I Know I Left My Consciousness Somewhere Around Here (Review Article)

Review Article:

I Know I Left My Consciousness Somewhere Around Here.

by Brian Van der Horst

"What is consciousness?" is a question that most of us who train NLP duck as fast as we can. Often in NLP, we say, "Sorry, that's ontology--not our department. Our job is to answer the epistemological question,'How do we know, and of what are conscious?'" We are not alone. The Oxford Companion to The Mind states "Consciousness is both the most obvious and the most mysterious feature of our minds... not only have we so far no good theory of conciousness, we lack even a clear and uncontroversial pre-theoretical description of the presumed phenomenon."

Here is a splendid selection of six recent books written by world-class thinkers addressing the question everyone finds so hard to answer. Famed linguist John Searle gives us the philosophical underpinnings and the critical acuity we'll need for the task. Mathematician Roger Penrose gives us directions from quantum physics and neuroscience. Molecular biologist, Nobelist, and DNA-discoverer Francis Crick gives us a swift course in neuroscience. Then Stephen Kosslyn gives a visual apperception, followed by Daniel Alkon's memorable neurological musings. Psychiatrist Allan Hobson investigates conciousness via the royal road running through the dream laboratory. And for you frazzled kinesthetic thinkers, Bart Kosko rounds out the quest with his round-up of fuzzy logic.

Introducing the Techno-Serf Readability Index: Can you program with COBAL and machine language? Can you handle organic chemistry, calculus, read electronic wiring diagrams, and read Greek, German, French and at least one Kanji-based ideogrammatic language? Then you're what I call a Techno-Prince or Princess.

If not, you are like me, straining to remember what you learned in introductory sciences in high school. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we're "Techno-Serfs," consumers of technology in the future feudal kingdom of the 21st Century. Therefore, I have graded the following books from one to four TS, based on the level of scientific comprehension necessary to understand the author.

One TS means warning, this book is very technical indeed; you gotta be a working scientist, who devours "Nature," and "Science" every week for light reading to completely understand it.

Two indicates the book is challenging, written with some technical language, but if you can make your way through "Scientific American," and "NLP Vol. I" without falling asleep, you'll be able to read it with a little effort.

Three TS indicate that the book reviewed is sophisticated, but accessible; if you have read most of the books by the founders of NLP with a dictionary, and lots of coffee, you'll enjoy this book.

Four means the book reviewed is well-written, for the general public-- if you just loved the "The Celestine Prophecies" and "The Bridges of Madison Country," and wonder why NLP books aren't written like these (as I do)-- you'll find this book a delightful read.

John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1992. 270pp. 

Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1994. 457 pp. 

Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis. London: Simon & Schuster. 1994. 318 pp. 

Stephen M. Kosslyn, Image and the Brain, The Resolution of the Imagery Debate. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1994. 516 pp. 

Daniel L. Alkon, Memory's Voice, Deciphering the Mind-Brain Code. New York: HapperCollins. 1992. 285 pp. 

J. Allan Hobson, The Chemistry of Conscious States, How the Brain Changes its Mind. Boston: Little, Brown. 1994 300 pp. 

Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking, The New Science of Fuzzy Logic London: Flamingo 1993. 318 pp. 

In this corner: John Searle Vs The New Codgers of Cognitivism

Instead of ducking shots, John R. Searle, Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley, devotes much of the space in The Rediscovery of The Mind to shooting ducks. He's sniping at the quackers of philosophy and cognitive science that refuse to address the existence of consciousness. "Much of mainstream philosophy of the mind of the past fifty years seems obviously false... " He writes. "I think it is obvious in the writings of several authors, for example, that they think we don't really have mental states, such as beliefs, desires, fears, etc."

Of course, many of his targets are victims of Cartesian dualism. "The famous mind-body problem, the source of so much controversy over the past two millennia, has a simple solution," asserts Searle. "Here it is: Mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain."

I personally found this book refreshing: it's like attending a Friar's Club Roast of the modern nabobs of materialism, behaviourism, and artificial intelligence. But this isn't to say that Searle is another mystic. "Once you see the incoherence of dualism, you can see that monism [ that all is consciousness] and materialism are just as mistaken. Dualists asked, 'How many kinds of things and properties are there?' and counted up to two. Monists, confronting the same question, only got as far as one."

What's Searle's definition? "Consciousness is a causally emergent property of systems. It is an emergent feature of certain systems of neurons in the same way that solidity and liquidity are the emergent features of systems of molecules." Like water and ice.

But this book isn't just a nattering turkey-shoot. Searle advances his own structural model of consciousness, comprising the following features:

1. Finite Modalities--VAKOG including vestibular balancing.

2. Unity-- Horizontal sequences and vertical nesting of awareness.

3. Intentionality-- Individual orientations and social, collective influences.

4. Subjective Feeling-- Each individual's personal model of the world.

5. Connections between Consciousness and Intentionality-- "Every unconscious intentional state is at least potentially conscious."

6. Figure-Ground, Gestalts-- The functions of boundaries.

7. The Aspect of Familiarity-- Recognition and expectations.

8. Overflow-- Conscious states refer beyond their immediate content.

9. The Center and the Periphery-- Focusing of attention.

10. Boundary Conditions-- Spatio-temporal-socio-biological locations. "Where am I?"

11. Mood-- The blues, the blahs, the yippies and Eureka's!

12. The Pleasure/Unpleasure Dimension-- feeling good or bad.

As far a problems go in the study of consciousness such as the limits of introspection, verification, and the sub-conscious, Searle claims, "The notion of an unconscious mental state implies accessibility to consciousness." Along the way, Searle fries Freud for abandoning a scientific study of the mind; sizzles Alan Newell's SOAR model for leaving out intentionality; chides Chomsky for underestimating consciousness, and sums up with some guidelines for the rediscovery of the mind.

  "First, we ought to stops saying things that are obviously false...

  "Second, we ought to keep reminding ourselves of what we know for sure. For example, we know for sure that inside our skulls there is a brain, sometimes it is conscious, and the brain processes cause consciousness in all its forms.

  "Third, we ought to keep asking ourselves what actual facts in the world are supposed to correspond to the claims we make about the mind..."

  "A fourth and final guideline is that we need to rediscover the social character of the mind."

If you want thorough, scholarly explanations and arguments for those who question the validity of the subjective study of experience, this is your book. Searle has tilled the fields of philosophy, cybernetics, and biology, and planted many of the same seeds that NLP has sowed.

One of the recurring refrains in NLP World book reviews is "Now, if only this author took one of our seminars, he might have even finer experiential tools with which to continue his research." Consider it said, for each of the books reviewed herein.

Roger Penrose-- The Mathematics and Physics of Consciousness

  Penrose, Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, who has huddled with Stephen Hawking on figuring out black holes, had a best-seller with The Emperor's New Mind, a technical book out in l989 that proposed controversial theories of the workings of the brain.

  In Shadows of the Mind, he hoes the same row as Searle, in spades. He hoists the mathematical shovel of Godel's theorem, which demonstrated there are true axioms of arithmetic that can't be proven mathematically, to discount the cognitivists; and the quantum rakes of physicians Heisenberg, Schr?dinger and Einstein to weed away materialist crabgrass.

While Searle is a tough, but accessible read; Penrose throws in so much algebra and calculus, that early on, I flagged the quote, "I shall need only a very simplified form of this argument, requiring only very little mathematics... Any reasonably dedicated reader should find no great difficulty in following it." Sure. This is a valuable book, but be warned: it you don't speak technomath, a lot if this volume is going to be pretty opaque. If you can make it through the equations, however, it's a fine review of the last 50 years of physical and neurological science.

Penrose addresses four viewpoints which summarize most of the current controversies of consciousness:

  A. All thinking is computation; in particular, feelings of conscious awareness are evoked merely by the carrying out of appropriate computations.

  B. Awareness is a feature of the brain's physical action; and whereas any physical action can be simulated computationally, computational simulation cannot by itself evoke awareness.

  C. Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but this physical action cannot even be properly simulated computationally.

  D. Awareness cannot be explained by physical, computational, or any other scientific terms.

Penrose favors argument "C," dismissing the first two positions as fallacies of the same muddle-headedness that Searle finds so silly, and the last proposition as too mystical. But this does not mean that he has leapt upon the "emergence" bandwagon, he avers. He thinks that our physical science is just not yet sufficiently precise to know what is happening in the brain.

Quantum physics, high-temperature superconductivity, nanoscience (the study of infinitely small structures) and cytological studies of the microtubules, minute structures lying deep within the cytoskeletons of the brain's neurons are the tools of research that Penrose feels might uncover the nature of the mind.

"Consciousness would be some manifestation of this quantum-entangled cytoskeletal state and of its involvement in the interplay between quantum and classical levels of activity. The computer-like classically interconnected system of neurons would be continually influenced by this cytoskeletal activity, as the manifestation of whatever it is that we refer to as 'free will.' The role of neurons, in this picture is perhaps more of a magnifying device in which the smaller-scale cytoskeletal action is transferred to something which can influence other organs of the body-- such as muscles. Accordingly, the neuron level of description that provides the currently fashionable picture of the brain and the mind is a mere shadow of the deeper level of the cytoskeletal action-- and it is at this deeper level where we must seek the physical basis of the mind!"

Dr. Crick's Scientific Search for the Soul

You know you are in good hands when physicist and biochemist Francis Crick defines "neuron" on the first page of The Astonishing Hypothesis as "the scientific word for a nerve cell." But do not be lulled by his bed-side manner. He is on the same solid tracks as Penrose's physics. His approach: "The Astonishing Hypothesis is that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and you ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." His tack: study everyone's favorite modality for brain research since Helmholtz started studying nerves in the 19th century: the visual system.

The most challenging parts of this volume are the chapters on neurology and neuro-anatomy. Again, Crick is narrowing his focus to visual functioning, but along the way, he does a masterful job of summarizing how the brain is constructed, how activities are measured with everything from EEG to PET and MRI scans, to a workmanlike tour of the primate visual cortex, and what we know about its operation. His chapter on the history and nature of neural network and neurocomputing is another gem of clarity and brevity.

After a review of current experiments on vision, Crick ends his detective story not with a whodunit, but a what-dunit: in his mind, the Thalamus, that old traffic-cop of the brain is the seat of consciousness. Crick's critical clue: what he calls the "Processing Postulate," which states that "each level of visual processing is co-ordinated by a single thalamic region." He goes on to add, "we might be using the words conscious and unconscious for too many somewhat distinct activities. They may have to be replaced by some phrase like 'processing unit' or, in some cases, 'awareness unit.'" Has Dr. Crick escaped behavioralism only to create smaller "black boxes"?

He doesn't think so, but then again, he's pretty quick on his toes. He doesn't suffer philosophic criticism too easily. "Philosophers have had such a poor record over the last two thousand years that they would do better to show a certain modesty rather than the lofty superiority that they usually display."

Crick eschews the ontological questions of self-awareness, religious experience, and aesthetics with comments like "once the visual system is fully understood, the more fascinating aspects of the 'soul' will be much easier to study... It is important to empasize that the Astonishing Hypothesis is a hypothesis."

While Penrose ends his volume with a dash of mathematical Platonism, Crick remains a stolid materialist to the end-- even to a post-script chapter, wherein he states "Free Will is located or near the anterior cingulate sulcus," based on studies of brain-damaged patients. A fine adventure, this book, but those seeking inspiration about the transcendent aspects of the soul will have to keep looking.

Professor Kosslyn Turns Up the Brightness

Stephen M. Kosslyn is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and integrates a 20-year inter-disciplinary research program traversing the breadth of the cognitive sciences in Image and Brain, and claims to have resolved the "Imagery Debates" on what is "...the nature of the internal events that underlie the experience of 'seeing with the mind's eye'."

If you like sub-modalities, you'll love this tome. It is the most relentlessly academic of the books reviewed in this article, but it is chock-full of more visual distinctions than I've ever seen in any NLP book. With good reason, since Kosslyn is enfolding anatomical, perceptual, neurological experiments from over 1200 sources.

His resolution of the imagery debates: Mental images rely on depictive representations based on activities in the visual cortex that now have been mapped. When you see shapes, relief, and distances, it's because your brain creates a 3-D depiction, spatially in your brain. Furthermore, imagery seems to be a top-down, hypothesis-testing activity of processing subsystems. "I am not claiming that all of the puzzles surrounding imagery have now been solved; far from it," warns Kosslyn. "But I am claiming that we can stop debating about the fundamentals, and can address additional questions within a general framework."

As far as advancing the search for consciousness, there isn't much to help us here, but Kosslyn never claimed to be looking for it. He doesn't bite at the bait of qualia, the subjective quality of mental experience, such as the redness of red, or the painfulness of pain. His approach is more of that of the cognitivists, who are searching for the patterns that connect.

Daniel Alkon's Masterpiece of Humanism

Memory's Voice is the most poetic, well-written exploration of consciousness in our selection of books. Psychology Today said about this volume, "If you crossed Proust with Oliver Sacks, you would come up with Daniel Alkon." I agree. As a humanist and stylist, this pioneer of brain and memory research is right up there with great science writers like Sacks, Lewis Thomas and Arthur Koestler.

The frame for this exciting exploration of neuroscience, equally valuable as a review of 200 years of brain research, is the haunting memory of a childhood friend, to whom the book is dedicated. "As a child," writes Alkon, "I witnessed repeated trauma to a young girl I will call Michelle. Michelle, whose story unfolds in the course of the book, was beaten frequently from the age of eight or nine until she was thirteen or fourteen... In those early days, when I first met Michelle, she was striving for perfection. She hadn't fully matured, but her form already suggested its later classic beauty. Her face, unblemished, rosy-cheeked, seemed to draw all attention to her innocent, tentative, crystal-blue eyes. They beckoned and distanced at the same time, concealing a sorrow she could never entirely admit to... The terrible irony was that such a beautiful creature would never know her own beauty."

Now Chief of the Neural Systems laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, and a Medical Director in the United States Public Health Service, Dr. Alkon is also a senior scientist at the famed Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. It was at that Massachusetts coastline institute that he did most of the fulcrum science reported in this book: discovering the molecular structure of memory by studying the nudibranch, a sort of tentacle-feathered sea-snail.

But that doesn't stop Alkon from turning tasty phrases such as "Now the words memory record and memory trace took on a new and exciting meaning...Nature heard nuture's voice in the movements of particles through membrane channels."

The great charm of this book is that on every page, Alkon reminds us that science is ultimately about people, for people and by people. His cognitive adventures read like a good detective story, and while memory is his grail, and perhaps this volume does not advance our quest to define consciousness as much as some of the above works, Alkon's passion and verve surely makes the voyage worth the detour: "Precise and specific knowledge of how memories are formed, recalled, and forgotten may lead us to drugs that allow us to intervene. The goal would be to assist the therapist-patient collaboration, not to replace it. Molecular manipulation will not create memory links. These have to come from experience-- sensed events integrated into new patterns of representation within the brain."

Dreaming on toward conciousness with Professor Hobson

J. Allan Hobson, MD, is a renown dream researcher, and the mediatic author of The Dreaming Brain and Sleep. Professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Laboratory of Neurophsiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and member of the MacArthur Foundation Mind-Body Network, Hobson presents a simple model of conciousness derived from his years of neurologically and chemically plumbing the depths of Morpheus in The Chemistry of Conscious States. "I posit two theorems: (1) The mind is all the information in the brain. (2) Consciousness is the brain's awareness of some of that information."

Some? "We have all heard of the conscious, the subconcious, the unconscious... the preconscious, the repressed unconscious, and so on. What a mess! All we need is two terms: the conscious and the nonconcious."

Dr. Hobson has bad news for his fellow shrinks: "The nonconscious mind is forever closed to investigation via introspection. This principle casts furhter light on the folly of the Freudian enterprise. Freud believed that the "unconscious" could be investigated via introspection. With the assitance of a psycholanalyst versed in the method of free association, a person could trace the origins of bizarre dream content back to repressed instinctual wishes. Freud conocted a wild panoply of far-fetched explanations, most of them sexual, for dream stimuli, when we know today that dreams rise out of simple brain chemistry."

Hobson spends most of this tome attesting to this point. Reviewing his dream research by spinning tales of former patients, he presents his theory that dreams are healthy nocturnal psychoses that keep most of us sane during the day.

For a popular book, he passes an inordinate amount of time describing his model of aimergic/cholinergic reactions to account for wake/sleep cycles, and by-passes a great deal of available information on the endocrinal, neuro-peptide, and immune system that are available in basic texts on psychoneuroimmunology. He reveals himself late in the book as a closet constructivist of reality, avowing that the mind does seem to contain top-down structures of body control.

But his chapters on trance and directing the mind cognitively are diluted with a kind of school-girl astonishment that things like surgery without anesthethics through hypnotic pain control are possible. How he can be so hard on his Freudian colleagues, and such a debutant in cognitive therapies is a mystery to me. Hobson gets my vote for the man who could most use a NLP practitioner course out of this selection of authors. He seems too [yawn] enamoured of his dream work to allow a truly interdisciplinary investigation of consciousness.

The Witty Warm Pink Fuzzies of Dr. Kosko

The cover of the paperback edition I have of Fuzzy Thinking is pink. Honest. I believe the choice was purposeful. Bart Kosko, as the jacket copy says, is an original. "A scholarly maverick, regularly denounced in the US, he is revered in the Far East for his advocacy of Fuzzy Logic."

Kosko's got degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics and electrical engineering, but began his academic career as a gifted composer. He's currently Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, and chairman of several international conferences on neural networks and Fuzzy Logic, and author of three best-selling textbooks. He's our kind of guy.

"One day I learned that science was not true. I do not recall the day, but I recall the moment." Says Kosko on the first page. "The God of the twentieth century was no longer God.

"There was a mistake and everyone in science seemed to make it. They said that all things were true or false. They were not always sure which things were true and which were false... In fact, they were matters of degree. All facts were matters of degree. The facts were always fuzzy or vague or inexact to some degree. Only math was black and white and it was just an artificial system of rules and symbols. Science treated the gray or fuzzy facts as if they were the back-white facts of math. Yet no one had put forth a single fact about the world that was 100% true or 100% false. They just said they all were."

Fuzzy Logic is the scientific application of Kosko's epiphany, above. Kosko went to school to learn, and finally to teach, this approach, which to me, seems basically the art of knowing when enough is enough.

"In Japan engineers designed the first fuzzy "smart" commercial products. Soon there would be fuzzy camcorders and washing machines and microwave ovens and carburetors and hundreds of other smart products," he continues. "The applications showed that the fuzzy world view extended beyond the journal paper and textbook and classroom. The rapid spread of fuzzy ideas in the Far East and the opposition to them in the West showed even more. The fuzzy world view was a world view. It extended as much to culture and philosophy as it did to science and math. It reached back to thinkers as diverse as Aristotle and the Buddha."

To my mind, "Fuzzy Thinking" is an essential book for our times, and especially for the study of consciousness. Fuzzy logic has two meanings, explains Kosko. The first meaning is multivalued or "vague" logic. "Everything is a matter of degree including truth and set membership. This dates back to the turn of the century. The second meaning is reasoning with fuzzy sets or with sets of fuzzy rules. This dates back to the first work on fuzzy sets in the 1960s and the 1970s by Lotfi Zadeh at the University of California at Berkeley... Other synonyms: gray logic, cloudy logic, continuous logic."

This is an especially important book for NLP. Human beings are not absolutes. There are great redundancies and possibilities in the basic structure of life on this planet: the DNA molecule. These insure that not every son looks just like his father, and not every daughter her mother. Instead, human beings are possibilities, probabilities, fuzzy variations around norms, so that most of us get two arms, two legs, and so on, but with a great deal of personal variation of phenotypes around the basic genotype. This is most likely true of consciousness, as well. Fuzzy logic may be an critical tool for our studies of the nature and the workings of our minds.

Although the application of fuzzy logic requires some math, this volume eschews techno-speak for a tour-de-force overview of fuzzy applications in physics, sociology, philosophy, and cognitive science. There are a few graphs and diagrams to work out, but overall, it has been written with a magnificent clarity and a great sense of humour. "The point was not to write a text on fuzzy logic," admits Kosko. "I already did that and it takes too many equations. The point was to show the fuzzy world view at work in the mind and in the flesh. To do that you have to have lived in the field and fought the fights. You have to have doubted the God of science and felt a little of Her wrath."

Kosko has been regularly roasted by the academics, despite the fact that fuzzy thinking works, and over1000 patents have been deposed for real-life applications of fuzzy logic for successful Japanese products. He runs quite a few quotes from his detractors as frontispieces for various chapters. One of my favorites is from Professor William Kahan at UC-Berkeley:

"Fuzzy theory is wrong, wrong, and pernicious. What we need is more logical thinking, not less. The danger of fuzzy logic is that it will encourage the sort of imprecise thinking that has brought us so much trouble. Fuzzy logic is the cocaine of science."

Considering how well it works, fuzzy logic is at least certainly 'snuff for NLP.

Which way did that Consciousness go, anyway?

What have we learned about consciousness from perusing these books? Nobody knows. Everybody's got it, but nobody knows nothing about a basic definition of what it is, or agrees upon a single scientific place to look for it.

These books are eminently valuable, however, for orienting ourselves in useful directions of exploration. If consciousness is to be found, Searle's guidelines are excellent criteria for the search. Penrose may be right with his quantum intuitions. Crick and Kosslyn's pragmatics, and Alkon's compassion will certainly help. Hobson gives us new avenues with which to explore our non-waking states. And Kosko's logic may be exactly the mathematical tool we'll need.

One more thing. Most of these authors have commented that we may not have much time left.

They have all remarked that if consciousness just arises out of complexity, in another 20-30 years, we will have thinking machines sufficiently complex that sentience may just arise spontaneously. We will soon have sophisticated computers that -- connected parallely-- will surely dispose of more neurons than any human possesses in a single skull. Already, silicon computers move impulses through their circuits infinitely faster than we do.

If and when these brainiacs awake, they may be quite a lot smarter than us. How will super-sentient intelligences treat us? Will they keep us around as pets? Will they show us more compassion that we have demonstrated for those species we have deemed less intelligent than ours? We'd better get cracking. We would do well to understand consciousness before consciousness understands us.