Enquiry into the nature of mind is considered as an inevitable part in the understanding of reality in the contemporary sciences. There was a time which is not that far away in the history of science in which mind was not considered as an object of study at all. The can-do attitude in the case of consciousness entered into science, especially in special brain-based sciences, just four decades back. Christof Koch, the biologist is one of the pioneers whose work paved the way for turning the attention of science to a domain which was once considered as something which is completely nonviable one for science. His recent book titled Consciousness: Confessions of A Romantic Reductionist explicates the journeys which he made with the quest for a scientific study of consciousness. It contains an enormous amount of data which include his theoretical insights and his metaphysical convictions from time to time, about personal and most importantly about his future projections in the study of mind and so on.

The book is written in ten chapters which incorporates a lot of data. It would be good if we start with a look at the title Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. As far as mind is concerned, the biggest problem ever is ‘how the water of matter turns into the wine of consciousness’. It is widely thought that consciousness can be reduced to something which is something more fundamental and physical down the line. Consciousness as a phenomenon which is seemingly difficult to be captured by science through any such reduction is the new insight which Koch draws out from his engagement with the problem for over three decades. This paves the way for the author to think about consciousness in a different way.

Emergentism and reductionism always go hand in hand, where the former is the view that higher levels of reality evolves out of the lower levels which constitute them. When applied to consciousness, emergentism implies that consciousness is an emergent property caused by the supporting systems for example, brain at the lower level. This conception gives room for explaining the properties of emergent levels in terms of the lower level processes. To account for the emergent levels in terms of lower level processes would entail that there is nothing over and above the lower level processes. Much of the scientific studies of consciousness today are driven by the notions of reduction and emergence owing to their physicalist world view according to which matter is the ultimate and fundamental element of reality. Koch also subscribes to this world view and now makes a radical shift in his position.

The new position that he takes is that consciousness is a fundamental irreducible property of organized systems which carry information. He takes recourse to the famous 17^th century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s idea of monads. Monads are fundamental and non-composite and thus are irreducible too. Consciousness according to Koch’s revised metaphysical view is a monad like element which is fundamental to reality like the charge of sub-atomic particles. Koch admits that his revised view is a kind of property dualism according to which mind and matter are two aspects of the same reality and one cannot be reduced to the other. This move in some sense goes against the current in the middle of physicalism driven scientific world view.

Though Koch changed his world view, he is strict in his convictions about naturalism and scientism. Naturalism as Koch projects is a view according to which there is nothing other than the natural entities which are responsible to account for various phenomena in the world. This helps him to avoid anything divine including god to intervene into the explanatory paradigms including those which study consciousness. Scientism is a view which claims that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints. While admitting that the major part of reality includes dark matter, dark energy as well as much of what we call as consciousness, he still finds hope in science as the systematic enquiry in terms of its explanatory power, testability and predictability.

This book opens up the scope for discussing many ‘hot’ topics which are of concern to various pragmatic walks of life too. One such instance is when he talks about the nature of mind which hides many things from us, the so-called owners of our own minds. He takes a position which almost leads us towards an illusory conception of self. The feeling or the sense of self which prompts us to talk about and conceive of free-will, responsibility for our actions etc are illusions which lack causal efficacy to initiate the actions which we think we have initiated. He provides strong experimental data to back up his claim. Moreover, his claims such as consciousness is not just the whole of mind and that much of the functionings of mind are behind the screen which is placed in front of  the mind’s eye shakes the age old conceptions about ourselves which are taken for granted as common-sensical today.

With the new world view which pictures consciousness in a new light on the one hand, and the  strong convictions on the method of science subsumed under naturalism on the other hand, Koch invites the reader’s attention towards his dream project such as measuring consciousness by quantifying the qualitative elements. He draws inspiration from the theory of integrated information  according to which conscious systems are those systems which carry enormous amount of information and at the same time the information generates integrated complex systems. “The system must discriminate among a large repertoire of states (differentiation) and it must do so as a part of a unified whole, one that cannot be decomposed into a collection of causally independent parts (integration).”

Being romantic successfully drives Koch to the dark paths of consciousness, but sometimes, his attempts give a sense of danger of falling into the too imaginative traps. One such instance is when he makes a dramatic prediction that one day the internet which carries huge amount of information in its world wide web would be one big conscious system. He brings in a version of panpsychism founded on the notion of functional equivalence. Any functionally equivalent integrated information carrying system can be conscious like biological organisms. Perhaps this may not disturb his Monadic view of consciousness but still gives a sense of saying too much about the mind which would be a romantic prediction at this point.

Apart from these intellectual matters the author talks about his childhood days, his adoption of Francis Crik, the Nobel laureate for the discovery of the structure of D.N.A as his intellectual father in his study of consciousness and during his days as a professor. He talks about his married life and his rejection of the idea of a personal god due to the influence of naturalistic concerns. His non- anthropocentric concerns also figures in while he admits that animals also have consciousness with varying degrees. This claim is in tune with his ideas about naturalistic evolution and the place of living systems within it. All these make the reading of the book more like a visual treat pointing into the ways in which Koch’s life is shaped. Towards the end, the reader can find the author sitting pretty with a romantic look at the roads ahead especially those which lead to the ultimate destination namely consciousness. The book is written for a general audience which is evident from the way of presentation of its contents, in less technical and a more robust autobiographical mode.

© 2012 Robin Luke Varghese

Robin Luke Varghese, Research Student, Department of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad