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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Greene
Read between
February 17 - May 3, 2020
the more finely you examine something that’s alive, the more challenging it is to see that it’s living.
six types of atoms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur, a collection of elements students sometimes remember with the acronym SPONCH
The art of science, of which Newton was the master, lies in making judicious simplifications that render problems tractable while retaining enough of their essence to ensure that the conclusions drawn are relevant.
conscious awareness is information that is highly integrated and highly differentiated.
familiarity can skew our sense of the absurd.
Brains that survived are brains that avoided being consumed by details that lacked survival value.
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.
Requiring no supra-scientific spark, invoking no novel qualities of matter, consciousness would simply emerge. Ordinary stuff, governed by ordinary laws, carrying out ordinary processes, would have the extraordinary capacity to think and feel.
Our experiments and observations support the view that when a quantum system is prodded—whether the prodder is a conscious being or a mindless probe—the system snaps out of the probabilistic quantum haze and assumes a definite reality. Interactions—not consciousness—coax the emergence of a definite reality.
Whether the laws are deterministic (as in classical physics) or probabilistic (as in quantum physics) is of deep significance to how reality evolves and to the kinds of predictions science can make. But for assessing free will, the distinction is irrelevant.
Our freedom is not from physical laws that are beyond our ability to affect. Our freedom is to exhibit behaviors—leaping, thinking, imagining, observing, deliberating, explaining, and so on—that are not available to most other collections of particles.
Human freedom is not about willed choice.
Instead, human freedom is about being released from the bondage of an impoverished range of response that has long constrained the behavior of the inanimate world.
I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organization has emancipated my behavioral responses.
Learning and creativity do not require free will.
We need to recognize that although the sensation of free will is real, the capacity to exert free will—the capacity for the human mind to transcend the laws that control physical progression—is not.
Mathematics is the articulation of pattern.
Words not only express reasoning, they vitalize it.
Toni Morrison, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
The usefulness of rehearsing for the real world is encountering situations that would be challenging to respond to without preparation.
With math we commune with other realities; with story we commune with other minds.
To reflect on origins is to rouse questions of endings. To reflect on how to live a life is to reflect on the absence of life.
Boyer argues that a given musing lands in the cognitive sweet spot when it is “minimally counterintuitive”—which means that it violates one or perhaps as many as two of our deeply ingrained expectations.
Aligning with the larger-than-life themes of mythic tales, the protagonists we encounter are larger than life but minimally counterintuitive constructs of the human imagination.
the brain’s inference systems are particularly responsive to the kinds of features that show up in the world’s religions.
Religion is story, enhanced by doctrines, rituals, customs, symbols, art, and behavioral standards. By conferring an aura of the sacred upon collections of such activities and by establishing an emotional allegiance among those who practice them, religion extends the club of kinship.
Religion provides membership to unrelated individuals who thus feel part of a strongly bound group. Even though our genetic overlap is minimal, we are primed to work together and protect one another because of our religious attachment.
the adaptive value of cooperation is itself a complex business: In any group of cooperative individuals, selfish members can game the system.
Evolution did not configure our brain processes to form beliefs that align with reality. It configured them to favor beliefs that generate survival-promoting behaviors.
Myth did not supplicate for belief. It did not elicit a crisis of faith that through painstaking deliberation was resolved by its beholders. Myth provided a poetic schema, a metaphorical mind-set, which became inseparable from the reality it illuminated.
Beauty amounts to publicly available credentials attesting to a potential mate’s adaptive fitness.
Innovation is the foot soldier of creativity. Group cohesion is the army of implementation. Success in the relentless battle for survival requires both: creative ideas that are successfully implemented.
“By refining and strengthening our sociality, by making us readier to use the resources of the imagination, and by raising our confidence in shaping life on our own terms, art fundamentally alters our relation to our world.”
An examined life need not be an articulated life.
“Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”
As 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.”
Light provides an illusion of presence. And not just for stars. Undisturbed, reflected beams of radiation carry your imprint and mine across an arbitrary expanse of space and time, a poetic immortality racing across the cosmos at the speed of light.
Impermanence underlies experience. We revere the absolute but are bound to the transitory.
Living in an endless world absent death, writes the protagonist in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Immortal,” “no one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men…I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.”
to conclude that we would necessarily grow bored suggests an unduly parochial vision of the immortal mind.
The explanations we give for the subjects we study, the trades we learn, the work we pursue, the risks we take, the partners we join, the families we build, the objectives we set, the concerns we entertain—all reflect the recognition that our opportunities are scarce because our time is limited.
“Which news would affect you more,” she asked, “being told you have a year to live or that in a year earth will be destroyed?”
Our concerns and commitments, our values and judgments of importance, our sense of what matters and what is worth doing—all these things are formed and sustained against a background in which it is taken for granted that human life is itself a thriving, ongoing enterprise…We need humanity to have a future for the very idea that things matter to retain a secure place in our conceptual repertoire.7
There is no need to chant, and a lotus position is optional, but if you find a quiet place and let your mind slowly and freely float along the cosmic timeline, moving through and then past our epoch, past the era of distant receding galaxies, past the era of stately solar systems, past the era of graceful swirling galaxies, past the era of burnt-out stars and wandering planets, past the era of glowing and disintegrating black holes, and onward to a cold, dark, nearly empty but potentially limitless expanse—in which the evidence that we once existed amounts to an isolated particle located here
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We are ephemeral. We are evanescent. Yet our moment is rare and extraordinary, a recognition that allows us to make life’s impermanence and the scarcity of self-reflective awareness the basis for value and a foundation for gratitude.
the scientific journey we’ve taken suggests strongly that the universe does not exist to provide an arena for life and mind to flourish. Life and mind are simply a couple of things that happen to happen. Until they don’t.
Looking for the universe to hug us, its transient conscious squatters, is understandable, but that’s just not what the universe does.
As we hurtle toward a cold and barren cosmos, we must accept that there is no grand design. Particles are not endowed with purpose. There is no final answer hovering in the depths of space awaiting discovery.
Instead, certain special collections of particles can think and feel and reflect, and within these subjective worlds they can create purpose. And so, in our quest to fathom the human condition, the only direction to look is inward.
