WITH THE WORD “consciousness” introduced into the conversation, I suddenly realized why our morning talk had got me thinking about my days at Guideposts, with our modern world’s obsession with fame, and with that feeling of fleeting reality that I believed so many people in the modern world suffered from.
I also realized that with it, we had stepped to the very center of what our discussions had been moving toward from the very beginning.
“Consciousness” is a notoriously hard word to define, but one simple—and accurate—way to do so is to substitute another word for it: thought.
The word “thought” took on new significance when the seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist René Descartes used it in what is perhaps the single most famous philosophical statement in history.
This sentence, Cogito ergo sum, is usually translated as “I think, therefore I am.” It’s one that most people remember from school no matter how little contact with Philosophy classes they may have had.
Though Descartes first formulated this sentence in Latin, he introduced it to the world in 1644 in his native French as Je pense, donc je suis. But whatever language this sentence is spoken in, its meaning remains clear: the fact that we think is evidence—incontrovertible evidence—that we exist.
Thinking, said Descartes, is the one and only thing, in a world where we must greet everything we see with doubt and a demand for proof, that does not require proof. It does not require proof because it is self-evident. No one can doubt that he or she thinks—that he or she is conscious. This is, said Descartes, the one unqualified truth that we can know—the one fact that is evident without any need of experiment.
But a closer look at Descartes’s famous declaration reveals another message: to arrive at truth, we must separate our minds from everything else in the universe.
Descartes, in short, is the father of our distinctly modern way of looking at the world: as a collection of material objects that we can isolate, measure, perform experiments on, and just generally treat as separate objects; objects having nothing to do with the thinking, watching, manipulating selves that are performing all these experiments.
For Descartes, the division between the out there world of objects and the in here world of thought was firm. This division in essence launched modern science, for it freed scientists to measure, weigh, kill, dissect, experiment on, and just basically do whatever it wanted to the world and all the things, be they living or dead, within it.
In the world before Descartes, objects could be loaded down with all kinds of invisible yet real qualities. A holy relic preserved in a church was holy not just because it had, at some point in the past, been associated with a sacred event. That holiness lived, as a very real power, within that object itself.
Not so after Descartes. By dividing the world into “inner” and “outer,” he robbed the outer world not just of its holiness, but of all qualities, from large to small.
Before Descartes came along, the world was full of qualities. After Descartes, all those qualities were swept away as mere illusion. If a particular spot—a section of woods, say—held a certain kind of magic that all who went there could feel, people understood it as special. After Descartes, there was nothing real about this so-called magic. The leaves on the trees were real. The earth those trees grew out of was real. But all moods and atmospheres, all beauty, anything at all that failed the test of being physically analyzable, was proclaimed unreal. This even extended to color, which Descartes proclaimed was a creation of the “inside” world of the mind, and was not present at all in the nuts-and-bolts, measurable world, with which science was from then on exclusively to concern itself.
In 1665, just a few decades after Descartes formulated his famous sentence, an outbreak of bubonic plague sent the young scholar Isaac Newton back from Cambridge University to Woolsthorpe, the English country manor where the wealthy young man had grown up. While reading under an apple tree in his family’s orchard, Newton watched an apple drop from the tree to the ground. (This story is often told with the apple landing squarely on Newton’s head, but that part was added later.)
This seemingly obvious observation led Newton to ask a question that no one, in the history of humanity, had apparently asked before. Why, Newton wondered, did that apple make a beeline for the ground instead of—who knows?—drifting off into the countryside, or floating up into the sky?
For the same reason, Newton swiftly intuited, that he himself, and every other object around him, didn’t drift off into the sky. Something was holding both him, the apple, and everything else down.
This observation led Newton to suggest the existence of gravity, the first and most important of those invisible forces that Bernie and I had begun our conversations discussing.
Along with a handful of other men—Galileo, Copernicus, and, a century later, Charles Darwin—Descartes and Newton created the world we live in today: a world full of physical objects that seem real, and an inner world of thought, or consciousness, which is not real.
It should be mentioned, by the way, that this was not Descartes’s original intent. By separating the inner world of thought, or consciousness, from the outer world of measurable things, Descartes merely meant to divide the world into two parts: the res extensa, or exterior world, and the res cogitans, or the inner world of thought. Like all the other fathers of modern science, Descartes was a firm believer in God.
But by the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists had pretty much forgotten about granting the inner world of thought, or consciousness, any kind of reality. What was the point? By treating the exterior world as a dead realm of matter to be manipulated and used however we liked, science had made tremendous advances, changing the entire world more in a few hundred years than it had been changed in all the thousands of years that had elapsed before its sudden explosive birth.
“Okay,” I said, back in Bernie’s office. “I have a feeling that consciousness is the up-to-now invisible planet that, whether we meant to or not, we’ve both been circling closer and closer to. ‘Consciousness,’ frustratingly vague a word as it is, is the word that lies at the center of everything we’ve been talking about. And in line with that, I think now I understand where you’ve been heading with all of these arguments you’ve been putting forth so far. The model that you were given, that I was given, in Science class when we were kids was that consciousness was something that only came into existence with life. Most likely it came only with quite advanced life. For the billions of years before life arose in the universe, there was no consciousness. Primitive life appeared, but there was no consciousness to be aware of these events, because consciousness only arose after brains developed. First animal, then human brains, which, through the sparks of the synapses zipping back and forth within those brains, created this thing we know as consciousness.”
“Exactly,” said Bernie. “And because the phenomenon of consciousness has been sold short, ordinary people who look to science for answers are sold short too. Because consciousness didn’t arise from matter. It wasn’t created by brains. Consciousness is . . .”
“Primary,” I said, glad that I was back to completing Bernie’s sentences for him. “Consciousness didn’t ‘arise.’ It was here from the beginning. It was, in fact, the first thing, from which all else arose.”
“And that,” Bernie said, “is the reason I’m excited by computers. Not because we’re all living in some computer program created by a bored kid on his couch two hundred years from now, creepily imaginative as that idea is. But because we are conscious beings, living in a simulated universe that was itself created by a conscious being—the supreme conscious being.
“There is nothing genuinely real in our world save for one thing: and that ‘thing’ (which, of course, isn’t a thing) is consciousness. All virtual worlds are, if you follow them back far enough, created. At the end of the day, as they say, the virtual world—its rules, the algorithms thanks to which it is able to run—cannot be created by anything that lives within that same virtual domain. It must be created by something, or Someone, which is outside it and above it.
“Consciousness is, to use your analogy about music, the one true ‘analog’ phenomenon in the universe. Nothing else is genuinely fluid, nothing else is able to transcend the ‘virtual’ nature of everything else in the universe. There is, in fact, nothing else in the world that truly exists. Everything real is consciousness.”
And with that, I realized, I had my second Key:
Consciousness is the only reality in our universe. Matter, energy, space . . . All these things are only simulations, generated by God using the sole and single “thing” in this universe that actually exists. The world of objects we move through is not conscious, but we are. And because we are conscious, we are real.
Emerging from that second talk with Bernie into the overwhelming normalcy of Bernie and Marsha’s house, with the sounds of yet another singing lesson going on upstairs, I marveled at the way these talks had of pulling me into another frame of mind.
There was, I realized, something so real about the things Bernie was saying that, at least while we were discussing them, they had what bordered on a physical effect on me. For all the griping I’d done about my sorry situation in life recently, I was in a truly privileged situation. I was talking with one of those rare individuals who could actually speak, with real authority, about what I really was, about what the world around me really was, and what it all meant. Bernie was, slowly but surely, pulling me into his understanding of the world. And it was doing what I’d hoped it would do, but secretly doubted that it could.
It was cheering me up.
I noticed that Bernie, like me, was one of those people who was happiest when engaged in something, and would sort of pop out of gear and not know what to do with himself when he wasn’t busy. Bernie and Marsha ate dinner early, and once it was done, and Marsha had brought Pogo, their pet box turtle, in for the night, and Bernie had settled himself in front of CNN, I found myself sorely challenged for how to get through the night. That night—my second at the Haisches’—I shut my door, settled my six-foot-two frame somewhat haphazardly into Taylor’s bed, and waited for the two Ambien I’d taken to kick in.
Here I am, I thought, in the middle of Silicon Valley, and I’ve just found out that I live in a giant computer program created by God.
And, meditating on that peculiarity, I was out.