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

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.