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

by Brian Greene

Cognitive psychologists Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, pioneers of a Darwinian approach to language, suggest a less bespoke history, one in which language emerged and developed through the familiar pattern of a gradual buildup of incremental changes that each conferred a degree of survival advantage.

Still other researchers identify a suite of adaptations including breath control, memorization, symbolic thinking, awareness of other minds, formation of groups, and so on that may have worked in tandem to yield language even though language itself may have had little to do with the survival value of the adaptations themselves.13

Although language’s origin remains enigmatic, what’s unquestionable, and of most relevance as we head onward, is that language and thought provide a potent mix. Whether or not an internal version of language preceded its external vocalization, and whether or not that vocalization was prompted by song or infant care or gesticulation or gossip or communal discourse or possessing a big brain or something else entirely, once the human mind had language, our species’ engagement with reality was poised for radical change.

Why were our ancestors drawn to expend precious resources of time, energy, and attention telling stories that, at first blush, don’t seem to enhance our survival prospects? Fictional stories are particularly puzzling. What evolutionary utility could arise from following the exploits of imaginary characters facing make-believe challenges in nonexistent worlds?

With the flight simulator as our metaphor for the adaptive utility of story, how would we program the simulator itself? What kinds of stories would we have it run? We can take the answer from the first page of the Creative Writing 101 curriculum. An axiom of storytelling is the need for conflict. The need for difficulty. The need for trouble. We are drawn in by characters pursuing outcomes that require clearing treacherous hurdles, external and internal. Their journeys, literal and symbolic, keep us on the edge of our seats or furiously turning pages.

Without conflict, without difficulty, without trouble, the adaptive value of story would fizzle too. A Josef K. who is happy to confess to an unnamed crime and dutifully serve an unjustified punishment would be a quick read.

Clear skies, textbook-perfect engines, and model passengers are not the simulations that improve pilot readiness. The usefulness of rehearsing for the real world is encountering situations that would be challenging to respond to without preparation.

Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance.

Through story we break free from our usual singular perspective and for a brief moment inhabit the world in a different way. We experience it through the eyes and imagination of the storyteller.

In the words of Joyce Carol Oates, reading “is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s voice; another’s soul…to enter a consciousness not known to us.”36 Without story, the nuances of other minds would be as opaque as the microworld without knowledge of quantum mechanics.

Whether dealing with fact or fiction, the symbolic or the literal, the storytelling impulse is a human universal. We take in the world through our senses, and in pursuing coherence and envisioning possibility we seek patterns, we invent patterns, and we imagine patterns.

Evolution instilled a tendency for us to imagine our surroundings chock-full of things that think and feel, sometimes envisioning them offering help and counsel, but more often conceiving of them as plotting and planning, crossing and double-crossing, attacking and avenging.

We see our forebears engaging in ceremonial burials, ritualized send-offs to other worlds; creating art that imagines realities beyond experience; telling mythic narratives that invoke powerful spirits, immortality, and the afterlife—in short, the strands of what later generations would label religion are coming together, and we don’t have to strain to see recognition of life’s impermanence entwined in the braiding.

The thesis is that features inherent to human brains, shaped over eons by the relentless battle for evolutionary supremacy, prime us for religious conviction.

Becker himself made a persuasive case that addressing mortality awareness by invoking the supernatural was a wondrous human innovation. To alleviate the distress of transience requires a palliator with unqualified and unlimited durability, something impossible to achieve in the real world of material things.

Is there any basis for believing in an invisible, all-powerful being who created the universe, listens and responds to our prayers, keeps track of what we say and do, and doles out rewards and punishments? In developing an answer, it is worthwhile to flesh out the concept of belief more fully.

Evolution did not configure our brain processes to form beliefs that align with reality. It configured them to favor beliefs that generate survival-promoting behaviors.

Across tens of thousands of generations, our brains eschewed greater accuracy for a rough-and-ready understanding. Nimble responses often beat considered assessments. Verity is an important character in the drama of belief but is easily upstaged by survival and reproduction.

In forming beliefs, some look to science, both in content and for strategy. Some rely on authority, others on community. Some are coerced, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. Some place their utmost trust in tradition. Others give full jurisdiction to intuition. And in the mind’s subterranean, generally unmonitored processing centers, we each employ an idiosyncratic and highly variable combination of all these tactics.

am comfortable admitting that every now and then I knock on wood or speak to the departed or seek heavenly reinforcement. None of this fits within my rational beliefs about the world, and yet I am perfectly content with my occasional apotropaic leanings. In fact, there is a certain delight in momentarily stepping beyond rational strictures.

Myth did not supplicate for belief. It did not elicit a crisis of faith that through painstaking deliberation was resolved by its beholders. Myth provided a poetic schema, a metaphorical mind-set, which became inseparable from the reality it illuminated.

Over time, metaphors become so overused that any poetic quality they may have initially possessed gradually evaporates (water evaporates, not poetry) and they become everyday workhorse words (horses work, not words). In a word, they become literal. Perhaps an analogous process plays out with mythic-religious notions. Perhaps such notions begin as evocative, poetic, metaphorical ways of looking out on the world that, over an expanse of time, gradually lose their poetry, shed their metaphorical meaning, and transition into literalism.

And so, if religious practice—or perhaps a better label here would be spiritual practice—is undertaken as an exploration of the mind’s inner world, an inward-directed journey through the inescapably subjective experience of reality, then questions of whether this or that doctrine reflects an objective truth become secondary.

While decidedly not providing insight into a verifiable basis of material reality—the purview of science—religion has provided some of its adherents with a sense of coherence that has given life context, placing the familiar and exotic, the joys and the travails within a grander story. And because of that, the world’s venerable religions provide lineages that connect followers clear across the ages.

Magnificent minds—rare but arising in every age, all shaped by nature and some by imagined inspiration from the divine—would discover new ways for articulating the transcendent. Their creative odysseys would express a variety of truth standing beyond derivation or validation, giving voice to defining qualities of human nature that remain silent until experienced.

We are thrust into the world without consultation. Once here, we are granted leave to embrace life for merely a moment. How elevating to grab the reins of creation and fashion something we control, something intrinsically ours, something that is a reflection of who we are, something that captures our peculiar take on human existence.

To illuminate reality with beacons of our own making, to move the world with works that flow through our particular molecular makeup, to craft experiences that can stand the test of time—well, it all sounds thoroughly romantic.

For some, there is magic in the creative process, an irrepressible drive for self-expression. Others see an opportunity to elevate their status and esteem. For others still, there is a nod toward eternity; our artistic creations, as Keith Haring once said, are a “quest for immortality.”4

Much as cheesecake artificially stimulates our ancient adaptive preference for foods with elevated caloric content, music artificially stimulates our ancient adaptive sensitivity to sounds with elevated information content.

Art may have had adaptive utility directly at the level of the individual, a perspective I find particularly compelling.

A mind that assiduously sticks to what’s true is a mind that explores a wholly limited realm of possibility.

But a mind that becomes accustomed to freely crossing the boundary between what’s real and what’s imagined—all the while keeping clear tabs on which is which—is a mind that becomes adept at breaking the bonds of conventional thinking. Such a mind is primed for innovation and ingenuity. History makes this manifest.

In the assessment of illustrious pianist Glenn Gould, the genius of Bach is demonstrated by his ability to devise melodic lines “which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit…some entirely new but completely harmonious profile.”

Which is all just to say that the arts may well have been vital for developing the flexibility of thought and fluency of intuition that our relatives needed to fashion the spear, to invent cooking, to harness the wheel, and, later, to write the Mass in B Minor and, later still, to crack our rigid perspective on space and time.

“By refining and strengthening our sociality, by making us readier to use the resources of the imagination, and by raising our confidence in shaping life on our own terms, art fundamentally alters our relation to our world.”18

With this perspective the arts join language, story, myth, and religion as the means by which the human mind thinks symbolically, reasons counterfactually, imagines freely, and works collaboratively. Over the sweep of time, it is these capacities that have given rise to our culturally, scientifically, and technologically rich world.

“Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides—the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.” And without that other reality, Bellow notes, channeling thoughts set down by Proust, existence is reduced to a “terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.”20

Artistic truth touches a distinct layer; it tells a higher-level story, one that in the words of Joseph Conrad “appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom” and speaks instead to “our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation…in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

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.”

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.

In Rank’s view, the artistic impulse reflects the mind taking charge of its fate, having the courage to rework reality, and embarking on the lifelong project of shaping its own idiosyncratic self. The artist moves toward psychic health by accepting mortality—we’re going to die, that’s that, get over it—and shifting the urge for eternity onto a symbolic form carried by creative

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.

For almost five billion years, the sun has supported its tremendous mass against the crushing force of gravity through the energy produced by the fusion of hydrogen nuclei in its core.

An increasingly powerful repulsive push of gravity would, in time, triumph over all forces that bind, with the result that everything would be torn apart. Your body is held intact by the electromagnetic force, binding together your atomic and molecular constituents, and also by the strong nuclear force, binding together the protons and neutrons inside of your body’s atomic nuclei. Because these forces are far stronger than today’s outward push of expanding space, your body holds firm. If you are widening, it is not because space is expanding. But if the strength of the repulsive push grows ever larger, the space inside your body will ultimately expand with such a powerful outward thrust that it will overcome the electromagnetic and nuclear forces holding you together. You will swell and ultimately burst to pieces, as will everything else.

In loose terms that for now lack mathematical rigor, it is possible that repulsive gravity will shred the very fabric of spacetime itself.

The light each galaxy emits does travel through space. And much as a kayaker will be stymied if she’s paddling upstream at a speed that’s less than that of the stream itself, the light emitted by a galaxy that is sprinting away at superluminal speed will fight a losing battle as it tries to reach us. Traversing space at light speed, the light cannot overcome the faster-than-light-speed increase in the distance to earth. As a result, when future astronomers look past nearby stars and focus their telescopes on the deepest parts of the night sky, all they will see is velvety black darkness.

With the dissolution of atoms and molecules, the very scaffolding of life and most structure in the cosmos will have crumbled. So if life has made it this far, will it now hit the final wall? Perhaps. But, perhaps too, over the timescales we’re considering—more than a billion billion billion times the current age of the universe—life will have evolved into a form that has long discarded any need for the biological architecture it currently requires. Perhaps the very categories of life and mind will be rendered coarse and clumsy by future incarnations that require new characterizations altogether.

Underlying such speculation is the assumption that life and mind are not dependent on any particular physical substrate, such as cells, bodies, and brains, but are instead collections of integrated processes.

Let’s start by thinking about your brain. Among its other qualities, your brain is hot. It continually takes in energy, which you supply by eating and drinking and breathing; it undertakes a host of physiochemical processes that modify its detailed configuration (chemical reactions, molecular rearrangements, particle movements, and so on); and it releases waste heat to the environment. As your brain thinks (and does everything else brains do), it thus recapitulates a sequence we first encountered in chapter 2 when analyzing steam engines.

If, for whatever reason, a steam engine is unable to eliminate its entropic buildup, sooner or later it will redline and fail. A similar fate will befall a brain that, for whatever reason, cannot clear away the entropic waste that its functioning continually produces. And a brain that fails is a brain that no longer thinks. Therein lies the potential challenge to the durability of brain-based thought.