I had to try and absorb so much new and alien knowledge and then integrate it into a fictional world of characters and plot and imagination and metaphor. My subject at university was English literature. This book took me a long time to write because I wasn’t trained as a scientist. And the narrative of electrochemical activity and neuroimaging and genetic sequences somehow failed to capture the quality of being alive. The first-person narrative of experience seemed to refuse to be reduced to the third-person narrative of experiment. And as time went on, I started to wonder to what extent the authority of science was undermined by that explanatory gap. Aubyn: Well, I think the trouble probably started as long ago as 1996, when I went to a conference in Tucson, Arizona, called Towards a Science of Consciousness, and realized that consciousness, which is the only thing we know we have and the basis of everything else we think we know, was something which hadn’t been successfully included in science’s majestic description of the world. What caused you to think and write about the sciences and the practices of the sciences?Įdward St. Merlin Sheldrake: I’m interested in what led you to write this amazing novel, Double Blind. Their conversation is below, and you can listen to them together on Vintage Books’ podcast here. Aubyn’s Double Blind, which wrestles deeply with ideas and questions from the sciences, and Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, about fungi. Aubyn spoke with Merlin Sheldrake about their most recent books: St.
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