The Mysterious Flame
"Is consciousness nothing more than the result of neurons firing through brain tissue? Or is it, as some claim, 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 in the scientific discourse. Now in this new book, Colin McGinn takes a provocative position on this perplexing problem."--BOOK JACKET. "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."--BOOK JACKET.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
3people
2013–2023years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- One excellent book on consciousness is Mcginn's The Mysterious Flame [1]. I knew consciousness is a hard problem, but the book made it clear how baffling and utterly mysterious it is. I am still absolutely flabbergasted when I think about it (how on earth does consciousness arise from material "meat"?! [2] Where are pain and color and subjective experience really located in the material universe?). It also made me skeptical of people who think AI will be sentient [3] while we are in the complete dark about consciousness in biological organisms.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mysterious-Flame-Conscious-Minds-Mate...
[2] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
[3] https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1653051310034305025
- An excellent book that greatly expands on this "mystery" is The Mysterious Flame, Conscious Minds in a Material World, Colin McGinn.
- Normally I tell everyone to read The Name of the Rose first and be happy, but for you I think you should start with The Mysterious Flame of queen Loana, even though it's one of his less accessible works. Much of it is a fictionalized memoir on how fascism became embedded in the fabric of daily life during Mussolini's reign, although this concern with mass movements and the dangers they pose to thinking individuals is a consistent theme in his work.
- Foucault's Pendulum gets my vote too if you want to read something that is as straight forward as Eco can get.
The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana felt more like he was trying to test you, in each of those books, to see if you are worthy of consuming the entire book. Every time you feel you have a reasonable grasp of what is going on, he'll descend into a phase where you'll be lost again.
The Prague Cemetery, on the other hand, was utterly fascinating. Really enjoyed it.
