A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness [Paperback]

Merlin Donald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2002

"The most significant contribution yet to the rapidly growing literature of minds, brains, and consciousness."—Steven Rose

In this masterful rebuttal to the prevailing neuroscientific arguments that seek to explain away consciousness, Merlin Donald presents "a sophisticated conception of a multilayered consciousness drawing much of its power from its cultural matrix" (Booklist). Donald makes "a persuasive case...for consciousness as the central player in the drama of mind" (Peter Dodwell), as he details the forces, both cultural and neuronal, that power our distinctively human modes of awareness. He proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product, interweaving a super-complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a "distributed" cognitive network. This hybrid mind, he argues, is our main evolutionary advantage, for it allowed humanity as a species to break free of the limitations of the mammalian brain. "Donald transcends the simplistic claims of Evolutionary Psychology,...offering a true Darwinian perspective on the evolution of consciousness."—Philip Lieberman

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Many scientists have denied any evolutionary significance to human consciousness, dismissing it as illusory smoke dancing above the fire of real neurochemistry. But Donald sees in consciousness the very key to understanding how humankind developed. After assaulting (with great panache) the arguments commonly deployed to remove it from the research agenda, Donald presents a natural history for consciousness, focusing particularly on its astonishing and clearly unique complexity among human beings-- Why does the human brain so closely resemble those of other primates yet so dramatically outstrip them in capacity? How does the mind endow the ego center with autonomy and a narrative autobiography? In his sophisticated conception of a multilayered consciousness drawing much of its power from its cultural matrix, Donald bids fair to reset the terms for evolutionary psychology. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

Donald transcends the simplistic claims of Evolutionary Psychology,...offering a true Darwinian perspective on the evolution of consciousness. -- Philip Lieberman

The most significant contribution yet to the rapidly growing literature of minds, brains, and consciousness. -- Steven Rose

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Paperback Edition edition (June 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393323196
• ISBN-13: 978-0393323191
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #519,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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69 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sparkling and erudite defense of consciousness, July 7, 2001

By 

Todd I. Stark "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Hardcover)

A delightful polemic with a valuable point. Donald dramatically uses the intricate demands of a face to face conversation to show the practical weaknesses in the laboratory view of short and long term memory. The laboratory evidence that working memory is very limited is overwhelming, and has fed the modern philosophical trend toward viewing conscious awareness as an illusory result of the work of unconscious agents.

But things we do in daily life clearly require us to track things much more numerous and much longer than could possibly be accomplished by "seven plus or minus two" chunks, even with clever strategies for grouping things. Donald uses this to argue that conscious processes are very real and not to be ignored, and do play a central role in human intelligence.

Donald unflinchingly takes on the likes of "hardliners" such as Dan Dennett who argue that there is no central "meaner," no self, no little person in our heads observing the stream of consciousness in a Cartesian theater. He points out that the drafts we generate in our minds are not at all arbitrary competitors for dominance, but are distinctly related to goals and expectations. Most insightfully, he argues that discounting the role of conscious processes has dire implications for social and political philosophy and how we view human responsibility for our own actions.

In my view, Donald makes the excellent point for yet poorly understood intermediate term memory mechanisms very convincingly. I was completely persuaded that this is something we need to study to understand human abilities, and that "hardliners" views have some weaknesses I hadn't considered seriously before. He does make one rhetorical twist, though, that confused and sometimes annoyed me until I figured it out. He argues convincingly that we should retain the ideas of executive processes, goals, schema, and expectations, and how they influence thinking. The mind is organized in a central and domain general way for many critical things, rather than being completly modular and the result of bottom-up processing by independent functional agents.

I bought his argument here from fairly early in this excellent book. But then he also consistently equates this kind of organization with what other people call "consciousness," without making it clear at first. So you start wondering why he is calling all sorts of things "conscious" when clearly we

don't notice them !

Most strikingly, in reviewing the research on subliminal effects, he considers them conscious, even though they are seemingly by definition, not ! That is where I discovered that he is relating conscious processes to goal direction and selective attention, not to "noticing." "Noticing" per se actually has very little to do with anyghing in this book. This was a difficult conceptual turn for me, but may be a profound idea. It preserves the idea of consciousness as the selective goal-oriented use of attention to organize the activity of the mind, but doesn't attempt to explain phenomenal awareness per se. His idea of the substrate of consciousness is a neccessary but not sufficient basis for "noticing." The emphasis here is on how we select things to focus our resources on, rather than how phenomenal experience arises. This shift of emphasis allows him to make short work of some of the paradoxical ideas of the hardliners, without trying to tackle the "hard questions" of consciousness directly.

In a way, Merlin Donald takes on the role toward the study of the human mind that Gould, Lewontin, and Rose take toward the study of human evolution. He tries valiantly to bring us back from what he sees as the brink of an awful and unwarranted reductionism. The reductionism of mind to unconscious computation, he points out, threatens the very foundation of our political and economic ideas around freedom and individual responsibility.

Remarkably enough, I think his argument often succeeds.

One of the reasons his argument succeeds is that he makes a very clear distinction between limited consciousness and non-existent consciousness, a line that gets blurred by some philosophers in the process of trying to explain subjective experience in terms of neurons.

Donald describes the difference that makes a difference, that human beings can select their own goals and adjust their own priorities because their nervous system is patterned by a symbolic web of culture to form a distributed cognitive network. Going directly against the modern trend of evolutionary psychology in explaining away awareness as an artifact of functional computational modules, the author argues that human minds do have one very important distinction from other primate minds, a unique additional capacity for consciousness that evolved from the unique conditions of human evolution. The human mind is not, he suggests, simply the result f emergent qualities of an arbitrarily complex neural network. That would be too glib an explanation, and wouldn't explain why sensory nets are aware and not motor nets.

This book seems to be a manifesto of sorts toward a new view of the mind that incorporates what we know about the self and goal-directed domain-independent behavior rather than explaining away these important aspects of human mental function.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Corticocentrism Reconsidered, November 6, 2001

By 

Edward A.Cohen, MD - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Hardcover)

In this sweeping neocortical neuroparadigm, Merlin Donald brings elan and scholarship in our hour of need.

It has become almost normative to speak of higher consciousness as modular, with each module (attention, emotion, volition and so on...) in turn, a weighted sum of parallel agents interacting in unconscious `pandemonium'. Dennett and other proponents of this view are joined by the evolutionary psychologists, who deconstruct the Purpose of human endeavor by reference to these modules, seen as vestigial survival strategies inappropriate to contemporary life, eg. the frisky male ex-hunter-gatherer dumping MDMA in the drinks of ladies who chance bearing his offspring ..well, you get it.

A picture emerges: an incontrovertibly brilliant series of contributions by `Hardliners' [philosophers, psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists] has weakened an Emperor already hostage to the `demons' of his unruly New Mind. While holists wave hands and damn the evidence, serious observers nod in depressed capitulation. Another Postmodern Truth has displaced our helmsman to the periphery.

Donald comes to the rescue, wielding formidable expertise and sharp wit. He makes an excellent case for Autonomous Man, without soft fuzzies and without cliche. And he vigorously and cogently propounds a top-down viewpoint.
Cortical Size does count, and human consciousness is active, not a passive construction of the "real stuff" from lower hierarchical levels.

With the unitary perspective that single authorship confers, this kind of coherent articulation stands as a monument to plausible theorizing. Much what Lee Smolin's 'Life of the Cosmos' did for cosmology, 'A Mind So Rare' does for neuropsychology. Maybe Smolin's Universe and Donald's three-pound universe are connected after all.

The book is neither casual in popularization nor dense in neurobabble . Nearly every page discloses smaller and larger insights which make the reader wonder "why, despite a lesser IQ, didn't I think of that? "

Drawbacks? Not when one takes this book on its own terms, but there are some omissions. The big one (two) is Emotion and Value. Donald, effectively flogging the philosophers, needs to conciliate some scientists, eg. Douglas Watt, who just as effectively dethrones the cerebral cortex as Donald enthrones it (see the journal Consciousness & Emotion).

It's thus no surprise that Donald mentions little of the extended limbic system or lower brain centers which undergird crucial emotional and evaluative parameters. But such differences are essentially those of emphasis. One can appreciate the Hardliners and still retain perspective.

Doubts may arise as to testability. Quantum consciousness surely has no slam-dunk model, yet Stuart Hameroff has attended to such concerns. Yet even someone as articulate as Donald can't know everything about everything. It's enough that he effectively (and uniquely) spans the yawning chasm between neural circuitry and cognitive psychology, and does so without making us yawn.

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting ideas flawed by sloppy writing, March 19, 2002

By 

John Anderson (Bar Harbor, ME USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Hardcover)

I wish that I could jump on the bandwagon of approval that this book seems to be getting, but I am afraid that I can't. I picked A MIND SO RARE for a graduate seminar, largely because of the glowing reviews that it had received here & in some technical journals, but the more I read of it the more irritated I became with Donald's habit of sticking in little jeers & snide asides about his opponents, and his tendency to create straw men for any argument with which he disagrees. Having assigned the book I did my best to keep the conversation going, but to be honest it bombed with the students. Most felt that he could have summarized his "new ideas" in many fewer pages & that the elaborations served to confuse more than to enlighten. It was also hard to follow just whom he was citing or why he chose to leave some theorists out & put others in -this particularly annoying at the graduate level! All in all this is a pity, because some of Donald's ideas suggest interesting alternatives to much of the popularly stated positions in this field, but he would have done us all a much greater service by clearly expounding his points & avoiding the unproductive carping about his (often un-named) opponents.