“During our lifetimes, we will get further on that pier. We excitedly add on to the pier little by little, but then we look around and say, “Wait a minute, I’m at the end of the pier but there’s a lot more out there.” The ocean of what we don’t know always dwarfs what we do know, he emphasizes. The work of science is like building a pier out into the ocean, he says. Since scientists mostly talk about what they know, Eagleman’s emphasis on our ignorance may seem strange. In their place, he has coined the term possibilian: those who “celebrate the vastness of our ignorance, are unwilling to commit to any particular made-up story, and take pleasure in entertaining multiple hypotheses.” In the spiritual realm, that leads Eagleman to reject not only conventional religion but also the label of agnostic or atheist. Though they might seem different, Eagleman’s scientific and literary lives really are part of the same creative endeavor aimed at deepening our understanding of a complex world we can never really come close to understanding. And, if things work out the way Eagleman hopes, someday he’ll get a shot at a larger stage where he can fulfill his dream of becoming the Carl Sagan of the brain, explaining the billions and billions of neurons in our head to a curious public.
#SOUL SEEKER WAR OF THE GODS SERIES#
So, while he reports on what-is in scientific journals, his brain and mind run free pondering the what-ifs, as he did in the 2009 book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, a playful series of short philosophical imaginings of life beyond death. But Eagleman-the-writer knows that those machines aren’t going to answer those questions. Welcome to the world of “possibilian” neuroscientist-writer, David Eagleman, to life in the space between what-is and what-if, between the facts we think we know and the fictions that illuminate what we don’t know.Įagleman-the-scientist would love to rev up his high-tech neuroimaging machines to answer the enduring questions about the brain and the mind, the body and the soul. In fact, Eagleman’s brain is not completely sure that there is an Eagleman-beyond-Eagleman’s-brain at all, with or without a soul, whatever that term might mean. That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had a soul, which he is not sure about.
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