Publisher's Synopsis
What are you? A human organism? A brain? A pattern of information? An immortal soul? Something else entirely?This collection of poems examines the mysteries of the mind from the point of view of a scientist coming to terms with the strange qualia that form our perceptions of everything we experience. It critiques the modern-day myths about consciousness known as functionalism, epiphenomenalism and mysterianism - the view that our inability to understand consciousness is as inescapable as a dog's inability to understand human speech - which, in the author's opinion, smother progress in this field. Through the lens of established science, it tours the galaxy of mental phenomena, and brings you face-to-face with the strange black hole at its centre: An unexpected time-warping entity of unknown nature called 'subjective awareness' that sucks in information from the surrounding brain at an alarming rate, and yet emits nothing we have been able to detect, leaving its exact location and physical origin a complete and utter mystery, This huge gap in our understanding of what we are is something few of us nowadays hear much about. The materialist view of reality that underlies modern scientific discourse makes mental phenomena seem bizarre miracles, and scientists far prefer to dwell on what their profession illuminates than on what it leaves in deep shadow. Yet the edge of that empirically-impenetrable darkness - the contentious boundary between the science and the philosophy of mind - may well hold the key to appreciating the true nature of reality.Some of the poems in this collection even attempt to peer beyond that "event horizon". Guided by established scientific knowledge, they infer what a scientist should most expect the explanation that fills this explanatory gap to consist of. The hope is that the reader will be sucked into this mystery too, and emerge with a worldview greatly broadened from the experience - or at least, one in which all vestiges of materialism, functionalism, epiphenomenalism and mysterianism have become thoroughly spaghettified.
