FROM THE GUARDIAN
David Eagleman: 'We won't die – our consciousness will live forever on the internet'Seeing God as a microbe is just one way the neuroscientist's debut novel gets to grips with the afterlife
In one of the stories in David Eagleman's first work of fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Canongate), God consoles himself for the mess that is humankind by reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In another, people pay vast sums to ensure the glamorous afterlife they desire, only to find themselves marooned in the most cliched version of heaven, where they sit on white clouds, clad in ill-fitting white robes, strumming harps.
By day, Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he specialises in the study of time perception and synesthesia. He also directs the college's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Sum is his first foray into fiction – but it has become a word-of-mouth bestseller and earned him plaudits from Stephen Fry and Brian Eno, who called it "as surprising a book as I've read in years".
What leads a neuroscientist to tackle the idea of the afterlife?
I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us. Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty – you find the atheist and you find the religious and everybody is acting like they know the answer. I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance. We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows. We don't have any evidence for it. We don't have any evidence against it. The thing that has always surprised me is that people are always acting as though they know the answer. The idea with Sum was to write 40 mutually exclusive stories, where each story tells a completely different, incompatible version of the afterlife There's a meta-message and that meta-message is that we don't know.
This sphere involves vociferous atheists such as Richard Dawkins on the one hand and the rise of fundamentalist faiths on the other. Was that at all in your mind when writing this book, that backdrop?
I think so. I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, "uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position". The books by the neo-atheists like [Richard] Dawkins and [Daniel] Dennett and [Christopher] Hitchens are fantastic, very important – but the public has gone away with a misconception that scientists have thrown away the baby with the bathwater, where the baby is all of the awe and wonder and mystery of what's going on. So some people have the impression that over here on the atheist camp it's "OK, we've got it all figured out, there's nothing else to discuss". The fact is, we know too little about what's going on in the cosmos to commit to that sort of strict atheism. On the other end of the spectrum, we know way too much to commit to a particular religious story. These stories are often very beautiful and they crystallise a lot of wisdom but they're much too small-thinking to possibly be correct, given everything we know now about the size of the universe and the biological algorithms and computations and so on.
So we're stuck in a position where we know too little to commit to atheism and we know too much to commit to religion. That put me somewhere in the middle. I don't prefer the term agnostic because agnosticism is often used as a weak term that means I'm not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist. So I call myself a possibilian. The idea with possibilianism is to explore new ideas and to shine a flashlight around the possibility space to really understand what the size of that space is. The idea is not to commit to any particular story, it's not the end goal to say "OK, we're going to figure it out and commit to it" because it's simply past the toolbox of science. The best we can do, and I find it a wonderful pursuit, is to just try and understand what the possibilities are.
In one of the stories, you imagine God to be a metaphysical scientist who has completely messed up and comforts himself by reading Frankenstein. It made me laugh. And when He does make a fleeting appearance in the stories He tends to be scratching His head, wondering where He's gone wrong.
That's right. There are many different flavours of stories but that's a theme I keep coming back to and exploring. In some of the stories, God is a female and in some stories God is actually a married couple. In one, God is the size of a microbe and we exist at the wrong spatial scale and so he doesn't know about us.
In another story you write: "We are finally able to determine our own hereafter. It has become privatised and computerised. For a reasonable price you can download your consciousness into a computer to live forever in a virtual world." Could that point be close?
I think so. Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing. We don't know which ones will work and which won't yet – like the possibility of being able to download your consciousness into a computer someday, maybe not 50 years from now but maybe 200. If that works that means we're sort of the last bit of the biological era where people have to die. In the future you won't die, you'll just download yourself.
Somewhere in your belief system do you hope that our consciousness continues after we die physically?
I'm not certain. By the way, I don't have a belief system, I only have a possibility system! But I do hope that consciousness will survive our bodies.
Would you really want to live forever ?
For better or worse we probably have no choice. Option one is we might just die and shut off like going to sleep. Possibility number two is there might be something much bigger than us, in which case we don't have a choice about it anyway – we'll just find ourselves there.
What do you do when you're not writing fiction?
During the day, what I try to figure out is how the brain works and specifically this issue of how the brain constructs reality. How do you put together hundreds of billions of cells and get it to have a private subjective experience? Consciousness. In other words, if I gave you a hundred billion Tinkertoys and asked you to put them together in a complicated fashion, the question is at what point would you add one more Tinkertoy and suddenly it is having a private subjective experience. It can experience the colour red and the feeling of pain or the taste of feta cheese. Not only do we not have a theory of that but we don't even know what a theory of that would look like. That's the situation we're in in modern neuroscience. What we are doing is seeking any sort of inroad and I recognise that with synesthesia, where people have a mixture of the senses. Your neighbour's reality can be very different than your reality. The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.
I direct the [college's] Initiative on Neuroscience and Law which asks how does modern neuroscience affect the way we think about criminal behaviour and criminal punishment and new ideas of rehabilitation – even how jurors and judges make decisions? It's really getting at the heart of understanding human behaviour better and how that affects the legal system. My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.
Have you had any rumbles of discontent with Sum in America? Have you had believers coming up and saying "how dare you?"
Here's been the most amazing part about what's happened. This book has been well received by both the atheists and the religious. I think why the religious like it, is that it allows them to wrestle with the notion of God and it stretches them mentally and spiritually. Sum was named one of the top 10 spiritual books of 2009, which really cracked me up.
In one of the stories in David Eagleman's first work of fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Canongate), God consoles himself for the mess that is humankind by reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In another, people pay vast sums to ensure the glamorous afterlife they desire, only to find themselves marooned in the most cliched version of heaven, where they sit on white clouds, clad in ill-fitting white robes, strumming harps.
By day, Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he specialises in the study of time perception and synesthesia. He also directs the college's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Sum is his first foray into fiction – but it has become a word-of-mouth bestseller and earned him plaudits from Stephen Fry and Brian Eno, who called it "as surprising a book as I've read in years".
What leads a neuroscientist to tackle the idea of the afterlife?
I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us. Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty – you find the atheist and you find the religious and everybody is acting like they know the answer. I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance. We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows. We don't have any evidence for it. We don't have any evidence against it. The thing that has always surprised me is that people are always acting as though they know the answer. The idea with Sum was to write 40 mutually exclusive stories, where each story tells a completely different, incompatible version of the afterlife There's a meta-message and that meta-message is that we don't know.
This sphere involves vociferous atheists such as Richard Dawkins on the one hand and the rise of fundamentalist faiths on the other. Was that at all in your mind when writing this book, that backdrop?
I think so. I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, "uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position". The books by the neo-atheists like [Richard] Dawkins and [Daniel] Dennett and [Christopher] Hitchens are fantastic, very important – but the public has gone away with a misconception that scientists have thrown away the baby with the bathwater, where the baby is all of the awe and wonder and mystery of what's going on. So some people have the impression that over here on the atheist camp it's "OK, we've got it all figured out, there's nothing else to discuss". The fact is, we know too little about what's going on in the cosmos to commit to that sort of strict atheism. On the other end of the spectrum, we know way too much to commit to a particular religious story. These stories are often very beautiful and they crystallise a lot of wisdom but they're much too small-thinking to possibly be correct, given everything we know now about the size of the universe and the biological algorithms and computations and so on.
So we're stuck in a position where we know too little to commit to atheism and we know too much to commit to religion. That put me somewhere in the middle. I don't prefer the term agnostic because agnosticism is often used as a weak term that means I'm not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist. So I call myself a possibilian. The idea with possibilianism is to explore new ideas and to shine a flashlight around the possibility space to really understand what the size of that space is. The idea is not to commit to any particular story, it's not the end goal to say "OK, we're going to figure it out and commit to it" because it's simply past the toolbox of science. The best we can do, and I find it a wonderful pursuit, is to just try and understand what the possibilities are.
In one of the stories, you imagine God to be a metaphysical scientist who has completely messed up and comforts himself by reading Frankenstein. It made me laugh. And when He does make a fleeting appearance in the stories He tends to be scratching His head, wondering where He's gone wrong.
That's right. There are many different flavours of stories but that's a theme I keep coming back to and exploring. In some of the stories, God is a female and in some stories God is actually a married couple. In one, God is the size of a microbe and we exist at the wrong spatial scale and so he doesn't know about us.
In another story you write: "We are finally able to determine our own hereafter. It has become privatised and computerised. For a reasonable price you can download your consciousness into a computer to live forever in a virtual world." Could that point be close?
I think so. Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing. We don't know which ones will work and which won't yet – like the possibility of being able to download your consciousness into a computer someday, maybe not 50 years from now but maybe 200. If that works that means we're sort of the last bit of the biological era where people have to die. In the future you won't die, you'll just download yourself.
Somewhere in your belief system do you hope that our consciousness continues after we die physically?
I'm not certain. By the way, I don't have a belief system, I only have a possibility system! But I do hope that consciousness will survive our bodies.
Would you really want to live forever ?
For better or worse we probably have no choice. Option one is we might just die and shut off like going to sleep. Possibility number two is there might be something much bigger than us, in which case we don't have a choice about it anyway – we'll just find ourselves there.
What do you do when you're not writing fiction?
During the day, what I try to figure out is how the brain works and specifically this issue of how the brain constructs reality. How do you put together hundreds of billions of cells and get it to have a private subjective experience? Consciousness. In other words, if I gave you a hundred billion Tinkertoys and asked you to put them together in a complicated fashion, the question is at what point would you add one more Tinkertoy and suddenly it is having a private subjective experience. It can experience the colour red and the feeling of pain or the taste of feta cheese. Not only do we not have a theory of that but we don't even know what a theory of that would look like. That's the situation we're in in modern neuroscience. What we are doing is seeking any sort of inroad and I recognise that with synesthesia, where people have a mixture of the senses. Your neighbour's reality can be very different than your reality. The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.
I direct the [college's] Initiative on Neuroscience and Law which asks how does modern neuroscience affect the way we think about criminal behaviour and criminal punishment and new ideas of rehabilitation – even how jurors and judges make decisions? It's really getting at the heart of understanding human behaviour better and how that affects the legal system. My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.
Have you had any rumbles of discontent with Sum in America? Have you had believers coming up and saying "how dare you?"
Here's been the most amazing part about what's happened. This book has been well received by both the atheists and the religious. I think why the religious like it, is that it allows them to wrestle with the notion of God and it stretches them mentally and spiritually. Sum was named one of the top 10 spiritual books of 2009, which really cracked me up.
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