Читать книгу How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence - Christopher Potter, Christopher Potter - Страница 18

1 | Physicists’ seeming obsession with fundamental descriptions takes them as far away from the human condition as it is possible to go, to the beginnings of the universe. Even though they often pretend otherwise – affecting to disdain philosophy – physicists care what the fundamentals are: what the material is that reality is woven out of; whether it is space that is real and time the illusion, or vice versa; whether or not there really are causes and effects; how the world can be all of a piece and yet have things in it. If we are ever to make a human being we will have to abandon these concerns and move closer to our own scale. In this evolving, expanding universe in which we find ourselves we might take everything to be equally existent no matter when it first appeared, or at what scale. Time may be an illusion from a reductive physical point of view, but it is no less real now at this point in the evolution of the universe. There are causes and effects in the human world. Things happen, and we make things. We might take the universe as read and wonder instead how the universe evolved human beings as things in time.