Mixed feelings about the book. There were things I really liked about it, for example he was great at examining his own mental experiences and writing about them. And he had a good sense of humor. And he’s interested in consciousness as I am. But he’s very interested in something called the “Spread Mind” theory by Ricardo Manzotti, which I can’t help but see as very loony and unscientific, and it kind of pervades the book. ( )

Probably can't do this book justice. Parks has written many novels, four or five of which I've read and which were memorable. Also much non-fiction--about living and learning in Italy, about reading, about learning to meditate and other subjects (I've read those three) so obviously I am partial to Tim Parks. In this offering Parks has been asked to explore consciousness from the 'literary' perspective, e.g., I guess, as a creative person, by visiting various neuroscientists at a sciency institute based in Heidelberg. Actually it sounds . . . peculiar to me as if someone higher up felt that it would look good if someone connected the scientists with the 'creatives' -- one question posed is whether science has replaced religion (at least for some.) Is it a belief system, just a very very tricky one? But Parks goal is to use this conference/festschrift as a fulcrum for his interest in consciousness. Is it only in our heads? So, as some philosophers (and many scientists declaim) we 'store' memories and 'process experience' etcetera -- as if the brain is a computer (think about that--a relatively new metaphor but all the rage--earlier the idea was something alarmingly like a homunculus in there orchestrating everything. Or, as an Italian philosopher who fascinates Parks, is there literally no space between our experience and the world around us, that at all times what we experience is entirely dependent on where we are, what we see, touch, hear, all of it, all at once, in an endless (at least our lifetime kind of endless) continuum of experience. Manzotti calls this the Spread Mind. Unlike the romantics who personified and gave consciousness (of some kind) to literally everything, Manzotti limits this interconnection to the present and to the presence of you, the human. Ah, it is complicated and really I am not sure about all of it, Parks valiantly works to demonstrate his ideas and to show the limitations of neuroscientific experiments. He pretty well succeeds. I am sure if I had the patience to read the book from start to end again and also to discuss it at length with others I would make sense of and more or less agree with this Manzotti. It does place us 'in' and 'part of' rather than putting us in the place we have occupied in our imaginations of being 'the center' 'the only reality' etcetera. This is a modern concept really first written up by the Greeks, but earlier peoples knew they were not apart, not separate. So not a book for the faint of heart but worthwhile if you are a quester. **** ( )

Human consciousness: what a strange, complex thing it is. In the scientific world, consciousness is hot stuff: research, publications and conferences i-on this topic follow one another. And it is also the subject of this book. For once not a real work of fiction by Parks, although it is not full-fledged nonfiction either. In some ways it is comparable to his “Teach me to sit still” (2010), when Parks zoomed in on his search for a treatment of a personal physical problem to show that there are more ways to the body-mind issue than evidence-based science.
The book on consciousness offers an amalgam of Parks' tour along various scientists, especially neurologists who do experiments on babies and mice (yes, yes), along with personal experiences and reflections, and scientific and philosophical talks. It’s the variation that makes this book on a very difficult topic fairly easy to read.
On to consciousness then. Parks' own approach is the Spread Mind Theory of the Italian philosopher Riccardo Manzotti. It opposes the scientific consensus that our consciousness takes place entirely within our heads: memories, experiences, dreams, they are all within our brain. This internalist view seems to be supported by the vast neurological research that records which brain connections are flashing during certain human actions. Next to this, there is the (smaller) school of the enactivists: they see consciousness as an intentional action that emanates from the human being towards external (or internal) objects or phenomena, consciousness is a ‘reaching for’. The Spread Mind Theory is kind of similar. Manzotti first interpreted this as the mutual relationship between man/woman and object, the interaction itself being consciousness, both internal and external. But in 2015 he changed course and concluded that in this interaction ultimately the external object itself constitutes the relationship and thus consciousness: “The brain and body, in contact with the world, allow experience, or mind, or consciousness, to happen, but the experience is not located in the body or the brain. It's outside. The object is the experience.” Parks admits that this seems very strange, and he continues to struggle with it throughout the book, but at the same time, he agrees there is certainly truth to it.
By now it will be clear to the reader that this is not an easy book, and although Parks does his best, at times it is quite hard to digest. What particularly appealed to me is his clear criticism of the reductionism of classical science; in this respect, this book is perfectly in line with Siri Hustvedt's masterpiece The Shaking Woman. With Parks it is mainly the neuroscientists with their endless empirical experiments (especially on mice) who, he feels, keep going in a meaningless circle.
Parks' experiences and musings do not seem to deliver a real outcome, although I have the impression that in the end he opts for the soft version of the Spread Mind Theory (the one from before 2015), in which consciousness is the 'meeting' between the me and an external object (in the broad sense of the word), an encounter that is always new. A nice compromise that I can live with. In a way this book related to what is – in my view - one of his masterpieces, “Dreams of Rivers and Seas” (2008), which is also about perception and the fluidness and intangibility of reality. ( )

In philosophy one of the most difficult questions to ask and the answer is consciousness. Daniel Dennet has made strides in this area but here the author takes on the same general area but of course with a very different answer. The work can be heavy going but it is interesting for those in the field.

Not everyone's cuppa but I got a lot out of this book. Especially his dogged questioning. ( )