Jonah: The Anatomy of the Soul

by Stephen Goldberg

Book by Goldberg, Stephen

103 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1990

Reviews

[Arno Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a lovely preface and the book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through the author’s thoughts on consciousness, free will, death, morality, God, etc, all summarized neatly in Chapter 15, points 1-4 (pp. 85-86). He believes in the concept of consciousness arising as a fundamental attribute of the universe, from a “quark-like unit of consciousness”, and suggests that everything may ultimately be conscious, and indeed everything may be consciousness. While entertaining reading, I lost interest when he asserted that all consciousness exists everywhere and at all times, and when I peeked ahead and saw an incorrect illustration of the double-slit experiment. The book is replete with poorly constructed arguments whose conclusions are simply accepted by the characters of the meandering narrative. My favorite portion of the book provides an allegory of how we mistake access consciousness as the only form of consciousness:

'The cerebellum then delivered its final and critical argument: "Jonah," said the whale's cerebellum, "You are a highly complex conscious individual. You are inside this whale. If complexity is the issue, why is the whale not conscious of your thoughts? You and I have the same difficulty in communicating with the whale. The whale is full of conscious Jonahs, and these include you and me. You are also full of conscious Jonahs. We are so arrogant as to think that we have but one mind. Actually, what we have been used to thinking about as subconscious, or unconscious functions are actually conscious functions of separate Jonahs in our bodies.”' (pp 19-20)