By Laura Cummings
Consciousness is one of the least understood aspects of human cognition. Some think of it as the last frontier — understand it and we will be well on our way to understanding the human mind as a whole. Others think of it as the last great mystery, destined to remain forever unknown and incomprehensible. Andrew Brook is firmly in the first camp.
Brook is a professor of philosophy and cognitive science and Director of the Institute of Cognitive Science (ICS) at Carleton University. Under his direction, ICS developed and now offers Canada’s only free-standing, fully integrated PhD in Cognitive Science.
His research has taken him in a number of directions — Kant, environmental ethics, psychological and psychoanalytic explanation, cognitive science — but his main interest for many years has been consciousness.
“Consciousness is at the centre of nearly everything distinctively human,” Brook said in a recent interview. “Pathologies of consciousness (anxiety, mood disorders, dissociative disorders, disorders of affect, and so on) are central in most mental illness. Treatments that work by engaging consciousness are equally central; this is true of virtually all psychotherapy. And conscious pleasures are what make life worth living. Yet there is no agreement on something as basic as what consciousness is.”
Soon Brook’s theories about consciousness will reach a readership much larger than his students: the general public. Brook and co-author Paul Raymont have written A Unified Theory of Consciousness, to be published in 2009. In the book, Brook and Raymont, who was one of Brook’s post-docs and is now teaching at Ryerson University, explore several fascinating ideas about consciousness.
First, consciousness is just an aspect of representation and cognition; it is not unique or even so very different from other aspects of cognition. Second, it is possible to create a unified theory that works for all the main kinds of consciousness. Third, what is called the unity of consciousness is at heart of our kind of consciousness.
The book also has a polemical side. “In order to argue that consciousness is simply a way of processing information, we need to show that arguments for the idea that it unique, totally different from anything else in the mind, do not work,” Brook said about the critical side of A Unified Theory of Consciousness.
This is the third book that Brook has written. The others are Kant and the Mind (Cambridge) and, with Robert Stainton (now at UWO), Knowledge and Mind (MIT Press). He has edited a further five books and has about 100 publications in total.