Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience.
Mr. Lightman is at an age when such ultimate questions of life—and a possible afterlife—resonate more deeply. That urgency sharpens the focus of The Transcendent Brain, which departs from the more loosely discursive sensibility of the author’s recent books ... Mr. Lightman’s gift for distilling complex ideas and emotions to their bright essence quickly wins the day. He displays a beautiful economy of language, describing one of his moments of transcendence as succinctly as Thoreau ever could ... A big challenge in placing a subject as ineffable as transcendence under the microscope is that even with the best intentions, the result can feel aridly reductionist ... Mr. Lightman, though, belongs to a noble tradition of science writers...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 author’s overall thesis seems to involve some mistaken assumptions. The first is that the belief in a neo-platonic soul is essential for faith. True, as early Christianity spread into a world dominated by Greek philosophy, this view of the soul became popular ... Lightman’s second mistaken assumption is that substance dualism is essential to religious ways of understanding personhood ... So, the author’s attempt to justify a merely spiritual rather than religious worldview does not fare well, for the simple reason that modern science has emerged out of a theological womb in which belief in a personal cosmic mind behind all that exists provides the common thread.
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.
