I have been reading an excellent book, I am a Strange Loop , by Douglas Hofstadter which represents a rare departure for me from the land of good fiction. Hofstadter, who is a Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University, achieved fame in the weird circles I frequent for his first major book, Gödel, Escher, Bach in 1999.
The subject of Strange Loop, like much of his scholarship, is the difference between brain and mind, the origin of consciousness, at what point along the continuum of amoeba, mosquito, human embryo, dog, chimp and the adult human being does a "soul" arise?, and perhaps the greatest of all biological, religious and philosophical issues, where does the "I" go when we die?
There has been much written, but little proved empirically on these interesting, existential questions. Unfortunately, much of the public debate in the US over the past seven years has focused on substituting a quasi-religious, political view (stem cell research violates human dignity; "partial-birth" abortions offend God , etc. ). How refreshing then to have a scientist who sticks to his subject matter and comes up with a perfectly sound set of explanations of how consciousness could have arisen in sufficiently complex brains or other computing structures. At root what is required is a symbolic or representational system of sufficient complexity that it can create and build symbols on the backs of prior symbolic building blocks, including the most complex symbol of all - the strange recursive loop we call "I".
This may all sound very esoteric and far fetched, but Dr. Hofstadter writes with a breezy, self-deprecating wit, and his musings on where a person's "I" or "soul" goes when the physical body dies is worth the read alone. As I have been spending far too much time at 38,000 feet (usually within a speeding airplane), I have had the time to read a bit more broadly than the usual .ppt, .doc and .xls..
I generally read fiction for pleasure because I find it a wonderful antidote to the endless stream of corporate-speak memoranda I need to read. I have also always found that fiction and indeed poetry can penetrate more closely to the core of the great issues human beings must grapple with (like why are we put on this earth, why do good poeple die young etc.) than even the most analytically probing non-fiction essay - somewhat akin to Heisenberg's uncertaintly principle that you can not measure both the location and momentum of a given particle..
In any event, it is time to return to the real world . Beam me up Scottie!