One of the more unusual non-fiction reads I’ve found in a while. Its subject is mind (or “mind” if you prefer): what it is, how it works and why it is the way it is—its history in other words, what shaped it. And by history I really do mean the long view of things because this book takes us all the way back to the very earliest and simplest microscopic living things, sensing and responding to their surroundings; then, step by careful step, it runs the clock forward from there.
    I found the first 118 pages (Parts 1 and 2, from microbes to invertebrate animals) fascinating and packed with insights. The way even a simplified cartoon version of a bacterium, say, deals with its world left a big impression—how even simple structures produce such purposeful-looking behaviour, and how even the most minor alterations radically transform those behaviours. Or this: “…we can begin to appreciate an interesting fact about the journey of Mind: how easy it seems to have been to develop complex mental faculties…”. Not how hard or unlikely, but how easy—that made the biggest impression on me of all.
    During Parts 3 and 4 though (the vertebrates, including ourselves) the whole book changes. We get a nine-page biography of Stephen Grossberg, mathematician and pioneer of the “module” theory of mind, and then the rest is based on his ideas. The result reads almost like two separate books: the authors’ own work taking us halfway, then someone else’s to complete the story.
    One other point: the authors are either just lazy with their use of language (“…as humankind was groping its way toward civilization…”; I’m sure it wasn’t like that at all, that humanity had no more idea of where it was going in the past than we do today), or they really do see it that way. Hard to tell—despite a disclaimer—but the book is peppered with teleological (or just quirky?) phrases like that.
    Overall then an unusual read—but Parts 1 and 2, on their own, would have got the full five stars. ( )

Like Deacon's _Incomplete Nature_ (2012) and Dennett's _From Bacteria to Bach and Back_ (2017), this volume strives to explain how mentality arose, but it does so in a very different way. With the aid of a lot of illustrative diagrams, it describes the gamut of brain-like structures, from that of the simplest archaeon to that of the human animal. The authors are disciples of cognitive scientist Stephen Grossberg, stressing the "embodied thinking principle" whereby the mind is the brain plus the body plus the environment and is not anything like a computer or software. They say that a fly's mind exemplifies the upper limit of non-conscious minds and that higher (conscious) minds involve "resonant" interplay among various mind "modules". This model affords a complicated explanation of the human language faculty. When applying it to analyze societal-level mentality, I think, the authors get carried away by bringing in some of their opinions on social systems, economics, the internet, etc. But then they gift us with a marvel of a long almost-lyrical essay on how the "Self" concept (consciousness of consciousness) can be seen as sitting on top of all that has come before. The authors assure us that Grossberg's full theory involves a complex system -- too hard to summarize concisely -- of simultaneous nonlinear differential equations. This would imply that we who thought Tononi's (very different) Integrated Information Theory was the only quantitative theory of consciousness were wrong.