A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human ConsciousnessIn this masterful rebuttal to the prevailing neuroscientific arguments that seek to explain away consciousness, Merlin Donald presents "a sophisticated conception of a multilayered consciousness drawing much of its power from its cultural matrix" (Booklist). Donald makes "a persuasive case...for consciousness as the central player in the drama of mind" (Peter Dodwell), as he details the forces, both cultural and neuronal, that power our distinctively human modes of awareness. He proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product, interweaving a super-complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a "distributed" cognitive network. This hybrid mind, he argues, is our main evolutionary advantage, for it allowed humanity as a species to break free of the limitations of the mammalian brain. "Donald transcends the simplistic claims of Evolutionary Psychology, ...offering a true Darwinian perspective on the evolution of consciousness."--Philip Lieberman |
Contents
Consciousness in Evolution | 1 |
Demons and memes | 3 |
Questions of definition | 4 |
Building our own demons | 7 |
How this book is organized | 8 |
The Paradox of Consciousness | 13 |
A limited instrument | 14 |
Minimalist people | 16 |
Selective binding | 178 |
Shortterm control | 184 |
Intermediate and longterm governance | 195 |
Episodic awareness | 200 |
Entertaining a radical possibility | 202 |
Condillacs Statue | 205 |
Minds in motion | 206 |
Superplasticity | 208 |
The ultimate form of deconstruction | 19 |
The tunnel of consciousness | 21 |
The paradox of paradoxes | 25 |
Hardliners | 28 |
Radical presumption | 31 |
Even more radical presumption | 35 |
Dennetts dangerous idea | 39 |
Conclusion | 44 |
The Governor of Mental Life | 46 |
The time frame of awareness | 47 |
Confusion over automaticity | 57 |
Consciousness and selfgovernance | 59 |
A case history | 70 |
Zasetskys mirror twins | 76 |
A literary view | 78 |
The true reach of metacognition | 83 |
Internalization and solipsistic awareness | 87 |
Changing our model | 88 |
The Consciousness Club | 92 |
The materiality of mind | 96 |
Eliminating the scale problem | 99 |
Vestigial brains not so vestigial minds | 106 |
Avoiding the scala naturae | 113 |
Defining the domain | 117 |
The Consciousness Club | 122 |
Bringing extra resources to bear | 130 |
Embodiment egocenters and homunculi | 134 |
Defining the primate zone of proximal evolution | 137 |
Three Levels of Basic Awareness | 149 |
The great computational divide | 153 |
Access to memory | 157 |
Models of models and the tertiary regions | 164 |
Chasing phantoms | 168 |
Deep enculturation | 211 |
The muchmisunderstood Statue and the birth of Constructivism | 214 |
Mandlers dictum | 227 |
The extraordinary mind of Helen Keller | 232 |
Contact | 239 |
OutsideInside | 250 |
The First Hybrid Minds on Earth | 252 |
Consciousness and community of mind | 254 |
The cultural relevance of a multifocal multilayered consciousness | 257 |
The stages of human cultural and cognitive evolution | 259 |
Establishing the mimetic framework of human culture | 262 |
The germ of selfconsciousness | 269 |
Kinematic imagination | 271 |
The spiraling coevolution of thought and symbol | 274 |
Piggybacking language on culture | 279 |
Our cerebral boxing match with the cultural matrix | 285 |
The management of idealaundering schemes | 287 |
Symbolic invention and the growth of the lexicon | 290 |
The virtual realities of oralmythic culture | 295 |
Collectivity of mind | 298 |
The Triumph of Consciousness | 301 |
The invention of symbolic technologies | 305 |
The external memory field | 308 |
A cerebral Trojan Horse | 315 |
Multilayered cultures multilayered domains of awareness | 320 |
The essential unity of the conscious hierarchy | 322 |
Coda | 324 |
Notes | 327 |
References | 345 |
Acknowledgments | 363 |
365 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
ability abstract achieve acquire action activity algorithms Annie Sullivan apes attention automatic awareness basic become behavior binding bonobos Cambridge cerebellum chimpanzees cognitive complex Condillac conscious capacity conscious mind conscious processing consciousness cortex cortical columns demons distributed cognitive domain domain-general emerged emotional enculturation environment episodic evolution evolutionary evolved executive brain existence external memory field external symbols function gesture Hardliners Helen Helen Keller hierarchy hominid homunculus human brain human consciousness human culture ideas images imagination intermediate-term invention Kanzi kind knowledge language learning level-3 linguistic mammals meaning mental metacognitive mimesis mimetic mindreading modules nervous system networks neural neural nets neurons normal operations patterns perception play prefrontal cortex primate psychology regions representation role sciousness sensation sense sensory sequence simple skills social species Statue structure symbolic technology tertiary theory things thought tion uncon unconscious University Press visual words York Zasetsky