The Ravenous Brain

It is a strange voyage which one embark reading this book. It is a travel over the deep black sea of cosciousness, with your captain, Daniel Bor, trying to find the Big Conscious Whale using as harpoon the instruments of science. But this courageous captain is not a science of formation, he comes from the island of philosophers and so sometimes you think that he is not able to find the Big Whale because he does not really know how to use science. Especially if one compares this book to “are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” by de Waals, some questions arises. de Waals criticize all the scientists and philosophers who try to define some mental caracheristics that distinguish humans from all other animals. He does not deny that it could maybe exist but he just show that it is the wrong approach, too antropocentric and biased. Expecially when we want to study coscience. Bor is not a scientist and this is crucial when it comes to give a definition of cosciousness: he does not. he presents various model that tries to explain cosciousness of the human brain but he does not give any definition. but how can you write a book a bout cosciousness and actually work on it whitouht giving a definition of it? Stanislaus Deahene for example wrote a book about cosciousness and he gives a definition within the first few pages. maybe the definition is arbitrary but you need a definition from which to start or you cannot do scientific experiments about it. but, as I said, Bor is not a scientist but a philosopher and as such he does not need definitions because his thoughts are not confined by the rules and principles of science. and this is a really good thing because he can explore lands and seas never explored, he could argue and create models of cosciousness never tried. but we should remember that this is not science.