Product Description
by Chris H. Ransford (Author), Trevor Harley (Foreword by)
Most studies of consciousness proceed from a standpoint where external reality already pre-exists. As such, these studies would be inherently unable to recognize it if consciousness in fact arose at the same level where reality itself takes its source--at the level where wave functions collapse and thereby generate the fabric of material reality.
At the same time, a number of compelling contemporary interpretations of physics strongly hint that consciousness must most likely be a fundamental constituent of reality, that it cannot be emergent, and that the role of the brain is limited to the harnessing, optimization, and deployment of consciousness within material reality--aka the realm of collapsed wave functions. This view seems to be also supported by a range of credible observations made by a number of credible professionals who operate at the margins of studies of consciousness, such as psychiatrists, who occasionally observe puzzling cases involving unusual phenomena related to consciousness. If we back-engineer the inevitable macroscopic consequences of a consciousness born at the same level as the building blocks of physical reality itself, we discover that such marginal phenomena become then fully explainable. The book offers readers new insights into interpretations of current research in physics and enables readers without a background in physics to understand the implications and their relevance to our understanding of consciousness.Author Biography
Physicist and engineer, educated in three different countries and holder of several advanced degrees incl. a Grande Ecole degree (Dipl.-Ing., INPG Grenoble.), Chris Ransford was a tutor and Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and at Monash University, and a guest academic at the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) in Germany on a DAAD scholarship. Ransford also published "The Far Horizons of Time: Time and Mind in the Universe" (de Gruyter 2015), "God and the Mathematics of Infinity" (ibidem Press 2017) and "In Search of Ultimate Reality: Inside the Cosmologist's Abyss" (ibidem Press). He has also published a number of peer-reviewed articles on the themes of eschatology and ultimate meaning, including a chapter in Szymon Wróbelʼs Anthology "Atheism Revisited" ( Palgrave Macmillan). He occasionally contributes to online Q&A forums such as Quora, where his contributions sometimes go viral.
