I have friends who think that our society is destroying itself through sheer hedonism. I am far more pessimistic than that. The hedonist seeks pleasure, and I see little evidence that we are even on nodding acquaintance with the stuff. We seek numbness, avoidance of pain, oblivion. Examples could be enumerated indefinitely. I think of the student I read about in a recent reported piece for New York magazine who uses ChatGPT to do most of her homework so that she has time to scroll through online shortform videos until, by her own admission, her eyes hurt. She represents both my greatest worries about my students and, though to an exaggerated degree, my disappointments with myself. I wake up every day aiming at Christianity, and often can’t even land on Epicureanism.

Perhaps the fantasy of a “strong” artificial intelligence – just read a book like Raymond Tallis’s Why the Mind Is Not a Computer (2004) or  All Things Are Full of Gods (2024) by David Bentley Hart to see why it is a fantasy – represents a hope for the arrival of some other entity who will make more of consciousness than we have. (It represents other, more obvious hopes as well, such as breaking labor power.) The search for such an entity shapes two of the most interesting books of popular science that I have read in the last few years, George Musser’s Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation (2023) and Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity (2024), by David Bessis, translated by Kevin Frey.

Musser’s book is preoccupied by the recent turn within the hard sciences toward the study of human consciousness. “Physics,” he writes on the first page, “has sought for ages to get our minds out of the picture – to transcend our everyday experience and reveal how puny humans are compared to the vastness of the universe.” Already, the attentive non-scientist reader can see a self-contradiction here: “puniness” and “vastness” aren’t qualities that come into play unless a human mind is still very much in the picture. But in any case, even the general reader knows that this austerely impersonal version of science has been damaged by nearly a century of quantum physics, in which our choice to observe and measure particles at least seems to have some influence on their ultimate disposition.

This much I already dimly knew , but not until I read Musser’s book did I realize how much human consciousness is infiltrating physics on every level. He starts the book by interviewing a quantum-gravity specialist who studies lucid dreaming, and then brings in a quantum statistician who studies the way that complex groups of particles – bits of glass or gas – seem to “spontaneously arrange themselves.” She thinks that neurons do the same thing, and that the mind emerges from their self-organization – which means that billions of computing units arranged into a “neural network” might genuinely simulate human intelligence, if we made the computing units just right. Musser then gives the reader a crash course in things like “integrated information theory,” in which “the cerebrum’s vast network of neurons works as a unified whole, fusing sights, sounds, and memories into a seamless field of experience,” and “predictive coding theory,” which proposes that consciousness is generated by – or somehow just is – the friction generated by the confrontation between actual external reality and our brain’s helpless, compulsive, always slightly inaccurate mapping of it.

The last of these theories founders on what is called the Hard Problem of consciousness. A scientist can strap you into his device, show you a red thing, and point to a computerized map of your pinging neurons and say, “See all that activity? That’s your experience of the color red.” Or he can point to some other process, one involving self-organizing electrons, and say “That is how you weave individual perceptions into a continuous conscious experience of the world.” But if he does so, you are still perfectly within your rights to say “How?” or “No it isn’t” or “That doesn’t look much like my experience of the color red. It looks like a bunch of neurons pinging.” Scientists and philosophers have unfolded a beautiful array of theories that are designed to bridge red and your pinging neurons, electrons and your conscious mind, but the two remain stubbornly apart.

Similarly, physicists face a so-called Hard Problem of matter. If you look at the universe on a small enough scale, there really doesn’t seem to be any stuff. Particles in themselves lack personality. Cosmology seems to tell us that much of the universe is so violent and chaotic on a material level that we can’t conceive of it; that causation and time are fictitious; that things don’t have position till we see them; that there is nothing out there but “atoms and void.” And yet we live on our little island of low entropy, experience and observe both time and causation, don’t seem to generate the universe out of our heads, and are surrounded by bounded, real objects, distinguishable from each other. How do you get from one thing to the other? How are these descriptions of the same universe? The world as experienced from a first-person, subjective point of view and from cosmology’s third-person view seem almost incommensurable, much like mental experience and the physical processes that purportedly cause them. Some of my favorite sections of Musser’s book examine these similarities between the Hard Problem of consciousness and the Hard Problem of matter. Musser seems hopeful that science can overcome these problems, and that the third-person, “objective” view can eventually find a way to enfold the first-person. I finished the book even more convinced than ever that the third-person view is a helpful fiction created by first persons.

A high number of Musser’s interviewees are involved in AI research. He tells us early on that many of them are being funneled in that direction because “jobs are scarce” in physics. Thus, the book leaves me with an enhanced appreciation for human capacities and, simultaneously, with a sense that we are forcing these capacities to work within a deeply hostile structure.

David Bessis’s Mathematica induced in me a similar combination of humanist euphoria and economic-political melancholy. The book purports to explain how mathematicians actually work, and in its early sections it is one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever read. Bessis quotes Einstein’s famous self-description as a man of “no special talent” who is “only passionately curious.” His reaction is intensely relatable: “When I was fifteen,” Bessis tells us, “I hated this quote,” because “to me it sounded phony, insincere, like a supermodel saying that what really counts is inner beauty. Do we really need to hear this stuff?” But having scaled the heights of academic mathematics (he did something involving really hard geometry), Bessis urges us to “take Einstein’s words seriously.”

We imagine – at least I imagine – that mathematicians are simply special people, with special brains, who are capable of thinking only in incremental, logically justified half-steps. In fact, Bessis argues, most mathematicians work by intuition, visualizing promiscuously and making logical leaps. The logical strictness and forbidding notation that we assume makes up all of math is actually something mathematicians bring in after the fact, to check and chasten their thinking, to make the leap a series of beautifully precise ballet steps. “Logic doesn’t help you think,” he writes. “It helps you find out where you’re thinking wrong.”

The actual insights of the great mathematicians come from disciplined intuition. “To make a mathematical discovery,” he writes, “you have to start by inventing for yourself new mental actions, creating new images in your head, without knowing in advance how to do it or whether it will work.” Elsewhere, he writes:

Mathematical creation is a constant back-and-forth between imagination (the art of picturing what you read) and verbalization (the art of putting words to what you see). This simultaneously transforms our intuition and our language. We learn to see and, at the same time, we learn to talk. We learn to picture new things and we invent a language that allows us to name them.

Bessis shows this process of intuition-training as it operates in the lives of scientists like Descartes and Grothendieck, as well as prodigies like Ben Underwood (a blind child who basically taught himself echolocation). He suggests some visualization exercises (imagine the room around you from some perspective other than your own) and some strategies for learning. The book is digressive and winsomely eccentric, and, in an era of let-the-machines-think-for-us, seemingly utterly sincere in its appreciation for the creative powers of human beings. It is impossible not to love an author who says things like this:

Reconnecting with your early childhood capacity for learning means to stop believing in these absurd stories of gifts and talent. It means to become once again capable of devoting ten or twenty hours to something that may or may not be impossible, without being distracted by the feeling of your own uselessness. It means to rediscover the world with an open mind, trying something just to see what happens, for fun, because you want to.

Imagine my chagrin, then, when I reached the last section of the book, and learned that Bessis had left the university world for an AI startup.

I don’t necessarily blame him, mind. Judging by his book, Bessis clearly understands that he is helping build machines that will imitate, not instantiate, human consciousness. And at least half my problem with “artificial intelligence” is the way we insult ourselves when we call it that. I could probably even be convinced, over enough beers, that there are non-insane, non-destructive, modest, useful applications of some of these technologies, under proper regulation. It’s just that the distance between this world and a world capable of regulating Silicon Valley seems almost as infinite as that between qualia and neural activity. I would like to see more minds as beautiful as Bessis’s apply themselves to that problem.

Why am I waiting for other, more beautiful minds to do so? I am a citizen in an increasingly repressive autocracy, governed by people who are lazy and splenetic enough to be defeated. It is my problem to think about. And so we return to the problems of inattention, sloth, personal laziness. The writer and podcaster Elizabeth Oldfield’s excellent recent book Fully Alive, already reviewed in Plough, is nevertheless worth referencing again in this connection. Oldfield moves through each of the seven deadly sins chapter by chapter, and when she gets to acedia, she calls it “the unnamed temptation of our times”:

Listlessness, distraction, apathy, restlessness. A monk never called it this, but I recognize it most in my own life when I’m faffing. Failing to settle to anything, craving something, trying to sate a snackishness I’m only semiconscious of. Time feels baggy or tight…. The list in listlessness comes not from to-do lists but the Middle English liste, meaning pleasure, joy, or delight. So, joylessness is in there, too.

The remedy for such joylessness, Oldfield suggests, is focused attention to what matters. She contrasts such attention to the “artificial urgency” of what we ironically call the “attention economy”:

Go! Go! Go! Do! Do! Do! Shiny! New! Over here! Take your eyes off the people in front of you and keep moving. Don’t stretch steadily and intentionally towards the most important things, but ping around responsively, because this whole engine is running off your distracted, restless hustle.

We waste our attention consuming trash, and our energy producing it. Distraction culture needs productivity culture.

Productivity culture is, in turn, the target of Maria Bowler’s Making Time (2025). Bowler, a writer and creative coach, traces the book’s genesis to the depression that settled on her soon after she gave birth to her first child, when she was isolated by the pandemic and her husband’s long working hours, and left with little to do but nurse:

The nurses and doctors tasked to follow up with me called it postpartum blues, but I knew this was not simply a hormonal dip or just the undesirably isolating circumstances of her birth. It was a confrontation demanding an answer: “Who are you being when you are not out there doing? How alive can you stand to be exactly where you are, as you are?”

Pascal blamed most human problems on the fact that we can’t sit alone in a room. Bowler wasn’t exactly alone, I suppose, but you can’t make conversation in the conventional sense with a newborn. “Productivity” as our culture constructs it can be as narcotizing as the infinite scroll: you distract yourself from thinking about what you’re doing by adding to that satisfying little list of things that you did. Being forced to do nothing but nourish a newborn forced Bowler to adopt a different mindset, to be “intimate with the creative process of life itself, not the result.” Making Time seeks to explain that mindset. It is a good book for people who feel a little burnt out with their work, whether that work is paid or unpaid, overtly creative or just implicitly so. If I had to summarize it in one sentence, I would say that it urges careful, loving attention to the form and texture of one’s burnout, the precise shape and angular measurements of the block. Get to know your own avoidance as though it were a strange new backyard animal that you hope to befriend. “When there is loving attention to how the process of life unfolds, the human heart yearns to join in,” Bowler writes. Put that starkly, the advice seems obvious, but we are, again, inattentive creatures, and we often need someone to say the obvious in a way that arrests us. When Bowler pays attention, the reader’s heart joins in.