What do we really know? What are we in relation to the world around us? Here, the acclaimed playwright and novelist takes on the great questions of his career--and of our lives

Humankind, scientists agree, is an insignificant speck in the impersonal vastness of the universe. But what would that universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there be numbers if there were no one to count them? Would the universe even be vast, without the fact of our smallness to give it scale?

With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work of philosophy sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Our contact with the world around us, Michael Frayn shows, is always fleeting and indeterminate, yet we have nevertheless had to fashion a comprehensible universe in which action is possible. But how do we distinguish our subjective experience from what is objectively true and knowable? Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls the oldest mystery: the world is what we make of it. In which case, though, what are we? All of Frayn's novels and plays have grappled with these essential questions; in this book he confronts them head-on. Michael Frayn is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Headlong, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist, and Spies, which won Britain's Whitbread Fiction Award. He has written fourteen plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards in 1999. He lives in London. Humankind, scientists agree, is an insignificant speck in the impersonal vastness of the universe. But what would that universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there be numbers if there were no one to count them? Would the universe even be vast, without the fact of our smallness to give it scale? With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work of philosophy sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Our contact with the world around us, Michael Frayn shows, is always fleeting and indeterminate, yet we have nevertheless had to fashion a comprehensible universe in which action is possible. But how do we distinguish our subjective experience from what is objectively true and knowable? Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls the oldest mystery: the world is what we make of it. In which case, though, what are we? All of Frayn's novels and plays have grappled with these essential questions; in this book he confronts them head-on. London-based novelist, playwright, and self-proclaimed amateur philosopher Frayn tackles the big questions of human understanding in this profound work. Beginning with a description of the continual 'traffic' between humans and the universe, Frayn shapes a cohesive introduction to philosophy that includes elements of science, determinism, physics, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, and epistemology . . . Frayn succeeds in peeling back the layers of both the external and the internal thought processes of humans, and he conveys an illuminating proposition that establishes human intellect as a distinct, necessary mediator of our universe . . .--Jason Moore, Library Journal Frayn . . . has a healthy respect for the power of external reality to constrain our world-making. Indeed, what makes The Human Touch so rewarding is the subtlety and humor with which he examines 'the great mutual balancing act.' There may be something godlike in the way we 'bring into their various forms of existence all the receding ontological planes of the world we inhabit, ' but we are also at the mercy of that world's whims. A brick to the head and the whole show comes to an end.--Jim Holt, The New York Times As a primer in where we are up to, these days, vis-a-vis the universe . . . could hardly be bettered.--The Observer (London) The subject here is not dumbed-down; rather, the reader is gently and ingeniously clevered-up.--Sunday Telegraph (London) London-based novelist, playwright, and self-proclaimed amateur philosopher Frayn tackles the big questions of human understanding in this profound work. Beginning with a description of the continual 'traffic' between humans and the universe, Frayn shapes a cohesive introduction to philosophy that includes elements of science, determinism, physics, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, and epistemology. Throughout, he makes great use of articulate and witty examples to supply answers (or, more often, lines of thought that provide paths to satisfying nonanswers) without leaving the general reader too far behind. In the end, Frayn succeeds in peeling back the layers of both the external and the internal thought processes of humans, and he conveys an illuminating proposition that establishes human intellect as a distinct, necessary mediator of our universe . . .--Jason Moore, Library Journal A vade mecum for head-scratchers by the multifaceted Frayn, whose philosophical concerns are notably many and well attested in his body of work. Humans were born to gaze at the stars and wonder, and when we do, most of us tend to be humbled by the vastness of the universe. But humans shouldn't be daunted, counsels Frayn; instead, we should take courage from the fact that '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.' The technical complexities of the Bishop Berkeley/tree-falling-in-the-forest argument and its counters are legion, but Frayn does a very nice job of adumbrating, observing along the way such legendary trip-ups as the principle of uncertainty and observational distortion and revisiting the questions that used to keep college students awake at night: How do we know that we know? Do we ever really make decisions? Why do we say that there's a present when the present is already the past? Why is it that 'the conscious subject that gives meaning to the objective universe cannot give meaning to itself'? Frayn takes clear pleasure in considering questions that make the heads of lesser mortals spin and pulsate, and he takes leisurely detours that sometimes lead to the neat destruction of philosophical positions and schools of thought; his dismantling of Chomskyan transformational grammar, for instance, is a masterpiece of gentle subversion, in keeping with Frayn's overall playful and user-friendly approach. He spins out some nice apothegms, too: 'The decisiveness of decisions is as elusive as the decisions themselves. It recedes like the intentionality of intention.' Indeed, and though the universe may spin merrily along without us, it requires us to interpret it--or, if nothing else, finds it congenial that we do so. An inviting introduction to modern cosmology and philosophy with no prerequisites other than the willingness to entertain counterfactuals, imponderables and leaps of faith. Nicely done.--Kirkus Reviews B

"British playwright and novelist Frayn has nursed a serious interest in philosophy since studying it at Cambridge in the 1950s, a fact that won't surprise fans of the writer best known for his 1982 farce, Noises Off, and award-winning 1998 drama, Copenhagen. This bold, original spin on the role of the human imagination in the construction of reality reflects the same robust intellectual curiosity, keen powers of observation and ingenious sense of humor that characterize all his work. Ranging over science, mathematics, philosophy, psychology and linguistics — with a grasp that would be admirable in a professional but is astounding in a self-confessed amateur — Frayn rigorously exposes the human scaffolding propping up what we like to see as a detached, neatly ordered universe. Gazing both outwardly at the indeterminate cosmos suggested by relativity and quantum mechanics, and inwardly at the slippery constructions of consciousness and our sense of self, he focuses on the narrative compulsion that arises from the continual 'traffic' between human beings and their ever-changing, ephemeral surroundings. Frayn's dogged unraveling of determinist assumptions and the occasionally mind-bending minutiae of theories, arguments and counterarguments can get taxing, despite lucid and witty prose. But Frayn's ecstatic embrace of a human-made universe is a fascinatingly persuasive ride." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Michael Frayn, renowned playwright and novelist, has written a long and ambitious book on the relationship between the objective world and the human mind. His question, central to philosophy, is to what degree, and in what ways, is the world dependent on the mind? Do we construct the world, or is it thrust upon us? He contends that reality has neither substance nor form without the constructive activities... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) of the knowing subject, that space, time, causality and matter are all mental products, the results of our 'traffic' with the world, not antecedent realities. He admits that the universe must exist independently of us in some way, but only as a kind of 'undifferentiated mass.' This is, he thinks, the basic paradox of philosophy: that we both create and are created by the world.

Frayn covers a lot of ground in a chatty, avuncular style designed to appeal to the general reader. But his amiable ramble makes no serious contribution to philosophy, is quite unconvincing in its main thesis and seems to rest on some obvious errors. The book begins, ominously, with quantum theory, and Frayn reiterates the popular, but misguided, view that this branch of physics demonstrates the dependence of the material world on the consciousness of the observer. That has certainly been one interpretation of it, but it's by no means the only interpretation, and I side with those physicists and philosophers who regard quantum theory as having no such implication. In brief, although measurement can change the state of what is measured, it simply does not follow that the state has no reality independent of the act of measuring.

Frayn also claims that the selectivity of attention shows that what we perceive depends on us, as when you focus on a bird in flight and ignore the sky behind it. But this rests on confusing the world as it appears to us with the world as it is in itself, a confusion that runs through the entire book. It is quite true that we contribute to the way things appear to us, but it doesn't follow that we construct the world that thus appears.

It is also a mistake to suppose that because we must always be aware of the world through the medium of our own consciousness, we cannot think of the world except as represented by our consciousness. I cannot refer to things without using words to do so, obviously, but it is wrong to conclude that objects cannot exist without words. Frayn is here committing the same fallacy as the idealist philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, who reasoned that objects had to be ideas, since no one can conceive of an object without having an idea of it.

Frayn's subjectivism is also self-refuting. If everything depends on the observer, what about the observer herself? Isn't she at least a determinate reality? We can't confer form and substance on the world, resolving its inherent indeterminacy, unless we have it to begin with. Frayn goes so far as to suggest that reality is just a projection of our stories about it, with the line between fact and fiction erased. But isn't it at least an observable fact that we construct fictions? It may sometimes be hard to decide what is factual and what is fictional, but it doesn't follow that there is no distinction between the two.

Once these points are kept clear, Frayn's putative paradox disappears. He writes: 'This is what it comes down to in the end: 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. We are supporting the globe on our shoulders, like Atlas — and we are standing on the globe we are supporting.' But this is simply an outright logical contradiction, generated by Frayn's own misunderstanding of the issues, not an interesting and inescapable conundrum. Frayn confides that his philosophy tutor at Cambridge, Jonathan Bennett, having read his manuscript, told him he was guilty of rampant anthropocentrism. He should have listened to his old teacher.

Colin McGinn is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami and the author, most recently, of 'Shakespeare's Philosophy.'

" Reviewed by Marc LeepsonJames M. LindsayRon CharlesColin McGinn, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls "the oldest mystery": the world is what we make of it.