I first bought and read this book in 2006. I didn’t like it at the time, but we will see what I think of it now (2026). It’s out of print, but the publisher still presents it as “An innovative theory of consciousness, drawing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and supported by brain-imaging, presented in the form of a hardboiled detective story“.
If I remember back to 2006, I liked the idea of a neo-noir campus mystery, but I had the idea that it would in some way capture the Gibson cyberpunk-style, with fast, image-heavy techno-centric prose (à la Neuromancer).
However, when I first read it, I felt that Radiant Cool didn’t create (for me) the atmosphere I was looking for. In fact, the cool, intellectual, slightly ironic detachment in the writing created nothing in my mind. So the rest fell flat, like the taste of old beer.
Some reviewers have argued that the book is “entertainment with real intellectual ambition“. Others argued that the book “can be enjoyed even if you don’t buy the theory“.
For me there are too many arguments crammed into a single book, and the novel is the wrong format for the weight of theory it carries.
The reader is not treated fairly, because the publisher oversells, and there is no dramatic mystery-revealing end. It’s not really a who-done-it, and the mix of story and science, needed a good stir and not a light shake (or to be served apart). The jargon and unnecessary cleverness are an additional barrier.
I like the idea of a playful and technical storyline, and I actually bought the book because of the “hard problem” of consciousness and neuroscience. However, it never drew me into campus life, relying instead on familiar ivory-tower stereotypes. I knew the technical content of the book might be well past its “sell-by date”, but I did first read it in 2006, and I had hoped that it would have aged better. It didn’t.
This time I approached the story as I would a technical book, taking bullet-notes, and looking to learn something new. But I had enough problems following, or wanting to follow, the story line. I include below my notes for what they are worth.
Stuck between the Contents and Acknowledgements
Usually nothing comes before a prologue. Yet here we are given not one but two poems, first Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and second, a brief excerpt from Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, specifically the lines beginning “I do not know which to prefer…”. Their placement is not ornamental. Before any argument begins, the reader is positioned within two distinct enactments of consciousness.
Ginsberg’s Howl is structured through parataxis, that is clauses placed side by side without hierarchical subordination. It advances not by careful argument but by breath-driven accumulation. Images and experiences are juxtaposed without explanatory transitions, producing a sense of psychic immediacy and associative flow. Consciousness here appears as surge, as if lived intensity unfolds faster than it can be organised.
The excerpt from Stevens does something very different. In the selected lines, the speaker cannot decide between “the beauty of inflections” and “the beauty of innuendoes”, between the blackbird’s whistling and “just after”. The focus is not multiplicity in general, but hesitation at the boundary between event and meaning. Is beauty in the sound itself, or in what it implies? In the act, or in its resonance? The mind is shown suspended between presence and interpretation.
Placed at the front of the book, these two poems frame the problem that follows. Ginsberg foregrounds consciousness as immediate, overflowing experience. Stevens foregrounds the reflective uncertainty about what counts as the locus of experience, is it the thing itself or its interpretive aftermath. One enacts unfiltered immediacy, and the other enacts epistemic hesitation.
Together they suggest that consciousness cannot be reduced either to raw sensation or to structured explanation. It oscillates between event and interpretation, between the doing and “just after”. By opening the book with these two voices, the author Dan Lloyd signals that whatever theoretical work follows must account for both the intensity of lived experience, and the ambiguity of how that experience becomes meaningful.
The poems therefore function as conceptual framing. They do not introduce the book’s thesis directly. They stage its central tension.
Prologue
The author, Dan Lloyd, presents the book as his attempt to document the discovery, by a certain Miranda Sharpe, of a new theory of human consciousness. It would appear that this discovery occurred during “her sleuthing” in “the furnace of extraordinary events“. We only learn later the events are those that follow the apparent death or “missing-death” of her supervisor, a certain Professor Max Grue.
This Dan Lloyd is the writer-character in the book, who writes the book, and not the real-world Dan Lloyd who is author of the book, i.e. the actual one who had to deal with the publisher and who pocketed all the real-world money.
The writer-character thought to report on the events, but Miranda Sharpe decided to provide a first-hand narrative “The Thrill of Phenomenology”, which is the first part of the book.
It would appear that the result of Miranda Sharpe’s writing is “a new way of thinking about thinking“. And that Dan Lloyd (the writer-character not the real author) has only “taken her insights and run with them“. It is in the second part of the book that Lloyd contributes “some philosophical and scientific elaborations of Sharpe’s theories“. In addition Miranda Sharpe also added an epilogue, to bring the story up to date. There are even Web addresses that “remain operational”. I wonder if I will check them out?
You will note that I wrote “that Lloyd contributes” the second part of the book. In terms of the book, this second part is contributed by the writer-character Dan Lloyd. So its part of the story. But as far as I can tell the contents are what the real author Dan Lloyd suggests (or suggested in 2004) as a legitimate and scientifically useful model. However, as far as I know, the formulation has not become a widely adopted scientific framework.
On the other hand, it would appear that phenomenology is, according to Wikipedia, a philosophical study and movement largely associated with the early 20th century that seeks to objectively investigate the nature of subjective, conscious experience and world-disclosure. And that world-disclosure, again thanks to Wikipedia, is how things become intelligible and meaningfully relevant to human beings, by virtue of being part of an ontological world, i.e. a pre-interpreted and holistically structured background of meaning. This understanding is said to be first disclosed to human beings through their practical day-to-day encounters with others, with things in the world, and through language.
There is enough in the above descriptions to “put me off” reading the book, but no, for the sake of science, I read on.
But let me just check. First it would appear that Miranda Sharpe is not based on a well-known public figure or real philosopher. She’s just a narrative device. But the name itself derives from Latin mirandus, meaning “worthy of wonder” or “worthy of admiration”, and Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is presented as someone naïve yet morally alert, and intellectually curious. However, I must admit I can’t remove from my memory that Miranda Priestly is the controlled, sharp, intellectually intimidating, emotionally opaque boss in The Devil Wears Prada. Even if the film appeared in 2006, and the book in 2004. In a novel about how patterns form and associations structure experience, I guess I will have to just live with my “memory worm”.
But the surname “Grue” is almost certainly a direct reference to the American philosopher Nelson Goodman, who introduced the famous “grue” paradox in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (1955). The idea is that “grue” is a new riddle of induction. Namely, for Goodman the problem is of projectible predicates (i.e. some predicates are more projectible than others) and which ultimately, makes it difficult to determine which empirical generalisations are law-like and which are not.
Just for clarity a projectible predicate is one that we feel justified in projecting into the future based on past observations. This means we have enough evidence to suppose that something (an observation, object, action, etc.) is law-like, and when it occurs again we can predict what it means. There is a nice example with a copper wire. We have seen enough copper wires to predict that the next one we see might be electrified, and therefore we exercise caution. This ability to predict based up past experience is very useful for finding light switches. But it’s also true that simply because we may see a thing several times, does not automatically make that law-like, because we have not formed a related prediction.
The Thrill of Phenomenology
This is, or at least starts, as the first hand experience of Miranda as she discovers the dead (or presumed dead) Professor, slumped over his keyboard. I loved the “paper landfill he called his office” on the third line. It set the tone. The text is punchy, staccato, but not quite cyber. Maybe, it’s trying too hard.
OK, he’s dead, and Miranda, has grabbed back her thesis, entitled CONSCIOUSNESS, and she escapes. But the writing is not quite there. Too, bang, bang.
Describing the scene is not Miranda forte, but she’s does a better job describing her thinking. Was he really dead? Will someone find him? Why didn’t she call someone? He had a class, they had a class. She must go, and act normal.
She casts a good spell, “ribbed sweater (black), denim jacket (same), jeans (of course), mascara but barely, impeccable high ponytail – the neo retro beatnik graduate student look“. I like Miranda, I will read on. Written in the early 21st century, this harks back to the rejection of the consumerism of mainstream American culture from the 1950s. To me she has simply replaced one conformity with another. She drives back to the campus, so we are still in climate denial. No walk, cycle, or public transport.
We learn that she didn’t just want to reclaim her thesis, she wanted to reclaim her right to think outside the influence of the Professor, the Thinker (note the capital), who is now dead.
In class the homework was reading from “The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness“. This does not argue well for an easy read, but love the “students float in like dust bunnies“. So there is hope still, for an interesting book. She reads from Edmund Husserl. He was a philosopher and mathematician (that’s not good). Worse still he was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician. This is not looking good at all.
Professor Grue is not there, so Miranda cancels. She thinks murder, and then maybe it was one of the grad-students. Harsh grades – then bye bye Prof. She takes a question, casual. “Our conscious experience is not limited to just what we can see or hear. Many possibilities are part of our awareness of things, non-sensory parts. We think we live in a world of things. But that’s the tiniest edge of it”.
So it’s “Have you ever wondered what an experience is?” In philosophy the word “is” is not trivial, it’s a small word that can carry enormous weight. The question isn’t asking for a definition of “experience,” but asks “What does it mean for something to be an experience?“
Conclusion “Ordinary experience is full of mystery“. The book suggests (through Max, the Prof), that “…the richness and complexity of experience … is the structure of consciousness“.
It was another Professor, the logician, the one able to prove “through a five-minute quiz that you were a total moron“, who asked to recover a book lent to Prof. Max, called “The Mind-Body Problem“. And therein was the problem. On opening the office of our (supposed) dead professor, there was no body. Or “he is elsewhere“.
Chapter 2
Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to summarise every step.
Max, the Prof, missed class, yet “teaching is to him like blood to a vampire“.
Snow on car, showing it was left in its parking spot overnight, overcoat still in car.
We learn that our Prof had said that night “I have seen the aleph of consciousness“.
In Borges’ 1945 story titled The Aleph, the narrator discovers a point in a Buenos Aires basement — the Aleph — that contains all other points in space simultaneously, without overlap or confusion. But to see everything at once is not liberation. It is overwhelming, sublime but nearly unbearable. The story suggests that human consciousness is structured by limitation. Infinity may exist, but we are not designed to hold it.
An idea emerges that maybe he saw that consciousness is not a single thing, funnelled through some magical place in the brain. The mind is full of codes and data-structures, forming and unforming, some are updates, some are infantile needs, some are over-writes by the ego, and a bit of that is conscious.
Chapter 4
Nice description of one of the undergraduates, Gordon Fescue, round body, flat face, pudgy baby hands, looking as if distorted in a space-time continuum. Our Miranda was the image of Gordonic desirability – female and not unconscious.
Gordon was having a problem programming a computer to be conscious. Gordon’s bedtime reading was C+++. It was all about neural networks and a simulator that Professor Grue had received yesterday, so he could decide himself on the inputs and train his own net.
There is a CD slipped under door. It’s Prof Max’s brain scan. It would appear that he had participated in an experience. He just had to say out loud anything he wanted during a long brain scan.
Chapter 5
It kicks off with connecting 100 billion neurons to 100 trillion synaptic connections, and each cell-to-cell connection can be strong, weak or anything in between. That makes for a very big number.
Today we have ~10¹¹ neurons, ~10¹⁴ –10¹⁵ synapses, making ~3.7 × 10²¹ if all connected, which they are not.
Chapter 6
Back in her one-room flat, Miranda has a cat called Holly Golightly.
Holly Golightly is Audrey Hepburn character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. Interestingly, in the story, Holly refuses to name her cat. She calls it simply “Cat”.
On the CD there were lots of pictures of Max’s brain. And there was another big file, an earlier scan, but password protected.
Chapter 7
Things liven up (about time, it’s page 65). A certain Porfiry Petrovich Marlov (visiting professor) rings, claiming to know Professor Grue.
Not sure what the author is up to, but Porfiry Petrovich is the examining magistrate from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and he is a subtle psychological interrogator concerned as much with moral interiority as with crime itself. The reference appears deliberate. The surname “Marlov,” has a Slavic resonance, but doesn’t point to any separate literary figure.
He lives in the same building as Grue. He found Grue’s door open that morning, and has not been able to find the Professor. He questions Miranda about their last meeting (alive that is).
It would appear that Miranda is half-Finnish, quarter-Vietnamese, and a quarter-Welsh. Who cares?
Our visiting (Russian ex-police inspector) presents facts as many dimensions (read the book if you want more), and asks lots of questions, including if she murdered Professor Grue (he got the obvious answer). He also asked, that when she entered Max’s office, was the screen saver working. She replied yes.
Chapter 8
We learn that Max was one of those people who found themselves amusing.
We also see mention of the real cognitive scientist and linguist Jeffrey L. Elman, and his paper which refers to a simple recurrent neural network architecture introduced in his paper Finding Structure in Time (1990). You want to know the relevance of the work of Elman, then read the book (or his paper).
To summarise, this is about connectionism, the study of human mental processes and cognition that utilises mathematical models known as connectionist networks or artificial neural networks.
This was where I looked to see how long this first part of the book was. It’s 207 pages long, and I was on page 79. Did I really want to read on? No, but for science, people do strange things.
A simple network could try to predict what the next word would be, based upon what it had learned from past examples. It’s a kind of reflex, replying based on whats in front of it. Here the idea is a recurrent network, designed for processing sequential data, such as text, speech, and time series, where the order of elements is important. Like I wrote, if you are interesting, read the book.
Then, Mirranda gets an email.
Chapter 9
There are 18 chapters, so we are 50% through the first part of the book. I have already decided I won’t read the second part. Will something change my mind?
So the email is from Maxwell Grue to himself, subject “Archive of Lost Time”. It was a long email exchange, on the topic of … (read the book).
It’s not clear (to me) but it may have been about Prof Max imaging a girl-woman Imogen, and his desire to “get beyond imaging her“, and “imagine perceiving her“, a bit like virtual reality (remember we are in 2004, or 1999 in the book).
The name Imogen is generally traced to William Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline. His Imogen was loyal, intelligent and survived betrayal, exile, and false accusation. She symbolised romantic nobility and moral strength. I wonder if “Archive of Lost Time” refers to À la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Is this about how to keep a memory of irretrievable experiences? The computation of sensation.
In any case, I only scanned the emails, in the hope that anything important would reappear in…
Chapter 10
Things did not start well, there was another message, long and in italics. Miranda thinks…
But she did drop an interesting comment, because it captured the essence of my beloved wife, my real-world, recently passed, wife Monique.
“All that ever exists is the Present, the Instant. The Now is the infinite pinnacle rising from the vast depths of nothingness. Falling away on one side, the past. On the other, ever approaching but never arriving, the future. From pinnacle to abyss the drop is infinite. Neither past nor future exist. Period.“
By ignoring much of the italics, Chapter 10 led directly into…
Chapter 11
If there is a lot more italics, I may stop reading. But then I might not know who did it. But will I care?
There is a fax, fortunately not in italics. It from Gabriel Zamm to Dr. Cronkenstein (does that sound a bit like Frankenstein?) about his transducer-actuator (apparently linked to acoustic vibration), and his trip planned to meet Maxwell Grue at the Wundt Psychophysics Lab at 7 PM. And it looks as if our Dr. will also be the first human subject.
The “Wundt Psychophysics Lab” refers to the laboratory established in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, and today there exists the Wilhelm Wundt Institute for Psychology.
It was 6 PM, so will Max be waiting?
I had not realised it but the story, the Prof, Miranda, etc. were all situated nearby Leipzig.
Miranda goes to the lab and discovers a seat with a thing for the skull, and 5-jointed robot arms. The controls looked more Radio Shack than Frankenstein, and the laptop was obsolete.
Then, still in the lab, she was approached by two men, asking “Dr. Cronkenstein, I presume“, to which she replied Yes! (God help me, why do people say stupid things in books). One was the Gabriel Zamm, and the other Steve Addit, from the lab.
And where is Professor Grue? That is the question.
It looks like the skull thing is a Transient Lesion device and the real Dr. Cronkenstein may have been working on the thalamic centre of consciousness.
The thalamus is a paired structure deep in the brain, and often described as a relay station between sensory systems and the cortex. It is crucial for arousal, attention, and wakefulness. Clinical evidence shows that severe bilateral thalamic damage can lead to coma or persistent vegetative state.
Some researchers have proposed that consciousness requires a thalamocortical loop, continuous reciprocal signalling between cortex and thalamus. So “thalamic centre of consciousness” can loosely mean that the thalamus is crucial for maintaining conscious state.
There followed gibberish, but scientific sounding gibberish. I know that the real author Dan Lloyd won’t be happy, but he should have worked harder to make the text more accessible.
Our fake Dr. Cronkenstein learns that she is to be the first human subject (remember I did mention it). Once strapped in, the nice Addit whispers that she should be careful for both Grue and Zamm are egomaniacs and rivals. Good timing!
It works, the device does affect her sensory perception. But the two mad scientists want to try ever more complex tests, so our less than willing guinea pig, asks to go for a pee.
It’s surprising but I’m beginning to remember having read this book 20 years ago.
She plays faint, and manages to leg it (after throwing up).
Chapter 12
Miranda returns home, dreams (not surprising for a grad student), and gets a URL – www.trincoll.edu/~dlloyd. Today (2026) it’s a “Page not found”.
Chapter 13
It would appear (in the book) that the website does exist as “Welcome to the Labyrinth of Cognition”. Looks like it starts as a tutorial on PET scans (positron emission tomography) for the brain. The rest of the chapter is (I guess) graphics pulled from the Labyrinth and (I think) comments of Miranda. I found the mix incomprehensible, largely because I was not prepared to expend effort to understand something. Something that I felt was what someone might have felt as a 60s-hippy.
Chapter 14
Miranda enters a discussion forum, with just one message by the writer-character in the book Dan LLoyd. Who apparently is mapping cognition, and not consciousness. Then she dumped her ideas about consciousness on him, if you want to know what she wrote, read the book. But the message is that she thinks his mapping of cognition could be a good starting point for a map of human consciousness. His answer is that PET scans won’t do it, but fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) could.
PET measures metabolic activity (e.g. glucose uptake, oxygen use, blood flow). fIRM measures changes in blood oxygenation (BOLD signal or Blood Oxygen Level Dependent contrast). So its between a quantitative map of biochemical activity and an indirect map of brain activity via hemodynamic response. If that helps…
Then her computer goes blank (after the cognition map disappeared), she reboots and looks up Dan LLoyd (actually checking the writer-character, but it looks also like the real author). Looks like the only copy has disappeared (doesn’t everyone make copies). She has a copy, she send him her copy, but then Dan LLoyd disappears completely from her computer screen. The writer-character phones to say all his work (site, folders, etc.) is deleted from the server. So she decides to take her copy by hand (well by car), at night, to Dan LLoyd.
Chapter 15
It was snowing, he lives in a barn, a cathedral-ceiling barn. He gets copy, goes upstairs, power goes out. But she can make a copy on her Powerbook (I guess product placement existed already in 2004). Her Powerbook crashes, or does it. The blank screen looks wrong. Is it hoping that she will re-start and then load some wrong stuff. But OS-X doesn’t allow that, but the start screen looks too grainy. Maybe it didn’t crash, so they look at the page html, and it looks like the resolution has been changed so the edges (menubar, etc.) are now outside the screen view. And hidden is a reassign of command-control-delete, which highjacks the reboot.
But now she detects someone hidden in the room (remember no power). It’s Dr. Lucid, who’s an “old friend” of Max, and also a well known academic with her own radio show Dr. Clare. It would appear she was also logged-in to the Dan Lloyd forum and saw that Miranda was planning to visit our writer-character. She was worried, etc., etc. Then yet another “visitor” turns up, Porfiry Petrovich Marlov, “our” detective friend. Lloyd (finally) learns that Maxwell Grue has disappeared.
Miranda finally hits command-control-delete, and sees the simulated resurrection of her Powerbook. And it would appear that the program is doing a global replace with itself, everywhere. And it’s coming from the university of Dan Lloyd. But as Miranda looks to contact the technical office, Porfiry pulls a gun. He claims to be a foot soldier, building a house of cards (a replicating virus). So it’s nothing to do with mapping consciousness, it’s that they have discovered a cunning ploy (by Russia) to pull down the house of card. Nasty Russians in 2004, and quite topical today. But it’s not yet time. The baddies had discovered what our writer-character Dan Lloyd had discovered now, and wanted to propagate an incorrect version of the data and conclusions, etc. But they needed to take down the original site, which would eventually unlock consciousness itself. Maxwell Grue, was unimportant, but they followed his trace, just in case.
So the idea is world domination, through a theory of consciousness. Not sure it justifies a book, or at least not this book.
But all is not lost, our Dr. Clare Lucid is a black belt Tai Kwan Do (how convenient), and disarms Porfiry.
Chapter 16
So they sup tea, whilst waiting for the police. They discuss Grue’s overdosing on Prozac, an antidepressant. And our Dan thinks Grue must have also been taking L-tryptosinate (which maybe L-tryptophan, used but not recommended for the treatment of insomnia). But perhaps he did not know he was being given this, so someone was blocking an antidepressant in a depressed man.
It would appear that our Dr. Clare Lucid had been feeding Grue this L-tryptosinate in his daily tea, but on the day Grue went missing he had drunk a tea given to him by a student. Lucid also had the gun, and planned that Marlov would be accused of the murders (it’s his gun).
Remember the power failure, so most of the light came from the Powerbook screen, but the battery said bye, bye. In the dark Miranda moved to grab a camera, blinding Dr. Clare with the flash. Then flash, again, and again, whilst the blinded Dr. Clare fired shots at the light, until the gun is “now spent” (and Miranda has some really cool live snaps as well). But our Dr. Clare Lucid manages to escape.
Are you getting the excitement. No, doesn’t surprise me.
Chapter 17
Police arrive, and Miranda’s computer had taken a shot in the screen, but the backup copy of Dan Lloyd’s work was intact. Porfiry was in handcuffs, and the camera had been taken as evidence, along with Miranda’s Powerbook. Grue was still missing. Lloyd and Miranda chat in a local 24-hour coffee shop. They chat about consciousness (this book has made the topic boring). They decide to make the copy back at Miranda’s office, where they discover Grue at the computer.
Chapter 18
I’ve subtitled this last chapter “Thank God”. Grue is not totally coherent, or not at all coherent. Grue had gone blind, then I think suffered a stroke.
Epilogue
Massive stroke. Grue dead. Miranda gets a 1.2 GB file of Max’s brain. She runs it, and it replies, and it is an admission by Clare Lucid. But for Miranda, frankly the text goes out of control, and I’m not really interested in re-reading it.
The End.
There is also “The Real Firefly”, a kind of 107-page annex, subtitled “Reflections of a Science of Consciousness”. It’s meant to fill in what the fiction can only dramatise. The first time I read this book, I actually also read this annex (I can see the notes I made). This time I did not make the same mistake.
