13.
I cannot resist the temptation to quote this, although I cannot locate the source.
14.
Wheeler, “Sakharov revisited: It from Bit”.
15.
Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum”, 5.
16.
See Barbour, “Bit from It”, 1.
17.
Ibid., 1.
18.
Quoted in Smolin, Time Reborn, 293.
19.
Julian Barbour argues, against Wheeler, that “structured variety” – instantiated in things – is the ground of being and that bits offer neither structure not variety. Barbour also makes another point which hits at the claim of standard quantum theory to be the last word on what is real: “Probabilities without things are pure nothings” (“Bit from It”, 6).
20.
“Die Sprache spricht” (Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, xxv).
21.
Tactfully and sympathetically described in Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe.
22.
Quoted in Dainton, Time and Space, 200.
23.
Anton Zeilinger quoted in Barbour, “Bit from It”, 9.
24.
Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, 13.
25.
I owe this point to William Simpson (MPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2016).
26.
“Of the Outer Life” is available in translation in The Poem Itself.
27.
Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter, 133–4.
28.
Nagel, View from Nowhere, 74.
29.
See, for example, Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation §11.3 “The Onlooker”.
30.
Even so, it is very much alive among the transhumanists in California and elsewhere. Their pursuit of transcendence takes them beyond tinkering with the biological body. Zoltan Istvan, a leading transhumanist mused as follows: “What would be a nice scenario … is that we first get smart drugs and wearable technologies. And then life extension technologies. And then, finally, we get uploaded and colonize space and so on”. Humanity would be “the nucleus … of some greatly more vast and brilliant phenomenon that would spread across the universe” and “convert a lot of matter and energy into organized form of life in a generalized sense”. Ultimately, “Life will eventually control all matter, all energy, and calculate an infinite amount of information” (quoted in O’Connell, To Be a Machine, 18–9). It would encompass the Alpha and the Omega; or at least the 0 and the 1 and the nothing in between.
CODA
1.
Nagel, View from Nowhere, 9.
2.
I have not been able to track down the origin of this quote but I am entirely confident it is Valéry’s.
3.
Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, chapter 4.
4.
St John’s Gospel 8:11.
5.
“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in the night / God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light” (Alexander Pope, “An Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton” in Westminster Abbey).
6.
Given that vision is scarcely limited to the human species, and that man is by no means the most visually gifted animal, ascribing uniquely human sense-making to this sense may seem odd. However, human sight is not merely a property of an organism but of an embodied subject facing a world of objects. Behind this observation is a long story, set out in a trilogy of books I published a decade ago. The most relevant volume is The Knowing Animal. (Incidentally, as I have had occasion to point out previously, blindness is not a barrier to knowledge. Those who are congenitally blind acquire their knowledge, and the concepts that structure it, by testimony – as, for the most part, do the rest of us.)
7.
Of course what is visible in the written word is not what the written word is about: knowledge is colourless. The light that falls on the word is not sufficient to reveal its meaning. This may be one reason behind the rivalry between light and words for priority in establishing to the sense of the world, as discussed in Chapter 2. In the beginning was the Light, says the Old Testament. In the beginning was the Word, says the New. The Old Testament light, however, was brought into being by the word, commanding it (along with the rest of creation) into existence. If we wished to be fanciful, we may think of words as sustaining holographic images of objects of the senses created by their folded light. But we may resist the temptation.
8.
A thesis that is argued with great care by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Those for whom pessimism is a mark of depth and optimism correspondingly a measure of shallowness have loathed this book.
9.
T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” in Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 177.
10.
For a sceptical view on this, see Tallis, “‘I kid you not’: Knowingness and Other Shallows” in In Defence of Wonder.
11.
Parfit, On What Matters, 1.
12.
It is no longer believed that St John of Patmos was the same St John who wrote the Gospel that begins with “In the beginning was the Logos.” It would have made an even better story if this had been true; but the metaphysical point still holds.
13.
I can imagine the world without me – that I am not. Or at least I imagine I can, as an extrapolation of my awareness of my absence in every part in the world I am currently not. I am absent from the next room, the next street, the adjacent county, from 99.999 per cent of England, a greater percentage of the world and of the universe. Thus, the idea of the world without me is simply a matter of closing the last small hole in my universe-wide absence. This, however, is an illusion because the absence my pin-prick of presence punctures is sustained by my awareness of it. After my death, my absence will leave the world as well as my presence (leaving aside the proxy presence I have in others who are aware of my absence, who may miss me, or at least are aware that I am missing).
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