The Mind in a Mustard Seed

The Harvard study came out just months before All Things are Full of Gods, a new philosophical dialogue by theologian David Bentley Hart on The Mysteries of Mind and Life. Hart’s characters—especially the two principals, Psyche and Hephaistos—would surely have much to say about that little brain fragment. Hephaistos, ancient lord of technology and metalwork, might take the microscope images as further proof that life is a product of automatic physical processes, which at one point he describes as “legions of exquisitely orchestrated systems within systems, guiding the flow of information through ever more sophisticated systems.” Indeed, Hephaistos insists, somewhere latent within that magisterial architecture, occult principles are waiting to be discovered that can explain human consciousness in physical terms.