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

Merlin Donald
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

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Book Description

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

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A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness + Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition + The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain
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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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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

Product Details

  • Paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (June 17, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0393323196
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393323191
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8.1 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: #777,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
75 of 80 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A sparkling and erudite defense of consciousness July 7, 2001
Format: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....

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. Read more ›

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33 of 35 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Corticocentrism Reconsidered November 6, 2001
Format: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....

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. Read more ›

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41 of 47 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting ideas flawed by sloppy writing March 19, 2002
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Consciousness from genetic thru cultural evolution August 7, 2002
Format:Hardcover
As a concerned reader I will explain, briefly, what I took from the book, and not critique the negatives. One strength seems to be a multidisciplinary approach. Merlin Donald is a research psychologist and makes an effort to draw from Psychological, Cognative, Neurological, and Evolutionary sciences; as well as literature.

Points: the shift of evolutionary importance from genetic to cultural in the hominid line; recognition of a fourth layer in human mental evolution, that of cultural memory (which he calls "external" memory in his fourth or Theoretic layer); and consideration of the whole of human consciousness.

Donald has expanded on his "Origins of the Human Mind" ('93) with exploring how culture has outstripped genetics in co-evolution with supporting the emergence of Homo Erectus, and then structuring the extended consciousness and symbol manipulation of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

He postulated a fourth Theoretic layer (after Episotic, Mimetic, and Mythic layers) as an "external symbolic universe", or recorded symbols, or "external memory". But before recorded symbols, the past was only recovered by recall, by both speaker and, often, the listener. Recall must be distinguished from memory (as recorded symbols), for recall of past events or thoughts or moods must be incomplete and personal, whereas using recorded symbols is about interpretation, which is as complete as the writer and reader choose to make it, and is social. If people insist in using 'memory' for 'recall', then recorded symbols should be called 'cultural memory', but it is critically different.

Donald attempts an evolutionary analysis of the integrated, whole of consciousness. Since I am more interested in the human emotional (value) systems than in consciousness, I have one critical comment.... Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars An important corrective
In this book, Donald approaches the philosophy of mind from a slightly different dynamic systems perspective than is traditionally taken - it's more of a "minds in society" dynamic... Read more
Published on November 14, 2010 by Ideophile
4.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking and informative
I found this book to be well written. The argument was tightly constructed and the content most interesting Donald challenges the notion of the autonomy of the non-symbolic search... Read more
Published on January 7, 2009 by Annie
5.0 out of 5 stars executive consciousness
Like Donald, Dennet, and others, I too have no idea how sentences come forth from what must be a tangle where memories, cultural conventions, and sensations converge. Read more
Published on March 19, 2008 by H. Toliver
2.0 out of 5 stars Damage control for constructivists, connectoplasm
This is a strange book, and I couldn't figure out why until about page 225. Donald starts out even on page one lumping a collection of psychologists into a group, and then... Read more
Published on January 5, 2007 by Herbert V. Leighton
1.0 out of 5 stars apples and oranges
first: I haven't finished reading the book and am not sure I will
second: Donald readily acknowledges that there are multiple meanings to the word consciousness, he then takes... Read more
Published on December 4, 2005 by K. Victor Volle
5.0 out of 5 stars A turning point that deserves to become a classic.
This book is so good and so important, rich in ideas as solid in all its construction one just cannot believe that nobody nominated it to a book award; meanwhile all the attention... Read more
Published on July 10, 2005 by Rodrigo Negrete Prieto
4.0 out of 5 stars A Game of Words
Donald's A MIND SO RARE was an enjoyable read. It is probably the only book that I enjoyed reading, while disagreeing with almost all the conclusions that the author has... Read more
Published on January 30, 2004 by Michael M. Halassa
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book, confused sometimes.
This is a book about consciousness, but Donald concentrates on extended human consciousness. His approach is functional and psychological, not neurobiological, but he uses... Read more
Published on July 28, 2002 by Carlos Camara
4.0 out of 5 stars A mind so limitless
What is human conscience? How did it develop? What is language? In what part of evolution did language first exist? Read more
Published on January 18, 2002 by Gunnar Odhner
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