Consciousness and the Probability of Being: The Origin of the Particular "I"

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Back Cover:

The third most important book you will ever read!*

Why do you exist?

Ask passersby on a university campus the above question and you will get these answers:

“Genes, I suppose. My parents must have had just the right chromosomes to give birth to me.”
“God put me here, of course!”
“I assume you’re asking why my particular consciousness exists. I don’t know the answer to that. I would prefer a secular explanation, if there were one. But no one likes to think they just happened—that’s too scary!”

(The third person must be a philosophy major.) Is anyone on this campus close to the actual facts behind their existence?
The shelves of science and philosophy are not overflowing with works on the origin of individual consciousness and first-person views. However, this treatise hosts a definitive exploration of the literature that does exist. An unanticipated conclusion gradually surfaces from this examination: Specific first-person views cannot be caused by particular gene sets (the popular impression) but solely by “irreducibly” random chance. Accepting this, the next logical step is to search the discipline of probability for any indication as to whether the “initialization” of elemental first-person views (that is, no memory) might qualify as a repeatable probabilistic event.
Scholarly behind the scenes, the investigation is lightened by humor and metaphor to the extent that the book is a “fun read” for the intelligent layperson—even if the subject matter did not concern one of the most important topics in our lives.

Dr. Wright was a Scientific and Technical Computing Specialist for International Business Machines Corporation, supporting both the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

*After Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene

$19.95 U.S. ISBN 0-9763394-0-4
Stochastic Books