The End as Far as We Know, Part 2

In my last blog post I was describing how I went from feeling absolutely bereft in the wake of my husband, Stephen’s death to feeling still connected to him through the love that the two of us had established over our 38 years in life partnership. I talked about how I reappropriated my “eternity channel”—the conduit that I have used most of my life to communicate with the higher power that created and sustains my life—into a means of continuing my long-standing conversation with Stephen. And I was telling you about the very provocative three-part PBS series Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science which is hosted by Alan Lightman. Lightman is a committed research scientist who is exploring in this series what, if anything, can science tell us about our very personal and vivid day-to-day experience. The first episode proved to be just the catalyst I needed to begin a more measured and reasoned approach to the very powerful and sometimes painful process of grief that I had been going through since February 7 of this year.

In the second episode of the Searching series, Lightman helps us to get some perspective on how we humans fit into our Universe as described by the results of careful scientific inquiry. He says we are right in the middle of the very big and the very small. The stars are about 10¹⁰, that is, 10 billion times bigger than us. An atom is about 10 ⁹ or 1 billion times smaller that us. Science and technology have helped us to see back near the beginning of the Universe 13.4 billion years ago, and we’ve learned much about the stars and galaxies, their containers. Science and technology have enabled a look inside even the atom, but we are about to the limit of small. At the level of quantum gravity, everything fades into a frothy mist of probabilities.

Still, wonders Lightman, where does our consciousness fit into this? He interviews a humanoid robot and wonders if it is conscious. Probably not, he concludes, but maybe in the future. He interviews the Dalai Lama, who tells him that matter and consciousness are two different orders of things; one cannot come from the other. Lightman doesn’t agree with the Dalai Lama. He interviews a scientist who is a reductionist; the scientist tells us that he believes that eventually we will understand how consciousness is generated from matter. Still, Lightman is not sure; he has such intense personal experiences, and he feels love and compassion. These things are not well understood from a scientific point of view. Also, we hear the scientist quoting data and statistics that support possible connections between what goes on in our bodies and brains and what we experience, but these do not impress us as having fully accounted for what goes on in our “inner” world.