An earnest effort to describe the indescribable, of interest to students of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology.
A philosophical inquiry into the nature of consciousness, that most elusive of constructs.
“Nothing is more certain than consciousness,” writes Goff (Philosophy Durham Univ.; Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, 2017), “and yet nothing is harder to incorporate into our scientific picture of the world.” Since the time of the Renaissance, science has worked on the premise that the thing doing the observing cannot observe itself reliably and that even the thought that “I exist as a conscious being” lies outside the realm of science. The author aims to restore the problem of consciousness as an object of scientific inquiry, not easy in a time when, as he notes, many philosophers consider consciousness to be a kind of elaborate illusion. Think of The Matrix, in which we’re all part of a machine that feeds on our psychic energy; however, we can come down on Galileo for having reduced the complexity of being to four attributes: size, shape, location, and movement. By removing the sensory—“Galileo did not believe that you could convey in mathematical language the yellow color or the sour taste of the lemon”—from consideration, science is indeed able to reduce being to physical and mathematical formulas. But that’s only part of the story. Goff introduces numerous theories to promote the scientific study of consciousness, such as integrated information theory, with “integrated information” being another way of saying consciousness. He considers other problems, such as that of free will, in light of consciousness, and he looks at ways in which subjective experience might be introduced into “the purely quantitative vocabulary” of modern neuroscience and physics, the latter of which, he adds, “tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of matter." It is therefore paradoxical that we understand consciousness to be reality while not quite being able to explain why, a challenge for a future science that might free itself from dualistic constraints.
An earnest effort to describe the indescribable, of interest to students of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4796-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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