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The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, by Francis Crick
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The Nobel Prize-winning physicist who discovered the molecular structure of DNA examines what makes humans sentient beings, offering an analysis and description of how the brain sees.
- Sales Rank: #874992 in Books
- Published on: 1994-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.05" h x 6.40" w x 9.54" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 317 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Crick (co-discoverer with James Watson of DNA's double helix structure) here takes readers to the forefront of modern brain research. Geared to serious lay readers and scientists, this speculative study argues that our minds can be explained, without recourse to religious concepts of a soul, in terms of the interactions of a vast assembly of nerve cells and associated molecules. Crick delves into the nature of consciousness by focusing on visual awareness, an active, constructive process in which the brain selectively combines discrete elements into meaningful images. Early chapters include numerous interactive illustrations to demonstrate the brain's shortcuts, tricks and habits of visual perception. In later chapters Crick discusses neural networks--electronic pathways that can "remember" patterns or produce spoken language--and outlines research strategies designed to pinpoint the brain's "awareness neurons" that enable us to see.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Nobel Prize winner Crick, who with James D. Watson discovered the molecular structure of DNA, considers the nature of human consciousness, focusing in particular on visual consciousness in an explanation of how the brain "sees."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Winner, with James Watson, of a Nobel Prize in 1962 for their world-changing discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, Crick here devotes his considerable mental powers to the study of the brain and the nature of consciousness. No topic could be more demanding or fraught with subjectivity--not to mention mysticism--but Crick insists upon the value of rational thought, logic, and experimental verification. This perspective underlies the "Astonishing Hypothesis," which states "that `You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." How's that for reductionism? But think about it. Could anything actually be more astonishing than learning that neurons make, store, and retrieve memories? Create moods? Or, and this is Crick's focus, interpret light as images? Given the impossibility of tackling consciousness in its entirety, Crick has chosen to concentrate on one crucial manifestation, visual awareness, a process far more complicated than most of us realize. While scientists have begun to understand how the brain breaks down visual information, no one knows how it puts it back together. What Crick presents is a lucid, if challenging, explanation of the components and actions of neurons, the many levels of "neural architecture" in the neocortex, and all the dynamic and constructive cognitive processes relating to vision that evolve from the incessant pulse of a myriad of molecular events. Donna Seaman
Most helpful customer reviews
54 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
Flawed, but still worth it
By Amazon Customer
The astonishing hypothesis referred to in the title of Crick's book is that all of your phenomenological experience is ultimately reducible to "no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." So, just how is consciousness neurally instantiated? What the reader should take away from the book is just how difficult of a question this is.
Francis Crick was a thorough going empiricist and he strongly believed that the experimental method was the only way of successfully tackling the problem of consciousness. Along with his close collaborator, Christof Koch, Crick chose visual awareness (rather than say, self-awareness) as the main point of attack. The reason for this is because the visual system is relatively well understood and much easier to study in the laboratory.
Visual processing is an extremely complex business. Essentially, the visual system has to create a fairly high-fidelity representation of the environment (a model) from an array of heterogeneous light patches falling onto the retina. A staggering number of computational processes need to be performed in order for you to become aware of the final output. These processes operate unconsciously, in massively parallel streams. So, what we finally become aware of (our model) is the end result of a great many hidden computations. Much has been learned about the details in which the various features of a visual scene are decomposed and processed, but what remains a mystery is how we ultimately see something (i.e., become visually aware of it). As Crick says, what is required is an account of our "explicit, multilevel, symbolic interpretation of a visual scene."
"The Astonishing Hypothesis" does not provide anything like a Crick-Koch `theory' of consciousness. In fact, Crick goes to some length to eschew any precise definitions or theories. Any such purported theories, he believed, were pre-mature. (The closest that he comes to presenting some kind of a theory is his `Processing Postulate'). Instead what the book offers is a general strategy for submitting the problem to experimental study. Here the idea is to look for neural signatures of awareness or more technically the neural correlates of consciousness (abbreviated NCCs). In a nutshell (excuse the oversimplification), here is what NCCs are all about: submit to study some visual phenomenon which has an ambiguous interpretation (e.g., the Necker cube which can be perceived in two possible ways) and simultaneously obtain measures of neural activity. Some portion of the neural activity associated with the processing of an ambiguous figure will remain invariant (that portion which corresponds to the unchanging retinal input) while another, minimal portion of the neural activity will vary along with the percept. This variant, minimal portion is a good bet for representing a NCC, a neural signature of awareness. Finding a NCC can also tell us many other interesting things, such as whether or not there any special properties of the neurons in question, whether they are located in particular places or cortical layers and so on. And, a similar mechanism which underlies visual awareness is likely to underlie other forms of awareness. [Note that this addresses what David Chalmers has called the `easy' problem of consciousness and does not touch on the `hard' problem. There is a possibility however that Chalmers' hard problem is ill-posed and that there may in fact not be a hard problem to address].
Crick presents the results of many interesting research studies that bear on the problem of consciousness. He devotes some space to the issue of temporal binding and the 40-Hz oscillation hypothesis (or more precisely, the gamma-band oscillation hypothesis) as well as the potential importance of reverberatory thalamo-cortical circuits (see also the work of Gerald Edelman). Crick also speculates about the possibly important role played by the claustrum in the generation of consciousness (something he thought about a lot just prior to his death). Unfortunately for the general reader, this comes only near the end of the book, after a rather protracted discussion of the psychology and neurobiology of vision. For a reader who is unfamiliar with neuroscience, all the hard work done to get to the final portion of the book may produce a low pay-off. It seems that Crick could have got the main point of the book across just as strongly while omitting some of the technical details along the way. For those who have some familiarity with the subject matter the book will actually be an interesting and concise review but since the work was intended for a general readership one must judge it according to that criterion (and this is one of the book's flaws).
Francis Crick died in 2004. This marked a tremendous loss to the field as Crick was blessed with a brilliant mind and he undoubtedly had it in him to make many more important contributions. He brought his enthusiasm to the study of consciousness and made it a bona-fide scientific problem. For this, among other things, he should be celebrated.
A few final remarks about the book's title are in order. First, "The Scientific Search for the Soul" is a sensationalist title that was more likely than not the publisher's idea. Second: as most of the people working in the neurosciences adopt a materialist perspective (the most famous exception of course was Sir John Eccles), the purported astonishing aspect of the hypothesis has sometimes been questioned. And yet, this idea (that our consciousness, in all its richness, is in some mysterious way the result of biophysical processes) really should be astonishing. It is easy to be familiar with the workings of the brain and still slip into old habits of thought, implicitly believing that there really is some homunculus in the head who is doing all of the perceiving. As Crick says, "A man may, in religious terms, be an unbeliever but psychologically he may continue to think of himself in much the same way as a believer does, at least for everyday matters."
It is interesting to speculate about whether our experience of ourselves would change even in the hypothetical case that we did have a complete neurobiological theory of consciousness.
12 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
The Not So Astonishing Hypothesis
By Edgar Foster
I purchased "The Astonishing Hypothesis" by Francis Crick with great expectations. I am very much interested in the scientific search for what some call "soul" and was under the impression that Crick (co-discoverer of the double helix DNA structure) had marshalled plausible or powerful evidence that the soul merely is a person's mental activities that result from the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, atoms, molecules and ions that influence glial or nerve cells. For the most part, mutatis mutandis, I affirm Crick's hypothesis. However, I don't think "The Astonishing Hypothesis" comes anywhere close to providing information that supports Crick's hypothesis. His detour on how the human brain sees is at times interesting, but ultimately not all that helpful in illuminating Crick's "astonishing hypothesis." The book (page 259) supplies a reasonable answer to presupposed objections via-a-vis Crick's modus operandi for supporting his hypothesis. The scientist explains why he chose the visual system to buttress his hypothesis. It evidently yields most easily to "experimental attack" and is only the start (i.e. a prolegomenon) of explaining what soul is. The work's provisional nature is to be applauded. However, since the attack on "soul" has just started, it seems that Crick should have been more modest in his claims and not proclaimed the death of the human soul (as the term is commonly understood) until a full "experimental attack" of the brain had been carried out. Personally, I believe that theoreticians who have undertaken studies in the philosophy of mind offer more reasonable alternatives or explanations for "soul" than Crick does. The concept of supervenience more adequately accounts for "mind" or "soul" than "The Astonishing Hypothesis" does. While "mindness" is probably a higher-level phenomenon based on a lower-level phenomenon, as are qualia, it is my belief that mind is not reducible to brain states. But without the brain, mind does not exist: mind supervenes on the brain. William Hasker's "The Emerging Self" satisfactorily develops these points.
44 of 59 people found the following review helpful.
Not a light read
By Atheen
Francis Crick is probably best known to most of us from high school biology classes for his pioneer work with James Watson on the structure and function of DNA. In his book the Astonishing Hypothesis he tackles a topic hardly less complex, the origin of awareness. Although the subtitle would suggest that the discussion is the scientific proof for the existence of the soul--and possibly thereby the existence of God--the reader who takes up the book with this expectation will be resoundingly disappointed. Instead he or she will find a very convoluted discussion of brain neurophysiology, the theoretical basis of sensory systems, the attempts to synthesize human neural function in computers, and the author's personal theory of free will. What if anything any of this has to do with the soul is anybody's guess.
On the whole, I have no quarrel with the author's choice of subject matter, but I found the book at times overly in depth and at others too brief in its discourse. I also found that the train of thought was a little confusing, as though the author went off on interesting tangents at great lengths and could only with great effort get back on track. It was as though he could have used a better outline to begin with or had attempted to cover too much in too small a space. It might also have arisen from his need to extensively paraphrase the work of others in fields in which he himself has less expertise. The discussion of the neural function of the human brain, particularly the oddities of its dysfunction were quite good. Indeed I felt it was an excellent update on what I had learned years ago in A&P for nursing school. The discussion of neural networks and artificial intelligence got a little too detailed for me, but if you're the type who finds Roger Penrose a pleasant afternoon's read, then Crick's account might actually be a little too light minded for you.
In general I found the writer's style was labored enough for it to require a concerted effort to plow my way through it. It took several attempts, during which I read several other books on wholly different topics, before I could actually finish it. I even went to the extreme of taking it with me to my health club where I would be a "captive audience" with nothing better to take my mind off the boredom of my half hour on the tread mill. On the whole, I preferred boredom. While I've no doubt the gentleman is a very learned individual, I've undertaken more readable books on the subject of mind and awareness. States of Mind by Conlon and Hobson would probably be more understandable by and enjoyable to the average reader, although this book too tends to try to cover too much in too little space.
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