Ron's rages are sincere and — according to his wife — healthily cathartic. But can these splenetic outbursts loosen the grip of capitalism at its most monstrous?
The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One
by Riccardo Manzotti
(O/R Books, £17)
EVEN readers familiar with key concepts in neuroscience and cognitive psychology are likely to find The Spread Mind a tricky read.
Not because Riccardo Manzotti is a poor communicator of complex material or that he lacks commitment to widening access to the science of consciousness but because the idea at the heart of his latest book is so profoundly subversive of scientific orthodoxy it demands careful reconsideration of experimental evidence and personal experience.
Experience is key to Manzotti’s theory of consciousness. Conscious experience is an aspect of nature, he suggests, and has no special status as a simulation or reconstruction of reality.
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an entertaining, useful guide to the threats and promises of mathematical rationality
RICHARD SHILLCOCK examines an enjoyable, but philosophically conventional book, and urges Marxists to employ their capacity to embrace the totality in any explanation
JONATHAN TAYLOR attempts to disentangle the mind, self and political opinions of a successful bourgeois novelist
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes an exuberant blend of emotion and analysis that captures the politics and contrarian nature of the French composer


