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Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction
(Very Short Introductions #121)
by
Susan Blackmore
3.83 · Rating details · 1,383 Ratings · 161 Reviews
"The last great mystery for science," consciousness has become a controversial topic. Consciousness: A Very Short Introductionchallenges readers to reconsider key concepts such as personality, free will, and the soul. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are opening up these debates, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments and clearly describes the major theories, with illustrations and lively cartoons to help explain the experiments. Topics include vision and attention, theories of self, experiments on action and awareness, altered states of consciousness, and the effects of brain damage and drugs. This lively, engaging, and authoritative book provides a clear overview of the subject that combines the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience--and serves as a much-needed launch pad for further exploration of this complicated and unsolved issue.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam. (less)
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Paperback, 146 pages
Published 2005 by Oxford University Press (first published 2003)
Original Title
Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
ISBN
0192805851 (ISBN13: 9780192805850)
Series
Very Short Introductions #121
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May 16, 2015Nandakishore Varma rated it really liked it
The Self is illusion – so says the Buddha; and Susan Blackmore agrees, albeit with more scientific evidence as backup.
***
The Hard Problem
We are sure that there is a world outside, filled with inanimate and live things. However, we can experience this world only through our senses: the colours, the smells and the feels. They are all we have, to form our idea about our environment. However, they are dependent upon the experiences of our brain, therefore by nature subjective - and when we come to abstract concepts like pleasure and pain, they have no existence other than in the mind.
"Mind" - the fateful word! What is it? Even if we are not read up on philosophy, we assume that it exists independently of our physical body. That is, most of us subscribe to some sort of dualism. All the world's religions, other than Buddhism, posit an indestructible "soul" (although there is a difference between the Hindu Atman and the Levantine soul, a point which I shall touch upon later).
The best-known dualist theory about the mind is the one proposed by Rene Descartes, the famous Seventeenth Century French philosopher. According to Descartes, the mind is non-physical and resides in the pineal gland in the centre of the brain. However, the problem of the interaction of the non-physical mind with the physical brain is not so easily solved, therefore most scientists and philosophers prefer a monistic explanation – either the mind being fundamental, or the body. Modern science takes the materialistic view that the mind arises from mental processes.
But this does not solve the problem of how a physical brain, made purely of material substances, can give rise to conscious experiences which scientists call the ‘qualia’, the indescribable experiences. This is traditionally called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, a term coined by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers 1n 1994.
***
What does being conscious mean? For example, is my computer which takes inputs from me, interacts with me, and provides output in some way conscious? Most of us would instinctively say no: we are conditioned to think only biologically “live” entities as conscious. But then, is a tree conscious? It is born, lives and dies: reaches towards light, and uses its roots to feed itself. Again, most of us would say no – it has no brain. But then, is a bat, which has a brain, conscious in the same way that I am conscious?
“What is it like to be a bat?” – This question was made famous by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel 1n 1974. He said that if there is something it is like to be the bat, that is, if the bat is self-aware of being itself, then it is conscious: otherwise it is not. Nagel was using this argument to challenge materialism: since consciousness is subjective, we can never know objectively what it is. What we are talking about here is phenomenal consciousness, which is where self-awareness comes from – which is to be differentiated from access consciousness, which we use for thinking, acting and speaking.
So here is the million-dollar question: is consciousness an add-on to the physical brain, something which arises out of neural activity yet independent of it (the ‘ghost in the machine’)? Or is it intrinsic to complex brain processes and inseparable from them, and the idea of an independent consciousness an illusion?
Blackmore subscribes to the latter viewpoint, following the path of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. This book is devoted to proving that the self is an illusion, based on the findings of scientific research.
***
The Theatre of the Mind and the Stream of Consciousness
Susan Blackmore says we more or less view our mind as a theatre, where the self sits, seeing the show through the eyes, experiencing smells through the nose, and hearing sound through the ears – our daily 4D movie show. Also, we add the time element to it, experiencing it as flowing like a stream (hence the term ‘stream of consciousness’). According to Dennett, this is all bunkum. There is no centre point in the mind where everything comes together – it is all processed in parallel.
The amount of scientific research the author manages to bring to the table to prove her point are impressive. First, the human brain is analysed in detail, how various parts are related to various activities of the consciousness – also how damage significantly changes human perception in weird ways. Having linked mental processes firmly to physical activity, Blackmore attacks the concept of ‘stream of consciousness’ by establishing that the events the brain processes do not enter consciousness at all unless verbally probed - that is, we become aware of doing something only when we introspect. So there is no ‘stream’ as such, rather multiple processes which are gathered into a coherent stream later on.
The Grand Illusion
Still there must be something like a consciousness to do all this activity. Blackmore does not disagree – we do feel a ‘conscious self’, but in scientific terms, it is an illusion. She presents an extensive list of interesting experiments to prove that perception is largely subliminal. Even if we are not “aware” of what we perceive, the brain functions just the same. The self, instead of an entity, is a ‘bundle of sensations’, to borrow the words of David Hume. This is also very near to the concept of the ‘Anatman’ – the ‘not-self’ – posited by the Buddha (a man much ahead of his time, it seems!).
However, Blackmore goes further in denying the self – she refuses to equate it with any brain process. Quoting Dennett, she says that the self is a total illusion created by the way we use our language:
Finally, a completely different approach is provided by Dennett. Having rejected the Cartesian theatre, he also rejects its audience of one who watches the show. The self, he claims, is something that needs to be explained, but it does not exist in the way that a physical object (or even a brain process) exists. Like a centre of gravity in physics, it is a useful abstraction. Indeed, he calls it a ‘centre of narrative gravity’. Our language spins the story of a self and so we come to believe that there is, in addition to our single body, a single inner self who has consciousness, holds opinions, and makes decisions. Really, there is no inner self but only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign user illusion – a useful fiction.
It seems we have some tough choices in thinking about our own precious self. We can hang on to the way it feels and assume that a persisting self or soul or spirit exists, even though it cannot be found and leads to deep philosophical troubles. We can equate it with some kind of brain process and shelve the problem of why this brain process should have conscious experiences at all, or we can reject any persisting entity that corresponds to our feeling of being a self.
I think that intellectually we have to take this last path. The trouble is that it is very hard to accept in one’s own personal life. It means taking a radically different view of every experience. It means accepting that there is no one who is having these experiences. It means accepting that every time I seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction and not the same ‘me’ who seemed to exist a moment before, or last week, or last year. This is tough, but I think it gets easier with practice.
In the same way, Susan Blackmore also negates free will. Quoting an interesting experiment by Wegner, she argues that the same unconscious impulses give rise to the action and the thought behind the action: only thing is that the thought occurs a fraction of a second before the action, so we conclude that we have willed it!
(This is a truly radical approach. I must confess, even though it is argued flawlessly, it is a bit hard for me to accept. But I must admit that I have lived with this consciousness for such a long time that it is very difficult to let the chap go!)
***
This is a good book, which talks on a difficult subject in a readable manner. The author’s erudition and credentials also cannot be faulted. Hence the four stars.
However, a couple of caveats:
Firstly, this is not an introduction to the subject – it is an introduction to particular theory of consciousness. History of scientific and philosophical research on the subject is largely ignored, and competing theories are presented only so that they can be refuted. I am definitely interested in the subject, and shall be reading more – and not just Dennett’s theory.
Secondly, materialism and monism is taken as a given. True, the Levantine concept of an indestructible soul occupying the destructible body cannot be treated scientifically (though it’s a valid religious concept)– but the Hindu concept of Atman and Brahman is slightly different.
The Mandukya Upanishad talks extensively of consciousness. It posits four ‘Purushas’ (we may think of them as various types of consciousness). The first one, which is outward-looking and connected to the waking state, experiences the ‘real’ world. The second one, which is inward-looking and connected to the dreaming state, experiences the phenomenal world. The third one, which is connected with dreamless sleep, experiences the real and phenomenal worlds at the same time. And the fourth one, the most profound, goes beyond all these experiences and transcends the phenomenal existence. I guess it is here that the Atman identifies with the Brahman.
The concept of the Brahman in Hinduism can be most closely approximated as ‘un-distilled sentience’: a sort of cosmic consciousness of which each and every atom of reality is but a part. The individual Atman is but an imperfect reflection of the Brahman: the realisation that it is part of the big whole is said to be the whole purpose of enlightenment.
At the present level of scientific knowledge, materialism seems to be the only valid worldview. But in the light of quantum phenomena, is the concept of reality as sentience wholly off the mark? I don’t think so.
Susan Blackmore could have dwelt a bit more on the philosophical aspects of the question also, I feel. But maybe it’s unfair to expect it from a book which is basically scientific in nature.
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Jan 07, 2013Ted rated it it was amazing
Shelves: life-sciences, psychology, beach-serious-nonfiction, have, women-s-works
Found this a fascinating book insofar as some of the ideas suggested in it were things I had never thought of. See for example the sections Theories of consciousness (p. 43), The nature of illusion (p. 50), The timing of conscious acts (p. 86), Memes (p. 127) and The future of consciousness (p. 128) She mentions Daniel Dennett frequently, citing in particular his Consciousness Explained (1991) and seems to agree which many of his ideas.
By the way, see this review
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
... for a much more ambitious and useful overview of what Blackmore's book contains!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Jul 19, 2013Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: 21th-century, philosophy, science, psychology
Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions #121), Susan J. Blackmore
How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion?
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: دهم ماه مارس سال 2009 میلادی
عنوان: آگاهی؛ نویسنده: سوزان جی. بلکمور؛ مترجم: رضا رضایی؛ تهران، فرهنگ معاصر، 1387؛ در 196 ص؛ شابک: 9789648637595؛ چاپ دیگر: 1388؛ چاپ چهارم 1393؛ موضوع: خودآگاهی قرن 21 م
ا. شربیانی
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Mar 31, 2013Andrew Langridge rated it it was ok
Shelves: non-fiction
This is a very clear, well-written exposition on a difficult subject, but it is by no means a neutral review of the field as one might expect from a 'very short introduction'. Instead, Susan Blackmore promotes her own thesis, sympathetic to the work of Daniel Dennett, in which a single inner self with subjective experience, holding opinions and acting on decisions is a useful fiction or benign illusion created by the brain. Our ordinary intuition that there is a center to conscious experience is a useful abstraction, but not something grounded in scientific fact. This very partial view probably helps to make the book a pleasurable read, but also makes it a conspicuous target for anti-materialists like me.
It is commonly agreed that the idea of subjectivity lies at the heart of the problem of consciousness. What it is ‘like’ for a person to have experiences, make plans or perform actions does not seem fathomable with standard rational techniques. My personal experience of the redness of an object might be completely different to your experience of the same object, and though we use the same terminology to describe redness, we can never really be sure that we have the same thing in mind. It deeply offends a certain class of objectively-minded people that something like this could be so fundamental to our being and yet scientifically unexplainable, and they adopt two major strategies for coping. The first soft-naturalistic strategy is to isolate this peculiar phenomenal experience from the physical world and neural processes. It is allowed to ‘emerge’ from the evolved physical brain but has no causal effects and is only describable in ordinary language or special codes such as ‘memes’. The second approach is to marginalize and diffuse the phenomenal experience, treat it as illusory, and hope that scientific advance will eventually do away with it. This latter hard-naturalistic approach is the one that Blackmore and Dennett promote. They say that most of what we do is unconscious, and when we finally succeed in understanding how all our individual mental capacities such as intelligence, perception, thinking or language function, we will understand consciousness.
Blackmore has many arguments to support her case. She describes a neurological condition called agnosia, in which the patient has normal visual ability but appears to lack the experience of seeing. He is able to reach out, pick up and post a letter, but cannot describe the shape of the letter or say what it is. One way of interpreting this is to say that the patient is able to see unconsciously; that agnosia is a disassociation between vision and consciousness. Blackmore says no; dualistic hogwash! There is no conscious ‘central processing unit’ able to 'observe' the visual stream and then act on it. Experiments on brain organization show that there are many different visual streams with distinct functions, and that agnosia is better described as a disassociation between action and perception. Although she argues forcefully in this way against representational dualism, Blackmore fails to recognize that her own interpretation fares little better as an explanation of visual perception. Perception has a qualitative richness, such as the aspect of the letter, that a stream of electrical energy lacks. Moreover, vision is always vision of something, just like pain is always pain somewhere, so how is our 'rapport' with an external letter incorporated in this stream? How is the patient `related appropriately' to the letter if his awareness of it is just a brain response? Awareness of external objects is different from awareness of physical mechanisms. The outside world of objects would be wholly mythical were it not for our primitive understanding of it.
Blackmore presents a large quantity of scientific evidence from unusual neurological conditions, split-brains, drug-induced hallucinations and altered mental conditions that she says disabuses us of the notion of a conscious self. Yet, the fact that brain damage makes a difference to what is experienced/perceived, does not account for the experience/perception itself. Moreover, there is ample circumstantial evidence from normal human experience that our intuitive ideas about consciousness are indispensable. We assume that it is proper and useful for us to reflect on our own guilt and motivations and to try to understand other people through patient attention to their beliefs and life histories. Blackmore recommends that we set little store by these touchy-feely aspects of consciousness since they are all part of the illusion. Presumably she also dismisses the idea that this activity of reflecting on ourselves or each other has any inherent value. If science is going to reduce all such mental activities to brain functions there will eventually be no questions about value left to ask. The bleakness of that prospect is startling. (less)
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May 20, 2015Hrishabh Chaudhary rated it really liked it
The Book and Me
The book deals with a very hard problem, which Blackmore puts forward in the very first line of the very first chapter: What is consciousness? A question you might have ruminated in past, in some way, at some point in time, but then you let it go in favor of attending to worldly obligations. My version goes like this:
Seventh grade, Biology class
Me and my friend were giving a re-read to our favorite chapter ;-) when these words fell upon my ears.
Teacher : a cell is the smallest unit of life… millions… single cell organisms… blah, blah…
Me: You mean we are filled with living beings! Do they know they are inside me?
Teacher : No. They don’t have consciousness.
Me: How can you be sure?
Teacher: Let’s drop this, it is getting absurd.
It was getting interesting. I never got an answer, as I said, it is a hard problem. It becomes even harder when you ask - Do we have consciousness? Susan Blackmore believes we don’t and declares it openly in the book, which may put off some readers, but there plenty of theories in here to keep you from falling to one side of the debate. Being a fan of Sam Harris and thus a non-believer in free-will I was much inclined to reject the idea of consciousness, but as pages increased on the left, I was gradually pushed to the center and by the end I didn’t know what to believe.
Recommendation
Recommended for people who are:
1. Cognizant of the debate, but haven’t read much; this might be a good start.
2. Convinced of existence/non-existence of consciousness after hearing one side.
3. Looking for fascinating experiments, stories, and psychological conditions( google “Hemispatial Neglect”)
If they had read it
Spider-man and Sandman
SP: Why did you kill my uncle?
SD: I had to, I didn’t have any choice.
SP: You always have a choice.
SD: But I just read that consciousness is an illusion and so is free-will. A guy named Benjamin Libet proved this by some experiment.
SP: Oh that’s only half of it, Libet’s experiment proves that we don’t have free-will but do have “free-won’t”, ha! Now take this punch and tell me if you feel conscious. (less)
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Feb 16, 2018Ross H rated it liked it
Three stars for giving me a lot to think about, but, as many other reviews have noted, this book falls pretty far from an "Introduction" to the idea of consciousness, and is instead a brief presentation of the evidence for a very particular theory which takes hard materialism as a given and treats consciousness as an illusion. My distaste for how much the author's specific position was taken for granted instead of presented as one view among many was reinforced at the very end when she tacked on Dawkins' memetic theory to attack the idea of religion, which had very little to do with the concept of consciousness and served a solely ideological purpose.
I read this book to gain some better language to approach the "hard problem" of consciousness, a subject that interests me deeply but which I find confusing to articulate in words, and while it did sharpen my thinking about the matter it also left me feeling that there may not actually be a clear way to explain consciousness. Blackmore's language attempting to refute the concept of consciousness (an interesting thing to do in an "Introduction" to it) still implies that there is "someone" to be fooled by the illusion of consciousness; she talks about how it is difficult but necessary to get outside the idea of an "I" but seems to be unable to do so herself. I am left thinking that "intuitive" is too weak a word for the concept of a self-as-observer--if anything, I would call it self-evident.
Reading this book was a good experience, but it leaves me only more frustrated by the concept of consciousness than I was when I started, and not in a helpful way. It also leaves me irritated with the author, who seems to have misunderstood the purpose of the Very Short Introduction series.(less)
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Nov 29, 2017Yousif Al Zeera rated it liked it · review of another edition
The book is a decent book to stimulate your curiosity into the “consciousness” subject. It questions more than it answers. The author does well in introducing the different ideas and school of thoughts in this subject. Many concepts are intriguing. If you want definite answers, then this book will not serve your purpose.
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Nov 20, 2015Clif rated it really liked it
Yes, I am stuck on these wonderful "very short introduction" (VSI) books from Oxford University. This one is the perfect follow-up to the one on free will that I recently reviewed.
While the free will book is about logic; how do we think about our consciousness and how can we eliminate false ideas about it through reasoning, this book is all about science and the physical brain. The actual parts of the brain are only mentioned a few times but many studies of brain function and the theories of a few modern philosophers form the foundation of the work.
It's clear the author is a fan of Daniel Dennett. Since I am too, it didn't surprise me that I found myself agreeing with much of what Susan Blackmore presents.
Being purely physical, the case for our possessing something apart from the physical that directs our activity doesn't hold up and no research has ever shown otherwise. That said, the next thing to put aside is the idea that consciousness is localized in a certain part of the brain. Instead, the leading idea is that consciousness is a byproduct of the overall operation of the brain.
Evidence shows that our consciousness is not a continuous thing across time. Instead, it appears to be a very momentary, transient thing that attends to a very limited part of what we sense at any given moment. Our sense that we are aware of the full environment around us at once is illusion our brain constructs.
Filled with intriguing experimental results, this book offers surprises for any reader. It appears the brain is far out in front of our perceptions as many physical activities, such as playing a game of ping-pong, proceed at speeds far beyond that of our consciousness. The brain plays ping-pong and the "me" that we experience is more like a spectator that later claims to have been in charge. And we've all had the experience of driving a car thinking of something else and suddenly coming back to awareness of the driving. Our brain was driving just fine while our mind was elsewhere.
As is the intent of the entire VSI book series, the content of Blackmore's work would be a wonderful source of ideas for a classroom and a full bibliography points the way to further exploration. I highly recommend that you make yourself a classroom of one and take on this little gem! (less)
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Aug 14, 2018Steve Kimmins rated it it was amazing
Shelves: popular-science
I obtained and read this book several years ago after going to a public lecture by Susan Blackmore, in my city. She was a lecturer at a nearby university at that time. The lecture and book made a big impact on me, as I’d never really thought about the subject of consciousness, whether it’s possible to study it scientifically and come to any conclusions as to its nature.
I remember her talk raised lots of evidence for what it probably isn’t linked to - Dualism. That the conscious mind is separate from our grey matter computing device, the brain. I’d sadly had a close relative who’d had a bad stroke and the brain damage from a stroke can change a person’s nature and personality. How they perceive the world. So I wasn’t under any illusion about that really, but this book firmed up on it for me and showed where studies had taken our knowledge. Unfortunately brain damage and how it affects survivors of the trauma is one important guide to how our grey matter functions. Sad but true, and a number of cases are discussed in the book.
As in her talk I don’t remember her coming to a dogmatic conclusion, as there’s still work to be done. Perhaps the evidence she marshals is intended to reinforce her viewpoint, but it seemed persuasive to me. Indeed a fairly recent experiment indicating that the subconscious brain can initiate what we might think is a conscious decision or action fractionally before the conscious brain is aware of it was a bit disturbing.
I took from the book the possibility that our conscious brain is a ‘scratchpad’ the brain uses when it needs to learn or review tasks more carefully, given that so much of what we do from body function control through to instinctive reactions is part of our subconscious, and normally hidden from our awareness. How the brain decides what to review is unclear but I personally take the possibility that it is an aspect we may be able train to a degree.
Though maybe I’m fooling myself there too! But I’ve always found Doubt a useful tool in work and life, and if that means I take a while to decide on an action at least I feel I’ve reviewed it thoroughly.
There seems a clear link to our language abilities too. Indeed, I’d heard elsewhere consciousness defined as the brain talking to itself. Holding that conversation is what we consider as our conscious brain operation, I presume, though I’m sure there’s more than that conversation at play.
I found this an educational book. Not a thorough review probably as it is a ‘short introduction’. I had enough evidence tossed at me to realise what a tricky area it is, but nonetheless open to a thorough investigation scientifically.
I’d certainly recommend this to anyone interested in questioning or examining how they think. You may or may not agree with her materialistic approach but she raises questions taken from the literature, and not just her opinions, that you’d have to ponder if you have a dualistic view of our brain.(less)
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Apr 03, 2011Leon M rated it really liked it
Shelves: psychology, philosophy
In "Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction", Susan Blackmore gives the reader just that - a very short introduction to a highly complicated interdisciplinary topic. Considering the sheer impossibility of doing that in a fully satisfying way, Blackmore did quite a good job at it.
The book starts of with the basic dichotomy between dualists and monists (mainly materialists these days) and explains why none of these sides have a convincing argument to offer for why their side is true and the other ...more
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May 19, 2011Mikael Lind rated it liked it
Shelves: cognitive-science
This book starts off very promisingly. It asks all the interesting questions and presents loads of interesting research and studies on the topics. However, the final chapter is so utterly disappointing that I can't give this book more than three stars. Blackmore presents her own "solution" to the problem of consciousness, but in such an unsatisfying way that all the questions she herself presented in the beginning remain unanswered. If our talk of consciousness and subconsciousness are nothing but delusions, how come we can direct our attention towards one thing rather than another? She doesn't even try to answer questions about intentionality, but instead presents her personal preference of meditation as some kind of remedy to all the delusions arising from questions about our consciousness. And even there she commits a fatal error. She writes that with Zen meditation one can "give rise to a state in which phenomena arise and fall away but without any sense of time or place, and with no one experiencing them." And this is presented as a solution to dualism! Wow. She fails however to explain who this "someone" experiencing the phenomena could fall away if there was no conscious observer in the first place. If Zen meditation can help one seeing beyond the fallacy of a conscious self, what is then this conscious self to all those people who don't practice Zen? In short, Blackmore's "solution" is no solution at all but makes us ask all the same questions all over again. A pity for an otherwise interesting book to have such an unsuccessful attempt to a solution in the final chapter. (less)
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Oct 23, 2015David rated it it was ok
I debated between giving this book two or three stars. On the plus side, it is well written, an easy read, and it has a clear and concise description of a lot of what has been done and the state of the art in understanding consciousness. In the end, I went with two stars because I felt this book is fundamentally dishonest, a fatal flaw in an introduction. My problem with this book is that rather than being a review, what the title promises, it considers other theories of consciousness only to dismiss them in favor of the author's theory; this book advocates rather than introduces. I am not sorry I read this book, I have done some reading on this topic already but nonetheless picked up some new information as to where the field is, but then again I read this book on the heels of one of the other authors books, "The Meme Machine" and for that reason and because this was not the first book I had read on this subject, I was able to detect its bias and discount it. In balance, I would only recommend this book to someone who is knowledgable in the subject area and who is interested in completeness and is able to read critically.
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