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by
Brian Greene
Read between
June 22 - July 22, 2020
“Man is the only being that knows death; all others become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which must seem to them eternal,” knowledge that instills the “essentially human fear in the presence of death.” Spengler concluded that “every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it.”3
Jean-Paul Sartre went farther, noting that life itself is drained of meaning “when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.”5 The suggestion, then, threading its way through these and other thinkers who followed, is that much of human culture—from artistic exploration to scientific discovery—is driven by life reflecting on the finite nature of life.
We emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose.
The unfolding of any given life is beyond prediction. The final fate of any given life is a foregone conclusion.
recent mathematical analyses of entropy suggest that life, or at least lifelike qualities, might well be the expected product of a long-lived source of energy, like the sun, relentlessly raining down heat and light on molecular ingredients that are competing for the limited resources available on a planet like earth.
As our trek across time will make clear, life is likely transient, and all understanding that arose with its emergence will almost certainly dissolve with its conclusion. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is absolute. And so, in the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of significance, are those of our own making. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.
Large groups often display statistical regularities absent at the level of the individual.
For now, the lesson is simply that low-entropy configurations should be viewed as a diagnostic, a clue that powerful organizing influences may be responsible for the order we’ve encountered.
whereas the first law of thermodynamics declares that the quantity of energy is conserved over time, the second law declares that the quality of that energy deteriorates over time.
is it true that “all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins”?17
Seeking insight into life by homing in on fundamental particles is akin to experiencing a Beethoven symphony instrument by instrument, note by single note.
life is one more means the universe employs to release the entropy potential locked within matter.
All life meets the challenge of energy extraction and distribution in the same way.
Life is physics orchestrated.
“Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.”
Gottfried Leibniz (“Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating”8).
I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organization has emancipated my behavioral responses.
Without story, the nuances of other minds would be as opaque as the microworld without knowledge of quantum mechanics.
The raison d’être of science is to pull back the veil obscuring an objective reality, and so scientific accounts must conform to standards of logic and be tested through replicable experimental scrutiny.
The stories we tell of the comings and goings of characters, whether real or fictional, have a different concern. They illuminate the richness of our ineluctably circumscribed and thoroughly subjective existence.
Science may seek an objective reality, but our only access to that reality is through the mind’s subjective processing. The human mind thus relentlessly interprets an objective reality by producing a subjective one.
While many among us would decline an opportunity to switch places with Shakespeare or Bach, Mozart or van Gogh, Dickinson or O’Keeffe, plenty would jump at the chance to be infused with their creative mastery.
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.
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.
“When a writer brings into language a new image that is fully right, what is knowable of existence expands.”
“Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”
As George Bernard Shaw put it, “You use a glass mirror to see your face, you use works of art to see your soul.”
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.
Our concerns and commitments, our values and judgments of importance, our sense of what matters and what is worth doing—all these things are formed and sustained against a background in which it is taken for granted that human life is itself a thriving, ongoing enterprise…We need humanity to have a future for the very idea that things matter to retain a secure place in our conceptual repertoire.7
