Working in Movement

Dwayne Hoover never met Francis Crick. Too bad.

You may remember Dwayne from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Hoover went bonkers one day when he was given the news that he was the only person in the universe who possessed free will; everyone else might as well have been a machine. Dwayne was an experiment by the Creator of the Universe, the only one who had to figure out what to do next. Hoover got this shocking news by reading a book by Kilgore Trout, the pornographic author and philosopher of free will, among other things.

Francis Crick could have spared Dwayne the agony--we're all in the same boat, free will or not. The Nobel Prize winner for co-discovering the structure of DNA, Crick today is working on what he calls the nature of consciousness. In essence, Crick and research partner Christof Koch are attempting to locate the structures and processes in the brain that account for the phenomenon of consciousness.

The article After the Double Helix: Unraveling the Mysteries of the State of Being profiles Crick and Koch's recent work. (And promotes their new book The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach.)

What news might Dr. Crick have for Dwayne as a result of his scientific investigations? Here's a quote from the article:

Having solved one of the basic mysteries of life here on Earth, Dr. Crick seems happy to skewer any notions of a life beyond. For him, the most profound implication of an operational understanding of consciousness is that "it will lead to the death of the soul."

"The view of ourselves as `persons' is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth," he said. He predicted that "this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years."

"In the fullness of time," he continued, "educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death."

So chew on that for a while, Dwayne. Just like Kilgore Trout, Francis Crick gives you some pretty meaty things to ponder.