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

by Brian Greene

when the Ferrari grabs your attention, a collection of cognitive data processing wheels is set in motion. Red, fragrant, shiny, metallic, glass, wheels, engine, power, movement, velocity, and so on—a range of physical qualities and functional capacities are both conjured and bound by your brain into the version of the car you hold in your mind. So far, this sounds similar to integrated information theory, but Graziano’s proposal takes these realizations in a different direction. His central thesis is that however heedful of detail you might be, your mental representations are always vastly simplified. Even describing the car as “red” is a shorthand for the many similar but distinct frequencies of light—the many shades of red—that reflect off different parts of the car’s surface: electromagnetic waves, for instance, oscillating at 435, 172, 874, 363, 122 cycles per second from a spot on the driver’s side door, 447, 892, 629, 261, 106 cycles per second from a spot on the hood, and so on.31 Your mind would reel if it dealt with such an overabundance of detail. Instead, “red” is the mind’s welcome, albeit schematic, simplification. So too for the vast collection of similar simplifications the mind constantly makes. For just about everything you ever encounter in the environment, a schematic representation is not only adequate but also frees up mental resources for other life-supporting purposes. Long ago, brains that may have become distracted by the billowing details of the p...