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Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind
How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it?
This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it.
The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots.
Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species.
The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically.
Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.
This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it.
The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots.
Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species.
The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically.
Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.
768 pages, Hardcover
Published July 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 30, 2022
Pure gold read for anyone willing to question our perception and brain function. How does our wetware get to work as it seems to do?
The only thing that could bother me is whether all this is actually proven stuff or a bunch of hypotheticals. Then again, even hypothetically, this material is pure gold.
The only thing that could bother me is whether all this is actually proven stuff or a bunch of hypotheticals. Then again, even hypothetically, this material is pure gold.
February 28, 2022
Magnum Opus of the greatest neuroscientist you have likely never heard of.
Every engineering student has come across Maxwell's equations (if not understood them). James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory changed our understanding of the world, unifying electricity and magnetism. It has, more than any other idea before or after, also unified the world, unshackling communication from earth-bound wires and suffusing the skies with thoughts, hopes, desires, and TikTok videos ricocheting at the speed of light.
But for nearly twenty years after initial publication, Maxwell's work went virtually unnoticed. The math was considered complex and difficult, the equations an impenetrable thicket of all known notation. For an era steeped in the Newtonian mathematics and metaphors of “one-fluid” and “two-fluid” theories, and of storing currents in Leyden jars, it was simply too far ahead of its time.
We are likely in a similar epochal interregnum now. Just as electric motors and electromagnetic generators were discovered and in use before a real understanding of the underlying principles, we are now at the dawn of an AI age with astonishingly powerful artificially intelligent machines being put to use — without any real understanding of how and why they work.
The unification of mind and brain holds the promise of unshackling intelligence and consciousness from their earth-bound biological vessels and paving the path to a new world of soaring superintelligences that currently only inhabit the realms of science-fiction. And just as in Clerk Maxwell’s time, the unifying framework may already be here with us, unappreciated and far ahead of its time.
Over 60 years (starting in his freshman year in 1957!), Grossberg has pioneered and developed foundational intuitions and mathematics that have become invisible tramlines in the field. The equations and architectures he formulated offer a rare and breathtaking unifying framework that can model and explain a vast number of brain processes. Many of these predictions have been subsequently proven by experimental results “5–30 years after they were first published.” How, one might ask, does such seminal work go unrecognized for so long? In Grossberg’s own words, it might have been because the path he chose was “lonely and independent” and whenever he had an idea, he “usually had it too far ahead of its time” or “would develop it too mathematically for most readers.”
Fortunately for us, Stephen Grossberg has finally published his Magnum Opus, which brings together decades of his work in its most accessible form. (Having read Grossberg’s papers first as a Ph.D. student nearly two decades ago, and revisiting his body of work over the past two years for a book I am co-authoring, I can vouch for the “most accessible” descriptor.)
The British-American polymath Freeman Dyson once likened mathematicians to birds and frogs:
Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.
Grossberg’s genius lies in embodying both, and in recognizing that “obvious hypotheses, with which no one would disagree, together imply conclusions about deep properties of brain organization.” Can a deep understanding of boundaries and surfaces of simple, toy objects lead to the most profound insights into the nature of learning and attention? Can an understanding of how silence flows across time and alters the perception of words uttered before it, help explain consciousness itself? Grossberg shows how.
(You can read a longer review at saigaddam.medium.com)
Every engineering student has come across Maxwell's equations (if not understood them). James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory changed our understanding of the world, unifying electricity and magnetism. It has, more than any other idea before or after, also unified the world, unshackling communication from earth-bound wires and suffusing the skies with thoughts, hopes, desires, and TikTok videos ricocheting at the speed of light.
But for nearly twenty years after initial publication, Maxwell's work went virtually unnoticed. The math was considered complex and difficult, the equations an impenetrable thicket of all known notation. For an era steeped in the Newtonian mathematics and metaphors of “one-fluid” and “two-fluid” theories, and of storing currents in Leyden jars, it was simply too far ahead of its time.
We are likely in a similar epochal interregnum now. Just as electric motors and electromagnetic generators were discovered and in use before a real understanding of the underlying principles, we are now at the dawn of an AI age with astonishingly powerful artificially intelligent machines being put to use — without any real understanding of how and why they work.
The unification of mind and brain holds the promise of unshackling intelligence and consciousness from their earth-bound biological vessels and paving the path to a new world of soaring superintelligences that currently only inhabit the realms of science-fiction. And just as in Clerk Maxwell’s time, the unifying framework may already be here with us, unappreciated and far ahead of its time.
Over 60 years (starting in his freshman year in 1957!), Grossberg has pioneered and developed foundational intuitions and mathematics that have become invisible tramlines in the field. The equations and architectures he formulated offer a rare and breathtaking unifying framework that can model and explain a vast number of brain processes. Many of these predictions have been subsequently proven by experimental results “5–30 years after they were first published.” How, one might ask, does such seminal work go unrecognized for so long? In Grossberg’s own words, it might have been because the path he chose was “lonely and independent” and whenever he had an idea, he “usually had it too far ahead of its time” or “would develop it too mathematically for most readers.”
Fortunately for us, Stephen Grossberg has finally published his Magnum Opus, which brings together decades of his work in its most accessible form. (Having read Grossberg’s papers first as a Ph.D. student nearly two decades ago, and revisiting his body of work over the past two years for a book I am co-authoring, I can vouch for the “most accessible” descriptor.)
The British-American polymath Freeman Dyson once likened mathematicians to birds and frogs:
Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.
Grossberg’s genius lies in embodying both, and in recognizing that “obvious hypotheses, with which no one would disagree, together imply conclusions about deep properties of brain organization.” Can a deep understanding of boundaries and surfaces of simple, toy objects lead to the most profound insights into the nature of learning and attention? Can an understanding of how silence flows across time and alters the perception of words uttered before it, help explain consciousness itself? Grossberg shows how.
(You can read a longer review at saigaddam.medium.com)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews