The Conscious Mind, Zoltan Torey
The Conscious Mind, Zoltan Torey
5 Rating(s)
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The Conscious Mind

Author: Zoltan Torey

Narrator: Don Hagen

Unabridged: 3 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 07/01/2015


Synopsis

How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Zoltan Torey offers an accessible and concise description of the evolutionary breakthrough that created the human mind. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and linguistics, Torey reconstructs the sequence of events by which Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. He describes the augmented functioning that underpins the emergent mind -- a new ("off-line") internal response system with which the brain accesses itself and then forms a selection mechanism for mentally generated behavior options. This functional breakthrough, Torey argues, explains how the animal brain's "awareness" became self-accessible and reflective -- that is, how the human brain acquired a conscious mind. Consciousness, unlike animal awareness, is not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey's account shows how protolanguage evolved into language, how a brain subsystem for the emergent mind was built, and why these developments are opaque to introspection. We experience the brain's functional autonomy, he argues, as free will. Torey proposes that once life began, consciousness had to emerge -- because consciousness is the informational source of the brain's behavioral response. Consciousness, he argues, is not a newly acquired "quality," "cosmic principle," "circuitry arrangement," or "epiphenomenon," as others have argued, but an indispensable working component of the living system's manner of functioning.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Olve on March 30, 2019

This is the one book to read on consciousness. I’m not a neuroscientist, so I can’t evaluate all the detailed claims in this book. As Torey himself acknowledges, the science is controversial, and the science behind each chapter deserves at least a book by itself. But the takeaway is not contingent o......more

Goodreads review by Gary on February 22, 2015

Excellent and accessible story of how consciousness and mind emerged from animal awareness. I find that this study along with the book Incomplete Nature which I finished a few months earlier are the best yet conceptualizations of this process of development/emergence. Highly recommended. I want to e......more

Goodreads review by Sebastian on September 01, 2023

Solid introduction to neuro-minded theories of consciousness. Much like the Joker, the author’s origin story is being permanently wounded by a vat of acid. Following a similar trajectory as the Joker, he attempts to make a physicalist argument about consciousness without being as anti-fun (he tries t......more

Goodreads review by Anthony on April 18, 2021

What the Very disappointing. A work of this kind should surely contain a brief summary of current work and views. Instead we get a rolling fluffy wordy personal theory about all and everything. Not even a theory. Not the ‘model I am proposing’ we keep hearing about. Just a farrago of suggestive conce......more

Goodreads review by mark on November 14, 2016

A really brilliant (and that's not just my opinion) short book detailing a theory of how the brain became aware of itself and developed into a self-reflective mind with the capacity to monitor and thus withhold response, i.e., the development of (limited) free-will. And it's beautifully and mostly f......more