No soul?

I chose and became passionate about science writing because I trust the exquisite powers of reason to help us better understand ourselves and our universe. The clarity of reasoning as well as the elegance of laboratory and "thought" experiments that give me a good picture of how things work deliver me from those moments when narrow minds and the most perverse conceptions of the natural world reign to shrink and suffocate our lives. But there are times when science can also strap me into a corner, albeit with the elegant strings of intelligent reasoning, when it tries to explain who I am, all that I am, in my humanness, in all my contradictions and my confusions, my desires and expectations, memory and longing, choices and resignations, only in terms of Darwinian natural selection, neural connections, DNA sequencing, or cellular processes. When science does that, reasoning, exquisite as it may be, makes me want to dart from it like quicksilver in the same manner I do from any religion when it tries to map out the contours of my being and determine its path or destination totally independent of reason.

I particularly felt this about science when I recently read an interview with Francis Crick in the New York Times. In 1953, Crick said they found the "secret of life" when he discovered the double helical structure of DNA – the key to what we have explored so far in genetics – with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for which they also won the Nobel Prize. Almost 50 years later, in this recent New York Times interview, Crick made another loaded statement: "In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death." This is what he thinks his research on the neurological basis of human consciousness will prove: that human consciousness is in fact simply "the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." In all of Crick’s 87-year long life, most of it held up by the march of his scientific thoughts, and now stricken with cancer, he has come to tell us before the brilliant hours of his mindful life kisses midnight: that our humanness can be totally defined by what our cells have (DNA) and how they behave (synapses or neural connections in our brains that correspond to consciousness). This also reminded me of how the famous mathematician, Roger Penrose, once defined "thought" as "the quantum effects in the microtubules of our neurons." I have a feeling that intellectually enriching as this research into human consciousness may be to the scientists involved, it is devoid of the sense of enchantment with life to which consciousness dances, at least for non-scientists.

Deep, true and important as Crick’s or Penrose’s scientific or mathematical insights may be into human consciousness, I don’t think they should sign up as cheerleaders of the human race running the difficult course of this mysterious universe in a quest for meaning. Because with that kind of pep talk, the rest of us will be too crushed to engage in the adventure of our lives, as our inspiration to live will quickly be dissolved into the cold, complex mix of bio-chemical mechanisms. However scientifically true as it may later turn out, when you break your heart, lose your self-respect, experience humiliation yourself or of others, the last thing you want is the arrogant smirk of science intellectuals writing off your pain as neural breakdown or DNA failure. That is why we should not look to science for personal meaning.

Crick and his colleague, Dr. Koch, did acknowledge in the interview that theirs is an ethically precarious science and that human beings will never wholly submit to this view of themselves. The late Rene Dubos, a microbiologist at the Rockefeller University who won the 1969 Pulitzer prize for his book "So Human an Animal" (Scribners, New York, 1969) that beautifully journeyed into the uniqueness of being human without compromising its scientific foundations, I think, could have written a worthy commentary on Crick’s and Koch’s works as far as the work of these two scientists render porous the line between how the mind works and the meaning of human lives. Dubos painted the predicament of human consciousness as it tries to capture all it is by what it is, with the help of some lines by Dostoevsky "…hadn’t we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply send these algorithms to the devil, to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will?…the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key."  

In the end, we may really be piano keys but it is also part of this very consciousness to forever try to refuse to believe so and I think that is so uniquely human. We see the evidence of notes and the dictates of other musical symbols in our physical lives but we somehow could not wholly subscribe to any theory that says who we are, in all our voices and instrumentations that form the human chorus in this universe, is a complex but not inscrutable firework of neural synapses and latticework of spiraling nucleotide bases (DNA). We intuitively balk at the idea that there is no transcendence of any sort and that what science can "see" is all humans have been, are and can become.

I think this quest of science to try to wholly explain human consciousness in terms of neural coordinates is like a hand trying to hold itself. I, for one, have to admit that when scientists get to think that theirs is the approach that could explain all that humans have been, are and can become, in one sweep of a mechanism like what Crick and Koch hope, I am thrown into a schizoid reaction. I can picture a neural connection for "joy" lighting up in my brain for the triumph of reason at the same time as neural connections for "terror" and "regret" for solving what I think is the most beautiful and poignant mystery of science.

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