A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness

5 Responses to “A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness”

1. K. Victor Volle says:

   July 1, 2010 at 9:52 pm

   first: I haven’t finished reading the book and am not sure I will
   
   second: Donald readily acknowledges that there are multiple meanings to the word consciousness, he then takes one meaning “the creative engine itself, [...] the focal top of human genius”. He even acknowledges that “this book proposes a theory of consciousness that [...] does not try to ‘clarify’ how awareness may possibly have emerged from a material thing such as a brain”. But then he starts to slash hostile to anyone (like e.g. Dennett) who tries to develop such explanations. He is so consumed in fighting hostile to the ‘hardliners’ that his own theory is invisible and often rests on his (ours) intuition that there must be “somebody home”. He even compares the telling of such theories with telling someone that his parents are “Jack the Ripper and Elsa, She-Wolf of the SS” (p. 45). Strong picture but weak argument.

   I reckon his further arguments about complex interactions like an evening long conversation about a film has its merits, showing that there is something more about culture and consciousness, memory and inter-theme communication, than what someone like Dennett (or Pinker) is trying to clarify. But that is the top: they are trying to clarify a different meaning of the word consciousness: “How does it work on a basic level, how may possibly consciousness ‘become’ and not how it evolved from there. So Donald in his attacks is comparing apples to oranges and that makes his book a pain to read.
   Rating: 1 / 5
2. Annie says:

   July 1, 2010 at 10:04 pm

   I found this book to be well written. The argument was tightly constructed and the content most fascinating Donald challenges the notion of the autonomy of the non-symbolic search engine.He explores consciousness. It is a book that is challenging and plotting provoking
   Rating: 4 / 5
3. Gunnar Odhner says:

   July 1, 2010 at 11:12 pm

   What is human conscience? How did it develop? What is language? In what part of evolution did language first exist? These are questions that Merlin Donald deals with in his book A mind so Rare.
   The first chapters are devoted to a criticism of the Hardliners, people like Steven Pinker, Jackendoff, Noam Chomsky and others who reckon that language can be clarified as a only innate administer. Merlin Donald gives lots of examples – among them Helen Keller – of how this might not be right. Language must be consciously aquired, and this can be done in many ways. Thus he argues that conscience is a prerequisite of language.
   His book is the first one I have read where the vast, seemingly fathomless possibilities of the human mind are explored. Contrary to Steven Pinker, who wants to narrow down language to a common brain-base for all of mankind, Donald shows that our possibilities of symbolic expression are effectively without limits.
   His conclusion is that language has been aquired from the outside and in, that it’s not an innate administer but a cultural one. It developed from acting, body-language, sounds and other primitive means of communication within hunting and food-gathering groups, he claims.
   But is this an explanation? Body language is also a form of language, pointing has to be learned consciously as Wittgenstein has shown (to top might mean: look in the other direction, or anything at all). It seems that Donald is saying that language is a prerequisite of language. He has to clarify how language taken in a wider context including body language may possibly arise in the first place. He has to show how you can be conscious (if consciousness precedes language) without knowing that you are conscious, that is without having some sort of language.
   My guess is that both Hardliners and those speaking in behalf of deep enculturation like Donald are incorrect and that language (some sort of symbols) and conscience arose simultaneously. When you study language you are already enveloped in language and can never go back to the beginning, something that strongly advocates my view. You are in chains when you try to find out what chains are, which makes it impossible to do so.
   Donald’s book is nevertheless very fascinating. His attempts to smother Hardliners are very convincing and therefore worth every bit of praise that they can get.
   Rating: 4 / 5
4. humanorganism says:

   July 1, 2010 at 11:19 pm

   I had rejected purchasing this book several times on the presumption that it was yet another attempt to infuse romantic wishes and hopes into a scientific theme. The title seemed to imply that.

   I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was incorrect.

   On page 18-19, Donald writes:

   “Our examination of the microdetails of behavior over the last three decades has yielded at least one very consistent impression: Below these conditions, human consciousness measures out as a fleeting and narrow window. When people are indifferent from their familiar settings–work, school, home, city, street–and subjected to bare-knuckled scrutiny, their conscious capacity reveals its severe limitations. This includes everyone. There are no geniuses in the psychology laboratory. In real life you may be the local Einstein or the village fool, but it does not matter. The laboratory setting is the greatest leveler of people yet exposed. You might feel that this is inherently unfair, a nasty bit of Postmodernist acting calculated specifically to reduce us all to nothing, an insensitive abasement of the human mind, and in a sense, you would be aptly. You might also object that human beings are not butterflies, not to be pinned in such a way. Again I agree, at least in spirit. Ideally we all deserve better than that. But in the final analysis, these Romantic objections do not really wash. They express rage at a loss of dignity that humans have suffered at their own hands. They reflect lost pride. But they cannot dismiss the stark reality of the laboratory findings. The consequences are very real. They cannot be ignored.”

   This attitude is one that can be trusted. Evidence obtained in applying scientific methods cannot be ignored. Loss of dignity notwithstanding.

   My reading of Critique of Impure Reason: An Essay on Neurons, Somatic Markers, and Consciousness informed me of the kind of mistakes researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience were making.

   Rating: 5 / 5
5. H. Toliver says:

   July 2, 2010 at 1:45 am

   Like Donald, Dennet, and others, I too have no thought 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 payment 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 go honestly effortlessly from small-term awareness to intermediate and longer spans. Even as 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 consequences. 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 small term, moderate part, and long-term memory, help us bind stages of the argument together. That conceptual architecture accompanies a chronological judgment 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 tale 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 correctly this way, any more than anyone writes just so 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 in rank and thoughts 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 minutes, and thanks to the recording of near everything these days, we have abundant exposure to new devious brains nearly daily. Minds that defy prudence and follow myths originating millennia ago are also in no small supply. Once such collectives have distinguished other races, dialects, creeds, religions, and nations they often choose that attacking them is the thing to do.

   Since that do cuts across races and cultures-as what sometimes passes as universal grammar also does-aggression, the tendency to err, and lying should perhaps be added to the list of things we suspect might be genetically hardwired in the most massively destructive of species.

   Nonetheless, a fine study of the mind. It easily keeps up with the best of the kind that I’ve encountered.
   Rating: 5 / 5