The Cerebral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness Book

Starting each chapter with observations from real life (most or all dealing with the behavior of a cormorant living near WHOI), Calvin describes possible mechanical explanations for how the operation of the human brain results in the consciousness that we all know and love.

He starts with the problem an early hominid had: how to combine the rock in his hand with that rabbit scampering by to produce a prehistoric version of hasenpfeffer. Having learned that he could kill an animal with a rock to the head, the problem was that the animal would rarely agree to stand still for this procedure, and he therefore had to throw the rock and hit the rabbit.

Clearly, by trial and error, just as we learned to throw a baseball as children, he learned this valuable skill. Calvin explains this by suggesting that each time he threw the rock, the variables from the encounter (distance to the rabbit, weight of the rock, muscular effort expended, etc) were "memorized", along with the result (too far, not far enough, off to the left, hit myself in the knee, etc.) A set of these configurations that were deemed successful were stored for future reference. The next time a rabbit comes by, in order to throw the rock effectively, a whole set of these configurations is compared to the current situation (Calvin gives a mechanical picture of how the brain could do this), and the "muscular program" that was used for the situation most like the current one is then used as a pattern to direct the throwing motion of the arm this time.

The saved setups that we use to cope with later situations Calvin refers to as scenarios; unsurprisingly, the more scenarios we have to choose from, the better our later judgement is expected to be.

He then goes on to suggest that the same neural machinery that was developed for this task was later adapted for more and more tasks that we perform today, from speech and visual pattern recognition to creative writing. These higher functions are groomed and exercised by going one step further, and spinning new scenarios by combining old ones, combinations based on links between concepts stored in our brains and that may or may not seem rational if we examine them consciously. When we choose to go with one of these scenarios built from seemingly unrelated concepts, it might produce results which we then consider to be insights or quantum leaps in our thinking.

And, the neat bow on the top of the whole package is that this whole process of selecting and comparing scenarios is not available to our conscious, but that consciousness is actually an emergent property of the selection of the winning scenario!