Customer Reviews

Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind

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Okay, okay, I admit it; I should never argue with Steven Haines about a book. I had first discovered the title Figments of Reality while reading another author. When I finally got the book, though, I discovered that I really couldn't get into it, but Steven Haines' review was so enthusiastic that it suggested that the book might be worth the extra effort, so I tried again. I'm glad I did; it's a wonderful book. It is however, very dense with information, and like D. C. Dennett's books, requires a lot of active participation in the learning process.

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen are a biologist and a mathematician team who have worked together to write a book on evolution; and not just biological evolution either. They discuss the origin of life, intelligence, consciousness, concepts of reality, social order, cities, and global civilization all within a 299 page volume.

Each chapter is opened with a charming quote, usually drawn from the lore of the behavioral sciences, that illustrates in capsule the content of the chapter. My favorites were the woman scientist and her chimpanzee subject, the viper with its "dead snake" pose, and the parrot whose protest over going through a boring word list made his intelligence far more apparent than reciting the list ever could.

Addressed in these chapters were some pretty heavy duty concepts. It's not that I hadn't come across them before in my reading, but that the authors' approach was novel, at least to me. Their treatment of the statistics of evolution and especially their analysis of the "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis were particularly enlightening. Until they likened it to the opening and ending moves of a chess game, with it's myriads of potential moves between beginning and end, I had not given much thought to how misleading are the cladal diagrams of evolutionary trees. They point out that the reductionist view, that looks for a core and a root to everything, is misleading because it neglects the total picture of what is going on in the environment and the emergent aspects of the interactive parts.

In the instance of the mitochondrial studies, they point out that a breeding population would probably have been at least 100,000 individuals, and the theory of 1 Eve and 99999 Adams, doesn't make much sense. As they note, it's much more likely that there were 50,000 of each gender, some of whom carried a particular stretch of DNA. Pointing out that there is a difference between the descent of a molecular sequence and the descent of a species they write, "Possibly there did exist a Mitochondrial Eve, but she is not the Mother of Us All: she represents a particular molecular sequence for mitochondrial DNA, embodied in a population of women possessing the molecule, from whom all modern mitochondrial DNA molecules descend (p. 88)."

More intriguing still was their discussion of complicity, which is a synergy among constituent parts that gives rise to unexpected results, sort of the old saw "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." They feel that this type of unpredictable interaction among complex variables is what has given rise to human consciousness and even to the group think that occurs in crowd behavior. As they write, "One of the universal features of complicity is the emergence of new patterns, new rules, new structures, new processes that were not present, even in rudimentary form, in the separate components (p. 245)." They note that a complicity between language and intelligence might have worked synergistically, in a lock step fashion, enhancing both characteristics and in combination with what they term "extelligence," the variously stored knowledge of generations of humans, may possibly have lead to consciousness and civilization.

In their comparison of cellular evolution and village/town evolution, they again appeal to a complicity among parts, in this case individuals-or more correctly among professions-that created towns from villages. As unspecialized bacteria specialized and commingled to form nucleated cells, the members of villages began to specialize and create a larger more resilient town and as that grew, cities.

The most unique concept they presented-at least not one I'd heard before-was the possible explanation for the god phenomenon. They suggest that someone, Abraham for instance, might have been impressed by the extelligence of the environment, that "something outside himself" that knew more than he did. As they write, "It is a very small step from `There is Something out there' to `There is a Being out there (P. 264).'"

Steven was right again. This is a wonderful book. It definitely gets one thinking along new channels.

How could a game with such simple rules, such as evolution by natural selection, produce such complexity? Well, chess has simple rules and we still don't know a sure-fire way to play and win every game. The idea that simple rules may interact to produce wonderful complexity-"simplexity"-is only one of the brain-bending ideas authors Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart gush forth with in this rich and entertaining popular science book. The flip side of "simplexity" is "complicity"-a game where the very act of playing the game changes the rules. Hmm...this looks like evolution again! It's a wonderful exploration of the science behind evolution cast into many different allegories and scenarios, including comical heated discussions among the eight-sexed Zarathustrans, an invention of the authors that does beautifully at reflecting our own egocentric assumptions about the nature of reality -- and the figments of reality.

--Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

Scientists advocating a thesis, whether their own or others, tend to adopt a crusader's approach. Cohen and Stewart here campaign for a new view of the evolution of human thinking. Their technique rests on the idea of recursive development of human cognitive capacity; building from simple foundations through increasing complexity. Their most innovative technique is a comparison of human outlook on nature, the cosmos and humanity with a fictitious alien culture based on eight. The Zarathustrians, who need eight members to be an "individual", can be equally rigid in their thinking, but the framework is wholly different from ours. The technique provides a compelling means of looking at our evolutionary record from a different viewpoint and allows the posing of questions we should all be asking ourselves about who we are. The technique adds entertainment to a highly original and readable book.

Arguing that humans are "in nature but not of it" the authors separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. What makes us different is our mental complexity. We can control our thoughts, make choices, impact the surrounding environment instead of merely responding to it. How did we come to be that way? The record of evolution shows that life's origins were clearly very simple. Perhaps, as they relate, a beginning as simple as some molecules "hitching a ride" on crystals as a step in learning the process of replication. From such origins, life progressed through building complexity in gradual steps, with some branches able to increase in complexity leading to such as you and i. The mechanism works in "phase space" by combining simple forms in a process they call "complicity." Complicity is Nature using existing "scaffolding" to build successful features. In short, evolution.

The flip side of this captivating book is their crusade against "reductionism." This straw man is a frequent target for those unable or unwilling to see human beings as an integral part of the animal kingdom, hence, a product of the evolutionary process. You will not find the target of their attack until you peruse the bibliography, but it becomes clear that their aim is Richard Dawkins. His "selfish gene" concept and his proposal on cultural aspects, a major element in their argument, are assaulted or ignored. How did the human mind evolve its distinct characteristics if not through genetic processes? The authors make great show of cultural continuity as an expression of human mental capacity. Yet, they fail to identify the roots of that persistence. The root was postulated by Richard Dawkins as the "meme," the mind's equivalent of genetic transmission of characteristics. Given Dawkins' concept preceded Figments by over a decade, their omission of the term is an astonishing oversight.

The great irony here is Cohen and Stewart's reliance on Daniel C. Dennett as a source for much of their thinking. One can envision that jolly, St Nicholas-like countenance hardening as he read their deviant interpretation of Dennett's thinking. Figments was published shortly after Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which effectively refutes much of Cohen and Stewart's thesis. Dennett uses "cranes," a more active instrument, instead of "scaffolding" to describe evolution's methods. Likewise, he nods favourably toward memes as the mechanism of cultural transmission, which Cohen and Stewart ignore completely. They rely on the mechanism Dennett considers a perversion of Darwinian thought, the "skyhook" to bring humans to an elevated role in the animal kingdom. Cohen and Stewart are to be commended for their innovative approach and unconstrained imaginations. Still, this highly readable and provocative book must be balanced with Dennett's more realistic analysis. Buy them both, you'll gain much insight into who you are.

A thoroughly enjoyable synthesis of many views concerning the evolution of mind, consciousness, free will etc.

Clearly written, with wit and parody where appropriate. There are dialogs which recall Goedel Escher Bach (although with perhaps fewer levels of meaning), and depth.

The authors clearly distinguish between facts and their opinions, and confess to less than absolute certainty on occasion, which is refreshing.

Highly recommended.

While there is relatively little about the brain itself in this book, the authors do consider the importance of symmetries in neural processing. Thus, a discussion of the recognition of male and female faces takes advantage of an eigenvector (or eigenface) that embodies the difference between an average him and her. (Enthusiasts of the quantum mind approach to consciousness studies should note that such ideas are the coin of modern nonlinear science, and not at all dependent upon the extrapolation of quantum theory to the macroscopic world: a point that was clearly made by Niels Bohr back in 1933.)
Unfortunatly, there is no mention of recent research by Hermann Haken and his colleagues in connection with this work, although this sort of eigenvector analysis is closely related to ideas presented in his book Principles of Brain
Functioning (1996).

A short chapter on free will is interesting but ultimately somewhat disappointing because the authors seem to be sitting on both sides of the philosophical fence. Recognizing that the assumption of free will is necessary for the orderly functioning of any culture and scornful of the inflated claims of genetic determinists, they note that theoretical reasons can be imagined for anything that occurs. To me, at least, this is as true as it is unconvincing. It is always possible to cobble together some sort of explanation of whatever transpires after the fact. Does this imply that the future is determined by the present? What might such an assertion mean? This chapter ends with the statement: ``Therefore free will is not just an illusion: it is a figment rendered real by the evolutionary complicity of mind and culture'' (p.241). Maybe I am dense, but this doesn't mean much to me. Perhaps the authors would have been wiser to omit this chapter, admitting that they do not know what free will is.
Two final chapters deal with some of the details of our many interactions with the surrounding culture, noting that a very large amount of knowledge is presently available to us all through libraries, schools, theater, television, and more recently the World Wide Web. The first of these chapters, entitled Extelligence, considers in some detail the ever increasing pool of information in which we are embedded in by our technological culture. The authors consider their notion of extelligence to be somewhat different from (say) Karl Popper's World 3, because it involves complicit interactions with individuals in a culture. This is, in my view, such an extremely important aspect of the overall subject of consciousness studies, that it deserves a book of its own. Perhaps the authors will team up with an informed and imaginative ethnologist in the not too distant future and work on such a project. The last chapter - entitled ``Simplex, Complex, Multiplex'' - describes the relationships between the organization of biological cells and human social systems. From this perspective, the village is analogous to a bacterium, whereas a town is compared to an eukaryote, and a city to a multi-celled organism. The chapter title alludes to increasingly sophisticated ways that individuals have of perceiving the intricacy of their social environments in a human culture.

Alwyn Scott
http://personal.riverusers.com/~rover/

Who said the whole Universe should be comprensible to humans? Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen explain "flowlike" that Mind is not a thing, it's a process. In order to represent the real World surrounding us, Minds are producing Figments of Reality. Modells or mappings of our objective outer world. They represent it in a coded and imperfect form, but consciousness is dynamically reshaping those maps in an ever adapting game of complexity and simplicity that change context dependent and not in a reductionistic(hierarchical- ) space-of-the-possible. Evolution is Nature's armsrace, selecting within the coevolving complexity and themfore creating higher forms of order, higer structures, new phase spaces. Nature improves itself. Creating new technologies, more flexible ones more adaptable ones, more able to co-evolve and withstand changes. It is in this phase-space -of-the-possible that senses evolved and with them the brain-mind system. You can only get intelligent if there is something about to get intelligent. So, a complicit(evolving together) evolution of senses(smell, eyes, sound,..) and mind, was needed to produce the signals and to process them, creating a loop of dynamic evolution with a constant feedback reaching continously higer degrees of complexification but also of better "mapping" of the real world. An always adapting and improving Figment of the Real World like our Conscious Brain-. These feedback loops got intelligence to new phase changes and higer degrees of sofistication. It was a special set of circunstances that triggered an Intelligence/Extelligence co-evolution. It is just these fedback loops that drive faster the race of evolution to our Cultures. They are flexible in their own way, reshaping, adapting, further evolving to higher levels of complexity and order to keep themself existing. It is this spreading out of culture-knowledge to a higer degree that closes the loop. The Universe started as simple, evolved its matter to complex systems like us, that try now to recreate it inside tiny-highly-organized masses of "that" matter into "Our Figments of Reality".

How does life arise from inanimate matter? How does consciousness arise from life? Is consciousness of the universe an illusion? Or is mind itself an illusion?

The British authors of this book are a mathematician and biologist pair who boldly tackle these classic questions in philosophy with some original approaches. Maintaining that life, consciousness, and culture cannot understood by reducing them to the material elements from which they arise, the authors deftly develop a set of interesting concepts. Some of these are not especially original, but they are presented in an unusual light particularly as the authors ably illustrate them with very accessible descriptions of complex biochemical pathways of living matter.

A key concept is that of emergence - well established in philosophy and roughly equated to the popular idea of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. The authors couple this concept with one of their own - complicity, or the interaction of different things which lead them to become entirely new things. A third, among several others, is that of extelligence which arises from the interaction of the intellegences of individuals and is rooted in human culture. Using these and other concepts, the book, which is at the nexus of science and philosophy, seeks to explain how life, consciousness, culture, and reality arise and the relationship between them.

Be prepared to wade through these pages slowly to enjoy the masterful exposition of this book. Or, if you find this tedious, enjoy the elegant prose which uses the lens of science and philosophy to describe events which we might normally frame in different language. In the four-page prologue, a graphic sequence of events unfolds which chart the creation of the universe to the emergence of the symbolic literary creatures which constitute the human species: QUOTE Fifteen thousand million years ago the universe was no bigger than the dot at the end of this sentence......today, the two descendants of those tiny creatures are busy delineating their own limited version of the entire story in strange, angular geometric symbols impressed in contrasting pigment upon sheets of impressed white vegetable matter. UNQUOTE

Having long forgotten more than half the courses I took in college, this book allowed me to relive and reinforce the pleasures of two wonderful philosophy seminars - on theories of mind and philosophy of science. Expect, if you get through the book cover to cover, to see the world a little differently from when you start at the prologue.

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen unfold the evolution of human intelligence from the beginnings of time. Their basic theory is that inorganic matter combined with carbon and became self-organizing, providing the basis for life. Over millions of years, this matter interacted with the environment and gained intelligence. Physical and intelligent matter co-evolved and eventually became human. While the book presents an intriguing, novel and reasonably well-argued scientific position about evolution, many readers may find it tough going, in that it offers exhaustive detail about the processes involved. The authors extensively discuss game theory, mathematical probability, chemistry, physics, DNA and natural selection. In addition, they include some speculative breaks - in the form of conversations about these ideas with an imaginary alien - that are hard to follow. Skip them. We at getAbstract recommend this book to scientifically inclined readers with a grounding in science, math and physical anthropology, who will relish the depth of information the authors provide.

Takes reductionist ideas about evolution and the human mind, hauls them round the back of the roadhouse and kicks them senseless -- and we cheer all the way. The antidote for anybody who thought Penrose's 'Emperor's new Mind' either pompous or unintelligible: and the foil for those among the hard-of-thinking who fail to understand how science fiction aids scientific creativity. "Figments of Reality" is like "Godel Escher Bach" for the 1990s -- faster, harder, more brutal, more thrilling, and with aliens. Frighteningly readable.

JC & IS (Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart) have written another great book on complexity and evolution. Figments of Reality is an immensely entertaining read that tests our ideas about evolution, and convincingly argues the case for the coevolution of mind and culture. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll not put it down until you've finished reading all of it.