Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we will also provide a glimpse
Speaker 1: into human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's an honor to have doctor Shan Carroll on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Doctor Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute
Speaker 1: of Technology. Recently, Carol has worked in the foundation of
Speaker 1: quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity.
Speaker 1: He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National
Speaker 1: Science Foundation, NASA, the Offered Peaceful and Foundation, among others.
Speaker 1: Doctor Carroll's given a TED talk on the multiverse that
Speaker 1: has more than one point five million views, and he
Speaker 1: has participated in a number of world public debates concerning
Speaker 1: material In his latest book, which is called The Big Picture,
Speaker 1: on the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe itself.
Speaker 1: Sean so great to chat with you today. Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me on, Scott. Yeah, I've been really looking forward
Speaker 1: to this chat my whole life. I've been deeply plagued
Speaker 1: by these existential issues, and it's so exciting to finally
Speaker 1: talk to someone who kind of tell me what the
Speaker 1: probabilities are about these things actually, you know, without me
Speaker 1: having to have no priors whatsoever. As I'm just like
Speaker 1: laying in bed thinking about this stuff. You know, it's
Speaker 1: very interesting to me how few physicists worry about this stuff.
Speaker 1: Like really, part of it is just that we're trained
Speaker 1: not to talk about these things, right, Yeah, By these things,
Speaker 1: I mean like what if the universe didn't exist? Why
Speaker 1: does it exist at all? Right? I talk about this
Speaker 1: a little bit in the book that I'm writing right
Speaker 1: now about quantum mechanics. But we are really trained to
Speaker 1: solve tangible, specific, put your finger on them problems. Physicists
Speaker 1: are trained to not think about more philosophical issues. So
Speaker 1: in some sense, the people best trained to address these
Speaker 1: issues about why the universes here are reluctant to even
Speaker 1: address the issue. You know, I do think that is
Speaker 1: I can actually verify that a little bit. I did
Speaker 1: this event called the Physics Imagination retreat. I had a
Speaker 1: whole series of retreats that when I worked at the
Speaker 1: Imaginations at Penn and one of our chrees was physics,
Speaker 1: and I had a conversation with about six or seven
Speaker 1: of the top physicists at Cambridge, and I asked all
Speaker 1: these questions I've just been wondering my whole life. I
Speaker 1: was like, well, try and travel are we possible? And
Speaker 1: people are like, ah, who cares? And I was like,
Speaker 1: ohwas you know all things that like, as a human being,
Speaker 1: a human being I care about, right right? And people
Speaker 1: were just like like, I don't know, maybe maybe not.
Speaker 1: It's just like, why do you not care? Why is
Speaker 1: that not so fascinating to you too? That question? You
Speaker 1: know that I just asked so I can verify. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know, I think I suspect that most physicists
Speaker 1: were initially drawn to the field by those kinds of questions.
Speaker 1: But it does get beaten out of you. I mean,
Speaker 1: it might be true. I don't know. I mean, I
Speaker 1: didn't get beaten out of me. It might just be
Speaker 1: that other physicists were never interested those questions. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I suspect that there's a selection effect academia. If you
Speaker 1: worry too much about those things. We're not going to
Speaker 1: give you a job. Yeah, that's why I don't have
Speaker 1: a job in physics. There you go. So okay, let
Speaker 1: me ask a question. You call yourself a cheerful naturalist,
Speaker 1: Can you tell uh listeners a little bit what a
Speaker 1: naturalist is and what would a pessimistic naturalist look like? Sure?
Speaker 1: I mean, a naturalist is just someone who thinks there's
Speaker 1: one world, the natural world. The world that we see
Speaker 1: around us is basically our experience of this natural world.
Speaker 1: So almost always these words, which are very simple but
Speaker 1: maybe you can worry about their definitions, go along with
Speaker 1: some other presuppositions, like one is, basically the conventional notion
Speaker 1: of the supernatural world is not there. That's the most
Speaker 1: important thing about naturalism is that there's no supernatural world.
Speaker 1: There's no gods or spirits or anything like that. There's
Speaker 1: a complicated thing we can get into about consciousness that
Speaker 1: maybe we'll get into about contrasts. We will, we will, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we will, Okay. Good. The other thing that is more
Speaker 1: or less implicit in the conventional use of the phrase
Speaker 1: naturalism or the word naturalism, is the idea that we
Speaker 1: can learn about the natural world through scientific experimentation, through
Speaker 1: empirical means, we can go poke at the world and
Speaker 1: therefore learn about it. So, I mean, that's basically it.
Speaker 1: But you know, for all intents and purposes going through
Speaker 1: the day, naturalism is opposed to supernaturalism, and in many
Speaker 1: debates it's naturalism versus theism in particular that people care about. Okay,
Speaker 1: and then the cheerful part, where's that coming? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you might not be cheerful if you were. You know,
Speaker 1: I think that even though there's a growing number of
Speaker 1: naturalists in the world, our background cultural conversation is still
Speaker 1: pretty theistic in its presuppositions. So there's an idea that
Speaker 1: purpose and meaningfulness in our lives comes from something beyond us,
Speaker 1: comes from something beyond the natural world. Right, it's given
Speaker 1: to us by God, or there's just some teleology, there's
Speaker 1: some point to life that we're headed toward, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And so if you start from that starting point, you
Speaker 1: can still deny that there is anything beyond the natural world.
Speaker 1: But then you might feel a lack a gap, right,
Speaker 1: a longing like, well, now I don't have any purpose
Speaker 1: or meaning in my life, what is it all for?
Speaker 1: And you know, we had one hundred years of existentialists
Speaker 1: arguing about this right from Kirkerygarden, Nietzsche through Sartre and Kimu,
Speaker 1: and you know, mostly they landed on the right answer,
Speaker 1: which is that we human beings make up purpose and
Speaker 1: meaning for ourselves. And so I'm in this sort of
Speaker 1: post existentialist phase. So I can say, yeah, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: a human being. I make a purpose of meaning for myself.
Speaker 1: That's great. I'm very cheerful about that. I don't feel
Speaker 1: this existential dread about it. Wait, I've never heard that
Speaker 1: phrase post existential phase. Did you just make that up?
Speaker 1: I just made it up. Yeah, I'll copyright it. I'll
Speaker 1: quickly write an article about it. That is because no,
Speaker 1: it's kind of it's kind of awesome, like it's meaningful.
Speaker 1: There is a stage, and I can see how people
Speaker 1: embracing that sort of post existential philosophy. Well, and I
Speaker 1: think that you going along with the idea that many
Speaker 1: physicists don't think deeply about whether or not the universe
Speaker 1: should exist. Many atheist slash naturalists in the modern world
Speaker 1: say or pretend or have opposed that says, oh, it
Speaker 1: never should have bothered us that God doesn't exist because
Speaker 1: you know, God didn't serve any purpose whatsoever. I think that, actually,
Speaker 1: and this is one of the reasons why I put
Speaker 1: together this workshop called Moving Naturalism Forward a few years ago,
Speaker 1: because I think that accepting naturalism leaves us with plenty
Speaker 1: of important questions yet unanswered, and purpose and meaningfulness are
Speaker 1: one of them. I don't think you should give a glib, simple,
Speaker 1: off the cuff answer to those questions. So I think that,
Speaker 1: you know, the existentialists worked hard at trying to figure
Speaker 1: this stuff out. But it's funny though, you know, someone
Speaker 1: once said said fairly recently, like no one in philosophy
Speaker 1: departments described themselves as an existentialist anymore. But maybe that's
Speaker 1: just going to be absorbed that lesson a little bit
Speaker 1: too thoroughly. And so I think that there's still work
Speaker 1: to be done in establishing how we can create perpose
Speaker 1: and meaningfulness and mattering and morality and ethics in a
Speaker 1: natural world. So we don't speak the language of the
Speaker 1: existentialists very much anymore, but the task remains unfinished. So
Speaker 1: post existentialist phase is I think the right one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they got some stuff wrong, right from like a psychological perspective,
Speaker 1: the idea that existence precedes essence. Now we know that,
Speaker 1: Holy cal you know, DNA predicts existence more than they
Speaker 1: ever could have imagined. Right. They were better at ethics
Speaker 1: then at metaphism or psychology or psychology. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: doubt that they were better ethics than psychology. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they wrote great novels, right, there were some great novels,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, there were some great novels. And some
Speaker 1: of the sentences they wrote were very poetic. Yeah. That
Speaker 1: counts for something, and it does count for something. Well,
Speaker 1: it does. And I could actually see that segueing to
Speaker 1: your notion of poetic was it poetic naturalism? Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: So did you like that segue? Yeah, that was very good,
Speaker 1: excellently Well, yeah, fall podcaster. By the way, I just
Speaker 1: want to say is step back and saying congratulations on
Speaker 1: the huge early success of your podcast. I mean it's
Speaker 1: only been like three months or something, is that right? Yeah? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been very gratifying, and you know, there's there's ups
Speaker 1: and downs, and uh, you know, there are people in
Speaker 1: the comments who want to, you know, be trouble, but
Speaker 1: you know, for the most part, yeah, both people have
Speaker 1: liked it, and you know, people have said nice things
Speaker 1: on the internet about it, which is kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: So most importantly, I'm having fun and I've got to
Speaker 1: talk to a lot of fascinating people by doing It's
Speaker 1: so much fun, isn't it? Doing a podcast and not
Speaker 1: being tethered to any rules about, you know, how to
Speaker 1: have discourse. I mean, we can just have an open
Speaker 1: and see a conversation and let it emerge, let the
Speaker 1: complexity emerge, right, Yeah. And you know, one of the
Speaker 1: you know tussles that I see in the comments to
Speaker 1: mine or there, there's definitely a minority slice in there
Speaker 1: that only want me to ever talk about physics. And
Speaker 1: you know, they have not read the instructions because I'm
Speaker 1: very clear that the whole point my podcast is to
Speaker 1: talk about lots of things other than physic, including physics.
Speaker 1: I wonder if I'm going to get in trouble in
Speaker 1: this episode we're talking about physics. Yeah, you might while
Speaker 1: we talk about psychology a little bit. So it's okay,
Speaker 1: oh no, we'll get to it and we're going to
Speaker 1: actually we've I have this whole plan in my head,
Speaker 1: but we're going to let it emerge and we're going
Speaker 1: to what the plant emergs, so poetic naturalism. Can you
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about what the poetic part
Speaker 1: of that is, now that you've weighed out what naturalism is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think that one way in which naturalism can
Speaker 1: veer a little bit off the rails is So what
Speaker 1: I said is the way that we learn about the world,
Speaker 1: the natural world, is through scientific exploration. Scientific exploration or
Speaker 1: experimentation is not the only way to learn true fact.
Speaker 1: For example, math or logic are different than science. You know,
Speaker 1: they go by formal rules that get use certain results,
Speaker 1: whereas science is much more tentative and about probabilities and
Speaker 1: credence is not about certainties. Nevertheless, some people want to say,
Speaker 1: you know that science can do everything. For example, it
Speaker 1: can get us morality or meaning things like that, right,
Speaker 1: And I just think that's wrong. I think that's not
Speaker 1: what science does. Science tells us what happens, that's what
Speaker 1: it is. It tells us what the world is made
Speaker 1: of and what that stuff does. That's pretty good. That's
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, it fills a lot of time,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't tell us what should happen or why
Speaker 1: we should care about what happens. These are different questions.
Speaker 1: So the poetic naturalism comes about by the idea that
Speaker 1: number one, even at a scientific level, there's more than
Speaker 1: one way to talk about the universe. So there's one world,
Speaker 1: the natural world. There's more than one way to talk
Speaker 1: about it. We can talk about it as particle physicists,
Speaker 1: as chemists, that's biologists, as psychologists, et cetera. Right, these
Speaker 1: can all refer to real things in the world. I
Speaker 1: think that tables and chairs are real. Not everyone agrees,
Speaker 1: but this is the hell I'm willing to die on.
Speaker 1: And I think that if you think tables and chairs
Speaker 1: are real, then you probably think that you should think
Speaker 1: that consciousness and free will are real. But that's still
Speaker 1: just the scientific descriptive view of the world. So poetic
Speaker 1: naturalism says there are other vocabularies we can use describing
Speaker 1: the world that are not tied down by the scientific method,
Speaker 1: such as our moral or ethical vocabularies judging right and wrong. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: two people can judge a certain action right or wrong
Speaker 1: and disagree with each other, and there's no experiment you
Speaker 1: can do to show that one of them is right,
Speaker 1: one of them is wrong. Right, It's not science. That's
Speaker 1: the whole point of science is that in principle, there's
Speaker 1: data you can collect to adjudicate disagreements, and in morality
Speaker 1: that's not true. So poetic comes in because there's more
Speaker 1: than one way to be a moral person or to
Speaker 1: find meaning and purpose in life. And so there's a
Speaker 1: bit of human creativity that comes in to talking about
Speaker 1: the world in those ways. At the end of the day,
Speaker 1: you're still just talking about the natural world, but you're
Speaker 1: as signing properties to it of being moral, being immoral,
Speaker 1: being something we want to strive toward, or something we
Speaker 1: can just ignore. That is on the basis of your
Speaker 1: personal predispositions just as much as it is the action
Speaker 1: of the physical world around you. Yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: just triggered the psychological component there, right, I mean there's
Speaker 1: individual differences and yeah, that influences our the world view
Speaker 1: we develop, the environments we create for ourselves. The more
Speaker 1: that we create those sort of bubbles for ourselves, the
Speaker 1: more we start to ignore a broader picture things like that. Well,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, it becomes especially important to get
Speaker 1: this right when it comes to morality and action in
Speaker 1: the world. Right now, you know, I think that so
Speaker 1: much of our moral discourse is still embedded in this
Speaker 1: somewhat religious background. And I don't think that the public
Speaker 1: face of naturalism is doing ourselves any favors because it's
Speaker 1: trying to be to go too far in, you know,
Speaker 1: deriving right from wrong from science, which can't be done.
Speaker 1: So I think we need to elevate our game a
Speaker 1: little bit here, And ultimately it comes down to the
Speaker 1: fact are you willing to admit or the question are
Speaker 1: you willing to admit that choices about right and wrong
Speaker 1: can be subjective, that there's no experiment we can do
Speaker 1: or mathematical proof we can offer that shows that something
Speaker 1: is absolutely right or wrong. Yeah. I was going to
Speaker 1: get to the moral psychology later, but I do find
Speaker 1: that a truly interesting question from an individual differences perspective,
Speaker 1: because we use labels in our field to describe certain
Speaker 1: personalities as dark, the dark triad. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've come across the dark triads that's narcissis, Yeah, narcissism
Speaker 1: and machavilianism and psychopathy, and you know, in one sense
Speaker 1: of description, we're not. Actually, that's a subjective term that
Speaker 1: us humans researcher science nerdy scientists have decided to label
Speaker 1: a constellation of traits when we start talking about what
Speaker 1: is the fundamental nature reality, because that's what we're talking
Speaker 1: about ontology. You know, that is a concept. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a level of description from physics from your point
Speaker 1: of view, where that constellation of personality traits are literally
Speaker 1: just a patterns of atomic particles that have self organized
Speaker 1: at a particular moment of time, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So there's a level of description upon which dark try
Speaker 1: it has no meaning. Do you see what I'm saying. Oh, yeah, no, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly right. So look, tables and chairs
Speaker 1: have no meaning at the level of description of particles, right, So,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the point I'm trying to make
Speaker 1: that I completely agree with that there's only one world,
Speaker 1: but there's more than one way to talk about it.
Speaker 1: That's the short loss on poetic naturalism, and nobody should
Speaker 1: disagree with this. There are some very very hardcore eliminatives
Speaker 1: that want to say, you know, I have friends of mine,
Speaker 1: to be honest, that want to say the only thing
Speaker 1: that exists is this deepest substructure of reality, the particles
Speaker 1: and forces or the quantum wave function of the universe
Speaker 1: or something like that. But look, they prove themselves wrong
Speaker 1: every time they do anything in the world because, of
Speaker 1: course they talk about tables and chairs, right, tables and
Speaker 1: chairs are real phenomena there, Daniel Dennet talks about real patterns.
Speaker 1: They have causal efficacy and explanatory power in the world.
Speaker 1: You could talk about a table in terms of all
Speaker 1: of its atoms and the forces holding them together. That's dumb.
Speaker 1: It's an enormously inefficient way to talk about this immersion pattern.
Speaker 1: Immersions happens when there's an enormously more efficient way to
Speaker 1: get useful information about a situation without going to that
Speaker 1: fundamental substrate. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend going to that fundamental
Speaker 1: level on a first date at least. Well, exactly, I've
Speaker 1: made that joke, right, Oh you've made it too, are
Speaker 1: we both like? Do we both have an awkward sense
Speaker 1: of humors? I totally, Well, you know, so I get
Speaker 1: an extra bonus because my version of the joke is
Speaker 1: when you go on a first with someone and they says,
Speaker 1: they say, tell me about it yourself. You don't start
Speaker 1: listing all of your atoms right, all the positions of Veilosi.
Speaker 1: If your first day is with a Caltech student, that
Speaker 1: might actually work. So okay, fair enough, Oh okay, that's
Speaker 1: so funny that you thought your think is links similar. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I mean there's so many like pathways to go in
Speaker 1: this in this conversation, because people make a distinction as
Speaker 1: you talk about your book, between rich ontology and sparse ontology,
Speaker 1: and I think that is relevant here. Could you please
Speaker 1: explain to our listeners the difference between these two forms
Speaker 1: of staying in the nature of reality. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: this is really important because we have to admit that
Speaker 1: when we're facing these issues that are deep and difficult,
Speaker 1: and we don't know the answers, you know, until we
Speaker 1: know the answer, right, until the answer is just bleeding obvious,
Speaker 1: as long as you were in that phase where things
Speaker 1: are still a little bit up for grabs. Our human
Speaker 1: personalities and preferences and predilections affect the hypotheses to which
Speaker 1: we attach the most creedence by a lot, right, Different
Speaker 1: people have different kinds of, you know, love for different
Speaker 1: kinds of scientific hypotheses. I think this is a maybe
Speaker 1: psychologist should look at this. Certainly, philosophers or sociologists of
Speaker 1: science should look at this. But of course we hope
Speaker 1: that eventually the data decide and we all agree. But
Speaker 1: the interesting part of science and we don't yet have
Speaker 1: enough data, we don't yet agree. So when it comes
Speaker 1: down to the deepest level, right, like what is the
Speaker 1: world right? What is the world of the fundamental level,
Speaker 1: some people are going to prefer an explanation which is
Speaker 1: more or less very close to the phenomena. So we
Speaker 1: see tables and chairs, and we see people who had
Speaker 1: purposes and meaning in their lives. So some people are
Speaker 1: going to naturally want those things that you see to
Speaker 1: play a role in their fundamental ontology. I mean consciousness
Speaker 1: is the way that this shows up a lot with
Speaker 1: For Plato, it would have showed up in tables and chairs.
Speaker 1: He actually wants them to be part of the fundamental ontology.
Speaker 1: We can't get away with that today, but a lot
Speaker 1: of people would still want human consciousness to be there,
Speaker 1: And other people are willing to give up that closeness
Speaker 1: of fundamental ontology to experience in favor of the ontology
Speaker 1: itself being very very lean and mean. This is the
Speaker 1: sparse ontology. So if I can claim to have a
Speaker 1: really really simple elegant, very compact, easily written down ontology,
Speaker 1: and then I can claim that if I work hard
Speaker 1: enough at unpacking the predictions or the implications of that ontology,
Speaker 1: I can explain the world. Then that's another kind of
Speaker 1: triumph that you might want to claim. I'm definitely on
Speaker 1: the sparse ontology the side of things. I'm very, very
Speaker 1: minimal in my preferred view of the underlying world. Of course,
Speaker 1: the data could always prove me wrong, but that's what
Speaker 1: I'm betting on right now. Yeah, so you're right, we
Speaker 1: will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality,
Speaker 1: not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself.
Speaker 1: Could some people view that statement as arrogant in a
Speaker 1: sense that you are so confident about that. So strictly speaking,
Speaker 1: the answer to your question is yes, obviously, because they
Speaker 1: have and they do, because you know it's I mean,
Speaker 1: you have two options. The world exists all by itself,
Speaker 1: or the world is sustained by something outside it. Nobody
Speaker 1: knows what one hundred percent certainty which option is correct.
Speaker 1: Many of us have opinions about the relative likeliness of
Speaker 1: these two different options. I don't think it's arrogant or
Speaker 1: otherwise to say which your preference is right, I don't
Speaker 1: see why it would be any less arrogant to say
Speaker 1: the other side, you know, I don't think. I think
Speaker 1: as soon as people start talking about arrogance, they stopped
Speaker 1: having a good face conversation about ontology, right. You know,
Speaker 1: if you want to say the evidence is against my view,
Speaker 1: then that's fine. Or if you want to say, like,
Speaker 1: here's the experience we have that that leads us to
Speaker 1: think that there's a better view, that's fine. If you
Speaker 1: just say that, you know, I'm arrogant, then you're just
Speaker 1: switching to ad hominems at that point. You're not trying
Speaker 1: to argue with the claim. No, I totally hear you.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of, like, at what level of
Speaker 1: probability are you allowed to say something with confidence without
Speaker 1: putting all the caveats around it, because you could have
Speaker 1: phrased that sentence. You know, based on my current priors
Speaker 1: and the current evidence that I've amassed over a career
Speaker 1: of studying this stuff, my current understanding and prediction is
Speaker 1: that we will ultimately understand that we're bubtle et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Yea, but you stated we will understand, And
Speaker 1: you know, there are a lot of things during the
Speaker 1: course of my day, I wonder, like what should be
Speaker 1: my threshold for having confidence, you know, for a whole
Speaker 1: wide range of things like crossing the street. You know, like,
Speaker 1: what's the probably that I can confidently you know, across
Speaker 1: the street right now? What is the probably? Et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Have you thought about, like, you know, if
Speaker 1: you want to live your life really like rationally every
Speaker 1: second of your life, Like, what's a good guideline for that? Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, above fifty percent seems right to me? But
Speaker 1: what above fifty percent? Are we talking ninety percent? Like
Speaker 1: ninety one percent? Because you could be wrong in that
Speaker 1: statement and you admit that, but you still state it
Speaker 1: confidently because it's higher than what ninety would you say percent?
Speaker 1: What would you say? I would? You know? No, I
Speaker 1: would go I think it depends on context a little bit, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, forget exactly how I prease that statement, but
Speaker 1: you know it's absolutely we will, we will. Well, what
Speaker 1: was the beginning of that we will? Oh, fair enough,
Speaker 1: I would need to look that up. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: know it might be something like I believe we will
Speaker 1: or you know, confident we will or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, right,
Speaker 1: I can't say that with one hundred percent confidence. And
Speaker 1: yet when I say it, I don't feel the need
Speaker 1: to add footnotes about the relative likelihood and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: I think that that one I would put better than
Speaker 1: ninety nine percent probability on, you know, for the world,
Speaker 1: you know, not having an external mover. I would probably
Speaker 1: also put greater than ninety nine percent chance on that.
Speaker 1: That's huge. I mean, like if people, okay, look, I
Speaker 1: need to step back second, because this is I'm not
Speaker 1: sure people really might really get exactly how big that is.
Speaker 1: In a way, you know, throughout the course of human history,
Speaker 1: people have been conjecturing about the fundamental nature reality, or
Speaker 1: about the existence of God, and even today a lot
Speaker 1: of people have certain religious beliefs, certain specific beliefs. You're
Speaker 1: saying that there's like a ninety nine percent probability that
Speaker 1: some people and their beliefs that they hold so dear
Speaker 1: is just simply wrong, incorrect. The only part of that
Speaker 1: I would disagree with or footnotes. Since we're trying to
Speaker 1: be very very careful right now, I appreciate it is
Speaker 1: there is a probability. I think that these probabilities are subjective.
Speaker 1: That's basing an inference for you. Everyone has a credence
Speaker 1: for different things to be true. My credence that God
Speaker 1: exists and sustains the universe is less than one percent. Yes,
Speaker 1: based on your credences, which are fast believing God when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, and you know, more data came
Speaker 1: in and I process the data and I updated my credences,
Speaker 1: and you know, the world just makes so much more
Speaker 1: sense as a world that doesn't have God in it now.
Speaker 1: Of course, in any you know, we can always spend
Speaker 1: plenty of time debating what is meant by God. So
Speaker 1: I mean a somewhat traditionalist view of God, the kind
Speaker 1: of typical religious believers believe in. So do our facts.
Speaker 1: By the way, I'm trying to be skeptical here from
Speaker 1: the point of view of someone that neither me or
Speaker 1: you are, because I'm I'm in more of your camp
Speaker 1: about how I see the world. But I'm trying to
Speaker 1: think of, like, why do facts and this might be
Speaker 1: an obvious answer, but I could see someone asking why
Speaker 1: do facts take priority in credences over experiences like someone
Speaker 1: else could say, well, my credences throughout my life are
Speaker 1: like I talk to God at night when I pray.
Speaker 1: Right now, those totally can't. Those experiences are facts that
Speaker 1: that is a data in the Baysian way of thinking
Speaker 1: about it, like I talked to God, I had this experience. Therefore,
Speaker 1: I'm going to update my credences. You know, that's perfectly
Speaker 1: legitimate by itself. Now you should also be thinking, you
Speaker 1: know what Bayes tells us to do. I don't think
Speaker 1: he told us to do. And by the way, he
Speaker 1: believed in God, he was a reverend. Thomas Bay's funny.
Speaker 1: What he would have said is, look, you can't just
Speaker 1: figure out whether or not you would have had this
Speaker 1: experience if God existed. You also need to ask what
Speaker 1: is the chance you would have an experience like that
Speaker 1: if God didn't exist? Right? Right? And so my point
Speaker 1: is that people who take that to be strong evidence
Speaker 1: are typically vastly underestimating the probability and something like that
Speaker 1: could happen even if God didn't exist. You know, the
Speaker 1: human mind, as you might know as a psychologist, things
Speaker 1: can happen in the human mind. Like we can misremember things,
Speaker 1: we can imagine things, we can talk ourselves into things,
Speaker 1: we can hallucinate. You can have all sorts of experiences
Speaker 1: that make perfect sense in a naturalistic world that you
Speaker 1: could also interpret as spiritual or religious. So I think
Speaker 1: the probability of either one of these under eat one
Speaker 1: of these hypotheses, that things like that happen would be
Speaker 1: very high, no point, very well. Thing. I mean, the
Speaker 1: human mind is massively biased, and we've evolved illusions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I want to as we're as we're unraveling the
Speaker 1: probabilities of the reality of the universe, let's talk about
Speaker 1: how the universe probably evolved before we get to life.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe we should back up a second and
Speaker 1: start pre life about the universe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very exciting for me, But it was very exciting. I
Speaker 1: love physics. In college, I did a presentation on time
Speaker 1: travel got me in a and that's like I claim
Speaker 1: to fame and congratulation, you know, and yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1: So I'm so fascinst So let's talk about how our
Speaker 1: universe actually evolved. Because reading your book, I realized that
Speaker 1: we're in a heck of a lot. Since when I
Speaker 1: took physics in college, I guess it's been two thousand
Speaker 1: and two. You know, like I learned a lot of
Speaker 1: things from that have been updated since then. So tell
Speaker 1: us what our cur a best understanding of how our
Speaker 1: universe involved is. So it's been about fourteen billion years
Speaker 1: since the Big Bang. So sometimes you'll hear people try
Speaker 1: to make it, you know, thirteen point seven thirteen point eight.
Speaker 1: We don't know that third digit very well, So let's
Speaker 1: just say fourteen matter, okay for us? Yeah, exactly. So,
Speaker 1: oh no, there's very heated emotional really at thirteen point eight. Yea, well,
Speaker 1: within specific academic fields, there's such hud arguments about things
Speaker 1: know ys cares about. So what does that mean that
Speaker 1: there was a big bang? You know, we discovered in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties that the universe is number one, very big.
Speaker 1: We might have always thought that we knew the universe
Speaker 1: is very big. What we discovered is that these little
Speaker 1: blobby things that we see in the sky are actually
Speaker 1: separate galaxies made of stars. Right before Hubble came along,
Speaker 1: we might have thought that they were just clouds within
Speaker 1: our own Milky Way galaxy. So the universe seems to
Speaker 1: be this homogeneous spread of galaxies roughly two trillion galaxies
Speaker 1: is the best current estimate in the observable universe. And
Speaker 1: number two, we discover that it's expanding. So the distance
Speaker 1: between alexies is growing over time. So if you imagine
Speaker 1: winding that backward, in the past, things were closer together,
Speaker 1: and at one point, if you just keep going, it's
Speaker 1: natural to assume everything was on top of everything else.
Speaker 1: And that's what George Lemetra, another priest who was a scientist,
Speaker 1: called the primeval atom and what we now call the
Speaker 1: Big Bang. So in according to general relativity right Einstein's
Speaker 1: theory of gravity that says that space and time are curved,
Speaker 1: you can again plug into the equations and ask what
Speaker 1: things were like at the Big Bang, and the answer
Speaker 1: is there was a singularity, a moment of infinite density, pressure,
Speaker 1: expansion rate, curvature, and so forth. And in some sense
Speaker 1: that suggests that it was the beginning of the universe.
Speaker 1: There's no space time beyond the Big Bang. Now, the
Speaker 1: truth is, the story I just told you is one
Speaker 1: you will often hear, but it's only half the truth.
Speaker 1: The other half is there's no reason to believe general
Speaker 1: relativity in the regime of the Big Bang, because general
Speaker 1: relativity is a classical theory. It does not take quantum
Speaker 1: mechanics into account. Everyone knows quantum mechanics matters in conditions
Speaker 1: where you know, the density is very high and things
Speaker 1: are very energetic, and things are all squeezed together. So
Speaker 1: the fact that there's a singularity predicted by general relativity
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the universe does not mean that
Speaker 1: the universe began at that time. All it means is
Speaker 1: that our classical way of describing the universe using general
Speaker 1: relativity breaks down. Something big happened, transition in the phase
Speaker 1: transition or something. Well, it's not the beginning of the universe,
Speaker 1: it's the end of our theoretical understanding, is the way
Speaker 1: that I'd like to say. So it's very possible that
Speaker 1: that was the first moment in the history of the universe,
Speaker 1: the moment before which there were no other moments. But
Speaker 1: it's also very possible there was something before that that
Speaker 1: we don't know. So that's all mystery land What happened
Speaker 1: at or before the Big Bang? After the Big Bang,
Speaker 1: you know, one second after the Big Bang, we have
Speaker 1: a very good handle on what the universe was doing.
Speaker 1: It was a nuclear reactor turning protons and neutrons into
Speaker 1: helium nuclei, and it's been expanding ever since. It was hot,
Speaker 1: so hot and dense that it was opaque for the
Speaker 1: first few hundred thousand years, and then it became transparent,
Speaker 1: and we can see the leftover radiation from that hot,
Speaker 1: dense early phase in what we call the cosmic microwave background.
Speaker 1: And we can you know, back when we had television
Speaker 1: sets with antennas on them, some non negligible fraction of
Speaker 1: the static in your TV set came from the cosmic
Speaker 1: microwave background radiation. It's all around us, and it's there
Speaker 1: from the Big Bang, and we can learn an enormous
Speaker 1: amount about what things were like back then. And basically
Speaker 1: what things were like were very, very smooth. That was
Speaker 1: the interesting thing. There's not a lot of feature. There's
Speaker 1: not a lot of structure in the universe at that time.
Speaker 1: There's a little bit of variation of density from place
Speaker 1: to place, but not that much. And what has happened
Speaker 1: over fourteen billion years is gravity has taken the regions
Speaker 1: with a little bit more matter and pulled things together
Speaker 1: to make them even denser, and regions with a little
Speaker 1: bit less matter and emptied them out to make them
Speaker 1: even less dense. So structure the contrast novel in the
Speaker 1: universe is and turned up over these fourteen billion years,
Speaker 1: and now we see a universe that is full of
Speaker 1: planets and stars and galaxies. Right, And at that smooth stage,
Speaker 1: there was very low entropy. Right. Yes, So there's a
Speaker 1: whole complicated discussion about entropy, one of the son Even
Speaker 1: professional cosmologists get this wrong all the time. If you
Speaker 1: have a box of gas on your desk. For whatever reason,
Speaker 1: physicists do this. Sometimes there's a box of gas on
Speaker 1: your desk and you heat it up and you let
Speaker 1: it go to its maximum entropy state. So entropy is
Speaker 1: a way of talking about the disorderliness, right, the randomness,
Speaker 1: the disorganization of things. So if you let things go
Speaker 1: all by themselves, there's the law, the second law of
Speaker 1: thermodynamics that says that entropy goes up until maybe it
Speaker 1: hits a maximum and then it just remains constant. So
Speaker 1: the maximum entropy that that box of gas could be
Speaker 1: in the maximum trope state. If you open it up
Speaker 1: and look at it, it's what we call thermal equilibrium.
Speaker 1: It looks like it's very smooth and it's giving off
Speaker 1: radiation with a certain very specific spectrum of a different wavelength,
Speaker 1: and when you look at the early universe, that's also
Speaker 1: exactly what you see. It's very smooth that it's giving
Speaker 1: off radiation with exactly that kind of radiation, that that
Speaker 1: kind of spectrum. So phys is to say to themselves, Aha,
Speaker 1: the early universe looks like it is a very high
Speaker 1: entropy state, which is exactly wrong, exactly backwards, because the
Speaker 1: reason why is there something very very different about the
Speaker 1: early universe than about your box of gas. Namely, the
Speaker 1: early universe was really heavy, It had a lot of
Speaker 1: mass in it, It It had a lot of gravitational pull
Speaker 1: to it. The box of gas on your desk, the
Speaker 1: gravitational pull between the different gas molecules is negligible. Gravity
Speaker 1: is a very very weak force, but in the universe,
Speaker 1: the gravitational force is very very important. Once you turn
Speaker 1: on gravity, a high entropy state does not any longer
Speaker 1: look like a smooth thermal box of gas. You could
Speaker 1: take that box of gas and turn it into a
Speaker 1: black hole and you would have a much higher entropy.
Speaker 1: The early universe could have had a much higher entropy
Speaker 1: if all the matter that we see smoothly distributed had
Speaker 1: in fact been very lumpy, and in fact, best of all,
Speaker 1: if a lot of it had been in the form
Speaker 1: of black hole. So that's a puzzle. The early universe
Speaker 1: was actually compared to what it could be really really
Speaker 1: low entropy and low entropy states are very rare in
Speaker 1: the space of all possible states. You know, if you ask,
Speaker 1: how could the universe have looked at the beginning? What
Speaker 1: might it have looked like? Choose? You would never have
Speaker 1: chosen the actual configuration of the universe. It's just too unlikely.
Speaker 1: And why is that? There must be something you know,
Speaker 1: maybe God did it. That's one of the explanations, but
Speaker 1: there are other explanations on the table. Also, Yeah, is
Speaker 1: it possible that when you have too much entropy like that,
Speaker 1: too much that the system can handle like it explodes
Speaker 1: like and then enters and then there's a state of
Speaker 1: complete voluntry like kind of the cycle starts over again?
Speaker 1: Is that po Because I think, can I just tell
Speaker 1: you why I bring this up? Yeah, because I'm trying
Speaker 1: to make a linkage to my field. So there's a
Speaker 1: tick of her and colleagues of mine that have come
Speaker 1: up with this really neat theory of psychological entropy. They've
Speaker 1: taken the same principles of the second world thermodynamics and
Speaker 1: they try to apply it to the mind and our
Speaker 1: need for certainty, you know, the human need for certainty,
Speaker 1: and the theory of psychological entropy. You know, we get
Speaker 1: to this state where sometimes we get so overwhelmed. But
Speaker 1: you know when people who are high on the personality
Speaker 1: neuroticism already walk around in a high state of entropy
Speaker 1: in their daily life, I laugh because that's basically me,
Speaker 1: you know, like, you know, I can relate to that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this's just like so much a certainty, and I can
Speaker 1: get overwhelmed. But then there's something that it's interesting happens
Speaker 1: psychologically when the system just gets so over On a
Speaker 1: less humorous note, a more serious note, like people have
Speaker 1: had abuse in childhood or very severe trauma actually get
Speaker 1: to a point where they just don't care anymore. They
Speaker 1: actually get to a point of you can almost characterize
Speaker 1: it as low entropy because there's just been too much entropy.
Speaker 1: So I'm just saying, like, if we have this analogous
Speaker 1: to the creation of the universe, is it pau like
Speaker 1: there was a prior, larger universe or prior different kind
Speaker 1: of universe that maybe was doing its own thing for like,
Speaker 1: this is my imagination running wild but kind of doing
Speaker 1: its own thing. For like, you know, one hundred trillion
Speaker 1: years got to that state, the same state that we're
Speaker 1: predicting one google years from now, all black holes in
Speaker 1: our universe will have evaporated into a thin mist of particles. Okay,
Speaker 1: is it possible that happened already? And then what you
Speaker 1: naturally get as a result of that is like pop,
Speaker 1: you know, like this very low entropy state. I don't know,
Speaker 1: this is crazy talk. It is partly crazy, but partly
Speaker 1: very sensible. So let me see, like you remember everything
Speaker 1: I need to say here. Okay, to answer your immediate question,
Speaker 1: it's certainly possible that there was something before the Big
Speaker 1: Bang that we would have recognized as high entropy. Yes,
Speaker 1: in fact, this is my favorite theory that I've written about.
Speaker 1: You know, a way by using the mechanism that we
Speaker 1: used was I'm sorry, I need to back up a
Speaker 1: little bit. What would the universe look like if it
Speaker 1: were high entropy? You might ask, And again, gravity is
Speaker 1: the most important thing here, and the answer is the
Speaker 1: universe would look like empty space if it were high entropy,
Speaker 1: which is what you predict eventually we're going to have, right,
Speaker 1: because entropy is growing, So just let the universe go,
Speaker 1: it'll empty out. And so the real cosmological question that
Speaker 1: none of my fellow cosmologists recognized is the right question,
Speaker 1: but it is, is why don't we live in empty space? Yeah? No,
Speaker 1: it's a good darn good question. Why is there stuff
Speaker 1: in the universe? Why are there the eighty eighth particles
Speaker 1: around us? And so what we suggested this is Jennifer
Speaker 1: Chen who was a graduate student of mine and i
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four suggested, well, maybe there can
Speaker 1: be a quantum transition where you have a big empty
Speaker 1: universe and it's almost like a little nucleus that is
Speaker 1: radioactive that spits off a photon or something like that.
Speaker 1: This big empty universe spits off a little baby universe,
Speaker 1: right right, that starts small and dense and energetic. And
Speaker 1: then what we recognize is by itself very low entropy.
Speaker 1: But secretly, of course, it's part of this bigger system
Speaker 1: that is high entropy. So it's just a localized bit
Speaker 1: of low entropy. It's not the whole universe is going
Speaker 1: down in entropy, but the whole universe is creating a
Speaker 1: more universe that starts low entropy and then grows. That
Speaker 1: is absolutely possible. And now that what's the crazy part. Okay,
Speaker 1: the crazy part is I'm not sure that I agree
Speaker 1: with the analogy that the psychologists have suggested between entropy
Speaker 1: and and back channel. I'd love to send you the paper, okay,
Speaker 1: so you can read it and I'll put in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Yeah, but it might be very fixable in
Speaker 1: the sense that human beings are quintessentially not closed systems, right,
Speaker 1: that's we interact with the environment around us. So the
Speaker 1: fact that entropy tends to go up, you know, if
Speaker 1: that's all you thought ever happened, that would mean that
Speaker 1: you could never take a bottle of champagne and cool
Speaker 1: it down in your refrigerator because the entropy of the
Speaker 1: bottle of champagne goes down. Of course, it's not acting
Speaker 1: all by itself. It's in a refrigerator, right, and the
Speaker 1: refrigerator is viewing heat out the back. So human beings,
Speaker 1: I don't think are very well modeled as closed systems
Speaker 1: that obey the second law of thromodynamics, or to which
Speaker 1: the second mology Human beings are dynamical systems that are
Speaker 1: you know, channels through which a lot of things come
Speaker 1: in and a lot of things go out. And so
Speaker 1: what you're really looking for is the different steady state
Speaker 1: configurations or quasi steady state configurations subject to these inputs
Speaker 1: and outputs. I think that you can try to model
Speaker 1: that with entropy like notions, but the simple thing of
Speaker 1: looking at as a closed system is not going to
Speaker 1: fit the data very well. Yeah, So these are the
Speaker 1: four propositions, four major tenets of entropy the entropy model
Speaker 1: of uncertainty. So one, uncertainty poses a critical adaptive challenge
Speaker 1: for any organism, so individuals are motivated to keep it
Speaker 1: at amaginable level. So uncertainty management is a huge thing
Speaker 1: that humans have. Two. Uncertainty emerges as a function of
Speaker 1: the conflict between competing perceptual and behavioral affordances. Three. Adopting
Speaker 1: clear goals and polief structures helps to constrain the experience
Speaker 1: of uncertainty by reducing the spread of competing affordances. And
Speaker 1: the uncertainty is experienced subjectively as anxiety and is associated
Speaker 1: with activity in the anterior sing or cortex and with
Speaker 1: heightened neuroadrenaline release. By placing the discussion of uncertainty management
Speaker 1: a fundamental biological necessity, which I think is what you
Speaker 1: were talking about, within the framework of information theory and
Speaker 1: self organizing systems or model helps us situate key psychological
Speaker 1: processes within a broader physical, conceptual, and evolutionary context. So
Speaker 1: I presume you agree with that. Well, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: the assumptions sound plausible on the face of them. Of course,
Speaker 1: there's probably some mathematization of them or formalization of them
Speaker 1: that goes into it. But again, I think that there's
Speaker 1: a missing ingredient there, which is the environment in which
Speaker 1: people are embedded. So or even before that, there's I
Speaker 1: don't know how much we want to get into this,
Speaker 1: Give me a minute to just indulge myself here. You know,
Speaker 1: I think that much more emphasis needs to be placed
Speaker 1: on the idea of homeostasis. I know that Antonio Domacio
Speaker 1: has been writing about this idea. But here is the
Speaker 1: important fact as I see it. If you turn your
Speaker 1: computer on your laptop, it doesn't do anything it turns on.
Speaker 1: It just sits there. It doesn't get bored, right, It's
Speaker 1: not gonna sort of twiddle its thumbs and be annoyed
Speaker 1: that you haven't given anything to do. It is happy
Speaker 1: sitting there for a very long time, whereas a human
Speaker 1: being is not. A human being can meditate, and you
Speaker 1: can sit there and close your eyes and steal your breath,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But human being is still a fundamentally really
Speaker 1: really different thing than a computer or a chair. But
Speaker 1: the point is that a chair is more or less
Speaker 1: static because it's made out of pieces that are individually static. Right,
Speaker 1: it's almost essentially a lattice of different atoms and molecules.
Speaker 1: A person can be fairly static, but there's an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of activity going on underneath the surface. Right at
Speaker 1: the very least your heart is beating, there are chemical
Speaker 1: electro chemical signals going down your central nervous system ATP
Speaker 1: is being generated. Right, So your staticness is being maintained
Speaker 1: by an enormous of activity beneath the surface. And that
Speaker 1: activity depends on the fact that you're embedded in an
Speaker 1: environment that is very, very far from thermal equilibrium. We
Speaker 1: bring in free energy, we use it up, we expel it,
Speaker 1: and that's a process that has to keep going. So
Speaker 1: if I were to build psychological models in a sort
Speaker 1: of an entropic or information theoretic framework, I would look
Speaker 1: for these quasi static equilibria based on certain free energy
Speaker 1: inputs and high entropy output. This is really exciting, actually,
Speaker 1: I read about this quite a bit in my book.
Speaker 1: As the physicist Irwin Schrodinger argued in this highly influential
Speaker 1: book what is Life, which you talk about in your book,
Speaker 1: So it's really cool to make these linkages. All living
Speaker 1: systems survive by reducing their internal entropy while necessarily increasing
Speaker 1: the entropy in their external environment. All living organisms reduce
Speaker 1: enterpy by consuming energy and ordered states such as food
Speaker 1: or sunlight, and using that energy to maintain their own order,
Speaker 1: but with various byproducts at least back into the environment,
Speaker 1: such as heat and acrement, so that the sum totals
Speaker 1: that they increase entropy in general while maintaining their own
Speaker 1: low entropy. Humans aren't exempt from the second world thermodynamics.
Speaker 1: The toll amount of entropy or disorder in the universe
Speaker 1: will increase over time, whether we like it or not.
Speaker 1: Things fall apart. All organized systems will deteriorate and dissolve
Speaker 1: unless they're actively maintained, which require a constant supply of
Speaker 1: energy and resources from the environment, such as food, water, oxygen.
Speaker 1: Without these resources, our buis and minds deteriorate and eventually
Speaker 1: cease to exist. When we consume energy from the environment, however,
Speaker 1: we necessarily destroy the order that existed there Consider the
Speaker 1: immense amount of biological organization is contained within every living thing.
Speaker 1: Consuming other organisms is necessary for us to maintain our
Speaker 1: internal biological order. However, in the process of doing so,
Speaker 1: we destroy the order that existed outside our bodies before
Speaker 1: we launch the plants and animals, and our plants organized systems.
Speaker 1: After lunch, the systems are absorbed into our bodies just
Speaker 1: like us. Those other life forms were able to survive
Speaker 1: only by consuming energy from the environment and leading disorder
Speaker 1: in their wake. The process of all living systems is
Speaker 1: therefore to minimize internal disorder with the effect of increasing
Speaker 1: external disorder. There are deep implications here, not just for
Speaker 1: our physiological functioning, but also for our ecology. And this
Speaker 1: is what the linkage I try to make in this
Speaker 1: new book I'm working on. This hasn't even been published yet,
Speaker 1: but I am excited to get the opportunity to just
Speaker 1: say it out loud to you. I mean, no one
Speaker 1: else is listening. Hopefully they will turned out. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: We use a fair amount of physical energy to run
Speaker 1: our brains. Just tell me if this makes sense, because
Speaker 1: this is I tried to make this connection. We use
Speaker 1: a fair amount of physical energy to run our brains,
Speaker 1: which allows us to maintain a reasonable degree of predictability
Speaker 1: and coherence and determine what actions will move as closer
Speaker 1: to our goals. The more uncertainty we perceive in our lives,
Speaker 1: the more metabolic resources we waste, and the more stress
Speaker 1: we experience. When internal disorder becomes too great, we are
Speaker 1: at risk of resorting to strategies that are destructive to others,
Speaker 1: not to mention to our own selves. Our sense of
Speaker 1: possibility strengths, and we're dominated by an exquisitely narrow repertoire
Speaker 1: of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, leaving us with diminished potential
Speaker 1: to become the person we truly want to become. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to stop there just to discuss this. So
Speaker 1: just the way I was thinking of applying some of
Speaker 1: those physics principles to the notion that we, you know,
Speaker 1: are what does it mean when we have like high
Speaker 1: anxiety and like our whole world narrows into this one,
Speaker 1: like we rummage around it. What is rumination? Rumination is
Speaker 1: when you rummage around in your prefontal cortex and you
Speaker 1: can't get out of it, or you know, a particular
Speaker 1: part of your neural structure you can't like see a
Speaker 1: bigger picture. Do you see the linkage there? Well? Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: But I think that there are you know, things I
Speaker 1: would poke at. I mean, starting not with you, but
Speaker 1: with Schrodeger. You know, it was a brilliant book, and
Speaker 1: I think I think he's very influential and very far seeing,
Speaker 1: and everything he says is sort of mostly true on
Speaker 1: the right track, but you know, step one in a
Speaker 1: thousand step journey in some sense. For instance, he says,
Speaker 1: you know, we try to minimize the order within ourselves
Speaker 1: by the disorder within ourselves, by increasing disorder around us.
Speaker 1: That's going a little bit too far. It's not clear
Speaker 1: that we minimize the disorder. We have lower disorder than
Speaker 1: we could, but it's not at all clear that there's
Speaker 1: something quite as cut and dried as minimizing the disorder.
Speaker 1: You know, putting ourselves in a refrigerator would lower our disorder,
Speaker 1: and yet we don't do that, right, So I think
Speaker 1: that it's more subtle than that. Why why would I
Speaker 1: lower my disorder if I put myself in refrigerator? Well,
Speaker 1: just as you lower your temperature. Oh, I see, there
Speaker 1: are fewer things that your atoms can do. Like if
Speaker 1: you froze yourself solid, you would have almost zero entropy.
Speaker 1: I see, but not necessarily with it, But not necessarily
Speaker 1: the disorder in my head. Right, Like if I'm feeling
Speaker 1: anxious and I go and refrigerator, will that actually calm down?
Speaker 1: So this is the other point I wanted to make
Speaker 1: you know. This is a doable thing, but it's important
Speaker 1: to do, which is to distinguish between the entropy or
Speaker 1: the disorder of the physical stuff of which you are made,
Speaker 1: including the neurons in your brain, and you know, the
Speaker 1: higher level. As a poetic naturalist, we're allowed to talk
Speaker 1: about the higher level descriptions of you know, your thoughts
Speaker 1: and beliefs and mental states and emotions, and these are
Speaker 1: things that we can also imagine being in states of
Speaker 1: more or less disorder. It might be more difficult to
Speaker 1: quantify that, but okay, we can, you know, we can
Speaker 1: approximate it. I think that there's something real in here.
Speaker 1: There's a few things going on, and I think that
Speaker 1: there's you know, there's a lot of ideas, so I'd
Speaker 1: be reluctant to say which I think is right. You know,
Speaker 1: there's Carl Fristen and his basian brain ideas, So he's
Speaker 1: about the brain of prediction machine prediction machines, right exactly,
Speaker 1: And that makes perfect sense, you know, and evolutionarily right
Speaker 1: that we want to be able to make predictions about
Speaker 1: our environment as quickly and accurately as we can. Sadly,
Speaker 1: the desire to do that quickly competes with the desire
Speaker 1: to do it accurately. So that's why we meant heuristics
Speaker 1: and system one takes over all the time and things
Speaker 1: like that. Right. So again, that fact there's this competition
Speaker 1: between quickness and accuracy might make it hard to identify
Speaker 1: something simple that is being minimized when the brain is
Speaker 1: doing something. But the other thing is what we learned
Speaker 1: from neuroscience about the actual brain is that the brain
Speaker 1: there's something nice about being in between a state of
Speaker 1: minimum order and maximum order. The brain is close to,
Speaker 1: but not exactly at a critical balancing point between these
Speaker 1: two states, because on the one hand, you want to.
Speaker 1: I think this is part of this balance between being
Speaker 1: quick and being right. You know, if you have a machine,
Speaker 1: if you ask you to answer no question, it always
Speaker 1: says no. That's very quick, but it might not be
Speaker 1: right all the time. If you have one that takes
Speaker 1: a long time to think about it, it might be right,
Speaker 1: but it might be dead before it gets around to
Speaker 1: answering it. So these what we see in both in
Speaker 1: nature and in sort of self assembled systems like the
Speaker 1: Internet or something like that, is that hierarchical structures, which
Speaker 1: are not fully chaotic nor fully orderly, are often the
Speaker 1: best way to robustly deal with these problems of doing
Speaker 1: things both quickly and correctly. So you just have me thinking, now,
Speaker 1: is that possible? That explains why consciousness evolved in the
Speaker 1: first place to give us that kind of equipment. But
Speaker 1: maybe there was a point in our evolution where our
Speaker 1: system one was getting too was not being adaptive anymore,
Speaker 1: and we actually had to evolve some mechanism of control
Speaker 1: that would all kind of put the brakes on it
Speaker 1: a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think that's very
Speaker 1: similar to something I talked about in the Big Picture,
Speaker 1: which is an idea from Malcolm mcgiver about one of
Speaker 1: the great leaps forward in consciousness. He suggests was when
Speaker 1: fish crawled out onto land, right, and the idea was
Speaker 1: very close to what you just said. If you're a fish,
Speaker 1: all the evolutionary pressure is make decisions quickly because you
Speaker 1: can't see that far and water. Once you can see
Speaker 1: something with your eyeballs, it's right on top of you. You
Speaker 1: You got to make a choice right away. On land
Speaker 1: where you're seeing through air and you can see kilometers away.
Speaker 1: It opens up the space of ways to organize your brain,
Speaker 1: to let yourself think a little bit more right, even
Speaker 1: to imagine possible future, alternative hypotheses, and you know, contemplate things.
Speaker 1: And we know again from neuroscience that contemplating imagining the
Speaker 1: future happens in the brain seeing the same hardware that
Speaker 1: remembering the past does. So it's easy to imagine that
Speaker 1: fish evolved primitive memories and that then when they hopped
Speaker 1: on the land, they repurposed that little memory machine as
Speaker 1: an imagination machine, and that was one of the steps
Speaker 1: towards getting consciousness. Yeah, yeah, and I love that part,
Speaker 1: by the way, and you have to give like a
Speaker 1: picture that was cute around that section. Yeah. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I mean you raise something that is really kind of
Speaker 1: gets the heart of what I've been fascinated with is
Speaker 1: the human imagination. And the default mode network is the
Speaker 1: seed of the kind of imagination you're talking about, the
Speaker 1: ability to you know, to draw in the past in
Speaker 1: order to reconstruct a future. And mostly it's social content.
Speaker 1: So like the kind of imagination Einstein Hatter or that
Speaker 1: you have in your work that you do is draws
Speaker 1: on a different network than the default mode network. It
Speaker 1: draws more on visual spatial network. But the kind of
Speaker 1: you know, those findings you're talking about episodic memory, it's
Speaker 1: social content. So that suggests like through the course of
Speaker 1: human evolution, we must have been very social creatures, you know,
Speaker 1: more so than thinking about the nature of the cosmos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that sounds plausible to me. I would not
Speaker 1: be enough to say that it is right or wrong,
Speaker 1: but you know, I think that to get back, you know,
Speaker 1: to touch it back to you know, this issue of
Speaker 1: can we think about the brain in useful terms and
Speaker 1: tropically you know, I think that it's fascinating to imagine
Speaker 1: that there are aspects of psychology they could be explained
Speaker 1: by either minimizing or maximizing or extremizing some information theoretic
Speaker 1: characterization of what's going on. I think that's very possibly true,
Speaker 1: and could even you know, in chaotic dynamical systems, we
Speaker 1: often see things that are more or less smoothly going
Speaker 1: on for a long time. In banging, something completely unpredictable happens.
Speaker 1: So you might even be able to fit in sudden
Speaker 1: changes of psychological state into such a framework. But I
Speaker 1: think that it's going to be work to do it.
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, physicists who are you know again,
Speaker 1: Physicists just do the simplest stuff, right, Like we think
Speaker 1: about so simple, you know, the nature of the universe.
Speaker 1: It's way easier than the brain. And yet even physicists
Speaker 1: are reluctant to think about out of equilibrium dynamics, right,
Speaker 1: things actually changing in interesting ways. If you take a
Speaker 1: typical undergraduate thermodynamics course, they'll teach you what happens in equilibrium.
Speaker 1: We're very very slowly changing, and if something changes rapidly
Speaker 1: like well, I don't know, we can't really say anything, right,
Speaker 1: And so we're only in the last fifteen years there's
Speaker 1: been quite a little mini revolution in statistical mechanics where
Speaker 1: we now have some tools based in part on information
Speaker 1: theory that lets us talk about those things. Yeah. Good.
Speaker 1: So I'm returning to this idea of you know, remembering
Speaker 1: the past, I mean, or the times arrow the direction,
Speaker 1: cause I mean, there's this very interesting quirk of the
Speaker 1: Big Bang in that it did create the situation where
Speaker 1: we can remember our past but we can't remember our future,
Speaker 1: you know, right, that idea of us our inability to
Speaker 1: we can imagine the future, and it's not the signing
Speaker 1: is remembering the future? What are the links there to
Speaker 1: free will? Yeah? So then let me just say one
Speaker 1: thing because I don't want people to misunderstand the fact
Speaker 1: that we remember the past and not the future is
Speaker 1: not a psychological fact. It's a fact about memories and records. Right,
Speaker 1: forget about our memories. There can be photographs of the past,
Speaker 1: but not photographs of the future. Right, that's the same
Speaker 1: fact as we remember the past. So it's not time
Speaker 1: machines yet. Then, No, that's right. But it's not supposed
Speaker 1: to be a claim about the brain or consciousness. It's
Speaker 1: just a claim about pistemology. We have a much greater
Speaker 1: epistemic anchor on the past than we do on the future,
Speaker 1: even though the laws of physics treat them equally. And
Speaker 1: the explanation for that is the low entropy of the
Speaker 1: big band. So what it says about free will is
Speaker 1: exactly what you would expect you to say. Free will
Speaker 1: is supposed to say that we can make choices about
Speaker 1: the future. Right, nobody believes. No one who I've ever
Speaker 1: met believes we can make choices about the past. We
Speaker 1: would like to be able to do that. We'd like
Speaker 1: to combine our knowledge of the past with the ability
Speaker 1: to change it by making choices now, but we can't.
Speaker 1: So we have a epistemic handle on the past. We
Speaker 1: know something about it. We don't know about the future,
Speaker 1: but we have a causal handle on the future, in
Speaker 1: the usual folk way of talking about things. And so
Speaker 1: the connection of that with entropy is just the fact
Speaker 1: that since entropy is increasing, there's many many possible futures,
Speaker 1: and since entropy was very low in the past, there
Speaker 1: are relatively few possible pasts compatible with what we know
Speaker 1: about it. So free will is enabled by our ignorance
Speaker 1: in this point of view. Right, it's a reflection of
Speaker 1: the fact that we are complicated, chaotic, dynamical systems. We
Speaker 1: can't make predictions about ourselves very well. And therefore the
Speaker 1: best you can say about a human being is that
Speaker 1: they are an agent making decisions with certain information, certain inclinations,
Speaker 1: certain preferences and predilections and so forth. And we call
Speaker 1: that free will. And if you don't want to call
Speaker 1: it free will, I don't care. Like people get very
Speaker 1: emotional about this one too, and I really can't get
Speaker 1: worked up about I don't care what you call it.
Speaker 1: But everybody, no matter how skeptical they are, free will
Speaker 1: acts as if people make choices. Okay, why do they
Speaker 1: make choice about the future and not the past because
Speaker 1: the future is not anchored by the low entropy past condition.
Speaker 1: You're the big bang, right. There's obviously this deeply intertwined
Speaker 1: with the nature of consciousness, because what is the you
Speaker 1: that we're talking about that doesn't have access to all
Speaker 1: the fundamental right, because if there was a being, a
Speaker 1: universal consciousness that did have access, in principle, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: make sense to talk about choices because you know everything
Speaker 1: that has all run raveled, you know, well, I would
Speaker 1: say it wouldn't make sense for that being to talk
Speaker 1: about choices, right, as long as we don't have access
Speaker 1: to what that being knows, right, then we talk about
Speaker 1: choices all the time. That's why we talk about choice
Speaker 1: is right. Yeah, but who is the eye that is
Speaker 1: self aware of that fact that we don't have access to?
Speaker 1: You know, who is that person just talking just now?
Speaker 1: You just talk to me, right like? There are different
Speaker 1: levels of reductionism that we can get at. And when
Speaker 1: we build up, you know from the topic, there's some eye,
Speaker 1: there's some conscious, self aware I that can. To me,
Speaker 1: it's miraculous. I don't know if you find it, just
Speaker 1: as I know that you prefer wonder overall, as you
Speaker 1: write in your books. I almost said all inspiring, but
Speaker 1: I shouldn't say that I find it all inspiring wondrous,
Speaker 1: and I find it one. I find both all inspiring
Speaker 1: and wondrous because I feel I know that you don't
Speaker 1: like the reverence aspect of it. But I stand in
Speaker 1: a lot of humility, a lot of I stand like,
Speaker 1: holy cow, like that is pretty incredible that there did,
Speaker 1: Like if the universe could, if there was a god,
Speaker 1: if there was a universe that was conscious, I think
Speaker 1: it would be pretty darn amazed that holy cow, like
Speaker 1: you know when it comes back fourteen billion years later, right, Like,
Speaker 1: let's say God like took a fourteen billion year vacation
Speaker 1: and then comes which is understandable after Yeah, how smooth
Speaker 1: God was at the beginning, I know, But it comes
Speaker 1: back fourteen billion years and it's like, wow, that evolved,
Speaker 1: Like really, I think God would be in awe of
Speaker 1: that fact as well, that like, wow, that probably a
Speaker 1: random perturbation led to this random perturbation led to this
Speaker 1: to the extent that we can actually like witness, we
Speaker 1: can witness the laws of nature unfolding. To me, that
Speaker 1: is just absolutely so incredible. Yeah, and I think, you know,
Speaker 1: it's always hard to ask questions about how incredible something
Speaker 1: is or how surprising it should be. Right, there are
Speaker 1: these results in quantum field theory that seem very surprising,
Speaker 1: and there are literally back and forth articles in the
Speaker 1: philosophy of science literature solely about the question should we
Speaker 1: be surprised by this? Some people say, well, now that
Speaker 1: I understand, it's not surprising at all, but you didn't
Speaker 1: understand it, so it was surprising, so it could be surprising.
Speaker 1: Like I don't want to deny anyone's surprise at this
Speaker 1: wonderful fact that consciousness has arisen, self awareness and ability
Speaker 1: to grasp the universe in our minds, or at least
Speaker 1: part of the universe. Could I very easily imagine a
Speaker 1: somewhat deflationary story that says, you know, well, entropy is
Speaker 1: increasing and complexity arises as entropy increases before it then
Speaker 1: eventually fades away. And certain structures are met as stable
Speaker 1: because they actually use free energy around them to increase
Speaker 1: the entropy of the universe. And in an information theoretic sense,
Speaker 1: these structures begin to represent the world around them because
Speaker 1: it helps them survive and go on through the world.
Speaker 1: And that information theoretic representation of the world we can
Speaker 1: think of as knowledge in the brains or minds of
Speaker 1: these systems, and of course knowledge of the self is
Speaker 1: an important part and blah blah blah. So we could
Speaker 1: tell us story in which you would say, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: that sounds like something that would happen. You know, I
Speaker 1: get both sides of that debate. I don't think he's
Speaker 1: a right or wrong there. I think that you know,
Speaker 1: if I had just told you about the Big Bang
Speaker 1: and said, you know what, what is they going to
Speaker 1: be like? Fourteen billion years from now, chances you would
Speaker 1: have talked about human beings are very very small. That
Speaker 1: I completely agree with. But can you demystify it after
Speaker 1: the fact by some scientific investigation you know that I'm
Speaker 1: willing to believe. Also, Okay, well, let's try to demystify
Speaker 1: consciousness because I still do think it's incredible. And by
Speaker 1: the way, I you know, David Chalmers, the philosopher, is
Speaker 1: a friend of mine and we were talking about this,
Speaker 1: and he says he's going to be in your podcast,
Speaker 1: and maybe I shouldn't reveal this I can. Yeah, that'll
Speaker 1: be a special bonus for listeners of your podcast that
Speaker 1: they will now know that they care. Okay, well, you know,
Speaker 1: the top conscious researchers are still kind of in awe
Speaker 1: of the fact that consciousness exists right within psychology. So
Speaker 1: why are some physicists not as you know, like you,
Speaker 1: for instance, do you not see the hard as hard
Speaker 1: as some people in our field see it? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: think that's exactly the right way to put it. I
Speaker 1: don't see it as hard. Yeah. So, by the way,
Speaker 1: this harkens back to when we're defining naturalism, because you know,
Speaker 1: David Chalmers is an excellent example someone who is a
Speaker 1: naturalist but not a physicalist. Okay, so physicalists are subsets
Speaker 1: of naturalists. Naturalists think that there's only one world, the
Speaker 1: natural world. Physicalists think that all of the aspects of
Speaker 1: the natural world can be summarized as physical aspects things
Speaker 1: happening in the world. David thinks that there needs to
Speaker 1: be a whole other category for mental properties in the world.
Speaker 1: He doesn't believe there's a separate spirit realm where there's
Speaker 1: disembodied brains or anything like that, but he believes that
Speaker 1: consciousness is not reducible to the physical goings on in
Speaker 1: the world. And I do and again belief. You know,
Speaker 1: we talk about the degree of belief. Neither one of
Speaker 1: us is one hundred percent, right, okay, but we have
Speaker 1: our preferences, and yeah, you know, I think that, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's put it this way. And if again, you took
Speaker 1: a background view and you didn't know who you were,
Speaker 1: and then even you just ask yourself, like, of all
Speaker 1: the phenomena that we see in the universe, at some
Speaker 1: stage of scientific advancement, which is the thing we will
Speaker 1: understand the least, you know, consciousness would be a good
Speaker 1: bet the thing we understand the least, it's like the
Speaker 1: most complicated thing being done by the most complicated thing
Speaker 1: that we know in the universe, the human brain. Right,
Speaker 1: it's zero surprise that we don't yet understand consciousness, and
Speaker 1: that involves in my mind, both you know, straightforward scientific
Speaker 1: understanding and also philosophical clarification of important concepts. So I
Speaker 1: think I both have specific disagreements with David's point of
Speaker 1: view and general ones. I don't think that zombies, philosophical
Speaker 1: zombies who act just like us but don't have consciousness,
Speaker 1: are even conceivable. I think that that's not a thing
Speaker 1: that could possibly happen, because I think the consciousness is
Speaker 1: just a manifestation of atoms talking about themselves in a
Speaker 1: particularly complicated way. There's an enormous road to go before
Speaker 1: we understand how that exactly plays out. But I don't
Speaker 1: see this barrier in principle to it playing out. No,
Speaker 1: that's fair enough, I guess I don't understand why you're
Speaker 1: not as amazed that we went so many years after
Speaker 1: life existed. There are a lot of possibilities for that
Speaker 1: emergent that can put I mean, like dolphins have a
Speaker 1: pretty complex neural system, there are other animals that do
Speaker 1: other animals don't come close to being as conscious as
Speaker 1: we are. Why Like why us? And I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to get all like religious here all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: but it's pretty amazing. I shouldn't say ridiculous, but I
Speaker 1: think there. I don't think it's marcus at all or
Speaker 1: amazing at all. I think that that's a pretty obvious
Speaker 1: case of survivors bias, like someone had to be first,
Speaker 1: and whoever was first, whichever species developed consciousness first, would
Speaker 1: have this conversation why us? How amazing? Is that I'm
Speaker 1: not that impressed by us so far. I think that's
Speaker 1: like the only thing I can tell so far that
Speaker 1: that referentiates us a little bit, because I am in general,
Speaker 1: I actually really and there's no actually about it. I
Speaker 1: really appreciate your spirit, your truth seeking attitude, and I
Speaker 1: share that very much. But I tend to just walk
Speaker 1: around with so much wonder of the maraculous of the
Speaker 1: fact that I can witness this impartial universe unfolding. I
Speaker 1: think it's just incredible that we've been giving. It's almost
Speaker 1: like a privilege, Like you know, we talk in positive
Speaker 1: psychology about gratitude, but I feel like I want to
Speaker 1: coin a phrase. I was thinking about this of their
Speaker 1: existential gratitude, like, would that be fair? Like I feel
Speaker 1: like I walk around with a lot of existential gratitude
Speaker 1: in my life, and no one's talking about that in
Speaker 1: the field of positive psychology. We're talking about more mundine,
Speaker 1: you know, like I'm so glad my mother, you know,
Speaker 1: baked that cake for me, or you know whatnot. But
Speaker 1: I walk around almost every day. It's like the universe
Speaker 1: did not plan for us to be aware of it,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, No, I mean I think that I
Speaker 1: actually love the phrase existential gratitude because it's a good
Speaker 1: counter way to existential despair, which talk about all the time, right, right,
Speaker 1: And we should be grateful and that's great. But I
Speaker 1: keep wanting to say, but because I think, you know, we,
Speaker 1: like you said, we agree on most everything with the
Speaker 1: r scientists, you know, let's concentrate on what we disagree on.
Speaker 1: That's that's where things are fun. You know. I also think,
Speaker 1: and maybe this is the hidden positive psychologist within me.
Speaker 1: I also dwell on how crucially important it is to
Speaker 1: be grateful and appreciative of some of the many mundane
Speaker 1: things about life, right, some of the things that wouldn't
Speaker 1: be on most lists of the miraculous and the incredible.
Speaker 1: But you know, a good slice of pizza, or you know,
Speaker 1: when my cat jumps into my lap or whatever, and
Speaker 1: the phenomenon of consciousness is there, Like, I don't need
Speaker 1: it to be incredible to be grateful for it. Certainly
Speaker 1: the fact I am impressed by many, many things. I'm
Speaker 1: impressed by the rate at which human beings have figured
Speaker 1: stuff out about the universe. I'm impressed with the wonderful
Speaker 1: variety of human experience and the things that we've done,
Speaker 1: and you know, the obvious things art in music and
Speaker 1: poetry and so forth. So I don't feel like I
Speaker 1: need to judge how likely or unlikely these things were
Speaker 1: to be impressed by them and grateful for them. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I appreciate your perspective, you know, I definitely appreciate it.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the link between quantum reality and consciousness,
Speaker 1: because you're also skeptical that quantum mechanics will help us
Speaker 1: understand consciousness. Is that right? Yeah, this is a very
Speaker 1: four conversation. There is no link between quantum reality and consciousness. Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: what do you say is a conversation? There is a
Speaker 1: very short comm short short sure, sure, right, right, well,
Speaker 1: you you know you sent me and I'm very grateful
Speaker 1: you sent me some new material where you talk about
Speaker 1: that possibility. And it's obviously from both directions. Right, So
Speaker 1: does consciouness play a role in accounting for quantum mechanics?
Speaker 1: And you would say no as well? Right, all right, exactly, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's no. So this is interesting and important
Speaker 1: and in my mind more or less solved in both directions.
Speaker 1: So when quantum mechanics first came along, it comes along
Speaker 1: with a problem. The problem still exists, called the measurement problem.
Speaker 1: What really happens when you measure a quantum system? What
Speaker 1: makes quantum mechanics so different and so difficult to understand
Speaker 1: compared to every pre existing version of physics is that
Speaker 1: seemingly we need separate rules for what happens to physical
Speaker 1: systems when we're looking at them and when we're not
Speaker 1: looking at them. That's you know, and why is that?
Speaker 1: What exactly are those rules? Do we really need them?
Speaker 1: This is the measurement problem. The witty short motto for
Speaker 1: this is quantum mechanics says that what exists is very
Speaker 1: different than what you see and is capably so. So
Speaker 1: it was natural then to imagine in the early days
Speaker 1: that well, since the act of observation or seeing or
Speaker 1: looking is something that human beings do, maybe that to
Speaker 1: explain this problem, we need to understand something about consciousness.
Speaker 1: Maybe the human consciousness really changes the world when you
Speaker 1: look at it an important way, or even brings the
Speaker 1: world into existence in some interesting way. And you know,
Speaker 1: people are still welcome to believe that. People can believe
Speaker 1: whatever they want, but it's absolutely false to say we
Speaker 1: can't account for quantum measurements unless there's something special about consciousness.
Speaker 1: There's perfectly good explanations for the measurement problem now that
Speaker 1: didn't exist in the nineteen thirties. They have nothing to
Speaker 1: do with consciousness or human perception at all. So you know,
Speaker 1: you're welcome to believe those things, but there's no need
Speaker 1: for it or evidence in favor of them. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: some of this may sound really technical to our listeners.
Speaker 1: I just want to impress upon everyone just how profound
Speaker 1: this argument you're making is, because it does you know,
Speaker 1: as far as I see it, this gets at the
Speaker 1: crux of whether or not we live after death, because
Speaker 1: the only thing we care about. Living after death is
Speaker 1: our consciousness. I mean, when we really get down to it,
Speaker 1: it is our you know that there's some continuity of
Speaker 1: some sort of awareness, our memories can persist in some way,
Speaker 1: and our awareness of those mets. I'm raised. If doesn't
Speaker 1: where memories exist and we're not aware of them, then
Speaker 1: it's like what's the point, right, Okay? So exactly, so
Speaker 1: this does get the heart of like, you know, like
Speaker 1: is their life after death? I mean, the question is
Speaker 1: their life ever death? Like that is one of the
Speaker 1: most pressing questions of humankind. And it sounds like you're
Speaker 1: like ninety nine percent certain there is no life after death. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, okay, And that's so cool that we could
Speaker 1: so objectively and rationally and coolly just answer that question
Speaker 1: like right. And you know, again, I don't want to
Speaker 1: be dismissive with people who disagree with me here, because
Speaker 1: some of them are very smart and I admire them,
Speaker 1: and in any sorts of numbers of ways, I'm going
Speaker 1: to halt you after her. Yeah, that's exactly. I'm also
Speaker 1: setting myself up for Pascal's wager kind of come up.
Speaker 1: And but I'm not saying things that have other people
Speaker 1: that I'm in reading for my podcast that they will
Speaker 1: be talking about these issues with, So stay tuned to
Speaker 1: feature episodes of the Mind Skate podcast. Yeah, you're more
Speaker 1: discussion about these things. But yeah, I think that consciousness is,
Speaker 1: as far as we can tell, is inextricably twined to
Speaker 1: the stuff that is happening in your body, in your brain.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no evidence for consciousness happening in the
Speaker 1: absence of brains, let's put it that way. That's a
Speaker 1: fairly weak claim, right. Yeah. I talk in my book
Speaker 1: In the Big Picture about the story of Princess Elizabeth,
Speaker 1: who I want to act as her public relations advisor
Speaker 1: because she needs a lot more credit. She was the
Speaker 1: one who challenged Descartes on his mind body dualism based
Speaker 1: on the idea that you know, he hadn't specified how
Speaker 1: the mind and body should interact with each other. And
Speaker 1: these days philosphers called this the interaction problem. And I
Speaker 1: think what you're getting at here is that we what
Speaker 1: I claim the book anyway, is that we now know
Speaker 1: so much more about the body than Descartes did. We
Speaker 1: know that our bodies are made of atoms. We know
Speaker 1: that atoms are made of electrons and protons and neutrons.
Speaker 1: We know the equations that govern how those particles move around.
Speaker 1: So as much as Elizabeth was able to say there's
Speaker 1: no room for this imagerial mind to affect your body,
Speaker 1: that problem is a million times harder. Now. There's just
Speaker 1: no way to alter the equations of physics in any
Speaker 1: sort of harmless way that would allow something other than
Speaker 1: those physical electrons and protons and neutrons, et cetera to
Speaker 1: do their thing. So that doesn't mean it's impossible. That
Speaker 1: means it's a huge burden on those who would have
Speaker 1: that be the case, to show how you could change
Speaker 1: the laws of physics as we know them, and if
Speaker 1: you don't, then there can't be any life after death.
Speaker 1: Then the laws of physics as we know them are
Speaker 1: unambiguous about that, and I need to emphasize, as we
Speaker 1: know them, they could be wrong. It's just that there's
Speaker 1: zero evidence that they're wrong in the relevant regime, there's
Speaker 1: zero reason to believe it, and attempts to change them
Speaker 1: to make this happen are, you know, ranged from non
Speaker 1: existent to abysmal failures. So as a good BAYSI and
Speaker 1: calculating my credences the credence that somehow the information, Like
Speaker 1: these days neuroscientists can locate which neuron certain memories are
Speaker 1: associated with, right, if that neuron is not there anymore,
Speaker 1: how can the memory be there anymore? There's just no
Speaker 1: way for that to happen. Yeah, and I agree with that,
Speaker 1: But you know, can you use the human imagination to
Speaker 1: think of some possibility that there is a life ut
Speaker 1: or death? Not that possibility because I agree with you
Speaker 1: that when the physical system supporting consciousness is no longer
Speaker 1: in existence, it's kind of hard. It will be hard
Speaker 1: for consciousness to exist. Yes, I agree with that, But
Speaker 1: can you imagine the possibility of Like my friends and
Speaker 1: I we sit around, we're not physicists, but we like
Speaker 1: think of, well, maybe like the universe is not infinite.
Speaker 1: We don't know for a fact that it is infinite,
Speaker 1: and how do we know that, like doesn't loop back
Speaker 1: on itself. Like when we die, there's going to be
Speaker 1: an infinite or a really long time that we're dead.
Speaker 1: But there might be hope that there will be like
Speaker 1: a time maybe for trillion years. It'll feel like a
Speaker 1: second us. But where that constitution of atoms that made
Speaker 1: us us? Somehow reconfigures itself just through chance. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it won't be you. I tried, I try. It won't
Speaker 1: be you. I try. You know it won't be I
Speaker 1: mean all I am from a physics point of view,
Speaker 1: is you made note? Is you know this really improbable
Speaker 1: pattern of atoms? I mean, how do you know that? Like,
Speaker 1: given enough, you're a persistent pattern. And so it's the
Speaker 1: persistent part that's important here, isn't it. Yeah, so of
Speaker 1: course for every time it's not clear that we do.
Speaker 1: Let's imagine that we live in a world where random
Speaker 1: fluctuations continue infinitely far into the future. Okay, then, since
Speaker 1: you're made of a finite number of particles in a
Speaker 1: finite region of space, if you have an infinite amount
Speaker 1: of time for random fluctuations to happen, something just like
Speaker 1: you will appear in the number of times. However, for
Speaker 1: every one time that happens, there will be an enormously
Speaker 1: larger time when something kind of like you appears but
Speaker 1: not really exactly the same, like every possible variation on you.
Speaker 1: It's Boorhaes's infinite library, right, So, and all of these
Speaker 1: will say like, well, did I just fluctuate into existence
Speaker 1: or you know, they'll have false memories or whatever. There's
Speaker 1: no useful sense in which any of those are you
Speaker 1: or descended from you, or anything like that. The idea
Speaker 1: of a person we talked about emergent phenomena. Right. Tables
Speaker 1: and chairs are useful categories because they have certain properties,
Speaker 1: which include the fact that they stick around. You know,
Speaker 1: they're here, and they're here it again, you know, the
Speaker 1: next moment, et cetera. People are the same way. People
Speaker 1: are collections of atoms arranged in a certain pattern. Most
Speaker 1: of our atoms, by the way, you know, don't last
Speaker 1: through our body the whole life span. Right, we have
Speaker 1: my four year old it self is dead. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: is not the right word. But your atoms are not
Speaker 1: there anymore, except for maybe in your teeth or something
Speaker 1: like that. Non existent well, you know, has evolved into
Speaker 1: something else. But there's a reason why it is useful
Speaker 1: to categorize your four year old self and your present
Speaker 1: self as different moments in the life of the same person.
Speaker 1: There is zero reason to categorize yourself now and yourself
Speaker 1: ten to the ten to the one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: years from now that fluctuated existence as different moments in
Speaker 1: life and the same person, So you can't think of
Speaker 1: any legitimate physics thing that could surprise you where like
Speaker 1: you didn't think of it now, you know, Let's say
Speaker 1: you die and then something happens where you are still
Speaker 1: maybe like some atom is conscious, like but it's not
Speaker 1: a body anymore, or something like and like, can you
Speaker 1: imagine something that still bays the laws of physics where
Speaker 1: there's hope that we live after we die or you're
Speaker 1: like nine nine point nine repeating sure that that's not
Speaker 1: going to happen. Yeah, no, I mean if you so
Speaker 1: you add it on that obeys the laws of physics,
Speaker 1: like if you want to obey the laws of physics,
Speaker 1: whenever you ask a theoretical physicists, can you imagine there's
Speaker 1: always sure? If I try hard enough, I can do it.
Speaker 1: I remember, it's funny, that's very funny. It's true. We
Speaker 1: have two minutes to digress. You know. I sometimes act
Speaker 1: as a science consultant for movies, and the movies are
Speaker 1: usually written even before I get to look at them,
Speaker 1: So it's more a matter of like cleaning some things up,
Speaker 1: not adding new ideas. So once we were doing this
Speaker 1: movie and the actress who was going to play a
Speaker 1: physicist wanted to come to cal Tech to talk to
Speaker 1: some real physicists. So I introduced her and one of
Speaker 1: the producers to some my graduate students, and they explained
Speaker 1: the plot of the movie, which is utterly implausible by
Speaker 1: physicist standards, and you know, so they explained it to
Speaker 1: the grad students and said, you know, well, so what
Speaker 1: how would you explain this physically? You know, if you
Speaker 1: if this had happened, And the gradutudents are like, Nope,
Speaker 1: that cannot happen, that would never happen. And so then
Speaker 1: I explained to them, I said, look, when you have
Speaker 1: a movie plot, don't think of the plot of the
Speaker 1: movie as a new theory. Think of the plot of
Speaker 1: the movie as data. You don't have the option of
Speaker 1: not believing it. Right, You're forced to explain it. How
Speaker 1: would you explain it? Five minutes later they had like
Speaker 1: twenty different explanations that they come up. Right, So, can
Speaker 1: I imagine ways that despite everything we know about a
Speaker 1: law position, some knowledge, you're so cynical. I am no,
Speaker 1: I'm just a good abductor, I'm a good basia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's a rational part of me that agrees with that. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's a rational part, now do you, I mean, does it?
Speaker 1: It must really frustrate you then when you're talking to
Speaker 1: someone who israel religious and says, well, you're just not
Speaker 1: open enough or you're not in touch with God like
Speaker 1: I am, that that argument must frustrate you. Well, it does,
Speaker 1: because I don't think it's a sensible argument. I mean
Speaker 1: it just like the arrogance argument, you know, like, is
Speaker 1: it more arrogant for me to say the universe that
Speaker 1: we see is all there is than to say that, oh,
Speaker 1: I have personal knowledge of an I phenomenon in being.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. That is such a great point
Speaker 1: that you're right, You're right. Yeah, both are kind of
Speaker 1: arrogant in a way. Yeah, So I mean people can
Speaker 1: always say so, Look, it's possible. I mean that among
Speaker 1: the things that are possible to imagine is that there
Speaker 1: are ways to access the world that different people have
Speaker 1: different capabilities in. Right. I mean, this is what Alvin
Speaker 1: Plantinga believes, right, that there is a divine sense, census
Speaker 1: divinnatas in some of us but not in others. And
Speaker 1: he says atheists just don't experience it. So if you
Speaker 1: believe that, you know, again, my basy and prior for
Speaker 1: that would be very small. You know, I'm tempted to
Speaker 1: say that I don't have that, but I have a
Speaker 1: census bullshittiis that says that, you know, maybe you just
Speaker 1: made that up, but it could be right. It's absolutely possible,
Speaker 1: and in that case that they have access to information
Speaker 1: that I don't have. But you have to make your
Speaker 1: choices about layer cretencies. Yeah, this is so much fun.
Speaker 1: Let's end this podcast talking about if we accept as
Speaker 1: true the ninety nine percent probable ability these things are true,
Speaker 1: how should we live our life? Right? So you have
Speaker 1: this whole section of your book on caring and morality
Speaker 1: leading up to existential therapy, So I want to end
Speaker 1: this podcast talking about that because this is very important.
Speaker 1: So Carl Sagan has this quote our star stuff, which
Speaker 1: is taking its destiny into its own hands. Now, first
Speaker 1: of all, I find that absolete and all inspiring. So
Speaker 1: Carl Sagan says that, and I'm in all, you know,
Speaker 1: the fact that we are a species that can take
Speaker 1: the destiny into our own hands. And I was thinking
Speaker 1: about morality in the sense like every time, it seems
Speaker 1: like every time we make a choice to take the
Speaker 1: moral decision when we're faced with a dilemma. To me,
Speaker 1: that's the true test of free will. And I wanted
Speaker 1: to run that by you because in a way, we're
Speaker 1: kind of defying the universe every time that we And
Speaker 1: I know that sounds too grandiose, but you know, it
Speaker 1: just seems to me like there's a certain satisfaction we
Speaker 1: get when we don't give into some impulse that is
Speaker 1: destructive and instead we choose the choice that is growth
Speaker 1: oriented or healthy, or caring or even caring, you know,
Speaker 1: we can use the word caring. There's something about that,
Speaker 1: you know. And also the sense of like consciousness and self.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's this really interesting research shows that other
Speaker 1: things we can lose, other things we can lose our
Speaker 1: memory of you know, like fat actient, we weren't in
Speaker 1: high school, et cetera. But as long as our moral
Speaker 1: sense is intact, we still feel a sense of self.
Speaker 1: So it's something about this moral Yeah. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there's a couple of background things to say,
Speaker 1: and they'll try to answer the question. You know, in
Speaker 1: that section of the book called caring, some people got
Speaker 1: frustrated because my personal interest in that section was more
Speaker 1: on meta ethics and meta morality and meta meaning rather
Speaker 1: than ethics the morality and meaning. So I didn't tell
Speaker 1: anyone how to behave or how to find meaning in
Speaker 1: their lives, right. I talked about what it would mean
Speaker 1: to find meaning in your life, what it might mean
Speaker 1: to come up with rules for being a good person
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. And people don't want that. People
Speaker 1: want rules like people like, tell me what to do?
Speaker 1: You know, That's what I want, even if I disagree
Speaker 1: with you, I want you to say there are rules
Speaker 1: I can disagree with you, not just give me a
Speaker 1: platform for thinking about it. You mean, like Jordan Peterson's
Speaker 1: the Rule. I know. Yeah, you know. That's why he
Speaker 1: sold more copy than I did. Yeah, you know, it's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons. One, so one of the reasons.
Speaker 1: So but okay, But so, having said that, there's some
Speaker 1: you know, perfectly kind of obvious aspects to making choices
Speaker 1: that are moral and ethical and good and meaningful and
Speaker 1: so forth. The reason why I called the book or
Speaker 1: the section caring is because I think that what we
Speaker 1: have to work with is the fact that we all
Speaker 1: care about stuff. You can care about things in a
Speaker 1: bad way, right, like you can have you know, bad
Speaker 1: motivations and care about you know, doing them. Revenge is
Speaker 1: something you might care about. But that's the starting point
Speaker 1: for me for developing, you know, our personal views on
Speaker 1: morality and meaningfulness and so forth. So I mean, I
Speaker 1: think what you're saying is good as a more substantive
Speaker 1: direction to move in when it comes to bringing meaning
Speaker 1: and morality to our lives. You know, we can, we can.
Speaker 1: You're a psychologists, you're better at this than I am.
Speaker 1: But we can imagine that there are sort of the
Speaker 1: simple things to do and the more challenging things to do.
Speaker 1: And in some sense, you know, there's a struggle between
Speaker 1: system one and system two maybe, or at least between
Speaker 1: the most obvious heuristics that get used to get through
Speaker 1: the day versus more reflective, carefully thought out things. I
Speaker 1: think it's an aspect of free will, you know, But
Speaker 1: I would also call free will what happens when I
Speaker 1: choose to wear the white shirt or the black shirt,
Speaker 1: you know, in the morning. I don't think that it
Speaker 1: needs to be fraught with moral weight. But yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think this idea of when it goes back to
Speaker 1: the idea of you know, explaining the brain and personality
Speaker 1: by entery considerations as wonderful as it would be to
Speaker 1: explain things by simple principles, I think that when it
Speaker 1: comes to complex systems like life, there's so much more
Speaker 1: often a tension at work, right, And it's not one
Speaker 1: overarching thing that gets minimized or maximized for the competition
Speaker 1: between different things. And you're right that it, you know,
Speaker 1: very roughly speaking, I think that John Stuart Mill would
Speaker 1: have told us that we have, you know, higher desires
Speaker 1: and lower desires or something like that, higher pleasures and
Speaker 1: lower pleasures, and you know, want to work to sort
Speaker 1: of boost up the higher ones a little bit. I
Speaker 1: think that's a wonderful thing to do. It is definitely
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that a poetic naturalist would be
Speaker 1: happy to endorse. Yeah, and also I see a lot
Speaker 1: of similaris to one of my favorite psychotherapist, role in May.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've read his writings on existential
Speaker 1: humanistic psychotherapy, and he's been my one of my biggest influences.
Speaker 1: He talks a lot about caring is simply just throwing
Speaker 1: your weight, you know, for something, and his book you know,
Speaker 1: Love and Will, I highly would recommend you read Love
Speaker 1: and will Actually I love to like grab a beer
Speaker 1: with you someday and discuss love and will you know.
Speaker 1: But so I think it very much in line with
Speaker 1: your thinking about desire and care as intertwined. You talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, relating to this point of there's no ten commandments.
Speaker 1: You didn't want to put it forward, and I really
Speaker 1: appreciate that because there's such a push and to write
Speaker 1: self help book these days, right where you have a
Speaker 1: certain number of things. I reserve the right to write
Speaker 1: a health help book, something good, good, good, and you
Speaker 1: know it makes a lot more money. I'm sure. Well
Speaker 1: you know what you got to say, crowded market, But yeah,
Speaker 1: you got to have an angle. You need an angle.
Speaker 1: So these ten guides that you put forward, you know,
Speaker 1: i'll call them guides to living or yet obviously considerations.
Speaker 1: I like that a lot, you know, I really like
Speaker 1: this one about how there's no natural way to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we are the final product of a cacophony of competing impulses.
Speaker 1: This seems very relevant to what we're just discussing about
Speaker 1: morality and over rising above our competing impulses. You say
Speaker 1: we're the final product of a cacophony of competing impulses,
Speaker 1: and so are other people. It's that we are not simple, unified,
Speaker 1: fixed creatures. We have inclinations, desires, probably one of our
Speaker 1: any dispositions. But we also have the opportunity to change
Speaker 1: as individuals and as a society. So there is an
Speaker 1: optimism here at the end of the book that even
Speaker 1: though we're in this totally meaningless universe and we're all
Speaker 1: going to die, and like all these other things we
Speaker 1: figured out here, still in this short life span that
Speaker 1: we have, we still have the opportunity to make others
Speaker 1: better as well as ourselves better. Right, Yeah, absolutely, And
Speaker 1: I think that. I mean maybe in retrospect I had
Speaker 1: this in mind and might even have said it, but
Speaker 1: didn't emphasize it nearly enough. The poetic naturalist will accept
Speaker 1: both that we have basic instincts, desires, things that are
Speaker 1: given to us by evolution or things that are just
Speaker 1: accidental or whatever, and we have higher cognitive capacities which
Speaker 1: allow us to take those basic ingredients and shape them. Right,
Speaker 1: And it's you know, you can't I think that again.
Speaker 1: Too many people want to say, like, well, we're just
Speaker 1: you know, beasts in the wild, giving into our evolutionary desires,
Speaker 1: or we are perfectly rational or we should try to
Speaker 1: be perfectly rational things. I think that the interface of
Speaker 1: those two things, or the relationship between those two things,
Speaker 1: is central. David Hume, who I really like. You know,
Speaker 1: reason is the slave of the passions. Like you know,
Speaker 1: your passions tell you where to start going, and reason
Speaker 1: will help get you there. And one of the reason
Speaker 1: things that reason can say is, you know what, that
Speaker 1: passion was a bad idea. And I think this is
Speaker 1: what it means to do moral philosophy in a morally
Speaker 1: constructivist framework, where you think that morality is not out
Speaker 1: there to be located in the world by you know,
Speaker 1: rationality or scientific experiment. It's something we make up that
Speaker 1: leaves us with an enormous amount of work to do.
Speaker 1: You know, what are we going to make up? Like
Speaker 1: where do we start to how are we going to
Speaker 1: do it? And certainly our rationality and higher cognitive functions
Speaker 1: play a huge role in that. Certainly, certainly you know,
Speaker 1: in this recent Scientific American article I wrote about what
Speaker 1: would be the implications if we all believe that we're
Speaker 1: all one. You know, a lot of spiritual people believe
Speaker 1: and there is a sense as I'm reading this book
Speaker 1: and understanding the latest laws of physics, there's a sense
Speaker 1: in which we're all one. In a sense, we all
Speaker 1: are living under the same fundamental laws of nature. So
Speaker 1: you know, some scientists have starting to look at what
Speaker 1: would happen if we all really believed it, And in
Speaker 1: a sense, it's not a belief, it's actually the truth.
Speaker 1: And so I want to end this podcast day with
Speaker 1: this great quote from your book. All lives are different,
Speaker 1: and some face hardships that others will never know, but
Speaker 1: we all share the same universe, the same walls of nature,
Speaker 1: and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of
Speaker 1: mattering for ourselves and those around us in this brief
Speaker 1: amount of time we have in this world. Book Sean,
Speaker 1: I consider it miraculous and improbable that I got a
Speaker 1: chance to talk to you today about whether or not
Speaker 1: we matter in this impartial universe. So I have a
Speaker 1: lot of existential gratitude for this chat today. So thank you, darned.
Speaker 1: I was going to tell you a lot of exent,
Speaker 1: but you took it from me. But I did great
Speaker 1: pleasure for me too. Yeah, it was a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: a lot to think about here. We should talk again
Speaker 1: sometimes I'd love that. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
Speaker 1: you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please
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