Alex Tsakiris has interviewed many bestselling authors and dozens of world-class academics on his popular science podcast Skeptiko.com. In this book he shares with us what he's learned through his 200 plus interviews with some of the world’s leading consciousness researchers and thinkers. In doing so, he reveals what the best research is saying about “big picture” science questions and the limits of science in general. What's he's learned, in short, is that science-as-we-know-it is an emperor-with-no-clothes-on proposition. It mesmerizes us with flashy trinkets, while failing at its core mission of leading us toward self-discovery. Science is wrong about almost everything because science depends on our consciousness being an illusion?and it’s not!
"Alex Tsakiris has articulated in this feisty work what many of us in the academy have felt but have not quite had the courage to say. Alex writes as our conscience here, as he calls us all to balk against the silly and self-contradictory script that is reductive materialism. Such a balking, Alex reminds us, does not make us creationists or anti-science, as the skeptics would have us believe. It makes us conscious beings who refuse this bizarre pact of unconsciousness, meaninglessness, and depression." ? Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University and author of Authors of the Impossible
"In the best of American traditions, Tsakiris is a plain-talking Everyman who speaks truth to power. Only, in this case, power is a scientific paradigm that has Ivy League academics and New York media intellectuals completely in its thrall. Are materialists right? Not if you follow the data. Tsakiris brings some giants to their knees, here, simply by asking smart, tough questions that no one has thought to ask. Fascinating stuff." ? Patricia Pearson, author of Opening Heaven's Door
"Tsakiris has distilled the essence of his podcast Skeptiko into a book as direct as his show-and equally necessary. If you want evidence that consciousness is not an illusion, that we are more than biological robots, this book is a great place to start." ? Steve Volk, writer-at-large for Philadelphia Magazine and author of Fringe-ology