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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Brian Greene is a terrific science writer. We armchair science explorers owe him a debt of gratitude for sitting down and working out his thoughts and observations in terms laymen can understand.

I bought the recently published book based on my interest in consciousness and free will. This work presents a head scratching paradox: it delves deeply into both subjects while starting with the premise that they don’t exist. Greene is an ardent material reductionist. He claims that belief right up front and expresses a deep commitment to the concept. Most physicists are material reductionists, whether they know it or not. For a material reductionist everything is explained by physical particles. Greene’s position is a modern version of Laplace’s “Demon” written in 1814. Laplace supposed the world was a giant machine where if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe the future can be predicted. Like balls on billiard table, knowing where and how fast the cue ball is going can be used to predict where the other balls will all end up. In that sense, as Greene takes it, free will is nonexistent, everything that ever happened and is going to happen was determined at the big bang. Free will is just a sensation we have. As he is fond of saying, we are merely a bag of material particles. Explore the particles at a deep enough level and he is certain that everything will be explained.

Greene is the same about consciousness. He admits we don’t know what it is and how it came about and that scientists have been reluctant to pursue it. He says there is no evidence that consciousness comes from anywhere but the material, and then he breezes right over questions like the quantum enigma where particles only come into material existence from the quantum level once they are observed.

I am with the philosopher Thomas Nagel. In his book, Mind and Cosmos, Nagel makes the case that the current scientific orthodoxy where everything that exists can be reduced to the material, and that consciousness and free will are an illusion, is based on a unexplored assumption that is unsupported and that flies in the face of common sense.

But given his unsupported assumptions, Greene reverently and with awe looks at our existence, and at the evidence that someday in the mega-future our universe is going to blink out, and finds all the more reason to cherish the astonishing fact of our being here and now.