**Book Review: "The World Behind the World" - Unveiling the Mysteries of Consciousness**

*"The World Behind the World"* invites readers on a thought-provoking journey into the enigmatic realm of consciousness, guided by Dr. Erik Hoel—a scientist recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30 list. The book challenges the dichotomy between the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives, delving into the intersection of feelings, thoughts, and the physical world. With the goal of reconciling these perspectives, Hoel takes us on a tour of the evolving science of consciousness, touching upon paradoxes and exploring groundbreaking ideas.

The book starts by exploring the historical struggle between the intrinsic and extrinsic viewpoints, offering insights into how these perspectives shaped human understanding. Hoel introduces us to the ambitious endeavor of the science of consciousness, an attempt to fuse these distinct viewpoints. The convergence of these perspectives, he argues, is now possible due to the groundbreaking work of DNA-discoverer Francis Crick.

Throughout the book, Hoel navigates a complex landscape, weaving together science, philosophy, and history. He tackles the relationship between consciousness and physics, morality, and even the potential for artificial intelligence to achieve consciousness. The writing is dense, occasionally challenging readers to absorb intricate concepts, but its engagement with topics such as free will, the nature of existence beyond brain death, and the incompleteness of science keeps the mind captivated.

Hoel's exploration of the historical backdrop to consciousness, however, falls short of expectations. His reliance on Greek literature feels underwhelming, as similar themes have been foundational in Eastern philosophies for centuries. Despite this, the book gains momentum as it delves deeper into the current state of the science of consciousness.

The work dissects significant topics, such as the belief in free will and the level at which the brain should be analyzed for understanding behaviors. Hoel's incorporation of historical figures like Gödel and Boole, coupled with contemporary discussions around the intersection of science and philosophy, breathes life into the exploration.

"The World Behind the World" champions the idea that neuroscience needs a paradigm shift. It's a bold declaration that resonates throughout the narrative. Hoel's comprehensive analysis of integrated information theory (IIT) and his proposal of causal emergence theory shed light on the attempts to resolve the perplexing "hard problem of consciousness."

Despite the dense prose and occasional inconsistency, the book successfully ignites curiosity. It prompts readers to delve into the intricacies of the science of consciousness, to question long-held beliefs, and to engage with the challenge of reconciling the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives.

In summary, while "The World Behind the World" might not be everyone's cup of tea, it is an important exploration into the mysteries of consciousness. It offers a stimulating journey through history, science, and philosophy that demands engagement from those interested in unraveling the fundamental questions of existence.

Discovering the true nature of conscious experience, to have a complete scientific theory, has been the intellectual fantasy of many of the sharpest minds of today and yesterday. It's a befuddling question that frustrates with paradox, seducing many into obscurantism. Erik Hoel, former assistant professor of neuroscience at Tufts University and now prominent writer at Substack, offers a peek into what an improved scientific theory of consciousness might look like in his book The World Behind the World.

In Hoel's telling, our world can be divided into the intrinsic and extrinsic: art and science, immaterial and material, subjectivity and objectivity. The big mystery is how to these two seemingly separate spheres communicate to forge modern humans with sophisticated conscious experiences and thoughts. The World Behind the World carefully yet quickly tours different approaches to the study of consciousness: the empirical camp (Francis Crick) vs the theoretical camp (Gerald Edelman). Hoel gives special attention to the ideas of the latter camp after a brief but trenchant critique of the track record to find "neural correlates of consciousness" while doing "normal science." Hoel trained with Giulio Tononi, of Edelman's lineage, where he worked on integrated information theory (IIT), an axiomatic framework for formally explaining consciousness.

Hoel is no mere cheerleader of IIT. He identifies several of its limitations and introduces other ideas from philosophy, e.g David Chalmer's zombie argument, that present clear challenges to formal efforts to resolve "the hard problem of consciousness." Finally, Hoel reveals his contribution to this field: causal emergence theory. The remainder of the work explores the phenomenon of emergence. Causal emergence is essentially the observation that some causes and effects can unexpectedly by easier to explain at larger than smaller scales. Hoel argues causal emergence is found all over the place and is likely important to a physical description of subjective experience in the brain, especially because emergence is likely to be critical to biological systems that have evolved over millennia.

The World Behind the World succeeds in being a scientific and philosophical attempt to chip away at the fundamentals of a universal theory of conscious experience. It is a heady read that will challenge readers, even those with advanced scientific backgrounds. Although I descend more from the empirical school and probably am more of a determinist than Dr. Hoel, I think this is a pithy work of communication about an extraordinarily important scientific and human question. It's a book that escapes the pitfalls of popular science writing and still manages to be legible and engaging enough to intellectually adventurous lay readers.

I strongly recommend The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science.

I find recent developments in neuroscience fascinating and looked forward to reading this book. In parts, it is very thought provoking, though the writing is dense and coverage inconsistent.

The first 20% of the book covers the historical basis for consciousness – the intrinsic (thoughts & feelings) vs the extrinsic (external action oriented). The author quotes analysis of Greek literature on how the early texts had no references to consciousness and later ones did. This brings up the question on whether humankind acquired it later or learnt to better write about it later. This portion of the book is an utter waste. The author here takes the approach of searching for a lost object where there is light by referring only to Greek literature for analysis and conclusions. That there are great truths inside us as outside is a foundational element of eastern thinking since ages. As the author of the book, I am now reading “Five Seats of Power” says, Hindu philosophical thought starts with consciousness and significantly predates most of the references in this book.


After a very poor start, the subsequent sections thankfully get better. The author points out that studying the brain without consciousness has been a mistake. It is that nobody wanted to tackle the inherent problem of causation since it seemed impregnable. After all “That which causes - exists” is what drives our foundational understanding. It was believed earlier on that consciousness origins can be cracked by physicists with theories such as quantum, but that was not to be and later it was left to spiritualists and pseudo-science to talk about it. Now neurologists are hoping they can crack it. Roger Penrose supposedly said that the human mind is non-algorithmic, which suggests free-will being a reality. The author similarly is convinced that we have free-will though he leaps to this conclusion abruptly. He brushes over the findings that brain imaging has been able to predict the next action. I do agree that this cannot be taken as conclusive proof of absence of free will. He also points out that belief in free-will has been shown to have positive behavioural impacts (though I think that is immaterial to the discussion). There is an interesting discussion on at what level our brains should be analysed for behaviours – doing it at a neuron level may be a mistake. Some have suggested a concept of minicolumns with less than 100 neurons which may be the right level for this.

The author points out that neuroscience has been making slow progress. It is also possible that be it neuroscience or cosmology, there may always be some unsolved mysteries left.

In a later section, the author mentions that this particular chapter would be dense, but I found the whole book to like that, lacking an engaging conversational style for the most part. One yardstick I use for rating non-fiction books especially is how much I ruminate over the content after I finish the book. While this book covers some important topics, it is inconsistent and falls short in leaving a lasting impression. That said, I still recommend it for the content it covers.

My rating: 3.25 / 5.

I am not really in a position to write a review on what is written about this book, because the topics are only partially known to me and especially I am no longer able to cite my sources, so it would be as useless as expressing my own opinions when scores of scientists and philosophers have been squabbling over the "consciousness" issue for hundreds of years. That said, however, the book is quite understandable when it decides to be and somewhat less so when it strives to pass off as valid ideas that are at least questionable such as that of free will.
The whole thing then undergoes the usual description of how the subject has been treated from the ancient Egyptians to the present, partly because I imagine a minimum page limit is also necessary to publish a book as well as to provide a state of the art. So if you are interested in the author's view on the subject of consciousness, related of course also to the trend topic of the moment and that is AI, this is the book for you.

Non sono veramente in grado di scrivere una recensione su quanto scritto su questo libro, perché gli argomenti mi sono noti solo in parte e soprattutto non sono piú in grado di citare le mie fonti, quindi sarebbe inutile come esprimere le mie opinioni quando fior di scienziati e filosofi si accapigliano sulla questione "coscienza" da centinaia di anni. Detto questo peró, il libro é piuttosto comprensibile quando decide di esserlo e un po' meno quando si sforza di far passare come valide idee che sono quanto meno questionabili come quella del libero arbitrio.
Il tutto poi subisce la solita descrizione di come l'argomento sia stato trattato dagli antichi egizi fino ad oggi, anche perché immagino sia necessario anche un limite minimo di pagine per pubblicare un libro oltre che per fornire uno stato dell'arte. Quindi se siete interessati alla visione dell'autore sull'argomento coscienza, collegato naturalmente anche al trend topic del momento e cioé l'AI, questo é il libro che fa per voi.

I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.

Erik Hoel's book, "The World Behind the World," is about consciousness and free will. Scientists are still striving to understand what it means to be conscious, and the author insists that a new scientific paradigm is needed if we are to make headway on this vexing question. The author also asserts that free will is real, but he is wrong. During the 19th century, Pierre-Simon Laplace insisted that our entire world is deterministic, and he was correct. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In our daily life, it seems as though we have free will, that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions we freely make. You get up from the couch, and you go for a walk. You eat chocolate ice cream. We control actions like these; if we are, we have free will. But in recent years, some have argued that free will is an illusion. For example, the neuroscientist (and best-selling author) Sam Harris and the late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner claim that specific scientific findings disprove free will. 
Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do wrong, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics and touching the ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries, we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's challenging and sometimes impossible to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and ourselves.
It isn't easy to believe that in the face of all of this scientific evidence, anyone still thinks that Hume and Kant were correct about free will. Unfortunately, some left-leaning philosophers have not come to these compelling scientific findings. As a result, in the last twenty or thirty years, the concept of biological determinism has once again sprung to life. 
Complexity theory (or chaotic systems) was first uncovered in 1687 by Sir Isaac Newton when he revealed his inability to solve the "Three-body problem in his Principia." A two-body problem was workable, but every three-body system led to an unsolvable snarl. Newton's first attempts at a solution using the Earth, the Sun, and our Moon fell short. Over the following years, dozens of history's most famous mathematicians attempted to solve the three-body problem, and they all came up short. Then during the mid-1890s, the French polymath Henri Poincare demonstrated that no solution to the three-body problem was possible. As Poincare stated, such a system is "asymptotic!"
After Poincare's proof, the subject of non-linear dynamic systems lay mostly dormant until 1961 when Edward N. Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, discovered a chaotic system in one of his long-range computerized weather predictions. Lorenz defined chaotic behavior as when the current situation determines the future but when approximations (computer models) of the prevailing estimates of the existing system cannot predict the future accurately. Chaotic behavior is found in almost all natural Earth systems, such as turbulence in flowing fluids and complex non-linear systems like weather and climate. Unfortunately, some scientists either do not understand complexity theory or believe they can construct more detailed computer models and use supercomputers to overcome or at least deal with the difficulties imposed by chaotic systems. They do not comprehend that chaos makes accurate predictions impossible.

What a crazy trip is The World Behind the World: Dr. Erik Hoel, a Forbes 30 Under 30 scientist, starts this history of scientific navel-gazing in Ancient Egypt (handily disproving the misconception that they had no understanding of stream of consciousness and believed that all interior monologue came from their gods) and ends with modern efforts with Artificial Intelligence (making the case that machines will never gain true consciousness). Quoting from poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists throughout the ages, Hoel presents equal parts narrative and theory to explain why Neuroscience is in need of a paradigmatic shift (along the lines of Relativity’s impact on Physics or the double-helix structure of DNA on Genetics), because as it stands, the field is “floundering”, and “secretly, a scandal.” Hoel writes, for the most part, at the layperson’s level (I have no background in Neuroscience and could follow along), but I got the feeling that he was maybe not writing for me: this has the feel of a disruption, a wake up call for the small group of researchers and their post-docs who control research into the nature of consciousness, and more than anything, the narrative-lover in me would like to know how this disruption plays out. Fascinating, beginning to end.