The biological conditions of consciousness a review of Edelman and Tononi's 'a universe of consciousness'

Although there is little empirical doubt of the cerebral base of consciousness, it still has an unapproachable quality about it. Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi (hereafter ET) offer a hypothesis that should give us the tool to start disentangling the 'world knot', an image Arthur Schopenhauer used to describe the problem of the origin of consciousness. Their primary focus is not the richness in everyday experience, but the conditions that allow us that experiential richness -- a difficult enough task, as most would admit reading the book. It shows how the cranial barrier can be overcome by new observation techniques, producing a plethora of experimental data in support of the concepts and theories described in the book. This material leads to the formulation of the dynamic-core hypothesis which describes the necessary biological conditions for consciousness.