why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[Belacqua]

In his introduction, the author states that he wants “to examine how matter makes minds.”  He thinks “consciousness is an instinct.  Many organisms, not just humans, come with it, ready-made.”  Further, he states, “We are each a confederation of rather independent modules, orchestrated to work together.”

It turned out that I had too much fun over the weekend to work on the book, but I hope to get back to it soon. In the meantime, thank you for this summary. 

The goal, “to examine how matter makes minds” is just what we want. The statement that “consciousness is an instinct" is, I guess, stating that it is something we do naturally, without the need for training? The statement that “We are each a confederation of rather independent modules, orchestrated to work together” I think is well-accepted these days. No argument there. 

the author lists several of the important scientific discoveries about consciousness from the last century

These are all important discoveries. The ones you list, 1 through 4, seem to me to be discoveries about how the brain works. How those facts about the brain give rise to consciousness is what we're working on, so it'll be interesting to see the connection. 

Gazzanina and Roger Sperry studied such split-brain patients together. From such studies, Sperry concluded that conscious experience is a property of brain activity which is:

1) nonreductive (it can’t be broken down into its parts),
2) dynamic (it changes in response to neural activity),
3) and emergent (it is more than the sum of the processes that produce it).
He also concluded “it could not exist apart from the brain.”

The nonreductive part is where the trouble starts, I'd say. This is where we see that the parts (brain activity) don't add up in any clear way to consciousness. 

The dynamic part is surely true; changes in brain states translate -- somehow -- to changes in consciousness.

The emergent part is the difficult part. How does it emerge is the question at hand. 

No doubt there are spooky people out there who claim that minds exist without brains. But nobody here is claiming that, I don't think. I'd go further, or define it a bit differently, to say that minds require bodies.

More and more progress was made assigning specific functions to specific brain areas through a study of patients [...]

The center part of the summary addresses how the brain has various parts and functions, layered architecture, etc. This all seems undeniable to me. It may well have something to tell us about how consciousness emerges from brain events. 

Biosemiotics is the semiotics of living systems. Semiotic systems pair signs and meanings with a code which is included within the system itself, and not imposed externally. Such assignments are arbitrary, like sounds for meanings in language, and came into existence through random molecular resorting. In other words, matter can self-organize in another way besides the laws of physics or evolution. “In its informational (subjective) mode, DNA follows rules, not the laws of physics.”

Here we get back to the type of thing addressed by the p-zombie problem. A computer also uses semiotics, or code, to store and process information. Yet they don't have consciousness, by definition.

I had never heard that matter can do things not according to the laws of physics. That's something I'll look forward to reading more about. 

Consciousness of such a self is further down the road, and is a relatively simple matter of perceiving an already existing self.

Oh dear. This is where the red lights come on.

To say it's "a relatively simple matter of perceiving" something is not self-evident to me. Because the whole thing we're working on is how we perceive things in consciousness. 

There are unexpectedly difficult questions here. E.g. what is a self? 

“Brains aren’t like machines; machines are like brains with something missing.

This is good. I guess it all boils down to what the "something" is. 

Again, I haven't read the book yet. I'm still left with a number of questions. And I'm afraid that the key terms people use remain unexplained. The fact that the mind is "emergent" for example. Or that the brain does its thing and then "we" perceive it. How do those things happen? 

Maybe I'll get more from a closer reading of the book.