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(Or, as Alexander Pope put it in his famous couplet, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:/God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”) But that represents a misreading of Newtonian physics. It is true that, by discovering the law of gravity, and realizing that its manifestation on Earth (that famous, if apocryphal, falling apple) and its manifestation in space (tethering the Moon to Earth, and Earth and planets to the Sun) are simply different aspects of the same phenomenon, Newton in some sense largely eliminated the divine from the ongoing workings of the universe. But Newton himself did not believe in pure materialism. Although he rid his clockwork universe of the hand of God, Newton replaced it with something just as immaterial—fields of force. In contrast to the materialist doctrine, which holds that the world is a set of objects that interact through direct contact, Newton’s theory of gravity posited action at a distance. Just how, exactly, does Earth keep the Moon from flying away into space? Through gravity. And what is gravity? An ineffable force that pervades all space and is felt over essentially infinite distances. There is no connective tissue, no intervening matter betweenthe mutual gravitational pulls of objects separated by vast distances across a vacuum. You cannot touch a gravitational field (although you can, of course, feel its effects). Newton himself squirmed under the implications of this: “That one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else…is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has…any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent…but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to…my readers.”
    This is not the view that most people associate with classical Newtonian physics. Laypeople as well as most scientists believe that science regards the world as built out of tiny bits of matter. “Yet this view is wrong,” argues Henry Stapp, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory high in the hills above Berkeley, California. At least one version of quantum theory, propounded by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann in the 1930s, “claims that the world is built not out of bits of matter but out of bits of knowledge—subjective, conscious knowings,” Stapp says. These ideas, however, have fallen far short of toppling the materialist worldview, which has emerged so triumphant that to suggest humbly that there might be more to mental life than action potentials zipping along axons is to risk being branded a scientific naif. Even worse, it is to be branded nonscientific. When, in 1997, I made just this suggestion over dinner to a former president of the Society for Neuroscience, he exclaimed, “Well, then you are not a scientist.” Questioning whether consciousness, emotions, thoughts, the subjective feeling of pain, and the spark of creativity arise from nothing but the electrochemical activity of large collections of neuronal circuits is a good way to get dismissed as a hopeless dualist.
    Ah, that dreaded label.
    The dualist position in the mind-matter debate dates back to the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). Although the problem of mind and matter is as old as the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, Descartes was the first modernscientific thinker to grapple seriously with the strangeness of mind, with the fact that the mental realm seems to be of an entirely different character from the material world. His solution was simplicity itself. He posited the existence of two parallel yet separate domains of reality: res cogitans , the thinking substance of the subjective mind whose essence is thought, and res extensa , or the extended substance of the material world. Mental stuff and material (including brain) stuff are absolutely distinct, he argued. Material substance