One of our most original thinkers addresses the premier question of science and philosophy: Can consciousness be explained?. 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 consciousnessour immediately known experienceshas 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 consciousnessthat the human intellect is simply not equipped to unravel this mysteryhe 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 positionsuch as the new value it gives to the power of dreams and of introspectionand challenges the reader with intriguing questions about the very nature of our minds and brains.

Review

You have a piece of meat in your head called a brain. You also have perceptions, feelings, thoughts and ideas, which scientists assert are related in some fashion to that piece of meat. How can this be? Philosopher Colin McGinn looks at this question in depth in The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, a slim, accessible book which presents a novel answer: we'll never know. We can look at the brain from outside and look at our consciousness from within, but never the twain shall meet.

Not at all defeatist in tone, The Mysterious Flame rejects strict materialism and dualism, which seek to solve the mind-body problem in fairly unsatisfactory ways, and claims instead that our intelligence is not an appropriate tool to use for understanding the interface between subjective experience and material reality. (And, unfortunately, we don't have anything better.) Instead of bemoaning our fate, McGinn turns the traditional questions around and asks: "What can we know about ourselves?" This is just as interesting as any being asked by philosophers of the mind, and in fact seems to merit a higher priority. Whether McGinn's arguments will succeed in the marketplace of ideas is an open question but they certainly deserve the attention of anyone interested in the nature of human thought. --Rob Lightner, Amazon.com

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