Take a tour through the mind of America's undiscovered philosopher: Pierce Timberlake.

Swimmer in a Dark Sea is a dizzying ride through a dazzling array of profound concepts. Using a hybrid of narrative and essay, Timberlake analyzes the big ideas that all thoughtful people wonder about at some point in their lives.

Using intimate but universally relatable moments in his life as launch points, Timberlake examines profound questions such as:

• Is it possible to live forever and remain sane? And human? How exactly would we adapt to immortality?
• What do we really mean by empathy? (And why it is not sympathy.) How and why does it intertwine our lives and bind us into a functioning society?
• What are the relative merits of stoicism, hedonism, and Epicureanism? Do thinkers like Freud, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Blake, and Marx, still have anything to offer us today?
• If it we were possible to fully embrace rationalism, what would that lead us to believe about a God, and about the origin of the universe? The basis of morality?
• What is the root nature of risk-taking, and why do some embrace it while others avoid it at all costs?

Dealt with along the way are such topics as chaos theory, deism versus atheism, how we decide to go to war, the real differences between conservatives and liberals, the parallels between visual and political perception, the mindset of bullies, the possibility that we live in a virtual world, and why our sexuality often seems so conflicted.

Several new concepts such as metaphysical quantification and spurious certainty are introduced.