All the Answers

Ogas and Gaddam take a very broad view of mind as “a physical system that converts sensations into action”. At face value, this grants a mind to thermostats and robots as much as to living entities. “A mind responds. A mind transforms. A mind acts,” they write. But the same is true of many machin...

An informative guide takes in archaea, birds, primates and more — overconfidently.

Look through a microscope at a macrophage cell pursuing, engulfing and consuming a bacterium, and it is hard not to impose a narrative: one is trying to catch the other, which is...

And they trivialize a pivotal social moment when they compare the mind’s attentive focus to the media presentation of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.

There is plenty to like in Journey of the Mind. It is so often informative and entertaining that it feels mean to cavil. B...

A rat finding food in a maze breaks down a visual scene into component features of edges, foreground and so on. And there’s more: the rat mind holds a complex internal representation of the world against which to compare sensory input; it is constantly checking this inner map. The authors lean he...

The book offers an admirable survey of how minds might comprise modules that control simple operations, which are combined to solve complex problems of survival. For instance, a bacterium can move towards food sources thanks to motor systems that switch between directional swimming and random tum...

There is more than a hint that evolution is striving to a particular end in Ogas and Gaddam’s suggestion that, once early single-celled organisms acquired the ability to sense and move, “the royal road to consciousness beckoned”.

The authors deploy some unedifying metaphors to tell their ta...

Even bacteria are not the simple automata portrayed here; other researchers describe bacterial behaviours in the language of cognition. The structure of a progression from the seemingly simple minds of bacteria and amoebas to the complex ones of primates makes narrative sense, but recalls the out...

There are other instances in which they present contentious ideas with certainty. For all of the minds they discuss, much remains open. They write that birds didn’t develop language “because they don’t have hands”, but in fact it’s still debated whether gestures helped lead to the origin of langu...

Grossberg’s theory is provocative and stimulating, but, couched in the abstract mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory, it remains contingent on his supposition that “all conscious states are resonant states”. I’m not convinced it amounts to the revolution that the authors assert. The...

Many assertions go beyond the facts. The discussion of consciousness rests on the belief that the problem has been solved by cognitive scientist Stephen Grossberg (whom the authors thank for “guidance and support”). Since the late 1960s, Grossberg has developed the idea that consciousness arises ...