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Alan Lightman

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The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science Kindle Edition

by Alan Lightman (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 92 ratings

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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.

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“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

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0B4R48YH9
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon (March 14, 2023)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 14, 2023
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 20106 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 209 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #223,842 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #73 in Religious Studies - Science & Religion
- #113 in Religious Philosophy (Kindle Store)
- #242 in Science History & Philosophy

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4.4 92 ratings

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Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman is an American writer, physicist, and social entrepreneur. Born in 1948, he was educated at Princeton and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in theoretical physics. He has received five honorary doctoral degrees. Lightman has served on the faculties of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities. He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. His scientific research in astrophysics has concerned black holes, relativity theory, radiative processes, and the dynamics of systems of stars. His essays and articles have appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications. His essays are often chosen by the New York Times as among the best essays of the year. He is the author of 6 novels, several collections of essays, a memoir, and a book-length narrative poem, as well as several books on science. His novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and has been the basis for dozens of independent theatrical and musical adaptations around the world. His novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent books are The Accidental Universe, which was chosen by Brain Pickings as one of the 10 best books of 2014, his memoir Screening Room, which was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the best books of the year for 2016, and Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018), and extended meditation on science and religion. Lightman is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the founder of the Harpswell Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.”

Photo by Alan Lightman (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Steve Johnson

"Cogito, ergo sum," the Golden Ratio, & the Great Chain of Connection

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2023

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Rather than cover territory that others have in these reviews, I’d like to offer one that provides a concise synopsis, hopefully without too much oversimplification. So, I encourage the reader to look over the other reviews here, the publisher’s overview, and blurbs from other writers.

In a nutshell, Lightman’s thesis is that humankind’s spirituality necessarily originates in the organic structures and chemistry of the brain, which is one and the same with the mind (consciousness) since the mind cannot exist without it. Furthermore, since humankind has evolved through the eons in symbiotic relationship with nature writ large – on the cosmic scale – the very structures of our brains and bodies, as well as our mind’s affinities and propensities, are determined by these evolved adaptive responses to environment. In this regard, he shows how the golden ratio (3:2 or 1.618 AKA “Phi”) provides a key to unlocking and understanding these connections; the golden ratio being ubiquitous to a pretty astonishing degree throughout the natural world, which is why the human brain – which evolved in that very context – responds so easily and pleasurably to it in art and design, i.e., aesthetically. And, there is much merging and blending of aesthetic experience with spiritual experience, which leads to his discussion of the human experience of “awe” and transcendence, which is the mystical experience. Lightman offers several personal experiences of transcendence and mystical union. This is one that he experienced while kayaking in a favorite cove in Maine:

“As I’ve come to understand, a common feature of all aspects of spirituality is a loss of self, a letting go, a willingness to embrace something outside of ourselves, a willingness to listen rather than talk, a recognition that we are small and the cosmos is large. For a moment, I stop paddling and listen. I think that I hear the soft beats of my heart. Or is it the soft clapping of waves on the shore?” (p.165)

This is what Lightman terms, the Great Chain of Connection, which he relates to another of his concepts, viz., “cosmic biocentrism.” Central to the notion is “the kinship of all living things in the universe.” He writes, “The golden ratio is built into us, just as it is built into seashells and aloe plants. Our aesthetic of beauty is literally an expression of our oneness with nature.” (p.153)

Lightman has substantiated his arguments with a well-documented, thorough historical examination of spiritual diversity and biological science, all leading to his thoughtful conclusions. His arguments are, in the opinion of this reader, sound and convincing. While being careful to express his sincere respect for the spiritual traditions and beliefs of others, his goal, it seems to me, is to shine a guiding light into a future where science does not challenge, let alone dismiss, spirituality, but instead points a way to a new and perhaps even deeper, more profound understanding of humankind’s consciousness as part and parcel of the cosmic order – a spirituality with the foundation built on and with all facets of human consciousness: science, mathematics, the arts, and the humanities. This is a new Renaissance Man, as it were, for the 21st Century and beyond.

Sidebar: There does seem to me to be a close affinity in Lightman's discussion of "lawful nature," with the ancient Greek notion of "logos" in its various iterations from Heraclitus to the Stoics, et al, but Lightman nowhere mentions it.

It is a book I can enthusiastically recommend to anyone intellectually open-minded enough to accept and consider a fresh perspective on a biocentric spirituality grounded in science and the human experience.

My only criticism is a complaint. Why is there no index?! The book is replete with names, dates, scientific studies, proprietary terms, and so on. There are 169 footnotes of text reference credits and another page and a half of illustration credits! How long would it take a junior editor, with the manuscript on a computer, to cobble together an index? How many pages would it add to the book? Fifteen? It would sure eliminate a lot of frustration for the reader trying to locate material.

24 people found this helpful

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Sotto voce

Irresistible force paradox - fresh insights

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2023

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Lightman's latest book is a must-read for anyone looking for some serious mental stimulation. The book dives into the conflict between our current scientific understanding of the universe and our inner belief in something more. While the body and natural world are well-understood, the mind, spirit, and soul remain elusive.

Lightman starts with a survey of lesser-known philosophers throughout history, interpreting the famous "I think, therefore, I am" metaphor in the context of modern scientific materialism. He then explores biological and psychological theories that could explain our sense of a supernatural God, concluding that spiritual feelings can arise from natural selection and our brilliant brains.

For Christ-followers, Lightman's thesis will not align with their own spiritual experiences, but the book is still worth a read. It's a thought-provoking work that leaves a lasting impression, reminding us of the importance of spirituality throughout human history.

Whether you're a believer or not, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science offers excellent fodder for deep thinking and exploration. Don't miss out on this enriching and insightful work!

18 people found this helpful

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jojonick

Wow

Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2024

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. If you love learning and thinking about the big ideas at the core of the human experience, you will, too. I was fascinated by stories about ancient and modern philosophers and scientists and was compelled to consider new ideas about the meaning of life, our purpose on this planet, and the power of connection. Clear and straightforward, easily one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while.

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2023

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Addendum to my original review: My original critique of Lightman’s style was intemperate. After finishing the book, realized composition was pretty good. Mea culpa Alan Lightman. However my original assessment stands. Worth the candle-five stars.

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SB

The Most Challenging Book I Read This Year But The Most Memorable

Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2023

Alan Lightman, a physicist, and writer, explores the idea of spirituality, soul, and mind from a scientist's perspective. He first discussed non-materialism, its emergence, and its place in ancient teachings. God, immortal soul, heaven, and hell are nonmaterial. Then, he moved on to talking about materialism, the brain and its neurons, and spiritual materialism. The theme of the book is very challenging for me but I did learn a lot from this book. I enjoyed learning about prominent figures such as Moses Mendelssohn, Lucretius ( a Roman poet ), Christof Koch, and Cynthia Frantz. I appreciate Lightman's position on faith and spirituality. While I strongly believe in God, I respect his stand. The book did shake my faith and made me appreciate Science more. Of course, at the end of the day, I still decide which to believe. Thank you, Alan Lightman and NetGalley for the chance to read this book and share my honest thoughts.

3 people found this helpful

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Marco Greenberg

Alan Lightman Does It Again!

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2023

Alan Lightman does it again! In The Transcendent Brain, this most inspiring author connects and explores “spiritual materialism” and unveils a new window on the beauty of our universe.

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