Book Reviewed: Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human, by Susan Blackmore

Book Reviewed: Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human, by Susan Blackmore

The quest for consciousness

Author Susan Blackmore interviews about 20 scientists working in the physics and biology of consciousness, and focuses mainly on the neurobiological aspects of mind, subjective experience, free will and consciousness.

Consciousness is a set of physical processes that give rise to conscious experience. But in order to understand the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, we need to know the nature of physical reality. This leads us to quantum physics and the explanatory gap between quantum and classical realities. We are conscious of only classical reality which is governed by the classical laws of physics, but we cannot comprehend quantum reality that is governed by the laws of quantum physics. This suggests that there is a hidden reality of nature that our mind does not sense but only revealed to us through the quantum physical measurements. Therefore our consciousness must include both classical and quantum realities. Many neuroscientists believe that consciousness is as fundamental as spacetime and matter (energy). Quantum physical measurements also imply that the physical reality does not objectively exist, but they exist after an intervention by a conscious observer.

There is another thorny question still remains as to why any physical process, quantum or classical, should give rise to subjective experience. This book discusses in depth about subjective experience, free will and the nature of consciousness with the leaders of consciousness research. The book illustrates that these are really hard problems to solve, and the opinions of the experts are varied and diverse. Many neuroscientists assume that these mental powers somehow emerge from the electrical signaling of neurons, the circuitry of the brain. Cartesian theater (CT) is a term Dan Dennett uses to describe a common idea that somewhere in the brain or mind, everything comes together and consciousness happens. Neurobiologist Susan Greenfield proposes that consciousness is associated with brain and brain generates consciousness. Dave Chalmers says, that consciousness ceases when one is dead, therefore consciousness is strongly associated with brain. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff propose "orchestrated objective reduction" ('Orch OR') theory, according to which consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules (protein polymers inside brain neurons) which both govern neuronal and synaptic function. They connect brain processes to self-organizing processes on quantum scale to produce quantum structure of reality. Stephen LaBerge takes a Vedantic view of a universal consciousness akin to the quantum physical reality. Kevin O'Regan believes that consciousness can survive death, but in years to come we would be able to download our personality onto a computer and re-live in virtual worlds. Philosophers like David Rosenthal and Michael Graziano suggest that consciousness is illusory. They observe that we have certain beliefs about mental states, and they have distinctive functional properties which causes some forms of attention. Philosopher John Searle believes that consciousness is essentially a biological property that emerges in some systems but not in others for reasons as yet unknown. V. Ramachandran offers a neurobiological explanation as to why animals do not have the same level of consciousness as humans.

Free will is another topic widely discussed in this book and it is the most disputed philosophical issue of all time. It is an idea that we can act or make choices unconstrained by external circumstances or an agency such as fate or divine will. It is often compared with determinism, which means that all events in the world are determined by prior events. The experts discussed in this book differ in their opinion. Pat and Paul Churchland, Francis Crick, and Chris Koch suggest that free will is an illusion, but Dan Dennett, Stuart Hameroff, Thomas Metzinger, and Kevin O'Regan believes that we have free will.

To summarize, it is evident from the discussion presented in this book that there is a lack of complete theory by neuroscientists regarding how neural activity translates into conscious experiences. Deepak Chopra argues that it is still a speculation no matter if you want to call consciousness a fundamental property of the universe consisting of matter (or energy) operating in spacetime; or consciousness is caused by brain activity and creates the properties and objects of the material world. Some critics argue that the hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness has more evidence than the hypothesis that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. Such arguments falls short, since quantum reality is not considered a part of overall reality in this argument.