Publishers Weekly
05/29/2023
Neuroscientist Hoel (The Revelations) serves up a challenging overview of the science of consciousness, exploring how the tension between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” perspectives has shaped debate for millennia. Defining the intrinsic perspective as “the frame we take on when discussing the events that occur only within the mansions of our minds,” Hoel traces this strain of thinking from ancient Egypt, where inscriptions suggest people “lacked good language for the subtleties of the mind,” to modernist novels primarily concerned with characters’ feelings and thoughts. By contrast, the extrinsic perspective views the mind “as consisting of machinery, mechanisms, formal relationships,” and was pioneered by Galileo in a 1623 manifesto that argued science should focus on “what can be measured and counted.” Delving into current research on consciousness, the author discusses how inconclusive neuroimaging research attempting to match patterns of brain activity to specific mental states has thwarted proponents of the extrinsic view, and notes that scientists are studying whether measuring the brain’s response to electromagnetic stimulation might provide a falsifiable test of consciousness. The history intrigues, but the jargon-heavy discussions of contemporary neuroscience are hard to follow (“At the macroscale, the COPY = 0 is counterfactually dependent on α = 0”). The result is a mixed bag. (July)
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“Neuroscientist and fiction writer Hoel draws on history, philosophy, mathematics, and neuroscience to examine ways that consciousness has been imagined and investigated.” —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for The Revelations:
“A dizzying, impressive debut . . . Fast and furious, this mind-stretching novel makes the grade.” —Publishers Weekly
“Hoel’s debut is one of the year’s most ambitious novels to date, a provocative and weighty exploration of nothing short of human consciousness. . . . The novel is packed full with ideas, debates, scientific inquiry, and language that seems itself to come alive. This is a mystery novel you won’t soon forget and the announcement of a major new talent.” —CrimeReads
“The Revelations is written in muscular, hypnotic prose, and not unlike its main character, is ambitious and abrasive. It is bursting with ideas, ranging from Greek mythology to the dark realities of animal testing, to some of the biggest unanswered questions facing scientists today.” —Brooklyn Digest
NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile
Brace yourself--this expertly executed audiobook on the nature of consciousness will shake your brain to its core. Sean Hopkins wisely delivers it at a fast pace that matches the author's groundbreaking intelligence and giddy dedication to understanding how the mind works. Like trying to understand biology without Darwin's theory of evolution, or physics without Einstein's theories of relativity, the author, a neuroscientist, posits that his field is woefully incomplete without a theory explaining the fundamentals of consciousness. Hopkins's spirited performance imparts Hoel's intellectual excitement. The audiobook's questions and ideas whiz through history, pausing only to smash the paradigms of psychology and neuroscience. Hang on for the ride because this listening experience will forever change your understanding of yourself and the human mind. J.T. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-05-02
Investigating the mystery of the mind.
Neuroscientist and fiction writer Hoel draws on history, philosophy, mathematics, and neuroscience to examine ways that consciousness has been imagined and investigated. Beginning with an overview of what ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans believed about “the subtleties of the mind,” he considers the distinction between intrinsic phenomena, which came to be associated with religious experience and literature, and extrinsic phenomena, which fell under the purview of science. Neuroscience should be exceptional in being “where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet,” but Hoel offers a sharp critique of the field, which he finds too heavily focused on neuroimaging and mapping—on the quantitative rather than the qualitative. He points out that scientific conclusions often are based on very small samples. “It takes thousands of individuals to achieve reproducible brain-wide associations,” he writes. “This is not a bar most neuroimaging studies pass.” Instead, he has discovered “that findings don’t replicate, that every lab uses a different methodology, that small changes in methodology lead to big changes in outcomes,” and that researchers tend to make up hypotheses to fit their own data. Even research in institutes founded by Nobel laureates in biology Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman falls short, in Hoel’s estimation, because they each focus on correlating brain function to conscious experience. Readers may feel daunted by the author’s explanation of the complexities of integrated information theory, which he helped to develop as a graduate student but now finds inadequate as “an explanation for subjectivity.” More fruitful, for Hoel, is the theory of causal emergence, which posits that “macroscales have more causal influence than their underlying microscales over the exact same events.” Emergence theory, he argues, accounts for “the brain’s entire evolved purpose, it’s very raison d’être—maintaining a stream of consciousness” as well as offering a “scientific justification for free will.”
A dense inquiry that will challenge readers without a scientific background.
