Consciousness Demystified Hardcover – Illustrated, 25 September 2018
by Todd E. Feinberg (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars 13
Demystifying consciousness- how subjective experience can be explained by natural brain and evolutionary processes.Consciousness is often considered a mystery. How can the seemingly immaterial experience of consciousness be explained by the material neurons of the brain? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between understanding the brain as an objectively observed biological organ and accounting for the subjective experiences that come from the brain (and life processes). In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt attempt to demystify consciousness-to naturalize it, by explaining that the subjective, experiencing aspects of consciousness are created by natural brain processes that evolved in natural ways. Although subjective experience is unique in nature, they argue, it is not necessarily mysterious. We need not invoke the unknown or unknowable to explain its creation.Feinberg and Mallatt flesh out their theory of neurobiological naturalism (after John Searle's biological naturalism) that recognizes the many features that brains share with other living things, lists the neural features unique to conscious brains, and explains the subjective-objective barrier naturally. They investigate common neural features among the diverse groups of animals that have primary consciousness-the type of consciousness that experiences both sensations received from the world and affects such as emotions. They map the evolutionary development of consciousness and find an uninterrupted progression over time, without inserting any mysterious forces or exotic physics. Finally, bridging the previously unbridgeable, they show how subjective experience, although different from objective observation, can be naturally explained.
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From other countries
YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, Concise, Nuts & Bolts Explanatory Text on Primary Consciousness
Reviewed in the United States on 23 November 2018
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This book is a concise description of the brain structures and processes that give rise to Sensory, aka Pheonomal Consciousness, which consists of Exteroception (5 senses), Interoception (gut feelings) and Affect (emotions). For me, this provides a comprehensible working model of consciousness, especially the hardware and firmware aspects.
Consciousness Demystified extracts and refines the core ideas about consciousness from the fantastic book they wrote in 2016, Ancient Origins of Consciousness, which traced the evolution of the structures of the brain that enable consciousness. It also expands the discussion of closing the "Explanatory Gap", aka the "Hard Problem", which seems to be a modern form of Dualism. I was sold in 2016, but, I think it will make the book more powerful to new readers.
The key concepts carry over from 2016: 1) NeuroOntologically Subjective Features of Consciousness, and 2) The Defining Features of Consciousness, although the articulation of the defining features is greatly expanded. The explanation of the the bridge of the explanatory gap is also greatly expanded. The new concepts are a gradation from image based consciousness to affective consciousness, with an emphasis on the maps. See Plate 1 to the right. There are fantatic illustrations, as with the 2016 book.
Isomorphic Maps (image-based consciousness)
Isomorphic, from the American Heritiage Dictionary, Biology: Having a similar structure or appearance but being of different ancestry.
This is key and Feinberg & Mallatt paint the picture better than anyone. Plate 1 is amazing. All visual information and probably audio and perhaps much more is represented in 2D maps that are overlayed one upon the other to integrate all sensory data. It is like an image with many layers that automatically binds the properties of the red Ferrari zooming by.
p.40 (2018): To summarize the chapter, isomorphic maps are the corner stone of image-based sensory consciousness, these maps evolved in early vertebrates more than 520 million years ago, and this process was the natural result of the extraordinary innovations of the camera eye, neural crest, and placodes. These events led to the mental images that mark the creation of the mysterious explanatory gaps and the subjective features of consciousness outlined in chapter 2.
Box 4.1: NoSFC: NeuroOntologically Subjective Features of Consciousness
NSFCs are carried forward from 2016. A bit like the NCCs of Christof Koch - Neural Correlates of Consciousness. NoSFCs are NeuroOntologically Subjective Features of Consciousness. This phrase is important for closing the Explanatory Gaps. NoSFCs:
1) Mental Unity - we have one coherent notion of Reality. See: Unitary Nature of Consciousness
2) Qualia - subjective perceptrons of qualities.
3) Referral, aka Projection - Reality seems to be Out There, not in our heads.
4) Mental Causation, "Using our notion of Reality as a map to direct our actions to objects in the environment on which we cause affects." (imagining how to interact shapes what we see.)
p.49 The intercommunicating axons of affective pathways also branch a lot more than in the exteroceptive pathways, sending signals to many different parts of the system. Another difference is that affective circuits communicate less through short-distance neurotransmitter chemicals and more through far-diffusing neuromodulator chemicals than do exteroceptive circuits.'
p.50 With both thirst neurons and danger neurons, it seems that neurons can code affective information that is far more sophisticated than just a simple liking of disliking.
... affective system seems diffuse, with its different intercommunicating parts overlapping one another in function, the parts do specialize for their own affective functions. These parts are shown in figures 4.1 and 4.2 [jch: not here], and they include the amygdala for fear and emotional learning, lateral habenular nucleus for coding punishment and disappointment, nucleus accumbens for motivated seeking of rewards, a part in the anterior reticular formation for arousal,' and the parts of the cerebral cortex that use reason to control one's core emotions and passions (e.g., the orbitofrontal cortex in fig. 4.2). Upon further study, this affective system could prove to have a well-organized and highly differentiated structure, after all, an organization that researchers are just starting to recognize.
p.66,67,68,69: The Defining Features of Consciousness. These are MUCH more fleshed out than in 2016. Headings, subheadings and many, many bullet points [ not shown]
Box 6.1: The defining features of consciousness, Level 1: General biological features, which apply to all living things
Life, embodiment, and process, System and self-organization, Hierarchies, Teleonomy and adaptation
Box 6.2: The defining features of consciousness, Level 2: Neuronal reflexes and simple core brains
Reflexes and all neural communications are extremely fast relative to other large-scale physiological processes. Thus they can move a large body in response to a stimulus. Connectivity, Simple reflex arcs are chains of several neurons connected at synapses. More complex arcs have more neurons in the chain (C) and in networks (N); they also have more sensory input (S), more neuronal interactions, (I) and capacity to process more information (P).
Increasing complexity, Basic motor programs from central pattern generators, Core brain features
Box 6.3: The defining features of consciousness, Level 3: Special neurobiological features, which apply to animals with primary consciousness
Neural complexity (more than in simpler, core brain), Elaborated sensory organs, Neural hierarchies with unique neural-neural interactions
Neural pathways that create mapped mental images or affective states, Attention as a participant in consciousness, Memory
p.82 From a different perspective, however, consciousness is valuable because it enables prediction processes, for which neural hierarchies are essential. The predictive mechanism, as explained in figure 6.5, depends on up-and-down communication within the hierarchy. As long as the predictions are kept updated, they stay a fraction of a second ahead of what is happening in the world - a huge benefit for survival whenever the conscious animal successfully predicts the attack path of a predator [ or prey/threat/reward in near term ]
[jch: NOTE!!! Bringing near term predictions to consciousness is different from prediction processing, which seemed to be covered in the 2016 book. [add to 2016 and put in link] Figure 6.5 stands in stark contrast to Jill Gregory's usual rich and detailed and attractive illustrations. ]
p.86 Our approach to the first question is to ask: what is the minimal memory requirement for sensory consciousness? Christof Koch conservatively reasoned that image-based consciousness needs at least a fleeting type of information storage called iconic memory. Actually, a better name is sensory memory, with the term "iconic memory" serving only for visual image perception (lasting less than half a second), "echoic memory" for sound perception (lasting about three seconds), "tactile memory" for touch (lasting about ten seconds), and "odor memory" for smell (lasting longer). The term "sensory memory" includes all these functions.
[jch: in prediction processing, this short term memory would be a partial mental model, broadcast from the unified mental model, and then relayed thru the icon buffers to - region -- be compared against current input. Instead of iconic memory of the past, we have the refreshed prediction. ]
p.86 This neuron type is in the parabrachial nucleus of the interoceptive pathway (fig. 2.3), and its signals elicit fear responses from affective brain centers like the amygdala,' With both thirst neurons and danger neurons, it seems that neurons can code affective information that is far more sophisticated than just a simple liking or disliking.
p.110 Conscious unity at the higher level of the special features is directly linked to reciprocal neural interactions that bind coded sets of sensory information together into a unified image or affect (top of plate 10). However, down at the more basic levels, all physiological life processes are integrated and unified to achieve homeostasis, and the reflexes are genetically prewired to create linked programs that effect unified actions. In short, the unity and integration that result from the special features (box 6.3) stem from the unified systemic features of life and the reflexes at the lower levels. Again, we have derived a gap feature at the top of plate 10 ("unity") from the physical features lower down in the figure.
p.109 ..., we also found that the neurobiological basis of primary consciousness, along with its accompanying subjective features like qualia, is remarkably varied both within individual brains and across the brains of different species from vertebrates to arthropods to cephalopods. To reinforce how diverse the neural contributors to consciousness are, let us reconsider a part of the vertebrate brain that we have only touched on: the wide-ranging reticular activating system and thalamus that contribute to attention, alertness, arousal, and wakefulness, without which consciousness and therefore subjectivity would not be possible (chaps. 3 and 6; fig. 4.1).3 This immensely broad distribution of structures that contribute to consciousness - perhaps the broadest of all neural functions - ensures that the neural basis of Consciousness will be at best poorly localizable within the brain.
Color Plates!
As with the 2016 book, Jill Gregory's rich and detailed and attractive illustrations add tremendous value. In Demystifing Consciousness, there are 10 color plate illustrations. No list with names, but, they are so key, I list them here:
Plate 1: Isomorphic (normalized) Maps of Sensory Inputs - See above *** Amazing ***
[jch: image-based consciousness automatically binds color, object, motion, etc.]
Plate 2: Subtypes of Consciousness: Exteroceptive, Interoceptive, Affective...
Plate 3: Optic Tectum in Monkey & Cod with Layers of Cortex ** Great ! ! **
Plate 4: Sensory Pathways - [jch: most road lead thru Thalamus
Plate 5: Basic Valence Circuit -
Plate 6: Comparison of Frog, Octopus, Insect brains ** Wicked Aweseom ! ! **
Plate 7: Brain Regions showing Sensory and Affective structures
Plate 8: Stages of Evolution of structures of Consciousness
Plate 9: Hiakouichthys (fish)
Plate 10: Summury Illustration.
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Bumpa
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent on the question of evolution of consciousness
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 December 2020
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I understood, most of this book and it get better as it neared the end. I wonder, though, why there was little hint of the complexity of the brain producing an emergent property.
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Edward A. Morris
2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing bait-and-switch
Reviewed in the United States on 7 December 2018
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There's some interesting information in this book about various brain structures of different kinds of animals and how they correlate with those animals' presumably-conscious behaviors. But throughout the book, the authors keep promising they are leading up to a new approach to the central philosophical mystery of consciousness, the so-called explanatory gap (aka "hard problem of consciousness"), which they never really follow through on, other than to suggest the problem be broken down into several different aspects.
To illustrate why I consider this a bait-and-switch tactic, consider first what they say on p. 3: "[T]here still appears to be a mysterious divide between the brain and subjective experience. Our MAIN GOAL HERE is to explain and 'naturalize' that gap." (emphasis added)
OK, great. That's the hard problem of consciousness, all right. You might think they are finally getting around to offering their promised "main goal" explanation of how to naturalize this explanatory gap at almost the end of the book, on p. 120: "We hypothesize that experience and qualia are living processes that cannot be explained solely by a nonbiological computation, and our view of the hard problem begins and rests on the essential role that biology plays in making experience and qualia possible....If our hypothesis is correct, the combination of life and reflexes, the special features, and auto- and allo-ontological irreducibilities can account for how both subjectivity and the unique phenomenon of consciousness are naturally created."
But then you read in their conclusion on pp. 121-122: "Once brains reach the level of neural heirarchical complexity and specialization that enables subjective experience, there arise the PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS posed by the third-person observations of brains versus the VERY DIFFERENT aspects of subjective feeling--such as the 'character' of experience. But subjective experience will always have very different features than third-person explanations of subjectivity or brain processes. ...[T]his does not mean that the neurobiology of consciousness cannot be scientifically explained. It just means that we must not conflate the neurobiological and philosophical problems." (emphasis added)
In other words, in spite of their stated "main goal" to address the explanatory gap between a third-person, objective description of how the brain works and the mystery of why that gives rise to (or amounts to) subjective, conscious experience, in fact they finally conclude that this explanatory gap is only a "philosophical problem" instead of a "neurobiological problem" and thus not really what their book was ever intended to explain anyway. To attempt an explanation of this hard problem of consciousness would be to "conflate the neurobiological and philosophical problems," apparently. Which is understandable enough, and perhaps the best we can hope for at present, but I still think if they didn't care to address this central philosophical mystery, it would have been nice of them to be up front about it instead of constantly pretending they were going to get there, and even calling that the main goal of their book.
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