Science, Literature and Life: A Celebration of Non-Locality

Abstract

As we approach the 21st century, the notion of the self and subjectivity is undergoing rapid change. Rumor has it that a divided, fragmentary, and neurotic self has displaced the romantic notion of a deep interior as well as the age-old experience of pure consciousness. Allegedly the romantic subject, and more recently the modern subject, have been superseded by postmodern constructions of subjectivity based on a multiplicity of media voices. If modernism was marked by a sense of rationality, progress, and essential truths, postmodernism is “marked by a plurality of voices vying for the right to reality–to be accepted as legitimate expressions of the true and the good.”1 Although postmodernism can’t be defined as a homogeneous cultural construct free from controversy, the postmodern self is generally held to be finite, fragmentary, and disconnected. It stands in sharp contrast to traditional self-conceptions based on consciousness as a source of meaning, unity, and happiness. Having fallen in stature as a legitimate field of study, consciousness is largely ignored in the humanities and social sciences, which tend to focus more on language, social constructions of reality, and cultural studies. This neglect of something so intuitively central to our sense of self is rooted in the historical record of consciousness in philosophy and science over the past hundred years. Although we know subjectively what it is like to have it, consciousness itself remains a scientific mystery in spite of the growing interest in it among the scientific community.