Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Lloyd, Dan Edward, Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, London, The MIT Press Ltd, 357 Pages, ISBN 0-262-12259-6, £16.95.
Reviewed by
There is much to like about Lloyd’s expert and novel approach to understanding consciousness in Radiant Cool. This book expands into unexplored ground within the genre of philosophical fiction. Lloyd combines multiple literary forms to both entertain and edify the reader. Lloyd’s fresh approach to understanding consciousness appears in the second part (appendix) of the book after first delivering illuminating accounts and associated puzzles conveyed through a cast of fictional characters each eager to solve the neurophilosophical problem of consciousness. Radiant Cool is a fictional story that explores the intellectual developments and their respective problems associated with consciousness studies (mind-body problem) as presented from a phenomenological perspective, narrated and portrayed through the inquisitive mind of Miranda Sharp, a graduate student/sleuth. Solving the mystery of consciousness develops against a background of information steadily revealed in relation to the mysterious disappearance of Professor Grue. Each character contributes an element not only to the composition of the novel, but largely as reflected upon in the appendix, to establishing testable hypotheses.
Radiant Cool is indeed an enjoyable and provocative read alive with imagery and rich in metaphor. It constitutes a wonderful approach adapting fictional form to bring to life philosophical and cognitive research. The mystery of consciousness is not actually solved but there is something still very refreshing about Lloyd’s later account in the appendix. An important feature of Lloyd’s account relies upon the phenomenological theories of Edmund Husserl in particular Husserl’s theory of ‘Time Consciousness’ which provides us with an understanding that time is not merely a feature of external reality. Time, as I strongly agree, if it really does exist, must form an integral part of the very fabric of our own being and phenomenal experience. The tripartite process of time-consciousness (temporality) as espoused by Husserl is adapted to form a new approach to multivariate thinking about the geometry (“dimension thinking”) of the brain and phenomenology of conscious experience. Multivariate mathematics, as Lloyd explains, provides more than just a conceptual shift; it also provides that all-important avenue to explore complex phenomena. As Lloyd says, “multidimensional scaling offers a way to grasp the real complexity, by extracting essential relationships within the underlying multivariate dynamics (2004: 300)”.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Radiant Cool and have no qualms recommending this very worthwhile book. What I think is lacking, however, in Lloyd’s account, which the author in fact admits is required, refers specifically to the location of the internal mechanism/s responsible for the perception of time. Oddly enough, neuroscientists have already identified the internal clock of the human body. Several sources identify the mechanism of the brain clock as a loop of dopamine-generated neural activity flowing between the ‘substantia nigra’ in the base of the brain, the ‘basal ganglia’, and the ‘prefrontal cortex’. The time it takes for the nerve signals to complete a cycle is thought to represent one subjective motion/moment of the body clock and all that occurs within one cycle represents a single happening or event for the perceiver. The neurotransmitter dopamine said to be responsible for ‘motivation’ is associated with the neural activity, hence, there is a strong correlation with the temporal displacement (i.e. duration) associated with one’s mood swings. Depletion of dopamine results in slower cycle rates and consequent slowing of subjective time. Conversely, the increase of dopamine results in swifter cycle rates and promotes the feeling of clarity as increasing numbers of events are discriminated. The dopamine loop may well be only one of several mechanisms responsible for the perception of time, as I suspect, though its role is nonetheless an important factor and should be included when discussing the role of internal time.
Nevertheless, the importance of Lloyd’s approach as it builds on the phenomenological theories of Husserl, combined with advanced neural net modelling, really does offer new insights into consciousness studies. Multivariate thinking as the author espouses “expands the parts of the system, transforming them into dimensions or axes that map the boundaries of an abstract space. At the same time, it takes the system considered as a whole and transforms it into a mathematical point, a point defined by its coordinates along all the new axes of system space. So instead of the entire system containing its parts within it; now the parts have become a single space and the system is contained within them (2004:294)”. Whether this model emulates the actual functioning of the brain is still an open question though it already serves to increase our understanding of how the brain might function as research brought to light in the book already confirms.
Essentially Lloyd has developed a way to model the physical effect of the phenomenology of embodied time though I think he has not gone far enough. The notion of space, if relativity is correct, is indeed a dimension geometrically associated with time and more needs to be said on the matter. Further, the Husserlian notion of ‘nesting’ as Lloyd employs is used as a metaphor to describe the “depth of recursion” as that which “is the depth of time itself” (2004:273). The notion of ‘nesting’ is quite an important point in the presentation of ideas and I felt required more developing. St Augustine’s Confessions is the first real scholarly attempt after Plato to define time. Augustine dealt with the notion of duration and concluded that time was mind-dependent, a protraction of the mind. Only the present exists, that is, the present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things future, expectation. Thus reflecting the subjective sense of time in such a manner that when we measure time we are measuring an expanse of conscious memory. The present, for Augustine, connects the past to the future separated only by the measure of the present, that being an instant (i.e. ‘nesting’). So what is the length of an instant? Augustine concluded that the present must be an indivisible instant. Nowadays the most accurate measure of time is the atomic clock. The relation between objective time and subjective time is indeed nested in physical processes and Lloyd is well on the way to discovering.
Anyone interested in consciousness will enjoy Radiant Cool. I hasten to add that certain passages for some readers may require added suspension of belief. Fiction may not appeal to everyone but its effective employment by Lloyd to deal with philosophical research certainly adds an element of interest and intrigue to one of the most perplexing philosophical and neuroscientific problems of all time.