Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative) [Kindle Edition]

This little book (just 134 pages of text) springs from some guest lectures which Nicholas Humphrey gave at Harvard in 2004. At the start of the first lecture he projected plain red light onto a screen and announced that he would spend the next three hours talking about what was going on in the minds of those viewing the screen. If you are at all interested in consciousness then this book is well worth reading.

On flicking through its pages, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is going to be a fun and easy read. The cartoons which appear give the impression that it isn't too intimidating. And to be fair, I could follow this book where I have struggled with Edelman's and Damasio's popular accounts of consciousness - but it was harder work than anticipated. In part, I suspect that this is because it is a book which is very rich in ideas.

Just a final word of caution and a personal confession. I have become rather evangelical about this book. It must be added that, so far, none of my victims share my enthusiasm. Please keep this in mind before spending your hard-earned cash but, if you do buy it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

This book has the merit of a clear and concise style. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that sensation/qualia on the one hand and information/perception on the other are separate systems in the brain, with the former having a largely passive role. Five main arguments are advanced to support this. Possibly the most important is blindsight a form of non-conscious vision argued here to be a demonstration of a separate path for perception. The very limited functionality of blindsight makes the suggestion of a properly functional separate pathway unconvincing. The ability to adjust to metamorphopsia, a condition where there are fluctuations in the visual field is a second argument, but in principle this appears to be little more than adjusting to being on a rolling ship at sea, and hardly justifies a separate pathway. Thirdly, the author claims that altered perception as a result of drugs such as LSD indicate separate pathways, but this would seem to require a major rejigging of our understanding of how drugs act on receptors. Sensory substitution where patients have a form of sight restored by converting visual signals into auditory or tactile signals is also put forward, but what the patients seem to describe is a mixture of modalities, similar to synaesthesia. Finally, there is a slightly bizarre experiment where subjects are persuaded that they are being tapped on a visible artificial hand, rather than their real hand, which is hidden under the table. The answer to this would seem to be that this was never likely to have happened in the conditions for which we evolved, and the most adaptive thing would be for the brain to model on the basis that the tapping must be coming from the visible artificial hand.

The author starts his book with a pessimistic quotation from psychologist Stuart Sutherland, "Nothing worth reading has been written about it" (consciousness.)
At the end of chapter 3 the author makes a rather optimistic conclusion that "So, I do believe we are closing in on what consciousness is and what it's for, I admit...... But we are on our way" (to understand consciousness.) After reading this book in its entirety, the reader is unable to share this author's optimism.

The author attempts to relate sensation to subjective qualia, and consciousness. What is creating the sensation and what makes this to be the subject of it? Could it be consciousness or selfhood? Francis Crick and Christof Koch believe the most difficult problem is the qualia; the redness of red, painfulness of pain, etc. The author believes that neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) may be the causal factor because the experience of sensation is a result of neuronal activity. The other factor could be the functional correlates of sensation (FCC).

Wherever there is a subjective experience, there has to be a subject. Because pain, mood, wish can not exist without a bearer, and the person has to be there first before the subjective experience. Sensation consists of; ownership that belongs to the subject, body location (particular part of the body), present-ness (being at present), qualitative modality (visual, facial, hearing, etc.) and phenomenal immediacy (happening to me instead of somebody else, happening at the moment than another moment). The author surmises that the evolution of sensation, feeling, and perception starting with primitive amoeba and ending up with human beings is as follows: It appears that during evolution the sensory activity gets privatized. The command signals for every sensory response get short circuited before they reach the body surface. So that instead of reaching all the way out to peripheral site of stimulation (as in amoeba), they now reach only to points more and more central on the incoming sensory pathways, until eventually the whole processes becomes closed off from the outside world in an internal loop within the brain (as in humans.)

The book is very brief and it is based on guest lectures delivered at Harvard in spring 2004. Some paragraphs have been repeated verbatim; for example, third paragraphs of pages 94 and 121 are almost the same. It would have been easier for the reader, if the last paragraph of each chapter or the last chapter of the book had summarized the author's point.

1. Consciousness: An Introduction
2. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
3. Conversations on Consciousness
4. Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Neural Theories
5. Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World
6. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach