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The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science
From a Forbes 30 Under 30 scientist comes a fascinating exploration into how the brain creates our conscious experiences—potentially revolutionizing neuroscience and the future of technology—transforming the very fabric of our society.
Throughout history, two perspectives on the world have dueled in our the extrinsic—that of mechanism and physics—and the intrinsic—that of feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The intrinsic perspective allows us to tell stories about our lives, to chart our anger and our lust, to understand our psychologies. The extrinsic allows us to chart the physical world, to build upon it, and to travel across it. These perspectives have never been reconciled; they almost seem to exist on different planes of thought. Only recently, due to the pioneering work of DNA-discoverer Francis Crick, have these two perspectives been conjoined.
This attempt to reconcile these perspectives is the science of consciousness, and posits that the intrinsic aspect of the world, how and what we perceive, can coexist in the extrinsic part of the world, in the realm of physics. The World Behind the World is a grand tour of the state of this science, an exploration of the point where tectonic metaphysical forces meet, often in paradoxical conclusions.
Dr. Erik Hoel lays out the evidence that nothing in the brain makes sense except in the light of a theory of consciousness. Some topics he examines include what the similarities are between our brains and black holes; where consciousness fits into physics and morality; and why it may be impossible for AI to ever become conscious, despite popular belief.
What does the science of consciousness tell us about what happens beyond brain death? Does our understanding of consciousness strengthen or weaken the case for free will? Is science itself incomplete in the way Gödel showed mathematics is? By taking us through the heated debates of the field and drawing on Hoel’s own original research to shed light on the latest theories about how the brain creates consciousness, The World Behind the World shows us that at long last, science is coming to understand the fundamental mystery of human existence.
Throughout history, two perspectives on the world have dueled in our the extrinsic—that of mechanism and physics—and the intrinsic—that of feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The intrinsic perspective allows us to tell stories about our lives, to chart our anger and our lust, to understand our psychologies. The extrinsic allows us to chart the physical world, to build upon it, and to travel across it. These perspectives have never been reconciled; they almost seem to exist on different planes of thought. Only recently, due to the pioneering work of DNA-discoverer Francis Crick, have these two perspectives been conjoined.
This attempt to reconcile these perspectives is the science of consciousness, and posits that the intrinsic aspect of the world, how and what we perceive, can coexist in the extrinsic part of the world, in the realm of physics. The World Behind the World is a grand tour of the state of this science, an exploration of the point where tectonic metaphysical forces meet, often in paradoxical conclusions.
Dr. Erik Hoel lays out the evidence that nothing in the brain makes sense except in the light of a theory of consciousness. Some topics he examines include what the similarities are between our brains and black holes; where consciousness fits into physics and morality; and why it may be impossible for AI to ever become conscious, despite popular belief.
What does the science of consciousness tell us about what happens beyond brain death? Does our understanding of consciousness strengthen or weaken the case for free will? Is science itself incomplete in the way Gödel showed mathematics is? By taking us through the heated debates of the field and drawing on Hoel’s own original research to shed light on the latest theories about how the brain creates consciousness, The World Behind the World shows us that at long last, science is coming to understand the fundamental mystery of human existence.
246 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 25, 2023
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June 21, 2023
I find recent developments in neuroscience fascinating and looked forward to reading this book. In parts, it is very thought provoking, though the writing is dense and coverage inconsistent.
The first 20% of the book covers the historical basis for consciousness – the intrinsic (thoughts & feelings) vs the extrinsic (external action oriented). The author quotes analysis of Greek literature on how the early texts had no references to consciousness and later ones did. This brings up the question on whether humankind acquired it later or learnt to better write about it later. This portion of the book is an utter waste. The author here takes the approach of searching for a lost object where there is light by referring only to Greek literature for analysis and conclusions. That there are great truths inside us as outside is a foundational element of eastern thinking since ages. As the author of the book, I am now reading “Five Seats of Power” says, Hindu philosophical thought starts with consciousness and significantly predates the references in this book.
After a very poor start, the subsequent sections thankfully get better. The author points out that studying the brain without consciousness has been a mistake. It is that nobody wanted to tackle the inherent problem of causation since it seemed impregnable. After all “That which causes - exists” is what drives our foundational understanding. It was believed earlier on that consciousness origins can be cracked by physicists with theories such as quantum, but that was not to be and later it was left to spiritualists and pseudo-scientists to talk about it. Now neurologists are hoping they can crack it. Roger Penrose supposedly said that the human mind is non-algorithmic, which suggests free-will being a reality. The author similarly is convinced that we have free-will though he leaps to this conclusion abruptly. He brushes over the findings that brain imaging has been able to predict the next action. I do agree that this cannot be taken as conclusive proof of absence of free will. He also points out that belief in free-will has been shown to have positive behavioural impacts (though I think that is immaterial to the discussion). There is an interesting discussion on at what level our brains should be analysed for behaviours – doing it at a neuron level may be a mistake. Some have suggested a concept of minicolumns with less than 100 neurons which may be the right level for this.
The author points out that neuroscience has been making slow progress. It is also possible that be it neuroscience or cosmology, there may always be some unsolved mysteries left.
In a later section, the author mentions that this particular chapter would be dense, but I found the whole book to like that, lacking an engaging conversational style for the most part. One yardstick I use for rating non-fiction books especially is how much I ruminate over the content after I finish the book. While this book covers some important topics, it is inconsistent and falls short in leaving a lasting impression. That said, I still recommend it for the content it covers. “Behave” by Robert Sapolsky is the best neuroscience book I have read, though it does not focus much on consciousness. I am looking forward to reading his upcoming book – “Determined”.
My rating: 3.25 / 5.
Thanks to Netgalley, Avid Reader Press and the author for a free electronic copy.
The first 20% of the book covers the historical basis for consciousness – the intrinsic (thoughts & feelings) vs the extrinsic (external action oriented). The author quotes analysis of Greek literature on how the early texts had no references to consciousness and later ones did. This brings up the question on whether humankind acquired it later or learnt to better write about it later. This portion of the book is an utter waste. The author here takes the approach of searching for a lost object where there is light by referring only to Greek literature for analysis and conclusions. That there are great truths inside us as outside is a foundational element of eastern thinking since ages. As the author of the book, I am now reading “Five Seats of Power” says, Hindu philosophical thought starts with consciousness and significantly predates the references in this book.
After a very poor start, the subsequent sections thankfully get better. The author points out that studying the brain without consciousness has been a mistake. It is that nobody wanted to tackle the inherent problem of causation since it seemed impregnable. After all “That which causes - exists” is what drives our foundational understanding. It was believed earlier on that consciousness origins can be cracked by physicists with theories such as quantum, but that was not to be and later it was left to spiritualists and pseudo-scientists to talk about it. Now neurologists are hoping they can crack it. Roger Penrose supposedly said that the human mind is non-algorithmic, which suggests free-will being a reality. The author similarly is convinced that we have free-will though he leaps to this conclusion abruptly. He brushes over the findings that brain imaging has been able to predict the next action. I do agree that this cannot be taken as conclusive proof of absence of free will. He also points out that belief in free-will has been shown to have positive behavioural impacts (though I think that is immaterial to the discussion). There is an interesting discussion on at what level our brains should be analysed for behaviours – doing it at a neuron level may be a mistake. Some have suggested a concept of minicolumns with less than 100 neurons which may be the right level for this.
The author points out that neuroscience has been making slow progress. It is also possible that be it neuroscience or cosmology, there may always be some unsolved mysteries left.
In a later section, the author mentions that this particular chapter would be dense, but I found the whole book to like that, lacking an engaging conversational style for the most part. One yardstick I use for rating non-fiction books especially is how much I ruminate over the content after I finish the book. While this book covers some important topics, it is inconsistent and falls short in leaving a lasting impression. That said, I still recommend it for the content it covers. “Behave” by Robert Sapolsky is the best neuroscience book I have read, though it does not focus much on consciousness. I am looking forward to reading his upcoming book – “Determined”.
My rating: 3.25 / 5.
Thanks to Netgalley, Avid Reader Press and the author for a free electronic copy.
May 8, 2023
It’s a civilizational achievement to be able to extrinsically see the universe “from the outside.” It is also a civilizational achievement to be able to intrinsically see the universe “from the inside.” The two perspectives are the sources of our greatest triumphs, like our ability to observe galaxies light-years away, and also the elegance and beauty of the stories we tell. Although not technological marvels we can take a picture of, the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives are conceptual marvels, and took as much intellectual work to create as our greatest institutions and constructions. They are, if judged by their fecundity, the cognitive Wonders of the World.
What a crazy trip is The World Behind the World: Dr. Erik Hoel, a Forbes 30 Under 30 scientist, starts this history of scientific navel-gazing in Ancient Egypt (handily disproving the misconception that they had no understanding of stream of consciousness and believed that all interior monologue came from their gods) and ends with modern efforts with Artificial Intelligence (making the case that machines will never gain true consciousness). Quoting from poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists throughout the ages, Hoel presents equal parts narrative and theory to explain why Neuroscience is in need of a paradigmatic shift (along the lines of Relativity’s impact on Physics or the double-helix structure of DNA on Genetics), because as it stands, the field is “floundering”, and “secretly, a scandal.” Hoel writes, for the most part, at the layperson’s level (I have no background in Neuroscience and could follow along), but I got the feeling that he was maybe not writing for me: this has the feel of a disruption, a wake up call for the small group of researchers and their post-docs who control research into the nature of consciousness, and more than anything, the narrative-lover in me would like to know how this disruption plays out. Fascinating, beginning to end. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Who am I to write this book with such a span it involves not just history, but literature and neuroscience and philosophy and mathematics? It is impossible in scope. But if not me, then who? For I have lived for years ensconced in both perspectives, and feel, at a personal level, the tension in their paradoxical relationship. I grew up in my mother’s bookstore and, later in life, became a novelist. Yet I am also a trained scientist. And in graduate school for neuroscience I worked on a small team advancing the leading scientific theory of consciousness. So for decades I have lived in the epistemological hybrid zone where the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives meet. What I saw nearly blinded me with its beauty and paradox. This book is an expression of what I’ve learned living in the hybrid zone.
Basically, the question is: Can we understand how the brain works only using tools developed by that same brain? Poets and novelists have long attempted to describe the interior (“intrinsic”) experience of humanity, but starting with Galileo — who argued that science should concern itself only with those properties (size, shape, location, and motion) that can be described mathematically — a “serious” study of any phenomena (from human consciousness to the speed of light) was to be considered solely from this “extrinsic” perspective. As far as Psychology is concerned, Hoel names B. F. Skinner as the “villain” of the story: Failed novelist, rejecter of the intrinsic perspective. Due to the popularity of his (black box) approach consciousness became a pseudoscientific word and psychology was stripped of the idea of a “stream of consciousness,” stripped of everything intrinsic, for almost a century. In order to survive as a science, psychology only kept the reduced elements of consciousness — attention, memory, perception, and action — while throwing out the domain in which they exist, the very thing that gives them form, sets them in relation, and separates one from the other.
In the middle of the twentieth century, modern research into consciousness divided into two camps which continues to this day: the empiricists (following in the footsteps of Francis Crick), “who focus on brain imaging and finding the neural correlates of consciousness”, and the theorists (following the work of Gerald Edelman), “who make quantitative and formal proposals to measure the content and level of consciousness”. With regard to the empiricists, Hoel doesn’t have much respect for their reliance on fMRIs to map brain functions (In a notorious study in 2009, a dead salmon was put in an fMRI scanner and shown the kind of standard fMRI task of “looking” at photographs that depicted humans in social situations. The dead salmon, quite obligingly, showed a statistically significant response to a common analysis pipeline. Also: I was stunned to read that my mental picture of neurology is all wrong – neurons are actually “squishy quark clouds”?) And as for the camp of theorists: Hoel did his postgraduate work with a leading neuroscientist who had studied under Edelman — Giulio Tononi — and although Hoel had been captivated by Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT), Hoel would eventually co-author a paper that demonstrated the theory’s shortcomings.
Hoel goes on to explain that perhaps the nature of consciousness is unknowable. Referencing the 2017 paper, “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?”, I found it fascinating that, using the same methods they would to map out a human brain, neuroscientists were unable to locate any specific function in a 1980s era Nintendo-running MOS 6502 microchip (despite knowing its complete wiring diagram). Further:
No one knows how the large-parameter models that show early signs of general intelligence, like GPT-3 or Google’s PaLM, actually work. We just know that they do. And this is because there is often no compressible algorithm that an ANN is implementing. Applying this same reasoning to neuroscience leads to some uncomfortable conclusions. Neuroscientists often assiduously avoid such discussions, since asking “How does the brain perform this transformation between input and output?” is a far more complex version than that same question put to ANNs, and with ANNs we know that often in principle we can say very little about this (and that’s with the complete and perfect access to the connectome, or wiring diagram, of the ANN, unlike the brain, which comes to us piecemeal via invasive surgeries or coarse-grained neuroimaging). So it’s not a lack of data about the brain that’s the problem. It’s the approach.
Hoel spends a lot of time on mathematicians Gödel and Boole (and their realisation that “formal systems built on axioms are necessarily incomplete”), and eventually references Stephen Hawking as acknowledging that science — using as it does the language of mathematics — is, by extension, also necessarily incomplete. So maybe uncertainty is simply a feature of reality and neuroscientists are asking all the wrong questions (and it's this conclusion that feels disruptive for the gatekeepers of academia). From here, Hoel goes on to briefly explore the possibility of consciousness surviving death and presents an examination of the case against free will. All fascinating stuff and well worth the read.
We may be hairless apes, but we are conscious, and that is indeed something special and unique, as the paradoxes around it attest to. Studying consciousness scientifically requires exploring the hybrid zone where the qualitative meets the quantitative, a unique metaphysical ecosystem. And it is possible that this zone will never be resolved to our satisfaction in the way other fields of science are, that it, and therefore we, will always remain paradoxical, mysterious as a deep-sea trench.
December 3, 2023
The World Behind the World is neuroscientist, novelist and philosopher of science Erik Hoel’s
brain jamming, fancy tickling, but ultimately less than satisfying DIVE into the nature of consciousness.
Hoel critiques (more like demolishes) current neuroscience approaches to consciousness as one part smoke, the other part mirrors, with a BIG dash of confusion stirred in for flavor.
Honestly, I’m a BIG neuroscience fan. But I don’t think I will look at it the same after reading this.
Hoel highlights the limitations of neuroimaging data, and calls for a more holistic, more philosophically sound, and more scientifically substantive way of understanding the brain.
Hoel asserts that neuroscience is a pre-paradigmatic science (and I totally agree that It’s a mess in this regard). Hoel opines that a basic theory of consciousness is THE important goal of neuroscience, and that trying to understand the brain without trying to understand consciousness is a TOTAL fail.
Hoel is one of the junior architects of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, which attempts (and fails) to explain how physical systems (like the brain) give rise to conscious experiences. More recently Hoel has been cooking up a theory for identifying the appropriate scale of interpretation for a given scientific question.
As if ALL of that weren’t enough. Hoel also tackles the hard problem of consciousness, free will, and the potential incompleteness of scientific understanding.
All of that was REALLY interesting and thought provoking. And REAL TALK, there was a lot of it that I didn’t understand, and (absolutely even on a good day) did NOT (at all) feel like unpacking.
But I did like it.
And it made me think hard about aspects of consciousness that I have never encountered.
And I liked Hoel a lot.
So yes to all that.
But ultimately, many of the exiting theories introduced in the first part of the book, either die or disappear by the end of the book.
In the epilogue.
Hoel concedes that universe is partly knowable, but may not be fully knowable in a way that does not engender paradox for the understander.
4/5 stars ⭐️
With points deducted for taking the reader right to the edge of something. And then just sort of leaving you there and saying we may not be able to fully understand the thing (consciousness) that this book is supposed to be about 🤔
brain jamming, fancy tickling, but ultimately less than satisfying DIVE into the nature of consciousness.
Hoel critiques (more like demolishes) current neuroscience approaches to consciousness as one part smoke, the other part mirrors, with a BIG dash of confusion stirred in for flavor.
Honestly, I’m a BIG neuroscience fan. But I don’t think I will look at it the same after reading this.
Hoel highlights the limitations of neuroimaging data, and calls for a more holistic, more philosophically sound, and more scientifically substantive way of understanding the brain.
Hoel asserts that neuroscience is a pre-paradigmatic science (and I totally agree that It’s a mess in this regard). Hoel opines that a basic theory of consciousness is THE important goal of neuroscience, and that trying to understand the brain without trying to understand consciousness is a TOTAL fail.
Hoel is one of the junior architects of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, which attempts (and fails) to explain how physical systems (like the brain) give rise to conscious experiences. More recently Hoel has been cooking up a theory for identifying the appropriate scale of interpretation for a given scientific question.
As if ALL of that weren’t enough. Hoel also tackles the hard problem of consciousness, free will, and the potential incompleteness of scientific understanding.
All of that was REALLY interesting and thought provoking. And REAL TALK, there was a lot of it that I didn’t understand, and (absolutely even on a good day) did NOT (at all) feel like unpacking.
But I did like it.
And it made me think hard about aspects of consciousness that I have never encountered.
And I liked Hoel a lot.
So yes to all that.
But ultimately, many of the exiting theories introduced in the first part of the book, either die or disappear by the end of the book.
In the epilogue.
Hoel concedes that universe is partly knowable, but may not be fully knowable in a way that does not engender paradox for the understander.
4/5 stars ⭐️
With points deducted for taking the reader right to the edge of something. And then just sort of leaving you there and saying we may not be able to fully understand the thing (consciousness) that this book is supposed to be about 🤔
July 18, 2023
Discovering the true nature of conscious experience, to have a complete scientific theory, has been the intellectual fantasy of many of the sharpest minds of today and yesterday. It's a befuddling question that frustrates with paradox, seducing many into obscurantism. Erik Hoel, former assistant professor of neuroscience at Tufts University and now prominent writer at Substack, offers a peek into what an improved scientific theory of consciousness might look like in his book The World Behind the World.
In Hoel's telling, our world can be divided into the intrinsic and extrinsic: art and science, immaterial and material, subjectivity and objectivity. The big mystery is how to these two seemingly separate spheres communicate to forge modern humans with sophisticated conscious experiences and thoughts. The World Behind the World carefully yet quickly tours different approaches to the study of consciousness: the empirical camp (Francis Crick) vs the theoretical camp (Gerald Edelman). Hoel gives special attention to the ideas of the latter camp after a brief but trenchant critique of the track record to find "neural correlates of consciousness" while doing "normal science." Hoel trained with Giulio Tononi, of Edelman's lineage, where he worked on integrated information theory (IIT), an axiomatic framework for formally explaining consciousness.
Hoel is no mere cheerleader of IIT. He identifies several of its limitations and introduces other ideas from philosophy, e.g David Chalmer's zombie argument, that present clear challenges to formal efforts to resolve "the hard problem of consciousness." Finally, Hoel reveals his contribution to this field: causal emergence theory. The remainder of the work explores the phenomenon of emergence. Causal emergence is essentially the observation that some causes and effects can unexpectedly by easier to explain at larger than smaller scales. Hoel argues causal emergence is found all over the place and is likely important to a physical description of subjective experience in the brain, especially because emergence is likely to be critical to biological systems that have evolved over millennia.
The World Behind the World succeeds in being a scientific and philosophical attempt to chip away at the fundamentals of a universal theory of conscious experience. It is a heady read that will challenge readers, even those with advanced scientific backgrounds. Although I descend more from the empirical school and probably am more of a determinist than Dr. Hoel, I think this is a pithy work of communication about an extraordinarily important scientific and human question. It's a book that escapes the pitfalls of popular science writing and still manages to be legible and engaging enough to intellectually adventurous lay readers.
I strongly recommend The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science.
Extended review at my Substack Holodoxa
*Disclosure: received as an ARC through NetGalley
In Hoel's telling, our world can be divided into the intrinsic and extrinsic: art and science, immaterial and material, subjectivity and objectivity. The big mystery is how to these two seemingly separate spheres communicate to forge modern humans with sophisticated conscious experiences and thoughts. The World Behind the World carefully yet quickly tours different approaches to the study of consciousness: the empirical camp (Francis Crick) vs the theoretical camp (Gerald Edelman). Hoel gives special attention to the ideas of the latter camp after a brief but trenchant critique of the track record to find "neural correlates of consciousness" while doing "normal science." Hoel trained with Giulio Tononi, of Edelman's lineage, where he worked on integrated information theory (IIT), an axiomatic framework for formally explaining consciousness.
Hoel is no mere cheerleader of IIT. He identifies several of its limitations and introduces other ideas from philosophy, e.g David Chalmer's zombie argument, that present clear challenges to formal efforts to resolve "the hard problem of consciousness." Finally, Hoel reveals his contribution to this field: causal emergence theory. The remainder of the work explores the phenomenon of emergence. Causal emergence is essentially the observation that some causes and effects can unexpectedly by easier to explain at larger than smaller scales. Hoel argues causal emergence is found all over the place and is likely important to a physical description of subjective experience in the brain, especially because emergence is likely to be critical to biological systems that have evolved over millennia.
The World Behind the World succeeds in being a scientific and philosophical attempt to chip away at the fundamentals of a universal theory of conscious experience. It is a heady read that will challenge readers, even those with advanced scientific backgrounds. Although I descend more from the empirical school and probably am more of a determinist than Dr. Hoel, I think this is a pithy work of communication about an extraordinarily important scientific and human question. It's a book that escapes the pitfalls of popular science writing and still manages to be legible and engaging enough to intellectually adventurous lay readers.
I strongly recommend The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science.
Extended review at my Substack Holodoxa
*Disclosure: received as an ARC through NetGalley
October 13, 2023
I have been following Erik's work for quite a while now after coming across his paper 'Quantifying Causal Emergence, Why Macro Beats Micro'. I was really excited to hear about the news of his upcoming book, and am pleased to say that I was not disappointed ! The book definitely lived up to the hype and gave me a lot of new ideas to think about and relate with my previous knowledge base.
The book really picked up steam from the third chapter onwards once it got into the meat of the current state of neuroscience. Being an unabashed Kuhnian, Hoel argues for a paradigm shift that neuroscience sorely needs at the moment if it is to mature and develop into an effective scientific discipline. This, he argues, is because the field has failed to make 'consciousness' the central basis around which to structure its entire subject matter. Hoel recounts the failure of the behaviourist school to become a successful paradigm after its dogmatic exclusion of the intrinsic perspective. He rightfully argues that it may turn out that 'Nothing in Neuroscience makes sense except in the light of Consciousness', that consciousness would turn out to play the same role for neuroscience that evolution did for biology. He mentions the replication crisis and the boom and bust cycle of catchwords like 'mirror neurons' that frequently crop up and generate excitement but later turn out to disappear entirely or fail to tell us anything useful once other variables are accounted for, higher resolution studies become available or prejudices are taken care of. The take home message was that the state of the field cannot simply be improved by a careful analysis of its experimental methods or drilling down on the accuracy of the procedures but requires a complete overhaul that grounds the field in a more imaginative and novel framework that is centred around consciousness. Hoel contrasts the methodology of the House of Crick with the House of Edelman while convincingly showing why he sides with the latter. This part was especially illuminating as he brought in a meta argument to judge the efficacy of the theory shorn merely correlationist method of the House of Crick. This puts a big question mark on the idea that successfully mapping the neural correlates of consciousness with their phenomenological counterparts would tell us anything useful without an a pripri unifying theoretical framework in which to make sense of the data. He then goes on to show how most of the current methods of Neuroscience tell us nothing useful even if we assume that we have complete knowledge of the entire connectome and it's neuronal firings. He mentions certain methods like 'averaging' as being nothing more than experimentally convenient epiphenomenon that the Mind should not be expected to oblige to in reality.
If I can describe the book in one word, I would say that its a Meta-Analysis. This term really captures the original character of the book and is I think the central idea that Hoel masterfully applies not only to the current state of Neuroscience but also to What a theory of Consciousness would look like in technical terms. He goes on to separate the question of a theory of consciousness, which he defines with useful diagrams as a mapping from extrinsic to Intrinsic states from the deeper question of the nature of consciousness itself. This demarcation serves a useful purpose as it shows that it is not possible, in principle, to answer Nagel's question of 'What it is like to be a Bat?, which is the colloquial formulation of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. I really felt like this distinction was much needed as it really sharpens and clarifies the technical meaning of what we want and should expect from a theory of consciousness.
He follows this up with a similar analysis of the scientific method itself and its evidently incomplete nature.
I loved the discussion of recursive self reference and how it generates paradoxes that go on to reveal the limits of scientific knowledge. Also the discussion of the axioms of IIT, their translation into mathematics of causal structures and the adequacy and potential pitfalls of its application to real systems in the world was especially illuminating. Not only did Hoel present an intuitively understandable account of IIT by drilling down to its nuts and bolts but also explained what any theory of consciousness grounded in phenomenology would actually look like once it reaches the same level of formalisation as IIT. I connected this discussion with Hoel's recent article where he defended IIT from the open letter which denounced it as pseudoscience. What I learned was that current practitioners in the field do not even have an idea of what a scientific theory of consciousness necessarily entails let alone judge the basis on which to declare a theory as pseudoscience or differentiate this loaded term from bad science.
The last section of the book arguably contained it's most original insight. I believe that the arguments and concepts that were presented inject some much needed nuance into the whole free will vs determinism debate. Erik introduces the idea of 'causal emergence' and differentiates it from 'weak emergence' and 'strong emergence'. He slowly builds the argument for a scientific case for free will by introducing ideas like supervenience, the exclusion argument and a quantifiable definition of causation. He makes use of the ideas of Judea Pearl to differentiate sufficiency from necessity while talking about causation. Once again he brackets and sidesteps the intrinsic nature of causation itself and deals solely with how we can use the concept in science. Hoel shows how we can base it on the experimental method of counterfactual perturbation in order to calculate the causal contribution of each level of analysis and give a practically rigorous meaning to causal emergence. Using this powerful tool we can leave the philosopher's armchair and quantitatively decide how to devise the appropriate level on which to analyse our explanatory entities ranging from quarks, proteins, neurons to ideas etc This would be an actual way to cut nature at its joints. This is exciting as it means that we can decide where reductionism works and where it doesn't and how to determine the appropriate scale at which to apply it rigourously. In the last part of the book Erik addresses the logical entailment argument for determinism and shows how a definition of free will that is full blooded enough to actually matter to us will be robust enough to avoid the objection from logical entailment if we apply the same causal argument not only to scale but also to time, especially the events leading up to the free act. He shows how indeterminacy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for any account of free will as complete indeterminacy makes free will entirely random and unintelligible. He also brings in the idea of computational irreducibility and how it acts as an epistemological barrier to any supposed Laplace's Demon.
The book has inspired me to have a look at Vervaeke's arguments from his new series in which he argues against the idea that there is a privileged level at which to analyse causality like particle interaction hegemony claims to do. Also it cements my favourite idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I especially loved this book as it is one of those books that rescue philosophical ideas from the realm of endless armchair speculation to definite testable ideas, just like Michael Levin is currently doing for biology. Overall this book is a must read for anyone interested in philosophy of mind, the limits of science, neuroscience, Consciousness and causation.
The book really picked up steam from the third chapter onwards once it got into the meat of the current state of neuroscience. Being an unabashed Kuhnian, Hoel argues for a paradigm shift that neuroscience sorely needs at the moment if it is to mature and develop into an effective scientific discipline. This, he argues, is because the field has failed to make 'consciousness' the central basis around which to structure its entire subject matter. Hoel recounts the failure of the behaviourist school to become a successful paradigm after its dogmatic exclusion of the intrinsic perspective. He rightfully argues that it may turn out that 'Nothing in Neuroscience makes sense except in the light of Consciousness', that consciousness would turn out to play the same role for neuroscience that evolution did for biology. He mentions the replication crisis and the boom and bust cycle of catchwords like 'mirror neurons' that frequently crop up and generate excitement but later turn out to disappear entirely or fail to tell us anything useful once other variables are accounted for, higher resolution studies become available or prejudices are taken care of. The take home message was that the state of the field cannot simply be improved by a careful analysis of its experimental methods or drilling down on the accuracy of the procedures but requires a complete overhaul that grounds the field in a more imaginative and novel framework that is centred around consciousness. Hoel contrasts the methodology of the House of Crick with the House of Edelman while convincingly showing why he sides with the latter. This part was especially illuminating as he brought in a meta argument to judge the efficacy of the theory shorn merely correlationist method of the House of Crick. This puts a big question mark on the idea that successfully mapping the neural correlates of consciousness with their phenomenological counterparts would tell us anything useful without an a pripri unifying theoretical framework in which to make sense of the data. He then goes on to show how most of the current methods of Neuroscience tell us nothing useful even if we assume that we have complete knowledge of the entire connectome and it's neuronal firings. He mentions certain methods like 'averaging' as being nothing more than experimentally convenient epiphenomenon that the Mind should not be expected to oblige to in reality.
If I can describe the book in one word, I would say that its a Meta-Analysis. This term really captures the original character of the book and is I think the central idea that Hoel masterfully applies not only to the current state of Neuroscience but also to What a theory of Consciousness would look like in technical terms. He goes on to separate the question of a theory of consciousness, which he defines with useful diagrams as a mapping from extrinsic to Intrinsic states from the deeper question of the nature of consciousness itself. This demarcation serves a useful purpose as it shows that it is not possible, in principle, to answer Nagel's question of 'What it is like to be a Bat?, which is the colloquial formulation of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. I really felt like this distinction was much needed as it really sharpens and clarifies the technical meaning of what we want and should expect from a theory of consciousness.
He follows this up with a similar analysis of the scientific method itself and its evidently incomplete nature.
I loved the discussion of recursive self reference and how it generates paradoxes that go on to reveal the limits of scientific knowledge. Also the discussion of the axioms of IIT, their translation into mathematics of causal structures and the adequacy and potential pitfalls of its application to real systems in the world was especially illuminating. Not only did Hoel present an intuitively understandable account of IIT by drilling down to its nuts and bolts but also explained what any theory of consciousness grounded in phenomenology would actually look like once it reaches the same level of formalisation as IIT. I connected this discussion with Hoel's recent article where he defended IIT from the open letter which denounced it as pseudoscience. What I learned was that current practitioners in the field do not even have an idea of what a scientific theory of consciousness necessarily entails let alone judge the basis on which to declare a theory as pseudoscience or differentiate this loaded term from bad science.
The last section of the book arguably contained it's most original insight. I believe that the arguments and concepts that were presented inject some much needed nuance into the whole free will vs determinism debate. Erik introduces the idea of 'causal emergence' and differentiates it from 'weak emergence' and 'strong emergence'. He slowly builds the argument for a scientific case for free will by introducing ideas like supervenience, the exclusion argument and a quantifiable definition of causation. He makes use of the ideas of Judea Pearl to differentiate sufficiency from necessity while talking about causation. Once again he brackets and sidesteps the intrinsic nature of causation itself and deals solely with how we can use the concept in science. Hoel shows how we can base it on the experimental method of counterfactual perturbation in order to calculate the causal contribution of each level of analysis and give a practically rigorous meaning to causal emergence. Using this powerful tool we can leave the philosopher's armchair and quantitatively decide how to devise the appropriate level on which to analyse our explanatory entities ranging from quarks, proteins, neurons to ideas etc This would be an actual way to cut nature at its joints. This is exciting as it means that we can decide where reductionism works and where it doesn't and how to determine the appropriate scale at which to apply it rigourously. In the last part of the book Erik addresses the logical entailment argument for determinism and shows how a definition of free will that is full blooded enough to actually matter to us will be robust enough to avoid the objection from logical entailment if we apply the same causal argument not only to scale but also to time, especially the events leading up to the free act. He shows how indeterminacy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for any account of free will as complete indeterminacy makes free will entirely random and unintelligible. He also brings in the idea of computational irreducibility and how it acts as an epistemological barrier to any supposed Laplace's Demon.
The book has inspired me to have a look at Vervaeke's arguments from his new series in which he argues against the idea that there is a privileged level at which to analyse causality like particle interaction hegemony claims to do. Also it cements my favourite idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I especially loved this book as it is one of those books that rescue philosophical ideas from the realm of endless armchair speculation to definite testable ideas, just like Michael Levin is currently doing for biology. Overall this book is a must read for anyone interested in philosophy of mind, the limits of science, neuroscience, Consciousness and causation.
May 28, 2023
Erik Hoel's book, "The World Behind the World," is about consciousness and free will. Scientists are still striving to understand what it means to be conscious, and the author insists that a new scientific paradigm is needed if we are to make headway on this vexing question. The author also asserts that free will is real, but he is wrong. During the 19th century, Pierre-Simon Laplace insisted that our entire world is deterministic, and he was correct. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In our daily life, it seems as though we have free will, that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions we freely make. You get up from the couch, and you go for a walk. You eat chocolate ice cream. We control actions like these; if we are, we have free will. But in recent years, some have argued that free will is an illusion. For example, the neuroscientist (and best-selling author) Sam Harris and the late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner claim that specific scientific findings disprove free will.
Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do wrong, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics and touching the ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries, we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's challenging and sometimes impossible to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and ourselves.
It isn't easy to believe that in the face of all of this scientific evidence, anyone still thinks that Hume and Kant were correct about free will. Unfortunately, some left-leaning philosophers have not come to these compelling scientific findings. As a result, in the last twenty or thirty years, the concept of biological determinism has once again sprung to life.
Complexity theory (or chaotic systems) was first uncovered in 1687 by Sir Isaac Newton when he revealed his inability to solve the "Three-body problem in his Principia." A two-body problem was workable, but every three-body system led to an unsolvable snarl. Newton's first attempts at a solution using the Earth, the Sun, and our Moon fell short. Over the following years, dozens of history's most famous mathematicians attempted to solve the three-body problem, and they all came up short. Then during the mid-1890s, the French polymath Henri Poincare demonstrated that no solution to the three-body problem was possible. As Poincare stated, such a system is "asymptotic!"
After Poincare's proof, the subject of non-linear dynamic systems lay mostly dormant until 1961 when Edward N. Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, discovered a chaotic system in one of his long-range computerized weather predictions. Lorenz defined chaotic behavior as when the current situation determines the future but when approximations (computer models) of the prevailing estimates of the existing system cannot predict the future accurately. Chaotic behavior is found in almost all natural Earth systems, such as turbulence in flowing fluids and complex non-linear systems like weather and climate. Unfortunately, some scientists either do not understand complexity theory or believe they can construct more detailed computer models and use supercomputers to overcome or at least deal with the difficulties imposed by chaotic systems. They do not comprehend that chaos makes accurate predictions impossible.
Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do wrong, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics and touching the ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries, we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's challenging and sometimes impossible to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and ourselves.
It isn't easy to believe that in the face of all of this scientific evidence, anyone still thinks that Hume and Kant were correct about free will. Unfortunately, some left-leaning philosophers have not come to these compelling scientific findings. As a result, in the last twenty or thirty years, the concept of biological determinism has once again sprung to life.
Complexity theory (or chaotic systems) was first uncovered in 1687 by Sir Isaac Newton when he revealed his inability to solve the "Three-body problem in his Principia." A two-body problem was workable, but every three-body system led to an unsolvable snarl. Newton's first attempts at a solution using the Earth, the Sun, and our Moon fell short. Over the following years, dozens of history's most famous mathematicians attempted to solve the three-body problem, and they all came up short. Then during the mid-1890s, the French polymath Henri Poincare demonstrated that no solution to the three-body problem was possible. As Poincare stated, such a system is "asymptotic!"
After Poincare's proof, the subject of non-linear dynamic systems lay mostly dormant until 1961 when Edward N. Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, discovered a chaotic system in one of his long-range computerized weather predictions. Lorenz defined chaotic behavior as when the current situation determines the future but when approximations (computer models) of the prevailing estimates of the existing system cannot predict the future accurately. Chaotic behavior is found in almost all natural Earth systems, such as turbulence in flowing fluids and complex non-linear systems like weather and climate. Unfortunately, some scientists either do not understand complexity theory or believe they can construct more detailed computer models and use supercomputers to overcome or at least deal with the difficulties imposed by chaotic systems. They do not comprehend that chaos makes accurate predictions impossible.
August 15, 2023
Fascinating if you are interested in theories of consciousness, but also a very tough read in some highly technical chapters.
September 6, 2023
I am too dumb for neuroscience.
But also, neuroscience is too dumb to understand the brain.
We don't understand consciousness and perhaps we never will. Back to the fiction for me!!! Imho, the only way to truly explore and try to understand our conscious experiences.
But also, neuroscience is too dumb to understand the brain.
We don't understand consciousness and perhaps we never will. Back to the fiction for me!!! Imho, the only way to truly explore and try to understand our conscious experiences.
June 4, 2024
i honestly wasn’t smart enough to read this yet but I think the way the author broke down integrated information theory by its axioms was helpful to someone who isn’t well versed in science language, also the zombie descartes analogy was super interesting and i hope descartes and the princess were actually in love
July 16, 2023
Discovering the true nature of conscious experience, to have a complete scientific theory, has been the intellectual fantasy of many of the sharpest minds of today and yesterday. It's a befuddling question that frustrates with paradox, seducing many into obscurantism. Erik Hoel, former assistant professor of neuroscience at Tufts University and now prominent writer at Substack, offers a peek into what an improved scientific theory of consciousness might look like in his book The World Behind the World.
In Hoel's telling, our world can be divided into the intrinsic and extrinsic: art and science, immaterial and material, subjectivity and objectivity. The big mystery is how to these two seemingly separate spheres communicate to forge modern humans with sophisticated conscious experiences and thoughts. The World Behind the World carefully yet quickly tours different approaches to the study of consciousness: the empirical camp (Francis Crick) vs the theoretical camp (Gerald Edelman). Hoel gives special attention to the ideas of the latter camp after a brief but trenchant critique of the track record to find "neural correlates of consciousness" while doing "normal science." Hoel trained with Giulio Tononi, of Edelman's lineage, where he worked on integrated information theory (IIT), an axiomatic framework for formally explaining consciousness.
Hoel is no mere cheerleader of IIT. He identifies several of its limitations and introduces other ideas from philosophy, e.g David Chalmer's zombie argument, that present clear challenges to formal efforts to resolve "the hard problem of consciousness." Finally, Hoel reveals his contribution to this field: causal emergence theory. The remainder of the work explores the phenomenon of emergence. Causal emergence is essentially the observation that some causes and effects can unexpectedly by easier to explain at larger than smaller scales. Hoel argues causal emergence is found all over the place and is likely important to a physical description of subjective experience in the brain, especially because emergence is likely to be critical to biological systems that have evolved over millennia.
The World Behind the World succeeds in being a scientific and philosophical attempt to chip away at the fundamentals of a universal theory of conscious experience. It is a heady read that will challenge readers, even those with advanced scientific backgrounds. Although I descend more from the empirical school and probably am more of a determinist than Dr. Hoel, I think this is a pithy work of communication about an extraordinarily important scientific and human question. It's a book that escapes the pitfalls of popular science writing and still manages to be legible and engaging enough to intellectually adventurous lay readers.
I strongly recommend The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science.
**stay tuned for a longer review to be published at my Substack Holodoxa
In Hoel's telling, our world can be divided into the intrinsic and extrinsic: art and science, immaterial and material, subjectivity and objectivity. The big mystery is how to these two seemingly separate spheres communicate to forge modern humans with sophisticated conscious experiences and thoughts. The World Behind the World carefully yet quickly tours different approaches to the study of consciousness: the empirical camp (Francis Crick) vs the theoretical camp (Gerald Edelman). Hoel gives special attention to the ideas of the latter camp after a brief but trenchant critique of the track record to find "neural correlates of consciousness" while doing "normal science." Hoel trained with Giulio Tononi, of Edelman's lineage, where he worked on integrated information theory (IIT), an axiomatic framework for formally explaining consciousness.
Hoel is no mere cheerleader of IIT. He identifies several of its limitations and introduces other ideas from philosophy, e.g David Chalmer's zombie argument, that present clear challenges to formal efforts to resolve "the hard problem of consciousness." Finally, Hoel reveals his contribution to this field: causal emergence theory. The remainder of the work explores the phenomenon of emergence. Causal emergence is essentially the observation that some causes and effects can unexpectedly by easier to explain at larger than smaller scales. Hoel argues causal emergence is found all over the place and is likely important to a physical description of subjective experience in the brain, especially because emergence is likely to be critical to biological systems that have evolved over millennia.
The World Behind the World succeeds in being a scientific and philosophical attempt to chip away at the fundamentals of a universal theory of conscious experience. It is a heady read that will challenge readers, even those with advanced scientific backgrounds. Although I descend more from the empirical school and probably am more of a determinist than Dr. Hoel, I think this is a pithy work of communication about an extraordinarily important scientific and human question. It's a book that escapes the pitfalls of popular science writing and still manages to be legible and engaging enough to intellectually adventurous lay readers.
I strongly recommend The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science.
**stay tuned for a longer review to be published at my Substack Holodoxa
July 25, 2023
I am not really in a position to write a review on what is written about this book, because the topics are only partially known to me and especially I am no longer able to cite my sources, so it would be as useless as expressing my own opinions when scores of scientists and philosophers have been squabbling over the "consciousness" issue for hundreds of years. That said, however, the book is quite understandable when it decides to be and somewhat less so when it strives to pass off as valid ideas that are at least questionable such as that of free will.
The whole thing then undergoes the usual description of how the subject has been treated from the ancient Egyptians to the present, partly because I imagine a minimum page limit is also necessary to publish a book as well as to provide a state of the art. So if you are interested in the author's view on the subject of consciousness, related of course also to the trend topic of the moment and that is AI, this is the book for you.
Non sono veramente in grado di scrivere una recensione su quanto scritto su questo libro, perché gli argomenti mi sono noti solo in parte e soprattutto non sono piú in grado di citare le mie fonti, quindi sarebbe inutile come esprimere le mie opinioni quando fior di scienziati e filosofi si accapigliano sulla questione "coscienza" da centinaia di anni. Detto questo peró, il libro é piuttosto comprensibile quando decide di esserlo e un po' meno quando si sforza di far passare come valide idee che sono quanto meno questionabili come quella del libero arbitrio.
Il tutto poi subisce la solita descrizione di come l'argomento sia stato trattato dagli antichi egizi fino ad oggi, anche perché immagino sia necessario anche un limite minimo di pagine per pubblicare un libro oltre che per fornire uno stato dell'arte. Quindi se siete interessati alla visione dell'autore sull'argomento coscienza, collegato naturalmente anche al trend topic del momento e cioé l'AI, questo é il libro che fa per voi.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
The whole thing then undergoes the usual description of how the subject has been treated from the ancient Egyptians to the present, partly because I imagine a minimum page limit is also necessary to publish a book as well as to provide a state of the art. So if you are interested in the author's view on the subject of consciousness, related of course also to the trend topic of the moment and that is AI, this is the book for you.
Non sono veramente in grado di scrivere una recensione su quanto scritto su questo libro, perché gli argomenti mi sono noti solo in parte e soprattutto non sono piú in grado di citare le mie fonti, quindi sarebbe inutile come esprimere le mie opinioni quando fior di scienziati e filosofi si accapigliano sulla questione "coscienza" da centinaia di anni. Detto questo peró, il libro é piuttosto comprensibile quando decide di esserlo e un po' meno quando si sforza di far passare come valide idee che sono quanto meno questionabili come quella del libero arbitrio.
Il tutto poi subisce la solita descrizione di come l'argomento sia stato trattato dagli antichi egizi fino ad oggi, anche perché immagino sia necessario anche un limite minimo di pagine per pubblicare un libro oltre che per fornire uno stato dell'arte. Quindi se siete interessati alla visione dell'autore sull'argomento coscienza, collegato naturalmente anche al trend topic del momento e cioé l'AI, questo é il libro che fa per voi.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
November 3, 2023
In this book, Erik Hoel artfully weaves two perspectives: the intrinsic and the extrinsic, blended with concepts from neuroscience, psychology, philosophy to discuss the relationship and nature of consciousness and free will, and the limits of science to arrive to a comprehensive theory of consciousness.
Hoel acknowledges that current neuroscience is limited to fully understand and model consciousness. (Hoel received a PhD in neuroscience working with Giulio Tononi on developing aspects of Integrated Information Theory). He explains several models of the consciousness using the IIT, realizing at the end, that it is still not capable to model effectively the consciousness. Hoel says: “IIT concerns only the extrinsic properties of consciousness, not the intrinsic aspect of it that cries out for an explanation”. So, I coincide that there is a necessity for a future paradigm shift and approach.
Hoel goes deeper into discussing the incompleteness of a falsifiable scientific theory of consciousness and the difficulty to measure consciousness only through inferences normally based on report or behavior. He concluded that it had too many irresolvable holes. Then later Hoel explains his research on her PhD that, eventually became what is now called the theory of causal emergence “to explain the intrinsic in terms of the extrinsic”.
This latter part was very hard for me to follow. I needed to read it more carefully to understand, it demanded more from me than just my limited knowledge of philosophy and epistemology.
I like to read a lot about the subject of consciousness, one of the “hard problems” for science and philosophy now. This book has plenty of very good references on the topic and is very well supported and documented on that matter. I liked this book because it tackles the consciousness problem from two perspectives, the extrinsic: neuroscience (IIT), philosophy, epistemology, psychology, and the intrinsic: literature, phenomenology, art, recognizing the limits of science.
Hoel acknowledges that current neuroscience is limited to fully understand and model consciousness. (Hoel received a PhD in neuroscience working with Giulio Tononi on developing aspects of Integrated Information Theory). He explains several models of the consciousness using the IIT, realizing at the end, that it is still not capable to model effectively the consciousness. Hoel says: “IIT concerns only the extrinsic properties of consciousness, not the intrinsic aspect of it that cries out for an explanation”. So, I coincide that there is a necessity for a future paradigm shift and approach.
Hoel goes deeper into discussing the incompleteness of a falsifiable scientific theory of consciousness and the difficulty to measure consciousness only through inferences normally based on report or behavior. He concluded that it had too many irresolvable holes. Then later Hoel explains his research on her PhD that, eventually became what is now called the theory of causal emergence “to explain the intrinsic in terms of the extrinsic”.
This latter part was very hard for me to follow. I needed to read it more carefully to understand, it demanded more from me than just my limited knowledge of philosophy and epistemology.
I like to read a lot about the subject of consciousness, one of the “hard problems” for science and philosophy now. This book has plenty of very good references on the topic and is very well supported and documented on that matter. I liked this book because it tackles the consciousness problem from two perspectives, the extrinsic: neuroscience (IIT), philosophy, epistemology, psychology, and the intrinsic: literature, phenomenology, art, recognizing the limits of science.
September 2, 2025
It’s an intriguing fact that humans come into the world without the tools to explain it, or for that matter our own experience of it. We have to develop those tools. The record of our attempts persist in the ochre shapes of hands, hunters, and animals on ancient cave walls, liturgical objects and activities from sacred sites, and myths and legends passed through communities.
We can say these and related efforts add to our knowledge inasmuch as culture is cumulative. Insights compound over time, so that a person born in a particular century may have access to better developed cultural tools than a person born at an earlier time.
Note the emphasis on may. Most of these developments are culturally contingent in terms of value, slow in coming, and unevenly distributed across peoples and regions. As such, we should resist triumphal narratives of progress and advancement. But! Progress and advances nonetheless occur and warrant attention.
In The World Behind the World, Erik Hoel points to two primary examples: literature and science—no surprise since Hoel is both a novelist and a neuroscientist. Along with The World Behind the World, he’s also the author of The Revelations, a fictional exploration of neuroscience’s search for consciousness.
Literature—think of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible, or the Iliad and Odyssey—unlocks our understanding of the world and what it means to be a human within it. But literature isn’t static, nor does it produce singular, predictable outcomes.
As people worked with the tools of literature, they innovated, developed, and improved them. In time these developments opened up what Hoel calls the intrinsic perspective. Instead of illuminating the world outside—the extrinsic perspective—literature began equipping people to directly explore and manipulate the interior world of their own emotions, beliefs, and memories.
We can guess that people have always had access to these and other aspects of their consciousness, but Hoel argues that literature as a cultural tool expanded our access along with our ability to control it. As a product of successful cultural innovation, this expansion has been cumulative. Literary innovators added their developments to the cultural toolkit, allowing subsequent users and consumers to both benefit and further innovate.
Whereas literature began with extrinsically oriented tales (such as the Iliad, which largely emphasizes the objective, observable behaviors of its characters), in time more subjective, inwardly focused, and individualized forms emerged (such as lyric poetry). There’s a world of difference between Homer and Sappho.
We can overstate this development, of course, as Hoel admits. But he also warns against ignoring it. Otherwise, we’ll miss a trajectory of literary innovation that leads to evermore interiorized forms, culminating in the novel.
Few devices have allowed humans greater access to their own consciousness than the novel, which invites exploration of motives, preferences, self-reflection, self-deception, and—importantly—comparison with the revealed motives, preferences, and so on, of others. The novel is a tool designed to spark self-awareness.
As the novel was taking recognizably modern shape in the seventeenth century, so was science. Like literature, science tells a story; that is, after all, what a hypothesis is—a narrative about cause and effect. But whereas literature came to privilege the intrinsic, science privileges the extrinsic.
Since the time of Galileo, science has proceeded by focusing on external realities, the objective, the observable, the measurable. Science progresses, as Michael Strevens argues in The Knowledge Machine, by recruiting the subjective, partial, untested intuitions of scientists and subjecting them to an externalizing process forcing the scientist to render their insights in forms available for evaluation, testing, and critique.
No one can appeal to good will, belief, confidence, or anything unless it can be put to the test. “I believe things that can be proven by reason and by experiment,” jokes P.J. O’Rourke in Give War a Chance, “and, believe you me, I want to see the logic and the lab equipment.”
This method has worked wonders for shedding light on everything from atoms to galaxies and all points in between. What it struggles to illumine? The human mind—consciousness itself.
Much of the drama in Hoel’s book concerns why. No reliable, predictive theory of the consciousness exists so far, though Hoel traces many attempts to do so. Despite all the advances, neuroscientists have made in the last half century and more—which are indeed impressive—they still can’t explain why or how a network of neurons produces the experience of being you. The extrinsic perspective is seemingly walled off from the intrinsic.
In this way, science differs significantly from literature as a cultural product, at least insofar as understanding human experience. Neuroscience demonstrates a lack of development; it’s not accumulating the kind of insights that fill in a picture of the self, consciousness.
As a neuroscientist, Hoel finds this concerning, even disappointing. There is some sort of missing element to the study of the brain that currently prevents researchers from make the leap from neurons to self-awareness. And maybe that’s not a bad thing just yet.
An Argument for Free Will
One thing the experience of you includes is the feeling of agency—the freedom to choose and power to act. One conflict between the intrinsic and extrinsic involves the latter’s tendency to reduce the subjects of its scrutiny to mechanisms. It’s disconcerting when this tendency is turned on the mind itself.
Suddenly from the perspective of neuroscience you’re not a free agent; rather, you’re a biological machine with manipulable levers, which runs counter to the actual experience of being us.
Let’s say you see and then reach for a cookie. Science can only comment on what it can observe, and that does include certain extrinsic aspects of consciousness. So a scientist can follow—as Mark Humphries does in his fascinating book The Spike—the neuronal firing in your brain from the moment your eye finds the image to the moment 2.1 seconds later you reach out your hand for the treat.
But it so far cannot shed light on the intrinsic aspect of the experience, including the rationale you follow to decide if you want the cookie or don’t. That processing happens in a black box. And that leaves room for free will—as a philosophical concept, yes, but more importantly as a simple, daily feature of being and feeling like ourselves.
There are reasons to believe that neuroscience will eventually sort out this challenge and make the same sort of advances that literature has made, allowing us to more fully see and explore inside ourselves. There are also reasons to believe we may never get there; Hoel’s argument at points involves intricacies that stretched my ability to follow but highlights hurdles that appear difficult to clear.
At least for now. I expect workarounds will be found. In the meantime, we can all enjoy a novel. And probably should: It’s one of our species’ best ways to travel inside the mind.
We can say these and related efforts add to our knowledge inasmuch as culture is cumulative. Insights compound over time, so that a person born in a particular century may have access to better developed cultural tools than a person born at an earlier time.
Note the emphasis on may. Most of these developments are culturally contingent in terms of value, slow in coming, and unevenly distributed across peoples and regions. As such, we should resist triumphal narratives of progress and advancement. But! Progress and advances nonetheless occur and warrant attention.
In The World Behind the World, Erik Hoel points to two primary examples: literature and science—no surprise since Hoel is both a novelist and a neuroscientist. Along with The World Behind the World, he’s also the author of The Revelations, a fictional exploration of neuroscience’s search for consciousness.
Literature—think of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible, or the Iliad and Odyssey—unlocks our understanding of the world and what it means to be a human within it. But literature isn’t static, nor does it produce singular, predictable outcomes.
As people worked with the tools of literature, they innovated, developed, and improved them. In time these developments opened up what Hoel calls the intrinsic perspective. Instead of illuminating the world outside—the extrinsic perspective—literature began equipping people to directly explore and manipulate the interior world of their own emotions, beliefs, and memories.
We can guess that people have always had access to these and other aspects of their consciousness, but Hoel argues that literature as a cultural tool expanded our access along with our ability to control it. As a product of successful cultural innovation, this expansion has been cumulative. Literary innovators added their developments to the cultural toolkit, allowing subsequent users and consumers to both benefit and further innovate.
Whereas literature began with extrinsically oriented tales (such as the Iliad, which largely emphasizes the objective, observable behaviors of its characters), in time more subjective, inwardly focused, and individualized forms emerged (such as lyric poetry). There’s a world of difference between Homer and Sappho.
We can overstate this development, of course, as Hoel admits. But he also warns against ignoring it. Otherwise, we’ll miss a trajectory of literary innovation that leads to evermore interiorized forms, culminating in the novel.
Few devices have allowed humans greater access to their own consciousness than the novel, which invites exploration of motives, preferences, self-reflection, self-deception, and—importantly—comparison with the revealed motives, preferences, and so on, of others. The novel is a tool designed to spark self-awareness.
As the novel was taking recognizably modern shape in the seventeenth century, so was science. Like literature, science tells a story; that is, after all, what a hypothesis is—a narrative about cause and effect. But whereas literature came to privilege the intrinsic, science privileges the extrinsic.
Since the time of Galileo, science has proceeded by focusing on external realities, the objective, the observable, the measurable. Science progresses, as Michael Strevens argues in The Knowledge Machine, by recruiting the subjective, partial, untested intuitions of scientists and subjecting them to an externalizing process forcing the scientist to render their insights in forms available for evaluation, testing, and critique.
No one can appeal to good will, belief, confidence, or anything unless it can be put to the test. “I believe things that can be proven by reason and by experiment,” jokes P.J. O’Rourke in Give War a Chance, “and, believe you me, I want to see the logic and the lab equipment.”
This method has worked wonders for shedding light on everything from atoms to galaxies and all points in between. What it struggles to illumine? The human mind—consciousness itself.
Much of the drama in Hoel’s book concerns why. No reliable, predictive theory of the consciousness exists so far, though Hoel traces many attempts to do so. Despite all the advances, neuroscientists have made in the last half century and more—which are indeed impressive—they still can’t explain why or how a network of neurons produces the experience of being you. The extrinsic perspective is seemingly walled off from the intrinsic.
In this way, science differs significantly from literature as a cultural product, at least insofar as understanding human experience. Neuroscience demonstrates a lack of development; it’s not accumulating the kind of insights that fill in a picture of the self, consciousness.
As a neuroscientist, Hoel finds this concerning, even disappointing. There is some sort of missing element to the study of the brain that currently prevents researchers from make the leap from neurons to self-awareness. And maybe that’s not a bad thing just yet.
An Argument for Free Will
One thing the experience of you includes is the feeling of agency—the freedom to choose and power to act. One conflict between the intrinsic and extrinsic involves the latter’s tendency to reduce the subjects of its scrutiny to mechanisms. It’s disconcerting when this tendency is turned on the mind itself.
Suddenly from the perspective of neuroscience you’re not a free agent; rather, you’re a biological machine with manipulable levers, which runs counter to the actual experience of being us.
Let’s say you see and then reach for a cookie. Science can only comment on what it can observe, and that does include certain extrinsic aspects of consciousness. So a scientist can follow—as Mark Humphries does in his fascinating book The Spike—the neuronal firing in your brain from the moment your eye finds the image to the moment 2.1 seconds later you reach out your hand for the treat.
But it so far cannot shed light on the intrinsic aspect of the experience, including the rationale you follow to decide if you want the cookie or don’t. That processing happens in a black box. And that leaves room for free will—as a philosophical concept, yes, but more importantly as a simple, daily feature of being and feeling like ourselves.
There are reasons to believe that neuroscience will eventually sort out this challenge and make the same sort of advances that literature has made, allowing us to more fully see and explore inside ourselves. There are also reasons to believe we may never get there; Hoel’s argument at points involves intricacies that stretched my ability to follow but highlights hurdles that appear difficult to clear.
At least for now. I expect workarounds will be found. In the meantime, we can all enjoy a novel. And probably should: It’s one of our species’ best ways to travel inside the mind.
August 1, 2023
Human knowledge has, in the broadest sense, progressed along two separate tracks, one being knowledge of the world of subjective experience, and the other the world of external objects—what can be called the “internal perspective” and “external perspective,” respectively.
Our mastery of our inner experience has culminated in the development of literature, and our mastery of the external world culminated in the development of modern science. But the ultimate task remains: reconciling these two perspectives to create a theory of consciousness that actually makes sense.
That’s the ambitious topic explored in neuroscientist and novelist Erik Hoel’s nonfiction debut, The World Behind the World.
Hoel begins by reviewing the intellectual history of literature, noting that, as he puts it, “the development of the intrinsic perspective was the process of evolving our language and concepts such that the richness of access consciousness began to approach the richness of phenomenal consciousness.” The idea here is that, as we developed the language (access consciousness) necessary to express our subjective experiences (phenomenal consciousness), we become better able to understand our inner, mental and emotional lives, culminating in the masterpieces of literature that explore the depths of our psychology (an approach largely missing from much of ancient literature). To Hoel, it’s not that consciousness just suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the historical record; rather, we developed the language necessary to understand and express it better.
Hoel turns next to science, which, ironically enough, made progress only by removing all references to subjective experience. This began with Galileo. As Galileo himself wrote:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”
Hoel explains that, “When championing that science should be in the language of mathematics, Galileo argued that science should focus on four properties of matter, all of which are susceptible to mathematical formalization: size, shape, location, and motion.” But Galileo also knew—and himself admitted—that science therefore had only limited explanatory power.
And so what we subsequently gained in scientific knowledge we achieved only by sacrificing half of our reality, focusing exclusively on mathematics and matter and ignoring the mind. But this begs the question: If the only way we can make progress in science is by removing subjective experience (consciousness), then how can we then use science to explain consciousness? Perhaps it’s more than just difficult in practice, but rather impossible in theory.
In fact, if Galileo were alive today, he likely wouldn’t be very impressed with our supposed leading candidate for providing a scientific explanation of consciousness—neuroscience. Hoel, a neuroscientist himself, points to the field's many faults, chief of which is its embarrassing lack of progress made over the decades relative to other scientific fields like genomics or virology.
Case in point: The neuroscientist Christof Koch recently lost a bet to philosopher David Chalmers, made 25 years ago, in which he claimed that science would, by now, have a complete theory of consciousness. This unequivocal failure perfectly encapsulates the problem with neuroscience, and it doesn’t look like it's likely to change anytime soon, even with better technology.
As Hoel puts it, neuroscience is about as useful to understanding how the mind works as “trying to understand a clock by examining the shadows it casts.” Sure, we have the hazy statistical averages from fMRI machines that map out a series of opaque or transient correlations, but, as Hoel puts it, “What does mere [neuronal] involvement tell us, beyond what areas to avoid during neurosurgery? Almost nothing.”
fMRI statistics are only superficial representations of neural activity; neural activity is itself only a superficial representation of mental processes; and mental processes, studied directly via psychology, seem largely chaotic and non-replicable. So what we’re left with is layer upon layer of abstraction, and, as you move further and further from the mental processes themselves, you get less and less reliable or predictive data.
As Hoel notes, this may largely be a problem with science itself, or at least with our overestimation of its abilities. As Hoel wrote:
“Science can strike even its admirers as a joke when they’re in darker moods. In such a view, science appears to be merely a series of prosthetics, donned by hairless apes. Telescopes are just farther-seeing eyes, radios merely a way of shouting loudly across mountaintops, microscopes simply large magnifying glasses, computers just a way to externalize and formalize our language—even impressive biomolecular armament like CRISPR are merely an extremely tiny and precise set of scissors. And the useful power of these prosthetics often fools us into overestimating our own powers, as if enhanced sight or hearing meant actual true understanding.”
Additionally, if humanity’s most secure form of knowledge, mathematics, was shown by Kurt Gödel to be incomplete—in that no formal system can prove all of its proposition using its own axioms—and, further, since science is largely based on the language of mathematics, it seems to be an inescapable fact that science will always exhibit explanatory holes.
Even Stephen Hawking “came to believe that scientific incompleteness is necessitated by the simple fact that science itself uses mathematics, and mathematics is itself paradoxical in nature,” as Hoel explains.
Complicating matters further is, as we’ve said, the fact that the scientific knowledge we do have is achieved through consciousness, but only by removing consciousness from the equations. To then expect to be able to turn around and use science—which presents models that remove the very thing we are most interested in (consciousness)—to provide a full explanation of consciousness seems, at the most fundamental level, paradoxical. And it certainly isn’t going to happen by mapping correlations obtained from an MRI scan.
So where does that leave us, then?
According to Hoel, we must remain content to allow science to do its thing, providing useful models from which to understand and control the material world, without being deluded into adopting an attitude of reductionist scientism towards philosophical questions and paradoxes. And to recognize that the internal perspective is every bit as important to human experience as is the external perspective. In fact, the failure to recognize this leads otherwise intelligent people to make some serious intellectual mistakes.
For example, the modern denial of free will is simply the wholesale adoption of the external perspective. As Hoel wrote:
“And what does it mean to not believe in free will? What is the impetus of this belief? I think, fundamentally, that it is simply taking the extrinsic perspective of the world as literally as possible.”
The philosopher Colin McGinn may have put it best, regarding the limitations of the human mind and, therefore, of the external perspective, to understand consciousness and free will:
“Properties (or theories) may be accessible to some minds but not to others. What is closed to the mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us may be closed to the monkey. Representational power is not all or nothing. Minds are biological products like bodies, and like bodies they come in different shapes and sizes, more or less capacious, more or less suited to certain cognitive tasks…. We could be like five-year old children trying to understand Relativity Theory…. We constitutionally lack the concept-forming capacity to encompass all possible types of conscious state, and this obstructs our path to a general solution to the mind-body problem. Even if we could solve it for our own case, we could not solve it for bats and Martians.”
The list of difficulties is substantial: Mathematical and scientific incompleteness. Cognitive limitations. The overwhelming complexity of the world. The measurement problem. These are all major roadblocks to understanding that the scientist cannot simply ignore or shake their head at. They are deep epistemological issues that may forever delimit the explanatory power of science itself. (And no, this doesn’t mean religion fills in the gap by default; if anything, religious reasoning is infinitely less reliable than even scientific reductionism.)
The evidence for this is the fact that every other materialistic field of science has made astronomical progress over the last couple centuries, while our understanding of consciousness is no better, really, than the ancient Greeks, or what is expressed in the best literature.
Hoel concludes the book by offering something very rare for a neuroscientist: a scientific case for the existence of free will, based on the concepts of scientific incompleteness and “causal emergence,” an area he has directly researched. This isn’t the place for a critique of this view, however; you’ll have to read the book for the details and to form your own conclusions.
But here’s what I think we can say: Since free will is dependent on consciousness, and since we have no scientific theory of consciousness, and, further, since science is incomplete and that causation is proving to be more complicated than we thought, it makes sense to reserve judgment regarding the existence or non-existence of free will. But, since free will seems so obviously true and is so crucial to the internal perspective, it also seems reasonable to maintain this belief unless some kind of extraordinary and irrefutable evidence presents itself. Or, as Christopher Hitchens more succinctly put it, “ Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.”
In any case, for those who like the idea that we may not be fully deterministic biological automatons, you now have a fairly sophisticated scientific defense of free will based on the lifelong research of a prominent neuroscientist. Whether he’s right or not is beyond my ability to answer, but I have a suspicion it may be beyond everyone’s.
Our mastery of our inner experience has culminated in the development of literature, and our mastery of the external world culminated in the development of modern science. But the ultimate task remains: reconciling these two perspectives to create a theory of consciousness that actually makes sense.
That’s the ambitious topic explored in neuroscientist and novelist Erik Hoel’s nonfiction debut, The World Behind the World.
Hoel begins by reviewing the intellectual history of literature, noting that, as he puts it, “the development of the intrinsic perspective was the process of evolving our language and concepts such that the richness of access consciousness began to approach the richness of phenomenal consciousness.” The idea here is that, as we developed the language (access consciousness) necessary to express our subjective experiences (phenomenal consciousness), we become better able to understand our inner, mental and emotional lives, culminating in the masterpieces of literature that explore the depths of our psychology (an approach largely missing from much of ancient literature). To Hoel, it’s not that consciousness just suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the historical record; rather, we developed the language necessary to understand and express it better.
Hoel turns next to science, which, ironically enough, made progress only by removing all references to subjective experience. This began with Galileo. As Galileo himself wrote:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”
Hoel explains that, “When championing that science should be in the language of mathematics, Galileo argued that science should focus on four properties of matter, all of which are susceptible to mathematical formalization: size, shape, location, and motion.” But Galileo also knew—and himself admitted—that science therefore had only limited explanatory power.
And so what we subsequently gained in scientific knowledge we achieved only by sacrificing half of our reality, focusing exclusively on mathematics and matter and ignoring the mind. But this begs the question: If the only way we can make progress in science is by removing subjective experience (consciousness), then how can we then use science to explain consciousness? Perhaps it’s more than just difficult in practice, but rather impossible in theory.
In fact, if Galileo were alive today, he likely wouldn’t be very impressed with our supposed leading candidate for providing a scientific explanation of consciousness—neuroscience. Hoel, a neuroscientist himself, points to the field's many faults, chief of which is its embarrassing lack of progress made over the decades relative to other scientific fields like genomics or virology.
Case in point: The neuroscientist Christof Koch recently lost a bet to philosopher David Chalmers, made 25 years ago, in which he claimed that science would, by now, have a complete theory of consciousness. This unequivocal failure perfectly encapsulates the problem with neuroscience, and it doesn’t look like it's likely to change anytime soon, even with better technology.
As Hoel puts it, neuroscience is about as useful to understanding how the mind works as “trying to understand a clock by examining the shadows it casts.” Sure, we have the hazy statistical averages from fMRI machines that map out a series of opaque or transient correlations, but, as Hoel puts it, “What does mere [neuronal] involvement tell us, beyond what areas to avoid during neurosurgery? Almost nothing.”
fMRI statistics are only superficial representations of neural activity; neural activity is itself only a superficial representation of mental processes; and mental processes, studied directly via psychology, seem largely chaotic and non-replicable. So what we’re left with is layer upon layer of abstraction, and, as you move further and further from the mental processes themselves, you get less and less reliable or predictive data.
As Hoel notes, this may largely be a problem with science itself, or at least with our overestimation of its abilities. As Hoel wrote:
“Science can strike even its admirers as a joke when they’re in darker moods. In such a view, science appears to be merely a series of prosthetics, donned by hairless apes. Telescopes are just farther-seeing eyes, radios merely a way of shouting loudly across mountaintops, microscopes simply large magnifying glasses, computers just a way to externalize and formalize our language—even impressive biomolecular armament like CRISPR are merely an extremely tiny and precise set of scissors. And the useful power of these prosthetics often fools us into overestimating our own powers, as if enhanced sight or hearing meant actual true understanding.”
Additionally, if humanity’s most secure form of knowledge, mathematics, was shown by Kurt Gödel to be incomplete—in that no formal system can prove all of its proposition using its own axioms—and, further, since science is largely based on the language of mathematics, it seems to be an inescapable fact that science will always exhibit explanatory holes.
Even Stephen Hawking “came to believe that scientific incompleteness is necessitated by the simple fact that science itself uses mathematics, and mathematics is itself paradoxical in nature,” as Hoel explains.
Complicating matters further is, as we’ve said, the fact that the scientific knowledge we do have is achieved through consciousness, but only by removing consciousness from the equations. To then expect to be able to turn around and use science—which presents models that remove the very thing we are most interested in (consciousness)—to provide a full explanation of consciousness seems, at the most fundamental level, paradoxical. And it certainly isn’t going to happen by mapping correlations obtained from an MRI scan.
So where does that leave us, then?
According to Hoel, we must remain content to allow science to do its thing, providing useful models from which to understand and control the material world, without being deluded into adopting an attitude of reductionist scientism towards philosophical questions and paradoxes. And to recognize that the internal perspective is every bit as important to human experience as is the external perspective. In fact, the failure to recognize this leads otherwise intelligent people to make some serious intellectual mistakes.
For example, the modern denial of free will is simply the wholesale adoption of the external perspective. As Hoel wrote:
“And what does it mean to not believe in free will? What is the impetus of this belief? I think, fundamentally, that it is simply taking the extrinsic perspective of the world as literally as possible.”
The philosopher Colin McGinn may have put it best, regarding the limitations of the human mind and, therefore, of the external perspective, to understand consciousness and free will:
“Properties (or theories) may be accessible to some minds but not to others. What is closed to the mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us may be closed to the monkey. Representational power is not all or nothing. Minds are biological products like bodies, and like bodies they come in different shapes and sizes, more or less capacious, more or less suited to certain cognitive tasks…. We could be like five-year old children trying to understand Relativity Theory…. We constitutionally lack the concept-forming capacity to encompass all possible types of conscious state, and this obstructs our path to a general solution to the mind-body problem. Even if we could solve it for our own case, we could not solve it for bats and Martians.”
The list of difficulties is substantial: Mathematical and scientific incompleteness. Cognitive limitations. The overwhelming complexity of the world. The measurement problem. These are all major roadblocks to understanding that the scientist cannot simply ignore or shake their head at. They are deep epistemological issues that may forever delimit the explanatory power of science itself. (And no, this doesn’t mean religion fills in the gap by default; if anything, religious reasoning is infinitely less reliable than even scientific reductionism.)
The evidence for this is the fact that every other materialistic field of science has made astronomical progress over the last couple centuries, while our understanding of consciousness is no better, really, than the ancient Greeks, or what is expressed in the best literature.
Hoel concludes the book by offering something very rare for a neuroscientist: a scientific case for the existence of free will, based on the concepts of scientific incompleteness and “causal emergence,” an area he has directly researched. This isn’t the place for a critique of this view, however; you’ll have to read the book for the details and to form your own conclusions.
But here’s what I think we can say: Since free will is dependent on consciousness, and since we have no scientific theory of consciousness, and, further, since science is incomplete and that causation is proving to be more complicated than we thought, it makes sense to reserve judgment regarding the existence or non-existence of free will. But, since free will seems so obviously true and is so crucial to the internal perspective, it also seems reasonable to maintain this belief unless some kind of extraordinary and irrefutable evidence presents itself. Or, as Christopher Hitchens more succinctly put it, “ Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.”
In any case, for those who like the idea that we may not be fully deterministic biological automatons, you now have a fairly sophisticated scientific defense of free will based on the lifelong research of a prominent neuroscientist. Whether he’s right or not is beyond my ability to answer, but I have a suspicion it may be beyond everyone’s.
March 17, 2024
Interweaves research, philosophy, history, and literature to outline the current state of consciousness studies, carefully avoiding oversimplification or overstating what's known.
July 28, 2025
I'm not smart enough for this book.
August 23, 2023
This book felt pretty uneven, not meaning "good in some parts and bad in other parts" but rather "different parts seemed to be written for completely different audiences".
The book starts out with some history and context on the how people have historically thought about consciousness. This part is written breezily and engagingly and at a level a smart high school student could easily follow.
Then it gets to Integrated Information Theory, in Hoel's view the most completely mathematically described theory of consciousness, and it completely changes to be written for a much more knowledgeable audience. Or, if written for the same audience, it doesn't succeed in making this particular complex topic into something readily understandable. At the end of the chapter about IIT I still couldn't have adequately described it (I'm a layperson but do have interest in consciousness and related topics and have done some previous reading in the area).
Then it settles into some pretty interesting stuff on the author's own theories of causal emergence which he believes constitute a better theory of consciousness and also strong support for the concept of free will. I found this stuff quite interesting and about 80% comprehensible. In particular I thought his theory of how greater info emerges at more macro (less reductionist) scales as a result of redundancy to correct errors seemed more plausible than any other account I've read of emergence. I don't have the scientific of philosophical chops to really evaluate it, but it seemed both interesting and well argued to me. Ditto for his thoughts on free will.
I'm a huge fan of Hoel's blog on substack (The Intrinsic Perspective), it's super interesting and also just plain fun to read, he's very engaging. But I thought this book didn't work as well, and that while it was also very interesting, it was more of a mish-mosh of different things that didn't quite mesh.
The book starts out with some history and context on the how people have historically thought about consciousness. This part is written breezily and engagingly and at a level a smart high school student could easily follow.
Then it gets to Integrated Information Theory, in Hoel's view the most completely mathematically described theory of consciousness, and it completely changes to be written for a much more knowledgeable audience. Or, if written for the same audience, it doesn't succeed in making this particular complex topic into something readily understandable. At the end of the chapter about IIT I still couldn't have adequately described it (I'm a layperson but do have interest in consciousness and related topics and have done some previous reading in the area).
Then it settles into some pretty interesting stuff on the author's own theories of causal emergence which he believes constitute a better theory of consciousness and also strong support for the concept of free will. I found this stuff quite interesting and about 80% comprehensible. In particular I thought his theory of how greater info emerges at more macro (less reductionist) scales as a result of redundancy to correct errors seemed more plausible than any other account I've read of emergence. I don't have the scientific of philosophical chops to really evaluate it, but it seemed both interesting and well argued to me. Ditto for his thoughts on free will.
I'm a huge fan of Hoel's blog on substack (The Intrinsic Perspective), it's super interesting and also just plain fun to read, he's very engaging. But I thought this book didn't work as well, and that while it was also very interesting, it was more of a mish-mosh of different things that didn't quite mesh.
September 18, 2025
I really wanted to like this book, because I am very interested in the science and philosophy of consciousness, but this book is just... not it. Consciousness science has a lot of unknowns, but this book lacks humility about it. Also, the organization of the book's topics doesn't really make much sense to me.
October 6, 2023
Hmm, I dunno how to talk about the book. I enjoy thinking about what consciousness is, and reading about it, but books on the topic always seem to get a little too complex for me to follow. I was doing pretty well with this one until about a third of the way in, when I started losing track of the discussion. And then it was just a bit weird when about two-thirds of the way through the book that he pivoted to talk about free will. OK, that’s related and also an interesting topic, but it was a strange change of direction for the book.
There were a lot of interesting discussions that I enjoyed and found thought-provoking so I’m glad I read it. Can’t claim to understand a large chunk of it, though.
There were a lot of interesting discussions that I enjoyed and found thought-provoking so I’m glad I read it. Can’t claim to understand a large chunk of it, though.
June 11, 2025
I'm no scientist or philosopher and I can't objectively point out the flaws in the arguments of this book, but quite a few arguments presented just seemed cherry-picked to make a point in favor of the author's view.
Also, and this may just be me, but instead of explaining simply, I felt that the author used rhetoric to confuse me with arguments, counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments, irrelevant maths, equations and theories.
At the end of the book, I know the author's stand, but can't consciously list any of his reasons. Well, except one - science has limitations and thus cannot be in a position to answer the questions.
But that's the point of science. It will never be complete or limitless. So, is it incapable of answering questions? We don't know enough about genes and cells and thus science will never be able to cure cancer - is the kind of reasoning this sounds like to me.
I just wish that the proponents of consciousness and free will avoid the use of hocus-pocus to convince me that they exist.
Also, and this may just be me, but instead of explaining simply, I felt that the author used rhetoric to confuse me with arguments, counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments, irrelevant maths, equations and theories.
At the end of the book, I know the author's stand, but can't consciously list any of his reasons. Well, except one - science has limitations and thus cannot be in a position to answer the questions.
But that's the point of science. It will never be complete or limitless. So, is it incapable of answering questions? We don't know enough about genes and cells and thus science will never be able to cure cancer - is the kind of reasoning this sounds like to me.
I just wish that the proponents of consciousness and free will avoid the use of hocus-pocus to convince me that they exist.
December 11, 2023
Possibly the worst book I have read in a decade, at least. I read the whole work just to see if it got better (it got worse) and so that I could critique it with integrity. When I enjoy a book I often write the author and often get a nice note in return. I won't be writing to Dr. Hoel. Why hurt his feelings, or rather, if I was artful enough, shatter his sense of self importance and intellectual superiority. For the record and simply to qualify myself, not to boast, I am a retired bench chemist of more than 40 years. In fairness, the bench descriptor does reveal my bias toward empirical science as opposed to theoretical. Guilty as charged. What I learned from the book, in all sarcasm, is that the entire field of neuroscience is in its infancy and severely lacking. I also learned that Eric is just about the smartest neuroscientist today and is certainly on the verge of making great discoveries. That's about it. But if you enjoy suffering, by all means read this book.
September 26, 2023
Recommendation from Peter Watts -actually read this one sandwiched in-between 2 books by him.
This book has significant highs and low, much to admire, much to disagree with. And for a book that covers such topics I must admit it was quite an easy read when compared to others on the same category.
The book started with a wonderful review on the idea that intrinsic thought, and men's theories of their own though process (the self-model of mind?), evolved through history, and how this reflects in the most ancient writing examples -ie Egyptian, Greek, where inner monologue is often attributed to a god, a soul, a spirit. Then it illustrates how, form all art forms, the book, particularly the novel -he considers El Quijote the first fully formed novel- is the only one that can truly capture internal thought processes, in a way that screen based media would never be able to.
Then he spends significant time underlining that we don't have a good theory of consciousness, and all of the limitations of neuroscience in particular, and science in general. His application of Godel's theorem to strengthen his argument about the unavoidable incompleteness of science seems far too obvious and not enough justifiable. I also bounced some of his criticisms with a neurologist (my in-law, who happens to also be very strong on philosophy) and he defused some of these, particularly the one about the sample size required for fMRI. But is undeniable that his concern about the low rate of repeatability for even the most cited experiments is a huge concern for the praxis of science. And overall, I agree with his assessment that the study of consciousness is still pre-paradigmatic.
To my great shock, he tells the story of Wilhelm Wundt (the father of psychology?) who in Leipzig in 1875 attempted to create a mirror of the periodic table for consciousness, mapping all the mental experiences that are the building blocks for consciousness... and a few years ago I was obsessed with this idea, I thought it was my original idea. Oh, well, over a hundred years late to the party. He did collect 34 thousand of them, which strongly suggests his approach was very different that mine, as my early estimates were in the double digits, so probably I was grouping at a much higher level.
Then he outlines two main approaches to the study of consciousness: "The house of Francis Crick" and "the house of Gerald Edelman" the first anchored on neuroscience and the neural correlates of consciousness, the second searching for a theoretical framework.
Hoel is a neuroscientist himself, and has worked on what he calls the star of theoretical models of consciousness, IIT (Integrated Information Theory). He -understandably- spends significant time outlining the criticisms and defense of IIT. The really cool thing is that he outlines logical models to analysis of causality (assess the degree of causality) and describes (also with logical fundament) emerging causality, where a macroscale shows causality that is not present at microscale; that is extremely important.
One of the most heart-warming parts of the book is the story of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, her intellectual prowess, and her pointing out to Descartes that if the soul is immaterial, it can not be causal agent for anything that happens in the body or the material world. If it were causal, it would be material; so dualism was dead on arrival.
He has a long chapter on why you have to use a model that is appropriate to the scale (ie atomic, molecular, chemical, biological, etc. But I think is a missed opportunity, I don't think that is as eloquently stated as it could have been - although I like his term "natural scale" for the appropriate scale of the model.
There Hoel comes back to the concept of emerging causality, but -this is one of the coolest things in the book- he convincingly makes a parallel to information theory, where communication in noisy environment is savaged by building redundancy (ie extra bits), he describes (proposes?) that causal emergence is a mechanism for error correction: he illustrates that in causality "noisy environment" is unclear causality (ie, 2 light switches for the same bulb, one of which is unreliable)
The last chapter is where I have the most problems with. He is so keen on preserving the concept of free will that he disposes of criticisms a bit too easily; furthermore, he equates lack of predictability with free will -but to his credit he distinguishes lack of predictability from non-causal, magical randomness, which he -as everyone- finds unpalatable. That and irredutability (when no simpler system can be build to predict the behavior of a given system) -for me neither equates free will.
But it closes off with a fantastic definition of free will, the one I've liked the most so far "Having free will means being an agent that is causally emergent at the relevant leel of description, for whom recent internal states are causally more relevant than distant past states, and who is computationally irreducible" Brilliant.
This book has significant highs and low, much to admire, much to disagree with. And for a book that covers such topics I must admit it was quite an easy read when compared to others on the same category.
The book started with a wonderful review on the idea that intrinsic thought, and men's theories of their own though process (the self-model of mind?), evolved through history, and how this reflects in the most ancient writing examples -ie Egyptian, Greek, where inner monologue is often attributed to a god, a soul, a spirit. Then it illustrates how, form all art forms, the book, particularly the novel -he considers El Quijote the first fully formed novel- is the only one that can truly capture internal thought processes, in a way that screen based media would never be able to.
Then he spends significant time underlining that we don't have a good theory of consciousness, and all of the limitations of neuroscience in particular, and science in general. His application of Godel's theorem to strengthen his argument about the unavoidable incompleteness of science seems far too obvious and not enough justifiable. I also bounced some of his criticisms with a neurologist (my in-law, who happens to also be very strong on philosophy) and he defused some of these, particularly the one about the sample size required for fMRI. But is undeniable that his concern about the low rate of repeatability for even the most cited experiments is a huge concern for the praxis of science. And overall, I agree with his assessment that the study of consciousness is still pre-paradigmatic.
To my great shock, he tells the story of Wilhelm Wundt (the father of psychology?) who in Leipzig in 1875 attempted to create a mirror of the periodic table for consciousness, mapping all the mental experiences that are the building blocks for consciousness... and a few years ago I was obsessed with this idea, I thought it was my original idea. Oh, well, over a hundred years late to the party. He did collect 34 thousand of them, which strongly suggests his approach was very different that mine, as my early estimates were in the double digits, so probably I was grouping at a much higher level.
Then he outlines two main approaches to the study of consciousness: "The house of Francis Crick" and "the house of Gerald Edelman" the first anchored on neuroscience and the neural correlates of consciousness, the second searching for a theoretical framework.
Hoel is a neuroscientist himself, and has worked on what he calls the star of theoretical models of consciousness, IIT (Integrated Information Theory). He -understandably- spends significant time outlining the criticisms and defense of IIT. The really cool thing is that he outlines logical models to analysis of causality (assess the degree of causality) and describes (also with logical fundament) emerging causality, where a macroscale shows causality that is not present at microscale; that is extremely important.
One of the most heart-warming parts of the book is the story of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, her intellectual prowess, and her pointing out to Descartes that if the soul is immaterial, it can not be causal agent for anything that happens in the body or the material world. If it were causal, it would be material; so dualism was dead on arrival.
He has a long chapter on why you have to use a model that is appropriate to the scale (ie atomic, molecular, chemical, biological, etc. But I think is a missed opportunity, I don't think that is as eloquently stated as it could have been - although I like his term "natural scale" for the appropriate scale of the model.
There Hoel comes back to the concept of emerging causality, but -this is one of the coolest things in the book- he convincingly makes a parallel to information theory, where communication in noisy environment is savaged by building redundancy (ie extra bits), he describes (proposes?) that causal emergence is a mechanism for error correction: he illustrates that in causality "noisy environment" is unclear causality (ie, 2 light switches for the same bulb, one of which is unreliable)
The last chapter is where I have the most problems with. He is so keen on preserving the concept of free will that he disposes of criticisms a bit too easily; furthermore, he equates lack of predictability with free will -but to his credit he distinguishes lack of predictability from non-causal, magical randomness, which he -as everyone- finds unpalatable. That and irredutability (when no simpler system can be build to predict the behavior of a given system) -for me neither equates free will.
But it closes off with a fantastic definition of free will, the one I've liked the most so far "Having free will means being an agent that is causally emergent at the relevant leel of description, for whom recent internal states are causally more relevant than distant past states, and who is computationally irreducible" Brilliant.
August 5, 2023
Mr. Hoel is an expert on neural networks and has solid and unique views on consciousness. These views are more robust in refuting past theories, as is generally true with most experts on such subjects. In his own views, the author has surprisingly many concrete arguments in support owing to his theoretical and computational background. Unfortunately, the debut book for general audiences lacks the lucidity its topic deserves for lay readers.
The book ambitiously tackles the nature of consciousness through theories of emergence, information, and causality. The core argument that consciousness emerges from recursive information processing achieving a certain level of complexity in neural networks is interesting but not extraordinarily new. However, the author's examinations of integrated information theory, causal emergence across scales, and scientific incompleteness contain superb insights.
The main weakness is the writing itself. The writer tends to get lost in convoluted historic arguments and theoretical mathematics. The book would benefit greatly from more practical examples and analogies to supplement esoteric theories. Without this, the book often comes across as more textbook than popular science.
For example, Mr HoelMr Hoel makes a superb point early in the book, supporting the emergent nature of consciousness on the back of evolutionary science. The book analyzes it through the lens of information theory. If we accept consciousness emerged via evolution, as most scientists do, then it cannot be anything but an emergent phenomenon arising from a more complex organization of matter. Since primitive organisms early in evolution lacked the rich inner experience of modern humans, our consciousness must have emerged gradually from more complex neural information processing. This simple yet profound point uses basic evolutionary assumptions to elegantly frame consciousness as an emergent property requiring no exotic new physics, just increasing biological complexity and causal information integration.
Unfortunately, the author undercuts his own compelling point by miring it in excessive historic speculation. He tries to judge when humans reached modern "thoughtfulness" by controversially analyzing early literature's self-reflective content. But this literary navel-gazing only muddles the crisp clarity of his evolutionary insight. As the book quips, "Homer's Iliad, for example, demonstrates little introspective capabilities," unlike modern authors. Such arbitrary comparisons only distract without strengthening his scientific case for consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. This tendency towards irrelevant historic detours plagues the stronger scientific arguments in later chapters as well. For example, his fascinating analysis of causal emergence across scales is obscured by digressions into abstract mathematics that is unlikely to engage general readers. The book fails to provide almost any concrete examples on the fascinating subjects of scale and causal emergence, scientific incompleteness, computational irreducibility, etc.
The standout chapter explores how causal emergence produces new layers of complexity. For readers fascinated by emergence, this chapter provides a mesmerizing scale-jumping journey from quanta to qualia. It represents the book's most thrilling glimpse into the writer's unconventional insights on consciousness. Using math, he proves the emergence of different types of causality at a higher level compared to the interplay at the constituent levels. This is subsequently used to argue that consciousness represents another level of emergent causation arising from billions of neurons integrating into the recursive information processing of a brain. When these neural networks achieve sufficiently complex, interdependent architecture, self-awareness emerges from their dynamic information flows.
Mr Hoel's formidable intellect and visionary insights are evident throughout the book. However, truly transformational ideas require articulate expression to ignite their potential fully. "The World Behind the World" smothers too many of its insights in dreary abstraction for the average reader. Though the uneven prose hampers this book's impact, the originality of its core ideas still shines through. The author needs to be followed as his ideas and eloquence mature in tandem in the coming years.
September 25, 2023
Do we create physical reality?
The discussion of consciousness and free will involves neuroscience, physics, philosophy, history, and mathematics. It is huge in scope and reaches the core of physical reality itself. This is not a neuroscience book per se but a philosophical one that combines all the relevant fields. Consciousness hinges on two characteristics: the extrinsic world that operates on the laws of physics, and the intrinsic world of life that is related to feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The presumption is that in this world cognition exists and evolves in mobile living beings in parallel with the evolution of life, and the cosmos we observe is real. It is hard to put the two perspectives together in a science of consciousness. Could these two perspectives be reconciled, or whether science will remain incomplete. This is the point at which where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet, that is ontology (what exists for one to know about) and epistemology (how knowledge is created and what is possible to know) becomes meaningful. When they begin to merge and breakdown in their distinctions, something dimensionless and unnamable is formed. This creates a structure that we call "experience” and the standard correlational approach of certain behavior with a part of brain becomes irrelevant. What makes someone or something conscious is described by the integrated information theory (IIT), and consciousness has a physical basis which can be mathematically measured. IIT proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness.
Having free will means being an agent that is causally emergent at the relevant level of description for whom recent internal states are causally more relevant than distant past states and they are computationally irreducible. The logical fatalism is a philosophical and abstract argument against free will because everything is predetermined in this world. The opposite is a universe where the future is not dependent on the past, not even randomly, as there is no probability distribution drawn from it, and therefore this looks unappealing. In either case, one must guess how recent and past states play a role in the emergence of free will.
The author’s use of bombastic phrases and technical jargon make reading a little challenging, but nevertheless he makes a valiant effort to address issues. My only gripe is that this is an open-ended book that does not draw any conclusions about the existence or nonexistence of free-will.
The discussion of consciousness and free will involves neuroscience, physics, philosophy, history, and mathematics. It is huge in scope and reaches the core of physical reality itself. This is not a neuroscience book per se but a philosophical one that combines all the relevant fields. Consciousness hinges on two characteristics: the extrinsic world that operates on the laws of physics, and the intrinsic world of life that is related to feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The presumption is that in this world cognition exists and evolves in mobile living beings in parallel with the evolution of life, and the cosmos we observe is real. It is hard to put the two perspectives together in a science of consciousness. Could these two perspectives be reconciled, or whether science will remain incomplete. This is the point at which where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet, that is ontology (what exists for one to know about) and epistemology (how knowledge is created and what is possible to know) becomes meaningful. When they begin to merge and breakdown in their distinctions, something dimensionless and unnamable is formed. This creates a structure that we call "experience” and the standard correlational approach of certain behavior with a part of brain becomes irrelevant. What makes someone or something conscious is described by the integrated information theory (IIT), and consciousness has a physical basis which can be mathematically measured. IIT proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness.
Having free will means being an agent that is causally emergent at the relevant level of description for whom recent internal states are causally more relevant than distant past states and they are computationally irreducible. The logical fatalism is a philosophical and abstract argument against free will because everything is predetermined in this world. The opposite is a universe where the future is not dependent on the past, not even randomly, as there is no probability distribution drawn from it, and therefore this looks unappealing. In either case, one must guess how recent and past states play a role in the emergence of free will.
The author’s use of bombastic phrases and technical jargon make reading a little challenging, but nevertheless he makes a valiant effort to address issues. My only gripe is that this is an open-ended book that does not draw any conclusions about the existence or nonexistence of free-will.
August 1, 2023
Hoel begins by placing the question of consciousness in the context of two standpoints from which the world can be considered: the extrinsic view - where the world is viewed and described from the outside as a system of objects, creatures, and mechanisms, and the intrinsic view - the view from within with its sensations and perceptions. The history of these two standpoints is traced from ancient times, through the rise of science, up to the current day with the reformulation of the ancient intrinsic/extrinsic gap as a problem of consciousness - the so-called hard problem. This is a fascinating history as told by Hoel, and seems the right historical context for the question of consciousness. This is followed by a survey of modern consciousness research - a survey which Hoel is very well qualified to conduct.
The last section of the book concerns crucial and contemporary theoretical issues about how a scientific study of consciousness is to be grounded. Can there be a complete science of consciousness at all? (covered in chapter 9: "Consciousness and Scientific Completeness"). Chapter 10 ("How Science Got Its Scale") was the most valuable to me. It considers the topic of causal emergence. I believe with Hoel that causal emergence can partly account for the emergence of the conscious mind from the brain, in so far as the mind itself can be regarded as a layer of causal emergence, with the brain as one of its microscales, in Hoel's terminology. (I say partly, because causal emergence does not address the problem of how experience as such arises - the hard problem; causal emergence theory lies in the extrinsic camp). Causal emergence is explained clearly and in detail via examples. The last chapter considers free will in light of causal emergence. The last section of the book is based largely on Hoel's own research.
With my interests, this was the perfect book. But it is a great read, and will be appreciated by anyone interested in its topic.
The last section of the book concerns crucial and contemporary theoretical issues about how a scientific study of consciousness is to be grounded. Can there be a complete science of consciousness at all? (covered in chapter 9: "Consciousness and Scientific Completeness"). Chapter 10 ("How Science Got Its Scale") was the most valuable to me. It considers the topic of causal emergence. I believe with Hoel that causal emergence can partly account for the emergence of the conscious mind from the brain, in so far as the mind itself can be regarded as a layer of causal emergence, with the brain as one of its microscales, in Hoel's terminology. (I say partly, because causal emergence does not address the problem of how experience as such arises - the hard problem; causal emergence theory lies in the extrinsic camp). Causal emergence is explained clearly and in detail via examples. The last chapter considers free will in light of causal emergence. The last section of the book is based largely on Hoel's own research.
With my interests, this was the perfect book. But it is a great read, and will be appreciated by anyone interested in its topic.
September 14, 2023
Overall, focussing on the content covered in the book it is a very interesting read. Hoel twists from neuroscience to logic, through to metaphysics and philosophy of mind covering very thought provoking concepts and ideas I had never before come across. However, stylistically and in it's length is where the book flounders slightly for me. Stylistically, Hoel is an accomplished novelist and this shows in this book, with complex discussions in metaphysics ending with a flowery turn of phrase or metaphor. And while this writing isn't bad, for me it was certainly out of place and acted to confuse, with vague metaphors being employed just after complex arguments which rest on precise definitions, rather than providing the flowery edge which the author may have intended. Next, the length or pace of the book was too quick. Hoel covers a range of detailed arguments very quickly and in some cases spends only a few lines introducing a complex, wide-reaching concept, before assuming it has been understood and carrying on. Providing more context, introduction and explanation would certainly have helped to ground the book and make it a more graspable read and I would certainly recommend being ready to open some Wikipedia tabs whilst reading. That being said, the book is a fascinating look at the intersections between neuroscience, philosophy and logic and the author introduces his own novel concepts and many which were previously foreign to me. So, I would still recommend giving it a read.
December 16, 2024
In this book, Hoel argues that our understanding of reality hinges on two perspectives: the intrinsic and the extrinsic and how integrating these can help us better understand consciousness.
We go through and explore the dualling nature of these two perspectives, as well how consciousness may have evolved over time, especially through our literature and science. These parts of the book I found the most interesting.
We then move onto explanations of how our current science is extremely limited in its ability to address our subjective experience, which was equally fascinating and hard to grasp, in how challenging this problem actually is to the field. We go down many roads in this book and almost all of them lead to dead ends. While this may seem a bit of a downer it also serves to pull some of the wool from our eyes too.
The philosophical exploration and scientific rigor are helped by the fact that Hoel is talking about much of his own research so his interest and own personal story help ground the book and give it a logical progression.
Overall, the book was quite thought provoking as it poses the idea that science, as we know it, may simply be incomplete when it comes to understanding consciousness and our subjective experiences may not be fully explainable through objective science. We often think that science will inevitably ‘solve’ problems through the march of progress and this book serves as a reality check.
We go through and explore the dualling nature of these two perspectives, as well how consciousness may have evolved over time, especially through our literature and science. These parts of the book I found the most interesting.
We then move onto explanations of how our current science is extremely limited in its ability to address our subjective experience, which was equally fascinating and hard to grasp, in how challenging this problem actually is to the field. We go down many roads in this book and almost all of them lead to dead ends. While this may seem a bit of a downer it also serves to pull some of the wool from our eyes too.
The philosophical exploration and scientific rigor are helped by the fact that Hoel is talking about much of his own research so his interest and own personal story help ground the book and give it a logical progression.
Overall, the book was quite thought provoking as it poses the idea that science, as we know it, may simply be incomplete when it comes to understanding consciousness and our subjective experiences may not be fully explainable through objective science. We often think that science will inevitably ‘solve’ problems through the march of progress and this book serves as a reality check.
January 23, 2024
Something fascinating on every page, but somehow less than the sum of its parts: each argument feels a bit underdeveloped and would be stronger as a book. Normally I like this sort of thing, and perhaps am just deceived by the book's self-presentation, which wants to be a sort of coherent manifesto for a research program, rather than a collection of interesting essays.
Take the discussion of free will: there's a really fascinating exploration of how Judea Pearl-style causality and computational irreducibility (deterministic processes whose processes can most efficiently be discovered by running them) can add to the free will debate... or rather, there's a really fascinating exposition of those ideas, with the suggestion that they could so add. Compatibilism is dismissed in about a paragraph, but sorry, it's on compatibilist terrain that those concepts (which are about deterministic or mechanically-probabilistic systems) have something to add, and compatibilists debate amongst themselves about what elements are required for different free will desiderata (moral responsibility, a justified feeling of autonomy, or whatever.) Hoel presents them as something like a vindication of libertarian free will, tada, which isn't as bad an entry in the "neuroscientist writes about philosophy" genre as say https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/determine... , but.
Still! Something fascinating on every page, all the complaints after that are just a footnote.
Take the discussion of free will: there's a really fascinating exploration of how Judea Pearl-style causality and computational irreducibility (deterministic processes whose processes can most efficiently be discovered by running them) can add to the free will debate... or rather, there's a really fascinating exposition of those ideas, with the suggestion that they could so add. Compatibilism is dismissed in about a paragraph, but sorry, it's on compatibilist terrain that those concepts (which are about deterministic or mechanically-probabilistic systems) have something to add, and compatibilists debate amongst themselves about what elements are required for different free will desiderata (moral responsibility, a justified feeling of autonomy, or whatever.) Hoel presents them as something like a vindication of libertarian free will, tada, which isn't as bad an entry in the "neuroscientist writes about philosophy" genre as say https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/determine... , but.
Still! Something fascinating on every page, all the complaints after that are just a footnote.
August 11, 2025
Needed CHATGPT5 (that will date fast) to better appreciate it.
Here is my take:
Core idea: Emergence is real. Sometimes higher-level patterns (like circuits, minds, ecosystems) have stronger, clearer cause-and-effect than their tiny parts. This is “causal emergence.”
Measure of “good” causes: Using effective information, Hoel argues that macro levels can carry more reliable causal power than microphysics, so stepping back can improve explanation and prediction.
Limits of reductionism: Knowing every particle isn’t always the best way to understand a system; coarse-grained models can be more causally informative (e.g., programs running on chips).
Consciousness: Treated as an emergent, real phenomenon—not an illusion—whose causal role is best captured at the right scale rather than at the level of neurons or atoms alone. Study consciousness by identifying the scales and models where its causal role is maximal (e.g., tasks, reports, network states), rather than only cataloging micro details.
Free will (reframed): At the macro level (persons making choices), there can be genuine causal control compatible with physical laws, via emergence.
Big picture for science: Progress comes from finding the right level of description and building bridges between levels, not from insisting that only the smallest parts “really” explain.
Here is my take:
Core idea: Emergence is real. Sometimes higher-level patterns (like circuits, minds, ecosystems) have stronger, clearer cause-and-effect than their tiny parts. This is “causal emergence.”
Measure of “good” causes: Using effective information, Hoel argues that macro levels can carry more reliable causal power than microphysics, so stepping back can improve explanation and prediction.
Limits of reductionism: Knowing every particle isn’t always the best way to understand a system; coarse-grained models can be more causally informative (e.g., programs running on chips).
Consciousness: Treated as an emergent, real phenomenon—not an illusion—whose causal role is best captured at the right scale rather than at the level of neurons or atoms alone. Study consciousness by identifying the scales and models where its causal role is maximal (e.g., tasks, reports, network states), rather than only cataloging micro details.
Free will (reframed): At the macro level (persons making choices), there can be genuine causal control compatible with physical laws, via emergence.
Big picture for science: Progress comes from finding the right level of description and building bridges between levels, not from insisting that only the smallest parts “really” explain.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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