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Enchanted Looms : Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers
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Author: Rodney Cotterill
List Price: $70.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0521624355
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (12 November, 1998)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 167,993
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Enchanted science writing
Rodney, neuroscience explorer, returns from a trek into the unknown chart area, "terra incognita". Consciousness and mind hide there and now this book yields up their secrets and treasures. Well illustrated, apt quotations, written with beautiful expression and constantly rigorous in thought and argument. Science writing now days divides into the noisy and the hidden gems. The first is smart agents, pushy PR and personalities that constantly self promotion but write work that never lives up to its flash and advertising. Would that Pinker was as good as the ads tell us he is. In the second group are those that never get into the stream of success because they are too good natured for the game. But they write the science that is worth reading. Professor Cotterill - at least after reading this book -- is at the top of that group. Having read Pinker's Blank Slate, I wished I had read this first - better is a personal judgment but this is. Not a book for indenting from the library but buying for a holiday and pleasure.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Tough going at times, but worth it.
If you are, like me, an "amateur" when it comes to the study of the mind, you have probably sought to balance your reading of philosophers like Dennett with something more solid from the science of mind. "Enchanted Looms" is a fine place to do that.This is not a book to sweep through in a few days. You will want to pause and digest. Although Cotterill is clearly aiming at an educated layperson as a reader, he bows, stylistically, to an academic audience. This interfered with my reading of the book. Dozens of times per chapter, he cites sources parenthetically or within the text. Too many sentences begin in the form "The work of _x_ and _y_ has shown..." For the longest time I kept thinking that noting and remembering those names would help me in following a line of argument. This was rarely the case. But then, at times, a backward reference to "_x_" would stump me. Once I learned to glide over these I found it much easier to read the book. The tie-in with "neural networks" was an interesting process since I had little sense of their importance in cognitive science. Cotterill does a nice job, initially, of showing how such structures might work in both the abstract and at the level of neural anatomy. But, interestingly, he moves on to make a convincing case that such structures cannot adequately model all the functionality of the human brain. I came away from this book with the sense that neural nets are the "Ptolemaic epicycles" of brain science - a paradigm that with growing complexity and constant tweaking can just barely model what we know about a physical phenomenon, but which are not up to the ultimate task. Cotterill does a nice job of making the macro-anatomy of the brain a part of a meaningful whole. Too many neuro-anatomy-focused books seem to just carve out the various regions and leave a sense of oddly unconnected "vision centers" and "speech centers." "Enchanted Looms" presents much more of the sense of the interconnectedness of those zones that we have chosen to isolate as anatomical pieces. He goes into some depth about how these connections might themselves function as a layer in the processing that we call thinking or sensation, ... or consciousness. Which brings me, in the end, to the grail in my own "brain-book" search - "consciousness." Sure its fascinating to realize how interesting the study of, for instance, vision, might be, but its that "me" in there, in HERE, that wants some explaining. Although this is not the focus of Cotterill's book, he does propose a very different model for consciousness from any that I have seen - seemingly centered around neuro-motor systems; an odd twist on the notion of a "muscle-head" ! I say "seemingly" because it was really only upon reading this concluding section of the book that I realized I might not have understood enough of the prior 500 pages. Cotterill's argument for this unusual underpinning of consciousness seemed somewhat unconvincing, to me, only to the degree that it built upon elements of his model for brain that I had only partially grasped. So I will reread this book... a very unusual thing for me, for this topic. It bespeaks the power of the ideas it presents that I know "Enchanted Looms" will be worth that second effort.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Great.
This is an extremely comprehensive book. It covers many aspects of neuroscience and neural networks. Among a lot of information, there is his theory of consciousness. He bases his view of the mind as action centered, and this is to my mind, a good move. It is no surprising that his model includes sensimotor areas. He also includes the prefrontal, premotor, and the thalamus intralaminar nuclei, forming a loop, in his theory of consciousness. He supports it quite well, and it gives rise to predictions that can be experimentaly tested. The data considered is overwhelming, so even if the consciousness theory end up not being totally right, the book as a whole is still a very important piece of literature in the neurosciences. Qualia as essentialy the effects of muscle-spindles in the loop at first seems confusing, if not implausible, but maybe deserves further consideration. Not a lot of neural network talk, but enough to complement nicely.
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