The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling The Mystery of How The Brain Makes The Mind. Michael S. Gazzaniga. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. NY. 2018.
Hard Cover. Sewn and Glued. 275 pages. 1.05 lbs. Notes. Index.
Found at Fayetteville Public Library, purchased at Alibris.com
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Dear Mr. Gazzaniga,
When I finished reading your book recently, for the second time in four years, I felt both inspired but also a bit confused. Perhaps the study of consciousness is just like physics as described by Feynman, who you quote to state, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” And consciousness?
You speak of the brain’s modularity, and of bubbles arising from each of those modules, and how each bubble is an event of consciousness, but I was still left unsatisfied, and I’m neither a Determinist nor a Spiritualist.
I simply have trouble grasping your contention that consciousness does not reside in any one place in the brain. Instead, you claim, it is all pervasive.
As you state in the introduction: “There [in the neurological clinic] we will discover that our modular brain with its layered architecture is managing our consciousness from . . . everywhere in its local tissues, over and over again. There is not one centralized system working to produce the grand magic of conscious experience. It is everywhere, and you can’t seem to stamp it out, not even with a wide-ranging brain disease like Alzheimer’s.” [ellipsis is the original author’s; nothing was left out of this quote.]
Grasping the concept of a pervasive consciousness is quite counter-intuitive to the assumptions made and taught to me over the years based on Descartes’ dualistic approach to life and to the scientific training of strict determinism. Yours is an offbeat, syncopated character to the usual idea of mind vs. brain.
The protagonist in your story, the main idea, is “… to examine how matter makes minds.” Your antagonists are “… two overarching and contradictory notions—that the mind either is part of the brain’s workings or works somehow independently of the brain… .”
Your supporting cast of characters are ideas gleaned from neurology, evolutionary and theoretical biology, engineering, physics, psychology, and philosophy. Engineering!?
Central to your protagonist’s journey is the belief that “consciousness is an instinct” and that “many organisms, not just humans, come with it, ready-made.” As you state, an instinct is that which we never have to learn how to produce or how to utilize. Included in the long list of instincts are survival, sex, walking, language, and consciousness.
The journey of exploring how nature turns neurons into mind is filled with adventures in history, visits with patients in the neurological wing of hospitals, lessons from experimental labs, and philosophical discussions.
The idea is clarified by its contrast with its antagonists; what does it really mean for matter to make a mind? How does the co-existence of matter and mind compare with the antagonistic ideas that the mind is a part of the brain or that the mind is independent of the brain?
How you tell this story is important to my question for you at the end so let’s first make sure I am getting your story correct in an abstracted summary.
In your first of three broad sections of the book, you spend the requisite time looking at the history of consciousness studies from Greek philosophy through Descartes—who coined the word ‘consciousness’—to 20th century scientific insights, experiments, and philosophy. A common theme throughout this history lesson is the constant tug-of-war between your antagonists.
Your second section explores how the brain is physically constructed, which sets up the third section that brings it all together through physics and the theory of life itself. First, the brain’s construct:
In brief, the brain is composed of modules in a layered architecture. Of course, the power of your thinking is in the depths of what those two concepts mean.
Here are two compelling questions you pose: “Gazillions of electrical, chemical, and hormonal processes occur in our brain every moment, yet we experience everything as a smoothly running unified whole. How can this be? Indeed, what is the organization of our brain that generates conscious unity?”
Your answer to the second question above is in part modularity, one of my favorite approaches to life and work, though I appreciate you spelling out the advantages. A modular brain—and a modular organizational structure—have the advantages of saving energy, parallel processing rather than linear (one-at-a-time) processing, resiliency and adaptability, and an increased ability to learn.
When we consider evolution, we see that other creatures have modular brains, including worms, flies, and cats, among the many. We know that modular brain construction works for survival and reproduction. But how does it help create consciousness?
Layered architecture. An approach first described in engineering, layered architecture conveys an image of sub-modules perceiving information then abstracting it into a simpler format to pass up to the next higher module. That module takes in the information from several sub-modules and abstracts it all further for passing up to the next higher module layer. And so on.
Along the line of layered modularity, any one of those modules could command enough electrical energy to become a conscious event for the person.
Each layer of modules follows its own set of protocols. Some of these protocols are so endemic to living creatures that they have been conserved through evolution from the earliest bacteria.
The advantages of a layered architecture are similar to the advantages of modular organization, such as being easily fixable, more flexible, and evolvable.
One of the evolutionarily advanced layers includes the ability to learn how to prepare for future events. Yong talks about this in An Immense World in the context of pain. He mentions the distinction between nociception—the sensory process by which we detect damage to some part of our body—and pain—the suffering that ensues afterwards.
You approach humans preparing for the future in terms of the layered brain. One of the evolutionarily earliest layers gives us the ability to survive in a moment of crisis. Our lower, reptilian layer pulls our hand away from fire immediately, even before any awareness of pain. Our more advanced layer will then feel the pain and learn to avoid getting too close to fire in the future.
Modern neurological studies of clinical patients have shown that consciousness does not reside in any one module or layer in the brain. If one module of the brain is damaged, there is still a stream of consciousness for the individual. There is no interruption to the person’s self-experience or self-story. Their ability to do a particular task may change, but the other modules continue to contribute to the feeling of a singular conscious experience by sending their information up the chain of layers.
Bouncing between our emotions and our thoughts, “The pattern in which these various conscious forms come in and out of awareness gives us our own personal life story.”
But understanding how the brain is constructed with modules and layers still does not get us to that specific answer of how an objective event of neurons in action can create the subjective mental experience. This is where the third section of your book comes into play, specifically regarding physics and complementarity.
Complementarity—a major concept in physics—is a crucial element to your argument. In its simplest terms, we know that light has both wave properties and particle properties. Which behavior we are seeing at any given time depends on how we look at light and how we measure it.
It’s the debate between the idea of objective reality vs. subjective experience. Is something real in and of itself, or is it real only once measured, observed, or experienced from another viewpoint?
For those who hold to the second option, layered architecture becomes an important concept. Reality is just too complex for all its layers to be described by the same protocols; each layer must and does have its own protocols. Thus, at the quantum level of reality, observers are part of the system, and cannot be separately objective.
To understand the brain from the viewpoint of complementarity—that a reality can be described in two different and legitimate ways at the same time—also requires us to look at the very existence of life itself. Indeed, you insist, the two beg a similar basic question: how can objective neural cells combine to create the subjective experience of consciousness, is like asking how can material atoms and molecules combine to create a life?
The engineering term of layered architecture comes into play again.
We must distinguish between laws and rules. Laws are inescapable, unchangeable, and universal; rules are arbitrary, changeable, and local.
DNA has a layered architecture, one layer of physical existence following the laws of physics and another layer of symbolic function following rules. This distinguishes between the genotype and the phenotype, between the genetic structure and how the genes are actually expressed in the body. This complementarity of genes is the only way life can exist.
And through the time of evolution, this layered architecture of DNA works its way up from single-celled bacteria into the layered architecture of the brain. No single model can explain both truths of how DNA works and how neurons work. We must look at them with both realities: a physical structure and a symbolic function.
You summarize that, “It should therefore not surprise us that two complementary modes of behavior, two levels of description, keep appearing in our thinking. The subject/object cut is present in all the great philosophical debates: random/predictable, experience/observation, individual/group, nurture/nature, and mind/brain. … The two models are inherent in life itself, were present from the beginning, and have been conserved by evolution.”
“Ignoring one side of the gap will result in missing the link between the two sides. Linking the two requires acknowledging the dual and complementary nature of symbols. The link will consist of mechanisms that are describable by physics, yet the explanation may not prove warm and cuddly, not psychologically satisfying to anyone, neither to determinists nor to believers in spirits.”
Bringing ourselves full circle from the question of neurons/brains and matter/life: matter composed of atoms and molecules coalesce into physical genes that symbolically code life. These genes follow physical laws but also symbolic rules. This complementary reality allowed for life, the evolution of life, and the emergence of consciousness.
Consciousness is the act of neural circuits that are themselves composed of physical atoms and molecules, which follow the laws of physics while also carrying symbolic information that follows variable rules.
Your story of the brain? “It is an organ, finely engineered by natural selection, organized into local modules whose functioning is accomplished in a layered architecture such that, for the most part, one set of modules doesn’t know what all the others are doing.”
“Thus, while consciousness seems to be a cogently coherent, flawlessly edited film, it is instead a stream of single vignettes that surface like bubbles roiling up in a boiling pot of water, linked together by their occurrence through time.”
Or, to wrap around from the start of this review letter to you, consciousness is neither a part of the brain nor independent from the brain. Consciousness IS the brain, in action over time.
Since I first read your book four years ago, and still now, I ponder: the emergence of life from matter, the role of time, the dilemma of complementarity, the role of evolution in the formation of the human condition, consciousness as a stream of bubbles, and how these concepts relate to other stories of human knowledge.
The Consciousness Instinct is, in short, one of my favorite—and most difficult—books from the past five years.
My question for you comes from your contention that consciousness is a stream over time of many bubbles; each bubble with the strongest electrical current claiming top attention for a moment. In my reading of what you are saying, there really is no one Mind. One stream of consciousness: yes; one Mind: no.
As I’ve recently learned and as you mention, our eyesight has an actual blind spot that our brain fills in. I have lamented my inability to control my brain well-enough that my consciousness could see as my eyes actually see: a lemon-sized black hole in the center of my vision surrounded by a thin band in focus that fades to an out-of-focus periphery, all upside down, not in 3-D, and in black and white. My brain makes up a story of my vision that insists I see no blind spot, all in focus, all right side up, all in color.
Similarly, my brain insists that I experience bubbles arising from the various modules of the brain as a continuous event, stitched together in time over the course of my entire life. My brain will not let me experience each of these bubbles as the truly independent events that they are.
But what is paying attention to each bubble? If there is no one Mind, what is doing that stitching for both my eyesight and for my consciousness?
In fact I don’t see an answer to this question you pose: “How can this be,” that while “Gazillions of electrical, chemical, and hormonal processes occur in our brain every moment, yet we experience everything as a smoothly running unified whole?”
Thank you for your own bubbles of attention to my Review Letter to you.