Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness Book

The glaring thought I have upon finishing Radiant Cool is: "this book is the perfect exemplification of why I prefer literature to philosophy."

Okay okay now I do love philosophy, really -- I have a soft spot for old white dudes arguing with each other about Why We Exist & Other Philosophical Conundrums. But: I'm a fiction girl right down to the quick. I have my reasons, and Radiant Cool is a good jumping point for articulating them.

So:
Dan Lloyd is a philosophy professor (and, I guess, cognitive neuroscience aficionado) who has written a kind of double narrative based on his theory of consciousness. Part 1 is a thought experiment turned allegorical novel; Part 2 is a relatively informal academic treatise on the same ideas/theories contained in the novel. Is it original? Yes. Does it work? uhhhh...

Okay yes, kind of. Lloyd's clearly not a fiction writer -- though I imagine he'd say that some of the sketchy characterization, flawed plot-building, and ridiculous pacing is intentional (and, to be fair and without giving away the ending, much of it has to be for that ending to make sense). He hangs a lantern on it a few times -- and the fact that he (or a fictionalized version of himself) pops up in the narrative is pretty absurd; we're not in grandmaster territory here.

That said, it's pretty ingenious to approach academic consciousness theory in a fictional universe. Lit-Girl always beats out Philosophy-Girl in my heart -- the possibility of ideas and interpretations offered by literature trumps the strict structure and reasoning of philosophy. Sure, I want my heart involved (my thesis, in comparison to Miranda Sharpe's "The Thrill of Phenomenology," would certainly be "The Thrill of Literature"), but I also want my head forced in multiple directions simultaneously. Straight lines are not for Lit-Girls; we want explosions.

So, to that end, I endlessly appreciate Lloyd's claim -- in Part 2 -- that the future of "neurophenomenology" [the juncture where philosophy and cog-sci meet to discuss consciousness] requires an interpretive, not predictive/explanatory, approach. But that sort of renders the endless explanations of recurrent neural networks etc., immediately preceding this cool conclusion, unnecessary. Just me? I skimmed all the scientific data, at best; I found I wanted explanation of the characters. Who, or what, does Clare Lucid symbolize? Is she just an AI example personified, or was there more to that? Who is Grue in all this, and oh my god, Dan Lloyd: why the fuck does Grue disappear?!

Surely his answer to me would be: look closer, Lit-Girl, isn't that uncertainty what you want?
To which I would reply: yes, you're right, but you can't follow up a lit text with an explanatory one and not expect people to get frustrated when you don't explain your allegory.

The format of the book was unique, cool, fun, but it left a lot to be desired and I felt bereft when I finished. Either leave the novel as is, or work with your novel when you explain your ideas -- don't leave them disconnected, and they were disconnected. I think there's so much more to the Miranda Sharpe story than to Dan Lloyd's theory of consciousness --- but then, I would; I'm a Lit-Girl.



Another example of a book-as-Rorschach-test; you will find your own ideas in these pages. I am sure this is intentional, perhaps snarkily so. The problem is where you go from there: Dan Lloyd doesn't offer any theoretical meat interesting enough to play with; certainly not as interesting as the ending to Part 1.




And just as an aside: the entire. fucking. time. I read this book ------- my heart was yearning, YEARNING, for Scarlett Thomas. The End of Mr. Y was published two years after Radiant Cool, so I don't know if she'd read it before starting on her own version of essentially the same plot, but hers is so much better. Like I never full-on yearn for other authors while reading books and I was friggin pining, ok.

I don't know if that means anything. But I can say that I found it hard to feel for Radiant Cool the way I feel for other fiction, and ultimately that's what Lloyd is missing as he provides an example of his theory: fiction is meant to be felt as well as thought about. And that, too, is part of consciousness. Lloyd, I think, forgot that part.