The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

This fascinating book addresses the question of how the West went from the mediaeval vision that saw ourselves at the centre of an 'angel-filled space suffused with divine presence and purpose to the modern scientific picture of a pointless physical void'. It sheds a new light on the history of the mind-body problem by showing that our conceptions of space and ourselves are inextricably entwined. The reason is that the mediaeval world picture incorporated two parallel dualisms: a metaphysical dualism of body and soul and a corresponding cosmological dualism of terrestrial and celestial space.

A key figure in the transformation from the mediaeval to the modern world-view was Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, who lived a century before Copernicus. In his treatise On Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia), he explains that only God can be absolute, hence nothing physical can be absolute. If, he reasoned, the universe has either a centre or an outer boundary, these would constitute absolutes that he has ruled out by definition: hence the universe must be without a centre and unbounded (as Bruno later argued to his cost). Hence the earth is not the centre of the cosmos. And since Cusa's universe is a unified realm, the distinction between terrestrial and celestial space is invalid. This also entails a rejection of the hierarchy of celestial beings and paves the way for a transition from a meaningful astrological cosmos to a purposeless astronomical universe. Kepler then adds the insight that physical forces inherent in the cosmic system are responsible for planetary motion, not God. In this way, the abolition of celestial space means that physical space becomes the whole of space (and indeed reality): the equation of celestial space with inner space means that both are abolished along with the corresponding notion of the soul. There is literally no room for the soul in a physical cosmos: 'we lost our spiritual space…because we had linked it to celestial space'. (p. 150) The new science deals only with res extensa.

In leading up to these pivotal insights, Wertheim takes us through the development of perspective and point of view in mediaeval art, which had far-reaching effects on our concepts of space by formulating a 'geometric vision'. She then moves on to describe the development of relativistic space and the pioneering work of Hubble in the 1920s. We find that space itself is expanding and that material objects depend on its supporting membrane. This brings her on to hyperspace and then to the new concept of cyberspace, which, like the universe itself, is expanding at a phenomenal rate.

Here new concepts of the self, community and relationship are forged. It is a space that goes beyond the body, but I dispute that this makes it 'transcendent' in any meaningful way, as the author argues in a chapter on cyber soul-space. However it is a space of expectations that reach back to the Christian promise of paradise beyond earthly tensions and troubles. She is rightly sceptical about ideas of 'cyber-immortality', as if the mind is a set of files that might plausibly be downloaded from a brain into a computer! There are also Manichean echoes of contempt for mere earthly existence in visions of 'cyber-utopia'. If there is cyber-utopia, there is also an underside projection of sex and violence that is readily available on the Internet. A more interesting question, however, is the way in which cyberspace is a web of relationships. To what extent, though, can it be defined as a community when communities have traditionally been embodied? Network yes, but community? However, the structure does presuppose responsibility for the communally produced space and there is a sense in which all notions of space are communally produced, as Wertheim contends. We are currently in a position where our physical understanding of space underpins a physicalist understanding of the human being. Is this changing? I suspect so, with the advent of consciousness studies and the rediscovery of the reality not only of inner space but also inner worlds. Although we can speak of physicists' concepts of 12-dimensional space-time, the notion of inner space is less acceptable. I believe that a new understanding of reality is being opened up that will reinstate the validity of inner space without making it dependent on material substructures. NDEs give us a clue in this respect. Here, inner space is experienced as primary, which means that consciousness is more fundamental than physicalists will allow. All of this will be considered in this year's Mystics and Scientists conference, which will be reported in the next issue.