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Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
Two neuroscientists reveal why consciousness exists and how it works by examining eighteen increasingly intelligent minds, from microbes to humankind—and beyond.
Why do you exist? How did atoms and molecules transform into sentient creatures that experience longing, regret, compassion, and even marvel at their own existence? What does it truly mean to have a mind—to think? Science has offered few answers to these existential questions until now.
Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, self-awareness, and civilization arose incrementally out of chaos. The journey begins three billion years ago with the emergence of the universe’s simplest possible mind. From there, the book explores the nanoscopic archaeon, whose thinking machinery consists of a handful of molecules, then advances through amoebas, worms, frogs, birds, monkeys, and humans, explaining what each “new” mind could do that previous minds could not. Though they admire the triumph of human consciousness, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam argue that humans are hardly the most sophisticated minds on the planet. The same physical principles that produce human self-awareness are leading cities and nation-states to develop “superminds,” and perhaps planting the seeds for even higher forms of consciousness.
Written in lively, accessible language accompanied by vivid illustrations, Journey of the Mind is a mind-bending work of popular science, the first general book to share the cutting-edge mathematical basis for consciousness, language, and the self. It shows how a “unified theory of the mind” can explain the mind’s greatest mysteries—and offer clues about the ultimate fate of all minds in the universe.
Why do you exist? How did atoms and molecules transform into sentient creatures that experience longing, regret, compassion, and even marvel at their own existence? What does it truly mean to have a mind—to think? Science has offered few answers to these existential questions until now.
Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, self-awareness, and civilization arose incrementally out of chaos. The journey begins three billion years ago with the emergence of the universe’s simplest possible mind. From there, the book explores the nanoscopic archaeon, whose thinking machinery consists of a handful of molecules, then advances through amoebas, worms, frogs, birds, monkeys, and humans, explaining what each “new” mind could do that previous minds could not. Though they admire the triumph of human consciousness, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam argue that humans are hardly the most sophisticated minds on the planet. The same physical principles that produce human self-awareness are leading cities and nation-states to develop “superminds,” and perhaps planting the seeds for even higher forms of consciousness.
Written in lively, accessible language accompanied by vivid illustrations, Journey of the Mind is a mind-bending work of popular science, the first general book to share the cutting-edge mathematical basis for consciousness, language, and the self. It shows how a “unified theory of the mind” can explain the mind’s greatest mysteries—and offer clues about the ultimate fate of all minds in the universe.
426 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 8, 2022
About the author
Ogi Ogas
11 books109 followersI am a mathematical neuroscientist, author, and autist. My autistic special interest is the fundamental nature of reality.
I am non-partisan, unaffiliated, non-aligned, independent. I write books about transcending our everyday reality. I identified the neural basis of autism. My current work seeks to fill the yawning spiritual hole in the heart of human science.
https://ogiogas.substack.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDarkGift
I am non-partisan, unaffiliated, non-aligned, independent. I write books about transcending our everyday reality. I identified the neural basis of autism. My current work seeks to fill the yawning spiritual hole in the heart of human science.
https://ogiogas.substack.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDarkGift
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March 28, 2022
As the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in a 1973 essay, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." It stands to reason, then, that if you believe consciousness can be explained strictly in biological terms—or even if you believe that consciousness at least in part depends on the underlying biology of nervous tissue—then consciousness too can only make sense in the light of evolution.
In this book, the authors—both practicing neuroscientists—set out on the modest task of solving the mystery of consciousness by tracing the evolution of the mind from the single-celled archaea to the “supermind” of human civilization, and everything in between. All told, the authors explore 18 minds of progressive complexity with the ultimate goal of explaining the mysteries of human language, consciousness, and the self.
The book is certainly ambitious, and by the end, you’ll be thinking about the mind in entirely new ways. For instance, you’ll learn that the mind is not the brain; in fact, the mind is not a “thing” at all. Rather, it is a physical “system” that pursues purposeful activity. To qualify as a mind, an entity must include certain constituent parts, including a body to separate itself from the environment, sensors to capture information from the environment, “thinkers” to process this information, and “doers” to interact with or alter the environment (e.g., the flagella bacteria use for movement). Minds are simply systems that process information to facilitate the survival of the body within its environment.
Additionally, not all minds have consciousness, but anything with consciousness must have a mind, and a mind of a certain type. Archaea are not conscious—nor are insects, according to the authors (dealing a blow to proponents of panpsychism everywhere)—because a mind must include the appropriate cognitive modules that create the necessary “resonances” for the emergence of subjective experiences. Minds that meet these criteria include the minds of fish, reptiles, mammals, and, of course, apes and humans.
The authors then explain how human consciousness, language, civilization, and the self emerged as the mind evolved to be increasingly complex. This part of the book is especially intriguing, as the authors point out that humans raised in isolation without exposure to language turn out to be something far less than human, as confirmed in an ethically dubious experiment conducted by Frederick II in the 13th century. In this experiment, Frederick had infants raised without human interaction to see which language they would naturally develop. Unsurprisingly, the results were disastrous, as the children—deprived of language and human interaction—became severely developmentally stunted and behaved more like animals than humans.
Language, then, is necessary for the development of the human mind. And from language comes art, science, and the aspects of culture that are necessary for you to have a sense of “self” in the first place.
Science is particularly powerful. As the authors wrote:
“Science enabled the sapiens supermind to model physical reality at a scale and accuracy far beyond what individual minds could ever hope to achieve. The ancient Greeks measured the circumference of the Earth, the ancient Chinese created massive earth-rearranging canals and dams, the ancient Mayans created fine-tuned astronomical calendars. No human growing up in isolation could’ve accomplished these feats any more than a gorilla could.”
In an age of hyper-individuality, we forget that our sense of selfhood in the first place is entirely dependent on the language and culture in which we are raised, elements we had no part in shaping but mostly transmit to future generations. In isolation, you could never, for example, hope to perform heart transplant surgery or build or fly an airplane. But human minds developed and educated within the sapiens supermind—a collective intelligence that knows how to do heart transplants and build and fly airplanes—can routinely do these things on a daily basis.
The stark reality is that we can have no identities except in relation to the cultural creations, including language, developed by our ancestors. We can of course contribute to our culture or collective intelligence—the sapiens supermind—but we are never entirely divorced from it. As the authors wrote:
“What is your Self made of? You are a local hurricane of language within a supermind hurricane of language on top of a local hurricane of consciousness. Every word that forms your conscious identity is the direct result of the ecstasies and agonies of billions of minds who loved and dreamed and fought blood-soaked battles and who recorded these feelings and deeds within the syllables that are now stitched into the vibrant fabric of your Self.”
Among other things, this shows that we are often drawn to history and classic literature because, in large part, the ideas of the past reflect who we are in the present. A recurring theme of the book is that all minds are connected—with all human minds connected across time through language—and that it is our duty to project compassion and kindness to the sapiens supermind to transmit a culture that is more conducive to human flourishing for future generations. We all have a small, albeit important, role to play in the development of the collective human supermind.
I find this view of the mind, consciousness, language, and the self to be infinitely more poetic, inspiring, useful, and scientific than the blasé statement you repeatedly hear from Buddhists of various stripes that “the self is an illusion” or that “the self doesn’t exist.” Of course there is a self, but the self is more dependent on and connected to others than is typically recognized.
My only complaint about the book is the somewhat annoying insistence that the authors have solved the hard problem of consciousness, a claim that most philosophers would probably not take too seriously. The hard problem of consciousness, of course, is the problem of how purely physical phenomena manifests as subjective experience. It’s the difference between describing the color red in terms of wavelengths of light and the actual experience of seeing red. To get an idea of the hard problem of consciousness, imagine trying to describe the experience of seeing red to someone who was born blind.
To begin to “solve” this problem, the authors present what they call the basketball analogy. To understand the game of basketball, the authors explain, you cannot focus on its constituent physical parts—the players, the ball, the hoop, the referee. Instead, the game of basketball can only be understood in terms of how these constituent physical components interact on the court. The flurry of activity among the players, the movement of the ball, the rules of scoring, etc., all describe the dynamics of a basketball game and it is within these dynamics that the game of basketball emerges and is best understood.
The same is true of consciousness, according to the authors. Consciousness cannot be understood by analyzing neurons and chemicals any more than you can explain basketball by analyzing the physical attributes of the players and the ball. It is the flurry of activity of nervous tissue—interacting with its environment—that accounts for consciousness, just as the total activity of the basketball players accounts for the game of basketball.
There are issues with the analogy, however, at least in terms of explaining the hard problem. First of all, and most importantly, the game of basketball itself requires conscious agents pursuing purposeful activity according to clearly defined rules and other conscious agents interpreting the results of that activity. Therefore, the game of basketball is not merely the dynamic activities associated with the game, as the authors suggest, but rather the interpretation of the activities of the game within the consciousness of a human being.
The phenomenon of consciousness cannot be explained by referencing an analogy that includes a game that itself depends on consciousness for its interpretation. Without consciousness, there is no basketball game, or any other game, for that matter. What we want to know is how subjective experience—of games, colors, scents, emotions—can arise from purely physical phenomena. Referencing a basketball game, which requires consciousness to interpret, does not really help us solve anything.
Further, and crucially, the basketball game, through its flurry of activities, never becomes conscious of itself. Yet out of the physical dynamics of our brains, our minds do become self-aware, somehow, and so the analogy fails, or at least loses its power to explain anything.
The experience of the color red might “emerge” out of the flurry of electrochemical activity in my brain, but in this case, saying that consciousness “emerges” out of physical processes is equivalent to saying, “it happens, but it beats the hell out of me how.” I know that a basketball game emerges from the activities of all the players because I know the rules of the game and the purpose of all the activities. But with consciousness, we’re talking about a different category altogether. I don’t know how the mathematics of wavelengths of light results in me seeing or experiencing red, other than that it does. It is therefore far more mysterious than interpreting the rules of a basketball game.
The basketball analogy can therefore help us see that thinking happens everywhere at once, but does nothing to explain the hard problem of consciousness.
The authors ultimately claim that consciousness evolved to solve a problem—specifically the attentional problem of what an agent should be focusing on out of an overwhelming number and variety of stimuli—and this is probably, in general, true. But as to the exact mechanism by which this happens, don’t expect an answer from this book (which shouldn’t be surprising, considering people have tried and failed to fully explain consciousness for at least 2,500 years).
For these reasons, I don’t think this book is the last word on consciousness. I do think, however, that it does advance our understanding, and the overall message that all minds are connected, that we each contribute to the supermind of culture, and that we therefore ought to conduct ourselves in a more considerate manner, is a welcome and worthwhile one.
In this book, the authors—both practicing neuroscientists—set out on the modest task of solving the mystery of consciousness by tracing the evolution of the mind from the single-celled archaea to the “supermind” of human civilization, and everything in between. All told, the authors explore 18 minds of progressive complexity with the ultimate goal of explaining the mysteries of human language, consciousness, and the self.
The book is certainly ambitious, and by the end, you’ll be thinking about the mind in entirely new ways. For instance, you’ll learn that the mind is not the brain; in fact, the mind is not a “thing” at all. Rather, it is a physical “system” that pursues purposeful activity. To qualify as a mind, an entity must include certain constituent parts, including a body to separate itself from the environment, sensors to capture information from the environment, “thinkers” to process this information, and “doers” to interact with or alter the environment (e.g., the flagella bacteria use for movement). Minds are simply systems that process information to facilitate the survival of the body within its environment.
Additionally, not all minds have consciousness, but anything with consciousness must have a mind, and a mind of a certain type. Archaea are not conscious—nor are insects, according to the authors (dealing a blow to proponents of panpsychism everywhere)—because a mind must include the appropriate cognitive modules that create the necessary “resonances” for the emergence of subjective experiences. Minds that meet these criteria include the minds of fish, reptiles, mammals, and, of course, apes and humans.
The authors then explain how human consciousness, language, civilization, and the self emerged as the mind evolved to be increasingly complex. This part of the book is especially intriguing, as the authors point out that humans raised in isolation without exposure to language turn out to be something far less than human, as confirmed in an ethically dubious experiment conducted by Frederick II in the 13th century. In this experiment, Frederick had infants raised without human interaction to see which language they would naturally develop. Unsurprisingly, the results were disastrous, as the children—deprived of language and human interaction—became severely developmentally stunted and behaved more like animals than humans.
Language, then, is necessary for the development of the human mind. And from language comes art, science, and the aspects of culture that are necessary for you to have a sense of “self” in the first place.
Science is particularly powerful. As the authors wrote:
“Science enabled the sapiens supermind to model physical reality at a scale and accuracy far beyond what individual minds could ever hope to achieve. The ancient Greeks measured the circumference of the Earth, the ancient Chinese created massive earth-rearranging canals and dams, the ancient Mayans created fine-tuned astronomical calendars. No human growing up in isolation could’ve accomplished these feats any more than a gorilla could.”
In an age of hyper-individuality, we forget that our sense of selfhood in the first place is entirely dependent on the language and culture in which we are raised, elements we had no part in shaping but mostly transmit to future generations. In isolation, you could never, for example, hope to perform heart transplant surgery or build or fly an airplane. But human minds developed and educated within the sapiens supermind—a collective intelligence that knows how to do heart transplants and build and fly airplanes—can routinely do these things on a daily basis.
The stark reality is that we can have no identities except in relation to the cultural creations, including language, developed by our ancestors. We can of course contribute to our culture or collective intelligence—the sapiens supermind—but we are never entirely divorced from it. As the authors wrote:
“What is your Self made of? You are a local hurricane of language within a supermind hurricane of language on top of a local hurricane of consciousness. Every word that forms your conscious identity is the direct result of the ecstasies and agonies of billions of minds who loved and dreamed and fought blood-soaked battles and who recorded these feelings and deeds within the syllables that are now stitched into the vibrant fabric of your Self.”
Among other things, this shows that we are often drawn to history and classic literature because, in large part, the ideas of the past reflect who we are in the present. A recurring theme of the book is that all minds are connected—with all human minds connected across time through language—and that it is our duty to project compassion and kindness to the sapiens supermind to transmit a culture that is more conducive to human flourishing for future generations. We all have a small, albeit important, role to play in the development of the collective human supermind.
I find this view of the mind, consciousness, language, and the self to be infinitely more poetic, inspiring, useful, and scientific than the blasé statement you repeatedly hear from Buddhists of various stripes that “the self is an illusion” or that “the self doesn’t exist.” Of course there is a self, but the self is more dependent on and connected to others than is typically recognized.
My only complaint about the book is the somewhat annoying insistence that the authors have solved the hard problem of consciousness, a claim that most philosophers would probably not take too seriously. The hard problem of consciousness, of course, is the problem of how purely physical phenomena manifests as subjective experience. It’s the difference between describing the color red in terms of wavelengths of light and the actual experience of seeing red. To get an idea of the hard problem of consciousness, imagine trying to describe the experience of seeing red to someone who was born blind.
To begin to “solve” this problem, the authors present what they call the basketball analogy. To understand the game of basketball, the authors explain, you cannot focus on its constituent physical parts—the players, the ball, the hoop, the referee. Instead, the game of basketball can only be understood in terms of how these constituent physical components interact on the court. The flurry of activity among the players, the movement of the ball, the rules of scoring, etc., all describe the dynamics of a basketball game and it is within these dynamics that the game of basketball emerges and is best understood.
The same is true of consciousness, according to the authors. Consciousness cannot be understood by analyzing neurons and chemicals any more than you can explain basketball by analyzing the physical attributes of the players and the ball. It is the flurry of activity of nervous tissue—interacting with its environment—that accounts for consciousness, just as the total activity of the basketball players accounts for the game of basketball.
There are issues with the analogy, however, at least in terms of explaining the hard problem. First of all, and most importantly, the game of basketball itself requires conscious agents pursuing purposeful activity according to clearly defined rules and other conscious agents interpreting the results of that activity. Therefore, the game of basketball is not merely the dynamic activities associated with the game, as the authors suggest, but rather the interpretation of the activities of the game within the consciousness of a human being.
The phenomenon of consciousness cannot be explained by referencing an analogy that includes a game that itself depends on consciousness for its interpretation. Without consciousness, there is no basketball game, or any other game, for that matter. What we want to know is how subjective experience—of games, colors, scents, emotions—can arise from purely physical phenomena. Referencing a basketball game, which requires consciousness to interpret, does not really help us solve anything.
Further, and crucially, the basketball game, through its flurry of activities, never becomes conscious of itself. Yet out of the physical dynamics of our brains, our minds do become self-aware, somehow, and so the analogy fails, or at least loses its power to explain anything.
The experience of the color red might “emerge” out of the flurry of electrochemical activity in my brain, but in this case, saying that consciousness “emerges” out of physical processes is equivalent to saying, “it happens, but it beats the hell out of me how.” I know that a basketball game emerges from the activities of all the players because I know the rules of the game and the purpose of all the activities. But with consciousness, we’re talking about a different category altogether. I don’t know how the mathematics of wavelengths of light results in me seeing or experiencing red, other than that it does. It is therefore far more mysterious than interpreting the rules of a basketball game.
The basketball analogy can therefore help us see that thinking happens everywhere at once, but does nothing to explain the hard problem of consciousness.
The authors ultimately claim that consciousness evolved to solve a problem—specifically the attentional problem of what an agent should be focusing on out of an overwhelming number and variety of stimuli—and this is probably, in general, true. But as to the exact mechanism by which this happens, don’t expect an answer from this book (which shouldn’t be surprising, considering people have tried and failed to fully explain consciousness for at least 2,500 years).
For these reasons, I don’t think this book is the last word on consciousness. I do think, however, that it does advance our understanding, and the overall message that all minds are connected, that we each contribute to the supermind of culture, and that we therefore ought to conduct ourselves in a more considerate manner, is a welcome and worthwhile one.
November 23, 2023
One of the more unusual non-fiction reads I’ve found in a while. Its subject is mind (or “mind” if you prefer): what it is, how it works and why it is the way it is—its history in other words, what shaped it. And by history I really do mean the long view of things because this book takes us all the way back to the very earliest and simplest microscopic living things, sensing and responding to their surroundings; then, step by careful step, it runs the clock forward from there.
I found the first 118 pages (Parts 1 and 2, from microbes to invertebrate animals) fascinating and packed with insights. The way even a simplified cartoon version of a bacterium, say, deals with its world left a big impression—how even simple structures produce such purposeful-looking behaviour, and how even the most minor alterations radically transform those behaviours. Or this: “…we can begin to appreciate an interesting fact about the journey of Mind: how easy it seems to have been to develop complex mental faculties…”. Not how hard or unlikely, but how easy—that made the biggest impression on me of all.
During Parts 3 and 4 though (the vertebrates, including ourselves) the whole book changes. We get a nine-page biography of Stephen Grossberg, mathematician and pioneer of the “module” theory of mind, and then the rest is based on his ideas. The result reads almost like two separate books: the authors’ own work taking us halfway, then someone else’s to complete the story.
One other point: the authors are either just lazy with their use of language (“…as humankind was groping its way toward civilization…”; I’m sure it wasn’t like that at all, that humanity had no more idea of where it was going in the past than we do today), or they really do see it that way. Hard to tell—despite a disclaimer—but the book is peppered with teleological (or just quirky?) phrases like that.
Overall then an unusual read—but Parts 1 and 2, on their own, would have got the full five stars.
I found the first 118 pages (Parts 1 and 2, from microbes to invertebrate animals) fascinating and packed with insights. The way even a simplified cartoon version of a bacterium, say, deals with its world left a big impression—how even simple structures produce such purposeful-looking behaviour, and how even the most minor alterations radically transform those behaviours. Or this: “…we can begin to appreciate an interesting fact about the journey of Mind: how easy it seems to have been to develop complex mental faculties…”. Not how hard or unlikely, but how easy—that made the biggest impression on me of all.
During Parts 3 and 4 though (the vertebrates, including ourselves) the whole book changes. We get a nine-page biography of Stephen Grossberg, mathematician and pioneer of the “module” theory of mind, and then the rest is based on his ideas. The result reads almost like two separate books: the authors’ own work taking us halfway, then someone else’s to complete the story.
One other point: the authors are either just lazy with their use of language (“…as humankind was groping its way toward civilization…”; I’m sure it wasn’t like that at all, that humanity had no more idea of where it was going in the past than we do today), or they really do see it that way. Hard to tell—despite a disclaimer—but the book is peppered with teleological (or just quirky?) phrases like that.
Overall then an unusual read—but Parts 1 and 2, on their own, would have got the full five stars.
May 8, 2022
The authors of this book are evangelical missionaries of Stephen Grossberg. And unlike most missionaries I’ve met in the wild, they’re persuasive. I was seized by the holy spirit after reading the passage about Grossberg inventing math to explain phenomena (like our lord and savior Isaac Newton), and my fingers autonomously opened a new browser tab and one-click ordered his 40 dollar, 700 page sacred text, Conscious Mind Resonant Brain.
I will admit that while Conscious Mind Resonant Brain does radiate a divine light, it is a prosaic, differential equation-filled monolith of a book. Journey of the Mind is not. It’s one of the few popular nonfiction brain books I’ve read that actually tries to make the reader understand its content. It’s stuffed with diagrams and sufficient explanations, which is a breath of fresh air. When it comes to structure, the first part of the Journey of the Mind covers the “minds” of select living organisms, discussed from least to most complex. This section explains processes like the mechanics of movement toward light and simple decision-making. The second part goes into Grossberg’s territory, and each chapter describes a different brain module that all animals with “module minds” possess. Consciousness is discussed here. The third part of the book does venture into a speculative zone, covering things like “super minds”, the self, and transcendent beings. Fascinating stuff.
Again, a large portion of the content was Grossberg-based. People think he’s before his time. He’s a “living giant”. Is the man actually worthy of worship? Maybe time will tell. For now, ancient astronaut theorists say, yes.
I will admit that while Conscious Mind Resonant Brain does radiate a divine light, it is a prosaic, differential equation-filled monolith of a book. Journey of the Mind is not. It’s one of the few popular nonfiction brain books I’ve read that actually tries to make the reader understand its content. It’s stuffed with diagrams and sufficient explanations, which is a breath of fresh air. When it comes to structure, the first part of the Journey of the Mind covers the “minds” of select living organisms, discussed from least to most complex. This section explains processes like the mechanics of movement toward light and simple decision-making. The second part goes into Grossberg’s territory, and each chapter describes a different brain module that all animals with “module minds” possess. Consciousness is discussed here. The third part of the book does venture into a speculative zone, covering things like “super minds”, the self, and transcendent beings. Fascinating stuff.
Again, a large portion of the content was Grossberg-based. People think he’s before his time. He’s a “living giant”. Is the man actually worthy of worship? Maybe time will tell. For now, ancient astronaut theorists say, yes.
January 2, 2022
Sometimes I felt like I just wasn't clever enough for this book, but I can't really blame the authors for that.
'Journey of the Mind' was not as I expected. I've read a fair few books by neuroscientists, and you start to notice a 'pop science' template after a while. But Ogas' and Gaddam's book focuses less on vignettes and case studies, using these more sparingly and more often for metaphor than examples. The authors opt for a more abstract approach instead. In less adept hands this would be a real struggle to read, but I found most of the book to be engaging (with even a small sharp edge of humour). It helps that the prose is so whip-smart and assured. There's also a very cool moment when the subject of AI is under discussion - you'll know what I mean when you get there.
What 'Journey of the Mind' does is give you a completely different way to imagine intelligence and consciousness. I wasn't always convinced (for example, I didn't see an explanation for the claim that chimpanzees only have a sense of self for as long as they have a mirror in front of them), but I felt intellectually exercised, and my mind feels satisfyingly broadened.
(With thanks to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)
'Journey of the Mind' was not as I expected. I've read a fair few books by neuroscientists, and you start to notice a 'pop science' template after a while. But Ogas' and Gaddam's book focuses less on vignettes and case studies, using these more sparingly and more often for metaphor than examples. The authors opt for a more abstract approach instead. In less adept hands this would be a real struggle to read, but I found most of the book to be engaging (with even a small sharp edge of humour). It helps that the prose is so whip-smart and assured. There's also a very cool moment when the subject of AI is under discussion - you'll know what I mean when you get there.
What 'Journey of the Mind' does is give you a completely different way to imagine intelligence and consciousness. I wasn't always convinced (for example, I didn't see an explanation for the claim that chimpanzees only have a sense of self for as long as they have a mirror in front of them), but I felt intellectually exercised, and my mind feels satisfyingly broadened.
(With thanks to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)
June 27, 2022
How life makes conscious mind
The authors address specific issues regarding the rise of consciousness, language, self-awareness, and civilization. Even in most basic forms of life, the cellular “chaos” where diverse type of molecules assembles to form life, and how self-awareness work from microbes to humankind. The book scales the steps of the mind’s complexity chapter by chapter, from simple functions to human beings trying to create artificial intelligence and super minds. The basic idea is that mind is an activity that is not an airy concept but seated in the human brain that react to our environment by taking outside stimuli, comparing them with internal concepts, and seeing how well they match up. This is referred to as “Resonance” by neurobiologist Stephen Grossberg, and it is widely used in this book. The authors suggest that human mind is at the apex. Humans do well in developing language, do advanced mathematical calculations, and interpret mathematical formulas to the workings of cosmos. But they don’t have sixth sense that many migrating birds have, which use earth’s magnetic field and the position of Sun for navigation. Does that make migrating birds more intelligent?
According to physicist Geoffrey West who proposes the universal law of Scaling, which he applies to all complex systems like living cell, cities, and corporations. They all are self-supporting and obeys an evolutionary scheme that incorporate an underlying “consciousness.” But the complexity that arises when matter (non-living) transitions to living matter (living cell) by caging a set of biomolecules in a highly organized manner appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. In this scenario, less information creates more information, disorder becomes order, non-living matter becomes living where the newly created entity becomes independent and self-regulating that becomes aware of surviving, adapting, growing, and multiplying itself. Consciousness seems to pervade the living cell that continues to adapt and evolve.
Despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors, the human behavior is self-defeating, says the authors. The strange arguments presented in this book for tolerance of racial minority groups is somewhat confounding. I was confused by the title of the book which I thought was going to discuss about statistical thermodynamics in the operation of “consciousness.” But the book is disappointing which describes conscious mind in terms of human brain.
The authors address specific issues regarding the rise of consciousness, language, self-awareness, and civilization. Even in most basic forms of life, the cellular “chaos” where diverse type of molecules assembles to form life, and how self-awareness work from microbes to humankind. The book scales the steps of the mind’s complexity chapter by chapter, from simple functions to human beings trying to create artificial intelligence and super minds. The basic idea is that mind is an activity that is not an airy concept but seated in the human brain that react to our environment by taking outside stimuli, comparing them with internal concepts, and seeing how well they match up. This is referred to as “Resonance” by neurobiologist Stephen Grossberg, and it is widely used in this book. The authors suggest that human mind is at the apex. Humans do well in developing language, do advanced mathematical calculations, and interpret mathematical formulas to the workings of cosmos. But they don’t have sixth sense that many migrating birds have, which use earth’s magnetic field and the position of Sun for navigation. Does that make migrating birds more intelligent?
According to physicist Geoffrey West who proposes the universal law of Scaling, which he applies to all complex systems like living cell, cities, and corporations. They all are self-supporting and obeys an evolutionary scheme that incorporate an underlying “consciousness.” But the complexity that arises when matter (non-living) transitions to living matter (living cell) by caging a set of biomolecules in a highly organized manner appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. In this scenario, less information creates more information, disorder becomes order, non-living matter becomes living where the newly created entity becomes independent and self-regulating that becomes aware of surviving, adapting, growing, and multiplying itself. Consciousness seems to pervade the living cell that continues to adapt and evolve.
Despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors, the human behavior is self-defeating, says the authors. The strange arguments presented in this book for tolerance of racial minority groups is somewhat confounding. I was confused by the title of the book which I thought was going to discuss about statistical thermodynamics in the operation of “consciousness.” But the book is disappointing which describes conscious mind in terms of human brain.
June 4, 2022
Hmm i had a hard time rating this, it wasn’t objectively bad but i felt bored for a fair amount of it because it wasn’t quite what i hoped for/some of it went over my head. The authors basically take you through a detailed evolution of consciousness from archaea to the supermind of civilizations, there’s definitely interesting parts and the authors do their best at taking some complex topics and writing them in an accessible way, but i personally was just kind of bored a lot of the time.
I liked the latter half of the book talking about human evolution, was interesting learning about the evolution of language and why that evolved in humans and not other animals
I liked the latter half of the book talking about human evolution, was interesting learning about the evolution of language and why that evolved in humans and not other animals
May 28, 2022
It's an interesting conceit that quickly fizzles. The first third of the book tracking the ways that behavior gets more complex and the neural underpinning of that behavior is quite interesting. Then, once things get complicated ("module minds", in there terminology), the empirical detail pretty much vanishes. All explanations are schematic at best, and all evidence is basically "Stephen Grossberg invented a mathematical model that says this"; that really doesn't cut it, because what the authors end up presenting is not much different from a bare-bones decision theory. Hey, our why module values things, our what module identifies things, and our how module uses those to execute the most valuable behavior. Oh, except all of this is because our mental representations in the modules "resonate" with each other. How that's different than a simple look-up table or something like that is not spelled out (except that Stephen Grossberg did something brilliant, by the way).
Once it gets to higher levels of language, society, and self, it's just all armchair philosophical psychology. For each claim, just ask what the evidence for the claim would be, and what alternative hypotheses would need to be rule out, because the authors sure don't ask those questions. In addition, the book has all of the bad habits of popular science books turned up to eleven: every chapter starts with a vaguely related anecdote/fable/myth, and interlude chapters do this for even more pages to even smaller effect.
So skip this one and, I guess, just go read Stephen Grossberg's book?
Once it gets to higher levels of language, society, and self, it's just all armchair philosophical psychology. For each claim, just ask what the evidence for the claim would be, and what alternative hypotheses would need to be rule out, because the authors sure don't ask those questions. In addition, the book has all of the bad habits of popular science books turned up to eleven: every chapter starts with a vaguely related anecdote/fable/myth, and interlude chapters do this for even more pages to even smaller effect.
So skip this one and, I guess, just go read Stephen Grossberg's book?
March 12, 2022
It's not easy to review this book because it's complex and full of food for thought. it's more complex than the average informative science book and I was fascinated by what I read.
Great style of writing, well researched.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine
Great style of writing, well researched.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine
December 5, 2022
100 stars!!! Best book EVER to explain the origins of thinking and illuminate our inner world. It really helped me think about the interplay between my mental inputs and outputs. I am buying this for all my science-reading friends for Xmas! Loved it so much!
February 1, 2023
What I liked most about this is the use of metaphors, or I guess, more accurately, allegories. A lot of thought has been put into these and they generally illuminate the point being made that is clear and simple to follow. In fact, that is the key benefit of this book. It doesn’t assume you have any prior knowledge.
Too many books on this topic read a bit like this:
“Like semantic processes, syntactic information appears to be automatically utilized sometime after 200 milliseconds from frontal areas such as Broca’s, from left temporal areas, and also from the right cerebellum.” Proust and the Squid page 154.
This book doesn’t really do that – and there is no question that the authors could have done this with no effort at all and crowded the pages with mathematical formula to blind the most persistent of readers. In fact, I can see a lot of people might not like this book because they don’t come away from it feeling a bit dizzy from the names of brain regions and numbers with lots and lots of zeros – you know, no pain, no gain.
Much of this is presented in almost unscientific language – we are told of a ‘sensor’ and a ‘doer’, for example. We are given a history of the ‘mind’ – and as they say, or nearly say, ‘mind’ is a bit like the opposite of the Eskimo words for snow, one word that covers a multitude of sins.
We are repeatedly reminded that mind is a verb, rather than a noun. That is, it is not the bits that are important, but what is being done with them. Mind only makes sense in terms of changes that occur in the world – as such, this is a fundamentally materialist vision of mind. And again, potentially something that will alienate some readers. It is also a vision that avoids leaving ‘gaps’ that might be filled by spooky spirit and soul stuff. Consciousness isn’t even presented as an emergent quality, certainly isn’t presented as weird shit that appears out of the quantum gaps between synapses or whatever – consciousness is presented as the brains way of answering problems. Those problems are very much ‘this worldly’ and the solutions presented are equally this worldly too.
If I have a criticism of this book, it is that some of the metaphors are rather extended but then don’t particularly explain as much as I was expecting. For example, we are provided with an extensive history of Mumbai to explain the ‘metropolitan principle’. Essentially, this says that a complex city is likely to not just become more highly developed in its megastructures, but also in its component elements too. And this will also be the case for brains – with the most complex brains being the most highly developed on all scales. And while the metaphor of the city was interesting here, this wasn’t the only time when I worried that the metaphor and what it was seeking to illuminate might have gotten a bit out of hand.
There are actually a couple of ‘city’ based metaphors in the book, something I want to come back to in a minute. Okay, so what you need to come away from this review knowing is that we are presented in the book with a kind of bottom-up developmental history of the development of ‘mind’. That isn’t totally fair or accurate – it’s evolution, and our standard metaphor for evolution and development is a kind of straight line – something they repeatedly imply is wrong, for instance, when they say birds have perhaps more complex brains than rats, although they evolved a long time before rats. The bit you really need to notice here is that brains are what you use them for, not what they ‘contain’. And this is a kind of ‘living out’ of the fact they don’t talk about frontal lobes and hypothalamuses, but rather about ‘brain modules’ that are concerned with what and how and where and when. I liked all this very, very much. The point isn’t ‘where’ these modules reside, the point is that they exist and they need to exist and they need to be able to work together – and that’s pretty much what this book sets out to explain. And it does that remarkably well. And then it tells us how all the bits working together give us a sense of self and then how gaining language plays into that too. Not least since it allows us to enter a ‘super mind’, a mind infinitely more powerful than our own, except, the super mind can only exist with all of our individual minds linked together in a kind of harmony.
All of this is lovely, as is the assertion that the fact that birds do not have hands probably condemns them to never having language either. The explanation being that hands allow us to essentially point to what we are referring to and therefore create a connection between the sort of Saussurian signifier and signified to produce the linguistic sign. I’m still not sure if that’s not a bit of a stretch – but it is clear birds have been producing insanely complex songs forever, but it seems also quite clear they don’t do anything similar to our ‘language’, and so, that does seem to need to be explained.
There really are lots of things I like about this book. And what I’m about to say isn’t really a criticism, but more some random reflections on ideas raised here that made me think of other things that have been bothering me for a while. Like I said, this is very much a materialist understanding of the development of the mind – very much a material mind that evolved in response to very much material problems. But the progress towards the super mind is here presented as linguistic and cultural. I found this shift away from the material to be interesting, not least since I feel that the most human thing we do, for better or worse, is transform our world, and while language and culture play essential roles in this transformation, the transformation is also linked to material culture (back to cities again) and to technology.
There is an interesting bit in the book where AI is discussed – and the authors say how they feel it is unlikely that we will have a kind of Matrix war with computers, since we built them to serve us. But my interest isn’t so much in a war of us against them – but rather how we have become ‘post-human’ by creating our own ‘mental modules’ – such as, calculators, mobile phones, television screens, satellites, and so on. Oh, and the 'so on' now includes, it seems, ChatGPT. These are external mental modules, external to our minds and bodies, and they change how we interact with the world and with each other. Our super minds are made even more super and even more connected by them, I think. And this is true of all of our technologies and our techniques. This story isn’t at all simple or something that always works for the ever more perfect human subject. For many people, as Braverman says in his Labor and Monopoly Capital, the development of capitalism has been premised on the ‘degradation’ of their work and of their, for want of a better word, ‘souls’ – and this has resulted, as David Hume said, with the division of labour that can make a person ‘as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be’.
For the last few years, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea that other aspects of human life can have impacts upon us that we don’t recognise or understand. Many of these are spatial, and so how our cities are designed and how the rules that underline them are likely to structure other aspects of our ways of understanding the world over and above walls and roads. Some books I’ve read point to the fact that some forms of town planning go to making people’s lives more ‘liveable’. Often one of the things that makes for better communities (and in this book’s terms, I guess, a more heightened super mind) is less space and fewer places to stand aside. These outside, between spaces force us to interact. But also, when I was at a conference in Manchester years ago, a woman explained to me why the building we were in was masculine and therefore discouraged anything beyond surface interactions between people. The walls were bare concrete, they had what looked like bullet holes left where bolts held the slabs together, the offices around us were all highly visible through glass windows, we were potentially and constantly under surveillance, the open plan nature of all aspects of the building did not allow for any intimacy. How does this constructed human environment shape our minds – and what does it say about the mind that has shaped it?
All of which might well sound a bit off topic – except, I’m not sure it is. Our minds are shaped by our environments and those environments are increasingly made by our minds. And those minds are shaped by the power relationships that exist in our worlds, and those power relationships, if they do nothing else, justify their own existence by making power a taken-for-granted unspoken assumption of how the world works. So that perhaps the very material nature of the world constructed around us reinforces the power relationships that hold all of us (oppressor and oppressed alike) in our mutual dependancies.
Anyway... You should read this book. The drawings are helpful, the text is easy to read, and it is about one of the most important topics a book can be about.
Too many books on this topic read a bit like this:
“Like semantic processes, syntactic information appears to be automatically utilized sometime after 200 milliseconds from frontal areas such as Broca’s, from left temporal areas, and also from the right cerebellum.” Proust and the Squid page 154.
This book doesn’t really do that – and there is no question that the authors could have done this with no effort at all and crowded the pages with mathematical formula to blind the most persistent of readers. In fact, I can see a lot of people might not like this book because they don’t come away from it feeling a bit dizzy from the names of brain regions and numbers with lots and lots of zeros – you know, no pain, no gain.
Much of this is presented in almost unscientific language – we are told of a ‘sensor’ and a ‘doer’, for example. We are given a history of the ‘mind’ – and as they say, or nearly say, ‘mind’ is a bit like the opposite of the Eskimo words for snow, one word that covers a multitude of sins.
We are repeatedly reminded that mind is a verb, rather than a noun. That is, it is not the bits that are important, but what is being done with them. Mind only makes sense in terms of changes that occur in the world – as such, this is a fundamentally materialist vision of mind. And again, potentially something that will alienate some readers. It is also a vision that avoids leaving ‘gaps’ that might be filled by spooky spirit and soul stuff. Consciousness isn’t even presented as an emergent quality, certainly isn’t presented as weird shit that appears out of the quantum gaps between synapses or whatever – consciousness is presented as the brains way of answering problems. Those problems are very much ‘this worldly’ and the solutions presented are equally this worldly too.
If I have a criticism of this book, it is that some of the metaphors are rather extended but then don’t particularly explain as much as I was expecting. For example, we are provided with an extensive history of Mumbai to explain the ‘metropolitan principle’. Essentially, this says that a complex city is likely to not just become more highly developed in its megastructures, but also in its component elements too. And this will also be the case for brains – with the most complex brains being the most highly developed on all scales. And while the metaphor of the city was interesting here, this wasn’t the only time when I worried that the metaphor and what it was seeking to illuminate might have gotten a bit out of hand.
There are actually a couple of ‘city’ based metaphors in the book, something I want to come back to in a minute. Okay, so what you need to come away from this review knowing is that we are presented in the book with a kind of bottom-up developmental history of the development of ‘mind’. That isn’t totally fair or accurate – it’s evolution, and our standard metaphor for evolution and development is a kind of straight line – something they repeatedly imply is wrong, for instance, when they say birds have perhaps more complex brains than rats, although they evolved a long time before rats. The bit you really need to notice here is that brains are what you use them for, not what they ‘contain’. And this is a kind of ‘living out’ of the fact they don’t talk about frontal lobes and hypothalamuses, but rather about ‘brain modules’ that are concerned with what and how and where and when. I liked all this very, very much. The point isn’t ‘where’ these modules reside, the point is that they exist and they need to exist and they need to be able to work together – and that’s pretty much what this book sets out to explain. And it does that remarkably well. And then it tells us how all the bits working together give us a sense of self and then how gaining language plays into that too. Not least since it allows us to enter a ‘super mind’, a mind infinitely more powerful than our own, except, the super mind can only exist with all of our individual minds linked together in a kind of harmony.
All of this is lovely, as is the assertion that the fact that birds do not have hands probably condemns them to never having language either. The explanation being that hands allow us to essentially point to what we are referring to and therefore create a connection between the sort of Saussurian signifier and signified to produce the linguistic sign. I’m still not sure if that’s not a bit of a stretch – but it is clear birds have been producing insanely complex songs forever, but it seems also quite clear they don’t do anything similar to our ‘language’, and so, that does seem to need to be explained.
There really are lots of things I like about this book. And what I’m about to say isn’t really a criticism, but more some random reflections on ideas raised here that made me think of other things that have been bothering me for a while. Like I said, this is very much a materialist understanding of the development of the mind – very much a material mind that evolved in response to very much material problems. But the progress towards the super mind is here presented as linguistic and cultural. I found this shift away from the material to be interesting, not least since I feel that the most human thing we do, for better or worse, is transform our world, and while language and culture play essential roles in this transformation, the transformation is also linked to material culture (back to cities again) and to technology.
There is an interesting bit in the book where AI is discussed – and the authors say how they feel it is unlikely that we will have a kind of Matrix war with computers, since we built them to serve us. But my interest isn’t so much in a war of us against them – but rather how we have become ‘post-human’ by creating our own ‘mental modules’ – such as, calculators, mobile phones, television screens, satellites, and so on. Oh, and the 'so on' now includes, it seems, ChatGPT. These are external mental modules, external to our minds and bodies, and they change how we interact with the world and with each other. Our super minds are made even more super and even more connected by them, I think. And this is true of all of our technologies and our techniques. This story isn’t at all simple or something that always works for the ever more perfect human subject. For many people, as Braverman says in his Labor and Monopoly Capital, the development of capitalism has been premised on the ‘degradation’ of their work and of their, for want of a better word, ‘souls’ – and this has resulted, as David Hume said, with the division of labour that can make a person ‘as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be’.
For the last few years, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea that other aspects of human life can have impacts upon us that we don’t recognise or understand. Many of these are spatial, and so how our cities are designed and how the rules that underline them are likely to structure other aspects of our ways of understanding the world over and above walls and roads. Some books I’ve read point to the fact that some forms of town planning go to making people’s lives more ‘liveable’. Often one of the things that makes for better communities (and in this book’s terms, I guess, a more heightened super mind) is less space and fewer places to stand aside. These outside, between spaces force us to interact. But also, when I was at a conference in Manchester years ago, a woman explained to me why the building we were in was masculine and therefore discouraged anything beyond surface interactions between people. The walls were bare concrete, they had what looked like bullet holes left where bolts held the slabs together, the offices around us were all highly visible through glass windows, we were potentially and constantly under surveillance, the open plan nature of all aspects of the building did not allow for any intimacy. How does this constructed human environment shape our minds – and what does it say about the mind that has shaped it?
All of which might well sound a bit off topic – except, I’m not sure it is. Our minds are shaped by our environments and those environments are increasingly made by our minds. And those minds are shaped by the power relationships that exist in our worlds, and those power relationships, if they do nothing else, justify their own existence by making power a taken-for-granted unspoken assumption of how the world works. So that perhaps the very material nature of the world constructed around us reinforces the power relationships that hold all of us (oppressor and oppressed alike) in our mutual dependancies.
Anyway... You should read this book. The drawings are helpful, the text is easy to read, and it is about one of the most important topics a book can be about.
September 17, 2023
This book is like 3 book summaries that don't really play well together crammed into one. It starts off with a tour of an analogue of the possible evolutionary history of simple neural systems to more complex. This is the part of the book that I was most interested in and had it only been this part, or competently stuck to this structure it would have been a 5 star read.
At some point around the blurry edges of sentience, the authors abandoned their theoretically linear, biological, progression and there was a jump to a summary of Stephen Grossbergs's "Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain" which I was not familiar with, and am grateful for the introduction to, but I did not feel like it was a smooth transition. My primary complaint for this section of the book is that I felt the authors failed to provide enough substance of the summarized content for me to understand what they were summarizing, instead opting to provide only the essential supporting evidence for the narrative they were stringing along. The task I desired may be near impossible, as it seems like Grossberg's writing is extremely technical, so I will have to try going to the source.
Finally, the authors took this already shaky foundation, and tried to place upon it something resembling a fraction of Douglas R. Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach", confident of their simple explanation of consciousness as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. This was another herculean task that again left me unsatisfied - although I cannot accuse it of being blatantly erroneous.
The confident bluster after crossing into the realm of sentience felt pedantic and disingenuous, like I was not smart enough to actually have the truth explained to me, so I was given some blurry diluted version.
I'm still grateful for the author's work, and I certainly am better informed after reading "Journey of the Mind", but I am left hungry, and my high expectations created during the beginning when I felt that this book was explaining exactly what I hoped to find are ultimately left unfulfilled.
At some point around the blurry edges of sentience, the authors abandoned their theoretically linear, biological, progression and there was a jump to a summary of Stephen Grossbergs's "Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain" which I was not familiar with, and am grateful for the introduction to, but I did not feel like it was a smooth transition. My primary complaint for this section of the book is that I felt the authors failed to provide enough substance of the summarized content for me to understand what they were summarizing, instead opting to provide only the essential supporting evidence for the narrative they were stringing along. The task I desired may be near impossible, as it seems like Grossberg's writing is extremely technical, so I will have to try going to the source.
Finally, the authors took this already shaky foundation, and tried to place upon it something resembling a fraction of Douglas R. Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach", confident of their simple explanation of consciousness as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. This was another herculean task that again left me unsatisfied - although I cannot accuse it of being blatantly erroneous.
The confident bluster after crossing into the realm of sentience felt pedantic and disingenuous, like I was not smart enough to actually have the truth explained to me, so I was given some blurry diluted version.
I'm still grateful for the author's work, and I certainly am better informed after reading "Journey of the Mind", but I am left hungry, and my high expectations created during the beginning when I felt that this book was explaining exactly what I hoped to find are ultimately left unfulfilled.
August 5, 2022
This book was astoundingly fascinating and I highly recommend it to any of us drawn to questions about the nature of consciousness and potential expansion of "mind." While some of the ideas still remain a bit of reach for me in their complexity, the authors found engaging ways to relate to readers still relatively new to neuroscience and Stephen Grossberg's "unified theory of mind." The way the book is structured, going from the simplest to the most complex beings, created quite a bit of suspense and anticipation as I grew eager to "get to the good stuff" around self, soul, identity, language and consciousness. But what I realized along the way, with more grounding and substantive evidence than ever before, is that all beings that possess life — the ability to sense and act — have some kind of embodied awareness. From there, the book continues to take even more poetic twists and turns, offering up several useful metaphors and frames to deconstruct and put back together a new definition of mind, thinking and consciousness. One of the elements that blew my mind was the notion that time as a construct is relatively new and only exists in relationship to language and others. Without it, there's nothing in our biology alone that is predicated on fixed notions of "time" and this, to me, helps anchor the more religious or spiritual assertions of the "be here now" mantra. All that exists is now and nothingness that makes up everything that we experience in this shared reality. The other mind-blowing concept that emerges is the notion that very little of what we do or think is generated as a solo act. Our minds are more like neurons working together in the brain of a "supermind" or a society, and that through our increasingly complex & networked existence, each of us is inevitably entangled in hordes of humans all trying to balance the solo self-mind and the hive-supermind. What we think of as "mine" is actually a series of elements that conspire at any given moment to give rise to the illusion of possession. It's trippy but important to ponder this in terms of our collective and interdependent realities. A couple other knock-out tidbits to remember from this book: 1. the mind is NOT a computer, it's an endless activity. 2. all living beings grapple with various dilemmas that can either affirm life or threaten it, and they are a. the attention dilemma (what deserves my focus right now? each mind actually works like a mini-newsroom, deciding minute by minute what it will pay attention to and amplify or analyze or ignore), b. exploration dilemma (should I stay where I am or venture out beyond the borders of my current existence?) c. stability dilemma (which representations emerging from the chaos of the cosmos need to be sustained or ignored) d. the uncertainty dilemma (how can I eliminate ambiguity associated with what I am experiencing so I can correct identify it). 3. to understand consciousness, think of a basketball game. the ball is consciousness itself, the players represent the various modules of mind (what, how, where, when, why via senses) that all work together to give that ball meaning and purpose 4. self does not exist without language (we literally create a "self" using words and getting "mirrored back" who we "are" from society) and language systems flourished once the first seeds and agriculture emerged 5. consciousness in humans describes the ability to become aware of one's awareness (self-reflective loops). I could go on and on. There are so many fun ways to grapple with this book and the nature of consciousness and mind through a science lens that affirm our collective consciousness and meaning-making through the mystery. The book culminates in some highly poetic and speculative thoughts about the future of sentience, artificial intelligence & evolution of a "hypermind," dipping into the wonder of imagining the possibility of accessing entities that cannot exist in the physical realm but thrive within "whorls of thought." I mean, it really gets trippy! Loved every minute of reading this book — even some of the more challenging graphs & diagrams in the first half the book to explain and visualize the wonder of less complex yet living beings like amoeba, worms and flies. This book gripped me and offered up some really helpful vocabulary and scaffolds to be able to be discuss the ineffable nature of consciousness!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 21, 2022
This book traces the development of the mind from a one cell archaea to the modern human brain. The authors work up the story through 14 animals of increasing complexity.
Their approach is based on the work of Stephen Grossberg. He is a scientific prodigy. He designed a model for how minds work. It is based on the idea of different modules making discrete tiny decisions. The modules hierarchically combine into immensely complicated minds. The authors explained that he created new mathematical techniques to prove his theories. Luckily, they stay out of the mathematical weeds.
They make two big points. A mind is a process for sensing and reacting. It is a verb more than a noun. If you use that definition then it is sensible to talk about a bacterium having a mind, even though it has no central brain.
Secondly, consciousness is a result of increasingly complex brain structure. It becomes necessary to evolve a sense of consciousness so that very complex brains can do what they are capable of. There is no difference in kind between human consciousness and animal consciousness. Human consciousness is just more complicated and developed because the brain producing it is more complicated.
They have a wonderful footnote on P. 344 where they list all of the various magic in the box theories that brilliant scientists have come up with to explain where the specialness of human consciousness comes from. They dismiss those theories as unnecessary.
The explanations of how, as a practical matter, organisms make decisions are fascinating. They have diagrams of "modules", which work like decision trees. They develop that theory up to the point of fairly complicated decisions. How does a monkey decide what to eat? How does a rat recognize a sunflower seed?
They are careful to make it clear that a computer is not a good model for the mind. The mind is not based on binary logic. It doesn't process information sequentially. It's hardware develops and improves with age.
There is a bunch of interesting stuff. They explain why you remember our first kiss so well. They make this obvious point which never occurred to me. The head is well designed. The input devices, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose are located right next to the data processing systems.
You can only do so much in a popular science book. I was disappointed however because the authors don't really tell us whether their explanation of complex brain functioning is theory or whether they are describing an actual physical process that has been observed.
We get explanations later in the book like this; " The Where module shares the attentional shroud with the How module, which uses it for targeting the object.". It was not clear to me whether this is a theoretical way of describing what happens or whether we have discovered actual physical systems that we have observed to act like that.
I did like the Boston shout outs from these two Boston University professors. We get Bill Belichick and Copley Square references.
Their approach is based on the work of Stephen Grossberg. He is a scientific prodigy. He designed a model for how minds work. It is based on the idea of different modules making discrete tiny decisions. The modules hierarchically combine into immensely complicated minds. The authors explained that he created new mathematical techniques to prove his theories. Luckily, they stay out of the mathematical weeds.
They make two big points. A mind is a process for sensing and reacting. It is a verb more than a noun. If you use that definition then it is sensible to talk about a bacterium having a mind, even though it has no central brain.
Secondly, consciousness is a result of increasingly complex brain structure. It becomes necessary to evolve a sense of consciousness so that very complex brains can do what they are capable of. There is no difference in kind between human consciousness and animal consciousness. Human consciousness is just more complicated and developed because the brain producing it is more complicated.
They have a wonderful footnote on P. 344 where they list all of the various magic in the box theories that brilliant scientists have come up with to explain where the specialness of human consciousness comes from. They dismiss those theories as unnecessary.
The explanations of how, as a practical matter, organisms make decisions are fascinating. They have diagrams of "modules", which work like decision trees. They develop that theory up to the point of fairly complicated decisions. How does a monkey decide what to eat? How does a rat recognize a sunflower seed?
They are careful to make it clear that a computer is not a good model for the mind. The mind is not based on binary logic. It doesn't process information sequentially. It's hardware develops and improves with age.
There is a bunch of interesting stuff. They explain why you remember our first kiss so well. They make this obvious point which never occurred to me. The head is well designed. The input devices, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose are located right next to the data processing systems.
You can only do so much in a popular science book. I was disappointed however because the authors don't really tell us whether their explanation of complex brain functioning is theory or whether they are describing an actual physical process that has been observed.
We get explanations later in the book like this; " The Where module shares the attentional shroud with the How module, which uses it for targeting the object.". It was not clear to me whether this is a theoretical way of describing what happens or whether we have discovered actual physical systems that we have observed to act like that.
I did like the Boston shout outs from these two Boston University professors. We get Bill Belichick and Copley Square references.
April 3, 2023
Wow! This is one of the best pop mind science titles…ever. As the authors acknowledge throughout, they did not innovate the book’s main ideas. But they do a superb job of explaining them to a non-specialist readership. And what a set of ideas they treat. Or rather, what a model of cognition, consciousness, and self-consciousness they build! From pebble molecules to cathedral superminds. I don’t take it for granted that the model is, in every respect, accurate, but I am wholly convinced that something like it (if not this very model) does really obtain. Why my uncertainty? Because the book moves swiftly from modeling with reference to empirical evidence to modeling alone. The authors don’t directly address this shift. I’m guessing that as their treatment passed from simple to more complex minds that the sorts of empirical evidence they would have needed to describe (were their goal to provide an empirical account) would have been so complex and substantial that discussing it would have added enormously to the book’s length. If a decision was made to focus on the model only, I respect that decision, having greatly profited from being able, as a reader, to focus my attention on the devil rather than lose myself in the details. That said, I do wish the authors had provided an explanatory bridge between the model/empirical portion of the book and the model only portion (which commences with the discussion of “modules”). I’d like to know what sort of empirical evidence there is for modules, feed-forward/ backwards mechanisms, resonances, etc. in minds that purportedly have these features; how we can reliably associate them with features of the model; what, if any, features of the model are uncertain or — at present — entirely speculative, etc. But even if the entire model — from modules upwards — is pure speculation, it’s speculation resonating with powerful plausibility. Journey of the Mind is a feast for mind science junkies — a fascinating reflection on what a thinking capacity is and what and why one developed. This book also comes as close as any I’ve ever read to (plausibly) explaining how subjectivity and intersubjectivity arose and how they work. Fantastic book!
May 17, 2024
I read this book Because the author appeared boastful and conceited Scientist who looked down on mere philosophers. And as it turns out the author/scientist is conceited and condescending (to the reader) often stating theory as fact and preaching these as simple things to be resolved soon. And using stupid metaphor as if we're children like cutesy names for species which the author appears to know How they think. And the author's a poet too and wants to become famous for creating concepts like Superminds (when will science stop using Super as a prefix). OMG, it's all too meaningless as the author wanders between topics as diverse as George Floyd Black Lives Matter and the start in life of Frederick Douglas to Chat-GPT thinking itself aware. What a popular book you have here Ogi... and therefore USELESS.
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April 6, 2022Approachably written book that does a good job showing how consciousness and the mind evolved over time. This book demystifies many questions I had about the brain, like those on self, decision-making, and perception. One part I found unsatisfying was then they talk about the Self as being solely created by language. There was not enough evidence to back this claim up, nor was there reasoning very compelling given the boldness of their claim. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone curios about the mind and evolution.
June 22, 2022
This is not the same as other books that look at thinking. It uses the idea of modules and follows that to the conclusion of the book.
March 17, 2024
had high hopes for this but really did not enjoy
September 28, 2022
Great figures and explanation. Great mix of history, biology of various organisms, and development of the mind.
July 16, 2022
Amazing explanation of the road towards the human mind. Too bad my mind was not able to understand everything and what I understood I already forgot 😫
June 6, 2022
This book started out interesting, and the writing style is very easy to read. I liked the conversation about how relatively simple mechanisms can demonstrate some emergent behavior in simple organisms. However, the last maybe third of the book starts to go off the deep end by extending the metaphor of collective culture as just another stage along the evolution of mind. There may be some interesting or even useful analogies to be drawn between the way different parts of a human brain work together and the way different human brains interact/collaborate. However, I think this book is so enthusiastic about the parallels that it gets carried away into believing that it is more than just an analogy and that a society as a whole is literally a form of consciousness with self-awareness, and I just don't believe that leap is justified.
January 3, 2023
كل عقل له جسد. ومع ذلك ، بغض النظر عن مدى تعقيد التنفس والتغذية والإخراج ، فإن الجسد وحده ليس عقلًا. قامت أجيال لا حصر لها من الكائنات المغلفة بالغشاء برعاية عملية التمثيل الغذائي الكيميائي الحيوي النابض بالحياة وكانت على قيد الحياة تمامًا ولكنها ظلت بلا عقل تمامًا. ذلك لأن هذه الأنواع الرائدة تفتقر إلى شيء آخر لا غنى عنه لتكوين الفكر :
كانوا بحاجة إلى شيء للتفكير بواسطته .
العقل هو نظام فيزيائي يحول الأحاسيس إلى أفعال. يأخذ العقل مجموعة من المدخلات من بيئته ويحولها إلى مجموعة من النواتج التي تؤثر على البيئة والتي تؤثر بشكل حاسم على جسده. إن عملية تغيير المدخلات إلى مخرجات - تغيير الإحساس إلى سلوك مفيد - هي التفكير ، النشاط المميِّز للعقل.
.
Ogi Ogas
Journey Of The Mind
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
كانوا بحاجة إلى شيء للتفكير بواسطته .
العقل هو نظام فيزيائي يحول الأحاسيس إلى أفعال. يأخذ العقل مجموعة من المدخلات من بيئته ويحولها إلى مجموعة من النواتج التي تؤثر على البيئة والتي تؤثر بشكل حاسم على جسده. إن عملية تغيير المدخلات إلى مخرجات - تغيير الإحساس إلى سلوك مفيد - هي التفكير ، النشاط المميِّز للعقل.
.
Ogi Ogas
Journey Of The Mind
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
June 10, 2022
Absolutely fascinating, and written in a way that explains very complex and intangible concepts clearly and with helpful drawings and the occasional clarifying story.
I learned so much.
It would be interesting to hear the authors discuss this with Yuval Noah Harrari.
I learned so much.
It would be interesting to hear the authors discuss this with Yuval Noah Harrari.
April 29, 2022
Great science communication! Personally paradigm shifting! Going to be processing this one for some time. Beautiful book.
June 20, 2022
Ambitious does not begin to describe the evolutionary scope of “Journey of the Mind”. Our authors attempt to build a theory of consciousness, language and self. It’s almost a theory of everything. Using exampes across the animal kingdom, we understand the “doer” and “sensory” neurons for the large swath of animals. These would be the lower-level animals that exist without an organizing unit. From bacteria, hydras, roundworms, tortoises, frogs, and yes eventually human, Gaddam and Ogas explore top down processing in a bottom up world. Sharing the arrival of human consciousnss they state “aimless cycling of mud on a dark and barren Earth until the morning a mind woke and up and declared to an indifferent universe. I am aware of me” (p.2). Adding poetry and social commentary, they explore the self/consciousness and meaning from outside an experiencing self.
With anticipatory excitement, we build up from simple evolutionary adaptations such as a flagella in bacteria. And we move to the advanced reflective and memory processing of a human brain. The first third of the book is so exciting, as it points to an underlying sense of evolutionary order across life. As we build to more complex organisms, there is centralization, the beginning of a self, that is responding to a challenging and uncertain environment.
As a reader, I began to lose the thread of hierarchical changes across species , to the horizontal modules of the human mind. These ideas are largely built on the ideas of cognitive scientist Stephen Grossberg. Human action (“what”, “when”, “why”) is modularized to an underlying mental processes. Unlike an information theory schema, the modules of mental processing are “intimately intertwined with one another, continuously influencing each other’s ongoing internal operations in real time.” (p.136).
For all my admiration of the synthesis of these ideas, I found myself lost with some of the narrative intros to these chapters. Some of the narratives used to illuminate the mental processing were so creative and mythic that they took me out of the book. For example in the supermind chapter (p.281), we get an analogy about a relationship that is a metaphor about the Civil War. The metaphor is to understand dynamics in a system. Our authors dance adroitly between concepts across fields. At times the metaphors are gorgeous, particularly one regarding amoeba structures and the ancient Turkish city of Catalhoyuk. At times human processing is explored in a whirlwind of social and biological dynamics, and this may be true at the experiential self. However, I think, at times, they sacrifice clarity for wonder.
Like other animals, we seek survival, and our processing here is understood in these evolutionary terms (targeting, sensing, matching). None of this reduces the human experience, rather Ogas and Gaddam move toward a expansive perspective of mind conquering the chaotic chaos of our physical and social world. Through language, integration and building awareness, we have the opportunity to build a better superorganism as well.
All and all, quite a fascinating book. I think the first third is much more clear, than the compilation of language/self/consciousness explored with human processing. Admittedly, I had a hard time with the later chapters, and felt the tendency was to saturate with scientific concepts rather than to have clarity. It may be a limitation of this reader, I imagine many others would enjoy the exploration of fundamental questions through this riveting narrative.
With anticipatory excitement, we build up from simple evolutionary adaptations such as a flagella in bacteria. And we move to the advanced reflective and memory processing of a human brain. The first third of the book is so exciting, as it points to an underlying sense of evolutionary order across life. As we build to more complex organisms, there is centralization, the beginning of a self, that is responding to a challenging and uncertain environment.
As a reader, I began to lose the thread of hierarchical changes across species , to the horizontal modules of the human mind. These ideas are largely built on the ideas of cognitive scientist Stephen Grossberg. Human action (“what”, “when”, “why”) is modularized to an underlying mental processes. Unlike an information theory schema, the modules of mental processing are “intimately intertwined with one another, continuously influencing each other’s ongoing internal operations in real time.” (p.136).
For all my admiration of the synthesis of these ideas, I found myself lost with some of the narrative intros to these chapters. Some of the narratives used to illuminate the mental processing were so creative and mythic that they took me out of the book. For example in the supermind chapter (p.281), we get an analogy about a relationship that is a metaphor about the Civil War. The metaphor is to understand dynamics in a system. Our authors dance adroitly between concepts across fields. At times the metaphors are gorgeous, particularly one regarding amoeba structures and the ancient Turkish city of Catalhoyuk. At times human processing is explored in a whirlwind of social and biological dynamics, and this may be true at the experiential self. However, I think, at times, they sacrifice clarity for wonder.
Like other animals, we seek survival, and our processing here is understood in these evolutionary terms (targeting, sensing, matching). None of this reduces the human experience, rather Ogas and Gaddam move toward a expansive perspective of mind conquering the chaotic chaos of our physical and social world. Through language, integration and building awareness, we have the opportunity to build a better superorganism as well.
All and all, quite a fascinating book. I think the first third is much more clear, than the compilation of language/self/consciousness explored with human processing. Admittedly, I had a hard time with the later chapters, and felt the tendency was to saturate with scientific concepts rather than to have clarity. It may be a limitation of this reader, I imagine many others would enjoy the exploration of fundamental questions through this riveting narrative.
May 23, 2023
An incredible book for how much information it gives while still being so short and accessible.
I had no idea going into this book just how far our understanding of consciousness had advanced over the last couple decades. If these authors are to be believed, this guy Stephen Grossberg has basically figured out the whole kit and kaboodle, presenting his magnum opus of a lifetimes worth of research in 2017. The way they describe it certainly lines up with other reading I've done, the module minds whose resonance makes up consciousness echoing Marvin Minsky, and the penultimate argument that self-consciousness, the "I", being but a natural consequence of recursive self-reference within our language modules echoing Douglas Hofstadter argument (as explained by him poorly in Godel Escher Bach, and tediously in I Am A Strange Loop).
Unfortunately, while the rest of this book is a hard-nosed, realist, illusion shattering tour of the nature of consciousness and what we consider ourselves, for some reason in its final chapter it decided to go completely off the rails into some truly hippy dippy bullshit. We spend 95% of the book learning that, yes, there is no special divine spark or supernuminal energy field within us, we really are just layers of neural modules and linguistic feedback loops.
Then in the last 5% suddenly its "and who knows where the journey of mind will stop, maybe someday it'll take over the entire universe and become God why not." And like, that's even some hippy dippy bullshit that I enjoy, when I've seen it other places, but this is supposed to be a book of science not science fiction. Get that shit out of here. Truly shockingly disappointing final chapter that lost this book an entire star for me.
But even still I can't recommend a better book if you're looking to understand what's going on in that head of yours.
I had no idea going into this book just how far our understanding of consciousness had advanced over the last couple decades. If these authors are to be believed, this guy Stephen Grossberg has basically figured out the whole kit and kaboodle, presenting his magnum opus of a lifetimes worth of research in 2017. The way they describe it certainly lines up with other reading I've done, the module minds whose resonance makes up consciousness echoing Marvin Minsky, and the penultimate argument that self-consciousness, the "I", being but a natural consequence of recursive self-reference within our language modules echoing Douglas Hofstadter argument (as explained by him poorly in Godel Escher Bach, and tediously in I Am A Strange Loop).
Unfortunately, while the rest of this book is a hard-nosed, realist, illusion shattering tour of the nature of consciousness and what we consider ourselves, for some reason in its final chapter it decided to go completely off the rails into some truly hippy dippy bullshit. We spend 95% of the book learning that, yes, there is no special divine spark or supernuminal energy field within us, we really are just layers of neural modules and linguistic feedback loops.
Then in the last 5% suddenly its "and who knows where the journey of mind will stop, maybe someday it'll take over the entire universe and become God why not." And like, that's even some hippy dippy bullshit that I enjoy, when I've seen it other places, but this is supposed to be a book of science not science fiction. Get that shit out of here. Truly shockingly disappointing final chapter that lost this book an entire star for me.
But even still I can't recommend a better book if you're looking to understand what's going on in that head of yours.
December 14, 2023
Difficult to review this book. It was recommended by a friendly acquaintance. It’s certainly a topic I’m interested in. I thought the writing was slightly odd and clumsy but found the first third or so of the book interesting and engaging.
But more and more it became impossible to ignore the fact that the authors are fans of a (possibly brilliant but obscure and hard to comprehend) BU Professor Emeritus named Stephen Grossberg. They compare him (favorably) to Isaac Newton. His theories of intelligence and consciousness are said to be highly mathematical, using math techniques that he has invented.
As the book went on, various concepts and models and metaphors all get stacked up to explain the human mind, and then we zoom past that even, to look at super minds comprised of human cultures, nations, all of humanity, and then going to the whole universe.
Maybe Stephen Grossberg truly comprehends how the mind works and everyone will slap their foreheads in 50 years and be amazed at how ahead of his time he was. I don’t have any way to judge that. Again, the first third or so of the book was interesting and believable. But the rest of it? I dunno. If some scientists I’ve heard of agreed with him, it would be one thing. But it seems like most famous people researching consciousness don’t agree or disagree— they just ignore him. (Exception - Karl Friston, who is famous and respected in the field, contributed a positive blurb on the book jacket.)
And of course, Grossberg didn’t write this book, two people who at one point worked with him did. And no major periodical has thought this book worthy of reviewing as far as I can find. I guess there must be a reason for that.
But more and more it became impossible to ignore the fact that the authors are fans of a (possibly brilliant but obscure and hard to comprehend) BU Professor Emeritus named Stephen Grossberg. They compare him (favorably) to Isaac Newton. His theories of intelligence and consciousness are said to be highly mathematical, using math techniques that he has invented.
As the book went on, various concepts and models and metaphors all get stacked up to explain the human mind, and then we zoom past that even, to look at super minds comprised of human cultures, nations, all of humanity, and then going to the whole universe.
Maybe Stephen Grossberg truly comprehends how the mind works and everyone will slap their foreheads in 50 years and be amazed at how ahead of his time he was. I don’t have any way to judge that. Again, the first third or so of the book was interesting and believable. But the rest of it? I dunno. If some scientists I’ve heard of agreed with him, it would be one thing. But it seems like most famous people researching consciousness don’t agree or disagree— they just ignore him. (Exception - Karl Friston, who is famous and respected in the field, contributed a positive blurb on the book jacket.)
And of course, Grossberg didn’t write this book, two people who at one point worked with him did. And no major periodical has thought this book worthy of reviewing as far as I can find. I guess there must be a reason for that.
November 16, 2022
I had high hopes for this one. The first third was really great, discussing the basic mechanics of the minds of simple organisms. The second third, discussing the interactions between different modules of more complex minds was pretty good. But once the book started in on human minds and societies it went off the deep end into a lot of unsubstantiated claims and a fair amount of woo-woo. A discussion about how a society can behave like a higher-level mind might be interesting, but I wanted more about how we can investigate the specifics of this, and what we have discovered so far, and less armchair pontificating.
March 30, 2023
This book has introduced me to the revolutionary work of Stephen Grossberg. It's like wondering why apples fall and then picking up Newton's book and reading it without ever having heard of Newton or the laws of gravity. I will be looking at the world in a whole new way. The book itself is written in an easily accessible style with plenty of really good illustrations of the concepts being explained. It takes a step by evolutionary step approach to building the conceptual framework necessary for an understanding of the most profound questions that mankind can ask, "what is consciousness?"
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has a deep thirst for knowledge.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has a deep thirst for knowledge.
April 16, 2022
👍👍
CONSCIOUSNESS: An activity, not a thing.
A collective phenomenon.
A process, not a substance.
Networked Activity, not a localized control center.
The emergence and evolution of mind in Earth life.
How consciousness emerged in stages.
How we unraveled the mysteries of this process using the mathematics of dynamic processes.
The so-called hard problem of consciousness is not real.
The illusion of the "soul" explained.
Free Will explained.
Become aware of how to comprehend the mystery of consciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS: An activity, not a thing.
A collective phenomenon.
A process, not a substance.
Networked Activity, not a localized control center.
The emergence and evolution of mind in Earth life.
How consciousness emerged in stages.
How we unraveled the mysteries of this process using the mathematics of dynamic processes.
The so-called hard problem of consciousness is not real.
The illusion of the "soul" explained.
Free Will explained.
Become aware of how to comprehend the mystery of consciousness.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews