Finally got through Picturing the Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution!

It was a really light and fun read, and is full of interesting facts and opinions and info on past research about things like:

  • Consciousness in animals (and plants [and sponges]))
  • What separates humans from other animals [and sponges]
  • How human symbolic language may have evolved
  • Autism and savant-ism
  • There's a chapter titled "Blushing Homo-Erectus"
  • Robot sentience and cyborgs

I had originally picked it up because I was working on a storyline involving robot sentience after being inspired by the novel Blindsight (which explores the concept of the "philosophical zombie"). I thought it might be good to do at least a little research on the philosophies and sciences of consciousness before starting, but didn't really know where to begin as consciousness a bit of a broad field. I happened to see this book listed on hacknernews with zero comments and knee-jerk purchased it.

This was an excellent place to begin! It's extremely accessible, with each topic taking only a single page, ending with open-ended questions about the things we might not know yet, and being accompanied by a wacky abstract illustration and/or poem. It was like a picture book for grown-ups.

Having each topic only a page long means you only get high-level overviews of each topic with a couple of "this person said X" or "it is believed that Y", but they're all accompanied by references in the appendix, allowing the reader to quickly get through less interesting topics while deep diving the things they're interested in. Everything moved at a quick and jolly pace kept up-beat by the accompanying artwork.

I don't think I could honestly say I know terribly much more about consciousness than when I started the book, but I'm now much more confident in what I'm looking for and where to look, and I thank the authors for that.

I wish there were more beginner books for complex topics designed in this format. The ability to read a light-hearted high-level overview of something before diving into technical details or papers, or just decide "this topic isn't interesting to me" and move on to a different topic would be great for self-learners exploring complex math, science, or philosophical topics.