my mind on books

Despite the title, God Soul Mind Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World (link for amazon.co.uk) is not primarily about religion or the spirit world from a neuroscientific perspective. Instead, gods and spirits figure as examples of a more general process of social perception that is the real focus of the work.

In a clear, reader-friendly manner, author Michael Graziano describes social perception as a mechanism for constructing simplified models of mental states and intentions. Because we are social animals we developed this capacity for constructing models of other minds. As with perception of objects, social perception is subject to illusions, such as the illusion that a ventriloquist’s dummy is a separate person.

Simplified models of intentionality consist of “point agents” assigned to spatial locations. Such mind-models are the source of concepts of spirits and souls. In this approach, for example, the God of monotheism represents “the perception of a single unified mind behind every otherwise inexplicable event.”

Graziano argues that consciousness can also be understood as a social perceptual model applied inwardly. The account of consciousness seemed to be the real core of the book, an original approach to the problem with potential applications from AI to multiple personality disorder.

Also included is a discussion of the brain circuitry involved in social perception, primarily the superior temporal polysensory (STP) area and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ).

Graziano also discusses social imitation and memes as the source of human culture. What is missing is an account of the role of culture in affecting what kinds of entities (gods, spirits, souls, etc.) are modeled by the social perceptual system.

[Thanks to Leapfrog Press for allowing me to view an advance copy via NetGalley].

Product description from the publisher:

Written for the general public, God Soul Mind Brain explores the controversial relationship between science and religion by first dismissing the “science versus religion” debate as outdated and unnecessary. The cutting-edge field of social neuroscience explains how our perceptions of our own consciousness, of other people’s minds, and of spirits and gods depend on machinery in the brain that evolved to make us socially intelligent animals. In clear prose without technical jargon, Graziano discusses his and others’ findings in this 20-year-old field of study, and the implications for human spirituality and religion. By addressing head-on the fundamental issues of human consciousness, religion, and God, and how these elements relate to the science of the brain, Graziano presents an entirely new view of religion and science.

See also: “Why We See Spirits and Souls”, Graziano’s article at “Big Questions Online,” with lots of comments; author’s website

Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind by Evan Thompson (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), originally published in 2007, is now available in paperback.

(link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life.

Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, Continental Phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than has previously been accepted, and that current explanations do not adequately address the myriad facets of the biology and phenomenology of mind. Where there is life, Thompson argues, there is mind: life and mind share common principles of self-organization, and the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. Rather than trying to close the explanatory gap, Thompson marshals philosophical and scientific analyses to bring unprecedented insight to the nature of life and consciousness. This synthesis of phenomenology and biology helps make Mind in Life a vital and long-awaited addition to his landmark volume The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (coauthored with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela).

Endlessly interesting and accessible, Mind in Life is a groundbreaking addition to the fields of the theory of the mind, life science, and phenomenology.

See also: review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (“should be read by all those interested in exploring new approaches in cognitive science”), author’s website

An interesting-looking though pricey book from philosopher-physicist Mario Bunge — may be something to check for at your library or through interlibrary loan…

Matter and Mind: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science) (Springer, 2010)

(link for amazon.co.uk)

This book discusses two of the oldest and hardest problems in both science and philosophy: What is matter?, and What is mind? A reason for tackling both problems in a single book is that two of the most influential views in modern philosophy are that the universe is mental (idealism), and that the everything real is material (materialism). Most of the thinkers who espouse a materialist view of mind have obsolete ideas about matter, whereas those who claim that science supports idealism have not explained how the universe could have existed before humans emerged. Besides, both groups tend to ignore the other levels of existence—chemical, biological, social, and technological. If such levels and the concomitant emergence processes are ignored, the physicalism/spiritualism dilemma remains unsolved, whereas if they are included, the alleged mysteries are shown to be problems that science is treating successfully.

See also: Publisher’s webpage for the book

Besides new books by David Chalmers and Douglas Hofstadter mentioned in an earlier post, there are also new books coming later this year by Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio.

Coming in October – The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks (Knopf, 2010). (link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

From the author of the best-selling Musicophilia (hailed as “luminous, original, and indispensable” by The American Scholar), an exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals—including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill. Most dramatically, Sacks gives us a riveting account of the appearance of a tumor in his own eye, the strange visual symptoms he observed, an experience that left him unable to perceive depth.

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks explores some of the most fundamental facets of human experience—how we see in three dimensions, how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed, and the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains find new ways of perceiving that create worlds as complete and rich as the no-longer-visible world.

Damasio’s book is coming in November from Pantheon: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. (link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

One of the most important and original neuroscientists at work today tackles a question that has confounded neurologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists for centuries: how consciousness is created.

Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In this revelatory work, he debunks the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting astounding new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as “self”—is in fact a biological process created by the brain. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the personal, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces the evolutionary perspective, which entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told.

Self Comes to Mind is a groundbreaking investigation of consciousness as a dynamic, unpredictable faculty that is instrumental in defining and explaining who we understand ourselves to be.

Coming soon from Oxford University Press (US release scheduled for July 15, already available at amazon.co.uk):
Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds by Murray Shanahan.

Product description from the publisher:

To understand the mind and its place in Nature is one of the great intellectual challenges of our time, a challenge that is both scientific and philosophical. How does cognition influence an animal’s behaviour? What are its neural underpinnings? How is the inner life of a human being constituted? What are the neural underpinnings of the conscious condition?

Embodiment and the Inner Life approaches each of these questions from a scientific standpoint. But it contends that, before we can make progress on them, we have to give up the habit of thinking metaphysically, a habit that creates a fog of philosophical confusion. From this post-reflective point of view, the book argues for an intimate relationship between cognition, sensorimotor embodiment, and the integrative character of the conscious condition.

Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and dynamical systems, it proposes an empirical theory of this three-way relationship whose principles, not being tied to the contingencies of biology or physics, are applicable to the whole space of possible minds in which humans and other animals are included. Embodiment and the Inner Life is one of very few books that provides a properly joined-up theory of consciousness, and will be essential reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists with an interest in the enduring puzzle of consciousness.

See also: Author’s website