Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Yep.

Maybe not as much as you think. It’s more of a shift in attitude. It could actually help you make better decisions—better connections, more useful to you, more productive, more human. And remember, I don’t want anyone to be serious 100 percent of the time. One of my “Commandments of Consciousness” is, after all, “play.”

Any ethical rule you’d observe in treating people, you’d observe in your connections. You’d keep the other person in mind. E-mail is very quick; it lets us see words but not see a person, so sometimes we can respond impatiently or rudely. We can flare and flame. Don’t do that. Preserve the other’s dignity. Try to think of him or her. There’s always a he or she behind the words on your screen. The ethicist Richard Sennett writes about what he calls the pivotal concept of respect. Well, it is pivotal.

If toughness is called for, as it often is in personal (or especially business-related!) e-mails, you can still preserve respect—and let the other person know you respect their position while differing from it.

The delete key is the most ethically powerful key on the board. Spam is advertising. Since it’s seldom a personal communication, you can delete it without resorting to undue ethical meditation. In fact, you’re expressing your own dignity and power to choose by so doing.

Honor ownership and intellectual property. When information was always printed on paper or vinyl or tape, it was easier to treat it as an object that could be sold, owned, or stolen. Since everything today is code and little is concrete material, it’s easier to think that it’s really not stealing if I copy some song, poem, article, book, or other material without paying for it, or pass it on to someone else without telling them where it came from. But, of course, as everyone knows, it is stealing.

I realize a whole culture of everything-should-be-free has arisen on the Internet—indeed, that culture helps make the Internet vigorous. But why should people work hard, give you services, find information for you, give you important advice you might not have had otherwise—why should they do all that for free? Why should you expect them to? It’s a scandal that so many of us have gotten used to this state of affairs. It’s morally wrong, and, almost as bad, just lazy.

No. We need to remember that the virtual is only virtual. As Miller McPherson, Matthew E. Brashears, and Lynn Smith-Lovin make clear in their recent study Social Isolation in America, keeping in touch by e-mail or telephone or Instant Messenger is no substitute for closer, flesh-and-blood social intercourse. We need to take a very close look at how overscheduled we have become. The next great cultural and, I’d argue, moral challenge will be for individuals to ratchet down their schedules in favor of their friends and families. Here, I am thinking of David Cameron’s work on quality of work and well-being. It’s actually a very important moral issue—one most of us are a little too cowardly to face. Can you really decide to make less money, be less important, climb the ladder less, in favor of being with the people in your life? That’s consciousness, too.

I’m talking about the part of consciousness we call awareness—the stuff we know about and know we know about.

The odd thing is, most of consciousness is unconscious. Let’s start with all the brain machinery that’s processing the impulses and information, all the factory-work—most of that, for obvious reasons, we don’t know about. It’s too fast, for one thing: It happens in tenths and hundreds of seconds. For another thing, all this processing has already happened by the time we are aware of something. Bang-bang-bang, super-fast. The raw data aren’t what we experience; they’re always passed through the brain-factory, at lightning speed, to be sure, but they have gone through the grinder.

Pretty much. Consciousness comes to us, for example, as a smooth, continuous thing, no gaps, no flickers. But in fact, it may be that even this continuity is an illusion. Preliminary neurobiological research—you might look at books such as A Natural History of Vision, by Nicholas J. Wade, or The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, by Christof Koch, which has a great foreword by the late Francis Crick—suggests that consciousness actually is a series of frames, each seven to 10 hundredths of a second big. The brain processes these frames, fills in, smoothes out, so we get a continuous movie, so to speak. Is that reality or not reality? Me not know—but I do know it’s the vision of reality the brain serves up to us.

I mean, come on, much of our experience is pretty instantaneous—tenths of seconds after the fact. Your hand is in the fire—you need to know that, realize it is a bad situation, and then the reflexes, the muscles, the vocal chords, the tear ducts, etc., get hauled onstage, and all that has to happen in a hurry to limit the damage. Wowee.

But technically speaking, you can’t really know something until your brain has processed it—that very processing is what knowing often is. So, yes, we don’t get anything absolutely instantly.

This gets into philosophical territory pretty fast. I mean, what do we really mean by the word reality? Is it (a) the raw data, the raw experience, the universe acting on us, is it that—or is it (b) the picture our brains serve up to us? One might answer (a), except… we can’t actually know that. (See above.) Anything we know, we know because the mind has already packaged it and served it up. So we’re pretty much led to (b).

Well, what the brain tells us is, for just about every purpose, our truth. But it is a packaged truth. Color, for example, is what your brain makes of different wavelengths of light. A bee’s brain sees it differently, and so does a dog’s. Our brain packages colors very differently from the way their brains do. Still, to say color does not really exist is a pretty useless statement. You need to know that red light from the green, and if you don’t, there’ll be consequences!

Again, the way it is is a debatable thing.

At the process-level we’re talking about here, the concept of “lying” can’t apply—this is impulse-quick factory work.

Sigmund Freud famously taught that aside from the consciousness we’re aware of, there is an unconscious or subconscious (people fight about which term is more accurate… I go with un- because it’s not that this level is under consciousness, which a sub-conscious would be, but that we are not aware of it) level of mentation (mental activity) we’re not conscious of or less conscious of.

People are very unfair to his ideas—partly because of the prominence of sex in the discussion. But drop all that! He was the great poet of self-deception: He wrote beautifully and movingly about how human beings ignore the real motives of their actions, flee the real significance of what they do. He also wrote persuasively about how our past experiences, our dreams, and our innermost drives shape our actions, in ways we can’t ever fully know. Yes, there were excesses, and yes, in some ways, the “market” for strictly Freudian therapy isn’t what it was—most therapy is a mix of modalities, of which strict Freudian approaches are only a part. But let’s be serious: Freud was a great pioneer and said many things that everyone knows, if they think about it for more than seven hundredths of a second, are true.

Granted, the unconscious may not always be fully unconscious—among other things, it’s a product of many strategies of avoidance and survival. Still, we can’t be expected to be ethically responsible for all of it.

Regarding the first part—about us not being special—the answer is yes and no. Scientists want to understand what makes the brain work, and most scientists are confident we’ll someday know it right down to the atoms and chemicals. They believe there’s no reason our brains should be exempt from the laws of physics that work everywhere else. They don’t believe there’s magic—if what we mean by that is something different from the wonder we see all around us, some “other magic”—at the heart of the brain.

If they’re right—and we won’t know for at least a century and probably longer—then it’s true: We aren’t different from the rest of the universe. We work by its laws. We’re not exempt.

On the other hand, think—would you want to be? Is that what being “special” really means? Not in my book. I love being connected to the universe. And for me, every person I meet is only and unrepeatably himself or herself. What more do we need?

Besides: I’m smarter than the universe. So are you.

Remember: The human brain—hands down, no doubt, game’s over, sweep the stadium—is a miracle. If it’s not, then the word miracle has no meaning. The human brain is the most complicated thing we’ve ever found, far more than anything else anywhere in the universe. That’s special. And, as a living organ, it’s life’s most finely tuned triumph. It makes your hair stand up to consider it. That’s special.

I never understood this notion that understanding something detracts from its specialness. The reverse, if you ask me. The day we discover the key to the human brain will let an awesome flood of light into human history—I hope only we’re ready for it. It could give us dangerous powers, and also astonishing means to alleviate suffering and make life better.

But you’re also asking about the notion of “spirit.” To me, the big, ancient distinction between “matter” and “spirit” has always been an awkward one, ranging from maddening to clearly false. Neither side of this supposed “duality”—and why did we ever think this way?—is especially well defined, not “spirit” and certainly not “matter” Someday, we probably will arrive at an understanding of the universe that makes necessary a new concept. What will that be? How should I know? But someday we probably will want to give up this irritating insistence that the “two” are “two,” and not only that, but somehow “opposed.”

But perhaps what you’re really asking about is the divine and the soul. Let me say—with great respect for materialists, rationalists, atheists, and all other stripe of believer and unbeliever—I believe in both. I’ve never learned anything in science that necessarily endangers those notions. What if the divine works through what we call matter? What if evolution is how The Big Girl works? I ask you: Consider the universe. Consider the human brain, which has given us so much—literally, the brain has made possible everything else we know. It seems to me the most recent expression and triumph of a principle at work everywhere—and that principle is at work now. It certainly isn’t through.

Am I being a scientist? Am I being a mystic? A materialist? Or do we need that new stance? Something to pique your consciousness.