The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe

This is an astoundingly brilliant, yet accessible, exploration of man's true nature. As part of my joy and work, I have read many of the wisest thinkers who have set words to paper. I know of no one since the Axial Age who has presented these truths about how we humans really function as clearly and refreshingly as Mr. Frayn. Nevermind the absense of a competent editor - Frayn probably couldn't find one up to the job, please read it, understand it, and integrate the understanding. Do it for your own integration and fulfillment, your children's and, ultimately, mankind's.

I know Michael Frayn through exposure to his playwriting masterpiece (at least that is how I consider it) "Noises Off", a thoroughly entertaining and very, very funny farce of all things theatrical and therefore, of culture as a whole. I was not prepared for the depth and breadth of his skill in weaving the substances of philosophical thought and almost gossamer-like threads of humor and grace and compassion for the struggle we as human beings have with living life. A long book yet filled with enough insights theatrical and, especially humor, and it became an easy read, enjoyable as well as thought-inducing. I highly recommend it.

Michael Frayn is well known as a playwright for the hilarious farce _Noises Off_ (film version good but less funny) and for _Copenhagen_, a drama about quantum physicists. He is also a novelist, translator, and journalist. When he was at Cambridge, though, he studied philosophy, and he might say that all his works have been offshoots of that particular endeavor. He returns to the big subject in _The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe_ (Metropolitan Books) with a suitably big book with lots of big and important topics and plenty of profound but lightly-expressed ideas. It has to be said that most of Frayn's ideas have to do with just how deep our wonderment ought to be and how few answers we have, but still, this is a genial guided tour of the issues that have consumed thinkers since before the days of Plato. The paradox that Frayn looks at in many different ways is this: "The world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them, and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn." He also says that we have not even begun resolve the paradox. "The universe plainly exists independently of human consciousness," he writes, "but what can ever be said about it that has not been mediated through that consciousness?" We have come scientifically to understand a great deal of our universe, especially the planet we inhabit, but the amount compared to the mysteries that still remain is tiny. When we look closely at its complexity, it merely becomes more complex. Frayn, as you can imagine, thinks that numbers are invented. After all, we messed around with numbers for centuries without using a symbol for zero until that concept became part of the system. "Number, in short, is not something logically and mysteriously anterior to space and time, or to cause, or to the human presence in the world." Frayn examines the truth content of stories; how can we evaluate, for instance, the statement "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street"? It is all less complicated than counterfactuals, which have been a puzzle for philosophers for centuries. All this is less puzzling than that of the old bogey of consciousness; Frayn writes, "About consciousness much has been said, and not a word of it that told us anything we didn't already know perfectly well from our own lifelong experience, which is nothing. We can't even say what _sort_ of a thing it is." Consciousness is plainly dependent on the mechanisms in the brain, but paradox again, no accounting of such mechanisms comes close to explaining what feeling and being aware are. What meaning we get from the universe, too, is up to us. Frayn starts and ends his tour of paradox and how little we can really know with a Rashomon-like invitation: on a calm, clear night, just look up at the stars in wonder. It isn't enough for us humans, because we will start wondering about those lights, and their spectra, and their speed of emission, and on

Professional philosophers will have the same problem with this book as professional historians have with Paul Johnson (thus a few 4-stars will appear in an otherwise unassailable 5+-stars). As a non-professional philosopher (but professional scientist), I found this to be a remarkable work: An amalgam of physics, neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy, brought to bear upon the issue of how we create the universe. Its an astonishing synthesis. Frayn has a genius for accessibly posing the important questions. What is free will? What is consciousness? Does the universe exist (metaphorically) without us? Most important, do we have the language to even ask the right questions? Could we ever understand ourselves? Frayn has serious doubts, and the answers pour through our fingers like water. But our hands are left wet, and we thirst for more.

A beautifully written book that examines our view of the cosmos. Through a great deal of thought, study, experimenting and effort we have established a view of the universe. We call it the 'Standard Model.' And while it seems to be developing a few cracks around the edges (the speed of gravity, dark matter/energy) it's the best view that we have. Mr. Frayn points out that we have a bit of grey matter up in our heads that lives on a small clump of matter that isn't quite a sphere, that's going around a rather ordinary star. It's about a third the way out in an arm of a spiral galaxy. One of three hundred million or so stars that are going round and round. And this is just one in our local cluster of galaxies, one local cluster in our super cluster, part of we really don't know how many galaxies, perhaps 125,000,000,000 give or take a few billion. And from here we've developed the Standard Model. This is a beautiful look at our presumptions to have to be the center of things, a look at the world by a philosopher of our time. Conclusions, no -- the book ends with the same words it uses to begin: 'Look up at the stars on a calm, clear night....'