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Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience
“A first-class intellectual adventure.” ―Brian Greene, author of Until the End of Time Illuminating his groundbreaking theory of consciousness, known as the attention schema theory, Michael S. A. Graziano traces the evolution of the mind over millions of years, with examples from the natural world, to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention and then to construct awareness of the external world and of the self. His theory has fascinating implications for the future: it may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially, and even someday taking the natural consciousness of a person and uploading it into a machine for a digital afterlife. 7 illustrations
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2019
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August 21, 2020
Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist at Princeton university. Before moving to consciousness, he was involved in the development of so-called body schema. Body schema is a simulation model the brain uses to predict and control body movements. The idea of body schema is well known and widely used in engineering, for example in development of driverless cars and many other things. His theory of consciousness is the logical extension of this idea. I do not know much about neuroscience. But i am the targeted audience for this book as it is written for a general public. After reading it, I am bit sceptical of this theory. It might be me, or problem with the theory, or simply the way how this book is written. In one sentence, I think it seems a bit premature to write a book for general audience based upon the amount of unknowns in the theory.
The theory is based on two fundamental assumptions:
1) our brain is an information-processing machine. Only thing it does is computation. This word is not specifically defined in the text. But if we use Alan Turing’s definition, then the power assigned to the brain seems to be somewhat limited.
2) “It take a statement of fundamental logic that an information processing machine cannot make a claim it cannot output information unless it contains the information that it is claiming.” I was not sure totally what it meant as it could be interpreted very reductively and vice versa. He explained a bit more: “We cannot just hope adding complexity would make machine claim it consciousness.” Well. Many theories actually count that yes we can hope exactly that. And the emergent properties of a system is well established concept. There is for example Integrated Information Theory (ITT).
But those are two main assumptions he starts with as I understood. Again, they are not mentioned at the beginning but spread around and repeated in the text. Anyway, if we assume these things, then his theory would be that consciousness is a simulation or a “cartoon” our brain plays for us to be able to control our attention. Attention is the electrical process of inhibition and passing through the signals in the brain. We do not need to know all of this while getting attracted to something, so instead we have a simulation played by our brain. This simulation is called attention schema internal model. Again the word “model” is not defined in this context. But my understanding is that brain plays this model of itself and that what makes us experience anything subjectively. Confused? I am not surprised. I could then speculate that this model would give rise to a similar model within it which would give rise to a similar modern again recursively etc etc.. Ok, I know. I am just not clever enough to avoid the irony.
And Graziano does not help that much. I parsed a few passages from his book to show what I mean. Here what he says:
“Now, finally, we reach the central proposal of the theory. My colleagues and I propose that the cortical attention schema has a particular form. The information within it provides a cartoonish account of how the highest levels of cortical attention take possession of items. There is no simple, physical, roving eyeball, as in the case of overt attention. Instead, that cartoonish account describes an essence that has no specific physical substance but that has a location vaguely inside you, that can take temporary possession of items—of apples and sounds and thoughts and memories—and that restlessly moves about, searching, seizing some items and dropping others. When that ethereal mental essence takes hold of an item, it has the property of making the item clear to you, real to you, vividly present—in other words, it turns the item into an experience. It also has powerful consequences. It enables you to understand the item, to respond to it, to talk about it, or to remember it so that you can choose to act on it later. It empowers you to react. That amorphous power inside you is a fictionalized, detail-poor account of cortical attention.” So “etherial mental essence” then? What is the difference between this and the classical dualism?
And one more lengthy passage in which he summarises his theory in 5 points:
“The attention schema theory of consciousness has some inevitability to its logic. First, we know that the cortex uses covert attention. Second, we know that it needs to control that attention. Third, we know that the brain must have an internal model of attention in order to control that attention.” - how do we know this and why? For me it is not obvious that it should be some model. And if yes, in which form this model is presented in the brain? It is not even obvious what part of the attention needs to become conscious. I have not found the answers.
Fourth, we know that a detailed, fully accurate internal model is at best wasteful and at worst harmful to the process, and so, this internal model of attention would necessarily leave out the mechanistic details. Therefore, and fifth, an attention schema would depict the self as containing an amorphous, nonphysical, internal power, an ability to know, to experience, and to respond, a roving mental focus—the essence of covert attention without the underpinning details. How that “therefore bit follows”? It does not for me. If we are machines we do not need nonphysical, amorphous stories of self. Is it not “wasteful at best and harmful at worst” as well? All of this seems to be redundant and not efficient.
“From first principles, if you had to build a well-functioning brain that had a powerful, cortical style of covert attention, you would build a machine that, drawing on the information constructed within it, would assert that it has a nonphysical consciousness. That cortical machine, of course, would not know that its subjective conscious experience is a construct or a simplification. It would take the nonphysical nature of conscious experience as a reality, because—somewhat tautologically—the brain knows only what it knows. It is captive to its own information.” - well, it might logically follow, but i am sorry for our brains who keep captive themselves.
In his defence, I would tell that he has identified two useful features of the consciousness: 1) better internal control of the attention; 2) social aspect in understanding other conscious beings. But these two features I would argue are sufficiently independent from his specific “internal schema” theory and would apply to any other theories with the same level of success.
It would be jolly good if the place of this schema-model inside of the brain would be identified by science. Then I would share the celebration. But solar, this is only hypotheses. He mentions some specific places, but it has not been confirmed as far as I understood. Another way of testing is of course is to build a similar artificial machine. After some pondering about Turing test, Graziano finally suggest this as the most objective testing.
But here, it seems, anything vaguely resembling some level of real life complexity is far away. He acknowledged for example, that we do not know much about emotions to model them sensibly in silicon. The most useful bit of the book was actually the Appendix where he has shown how he would design a primitive machine with only visual awareness. I would recommend to read this bit first and see whether you would be interested to read the whole book after that. I certainly would not. His machine includes three parts: visual recognition representing an object. He likes an apple; the module representing the knowledge about the machine (I understand it is a sort of ‘self-awareness” bit). And the third which is his schema which would relate the first two to each other. But this third one for whatever reason would make the machine think in metaphysical terms. It would do so because it would be loaded with the related input. One thing i struggle with why would this be a subjective experience in a way we understand it. And why i would want to tell a machine something metaphysical if i could use one relational verb to program a connection. But alas, the machine is just a design even like that. So too early to ask probably.
As a bonus, we are treated to a whole lengthy chapter about the possibility, not very remote for the immortality by coping the brains into something more lasting than a body and creating a virtual reality for those brains. He says 50 years and some of his pals say within a decade. Well, it was jolly interesting. But it was not related to the topic I was reading the book for.
In general, I’ve learned a thing or two about neuroscience, but his theory seem to be not too different from pure illusionism or so called Global Workspace Theory. The last one is much better established. He recognises it. And he did not convinced me that he adds something substantial at this stage. I hope he would come up with the successful testing program and then we will see.
The theory is based on two fundamental assumptions:
1) our brain is an information-processing machine. Only thing it does is computation. This word is not specifically defined in the text. But if we use Alan Turing’s definition, then the power assigned to the brain seems to be somewhat limited.
2) “It take a statement of fundamental logic that an information processing machine cannot make a claim it cannot output information unless it contains the information that it is claiming.” I was not sure totally what it meant as it could be interpreted very reductively and vice versa. He explained a bit more: “We cannot just hope adding complexity would make machine claim it consciousness.” Well. Many theories actually count that yes we can hope exactly that. And the emergent properties of a system is well established concept. There is for example Integrated Information Theory (ITT).
But those are two main assumptions he starts with as I understood. Again, they are not mentioned at the beginning but spread around and repeated in the text. Anyway, if we assume these things, then his theory would be that consciousness is a simulation or a “cartoon” our brain plays for us to be able to control our attention. Attention is the electrical process of inhibition and passing through the signals in the brain. We do not need to know all of this while getting attracted to something, so instead we have a simulation played by our brain. This simulation is called attention schema internal model. Again the word “model” is not defined in this context. But my understanding is that brain plays this model of itself and that what makes us experience anything subjectively. Confused? I am not surprised. I could then speculate that this model would give rise to a similar model within it which would give rise to a similar modern again recursively etc etc.. Ok, I know. I am just not clever enough to avoid the irony.
And Graziano does not help that much. I parsed a few passages from his book to show what I mean. Here what he says:
“Now, finally, we reach the central proposal of the theory. My colleagues and I propose that the cortical attention schema has a particular form. The information within it provides a cartoonish account of how the highest levels of cortical attention take possession of items. There is no simple, physical, roving eyeball, as in the case of overt attention. Instead, that cartoonish account describes an essence that has no specific physical substance but that has a location vaguely inside you, that can take temporary possession of items—of apples and sounds and thoughts and memories—and that restlessly moves about, searching, seizing some items and dropping others. When that ethereal mental essence takes hold of an item, it has the property of making the item clear to you, real to you, vividly present—in other words, it turns the item into an experience. It also has powerful consequences. It enables you to understand the item, to respond to it, to talk about it, or to remember it so that you can choose to act on it later. It empowers you to react. That amorphous power inside you is a fictionalized, detail-poor account of cortical attention.” So “etherial mental essence” then? What is the difference between this and the classical dualism?
And one more lengthy passage in which he summarises his theory in 5 points:
“The attention schema theory of consciousness has some inevitability to its logic. First, we know that the cortex uses covert attention. Second, we know that it needs to control that attention. Third, we know that the brain must have an internal model of attention in order to control that attention.” - how do we know this and why? For me it is not obvious that it should be some model. And if yes, in which form this model is presented in the brain? It is not even obvious what part of the attention needs to become conscious. I have not found the answers.
Fourth, we know that a detailed, fully accurate internal model is at best wasteful and at worst harmful to the process, and so, this internal model of attention would necessarily leave out the mechanistic details. Therefore, and fifth, an attention schema would depict the self as containing an amorphous, nonphysical, internal power, an ability to know, to experience, and to respond, a roving mental focus—the essence of covert attention without the underpinning details. How that “therefore bit follows”? It does not for me. If we are machines we do not need nonphysical, amorphous stories of self. Is it not “wasteful at best and harmful at worst” as well? All of this seems to be redundant and not efficient.
“From first principles, if you had to build a well-functioning brain that had a powerful, cortical style of covert attention, you would build a machine that, drawing on the information constructed within it, would assert that it has a nonphysical consciousness. That cortical machine, of course, would not know that its subjective conscious experience is a construct or a simplification. It would take the nonphysical nature of conscious experience as a reality, because—somewhat tautologically—the brain knows only what it knows. It is captive to its own information.” - well, it might logically follow, but i am sorry for our brains who keep captive themselves.
In his defence, I would tell that he has identified two useful features of the consciousness: 1) better internal control of the attention; 2) social aspect in understanding other conscious beings. But these two features I would argue are sufficiently independent from his specific “internal schema” theory and would apply to any other theories with the same level of success.
It would be jolly good if the place of this schema-model inside of the brain would be identified by science. Then I would share the celebration. But solar, this is only hypotheses. He mentions some specific places, but it has not been confirmed as far as I understood. Another way of testing is of course is to build a similar artificial machine. After some pondering about Turing test, Graziano finally suggest this as the most objective testing.
But here, it seems, anything vaguely resembling some level of real life complexity is far away. He acknowledged for example, that we do not know much about emotions to model them sensibly in silicon. The most useful bit of the book was actually the Appendix where he has shown how he would design a primitive machine with only visual awareness. I would recommend to read this bit first and see whether you would be interested to read the whole book after that. I certainly would not. His machine includes three parts: visual recognition representing an object. He likes an apple; the module representing the knowledge about the machine (I understand it is a sort of ‘self-awareness” bit). And the third which is his schema which would relate the first two to each other. But this third one for whatever reason would make the machine think in metaphysical terms. It would do so because it would be loaded with the related input. One thing i struggle with why would this be a subjective experience in a way we understand it. And why i would want to tell a machine something metaphysical if i could use one relational verb to program a connection. But alas, the machine is just a design even like that. So too early to ask probably.
As a bonus, we are treated to a whole lengthy chapter about the possibility, not very remote for the immortality by coping the brains into something more lasting than a body and creating a virtual reality for those brains. He says 50 years and some of his pals say within a decade. Well, it was jolly interesting. But it was not related to the topic I was reading the book for.
In general, I’ve learned a thing or two about neuroscience, but his theory seem to be not too different from pure illusionism or so called Global Workspace Theory. The last one is much better established. He recognises it. And he did not convinced me that he adds something substantial at this stage. I hope he would come up with the successful testing program and then we will see.
February 9, 2025
O carte despre conștiință ca model simplificat și util al atenției.
Atenția este capacitatea creierului ca într-un anumit moment să-și concentreze resursele limitate asupra unui fragment din lume pentru a-l procesa în profunzime. Fără atenție creierul ar fi rapid copleșit cu informații.
Cheia conștiinței este, conform autorului, controlul atenției. Sistemele cerebrale (joncțíunea temporo-parietală, în special) construiesc o "schemă de atenție"- un pachet de informații, numit model intern, care monitorizează atenția.
Conștiința este o iluzie, dar nu este nicidecum un miraj. E o expunere simplificată, imperfetă a ceva real. Creierul chiar asimilează informații și le procesează în profunzime. Conștiința seamănă cu o iluzie în sens practic.
În studiul conștiinței sau a experienței subiective, la fel ca în mecanica cuantică, au fost formulate mai multe teorii. O altă teorie a conștiinței este teoria spațiului global de lucru (global workspace theory), pe care autorul o consideră complementară cu propria teorie a schemei atenției.
Joseph Jebelli, în cartea sa "Evoluția minții. O istorie a creierului uman" promovează, de asemenea, o teorie a atenției conștiinței.
Recomand
Atenția este capacitatea creierului ca într-un anumit moment să-și concentreze resursele limitate asupra unui fragment din lume pentru a-l procesa în profunzime. Fără atenție creierul ar fi rapid copleșit cu informații.
Cheia conștiinței este, conform autorului, controlul atenției. Sistemele cerebrale (joncțíunea temporo-parietală, în special) construiesc o "schemă de atenție"- un pachet de informații, numit model intern, care monitorizează atenția.
Conștiința este o iluzie, dar nu este nicidecum un miraj. E o expunere simplificată, imperfetă a ceva real. Creierul chiar asimilează informații și le procesează în profunzime. Conștiința seamănă cu o iluzie în sens practic.
În studiul conștiinței sau a experienței subiective, la fel ca în mecanica cuantică, au fost formulate mai multe teorii. O altă teorie a conștiinței este teoria spațiului global de lucru (global workspace theory), pe care autorul o consideră complementară cu propria teorie a schemei atenției.
Joseph Jebelli, în cartea sa "Evoluția minții. O istorie a creierului uman" promovează, de asemenea, o teorie a atenției conștiinței.
Recomand
December 2, 2019
This is a fairly lay version of an introduction to Graziano's attention schema theory of consciousness, which is easy to follow and good for introductory readers. The simplification is well drawn, but does not go into depth or provide strong enough arguments for competing theories. I lost my interest over the last chapters concerned with whether machines can or will have consciousness and whether there is or when there will be the possibility of uploading human consciousness to another vehicle. These are interesting questions but best decided in science fiction till an agreed upon definition of consciouness exists.
October 22, 2019
A famous neuroscientist provides a concise "engineering" description of consciousness based on the following assumption:
Any information-processing machine cannot make a claim-- it cannot output information-- unless it contains the information that it is claiming.
Of course, inherent in this assumption is that the human brain is an information-processing machine (which might be controversial to some people). However, I think the author's arguments are so neatly well-grounded and with all prior assumptions laid bare that if you accept the premise, the author's conclusions necessarily must follow. Consciousness must be the result of neural circuitry that helps you model and direct your attention, and subjective experience must seem metaphysical, because you have no additional neural circuitry to think of it any other way.
That is, you have no direct access to the knowledge and workings of your actual neurons-- your raw, objective, information processing capabilities. Instead, you must rely on a meta-cognitive "attention schema" that is necessarily a crude model of your own (extremely complex) mental states. But, given that this attention schema too must be comprised of neural circuitry that operates through its own objective neural information processing, any attempt to model subjective experience as anything but a metaphysical "feeling" will fail-- we simply don't have the information contained within us to be able to make any claim otherwise.
Of course, inherent in this assumption is that the human brain is an information-processing machine (which might be controversial to some people). However, I think the author's arguments are so neatly well-grounded and with all prior assumptions laid bare that if you accept the premise, the author's conclusions necessarily must follow. Consciousness must be the result of neural circuitry that helps you model and direct your attention, and subjective experience must seem metaphysical, because you have no additional neural circuitry to think of it any other way.
That is, you have no direct access to the knowledge and workings of your actual neurons-- your raw, objective, information processing capabilities. Instead, you must rely on a meta-cognitive "attention schema" that is necessarily a crude model of your own (extremely complex) mental states. But, given that this attention schema too must be comprised of neural circuitry that operates through its own objective neural information processing, any attempt to model subjective experience as anything but a metaphysical "feeling" will fail-- we simply don't have the information contained within us to be able to make any claim otherwise.
February 20, 2020
Pretty good book, except the last couple chapters. Most of the book is a brief but good explanation of his theory of consciousness and attention, which I had seen before in a previous book of his, but the explanations here were simplified and easier to understand. But I wasn’t impressed by the last couple chapters — speculation about the possibilities of artificial consciousness and even worse about the possibilities of mind-uploading. These chapters should have been left out of the book. However, don’t skip the appendix! It’s a great brief summary of the way his theory of consciousness and attention (as outlined in the good first 7 chapters) could be used to set up a rudimentary computer prototype of his theory.
December 11, 2023
GREAT BOOK
No time to review.
Will try to circle back and write something about this one.
In the event that I can’t….
5/5 ⭐️
No time to review.
Will try to circle back and write something about this one.
In the event that I can’t….
5/5 ⭐️
June 25, 2021
Problematica conștiinței a incitat spiritul uman, care și așa era dornic de căutare a sensurilor și esențelor existenței, în fel și chip de-a lungul mileniilor, și cu cât omul a aflat mai multe răspunsuri la eternele întrebări lansate, cu atât misterul nu s-a epuiziat, ci, dimpotrivă, a dezvăluit o câmpie și mai siunoasă din care s-au ivit alte și alte întrebări care-și cereau răspunsul de asemenea. Michael Graziano este un neurocercetător ce prezintă într-un mod cât mai accesibil publicului larg, prin multe analogii, o nouă perspectivă asupra conștiinței și nu intenționează să le înlăture pe celelalte, doar să le completeze. Subiectul e dificil și de aceea analogia facilitează crearea unei imagini în mintea cititorului despre propria lui minte și a activităților care se petrec acolo permanent încât să apară acea forță misterioasă, experiența subiectivă. Pas cu pas, de-a lungul traseului evolutiv, creierul, ca organ central în activitatea de supraviețuire, a deprins noi și noi mecanisme de îmbunătățire a relației deținătorului său cu mediul, iar dincolo de complexitatea sa de neegalat a produs un element, produs al comunicării între zonele cerebrale, trăirea subiectivă. Atenția și experiența subiectivă sunt elementele principale ale conștiinței. Atenția e acea activitate prin care un stimul codificat la nivel cerebral primează în fața altor stimuli, iar printr-o procesare centrală adecvată produce un răspuns coerent la mediu. Experiența subiectivă sau conștientă este ceva mai misterios, imaterial, non-fizic, ce pornește de la un construct intuitiv al creierului ce generează la rândul lui o schemă a atenței codificată în interiorul lui. Creierul lucrează cu modele ale lumii exterioare și modele ale rezultatelor prelucrării modelelor lumii exterioare. O schemă a atenției nu este decât ce e codificat în creier procesul atenței în sine, ce știe creierul despre cum a fost acaparat de un stimul și ce simplificări a trebuit să sufere procesul de-a lungul parcursului informației ca să se obțină esența lucrativă.
O culme a acestei procesări este așa numita teorie a minții. Teoria minții este îndeletnicirea sistemelor cognitive complexe, cum e omul, de a reconstrui mintea altcuiva, adică de a atribui și altora conținuturi mentale gen emoții, planuri, intenții, convingeri. Și e posibil ca să existe și alte animale care să posede capabilitatea aceasta, doar că prejudecățile noastre din asocierea dintre complexitatea cogniției noastre și teoria minții ar exclude alte animale din acest grup privilegiat. Clișeul conștiinței provenite din complexitate înlătură perspectiva, verosimilă de altfel, că ea ar putea fi ceva mai elementar și faptul de a atribui experiență subiectivă altuia ar putea fi mai răspândit în regnul animal mai mult decât ne-am închipui.
Teoria atențională consideră conștiința ca fiind un model intern străvechi, foarte simplificat și optimizat de evoluție pentru a îndeplini două sarcini principale. A conferi un sine, astfel fiind mai facilă predicția și controlul atenției, și facilitarea cogniției sociale, adică a predicția comportamentelor celorlalți și a stărilor pot atenționale. Acest mecanism predictiv produce un construct, un fel de substanță metafizică.
La final, autorul nu ne văduvește de-o imagine a unui potențial viitor când mintea umană se va retrage într-un creier artificial. Implicațiile acestui dificil transfer, imposibil astăzi, ar putea trece de barierele imaginabilului atât din punct de vedere tehnic, cât și etic. Dar mintea umană este propriul ei propulsor generator de energie așa că inimaginabilul se poate întrevedea în posibil, iar posibilul poate deveni probabil odată cu trecerea perioadelor de timp, mai lungi sau mai scurte.
O culme a acestei procesări este așa numita teorie a minții. Teoria minții este îndeletnicirea sistemelor cognitive complexe, cum e omul, de a reconstrui mintea altcuiva, adică de a atribui și altora conținuturi mentale gen emoții, planuri, intenții, convingeri. Și e posibil ca să existe și alte animale care să posede capabilitatea aceasta, doar că prejudecățile noastre din asocierea dintre complexitatea cogniției noastre și teoria minții ar exclude alte animale din acest grup privilegiat. Clișeul conștiinței provenite din complexitate înlătură perspectiva, verosimilă de altfel, că ea ar putea fi ceva mai elementar și faptul de a atribui experiență subiectivă altuia ar putea fi mai răspândit în regnul animal mai mult decât ne-am închipui.
Teoria atențională consideră conștiința ca fiind un model intern străvechi, foarte simplificat și optimizat de evoluție pentru a îndeplini două sarcini principale. A conferi un sine, astfel fiind mai facilă predicția și controlul atenției, și facilitarea cogniției sociale, adică a predicția comportamentelor celorlalți și a stărilor pot atenționale. Acest mecanism predictiv produce un construct, un fel de substanță metafizică.
La final, autorul nu ne văduvește de-o imagine a unui potențial viitor când mintea umană se va retrage într-un creier artificial. Implicațiile acestui dificil transfer, imposibil astăzi, ar putea trece de barierele imaginabilului atât din punct de vedere tehnic, cât și etic. Dar mintea umană este propriul ei propulsor generator de energie așa că inimaginabilul se poate întrevedea în posibil, iar posibilul poate deveni probabil odată cu trecerea perioadelor de timp, mai lungi sau mai scurte.
September 27, 2019
What is consciousness? Arguments abound, and there are plenty of competing theories about what consciousness consists of, how it arises, and what it “means.” But what if we’ve overestimated consciousness? What if we’ve imbued the concept with special meaning because we’ve been tricked, essentially, into doing so by our own minds?
Rethinking Consciousness offers a new theory of consciousness that eliminates the mystery or the “hard problem” of consciousness by positing that our sensation of subjective experience—one way of defining what it means to be conscious—arises from an internal model of attention. The attention schema is analogous to the brain’s body schema, a much investigated modeling system that not only makes sense of sensory information about the body but also provides the body with a means of anticipating and planning movements so that it can react to stimuli or accomplish different tasks. Like the body schema, the attention schema does more than correlate inputs; it provides the mind with a way of internalizing and prioritizing various kinds of focus, or, in this case, attention. Graziano sums up the idea succinctly near the end of the book:
And thus:
Accessible and well-argued, Rethinking Consciousness does a masterful job of steering us clear of those overcomplicated and sometimes circular arguments about consciousness that plague philosophical explorations of the mind (as well as some early books on artificial intelligence), which it accomplishes by focusing on attention as a way of understanding what it means to be conscious. At the same time, the book also skips past a question that potentially undermines its argument, although it does so in a clever way.
What is a thought? What does it mean to think? Graziano seems to be squashing thoughts down into bits, making them into information equivalent, in some ways, to sensory input or to emotions that arise from physical feelings. The idea that consciousness may be a “trick,” the brain’s way of explaining the attention schema to itself, since it cannot understand that such a schema exists even though it is aware of the “feeling” of that awareness, is a very powerful notion until we consider a topic that Graziano never mentions: meditation.
Anyone who has ever meditated knows that meditation is an acquired skill. Why? Because your attention wanders, which seems to support some of what Graziano is saying about the power of attention in the mind. But suppose you do know how to meditate, and after you’ve finished your morning or evening session, with your eyes still closed, a random thought slips into your mind. Your attention has been focused, while you were meditating, on not thinking, on simply Being; but now, here’s this thought, a thought that isn’t connected to the environment around you or to anything you have to do after you’re done meditating. Let’s say it’s a thought connected to someone you haven’t seen in some time, a friend long gone. How is this thought connected to your attention schema? Where did it come from? And what’s more, were you conscious before you had this thought? Suppose you are so good at meditating that you are no longer aware of your breathing, your heartbeat, or of your surroundings at a conscious level when you meditate. Are you still conscious? Do you have consciousness or not if your mind is focused entirely on becoming unfocused?
Suppose the random thought is not “latched onto” by your mind; it fades into the murky depths of your unconscious but rises again just before you go to sleep. This time, you groggily pursue it, taking a trip down memory lane before you drop off, and the attention schema is responsible for this trip, providing a method of linking you to your memories of the person you knew in the past. So was the thought not an aspect of your consciousness when you were not “focused” on it? Most of us would argue that the thought definitely represented some aspect of consciousness or even comprised part of the essence of your consciousness, because the act of thinking does seem inseparable from the idea we have of being conscious beings. But if the attention schema can explain how we can believe that we are conscious—and create the illusion that we have a focused “beam” of consciousness that we can direct toward any internal or external experience—what, then, is thought, and how does it arise?
I do see how the attention schema could explain the subjective experience of being aware, self-referentially, of the thought itself, but by flattening out thoughts until they are merely circuits or patterns of excitation equivalent to the sight of an apple or a pinch on the arm, it does seem as if Graziano is taking the kind of shortcut that AI researchers commonly did in the past, when they were determined to convince us that the brain was simply a complicated computer.
Nonetheless, a short, fun read, especially the last two chapters on artificial consciousness and uploading minds. Recommended.
Rethinking Consciousness offers a new theory of consciousness that eliminates the mystery or the “hard problem” of consciousness by positing that our sensation of subjective experience—one way of defining what it means to be conscious—arises from an internal model of attention. The attention schema is analogous to the brain’s body schema, a much investigated modeling system that not only makes sense of sensory information about the body but also provides the body with a means of anticipating and planning movements so that it can react to stimuli or accomplish different tasks. Like the body schema, the attention schema does more than correlate inputs; it provides the mind with a way of internalizing and prioritizing various kinds of focus, or, in this case, attention. Graziano sums up the idea succinctly near the end of the book:
“By treating attention as a relational property of the world that is worth modeling, the brain constructs a central connector, the attention schema, to which all other information sets in the range of your attention will necessarily attach.”
And thus:
“The attention schema theory extends gestaltism by adding the ultimate connector. Consciousness pulls features together into a single, integrated whole—me, embedded in the world, at this moment in time.”
Accessible and well-argued, Rethinking Consciousness does a masterful job of steering us clear of those overcomplicated and sometimes circular arguments about consciousness that plague philosophical explorations of the mind (as well as some early books on artificial intelligence), which it accomplishes by focusing on attention as a way of understanding what it means to be conscious. At the same time, the book also skips past a question that potentially undermines its argument, although it does so in a clever way.
What is a thought? What does it mean to think? Graziano seems to be squashing thoughts down into bits, making them into information equivalent, in some ways, to sensory input or to emotions that arise from physical feelings. The idea that consciousness may be a “trick,” the brain’s way of explaining the attention schema to itself, since it cannot understand that such a schema exists even though it is aware of the “feeling” of that awareness, is a very powerful notion until we consider a topic that Graziano never mentions: meditation.
Anyone who has ever meditated knows that meditation is an acquired skill. Why? Because your attention wanders, which seems to support some of what Graziano is saying about the power of attention in the mind. But suppose you do know how to meditate, and after you’ve finished your morning or evening session, with your eyes still closed, a random thought slips into your mind. Your attention has been focused, while you were meditating, on not thinking, on simply Being; but now, here’s this thought, a thought that isn’t connected to the environment around you or to anything you have to do after you’re done meditating. Let’s say it’s a thought connected to someone you haven’t seen in some time, a friend long gone. How is this thought connected to your attention schema? Where did it come from? And what’s more, were you conscious before you had this thought? Suppose you are so good at meditating that you are no longer aware of your breathing, your heartbeat, or of your surroundings at a conscious level when you meditate. Are you still conscious? Do you have consciousness or not if your mind is focused entirely on becoming unfocused?
Suppose the random thought is not “latched onto” by your mind; it fades into the murky depths of your unconscious but rises again just before you go to sleep. This time, you groggily pursue it, taking a trip down memory lane before you drop off, and the attention schema is responsible for this trip, providing a method of linking you to your memories of the person you knew in the past. So was the thought not an aspect of your consciousness when you were not “focused” on it? Most of us would argue that the thought definitely represented some aspect of consciousness or even comprised part of the essence of your consciousness, because the act of thinking does seem inseparable from the idea we have of being conscious beings. But if the attention schema can explain how we can believe that we are conscious—and create the illusion that we have a focused “beam” of consciousness that we can direct toward any internal or external experience—what, then, is thought, and how does it arise?
I do see how the attention schema could explain the subjective experience of being aware, self-referentially, of the thought itself, but by flattening out thoughts until they are merely circuits or patterns of excitation equivalent to the sight of an apple or a pinch on the arm, it does seem as if Graziano is taking the kind of shortcut that AI researchers commonly did in the past, when they were determined to convince us that the brain was simply a complicated computer.
Nonetheless, a short, fun read, especially the last two chapters on artificial consciousness and uploading minds. Recommended.
April 10, 2020
A 2019 staff pick recommended by Rob. Check our catalog: https://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore...
June 23, 2021
I think this is a 3.5 book.
While I enjoyed it, as it was a good introduction into the different theories that exist on consciousness in what felt like a really interesting conversation, it never goes deep enough in any technical sense to any one of them. It feels like too introductory for people in the area and I wouldn't think people who don't understand what a neuron is to be interested in this book.
I did enjoy it, it has really interesting ideas in it, but maybe I wasn't its market.
While I enjoyed it, as it was a good introduction into the different theories that exist on consciousness in what felt like a really interesting conversation, it never goes deep enough in any technical sense to any one of them. It feels like too introductory for people in the area and I wouldn't think people who don't understand what a neuron is to be interested in this book.
I did enjoy it, it has really interesting ideas in it, but maybe I wasn't its market.
August 24, 2024
I’m convinced.
Probably doesn’t cover everything, but it’s such a good case, both evolutionarily and neuroscientifically, that this is now my working conception of what consciousness really is.
Probably doesn’t cover everything, but it’s such a good case, both evolutionarily and neuroscientifically, that this is now my working conception of what consciousness really is.
September 18, 2022
In this book, Graziano basically sketches his explanation of what subjective experience (the distinctive feeling of pain and pleasure, the experiencing of the color quality space, the sense and recognition of having these very experiences) consists of and how it comes about. His basic claim is that consciousness is the product of an attention schema - which is a neuronal model an organism has of its own attention. Graziano is careful to make clear that "attention" here is a technical term: in neuroscience, attention means neural signal enhancement, and it comes in degrees (so, for example, if you're looking at the sunset but at the same time more focused and concerned about your exams next week, both the sunset and your exams are objects of attention, the former to a lesser degree than the latter). Being a model, the attention schema works by simplifying the vast amount of information the brain processes and attends to, which is useful for efficient control of behavior/reactive dispositions (and I think it's safe to say we're moving to a scientific consensus according to which the brain's main evolutionary role is flexible behavioral control in an organism's many time-pressured situations).
The attention schema theory has much to recommend it, and as far as I know there's very good empirical motivation to emphasize attention as an important part of explaining consciousness. It's also entirely compatible with the neuronal global workspace theory as developed and empirically tested by Dehaene and others (building on Baars' work in the 80's and 90's). In other words, I think Graziano is on the right track and he manages to provide a good summary of his AST and of the motivation for developing it.
I know it's a book for the general public and as such it has to resort to a lot of simplification and rely on metaphors so that laypeople get the gist of it all; and like I said, I think Graziano successfully conveys his main idea in a simplified form. But my reading experience overall wasn't very good and some parts of the book felt rushed. Also, Graziano has an overconfident attitude that comes across as misplaced, especially considering what was just said about the inevitably simplifying nature of the book.
A more serious problem is that Graziano explicitly defines consciousness as subjective experience, but then later in the book he conflates "subjective experience" with a kind of more sophisticated "self-consciousness" that is to be understood as some sort of "meta-attending self". But these are not synonymous. It's within the possibility space (as constrained by our best scientific knowledge, not by mere logical possibility) that we can have an animal that has subjective experience in the sense of qualitatively experiencing sensory information while lacking a robust self-model, understood here as an enduring model of itself as an experiencing organism. Recognizing this conceptual distinction enables us to better theorize about different degrees of selfhood and subjectivity, as sound evolutionary thinking recommends, and how they bundle and interact.
Graziano's speculation about machine consciousness and mind uploading also has some problems. To be clear, I agree that we have no good reason to think that in principle there can be no such thing as conscious machines or cyborgs. But this doesn't mean that we won't run into empirical findings that suggest that this can't quite happen. It's an open empirical question that depends on future developments of the scientific investigation of consciousness, and Graziano himself acknowledges just how much work we still have to do to better understand how everything works. It may be the case that biologically-based nuances are a major obstacle to machine consciousness - Anil Seth, another major researcher in consciousness science, tends to side with this idea (he even calls it "beast machine theory"), for example. (I have no particular horse in this race, and I tend to think that people like Seth have no sound basis to reject artificial consciousness; and to be fair, Seth is very often careful to acknowledge that his so called "biological naturalism" is mostly hunch-based.) It's here that Graziano clearly displays overconfidence. And it gets even worse in the last chapter where he discusses the possibility of uploading conscious minds in virtual worlds. At this point his speculations run so wild that it ends up being annoying and even ridiculous.
All things considered, I'll just reiterate that this is a good book as far as conveying the main positive ideas go, and one can also learn/refresh some interesting, updated neuroscientific information.
The attention schema theory has much to recommend it, and as far as I know there's very good empirical motivation to emphasize attention as an important part of explaining consciousness. It's also entirely compatible with the neuronal global workspace theory as developed and empirically tested by Dehaene and others (building on Baars' work in the 80's and 90's). In other words, I think Graziano is on the right track and he manages to provide a good summary of his AST and of the motivation for developing it.
I know it's a book for the general public and as such it has to resort to a lot of simplification and rely on metaphors so that laypeople get the gist of it all; and like I said, I think Graziano successfully conveys his main idea in a simplified form. But my reading experience overall wasn't very good and some parts of the book felt rushed. Also, Graziano has an overconfident attitude that comes across as misplaced, especially considering what was just said about the inevitably simplifying nature of the book.
A more serious problem is that Graziano explicitly defines consciousness as subjective experience, but then later in the book he conflates "subjective experience" with a kind of more sophisticated "self-consciousness" that is to be understood as some sort of "meta-attending self". But these are not synonymous. It's within the possibility space (as constrained by our best scientific knowledge, not by mere logical possibility) that we can have an animal that has subjective experience in the sense of qualitatively experiencing sensory information while lacking a robust self-model, understood here as an enduring model of itself as an experiencing organism. Recognizing this conceptual distinction enables us to better theorize about different degrees of selfhood and subjectivity, as sound evolutionary thinking recommends, and how they bundle and interact.
Graziano's speculation about machine consciousness and mind uploading also has some problems. To be clear, I agree that we have no good reason to think that in principle there can be no such thing as conscious machines or cyborgs. But this doesn't mean that we won't run into empirical findings that suggest that this can't quite happen. It's an open empirical question that depends on future developments of the scientific investigation of consciousness, and Graziano himself acknowledges just how much work we still have to do to better understand how everything works. It may be the case that biologically-based nuances are a major obstacle to machine consciousness - Anil Seth, another major researcher in consciousness science, tends to side with this idea (he even calls it "beast machine theory"), for example. (I have no particular horse in this race, and I tend to think that people like Seth have no sound basis to reject artificial consciousness; and to be fair, Seth is very often careful to acknowledge that his so called "biological naturalism" is mostly hunch-based.) It's here that Graziano clearly displays overconfidence. And it gets even worse in the last chapter where he discusses the possibility of uploading conscious minds in virtual worlds. At this point his speculations run so wild that it ends up being annoying and even ridiculous.
All things considered, I'll just reiterate that this is a good book as far as conveying the main positive ideas go, and one can also learn/refresh some interesting, updated neuroscientific information.
March 13, 2021
Скучная книга. Ничего особенного или нового автор не рассказывает.
May 31, 2023
Rethinking Consciousness is a nontechnical introduction to the attention schema theory of consciousness. In the attention schema theory of consciousness, the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness are 1. attention, 2. an internal model of attention, and 3. an internal model of consciousness. If any entity/creature/being has all three of these characteristics, that being is conscious. This is a theory that would make B. F. Skinner proud, as it focuses solely on observable, material characteristics and discards the inner, subjective experience of consciousness as irrelevant and effectively non-real.
We begin by journeying along the evolutionary tree of the animal kingdom, examining the types of nervous systems in each of our animal ancestors. Michael’s argument is that crabs are probably not conscious, because they have attention processors but likely lack models for attention processing and for the self. Dinosaurs, birds, and mammals probably are conscious, though, because they have a cerebral cortex (or wulst) which may be able to model the conscious self. We also get some discussion on how attention works, mechanistically. I liked the discussion of one of the most rudimentary mechanisms of attention, lateral inhibition - when a group of neurons are stimulated, the most stimulated neurons suppress the activity in the surrounding neurons, which acts to sharpen the signal.
Michael then delves into experiments which have attempted to locate consciousness in the brain. This section was fascinating and I liked the discussion about how one MRI experiment which at first glance seems to pinpoint consciousness in the brain might actually have nothing to do with consciousness. The book explains this really well with an analogy about colors and shapes. I also liked reading about the temporal-parietal junction in the brain, and how lesions to it can cause hemispatial neglect, which is a complete lack of awareness of an entire side (left/right) of space.
My main problem with the attention schema theory, which I kept thinking throughout the entire time I was reading the book, was that it does not satisfyingly address the question of how to distinguish a “zombie” from a person. I.e., it seems possible that a being could exist that behaves like it is conscious and perhaps even is constructed like it is conscious, but it might not actually be conscious. From what I could tell, Michael’s resolution to this problem is to deny the existence of these types of zombies - if a being is materially constructed in a similar fashion to other conscious beings, then it is conscious. I didn’t find this entirely convincing, though, especially since it seems like we still don’t exactly know _what_ specific building blocks constitute a consciousness. Following Michael’s logic, it seems like a person might be able to convince themselves that Chat GPT is conscious (or close to becoming conscious) (MaybE it Is THouGH). Or even that relatively simple computer programs, which can model themselves and their attention, might be conscious. Michael tries to address this: “A colleague once told me that every desktop computer already has a kind of attention schema, a set of information that monitors its distribution of processing resources. By my theory, then, every computer is already conscious… A group of colleagues actually did build an artificial attention device with an attention schema to help it monitor and control its own attention… But is that machine really conscious? The answer, I’m pretty sure, is no. None of these examples capture consciousness” (127-128) Michael argues that in fact, these machines, despite seemingly meeting his requirements for consciousness, are not conscious. His argument seems to be they are not conscious because their attention schema do not inform them of their own consciousness. But isn’t the definition “a conscious entity is an entity which is informed about its own consciousness” circular?
Also gonna say, unlike Michael, I feel hesitant to jump fully onboard the B. F. Skinner wagon. Just because information about another person’s subjective experience of consciousness is inaccessible to us, does that really mean it’s not “real”?
At the end of the book, we get a section about how one day, we might be able to upload our own brains into machines in order to preserve our own consciousnesses. Though, what we’d really be doing, as Michael admits, is making a copy of our consciousness, rather than directly preserving our selves. Michael rightly notes that you might not want to be one of the first people to try out this new technology, as even if just a tiny part of the copying or simulating process goes wrong, new you’s new existence might be laden with any number of unimaginable horrors. Despite this, Michael is disturbingly optimistic when envisioning a distant future where we all essentially live in the Matrix, saying that cavemen probably would view our modern-day, city-dwelling existence as just as dystopian as we might view some sort of future where all of our minds are melded into a collective consciousness and stored in datacenters. Yeah I’m still gonna pass, I think.
Reading Jeffrey Schwartz’s The Mind and The Brain made me less convinced that the mind and the brain are separate entities, which was what that book was trying to argue. Somehow, all of the flaws of the theory came to the forefront, when the theory was laid out and the evidence presented. Similarly, reading Rethinking Consciousness, I became extra aware and annoyed by the flaws in the attention schema theory of consciousness. I think it’s a solid effort at a 100% materialist theory, but it does seem weak in some areas.
Misc. things:
- “The new approach does not solve the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness — how a physical brain can generate a nonphysical essence. Instead, it explains why people might mistakenly think there is a hard problem to begin with.” (2)
- “But the mere ability to make a decision does not require consciousness” (6) and consciousness does not require the ability to make a decision, at least according to Peter Watts in Blindsight.
- “Rocks and water and single electrons are teeming with information and fluctuating states, sensitive to their outside environments. Why aren’t they conscious, too? Once you start with the intuition that consciousness arises naturally from complex information processing, it’s hard not to slip into panpsychism, the belief that everything in the universe is conscious to at least some degree.” (37) I always knew rocks were conscious…
- Consciousness is linked to, though separate from, sensory data, intelligence, and memory. But though to be conscious without language and/or without memory seems in principle possible, the corresponding subjective experiences would be so entirely different from our everyday subjective experiences of our own consciousnesses, to the point where it almost seems weird to call both types of existences by the same word “consciousness.”
We begin by journeying along the evolutionary tree of the animal kingdom, examining the types of nervous systems in each of our animal ancestors. Michael’s argument is that crabs are probably not conscious, because they have attention processors but likely lack models for attention processing and for the self. Dinosaurs, birds, and mammals probably are conscious, though, because they have a cerebral cortex (or wulst) which may be able to model the conscious self. We also get some discussion on how attention works, mechanistically. I liked the discussion of one of the most rudimentary mechanisms of attention, lateral inhibition - when a group of neurons are stimulated, the most stimulated neurons suppress the activity in the surrounding neurons, which acts to sharpen the signal.
Michael then delves into experiments which have attempted to locate consciousness in the brain. This section was fascinating and I liked the discussion about how one MRI experiment which at first glance seems to pinpoint consciousness in the brain might actually have nothing to do with consciousness. The book explains this really well with an analogy about colors and shapes. I also liked reading about the temporal-parietal junction in the brain, and how lesions to it can cause hemispatial neglect, which is a complete lack of awareness of an entire side (left/right) of space.
My main problem with the attention schema theory, which I kept thinking throughout the entire time I was reading the book, was that it does not satisfyingly address the question of how to distinguish a “zombie” from a person. I.e., it seems possible that a being could exist that behaves like it is conscious and perhaps even is constructed like it is conscious, but it might not actually be conscious. From what I could tell, Michael’s resolution to this problem is to deny the existence of these types of zombies - if a being is materially constructed in a similar fashion to other conscious beings, then it is conscious. I didn’t find this entirely convincing, though, especially since it seems like we still don’t exactly know _what_ specific building blocks constitute a consciousness. Following Michael’s logic, it seems like a person might be able to convince themselves that Chat GPT is conscious (or close to becoming conscious) (MaybE it Is THouGH). Or even that relatively simple computer programs, which can model themselves and their attention, might be conscious. Michael tries to address this: “A colleague once told me that every desktop computer already has a kind of attention schema, a set of information that monitors its distribution of processing resources. By my theory, then, every computer is already conscious… A group of colleagues actually did build an artificial attention device with an attention schema to help it monitor and control its own attention… But is that machine really conscious? The answer, I’m pretty sure, is no. None of these examples capture consciousness” (127-128) Michael argues that in fact, these machines, despite seemingly meeting his requirements for consciousness, are not conscious. His argument seems to be they are not conscious because their attention schema do not inform them of their own consciousness. But isn’t the definition “a conscious entity is an entity which is informed about its own consciousness” circular?
Also gonna say, unlike Michael, I feel hesitant to jump fully onboard the B. F. Skinner wagon. Just because information about another person’s subjective experience of consciousness is inaccessible to us, does that really mean it’s not “real”?
At the end of the book, we get a section about how one day, we might be able to upload our own brains into machines in order to preserve our own consciousnesses. Though, what we’d really be doing, as Michael admits, is making a copy of our consciousness, rather than directly preserving our selves. Michael rightly notes that you might not want to be one of the first people to try out this new technology, as even if just a tiny part of the copying or simulating process goes wrong, new you’s new existence might be laden with any number of unimaginable horrors. Despite this, Michael is disturbingly optimistic when envisioning a distant future where we all essentially live in the Matrix, saying that cavemen probably would view our modern-day, city-dwelling existence as just as dystopian as we might view some sort of future where all of our minds are melded into a collective consciousness and stored in datacenters. Yeah I’m still gonna pass, I think.
Reading Jeffrey Schwartz’s The Mind and The Brain made me less convinced that the mind and the brain are separate entities, which was what that book was trying to argue. Somehow, all of the flaws of the theory came to the forefront, when the theory was laid out and the evidence presented. Similarly, reading Rethinking Consciousness, I became extra aware and annoyed by the flaws in the attention schema theory of consciousness. I think it’s a solid effort at a 100% materialist theory, but it does seem weak in some areas.
Misc. things:
- “The new approach does not solve the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness — how a physical brain can generate a nonphysical essence. Instead, it explains why people might mistakenly think there is a hard problem to begin with.” (2)
- “But the mere ability to make a decision does not require consciousness” (6) and consciousness does not require the ability to make a decision, at least according to Peter Watts in Blindsight.
- “Rocks and water and single electrons are teeming with information and fluctuating states, sensitive to their outside environments. Why aren’t they conscious, too? Once you start with the intuition that consciousness arises naturally from complex information processing, it’s hard not to slip into panpsychism, the belief that everything in the universe is conscious to at least some degree.” (37) I always knew rocks were conscious…
- Consciousness is linked to, though separate from, sensory data, intelligence, and memory. But though to be conscious without language and/or without memory seems in principle possible, the corresponding subjective experiences would be so entirely different from our everyday subjective experiences of our own consciousnesses, to the point where it almost seems weird to call both types of existences by the same word “consciousness.”
January 10, 2021
Graziano writes for a non-academic audience (thank God), and his easy conversational style powers through some pretty dense conceptual/theoretical thinking. The end result has obviously acted as fodder for many a popular sci-fi novel, comic book, or even streaming service series on related topics. It got me thinking about how are brains are being rewired in this brave new world of smart phones, work-at-home, zoom conversations/meetings. Highly recommended!
December 16, 2019
A conscious being explains that consciousness is only an illusion ... somehow reminds me of a liar claims he is not a liar.
March 1, 2022
An excellent discussion of consciousness, neuroscience, and attention schemas. Complex concepts are easily dissected and I'm left hopeful for the advent of futuristic neural technology.
November 3, 2022
i sent a 9 paragraph email to the author of this book w my thoughts and question
October 6, 2024
I picked up this book after hearing an interview with the author. I’m interested in learning more about the current thinking on consciousness and have read several books on the subject. This book is easy to read without too much jargon and offers a good general primer. It’s also intended as an argument for his favoured theory, called Attention Schema. He’s what consciousness theorists call a materialist, meaning he believes that consciousness is produced by brain processes, in which case it can potentially literally be uploaded to a sufficiently complex computer some time in the future when our understanding of the neural network map of the brain becomes adequately understood and our technology reaches a point to reproduce it computationally. I remain unconvinced. I don’t think the author truly answers the consciousness question, ie. at what point can an information processing machine become conscious, and what constitutes that point. His schema of 3 areas of information processing, don’t seem adequate, and hint at what actually makes the question so compelling and elusive. I appreciated that he talks about the body (Body Schema) being an integral component of consciousness (we tend to think of it only in the brain) and this points to a main difficulty of the notion that the mind could be disembodied and uploaded. He does not deal with that problem, a glaring omission, and instead spends a lot of space (too much in my view) talking about a future with uploaded minds and the consequences of that, culturally, politically etc. I would have preferred a more elaborate explanation of his theory and meeting objections to it.
November 19, 2019
An interesting read, but in the end, he told us the truth and I still know little about consciousness. From millions of years ago to today, the brain has been built and rebuilt to address our awareness of the world and the things around us. His assumptions of the attention schema theory is quite interesting and more should be done with research today (as he suggests) to present further evidence of the experiments and research of the past and today. I was quite entertained in trying to compare neural networks of the mind to that of trying to replicate in technology and artificial intelligence. The problems of uploading the mind into AI will bring about a totally different set of survival characteristics for mankind in the years to come. Far too distant in the future to allow myself to consider such a process. Since the human brain contains about 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses (connectivity and memory) , it will take quite a bit of calculations to address the self in a machine environment which is not available today. Interesting and quite thrilling in thinking about the future and artificial intelligence.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested n finding more about the self, consciousness, and what it all means.
I recommend this book to anyone who is interested n finding more about the self, consciousness, and what it all means.
December 31, 2019
I found this book to be a wonderful read. I'm an absolute newcomer when it comes to both theories of consciousness and neuroscience, but I found Rethinking Consciousness eminently readable, with ample analogies to explain what are clearly very complex ideas based on solid and detailed science. The copious notes in the back of the book essentially functions as a bibliography which feels like it cites enough of a breath of research that it could function as a good guide through the hard science and philosophy which Graziano based his theory on, for anyone wanting to do more serious reading on consciousness. The appendix contains a brief outline, or schematic, of a practical way to build visual consciousness, which I found nicely sums up the thesis of the book, and could potentially function as a quick refresher for any reader who wants to recall the gist of the attention schema theory later on in life, without having to reread this whole book.
All in all, I found this book entertaining, informative, easy to read, clear, and a thrilling intellectual escapade into cutting edge science. It will be wonderful to see if anything comes from this intriguing theory of consciousness in the years to come.
All in all, I found this book entertaining, informative, easy to read, clear, and a thrilling intellectual escapade into cutting edge science. It will be wonderful to see if anything comes from this intriguing theory of consciousness in the years to come.
December 25, 2022
I study AI and machine learning. I like to read about neuroscience to try to better understand how the brain works in an effort to improve my models.
I liked the historical perspective and some of the brain research in this book, especially the studies of phantom limbs and hemispatial neglect or “the reduced awareness of stimuli on one side of space, even though there may be no sensory loss.” I also liked the concept that social, religious, and traditional biases may cause us to believe in a non-material consciousness.
Unfortunately, I found the rest of the book to be pretty disappointing.
The author simplifies consciousness down to awareness and then simplifies this down to attention. Based on this narrow definition, he is able to theorize about replicating and storing “consciousness”.
The last couple of chapters were complete nonsense. Extrapolating his simplified version of consciousness to various scenarios prefaced with “I believe”, “let’s suppose”, “possibly”, “probably”, “let’s make a big leap here”. AARGH!!!
Do yourself a favor and give this one a miss. Read Matthew Cobb or Daniel Dennett instead.
I liked the historical perspective and some of the brain research in this book, especially the studies of phantom limbs and hemispatial neglect or “the reduced awareness of stimuli on one side of space, even though there may be no sensory loss.” I also liked the concept that social, religious, and traditional biases may cause us to believe in a non-material consciousness.
Unfortunately, I found the rest of the book to be pretty disappointing.
The author simplifies consciousness down to awareness and then simplifies this down to attention. Based on this narrow definition, he is able to theorize about replicating and storing “consciousness”.
The last couple of chapters were complete nonsense. Extrapolating his simplified version of consciousness to various scenarios prefaced with “I believe”, “let’s suppose”, “possibly”, “probably”, “let’s make a big leap here”. AARGH!!!
Do yourself a favor and give this one a miss. Read Matthew Cobb or Daniel Dennett instead.
September 29, 2023
First, a book which starts with a talking stuffed elephant can do no wrong for me :-)
But on a more serious note: Rethinking Consciousness provides a clear and concise presentation of Graziano's attention schema theory (earlier described in the more meandering Consciousness and the Social Brain), its relationship to other theories of consciousness, its implications for machine intelligence and possible future mind upload technologies.
The last part seems to earn him quite a bit of criticism, but undeservedly so, in my opinion. During the 'AI winter', dreaming big and getting inspiration from science fiction was a bit frowned upon in research circles, leading to a focus on 'beancounter AI'. It's good to see that this is changing, and that Graziano's not afraid to ask the big questions.
Fascinating work, and an enjoyable read. I'm looking forward to exploring its bibliography.
But on a more serious note: Rethinking Consciousness provides a clear and concise presentation of Graziano's attention schema theory (earlier described in the more meandering Consciousness and the Social Brain), its relationship to other theories of consciousness, its implications for machine intelligence and possible future mind upload technologies.
The last part seems to earn him quite a bit of criticism, but undeservedly so, in my opinion. During the 'AI winter', dreaming big and getting inspiration from science fiction was a bit frowned upon in research circles, leading to a focus on 'beancounter AI'. It's good to see that this is changing, and that Graziano's not afraid to ask the big questions.
Fascinating work, and an enjoyable read. I'm looking forward to exploring its bibliography.
October 11, 2021
Общая оценка, наверное, 3,5, но округлил в сторону большего)
Автор описывает и аргументирует свою теорию сознания (сознание как схема внимания), а также описывает её соотношение с уже имеющимися другими теориями.
Немного нудновато и тяжеловесно в середине, но но в целом для непосвящённого человека для общего ознакомления с темой вполне норм. Особенно понравились заключительные главы, где описываются проблемы (технические, этические, культурные и т.п.), связанные с созданием искусственного сознания и с копированием сознания живых людей. Особенно это было интересно после прочтения "Смерти.net" Замировской, где всё то же самое осмыслялось с художественной точки зрения. Рассуждения учёных, как выясняется, могут быть ничуть не менее увлекательными, чем видения художников.
Автор описывает и аргументирует свою теорию сознания (сознание как схема внимания), а также описывает её соотношение с уже имеющимися другими теориями.
Немного нудновато и тяжеловесно в середине, но но в целом для непосвящённого человека для общего ознакомления с темой вполне норм. Особенно понравились заключительные главы, где описываются проблемы (технические, этические, культурные и т.п.), связанные с созданием искусственного сознания и с копированием сознания живых людей. Особенно это было интересно после прочтения "Смерти.net" Замировской, где всё то же самое осмыслялось с художественной точки зрения. Рассуждения учёных, как выясняется, могут быть ничуть не менее увлекательными, чем видения художников.
June 2, 2022
Graziano's main point is that consciousness is, forgive the simplification, really just an internal "attention schema", that is, the idea in the mind of a being that it can direct and focus its attention as it chooses. Fairly straight-forward.
But in the last chapter of the book he discusses the possibility of "uploaded minds". By this he means simulated humans, existing in the cloud, constructed from complete brain scans. The technology for this doesn't yet exist because of the computing power needed to map the trillions of synaptic connections of the human brain. Graziano is confident that someday, not in the near future, this will be achievable, and that uploaded minds will not die. Immortality, in some sense, will be the norm. Wonderful or horrible to contemplate, your choice.
But in the last chapter of the book he discusses the possibility of "uploaded minds". By this he means simulated humans, existing in the cloud, constructed from complete brain scans. The technology for this doesn't yet exist because of the computing power needed to map the trillions of synaptic connections of the human brain. Graziano is confident that someday, not in the near future, this will be achievable, and that uploaded minds will not die. Immortality, in some sense, will be the norm. Wonderful or horrible to contemplate, your choice.
June 9, 2025
This book, in addition to being a great layman-friendly guide to Graziano's Attention Schema Theory is a very interesting introduction to many interesting philosophy and neuroscience concepts. I particularly enjoyed earlier in the book when he explained the neuroscience of how the tectum focuses our attention through lateral inhibition, and how signals compete with one another in our cerebral cortex to reach our attention in order to be processed more deeply.
Overall, the ideas in the book are communicated well and the book provides an interesting insight into the world of neuroscience that novices like myself can appreciate.
Overall, the ideas in the book are communicated well and the book provides an interesting insight into the world of neuroscience that novices like myself can appreciate.
February 9, 2020
This book answers my questions on consciousness from engineering stand point. I want to read this book again as I felt one reading is not enough. I wish charlatans like Deepak Chopra reads this book and stops fooling with his mumbo-jumbo.
I want my kids to read this book to understand what can be achieved and what cannot be achieved wrt consciousness and what would be the holy grail of consciousness.
Good and honest attempt by the author to make reader understand what could be consciousness and why it’s difficult from many aspects.
Thank you for enriching my concept of consciousness.
I want my kids to read this book to understand what can be achieved and what cannot be achieved wrt consciousness and what would be the holy grail of consciousness.
Good and honest attempt by the author to make reader understand what could be consciousness and why it’s difficult from many aspects.
Thank you for enriching my concept of consciousness.
April 22, 2022
It made me think. Science-based, this work does little to delve into the metaphysical properties of the psyche. It is about the attention schema theory, it's evolutionary development, and its (possible) biological devices. He dumbs down the science enough for me to understand, and that's all I ever want out of a book such as this. Well written. I would recommend to those interested in consciousness and our evolutionary development.
He believes animals are conscious. He passes the vibe check.
He believes animals are conscious. He passes the vibe check.
March 6, 2020
I was predisposed to like the author's theory of where consciousness came from and, perhaps showing a little confirmation bias, enjoyed reading with someone who could confirm my educated musings.
I don't know enough about neuroscience to comment on the accuracy of Graziano's descriptions of how the brain processes visual information but I found it easy to follow and convincing.
I deducted a full star for the weird musings about trans-humanism and AI at the end.
I don't know enough about neuroscience to comment on the accuracy of Graziano's descriptions of how the brain processes visual information but I found it easy to follow and convincing.
I deducted a full star for the weird musings about trans-humanism and AI at the end.
September 20, 2021
My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.
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