Two ideas that stood out when I read The Consciousness Instinct:
Consciousness does not have a location in the brain
“For sure, the holy grail of science is to find consciousness in the brain, but trust me, it would have been found by now if there were such a thing to find.” (page 134)
“Simply trying to locate the structure that produces consciousness, as Descartes and many of his predecessors have attempted, will not unveil the Holy Grail, because consciousness is inherent throughout the brain. Cutting huge chunks from the cortex does not disrupt consciousness, but only changes its contents.” (pages 230-31)
Brains aren’t like machines, so it’s unlikely machines will ever behave like brains
“[T]he traditional deterministic classical machine analogy for life is exactly backward. Brains aren’t like machines; machines are like brains with something missing…. [H]umans evolved through natural selection, whereas machines are made by humans.” (pages 226-27)
“I now think we humans will never build a machine that mimics our personal consciousness. Inanimate silicon-based machines work one way, and living carbon-based systems work another. One works with a deterministic set of instructions, and the other through symbols that inherently carry some degree of uncertainty. This perspective leads to the view that the human attempt to mimic intelligence and consciousness in machines, a continuing goal in the field of AI, is doomed. If living systems work on the principle of complementarity—the idea that the physical side is mirrored with an arbitrary symbolic side, with symbols that are the result of natural selection—then purely deterministic models of what makes life will always fall short.” (page 236)
When and Why I Read The Consciousness Instinct
Another brain book.
Genre: cognitive science
Date started / date finished: 23-Mar-25 to 19-Apr-25
Length: 259 pages
ISBN: 9780374538156
Originally published in: 2018/2019
Amazon link: The Consciousness Instinct
