Marchant, a PhD geneticist and freelance science writer, has given us a remarkable book about human consciousness, free will, and the reality in which those exist.  My practice when reading non-fiction (and occasionally the long sprawling novel as well) is to write notes highlighting key phrases or concepts and the page(s) on which they can be found when I later write my review.  I typically use small, random pieces of scrap paper with one or two sides being sufficient for these reminder notes.  In reading “In Search of Now”, I filled nine sides and there would have been more had I had the energy to keep taking notes.

This is one of those books where the author tries to explain the ultimately unknowable ins and outs of neuroscience, Bayesian probability, perceptions, time, space, quantum mechanics, and more.  In fact, it goes beyond the usual endpoint of quantum science and presents even more esoteric frameworks for dealing with how human consciousness and the external world interact.

What started out as a fairly limited exercise, i.e. how do we define this ever-disappearing and briefest of times called “now”, evolved over 326 pages into a deep dive into QBism, enactivism, IIT, Integrated Information Theory, and other theories.  Interestingly, Marchant explores many of the same fields addressed by Michael Pollen in last month’s “A World Appears” though she comes at it from a different angle.

Moving from the traditional Aristotelian and Newtonian view of the universe as determined by interactions typified by the predictable behavior of billiard balls, gravity, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Marchant takes us into the Einsteinian world of four dimensional time/space with its continuum of past, present and future all existing simultaneously and all future actions already predictably determined.   She then introduces us to the strange elements of quantum mechanics where superposition, entanglement, and probability move reality into the mode of probability rather than certainty.  Finally, she introduces us to today’s debates about the nature of reality, i.e. is that a table we see in our kitchen or only a set of probable positions of atoms and molecules that our senses are too ‘blurred’ to clearly distinguish as anything other than a table.

Her parallel analyses confront the external world and our internal world of perceptions using the metaphor of a braid to describe the interaction between these two strands.  Brain biology and imaging have moved us steadily from the view that the brain is simply a computer that processes signals from our body and from the external world towards a model of the brain as a hierarchy of complex systems engaged in predictive coding, using Bayesian probability to constantly refine and improve our prediction of the outside world.  This is continuous process is designed with one goal—to sustain our life through homeostasis.

Marchant concludes her book with this passage: “But what if the universe wasn’t created in one Big Bang but in billions upon billions of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us? This journey into Now has made me wonder whether reality might have given us, not just one long-ago moment of creation but an ongoing miracle.  Now…Now…Now…. Perhaps with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.”  This is a powerful plea for human agency and an explanation of  we can’t define Now. “Perhaps the reason we can’t pin down or perceive Now is because it isn’t a thing or a time.  It isn’t a moment of an experience of even a probabalistic network of constraints.  It is further upstream from all of this: the ever bubbling precondition that makes time and things possible. The creative source from which we carve our lives and worlds.”  

This is not light reading nor have I clearly understood or explained most of the concepts and thinking behind them, but along with Pollen’s book, Elizabeth Strout’s recent novel, and Yiyun Li’s recent autobiography, it confronts the ultimate human question—-what does it mean to be alive, human, and living in a real world?  I may have understood less than half of the book and retained even less, but I feel a bit better oriented for having read this brilliant analysis of what we mean by time, now, and being alive.