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This book aims to span what the author calls "the explanatory gap" (Preface, p. x), his name for the question: "How are consciousness and subjective experience related to the brain and body?" The author says: "My aim is not to close the explanatory gap in a reductive sense, but rather to enlarge and enrich the the philosophical and scientific resources we have for addressing the gap." (Preface, p. x) As such, it discusses a very large literature on this subject and tries to knit it into one tapestry. It is an earnest and detailed attempt.

My experience in reading this book is that it requires close attention, and a lot of re-reading. There is a lot of vocabulary that needs revisiting as reading goes along, and the style is not one of emphasizing main issues, but of trying to give every author a fair treatment. One example of what I mean is that a lot of attention is given to explaining biological details, but the point of all this often seems to be to impress the reader that Thompson is up on the details, more than helping the reader understand how this work supports the project of spanning the gap.

Thompson puts much weight upon the distinction between a 'machine' and a 'living organism' and wants to find the distinction in "autopoiesis", which appears to name the distinction between a machine as something that is designed for a purpose by a designer (a watchmaker), and an organism that generates its own purpose and arranges and replaces its parts for its own ends. I think the idea here is to provide some criteria that allow a scientifically verifiable separation of living from nonliving things by observation of their operation. However useful that may be for science, it doesn't address the 'gap'. To do that, Thompson needs the added thesis that the organism's "autopoiesis" involves it in forming concepts about its environment during interaction with it, and that this process involves consciousness. I don't think Thompson establishes this thesis, although much verbiage surrounding it is provided.

In my view, the crux of the matter of human consciousness is crammed into Thompson's Chapter 13 where he finally gets around to enculturation (p. 402). To quote: "Human mentality emerges from developmental processes of enculturation and is configured by the distributed cognitive web of symbolic culture." (p. 403) He says "it makes no sense to think of culture and nature as separate developmental domains" nor to "conceptualize human cognitive development in the dichotomous framework of "nature versus culture" or "nature versus nurture" "Right from the start we need to situate the enculturation thesis in a developmental framework that explicitly rejects these dichotomous categories." (p. 403)

This framework for enculturation incorporates a very extensive review of opposition to the "selfish gene" theory and the unmerited dominance of the gene concept to the exclusion of other essential aspects of evolution and reproduction. The idea is to weaken the view that life is following a built-in program selected by evolutionary forces, and to emphasize that an active interplay between the organism and its species-specific environment is at work and is the more critical aspect. The argument against a prevalent overemphasis upon DNA occupies all of Chapter 7.

However, enculturation itself spans only the last nine pages of the book.

Although the author has given ample space to biologists and philosophers, he has ignored almost entirely the work of Erwin Schrodinger (Mind and Matter), of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), Georg Northoff (Philosophy of the Brain) and of Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos) (among many others) that suggests science is restricted in scope by its inability to address its own subjectivity, and by theories limited by our mental abilities, by social censorship, by funding failures, and by the segregation of scientists from the rest of society. Here are some practical sources of the explanatory gap, perhaps to be resolved by another book that more seriously explores enculturation.

Bottom line: This book is a powerful presentation of a somewhat limited thesis

The questions being asked in this fascinating volume are, "what kind of entity can be said to be a mental entity" or "what has a mind and what doesn't," but also "where is mind - where does it begin and end"? Does a machine have mental capacity or does it just simulate mental capacity? Evan Thompson sets out to show that living things are synonymous with mental things and draws his arguments from molecular biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, complex systems theory, psychology, phenomenology, and analytic philosophy. Mind arises in and as the organization of living systems and their environments. Following Gregory Bateson, Erich Jantsch, Heinz von Foerester, and Francisco Varela before him, Thompson set out to show that where there is life, there is mind. Minds are not a reflection or representation of a pre-specified, external realm, but rather "enacted or brought forth by a being's autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment." This is postmodern biology, the situating of mind, reason, emotion and all products of interiority and the mind in bodies, environments, and worlds brought forth in co-construction of organism and environment. This is mind embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended and it is where cognitive science is currently heading.

Finally we are coming closer to an understanding that can situate and ground mental phenomena in the living bodies and environments that have always produced them rather than attributing them to disembodied transcendent-metaphysical realms or to see them as equivalent to electronic processing machines. The postmodern revolution in the social sciences and humanities that situated rationality and meaning in culture, language, and history continues into the cognitive and life sciences where it is now in the process of situating subjective experience and mind in bodies and their environments. Thompson's book is a huge contribution towards that end.