Sublime

Energy is nature’s fundamental organizing force, and a universe rich with flowing energy is a cosmos primed for complexification.

The Laters sit in cafés sipping coffee and discussing the possibilities of life.

Each individual has a role to play. This role involves sacrifices that are entirely distinct from those of a bloody revolution.

“It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

In the 1970s, Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch argued that these same basic principles underlie the regularities of social existence too, up to and including the cultural symbol systems used by humans to encode meaningful information and guide our behavior.7 Today, quantum information theory, discussed in the last chapter, is also being applie

philosopher Arthur Young, founder of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley.

“the blind spot of contemporary science is experience.”

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined.