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Title: Radiant Cool: A Novel of Theory of Consciousness by Dan Edward Lloyd, Dan Lloyd ISBN: 0-262-12259-6 Publisher: Bradford Book Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: An interesting and engaging story
Comment: What is it about the new neuroscience that sometimes causes uneasiness in people when it is contemplated? This has been communicated to me many times by colleagues, co-workers, and business associates with whom I have discussed neuroscience over the years. The story in this book is brilliant if viewed from the standpoint of the moods that accompany the contemplation of the conscious mind from the perspective of contemporary experimental neuroscience. It captures, through its main character, the disquieting feelings that one sometimes gets when thinking about the true nature of consciousness from a scientific viewpoint. It is very perplexing that such feelings exist when examining something that is so close to us. Do we not want to believe that our consciousness can be explained according to the conceptions of modern neuroscience, with its mathematical models of neurons and neuronal connections, all validated with the experimental tool of fMRI? Does scientific description and analysis of consciousness trivialize it so that we no longer feel unique and retain a special, integrated "I-ness", but instead a collection of neuronal impulses and a bundle of Machian sensations?
This book is unique in that the author has chosen to present his ideas on consciousness using a story, with the rigorous scientific statements of his ideas coming after the story is over, in part 2 of the book, which the author has named "The Real Firefly". His ideas, as I see them, could loosely be described as a scientific justification of Husserlian phenomenology. He is honest enough to say though that much work remains to be done. Thankfully the time when the study of consciousness was solely a philosophical affair is over. Scientific experiments are now being done to elucidate the phenomenon of human consciousness, and this hopefully will lead to a better understanding of the brain outside of what philosophy has given us so far. The armchair speculations of philosophy are being put aside in favor of a careful, scientific approach. Thought experiments, the most popular of philosophical toolboxes, have failed to give us anything substantive. True knowledge is difficult to obtain, but the patience and fortitude of the researchers in neuroscience will no doubt bring about exciting developments.
The author is clearly optimistic about the possibility of science giving a complete explanation of human behavior. One can bet on this "radical pipe dream" he says. But again, he expresses an intellectual honesty about the difficulty of this goal, and the doubts that he himself has about his research. This doubt he says, causes him and others to sometimes exaggerate the current status of research, giving it a kind of "infomercial" overtone. But the goal of this research is to show how consciousness is part of the natural world, and this is to be done however, not with the tools of current cognitive neuroscience, but with a scientific interpretation of phenomenology. The author gives his reasons for rejecting contemporary cognitive neuroscience in the early paragraphs of part 2. He criticizes in great detail for example the "Detection Theory of Consciousness", with its assumption that the detection of complexity in the environment can be done by "matching" it in consciousness.
The author's theories of consciousness are built on phenomonology, but which he calls a "subjective view of objectivity". To contrast this with ordinary phenomonology, such as Husserl's method of "bracketing", he asserts that the world outside the mind is already bracketed, that one has an "inescapable experience of the real as real". He then constructs step by step a justification of these assertions, with intentionality being the first step; superposition, which he defines as a symbiosis of object and interpretation, the second step; transcendence, which enables us to distinguish imaginary properties from real is the third; temporality, which asserts that reality is temporal and allows comparisons through time, is the fourth. The next three steps are refined notions of temporality, the first being the conscious present, which includes the awareness of temporal context, the second being an ordinal notion of temporality, which orders moments in time and is assuredly monotonic. The third is more sophisticated, and is called recursive retention, which provides a recursive nested trace of the succession of past moments.
This subjective view of objectivity is still phenomonology for the author, and so a successful scientific view of consciousness for him must then involve an "objective view of subjectivity". To do this, he brings in the tools of artificial neural networks and their validation using fMRI, and he deals with the consequent demand for reducing the dimensionality of the acquired data. Certain "multivariate tests" are used to detect the necessary conditions for consciousness in the brain. He uses three instances of what he calls "indices of temporality" to get a handle on the time series data extracted from fMRI: the temporal gradient, which measures absolute temporality, and is a monotonically increasing, the relative temporal gradient, which is a measure of the brain's sensitivity to position in a sequence of data, and the stimulus similarity gradient. which determines to what extent the distributed neural activity in the brain is sensitive to conditions that remain the same during an experiment. This index is interesting, for it has as its goal a sort of measure of "stability" in the phenomenal world. These three indices allow the author to "interpret the brain over time". He then deals with the internal temporal structures of the brain, i.e. with what the phenomonologist called protention, presence, and retention. Retention in the brain in particular, is modeled again by neural networks, and experiments are conducted to illustrate just how well they do their jobs in this regard. The author ends the book with a positive and optimistic view of future research in neuroscience, a future, which, regardless of its content, will certainly be fascinating to witness.
Rating: 5
Summary: Good for Neuroscience Curriculum
Comment: It has been my experience that many students in introductory undergraduate philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience courses have a difficult time wrapping their heads around some of the more complicated issues relating to how consciousness is represented in brain, what tasks it may be performing, and what techniques are available for investigation. While Dan Lloyd may be pursuing lofty goals by mixing novel science with fiction, I found that he has managed to strike a good balance here, and may have produced a text well fit to supplement a primary text and lecture material for some of these introductory courses. By being placed in the shoes of a philosophy graduate student coming across some of the pertinent issues of brain study for the first time, the reader is exposed to a beautifully rich existential conscious experience, and is forced to question the nature of his\her own consciousness, an essential part of any encounter with brain study. Thought provoking and fun.
Rating: 3
Summary: Scientist as novelist
Comment: Scientists don't necessarily make good novelists; Ian Stewart's Flatterland is a case in point. Dan Lloyd has a wicked sense of humor, however, and captures his protagonist, a sardonic philosophy graduate student, perfectly. I'm less enthusiastic about the so-called theory of consciousness the novel is supposed to set forth, which attempts to merge brain scans with Husserl. And readers should be forewarned that a working knowledge of neural networks and multi-dimensional scaling is very helpful.
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Title: Turing: A Novel About Computation by Christos H. Papadimitriou ISBN: 0262162180 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: One, True Platonic Heaven: A Scientific Fiction of the Limits of Knowledge by John L. Casti ISBN: 0309085470 Publisher: Joseph Henry Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Properties of Light by Rebecca Goldstein ISBN: 0618154590 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 14 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness by Gerald M. Edelman ISBN: 0300102291 Publisher: Yale University Press Pub. Date: 10 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0393003388 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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