Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality

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More than your typical mind/brain book, April 13, 2010 By  Edward F., Kelly (Charlottesville VA) – See all my reviews
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Most contemporary scientists and philosophers take it as axiomatic that mind and consciousness are entirely products of physiological processes occurring in brains. In stark contrast, others have argued that consciousness is beyond the reach of serious scientific study. Nunez takes a plausible middle ground, calling on his physics and neuroscience education and his extensive experience in brain imaging research. Aimed at a general audience, this book addresses both the “easy” problem (finding neural correlates of consciousness) and the “hard” problem (explaining its qualitative properties), repeatedly coming back to the question of balance between knowledge and ignorance: What do we really know about ourselves and our universe and how do we know it?, he asks. Using personal stories, fanciful metaphors, and humor to convey profound ideas in an engaging manner, Nunez makes even his most technical material accessible to nearly any interested reader. The first few chapters introduce important concepts like complementarity, intuition versus logic, and religious beliefs, with insightful and amusing references to subjects as diverse as crooked investment bankers, philosophical zombies, conscious computers, unconscious brain processes, abortion, first life controversies, plug-pulling on terminal patients, ideas from science fiction, poker, encounter groups, extended consciousness, and religion. The “easy” problem of consciousness is considered in the context of EEG “brain waves” regarded as the shadows of thought associated with our constantly varying mental states. Brain physiology and anatomy are outlined in an engaging chapter called Why hearts don’t love and brains don’t pump. It is suggested that healthy brains maintain a delicate balance between functional isolation and functional integration, explained by an analogy to human cultures with embedded social networks. A nice overview of modern ideas from many interrelated scientific areas is presented, mercifully limiting heavy technical details to Endnotes. Some of the material in later chapters on cosmology and quantum mechanics is challenging, but even readers with minimal scientific background will come away with a better feeling for the deep issues involved. The final chapter gets down to the book’s central question: Does the brain create the mind, as most contemporary scientists and philosophers unquestioningly presume, or is Mind in some sense already “out there”? Taking great pains to distinguish fact from speculation, and readily admitting that current science has only small parts of the picture, Nunez makes a surprisingly strong case for taking the latter possibility seriously. In the opinion of this reviewer, Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality is more than merely engaging and informative in the conventional manner; rather, it takes another significant step toward the enlargement of conventional mind/brain theory that will be necessary before we can fully understand many still-mysterious properties of human mind and consciousness.

Because of the sheer breadth of subjects that Nunez covers in this book, I cannot give adequate treatment, or do justice, to the entire book in this review; however, I can say that Nunez has pulled off something very remarkable – every major topic related to consciousness is synthesized and laid out in a system that makes complete sense, even to the lay reader. This is something that others, whom Dr. Nunez quotes (Roger Penrose: The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe and Henry Stapp: Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics (The Frontiers Collection), et. al.), were never able to do! Don’t get me wrong though, there is enough math in this book to choke a donkey! It’s just that Dr. Nunez has struck the right balance by not dumbing-down the issues just to sell more copies of his book, nor made it so difficult that you end up drooling in a dark corner; I definitely appreciate this fact.

In conclusion, I cannot recommend this book enough. Dr. Nunez seamlessly incorporates many themes (Complexity: Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory; Neuroscience: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain; Philosophy: Brainstorming: Views and Interviews on the Mind; Physics: The Life of the Cosmos) into a wonderful book that, for my money, is the best book on the issue of Consciousness ever written to date. I would also recommend another book that is similar in nature, but not nearly as in-depth: Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. Lastly, I would like to say that above all, I admired Dr. Nunez’s tone throughout the entire book, which is that of a skeptic’s skeptic. Dr. Nunez neither advocates for nor against some of the strange, weird, and far-out theories that arise from the study of quantum mechanics and consciousness. In a word, this book is brilliant.

However the core question for this book is about the scientific status of consciousness itself. Chapter 9 – its title “Modern Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness” — begins a deep discussion of the author’s view on Consciousness and physics formulating a general conjecture – the RTQC Conjecture – that Relativity, Thermodynamics and/or Quantum Mechanics may well be related to Consciousness. It is admitted that this idea may be controversial to some and indeed the author admits to have gradually convinced himself of the plausibility of this conjecture from an initial position of skepticism. So anyone who wonders why there might be such a connection can study the discussion in this book.

His discussions of the Physics examples and theories is excellent and well referenced. There are indeed some maths notes in the Endnotes which identify some of the equations and the physics involved.

In the final chapter the author gives us some definitions within which he would frame this discussion further: Ultra-Information, Ultra-computation. There is a fairly serious discussion of ideas that “Mind” is not necessarily localized in the usually understood sense. Models in which consciousness is a correlate of sub-quantum matter or perhaps is non-local are given some airing too. Some quantum reasons (like Bell’s ERP Theorem) are given for why this might work.

Readers familiar with Professor Penrose’s popular book “The Emperor’s New Mind” might be familiar with some similar ideas (although expressed from a physics perspective). Indeed Professor Nunez quotes from Penrose in the last section of this book so there may be a convergence to be found between these ideas of a leading Neuroscientist and of a leading Quantum Physicist. So this has to be interesting too!