Book Reviewed: Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

How life makes conscious mind The authors address specific issues regarding the rise of consciousness, language, self-awareness, and civilization. Even in most basic forms of life, the cellular “chaos” where diverse type of molecules assembles to form life, and how self-awareness work from microbes to humankind. The book scales the steps of the mind’s complexity chapter by chapter, from simple functions to human beings trying to create artificial intelligence and super minds. The basic idea is that mind is an activity that is not an airy concept but seated in the human brain that react to our environment by taking outside stimuli, comparing them with internal concepts, and seeing how well they match up. This term referred to as “Resonance” was first proposed by neurobiologist Stephen Grossberg is widely used in this book. The authors suggest that human mind is at the apex is premature. Humans do well in developing language, do advanced mathematical calculations, and interpret mathematical formulas to understand the workings of the cosmos. But they don’t have sixth sense that many migrating birds, which use earth’s magnetic field and the position of Sun for navigation. Does that make migrating birds more intelligent? According to physicist Geoffrey West who proposes the universal law of scaling in which he applies to all complex systems like living cell, cities, and corporations. They are self-supporting and obeys an evolutionary scheme that incorporate an underlying “consciousness.” But the complexity that arises when matter (non-living) transitions to living matter (living cell) by caging a set of biomolecules in a highly organized manner appears contradict the second law of thermodynamics. In this scenario, less information creates more information, disorder becomes order, non-living matter becomes living where the newly created entity becomes independent and self-regulating that becomes aware of surviving, adapting, growing, and multiplying itself. Consciousness seems to pervade the living cell that continues to adapt and evolve. Despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors, the human behavior is self-defeating, says the authors. The strange arguments presented in this book for tolerance of racial minority groups. I was confused by the title of the book which I thought was going to discuss about statistical thermodynamics in the operation of “consciousness.” But the book is disappointing which describes conscious mind in terms of human brain.