The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds In A Material World - Hardcover

Mcginn, Colin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465014224 ISBN 13: 9780465014224

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

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 consciousness our immediately known experiences has 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” 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. In elegant prose, McGinn explores the implications of this Mysterian position such as the new value it gives to the power of dreams and of introspection and challenges the reader with intriguing questions about the very nature of our minds and brains.

About this title

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 that 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 question 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

About the Author:

Colin McGinn is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books, including The Character of Mind; Moral Literacy; Minds and Bodies; Ethics, Evil and Fiction, and Mental Content. He lectures widely in the United States and abroad, and is a frequent contributor to scholarly and popular magazines, including Lingua Franca and The New Republic.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0465014224
• ISBN 13: 9780465014224
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256