Consciousness Demystified

By Todd E. Feinberg and Jon M. Mallatt

Demystifying consciousness: how subjective experience can be explained by natural brain and evolutionary processes.

Consciousness is often considered a mystery. How can the seemingly immaterial experience of consciousness be explained by the material neurons of the brain? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between understanding the brain as an objectively observed biological organ and accounting for the subjective experiences that come from the brain (and life processes). In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt attempt to demystify consciousness—to naturalize it, by explaining that the subjective, experiencing aspects of consciousness are created by natural brain processes that evolved in natural ways.

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From Scientific American, Observations:

Unlocking the "Mystery" of Consciousness

Explaining it requires neither supernatural intervention nor any new fundamental physics

By Todd E. Feinberg, Jon Mallatt on October 17, 2018

The Evolutionary Origins of Consciousness

"The Evolutionary Origins of Consciousness: The ancient beginnings of subjective experience."

In this article (Part 2 of a 5-part blog series on the Evolution of Consciousness published on Psychology Today online), psychiatrist and writer Dr. Ralph Lewis of the University of Toronto reviews The Ancient Origins of Consciousness and Consciousness Demystified by Drs. Feinberg and Mallatt. Dr. Lewis summarizes the biological approach taken in these books to understanding the gradual evolution of central nervous systems and the concomitant evolution of consciousness. [the blurb could end here, or if more detail is desired, continue with the following, which can also be shortened by simply deleting the contents of each of the parentheses below]:

Dr. Lewis describes how that evolution progressed in gradations, from the most elemental forms of primary or sensory consciousness in the first vertebrates in the Cambrian period more than 500 million years ago (as well as. in parallel, in arthropods and cephalopods), through increasingly evolved vertebrates with more complex brains, eventually to humans. Dr. Lewis summarizes Feinberg and Mallatt's approach to understanding the formation of internal representations of increasing complexity, types of awareness (exteroceptive, interoceptive and affective), prerequisites for consciousness (general biological features of all life, basic features of nervous systems, and special neurobiological features), and Feinberg and Mallatt's proposed solutions to the apparent problem of subjectivity and the subjective-objective divide.