A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness

by Merlin Donald

Book Overview

In this masterful rebuttal to the prevailing neuroscientific arguments that seek to explain away consciousness, Merlin Donald presents a sophisticated conception of a multilayered consciousness drawing much of its power from its cultural matrix (Booklist). Donald makes a persuasive case...for consciousness as the central player in the drama of mind (Peter Dodwell), as he details the forces, both cultural and neuronal, that power our distinctively...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393323196
• ISBN13: 9780393323191
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 388 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

executive consciousness

Like Donald, Dennet, and others, I too have no idea how sentences come forth from what must be a tangle where memories, cultural conventions, and sensations converge. They may be duking it out for attention in there, but Donald is convincing in finding executive consciousness in charge of what emerges, at least in members of the "consciousness club" that include a few advanced primates as well as hominids. Mental hybrids whose consciousness combines nature with learning move fairly effortlessly from short-term awareness to intermediate and longer spans. While reading chapter eight we remember the gist of chapters one through seven and if called upon something vaguely perhaps of Darwin, Dawkins, and Gould as well. Contributions from neighboring fields of literary criticism, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and historical linguistics also find their way into Donald's keyboard work and our tracking of the results. These acrobatic accomplishments the executive consciousness can choose to do or not. Illustrations and tables like the one on levels of conscious capacity (195), applicable to short term, moderate length, and long-term memory, help us bind stages of the argument together. That conceptual architecture accompanies a chronological logic that since Darwin underlies work in cognitive evolution, historical linguistics, biology, paleontology, and archaeology. Knowing how the human brain got to be what it is helps us sort out its internal hierarchy from episodic impressions to the use of symbols. (For that linear story it helps to have read Donald's earlier Origins of the Modern Mind , 1991.) Donald's prose is fully up to this multilevel task. It is never less than accessible and as a bonus is spiced with quicksilver deliveries. He doesn't make the argument that style is the mark of individual consciousness, but no one writes precisely this way, any more than anyone writes exactly like Donald Culross Peattie or Stephen Jay Gould. Each executive self comes across in its own way both in print and in person. That is partly what the fuss is about-self-making amid a large common store of information and ideas on deposit in libraries, digital storage, and other minds. My one complaint of any significance is Donald's unstinting praise of the achievements of the mind so rare and lack of comparable attention to its deceptions and aggression. Cheating, theft, and deception in some primates and widespread antisocial behavior in Homo sapiens sapiens warrant more attention than they generally get. As for the latter, we don't lack for historical records, and thanks to the recording of nearly everything these days, we have abundant exposure to new devious brains almost daily. Minds that defy rationality and follow myths originating millennia ago are also in no short supply. Once such collectives have distinguished other races, dialects, creeds, religions, and nations they often decide that attacking them is the thing to do. Since that pra

A turning point that deserves to become a classic.

This book is so good and so important, rich in ideas as solid in all its construction one just cannot believe that nobody nominated it to a book award; meanwhile all the attention seems to be directed to a bunch of rambling, pedantic and even dangerous literature on the subject of mind and consciousness. This is the kind of work and reflection that puts an order in the landscape at the same time it delivers a great experience to the reader. Merlin Donald is a psychologist with an important experimental background nevertheless he achieves magnificent philosophical work reaching a level of concretion and clarity related with Wittgenstein's best insights on the true grounds that support meaning and language at the time he achieves as well -I think without realizing about it- the aim of the German thinker Ernst Cassirer in outlining a view of the unity of the multilayered human nature. Indeed in a rather unassuming fashion he reaches the peak-the summit of what others only envisioned maybe without having philosophical concerns as his prime issues. One of the Merlin's Donald contributions is to defend the very idea of consciousness against those sustaining it is not much more than a computational device (those who dismiss consciousness as a mere "folk psychology") by means that do not appeal to a dualist stance on the mind-body problem (In this he converges with John Searle but with a more powerful arsenal of resources). On the contrary on a materialistic approach it is possible to grasp the centrality role of consciousness in the human mind as the only way that it can connect and make transactions with a network of other minds in that environment known as society or culture. Thus Merlin Donald postulates a Biocultural approach, contrasting with the Sociobiology/ Evolutionary-Psychology approach (Pinker) allies (Churchlands) and propagandists (Denett) whom share the problem that they can not grasp the key role of consciousness on the functioning of the mind because they cannot understand the role of enculturation as the decisive turning point in the evolution of our species. At the end their conception of the human mind is for them a solipsistic modular device, with everything already packed in it in order to work. Contrasting with that Merlin Donald develops the thesis that a community of minds (culture) scaffolds the level of awareness of each of its nodes(individual minds)by changing their architecture and states, demanding for one and each of them consciousness process in order to follow the coordinates and cues of that artificial environment that overlaps the natural environment. Once this is established the author explores some fascinating implications in the domains of our species' world and action. A truly genuine and insightful reflection on what makes us human.

Consciousness from genetic thru cultural evolution

As a concerned reader I will explain, briefly, what I took from the book, and not critique the negatives. One strength seems to be a multidisciplinary approach. Merlin Donald is a research psychologist and makes an effort to draw from Psychological, Cognative, Neurological, and Evolutionary sciences; as well as literature.Points: the shift of evolutionary importance from genetic to cultural in the hominid line; recognition of a fourth layer in human mental evolution, that of cultural memory (which he calls "external" memory in his fourth or Theoretic layer); and consideration of the whole of human consciousness.Donald has expanded on his "Origins of the Human Mind" ('93) with exploring how culture has outstripped genetics in co-evolution with supporting the emergence of Homo Erectus, and then structuring the extended consciousness and symbol manipulation of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. He postulated a fourth Theoretic layer (after Episotic, Mimetic, and Mythic layers) as an "external symbolic universe", or recorded symbols, or "external memory". But before recorded symbols, the past was only recovered by recall, by both speaker and, often, the listener. Recall must be distinguished from memory (as recorded symbols), for recall of past events or thoughts or moods must be incomplete and personal, whereas using recorded symbols is about interpretation, which is as complete as the writer and reader choose to make it, and is social. If people insist in using 'memory' for 'recall', then recorded symbols should be called 'cultural memory', but it is critically different.Donald attempts an evolutionary analysis of the integrated, whole of consciousness. Since I am more interested in the human emotional (value) systems than in consciousness, I have one critical comment. Donald ignores the role of emotions in consciousness, which is to leave out feelings (which are the conscious perception of emotions), and the role of emotions in guiding consciousness. Emotions (or values) on several layers interact with most cognative functions.

Corticocentrism Reconsidered

In this sweeping neocortical neuroparadigm, Merlin Donald brings elan and scholarship in our hour of need. It has become almost normative to speak of higher consciousness as modular, with each module (attention, emotion, volition and so on...) in turn, a weighted sum of parallel agents interacting in unconscious `pandemonium'. Dennett and other proponents of this view are joined by the evolutionary psychologists, who deconstruct the Purpose of human endeavor by reference to these modules, seen as vestigial survival strategies inappropriate to contemporary life, eg. the frisky male ex-hunter-gatherer dumping MDMA in the drinks of ladies who chance bearing his offspring ..well, you get it. A picture emerges: an incontrovertibly brilliant series of contributions by `Hardliners' [philosophers, psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists] has weakened an Emperor already hostage to the `demons' of his unruly New Mind. While holists wave hands and damn the evidence, serious observers nod in depressed capitulation. Another Postmodern Truth has displaced our helmsman to the periphery. Donald comes to the rescue, wielding formidable expertise and sharp wit. He makes an excellent case for Autonomous Man, without soft fuzzies and without cliche. And he vigorously and cogently propounds a top-down viewpoint.Cortical Size does count, and human consciousness is active, not a passive construction of the "real stuff" from lower hierarchical levels.With the unitary perspective that single authorship confers, this kind of coherent articulation stands as a monument to plausible theorizing. Much what Lee Smolin's 'Life of the Cosmos' did for cosmology, 'A Mind So Rare' does for neuropsychology. Maybe Smolin's Universe and Donald's three-pound universe are connected after all. The book is neither casual in popularization nor dense in neurobabble . Nearly every page discloses smaller and larger insights which make the reader wonder "why, despite a lesser IQ, didn't I think of that? " Drawbacks? Not when one takes this book on its own terms, but there are some omissions. The big one (two) is Emotion and Value. Donald, effectively flogging the philosophers, needs to conciliate some scientists, eg. Douglas Watt, who just as effectively dethrones the cerebral cortex as Donald enthrones it (see the journal Consciousness & Emotion). It's thus no surprise that Donald mentions little of the extended limbic system or lower brain centers which undergird crucial emotional and evaluative parameters. But such differences are essentially those of emphasis. One can appreciate the Hardliners and still retain perspective.Doubts may arise as to testability. Quantum consciousness surely has no slam-dunk model, yet Stuart Hameroff has attended to such concerns. Yet even someone as articulate as Donald can't know everything about everything. It's enough that he effectively (and uniquely) spans the yawning chasm betwe

A sparkling and erudite defense of consciousness

A delightful polemic with a valuable point. Donald dramatically uses the intricate demands of a face to face conversation to show the practical weaknesses in the laboratory view of short and long term memory. The laboratory evidence that working memory is very limited is overwhelming, and has fed the modern philosophical trend toward viewing conscious awareness as an illusory result of the work of unconscious agents.But things we do in daily life clearly require us to track things much more numerous and much longer than could possibly be accomplished by "seven plus or minus two" chunks, even with clever strategies for grouping things. Donald uses this to argue that conscious processes are very real and not to be ignored, and do play a central role in human intelligence. Donald unflinchingly takes on the likes of "hardliners" such as Dan Dennett who argue that there is no central "meaner," no self, no little person in our heads observing the stream of consciousness in a Cartesian theater. He points out that the drafts we generate in our minds are not at all arbitrary competitors for dominance, but are distinctly related to goals and expectations. Most insightfully, he argues that discounting the role of conscious processes has dire implications for social and political philosophy and how we view human responsibility for our own actions.In my view, Donald makes the excellent point for yet poorly understood intermediate term memory mechanisms very convincingly. I was completely persuaded that this is something we need to study to understand human abilities, and that "hardliners" views have some weaknesses I hadn't considered seriously before. He does make one rhetorical twist, though, that confused and sometimes annoyed me until I figured it out. He argues convincingly that we should retain the ideas of executive processes, goals, schema, and expectations, and how they influence thinking. The mind is organized in a central and domain general way for many critical things, rather than being completly modular and the result of bottom-up processing by independent functional agents.I bought his argument here from fairly early in this excellent book. But then he also consistently equates this kind of organization with what other people call "consciousness," without making it clear at first. So you start wondering why he is calling all sorts of things "conscious" when clearly wedon't notice them ! Most strikingly, in reviewing the research on subliminal effects, he considers them conscious, even though they are seemingly by definition, not ! That is where I discovered that he is relating conscious processes to goal direction and selective attention, not to "noticing." "Noticing" per se actually has very little to do with anyghing in this book. This was a difficult conceptual turn for me, but may be a profound idea. It preserves the idea of consciousness as the selective goal-oriented use of attention to organize the activity of the mind,