Kevin J. Mitchell - Free Agents - How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton University Press, 2023) *****

Earlier this year I read Robert Sapolsky's "Determined - Life Without Free Will" in which he argues that our idea of free will is only an illusion, and that any action our body takes is actually the result of hundreds of unconscious forces that work in it. Much earlier, I also read Sam Harris's "Free Will" which makes a very similar claim, although less substantiated and more philosophical. 

As a counter-argument I came across this delightful book by geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell, professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and author of the blog "Wiring The Brain". 

In contrast to his blog, he does not take Sapolsky head-on in this book, but it's clear that some of the arguments come from refutations of some of Sapolsky's claims. Both books are well-documented, both are written by experts in their fields, and both come to different conclusions. Both agree that there is no 'immaterial I" that takes decisions, or that there is no mind-body duality. Both agree that many of our decisions are pre-determined by patterns of culture, genes, education, etc. They disagree whether this body can make any deliberate choice now, at this very moment, by weighing the pros and cons of certain actions. Sapolsky will say the choice is automatic. Mitchell will say that our neurons balance the options and our brain eventually makes a choice. That our body has "agency". 

Interestingly enough, the recent debate on this topic, and largely the spark that lit the fire for the books of Sapolsky, Harris and Mitchell goes back to an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in 1983. Mitchell also comes with a different interpretation on the methodology and the result of the data. 

I share a whole lot of text below, as examples of parts of his arguments. I can only recommend that you read the whole book. 

This question of morality is a topic that Sapolsky ends his book with. And the question is essential. Without free will, how can we make moral decisions? 

"Another barrier to a clear explication of the arguments around whether free will exists is that they are often approached from the direc­tion of their consequences for our positions on moral responsibility. If people are not really in control of their actions - if we are nothing more than physical automata, mounting a wonderfully sophisticated but ul­timately empty simulacrum of free will - then how can we be worthy of praise or blame? How can we defend judgment or punishment? The stakes here could not be higher. The idea of moral responsibility is the foundation not only of our legal systems but also of all our social interactions. We are constantly thinking about what we should or shouldn't do in any given circumstance and probably spend even more time thinking about what other people should or shouldn't do ( or should or shouldn't have done). But tying the discussion of free will to the issue of moral responsibility muddies the waters. Questions of moral responsibility are crucially important, of course, but they are confounded by all kinds of additional issues: the nature and origins of our moral sensibilities, the evolution of moral norms, the legal philosophies underpinning our justice systems, and the complex and innumerable pragmatic decisions that societies and individuals have to make to keep our collective existence stable. Ask­ing what kind of free will we want that will let us maintain our positions on moral responsibility can become almost a theological exercise in motivated reasoning" (p.17)

Mitchell goes very deep into the origin of our species and explains how even in the most basic forms of life, choices are made, obviously not conscious choice, but choices all the same. Even the very first cells, who function based on chemical reactions, start having options on how to proceed. The concept of 'information' as the basis for agency is essential to his thesis. 

"Although their behaviors appear simple from the outside, these single-celled creatures are thus far from being passive stimulus-response machines. Their response to a given signal depends on what other signals are around and on the cell's internal state at the time. These organisms infer what is out in the world, where it is, and how it is changing. They process this information in the context of their own internal state and recent experience, and they actively make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions. This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behavior of the organism is not purely driven or determined by the playing out of physical forces acting on it or in it. Clearly, a physical mechanism underpins the behavior, which explains how the system works. But thinking of what it is doing-and why it is doing it-in terms of the resolution of instantaneous physical forces is simply the wrong framing. The causation is not physical in that sense-it is informational." (p.62)

or a little further ...

"These simple organisms are not aware of those reasons. But it is still correct to say that the organism is doing something because it increases its chances of persistence. Or, at a finer level, that it is moving in a certain direction to get food or to escape a predator. It's right to think of various components and subsystems as having functions. And it's right to say the organism is acting on the basis of inferences about what is out in the world, rather than simply being triggered by external stimuli. The mecha­nisms are simply the means by which those goals are accomplished. Even these humble unicellular creatures thus have real autonomy and agency, as organized dynamic patterns of activity, causally insulated from their environment, and configured to maintain themselves through time. It is not merely that they hold themselves apart from the world outside: they act in the world and on the world in a goal-directed manner. They are causal agents in their own right. As evolution proceeds, the degree of autonomy increases-at least along some lineages, like the ones leading to humans. The tight coupling of perception and action is loosened. With the advent of multicellularity and especially the invention of nervous systems, additional layers of processing emerge. Organisms evolve the means to represent sensory in­formation internally without directly acting on it. More sophisticated control systems emerge for guiding action over longer timeframes. Organ­isms develop internal systems of evaluation that free them from the brutal, life-or-death judgment of natural selection. Crucially, all these systems are informational. Meaning becomes the currency of cognition." (p. 67)

The complexity of our bodies implies that our brains receive information from various sources inside and outside the body, information that needs to be integrated, balanced and decided upon based on neural hierarchies in the brain.  

"But the coupling between perception and action is at least loosened a bit. There are now some intermediate stages of processing-carried out by the middle layers of interneurons-during which multiple signals are integrated to allow the animal to respond to the situation as a whole, as opposed to independent stimuli. Specific interneurons collect signals from multiple sensory neurons responding to diverse aversive stim­uli, while other interneurons sum the activity of a different set of sen­sory neurons responsive to diverse attractive stimuli. The relative activ­ity of these interneurons is then itself integrated at another stage to determine whether the sum of attraction outweighs the sum of aversion. All of this is dependent on the context: responses to those integrated external sensory signals differ depending on the current internal state of the animal."(p.91)

 At a further stage, information becomes meaning. 

"When configured in this way, perceptual systems are not just pro­cessing information-they are extracting meaning. The patterns of neu­ral activity across different areas in the visual hierarchy represent the system's best guesses of what is out in the world, focused on what is most relevant and important for the survival of the organism. Those guesses are not merely passively computed through successive levels of information processing. The organism is actively, subjectively interpret­ing this information, bringing its prior experience and expectations to bear. (p.118)

In this sense, we are neither a machine nor is there a ghost in the machine. We are an organism that decides. 

"In a holistic sense, the organism's neural circuits are not deciding­: the organism is deciding. It's not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It's an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it's not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it. Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it's the self that decides. If we break them apart, even conceptu­ally, we lose sight of the thing we' re trying to explain. 

However, although we can reject a reductionist, purely mechanistic approach, that should not send us running in the other direction toward a nebulous, mysteriously nonphysical mind that is "in charge": the ghost in the machine. Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physi­cal brains, somehow directing the flow of electrical activity. The activity distributed across all those neural circuits produces or entails our mental experience ( and similarly for whatever kinds of mental experience other animals have). The meaning of those patterns for the organism has causal power based on how the system is physically configured. We can thus build a holistic physical conception of agency without either re­ducing it or mystifying it." (p. 144)

"This skepticism seems partly due to the enduring intellectual legacy of French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, which has shaped the Western scientific tradition. One of Descartes's most famous ideas is that the world is made of two very different types of substance: the physical and the mental. This dualist position gets around having to explain how physical stuff can produce immaterial things like thoughts by simply positing that thoughts occupy a kind of parallel realm of the mental. The problem with this idea-pointed out by some of Descartes's contemporaries, such as the astute and wonderfully titled Elizabeth, Prin­cess of Bohemia - is that it does not explain how the physical and the mental realms can interact. They clearly seem to, because thinking about doing something can indeed lead to us doing it - physically moving our bodies and things in the world - but how? Descartes did not have a good answer to this question (though he did propose a route of communication through the pineal gland, for no particularly good reason). 

You would think we would have moved on by now, after four hun­dred years, but it seems we still get hung up on a version of the same question: How could having a conscious thought move physical stuff around? Doesn't that somehow violate the laws of physics? It seems to require a mysterious form of top-down causation in which the mental pushes the physical around. But this apparent mystery only arises if we think of the mental as some realm of free-floating thoughts and ideas. It's not a question of whether immaterial thoughts can push around physi­cal stuff. Thoughts are not immaterial: they are physically instantiated in patterns of neural activity in various parts of the brain, which can naturally have effects on how activity evolves in other regions. There's no need to posit a "ghost in the machine"-you're not haunting your own brain. The "ghost" is the machine at work." (p. 268)

 By accepting our free will as an evolutionary outcome that gives us powers no other animal has ever had, we also need a heightened sense of responsibility, anticipation and morality. 

"By being able to think at this level, we turn isolated elements of knowledge into a more general understanding of how the world works, something that artificial intelligence still struggles to do. And we can deploy that understanding in directing our own behavior, even in osten­sibly novel situations. We can combine these nested hierarchies of con­cepts and maps of causal relations and system dynamics in new, creative ways within this abstract cognitive space and thereby engage in open­ended, model-based reasoning. We can imagine things. In effect, we can mentally simulate a model of the world and "run" it in fast forward, predicting and evaluating outcomes of various actions over short and long timeframes. 

Our ability to model the world in this way gives us unprecedented control over our environments. When faced with some problem, we have the ability to see the bigger picture by taking into account a wider context and a longer time horizon. This means we can avoid getting stuck in local optima - the quickest, easiest solution to a local problem­and instead optimize for global parameters. We can think strategically, not just tactically." (p. 254)

Without a doubt Mitchell's book is more than welcome and was a great relief to have his substantiated arguments for free will. Even when Sapolsky argues that the absence of free will may be morally liberating, his concept still felt suffocating and utterly reductionist. Mitchell's arguments are scientifically sound and they offer us a much stronger and open foundation to start working on, both as an individual and as a society. 

I have the intense pleasure of seeing my four grandsons - between one month and four years old - learn about the world and their immediate environment. When I see them discover their feet (the youngest) or make choices when playing, or interacting with each other, the only thing I see are four distinct characters, exploring, choosing, reasoning, fantasising, enjoying themselves and the freedom they have to do this. They are not little machines who are fully determined by culture or genes. They are four individuals enjoying life (well ... OK, sometimes not). Their life is in front of them. They will make billions of choices in the future. That is what life offers them, what it offers us. 

Anybody interested in evolution, cognitive science, society and ethics should read this book. But don't trust me ... I am fully confident that you can do this based on your own free will. 

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein - Noise - A Flaw in Human Judgment (William Collins, 2022) ****

Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" became a global bestseller, and rightly so, even if many of the book's core positions have been challenged by some cognitive scientists. Be that as it may, the book managed to open many minds to relfect on our own inuitive way of thinking, often very fast and even subconsciously, rarely with considered and conscious rationality. Driving that message home to us humans is already a major achievement, even if I'm not too optimistic about what it actually leads to in practice. 

"Noise" will probably not be a bestseller at the same level, yet it also deserves to be read by many. The core proposition of the book is that we all have a decision-making 'bias' that is linked to our perspective, culture, education, profession, etc. This 'bias' is well understoord by anybody involved in research, in opinion-polling or other levels of understanding decision-making. At the same time there is also 'noise' in the system, a problem of the same nature that is less widely acknowledged. "Noise" is the variation in choices or decisions made based on the same data, and that demonstrate a lack of coherence within an organisation or within the same person. 

The book gives dozens and dozens of examples of for instance claims administrators in insurance companies who give entirely different sums to claimants even if the damage is the same, or judges who give totally different sentences for identical crimes, or doctors who give totally different diagnoses for the same presented symptoms by patients. The stunning factor in the given examples are not only that there is variation in their decisions, but how wide the variations can be, as from three months to three years in the context of court sentences. A even more stunning fact is the variation by one and the same individual. Kahneman and colleagues mention studies that were conducted by presenting the same cases to the same judges or doctors six months after the first evaluation. The same judges and doctors came to a completely different decision so many months later. Some of these differences may even change depending on the moment of the day. Judges are more lenient with a full stomach, and less lenient on an empty one. The same is true with doctors apparently. 

We don't want to judge judges or doctors here, but show how we all should reflect on our own inconsistencies in judgment. In that respect, this book is again an eye-opener for anyone interested in the quality of our thought processes. 

The only downside in the book is the lack of recent data to substantiate their positions. Many of the studies that I double-checked had data from the '90s. It may be that nothing has changed since then, but I think that especially in medicine, many things have changed, including better diagnostics and the use of artificial intelligence to help mitigate the problems mentioned in the book. 

Recommended reading. 

Robert Sapolsky - Determined - Life Without Free Will (The Bodley Head, 2023) ****½

After I read neurologist and biologist Robert Sapolsky's brilliant "Behave" some years ago about all the aspects that determine our behaviour, his new book "Determined - Life Without Free Will" presented itself to me. It got ordered and shipped to me. It was lying on the shelf for a few months, waiting to make me sufficiently interested and with sufficient time to start reading it, which happened when the holidays decided it was time to start. The book is a real sequel to "Behave", and the words, paragraphs and chapters filled my brain with their insights and facts. 

Did I at any point take a decision to buy or read this book? Not if you believe Sapolsky, who claims with an incredible amount of facts and study results that free will does not exist and that everything we do is the result of our neurons and other aspects of our brain, our body, our life, our culture, our history co-determining what we do and when we do it. Intuitively I could agree with him, in the sense that our body creates an illusion of self, which we call 'I', the agent that determines our choices and actions. If you accept this, then obviously 'free will' is also an illusion. Sapolsky reasons that the concept of 'free will' is by definition impossible, since there is no immaterial agent that intervenes in all the aspects of our behaviour, but the exact opposite, our hormones, neurons, determine the choices we make, and hence create the illusion of free will. 

He gives a lot - hundreds of studies - at each level of our possible influence. Here are two examples. 

 "Stick a volunteer in a brain scanner and flash up pictures of faces. And in a depressing, well-replicated finding, flash up the face of someone of another race and in about 75 percent of subjects, there is activation of the amygdala, the brain region central to fear, anxiety and aggression" (p.97)

or: 

"What happens when the dlPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) is silenced is really informative. This can be done experimentally with an immensely cool technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which a strong magnetic pulse to the scalp can temporarily activate or inactivate the small patch of cortex just below. Activate the dlPFC this way, and subjects become more utilitarian in deciding to sacrifice one to save many. Inactivate the dlPFC, and subjects become more impulsive: they rate a lousy offer in an economic game as unfair but lack the self-control needed to hold out for a better reward. This is all about sociality - manipulating the dlPFC has no effect if subjects think their opponent is a computer." (p. 101)

His arguments and evidence are more than convincing, but as a reader and human being, I often wondered whether this is all a matter of semantics? My illusion of the "I" helps me function in this world, and the decisions made by my neurons are made by "my" neurons, based on "my" experiences, and "my" physiology, and "my" education, and "my" culture. This broad base that I call "me", is also "me" for all practical purposes and dialogue, and all the decisions is the result of my will. 

In the last part of the book, Sapolsky takes his findings a step further, and implying that if there is no free will, people cannot be held moraly and legally responsible for the actions of their bodies. Again, he gives a lot of convincing arguments, and interesting case studies that shed an unexpected light on both judgment and punishment. 

Interestingly enough, at the very end of the book, Sapolsky gives a long explanation of his own personal abhorrence for antisemitism. 

"I was once asked if I would take on that role working on the case of a White supremacist who, a month after attempting to burn down a mosque, had invaded a synagogue and used an assault rifle to shoot four people, killing one. "Whoa," I thought. "WTF, I'm supposed to help out with this?" Members of my family died in Hitler's camps. When I was a kid, our synagogue was ar­soned; my father, an architect, rebuilt it, and I had to spend hours holding one end of a tape measure for him amid the scorched, acrid ruins while he railed on in a near-altered state about the history of anti-Semitism. When my wife directed a production of Cabaret, with me assisting, I had to ac­tively force myself to touch the swastika armbands when distributing cos­tumes. Given all that, I'm supposed to help out with this trial? I said yes-if I believed any of this shit I've been spouting, I had to. And then I subtly proved to myself how far I still had to go". (p. 383). 

I can accept that our "will" is the choices made by our body and brain based on everything we've been conditioned to do. I can accept that "I", my consciousness is an awareness of things that were decided microseconds before by my brain, and I can accept that despite the conditioning and determinisms, the word "free" means that you are entitled to your own thoughts and actions (as compared to being the robot in somebody else's power), and I do believe that the concept of "free will" is still for all practical purposes a useful term. Just like Sapolsky himself does in the excerpt above. Whether you want to or not, we humans are driven by emotions yet we have to accept that a huge number of elements come into play when our brains make decisions. 

The whole essential question revolves around the study by Benjamin Libet from 1983, in which study subjects only became aware of their choices after their brain gave the signal of their choice. I fully agree with Sapolsky that there is no immaterial agent at work. We are not passengers in our own bodies. But the question is whether our consciousness (an effect of our brain's activity) and our choices (an effect of our brain's activity) coincide, precede or follow each other. For sure, we do many things that we are not conscious of, and life would be unmanagable if we were, but it could still be that the neurons in our brain consciously weigh options before making a choice.

Things that I found missing in this book is the loop that is possible between different parts of our brain. Even if free will does not exist, our brain has the incredible capacity for self-reflection, improvement in thought processes, acquiring the skill to evaluate options based on increased knowledge and the like. How are the changes in our brain steered? 

Like Sam Harris's opinion about the absence of "free will", Sapolsky takes it a level further, less philosophical but more scientific. The subject is counter-intuitive yet there is much to say for their view. Even if you are not convinced, as I was when I started to read, I can only recommend that you read it too. The quality and the passion of the writing, the many real-life examples will at least make you think and will make you doubt. And that's possibly already a great achievement. 

Andy Clark - The Experience Machine (Allen Lane, 2023) ****

There is this great quote by author Anais Nin: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are", and it might have been a subtitle for this book by Andy Clark, cognitive scientist at the University of Sussex. 

He describes convincingly how our brain shapes our perception by what we have experienced before, in an approach of increased efficiency and economical use of energy, in order to make predictions. Instead of each time generating a full perception from scratch, our brain selects what it expects, and adjusts when it is presented with unexpected visual stimuli: "the brain is constantly painting a picture, and the role of the sensory information is mostly to nudge the brushstrokes when they fail to match up with the incoming evidence" (p. 5). This is of course not rocket science, but Clark gives lots of examples of situations in which this operates, including for instance the sensation of pain, and other bodily experiences that are more generated by the brain than by an actual physical cause, such as the "aesthetic chill" or goose bumps. 

He also explains how the counter-intuitive mental images we make of an action may precede the action, instead of the reverse. It's the mental image we have that makes the action take place. 

"Predictive processing suggests a much more thoroughly entwined process in which the way your body feels to you is itself altered by what you know about the overall context. This is because all those sources of infor­mation and evidence (raw bodily signals plus all the knowl­edge you are bringing to bear on the situation) mesh together, feeding influence back downward and impacting neuronal processing at all stages. In this way, even your bedrock bodily sensations may be altered by the way they are currently being framed by your own higher-level thoughts and ideas". 

The experience of our brain can also lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. When you feel high levels of distress or feel threatened, this can predictively contribute to perceiving the world as more stressful or threatening in a very literal sense. On the other hand, fictions and narratives can also lead to the opposite effect and break down stereotypes. 

Clark goes much broader than the typical psychology experiments in cognitive science, expanding the scope to our human physiology in a way that is really refreshing and fascinating, such as the following factoid: 

"Consider coalitions of neurons that are already located out­side the brain. An increasingly familiar example can be found inside the human gut, where upward of 500 million neurons in the gut wall already relay important information to the spi­nal cord and the brain. This circuitry helps regulate serotonin and other neuromodulators. The so-called gut-brain is by a long margin the largest cluster of neurons outside the brain, and an essential part of the nervous system. It is pretty clearly part of what makes you who you are and has a major influence on what you think and feel. This already gives the lie to the idea that your mind consists entirely of "what the brain does." But there's more. Our gut is also alive with (mostly) help­ful bacteria, which together comprise the "microbiome." These gut bacteria (unlike the neurons) are not even "genetically you." But they too make essential contributions, and have been shown to affect learning, memory, and mood as well as basic bodily regulation. Such links are not surprising given the deep role of bodily information in the construc­tion of the mind. For example, gut bacteria manufacture up to 95% of the body's serotonin, which has large impacts on mood and is one of the neurotransmitters implicated in the precision-weighing process" (p. 164-165)

He also goes a step further, and includes our everyday tools, such as our smartphone, as extensions of our mind. And much more. I have so many annotations in the book that will take a full essay to integrate them. This is not the objective here, so suffice it to say that I can recommend this book to any person interest in the workings of our mind. 

Clark's book is solid, comprehensive, well-written, at many times an eye-opener, and as said, includes many other disciplines such as physiology, medicine, computer sciences and more to paint a broad picture of the mysterious workings of our brain as a prediction machine. 

He concludes: 

"WE ARE what predictive brains build. If predictive processing lives up to its promise as a unifying picture of mind and its place in nature, we will need to think about ourselves, our worlds, and our actions in new ways. We will need to appre­ciate, first and foremost, that nothing in human experience comes raw or unfiltered. Instead, everything -  from the most basic sensations of heat and pain through to the most exotic experiences of selfhood, ego dissolution, and oneness with the universe - is a construct arising at the many meeting points of predictions and sensory evidence". 

It's a humbling message. The question now is how to make sure that this is known by as many people as possible. 

 

Mark Solms - The Hidden Spring (Profile Books, 2021) ****

South African neuroscientist Mark Solms takes a deep dive into our consciousness with the aim to determine its mechanism, and especially the relationship between the fysiological workings of our body and the elusive and abstract notion of consciousness. 

Interestingly enough, Solms is willing to go back to Freud and find aspects in his theories that my still be valid today. He also likes the reports of individual patients to present what they feel. It gives a different perspective to the more academic approach of the cognitive scientist or neuroscientist. He mentions the value of Oliver Sack's books and reports of all the individual cases that he worked on: "enlightening insights into neuropsychological disorders from the perspective of being a neurological patient" (p.14 - Solm's emphasis). As a patient advocate, I can only applaud this insight, and it's one that we as patient advocates have been fighting for for years. 

Solms makes the useful distinction between affects, emotions and feelings. 

"Let me be absolutely clear about what I mean by the term 'feeling': I mean that aspect of an emotion (or any affect) that you feel. I mean the feeling itself. If you do not feel something, it is not feeling" (p. 87)" in reaction to psychologists who claim that some feelings may be unconscious. 

Where I agree with him is on this: "The extent to which the empiricist philosophers and their scientific heirs, the behaviourists and cognitive scientists, ignored feeling is astonishing" (p. 88), as I already mentioned in several book reviews on cognitive science. 

"(...) feelings are always conscious, without exception. That is not to say that all the need-regulating mechanisms in the brain are conscious, but that is my point: it makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.   

Different things call for different names, and the difference between felt and unfelt needs makes it necessary to introduce a terminological distinction. 'Needs' are different from 'affects'. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermo­regulation and glucose metabolism. These are called 'vegetative' functions, and with a good reason: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic 'reflex'. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt" (p. 99)

" (...) human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They, too, are ultimately 'error' signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you. 

There is unfortunately no generally agreed upon classification of affects in current neuropsychology. I have drawn a distinction between bodily and emotional affects, but such sharp demarca­tions do not exist in nature. In drawing this line, I am following Jaak Panksepp's taxonomy, which is widely - but not universally - accepted. He further divided bodily affects, of which there are a great variety, into interoceptive ('homeostatic') and exteroceptive ('sensory') subtypes. Hunger and thirst, for example, are homeo­static affects, whereas pain, surprise and disgust are sensory ones.,,. So, to be clear, according to Panksepp there are three types of affect: homeostatic and sensory ones (both of which are bodily) and emotional ones (which involve the body but cannot be described as 'bodily' in any simple sense). Think, for example, of missing your brother, which is an emotional state; it is not bodily in the same way that hunger and pain are" (p. 102)

Solms then resorts to physics in an attempt to solve the 'hard problem', the actual transition between fysiological and biological phenomena into the level of immaterial consciousness, especially the laws of thermodynamics and the minimisation of free energy, with concepts of order and entropy. 

"(...)the great mystery of this conjunction - the mystery of how subjective experience fits into the fabric of the physical universe - could be solved only if we reduce physiological and psychological phenomena alike to their underlying mechanistic causes. These causes were to be revealed at a depth of abstraction that only physics could provide."(p.191)

The whole concept can be quantified by linking laws of probability with the use of energy. You become conscious only of things that deserve to get the energy needed for the active participation of the agent.

He also refers to the fact that the real brain area of consciousness is in our most animal part of the brain, which also drives our basic emotions of fear and lust, of fight or flight. 

" (...) consciousness ultimately arises not in the cortex, the seat of advanced intelligence, but in the more primitive brainstem, where basic emotions begin. The fundamental form of consciousness is not something cognitive, like vision; rather, it is something affective. In that sense, and that sense alone, Chalmers was right to imply that consciousness is not a cognitive function: the primary function of consciousness is not perceiving or remembering or comprehend­ing but feeling. How can the function of feeling go on 'in the dark', without any feeling? We can legitimately ask why vision is accompa­nied by experience. Vision does not require consciousness, and neither does any other cognitive process. But feeling does." (p. 265)

I think Solms goes a little too far in his theories on 'artificial sentience', as if human consciousness could be replicated with the right conditions in a machine. The immense complexity of our human biology can still not be replicated by any mechanical context, not by a long stretch. 

I also miss a little bit the effect of the brain creating a narrative of self, the sentiment of being an individual 'I', by assempling all the different conscious sensory perceptions and emotions into a coherent narrative that reinforces consciousness of the self. 

Solms makes his case very eloquently, using a lot of cross-scientific references and insights that are not always easy to follow for the lay person. But his approach is just a theory, he admits himself in all humility, explicitly saying that he may be wrong, but it's still more than worth to further investigate. Especially his claim that consciousness can be measured both in qualitative and quantitative terms requires some further work. It's one thing to claim it, it's still another to demonstrate it. 

That being said, it's a fascinating approach to the core concepts of the cause of consciousness, and one of the more plausible that I've read about in the last few years. 

Joshua Foer - Het Geheugenpaleis (De Bezige Bij, 2014) **

In "Het Geheugenpaleis" leidt wetenschapsjournalist Joshua Foer ons naar de wereld van de wereldkampioenen geheugenwedstrijden. Wat eerst een wetenschappelijk queeste was naar tehnieken om ons geheugen beter te begrijpen en te gebruiken, wordt al snel een persoonlijke uitdaging voor de schrijver die ingaat op een uitnodiging om zijn geheugen te trainen zoals de wereldkampioenen het doen. En wat blijkt: je hebt geen speciale gaven nodig om dit te kunnen. Ook hier baart oefening kunst en kun je door visuele technieken vele abstracte gegevens in je geheugen opslagen zonder dat die verdwijnen. Die verankering vindt plaats door het nauwgezet associëren van de gegevens (woorden, cijfers, data, ...) in een echt geheugenpaleis, een ruimte die je zelf bedenkt en waar je al die gegevens ergens in onderbrengt, zodat je ze achteraf bijna fysiek kan terugvinden.

Om zoals Foer uiteindelijk te kunnen deelnemen aan de wereldkampioenschappen, moet je wel ongeveer een uur per dag oefenen. Fijn dat hij dat heeft gedaan. Ik zou de inspanning niet kunnen opbrengen.

Bobby Duffy - The Perils Of Perception (Atlantic Books, 2018) ****

In a world of post-truth and alternative facts and fake news, this book is a welcoming read for everybody to understand how wrong they are. It is in fact the perfect companion book to Hans Rosling's "Factfulness".

Bobby Duffy is head of one of the world's leading opinion-polling agencies, which one lucky day started - for promotional reasons - to conduct studies on political thinking and reality. Now, decades later, the agency has conducted their surveys around the world, allowing them to compare countries, trends over time, and of course of perceptions by common people completely differ from the actual reality of the country.

Whether the topic is health, money, immigration, religion ... or even less emotional topics such as internet access, public perceptions are almost always completely off the mark, and not by a short distance, but a very large margin in most countries.

This book is an essential read for anybody in politics, public affairs and journalism. It demonstrates the extreme dangers of referendums, because the average population does not have a clue about reality. They don't. It explains why populism has such an easy task of exploiting these misperceptions and use them to advance their evil cause. It explains a lot of the anger and the fear among populations, two emotions that are often misdirected, but they relate more about people's perceptions than about reality. To put it differently, people seem to be afraid of their perceptions rather than from reality.

And the book is very well written: simple coherent, non-judgmental, objective.

Hans Rosling - Factfulness (Flatiron, 2018) ****

If you don't know Swedish epidemiologist Hans Rosling, it's high time you find out about him on the internet, via his Gapminder Foundation, or through this book, which was published posthumously. 

Rosling is an incredible educator and big picture thinker, who managed to show the state of the world through very interesting visualisations of the evolution of poverty and wealth, of diseases and of demographic changes. 

"Factfulness" describes in a comprehensive way all his teaching, youtube presentations and TED Talks. 

This book should be mandatory reading in all schools across the world. It will bring both humility and hope for everybody. He demonstrates that most countries in the world are currently having the same living standards as the richest countries somewhere in the middle of last century. He shows how things improve for many people across the world, and how our categorisation of the world in "developed" and "developing" countries is completely outdated. 

One of the best things about his lectures, is that Rosling always submitted his audiences to a quiz before his presentation, only to show how most of us have completely wrong assumptions about the state of the world. And these audiences included politicians, journalists, WHO and IMF collaborators, who in general and with great majority gave the wrong answers. 

And that includes both you and me. So you'd better read this book too!

Robert Sapolsky - Behave (Bodley Head, 2017) *****

Truly amazing. In "Behave", Robert Sapolsky, professor in biology and neurology at Stanford University, gives a big picture overview of all the processes that make us do what we do. He uses the simple act of pulling the trigger of a gun, but he could have used any other action. He then analyses all the biological (hormonal, genetic, ...), psyschological, cognitive, genetic and cultural elements that drive that specific simple activity, by moving back in time, starting with the first seconds preceding the act, step by step back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In fact, Sapolsky tries to go beyond the traditional academic distinction between the sciences of behaviour.

As is often the case by such sweeping overviews of current scientific insights, academics will criticise the lack of true in-depth and up-to-date knowledge of each of the disciplines presented, and especially in their own field of interest, but that is unavoidable in books with the ambition to popularise and create such a broad canvas. The big advantage is that it brings together the incredibly complex processes behind our everyday actions. It shows were our limits are, allowing to become more conscious of why we do what we do, and therefore also to become smarter, and as Sapolsky advocates, also wiser.

Sapolsky's ways of presenting human behaviour in all its complex processes, should be mandatory for all schools in the world. If everybody understood some of the essential drivers of our current behaviour, the way our hormones work, the way our brain functions, the way adolescents brains differ from adult brains, understanding how us-versus-them thinking drives moral choices, how apperent personal moral decisions may have deep emotional roots that can only be overcome by becoming conscious of them ... the world would definitely be a better place.

And that is the great value of a popular science book such as this one. It's insightful, humane, wise and compassionate.

One of the best books of the year.

Beau Lotto - Deviate - The Science of Seeing Differently (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2017) ***

Beau Lotto is an American neuroscientist, active in London, and the founder of the Lab of Misfits, a studio that creates unique real-world ‘experiential-experiments’ that places the public at the centre of the process of discovery.

In this book, Lotto starts with a deep dive in how we perceive things, and specifically colour, and how our brain creates these perceptions often more based on how brain functions than how reality really is. It is only when we become aware that we see things that aren't there, and we don't see things that are there, that we can start opening our mind to new possibilities. Humans did not evolve to see reality, but to survive. Yet now, we have to challenge our brain. We have to open it, with the right approaches, to mold it to have more neural connections. We need more contexts, different environments and experiences. We need to be incentivised to imagine things. We need methods to go beyond the narrow confines of our current perspectives. That's why we have to deviate. To be more open, more creative, more innovative, more connected.

If it all sounds a little new-agey, it's maybe because it is. The book is also written in the same style, with the lay-out aiding to challenge the reader (sometimes written upside down, sometimes graphically, sometimes ...).

In fact, there's nothing much new to read here for anybody who's read some works on how the brain works. But for the general audience, it's a good introduction. The only downside is that Lotto seems to have all the answers. Instead of all the right questions.

Daniel Dennett - From Bacteria To Bach And Back (Allen Lane, 2017) ***

In this ambitious book, American philosopher Daniel Dennett describes the evolution of mind and consciousness as the result of biological adaptations in a very Darwinian way. No problem with that of course. And to a large extent you can only agree with all the different facts that support his vision.

But then he suddenly makes a jump to the description of consciousness which is, if I understand him well, an illusion. I can understand that the perception of the ego is an illusion, but consciousness itself? He calls it a 'user-illusion' at the same level as the color that stays on your retina after you've closed your eyes, a kind of imprint of continuity that does not exist in reality. I have no problem with this either, but he does not substantiate this fully, apart from a philosophical plausible explanation. Suddenly, the facts are no longer there, only the analogy with visual illusions.

At the same time you wonder who is writing for? The language is too complicated and the arguments too subtle to be read by mass audiences. But then why does he spend so much time on attacking "Intelligent Design", when surely none of his readers will need to be convinced of its stupidity? Why does he need to attack Noam Chomsky in such a way, when it's not even needed for his reasoning? Why does he refer so often to his own work to make his point?

In the end the reader will have read an interesting overview of a selection of scientists working in the area between biology and cognitive science, or seperately but brought together by Dennett in a synthesis of current thinking, with a original viewpoint of his own. At the same time, it is needlessly complicated, with divergence and repetitions that could have been avoided.

Steven Sloman & Philip Fernbach - The Knowledge Illusion (McMillan, 2017) ****

Steven Sloman is professor of Cognitive Linguistics and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, and Philip Fernbach is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Colorado. In "The Knowledge Illusion" they have written one of the most interesting and thought-stimulating books about the mind that I've read in quite a while. The writing is fluent, easy to understand for lay audiences, well substantiated with evidence and coherent in its narrative, which is not always evident for prominent scientists.

They describe quite a number of cognitive tests that demonstrate how little we actually know, and how strongly we over-evaluate our own knowledge. They explain the 'Illusion of Explanatory Depth' (which demonstrates how shallow our knowledge is of evern everyday things such as zippers and flushing toilets), they explain how our perceptions fool us by (re)constructing the gaps in our vision for instance. They explain the Illusion of Comprehension when you think you understand it because it looks familiar (as in a student re-reading his course without integrating the knowledge).

Their theory is that the mind is actually much broader than the individual. You don't store information because you know it's available elsewhere (as with the natural distribution of sharing knowledge within couples: tasks of storing information becomes divided). There is the obvious 'groupthink' that reflects the unquestioned beliefs and assumptions that you take over from the group you belong to.

Our brain has evolved to work properly in an action-oriented environment. Sufficient to act in different circumstances, driven by a simple cause-and-effect logic.

It's a humbling book because of all the flaws that we have in our thinking, the faulty perceptions, the lack of logic, the overestimation of our own capacities, the shallow memory, etc. At the same time, it is also enriching, in the sense that it demonstrates that in specific circumstances, we can obtain strong results by collective thinking, by adding different perspectives to our own. We are social animals, and by listening and challenging and enriching each other, we can challenge assumptions, misperceptions,  and other illusions.

Highly recommended!

Scott E. Page - The Difference (Princeton University Press, 2007) ****

Page's book is one of the landmark books on the topic of diversity of thought, or collective intelligence. He approaches the topic like a mathematician or computer scientist, devoid of any emotional or ideological intentions, analysing how choices can be made by different people, and how the outcome of problem-solving can be improved if diverse perspectives are combined.

He creates a number of theorems that he systematically investigates. He defines all the difference that people may have in their approach to a problem. He defines 'perspectives', 'heuristics', 'interpretations', 'tool boxes' and 'preferences'. He calculates how adding every person's individual set of perspectives, heuristics, interpretations, tool boxes and preferences to another person's, increases the list of possible solutions to a problem with a huge factor.

His conclusion is clear : Diversity Trumps Ability. Collective decision-making will increase the predictive power, will generate more creative ideas, will come to more and better solutions to problems, and will obviously know more facts ... But Page is also clever enough to put some conditions against this strong evidence. It does not work in all situations and in all contexts. It should fit the purpose. A random group of people will not solve a mathematical problem better than a mathematical expert on his own. And it is not because you have good identity diversity (ethnic, gender, age group) in teams, that you have the best possible diversity of perspectives: if they all have the same social and educational background, they may be less diverse than you think.

Page writes well, and like any scientist, his approach his very systematic and in-depth, but he manages to keep it readable, with examples and reasonings that do not require any specific knowledge of mathematics, economy or computer science.

Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion (Constable, 2011) ***½

Bruce Hood is a British experimental psychologist at Bristol Universiy, who specialises in developmental cognitive neuroscience. In "The Self Illusion" he gives a sweeping overview of the most current thinking on the workings of our brain and the illusory perception of the 'self'.

He explains how our brains work, how the neurons interconnect, how memory is created and stored, and then finally how the brain creates a narrative around these memory to give it a sense of continuity and overall framework. This 'self' is, according to Hood, a fiction that may change dramatically depending on the situation (eg work vs private environment) or the different phases in life. The same holds true for free will, which is also a conscious creation of brain cells and neurons at work in the background, and the post hoc rationalisation is nothing more than a narrative for what's happening unconsciously. A quite shocking statement for us who so strongly believe in our own rational powers and strong personalities (including your humble servant).

Yet Hood's explanation, his rigorous documentation of own research and of cases presented by other scientists is quite compelling, especially now that brain scans can demonstrate that our brains decide several seconds before we make a conscious decision.

Many of Hood's examples and extreme cases were already mentioned in other books on the same topic, such as the ones by Oliver Sacks or Daniel Kahneman, yet at the same time, it's good to have them again in a very accessible and even entertaining book with a very comprehensive overview of today's cognitive science.