The Mind's Past First Edition

After reading the book, it's almost hilarious reading the reviews, which amount to an assorted collection of interpreters gone wild.
The psychologists are miffed, the transcendentalists deride it as being mechanistic, the armchair quarterbacks are confused because in part it's an impressionistic romp, so of course it's incomplete and not rigorously consistent.
We're spared the complexities of advanced neuroscience, which for the most would only be comprehensible to other neuroscientists.
This is science for the citizen at it's finest, with a bit of speculative philosophy, some great images, and more than enough one liners to make you chuckle.
As one reviewer pointed out, virtually all the comments are interesting and worth reading, and more importantly reveal the hardwired mindsets of the writers,
which only goes to reinforce much of what The Mind's Past is getting at.
Clearly the book is thought provoking in numerous ways, and to a wide range of readers.
The concepts introduced have implications that reach into the heart of philosophy, science, religion, literature, social justice ... you name it.
What a gem ... thank you M. Gazzaniga.

A landmark text!

excellent!

Lots of substance...useful for my purposes

The reason this great little book isn't more popular or influential may be because its clearly expressed ideas, well proven,are so counter-intuitive. If now isn't now, what is it? Here is an interesting part of the answer.

Very interesting things in this book. It goes through cycles of incredibly hard to read to very understandable. It isn't a long book but it may take you a while to get through.

From the outset, Gazzaniga claims that the "purpose of life" is reproduction. In congruence with reductionist neurobiologists he,as an "evolutionary biologist," would reduce the main import of mental activity to subconscious and automatic processes which promote the "survival of the species," largely through the employment of the "usefulness" of existing "potentialities." (He cites the example of the large billed Galapagos finch's random mutation of a large bill from the earlier normative small bill during a time of drought as an adaptation from an "existing potentiality" that enhances reproduction and survival.) These adaptations and "random useful genetic mutations" are the means by which species evolve. On the human level, the ability to reason is an evolutionary survival mechanism, which enhances the search for a mate. He assures us that evolutionary biologists know that this is what the brain is for. "The brain is for making decisions about how to enhance reproductive success. That is what the brain is for, no more no less (sic). In its capacity to to carry out that task, it can do a lot of other things, which come along for free and are what researchers have come to study while leaving unexamined the reason the brain exists. Yet once we realize that the brain can be explained only in terms of how it handles information and makes decisions, we gain precious insight into mind-brain relations. The brain is not primarily an experience-storing device that constantly changes its structure to accomodate(sic)new experience. From the evolutionary perspective it is a dynamic computing device that is largely rule driven; it stores information by manipulating the value of simple arithmetic variables." (Page 35.) Gazzaniga concludes that on a day to day basis reason is tempered by and controlled by "built in " automatic brain processes which are beyond our conscious control. He writes, "Our conscious lives depend on all kinds of automatic processes happening inside our brains. Though we can't even influence them by willed action, we continue to believe that we are in control of what we do." (Page 121.) The "interpreter" in our brain puts a "spin" on data, and this gives us the illusion that we have conscious control of the processing of stimuli.
As an example of the "free baggage" and the "spin doctoring" that comes along with the automatic responses to stimuli, he writes, "Each of us brings to the objective data in front of us an implicit view of how the world works. Personal and political or social leanings color our rational processes in such a way that we can render almost any observation either critical or meaningless, as we see fit." (Page 34.) Our subconscious drive for "reproductive success" only tricks our conscious mind into believing that we have a "self," which we imagine is in control of our thoughts. Not so, says Gazzaniga. This "self" is pure illusion. In a discussion of our easily sidetracked powers of rational deduction he writes, "The reason why this is such a big deal- why there is so much heat on the issue of rationality, or the lack of it- is that from an evolutionary standpoint the wonder of the human brain is its ability to reason sensibly and hence enhance reproductive success." All the rest- the search for the self, for morality, for the meaning of life, is illusory or of minor importance. Is that all there is, a physical struggle for survival of the fittest carried out by subconscious brain activity? A not very reassuring view of the human condition.
The "personal leanings" that "color our rational processes" only amelioriate the conditioned subliminal responses, a position that renders Gazzaniga a behaviorist along the lines of Skinner. He is ambiguous on the issue of free will, first arguing that our brain decides every issue before our consciousness chimes in, then claiming that "we can render almost any observation either critical or meaningless as we see fit." This ambivalence would seem to underlie the fact that an "automatic physical response" to a stimulus is not the same as "critical thinking," in which there is a much greater range of possible responses. Perhaps the brain has been "preprogrammed" not to make "automatic" choices when faced with mental phenomena, as Gazzaniga claims, but is in fact designed to evaluate possible responses and communicate these variables to our rational conscious mind, which then can "suggest" possible responses to our subconscious mind in a give and take that is resolved by the subconscious working in concert with the conscious mind.
There are those of us who maintain that the ultimate goal of life is not reproduction or the survival of the species, at all. Some might conclude that self consciousness is not the fickle "baggage" of automatic and subconscious brain activity. They would maintain that physical survival is the means, not the end goal of life. Consciousness, both on the individual and species level, they would argue, is the real end goal of life. Reproduction is merely the mechanism for providing progeny whose goal is to attain ever greater self-consciousness. Consciousness and the concomitant search for meaning, for enlightenment, for gnosis, justifies life. Are we to believe, as Gazzaniga implies, that the goal of Plato's life was to produce "little Platos" and that his philosophy was a mere "side effect" of his brain activity? To argue along these lines would be to assert that nuns, monks, and other celibate people, however fertile their rational minds might be (non-reproducing evolutionary biologists included!) are mere baggage on the species' struggle to reproduce more "robotic" progeny.
It is true that my brain's subconscious processes condition my bodily and mental responses to a large extent, but it is equally true that my conscious mind, my "self," can contemplate these "automatic" responses and modify them in a looping process of give and take that is indeed within my conscious control. I can scratch that itch or ignore it as I see fit. The pessimism that relegates humans to a species bound by ironclad subconscious urges toward biological survival is modified by the knowledge that the conscious as well as the subconscious may well subordinate reproductive mechanisms to even stronger instincts toward increasing consciousness of the self- a self that is a mirror of universal consciousness. Mystics and theologians insist that there is more to life than the survival of the species on this present "plane of existence." My subconscious self tells me that they are right.

Gazzaniga's concept of the "interpreter" has made a major contribution to my understanding of what goes on in my brain, for which I'm grateful. The research he describes in support of the idea is very convincing, but there are some serious problems with his conception of mind/brain duality.

On page 151, he gives a brief summary of the interpreter's job: "In general the interpreter seeks to understand the world."

Located in the left hemisphere--at least in the subjects who've been tested--the interpreter is intertwined with the use of language. Language is required for the kind of understanding that involves the construction of rational arguments, an activity that brains without language are incapable of. Non-linguistic brains can learn by associating a stimulus with a response, but it takes language to ask "why" the stimulus provoked the response.(p. 152)

This kind of understanding-through-language places some rather profound limitations on the abilities of the interpreter which Gazzaniga fails to explore in depth, with the result that confusion reigns where clarity otherwise might. Like many other writers on brain function, he is stuck with a conception of "mind" that results in a plethora of paradoxical statements.

The confusion begins on page 1: "After the brain computes an event, the illusory `we' (that is, the mind) becomes aware of it..." (His parenthesis.) This is as close as he comes to defining "mind," although we can get some further ideas of what he means from contexts in which he uses it. For example, a few pages later he writes:

"Our mind has an absurdly hard time when it tries to control our automatic brain. Remember the night you woke up at 3 A.M., full of worry about this and that? Such concerns always look black in the middle of the night. Remember how you tried to put them aside and get back to sleep? Remember how bad you were at it?"(p. 22)

And on the next page:

"Nowhere is the issue of ourselves and our brain more apparent than when we see how ineffectual the mind is at trying to control the brain. In those terms, the conscious self is like a harried playground monitor, a hapless entity charged with the responsibility of keeping track of multitudinous brain impulses running in all directions at once. And yet the mind is the brain, too. What's going on?"(p. 23)

He never answers that last question, although he discusses a lot of information that might allow him to. The answer is that the mind (our conscious experience, including the interpreter and its language as well as sensory experience), is the product of brain processes, and it doesn't control anything, much less the "automatic brain" that creates it.

Our conscious experience is the measure of the brain's abilities and of what it knows about its own processes, and if we read Gazzaniga's book for explanations of the gaps in the brain's understanding of itself and the rest of the world, and why it has them, there is much to be learned. He can teach us things that he doesn't seem to know himself.

The brain has many abilities that it doesn't understand, and Gazzaniga points out quite a few: the brain can walk, talk, produce a useful visual model of the world, etc., without having a clue about how it does any of these things: "As I sit and write, I am not aware of how the neural messages arise from various parts of my brain and are programmed into something resembling a rational argument. It all just happens." (p. 22) If Gazzaniga doesn't know, his brain doesn't know, either. It can construct a rational argument without knowing how it does it.

Another limitation on the brain's verbal explanations is that it doesn't have a wiring diagram of itself, and if parts of it get damaged, it often is not aware of the abilities it has lost unless it tries to do something it remembers being able to do and finds that it cannot. The brain can't attach language to information it doesn't have; it can't explain anything unless it has some awareness of it. Here's one of several descriptions of this kind of phenomenon: "...the patient with the central lesion doesn't have a complaint because the part of the brain that might complain has been injured."(p. 135)

To see how eliminating the mind/brain duality can add some clarity to Gazzaniga's discussions, let's go back to his example of 3 A.M., struggling with our thoughts, trying to get back to sleep. It's not that the mind is struggling with the automatic brain, as he puts it, to quiet these thoughts that are keeping one awake. It's that there's a neural network (or circuit, or brain state) that is concerned with sleep and rest that is alternating with another neural network that evaluates the problems one's thinking about as more important than sleep. What we experience in consciousness is, at one moment, the neural network that is in favor of sleep comes to the fore and says, "I've got to stop thinking about this stuff," and the next moment, the neural network that evaluates the priorities of these disturbing thoughts is bringing them to the fore; it's winning the competition on what is important at that moment. This competition is the result of all the things that the brain is aware of at the time, prompted by the environment: the bills that have to be paid with not enough money, etc. and the part of the brain that deals with those issues is in the ascendency. It's getting reinforcement from other parts of the brain. It's like a committee meeting in that there are different factions and some say, "Oh, this is the thing that we have to deal with," while another faction says, "Oh no, this is the thing we have to deal with." We aren't aware of all the behind-the-scenes negotiations; we are only aware of what emerges in the foreground: this vacillation between the need for sleep and the need to deal with these issues. (In this video from late 2008, Gazzaniga describes a process very much like this in talking about consciousness:[...])

If you apply a similar construction to all Gazzaniga's uses of "mind," you will have a much clearer idea of the human condition and his contribution to its understanding. I'll give one more example from his final conclusions: "The interpretation of things past... produces the wonderful sensation that our self is in charge of our destiny... Because of that, maybe we can drive our automatic brains to greater accomplishments and enjoyment of life."(p. 175)

Rephrased: If the brain realizes that the "sensation that our self is in charge of our destiny" is an illusion, it may turn its attention to the likely determinants of its self-concepts, its accomplishments and its enjoyment of life; the understanding of which will open up vast new opportunities for the brain to consider.