The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds In A Material World - Hardcover

Mcginn, Colin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465014224 ISBN 13: 9780465014224

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

Is consciousness nothing more than brain tissue, as Daniel Dennett argues in his best-selling Consciousness Explained ? Or, as others claim, is it a fundamental reality like space, time, and matter? In recent years the nature of consciousness—our immediately known experiences—has taken its place as the most profound problem that science faces. Now in this brilliant and thoroughly accessible new book Colin McGinn takes a provocative position on this perplexing problem. Arguing that we can never truly “know” consciousness—that the human intellect is simply not equipped to unravel this mystery—he demonstrates that accepting this limitation in fact opens up a whole new field of investigation. Indeed, he asserts, consciousness is the best place from which to begin to understand the internal make-up of human intelligence, to investigate our cognitive strengths and weaknesses, and to explore the possibility of machine minds. In elegant prose, McGinn explores the implications of this Mysterian position—such as the new value it gives to the power of dreams and of introspection—and challenges the reader with intriguing questions about the very nature of our minds and brains.

About this title

About the Author

Colin McGinn is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books, including The Character of Mind; Moral Literacy; Minds and Bodies; Ethics, Evil and Fiction, and Mental Content. He lectures widely in the United States and abroad, and is a frequent contributor to scholarly and popular magazines, including Lingua Franca and The New Republic.

Reviews

Although its roots reach back to ancient Greece, the mind-body problem has bedeviled Western philosophers particularly since the time of the rationalist suppositions of Descartes in the 17th century. As knowledge of neurophysiology and brain function increase, questions about the nature of human consciousness also multiply. McGinn (Ethics, Evil and Fiction), a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, explores the relationship between the brain and the mind in a witty style. The authors analysis of the classical philosophical answers and conundrums emanating from this problem (dualism, epiphenomenalism, materialism, supernaturalism) are made easy to understand for the lay reader. Pushing reason, logic and experience to their limits, McGinn concludes that, ultimately, the essence of mind and the meaning of consciousness lie beyond the capability of the minds trying to define and comprehend them. Yet, he says, in accepting the limitations of thought about thought, we may find unlikely intellectual solace in inexplicable mystery. This is no pessimistic tract. McGinn asserts that acknowledging the frustrating boundaries of reason about reason frees the thinker to explore those areas of human intelligence that are open to our understanding. Except for his distracting habit of defaulting the third-person personal pronoun to the feminine, McGinn makes his case eloquently, with literary examples drawn from areas as diverse as biology, astrophysics and science fiction. Susan Rabiner Literary Agency.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

McGinn, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, asks several deep questions about consciousness and then answers them in clear and entertaining prose. "What is consciousness? Where does it come from? ... What does the activity of the brain have to do with it?" His answer: "My thesis is that consciousness depends upon an unknowable natural property of the brain." The inability of the human intellect to resolve the mind-body problem arises because "our minds are not equipped to solve it, rather as the cat's mind is not up to discovering relativity theory." McGinn supposes that brains capable of understanding consciousness might be developed by breeding advanced thinkers or by a "genetically engineered super-mind," but he warns that one must consider what such a superbrained person might lose as the cost of what he gains. "As they say, be careful what you wish for!"

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465014224
• ISBN 13: 9780465014224
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256