RH: At the beginning of The Secret Commonwealth there’s a quote from William Blake: “Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.” Tell me about that. Lyra with her daemon Pan from the BBC version of His Dark Materials You read it in Shelley and Keats and Shakespeare, you hear it in Debussy and Stravinsky. PP: I’d point out we’ve got there already. Perhaps I am being a gung-ho scientist, but I feel that we will be able to get there eventually. RH: I feel that’s a pessimistic outlook on what we will be able to explain about consciousness. We’ll measure it one day.” I’d say, “Well, you won’t because it’s just not measurable.”

PP: Gung-ho triumphalist proponents of science would say, “We haven’t got there yet. RH: How do we move towards a scientific theory of consciousness without going down the dualist road? There’s one kind of stuff, but it’s conscious. Those are the tools with which we examine this kind of stuff. PP: Would that be like Proust ? I think a lot of the things that science is either dubious about or sceptical about, or refuses to have anything to do with, are these qualities that are so well expressed in terms of literature or music, poetry or the visual arts. That would be a sort of artificial nostalgia. RH: You could assign different values to its memories and experiences in its algorithm. How do you explain nostalgia for example? How would you build nostalgia into an artificial intelligence? You need to accept that there are things that are important to us all, which science can’t yet get a grip on.

Since Galileo, the approach of science has been a mathematical one, where you measure things, you’ve got a quantity that’s measurable, you measure it, and that’s part of what you do.īut science can’t deal with qualities. The second part of this, The Secret Commonwealth, was out last year. Pullman is following up the trilogy with another, The Book of Dust. Perhaps his most celebrated creation is the daemon, a physical manifestation, in the form of an animal, that represents a person’s consciousness, spirit or soul.

The story of two children crossing into parallel worlds in a quest to understand the nature of reality and humanity draws on fantasy as well as theology, physics and neuroscience, with strong influences from poets William Blake and John Milton. Pullman had been writing for years before he became a global sensation with the His Dark Materials trilogy. He made a pot of tea with his favoured blend of two spoons of Assam, one of lapsang souchong (“for the smokiness”), and we sat surrounded by books and pens and pads and knick‑knacks, and spoke of science, daemons and Dust – Pullman’s particle for consciousness. In what now feels like a distant time, when we could still travel and meet people, I went to Oxford,to the home of author Philip Pullman. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials delves into science and philosophy

Philip pullman trilogy