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Rethinking Consciousness
- A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's summary
Focusing attention can help an animal find food or flee a predator. It also may have led to consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano uses examples from the natural world to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as necessary.
Then some animals evolved covert attention - a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory.
Graziano proposes that in order to monitor and control this specialized attention, the brain evolved a simplified model of it - a cartoonish self-description depicting an internal essence with a capacity for knowledge and experience. In other words, consciousness.
In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.
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Freedom Evolves
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- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
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Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers "yes!" Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original arguments - drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy - that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally.
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I knew I was going to like this book
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Your Brain Is a Time Machine
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In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell and perceive time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel" - simulations of future and past events.
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Great book on an underrated subject
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The Big Picture
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Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?
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ABSOLUTE MUST READ!
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Undeniable
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Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the "design intuition" - the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.
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Seductively Challenge what are consider facts
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Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
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Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining, and accessible collection reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You'll learn where brains came from, how they're structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience.
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slow reader & little bit of a Wokie
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The Spike
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This audiobook narrated by Anand Jagatia tells the extraordinary story of a neural impulse and what it reveals about how our brains work.
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Read this a year ago, very handy info
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Beyond Biocentrism
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In Beyond Biocentrism, acclaimed biologist Robert Lanza and astronomer Bob Berman take the listener on an intellectual thrill ride as they reexamine everything we thought we knew about life, death, the universe, and the nature of reality itself. The first step is acknowledging that our existing model of reality is looking increasingly creaky in the face of recent scientific discoveries.
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Here's the thing
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The Perfect You
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There are a lot of personality tests out there designed to label you and put you in a particular box. But Dr. Caroline Leaf says there's much more to you than a personality profile can capture. In fact, you cannot be categorized! In this fascinating book, she takes listeners through seven steps to rediscover and unlock their unique "you quotient".
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Hands down, the most helpful book I've listened to
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The Master Algorithm
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Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.
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Great book, irritating narration
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By: Pedro Domingos
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Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.
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Don't buy - visual examples missing, no pdf
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For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime's quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies.
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Fascinating
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What listeners say about Rethinking Consciousness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Orca
- 10-23-19
Disappointing and strangely anachronistic
I enjoyed the Social Brain, and the elucidation of an attention schema (author's previous work), but much of this book reads like a step sideways not forward. It's got an overly avuncular tone (which may also have to do with the narrator) and is an underwhelming summary of the pop-culture approach to consciousness. Especially the final chapters which read like an exercise in wool gathering and clichés.
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3 people found this helpful
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- And vice versa
- 08-14-20
Almost excellent, and very helpful
Graziano’s attention schema theory of consciousness is almost understandable to the devoted lay reader/listener. Almost, but not quite. Regardless, he makes a persuasive case that the mysteriousness of consciousness will be solved, and also that there is no barrier precluding consciousness in machines. (We are, after all, conscious machines ourselves.) It even makes me think that while the details are important and remain to be fully hammered out, the bigger picture isn’t as hard as some would suggest. Excellent narrator, btw.
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- Matt Creech
- 05-31-20
Thought-provoking survey of consciousness science
While the book focuses primarily on Attention Schema Theory -- the scientific theory of consciousness developed and supported by the author -- it's a pretty good overview of the landscape of scientists' thinking on consciousness in general. Graziano goes to some lengths to describe not just AST, but also the other leading categories of theories around consciousness.
For me it lacked a little detail, painting a great picture in broad strokes but not refining the predictions & ramifications of AST, or contrasting it against other theories in a way that helps to differentiate them. But I think for the general public, whose main purpose is something like "understand what consciousness is and how it relates to better-understood systems of information processing", rather than "get testable predictions for designing experiments" or "enumerate detailed subjective ramifications of objective theories of consciousness", the book hits the bullseye.
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- David J.
- 05-09-24
Unbelievable scope of work!
I can't believe I learned the evolution of the brain in such depth and awesomeness. Starting with one of my favorite subjects, early evolution, all the way up to mind uploading??! I had no idea mind uploading was even a thing and now I fully believe in humanity's digital future. It was actually great hearing that after finishing my last book about the Fermi paradox.
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- wbiro
- 12-10-19
Clueless on Many Fronts
Does not realize
(1) that he is merely playing semantic parlor games (ex. 'attention' vs 'awareness');
(2) that there are varying degrees of consciousness (he's pursuing a go, no-go perspective, which is less useful, if not useless);
(3) that he is proposing Perspectives, not hard science, and that the value of perspectives are their useful (if any));
(3) that emotions are used to affect outcomes (usually social), and that they can easily be programmed;
(4) that his grasp of artificial intelligence consciousness is askew, and his potifications on future AI's internal workings are weak.
Interesting was the idea of measuring consciousness.
He has a Philosophy of Death (he does not want to live forever).
He misunderstands mind uploading, in that you will not be uploaded, but only an initial copy of you, which will immediately begin to become different (individualized) with different new experiences.
All in all, he represents Continued Universal Human Cluelessness, and all of the deficiencies associated with it. On that level (philosophical), it was torture for me to listen to. The science was enjoyable.
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- Dror
- 11-07-19
A conscious spark of joy
Prof. Graziano delineates clearly and intuitively what consciousness really is.
This book is a swift and Jargon-free journey to the recent advance in neurobiology and especially a computational theory of consciousness. It takes you from the evolution of the conscious brain trough the biological technicality and advantages, the philosophical considerations, and the possible future of conscious machines and mind uploading.
I think that the final chapters on mind uploading and futurism are too speculative. After all, the attention-schema theory of mind does not require a full brain-scan for mind uploading. It is not even clear that you need a neural network for that. Nevertheless, the ideas are mind-blowing and inspiring. A most read to any intellectual.
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