Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness [Hardcover]

Dr. Gerald Edelman Ph.D. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2004

How does the firing of neurons give rise to subjective sensations, thoughts, and emotions? How can the disparate domains of mind and body be reconciled? The quest for a scientifically based understanding of consciousness has attracted study and speculation across the ages. In this direct and non-technical discussion of consciousness, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman draws on a lifetime of scientific inquiry into the workings of the brain to formulate answers to the mind-body questions that intrigue every thinking person. Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains. Edelman explores the relation of consciousness to causation, to evolution, to the development of the self, and to the origins of feelings, learning, and memory. His analysis of the brain activities underlying consciousness is based upon recent remarkable advances in biochemistry, immunology, medical imaging, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, yet the implications of his book extend farther--beyond the worlds of science and medicine into virtually every area of human inquiry.

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

When he was still a student, Richard Feynman hinted at a career to come as a scientific wonderer when he wrote: "I wonder why. I wonder why. / I wonder why I wonder / I wonder why I wonder why / I wonder why I wonder!" Such wondering, and meta-wondering, takes us to the heart of what geneticist-cum-neuroscientist Francis Crick (who would know) calls "the major unsolved problem in biology"--explaining how billions of neurons swapping chemicals give rise to such subjective experiences as consciousness, self-awareness, and awareness that others are conscious and self-aware. The body of literature attempting to solve this problem is extensive, and getting one's mind around the field is a herculean task successfully executed by psychologist Susan Blackmore in her delightful introduction, Consciousness. Presented as a textbook, it is so highly engaging that I recommend it for general readers, too. In many ways, the book is structured like a brain, with loads of independent modules (boxes and sidebars featuring profiles, concepts and activities) tied together by a flowing narrative and integrated into a conceptual whole. The easy problem, Blackmore says, is explaining each of the functional parts of the brain, such as "the discrimination of stimuli, focusing of attention, accessing and reporting mental states, deliberate control of behavior, or differences between waking and sleep." In contrast, the hard problem in consciousness studies "is experience: what it is like to be an organism, or to be in a given mental state." Adding up all of the solved easy problems does not equal a solution to the hard problem. Something else is going on in private subjective experiences--called qualia--and there is no consensus on what it is. Dualists hold that qualia are separate from physical objects in the world and that mind is more than brain. Materialists contend that qualia are ultimately explicable through the activities of neurons and that mind and brain are one. Blackmore, uniquely qualified to assess all comers (she sports multihued hair, is a devotee of meditation, and studies altered states of consciousness), allows the myriad theorists to make their case (including her own meme-centered theory) so that you can be the judge. Making a strong case for the materialist position is Gerald M. Edelman's latest contribution, Wider Than the Sky, offered as a "concise and understandable" explanation of consciousness "to the general reader." Concise it is, but as for understandable, Edelman understates: "It will certainly require a concentrated effort on the part of the reader." As director of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., a Nobel laureate and author of several books on consciousness (Neural Darwinism, The Remembered Present and Bright Air, Brilliant Fire), Edelman has impeccable credentials. But science writing for a general audience involves more than expunging scholarly references and providing a glossary of technical terms as a substitute for clear exposition. To wit, on memory Edelman writes that "it is more fruitfully looked on as a property of degenerate nonlinear interactions in a multidimensional network of neuronal groups." Such prose is common throughout the book, which is a shame because Edelman is a luminously entertaining conversationalist, and his theory that the brain develops in a Darwinian fashion of neuronal variation and selection, and that consciousness is an emergent property of increasingly complex and integrated neuronal groups, has considerable support from neuroscience research. An ideal combination of exquisite prose and rigorous science can be found in California Institute of Technology neuroscientist Christof Koch's The Quest for Consciousness. A rock climber adorned with a tattoo of the Apple Computer logo on his arm, Koch takes an unabashed neurobiological approach, the natural extension of what his longtime collaborator Francis Crick started in 1994 when he wrote in The Astonishing Hypothesis "that 'you,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." To me, the most astonishing aspect of this theory is that it is astonishing to anyone. Where else could the mind be but in the brain? Nevertheless, finding the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) has proved elusive, so instead of concocting a grand unified theory, Koch and Crick undertook a very specific research program focusing on the visual system, to understand precisely how photons of light striking your retina become fully integrated visual experiences. Koch and his colleagues, for example, discovered a single neuron that fires only when the subject sees an image of President Bill Clinton. If this neuron died, would Clinton be impeached from the brain? No, because the visual representation of Clinton is distributed throughout several areas of the brain, in a hierarchical fashion, eventually branching down to this single neuron. The visual coding of any face involves several groups of neurons--one to identify the face, another to read its expression, a third to track its motion, and so on. This hierarchy of data processing allows the brain to economize neural activity through the use of combinatorics: "Assume that two face neurons responded either not at all or by firing vigorously. Between them, they could represent four faces (one face is encoded by both cells not firing, the second one by firing activity in one and silence in the other, and so on). Ten neurons could encode 210, or about a thousand faces.... It has been calculated that less than one hundred neurons are sufficient to distinguish one out of thousands of faces in a robust manner. Considering that there are around 100,000 cells below a square millimeter of cortex, the potential representational capacity of any one cortical region is enormous." Given that the brain has about 100 billion neurons, consciousness is most likely an emergent property of these hierarchical and combinatoric neuronal connections. How, precisely, the NCC produce qualia remains to be explained, but Koch's scientific approach, in my opinion, is the only one that will solve the hard problem.

Michael Shermer writes the Skeptic column for Scientific American and is publisher of Skeptic and author of The Science of Good and Evil (Henry Holt and Company, 2004).

From The New England Journal of Medicine

"Consciousness is the guarantor of all we hold to be human and precious. Its permanent loss is considered equivalent to death, even if the body persists in its vital signs." It is with this allusion to the permanent vegetative state that Gerald Edelman opens his latest book, Wider Than the Sky. Edelman aims to answer the question of how the firing of our neurons gives rise to conscious, subjective experiences -- or, as philosophers call it, "qualia." He hopes "to disenthrall those who believe the subject is exclusively metaphysical or necessarily mysterious." The title of the book comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson: "The Brain -- is wider than the Sky -- / For -- put them side by side -- / The one the other will contain" (circa 1862). Having laid the groundwork in his critically acclaimed books Neural Darwinism (1987), Topobiology (1988), Remembered Present (1990), Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), and A Universe of Consciousness (2000, written with Giulio Tononi), Edelman here elegantly summarizes his thinking on consciousness. This is, as he calls it himself, a small book, but reading it requires a concentrated effort. Edelman sees his work as a completion of Charles Darwin's in the sense that he views consciousness as a product of evolution, and he cites the idea from Darwin's notebook (1838) that "he who understands baboon will do more toward metaphysics than Locke." Edelman emphasizes that a brain-based explanation of consciousness cannot and need not offer an "explanation that replicates or creates any particular conscious experience," in the same way that a theory that explains how a hurricane arises cannot create the experience of a hurricane or even get one wet "by description." For Edelman, a biologic theory of consciousness must rest on a global theory of the brain (a reference to Bernard Baars's Global Workspace Theory) and must strictly obey the principles of physics: "no spooky forces that contravene thermodynamics." He makes the distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness. Primary consciousness relates to being mentally aware of a scene, in what Edelman has coined the "remembered present" (a reference to William James's "specious present"). This could be compared to the form of consciousness associated with rapid-eye-movement sleep. Primary consciousness would have evolved as our species did (it remains unclear when), because it increased the chances of survival. According to Edelman, animals with primary consciousness experience qualia but are not conscious of being conscious. Only humans and, "to some minimal degree," higher primates would have a higher-order consciousness that permits them to have a social concept of the self and concepts of the past and the future. Higher consciousness in its most developed form, Edelman thinks, requires the acquisition of language. Edelman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 for his studies on the structure and diversity of antibodies (which established that the immune system works according to Darwinian principles), once again applies the theory of natural selection to his own theory of neuronal group selection, which he first proposed in 1978. Key to this hypothesis is the proposal that "reentry" is a central organizing principle that governs the functioning of our brains: the dynamic recursive signaling ("reentry") within the thalamocortical system (the "dynamic core") would give rise to our conscious perceptions. These core states change within hundreds of milliseconds as different circuits are activated by stimuli within our environment, our bodies, and our brains. Only some of these states are stable and thus become integrated, giving rise to the unitary property of consciousness. Similarly, memory is considered nonrepresentational and necessarily associative as a result of the interactions among massively degenerate networks. Edelman thinks that computer or machine models of consciousness will not work and that much of cognitive psychology is ill founded, since there are no functional states that can be uniquely equated with defined or coded computational states in individual brains and no processes that can be equated with the execution of algorithms. "A genuine glimpse into what consciousness is would be the scientific achievement, before which all past achievements would pale. But at present, psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo," wrote William James in 1899. Edelman's hypotheses, even if they are still far from solving all of the detailed mechanistic problems related to the local operations of networks in the brain, give us such a glimpse. Together with the writings of other pioneers such as Francis Crick, this book has the great merit of offering testable hypotheses to the ever-increasing number of "consciousnologists." Steven Laureys, M.D., Ph.D.
Copyright © 2005 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1ST edition (March 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300102291
• ISBN-13: 978-0300102291
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,133,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best neurobiologic construct of consciousness out there, April 9, 2004

By 

Michael M. Halassa "mhalassa" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (Hardcover)

In this new book, Gerald Edelman continues his intellectual saga regarding the scientific study of consciousness. Both the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) and the Dynamic Core Hypothesis have been introduced in earlier books (Surprizingly, with alot more mathematical detail), but never had they been described with clarity and vividness as they were in this book. Examples, that the general reader can relate to, are given throughout the whole book.

Chapter One (The Mind of Man: Completing Darwin's Program) is an assertion by Dr. Edelman that any theory of consciousness should account for the phenomenon to have arisen in evolution by Natural Selection.

Chapter Two (Consciousness: The Remembered Present). This is a chapter in which Dr. Edelman talks about some properties of consciousness in light of William James' earlier descriptions. He ascribes privacy, differntiation and intergration to consciousness and stresses the fact that consciousness is a process not a "thing". For instance, on page 6 he says:
"... there are accounts that attribute conscoiuness specifically to nerve cells (or consciouness neurons) or to particular layers of the cortical mantle of the brain. The evidence, as we shall see, reaveals that the process of consciousness is a dynamic accomplishment of the distributed activities of population of neurons in many different areas of the brain."

Chapter Three (Elements of the Brain) is where Dr. Edelman briefly goes over the structural elements of the brain, describing neurons and their chemical and electrical based signaling systems along with diagrams. He also describes the next hierarchial system of networks and highlights three major neuroanatomical systems that are important for his Global theory of consciousness. Those are the thalamocortical system, cortical/subcortical polysynaptic loop systems (e.g. basal ganglia), and the ascending value system arising from nuclei in the brainstem. It is worth noting that this structural organization is in good agreement with Bernard Baar's Global Workspace model. Another point worth mentioning in this chapter is Edelman's view of synaptic plasticity in relation to memory. on page 21 he says, "Studies of the neural properties of the hippocampus provide important examples of some of the synaptic mechanisms underlying memory. One such mechanism, which should NOT be equated with memory itself, is the change in the strength, or efficacy, of hippocampal synapses that occur with certain patterns of neural stimuation."

Chapter Four (Neural Darwinism: A Global Brain Theory) is a superb chapter. Although, conceptually, TNGS has already been built in earlier books and publications, but it is now vividly described. Dr. Edelman highlight major differences between the working of the brain as a selectional biological systems and that of a Turing Machine. He discusses noise in biological systems, degeneracy, and reentrancy. Degeneracy in relation to Reentrant circuits is finally illustrated in a diagram.

Chapter Five (The Mechanism of Consciousness) is where Dr. Edleman talks about non-representational memory of biological systems (a difficult concept made simple). He also describes the emergence of primary consciousness On page 57 as " The ability to create a scene by such reentrant correlations between value-category memory--reflecting earlier categorizations--and similar or different perceptual categories is the basisfor the emergence of primary consciousness."

Chapter Six (Wider than the Sky: Qualia, Unity, and Complexity) discusses the aformetioned issues along with concepts like information exchange accross brain areas stressing the role of consciousess in them.

Chapter Seven (Conscoiusness and Causation: The Phenomenal Transform) discusses the place of consciousness in the physical world. Dr. Edelman introduces C and C' notions, and explains the logical impossibility of zombies (introduced by David Chalmers).

Chapter Eight (The conscious and the Nonconscious: Automaticity and Attention) discusses the role of consciousness in behavior, and the evolutionary advantage of having a conscious system over automatic (zombie) systems. Dr Edelman also discusses the role of basal ganglia in mechanisms of attention (which are strongly associated with conscious thought).

Chapter Nine (Higher-Order Consciousness and Representation) discusses the role of symbolic/semantic thought in the emergence of higher order consciousness. It also talks about the semantic problems with ascribing representation to neural states that could be observed from a third person perpective, and provides evidence that the neural correlates of consciousness (for a laboratory task at least) are distinct in different people.

Chapter Ten (Theory And Properties Of Consciousness) puts it all together. A superb chapter describing General, Information, and Subjective featres of conscious states in light of all the arguments made earlier. It is the intellectual climax of the book.

Chapter Eleven (Identity: The self, Mortality, And Value) and Chapter Twelve (MInd and Body: Some consequence) describe some scientific and philosopical consequences to the neurobiologic framework of consciousness the book makes. There are some really interesting thoughts regarding value and law.

Overall, this is a great book. The scientific american book review (which is shown on the book description page) is, in my opinion, very poor. If this book was made longer, discussed the ideas more, and showed more experimental evidence (and maybe more math in the Appendix), it would arguably be the best book on consciousness ever written.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Taste of Brilliance, Then A Let Down, March 9, 2007

By 

James Gerofsky "quietman" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (Paperback)

I was disappointed by this book. I have read a number of recent works on consciousness, and in them I've seen quite a few positive references to bioscientist Gerald Edelman. Philosopher John Searle, who some regard as the "dean" of the consciousness debate, says that Edelman may understand the physical and functional workings of the human brain better than anyone else (see Searle's The Mystery of Consciousness). Edelman's work regarding the brain's ability to set up ad-hoc looping circuits between the many "maps" within it (i.e., small segments that specialize in a particular task, e.g. the area that identifies colors from visual inputs) is very powerful. It addresses many important questions, such as how we experience things in a unified manner when many different areas of our brain separately process the elements and sub-elements of sight, sound, smell and touch.

Thus, I had hoped that Wider Than the Sky would be Edelman's attempt to unfold his powerful insights regarding brain-mind dynamics before the reasonably educated masses. Unfortunately, Dr. Edelman chose to zip through his important ideas so as to dish out a warmed-over version of philosopher Daniel Dennett's functional materialism. This book should be compared with Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works. Pinker wrote a long book that eventually did what it promised, despite breezy asides about Queen Elizabeth, Lilly Tomlin, Leonard Nimoy and the like. Pinker ultimately stuck to analyzing the processes by which the human brain forwards the interests of the body to which it is attached, within a changing and challenging environment. Pinker remained agnostic to the ultimate question of what consciousness is and what its nature might be. I myself would have preferred it if Edelman had stuck to that script.

Edelman does indeed give the reader a taste of some important concepts regarding the dynamics of the brain. These would include: re-entrant neuron looping between processing areas; neural group selection (or day-to-day Darwinism, the on-going shaping of the "plastic" brain); degeneracy (i.e. the ability to quickly change the looping circuits in a way that responds to new stimuli, but doesn't immediately drop the thought or perception that you were attending to); and "value systems" (a spaghetti-like network of connections originating under the cortex, which in effect spray the brain with mood and mind-altering chemicals such as serotonin and ACH at the right times, helping the body to enforce its basic agenda of survival, reproduction and probably other "higher-order" agenda derived from learning experience). But Edelman doesn't take the time to develop these fascinating ideas with needed examples and analogies, so as to help the lay reader to appreciate what he and his team have discovered regarding brain processes. He's like those "I'm only going to say this once" professors that you try to forget once the semester is over.

Instead of explaining his research, Dr. Edelman leads us up the metaphysical mountain of consciousness, where we sit at his feet as he purifies us of any superstitious, dualistic notions regarding who we are and what it's like to be human. He tells us that consciousness, as we "folk" think of it, is ultimately just a side-effect of material interactions. He explains that qualia is really a function, i.e. the brain's ability to discriminate different portions of a mental image. And he fails to acknowledge those who had put forth similar ideas in the past. It's a shame; Edelman rushes through the really innovative research that he is doing, to dwell on a set of ideas that you could get the hang of in an hour or two from one of those Totem / Icon "comic books" (i.e., Introducing Consciousness by D. Papineau and H. Selina).

Edelman takes some other interesting positions, but fails to alert the reader as to their speculative and controversial nature (I mean, isn't that what footnotes are for?). Regarding emotions and feelings, he gives them minimal consideration, passing them off as a side-effect of value system operations (those mind chemicals, remember?). By contrast, some mind analysts such as Antonio Damasio and Susan Greenfield give emotions top-billing. Edelman dismisses the notion advanced by Jerry Fodor that the mind uses a "language" of sorts between its specialty components, and the related notion regarding proto-language, which underlies Chomsky's views about the universal elements of all human languages. I can't say that Edelman is wrong here, but a footnote acknowledging the existence of differing viewpoints seems to be the usual practice. Are Nobel Prize winners permanently excused from the need to footnote?

One more example of Dr. Edelman's intellectual rope-walking without a net: he posits that the human brain has greater computing capabilities than the hypothetical "Turing Machine", which is an intellectual keystone of computing theory. This sounds OK until you do a search on the topic and discover "hypercomputation", a very uncertain and controversial concept. I'd venture that Dr. Edelman is wandering quite far from the zone of expertise where he earned a Nobel Prize (regarding his work in immunology). The same applies to his metaphysical (or anti-metaphysical) admonitions regarding "folk understanding" of human consciousness. His thoughts would make for a lengthy and interesting footnote, for sure. But this book is not about footnotes - it has none (although it does contain a very useful glossary). Wider Than the Sky is another unfortunate example of a brilliant person doing some very interesting research about the brain, who gives in to the temptation of lecturing mere mortals regarding their unenlightened assumptions. I hope that Dr. Edelman came closer to the Pinker tradition of exposition and respect for the general audience in his (Edelman's) other popular works (Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and Second Nature). But I'm not in any hurry to bet on it -- too many other interesting authors on the mind and consciousness to get to.

42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ...an account of consciousness to the general reader..., March 21, 2004

By 

Celia Redmore "Celia Redmore" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (Hardcover)

"Wider than the Sky" offers a concise scientific explanation of human consciousness to readers with no previous formal education in neurobiology. It avoids the metaphysical and mystical (what Edelman calls "spooky forces") and clearly explains any technical terms used. A glossary at the back of the book defines words from Action potential to Zombie. ("A hypothetical humanlike creature that lacks consciousness but which, it is erroneously assumed, can carry out all of the functions of a conscious human.")

The author uses the concept of neural Darwinism to suggest how consciousness evolved in mammals by massively increasing the connectivity between the cortical areas of the brain that carry out perceptual categorization and the frontal areas responsible for value-category memory systems. The definition of zombies turns out not to be purely whimsical. Consciousness requires specific neural activity - and where that activity occurs there must be consciousness.

Dr Edelman promises a "deeper insight into issues that are the center of human concern" to any reader willing to make a concerted effort to understand this challenging subject. He delivers wonderfully well on his promise. The conscious brain as described in "Wider than the Sky" is complex, dynamic, variable and unique to humankind.