(2023-02-02) Hoel Introducing The World Behind The World

Erik Hoel: INTRODUCING: The World Behind the World. What do you give away, when you write a book? What piece of yourself are you carving off, I mean?

In my first book, a novel, what I gave away was myself in my twenties, when I was flawed and prideful and angry but also poetic and barely containable

It may at first seem authors have to give less with nonfiction

we are human beings, and what an author can give is not just knowledge, but more critically a perspective on that knowledge. (gloss)

For most of 2022 I was quietly working on my second book, The World Behind the World, which is now being published by Simon & Schuster on July 25th. Its subtitle gives you a stronger hint of what it’s about: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science.

It is a book that tells the story of the twin perspectives that humanity has taken on the world. First, there is the extrinsic perspective, which describes the mechanical, the scientific. Then, there is the intrinsic perspective, which describes human consciousness and its myriad contents

focusing on science as the means we developed to best describe the extrinsic and literature as the means to best describe the intrinsic.

it’s also about what happens when the two perspectives meet in the contemporary attempt to create a science of consciousness

the field I got my PhD in, working on what is arguably the leading scientific theory of consciousness.

it is an interdisciplinary book. In this it is a homage—I was inspired to study science because of unclassifiable books from unusual perspectives, heady tomes like Godel, Escher, Bach or The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

As an example, TWBTW argues that, since neuroscience lacks a good theory of consciousness, and is therefore unable to lawfully relate brain states to experiences, as a scientific field it is currently pre-paradigmatic and deeply confused.