Well worth reading if you are interested in consciousness and its neural underpinnings

One of our Greatest Intellectual Mysteries Finally solved | Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness | Gerald M. Edelman

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	• Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness Gerald M. Edelman Yale University Press, 2005 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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right ideas but could have been better written

In my opinion the author comes closer than any other in providing us with the theory of consciousness that will prevail in the future.He bases his theory on scientific and experimental basis and not on endless philosophical conversations .His scientific background is impressive and evident in every page of the book .For these he gets easily from me the 5 stars. However the author in the middle of the book fails in writting clearly, trying to understand what he wants to express becomes demanding and his endeavor to make the book both scientific and readable by the average reader doesn't succeed.Dr Edelman I look forward for your next book, I hope you have developed your ideas as I am expecting from you the ultimate consciousness theory!

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Well worth reading if you are interested in consciousness and its neural underpinnings

This book is a short read, and thought-provoking. Edelman is one of a select group of cogniscenti on consciousness -- he really knows his stuff. He is a neuroscientist, and does not shy away from detailing neuroanatomical systems in his writing. For people who do not have any background in neuroscience, this book might seem a bit impenetrable. For those who are deeply interested in neuroscience and the information it can provide on human intelligence and consciousness, I have heard that Edelman's book Topobiology is a longer, more comprehensive version of Wider Than the Sky, and well worth reading. Although I have not read that book, I would suggest that Wider Than the Sky might be a good place to start, and make that book more easily understandable.

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One of our Greatest Intellectual Mysteries Finally solved

Building systematically and admirably on his previous work (A Universe of Consciousness), Gerald Edelman, has finally succeeded in cracking the cosmic code of the mind body problem, or how the conscious mind is a direct product of, rather than an indirect, or by-produce of, or even an epiphenomenon of, physical processes that take place in the brain.

Not only has he exhibited the brain parts, chemical processes and functions responsible for consciousness, also he has mapped them into identifiable aspects of conscious processes themselves. And more importantly, in doing so, his research meets the highest cannon of scientific enquiry: It is empirically based, definitions and hypotheses are lay out clearly; and then they are systematically and clearly proven. Every aspect of the research is transparent and replicable. It is also simply explained, but following Einstein's famous edict, it is not explained simpler than necessary. Yet, even where it is not so simple, it is clear enough that the courageous reader -- bent on following this exiciting adventure to the bitter end -- can indeed follow and understand the meaning of these important conclusions.

In an inmaterial aside, I must say I had put all my bets on another horse in this race to immortality. I thought that Dan Dennett and his computer analogies would in the end prove weightier in this important scientific foot race.

Dispite my earlier misgivings about the Edelman approach, I now know that this always was the best horse in the race. I am thus a happy loser. Two cheers and five stars for the winner.

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A Taste of Brilliance, Then A Let Down

I was disappointed by this book. I have read a number of recent works on consciousness, and in them I've seen quite a few positive references to bioscientist Gerald Edelman. Philosopher John Searle, who some regard as the "dean" of the consciousness debate, says that Edelman may understand the physical and functional workings of the human brain better than anyone else (see Searle's The Mystery of Consciousness). Edelman's work regarding the brain's ability to set up ad-hoc looping circuits between the many "maps" within it (i.e., small segments that specialize in a particular task, e.g. the area that identifies colors from visual inputs) is very powerful. It addresses many important questions, such as how we experience things in a unified manner when many different areas of our brain separately process the elements and sub-elements of sight, sound, smell and touch.

Thus, I had hoped that Wider Than the Sky would be Edelman's attempt to unfold his powerful insights regarding brain-mind dynamics before the reasonably educated masses. Unfortunately, Dr. Edelman chose to zip through his important ideas so as to dish out a warmed-over version of philosopher Daniel Dennett's functional materialism. This book should be compared with Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works. Pinker wrote a long book that eventually did what it promised, despite breezy asides about Queen Elizabeth, Lilly Tomlin, Leonard Nimoy and the like. Pinker ultimately stuck to analyzing the processes by which the human brain forwards the interests of the body to which it is attached, within a changing and challenging environment. Pinker remained agnostic to the ultimate question of what consciousness is and what its nature might be. I myself would have preferred it if Edelman had stuck to that script.

Edelman does indeed give the reader a taste of some important concepts regarding the dynamics of the brain. These would include: re-entrant neuron looping between processing areas; neural group selection (or day-to-day Darwinism, the on-going shaping of the "plastic" brain); degeneracy (i.e. the ability to quickly change the looping circuits in a way that responds to new stimuli, but doesn't immediately drop the thought or perception that you were attending to); and "value systems" (a spaghetti-like network of connections originating under the cortex, which in effect spray the brain with mood and mind-altering chemicals such as serotonin and ACH at the right times, helping the body to enforce its basic agenda of survival, reproduction and probably other "higher-order" agenda derived from learning experience). But Edelman doesn't take the time to develop these fascinating ideas with needed examples and analogies, so as to help the lay reader to appreciate what he and his team have discovered regarding brain processes. He's like those "I'm only going to say this once" professors that you try to forget once the semester is over.

Instead of explaining his research, Dr. Edelman leads us up the metaphysical mountain of consciousness, where we sit at his feet as he purifies us of any superstitious, dualistic notions regarding who we are and what it's like to be human. He tells us that consciousness, as we "folk" think of it, is ultimately just a side-effect of material interactions. He explains that qualia is really a function, i.e. the brain's ability to discriminate different portions of a mental image. And he fails to acknowledge those who had put forth similar ideas in the past. It's a shame; Edelman rushes through the really innovative research that he is doing, to dwell on a set of ideas that you could get the hang of in an hour or two from one of those Totem / Icon "comic books" (i.e., Introducing Consciousness by D. Papineau and H. Selina).

Edelman takes some other interesting positions, but fails to alert the reader as to their speculative and controversial nature (I mean, isn't that what footnotes are for?). Regarding emotions and feelings, he gives them minimal consideration, passing them off as a side-effect of value system operations (those mind chemicals, remember?). By contrast, some mind analysts such as Antonio Damasio and Susan Greenfield give emotions top-billing. Edelman dismisses the notion advanced by Jerry Fodor that the mind uses a "language" of sorts between its specialty components, and the related notion regarding proto-language, which underlies Chomsky's views about the universal elements of all human languages. I can't say that Edelman is wrong here, but a footnote acknowledging the existence of differing viewpoints seems to be the usual practice. Are Nobel Prize winners permanently excused from the need to footnote?

One more example of Dr. Edelman's intellectual rope-walking without a net: he posits that the human brain has greater computing capabilities than the hypothetical "Turing Machine", which is an intellectual keystone of computing theory. This sounds OK until you do a search on the topic and discover "hypercomputation", a very uncertain and controversial concept. I'd venture that Dr. Edelman is wandering quite far from the zone of expertise where he earned a Nobel Prize (regarding his work in immunology). The same applies to his metaphysical (or anti-metaphysical) admonitions regarding "folk understanding" of human consciousness. His thoughts would make for a lengthy and interesting footnote, for sure. But this book is not about footnotes - it has none (although it does contain a very useful glossary). Wider Than the Sky is another unfortunate example of a brilliant person doing some very interesting research about the brain, who gives in to the temptation of lecturing mere mortals regarding their unenlightened assumptions. I hope that Dr. Edelman came closer to the Pinker tradition of exposition and respect for the general audience in his (Edelman's) other popular works (Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and Second Nature). But I'm not in any hurry to bet on it -- too many other interesting authors on the mind and consciousness to get to.

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How does the firing of neurons give rise to subjective sensations, thoughts, and emotions? How can the disparate domains of mind and body be reconciled? The quest for a scientifically based understanding of consciousness has attracted study and speculation across the ages. In this direct and non-technical discussion of consciousness, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman draws on a lifetime of scientific inquiry into the workings of the brain to formulate answers to the mind-body questions that intrigue every thinking person.
Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains. Edelman explores the relation of consciousness to causation, to evolution, to the development of the self, and to the origins of feelings, learning, and memory. His analysis of the brain activities underlying consciousness is based on recent remarkable advances in biochemistry, immunology, medical imaging, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, yet the implications of his book extend farther?beyond the worlds of science and medicine into virtually every area of human inquiry.

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