Alan Lightman, or should I say the tens of billions of neurons in a certain skull generating a selfhood illusion that are known as Alan Lightman, is a Reluctant Materialist. He writes beautifully, but sadly, about finding meaning while giving us the bad news that science in his understanding shows that one’s self is just a temporary collection of atoms, soon to be dispersed, operating deterministically. This bums him out but, looking at what religion offers as an alternative, it can’t be credited. All in all it sounds rough but he looks to make the best of it. As always, he’s an excellent, learned, thought provoking, and sympathetic writer.

I have no idea why some people get personal encounters with the Divine, but he’s got my nomination as a needy and deserving candidate. ( )

Nicely poetic at times and I appreciated the integration of historical context. I wish the physics review would have been a little more in depth, but I also recognize that wasn't the point of the book. ( )

Even though I don't agree with Lightman's philosophy, I appreciate his explanations. The bok allowed me to look inside the mind of a scientist trying to come to term with the big questions humans have. ( )

Quotes

"I will admit that the incoming stimuli are not forming patterns to my personal satisfaction. A major obstacle is this (and now I am truly baring my material soul): I've always thought that for something to have meaning, it has to be permanent, or at least last a very long time. (I'm aware that a whole branch of philosophical thought deals with the question: What is the meaning of meaning?) Permanence is the Absolute that attracts me the most. What's the point, I ask myself, of anything that's here today and gone tomorrow-like a meal or a letter or a pair of shoes? By contrast, people still discuss and perform King Lear hundreds of years after it was written. People still gaze in awe at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. People still study the ideas of justice and government of Confucius and of Plato. Isn't that longevity a sure sign of meaning? I've always believed so. And, unconsciously, I measure my own strivings and the strivings of others on that basis. But I'm a materialist. And as a materialist I know that nothing lasts. Even King Lear might be forgotten in a thousand years. Or if a thousand isn't long enough for your personal idea of a long time, what about ten thousand years? Ten thousand years is the blink of an eye to the cosmos. Everything I see around me at this moment- the trees, my house, the books on my shelves, my children and their children and their children- will be gone without a trace in a few thousand years.

Sometimes I ask myself: Does meaning require some external agency, capable of recording events and precious moments in a permanent repository? God, if such a Being exists, could be that agency. Wouldn't any other agency also pass away after a certain lapse of time? What if we had a second external agency, grander and far longer-lived than the first, and suppose all the information and meaning recorded by the first agency was eventually inherited by the second? Yet this new arrangement would save the situation for only a limited time. Because the second agency, being finite, would also pass away after a time.
In fact, does anything we do on our modest planet- only one among billions of planets in our galaxy, which is only one among billions of galaxies in the observable universe - have any meaning on a grand scale? What do creatures on planet XUFK, a thousand galaxies away, know or care about anything that happens on earth? Unless there exists an infinite and permanent observer such as God - some absolute authority or scaffold by which to judge and preserve meaning- then the situation seems hopeless to me. On the other hand, perhaps my starting assumption, that meaning requires permanence, is erroneous. Or perhaps meaning itself is an illusion. After all, why should I insist on meaning? Fish and squirrels get by quite well without it."

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Searching for stars on an island in Maine byLightman_ Alan P
Enjoyed listening to this book because of the area and also other certain chapters of things we treasure in our lives.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device). ( )