“The entire scope of human experience can be viewed as a collective effect resulting from elementary particles dutifully following well-understood equations.” Statements like this excite deep-seated passions and tend to bring out strongly polarized views. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace by Margaret Wertheim is a product of this passionate debate.

This debate is one I usually find quite tiresome. As someone who is comfortable with reductionist views, I readily concede that comments like the one above shed very little useful light on many aspects of our lives, particularly those that we might call “spiritual”. Still, I hope that bridging the mind/body gap will lead to interesting insights into both psychology and physical collective phenomena. I expect the wide range of medical and other researchers who are investigating this frontier will make exciting progress in my lifetime. That’s the fun part.

But no matter what progress is made, it seems reasonable to expect there will remain vast domains of human experience that will be more effectively discussed in broadly “spiritual” terms, despite the existence of a reductionist perspective. What I find tiresome in all this is the way many people see these issues as an opportunity to preach about matters that are far removed from the really exciting problems. This rather empty debate seems to occupy an extraordinary amount of some people’s time, and seems to receive a huge amount of publicity. Statements like: “The failure of modern science to incorporate this immaterial ‘I’ – this ‘self’, this ‘mind’, this ‘spirit’, this ‘soul’ – into its world picture is one of the premier pathologies of modern Western culture…” (quoting Wertheim) are the sort of things I am talking about. Whether or not our culture pays sufficient attention to spiritual matters, to set modern science up as the villain seems quite beside the point.

So, is The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace simply another scolding of the science community on behalf of those whose humanity is being “crushed” by our rationalistic zeal? Not at all! Wertheim manages to take what seems like a tired old subject and introduce an entirely fresh and original perspective.

The traditional mind/body debate is argued between those who cannot imagine that the richness of our personal experience is built on a mechanistic world of atoms and molecules, and those who are enthusiastic about that possibility. Wertheim steps in with an entirely different angle. To start with, she chooses to focus on the concept of “space”. For Wertheim, it is our 3 + 1 dimensional concept of space and time that most clearly characterizes the limitations of modern science. She wonders where there could possibly be room for a soul in such a space, and concludes that, with this kind of view of the world, we are bound to stifle the human spirit.

But physicists are perhaps even too eager to consider all kinds of different spaces. There are, for example, the Hilbert space of atomic states, the Fock space in field theories, and the spaces of gauge transformations (Abelian or non-Abelian). There is the space of “all vacuua of M-theory”, or the space occupied by the phase diagram of helium-3, and so on. What Wertheim seems to have completely ignored is that we are quite happy to use a much more generalized idea of space to describe different states of matter. For the reductionists among us, it is in this space that we might hope to find our spirit romping around, but somehow Wertheim manages to avoid this point. Well, she gingerly acknowledges the “extra dimensions” models for the matter fields but still argues vigorously that even the extra dimensions are not a suitable place for the soul to reside.

But the real thrust of Wertheim’s book is that she feels she has at last discovered the true space for the human soul: cyberspace! I imagine most readers are just as stunned as I was about this. Even the most cranky among us will admit that some interesting (possibly even amazing) advances will be required before we can understand how the human mind can be built out of the microscopic world we know. Many will feel that within that gap lie endless possibilities for even the subtlest spiritual nuances to emerge.

But cyberspace? Cyberspace today is perhaps the most boring mechanistic object in our entire world. Just a bunch of files shifting from one computer to another in a way that (if sometimes delayed) is usually accurate to the point of tedium. The microscopic perspective on this process is perfectly well understood due to the efforts of many scientists and information-technology engineers. Wertheim imagines that she has a “position” in cyberspace that does not obey “F = ma”, and finds this deeply liberating. Why this aspect of cyberspace is so exciting, while the flights of the thoughts in our own minds do not seem to count for much, is completely beyond me. If I am looking for spiritual enrichment I will take my brain (or anyone else’s) over cyberspace any day. Perhaps some day that will change, but then you could write another book.

In the process of developing her argument, Wertheim undertakes to review the abstract notions of spiritual space that have existed throughout history, discusses parts of the history of science, and surveys the great opportunities presented by the Internet and other information technology. Each of these is an interesting topic in its own right, but my aversion to the overall premise of the book made it hard to enjoy any of these discussions. None of them seemed particularly inspired.

The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace gave me only one enjoyable moment: this was when I learned of the plan by the German-born mathematician Theodr Kaluza to shed the “crazy theorist” label attached to his proposal, with Oskar Klein, about a possible fifth dimension. A non-swimmer, Kaluza decided to teach the world about the value of pure theory by carefully studying the “theory of swimming”. When he was satisfied with his understanding, he threw himself into the sea (we are not told how deep it was) and indeed he could swim! Boy, theorists are a crazy bunch.

Aside from this entertaining moment, I found The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace downright painful to read. I doubt any reader would enjoy it.