him to be wrong. Despite what physicists such as Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking tell us, there is no evidence that God plays dice. Those who make such claims are confusing the kinds of predictions we can make about nature with the behavior of nature herself.
2. Beginning the Journey
Everything you know is wrong.
The Firesign Theatre
More than thirty-seven years ago, I began my undergraduate studies at MIT with thoughts of someday unlocking nature’s secrets through the methods of science. Having been raised in an environment where science reigned supreme, I was eager to join a community that was unified in the pursuit of fundamental truths. Like many of my fellow students, I thought that a scientific career would be a sure route towards understanding the mysteries of the universe. I could think of nothing that was more important, and I relished the idea of contributing to an ever-growing body of knowledge.
As I progressed through my freshman year, however, I developed the uneasy feeling that something was missing amid all the math and formulas. It had seemed to me even before entering the citadel of science and technology that there were important areas of inquiry beyond the scope of the sciences, and I began to find my educational experience to be very limiting. As I got to know the atmosphere at MIT, where “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry were deified and everything else was considered second-rate at best, I became increasingly convinced that the scientific method was somehow inadequate as a means of fully understanding reality. Huston Smith, a former philosophy professor of mine, once told a story that will give you an idea of the atmosphere in existence at the time. One day during lunch at the MIT Faculty Club, Smith sat down next to a physicist. Deciding to engage in conversation, Smith asked, “What do you think of us humanists?” The physicist replied, “Think of you? We don’t even bother to ignore you.” I am not sure that much has changed since then.
I couldn’t put my finger on any specific problem with my studies, but the more I learned about science and how it approached nature, the less I wanted to restrict myself to memorizing theories and manipulating mathematical equations. I don’t mean to imply that my formal class work in calculus and physics wasn’t valuable to me, for I found it extremely useful. I was tested and challenged in many ways, and MIT’s reputation for teaching students how to use their analytical powers is, for the most part, well-deserved. (An MIT education is, by the way, often described as drinking water through a fire hose.)
On the other hand, I experienced an underlying discomfort because I didn’t feel that I was allowed to do any original thinking in my science courses. I realized, of course, that students in the elementary stages of scientific study were supposed to learn an indisputable body of core knowledge and build from there. The foundations that we were being taught had stood the test of time, and supposedly there was nothing about them that needed questioning. Almost everything that we were expected to know could be gotten out of a textbook, often a very old one (or a new, more expensive one containing essentially the same ideas, but please don’t get me started on the textbook market and why books that have little new material cost upwards of $100), and few fresh ideas were presented in classes.
As a result, many of us found that classroom affairs had a dull, repetitive feel to them. Nothing new seemed to be going on. Students could practically skip the lectures as long as they kept up with the text. The primary method of education focused on our obediently absorbing so-called “facts” and applying them mathematically under different circumstances. Problem solving was the order of the day. Our homework seemed to be an endless series of exercises dealing with artificial numerical problems. Correct answers to the puzzles that we tackled always existed, so there was little need for debate or discussion. We were simply mastering, in a step-by-step fashion, fundamental principles that had been established and accepted long ago. Challenging scientific authority was the last thing we freshmen were expected to do; our role at the bottom of the totem pole was to learn what we were taught with a minimum of commotion. Creative thinking would have to come later.
As a result of feeling as though I was being forced into a scientific straitjacket, I decided to carry out a search for knowledge as something of an extracurricular activity. I didn’t have any specific goal in mind, but I knew that I wanted to enlarge my horizons and probe beyond the confines of science. I began reading dozens of books in a variety of other subjects, often spending hours on end at various bookstores in Cambridge and Boston. Among the disciplines I immersed myself in were philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, history, literature, and religion. While researching in these areas, I felt that I could formulate my own thoughts rather than simply learn a body of unquestioned knowledge. There was room for dialogue and inquiry of a kind that was wholly absent from my work in the sciences. My courses in math and physics were making me very good at coming up with solutions to all kinds of routine and insignificant problems, but I found such pursuits to be mundane and often tedious. I knew that I was gaining important grounding, but I really didn’t care very much about calculating variable masses, inverse ratios, and angular velocities.
On the other hand, I recall the tremendous excitement of coming across Norman O. Brown’s pioneering analysis in Life Against Death and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. I remember examining Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Lao Tzu, and other philosophers who thought about notions of reality and the absolute. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, which I had read before coming to MIT, played an important role in my ongoing reflections of themes such as alienation and redemption. The work of T. S. Eliot also captivated me, especially the early poems that express a haunting vision of a human race at odds with itself.
As I continued to read practically anything I could get my hands on about the mind and various ways of approaching truth, I found myself making a kind of progress in my explorations. I slowly developed the feeling that I was onto something really important. I became increasingly confident that my search was leading somewhere. The more I worked at it over the months, the more it seemed that unrelated things fell into place. I had no inkling where this unfamiliar and at times intensely unsettling journey was going to end up, of course; I was simply taking in as much as I could from a wide range of sources. (I showed my reading list to Noam Chomsky, one of my professors, and he said something to the effect that it was a life’s work.) Some of the material that I came upon would prove to be of no lasting value, but I wasn’t about to rule out anything in advance. My general area of investigation was the unknown, and I was more or less prepared to follow any avenue that showed promise, no matter where it might lead.
About nine or ten months into my odyssey, I suddenly reached what I recognized at once as a major breakthrough. I experienced a momentous intellectual and emotional turning point that completely transformed my life. It was a shattering event in more ways than one. The many pieces of knowledge that I had been accumulating along the way were, figuratively speaking, abruptly turned upside down and inside out in a rush of definitive insight. All the assorted and often unrelated avenues that I had been following over my year-long search came together in a totally unanticipated fashion. I discovered, much to my surprise, that the world view that I had been embracing all along was full of illusion and error.
A new and unprecedented picture of reality forced itself on me, one that was all-encompassing, coherent, and perfectly logical. It was also preposterous, bizarre, outlandish, and seemingly impossible. I found it extraordinarily difficult to abandon a lifetime of beliefs in favor of conclusions reached almost overnight, but I knew that I had achieved a new and uncommon knowledge that was certain and final. It was as if I had found a higher level of consciousness or, to put it in another manner, a way out of the mental labyrinth of uncertainty and confusion. I was no longer in the position of grasping for answers; I knew that I had achieved them.
The experience of piercing what was in retrospect a veil of untruth involved a profound and terrifying exhilaration unlike any I had ever felt. Everything that I had taken for granted prior to that point needed to be reevaluated and put into another perspective, to say nothing of the scientific
