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

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Things start well with this latest title from Brian Greene: after a bit of introductory woffle we get into an interesting introduction to entropy. As always with Greene's writing, this is readable, chatty and full of little side facts and stories. Unfortunately, for me, the book then suffers something of an increase in entropy itself as on the whole it then veers more into philosophy and the soft sciences than Greene's usual physics and cosmology. Many researchers over the years have imagined a close association between evolution and the emergence of the world’s religions. Some have suggested that religious belief— and the kinds of behaviors such beliefs entail—has direct evolutionary benefit. For instance, religious belief may bind us into stronger groups that are better able to respond to the difficult challenges our forebears faced in the Pleistocene. Other researchers have suggested that religion has no adaptive role of its own, but naturally emerges as a byproduct of other evolutionary adaptations, from having a big brain to having developed highly sensitive “agent detectors”—which are good for recognizing that you’re being stalked by a lion but often go overboard in sensing intelligent beings blowing in the wind or floating in the clouds. As a means of overlaying coherence on a broad spectrum of human perceptions and experiences, having a religious outlook is, according to these perspectives, not at all surprising. Much to his credit, Miller mentions paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin’s 1979 “Spandrels of San Marco” paper in Chapter Five (“The Mind of a Primate”), hailing it as a major critique of the adaptationist view of Natural Selection prevalent in current evolutionary theory and especially, its recognition that other evolutionary processes, not only Natural Selection, are responsible for the history of life on our planet. Gould and Lewontin were responding to the “just so” tales of evolutionary adaptations in organisms, noting that such “adaptations” may be unintended consequences of evolution, in a manner consistent with the existence of spandrels within the domes of cathedrals like the one in San Marco, Italy that appear – and Miller notes this in italics - “whether you want them or not.” It is this expansionist view of evolution that underscores his subsequent discussion of the emergence of reason, human consciousness and free will. The eruption of a volcano, the causes of the second World War, and your inner experiences and emotions, for example, could be explained by physical laws, it’s just that we don’t have the capability of doing so. This is why we must study geological phenomena, history, and psychology at different, emergent levels, levels that we can cognitively handle. But this doesn’t mean that, in reality, it’s not “physics all the way down,” which Greene unabashadely believes.

Engaging . . . An insightful history of everything that simplifies its complex subject as much as possible but no further.” The existence of life, and more particularly, conscious, thoughtful, self-reflective life is an astounding and wondrous quality of reality. All the same, I consider life and consciousness to be the result of the very same physical processes acting on the very same types of ingredients responsible for everything in the cosmos—shining stars to swirling galaxies. There is a beautiful continuity between the physical universe “out there” and the subjective universe of common experience. Understanding that continuity and grasping how life and consciousness fit on the cosmic timeline gives us an uncanny perspective. It is a perspective that allows us to feel a deep unity with a much larger, much older, and much grander reality. These discussions include consideration of gravity, repulsive gravity; dark energy, electromagnetic and nuclear forces, the Higgs field, and other such things that physicists love. No matter what, however, the universe will ultimately disintegrate into widely separated teeny tiny particles that are randomly drifting around. A long, long time ago in college, I was the sole skeptic and “evolutionist” in the Brown University chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ. One night I attended a meeting featuring the California college chairman of Campus Crusade, who recommended strongly that I might consider reading Thomas Jefferson’s version of the Bible, since Jefferson removed all references to the supernatural in his extensively edited edition, and one I am certain was well received by fellow Enlightenment skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic. This is exactly how I feel after reading Brian Greene’s “Until The End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe”. Buried within his latest expansive tome is a superb physics book on describing the first two laws of thermodynamics and the law of gravity (the first four chapters) comparable in quality to what fans of Greene’s earlier writings have come to expect, along with a very good concluding section (Chapters 9 to 11) on the fate of the universe itself, drawing upon current cosmological research. What lurks between two halves of a fine physics book, unfortunately, is a humanist manifesto on humanity’s future, relying extensively on the very evolutionary psychology criticized repeatedly by paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould, population geneticist Richard Lewontin and cell biologist Kenneth R. Miller; the latter, most notably, in his superb “The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness and Free Will”.Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist but in this book he veers off into philosophy and linguistics and sociology and other sciences. 'Round and around we go. It was all over the place. It seemed to me that Mr. Greene decided to write a book about the future of the universe using his speciality of physics, but then found he had only enough material for a few chapters. Therefore, perhaps at the insistence of his publisher, he decided to add more chapters by discussing other scientific fields he has read up on. While some may find this narrative approach (which is conspicuously devoid of anything “supernatural” or “divine”) depressing, others (like me) will find it utterly fascinating and even, in a sense, liberating. Greene shows us that by contemplating the universe at its largest scales—and by recognizing the impermanence of everything—we can come to more deeply appreciate our fleeting moments on this earth. And, even more importantly, we can learn to embrace the responsibility we all have to create our own meaning in our lives, while avoiding the somewhat childish view that meaning has to be imposed on us from above for life to have any value.

For humans, natural selection favored physical traits - including our big brains - that allowed us to use tools; run from danger; kill prey; make fires; build shelters; etc. Greene posits that more nebulous human endeavors, like language; story-telling; art; religion; music; and so on ALSO helped us survive. As a child, I remember feeling this deep sadness when I looked out the window and into the sky lit up by the Sun and knew that billions of years into the future the Sun would die. I don’t exactly remember how I came to know this fact, whether through a book, my parents telling me, or via one of the many space shows and documentaries playing on the family TV. In any case, it was one of those moments that caused me to reflect on my own impermanence—if the Sun couldn’t burn forever, then what did that mean for my own prospects? They do. Einstein famously said that “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” There is no one who has said it better. My work for over three decades—seeking a deeper understanding of the big bang, nature’s forces, and the nature of physical reality—has been driven by an urge to experience the mysterious. And on rare occasions, some of those mysteries have resolved into breathtaking clarity. But it is only with art and the humanities that we gain the fullest, most visceral sense of both the wonders and the mysteries of life and experience. That is the first sentence of the first chapter of Brian Greene’s new book, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. Greene suggests that the knowledge of inevitable death drives people to leave a mark, to accomplish something that lasts beyond themselves. This may be the impetus that inspires scientists, scholars, artists, musicians, writers, etc.Enter Brian Greene and his latest foray into the field of big history, Until the End of Time. There’s no question that Greene is well-suited for the task; in addition to his deep expertise in theoretical physics, he also has the unmatched ability to clearly explain complex scientific concepts. The beginning chapters are a testament to this, as Greene takes the reader through the origins of the universe to the present day by explaining, with a liberal dose of clever analogies, how the fundamental concepts of entropy, energy, and evolution guide the physical, chemical, and biological processes that make up our world.