The Consciousness Revolutions From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation

This book is about all things consciousness, great and small. It starts by pointing to the key characteristic of consciousness, without realizing which it cannot be understood: like everything else about the mind, it is fundamentally a kind of computation. Among many other matters, this explains: how it is that we share some aspects of consciousness with bacteria; how it can arise in artificial machines and not just living ones; how the empty cocoon of the self that it spins ends up pretending to be the butterfly; and how consciousness dooms this virtual butterfly to the splendor and the suffering of being awake and aware. Unlike most other books on consciousness, this one includes a discussion of some possible ways whereby we, pinned like butterflies by our species’ history and socioeconomic circumstances, can awake to our collective predicament and join forces to do something about it. It should be of interest to all readers who care about the nature of our lived experience — andabout our survival, which depends on developing critical consciousness of our dire situation and the social dynamics that shape it.

Shimon Edelman holds degrees in electrical engineering and in computer science and is presently Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. Having worked and published in computer and human vision and motor control, language acquisition and evolution, computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, brain imaging, theoretical and computational neuroscience, and computational social science, he is now primarily interested in consciousness in all its manifestations: from the basic sentience of an amoeba to critical and class consciousness of human selves in their natural social settings. His most recent book is Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist's View of the Human Condition.