Skip to main content

Sentience - Nicholas Humphrey *****

The first seventy-odd pages of this book are absolutely phenomenal (pun intended, though still true). We start with a near-stream of consciousness prologue - very appropriate for a book on sentience - and then go on to have a description of the early part of Nicholas Humphrey's career in a wonderfully approachable fashion with a writing style somewhere between a deep conversation and a thought process. I particularly loved Humphrey's description of his heading off to Elba to investigate the paranormal claims of the eccentric Hugh Sartorius Whitaker and his experiences with Dian Fossey (not always pleasant) when visiting to study the 'natural psychologist' ability of gorillas.

The book then takes a change of tack, signified by the author heading the next chapter 'To work', as he sets out to build for us his theory on the nature of sentience and 'phenomenal consciousness'. This too is very interesting, but lacks the same storytelling verve. It's also a lot harder to get your head around, as a lot of the time we are dealing with rather wispy philosophical concepts. The central thesis is that sentience is about not the ability to react to sensations (as it originally meant), but to be consciously aware of what it's like to experience sensations (that's phenomenal consciousness, I think - though I need to say 'I think' because it is difficult to take in).

The job Humphrey has is to persuade the reader of his thesis, apparently not accepted across the board by any means, that sentience arises from a particular mechanism in the brain. This, he suggests, was linked to warm-bloodedness, so it is likely that only mammals and birds (presumably potentially also including earlier dinosaurs) have been sentient - though not all to the same level. He gives a (to me) quite convincing argument that, for example, playing is a good indicator of sentience.

There were times when I think there could have been more explanation (and he might have better avoiding some of the confusing technical terms). So, for example, I don't think there is enough distinction between the sensation of redness as we experience it and the quality of an object being red, which is a simple physical property of giving off photons in a certain range of energies. To philosophers used to discussing this topic, there is a yawning gap between the two - but to the ordinary reader they are much closer and the distinction needed better handling. The same is true of some of the other philosophical niceties that are needed to really get your head around this topic.

Despite this resulting in sometimes feeling like I was experiencing Humphrey's ideas like a view through gauze (going all sensational there), reading this book was a real pleasure. 

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Random Universe - Andrew Jaffe *****

This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to take a scientific view because largely we are dependent on induction: predicting the future from what has previously been observed. He explores what probability is, the two key ways of looking at it (frequentist and Bayesian) and how scientists use (or misuse it) to work out the implications of their experiments for hypotheses. This is then expanded into looking at the nature of scientific models and the philosophy of science before heading out to entropy, quantum randomness and attempting to achieve meaningful cosmology with its potential dearth of evidence.  The topic might sound a little dry, but in fact Jaffe does it with good humour and a very readable style. For example, he uses measuring his daughter's height by making marks on...
Post a Comment
Read more