EL Doctorow: 'My politics are biblical: you shouldn't murder, you shouldn't steal'

EL Doctorow is one of America's most distinguished novelists. He began his career in 1960 as an editor, working on books by Ian Fleming and Ayn Rand, among others. He rose to prominence as a novelist in 1971 with The Book of Daniel, followed four years later by Ragtime, which won the National Book Critics Circle award and was later adapted into a film and a Broadway musical. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker international prize. Andrew's Brain is his 12th novel.

You're famous for writing expansive historical novels. Many critics have noted that your new book, which takes the form of a dialogue between a cognitive scientist and an unnamed interlocutor, seems like a change of direction. Do you agree with that view?

This book is a bit different, but I've always resisted the label of historical novelist. I could just as easily be called a geographical novelist. Many of my books take place in different parts of the UStates: the Dakotas out west, down south in Georgia, or the Adirondack mountains up in northern New York state. I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist – or perhaps a national novelist.

Do you see this book as a novel about America?

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. The book is constructed as a conversation, with someone doing most of the talking and someone doing most of the listening. Once I was committed to, or trapped in, that style, it all flowed out as the thinking of a troubled man who is asked to recognise that he has been responsible for disasters all his life, without having deliberately meant to do harm. Now if you want to decide that this is a statement about this country, I can't stop you, but it's difficult enough writing these books without interpreting them critically.

The novel revolves around questions about the nature of the mind and consciousness. How did your study of philosophy inform your writing?

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on. The idea of cognition – what it is and how it works – has preoccupied me in previous novels, as it does here. Currently the neuroscientists who accept the materiality of the mind – who regard the soul as fiction – don't know yet how the brain becomes the mind, how it's responsible for all our thoughts and feelings, our subjective life. How this three-pound "knitting ball", as Andrew calls it, produces our subjective life. If we do ever figure it out, that could be a glorious intellectual achievement. At the same time, it carries grave dangers, because if we understand how the brain works in all its detail, then a computer could be built that emulates the brain and creates consciousness. This is not just Hollywood movie stuff. If that ever happens, it's the end of the mythic world that we've lived in since the bronze age, with all the stories we've told ourselves about what human life is. That could be as much of a disaster as an asteroid hitting the planet.

In the final third of the book, Andrew spends time at the centre of political power in Washington during what seems to be the presidency of George W Bush. How do you decide when to channel your views about politics through your fiction and when to simply write an article or give a speech instead?

Whenever I've taken a forum to talk politically, I've always had to be dragged into it. I'm not comfortable using the common political diction because it's so deadening. Take the phrase "campaign finance reform" – you can't do much with that. I think of my politics as biblical politics: you shouldn't murder, you shouldn't steal, that sort of thing.

If anyone wants to think about President Bush and his people while reading the Washington episode in the novel, that's fine with me. But if I'm lucky and this book is read 25 or 50 years from now, no one will care who the apparent models for these characters are. What it's really about is moral insufficiency attached to power. You could find any number of examples of that in political history.

On a different note, you were recently awarded the National Book Foundation's 2013 medal for distinguished contribution to American letters and in your acceptance speech you stated that "an ebook is not a book".

The physical book is what appeals to me. A physical book is great technology if you think about it. Once it's produced it doesn't use up any energy, and if you take decent care of it, it will last for ever. That's a considerable technological achievement. The techies talk about interactivity but reading is the most interactive experience imaginable. A book is not complete until it's read. The reader's mind flows through sentences as through a circuit— – it illuminates them and brings them to life. That's an extraordinary thing. I don't like ebooks. I suppose you could think of that as a point of view that has to do with my age. The trouble with technology is that once it appears, everyone thinks they need it. It's not true in this case.