Rating: 
Summary: You can spend your time better!
Review: My God!( if you'll pardon the espression).Does Crick need the money that bad? This is a good book for Neuroscientists interested in getting up to date on specific knowledge of the visual cortex. Why the cover states that this is "The Scientific Search for the Soul" is a puzzle to me.Is it to get this book on the popular science charts? As a scientist and physician I found the book mildly interesting-the resource lists at the end are quite good. As a spiritual human being and a physician I am convinced that many of the reviewers never read this book as it has NOTHING to do with soul. In addition any scientist and/or theologian knows that a "Scentific Search" for the soul is as meaningless an effort as describing the sound blue makes.Religion doesn'd need science to support it and science doesn't need religion to support it. Crick seems to know this as he never attempts to marry the two in his book.The insult is that the publishers seem to think he does! Read Paul Davies if you insist on linking these two disciplines.That can be an enjoyable and intellectually challenging endeavor.e
Rating: 
Summary: He Will Be Missed
Review: One of the greatest scientists of all time passed away today but leaves a contribution that shall never be forgotten. He is famous, of course, for his co-discovery of DNA, the molecule of life.
Crick spent many of his years as a neuroscientist and was fascinated with this field. This book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, is the author's statement on human consciousness, and by extension, on human life itself.
Like virtually everyone who appreciates the brain's workings, Crick sides on the side of the materialists and rightfully entitled his hypothesis 'astonishing.' The idea that consciousness and everything human comes from a jumble of meat is astonishing and should never fail to be. We still live in the philosophical era of the soul and all of our ideas about personhood are based in its archaic terminology and categories. We have just begun to redefine ourselves. It will be a long time before the 'astonishing hypothesis' ceases to amaze.
The book is challenging and difficult at places. The good parts make the task worth it, but the challenging parts are probably better reserved for specialists.
Rating: 
Summary: WorkinProgress -- groping through the jungle
Review: Sympathy for F Crick is what I felt reading this tome. His best metaphor was the conductor of the orchestra -- trying to show that brain functions needs both parallel and serial processing. Here is a famous man who got the Nobel for discovering DNA and then here, totally ignores DNA in the functioning of the brain. So obsessed with his title and his bag of neurons which enable man to see visually that he totally missed the submicroscopic hidden realm. Also no mention of the gaseous, non-synaptic neurotransmitter, nitric oxide (NO). His intent was admirable -- to pin the search down to a hard wired brain that was available for experimentation, but what if there are wireless signals or gaseous (NO) signals involved? He had nothing to say to the blind baby with his pronouncements of consciousness now and visual cortex uber all. I wish I had a nickel for every time Crick says "further work/experiment is needed" or "facts are not completely clear." Unfortunately academic humility doesn't make a good book. Definitely a work in progress that didn't have to be published yet.
Rating:
Summary: WorkinProgress -- groping through the jungle
Review: Sympathy for F Crick is what I felt reading this tome. His best metaphor was the conductor of the orchestra -- trying to show that brain functions needs both parallel and serial processing. Here is a famous man who got the Nobel for discovering DNA and then here, totally ignores DNA in the functioning of the brain. So obsessed with his title and his bag of neurons which enable man to see visually that he totally missed the submicroscopic hidden realm. Also no mention of the gaseous, non-synaptic neurotransmitter, nitric oxide (NO). His intent was admirable -- to pin the search down to a hard wired brain that was available for experimentation, but what if there are wireless signals or gaseous (NO) signals involved? He had nothing to say to the blind baby with his pronouncements of consciousness now and visual cortex uber all. I wish I had a nickel for every time Crick says "further work/experiment is needed" or "facts are not completely clear." Unfortunately academic humility doesn't make a good book. Definitely a work in progress that didn't have to be published yet.
Rating: 
Summary: He means the soul as ?the ghost in the machine?
Review: The "astonishing hypothesis" of the title is simply that we are "no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." (He really needs to add "...developing and interacting with the environment," since part of what we are can only be understood as emergent properties of our structure over time.) What he does add is that "to most people" this is "a really surprising concept." I think Crick is a little out of touch because it's not surprising to me or to any number of people I know. His view, along with my addendum, is generally considered the standard "no ghost in the machine" view of consciousness.Consciousness, then, is what this book is really about. The "soul" in the title is meant tongue in cheek, or ironically since the idea of a soul is not amenable to scientific inquiry. Crick thinks that the best way to understand consciousness is first to understand, at the cellular/chemical level, how the brain works. He proposes to make an attack on this (he likes the military metaphor) through a study of how the brain "sees." Consequently he presents a number of optical illusions, some of which I hadn't seen before. He believes it is "hopeless to try to solve the problems of consciousness by general philosophical arguments..." (p. 19). He uses the terms "awareness" and "consciousness" "more or less interchangeably" (p. 10) which I think is good since it takes the aura of awe off the pumpkin, so to speak. Crick is not a dualist who believes there is a "mind" independent of the neurons. Of course, from my point of view there is indeed a "mind" independent of the nerve cells; this "mind" however is an abstract construct consisting of thoughts, ideas, experiences, however vaguely and inaccurately recalled, hopes and dreams, etc. It exists "nowhere" and of course everywhere. It exists before time and after time. It is not matter or energy but information written not on the wind nor on the ether, but on the vacuum of time and space. It cannot be accessed by anyone, although I personally can access some of my own mind, again however incompletely. I like to think of this "mind" as the rationalist's soul It is information, period. Now it may be that there is an intelligence or intelligences elsewhere in the universe with the power to access such information and to reconstruct it in some sense, perhaps able even to reconstruct the matter and energy that developed it! However this is just the sort of fanciful speculation that Crick wants to get away from. Even before he wrote this not very readable and somewhat opaque book, there have appeared a number of excellent books on consciousness discussing what Crick thinks is the astonishing hypothesis, especially books that see consciousness as a sort of illusion developed by the evolutionary mechanism. Two very readable ones are David Darling's Zen Physics (1996) and Tor Norretranders' The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (1991;1998). Incidentally, this is the same Francis Crick, who in the early fifties, along with James D. Watson, discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule thereby winning a Nobel Prize and achieving fame and fortune. Watson's controversial memoir about their discovery, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, is one of the most readable scientific detective stories ever written. Crick is also a prime proponent of the panspermia hypothesis about the origin of life on earth.
Rating:
Summary: He means the soul as ¿the ghost in the machine¿
Review: The "astonishing hypothesis" of the title is simply that we are "no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." (He really needs to add "...developing and interacting with the environment," since part of what we are can only be understood as emergent properties of our structure over time.) What he does add is that "to most people" this is "a really surprising concept." I think Crick is a little out of touch because it's not surprising to me or to any number of people I know. His view, along with my addendum, is generally considered the standard "no ghost in the machine" view of consciousness. Consciousness, then, is what this book is really about. The "soul" in the title is meant tongue in cheek, or ironically since the idea of a soul is not amenable to scientific inquiry. Crick thinks that the best way to understand consciousness is first to understand, at the cellular/chemical level, how the brain works. He proposes to make an attack on this (he likes the military metaphor) through a study of how the brain "sees." Consequently he presents a number of optical illusions, some of which I hadn't seen before. He believes it is "hopeless to try to solve the problems of consciousness by general philosophical arguments..." (p. 19). He uses the terms "awareness" and "consciousness" "more or less interchangeably" (p. 10) which I think is good since it takes the aura of awe off the pumpkin, so to speak. Crick is not a dualist who believes there is a "mind" independent of the neurons. Of course, from my point of view there is indeed a "mind" independent of the nerve cells; this "mind" however is an abstract construct consisting of thoughts, ideas, experiences, however vaguely and inaccurately recalled, hopes and dreams, etc. It exists "nowhere" and of course everywhere. It exists before time and after time. It is not matter or energy but information written not on the wind nor on the ether, but on the vacuum of time and space. It cannot be accessed by anyone, although I personally can access some of my own mind, again however incompletely. I like to think of this "mind" as the rationalist's soul It is information, period. Now it may be that there is an intelligence or intelligences elsewhere in the universe with the power to access such information and to reconstruct it in some sense, perhaps able even to reconstruct the matter and energy that developed it! However this is just the sort of fanciful speculation that Crick wants to get away from. Even before he wrote this not very readable and somewhat opaque book, there have appeared a number of excellent books on consciousness discussing what Crick thinks is the astonishing hypothesis, especially books that see consciousness as a sort of illusion developed by the evolutionary mechanism. Two very readable ones are David Darling's Zen Physics (1996) and Tor Norretranders' The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (1991;1998). Incidentally, this is the same Francis Crick, who in the early fifties, along with James D. Watson, discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule thereby winning a Nobel Prize and achieving fame and fortune. Watson's controversial memoir about their discovery, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, is one of the most readable scientific detective stories ever written. Crick is also a prime proponent of the panspermia hypothesis about the origin of life on earth.
Rating:
Summary: What is so astonishing, Dr. Crick?
Review: The problem with Crick's book--a rather common problem these days--is that it does not do what it sets out to do. According to Crick, there is this revolutionary and "astonishing" hypothesis that most people either do not know or cannot accept, namely the century-old idea that neurons, as individual and independent units of the brain, are solely responsible for all the higher functions that most people attribute to God, to mind, or to some mysterious agent. Well, if you tell this to any neuroscientist, you probably won't astonish him; if you tell this to a lay man, you won't astonish him any more than, say, the god hypothesis. So Crick, who is a reductionist in need of a little sophistication, really isn't telling us anything extraordinary. His arguments neither shock nor enlighten. The primary merit of this book lies in a solid, if technical, summary of some interesting research in recent years. It is handy as reference, but not particularly a pleasure to read. Crick is not much of a writer; nor is he competent enough in other fields to talk about some of the issues that he does talk about. The more entertaining part of the book, for me, is the delightful bibliography, in which Crick briefly describes each book that he recommends. His remarks are sometimes sharp and witty. Overall, though, this is merely an average book on a most popular subject.
Rating:
Summary: What is so astonishing, Dr. Crick?
Review: The problem with Crick's book--a rather common problem these days--is that it does not do what it sets out to do. According to Crick, there is this revolutionary and "astonishing" hypothesis that most people either do not know or cannot accept, namely the century-old idea that neurons, as individual and independent units of the brain, are solely responsible for all the higher functions that most people attribute to God, to mind, or to some mysterious agent. Well, if you tell this to any neuroscientist, you probably won't astonish him; if you tell this to a lay man, you won't astonish him any more than, say, the god hypothesis. So Crick, who is a reductionist in need of a little sophistication, really isn't telling us anything extraordinary. His arguments neither shock nor enlighten. The primary merit of this book lies in a solid, if technical, summary of some interesting research in recent years. It is handy as reference, but not particularly a pleasure to read. Crick is not much of a writer; nor is he competent enough in other fields to talk about some of the issues that he does talk about. The more entertaining part of the book, for me, is the delightful bibliography, in which Crick briefly describes each book that he recommends. His remarks are sometimes sharp and witty. Overall, though, this is merely an average book on a most popular subject.
Rating:
Summary: rich and interesting
Review: This book is important for people who wants to know more about current progresses in neuroscience. I especially like chapter 12 where Crick provides a lot of examples on how patients with brain injuries would behave differently from normal. I think these evidences make his "hypothesis" much more convincing. However, his treatment on nonlinear dynamics, neural network and learning mechanism is too brief and insufficient. Perhaps he does not want his book becomes too technical, but I think these topics are important for readers to understand the richness of information patterns in human brains.
Rating: 
Summary: Should be required reading for high school...
Review: This is an excellent book by a working scientist. It shows a scientist at work, looking for answers. It demonstrates what answers are and how to find them. It addresses a topic that everyone is interested in, but few actually know anything about. I highly recommend it. It is a bit dry and technical, but after all the nonsense and fluff written on this subject, the change is delightful.
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