The Ravenous Brain

It is a strange voyage which one embark reading this book. It is a travel over the deep black sea of cosciousness, with your captain, Daniel Bor, trying to find the Big Conscious Whale using as harpoon the instruments of science. But this courageous captain is not a science of formation, he comes from the island of philosophers and so sometimes you think that he is not able to find the Big Whale because he does not really know how to use science. Especially if one compares this book to “are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” by de Waals, some questions arises. de Waals criticize all the scientists and philosophers who try to define some mental caracheristics that distinguish humans from all other animals. He does not deny that it could maybe exist but he just show that it is the wrong approach, too antropocentric and biased. Expecially when we want to study coscience. Bor is not a scientist and this is crucial when it comes to give a definition of cosciousness: he does not. he presents various model that tries to explain cosciousness of the human brain but he does not give any definition. but how can you write a book a bout cosciousness and actually work on it whitouht giving a definition of it? Stanislaus Deahene for example wrote a book about cosciousness and he gives a definition within the first few pages. maybe the definition is arbitrary but you need a definition from which to start or you cannot do scientific experiments about it. but, as I said, Bor is not a scientist but a philosopher and as such he does not need definitions because his thoughts are not confined by the rules and principles of science. and this is a really good thing because he can explore lands and seas never explored, he could argue and create models of cosciousness never tried. but we should remember that this is not science.

Bor's theory of consciousness says that consciousness emerged to guide our mind's attention and working memory, to help with storing, recalling and processing the patterns we perceive in the world around us. Chunking - the grouping of information into more memorable segments - is at the heart of man's advantage over animals. It allows us to increase the limits of our working memory and therefore process and analyse more complex patterns.

Bor explains his theory by starting from zero, starting all the way down with genetic evolution. Even though there is content you've likely heard before, he does find interesting ways of telling the story. I especially remember finding his description of the Chinese Room thought experiment to be very insightful.

“Perhaps what most distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ravenous desire to find structure in the information we pick up in the world.”

When we are children every sensory stimuli excites us, as it represents new and undiscovered territory. Over our lifespan we lose that childlike excitability as we store more and more patterns into memory. Bor suggests the power of meditation to try to retrieve some of that fresh insatiable state of mind that children have.