The Novelist The Gladsadness
Before I met Rebecca Goldstein, I worried she might be snooty. She looks glamorous and brainy in author photos, with long blond hair and an austere expression. She’s an adept in physics and mathematics with a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton. She has won acclaim for her highbrow fiction and quasi-fiction, including The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Plato at the Googleplex and biographies of Spinoza and Gödel, two of history’s knottiest thinkers. She’s spoken at Davos, given a TED talk, won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. In 2015, Barack Obama gave her the National Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House. Come on, the woman is entitled to be snooty.
Then I met Goldstein in the fall of 2015 at “The Weirdness of Consciousness,” an event at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Robert Wright, a journalist and friend, organized “Weirdness.” He loves to dwell on how “weird” consciousness is, hence the title. The announcement stated: “Science can explain the body, but can it explain the mind? The failure of scientists and philosophers to reach a consensus explanation of consciousness has led to a revival of interest in theories once widely dismissed, such as panpsychism.”
Wright chatted with David “the hard problem” Chalmers and Goldstein. She didn’t try to dazzle us with eloquence and erudition, although she was in fact eloquent and erudite. She seemed—no, she was—fascinated by the hard problem, panpsychism and the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. She was eager to hear what Chalmers and Wright had to say and to share her thoughts with them and the audience. The ideas mattered.