The Hidden Spring, an ambitious book by Mark Solms, wants to sell you on two things. First, that it has the outlines of a theory of consciousness. Second, that other theories – on multiple counts – are looking for it in the wrong place.
Continue reading “My Brain…takes a big swing”
In lieu of a more substantial post, here’s a book-themed mess.
First though, given the continuing whatever-the-hell on twitter, while I’m maintaining my account there (@Neuron2sumthing) in lurk/broadcast only mode, I’ve broadened out a bit and you can now find me on mastodon (@neurontosomething@mas.to) and tumblr (@neurontosomething), in addition to the other ways you can contact me.
Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind – A meditation on memory and it’s molecular mechanisms from a Nobel prize-winner? An autobiography of someone whose personal life includes the legacy of escaping Nazi Vienna as a child, and a professional life that spans multiple revolutions in biology? Sounds great, and right up my street. Except – it’s only the first few and possibly last chapters that really deliver on that. The middle majority of the book was quite repetitive, dry and I would say textbook-like except the THE neuroscience textbook by the same guy (among others) is on my shelf and it doesn’t suffer in the same way. Perhaps the science not being entirely new to me reduces the impact of the book. There’s a lot of detail but not a lot of tying back into personal or larger contexts, which is what the autobiographical presentation and early chapters seem to promise. If you have a specific interest and need for detail on the history of how these (fascinating!) mechanisms were explored, or on the career of the author, then this could be a useful book. Unfortunately, even for someone who works in neuroscience but was looking for something outside my immediate area of interest, after a strong start I found this a bit of a slog to finish.
Continuing the history theme in podcast form, I want to recommend A Reader’s History of Science Fiction. This is a well-researched, accessible and interesting overview of the history of science fiction now into it’s second season and going strong. Each episode selects a recommendation from the titles discussed, and on the strength of the titles I do know, I’m motivated to check out the recommended titles that I don’t know. Well worth your time.
Goonhammer, a website focused on my other very serious hobby of miniature modelling, also happens to be publishing a series of posts on the history of scifi. Drawing on a different set of sources choosing the recommendations, this is complementary to the podcast above. They pair their recommendations of classic scifi relevant to a given post’s theme, with recommendations for the Black Library – the vast back catalogue of Warhammer 40,000 books. I’ve only read one Black Library book, ‘Day of ascension’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This an author I was already familiar with, whose characteristic flair for non-human perspectives has you somehow feeling feels for the gibbering horrors in this quick, ‘fun’ grimdark read. Based on that, and the strength of the goonhammer series’ other recommendations, I way well be giving some other Black Library titles a go.
Peter F. Hamilton – Pandora’s Star – I have a confession to make that might put my geek card at risk: I have never finished Lord of the Rings. Not even Fellowship. The TV series has me eyeing up the Wheel of Time books, but GoT burned me that way too and I gave up after the first book. It’s not that think they are bad, and on paper I’m fascinated by the world-building. It’s just that Epic Fantasy, in book form, just doesn’t DO it for me. Epic SCIENCE Fantasy, or Space Opera, if you will – that’s different. Apparently, I’m happy to sit through the exposition of a constructed universe, and the chorus of characters used to explore it, as long as there is sufficient PEW PEW. Pandora’s Star takes it’s time introducing us to the worlds of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth, and then upsets things with a engaging Big Bad linked to alien mega-structures, leading to set piece actions sequence interspersed with politicking factions and hints of deeper twists. We’re not plumbing new depths of philosophical inquiry or especially original scifi what-iffery, but the feel and the tone of the constructed world is distinctive in the context of it’s genre. It’s not without it’s problems – the social and economic sides of the story and especially their conflicts are painted with a fairly broad brush, sometimes to the point of caricature, and there is definitely a basis for the accusations of sex-scene wish-fulfilment. It was a holiday-read blockbuster with a savvy eye towards the genre elements, that I enjoyed enough that I didn’t mind the door-stopper size and it showed me a world, characters, stories that interest me enough that I will be coming back for more despite the cliff-hanger ending (grrr). If that’s what does it for you, you could do a lot worse than Pandora’s Star.
Mind, spirit, consciousness, essence, anima – what ‘makes us who we are’ is a defining question in religion, philosophy, art…. and table-top games where Space Marines bring the rightious PEW! to the alien and the unbeliever. The ideas present in these more ‘serious’ traditions are implicit in the way we tell stories about thoughts, minds and identities. Possibly due to being written by more than one person, sprawling shared universes (cf. Star Trek, Dr Who, long-running comics franchises…) are particularly fertile hunting grounds for examining the strange attractors in the way a culture approaches these ideas.
Continue reading “Your brain on…the Table-top: Soul, mind, and spiritually bent hyper-spaces in Warhammer 40k”
NeurOnToSomething 
