He knows, you know
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1236069,00.html

Gerald Edelman offers a Nobel prize-winner's solution to the problem
of consciousness in Wider Than the Sky, but John McCrone is left
wanting more insight

Saturday June 12, 2004
The Guardian

Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness
by Gerald Edelman
192pp, Allen Lane, £15.99

Why does Gerald Edelman have so many enemies? In 1972, Edelman won a
Nobel prize for his work on immunology. Not long afterwards he
switched to the study of the brain and consciousness. Erudite, urbane,
rumbustious, Edelman cut a dash in New York society, eventually
drumming up the funds to set up his own lab - a monastery for science,
he proudly calls it - near La Jolla in southern California. Ever since
he has churned out books and papers, sharing the fruits of his study.
As he puts it in his own publicity: "My hope is to disenthrall those
who believe that the subject of consciousness is exclusively
metaphysical or necessarily mysterious." Wider Than the Sky is his
latest go at disenthralling. What gets the goat of his academic
colleagues is that Edelman does not hide the fact that he believes he
has all the answers - and that they are pretty simple really. Others
tend to make the most elementary philosophical and neuroscientific
blunders. But Edelman turned his attention from bodies to brains and
more or less got it straight away.

Gerald Edelman