Book Reviewed: The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik

Do we create physical reality? The discussion of consciousness and free will involves neuroscience, physics, philosophy, history, and mathematics. It is huge in scope and reaches the core of physical reality itself. This is not a neuroscience book per se but a philosophical one that combines all the relevant fields. Consciousness hinges on two characteristics: the extrinsic world that operates on the laws of physics, and the intrinsic world of life that is related to feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The presumption is that in this world cognition exists and evolves in mobile living beings in parallel with the evolution of life, and the cosmos we observe is real. It is hard to put the two perspectives together in a science of consciousness. Could these two perspectives be reconciled, or whether science will remain incomplete. This is the point at which where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet, that is ontology (what exists for one to know about) and epistemology (how knowledge is created and what is possible to know) becomes meaningful. When they begin to merge and breakdown in their distinctions, something dimensionless and unnamable is formed. This creates a structure that we call "experience” and the standard correlational approach of certain behavior with a part of brain becomes irrelevant. What makes someone or something conscious is described by the integrated information theory (IIT), and consciousness has a physical basis which can be mathematically measured. IIT proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness. Having free will means being an agent that is causally emergent at the relevant level of description for whom recent internal states are causally more relevant than distant past states and they are computationally irreducible. The logical fatalism is a philosophical and abstract argument against free will because everything is predetermined in this world. The opposite is a universe where the future is not dependent on the past, not even randomly, as there is no probability distribution drawn from it, and therefore this looks unappealing. In either case, one must guess how recent and past states play a role in the emergence of free will. The author’s use of bombastic phrases and technical jargon make reading a little challenging, but nevertheless he makes a valiant effort to address issues. My only gripe is that this is an open-ended book that does not draw any conclusions about the existence or nonexistence of free-will.