craig robert martin

Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It by Christof Koch My rating: 5 of 5 stars Christof Koch’s latest book gives a good overview of his work in neuroscience spanning several decades. Koch always likes a bet, and talks about settling his 25 year wager with David Chalmers: in June 2023 he handed over a case of fine Madeira wine for failing to have identified the neural correlates of consciousness in the preceding 25 years. He thinks he is closer in the elusive search for the seat of consciousness, with the hunt narrowing towards the back of the neocortex, and reckons the next 25 years or so should see it pinned down further. In terms of ‘how’ consciousness works, he is now a fervent advocate of the ambitious Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Giuilio Tononi, a theory that more than 100 consciouness researchers have branded pseudoscience. The chapter on IIT is, unsurprisingly, the most dense. The rest of the book is ...

The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima My rating: 4 of 5 stars Mishima must have been uncharacteristically cheerful when he wrote this delightful short novel about a fishing island in 1950s Japan. Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. The girl's father thinks he has no prospects and prohibits her from meeting the boy. The boy proves himself a hero, and the father gives his blessing—the end. Shinji has just turned 18, and other than his daily work on a fishing vessel, he has never left town. He falls innocently for the new girl in town, Hatsue, and his interest in her sparks the gossip of their tight-knit community fueled by the jealousy of his peers. Fourteen hundred people live on Song Island, Uta-Jima, within its three-mile coastal universe. The island is steeped in ancient myths and appears to have escaped much of the effects of war and industrialization, with its residents living their lives as if the Meiji Restoration had never happened. The women s...

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins My rating: 3 of 5 stars The book offers an intriguing exploration into an alternate architecture of intelligence, drawing from Hawkin's extensive background in neuroscience and computing (he helped design the Palm Pilot). The book is divided into three parts, each tackling a distinct aspect of brain function and its implications for artificial intelligence and beyond. The book's first part is a compelling dive into the world of cortical columns. It focuses on the importance of the brain's cortex (the crumpled outer layer), which is thought to have evolved later than the older 'reptilian brain', which the author dismisses throughout the book (despite the fact it keeps him and other humans alive). Hawkins suggests that if you spread the brain's 'newer' neocortex out on a table into its 2.5mm thick extra-large pizza size, you would be looking at 150,000 simil...