Carter's Consciousness example essay topic

The thinking machineConsciousnessby Rita Carter 319 pp, Weidenfeld The science of consciousness is like a car revving loudly while stuck in neutral. Just a decade ago, mind researchers were bright with confidence. Neuroscientist's had scanners with which they could take intimate snapshots of the human brain. Psychologists were getting together with philosophers to hammer out a common intellectual ground.

At conferences, speaker after speaker proclaimed that science was now ready to take on the ultimate mystery. But despite all this noisy racing of engines, the quest looks as though it's still stuck on the starting line. The problem for consciousness studies appears to be conceptual. Too much of the thinking, the theorising, has a stale feel. The mind is a kind of a machine. The mind is a kind of field.

The mind is ineffable. These ideas have already been around the block a few times, so it's not surprising that even in a shiny new vehicle - consciousness studies has had some big money invested in it - the latest go-round is in trouble. In this light, Rita Carter's Consciousness is an excellent introduction for those who want to glimpse the state of play. The book is glossy, richly illustrated and enthusiastic - a welcoming text for a difficult subject. And through the clever ruse of interspersing frequent two- or three-page mini-essays penned by the big-name philosophers and neuro-scientists in the field, it accurately mirrors the somewhat confused rabble of voices that is consciousness studies.

The reader can overhear the sound of querulous passengers waiting for their journey to get going. In the main text of the book, all the bases are well covered. Carter, an experienced medical journalist, begins by gently shaking up the naive belief that we actually know what our own consciousness is really like. She shows that perception is a construction that depends more on networks of meaning and expectation than on a TV-screen-like recreation of the world outside. The central philosophical problem of how any material mechanism such as a brain can give rise to the subjective experience of mind is then aired. Carter uses some delightful analogies, such as crowds of tiny zombies piloting airships, to explain the intricacies of the operation of the brain itself.

The book is light on the neurological details, but many readers will be grateful for that. Finally space is left at the end for the alternative view - the possibility that the mind really is a soul-stuff of some form rather than just patterns of information skittering across ranks of brain cells. Naturally Carter is bang up to date with the controversies and discoveries in the basic science. And yet herein lies the problem.

If truth be told, there is little reported in the book that was not already known 50 years ago. Or in some cases, even 100 years ago. Brain scanners and other new instruments are technological marvels. But these better scientific tools have merely brought what was largely suspected into sharper, more detailed, focus. Many researchers in the 1990's were hoping for a truly startling finding, perhaps something to do with quantum mechanics, which might suddenly show how brains can generate minds. However, the actual obstacle appears to be in our own heads - in the way we perceive the available scientific data.

The connecting of human mental experience to the physical facts about brains seems troublesome because we are so used to thinking about the world in terms of hard matter, arrangements of basic, atomistic stuff. But as physicists working on quantum mechanics have been finding out, the solidity of reality is just another one of those perceptual illusions. Dig down to the quantum realm and you find merely forms - the ghostly shapes of departing events rather than actual particles, or even waves. If the material world turns out to be not so material as it appears, then perhaps there is not quite the explanatory gulf between mind and matter that we first thought. The study of consciousness seems to need this kind of seismic shift in perspective.

Carter touches on the possibility but in the end prefers to leave the question hanging in the air. In this, her book is a very faithful reflection of the state of mind science... John McCrone's How The Brain Works is published by Dorling Kindersley.