More summary of this Brian Greene book. Earlier: post 1, post 2, post 3. In these chapters Greene summarizes how imagination, extrapolating from dreams and the perception of patterns, led to the formalization of myths into religions, which may have value without being actually true. And speculation into the value of the arts, how they too are ways to think symbolically, or moments of truth beyond rational explanation. At best, bids for vicarious immortality.
Ch7, Brains and Belief: From Imagination to the Sacred, p188
Understanding leads to questions of significance. Why does survival matter? Evidence of child burials goes back 100,000 years, suggesting belief in the survival of some vital quality of a person, aside from the body. Dreams were used as evidence of this conclusion. People attributed natural disasters to unseen beings, as a way of making stories out of random events.
Pascal Boyer and others have outlined the evolutionary basis for religion, given the way human minds work, including the theory of mind, and our social inference system, our way of keeping track of relationships. Kin selection bound family members; larger groups were bound into a club of kinship through religion. Such cooperation was necessary to bind larger and larger groups. Other ideas, including group selection and game theory, may play roles too; the matter is not definitely solved.
Various myths were organized and set down in the 1st millennium BC. The Vedas, in India, 1500 BC; the Upanishads go back to the 8th century BC. Siddhartha, in 6th c BC took up wandering the created Buddhism, with its ideas that perception is an illusory guide to reality, and all is impermanent, that life is cyclic. Around the same time the Jewish people were forced into exile by the Babylonians. Their oral histories became the sacred texts of the three Abrahamic religions, with their all-powerful, all-knowing singular god. The OT tells two origin stories, and about generations that follow, but says little about where they go when they die. Doctrines about eternal souls and whatnot weren’t formed for another half a millennium, and in Islam even later, driving eventually toward a day of judgment and heavenly rewards. And there are thousands of smaller religions. Their similarities include bodies of stories about how to live and behave.
Belief in God, or in quantum mechanics, is about confidence, based on the real world. “Discoveries” indicate a very high confidence; but subsequent data might shift that confidence. But evolution isn’t about understanding reality; it’s about survival-promoting behaviors 211.8. Evolution also added emotions, as Darwin himself realized. Belief arises in phases: At first, something is true because mom or dad says it’s true. Later, beliefs are revised through other people, or experience. No one person can verify thousands of years of accumulated knowledge; we take almost everything on a sort of faith. Some people instead rely on authority, or tradition, or intuition. Our beliefs needn’t be consistent. Most of our beliefs go unexamined; we just get on with life. The very idea of belief has changed, notes Karen Armstrong. For most of human history, things just were, not things to be ‘believed’ or not. There’s an analogy with language, as metaphors become banal and are replaced by new ones, or become literal. Similarly with myths. Author admits that in principle some or other god may exist. But only if such a god is compatible with reality as science has come to understand it. For that understanding, religious doctrines are irrelevant. A religious assertion that contravenes established scientific law is false, full stop.
Still, we can talk about religious doctrines in other ways. [Here’s yet another nested story.] Beliefs can have value without being veridical. Humans interpret objective reality through a subjective one. And that world contains constructs like good and evil, awe and dread, etc., not to be found in the objective world. Many of the world’s religions are old. Their traditions have hung on.
Ch8, Instinct and Creativity: From the Sacred to the Sublime, p220
Our myths and religions reveal how our forebears collectively tried to make sense of the world. Embracing story, ritual, and belief, our traditions have sought–sometimes with compassion, sometimes with untold brutality–a narrative to explain the journey so far and to urge us onward from here. As individuals, we’ve been trekking the same path, relying on instinct and ingenuity to safeguard survival while seeking rhyme and reason for why we should care. Some on this journey would capture the coherence of reality in new and startling ways, offering reflections through works in literature, art, music and science that would redefine our sense of self and enrich our relation to the world. The creative spirit, which had long since been chiseling figurines, coloring cave walls, and telling stories, was poised for flight.
Humans are sensitive to patterns, and we learn from them. Aliens might be sensitive too, but not in the same way; they might respond blankly to our art.
What sparks our imaginative impulse? What is art’s survival value? Why are we moved by art?
The answer might be similar to why we tell stories. But the notion of a flight simulator doesn’t fit abstract forms like music, dance, and painting. Darwin’s idea of sexual selection — e.g. displays like the peacock’s tail, not to survive but to attract mates and thus reproduce — was not well-received at the time, but is now well understood, via evidence of female choosiness. Pinker would even say that the arts appeal to sensibilities we possess for other reasons; art is junk food. Thus the arts can be significant to humans without being biologically adaptive.
Still, people have searched for adaptive rationales for the arts. Perhaps they played roles in human rituals. They bound groups, enhanced cooperation, enhanced communal solidarity. Culture, by definition, consists of a common set of practices, including arts. The same principles work for individuals: the arts exercise the imagination, enable a few to solve problems others couldn’t. Examples of Einstein, Bach.
Author is inclined toward the view that story, myth, religion, the arts are ways humans think symbolically, that have resulted in our technologically rich world. In any event, art has existed throughout human history. What does this say about art and our engagement with truth?
The author recalls running over a dog, that died. It was a key moment of experience that changed his outlook on life, among a handful of other unforgettable moments. (List, 234b) He thinks of these without needing to interpret them in words. So too with the most arresting art: they are moments of truth that need no explanation. Objective truth makes for progress, but does not account for the entire human experience. Artistic truth tells a higher-level story; author quotes Joseph Conrad, and then list examples of especially sublime works of music.
That we see the light from things that existed millions of years ago is a kind of poetic immortality; through art we can range through imagined worlds in a similar kind of immortality. We wonder who will be remembered, which works will last. This pursuit may be a primary driver of human behavior. Was this the original impetus for creating works of art? Author thinks so. We have many works that reflect on morality and eternity. Whitman, Yeats, Melville, Poe, and so on; even Douglas Adams.
Of all the arts, author says he’s most affected by music. He opens and closes the chapter with anecdotes about Beethoven, conducting the premiere of his 9th symphony while deaf, and Helen Keller, ‘listening’ to that symphony via vibrations from a speaker.
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The final three chapters return to the cosmic scope, and explores what we’ve concluded about the far future and the possible end of the universe.
Ch9, Duration and Impermanence: From the Sublime to the Final Thought, p244
Ch10, The Twilight of Time: Quanta, Probability, and Eternity, p280
Ch11, The Nobility of Being: Mind, Matter, and Meaning, p310
