Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Here’s my main theme: Consciousness is connectedness. Simple. Sweet. And it sings like the very cosmos. If it’s true, then you, I, and our society are rewiring ourselves and our worlds at breathtaking speed. And we need an ethics for it.

Last year, two scientists, Marcello Massimini and Giulio Tononi, performed what might at first seem a simpleminded experiment. They stimulated a number of awake subjects at a small, specific site in the brain. Then they measured where the stimulus went. It did rocket around in there. The awake brain does that: It can refer a single stimulus all over, connect different centers, serve different uses. Sometimes a stimulus ping-ponged around in there for as long as 300 milliseconds (almost a third of a second), a long time to bonk around for brain impulses, which can travel between 1 and 100 meters per second.

But then the scientists waited until the same people were asleep, and then they repeated the stimulus. This time, less bounce. The brain didn’t refer it around nearly as much. It fell dark and silent after only 100 to 150 milliseconds. The connections weren’t there.

Sleep, after all, is a loss of consciousness. As Massimini put it so beautifully: At the start of the night, when we fall into a deep sleep, we and the universe around us ‘cease to exist.’ He also—very poetically—said that consciousness is what leaves us during sleep.

This is a little experiment, but it makes a powerful suggestion: Consciousness occurs when the brain is fully connected, when its different regions and centers are “talking” to one another, or at least “prepared” to talk.

Consciousness—and by this I refer to the aspect we call “awareness”—equals connectedness. It also involves connectivity—being prepared, open, ready to receive and relay and apply. Connectedness and connectivity.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has suggested what he colorfully terms the multiple drafts model of consciousness, seeing the conscious mind as essentially an information-processing machine. I’m not the materialist, nor the iconoclast, that Dennett is, but I do love the notion that we are constantly processing—and also processing the processor! The brain, a remarkably plastic gift, rewires, revises, reemerges, learns to do things differently.

We are, easily, the most connected and connective society of human beings ever. With us, more than ever before, consciousness opens out beyond individual minds (each one a miracle) into the greater world. We are exquisitely laterally aware. This is both our gem and our canker.

Our gem because, with all our novel gadgets, our music boxes, long-distance murmurs, Nets and Webs, we rewire ourselves. Literally, physically: With each new gadget we acquire, we learn how to live a new way. We teach our brains how to deal; we rewire. The processor reprocessed.

This has led to a reorganization of human knowledge, a spasm of invention that has reordered, repackaged, and rethought information and what it means. We are getting smarter, faster, about more and more. And we are staying in touch wherever we are.

We are pretty much the same animal that walked the African veldts 160,000 years ago. But culture evolves orders of magnitude more quickly than biology. And I’d argue that, at very great speed, through our own ingenuity, we’re doing what natural selection can’t do fast enough. We are literally expanding the reach—and the grasp—of human awareness.

Just as the average human brain is a network of around 1011 neurons, so each of us connections/connectors represents a node in a world network of billions and billions of connections and reconnections. Heady stuff. Pun intended.

Our gem and our canker. Consciousness, especially the hyperconsciousness we now court, becomes a burden. We are snowed, bewildered, paralyzed. Whenever thousands die, whenever quake, wave, famine or plague strikes, we know within a few hours. Every war, every need adds to the weight. This is not a quiet world. Too many of us feel obligated to be contactable every moment; many of us (too many?) require that others be totally contactable 24/7.

This is a heavy, loud world.

We build great edifices of knowledge, technologies that are huge versions of what our intense, exquisite personal brains do. The “communications age” is actually consciousness asserting itself in and through us. It’s not hard to feel the elation, the exhilaration of all that.

It’s also not hard to feel, within this greater consciousness, a threat of psychosis—the inability to screen out, order, select, discriminate among data and information. As the fine American poet Yvor Winters once wrote: The rain of matter upon sense/Destroys me momently.

We have rewired ourselves and that’s about it; it isn’t going to stop. So here, in a couple of paragraphs, are a few first ethics of the connected consciousness.

Why do we need an “ethics”? Isn’t consciousness pretty much an attribute we’re given, that we sort of just have?

Yes, much of the time it is. Ironically, most of consciousness is unconscious. So we can’t really be expected to “take responsibility” for all of it. After all, the nonconscious, or just-beneath-conscious, aspects of our minds—the instincts; all the images, impulses and prompts fountaining from our inherited software and hardware—are flowing all the time, and we don’t know it. It’d be hard to have an ethics for the unconscious.

However—and this has been my point—we are, quite consciously, augmenting, powering, and extending our consciousness in new ways. That’s what we need to take responsibility for. We need to have standards for it. We need to know what’s worthy and what’s not, what’s better and just and what’s not. We need an ethics, to ensure that we serve ourselves and one another well—and to make sure that the rain of matter upon sense does not destroy us.

To what would I apply this ethics? To any data, no matter the source—the warm lips of your beloved or a cold glass screen; a 100^th-hand wildfire rumor off the Web or an entry in a dog-eared textbook. Where would I use this ethics? When I make any phone call; go on the Web, as it’s put; write a term paper or professional report; do my taxes; write a blog; file an article; tell my neighbor, child, friend, coworker, spouse, or significant other anything new. Above all, I’d apply it while watching, listening, browsing. Turn what’s all too often passive into what even cows do when they browse—conversion of fodder into energy. Therefore, I should:

• Cultivate connection and connectivity.

  These, to a greater extent with us than with any other animal, are what we are.

• Be responsible for connectedness.

  That means I should:

  • Value each act of connection.

    When connection was difficult and time-consuming—think, “handwritten letters”—it was valuable and valued. Less so, now that it comes easy. That’s a mistake. Each time I connect with someone, I should treat it as though it were the same offering of spirit, the same opportunity, as that handwritten letter of yore.

  • Be responsible for sources.

    I should know where information comes from. Learn what sources to trust. Check sources (both human and other!) against one another. Never consume information uncritically. Exercise restraint and (respectful) skepticism. Require information to prove its own worth. Check often and check repeatedly.

  • Give credit.

    I should always make clear who owns what—and tell people if I pass it on. Call it the Seventh Commandment of Connectivity.

  • Be more than a receiver; be a filter.

    Analyze; consider; discuss with others. Subject almost everything I learn to as many other minds as I can.

  • Be responsible for where I send information, and how I package and explain it.

    If I relay what I’ve learned, I should, as often as possible, accompany it with context: where I got it, how it was assembled and generated, what its limitations are. Never merely pass an idea along—a wire can do as much. Our humanity rests with what we do with the information we receive... . This is a rather inconvenient rule. It means that, if I don’t know the origin of something I learn, I should either (1) decide not to pass it on; (2) pass it on, but with the warning that I can’t vouch for this and don’t know where it came from, or (3) shoulder the responsibility of tracing it. The best course is (3), meaning few of us actually will do it. I hope for (2), and better yet (1).

  • Regard myself as morally obliged to maintain an open, skeptical mind.

    Being connective means being ready to connect. In other words: Do not hasten to close the door on conclusions. New data and info flood in so fast that the mind is like a Magic Pad: Often we lift the page, erase the writing. If something I think is confirmed, great, but it’s a small victory—most of what’s worth thinking is worth debating. I should seek connections that challenge me, not only those that confirm what I already think.

  • Play.

    Enjoy being here and now. Explore the possibilities with a smile. Playfulness is the heart of being human.

  • Get plenty of rest.

    Ironically, to remain responsibly connected, I should practice responsible disconnection. As William Safire has written, we should avoid the rush to total intouchedness. For him, a society with no place to hide produces people with no secrets worth keeping and individuals with no minds of their own. Turn everything off. Frequently. Close the book; switch off the TV, iPod, radio, computer, BlackBerry, land line. Resort to the great traditions of contemplation and meditation. Take the pooch for a walk. Cultivate quiet. I need to step outside the system decisively and often, to maintain the perspective that can help me once I’m back inside.

Our great switchboard is in place—but perhaps not our owner’s manual, our rules of order, a lively-enough consensus about what is worthy. If we can stay mindful of those things, we may achieve a morality of the new consciousness. Once again we will have rewired The Great Rewiring.

Thanks to John Horgan of the Stevens Institute of Technology and Michael Brooks of the New Scientist for their improvements to this piece. Contact John Timpane at 215-854-4406 or [email protected].