Brief Commentary on Nixon's Three Papers

Abstract

A desire for transcendental experience seems to permeate all three papers – the phrase ‘deeply interfused’ struck my eye, and sure enough there it is in Wordsworth’s ‘Lines composed above Tintern Abbey’: “a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused, /Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns”. So although I would hope that answers to the Hard Problem will come eventually from neuroscience, these essays are greatly to be welcomed as an original and informed perspective on consciousness, expressed in well-turned prose, and occasional poetry.