PHI

Now finished the second pass of an unusual book called 'PHI', no less, according to the subtitle, than a voyage from the brain to the soul. Offered by Giulio Tononi.

Unusual started when the package from Amazon landed on the mat, as for a book of its size it was unusually heavy. Weight which looked to be caused by the use of the sort of paper used in art books which can take good quality colour printing. Next step was clearly to check out the publisher, Pantheon. According to Wikipedia the publisher 'was founded in 1942 in New York City by European intellectuals who had come to the United States to escape fascism and the Holocaust' but which more recently 'moved aggressively into the comics market'. In the meantime the abridged story seems to be that Random House bought Pantheon, RCA bought Knopf and gave it Pantheon, RCA bought Random House, RCA sold Random House, Bertelsmann AG bought Random House.  Bertelsmann AG (http://www.bertelsmann.com/) is a large German multi-media outfit of which I had not previously heard, but which turns an annual profit in excess of €500m and which had rather a bad war, in the sense that it was heavily involved in work for the Nazi regime. But it survived to become what it is now.

Unusual continued when it turned out (I had bought the book blind apart from the name of the author) to be something of a Thames & Hudson job, in the form of a fantasy (if also scientific) tour through consciousness, complete with eminent tour guides (mainly now dead) and illustrated by all kinds of art works, mainly paintings, some tweaked.

One slightly irritating feature of the art works was that they were not labelled and one had to ferret around in the notes to find out about them. Tononi would no doubt argue that the labels of the pictures were not relevant to the tour. At least one major art gallery (I think in Philadelphia) makes the same point and does not label its paintings. A fat photo book about Kate Moss, pretty much pornography, does it as well, relegating labels and provenances ('first appeared in Harper's Bazaar, July 1978' sort of thing. There may also have been stuff about the film, the lens, the stop and all that photographic stuff) to the notes at the back. You can have a collectible version from Amazon for a snip at £129. But I find it rather irritating: are we to be denied the innocent, if more or less irrelevant, pleasure of knowing from where this or that striking image came from? Where we might go and see the original? Without going to all that bother.

But despite the oddities, the Tononi book was a useful canter through many of the odd features of the strange phenomenon which is our consciousness - and that of other, reasonably complex animals. We are invited to think about all kinds of odd effects which arise when consciousness is altered or damaged in some way or another, usually mechanically rather than chemically. We are invited to try and share the experience of a bat as it echo sounds its way around a pitch dark cave. When a bat sees red, it seems plausible that its experience of red is not that unlike ours: but what happens when it gets a ping from its echo sounder? Does it image the cave in some way that we would recognise? So the book was worth its money.

Even though I found the central argument unconvincing. So 1) one can measure the complexity of an information system such as a modern telephone or an ancient brain. 2) call this measure phi. 3) assert that consciousness is measured by phi. For large enough values of phi we have a consciousness of the sort that we know and love and that is all that there is to it. No need for further explanation. 4) as an aside, one can model this complexity by mapping the system onto an object in a multi-dimensional space, where the multi is measured in millions if not billions, Tononi and his friends not being satisfied with the dozen or so that even the most ambitious physicists make do with. Part of the book is given over to wandering through such an object.

But not that unconvincing that I won't try to run down some mathematical description of this space. The sort of description avoided in this determinedly non-technical presentation. I shall report back in due course.