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The Transcendent Brain
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The Transcendent Brain

Spirituality in the Age of Science

About the Book

From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to the question, Can the scientifically inclined still hold space for spirituality?
 
“Lightman…belongs to a noble tradition of science writers, including Oliver Sacks and Lewis Thomas, who can poke endlessly into a subject and…stir up fresh embers of wonder.” —The Wall Street Journal

Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?

According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems?

Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”— the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution.

What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human.
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Praise for The Transcendent Brain

“Mr. Lightman [has a] gift for distilling complex ideas and emotions to their bright essence. . . . He displays a beautiful economy of language. . . . Mr. Lightman, though, belongs to a noble tradition of science writers, including Oliver Sacks and Lewis Thomas, who can poke endlessly into a subject and, in spite of their prodding, or perhaps because of it, stir up fresh embers of wonder.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Thoroughly researched, well-written. . . . Moving.”
—The Washington Post

“A revelation about how mere atoms and molecules can give rise to the very persuasive experience of a self, of a soul, of something that feels so vast and complex and magnificently irreducible to matter. . . . Radiant. . . . Largehearted.”
—The Marginalian

“Scientists don’t do enough to emphasize the mystery of the world behind appearances, and what is so often taken for granted, missed entirely, or unexamined in the domain of human experience. This book is an inspiring and convincing antidote to that trend. It is a rigorous and yet very personal inquiry into and recounting of how scientific knowledge does not preclude, diminish, or extinguish the experience of transcendence, but rather brings it very much to the fore. Lightman provides direct inspiration to the reader to apprehend for oneself and revel in the wonder that is everywhere.”
—Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and author of Meditation Is Not What You Think and Falling Awake
 
“With scholarly verve and unbounded curiosity, Alan Lightman asks how our experiences of awe, wonder, and the sublime can unfold in a universe—and in our brains—built only of atoms. A fascinating exploration of where science and humanism meet.”
—David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of Physics and the History of Science, MIT
 
“A remarkable meditation on the emergent structures, feelings, and values that arise from the self-organization of neurons, atoms, and creatures. The book is an invitation to reflect on the wonder of firefly group flashes, sociality and, ultimately, consciousness itself.”
—Peter Galison, University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics, Harvard University and author (with Lorraine Daston) of Objectivity

"Science and spirituality converge in this probing examination of humanity’s connection to the divine. . . . The prose is reflective and lyrical, and Lightman’s arguments succeed in walking the fine line between honoring spiritual experiences without lapsing into pseudoscience. Thoughtful and intellectually rigorous, this treatise impresses."
—Publishers Weekly

“A scientist explains experiences that seem inexplicable. . . . Never shy about tackling big, complex issues. . . . Lightman urges readers to accept a scientific view of the world while embracing experiences that cannot be understood by material underpinnings. We need to balance a yearning to know how the world works with a willingness to surrender ourselves to things we may not fully comprehend.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Lightman writes with passion and panache about how the search for knowledge need not inhibit moments of transcendence, offering a poignant reminder that wonder is everywhere, if we only look.”
—Booklist
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Excerpt

The Transcendent Brain

1 The Ka and the Ba
A Brief History of the Soul, the Nonmaterial, and the Mind-Body Duality
 
The man sits at the table, leans toward a friend in the opposite chair. One hand rests on his knee, the other lightly cradles his chin with its short scraggly beard. He wears a red jacket, dark pants, silver-buckled shoes, a white shirt with rued cus. While his friend reaches out with a smile, our man seems lost in some deep inner realm, as if brooding over the vast cosmos of earthly existence and what might come after. His face would be recognized by many in eighteenth-century Europe, from numerous portraits rendered on porcelain teacups, vases and pendants, busts, paintings. His name is Moses Mendelssohn.
 
This particular painting with the red jacket depicts a meeting between Mendelssohn and two other thinkers: the German writer and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the Swiss poet and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater. The latter once described Mendelssohn as “a companionable, brilliant soul, with piercing eyes, the body of an Aesop— a man of keen insight, exquisite taste and wide erudition . . . frank and open- hearted.”
 
Let’s describe the scene a bit more. Judging from Mendelssohn’s visage, he is about fifty years old, making the year about 1779. A chessboard rests on the table. Above it hangs a brass fixture, whose top section is a chandelier and lower part an oil lamp used for the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays. Mendelssohn is the most famous Jew of his generation. Although deeply religious, he has crossed the border from Jew to Gentile. Breaking from a prescribed life of studying the Talmud and Torah in Hebrew, Mendelssohn has mastered the German language, more adeptly than the Prussian king Frederick the Great, and writes his many philosophical works in that tongue. Against the back wall of the room is a shelf filled with books. A wood floor. A beamed ceiling. A richly embroidered green cloth on the table. A woman enters the room carrying a tray with teacups. This is Mendelssohn’s home, on 68 Spandau Street in Berlin. It is a prosperous house. After beginning life as the son of a poor Torah scribe and living for years as a lowly clerk in a silk factory, Mendelssohn has become part owner of the factory.
 
I start with Mendelssohn because no other philosopher or theologian in the history of recorded thought has argued so rationally for the existence of the soul, the prime example, after God, of the nonmaterial. Aristotle claimed that the soul could not exist without a body. Augustine attributed all aspects of the soul to the perfection of God, Augustine’s starting point in all things. Maimonides assumed the existence of the soul, which would become immortal for the virtuous (but not for the sinners). Mendelssohn made none of these assumptions. Coming of age after the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton, Mendelssohn started from scratch. He constructed logical arguments for the existence of the soul and its immortality. He thought like a scientist as well as a philosopher. In 1763, he won the prize oered by the Prussian Royal Academy of Science for an essay on the application of mathematical proofs to metaphysics, beating out such people as Immanuel Kant. In his salon, a portrait of Isaac Newton hung next to the portraits of the Greek philosophers.
 
Mendelssohn was a polymath. As a boy, he studied astronomy, mathematics, philosophy. He wrote poetry. He played the piano (studying with a student of J. S. Bach). At the age of sixteen, he began learning Latin, so that he could read Cicero and a Latin version of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Aaron Gumperz, the first Prussian Jew to become a medical doctor, taught Mendelssohn French and English. In his twenties, Mendelssohn joined the German writer and bookseller Christoph Friedrich Nicolai to publish the literary journals Bibliothek and Literaturbriefe. Not content with five languages under his belt, Mendelssohn then learned Greek, so that he could read Homer and Plato in the original.
 
In 1767, Mendelssohn wrote his masterwork, Phädon, or On the Immortality of the Soul, a reconception of Plato’s famous Phaedo. In doing so, Mendelssohn wanted to do for the modern European world what Plato had done for the ancient Greek world— describe the necessity and nature of the soul. “I . . . tried to adapt the metaphysical proofs to the taste of our time,” Mendelssohn modestly wrote in the preface to his book. But he did more than adapt. He presented new arguments. He reasoned that while the body and all experiences of the body are composed of parts, to arrive at meaning there must be a thinking thing outside of the parts to integrate and lead their individual sensations, just as a conductor is needed to lead a symphony orchestra.
 
Furthermore, this thinking thing beyond the body must be a whole. If it were composed of parts, then there would need to be another thing outside of it, which composed and integrated its parts, and so on, ad infinitum. “There is, therefore . . . at least one single substance, which is not extended, not compound, but is simple, has a power of intellect, and unites all our concepts, desires, and inclinations in itself. What hinders us from calling this substance our soul?” And, the Jewish scholar argued, the soul must be immortal, because nature always proceeds in gradual steps. Nothing in the natural world leaps from existence to nothingness.

About the Author

Alan Lightman
ALAN LIGHTMAN earned his PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology and is the author of seven novels, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award. His nonfiction includes The Accidental Universe, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, and Probable Impossibilities. He has taught at Harvard and at MIT, where he was the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities. He is currently a professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. He is the host of the public television series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science. More by Alan Lightman
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