This one's a bit of a mindbender for me. Like most readers, I've taken only passing interest over the years in postmodernist theory. No doubt there's some brilliant writing out there engaging that subject. I, however, have never come across it. Theoretical literary texts--how many have I tried to read?--have always left me cold. I read books because of a fascination with the source material, the artist's conception, and whether he or she has brought it off. This is something the postmodernist critics often seemed to relegate to a lower-tier function of the text. What really matters to them it seems is their abstruce intellectual games, which usually come at the expense of the text and its author. While I was always interested in the "how" of the work, its structure, use of metaphor, tone or voice, psychic distance, means of suspense and so forth.

What I find interesting here is Slingerland's post-mortem on post modernism, his list of reasons why so many readers like myself rejected it as little more than mental onanism, and what we might look forward to in its stead. He argues that what we are tending toward now is what he calls consilience or vertical integration of the natural sciences. This view rejects the old fashioned humanist dualism; that is, the view of body and soul being separate if complementary entities, for one that sees them as inextricably integrated, whole, one. Slingerland's use of jargon can be a little difficult for the nonspecialist at times (a glossary would have been a wonderful addition) though his arguments are elegant if lengthy. He believes that what we presently find occuring in the cognitive sciences, AI and robotics demonstrates that any separation of the mind and body is untenable.