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

by Brian Greene

The upshot, anthropomorphized, is that the universe cleverly leverages the gravitational and nuclear forces to wrest a cache of untapped entropy that’s locked up inside of its material constituents.

Albert Szent-Györgyi, continuing his poetic reflections, mused, “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.”

But the fact that a huge number of your molecules can act in concert, coordinating their overall motion to cause your arm to reach out across a table and your hand to clutch a mug, reflects the wealth of biological information, embodied in atomic and molecular arrangements, directing a profusion of complex molecular processes. Life is physics orchestrated.

“To determine more absolutely, what Light is…and by what modes or actions it produceth in our minds the Phantasms of Colours, is not so easie. And I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties.”

But consider your incredulity in context. How can it be that a three-pound clump of brain, when appropriately connected to a blood supply and network of nerves, has familiar conscious experience?

And this, according to Graziano, is the heart of why conscious experience seems to float unmoored in the mind. When the brain’s penchant for simplified schematic representations is applied to itself, to its own attention, the resulting description ignores the very physical processes responsible for that attention. That is why thoughts and sensations seem ethereal, as if they come from nowhere, as if they hover in our heads.