Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

However much we’d prefer it otherwise, to achieve “I think, therefore I am” is to run headlong into the rejoinder “I am, therefore I will die.”

Since, more than likely, you don’t know me personally, let me put this in context. I’m open-minded with a sensibility that demands rigor.

Large groups often display statistical regularities absent at the level of the individual.

What matters to me is that unlike my desk and unlike my chair and unlike my mug, my collection of particles is able to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviors. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m pleased they did. Sure, that reaction, too, is nothing but my particle army carrying out their quantum mechanical marching orders, but that doesn’t diminish the reality of the feeling. I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organization has emancipated my behavioral responses.

In shaping some of these behaviors, one carrot evolution wielded was pleasure: if you find particular survival-promoting behaviors pleasurable, you will be more likely to undertake them. And by virtue of their survival-promoting qualities, these behaviors will increase the likelihood that you’ll stick around long enough to reproduce, endowing future generations with similar behavioral tendencies. Evolution thus generates a collection of self-reinforcing feedback loops that renders pleasurable those behaviors that enhance fitness. In Pinker’s view, the arts cut the feedback loops, sever adaptive benefits, and directly stimulate our pleasure centers, yielding gratifying experiences that from an evolutionary perspective are unearned. We like how the arts can make us feel, but neither creating nor experiencing them makes us more fit or appealing. From the standpoint of survival, the arts are junk food.

As Noël Carroll, a philosopher who has also been at the forefront of these ideas, has emphasized, “Art has been about stirring up and shaping the emotions in a way that binds and inculcates those under its sway as participants in a culture.”16 And indeed, the very notion of culture—a broadly shared set of traditions, customs, and perspectives—relies on a common heritage of artistic practice and experience. Members of such emotionally attuned groups had a better chance of surviving and passing on a genetic tendency for such behaviors to subsequent generations.

The link between scientific aptitude and solving real-world challenges may be more apparent, but minds that reason with analogy and metaphor, minds that represent with color and texture, minds that imagine with melody and rhythm are minds that cultivate a more flourishing cognitive landscape.

What’s curious, although likely common, is that while my own working process is thoroughly language based, I feel no urge to explore these experiences in words. When I think of them, I feel no lack of understanding calling out for linguistic clarification. They expand my world without need for interpretation. These are the times that my inner narrator knows it’s time to take a break. An examined life need not be an articulated life.

The lyricist Yip Harburg, author of many classics including “Over the Rainbow,” said it simply: “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”22 Feel a thought. For me, that captures the essence of artistic truth. As Harburg emphasized, thinking is intellectual, feeling is emotional, but “to feel a thought is an artistic process.”23 It is an observation that rests on linking language and music but, really, it yokes the arts more generally. The emotional responses elicited by art ripple across the reservoir of churning thought that underlies conscious awareness.

and picked up lightheartedly by Douglas Adams through his accidental immortal, Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, who plans to deal with his profound ennui by systematically insulting everyone in the universe, one by one, in alphabetical order.

The examined life examines death. And for some, to examine death is to free the imagination to challenge its dominance, dispute its eminence, and conjure realms that lie beyond its reach.

When I asked why he chose music, my dad answered, “To keep away the loneliness.” He swiftly transitioned to a brighter tone, more suited to a third-grade report, but that uncensored moment was revealing. Music was his lifeline. It was his version of Conrad’s solidarity.

If a brain, yours or mine or anyone’s, can’t trust that its memories and beliefs are an accurate reflection of events that happened, then no brain can trust the supposed measurements and observations and calculations that constitute the basis of scientific understanding.

I may have memories of saying to myself “I think, therefore I am,” but viewed from any given moment, an accurate accounting requires that I say instead, “I think I thought, therefore I think I was.” In reality, the memory of such thoughts does not ensure that the thoughts ever happened.