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| View Larger Image | Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human
by Susan Blackmore
| | List Price: | $23.00 |  | | 8 New starting at: | $4.00 | | 11 Used starting at: | $3.80 | | 1 Collectible starting at: | $23.00 | | | | | Sales Rank: | 388336 | | Studio: | Oxford University Press, USA | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 288 | | Publication Date: | January 01, 2006 | | Publisher: | Oxford University Press, USA |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
"Human brains are just the most complicated thing that's yet evolved, and we're trying to understand them using our brains," notes philosopher Daniel Dennett. "We're trying to reverse engineer ourselves, to understand what kind of a machine we are."
In Conversations on Consciousness, Susan Blackmore brings together some of the great minds of our time, a who's who of eminent thinkers, all of whom have devoted much of their lives to understanding "what kind of a machine we are." Some of the interviewees are major philosophers (such as John Searle, Ned Block, and David Chalmers) and some are equally renowned scientists (Francis Crick, Roger Penrose, V.S. Ramachandran). All of them talk candidly with Blackmore about some of the key philosophical issues confronting us, in a series of conversations that are revealing, insightful, and stimulating. They ruminate on the nature of consciousness--is it something apart from the brain? Is it even possible to understand the brain, to understand human consciousness? Some of these thinkers say no, it isn't possible, but most believe that we will pierce the mystery surrounding consciousness, and that neuroscience will provide the key. Blackmore goes beyond the issue of consciousness to ask other intriguing questions: Is there free will (a question which yields many conflicted replies, with most saying yes and no); if no, how does this effect the way you live your life; and more broadly, how has your work changed the way you live.
Ranging from the curious (do bees have consciousness?) to the profound (is our sense of having a self just an illusion), these provocative conversations illuminate current thinking on the mind and on human nature itself. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 4 reviews)
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Controversies in consciousness studies 
What is the problem of consciousness?
Are zombies (creatures that look and act like humans but who have no consciousness) theoretically possible?
Does consciousness survive death?
Is there such a thing as free will?
These are the types of questions Susan Blackmore poses to twenty-one experts, who come from neuroscience, philosophy and psychology, and who are all involved in the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies. Each interview also includes specific questions about the subject's work and theories. The cumulative effect of reading them is that you walk away with a good sense of the frequently conflicting perspectives within the field and an idea of which ones you might want to explore further. As other reviewers have pointed out, the sequence of the interviews is alphabetical - an arbitrary choice but not one your reading of the book has to be restricted by. My preference was to dip into different sections till I'd read the whole book. As I'd read one interview, the subject would make reference to other interviewees and their ideas and if something struck me as being particularly interesting, I'd read the interview with that person next, sort of the way you might surf the net. In some ways it was a very liberating experience and I almost felt like I was creating the book that suited my level of understanding.
Some of the material presented here is undoubtedly very challenging but I didn't feel overwhelmed even if I didn't "get" everything. The only other book I'd read on the subject was V.S. Ramachandran's "A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness," which I found interesting but too brief. I also found that the conversation format in Blackmore's book made the topic more engaging and easier to penetrate. The fact that she is a scientist herself is actually a strength because she uses her intimate knowledge of the field to not only reflect back complex ideas in easy to understand language but also asks the right questions to lead the subjects to deepen their explanations of their work. She clearly has her biases but rather than detracting from the discussions I thought her disagreements with the interviewees brought more life to the material. I had to keep asking myself what I think and had an idea of what I need to learn more about to help make up my mind.
The back of the book has a helpful glossary to assist with learning some of the key terms that are used and also links to a couple of great websites that I'm sure I'll be spending time browsing through.
If you're willing to actively engage with it, this is a great book to start your explorations into a fascinating field.
April 01, 2007 | |
Hameroff suggests part of us does live on 
The main problem I had with CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUSNESS was that the interviewer was also a scientist. I think a journalist would have forced these scientists to articulate their ideas more coherently. Susan Blackmore, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of the West of England, seemed to ignore the reader at times and use scientific jargon. I wasn't aware of the glossary in the back of the book until I was half finished.
There are twenty interviews. I was familiar with Francis Crick, who along with James D. Watson, discovered the structure of DNA, but I was unfamiliar with the others. They discussed such issues as blind sight, binocular rivalry, free will, whether there's an afterlife, split brains, lucid dreaming, and qualia (subjective qualities of any sensory experience, such as the smell of coffee or the blueness of the sky). Color is a qualia and does not exist in the physical realm.
Many of these scientists, Blackmore included, have experience with eastern religion and meditation. Blackmore, herself, believes the self is an illusion. She is able to repress the self while meditating. One of the other scientists, Francisco Varela, used people who have trained for 20 or 25 years in the Buddhist tradition of meditation as research subjects since you can ask them to perform tasks normally impossible for regular people, such as to keep a steady attention over a 30 minute span. Most college students have an attention span of only two and a half minutes.
Another interviewee I found especially interesting was Stuart Hameroff, a working anaesthesiologist. He believes proto-consciousness is fundamental to the universe, a force such as electro-magnetism. He theorizes that the self is found on the quantum level: "In our unconscious minds we have superimpositions of multiple possible choices or perceptions which reduce or collapse to one particular choice or perception, say 40 times a second. Each reduction chooses a set of qualia." Hameroff is studying the computational capabilities of protein structures called microtubules, which make up the internal scaffolding within nerve cells. He believes microtubules might be quantum computers. One uplifting result, if Hameroff is right, is that quantum information doesn't completely dissipate when we die; it exists holographically, indefinitely.
Blackmore, herself, is author of a book entitled, THE MEME MACHINE. I had never heard the term before, but it means "skills, stories, songs, theories, or artefacts, that are copied from person to person. According to the theory of memetics, memes are replicators and culture evolves by the process of variation and selection among memes." In other words, we don't have a whole lot of free will and creativity is pretty much an illusion.
January 18, 2007 | |
Not suitable as an introduction to consciousness researchers or their hypotheses
This book is a collection of "conversations" with scientists working on the problem of consciousness, and I was hoping that it would provide a readable and interesting introduction to these scientists and their various hypotheses. However, I found this book unsuitable for this purpose. The author does not try to organize the material--the "conversations" are presented in alphabetical order of the interviewees' last names because the author could not conceive of a meaningful order. There is virtually no editing of the material--the author wanted to "let the people speak for themselves" and "make the editing very light". There is only a minimal introduction to the book, and only biographical introductions to the scientists. While there may be some merit in the approach of "light editing," overall I had to wonder what value was added by the author. Additionally, in the book introduction the author generally refers to her interviewees by their first name. Perhaps she is trying to show that she is on a first-name basis with all these scientists, but since scientists are more typically known by their last names, this was distracting at best and made it even more difficult to follow the minimal introduction (who is "Dave"? ... presumably Chalmers). Overall, this book seems intended for somebody who is already familiar with the study of consciousness, not for a reader relatively new to the subject. I had previously read the author's book "Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction," and I didn't feel that prepared me for "Conversations on Consciousness." So what value does this book provide? If you are already familiar with the subject of consciousness, you may find the interviews with your favorite researchers to be of interest.
May 16, 2006 | |
Very impressive book 
That was a brilliant idea of Sue Blackmore, and the results are quite impressive. This book does what it was designed to do - it involves anyone (I believe) who reads it in the "hard problem of consciousness", that is in reflection on explanations of the fact of subjective experience arising from neural structures (there are a few other themes debated here like the problem of free will, but they are marginal - with an exeption of zombie-problem, which, however, is closely connected with "hard problem"). We see different approaches to the "hard problem" and a clash of philosophers, like Dennett, with scientists, like Crick or Koch. It became clear, however, that scientists are in need of philosophers these days. By the way, most elaborate responses in these conversations came from philosophers - Chalmers, Dennett, Velmans etc. So far - OK. Why only 4 stars then? Because the book is imbalanced, and Sue knows that. First of all, among her 20 "best minds" there are no Chomskian philosophers - Chomsky would probably refuse to respond - Fodor, McGinn, Pinker. Then where are Identity theorists - Armstrong or Smart? Why Edelman is not included in the list? Where is Kim? And so on. Of course, it is not easy to achieve balance in such projects. But still it is possible - I myself did something like that, collecting more than 100 opinions of Kant scholars in 2004 - so called "International Kant Interview". So Sue Blackmore did not do her best - but she did much. Her book helps to feel the progress in consciousness studies.
January 07, 2006 | |
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