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by
Brian Greene
As Noël Carroll, a philosopher who has also been at the forefront of these ideas, has emphasized, “Art has been about stirring up and shaping the emotions in a way that binds and inculcates those under its sway as participants in a culture.”
A mind that assiduously sticks to what’s true is a mind that explores a wholly limited realm of possibility. But a mind that becomes accustomed to freely crossing the boundary between what’s real and what’s imagined—all the while keeping clear tabs on which is which—is a mind that becomes adept at breaking the bonds of conventional thinking. Such a mind is primed for innovation and ingenuity.
History makes this manifest. We owe many of the greatest breakthroughs of science and technology to a collection of individuals who were able to look at the very same problems that had confounded generations of previous thinkers and have the flexibility of thought to see those problems differently.
Across hundreds of thousands of years, artistic endeavors may have been the playground of human cognition, providing a safe arena for training our imaginative capacities and infusing them with a potent faculty for innovation.
Brian Boyd has made this point succinctly: “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.”
Art and Truth
The lyricist Yip Harburg, author of many classics including “Over the Rainbow,” said it simply: “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”
As George Bernard Shaw put it, “You use a glass mirror to see your face, you use works of art to see your soul.”
Poetic Immortality
This range of dispositions, from longing to disdaining, demonstrates the larger point: our recognition of the limited time we are allotted has driven an artistically vibrant engagement with the concept of eternity. The examined life examines death. And for some, to examine death is to free the imagination to challenge its dominance, dispute its eminence, and conjure realms that lie beyond its reach. However intently researchers argue about their evolutionary utility, their role in building social cohesion, their necessity for innovative thinking, and their standing in the pantheon of primal
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9
DURATION AND IMPERMANENCE
From the Sublime to the Fi...
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Evolution, Entropy, and the Future
Life, among the premier achievements of evolution, embodies this mechanism, consuming high-quality energy, using it to maintain and enhance its orderly arrangements, and expelling high-entropy waste to the environment.
An Empire of Time
The Black Sun
Without the required temperature for further nuclear fusion, thermal energy will slowly dissipate into space and, like the final glow of a burning ember, the remnant sun will cool and dim, ultimately transitioning into a dark frozen orb.
The Big Rip
The case for dark energy is compelling but circumstantial. No one has found a way to clutch hold of dark energy, establish its existence, and directly examine its properties. Nevertheless, because it so adeptly accounts for the observations, dark energy has become the de facto explanation for the accelerated expansion of space.
The details depend on the rate at which repulsive gravity increases, but in one representative example worked out by physicists Robert Caldwell, Marc Kamionkowski, and Nevin Weinberg, about twenty billion years from now repulsive gravity will drive apart clusters of galaxies, about a billion years later the stars constituting the Milky Way will be flung apart like sparkles in a fireworks display, about sixty million years after that earth and the other planets in the solar system will be thrust away from the sun, a few months later the repulsive gravitational force between molecules will cause
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The Cliffs of Space
The Twilight of Stars
about one hundred trillion years in the future, star formation in the vast majority of galaxies will draw to a close.
The Twilight of Astronomical Order
Gravitational Waves and the Final Sweep
They concluded that 1.3 billion years ago, a time when multicellular life was just starting to coalesce on planet earth, two distant black holes were orbiting each other ever more closely and ever more quickly, closing in on the speed of light, until in a final orbital frenzy they smashed together. The collision generated a tidal wave in space, a gravitational tsunami so enormous that its power exceeded that produced by every star in every galaxy in the observable universe.
For this achievement, team leaders Ray Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize.
Taking account of both influences, central black holes will sweep most galaxies clean of stars by the thirtieth floor, 1030 years since the big bang, if not sooner.
Punctuated here and there by cold planets, burnt-out stars, and monstrous black holes, space will be dark and desolate.
The Fate of Complex Matter
Matter itself may disintegrate.
The failure to observe any disintegrating protons allowed the researchers to set a lower bound on the proton’s lifetime, which currently stands at about 1034 years.
Underlying such speculation is the assumption that life and mind are not dependent on any particular physical substrate, such as cells, bodies, and brains, but are instead collections of integrated processes. Biology has so far monopolized life’s activities, but that may only reflect the vagaries of evolution by natural selection on planet earth. If some other arrangement of basic particles should faithfully execute the processes of life and mind, then that system will live and that system will think.
The Future of Thought
If, for whatever reason, a steam engine is unable to eliminate its entropic buildup, sooner or later it will redline and fail. A similar fate will befall a brain that, for whatever reason, cannot clear away the entropic waste that its functioning continually produces. And a brain that fails is a brain that no longer thinks. Therein lies the potential challenge to the durability of brain-based thought. As the universe progresses ever further into the future, will brains maintain the capacity to jettison the waste heat they produce?
But the diagnostic requirement of being able to expel waste heat is so fundamental that it applies to any configuration of any kind that undertakes the process of thought.
And should the constraints imposed by physical law in an expanding universe dictate that every Thinker everywhere, sooner or later, is destined to fail in this indispensable task of entropy disposal, the future of thought itself will be imperiled.
How much energy does the Thinker’s thought require and how much entropy does the process of thinking generate? At what rate does the Thinker need to expel waste heat and at what rate can the universe absorb it?
Thinking Slow
So for a system with low entropy, its particle configuration has low-information content; for a system with high entropy, its particle configuration has high-information content.
Dyson leveraged the mathematical version of the links between each to quantify the heat that the Thinker needs to expel based on the number of thoughts the Thinker has.
Many thoughts implies that a lot of heat needs to be expelled. Fewer thoughts implies that less heat needs to be expelled.
Now, to power its thinking, the Thinker must extract energy from its surroundings. And because heat is itself a form of energy, the amount of energy the Thinker takes in must be at least as large as the amount of heat the Thinker needs to expel. The input energy has higher quality (so it can be readily harnessed by the Thinker) than the output heat (which is waste and will thus be dispersed), but the Thinker can’t release more than it absorbs. So Dyson’s calculation specifies the minimum high-quality energy the Thinker needs to absorb from the environment, thereby quantifying the challenge: as
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Faced with a universe that’s expanding, cooling, and winding down, the Thinker, who aspires to continue thinking for as long as possible, needs to place a premium on conservation, executing a long, slow burn instead of a quick, intense flash. We therefore advise the Thinker to follow the universe’s lead: as time goes by, the Thinker should continually lower its temperature, slow down its thinking, and decrease the rate at which it consumes the universe’s diminishing supply of quality energy.
The math reveals that much like a car whose mile-per-gallon consumption gets ever better the slower it drives, the Thinker’s thought-per-energy consumption gets ever better the slower it thinks. That is, the Thinker’s thinking becomes ever more efficient at ever lower temperatures. For this reason, the Thinker can actually think an infinite number of thoughts and yet only require a finite supply of energy (much as an infinite sum such as 1 + ½ + ¼ +…can add up to a finite number, in this case 2). We excitedly inform the Thinker of the result: “By following the plan, not only will you be able
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We do not need to know anything about the Thinker’s detailed physiology or construction to conclude that as the Thinker’s temperature decreases, the rate at which it can expel entropy will drop below the rate at which it produces entropy.
“Although thinking at ever lower temperatures is essential for prolonging thought as well as for needing only a finite supply of energy, there will come a point when your entropy will build up more quickly than you can expel it. And from there on, if you try to think further, you will burn up in your own thoughts.”
The Thinker needs periodically to give thinking a rest—turn off its mind and go to sleep—pausing entropy production while continuing to clear out all of its waste heat.
A Final Thought on Thought
