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

by Brian Greene

That the brain is awash with influential processes escaping introspection is a premise with a long history, one that has been expressed in myriad forms. Vedic texts written three thousand years ago invoke a notion of the unconscious, and references continue across the centuries as penetrating thinkers have surmised flavors of mental qualities unavailable to the palate of conscious awareness: Saint Augustine (“The mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain?”5), Thomas Aquinas (“The mind does not see itself through its essence”6), William Shakespeare (“Go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know”7), Gottfried Leibniz (“Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating”8). Intriguing too are processes that seem to reside below the radar and yet generate echoes accessible to conscious processing. Stories abound, for example, of the unconscious mind solving problems and delivering the solutions unbidden. One of the most colorful comes from German pharmacologist Otto Loewi, who during the night before Easter Sunday 1921 briefly awoke and scribbled down an idea that had just come to him in a dream. In the morning, Loewi had an overwhelming sense that the nocturnal note contained a vital insight, but however hard he tried he was unable to decipher it. The next night he had the same dream, but this time he immediately went to the lab and followed the dream’s di...