the proto-cell separating itself from the primordial sea to define a "self." Gazzaniga thus hopes to build a rapprochement between quantum and classical much deeper within the very structure of biology. He goes on to give some fascinating explications of Howard Pattee's concepts of biosemiotics in arguing that life is not a deterministic-mechanistic system, but is a qualitatively different kind of game for matter to play, arising from the probabilistic effects of quantum interactions baked into being a type of matter that has complementary interior and exterior views which are irreducible to one another. He's quick to repeat that this is still a physicalist approach, and no "spooks in the system" are necessary for the thing to hang together. I guess it depends on how you define spooks.

Even when I found some of this stuff unconvincing, it was fascinating reading and bold thinking willing to engage with the biggest questions of philosophy and science. I've read other books by Gazzaniga but I'd say this was the meatiest. Too bad he gunked it up with the first section. Skip past that and get to the second and third parts. He'll give you lots to mull no matter where you fall on the materialist/idealist spectrum. My rating here is an average of those stellar and pedestrian parts.

[barbs]

This is a brilliant example of a book I think I'll like but whilst reading it I realized I don't really care about the subject matter that much... or at all.

[Leonardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Está bien. Es un libro interesante. Gazzaniga es el padre de la idea de que el cerebro funciona por compartimentos, por ejemplo el hemisferio izquierdo se ocupa de unas cosas, el derecho de otras. En este libro bastante reciente lleva un poco esa idea al plano de la conciencia. En ese sentido, la conciencia no estaría en un lugar específico del cerebro sino que emerge desde distintas áreas como burbujas. Sería como decir no hay UNA conciencia. Lo cuál tiene sentido, me parece. Se discute la dualidad mente-cerebro. Defiende una posición no plenamente materialista. A ese respecto resulta interesante el caso de las personas con hemisferios escindidos que parecieran desarrollar dos conciencias independientes.

[Abdullah · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب جميل يحكي لك رحلة العلماء في فهم الوعي. من بداية عصر الفلاسفة إلى الآن.

رأيي الشخصي في الموضوع أن الوعي ناتج عن اختلاف في الاعصاب في الدماغ. واختلاف الاعصاب ناتج عن اختلاف جيناتنا.
الوعي مسألة كبيرة جداً ولا اظن اننا سنحصل على حل في اي وقتِ قريب

[Falah Al-Otaibi · Rating 4 out of 5]

من أهم المراجع العلمية التي قرأتها في تاريخ البحث العلمي للدماغ، تتميز بكثرة المراجع التاريخية و اسماء المصطلحات الانجليزية وكثره الأمثلة توضح المعنى المطلوب، يستحق القراءة

[Nathan Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was at least somewhat disappointing because it did not provide nearly as much science as I expected when it comes to the matter of consciousness.  On the other hand, the book is one of those volumes that ends up being unintentionally damaging to materialism and evolution for a variety of reasons.  For example, if consciousness is an emergent property that evolved, then it has to be present in all life forms in some fashion, which would mean that one must not only investigate the awareness of animals, many of which show some sort of response to external stimuli, but that of plants and fungi and various one-celled organisms.  The author also seems far too uninterested in the design implications of what he refers to in consciousness as being a certain complex set of instincts that become more and more complex the more intelligent a particular life form happens to be.  Naturally, there are a great many problems discussed here when it comes to the problem of defining what exactly consciousness is, as well as dealing with the mind-brain dualism that has made truly understanding consciousness impossible so far, and at least for the foreseeable future so long as scientists continue to put their head in the sand looking for evolutionary explanations.

This particular book is a bit more than 200 pages and is is divided into three parts and ten chapters.  The book begins with an introduction, before the first part of the book which discusses consciousness and the preparation for modern thought as the author teleologically describes it (I), with chapters on the historical view of consciousness that the author does not approve of (1), the dawn of what the author views as "empirical" thinking (2), and some of what the author considers to be 20th century strides towards understanding consciousness (3).  After that the author looks at the physical system of the brain (II), with chapters on the modular nature of brains (4), the desire to understand the architecture of the brain (5), and the fine line that exists between sanity and consciousness that means that people with dementia are still conscious (6).  After that, the third part of the book discusses the origins of consciousness (III), with chapters on the concept of complementarity that comes from physics (7), the transition from non-living to living and from neurons to mind (8), the bubbling nature of personal consciousness (9), and the author's view that consciousness is an instinct (10), after which the book concludes with notes, acknowledgements, and an index.

For someone who is not as wedded to evolutionary thinking as the author is, I find that this book gives a great deal of unintentional insight into consciousness and the gratitude that we should have to God for it.  For one, the author's belief that consciousness is an instinct means that there is some sort of programming for it, given that instinct contains a high degree of information content to it.  In addition to that, the author's view of the human mind as being particularly efficient due to its modular design and the author's interest in the architecture of the brain means that, however unintentionally and perhaps even against his will the author provides a great deal of insight into God as a programmer, designer, and architect.  Obviously, then, this book is of great interest to those who have a design perspective as it provides considerable insight into the ways that the human mind and even other minds were designed to deal with reality and how human beings reflect on that reality by subcreating subjective internal worlds.  Whether that is the author's intention or not is hard to say, but it is an achievement nonetheless.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa.

My personal interest in the questions of the psychobiological mechanisms of consciousness, whether machines develop consciousness, do some animals have consciousness, and what consciousness even is began around the time I was taking a course that used Gazzaniga's Cognitive Neuroscience textbook. I suppose it's not surprising that the best answer that I've ever gotten to that question came from another book of his, but it is a truly compelling one that speaks to much of the current discourse on both AI and animal rights.

This is not merely the account of psychological research that I expected, though that content is present and characterized by deeply illuminating and illustrative examples. It is a thoroughly interdisciplinary treatise, synthesizing concepts from the breadth of the cognitive and natural sciences, drawing from linguistics, computer and information science, physics, biology, and chemistry, as well as the humanistic fields of philosophy, history, and science fiction. The meta and metaphysical history of humans' understanding of human understanding that Gazzaniga traces pieces together a narrative that sets the stage for understanding what we're talking about when we talk about consciousness, starting from ancient models of mind, working through Cartesian dualism, Darwin's paradigm shift, the renowned 20th century physicists' take on our place in the universe, the cognitive revolution and modern attempts at recreating mind in digital symbolic systems.

It reads with the tone of the type of teacher who is somehow gifted at explaining topics that literally no one understands. It is a bit dense at the beginning, as he is really just laying the groundwork for the second half, where his own thesis about consciousness is expounded on (framed in a easily grasped metaphor that Don Ho would approve of). But everything said is necessary in order to follow the rest. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in understanding how our lived experience comes to be, or those who have wondered what the nature of the self truly is.