Rama Rao 2008-08-29

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

The author starts his book with a pessimistic quotation from psychologist Stuart Sutherland, "Nothing worth reading has been written about it" (consciousness). At the end of chapter 3, the author makes a rather optimistic conclusion that "So, I do believe we are closing in on what consciousness is and what it's for, I admit...... But we are on our way" (to understand consciousness.) After reading this book in its entirety, the reader is unable to share this author's optimism.

The author attempts to relate sensation to subjective qualia, and consciousness. What is creating the sensation and what makes this to be the subject of it? Could it be consciousness or selfhood? Francis Crick and Christof Koch believe the most difficult problem is the qualia; the redness of red, painfulness of pain, etc. The author believes that neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) may be the causal factor because the experience of sensation is a result of neuronal activity. The other factor could be the functional correlates of sensation (FCC).

Wherever there is a subjective experience, there has to be a subject. Because pain, mood, wish can not exist without a bearer, and the person has to be there first before the subjective experience. Sensation consists of; ownership that belongs to the subject, body location (particular part of the body), present-ness (being at present), qualitative modality (visual, facial, hearing, etc.) and phenomenal immediacy (happening to me instead of somebody else, happening at the moment than another moment). The author surmises that the evolution of sensation, feeling, and perception starting with primitive amoeba and ending up with human beings is as follows: It appears that during evolution the sensory activity gets privatized. The command signals for every sensory response get short circuited before they reach the body surface. So that instead of reaching all the way out to peripheral site of stimulation (as in amoeba), they now reach only to points more and more central on the incoming sensory pathways, until eventually the whole processes becomes closed off from the outside world in an internal loop within the brain (as in humans.)

The book is very brief and it is based on guest lectures delivered at Harvard in spring 2004. Some paragraphs have been repeated verbatim; for example, third paragraphs of pages 94 and 121 are almost the same. It would have been easier for the reader, if the last paragraph of each chapter or the last chapter of the book had summarized the author's point.

1. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
2. The Brain: A Very Short Introduction
3. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
4. Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution
5. Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness: Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience
6. Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind
7. A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers
8. Consciousness: An Introduction
9. A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination

Peter McCluskey 2008-03-11

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

This book provides a clear and simple description of phenomena that are often described as qualia, and a good guess about how and why they might have evolved as convenient ways for one part of a brain to get useful information from other parts. It uses examples of blindsight to clarify the difference between using sensory input and being aware of that input.
I liked the description of consciousness as being "temporally thick" rather than being about an instantaneous "now", suggesting that it includes pieces of short-term memory and possibly predictions about the next few seconds.
The book won't stop people from claiming that there's still something mysterious about qualia, but it will make it hard for them to claim that they have a well-posed question that hasn't been answered. It avoids most debates over meanings of words by usually sticking to simpler and less controversial words than qualia, and only using the word consciousness in ways that are relatively uncontroversial.
The book is short and readable, yet the important parts of it are concise enough that it could be adequately expressed in a shorter essay.

Ruggero Rapparini 2007-07-29

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

The book is written in a page-turner style due to the very understandable (not popularized, fully rigorous) description of qualia and their role in the context of cognitive sciences. Being myself not a specialist in the field (I am a physicist) I refrained from giving a five-star rating but I would certainly recommend the book for both beginning and advanced researchers in the field of AI.

Debbie Gioia 2007-06-27

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Everything was terrific - book arrived in a timely way, well-packaged and in great condition

Dr. Richard G. Petty 2007-06-06

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

Though I will read a book of any length, I must admit to a fondness for short ones. Particularly if they are bursting with ideas that make me stop and think on virtually every page. This book clearly falls into that category.

Seeing Red is based on a series of lectures at Harvard University, and, as with all his other books, it is written in a simple and direct style.

Humphrey begins by asking his audience to look at an expanse of red. If it is convenient, you might want to take a moment away from reading this to join in with the experiment. Simply look at something red for a moment.

Then comes the first question: What does it mean to see red? We can measure the light and the mixture of wavelengths, but actually seeing red is a subjective experience. So this first and apparently simple question brings us straight to the heart of the great mystery: consciousness itself. Despite millennia of philosophies, experimentation and now the advent of sophisticated methods for peering into the brain of conscious individual, we are still face with the "hard problem:" how do three pounds of physical matter with the consistency of thick oatmeal, give rise to self-awareness, the works of Mozart and Shakespeare, and the insights of Einstein and the Dalai Lama?

Seeing Red is a synthesis and summing up of much of Nick's earlier work, much of which is provocative and controversial, but also brilliant and insightful.

The high school theory of vision, still being taught today, is that first we receive photons that strike the rods and cones in the retina, which in turn generate visual sensations. We then use those sensations to perceive objects in the external world.

From the outset, Nick tells us that this is completely wrong. Instead he claims that sensation and perception are independent mental processes that occur in parallel instead of in a series or sequence of events. He goes on to say that sensation and perception originally evolved for different functions.

Part of his reasoning is derived from the strange and intriguing phenomenon of blindsight. There are people who have sustained damage to the visual cortex and are unable to see anything in part of their visual field, yet they can still make visual discriminations. This implies that they seem to have perception without sensation.

This leads to the next question: if conscious sensations are independent of perception why do we need them at all? The heart of the theory outlined in this book is that when we see the color red, it is not a process of passively receiving impressions or of building up internal images. It is an active participatory process that he calls redding.

Why this is so different from the standard model is that it means that sensation is an active productive activity of the brain, rather than passive reception. This idea has been discussed in psychology and neuroscience for several years, but rarely as clearly as in this book.

For anyone interested in consciousness and the development of greater personal control this apparently simple conceptual shift has some unexpected and rather exciting implications.

We would predict that sensation should be susceptible to "top-down" influences: we should be able to exert voluntary control over our sensations. We already know that to be true: there is a fairly well known exercise taught in some Buddhist traditions in which students learn to experience the whole world through a single color. The model also helps us to make sense of those odd states in which sensations are altered by drugs or illnesses that generate complex images or hallucinations. If vision is an active process, it might help explain how a healer or empath might stimulate the mental states of another person.

So far so good, but now come to the part of the book that is more difficult to accept. Nick claims that we can only have an experience if there is a conscious experiencer. Yet there are countless credible reports - and personal experiences - of meditators and mystics experiencing while their minds are completely stilled. Nick theorizes that the self arises with sensations and that sensation is what makes consciousness matter.

So in this view the created self must be an illusion. But just to throw in another wrench, Humphrey suggests that the belief in a mind-body duality is not just a regrettable mistake, but is instead an adaptation that has helped individuals live longer and more productive lives. So self-deception is hardwired in our genes and our brains.

The part of the book on vision and imagination is superb, but I am skeptical about some of his comments about consciousness and the self: he ignores too much data.

That being said, this book is one of the best mental workouts that I have had in a while: it forces you to think about things that could have considerable practical consequences. And weighing in at a mere 150 small pages, I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in psychology, consciousness, the mind or meditation.