Books

There are somewhere between one and 8.5 billion ways a brain can work, which means there are between one and 8.5 billion factorial ways of looking at consciousness.

Where does a consciousness end and the rest of the world begin? Where is the line between inside and outside? Between life and not life? Between the parts of the universe that are conscious and the those that are not? Between you and not you?

We are all chimeras who have inherited the quirks of a single cell too timid to die billions of years ago.

Why "Nineteen" Ways? (Isn't that six too many?)

The book is inspired by a collection of translations of a single poem by the Chinese poet Wang Wei called 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. In that book, a single poem is translated nineteen times throughout more than one-thousand years of scholarship.

Does the book solve consciousness?

No. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness offers different 'translations' of a single moment in time—when a neurosurgeon makes one of his patient's laugh by stimulating, with an electrode, a part of her brain. Nonetheless, the patient reports feeling the subjective experience of 'joy' and 'mirth'. How does electrical stimulation create the experience of joy? Somewhere in a full explanation of that moment is a solution to consciousness. These are but clues.

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Write me: housepk@proton.me