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Book Review: In Consciousness We Trust by Hakwan Lau

There was a time when psychologists focussed mostly on experiments and piecemeal progresses, leaving big pictures and theoretical adventures to philosophers. That time has ended, as we see substantive theoretical frameworks coming out of experimentalists’minds: along with Being You (Seth, 2021) and Know Thyself (Fleming, 2021), In Consciousness We Trust is yet another contribution in the same vein. The book epitomizes Hakwan Lau’s research program in cognitive psychology and neuroscience in the past two decades, which deals with thorny theoretical issues concerning the nature of conscious experiences. It touches on the empirical literature on conscious perception, attention, metacognition, rational control, emotion, and the sense of agency, among others. But the book does not simply review findings; it also presents an empirically informed original theory of consciousness. Lau’s narrative is alive and includes personal journeys, which make the book very readable and intriguing. The book has an introduction and nine chapters, and usefully contains succinct yet informative summaries of chapters. Introduction explains why the right level for understanding consciousness is cognitive neuroscience rather than physics (contra, e.g., Sir Roger Penrose) via discussing some aspects of the recent history of consciousness studies. Ch.1 discusses the relations between subjective experience, wakefulness, and voluntary control. It also introduces the key contrast between global (e.g., Baars, 1989; Dehaene, 2014; Dennett, 1991) and local theories (e.g., Lamme, 2003, 2006; Zeki, 2001), and five key issues that help arbitrate between the global and the local. Ch.2 argues that the relevant evidence favors the view that the prefrontal cortex is part of the neural correlate of consciousness. It also discusses the nature of NCC, blindsight, stimulus confounder, binocular rivalry, and no-cognition paradigms. Ch.3 points out that the relevant lesions and stimulation studies, barring certain conceptual confusions, further support the prefrontal involvement of consciousness. Ch.4 discusses the relation between attention and the apparent richness of consciousness, and how it creates problems for local theories; it also discusses a traditional puzzle “speckled hen” in philosophy, the classical partial report paradigm in psychology by Sperling (1960), load theory of attention, peripheral vision, and so on. Ch.5 discusses potential functions of consciousness and covers issues such as subliminal priming, Libet’s classical experiment on volition and free will, and metacognition. The result here puts pressure on global theories. Ch.6 argues that neither global nor local theories seem right given what has been discussed so far, so the author’s alternative—the centralist proposal—looms large (other centralists include, e.g., Cleeremans et al., 2020). It also discusses issues such as predictive coding, constraints of a plausible theory of Book Review