AustLit

'The broader landscape in which Greg Egan's two symmetrically themed novels, Quarantine and Teranesia, unfold includes new research in neuroscience on the cognitive nonconscious (or proto-self) in humans. The cognitive nonconscious, which emerges from underlying neuronal processes, interacts with consciousness and the unconscious through its superior information-processing abilities. Egan links this new research with von Neumann's suggestion in the 1950s that the “wave collapse” in quantum mechanics, in which the superposition of particles creates indeterminacies through the particle's eigenstates, “collapses” so that, upon measurement, only one value is observed. While Quarantine explores the ways in which human consciousness is complicated by its interaction with quantum processes, Teranesia, in remarkable symmetry, investigates the possibility that the cognitive nonconscious may also emerge from and interact with quantum processes. Thus Egan plays with realigning into different configurations the three categories of consciousness/unconsciousness, the cognitive nonconscious, and material processes. As a result, the two novels constitute an important contribution to the millennial reassessment of the costs of consciousness and the rise of the cognitive nonconscious, serving as narratives to think with and through the recursive paradoxes and conceptual complexities inherent in this paradigm shift.' (Publication abstract)