Strangely enough, the science they are trusting in is about three hundred years behind the times. If their science conforms with what their senses tell them, they are subscribing to Newtonian views developed during the seventeenth century. This mechanistic science leads us to view humans as machines that respond to internal and external stimuli, each living in a separate corner of a larger machine: the physical universe. Such a view leads us to believe that we are completely separate, self-animating beings. Our bodies house brains, but our thoughts are only side products of our physical machines; consciousness, free will, divine purpose, and Essence are superfluous at best. The mechanistic view has led us to try and predict and control nature rather than harmonize with it. We strive rather than surrender.

The neural embodiment of self, it seems, is extremely robust. Every perception, every action, every thought, every utterance seems to bear the mark of the individual’s experience, of his value system, of all that is peculiar to him. In Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection (as in Esther Thelen’s work on the development of cognition and action in children), we find a rich account of how neuronal connectivity may be determined by, literally shaped by, the individual’s experience, thoughts, and actions no less than by all that is hardwired and biologically given. If individual experience and experiential selection so determine the developing brain, we should not perhaps be surprised that individuality, self, is preserved for so long even in the face of diffuse neuronal damage.

A funny thing happens to people in a community of truth. Somebody has a thought. The thought is like a little circuit in their brain. When someone shares a thought and others receive it, then suddenly the same circuit is in two brains. When a whole classroom is considering the thought, it’s like the same circuit in twenty-five brains. Our minds are

intermingling. The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls these circuits loops. He argues that when we communicate, and loops are flowing through different brains, we are thinking as one shared organism, anticipating each other, finishing each other’s sentences. “Empathy” is not a strong enough word to describe this intermingling. It is not one person, one body, one brain that marks this condition, Hofstadter argues, but the interpenetration of all minds in ceaseless conversation with each other.

My friends Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik literally wrote the book on complex failure and why it’s on the rise. Meltdown, their engaging, and at times terrifying, book explains the “shared DNA of nuclear accidents, Twitter disasters, oil spills, Wall Street failures, and even wrongdoing.” Like me, Chris and András were influenced by sociologist Charles Perrow, who identified risk factors that make certain kinds of systems vulnerable to breakdowns.

A good friend had lent me some books several years earlier, which I had never opened because they looked difficult. He’d said at the time that there was only one really good treatment of the importance of information and feedback in social sciences, and that it was a shame that it had never caught on. I reached up to the top shelf and pulled down the first volume that my hand landed on. It was called Brain of the Firm, by Stafford Beer.