●^ xiv
- PReFACes
and turning to lots of the same ideas Sue worked with – and even citing her quite
often. And since then I’ve thought of myself as poised on the edges of many
disciplines – quite a few of them the ones that make up this book.
I’d always thought this a wonderful, and surreally ambitious, book, and I hated
the idea of it becoming gradually obsolete. Had I known quite how much time
and energy the third edition would ask of me, or how hopeless the task would
feel at times, I’m not completely sure I’d have made the offer. The process of
co- authoring a book at all, let alone with my mother, let alone when living some
of the time in her house, let alone when trying to do justice to the past six years
of developments across all the fields that consciousness studies encompasses
without adding many more words, has been something of an existential learning
curve. Yet we’ve had lots of fun, too, and Sue has been very brave in letting me
rip her baby to shreds and put it back together again – and now, three years later,
it’s nearly over and I’m proud of what we’ve done: make an already great book,
I think, even better.