Phi

"From a neurologist whose work offers one of the most promising paths to unraveling the mystery of consciousness, an exploration of consciousness unlike any other. Somehow our soul, our consciousness, our world, all is generated by what's inside our skull. This is the essential question of neurology. Consciousness cannot just rest inside the shroud of science, because consciousness is more than an object of science: it is its subject, too. In PHI, we follow an old scientist, Galileo, on a journey in search of consciousness. Galileo once wrote "concerning sensation and the things that pertain to it, I claim to understand but little"--so he chose to remove the observer from nature, and now his investigation requires its return. Galileo's journey has three parts, each with a different guide: in the first, accompanied by a scientist who resembles Francis Crick, he learns why certain parts of the brain are important and not others and why consciousness fades with sleep. In the second part, when his companion seems to be Alturi (Galileo is hard of hearing, so doesn't properly hear his companion's name--Turing), he sees how the facts we have might be unified into a theory of consciousness. In the third part, accompanied by another master of scientific observation, he muses on how consciousness is an evolving, developing, ever deepening awareness of ourselves in history, culture"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.