We speak of consciousness, or awareness, or the I, or my inner being, or sentience, or however to call it. It may reach to the deeper metaphysical levels of the universe, but what is its relation to the material world? What is this relation from the perspective of science? Science always builds carefully, slowly on what is more certain. It can start to have a somewhat mathematical character. Thought provoking observations appear, and issues. Some are these.

 

What is the material world? Does meaning/logic exist outside and independent of the human mind? What is meaning’s relation to time and space? Are there different I’s? Is the idea of death so simple? All this in the book is within a scientific perspective.

 

The book is valid hard-nosed science, philosophy, and logic. It is in the form of the developing thoughts of a person on a long walk through the desert and who meets a god that assists. The flight backwards in time is fiction, but we see generally accepted historical facts. Elsewhere, in a brain surgery hospital very far in the future, we see hypothesized observations about hard, universally valid, scientific logical going-on’s in a brain. At the book’s end, the flights through space are fictional, but not the judgments. The “all souls” theorem is not fiction but genuine scientific mathematical statement.

 

The author’s background includes, over time, going into works of philosophers from Wittgenstein to Spinoza. And from Pythagoras, Lao Tzu, and Heraclitus, to the forms of Plato and Aristotle. And Parmenides and Zeno to Lucretius. And Hegel to Gottlob Frege.

 

Earlier, the author obtained masters degrees and doctoral work in mathematical logic at the University of California at Berkeley, and in artificial intelligence at Stanford University, with specializations in machine theory, complexity theory, computer vision, automatic programming, and, always, logic.

 

(This February, 2008 book is the same as the July, 2005 edition except for the description above, covers, publishing information, and contact website.)