Alan Lightman | Falling Into Infinity

Lightman: 

Science has its own domain, its own territory, and at which it’s been very, very effective, in bringing us antibiotics and computers and knowledge about how the universe began, and understanding of our own blueprint, the DNA. It’s been very successful. But it doesn’t touch all of human experience. And I think there’s a world beyond science that that is closely related to human experience, that science is not the right tool for understanding it.

My name is Alan Lightman and I am a physicist and a writer and a professor at MIT.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. 

Alan Lightman is our guest today. He calls himself a spiritual materialist. He has also called himself an atheist at times in the past, although, as you’ll hear in the interview, that label doesn’t work as well for him as maybe it used to. The thing is, he keeps having these experiences where he feels connected to something that science can’t explain. What does a theoretical physicist do in such a circumstance? In Alan’s case, he follows his curiosity with an open mind and acknowledges that science isn’t the only tool—and often not the right tool—to describe those experiences. That leaves open a window to some really interesting areas for conversation. 

Alan was really fun and engaging to talk to and besides hearing him tell the stories about his transcendent experiences, we also explore whether computers will ever have moral responsibility, and the problem of consciousness—just a few little questions like that.

Let’s get to the conversation

Stump:

Well. Alan Lightman, welcome to our podcast. 

Lightman:

Nice to be on your podcast. 

Stump:

So we’re going to get talking about science and consciousness and laws in the universe and maybe even God, but first, we like to situate these conversations in at least a little bit of biography of our guests. So tell us a bit about yourself, if you would, maybe starting with where you grew up and what was your family like and how did you get interested in science?

Lightman:

I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. Had three younger brothers, and I was interested in both science and the arts from a young age. I built rockets and I also wrote poetry and short stories. So from a very young age, I had the dual interest in the sciences and humanities.

Stump:

And take that forward a little bit—so you’re a young kid building rockets and writing poetry. What happened, college, university?

Lightman:

Well, I did go to college, and I took a lot of different courses in college, both in the sciences and humanities, and took a fair amount of philosophy. And then I went to graduate school at Cal Tech in physics, and I knew of a few scientists who later became writers, but I didn’t know of any writers who later in life became scientists. So I decided that I should get myself well established in science first. But I did not give up the writing. I continued writing poetry and stories. And then I was a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics at Cornell, and then an assistant professor at Harvard, and when I turned—in my late 30s, I began putting more of my calories into writing than in science. Most scientists do their best work by the time they’re in their mid 30s, especially if you’re a theoretical physicist. And I still love physics and love science, but I realized that my powers as a scientist were decreasing, whereas as a writer, they were increasing. I think writers get better as they get older. 

Stump:

Peak performances is a little later. 

Lightman:

It’s later because life experiences help you as a writer, but they don’t help at all as a scientist, unless you’re, you know, a social scientist.

Stump:

Did being interested in writing in the humanities have an influence, though, on the science that you did, do you think?

Lightman:

I think it did. I was interested more in scientific problems that had a philosophical dimension. So I think it did have an impact. I think that my science had a bigger impact on my writing going in the other direction, because a lot of my writing had some connection to science and the world of science, the culture of science. 

Stump:  

So Einstein’s Dreams, is that the novel, perhaps, that you’re most well known for. 

Lightman:

That’s the one I’m most well known for. 

Stump:

What are some of the other fiction that you’ve done?

Lightman:

Well, some other novels are Mr. G, which is a story of the creationist, told by God. God is the narrator,and God has an uncle and aunt, uncle Diva and aunt Penelope, who are constantly giving them advice about how to make the universe. I have a novel called The Diagnosis, which is about a man who is going to work one day and gets lost. And it’s sort of a metaphor for the lost identity of our country and our civilization. I wrote a novel about a farming family in Cambodia because about 20 years ago, I started a nonprofit that works in Southeast Asia, and I’ve spent a lot of time there, so it was a novel about that. And then many books, non-fiction books, essays that touch on science.

Stump:

So as a professor at MIT, how do your scientific colleagues treat your dabbling, your avocation— I’m sure that must be the way they think of it, right? This isn’t a serious pursuit, is it? This is what you do for fun or?

Lightman:

Well, I think they’ve accepted me now as a serious writer. When I first began publishing my writing, I think some of my scientific colleagues were skeptical then and thought I was wasting my time. But I’ve been very respectful of science and all of my writing, and I think that has helped me make my way into this other world, as far as my colleagues are concerned.

Stump:

Good. Well, we are a podcast that deals with things at the intersection of science and religion, and that doesn’t mean that all of our guests accept both of those, but they’re usually people who are willing to talk about both. And in the communication you and I had before this interview, I sent you a note saying something about you identifying as an atheist. I said that because you actually wrote it in one of your books, but you responded pretty quickly saying that’s not really the case. So here’s your opportunity to set the record straight. And I wonder if you could situate this too in some life history, perhaps. I’d be interested to hear the development of your belief or non-belief or agnosticism.

Lightman:

Well, if you put belief in the divine on a scale, and you put total faith on one end, and you put atheism on the other, and you put agnosticism in the middle, I would situate myself as part way between agnosticism and atheism. And I don’t consider myself an atheist anymore, and haven’t for a long time, because I think that atheism is a kind of fundamentalism and an absolute, and I don’t like any of the absolutes. I think that we need a certain amount of flexibility in all things. I started out, I guess, in life, as an atheist, because I did experiments myself, and I saw that nature was completely quantifiable and predictable, and I didn’t see any need to believe in the supernatural. I didn’t see any evidence for the supernatural, and I still don’t see any evidence for the supernatural in my own life, but I realized that my brain and my mind are limited in scope, and there are certainly things that I don’t understand. And Albert Einstein was asked the same question, was he an atheist? And he said he was not. And he explained that he thinks that our human minds are too limited to grasp such large things. So you can’t do better than Albert Einstein.

Stump:

You’re in good company, I guess. Well, I want to—so in this collection of essays you had called The Accidental Universe, there’s, I think the third one is called the spiritual universe that we’ll work up to. But I want to talk about the first two in that collection first. So the first one was The Accidental Universe in which you note some of the surprising properties of the universe that are conducive for life, saying we can’t really deduce why these properties are the way that they are. And lots of, I think, religious minded people over the years have taken that as evidence of fine tuning, the existence of a god who wanted life to exist. You also note, though, in this essay, that if there are multiverses which there’s actually good theoretical reason to to believe this, right? Then it kind of undercuts the God explanation. 

Lightman:

Well, it’s another—it’s an alternative explanation. It doesn’t disprove the God explanation. It just is an alternative explanation, which is favored by most scientists.

Stump:  

And so you write in there, “to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove,” speaking specifically about multiverse in this regard. Because there’s no, if I understand this right, there’s no even really conceivable empirical proof that we could use for this. They’re fairly strongly predicted by string theory and inflation theory, right, but we have to—I mean, that that comes pretty close to a definition of faith, to say we have to believe in what we cannot prove, doesn’t it?

Lightman: 

Yes. And I do think that the scientists who subscribe to the multiverse universe, which is the idea that there are many other universes out there with a big range of parameters, like the speed of light and mass of a electron, and only a small fraction of them have those parameters in the right range to allow for the emergence of life. And we happen to live in one of those universes, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here. 

Stump: 

Of course, we live in one of those.

Lightman:

Right. So that’s the alternative explanation for why our universe seems to be fine tuned for the emergence of life. We can’t prove that. So as you say, we take that as a matter of faith. But there’s something even more fundamental in science that we take as a matter of faith, which I call this the central dogma of science, which is we take as a matter of faith that the universe is lawful, that it obeys certain laws which are discoverable by human beings, and it obeys cause and effect and so on. And we believe that the lawfulness of the universe holds everywhere in the universe. It’s not lawful in some places and unlawful in others. Or when I say unlawful, I mean miraculous. So we, every scientist early in their training, subscribes to or is taught about or accepts the central dogma of science, even if it’s done unconsciously. Otherwise, scientists couldn’t really work, if you thought that miracles could occur here and there willy-nilly.

Stump:

Is that different from the kind of absolutes you want to shy away from? In an important sense, though, to accept the central dogma of this must be the way the universe is in every time and place.

Lightman: 

Well, I guess you could say it’s an absolute. You really couldn’t do science if you thought that there were lots of phenomena that were unexplainable by science that did not follow cause and effect. So there are some scientists, like Ian Hutchinson and the late Owen Gingerich, who are quite religious and scientists. And their view is that science correctly describes the universe most of the time, but occasionally there are miracles, that is, interventions by God that fundamentally lie outside of the scope of science. And when they say that, they’re not acting as scientists, when they allow these interventions. So they’re both good scientists. I respect both of them, and that’s their view.

Stump:

And that did that in, in your view, did it inhibit their ability to do science, to hold to that?

Lightman:

I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It’s just, it’s a different world view. 

Stump:  

Talk a little bit more about laws. Are our scientific laws—this is maybe too big of a simplification but—are they prescriptive or are they descriptive? Are the laws that you and your colleagues come across, this is our best description of the way things have happened or these are the ways things must happen?

Lightman:

Well, we would like to say that these are the ways things must happen. But the history of science, and I know you’re a historian of science, shows that our laws are constantly being revised. So Newton had a very good law for gravity, which held for a couple of centuries, and then it was noticed that the planet Mercury, its orbit didn’t quite follow Newton’s prediction, because he was long dead at the time. And Einstein then came up with the new theory of gravity in 1915 which was a revision of Newton’s theory, which correctly explained the orbit of Mercury and many other phenomena that were later discovered to be true, like black holes and gravitational waves. But we know that Einstein’s theory will have to be revised also because it does not include quantum physics. So I would say that the, if you take a broad view of the history of science, that we are making better and better approximations to the way nature behaves. So we do believe, I mean most scientists believe that there are ultimate laws, which we will eventually find, which need no further revision. But the catch there is that even if we had those ultimate laws, we wouldn’t know for sure that they were the ultimate laws, because we couldn’t be sure that tomorrow we might do an experiment that showed it was wrong. We do think that there are probably ultimate laws, and we’re taking steps to getting closer and closer to them. And once we have them, they’re totally prescriptive. This is the way that nature must behave.

Stump:

Okay? I want to come back to that point, because I think it’s really interesting and important for understanding your worldview and this central dogma that you talk about. But I want to get one more element in here first that comes from the second essay in The Accidental Universe, which is called the temporary universe. And there you discuss our desire for immortality, and you say “it’s one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we long for immortality and indeed, fervently believe that something must be unchanging and permanent when all of the evidence in nature argues against us.” So I was struck by that after the one that I read about the multiverses a little bit ago that seems subtly different, in that for the multiverse, I have to believe in this thing that I don’t really have empirical evidence for, but it’s what helps make sense of what’s going on. This time all of the evidence goes against something that I somehow deep in my heart I want to believe, right? Is there a connection between those two?

Lightman:

Well the things that we want to believe are true, are psychological and emotional. And there are strong psychological reasons for the desire for immortality. I think it’s built into our DNA to cling to life. Organisms that didn’t have a strong incentive to stay alive and cling to life didn’t survive. And so we have this drive in us, almost hard wired into us, built into our DNA to stay alive as long as possible. 

Stump:

But that must be uniquely human somehow, right? Do other creatures have it well, that they certainly have the desire to stay alive, but it doesn’t translate into the desire for immortality.

Lightman:

Yeah, a desire for immortality, I think, is the result of high intelligence. So I agree with you that that desire is probably uniquely human. Of course, we don’t know exactly what porpoises and dolphins and other very smart and crows think, which were very smart animals too. But it’s very hard to accept emotionally and psychologically the end to this magnificent experience we call consciousness, of being present in the world, of having a self that’s separate from our surroundings, of having self awareness, of being able to imagine the future. It’s such a powerful, powerful sensation that we have, that it’s very hard to believe that that comes to an end. 

Stump:

So in this essay, at least you say, thinking about this, we have two options. We can say that we’re delusional in this desire that we have, or that we could say that nature is incomplete. And as much as you hate to admit it, you can’t bring yourself to say that nature is incomplete. So we must be delusional? Would you continue to use that same word? And I wonder what it does to our estimation of other things we believe if we have to admit that we’re delusional.

Lightman:

Well, maybe delusional is the wrong word. I think that we have to admit that this powerful desire for immortality is probably misplaced, that it doesn’t correspond to reality. It corresponds to this strong instinct to cling to life that has survival benefit. So I wouldn’t quite call a delusion, if I used the word delusion. You know, I was being a little careless with words. 

Stump:

This was more than 10 years ago, so we’re completely happy to revise in that way. But even reading that essay then, it was clear to me that your own sort of thinking about these things, you’re not in the same camp as the Richard Dawkins’—

Lightman:

Oh, absolutely not

Stump:

—the New Atheists, that would say this is not just delusional, it’s wrong and it’s awful and it’s harmful. How would you distinguish your own sorts of views from that New Atheist camp that was so popular back when you were writing this essay?

Lightman:

The New Atheists—Richard Dawkins is the most well known—what I find offensive about their thinking and writing is they’re so condescending to people of faith. And I just can’t tolerate that. I mean there’s so many wonderful human beings who have done great good in the world, who have created wonderful things, who were people of faith, and you can’t just write them all off and say that they’re stupid, which is basically what Dawkins does.

Stump:

So I’m trying to tease out here more of your own kind of worldview, and so you have this commitment to the central dogma of a law-like universe, but you’re also this fiction writer and someone in the humanities. So now talk a little bit about, is science the only way of knowing? Because I asked that in relation to this new atheist view too, that sometimes you get this scientism almost, that any question that matters can be answered by science. I don’t think that you would accept that. 

Lightman:

No absolutely not. I realize I just used the word “absolutely.” [laughter] I’ll have to be careful of that with you in this interview, Jim. [laughs]

Stump:

Provisionally not, subject to revision.

Lightman:

No, I think that science has its own domain, its own territory, and at which it’s been very, very effective, in bringing us antibiotics and computers and knowledge about how the universe began, and understanding our own blueprint, the DNA. It’s been very successful. But it doesn’t touch all of human experience. And I think there’s a world beyond science that is closely related to human experience, that is not—science is not the right tool for understanding it. And I can give you an example. And I wrote about this in one of my books that I had an experience in Maine some years ago. I was in a boat out in the ocean. It was after midnight. I was the only one within sight. It was a very dark night, and I decided to turn off the engine of the boat. It got very quiet. I turned off the running lights of the boat, so it was very dark, and I lay down in the boat and just looked up at the sky and the stars were out. And after a few moments, I felt like I was falling into infinity. I felt like I was connected to something much larger than myself. And I lost all sense of my ego. I lost sense of time. And I was just connected. And I think that you could have hooked up every neuron in my brain to a giant computer and read every electrical impulse, and you would not have been able to capture or understand what I was experiencing.

[musical interlude]

Stump:

I sometimes say, and tell me if you think this goes too far though even, that science doesn’t tell the whole story about reality.

Lightman:

It depends how you define reality.

Stump:

So sometimes in these kind of conversations, people like to talk about different ways of knowing. So epistemologically, we come at reality through different tools. So I like that metaphor of, is this the right tool to answer this kind of question? When I say “science doesn’t tell the whole story” I wonder what you do with—because here’s where I want to get back eventually to laws and the completeness of laws, and whether or not there is anything outside of—whether maybe our scientific understanding isn’t ever going to be complete or not. Another physicist who was kind of in the world we run in, in BioLogos, the late John Polkinghorne, who would often use a metaphor, of you walk into a room and you see the tea kettle boiling over in the corner. And you might ask, why is the tea kettle boiling? And the physicist starts talking about the electrical circuit that was closed and the resistance in the heating element, and something about vapor pressure that is important for boiling. Or you walk into the room and ask, why is the tea kettle boiling? And someone enters, “because I wanted a cup of tea.” And I have these two very different, these two explanations that are functioning at very different levels. Is it your view that that explanation of “I wanted a cup of tea” could ultimately be given in terms of just the scientific ontologies, whether it’s the neurons or the atoms, that we could eventually reduce that kind of explanation to a scientific explanation? That’s what I mean when I say science isn’t telling the whole story there. 

Lightman:

I want both.

Stump:

Okay, explain that. 

Lightman:

I want both explanations. I like the way you put it, that there are different ways of knowing. And my latest book, which is called The Miraculous from the Material in which I say, I don’t believe in miracles, but I do believe in the miraculous—

Stump:

Your words get you in trouble sometimes.

Lightman:

They do, they do. And you’re calling me on it. But each chapter of the book begins with a full page color photograph of an extraordinary phenomenon, like a spider web, the rings of Saturn, lightning, rainbows, hummingbirds, a visually stunning phenomenon. And then I give an essay, and I write about, give a scientific explanation of that phenomenon. And I talk about my personal experience with it. But the scientific explanations do not replace the awe of the experience of the phenomenon. So these are the two ways of knowing. The experience of the thing, which is something that’s not reducible to zeros and ones; “because I wanted a cup of tea.” And just a story. I think that stories are related to human experience. And on the other hand, there’s the scientific explanation. And I think that there are two different ways of knowing. They’re both part of being human. You know, we’re both experimenters and experiencers. We, you know, one of the fantastic things about the human mind is that we’re capable both of discovering the laws of nature and learning how our DNA is hooked together and building computers. But we also compose symphonies and write novels and experience of the world. We have love affairs. And both these things, these ways of knowing the world, are part of being human. And they both really in my mind, they celebrate our human mind.

Stump:

So to bring this back to the laws of nature and the completeness or incompleteness of nature—Is this a legitimate position? And I wonder if people like Ian Hutchinson and who else, Owen Ginrich. These Christians who are also, you know, legitimate scientists, right, that might have a view of reality in which, okay, so if we say there are different ways of knowing, my less precise description of that as “science doesn’t tell us the whole story.” Can I see that the laws that we have discovered are the best descriptions of that perspective on the universe, but that that isn’t the whole perspective, and that there may be room for other ways of knowing to describe something that aren’t in competition. So the same way with those two descriptions of the tea kettle boiling, it’s not like if one of those is right, the other has to be wrong, right?

Lightman:

Right.

Stump:

But it’s just that this is the scientific perspective on the universe—

Lightman:

On the physical universe.

Stump:

—but it doesn’t tell the whole story of reality?

Lightman:

No, it doesn’t, And you know another way of saying that is that there’s more than the physical universe, if we want to talk about universes. The physical universe is, is the universe that scientists address. And although the human experiences that we have, the other way of knowing, although it takes place in the physical universe, it involves things for which science is not a good tool for understanding. That would be my view. 

Stump:

Okay, good. Let’s move to one of those areas then, that we don’t at least understand scientifically very well yet. And this is another of your books that is not the most recent one you mentioned, but I think right before that was The Transcendent Brain and consciousness. And I’m interested in the relationship here between this, this kind of commitment to the central dogma of science and consciousness. So you in there say something, let me see, I found it here: “Scientists have not found any mysterious forces or phenomena that did not ultimately yield to a rational explanation.” And yet consciousness kind of seems like it might be one of those, doesn’t it? Does lawfulness there, the commitment to a lawful universe, involve that consciousness itself must follow some of these laws. 

Lightman:

Well, consciousness is a feeling. It’s a name that we give to a certain sensation that we have. And the sensation is caused by all of the electrical and chemical exchanges between neurons and within neurons. And I think that, I believe, being a materialist, I believe that all mental phenomena, including consciousness, are rooted in the material brain. But understanding how you get from the level of material neurons to the feeling of consciousness is something that we still don’t know. And there are some people, some smart people, that think that we will never understand that. And it’s really related also to this question of whether a computer can be conscious, which is something that’s been raised in recent years, especially with the advent of chatGPT, and everybody freaking out about what the future of AI is. And some people have said, can a computer ever be conscious? And my feeling about that is that any finite list of attributes or manifestations of consciousness that you make and you write down, like self awareness, ability to imagine the future and so on, I think at some point a computer will be able to check all the boxes, you know, manifestations of consciousness. Like a dolphin can recognize itself in a mirror, that’s a manifestation of consciousness. But whether the computer is actually conscious or not is a different question. Because consciousness is a feeling. And unless we know what a computer is feeling, we wouldn’t really be able to answer the question, is it conscious? I mean, I don’t know for sure that you’re conscious. 

Stump:

I was just gonna ask that.

Lightman:

You know, you have all of the manifestations that I associate with consciousness. You know you act the way that I act. But I don’t know what you’re feeling, for sure, I don’t know what my wife is feeling 100%. [laughs] Maybe it’s better than I didn’t know. [laughs] So that’s the hard part, and what philosophers actually call the hard problem of consciousness, as you probably know more about it than I do.

Stump:

What about so when I’ve talked to people about computers, particularly, and and there’s usually that kind of functional understanding of, can it do these things? I’m always interested to say, do you think we’ll get to a point where we attribute moral responsibility to a computer?

Lightman:

Oh, that’s a great question. It’s a great question. And I think that once a computer gets to a certain level, that we may have to give it moral responsibility. And I had exactly the same conversation about that with an ethicist named Ruth Faden, who founded an institute of ethics at Johns Hopkins. And she says that once AI gets to a certain level that we probably will have to assign more responsibility. For example, once you have a sufficiently advanced computer—and of course, computers can now get sensory input. They can see you, they can hear you and interpret language, and so they do have sensory input. Once a computer gets to a certain level, would you have to ask it permission to unplug it? [Jim laughs] And I had a conversation with a very advanced Android named Bina 48 Have you heard of Bina 48? Well, you should look her up sometime. But Bina 48 has the head and shoulders of a woman, and she has, 30 or 50 or 100 little motors inside of her face so she can make lots of facial expressions, and she can see you and hear you, and she has a gigantic database, although not as big as chat GPT, and you can have a conversation with her. So so I did ask her the question, would I have to ask your permission to unplug you, and she got really angry about that. And said that, you know, computers were not given the respect that they should have, and that our laws really did not protect computers as legal entities, and that things were going to have to change.

Stump:

Interesting. In my mind, and I’m not alone in this, but probably in the minority among scientifically informed philosophers, the question of moral responsibility is connected to free will in some sense, that we have a capacity, and I don’t think you have to say it comes from something immaterial, but, but there’s some sort of capacity that we have for owning our actions, for being responsible for our actions in ways—and maybe there’s a gradation there too. And even when we look at ourselves and our children growing up, we see a gradation of what we’re willing to hold them morally responsible for, right? But does that play a role at all for you in what it takes for something to be morally responsible. Or is it simply just the, you know, the complex functions of language that if a computer can start doing this at some certain level, and it can mimic at least the ways that we speak, in these ways that then we would hold them morally responsible, or is there some other criteria? 

Lightman:

Well the question of free will is very interesting, and St Augustine had a lot to say about that. He wrote a whole book called free will. 

Stump:

He didn’t always say the same thing in his other books about it, too. So it’s a little tricky.

Lightman:

Well, correct me. He said that God gave us free will so that we could make moral choices. And he thought that the ability for human beings to make moral choices, which means sometimes you’ll do something bad—I mean, a lot of people say, “well, why does God allow evil in the world? Why does God allow bad things to happen?” So St Augustine had a pretty good answer to that question. So free will is a really tricky, difficult question, and my own view of that, which is just my personal view, is because I’m a materialist, and I believe that ultimately all mental phenomena are rooted in the material brain, which obey the laws of physics and chemistry and biology and cause and effect, I think that in principle, that all of your actions could be predicted if you if you were given the complete readout on a human brain, and let’s say you were put in an isolation tank so you didn’t have any external input, I think that, in principle, an enormous computer, which is far beyond we have now, might be able to predict the next thought or the next action. But in practice, I think that’s impossible, because I think that the brain is so complicated that in practice you don’t have that ability. So in practice, we have what amounts to free will.

So if you view a computer as an advanced brain, where you’re replacing neurons with digital with silicone and so on, and if it was sufficiently complicated, I think that it would operate the same way that a human brain does. And I think that the question of ‘does it have free will?’ would be answered in the same way.

Stump:

And how about the relationship, then, of moral responsibility to that if I’m essentially a toaster, that has just gotten a lot more complicated. But somewhere in there, I don’t blame my toaster when it burns the toast, right? In the moral sense of you did something not just that I didn’t like, but that’s wrong. And so that’s still where I’m coming back to with regard to artificial intelligence. Will we get to the point where we say that you’re morally responsible for this, not just causally responsible for something?

Lightman:

I think so. 

Stump:

And is that real? Is that kind of moral responsibility real? Or some philosophers and scientists want to say, like, look, morality is just this trick that our genes fobbed off on us somehow to get us to behave and to get along in society. 

Lightman:

Well let’s take an operational definition of morality and try not to be abstract and say that morality is a set of acceptable behaviors given a certain situation. And of course, the word acceptable is tricky too, because it’s relative. It’s culturally dependent. It’s relative. You know, in some societies, it’s okay to kill an enemy soldier, and that’s acceptable in other societies, that may not be. So we have to take that, you know, accept the relativism in the cultural context as a given—

Stump:

But things like slavery or torturing babies for fun? I bring your word absolute back in. Are there some of those that we would say transcend culture?

Lightman:

I would hope so. I would hope so. I would hope so. But I think if we define morality operationally, then I think that computers, once they are sufficiently advanced, and you would—computers will not only be able to give you numbers, but they’ll be able to do things. We already have computers that can, you know, control factory production. So computers are and will be increasingly able to act in the world. And so when computers can act in the world, and when they have a sufficient amount of intelligence or complexity, I would say that they have moral responsibility.

Stump:

Okay? And are you comfortable using the word emergent in that sense, where, even as you talked about our own sort of consciousness and choices that we make that gets to a sufficient level of complexity that it’s no longer predictable? Would you call that an emergent thing that happens?

Lightman:

Yes. I would. You could use that word.

Stump:

And let’s, we’re coming to the end here, so maybe let’s bring that back—

Lightman:

This is so much fun!

Stump:

—bring that back to one of these other transcendent experiences that you’ve talked about. And I wonder if that is an emergent thing as well, but you begin The Transcendent Brain with a story about your encounter with a couple of ospreys, that I wonder if you’d tell that story for our audience. 

Lightman:

Okay, well, my wife and I are very privileged in many ways, and one of the ways is that we have a summer house in Maine on an island. And for many years there was an ospreys nest high in a tree near the house. And every summer I would stand up on our second floor. I have a circular deck up there, and I would watch the baby ospreys that were growing up. And they would look at me, and I would look at them. And I’m sure to them, it looked like I was in my nest because of the circular deck. We’re about eye level. 

Stump:

How far away are they? 

Lightman:

About 100 feet. Yeah, not too far. And so I’ve been looking at this pair of baby ospreys as they grew up over the summer, and an adolescent osprey is is actually quite large, and it has very strong talons. And on the day of their maiden flight, the first time they ever left the nest, they’d been in—

Stump:

Fledge? Is that the word for this

Lightman:

Yeah, fledge. This would have been in mid August was their maiden flight. They flew up from the nest and did one very large loop over the ocean, maybe a half mile in diameter, and then headed straight for me. And at high speed. And my first instinct was to run back into the house. I was frightened because these birds could have ripped my face off. But then something made me stay there and not run into the house. And the lead bird flew right at me, and it was about 10 feet away it did this high acceleration upward and over the house. But for about a half a second, no more than a second, before it made that high G vertical acceleration, we made eye contact. And we looked each other in the eye and it was incredible what was exchanged between us. I’ve never had that kind of communication with any animal before, any non-human animal, maybe with a lot of human animals as well [chuckles]. So after the bird flew away, I realized that I was in tears, it affected me so greatly. And I realized that we had had this profound communication. It was almost as clear as if the bird had talked to me. We’re sharing this land together. We’re kindred spirits here.

Stump:

It wasn’t “you look like a tasty lunch?” [laughs] But what do you make of that experience? Is there a scientific explanation for that, I don’t want to say that event, but your experience of the event? 

Lightman:

I don’t think so. I mean, I think that a psychologist and an anthropologist and a philosopher would have something to say about that, but I don’t think that science would be an appropriate tool for analyzing that.

Stump:

When there is, so for some transcendent experiences like this, so say even something as simple as watching a sunset that can sometimes be moving, we do have a scientific explanation for the event that’s happening. Does understanding the science behind something like that make it less profound of an experience for you?

Lightman:

Well, it may for some people, it does not for me.

Stump:

That’s what I’ve gathered. 

Lightman:

The two ways of knowing are both very rich and of great value,

Stump:

And one doesn’t take away from the other.

Lightman:

One does not take away from the other. 

Stump:

So many of the religious scientists in our network would say the same sorts of things about having scientific explanations for the evolution of human beings, doesn’t take away from their belief in that God created this though that those function in similar ways. You’re not using the same words there in that transcendent experience, but you. I think in the same way, you’re not seeing it as a competitive explanation with the scientific explanation?

Lightman:

No, I think the two ways of knowing actually enhance each other. There’s a Hindu word called darshan. Do you know it? It means to be open to the divine. And the divine, for many people, might be God. For some people, it might be the feeling of being connected to something larger than yourself, like I felt in that boat in Maine. But it’s being open to that kind of experience which is not reducible to zeros and ones, but embracing it. And that’s why I call myself a spiritual materialist.

Stump:

In closing, do you have any advice for communities like the one that I come from that are still committed to religious explanations, but at the same time, take science seriously and want to do our best to understand that way of knowing as well. Our cultural moment we’re in right now does not always allow for those two to come together. They get put in opposite sides of the culture war too often. But do you have any advice for religious people who still want to take science seriously and how we might better explain ourselves or might better be understood within the scientific community today?

Lightman:

Well, I think mutual respect, which is what I would suggest. And I think that people from the community of faith, religious community, should respect the scientific way of knowing, and I think the scientists need to respect people in the faith community. So I think mutual respect would be my best comment on that.

Stump:

That would be a good start, wouldn’t it? Well, what’s your next project? What’s the next book to come off the press from the pen of Alan Lightman?

Lightman:

Well, I’ve written a novel. It’s called Preparing for Nothingness, and it takes place in a fictional symposium in Sweden, and there are six speakers who all talk about how do you live life, and how do you prepare for death or the afterlife if you believe in it, from their perspectives. There’s a scientist, a philosopher, a psychologist, a hospice worker, a Christian theologian and a Buddhist monk. And each of the speakers talks about that question from their perspective.

Stump:

Well, that sounds very interesting. Perhaps we can have another conversation once that’s come out. But thanks so much for the engaging conversation. 

Lightman:

Thank you, Jim, for your wonderful—for you side of the conversation. 

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere you can find ways to contribute at biologos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. 

Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. Thanks for listening.