If the mind is what the brain does, is the universe ultimate reality or the mind’s simulation of it?
Here is a thought-provoking passage from a Julian Huxley’s poem in Essays of a Biologist (1923), quoted by Richard Dawkins in A Devil’s Chaplain (2003).
The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.
Within its walls the strangest partners met,
And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.
For, once within, corporeal fact could find
A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt
Built there your little microcosm—which yet
Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.
Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:
Equator speaks with Pole, and Night with Day:
Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars—
A million isolations burn away.
The Universe can live and work and plan,
At last made God within the mind of man.
According to Dawkins, Huxley wrote this poem to extol “the brain’s capacity to construct a model of reality, a microcosm of the universe.”
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS (1887-1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. To learn more about him and his work, please click here.
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