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The Order of Time- Carlo Rovelli

Chapter 3: There is no "present"

When thinking about the concept of a present, we think that the moment in our perception exists as a discrete tangible thing at a point in time. As though time was ordered into discrete ordered steps that the universe cycles through in order. However, physics suggests otherwise. Time passes more slowly the faster you are moving.

"Not only is there no single time for different places- there is not even a single time for any particular place. A duration can be associated only with the movement of something, with a given trajectory.

Proper time" depends not only on where you are and your degree of proximity to masses; it depends also on the speed at which you move."

"There is no special moment on Proxima b that corresponds to what constitutes the present here and now.""The notion of "the present" refers to things that are close to us, not to anything that is far away. Our "present" does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us."

" Mathematicians have a term for the order established by filiation: "partial order." A partial order establishes a relation of before and after between certain events, but not between any two of them. Human beings form a "partially ordered" set (not a "completely ordered" set) through filiation. Filiation establishes an order (before the descendants, after the forebears) but not between everyone (parallel people)."

"The expanded present is the set of events that are neither past nor future: it exists, jsut as there are human beings who are neither our descendants nor our forebears."

In a similar way to how a person's descendents and antecedents are not entirely comparable in terms of "sharing a generation". Many competing definitions of "a generation" exist. Similarly, the present moment does not singularly exist. At any one point in time, the cones of light determine when "now" is perceived. In any two places "now" could be perceived differently. For example, asking what is happening on Earth now vs on a distant star is a useless comparison. The "now" does not exist in the same way. Instead, now is defined for a local region.

" The whole idea that the universe exists now in a certain configuration and changes together with the passage of time simply doesn't stack up anymore."

Black holes have so much mass that the gravitational force curve light cones back toward the present. Hence, if you were to enter one you could not escape it unless you move toward the present ?i.e along the time dimension faster than the speed of light ?

Chapter 4: Loss of Independence

diurnal:

filiation:

"The diurnal rhythm is an elementary source of our idea of time: night follows day; day follows night"

We historically measured the passing of time in terms of the ways which things change. Assuming that physical properties guarantee they change at a similar speed reliably. e.g. hourglass grains, seasons coming and going, moon cycle, pendulum swings

"Aristotle is the first we are aware of o have asked himself the question "What is time?," and he came to the following conclusion: time is the measurement of change. We call "time" the measurement, the counting of this change." (in terms of sun cycles or other regular phenomena)

(Newton) There is "relative time" - the one that registers change and motion. Tied to perception.There is also "absolute time" that passes regardless - independently of things and all their changes or movement

"Newton's time is not the evidence given us by our senses: it is an elegant intellectual construction"

"Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be "natural": they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us."

(Aristotle) The place of a thing is what surrounds that thing. (relative/ apparent/ common)(Newton) (absolute/true/mathematical) [Space is ] that which exists even when there is nothing

"Newton imagines that things are situated in a "space" that continues to exist, empty, even when divested of things . For Aristotle, this "Empty space" is nonsensical, because if twp things do not touch it means that there is something else between them, and if there is something, then this something is a thing, and therefore a thing that is there. It cannot be that there is "nothing".

Chapter 5: Quanta of Time

Fundamental discoveries of quantum mechanics led to properties of physical variables (of which space time is one): granularity, indeterminacy and relational aspect

Granularity: "most characteristic feature of quantum mechanics, which takes its name form this: "quanta" are elementary grains. A minimum scale exists for all phenomena."

"Planck time: at this extremely miniscule level, quantum effects on time become manifest...The "quantization" of time implies that almost all values of time t do not exist... a minumum interval of time exists. Below this, the notion of time does not exist- even in its most basic meaning."

"Continuity is only a mathematical technique for approximating very finely grained things. The world is subtly discrete, not continuous."

"Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find a use- or confirmation- in scientific inquiry.The spatial sister of Planck time is Planck length: the minimum length below which the notion of length becomes meaningless. (around 10^-33 cm)"

Quantum Superpositions of Times

Indeterminacy: "it is not possible to predict exactly, for instance, where an electron will appear tomorrow. Between one appearance and another, the electron has no precise position, as if it were dispersed in a cloud of probability. In the jargon of physicists, we say that it is in a "superposition" of positions.

Spacetime is a physical object like an electron. IT, too fluctuates. It , too, can be in a "superposition" of different configurations."

"Just as a particle may be diffused in space, so too, the differences between past and future may fluctuate: an event may be both before and after another one."

Relations

"Indeterminacy is resolved when a quantity interacts (measure is the misleading technical term) with something else....

Concreteness occurs only in relation to a physical system: this, I believe, is the most radical discovery made by quantum mechanics."

"Time has loosened into a network of relations that no longer holds together as a coherent canvas."

"Let me reprise the long dive into the depths made in the first part of this book. There is no single time: there is a different duration for every trajectory; and time passes at different rhythms according to place and according to speed. It is not directional: the different between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations of the world; its orientation is merely a contingent aspect that appears when we look at things and neglect the details."

PART 2: THE WORLD WITHOUT TIME

Chapter 6 : The World is Made of Events, Not Things

"None of the pieces that time has lost (singularity, direction, independence, the present, continuity) puts into question the fact that the world is a network of events. On the one hand, there was time, with its many determinations; on the other, the simple fact that nothing is: things happen."

"The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians"

"We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being. "Things" in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous."

Chapter 7: The Inadequacy of Grammar

"Presentism" is the philosophical school of thought that the universe is organized into a sequence of "present" time slices ,one following the next. Physics understanding suggests that this model of thinking is flawed. "the temporal structure of the world is moroe complex than a simple linear succession of instants"

"Eternalism" philosophical thought that flow and change are illusory - "present, past, future are equally real and equally existent"

"To ask oneself "what exists" or "what is real" means only to ask how you would like to use a verb and an adjective. It's a grammatical question, not a question about nature."

Chapter 8 : Dynamics as Relation

"If we find a sufficient number of variables that remain synchronized enough in relation to each other, it is convenient to use them in order to speak of

when

"The fundamental theory of the world must be constructed in this way; it does not need a time variable: it needs to tell us only how the things that we see in the world vary with respect to each other. That is to say, what the relations may be between these variables.The fundamental equations of quantum gravity are effectively formulated like this: they do not have a time variable, and they describe the world by indicating the possible relations between variable quantities."

"I can no longer tell him I believe that he was the first to come close to the heart of the mystery of quantum gravity. Because he is no longer here- here and now. This is time for us. Memory and nostalgia. The pain of absence.But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. IT is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life."

"they had discovered the extremely simple sstructure of the equation that describes the dynamics of the world. It describes possible events and the correlations between them, and nothing else.It's the elementary form of mechanics of the world, and it does not need to mention "time". The world without a time variable is not a complicated one. It's a net of interconnected events, where the variables in play adhere to probabilistic rules that, incredibly, we know for a good part how to write. "

Essentially, the foudners of quantum gravity understood that time was not aa well-defined entitiy necessary for understanding the universe and nature, but instead things could be thought of by modeling how events interact with each other.

Elementary Quantum Events and Spin Networks

"The fields manifest themselves in granular form: elementary particles, photons, and quanta of gravity- or rather "quanta of space". These elementary grains do not exist immersed in space; rather, they themselves form that space. The spatiality of the world consists of the web of their interactions. They do not dwell in time: they interact incessantly with each other, and indeed exist only in terms of these incessant interactions. And this interaction

the happening of the world: it is the minimum elementary form of time that is neither directional nor linear. Nor does it have the curved and smooth geometry studied by Einstein. It is a reciprocal interaction in which quanta manifest themselves in the interaction, in relation to what they interact with."

"The world is like a collection of interrelated points of view. To speak of the world "seen form outside" makes no sense, because there is no "outside" to the world."

Loop quantum gravity shows that it is possible to write a coherent theory without fundamental space and time- and that is can be used to make qualitative predictions.

In a theory of this kind, time and space are no longer containers or general forms of the world. They are approximations of a quantum dynamic that in itself knows neither space nor time. There are only events and relations. It is the world without time of elementary physics."

Part III: THE SOURCES OF TIME

Chapter 9: Time is Ignorance

THERMAL TIME

"On the one hand, knowing what the energy of a system may be - how it is linked to the other variables - is the same as knowing how time flows, because the equations of the evolution in time follow from the form of its energy. On the other, energy is conserved in time, hence it cannot vary, even when everything else varies."

"in an elementary physical system without any priveleged variable that acts like "time"- where, in effect, all the variables are on the same level but we can have only a blurred vision of them described by macroscopic states. A generic macroscopic state

determines

a time. I'll repeat this point, because it is a key one: a macroscopic state ( which ignores the details) chooses a particular variable that has some of the characteristics of time."

"In fundamental relativistic physics, where no variable plays a priori the role of time, we can reverse the relation between macroscopic state and evolution of time: it is not the evolution of time that determines the state, it is the state- the blurring- that determines a time. Time that is determined in this way by a macroscopic state is called "thermal time...from a macroscopic (point of view) one, it has a crucial characteristic: among so many variables all at the same level, thermal time is the one with behaviour that most closely resembles the variable we usually call

"time", because its relations with the macroscopic states are exactly those that we know from thermodynamics.But it is not a universal time. It is determined by a macroscopic state, that is, by a blurring, by the incompleteness of a description."

QUANTUM TIME

"noncommutativity" of the quantum variables, because position and speed "do not commute", that is to say, they cannot exchange order with impunity. This non-commutativity is one of the characteristic phenomena of quantum mechanics. Non commutativity determines an order and, consequently, a germ of temporality in the determination of two physical variables. To determine a physical variable is not an isolated act; it involves interaction. The effect of such interactions depends on their order, and this order is a primitive form of the temporal order. "

(Alain) Connes has shown that: "Putt more simple: the time determines by macroscopic states and the time determined by quantum noncommutativity are aspects of the same phenomenon."

"The intrinsic quantum indeterminacy of things produces a blurring, like Boltzmann's blurring, which ensures- contrary to what classic physics seemed to indicate- that the unpredictability of the world is maintained even if it were possible to measure everything that is measurable. The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance."

Chapter 10: Perspective

"Therefore, our vision of the world is blurred because the physical interactions between the part of the world to which we belong and the rest are blind to many variables."...The entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I

do not

register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations. The same microscopic configuration may be of high entropy with regard to one blurring and of low in relation to another.This does not mean that blurring is a mental construct; it depends on actual, existing physical interactions. Entropy is not an arbitrary quantity, nor a subjective one. It is a relative one, like speed.The speed of an object is not a property of the object alone: it is a property of the object in relation to another object."

"The same is true for entropy. The entropy of A with regard to B counts the number of configurations of A that the physical interactions between A and B do not distinguish...

The entropy of the world does not depend only on the configurations of the world; it also depends on the way in which we are blurring the world, and this depends on what the variables of the world are that we interact with. That is to say, on the variables with which our part of the world interacts."

"The entropy of the world in the far past appears very low to us. But this might not reflect the exact state of the world: it might regard the subset of the world's variables with which we, as physical systems, have interacted....

This which is a fact, opens up the possibility that it wasn't the universe that was in a very particular configuration in the past. Perhaps, instead it is us, and our interactions with the universe, that are particular. We are the ones who determine a particular macroscopic description. The initial low entropy of the universe, and hence the arrow of time, may be more down to us than to the universe itself. This is the basic idea."

"IF a subset of the universe is special in this sense, then for this subset the entropy of the universe is low in the past, the second law of thermodynamics obtains; memories exist, traces are left- and there can be evolution, life, and thought. In other words, if in the universe there is something like this- and it seems natural to me that there could be- then we belong to that something. Here, "we" refers to that collection of physical variables to which we commonly have access and by means of which we describe the universe. Perhaps, therefore, the flow of time is not a characteristic of the universe: like the rotation of the heavens, it is due to the particular perspective that we have from our corner of it.But why should we belong to one of

these

special systems?" (because such a system has conditions in whcih our existence is possible)

"Similarly, in the boundless variety of the universe, it may happen that there are physical systems that interact with the rest of the world through those particular variables that define an initial low entropy. With regard to these systems, entropy is constantly increasing. These and not elsewhere, there are the typical phenomena associated with the flowing of time: life is possible, together with evolution, thought and our awareness of time passing. There, the apples grow that produce our cider: time."

INDEXICALITY

"Science aspires to a objectivity, to a shared point of view about which it is possible to be in agreement."

"what philosophers call "indexicality": the characteristic of certain words that have a different meaning every time they are used, a meaning determined by where, how, when and by whom they are being spoken...These indexical phrases make explicit reference to the fact that a point of view exists, that a point of view is an ingredient in every description of the observable world that we make."

"At the fundamental level, the world is a collection of events not ordered in time. These events manifest relations between physical variables that are, a priori, on the same level. Each part of the world interacts with a small part of all the variables, the value of which determines "the state of the world with regard to that particular subsystem."

A small system S does not distinguish the details of the rest of the universe because it interacts only with a few among the variables of the rest of the universe. The entropy of the universe with respect to S counts the (micro) states of the universe undistinguishable by S. The universe appears in a high-entropy configuration with respect to S, because (by definition) there are more microstates in high-entropy configurations, therefore it is more likely to happen to be in one of these microstates....But among the innumerable small systems S that exist in this extraordinarily vast universe where we happen to live, there will be a few special ones for which the fluctuations of the entropy happens to be low. For these systems S, the fluctuation is not symmetrical: entropy increases. This growth is what we experience as the flowing of time. What is special is not the state of the early universe: it is the small system S to which we belong."

Chapter 11: What Emerges From a Particularity

"Energy (be it mechanical, chemical, electrical, or potential) transforms itself into thermal energy, that is to say, into heat: it goes into cold things, and there is no free way of getting it back from there to reuse it to make a plant grow, or to power a motor. In this process, the energy remains the same but the entropy increases, and it is this which cannot be turned back. The second law of thermodynamics demands it.

What makes the world go round are not sources of energy, but sources of low entropy. Without low entropy, energy would dilute into uniform heart and the world would go to sleep in a state of thermal equilibrium- there would no longer be any distinction between past and future, and nothing would happen."

Near to the Earth we have a rich source of low entropy: the sun. The sun sends us hot photons. Then the Earth radiates heat toward the black sky, emitting colder photons. The energy that enters is more or less equal to the energy that exits; consequently, we do not generally gain energy in the exchange. (Gaining energy in the exchange is disastrous for us: it is global warming.) But for every hot photon that arrives, the Earth emits ten cold ones, since a hot photon from the sun has the same energy as ten cold photons emitted by the Earth. The hot photon has less entropy than the ten cold photons, because the number of configurations of a single (hot) photon is lower than the number of configurations of ten (cold) photons. Therefore, the sun is a continual rich source of low entropy for us. We have at our disposal an abundance of low entropy, and it is this that allows plants and animals to grow, enables us to build motors and cities—and to think and to write books such as this one.Where does the low entropy of the sun come from? From the fact that, in turn, the sun is born out of an entropic configuration that was even lower: the primordial cloud from which the solar system was formed had even lower entropy. And so on, back into the past, until we reach the extremely low initial entropy of the universe.It is the growth of this entropy that powers the great story of the cosmos.

"The entire history of the universe consists of this halting and leaping cosmic growth of entropy. It is neither rapid nor uniform, because things remain trapped in basins of low entropy (the pile of wood, the cloud of hydrogen...) until something opens a door onto a process that finally allows entropy to increase."

"Life is this network of processes for increasing entropy—processes that act as catalysts to each other.98 It isn’t true, as is sometimes stated, that life generates structures that are particularly ordered, or that locally diminish entropy: it is simply a process that degrades and consumes the low entropy of food; it is a self-structured disordering, no more and no less than in the rest of the universe."

TRACES AND CAUSES

"The fact that entropy has been low in the past leads to an important fact that is ubiquitious and crucial for the difference between past and future: the past leaves traces of itself in the present."

"Traces of the past exist, and not traces of the future, only because entropy was low in the past. There can be no other reason, since the only source of difference between past and future is the low entropy of the past. In order to leave a trace, it is necessary for something to become arrested, to stop moving, and this can happen only in an irreversible process- that is to say , by degrading energy into heat....

In a world without heat, everything would rebound elastically, leaving no trace."

"It is the presence of abundant traces of the past that produces the familiar sensation that the past is determined. The absence of any analogous traces of the future produces the sensation that the future is open. The existence of traces serves to make it possible for our brain to dispose of extensive maps of past events. There is nothing analogous to this for future ones. This fact is at the origin of our sensation of being able to act freely in the world: choosing between different futures, even though we are unable to act upon the past."

Chapter 12 : The Scent of the Madeleine

"There are different ingredients that combine to produce our identity. Three of these are important for the argument of this book:

The first ingredient is that every one of us identifies with a point of view in the world. The world is reflected in each one of us through a rich spectrum of correlations essential for our survival...

... In the process of reflecting the world, we organize it into entities: we conceive of the world by grouping and segmenting it as best we can in a continuous process that is more or less uniform and stable, the better to interact with it.... It is the structure of our nervous system that works in this way. IT receives sensory stimuli, elaborates continuously, generating behaviour... If this (networks of neurons evolving by associating more or less stable fixed points of their dynamic with recurring patterns that they find in the incoming information) is so, then "things" like "concepts" are fixed points in the neuronal dynamic, induced by recurring structures of the sensorial input and of the successive elaborations. They mirror a combination of aspects of the world that depends on recurrent structures of the world and on their relevance in their interactions with us... In particular we group into a unified image the collection of processes that constitutes those living organisms that are other human beings, because our life is social and we therefore interact a great deal with them. They are knots of cause and effect that are deeply relevant for us. We have shaped an idea of a "human being" by interacting with others like ourselves. I believe we are applying to ourselves the mental circuits that we have developed to engage with our companions.... The experience of thinkinf of oneself as a subject is not a primary experience: it is a complex cultural deduction, made on the basis of many other thoughts. My primary experience - if we grant that this means anything - is to see the world around me, not myself. I believe that we each have a concept of "my self" only because at a certain point we learn to project onto ourselves the idea of being human as an additional feature that evolution has lef us to develop during the course of millenia in order to engage with other members of our group: we are the reflection of the idea of ourselves that we receive back from our kind.

But there is a third ingredient ...- it is the reason this delicate discussion is taking place in a book about time: memory. Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar thread to our past- the most recent and the most distant- by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother's caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mindl I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I've written, what I've heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word "memory" into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it... To a large extent, the brain is a mechanism for collecting memories of the past in order to use them continually to predict the future. This happens across a wide spectrum of time scales, from the very short to the very long.... The possibility of predicitng something in the future obviously improves our chances of survival and, consequently, evolution has selected neural structures that allow it. We are the result of this election. This being between past and future events is central to our mental structure. This, for us, is the "flow" of time.... In other words, what we perceive is not the present, which in any case makes no snese for a system that functions on a scale of finite time, but rather something that happens and extends in time. It is in our brains that an extension in time becomes condensed into a perception of duration... And he (Augustine, Confessions Book XI) asks himseelf how we can be aware of duration- or even be capable of evaluting it- if we are always only in a present that is, by definiton, instantaneous... HEre and now there is no past, no future. Where are they? Augustine concludes that they are within us:

IF is within my mind, then, that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective. When I measure time, I am measuring something in the rpesent of my mind. Either this is time, or I have no idea what time is.

Kant discusses the nature of space and time in his Critique of Pure Reason, and interprets both space and time as a priori forms of knowledge- that is to say, things that do not just relate to the objective world but also to the way in which a subject apprehends it. But he also observes that whereas space is shaped by our external sense, that is to say, by our way or ordering things that we see in the world outside of us, time is shaped by our internal sense, that is to say, by our way of ordering internal states within ourselves."

subsidence: either the sudden sinking or gradual downward settling of the ground's surface with little or no horizontal motion.

"It is with respect to that physical system to which we belong -due to the peculiar way in which it interacts with the rest of the world, thanks to the fact that it allows traces and because we, as physical entities, consist of memory and anticipation- that the perspective of time opens up for us, like our small, lit clearing. Time opens up our limited access to the world. Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of our identity."

inexorably: in a way that is impossible to stop or prevent.Tyrrhenian Sea: is part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of Italy. It is named for the Tyrrhenian people, identified since the 6th century BCE with the Etruscans of Italy.pumice: a volcanic rock that consists of highly vesicular rough textured volcanic glass, which may or may not contain crystals.

Chapter 13: The Source of TimeSummary

"A present that is common throughout the whole universe does not exist( chp3). ..The present is a localzied rather than a globalized phenomenon. The difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations that govern events in the world(chp2). (the difference) It issues only from the fact that, in the past, the world found itself subject to a state that, with our blurred take on things, appears particular to us...The closer we are to a mass, or the faster we move, the more time slows down: there is no single duration between two events; there are many possible ones. The rhythms at which time flows are determiend by the gravitational field ... If we overlook wuantum effects, time and space are aspects of a great jelly in which we are immersed...In the elementary grammar of the world, there is neither time nor space- only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it si possible to calculate probabilities and relations.(chp5)...At the fundamental level we currently know of, there is little that resembles time as we experience it. There is no special variable "time", there is no difference between past and future, there is no spacetime.(Part Two)..It is not a "static" world, or a "block universe" where all change is illusory: (chp7) on the contrary, ours is a world of events rather than of things (chp6)." -- concluding a universe "without time"

Then the book details how our perception of time can emerge from this universe without time. (chp9)"From our perspective ... we see that world flowing in time...Perhaps we belong to a particular subset of the world that interacts with the rest of it in such a way that this entropy is lower in one direction of our thermal time. The directionality of time is therefore real but perspectival (chp10): the entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. We see the occurrence of things ordered in this variable, which we simply call "time", and the growth of entropy distinguishes the past from the future for us and leads to the unfolding of the cosmos. It determines the existence of traces, residues, and memories of the past(chp11). We human beings are an effect of this great history of the increase of entropy, held together by the memory that is enabled by these traces."

Hans Reichenbach:Parmenides:PlatoHegel:Heigegger:HeraclitusBergson: Copernicus:

"Perhaps , ultimately, the emotional dimension of time is not the film of mist that prevents us from apprehending the nature of time objectively. Perhaps the emotion of time is precisely what time

for us."

"When we cannot formulate a problem with precision, it is often not because the problem is profound: it's because the problem is false.Will we be able to understand thigns better in the future? I think so.... we begin to see that we are time. We are this space, this clearing opened up by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come. The clearing that is opened up in this way, by memory and by anticipation, is time: a source of anguish sometimes, but in the end a tremendous gift.A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time- in our finite time- to savouring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence."

THE SISTER OF SLEEP

"I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to well-earned rest."

"Job died when he was "full of days". It's a wonderful expression. I, too, would like to arrive at a point of feeling "full of days," and to close with a smile the brief circle that is our life."

"Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution. Many animals react instinctively with terror and flight at the approach of a predator. It is a healthy reaction, one that allows them to escape from danger. But it’s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly. Natural selection has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future. It’s a prerogative that’s certainly useful but one that has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight. Basically, I believe that the fear of death is the result of an accidental and clumsy interference between two distinct evolutionary pressures- the product of bad automatic connections in our brain rather than something that has any use or meaning. Everything has a limited duration, even the human race itself...Fearing the transition, being afraid of death, is like being afraid of reality itself; like being afraid of the sun. Whatever for?"

"We are not, in the first place, reasoning beings. We may perhaps become so, more or less, in the second. In the first instance, we are driven by a thirst for life, by hunger, by the need to love, by the instinct to find our place in human society... The second instance does not even exist without the first. Reason arbitrates between instincts but uses the very same instincts as primary criteria in its arbitration....It allows us to recognize the innumerable inefficient strategies, mistaken beliefs, and prejudices that we have. It has developed to help us understand that the tracks we follow, thinking that they will lead to antelopes we are hunting, are in fact false trails. But what drives us is not reflecting on life: it is life itself.So what really drives us? It is difficult to say. Perhaps we do not know entirely. We recognize motivations in ourselves,. We give names to these motivation, and we have many of them. We believe that we share some of them with other animals; others only with humankind- and others still with smaller groups to which we see ourselves as belonging. Hunger and thirst, curiosity, the need for companionship, the desire to love, being in love, the pursuit of happiness, the need to fight for a position in the world, the desire to be appreciated, recognized, and loved; loyalty, honor, the love of God, the thirst for justice and liberty, the desire for knowledge . . . We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping...Our thinking is prey to its own weakness, but even more so to its own grammar.......It only takes the experience of spending time with a friend who has suffered a serious schizophrenic episode, a few weeks with her struggling to communicate, to realize that delirium is a vast theatrical equipment with the capacity to stage the world, and that it is difficult to find arguments to distinguish it from those great collective deliriums of ours that are the foundations of our social and spiritual life, and of our understanding of the world....

The instruments that we have found for dealing with it and attending to it have been many, and reason has revealed itself to be among the best of these. It is precious.But it is only an instrument, a pincer. We use ti to handle a substance that is made of fire and ice: something that we experience as living and burning emotions. These are the substances of which we are made. They propel us and they drag us back, and we cloak them with fine words. They compel us to act. And something of them always escapes from the order of our discourses, since we know that, in the end, every attempt to impose order leaves something outside the frame."

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