Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness [Hardcover]

I am truly grateful to Nicholas Humphrey for this book. I have been concentrating on how scientists see consciousness for some time now and I normally gain something of value whilst disagreeing with a lot. With this book Nicholas Humphrey has bridged the gap between the academic study of this topic and all the rest of us. After a relatively short scientific gestation period, the study of consciousness has caught us all up!

The study was pulled from the hands of philosophers who had made little progress and finally put into the spotlight by scientists. Admittedly, the neuroscientists seemed to be leading the pack. But here is Nicholas Humphrey, a Professor of Psychology, coming up on the outside.

Not only has he positioned consciousness with respect to evolution, convincingly in my view, he has also expounded a theory for the way we view the world around us through the veil of consciousness. That theory, which I am not going to attempt to paraphrase here, could have undermined my own thinking but it hasn't. If anything it has cleansed my vision. It has made everything around me more real and more meaningful.

Nicholas Humphrey's book is a breakthrough and a joy to read. After 20 or so years of scientific study perhaps now, with this book, science can approach this topic in a way that will have relevance for us all.

Like many others, I have been struggling to understand how consciousness works for years, and Nicholas Humphrey has written two of the most illuminating books - 'Seeing Red' a few years back and now 'Soul Dust'. The other two books that have helped me a great deal are Daniel Dennett's 'Consciouness Explained' and Igor Aleksander's 'The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World' (not a book that seems to be widely known). Humphrey's latest book, taken with these other three, makes real progress in shedding light on a notoriously difficult problem - how and why are we conscious? He brings in important considerations such as why do we enjoy life, which philosophers usually don't seem to understand, and his prose has a marvellous lightness of touch. Well worth getting for anyone who is keen to learn about the topic.

Why do people have qualitative phenomenal experiences, and why is it "like something" to have sensations? And why do we feel special and spiritual, as if we existed in a "soul niche?" In his marvelous book Soul Dust, Nicholas Humphrey provides perhaps the most sensible solutions to these fundamental but seemingly-intractable questions, and he offers some credible possibilities how and why consciousness likely evolved with these features.

The first half of Soul Dust is a whirlwind tour through Humphrey's thoughts on sensation and why first-person experience feels like it does. As the author favors brevity, this part of the book is dense and requires some mental lifting on the part of the reader. Humphrey explains how natural selection could "adjust the properties of existing sensory feedback loops so as to steer the activity toward a special class of attractor states... [which] would seem, from the subject's point of view, to give sensations their phenomenal properties." Then, he illustrates multiple lines of evidence on what consciousness is for - why it may not enable you to *do* something but still has the crucial function of *encouraging* you to do something - and that primary individualism, by helping us develop a theory of mind, is beneficial for the individual *and* for the social group. Finally, he surveys the important work of scientists and convincingly argues why philosophers are still necessary, arguing that "the probability is that brain scientists would not recognize the NCC [neural correlates of consciousness] for what it is even if it were right in front of them."

With this foundation in place, it's the second half of Soul Dust which truly astonishes, for here, Humphrey shows why life can be beautiful in the face of death. Drawing on multiple lines of evidence (from types and degrees of consciousness and "presentism" in other animals; poetry; primitive art; psychological studies; and even the last meals of death row inmates), Humphrey describes how and why we take pleasure in existence in itself. If natural selection can arrange pleasure in the feeling of existing, existing can become a goal, and you can plan and go through pain or delayed gratifications to achieve or continue it. In a brilliant move, Humphrey shows how and why our experience and the structure of our minds guide the false intuitions that our "souls" could somehow live on after bodily death. This helps explain why reductionist theory is counterintuitive for so many people and how religion rides as a parasite on our natural predilection for spirituality (and not vice versa).

The beautiful final chapters provide strong evidence for how phenomenal consciousness is a "magic show" you stage in your head which lights up the world so you can feel special and transcendent, and why it's adaptive for you to feel that way (as well as even to have death anxiety). In so doing, Humphrey gives voice to the notion that there is actually beauty in being a creature which knows it's going to die. For thousands of years, people have told crazy stories to explain and to comfort each other in the face of death, tales which include positing earth-centered creation, the permanence of souls, and even consciousness as a separate fundamental element of the universe. But, to quote the film True Grit, "I do not entertain such hypotheticals, for the world as it is is vexing enough."

It can seem like a dark joke to have a subjective experience of consciousness for such a brief period of individual existence. But this book finds meaning and beauty in our brief skein not as a fairy tale or a "gallows-humor" consolation prize; it shows how this "magical mystery show" of consciousness and sensation over a limited timeframe is actually lovely, and in so doing, it gives the reader the feeling that everything is illuminated. "Sentio ergo sum" ("I feel, therefore I am") indeed!

Soul Dust is worth every minute of attention it demands, and it's a mind-expanding, life-affirming work.