Well, I think communicating is tricky because you’ve got to latch onto what people are already interested in. It’s extremely difficult to initiate an interest from scratch, first of all, but if you talk about or in any way exhibit what they’re already interested in, why don’t you bore them because they’ve already done it? There’s a fine line here. There’s a fine line between what people already know and what you can tell them. I think that a book can only give a small change in a knowledge base of the person. I don’t think you can go from nought to infinity. I don’t think you can go from nought to a reasonable understanding and that’s why, I think, in one’s life, one wants to read a lot of books on the same subject written by different authors, different points of view, some quite light hearted, every now and again a really deep book which goes into the thing in absolute detail. But if you only look at the detailed book, it’s just too much for the ordinary human being, too much of an effort and not rewarding enough. You need your imagination stirred and switched on and developed, which often happens by a light hearted book so I think that books should be accessible, have nice pictures in them, American textbooks are very good, and why not, you know, use colour, use jokes, use a lot and then you lead the reader into the difficult bit where they really have to focus, get their brain working and follow through the argument for themselves. It’s even true with this mirror reversal thing, you actually have to sit down and think about it, play with mirrors, try it out, and if you then go on to a really difficult question, why the brain has consciousness, well, if that mirror problem is difficult, how come that we’re likely to solve the problem of consciousness and can’t we learn a bit about the difficulties, the hazards, of thinking about this extremely difficult problem by analysing our difficulties with the allegedly simple problem? It seems to me we should calibrate ourselves and teach ourselves what we’re good at, where we trip up, the sort of mistakes we make, in order to hone our intellects, our understanding, our enthusiasm, to the hard problem? So I believe in a variety of trivial, fun books with loads of jokes to really deep philosophy, like Wittgenstein, for example. I think you want the range.
