Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books) [Paperback]

Dan Lloyd (Author)

Book Description

Series: Bradford Books | Publication Date: August 20, 2004

Professor Grue is dead (or is he?). When graduate student/sleuth Miranda Sharpe discovers him slumped over his keyboard, she does the sensible thing--she grabs her dissertation and runs. Little does she suspect that soon she will be probing the heart of two mysteries, trying to discover what happened to Max Grue, and trying to solve the profound neurophilosophical problem of consciousness. Radiant Cool may be the first novel of ideas that actually breaks new theoretical ground, as Dan Lloyd uses a neo-noir (neuro-noir?), hard-boiled framework to propose a new theory of consciousness.In the course of her sleuthing, Miranda encounters characters who share her urgency to get to the bottom of the mystery of consciousness, although not always with the most innocent motives. Who holds the key to Max Grue's ultimate vision? Is it the computer-inspired pop psychologist talk-show host? The video-gaming geek with a passion for artificial neural networks? The Russian multi-dimensional data detective, or the sophisticated neuroscientist with the big book contract? Ultimately Miranda teams up with the author's fictional alter ego, "Dan Lloyd," and together they build on the phenomenological theories of philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) to construct testable hypotheses about the implementation of consciousness in the brain. Will the clues of phenomenology and neuroscience converge in time to avert a catastrophe? (The dramatic ending cannot be revealed here.) Outside the fictional world of the novel, Dan Lloyd (the author) appends a lengthy afterword, explaining the proposed theory of consciousness in more scholarly form.Radiant Cool is a real metaphysical thriller--based in current philosophy of mind--and a genuine scientific detective story--revealing a new interpretation of functional brain imaging. With its ingenious plot and its novel theory, Radiant Cool will be enjoyed in the classroom and the study for its entertaining presentation of phenomenology, neural networks, and brain imaging; but, most importantly, it will find its place as a groundbreaking theory of consciousness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This ambitious, unwieldy "novel theory" by philosophy professor Lloyd (Simple Minds) sets out to explore paradigms of consciousness while solving the murder of a stodgy instructor at fictional Whaleard University. When graduate student Miranda Sharpe makes an early morning raid on her adviser's office to take back her dissertation, she is horrified to find philosophy professor Maxwell Grue hunched over his desk, presumably dead. Later in the day, his body has disappeared, and Miranda begins "Sherlocking." After the firewall protecting the college computer network is breached and the system crashes, she sifts through Grue's e-mails, CD-ROMs and jargon-laden "virtual world" Web site to find clues. A number of suspects materialize: radio psychologist Clare Lucid; a Russian forensic exchange professor; Miranda's ex-boyfriend; and a smitten computer geek named Gordon. Even the author himself surfaces to lend a hand. Since everyone revels in illustrating neurophilosophical theories, by the time all the sleuthing pays off, the characters have lost definition and the narrative is tied up in knots. Bafflement continues into a stand-alone Part Two as Lloyd leaves his primary story behind for a more academic focus, expanding on a new theory of consciousness developed over the course of the novel. Dry textbook language and graphics that only seasoned scholars will fully comprehend make Lloyd's concentrated exploration of cognitive science a slog for the average mystery reader. The theories on time, reality and whole-brain functionality are intriguing, but Lloyd will lose all but his hardest-working readers by the time the "Sources and Notes" section is reached
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

The riddle of human consciousness has confounded philosophers for centuries. But not to worry--now there's a sleuth on the case. Or so it would seem in this strange hybrid of a book in which philosopher Lloyd appropriates the conventions of private-eye fiction to adumbrate his own groundbreaking theorizing. Thrust into the role of detective, the disgruntled graduate student Miranda Sharpe must find out what has happened to Max Grue, her missing graduate advisor. Miranda's search for answers soon involves a complex cast of characters (including the alter ego of Lloyd himself) who together enact the vanished professor's complex theory of consciousness even as they try to understand it. In a dizzyingly convoluted plot, Miranda and the fictional Lloyd frantically scrutinize e-mails, neural-network matrices, and brain imagery, trying to unravel Grue's multiplayer theory in time to avert an Internet meltdown and an international crisis. Lloyd concludes with an appendix explaining the theory embedded in his tale. Certainly not the most accessible first novel of the season but quite possibly the most original. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 357 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book; 1 edition (August 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262621932
• ISBN-13: 978-0262621939
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #815,004 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Scientist as novelist, November 25, 2003

By 

David Gibson (Somerville, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books) (Hardcover)

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.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting and engaging story, January 4, 2004

By 

Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books) (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good for Neuroscience Curriculum, December 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books) (Hardcover)

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.