Customer Reviews

Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative)

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3 star:		(1)
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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.

Humphrey has written a very nice little book. Although the bulk of the book consists of a condensation of his earlier ideas (more extensively discussed in A History of the Mind, among other books and papers), his aproach is incredibly interesting and sensible. Humphrey takes the bull by the horns, so to speak, and starts right out declaring his book is about qualia itself (red qualia), that most elusive philosophical concept at the heart of the consciousness studies debate.

He takes a dual approach, first laying out a pseudorepresentationalist naturlistic theory of sensation, and then proposing an evolutionary history to account for its existence. The first part is probably the weakest part of the book. Humphreys idea that there very likely exists a deep functional/biological basis for perception and sensation must be right at some level, but its not clear how this accounts for the representational aspects of sensation. Humphrey proposes that sensations are representing (virtually) what once was a bodily reaction to a stimulus, and this seems also to be right at some level, but again, just because sensation and actions have some properties in common (even intentionallity), it is not clear how this makes sensations any more amenable to philosophical explanation. At times, Humphrey seems to drift from representationalism to higher order thought theories of sensations, when he decleares that to see red "the subject gets to have a red sensation,s, then gets to feel his having of this red sensation p(s)". What exactly is, in phenomenological terms, the difference from having a red sensation (redding, if you will) and to get to feel the redding itself? if "feel" seems to allready imply sensation, then I do not really think it does any explanatory or causal work. This is not to say that his analysis is helpful. It certainly accounts elegantly for blindsight and other phenomena. But at the end of the first couple of chapters, one is left with what feels like an incomplete theory of sensation, in philosophical terms.

But then comes the good stuff. Humphreys theory of the evolutionary roots of sensations is one of the most elegant out there. How bodily reactions became internalized, and then played in internal neural loops, is hard to answer indeed, but theoretically, it sounds like a plausible theory. Humphrey also proposes a totally novel function for consicousness (no small feat). Consciousness, according to Humphrey, makes things matter to the subject. This is why blindsighted individuals with no visual sensations do not care for their visual abilities. Without visual consicousness, vision does not matter as much. It is easy to see how conciousness would have survival value. Conscious organisms would work harder in doing things if they are conscious. The problem would be to explain why mattering would be so essential in evolutionary success. Evidently, amoebas, not likely consious, are evolutionary succesfull, without anything mattering to them at all, so mattering cannot be essential to the evolutionary origins of sensation. When did mattering enter the picture? at the same time conscious sensations did, or latter? if the latter, then consciousness existed befor it had that function, which would raise the qustion of why it developed that function at all. It seems like if consiousness has a function, it evolved to serve it, and not the otherway arround. Still, it must be right that in humans, consicousness makes things matter. But it is not clear how this function could be implemented in low level organisms that might have sensations.

Other discussions in the book, like the spirited section on the "thick present" of consiousness, also raise some intersting questions. Overall, I think Humphreys book shows that by defining concepts, and some clever theorizing, a simple idea can go a long way into explaining big phenomena, such as sensation and qualia. At the end of the book, one feels like progress has been done, but it is difficult to point out exactly how much and where. The strenghts in Humphreys work are his evolutionary theories of the origin of sensation, and the elegant way these lead to speculation on the functions and neural bases of consiousness. But the philosophical parts are sketchy at best. Humphrey himself admits to not having much philosophical support (apart, it seems, from Dennett), and this might be fatal, as it seems more and more that explaining qualia will have more to do with philosophers than with scientists (unfortunately). However, this book is an important contribution to the debate.

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.

Seeing Red is a truly spectacular book - the format is creative and the scope is ambititous yet not esoteric - Humphrey urges the reader to engage with him in an epoché of sorts and simulates a Harvard lecture written in a conversational style and clever graphics. The author successfuly translates his professorial élan into the book and the reader feels invited into the discussion. It is a genuine effort to fuse neuroscience, art, philosophy and literature to come up with a transparent theory of consciousness - no mean feat! The book's potential really lies its ability to stimulate reflection about consciousness in light of recent evidence and ancient conjecture delivered seamlessly.

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.

Indeed, sensation lends a hereness, a nowness, a me-ness to the experience of the present moment, such as seeing red. It constructs our world.
In the book Nicholas Humphrey describes ''re-entrant sensation circuits'' in the brain, neural activity that loops back on itself, so as to create self-resonance. Sensory response circuits that have evolved to give a new level of mind sophistication. The creation of a thickening time of core consciousness. According to Humphrey: With these circuits, the subject is lifted out of zombiedom. Now with a self - a human being that has a life worth pursuing. Something to build a rich subjective life around.
By putting sensation on the production side of the mind rather than the reception side, we get a whole new life.
All brilliant described by Humphrey in this small, but wonderful book.

-Simon

This is one of those books that is changing how I'm sensing/perceiving the world. It is bringing me to another level of awareness of what my brain/mind does. Some of Humphrey's assertions are tentative hypotheses that still need testing, others may remain tantalizing speculations. But I believe, at the least, this book can change what you think you can do with your mind.

Where do sensation and perception diverge? Is perception based on sensation, or the other way around? Or are they both independently based on some primitive facility that lurks deep within the brain? How could consciousness possibly evolve separate to perception? What's the function of consciousness? What's its evolutionary role?

This is an amazing topic, and I find this book does a good job of surveying basic issues as well as laying out the author's particular position, though it seems that his argument sometimes fails to flow.

Ultimately, I like Humphrey's view of consciousness, with one little qualification: to describe human consciousness as a re-entrant circuit is reasonable, but that description does not explain the capacity of matter to observe in the first place. This little nitpick is what makes me a philosophical idealist rather than a philosophical materialist, but hey: it's not my book.

The book, even for its small size, has its excesses. His decision to start the book by deconstructing a statement about the state of our understanding of consciousness was a waste of ink and time. Better, I think, just to hit the ground running.

I appreciate the fact that he cites some of the criticisms of his position. Understanding counter arguments is more useful than being convinced of a particular point of view.

A nicely-produced little book. Good bathroom meditation book. If it'd only been proofread (I ran into a couple glaring typos).

Humphrey thoroughly examines his view of personal consciousness from a neurological point of view.
Quite technical in many respects, drawing upon his experience and experiments over many years. But quite readable, building up a good case for his view.

I found this book reminiscent of Scarry's The Body In Pain. It addresses the subjective sensation of seeing, and our attachment/involvement as subjects of the sensation.

An interesting and potentially fruitful way to think about it.

Well written, and overall a fun, provocative read. In addition, the book is very well designed -- it really pulls you in.

I only give it four stars since as a set of lectures, its argument is quick rather than thorough.

He also does overreach at the end of the book, although he admits that he's is overreaching