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

by Brian Greene

This discussion highlights one of our central themes: the need for nested stories that explain distinct but interconnected layers of reality. Were you content with a story that describes the unfolding of reality solely at the level of particles, you would not be motivated to introduce concepts like learning and creativity (or, for that matter, entropy and evolution). All you would need to know is how collections of particles continually rearrange their configuration, and that information is delivered by the fundamental laws (and a specification of the state of the particles at some moment in the past). But most of us are not content with that sort of story. Most of us find it enlightening to tell additional stories, compatible with the reductionist account, but focused on larger and more familiar scales. It is in these stories, whose main characters are aggregates of particles like you and me and the Roomba, that concepts including learning and creativity (and entropy and evolution) provide an indispensable language. While the reductionist story describing the Roomba would catalog the motion of billions of billions of particles, the higher-level story might explain that the Roomba’s sensors recognized that it was on the edge of a flight of stairs, stored that dangerous location in memory, and reversed course to avoid a potentially catastrophic drop. The two stories are fully compatible even though one uses the language of particles and laws while the other uses the languag...