review:
I picked up this book because of the title stating it is "a user's guide" - which to me implied that I would be receiving some sort of primer or framework. To a certain extent, the book does provide different concepts and theories from philosophy, neurology, biology, and physics to discuss consciousness. This knowledge spans and skips domains in so many ways that the book became quite dense and at times it felt that the subject wasn't been explored in as much detail as possible. For example, the notion of neurons and the brain being evolutionary key pieces to discuss how consciousness evolved is a great topic to understand what consciousness actually is or means. But it is quite quickly glossed over. Similarly, how the brain exhibits consciousnes versus what is the 'feeling' of being conscios is mentioned throughout the book, but the conclusion never offers enough insight to think about it further. Even as a book providing 'here's what we know' type of collections, it didn't really tickle my neurons. Good to skim through and pick at pages that interest.,