The Conscious Mind (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

As one not steeped in cognitive science, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I found the discussion into Free Will particularly illuminating.The brain stem is presented with options and it picks based on the sum total of its experiences and values. This in my opinion does not run afoul of determinism!

Very easy read of a very complex subject. I recommend it as much for the clarity of presentation as the content. Any one interested in consciousness, free will and how they may work will like this.

Just now into this book; it is going to be good

The text would be interesting were it not littered with self-aggrandizing egoism.

good

I was excited to get this book. I had recently read a few books about the brain, which talked about consciousness and I was looking forward to a book that dealt with the topic specifically. But, it turned out that I learned more about consciousness from those other books. I strongly recommend reading them. They are: "The Future of the Mind," by Michio Kaku; "Incognito," by David Eagleman; and "Light on Life," by BKS Iyengar. (Aside: The last one is a yoga book, I have been impressed how well the map of the mind from Yoga and Buddhism compares with the map of the mind that has been recently coming out of neuroscience.)The main problem with this book (The Conscience Mind) is that the definition of consciousness is too narrow. It is simply the superficial, language-using consciousness. The books listed above discuss about that part as merely the tip of the iceberg. The premiss of this book is that consciousness does not exist without language. I don't believe that is true. There are many times that I evaluate solutions to technical problems by running ideas through my mind without ever thinking of the words to describe them. Call it intuition, or whatever, but it is much quicker than thinking if the words as I go along. And, I am sure I am conscious the whole time. In fact, being conscious without words is one of the steps of yoga and zen. Also, It seems implausible that the modern human mind would have evolved for the purpose of language (as the book implies). Evolution would not have created something that would have been useful 1000 generations later, when language would become more fully developed. Even the book admits that complex language developed many generations after the modern human brain evolved. There had to be an evolutionary advantage right then and there, or it would not have been selected for. It seems way more plausible that the modern human brain was developed to quickly produce and evaluate various courses of action in real situations, right then and there. Adapting the brain for language was eventually a great advantage, as this and other references make clear. But, that doesn't prove language was the advantage that drove the physical evolution or that it is a requirement for consciousness.Also, this book is long on hypotheses, but short on evidence to support its hypotheses. Many of them are reasonable, but they are not satisfying without evidence. And, there were sections of the book that seemed out of scope. For example, the last chapter on how life was initiated on Earth was interesting, but did not really have anything to our with The Conscious Mind. And, it was one of those examples of lots of hypotheses with little evidence. Another questionable section was the one about Free Will. It was not a fair argument about the existence of free will, since it started with the assumption that free will could not exist. It has the same weakness as many discussions about free will: it seems to assume that there is one obvious definition of free will, but it never actually states the definition of free will, or admits that it is an assumption. The section ends with the case for a new concept called "Functional Autonomy." I think the original definition of free will (used in the section) could have just been the author's "Functional Autonomy." I am not sure what is the definition of free will that the author believes could not exist, but nothing was proven about free will in this book.

By Les GapayThe blind writing about the blind. I never thought it would come to that. But here I am reviewing a new book by my late cousin, a Hungarian-Australian expert on human consciousness.Bad luck must run in our family. Zoltan Torey was born in Budapest in 1929 and grew up in a privileged family. His father was head of a movie studio and also of the Hungarian Film Bureau. Zoltan fled Hungary in 1948, seeing no future under communism after his father's land and house were taken away and he was branded a "class enemy." Ending up in Australia, Zoltan was blinded in both eyes in an industrial accident in a battery acid plant in 1951. He didn't let this deter him and became a clinical psychologist. Later, he took on researching and writing about human consciousness, a subject that fascinated him. His latest book was just released by MIT Press, "The Conscious Mind." Previously, he wrote "The Crucible of Consciousness" published by Oxford University Press in 1999. He also wrote a memoir in 2003 on growing up in Hungary and his blindness with a forward by author and neurologist Oliver Sacks. "Out of Darkness" was published in Australia and Britain (Picador and later Macmillan).I had just found Zoltan in July of 2013 while doing genealogy research on our connected families. His Hungarian grandmother was the sister of my paternal grandfather. So we were second cousins. I was born in Hungary in 1943 and ended up in America with my parents in 1951. Zoltan used a typewriter though blind. He wrote me long letters about his recollections of our mutual relatives, as well as emails with help of his wife. He also mailed me a copy of his memoir, which tells stories about our ancestors and their high society lives. Zoltan died in January of a heart attack at age 84.By chance, I was permanently blinded in the right eye Aug. 24 in an attack by three men in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Missoula, Montana, while they were fleeing after a shoplifting spree. My eyeball was ruptured and much of the contents pushed out including the retina. An eye surgeon said it was unrepairable and pushed back in what he could including the retina and sewed the eye shut. He said I would never see with that eye and was focusing in saving the eyeball and hoping I wouldn't lose sight in the good eye from a rare condition after eye trauma called sympathetic ophthalmia in which the immune system attacks the good eye. I am writing this while recuperating in a motel where I have been since being released from the hospital. I read Zoltan's book here. I had always planned to review it, but not from the point of view of our joint blindness and bad luck.I'm no expert on consciousness. But had a layman's interest in it. Once, before a knee surgery under general anesthesia the surgeon told me, "They don't know where you go when you are under." Years later at surgery for the other knee I asked the anesthesiologist about this. He said, "We turn off the conscious parts of the brain with chemicals." How it actually works and what happens is not well understood. Zoltan Torey made a career of figuring out human consciousness. Largely self taught, after 12 years he came up with his theories in "The Crucible of Consciousness" in 1999 to acclaim and some controversy. He took a detour with his memoir in 2003 at the urging of Oliver Sacks. In 2009, the paperback of "Crucible" was published by MIT Press. Now his sequel on consciousness published in August is part of MIT Press's series on "essential knowledge" topics by leading thinkers.A slim volume, it's complex, difficult to read in parts and outlines Torey's model of what consciousness and the mind are and how they work. Zoltan's views on the topic are completely science based, with the brain the cause and mechanism for both consciousness and the mind. He makes strong scientific cases for his theories and refutes some ideas of other experts. In his view, everything in the universe comes from the Big Bang and evolution brought it along. He leaves no room for anything but a material world and debunks religion, the supernatural, God and creation. He uses science to fairly convincingly theorize that the mind and human consciousness are biology based in the brain. He says humans made the breakthrough from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens with the advent of language. Then came consciousness and the mind, both brain based. He says the physical mind is a subsystem of the brain. He says the brain acquired self awareness and the ability to think and to understand itself and the world. "Human consciousness is a neurobiological process and not an ephemeral quality as some believe." Further, Torey says free will is an illusion. The physical mind, he says, generates options but the brainstem does subconscious decision making or selection. It just feels like free will to us because it is done so fast. He further adds that what we feel as self is not a soul, spirit or other nonmaterial manifestation but "a natural byproduct of the language equipped brain's routine functioning."Zoltan doesn't stop with science but concludes that the mind's physicality "leaves no gaps for gods or for mythological narratives." It's a product of 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution, he says, with no creator. To speak of a creator, he says, is outside what can be legitimately thought. In fact, he says the universe is self created. I think my cousin should have stopped with science. My personal views are far from Zoltan's. I don't dispute the evolution or the Big Bang theories. Zoltan was raised Lutheran but apparently didn't practice it as an adult. I am Catholic and practicing. That church has no problem today with evolution or science. It says religion and science are compatible, but that there is a creator behind it all. I was disappointed in Zoltan's conclusions. What's the point of our existence if this is all there is? Then we are like advanced self-replicating robots, as a scientist once speculated to me, when I was a daily journalist, that we are, perhaps put here by advanced beings from another planet. My view is that we are on a material plane and are beings using senses. I think it makes sense that there are also nonmaterial or supernatural planes of existence and beings. Why not? Maybe thinking we are all that there is could be another illusion of our self like Zoltan claims free will is. It seems self centered to think we humans are the top of the living order because we can't see other possible realms of existence.What I want to personally take away from my cousin's books is Zoltan's perseverance under his blindness. He continued his work despite obstacles that would have stopped or slowed many. I plan to continue my writing. I have an interest in religion and spirituality and have written several unpublished essays. I plan to use Zoltan's example to continue my writing and other life despite the recent blindness in one eye and persevere. God willing. Perseverance is a strong Hungarian trait in face of centuries of obstacles for its people. Good thing for that. Zoltan and I would agree there.(Les Gapay is a retired newspaper reporter.)

Contrary to other books in these series, the current book does not review the various theories that try to explain consciousness but rather presents one unique theory. And like the other theories in this field, it fails to explain how can we build a machine (material or biological) that is conscious. We still have no clue what consciousness is and how it works.

This is a short book written by (unfortunately the recently deceased) clinical psychologist Z. Torey. It is less then 200 pages - fewer than 160 pages of text with the rest taken up by glossary, notes, further readings and references.Torey has an interesting writing style, quite dense and full of technical jargon, that takes some getting use to. He does explain each instance of jargon so that the non-technical reader can follow - with some dedicated effort. In the end I was happy to have purchased it.Having had a longstanding interest in the nature of consciousness, this summary of Torey's particular slant on the evolution of the mind and his theory of how it develops and works in each individual was exactly what I was hoping for. It is not many authors who take the long and all encompassing view that he does. His metaphor that neuroplastic modification in the infant brain is the effector organ (or motor-arm) of language, complete with proprioceptors that effectively feed this data back to be treated in the same way as other purely sensory inputs is inspired, and represents a novel way of looking at the mind. His theory that the highest level of consciousness results from the oscillation of non-reflex language-related neural processing and feedback from utilizing this processing is both interesting and thought provoking.At the same time he unfortunately states and restates his unsubstantiated position that only Homo sapiens can have evolved this mechanism, and that all other species therefore cannot have consciousness. For me this position strains credibility and Torey seems to have completely ignored recent evidence to the contrary. Furthermore his assertion that we posses free will, or at least his version of "free won't", is presented in as argument that does not hold water on close inspection. ("Free won't" is a theory in which the conscious mind somehow magically intercepts the unconscious chain of processes that leads up to our conscious decisions - in the final few hundred milliseconds.)In spite of these few drawbacks Torey delivers a cogent and reasonably compelling summary of how the mind evolved and how it is established in the first year or so after birth in each one of us. Worth the read.

A Little Bit of humility regarding the Limits of the authors intellect would have been helpful.

Cet ouvrage apporte une analyse intéressante sur l’évolution et le fonctionnement des circuits neuraux du langage humain et leurs rôles dans la conscience réflexive. Il manque cependant à mon goût de cas cliniques et d’appuis scientifiques.

Did what I wanted. Might not have agreed with Torey but he covered some interesting ground and raised some interesting questions. And not a difficult read either.