Professor Grue is dead (or is he?). When graduate student/sleuth Miranda Sharpe discovers him slumped over his keyboard, she does the sensible thing - she grabs her dissertation and runs. Little does she suspect that soon she will be probing the heart of two mysteries, trying to discover what happened to Max Grue, and trying to solve the profound neurophilosophical problem of consciousness. Radiant Cool may be the first novel of ideas that actually breaks new theoretical ground, as Dan Lloyd uses a neo-noir (neuro-noir?), hard-boiled framework to propose a new theory of consciousness. In the course of her sleuthing, Miranda encounters characters who share her urgency to get to the bottom of the mystery of consciousness, although not always with the most innocent motives. Ultimately Miranda teams up with the author's fictional alter ego, "Dan Lloyd," and together they build on the phenomenological theories of philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) to construct testable hypotheses about the implementation of consciousness in the brain. Will the clues of phenomenology and neuroscience converge in time to avert a catastrophe? (The dramatic ending cannot be revealed here.) Outside the fictional world of the novel, Dan Lloyd (the author) appends a lengthy afterword, explaining the proposed theory of consciousness in more scholarly form.

Author Biography

Dan Lloyd is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Connecticut, and winner of the first New Perspectives in Functional Brain Imaging Research award, given by the Functional MRI Data Centre and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. He is the author of Simple Minds (MIT Press, 1989).