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The Associated Press Stylebook 2015 This new edition contains more than 3,000 A to Z entries detailing the AP’s rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation, and word and numeral usage. Learn more
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Product Details
Hardcover: 200 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (March 9, 2012)
Consciousness is one of the hot topics today in science. Perhaps nobody feels especially affected by the multiverses or by what the dark matter or the dark energy are. But everyone has an idea, has been affected or plain and simple wanted to know what is this stuff that "speaks" all the time inside our heads.
So in my case I bought this book because it gives an explanation through a detailed account about what consciousness is (not a ghost, just in case), which means what we know about it today, what it is consciousness now, and what we could expect to know for the future. Another reason is that Christof Koch is an authority on the subject so the combination for learning something new and serious on the topic was perfect.
The other reason to read the book was the personal approach that Koch proposes as a writer. He creates a personal and very intimate relationship with the reader as long as he tells you about his life, how he came to be involved in the subject of consciousness and which are his ideas today after decades of study.
Christof Koch, a physicist, worked for several years with Francis Crick (one of the DNA discoverers) so the proximity with the history of science, the philosophy involved and the effects of living a life dedicated to know who's that guy inside our brains, is all very close, intermingled and narrated in a very exciting style. To read this book is something very similar to stay at Koch's living room, listening to him and sharing good moments of high level science, sadness, memories and humor. "What is striking," says Koch, "to a physicist studying the brain and the mind is the absence of any conservation laws: Synapses, action potentials, neurons, attention, memory, and consciousness are not conserved in any meaningful sense.Read more ›
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Koch is trying to explain the possibility of consciousness (or sentience or awareness), which he also calls phenomenal experience. But, perhaps we need to ask why it needs explaining. If it's a fundamental and irreducible aspect of reality, perhaps it needs no explanation, or, at the least, would have a different kind of explanation. If it's an emergent feature out of an organized something, for example dynamic information structures in the brain as Koch suggests, then perhaps we only need to know that it is emergent and from what, and nothing more. After all, to say that X is emergent from Y is equivalent to saying that X is built up out of Y but that we have *no* explanation for how it is constructed from and of Y.
Koch says things like: If X is an emergent phenomenon from Y, then X can, ultimately, be reduced to Y. His point in saying something like that is that there is no hidden elixir, essence, soul, etc; there is nothing other than Y. But, it's a slippery slope from saying "X can be reduced to Y" to saying "X can be explained in terms of Y". And, one of the points of saying that it is an *emergent* property or phenomenon is to assert that Y is *not* a sufficient explanation of X.
Since Koch says that he wants to solve this problem before he dies, we can surmise that, as of the time he wrote this book, he had not solved it. So, perhaps we will want to wait for his *next* book.
One troubling thing about Koch's discussion is the question of what difference it makes whatever explanation we have for consciousness. How would it change our lives, the way we interact with and treat others, the way we treat animals of different kinds, etc?Read more ›
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76 of 88 people found the following review helpful
This book is really more an attempt at memoir than about consciousness as you might have surmised by its subtitle, "Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist." But that is how the book fails. It's hard to tell what the author intended here (although I have a notion). There are really three intertwined threads. One focuses on the study of consciousness and in this regard it's worth reading for the general reader or philosopher. It provides a generally interesting account of research and thought of what's been happening in the field over the last 30 years or so. The problem is that these nuggets are buried within a narrative of the author's life and also secondly the author's relationship with Francis Crick. The result is a very chatty book that is not necessarily very interesting. The parts on Francis Crick are fulsome references (the author is quite rightly enamored of his friendship with but annoyingly refers to him as Francis) to various ideas that they cogitated together. Now mind you Francis Crick would seem to be a fascinating figure well worth the subject of a book in its own right but Koch is no Boswell nor should you expect a research scientist to be one. So unfortunately the parts on Francis Crick are not fascinating anecdotes that bring him back to life as one would have liked but just serve to get in the way of what you're trying to read which is about the new breakthroughs in Consciousness. Here Koch does a pretty good job of summarizing. I read the book for Kochs one tantalizing hypothesis that consciousness does not arise out of or ride on top of matter as an epiphenomenom, but is part of the very fabric of reality itself. It is omnipresent in all matter down to the tiniest particles. Right on I thought, I've got to read this book.Read more ›
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This item: Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
