AT PRESENT, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER; SOME OF THESE HAVE BEEN PUT ON RESERVE
David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You, Pantheon
Books, New York, 2015.
[Wonderfully engaging popular presentation of brain function and consciousness,
corresponding to the PBS television series.]
Pentti O Haikonen, Consciousness and Robot Sentience,
World Scientific 2012. Available online at
http://marte.aslab.upm.es/redmine/files/dmsf/p_robot-self/150806143319_112_Haikonen_-_Consciousness_and_Robot_Sentience.pdf.
[A broad-coverage discussion an assessment of many approaches to the
analysis and engineering of consciousness, culminating in Haikonen's own
model, which he argues is the only one explaining real consciousness.
He says that conscious qualia are the internal appearance of perceptual
processes -- they don't have a separate function, but require a certain
processing architecture in order to exist. He emphasizes the role
of associative processes (relating and coordinating different kinds of
information in the brain), various feedback loops, and the need for
subsymbolic and symbolic processing, language, and a self-concept.
There are reasonable overviews and assessments of Baars and Shanahan
towards the end of the book, and good bulleted summaries after each
chapter. But the technical content of the book just consists of various
functional architecture proposals, with block diagrams, and it's entirely
unclear how to fill in the higher-level, more abstract blocks. E.g.,
there are boxes like "cognitive evaluations and report" (p.57), "situation
model" (p.65), "distributed representation" (of sensory input) (p.126),
"autoassociative memory" (p. 136), "search routine" (p.156), "mental
process" (p.168), "internal needs" (p.170), "context" (p.183), etc.
Where and how do the self-concept and language arise in this model?
Chapter 21 is about Haikonen's robot XCR-1, which fills in the various
architectural boxes in extermely simple ways. E.g., object perception
is limited to two objects -- and depends on these objects emitting
infrared pulses at distinct frequencies. The self-concept turns out
to be a simple "self-concept signal" (p.214), allowing it associate its
perceptions and activities with "me", and enabling it to say (via some
canned language) "me hurt", when hit, "me search", when searching for an
object and "me touch", when the touch sensors indicate contact pressure.
Architecture alone just isn't sufficient. Seemingly sophisticated
architectural models lead to unconvincing "conscious" (or "intelligent")
machines when implemented minimalistically -- we're apt to end up with
artifical insects or even microbes.]
M. Shanahan, Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and
Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds, Oxford University Press,
2010.
[A Baars-like model of consciousness, except that he rejects the "theater"
metaphor in favor of communication networks centered around the global
workspace, with major components like working memory, episodic memory,
and sensory cortex. See Haikonen, p.193, above.]
Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic
Reductionist, MIT Press, 2012.
[Koch is an eminent cognitive neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain
Science, and this book is engaging; but, based on some analyses by eminent
theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson, the information-theoretic
"Φ" theory of consciousness (due to G. Tononi) is a nonstarter.]
Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, Vintage Press, 2010.
{Endorsed by Yo-Yo Ma! :-}
["He emphasizes wakefulness, self-awareness, reflection, rationality,
'knowledge of one's own existence and of the existence of surroundings'"
(from a New York Times book review by Ned Block). But Damasio downplays the
idea of qualia, and elsewhere rejects symbolic processing in favor of imagistic
processing, rather than allowing for both, which I find untenable.]
Bernard J. Baars & Nicole Gage Cognition, Brain and Consciousness:
An Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience, Elsevier/Academic Press,
London, second edition 2010.
Ray Kurzweil How to Create a Mind, Viking Press 2012.
[A book proposing hierarchical pattern recognition and prediction
(e.g., much as implemented in hierarchical hidden Markov models,
HHMMs) as basis for cognition in humans and machines. But he
discusses recent AI successes (such as IBM's Watson) and many
other AI-related topics along the way, and ch. 9 is quite a good
discussion of consciousness.]
John A. Anderson How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical
Universe?, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007, isbn=9780195324259.
Stan Franklin, Artificial Minds, MIT Press, 1997.
[About the nature of mind, rejecting a rigid distinction between mind
and non-mind. Overviews of AI, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience,
etc., with glimpses of Newell's SOAR, Holland's genetic algorithms,
Wilson's Animat, Brooks' subsumption architecture, Jackson's
pandemonium theory, Ornstein's multimind, Marvin Minsky's
society of mind, Patti Maes's behaviour networks, Gerald
Edelman's neural Darwinism, Drescher's schema mechanisms, Pentti
Kanerva's sparse distributed memory, Douglas Hofstadter and
Melanie Mitchell's Copycat, and Agre and Chapman's deictic
representations.]
Jeffrey Foss, Science and the Riddle of Consciousness: A Solution,
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000.
Daniel N. Robinson, Consciousness and Mental Life,
Columbia Univ. Press, New York, 2008. Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness, MIT Press, 1997. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, (W.W. Norton & Co.,
New York and London, 1997.
Baars, B. J., William P. Banks, and James B. Newman (eds), Essential
sources in the scientific study of consciousness, 2003.
Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial
Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind, Amazon.com 2006.
Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, Basic Books, 2007.
S. Hameroff, A. Kaszniak, & A. Scott, eds, Toward a Science of
Consciousness II. MIT Press, 1996.
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
Brain, Avon Books, 1994.
J. Cohen & J. Schooler (eds), Scientific Approaches to Consciousness.
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997.
Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Guven Guzeldere (eds.), The Nature
of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, Bradford, MIT Press,
1997.
M.I. Stamenov (ed.), Language Structure, Discourse, and the Access to
Consciousness. John Benjamins, 1997.
M. Ito, Y. Miyashita & E. T. Rolls, eds, Cognition, Computation, and
Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 1997.
D.R. Hofstadter & D.C. Dennett, The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections
on Self and Soul. Basic Books, 1981.
G. Underwood, (ed), Aspects of Consciousness, Volume 3: Awareness and
Self-Awareness. Academic Press, 1997.
P. Pylkkanen & T. Vaden, (eds), Dimensions of Conscious Experience.
John Benjamins, 2001
J. LeDoux, J. Debiec, & H. Moss, The Self: From Soul to Brain,
NY Academy of Sciences, 2003.
N. Osaka, (ed) Neural Basis of Consciousness. John Benjamins, 2003
Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will, MIT Press, Bradford
Books, 2002.
David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press,
1996.
P. Carruthers, The involvement of language in conscious thinking.
In Language, Thought, and Consciousness. Cambridge University Press,
1996.
H.A. Nielsen, Evolution and consciousness: The Role of Speech in
the Origin and Development of Human Nature.
J. Snodgrass & R. Thompson, (eds), The Self across Psychology:
Self-recognition, Self-awareness, and the Self Concept. New York Academy
of Sciences, 1997.
Ray Jackendoff, Consciousness and the Computational Mind. MIT Press,
1987.
G. Edelman, Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness.
Yale University Press, 2004.
J. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping Up on the Hard Problem.
Oxford University Press, 2004.
W. Huemer, The Constitution of Consciousness. Routledge,
2004.
C. Koch, The Quest for Consciousness. Roberts and Company, 2004.
Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness. Oxford University
Press, 2005.
D. Radner and M. & Radner, Animal Consciousness. Prometheus
Books, 1996.
M. Stamenov & V. Gallese (eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution
of Brain and Language. John Benjamins, 2002.
T. Metzinger, Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and
Conceptual Questions. MIT Press, 2000.
B. Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of
Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2000.
J. Snodgrass R. Thompson, (eds), The Self across Psychology:
Self-recognition, Self-awareness, and the Self Concept.
New York Academy of Sciences, 1997.
[Provides much greater depth on brain function than
[A book by a Canadian philosopher carefully analyzing the requirements
for a scientific analysis of phenomenal consciousness, and advocating
a view of objective and subjective perspectives as complementary.]
[A very erudite critique, from a philosophical perspective, of any
and all claims that the hard problem of consciousness has been "solved",
whether by philosophical functionalists like Daniel Dennett or cognitive
neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio. He defends Descartes and more
ancient philosophers as having had insights at least as deep and
carefully formulated as those of the "moderns".]
[Baron-Cohen argues that we "mindread" all the time, from early childhood
onward, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. This enables
us to interpret facial expressions, gestures, and social behavior, and to
ascribe mental states to people, including thoughts, desires, knowledge,
and intentions. Autistic children suffer from impairment of the
mindreading mechanism. Mindreading is very relevant to self-awareness,
because we can surely turn the modelling of mind inward upon ourselves.
Interestingly, recent research (after this book) suggests that
mind-modelling and language ability evolved at the same time --
mind-modelling seems centered in the part of the right cerebral
hemisphere corresponding to Broca's area in the left hemisphere,
as mentioned in the Economist '06 artcle ...]
[A wonderful book on the high-level functioning of the mind,
by a cognitive scientist who is also an expert on language (he previously
wrote the acclaimed book, The Language Instinct). He describes
the mind's functional modules, its learning mechanisms, and its
evolutionary background, with lucidity and panache. His most recent,
also thoroughly intriguing and entertaining book, is The Stuff of Thought:
Language as a Window into Human Nature.]
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Last Change:
19 April 2022 / Len Schubert