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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Greene
With math we commune with other realities; with story we commune with other minds.
Mythic Tales
It is notoriously difficult to define myth, but we will take it to denote stories that invoke supernatural agents to explore culture’s grand concerns: its origin, its long-practiced rituals, its particular ways of imposing order on the world.
Language provides another cylinder powering myth’s creative engine. Once we have the capacity to describe the structure of ordinary things—raging storms, burning trees, slithering snakes, and so on—language provides a ready-made narrative Mr. Potato Head, allowing us to mix and match freely.
7
BRAINS AND BELIEF
From Imagination to t...
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To survive is to kindle the search for why survival matters.
Imagining Other Worlds
Inferring the inspiration of those who lived hundreds of centuries ago is a risky business, and so we’re well advised not to overreach. But when you consider the ordeal required to reach at least some of these sites—archaeologist David Lewis-Williams describes how explorers now and, presumably, cave artists then “crouched and crawled underground along a narrow, absolutely dark passage for more than a kilometre, slid along mud banks and waded through dark lakes and hidden rivers”6—an art-for-art’s-sake explanation seems less plausible. Even those of our ancient brethren with an especially
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According to Smith and many like-minded researchers, our forebears believed deeply that through art and ritual they could influence spiritual forces. That confident conclusion notwithstanding, as we look back twenty-five, fifty, perhaps even a hundred thousand years, details are hazy, and so it is unlikely that we will ever definitively know what motivated our ancient brethren.
Evolutionary Roots of Religion
The elephant in the religious room is the human mind, and without a primary focus on the mind’s evolved nature we leave out the dominant force.
Take One for the Team
When groups outgrow a collection of kin, is there a genetic carrot that wields the cooperative stick?
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.
In any group of cooperative individuals, selfish members can game the system. By taking advantage of affable comrades, selfish individuals can acquire an undue allotment of resources and thus unfairly increase the likelihood of surviving and reproducing. Passing on their selfish tendencies, their progeny will tend to do the same, over time driving their trusting companions—together with their religious sensibilities—into extinction. So much for religion’s adaptive coup.
If we assume that across many thousands of generations between-group success dominated the calculus of survival, allegiance to the group would hold sway, and so religion’s social cohesion would triumph.
Using mathematical analyses and computer simulations, researchers have pitted various strategies against one another and found that one in particular—“I’ll do something good for you so long as you do something good for me in return, but you do something underhanded and I’ll quickly retaliate”—reliably trumps other variants, including those far more selfish.
Individual Adaptation and Religion
Clearly, there is as yet no consensus on why religion arose nor on why it has so tenaciously remained. And not for lack of ideas: coopting the naturally selected brain, driving group cohesion, calming existential anxiety, protecting reputations and reproductive opportunities. The historical record may be too spotty for us ever to build a definitive case; religion may play roles too varied to submit to all-embracing explanations.
I remain partial to religion’s relevance to our singular recognition of our finite lives; as Stephen Jay Gould summarized it, “A large brain allowed us to learn…the inevitability of our personal mortality”
But whether religion then took hold because it transformed that awareness into an adaptive advantage is a wholly different question.
A Sketch of Religious Roots
Among the earliest surviving written records are the Vedas, composed in Sanskrit on the Indian subcontinent, with portions that date from as far back as 1500 BC. Together with the Upanishads, a rich body of commentary likely written sometime after the eighth century BC, the Vedas are a voluminous collection of verse, mantra, and prose that constitutes the sacred texts of what would become the Hindu religion—now practiced by one in seven inhabitants of the earth, about 1.1 billion people.
Deviating from its Vedic origins, Buddhism denies that there is an immutable substrate underlying existence and attributes the root of human suffering to the failure of recognizing the impermanence of everything. The Buddha’s teachings outline a way of life that promises an unvarnished, more clearly perceived view of truth, and as with the Vedas, the path to such enlightenment involves a series of rebirths, with the endgame seeking to conclude the cycles of reincarnation by reaching an eternal state of bliss that stands beyond desire, beyond suffering, and beyond self.
Some years ago I was invited to participate in a public forum with the Dalai Lama. During the discussion, I noted the preponderance of books explaining how modern physics is recapitulating discoveries made in the Far East thousands of years ago, and I asked the Dalai Lama whether he considered these claims valid. His forthright answer left a significant impression on me: “When it comes to consciousness, Buddhism has something important to say. But when it comes to material reality, we need to look to you and your colleagues. You are the ones penetrating deeply.”
The Urge to Believe
If data collected in carefully designed and replicable experiments investigating, say, the ability to sense hidden cards in a deck, revealed better than random success, or if robust data established that a member of our species was able to channel an ancient sage hailing from a long-lost land, I’d be interested. Extraordinarily interested. But in the absence of such data, and in the absence of any reason whatsoever to anticipate that such data might be forthcoming, and in the absence of any argument as to why such claims are not in flat-out contradiction with all we demonstrably know about the
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Belief, Confidence, and Value
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.
If our forebears had carefully investigated every swish and rustle that caught their attention, they would have found that most could be explained without invoking a volitional agent. But from the standpoint of adaptive fitness, their burdensome investment in seeking the truth would have had little going for it. Across tens of thousands of generations, our brains eschewed greater accuracy for a rough-and-ready understanding. Nimble responses often beat considered assessments. Verity is an important character in the drama of belief but is easily upstaged by survival and reproduction.
One of the dominant approaches to quantum mechanics (called the Copenhagen interpretation) can be traced in part to powerful personalities that held sway during the theory’s inception. I’ll refer you to one of my other books, The Hidden Reality, for a discussion, but I suspect that had quantum mechanics been developed by a different cast of characters, the formal science would exist all the same but this particular interpretive perspective would not have enjoyed the same dominant position across so many decades.
We invoke the equations of Einstein and Schrödinger, the evolutionary framework of Darwin and Wallace, the double helix of Watson and Crick, and a long list of other scientific achievements not because they are compatible with our observations, which of course they are, but because they provide a powerful, detailed, and predictive explanatory structure for understanding our observations.
Science may seek an objective reality, but our only access to that reality is through the mind’s subjective processing. The human mind thus relentlessly interprets an objective reality by producing a subjective one.
8
INSTINCT AND CREATIVITY
From the Sacred to th...
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To Create
But what sparks the imaginative impulse? Is it catalyzed by behavioral instincts shaped by natural selection? Or have we long been expending precious resources of time and energy on artistic pursuits that have little connection to survival and reproduction?
To experience a work that enlivens the soul or moves us to tears is to go beyond the humdrum of the everyday, and who wouldn’t thrill to an experience like that? But as with the superficial observation that we eat ice cream because we like sweet things, this explanation is focused solely on our proximate responses and hence is limited to the most immediate impetus for creative inclinations.
Can we go deeper? Can we gain insight into why our forebears were so willing to turn from the all-too-real challenges of survival and expend precious time, energy, and effort engaging the imaginative?
Sex and Cheesecake
the arts, according to Pinker, are adaptively useless creations designed to artificially excite human senses that evolved to promote the fitness of our ancestors.
Evolution has surely coaxed us toward a raft of behaviors aimed at increasing our biological fitness, from finding food, securing mates, and ensuring safety to establishing alliances, fending off adversaries, and instructing progeny. Heritable behaviors that, on average, resulted in greater reproductive success spread widely and became the go-to mechanisms for surmounting particular adaptive challenges. In shaping some of these behaviors, one carrot evolution wielded was pleasure: if you find particular survival-promoting behaviors pleasurable, you will be more likely to undertake them. And by
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He suggests that music is an auditory parasite, free riding on emotionally evocative aural sensitivities that long ago provided survival value to our forebears. For example, sounds whose frequencies are harmonically related (frequencies that are multiples of a common frequency) indicate a single and potentially identifiable source (basic physics reveals that when a linear object vibrates, whether a predator’s vocal cords or a weapon made from hollowed bone, the vibrational frequencies tend to fill out a harmonic series). Those of our forebears who responded more pleasurably to such organized
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According to Pinker, music hijacks such sonic sensitivity and takes it for a joyride of sensual pleasure that confers no adaptive value.
Much as cheesecake artificially stimulates our ancient adaptive preference for foods with elevated caloric content, music artificially stimulates our ancient adaptive sensitiv...
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Imagination and Survival
We triumphed because we are resourceful and creative, certainly, but above all because we are exceptionally social.
