Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind Reprint Edition

by Gerald Edelman (Author)

18 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0465007646

ISBN-10: 0465007643

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We are on the verge of a revolution in neuroscience as significant as the Galilean revolution in physics or the Darwinian revolution in biology. Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman takes issue with the many current cognitive and behavioral approaches to the brain that leave biology out of the picture, and argues that the workings of the brain more closely resemble the living ecology of a jungle than they do the activities of a computer. Some startling conclusions emerge from these ideas: individuality is necessarily at the very center of what it means to have a mind, no creature is born value-free, and no physical theory of the universe can claim to be a ”theory of everything” without including an account of how the brain gives rise to the mind. There is no greater scientific challenge than understanding the brain. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire is a book that provides a window on that understanding.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Gerald M. Edelman is director of the Neurosciences Institute and chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute. He received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1972. He is also the author of Bright Air, Brilliant Fire; Tobiology; and The Remembered Present.

Product details

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; Reprint edition (June 16, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465007643
ISBN-13: 978-0465007646
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 18 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #933,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #769 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Movements > Humanism
- #6332 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Philosophy
- #7342 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > General

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Samuel Meredith

Just what I needed in this confusing field

March 22, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The best line in this book is “Ironically, the self is the last thing to be understood by its possessor.” On reaching retirement age, I find myself reviewing all the spirituality and science I have read in the past (lots) and reading the latest on theories of mind and consciousness in an effort to approach this irony. This year’s authors for me have included Dennett (re-read), Nagel, Rosenblum and Kuttler, Goertzel, and Penrose.

I classify theorists on mind as being either “mysterians” or “dismissives.” The mysterians may dismiss Descartes and theology, but they cannot give up the idea that mind and consciousness have some mysterious mystery beyond the mystery of, say, “life” or the complexities of biology and neurophysiology; requiring some as yet unknown layer of physics or universal teleology or panpsychism for our understanding.

The Dismissives tend to blow off the “ghosts” and “spirits” and pull out the digital computer to await strong AI. Like the New Atheists they tend to be irritatingly arrogant and dismissive in the pejorative sense of the word, stripping us of our unique humanity, dignity, and personal selves. Consciousness tends to be an epiphenomenon, a virtual reality, perhaps not even a necessity for a higher animal. Dennett is the poster boy for this group.

Edelman is a dismissive without the irritating arrogance. His central theme of (evolutionary driven) biology of the brain, and the idea of the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection is dense and new and difficult at first reading. Yet once grasped, it becomes and adequate theory (in the true, honest, humble, and provisional best sense of the word) to gently but firmly dismiss all the spooks, homunculi, Turing machine analogies, and “silly reductionism” and other false layers and inaccuracies clouding the field.

As a physician I have been continually impressed by human physical similarities yet equally baffled by the range of human thought and behavior, my own included. I have always had an almost religious faith in the biology and physics of the nervous system as the source of consciousness and mind. Yet how could individuals with virtually identical gross neuroanatomic structures and pathways be so different and unique psychologically? The author provides plausible answers.

My one small issue with the author is his dense, clause-saturated sentences necessitating constant re-reading. I await re-reading the entire book forthwith.

One person found this helpful2 people found this helpful

Stuart W. Mirsky

Fascinating Thesis Marred by Opaque and Overly Complex Exposition

July 26, 2009

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Having read this book roughly twice, I'm still not sure I'm up to offering a review but that may, itself, be an important comment because clarity often reflects theoretical adequacy. The book's main thesis seems to boil down to this: Brains are a product of what Edleman calls selectional events, reflecting an operational principle specific to living systems. In this he draws a distinction at the very outset between the hit or miss outcomes of evolutionary development by random selection (which produce species differentiation by changing the individual members of species over time) and the instructional development people cause to happen via algorithms (step by step procedures for getting things done, either by describing the steps needed to get things done to one another, by following such steps, or by producing those steps in computational code which can then be translated into the digitized electronic signals we think of as 0's and 1's that govern computer operations).

Selection, of course, is serendipitous, whatever blueprint establishes each individual being the result of eons of trial and error in the selectional process that preceded it. Edelman takes this idea and applies it to how individual brains operate on a daily, and instant by instant, basis. Extending the idea of selection, as he has previously identified it in human immune systems (where antibodies in our bloodstreams selectively bond with invading agents, based on their "fit", and those which bond more closely out-produce those which don't, thus increasing the "right" type of antibodies in the bloodstream), Edleman suggests that the waxing and waning of the brain linkages (which, he claims, embody our mental processes) occurs in roughly the same way.

This is somewhat controversial because of 1) its implications (it challenges more accepted functionalist accounts which liken brain operations to algorithms such as those a computer can perform); and because of 2) its failure to fully account for how the selecting actually alters the strengths of the linkages or how the linkages themselves give us the features we associate with consciousness (things like awareness, intentionality, understanding, etc.). And yet, given that he has so thoroughly laid out his case for this kind of biological mechanism driving brains, and that he seems to have covered the obvious operational issues as they apply to what we presently know about brains, his thesis has a certain plausiblity. But it remains highly complex and even controversial because it boils down, in the end, to a number of somewhat abstruse and not intuitively apparent claims.

It's really all about memory in the end, Edelman says, though he defines this function so broadly that it's no longer recognizable as what we call memory in ourselves. Memory at its most basic level is the capacity of a self-contained, self-replicating system to retain changes and, via self-replication, to pass them on to descendent systems. Of course, "memory" also means the ability of a computational system to recover stored coded data and, in us, the ability to summon up past images, thoughts, associations, etc. Are these all the same thing? Edelman suggests they are and claims that it is the increasing systemic complexity and resultant sophistication that makes the primitive memory we find in relatively simple systems and their components (including the capacity to reproduce progeny with like "fits" as we find in immune systems) into the kinds of things we call memory in ourselves. It is this memory principle, a product of the selectionist dynamic (or perhaps the reason that selection manages to occur?) that, on his view, is the foundation of the kinds of features we recognize as consciousness in ourselves.

Alas, Edelman's thesis is anything but simple (which I'm guessing, is already apparent from my efforts here). In the end it seems to amount to the claim that brains, being organic and the result of the previously described selectional processes, are uniquely complex in structure and operation in the universe, each uniquely differentiated from all other brains (because even twins' brains, constructed on a shared blueprint, will have changed in their lifetimes in ways unique to each individual). It is this complexity of structure, this "morphology", he tells us, that is responsible for the things brains do. Consciousness, he argues, is built on levels of operation in the brain and primary or animal level consciousness (which itself has levels) forms the necessary foundation for higher level consciousness in which self-awareness and self-reflexiveness become possible. These levels are only possible because of the intrinsic complexity of brain morphology.

Edelman lays out a picture of how the different parts of the brain are responsible for different features and notes how many of the features we treat as unitary in ourselves (e.g., memory, perception, conception, etc.) may be best understood, upon reflection, to really be the result of the elaborate collaboration, through cross brain linking of neuronal groups in different brain centers responsible for different things. These combine to produce the various constituent operations that, when further joined through what he calls "reentrant loops", become the features we recognize in ourselves like awareness, understanding, remembering, intentionality, conceptualizing, believing, etc. He calls his model of how brains work, built on all of this, the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), because, he explains, different neuronal groups (not individual neurons) must operate together through the cross-brain linkages already mentioned to produce each instance of consciousness in ourselves. Such instances are thus complex occurrences and not the simple unified phenomena they appear to be on introspection.

Human memory, for instance, he describes as a complex phenomenon that differs from the relatively simple memory function which computers rely on. What we recognize as memory in ourselves is never exact, he points out, because it consists of a bunch of different linked constituent elements running in parallel and impinging on one another, albeit never exactly in the same way, each time a remembered item is summoned up. Unlike computational memory, which involves the exact replication of a coded instruction in each instance (a failure of this level of precision being a failure of the computational memory function), human memory is seen to be rough, approximate and ever-changing (think Roshomon or the related phenomenon of "false memory" as described by modern psychology). This feature of our memory happens because remembering in us is a function of a complex reconstruction process that depends on the relative strengths and linkages of the connecting loops between the implicated neuronal groups. As such this makes creativity and metaphor possible but it also means that each instance of recall introduces changes through new associations.

It's because of his claim that brains are uniquely complex (more like a jungle than a powerplant as he puts it) that he insists that computationalism, the thesis that consciousness can be replicated on computers, is unsound. We need brains he says, because consciousness is a biological product requiring the complex morphology and historical development, reflecting selection, that only organic systems can achieve. On this last point, though, I think he may well be mistaken.

Edelman often uses "consciousness" in a relatively unsophisticated way and seems to be under the impression that computations, as performed by computers, are purely abstract without, as John Searle (whom he cites) puts it, causal efficacy in the world. In fact, computers are as physically instantiated as brains and computational processes on computers as physical as they must be in human brains. But his answer as to whether a computer can be conscious does not stop with this claim about the abstract nature of computational processes. He makes the further point that computers, running on logic, are instructionally based whereas our brains, running on "selection", are not. In this he seems to disregard the notion that selection in evolution itself provides its own set of instructions (our genomes), even if they're not conceived in advance by any mind. Similarly he seems to overlook the obvious fact that the genetic mechanism, itself, appears to be a form of information processing just as computations in computers are (though genetic information processing may, in fact, be more complex).

Moreover, if what constitutes consciousness in us is a range of features which occur together (awareness, intentionality, understanding, perception, conception, etc.), then the real question is not whether brains and computers can accomplish the production of these features in the same way but whether they can both achieve the same functional output at all. If computers can produce the features we associate with consciousness, how they do it is likely to be less important than that they can and his argument that computers can never be expected to do what brains do would be wrong.

Nevertheless, he has offered a very compelling picture of the incredible complexity that confronts us (especially if you're a computationalist) in endeavoring to achieve the goal of creating synthetic minds. For Edelman, everything hinges on his argument for uniqueness and complexity, which he derives from the principle of selection that, he tells us, is unique to self-contained, self-perpetuating systems like living things. Computers, on the other hand, are pre-set operational functions ("syntactical" systems, again echoing another of Searle's famous criticisms) which are guided by an outside mind (the programmer) and therefore unable to react to an open-ended world of unpredictable and ever changing inputs. But in claiming this, he presumes that computers lack the ability to be open-ended because they are programmed though this is by no means clear -- or likely to be any truer than his related claim that consciously programmed computational machines are qualitatively different from organic machines that have evolved over eons as a result of a selectional mechanism. After all, does it really matter where the programming comes from, as long as there's programming there?

Edelman's underlying position is that the genetic programming of evolutionary selection leads to an open-ended tangle of unpredicted, and unpredictable, synaptic connections -- and their more macro neuronal group links which strengthen and weaken according to their ongoing interaction with external stimuli. It is this waxing and waning of the neuronal group pathways between the different brain centers and their sub-parts that gives rise to the facets of consciousness on his view -- an activity that is nothing like the computational processing of machines as found on computers.

Yet, in this he seems to be disregarding the fact that computational programs can also involve multiple sub-systems doing different, interrelated things, and that such systems can be designed to implement open-ended reactions to an unpredicted world of stimuli once basic parameters are set. Such parameters need be no more obtrusive than our own evolution-driven genetic codes, after all.

Edelman's thesis is worth thinking about and may well offer some interesting directions for understanding how brains work and for developing new thinking machines that may depart from the standard computational model we rely on today (the universal Turing machine). Unfortunately Edelman's writing is not up to the level of the ideas presented (on my view). It may be the case that the complexity of Edelman's thesis would not admit of any more succinct or precisely written text than he has provided but, in spite of my own difficulties here in explicating his ideas, I rather think he could have (and should have) been clearer. Certainly his failure to be clear is at least a prima facie reason to question the potency of the underlying ideas.

SWM

7 people found this helpful8 people found this helpful

T. O. Whitehead

Insightful review from a brilliant scientist.

August 24, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

A brilliant Nobel-prizewinning author presents his findings and insights about the biological roots of consciousness. There's nobody better qualified to take on this task. He's spent a good part of his life pursuing this. More to the point, his views are correct. A book well worth reading, although he (like all others who have addressed this topic) doesn't really achieve his aim of resolving "the hard problem" - showing how subjective conscious experience arises from our biological bodies. I guess that's why they call it the hard problem.

One person found this helpful

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