George Zarkadakis

Bold text George Zarkadakis (Γιώργος Ζαρκαδάκης) is a Greek novelist, poet, playwright, and popular science writer, born in Athens on August 27, 1964.

Academic and popular science work
In 1982, he migrated to London, England, where he studied systems engineering at City University. At the age of 24 he received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence. Since then he has worked for the European Commission in Brussels, as an IT consultant for a number of US companies, and as a scientific researcher.

In 1999 he launched in Greece the monthly popular science magazine Focus (originally published in Italy by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore since 1992) and in 2004 he wrote a very popular television program for the communication of science called Εύρηκα! - Evrika! ["Eureka"] (produced and hosted by Antonis Kafetzopoulos ). He was also very active in organizing the first Cafés Scientifiques in Greece; an attempt to improve the dialogue between scientists and lay citizens. He remained Editor-in-chief of Focus till the end of 2006. Then he became the publisher of Avgo Books, an imprint of Oceanida Publications that is specializing in popular science books and the organization of science and art events for a wider audience.

Noetics
In 2001 he published an academic paper called “Noetics: A proposal for a theoretical approach to consciousness”, and a popular science book called “The Mystery of the Mind: how the brain evokes consciousness” explaining the status of the contemporary cognitive and philosophical studies of consciousness.

In the 2001 paper, he proposed the use of the term Noetics in an explicitly non-metaphysical context, as the name of a hypothetical unified science of the Mind. Based on David Chalmers' philosophical work “The Puzzle of Consciouss Experience”, he also proposed several speculative laws of such a theory. In both the paper and the book, Zarkadakis favors a multilevel description of mental phenomena. He posits the existence of the following four levels of description: (1) a quantum level (Roger Penrose, David Chalmers, Andreas Mershin, and Stuart Hameroff are cited as the original proposers of this approach); (2) a self-organization level (the book endorses the paradigm of Neural Darwinism); (3) a phenomenological level (the study of qualia); and (4) a sociobiological level (the study of memes).

Literary work
His first published work was the novel “The Secrets of the Lands Without”, published in 1994 by Alexandria Publications, which was also released on the World Wide Web (often called "the first Greek novel on the Internet"). The second edition of the novel was published by Kedros Publications in 1996. "End of the East" (a novel), was published in 1996 by Kedros Publications and was runner-up for the prestigious Greek State Literary Prize. His third novel "Archipelago Republic" was published in 1999 also by Kedros. His fourth novel “The Passage” was published in late 2004 by Kastaniotis Publications and in Italy in 2007 by Croccetti with the title “Il Grande Gelo”. Other literary works of George Zarkadakis include a collection of short stories “The day America Disappeared” (Kedros Publications, 2002) and a poetry collection “The Koans of the Day” (Kedros Publications, 2006). He has written several plays, three of which have been staged in Athens: “The Fixer” in 2002, “Y” in 2005 and “Baby” in 2007.