As he has done previously, USC neuroscientist Damasio (Descartes' Error) explores the process that leads to consciousness. And as he has also done previously, he alternates between some exquisite passages that represent the best popular science has to offer and some technical verbiage that few will be able to follow. He draws meaningful distinctions among points on the continuum from brain to mind, consciousness to self, constantly attempting to understand the evolutionary reasons why each arose and attempting to tie each to an underlying physical reality. Damasio goes to great lengths to explain that many species, such as social insects, have minds, but humans are distinguished by the "autobiographical self," which adds flexibility and creativity, and has led to the development of culture, a "radical novelty" in natural history. Damasio ends with a speculative chapter on the evolutionary process by which mind developed and then gave rise to self. In the Pleistocene, he suggests, humans developed emotive responses to shapes and sounds that helped lead to the development of the arts. Readers fascinated from both a philosophical and scientific perspective with the question of the relationships among brain, mind, and self will be rewarded for making the effort to follow Damasio's arguments.

(Original Review, 2010-11-15)

I think that if you look at the internet and the World Wide Web it gives some insight on what Damásio’s book is all about. On the one hand you have the network of servers and cabling and input and output devices and on the other you have the network of websites. We know that the latter sits on the former but you can tell very little about one network from the other. When you look at this webpage, for example, it looks like a single, though quite complex, entity but the annoying advert down the right hand side, for example, may sit on a server on a different continent from the text that you are reading and the photograph on yet another. There is nothing on the face of it to tell you that this is happening (although if you look at the code behind the page you can see what is intrinsic and what is being imported from elsewhere - but still very little clue about the hardware). Similarly you can examine the hardware with all the skills of and electronic engineer and it won't give you the Guardian webpage. Neuroscience is approaching the brain as the electronics engineer would approach the internet whilst conscious thought bears more resemblance to the network of webpages. Consciousness must reside in what the brain does and not what it is. During our lifetime the molecules within the brain will have turned over many times and yet not only do we have consciousness we have a sensation of continuity of one conscious entity which is inextricably linked just to me and can't move into any other person or object - even though the stuff of which my brain is made will be continually changing and could end up inside someone else's brain. An analogy would be if the company hosting this website swaps over the server storing the data for this webpage. That could easily happen in a way that would be undetectable to the person reading the page so long as the data was moved intact.

I'm not saying for a moment that the internet is conscious - others have made that point and I make no comment. What I'm trying to point out is that just as you can tell very little (nothing really) about the function of the world wide web and its content from looking at the hardware (and vice versa) you can tell very little about consciousness and the experience of having a brain by looking at the anatomy (and physiology) of the brain, certainly at the macro level. Just because you can't bottle consciousness like you can bottle a brain you can't bottle the world wide web either as it is a dynamic function and not a solid object. That doesn't mean that it's supernatural. Consciousness is a dynamic function of the brain and it isn't a solid object either - nor is it supernatural in my opinion (these are not exclusive alternatives as some seem to assume).

My point about external input being necessary for changes to the web whereas consciousness is entirely internal. Whilst it is true that most content on the web has been put there by human beings it is perfectly conceivable that content could be automatically generated in response to information received from sensors (or perhaps even randomly) - and this probably does happen in relation to such as traffic and weather. Compared to human consciousness the web is very primitive still, of course. The analogy is as imperfect as using the interaction of snooker balls to demonstrate the interaction of the planets - one is not the other but it is not without some validity.

As for the external influence on our consciousness - that comes from our genetic inheritance. We have a lot of pre-programmed instinctive behaviour (the lower animals such as insects appear to be entirely instinctive and their behaviour can be precisely modelled by a robot, but we can't be sure they aren't conscious nevertheless). And then, of course, our conscious experience is being continuously affected by input through our senses - and by any psychoactive substances that we might take.

Of course, my analogy only works if you believe there is something outside of us that directs all these actions. Websites/the internet does not change server data for websites by itself. Those are conscious actions by conscious individuals.

As someone in Tech for a long time, and back in the day involved in learning about deep learning/deep neural networks ("AI" if you will), the whole idea of computers, the internet or neural networks somehow gain consciousness and becoming self-aware is patently ridiculous. I also don't believe, for instance, that consciousness is the result of, or our brains are simply a large series of floating point matrix calculations, driven by some cost function.

Here's my theory. It centres on the SallyAnne test which talks about theory of mind - the understanding that other entities can have a view point. So, the brain builds a model of the world it sees. Gradually that model becomes complex enough to understand that other entities with their own models may exist. At this point your behaviour in the test changes. However, over time, the model gets more and more complicated until it includes the fact that the other entities world model includes a model of you. My theory is that at this point you have lift off though feedback. You become conscious through your model of other people's model of you. Rather egotistical maybe.

I'd suggest that the emergent behaviour happens from first "modelling" others as having something we call a 'conscious mind', which even entirely behavioural agents can appear to have if we are not aware of all the stimuli they are subjected to, and then - due to recognising that we are similar to them - modelling ourselves the same way. Observing children develop, it would appear that they (typically) have models of other people as individuals with their own motivations before they become 'fully conscious' of themselves as individuals.

Modelling the observable responses of others as a 'black box' capable of self-determination would appear to make sense from an evolutionary perspective, and re-using the neural apparatus to model oneself appears to be a reasonable and effective use of resources.

NB: Damásio is a fellow Portuguese. ( )

A compelling theory of the nature of self-consciousness, and a great review of current neuroscience. ( )

Interesting, but not satisfying. I felt that Damasio has a lot to say about consciousness and the self and the brain, but that he didn't really do it in this book. It seemed that he jumped far too quickly from high-level constructions like "mind" to low-level brain areas, and with too little justification. His train of thought seems to go into tunnels and come out at unexpected places.

However, this dissatisfaction might reflect the reader's ignorance more than anything else. Damasio has certainly earned a second reading. I want to make sense of this book - the fact that I haven't yet might be my fault, or his, or the fault may lie somewhere in between. ( )

I wasn't disappointed by this book, but overwhelmed. It was an honest struggle to finish, as the author chose to emphasize the structure and construction of consciousness. That may be fascinating to many, but not where my interests lie. It is hard to blame an author for not writing the book you wanted, and this book is very strong on what he emphasizes.

I feel this is a further development of the Dennett _Consciousness Explained_ train, with the theory developed into neuro-based facts of the brain. What it means for free will and all that springs from this seemingly fading idea of humanity is important for us all to understand. ( )