How Did Consciousness Evolve? An Illustrated Guide

This looks like it is derived from their fantastic book "The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/evolution-sensitive-soul That book is a more thorough dive into understanding how the mechanisms of consciousness could have been pieced together in evolutionary time. The authors do not have a computational backround, which makes their Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework a bit too much of a black-box model. That said, the book is thoughtful, balanced and scholarly -- and beautifully written. And, it is also not bogged down by the obdurate and unreasonable certainty one often sees with other grand theories of consciousness (which are almost always underwhelming). They even call this out in Sensitive Soul:

"... The claims about consciousness that are being made today, at the beginning of the third millennium, are in some ways less provocative, but they are by no means less confident. In fact, not just Edelman and Crick, but each of the prominent neurobiologists whose work we describe in this chapter believes that he (they are all male) and his group have conceptually solved the great enigma."

Sensitive Soul is an essential read if you are interested in consciousness. It is one of the few books we give special mention to in our own book, Journey of the Mind (plug! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-...)

"More recent books that we think are excellent and which also influenced us heavily include Principles of Neural Design by Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin, Evolution of Nervous Systems by Jon Kaas, Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul by Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, and Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers."

Somewhat disappointed to see that this is not a guide in the form of illustrations.

The reading is accompanied by a small number of illustrations, but they appear to be artistic interpretations of the theme, and not directly illustrative of something that isn’t said in the text.