Radiant Cool — a book review

Philosopher Dan Lloyd has given us a unique book: a novel about the brain, the mind, and consciousness. And, the title and jacket cover suggest that it is the vehicle for a new theory for understanding consciousness and the brain.

This is a multi-faceted book. First, it is a novel, thus a work of literature. Second, it presents a phenomenological view of consciousness. Third, it offers a reasonably detailed theory of how the brain creates, or at least supports, consciousness itself. If that isn’t enough, it also comes equipped with a long section at the end, Part II, loaded with scientific observations about the brain, and includes an appeal for Lloyd’s own view on how science should best proceed toward understanding consciousness.

Loyd is a marvelous writer As a novel the book has its ups and downs. Before I get to them, especially the downs let me say that Lloyd is a marvelous writer. His talent for beautifully crafted sentences sent me to his personal website, where I was not surprised to discover that he holds degrees in both literature and philosophy. The book is peppered with sparkling passages such as the following, still in the Prologue:

Our conscious mind is the great quaking stage of experience from first step to first kiss to last word. No place could seem less its home than that gelatinous organ known as the brain, a place of perfect darkness and bare chemical murmurs. (p. xvi)

Aside from the high quality of writing in this novel, the character development is excellent as well. The story is told in the first-person voice of a shrewd young graduate student named Miranda Sharpe. Her witty and jaundiced observations carry the reader through even the slower sections of the book with trust and affection. Dan Lloyd himself arrives near the end, as one of his own characters. One only wonders how accurately he has depicted himself, though in the shy and unassertive persona he presents it is clear he is not given to self-flattery.

As the author, Lloyd has a gift for clever, even enticing names. After meeting the astute Miranda Sharpe, we encounter characters such as Clair Lucid, the talk-show psychiatrist with hybrid dispositions toward cognitive science and psychoanalysis, and Maxwell Grue, the mysteriously missing phenomenologist and Miranda’s major As a story, the book is so-so professor. “Max” evidently thinks he has discovered the key to consciousness itself, but on the day of the story – the entire novel takes place in a single day – no one can locate him. Missing through most of the story, nevertheless his shadow falls across every page. One wonders if he is Prospero for Miranda: if the name “Grue” is intended to resonate with “Guru.” Several ephemeral characters make cameo appearances with names suggestive of Shakespearian origins, such as Imogen and Pisanio, both names from the relatively obscure play, Cymbeline, mentioned once in passing. Porfiry Petrovich Marlov, a sleuth out of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, appears as a retired detective, here to explain multi-dimensional scaling to Miranda and the reader. My first thought was that these suggestive names must signify a deeper meaning in the text, but if so I was never able to find it.

As a story, the book is so-so. The narrative begins in the wee hours of a cold April morning when Miranda slips into Max’s office to steal back her dissertation. She expects to find the room empty, but instead is startled by Max himself, slumped across his computer and apparently dead. On the screen is an icon indicating that the computer has crashed. She does the right thing; she slinks back to her apartment and It is much the same theory as the Churchlands hopes the whole business will all go away. But there is to be no rest for her. The day becomes a series of adventures that continue throughout the morning, afternoon, evening, and on into the night, when the action finally plays itself out to a surprisingly satisfying and unexpected conclusion. The weakness of the narrative is that the episodes, though interesting, hang together loosely at best. Lloyd seems more concerned with teaching the reader about consciousness and the brain than with advancing the plot. The reader is lectured at, read to, and talked with, about the phenomenological aspects of consciousness, a la Husserl, and about neural networks and multidimensional scaling in the brain, a la Dan Lloyd the writer, represented by his fictional alter ego, Dan Lloyd the character. Indeed, it is no accident that references are scattered throughout the book to Jorge Luis Borges, master of literary self-reference. If this isn’t enough, the book contains 109 pages of explanation of Lloyd’s own theory of the brain and consciousness, inserted after the novel is finished.

Ordinarily, a novelist who lectures to his readers is a novelist who has failed to deliver the goods in the story. We might forgive Lloyd on this point, however, because of the complexity of his topic. Unfortunately, all this effort fails because (1) neither the novel nor the 109 pages of explanation presents a user-friendly introduction to the brain science Lloyd wants to talk about, and (2) the reader has to already be familiar with his kind of theorizing to understand the novel to begin with. It would have been better to direct the novice reader to Paul Churchland’s excellent The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain, with instructions to return after digesting its content. Which brings us to the next topic: the theory itself.

The jacket cover indicates that the novel delivers a new theory of consciousness and the brain. But as far as I could tell, it is much the same theory that the Churchlands and others presented over a decade ago, according to which the brain is a multidimensional neural network, and conscious experience at any moment is the product of the activity trajectories of all the nerve cells within that network.

Each state of consciousness is what it is. Literally, each one is a pattern of agitated neurons, a point in (multidimensional) hyperspace… (p. 153)

Each pattern is the entire intentional (experiential) package, subject and object together. The pattern is the image of your relations to everything. That includes the world before you. That includes the past and the future. All that is just as real as anything else. In the end, the labyrinth is reality. The patterns are the world. (p. 197)

I told you he is a good writer! I will only say that the validity of this view is still up for grabs. It can hardly be denied that there is some truth to it. I personally find this model unconvincing, however, at least as a total description of brain processes that underlie consciousness. For one thing, far too much emphasis is placed on small numbers, or even single, neurons, which according to this notion significantly influence the meaning of the overall pattern, and thus the form of the resulting experience. But consider the fact that patients who have experienced the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere report no change in the quality of conscious experience (e.g, Gazzaniga, 1993). It would seem, according to the above view, that such a huge change in network dynamics should have an equally large effect on the quality of conscious experience. Also, consider Roy E. John’s (1965) finding that virtually every nerve cell in the brain is to some degree correlated with, or involved in, every activity of the organism. It would seem that some more holistic dynamic must be taken into account. My own view favors a more dynamical understanding of the brain, one that stresses patterns within large fields of action, as described by Walter Freeman (Freeman & Barrie, 1994). This is not to deny, however, that Lloyd’s view is not perfectly legitimate. In fact, it seems to me to represent the mean view of brain scientists today.

In summary, the book is beautifully written and a good read, but in this reviewer’s mind does not entirely succeed in its mission to deliver a successful novel understanding of consciousness and the brain.

Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness
By Dan Lloyd
Bradford Books; 2003. 357 pages, no index.
ISBN 0-262-12259-6 (Cloth); 0-262-62193-2 (Paper)

© 2005 Allan Combs

Author Information

Allan Combs
January 19, 2005
The Graduate Institute
Saybrook Graduate School
E-mail Homepage

References

1. Churchland, P.M. (1995). The engine of reason, the seat of the soul. Cambridge: MIT Press.
2. Freeman, W.J, and Barrie, J.M. (1994). Chaotic oscillations and the genesis of meaning in cerebral cortex. In G. Buzáke, R. Llinás, W. Singer. A. Berthoz, and Y. Christen (Eds.), Temporal coding in the brain (pp. 13-38). New York: Springer-Verlag.
3. Gazzaniga, M.S. (1993). Brain mechanisms and conscious experience. In: Ciba Foundation Symposium 174. Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness (pp. 247-257). New York: Wiley.
4. Sutton, S., Baren, M., Zubin, J. and John, E.R. Evoked potential correlates of stimulus uncertainty. Science, 1965, 150: 1187–1188.