Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness

Like many others, I have been struggling to understand how consciousness works for years, and Nicholas Humphrey has written two of the most illuminating books - 'Seeing Red' a few years back and now 'Soul Dust'. The other two books that have helped me a great deal are Daniel Dennett's 'Consciouness Explained' and Igor Aleksander's 'The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World' (not a book that seems to be widely known). Humphrey's latest book, taken with these other three, makes real progress in shedding light on a notoriously difficult problem - how and why are we conscious? He brings in important considerations such as why do we enjoy life, which philosophers usually don't seem to understand, and his prose has a marvellous lightness of touch. Well worth getting for anyone who is keen to learn about the topic.

Fantastic

I am truly grateful to Nicholas Humphrey for this book. I have been concentrating on how scientists see consciousness for some time now and I normally gain something of value whilst disagreeing with a lot. With this book Nicholas Humphrey has bridged the gap between the academic study of this topic and all the rest of us. After a relatively short scientific gestation period, the study of consciousness has caught us all up!The study was pulled from the hands of philosophers who had made little progress and finally put into the spotlight by scientists. Admittedly, the neuroscientists seemed to be leading the pack. But here is Nicholas Humphrey, a Professor of Psychology, coming up on the outside.Not only has he positioned consciousness with respect to evolution, convincingly in my view, he has also expounded a theory for the way we view the world around us through the veil of consciousness. That theory, which I am not going to attempt to paraphrase here, could have undermined my own thinking but it hasn't. If anything it has cleansed my vision. It has made everything around me more real and more meaningful.Nicholas Humphrey's book is a breakthrough and a joy to read. After 20 or so years of scientific study perhaps now, with this book, science can approach this topic in a way that will have relevance for us all.

Given previous form, the reader reviews and professional references, I confess to expecting something almost revolutionary. Upon reading the three sections of this book I had mixed feelings. However, I still applaud any good scientific mind with the courage to tackle the 'hard problem'; (how an entity made entirely of physical matter can experience conscious feelings), and come up with meaningful answers.The first part of this book was my least favourite. Humphrey's does encourage the reader to persevere with the early chapters, in the interest of laying a foundation for the rest, but I found this part an unnecessarily long and convoluted way of arriving at his consciousness description: "A magic show that you stage for yourself inside your head."Though Humphrey's logic seems fairly robust, I found the use of invented words to be unhelpful in communicating his ideas because it disrupts the flow of the message e.g "the illusion generating ipsundrum was conjured up out of sentition." p52On a more positive note there is no shortage of Humphrey's addressing really interesting questions, especially in part two, which examines consciousness in the light of natural history. I really like his idea of self awareness being synonymous with a stronger will to live and therefore having survival value. That said, I did not read a justification here as to why Humphrey's thinks other explanations are less likely: Maybe consciousness is partly a by-product of a separate adaption, an inevitable consequence of increased the mental hardware required to construct grammatical speech?Part three sees a thought provoking foray into the ability of the phenomenally conscious human ability to contemplate their own mortality (though it would appear that chimpanzees have not yet achieved this benchmark). Humphrey's is right that people are not comfortable dwelling on this subject, his summary of how people deal with death was edifying.I admit to being provoked by his comment on p191, "Human beings ought rationally to believe in a afterlife.", but have to agree with his observation that the vast majority do.In summary, this book will undoubtedly prove interesting to students of philosophy, but I think it is far from Humphrey's most coherent effort, if you want a really good example of his writing buy "Soul Searching" instead.

Having read some good reviews of this book, I was looking forward to a mind expanding tour-de-force that would provide a credible account and explanation of consciousness, how it arose and how the brain creates it. Unfortunately, for me at least, Humphrey failed to provide a convincing argument for any of this.His ideas of how the brain uses its inherent feedback loops to create the illusion of consciousness are no more than just-so stories. His supposition is that consciousness is "a magic show that you stage for yourself inside your head . . . based on a contrived illusion: the sensory ipsundrum, which is an evolutionary develpment of sentition . . . " This is hypothesis without barely a shred of objectively verifiable evidence to support it. Instead of science Humphrey, thoughout the book, relies on quotations from other sources, mainly other philosophers, writers and poets to buttress his case. Most scientists, when putting forward a hypothesis like this, would accompany it with a proposed programme of research that would either provide supporting evidence or disprove it. This book contains nothing of the sort.In the second section of the book Humphrey attempts to show how his model of consciousness could have evolved through natural selection. But, his understanding of the mechanisms of evolution by natural selection appear to be sparse and flawed. For example, his contention is that consciousness and the awareness of self improves self preservation through the enhancement of the joy of living and being. But he ignores the glaringly obvious fact that all creatures have already evolved to preserve themselves (and other carriers of their genes) without having to support the burden of consciousness. A possibly stronger hypothesis might be made that consciousness evolved as a result of sexual selection, but the book does not even mention this. Humphreys goes on to say, ". . . nothing in evolution by natural selection is really just a matter of luck . . . " Well, natural selection relies utterly on the appearance of random beneficial mutations that are preserved and amplified in the gene pool. If a cosmic particle fails to hit the right bit of DNA at the right time to create a mutation, or if the right DNA copying error does not happen to occur to produce a minor improvement to the phenotype, then a particular line of natural selection cannot occur. It is just a matter of random chance ie "luck"; natural selection is simply very good at cashing in on any lucky breaks that occur.The third and final section of the book tries to show how spirituality, the ideas of the soul and immortality are inevitable and inescapable, even logical, consequences of consciousness, resulting in both rewards and anxieties. Some of this section was more credible but, I feel, offered little that was new or obvious. I was surprised that he had little to say about religion other than " . . . religious belief - especially belief in God - can be something of a drag on it [spirituality]". That was probably the biggest truth in the book.I found Humphrey's style convoluted and heavy. His recourse to quoting other (and far better) writers leavened this a little, but his occasional attempts at humour didn't really help to lighten this difficult read.