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Rethinking Consciousness
- A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
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Rethinking Consciousness
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Publisher's Summary
Focusing attention can help an animal find food or flee a predator. It also may have led to consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano uses examples from the natural world to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as necessary.
Then some animals evolved covert attention - a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory.
Graziano proposes that in order to monitor and control this specialized attention, the brain evolved a simplified model of it - a cartoonish self-description depicting an internal essence with a capacity for knowledge and experience. In other words, consciousness.
In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Craig
- 18-04-2022
On the right track
I have read a large number of books on consciousness. This author is one of very few that seems to understand consciousness in a way that is compatible with my own views formed after decades working as a clinical neurologist. The idea behind the book is that consciousness is a cognitive construct with a specific functional purpose rather than an accidental property emerging from complexity. That purpose is providing a user-friendly schema for directing attention.
Those wanting a complete take down of the Hard Problem of Consciousness will not find a full explanation in this book of why some philosophers are so drawn to dualism and so convinced scientists cannot explain consciousness, but for those already predisposed to see the Hard Problem as ill-posed, this book provides a plausible explanation to the central problem of defining what consciousness is and why it evolved.
Qualia are barely acknowledged, which will frustrate some readers.
Those readers who are drawn to Chalmers' mystification will no doubt come through unconvinced. Only a detailed analysis of the dualist intuition would have a chance of turning someone towards physicalism, but for physicalists with an appetite for a coherent theory, this book is an important addition to the discussion.
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