Overview

Professor Grue is dead (or is he?). When graduate student/sleuth Miranda Sharpe discovers him slumped over his keyboard, she does the sensible thing - she grabs her dissertation and runs. Little does she suspect that soon she will be probing the heart of two mysteries, trying to discover what happened to Max Grue, and trying to solve the profound neurophilosophical problem of consciousness. Radiant Cool may be the first novel of ideas that actually breaks new theoretical ground, as Dan Lloyd uses a neo-noir (neuro-noir?), hard-boiled framework to propose a new theory of consciousness. In the course of her sleuthing, Miranda encounters characters who share her urgency to get to the bottom of the mystery of consciousness, although not always with the most innocent motives. Ultimately Miranda teams up with the author's fictional alter ego, ""Dan Lloyd,"" and together they build on the phenomenological theories of philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) to construct testable hypotheses about the implementation of consciousness in the brain. Will the clues of phenomenology and neuroscience converge in time to avert a catastrophe? (The dramatic ending cannot be revealed here.) Outside the fictional world of the novel, Dan Lloyd (the author) appends a lengthy afterword, explaining the proposed theory of consciousness in more scholarly form.

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Reviews

A deft and engrossing noir mystery. -- Daniel C. Dennett TLS [A] book that is both a gripping story and an intellectual challenge. -- Susan Blackmore New Scientist As Lloyd's final pages make clear, consciousness may in principle by partly opaque. George Scialabba Boston Sunday Globe Boston Sunday Globe Radiant Cool is likely to become a campus classic. Durrants ... ingenious and compelling. -- Jonathan Derbyshire Time Out London Other writers...have used literature to illuminate science. Lloyd...[has] done it the other way round. -- Walter Ellis Times Higher Education Supplement ...A fine read for anyone interested in consciousness studies as well as fictionalized science. -- Jaak Panksepp JAMA As Lloyd's final pages make clear, consciousness may in principle by partly opaque. -- George Scialabba Boston Sunday Globe Other writers, including Umberto Eco, have used literature to illuminate science. Lloyd...[has] done it the other way round. -- Walter Ellis Times Higher Education Supplement

I had dreamed of writing a book like this someday, and Lloyd has done it, taking us backstage and explaining how the brain plays its tricks creating the benign illusions of consciousness: amazing. - Daniel C. Dennett, TLS, Books of the Year ; A book that is both a gripping story and an intellectual challenge. - Susan Blackmore, New Scientist

A deft and engrossing noir mystery. Daniel C. Dennett TLS ... [A] book that is both a gripping story and an intellectual challenge. Susan Blackmore NewScientist As Lloyd's final pages make clear, consciousness may in principle by partly opaque. George Scialabba Boston Sunday Globe Radiant Cool is likely to become a campus classic. Durrants ... ingenious and compelling. Jonathan Derbyshire Time Out London Other writers...have used literature to illuminate science. Lloyd...[has] done it the other way round. Walter Ellis Times Higher Education Supplement ...A fine read for anyone interested in consciousness studies as well as fictionalized science. Jaak Panksepp JAMA ...[A] book that is both a gripping story and an intellectual challenge. Susan Blackmore NewScientist As Lloyd's final pages make clear, consciousness may in principle by partly opaque. George Scialabba Boston Sunday Globe Other writers, including Umberto Eco, have used literature to illuminate science. Lloyd...[has] done it the other way round. Walter Ellis Times Higher Education Supplement

Author Information

Dan Lloyd is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Connecticut, and winner of the first New Perspectives in Functional Brain Imaging Research award, given by the Functional MRI Data Centre and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. He is the author of Simple Minds (MIT Press, 1989).

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