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

by Brian Greene

German pharmacologist Otto Loewi,

had the same dream, but this time he immediately went to the lab and followed the dream’s directive to carry out an experiment testing his long-standing hypothesis that chemical processes, not electrical, are central to cellular communication.

brain surreptitiously coordinates a regulatory, a functional, and a data-mining marvel.

And I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties.”

explain how there can be a “what it feels like”

Complete knowledge of the brain’s physical workings leaves something out.

concept of complete physical understanding is so utterly foreign that we grossly underestimate the explanatory power it would provide.

either dismiss consciousness as an illusion (eliminativism) or declare that consciousness is the only quality of the world that is real (idealism).

objective, third-party-accessible quality of information—the

subjective, first-person-accessible quality of information that physics has so far not considered.

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

our theory of mind32 (we theorize, intuitively, that living things are endowed with minds that operate more or less like ours), or the intentional stance33 (we attribute knowledge, beliefs, desires, and thus intentions to the animals and humans we encounter).

Quantum mechanics is the most accurate theoretical framework for describing physical processes ever developed.

The challenge, known as the quantum measurement problem, is to resolve the puzzling disparity between the fuzzy quantum reality described by the equations and the sharp familiar reality you consistently experience.

Mathematics is the articulation of pattern.

my language mean the limits of my world”

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”4

“A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.”

singular neurobiological event, a “slight rewiring of the brain” perhaps eighty thousand years ago, may have resulted in our ancestors acquiring this capacity, sparking a cognitive big bang that blasted language clear across the species.

rework reality

Neolithic Thelma and Louise.

Einstein’s bold quest had arrived safely on the shores of understanding.

reading “is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily,

often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s voice; another’s soul…to enter a consciousness not known to us.”

With math we commune with other realities; with story we commune with other minds.

storylike packets.

myths are “nearly always rooted in the experience of death and the fear of extinction,”44 and even if we’re a touch more conservative and soften “nearly always” to “often” or “in many instances,” we still have a strong guiding light to lead us onward.

“minimally counterintuitive”—which

uniformly applicable evolutionary basis:

brain is likened to a special-purpose computer, hardwired with programming designed by natural selection to bolster the survival and reproductive prospects of our forebears.

“inference systems,”

inference systems are readily coopted by the very qualities intrinsic to religion.

adaptively beneficial tendency to overendow such agency clarifies why we so readily imagine our surroundings—whether

minimally counterintuitive concepts (recall

brain’s evolution was shaped by the battle for survival, and the victorious brain that emerged has qualities that embrace religion with open arms.

evolutionary package deal.

addressing mortality awareness by invoking the supernatural was a wondrous human innovation.

palliator with unqualified and unlimited durability, something impossible to achieve in the real world of material things.

religious experience that William James described as providing “an assurance of safety and a temper of peace”

while instilling a “new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form of either lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism.”25

perception is an illusory guide to reality.

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.

Hinduism and Buddhism seek a reality beyond the illusions of everyday perception,

never encountered more than a metaphorical resonance between distinct ideas vaguely construed.

“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.”

“discovery” is generally used only when the confidence crosses a mathematical threshold:

the probability of being misled by a statistical fluke in the data must be less than about one in 3.5 million

Beauty amounts to publicly available credentials attesting to a potential mate’s adaptive fitness.

(Artists of the Pleistocene, apparently, were anything but starving.)

“Sexual selection has been an extra gear for art, not the engine itself.”