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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Greene
Read between
May 1 - July 12, 2020
nebulous.
insidious
cogitating
scythe
mandala,
evanescent
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.
more likely
taken
configurations
providing
different
explanation.
Laws
Unlike
coins
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.
“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
3 In the early 1980s, Soviet physicist Andrei Linde and the American duo Paul Steinhardt and Andreas Albrecht took Guth’s handoff and ran with the concept, developing the first fully viable versions
that
creates
be.
dainty.
anywhen.
unmoored
penchant
ethereal
The hard problem seems hard—consciousness seems to transcend the physical—only because our schematic mental models suppress cognizance of the very brain mechanics that connect our thoughts and sensations to their physical underpinnings.
Ordinary stuff, governed by ordinary laws, carrying out ordinary processes, would have the extraordinary capacity to think and feel.
Trumpets should blare and the species should take a bow because that represents a triumph of human
understanding.
furrow
But faced with the intransigence of physical law, autonomy withdraws. We are no more than playthings knocked to and fro by the dispassionate rules of the cosmos.
cogitation
eschew
Today’s craving for pistachio Häagen-Dazs, no longer praised as a health promoter, is a modern relic of yesteryear’s vital scavenging for calories.
Our actions result from a complex amalgam of biological, historical, social, cultural, and all manner of chance influences that are imprinted on our particle arrangement.
We can learn new tricks but, genetically and hence instinctually speaking, we are old dogs.
The general directive, emphasized colorfully in a famous paper by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, is that you can’t cherry-pick evolution.
chock-full
verisimilitude
Judy Garland’s simple and exquisite rendition of “Over the Rainbow” captures the pure yearnings of youth; John Lennon’s “Imagine” embodies the simple power of envisioning the possible.
Harburg emphasized, thinking is intellectual, feeling is emotional, but “to feel a thought is an artistic process.”
As George Bernard Shaw put it, “You use a glass mirror to see your face, you use works of art to see your soul.”
anthropocentric
After leaving Freud’s Vienna Circle, Otto Rank developed his thesis that the pursuit of symbolic immortality is a primary driver of human behavior.
“Man needs eternity, as the whole history of his aspirations bears witness; but the eternity of art is, in all probability, the only sort he will ever get.”28
chock-full
