Spook
Science Tackles the Afterlife
by Mary Roach
(W.W. Norton, 2005, hardcover $24.95)

Mediums star in prime-time television dramas, Barbara Walters explores the nature of heaven, near-death researchers grace the covers of popular magazines. Given pop culture’s current fascination with the afterlife, it should be no surprise that a popular author would decide to write a book for the masses exploring the subject. And Mary Roach, author of the bestselling Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, is an obvious choice. Stiff chronicled the strange and grisly life of dead bodies as they journey from the morgue to the graveyard, proving that Roach can bring a journalistic flair to the more morbid dimensions of existence. In her new book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, she turns from the corporeal to the immaterial and sets out to explore all of the many ways science has tried to find out what becomes of the human being after the flesh reaches the end of its earthly sojourn. Having recently researched a long feature article on reincarnation and the afterlife (WIE, March–May 2006, “Death, Rebirth, and Everything in Between”), I was especially curious to see how a popular author with a mass audience might treat such a controversial and complex subject.

Roach begins her inquiry by acknowledging that science has been largely skeptical of a postmortem existence. “For the most part,” she writes, “science has this to say: Yeah, right. If there were a soul, an etheric disembodied you that can live on, independent of your brain, we scientists would know about it.” And she goes on to state her primary intention for the book: “What I’m after is proof. Or evidence, anyway—evidence that some form of disembodied consciousness persists when the body closes up shop.”

With that established, Roach embarks on her journey. She travels to India to observe researchers who are investigating young children’s past-life memories; she delves into the scientific basis of the legend that the human soul weighs twenty-one grams; she spars with University of Arizona researcher Gary Schwartz over the legitimacy of his controversial experiments with popular mediums; and she visits near-death researchers in Virginia who are putting monitors on emergency room ceilings hoping that temporarily disembodied patients will later be able to accurately remember what the monitors show. And that’s just scratching the surface of her unconventional but fascinating narrative. Roach is an incredibly thorough researcher, and it sometimes seems that no obscure historical fact is too small for inclusion, occasionally causing the book to get bogged down in detail. But some of the details are fun, even morbidly funny, as when she describes the efforts of early-twentieth-century surgeon Dr. Duncan MacDougall to determine the weight of the human soul by hoisting dying men onto the right kind of scales and then waiting for the exact moment of death. Roach’s clever style comes especially alive when she gets into the more bizarre forms of afterlife science, like the course she takes on the “Fundamentals of Mediumship” or her research trip to test the potential of EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena), where erstwhile tape-recording amateurs try to pick up stray voices of disembodied spirits on Sony Walkmans.

While Roach’s book finds its strength in the breadth and depth of her research and travels, and in the enjoyable banter of her sharp and clever pen, it falls short in its attempt to bring light to the empirical research currently being conducted on the afterlife. For example, Roach does not make enough effort to distinguish serious scholars doing highly reputable work from the more dubious inhabitants of the field. She tends to simply mix it all together in one big soup and let her readers sort it out for themselves. And this exacerbates what is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Spook—the book’s failure to achieve its stated mission of serious inquiry into the existence of an afterlife. Indeed, it becomes clear fairly quickly that the ironic, hip, middle-of-the-road position that Roach expresses in the opening pages—she wants to believe, but she finds it difficult—is exactly where she will end up. Roach claims to have been changed by the journey, but the impact is hard to discern. She doesn’t grow substantially more doubtful when she encounters the many crackpot researchers in the field or more convinced when she comes across evidence that seems almost impossible to explain conventionally. And more importantly, some of the most serious and careful research being done today on the afterlife (like Ian Stevenson’s extensive investigations of children who remember past lives) gets short shrift, while obscure histories of more unconventional topics get all kinds of airtime.

Overall, Spook is enjoyable and informative, and Roach certainly has put together an extraordinary sweep of interesting material. The book is easy to recommend on that count alone. But readers should be wary of its aspirations to be an authoritative account. In the end, Roach is more concerned with writing a fun, informative, and entertaining narrative. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself, except that the book falls short of its own intentions and, in doing so, fails to shed much light on one of life’s greatest mysteries.

Carter Phipps

The Singularity Is Near
When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
(Viking Adult, 2005, hardcover $29.95)

From faster computers to the latest video iPods, from cloning experiments to pioneering genetic therapies, most of us cannot help but notice how our lives are impacted by new technologies. Far fewer of us, claims futurist Ray Kurzweil, realize that the rate of technological progress itself appears to be accelerating at an exponential pace. Unabated, this trend will eventually lead us to a period of such rapid technological development that we will see near-instantaneous, near-infinite—yes, infinite—development in the cyber-material universe. If you find that impossible to imagine, then welcome to the “Singularity,” Ray Kurzweil style.

As a pioneering technologist and visionary philosopher of the material domain, Kurzweil has made it his business to chart technology growth. His enduring insight—that the “pace of change of our human-created technology” is increasing exponentially and shows no signs of slowing—is the key to understanding his conception of an imminent Singularity. And he begins his exposition by amply illustrating such growth over varying time scales, using examples from biological evolution and technological developments in areas as diverse as microprocessor performance, DNA sequencing, and the decreasing size of mechanical devices. Thus, Kurzweil defines the Singularity as “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” He even predicts that this moment will arrive sometime around the mid--twenty-first century, because by then, he writes, “the [non-biological] intelligence created per year...will be about one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. That will indeed represent...a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability.”

To illustrate just how profound this metamorphosis is likely to be, Kurzweil takes us on a breathtaking and detail-packed tour of his vision of the future, basing his predictions on the current state of technologies and allowing for exponential growth. He maintains that human intelligence can be replicated with sufficiently advanced computing power—and then massively surpassed. He describes “three overlapping revolutions” of the twenty-first century—genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics—which will enable us to fully understand the operating principles of the human brain and thus engineer human-like intelligent processes into nonbiological circuitry. Furthermore, they will allow us to redesign most of our biological systems at the molecular level, enhance our brains with unlimited artificial intelligence, and eventually live as long as we choose—biologically or virtually. In fact, our lives will be permeated from within and without by superintelligence, and as we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe-wide awakening.

Offering more than just a mind-bending trip to the future, the latter chapters of the book address some of the commonly voiced philosophical and moral concerns about our expanding technological prowess. Should we restrict technology for our own safety, even though millions may die of potentially curable diseases? Can a superintelligent machine ever really be conscious? How will we protect ourselves against malicious or accidental nanobot replication? And could the AIs take over? While the breadth of this coverage is impressive and fair-minded, it leaves important dimensions of the discussion unresolved. Technological evolution will undoubtedly solve many of our material problems, but what about the age-old human failings with which they are associated, such as egotism and greed? Are they likely to be affected? We may understand, as Kurzweil suggests, that “intelligence is inherently impossible to control,” and thus strive to imbue our robots with “human ethics and values.” The question remains, however, of whether or not those values are sufficiently developed within us to ensure that an intelligence spawned from ours would choose to abide by them when we ourselves often do not.

Nonetheless, Kurzweil excels as a technological visionary with a proven track record of success, clearly believing in the potential power of technology to improve human life. And to his credit, he is willing to comment openly on the dangers involved. See, for example, his ongoing dialogue with Sun Microsystems cofounder and techno-pessimist Bill Joy, with whom he coauthored a New York Times op-ed piece last year arguing that the genetic code of the 1918 flu virus should never have been published on the internet.

The Singularity Is Near may not have all the answers to the human implications of our date with technological destiny. However, this highly enjoyable and considered work is sure to make even the most hardened Luddite more than a little curious about its anticipated rupture in the fabric of our lives, looming on the not-too-distant horizon.

Ravi Agarwal