Book Reviewed: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness by Patrick House

Comprehending the cosmic design Where does consciousness begin? And where does it end? Where is the line between an individual biological entity and the rest of cosmos? Between life and non-life? Between living (not necessarily a biological entity) and a non-living entity? In this book, the author discusses a number of facts about consciousness and physical reality; the neurobiology, physics and philosophy of it. But he keeps the characterization of conscious experience open to discussion. At any given time, a brain is taking in more information than it can handle, with more possible ways of configuring itself than the universe has atoms. There is no single conscious experience that is unique and that cannot be listed, cataloged, and reproduced with electrical, physical, or magnetic stimulation of the brain. A simple bit of shunted electricity can cause a brain to compile, run, and display to the conscious clipboard. The author derives the ideas from the work of Eliot Weinberger “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei,” which tracks the English translations of a short ancient Chinese poem, “Deer Park,” written in the Eighth Century C.E. Wang Wei’s original poem established the Buddhist propensity for parallelism, and śūnyatā which interprets that all things in this world are empty of intrinsic existence and nature.