An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired
self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power
of speech.
How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes
up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional
autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and
the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Zoltan
Torey offers an accessible and concise description of the evolutionary
breakthrough that created the human mind.
Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and
linguistics, Torey reconstructs the sequence of events by which Homo
erectus became Homo sapiens. He describes the augmented functioning
that underpins the emergent mind--a new ("off-line") internal response
system with which the brain accesses itself and then forms a selection
mechanism for mentally generated behavior options. This functional
breakthrough, Torey argues, explains how the animal brain's "awareness"
became self-accessible and reflective--that is, how the human brain
acquired a conscious mind. Consciousness, unlike animal awareness, is
not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey's account shows
how protolanguage evolved into language, how a brain subsystem for the
emergent mind was built, and why these developments are opaque to
introspection. We experience the brain's functional autonomy, he argues,
as free will.
Torey proposes that once life began, consciousness had to
emerge--because consciousness is the informational source of the brain's
behavioral response. Consciousness, he argues, is not a newly acquired
"quality," "cosmic principle," "circuitry arrangement," or
"epiphenomenon," as others have argued, but an indispensable working
component of the living system's manner of functioning.
