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I have written this book," Gerald Edelman brazenly announces at the opening of Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, "because I think its subject is the most important one imaginable." Since his book is about the nature of human consciousness, that might be nothing more than cutely obvious. But Edelman is not playing obvious, and he is far from alone in believing that something has recently cracked and given in what used to be the wall of mystery surrounding consciousness. Building on a generation's worth of studies of brain physiology and on the creation of computers in the last decade and a half sophisticated enough to simulate thinking, Edelman—together with Patricia and Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and Francis Crick, to name only the most well-known—have suddenly thrust onto center stage an unsettling series of solutions to the mystery of human self-awareness, our subjective experience of being alive and personal, of the divine spark, if you will.

These solutions are far from unanimous in their details, but they are all agreed on one very basic point: What we call "consciousness" is purely a material process. Consciousness is not the evidence of a "mind" substance as apart from "body" substance; still less is "consciousness" the activity of a spirit or soul inside our physical bodies. "We are at the beginning of the neuroscientific revolution," Edelman buoyantly declares, "a prelude to the largest possible scientific revolution, one with inevitable and important social consequences." Indeed we are, and while Christians are mostly consumed with opening yet newer rounds in their century-and-a-half-old war with Charles Darwin, they have scarcely the faintest idea that the new consciousness enthusiasm is by far the greater threat to the integrity of Christian belief.

What is peculiar about what Edelman calls "the neuroscientific revolution" is that it is really not a new business at all, but merely a long-deferred one. Three hundred years ago, the achievements of Galileo, Newton, and the Scientific Revolution knocked down all explanations of the physical universe to the operation of laws on material substances. They might have tried to reduce the inner world of human experience to the same level if the brain had been as easily observable as the orbit of the moon. But that, as RenŽ Descartes delighted in showing in his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641, was not the case, a difficulty that allowed Descartes to cut one of the greatest deals in Western philosophy. In exchange for conceding that the world outside the human consciousness was nothing but material substance (and therefore the proper domain of the scientists), Descartes insisted on keeping the subjective world of the consciousness as the location of spiritual substance, or the soul. It was, in effect, the first great land-for-peace swap: the scientists would be allowed to reduce everything outside the mind to simple physical laws and material substance provided they acknowledged that personal consciousness was the product of an entirely different kind of spiritual substance that obeyed spiritual and moral laws and provided direct contact with God.

And this was not, on the whole, a bad bargain, either. The scientists had more than enough to explore in the outer world to keep them occupied for a couple hundred years, and the theologians could be content that, whatever might be true in the physical world, the irreducibility of the mind to material substance was proof of the existence of the soul, and beyond that, of God.

This zoning-off of the mind from the scientists was helped by the fact that human consciousness really did turn out to be a difficult subject to get under scientific observation. Even defining consciousness is not easy since our own consciousness is the most obvious, direct, and familiar thing we deal with every day, but also the hardest to analyze and report upon. To study one's own consciousness is like trying to be conscious of one's consciousness: how can you step back and look at the very thing which permits you to step back and look in the first place? Not only is it difficult to be objective about one's own consciousness, it is impossible to simulate someone else's. Objectively, we can all recognize the sharpness of a thorn, but only the person who is pricked by it feels pain.

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