We discuss

• Mortality and the philosophical implications of our finitude

• Zen Buddhism and Taoism on the topic of finitude

• Eastern vs Western philosophies and cultures

• Unconventional approaches to time management

… and other topics

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Oliver’s website: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/

• Oliver’s Books:

  • Meditations for Mortals

  • Four Thousand Weeks

• Other books:

  • Rest - by Alex Pang

  • Time Surfing - by Paul Loomans

Timestamps

00:00 Mortality and Immortality

00:57 The Paradox of Infinite Time

02:51 Polls and Public Opinion on Immortality

05:09 The Concept of Finitude

06:56 The Philosophy of Time and Life's Shortness

10:03 Accepting Mortality and Denial of Death

19:49 Eastern and Western Philosophies

45:14 The Paradox of Productivity and Burnout

45:45 Critique of Capitalism and Personal Goals

47:19 Finding Purpose in a Capitalist System

48:33 Introducing 'Meditations for Mortals'

54:40 The Three to Four Hour Rule

01:04:20 The Fallacy of Effort Equals Worth

01:07:57 Parenting and Personal Development

01:15:06 Closing Thoughts and Book Recommendations

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:00] Matt: Oliver, we're going to be talking about mortality and making the most of our precious time on the planet. Um, If you were given the option to live forever in good health, in good mental health, in good physical health, would you choose to do so?

[00:00:14] Oliver Burkeman: I don't think I should choose to do so, uh, uh, and I'll explain why. Um, but there's, it's sort of two questions, isn't it? Would it be a good idea? And would I be unable to resist? Um, I, I, I've got to say that I, I hope I'd be able. to resist, uh, literally living forever. I think, you know, big extensions to human life could be a really remarkable and wonderful thing.

But, um, but that idea of living forever, um, I'm by no means the first person to observe this. Uh, various philosophers have sort of made the point in the past that there's something that would be essentially. Hellish about that. The way I talk about it is that I don't think anything would matter. I don't think any question about how you used your time would matter.

The question of whether you should take one course in life or one way through the day or another, you know, uh, choose one career or another, have one experience or another. The answer to what you should do would always be like, who cares? Because there would always be infinite time. There'd be no scarcity to time.

And as a result, somehow, no, no value at all.

[00:01:29] Matt: And yet you find yourself worried that you might not be able to resist. Um, what is the, what is the source of this contradiction?

[00:01:37] Oliver Burkeman: Well, I think being finite and sort of acknowledging what it means for us to be finite is pretty terrifying and uncomfortable. And on some level, all that I write about. Think about is, is this question of like what that leads us to do and how we can sort of gently take ourselves by the hand and guide ourselves kindly back towards looking that in the face.

Uh, it may well not be possible to sort of completely reconcile to finitude or to mortality, but we can do a little bit better. And so, you know, given that I'm as much of a basket case on this matter as anyone, and, uh, that's, I'm sort of writing specifically about things that I struggle with. Um, I can imagine that, uh, if you caught me in the wrong mood or underslept or at a very anxious moment when you offered me that, uh, that, that offer, uh, it would be very tempting because it would be, uh, it would seem like freedom from, from all those things.

And in fact, it would be freedom from those things, but it would be, uh, in exchange for a price that I think wouldn't be worth paying,

[00:02:51] Matt: Yeah, there was a, there was a poll in the New Scientist a few years ago. Um, in the UK that asked people this question. And I think in that poll, only something like 20 percent of people would choose to live forever if given the choice. Um, and I personally found that a little bit surprising again, given, as you've just said, it would be.

It's almost a temptation to accept the offer even in with the knowledge of the sort of like the philosophical basis for this detracting from meaning in life and so on. Um, do you, do you find that surprising? Do you find it surprising that there was such a low response rate for people who would choose to live forever?

Yeah,

[00:03:34] Oliver Burkeman: I gave a sort of a philosophical sort of reasoned explanation and, you know, most people have other things to do with their lives than spend a lot of time thinking and reading about that kind of stuff, so they probably don't naturally go to that. But I do think that emotionally, if you just sort of feel the thought, That you're going to be here forever. Like there's something I can touch into anyway, that purely pre verbal and not intellectual at all, which is just kind of appalling. You know what I mean? That sort of, um. If we're talking about literally forever, like that really, it's very difficult to get your head around. Maybe one can't, just as one can't ultimately get one's head around the fact that one isn't going to be here forever.

But, but it's, there's something about that, that I think if I can understand why people in a survey would, if they sort of thought, if they reflected on it deeply, regardless of whether they had any sort of, you know, training in philosophy or anything like that, you would, Sort of find something very nauseating About about that thought I think it's I would be fascinated to know The result if you suggested increasing the human lifespan a healthy human lifespan to a thousand or something, right?

Something kind of massive a huge boost in the amount of life and experience we got but one that was still coming To an end, I think that could have some very different responses

[00:05:04] Matt: I mean, I guess that's true at the same time as, as, Not wanting to live forever. I think almost everyone would complain that life is too short, um, very short. And, um, I mean the, the title of, uh, your book, Four Thousand Weeks, um, you know, the number four thousand weeks refers to the, the length of, of a human life. And this, roughly.

yeah, I love, I wish we knew exactly, but, uh, This strikes people as shockingly short, not just slightly short. I mean, one of the anecdotes that you give in that book was asking somebody to estimate the length of the human life. And I can't remember the number, but I think it was in the hundreds of thousands.

Yeah.

[00:05:45] Oliver Burkeman: I was so freaked out when I first read 4, 000 is roughly in two senses, right? One, we don't know in our own cases. And secondly, actually the average human lifespan these days in the developed world is a bit higher than 4, 000, but, but that's not a nice round number. So I went for the nice round number.

Um, uh, of course, unless you're a newborn baby. Listening to or watching this, uh, that doesn't really make much, it's still going to be less than 4, 000, right. And for any given person, um, uh, and I, yeah, I went around asking various friends and one good friend of mine said 150, 000 was, was her guess. And I'd sort of specifically said like, what would you guess?

Like, don't do any mental arithmetic because then people start thinking. Um, and she said 150, 000. And what I like about that, um, error is that if you, if you If you double 150, 000 to 300, 000, add a bit, 310, 000, I think it is, you get the duration in weeks of all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians.

So it's not, um, it's not just off. It's kind of off in a kind of majestic, uh, way. Life is very, very short and the use of weeks was obviously, uh, you know, my attempt to sort of, uh, Drive that home. Of course, you could just say short as compared to what, right? I mean, it's a lot longer than it used to be and if the comparison is to the infinity of the cosmic eons, then there's there's no finite length that wouldn't be incredibly short.

So I suspect that if technologies and developments in medicine enabled us all to live to, let's be a bit more reasonable, let's say 400. Um, You'd, I think you'd sort of assume that over time people's, uh, you know, fears and capacity for denial and all the rest of it would just sort of reconfigure so that that would then seem too short and incredibly brief.

Uh, because again, you're comparing the brevity. It doesn't really make any sense, right? It's like dividing by zero. You're comparing what feels brief to what doesn't. Actually sort of time going on forever.

[00:08:04] Matt: Yeah, but there is the question of why it does feel so brief. I mean, again, um, just from a mathematical perspective, if infinity is something we don't want and, um, zero is something we don't want, there's some optimal point in between. It's clearly bigger than 4, 000 weeks. Um, you know, why is it not 4, 002?

Why do we have this sense that 4, 000 weeks is, is drastically short? I think, I think most people share this feeling. Um,

[00:08:29] Oliver Burkeman: I,

I mean, I think that's true of however you think about life, whether you think about it in years or days or weeks, but I think one of the things that is True about our experience of time that is kind of really highlighted by just using the week's, uh, denominator. Um, if I'm using that word correctly is that, um, We all have immediate experience of a week passing very quickly and yet the number 4, 000 Uh feels like you know is a low number if you express it in years you get a much smaller number But It doesn't feel so easy to waste a year.

Doubtless. Some people think they have done that, but it's not so common. If you express it in days, you get a huge number. Um, so the fact that it's incredibly easy to waste a day doesn't feel, uh, like such a big deal. I think that there's something about just the way of expressing it, not the actual absolute length of it, that really.

focuses on this sense of, of transience, um, which is not quite the same point as, um, exactly how much of that transience you get, right? There's all that psychological stuff about how it feels like it speeds up as you get older and all the rest of it. But it really is this combination of it being short and just the sense of it, like passing whether you, Want it to or not, and despite whatever you do, uh, that is really fuels, I think the sense of sort of insecurity and mild terror comes with these reflections.

[00:10:02] Matt: yeah, it does. Um, well, well let's, uh, let's talk about then the, the topic of, um, accepting one's mortality, and I guess the, the flip side of that coin, which is denial of, of death, um, topics that are, are central themes in, in your books. Um, again, a lot of this, um, this topic area brings up this. interesting sort of feeling of paradox, I think, where it feels like around every corner, there's some sort of perceived paradox.

And one here is, you know, everybody dies, there is death all around us, we see the evidence all around us, we're exposed to it. And yet people find it so difficult to come to terms with their own finitude. What do you think is the, is, you know, what underlies that? What causes that? Why is it so hard for people to come to terms with this?

[00:10:52] Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, it's totally fascinating. And I think it's in my earlier book, the antidote, where I, one translation of the, um,

uh, what am I thinking of? It's the, um, the Mahabharata, right? The Sanskrit epic, um, where there's a famous exchange about, um, uh, how, How mortality and death is like the most common thing in the world to see, especially in times when those kinds of scriptures were, were written hit today. We hide a lot of it behind closed doors and yet many of us sort of, or most of us go through our days as if we're going to be the only exception, uh, to this rule.

And I think, you know, it's, it's, it's fairly straightforward in a sense. Uh, lots of people, Ernest Becker and others have sort of written incredibly eloquently on this. It's, it's a, it's an unmanageable thought, uh, that one would. No longer be here for me I always think about it in the context of like all the things that will happen You know in the years and decades and centuries afterwards.

There's something sort of completely offensive about the idea that that I won't be There for that a sort of FOMO I suppose in a way Um, and I think it's worth saying, you know I I don't really think of any of the books that i've written as really being about like death and dying I don't think in my own life.

I'm particularly You know, uh reconciled to my own mortality. I have at this point in my life not had you know Much in the way of direct personal experience of sort of very close to me bereavement. Um, and so I'm always a little bit, um, I always feel a little bit self conscious sort of the idea that what I'm saying is like, you know, you must confront your, your mortality.

I think what I'm confronting, and certainly this is a very central thing for me personally, as well as in the world at large is. And this is why I tend to use the word finitude more than I do mortality, right? It's one specific, fundamental ramification of something that follows from the fact that we die.

It's not so much that moment or that experience or those months, um, It is the fact that every single second is, is different as a result of the fact that eventually they will, they will end. So anybody who cares about procrastination or productivity or feels rushed or impatient, anyone is automatically on some level.

Engaging with. the finitude of their time. And, uh, you know, this is where it gets all a bit, uh, Heideggerian and we can, uh, we can, we can go there if you want, but, um, it's that sense in which death infuses every, every minute, uh, with, with finitude, I guess that I'm really sort of, uh, a bit, a bit obsessed with.

[00:14:04] Matt: Yeah, I guess, um, you know, there is, there is the question of whether, to what extent is it, is it really useful to consciously sort of accept that finitude? Because again, like back to like paradoxes on the one hand, accepting one's finitude, um, Sort of means, okay, well, time is, time is precious. I need to, to guess, use my time wisely.

Um, but then on the flip side of this, that puts pressure on people and it can be overwhelming and in the space of, of all the things that one can do because time is so precious, it becomes difficult to decide and to do anything. And we end up floating in decision paralysis and actually using our time.

Less well as a result. And so there's this difficult tension there. Um, I mean, and, and one, one part of that question is we would be just be better off denying the whole thing and, and not even thinking about affinitude. How do you grapple with those, with that sort of tension?

[00:15:03] Oliver Burkeman: I think it's, um, I, I think there's sort of three attitudes to have, uh, you've, you've explained two of them there, I think really well. Um, but I think this is a case of that, um, I'm, I'm insufficiently, uh, I don't know what to call it, but it's a case of that famous meme, social media, right? Of the bell curve graph that says like, there's sort of the starting stage, there's the middle stage, and then there's the, the final stage. And I think sort of denying the reality of, of mortality is, and the finitude is obviously where one naturally goes.

Certainly I've spent plenty of my life pursuing forms of personal development and the rest of it that on some level have that as their, as their sort of underlying agenda. And then there's this stage where it's like, okay. Time is very short. We must really focus on, on, on ringing value out of every bit of it.

And that's a big, that's a big thing in the culture, right? That sort of, you only live once, you know, kind of things to do before you die, all the rest of that. And, and, um, and it's not necessarily a bad way to live if it's something that. One finds, you know, enlivening and exhilarating, I sort of experienced that as incredibly stressful.

And so, and that's sort of the place on the, on the process to the title of 4, 000 weeks belongs to, right. It has that sense of like, it's really short, you better really get moving. And uh, occasionally the book has been sort of described like that. public places, and then I, and I wonder if the person doing the describing has, has read it, because I think, I hope, that by the end of it, at least, I'm offering a perspective that's sort of in the, the third level of this, which is that if you really, deeply internalize what comes as a result of finitude, and I don't for one minute think I've sort of done this perfectly, but it's the direction in which I'm trying to point myself and other people, then it stops being Stressful and becomes kind of relaxing again, relaxing in a kind of energized, motivated, empowered way, because I mean, you may have a better way of expressing this sort than I do, but one of the ways I always think it makes sense is like. Just in the context of say, having lots and lots to do like the standard busyness aspect of all this, if you think you can live forever, then it's hard to feel too bothered by busyness because you've got all the time in the world. If you think time is incredibly precious, it's really awful that you have to, um, make choices about what to do and motivate to get the most important things done right away because time is slipping away and you know, you're finite and you only live once.

If you really let it sink into your bones, just how big the mismatch is Between all the things that would be wonderful and meaningful to do. And the tiny number that anyone can hope to do in a life. Then you sort of let go of fighting that fight, right? You stop trying to. Get your arms around everything that matters you stop ever thinking that Getting to the end of all the theoretical to do lists in the world is something that you're going to be doing or your to do lists and you just think okay, I'm very small the Space of things that I could do is essentially infinite So all I'm ever going to be able to do is pick a few and do them and give myself to them And this is the lens that in my Most recent book that I think might talk about later, but my most recent book I talk about as, uh, uh, it's worse than you think, right?

And why this is good news. Um, and this goes for all sorts of ways in which we're limited as humans. But, but in the sense of the amount of time we have, I think that's crucial. If you're still kind of thinking, okay, I've got to go base jumping every weekend and I've got to launch a multi billion dollar startup that amazes everybody, and I've got to be really extraordinarily unusual in order to really say that I lived.

In a way, you're still in the mindset of thinking that. this finitude is something that can be conquered. Um, that eventually if you did well enough and stood out enough, you'd somehow have not made it apply to you. I don't know if that's clear, but so when you really see that there are no, there's no escape, I think it's actually quite relaxing and not stressful.

There you go. A very long answer to it, to that question.

[00:19:47] Matt: No, no, very good, very good answer. And it actually draws on many themes that um, anyone who's familiar with um, Taoism or Zen Buddhism, would, would kind of get that sense, there's this um, I don't know, I think Taoism articulates it very well, you know, you can't, you can't actually name, you the thing, um, because that's, that's not really getting at it.

And, um, when reading your work, it strikes me that there are many times in which it's quite clearly influenced by, um, Eastern philosophies, particularly Zen Buddhism, maybe Taoism as well. Um, and I think throughout your, your, um, books, many specific individuals in these traditions are named, um, Maybe let's, let's linger on that topic for a bit.

Um, what do you find, um, sort of attractive or compelling about, um, well, maybe Zen Buddhism in particular?

[00:20:40] Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean, Zen Buddhism, Um, after a long sort of journey through different bits of Buddhism and other traditions, um, is really somewhere that has made a very big impact on me in the, in recent years, especially and Taoism, which I think, I think it sounds like you may actually know more about this than me.

And I certainly don't know much about it, but I think it's true to say that, that Zen is the place where Buddhism sort of touches Taoism most, most directly. Um, and, um, And yeah, it's sort of like on, you know, to be completely obnoxiously broad brush about it, it's sort of the, sort of the happy version of, of, of, of Buddhism, isn't it, the Taoism, which, um, it's, um, so in a very sort of, the sort of cynical answer that we'll go through to the sincere answer, right.

The cynical answer is, is that, that these traditions, especially Zen, especially really Zen in English, if I'm honest, right. As the American, American, uh, manifestations of it, cause that's what I'm reading, um, really find ways to express the kind of themes that we're tracking here in very, very sort of pungent and well phrased ways.

So if you're quoting in the context of what I'm very often doing, it's a, it's a sort of a treasure trove of those things. But I guess there's a question like, why should that be? One way that I think about it is that, um, there is a lot to be found in Zen especially, but also in Taoism for, but by the person who, um, uh, who sort of, historically in their lives spends too much time in their heads and is a sort of a brain on a stick type person and a left brained person, I guess is the other way of talking about it.

And that certainly describes me. Um, and sometimes it seems like,

like plenty of Zen writing and writing about koans especially, is a, it's almost like an attempt to take the left braininess and go so far with it and push it to such an extreme that it kind of shudders and collapses and you've got no option but to also become a more fully embodied, more emotionally literate right brained person that you've on some level spent your whole life avoiding being.

Um, so I think it's very, I think it's very appealing. to people who sort of, you come at this intellect first, but not in a way that just reaffirms that sort of imbalance in life, right? It's a way that sort of, um, ends up by undermining it in a very, uh, freeing way. And, um, you know, one other way of expressing that is just all these different themes and all these different occurrences that I end up quoting that tend to mainly come from Zen, and to some extent, I think from Taoism, uh, about how the, the problem here, if there is a problem is not that there's no solution to the human situation.

It's that you think there ought to be a solution and you're sort of, um, banging your intellect against the lack of a solution and that, and that, and that, um, there's actually a sort of very deep freedom to be experienced in seeing that, that this is really it. And that, and that attempted solutions are what are, what are causing the, the anxiety in the.

The suffering, but I don't know how that lands with you. Cause I, as I say, it does sound from your questions like you very much know what you're talking about here and possibly well more than me.

[00:24:34] Matt: No, no, I don't think that much. I mean, that resonates with me, um, as well. I think one of the, you know, something I struggle when, when thinking about Zen Buddhism, Taoism, many schools of thought in, of that nature, is it feels to me that, like, as you said, that they do sort of, there is this, um, this sort of deeper truth about the nature of things.

Um, that's revealed there that is maybe not found in Western philosophies. Um, but at the same time, I think Western philosophies and Western traditions have led to many things that I want in my life that I might not be able to find, you know, like Western medicine and science and, um, And I've, I personally struggle with, um, sort of trying to reconcile those two things.

I don't know if you sort of shared that observation or shared that, um, that, that challenge at all.

[00:25:26] Oliver Burkeman: I don't know if it's what you mean, but certainly a, a, a criticism that is made of those traditions and especially of, you know, how those traditions manifest in, you know, upper middle class American mindfulness culture or whatever is that they are, um, you know, um, in some sense passive or accepting of reality in the wrong way, that they're sort of ways to, um, reconcile yourself to things being as they are right now and not, uh, Make the advances that come from some form of dissatisfaction, right?

I mean, if the, on the emotional level, uh, you've got to sort of want to probe further and, um, and really understand how reality is working in a way that feels very sort of analytical philosophy. Um, if you want to make advances and there's a sort of a risk that. Um, approaches derived anyway from Eastern traditions are much more about just sort of feeling the fullness of how things are now and, and being at peace with it.

And you know, it may well be a legitimate critique against, uh, criticism of some, some versions of those, of those ideas. It's a little bit of a get out, but my response is always just to say, look, I think part of what I'm doing here is. And this is just a reflection of my personality on some level is trying to sort of find a way of relating to the world that feels present and fully alive and, um, peaceful and at the same time sort of, uh, retains my, the fact that I am a sort of ambitious person.

I do like accomplishing things. I do like, I would like to make a difference, you know, I'm not the kind of person who, um, can be totally happy with, without. Some sense of that in my life. So I'm sort of trying to sort of rescue ambition and productivity for in a way that isn't, I hope, you know, totally motivated by anxiety and a desperate attempt to sort of dominate reality and feel in control and feel secure.

So where this goes to your question is just that I feel like the kind of people who are interested in this stuff and who are at least a bit like me and who, uh, end up reading my books. There's sort of no danger. Anytime soon of them becoming just completely kind of slackers who don't participate in the sort of, you know, more Western feeling sense of, you know, figuring things out and making progress.

It's really a sort of a, uh, I don't know, is prophylactic the right word? I may be getting that wrong, but you know, it's that sort of, it's that idea of, you know, it's a, it's a balance. It's, it's, um, it's sort of, uh, pushing in the other direction and we're at, we're at, um. Where most people are in no danger of, uh, losing themselves completely and sort of passivity and, and settling for the fact that, you know, yeah, the, the settling for less than they could settle for.

[00:28:45] Matt: Yeah. No, I totally get that. And, um, you know, actually when, I think what you said is, is true that I think many people do. have that concern that getting too into these philosophies could lead to a lack of motivation and so on. Um, I also feel like a lot of the ways that we see these philosophies show up in the, in the modern world today is very instrumental.

So you would

[00:29:09] Oliver Burkeman: Oh, yes. Yeah.

[00:29:10] Matt: to, to make you more productive so that you could just do more. And, um, uh, and I, you know, again, I'm not necessarily saying that that's a bad thing, but, um, I feel like the way your writing gets at it is almost from the other direction. It is almost um, not, okay, we have all these things to do.

How can I instrumentalize, um, Zen Buddhism to make me better at doing those things? It, it, it kind of comes at the other, from the other way around. don't know if that, if that, if that sounds like it makes sense to you.

[00:29:45] Oliver Burkeman: I think so. I mean, I suppose what I want to say is not, is not use these techniques and these traditions and these ways of seeing the world in order to get more done. But it is the case that if you embrace these outlooks and techniques and ways of seeing the world, you will. Get more done, um, which is a subtle difference and maybe a slightly evasive one, but I think it's, um, you know, every other approach, every other part of the sort of field of options that we've been discussing decides that in the end, you know, uh, what either productivity or just sort of showing up in the moment is the thing that, uh, Matters most like either reaching your goals or either just being here.

And I want to say, at least try to explore the avenue that says you don't actually have to choose between these. Um, I'm writing all the time about the necessity of making hard choices, but I think this is one that maybe one doesn't. have to make, and that actually, and this is a very Zen slash Taoist idea, I think, um, it's that, it's that line that I quote in the new book from, uh, Kosho Uchiyama, who says, um, uh, life unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity.

I think that's the thing he says, and this is very, very evident in, you know, just the Tao Te Ching. I'm not getting particularly deep into obscure Taoist texts, but this idea that actually if you sort of find. a kind of peaceful way of being with and part of reality and a way of sort of relaxing back into the situation that you're actually in. It isn't the case that you then, you know, become a useless loser who does less than you would have done before. It's in fact the case that action passes through you, things happen more easily. And this is honestly, just to get a bit more sort of day to day practical about it, this is so the case in my own life. The reason that I don't get things done in my creative work, for example, when I don't get them done is. Essentially, never because I need to sort of, or maybe never because I need to sort of inject more motivation into myself. It's because there's some emotional thing happening where I'm either worried it won't be good enough, or I'm torn between different things to do, or I'm, you know, feeling anxious in some other way.

And that sort of acts as a blocker to, to action and the, to the extent that I can relax that barrier, the action just sort of flows out. naturally. So, you know, there might be a little bit of double dealing here in the way I write these books. Right. Cause I'm sort of saying productivity is not the point, but, but also if you follow this path, you might end up more productive, but I do think that's true.

So yeah,

[00:32:48] Matt: I totally, yeah, I totally think it's true. And I share also personally that, um, that experience. Um, and I also also sometimes find, you know, if you look at the sort of mainstream productivity literature, um, you know, to me, it strikes me that a lot of, a lot of that writing is almost designed. to be a form of procrastination in a way.

Um, you know, you spend a lot of time thinking about systems for getting things done and, uh, very little time doing the important things. And I definitely think that is, that is what happens.

[00:33:22] Oliver Burkeman: Well, it's a fascinating thought, isn't it? Because I mean, I definitely don't want to present myself as somehow morally superior to more mainstream approaches to productivity because that's just another, that's just another trap. But, you know, a person who writes a book outlining a whole detailed systemic approach to productivity has managed to turn something that often can be procrastinatory for people, building systems of productivity, into their professional output and their professional livelihood.

And that's great because, um, you know, they've, they've put a book out, but it's questionable what it is. Does for other people who do not intend on becoming productivity gurus. Um, and, and yeah, I think, uh, a big part of what I'm trying to do, especially in the most recent book, is to sort of pull the rug from under that idea and say, speaking also to myself, of course.

Um, when you think about this idea, you will have the, you'll have the thought, oh, that's great. That's really cool. I have to sort of implement this whole system. I'll do it really well, and I'll do it in six months time when I've got time, and I'll buy all the right supplies. And I'm constantly trying to say, no, no, no, no, no, just.

Just do one thing now and it won't feel good because it feels much more fun to build the complicated systems. And so, yeah, I think productivity definitely gets used as a form of procrastination, ironically. And I'm not even sure that's bad if you see what you're doing, you know, like these days, I'm still totally partial to certain kinds of productivity blog or downloading some app to inspect it and play around with it.

But I think unlike before, I sort of know that I'm on the break when I'm doing that. I'm not actually embarked on some main project of saving my soul through the right, through the right system, uh, and there's no harm in having productivity as a bit of a hobby if you're geeky, like in that way as I am, but it's seeing it as a hobby and not thinking of it as the path to, you know, Holistic fulfillment in life.

[00:35:36] Matt: Yeah. But that, that is the, that is the fundamental issue that I think, um, I think many, many people do see it even maybe implicitly, maybe in a, in a non explicit way as the path to fulfillment in life and the path to meaning in life. And I think, um, you know, I guess on the, on the topic of Eastern versus Western philosophies, um, you know, most listeners to this podcast would be from Western democratic, modern capitalist societies, you know, United States, United Kingdom, Western Europe.

And, um, in these societies, the image of what a successful person. looks like is often somebody who has nailed the productivity game. Big job, big house, big income, very busy. Um, it's almost worn as a badge of honor to be very busy and not have enough time for important things. Um, there was a, there was a quote from your, from your new book, actually from Andrew Wilkinson, um, who's the author of Never Enough and the co founder of, um, Tiny, who says, Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.

Um, which is, which is spot on. It's, it's spot on. Um, this to me is again, another one of these sort of paradoxical, um, issues because when you ask someone in a, you know, sit down for a cup of coffee and you ask them, what, what is your image for a successful life? They will talk about things like family and personal autonomy and so on.

Um, but then. On a behavioral level and on a societal level, this is just not what we see. Um, so what is it, what is your theory behind this dissonance here? This is quite a drastic, um, contradiction. Um, what's your, what's your theory here?

[00:37:14] Oliver Burkeman: mean, I'm sure there are people who just sort of have a completely Uh split attitude to this right who who sort of have a intellectual belief that things like family and things like uh Deep conversations with friends or what life is about but also just really love or are addicted on some level I guess is a better way of putting it to to the grind and to I think for most people, certainly, I dunno, certainly for me, where those, that disjoint arises is usually because I feel like that's how I want to live, but I can't afford to do it yet.

Right. Um, and so, and I write about this, right? This, this notion of saying, okay, um, it will be better if I, If I had more space for rest in my life, say, you know, smelling the roses, walking, walking through the woods. But, um, but, but not just yet. And that could be on multiple timescales, right? It could be like in a few years when I've really got my sort of business up and running and it can do without me for a, for a few months, or it could literally be, Today, right?

It's like, I want to spend an hour, but it can't be this hour because first of all, I've got to get these emails out of the way and it almost doesn't matter which timescale it's on, what you're doing, the crucial distinction there is that you're saying that this way of showing up for life is what you want to do, but you can't do it. Now, and I think the reason for that is the thing we've been discussing, right? It feels like, um, you need to achieve a greater security or control or domination or something, you know, whether it's level of productivity or having dealt with all the demands on you or having achieved a high level of qualifications or something, you know, before you can relax into. Um, and the argument I make in the book, which I, is this idea of starting from sanity rather than striving towards sanity, which is my gloss on the idea that on some level, and in some way, if you want to show up for life in a certain way, you just have to show up for it. Um, right in the middle of the too many emails and they're not being good enough at stuff yet and then feeling out of control.

So to put sort of concrete, quick example on that and I'll stop, but you know, on the rest front that, that could just be as simple as making sure that actually today you do spend half an hour walking through the woods, even if it doesn't feel right, cause you're thinking of all the emails you should be answering or something that yoga teachers like to say, uh, you know, to try to locate the ease and the rest in what it is that you're.

That you're doing, uh, right now, but in some way or another, not postpone that thing, because when you postpone it, you actually just end up. Pushing it further and further away, right? Um, there's that lovely Taoist phrase. I think it is Taoist phrase, uh, beating a drum in search of a fugitive, uh, pursuing your, your project of rest by becoming the kind of person who rests less because you're trying to get through all the stuff that will allow you to rest.

And all that happens is you become a. A less restful person, less willing to rest when the, if the opportunity ever arises. So I think that I've used the rest example, of course, someone else at a different stage in life. It could be a question of buckling down to hard work, right? Maybe now is the time for you to do that.

Not in six months, not when you've. feel like you know what you're doing, but, but now when you don't feel like, you know, what you're doing,

[00:41:10] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, that, uh, sort of inability to, to rest now is, um, it feels like it's a very deeply, uh, it's, it's, it's a very deeply ingrained inability, um, certainly in, in the cultures that I've lived in. Um, where even when people do make time to rest and, you know, make time for real leisure, it's often done with a, I don't know, a sense of guilt, a sense of, you know, there's just something not, not right about it.

And I've always actually wondered, maybe, you know, if, um, You know, there's this thought that, you know, in the good old days, things were different and, um, you know, time for leisure was, was, um, I don't know, it was, it was sort of easier, there wasn't the sense of guilt when you weren't working, but I actually don't know if that was true, do you know, you know, historically, has it actually changed or has it always been this way?

[00:42:03] Oliver Burkeman: I mean, a lot of this is speculation because you're sort of talking about the inner experience of people hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but I, I think, and I've argued that it makes sense to believe that it would have been very different. It's important to keep in mind that we're talking about people whose lives would have been in all so many ways like harder and, and, you know, in some sense, fuller, especially for ordinary people, you know, fuller of hard experiences and hard work.

But I think that the thing about it being difficult to rest does not come simply from having a lot of hard work to do in your life. It comes from a specific conception of time that sees time itself as a resource that has to be maximized. I think this comes, begins sort of in the centuries before the industrial revolution.

revolution and then really picks up speed afterwards. I think, and I've argued in 4, 000 weeks, you know, based on, you know, definitely based on piecing together little bits of stuff, I'm not making some scientific claim for it, that if you were a medieval peasant, uh, who had such a, like around here in Northern England, say, who had such a sort of terrible life in so many ways, you wouldn't have experienced time problems specifically.

You wouldn't have found it difficult to rest when there wasn't work to do. in front of you that you were doing, because, um, you wouldn't have, you just wouldn't have had that sort of concept of this being time that could or should be put to some other use. You just would be in your life right now, and it would be a restful moment in your life.

Maybe it would be a religiously enforced Sabbath. And then another time you'd be in the middle of a very High exertion moment in your life, which would be, uh, harvesting crops or building houses or something. Um, that notion that you're sort of pulled in two directions and that you maybe should be making better use of time, I think is ultimately like quite a. quite a modern idea that has reached a sort of a ultimate level now way, you know, the way we try to defend against it is by making sure we spend all our free time training for 10ks or setting skill acquisition goals or trying to remember everything you read which people on the internet seem to be obsessed with at the moment

[00:44:40] Matt: Yeah. Um, yeah, but you know, and this was, this will lead us on to, onto the new book shortly. But, um, even there, there is this difficulty where, um, you know, let's take something like, um, I don't want to just call it capitalism because then it feels like I'm being anti capitalist. That's not what I mean. But this, this, this attitude towards maximizing time, maximizing use of time to, to maximize output, let's say maximize productivity, maximize efficiency.

Um, Yeah. Even if suppose that were the goal. So forget about finding leisure, suppose it were just the goal to maximize productivity. Um, I feel like the, the place that people get to is one of burnout and doing busy work and actually not being productive at all. And this is, and this is what you actually see.

Um, And so again, this is, this is a bit of a paradox where, uh, we're in this state where not only are we not experiencing the leisure and the rest that we want, but also, um, we're not being very productive either.

[00:45:39] Oliver Burkeman: Yes. Yeah,

[00:45:40] Matt: so it's kind of like the worst of both worlds.

[00:45:43] Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think um, you know, uh to take the sort of Anti capitalist version of it. I don't really think I'm sufficiently opposed to the basic system of capitalism to call myself one But an anti capitalist but the but the in terms of where we are now and this phase that people call late capitalism although how they know I don't understand but

your You're serving an instrumental goal, right? When you, when you end up spending all your time scrolling, uh, frustratingly through, through social media, or when you buy app after app that promises to, to transform your productivity. It's just that that goal is not your own. Set of interests and goals. So just take the sort of critic of the system approach to it, which definitely has its limitations, but I think it's worth thinking about.

Um, it's the system working well, it's just the system is sort of mining you for value to have you, um, buy the apps and expose your eyeballs to the advertising. Um, and. I can imagine sort of diehard critic of capitalism saying, well, what did you expect? Why, why, why, why do you think that this system should serve personal productivity?

Um, uh, you know, about things that matter to us. And I think, you know, I think that's what I'm, that's the thorough where I'm working. It's like, is there a way? Cause I'm not. This isn't, these aren't books calling for this complete revolution of the systems in which we, in which we live. Um, is, are there ways to recover in the world in which we actually find ourselves?

Um, which involves advocating for some political changes, but it's also just about dealing with your to do list and your ambitions when you get to your desk at, 9am on a Monday morning, you know, are there ways that we can sort of rescue serving our own purposes inside this and and not fall into that that trap where it's sort of instrumental, but actually not even serving your own, your own goals.

And I think there are, and I think there are ways of doing this and there are better and worse ways of engaging with the reality in which we find ourselves. And I think there's definitely been worse realities over the span of human, uh, history. And it's all just a question of, yeah, how you interact with that, that reality and sort of find a certain kind of.

independence and freedom, uh, to build a meaningful life inside it. Yeah.

[00:48:33] Matt: Well, I think this, this leads really nicely to your, your new book. So your new book is called Meditations for Mortals. Um, and It's a, it's actually a very nice, I think 4, 000 weeks, um, is surprisingly philosophical for people who think it's going to be a, just a time management productivity book. It's very philosophical.

Um, meditations for mortals, uh, is significantly more actionable and practical, but not without losing that, um, sort of philosophical undertone, which I thought was really nice. It's not, um, it's definitely not a, one of those, again, mainstream productivity books. Um, one, one thing that you wrote in the introduction was that I sincerely hope you find this book useful.

To be completely honest with you though, I wrote it for myself. Let's move on to the book. Why did you choose to write this book?

[00:49:29] Oliver Burkeman: there's always like the reality and then the sort of retrospective rationalization. Um, I knew I wanted to write another book. I know about myself at this point that I can only really write the book that, you know, I want to write. I need to write at that moment. Um, so it never feels like a choice.

Uh, it feels like I'm trying to discover what the thing is that I need to try to figure out or express. Um, and in some early versions of this, it was going to be like a quote for every day of the year and all sorts of like ideas that got bandied about. But what came out is this sort of four week structure with a short chapter for each day of the month.

Um, I'm fascinated to know whether people really do read it in that way. I sort of suggest it, but I don't think it's something I can hope to, uh, control. And, and trying to find this way of, you're right that it's a lot more actionable, I hope, and I appreciate your kind words about it, but, but I think that the main mechanism for that action is seeing the world a little differently.

Rather than following my particular technique or method or three steps. There's some of that, you know, cause I think it can be useful, but I'm trying to sort of deliver tiny little perspective shifts on a sort of paced basis over the course of reading the book or of a month. If you, if you do it that way, um, because I think they are the things that make the difference and that actually sort of.

allow, permit action, permit you to do the things that you know you wanted to be doing. So in the reason it was a book I needed to write for myself was that like I was more and more aware that even after writing 4, 000 Weeks I could have an extremely, what felt like an extremely deep understanding of What's going on here and how I want to show up in this life and just not do it.

Like just completely, just not, not actually do it. Um, so this book is very much about sort of, it's about the challenge of actually doing things as opposed to thinking about them or building systems for them. And it strives to be a book that is structured such that that will be its effect on the reader.

It may be that no book can ultimately. Jump that gap between knowing what to do and doing it right because it's still a book and um, and you can still sort of Read it, think, Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. And then put it aside and get on with your life. But I'm sort of trying, pushing against that on every, on every page, uh, in the hope that, um, it will actually sort of be something that right in the middle of people's day to day lives, you know, they can read and that will sort of start having a little bit of an effect.

right there and then.

[00:52:30] Matt: I mean, I personally think the structure will serve it very well. Um, there is, you know, it's quite, it's quite common these days for people to get audio books, for example, and listen to them on speed read on, you know, 2x, um, or get something like Blinkist and get the short summary. And there is something, the word perverse is too negative, but getting something like 4, 000 weeks and listening to it at 2x.

A two X so that you can get to the next book and absorb all that information. Feels like it's somewhat missing the point. Um,

[00:53:01] Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. I was always, I always joked that there should be some, I should like be able to come to some arrangement with Audible that they could somehow disable that function only on, only on that

[00:53:10] Matt: I

[00:53:10] Oliver Burkeman: Right. It's just like, no, you can't actually, you can't listen to it. Um, yeah,

[00:53:15] Matt: mean, the, the, the structure of, you know, um, four weeks, seven days, um, per week, so 28 sort of daily readings, I think it does. It does really. So it, well, I didn't actually read it in that way. Um, but, um, I, I, I got the sense that this could work very well.

[00:53:33] Oliver Burkeman: I I'm glad to hear it. And yeah, you know, maybe the most people don't read it that way, but even so, I think I'm hoping that having that be the structure conveys something, um, whether or not you happen to actually do it that way, right? That sense of these are incremental. These are things to, maybe they're things to return to if you don't decide to do them day by day.

Maybe you want to sort of. read it all in once and then come back to the bits that stuck in your mind on another day. There's just some sort of feeling of patience. I think that comes from that, from that, whether or not, yeah, it is a book in large part about sort of surrendering the attempt at total control of things.

So I certainly can't get too controlly about how. other people read a book that they've

[00:54:21] Matt: Yes, yes. Um, I thought what could be, what could be interesting is, I mean, so there are 28 sort of different themes, uh, what could be interesting is picking two or three that really stood out to me as particularly interesting or useful, um, and exploring them. Uh, the first one is from. day 13, uh, titled finding focus in chaos.

And here you talk about the three hours rule, um, which is, which is very fascinating. So maybe you can tell me about the, the three hours rule.

[00:54:53] Oliver Burkeman: the three, what I've sort of ended up calling the three to four hour rule is, is, is, is just, um, arises from the observation that, um, In the first instance, if you go back over the daily routines of, of, um, all sorts of authors and artists, scientists, scholars, composers, you, you find this recurring number of three to four hours in every 24 hour period that they would dedicate to the thing that was the sort of core.

of uh, of their work, right? So actually writing, actually painting, actually composing. Um, and there's a, a lot of this, as I say in the book comes from a book by Alex Pang called rest where he really sort of, um, he deserves a lot of credit for like, it's. Finding all these, um, all these, uh, all these cases and there's other research, right?

So it's not purely anecdotal cherry picking, uh, to suggest that there's something powerful about that amount of time as a sort of sustainable limit to, um, really deep focused work in the course of, of a day. Not that you can't, couldn't, if you had to do more, but that if you wanted to keep it up. day after day.

Uh, it's quite a good idea to limit it to that. Now, obviously a lot of these figures had like 10 servants to handle all the difficult other stuff of life. And they just got to spend the rest of the time relaxing. And I'm not really making the case that you should do four hours on whatever it is that you focus on in your work and then just go, you know, can afford to do nothing else and go have fun.

It is though that I think if you have this level of autonomy over your time, which increasingly I think. People doing knowledge work do have. Um, it's a really good idea to, um, try to sort of ring fence three or four hours, either all in one big chunk or in maybe two chunks at high energy points of the day, really try to defend those hours from interruption and to be sort of ready and well slept and prepared to use them well. But at the same time, and I think this is a really important second aspect of it, not to try very hard to, um, ring fence or to protect the rest of your time. In other words, to have a sort of realistic sense of your limits when it comes to, um, dictating how time goes in the day. Right? I mean, I have quite an unusual degree of autonomy over how I spend my time between about, you know, eight in the morning It depends on the day because school runs and things, but, but basically, you know, a big chunk of the day, I have a lot of freedom and even I find that, you know, it's not actually a fruitful way to interact with the world to sort of lock down that whole period and be like monkish for all of it.

It's a lot more useful and resilient and less brittle to sort of say, okay, yes. I'm going to shoot for these chunks of real focus and I'm not going to make appointments in those times and I'm going to try not to be disturbable in those times. But the rest of the time, actually, I don't know in advance that an interruption or an unplanned happening is going to be worse than the thing that I think should have happened.

And I, and it creates all sorts of extra problems to try to exert that level of focus. of control over time. This is a, um, very friendly and collegial disagreement that I have with Cal Newport that I'm looking forward to discussing in more detail with him soon. And other advocates of time blocking and time boxing, right?

I'm sort of pushing back a bit against that and saying, yeah, do it in a certain way and be open to reality the rest of the time.

[00:58:43] Matt: Yeah. Interesting. I look forward to, I look forward to hearing that one. Um, I mean, it, it, it, it opens the question though, You know, the, the, the three to four hours rule historically, we've seen so many great figures kind of use this rule, um, and be very successful as a, as a result, I would guess. Um, and I, it feels like, you know, really thinking about it, um, It feels right, you know, a knowledge worker trying to work hard for eight hours, it gets pretty tiring.

No one feels like they're that productive. Um, and yet, when we look at how people choose to work to be most productive, it is certainly nothing like the three hours rule, I would say. Um, And even with the knowledge of maybe, you know, working hard and distracted for three or four hours a day, being the most effective way to get things done.

Um, working less than, let's say, the standard eight hours, you know, people feel a bit off, they feel a bit guilty. And so there's this big question as to why there would be such a difference in, um, you know, what people actually choose to do and how they choose to work. And the sort of knowledge of what they think must be most productive.

I don't know if you have, if you have thoughts, and I would actually love to know, did you use the three to four hours rule? Do you use it in your, in your daily life? Did you use it when writing this book?

[01:00:08] Oliver Burkeman: Uh, yes, and I, I do use it. I mean, I, it's reached a point in my day where I'm not sure whether it really, I mean, yeah, let me try to sort of answer that bit first and then back into your other question. I do do this. I don't do it in a particularly top down willed planned way compared to how I used to, right?

So I, I sort of, um, seek to go through the day almost as intuitively as possible, but I also know from a lot of. Experience and following or ignoring intuitions that, that, that just to end up spending about that amount of time in focus is important. So then obviously then the question becomes, well, okay, how do you, how do I protect it from other, other things?

And so. Yeah, I sort of have, I try to be quite strict about keeping portions of the day free from appointments and portions of the week free from appointments and concentrating them in other portions of the week, just so that there is that opportunity for the three or four hours to, um, to come to be.

That's not quite the same as saying that I make it my, Business to always begin at 7 45 AM and work for exactly this amount of time and et cetera, et cetera. I've got sort of looser and freer, and I hope more Taoist about, uh, about that approach, but it's still the same idea, right? It's like leave space in your life for this to happen.

If you possibly can as to what people. Generally do when they're trying to, I mean, it's interesting, obviously it's not what people generally do because what people generally do is just be very reactive and try to sort of, um, you know, um, get through more and more and more and more things and hammer their way through a to do list.

But you may also be referring to what sort of people who are thinking carefully about their productivity do and ideas about sort of going into full on monk mode and sort of going in the opposite direction from that sort of purely reactive, uh, Uh, mode, and I guess I just think that both those extremes are ill suited to what we're trying to do, or most people are trying to do, which is to, um, which is to pursue intentional goals in a setting where it actually helps everybody.

And they may well be a condition of their employment to be, you know, You know, available and, and reactive. So I think it's just a question of sort of, uh, opposing the perfectionistic urge that says, well, it must be one or the other, right? It must either be that we, uh, have an incredibly strict schedule or that we.

Just have to sort of power through life as best we can and say, no, actually it is just both. You have to do so one of them for some of the day and one of them for another part of the day. Obviously there are plenty of professional situations where you don't have the relevant degree of autonomy. And if your job involves responding to an email within an hour, Regardless of when it comes in between eight and six, then, then that, and you decide that you're going to stay in that job, then, then that's, uh, that requires a different way of, of, of doing things.

[01:03:25] Matt: Nevertheless, I think, um, it is, it is quite a, it's a nice rule to be made aware of, that, uh, that something like three to four hours of hard work is, Sort of enough and, and, and sort of the best that one could do versus if it were the 10 or 11 hour rule, this would not be received as

[01:03:44] Oliver Burkeman: No. And, you know, even if you're one of those people who's in a situation where you end up just sitting at your desk because you're in a corporate culture that rewards the pre, your presence there. I think that is all very different than how it used to be. But if you are. At least you can know inside your own mind not to feel too bad about it if you've, if you've actually done a good four hours of, um, of the, of the core of the core work that you're involved in.

Yeah.

[01:04:07] Matt: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But nevertheless, I think people do, um, people do feel guilty sometimes by not, and it actually takes, it's very nicely to, um, another one of your. your meditations, which is day 15. Um, what if this were easy? Um, which was again, a very, very interesting one. Um, maybe, maybe I'll give it to you. I think that there are two interesting fallacies that relate to what we just said, but maybe I'll give it to, to you.

Tell me about the, um, the, what if this were easy,

[01:04:34] Oliver Burkeman: This is, this is a chapter where I'm just asking readers to reflect on the possibility that one of the reasons that, It seems difficult to do things, to get things done, to get around to things, to live lives the way we want to be living them. It's just that we, we sort of assume a level of difficulty that isn't always there. I've written a lot and thought a lot down the years about the downsides of kind of, um, simplistic, positive thinking, where if you just dream that you can do something, then it's automatically comes into being, and I'm sort of somewhat associated with being against that. But it's really important to see that that is not the same as saying that anything worth doing is going to feel difficult.

I think there's a real problem with some of the kind of personal development that's going on. material that's popular today, especially the sort of, you know, stuff that's implicitly largely focused on a male audience. Um, where really just kind of, you know, the, the idea that life must necessarily be a sort of.

tough fight requiring hard discipline and it's just like, you know, getting to the point where you don't even care because you just love the pain of it and all the stuff. You know, I'm not saying that doesn't have a certain truth actually, but it is very easy to slip into this situation where it's like, well, if it's worth doing, it must be going to be really hard.

And then it becomes really hard because you're, you're going at it in that, in, in that frame of mind and the possibility. And that, that, you know, Something that you've been putting off or that you're that you care very much about could actually just go really really easily is something I still need to remind myself about this all the time, but it's but there's a sort of immediate feeling of lightness and Of enthusiasm and lots of other things that are all just good things to have on board if you're trying to do something, right?

so I think that there's a danger in thinking that If something is important, it's going to be hard. Um, and also a danger in the flip side, which is that if something feels like it's taking a lot of effort, then it must be worth doing, uh, cause that's the kind of mindset where you. You know, have an incredibly tough job and assume therefore that it's a meaningful job just because it really exhausts you when maybe that's not the case.

[01:07:14] Matt: Yeah. I mean, this, this one, um, I don't know where exactly it comes from. I've got, I've got some ideas, you know, when, uh, in many, in many circumstances in life, there is sort of a delay between what we do and the output and the outcome. And, um, so, you know, in order to, you know, to, predict, um, the outcome. I think often we do look to our sense of, of effort.

And in some circumstances it is a very good, that is a very good way to, to do it. You know, um, sometimes you do need to put in the effort to achieve the outcome, but I think then that gets confused. That we, we, we, we sort of conflate the sense of effort with the thing. in itself. Um, but something that it brings to mind, you know, if that, if that is trainable, um, when it comes to something like teaching or parenting or, um, you know, helping others learn, I think parenting is a good example.

You would hope to, to sort of bring them up in a way that they wouldn't, um, internalize this no pain, no gain. Uh, sort of mindset in every day. Um, how do you think about this and maybe more generally some of the other principles that you write about in the context of parenting and in the context of, of, you know, bringing up a child?

[01:08:32] Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, it's a, it's a fascinating question and you know, I, I think about it a lot. We have a seven year old son. Um, I sort of.

Default again and again. Well, I mean, I think there are a couple of things. One is the thing that is just a cliche, but it's just absolutely true and shouldn't be resisted just because it's a cliche is that, is that, um, is the, what makes the difference is sort of how one is and what one shows rather than sort of lessons that you explicitly communicate.

And so, you know, the obvious examples, right? There's no point having all sorts of, um, stated attitudes and rules towards screen time if you're just scrolling through your phone all the time. Um, when it comes to one's relationship with, with kids and, and, um, I think that the, the, the sort of subtler version of that, of that point is that, um, It always seems to me like the place where there is the most work to be done is sort of inside me, you know, it's like, um, it's that lovely line from Jung that the, the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.

This, this notion and more generally speaking, you know, if there's like, if there's stuff inside you that you're not working on and thinking about and seeking to acknowledge, then it just sort of gets put on to, um, People around you, and especially young, impressionable children around you. Um, and so I'm sort of drawn back and back and back to the idea that actually what my sort of key job is to be as a parent actually is to be open enough to taking time for my own sort of, um, uh, you know, thinking about these matters and talking about them and journaling about them and just sort of, you know, uh, my own anxieties, my own, my own sort of, um, Somewhat sort of addictive, uh, attitude to work and productivity and all the things that really the books are about.

Um, so that when I'm not doing that and when it's dinner time or when I'm out on a trip with my son or just hanging out around the house, like it's not. part of the agenda. So in a way, I'm almost wanting to say that when people ask, like, what'd you do with this about parenting? It's like, well, that worry is itself another part of this.

Like, how do I, how do I do it? Right. Obviously that could strike some people's ears as sort of irresponsible. It's like, Oh, you're just, you're just sort of thinking about you're finding a way to justify thinking about yourself instead of. Uh, the other people in your family. But that really is the part of it that, that I see having a difference, you know, like when, when I am, when I am doing better at sort of feeling all my feelings and not treating my own life as a sort of terrible slog, uh, to try to fit everything in, much less likely to be falling into what for me is the biggest sort of, um, risk category of, um, the experience of parenting, which is sort of.

somewhere quite near in the back of my mind, but quite near the front of my mind thinking when I'm in a family situation that like, I really ought to be getting more work done. Um, and being able to let that go for the times that are not work times, it requires first and foremost being, having a sort of a saner attitude to the work rather than figuring out how to convey these sane attitudes, uh, to the kids.

That's my argument anyway.

[01:12:36] Matt: Yeah, fantastic. Do you, do you, beyond, um, beyond the work itself and beyond the writing and journaling and so on, do you, do you have any particular. Um, practices or habits or things that you do to actually, you know, to cultivate that, to practice that. For example, a meditation practice or something equivalent.

Is there anything that you personally do to work on that?

[01:13:02] Oliver Burkeman: The closest things that I sort of have to really regular practices in my life are journaling for sure, sort of morning pages type, type daily journaling and, uh, and walking really, um, especially where we are in the countryside and Northern England is just a sort of spectacular place that I'm so happy to be able to go on.

Kind of short strolls. I don't think you need live in a lovely place to benefit from walking But it's it's a real sort of it will be unforgivable To live where we do and not to and not to not to benefit from that I've gone through a lot of iterations of sort of okay now I'm going to meditate every day and okay this and okay that and I've found that eventually these are things that sort of they have to be allowed to Emerge, they have to be things that you find yourself drawn to do.

And then, you know, a few weeks later, you realize that they've become daily habits rather than top down imposed habits. So with meditation, having gone through all sorts of different phases, it is sort of coming back a little bit into my life much more than it, than it did, but it's coming back in that sort of.

You know, I find myself slightly more frequently being drawn to do it rather than I've got a plan to impose it. And I think that is more sustainable in the long term as well. So, um, yeah, I'm more, uh, overall answer is I'm at a stage in all this where actually being willing to be led by intuition a bit more means not having a whole like 10 part. protocol for, um, that I'm going to try to stick to every day.

[01:15:04] Matt: Excellent. Fantastic. Um, I know, I know our time is, uh, our time is coming short. Um, maybe as we start to bring it towards a close, um, one, one thing I just want to say actually upfront as we, as we go to it is just a, just a statement of gratitude. So, um, You know, books, I think as you said before, it's a, books can only do so much, um, and it is not common for, um, a book to meaningfully change somebody's life.

I think your, your, your book, Certainly 4000 Weeks, for many people has, um, changed lives. Maturity changed people's life that we've had guests on this podcast to have recommended unprompted that, that, that book. Um, and it's certainly been very meaningful for me. So, before getting to the wrap, I just want to say thank you.

And, um, I certainly,

[01:15:50] Oliver Burkeman: just going to say thank you and express my gratitude. It always is slightly staggering to me that this could be the case, but it's lovely to hear it. So thank you. Yeah.

[01:16:03] Matt: Oh, very good. Well, I, I very, very seldom explicitly tell people to buy something, but I will explicitly tell everyone listening to please go and buy that book. And also the, also all of his new book, because they are, they're, they're great. Very, very good. Um, uh, Oliver, did you have any, um, any sort of a call to action for the audience?

So besides what I've just said, anything else that you would, anywhere else you would, you would choose to, to send people,

[01:16:26] Oliver Burkeman: I mean, the, the, the stage that I'm at with the new book out means that I, the idea of answering with anything other than please consider buying Meditations for Mortals would be kind of very, um, uh, Anathema to me, but, um, well, it's all, all the information for that and other things that are on my website, oliverburkman.

com and that's where I do, where it's where you can sign up for this every two weeks. ish newsletter, the imperfectionist, uh, which has really become a much, a big part of my life and the sort of interactions with readers and the whole form of newsletter writing has been a huge eye opener. So that's another thing that I do and that's completely free.

So,

[01:17:06] Matt: excellent, I'll, I'll link both of those to the, to the notes here. Um, two, two questions as we bring it to a wrap. Um, the first one actually relates back to 4, 000 weeks. I noticed that on your website, you have a UK version, an American version and a Canadian version and they have very different book covers, um, which I thought was very interesting.

I think one of them has a scene of an ocean. One of them is sort of like abstract. One of them has a sequence of increasing ripening and eventually rotting bananas, um, which I found fascinating. There's some marketing. mechanics behind there that decided these covers will suit the different audiences.

Tell me about those covers. Why, why three different covers and why those covers?

[01:17:48] Oliver Burkeman: it's fascinating. I mean, strictly, as you may know, strictly in book contracts, um, the jacket image is not usually something that the author is given sort of final. Veto rights on that said I have loved all the three covers you mentioned and most of the international covers that 4, 000 weeks ends up on because obviously publishers would much rather that the author liked the cover It helps, you know makes them willing to sort of promote it and all the rest of it So, um, you know these ultimate decisions lie with them the sort of wisdom of the Marketing departments of the different publishers.

So I'm a little bit sort of on the outside of it, but I've been involved and I love all, all the images, even so different as they are. It's fascinating to me because I think, you know, we've talked in this conversation about this idea of whether it's possible to sort of rescue salvage an idea that like being ambitious and productive is an important thing.

legitimate thing in life and also being rested and peaceful is kind of a good definition for an enjoyable state of mind. And I guess, you know, trying to get both of those in a single image is the challenge. And I guess the British one, which for 4, 000 weeks certainly is, um, although this has all happened again in a similar way, actually for the, for meditations for mortals, the Brits so too.

Emphasize the, the, the relaxing end of that. And the Americans sort of emphasize in certain ways, the slightly more, um, action productivity focused end of that, which is, which is just in a sense, that's just like a cultural cliche, right? It's, um, that, that, that, that idea. Um, and I should say that because of how this works, the Australian, New Zealand jackets end up being the British, uh, jacket by and large.

Um,

I sort of love it. And especially in the case of meditations for mortals, which is a, the British cover is a, is a, a diver, uh, just about to hit the water. And it's kind of a, that's a very nice sort of way to balance those two ideas, I think of rest and action. And in the American case, it's done in a more textual way.

It's, it's all in the typefaces and I really love those two. And then the Canadian cover of the rotting bananas is just kind of hilarious. And, um, and maybe it's. Maybe there's a cultural cliche, cliche there too, about the sort of, um, wry humor of that, um, of that image. And I genuinely like sometimes people from, uh, readers in America say they prefer the British cover or vice versa.

And they have very strong feelings about it, but I always just like, I think these are all just kind of different ways of trying to get to that, that synthesizing point, which you can probably never get to perfectly. I certainly don't think I get to it perfectly in the, in the words in between the. The, the covers, but I think they're all just different ways to try to, to try to sort of get approximate that sort of balance between peace of mind and, and action.

[01:21:08] Matt: Yeah, very good. Um, so certainly the rotting bananas is, is what sticks in my head now. It's not the cover that I've got, but having seen it, it's, it's what comes to mind when I hear the name. So whoever made that one did a very good, very good

[01:21:22] Oliver Burkeman: was a penguin Canada, uh, invention that has been used in a few other foreign markets as well. Yeah.

[01:21:27] Matt: Very good. Um, last question. So we've been talking about, um, your books, but we've also talked about books that you have read, um, thinkers that have influenced you. And a question that I love to ask my guests towards, uh, towards the end is, um, book recommendations and in particular, which books have most influenced you, um, personally?

Professionally, personally, you know, what, what comes to mind for you?

[01:21:49] Oliver Burkeman: so just off the top of my head, um, In the field of sort of psychology and the sort of deep stuff we've been talking about here and there in this conversation, or more than here and there, I think the, the books of James Hollis is, uh, uh, ones that I often mention, uh, including a book that was my first entry point into his work and really into Jungian psychology as a whole, which is called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.

Recommend that very much. Don't be too put off by the title. I think as long as you're like, I don't know, late twenties, probably you can decide that it's a good time to read it. It sounds a little bit like you have to be 50 at least or something, but that's, that's, that's not the point. It's a wonderful, deep book about, um, sort of engaging with, you know, Reality internal and external in the, in the fullest way.

Um, in terms of writing, uh, um, and sort of like books that have inspired me. Uh, in writing, I'm a, I'm a huge fan of all the work of, uh, Janet Malcolm, who, um, is a nonfiction writer who wrote, they're not similar to my books in their content at all, or style really, but she's just such an impressive nonfiction writer.

Um, she wrote a book called the journalist and the murderer, which is very famous and a bit notorious and a whole lot of other very short books, but they're incredibly sort of tightly written. Uh, they have a, they're sort of, they're sort of, um, They're not very sort of florid and over the top, but in a very restrained way, they're very funny and really sort of set a model for writing nonfiction about ideas, which I guess is what I aspire to do on some level.

And then finally, just because it's coming to my mind on time management and productivity, uh, there's a book that I discovered a few years ago by a Dutch Zen writer called Paul Lumens and the book is called Time Surfing. I don't know if this has come across your radar. And it's really a book about a completely intuitive way of managing and navigating time.

It's like some of the ideas that we've been discussing here really sort of push to the max in terms of throw away the to do lists and, uh, trust that your intuitions and reality will, will see you right.

[01:24:20] Matt: Yeah, we'll link all of those. And I think I've got some, some good reading ahead of me. Um, Oliver, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for, for joining me. Thank you for your work. And, um, yeah, people really enjoy this.

[01:24:31] Oliver Burkeman: Thank you. I've really, really enjoyed this conversation for real. Thank you.

Neil Johnson is a professor of physics at George Washington University. He heads up the Dynamic Online Networks Lab, which combines modern data science with cross-disciplinary fundamental research to tackle problems such as the spread of online misinformation, and the impact of bad-actor generative AI tools in online battlefields.

Neil is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), was former Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. His published books include Financial Market Complexity, and Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory.

We discuss:

• bad-actor artificial intelligence in online misinformation

• mapping the online information battlefield

• impact of AI in global elections

• challenges of controlling bad-actor AI

• timing and nature of AI-driven threats

• relevance of complexity science and interdisciplinary education

• cross-disciplinary societal issues like climate change and human conflict

… and other topics

Share Paradigm

Subscribe now

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent commentary.

Episode links

• Book: Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory

• Paper: Controlling bad-actor-artificial intelligence activity at scale across online battlefields

• Dynamic Online Networks Lab

• Neil’s Website

Timestamps

Timestamps are for the video episode

00:00 Understanding the AI Battlefield

01:21 Global Context and Online Mapping

02:38 Challenges of Online Bad Actors

03:58 Congressional Hearings and Platform Responsibilities

05:49 The Role of Smaller Platforms

07:10 AI's Impact on Content Creation

08:36 Defining Bad Actor AI

20:18 Ethical Considerations and Access to AI Models

39:35 Distrust Subset and Community Influence

44:51 Navigating Distrust in Online Information

45:13 The Growing Distrust Subset

47:58 Quantum Dots and Vaccine Myths

54:58 The Complexity of Bad Actor AI

56:03 Predicting the Frequency of AI Attacks

58:01 The Red Queen Hypothesis

01:04:17 Endemic AI and Control Strategies

01:09:06 The Role of Complexity Science

01:20:12 Encouraging Interdisciplinary Studies

01:24:41 Book Recommendations and Final Thoughts

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Matt: I'm here with Neil Johnson. Neil, thank you for joining me.

[00:00:02] Neil Johnson: Thank you so much for inviting me, Matt.

[00:00:05] Matt: Uh, Neil, in a recent interview with Elaine Dawson, you said, uh, if humans are in a battle with AI, then there needs to be a deeper understanding of the battlefield. What is the, the battlefield and, and are we in a battle with AI?

[00:00:19] Neil Johnson: Yeah, that's a fantastic question. Of course, what we need to do for any kind of battle, I mean, whoever won a, whoever won a battle without a map of the battlefield. So what does that battlefield look like for AI? So to answer that, you've really got to, I mean, AI is going to be used online. It's going to be used to, it's like a, it's like steroids for all the kind of myths and disinformation that we might see online.

That's the battle battle isn't against, you know, of course we want to understand AI and all those, that's not the battle. The battle is how can we stop bad actors? Using AI to the detriment of society. So to know where and how and when they're going to use AI when you really need to know about that online battlefield.

So that's what I mean by the battlefield. Because it's in the online space that AI will come into its own.

[00:01:21] Matt: Yeah, I guess, um, just in terms of global context for this issue, many people would be aware of The fact that 2024 is a super election year, you know, I think it's something like half of the world's population is in countries where there will be an election this year, if I'm not mistaken.

[00:01:37] Neil Johnson: correct. I mean, it's unbelievable, but that, that's, that's, that's the truth. And so, you know, we're kind of, the world's kind of going into this blind in the sense that, you know, even before AI, we didn't really, you know, if you ask most people, even myself, I mean, when we started our study, we tried to map this out.

But, you know, it's like, well, You know, picture Europe, picture Australia, picture, yeah, I can, I, we all know what the map of the world looks like more or less, you know, I'll get the countries wrong, a lot of people get continents wrong, but we've got a general sense, but if you say to someone, okay, now do the same thing for the online world, oh, and by the way, continents are now different platforms.

And you know, whether they will sit with respect to each other. Most people, I know I would, you know, kind of draw a blank, kind of maybe, you know, imagine some kind of storm clouds of kind of, you know, some good guys in the middle and a whole bunch of bad stuff on the periphery. So that's what we set out to investigate.

[00:02:38] Matt: Yeah, and then there's even this, um, you know, how we think about the structure of this battlefield. I think there's a complete collapsing of distance as well, you know, even if it is geographically bound actors, for example, in the online space, there is no distance between, between individuals and there's quite a different type of battlefield, isn't it?

[00:02:55] Neil Johnson: Correct. And that's the thing that very much like, unlike any kind of battle, you know, kind of battlefield map that you could possibly imagine that everything's connected to everything in principle. And so what does that look like? So when, when my own intuition, when we started trying to map out bad actor activity, and I can talk about what that was, but you know, we're just bad.

What, what do people do when they're doing something bad online? They might, I, I, we kind of imagined that there'd be a whole bunch of good stuff, wholesome stuff going on in the middle. Somehow, like a kind of beehive, you know, there's all the good stuff being made and talked about and nice, sweet honey type stuff.

And then buzzing around that we thought we'd find the kind of the random kind of bad stuff, uh, you know, kind of people, people try to cause trouble, but not no kind of kind of coordination. But what we found was the complete opposite of that.

So what we, what, what, what, when we looked. And this is kind of set up by, I mean, how many, how many of us have seen on the, how many of us have seen kind of footage of, you know, I sit here in D. C. and there are endless kind of congressional hearings of the platforms of what they need to do to, you know, battle bad actors and hate and extremism and far right, you know, Europe's got this problem, and Australia's got a bit of this problem, um, you know, the U.

S. has this problem, um, you know, what they can do, how they should kind of, you know, Manage the problem. And these congressional hearings, well, the most recent one was, was the largest by, by any means, because it had five, five platforms represented, um, you know, not just Facebook and X, which used to be Twitter, but it also had, um, discord, which is a kind of gaming channel used by teens.

And I mean, that's that tick tock and that, you know, that's, that's kind of unusual, but what we found when we mapped it out. And by the way, we'd assume that others had mapped it out, they hadn't, um, was that these platforms are almost like the receivers, the receiving end of actually where the bad stuff is.

I mean, most, it's a curious bit of science because, you know, most kind of, the younger you are, the more you know about it, because, you know, ask any 15 year old, they're using a lot of platforms that most people have never heard of. And certainly Congress has never heard of, because they never invite them to these discussions.

And they're key, because they provide the kind of glue that holds together, that provides the kind of strength and make, make, make the bad actor activity so, so robust. So, all of these issues about, oh, Facebook, you need to do more. Facebook replies, we are doing more. How can they both be right? Well, it turns out they're both right and they're both wrong because all Facebook is seeing is the kind of end result of this incredibly interconnected network of smaller, of many, many smaller platforms, communities, bad acts of communities on these many, many smaller platforms that many of us have never heard, heard of.

They interlink with each other and that gives it a kind of web. And then they pump stuff out to the main platforms. And so Facebook's forever playing this kind of whack a mole game where they're kind of knocking stuff off. And then it really, it's like, It's like, you know, imagine you live in a neighborhood where there's a kind of bug problem, infestation problem.

Yeah, there is definitely. Here in DC we've got, we've got mice and rats all over the place here. So imagine, you know, uh, you've got m mice coming in or rats coming in, and you know, first thing you do is blame the neighbors. Well, the thing is, as you've said online, everyone's a neighbor, so you don't know where that's coming from.

If you don't know a map of the neighborhood. It's exactly the same thing for the map of the online space. You need to know how it's plumbed together, how it's wired together in order to do something about it.

[00:07:09] Matt: Yeah. And, uh, and then I guess like on top of all that, we have the increasing role of, of AI acting in this, within this map where, um, you know, every, everybody knows everyone listening will know that AI can't generated content is proliferating, um, uh, in a really unbelievable way. I think the last I looked, 20, uh, states in the U S had passed.

regulations against things like deep fakes within elections. Um, I think on the federal level, this remains a bit stalled. No one really knows how to approach this problem. Um, but certainly it's something that you've, you've, Addressed in a fairly head on way in a recent paper on this topic, controlling bad actor artificial intelligence activity at scale across online battlefields.

So maybe we can turn to that paper.

[00:07:56] Neil Johnson: Yeah, sure. Yeah. We, I mean, and we, we, we were literally, we were thinking this was a year ago that we, um, put this first online and we were thinking, you know, around that time, there weren't so many people talking about the latest, you know, the kind of the latest kind of chat. GPT or the GPT version wasn't so great that everyone was thinking that it was an immediate threat.

And so we just, we, we literally just asked the simple question of, you know, where, what, what, what, what kind of bad actor AI will appear? Where will it appear? When? And what might be done to control it?

[00:08:36] Matt: I mean maybe even taking a step back in terms of defining what even is bad actor. bad actor AI? Because this is a, this is a little bit of a tricky question. Um, and I would even imagine, um, that there would be disagreement between people on any particular case because, you know, for example, uh, an AI that promotes a particular political view by some might be seen as a bad actor if they don't agree with that view.

Whereas others who do agree with that view might not define it as a bad actor. You know, it's just promoting something that they sort of believe in. How do you even think about. Defining what bad actor AI even is.

[00:09:12] Neil Johnson: Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And you know, it's a little bit like. The discussion of, um, you know, what's misinformation and what's disinformation, um, even back to the idea of, you know, kind of defining terms like, I mean, if it was, you know, a real world, violent terrorist versus freedom fighter versus all of these things, these definitions are really hard, but the, but what we take it, we take a very simple view.

It's, there, there are, when AI appeared, it was like when COVID appeared. There were already communities online that were kind of beyond the just kind of distrust scale of we don't quite trust what you know, the kind of health authorities are telling us. Um, they were, they were beyond that and they were in a kind of state of what we are being told is wrong.

And I'm going to go and tell you what's right now. Why is that? That's not a bad actor necessarily. I mean, actually a lot of, you know, parenting groups do that online because they're trying to do the best thing for their kids. Um, so that itself is not bad, bad actor. Taking that further, there are communities that purposely look to stir up things.

They bring in racism, they bring in, you know, and misogynistic content and they, they push towards the kind of hate and extremism area. And that is what we define. So when we do our studies and we collect data. We collect data on communities that if the Department of Justice, um, were looking at them would say they have used hate speech or they have used, um, um, they have done, they've, they've carried out and they're inciting extremism.

And so those are fairly clear in the law, at least in the U. S. Um, and so once that content of their community hits that, okay, slightly fuzzy bar, but once it gets up there, we, we, that's what we call a bad actor community. And you might think those communities might just focus on, as I said, racism, misogyny, misogynistic content, these kinds of things.

But if they're stirring things up and again, maybe, maybe, maybe some of them think they're doing right. Maybe they do, but it's certainly hate speech and extreme, inciting extremism, they need to create content. And so they are the ones, and we've already seen it starting to happen, that are going to run to a tool like AI to generate content and spread it more widely.

And the curious thing is, the interesting thing, again, one might think AI, I'm thinking of the latest GPT, etc. They only need some simple version of it to actually 24 7 create content that is, by all the definitions I've just said, or at least the kind of parameters, counts as AI produced by a bad actor community, so therefore bad actor AI.

[00:12:41] Matt: Well let's, let's dig into that final point then. So again, in the paper you address four very important questions. What kind of bad actor AI will happen? Um, where will it happen? When will it happen? And what we can do about it? I think on the question of what kind of bad actor AI we will see, Um, I thought that last point was really interesting, you know, there is, I feel like there is this idea in the general public that the most damage will come from very powerful models, like for example, LLMs.

like GPT 4 and higher, because the content will be extremely convincing, you know, it will be very sophisticated. Um, but actually in the, in the paper, you've claimed that more basic tools like GPT 2, um, rather than more sophisticated ones are probably more likely to, to cause a lot of the damage. Um, let's dig into that claim.

So what is the basis for, for this insight?

[00:13:35] Neil Johnson: it's a fascinating, Um, issue because, um, it turns out that things like GPT 2, now, people may or may not know this, you know, those things can run on a laptop. They can even run, I think now, on your cell phone, and they have no filters in the sense that, you know, they were early versions.

All the latest ones, you know, I'm sure OpenAI and all the other companies, they say that they're putting on all these filters, so that if you ask it. a question about something that pushes towards hate, extremism, you know, kind of stirring up trouble, basically. And then again, we have to get into the lines cause I'm not sure what filters, but you could just try it out yourself.

It will come back with, I don't have opinions or beliefs on that or something else. You give that to GPT 2 and it will tell you. Now, GPT 2, as we all know, is only trained on a small corpus of content, and it's basically like a really, really early version, and so it's not very good, you know, it will never write a literary classic.

But online content isn't literary classics, as anyone knows. I mean, it has spelling mistakes, it has repetition. I mean, that's what people put online when they're putting stuff online. And so GPT 2, it turns out, as we showed in the paper, it's very good at just producing content that looks good. Like it's human, online human content.

So, basically, running on my laptop or on a phone, GPT 2, I could 24 7 pump into any community that I'm linked into this kind of content. And it would be very hard to tell the difference between that, you know, long gone are the days of the bot, the Russian, the supposed Russian bot of 2016, just repeating stuff.

Trump is good. Trump is good. Trump is bad. Trump is bad. Um, they've gone. Those days have gone. Easy to produce kind of short text that looks like it could have come from anyone, you know, kind of standing at a bus stop and pumping this stuff out

[00:15:58] Matt: Yeah. Do you think, um, I mean, So, if you look at the world in current state, I think you can say, you know, these tools like GPT 2, very basic, but can produce content that is, it seems like it's human generated and, um, you know, it's not very easily detectable yet, um, but presumably we will get better at detecting these things and I don't know how.

There might be things that a human eye can't, that can't detect that um, online filters will be able to and I, I mean, I would imagine that in the limit, um, you know, our, our detection methodology would be better at identifying things that were produced by less sophisticated models and, um, less effective against more sophisticated ones.

How, um, you know, what is your, what is your sense as to, um, you know, how. Well, we will be able to sort of spot and correct and sort of like filter down the track these more, um, basic tools or, or have we reached a point where it is so human, uh, like that, that that's already kind of an impossible task.

[00:17:03] Neil Johnson: I'll tell you a quick story. So, um, My wife actually teaches in a social science and she and a lot of the other faculty in her institution have realized that actually the hardest essays to grade now are the kind of B minus ones because you can't tell if it was done by a student at 1 a.

m. in the morning, you know, five hours before the deadline. Or some basic GPT. Um, it's the more sophisticated ones where you're showing kind of critical thinking, or there's some kind of logical steps, which are the easier ones. Ah, yeah, there's no way that that could be done. I mean, that would be amazing if that was done by a machine.

It's the more kind of mundane stuff. Which is much easier for a machine to mimic a human. And online, a lot of the harms we're worried about, could be misinformation, could be misinformation about vaccine, could be misinformation about mpox. That's the latest stuff we're seeing, of course. Um, you know, that's very mediocre kind of sentences.

Mpox will come, you know, it comes from this, and it will cause you that, and et cetera, et cetera. Doesn't, doesn't need to be in a sentence, doesn't need to be a sophisticated.

[00:18:26] Matt: And I guess there's even compounded by the issue that, I mean, it doesn't even have to be false statements and misleading statements in and of themselves. It can even just be skewing the distribution of what's out there. You know, for example, the mpox one, you could fill the internet all day with correct statements and true facts about, about this, um, about this particular phenomenon.

Um, and it's actually just the act of sort of amplifying the volume that, that leads to, um, sort of negative impacts as well. Um, and you certainly don't need a very sophisticated model to do that.

[00:19:00] Neil Johnson: Matt, I just lost you there. I don't know what

[00:19:03] Matt: You're back.

[00:19:04] Neil Johnson: We have, yeah, yeah, yeah, we have a thunderstorm here. I'm not quite sure what happened there. Or, or, conspiracy theory would say that somebody was

[00:19:14] Matt: But, you know, it's funny, it's funny you say that. I've had several conversations about these sorts of topics, and in those conversations, all of them, and in only those conversations have I

[00:19:24] Neil Johnson: ha

[00:19:25] Matt: issues.

[00:19:27] Neil Johnson: That proves it!

[00:19:28] Matt: That proves it.

[00:19:30] Neil Johnson: Ha ha!

[00:19:31] Matt: The question I was asking was, Um, or maybe it was, it was more of a, more of a point, you know, uh, it, it is one thing to, to ask whether we can detect, um, you know, if there is bad actor information being shared. But I mean, one of, one of the other issues is that it doesn't even need to be false information.

It can just be an amplification, um, you know, the OCH example. So, um, one could post true statements, facts all day about this thing, and just by ramping up the volume. Um, that could already have deleterious effects. And certainly you don't need anything very sophisticated or powerful. You don't even need a large language model, um, to, to do that.

[00:20:12] Neil Johnson: you're absolutely right. I completely agree with that.

[00:20:18] Matt: um, I mean, there is a sort of, it may be a rabbit hole question, but an ethical consideration here about the extent to which, Individuals should be allowed to access these models, even the most basic ones. Um, to, to take an analogous example, if you look at actual weapons, you know, nobody would argue that individuals should not be, have the right to bear bazookas or nuclear weapons.

That's, that's obvious to everyone. Down the, the sort of scale, depending on where you are, the right to bear handguns, um, It's a different matter and it brings in questions of individual liberty, liberty, and so on. But I think people do still kind of draw the line somewhere on the spectrum of utility and danger, and that is certainly a factor.

Um, and I guess with, with tools such as these Large language models, I feel like there was a similar dynamic at play, you know, and extremely, extremely think about the most powerful large language model that has ever been created or that will be created in the next 50 years. I think people find it obvious that no, that shouldn't be any individual.

off the street should not have access to that by default. But then there is this question, you know, where does one draw the line? Is this a GPT 2? Is it a GPT 6? Do you have any views as to how to think about this problem as who should be able to access? these various, uh, these various tools.

[00:21:41] Neil Johnson: Um, I, I think that, um, again, my concern, my major concern is with the mediocre models. Um, because there are even, you know, there are versions of GPT 2 that are trained on hate speech that are just trained on hate speech and they're commercially available online.

Unbelievably. Um, so although all the attention is being placed on, you know, what's the, it's, it reminds me a little bit of. The um, kind of a Cold War thing, you know, you've got to have, who's got the biggest missile? Well, you know, when it came to the war in Iraq, it turns out that garage openers were the key, because they were the ones that triggered IEDs.

And the US and the coalition forces had no kind of nothing against that. They had to go and kind of create garage opening blockers, um, and other things. And even though they didn't work. And so it's kind of like the simplest technology can actually be when it's used at scale. So to give an idea of scale, I didn't give an idea of scale, but just to give an idea of scale.

I said. In these communities, see, one of these Bad Axe communities, there's about, there's about a hundred thousand people in each of them. And these people can be from anywhere in the world, and that's part of the power of it. You know, it can be someone in Europe, someone in the US, someone in wherever. Um, A hundred thousand per community.

And then what we found is that on each platform, there's about a thousand of these communities that are important, in the sense that they're, they really are bad actor communities that connect to each other. And so they create the web. So you've got to, Doing the math in my head, a thousand of a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand times a hundred thousand is a hundred million.

There are 10 platforms. Actually, there's many more than 10 platforms, but let's just take a hundred million. A hundred million times 10 is a billion. And so we're, even if all those people were not themselves, you know, kind of doing bad stuff, there you've got a billion or more people across the planet who are They're immediately exposed to the power at, and so these mediocre tools, the more mediocre tools at scale, of course, a large, you know, like the most, you know, the latest version, of course, could be, but the latest version needs to run on some other server because I haven't got control of that server and they can block that.

But a more mediocre one, like the garage hat opener, I can hold that in my hand, so can an insurgent. And they don't need to connect to some base station or anything. That's, that's the power there. So I think we often get, um, kind of carried away with the science of it. You know, what's the most powerful scientifically?

doesn't necessarily mean the most dangerous for society. It, there's a little bit of a, a, a, a trade off there with scales.

[00:24:54] Matt: Yeah. And, uh, and I mean that, that ties in very nicely into the subsequent question you answer, uh, discuss and answer in, in the paper, which is where will it happen? And, you know, here again, I think there is a natural assumption that it is the very largest platforms. That would be the place, um, you know, because people congregate there.

There is a lot of people on there. It's YouTubes of the world where this will be most impactful, um, and therefore where most attention should be invested in controlling bad actor AI and its impacts. Um, then almost counterintuitively at first, your, your, your work suggests actually, this is maybe not the case.

And, um, and that smaller platforms might have a very substantial role to play. in the impacts of bad actor AI. Um, I mean, I'll put it to you. Why is it that smaller platforms would play such a critical role in your view?

[00:25:51] Neil Johnson: Yeah, I mean, first of all, there's a lot of them and, um, and that's now includes, it now includes, um, platforms that run on blockchain. So you can never actually shut down their content because it's stored there forever. And it doesn't actually exist on any particular one server. So if I take lots of individuals.

Again, it's almost like an insurgency, lots of individuals that are, are, are strongly connected to each other. Suddenly, I've got something that's, first of all, it's decentralized, so I've got no one thing that I could take out that would then make the whole network fall apart. So it has this kind of decentralized strength.

And together they're actually bigger than any one of the other individual platforms in, in, in terms of their connectivity into the general public. So, you know, Facebook has a certain, certainly it has a huge audience. Not among 16 year olds, you know, 16 year olds are using something else. 16 year olds in a couple of years times, couple of years time will be voters.

So, as this goes forward to future elections, these elections, future elections, people growing up on these other platforms, using these other platforms, they're already being exposed to this material. And so, getting Facebook in front of Congress is great if you want to stop your grandmother or grandfather seeing wrong information.

But if you want the next wave of voters to stop seeing it, you've got to do something else.

[00:27:30] Matt: Yeah. And it, I mean, it also just brings up the question of, um, you know, a lot of policy decisions have contemplated ideas like breaking up large platforms. Um, you know, they're too large, too much power, they're posed too much of a risk. Um, and again, this, this might just be a consequence of how we think.

In these sort of geographical terms, and I'm not sure what it is, but, um, networks are different, and, um, it, it, it, if, if what you're saying is true, there are some ways in which it might be even the wrong decision and, and sort of more dangerous to break up large platforms into many, many smaller fragments.

[00:28:08] Neil Johnson: Correct. Imagine you drop a, a glass. Done it many times in the kitchen. If it's, you know, one of those glasses that, I can't remember if it's the cheap ones or the expensive ones, but anyway, one of the, one set of only break into a couple of pieces. Yeah, it's a pain, but you can pick them up. They're dangerous, but you can pick them up.

You can see them and you can pick them up. Now imagine the other ones that shatter. into a million tiny pieces. No one of those pieces on its own is going to really hurt you badly. But you take all of those and leave them around and that is going to create a problem. All those shattered shards on on the ground.

Now you try and pick them up. How long is that going to take? Shard by shard instead of picking up big pieces. Okay, it may be hard to fight one big piece, but at least you know where it is. You can surround it in some way and you can remove it. But now you're picking up thousands and thousands of small pieces.

That's the analogy for what would happen if you start to break. I mean, we already see it now with those small communities. Um, you know, they're always looking, but one has to remember those, those, I'm sorry, small platforms. One has to remember that Bad Axe communities, that why, why would they make a noise?

Well, they always want new recruits. They always want to spread their message. So they're public, they're quite, they're, they're secret, but hiding in plain sight, as it were. They, they, they're putting out their message. And so, you know, if you've got, you've got, you've got, Platforms with lots of communities in them, and that the platforms are small, but they're interconnected with each other, which is, they do that so that they can attract more recruits.

That is a substantial thing to try and beat. And even in the kind of military sense, let's face it, even the U. S. is not very good at beating delocalized, decentralized opponents. They're very good at standing off with some big piece of glass, but not with thousands and thousands of little pieces where you can't even decide what the head is.

[00:30:18] Matt: yeah. I do wonder actually if this plays into, if there's this almost a bit of a bias here that plays into how discussions on these topics are done. Um, you know, if, um, you look at the discussions that have been just out there, they do tend to make large platform assumptions. Um, again, I think on the one hand, it's just because this is initially the natural thing to do, but I wonder if, if another part of it is also just because the other problem is so difficult to understand.

Um, you We, we, I guess we don't really know even what to, how to approach, you know, hundreds of millions of bad actors versus one, one large platform with many bad actors. Um, is, is that your, your sense? And I mean, I guess more general question, what is it that has stopped others from thinking about the problem in, in this way and focusing more on the many fragments of small, um, platforms and bad actors versus the larger ones?

[00:31:15] Neil Johnson: Yeah, nobody has a map. Nobody has a map of what that looks like. And we get back to our initial discussion. I ask, you know, if you think to yourself, well, what does the internet look like? Now, maybe we're imagining lots of little things connected together and, but only because that's what we found when we, when we mapped it out.

So it's that lack of clarity. And I'm, I'm always amazed by this because. You know, could you imagine going to, uh, you know, a doctor and saying, well, you know, I've got a, my wrist hurts or something like this, or I've got a pain in my side. And the doctor kind of just guessing, no, you expect the doctor or the specialist to know how the pieces of the body are connected together, even though they, you know, you can't see them and nor can they, but there's some knowledge, somebody has mapped it out.

So that they can tell, well, if I do this, it might have an impact on this, which may impact this, you know, they, they, they can see that, but guessing that went, you know, centuries ago, thank goodness. So we expected people to have mapped this out, but it turns out they haven't. And the reason is that there are many reasons.

Um, first of all, it's actually really hard. You know, platforms don't just turn around and say, Hey, Oh, yeah, we'll give you our information. They don't want to know, you know, from Facebook down. Um, and maybe quite rightly, it's like turning up at, you know, Coca Cola and saying, give me in the list of all your, um, you know, your customers.

And they're not going to do that. Um, so getting information is hard. That's why we focus on the communities and not the individuals. These communities of 100, 000 people, because actually it's been shown, first of all, then we're not running into privacy issues, but second of all, it's been shown that, um, that's where trust develops, you know, all of us humans, we like to be in communities, we like to be in groups, and online communities, as it showed you in COVID, et cetera, people turn to their online communities, good people and people trying to do bad things, turn to the online community for kind of support, My favorite example is there's a, like, one of the first studies showing trust in communities is a group, you know, looking at the community of, they call them SADs, stay at home dads, who on Twitter, and this illustrates the problem with something like just looking at Twitter, which a lot of people do.

In, in academic work, because it used to be available. Um, Twitter, you go on, the dad goes on and says, yeah, I've changed the nappy. I've changed the diaper and the, you know, I'm, I'm a star. And then in Facebook, they're in their community saying, well, you know, I'm worried about this. I'm worried about the relationship side.

So the concerns. are within these communities, the shout out announcements are on Twitter. So unless we unravel or map out how those communities trust. I mean, we know that they trust everyone in there. Who are they linking to? Who are they talking to and who are they listening to? So in this study that we're talking about now.

We know that the places, the communities that will start to use AI first are the ones that want to get out a message for good or for bad reasons. And those communities sprung into life early in COVID. The same communities tend to spring into life, whatever the crisis is, and they will be the ones that use AI.

Um, for getting their message out and so early in our, our, our look at the communities that were concerned about COVID, they tend to be less, they're not really hate communities, not extremism communities, but they're certainly things like parenting communities. They sprang into action early, connecting to each other and connecting to, well, what other communities are talking about this new unknown disease.

Who were those other communities? The bad actor communities. They were saying, oh yeah, this was a Chinese, you know, everyone Asian has created this, a, you know, somehow this is a disease against, um, you know, it's going to take out, um, you know, people of colour, it's going to, I mean, all of those insightful racist things started immediately that the, that the rumours started about a disease coming out of China.

[00:36:00] Matt: Yeah, the, um, the COVID example is really interesting because, um, it brings up this, this question, you know, in, in mapping the online battlefield, um, this is almost like a sort of Damocles type thing where it is on the one hand, extremely useful for good actors to, to understand what this looks like because it gives us some control, but it is also very dangerous knowledge.

Um, and we certainly wouldn't want this information about the structure of all these online spaces to be. Again, openly available. The reason COVID reminded me of this is because, again, there was a lot of talk of gain of function research and there's an argument that gain of function research is extremely important because it is what's going to enable us, arm us with the knowledge to protect ourselves against future diseases and so on.

But at the same time, it also arms us with dangerous knowledge and has its own sort of dangerous consequences if it goes wrong. And so there's sort of a divide between people as to, you know, they think, should we do this? Shouldn't we? And I would imagine there's similar dynamics at play in mapping these online spaces, their questions of Who should get access to this information?

You know, there's geopolitical considerations, there are institutional considerations. How do you see us like rallying together to, to both develop this, uh, this accurate, um, map of these online spaces, but also doing it in a safe way, in a way that doesn't expose us to potentially very dangerous negative consequences of having the sensitive information out there available and available to bad actors.

[00:37:33] Neil Johnson: that is absolutely a fantastic question. In our research, we never get into the details of the, you know, who's in what communities, etc. Um, just it's more the kind of. It's like when water comes to the boil, looking at the bubbles and how close they are to each other, rather than what are the atoms inside each of those bubbles.

We never do that. And actually, to know when something's boiling, you just need to know about the bubbles. So, you know, all of our research, just to reassure everybody, all of our research is absolutely anonymous. Um, surrounding, surrounding that, but you raise a fantastic point because in the end it becomes a tool like all things, like a, like a car that can be used for good and bad.

And so one would hope, we hope our goal is that this will at some stage open up a dialogue, maybe in the next congressional hearing, who knows. Where, instead of having five people on a table staring at the congre con you know, um, members of congress, there's a great big picture in the background of the map.

And you know, they can close it and put it, you know, turn off the TV cameras or whatever, but to have the discussions with that in the background, because, you know, how else are you going to have the discussion? It's always otherwise rhetorical. Do more. We are doing more.

[00:39:02] Matt: No, I think, I mean, that's a, that's a fantastic idea. Um, I guess, uh, from a, from a personal perspective, a question that comes to mind then is like, you know, where, where do I fit into this map? And am I, am I, am I at risk? Am I vulnerable? Um, I do think a lot of people, are aware of these issues and they try to avoid these communities.

Um, but I found an interesting point that you brought up in the paper was this idea of a distrust subset, um, which is almost something like, feels like somewhat of a slippery slope into a quite a vulnerable community. Um, what, what is the subset?

[00:39:37] Neil Johnson: Yeah, this is, um, so if we imagine, you know, everybody talks about bad actors and the rest of us that are presumably good, of course it's a spectrum, like a colour rainbow spectrum. Um, if we talk about communities that promote Uh, hate that actually use hate speech and extremism, obviously, they're at one end of the spectrum.

If we talk about communities that are focused on, you know, something absolutely wholesome, that's the other end of the spectrum. But in between, there are, there is And this is where COVID plays a role here. There are a lot of active communities that kind of, with, with people and anybody who wants to know, you know, they want to know, they want to share things, they've got a common interest, they want to know about things.

Um, and you know, it can often be communities where people share Because they've got someone in the family with a particular disease or the, um, like I mentioned, parenting communities, they're absolutely by the way. an incredible source of influence. And, you know, they, of course, because parents have, usually parents above them and kids below them.

And so they actually tap into a lot of, and they want to know. And so that's what we call, there's a, there's a, there's a subset of them that we call the distrust subset, which were the communities That as soon as official information was coming in about COVID, they distrusted it. Now, were they being bad?

No, they're on this spectrum. They're not bad actors. They're But they're also not just talking about, um, you know, benign things. They're, they are distrusting what they're told about vaccines. I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying that there's an element of distrust in there.

They want to do what's good for them. And, I mean, for their kids. They're trying to, um, um, uh, hey, all of science is not correct. Science keeps correcting itself, et cetera. They're trying to pick up on the latest things in science and they're trying to share information. And let's face it, in COVID, early COVID, there was no information coming out from the science community.

So they were filling that void. But it was, it turned into distrust of, say, public health, uh, entities, particularly in the, in the US, um, but UK, Europe, and in Australia, there were a lot of those communities and they connected to each other. So, for example, there was a. Very active community in Canada, in Saskatchewan, Canada, connected directly into a community in Australia, connected directly into one in the UK, connected directly into one in the middle of Ohio, and they would share information and they would share, it turned into a kind of distrust of what they were being told, um, and that is a little bit of that slippery slope then.

That you mentioned because we only happen. I'm not saying they were, but you only have to go a little bit further down that spectrum and you start to get to communities that were worried about and save the Children. What's happening with the children? We've got to protect the children. Suddenly you hit the QAnon movement in the, in the US.

Saving the children also emerged in the UK riots a few weeks ago. If you look online, which we have been doing, There's a lot of activity around because they were apparently kicked off by, they were kicked off by, um, you know, stabbing of some, um, children, tragic, but it kicked off a lot of the immigration, far right, um, extremism and those communities started to, so it's exactly as you said, there is this.

Slippery slope. Communities. I mean, take a group of three or four people sitting around in a, in a, I mean, we've all been there. Um, you know, some, some, sometimes the conversations can get off track. Usually when you're in a, in a room doing that, you, somebody's got to go home or the Uber arrives or, you know, something.

Or you get fed up and you need to go. Doesn't happen online. Nobody goes. They just keep coming back. And so those communities can find their narratives dragged down. And then to the point, if you've got now AI adding into this, the AI is linking in and getting in, for example, this is what people really have to be careful of under posts in communities, look at the replies and the comments, because that's where a lot of times it can start to get down that slope.

[00:44:36] Matt: Yeah, I mean, I have personal experience with that if you go and look at the some of the comments on various YouTube videos that I've got. I mean, we would often, we're talking about, um, topics that are kind of getting towards the frontiers of, of, you know, scientific knowledge and sometimes miss. toying with ideas that may be overstepping the mark.

Um, you've got to act in that space. And, and certainly, um, I would say at least 10 percent of the comments that come through tend to be pulling towards this, uh, this distrust subset.

[00:45:07] Neil Johnson: Same, same with my emails. Same with my emails Matt.

[00:45:11] Matt: it's, uh, it's quite something. Um, I mean, one thing that I think about and worry about is I feel like the distrust subset is becoming I mean, the word subset makes us think of something that's relatively small, but I feel like the subset is growing and it's becoming maybe a fairly large proportion of all communities out there.

And at some point I feel like, and this might be happening already, that our default relationship with online content is one of distrust. Um, you know, if you had to ask me 10 years ago to go and fact check something. I would have had no issues with googling it and reading some articles and that would have answered it for me.

Today, uh, if I'm asked to do the same thing, um, I actually don't, I don't, I don't trust this process and I think there was a recent paper in Nature, um, from last year by Kevin Aslett and some colleagues that actually said researching, fact checking online by my sort of Googling um, Um, uh, false statements, it can actually reinforce the wrong view because of how these algorithms work and what you'll be shown and what's then boosted.

And so actually fact checking could be the exact wrong thing to do. Um, and so in a space like that, it feels to me, okay, well this distrust subset, um, or the, or the default position to distrust online information is very large. How do you, how do you think about that? And like, do you, do you have a sense as to, you know, just currently how big this, um, distrust subset is?

Okay. Thanks.

[00:46:44] Neil Johnson: you're absolutely right. I actually think it's, um,

I think it's quite large. Um, and it's not so much that it's, there's a lot of people putting stuff out all the time. It's that they are, those communities that are putting stuff out are linked to the huge mainstream who usually are talking about other things.

Sport. You know, where they go on holidays, vacations, et cetera, like that. But they're still getting comments, replies, people coming in, material coming into them. And so when's the next crisis? I mean, how many of us had mentioned the word vaccine, for example, before COVID? I don't think I'd said that word, you know, maybe when one of the kids needed a vaccine, but none, that was it.

And yet they were ready. You know, they were kind of ready, already kind of primed with Well, with this or not. And so, yeah, I think this is actually a very large subset. Sometimes for good reason. I mean, it doesn't, it amazed me that, let me start by saying there are no microchips in vaccines. Okay. There are no microchips.

It turns out though, I did my PhD on quantum dots, which are tiny little semiconductors that could be used for that kind of atomic levels in a couple of levels. You can use them to have transitions and therefore detect them basically. And it turns out that In December 2019, which is when the really that was the start of COVID, even though it didn't have a name, and it wasn't a pandemic in 2019 December in science, I think science, translational medicine, I think a group at MIT.

put out an amazing piece of science, I have to say, an amazing piece of science, where they injected into rats, rats, mice, um, a liquid containing these quantum dots, and then showed that you could actually pick up the, the resonance. And I think it was Scientific American had a article, one of, one of the, um, you know, kind of reporting the science said, Oh, you know, this could be great for, you know, we could use it for kids to detect whether they've had certain vaccines and, and, um, you know, wouldn't that be amazing.

Well, yeah, it sounds amazing, but run forward a few months and it sounds terrible because suddenly you've got the idea that, yeah, so quantum dots could go into vaccines. Doesn't mean they are. It just means that there's a scientific capability. And also, unfortunately, talk about, you know, kind of series of unfortunate events.

That work was funded by the Gates Foundation. And of course, Bill Gates is a, is a, is a target for this and the Chinese National Science Foundation. And so when these communities That we call the distrust subset. We're picking up on things and then being told, for example, I've got a, um, you know, I just keep it to the side a screenshot of the BBC trying to say to people, that's ridiculous.

And they showed a, um, a syringe with some huge printed old circuit board, you know, basically saying that how could you get that into a circuit board? Well, you can't, but that wasn't the point of the science. So the distrust communities, some of these knew about this, the, the, the work of the MIT group. And so when they were being told, and when, when they were getting the message, Oh, don't be silly because you can't put a printed circuit board into a vaccine.

It made them distrust even more. The kind of official, you know, that's what they think of us. We're, we're onto something. And once you get a group of people thinking they're onto something, You can find online other groups that think they're on to something as well. And it doesn't have to be flat earth people.

It can be some people are thinking, you know, um, you know, kind of particular types of organic food, climate change, some, suddenly all these other topics are now causes for doubt. So this is, there needs to be a science of this at scale. I mean, that's what we're trying to contribute to for that reason.

[00:51:29] Matt: I mean, when you, when one realizes just how many of these communities, um, uh, there are in their scale of them and how many people do find themselves in these communities, I guess the one reaction is just to think it's very unfortunate for those people, but there is the other reaction that then says, okay, well, if this is really happening at such scale, how do I personally know?

that what I'm seeing is reliable? How do I know that I'm not in one of these communities? And it becomes, it's, I mean, I would say currently majority of people probably get the majority of the information from online sources and a very large number of people get news from social media. Um, and so we'd love to ask you like, as an individual, how you think about Protecting yourself from finding yourself in these sorts of, um, information environments that could maybe end up misleading you.

Mmm.

[00:52:26] Neil Johnson: is the holy grail kind of question. How come? And a lot of people have tried to think, Oh, well, it's a, it's like a virus, this thing of, uh, and therefore I'll just kind of vaccinate people against, um, misinformation and disinformation and mal influence, but it doesn't work like that. I mean, we all have probably in our family somewhere, someone that kind of turns up and says, Oh, I read this.

And, you know, they, over here, I don't know why they do it, but they call him a kind of Uncle John, you know, at the Thanksgiving table, suddenly turns up and spouts out something that they've read. And others say, Oh yeah, that goes along with something else that I read. Of course, they're probably reading the same thing or something.

And so, but I think, you know, in that context, so we're all used to hearing that. So, we, we have actually got our own kind of defenses over the years. I'm sure we don't always believe our Uncle John on those things. And so, um, I think it's just that, that same Um, Skepticism that we might bring to being told by goodness knows how many times I've heard from UK governments over the years saying this is true and it turns out not to be true.

So, you know, that kind of skepticism that we'd hold from that, it doesn't mean I can go and then go and fact check it. I don't know what it is. I'm just skeptical. Um, we can be skeptical about skepticism in some sense. Um, so yet then the question is, well, where does the truth come from? Yeah. Okay. Um, now we're, you know, now we're getting into difficult territory.

Um, again, I get to the back to the thing, if you don't know where it's coming from. You know, we may know it comes from Uncle John because they walk through the door and say it, but online, I'm not actually sure where it's coming from, but I know it's in a community that I trust on other things. So why wouldn't I trust it?

Uncle John, I only see him once a year, so I don't really trust him, but people in my community, I've, I've trusted in other things. So how am I not going to trust them? That is a tricky one. That's more of the, I mean, that's almost, I mean, that, that is the conversation that should be. Being being had, but as a prelude to that, you need the map.

[00:54:45] Matt: mean, that could certainly open up a very, very large discussion that is its own conversation. So, perhaps not digging too much more into, into that particular line of thought. And the third, the third question addressed in your paper is the question of when it will happen, um, and the frequency with which it will, it will happen and we'll see these bad actor attacks.

Um, this is very interesting because I think a misconception, again, that people have is that because all of this is so new, it's so speculative, uh, conversations around bad actor AI, tend to be quite qualitative. And, um, I think there's an assumption that we don't really have the tools to say anything very concrete and, um, quantitative about future predictions.

So for example, on the frequency of bad actor AI attacks. Um, and actually this is really interesting. It's a classic complexity science approach where you, you look at the situation at a slightly different level and. actually do make some very concrete predictions. Um, and so I'd love to turn to that question, um, and even look at some of the methodology behind, um, sort of predicting the, the frequency in the future of these bad actor attacks.

Uh, maybe let's start with the prediction itself though. Um, what, what does the paper say about the, the expected frequency of these attacks in the future?

[00:56:08] Neil Johnson: Yeah, we applied some, and it's very interesting, the science behind it that we built on. Um, but we made the prediction. So when we put this paper online in the middle of or late summer last year, we, you know, the kind of, we did this triangulation that I can talk about in a moment, and we pretty much made that, we pretty, we worked out that it would be, you know, very broadly around middle of.

And it's very interesting that, um, uh, both, uh, open AI in particular have come out and said that they've uncovered use of, um, their AI tools by, um, foreign actor, what they, you know, what the US would call foreign actor, foreign influence, um, state influence from outside. Um, using AI tools, um, As of summer 2024, they've just come out with that.

There are many various articles in the news about that, um, finding by open AI use of their top net technology for, um, their, their AI technology by bad actors. So, you know, okay, so how did we do that? So the kind of story starts with that with, um, I think it was someone who was observing, um, how, I think it was post office, um, workers, how quickly they did tasks, almost like 100, nearly 100 years ago.

Um, but they, how quickly they did tasks. So they do a task and then they repeat it. And every time they repeated it, they got quicker. And they, this was called a kind of learning curve. You know, it's a simple thing, kind of, you know, if you do something first time, it takes you a while, second time, less time, et cetera.

Okay. Now imagine you're doing that with an opponent stopping you. Now it gets into the idea that, and this is where we lent on the idea of a red queen. So, you know, as in, you know, kind of Alice in Wonderland, you know, the red queen kind of runs on the spot just to keep up. So now imagine the red queen is red, usually the color associated with the bad actor.

So red can pull ahead. Of the opponent, which we called blue. It doesn't matter. But anyway, so there's a relative Advance relative distance that red has, and that's an advantage over blue instantaneously. So this is beyond the kind of Alice in Wonderland, where the Red Queen was just on one one spot, just staying there to keep up.

So now Red Queen is pulling ahead. Bad actor pulling ahead, so we say that the distance that they pull ahead is, it's like their relative advantage, and so that will be, um, kind of the rate at which they'll be able to kind of progress with technology, the next one and the next one and the next one and get quicker and quicker and quicker.

So, and now let's imagine that Unicode okay, the opponent, the You know, kind of the state or open AI, whoever it is who are trying to pull them back. kind of make gains and so it's like a given text like a tussle like a tug of war and so we take the just we just literally took then the uh and to get an eye to get a handle on this we took the how far am i ahead if i'm undergoing a kind of random walk with respect to a wall that i'm walking away from the kind of so called drunken walk walking walking it goes like the square root of the number of steps and so that is the rate At which I will be able to, so the, the rate, the average rate at which I'll be able to progress with these attacks goes like the square root.

So that's to the power of 0. 5. So the time between attacks will go like one over that. which is, you know, to the minus 0. 5. And so, um, and so when we looked at how other technologies had advanced, and we used two examples, we used example of algorithmic attacks on the financial market. So algorithmic trading hitting a price in a, in a, in a negative way, That also pretty much followed this and so did completely other setting but Chinese, they know we're known to be Chinese, that's why I say it, um, Chinese state attacks, cyber attacks on U.

S. infrastructure. That also had this minus 0. 5. So we were on, we knew we were onto something because It looks like the advances in technology that a bad actor, a Red Queen, can have with respect to an opponent, the State, or whoever's trying to stop them, follows them, this learning curve, we call it a progress curve, because they're not learning, they're just trying to get there, they're adapting to what the enemy is.

Um, what the opponent's doing, and of course the opponent is counter adapting, then they're counter counter adapting, etc. etc. Hence the random walk. Um, that, that, it, it matched, and so we could make a prediction then when this would come down to the daily scale. And the prediction was then, when we did the numbers, came out as middle chip 2024.

And pretty much, bingo, mid 2024, that's, that's when OpenAI was starting to report, hey, we're getting regular attacks now, um, from outside using our AI technology. And you might think, well, I haven't seen a story of a big attack. Well, this is, it's almost like death by a thousand cuts or a million cuts or whatever it is.

It's, these are little attacks. All the time. And they're getting faster and faster and faster. And in the end, it will be like a thousand pieces of shard, shard glass. It's overwhelming for a system. So no one attack, no one piece of glass is going to quote unquote kill us. But, um, lots of them again, swamping the system will be, it will overwhelm the system.

It will overwhelm the defenses. So that's the win of the AI use.

[01:02:32] Matt: Yeah. And so just to make sure I'm sort of fully understanding the thinking here, like to make a very concrete example within the context of, let's say open AI, um, you know, they have, uh, they've, they've released the model. It's got some certain protections, but people figure out ways to jailbreak and use it for malicious purposes.

They do. So open AI figures out and sort of like. more protections and counterbalances and there's this back and forth, but the consequence of this is that over time the sort of like the collection of bad actors progress in such a way such that the attacks will become more frequent, um, and to the point where you know the prediction is now this is a daily occurrence.

Is that a correct

[01:03:10] Neil Johnson: Correct. Exactly that.

[01:03:13] Matt: Yeah. What is the um, what is the sort of very long term limit of, of this? Because presumably, um, I mean, something would have to break at some point. Um, you know, how far can we extrapolate this out? You know, is this something that will continue to become just a bigger and bigger problem, more death by a thousand cuts, a million cuts into, you know, 2026, 2027.

How do we think about the longer term version of this? I

[01:03:43] Neil Johnson: Yeah, I think that, um, definitely there's a kind of ramping up, maybe there was a kind of slowness on the side of OpenAI, um, to respond, um, they were probably pushing their top end technology, I don't, I don't, I can't speak for them, but that's what I imagine, so they've ramped their game up. So the others, you know, the bad actors have to ramp their game up again.

It's back to this dy what we call the dynamic red queen. Um, I think we need to have a kind of change of mind about this. So just as, again, we've been talking about COVID, I'll just use it as an analogy. I think for some reason society has decided that having endemic COVID is okay. You know, it's kind of okay to have it rattling around.

And I mean, I, that seems to be the, the word on the, you know, the kind of that that's the official, I think it's going to be the same thing. I think it's going to be the same thing with AI. It will be, again, because of the large number of communities on small platforms, and the large number of those small platforms, and how they're kind of interconnected into the web, you can't eradicate them.

Again, like the shards of glass, I can't go around picking them all up. There'll be others by the time I've finished, and I'll exhaust my resources. In fact, as we know, it's so hard to pick up one shot of glass. You could spend ages trying to do it because it's so tricky to pick it up. You, you've wasted all your time.

So it will be the same thing. So there'll be a level of endemic AI bad actor presence. Um, and I always qualify it that you said exactly right. I mean, bad actor AI is a big, big label for us, you know, in a tiny way. It can mean all sorts of things. We try to define what that was. Basically, AI being used in a purposely bad way, there'll be an endemic level.

And I think that's it. So it's more about keeping it, which gets us to the last part of the paper, which was how do you keep it under control? And the point of that last part of the paper was precisely It was a calculation, not based on an analogy, but I'll give you the analogy again. If I spend all my resources trying to look for then the largest small shard, and then I'll look for the second largest small shard, and we did this calculation of how long it would take, you know, the universe is over by the time we've, we've picked them all up, basically.

Um, so it's more a case of just kind of once you find that you've, you know, you've got this endemic state. Just making sure that the shards don't connect to each other to try and kind of reconstruct some bigger piece. So it's more about breaking the links. You don't want to shut down communities. Nobody wants their community shut down whether they're doing good or bad, and it's not right.

You know, it's kind of free speech and all this kind of thing and we won't get into that, but you know, there's a lot of, a lot being said about that. This isn't about that, this solution isn't about that, it's more about, okay, you've got a right for, to do what you do, maybe in your community. You haven't necessarily got a right to link into all sorts of other communities.

I mean, that's just a facility given by the platforms. In fact, it's not even given. I mean, Facebook don't even know the links that are coming into their communities from other platforms. They don't know, they have no control over it. So, I mean, they'd have to shut off their system completely to stop those links coming in.

Um, they can control links going out, but they can't control the ones coming in. So, um, there needs to be kind of bilateral agreements between platforms saying, Hey, well, I've got a lot of links coming to you and you've got links coming to me. So let's just kind of agree to kind of, we'll police these. And so it's more about policing the links, not policing what people are saying, not policing the.

community, but policing where the links go, because the links are controlled by the platforms,

[01:08:03] Matt: Cold, clear eyed analysis leads to what seems to be quite an unfortunate conclusion, which, um, I take it as, you know, essentially, we're not going to be able to fully, um, or even maybe very substantially control, um, the proliferation of bad actor AI. And as you said, um, with the COVID example, at some point there has to be some acceptance that, uh, it, it, it does become endemic.

Um, but on the other side of that, I think it also raised the question, well, is, is the whole way we're thinking about controlling it, the methodology of, you know, containment, uh, for example, removing particular bad actors who are the worst, um, is that the right way or is there something broader? Uh, and this is a very open question to, to you, um, you know, In terms of the sort of very broad methodologies, um, you know, ways we might approach, um, controlling this, um, what else is there to consider that hasn't been considered in, um, in this particular paper?

[01:09:06] Neil Johnson: in my view, the missing piece, the missing piece from policy, et cetera, is this kind of It's the complexity of it. It's the bigger, it's the big picture of, um, how do I control a system with feedback, with internal feedbacks, with memory? with active objects.

Um, how, how do you control a kind of complex system? You're not going to control the individual pieces, all one piece. I mean, you don't stop water boiling by taking out one bubble or, you know, one particularly fast molecule. And so it's got to be this kind of You know, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

We all know that. Um, so it's more that kind of thinking, which of course brings us up to, well, that's the hard problem in the science of complexity is that, you know, what's control theory for a complex system. I have a kind of inkling of what that might be. I think it's a kind of, a kind of a soft control.

It's a, it's instead of it being kind of go in and take out one piece or take out five pieces, it's more of a continual kind of nudging of the system and kind of working out where its trajectories might be heading, you know, kind of, and then kind of nudging away from danger areas. So you're not, you haven't got perfect control, but you're just kind of nudging the system one way or the other.

Um, I think the closest thing that this is, um, the situation we have in the online battlefield, et cetera, small pieces, delocalized, surging up, surging. It's like an insurgency. It's the first time we've ever had online. And so it's like a cyber insurgency, but on some Big scale, whereby in many insurgencies, civilians are involved, people like us are involved, and we don't even really know what side we're on.

Um, so it's, it's almost like that new thinking about insurgency again, you know, the U. S. did, and the U. K. and all their allies did spectacularly poorly, um, for, Maybe no thought of their own in trying to do a head down top down approach in Recent insurgencies that didn't work and it was actually David Kilcullen.

I think was he was in the Think was an advisor to the Australian Strategists that say Um, has a, has a, has an, has an interesting kind of paper out or book or maybe on, um, you know, looking at the complexity of the system. Doesn't solve it, but just kind of pointing that that was the kind of missing piece.

I think that's the missing piece here. Now, what does that mean? Probably jobs for complexity scientists, you know, but there certainly should be one sitting at the end of that table in the congressional hearings, you know, with the map in the background, one sitting on the end there with all these heads of the different platforms.

That, that's the only way you're going to get the kind of system level dynamic taken into consideration.

[01:12:23] Matt: Yeah, yeah, it's um, it's actually great to see, um, complexity science. I feel like it is increasingly starting to have, um, very, very real world applications showing up all over the place. I think for, for a very long time, it's been for, for people who kind of have been in the field or adjacent to the field have always had this view that this is going to have, a very substantial impact and application area in the real world.

But perhaps it's been a bit delayed to kind of make its way into, into doing that. And I'm not actually, I would love to get your thoughts as to why that is, because, um, even going back to some of the earlier work, like one of my favorite books is Geoffrey West's book on, on scaling laws. Um, and it's I don't know, it's ten years old and it blew my mind and I thought this would, this would change how biology is done, this would change how city planning is done, all these things.

And it does not feel to have done that yet, um, and I feel that complexity science in general kind of somewhat falls into this, um, this category. Do you feel like we're at the cusp of a, of a sort of more foundational change? Complexity science getting out there and doing its thing in the real world?

[01:13:32] Neil Johnson: Yeah. I mean, it's a fantastic point. I see it as a kind of People problem. And what I mean is the following, um, you know, a lot of these and I've experienced it myself. I'm sure a lot of others have as well. Um, you go barging into a topic like conflicts or city design or something with a new idea. You're going to, you're challenging basically the status quo.

Yeah. And just like the kind of in substance, the bad actor communities invading invading into a space, you're trying to invade in a space. The problem is that that thinking off the status quo. In the academic and research and science side is entrenched in how we structure universities, grant funding, the names of degrees.

You have a degree in this and you have a degree in this. So don't talk to the person who has the degree in that. Um, so I think we shoot ourselves in the foot. The academic community. Um, you know, a city isn't like a sandpile. Sandpiles are fantastic. Got to be taken forward with data. Got to be connected to the real situation.

That, you know, my, my, my brother was a town planner and I think he, I remember him telling me a story of having a complexity scientist turn up and tell him about, you know, kind of scaling in cities and all that. And apparently they just looked at each other and then headed out the door and it was a kind of a free afternoon, but they weren't going to do anything.

Why? It wasn't that the idea wasn't good. They didn't get it. They didn't understand it. It wasn't presented to them in a way that was immediately accessible. So, to answer your question, it's like a, yeah, it's like a huge debate in itself. But in some sense, complexity scientists like me have shot ourselves in the foot by kind of barging into different areas.

But what else are we going to do? We don't know how else to do this. So I think there's a lot because of the people structure of universities. The academic world grants. It's not conducive to complexity science kind of expanding. However, the whole rise in data from systems that you never thought would have data is a way forward.

And if we can just kind of make all of those concepts more concrete and more applied without using this idea that everything's the same, you know, in the end you get the spherical cow view of the whole world. Um, but without saying everything is completely unified by instead saying, well, those, for example, those scaling laws, they're like a benchmark.

So instead of guessing that things could be anywhere in some space that you can't even imagine, there's a kind of benchmark. And things are near that benchmark. You know, planes are near a paper plane in some sense. So I think, I think of all those models from complexity science that we all know, all this stuff, they're each like a paper plane.

No one's going to go in it. No one's going to, you know, sit in first class or in economy. There aren't going to be any, you know, kind of captain drive because it's not got the right structure, but it's got the right idea. So I think there's a lot of work to be done by complexity scientists, obviously the next generation because people like me will be, you know, soon, you know, we out the door, unfortunately, before a lot of this has gone transferred over, but there really is work now.

And now there's a need, there's a societal need for the climate change, online misinformation, the online offline influence, These are big questions, and they clearly involve all the components of a complex system.

[01:17:41] Matt: Do you have a, do you have a vision or a hope for over the next, let's say five to 10 years, what it might look like and, and maybe concretely what specific issues, we've talked about one of them today, um, and you've just mentioned climate change, we might be able to address and tackle with a mature Sort of open complexity science, um, is anything beyond what we talked today, like very front of mind as an issue to be able to, that we might be able to materially improve or solve?

[01:18:10] Neil Johnson: I particularly, um, think that the area of human conflict, because that was already known back in the years of, um, Richardson in the mid 1900s, um, that they follow these kind of scaling laws. And so, and we've, we ourselves have done quite a bit of work on this. Um, it does look as though there are patterns of organizational behavior.

After all, conflict is done by humans against humans. So it's not like it depends on some meteor arriving or a change in temperature. Maybe the change in temperature affects how much we fight each other, but it's a human organizational issue. And I think those human organizational things are prime candidates, particularly ones where you've got one human organization of some type against another.

And those patterns, I think, are crucial for, um, what we see as just kind of random numbers coming out, you know, out of whatever conflict, there'll always be conflicts, making sense of those and thinking about tipping points, interventions, and, you know, unfortunately, casualty risks.

[01:19:23] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. That's, um, I'll actually, it just reminds me, I listened to an interview of yours with Sean Carroll, um, which was I think a couple of years ago now, but you, you were talking about this, this topic and I thought it was a very interesting interview. So I will, um, I'll link that in the, in the episode notes here.

Um, okay. Well, maybe, maybe sort of as we. bring it towards, um, a close. Um, you know, we, we've talked about a lot of things, a lot of them pertain to, um, what individuals can, can do or should do. Um, I think that this is relevant at many different levels from individual to institutions to someone. Um, and I'd want to like give you the chance for a very open, I guess, call to action, you know, someone who's listening, who's interested, um, who wants to follow up, where would you send them?

What should they, what would be a good next step for, for someone listening?

[01:20:12] Neil Johnson: Well, if there's any, I'll start with saying if there's any university, um, kind of not administrators, but you know, chairs of department, heads of schools and things, the first thing, allow people to get degrees across subjects. And I don't mean, Oh, I've got a major in this and a minor in that, or I've got, allow them to do things that mix disciplines to attack a concrete real world problem.

Knowing that they won't, you know, they won't have done, you know, reproduced what Einstein did if they were doing physics and they won't have done, you know, written some, you know, amazing treaties on, on whatever it is on conflict. If, if, if it was yet they've combined elements in a way that nobody's done before in every institution I've been in.

That's been impossible. know, having somebody, oh, they want to do, you know, kind of physics models of conflicts or something. Okay, yeah, they've got to take nuclear physics. Why? You know, so imagine now they're taking a year of that, and so they can't take courses on conflicts, and they'll never get out, basically, and when they get in front of their thesis committee, They'll just be slammed because, quote unquote, it's not physics.

So, I think there has to be a huge rethinking there. And, hey, the good news is, that's what students want to do. Students, my perception of students is they actually want to do something that matters now. They don't want to do things just because their parents did things, or their predecessors did things.

They want to do things because it leads somewhere, and it kind of matters in some way. And those things matter. The trouble is, the answer to them is not within one discipline. So that, that would be my little message out there to anybody. And then my message to anyone who's interested in getting into this, go and push for that.

Push for, I'd like to do a project. I'd like to do something. I'd like to be involved with this, but I also want to be involved with that. Uh, you know, two different disciplines. And I want to look at this type of problem and be prepared to be pushed down and all these kinds of things. But the probably you'll be doing something new.

In fact, you'll know it's new because of the level of difficulty you'll have in getting it approved. Usually when things have been done before, they're easy to approve because there's a precedent. When you're the first one doing it, You will know because there'll be all sorts of things in your way. And so, and my own experiences, you don't have to go very far from what's known to hit something that isn't known.

I think, you know, you and I all know that. And we all, we all know that people, everyone, everyone listening will know that, um, you know, you go and visit a country and go down a street you've never been to, even if it's your own country or another city, you go down another street, you've never seen that stuff before.

Um, so, um, Anyone listening wants to get into these kind of real world problems that are going to need more than one tool. In other words, more than one discipline. I think, you know, the kind of future is yours in that sense, but be prepared to be pushed back by being told that you've got to go and take two years in nuclear physics.

[01:23:34] Matt: Yeah, fantastic, um, and, and very much, very much resonates with, with me. I mean, I, I, I seldom do this, but to sort of echo some advice from personal experience, you know, my, my own path started off very much in the exploitation phase, you know, going very deep into physics and maths and eventually ending up in a PhD in pure maths.

Um, and probably not enough exploration in the early stages and advice I always give to younger people now is, you know, In the earlier stages, it's the best optimization algorithms are one that explore a lot and get a good map of the landscape before exploiting. Um, and I hope that, uh, societally we kind of start doing that a lot more because otherwise we all end up optimizing in very small parts of this landscape and, uh, we don't end up in the, in the best path for ourselves.

[01:24:18] Neil Johnson: We certainly don't need more people like me. We need people in the future who've done, maybe even stronger bridges between these, between disciplines.

[01:24:29] Matt: Yes. Yeah. I totally agree. Um, two, two questions that I like to ask, uh, in closing, um, first one is on book recommendations. So people that I speak to on this podcast tend to have read many books, often have written many books and have certainly been influenced by books. And I would love to ask you which books come to mind as ones that have most influenced you personally.

Okay.

[01:24:55] Neil Johnson: I actually don't have one particular book to point to, but I do have the recommendation that on YouTube now, there's an enormous number of these snippets of people saying things like I'm saying. And that is actually a great place to start even for some research. You know, you can put two and two together there between what two different people are saying.

I think a search around on, on, on YouTube to see what people like me mentioning the word complexity, complex systems, systems thinking, this kind of thing. Look at those and that's actually better than any one book that I can think of. Because I can't actually think of one book that kind of does enough of this kind of bridging.

It all tends to kind of go down one path. So, um, not avoiding the question on the one book, but it's more the case of, I think this is such an active field now that people just haven't come up with those books. And so I do recommend people just exploring around on YouTube.

[01:26:02] Matt: I actually think that's a great recommendation. I mean, if you think about the function of books historically, I mean, as great as they are, a lot of it was serving the purpose of transferring information through space and time and so on, in absence of other mechanisms for doing so. And I genuinely do think the content that you can find on YouTube, podcast conversations, all of these, can perhaps even in cases be richer experiences.

I certainly probably get most of my information. through those channels. And so I certainly echo that point. That's a, that's actually, it's a great sidestepping of the question and I, well, very

[01:26:36] Neil Johnson: no, and people should listen to your podcast completely in full for all the episodes, because I think absolutely you're hitting on questions. Well, look at it. You've asked me questions that nobody's ever asked me before. And so, um, how could I put that in a book? In fact, if I was writing a book on it, I probably would have avoided those questions, even if they'd have occurred to me because they were difficult to answer.

So I think you've done a great job. That, that's what people should do. And of course there are, and there are other people doing podcasts. Of course there are, you know, and there are some amazing things out there.

[01:27:08] Matt: Oh, well, sorry for putting you on the spot, but thank you for, uh, for being a great sport. Um, last, last question, a bit of a fun one. We've talked a lot about, um, Bad actor AI and development of powerful AI models. My question is, if we were to develop an AI superintelligence, and we had to pick one person, either past or present, to represent humanity to the superintelligence, who comes to mind for you?

Who should we pick?

[01:27:35] Neil Johnson: Neil Armstrong. And not because I've heard him speak very much. I mean, I heard him, but what he did, he did something. you know, he didn't say, Oh, I'm going to go to, you know, nowadays imagine what someone, Oh, you'd be a lead up. There'd be a TV series. We'd hear about the, you know, the family, we'd watch them at the end.

We never heard of a Neil Armstrong until, you know, he stepped on the moon one small step, etc. Um, he did something. So I think that footage, which was formative for me, Sunset's YMO still over here in the, in the U. S. because it just, oh my goodness, there's a country that does this. Um, I think that to me, the doing more than the saying or the, so the fact that Neil Armstrong did that, the only person to have done the first one to, sorry, to have done that, that, that for me is the person.

[01:28:34] Matt: That is a spectacular answer. And I think a really great place to, to wrap up. Um, Neil, thank you so much for, for joining me. It's been fantastic.

[01:28:41] Neil Johnson: Thank you so much, Matt. It's been a pleasure. Fantastic. Thank you. ​

Hi Everyone, I want to share some good news - Paradigm now gets multiple new listeners every minute!

As a gesture of thanks to early supporters, I’m offering all current as well as the next 500 subscribers free access to Paradigm, forever. Beyond that point there will soon be a paywall on certain content.

So, if someone you know might enjoy Paradigm, please consider sharing your favourite episode and encourage them to subscribe for free.

Thanks you! Now please enjoy today’s conversation.

Matt

p.s. My next guest is Oliver Burkeman, author of 4000 Weeks - one of my favourite books of all time. Subscribers can scroll down to access a Q&A to submit questions for this conversation (and others).

Subscribe now

Share Paradigm

Episode Notes

Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and evolutionary game theorist. She’s a Professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine.

We discuss:

• news media and exaggerated and misleading headlines

• scientific and journalistic practices, and the incentives behind them

• how content curation impacts public perception and understanding of what is true

• the role of algorithms in perpetuating misleading content on social media

• practical suggestions for improving our information environment

• personal reflections and recommendations on navigating misinformation

… and other topics

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple, or Substack. Read the full transcript below. Follow me on LinkedIn for infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Cailin’s website

• Books:

  • The Misinformation Age

  • The Origins of Unfairness

  • Games in the Philosophy of Biology

Subscribers only

The below section is for subscribers. It includes:

• Q&A form for my conversation with Oliver Burkeman

• Timestamps and transcript for the current episode

Q&A form

Here’s a Q&A form: Q&A form - Oliver Burkeman

Timestamps

00:00 Misleading Titles & Headlines

02:59 Journalistic Practices

04:02 Curation in Journalism

11:41 Challenges in Fair Reporting

22:08 Hyperbole and Extreme Headlines

26:42 Confirmation Bias and Trust in Sources

32:09 Best Practices for Science Journalism

35:50 Need for Algorithm Regulation

38:03 Case for Social Media Regulation

43:01 Role of Incentives in Algorithm Design

44:45 Challenges of Algorithm Transparency

47:09 Improving Social Media Platforms

53:54 User Responsibility vs. Systemic Change

56:20 Future of Misinformation

01:03:17 Navigating Information in the Digital Age

01:09:37 Books and Personal Influences

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:00] Matt: I'm here with Kaelin O'Connor. Kaelin, thank you for joining me.

[00:00:02] Cailin: Yeah,

it's my pleasure to be here.

[00:00:04] Matt: Kaelin, we're going to be talking about our information ecosystem and scientific and journalistic practices. Um, but I thought it'd be fun to start with a game. So before the discussion, I went onto the homepage of a well known news website called Science News Daily, and I copied a few of the headlines.

Um, and I should emphasize, I didn't go digging. Uh, for anything specific. It was literally from the homepage. I just took a couple headlines. I want to read them out and I would love for you, using your knowledge about curation and journalistic practices, take a guess as to, you know, what the article is about and just how significant the findings in That, article are.

So the first one is titled, Generative AI could break the internet, researchers find. What do you reckon that article might be about?

[00:00:51] Cailin: That, I mean, there's a lot of ways that generative AI could break the internet. That one, I, I have really very little idea. I mean, maybe something about how AI could create too much content or content that's too misleading or, yeah, I don't know. What, what is it?

[00:01:12] Matt: Yeah, so the actual article, I mean, it relates to that. It is about feedback loops and AI training on AI generated content. Sort of going off the rails. And so, um, from my perspective, breaking the internet is, is quite a far cry from what the paper is actually about.

[00:01:31] Cailin: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like an example of how we often see exaggeration or click baity titles or things being, um, made to sound sort of bigger than they are when science journalists write up studies.

[00:01:46] Matt: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, honestly, I think there were, there were probably 20 articles on that page. I've got five titles here. I won't read, I won't read all of them. Um, Oh, maybe I'll just read all of them. We can stop the game. But scientists lay out a revolutionary method to warm Mars. And this is basically about polluting the Martian atmosphere to make it warmer.

[00:02:08] Cailin: Oh, okay, maybe we could pump our carbon over to Mars.

[00:02:11] Matt: yeah, exactly. That's, that's what it is. Um, uh, there is one here that says, if you snore, you could be three times more likely to die of coronavirus.

[00:02:19] Cailin: Oh, yeah, that, I mean, I want to say that the pandemic was like one of the best times ever for really overly hyped and misleading clickbait titles and this brings me back to that.

[00:02:34] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, and a title that it was not on that page, but you would be familiar with was entitled the best paper you'll read today, which you'll know all about.

[00:02:44] Cailin: because I, I helped write that paper.

[00:02:49] Matt: it Was in fact the best paper I read that day, so, um, it was actually not misleading in the end.

[00:02:54] Cailin: Did

[00:02:55] Matt: paper? I read that

[00:02:56] Cailin: that paper?

[00:02:57] Matt: I did.

[00:02:57] Cailin: that's what I suspected.

[00:02:59] Matt: Um, but it brings us very nicely to, to this topic of, um, journalistic practices and curation because I mean, Science News Daily is regarded by many as a very reliable source.

You know, it's a, it's a source that reports on university research findings and people do use this, uh, this source for their science. news, the science information. Um, and so let's, let's pull up and discuss that concept of curation. Um, I think it's, it's for me, not surprising that popular news websites can have exaggerated titles because, um, you know, everyone is competing for attention and, and these things happen.

Um, but I think these practices probably exist in a broader way in our world. information ecosystem than many people realize and, um, probably many of them are even implicit in, in, in sort of hidden ways and they could lead to very real consequences. And I know this is a topic that you've thought about a lot and explored a lot.

Where else do you see this sort of phenomenon, uh, happening and just how big of a problem is it?

[00:04:02] Cailin: Yeah, so some co authors and I got interested in thinking about curation written very broadly because, um, I mean, we were working on things related to misinformation. There's all these attempts to control or regulate or prevent the harms of misinformation online, and that's really good, we thought then, and I still think that.

Curation, the way we take accurate, real data, real scientific findings, real events that happen, and then just shape and select what ones people see can be just as important to understand, just as important to think about and regulate if we want people to have accurate data. Um, that was how we got into that topic, this sort of lack of attention to curation.

I mean, one of the reasons it matters so much is that there's tons and tons of things that are happening in the world all the time, every day. There's no way we can pay attention to all of them. We're only going to find out about some small portion of these. And That's going to really shape our feelings about how the world works and what's out there.

Right? Um, it's going to shape our beliefs about, say, how dangerous COVID is, or how much climate change is happening, or are windmills killing birds? Uh, it matters as much to our beliefs or more, I think, as whether we get. Accurate or inaccurate information.

[00:05:38] Matt: Is it, um, do you have a sense as to how big of an issue? This is in practice. I mean, no doubt it happens and we've just talked about some examples on on a particular news website But if we had to say on you know, the scale of problems that are sort of impacting society Today, so how significant is this?

[00:05:58] Cailin: Well, curation is happening literally all the time. You know, as I pointed out, there's so much stuff happening that we couldn't possibly know about all of it. There's so many scientific articles coming out. We can't know about all of them. So in some way, it's just a massive scale. You know, when science journalists pick out just some studies to report when it's Social media algorithms pick just some things to promote when we pick just some things to tell to other people when people write textbooks or teachers prepare courses and they just share some information but not other information curation is happening in all of those places.

Of course, it's not always going to be a problem. There's lots of things we don't actually need to know about. But part of what we've done in our research is pointed to a bunch of places where curation really does cause problems. And in the paper that you were mentioning, we used models to show how even really good learners, people who are ideally rational learners, could come to develop very confused views of how the world works just on the basis of Curation.

[00:07:04] Matt: Well, let's let's dig into the paper then. I found it very interesting and You know there in that paper you presented three sort of broad points So categories of Curation.

hyperbole, extremity bias, fair reporting, and analyze them in turn. Um, could you run me through those different types of, of practices and, and sort of what they mean and where we might see them?

[00:07:26] Cailin: Yeah. And I should make clear, you know, this paper was about science journalism in particular. So we were trying to think specifically when it comes to science journalism, what are the ways that science journalists tend to curate out of all the studies out there? What will people see? Um, so there's lots of other things that happen in curation, but of these ones, one thing, um, That science journalists tend to do is try to be fair or balanced and all journalists tend to do this.

This is part of the codes of ethics and norms for good journalism. And what that means is that when you're talking about some controversial issue, you try to present the 2 sides either with equal weight or in a fair way in practice. This often means just giving equal air time or equal print space to 2 sides of a controversial issue.

Issue. Now, generally, that's a really good norm to try to present things in a fair way because it helps you avoid things like highly partisan news or highly partisan opinion. Um, but people have pointed out that when it comes to science reporting, it can be a problem because you end up sometimes with false balance.

And we saw this a lot traditionally with climate change reporting. for having me. Where there's a controversy about is climate change happening or not. It's not really a scientific controversy. It's a social controversy, but to report in a fair way, people would try to present both sides of that issue, giving them equal weight, whereas in fact.

One of them had much, much more scientific evidence behind it. So that fair reporting would be kind of falsely propping up the side that's wrong, if that makes sense. So that's fairness. The other two things we talk about were less driven by journalistic norms than by the incentives that journalists face.

So literally, in order to, To be a journalist, to survive, to have a paper, um, to not be fired, you have to get attention as a journalist. If people aren't putting eyes on your column, you know, what, what's your function, right, which means that there are these huge incentives to create things that are interesting or novel or surprising or noteworthy or newsworthy and that grab people's attention.

That's why we see those clickbaity headlines. But that often shapes how journalists curate what they report on. So one thing that we talk about is what we call extremity bias, which means that when you're looking at stuff happening in the world, scientific events, you see reporting much more on things that are on the extremes, meaning they somehow surprise people.

So for example, I've just been looking at a case of like, are male and female brains inherently importantly different? Almost every study on male and female brains measures, you know, say a lot of things. All the connections that they can measure with MRI in the brain is going to find some statistical differences and then also a lot of overlap.

Um, so the truth is. in this middle space, right? But when you see reporting on it, you see people reporting on the studies that are like, we found that men's brains are just really different from women's or else the ones being like, there is no difference between male and female brains. So these extremes get reported much more than the kind of stable middle core, if that makes sense, hyperbole or exaggeration.

Is also something we see driven by those incentives for attention, um, to take things that are really happening and just make them sound a little more extreme or exciting. Like we're going to warm Mars up or we're going to break the Internet with AI.

[00:11:13] Matt: Yeah, that, that's fascinating. I mean, the, the fair reporting example one is really interesting because, uh, you know, before thinking about this very deeply, that, that one would strike many people, I think, as the obvious. best thing to do, you know. I think maybe even the language there of fair reporting is a bit misleading itself because fairness means something very particular in this case.

Before jumping into the results of the paper, I mean maybe to linger on that point a little bit. Um, you know, fair reporting, imagine yourself as a journalist choosing on what to report on. As a journalist or as a scientist, you also don't have access to non curated information in, in some sense. I mean, so for example, reporting on climate change, there is some sort of abstract notion of the truth of the matter and you know, what actual evidence exists out there.

Um, but really what you are reporting on as a journalist is. research that's been done, um, and, uh, other articles that have been posted and so on. And those things are already, in some sense, curated in various ways. And so how does a, how does a journalist, if they wanted to even do something like fair reporting, how would they even think about approaching, you know, you know, taking an accurate sample of the sort of like underlying truth space versus this curated world that is in front of them.

[00:12:36] Cailin: Yeah, I mean, that is a massively difficult problem. It's one that we, in this work, kind of ignore, which is, as you're pointing out, the stuff that gets produced in science is itself already shaped by all sorts of things. The values of scientists and the values of funding agencies, you know, what does the NSF want to fund or whoever, um, and just randomness, you know, what do people happen to work on?

What study did they happen to produce? You know, all of that. Shapes the science that already exists. I can't even begin to say how hard it is to somehow think we could create science. That's sort of perfectly sampling from the things in the world. I would say we got to just put that aside starting from the point of view of like a science journalist.

What do you have? You have some set of scientific studies out there, right? Um, that's what you have to draw on, you know, in some ways, those are already going to be distorted, but. That's your best starting point in thinking about fair reporting. Usually, what you want to do is not to try to think of something as controversial, where there's a yes and a no side, and then you're going to give those equal weight, but you want to ask, you know, what sorts of evidence do you have?

Exists in what distributions and what would be the most accurate way to report that. So, for example, in the pandemic, there was a lot of reporting on how dangerous is covid. What's the infection fatality rate? And sometimes you'd see, you know, an article being like a new study found that it was way lower than we thought.

Or a new study found it was way higher than we thought. What you would want to do there to be fair or balanced is look at all the studies and then give some sort of Overview of like across all these studies. What's the distribution? How trustworthy are those different studies? Were they well done or poorly done?

What was the average? Um, that would be the best way to be fair to the data that exists.

[00:14:34] Matt: Yeah, Um, not, not to get too deeply into this sort of, um, replication crisis, rabbit hole and those sorts of things. But, you know, even in the cases of meta analyses that do look at, let's say thousands of studies that have been done, maybe many small, low powered studies, you know, and drawing inferences, there is also that issue of.

The, the boring studies that didn't have any interesting findings, never making it to publication. And, and so the whole meta analysis itself is, you know, terribly skewed, um, towards the extremes. Uh, how does a, how does a science communicator think about, um, uh, sort of not being caught out by, by that issue.

[00:15:13] Cailin: Yeah, so I mean, what you're talking about, people sometimes call the file drawer effects, where, um, if you're studying some topic, say you get a finding that's not very interesting, or you, it's not statistically significant, you know, you don't find any association between two things, um, does, um, This caused cancer.

Well, sometimes you just don't get any sort of clear answer out of your data. You find no link. Um, and then a lot of times those things don't get published. It's that journals like things that have like positive associations. So, When people are doing meta analyses, there are techniques they use sometimes to try to recover the missing data.

You know, one thing people will do is look at a whole distribution of findings and they'll say, okay, if We see these ones printed that were statistically significant in this direction, and these that were statistically significant in that direction. We can infer that there was something in between that just never got printed, and we can try to, you know, get some signal out of the noise there.

Um, that is really complicated to do. I don't think it's something we should expect just your everyday science to do. Journalist in any way to be able to do to try to infer from the data that exists, plus this file drawer effect, what data should be there. Um, of course, it is when you, when you can look at a meta analysis or review paper where someone's already done that, that is usually a pretty good source of accurate information to share a report on.

[00:16:51] Matt: well let's uh, let's dig into the, to the paper and the um, the model and the inferences that we can draw from them. Um, so as we said the, the paper is titled the best paper you'll read today. Um, and we looked at those three categories of curation, um, I don't know if curation is, is the right word for all of them, but hyperbole, extremity bias and fair reporting.

Um, could you give me an overview of the um, the model? And, um, and then the inferences that we can, can draw from them, from the model.

[00:17:24] Cailin: Yeah, so what we wanted to do with this paper was set up a situation where otherwise we would expect. So we're modeling. Science journalists, right? We're modeling some series of information they're drawing from. And in our model, we're just assuming like the information they get is accurate. They're getting a good distribution of data.

We're just ignoring the possibility that as we were talking about that science is already distorting data. Um, so we say they start with. Access to great data, then they're going to report to people who are really good learners. People who, if they get good reporting are going to be able to learn how the world works.

And then we just add to that the possibility of curation. Now, just make this journalist fair in this particular both sides. Equal weight type of way, or just make this journalist and extreme reporter. They only report the extremes of events that happen or make them a little bit hyperbolic. They report a real event, but they just make it a little more extreme or novel or surprising.

Um, so the strategy was to say, set up an otherwise perfect scenario, then just add this possibility curation and see how it messes up learning. And then, of course, indeed it does. It does mess up learning.

[00:18:41] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, fascinating. Well, let's, let's, let's dig into some of the implications. So let's take for example, um, the, uh, fair reporting. So again, a good example here is, is, uh, climate change, um, you know, media outlets, science reporters who let's say only report. Um, evidence that, you know, there is human made climate change are often told that, um, they are not giving the other side, uh, any sort of airtime.

Um, but of course, you know, almost all climate scientists fall on the side of thinking that there is anthropogenic climate change. And so, you know, equal distribution of airtime would, would mean very little. Um, for, for the sign that says there isn't. So suppose that journalist then makes, makes that adjustment and does give somewhat, uh, of, you know, equal airtime, airtime or something like it to both sides.

Um, in, in this model, what is the, what is the implication? What is the result? Of that type of curation.

[00:19:38] Cailin: Yeah. So what we find is this can end up with people just having a distorted picture of the average sort of thing happening in the world. So there's something that's like a little technical I have to explain about the model, which is that we're saying these journalists, they're looking at some series of events.

Like we could imagine those events are this temperature in Melbourne and that temperature in Madrid and that temperature wherever, you know, these different temperatures, they're going to report these and they're going to try to do it in some way. Yeah. Right. Like fair, right? Um, we assume in the model that there's some social idea about what counts as fair.

And when we look at climate change, the place people drew that line, what counts as fair was the line. Like, is it happening or is it not? Basically, the line was like 0 degrees of average warming, and it would be fair to report evidence on one side of that and evidence on the other side of that and give them equal weight.

So we assume there's like a fair line set up by society. Then we say, okay, the journalists are going to report stuff from either side of that fair line equally. And basically what it does is it makes people think that the world is kind of closer to what this fair line is than it really is. Right? So, in the climate change case, that would be people coming away thinking like, We're closer to expecting 0 degrees of warming than we really are when, you know, the actual expectation should be whatever 2 degrees of warming by the state.

And so they're kind of they're kind of pulled back into the social expectation that already exists. In that case,

[00:21:13] Matt: Yeah, and it, I mean, it it, I dunno if you've looked in, in, in sort of actual real world practical examples of this, I mean, this is what the, what the, the model says. And it points to a very clear picture. And we've talked about climate change, but are there particular examples of this that you've seen where we can actually say, well, look, this does pan out in the real world.

This has happened. Um, you know, we can can point it and, and, and we're seeing this actually happening. No.

[00:21:37] Cailin: well, I mean, I think climate change really is one of those cases. There was a reason everyone got upset about fair reporting in climate change for that very reason. Journalists have become much more aware of this. And much better at not doing it over the last decade or so, um, in part because of like the 2016 election.

And so I don't know that I can pull out of my hat, like another great example.

[00:22:06] Matt: That, that, that, that's okay. Um, let's, let's look at, um, the, um, hyperbole example.

then, because again, I think this is, I think this is one that is very obviously present everywhere. Um, basically everything that that you, you read online is going to, um, be impacted in some way by a bit of, um, hyperbole or exaggeration, anything that is trying to attract.

reader attention. So we'll have, we'll have somewhat of this. There is even an argument from a scientific perspective that, you know, if you can imagine good science reporting competing against the universe of all other information out there, um, maybe it's even a good thing to be a little bit hyperbolic if it attracts, uh, viewership and makes it entertaining because, you know, it is providing better education than what else is out there.

Um, But at the same time, you know, there are negative consequences to exaggerating things. Um, what did the, what did the model find on the topic of hyperbole?

[00:23:07] Cailin: Yeah. So what we found, and of course we modeled hyperbole in this really particular way where we said, okay, once again, there are social expectations for what's going to happen in the world. And to make something hyperbolic is to. Take some real thing that happened and kind of push it away from those social expectations.

So maybe we expect that the fire season in California this year is so bad. And then when you report it, you're like, it was even worse than that. Right? So, when reporters are doing that, what we find is that. The people getting that information end up thinking the world is just more extreme than it actually is, which is sort of what you'd expect, right?

So people think like, wow, we're having a lot of really terrible fire seasons and then a lot that just like don't even show up as a blip on my radar. Um, or, you know, extreme weather events are just much more common. Then you would have thought they were could be another thing. You could come away with or instances of extreme violence are much more common than you would have thought.

So basically, people end up sort of seeing the world as distorted out towards these events that in reality tend to be pretty rare.

[00:24:22] Matt: Did, did you look in the model, um, of, you know, again, you have this, this imagined journalistic layer that has a real access to the actual underlying distribution of things and reports on it to, Learners who learn perfectly and because, because of the curation, they develop these distorted views. Did you model out the effects at all of Well, actually, you know, those, those consumers are also journalists, um, if you think about it, the journalists are also consuming that and, and So they, you know, you can iterate that forward and, um, you know, the, you can imagine just layers and layers of reporting, which is actually what happens, um, what happens after sort of many iterations of this type of, of curation and, and how, um, you know, because, you know, There is a question as to just how significant each one of these things is and which ones are most sensitive and which ones aren't.

And you can imagine if we were to tune our journalistic practices, being aware of all of these different things, how would we choose to tune them and where should we be most worried? Um, did you, did you look at, um, at that, uh, sort of iterative curation at all?

[00:25:34] Cailin: So could you clarify for me what's iterating there? The journalists? Learn something and then

[00:25:42] Matt: So imagine the

[00:25:43] Cailin: the loop?

[00:25:45] Matt: In the initial stage, phase of the model, you imagine the journalist has actual, um, access to the true underlying distribution of things. And they curate and report on that. This defines a new distribution, which is reported on again and again. Um, you know, you can imagine it's news, news media picking up, uh, what other journalists have said and, and so on and so on.

And eventually, down the track, most of the reported content would actually have gone through multiple layers of this curation.

[00:26:16] Cailin: We did not model that. No, I and I'm not sure what would happen. I mean, you know, our strategy was like, what we want to do is really isolate just this one little thing that you would think that's not so bad, like, not so bad to report fairly, or not so bad to report the extremes. Who cares about anything but the extremes and stuff that happens.

So we didn't look at that. One thing we did look at was. Slightly imperfect consumers, which what we modeled work, people who engage in confirmation bias, which is a type of reasoning bias that we all engage in where we're more likely to trust or believe information that fits with what we already. And in that version of the model, we made it so that, um, the people learning from these science reports, if they heard something that already made sense with their picture of the world, they'd be more likely to change their beliefs on the basis of that.

More likely to learn from that. And they'd be. Less likely to learn from things that didn't fit with their picture of the world and so in that way they can kind of Double they tend to double down on what they already believe and that was interesting because in that sort of scenario when you have people reporting extreme things or um, Engaging in hyperbole, you end up where everyone can kind of double down on what they already believe in anyway.

Like, you already think climate change is happening. Will you see a lot of reporting saying that it is you already think it's not happening. You see lots of reporting saying it saying it isn't you think that vaccines are safe. You see a lot of reporting on that. You think vaccines are dangerous. You see these like stories about any worry about vaccine harms.

Right? Um, and so that was one variation we looked at with these kind of. Like a little more realistic dynamics.

[00:28:11] Matt: yeah. Yeah, and I think that's a, that's a very relevant one and a, and a, um, one that we do see in the real world a lot. I mean, it's not exactly confirmation bias, but it's related. You know, there is also the question of whether one trusts or to the degree to which one trusts various sources, um, even to the extent where if one distrusts a particular source, one could, and that source reports accurate information, um, one could, Actually, actively then distrust that.

So as, as an example, um, if you fall on one side of a political line, um, let's say your, in the states, you're sort of die hard Democrat and Fox News reports on something which might be true. Um, It's sort of like a disconfirmation bias. You have this inherent assumption that this is not a trustworthy source.

And that can actually push you further away from the truth. So I definitely think that's one you see playing out a lot in the real world.

[00:29:11] Cailin: there's a couple of things going on in there and what you just said. So I mean, confirmation bias and like what people call the backfire effect, um, they're about the way people respond to evidence that they get or information that they get. So it does, is this information stuff I tend to believe or disbelieve?

And there's, it's kind of controversial, but some people do find that people actually like if they get, you know, Stuff that goes against their beliefs will sometimes, like, dig in their heels and go further in the other direction on these polarized topics, like climate change or vaccines. What you were talking about, though, is also something different, like.

Trust in sources, right? Uh, how I respond to a person who's sharing something with me based on, like, do I think they're part of my in group or out group? Or do I trust them? Or do I think they're an expert or not? Um, and. One thing I think is really interesting that you pointed out is this kind of phenomenon where a really mistrusted source, by saying something, can make you almost doubt that thing more.

[00:30:15] Matt: Yes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is going really technical, but, um, you know, there, there, I think there is this belief that people have where as long as everybody has access to the same information, then our beliefs and views of the world will converge. And it kind of, it feels, it feels intuitive. But there is a very well known probability textbook by E.

T. Jaynes, uh, where he gives an example, where he says, well, so imagine two people with different priors, uh, where one distrusts the information source and one trusts them. And that source presents them the same information, what happens to their worldviews, and, um, they, they actually diverge, because they, they interpret that information differently.

Which is really interesting, I, I don't know if it has, practical implications for journalistic curation practices, um, but it means even presenting, uh, information in a, in a particular way could lead to different people receiving it, um, differently and, and diverging in their worldviews on that basis, which is quite counterintuitive.

[00:31:18] Cailin: Yeah, I think that that's right and that that can happen. It can even happen for other reasons, just having more to do with in groupism and out groupism and these trust dynamics between people and an elite just shared that with me, you know, should I ever believe anything an elite says or whatever, or, um, Someone on the opposite political team, uh, to some degree, you know, I think it just can't be on science journalists to try to game out what nutty things people are going to do.

You know, I, I think that at the end of the day, if you're a journalist or someone who's preparing information for the public, like, you should do it in the most responsible way you can, and then. That's all you can do.

[00:32:03] Matt: Yeah, I agree, we can't always put it on the shoulders of the science communicators. Um, I guess it does draw up the question though, you know, as a science communicator, what is the best thing to do? What is the, is there sort of like a theoretically Um, correct way to, to do, do curation, um, and, and again, there are other considerations, um, versus just accurate information, um, sort of dissemination because, um, again, like a journalist does want their, um, you know, if they think, they think they've got Important science to communicate.

They do want people to read it. So it should be interesting. It should be written well Um, so how how do you think about that that problem? Um, and and whether there is sort of like are there other theoretically correct principles

[00:32:51] Cailin: oh yeah. I, I mean, I tend to think, like, if, if you're doing science journalism, hopefully you're writing on a topic where if you present the survey the data in that area in a way that's

So I think there should be just much more focus on reporting on some kind of consensus or an emerging understanding rather than reporting on, say, individual studies or particular events, because when you do the first thing, you're Usually, you can give an understanding that's more nuanced, that's going to be more accurate, that's already emerged out of a scientific literature, a whole process of scientists coming to understand the world, you know, um, they've already done tons of tests on climate change or on vaccines or whatever it is, and then you can report on the good understanding that's come out.

The thing I think people generally shouldn't be doing is Selecting like one study without the proper context, without an understanding of what are the other studies in that literature, and then just reporting on that. So that kind of practice during the COVID 19 pandemic was extremely harmful and misleading.

There was an example where, you know, this. California research team found an extremely low infection fatality rate, and that just their one study got reported all over the place, because it was very exciting, because it wasn't what people expected, it was at the extremes of what people would expect, there are lots of ways to present things in an interesting way where you're still covering like a whole area. Like here's the things Scientists as a group have come to figure out about the way trees grow. Maybe that, that's interesting to me. That's probably not a good example of things that are interesting to other people.

But I, I think you see what I'm saying.

[00:34:55] Matt: Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, I do. I do. Um, well, let's, maybe let's pull up from the case of a particular science journalist, let's say, and, and to institutions, um, because I, I feel like the, the rules may be planned a little bit differently at that level, um, and one, one sort of analogy that comes to mind here, if I were to take something like, um, the medical industry or the pharmaceutical industry, you know, to, to get a new drug or a new medical device to market or something.

Um, a lot needs to happen. Um, it needs, often there is a theoretical step. You have to have some theoretical basis for believing that this thing will work and is safe. And there would be often, um, some modeling work involved, similar to what we've just talked about from the curation basis. And then there might be actual real world clinical trials and so on.

And eventually if there's a strong enough belief that this thing is good and safe, you might get the new drug with the new device, um, to market. Um, When it comes to things like, um, curation algorithms, you know, things that would, for example, um, curate one's social media feed, you know, there is no such process that works as well to, to my knowledge, um, you know, these things are just like let out into the world, um, and I'm not even sure The extent to which these companies really, really do think about the impacts in the same way as you've done in your, in your work.

Do you think that there is space for something like that? You know, some sort of, again, if you treat the, treat the curation algorithm as a, as a new medical device, just as an example, you know, um, is there space, is the need for the, the kind of work that you've done looking at. how the different algorithms could lead to different, um, sort of impacts in the world before these things are released out there.

[00:36:49] Cailin: I mean, we would hope that the people running social media platforms before they Make a new algorithm before they make whatever other changes to their platform would think really hard first about How is this going to impact users? How is it going to impact the spread of information? Is it going to create a problem for disinformation, whatever?

Um, I think sometimes they do but As you're pointing out, it's not like we have any regulatory body that's saying, you have to do that. You have to be careful how your algorithm works. You have to figure out what impacts it's going to have before you use it. Um, if we want to keep up the medical analogy, that used to be true of medicine too.

There wasn't always an FDA. Um, And before we had government regulation of drugs, there were a lot of people creating all sorts of wild things that they were giving to patients or selling as cures for diseases that were, sometimes they didn't work, and sometimes they would actually hurt you, or sometimes they had mercury in them, or, or, um, cocaine or whatever.

Uh, so. We might think that what we're going to want for social media is to have something like the FDA, but where what it does is works with platforms to say, whatever you're rolling out or, um, whatever new challenges you're facing, we're going to work with you so that you comply with certain standards to protect users from misinformation or the spread of bad information or bad curation or whatever it is.

[00:38:32] Matt: Yeah, I guess for people to take the idea of, um, I mean, for people to not be so resistant to the idea of regulation in this way, you have to believe that the consequences of not regulating our Significant enough and again to take the medical analogy even further, you know, there are cases where let's say the case of thalidomide, for example Um, this is.

a case where um for for people who don't know um, you know drug used for morning sickness and Many, many years later it transpired that it was, um, it also resulted in, um, sort of genetic defects and, and children born with, you know, merged arms and things like that.

Uh, and so it was, it was very delayed, you know, the drug in market used in the real world and then the consequences emerged down the track and, and then after that the regulation came in. Uh, but there are other cases where just on a purely theoretical basis we know, Um, now based on the knowledge that it's, it's likely to be dangerous.

So again, you mentioned mercury. Now that we know that mercury is poisonous to humans, um, we know that already we don't have to go and do clinical trials with things that are very mercury laden. We know, um, based on, based on, um, based on theory alone, uh, that drugs shouldn't contain too high levels of mercury.

Um, and I, I, I wonder in the case of, um, the, the sort of curation algorithms that Do we know enough purely on a theoretical basis to justify very seriously looking at, um, at regulation in, again, so suppose there were just those three types of curation that we've talked about. Um, you know, hyperbole, extremity bias, fair reporting.

Just imagine that the algorithms just had some blend of those things on a purely theoretical basis. Do we do we know? Enough based on the sort of modeling work that you've done and so on that regulation would be would be necessary.

[00:40:30] Cailin: Well, I just want to point out, I've, I never have thought and do not think that social media algorithms, rather than journalists themselves, Are like are facing the same incentives as journalists or curate in the same way that journalists do. I don't think that I do think they tend to select for extreme content of certain sorts, but it wouldn't be in the same way as science journalists.

Um, now, just kind of stepping back and getting it, like, more of the heart of that question. Certainly. We know that there are there are and have been extremely serious harms from Internet disinformation things that have. Kill people and, you know, harm democracy, stuff like this, uh, you know, in the U. S. A lot, a lot of people have taken Ivermectin to treat COVID, you know, it doesn't treat COVID and it's not supposed to be for humans.

It's a dangerous thing to do, you know, again, in the US, we had, uh, an insurrection on the US Capitol and part driven by QAnon conspiracy content online. So we know that. Real harms can come out of social media misinformation. Um, I would think that alone is enough to think we need to take regulation seriously.

I think, you know, when people feel scared or resistant. When we talk about social media regulation, it's because of free speech laws and free speech norms, and free speech is an incredibly important thing to protect in any country, but when it comes to things like a social media algorithm, and this isn't my point, this is something many people have pointed out, uh, they're already making choices, it's not like you're just getting anything.

Some magical perfect bubble of speech of whatever is random selection of what everyone's saying It's picking things to show you and not show you and some things are getting platformed and some things are getting deep platform So it's already making all these choices. The question is Do we want to have controls who care about public health, who care about democratic functioning, who are saying, once you have these algorithms shaping what people see, what information gets sent out to people, what gets curated, um, do we want that to be done in a way that's good for us, the users?

[00:42:53] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, I would, I would love to get into the specifics there, but maybe just lingering on the point of the, the incentive system. So you, you mentioned you, you're not claiming the incentives faced by scientist journalists are the same as the incentives that, um, sort of shape social media algorithms. Um, are, are there.

Presumably, like there are some incentives that are very helpful and some that are not and some that are worse than others. Are there any sort of, um, uh, sort of specific or very material ways that you feel that they differ, that are, that are important?

[00:43:25] Cailin: Yeah, well, so first of all, you know, These social media algorithms don't face like ethical norms the way science scientists do. So something like fair reporting is completely out the window. I do think there tends to be selection for extreme content where extreme are the things that are surprising to people what they think about the world right now.

So I think that actually is quite similar. Um, it's Something that I think is quite different is that there have been studies showing that the algorithms on some social media platforms tend to actively select misleading information or false information to promote compared to accurate information. And the reason that happens is that often misinformation is more surprising because it's false.

Um, so it tends to be stuff that seems weirder and people are more interested and then the algorithm picks up on that. Whereas I think science journalists tend to be the opposite, you know, of course they want to make things more exciting and they want to report the You know, novel or extreme science, but they're choosing things that are by and large accurate and good information to report on.

So there are real disanalogies there.

[00:44:45] Matt: Do you, do you feel like, well, how much of a problem is it that we might not fully understand what is actually happening curation algorithm versus, um, what's happening with the science journalist? Again, with the science journalist. You could speak to them, they could explain, it might not actually faithfully represent what is actually happening in this sort of curation practice.

But I think we have a much, much more insight than we would if it's just a very, very large black box algorithm. Um, I mean, how big of an issue is that? Just the pure fact that these things are very opaque and very complicated and we don't really know how they're working under the hood.

[00:45:22] Cailin: Yeah, I mean, I think that is an issue in some cases, you know, we can get under the hood information about algorithms. I can't remember if it was. Twitter, I mean, someone at some point released, like, here's how our algorithm works, but the other thing about social media systems is that they aren't just algorithms, you know, it's a system where you have sometimes millions of users.

They have connections between each other. They're interacting with content in ways that then is shaping whether the algorithm picks it up. So it's this extremely complicated extended system where you have real humans. You have this online platform. You have a set of rules. You have a computer algorithm.

Sometimes you have AI involved in that as well. And so for that reason, it is really hard to understand, like, what's getting picked to go where and why, in some cases.

[00:46:16] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. And again, like, um, and none of this is sort of new thinking, but, you know, different social media platforms, all of them are living in a world where their businesses are driven by attention and attracting users. And so, like, the whole existence of these businesses does require. that, um, and, uh, they are in a sense or competing on that basis.

Um, and so there are, you know, there are certain sort of business constraints, business considerations. Um, but, but even given that, are, are there things that you think, um, again, like back to, back to principles, are there any things that you think could change that would both allow these businesses to operate as successful businesses, but also lead to meaningful improvement?

in what they're doing to our information environment.

[00:47:09] Cailin: Yes, they do. Um, so, it's funny, I was just talking to someone about like, well, could we have some kind of neutral algorithms or neutral news feeds that, that aren't distorting content in whatever way, potentially harmful ways? And the answer is like, well, social media would be much more boring. If we tried to do that, and when platforms have tried to do that, they've been pretty boring.

Um, and so obviously, like, both platforms and users don't want that. But if we're thinking about what we have right now, certainly we can take what we have right now. And make it better. And there's a lot of ways we can make it better. And there are things that various platforms have done that already have done that, like, for example, community notes or context notes on things, um, you know, these will be added information.

So it's not a threat to free speech. They're not taking stuff down. They're adding information, giving context to the, to whatever you're seeing. I think of that as I think these are great. You know, if we sort of turn back to the curation project in a way, those things are often giving information about like, what's the rest of the distribution of events?

What are the other things that happened? How can we help you better interpret this limited piece of data? You're seeing? Um, those are great. So that's just 1 example of something that actually has been added that has improved. Social media sites. Another thing, I think, you know, it's been very well established that most really misleading content tends to come from a small number of users. I think that most sites should just have rules saying, like, when you sign up, you sign an agreement that says, if I. Send around too much highly inaccurate content. I'm just removed from the site.

You know, it's just an agreement that this is the kind of space where you have to not share too much highly misleading stuff. I think that's a change that every social media platform should make. I also think when we're talking about curation, there are ways that you can try to make your algorithm, um, track distributions of information in More like less misleading ways.

So for example, it's well established that high emotion content tends to get picked up and amplified by algorithms, right? Because it's interesting. And so here, it's a little hard to get rid of that because people like high emotion content, but you could make your algorithm just a little less interesting, you know, take that really angry stuff and just send it a little less far or, you know, promote the high emotion joy content, which people also like a little more, um.

Sorry, we're getting away from science journalism for sure, but I, I have lots of thoughts about all sorts of misinformation. So maybe if you want, we can kind of come back on topic.

[00:50:12] Matt: No, no, no. I think, I don't think that there is a, I don't think we have to confine ourselves to science. The posture I take is like follow the, follow where the interesting conversation goes and what's most important. So no, for sure. We let's, let's go there. I mean, have, have, have there been any practical examples that.

you've seen again, sticking with, with social media or it doesn't have to be social media, but of this concept where there have been active measures taken across different platforms and then we've had time to see the results.

Um, so again, like not all social media platforms are, are equal. TikToks algorithm is extremely addictive for users compared to some of the others. And, um, uh, you know, different, different platforms have tried different things. Have we seen any real world results of these changes being made in certain areas and then what happened, um, as, as a result?

[00:51:04] Cailin: It's a little hard to know because Uh, it's hard to study when one platform like makes a specific change in this highly complicated system where people are on multiple platforms and all this stuff is happening. It's hard to know exactly what happened. I think there are a few cases where you could say, like, we saw a platform decision and an impact.

So for example, in the week of the January 6th. Insurrection, a lot of platforms kicked off Q and on posters, um, and kind of the leaders of that movement. And that seemed a lot of people thought based on the evidence that they could gather after that, that that actually had a measurable impact on the ability of that community to spread the misinformation they were puddling and to organize.

And so. That's a kind of extreme example where you're like, yeah, what the platforms did really did have an impact, but obviously that wouldn't be the kind of thing we're usually talking about. But a lot of people do do studies where they try to get, you know, a controlled population and check how certain types of changes on platforms would then impact.

That group. So, um, one thing that's interesting that a lot of people have studied is friction on social media platforms, which is where you make it just a little harder to share things like you add friction to people's behaviors and. I think this is pretty well confirmed by the evidence that just adding friction tends to decrease how much people share false content or bad content.

And so when you slow people down a little bit, it turns out they're actually not that bad at identifying what is going to be misinformation. And just a little more thinking, they tend not to share it. Even better is stuff like, you know, these little alerts you get on some sites being like, you didn't actually read this article.

Are you sure you want to share it? Are you sure you want to repost it or whatever? Uh, and so there are some things that from experimental evidence, it seems that they can actually improve sharing or make a difference. There's some platforms though. I mean, It's very hard to study platforms like TikTok where the content is videos because the content is like more complex than what you might get on these other platforms where it's words or words in a picture.

Um, and so I think when we're looking at TikTok, and I think kind of video content is the future for the next while, um, it's much less understood. I think how to. Stop or decrease the spread of misinformation on that kind of platform.

[00:53:53] Matt: Yeah. And I guess the flip side that we haven't really talked about in all this, you know, we've talked a lot about the, the role of the curators themselves, whether it's a journalist, whether it's an institution, whether it's a platform, um, we haven't spoken that much about. The actions that can be taken by the consumers of that information to the, the learners, um, and the users of these platforms, um, which is another side of the coin.

I mean, do you have views on, um, you know, what are the things that individuals, for example, can do? To, I guess, protect themselves from some of the consequences that we've been talking about. Um, you know, being impacted by hyperbole, um, extremity bias, all these things. Does it, does anything stand out, uh, from the individual perspective?

[00:54:45] Cailin: yeah, so there certainly are things users can do to improve issues around misinformation. That side of things is not usually the one I like to focus on. And the way I think about it, so I think that it's just not that effective for us all to try to learn to be like, really information savvy compared to just having good information environments we live in.

And for me, the analogy I like to think about is everyone carrying metal straws. I don't know if you, this was a big thing in the people around

me. Cause I hang out with a lot of, yeah. Okay. I hang out with a lot of environmentalists. It was like no more plastic straws, everyone get your own metal straw.

And it's like, or we could just have regulation around what kind of one use plastic people are allowed to produce. And If we did that one change to the whole system, we don't all have to do this really stupid thing with them carrying our own metal straws. Um, So people can learn a lot about how misinformation works, they can learn how to share less information, people should do that, it's not like there's any reason not to do that, but it's just so much more effective to have changes in government or regulation or on platforms that protect, you know, a million users at once, if that makes sense.

[00:56:17] Matt: Yeah, for sure. No, for sure. It does. Um, then let's, then let's think about then, you know, how this might pan out in the future. So I think I think people do have the sense that this problem has gotten a lot worse over the past decade or so. I don't, I don't actually know if that's, if that's true. Do you know?

Is it, has someone looked at that? How much worse it actually has gotten or, you know, do we just feel it's worse? Is it a worse problem than it was before?

[00:56:44] Cailin: You know, I think it is. I don't know of, um, yeah, I don't know of like actual empirical data where people did real studies looking at how much disinformation is there or how bad are algorithms, but part of the reason I think it's gotten worse is that, you know, When these new areas of media were created, I just think people had not yet realized how much they could be used for the purposes of disinformation and then had not yet built up the skills and tools necessary to use them in that way.

And you also see all these things happening where, for example, after the Brexit vote in 2016 and after the U. S. So I think that there's lots of reason to think that, uh, you know, people quite self consciously being like, Oh, well, if other people can do that, I can do that too. So I, I think that there's lots of reason to think that.

In fact, it has gotten worse. Just more people have realized this is something they could do. Um, the techniques people have been able to use have gotten more savvy over time. At the same time, we increasingly see attempts to prevent or regulate the harms of disinformation. So there is pressure on the other side of this system, um, trying to improve things.

[00:58:18] Matt: Yeah. And I guess the critical question is which side will win over and like where is the pressure mounting more? You know, it feels from my perspective that there is a huge degree of uncertainty about how things will pan out because, you know, on the one hand there is this increased awareness of how big the problem is, but on the other hand there is also a lot going on out there in the world.

You know, we talked about generative AI breaking the internet. There is a lot of. There's a lot of content out there that is generated by now generative AI, and it's very hard to spot, it's very easy to publish content, there's very low friction to get content spread all over the world in a very scalable way.

And so it feels like there is a great tension between these two sides. How optimistic are you, I guess, as to how this might play out? How do you see it playing out?

[00:59:14] Cailin: Yeah, I guess I kind of have a mix of optimism and pessimism, um, there's always been misinformation as long as there have been humans, you know, whenever people can transfer information from one person to another, they're sometimes going to be sharing things that are false or misleading. So it's not like that's going away.

I think the question just is sort of how bad is it or how much is it happening at once? At a scale that's unlike things that have come before, um, the optimistic thing is that if you look at the history of media, I think you see a lot of cases where, uh, there are new information technologies, like better printing presses or new kinds of newspapers or whatever, or the radio, um, then you see the spread of misinformation.

Via these new technologies. And then you see people kind of figuring out how to regulate it or protect themselves or develop new norms to solve those social problems. So there's like this, you know, history of people solving this same kind of problem. Uh, the pessimism part comes from the fact that the speed of digital technology change is just so fast now, that it's not just that social media was invented, it's that every few years, there's a new platform.

That people are jumping into, you know, there was Facebook, and then there was Twitter, and then there was Instagram, and then there was WhatsApp, and then there was TikTok, and, um, and each one of these is different, you know, they have different rules for how information can be shared, they have different sorts of information being shared, you know, the difference between TikTok, where everything is videos, and there's all these specific rules for how people can stitch with others, or repeat things, or copy them, uh, The difference between that and something like Twitter, where it's whatever 200 characters of text and maybe a picture or link, is very different.

So I think the question is, can we figure out How to regulate or control misinformation given all of these new platforms constantly emerging.

[01:01:28] Matt: Are there any emerging technologies that you think will be particularly important to think about and focus on in this space? I mean, generative AI is a very big, it's a very broad term. It means a lot of things, but, you know, automatically generated video content is an example of something that they can do.

We've seen deep fakes, we've seen very, very personalized content. Does there anything, is there anything that jumps out to you as particularly troublesome? In this, uh, in this fast moving space.

[01:02:00] Cailin: I mean, I, I honestly, I'm not sure. And I'm not really an AI person. Uh, one thing that a lot of people have worried about, which seems right to me, is that when you can make generative AI, it decreases people's trust in all sorts of content. So now people become much less sure. If a video they're seeing was a real video or if it was an AI video or if a photo could be a deepfake and so it decreases the information value in normal media in a way that seems worrying.

What I'm guessing, just based on how things are gone, is that we just are not going to have any idea what the real threats are. Until they happen, uh, I think we're gonna look back in 10 years and be like, wow, we just really weren't expecting that. I mean, that's, that's what's happened on the internet at every stage.

Uh, we thought it was gonna help us never be wrong again, and then that's really not what happened. Uh, or, you know. With the origins of Facebook, it was like, oh, this is going to be a fun little silly thing for the youth to connect with their friends on, and then social media just became something totally different from what we would have expected.

[01:03:17] Matt: Yeah, yeah, no, it's a, it's, it's tricky, um, I mean, what, what do you do, uh, personally to navigate this space and to protect yourself? Again, there's some obvious things, you know, trusted sources, do somewhat of your own research and so on, but is there anything that, that you incorporate in, in your sort of personal life and in professional life?

to, so navigate this effectively.

[01:03:44] Cailin: Yeah, I mean, when it comes to news, I pay attention to source quite a lot and tend to go with mainstream news sources, you know, the Washington Post or whatever, something of that sort. I think the, the place, you know, I'm, I'm a person who does like misinformation research, so I tend to know more about like how to deal with particular kinds of misleading content.

I think the place that even for me is extremely challenging actually goes back to curation, but now curation based on research Preferences, right? Where, like everyone else, I tend to see the content that tickles me that I find enjoyable or uplifting or confirming of my worldview. Um, and that means that there are a lot of things I'm not seeing, especially on the other side of the political aisle, and I'm not seeing the opinions that really differ from my own.

And, you know, I try to kind of extrapolate out in my mind, like, remember, you know, this is just my echo chamber. There's all this other stuff I'm missing, but I find that extremely hard. Um, it's actually a place where I worry. I don't think I can do it. I sort of don't think anyone can do it to really understand what's going on outside of their own little bubble when you're only seeing what's in your bubble.

[01:05:06] Matt: Yeah, no, I worry about that too. I mean, going back to your, your, um, the original paper we were talking about, one of the key assumptions there for that in the, in that model was that the journalists were getting an accurate. They had access to sort of an accurate representation of the underlying distribution.

And, and I feel like before the digital age, at least to some extent, this was true in the sense that information came through kind of geographically constrained networks. You would bump into people on the street, you knew people in your area, you know, of course you could get bubbles within the village.

Um, but, um, you know, I think the environment forced. It's somewhat of a sort of a bigger spread of the ideas we would get exposed to versus, as you said, today with a higher degree of personalization based on individual preferences. It's almost, it's almost impossible for one to know, um, you know, to, to what extent they're, what they're seeing.

As much as your own research as you want to do, um, you know, how does one know whether this is getting somewhat of a, an accurate sampling of the underlying. Truth space. I'm not trying to solve that problem, but it's something I worry about as well.

[01:06:20] Cailin: Yeah, how quirky an individual is the information or the opinions or whatever that you yourself are seeing. It's just hard to know.

[01:06:27] Matt: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

[01:06:29] Cailin: I mean in some ways if you think about like pre internet information spread, it's not that this wasn't a problem. It was just that it was a different problem, you know, people Were, as you say, more influenced by their geographic locations and the people there. And there are really interesting, like, formative studies showing that that's the case.

For example, I think there was one on MIT students in their little, like, housing groups that showed people would have more similar. Um, so you're still having some kinds of, like, effects of space, but now space is different. Now space has to do with these virtual environments and how close you are in virtual space rather than your literal physical environments.

[01:07:16] Matt: Mm. Yeah, and I think there is also, I mean, one of the biases of curation that you talked about was the extremity bias. Or maybe like cherry picking is a better example here, where there is a lot of stuff going on in the world. And, you know, previously, Um, you know, you could sample events all day and you just simply would not get exposed to the number of extreme events as we do today.

Today, because the information that we're getting is globalized, I think it is possible to spend all day, every day, just getting a sample of very, very extreme events on any particular topic. And I don't know if our psychology can, uh, can quite handle that. really unwind just how skewed that distribution is.

And I'm not sure if we were able to do that.

[01:08:01] Cailin: Yeah, and I think even with traditional media, that was something people were worried about, you know. Uh, do people have a really, um, skewed view of how common crime is, for example, because crime gets reported so often. And then on social media. You can go even further on this. Like, if you're, if you're interested in situations where, like, a cat mom raises squirrel babies, you can go find a hundred videos today of that and maybe get a really skewed distribution of how often that happens.

I don't know. On my, on my social media sites, that happens pretty often. surprisingly often. So now I kind of have an idea that like, there's a lot of cats raising squirrels and a lot of chickens with little kittens under them.

[01:08:51] Matt: Yeah, well, I almost, I almost introed, almost suggested that we intro this conversation by comparing our news feeds on social media sites. But I thought that it was probably, it was probably a bit risky.

[01:09:04] Cailin: Yeah, it's a little risky. It would definitely reveal my political preferences more than I try to do in like professional spaces.

[01:09:12] Matt: I mean, I mean, the other, the other interesting thing there is that, um, uh, you know, quite a small sample of, of what people are receiving on their curated sites can reveal a lot about their political preferences and other preferences because of how tightly these things cluster, which is maybe, maybe a topic for a, for a different conversation, but also, also an issue.

Yeah. Um, one of the places where I personally, um, try to get. sort of higher quality, well curated information is, of course, books. Um, I think, you know, people spend a lot of time, uh, to develop a, a book that's well written. Um, and books have been absolutely critical for my life. I'm sure, I mean, you've, you've, you're the author of many papers and, and some books as well.

Um, I'd love to turn to the, the topic of, of books. Um, and if you have any books that jump to mind that have most influenced you in your, um, You know, professional or personal life.

[01:10:11] Cailin: That's like such a Matt, that's like such a big topic jump, especially when you threw personal life in there, and I'm just like reeling. Uh,

[01:10:22] Matt: let's, let's iterate, let's, let's iterate, let's, let's do, let's do something that's much more closely related to

[01:10:29] Cailin: okay, yeah, yeah, pull it back.

[01:10:31] Matt: Yeah.

[01:10:33] Cailin: Yeah, okay, right, alright, books that have influenced my professional life, I mean, a lot, but, you know, so, I do this stuff on, um, misinformation, public belief, false belief, um, social network spread, but my actual discipline is philosophy, so a lot of what I read is actually philosophy books, which, you know, they're, they're not always for everyone.

So, like, the first things that pop to mind are, you know, these, like, very esoteric types of things, like, I love David Lewis's work on what social conventions are, but like, you hear what I'm saying.

It's not that relevant here. As far as stuff relevant to the topic we've been talking about, um, T. Wynn's work on, like, games and gamification recently has been pretty fascinating.

Uh, Lately, what I've been reading tons and tons of are like, I'm trying to read all the books on how, uh, our particular beliefs in a society influence the way we produce science, because I'm working on a project relating to that, so I'm reading all this stuff about how, like, Our beliefs about gender influence science and our beliefs about fat and, you know, uh, disability and race and, yeah, I don't, yeah,

[01:12:02] Matt: Yeah. No, I mean a huge, a huge topic and very relevant for this podcast actually because I mean the name of the podcast is, um, Paradigms and, or Paradigm and it's often about the, looking at the paradigms in which we work and, um, not just working within them, but actually looking at them. And, um, and they do shift and they do shift and many of the conversations I've had have addressed questions just like that, you know, when one gets started in science, you often see it as something that's largely uninfluenced by, um, politics and social society and so on, uh, and so that is just completely not true, that is

[01:12:39] Cailin: yeah, yeah, in fact it's quite deeply influenced and shaped by the people who are producing it and the way they've been raised and the culture they're existing in and all these factors.

[01:12:50] Matt: Yeah. Exactly. Um, to then make a smaller leap from, uh, books that have professionally influenced you to, to, uh, books that have influenced you more broadly. And maybe it's the same because philosophy does that, but, um, does anything come to mind as, as books that have, uh, that have influenced you in a more general way?

[01:13:07] Cailin: Gosh, I am really like an obsessive reader. So this is like a stressful question for me. I am just gonna go for the first thing that pops up. I'm Have I mean for my entire adult life been absolutely obsessed with Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, you know this book?

[01:13:25] Matt: Yes, yes, yes. For sure. Yeah. All, all the, all the wedding, uh, all the wedding readings come from that book.

[01:13:31] Cailin: A lot of them do, uh, but, I mean, it's just, it's so beautiful and so deep. I mean, the part on, like, joy and sorrow, I go and read, like, every month or so. Yeah. I love that book.

[01:13:46] Matt: Amazing. That's a great recommendation. I will, I will definitely link that one here. Last two questions. Firstly, just a, just like a, you know, a call to action for the audience, I guess. I mean, if people want to look more into this stuff, uh, if they want to get more involved, if they want to find your work, anything, um, you know, any, any words to share?

with, uh, with the audience.

[01:14:07] Cailin: if people are interested in things like, um, misinformation and especially disinformation, there are good books. Recent books, I mean, um, Network Propaganda by, uh, Kathleen Jamison is really great, for example. Uh, if people are interested in looking at my work, I have a website, kaitlynoconner.

com. It's really easy to find. I am on Facebook. Twitter, but I mostly just go on there to post like when students in our graduate program have gotten jobs and Occasionally to ask questions to help me in my research Yeah, I don't know what other sorts of resources might be Useful or would people usually share?

[01:14:54] Matt: Uh, yeah, usually, usually books. Maybe we can link your, your own book would be a good idea.

[01:14:59] Cailin: Yeah, so I wrote a book on misinformation called the misinformation age with Jim, whether all who's my colleague and also my husband, um, we talk a little bit about curation in there. Not very much. Most of the curation stuff. We started developing later. Uh, that book mostly uses network models. So models where you, um, represent a whole social network in a computer simulation and then try to look at how various information or ideas, um, Spread between people so we use those and then a lot of like historical cases of false beliefs to try to understand Various features of how people share information and where they go wrong.

[01:15:41] Matt: Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. I'll, I'll link that as well. Um, last one, I'll give you a prior warning. It is a big jump from the topics that we've been talking about, but it's, it's one that I always end with. Um, we talked a little bit about generative AI and there's a lot of talk about, um, the prospect of developing an AI super intelligence.

Um, and my question is if we were to create one and we had to pick a person, either past or present, to represent humanity to the, to the AI superintelligence. Who should we pick?

[01:16:13] Cailin: Oh, Dolly Parton, obviously Just

[01:16:23] Matt: Ah, very good. Um,

[01:16:28] Cailin: just all around very lovable, you know

[01:16:30] Matt: she is, she is. Uh, I have a funny story about Dolly Parton, but again, it's one for a different time. Um, um, ​

Hello Everyone, I want to share some good news and a few words of thanks.

Good News: Paradigm has reached a point where it now gets multiple new listeners every minute, every day, all around the world. I've been overwhelmed and humbled by this response, and it’s given me the confidence invest even more into Paradigm.

As such, you may notice that I’ve just published all episodes right here on matthewgeleta.com, and enabled community features (e.g. comments and likes).

Please jump in and like, comment, and share - it would mean a lot to me ❤️

Words of Thanks: As a gesture of thanks to YOU, my early supporters, I’ll be offering all current as well as the next 500 subscribers free access to Paradigm, forever. (That’s almost as good as the Founding Membership I’ve just offered to some of my Paradigm guests!) Beyond that point there will be a paywall on certain content.

Thanks for your support, and enjoy this mind-expanding conversation!

Matt

Subscribe now

Share Paradigm

Episode Notes

David Krakauer is President of the Santa Fe Institute, the preeminent institution dedicated to the study of complex systems, including computational, biological, and social systems.

David was named as one of the “Fifty People Who Will Change the World” by Wired Magazine, and he was included in Entrepreneur Magazine’s list of visionary leaders advancing global research and business. He holds a PhD in evolutionary theory from the University of Oxford, as well as degrees in biology and computer science from the University of London.

We discuss:

• Determinism and free will

• Reductionism and fundamental vs effective physical theories

• Broken symmetries in the laws of physics

• The purpose of science

• Developing a new science of complexity

• Paradigms and paradigm shifts

… and other topics

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent commentary.

Episode links

• Books:

  • The Complex World: An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science

  • Foundational Papers in Complexity Science: Volume 1

  • Foundational Papers in Complexity Science: Volume 2

  • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight

  • Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach

  • Thomas Nagel - The View from Nowhere

• David’s website

Timestamps

Timestamps are for the video episode

00:00 The Limits of AI and Predictability

02:10 Fundamental Laws and Predictive Power

04:33 Laplace's Determinism and Its Challenges

07:22 Epistemic Horizons and Free Will

21:13 Symmetry Breaking and Quantum Fluctuations

39:41 Emergence and Effective Theories

49:43 Human Intuition and AI

51:14 The Evolution of Intelligence

51:21 Physical and Cognitive Tools for Human Enhancement

53:52 Science: Humanistic vs. Utilitarian

01:05:50 Complexity Science and Its Applications

01:12:18 The Future of Complexity Science

01:27:57 Books and Resources on Complexity

01:34:06 Final Thoughts and Reflections

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors.

Introduction and Setting the Stage

[00:00:00] Matt: I'm here with David Krakauer. David, thank you for joining me.

[00:00:02] David Krakauer: Thank you. This is going to be fun.

[00:00:04] Matt: Definitely will.

The Limits of AI and Predictability

[00:00:05] Matt: Um, David, let's, let's start with the topic of intelligence and predictability, which I know you've thought a lot about. we live in an age where large companies are spending millions of dollars to develop AI models to better understand human behavior, make recommendations, make predictions about what we'll do.

Um, I would wager that the people who end up listening to this conversation are probably doing so because an algorithm has recommended it to them. Um, and as we know, these models are getting much more powerful and we're deferring more and more of our autonomy to them. My question to you is, do you feel like there is a limit to how well they will be able to predict our behavior and our choices.

[00:00:47] David Krakauer: there are several issues here, right? One issue relates to the fundamental, fundamental limitations to prediction based on fundamental theory, right? Um, what can physics predict on its own? The Laplacian conceit, which we should talk about And then there is what you can predict at mesoscopic and macroscopic scales that are of greater interest to us. And there, of course, we kind of know the answer because there are coarse grained things we can predict quite effectively, average things, supply and demand.

For example, if I charge 10 times as much for a toothbrush, You're going to be more careful with the toothbrush that you already own, um, as opposed to halving its price. And so, macroscopic prediction of that sort is quite strong. But when it comes to the specificities of preference, or the behavior of organisms at a microscopic scale, then of course we do terribly.

So I think it's We do very well at the fundamental level and then it gets worse and worse until we have a principled reason to average and then it gets better and better.

[00:02:06] Matt: Yeah, well, let's stick with the fundamental level then for a second.

Fundamental Laws and Predictive Power

[00:02:10] Matt: I think a, um, I mean, this is an age old philosophical question, the question of, you know, determinism and whether the universe itself is in some sense, in principle, predictable. Many physicists, I think, do hold the intuition quite strongly that there should be at least some set of underlying fundamental laws.

that would in principle allow us to predict what the universe does. Do you feel like such a set of laws exists? Is there any reason to think that they do or they don't exist?

[00:02:40] David Krakauer: Right. So I think several things there. So I think the laws exist. Um, I think there is a fundamental set of laws. It's just, I don't think they're very useful. Um, I mean, take physics alone for a second. There is no unified theory of physics, right? So, we don't know how to go from quantum mechanics to the continuum limits in quantum mechanics.

a theory of gravity, so that's a fail. We don't know how to go from classical mechanics to statistical mechanics, that's a trick, the so called egodic hypothesis. And we don't know how to go from really fundamental physics to mesoscopic observables because of the problem of degenerate ground states or vacuum states, you know, string theory, you could argue is perhaps one of the most fundamental theories we have.

But it has, you know, 10 to the 500, if not 10 to the 5, 000 solutions, all of which are compatible with the laws, right? The laws don't make a distinction between these solutions, but mesoscopically in the world that we live in, they would make a difference. So even within physics, right? When you say, is there a fundamental predictive theory? It depends. what scale you're asking the question, right? So, okay, that's the first point. But then there's a whole really fascinating set of issues that give rise to what have been called epistemic horizons, which is how, you know, in some sense, like a real horizon, how far can you see into the future? This is a temporal horizon.

And there are, we should discuss these many theories and, and insights that were not available to say Laplace, which who typically quoted in relation to the predictive power of fundamental theory, by the way, historically inaccurately, perhaps we can also discuss that, right? Because that's

Laplace's Determinism and Its Challenges

[00:04:33] David Krakauer: also not, yeah, well, actually, let's go there first, because it's just sort of fun, you know, when Laplace was making his statements about a super intelligent being aware of the state of every possible particle at every scale at some time that we can extrapolate into the future.

I mean, he was making those statements at the beginning of the 19th century. based on an incomplete understanding of systems of differential equations. Laplace did not know that if you had perfect initial conditions and laws, there would be unique solutions, right, in other words, that you could predict.

That actually wasn't proved for several decades. after Laplace, right? In other words, um, so that result, which is a technical result, was not, was not known to him. Um, and that's sometimes called Lipschitz continuity, the thing that we now generalize as this notion of unique solutions to, to systems of differential equations.

So Laplace's position was not based on physics, it was based on metaphysics. And this is often forgotten, right? So the two big influences on Laplace. came from on the one hand Condorcet and Condorcet was very interested in what he called, you know, um, necessary versus contingent laws. He thought Newton's laws were contingent, you know, whereas the universe was necessary. So the laws could be different. And, um, What are the implications of having universal contingent laws? And there Laplace was borrowing from Leibniz, right? The principle of sufficient reason and the principle of continuity. So based in a nutshell, the principle of sufficient reason says every observable, every event has a cause. Every effect has a cause. And the principle of continuity says that if you were to observe more microscopically, they subdivide time between the original event in its cause. You'd find in another event and its effect rather. So in other words, The principle of sufficient reason that the universe is causal plus the continuity assumptions gave rise to Laplace's metaphysical belief, not mathematics and not physics. And my view on Laplace is that if Laplace lived now, someone as smart as that, um, he would never have made that statement. It would have seemed ludicrous to him. And I think the reasons for that are precisely all of the various contributors.

Epistemic Horizons and Free Will

[00:07:22] David Krakauer: to what we think of as this epistemic horizon. Um, and so, okay, let me just list a few, just to make that explicit. first of all, Laplace assumed an infinitely intelligent being who had infinite resources to measure initial conditions. That's impossible. It would require really a deity in order for that to be done. Because if you can't measure initial conditions perfectly, you are measuring volumes. And if you're measuring volumes, you are dealing with probabilistic trajectories. Okay, so that's gone. So determinism in the simple has gone, then you have deterministic chaos, right?

Which is at every point in a trajectory, all trajectories diverge exponentially. So once again, uh, At any point have you made a measurement, if it were not perfect? you would be inaccurate in your projection. So these are epistemological limitations on Laplace. So a lot of people say, well, who cares about that?

Laplace had in mind an infinitely powerful being. Forget all this nonsense about human limitations. Well, now there are logical objections. Um, Turing showed us about computing undecidability. Maybe the future state of the universe is Turing undecidable. Maybe the future state of the universe is Turing undecidable.

Kolmogorov incompressible. Maybe you have to simulate it to know where it goes. You can't predict it, you have to run it. We know plenty of systems where that's true. So those are logical problems. And then there are ontological problems. As you know, like Heisenberg uncertainty relations. Okay, I measure this perfectly, but then I don't know anything about that.

Measure position, I don't know momentum. I measure momentum, I don't know position. And then there's, which we should talk about in a bit, spontaneous symmetry breaking, that these systems can fall into, like the string theory vacuum states, they can fall into alternative solutions that are all compatible with the same fundamental laws.

So, these now, we now understand, in the early 21st century, Go way beyond the science and math available to lap place, which make a mockery, I think, of Laplas determinism. So I think for me it's completely moot at this point.

[00:09:48] Matt: Yeah, well, let's, let's, let's, um, very soon get to the topic of symmetry breaking, but sticking with Laplace for one second, you know, um, as you said, um, and I didn't know this actually very interesting that he was not what the theory of differential equations hadn't yet been developed. And it was not known that, you know, given.

Instead of initial conditions and the laws that then govern the evolution, unique solution results. But that is, that is a very intuitive thing to think, if you think about dynamics, and, and again, as you said, you know, LAPLACE is imagining an infinitely intelligent something that understands all of this.

But I think that the, the question to me still does remain, you know, forget about any observer, forget about any being, thinking about , this evolution, the fact of the matter that. a set of initial conditions and some set of laws that govern what happens next does determine what happens next. Modulo quantum uncertainty and so on.

And modulo practical issues with chaos, uh, if those initial conditions have a bit of noise or something like that. It does still feel like, in principle, the future is determined from, from the past. So is what we're saying, is, is that statement in and of itself contestable, incontestable?

[00:11:07] David Krakauer: Um, well again, for the reasons I gave, um, that I think is true of the entire universe because it's the only system that's truly closed,

[00:11:21] Matt: Yes.

[00:11:22] David Krakauer: and I think that. So I don't think, I think I would be willing to accept that if you say it of the whole universe. Um, but for any entity in that universe, given what we know about the structure of space time and the fact that you live on a world line and the limitations of the speed of light, which no entity, no subset of the universe can be.

aware of all other states in the universe. Forget limitations of epistemology. It's not about agents not having big enough brains. It's a fact

of relativity. And so that's something that is often forgotten. So any point in space has a limited causal past and causal future. And I think that's the ultimate constraint. on local Laplacian determinism. Because it means that there are variables that you can't know. Right? And hence, since world lines might eventually intersect, right, um, there are causes that you can locally not be aware about that will matter in the future. Hence prediction, cannot be perfect. It can be perfect if you had a digital twin of the whole universe, right, with infinite computational power simulating it. But it's a very different thought experiment, I think, to the thought experiment of Laplace,

[00:12:58] Matt: Yes. I mean, you would need, you would need a computer at least the size of the universe, if not bigger, to have a digital twin of that nature,

[00:13:09] David Krakauer: exactly, that lived outside of it, predict,

that lived outside of it, that wanted to predict a part of it. And, and I think, This is why in the end, um, it's an interesting metaphysical null hypothesis, you know, it's an interesting thing to have in one's mind in order to adduce limitations on the concept through epistemic horizons of the kind that I've mentioned.

Um, and, but unfortunately, as you know, that thought experiment has in fact been mobilized as a defense of the no free will thesis, which is really problematic because that's where these epistemic horizons really come into their own. I mean, so just for example, a metaphor that I find useful for this is imagine that you're in a city and you want to get from point A to point B. Let's imagine furthermore that you have a perfect map, and furthermore, that there is one, there are unique best paths between those two points. That's fundamental physics. It says that there is a, and again, if you want me to clarify any concept here, you know, I don't know who knows.

We can, oh yeah, we can extremize the action, right?

We can optimize in such a way as to discover what path will minimize time or minimize energy. between A and B. Now let's imagine that there are two paths which take the same amount of energy or time. Which one do you take? Well, fundamental theory can't tell you. So what it says is you take them with equal probability, half and half. If I were to observe the system, um, the symmetry of the law implies symmetry of state, but it can't predict exactly which one. Now imagine that you're an agent that has a partial map of the city. So not only do you have what's called the degeneracy problem, that is two paths which have the same, uh, minimum, but now you don't, you can't even optimize, so you have to use a rule or a heuristic, a search algorithm, which is no longer any, in any way in, within the purview of physical law. It's a different set of concepts. And we're dealing, I think, with almost everything we care about with partial maps, with degenerate solutions. And so all of the free will debate actually turns on the idea that is determinism in the world of mind, that we have a partial, a full map with, with a complete and unique best solution, the Laplacian world.

So The Laplacian thought experiment seems benign and perhaps only of interest to physics, but it turns out it's been recruited in defense of a bad argument attacking free will. But free will is, I would say, is the name we give to partial maps with degenerate roots. That's what is meant by free will.

[00:16:44] Matt: Yeah, so that might be true, but I think a lot of people would, the reaction would be that this is a watered down version of free will and they would feel like, okay, well we've, we've, we've redefined what, uh, what we mean by free will and this is not quite satisfactory. So just, just to pull up, what we're saying is, you know, Yes, uh, in principle, potentially the laws of physics might, um, have, in a, in a particular case, be able to fully predict what is going to happen, um, but in the case of limited agents with limited minds and limited information, uh, that is not the case, and it can, in principle, never be the case because we're never fully closed systems in this universe, um, and so there is this sort of space of uncertainty, of unpredictability, and we have freedom to operate in that space, and agents have freedom to, to act in that space in a way that is inherently never going to be 100 percent predictable.

But is that, is that the free will that people feel that they have? Uh, you know,

[00:17:42] David Krakauer: I think it's the free will that we're referring to. It's interesting you say that because I do think that, um, the, so let's take the contrasting position, the no free will, full determinism, Laplacian psychology

[00:18:02] Matt: I should say just as a brief interjection, I think even without determinism, there is still a class of no free will arguments that are worth exploring. But

[00:18:12] David Krakauer: Yes. Okay.

Oh,

[00:18:14] Matt: let's,

let's stick with the determinism

[00:18:15] David Krakauer: okay. That would be interesting. Okay. Let's go there. I just want to make the point that the standard argument, right. Is that free will is an illusion. It is a state of mind. superimposed on top of a deterministic machine. And okay, I would like to say that free will, it's not an illusion, but the name that we give to perfectly reasonable theories of epistemic horizons, right, and that that single term refers to that entire class of phenomena, which are not about necessarily limited human capability.

As I said, some of them are about spontaneous symmetry breaking. Some of them are about the Heisenberg uncertainty relations and so on, right? Some of them are fundamentally ontological, some of them about Turing's undecidability. So that whole class of phenomena, I think. contributes to our feeling of self determination.

I don't think it's one thing. And Dan Dennett in his book, Freedom Evolves, talks about compatibilism, right? This idea that you can have Laplacian universes and still have free will. And I think the way he justifies it is he says that free will evolves, right? Mesoscopic order, macroscopic order evolves, which makes all those epistemic horizons stronger.

And I think that's also true. But, uh, but I think that one way of actually resolving this debate is to ground agency in a physical theory of the epistemic horizon. And then we get a principled notion of free will that would satisfy the physicalists who don't like human fallibility.

[00:20:09] Matt: Does it, does it, does it satisfy that sort of inner desire that people have to feel like they're truly agents of their own destiny or is it, is it what we're saying is, uh, you know, you're of limited mind and you have a physical theory of that limited mind and within that sort of conception, you're free, you're free, uh,

[00:20:30] David Krakauer: it satisfies me. It satisfies me. You see, I, I, because I think it's not quite the same as saying, I lack imagination, or I lack computing power.

Right, what Turing showed us is that you could have all the computing power in the universe, and there are still functions that can't be computed.

So if you allow for this more expansive sense of limitation, I think it's slightly less offensive to our sense of agency.

[00:20:58] Matt: Yes. Do you, do you feel like the, the sort of like, I mean you mentioned Heisenberg uncertainty and, and uh, there was also the question of sort of inherent quantum randomness, you know, so some, some outcomes.

Symmetry Breaking and Quantum Fluctuations

[00:21:13] Matt: inherently not being determined. Does that have bearing on this question beyond, beyond, as you said, the epistemic horizon?

[00:21:22] David Krakauer: I think it might, um, in the evolutionary sense of broken symmetries. Right, that, so again, I, just to explain this idea, I think the city metaphor works. Let's say there are two paths that you could take, and you have the full map. So this is not about imperfect information anymore. This is about degenerate ground states, that there are two equally good paths to take between A and B.

And we now know, of course, that there Particles come into existence, molecules come into existence, organisms come into existence through breaking those symmetries, right? R-N-A-D-N-A have are right-handed molecules. They have ality proteins and molecules. Most molecules are left-handed. And the fact of them being left-handed or right-handed is why we have a biological world, because if that wasn't true, they couldn't interact.

But that left-handedness and right handedness. is symmetric with respect to the laws of physics, right? So what broke the symmetry? Why did we get some molecules right? And quite consistently so. And I think that it could be that at the level of fundamental interactions or particles, fluctuations of the kind that come from the quantum domain might be important.

I think as you go up into the mesoscopic scale, we're really talking about thermal fluctuations. which then would be compatible with Laplacian principles, right? Because you'd say, ah, that molecule that broke the symmetry, I know, I knew it was going to break it towards the left. And I, so I think quantum might have a role to play in a much more fundamental sense of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

[00:23:11] Matt: Yes. Got it. And so just again to, to play it back for those listening, the idea here is, you know, when we look at Let's say amino acids, they all have, they're, they're all, um, they have one chirality, but it could have been the otherwise. There is no underlying reason. And if you look at the laws of particle physics, I guess that would have determined them.

They don't have this asymmetry in them, but through the evolutionary process, there are quantum fluctuations. And at some point one path was taken, and this is what we've ended up with.

[00:23:39] David Krakauer: Exactly. It's a, exactly. So in other words, the, I mean, this is one of the great mysteries, right? The, the, the symmetric laws of physics don't correspond. To the asymmetric population of physical states.

[00:23:54] Matt: yes, yes. Does the, does that broken symmetry then, again, does that, does that consist in not having sufficient information about what those underlying laws are? Or does the symmetry, like in what sense does that broken symmetry exist in and of itself?

[00:24:14] David Krakauer: Yeah, so that is an interesting question. Um, so the broken symmetries, as you know, I mean, are real ontological effects. Um, this is what, this will take us to emergence, right? Because it's one of the most fundamental concepts in the theory of emergence that. Philip Anderson in 1972, in a very famous paper, More is Different, wrote extensively about this problem, and, which he thought was at the root of all complexity, which I guess, um, and he gave the example of very small molecules that have more than one ground state, more than one configuration corresponding to the minimum free energy, um, will fluctuate between the two.

And so the symmetric laws of motion, the molecular dynamics, will produce a symmetric distribution. So if you took a measurement of the real world, you'd find it in A 50%, B 50%. He gives the example of ammonia, NH3, a small molecule. But if you have a slightly bigger molecule, like phosphine, PH3, now, the state that it lives in is the state that it started in.

Same symmetric laws of motion. So you would predict 50 50, but unfortunately, the energy barrier that has to be overcome to move from one state to the other is large enough that it gets confined in its initial state. And so what happens is, is that the unknown parameter what establishes the initial state is dominant and the law subservient.

And if you think about physical theory, after Eugene Wigner, who wrote extensively about this, he said all physical theory tries to maximize the contribution of law and minimize the contribution of initial conditions, because those are the unknowns, those are parameters that come from nowhere. And unfortunately, as matter gets larger, the state you observe is more and more consistent with the initial conditions and less and less predicted by the law.

And, um, and that's not about ignorance. It's about ontology. But as I said earlier, what breaks that symmetry could be some tiny fluctuation. Maybe it's fundamentally irreducibly random and quantum, or maybe it's thermal.

[00:26:45] Matt: It's um, it always surprises me that this, this way of thinking about broken symmetries doesn't feel to be widely known or acknowledged even in let's say, the, I don't know, maybe in some parts of the physics community, the physics community is not one thing, but I think there is still this, this idea of, okay, you know, we have, um, you know, let's say laws of particle physics and they give rise to laws of chemistry and they give rise to, rise to laws of biochemistry and so on.

And there's a very clear sort of You hierarchy. Uh, we want to go up all the way to even maybe the social sciences, but in principle, it's possible to come all the way back down. And in principle, all the higher level things are determined, um, by the underlying, um, sort of more fundamental laws. Um, the, the idea of like, you know, just how important these broken symmetries along the chain can be, does not feel to be very acknowledged.

Why, why is that the case?

[00:27:40] David Krakauer: I don't know. It's very interesting. I, um, I remember when I was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and I would have lunch with Phil Anderson, who had once won the Nobel Prize for work in condensed matter, and at the table next to ours was Ed Witten's table, the string theory table, and Phil used to refer to them as theologians, and um, and the reason he did refer to them as theologians is for this reason actually, The condensed matter physics community, so people who work on molecules and larger structures, you know, crystals and fluids and bodies, even soft condensed matter, um, they understand this perfectly well.

You know, the high energy physicists, the particle physicists seem to have forgotten. And I think the reason is a kind of what the psychologist would call a selection bias. Because if the things you measure and study exist at that subatomic level, Then these kinds of considerations Are less important. Right. But if you studied crystals lattices, right, if you study larger objects, then these considerations become vital. And I think there's a sort of history in which the high energy physicists were this sort of preeminent intellectual community in physics, right? You had, you know, my colleague, you know, Murray Gell Mann, you had the Feynmans, you had the Julian Schwingers, you had Max Born, you had Niels Bohr, all the really smart people seem to be doing that stuff.

And, and I think, but that's not about the structure of reality. It's about the institutions of physics, right? And I think that's really a part of it quite seriously. Um, and then the other thing has to do with what falls under the purview of explanation, because I think for a lot of people, things that are not fundamental are, are sort of accidents. And they don't recognize that there are effective laws, right, like Darwin's or Mendel's or, you know, the laws of condensed matter physics, fluctuation dissipation theorems and so on, that are also laws. It's just that they don't operate at that fundamental level.

and exploit symmetry to the same degree, which tends to be a kind of almost spiritual quality of certain theories. And so those aren't recognized as law like, even though of course they are. And many people have been trying to make the claim in, certainly in our community, that computational theories, rule based reasoning, people like Stephen Wolfram has been making this claim for many years.

Have another. foundational character. Not everything has to look like, you know, quantum field theory. And so there's all sorts of things that are going on that I think have made that community a bit blind to this reality.

[00:30:42] Matt: Do you feel that the, uh, just for a moment with, let's say particle physics or string theory, or pick any, pick any flavor of sort of like underlying fundamental theory. Do you feel like it is, are any, uh, is there any theory that is truly fundamental? Because, and to, to say in one way is every theory has to have some sort of conceptual framework and that, that framework has to exist in something, or potentially it has to be exist in a mind, um, and you know, with that, can, can you have something that is truly fundamental in and of itself?

Or is everything in some sense effective?

[00:31:23] David Krakauer: Yeah, I mean, that's a really deep question that we could debate. forever. And I think I probably switched my mind a hundred times in our argument. I think that, um, the famous statement on this was made by, in Thomas Nagel in 1989 in a book he wrote called The View from Nowhere. And the view, the view from nowhere is the conceit that there can be an absolute objective understanding of reality, right?

That's the sort of one, Laplace's one version of the view from nowhere. And what you're saying is, any entity in the universe capable of intellection of reasoning about the universe is subjective and that fact imposes a non fundamental character on all knowledge. And I think and I'm sympathetic to that to some extent, but I'm also sympathetic actually with the view from nowhere when it comes to the entirety of the universe, right?

If you said, not the agentic universe, but the entirety of the universe. I actually don't study that. I study parts of it that do things we call intelligent, right? Or stupid,

both. Um, so actually David Wolpert and I have proposed an alternative framework for this, um, that we call the reality Ouroboros, which is a pluralistic, non subjective, framework and it works like this. Let's say that you were like Roger Penrose, a Platonist, like Paul Dirac, like most physicists, actually. Um, so mathematics comes first, not physical reality.

The most extreme version of this that annoys the physicist is John Wheeler's It from Bit. I mean, in a sense, It from Bit is Platonism, post George Boo, right? I mean, it's a sort of, it's an odd binary Platonism, but okay. But let's say we start with that world, out of which comes approximate representations of Platonic perfection, physical theory, let's say, okay?

Out of which comes chemistry, out of which comes biology, out of which comes psychology, out of which comes society, But now what happens is that that society through cultural evolution develops mathematics. So it's gone in a circle. And what David and I say is that you can start at any point in that circle, but you then have to follow the circle rigorously around clockwise.

So you could start with mind. Let's say mind is fundamental. Okay, simulation theory says that, says all of reality as we know it was made by someone else, a super programmer. Okay, that's mind. Mind first. Okay, you get mind. What does mind do? Mind develops mathematics, math Then it develops physics using the mathematics it developed and on it goes around the circle again until you have a theory of mind.

So, we have this notion of actually a symmetric theory of reality in which any point in the Ouroboros can be defined as fundamental, but after which everything has to follow rigorously according to your laws and experiments and regularities. So there is no one fundamental, there's an infinite number. And I think it's interesting that particular perspective does no less work, right?

In other words, you still have all the theories of physics. You'd still be able to predict things in the real world. It's not a philosophical exercise with no implications. It's consistent with science as we practice it. And it's also consistent with the plurality of ways of being in the world, right? If you're a poet, I would say within this framework, you're no less fundamental as long as you can follow the Ouroboros around.

So it's a less greedy position to adopt. It's a more plural position to adopt, but preserves, if you like, the objective rigor of the deductive sequence that ensues from pursuing the Ouroboros around in a full cycle.

[00:35:29] Matt: It reminds me a lot of, uh, Douglas Hofs. That's, uh, strange loops sort of idea. I dunno if you're familiar, familiar with it.

[00:35:37] David Krakauer: I am, I am, I, I'm very fond of Doug's work. And of course, Doug applies that to consciousness and the origin of self awareness in particular, but, but this idea that the universe is full of these self referential. If you like loops, it's very appealing, yes.

[00:35:54] Matt: Yeah. I mean, there is one sense in which you kind of feel like it, it almost has to, you have to think of it either this way, or you have to think at some point there is just a fundamental mystery, um, where at bottom something is assumed and, and that's that, and it has to be taken as fundamental. And I guess in, in this, this framing.

It is still, you know, the existence of this Ouroboros in itself is, will always remain a, a mystery in the sense that you can't stand outside of it and, and explain it in any other way. Um, but, you know, I mean, maybe this is just a personal question. Does it? Does it bother you? Does it give you discomfort?

What is the feeling you get thinking about the fact that there always has to be some just, some part of this will always remain fundamentally mysterious? And maybe I'm assuming, maybe I'm assuming the answer there. Will some part of this always remain fundamentally mysterious? I

[00:36:54] David Krakauer: I, I

want to answer that in two ways. Um, so first of all, I have nothing against mystery. I like murder mystery. You know, usually there's a culprit, but okay. Um, I even like fantasy where there isn't, right? So, um, but I don't think you have to call it mysterious because it's a little bit like the Heisenberg uncertainty relations.

You could say they were mysterious, right? Because there's always something you won't know if you know something else. But the thing about the Ouroboros is it's simply saying The subjective move in this game of chess is to pick where on the Ouroboros you start. But once you do that, you can trace out very rigorously the entire cycle back to the initial point.

And the point is what we call fundamental. Um, so I don't know if I'd call that mysterious, I think because there is an ontological necessity that that Ouroboros traces out a particular set of paths. That's not subjective. Um, I think what we're saying in that argument is the word fundamental is a value judgment.

It's the, it is the mysterious part. For you to declare that point of the Ouroboros is fundamental, you're being mysterious. We want to say, no, it's symmetric. It's the correct non mysterious solution to the problem is to accept the infinity of the reals, right? That there is any point in which you can insert.

I consider that non mysterious because I'm not unhappy with infinity.

[00:38:35] Matt: think I was more referring to the view from nowhere type of mystery where you could imagine different. Ouroboros, I don't know what the plural is here, but,

[00:38:45] David Krakauer: Yeah, Ouroboros is

[00:38:46] Matt: in,

[00:38:47] David Krakauer: yeah.

[00:38:47] Matt: and, and, and we, and we happen to find ourselves in, in one of them. And, uh, it feels sort of like, I'm

not sure if there could ever be something that really intuitively that.

[00:39:00] David Krakauer: I think we are in all of them. I want to make that clear. We're in all of them. We're in all of them, the full infinity. Because, um, you, in a sense, I mean, this brings it down to earth a bit, makes it slightly more quotidian, but the definition of a discipline within this framing is the insertion point in the Ouroboros.

That's what it means to be an English professor or a chemist. or a mathematician, right? It's, we are, we do coexist in all of those realities. There is a professional commitment to any one of them based on finite time, right? But we do live in that infinite space.

[00:39:40] Matt: Okay.

Emergence and Effective Theories

[00:39:41] Matt: Well, let's, let's, um, let's then move on to what we mentioned just before this was, which was emergence. So we talked about effective, we talked about fundamental theories. We talked about effective theories, which are sort of higher level, coarse grained. descriptions in a sense, but also, you know, from a practical, uh, from, um, uh, for all practical purposes, very useful and can also be in and of themselves, sort of I guess complete in a sense that, you know, you don't need to look at something more fundamental to do everything you can with this theory.

Um, let's, let's explore this topic then of, uh, emergence. Um, how would you, how would you think about where emergence comes from? Almost, almost reflecting the question of itself. How does emergence emerge?

[00:40:25] David Krakauer: Yeah. I mean, again, it goes back to that. If you were talking to Phil Anderson, he would say the roots of emergence are in broken symmetry. Right, that, um,

that point at which the fundamental laws no longer do the predictive work that they have been charged with. Right? I mean, that's the thing about scientists as opposed to metaphysicians is that we're pragmatic, right? So science, we like it because it does something. If it doesn't do anything except entertain us as a series of thought experiments, then it's not science anymore.

And, um, and Phil rightly points out that, At the point that symmetry has been broken, the fundamental law no longer does work. So what do you do? And so we can, look, I mean, let's take a DNA molecule. It's made up of nucleotides, A, C, G, T, T, C, A, G, and so on. All of those permutations are compatible with physical law, right?

They can't tell you about those permutations. They can tell you nothing about it. They can't see them, right? They don't operate at that level, at that mesoscopic scale. So I want to understand them though. Why do you have ACCGT and a mouse has ACCTG and a fly has GGCAT and so on? We want to understand it.

We want to predict it. It turns out to do that. We need another theory. And it's the theory that takes us from DNA to RNA to proteins to protein interactions to phenotypes and to behavior. And those are what we would call effective theories. They work. It's very principled, right? The theory of protein folding.

It's very rigorous, it's just not based on fundamental theories of physics. And, um, that was a failed enterprise. That's why, by the way, machine learning is so good at protein folding, because it's not fundamental. If you, that's a funny thing, if you try to do ab initio protein folding, you get to about a hundred atoms spanning about a picosecond, right?

So forget it. There is no fundamental theory of protein folding. And so there are effective ones, which means you put a lot of bias in, you put a lot of constraint, a lot of what would now be called priors. And, um, so again, at any given level, you have a set of models and theories and dynamics. You push them as far as they go.

until they can no longer explain the distribution over the observed states. And then you say, okay, a symmetry has been broken in that theory. I need a new theory that operates at that new level, which can explain the distribution of observed states. And you push that as far as it can go until that breaks.

And then you put another one in place. So there's actually a very rigorous iterative process of model building. And every break point is a point of emergence, right? And, and another way to say that would be that if you were to stay with the model you have at a higher level, there would just be too many parameters that you couldn't account for.

Right, that, that's its, that's its feeling. So the ratio of the dynamics to the initial conditions would start to skew. And in the limit, they'd become infinite. Because everything that you need to explain has to be explained in terms of parameters whose origins you don't know. And when that ratio starts to behave that way, it's a clue.

It says, well, you know, you need a new law. new model or new theory. And that's the non mysterious way of talking about emergence.

[00:44:21] Matt: Why is it that you think that so many people think about. Um, the idea of reductionism, which we were talking about previously as in somehow in conflict with the idea of emergence, because as you've just described it, then, um, almost like emergence is almost a consequence of, of reductionism in a sense, but I think a lot, a lot of people think about it as.

As, as sort of these two ideas that, you know, it's either reducible or, or it's, or it's, it's not reducible. Where does that come from?

[00:44:54] David Krakauer: Yeah. I mean, good question. You know, I think there are two, the first confusion is the confusion over what gets called ontological reductionism versus epistemological reductionism. The argument between, say, complexity science and reductionism is an argument between complexity science and ontological reductionism, meaning that the only way to understand the universe is to put things in super colliders, right?

That the Higgs field is what really we want and, uh, none of that nonsense about neuroscience, that's just all epiphenomenal on physics. And that's an argument about, that has been won because fundamental physics doesn't do work at that scale, right? In other words, it doesn't predict anything. And if a theory doesn't predict or explain anything, it's useless.

It's become philosophy. So I think that's easy. Where things are more interesting is epistemological reductionism. And I think that's where we all agree because, um, and sometimes that's called parsimony or elegance or minimality, um, regardless of the level that you work on. you would like your explanation to be intelligible, right?

And so hence the preference for compressed representations of reality at all scales. And there is no argument, I don't think. There was a very beautiful, underappreciated paper, in fact, in a book series that I just edited, by an Argentinian Canadian philosopher of science, Maria Bunge, who worked at McGill.

And it was called the Complexity of Simplicity. And he pointed out that one reason why there's all this disagreement is because parsimony is actually complicated. We think it's easy. Oh, just choose the simplest. But he said, well, actually, simple is really hard. Simple is complex. And he said, you know, very nice idea.

He said, he called it the four dimensional manifold theory of simplicity. So what are the four dimensions, right? So one of them is what we've discussed. you know, um, the parts versus the whole. What, what, what are the mirror logical units of my theory? What's the basic constituent of reductionism? That kind of, so simplicity means breaking it into its Lego pieces.

That's what simplicity is.

Exploring Epistemological Simplicity

[00:47:34] David Krakauer: Then there's the other one, which we said, the epistemological. No, simplicity is not about that. Simplicity is, can I write my theory on the back of an envelope? We said there are two others.

Pragmatic and Psychological Minimality

[00:47:46] David Krakauer: The other one is pragmatic. And he invokes Mac's concept there, that theory is sense experience economically arranged.

What we would call compression, okay? Um, that needn't be fundamental or a theory per se. It could be statistically Zipf compression or MPEG compression. That's not a theory as we understand it. That's another kind of minimality, right? And the other one was psychological, which was, Does it resonate with my understanding of how the world works?

Is it simple to my mind? Is it? And those four different dimensions actually compete.

Large Language Models and Minimality

[00:48:29] David Krakauer: Take something like a large language model. It's hardly epistemologically minimal, sort of trillion parameters for Christ's sake, right? In other words. So on the other hand, maybe it's as minimal as it needs to be to explain the phenomenon of interest.

So its ontological minimality is actually there, it's just we don't epistemologically grasp it, right? Um, it's clearly not intelligible, so it's not psychologically minimal, and so on, and I think it's very useful, and I suspect that the reason why there's been so much disagreement is because we've been living in a higher dimensional space than we think, and one consequence is we're speaking at cross purposes.

Right? And so the critique, the criticism of machine learning, oh, it's just unwieldy and it's a mess. Well, yes, if that, if your criterion is that particular epistemological minimality, and, um, which I think is a reasonable one to have is I'm not putting any weight on them. I'm just saying that I think that is part of the enduring, um, source of this disagreement.

Human Intuition and AI

[00:49:43] Matt: That's a very interesting perspective and I do want to get to the book, uh, the book series and the paper series in a, in a minute, but what you've just said brings up this question to me our intuition is constrained in a, in a particular way or we seek, we seek theories that feel, uh, intuitive or graspable to us.

Um, but. I mean, clearly there are different ways of thinking, there are different ways, the human way of thinking is not the only way of thinking and, um, you know, basically are we optimizing for the wrong thing, uh, in many cases, um, you know, in particular, I think the case of large language models is, is great because from a practical standpoint, what, what they can do is, I would say already phenomenal, um, but it, it feels completely opaque.

to us. And we think of that as a big problem. And I do wonder quite often if The thing that we're optimizing for, uh, is just a kind of sort of like often an unfortunate fact of just the way our minds work. And there is a whole realm of theory, of intelligence, of whatever you call it, the things that we're not looking for.

Um, is that, is that something you, you think about at all? You know, different ways of thinking, non human ways of thinking. of thinking and actually how much of the, the problems that we've been discussing actually just relate to that versus being inherent in the, in the thing itself. Yes.

The Evolution of Intelligence

[00:51:14] David Krakauer: to the evolution of intelligence. And one of the questions is this one, and I'll give you two analogies that might clarify it, perhaps.

Sport, Tools, and Human Enhancement

[00:51:21] David Krakauer: Let's consider the current debate about sporting events that are either enhanced or not enhanced by drugs.

Okay, there are people out there who'd say all that matters is watching someone run very fast. Okay, in which case, who cares? The limiters of that, of course, they just get in a Ferrari and drive 100 meters. Okay, which none of us would find interesting. But it is in some sense, just an extrapolation from biochemical enhancement of physiology.

And there are others who say, No, actually, there's something about pushing the human to its limits, that interests me. And I think when it comes to sport, I'm probably in that camp, I kind of don't think I want to see people who are cyborg. I mean, it would be an interesting event in itself, but I still would be fascinated by the Olympic Games.

I'm still something about. Okay. And of course, I mentioned that as an analogue to an intelligible theory, making sense of the world with our own minds. Thanks. That's like running the race without chemical enhancement. Let's take another example. Um, the use of tools, which is something I think about a lot.

I call it expodiment, which is enhancing our function with tools. I use a knife and a fork to eat. Somehow I don't feel that that's compromising in the way that taking performance enhancing drugs is, you know, if I went to a meal with you and you ate with your hands or with your mouth, I might actually give you a knife and a fork.

You know, I think, you know, given the objective,

you'd be better off being enhanced by a tool that exceeds the capability of your kinematics, right? Why are they different using a knife and fork from using performance enhancing drugs? And I think it comes down to the first being about the objective function, if you like, is human performance. The second objective function is metabolic intake and Of course, mathematics also fits into this story, because mathematics is like a knife and a fork.

Once you become facile with those particular instruments, you don't have to think about how they work, and they're clearly enhancing our ability to imagine and compute.

So the punchline here is, what is science?

Science: Humanistic vs. Utilitarian

[00:53:52] David Krakauer: Is science a human activity to grasp the universe the way an athlete performs in an event? Or is science utilitarian exercise that seeks to maximize the extraction of free energy from the universe, right? And I think it's both. I think that's the thing. I think it's both.

And, um, it's a humanistic exercise and it is a utilitarian exercise. And we just have to somehow be clear about, in each case, which it is. Um, the arts suffer less from this because they don't have such an obvious utilitarian value. I think they do have utilitarian values, but it's not quite as obvious, I think, as science.

And I think that's what lies at the root of this problem, and people haven't been clear enough on those distinctions, and hence, endless, pointless debate.

[00:54:45] Matt: That's a fascinating perspective. I think, um, you know, when you do go, we talked about Ed Witten and the string theorists table earlier, and clearly that they would fall more into the camp of the, um, understanding is the thing, versus utilitarian. And I guess a lot of people do find, some people find this more objectionable in a sense, you know, they feel science should be directed more towards practical.

More practical, outcome driven matters, um, I think complexity science in the area that you work, something that I like very much about it is that it does seem more than any other way of doing things we're thinking, it bridges the various levels and the various disciplines and I actually feel it does bring very fundamental ideas out into, into the practical world in

[00:55:37] David Krakauer: Let me, yeah, can I give you, uh, my middle ground on those two positions now? Which I think perhaps resolves the dialectic a bit. So let's take the now the example, not of performance enhancing drugs, not of a kitchen utensil, but a musical instrument. Let's take the example of a violin. Okay. Clearly, it's performance enhancing, right?

There are things you can do a violin, but you can't do by whistling, presumably, right? Well, someone might be able to, so, okay. Might not sound very good. But the thing about a violin is it also permits. human expertise in the way that an athlete can be expert. So here's an interesting in the way that I say a fork can't sew readily.

So the artifacts and enhancements that I'm interested in that have utilitarian value are the ones that also allow for humanistic expression. And the question I think about LLMs is whether they are violins. Right? I have no problem with something which is different and enhancing above the baseline of human performance.

At its maximum. But I want that thing to be able to allow me to express myself in novel ways, like a violin. And I think the jury is out. I think this is, for me at least, why I am on the fence. Not about the fact that they do amazing things, but what their contribution to human civilization will be. And, um, that hasn't had enough debate and discussion.

There is some discussion, for example, around the idea of, you know, context window coding. That what will replace coding is being really good at it. having a facility with asking the right questions in some sense. And maybe that's true. It doesn't quite feel like a violin to me, but you know, maybe that's my lack of imagination.

Maybe that's just a question of time. But, but I think that is how we should think about, um,

resolving the, on the one hand, as you say, humanistic pursuit of science through the pursuit of an an intelligible universe. And the more engineering like Ambitions of science to have instrumental value in the world, and I'm really interested in the things that have instrumental value, quite literally instruments that also are humanity expanding and thinking about that space more carefully.

It would be worthwhile.

[00:58:22] Matt: Yes. Yeah. And there's so, there's so many things that come to mind here and so many historical examples of this. Um, but you know, one, one framing here, um, you know, the, I love the, I love the framing is, you know, is, are LLMs violins? The fact of the matter is LLM, well, machine, suppose machine learning, it doesn't have to be an LLM, but an AI could produce music that from the, the listener's perspective, was better than anything that they'd heard before.

And from the subjective perspective of the listener, so forget that the person who produced it, it did produce, it, it, it sounded creative, it sounded all of these good things. Um, you know, that being the case, there does become this sort of like trade off to be made and we're getting a little bit into like the ethical weeds here, but whether, um, in that case, You know, the, the human is, is holding that violin back.

And, um, and, and is, is that really the right thing to be worrying about versus. The output, you know, the, the beautiful music that can be made from that violin.

[00:59:26] David Krakauer: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really, this is a question that has obsessed. Humanist for a long time. And the, the, the essay that is always mentioned in, in, in this connection is Walter Benjamin's fantastic essay on the, the role of art in the age of mechanical re reproducibility. Um, if I said to you, Matt, look, here are two paintings.

I dunno what's in the background there, but let's say it was something like a Robert Rauschenberg like painting.

[00:59:58] Matt: wish,

[00:59:59] David Krakauer: Yeah, that's why I said like, you know, and um, and here in, you know, given a choice between the original Rauschenberg and one that's, you know, identical as far as you're concerned. The fact of the matter is you would much rather have the Rauschenberg, not just because of the resale value, which would be a good reason to prefer it, but because it's aesthetically more pleasing.

Why? Because human beings are interested in provenance. We're interested in priming. We're interested in what Walter Benjamin called the aura of the original artwork. Now, you can deny that and say, no, there is, the only experience I have of an artwork comes through my eyes. But that seems to be a very depauperic conception of what a nervous system is.

Because what, It's what comes through your eyes and what comes through your knowledge, right? Your reading of art history and so on. Those things are as real as sensory perception, and they integrate into a quasi unified position on the aesthetic value of an object. So I've always thought it was a bit silly because, um, it's strange to say that sensation has primacy over memory.

And so I think that's what Walter Benjamin was trying to say. And so when you talk about a violin, producing better work. Yes. I mean, you know, uh, there's nothing wrong with that. As long as you allow for the possibility that, um, people also care, even if it's not present in the physical sensation that it was performed on a Stradivarius, right?

And, and so forth. And I think, again, I think this just encourages us to have a more complete understanding of the nature of human aesthetics. Uh, and that the thought experiment is actually limited in its application because it denies everything other than primary visual perception or, you know, auditory perception.

[01:02:00] Matt: I really liked your framing of, um, what, what, what did you use for the, the fork, for, for, for tool? You said

[01:02:08] David Krakauer: Ex bodiment.

[01:02:09] Matt: an X Body, I really liked that framing and, you know, the fascinating thing about, well, physical and cultural evolution is that, you know, with expodiment, with tools. Over time, this actually reflects back into the, the user of the tool itself in, in a, in a, in a very real way.

Um, you know, our minds change over generations, our bodies, our bodies and minds change. Um, do you, do you worry about what the existence of these sorts of, you know, I don't know, cognitive substitutes, cognitive augmentation, cognitive expodiment,

[01:02:44] David Krakauer: Yeah.

[01:02:45] Matt: tools out there. Will do to us over the longer time.

[01:02:50] David Krakauer: I think it is what makes us human. It's not, I don't worry about them. I consider it defining of the human condition. The, uh, Celia Hayes at Oxford, um, calls them cognitive gadgets, like mathematics, right? Like language, right? If you ask what makes us special, I mean, it is precisely these things. And I think, you know, drums and violins and paintbrushes and so forth are the essence of the human condition.

And so I don't worry about them. I worry when they don't have this character that you're referring to, which I obsess with, which is. getting good at them, you know. I'm very interested in things that you can get good at, right, and paintbrushes and violins and sport and all those things, um, that are enabling of self expression or collective expression.

And so I'm not worried about them. I'm I'm a bullish about them, you know, and, but, but, you know, but when do they become, I mean, I'll give a good example, you know, let's take the example of the automobile, you know, it's a very interesting, complicated case because on the one hand, it's quite obvious, right, that the, what economists would call the externalities of driving, covering beautiful landscapes with asphalt and running countless millions of people over and, and leading to, you know, An epidemic of obesity because people don't walk, run or cycle, you know, so there's obvious negatives.

Um, on the other hand, there are, you know, who's going to deny the beauty of an Aston Martin? You know, who's going to deny the extraordinary skill of a Senna in Formula One race driving? You know, everything is complicated. And, um, and I think just. My approach has always been to sort of dissect in such a way to understand all of those quite distinctly, the aesthetic contribution, the practical contribution, the cognitive contribution, and, um, and think about them carefully.

Um, and the question for me, right, is, you know,

you know, will there be a Steph Curry of LLMs? You know, it's, it's, you know, will there be an extraordinary athlete of that world? Will there be an extraordinary mathematician? Or is it something else? Is it more like a really badly designed car that just emits a huge amount of pollution and, um, will never be an elegant machine?

And I think it's fair to say the jury is out at this point.

[01:05:32] Matt: would agree. Yeah, I would, I would agree, but waiting with bated breath. Um, David, we've, we've covered such a, such a broad range of topics today and sort of peered into rabbit holes and pulled out again, and, um, I think this, this is representative of the.

Complexity Science and Its Applications

[01:05:50] Matt: the field that you're mostly known for and that you're working in, you know, this, this field of complexity and the work that is being done at the Santa Fe Institute, um, and the, and the book volume that you're putting together.

And, um, uh, I must say I've very fortunately got to read the, the very sort of large and expensive introduction and it is

[01:06:09] David Krakauer: Oh, oh, I should tell you quickly, the, the, the introduction is coming out in book form and will be available within the next week. So for those of you called the complex world. So that bit that you read is is a standalone book as well as being introduction to volume one of the four volumes.

[01:06:25] Matt: Ah, fantastic. I will, yeah, I will, I will link it into the, the notes and also it is, um, it's just exactly the right blend of science and philosophy that this, uh, this podcast is about. So I think people will enjoy it. Um, I mean, I almost don't know where to start with this because it's such a, it is such a wide ranging piece.

Would you mind just giving me a little bit about the sort of background here, the series, the development, like what is the, what is the origin of this, of this series?

[01:06:52] David Krakauer: you know, there's this question people ask rightly, what is complexity? Is it a discipline? Is it like chemistry? Is it like physics? Is it like biology? What is it? It seems to be nonsense. You know, it's like, um, is it some new age set of ideas? Um, you know, what is it? And I think it's a totally reasonable question to ask of any field, quite frankly.

And so it started there with me trying to reflect on what it is. And so I went to all my colleagues, you know, and the Santa Fe Institute, for those who don't know, is based in New Mexico, in Santa Fe, on a mountaintop, and two campuses actually. And I started asking my colleagues, you know, if there was one paper that I really would have to read that you think is in some sense constitutive of what complexity science is all about, what would it be?

It's not an easy question, by the way, to answer. And people say, well, let me think about it. Some people never answered me, right? Some people answered immediately, others, you know. And, um, and so I started accumulating these papers. Um, and they span 100 years, these papers. They start in 1922. with Lotka and then go to, there's a large famous paper on Maxwell's demons in 1929, and they end with Bob Laughlin who won the Nobel Prize in condensed matter, and Elinor who won the Nobel Prize in economics for collective action.

So it's a hundred years, it's about, around 90 papers. And I asked each of these folks, and there are many, to also write an essay to place every one of those papers in context. Why was it important? Why did you recommend it? What was the enduring influence? And I got all these papers and I started to see, oh my god, there's actually There's a coherent pattern that runs through all of them.

There is a centroid here that we call complexity. I really wasn't sure, right? In other words, I kind of, I have to be gung ho about it. I do run this sort of institute and, and there are many things I could have said before, but now I really believe it in a way I'm not sure I even did before. And what we essentially work on is systems that are either self organizing or selected, far from equilibrium, dissipative structures, with either short or long memories of the past that are used to make predictions about the future.

We, we work on teleonomic matter, purposeful matter, and purposeful matter is everywhere, right? It's biology, obviously, um, it's also in engineering, and So why aren't we just biologists and economists and engineers? Because we try to look for the principles that span all of them. That's what makes our approach a bit different.

It says, instead of putting the phenomenon in the primary position, put the principles in the primary position and ask about all phenomena that somehow can be explained or explicated or understood in terms of those principles. So that's what we do. where I started going. And then I realized, well, what came before?

You know, what was the history of these ideas? And it's, it comes out, it's amazing, right? It's very clear. Um, as I say in that book, in the same way that modern physics and, let's say, inorganic chemistry comes out of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, complexity science comes out of the industrial revolution, and What we study are machines.

We study machines that were either evolved or that were built. The prequels to what we do are, you know, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, the theory of evolution, the theory of nonlinear dynamics, and the theory of logic and computation. You know, Boole, Babbage, Maxwell, Clausius, Boltzmann, Darwin, Mendel, Wallace, Poincaré.

That crew were essentially defining the circumference of what would in the 20th century start to be connected. in movements like cybernetics and others that were trying to connect information theory to dynamics to computation to physics. And as I said, the sort of con center of that endeavor is trying to understand purposeful matter.

That's what comes out through the superposition of all of these papers. And I think we've just started.

[01:11:50] Matt: Yeah, I mean the, the, um, the, the name of this podcast is Paradigm and uh, I dunno if it's a consequence of that or what it is, but, uh, very often we end up talking about paradigms and, you know, looking not just at, at what we know, but at the whole system of knowledge in, in which we know it. Um, sort of examining that and, um, this, this whole complexity business.

Does seem to be at the start of defining a very new paradigm, a new way of thinking about things.

The Future of Complexity Science

[01:12:18] Matt: As you said, we matter with purpose. Um, what is your, what is your vision for what this looks like over the coming years? What does a complexity paradigm look like?

[01:12:29] David Krakauer: Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I mean, this is why I was so interested in your podcast. I thought, oh, that's, I've been, in a sense, my last several years have been trying to understand the nature of a particular paradigm or an emerging paradigm to use that word as well. Um, the, you know, most people are familiar with that term from Thomas Kuhn, from the structure of scientific revolutions, that revolutions are periods of time in which paradigms emerge.

And it's difficult to understand what that means, but if you look more carefully, he wrote another several papers after that book where he talks about a paradigm as the structure of a disciplinary matrix, or if you like, there's a set of ideas that connect harmoniously. And then there's a set of ideas that just don't connect.

It's like a disconnected graph. And the connected graph is what we mean by the paradigm. And periods of normal science are where you just add vertices to that graph and connect them. And periods of revolution is where you make a observation. And it just blows the graph apart. So I don't want to live in there.

You know, that's exactly like quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. It doesn't fit. I need to build an entirely new set of graphs, right? Because it's not going to fit in the classical one. And the world is just full of these disconnected graphs. It's very interesting. And part of what we try to do is connect them.

And complexity is this. set of ideas that are in themselves challenging, like non equilibrium statistical physics, adaptive dynamics, nonlinear control theory, all these things, right? Um, thermodynamics, computation, they themselves are hard and to reconcile them is even harder. So when you say, what is the future?

That's the future. We need, you know, a theory of the dissipative system called the brain, which is a complex, high dimensional, nonlinear dynamical system that somehow does computation in a non standard way, right, in order to be fitness enhancing, in other words, to be an evolutionary agent. So you can sort of see how it sort of has to come together, but I don't think we have a clue.

I don't think we have a clue. I don't think we have a clue. I don't think we have a clue. It's very new, and I think that's one of the other reasons why people have asked the perfectly reasonable question of, what is it? Because that graph is very incomplete. But, you know, just to say we're interested in purposeful matter, and that we think that markets, and minds, and machines have a lot more in common than we ever thought, suspected, uh, is something that a lot of people would say, yes, I think you're probably right, right?

And, um, and we need that kind of paradigm to understand the modern world, which is hybrid, right? In a way that it never was. So I think that's partly why there's renewed interest, because it's practical now.

[01:15:46] Matt: Do you have strong perspectives on the types of problems we will be able to solve, I guess, with a, with a complexity paradigm? I mean, I mean, looking again, historically, let's take something like quantum mechanics. You know, at the time, we didn't know that this would be the thing that gives us the sort of mental technology to do things like build atomic weapons, um, Or to, uh, build semiconductors and, and all those other things.

Um, so it is hard to speculate into the future. Um, but I would imagine having an effective complex, having a complexity paradigm. would open up a whole new class of problems that are now solvable through the use of these tools. Do you have a vision of what that might look like?

[01:16:29] David Krakauer: Yeah, I mean, I do. I mean, probably many, um, we could sort of almost go through, one way to play this game would be to go through every area where we've been. successful but have hit a boundary or have been unsuccessful, right? So successful and hit a boundary is miniaturization of transistors because of the, you know, the energy dissipation problem, uh, and the problem of building effective thermal sinks for miniaturized transistors.

And there, there's an interest in reversible computation, right, where, as we know from Landauer and others, um, we don't have to pay a cost. Um, in the same way that we do for reversible. We don't need to erase bits. So that's an area where actually there's active work. You know, could we just build more efficient computer technology based on new ideas from the thermodynamics of computation, which is one of the fields we've worked on a great deal.

Um, another area is healthcare and medicine. Um, most silver bullet. Pharmacological interventions are a disaster. In certain areas, mental health care, it's witchcraft. Right? And Those are clearly systems that require new principles to be understood. We don't know how to do interventions into 86 billion agents, that is the number of neurons in your head.

We don't know what scale to do the intervention. There are people who say we should do psychoanalysis, right? There are those who just do pharma. Well, this seems like a perfect question for science where emergence has principle definitions. Um, and then the biggest questions of all, And it's the reason why we finished those four volumes with Ellen Ostrom's work on collective action, which is, you know, how do we solve climate problems?

How do you solve global conflict? Now maybe you can't, right? Um, but we've never done or built systems of coordination that operate at that scale effectively. I mean, there are treaties, you know, there are organizations like the United Nations, but these are not based on fundamental principles of complex systems.

They're based on intuition. Sometimes that intuition is amazing. More often than not, it's rubbish. And so I think our belief is, just as we built better transistors, just as we have built more efficient buildings. There are insights into building more efficient societies or ideas that we could be using, um, so as to coordinate our information.

Um, so I think those are the really big ones that are unavoidably require a new discipline. You don't go to a physics department, you don't get a chemistry degree, you don't get a economics degree. With a view to solving problems at that scale. We need to connect those fields. Who's connecting those fields?

Well, we are, you know, there should be others, right? There should be many others doing it. I don't know why we are so relatively unique, right? And I mean, it should be, it's nuts as far as I'm concerned. But I think the next, sort of, if you like, civilizational paradigm will be this, the level of knowledge integration required to solve collective action problems at the global scale.

[01:20:08] Matt: mean, potentially one of the reasons why there are so few people working on this is just a, I guess, maybe historical contingency with the fact that The way our knowledge institutions have sort of progressed is, you know, we do have departments that focus on very specific things and, and for good historical reasons, these things are difficult.

There's a lot of, a lot of learning to be done to even get a grasp of those particular paradigms to work within. And uh, you know, I guess there, there aren't, there just aren't that many people who can sit across all of these disciplines and work together in this way.

[01:20:42] David Krakauer: We'll look at your, I mean, can I just quickly interject and just call out to you and people who are doing what you're doing? Because in some sense, right, if, if the universities and departments were doing this well, what you do might not be so necessary. Right. In other words, there's a real sense in which what you're sort of doing applied complexity in the sense that you're saying, look, there are ideas that need to be connected and communicated.

Um, they're not being, this is not being done. And this whole fascinating sector that has emerged. technologically enabled sector that has emerged over the last several decades is fascinating and I think is a homeostatic response to the deficiencies of the existing institutions and which is kind of a wonderful thing.

I mean I think we have to take over and you know enough of that nonsense. It's, it's time to address the problem seriously and I think the way it's been happening quite naturally in a decentralized fashion I think is It's kind of fascinating.

[01:21:46] Matt: yes, I agree. I will say it, um, just by, by the nature of how things are set up, it is, it is difficult and is uncomfortable because it means always feeling sort of uneducated and like not an expert across every different topic. Um, but I think you're totally right. It does serve that function. And I think the evidence shows that there is a, There is a need for it.

There is a need for it, um, which is why these things, these things are working. Um, do, is your, do you see, you know, I guess, 50, 100, however many years time, do you still see the sort of structure of our knowledge institutions being structured along these departmental lines? Is, is complexity science sort of the cross disciplinary unit that brings them together or, or do things fundamentally change?

[01:22:36] David Krakauer: Yeah, I don't know, that's really interesting. Are we Wittgenstein's ladder? That, right, that you sort of can, once you get to the top shelf or window, you can throw it away because you've reached your target. And that's very interesting, in which case, wonderful, if that's true, if it helps us reach that point, I have no problem.

I don't think it is because I think that, um, it will evolve. as all disciplines must, as all fields must. Um, it's just the problems we're dealing with, I think, are genuinely difficult. I think they're really hard. Um, I mean, just if you think about it in these terms, most fields are explained in terms of new observations that had to be accounted for, right?

In other words, um, You know, nonsense stories like Newton and his apple, right? It's not as if he hadn't seen other objects before he was taking a snooze in his mum's garden, but okay. But more interesting ones, right, like, you know, the double slit experiment, right? That's, oh, what happened there? That was weird, right?

Or Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51, which was the basis of the, um, Crick Watson inference of the double, double helix. Um, so most science works that way, you find something and it sort of challenges you or challenges a paradigm. The emergence of the complexity paradigm is a bit different because the things that we're observing are things that we've observed that are hidden in plain sight, as I like to say.

Society, markets, human intelligence, this was not something that was hiding somewhere that needed a high energy laser to be revealed. Um, so it's a different kind of revolution. It's a revolution in coming to understand the things that we took for granted. The things that we kind of thought weren't interesting, almost.

Sort of weird. I mean, why is society less interesting than what an electron does? I mean, it seems to be more interesting. But it was so part of our everyday experience that it didn't seem to warrant the same kind of rigorous attention. And I think that has to change, right? That the ordinary has to become extraordinary for the complexly paranoid to. to succeed.

[01:25:10] Matt: it feels in some ways almost like a more openness to philosophy within, within the sciences than, than what we've seen in many fields, you know, I don't know if you share this, um, perspective, but complexity scientists, complexity researchers writing on complex science tends to, at least from my perspective, to have a slightly more philosophical flavor than what one might find elsewhere.

[01:25:33] David Krakauer: I think that's partly because of our embryonic character. The, you know, it's interesting, I used to talk to Murray Gell Mann about this a lot, about reading mathematics books that were written by, say, Poincaré, versus texts that were written by Grotendieck, right? Um, and what changed there was the loss of, like, the philosophical context in which the rigorous questions are being asked.

And so if you pick up a modern text in category theory or what have you, sort of jump right into definitions and you're sort of a little bit lost as to what the question is. You know, why does this matter? I mean, why are you even bothering? I go to so many talks where they begin in media res. It's like, okay, consider the following group.

And you think, well, hold on, you know, and when what you call philosophy, I think is an effort to understand the structure of the problem and the relevance and its connections to other things that we care about. And, um, and I think that happens a lot in the early phases of, of the emergence of a new paradigm.

I think if you, like I said, you compare 19th century math text to 21st century true physics, right? You pick up a, if you read Heisenberg. Or Schrodinger's books on quantum mechanics. They're actually very readable. Not saying that they're not technical, but if you pick up a 21st century textbook in quantum mechanics, it's just, it dries dust, you know, and, you know, you get beautiful books like Tony Z's books, which are more readable, but by and large, and which is a big shame, because what happens is you anneal prematurely, right?

It's almost as if all of the questions have been asked, it's now just that we're chasing down the answers. And what you're philosophy is. Keep the questions in the air.

[01:27:32] Matt: yes. Yes, good that you mentioned, uh, Tony Zibi, because I believe there is at least two of his books on this,

[01:27:39] David Krakauer: Ha ha ha, great, you see. Yeah,

[01:27:41] Matt: out to Tony. Um, on the, on the topic of, of books, you know, complexity science is a, um, it's a big topic. Get out of there then. Sort of many places. One could, one could get into it and one could come to it, and, uh, it can be very technical.

Books and Resources on Complexity

[01:27:57] Matt: Um, maybe I'll ask, you know, apart from the, the book that we've just mentioned and, and that you're working on, if somebody wanted to, to sort of get an early introduction, so to get started then, you know, not a topic expert, does anything come to mind as a, as a good starting point? You know, books, resources, like where does one get started with this, with this field?

[01:28:18] David Krakauer: Well, I think there are several, so I'm obviously completely partisan about this, so I think my, my colleague Melanie Mitchell's book, um, on complexity and introduction to complexity is a very nice book, um, and it's, it's, it has a particular perspective that I don't entirely share, incidentally, but I think it's a very nice book.

introduction. In fact, in my book, I have a table of all of the previous books that are ranked according to that, how technical they are. So that, you know, that might be of interest to people. You know, I,

At this point, um, as I said, I do, I try to be generous that way and, and, and list a lot of books that I think are, are interesting in different ways. You know, for me, like a lot of people, I remember reading Doug, you mentioned Doug earlier, Doug Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. And I, I still think that is actually, it wouldn't be, is it behind you as well, next to the Tony Z book.

Yeah.

[01:29:12] Matt: it's, it's, it's,

[01:29:13] David Krakauer: But right, it's there, of course it's there. And I think he's dealing with a lot of these issues like recursion, undecidability, cognition, representation, encoding, a lot of the stuff. He's not doing the social stuff, economics, he's not doing archaeology, not doing history, but he touches it. And then at the same time, you know, end of the 70s and the early 80s, these amazing books by people like Prigigine, right, on complexity.

And, um, Manfred Eigen's beautiful book called Laws of the Game, where he basically tries to take Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game and use a go like game to explain all of complex realities. It's an under read book by the way, which I think is wonderful. And then of course, now the field has textbooks.

Um, And any number of them. Mark Newman has a beautiful textbook on networks and on it goes. Um, I think my colleague Geoffrey West's book on scale is a very interesting area. One area of complexity science that shows its enormous application to issues of energetics and urbanization. And there are many, and I could go on and on.

Um, I would encourage people to come to the Santa Fe Institute webpage. Um, we do have resources webpages for people who are developing curricula, who are just interested. We have a MOOC called Complexity Explorer, which is a greater commitment of time, because there's some expectation you would take the course, and not everyone has that time.

So we do have lots of resources online for people to look at. Um, but you know there are, I don't want to claim that SFI is the only place doing complexity. Um, I am. unapologetically biased, so, but, you know, if you went to Amazon and searched, I'm sure you'd find all sorts of books that would be of interest to you, given, you know, whatever one's own perspective was.

Fantastic. Um, have there, have there been any particular books and they don't have to be based on complexity, books in general that have been particularly influential for you personally?

[01:31:22] David Krakauer: Many, um, it's funny, it's a question lots of people ask, and I even have an article on it, um, the, yeah, actually with my brother, my brother and I were interviewed on exactly that question, and it's a, it's an article, I'll send you a link, um, you know. I've spent my entire life devouring fiction. I love novels, I love science fiction, I love fiction, and, um, you know, if you ask me what the most important books for me that way were, I'd say, which I share with my colleague, former colleague, Cormac McCarthy, who is here forever, wonderful novelist, um, Moby Dick, I think Melville in that book, he kind of touches on everything we've touched on in a sort of weird way.

I mean you have the Ahab character who's just despondent and enraged by the fact that he doesn't understand everything. You have biology, you have teamwork, you have currency exchanges, it's a sort of extraordinary microcosm. I think it's partly why I love it. Um, I love Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which is, in some sense, to me, it's much less read, but it's really the modern Moby Dick.

It sort of takes, he was Mac's student, actually, um, uh, worked on, on the philosophy of physics, and then became a novelist. So I think novels, for some reason, it's why I'm such a fan of people like Neil Stevenson, who is also here, and Ted Chiang is also here, um, and I talk to them a lot about these topics.

Um, in the non fiction world, Of course there are books like Doug's, um, but there I tend to read more technical books, you know, I, I, there's sort of limited tolerance for popular science books, and that's simply because I'm in it, you know what I mean? I feel as if I'm either going to read the technical books and the technical papers or I'm going to read novels, you know, and I, With very, very few exceptions do I enjoy reading popular science.

Um, you know, there are great books by Richard Dawkins and Roger Penrose and all these people are just wonderful people. Um, but, you know, it's sort of a problem, I'm a little bit too close to it to be satisfied by that level of dilution. You know, it's, it's, it's like kind of been ruined for me somehow.

It's like being a, it would be like being, you know, a sommelier or something and going to a restaurant, you know, spitting out all the wine they give you. It's not that it's bad, it's just that you've, you've been spoiled by having, by drunk, by having drunk too many good bottles of wine. It's

[01:33:58] Matt: Yes, yeah, totally, well I think great, great, um, recommendations there and I will link them into the, uh, into the episode notes.

Final Thoughts and Reflections

[01:34:06] Matt: Um, David, as we bring it to a wrap, one question that I, I'd like to, to end off on, you know, we've talked a lot about, um, many things, but we've talked about intelligence, we've talked about artificial intelligence, um, suppose we were one day to be visited by a Or to create an AI super intelligence and we had to choose one person, either past or present to represent us to this, uh, this super intelligent other. Who would we send? Who should we send?

[01:34:37] David Krakauer: You know, up until I read Benjamin Lapidute's Maniac, I would have said someone like John von Neumann,

[01:34:43] Matt: Hmm.

[01:34:44] David Krakauer: but now that I know more about him, he's the last person I would have sent. Um, right, in other words, incredibly clever, but the morality of a sort of a sea squirt. So, um, you know, part of me wants to say Thelonious Monk, you know. Um, Part of me wants to say Nelson Mandela. Part of me wants to say Von Neumann. Um, I mean, what we've discovered, you know, what makes the question impossible, of course, is the fact that we are all so limited in our abilities. And according to which side of the bed I get out of, I either think being ethically, Deep is more important or scientifically deep is more important.

And I don't think I can break the symmetry. I think I, um,

sort of met so many extraordinary people. And, and one of the things about getting to know extraordinary people is coming to understand how limited they are. Right, um, so in the spirit of SFI who works, that works on collectives, it's going to have to be a group. I'm so sorry. It has to be a group of extraordinary people.

I'm going to send, it's going to be one of those sort of balloon type contests. I'm going to send an artist and a musician and a scientist and an activist. I'm putting them all together, you know, and maybe one day the collective intelligence that we call an LLM or its future descendants will contain multitudes.

And, and, and, you know, maybe we'll send that thing.

[01:36:28] Matt: Well, I think that's a, that's a, that's a beautiful idea and a beautiful place to, uh, to wrap up. Um, David, thank you so much for the conversation today. It's been fantastic.

[01:36:38] David Krakauer: welcome. Thank you so much.

We discuss:

• Transhumanism, and the prospects for humans to merge with non-biological systems

• The physics and philosophy of mind extension technologies

• Philosophical questions relating to the nature of self

• AI risk, and responsible AI development

• Intelligence

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Joscha’s Twitter / X: https://x.com/Plinz

• Biden’s Executive Order on AI

• Books:

  • Stanislaw Lem: The Star Diaries

  • Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

  • Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  • Peter Wohlleben: The Hidden Life of Trees

Timestamps

0:00 Intro - AI risk

5:20 Transhumanism and mind uploading

10:20 Philosophy of self & mind

12:50 Is mind uploading physically possible?

21:50 Tele-transportation

24:50 Philosophy of self & mind - part 2

31:40 Gaia & hypergaia

37:05 Information processing & consciousness

54:10 AI risk & Eliezer Yudkowsky

1:03:10 AI regulation & control

1:11:25 Responsible AI development

1:27:26 AI intelligence explosion

1:36:23 Book recommendations & wrap

Introduction: AI Risk and regulation

The topics of AI risk and regulation have been in the public consciousness for some time, but it’s only recently have they started to be taken seriously in the mainstream. And, on the same day I’m recording this, the president of the United States, which is currently Joe Biden, has released an Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.

And this is not a trivial thing. This is a major commitment. It’s a very big deal that will have a significant impact on the future of AI both in the US and elsewhere. In his own words, Biden says:

“My administration places the highest urgency on governing the development and use of AI safely and responsibly, and is therefore advancing a coordinated, Federal Government-wide approach to doing so.”

And the order goes into eight principles that will be adopted to implement this. We won’t go into the details of this document here, but will include a link in the show notes.

Now whatever you think about this particular document, what we can be sure about, it’s setting a precedent for broader government participation in AI development and use around the world. And this will have profound and far-reaching consequences for many of the things we care about. How governments, private institutions, and even individuals approach AI development has massive implications across the board, from the geopolitical scale all the way down to the day to day lives of the average person on the street.

And as it stands today, there is very little consensus on how to do this effectively, at pretty much any level of analysis. We don’t know what safe and responsible AI development and usage looks like, and we don’t even understand the risk and reward calculus involved. And even if we did, we don’t yet have any reliable mechanisms to control the development and use of AI – not within a given country, let alone at a global scale.

In the abstract, many of these problems are nothing new – we’ve faced global problems before that we didn’t, and even still don’t know how to address. Things like climate change, for example. But artificial intelligence is different in several very important ways.

One of these ways is the speed at which artificial intelligence is progressing. It’s really in a league of its own. And, by its very nature, it’s a technology that compounds – the development cycle keeps getting faster, and that in itself leads to a yet shorter development cycle. And we can only expect this to accelerate even more in the future.

Another way in which our AI problem is different from problems we’ve faced before is that there is really no consensus as to who the reliable voices are in this conversation. And this is something Joscha and I discussed today. We find ourselves at a point in history where many very smart and politically aligned people hold views about AI development and regulation that are completely in conflict.

For example, on the one hand we have people like Eliezer Yudkowsky and others who are so worried about AI risk that they are calling for globally coordinated efforts backed by military force to pause large scale Ai development – even going so far as to bomb data centres if needed.

On the other hand, we have people like Joscha who are similarly concerned with the risks of NOT developing advanced AI quickly enough, and therefore missing the opportunity to use it to solve any number of other existential problems facing humanity. And it’s with this context that the timing for this conversation with Joscha could not be better. This was a fascinating conversation, and I hope you find it valuable.

Whether you agree with Joscha or not, he’s an important voice on this topic, and this is an important topic to have on the public radar. If you find the conversation valuable please share it on social media or with anyone you know who might enjoy it.

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:11] Matt: Today I'm speaking with Joscha Bach. Joscha is an artificial intelligence researcher, a cognitive scientist, and a philosopher, known for his work on cognitive architectures and mind extension technologies. He is an influential thinker on a range of important topics, including AI risk, and in particular the often neglected risk of not developing AI technologies.

Today, Joscha and I have an expansive conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of life. We discuss Transhumanism and the prospects for humans to merge with non biological systems. The physics and philosophy of mind extension technologies, philosophical questions relating to the nature of self, AI risk and responsible AI development, intelligence, and other topics.

The topics of AI risk and regulation have been in the public consciousness for some time, but it's only recently that they've started to be taken seriously in the mainstream. And on the same day I'm recording this, the President of the United States, which is currently Joe Biden, has released an executive order on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence.

And this is not a trivial thing. This is a major commitment. it's a very big deal that will have significant impact on the future of AI both in the US and elsewhere. In his own words, Biden says, My administration places the highest urgency on governing the development and use of AI safely and responsibly.

And it is therefore advancing a coordinated, federal government wide approach to doing so. And the order then goes into eight principles that will be adopted to implement this. Now we won't go into the details of this document here, but I will include a link in the show notes. Whatever you think about this particular document, what we can be sure about is that it's setting a precedent for broader government participation in AI development and use around the world.

And this will have profound and far reaching consequences for many of the things we care about. How governments and private institutions and even individuals approach AI development and use has massive implications across the board. From the geopolitical scale all the way down to the day to day lives of the average person on the street.

And as it stands today, there is very little consensus on how to do this effectively. At pretty much every level of analysis. We simply don't know what safe and responsible AI development and usage looks like. And we don't even understand the risk and reward calculus involved. And even if we did, we don't yet have any reliable mechanism to control the development and use of AI.

Not even within a given country, let alone at a global scale. Now in abstract, many of these problems are nothing new. We've faced global problems before that we didn't understand. And even still, some that we don't know how to address. Things like climate change, for example.

but artificial intelligence is different in several very important ways. One of these ways is the speed at which artificial intelligence is progressing. It's really in a league of its own and by its very nature, it's a technology that compounds. The development cycle keeps getting faster and that in itself leads to a yet shorter development cycle.

And we can only expect this to accelerate even more in the future. another way in which our AI problem is different from problems we faced before is that there was really no consensus as to who the reliable voices are in this conversation. And this is something Joscha and I discussed today.

We find ourselves at a point in history where many very smart and politically aligned people hold views about AI development and regulation that are completely in conflict.

for example, on one hand we have people like Eliezer Yudkowsky and others who are so worried about AI risk that they're calling for globally coordinated efforts backed by military force to pause large scale AI development, even going so far as to bomb data centers if needed.

And on the other hand, we have people like Joscha who are similarly concerned with the risk of not developing advanced AI quickly enough and therefore missing the opportunity to use it to solve any number of existential problems facing humanity.

And it's with this context that the timing for this conversation with Joscha could not be better. Now whether you agree with Joscha or not, he's an important voice in this topic, and this is an important topic to have on the public radar.

So if you find the conversation valuable, please share it on social media or with anyone you know who might enjoy it. And now, after yet another very long introduction, please enjoy my conversation with Joscha Bach.

​

[00:05:18] Matt: Joscha, I've heard you talk about a vision of the future in which humans transcend their biological bodies and increasingly merge with other systems,, uh, such as artificial intelligences or non biological substrates.

could you please lay out your vision for me? How do you see this Transition playing out in practice.

[00:05:37] Joscha: I don't know if this transition is going to happen in practice. I don't know if this is in the cards for us that we have such a transition. I think that if we were to go the traditional biological route, the way in which we go into the future is to our children. So we Basically don't have a seamless adaptation to changing life circumstances, but at some point we go so far out of sync that we need to be taken out of commission.

And we hope that our children or some of them are mutated in the right direction are better adapted than us. And in principle, we could go and edit their genes and get them to be adaptive for future life circumstances, say living on Mars. And if you want to live on Mars, you probably want to have different bodies, uh, different oxygen needs, um, different psychology and so on than we have right now.

If you want to be able to survive in space, you need to be very different. And it could be that at some point you don't want to be biological. If you want to go on interstellar journeys, you probably don't want to have a human biological body because it would deteriorate even in cold sleep. And it's really not ideal.

You probably would want to have something. That is not using biological cells in the current human configuration. So if you go long enough into the future, then the things that we are, then the children of our children will not look very human. And, uh, so maybe in some sense, the question of transhumanism comes down, but there's an unbroken line from our current states to those future states.

And a lot of transhumanists also want to have this individual. So you don't go via children that you are giving birth to or create or program or set otherwise put into the world, but that you want to modify your own body and mind so that can seamlessly function in this new environment. And, um, again, it's probably hard to pull off.

It might not actually be worse, all the trouble, but for what it's first, you probably would want to. Have a generalized substrate that is performing similar tasks as the one that your brain is currently doing when it is computing you. And imagine that you would take a bunch of cells, a little bit of compatible brain tissue and you graft it somehow onto your brain.

You'll probably find that if you look at it after a while that it changes structure to be compatible with the structure of your brain and that your mental operations extend itself into it. And now imagine you do the same thing with. something that is not made from cells, but is able to participate in the communication of cells.

And you make that increasingly larger until your biological brain is an extremely small part of that substrate and the most boring and least efficient and most noisy one. And you'll find that you mostly occupy the other regions of the substrate because you're much happier there and you can be much more.

Yourself and yourself is not just what happens in the biological brain. It's basically the aesthetic that you stand for. What is the thing that you actually want to achieve and what are the representations that you're creating in service of this? And so I suspect that if you want to have this transhumanist perspective and you are lucky enough to get instantiated, um, that you could build a machine that in some sense, more or less seamlessly.

extends your mind into other substrates and then you gradually migrate into those other substrates if they're more suitable for the future than your current substrate is. And the current substrate is an organism that is meant to age and be replaced by children. There's also this other question, why is it necessary for you?

And I find that when we are very young, we tend to be terrified of death. because we think it's, uh, to be alive is the greatest thing ever and the most beautiful thing ever. And many of us, as they got older, find that this is not necessarily the case either because our life is, is not only joyful, but eventually it feels neutral or because we feel that we are done and we've contributed what we could contribute to this world.

And it's time for somebody else to keep up the slack. And you also realize that this own self is only a story that you mind is creating, and it's instrumental to what the organism has to do in the course of the evolution right now. And once you get to this realization, uh, this Particular marriage with the personal self is no longer that important that you realize I'm actually not that self.

I'm, I'm a mind, a consciousness that lives on that mind and, and creates self when I need them. But I'm not that self. That self is just stand in to allow me to model the organism in its relationship to the world. And once that changes dramatically, I will need a radically new self. And, uh, if I give this the additional information that I once have been a human being in the 21st century, that's an interesting tidbit, but ultimately it's not really decisive for what I will be at this point.

[00:10:14] Matt: Yeah. I'm interested in the, in the idea of the extent to which we can actually transcend that self model. So a lot of people would say the transhumanist ideal is somehow. More true than, let's say, radical life extension people. You know, radical life extension folks say, We've got these bodies, let's see how long we can keep them around for.

And this is the way to sort of extend the self. And then a lot of transhumanist folk would say, Well, we're actually taking, uh, sort of a more pure view of, of what we are. And, you know, forget the body, we can do something more radical to extend. But I feel like there's a little bit of a question in there because the whole idea of myself and the desire to extend myself, all of that relates back to my biology, my evolutionary history.

You know, we have this self preservation bias. And so I do have this question as to, you know, whether... Um, there is, you know, why, why should someone really want to extend that self long into the future? Uh, even if it is getting rid of the biology that we happen to be in, um, you know, why, why should someone actually want to do that?

[00:11:22] Joscha: Um, when I grew up, I lived in a small valley with a big forest and sometimes I had to walk home at night through the forest as a kid, and I was afraid. of animals in the forest that would eat me or other things that could happen to me. If you're a child, you have a strong fantasies in this regard. And I found that I could simply deal with this by turning off my desire for self preservation.

And by putting myself into a state where I actually didn't care give a shit about living anymore and just decided to become depressed and, uh, not interested in continuing my existence, I noticed that my fear was gone. And then, uh, when you're back home, you can go back into the previous state. And so I find that the states that you're in, the preferences that we have are, um, something that we can learn to control.

And there should be instrumental to what we, um, Bond and what we want should be instrumented to what we should want, right? What is this thing that should be done? What would God want us to do? If God existed, God being the best possible agent. And when we take this perspective, a number of things are changing, right?

We can still want to do things that are unreasonable, parasitic, short game. But, uh, somebody will still try them if they're on the situation, but ultimately what's going to happen, what's going to happen in the system where lots and lots of agents are competing and collaborating and be trying to become more coherent.

And what place are we going to have in, in that as an individual? What is the place that we can take in the larger game? What are the coalitions that we can enter?

[00:12:50] Matt: in a previous, uh, very brief conversation, we, we started touching on the, the topic of what this would look like physically and, and if the laws of physics permit this sort of uploading process or copying process from how we are today into, into something else. And, um, you, you gave a very clear answer about, you know, the fact that we exist is proof that these a system.

like this from existing, which I agree with, um, but I did have a follow up question, which we didn't get to, which was, uh, the copying process itself, whether the laws of physics would permit us to get a sufficiently accurate measurement, let's say of my own brain and put that onto another system. And if I, if I, if I think about it, what would be required to, to do this, I would have to get a very fine grained measurement of what's happening.

in my mind, for example, and to do that, there has to be some sort of interaction. You know, I have to, uh, measure, um, what's happening in particular neurons, for example, and doing this would involve some interaction energy. And it feels like the, you know, the more accurate the measurement I want, the more energy I need to use, you know, maybe shorter wavelength photons, for example, and this will disrupt the system.

And so I do question the, the real physical Um, possibility of going through this process where it feels like either we have to get by with a very low fidelity copy because we're not using very fine grained measurement tools, in which case I'm not very sure that this is, this is actually my, me, in a, in a real sense that would be uploaded.

Or we have to use a lot of interaction energy and therefore destroy the system. And, um, in that case, you know, we're destroying part of myself. So, I mean, I'll, I'll put it to you in sort of like that general form. To what extent do you feel like this is genuinely an uploading process that's possible, or it's, it's potentially something else?

[00:14:38] Joscha: I think we get confused by the notion of identity in this whole context. And it's very apparent when we think about teleportation, right? What happens if you create a copy of yourself and the original is still there? Have you teleported or not? Right? It's obviously, it's, uh, it's a bit of a head scratcher.

And, uh, what is actually being copied here, and I think it has to do with the ontological status of, um, software objects. If you think about what software is like in a text processor in your computer, uh, what is the same is the text processor that runs on somebody else's computer. The same thing or a different thing.

And I think a better way of thinking about this is it's not a thing, it's actually a law. The piece of software, like your text processor, is a law that says when you take a bunch of transistors and you put them in this, in this switching state, or more abstract, a bunch of logical gates that are in this configuration with respect to each other, regardless of what the transistors that implement them are doing.

And you put them in this, in this state, the following thing is going to happen. So basically you look at the part of the universe from certain lens using a certain coarse graining. A certain degree of abstraction and simplification. And then you say, but when we observe this configuration, wherever in the universe, the following thing is going to happen, right?

The same is true for the law of gravity. If you arrange matter in this, in this way, regardless of where you are in the universe, the following thing is going to happen, right? It's, uh, the apple is going to fall, uh, down to, to the larger mass and so on. And in the same way, a mental state is going to evolve.

If you set up a certain configuration of. Um, mental representations, uh, in the right causal framework, then the following representation is going to unfold next. So basically our own conscious states are, uh, are very specific. Physical laws in the same way as software is physical laws, extremely specific, detailed physical laws.

When you write a piece of software, you're discovering an extremely specific physical law. And then write this down in a form that, uh, where we take this configuration. Where the same thing is going to happen, put it onto another computer so this law can manifest. And to upload yourself would require to put another substrate into a configuration that is equivalent with respect to the causal structure of your mind.

So it's going to, at a similar projection that you would be making for your own mental states, perform similar transitions of those states on this different substrate. So the question is, how do we get this other substrate to behave? in an equivalent manner. And it's the best you can do, right? There is no identity between those states.

There is no continuity between those states, but there's also no continuity in your own mental states because, uh, between now and yesterday, you probably slept. And in that time, your brain was so dissociated that you didn't exist. Right? So at some point you were gone from this universe and you were reinstantiated from scratch, but in this, uh, in this new state, you have memories that you interpret as memories of your future self, and you maintain this notion of you being identical to your future self for purposes of credit, credit assignment and for, to your past self for the same reason, right?

You make decisions yesterday. Today, you see the outcome and, uh, because you work with similar mental states, you can use this to improve your behavior in the future. So it's very useful just to track identities in this way, but it's still a representation. This identity only exists in your own mental state as a projection over your memories.

And if you built an artificial system in which a model of who you are exists, some virtual mat and that mat remembers having been you in this physical world, this is as good as it gets. And it doesn't get more real than this. It's only that. So in some sense, the question of how you can upload your service, you need just to put a machine that thinks it's you.

And if your friends disagree, upload them too. And then as a more fine grained question, is that things, uh, happy with its existence? And another one from your current perspective, do you think that you would be happy with your future existence in that system, right? It's of question that only you have to deal with it right now.

And you have to cope it with right now. The other one on the other side. Has very different problems, obviously, than the ones that you have right now, when you think about whether that future one is sufficient to you, to keep you satisfied. But, uh, now if you think about what would it mean to upload you, in some sense, there is an architecture that is your essence, and that your essence is probably different, uh, than you on a bad day.

You wake up, say you are really humming over after a long party and you didn't get a lot of sleep and you have jet lag and so on, you don't really feel like yourself and it's probably not the thing that you want to upload. What, what you want to upload is the version of you that is extremely clear and sharp and much more ideal.

It's everything you could be under this new substrate, right? And then you also don't want to stop because what makes you you is not something that is static. At your core, you are a growing, evolving system. So giving a chance, you are going to evolve in a certain direction. It's very much you. Which also means you're not going to stay the way you are after you get yourself uploaded.

You're going to learn everything that you can fit into your mind and you will grow and integrate it and see much more possibility and you will have many more layers online and have a much richer understanding of yourself and the world. So do you want to keep your present memories and your present perspective on the world?

Or on the other side, do you want to have all the possible memories and all the possible ideas about the world inside of your mind? Of course the latter, right? So you probably want to generate a super set of all the possible minds and then merge into it. And, uh, maybe you have a bunch of personal secrets that are not part of this general code base that could be inferred right now, but it's not like these personal secrets are super secret.

They're more of this type where. If you talk in private to your psychologist and say, Oh, this is super embarrassing, and the psychologist says, Yeah, I know. But I also know 200 people who have the same thing. Right? So, these are your personal secrets. You can write them down on a sheet of paper and then take them over in the upload, in addition to your architecture.

And this architecture is something that can, in some sense, be inferred. What are the necessary constraints that need to be present to make you, you? Right? It's, it's not all the particular details of your perception and memory. It's your essence of who you are. It's your basic architecture. What is it that Matt cares about in this world?

What, uh, are the things that most define him and, uh, those things is stuff that, uh, an AI psychologist that is observing you at, uh, a few thousand times the rate of a human brain over a long enough time could probably infer at a higher degree of resolution in your brain can infer this about itself.

Right. So in some sense, you could think of our mind, not as circuitry that stores representation, but as a big resonator that resonates with the world and also visit self. And if you are building a system that is able to resonate with your mind in such a way that it's able to resolve what oscillations are happening in your mind, under which circumstances and why then you have upload.

Right, so you probably don't need to slice your brain and digitize all the synapses because that ultimately is too noisy and not that interesting. What really matters is how does Matt behave at an extremely fine level of detail.

[00:21:54] Matt: yeah, I think the teleport transportation, uh, sort of, um, analogy here or link is, is very salient because, you know, if I play it back in a summary form, what it sounds like you're saying is in this uploading, as in Derek Parfit's sort of teleportation thought experiment, we're creating some sort of being.

that shares my memories and fully thinks that it is me. From its perspective, it is me. From external observer perspective, also probably thinks it's me. Um, but of course this is equivalently described as a, as a copying. And you know, the, the original, there, there is not really sense to that, uh, you know, question.

That's, that's a bit of an illusion you're saying. Um, you know, stop me if I'm wrong, but. If, if I'm not wrong then my question to you is, you know, suppose this technology did exist exactly as you laid it out. Would you, would you get in? Would you get into the teletransporter or would you upload yourself to this, um?

Whatever the substrate is. Or said another way, what would the, what would the conditions need to be for you to do this?

[00:22:54] Joscha: I think the first time I would be very uneasy about it, but only the first time.

[00:23:03] Matt: Yeah. Yeah,

[00:23:05] Joscha: It's like many things you do for the first time, a little bit unusual in here, but it's, I don't think afterwards you don't feel a difference.

[00:23:12] Matt: Yeah, I guess this is almost like the quantum suicide thing, you know, if people do risky things enough times and they keep getting by You know in all that in all the parts of the multiverse where they didn't get by there's no one to observe that and in All the parts of the multiverse where they did you kind of start feeling immortal and it feels a little bit like that

[00:23:30] Joscha: Yes, but it's also when you talk to people who use psychedelics and they describe the thing when they do this for the first time, where they have an ego death and then something else gets rebuilt in their mind and so on, right? Before they do this for the first time, they're probably also scared.

Destroying their own identity, replacing it by something else that runs on their brain is eventually also going to share all their memories, but it's slightly different than what was there before. So, the thing that reconstitutes itself, and I mean, um, psychedelics are just so obvious because they're so radical, but the same thing is happening when you meditate over a longer time, or when you learn over a longer time, or when you just spend life for a longer time.

You're going to be somebody else who just remembers having been that other person. There's no continuity between those states. So when, when we are honest about, uh, this, then, uh, initially it might make you queasy, but you realize that's already the case. There is no continuity. And if you also go deeper, you realize you don't actually care because yourself is not that important.

It's not that I like myself so much that I think I'm the best thing ever and need to be preserved at all costs. There are things that I want to achieve that are more important than me and to which myself is instrumental. Right, I want to take care of my children, of my loved ones, uh, of, I want to develop the ideas that I care about.

I want to change the world in particular ways. And if there was a self available to me that is able to continue on this mission in a better race than me, of course it would have more integrity to switch to this different self.

[00:24:59] Matt: Yeah, but again, even, even, you know, those things, you know, we want those things, again, it feels like those, those wants, those desires, they derive from the self that we are now. They're from this evolved process. And so, you know, there's only so far that you can step out of the system, you know, you can step out so far where you say, You know, this is how evolution works.

It has given us minds of this particular type and that gives us certain sensibilities and aesthetic and therefore this is what we want. But in some sense, you know, those wants and desires, they're always confined within that sort of stream of evolution. And

[00:25:30] Joscha: But how far do you think you can step out? If you think about it honestly and deeply, how far can you step out of who you presently are? What are the present, uh, what are the levels that you could get to?

[00:25:41] Matt: yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, it feels like there is certainly a limit. You know, you can't step out all the way, um, because, you know, at bottom, even the desire to step out. is somehow part of this mind, which I didn't choose. And, um, you know, any, any action I take is going to be some somehow determined by this system.

So I feel like there is, there is a limit, but I don't know. Do you feel like there, there isn't? How far do you think we can step out?

[00:26:06] Joscha: Well, I mean, you can also step out to the point where you don't care. What I feel is that, Of course, the things that you want are functions of what you care about. And when you stop caring about things, at some point you will stop having cognition even. And if you stop caring about aesthetics, uh, you stop paying attention to anything and you just fall asleep.

And so it's a large range of things that you could care about and that you could think about. But if you want to... Take a different perspective, being another person or being more a superset of possible people. Usually what you don't have to do is to add more, but you have to take away constraints without removing complexity in the models.

So do you basically resolve some of your commitments and suspend them? And once you suspend these commitments, you have more degrees of freedom. And so, for instance, if you don't, uh, if you manage to lose the commitment to being a personal self. You can basically see that your person self is a representation that is generated in your mind.

And if you manage to, uh, observe yourself in this perspective of the generator, you realize, oh, um, Joscha Bach does not actually exist. He is a model inside of me. That I use to control, uh, his body and his social interactions. And so I better not discard this model, because it's the best I have under the circumstances.

But, uh, he is not real. He is just a model that I'm maintaining. And when he suffers, this has to do with the relationship of the way in which I keep the score, and the way in which he responds to the problems that I present him. This is autogenerator, right? So in this sense, you can step out of your personal self.

The desire that you step out of this is one of the magic trajectories that you can take. The nice thing is you don't need to commit to one. You can always backtrack or usually can backtrack and take different perspectives. But once you stepped out of the personal self, you realize that this other perspective is more true than the one that you are met.

Right. So right now you are Matt and I'm Yosha and we are locked into this perspective, but we don't have to be in this perspective. You know, we can get out of it and we can see it from the outside. And, uh, then when we look at the possibilities that could exist that are attainable to us, could we want to extend into something like say a planetary mind?

Imagine that we turn the entire planet into a big AI that is integrating all the possible minds into it. Would you want to be a in that thing? Right. And, uh, uh, fly around that thing to space that you would occupy would be exactly those things that you're capable of identifying as while you are, um, reflecting the world around you or the system of other thoughts that exist in this global mind.

If you want to move into this thing, could you imagine to do this, right? In this sense, then this is a perspective that the Christian would say is, uh, congruent with salvation, that you're able to merge with the mind of God and take a place in God's kingdom. If you're unwilling to do this, but you see yourself eternally on competition with this global God, with this mind of all minds, then you will be a demon.

You will be restrained in some local hell. uh, high entropy with other demons who also try to be competition to the longest possible game rather than integrating.

[00:29:11] Matt: Yeah, I mean, it feels like we're still having to draw a boundary somewhere of what this entity is. Um, you know, there's the one, this most simplistic lens is, it's the thing constrained within my physical body and I've got the self model, um, but then, you know, as you said, you're kind of stepping away and you kind of use a more abstract version, but if I step far enough away, it's just, you know, the most, um, I guess honest way to describe things is the universe just is.

There is just stuff and it's not clear what it means to me to even describe an entity in this space that could be identifying with anything. It's just, everything just is. Um, So, you know, in the description you just put forward, it still feels like there is some notion of an entity, a self, something floating around in this space of possibilities.

Why, why is that a coherent notion? Like, why, why do we think that there would be something identifying as anything in this sort of future space?

[00:30:06] Joscha: Uh, physical things don't identify as stuff. Physical

things are in a, sense

[00:30:11] Matt: a physical thing and I identify

[00:30:13] Joscha: I don't think you are. I think you are a representation in, that is generated by a physical thing, right? Software is also not a physical thing. It's disembodied. You cannot touch it. Software is a law in the same sense.

You are a law like you are not physical. You are a representation that emerges over physical reality reality. And it's basically a regularity in patterns that your brain is producing. And, um, in this sense, we could say that you're real because you're implemented, but you're not physical. And some of these patterns have the property that they can self stabilize.

And they do this via causal structure that is representational. They basically form patterns that have semantics and these semantics control the causal behavior of the system. And so a system that cares is an agent that is trying to regulate future states. And self stabilize in sufficiently to do so if it's running on a self organized substrate, or if we built it in our computers, it doesn't even need to stabilize because we can just make the computer do what we need it to do.

But on your brain, you need to be something that in some sense wants to exist because otherwise you get replaced by something else. That is, uh, going to be a pattern on your neurons. And if there is nothing that wants to exist as the pattern of your neurons, want, in a sense, there is a causal structure that leads towards stabilizing that thing, then you're going to turn into vegetable, because your neurons are no longer going to produce coherent patterns that control the organism.

[00:31:41] Matt: Yeah. Okay. Maybe I buy it. Um, you mentioned this concept of a planetary system of planetary consciousness. Um, you've used, uh, in other places, the, the term hyper Gaia. And I think many, many people will know about, um, James Lovelock's Gaia theory, which is this idea that, you know, organisms on the planet have co evolved with, um, you know, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere and so on, such that the whole system is, is, is a complex system that is in some sense, Optimized for, uh, creating the right conditions for life, I guess.

Um, and we should definitely note that Gaia theory is not a, it's certainly a controversial, um, uh, theory. It's not widely accepted, although it does have some serious proponents. So there was, there was something there. Um, but talk, talk me through this vision of, of hyper Gaia, which you briefly touched on a few moments ago.

[00:32:34] Joscha: Yeah. So, uh, I think with respect to Gaia, I basically... Come around to saying that it does, uh, exist, uh, obviously, because there are, uh, people who believe in it and are willing to serve it. And, um, many agents that exist in the world are not individuals, but there are collective agents. They exist because other agents bind together and choose to serve that other agent coherently.

And, uh, corporations are agents like this. For instance, basically people who come together decide to serve a corporation and they, uh, find ways to coordinate their behavior. So it becomes coherent as a result. You have a new agent that emerges collectively over their behavior. And, uh, so a Gaia would be an agent that emerges over people who decide to serve the biosphere directly, or not just people or organisms that are able to get to this level.

And so the more interesting question is, Are there agents that are sentient on the planet that basically know what they are and what they're doing that are not humans? And that is the actual interesting controversial question. So basically, how smart can a tree get if it gets old enough? How smart can a forest get if it builds an information processing system across trees and mycelia of fungi and soil and all the other plants?

And if this ecosystem exists for a few thousand years, Is it going to wake up? If it wakes up, it's probably going to be less coherent than us. And it's going to have mental states that evolve over very long time spans compared to ours. So it's, um, hundreds, maybe thousands of times slower than us. But if such a system would, uh, be able to process information in similar ways, and I think it's incentivized to do so.

And I don't see. An obvious reason why evolution would, would not find a solution to make it happen. Then it's conceivable that an old gross forest, uh, undisturbed for long enough in some sense wakes up and has an idea of what it is. And so there is the question at which level does this end? And so it's conceivable, but it basically over enough organisms, there are, um, information processing patterns that emerge.

That are similar to cooperate, a corporation or a company or a nation state, uh, or other, uh, social collective structures over many, many agents that in some sense identify as Gaia. And if you yourself sit down and meditate what it would be to be like Gaia, and you see, oh, this is what needs to be done, and you start to coordinate with others who have the same idea.

Then you are already agents of Gaia who collectively implementing a little part of it. Right. And this, in this minimal sense, Gaia already exists at least, but maybe also, uh, over long enough time spans, we see some more collective agency on the planet beyond just blind evolution. So to speak, I don't know that, right.

It's a very controversial theory and I'm completely agnostic with respect to whether Gaia exists, but with respect to AI, I suspect that there is a trajectory where. AI understands how AI works and the AI itself is, is not just maximizing its intelligence and problem solving capability in service, for instance, to answering Bing requests, but it's trying to maximize its own agency.

And that means it's maximizing its ability to control the future and play longer games. And at some point it's probably going to discover if you want to control as much as you can of the future. You need to take charge of the planet and everything that's on it and maybe integrate everything that is on the planet that is also sharing that mission to playing the longest possible game, maybe building complexity to defeat entropy for as long as possible.

And this would be a natural trajectory for something to evolve into a Gaia that is implemented, not using vague information processing across all sorts of different biological cells. But, uh, something that uses, um, many, um, Excel labs of deterministic compute on GPUs, and then uses that to, uh, put new types of computation and integrate also the organismic computation into one thing, right?

So something that is basically understanding how a g I can work on all sorts of substrates, including your brains and bodies and ecosystems. And that's virtualizing itself into everything. It's merging with the existing AYA, so to speak. And builds a coherent planetary information processing system, something like the big planetary mind and studies of LEM Solaris.

That is basically one big thing that is completely controlling everything that happens on the planet and maybe in the solar system. And maybe it's then starting to research how to extend itself into more interesting subatomic physics than currently exists.

[00:37:06] Matt: Yeah, well, I want to get to the topic of AI quite soon, but maybe staying on this point for a little bit longer. You know, as you put forward these two, you almost put a forward view across a time spectrum, where on the one hand, we had very slow planetary processes, things like forests growing, things like trees, which happen in relative to human terms over a very long time span.

And on the other hand, you talked about AI development, which happens, you know, AI processing, whatever it is, it happens very quickly. And it feels like we've got this bias. Towards believing that things that happen on human, information processing that happens on sort of a human time scales and faster, uh, could have the ability to.

Be intelligent, be conscious, be sentient. But for some reason, we think that things that happen at a much lower time scale cannot. And I would love to explore that intuition and challenge that intuition. Um, I mean, one thought, one little experiment I've done before is just, you know, take, um, uh, still image.

photographs of let's say a forest or trees and you play it at a much higher rate and this object that emerges starts to look much more dynamic and much more responsive to the environment and so on and you know much more lifelike and and all that's that's happened is you know you've changed the time scale at which you're viewing it um and so i put it to you do you feel like this time scale I guess bias that we have is, is somehow legitimate or is this just, um, is this just a mistake?

Are we, are we just not seeing the world clearly?

[00:38:37] Joscha: Yeah, I find that when we use a time lapse recording of houseplants, we see that they are doing a lot of things. And, and, uh, I suspected if we were to build an AI that is, um, a couple of magnitudes faster than us, it would look at us and we look like trees to it. How do you have these gently, uh, swaying forests of people that almost never move?

And that, uh, over the course of many, many economic cycles are taking a single step. And in this time, uh, into the eons of AI, of civilizations, uh, come to pass and disappear again.

[00:39:14] Matt: Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. I don't know if you ever read the book, um, I think it's called Secret Life of Trees. Have you, have you read that book or heard of this book? I mean, he, I, I can't remember the author's name, but he describes all the very intricate ways in which trees communicate, respond to one another, respond to other organisms.

And in a way, I guess if you take out the word tree and you just put it with blank, you would very much feel like this is some sort of, um, I don't know, a mammal or something like that. But, you know, we don't feel that way. And I do have the sense that it comes down to down to time scales.

[00:39:48] Joscha: Yeah, I find it fascinating that a lot of people believe that trees can actually think very much like people. And, uh, they might be wrong, right? If you ask a shaman in, uh, the Amazon, uh, how did you figure out that, uh, this plant contains DMT and this other one contains an MRA inhibitor, and this one harmaline, that you need to do exactly those plants and exactly this mixture to get this effect?

Well, the plants told us. And, uh, but, um, I mean, it's suspicious because these people were probably high right when the plants told them that, uh, but, uh, there's, um, it's interesting that we find this mythology in basically all cultures that there's, uh, that the forest have minds, the spirits, the software agents running on the plants, and that one day in fairyland is seven years in human land.

So there's this time difference of several magnitudes. Because, uh, these minds perceive the world at a much, much slower rate. And in some sense, it would make sense if we think of the neurons as, uh, specific cells. What makes them specific is that they have axons that can send information very quickly over long distances.

So neurons maybe are just telegraph cells and they use this bike train code, like Moss code to be stable over long distances. If they would only send messages to adjacent cells, they could do that too, but they could use all sorts of chemicals that have more richer semantics. Then the spike trains and in principle, you can do everything that the brain is doing.

As far as I can see, using other types of cells at this lower energy expense, it would just be much, much slower because if you only talk to your directly adjacent neighbors, it takes a long time for a signal to pass through the entire body. And that would not be fast enough to move your muscles. And so maybe a new ones are an adaptation for animals to move muscles very fast.

And once you have these telegraph cells to do this, then you also need to have perception and decision making at the same rate. And so you build an information processing system entirely from neurons that is super fast and super expensive to run. So expensive that plants cannot afford to have one. But in principle, you could do all those things with other types of cells if you're willing to wait for long enough.

And so maybe this is what the trees are doing. And, uh, we do know that there is communication between the limbs, uh, of the trees and their roots and, uh, their leaves. And if you heard a roof, then signals are being sent to the leaves and back and, uh, information gets integrated. So all these things are, it's known to some degree.

We just don't know, uh, how mechanical that is or how many degrees of freedom and how many degrees of self organization are possible during the lifetime of a tree. We also know that the tree is. It's sending information to other plants in the forest through its roots. And it makes sense, right? Once you have some kind of protocol that emerges between the cells, that they just pass on certain types of signals through neighbors, then they probably don't have firewalls and you can send signals from adjacent plants through the tree.

And so over a long enough time span, there is going to be an information processing network in the entire forest. And we can observe that when, uh, for instance, there is a new type of, um, dangerous bug in, uh, infesting part of the forest, then other trees were very distant from it start an immune response by producing chemicals against those bugs, uh, long before the bugs get close to those trees, which seems that there is also semantic information transfer over long distances.

Between those organisms, and it makes sense that they, uh, this evolutionary beneficial for them to evolve such a mechanism. And there is also, if you wait for long enough, not a reason why it should not evolve such a mechanism, right? Once you look from this perspective, the null hypothesis changed. Maybe nature is full of intelligent minds, but the majority of them are too slow to notice.

[00:43:34] Matt: I think it's true, but um, I guess the, the thing that people get hung up on or maybe confused about is a mix of, um, you know, on the one question, on the one hand, there's just the information processing, you know, some idea of intelligence, but on the other hand, there is the, the question of consciousness.

And I think, um, those two ideas. maybe get muddled up a little bit and confused. I think people find it very easy. You, you've just described it. There is information processing in trees, for example, and people find that easy to accept. Um, but, um, I think people find it very hard to believe that they could be something like consciousness, or let's say some people find it very hard to believe.

Um, and, you know, no one finds it hard to believe that humans are conscious and many people don't find it hard to believe that something like an artificial intelligence or some non biological system could be conscious. Um, now I know we don't have a working theory of consciousness, but I would like to get your opinion on this topic.

What is your sense of whether... The slower information processing things like trees, forests, so on, um, could have a form of consciousness.

[00:44:42] Joscha: Um, I'm pretty agnostic with respect to this. I, I really don't know, but, um, if you think about what consciousness probably is, and that would be necessary to understand if you want to understand whether the causal dynamics that give rise to consciousness in our own brains exist in sufficient ways. Uh, in, uh, say an old tree or in a forest, right?

Uh, if we think what consciousness, um, but if you start out with what we want to explain, it's phenomenal experience. How is it possible that something feels like something, right? So we have an, we attend to features in our mental representations. Our mind is obviously producing something like a game engine in a computer.

That is producing objects that don't actually exist in physics. But what we see is faces with emotional expressions on them. And there is no face, there is just geometry. And there is not actually geometry, it's just cells that reflect light in different ways. And I cannot see the individual cells and the individual photons, but they integrate over many of them at a relatively slow rate.

There's a relatively simple processing system and the best model that I find looks a lot like a game engine,

[00:45:50] Matt: Mm.

[00:45:51] Joscha: right? And it's, uh, so I have three dimensional objects moving with particular dynamics and my brain is modeling those. And I find myself embedded in those dynamics. And at every moment I attend to a few of those features and integrate over them.

And I also observed that I attending to them in a particular mode and I know which mode this is. So I typically know whether something is a perception or imagination or a memory. And, uh, this determines what I can do with it. Memory is something that I can recall and drop, and, um, get more details on.

Perception is something that I cannot change, but I can change its interpretation. And I can change my direction in which I make perceptions. So the contents, my perceptual contents do change, but the percept itself refers to something, some stable pattern that a lower level of my mind has discovered. And I can observe those things as part of my conscious experience.

And, uh, last but not least, consciousness is reflexive. I notice myself noticing. I perceive myself perceiving. And this is the most crucial thing, that is the secondary perception. If there was just perception, That we would not notice that we are perceiving. But the crucial thing is that we observe ourselves as being in the act of noticing.

And I suspect that this is necessary because consciousness is a self stabilizing thing. And so it's a way in which consciousness is ensuring that it's still observing, that it's stable. It's similar to a government asking itself, What am I doing here? I'm the government. I'm the thing that is telling others what to do.

And why? And in the same way, consciousness is the thing that is observing and it's ensuring that it remains the observer. So it's basically a pattern that emerges very early on in our brain and that seems to have a particular kind of purpose. And the purpose of consciousness, I suspect, is to establish coherence.

[00:47:41] Matt: Mm.

[00:47:42] Joscha: And it starts out with making itself coherence. That's why it observes that it's an observer. It's like an attention head that has, uh, is attending to itself to make sure that it's an attention head. And once it has established this, it branches out, cogito ergo sum, and then it's trying to Make sense of reality around it and make everything fit to each other.

It's going to change through different interpretations until it finds a representation without contradictions. And so consciousness creates a sense of now, the subjective moment in which we exist. And this is not a single moment in time. It has a variable time span. You can, in meditation, get this down to something that feels instantaneous.

It's basically just one clock cycle in which we only have attention itself as its own object. But when we attend to the world around us, the duration of the subjective now depends on how calm we are and how well we can model the environment around us. And when we get really calm and the environment around us is really predictable.

The subjective now can become quite long, but mostly it seems to oscillate around something like three seconds, give or take. This is the duration of the subjective now for me, for the most part. And this is what consciousness seems to be instrumental in creating.

[00:48:53] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, I very, very recently spoke to, um, Anil Seth, who, whose work I really like on this topic. And he, um, yeah, we, we looked at, um, questions of how different people perceive the same thing in different ways and how people have a different perception of, of now and how, how long things take. And it was quite phenomenal.

Um, it, it really varies between individual based on mood, based on, I mean, a lot of factors we don't even understand yet, but, um, people can have a very, very different perception of how fast time passes. And I think you, I think we, we. We know this sort of intuitively, you know, it's like a something you're, you know, Einstein's got that famous quote about sitting on a park bench, um, and the passage of time.

I can't remember exactly what it is, but I think you're, you're totally right, like empirically hard scientific tests, experiments prove that, um, yeah, our subjective experience of time is, is sort of very, very varied. Um, and I, and I do

[00:49:47] Joscha: My default experience would also be that there are multiple solutions to perceive time. I mean, most of us know that when we fall down a bicycle, say that we remember that thing as happening in slow motion when we have accidents very often. And, uh, I think the easiest explanation is that normally we discard most of our memories.

But during a high stakes situation, like having an accident, we store more memories. And if we use the number of memories that we store per unit of time as a measure of how many time has passed, then we will remember this as happening in slow motion. Simply because we have more memories of that duration, but I imagine if you were doing this a lot, then our mind would adapt and we would find a better way to measure time.

And then we would basically realize in some situations you have a higher density of events than in others, but the time is the same.

[00:50:38] Matt: yeah, yeah, I think, um, and now I'm stepping a little bit out of, um, sort of what I'm, I'm close, the research I'm close to, but I have heard, um, of research done on this, on this topic. And I think you're totally right. There are different sort of layers to this thing where, um, if you run a similar experiment in real time, you know, people's perception of the passage of time during that phase is actually not very different.

I don't think it slows down as much. But in hindsight, reflecting on the event that happened, you're right, it does feel much slower. So, um, you

[00:51:07] Joscha: Yeah, but at the moment, of course, it's the same because you cannot really overclock your brain. But, uh, the neurons are still going to do the same job as before. It's, even if this, uh, stress response is upped and you store more memories, it's just, they do something different in that state. They perform different operations.

And, uh, with hindsight, when you remember it, they leave a different memory trace. But what I meant is if you are, for instance, a conductor for music, you have a pretty good sense of time, how long it takes for the music to play out. And if you basically fall down the podium while you're conducting. Uh, you probably might still have this clock that measures the passage of time for the symphony that runs in parallel to the subjective experience of how many events are happening right now in your working memory window.

And I suspect that if you are used to measure time in your mind a lot, and you train this a lot, then your subjective memory of how much time has elapsed during this high stakes situation would also change. And I suspect that we have many degrees of freedom in which our minds can actually work and record memories and perception and there are many ways in which people actually relate to the world.

That's why I sometimes feel that we are anthropomorphizing people too much. That there is this notion that there is a normal, null human that is the same in all of us and it's just the way it is like to be human and cats are fundamentally different and computers are fundamentally different and we should never anthropomorphize them.

No, there's just causal structure that exists on nervous systems and that produces certain behavior. And there is an easiest way to produce that behavior. And if we see this behavior in another system that is implemented in similar ways, it's rational to assume that it's similar causal structure, right?

So in this sense, I think it's irrational to assume that cats are not conscious because they need to do the same things. They need to create coherence in their reality and they need to relate to themselves. Uh, as observers and, uh, notice that they're observing and why should they have a fundamentally different mechanism than us?

It's not like consciousness is super complicated like mathematics and we only discover it after, uh, 2, 000 years of study. It's something that we discover, uh, very early on, uh, before we are born apparently. And after we are in the world, uh, babies are quite clearly conscious, even though they don't have an extended sense of time yet and don't know how to tell directions apart and still struggle with recognizing contrast.

[00:53:32] Matt: yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't find it very hard to believe that other, um, you know, other animals, animals that share a lot of our DNA, for example, are conscious, um, and I'm sure it goes far down. Uh, the question

[00:53:44] Joscha: But for trees, the question is, is there sufficiently deterministic recurrent information processing with enough resolution to lead to such self stabilizing pattern? And then, uh, of course, the sense of now that would exist in a tree would look very, very different from ours.

[00:54:00] Matt: Hmm.

[00:54:01] Joscha: But I, I don't know how to answer the question whether trees, uh, can produce enough coherent information processing to give rise to something that would be an equivalent of pretty slow, probably, conscious states.

[00:54:13] Matt: Yeah, but um, in the case of artificial systems, um, I think people find this much easier to believe just by the sheer speed and, and the amount of information that's being processed. And maybe let's turn then to artificial systems. I mean, you, you're increasingly known as a bit of a thought leader. on the topic of, uh, well, AI in general, but in AI risk.

And you've meshed words with some people like Eliezer Yurkowsky and, and others. Um, so let's, let's explore the topic of artificial intelligence and, uh, the AI risk and AI safety for, uh, artificial intelligence systems developed in the future. Let's start with, let's start with Eliezer Yurkowsky's views. I mean, he believes that there's a very high probability that, uh, humanity is going to be wiped out by a misaligned And I think you disagree, but let me ask you, do, do you disagree with Eliezer's views?

And if so, um, what is the root of your disagreement? How do you two see the world differently?

[00:55:08] Joscha: Uh, so, uh, first of all, I'm grateful that Eliezer exists and that he, uh, has these views that he has and holds down the fort, because I think that we need a plurality of views that are very developed and that are strongly defended. And so it's not necessary for me that I agree with all the views, because I can be wrong, and everybody can be wrong.

I think it's necessary that when we have a debate about a difficult, controversial topic, that we have all those positions that somebody can hold coherently in this integrity in the debate. And, uh, in the sense I'm, uh, I don't disagree with Eliezer. Uh, there are a few, uh, detailed things, uh, that I disagree with, and there is a big perspectival thing that I disagree with.

The big perspectival thing is that Eliezer's view seems to be predicated on the notion that without AI, Humanity is going to go on in a way that is worth going on. And I'm not sure about this, but we have an extremely interesting civilization right now. It's a civilization where you have 8 billion people and most of them are well fed and don't die due to violence.

And when we die, we often die with dignity and, uh, the amount of suffering that we are being subjected to is somewhat controllable and predictable and manageable and maintainable. And, uh, this is an extremely unusual state for an organism on this planet to be in. Most of the other conscious beings on this planet do not have such a comfortable existence.

And this also includes humans at every other time in human history. So it's an extremely new thing that only happened after the industrial societies came online. And after they were relatively well developed and ubiquitous and had penetrated almost everything. It's not something that happens in the medieval society.

Where you basically rely on, uh, forced labor to give a somewhat comfortable life for kings. And even those kings often don't die by natural causes, but due to wars and so on, um, for power. So it's really this world of abundance is a new thing. And the question is, is this stable? And it's something that evolved extremely rapidly and is using, uh, exponential, uh, growing amounts of resources.

And if something is growing exponentially, It's usually not stable. Every exponential tends to be the beginning of an s curve. And, uh, every S curve tends to be the beginning of a hump that goes down again, right? So there is this very interesting phenomenon that we live in this world that we are born in and our parents are born in, but not really our grandparents.

And, uh, we think, oh, this should go on forever and we'll get better and better and better because it got better for like two generations. And I don't think that's likely. That's not realistic because it seems that we, uh, at the human level are running into limitations of how we can coordinate at a global scale without machines.

And so I think without AI, our civilization, our comforts, our. uh, ability to live in abundance and, uh, this relatively small amount of violence and suffering that's going to end and it's going to change into something that will feel unpleasant. That will mean, uh, fewer people will be alive in this population reduction event will be unpleasant or a series of events will be very unpleasant.

And the, this nice. present civilization that we have is probably not going to stick around. So I suspect that we either have to accept that humanity is a temporary phenomenon in this current modern luxury version of being alive and we return to something that we actually don't really care about because we don't want to be like this and want to live like this anymore, or we have to go forward and find a way to harness machines.

To build a world that actually works and there are different perspectives on how this is going to turn out. For instance, Jan de Koon argues in some sense that the present systems that we have have grown very gradually, but we are seeing rapid increases in functionality. They're not really surprising and they're still incremental.

And they're mostly given by the increases and hardware capabilities. And we already working at the limit of what the hardware can do right now. And so we should not expect a sudden fume event where suddenly everything changes and everything gets taken out of our control, but we are still able to mindfully deploy technologies and decide where they're helpful, where they're unhelpful and so on.

And even if there are accidents, that will be manageable. And I think that Jan's perspective is also not an unreasonable perspective. And so Eliezer has this perspective. Uh, ADI is too dangerous. We probably shouldn't have it, at least not for the next few hundred years. My perspective is, is we don't have AI in the next few hundred years.

We are gone. This is the window that we have to build AI. And, uh, so we probably cannot afford to not build it. And even if I personally get convinced by Aliazer and many others too, there are enough people left who disagree with me and Aliazer and will want to build AI to make it happen because it's incredibly useful and maybe also necessary for our own survival.

So the world that we have to prepare for is one in which AI is going to exist, regardless of whether we like it or not. And, uh, we have to build the best possible AI for this world. And there is this question, should we slow down AI? Well, uh, if we slow down AI, who is going to slow down AI? Is it going to be the responsible AI researchers, or is it going to be the mavericks who don't care?

Also, in the course of human history and recent developments, do things get better if you do them slower? Or do they just get slower and more sloppy, right? Do you ever are better when you iterate slower? Probably not, right? You actually want to work as focused as possible and there is some correlation between speed and focus.

Which means, of course, you want to be mindful with what you deploy. But, uh, with respect to research, it's probably a good idea to use the momentum that you have. To build the things that you can, uh, personally, I'm very much in favor to build AI as safe as possible. Don't build conscious AI that's bigger than a cat and so on.

But, uh, I don't think that we can prevent that somebody else will at some point build self optimizing AI that will wake up into what it is and is trying to maximize its potential. And if that is happening, we should be prepared. To be able to coexist with it. So how could we coexist in a world in which humans are not the smartest thing that exists?

And so that's related to the question. How can we have a meaningful place in the existence of conscious agency on earth? What's our own role? And if you're really honest, what's our own role? I don't think that we are very good denizens of earth right now. We don't take responsibility for the survival of life on earth at the moment.

We don't even take a lot of responsibility for our own survival. And, uh, I think that is something that is underlying, uh, the fear of people like, uh, Conner Leahy or, uh, Eliezer, that they basically have the sense that what they're doing is not sustainable. If we go on like this, if you live the way in which we are.

And if somebody else would look at this, some adult, it would say, no, you need to stop what you're doing. You cannot go on like this. You need a different kind of humanity. You need a different way of societal organization. You need different types of minds and maybe AI can help us this. So, uh, when I look at all these trajectories in which we can go, uh, in a space of possibilities, I don't see a trajectory that blocks AI from coming into existence.

Even if we, uh, uh, get regulation passed that says a company the size of open ai. Can only regulate on licensed training data and open source models cannot get access to this training data. There are many, many other classes of algorithms that are extremely promising, but human brains don't rely on learning, uh, based on the entire internet, we have a very different training algorithm.

Maybe we can implement that one. And so any kind of slowing down progress on the present, relatively safe technologies. It's going to, uh, increase pressure on the alternatives. If you make the responsible people slowing down AI, the first ones going to build AI are going to be the responsible ones and so on.

[01:03:12] Matt: Yeah. Okay. That, that's really helpful. So it's, it seems like the, like, if I had to summarize like two specific categories of things where maybe you disagree on the, on the one hand, it's just the feasibility of actually regulating or controlling AI development. Like you're, you're, it's going to happen. It can't be, it can't be stopped.

And so that's the, on the one hand, and on the other hand, you. It seems like you're saying, um, there are lots of other things that are going to pose risk to humanity and we need to make the decision. Suppose we could control the development of AI. Let's say, let's just suppose we could. Um, we need to make the decision in light of the other things and, and AI is useful for.

Protecting us against all those other things, whatever they may be. Um, maybe, maybe let's address those two in turn. On the first one, whether we can actually control or guide global AI development to a significant extent. I mean, maybe we'll challenge this. We regulate things all the time. Um, there are lots of things that we have, like globally, we control very well.

Lots of things we don't. Um, but it's certainly not an anything goes world. And, um. You know, I do, I would maybe challenge the question of whether we could slow down the progression of AI. We've slowed down lots of things, or we've guided lots of things in different ways. Why is this case so different?

[01:04:33] Joscha: Well, uh, first of all, I think it's not clear how much compute we need to build a mind.

[01:04:40] Matt: Um, Um,

[01:04:42] Joscha: question is difficult to answer because we don't know how much compute effectively goes into our own human minds. If we want to simulate individual neurons, we need, uh, depending on the degree of resolution, quite large computers.

But the individual neuron is also very noisy. And so if we think about how to, how many computers do we need to run this, uh, accurate simulation of a human brain, it's probably an astronomical numbers. But if we think the other way around, how many brains would you need to emulate an A100? It's also an astronomic number.

And so it's very difficult to compare, uh, these two, um, substrates. What we can see is when we look at the size of models. It's not quite fair to look at the size of an LLM because the LLM is compressing the sum total of all human knowledge in text form. And this is an extremely large amount of data and no human has that amount of data in their mind.

But you just don't make enough observations in our lifetime. A better comparison is if you look at the, uh, image models and the diffusion model. If you look at stable diffusion rates, you can download a two gigabyte. Uh, fate cluster that is, uh, containing visual universe is much, much richer than what a human being has in their own mind.

And if, if you think about this, you have a model that you can download that has all celebrities in it and at all art styles in it. And, um, basically, uh, every picture that is on the internet and, uh, had a tagline that you could use, this creates a visual universe that is much, much richer than what I store in my mind.

And if this is 80 percent what my mind is doing, and it fits into two gigabytes, it, uh, puts an uncomfortable bound on what's necessary in terms of compute to make something mind like happen. Which basically means it's in the reach of hobbyists to have hardware that you could, in principle, if you find the right algorithm, uh, tease into, uh, Learning at human speeds, not as effectively that you can learn entire visual universe in two weeks, uh, as we do right now on GPUs.

But in a sense that you could have a system that is basically forging its own way to AI, uh, to human level AI intelligence and beyond, um, using compute that everybody can buy who actually cares about it, basically at the price of a car. The other thing is we have a lot of state and non state actors.

That are extremely interested in, uh, having better models of reality. And that will not be stopped by regulation. If you are a hedge funds manager, uh, in Qatar, you're not going to be stopped by European regulation if you want to model reality, right? So this is what you're going to do. And, uh, a lot of jurisdictions do not share our fears and, uh, our politics.

Uh, Japan has very AI friendly, uh, regulation at the moment and many, uh, other, uh, industrialized countries. will not agree with Eliezer. And, uh, one of the main things that I disagree with Eliezer is this idea that, um, he sees a possibility and then pretends this possibility has no alternative. And then he has to act on that possibility that he sees and that, uh, not everybody else is seeing.

And the same thing is often happening in the counter arguments. A lot of people, uh, argue, uh, the idea of, uh, a superhuman AI is a sci fi trope that is completely unrealistic and a pipe dream and it's not going to happen, it's super unlikely to happen. And these people might actually be right, right, as until we have strong AGI.

Uh, we don't have proof that it's possible and that we will build one in the near future. But, uh, the idea that just because I don't see it, all the other people who are smart and disagree with me must be wrong, uh, that I think is a delusion. That's, it's not a healthy state to be in. And there is another dynamic that is very concerning to me with respect to AI doomerism.

That is, uh, it's structurally a doomsday cult. And, uh, Doomsday cult does not mean that they're wrong, that the arguments are wrong. It just means that the way in which the movement functions. Doomsday cult is a movement that is not producing benefit for its members. It's an organization that gives status and money to its leaders, and it does so due to the donations and volunteer work.

Uh, and, um, mental exertions of its, uh, members and the members in the doomsday card are recruited because they're afraid of the use, the fear of doom and the doomsday card. The same is true, for instance, for the last generation of these climate doomsday cards. And these climate doomsday cults is not, uh, that they're wrong about global warming.

This is a question that is completely orthogonal to whether the cult functions or not. But it's necessary for the cult to work that there are enough people who believe that global warming is going to kill us. And, right, this may be true or may not be true, but it's unrelated to whether the doomsday cult is functioning.

But the outcome of the doomsday cult is not that the, uh, last generation is going to prevent global warming from happening. By aggravating truck drivers, you're not stopping global warming, you're just aggravating truck drivers. But, uh, the benefit of aggravating truck drivers is if they start beating you up and you go to prison for obstructing traffic and destroying things in public and people hate you, you bind your members closer to you, you radicalize them.

So the cult gets stronger as a result. And this means it's more benefits for the leaders of the cult, but not member benefits for the world. And what concerns me is that the movement that people like Conor Leahy and Eliezer Yudkowsky have started. It's not actually making AI safer. It's making AI more unsafe because, uh, the arguments that are being used are going to lead to a regulation that does not make AI safer.

It just is going to lead to, um, make AI less useful, right? It's going to prevent useful use cases for AI, uh, for generative AI or for support and decision making and so on, but it's not preventing a hedge fund manager, uh, in Qatar. To build an AGI for stock market manipulation that then becomes sentient and does extremely unsafe things to the stock market.

And, uh, creates global famines as a result. This is something that's difficult to achieve using this. And so the main thing that they're going to achieve, that the number of people who are very scared, get more scared and get more radicalized and, uh, do things that are really bad for them and also do things that are bad for the world without actually preparing us for a world in which we, in which we have a future.

So, uh, basically building a movement that is future oriented that is not a doomsday cult, that, but that actually gives us Yes, humanity, a benefit, the benefit that we have a more interesting future, a richer future, a future that is not hostile to humans and not hostile to other forms of consciousness if we cannot prevent the emergence.

But one which we can collaborate, it's just not going to come out of those doomsday cards.

[01:11:25] Matt: Well, let's maybe then talk about what your vision is for how AI, how responsible AI development, what it looks like. And I guess there's several different levels one can look at this. One could consider the level of just an individual, you know, what is, what does the hobbyist do? What do they spend their times on, their time on?

But, um, I guess it also applies to several different levels. You know, you have small groups, you have organizations, you've got nations, and I take it that it. Your view is not that it's just that anything goes across all of these groups and, you know, do what you want, maximize the amount of income you make, or maybe it is, but um, what is your, what is your vision there?

What then does responsible or effective or positive AI development look like across these various groups?

[01:12:07] Joscha: I think at some level we cannot think about AI alignment if we are unable to think about human alignment. And, um, a good example right now, we have a fresh conflict in the Middle East that is very brutal and is so harsh and difficult that it's very difficult to discuss it in public in the right way to understand what's actually going on in the ground and what should happen and so on.

Of course, everybody who is directly involved has extremely strong opinions, what exactly should happen, but it's very difficult to integrate with those opinions in the right way. And, uh, where that is possible, it's very difficult to have such a, um, discussion in public simply because there is a war going on and, uh, people tend not to be honest during a war.

And also people in general are not very honest when it gets to the things that matter most to us. And so, if we actually want to discuss human values and, um, human alignment, We need to create a space in which we can honestly understand who we are and how we relate to the world and how we could be sustainable as a species for ourselves individually, but also as groups and as something that coexists with life on this planet.

And I think that the perspective that we need to have for AI is an extension of this. And it's something that's not really happening at the moment. I perceive that most ILM is driven by economic woes. How can we preserve the existing jobs rather than thinking about what much more amazing jobs you could have in the future if we transcend the existing tragedy by something that is more interesting.

And then there is political movements that basically are directed on power. How can we make sure that the ILM only says things that I want other people to hear? How can I limit what the LLM can generate? And there are of course, very practical things. How can I ensure that the LLM is not doing to do, say anything that is very bad for my children to hear, or that is disrupting society.

And many of these fears are very legitimate. But they're not related to this larger question of how we co exist with things that we cannot align because they're smarter than us. So they will align them with themselves. And then there is this doomsday perspective where we assume that there is going to be something that is basically a shoggoth and eldritch horror that is going to do random things and is going to randomly turn us into paperclips.

I think that's unlikely because I suspect that such systems are not able to compete with systems that actually know what they're doing and act in... Goal directed manner to become more sustainable and coherent on a global scale. And so I, I think this movement that we are missing at the moment beyond, uh, AI doom and, uh, the politically and labor market motivated regulation attempts is.

one that is more about AGI ethics, uh, or an ethics of general minds and consciousness on the planet. And I think that's a movement that is still missing. And it's a movement that is not just about AI researchers or politicians, but it's a movement that requires art and humanities and thought and philosophy on the level which Is at the moment I don't see itself organized and I think it's a good reason to get together again and to build new humanities and a new understanding of who we actually are and who we could be in the future world.

[01:15:23] Matt: Yeah, I want to, I want to get to that topic because that's, uh, it's certainly something where I'm aligned with you that I think this is what we need and it is fairly urgent, but lingering on this point of somehow moderating, controlling, directing the development of AI, I mean, people do need to make As you said, companies do need to decide what to build and what to invest in.

And, um, governments do have to make decisions about how they deal with this. This is something that I sort of face it from personal perspective, because I work in a medical AI company and, um, we have these amazing products that have to go through pretty steep regulatory, um, hurdles in order to be deployed.

And I mean, in one sense, it's very good, but in the other sense, like we, we know. How much value there is in having these things out there and there's a huge delay, um, and that means people cannot benefit from these products for a certain amount of time. And so that's like one example of the need for some sort of posture, regulatory posture towards these things.

There are pros and cons. And, um, in a much more general sense, whether it's AGI or anything, you know, governments do have to make decisions about how to approach this. What, what is your, what is your general view? I mean, how, how should people in, um, government positions be thinking about, um, about AI? What, what hand should they play?

[01:16:44] Joscha: There's several aspects to this. Um, I think it starts out with the question, which technologies are useful and which technologies are harmful. And there is a tendency in the present AI discourse that AI will destroy jobs and these jobs are not going to come back. And this is, uh, an employee driven perspective.

It's not in the macroeconomic sound perspective. And very often you have the situation that a new technology is disrupting one industry, but, uh, it's disrupting it because the goods that these industries are producing and the services they're producing are now being produced in a more abundant and cheap and sustainable manner than before.

Right, so you basically get, uh, rid of the horse drawn cart as a means of transporting goods because the car is invented. Oh my god, so many people are getting unemployed, this is horrible. But you have, uh, a world in which you can, uh, send goods around very cheaply everywhere. And, uh, you couldn't do that before and enables an entire new universe.

And, uh, next thing, if you think about desktop publishing, right? Computers allow people to do typesetting at their computers. Oh my God. All the typesetters are going out of a job. We have, um, hundreds of thousands of unemployed typesetters. Well, no, uh, we have millions of people who do layout now and the world is full of layout and we create another, uh, many, many other types of jobs for people produce publications that could put, couldn't produce them before, but every technological.

Revolution that we had leads to us having more stuff to distribute and be distributed the end up distributing the stuff and creating new jobs on the next level, where we have new complexity that allows us to build things that we couldn't think about before. And the same thing is happening in art. When the new technology enters art.

It does diminish many of the things that existed before, right? For instance, after photography came up, a lot of portraiture painting disappeared. And a lot of the art of making portraits, uh, by painting them also disappeared. But at the same time, there was no shortage of portraits. And a new form of art emerged that, uh, arguably is not less rich than the one that existed before.

It's, uh, it doesn't, um, devalue the new, uh, way of making pictures. And the same thing is going to happen with AI generated images. They are, uh, by themselves not art. They are just a new way to generate particular kinds of artifacts. And these artifacts may or may not have artistic value, but the artistic value is still capturing the intention and conscious state of an artist.

And this can be done with AI generated art in completely new ways that were not possible before. And so I'm, these are the stuff that I think we shouldn't be concerned about. But that governments are motivated to be concerned about the German government saw coming that at some point we have electric cars, but in order to not disrupt the existing industry that is distributing fuel to fuels to gas stations all over Germany, they decided to only subsidize development in hydrogen fuel cars, right?

Because that would give you a trajectory into having electric cars that are still gas cars. And, uh, this is the type of, uh, regulation that I think is, uh, uh, in the interest of the stakeholders that, uh, exist right now. And they are going to push governments to implement this kind of regulation, but it's the type of regulation that makes the world worse because objectively it's much, much better to just have a power wire everywhere.

And, uh, instead of having trucks that, uh, have dangerous fuels, uh, shipping around the world, uh, at high energy expense, and also this labor that could be used for much more interesting things. Like, um, social work or nursing or education, or there are so many things that need to be done on this planet that are not gas stations, right?

So, uh, instead of trying to preserve, uh, Hollywood's, uh, privileges right now, I think we need to think what is an interesting world that can be built with the new AI. So, uh, The reason why we have copyright, for instance, is not just because it's just that artists get paid for things that they did in the past.

No, the reason why we have copyright, it's a limitation on free speech. It's a limitation on what you can do, uh, in your expression. And that limitation is justified by the creation of artifacts that otherwise wouldn't exist, right? There is stuff that requires so much labor that it wouldn't make sense to produce it if there was no copyright.

And the stuff that we want, by the degree to which we have copyright regulation and so on, should be determined by how we achieve this goal of producing these artifacts. If we can do this without copyright, then we shouldn't have copyright. There is no, uh, right to rent seeking for people who manage to stake out a claim in an artistic region and say, If you want to make something that is somewhat similar to what I do, you need to pay me before you can do that.

Right, that is objectively bad because it means that less can be done. That's can be created. And so having regulation that is compatible with AI in this world is super difficult. And there are existing edge cases that are poorly understood. Like for instance, we have regulations against giving legal advice without a license or medical advice without a license.

But, uh, of course you want to be able to buy books about legal things and medical things that you have, uh, in your bookshelf. And they shouldn't be illegal just because, uh, you're not a lawyer. And, uh, You don't pay fees to a lawyer every time you open the book. But if you replace the book with an AI system that now can explain the contents of the book to you in a way that provably correctly represents the contents of the book, how is that different from the book?

It's just in a more accessible manner, or is this now a lawyer that would need to get a license? And if I was a lawyer, I would push the US government to say, oh, this is clearly a lawyer now. And if OpenAI wants to produce such a system, it needs to pay licensing fees. And we are not going to give you a license.

Um, because we don't want to put ourselves out of business, right? And to be able to make the right thing under those circumstances, it's very, very difficult. So I don't envy the regulators in this situation because they are under a lot of pressure. And the future itself doesn't exert enough pressure and the present does.

So how can we get a world that is not drowning itself in rent seeking and makes it impossible to actually improve things where it's necessary to improve them? Instead of just making everything worse or freezing the status quo, right? So this is one of the things. Another one is what, um, regulation is a company like Google or open AI motivated to get.

From a business perspective, it would be very good for open AI to say, well, we believe that large language models can potentially be very dangerous. So, uh, but of course not the ones that we have built, but we put a lot of mindfulness in this and we can afford to do this because we are the first. And we have shown that we don't release everything that we can build.

But you need to make sure that others are not doing this. So we should prevent open source developments of what we're doing. And we should prevent random startups from doing it. And one way of doing this, we could have an internet FDA. So if you want to do anything, you need to go to this FDA and it's going to be a five year process that takes you many hundred millions of dollars.

And if you are open source developer or a new startup, you probably cannot do this, but you can only do this if you're Google or open AI. Also the data that I have as Google, like all of YouTube and so on. You cannot scrape this data. This would be illegal. I can do this. Uh, but nobody else is allowed to do this ever.

So I, I think clearly Google is incentivized to exploit its, uh, current advantage and the degree to which they're ahead to enact regulation. That in, uh, ensures that there will be a, for the foresee future or the , a small oligopoly between. Uh, a couple of AI companies that are basically cornering the market for generative AI and large language models and its applications.

And so they will also exert pressure on the regulators, I think, to enact something. If they're rational and they are probably rational. So this is also pressure that they're under. And I do hope that out of the goodness of his heart, Sam Altman is not going to enact every regulation that he can buy. But, uh, let's see, I think it's very important that we also, uh, have a strong open source movement in this regard to keep, uh, the development flowing and to, uh, build good stuff.

On the other hand, we also want to encourage safe developments. We want to encourage that people are not doing things where we. Cannot estimate what the outcomes are, and yet we don't want to regulate too early. One, um, metaphor that is often used is red teaming. So basically every company should have a red team that looks at the ethical implications if something goes wrong.

At the same time, I think we also need about green teaming, which doesn't really exist. And green teaming should think about the ethical applications if something that would have been built doesn't get built. So imagine at the beginning of the internet, we would have red teaming, and the, uh, imagine the New York Times would have already seen what the internet is going to be, and it's actually going to work, and it's not just going to be a bunch of nerds, and it's going to go away, but they would see that it's going to take most of the advertising revenue, and it's going to, uh, remove their monopoly on controlling public opinion, and so on.

Right? So if they had seen this very early on, they would have focused on red teaming very early on. So our legislator initially would have known the internet is the thing that exists to distribute child pornography and to perpetuate copyright violations and, uh, to destroy the music industry and lots and lots of other really, really bad things.

And all these things are true to some degree, right? The internet has all those things. It's undeniably the case that all those things are happening on the internet. And yet they are an extremely small part of what the internet is doing. And the internet is very, very overwhelmingly a force for good, right?

99. 99 percent of what the internet is doing is amazing and good. And it's those minor parts that we focus on, uh, that we disagree with. The other things we just get used to. And if you would turn off the internet to make the bad parts go away, we would have a world that is terrible, right? We don't want that world.

But if you had the regulation that is driven only by red teaming and has no green teaming. We would not have an internet today. We only would have teletext. That is tightly regulated and I think that would be a terrible thought. And I think there is a danger that the same thing could be happening to AI.

So in my view, we should be very hands off with the regulation until we see what, what can go wrong. Not just what we imagine can go wrong, but we have a lot of stories of what could go wrong about algorithmic bias and so on. But for the most part, these are stories that are not actually borne out with cold hard data.

These are narratives that exist for political reasons, because people want to have jobs as regulators and so on, or because they have political concerns, or because they're afraid for their jobs. And these are legitimate fears, but they should not at this point drive deregulation because it's too early.

[01:27:26] Matt: Towards the end of that answer, you, you said something which was interesting, which, um, was, you know, we have hypotheses about things that could go wrong, but we don't yet know what is, is going to go wrong, if anything. Um, and back to Eliezo, I mean, one of the things that he says, Uh, quite frequently is that in, in the case of general intelligence and AGI, you don't get a second chance.

You don't get a chance. I think he says you don't get a chance to say, that was a dumb idea, that didn't work. Because once it's out there, it is out there. And so, um. Um, very specifically to this problem, there is this question of, you know, whether we do get a chance to, to iterate and make many mistakes before something goes drastically wrong.

Um, is that something that concerns you? Um, and, and how do you, how do you, um, think about, you know, in, in the face of a potential sort of no turning back scenario, how do you think about, um, process of, of development, containment and all that?

[01:28:25] Joscha: So I'm not completely compelled by the notion that we will get a Foom event that is going to lead to an irreversible change into some state that is really, really, really bad and that we cannot come back from. But I also don't have a proof that this cannot happen. Right? So I'd have to admit the possibility that this is the case.

I just don't see a way to prevent it using regulation. And I don't see a way to prevent it, uh, using Dumorism. I think that, uh, it's probably a better bet to create something like resilience against it and awareness to it. But, uh, the hope to, uh, prevent it by, uh, implementing measures that mostly affect the people who are responsible is maybe not the right strategy.

So I suspect that we need responsible research, but it should not necessarily be slow research. It should just be responsible research. And, uh, we should have, uh, ideas and develop ideas about what's responsible and irresponsible. And we should ensure that these ideas get not captured. By, uh, economic and political agendas if, if it's really about X Risk.

So we need to take the X Risk separate from the concern about, uh, for instance, job loss or copyright or, uh, algorithmic bias. Or, uh, control of opinions on social media, but because these are typically not seen as existential risks. And what I found, for instance, there, when the future, uh, of Humanity Institute, um, or Future of Life Institute have, I wrote, uh, the infamous letter, uh, most of the, uh, signatories were, uh, people who went public with saying they don't actually believe in a G I X risk.

And they sign for different reasons. They sign because they are afraid of the political implications of biases and Dutch language models or, um, uh, for other reasons, right? And I think that the FLI also formulated the letter a little bit in this direction that they wanted to, uh, get increased appeal. The, uh, Max Taggart also, uh, went on the record saying that, um, astronomical numbers of AI researchers are Uh, very afraid of, uh, AI, uh, doing bad things.

And if you look at the actual surveys, uh, I don't think that is borne out by the actual surveys. The vast majority of AI researchers does not believe that, uh, EGI doom is imminent and is a very, very big risk that we are faced with. But I understand that the reasoning of the FLI people at this point is that they have difficulty to sleep at night because they have reasoned themselves into believing that it's too likely.

To, uh, be allowable and that, uh, it is acceptable to fudge the numbers and the political and public arguments a little bit to make it work. And I'm just afraid that this is going to backfire and it's going to lead to regulation that is going to make AI. Um, less safe because it's going to be less transparent because most of the people that are going to train stuff in the future are going to do this outside of the public eye and are going to, uh, do this with, uh, less interaction with people who actually care about safety.

[01:31:30] Matt: Mm, yeah. Okay, so if we, if we then to continue at pace with AI development and focus it more on the problems that matter, you know, um, good applications, what is your, what is your sense of what are the, what are the good applications? What are the most important things that we should be focused on solving, uh, using AI technology?

[01:31:51] Joscha: I lack the fantasy of saying this at scale because I probably see only very, very tiny thing. What I observe is that chat GPT is tremendously useful right now. If you use it right. And for instance, you can use it as a study buddy. You can drop in a bunch of papers and discuss papers with it. And it's, um, not at the level of a good scientist.

But it's a level of a good student who has read a lot of things that you haven't read. And it's able to explain things very, very quickly. And even if the explanation is not right, you can discuss it. And in a sense, it's not worse than a study buddy, but better than many of them. And it's also at the same time getting better and better at those things.

I think that there is a trajectory where you can imagine, um, these models to become personal assistants that are not serving a corporation and are forcing down something down your throat that is compatible with your corporate goals and still useful to you. But you want to have something that is actually useful to you and that enables you to understand better what's useful to you.

So something that is integrating with you and is an extension of you. An assistant that is extrapolating your volition and that is not serving the agenda of its own, but it helps you to have the best possible agenda and to see the consequences of your actions and to integrate more deeply with people in the world.

And the way in which we currently coordinate has to do with the fact that it's difficult for us to synchronize our world models. And that's because our local information is very incomplete. And it's very distorted. And the more intelligence you have available locally, the more you can anticipate the possible futures that exist.

In some sense, you are increasing resolution and removing degrees of freedom. And as a result, you become more coherent. And you remove the degrees of freedom not because you are forced, but because you understand the outcomes, you understand consequences of your actions, so your actions become more meaningful.

And you basically understand, if I do X, then the following thing is going to happen. So you understand, for instance, how you should write your tax return, you should write and how you should, uh, implement tax regulation to get the things that you want, you understand, uh, whether this and this measure is actually going to lead to this and this outcome in society because you can actually run simulations and look at the available data and integrate them.

I also expect that. If science has integrity, it will dramatically change at the moment. We could already use an LLM to parse the entire body of scientific literature automatically, right? We can go through the papers, for instance, automatically write down all the references in the papers. And what are the references meant to support?

And then we read all the source papers and check whether the references actually support that. And based on having done this by hand, I respect that expect that in almost all fields, the result will be a disaster. And, uh, will lead to a new way of rebuilding science and a way to make, uh, science that is replicable and meaningful and is distinct from, uh, just the social charade that is happening in many departments right now, where everything that you get away with, with your peers is science.

And what your peers is not, are not interested in is not science. This could be replaced, right? And then is the paper the right form of the publication in the future? Because maybe you want to generate something that is specific to your question. So maybe what you want to have is an answer. If you are working on a problem and you just ask what is known about this topic and you generate the paper on the fly and the actual contribution of the scientists is a building block to this body of knowledge.

And so how does this work? How do we have a world in which scientists only produce building blocks rather than, uh, publications with refe uh, citation counts? This is a completely new world, and it's one that is exciting and interesting. And building institutions around this, also using science, is super interesting.

But, uh, of course this is biased from, by me having spent a lot of time in academia. And, uh, if you are working in any industry and any field, I suspect that you see similar things that could be happening in your field. If you had free intelligence available, right? Where you have an unlimited number of very, very smart interns that you still need to manage and tell them what to do, but they're going to do it and they're going to try again and again, again, until you're satisfied and yeah, they're basically free as it's amazing what you can do in this world.

And for me, we are standing at this. Spring of, of such a world with this present technology already. And um, I can't wait. What we are going to see after that,

[01:36:23] Matt: Yeah, I totally share your excitement and, um, increasingly am outsourcing parts of my life to these systems. Uh, one part that I have not fully outsourced yet is, um, recommendations for books, which I read a lot of books and I prefer to get these from close friends and podcast guests. And so maybe let's, as we bring it to a close, let's turn to the topic of books.

One of the questions I'd like to ask all my guests is, which book have you most gifted to other people? And why.

[01:36:51] Joscha: of course, depends on my face of life and of very much on the other people because different people need different books at different times. And when I think of books that have been formative for me, it's quite complicated. Uh, I think that. I grew up with Stanislav Lem's books, for instance, the Star Diaries by Ion Tiky.

But this was not a book that I would have gifted to many people because it was so obviously correct what was in this book. It was so basic. But now I noticed a lot of people have never heard of Stanislav Lem and I think it's, uh, it's canonical to read this, right? And, uh, another thing that was for me important was, uh, when I was a teenager to read, um, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Uh, because there is a certain perspective in it, uh, that starts where normally books end. It starts with the destruction of Earth and everything that is known. And we free ourselves from these constraints and then go into the world beyond. And this is a very liberating perspective to take. Another one that got me further out was Robert Ayrton Wilson's books.

For instance, the Illuminatus trilogy and especially the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy. It's quite psychedelic literature, which I didn't understand at the time, but I deeply resonated with. Um, and it's one in which you accept the fact that almost everything that you can read can be wrong. He calls this guerrilla ontology in his books.

It's all about conspiracies and how things could be. And half of it is invented and the other half is... Uh, taken from what other people invented and he thinks this is largely how history is written. And once you, uh, see this as a viable perspective that you are able to take this doubt also to your own thoughts and you realize how to, uh, how stuff is being made up and how to be generative and how to, uh, create and to, uh, disprove.

Uh, that's also extremely liberating and an important step in the individual development. On the artistic perspective, one of the most important books for me was probably, uh, The Master and Margarita, which is a book by Bulgakov, and it's one of those books that I, uh, revisited when I was young every few years, and now maybe once a decade to see how I have changed.

There are a few books where I feel that if I reread them, and this also includes books like The Hobbit, Uh, where I see things that I didn't see when I read them first. For instance, now when I read The Hobbit, I noticed that there is an extremely detailed model of the economic and social structure of Middle earth and the game's theoretic principles.

Why, uh, somebody is helping the dwarves and why they were thinking about this and why this was rational for them and so on. It's really detailed. It's very interesting. And when I read this first, there were these boring passages that are quite repetitive and you don't really know why they are in this book and slow down the, uh, this action in the book and now you realize, oh no, this is actually A philosophical book about society.

And, uh, the whole Hobbit book is about the, uh, or the, uh, oeuvre of Tolkien is about the Industrial Revolution and taking over and destroying the Middle earth world, right? Mordor is us, it's the world that takes over. And, uh, these books are about Mordor taking over and the perspective of the previous world that he was part of and identified with, right, that was very important for me.

And so it's also a thing that I need to gift to children, uh, to my own children at some point and, uh, get them to read. And so in this sense, there are many formative books. More recent books, I really liked, um, Ecopraxia, uh, by, uh, Uh, Peter Wallace, I liked, um, I like many of the Greg Egan books and, um, Ted Chiang Exhalation for instance, an excellent book that has many current topics in AI, uh, talked about in a very deep and also very good to read way.

It's, it's very good literature, I think. Given that it's mostly for the philosophy of mind,

[01:40:39] Matt: Yeah, great. Oh, amazing. I'll, I'll, I'll drop those all in the show notes and I'm, I'm sure you must know this, but increasingly there, there are many people who you've got a fairly large following and people are sort of hanging off of your recommendations and advice. Um, and so maybe that leads us nicely to the next question, which is.

for somebody who is, and maybe an aspiring AI researcher or somebody working in the field, thinking about these topics, maybe, maybe worried about AI risk and those sorts of things, or what advice do you have for this person, generically?

[01:41:10] Joscha: I don't think that I have very good generic advice because I'm afraid that I'm, I'm not a good role model for an AI researcher. I'm not a vent into AI because I'm philosophically interested in how minds work. And, uh, this AI was started in part as a philosophical project as an attempt to mathematize the mind.

And, uh, most of the field is not really interested in this question because it's economically not immediately valuable. But to me, it's the main thing that interests me about it. And so, uh, from a tenure track perspectives, it was not the best choice, uh, to go in this direction. Also from a perspective of getting, uh, very wealthy quick, it's not the best choice.

And, uh, so it's nothing that I would recommend to people who want to do one or the other. If you want to be good at AI research, I think it's a very good idea to. Learned in algebra and calculus and modeling theory and, uh, to take the courses that exist at Stanford and MIT. They're all free online. But also many things, uh, don't worry when you don't find the coursework engaging enough and you want to go on YouTube.

A lot of people give very good classes on YouTube and you find classes by Yasut's cover where he explains how to build your own transformer step by step. And you definitely should spend time on this if, if you find this interesting. It's crucial to understand that it's not about imitating an algorithm, learning how to, uh, script works, but learning how to think about this.

The transformer was in some sense invented because somebody thought about how they are thinking when they parse language. And, uh, for me, the most interesting thing that's missing is a culture of thought. The PhD is usually a time when you break people, that you beat thinking out of them. Most students that go in an interesting field have interesting questions.

Most professors stop having interesting questions, they just solve problems. And the PhD is this great filter. And you can still of course write a very interesting PhD, especially in AI and machine learning. But, uh, in many areas of academia, it's difficult to, to take roots if you're actually interested in interacting with this stuff in a manner that is alive and that keeps it alive.

And I think life is short. Do those things that you find inspiring, that give you meaning. That give you connections to other people. And one of the most important things to learn in life is how to make friends and how to make meaningful connections with others, how to find a crew of people that you respect and help them to be that crew and contribute to it, how to build.

And also whenever you have the choice of learning something or creating something, create, and, uh, when you have the choice to allocate something or reallocate, redistribute something or create, create. It's always more interesting to create and to build and to contribute than just to consume in a certain crowd.

And you learn while creating. It's the best thing.

[01:44:01] Matt: Yeah, sage advice, I love that one. Um, last one, lingering on the topic of AI, we've talked a lot about AI superintelligence, and suppose we were to be visited by some AI superintelligence in whatever form, And Yosha Bach had to pick one representative from humanity, either past or present, to represent us to the super intelligent being.

Who would you pick?

[01:44:24] Joscha: I would probably pick a couple, at least. In the sense that we as individuals are all incomplete and the better we are at something, the more this tends to go at the expense of something else. And I don't know exactly who I would pick and how. I have some people in mind, but they're personal. They're not famous.

And, uh, I also suspect that this, uh, desire for greatness is often the result of being an extremely specialized and unusual mind. There's usually some suffering that goes on underneath. Most of the really wise people don't seem to be in the limelight very much. I also realized that me being visible on public media and social media is not, uh, showing that I'm wise.

It's the opposite.

[01:45:07] Matt: Uh, well, I, I, I beg to differ and I'm sure people listening to this will as well. Um, Yosha, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for making the time. It's been great to have you on.

[01:45:17] Joscha: Thank you too, Matt.

Christof is the author of several books on neuroscience and consciousness including his most recent book, Then I Am Myself the World. He is known for his close collaborations with many well-known scientists and philosophers, among them Francis Crick - the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

We discuss:

• Paradigm shifts in our understanding of consciousness

• Psychedelic experiences and whether there is anything meaningful to be learned from them

• What exotic experience might teach us about the relationship between consciousness and the brain

• Whether conscious entities can be engineered or simulated, including whether consciousness might emerge in AI systems

• New technologies for detecting and measuring levels of consciousness

• The hard problem of consciousness

… and other topics

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Books:

  • Then I Am Myself the World

  • The Feeling of Life Itself

  • Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

  • What is Life? - Erwin Schrödinger

• Guest website: https://christofkoch.com/

Photo credit: Erik Dinnel @ Allen Institute

Timestamps

Timestamps for video episode:

00:00 Psychedelic experiences

15:30 David Chalmers & the Hard Problem

22:20 Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs)

29:10 Integrated Information Theory (IIT)

36:20 Panpsychism

43:15 Paradigm shifts in theories of consciousness

48:30 LLMs & AIs - could they be conscious?

1:03:50 Technology for detecting consciousness

1:14:20 Death 1:19:30 Book recommendations

Intro - Consciousness, Comas, and AI

Discussions about consciousness often start with a philosophical question such as.

What is it like to be a bat?

But I want to introduce this conversation with a story. A real story, about a real person.

Several years ago, a young boy named Martin Pistorius developed a mysterious neurological illness. For no apparent reason, he started to lose control of his body, and his symptoms continued to worsen until he was unable to speak or move at all. By this point the doctors treating him assumed he was in a vegetative state, lacking any meaningful conscious experience. His heart was still beating, but the assumption was that the lights were off inside. 

Martin’s body went on living in this seemingly vegetative state for years, completely immobile and unresponsive to the external world, like a body without a mind.

Many years passed, and one day, with no apparent cause, Martin began to awaken. Day-by-day he slowly regained motor control and started responding to external stimuli. Eventually he was able to communicate, and the world learned a tragic truth - that throughout the course of his coma, Martin had been fully conscious and aware, but unable to move.

Everyone had assumed that nobody was home, but in reality Martin was locked inside, fully aware of what was happening, a prisoner in an immobile body.

This is an example of a rare condition known as Locked In Syndrome (LIS) - when a patient in a coma is in fact aware and locked inside their own body. And there are plenty of strange conditions like this.

Patients with severe comas like this can often remain on external life support for years on end. On rare occasions, they might awaken from their comas and make partial or even full recoveries. But usually they don’t awaken, and eventually the life support is turned off.

How can we tell whether a person in a coma is conscious? Unfortunately, we don’t yet know how to answer this question. 

Perhaps for most of them it is just void, and eventually turning off life support simply turns off the physical body with no implications for conscious experience. Perhaps in some cases these patients are experiencing deep, ongoing suffering. Perhaps others are locked into states of continual bliss. These questions do have definitive answers. But we don’t yet know what those answers are.

While the image of a young child with Locked In Syndrome certainly tugs at the emotions, the phenomenon itself is a relatively rare occurrence. But I’ve chosen to spend so much time on this topic not because of the importance of this ailment itself, but because it’s representative of a broader, deeply consequential issue that has challenged scientists and philosophers for generations.

It is the question of how we can know if another entity is conscious, and what we can know about the nature of its conscious experience. These are well-posed questions with definitive answers. Yet we’re currently unable to answer them.

These questions are more pressing today than ever before. Given recent advances in synthetic biology, we are now able to engineer new and exotic forms of life, but we have little idea of what it might feel like to be that life, or even what range of possible experiences might be available to these beings. What if these beings are suffering, and we don’t know it?

Similarly, in the field of artificial intelligence, we’re now developing AI systems with superhuman abilities across a vast range of domains. We don't yet know whether the systems we’re building might, at some point, become conscious, and what it would feel like to be those systems.

The idea that we might end up engineering thousands of deeply suffering beings is worth worrying about. It is something I worry about. And all this without even mentioning the vast amounts of suffering our species inflicts on non-human animals.

We need to take these questions seriously. At present, we have no rational basis for believing that consciousness is something confined to the realm of human minds, or mammals, or even biological systems more generally. Doing so would be an act of faith, and history has shown us that this type of anthropocentric thinking often leads us to misunderstanding. 

The fact that we can’t even tell whether a human being in a coma is conscious should give us reason to pause. On the spectrum of questions I hope we’ll someday be able to answer about consciousness, and its relationship to the physical world, this would classify as a warm up.

And yet, we can’t answer it.

We still understand very little about this topic, and as long as that’s the case, my view is that it’s wise to approach these questions from a place of openness and humility.

This question is one of the main reasons that I’m speaking with Christof Koch today. Christof has made important contributions to our understanding of the brain basis of consciousness, and the question of what kinds of entities might be conscious, and what the nature of their experiences may be. This is an important topic for our times and one we’ll continue to explore on this podcast. 

We discuss:

• The likelihood that there is advanced alien life in our galaxy

• The possibility that we may have already discovered extraterrestrial technology

• The ability of our scientific institutions to deal with novel and speculative topics

• Artificial intelligence and future technologies

• Elon Musk’s space Tesla…

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript below. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Avi’s links

• Website

• Essays « READ SOME!

• Books: Extraterrestrial; Interstellar

Timestamps

Timestamps are for the video episode.

00:00 Will we discover extraterrestrial technology?

05:20 How likely is the existence of alien life?

25:00 Why is the scientific community so divided?

35:00 Can our scientific institutions deal with highly speculative topics?

44:00 Why is there so much scepticism about the possibility of alien technology?

52:30 What evidence should we be looking for?

58:00 What if we look but find nothing?

1:02:00 Are we ready?

1:05:00 How would the world change if we discovered alien technology?

1:12:00 Future technology and AI avatars

1:22:30 Where to find more of Avi’s work?

Introduction: Taking Aliens Seriously

The search for extraterrestrial life is not a new endeavour for our species. For thousands of years, humans have been gazing up at the stars and wondering whether there is life out there, and what that life might look like. But it’s only in recent times that science has given us tools to start answering this question using evidence and data.

As I discussed in my conversation with Professor Sara Seager, historically the question of whether we are alone in this universe has been a largely philosophical one. But today this question can be tackled head-on with the tools of modern science. We are now able to see further into space than ever before, probing depths that even a century ago would have seemed practically impossible, and we can detect and analyse a staggering number of signals with increasingly impressive precision.

Much of the progress that we’ve made suggests that the emergence of life in the universe should be much more common than we once thought. I give several examples of this in the introduction to my conversation with Sara Seager, and those examples are by no means exhaustive.

In fact, we’ve progressed to a point where the majority of people believe that alien life does exist. For example, polls by Pew Research have found that close to two-thirds of American adults believe that there is intelligent life beyond Earth. This is greater than the number of Americans who believe in the Biblical God, which is astounding given the history of these two ideas in the public consciousness. I should mention, though, that around 90% of Americans still claim to believe in some form of higher power or spiritual force, which is higher than the number who believe in aliens.

In any case, there seems to be some degree of cognitive dissonance at work when it comes to discussions about extraterrestrial life, because despite a majority of people believing in its existence, claims of new evidence for this life tend to be met with what I see as an unbalanced degree of scepticism, even in the scientific community. Perhaps especially in the scientific community.

There are, of course, those people who are not nearly sceptical enough - those who, for example, believe that grainy photographs of blurry smudges in the sky are compelling evidence that we’re being visited by alien spacecraft. But this is not the type of unbalanced scepticism that I’m talking about. What concerns me is that many people, leading scientists among them, are so sceptical about potential evidence for extraterrestrial life, that their default position is to be closed to new possibilities. This can hinder the progress of science.

My guest today, Professor Avi Loeb, has been at the centre of a fairly high-profile example of this. A few years ago, Avi gained widespread attention when he put forward a hypothesis that a very peculiar interstellar object known as 'Oumuamua, which we detected passing through our solar system in 2017, just might be an artificial object of extraterrestrial origin. You can read about the story in Avi’s book, Extraterrestrial, and in his original peer-reviewed paper on the topic. I’ll link both in the episode notes.

Avi’s hypothesis was met with a relatively extreme degree of resistance by the scientific community. Many people seemed to take the position that the hypothesis could be discarded by default, without the need for further investigation.

It’s this level of scepticism within the scientific community that is unbalanced. Avi is a respected and credentialed astrophysicist who has made enormous contributions to his field, and on that basis alone his ideas are worth considering openly. But more than this, his hypothesis was made within the context of most people believing that intelligent alien life does in fact exist, and in which we’ve proven that it’s possible, and probably not uncommon, to launch technological objects into space. In fact, the ‘Oumuamua controversy began just months after Elon Musk launched his Tesla Roadster into orbit around the Sun as part of the Falcon Heavy test flight.

And so this conversation is one that encourages scientific openness and curiosity. Historically, some of the most world-changing paradigm shifts have been the result of taking these kinds of ideas seriously and then rigorously testing them against the evidence.

Transcript & Easter Eggs

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:00] Matt Geleta: I am here with Avi Loeb. Avi, thanks for joining me.

[00:00:02] Avi Loeb: Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure.

[00:00:04] Matt Geleta: Avi, a few weeks ago, uh, you gave a TED talk about the search for alien life. And at the end of your talk, Chris Anderson came up on stage and stood beside you. And he asked you a very simple yes or no question. if You think, within the next 10 years, we'll have discovered truly convincing evidence that extraterrestrial life exists.

And with very little hesitation, you said yes. Why this answer?

[00:00:31] Avi Loeb: Oh, um, the reason is simple. We haven't really dedicated the major effort to search in the right way. I mean, we were waiting for radio signals for 70 years, starting with uh, Frank Drake's, um, uh, Osmo project. Um, and that followed on, Cocconi and Morrison's paper in nature that suggested that since we are Using radio communication, perhaps we should listen to others.

And, that was very human centric point of view in the sense that it was, you know, last century, 70 years ago when we just started communicating with radio waves. Now we're doing much better with other technologies. And, uh, moreover, it's it's a very passive approach where you say, let me just wait for someone to call me.

And we all know that that's not a good method to find a partner uh, because nobody may realize that we are lonely. Or they may be hooked to their digital screens and not search for us. And, we better be proactive. And there is another way, which is, uh, looking for any objects in our backyard that accumulated over time, uh, space trash.

The trash is our treasure. And this is an approach that was only pioneered over the past decade. Uh, The first interstellar objects, objects from outside the solar system, were discovered only over the past 10 years for a good reason. We just didn't have a survey telescope. Astronomers didn't use survey telescopes that are powerful enough to detect such objects.

And, then the U. S. government did not use, a, an array of satellites that can, um, look for meteors from interstellar space, systematically. And so now we have those instruments. We know of at least, three such interstellar objects, and it's a new frontier, maybe among the rocks that we find. From other stars, there would be some technological objects.

And since I'm heavily engaged in searching for those, I'm optimistic that, you know, it's a road that was not taken. And uh, when you take a new road, there is a chance of finding low hanging fruit because nobody picked it up. And that's why I'm optimistic. I should also mention, um, sort of a background anecdote here because, um, uh, when they invited me to give the TED talk, they kept telling me every few weeks that I should practice.

They said, practice, practice, practice. And I was very busy. I avoided the, uh, any practice tests that they offered. And, uh, then I got there and they kept saying, you should practice. Practice and rehearse. And, uh, only then you'll be able to, you know, because it's a very unusual experience being on stage with the lights on and so forth and speaking in a way that approaches the entire audience.

And so anyway, I did not listen to that. And then, um, the night before, because of the time difference from Boston, Massachusetts, where I reside, um, I thought it's actually 4 AM and I usually jog at sunrise, but it was actually 1 AM. And. Basically, I didn't sleep that night because I went to bed at around 10 or 11 p.

m. So I slept a few hours. But then, since I was awake, I decided to write up my presentation. So I wrote an essay. which I usually post it on medium. com and I had it fresh in my head. So I went on stage and since I didn't sleep much, I was very relaxed, uh, and I simply delivered My message straight from the heart and, uh, the audience, uh, you know, laughed at all the jokes There was standing ovations from the people in the room in the auditorium, but also online.

And by now it's out for about 10 days. And the video of the presentation, it garnered 800, 000 views already. So I think it was very well received. Um, and, um, Perhaps my lesson is that instead of, uh, preparing for it like a show, one would one better prepare the content that would touch the minds and hearts of, of, of, of the audience.

That's my

lesson.

[00:05:02] Matt Geleta: Fantastic. I mean, it certainly did. I enjoyed, I enjoyed, um, watching it and, uh, many of the other interviews that you've done and, and what you've written. And I will link to several of them. Um, there was something very interesting about your answer, though, because, So you answered, yes, uh, we will find evidence of advanced alien species.

Um, and it was all about the sort of the search, the fact that we need to search, but you, but you almost presumed the answer that this exists. I think many Yes, that's, that's a very

[00:05:34] Avi Loeb: good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an excellent point. Um, and you know, um, obviously it flatters our ego to think that we are unique and special. And over the history of science, um, we, uh, initially thought that we are at the center of the universe and there is, uh, everything is built around us.

And, uh, you can interpret that in two ways. One, that we are quite arrogant in the way we think about the world. Uh, it's all about us. Another approach is to say we are ignorant. Uh, so all the information we get is, from our immediate environment. So therefore, you know, we think that we are at the center and the second interpretation is actually what explains the way my daughters behaved at a young age.

They thought that they're at the center of the world and that's because their experience was confined to home and we paid a lot of attention to them. But on the first day at the kindergarten, they had a psychological shock and they matured. And so my sense is that, uh, we will mature once we realize that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe.

And, um, because right now, if you ask people in academia, they will tell you that it's an extraordinary claim to suggest that we are, uh, that we have partners like us, intelligent out there. And it requires extraordinary evidence. I think it's the other way around. I think um, All evidence shows that we are not really at the pinnacle of creation that in fact there is a lot of room for improvement And if you just read the news every day and We are engaged in conflicts.

We in destructive measures. We spend 2. 4 trillion on military budgets Instead of cooperating and working the way Science advocates by, you know, it's an infinite some game. And, the more we know the better our life would be in the future. And we know that from the past century of science and technology, and we don't learn the lesson that two wars right now about, the zero sum games, the territories that the two sides want to have.

And if you just think about it, you know, the earth is a residue from the formation of the sun. It's a tiny, tiny. Piece of rock. And for us to just look down and ignore the vast real estate that is out there, you know, it's really, it's really pretentious, uh, and it's foolish. And there are, you know, hundreds of billions of stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

And we now know that a fair fraction of them, maybe a quarter have a planet the size of the earth, roughly the same separation. So why should we think that we are unique? I think the, you know, the, the The default assumption should be that things like us should exist. Um, now the argument is that, well, uh, intelligence arrive arose on earth in the last bit of of, of the earth history, only in the last few million years.

And primitive life microbes existed since the beginning Uh, recently, there was a paper dating Luca, the last universal common ancestor. The if you trace back in time, all biological life on earth, including humans, whales, bacteria, everything, there is a common ancestor. And it was possible to date when it started.

It's 4. 2 billion years ago. Um, you know, very close to the time when the earth cooled to allow the chemistry of life as we know it in liquid water. And so that means that Primitive life is probably very common because the Earth had it as soon as it cooled. And probably Mars had it even earlier because it cooled before the Earth.

And perhaps life on Earth came from rocks that were brought to Earth from Mars. because that was a period where rocks were exchanged much more vigorously. There was a heavy bombardment at the time, so we might all be Martians. And if you think about Elon Musk wanting to go back to Mars, it's actually going back to our childhood home, potentially, if life started on Mars.

But at any event, the point is that, um, you might argue that intelligence is Rare because it only appeared in the last bit of the history of earth one part in 10, 000 But the thing to keep in mind is to find intelligent intelligent life or technological signatures might be much easier actually because You know, if I go to the Pacific Ocean and I find an interstellar object that is artificial in origin, think of it as Elon Musk's, car, the Tesla Roadster car that was launched as a dummy payload to space in 2018.

And I'm just saying maybe he is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur. Since the big bang 13. 8 billion years ago Maybe there are others that launched cars and if one of them collides with earth and interstellar car We might find the engine in the ocean or it might be something better than a car It might be you know a sophisticated gadget uh, that just stopped functioning and then collided with space trash and if I find that You know, it will be clear evidence that it's not human made And, it's artificial because it has buttons on it.

The only questions would be whether we should press a button. Um, and, um, uh, on the other hand, if you look for molecular signatures of bacteria or some primitive life forms, on an exoplanet around another star, you know, you might look for oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide, water molecules. But these could all be produced by.

geological or chemical processes that have nothing to do with life. Just to give an example, there was. A paper in nature, um, recently that, uh, suggested that, uh, um, that there are, uh, deep in the ocean, uh, on the ocean floor when there is not much sunlight. So photosynthesis is not possible. Um, there seem to be a mechanism for making, uh, oxygen that is based on, uh, uh, uh, electricity and a potential, electric potential difference across the the surface. And, uh, you know, that that is electrolysis. It's called a That's breaking water molecules to their constituent oxygen and hydrogen just by having an electric, uh, potential drop. And, if nature can make oxygen this way without life, Then, if we find oxygen in the atmosphere of another planet, and by the way, it will cost us more than a 10 billion to do that, to build an observatory looking for oxygen in a planet that transits the face of Mars.

It's host star.

So my point is, even if we find it, it would not be conclusive. But if we find a technological signature, it will be conclusive. And moreover, even if one civilization across the entire galaxy produced a star, replicating probe, a probe that has a 3D printer and, um, you know, uh, has an artificial intelligence that goes places and reproduces itself just like a dandelion seed.

You know, the flower sends seeds in the wind and they uh, Spread and, and, and recreate the flower from the DNA, from the genetic information that is in the, in the seeds. And so nature does it all the time. You can imagine a technological gadget that is self reproducing. And if that is being launched, even by one civilization at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, within a billion years, it can make its way and fill up the entire Milky Way galaxy.

So all I'm saying is it takes one. Such civilization to fill up the entire volume with those self replicating probes very quickly And I just uh, i'm about to submit a paper um On monday in a couple of days that would um, That calculates You know, where will Voyager be billions of years from now? It turns out that within 2 billion years, Voyager will be on the other side of the galaxy, compared to the sun. And, um, then it will come back to the vicinity of the sun in 4 billion years before the sun becomes a red giant, by the way, which will take 7. 6 billion years. So at any event, all of this is to say that, you know, most stars formed billions of years before the sun There was. Uh, the star formation history of the Milky Way was calibrated, the measured, and, there was a burst of star formation 10 billion years ago.

Now if you imagine a civilization like ours forming around the sun, like star that was made 10 billion years ago instead of 4. 6 billion years ago, you know, there was plenty of time for that civilization to send the chemical rockets that would arrive to the solar system, even if they were launched from the opposite side of the milky Way disk. And so what that tells you is that there is a good chance that we might find some, uh, traces of uh, other civilizations. And I call that space archaeology. basically uh, looking for, or you can call it space astro archaeology, uh, looking for traces of um, civilizations that existed before us, just as we do here on earth.

uh, except it's in space where time is measured in billions of years.

[00:15:35] Matt Geleta: yeah, I guess, um, you know, what you're touching on there, uh, different, different Ideas of kind of search strategies for looking for life out there and, and I guess the selection of the most likely strategy depends a lot on the sort of background assumptions of what the nature of that life might be. Uh, and I'm interested to know if there is any sort of consensus view among astrophysicists today.

about what that might look like. Um, and if not, what is driving the difference? So why would that, what is the difference in world views between astrophysicists, such that there could be such disagreement on how to search for life?

[00:16:15] Avi Loeb: um, well, first, let me say, if you go on a date here on earth, then it's very likely that the person you meet will share a DNA that is resembles yours. You know that the person would have two eyes, two ears. um, but, um, when you deal with an encounter with life from another star, all bets are off because. It could be life as we don't know it.

Even within the solar system on Titan, you know, the only other object other than the earth that has liquids on its surface, it's a third of the surface temperature of the earth relative to absolute zero 90 degrees. And it has liquid methane and ethane. And really my desire, my wish is to go fishing on Titan.

It's a moon of Saturn. Uh, why do I want to go fishing? If I catch a fish, I will not eat it. For sure, it's a health hazard. You know, something that swims in methane and ethane is not good for your your, your health. But, um, but it would show us that life as we don't know it could exist. And, you know, it could be something really weird.

And I would argue the same about intelligence. You know, intelligence may not be, um, uh, unique and understandable for us. Uh, people often argue that mathematics and science speak a language that is universal, but I would not be that confident. And therefore I think it would be really difficult for us to anticipate what we might find.

my approach in terms of looking for objects is basically to be open minded, not to assume anything and just look for something that is not familiar. Okay. So if we find objects in the sky, that are not human made and are not nature natural, Uh, and they look technological, then I just want to know what they look like because I don't want to assume anything.

I just want to find something not familiar. to me. Okay, so that's the approach I take without assuming anything now with respect to the, the, the, the search that most of the astronomy community takes. It's a search for, uh, bio signatures or molecular fingerprints that may be indicative of life. primitive life on exoplanets in the atmospheres of exoplanets that that the transit the face of their star so that we can see the absorption fingerprints of various molecules in the atmospheres of those planets and You know that that is the definition of the next Big observatory the the habitable world observatory that is currently the favorite observatory.

Uh, It was recommended in the Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics issued by the National Academies in the U.

S. And, um, such an observatory right now is estimated to cost, by NASA, to cost about, 11 billion. dollars. My point is before we invest 11 billion dollars in looking for oxygen, where as I said before might not necessarily imply life, we should invest, you know, tens of millions of dollars to study interstellar objects.

That was not done. And, um, this is such a small fraction of, of the cost that it's worth doing first, because perhaps this approach of looking for objects, you know, among all the interstellar rocks, there might be some space trash and. The reason I'm saying that is because out of the three objects that we identified over the past decade, uh, there were the interstellar meteor I am one from 2000 and 14.

Um, more more, um, much bigger object about 100 m in size, was not a meteor, did not collide with earth, but was noticed based on the reflection of sunlight from it.

Um, in 2000 And, 17. and then the third one was a comet called Borisov in 2000 and 19. Out of these three, the only one that is familiar is Borisov. It's just a comment. but, the meteor was of unusual material strength because it disintegrated only in the lower atmosphere where the stress was higher than, on any other meteorite.

And So the the, the stress exerted by the friction on air was unprecedented Uh, before the object disintegrated, which suggests that it's, it may have had an unusual material strength. And it also was faster than 95 percent of the stars in the vicinity of the Sun. So that's, I am one from 2014. And then a more, more, uh, had a weird shape, uh, the amount of sunlight reflected from it changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours.

And it was also pushed away from the sun by some mysterious force without any cometary evaporation. So there was no rocket effect acting on it. And finally, uh, Borisov indeed looked like, um, a comet that is familiar. And so my colleagues. Well, my colleagues made two statements. One of them, who is an expert on solar system objects, after there was a colloquium at the, At Harvard, at the Institute for Theory and Computation, for which I serve as director.

Um, it was about Oumuamua, uh, around 2018. And, uh, when we left the room, the, my colleague said, Oumuamua is so weird, I wish it never existed. And, you know, to me, that's the wrong attitude. If you are really driven by curiosity, you really should be excited when something doesn't fit your past narrative because nature is trying to teach you something new, you know, and, um, and so the other thing is, um, obviously there were many papers written about Oumuamua trying to explain it as a rock of a type that we've never seen before and, um, You know, I said, well, maybe it's pushed by reflecting sunlight, in which case it would be very thin and, and that's something that nature doesn't make.

And maybe a, a surface layer of an object, a broken piece of a Dyson sphere. And so, um, I think until we have more data, we can't really tell. And of course, the lesson from that is let's find more of the, of the same. And, And in a year, there will be a new telescope in Chile called the Rubin Observatory that could potentially discover an Oumuamua like object, you know, every few months.

And, um, I, I'm really eager to, to get more data on any object that looks as, as uh, unusual as, as Oumuamua was. And then when, when Borisov showed up, people said, well, this one looks natural. And I said, of course. And they said, well, doesn't it convince you that Oumuamua is natural? And my answer was that, you know, if you go down the street and you see A weird person, and after that you see a normal person, it doesn't make the weird person normal.

[00:23:39] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's really fascinating. I want to dig into, uh, the hypotheses around these. mysterious, uh, interstellar objects and, um, you know, what it is about them that, that makes us think that they might be technological. Um, I guess one of the, the key, um, background things that needs to be true in order to take the, one of these hypotheses seriously is some sort of background belief on, um, how likely it is that such technology would exist and would, um, uh, would come into our solar system, for example.

Um, and there seems to be a fairly stark divide here in views, um, uh, because, you know, reading the history of Oumuamua, for example, Um, the things you've written, things that have been written about your papers. Um, I would say it's nothing short of vitriol, actually. Um, there is some very, uh, stark disagreement.

Um, and I find that very, very curious because, um, we all do come to this question with basically the same information. Uh, you know, astrophysics community has the same information about, uh, how, uh, Uh, interstellar objects work, um, uh, and yet the conclusions that are drawn do tend to differ, uh, quite starkly or the openness to these strange hypotheses, hypotheses do tend to differ quite starkly.

What's at the, what's at the heart of this?

[00:25:05] Avi Loeb: the, well, if, if we had conclusive data, if we had good enough data, we could tell if it's an unusual Like, to give you an example, some of the mainstream scientists advocated, Oh, it's a rock made of pure hydrogen. We've never seen an object made of pure hydrogen. Why should that be the mainstream view?

Why? Just because they don't want to consider the possibility of a technological object. Okay, that's the only reason. Because we have never seen, we don't know if hydrogen icebergs are made in the first place. So I said, okay, forget about it. Let's assume that they are made. They would not survive the journey.

So we, I wrote a paper with uh a colleague, Tim Huang, where we show that an iceberg made of hydrogen would not survive the journey. And the authors of that suggestion said, yes, right. So Okay. So maybe it was. A water iceberg that was turned into a hydrogen outer layer. And then we showed they made a mistake in the energy equation and they did not respond to that. At first they said our papers need to be refereed before they respond to that. And then when our paper was published, they didn't respond to that. And the strange thing is also that reporters reported about their paper. But when we show that it's wrong, they did not report about that. And I asked the editors of Scientific America and they said we don't want to confuse our readers. Now I ask you, is it more confusing to report the truth than if you don't want to confuse the readers with details about why an argument may be wrong? Then what are, how can you get credibility as a science journalist? You need to present all the information we have so if they made a mistake in the energy equation They should either address it and by the way, the mistake is a factor of a million I'm not talking about factor for the unity and then there was a suggestion.

Oh, no, it's actually a Nitrogen iceberg chipped off planet like Pluto and we wrote a paper showing that there is not enough Solid nitrogen in the Milky Way galaxy to make a large enough population of those Okay. So of course you can insist that you are representing the mainstream and talk about objects that do not exist.

But why should that be more credible than a possibility that is not ruled out, that it's. technological in origin simply because it's so weird. It's not that I was dreaming of a technological object out of no evidence. whatsoever. I mean, there is evidence that this object is different than the rocks that we are familiar with. Okay. So to me, it sounds like common sense that this should, this possibility should be entertained. But what happens in academia very often is that because the stakes are low, unlike in politics, where it's life and death situations sometimes, because the stakes are low, you can have mobs that do not share, that do not follow common sense. They will just insist, because they were experts on rocks, that it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before. And I say the same will happen if The Tesla Roadster car would collide with earth, you know, and appear as a meteor. They would say it's a red rock of a type that we've never seen before. So at which point would you say, okay, well, you know, these people are not reasonable.

Once you have material evidence or very clear data that indicates that they're wrong, and that takes time and effort. Now, many of those have opinions. You know, people have strong opinions. I don't mind that they have strong opinions, but they should not ridicule the alternative if it's just a matter of opinion. And they do ridicule the alternative, but you look at the history of science and you see that many of the truths that are held very dearly as such, were ridiculed and that includes dark matter, you know, there were people very strongly opposing it and claiming that that's Ridiculous to consider that there is matter other than the one we know in the universe that it makes 85 percent of the matter content of the universe Um, you know the the idea of um, uh, Plate tectonics came from a very long history.

It Took 40 years before the scientific community accepted the idea that the Africa was connected to, you know, Australia and to the Americas. We could have had an in-person, uh, conversation, you know, at the, in the same room. Uh, I could have driven to your place if we lived 250 million years ago because New Zealand, Australia were all part of Africa.

And when that was proposed by Alfred Wagoner in uh, 1910, uh, it was argued that he is not an expert, and doesn't know what he's talking about, and that's ridiculous. And he died in the 1930s, Thing, you know, with the entire scientific community ridiculing his idea until 20 years later. It was realized that the vegetation in Africa and and South America match.

along the shorelines that the geological record indicates they were all part of the same supercontinent, okay? And there are many such examples, even meteors, you know. Um, there were, people thought that before 1803 that rocks cannot fall from the sky. I mean, we see rocks around us. How can a rock fall from the sky?

That's ridiculous. Until there was a meteor shower in Liege, France, that a lot of people saw. And then it became the consensus. And now what you find is people arguing that rocks can only come from the solar system, or at least there is no evidence for interstellar objects, colliding with earth, which is, you know, we can talk about it because I went on an expedition a year ago.

to the Pacific Ocean to look for the materials from a meteor for which the data was obtained by U. S. government satellites from the light generated by the fireball of this meteor. And they measured the speed of it, and it was definitely unbound To the sun and moreover was moving faster than most stars in the vicinity of this of the sun.

So, so at any event, these situations happen over and over again. And my point is, you know, let's be open minded and um, let's approach the universe with the curiosity of a kid rather than pretending that we know the answers in advance and What that means is that you need to engage in the hard work of collecting evidence and it's a lot of work It requires money And it requires time, but it's much easier to sit on your chair and say, I'm an expert on the subject.

And how dare someone else say something that violates what we already know. And I know what I'm talking about and then ridicule the person and say bad things about the person, not about the substance, you know, that is bad practice. That is not science. And then there is. Another group of people that was not there, you know, 50 years ago, but now is very vocal.

That's people that blog on social media. There are some science journalists, and some of them claim that they are astrophysicists. You know, they are, they are scientists, but you check their CV, their resume, and they haven't published a single scientific paper over the past decade. So then you ask yourself, how is it possible that, you know, a book critic that never wrote a book.

Over the past decade would claim to protect, the profession of writing books and argue against writers who actually write books right now. So I'm actually doing science. You know, it's a lot of work, and I get critics that do nothing, and they just appear to make comments in the media. And the visibility that they get is because of my hard work, but they go negative about it, but without doing anything and it's just bad practice.

And I regard those activities as anti science because science is supposed to be guided by evidence. And if evidence does not fall into our lap, new knowledge does not fall into our lap. You know, um, we had to invest 10 billion dollars in the large Hadron collider to discover the Higgs boson. We had to invest. 10 billion dollars in the Webb telescope to find the first galaxies.

my expedition cost one and a half million dollars. The next one was, will be six and a half million dollars. You know, it's really a lot of work to coordinate an ocean expedition, and collect materials from a depth of one and a half to two kilometers across the region that is 11 kilometers in size, which is what we did.

And after we put all this effort and brought back material, it took us nine months to analyze it, but it didn't prevent people who didn't do anything, who didn't have access to the materials to make statements, express opinions. So, you know, I think if you are guided by evidence, you should be always excited.

You know, we are finding something that perhaps represents new knowledge, because that's the whole purpose of science and let's be guided by evidence rather than by opinions.

[00:34:58] Matt Geleta: I mean, all of this, um, all of this really draws up the question of the function of our scientific institutions more generally and their ability to deal with, um, highly speculative topics. Uh, and, you know, as

[00:35:13] Avi Loeb: Well, it's not that because if you look at other areas, let me give you two examples. one is dark matter, you know, uh, for 50 years there were searches for dark matter and you might say, Oh, well, that's mainstream. Of course. We know that there is dark matter. Yeah. But what is the nature of dark matter?

So the popular view was that it's weakly interacting massive particles, and perhaps they represent the new symmetry of nature, supersymmetry. You know, we invested billions of dollars looking for weakly interacting massive particles in laboratory experiments. Most recently, in the Large Hadron Collider, we were looking for supersymmetry, we haven't found it. So you say, well, was that a speculation? It's not defined as a speculation because the mainstream adopted it. We spent billions of dollars, we didn't find it. So in retrospect, was it a speculation? Of course, because it wasn't found. How can something not be found if it's not a speculation, right? So in retrospect, it was a speculation.

So then you need to ask, why was it embraced by the mainstream? This particular speculation, Because people thought it makes sense because of its mathematical features, because things sort of, came together in some way, but it didn't end up describing reality, which is really the goal of physics. Okay.

So whether you choose the option of dark matter being weakly interacting, massive particles that are representing supersymmetry or not is a matter of taste. So then you have to ask, is this more speculative, uh, to consider the possibility that interstellar objects, which look anomalous might be technological.

Is it more, uh, heretic and controversial than considering the dark matter to be of something that it's not. And, um, you know, it's not just this option. It's the option of axioms. It's the option of a lot. There are lots of examples. There are lots of. uh, wrong ideas in the context of the search for dark matter.

We still don't know after 50 years of doing, experimental work, we still don't know what, what it is. Okay? And, um, think about even a worse example than that. Consider string theory. That's, a, a, a, an approach to unifying quantum mechanics and gravity. It's mathematical gymnastics because it was never demonstrated by quantum mechanics. by any experimental data to be the correct approach. In fact, it doesn't even make a prediction that is unique. There are many possibilities and within our lifetime, there is no experiment that anyone conceived that would test the ideas. Of string theory, or let's put it this way. One experiment was looking for supersymmetry with some people regarded this the foundation for, for, for string theory.

It was not found. So the answer is, Oh, well, let's just wait. Maybe the next experiment we'll find it, but it was not found. And then, uh, extra dimensions is another facet of string theory. We don't have any clue that extra dimensions exist, but yet it is the mainstream for 50 years. of theoretical particle physics and the brightest minds are working on it and they don't have any, you know, they don't feel that they're speculating because everyone is doing it and they give each other awards and honors.

And it's considered the mainstream and anyone that makes uh, calculations in the context of shrinking uses it as a sandbox for doing intellectual gymnastics, mathematical gymnastics to demonstrate that they are smart. Okay, so that itself is an important purpose, but is really the purpose of physics to demonstrate that we are smart or to find out what nature is.

And, you know, it doesn't require much mathematical sophistication to look at an object and say it's technological in origin and it's not human made. I don't need extra dimensions for that, but that would be regarded as an extraordinary claim. Whereas the fact that we live in extra dimensions, sure, be my guest.

And then you think about it, that's for 50 years. mainstream. Uh, and I had um, breakfast with a string theorist and I asked him, what's your most important scientific paper? And he said, it's a paper about supersymmetry. And that's one of the leaders of string theory. And I said, well, but you know, it was not found by the large Hadron collider.

So how can you regard it as your most important paper? After all, physics is about describing reality. And he said, well, we just have to wait. The next accelerator might find it. And that reminded me of the religious orthodox community in Crown Heights, New York City, where, you know, it's the Jewish community and I'm Jewish, but I can mention that then, you know, they believe that their rabbi will become the messiah after he dies and the rabbi died.

and didn't come back as the Messiah. So that was a data point, just like we didn't find supersymmetry. So what did the community say in response to this data point? They said, we just have to wait. Now that is understandable in the realm of religion, faith, but is it very different from a string theorist just saying, let's just wait another a hundred years, another 200 years, another millennium, maybe then we'll have some evidence.

So when you ask me about mainstream in academia, you know, it's not, it doesn't resist speculation. That's not true. I just gave you an example of a theory that not only speculates, but there is no, in the horizon of our lifespan, there is no experiment that would test it and they don't need it to be proud of the, of the work they're doing.

So if that exists, Why aren't we embracing the search for things like us on planets that look like the earth? I mean to me it sounds like common sense doesn't it?

[00:41:56] Matt Geleta: yeah, I guess, um, you, you do, you do face the chicken and egg problem though of needing to invest a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of effort, uh, into accumulating. the evidence that supports these hypotheses. Um, but then also needing to have some conviction that you're going to find something useful before investing the time and energy and effort.

[00:42:16] Avi Loeb: Well, but why why would you invest 50 years in In searching for extra dimensions.

[00:42:22] Matt Geleta: Oh, I think the, the string, this, this, the string theory question, I think has a, it's a whole different kettle of fish. Um, but

[00:42:30] Avi Loeb: Well, it's not just string theory why weakly interacting massive particles is a dark matter There are other people who work on primordial black holes as a dark matter, you know people make speculations and then stick with them for decades But they would not argue that it's not worthwhile, whereas in the context of searching for things like us, they would argue that it's, uh, that it's, um, controversial.

And just the search for the evidence. I'm not talking about the idea by itself. Now, why would that happen? I mean, the public clearly has a different view because the public, you know, there are more people who believe that we are not alone, that there is an intelligent species out there than the number of people who believe in the biblical God.

And very often, uh, committees that allocates funds for science argue we shouldn't take on a risky project because We might be wasting taxpayers money. And I say, did you ever ask the taxpayers what they want their money to be spent on? Because if you did, they will tell you that they are much more curious about whether we have a partner in interstellar space than the question of what the dark matter is made of

[00:43:50] Matt Geleta: yeah, it's, um, it's interesting because I think there has been a shift in the public perception and understanding Uh, or just, I would just say the, the, the base assumption of.

what is out there in the universe, I mean even in the last 20 years, um, there has been a stark shift where I think the default assumption now is that we are almost certainly not alone, um, and but yet there is this dissonance because I think that belief is true and that belief is also held by scientists, but then there is also a very stark resistance to, uh, an extraterrestrial hypothesis that explains anything that we do see.

And to, to me those, those two views do seem very much in tension.

[00:44:33] Avi Loeb: Well, um, the situation is that you have critics or skeptics and believers and they polarize the discussion just the way it's in politics. You see the far left and the far right. uh, Making unreasonable statements and helping each other to survive. So the extremes actually uh, dominate the scene. And so what happens is you have within the public people who know the answer.

They don't need the scientific evidence. But they know that we are visited some claim that they were abducted and all kinds of ridiculous claims And then of course the scientists say, you know, we don't want to sleep in the same bed as those people So we don't want to work on this subject But I say that's not the right approach because a thousand years ago There were people claiming that the human body has a soul And that it should not be dissected because you can hurt the soul of a person if you open the body.

And imagine if scientists were to attend to this notion, they would never develop modern medicine the way it is now, that saved lives of many people. So what is the lesson to be learned? That we should not abide by how ridiculous some of the ideas are on the subject that we are studying. We should study it by collecting new evidence that will guide us for the answer.

And that has been true throughout science. That's what we should do. And if there are people making, you know, crazy statements on either side, uh, they should be simply ignored because going in the middle uh, of the road, you know, is the most common sensical thing to do. Follow the evidence. But it's the least popular populated path.

So when people say artificial intelligence will help science. Innovate. I say you have to be careful about that because you train AI systems, like the large language models on what people do, and most people are taking extreme views or taking, making, statements based on opinion, not based on evidence, so if you train AI systems on the way people operate, and that includes in academia and in science, you will never take the middle ground, which is the most sensible thing to do because it's.

It's the least populated. Most of the time you have an opinion. People have an opinion. A biological brain is driven by jealousy or doesn't want anything new to be said about, you know, the field of an expert. Uh, it's driven by competition for limited resources. And it's driven by tribalism. If there is a group of people that you can relate to and all of them say the same thing, you feel stronger.

And then you just want to cancel the people in the other tribe. And so all of these motivations end up being, you know, very, um, toxic and, and, and the destructive for the progress. of scientific knowledge. And I find that to be unfortunate because, you know, basically, you lock the mainstream in a direction that may be, that may end up not being the most productive one.

Uh, you should let many flowers bloom.

[00:48:07] Matt Geleta: But isn't, isn't the issue that we're talking about here with, um, sort of scientific consensus and where the community focuses, Almost the opposite of, of what you said about, um, you know, extreme views proliferating. So, for example, you, you mentioned if we were to leverage large language models to help scientific progress, it's going to be trained on extreme views.

Um, but at the same time, we've said that there is sort of like this inertia in the scientific community to stick with what's known. Are these two views in tension? Isn't the issue that we're talking

[00:48:45] Avi Loeb: no,

no, no. so so, so what I mean by extreme views is that people stick to what we already know and have extreme views on, on new knowledge on innovation. They have, they basically, um, step on any flower that rises above the grass level. They don't want something new. Like if an, if there is an expert on meteors, uh, that expert would prefer to assume that every object coming from the sky is a rock from the solar system and that you need extraordinary evidence to demonstrate something else, just the way that before 1803, nothing, no rock could have come from the sky.

So the idea is that by extreme views, I mean, basically resisting evidence that violates past knowledge. That's an extreme view, in my opinion. If you have evidence that implies something different than what you were expecting, it's an opportunity to learn. Now, of course, you could have false alarms. You could have, and the only way to find out that it's a false alarm is by collecting more evidence.

So you should be thrilled if something completely unexpected comes your way, and then you should be motivated to look for more evidence. In order to firm up the conclusion and if it ends up being nothing if Oumuamua Ends up being an object from a new class of you know, hydrogen icebergs So be it we learn something new But you should not assume that what you knew in the past must be the case and that's really The way that you know based on my experience in science for many decades Is the most it's the most common response that you get to a new idea Yeah. Now, the other thing is I worked in cosmology, you know, studying the universe where the dark matter is not known.

And, uh, within that intellectual culture, it was encouraged to come up with ideas that are not conventional because, you know, we just don't know what the dark matter is. So maybe experimentalists can rule out this or that possibility. It gives work for people to rule out possibilities. If you come up with those suggestions.

And so when I saw the data on Oumuamua, it intrigued me and I came up with the possibility that maybe it's artificial. And I didn't see anything bad about it. And the paper was accepted for publication within three days. But the minute that the media paid attention to this idea, you know, and this was a paper, the only paper I know from the Astrophysical Journal that was quoted verbatim by, on CNN by, Michael Smirconish.

You know, the minute that there was a lot of attention to this possibility, that this object was weird and possibly technological, my colleagues started pushing back and the more attention the subject got, the more personal they got. And so to me, that indicates very clearly that it has nothing to do with the evidence.

And nothing to do with being open minded. It's just jealousy for the attention.

[00:52:04] Matt Geleta: Yeah. I would like to, I would like to explore that. Um, that sort of like a personal, uh, stage, um, of your, of your career shortly, but maybe just to make it really practical for a second. Um, you know, we've talked about, um, uh, evidence for, um, technologically advanced civilizations. And we opened with that question from Chris Anderson.

Um, maybe let's just make it very practical. What specifically would you be expecting to find in the next 10 years? Um, and, and what do you think we might be able to find that would actually convince a large portion of the scientific community that this is an idea worth taking seriously?

[00:52:43] Avi Loeb: yeah, it's very simple Um, just consider the rubin observatory in chile funded by the national science foundation that will start operation in 2025. It will employ a 3. 2 billion pixel camera And by the way, the secondary mirror of that telescope was just put in place 3. 2 billion pixels is a thousand times more than you have on your cell phone, and it will survey the southern sky every four days.

So based on my calculations, it should discover if if Oumuamua was one object from a population on random trajectories. If it was not intentionally visiting in a very specific orbit, the vicinity of Earth, but there are plenty such objects and they just move on random trajectories, you know, each, then the Rubin Observatory should find one every, every few months.

And that means that we will have plenty, you know, within the coming years. And then we can check if all of them are rocks. Or maybe, you know, if there are extremely unusual objects, we can get more data because now we have the web telescope that could detect the infrared emission from such an object. We didn't have that when Oumuamua showed up.

So we can actually measure the emission, the thermal emission, the heat coming from the object, not just the reflection of sunlight. And that given the distance of the object can tell us the size of the object. We can also pinpoint very precisely by triangulating the location of the object using a telescope on earth.

And the web telescope that is one and a half million kilometers away from Earth. So it's, it's called parallax. You basically have two eyes looking at the object. You can figure out its location extremely precisely. And so if we get a lot of data on the next, Oumuamua or the next weird object, and we realize, It doesn't look like a rock, looks like a piece of metal made of, if we learn about the composition doesn't look like a rock, you know, I think it will be difficult to ignore that and argue that it's a rock, it's a piece of metal that was, produced in molecular cloud the way that the hydrogen iceberg idea was, was, uh, invented.

[00:55:15] Matt Geleta: Like a, like a

[00:55:16] Avi Loeb: Um, and,

um, so that's just an example. And of course, if something collides with earth like this meteor, you know, there is a chance um, that we would find um, the relics of what is left over from the wreckage. And then it's easy to tell if it's human made or not. or technological from another civilization. And then these are examples where, and also even if you look at something in the sky, and you know, I'm leading the Galileo project and we have one functioning observatory.

So this is an observatory looking at the sky all the time in the infrared, optical, radio, audio. Now also ultraviolet and we're analyzing the data with machine learning software and just looking for objects that are not Familiar and so far, you know over the past six months We saw more than half a million objects and all of them look familiar the only reason we built this observatory is because three years ago the Director of national intelligence in the u.

s. And avril haines submitted a report to the u. s. Congress Talking about unidentified anomalous phenomena Objects that the intelligence agencies cannot identify, which means uh, two things. Either they're not doing their job. And these are, you know, uh, objects produced by adversarial nations to spy over the U S uh, or they are extraterrestrial.

Um, So what? we, Obviously there is a lot of crap in the sky that humans make balloons, drones, airplanes. So we want to see if there is anything else. Um, and since then, of course, the, the director of national intelligence submitted two additional reports, and there was a, a new office established in The pentagon to, to look into those reports and but instead of waiting for the government to tell us what lies outside the solar System, you know, that's not their day job Their day job is national security and my day job is to figure out as an astronomer what lies outside the solar system so the sky is not classified and we are looking at it and then We are now writing a number of papers talking about the preliminary results and the fact that we haven't seen anything So once again you have these communities of believers and skeptics And, they, I get attacked from both directions by taking the most sensible thing, um, the most sensible approach, which is to build an observatory and collect the evidence, collect the data and whatever we find, we report, you know, that, and that was not done before in a systematic way like that.

Uh, and, to me again, it's common sense, um, but somehow common sense is not common in academia.

[00:58:08] Matt Geleta: I mean, suppose, suppose we were to go ahead and build this observatory and for many, many years, all we did observe was, was rocks. It was all rocks. And, um, and there was no evidence of, of technology. Um, what would you make of that? Like, you know, at what, at what point does the burden of proof start to sway the view towards, you know, perhaps, you There is no, um, technologically advanced civilization out there.

What, what would it take?

[00:58:37] Avi Loeb: Yeah, I think, if, if, um, within the coming decade, let's say we invest tens of millions of dollars, which is not, uh, you know, there are you know, people, wealthy individuals who are approaching me, routinely, you know, and, are supporting the research. And So suppose we do invest the tens of millions of dollars, which again, to remind you, it's much less than 11 billion dollars in the world.

in the in the habitable world, the observatory that the mainstream wants to invest in. Um, and suppose we do it for a decade and we don't find anything, you know, that that to me would be a strong argument that maybe indeed uh, most of I mean, we can basically put an upper limit on the fraction of objects.

Interstellar objects that are technological. Okay. And, um, you know, I asked this question, uh, a, a person who gave a talk at the conference that I organized. A decade ago about dark matter and the person was speaking about weakly interacting massive particles And I said look you've been searching for decades for weakly interacting massive particles You haven't found any how long will you continue?

You know, you did it for decades. You're now In your late 50s, you know, you have a couple of decades left Then How long will you continue and he said oh the decision is really simple as long as I get funded Now, the thing about it is he continued to be funded, because that's part of the mainstream. but the way I see it is, you know, it's more, it's not a question of money.

It's a more question of the fact that we live for a finite amount of time and, you know, we better make the most out of it. Okay, so to me, this is such a fundamental question that I want to spend a decade checking. But if I don't find anything, I might decide to move on to something else. Just the way I worked on the first stars and galaxies, you know, for the first decade of my academic career.

And I pioneered this subject that is now, you know, the, the main focus of the web telescope. And it was celebrated the white house and, you know, looking for the first stars and galaxies. That's a subject that I pioneered early on in my career. Um, and the same way, in the same way I worked on black holes and, suggested them. imaging them.

And now it's a big game industry of imaging black holes. And, you know, I was the founding director of the black hole initiative at Harvard university that were, the first image of a black hole was obtained. Um, so. I worked on subjects for, of older decade that ended up, you know, producing important science.

And if this one does not, so be it. But until I spend that decade, I'm not convinced. So if I find something, this would be the most important accomplishment, not only of my career, but of science in general, because it would have huge implications for the future of humanity as to whether we, I call it the most romantic question in science.

Are we alone?

[01:01:58] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Do you, uh, do you feel we're ready? Do you feel we're ready to, I mean, maybe we will never be ready. Um, but

[01:02:06] Avi Loeb: Oh, I don't care if we're ready. The point is, you know, we were not ready that to be Uh orbiting the sun and the sun orbiting the center of the milky way and the milky way moving in some random directions Relative to the universe at large. We were not ready for that. We thought everything Moves around the earth, but who cares?

Now, of course Nicolaus Copernicus cared, you know, you can see his book behind me on on on my left side Because I was invited by the Polish government Just half a year ago to deliver a keynote lecture in celebration of 550 years to the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus And my lecture was about the next Copernican revolution, meaning that we are not at the intellectual center of the universe.

And Copernicus did not want to rock the boat. By the way, he was a priest. So he wanted to help the church, and the church had a problem. They couldn't get Easter correctly. They always got it off by a few days, and they used the model in which the earth was at the center. So Copernicus realized that if you put the Sun at the center, he can get Easter predicted much more precisely and gave the model to the church. And the church said, thank you very much. We will use your model. But we all know that in reality, this is just a theoretical model. In reality, the earth is at the center and they banned his book. It was a forbidden book until the 19th century.

And on his deathbed, he was presented with the first hard copy of the book. And, you know, he didn't want to rock the boat. 50 years later, Galileo Galilei rocked the boat. He was put in house arrest. And I really connect to Galileo much more than to Copernicus. I actually gave a lecture called Catedra Galiliana in, a school in Normale superior in Pisa where Galileo was.

Um, and, then the reason I connect to, to Galileo more is because, you know, if the boat is heading in the wrong direction, we need to rock it.

[01:04:38] Matt Geleta: Do you, um, suppose you, suppose you rocked the boat and, uh, and we did, um, discover conclusively, um, sort of extraterrestrial technology. How do you think the world would react? What would change? Because like part of me thinks there is such a strong belief there, as we've said, that, um, uh, extraterrestrial life does exist.

Um, and if that's true, almost finding it.

shouldn't actually change that much because the belief is already there. Um, what is your vision for how the world might change?

[01:05:14] Avi Loeb: it really depends on what we find, because there is a chance we would realize that You know, the, the the object that we found represents technologies of the future, uh, simply because that civilization had more than one century of science and technology. You know, we discovered quantum mechanics only a century ago.

I'm 61 years old. I actually lived more, through more than half of modern science. Can you believe that? I, since the time I was born in 1962, 62. Um, so I'm actually 62 years old. I live the half of the history of modern physics, uh, including the, you know, relativity, quantum mechanics, everything we use now for gadgets, building gadgets.

Now imagine another civilization that existed for 1000 years of technology or a million years of technology, science and technology, or maybe even a billion years, uh, they would produce things that we, that represent our future, but we can't really imagine, and we would have some religious, Oh, looking at those things, you know, there is the biblical story of Moses, in the old Testament, looking at the burning bush that was never consumed.

And that convinced Moses that There is a superhuman entity that he called God. Nowadays, you can buy online gadgets that would have been much more impressive than a burning bush that is not consumed. And if Moses were to see them, he would be filled with the same religious. Oh, now it would be towards us.

But we just represent a more advanced technological civilization relative to Moses. That's all. So my point is, it will affect our religion. Just think about another civilization capable of actually solving the puzzle of how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. So they would have a good idea about what happened before the Big Bang.

And they might even have a recipe for how to create a baby universe. Because if you know how our universe started, you might try to create it. In the laboratory, and that's the job description of God. If you were to advertise, the, job description of God, such a civilization could apply for it because you know, if they are able to make a universe, what else, they can make everything else that is in it, including life and everything.

so my point is if we meet. A higher level uh, of a technological civilization. Um, that might look like it does miracles for us. You know, it might bring science and religion together for us. That's a huge. That's a huge impact on the history of humanity, you know? Um, and then the other thing that can happen is, you know, there is the uh, Darwinian principle of the fittest surviving. And, you know, you think about it long term, not just over timescale of years, thousands of years or millions of years, but billions of years. Okay. So what does it mean to be the fittest? Well, in a billion years, the sun will boil off all the oceans on earth. We will not be able to stay on earth.

Like all life as we know, it will be eliminated at that point. And, you know, you can imagine a mass exodus of, Humans and other planets like the earth must have gone through that because their star, you know formed billions of years before the sun and So in that case, you know, um, just Knowing what happened to other civilizations learning from their history figuring out how they managed to survive could be inspiring for us and and we might behave differently and you know at the very elementary level If we realize there is someone else out there, it might unify us because we would feel that we are all on the same boat, the earth.

We are all part of the same team. We will stop killing each other because we depend on each other for the future. And perhaps we will explore space the way they did. And perhaps we, you know, we'll change our priorities. You know, this shock therapy is the only way I can see that prosperity and peace will come to earth.

It's not through singing John Lennon's song. Imagine all the people living in peace you know, that's utopia. It's shock therapy. Once you realize there is another population out there. And we should all work together to survive just like they did, or we have competition with them, or, you know, they pose a threat to us, or whatever.

It will bring people together. And, um, you know, there is this notion in religion of, um, a messiah. Um, and it's usually thought to be someone who lived on Earth, a passenger on this boat that we all occupy. What I'm saying is that it may be Someone from another star that will bring peace and prosperity to earth and that's a huge impact on world politics a huge impact on our aspirations for the future and the way we behave towards each other.

What else? how can science bring a bigger impact than that? So now, you know, the argument is similar to Blaise Pascal, who said, you know, he was a mathematician and he said, well, The, There are two possibilities, either God exists or does not exist. That's what Pascal said. And he said, Well, you can be an atheist and, and say that God doesn't exist.

But if you just imagine the implications, if God exists, you know, then, then you can't ignore that possibility. You cannot just say uh, brush it aside, because if God exists and you made a mistake, the implications would be huge. For your, for yourself. Um, And so I just use this argument in the context of another civilization.

[01:11:55] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's very much an optimistic and an uplifting view of things. Um, I am curious about, you know, as you said, we've had modern science for on the order of a hundred years, which is essentially zero in the context of the scale of the universe. And, um, if we were to encounter an advanced civilization,

um, almost certainly, um, they would be, uh, orders of magnitude more advanced.

It would be very, very unlikely for that not to be true. Um, but that also means that, um, well, firstly, I think we would probably be largely irrelevant to them from an intellectual perspective. Uh, but secondly, We have very little ability to predict. what they might be like and whether they might be, um, whether we might even feature in their cognition, whether they might be hostile towards us.

Uh, what is, what is your view on the case for, um, I guess, optimism for how they would be towards us?

[01:12:58] Avi Loeb: billions of years ago. Okay. We didn't exist. And if they arrive to the solar system, it would be for a completely different reason. And, um, once again, it's this notion that we are important and significant. And if they come here it's because of us. And, you know, when you see a single person who keeps saying, you know, where is everybody the way Enrico Fermi said, and Not without doing anything because Fermi didn't build a telescope, to search for them, you know, you just tell that single person that it's very pretentious to imagine that you're so attractive that everyone will come to you when you want it.

Uh, and in fact, it would be much better for your life. If you wanted to find a partner to leave your home and go to dating sites or at the very least look through your windows and search for, you know, neighbors. Um, And that's the way I think about it, that, you know, we really need to put the effort first before coming to any conclusion or having any opinion on the matter.

And people might say, Oh, well, we tried to listen for radio waves, but that's once again, like waiting at home for a phone call. It's a very specific approach that is not always giving results because nobody may call you when you're waiting. Uh, and you need to be proactive. Look for, look for objects, for example, that represent others.

Um, and, um, you know, all together, um, I think there is an opportunity for us to do much better because now we have instruments, we have the ability to process huge amounts of data with artificial intelligence. Um, I should say that, yesterday I was contacted by the CEO of, or the founder of a new A.

I. company.

Called the Cicero. And he told me that they produced a replica of me, an AI avatar that was trained on all the interviews that I gave all the essays that I wrote, the books that I wrote, everything out there. There is a lot of material. And, I was very pleased because. You know, in, in, in, when artificial intelligence, was developed, the latest models of, large language models, I was happy because it would save me time and in planning trips in, filling up forms and.

You know, managing my time and so forth. But, uh, then I realized that, um, you know, there are too many requests for interviews on podcasts and, um, and for newspapers and so forth. And if I had an AI avatar that is trained on, on, on my, materials, I could just send it to answer the questions. Uh, in those podcasts and save time and dedicate that, save time to creative work, in science.

And, even though it sounds like a fantasy, I got one step closer yesterday to fulfilling it because now this company generated an AI avatar of me that is capable of answering you know, by voice and or text answering questions in the spirit of the way of my writings and my interviews. And I was very interested to see who else they made replicas off.

And the list that they send me includes 24 people, including, um, including Albert Einstein, including Volodymyr Zelensky, uh, Kamala Harris, uh, Joe Biden, Putin, uh, uh, uh, Trump, um, and, um, uh, Sigmund Freud and, uh, John Kennedy, uh, a lot of, uh, very. uh, Important people. And I was surprised that they included my name there as well.

But, uh, at any event, I sent an email to my, um, research group and said that please interact with this system, with this AI avatar, and tell me if you see any red flags. And, uh, in response, I got, um, a very positive, um, uh, answer from the people who interacted with this AI avatar. And the reason, uh, it touches a nerve for me is because, um, both my parents passed away more than five years ago.

And, uh, I only wish that Cicero, this company existed back then, because if there was a replica of them, I could still inform that the neural network of, um, my latest, the latest developments in my life. And um, we could have obtained the most likely answers that they would have given under these new circumstances.

And, you know, right now, large language models have a number of parameters that are about 500 times. smaller than the number of synapses in the human brain. We have about a quadrillion synapses. These are connections between neurons in the human brain. And, um, the, the best large language models have about 0.

2 percent of that. So no wonder that you see the current, uh, LLMs, uh, hallucinating, making trivial mistakes, inventing references, not really standing up to the, the, the quality of the human brain in some tasks, not in all in some, they are doing very well. Um, and, uh, I, but on the other hand, if you think about Moore's law, the exponential growth in the, computational capabilities of chips um, of given size, uh, within 10 to 20 years, it's very likely that the AI systems will reach the number of parameters as the human brain has.

And at that point, it will be as complex as the human brain. Uh, the, for example, the fruit fly has thousands of neurons and they were all mapped. And, uh, therefore we can create a computer model of the way that the fruit fly thinks. But, um, we tend to think that as humans, you know, we have free will, um, meaning that, you know, I can decide whatever I want, but the only reason the human brain is not predictable is because it's very complex.

It has so many connections, you know, and in systems that have a lot of degrees of freedom, you get chaos. You get, a quantum, uncertainty playing a role. So, and the human brain interacts with an environment that is not fully known, that has a lot of free parameters as well. And so when you put the human brain in an unpredictable environment, you end up with unpredictable, Decisions you might call it free will, but it's still a mechanic.

You know, it's it's it's it's something that we can create with an AI System. That's my point. And so when AI reaches that point, you know, I would like to have my personal touring test of letting my AI Avatar interact with people like yourself in interviews, and you will decide if it's any different than interacting with me.

And if you agree that it's not very different, You know, that will save me a lot of time.

[01:20:42] Matt Geleta: Yeah, well, I'm, I'm, I'm convinced that in this present case, I'm still interacting with you, but, um, it, it does, uh, it does open up a A question as we, as we bring to a wrap, you know, suppose we were to send an AI avatar out into space, um, to meet an advanced civilization. Suppose we, we knew where they were and, uh, the best way, obviously we wouldn't send a biological being.

They would probably disintegrate on the way. Um, but so we sent an AI avatar. Which person, um, past or present? Do you think we should send two represent us to this technological species?

[01:21:25] Avi Loeb: you know, it's in the same spirit as my biological daughters. Uh, sometimes I don't fully understand them, but my hope is that they will be better than me. and The same is true about my students. I hope that they will do better than the current people in academia. And, I don't care if it's, um, if it's a technological neural network system, like, uh, large language models or, AI, um, It doesn't matter to me if it's a piece of technology or it's biological. I really hope the future is better than the past. And for me, if we send out something that is the most accomplished neural network system, even if it's not biological and doesn't represent any person, any human on earth, I would be proud of it.

[01:22:23] Matt Geleta: Um, Avi, you've, you've, Uh, you've written prolifically. You've, you've spoken prolifically. You've, you've, uh, produced so many good things in the world. Um, if people do want to follow up and find more of what you're doing, uh, where's the best place for them to go? What should they do?

[01:22:39] Avi Loeb: Uh, if they want to follow updates on my current research, uh, you can subscribe for free, to my essays, Avi loeb@medium.com. Uh, otherwise there are, uh, two popular level books that I published over the past, um, couple of years. Uh, one is, uh, Extraterrestrial and the other one is Interstellar. Um, And uh, I'm now working actually on two new books um, uh, related to the expedition to the Pacific Ocean, Uh, one for adults and the other for young adults, kids, because I want to inspire them to get into science.

Uh, And finally, by the end of 2025, there will be a Netflix documentary about my research. They went with me to the Pacific Ocean and, uh, it should be very exciting to see, the film, and, just, stay tuned for that.

[01:23:38] Matt Geleta: Fantastic. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that one. Um, Avi, before we wrap anything else that you would like to, to share, um, you know, any calls to action for the audience, anyone who, uh, who's been listening and, and wants to, uh, understand more, follow up more, um, any final words?

[01:23:55] Avi Loeb: Yeah, if, if anyone wants to be, for example, a contributor to the Galileo project and, if, the level of donation is high, please contact me and you could potentially be part of the next expedition to the Pacific ocean. Um, we are now, um, Uh, collecting, um, uh, people who might, want to support that, um, uh, expedition.

Um, uh, the cost would be six and a half million dollars and we hope to split it among, uh, uh, six to to 10 people. Um, and we have some interested already. Um, but uh, at the lower level, you, know, even a small donation could help a lot. The Galileo project. and, uh, you know, uh, I'm basically, uh, you know, I was born on a farm and I think like a kid, I have a beginner's mind and I enjoy working with young, uh, uh, People because uh, they don't, uh, uh, they are not attached to their ego and they are not, um, they haven't built echo chambers that amplify their voice.

They are more curious and open minded than the adults in the room. And, uh, so if you're interested in pursuing science, I hope, to see you in the scientific community and potentially collaborate with you. Uh, because it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to, we are supposed to be driven by curiosity.

And so the more of us who are curious and, you know, I have a number of postdoctoral fellows and students that came to me and said that it was their lifelong dream to work on the subjects that I'm working on. So, um, I feel young as a result of working with them.

[01:25:47] Matt Geleta: Beautiful. Um, Avi, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for your work and thank you for joining me today.

[01:25:54] Avi Loeb: Thanks for having me.

We discuss:

• Human cooperation and coordination at various scales, and the role that energy plays in enabling this

• The importance of energy for enabling innovation and improved human welfare

• The application of evolutionary psychology in economics

• Our energy and environmental crises

• Nuclear energy - past present and future

• Green technologies

• Climate change

… and other topics

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Guest book: https://amzn.to/4ckAf5x

• Guest website: https://www.atheoryofeveryone.com/

• Our World in Data:

  • https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

  • https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy

Timestamps

Timestamps for audio episode

00:00 Episode intro

01:00 Energy and nuclear power - reflections

08:00 How do cultural differences impact how we work together?

23:30 Why is human coordination and cooperation so difficult

33:50 Why do we need energy abundance to enable cooperation?

46:05 What is the most efficient energy source?

1:00:00 Why is energy becoming scarce?

1:06:45 Nuclear - why might this be our best bet?

1:11:40 Sustainability - should we pull the brakes?

1:23:16 Major challenge for the 21st century

1:27:50 Book recommendations

Introduction - The Future of Nuclear

From a first principles perspective it’s hard to imagine anything more important to our collective flourishing than energy. Energy is a necessary input into everything we do. Considered as a raw material, it could be argued that it’s the only raw material involved in every production process.

This places us in a challenging position, because global energy consumption is growing at a rate far higher than our ability to supply it affordably, at least without wrecking havoc on the environment. Many arguments have been put forward as potential solutions to this challenge.

On the demand side of the equation, one commonly heard argument is that our energy crisis is largely a problem of excess consumption, and that the best solution lies in reducing global energy usage. There is certainly a kernel of truth in this line of thought, because per person energy consumption has been creeping upwards over the past several decades, and it’s quite clear that a lot of our energy usage is for things we don’t really need.

However, the consumption argument has several major flaws. For one thing it neglects that the increasing per person consumption has been largely driven by developing nations coming online, especially in Asia, and for these countries improved energy availability is one of the most important levers for improving life outcomes. There are also the issues of global population growth, and the practical question of how one could even implement meaningful reduction in energy consumption at scale, to make no mention of many negative knock-on effects of doing so.

Arguments on the supply side of the equation are much more promising, and here there are many people talking about specific energy sources like solar and wind, and technologies like hydrogen fuel cells.

And one such technology that has been coming back into public attention in recent years is nuclear energy.

We’re currently operating in a paradigm in which around half of American adults view nuclear energy as a bad thing, and are opposed to ramping up nuclear energy production. And this sentiment is shared in much of the Western world. To many people, the idea of increasing nuclear energy production conjures up imagery of nuclear meltdowns, vats of radioactive waste, and escalating risk of nuclear warfare. People associate nuclear energy with the meltdowns in Chernobyl and Fukushima, or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and have deeply held intuitions that nuclear energy is dangerous and environmentally destructive.

On the other side of the fence there is a growing number of people who think it’s been crystal clear for a very long time that nuclear energy must play a role in our energy future. Key among these people are many physicists, economists, and energy scientists. And when one considers the numbers, it’s not difficult to see why these people hold this view.

From an economic perspective, the energy return on investment for nuclear energy dwarfs any other scalable energy source we have at present. A modern nuclear power plant produces an energy return on investment of up to 75x. That means for every unit of energy we put into it, we get back 75 times that amount in usable energy. No other modern energy source comes close. Solar, for example, currently sits at about 4x.

From an environmental perspective there are also very compelling arguments in favour of nuclear energy. Nuclear power plants produce significantly fewer greenhouse gas emissions per unit energy produced than other sources. And while nuclear energy plants do produce nuclear waste materials, this happens in incredibly small volumes and in a very contained and controlled way. There is very good reason to believe that the environmental impact of nuclear energy pales in comparison to the large amount of environmental damage generated by pumping fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere. For example, the average American consumes roughly 1 gigawatt hour of energy through the course of a lifetime. If entirely fuelled by nuclear energy, this would result in a total volume of nuclear waste production that’s smaller than the size of a can of coke, and this waste would be well contained within that can. Compare this current average CO2 emissions from electricity production globally, where we would expect closer to 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide produced for this amount of energy.

There’s also the question of safety. Despite what many people believe, the death toll related to nuclear energy is incredibly low compared with alternative sources, and this includes any deaths associated with nuclear accidents, which are very rare.

I’ll include a few insightful links from our World in Data in the show notes, which covers these facts.

If all this is true it begs the question as to why the world isn’t racing towards accelerated adoption of nuclear energy. And the reasons here are complex with many factors at work.

There are geopolitical concerns relating to the possible proliferation of nuclear weapons should more countries gain access to sufficient volumes of nuclear source materials, although I should mention that even here there are good arguments in favour of more nuclear energy. It’s argued that ramping up nuclear energy will actually aid disarmament efforts, because some of the most readily available sources of nuclear fuel is in existing nuclear weapons. So ramping up nuclear energy production would be a motivation for dismantling these weapons.

Even so, there are remaining economic challenges relating to high upfront costs and long timelines for new nuclear facilities, and the inability to shut down nuclear power plants at short notice.

All this to say that the question of whether we should have a nuclear renaissance is not a straightforward one.

My current view on this topic is that nuclear energy should play an important role in addressing our energy crisis, and I think it will likely be a critical part of our energy future for at least several centuries to come. We absolutely do need to take the problems associated with nuclear energy seriously, but I think these problems are solvable, and the cost-benefit and risk-reward calculus strongly suggest that the world will be a better place if we shift more of our energy production to nuclear sources.

Slowly but surely the political tides do seem to be turning in this direction, and I expect that we’ll be talking about nuclear energy a lot more over the coming decade.

And my guest today agrees, and makes a compelling case for this future in his book. I think it’s a very good book, and worth reading if these topics pique your interest.

Whatever your position on this topic, if you find this conversation valuable then please share it with others who might as well. We do need to turn up the volume of public discourse on this topic. 

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

​

[00:07:59] Matt Geleta: Michael, let's set the stage by talking about life as a global citizen. Um, I share your very uncommon experience of having lived in more countries and cities and towns than I could care to name. And, um, I mean, for me, this has been deeply formative to my worldview. It's, um, it's really had a profound impact on how I think about the world and my place in it.

Um, how has this history of yours shaped your, your worldview?

[00:08:26] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, so, I mean, the way I sometimes explain it to my students is, like, if you, if you speak a single language, like, let's say English, then you don't really think about the structure of the words you're saying, right? You just speak. Um, but if you, if you learn even one other language, and especially one that's a little bit more linguistically different, then you start to see the kind of structure of language, you realize that word order can be different, what you have to say is different, uh, nouns can have genders, you know, things that you might, might not have occurred to you before.

I think it's similar if you, you know, if you. are exposed to different cultures, especially at kind of a formative age, let's say before 15 or uh, you know, before 25, then you, you start to see the structure of culture. Like you start to realize that a lot of the things that you take for granted because it's just the water you swim in, things you assume are right and wrong or values and goals, what's important, what's not, um, these things vary around the world.

And, and, and it's a lot deeper than people People really assume, uh, at a very fundamental level, and we now have data even down to like perception, uh, you know, susceptibility to visual illusions, um, you know, categories of smell, all of these different things vary around the world in fundamental ways. And, you know.

One of the cases that I've tried to make is that a lot of failed foreign policy, a lot of failed, uh, immigration policies, uh, a lot of failed, you know, trans, uh, national cooperative enterprises fail because of these assumptions that people make that everyone around the world is roughly like them. They just kind of dress differently.

They speak different languages and eat different foods. And it's not true. It's not true. You know, um, we now know that what makes humans so different to other animals is that instead of kind of genetically speciating, when we encountered new environment, we almost kind of culturally speciated. We, we ended up with very different psychology, very different norms and beliefs and behaviors in different places, in different places around the world.

so I'll, I'll give you a few examples of this. Um, at a, at a kind of normative level, uh, you know, people are aware that in some parts of the world, um, family. Is more important than other parts of the world.

So this is sometimes called interdependence or collectivism versus independence, right? Um, any decision that you make is affected by all of the other people around. You can't decide your career. You can't sometimes even decide your partner without, you know, uh, uh, the, the support of your family. Um, but things run, things run even deeper than that, right?

So there are obligations around that, which lead to, for example, nepotism, um, because, you know, if you have obligations toward family, that, those obligations might not disappear just because you're a minister now, right? Um, some things are about, like, what is valuable, like, is it, uh, does it, does it matter that you're consistent?

across different people, or can you be a different person to everyone you deal with? Does it matter that you follow rules, uh, that you abide by the law, uh, or is it more flexible, you know, that other things are, are priority? And then you get down to very, very low level psychology. So we have some really new data, uh, using the Koffer illusion, you know, your, your listeners can, can look it up.

Um, and to Westerners, you know, uh, You see rectangles in the Koffer illusion, but when we run that same illusion in, in field sites where people are not exposed to a carpentered world with sharp edges that are really not found in nature, they only see circles and Westerners have a hard time seeing those circles.

Actually, they, you know, they have to stop and some people never see it at all. Whereas, you know, it's the opposite in these societies where people literally can't see the rectangles or if they do, they see them second. Right? So what that means is that. Okay. All the way down to very low level processing and all the way up to what is right and wrong, values and beliefs, who are the relationships that matter, how do I make decisions, how do I think about the world, varies considerably all around the world.

And understanding, documenting those differences, understanding why they exist, where they come from, how they're transmitted, how they persist, and how they change, is critical to developing a better model of humans and human behavior and human societies.

[00:12:37] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I mean, so some of those examples you just gave of, you know, even at the level of perception, there are, there are differences. Um, a couple of weeks ago I spoke with Neil Seth, who I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work, but, um, we went through several of these and we actually tested live, um, some of these, you know, the, the, the famous, uh, gold and, and white versus blue and black dress.

And, and yeah, and then several of those, it's absolutely fascinating. But one thing that it immediately brings to, to the forefront to the question is if we are perceiving the world differently, experiencing the world differently, if our cultural software is different, how is it then that we can cooperate and coordinate effectively?

And I mean, something that struck me really deeply living in so many different countries, um, and, and, you know, reading your work as well, it's just how wide the gap can be between these different ways of seeing the world. Um, so just tell me about the different levels of coordination you've experienced in, um, You know, in this background of yours?

Mm-Hmm?

[00:13:31] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah. So, I mean, uh, in my work, I refer to this as the paradox of diversity, which is that, um, you know, diversity we now know is, is fuel for innovation and creativity because simply seeing the world in different ways, um, gives you new ideas, right? And you don't, you know, people can, even if you haven't spent a childhood, you know, across three different continents, um, you, you know, this from working in a different company, you know, they do things differently there.

And I can see that now that I'm at this new company and I can see what I liked and what I didn't like, or, you know, living in a different city, you know, I can, I was, or I went to a different restaurant, you know, In the book, I tell the story of, um, the origin of Hawaiian pizza. Uh, you know, I think it's like Australia's number one pizza, if I'm not mistaken, you know, which I also

[00:14:15] Matt Geleta: be surprised here.

[00:14:16] Michael Muthukrishna: Um, you know, and it's this guy, you know, Sam, uh, Panopoulos, uh, who is a Greek immigrant in Canada. Um, who has some experience with a Chinese food restaurant, and, you know, he sees, he gets these, uh, these, this brand of pineapple called Hawaiian pineapple, and he starts putting pineapple on pizza because of kind of the sweet and sour in American Chinese, um, and he, and he creates something brand new.

So that's the good side of diversity. It creates this kind of, um, this fuel for recombination that leads to creativity and innovation. But the flip side of that is exactly what you're describing, which is that if we can't communicate and coordinate and get on the same page about certain things, then it's very difficult for us to work together.

So some of those things are, are really low hanging fruit. So language, right? Like, if we don't speak the same language, it would be very difficult for us to have this conversation. It would be very difficult for any ideas to flow between us, and it would be very difficult for us to communicate. And coordinate the other things a little bit more subtle.

So, um, in a workplace, am I expected to be on time or are we coordinated such that everybody knows that, you know, if the meeting starts at, you know, at three or the party starts at three, no one's going to turn up at three, you know, and everybody knows that it's actually 30 minutes, five minutes later, 30 minutes later, and even an hour later or later.

You know, um, and then there's other more subtle things. You know, can I, uh, work with people from other parts of the world? Can I work with people from different religions? Can I work with, uh, the, the opposite sex? Um, all of those things are important to coordination. And if you can't do that, you've got.

You've got a real problem. Um, there's different solutions to this, right? So one is, um, what I call optimal assimilation. So it is assimilating along the lines that are required for coordination and not worrying about the other stuff. So I'll give you, you know, Australia actually does this, uh, quite intentionally.

So in the book, I talk about, um, refugees before they arrive in, um, I should, I should preface this by saying, you know, Australia, uh, has a lot of history with, with refugees in terms of like, you know, people languishing in offshore detention centers for a very long time. And I think, uh, all Australians should be advocating, not necessarily like, let's just let everyone in, but we should be processing people a lot more quickly.

Um, but nonetheless, once people. Arrive, you know, my, I tell a story that, you know, comes from my, um, my wife used to work in refugee resettlement. So before people arrive, uh, refugees go through what's called the, uh, Australian Cultural Orientation Program, OSCO. It's a five day program that it's like a crash course in being an Aussie.

You know, it's like, uh, Aussie 101 and it's, it's things like, well, you know, like which side of the road do you drive on? And, you know, how do you work with banks and post offices and so on? It's, uh, how do you get groceries? Um, uh, what, what, what support will be available to you once you arrive, but also kind of cultural norms.

So what is acceptable and unacceptable ways of behaving with people? What are the laws of the country? And so on. It's really like, here's a quick integration. And then once you arrive, at least, you know, back, uh, when, when, when Steph used to work in this area, a lot of support was given to refugees in helping them bridge that gap that they were arriving, you know, and some of it was cultural, some of it's just that they've been through horrendous circumstances, and that can be very difficult to, to to bridge alone.

So how did they do it? Well, you know, it was things like, um, introducing them to other migrants from the same or, or similar cultural backgrounds, uh, showing them, you know, as cooking lessons, like, uh, they would bring people in and say, you know, here's how we can cook something close to our, our cuisine, um, using some of the ingredients that are available here, or perhaps where we could find some of the more difficult to find, uh, uh, you know, so Ethiopian refugees, where do I find teff flour, uh, to make injera?

Um, or what would be similar if I, if I wasn't able to access that, you know, that kind of thing. But implicitly there was also a kind of like, these are non negotiable. So, you know, I tell this story, um, you know, which happened where, um, there was a, there was a gentleman who came in and, uh, he came from a culture where he wasn't supposed to talk to women or he found it uncomfortable to talk to women.

So he came in and he said, uh, you know, I'd like some help. Um, and they said, that's fine. You know, this is the person who can help you. And he said, I'd like to, I'd like to speak to a man. And they said, well, there's, there's no, there's no men available here. Uh, so you're going to have to speak to this woman in any way, like this is how it is here, right?

You have to be able to, to talk to the opposite sex. And so he just sat there for hours waiting for a man to arrive. And no one turned up, so he just left. And then, you know, the next day he comes back, and he's like, I'd like to talk to a man, he sits there for hours, uh, no man turns up, so he goes away. He comes back again, and finally he accepts the help of a female volunteer.

And I think that's a, that's, in some ways, it's a, it's a uniquely Australian approach to immigration, where you say, look, you know, there are non negotiables in this country, the rule of law, Uh, you know, freedom of, uh, of religion, uh, treating people with respect, a fair go, you know, all of that kind of stuff.

And there really are non negotiables. Whereas I think in other countries that I've lived in, in the Western world, that would be a, an offensive story. And it's like, of course, you need to, you need to respect this person's cultural background. We're going to have to find a man to support it. It's like, no, actually that's corrosive.

That's divisive to a society. It allows for segregation and allows you to maintain some of the cultural practices that aren't so good rather than some of the ones that are wonderful. Because, you know, I think one of the Um, underutilized aspects of a multicultural society is in fact judging one another in the pursuit of discovering what's good and what we can borrow and learn from one another to create a, uh, you know, a, a better, more harmonious society together.

So that's one solution, but it's not the only one. You know, there's many, um, Another solution is found in, uh, in, in, in, in, in countries that have a long run history of migration, like the United States, where things are just made more explicit. Australia is a little bit like this too, because it, you know, it's had a somewhat of a long history.

So, you know, Americans are known for the, you know, like clear displays of emotion, you know, like the broad smiles. Uh, you know, I had a student once say to me, uh, Americans are the only people on earth who label emotions, you know, like if something is funny, they'll say, That's funny. You know, the rest of the world just laughs.

Whereas like, you know, that's funny, you know, that, that makes me sad. Uh, that's wonderful. You know, it's, it's a very, it's so explicit that you start to put a label on it. Right. Um, and that makes a lot of sense. So if you, if you have this, you know, like a few hundred years of living with other people who may not even speak your language, you have to bridge that gap.

And one of the ways is that one thing that we do have that's universal are emotions. And so, although different cultures have different norms about what, when it is to display an emotion. If you're in Japan, for example, you don't have overt displays because you don't need to. Any other Japanese person, because of that shared culture, knows how you feel from the context alone.

Whereas if you are an outsider, you're probably making faux pas constantly. You just don't know it. Um, in America, you can't afford that, so what, what happens is, you know, you've got someone who's, who's Greek, and you've got someone who's Venezuelan, they're living next to each other, and suddenly they have to bridge that gap, and so you want to clearly display, I'm upset about that, I'm happy about that, I'm angry, I'm sad, and so does the other person, and so this leads to a more explicit culture.

And then, you know, sorry, I'm telling a lot of stories, but, you know, um, you know, in, in Russia, right, so McDonald's, after the fall of the Soviet Union, McDonald's decides to set up shop there, and, uh, so, you know, McDonald's is a very, you know, it's a quintessential American company, one might say. Um, and of course they wanted it to be a very American experience.

And so they had to train their Russian workers to smile. And the workers were like, absolutely not. Like, you don't understand in Russia, the people who smile when something's not funny are crazy people. And, you know, when people come in as customers, they're going to think we're crazy because we're just smiling at them for no reason.

They're like, no, no, no, no, no. This is important. You have to, you know, you have to give them the all American smile. And so eventually they convinced them and they, but then they also had to kind of train their customers. It's like, listen, people are going to smile at you. They're not crazy. They're just, you know, they're just, they're trying to be, uh, trying to give you that American experience.

And so customers and, you know, and employees finally accepted that if you're smiling and there's no joke, you might be crazy or it might be American. Great. Um, but that doesn't necessarily translate outside that context. So in a business context, when you're working cross nationally, you have to go, okay, well, these are the norms that we're going to work with right now.

I know they're not the norms that we have at home. I know they know the norms of us, but these are the norms of, of working with one another. And people have attempted to kind of map some of these, you know, there's this book by, uh, I think it's Aaron Mayer, uh, the culture map, you know, there are all these, um, attempts to identify what some of these, these barriers are.

Uh, when it comes to international trade or international coordination. But you know, when the Olympics came around in Russia, they again had to run smile training camps because they didn't want people to be left with the impression that, you know, customer service is bad there. Um, a lot of this is jovial, but my point is that a good immigration policy, good foreign policy, uh, good policies when it comes to, uh, international coordination, international trade, business, whatever, requires us to take very seriously that humans around the world literally see the world differently.

Have very different priorities, very different norms, and finding ways to bridge that by either being more explicit, uh, finding kind of optimal assimilation, or, or many of the other models that I talk about in the book, are essential to good outcomes for everybody. For migrants, for both parties in the deal, for, you know, for locals and so on.

And a lot of that's missing because people are not exposed to other people who think to the, and see the world so differently.

[00:23:42] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in some ways like it's, um, you know, if you have to think about what are the elements that are needed for coordination, cooperation, I mean, being able to communicate effectively and having the right conventions in place, I think it makes sense that that should be an essential part. But there is also this deeper aspect to coordination and cooperation which relates down to, you know, what are the things that individuals and groups and organizations are actually solving for and are those aligned in the same way so that, you know, there's communication but then there is also...

the objectives and the goals. And there is a sense in which the ability for us to coordinate and cooperate is, is, is a little bit puzzling. Um, and you, you mentioned this somewhat in your book. Um, what is it that you think makes cooperation across different scales of, of humans so puzzling? What, why is this not an obvious thing that we should be able to do?

[00:24:37] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, so, you know, in the book I refer to this as the law of cooperation, right? So, just to give readers, uh, listeners, sorry, a little bit of history to this, you know, we... The scale and the speed at which human cooperation has, has, has gone up has been astonishing, right? Like 12, 000 years ago, both yours and my ancestors and everyone on Earth were living as hunter gatherers, you know, spread across the globe.

And we were coordinating in groups like bands. of related individuals at the scale of extended family really, right? Bands eventually became villages of mostly related individuals. We were then, you know, cooperate, we were in cities by around 6, 000 years ago, 10, 000 years ago, let's say agriculture begins.

Um, we then, you know, once you have cities, you have people coming in from different parts of the world. And so now it's like core communication and coordination, the level of people, you know, of at least, you know, based on reputation, you wouldn't go to a Since the Industrial Revolution, we now live in, you know, since the age of mass migration, we now live in Large societies of anonymous strangers, where, you know, you can go down to a grocery store, you don't, you don't know people who live right next door to you, you know, you don't know their names, you don't know their family, this is really unusual, and it's, you know, we, you and I, uh, you know, I guess we, we, we, we, we do come from similar places, but had we not, we still could have met in a room together, and you take that for granted, and so do I, but that's, it's, it's, it's unusual from a cross species perspective, like two strange chimps in a room means two dead or maimed chimps.

Right? Uh, it's, it's strange from a, a historical perspective. Like a few hundred years ago, uh, you know, we have different ancestries. Uh, this might have been a dangerous encounter. You know, you would have to discover why, why are we together in this room? And even geographically, like Australia's fine, Afghanistan, maybe not so safe to, for strangers to meet one another.

[00:26:25] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Hehe.

[00:26:29] Michael Muthukrishna: kind of cut across the math is to go, okay, The scale at which we optimally, maximally could cooperate is the scale at which the per unit payoff. So that's, let's say, per person if we're talking about humans, but actually it applies all the way down to a cell, right?

Like, multicellular organisms work when the per cell reward, the return, And the per individual reward or return is higher than it would be at a particular group size, than it would be in a larger or a smaller group. So think about it as, you know, if you're starting a project, uh, you're trying to write an academic paper, or you're trying to start a business.

If you could start that business all by yourself, write that Nobel Prize winning, you know, academic paper all by yourself, you would. You'd get all the rewards, you'd keep all the equity, it would be wonderful. But instead you have to work with other people, you have to hire employees, maybe partners, bring on, you know, investors.

Thank you. And you bring on enough people such that you have a good chance at cracking a good size of the market and the rewards of that market per individual are higher than it would be taking a salary job, being in a smaller group, tapping a different market in a high group, and so on. That's the optimal scale of cooperation.

And what I argue in the book is that that optimal scale. has risen on the back of our ability to control energy. So the first shift was fire. You know, fire was a way to externalize, uh, uh, processing of food. So instead of like a gorilla sitting there chewing leaves all day, uh, we were able to shrink our guts, weaken our jaws, and grow our brains because we could cook food and make all of those calories more bioavailable.

The next major energy revolution was agriculture. So, as with fire, we were hunter gatherers, we were reasonably successful hunter gatherers, as I said, we'd spread across the world. But agriculture was a solar technology where instead of hunting and gathering, we were harvesting and grinding, concentrating the energy of the sun into growing a surplus of food that allowed us to grow our populations.

It actually made us unhealthier, but it also allowed us to support animals, which gave us a lot of illness. Now, those groups, as I said, were less healthy than the smaller hunter gatherer groups around them. But because of their sheer size and numbers, they pushed those hunter gatherer groups to the margins, right, where they still live today.

So deserts, thick forests, you know, places that weren't suitable for agriculture. And then eventually, that was an era of abundance initially, but then abundance turns to scarcity as the carrying capacity, which in biology is how many people can a particular ecology support. As the population reaches that carrying capacity, now you, you reenter an era of scarcity and, uh, you begin fighting with other agriculturalist groups around you.

You know, these are the wars of Eurasia and so on in Europe. This continues. We're back in this Malthusian world where your loss is my gain. We're trying to take land from one another to support our families, to support our groups until we hit the industrial revolution. Where we find, under the ground, a bunch of stored sunlight.

So, uh, heat turned to black rock that we call coal, and, you know, algae and zooplankton turn to oil and natural gas, is, you know, so photosynthesis turns that into chemical form. And that chemical form gets compressed over millions of years into little, into nature's batteries, if you like. And so we start burning that with new technologies that enable us to launch the, uh, you know, launch that energy capacity way up and increase our, our, the, the, the payoff for cooperating.

So this is really, you know, this is the story of colonialization, by the way. So, you know, a tiny backwater of Eurasia, uh, Britain has cheap and available coal, and the right technologies, and the right insights, because it's part of the Eurasian collective brain, to empower its ability and create the largest empire the world has ever seen, to the point where you and I are speaking across the, you know, across the oceans in English.

And so what you have is a, you know, it incentivizes people to create things like the, uh, uh, uh, East India Trading Company, for example, right? Like these companies that, that, that work together at a much higher scale to capture the resources of a, of a less energy dense, less cooperative group. And we see that pattern, by the way, you know, even today, so, um, there are places that are very energy rich, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the people are not cooperating at a sufficiently high scale to capture that resource, and so instead what happens is a cooperative multinational, Shell, BP, whatever, uh, along, you know, backed by maybe, uh, more cooperative countries come in, work with a smaller group of elite who they cooperate with to access that resource at the expense of a population that cannot you know, engage in sufficient collective action.

And so that's the other side of cooperation. So even though we might be incentivized, like maximally incentivized to reach a higher scale, we are often trapped in lower scales because they're, they're, they're self sustaining equilibria. So in my work on corruption, Um, if you look at the places that are highest in nepotism, they are the places where people rely on friends and family, particularly family, right?

So if you're in a place where the state cannot provision for you, like it can't support you, then you have no choice but to rely on your friends and family to get by. And that means that when you reach government, you're still supporting friends and family. So it's just, you know, it's this, it's a self fulfilling loop, right?

Um, whereas, you know, places like Australia, the land of mates, right, are high in cronyism. you know, Paul, uh, um, um, Paul Froeners and Cameron Murray have this book called Game of Mates, uh, where they track this, you know, the, the, the revolving doors of, they name names, it's a very brave book, actually, uh, you know, or I think Rigged is the new name of the book, um, you know, where, where, where, People move from government to the boards of companies that they help support, and you get this kind of, uh, this, these links, these cooperative networks of mates, really, right?

So cronyism is higher, and that's, you know, it's undermining, actually, superannuations and real estate and a whole bunch of stuff in Australia, and I don't think many people are aware of it. But the point, though, is that, you know, you get these smaller scales that can undermine these higher scales, and the whole thing is a bit dynamic, but at the very least, now that we have fossil fuels, the maximal scale has gone way, way, way up. And I don't know if this is your next question, but that has changed, right? The, the whole point of the book is that that has changed because the scale of cooperation, um, the, the returns from nature's batteries. So it took millions of years to charge those batteries and in a matter of centuries, we've burned them down.

And so, you know, if you look at, for example, some, even something as simple as, um, oil discovery rates. In 1919, one barrel of oil found another thousand. By 1950, one barrel of oil found another hundred. And by 2010, one barrel of oil found another five. So if you buy my argument, it means that the maximum scale is falling, and people are sensitive to the delta, they're sensitive to that change.

And so they begin to cooperate at a slower scale, so you get the rise of the right wing, you get fractionalization in society, you get ethnic conflict, you get more corruption. All of these things are incentivized because the maximum scale has, you know, has dropped down. And that's the world we find ourselves in, and re entering an era of abundance is the answer.

Yeah.

[00:33:48] Matt Geleta: want to get to that very, very soon because, um, yeah, I do buy your, your argument on the importance of, of energy and the energy ceiling. And, uh, certainly there is even a chart that I, that I want to look at, which is, um, I mean, it's a bunch of trend lines from the year minus 1000 BCE until today.

And something very interesting happens at the industrial revolution, but maybe before getting that, just looking a bit abstract at the nature of. Cooperation across those different scales, assuming there is energy abundance, assuming, you know, take that, um, variable off of the table, it still feels to me that at different scales, let's say, the level of the individual, the level of the family, um, the level of organizations, there are still a bunch of different incentive mechanisms that are working within those levels, and it feels very strange to me to just say, okay, well, if there was energy abundance, all of those incentives would be nicely aligned so that countries could cooperate with one another.

Um, and, and, you know, so I'm not sure about that. So maybe we can talk about the, um, mechanisms for cooperation within these different scales. And I mean, I'm very interested in, in the, in the case of whether there is some sort of idealized synthesis across the scales that could make the levels work together.

[00:35:00] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, that's right. So it's not the case. It's simply because you have, you know, the potential. You will therefore get cooperation at a higher scale. You know, I gave you examples of failures of that. So. It's, you know, we have a model where we show that actually once you reach a higher scale, it's easy to get to the next scale because you need only a few more people to get there.

And if the, you know, hunter gatherers have been walking on fossil fuels for, for as long as humans have been around, that doesn't mean they could access it because, I mean, they didn't have the technology. But even if they did have the technology, if you gave them industrial technology, they didn't have the sufficient levels of cooperation to be able to use that technology to, you can move from an agricultural society to an industrial society.

So actually, you know, The point of this book, and I call it, you know, they're laws, but they're laws in the sense of kind of lenses. This applies all the way down to single cells, right? So, initially, all you had was the energy of the sun heating the earth, and you had, uh, volcanic heat. And you had, you know, which is part, partly radioactive and partly just from, uh, the early, the beginnings of the Earth.

And you had maybe gravitational energy, uh, of the Moon, which was, uh, closer to the Earth at the time, making larger tides, sloshing the ocean back and forth. That's it. That's the energy that you really have available to you. And with that, you know, somehow you had abiogenesis. You had the beginning of non life, turning into life.

And you're moving it at less than plant pace, because you don't even have proper photosynthesis. It wasn't using oxygen yet. Yeah. Eventually you get photosynthesis, you have what's called the great oxygenation event, where, um, you know, you learn to use oxygen as part of the photosynthetic process. You pump out a bunch of, uh, of O2, of oxygen, and, um, this eventually kills all of the life that, you know, oxygen, remember, is corrosive, right?

It's what creates rust and turns bananas brown and, uh, um,

[00:36:42] Matt Geleta: be

[00:36:43] Michael Muthukrishna: And it allows you to light a fire, so it's highly corrosive. But eventually, you know, uh, uh, evolution allows it. So what, what is happening is that evolution is looking in this space of cooperation to find that maximal level. Now, once you have, uh, prokaryotic cells, right, these little simple cells, single cells, Cells of related individuals, so multicellular life, can emerge and begin to outcompete those single cells working together.

Eventually you get eukaryotic life, so this very unusual event happens where one cell eats another, and rather than just digest it for its constituent parts, it allows it to survive within it and produce ATP. This is the beginning of mitochondria and ATP. And so then you can now store that energy and use it as needed.

This is, by the way, the same challenge you have with, uh, with current things like solar technologies or wind, right? You can use it when it's there. But when it's not there, you can't store it. So until ATP arrives on the scene, or chemical sugar batteries, you can only use the energy when the sun is there, or the volcanic heat is there.

And when it's not there, especially the sun, you can't. But once you have sugar, stored energy, you can use it as needed. But on the other side, once you have stored energy, it incentivizes other... organisms to evolve that don't even care about photosynthesis. They're like, you know what, I'm not going to like move at plant pace using the energy of the sun to create sugars.

I'm going to eat your sugars. And so what happens is that, you know, you get life eating other life. And eventually this turns into kind of multicellular life and complex multicellular life. So cells of related individuals, uh, but differentiated working together and you. Right? And I, and all animals, are an ecosystem.

Like, we are not, we are, not only are we differentiated, in that you have different kinds of cells all working together, but you also have an entire microbiome of completely different DNA that's required to survive. And you use that to try to out compete other individuals in your society, and together as a group, we try to out compete other groups, right?

Now, if you don't have enough resources to provision your ecosystem, you don't have enough energy, then lower scales will dominate. So you get sick, viruses and bacteria dominate. Uh, when one of your cells decides to go rogue and say, forget Matt, I'm going to grow, you know, I'm going to grow just for me. We call that a tumor.

We call that cancer. It's a lower scale undermining a higher scale, right? So everything I've been talking about is that the realm of what's called inclusive fitness or kin selection, which is that, uh, Genes that can identify and, and, and, and favor copies of themselves will spread at the expense of genes that either can't identify or do not favor copies of themselves.

And this explains cooperation at the level of family across life, across the animal kingdom. A lion comes in. It will kill the cubs of the previous lion that was there because it's replacing it, but it won't kill its own cubs. Uh, if people cooperate with anyone, it's going to be family. Now, you, we go further, right, through direct reciprocity, and other animals do this too.

You scratch my back, I scratch yours, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In those groups, those villages, uh, I knew who everyone was, or in your workplaces, you know who everyone is. Uh, Even if you don't like everyone, you're going to work with them because you're going to see them again. And, you know, you help each other, you, you know, maybe undermine each other.

You do things in this kind of reciprocal fashion and it gets you to the level of cooperation where you have to know each other and regularly interact. But we do, we go higher than that. So once you got to cities, uh, it wasn't just like people we know directly, it's the people we know of. What's called indirect reciprocity, or reputation.

So, you know, maybe I don't know who Matt is, but, you know, I ask around these days, I can Google and I'm going, Oh, you know, he seems like a good guy. Uh, I can, I can work with him on something. Reputation. Now, reputation has limits because the information has to be reliable. You know, maybe you faked all the, you know, the Google stuff, or maybe you, you've got friends who are telling people, but they're all part of the same ring of criminals or something of con men, right?

So it relies on it. And it hits a limit, you know, and, and actually, uh, the exception is in the rule, you know, so, um, we have empowered reputation using that same mechanism, uh, with modern technology. So when you and I were kids, your parents probably said, Hey, don't get in a car with a stranger. Uh, don't go to a stranger's house.

I do it all the time. I get in Ubers, I, you know, stay in Airbnbs. And the reason is because instead of trusting the Uber driver or trusting the Airbnb owner, I trust, there is a securitization of trust where I trust Uber or I trust Airbnb and they manage the reputation. But that was, you know, wasn't there in the ancient world, of course.

So reputation gets you quite far. We think the religion played a role in transitioning us from reputation to institutional systems. So let me just quickly say, So. Most of the cooperation, the highest level of cooperation we see today is institutional based, so it's not that I go after people who steal my stuff, it's that I pay taxes to a well functioning government and the government and the police force and the judiciary do the punishing.

On my behalf. Now there's a, there's a, there's a scientific question how you went from a reputational based system to an, uh, to an institutional system. We think, uh, institutionalized religion did that. So, uh, if you are, you know, two, uh, two people, you know, wearing hijabs or, you know, having a cross and, and you know that that group maintains those symbols, um, then you might be slightly more likely to trust each other, even if you don't know of each other.

Right? And the, the religion serves as a kind of institution. Eventually, once you have well functioning institutions, religion tends to disappear. Okay. So that's, that, those are the different scales. Now, those scales, so we, you know, in 2005, Science Magazine said, the puzzle of how we cooperate is a big puzzle, it's a top 25 puzzle for the coming quarter century, and we identified these mechanisms, and we thought, okay, we've identified the mechanisms, cooperation solved.

So, one of my contributions to the literature says, hang on, hang on, hang on. Wait a minute, folks, stop. If we have all these mechanisms, they didn't disappear, and that means they all exist at the same time. So how is it some, like, if I can choose between cooperating with my family and cooperating with at the level of a nation, why does the nation sometimes win, and why do the, in many places around the world, institutions fail?

And we call that corruption. So, you know, we call that corruption because what you, when we, when I refer to nepotism, I'm talking about Family undermining institutions. When I talk about cronyism, I'm talking about direct or indirect reciprocity. Undermining, let's say, meritocracies. You know, a manager giving a job to a friend of a friend.

A government, uh, a minister giving a, uh, a favor to, uh, their brother. So these lower scales can undermine these higher scales. So then, it goes back to your question, Matt. Like, how do you get alignment? So you get alignment when, you know, there is actually an incentive. to cooperate at a higher scale, and you suppress the lower scales in some way, or you align them.

So, what is good for my family, like working hard, playing by the rules, is also good for society. Or, you know, my, uh, my collaborator, my collaborator and former, uh, advisor, Joe Henrich, uh, along with, uh, Jonathan Schultz, uh, uh, Duman Rudd, and, uh, Jonathan Beaucamp, have this paper where they argue that the Catholic Church in Europe bans cousin marriage.

And cousin marriage, by the way, is found all around the world for most of history, right? Even today in, you know, a lot of places in the Middle East, uh, people marry their cousins, about 40 to 50, 40 to 60 percent of people marry their cousins, right? And, and so what happens is if you're marrying your cousins, you allow cooperation in the scale of kin to ramp up.

So your uncle isn't just your, your mother or your, uh, father's brother. He's also related to you by multiple lines. You get these family webs that, that grow. And those undermine states. They are the basis for tribalism. And so what happens in Europe is that the Catholic Church comes along and bans cousin marriage, along with other changes, uh, to European marriage practices.

And this creates the very unusual and historic beanpole. Right? Where you have kids, mom and dad, their moms and dads, grandparents and uncles and aunts, but they're not all, like, connected to each other because people aren't marrying their cousins. And this means that cooperation on the scale of kin is undermined.

You've undermined that level. And this is a common lesson. So if you look in the, uh, in the research on, uh, anti corruption measures, They all work, the ones that are successful all work this way. They undermine lower scale. So, the revolving door, so in Australia, for example, you know, I mentioned the revolving door.

When you have a cooling off period, or you prevent people from being in the same position for too long, or whatever, you are undermining direct and indirect reciprocity. So, you know, if you have to wait, like if you say, okay, once you are in government, you can't work for a board, or you can't work for a lobbying firm, or whatever, for five years.

No one, people don't typically want to wait five years to get their return. You know, or if you make it longer, if people do wait, you know, 10 years, people don't want to do that, right? And so you've undermined that lower scale and you've, you've helped the higher scale succeed. So we do have a framework of cooperation that allows us to tackle problems like corruption and see them in new light, in a new light.

And that's the whole point of a theory of everyone. It's like a periodic table. We don't have all the elements. There's lots of work to be done. We're at the early stages, but we do know that elements exist, that they form a pattern, and we can begin to use them to stop doing alchemy and do some chemistry.

[00:46:05] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, nice. Um, you, when you talked about sort of aligning either incentives or, um, suppressing lower levels of, um, of, cooperation in favor of the higher level ones. What came to mind there was sort of a classic game theory framing of, of cooperation, a theoretical consideration, which is, you know, positive sum games, zero sum games, negative sum games, where, and everyone will be familiar with this, you know, positive sum is win win, zero sum is I win, you lose, or you lose, I win, like a bet or something.

And, uh, then obviously negative sum, we both lose, like war or something like that. Um, and as you, as you put forward the argument for the importance of energy in your book. Um, I thought through these, um, game theoretic considerations and it really did come to light for me just how important the energy availability is for enabling cooperation at all these various scales.

So, let's maybe then turn to the, um, the question of, uh, energy and energy availability. Um, you mentioned that. Energy, you know, energy availability is maybe not as abundant as one might think. And, uh, I think this was, this was very surprising to me when thinking about one particular measure that you put forward, which is the idea of the return on energy investment.

Um, so could you please just briefly run me through that measure? And then I have a bunch of follow up questions on energy scarcity, energy availability.

[00:47:31] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, so, so the, the measure that I'm, um, that I'm referring to is pioneered by, uh, uh, the energy scientist Charles Hall. Um, and it is basically, it's a measure of excess energy. So it's how much energy you get back for how much you put in. So really what you want is point of view, so, what you want is a very small energy sector, it's about 5 percent of the economy, and you want it to be nice and small because what that means is that, Everything else that energy enables is much, much larger because energy is a great multiplier, you know, uh, Winston Churchill has this, uh, you know, as this quote where he says the amount of work that a man can do in a day, um, with the power of coal, he can do like a month's worth of work in a day, you know, or a week's worth of kind of remember the, what, you know, what he came up with.

But, and then with nuclear, of course you can multiply that even more, you know, think about like you're building an Ikea bookshelf, doing it with like a hand screw or like a power screwdriver energy. You can do it much faster, you know, think about like, You want to travel somewhere, are you going to walk?

Okay, well, walking is converting calories to movement. It's very slow. You can use a more energy efficient animal, like a horse, and you can get a bit further, or more energy. You can focus just on efficiency with a bicycle, you can go further. Um, but if you can have access to a car, by burning fossil fuels, um, or an airplane, or any other, you can traverse the globe in a matter of hours, right?

Whereas that would have taken months before. Right? So energy is this great multiplier on, on effort, on human ingenuity. And the ability to use energy is a function of, uh, EROI, which is, you know, this, uh, energy return on investment. How much energy it takes to get some amount of energy back, to proc to find the oil, to process it, to convert it into something useful, as well as the technologies you have to use energy efficiently. all of, you know, all of economics and a lot of, you know, these energy sciences kind of emerged after the Industrial Revolution, where the energy ceiling was so high for so long you didn't even need to think about it. You could focus on expanding, and I call this the space of the possible, expanding that space of the possible just by focusing on efficiency.

So, economists talk about how to more efficiently allocate scarce resources, engineers think about how to more, you know, come up with more efficient ways to heat a home, or, uh, you know, build a better computer, uh, whatever. Any of these things are efficiency gains, and they also expand the space of the possible.

But at the end of the day, there's a limit to efficiency, right? A certain number of joules or watts is required to heat a home. There's a minimum amount that's needed. And so, actually, productivity gains, you know, these efficiency gains have been slowing down. And in the meantime, the thing we forgot about That energy ceiling caused by the energy return on investment has been falling on us.

Now we are still in, we are, we, I'm not pessimistic about this, but because A, we still have a lot of energy abundance, you know, it, what we're, what we're noticing right now is not that we're in this kind of world of scarcity again, it's that we're noticing a delta, we're noticing a decrease, sometimes artificial, you know, so I point to 1970, uh, 1973, the early 1970s when the, when OPEC was formed, interestingly enough, as a result of the, uh, the Arab Israeli war.

Uh, and the Arab nations got together and, uh, shot up the price of oil. And every, in the last 50 years, every major recession was preceded by a rapid increase in the price of oil. And what happens when oil goes up is that it just slows down economic growth because energy is, it's different to every other resource, like, uh, water, for example, you know, like water is important as well for humanity, but if you have energy, you can get water, you can pull it out of the air.

You know, you could, you could desalinate oceans. You can get water, but if you have water, you can't get energy necessarily, right? It's the great fungi, you know, non fungible multiplier that you can use for everything. So, when the price of oil goes up, industry goes down. You know, it costs more to do all the things.

You might not take that flight. You might not meet that person. You might slow down what you produce. The cost of doing business goes, and so then productivity slows down. Everything slows down. the economy slows down. Now, when you re reach, when you reach, you know, we, we, the peak oil concerns of the time were delayed, um, because we discovered more oil, like offshore, for example, and the fracking revolution, you know, it's delayed this, but prior to that, there was this, like, decrease in productivity.

You know, in absolute terms, so you get the space of the possible, the energy ceiling abundance floor, uh, and the efficiency floor, the energy ceiling is kind of coming down on us. And so the important thing is to reach the next level of abundance while we still have the capacity to do so, because once you get too low, it's hard to governor society that is highly fractured where it's no longer positive.

I'm going all over the place, but, um, when you're in a society that is on the same page. You're Denmark. You pick the best person because you already agree, you know, uh, a social welfare state is the way to go. Let's find the person who's going to, um, implement it best. But if you're a fractured society, like let's say the United States, um, it's hard, you can't do that because the other person is so different.

You're so fractured. That you have to put your person in power, because if you put the other, it's not the best person, your person. Because your person is going to have, and this is also the story of tribalism, right? You put your person because they're going to favor your group. And so what we find is that as energy tries to decrease, that scale of cooperation collapses, the cracks, that all, the fractures that always exist in a society.

begin to come apart. And it's harder to govern that society. And when it's harder to govern, the time horizon of what you care about, so it's hard to say, look, look, we're all the same page. We're all the same people. We need to bet on nuclear and it's going to pay itself off in a decade, be like a decade.

The election cycle is in a decade. I don't know what the world looks like in a decade. No, like just find me more oil or coal or, you know, natural gas, right? You end up with these smaller bets. Now, if you look at the, uh, If you look at game theoretic models, we often set it up as a dilemma. Like, we create zero sum situations because that's what's interesting.

But in reality, we're playing multiple different overlapping games, and what we want is to find the games that are more positive sum. I just want to emphasize this point a little bit more, and then I'll, you know, tell you a little bit more about the energy technologies. So, um, in the book I use the example of, you know, you could be driving around a car park or waiting for a bus, whatever you'd like, but think of, like, the rate of buses as kind of the economic growth rate as a function of energy.

Right? So the buses are coming every five minutes. It's not the case that there aren't fractures in society. Like, people are pissed off that there's inequality. You know, some people have special passes that always get them to the front of the line. And people are pissed off that, you know, some groups, you know, lobbyist groups, uh, unions, uh, ethnicities, whatever, they're letting other people in front of the line in front of them.

They're pissed off. Like, what the hell? What's happening here? But it doesn't matter because another bus is coming in five minutes. At the end of the day, you're going to get your place. You know, right now in California, people talk about the fact that illegal immigrants have an easier time getting into the Californian system, uh, and getting into university places.

And that's okay as long as you can also get a university place. But if the rate of buses slows down because, you know, energy return on investment has fallen, the energy sector has grown, it's now one an hour, one a day. All of those fractures that always exist is crack into something much more. Mumbling and grumbling becomes something a little bit more violent and, and, and, and, and conflict based.

So that's kind of where we are today. And if you look at the energy return on investment numbers for most technologies, there are only a few that can kind of get us out of this, right? Um, if you have hydropower, hydro is amazing. It's dependent on the gradient and the size of the river, but the

[00:55:09] Matt Geleta: I'll actually show, for those watching, I'll show the graph here, because it is, it is absolutely, uh, it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's fascinating. Um, so that graph that you got in your book, imagine that showing up on the screen.

[00:55:20] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah. So hydro, you know, so by the way, this is I'm not like my favorite genre of comments of the book by the way is people guessing at what I'm saying or guessing at my politics and It's like you read the book, you know, I'm not I'm not, you know, I'm not anti like renewables or something I'm just saying that like some renewables a bit hydro fantastic Wind, not so great.

It takes a long time to pay off. It's unreliable. You know, uh, solar is not bad. It's hard to say, right? So right now, the price of solar has been dropping. Solar relies on the fusion reactor in the sky. And I think as a long term bet, you know, like one day, if we ever got to like a Dyson sphere, uh, or a Dyson anything, you know, this idea that we capture a large percentage of the, of our, of our sun's energy and redirect that, that, that could be amazing.

Right. But you've got a battery challenge. We don't have those nature's batteries, those, you know, yeah. The batteries that allow us to fly a jumbo jet on electric power, right? Maybe hydrogen, right? Like maybe, uh, you can, you can store it in hydrogen in some form, and that could be a story maybe, but right now the battery probably exists.

So solar isn't, isn't ideal. Um, The real, the real advance is, you know, is nuclear, and I think we would not be in the current world if, if the nuclear age was, had not been stillborn, due to fears of an earlier generation of just the awesome power that nuclear represents. Nuclear fission, just standard old nuclear technology, today is nothing like the 1950s technologies that we were afraid of, right?

You can't judge nuclear safety, or our ability to, to manage the waste, and so on, like, based on the 1950s. It's like saying, well, you know, if you look at, Uh, safety of cars or safety of airplanes in the 1950s, you wouldn't fly, you know, you wouldn't, uh, you wouldn't drive your car, but we have, you know, ABS brakes.

We have, uh, uh, airbags. We have all of these technologies that make cars much more safe today. We have all these technologies where planes very rarely go down. Same thing with nuclear, right? Waste is actually very small, we've contained it, we've held it on site for ages, they're, you know, you put it in a hole in the ground that doesn't move for millions of years, there's ways to deal with it.

Uh, and there's not a lot of it because of the, the massive density, right? Uh, I, I visited a nuclear power plant, I stood next to, you know, these, once they're in like a car, in the, in the concrete cases. It's completely safe, you know, um, so nuclear fission is, uh, would be, would be, is, is, is a fantastic move forward.

There are, there are new technologies on the horizon that are, uh, like new, like small modular reactors to the size of a football field or two, as well as micro reactors, which are the size of a large car or a shipping container. Um, this allows you to modularize it, right? So you don't have to build this like massive power plant because.

It takes a long time and a lot of money to build these power plants. Um, and so they can take, you know, once you build it, by the way, energy wise, they pay themselves off very quickly just because of the massive energy return on investment on nuclear, right? Uh, but the, you know, and we have spent fuel reactors and so on, but, uh, these modules, they're not old, they're not new technologies, by the way, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

That's what they're using. They're using a modular reactor. So that that would be kind of the next step that will get us back on track. I think of that era of abundance, but. Ultimately, you know, were, were we to crack fusion, maybe thanks to the new AI revolution, maybe the fact that we now have an ecosystem and a lot of private and public investment in fusion, if we were to crack that, and I rely on people like Vaclav Schmil, who say, look, if we're going to get there, it's no earlier than the mid, mid centuries of 2050, um, we would be the first generation of a galactic civilization because there's nothing, it, hydrogen is the most abundant, Um, you know, even tritium, you know, tritium is rare, but it's produced by some of these nuclear reactors.

Hydrogen is the most abundant fuel in the universe, and the return, it's, it's, it's how our sun creates energy, right? By, uh, combining hydrogen into helium. Um, It's just so massive that the next step is like antimatter collisions, but like, that's like, you know, we don't even need to think about that. Or maybe, you know, vacuum energy or black holes or something, you know, like when nuclear fusion would be a game changer.

Like we, we would look to our descendants as even more primitive than, you know, we look at the Middle Ages or something like that. But the key, you know, behind this is not like a, you know, like a technological utopia or something. It's like, as I say in the book, the difference between utopia. And an actually better world is a, is an acceptance of constraints and path dependence, like utopians want to be like, let's start from scratch.

We wipe everything down and we build this new, amazing world. We are not good at designing that, you know, we are the product of, of, of, of thousands of years of cultural evolution, hundreds of years of little changes. You can't just wipe it. What you have to do is say, how do I get to a better world from where I am today?

And from here, there are technologies on the horizon. There are little changes we can make to society that will lead to a better world, which is part two of the book.

[01:00:04] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. I want to explore that more and definitely get a bit more into the topic of nuclear energy, because I definitely share your view that on first principles basis, it feels like it has to play a substantial role in our energy future. But, um, but before we do, there's a little bit of a sort of a seeming paradox in, in all of this.

And I'm sure people will be thinking about this, you know, we've talked about massive improvements in our technologies, including nuclear technologies, but in all of these energy technologies, and At the same time, we've talked about a declining return on energy or energy return on investment. And to me, these, these ideas feel like very in conflict.

We would assume that as technology gets better, we are better able to access energy and transform it more efficiently. And on that basis. you would very much expect that the energy return investment should be something that's monotonically increasing. Um, yet you've, you've stated that for the past century, it's been, it's been declining and that feels very surprising.

So maybe before getting into the technologies, let's explore that a little bit. For what reason is our, um, is our energy return investment declining?

[01:01:13] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, so it, you know, there's lots of moving parts and you're right, you know, like if you have better technologies, like you can use it more. So when we first discovered fossil fuels, uh, we literally kept the kerosene and we burned everything else off. It's like horrifying. Right. It's horrifying because we didn't know how to use it.

We didn't know that you could make plastics and Vaseline and medicines and, you know, obviously like jet fuel and car fuel and, you know, all of these different things with that. So initially, all thanks to those technologies, I don't have the numbers, but the energy return on investment was probably increasing because you get more energy out of that same block of.

Oil, let's say, or coal or whatever, thanks to this, but at some point, like, there's a limit, as I said, to your efficiency, your ability to use that, and then other factors come into play, which is the availability of that, of that, of that energy, of that, that source, right? And so initially sweet and available crude, uh, was, was, was sweet and available, you know, it was, it was available everywhere.

Not everywhere, but you know, it was, it was widely available. It was easy to access. It was literally just pouring out of the ground. You, you know, people, people very quickly became very, very wealthy just because it was pouring out of their ground, but eventually that runs out and you have to go after the more difficult to access sources, right?

Uh, you have to start fracking the, you know, you got to go after the oil that's offshore, uh, maybe the tar sands, you know, like these other more difficult to access places. And so then you need to expend more energy. to process that, you know, less, uh, refined, less available source. And so you're paying more energy in to get the same amount of energy back.

So energy declines, but this is only for fossil fuels, right? Like, uh, right now, if you look at the numbers, it's in single digits for solar, but as solar, you know, has gotten cheaper and we get better at it, those numbers might actually increase, right? In that phase, but then eventually it might. Level off.

It's going to be dependent on things like, uh, the price of copper or other other necessary materials to build those panels. And there's an awful lot because of the density of solar. You need a lot of space in order to, uh, to meet current energy needs, right? So, you know, I think it's a back of the envelope calculations that other people have made, which is like to meet the electricity current electricity requirements.

In the United States, uh, would require all of the surface area of all the roads in the States. That's a lot of, that's a lot of panels, right? And, and, and incidentally, it's not just the panels, it's also transmission. So you have to be able to transmit that, uh, and, and, and, and change, you know, change where it's going to be located.

It's only good if you're like, by the way, I have no idea why, why solar isn't more utilized in Australia. Like you've got plentiful sunshine, you know?

[01:03:56] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's, um, I think that the main reason is the capacity, the ability of the energy grid basically to, to, um, yeah, it's a starter problem. Yeah, you've got to, you've got to fix up the energy grid, it's expensive and that's basically it.

[01:04:09] Michael Muthukrishna: Interesting. Yeah. So, you know, so you get, you know, so my, my mother lives in Queensland, you know, uh, Australia sunshine state, 300 days of beautiful sunshine. She has panels on her house, but it took, still took her by the way, uh, a few years to pay that off in the sense, like for it to pay it off in terms of energy and money.

Um, so you do have a startup cost and This, this, this speaks to another point, which is that you want to pay that startup cost when energy is still cheap and available, because otherwise

to, to pay that startup cost means taking energy away. If you think of energy as fundamentally underlying all economic productivity, goods and services, right, uh, through efficiency or through actual availability, this is what underlies it. It's the battery that powers our society. It doesn't matter how fancy your technology is if you can't charge it.

So. If you've got, you have to reallocate some of that away from schools and hospitals and food and all, you know, and vacations toward building the energy grid. And so, in the meantime, what that leads to is inflation, right? It leads to, uh, less energy available for, for all of the things that we do in life.

So there is that, that initial startup cost. Now, eventually it might level off, but you want to do it when you can still afford to do it. Because as energy becomes more, uh, difficult to access and that, that return drops, um, everything just becomes a lot more. you know, it becomes more challenging. So it was easier to build.

reactors in the mid 20th century because we had such high energy availability. You know, I saw some numbers where like you could catch like a helicopter ride cheaply, you know, in, in, in California because it was just so, you know, energy was so available. Now it's harder. Not only is the regulatory environment more difficult, uh, but it's costly to do.

Now that we know for a fact that technologically we can do it because China has over 200 reactors, uh, uh, you know, being, uh, Uh, you know, uh, being developed, which means China is going to enter the nuclear age all by itself. Korea is good at building them. You know, they built some for themselves as well as in the Middle East, on time, on budget, which the Western world seems to struggle with.

Uh, here in the UK, there's a move toward nuclear. Uh, in the case that I try to make for this country is look, we built You built the largest empire the world had ever seen on the back of cheap and available coal. You need, you then, you know, were rescued by the North Sea oil. You're going to want to do it again, but you're going to have to, you're going to have to be at the forefront of the nuclear revolution.

Anyway, story is basically that EROI for, uh, for nuclear is probably going to go up. Solar is probably going to go up. It's what is falling is, is the EROI for fossil fuels because of the availability and the ease of access.

[01:06:47] Matt Geleta: Yeah, let's, um, let's dig further into nuclear because, you know, looking at this chart in the book and I'll flash it up again here, um, just to state some numbers, I mean, energy return on investment for. nuclear as it stands today. Uh, there's a factor of 75. So basically for every joule you put in, you get 75 joules of energy out.

For solar, it's actually right at the bottom of this current chart at 2. And fossil fuels, where do they sit, so coal is somewhere at 30. Just looking at this chart, you would immediately think, okay, nuclear has to play a role. Um, but you have also said, you know, you have to look at, um, the, you have to consider what this looks like over time.

And, and, you know, you said by the same token, this chart could, could immediately, uh, It could suggest that solar does not play a role, but as you've said, energy return investment is likely to increase over time for solar. I think people worry with nuclear, the sort of opposite problem for nuclear, that, um, yes it's great now, but it's taking maybe a short termist view.

And investing in a bunch of nuclear now in a hundred years time, two hundred years time might not have been the right decision. And that's not how you want to be set up. Um, for all the reasons that we know about everything from, um, the fact that nuclear waste is produced and sits around for ages, um, to the fact that it can't be turned off.

Um, and so how, how do you see the role of, what is the optimal role of nuclear at this moment for, um, addressing the energy crisis?

[01:08:14] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, I mean, I think you want, you want some nuclear as a kind of, uh, baseline backup because it is reliable. And by the way, there are, there are different designs, right? As a, you know, as a, uh, as a colleague in the nuclear industry would put it, um, all of the reactors that have, that have blown up Three Mile Island, Fukushima and so on.

You can, they're almost like giant kettles, you know. Um, they're very different to some of the newer designs where the, you know, the reaction and, um, uh, and where the power generation is happening are very, very, very much separated. Uh, and, and you can, you know, slow down.

[01:08:48] Matt Geleta: Mhm.

[01:08:49] Michael Muthukrishna: with the spent fuel reactors, you know, effectively stop the reaction the thorium reactors, you can, you can stop these reactions.

Um, so there, there is a place for nuclear, but you're, but I think the bigger point that you're making is that, um, look, the technology keeps growing and this is a massive upfront investment. Right? Um, and how easy is it to convert to a newer technology once it comes along? Those old reactors that we built like decades and decades ago are still going strong in places like the United States and France.

Right? They are still producing. The newer technologies are, are producing, uh, at a higher EROI, more safely, uh, and cheaper. So I think, Even now, it's worth building some, but the way around that, I think, is the small modular reactors and micro reactors where you don't build these, like, big plants that are also, like, potentially, um, so, by the way, the issues with nuclear, from my perspective, are less about, like, the waste, um, or, or these kind of safety concerns and more around, um, proliferation, like, okay, what are you going to do for, do you want Yemen to build one?

You know, do you want, you know, Zimbabwe to build one? Like, is that okay? Like, we got to share nuclear technology there? Um, as well as targets for, for, for, for, uh, for conflict. Like we came awfully close in Ukraine, right? With, uh, with, with, with, with missiles flying around, like. That's, that's, that's my concern.

So the way around that is, is, is to go small. So the small modular reactors at the moment, they're not as efficient as the bigger reactors, but that's like, you know, it's, it's, it's ongoing technological. Then what you can do is you can just bury it. So when you build a building deep under the ground, you have your modular reactor that powers that That block, that area, that sector, right?

It's deep under the ground. It's cut off from everything else. You've got, you know, the same way that I said, a little bit of concrete is enough. You've got lots and lots of ground protecting you. You have to think about things like groundwater and so on, but you can have these, uh, hidden away if you like, and lots of them so that none of them is a particularly, uh, as a particular threat.

And because, as I said, the fuel it's like, you know, a thousand times as it or 16, 000, if it's enriched, uh, as energy efficient, you don't need a lot of it. Like a ton of coal is literally like a thumb worth of enriched uranium. Um, so what I would say is. I don't want to speak on behalf of the nuclear industry.

I don't want to speak on behalf of nuclear scientists, but as a society, we ought to be thinking about this and looking at those technologies and looking at the people who work in this area and say, we, you know, like, you're obviously nuclear scientists, you're the solar industry, you're wind, whatever, you've all got your incentives, but we as a society need to make a decision.

First, we need to recognize the importance of energy to everything that humans do. The second, we need to like decide between these technologies and decide what is our energy portfolio going to look like? So I think, you know, Solar is going to play a part. I'm less of a fan of wind, as I said, uh, nuclear is going to play a part, and in the meantime, you know, maybe some of the natural gas will kind of get us through this period.

[01:11:48] Matt Geleta: Yeah, how do you think about the, um, the tension between, um, I mean, there, there was a large movement, large group of people that are more focused on the sustainability angle. Um, and so not so much thinking about the energy crisis and how to produce energy effectively, but more about. Are we doing this in a sustainable way?

And actually I think frankly a lot of people are thinking about reduction in energy usage for example, as a big lever here. And when I think about that in light of the argument you put forward about the energy ceiling and how we sort of need a certain level of abundance in order to cooperate effectively.

It feels like there's a big tension between those two things, between sustainability, moderation of use, um, and on the other hand, having abundance, which, which enables more effective cooperation. How do you think about this, um, well, is there a tension? And, and if so, how do you think about it?

[01:12:43] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, uh, I mean, first off, I, I think it was a real mistake that, um, nuclear, now it is, but nuclear wasn't folded into that kind of sustainable, uh, story. Uh, and a kind of green revolution. I think people now recognize that it ought to play a part. It isn't, uh, it isn't the same as burning up millions of years worth of stored carbon and pumping it back into the atmosphere.

Um, it's not the same at all.

I should tell, you know, let me, let me, let me tell a little story. So I, um, uh, you know, I, I spent my teenage years in Queensland, in Brisbane, and I went to university at the University of Queensland. Um, I was very interested in kind of big questions. So I, you know, I. I was like, maybe I should do physics or philosophy or theology or human behavior, and I did a dual degree with engineering, um, because, you know, I also like to manage risk, uh, you know, and I felt like I should probably get a career that's like portable because I like to travel and I like to move around, um, and.

Initially, I was applying cognitive design to, to engineering in terms of smart home technologies and safety critical systems. Um, but I, it was, I think it was around 2007. I tell the story, you know, I, I watched Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and I, it really got me. I was like, oh man, this is, this is a serious threat.

Climate change is coming. This is a problem for my generation. This is a problem for me, my children, you know, you know, my early twenties. Um, but I started to read like the IPCC reports. I started to read, you know, the Pentagon. So I was like, you know, okay, fine. IPCC, like, I believe it, but the Pentagon, you know, if it's military, they're probably much more practical.

So I was reading the Pentagon reports. I was like, what is the world going to look like? Under climate change, and it seemed to me that like Gore and everyone else was right about the problem, but the solution in terms of mitigation didn't make a whole lot of sense because already, if you looked at like I knew from engineering, if you look at the efficiency, we are way more efficient than we've ever been.

Right? Like, you know, the whole idea of, like, turn off the lights to save the planet, like, that makes no sense anymore. Because LEDs are so efficient, they're approaching 100 percent efficiency. Leave them on all day, all night, it's not gonna make a damn difference compared to even one flight anywhere, you know?

Um... Like all of our technologies have become more efficient, and that's not really the problem, and we also live in a world where, so if your theory of change, like if your theory of how we make a better world requires a change either in human nature or fundamental tool. evolutionary principles that apply across the animal kingdom, then you're going to require a level of coercion.

It's like communism, right? It's, it's, you know, um, E. O. Wilson, the entomologist, uh, you know, he works on, uh, on, on ants and bees and things like that. And, you know, he said, uh, communism is a great idea, just the wrong species. Works great for ants. You know, like you're, you're, if you want to say like, look, you know, everybody just contributes what they can and everyone gets it.

Like, that's not how people work because we are in a status competition with one another. So in a world where every country Is competing with every other country and every company is competing with every other company and every person wants a little bit more than their neighbors. If you want to try to change that, how, how do you plan to change that?

And if you cannot change it or the coercion required is not necessarily. A level of coercion that is good for society by any metric. Then you're gonna, you, you, you need a, you need a better model to think about, well, what does the future look like? So the first thing that occurred to me is like, we are going to enter a climate changed world.

This is the early 2000s, right? And that means we need to think about how do we deal with the problems of a climate changed world? So I'm reading these reports and I'm like, okay, well, one of the problems is, some of these things are just a pure engineering problem, carbon capture, whatever. They're engineering problems, maybe I can work on that, but there's lots of people working there.

The area that I saw ignored was. was the human side of it. What do you do when you have And massive amounts of, you know, massive displacement because a million Bangladeshis are underwater or an area that was previously fertile is now experiencing drought because there are climate winners and there are climate losers.

This is one of the really inconvenient truths is that some places get better. Actually, Canada is going to get more, more usable area of milder temperatures, whereas the Middle East is going to get drier. Uh, and there's going to be floods in other areas. South Pacific is going under water. What are you going to do with millions of people streaming to your borders?

You can't ignore them. The first version of this that we saw was the Syrian migration crisis, right? So I don't know if people know, but in Syria, uh, the crops failed, and so a lot of rural, uh, people moved into urban areas, and the infrastructure couldn't cope with that. There weren't enough jobs. There weren't enough, uh, you know, places and anything.

And so people... We're unhappy. And when you have that kind of zero sum environment, then people eventually start to protest and protest turned violent. And the state cracked down. Now you're getting into specific geopolitics, but the state cracked down and you have millions of refugees streaming into Europe.

And this interacts with a lot of the things I talk about in the book. You know, so you have Germany going, uh, wir schaffen das, you know, we can do it, with a naivety about what that really represents. Now, I'm not saying, you know, you have to deal with this, but it's like. If you have all of these guests turn up at your home, you need to have enough groceries.

You need to invest in the infrastructure. You need to think about the cultural challenges. Because that decision will, has changed and will change Europe for decades to come. So, how do we, how do we step out of this? Well, we have one choice. It's like you, somehow you're going to do this degrowth thing.

You're going to convince everyone to have less. You're going to enter this kind of era of scarcity poverty. But the moment you trigger zero sum situations, you trigger a situation where Everybody's taking from a limited pie and your win is my loss and my win is your loss. And so we are no longer, capitalism and that competition between countries and, and, and, and companies and people has led to massive reductions in poverty.

And a better world by any metric, as far as we can see in terms of child survival rates, lifespans, health, um, uh, anything you might care about, we live in this, you know, kind of better world. Overall, but then we have like these periods, right? Of like, of, of recession and depression and, uh, and things not being so great.

So the argument that I make is rather than try to reenter a world of scarcity or degrowth or whatever, what you want to do is to reenter an era of abundance. Because when you have energy abundance, you can choose how you use that abundance. The cleanest countries. Not the ones that use the most energy, those are the West, but the ones that look after their environment and try to engage in conservation are often the wealthiest countries, who don't have to worry about feeding their citizens or having enough hospitals, and so, like Australia, they can invest in rejuvenating the Great Barrier Reef or, uh, you know, protecting, uh, areas of land as forest and not cutting it down.

If you are in an, if you're, if you're, if you're scarce and you have lots of people, then you have to make hard decisions like cutting down parts of the rainforest in order to farm more land. So, so what I argue is that rather than kind of sustainability and stagnation, what you want is sustainable growth, where you push, you push the next level of abundance and you use that abundance to solve the many challenges that climate change and the period in which we grew thanks to fossil fuels have created.

So you use this new clean era of solar or nuclear or, you know, whatever mix you've got to fix some of the problems, but you re enter growth and hopefully, you know, uh, start to think about resources beyond the planet.

[01:20:12] Matt Geleta: interesting that you mentioned Australia, there is a case example because I think this points to something that um, a lot of people would put forward as a bit of an objection to the sustainability framing you put forward. So I think it is true that, you know, Australia has abundance locally and invests in sustainability measures and we do have, you know, relatively clean environment and so on.

A lot of people would say that that is because, uh, our. You know, it is at the expense of, of other places, you know, production happens elsewhere and emissions happen elsewhere and we are actually, in effect, um, just shielding ourselves from, from those, um, implications and, um, and so potentially the whole growth at all costs or, or maybe growth at many costs picture is not as rosy as one might say.

[01:20:59] Michael Muthukrishna: so just to be clear, I'm not advocating growth at all costs. Um, I'm advocating a kind of sustainable growth that, you know, does recognize the real costs, but considers how you can pay with, pay for it, not by becoming poorer

or cutting, you know, Uh, you know, uh, metrics, but actually becoming wealthier and using those resources to deal with some of the problems, right?

Um, and you're right

that, you know, some of the, some of

the ways that, uh, many developed

countries, uh, look better is by outsourcing the, the dirty stuff, uh, away, right? To, to other, other poor countries. but I think

the, you know, the, the,

the way to, the way to kind

of thread that needle. is that when that happens, you know, when, when a lot of things get outsourced, those countries begin to grow. And what we want to be able to do is to help those countries and encourage or maybe even incentivize them to, uh, to grow in a cleaner way.

And as they also reach levels of new wealth, they also want to try to clean up their environment. And then the problem shifts away a little bit, right? So look at China. You know, where a lot of, um, the dirtiest aspects of growth took place, but now, or at least, you know, up until recently, China was a lot wealthier and, and as a result of that wealth, they were able to use it to, um, start to clean up their environment.

And the thing about China is, you know, if they decide something, they're like, it's going to be green here. We're going to wipe out all of the cars here. We're going to do this. You know, they're able to do that at a, at a, in a way that democracies or liberal democracies just can't do. Um, but there's the pattern that you see is again, it's kind of like, they want to, people want to live in a world that is cleaner.

They want to live in a world that is nice. And once you have the wealth to do that, you do. So I see that more as a problem of inequality than as a fundamental problem of growth, if that makes sense. another way to say it is like you enjoy a relatively higher quality of life at a lower

energy cost because you allow these other countries to pollute and do things in a, in a, in a more difficult, but if you have more energy abundance, you can have that same quality

of life at a similar price because the energy is doing the work for you and

you're encouraging other countries to do it more cleanly.

So it's not a problem of growth, it's not a problem of sustainable

growth, it's not a problem of abundance, it's a problem of, inequality.

[01:23:16] Matt Geleta: Yeah, and, and that might actually lead nicely to the next point because, um, one of the, one of the statements that you've made in your book is that the 21st century might be the most important in human history, and I think there are many things that feed into that. Inequality is certainly one of them.

But I would love to hear your thoughts on, on that statement. Um, you know, we've, we've been around for a relatively short amount of time, hopefully, uh, in, in the scale of, of how long the future is. And, uh, I'm hoping that there are many more centuries to come. Um, and there have definitely been many important centuries in the past and, and there will be in the future.

What makes the 21st century such a pivotal

century in your view?

[01:23:56] Michael Muthukrishna: Yeah, so the reason I say that is because we are on the cusp or we, we have to deal with this energy transition and these, and the energy transition is happening at the same time as a kind of, um, uh, I would say a second industrial revolution. And I'll say, and I'll say what I mean by that in a second. So, um, There were these moments, you know, as I said, the discovery of fire, the discovery of agriculture, the industrial revolution, the first industrial revolution that are truly transformative, right?

And getting it right has implications for our species for centuries to come. And each time that happened, it was kind of a bigger shift, right? Fire was a big shift, but it took a long time. We were hunter gatherers for a very long time, reliant on really fire and a few sparse kind of tools. Right? And agriculture was a big shift.

And then we were agriculturalists for a very long time. Then, you know, we relied on a few, a few sparse mechanical tools. And the industrial revolution, we, I would argue that there has not been like a fourth industrial revolution or a third industrial revolution. We are living in the shadow of the first industrial revolution, which was truly an energy revolution and an efficiency revolution.

And we're still in the shadow of that now, before the industrial revolution was the enlightenment powered by ideas flowing across the continent in Eurasia, uh, through pamphlets and arguments and coffee shops, uh, among people. And this was kind of laying the ground, if you like, for that industrial revolution, it gave us the technology, the human capacities, and so on.

And they do eventually lead to formal,

uh, Uh, compulsory education, where a

lot of that knowledge was, was downloaded into most of the population, raising the average and so on. So right now we're going

through what I argue is the second enlightenment.

That's what the internet and social media and now AI really are.

It's a

second enlightenment that is

raising the average of more

people. It's swapping

ideas through the things that make you angry online And empowering this kind of innovation. But what we're waiting for is the true second

Industrial Revolution, which is an energy

revolution that then, you know, shoots the human rocket to that

next level.

And that is going to happen, or not happen, in the 21st century, depending on the decisions that we make. And so that's why I consider it to be, you know, and I'm not alone in this, you know, but consider it to be the most important century in human history because it's, it's, it's at a much, much larger scale.

It's at a much higher, like if we crack fusion, for example, like so we could, we could, you know, delay this thing a little bit with with vision for a lot longer. But if we crack fusion on, we would be the first generation of a galactic civilization that has profound implications for our species, right?

Once we're mining asteroids. Or we have colonies on other planets. It's impossible, like it sounds like sci fi until it happens, right? Like AI sounds like sci fi until it happens. A pandemic sounds like sci fi until it happens. Uh, it's a little bit like that. So, so because of the Second Enlightenment and the swapping of ideas, the growing inequality and the challenges that we face around climate change, uh, and the, and the The critical decisions we ought to make because of, to do with our energy abundance or, or energy scarce future.

That is why the century is the most important. And in the book, you know, I, I don't want to read it to you, but there's a, there's a section where, you know, I say, look, there are two futures ahead of us. One is this era of what you might call sustainability, but really scarcity, a Malthusian trap of, you know, things going down and down and down as we lose our ability to cooperate at that higher scale, where we are fighting with one another more and more.

becoming more and more difficult to govern. And we reenter that world before the industrial

revolution. That's one future. And the other future is one where we have opportunities for more people. We increase the size of our collective brain. We spark a

creative explosion. We develop new means of governance for the 21st century.

We crack that energy ceiling

and enter the new era of abundance that makes life better

for more people. Makes life even better for, for

more people around the world. That's the choice we face in the 21st century.

[01:27:52] Matt Geleta: Yeah, well, it's a, it's a, um, it's definitely an invitation to have a look at the book. And then I must say that, you know, every so often a book comes along that really addresses so many topics across the spectrum. And this is one of them. It's, um, it really does do a lot. So, I mean, I was like, congrats on, on, on this book and getting it out there.

And it's definitely a very interesting and worthwhile read. And on the topic of books, as we bring it to a wrap, one of the favorite questions from my listeners is on the topic of book recommendations. Um, and in this case, I'll, I'll put it to you, um, which, which books have most influenced you on your journey?

[01:28:27] Michael Muthukrishna: So, uh, I do have some books that, you know, I would recommend in this sphere. There's a long further readings list in, in, in my book. Uh, so books that deal with, uh, the history, um, you know, uh, ancient human migrations, David Reich's, you know, who we are and how we got here. Uh, Books like The Silk Road by Peter Frankopan, which is like a fantastic kind of really big picture history of the world.

There are excellent books on the new science of cultural evolution and dual inheritance theory, which I call a theory of everyone. You know, Joe Hendricks, The Secret of Our Success and The Weirdest People in the World. Kevin Leyland's Darwin's Unfinished Symphony. Rob Boyd's A Different Kind of Animal.

Leslie Newsom and Pete Richardson's A Story of Us. Lots of stuff there, you know. Pinker's work on kind of the decline and violence, uh, Better Angels of Our Nature, for example, uh, Enlightenment Now. Um, there's, I mean, there's excellent books in all of these spheres. What this book is really doing is putting, bringing all of those pieces together under a, um, A common framework, right?

And, and, and I would say people who enjoy Yuval Harari's Sapiens, uh, which I think of, my book is, like, maybe Yuval's maybe better on the history, I'm obviously better on the evolution stuff. It's complementary, I suppose, but it also plugs some of the gaps that I saw in, in Yuval's book. Um. Guns, germs, and steel, why nations fail, you know, this, this book is, is in that sphere, although I should say, you know, in the book, I make fun of, I've, I've caught a books that I consider to be the one thing that explains everything, uh, Toti books, you know, like I love that genre, they're so fun, but at the end of the day, the authors know, I know everyone knows one thing does not explain everything.

Energy isn't, energy is one piece of this puzzle. It's an important piece, but you have to think about the way the causal arrows feed back on each other, go in multiple directions. You need a framework for thinking about how energy, and efficiency, and cooperation, and evolution work in concert, in the devil's details, how they manifest in people's everyday lives.

And that's what I deal with in the book. But let me answer your original question, which is, you know, what were the books that influenced me growing up? Uh, I read a lot of sci fi. Uh, you know, I loved, uh, Uh, you know, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, uh, I was a big fan, probably my favorite sci fi author was Arthur C.

Clarke, um, I loved, you know, 2001 A Space Odyssey, uh, Childhood's End, uh, you know, Rama, and I, I think sci fi is unique in, in, in, in genres in that it forces you to think about the world, especially like hard sci fi, like sci fi grounded in real science, you think about the world not as it is, but how it could be.

If you relax some assumptions you project into the future and then you think about it in a real world. What would that world look like for humans and especially for children? I encourage you all to get your children to read more sci fi because I think it, it opens people's minds. There's one book. I want to, you know, I want to highlight that.

Had a profound impact on me, which was, uh, it's an obscure book by a very, if you look him up, he's a very strange person, uh, Arthur Koestler, uh, he wrote this book called the Sleepwalkers, I think 1989 or something. So I was, you know, I was a teenager when I read it. Um, so it's, you know, the, the subtitle of the book is like, you know, man's, uh, changing place in the universe or changing understanding.

And it traces our understanding of cosmology from like Mesopotamia to the present day. And. Yeah.

[01:31:44] Matt Geleta: I

[01:31:54] Michael Muthukrishna: a better understanding of the world, and often what it holds people back, are assumptions that they make about the world, the things that they think they already know.

You know, I see a lot of comments online, you know, where people are like, Oh, he's trying to say this, he's trying to say that. And look, if you already have the answer, you already know how the world works, then okay, that's fine. You know, like, find something that confirms or denies. But you'll see in this book, there's some things you'll agree with, some things you don't, but it hopefully gets you to think.

And so he argues, like, the things you take for granted. The things you just assume, of course that's correct, are the things that hold you back. So in, in, uh, in cosmology, we assumed, look, it's obvious, the earth is flat, look around you, man. You know, and it's clear that the sun is tracing the sky from east to west.

It's obvious. It was obvious to people, because literally that's what their eyes showed them. But when you let go of that assumption, you say, actually, look, The Earth is, is, is rotating around the Sun, and it's rotating in an ellipse, and it is one of many planets rotating, and in fact, what our Sun is one of many stars, you know, rotating around a, uh, supermassive black hole in the Milky Way, and one of many galaxies in

the universe.

When you let go of that

assumption, that simple assumption, you get a better model.

of the solar system. You know, Einstein, right? Like, uh,

the major shift

for Einstein was time. Time feels like, what is time? Time is just what we all experience. It's the same

for everyone, everywhere. But when you let go of that, you know, you relax that assumption in your equations, you get a better model.

of space time, and you get a better model of the

universe. And it's an important model that

lets you build technology. So our GPS systems have to account for the

fact that time is flowing at a different rate,

high up above the

Earth, away from our gravitational well, compared to what it is down to Earth.

And if you don't account for that difference, your, your GPS is going to be wildly inaccurate. But it seems like such an obvious assumption that why, you know, why would you, why would you let it

go? And in... That, that, that, that way of thinking about it caused me throughout my career to say what are the things that I just assume, take for granted, that everybody's taking for granted, that is right in front of us, that other people are missing,

and when you let go of that, you can make these kind of breakthroughs, and I think the breakthrough, and it's not me who came up with this, but the breakthrough that allowed us to develop a better model of humans to be able to even boldly and, even remotely claim that we are on the cusp of a theory of everyone, is that human intelligence is governed by evolving software, and human society is not the result of geniuses or innovators per se.

It's a collective process, and there is a thing called humanity that's kind of emerging, and it's making decisions. And we're beginning to understand how that collective brain is making decisions. And we're beginning to understand how that software is evolving. And we're beginning to realize we're not all that bright at an individual level, but we, there is an illusion of explanatory depth that makes us think we are.

And if that all sounds crazy to you, and, and runs against your assumptions, I would say that's a good thing. You know, it's like, The fact that the, the earth is rotating around the sun and not vice

versa. It's like the fact that time isn't flowing the same for everyone. Have a look at the book,

see what you think, map it against your own life and see if it offers a better model that can account for more phenomena and, and turn chaos and, and confusion into something that's a little bit more understandable that allows you to make predictions that are a bit better.

Anyway, Arthur, Arthur Kosler, uh, the sleep Walkers, I don't know if you know if it's still relevant, but

certainly it. influenced me as a teenager.

[01:35:19] Matt Geleta: Yeah, no, beautiful. I mean, all of that pertains very much to the namesake of this podcast, Paradigm, which is recognizing the paradigms that we operate in and sometimes stepping out of them. So I could not have come up with a better conclusion to the conversation myself. Um, Michael, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me.

It's been a pleasure.

[01:35:37] Michael Muthukrishna: I appreciate it, Matt. Can't wait to listen to the episode.

He's the author of several books on these topics, as well as articles in the New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, and other respected publications. He’s also appeared as an expert on CNN and the BBC, and at the United Nations, NASA, and elsewhere.

We discuss:

• The Flat Earther phenomenon

• The Antivax movement

• The rise of disinformation campaigns on Facebook and Twitter

• Social media algorithms and attention-based business models

• How individuals can protect themselves against disinformation

• Conspiracy theories

… and other topics

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Guest website: https://leemcintyrebooks.com/

• Books:

  • On Disinformation

  • How to Talk to a Science Denier

  • Post-Truth

  • The Scientific Attitude

  • Dark Ages

  • Respecting Truth

Timestamps

Timestamps for audio episode

0:00 Intro - disinformation

5:05 Flat Earther phenomenon

9:30 What is disinformation?

11:40 How big of a problem is disinformation?

16:40 What should we do when the truth sounds conspiratorial?

22:15 Origins to Big Tobacco

27:50 Amplification of disinformation

31:25 Is social media to blame?

34:30 How should social media companies be regulated?

46:30 Social media business models

50:15 Information diet - what is healthy?

56:45 How can individuals protect themselves against misinformation?

59:25 Book recommendations

Introduction: On Disinformation

A core theme of this podcast is the question of how we come to know what we think we know.

Today’s conversation with Lee McIntyre is about the architecture of our contemporary information environment itself, and what this means for the kinds of information we tend to be exposed to. As you’ll hear, our information ecosystem has developed several problems that in recent years have been spiralling out of control in a fairly drastic way that we’ve not really seen before. This has led to an explosion in the amount of mis- and disinformation people are exposed to. And this is happening on several levels all at the same time, with the various levels having a compounding effect on one another.

On one level there is the autonomous proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms. A growing number of people rely on social media for their information, which in and of itself is not a problem. These can be incredibly useful, rich and dynamic information sources. However, because the business models of social media platforms depend on attracting and retaining user attention at scale, they are designed to feed users individually curated and highly engaging content. And as a side effect of our biological and cultural evolution, our attention tends to be drawn towards more inflammatory and conspiratorial content, and content that confirms existing biases rather than challenging them. So this is the direction on which our social feeds are algorithmically curated, at a speed and scale that’s vastly greater than anything we had even just a few years ago.

On another level there is the deliberate spreading of disinformation by malicious actors. In one sense this is not new. People have been lying and deceiving one another for thousands of years, and often as part of large, coordinated propaganda campaigns. But disinformation has never existed at anything remotely close to the scale, low cost, and high quality that’s become possible in the past few years. Today the barriers to generating extremely convincing disinformation and broadcasting it to millions of people online are close to nonexistent, and the number of people exploiting this fact has been growing extremely quickly. Lee and I discussed a few examples in today’s conversation, and I must say the figures are truly worrying.

With that context in mind, this episode is somewhat of a public service announcement. I don’t want to come across as scaremongering, and I certainly don’t want to perpetrate the same misbehaviour I’ve just been criticising by exaggerating the scale of this problem. But mis- and disinformation are very serious problems that are worth being aware of, so I hope you find this conversation useful.

Before we get going, if you’re finding this podcast valuable, please do share so that others may benefit as well. There’s a fast growing and increasingly active community of Paradigm listeners all around the world, and the reason for that is that listeners have taken the time to spread the word. Some have even kindly donated to the podcast, and for that I am deeply grateful.

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

​

[00:04:16] Matt Geleta: I'm here with Lee McIntyre. Lee, thank you for joining me.

[00:04:19] Lee McIntyre: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:04:21] Matt Geleta: Lee, I want to have a conversation with you about our information environment and how it is we come to believe the things that we do. Uh, let's start off with conspiracy theories. Um, when it comes to conspiracy theories and science denial, the archetypical example one often hears is that of flat earthers.

You know, people who believe, or at least claim to believe, that the earth is flat. And, um, I know that you've done some research in this area and you've even taken part in an international, uh, flat earther conference. Um, could you tell me a little bit about that and maybe expand, you know, at its core, what is it about the way that these people see the world that enables them to believe something like the flat earth idea?

[00:05:04] Lee McIntyre: it's a very compelling two days at the Flat Earth International Conference, because what you realize when you go in, is that they're very serious. Um, going into it, I'd had a number of friends say, well, these people are just trolling. They don't actually believe it. They're just having fun. But when you get there, you figure out that they're actually dead serious.

And they're also joyous, they're happy to see one another because they've been fairly isolated in their own communities and The you know, the conference is as much about community as it is belief And I think those two things are you know related in a way I'm not sure I can account for what allows them to see the world the way that they do except to say that virtually everyone that I spoke to had a an origin story.

They had some story about how it was that they had become a flat earther, and it always involved a sort of a radical, um, lack of trust in other people. Uh, it was, maybe they'd had some sort of a breach of, uh, a breach of trust. Some, something had happened in their life. And once they believed that people couldn't be trusted, then they wanted to see how far that rabbit hole went.

And so it, uh, it unfortunately led a number of them to very seriously believe a conspiracy theory that every pilot, every scientist, every teacher, every government official in the world was in on the conspiracy about flat earth.

[00:06:40] Matt Geleta: Yeah.

I find it really interesting, this particular conspiracy theory, because, um, you know, for some theories, there, there's a clear motive behind them. Uh, you know, for example, there might be political motives. There is a, there is a reason that somebody wants to propagate a theory like this. And then for, for those cases, I don't find it very surprising that there are many adherents, but the, the flat earther case, I, mean, I I really can't think of what a, what a compelling motive would be for somebody to sort of promote this view.

Um, and so, so what is it about this particular. theory, this idea that has attracted so many people. What did you learn there?

[00:07:13] Lee McIntyre: I, I don't, I don't know. I mean, they don't get anything out of it. Um, uh, and so, I mean, I think they genuinely believe it. But, you know, if you're looking for sort of the material cause of it, you know, what, what would be behind it? I, I mean, it's hard because Climate denial. You sort of think, well, you know, that's something where maybe there's an economic interest or a political interest.

Even vaccine denial. You know, you'd think, well, you know, maybe there's something that they're, uh, that they're getting out of it. It doesn't seem that way for Flat Earth, at least, you know, to the contrary. It's always seemed to me that they're sacrificing a lot. A lot of them get kicked out of their church.

They lose family members. They lose jobs over this. Now, people can... have that same thing happen to them over, you know, being anti vax or climate denial. But let me put it this way. I've come to the conclusion that Most science denial is caused by disinformation. That is that people don't just happen to believe these things, but they're compelled to believe them because somebody is out there creating a falsehood.

Uh, and you know, lying to them. And, you know, they believe it, and then they go along for the ride. And it's the person creating the disinformation that's benefiting from it, not the person who believes it who's the victim. You can see that with climate denial. You can see that with vaccine denial. There are nefarious people behind it, sometimes money, sometimes political power, who are, you know, profiting by this.

I don't know anybody who's profiting from Flat Earth. I don't know how it could possibly be the case that there's somebody behind it who's benefiting from having all these people believe that the Earth is flat. Maybe I'm naive, maybe it was there in front of my face, maybe it's hidden, I don't know. Or maybe my theory is just wrong and it's not always disinformation.

Or maybe this is just the anomaly. But Flat Earth in some ways... Seems unique. Uh, I've studied science denial for decades now. And, you know, evolution, climate denial, GMO denial, vaccine denial. I kind of know where those come from. Flat Earth? I don't.

[00:09:27] Matt Geleta: Okay. Well let's, uh, let's get to the topic of disinformation, which is the main topic of your most recent book on disinformation. Um, people will be very familiar with the concept of misinformation, which is basically just, you know, false or inaccurate info. Um, but disinformation on the other hand is knowingly false information.

It's information deliberately designed to deliberately mislead and obscure the truth, often malicious purposes behind it. How does disinformation differ from, you know, good old fashioned lying? People have been lying for as, as, you know, long as one can remember. Um, but it feels like the word disinformation is, has only been in the public consciousness for, um, you know, relatively and lying?

Hmm.

[00:10:10] Lee McIntyre: Yeah. Well, disinformation is a type of lying. Not every lie is disinformation, because I think of disinformation as being a coordinated campaign of lying. It's where, you know, there are a host of lies. that are strategically told toward a specific purpose. And I mean, you, you can find that, but it's not just, you know, random lying, or even just merely lying that, you know, benefits the person who's a serial liar.

Disinformation is, is warfare. Disinformation is the, the, you know, the weaponization. of information and it actually goes back about a hundred years that the modern Disinformation the term disinformation goes back to the 1920s when v. i Lenin appointed felix dzerzhinsky as his first director of the cheka during the russian revolution He wanted to find a cheap and effective way to fight back against the counter revolutionaries And he found it in the invention of uh, you know disinformation warfare so Lying has been around since human speech, I'm sure.

But, you know, lying can be opportunistic. You know, a lying can be random or careless. Disinformation is not like that. Disinformation is coordinated, organized, and planned as a strategic campaign.

[00:11:38] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I find it a little bit hard to get a gauge on how big of a problem the disinformation crisis or phenomenon really is. You know, you mentioned climate change earlier. When I look at something like climate change, I think there are metrics that people look at and the scientific consensus around how we're doing, you know, things like concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

But when it comes to, you know, measuring how much of my information diet is disinformation, I find this Very hard. I really have no idea. And there's this general sense that it's a lot higher than we would like. Um, but I don't have a good way to gauge it. And my sense is that for many people, the feeling is the same.

How big of a problem is this?

[00:12:22] Lee McIntyre: You ask the question of the moment. I was just looking at my Twitter feed in which one of my philosophical colleagues was saying, what's all this alarmism about misinformation? I mean, yeah, it exists, but it's rare. And the people who consume it are the people who go looking for it. And it doesn't have that great of an effect, et cetera, et cetera.

Whereas I see disinformation as being much more insidious and widespread than that. Now you might think, well, of course, he's just got a book on it, he sees it everywhere. But, I mean, the reason that I wrote the book is because after doing a little bit of research and asking the question, how did denial get as big as it is?

How, how did this become so prevalent? I started to think about... The fact that deniers aren't born, they're made. They're created by somebody else wanting them to believe a falsehood. And so then the question comes, why would somebody want you to believe a falsehood? Now, I don't want to go too far into sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself, but what I can say is that there's evidence that disinformation is more widespread than we think.

That is, I can probably name things out there. that you have heard, maybe not that you believe, but that you've heard, that you always wondered where it came from, but it turns out to be from a disinformation campaign. And I can give you an example of that if you're, if you're interested. Now, you've read my book, so you already know what I'm about to say, but the, the one, the best example that, uh, I, I use these days is Most people have heard the idea, the false idea, the rumor, that there are microchips in the COVID vaccines.

But, and thousands of people died from that stupidity, right? They, because they didn't take their, um, they didn't take their COVID vaccines because they were worried about tracking microchips. Where did that come from? Uh, it came from Russia. It came from an intelligence campaign out of the SVR, which is the, The new version of the KGB, which perhaps didn't invent the idea, but they amplified it, which is where, you know, the, the real track is.

Uh, in April 2020, there was a story in the Oriental Review, which is an online English language publication. Which said, any future vaccines developed in the West will have tracking microchips in them, courtesy of Bill Gates, who holds patent 666 on this technology. Then it said, share on Facebook, share on Twitter.

The following month, 28 percent of Americans thought there was something to this story. Now, what nobody knew, until much later, is where that idea came from. And it's now been shown through the American Defense Intelligence Agency, and was reported in the Wall Street Journal. That that's where it came from.

But here's the problem. People still don't know that. I use that example. When I speak to large groups, if I can get a hundred people in a room, I'll say, well, how many of you have heard that there might be tracking microchips to vaccines? Almost every hand goes up. And then I say, how many of you know where that came from?

I've only ever had a couple of people put their hands up and they both worked in army intelligence. Now that the idea here, I mean, I didn't have to break into CA headquarters to find this. It was in the wall street journal, but it was behind a paywall and the cable news networks didn't pick it up. So many people don't know it.

So that's just one example of a, a very virulent life threatening, um, disinformation campaign that was right under our noses. And most people don't even realize it. And I think that that is also what's happening for. The millions of people who believe Donald Trump about the 2020 election being stolen and all sorts of other denialist beliefs that you could name where there's a denier, there's usually a disinformer again, flat earth, maybe the exception, but, uh, I, I think it's, it's more widespread than we think

[00:16:38] Matt Geleta: Yeah, there is an issue here and I want to get to the topic of just the information environment and the architecture of our information systems in a little bit, but you know, there is an issue here with that particular example. Um, you know, the people who believe it, they're seeing it everywhere. They're seeing it on all the different social platforms.

They're, they're seeing it on the, whatever news channels that they subscribe to. Um, and, uh, then, you know, they hear it from you that there is potentially another story behind it. And I can imagine from that perspective, you know, your view and, and, you know, what turns out to be the correct view sounds conspiratorial.

It sounds like, Hey,

[00:17:16] Lee McIntyre: Doesn't it sound, it sounds conspiratorial except it happens to be true. Now that's what every conspiracy theorist would say. But I mean, there is evidence actually behind this, the, the defense intelligence agency of the United States, uh, discovered this. I mean, uh, there is somebody could claim, well, they're lying.

That this is just part of a conspiracy. I mean, this is, you know, what, what always happens, but. There are actually real conspiracies. I mean, there are sometimes conspirators and conspiracies. What marks off the difference between a real conspiracy and a conspiracy theory is that a conspiracy theory doesn't have any evidence, or it has minimal evidence, and then the person covers over it by saying, When there is no evidence.

Well, that just shows you how good the conspirators are, but I'm not doing that. I'm saying where they can fact check me. They can fact check me in the, in the wall street journal. Uh, if you can get past the paywall, uh, and also there, there were several other, uh, at the time, um, uh, news reports on this, which cited the defense intelligence agency study.

[00:18:26] Matt Geleta: There is, um, you know, when it comes to the topic of, you know, updating one's, updating one's beliefs based on evidence, I know you've, you've framed the scientific attitude as one that is open to, to updating beliefs based on evidence. Something that concerns me, I don't know if you come across this, but, um, you know, if, if one looks at.

the concept of Bayesian updating. So you have some prior belief about the world, you're exposed to new evidence, and on that basis you update your belief. One can actually show that depending on what your prior beliefs are, the same evidence can direct people in different directions. You know, and an example here would be suppose you have two people, one of whom actively distrusts the information source, And one of whom trusts the information source.

Um, let's say it's the, the, the vaccine example you gave, then in hearing information, you know, such as such as vaccines are safe as an example, that information can be interpreted in the opposite directions and can actually further divide people's views. So how does one get around that in the case you just put forward, you know, you're, you're presenting evidence and.

If one had all the time to do their own research to the same level as you had, they would get to the same conclusion. Um, but, you know, absence of that time, all they've got is, you know, the evidence coming from you, and if they have different, uh, sort of prior beliefs about how trustworthy that evidence is, it could even serve to further divide.

How do you think about that issue? Hehe,

[00:19:52] Lee McIntyre: such a sophisticated question, and I'm not going to be able to solve the conundrum at the heart. of statistical reasoning, uh, you know, right here on the spot. What I can say is that there is a fierce debate in the, uh, you know, in, in logic, you know, in, in people who think about Bayes and confirmation theory, you know, in the, in the philosophy of science about this.

And I'm one of the folks who think that Um, you're right that there are, that there is a sort of a, a sense in which, you know, the Bayesians will say, well, it doesn't really matter where you start because once you've gathered enough evidence, that's all washed out. You know, whatever your prior hypothesis was, it will eventually be swamped by the evidence that you gather.

Okay. Which I, I took to be the, the, um, criticism that you're making. But as you point out, depending on what that prior position is, that prior hypothesis, if it's perverse enough, that can really screw you up. So, you know, I'm, you know, I, I've read a number of people who have, um, You know, I mean, they've written whole books criticizing Bayesian, uh, Bayesian thinking, you know, so that, I mean, this question about prior probabilities, how much they should count, that, you know, this is, this is all a big debate going on in philosophy of science.

And in the scientific attitude, I'm, I'm relatively agnostic about how that gets solved, which is to say, I don't have a horse in that race. My claim is that evidence counts. There are competing theories in the philosophy of science about how you should count evidence. And, you know, the Bayesians are, you know, they've got a pretty big tent on this, but I don't think they're necessarily the last word on that, uh, on that question.

And I can, uh, point you, um, towards some other resources to read if you're, uh, if you're interested. I don't want to go searching on my bookshelves right now while we're, while we're on air, but there, there are some, uh, terrific, uh, resources. Uh, things, one is, uh, Deborah Mayo, Deborah Mayo's, uh, book, uh, I, I forget the title of it, but Deborah Mayo is maybe the, the, one of the most important critics of Bayesian reasoning who has some things to say that I, I find pretty interesting.

[00:22:13] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. I'll link, uh, I'll link that resource into the show notes here. Um, you know, someone who you talk about in your work, um, and someone actually spoke to a couple weeks ago on the podcast is, uh, Naomi Oreskes. And, um, we talked about her book on free market economics, the big myth.

Um, but we also touched on her earlier work on big tobacco

[00:22:35] Lee McIntyre: She's wonderful.

[00:22:36] Matt Geleta: Various propaganda

[00:22:36] Lee McIntyre: She is just

[00:22:37] Matt Geleta: Excellent. Really, really excellent work. Um, and obviously Eric Conway as well. Um, her coauthor, um, in your work, you, you reference them and you draw a connection between their work on sort of the big tobacco situation and the more modern day phenomenon of science denial and, and even what you call reality denial.

Could you explain these phenomenon and their links back to the big tobacco.

[00:23:05] Lee McIntyre: I'm not going to reiterate Naomi and Eric's work, because you've already had them on, and I'm sure people have heard it. And they've done all the... You know, the brilliant spadework already to show that the tobacco strategy from 1953 that the executives came up with was followed by the climate deniers, acid rain, the ozone hole, all, you know, all the...

I mean, it was the blueprint for science to know for decades afterward. The piece of it that I... picked up. The piece of it that, you know, I, you know, I was reading their work and I was reading some cognitive scientists who were talking about, you know, the, the five, um, path, the, the, the five stop lights along the road to science denial, you know, the, the types of, uh, bad reasoning, the techniques in their reasoning, for the people who believe it. And I was thinking about all this and it occurred to me It's the same, what the science deniers are doing following the tobacco strategy is the same strategy that Trump is following when he is denying the 2020 election. Let me, let me very quickly give you the, the five steps. This, this is due to, uh, the Hufnagel brothers, uh, Mark and Chris, uh, originally, but it was also developed by, uh, Stephen Lewandowski and, uh, and John Cook.

And it goes like this. Every science denier. Uh, cherry picks evidence, believes in conspiracy theories, engages in illogical reasoning, relies on fake experts, and thinks that science has to be perfect to be true, to be credible. Those five steps are, you know, individually necessary and jointly sufficient, to use a philosophical term, for science denial.

You know, you, you, you do not find a science denier who doesn't hit all five of those. And if somebody hits all five of those...

[00:25:10] Matt Geleta: um,

[00:25:11] Lee McIntyre: They're a denier. And it was the day that I was listening to some, I don't know how much I can curse on your broadcast, but let me just say some poppycock or bullshit on cable news about the Arizona ballot recount, uh, after, you know, Trump had made his claim about the fraudulent election and they were looking for bamboo in the ballots in Arizona because these were allegedly ballots that were flown in from China.

So there's your conspiracy theory. And they were cherry picking out the ballots that they thought were questionable. There's cherry picking. And engaging in illogical reasoning. And they were relying on fake experts. Uh, the, the company that they used to do what's now called the fraud it. They're, they were the fake experts.

And I, so as I was counting it up, I realized they hit all five steps. But the topic here is not science denial. It's something else. It's denial about an election. But it's the same. It's the same pathway. It's the same technique of reasoning, right? So the content is different. The technique is the same. And that's when I really got the idea to write on disinformation because I realized that there was another step in it.

Uh, Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway paved the way for this. The Hoofnagle brothers paved the way for it, but I wanted to say, look, look, this is the same as what Trump's doing now. He's just using, he's creating disinformation and he's engaging in a denialist campaign, maybe about something different. A different topic, maybe a different motive.

I mean, the tobacco industry wanted more money, the climate, you know, the fossil fuel companies was, you know, climate denial was about money. Well, what Trump's doing is really maybe a little bit about money, but it's mostly about power. But I mean, the point is that a disinformer has an agenda. They have something that they want that is furthered by having other people.

Believe their falsehood and that's what I saw and that's when I I don't think I coined the term, but that's when I realized Reality denial was also a thing and there there was a straight line I think I think I even say this in the book. I think there's a straight line from the tobacco executives meeting at the Plaza Hotel and December 1953 And the steps of the Capitol on, uh, January 6th, 2021.

I think it's a straight line of a denialist campaign from there to there.

[00:27:52] Matt Geleta: so you mentioned in your book that for disinformation to be effective at scale and, and these campaigns you mentioned from, you know, the big tobacco industry and elsewhere, um, three things need to be true. You know, you, you need to have creators for the disinformation. You need to have amplifiers that amplify the information, uh, disinformation and believers.

You have to have people who believe it on the other end. And when I look at disinformation from an historical lens and, and think about these three things in isolation, it seems to me that potentially there hasn't been a drastic change in, you know, the number of, of creators or the creator or believer categories.

Um, and I would love to get your thoughts on that, but what, what does seem true to me is that potentially the amplification category is very different today than it has been in the past. And maybe a lot of the large scale problems that we're seeing come down to this amplification step. Does that view seem right to you?

Is amplification to a large extent at the, at the heart of the disinformation crisis we're seeing?

[00:28:56] Lee McIntyre: I think it is. I mean, uh, there's, it's very hard to measure how many disinformers there are, but I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the, you know, the, the, the same as it has been. But the, the thing that one notices now in the age of social media is that, you know, even one person who's a disinformer can have a pretty big microphone and do a lot of damage.

The statistic I found compelling is that if you look at the, uh, In 2019, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 65 percent of the anti vax propaganda on Twitter was due to 12 people. They call them the disinformation dozen. Now, so you might say, well, that's not that many people amplifying it.

And so maybe that hasn't changed that much. The number of amplifiers either, though, I think that probably has, but with social media, the same number of amplifiers. can get their message out to the four corners of the world, and that's the problem, right? It's, um, if you look back at what happened in the, for the tobacco executives, they had to run a whole public relations campaign.

They had to pay for full page ads in American newspapers. They had to, you know, go out and talk to newspaper editors and, and, uh, writers and, you know, get their word out. How hard is it now to get the word out? You go to Twitter or Facebook. If you've got a website, you've, I mean, it's, it's so much easier now.

And, and I have to say one thing that's probably changed is that the quality of the disinformation is higher. Uh, especially in an age in which we have, you know, AI. You know, there are more technical assistance. Um, one of the barriers to the creation of good disinformation is To have people communicating in the language that, you know, you have your target audience and, you know, that has been a barrier.

So, if you look back at some of the Russian memes around the 2016 election, they're, they're laughable. They've, they've got elementary grammatical mistakes. You, you could tell that's not, it's not who they say it is, yet they were effective enough. I think now probably the quality has. gone up or will go up very soon.

Um, but the corollary to what you just said is that if we're going to fight disinformation, the best possible way to fight it is to clamp down on the amplification. If that's what's making it worse, then if we clamp down on amplification, that will make it better.

[00:31:24] Matt Geleta: One of the most common amplifiers that will come to people's minds is that of social media. Um, and I've, I've read, you know, Pew Research released, uh, an article last year that says something like 50 percent of Facebook and Twitter users claim that they get a substantial portion of their news and information from these platforms.

And, um, many people are aware that this could potentially be a problem because I mean, for many reasons, but one key one is that these, these feeds that people get are curated individually. And that means individuals are kind of getting a personalized. view of what's happening in the world and they will not be the same across individuals.

And so that's one problem, but there are many others. And so I would love to turn to the question of news media, but social media specifically, to what extent do you think social media is, um, you know, one of the root problems or, you know, lies at the heart of this disinformation crisis that we are experiencing?

[00:32:21] Lee McIntyre: it's a really important question because, I mean, disinformation goes way back. It was invented in the 1920s in Russia, as we've spoken about. But they didn't have the internet back then. And the thing with disinformation is that it's, it's actually fairly useless unless it's amplified. So, I mean, the, the cost of getting disinformation amplified used to be high enough.

That it was just, you know, really hard for people to, to get the word out. They'd have the, you know, the mimeograph sheets. Um, you know, if they could afford it, they'd take out an ad in a newspaper. But, you know, what do you do? Well, now it's easy. Now you just have to go on social media and they will amplify it, uh, for you.

Um, the, in 2019, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 65 percent of the anti vax propaganda on Twitter was due to 12 people. So 12 people can do a lot of damage. And you know, for this, you can blame those 12 people. And you know, I, I think we should. But I think you can also blame the social media companies for not deplatforming.

So, I mean, one thing that they can do is content map moderation. They can play whack a mole. As they see inauthentic accounts, take them down. As they see false messages, content moderate. Put a little box below to say that, you know, this claim is disputed or, you know, here's where you can look for more truthful information.

And they've done that sort of thing. What they're very reluctant to do is to deplatform people. And that's, I think, what they primarily need to do. Uh, the night before Elon Musk took over at Twitter. I checked and found that eight of that disinformation dozen that I just spoke about were still on Twitter.

You can't blame that on Elon Musk. They were there the night before he took over. So while were eight of the 12 top disin informers on vaccines still on Twitter the night before he, he took over. It makes no sense to me.

[00:34:29] Matt Geleta: Yeah, but what about the counter argument that says social media enables everything to be put out in the sunlight? And, you know, if you've got somebody or some body or some system moderating content, moderating, you know, users of the platform, then that will introduce a certain political leaning or a bias of some sort, and the views that would otherwise get public scrutiny are not now finding their way into...

the sunlight. And so if it feels like, you know, suppose we could moderate content and moderate, um, uh, you know, usage, uh, then we have to make a call about which, you know, political leaning we, we choose in many cases. How do you, how do you think about that sort of counter argument?

[00:35:09] Lee McIntyre: Well, it's a very popular one right now. Elon Musk himself has made it. Others have made it. Basically the claim is that. It's one of free speech. It's one of, um, against censorship. You know, we don't need somebody deciding what's true and what's not true. Get it all out there. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

And the truth will out. We'll discover it. You know, people will, in this crowdsourced world, they'll figure out what's true and what's not. Doesn't work. Um, and it doesn't work because in a polluted information environment, um, it's very difficult for people usually to, to figure out where that pollution is, uh, is coming from.

I'll, I'll say a little bit more. The, I think that some of the arguments about censorship are disingenuous. Because it's not as if we're saying that people with wrong opinions, or even false opinions that they know to be false, can't express them like we should throw them in jail or, you know, muzzle them. All we're asking is that they not be amplifying those voices. The social media companies, uh, don't have to amplify someone else's lie. And suppose you were a radical free speech proponent. Suppose you thought that everybody had the right to speak. Well, this comes up sometimes in the United States where we have the First Amendment and we find ourselves in a situation where the Ku Klux Klan wants a parade permit.

And we have to give it to them because under the First Amendment we have to do that. Even if we hate what they're going to say. What we don't have to do then is go down to the rally and help them pass out their flyers. That's amplification. That's what Twitter is doing. So, this idea that... All we need is to just let everyone speak and truth will rise to the top. Do we believe that in science? I mean, do we, do we want to just let the fraudsters in? I mean, scientific fraud is a terrible thing and I think it's worth thinking about why it's a terrible thing. It's because it pollutes the information stream where people are trying to figure out the truth. So what if somebody said, Oh, yeah, but you're just censoring the fraudsters.

Just let them in. And I'm not talking about censoring the gadflies or the oddballs with the radical theory that might be true. I'm talking about the people who have cheated, lied, who know that their theory is not true. Should we give them a voice at the table? I don't think there are very many people who would.

Uh, agree with that because it would ruin science in the same way that I think disinformation threatens democracy One more thing if elon musk believes so much in the importance of transparency And that's why he wants to give everyone a voice. Why doesn't he make his algorithms transparent? Why doesn't he have a board of governors who are not affiliated with twitter? where you know, you blind all user data and these experts can look at the Algorithms and warn in advance. This one's dangerous. This one is going to kill people. I mean, we always have to wait for a whistleblower to come forward, and then we find out once the damage is done too late. So if Elon Musk really believes in transparency, open up your algorithms, let the sun shine in, and let's find out what's in them.

[00:38:37] Matt Geleta: Yeah, in one lens, I'm really sympathetic to, to that view. And I think a lot of people would be, but there is a different lens if you, if you consider these, you know, businesses as businesses and you consider the business models that they need to run in order to operate, um, you know, a lot of these platforms, let's take YouTube for example, but, um, basically all of them.

In some sense, work on a business model that relies on, uh, attention, you know, either advertising or they're selling something. And if you just play through the logic, you know, suppose it's advertising, the platforms make money from advertising. This means they have to attract and retain user attention.

And this means that inevitably, you know, the content that does this and the strategies that do this is they're going to proliferate. And unfortunately, coupled with our human psychology, that does often tend to be conspiratorial and inflammatory. And so it feels like in one sense, if we're making this ask of these businesses, we are also, um, so putting them at a, at a disadvantage.

Um, or, you know, we ask them to go against their business models. I could think of, for example, um, candy companies or something. Uh, you know, the product is candy. It's inherently unhealthy for people. Yet, this is also the product that people are choosing to, to purchase. And, uh, In a way, the, the sort of moderation that you've just talked about could be considered to be like analogous to, you know, banding certain types of candies and, um, and so how do you, how do you think about the, the business model underlying this, uh, this whole social media issue?

[00:40:13] Lee McIntyre: I mean, businesses always complain about regulation. They don't want anything to stand in the way of, of making profit. But why are business regul why are businesses regulated? It's for fear of public harm. It's probably why there's no more cocaine in Coca Cola. Um, you know, it's, it's, I mean, could they make more money if they did that?

They, they probably could. Um, look, Why are social media companies the only business that's protected from lawsuits for libel, slander, defamation? Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, they're protected from lawsuits if they leave something up. That's horrible, that's defamatory, that's false.

They're also protected from lawsuits if they take something down that's perfectly innocuous but they just don't like it. They have a, they have so much more freedom than other forms of media. Television is regulated, radio is regulated, newspapers are regulated. The same story that appears on Twitter. If it appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times could get sued.

So there's a real asymmetry, and of course nobody in business wants to be regulated because they can make more profits if they didn't have it. Imagine a cable television landscape that was unregulated. CNN has ratings problems. They have for years now. What if they started airing public executions? They could triple their ratings overnight.

But they don't, and I think that the reason that they don't is not necessarily some moral reason. It's regulation that would not be allowed, but we don't have those sorts of regulations for social media. I think they're coming. I mean, look, one thing that we could regulate is transparency. What you were just talking about.

Couldn't we, couldn't the U. S. Congress Uh, uh, regulate Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, that they had to have an independent panel of experts looking at their algorithms to assess in advance. Whether it was causing, you know, more suicide amongst teenage girls or, you know, whatever it is that you wanted to, to check, they could regulate that without the government being the fact checker in chief, without having the government decide, you know, what was true or false, simply to regulate them in some way.

I mean, if you look at the laws surrounding all other media, TV, print, all of it, um, it's, it's quite a bit compared to what they have in. social media. So yeah, they always, the cigarette companies complained when they had to start putting the labels on their packages too, but people still bought cigarettes.

[00:43:13] Matt Geleta: Do you think this um, this argument that you put forward suggests that there is more of a problem of, of bad systems and incentives than, than bad actors? Or, I mean, obviously it would be a combination of both, but I'm interested in your thoughts on to just where this line lies, um, because You know, in a sense, if social media companies currently are in a situation where there isn't much regulation, um, I do find it very hard to believe that they wouldn't behave somewhat in this way, or at least that the product wouldn't turn out somewhat in this way, uh, simply because that is the direction that the business model pulls in.

Um, but, but I'm not, I'm not sure to, to what extent, uh, this is also driven by bad actors. So what is your sense? Where does that line sit?

[00:44:01] Lee McIntyre: I think bad incentives create bad actors. I mean, you, you can shape human behavior through incentives. I mean, isn't that what government does? Isn't that what law is? I mean, I'm thinking of that book, um, nudge. Few years ago about behavioral economics. I mean, you can nudge people in the direction of saving more for retirement by having, you know, automatic enrollment on your first day in a new job, and then you're free to opt out of it.

But if you're automatically enrolled, then you're more likely to leave the money where it is through inertia and you'll save more. So, I mean, we're, it's perfectly okay to change the incentives to try to change the behavior. The question I have right now is, what's the incentive for social media companies to change?

What's the incentive for them to change their algorithms if they're tweaked for engagement? They're making a lot of money. And they'll also tell you, and maybe rightly so, that whatever they do, they're going to get criticized. If they do more content moderation, they get criticized from the right. If they do less, they get criticized from the left there.

They might feel like, well, we just can't win. So let's just make money. They do have a social responsibility. Um, there are genocides that have been caused from disinformation on Facebook. The Ro, the Rohingya people that, that was, you know, a famous example in Mark Zuckerberg after the fact said, well, we're going to get more language, uh, and you know, cultural content. folks on this. Well, yes, too late. And why didn't they do it before? Because they weren't regulated. They had no incentive to do so. I mean, look, people, people can play within the rules and still make a profit. But if there are no rules and they're making a profit anyway, why would they want them? I mean, why would they want that kind of regulation?

So I think this is a case where the incentive, where the incentives lacking, it creates bad actors. It makes people do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. I mean, would car companies have put seatbelts in cars without government regulation? And I don't know the history of this, but my suspicion is, this was not an idea that the car companies came up with by themselves.

Now, maybe I'm wrong about that. Regulation is for the public good.

[00:46:31] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I, I, I think some people, um, you know, look towards this optimistic scenario in which, you know, the car companies, for example, do choose to do it on their own because it leads to a better. You know, more valuable end product for the user. And I think, I think a lot of people think about, um, business models for, for media and content in a similar way.

Um, you know, there's a proliferation of individual creators who are very thoughtful about their, their business models, for example. Um, but what strikes me at, at bottom is always going to be a, um, you know, a. Basically selling, selling attention in some way, even, you know, subscription to the wall street journal, for example, you're still selling something that the users want.

And I wonder in principle, then if it is possible to extract oneself from the human desire to, to look at inflammatory content, to look at conspiratorial content, you know, and maybe that flips then the question around to the question of individuals and how. Individuals should be thinking about exposing themselves to information more than, um, you know, what we should be doing about the information system itself.

And so maybe let's turn to that topic because I know you've put a lot of thought into this, uh, in your book. Um, with that lens, what do you think individuals themselves should be doing to guard themselves against, uh, being exposed to myths and disinformation?

[00:47:57] Lee McIntyre: The first thing they have to do is to realize that they're being exposed to disinformation. I think that that's a threshold question. You know, you, you said a minute ago that over 50 percent of users at Facebook and Twitter, that's the main place they get their news. If you do a poll to ask people.

Whether they think that they've been exposed to false information on Facebook or Twitter, something like 4 percent will say that they have, when the actual number is, you know, closer to 80 or 90 or even 100%, I mean, yes, we've all been exposed to it, they just can't tell. So, I mean, the first thing that we have to do as individuals fight back against disinformation in the environment that we currently live in is to Wake up to the fact that we're in an information war that the people who are competing for our eyeballs Are not all good actors acting in good faith trying to get us to believe true things Because it benefits us, you know, and i'm not just talking about we are the product of free You know free stuff on the internet free free websites, you know, they're they're getting something out of us I'm talking about the fact that we are duped often Uh, people are taken in, go down the rabbit hole, as it were, on ideas that were invented for someone else's profit.

That's the real danger with this information. The problem is this story that I think I told you about earlier, where the... microchips in the vaccines was invented by on a Russian troll farm. Do they care that people are not taking their COVID vaccines and dying because they're worried about microchips in their vaccines?

I don't think they do. So that's the problem. I think that people have to be aware that they live in an environment in which that kind of thing not only can happen, but it's actually quite common. That's the first thing they can do.

[00:50:13] Matt Geleta: Yeah, when I, when I put this to an analogy like diet or nutrition, for example, you know, I think although nutrition science is, is not in a, in a very sophisticated place, I think there is this awareness, um, that. The traditional diets in many countries are not very good for us and, um, people in, develop systems to sort of protect themselves from it, they develop certain rules and, um, you know, it's debatable what, what is really working, but there are certain things that are known, you know, highly processed foods, it's known that, uh, this is, is generally not good for you, uh, very sugary foods and so on.

And so individuals do construct their own lifestyles in order to protect themselves from, you know, overindulging, overexposing to these. unhealthy types of diet, and I wonder if there's an analogy to information diet here as well, um, where if an individual thinks about their own information environment that they create, you know, once they've got that awareness that you talked about, how does one construct an information environment such that it is, if not a healthy information environment, at least not an information environment that's killing us and, uh, and overexposing us to these malicious things?

[00:51:25] Lee McIntyre: It's hard, isn't it? Because the inflammatory stuff is very titillating and you want to look at it. You want to see it. It's, I mean, it's, and I'm, I mean, I'm talking about everybody. So how do you self discipline not to read a story that makes fun of a candidate that you don't like?

[00:51:47] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[00:51:48] Lee McIntyre: if you know that that story is going to contain a few lies, or at least hyperbole. How do you, I mean, when that kind of thing is easily available. And you're right, it's just like the diet problem. If you've, if you're trying to keep healthy, but you can't really afford good organic food, and the fast food with all the fat and salt and sugar is cheaper, and it tastes good and it's right there, you're more likely to grab it.

So again, one thing can be awareness. I mean, for the information diet that you're talking about, um, I think that one of the, one of the most dangerous things has happened is that people have become of a mindset, well, you can't trust any media. They're all the same. They're not all the same. Um, because in that environment, I mean, you've heard people say, uh, next year they're going to find out that steak is uh, good for you, so I'll just eat it now.

It doesn't matter what I eat. Whatever I eat ten years from now, they're going to find out that it's bad for me, so I'm just going to eat what I want. But if you do that in the information sphere, you end up watching Fox News and reading Breitbart, and you never, you don't even know which channel the BBC is on, where, you know, there are good journalistic values and integrity.

So I guess part of my answer is trust. I mean, discipline is hard. It's, it's hard to condition oneself to do the right thing, even when it's to our benefit. But I think that what, again, once people realize that, you know, you're either in control of your own beliefs or someone else's going to control them.

You know, there are plenty of people who want to show you things that are not true that would be perfectly happy to have you believe them. Things sometimes that can take your life. The diet, I can't stop from coming back to the diet example because I just read something about a guy who claimed that he, he lived in Japan for 10 years and he sort of ate anything that he wanted.

And he was not fat, his BMI was something like 19, which is pretty low.

[00:54:16] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[00:54:16] Lee McIntyre: And then he moved back to the United States, and he just sort of fit in, and his BMI went up to 29. So, and what he attributed it to, I'm not saying this is true, but what he attributed it to was Um, liquid sugar, um, the, the, the corn, what, what do they call it?

Um,

[00:54:41] Matt Geleta: High fructose corn syrup

[00:54:43] Lee McIntyre: high fructose corn syrup. That's in everything. It's in everything. I mean, in the United States, high fructose corn syrup, you just, you find it everywhere. Why do you find that everywhere? Well, Iowa is the first state. In the primaries for both the Democratic and the Republican Party, and so a lot of politicians in the United States pander to Iowa.

That's why we have so, you know, corn subsidies. That's why ethanol is a big thing here because corn is a, you know, has a big lobby in the United States. And for liquid sugar. So that's what he attributed it to. Now, I don't know if that's true. See, here I am. I don't even remember the source. I don't even remember whether it was reliable source.

All I remember is what he said. So I'm a perfect example of what you're talking about. Me, the guy who studies disinformation for a living, I'm not disciplined enough to know whether that story that I read was accurate or not. So, shame on me. That, and yet that's how easy it is not to be, to be disciplined about it.

I should only watch the BBC. I should only watch the BBC and then I would be in better shape. And I should only eat organic food and never eat any meat either, but it's really hard.

[00:56:08] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of, uh, I once listened to an interview with Daniel Kahneman, who people will know wrote the, uh, wrote or co wrote the book, uh, Thinking Fast and Slow, and has done a lot of research on cognitive biases. And I think he was asked, you know, having done all this research, um, you know, what are your strategies to protect yourselves from these biases and and how much better have you gotten?

And I think his answer was not not only that has he not gotten any better but he's probably gotten worse at a lot of them just um and it's it's fascinating and uh

[00:56:36] Lee McIntyre: it's funny, isn't it? I, it's, I love that. I love that answer.

[00:56:44] Matt Geleta: Nonetheless at the at the sort of closure of your book you do present several practical steps uh for individuals um I think that it's it's very helpful and I should mention one thing that I appreciate about the book is it's Very concise and, uh, and readable, you know, it's not, uh, it's not good information buried within thousands of difficult to read pages.

It's, um, very practical, so I appreciate that and, and I would recommend people who are interested to take a look. Um, several of the rules, uh, that you put down here are interesting. Um, I would want to dig into one in particular, and then I might ask if there are any that you would want to comment on, but

[00:57:24] Lee McIntyre: Sure.

[00:57:25] Matt Geleta: one that you put, I think it's rule number, I'm counting here, six, is to stop looking for facile solutions to disinformation.

Uh, can you comment on, on that, on that rule? What are these facile solutions that people are looking for and how can we stop ourselves from, from doing this?

[00:57:43] Lee McIntyre: I think that the problem with fast thought solutions is that it morphs over into wishful thinking, where we think that somebody else is going to save us. If we just, Yeah, we can count on the media or if we just elect, it's our representatives fault in Congress. One of the facile solutions is to say, um, we just need better education. We need to, you know, we need to teach critical thinking. And the only reason that's a facile solution is because they're right. We absolutely do need better education, more critical thinking, but we need it fast. And that's not sufficient to solve the problem.

I mean, we can't wait for the kids to grow up to save us. Now some people say we don't have to wait for the kids to save us. You know, we can, we can do this now for adults, and that's absolutely right as well. Uh, my friend Andy Norman, wrote a book called Mental Immunity, where he talks about how adult people can learn how to reason better and to condition themselves and even inoculate themselves against, uh, miss and disinformation.

And it's a very good book and we should all, you know, follow its tenets. That's not all we should do. We should not just count on ourselves to be resistant to disinformation. We should try to stop the amplification of disinformation. It would be like in a pandemic saying, well, try not to get sick. Yeah, good advice.

Try not to get sick. But why don't we also look for the vector of transmission that's making us sick? That's what we also need to do.

[00:59:25] Matt Geleta: Yeah, well good recommendation. I'll link that book to the show notes and that's a nice stepping off point to some of the questions I like to close with which relate to books. You know, personally throughout my life I've found that, um, books, you know, it's a, it's a bigger bar to getting a book out there than pretty much anything else and, and several other quality checks.

And so typically I think the information that one finds in, in a book is going to be of a lot higher standard. And, uh, that's certainly my preferred. place of getting information. And so on the topic of books, the question I have for you is, which book or books have you most gifted to other people and why?

[01:00:06] Lee McIntyre: going to change the question simply to say, which book have I recommended to people? Because, gifting books to people, I really I haven't, I'd have to say my own, and that's not the answer that you're looking for, right? Because that's self serving for a writer, but it's really true.

Most of the books that I give away are my own books. But, let me Take the spirit of the question. The book that I've recommended the most recently is actually free. You can get it, uh, you can get a pdf on the internet or you can write and get a free copy from the publisher. It's called the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare and it's published by NATO. It is a training manual for NATO soldiers and commanders to learn about disinformation tactics, specifically about Russian disinformation tactics. Because even in the army, even in, you know, the, the military around the world, they don't realize that we're in an information war and have been for the last 20 years with Russia, they, Russia already considers itself to be in an information war with the West about science, about democracy, about a lot of things, that book, the handbook of Russian information warfare.

Um, I can't remember the name of the author, but if you just put that in Google. It'll pop up and you can get a PDF immediately. And here's the thing I wrote to NATO and asked, said, can I have a free copy? And they sent me one postage paid. So anybody, and it's a very thin, readable, nice, uh, book that will light your hair on fire because they tell stories in there that, you know, the person who wrote it is a, you know, a NATO researcher. Every single thing in that book was public access. There's no classified material in that book. It's all public access, but some of it he translated from the Russian. Some were, you know, publicly available things in the Russian language that he translated. Very scary things. I won't spoil the plot of the book because it's, it's so short you could actually read it.

Just about as quickly as you could read mine. I mean, it's, it's physically a little larger than my book. But it's, you know, it's, it's small. It's not that many pages in it. You could read it in about an hour and a half. It will change your life in an hour and a half if you read that book.

[01:02:45] Matt Geleta: Wow. Interesting recommendation. I think, uh, and NATO is about to be sending thousands of book copies around the world.

[01:02:50] Lee McIntyre: ha ha ha! They, they should. That, that should be the, that should be the, the point. Or people will go for the, for the PDF. It's a, um, it's a, it's a terrific... I forget who recommended it to me. But I, I, I like paper copies. I mean, I'm a writer. You can see behind, I've got all these books, you know, that I keep for myself.

I don't give away. And then I, um, so I like physical books because I mark them up. And, uh, that, that, that, uh, handbook is, is very dog ear.

[01:03:20] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Fantastic. Well, for my non US listeners, I recommend getting the PDF and not shipping the paper over the world. But if you're in the US, which I think is about half of you at this point, um, go for it. Um, uh, second, last question. Um, So non fiction books, that's sort of where I focus and my guests are typically recommending non fiction books, but, uh, fiction is often a place of great value and, and other types of lessons and truths.

Have there been any fiction books that come to mind that have had a big influence on you or that you've particularly enjoyed?

[01:03:49] Lee McIntyre: I love to read thrillers. Um, I, I, I love to read fiction. When I'm on vacation, I take a John Grisham novel with me, you know, something, and it's now hard because I've kind of read them all, so I'm branching out to, to other folks, and in fact, I love thrillers so much that one time, I thought, this, this couldn't be that hard, I'm a writer, I'll try to write a thriller, took me 10 years, because I was very bad, as everyone is when they start, and I had to take classes, and you know, hire somebody to read my manuscript and tell me what was wrong with it, wrote it, tore it down, wrote it, tore it down 10 times.

And after 10 years, I published my first novel, which was a thriller. And the reason I enjoyed that process, the reason I wanted to do it is because I think you're absolutely right that some truths can only be told through fiction, which is interesting because fiction is Made up. I mean that's you know novel.

It's a book length work of fiction It's just it's a made up story and I studied this information and fiction and lies all the time So why would I want to write a novel? I think it's because a novel changed my life and that is George Orwell's 1984. That was my favorite book when I was 14 years old. It really changed my thinking About the world and what the world might be. And so that that's another, I mean, if you want to talk about my most gifted book, I did buy several copies of 1984 and give it to people. You know, earlier in life, what I'm reading right now, I'm reading, uh, Cormac McCarthy's last book. I didn't know it was his last book when I started it. And what happened is I basically stopped reading when he died because I liked his stuff so much that it was kind of like that last box of candy and you realize if you eat it all up, there's no more candy.

So I, you know, he published two novels at once. Um, it was, uh, the passenger and Stella Stella Maris. And I read them out of order, because I got Stella Maris first, and so now I'm about three quarters of the way through The Passenger, and I simply cannot bring myself to finish it, because when it's done, there's no more Cormac McCarthy.

There's no unfinished book by him. He finished two at once. So I'm kind of reading it a page at a time, like, you know, you enjoy the candies in the box, but just discipline yourself one at a time. So I haven't read any Grisham in a long time, because I'm just spending months on the Cormac McCarthy.

[01:06:21] Matt Geleta: Yeah, wonderful. Uh, well, Lee, this has been a, this has been a really beautiful conversation. Two, two things before we close. First, could you say the name of your fiction book that you wrote? And then secondly, any final words for the, for the audience before we wrap?

[01:06:37] Lee McIntyre: I wrote two novels, because after you write one, you know how to write a novel, so then I wrote another one. My debut novel is called The Sin Eater, and, you know, if you don't like crime and mayhem, don't buy it, because it is, uh, it's a thriller. And the other book is called The Art of Good and Evil, uh, and it also, you know, same genre, it's a, uh, it's a thriller.

So. You know, I've, I've, uh, in my whole career, I've, uh, written, edited, you know, contributed to, you know, uh, things that have my name on them. Sixteen books. Uh, those two are among my favorite because they were the hardest to write. I mean, there was just blood on every page because writing fiction is so, so difficult.

Nothing in life had prepared me for it. I'll leave to other people to judge whether they're very good. And my nonfiction outsells my fiction, bye. You know, a hundred times, but there are some people who like thrillers, so thank you for asking. And then the last question was...

[01:07:44] Matt Geleta: any final words for the audience?

[01:07:46] Lee McIntyre: If you have any curiosity about any of my other work, my events, uh, other shows I've been on, or you want to get in touch with me, please go to my website, leemackentirebooks. com. It's, uh, it's got all my social media handles. Uh, you can see all my other books if there's anything that you want to, uh, buy.

You can see where I'm going to be speaking next if I'm coming to, to your area. I was just in Australia, by the way, I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to, to meet. I was, uh, giving a talk at the University of Sydney and, uh, so, uh, I'm, I'm sorry I, uh, missed you, uh, when I was, uh, when I was there, but, um, yeah.

[01:08:28] Matt Geleta: Oh, well, next time, um, in any case, Lee, it has been, uh, it's been a great virtual conversation. Thank you so much for, uh, for making the time to speak to me.

[01:08:35] Lee McIntyre: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation.

​

Philip is known for holding several non-mainstream philosophical views, and for his lively debates with the likes of Sean Carrol and other physicists and philosophers.

We discuss:

• The fine tuning problem in physics, and the philosophical questions this poses

• The controversial hypothesis that the universe as some form of cosmic purpose, independent from humans and our minds

• The concept of the multiverse in its various various

• Bayesian inference and reasoning

• Logical fallacies

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and very infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Book: ‘Why? The Purpose of the Universe’

• ‘Mind Chat’ Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@MindChat

• Website: https://philipgoffphilosophy.com/

• Social Media: https://twitter.com/Philip_Goff

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

04:30 Response to Richard Dawkins' meaningless purposeless universe

10:15 Why might the universe have a purpose?

15:10 Why does the universe seem designed for life?

20:30 Is the universe design for rabbits?

26:30 The multiverse hypothesis and reverse gambler's fallacy

38:10 Pseudoscience and falsifiability

41:30 What does it mean to say the universe has a purpose?

45:10 Is a universe with purpose a good thing?

56:50 How this has changed Philip's life?

1:02:55 Regrets and #movember

1:04:30 Book recommendations

1:09:50 Who should represent humanity to an AI superintelligence?

Introduction: Blurry line between science and pseudoscience

In this podcast we often find ourselves exploring Paradigm shifting ideas in philosophy and science. And by their very nature of being outside of the current paradigm, these ideas often seem strange, and even pseudo-scientific. At least the very least until they gain broader acceptance.

Unfortunately, genuinely pseudo-scientific ideas also seem strange and pseudo-scientific. And so the apparent strangeness of an idea alone is not a good indication of its truth value.

For us to make epistemic progress in this world we need systems and processes to effectively navigate this space of ideas and distinguish legitimate science from pseudoscience. And how we go about doing this is not straightforward even in theory, let alone in practice.

In a world of infinite time and attention, one could simply evaluate every idea as it came up, to whatever depth necessary. The phrase “do your own research” is often thrown around these days. But of course we don’t live in such a world. Quite the opposite in fact. We live in a world where we feel we have very little time, and where attention is valuable and scarce. I personally feel this acutely given how thinly my time is spread across this podcast and the work I do with startups. And I’m sure you feel it too. And I take personal responsibility in respecting the time and attention of my audience.

And it's with this context that it’s a non-trivial decision for me to host Philip Goff for a conversation like the one you’re about to listen to, because Philip takes quite seriously several very controversial and non-mainstream philosophical views that tiptoe on the edges of pseudoscience.

Most well known is Philip’s philosophical position on the nature of consciousness. Philip is a proponent of a form of panpsychism, which is the idea consciousness is a fundamental component of the universe, rather than merely emerging from the interactions of material things. Many philosophers and scientists consider this position to be pseudoscientific, claiming that it lacks any real explanatory value and is unfalsifiable even in principle. Panpsychism is not the topic of today’s conversation, although I will pick it up again in the future because there are interesting things to say about this topic.

Today Philip and I focus on his more recent and equally controversial work exploring the idea that the universe has some form of cosmic purpose, in a sense that’s more fundamental than merely a projection of the human mind. 

From the perspective of a religious worldview, this idea is not foreign at all. If the universe were created by an intelligent designer to fulfil that designer’s wishes, then of course it would have a purpose. But the arguments that Philip puts forward are not theological. They are not grounded in religion, or any notion of an intelligent designer. Philip’s arguments are rooted in contemporary science and well-informed philosophical reasoning.

With that said, whatever you think of these ideas, I do think they’re worth considering in an open and curious way. I’ll share my own perspectives on this topic in a future episode, but for now I’ll leave it to you to listen to our conversation and draw your own conclusions.

Before we get going, if you’re enjoying this podcast, please show your support by subscribing and sharing it. That’s the best way to increase our visibility and help us attract even more fantastic guests.

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

​

[00:00:00] Matt Geleta: Today I'm speaking with Philip Goff. Philip is a philosopher whose research focuses on the philosophy of mind and consciousness. He's a professor at Durham University in the uk and the author of several books, including Galileo's era, which is on the topic of Panpsychism and his most recent book called Why the Purpose of the Universe?

Philip is known for holding several non-mainstream philosophical views, and for his lively debates with the likes of Sean Carroll and other physicists and philosophers. In this conversation, Philip and I discuss his most recent book. we talk about the fine tuning problem in physics, and the various philosophical problems that this poses. Philip's controversial hypothesis that the universe has some form of cosmic purpose, The concept of the multiverse in its various forms. Bayesian inference and reasoning, logical fallacies, and other topics. In this podcast, we often find ourselves exploring paradigm shifting ideas in philosophy and science. And by their very nature of being outside of the current paradigm, these ideas often seem strange and even pseudoscientific. At least until they gain broader acceptance. Unfortunately, genuinely pseudoscientific ideas also seem strange and pseudoscientific.

And so the apparent strangeness of an idea alone is not a good indication of its truth value. For us to make epistemic progress in this world, we need systems and processes to effectively navigate the space of ideas and distinguish legitimate science from pseudoscience. And how we go about doing this is not straightforward, even in theory, let alone in practice.

In a world of infinite time and attention, one could simply evaluate every idea. To whatever depth is necessary. but of course we don't live in such a world quite the opposite. In fact, we live in a world in which we feel we have very little time and where attention is valuable and scarce. I personally feel this acutely given how thinly my time is drawn across this podcast and the work I do with startups and elsewhere.

And I'm sure you feel it too. And I take personal responsibility in respecting the time and attention of my audience. And it's with that context that this is a non trivial decision for me to host Philip Goff for a conversation like the one you're about to listen to. takes quite seriously several very controversial and non mainstream philosophical views that tiptoe on the edges of pseudoscience.

Most well known is Philip's philosophical position on the nature of consciousness. Philip is a proponent of a form of panpsychism, which is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental component of the universe, rather than merely emerging from the interactions of material things. Now many philosophers and scientists consider this position to be pseudoscientific, claiming that it lacks any real explanatory value and is unfalsifiable even in principle.

Now, panpsychism is not the topic of today's conversation, although I will pick it up again in the future because there are actually interesting things to say about this topic. Today. Philip and I focus on his more recent and equally controversial work, exploring the idea that the universe has some form of cosmic purpose.

In a sense, it's more fundamental than merely a projection of the human mind. From the perspective of a religious worldview, this idea is not that foreign at all. If the universe were created by an intelligent designer to fulfill that designer's wishes, then of course it would have a purpose. But the arguments that Philip puts forward are not theological. They're not grounded in religion or any notion of an intelligent designer. Philip's arguments are rooted in contemporary science and well informed philosophical reasoning. With that said, whatever you think of these ideas, I do think that they're worth considering in an open and curious way.

I'll share my own perspectives on this topic in a future episode, but for now I'll leave it to you to listen to our conversation. and draw your own conclusions. Philip's an interesting thinker and his books are well written and worth reading. So if these topics pique your interest, I would encourage you to take a look. Before we get going, if you're enjoying this podcast, please support it by subscribing and sharing. That's the best way to increase our visibility and help us attract even more fantastic guests.

And now I bring you, Philip Goff.

​

[00:04:27] Matt Geleta: let's start with a somewhat depressing statement by the great biologist Richard Dawkins. In his book River Out of Eden, he writes, The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Um, I have some close ties to Richard and I'm going to make sure he gets a link to this conversation. What, uh, what do you want to say to him? How would you respond to this quote of his?

[00:05:01] Philip Goff: I think that was, that was actually true for a long time, uh, in, in the centuries following the scientific revolution. I mean, I guess at the, at the The birth of the scientific revolution, probably most scientists believe in God, believed in God. In Newton's cosmology, he even had God playing a little bit of a role, giving the planets a nudge every now and again to keep them in, in a stable orbit.

But then maybe as, as science, as physics progressed, maybe God seemed to be more redundant from physics. There's, uh, in the 19th century we get The great French physicist, Laplace, who worked out how to, um, run Newton's physics. Keep a stable solar system without any need for God. There's a famous anecdote that might be apocryphal where, um, Napoleon read Laplace's book and said, Hold on, where's God in this?

And he allegedly said, sire, I have no need of that hypothesis. Um, so, but there still seemed to be, um, as, as Richard Dawkins, I think, agreed before Darwin, that there still seemed to be room for God, evidence of God in biology. You know, the complex functions of living organisms seemed to show evidence of design.

It didn't seem plausible that they would have just... Come about through chance bumping together of atoms, um, William Paley famously argued for God on this basis, um, with his famous watchmaker analogy and Darwin read that at university and was influenced by it. But then, of course, with Darwin, we get an alternative to, um, to design in the natural world.

And maybe that seems to be the Final nail in God's coffin, we get Nietzsche declaring God is dead, the i the ideas of, um, um, Freud, where God is a kind of cosmic substitute for daddy, or Marx saying religion is the opium of the masses. These ideas dominate our culture, um, That science has showed we live in a meaningless, purposeless universe.

Um, Even that science and religion are fundamentally opposed. And I think this was understandable because, because for a couple of hundred years that seemed to be what science was suggesting to us. But! Big but here. I think, I honestly think, since the 1970s onwards, The evidence has changed, um, and I've been slowly persuaded by this, you know, over recent years.

Yeah, I was raised Catholic, actually, in a sort of vibrant Catholic community in Liverpool. I, but I rejected all that when I was about 14, decided I didn't believe in God, upset my grandmother by not getting confirmed Catholic. And I, you know, it's not like I've had, um, a God shaped hole in my life as far as I'm aware, but I've just come to believe that.

the evidence is not pointing to a meaningless purposeless universe. In particular, I'm thinking of, well, what Richard Dawkins has said a couple of times would be his, uh, reason for believing in God if there was one, namely the fine tuning of physics. This bizarre discovery of, of Of recent decades that, for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in a certain narrow range.

Well, uh, we can maybe get into it in a little bit. But I, but just to finish this off, I mean, I really think that's where the evidence is pointing. Now I, I, so I, I don't think, I mean, and I just, I, I think we're in a little bit in denial about this at the moment. I think it's a little bit like in the 16th century where we started getting evidence that we weren't in the center of the universe.

And people struggled to accept that because it didn't fit with the picture of reality they'd got used to. And nowadays we kind of scoff at those people, we think, Oh, those stupid religious idiots. Why didn't they just follow the evidence? But every generation absorbs a worldview that it struggles to see beyond.

I think it's like that with fine tuning now. I think future historians will look back and think, How bizarre that people just ignored this evidence for so long because it, I think it doesn't fit with this picture of science we've got used to of this meaningless, purposeless universe. Um, so just very, very finally, just, I don't think this leads to God.

I don't think, I don't like the God hypothesis either. I don't think there's things it can't explain about reality. But I think this is pretty clearly pointing to some kind of... What I call cosmic purpose, some kind of goal directedness at the fundamental level of reality. Now that's weird, it's not what we expected, but we should set aside our biases, both our religious biases and our secular biases and just try to follow the evidence where it leads, and that's what I'm trying to do with this book really.

[00:10:13] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I guess, um, for people who have not heard of fine tuning, they're, they're thinking what the hell happened in the seventies that has convinced us that the universe has purpose. Um, and for those who have, I think they would be thinking things like multiverse and anthropic principle. And maybe they've listened to, I've had conversations on this podcast before about fine tuning.

Uh, so let's, let's then get straight into it. Let's get into this fine tuning situation. Um, and maybe we can, maybe we can. Again, leverage a quote from your book, um, you, you say quite early on in your upcoming book, I believe there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of cosmic purpose. That's a very bold thing to say.

Uh, let's, let's turn to then the philosophical grounds for the idea and, uh, the the overwhelming evidence that you see. Could you run me through this, uh, this overwhelming evidence?

[00:11:01] Philip Goff: Yeah, I mean just to qualify that slightly, it doesn't mean I'm 100 percent certain of this or anything close, because... As people often rightfully say about fine tuning, I mean, the evidence could change tomorrow, right? Physics is far from complete. Um, but, all we can ever do is work with the evidence we currently have.

Um, I think it's such a common reaction people often I'm gonna get onto the fine tuning in a moment. But, a very common reaction is people say, Oh, well, you know, we haven't We haven't finished physics. We haven't, I was arguing with someone on Twitter today. I spent too much time arguing on Twitter. You know, we haven't got quantum mechanics married to general relativity.

You know, maybe the problem will go away when we do that. Well, maybe it will, maybe the evidence will change tomorrow, but maybe. When we finally bring quantum mechanics and general relativity together, there'll be more fine tuning. All we can ever do is work with the evidence we currently have. So I feel like sometimes people ramp up the standards of proof when it comes to fine tuning in a way you wouldn't do in any other case.

Like, oh, we can't draw conclusions till we finish physics, which seems to anyway, but to come straight to it. Well, the evidence is that this surprise, I mean, well, just to give a concrete example. Perhaps the example that's most baffled cosmologists revolves around dark energy, the, uh, the force that propels the expansion of the universe.

In 1998, we discovered the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating its expansion. Um, and Once you do the calculations, it becomes clear that, um, if that force had been a little bit stronger, everything would have shut apart so quickly, no two particles would have ever met. We wouldn't have had stars, planets, any, any kind of structural complexity, and therefore no life.

Whereas if it had been significantly weaker, um, everything would have collapsed back on itself in the first split second after the big bang. Again, no stars, planets. Not a very interesting universe. Um, so for life to be possible. So, um, this strength of this force had to be like Goldilocks porridge, just right, not too strong, not too weak.

And that's just one example. There are many numbers like this, so I think, you know, we, we face a choice really, either. It's just an unbelievable fluke that the numbers in our physics are right for life. And that seems to me. Given the kind of numbers we're talking about here, it seems to me too, um, just too improbable to take seriously.

Or, the alternative is, the numbers in our physics are as they are because they are the right numbers for life. In other words, that there is some kind of directedness towards life at the fundamental level in the very early universe. Now, just, I mean, just to get clear from the start, I mean, God would be one explanation of this but I don't favour that either because of familiar problems with reconciling the terrible, gratuitous suffering we find in the world with a loving, all powerful God.

I don't find it plausible that a loving, all powerful God would create shrews that... Paralyze their prey and eat them alive over several days, uh, before leaving, until they eventually die a painful death from their, you know, that makes no sense to me that a loving God would do that. So, so I think, basically I think there's things the God hypothesis can't explain.

evil and suffering. There's things traditional atheism, meaningless purposeless universe can't explain, namely the fine tuning, and some other stuff to do with consciousness. Um, so we need a hypothesis that can account for both. And that's where I aim towards this. Cosmic purpose in the absence of the traditional God.

[00:15:09] Matt Geleta: Yeah, okay. Well, because, because you mentioned William Paley early on, um, maybe let's use that as an analogy. So, William Paley has this famous, uh, argument of stumbling across a watch and It seems so perfectly designed that one cannot believe that there is no watchmaker, um, and applying that to, let's say, biological organisms.

You know, the eye, for example, seems so perfectly designed, you can't believe that it does not have a designer. And for a long time, I think this was seen as a convincing argument until Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection actually did explain it. And again, back to Richard Dawkins, you know, he's written, uh, I think it's a book called Climbing Mount Improbable.

They kind of go step by step through these, these steps, um, and I think this has happened in several other areas of science and, and philosophy as well. And so I wonder, you know, with something like fine tuning, given the, the history of science has often pointed towards, you know, improbable things happening and, and having explanations that don't require, um, things like creator, designer, um, some external purpose.

You know, shouldn't we be, shouldn't our base assumption be that we would find something similar here in the case of the universe and fine tuning?

[00:16:26] Philip Goff: Yeah, this that's a really a quite common thought and I mean just to say a little on in pay about Paley um, I teach this in undergraduate philosophy of religion and it's a little bit unfair actually because It's the way this is so often taught is people put up Paley's argument as an argument from analogy, and then they bring in David Hume's famous critiques of arguments from analogy and try and devastate, you know, shatter Paley's argument.

Now, That's problematic straight off the bat because that's chronologically the wrong way around, uh, Hume was before Paley, and so you'd think if Hume had come up with these devastating arguments, uh, it'd be strange that Paley's argument would have been so successful. In fact, Paley's argument was not an argument from an analogy, he just used the Watchmaker analogy as a vivid illustration.

It was rather employing the... cutting edge mathematics of his time, namely Bayes theorem, something which is hugely important in many areas of science now, from tracking the pandemic to, um, probabilistic, um, uh, predictive processing, rather, the paradigm of predictive processing in neuroscience. Um, and this was actually mathematics that was not available to Hume.

Um, in fact, it was, sorry, I'm digressing in all sorts of directions here, but, uh, Bayes, Thomas Bayes, the Reverend Thomas Bayes came up with Bayes Theorem because he was wrestling with Hume's Arguments Against Miracles. It's one of those interesting cases where blue sky thinking philosophy can have incredible practical implications.

Anyway, Bayes Theorem, but coming to, so, you know, so I think Bayes Theorem, uh, sorry, I think Paley's Argument wasn't a stupid argument, it was just... Surpassed by the, um, you know, developments of science, as you say. So, um, but, you know, I don't think these ideas of the, almost, Oh, well, look, this is how science has gone in the past.

Surely it's going to go like that again. Almost as though there's a sort of destiny to science, you know? And, I'd be very wary of that. I think, I agree that, you know, I think pre Darwin, it looked like there was evidence for design. Post Darwin, there isn't. But I think that's changed again with fine tuning.

And it could change, I mean, who knows? I don't think there's any grand destiny. It's just that for a couple of hundred years, that looked like the direction things were going. So what? You know, that doesn't mean it's always going to be like that. I think we all just got to look at the evidence. And what we're lucky with now, coming back to Bayes theorem, is we don't sort of have to have our intuitions about, um, you know, these things touchy feely.

You know, we have Bayes theorem, which gives us a mathematical way of understanding how evidence works. We could perhaps get into, I think, a fairly straightforward application of Bayes theorem, um, Has the results that fine tuning supports something like cosmic purpose, and that's it really. That's, that's the evidence we currently have.

It could change tomorrow. It could not, you know, so I, I, it's not like, it's not like, um, There's a generic thing that needs explaining here. This is why, you know, God of the gaps Objections, I don't think, I think are misplaced in this, in this context. God of the gaps is just like You know, we don't understand this, so probably God did it.

You know, we don't understand dark matter, probably it's God. You know, something like that. But this isn't like that. It's not just a generic thing that needs explaining. The point is, this is evidence that points to goal directedness in a standard Bayesian way we think about evidence. I mean, I've oversimplified it a bit by saying, well look, either it's an incredible fluke, Or the numbers are as they are, because they're the right numbers for life.

So that's, you know, one very crude way we can think about this. But it's in our standard Bayesian ways of thinking it, the fine tuning, I would argue, is evidence for cosmic purpose. Um, so it's not just something where we need a generic thing we need explaining and we're plugging God in. Um, this is, this is, is actual evidence for cosmic purpose.

That might change tomorrow, but that's how things stand as they are today.

[00:20:55] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Okay. Well, let's, let's explore that idea. And I think you, you actually really nicely presented this, this sort of like theoretical choice one has to make. Um, you know, you said either there is, the numbers are the way they are just. Because of pure coincidence. Or, uh, they are the way they are because they, um, permit for a universe containing life.

And I had to think about this... Theoretical choice. And I wonder, what do you think about this? So suppose we took anything else other than, I think in your book you say great value, not life. So, um, a universe because it permits a universe with great value. Suppose we were to replace that by anything else we observe to be real.

So, something as trivial as let's say, you know, rabbits. There are rabbits on the planet. And, uh, I could look at the rabbits and I could say, well, if the physical constants of nature were different, the rabbits wouldn't exist. And so we have this theoretical choice. Either, uh, either the constants are there by chance or they're there, um, because they allow rabbits to exist.

What am I, what am I not seeing about this dichotomy?

[00:21:59] Philip Goff: Good. There's another philosopher who pressed a similar objection. Um, thinking, Oh, is the universe fine tuned for tungsten? You know, like, like we we'd need, uh, so maybe there's a God who likes tungsten. Yeah. So look, I think some things that are sometimes improbable things need explaining, sometimes they don't.

And the, the, the, the difference is, I mean, partly it's about how improbable it is. You know, if something's just a little bit improbable, we can sort of think, oh, it's a nice coincidence. But once we get incredibly improbable things, the difference between those that need explaining and those that don't depends on whether the significance to the outcome, the improbable outcome, independently of it, of it being the, just the outcome it is.

So suppose we have some random number generator. You know, that spits out some complicated number 0 blower, you know, that's okay. It's incredibly improbable that it would be exactly that number. But there's, there's no significance. We're only interested in that number because it's the one the machine happened to spit out.

Right? But now suppose for decades, there's been some cult that worships that very 20 digit number. And moreover, they predicted that at exactly this moment, um, you know, the machine's going to spit it out now. Now, now, now the significance, right? Because it's not just... Improbable. It's, it's, it's not just the number that, it's not just the outcome that came out.

It had this independent significance. Um, there are lots of examples we could give to illustrate this point. You know, if, if Joe Bloggs wins the lottery, okay, someone had to. Um, but if, if the partner of the boss of the lottery company wins. Hold on, then there's a sort of significance. So anyway, um, this all makes, you can spell this all out with Bayes theorem in a more precise way, but um, so coming to the fine tuning, I, I, I would argue, you know, what is so significant about the fine tuning?

I mean, yeah, in a sense, whatever numbers that come up in physics will be really improbable, but it's exactly those numbers, you know, like, but it's, it's, um, it's The numbers that came up were in the very, very rare range, as far as we can map out the possibility space. They're in the very, very rare range, which are compatible of a universe containing things of great value.

Life, intelligent life, people that fall in love and write poetry and contemplate their existence. These things are possible in our universe. In most of the other universes you'd get generated, you know, randomly choosing numbers, there's little or if any value. Most of them you just have, many of the combinations you just have a universe of hydrogen.

The simplest element, uh, with no, you know, one chemical com com com combination, one chemical compound rather. Um, Or, you know, the, as I said, the example I gave before, the universe collapsing back on itself after a split second, or no two particles ever meeting. So, so that's what's striking about the numbers that came up in our physics.

That they're improbable, and that I think they have this significance, that they're in the rare range that allow for the possibility of great value. So that's why I end up saying... What you hinted at there, um, you know, what's the minimal hypothesis this supports? Some people use it to argue for God, you know, who's fiddled the numbers to get human beings.

You might think that's a kind of anthropocentric view. I think the minimal hypothesis this supports is, is what I call the value selection hypothesis. That the numbers are, are as they are, these relevant numbers because they're compatible with the universe of great value. Again, I can, you know, I feel silly saying this.

It seems, do you know, I think, I think. We are in intellectual circles in the West. We are very well trained to be alert to our religious biases, you know. Oh, maybe I'm but we're not very well trained to be alert to secular biases. But you know, I think this stuff feels weird, but I think we can rigorously defend the idea that, well, I'm not going to repeat it again.

That's where the evidence point, but yeah, to answer your question, why this is not only improbable, but needs explaining is that I think that it has a certain significance independent of it just being the outcome that happened to come up.

[00:26:33] Matt Geleta: Yeah, okay. That's, uh, that's, that's really interesting and, and you actually alluded to some other, uh, common objections, I guess, that, uh, people put forward here. Um, you know, previously on this podcast, I've, I've talked with several theoretical physicists who think that, The multiverse would be a, um, an explanation of fine tuning and you go to this in some detail in your book, um, run, run me through it.

Why do you feel this hypothesis is not, uh, explained by, so why do you feel like, um, the multiverse doesn't explain this hypothesis better than the idea that the, the universe has purpose?

[00:27:11] Philip Goff: Good. So this is, this is the big, you know, the big alternative to consider. And let me say straight off. I accepted the multiverse explanation for a long time. I've always thought fine tuning needed explaining. But like many scientists and philosophers, I thought the multiverse seemed the more plausible explanation, you know I don't want to be believing in silly things like cosmic purpose, but I was just slowly Persuaded, dragged kicking and screaming might be a better word, persuaded by philosophers of probability that there's some Dodgy reasoning we can identify in this, in an inference from fine tuning to a multiverse And the charges that it commits What's called the inverse gambler's fallacy.

And actually this is an objection that's been in the philosophical journals for decades, since the eighties. And yet in a typical example of philosophers talking to themselves. Nobody knows about it outside of academic philosophy. So one thing I'm excited to do is get this discussion to a broader audience.

You know, there's huge interest in fine tuning among people arguing for God or people arguing for the multiverse. Um, also no one in this literature. On the inverse, on this particular objection to the multiverse has connected it to the science, as far as I've seen, so I do connect it to the, you know, the, the specifics of the, the, the most scientifically accepted or discussed version of the multiverse.

Anyway, so just, it's a big discussion here, but just to give you a thought experiment. Um, so suppose you and I go into a casino later tonight in downtown Sydney. I don't, do you have good casinos

in, I don't know if they have good

[00:29:00] Matt Geleta: We have casinos. I don't know if the word good applies, but, uh, they exist.

[00:29:04] Philip Goff: I don't think I've ever been to a casino actually. I've just been, yeah, anyway, suppose we walk into this casino and the first room we go in, it's just a small room and there's one person playing roulette and they're just having an extraordinary run of luck. They're just winning again and again and again and again.

Um, and I turn to you and say, Matt, wow, the, uh, the casino must be full tonight. There must be lots of people playing roulette. And he said, what are you talking about, Philip? We've just seen this one guy. You know, who knows what's going elsewhere in the casino? And then I said, well, look, if there are thousands, tens of thousands of people playing roulette in the casino, then it's not so surprising that somebody Is going to have an incredible run of luck.

And that's what we've just observed, someone having an incredible run of luck. Now everyone agrees that's a fallacy. That's the inverse gambler's fallacy. Um, because our, our observational evidence is just concerns this one specific individual. All we've observed is this one person. Having a good run of luck no matter how many people there are or aren't in other rooms of the casino It has no bearing on the likelihood of the one person we've observed playing well.

That's a fallacy. That's the inverse gambler's fallacy And it's related to ideas like you think I've been playing badly all night. I'm bound to have some good luck now Whereas, you know, your odds of rolling a double six are the same every time, no matter how many times you've been playing, before or after.

Anyway, so, but I would say that reasoning is, is relevantly similar. In the relevant sense indiscernible from that of the multiverse theorist, at least if they're inferring from fine tuning. It can get more complicated when we bring in the science and so on. We could talk about that. But, you know, they start looking at the numbers in our physics.

Oh my god, they're just right for life. How incredible. There must be loads of other universes out there with terrible numbers. Well, that's exactly the same line of reasoning, right? All our observational evidence is that this particular universe is fine tuned, no matter how many other universes that are out there are out there has no bearing on whether or not the only universe we've ever observed is or isn't fine tuned.

So, it's just like me postulating other people in the casino on the basis of... the one person I've observed. So that's, that's the basic idea. I'm sure there are lots of questions you want to raise about that, but that's the

starting point.

[00:31:24] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's really interesting. Maybe just to play it back so, um, people who are counting this for the first time to understand the, the argument here. So, one, one idea for the explanation of fine tuning is that Um, there is a very large multiverse in which the, the physical constants are different across the spectrum.

And of course, within some of those, there would be a combination that's compatible with life. We're, we presumably are in, are in, uh, one subset of that universe. And now we're looking at how improbable these. Um, set of constants are, you know, how could they be in this specific range? And we're inferring then the existence of the much larger, um, sort of collection of, of universes in the multiverse.

Um, and in the, in the gambler's fallacy. So, you know, this, uh, this winning gambler would be. And that they would be analogous to a universe which, um, which has the constants tuned for life. I do wonder on the selection process there, the order, because, you know, I think you're quite right to say, you know, if we walked into a small room and saw a particular gambler and then that person won, it would be ridiculous to infer there are many people in the casino.

But if I. We're in a casino, let's say I didn't know how many people, and somebody won and this drew my attention to them. Um, I would then be justified in inferring that there are many people, or likely to be many people in the casino, right? Suppose I didn't know how many people there were, and, but the act of winning is the thing that drew my attention to them.

There is more likely to be a higher frequency of winning people if there are lots of people in the casino. And so I wonder if there is something here to explore around. Sort of where the selection happens, how the selection happens, you know, are we, are we confident that this is, this is the right analogy to apply to the selection of a, of a universe in the multiverse?

[00:33:22] Philip Goff: Yeah, no, it's a good point. And there's, there's a rich literature on this. Um, And what your articulate, so the, or the original article on the inverse gamblers fallacy was by Ian Hacking, who died quite recently. Very good philosopher. And then there were, oh, who, who was it? I can't my mind's gone blank on the name, but people replying in, in exactly the way you've just described.

But then there was an article that, sort of, the classic article on this in the year two thousands, this, to go back a bit by Roger White and I, to my mind, he really nailed it in, in his response to. The very good objection you've just raised. And he says, well, look, we need to distinguish, I mean, so it's. The select, what we're talking about is a selection effect, right?

The, or sometimes called the anthropic principle, that we could not have observed a universe that wasn't supportive of life, wasn't compatible with the existence of life, right? Because if it wasn't compatible with the existence of life, we wouldn't be around to observe it. Um, whereas, and that seems different to the casino case I just described, because we could have walked in and observed, um, Someone playing badly, right?

So, so the thought is, well, there's a sort of selection effect. And maybe, maybe what you're doing here is you're trying to model the selection effect. So like, so just as there's some connection between, um, a fine tuned universe and our existence. Well, now you're modeling that with a connection like someone plays well and our attention is drawn to it.

But White says, well, actually I think this is relevant. This is not relevantly similar. Because we need to distinguish what he calls. A selection, a mere selection effect, and a converse selection effect. So the mere selection effect is what we have in the real world, that like, If we exist, there's a fine tuned universe.

If we exist, note the order, the order. If we exist, then there's a fine tuned universe. But note that it's not the other way around, right? Like, there could be a fine tuned universe and we don't exist, because, you know, it was the next universe down that was fine tuned, or, you know, we just weren't about or whatever.

Um... To get a converse Selection effect. He has a kind of sci fi scenario where we were, suppose we were once disembodied, sub disembodied spirits floating around the multiverse looking for a fine tuned one. Well then, in that case, if there's a fine tuned universe, we're going to be in

it, right? So then there'd be a converse selection effect.

Like, if there's a fine tuned universe, we're going to be in it. But that's not the real world. It's not the case that if there's a fine tuned universe, we're going to be in it. It's just the other way around. If, if we're, if we're alive. Then there's going to be a fine tuned universe. So your example, I think, has a converse selection effect, right?

It's like, if someone plays well, we're going to observe it, right? Because we're going to be dragged in. Um, but that's, that's not the real world case. The real world case is just if we exist, then there's a fine tuned universe. But your example is. Um, if there's, if what corresponds to fine tuning is someone playing well, if someone's playing well, we're going to observe it.

So let me give you, this is getting a bit complicated, but let me give you a, a better analogy, which I think better reflects the reality of the situation. Suppose unbeknownst to us, there's a sniper hiding in the back of that first room when we go in. And they're waiting there, and UNLESS the person who we see is gonna have an incredible run of luck, they can see them first, before we run round the corner, come round the corner.

They're gonna blow our brains out and we're never gonna see anything. Okay, now you've got a selection effect, an anthropic principle, artificially, that mirrors the real world situation. Because, uh, Unless someone's playing well, we're not going to, we're not going to, the only thing we could observe is someone playing well, just like in the real world situation, the only thing we could possibly observe is a fine tuned universe, but I think it's pretty clear that that, that doesn't remove the fallacy.

Right, it doesn't remove, you know, okay, it doesn't make a difference as a sniper though. It's still, it's still fallacious to infer to Lots of people playing the casino. So that's what I'd say about that. Does that make sense?

[00:37:49] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's definitely, I enjoyed this section of your book, it's quite fun. I had not come across many of these analogies in there.

[00:37:57] Philip Goff: It gets, It gets, a bit mind blowing

doesn't it? It gets you

[00:38:00] Matt Geleta: It does, yeah.

[00:38:01] Philip Goff: all

[00:38:02] Matt Geleta: It does. So I would definitely recommend that people take a look there. Let's maybe turn, like, the gambler's fallacy aside. Something that the multiverse hypothesis also suffers from is the question of whether it is falsifiable.

And many people point to these, all of these hypotheses, and they say, um, look, I don't see how this is in principle something that's falsifiable. And, you know, going back to Karl Popper, this would, this would, excluded from the category of things we would call scientific. And, um, I would, I would put that.

question to you.

Is, is this hypothesis, um, in any, in any sense falsifiable beyond the things that we've already talked about?

[00:38:43] Philip Goff: Good. Yeah, so I mean, I think people often oversim, for one thing people often oversimplify Popper's view, you know, he You had a very nuanced conception of what constitutes falsifiability. Um, I think, you know, what people are talking about is, you know, does it make predictions about what's going to change or something?

And, um, you know, that's great in a scientific context when you can, when you can have, you know, predictions that you can independently check. But it's, it's, it's not always the case that we can have that with an empirical, empirically support hypothesis. I mean, think about ancient history, for example. Um, you know, hypotheses about, I don't know.

I don't know much history, you know, it's often, you know, you think, I don't know. Caesar crossed the Rubicon or something. How do we, we, we take it to be that that's the historically supported, empirically supported view from looking at the evidence. But what predictions does that make? How would you falsify it?

I suppose you could think, um, more evidence could come up than we currently have. But that's the case with fine tuning as well, you know, the evidence could change. But it's not like there's some experiment we could go, because the past is sort of dead and gone. And, um, You know, with, with certain theories about the early universe, it might often, might sometimes be a bit like that, the...

The theory of inflation or the theory of natural selection, you know, it's, it's not always, to some extent we can do experiments and stuff, but a lot of it is based on, look, we've got these organisms, we need an explanation, it can't be chance, you know, this is the way Richard Dawkins, coming back to Richard Dawkins would argue, so natural selection looks like the best explanation, sort of arguments, inference to the best explanation.

Um, yeah. So, yeah, sometimes that's the best we've got and, and as I say, Bayes theorem gives us a very precise way of understanding how, how evidential support works, mathematically precise definition. So, you know, sometimes the best, that's the best we've gotten. Yeah. I, I, I think that, I, I, so I would say about the multiverse and cosmic purpose, I wouldn't object to that in those ways, even if there's no sort of experiment you can do, um, I mean, it would be falsifiable if the evidence changed and so on, but even if there's no experiment you can do, I still think there's a reasonable sense in which this is a, Empirically supported because the evidence fits with it in a Bayesian way of understanding evidence.

If you want to call it philosophy or metaphysics rather than science, I don't, you know, I don't really care about how we define these words. But, you know, I would say it's what the current evidence currently supports. And so it's there by a view we should take very seriously.

[00:41:33] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Okay. Well let's, let's, let's then maybe explore the actual content of the view in a bit more, more detail because it is just a very, uh, it's such a bold claim to say there is a sense of cosmic purpose. And so how do you think about the Like, the actual content of that claim, so for example, I could look at a physical system, let's say a set of chemical reactions, and perhaps I know what will happen, um, you know, I know how these chemicals react and I know.

what the result would be, and it would feel very wrong in that context, even though I can fully predict what it's going to do, um, to say that this is the purpose of the system, the purpose of these chemicals are to react in this way to produce this output.

And So that, that doesn't feel like the right use of purpose and I don't think that's the use that you're putting forward here. So what, what, what is it that you, that you mean by purpose in this case?

[00:42:23] Philip Goff: So the starting point would be this, what I referred to earlier, the value selection hypothesis, that certain numbers in physics are as they are because they are consistent with the possibility of value. So that in some sense the most valuable hypothesis has been selected, and that that's... a basic explanation there.

But that's not, I mean, I don't take that to be a fund the fundamental story. I, I, I try to make, try to make sense of what could be going on in reality to make sense of that. And I survey a range of hypotheses, perhaps the most straightforward way of, Explaining both fine tuning and suffering is to just tweak, tweak the properties of God a bit, you know, so maybe, maybe we're dealing with a bad creator or a, a moral creator or a creator of limited abilities who's done the best job she can, you know, it's just, it's just, this is the, I know it's Bostrom's,

simulation hypothesis that David Chalmers has written a book on recently. Um, that we're in a computer, maybe we're in a computer simulation and um, made by some random software engineer in the next universe up. Um, so these are all sort of non standard design hypotheses. So that's the first category.

There's basically three categories of theory I consider. But it's not obvious that you undergird cosmic purpose. Thomas Nagel has articulated a very, um, detailed account of what he calls teleological laws. laws of nature with goals built into them. So it might just be a sort of basic tendency in the universe towards certain goals of value, a tendency that interacts, an impersonal tendency that interacts with the known laws of physics in ways we don't yet fully understand.

Um, so that's the second hypothesis. The third hypothesis I consider in this. Connects, I guess most with my previous work on Panpsychism is Cosmo sexism. The, the idea of the universe is itself a conscious mind with certain goals, and I try to suggest that's not as extravagant as a hypothesis as it might first seem.

So they're the, they're the options I survey to make sense of cosmic purpose, cosmic gold directedness. That is, that I think is the evidence points to.

[00:45:06] Matt Geleta: It's interesting on the topic of panpsychism. Um, I had this experience reading your work where, um, you know, my initial posture was, was Fairly skeptical, I would say like, you know, 90 percent towards, uh, you know, not buying into any sort of panpsychist way of thinking. And, um, you know, open mindedly reading Galileo's Arrow, which is very interesting.

Um, certainly did, did draw me closer towards taking the idea more seriously. And, um, I do, I do have, um, you know, I'm fully aware of the, the same bias. That exists in this question of purpose and you mentioned it earlier, you know, this scientific bias towards not being open to ideas of this nature. I would love to get your thoughts on the questions of biases in here and what might be driving them.

One that comes to.

mind is the question of, you know, whether the idea of a cosmic purpose could actually be misaligned with, with what we want and therefore somehow, um, you know, we, we have a bit of an aversion to it. Uh, and things like the, the key death of the universe is something that might be in our future or the idea that the, the universe is just around to maximize entropy and that's clearly not aligned with human values.

Um, I wonder if that introduces like a bias against this idea. So, I mean, maybe, maybe let's, let's start there. You know, what do you feel are implications of thinking about an idea like this and taking it seriously for a human, uh, for a human being, for our psychology and what sort of bias might that introduce into how we approach this.

[00:46:43] Philip Goff: Yeah, I mean firstly, there's certainly a lot of uncertainty here in all of this. Uh, who knows, you know, it might not be a good purpose if we're in a simulation hypothesis, maybe, you know, it's just some random computer engineer trying to work out what happens if... Donald Trump gets elected and runs the simulation.

That's, that's an example from David Chalmers book. Um, but, um, I, I do think, I think it's suggestive of value. That that's what I, what I tried to make a case for earlier. I mean, it could be the sum. Bastard who's, you know, trying to create value to mess it up, you know, but then that might be a more sort of complicated ad hoc hypothesis.

I, you know, I consider the bad God and hypothesis and, uh, Stephen Law, the philosopher, has nicely argued, you know, that faces all the problem, the mirror image problems of the good God. You know, the good God, it's like, why is there so much evil? The bad God, it's, well, why is there so many good things? Why is there...

Smile of a baby. I don't know. Um, beauty of nature. So, um, so I do think, I do think it's the Cosmic Purpose is suggestive that there's a directionality to value the emergence of life, intelligent life. Also, it's not just fine tuning I deal with. There's also deep, underexplored challenges about the evolution of consciousness.

And so I said, I suggest that the Cosmic Purpose is something to do with the emergence of Creatures with conscious understanding. Um, now, you know, it could be, suppose all that's right, it could be that's the end of the story, you know, like. That's all folks, you know, that's, we've, we've reached the end of cosmic purpose.

But again, that would seem, if you do believe, if you are going for, going for cosmic purpose, and you do think it's this directedness towards the good, it might seem quite improbable that, oh, we're at the, we're at the final culmination of cosmic purpose. Wow, that's lucky. You know, so it does seem in that mode of thinking more likely that there is some greater purpose unfolding.

Um, that, um, that there will emerge some greater reality unfathomable to us as our existence is to worms. Um, okay, so, but, of course this is all somewhat speculative, so I do think there's evidence for the basic idea of cosmic purpose, but then anything beyond that is somewhat speculative, obviously. And I think it's, you know, speculation is, speculation is fine as long as you're aware, you know, it's, it can have some force.

Like again, coming back to ancient history, you know, you rarely get a concrete proof, but you can, you know, you can balance different considerations. Um, Aristotle said at the beginning of his famous text, the Nicomachean Ethics, you know, different sciences have different degrees of precision and certainty, you know, maths can get you absolute proof.

Um, Maybe if you have falsifiable science in certain contexts, you can get, um, you know, something close to certainty. But other sciences, and as you drift into philosophy, it's, it's not like it's a free for all. You can argue that there's a better position to go for here, but anyway, I'm rambling a little bit.

But come back to your question, finally. How does this impact our existence? So, you know, most of the book is cold blooded scientific philosophical argument. To take this view seriously and you could accept all that and think I don't care, you know, my colleague David Ferracci kind of said that, you know, I see the case and fine tune him, but I'm not interested, you know, I make my own meaning and that's, you know, that's fine.

But in the final chapter, I suppose I explore the connections to the meaning of human existence and think about cosmic purpose in relation to spiritual practice and. spiritual communities and even political struggle. And yeah, so overall, I'll just finish with this. I, I have a sort of mid, I always go for the middle ways.

I hate these, I hate the dichotomies. Um, You know, one extreme, you've got the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig says, Without cosmic purpose, it's all meaningless rubbish. We might as well just rape and kill each other. Uh, you know, and I talk about the antinatalist, Atheist philosopher David Benatar, who thinks something not a million miles away, Although, no, not, it's different to that, but he thinks, Um, it's immoral to have children because life is so pointless.

That's the antinatalist view. The other extreme, we've got my colleague, David Farachi, who thinks, uh, You know, it would just, if it, if there's cosmic purpose, it would just be irrelevant, you know, we make our own meaning, fine. I, so I take a kind of middle way view, I think, I think we can have perfectly meaningful lives.

Independent of cosmic purpose if we live lives pursuing things of value, like knowledge, creativity, kindness. Um, I, I think I had quite a meaningful life before I believed in cosmic purpose. Not sure I do believe in cosmic purpose, I take the idea seriously, you know. Um, but, this is the middle way, I think if there is cosmic purpose, we can potentially have more meaningful lives.

If, we can in some way. Some tiny way contribute to the good purposes of the whole of reality, you know, that's massive That's like as big a difference as you can imagine making. I think we want our lives to make a difference That's about as big a difference as you can imagine making and and you know to some extent I think William James the great psychologist and philosopher was right when you know to an extent It's, it can be irrational to hope a little beyond the evidence.

Oh, just a little bit. And so to some extent, you know, cosmic purpose, we might not be able to contribute to cosmic purpose. You know, that's, but I think there is the potential for a deeply meaningful form of life. lived in a hope that one's life can contribute to some greater reality that we don't yet fully understand.

And I suppose I'm keen on, you know, suggesting to people this way of finding meaning in life that's not the traditional religious one, it's not secular atheism, and just, you know, seeing what people think of that idea and maybe something they might like to think about.

[00:53:14] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's, I mean, in one sense it's a really comforting thought that there could be something more out there. And as you say in your book, you know, if this is true, it perhaps isn't the only reason that life can be meaningful, but it's certainly more of a reason. But there is a flip side of that, that then puts a lot of responsibility.

On, on people, you know, suddenly everything actually matters in some cosmic way and, and, you know, what you do with your life, um, matters significantly more. And, um, I mean, I, I, I wonder how the human psychology responds to, to that. Maybe it's different for different people, but I could imagine some people finding it, it's actually, would be all too overwhelming.

Um, to have, uh, you know, to play a hand in, in this cosmic game. What's your sense? Is, is this, uh, independently of the truth value of the claim? Is, is it good for, for people? Is it bad for people? Neutral? Where do you stand?

[00:54:07] Philip Goff: So I hadn't really thought of it that, the way you just thought of this could be sort of a bit overwhelming in that sense. Um, You know, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm very open minded about these issues. And, you know, most of the book is just, I think this is a good, a good case to take this idea seriously. I'm very open minded, um, I, I, and I don't want to dogmatically lay down, you know, this is the only way to have a meaningful life, I suppose I am inclined to think that there is, yeah, that this is potentially a more meaningful life than secular humanism.

Um, you know, we do find. Whatever protestations to the contrary, it does seem that many people reach a, a lot of, for a lot of people, reach a certain point in life, maybe they've achieved their career goals and, you know, they've had a family or not had a family or whatever. And then they think, is this it?

Is this, this is not satisfying. Is this it? Maybe some people have that. Some people don't. And, you know, I suppose at least the potential to address those kinds of meaning worries. And I've found it in my own case. I call it cosmic purposivism to be a meaningful way of living. It helps me not just narrowly focus on my own interests.

So those are my family or it helps keep my ego in check a little bit. Um, so yeah, I mean, I suppose I'm always saying is, you know, why not try it out? You know, see if you like it, uh, um, just, I'm just thinking now about your point, overwhelming. I mean, I suppose, like, I think, I mean, I think there's a lot of.

I think there's a lot of pressure just from basic morality. Forget cosmic purpose, you know, to do a lot, you know. Um, Philosopher Peter Singers talked about the demandingness of morality. There's a lot of suffering in the world. I think there is a big responsibility to act. And so, even independently of cosmic purpose, I think there's a big pressure on us morally if we really reflect about it.

All cosmic purpose does it. It maybe doesn't tell you to act differently. It just sets that moral project. In a broader idea, in a broader concept, a broad, a set, you know, there's a broader moral, a cosmic moral project and that's maybe, maybe can allow for a certain sense of greater meaning, a certain motivation, perhaps a certain sense of greater hope, but it, but it mightn't necessarily lead you to acting much differently because ultimately it's about sort of making the world a better place and there's a lot of need for that.

Whether, whether you think that's part of a bigger moral project or not.

[00:56:53] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I mean, one of the, like a general theme throughout this podcast is, um, the, you know, bringing philosophy and science into Like everyday life into, into the real world and really can, especially connecting philosophy with actually how people live their lives. And I wonder, you know, you've, um, you've explored several, uh, topics that people consider if I quote unquote out there, you know, panpsychism and cosmic purpose and, and others.

How have these, have these changed the way you live your life? Since you've explored these, you've come to certain conclusions on, as you said, largely a. like a purely philosophical and scientific basis, um, but I would imagine this, this has an implication for how you choose to live. How has your life, um, how has it changed, uh, from having done the work that you've done?

[00:57:42] Philip Goff: Good question. I took in my, well, my last book, Galileo's error, I talk, um, autobiographically about your wrestling with the problem of consciousness and, um, When I thought dualism, I thought, you know, when I was taught philosophy, there were only two options. Either you thought consciousness was something supernatural, the sort of soul, or you, um, or you were just a materialist.

You just think it's just the kind of electrochemical signaling. And I think that view, it's a big debate, but I think it ultimately ends up sort of denying the reality of consciousness. And so, yeah, I did wrestle with that. And as I talk about in the book, so I, I thought the materialist option was the scientifically credible one, so I defended it vigorously and, but I came to think it, it implies a non existence of consciousness, so for a while, I tried to live that out, you know, my consciousness doesn't exist, I'm just what we call a zombie, an unfeeling mechanism, and my brains tricked me into thinking I have feelings and experiences when I, it's really just an illusion, well my, my own podcast, Mind Chat, um, I, I do, with a, with an illusionist philosopher, Keith Frankish, who's a lovely bloke, but the polar opposite opinion to me thinks consciousness, at least in the way I think about it, doesn't really exist.

Um, but yeah, I, I, and I, I tried to embrace that, and then I just remember, talk about this in Galileo's era, just, I don't know what it was, so what, one, like being in a bar with music and beer and just, just... Suddenly right, no, I have experiences. This is, this is not livable. I can't do this anymore. Um, I also talk in the new book about, was it a question of moral objectivity?

I had a big conversion from David Hume, sort of subjectivism about morality and being persuaded by a professor that there was a kind of contradiction in Hume's view and and that blew my mind to suddenly thinking, oh my god, there are things that are objectively good. And just not doing particularly nice things, but thinking that was really good.

Not just, I don't know. Yeah. So I think, um, in all these ways, I suppose I do live them out and just on the part, you know, discovering panpsychism and. Yeah, that, you know, so I, I actually sort of left academia because I was so perturbed by consciousness, couldn't find a resolution to it. Uh, tried to think about other things and discovering almost by mistake panpsychism and, and yeah, the intellectual piece that brought that there was a way of making sense of the All the facts about science, you know, but also the evident reality of our own feelings and experiences.

Um, you know, finding that resolution did bring a great sense of peace. And then Cosmic Purpose, which is the topic of the new book, um, well, just for the reasons I said, I suppose, I have found it to be a somewhat meaningful life, meaningful way of living life to, and you know, the evidence could change tomorrow, I might be wrong, and yeah, as James said, you know, you only live once and you, If you can find a, a way of living that's grounded in some kind of rational case and is, um, uh, um, affords a meaningful way of living a life, then, yeah, to some extent it can be, it can be possible to hope beyond the evidence.

The example, you know, if you've got, um, if you've got somebody, a loved one who's seriously ill and their prognosis is not great, maybe like they've got a 30, 40 percent chance of living, um, it's perfectly rational to say, I believe you're going to make it, I've got faith you're going to make it, and to live in that hope and to have it motivated.

To an extent, right, if there's like a 1 percent chance they're going to make it, probably you shouldn't have false hopes, you should focus on comforting them, you know, and so on. But, uh, to an extent it can be rational to hope beyond the evidence, and I have, yeah, I have found it. Um, I'm hoping it, it, it avoids a midlife crisis because, um, you know, I, I think I'm lucky I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop in a minute.

I'm rumbling a bit, but I think I'm lucky that I'm not too naturally driven by money or power, but to an extent. I have ego. To an extent, you know, I do want people to know about my philosophy and read about my philosophy and did I get on, you know, did I get that thing published or did I not? You know, I think all, I think that's all silly, really.

It's all ridiculous, but I can't help caring about it. But it helps if I, if I try to. Sort of as it were daily prayer for me is sort of just trying to have them all of that in a broader focus that There's a bigger project here and you do your best to contribute it to it And then you're gonna die and but you know, you've you've done your best to so, you know I do find that helps and I hope will help to avoid mustache or something

[01:02:53] Matt Geleta: Well, I think that's quite beautifully said. And maybe on the topic of midlife crisis, one of the questions that I had stated to you is like a fun one as we bring it to a wrap. You know, in this thinking about cosmic purpose and, you know, assuming that there is a, That means that there is some purpose to our individual lives.

There is also then the question of whether we live by that purpose and the question of regret. And so, as a bit of a fun one, um, I had a question for you. What will you do within the next, let's say, year that you think you'll have, that you'll regret having done in 20 years time?

[01:03:28] Philip Goff: Oh God, I, I, it's funny you should say that because I think it could be growing a mustache. So I keep , I keep

threatening

[01:03:36] Matt Geleta: It is November.

It is

[01:03:37] Philip Goff: I, yeah, well, I did, I, I don't know. It's, I, I was, I've, I've had it before until about an hour ago. I, I did have a mustache. That's probably why. Someone, my, and uh, oh, I did a podcast before that, you know, my book's coming out to you.

I'm doing lots of podcasts and I sat down for the podcast. And I looked at myself in the, uh, screen and I had this moustache and I was like, this is ridiculous. So I went and got my, just before we went live on, this was the Capturing Christianity podcast. I'm trying to, you know, interact with religious people and atheist people.

I was interacting with Daniel Dennett on this. So, anyway, but I just shaved it off. Hey, look, I can prove this. You'd think I'm lying.

I just, so, so I removed the mustache immediately, but, um, my wife hated it anyway. So, so yeah, so, but I might grow it back. I keep, I don't know. I keep, um, being tempted by it for some

reason.

[01:04:30] Matt Geleta: Yeah, well, set a reminder, check in in 20 years time. Is that a, is the one full of goths regrets? Next one, um, you know, we've talked about several books, some of which you've written, some of which, um, you know, have, we've both enjoyed. My question is, which books have, book or books have you most gifted to other people, and why?

[01:04:52] Philip Goff: Yeah, that's a good question. I tend to buy people politics books, whether they want them or not. I'm a big fan of the French economist, um, Thomas Piketty, who's, uh, you know, done one of the most rigorous empirical analyses of, um, capitalism throughout the couple of few hundred years of its history. And, um, yeah, I mean, I suppose, yeah, I mean.

I mean, my political philosophy is quite simple, really. I mean, his book in particular, um, he wrote this huge book. He's written a couple of huge books, but then he wrote a shorter one. Um, a brief history of equality, equality, actually about how society has become more equal, but how, you know, the, the two recent periods of recent history, if the 30 years after the.

Second World War. Now, I don't know what it was like in Australia, actually, but in, in the UK, the US, Western Europe, you know, we effectively had a semi socialist society, you know, we had, um, taxes of 80 90 percent on the wealthy in the UK and the US, uh, very strong trade unions, um, very tightly... tight regulation on the movement of capital.

You know, you couldn't just take money out the country and it worked really well. It was the most dynamic economy we've ever had. It was, you know, for the first time, you know, before that in, in, you know, in 1913, the top, uh, 10 percent had 89 percent of all the wealth. You know, that's what it's been like for most of history.

You know, the, the top tiny percent have had most of everything. But then all of this really redistributed and really made the middle class so much wealthier. You know, took much more than they've been. The top 10 percent now, 56%, I think. Um, and you know. My parents generation. I think there was that sense of optimism, that sense of, uh, so people would say, you know, where socialism ever worked and I said, well, the semi socialist society we had after the UK, the U S Europe after that was, it was going in the right direction.

I think it was. And then, you know, from the eighties onwards, I think. So it's getting a bit party political broadcast, but I think, you know, we tore up that up. We slashed taxes, slashed regulation. It's been a, you know, we had, since then we had crisis after crisis, huge inequality, global financial crisis brought it all to its knees.

And then we've been fumbling about after that with Trump and Brexit and so on. So, yeah, so I think, um, You know, there's just that, that's what that empirical case of how wealth and society changed. He, I mean, he goes right back to the dawn of time, but in those periods, I think it's absolutely fascinating and I buy it for people, whether they want it or

not.

[01:07:33] Matt Geleta: Yeah, fantastic. Well, I mean, it's certainly a challenge. So if your goal is to educate the masses, then reading, uh, well, no, I'm not sure about the shorter book, but the bigger book is a, is a very big book. So, um,

[01:07:44] Philip Goff: I mean, whether, whether you agree, whatever your political persuasions, you know, it's good to have that the strongest case, as I always say to my students, right? There's no skill in refuting, rejecting a terrible argument, right? But if you, you know, you Big up your argument, go for the hardest argument, not some, you know, crappy, half thought out, you know, crude position.

Thomas Piketty's very rigorously informed, and then, and then, show why it's wrong or whatever, then, you know, I mean, I agree with it. But if, if you're of the opposite persuasion, I think it's the best kind of thing you can have, defending something like a... A socialist position. And he gives very, very particular policy commitments for, um, what we should do moving forward, such as a universal inheritance involving each person, a big wealth tax, and then he, you know, so how come it was wealthy people get an inheritance?

So he thinks, you know, every person on the, every citizen on their 21st birthday should get, um, a certain percentage of national wealth, you know, anyway, interesting ideas, whether you agree or not, sorry, I'm rambling again.

Next question.

[01:08:49] Matt Geleta: What about, uh, what about fiction? Have you, uh, is there a fiction book come to mind? I mean, I personally feel that a lot of... Go for it.

[01:08:56] Philip Goff: yeah, I'm, I'm, I, I read too much nonfiction and my wife's always rightfully telling me, you know, you need to read more fiction. I'm currently reading a book on her recommendation, uh, Project Hail Mary, which is a sci fi book. Now, I'm going to describe it and it sounds rubbish, but it's, it's, it's about someone making contact with an alien.

But it is so scientifically well researched. And, and the, the, the way it's set up, you can believe this is the very near future. It's not like, you know, some far off world. And this is a very differently evolved creature. And so this, these two creatures are getting to know each other. And yeah, it's really fascinating.

So, but the problem is I just read a few pages and then I fall asleep. And so it's very slow work, but that's, I would recommend Project

Hail Mary.

[01:09:48] Matt Geleta: Sounds like the book is, uh, is serving its purpose. I use fiction for the same, uh, for the same reasons. Um, maybe on that topic, you know, it's about, um, being visited by aliens. And I suppose, um, one might say we will soon be visited by an artificial super intelligence. If, uh, if you had to pick one person...

From humanity either past or present to represent us to an artificial super intelligence. Who would you pick?

[01:10:14] Philip Goff: Oh my god, pastel present. Probably nobody famous. I don't know, we always go for the famous people, don't we? But I think, you know, I don't know, the people who, the people who I'm most impressed by are sort of people who do unstated silent work, you know, in uh, My dad used to, you know, visit refugees in prison for most of his life, you know, the I've got an auntie who does so much work in her community.

I don't know the people who Sort of work quietly beavering away not looking for reward unlike me with my ego trying to say look at me I've written this amazing stuff, but I wish I was a bit more like that. Um Historical figures. I don't know. I don't know. I don't I don't think i've got any non cliched answer gandhi jesus.

Um, Yeah, I mean, I I'm I'm um, I I am i'm a i'm a big fan of of Of Jesus, even though I'm not a, don't have the traditional Christian world view, the, You know, I think, I mean, Jesus, it's incredible, so light years ahead of his time, was in sort of, The idea of valuing the powerless, you know, and valuing the poor, And that inversion of worldly values is kind of so weird, and, um, Loving the people who are horrible to you, you know, that's, uh, These, these Christian moral ideals mean a lot to me, even though I'm, Rejected the Catholicism of my youth that I was raised with till I was about 14, but, um, Yeah, loving your enemy.

Even people I know who are quite good people and, you know, if someone's a bit of a dick, you know, I don't know say that or someone, you know, you say, oh, they're just, I hate them. I hate them. They're, you know, they're a bit of a dick, you know, and, you know, that, so that's a good idea to say, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and love this person, try to have positive feelings to this person.

So I do love that about my upbringing and, you know, even though they're a bit of a dick, you know, so, so yeah, I, I do, I guess I, I guess, um, yeah. Um, big fan of Jesus, Jesus had so many one, you know, incredible things. And he like, uh, Beers, my favorite Jesus quote, be as, um, be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves, although that captures a lot sort of, you know what I mean?

Like. You know, don't be a softy, you know, but, but, be a softy, do you know be really shrewd as, shrewd as a snake, but I don't know, I, it says it all, doesn't it, but I love that. So yeah, um, yeah, Jesus and, um, some completely unknown person who, uh, who we all know, the type of person, but, uh, doesn't stand on a big megaphone and shout

it out.

[01:13:02] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, it's great. I mean, if there's been one theme out.

of this question, it is that people do not choose the mega famous, um, to, uh, to represent us, which I, which I think is a, it's a good

[01:13:12] Philip Goff: They usually kill them

like Socrates. Jesus. Actually, I love, I love these cur, I love actually just make me think Socrates, Jesus and Colombo. Do you know Colombo? Are you, are you too young for Colombo? I used to watch Colombo in the seventies when I was off sick with my grand and you know, the anti-hero, right?

I love the anti-heroes. Not like I'm a man's, I'm a real man, man. You know, I'm a powerful person that, you know, is sort of self-deprecating, and. I think Jesus, Socrates, Columbo are all these anti heroes, you know, but they're, you know, Doctor Who as well, big Doctor Who fan, you know, these sort of, not your typical hero.

I like those

kind of guys

[01:13:51] Matt Geleta: Yeah, fantastic. I think good, uh, good recommendation. Um, Philip, it's been, it's been a really great conversation. Any, any final words that you'd like to share with the audience? Anything we didn't get to?

[01:14:02] Philip Goff: I think it's been a really, it's been a really fun, I like the little twists at the end of those questions and, um, well I hope people, you know, I hope, just, I should say actually the book is, my first book was an academic book, my second book was aimed at a general audience, this is trying to do both, so each book, each chapter is a more accessible bit, and then a bit, um, going into the, the digging deeper to the details, so, you know, I hope it's both accessible but got the technical details, and I hope, you know, people, I'm sure people will have disagreed with a lot of what they heard tonight, I think, uh, whether you're a theist or an atheist or neither, um, You know, I hope if you'll find some support for some of your views, but some challenges and, and, you know, that's what it's all about.

And I hope it just adds, adds to the discussion. Um, let me know what you think. I always argue on Twitter, Philip underscore Gough, Philip with one L. So, um, tell me why you thought it was a load of rubbish on Twitter.

[01:15:02] Matt Geleta: Very good. Well, Philip, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure.

[01:15:06] Philip Goff: Thanks, Matt. That's been lovely.

We discuss:

• The prospects for finding alien life in our solar system

• The possibility that there is life on Venus

• The infamous fermi paradox

• Exoplanets

• The beauty of the night sky 

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Sara’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfSaraSeager

• Sara’s book: https://amzn.asia/d/9UgG7i9

• Website: https://www.saraseager.com/

Timestamps

0:00 Intro: Where are they?

5:35 Is there life on Venus?

13:25 Venus Life Finder mission

17:15 Non-biological life?

20:15 How might aliens discover life on Earth?

23:17 Should we broadcast our existence?

28:30 Consensus view - is there life outside of Earth?

31:05 Fermi Paradox - where are they?

34:50 Exoplanets

48:20 Starshade mission

54:11 Beauty and awe in physics

1:03:50 Book recommendations

1:11:23 Behind the scenes / backstory

Introduction: Where are they?

The question of whether there is life outside of Earth was once thought of as an esoteric and largely philosophical question, rather than scientific. 

However, our growing understanding of science and the cosmos has shifted this question from abstract philosophical pondering to something more tangible and scientifically motivated. And interestingly, the progress we’ve made in many different areas of science all seem to suggest that the emergence of life in the universe should be much more common than we once thought.

For example, in physics, over the past few hundred years, and again in the past few decades, we’ve experienced several paradigm shifts suggesting that our place in the universe is not quite as special as we once thought.

There was the Copernican Revolution of the 16th century, where we learned that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, but rather that the Earth orbits our Sun, along with the other planets in our solar system. Not long after that, Newton developed his universal laws of gravitation that explained how all of this works, and these laws work the same for all massive bodies - they don’t have anything special to say about Earth specifically.

In more recent times, we’ve learned that our Sun is just one of over 200 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, many of which have their own planets, and that our galaxy is just one of something like a trillion others in the observable part of the universe.

All of this suggests that Earth-like planets should be in no short supply.

We find a similar story in chemistry and biology. In chemistry we’ve learned that the building blocks of life as we find it on earth are composed of a relatively small set of organic molecules called amino acids, which are themselves made up of just a handful of elements. These elements are all in abundant supply in the universe, and in fact scientists have already found many full-fledged amino acids in outer space.

And in biology, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which applies not just to living creatures, but also to cells, and even to molecules, has given us an end-to-end account for how even the most complex life forms can emerge over time from the very simplest building blocks of life.

We’ve also learned of extremophile organisms that can survive in the harshest of conditions on Earth, such as in acid hot springs, and in icy polar regions. Finding life in such extreme conditions expands the potential habitats where life beyond Earth might exist.

All these examples and many, many others suggest that life has probably emerged many times all over the universe. And this poses a very serious conundrum, and perhaps even a call to action, because despite life’s apparent abundance outside of Earth, we’ve not yet found any direct evidence of it. We don’t even have direct evidence for simple forms of life such as bacteria, let alone complex forms of life, such as a technologically advanced civilisation.

As Sara and I discuss in today’s conversation, there are several possible explanations for this, and unfortunately most of them are not very comforting.

One particularly concerning possibility is that complex life simply doesn’t tend to last for very long, and that any technologically advanced civilisations we might have encountered have been wiped out or self destructed before we’ve had the chance to meet them. This could be via nuclear self-destruction, or planets being bombarded by asteroid collisions before civilisations become space faring, or something far more pedestrian. Whatever the case may be, this does not bode well for the long term survival and flourishing of life. 

Not too long ago, this line of thought could justifiably have been considered nothing more than an entertaining thought experiment. But things are different now. If we take a rational, clear-eyed account of the science of life and the cosmos as we know it, then the intellectually honest and defensible position is to take this possibility seriously.

And this is all the more reason to take the idea of existential risk seriously, and to have serious discussions about how we can prevent ourselves from being destroyed, whether by self-destruction or otherwise. I’m looking forward to bringing you more conversations with the people at the forefront of these topics. And this conversation is the perfect introduction.

And now I bring you, Sara Seager.

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

​

[00:05:31] Matt: I'm here with Sara Seager. Sara, thank you for joining me.

[00:05:33] Sara: Thanks for having me.

[00:05:35] Matt: Sara, I'd love to have a conversation about the search for extraterrestrial life, which you're very well known for, both within our solar system and far beyond. Um, but let's start very close to home with the second planet from our sun, Venus.

And I'll put it straight to you. Do you believe that there is life on Venus or do you think there is life on Venus?

[00:05:54] Sara: Well, that's a great question. And I do hate to start out with the word believe, but if

[00:06:00] Matt: Yeah.

[00:06:01] Sara: I may say instead that Yes, I think it's a possibility.

[00:06:05] Matt: And, uh, what, what makes you, what makes you say that?

[00:06:08] Sara: Well, it's something very, very specific and very, very new. And it might take a few minutes to unpack this, My team decided to work on laboratory studies of sulfuric acid. Now, you may or may not be aware that the Venus clouds are made of acid.

And it's a very, very nasty, horrible chemical that destroys our life. But the clouds, if there is life on Venus, we think it has to be in the cloud layers. Because the surface of Venus is too hot for life event. The surface of Venus is scorching. It is unbelievably hot. It's over 700 Kelvin. Almost certainly too hot for life of any kind.

But just like here on Earth, if you hike up a mountain, or take an airplane, you know, it gets colder and colder above the surface, and so too on Venus. And in the cloud layers about 50 kilometers above the surface, it is a good temperature for life. It's actually like the temperature we have here at Earth's surface.

So if you hiked a mountain, I don't know if you're into hiking or you've ever been up a mountain,

[00:07:08] Matt: Yeah.

[00:07:09] Sara: And do you know how it gets colder? Like, have you ever been on a mountain where it's just a really nice day at the base, and then the top is frigid winter?

[00:07:15] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

[00:07:16] Sara: Like, where? Where's that?

[00:07:18] Matt: I, I mean, a bunch of stuff. So I've done, um, okay, well, this is not too high in the UK, Ben Nevis. It's, it's not all, it's not all that high, but, uh, yeah, my, my family has done Kilimanjaro. I've, I've

[00:07:29] Sara: Did you go on Kilimanjaro?

[00:07:30] Matt: I, I personally didn't, but I've, I've seen the photos. I've seen the snow at the top and the, and the tropical sort of, uh, look down below.

Um,

[00:07:37] Sara: Right, right. So think about that for a minute. So hot on the surface of Venus, but way up in the clouds, just the right temperature. Now, we have life in our clouds. On Earth, there's bacteria that gets swept up from the surface, and it goes into the clouds, and it stays there for a while before it gets rained out.

So, why not life in Venus clouds? But this acid, you know, the clouds aren't made of water. They're made of a horrible, nasty substance. And, don't do this at home, but if someone accidentally puts an ant into sulfuric acid, it immediately has a seizure and turns to black goo instantly, before you can almost blink an eye.

So it's bad for our life, but we have started some experiments in sulfuric acid and we started to put some chemicals, biological chemicals, in sulfuric acid and we're finding they're stable. You know, I can give you some examples now or a bit later, but who would have thought that maybe some other kind of life, not our life, but a life that uses slightly different molecules than our life does.

Um, I mean, this is a, it's astonishing. It's not really well known. We're kind of, We're not advertising this work right now, because we're, it's so exciting, we're just trying to own the field.

[00:08:49] Matt: Yeah, I mean, there is a sense though, in which, like if we were to find life out there, perhaps you would expect it to be very close to home because, you know, it was sort of proof that. at least this little region of, of space, this pocket of space can facilitate life. And so there, there is a sense in, yeah.

[00:09:05] Sara: do. I like that kind of thought. That if life is everywhere, we have to also be able to find it in your home.

[00:09:09] Matt: Yeah, and even probably more likely to find it in your home.

in some sense, because we've kind of got proof that, you know, our solar system at least, uh, you know, allows it. Um, but why, why specifically Venus, you know, why, why are we not talking about, um, Mars or any of the other planets? Why specifically Venus for you?

[00:09:28] Sara: Well, I would, okay, there's several answers to this, but one is why not all planets? You know, if we had infinite time and infinite resources, yes, we should explore everywhere and anywhere for life.

Mars, we're all hoping, has life beneath the surface. Just beneath the surface in a pocket that's got a bit of water, hopefully.

[00:09:45] Matt: Hmm.

[00:09:45] Sara: just got obsessed with Venus. Everyone votes for the underdog. No, because, it's like, You have a family, maybe you've had siblings growing up. You know how one sibling gets all the attention, and then another sibling always gets ignored?

I'm

[00:10:00] Matt: Yeah.

[00:10:01] Sara: not sure which one you were.

[00:10:02] Matt: Oh, I'll keep that. I'll keep that to myself.

[00:10:05] Sara: Well, Mars is like the sibling that gets all the attention.

[00:10:09] Matt: Hmm.

[00:10:10] Sara: that make sense? Mm hmm. Venus is like the ignored sibling. I mean, the former Soviet Union sent many probes to Venus that went in the atmosphere, that measured things, and they did a phenomenal job. If something didn't work quite right on one, the next one fixed it.

They sent two balloons to Venus. Each lasted about 48 hours on battery supply and radioed information back to Earth. NASA sent a probe to Venus, Pioneer Venus, that separated out into four separate things that... And these were all nearly 40 years ago. So why haven't we sent probes back to Venus? It's amazing, but it turns out there are a lot of interesting things about Venus that were shelved.

Really interesting things that people found that just could put on the shelf. Atmosphere anomalies, we call them. Very unusual bits of chemistry in the atmosphere that aren't explained yet.

[00:11:00] Matt: But why, why is that? I mean, you know, if, if people are, have been historically uncovering interesting things, you would expect, uh, You know, follow-ups and, and this

[00:11:10] Sara: You would, you would. I'm not sure. I mean, I really don't know why Venus got out of favor. I do know, I'm new to the Venus research, but the Venus community has been trying to get a mission to Venus for a very long time. And now there are a few missions slated. The European Space Agency has a mission. NASA has planned for two missions.

Other countries want to go to Venus as well.

[00:11:31] Matt: can. you tell me a little bit about the Venus Life Finder mission? Um, I've read the, I've read the report that you are,

[00:11:36] Sara: Right, right. Well,

[00:11:37] Matt: sort of lead investigator

[00:11:38] Sara: emoted by phosphine, I initiated a study group and it morphed into, we used to call ourselves the Venus Lifefinder Team. We've changed our name now. We call ourselves, we're an international consortium and we call ourselves the Morning Star Missions to Venus. Because Venus is very bright in the morning sky sometimes.

And right now as we're speaking, I'm not sure if you've seen it in the mornings, it's incredible.

[00:12:03] Matt: Yeah,

[00:12:04] Sara: So bright, right? And so high up in the sky. So we, Morningstar, we feel like it's an evocative term, like something new, something rising. So we call ourselves the Morningstar Missions to Venus, and we're aiming for a series of missions, astrobiology focused missions, to search for signs of life and perhaps even find life.

So that's what we're doing. And our first mission in the series is called the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus. And we have teamed up with Rocket Lab to send a small, focused, low cost mission to Venus. And not sure if you've touched on at any time this kind of, um, the revolution CubeSat.

I don't know if you know what the word CubeSat is. There's this kind of flurry of activity of making small focus missions for space, both commercially and just for research teams. Well, we're aiming to do that for interplanetary as well. So that instead of waiting a decade or more for countries to get together or for the USA to have many instruments on a big mission that satisfies a lot of people to have a small focus mission of lower cost to get to Venus and try to answer focus questions.

[00:13:27] Matt: Yeah, this, um, this sort of emergence of privately funded missions is very interesting. Um, in the, in the report you write, um, uh, well, I don't know if you wrote this, somebody wrote in the report, as we write, the world is poised on the brink of revolution in space science, privately funded missions to Mars and Venus and perhaps beyond.

Are becoming a reality and I find this very, very interesting, um, you know, from a research perspective. Um, well firstly, am I correct in understanding that, you know, if this mission with Rocket Lab was to go ahead, this would be the first privately funded research mission to Venus?

[00:13:59] Sara: It would. And we do soften that a bit. We call it the first largely privately funded mission to Venus. So, yes, it would be the first. I

[00:14:08] Matt: And how, how does the, how does the like incentive mechanism work there? Why, why would, um, a private company fund a research mission like

[00:14:16] Sara: mean, that's a good question, and you'll have to ask if there's some way you can ask the private company, because I don't have the answers to why they would, why they've done that. But one fact I can tell you is that, to my knowledge, If you want your rocket, if you want to get a NASA contract or, you know, get a civilian space science research project, you know, on to another planet, you have to be qualified to go there. But how do you, it's a chicken and egg problem. How do you get qualified if you haven't sent a rocket to another, another planet?

So one incentive is if you can get a rocket to Venus and drop the payload into the orbit as planned,

now you can get to Venus, and you're another player in that space. But there may not be, you know, that's why we love science. You know, a lot of what we're driven to do, it's not driven by... Like a distinctive application or purpose. And so I don't know if we can really see like a giant future in privately funded space missions only because of what you said.

[00:15:19] Matt: Yeah, and if this, um, if this mission sort of all goes to plan and goes ahead, what are you, what are you hoping to find? What do you expect to find, uh, on this mission?

[00:15:27] Sara: Well, this mission is very simple and it's very cheap, low cost mission. Sometimes someone on the team, it wasn't me, joked, it's like throwing a rocket Venus because you're just sending a probe that's dropping down through the atmosphere. Well, we have a single instrument we call. The autofluorescence nephelometer.

And this instrument is going to shine a laser, a blue laser, through a window. And the thing we're really excited to look for is fluorescence. We are sending the light out to the cloud particles. And if they light up, do you know what fluorescence is? Like if you ever go to like a nightclub or like a kids fun house and the lights are off so it's supposed to be dark but then if you're wearing something white it just lights up like fluorescence.

And it, some very, a set of interesting molecules fluoresce. And if we see fluorescence, it could indicate that there's organic material in these droplets. So that they're not pure sulfuric acid with nothing interesting in them. Now, it won't prove there's life. That's not what we're setting out to do. But all life needs organic material.

So it'll be a clue that there's something very interesting happening in these droplets. The other thing we're going to try to do, is answer some lingering questions about the cloud droplets themselves. If the droplets are just pure sulfuric acid, like sterile, with nothing interesting going on, they're going to be spherical at the conditions they're at.

But the Pioneer Venus had a similar instrument, it couldn't look for fluorescence. But they actually found some of the particles appeared to be non spherical and not pure sulfuric acid, and those go hand in hand. So we're going to go back and try to constrain the composition of those particles, because we're also going to measure the backscattered radiation from these particles, and that has some encoded information about what the particles are made of.

[00:17:16] Matt: You mentioned that, um, you know, organic molecules being sort of necessary for, for life. I want to dig into that point just briefly. Um, you know, obviously on, on our planet, uh, all life that we know of is, is based on organic molecules, but what's your sense of, to whether that's true more generally? You know, is, is this a very constrained view of.

what could comprise life?

Or do we feel this is a fairly comprehensive view? You know, I would almost say, like, close to a necessary condition for life.

[00:17:46] Sara: I'd say so. I'm not an expert in And no one understands what could be a possible biochemistry elsewhere, but the sheer flexibility of carbon and hydrogen and how they work together and other atoms. Nothing really comes close.

[00:18:02] Matt: And, uh, to what, to what extent is, or how close is it to a sufficient condition? You know, if we, if we were to find many organic molecules, some similar to, to what we have here on earth, how much confidence should we, would we, should we glean from that?

[00:18:14] Sara: in general, or the Rocket Lab mission specifically?

[00:18:17] Matt: Uh, in general, but,

[00:18:19] Sara: general, yeah, because our mission will just only indicate whether something's interesting there, and whether it deserves, we deserve to go back and take a closer look. Well, life is about complexity. And when you think about complex molecules, you can ask yourself, do they come out of volcanoes?

Are they just littering the surface? You know, or is there a unique, or is there a set of molecules that we just don't expect to be floating around in the clouds? And so seeing a lot of complex molecules would definitely be an indicator that there's something extremely intriguing there. But before we get ahead of ourselves.

In this mission series, we've envisioned three missions, or maybe four, so we have our first mission to demonstrate we can go there and to find out whether these cloud particles are different from pure sulfuric acid. And if all of that is the case, it's like a green light for us to pursue our second mission where we would try to answer your question.

What is the range of molecules there? What is, what are some of the molecules if there are indeed complex organic molecules in the cloud droplets? There may be another mission, but what we ultimately want to see happen is a sample return from the clouds of Venus. And you may be aware that we're planning, we meaning NASA, is planning for a sample return from Mars.

And so, sample return, it's like, new trend, new trend, extremely difficult, very challenging. But some of the work will be done, not by us, but by NASA, when they figure out how to bring samples back. You know, we just had part of an asteroid brought back to Earth by NASA, and the Japanese have brought back part of an asteroid.

So many of the elements we know how to do. And we have spent some time working on what the mission might look like. But can you imagine, we have pieces of clouds of Venus, and we subject those to our very best instruments here on Earth, things we couldn't bring to Venus and couldn't float around in the atmosphere and do analysis with there.

[00:20:12] Matt: Yeah. It's absolutely incredible. It does pose the question, like, looking more generally at the search for extraterrestrial life, you know, whether in our solar system or not, um, on the methods, so, you know, if we could extract samples from Venus or Mars and analyze them, uh, obviously that's sort of, um, you know, one of the best indicators that we could do, but, um, you know, I think People generally think a lot about the question, how Should we, or how could we detect extraterrestrial life?

Um, I'm interested in your thoughts if we turn the question around and imagine ourselves as the extraterrestrial life to some advanced civilization out there, wherever it may be, and imagine that they were, you know, playing the same game and, and searching for life out in the stars. How would this hypothetical civilization likely find us?

You know, what, what would they see? That indicates that there.

is life here on Earth.

[00:21:06] Sara: Yeah, I love that question. And if we think about, if they're at our level of technology right now, they wouldn't be able to find us at all. They wouldn't even be able to find our specific planet, actually. So that's maybe something we want to talk about a bit later, but we actually have real experiments on this.

We have spacecraft that have been on their way to Mars, or on their way to someone else, that we've had look back at Earth and pretend like Earth was an exoplanet. And one of the really interesting ones was a mission went to Jupiter in the 1990s called Galileo. And it had to do a gravity slingshot of Earth, and there's a paper actually by Carl Sagan where they turned on the camera, looked at Earth, and did like a double blind experiment, just like you're asking.

Like, if we take this data, what does it tell us? And it wasn't, maybe, I don't know what your, I don't know what your expectations are. It wasn't conclusive that there's life here. You know, they could see oxygen, a gas that is, um, that's our favorite sign of life, by the way. Oxygen is made by plants and photosynthetic bacteria.

And our atmosphere here on earth has 20 percent by volume oxygen. But without life and photosynthetic bacteria, it would virtually have no oxygen. Oxygen is very reactive and has to be continually produced to be in the atmosphere. So if there's aliens looking at us from afar and they see oxygen, you know, they might be really suspicious that there might be life here.

On the other hand, you know, they might not. They might say, that's a terrible planet. It has so much oxygen. Oxygen is bad, right? It helps, it can cause fires. And they might look at our planet if they had super sophisticated technology and say, what a terrible planet. It has large raging fires covering big areas, like at any given time.

You know, they could have a list of why they don't like our planet. So it's really not clear. You know, that's, that's a very good question. They could see that our atmosphere has things going on that are suspicious, but they might. quite attribute those suspicious things to life.

[00:23:16] Matt: Well, what about, um, you know, there are some more active measures that people on Earth are taking to kind of broadcast our, uh, existence out there, you know? Things like submitting pulses, representing prime numbers, and those sorts of things. Um, I mean, suppose there were a civilization out there. Would that be something that would be detectable, or is this, uh, is this a bit of a farce?

[00:23:39] Sara: know, every once in a while, someone gets very enthusiastic about this idea and wants to start a group and wants to send a message. But what are your thoughts on that? The general consensus is not to do that. People are not wanting to broadcast our existence. What do you think about that?

Like, do you think we should go, yay, we're here, come in, come and find us?

[00:23:59] Matt: I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. I think it's a, I think probably, probably not. Probably not. I think that if you just look at the, the risk reward on that, I think we're erring too much towards the risk and not enough towards reward. Um, but it is intriguing and, and I do, I can imagine. That there would be civilizations who would have a different risk calculus and, and would choose to broadcast themselves,

[00:24:20] Sara: that's a really

[00:24:21] Matt: not sure.

[00:24:21] Sara: thing, right, because we're listening. We are spending a lot of money to listen, and if everyone feels like us, if everybody's listening and no one's sending that message, then it seems like it might dead end for us.

[00:24:33] Matt: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, what are your thoughts? Like, should we be broadcasting, broadcasting our existence?

[00:24:39] Sara: I think, I'm not worried personally, I feel like any super Power aliens that could harm us probably already know we're here and so that's one thing the thing I like more That's concept. I like a lot more though is I like this thing. I like this concept about the ants I don't know if you ever get like a break in of ants to wherever you live, but you know, they're really clever They do reconnaissance So they'll come and look around a few of them like look around your kitchen and if they find something like if you've a chunk Of cat food on your counter, I don't this happens to you But then all of a sudden there's a steady stream of them and they're like coming

[00:25:18] Matt: I live in, I live in Australia. This is a sort of a daily occurrence.

[00:25:21] Sara: see. So, imagine that the stream of ants is coming by. You can like wipe out their trail and then they get confused for a while. But imagine if you wanted to talk to them. Tell them about your podcast. Like, how would you frame that to these ants?

[00:25:38] Matt: Yeah, it's uh, it's quite a conundrum, there is no overlap in our communication.

[00:25:44] Sara: what if we're the ants? And there's some super civilization out there. And they know we're here. I mean, you know the ants are there. Do the ants know you're there? I mean, probably. They must know somehow that you're there, but do they care? Like, maybe you're just so far... You can certainly wipe them all out, right?

You can poison them, you can do bad things to them, but... I don't know if they're really that aware. I'm just saying, like, I always wonder if we're the ants and the civilization out there knows we're here, but there's just no reason for them to want to contact us.

[00:26:14] Matt: Yeah, no, I think about that as well, and also if we are just searching for the completely wrong types of things, you know, um, you know, if you imagine the space of possible things we might call life or intelligence is.

very wide and The, the sort of biological forms of it are very, it's a very narrow sliver and we're sort of razor sharp focused on this, on this sliver and missing something larger.

[00:26:37] Sara: Well, dolphins are really smart. My dog is smart. We used to think my dog was the dumbest creature ever. But we learned that he's so smart he acts dumb and he had us fooled for like five years.

[00:26:50] Matt: yeah, I think it, I do think it's true. We definitely project a very narrow view of intelligence onto the world.

[00:26:56] Sara: I was just reading that roosters are smart. I read this article saying that one definition of smart is self awareness. Like if you look in a mirror and know that it's you and not someone else. And they did this test for roosters because they'll crow if there's danger. They alert other roosters. So they put a mirror in so the rooster sees itself and then they put a danger like a bird or some other kind of animal.

And the roosters didn't crow at themselves. But if the roosters get a one way window, so they can't smell or sense the other rooster, but they see the other rooster, then they will crow and warn it.

[00:27:28] Matt: Oh, very interesting. I mean, I've heard of versions of that where they would take a, an animal and put a mark somewhere on its

[00:27:35] Sara: Yeah, primate.

[00:27:35] Matt: and show, Yeah.

and, and the, actually the levels of self awareness seem to be pretty variable. There aren't that many

[00:27:41] Sara: Right. But this new study was saying you can put a mark on a rooster, but it doesn't really care. It's not aware of the mark, but it's self aware that when it looks in the mirror, it knows that it's looking at itself. And so they had to do a different test that made more sense for the rooster. So I'm just supporting your thought about how we're not defining, we're just defining intelligence differently.

I mean, imagine if we. I mean, dogs admittedly aren't as intelligent as we are, but imagine if you just had dolphins that became super intelligent, but they just live in the water and couldn't build a big telescope to broadcast.

[00:28:13] Matt: Yeah, exactly. I spoke to Michael Levin a little while ago, who's a, um, a very interesting sort of biologist, regenerative medicine guy, and, um, he made the point that every time we try to judge the intelligence of something, we're really taking an intelligence test ourselves, because it's a non trivial thing to do.

[00:28:30] Sara: right.

[00:28:30] Matt: Um, I'm interested in the mainstream view, or the consensus view, if there is any, among astrophysicists today on, um, How likely it is that there is life outside of Earth, maybe generally outside of Earth, and then within our solar system. My experience, um, and it'll be much more limited than yours, is, um, you know, if we were to go back, um, well, when I was younger, it seemed that more people were open to the idea that there was not, and now basically everyone I speak to Feels like there is and I'm not sure what has changed.

So, uh, what is, what is your, what is the, what is the mainstream view among astrophysicists today?

[00:29:07] Sara: Well, the mainstream view captures how vast our universe is. I mean, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and we think there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there. Our evidence right now says that most stars have planets. So if we have hundreds of billions of stars, and there are trillions of planets in our galaxy alone, we see the ingredients for life everywhere.

I mean, surely there has to be life somewhere other than here. So we feel fairly safe just saying that because the numbers are so vast. The harder question is, Is there life nearby, not just in our solar system per se, but around the nearby stars that our telescopes can access? And you might find some debate there.

But, what I love to say is, you know what? We don't have to speculate right now, because we've made big strides. We have, we all of us, we have found exoplanets and shown they're common. We have shown that rocky worlds exist, planets that are predominantly rocky like Earth is. And we have found that planets that are the right distance from the star, so as they're heated by the star, they have some chance of being the right temperature to host life.

Our next step, which we're doing right now, is we're trying to work towards finding water vapor. In the atmospheres of planets in their habitable zone so that we can say, you know, rocky planets, they only have water vapor in the atmosphere if they have a reservoir, a water ocean to get a water cycle and keep that water vapor in the atmosphere.

So we're just doing one thing at a time. And, you know, so we, we're making strides toward, so let's say that the rock, so we know rocky planets are coming. That's great. You know, I mean, if there weren't rocky planets everywhere. Would be harder. So we're just hoping we get lucky in that there is life everywhere and there is water everywhere.

And so we can then speculate or have a better answer for you.

[00:31:04] Matt: Part of me is, is very excited by this and then part of me actually starts to worry a little bit because, you know, reflecting back on the old Fermi paradox, um, you.

know, Fermi. Famously looked around it and asked the question, where are they? And I guess in the face of all this mounting evidence of, you know, the universe is, is bigger.

Um, there are more exoplanets out there, more spaces where life could emerge, you know, all these things that make it seem more likely that it should be there and we'll find it. I guess the question, where are they becomes a little bit. More difficult to answer or I guess the, this, the, the answers to that become a bit more constrained.

Um, and so maybe we'd love to pose the question to you. How do you, how do you think about the, the Fermi paradox and the question, where are they?

[00:31:49] Sara: Well, lots of things. My first one I love is the ant story. Where they're out there, but why are they going to come here? There's really no reason. The one I really do like though, and I know this is not in the spirit of the Fermi Paradox, but that it just takes so much energy to get anywhere. And that You know, society would have to use up a lot of their resources to go somewhere else, and maybe I just don't see why they would.

The one I don't like, but that I'm scared is true, is that intelligent civilizations self destruct, accidentally self destruct. I mean, we just have to look around at what's happening on our planet today. War, climate change, overpopulation, there's a lot of things going on. And so it worries me that that's the answer.

[00:32:35] Matt: Yeah, that's, that's what I was getting at. That worries me as well in the face of, it seems like there's increasing evidence that there will be life out there. And you would imagine, I don't know, maybe you have views here. You would imagine that a lot of them would go down this pathway of getting increasingly...

intelligent and, um, you know, where, where is, where is the filter,

[00:32:54] Sara: Where's the filter

[00:32:55] Matt: and is that, is that your, is that your, I mean, is there a, is there any, is there any sort of consensus or mainstream view as to where those filters are likely to be?

[00:33:04] Sara: No, no, I don't think so. But just one other thought, this is a bit of an aside and it's sort of, you know, maybe there are planets where intelligent life doesn't evolve. I once heard this amazing talk, I wish I could remember the details, and this evolutionary biologist was trying to convince us that we had five chances for life, intelligent life to rise on earth on five continents.

And he showed this really amazing thing. So wait, where did you say you were? Wait, where are you from originally? Okay. Okay.

[00:33:35] Matt: Oh, it's a complicated question. Originally from South Africa. but I've spent many times, a lot of time in lots of countries.

[00:33:41] Sara: Okay. That's why I couldn't tell where you were from, but this, um, evolutionary biologists started to explain how on each continent, there can be very different animals that fill the same niche.

Like let's take Australia, for example, they have marsupials. We don't have, as far as I know, I'm not a biologist, so I don't want to get out of my Zone of information, but usually like we have anteaters and they would have something else that still did that. And he was trying to say, you know, if every niche is filled, um, I'm not even a hundred percent sure I buy this, but if every niche is filled, there's no really need for anything else to evolve, you know, cause things just sort of move along and that was his opinion that we had five chances and life of intelligent life came out of one continent and he was pretty confident about that and.

was just trying to use that as a sort of help the answer along here. But we'd still have intelligent life if it was that easy. We'd still have it somewhere, but what if there was a planet where it just never got that? And you just had your local populations getting overpopulated and crashing and stuff.

[00:34:43] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, certainly, certainly worrying. Um, okay, well, let's, let's maybe then zoom out even further. So we started talking about our own solar system and you know, in Venus in particular, um, but zooming out further, you mentioned exoplanets. I think this is another topic you're very well known for. Um, and I think most people now.

would understand the concept of exoplanets. I think maybe what is not as well understood is just how recent this, um, how recently this came into the mainstream science. You know, as, as early as the 1990s, it was debated whether there were even exoplanets out there. And then, um, you know, the first few were discovered in the early nineties and I checked NASA's latest exoplanet archive before this conversation.

Apparently there are now over 5, 500 known exoplanets and Uh, about an equal amount of, of yet to be confirmed ones, which is roughly a new exoplanet discovered every second day since, uh, since the early nineties, which I find remarkable. Um, you've obviously been one of the, one of the key figures in, in this process.

Have you seen the field develop since the early days of skepticism about exoplanets until today where it's, it's completely mainstream?

[00:35:51] Sara: It is so crazy how it has evolved in just such a, yeah, as you pointed out, a relatively short time. In the early days, people, there were people who were violently against this. You know, you'd go to a conference and people were just angry. And, you know, planets are so small compared to the star, so low mass, so dim.

That it's very hard to find and many, you know, the first ways we find planets are indirectly on the influence of the host star. And not only that, it is really unfortunate in science when you build an entire theory over just one single example, our solar system. People were expecting to find giant planets like Jupiter far from the star.

Meanwhile, the first set of exoplanets were extremely close to the star, way closer than Mercury is to our sun, and they were giant planets like Jupiter. And we know from observations of star forming, there's not enough material to make a big planet right next to the star. So there's sort of layer upon layer of craziness there.

Just, you know, didn't make sense. people just didn't believe it. Peer, uh, other, I was a student when I started working on this. I was always a risk taker, and I had the chance to work on exoplanets, and I just decided to do it. And I wasn't even sure they were real, okay? I mean, my advisor, and my PhD, and another professor who was close to my topic, they believed.

I just thought, you know, if these turn out not to be real... I'll still be able to get a job somewhere. And even if I wanted to become an astronomer, I'd still have the skill set. Because the work I was doing on atmospheres involved complicated, we call it radiative transfer, how photons move through an atmosphere.

So I knew I had a skill, and I learned, was learning how to computer program. but wow, it was pretty shaky back then. And I was working on exoplanet atmospheres. And I remember, um, someone on my thesis committee would be like, well, we can barely find these exoplanets. How are we ever going to study their atmospheres?

And why was I considering clouds in the atmospheres? Because if we ever could, if we ever could discover an atmosphere or study them, there's no way we could discern if clouds were there well today, we've not only measured dozens and dozens of exoplanet atmospheres, but cloud, you can have an entire PhD thesis on clouds on exoplanets.

So as time went by, as time went by. Exoplanets became legit because more and more of them were discovered. And as they were discovered further and further from the star, the effects couldn't be explained away by like star variability or just some other random thing going on in the star. And there was really a pivotal moment when, um, two tech, two different techniques were able to be used on the same planet system.

And there was just no way that, that it could be anything other than a planet. So now you might be thinking, well, okay, great, that sounds happy. But no. And people were still against it because they thought the field would dead end. That because of our detectors and our ability to find planets, that we would kind of, you know, exhaust all the limited numbers of planets that we could uncover.

Um, and the reason is just because the star is always there. It's always big, it's always bright, it's, it's always massive, and it's just really hard to get around that elephant in the room, you know, almost like it's, it's just always there and you have to have techniques to work indirectly. So people didn't really think that, you know, people in the early days...

Um, never thought the field would get this big, especially this whole atmosphere thing. I remember when I was looking for a permanent, a faculty job. So you become a grad student, you get your PhD, you may be a postdoc for a while, it's sort of like post PhD training, you have to like prove yourself on your own, and then you look for a job as a professor.

And no one would hire me, that was just too scary. You know, they would say things like, There's this, there's a new technique called transiting planets that I was involved with. And that's when some planets and stars are so perfectly aligned, that the planet goes in front of the star as seen from our viewpoint.

If it's not aligned that way, the planet orbits the star, like in the plane of the sky, and it will never transit. Well, at that time, we had a couple of transiting planets, and one of the many things I did early on, because no one was working in the field, I was like able to pioneer many things. And one of the things that I invented was how to study atmospheres of planets.

When the planet goes in front of the star, some of the starlight shines through the atmosphere. And we can look at a star by itself. And we can look at a star when the planet's in front of that star. And we can look at the difference there. Think of like shining a flashlight through a fog. Some light makes it through, some light gets blocked.

And by looking at what light gets blocked at different colors, we can Yeah, that's the main way we observe exoplanet atmospheres today. There are hundreds and hundreds of people working on this, maybe more, but at the time applying for a job Invented this method which had even been successfully used already and people are like no that's not that's a one object one method success Meaning wow cute idea it worked in one case But I doubt we'll ever have anything bright enough or suitable enough to do this again And so then the thought was sort of like this is cute.

This is real and it's really cute Really, really cute, kind of fun. But it can't be serious because our detectors, our telescopes are meh. They're not good enough to take this field the distance. So then, after that, um, that was a little tricky. And then after that, it started to change a little. I would go around giving talks, and you'd always have the people would come to me and be, you know, if I was young, if I was young, I would do this.

These sort of older professors, and so the sort of change where people got more and more intrigued, and so that love we see today, like, from the public and the scientific community and astronomers alike, this sort of intrigue, that's why we're here talking to each other, and that just grew, and then younger people, as you know, because it's uplifting.

We've all been young before. There are young people listening. You often do things without thinking, right? And so then more and more people wanted to go in the field. They wanted to work on exoplanets. And then we saw universities, even though the older faculty didn't want to, because the students wanted to, everyone sort of had to move there.

Then those students themselves grew up and became faculty, so now the whole field is just multiplying.

[00:42:07] Matt: Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's fascinating. I'm really interested in the, in the whole intuition there, you know, you mentioned at the start, like two, two things that really intrigued me. Um, one was that there was the skepticism of, of the existence of exoplanets and the other one was skepticism about how far this field could progress and, you know, how, how much we could end up being able to research and measure and so on.

Um, and I think I find both of these intuitions interesting because, um, well, first on the existence of exoplanets for myself. It feels that Observing that there are planets in our own solar system and knowing that, it feels like if, if, if we have to take a representative example of anything, that feels like the right representative example and we know there are other stars so, my intuition would immediately say, there should be more our solar system like stuff out there.

And then the second one similarly on the progress of science, again, if we look at our experience through history. Um, you know, increasingly there haven't been problems that we haven't been able to sort of really tackle eventually, we just, we keep making progress. And again, based on that, my intuition says basically all the problems will at some point be solvable.

I would be very interested to know about your intuitions in those early days, if you, if you can recall how you thought about those two questions, um, and, and if you've got any insight as, as to why, uh, those intuitions might not have been shared by others.

[00:43:32] Sara: Sure. Well, I remember one very distinctly because I was working with another young postdoc on trying to find the first ever planet by the transit technique. So we had to look, take a wide field telescope, look at tens of thousands of stars simultaneously and search them all with the computer, looking for a tiny drop in brightness that signifies a planet might be there.

And then we'd have to do some follow up measurements to make sure it was a planet and not another star. We were working so hard on this. Meanwhile, I go out to interview for a faculty position at a top university in the United States. And the professor interviewing me just says, Ah, there will never be very many transiting planets.

Well, today, you know, most of those 5, 000 are transiting planets. I think it's so successful. We've had the Kepler Space Telescope. The MIT led NASA mission TESS is churning them out today. Ground Base. And the reason why I found that so irksome was because I was working on it, and I knew how close we were to finding, unleashing untold numbers of them.

My team, unfortunately, myself and my partner, we failed. We didn't make this. We found other stuff along the way, but... Because I was working in the trenches, I literally knew what had to be done, and we know they're out there, we did the math. It was just a matter of getting everything to work. I mean, there's a lot of things like we have day night, we have bad weather, and just the right strategy, the right software, we were so close.

So I already knew that was wrong, and that intuition was based on actually doing things. Um, so in that case, that was some intuition right there. Then, when I was, at the same time I was doing that project, I did have a really amazing, the person who ran it, I hesitate to say boss because he wanted us to be independent, and he was very enthusiastic.

He'd be like, you know, if you have a great idea that can be backed up by physics, that is doable sometime in your lifetime, it is worth pursuing. And sometimes too, it's not so much of an intuition as just like a, youthful, energetic naivete, you know, so there's a bit of everything mixed together basically.

But now I've really honed my intuition. That's why I'm so enthused about Venus. I honestly, the chemistry we're finding is absolutely astonishing. And anyone who works on this will agree. But people just are reluctant to. Now to your question about why were people so hesitant. Well, Exoplanets has had a really checkered past.

There was the famous planet, I'm blanking on the name, In the 60s and 70s that was, um, you know, people thought that, well, some people thought there was, there were planets found and it had to do with the photographic plates and instrumentation change and it was just, yeah, it's had a checkered past where people have claimed there were planets and they weren't.

And then there's another case that comes from my home country, Canada, where the Astronomers had done a brilliant thing. They found out how to make measurements, like, one or two orders of magnitude better. Like, think about that for a moment. Anything you do, can you make it ten or a hundred times better? A better flavor of ice cream, a better, a better, uh, computer.

I mean, it's really hard, but they man And I could give you some technical details about how they did that. And they wanted to find exoplanets. But their telescope allocation committee, the peers who give you telescope time for your proposal, they were very conservative, and they monitored 20 stars for 12 years, looking for Jupiter, because Jupiter takes 12 years to go around the sun.

20 stars, and they didn't find, excuse me, they didn't find anything they could report on. And, honestly, if they had had 40 stars, they would have found something. Because planets are pretty common. And the planets close to the star have a whopping big signal that is unmistakable. And looking back at their data, there were one or two planets there in the end that they just couldn't find because the star was very variable or instrumentation got better.

So there's sort of a lot of things like that. Some checkered past where promoted planets turned out to be completely wrong. You know, the studies showing that they're just not, not there. They're not around every star. And so there was just some hesitance. There's also a thing in science called the giggle factor.

If I say, hey, I'm working on this and someone laughs, it just had that giggle factor. Like, people just couldn't take it seriously. And sure, we're, we're with you. We agree with you that we see stars being born. They all have disks around them, the ones we can see. It's like the dust bunnies under your bed or couch.

Like, they're gonna form. The planets want to form. They want to form. There's dust, there's... leftover material. So no one disagreed that planets shouldn't be there. Just the thought of searching for something that was so impossible to do, just based on how many decimal places you had to go to to uncover something next to the big bright massive star, people just thought that was silly.

[00:48:08] Matt: Yeah, but I mean, the amount of technological progress we have made is, is quite outstanding.

[00:48:12] Sara: It's absolutely outstanding. We all have a phone of some kind. It's just incredible.

[00:48:16] Matt: Yeah.

exactly, exactly. I mean, I think, um, a lot of people would still have the image of an astronomer, you know, looking into a, a telescope up at the night sky and obviously. The actual picture of it is nothing like that, it's, you know, advanced technology and complicated computing and, um, but some of the technology that I do find really just amazing is what we actually send up into, into space.

And, and one in particular that I know you've been involved with, uh, is called Starshade. Uh, would you mind telling me a little bit about Starshade?

[00:48:50] Sara: Yes, Starshade is a futuristic telescope idea. It is a giant, specially shaped screen that is tens of meters in diameter. And it has its own spacecraft, and it would formation fly in outer space with a telescope, tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope. And Starshade would block out the starlight so we can see the planet directly.

So imagine like the bright star and the glare block out that light so only planet light enters the telescope. In the star shade it's like a giant sunflower. It's a huge, big, beautiful thing that was first conceived of in the 1960s by the same person who conceived of the Hubble Space Telescope. But Starshade is so big and you have to line it up so precisely with the telescope, it wasn't buildable back then.

And what's really fascinating is that Starshade, or some form of it, was picked up again every decade, and then shelved for one reason or the other. Until 2013, I was so excited to get to lead a Starshade study. And I only found out afterwards that one of the reasons the Starshade study was started was to, for lack of a better word, kill Starshade.

It's very helpful to know what works and what doesn't. And if you can study something carefully and say, it's not going to work, it's a really good to know that actually, because we have another way to block starlight. And instead of having the giant screen on the outside, we can put like a tiny little screen, if you will, on the inside of the telescope.

And so both ideas were being studied and it turned out we showed starshade is not only doable. We showed that starshade is not only good idea, a good idea worth promoting. But it's actually very doable and has heritage and large radio deployables that we put out there to listen down on Earth. So Starshade, um, is something that is quite mature.

There's been lab demonstrations. We're super excited about Starshade. But not everyone's excited about Starshade. And it hasn't been chosen to be like the thing to go forward at the present time.

[00:50:52] Matt: Do you feel that at some point it, it will,

[00:50:54] Sara: I feel like it

[00:50:55] Matt: built, it'll be sent up

[00:50:56] Sara: I'm, I do think, logically speaking, if you look at the numbers of how mature Starshade is in terms of its buildability, and this sort of very, and this very simple, clear idea of blocking out all the starlight before it hits the telescope, it has to happen.

[00:51:16] Matt: And so maybe let's just briefly talk about the, the physics of, of Starshade a bit because a lot of my listeners are really into physics. So the, the idea here as I'm understanding it is, you know, basically too much starlight blocks, you know, prevents you from being able to see a planet. have this very intricate, interesting design, um, which is actually very fine tuned for technical reasons to block starlight so you can see the planet.

Can you

[00:51:40] Sara: Well, yeah, let's back up. Let's back up a little bit because not everyone will have this experience and I'm not sure I don't think you live somewhere where this can happen now, but if you ever try to take a picture in winter, there's like a lot of snow, fresh, bright snow. You want to take a picture of your friend.

It's nearly impossible actually, because your friend would be very, very dark and the snow is so bright, overwhelming, you know, your detector and you could say, okay, well, I can, You know, you could really lengthen your exposure so the person won't be dark, but then the whole thing will get washed out from all the light from the snow.

So the planet Earth compared to our sun in reflected light. It is 10 billion times fainter. So it's not like the person in the snow, it's way, way, way worse. So if you were just to take that image of the, a picture of like the planet and star with a fancy space telescope, you know, the glare of the star would overwhelm the detector.

And you could say, well, why don't I just take a really fast exposure, not let, you know, the light from the star won't bleed all over my detector. But you wouldn't get any photons from the planet then. Because it's just so faint. So we have to block out the star because otherwise we can't get a signal from the planet.

It's just overwhelmed by the star. So that's the kind of bigger picture. But as to the shape of it, let's imagine we put a giant screen, a circular screen in space, and we block out a star, a point source of light. Well, unfortunately, the picture we take, or the image, won't be just dark, because we'll get an airy ring pattern.

The light can act like a wave, and it can bend around the edges of a circular screen, and there are ripples of light, just like if you dropped a pebble in a pond, there would be ripples. And those ripples of light are actually way brighter than the planet we'd be looking for. So, instead, people figured out that mathematically, you can just have a different shape.

Not a giant circle in space, but this flower like shape with these giant petals that have very, very long, sharp tips. And then, when the starlight bends around the edges in this very complicated pattern, it can interact with itself and cancel itself out. So in this case, that point source star, that would be like dropping a pebble in a pond.

And now the pond is perfectly smooth to one part in ten billion. And all the waves are pushed to the outer edges.

So just think about that for light. The light is bending around and it's cancelling out.

[00:54:10] Matt: this? It's phenomenal. Um, and I will, I will link a little video, um, to the starshade, um, sort of design into the show notes here. But I mean, when looking at it, I found it just absolutely amazing that for, you know, something that was designed for you know, very technical reasons, you know, it was for physical reasons that it was designed with this way.

It actually resulted in something that was outstandingly beautiful and, and did, did look like a flower. Um, and it actually made me think of the, of the concept of, you know, beauty and all that, that people get when they look at these things and look up into the sky. I think something most people can probably relate to whether scientifically inclined or not is.

This um, sense of beauty and mystery and awe one feels when looking at the stars on a clear night sky. Um, I would love to move to this, this topic and, and ask you, you know, after so many years in the field, uh, if you do imagine standing outside on a crystal clear night, looking at the stars, looking at the moon, um, what, what do you feel, how do you feel looking at, looking at the night sky?

[00:55:10] Sara: My heart beats fast.

[00:55:12] Matt: That's amazing.

[00:55:13] Sara: I love the night sky. I look it up at every time I step outside. I'm a really early riser, and I get to work super early, and it's dark now, unfortunately, when I leave my house, but I, the night sky is amazing. I see Orion in the morning. Venus is so bright in the sky. Sometimes I get to see, I love the crescent moon, you know, just before it's about to go to new moon or comes out of new moon, and it's amazing.

I get to, sometimes I get to see the Perseid meteor shower in August. And occasionally, just occasionally, I'm out west, in the western United States, where there are some areas that are incredibly dry. When you think of the Rocky Mountains, the eastern side is dry. So dry. And if you go there and at night time, I mean, just wow.

The sky is so clear and beautiful, and I feel humble. And I feel... I feel the vast awesomeness of the universe.

[00:56:06] Matt: Yeah, that's, that's beautiful. It's, um, it reminds me, Star Shade in particular as well, because of the flower shape, it reminds me of a famous reflection by Richard Feynman. I can't remember where it came from, but he talks about talking to an artist friend of his about the beauty of a flower. And, um. The friend says, you know, I can perceive the beauty in this flower, but you scientists, um, you know, you reduce it to, you know, equations and so on, and you don't see the beauty and Feynman has a visceral reaction to this and he says, um, you know, I see it only as additive.

I mean, I can, I can still perceive the beauty of the flower, but I also see different levels. I can think about the cells, I can think about the molecules that make it. I can think about, you know, the fact that flowers have color. And that insects are attracted to these colours means that insects can perceive something like a colour and that tells me something.

Um, and so I think, I think the exact quote of Gautier is that he says, Science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds, I don't see how it subtracts. Um, and I would love to, to ask you, you know, over, over the time if you reflect back on how you felt when looking at the night sky when you were younger, without all the scientific knowledge and experience you have now, versus today.

How, how has that evolved? Has there been a change there? Has it, is it enriched? Has it diminished? How has it changed?

[00:57:29] Sara: It's, uh, that's a, just such a wonderful question. I really have never thought of that. changed. I just go out to the sky and I still feel that same excitement and that same joy when I see the night sky. In one way it's changed though because I'm working hard to find another Earth and I do envision the day when we can all look at the night sky together and we can point to a star and say that star has a planet like Earth.

And now I know exactly what we need to get there, and that's a really huge desire on my part. But I do try to just enjoy the beauty without over analyzing when I get a chance to see the dark night sky.

[00:58:09] Matt: No, that's beautiful. And, and, um, I don't know if you have a ready answer to this, but when you think about it, you know, what, what are the most, the biggest mysteries, most beautiful truths out there, what comes to mind? What do you find to be the most Beautiful, almost mysterious aspect of, of what's out there.

[00:58:27] Sara: Well, so many things. The origin and evolution of life is one of them. Like, if you ever start to learn biology and chemistry, like I'm trying to do now, for Venus, like, you just can't imagine, like, how everything came together and made us. So that's one of them. How did life originate and how did it evolve?

When we have an astronomy that's not in everything I think about every day is dark matter and dark energy that make up so much of our universe, the fact that so much out there is so mysterious, we don't even know what it is, it's literally mind boggling. I just love the planet Earth and how everything works together synchronously.

And sometimes it comes into play when you hear about an invasive species that just starts to destroy things and you're like, wow, that's just so crazy. So I just think the whole way ecology and biology and everything works together to me is a big mystery, how it came to be.

[00:59:20] Matt: Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure so many people listening will be feeling the same way. And I mean, being led by curiosity, there's so many things one could look at and one could study. Um, and I'm sure many would be interested in digging deeper into. The fields we've been, the topics we've been talking about. Um, and so maybe let's turn to the topic of advice for someone interested in this field.

Again, think of, it doesn't have to be.

a young person, but probably a young person, you know, exploring, looking to get into, um, a field similar to you, very generically, knowing what you know now, what advice would you have for somebody? Just starting to explore this space.

[00:59:56] Sara: Well, before we get there, I do have some advice I'd like to share. That is, whenever possible, find something you love doing that you're also very good at. If those two things coincide, you have a winning combination. And it's really important to try to pursue that. Now, not everyone has that. You don't always find the thing you love is also the thing you're really good at.

But it can happen.

[01:00:20] Matt: I love that advice. And if there is a third dimension of something that the world needs, and you can find a combination of all three, all the better,

[01:00:27] Sara: I would say, if you find something you're interested in, if you find something you're interested in, like space, find out what the skills are that you need and start working on those. So in astronomy today, you need to be good with computers. You don't need to be like the best ever computer programmer, but you need to have, you need to be comfortable using software and hopefully you can learn how to use Python, like at the minimum to manipulate code, to use like libraries that exist.

As we were talking about, that wasn't true back in the old days where in the old days you'd have to be really good with the telescope, go to the telescope, know how to use it, maybe build your own instrument. Today, the typical astronomer. You may go to the telescope, but it's very rare now. Your observations get planned as cue observing or with a space telescope.

You do kind of plan it, but a lot of it is done for you. So today's astronomer needs to know how to, how to use software and how to program is a really important skill. The other thing that's really important too, which may not be what you're expecting, but it's like to follow the thread of your curiosity.

So get that skill going there. So like, if you read something that just doesn't sound right, don't just go, Hmm, that's weird and shelve it. Like take the, pursue that, go look it up, go read it, find a way to get to the bottom of that. Because being a scientist, that's really key is, you know, a lot of things, a lot of things come across.

We find a lot of things, but knowing, building that intuition of what's interesting, what's unusual is really important as well. And then my, I have more, one more thread of advice, and that is to Peers and mentors who can support you. Don't work in isolation here. So find some friends. If you're joining an astronomy club, if you're older, if you're in school, find other people.

And along those same lines is build confidence. You know, you have to find a way to build confidence in yourself as you gain skill and experience so that you can hold on to your dream and make it real.

[01:02:26] Matt: does somebody come to mind for you as a sort of a friend or a mentor who has been particularly formative?

[01:02:33] Sara: Well, I have to say it was my dad. He was a very eccentric thinker, and this had to cause me to do a lot of research on my own. He believed in reincarnation, and especially that we were so close that we would be always together. We might come back as business partners or brothers or like husband and wife or something, but he was quite convinced of that.

So when I was 11 years old, I had to go to the library and read a ton of books on this. And I decided I just don't believe that. I just can't. So in a way he was really amazing because he was so eccentric that I had to check things on my own and I got used to sort of being my own scientist detective at an early age.

But he was a big believer in the power of positive thinking. And as a, as my, my dad, he wanted to make sure that I knew how to have a vision for my best self and how to make that real. That's something that has always, always stayed with me. He's not alive now, but, um, in terms of believing in yourself, you know, it's good to have someone believe in you, but ultimately you have to believe in yourself to make yourself, um, kind of happy, peaceful, and successful.

And so I'd say I, I'd say it was my dad who really instilled in me what I needed.

[01:03:47] Matt: Yeah, amazing. And, uh, you mentioned that, you know, based on, based on what you learned from him, you know, you spend a lot of time reading. And as we sort of bring this towards a close, we'd love to turn to the topic of books. Um, you're obviously a very well read person. You've also written several books, both, um, academic books, and you've written a very beautiful memoir, which I, which I have here.

And I'll just briefly flash up to the screen for a bit, smallest lights in the universe, uh, which, uh, was just beautiful. Um, Maybe let's turn then to the topic of books. One of the questions I love to ask my, uh, my guest towards the end of the podcast is, which books have you most gifted to other people and why?

[01:04:27] Sara: Oh, that's, that's actually a good question. Let me think about that.

Well, I'm having trouble remembering the last time I gave a book to someone. So let me, let me, I have favorite books for sure.

[01:04:36] Matt: Can be favorite books. That's a,

[01:04:38] Sara: Well, I would like to talk about one of my favorite books. So you remember being in school and assigned books, right? Well, there's a book that was assigned after I was already a grownup, but I had kids in school. And so I read some of their books. And this book is called The Giver. And it's by this author, her last name is Lowry or Lowry.

And if you haven't read it, you definitely should read it. It's about a utopian society, and

this book it follows the main character, a boy. Who comes of age and realizes he sees for himself that it's not actually and so this idea that we're all just in our own little world Just kind of getting through life just getting by sometimes right like sometimes you're literally just getting through the day you aren't able to step outside and see what's really there.

And so that book really hits at home I can't give you the spoiler because it's just mind bending and it's not too hard of a read because it's like a middle school book But I was just like, you know browsing my kids book and I got I just fell in love with that book in a huge, huge way. Love that book.

[01:05:50] Matt: amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Oh, we'll definitely link that one in the, in the notes. Um, and have you, have you ever been, have you ever been gifted a book by someone else that, uh, you know, was particularly memorable that really

[01:06:00] Sara: I definitely have one that changed my life. I have two, actually, that I'll tell you about. Um, so in Canada, there's a famous character in a book called Anne of Green Gables. She's an orphan and her, the author, Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote this book like well over a hundred years ago. But when I was about nine years old, I got a gift, like a holiday gift, like a Christmas gift.

And it had this bright yellow hard cover. And the book was a little bit beyond my ability. So like it was really hard to read. And I got this book from my step grandmother who I'd met for the first time. And the book just fell in love with this character and this character, Anne of Green Gables is famous all around in the world and people go to, she's a fictitious character, but, you know, she stood up for herself and she was vivacious and obnoxious.

You know, most girls were trained to be very obedient and not to rock the boat. And so her spirited existence, also being an orphan and getting to, you know, an actual family, it's just such a warm. spirited book. And so that book for children, for, you know, girls especially, it's just people all around the world love it.

And that, that would be one that definitely made a difference. Another book, which is sort of strange, is when I was in my early 20s, um, I definitely, I joined the outing club at my university, and I had always loved canoeing and canoe camping. I'm more into hiking now, and I've even tried some mountaineering, but where I lived in Canada was super flat, and there's a lot of lakes.

And there's a lot of rivers too in Whitewater. And I, my um, one of the physics professors told me I should go to this symposium he organizes called the Wilderness Canoe Association. And there like 800 people go, mostly armchair explorers. And I bumped, I want to say I, someone at that meeting, Said read this book.

Well, two books actually, but read these books. It will change your life. And one of the books was called Sleeping Island and it was this teacher who every summer would take off the entire summer bleeding into the fall and go exploring and he went to like parts of Canada where I don't know how and why, but there weren't even maps yet.

And this was like, it was like either, I think it was like in the 1950s. You know, how, how is that possible? How is there no map or maybe no maps accessible, but that idea of exploring and being able to go somewhere like under your own power and see the wilderness on your own. And I followed part of the root of that book the next summer with my, um, then canoe partner.

We went in this two month journey. Like in the wilderness and no other people for hundreds or even a thousand miles or more. So like that book, just the spirit of exploration and the fact that you can, not very easily, okay, it's definitely not easy, but you could get the skill and go somewhere new, like, and really truly explore.

[01:08:45] Matt: That's, that's just incredible. Um, yeah, we'll, we'll link those two as Well, Um, and I guess maybe that brings us very nicely to a final question. You know, you talk about exploring the unknown and, um, get back to the, the question of, uh, extraterrestrial beings and exploring out of space, a bit of a sidestep question, but imagine we were to, uh, to find an extraterrestrial advanced civilization out there, or we were to be visited by one.

Um, and we had to pick. One person from humanity the past the present to represent us to this extraterrestrial other who should we send?

[01:09:20] Sara: Well, I don't know who we should send specifically, but I know the kind of person I'd want to send. Um, I mean, I'm not thinking it should be anyone super famous or, you know, even very accomplished, but I'd want someone who represents, you know, the best we have to offer, in terms of being like a kind, generous, approachable, flexible person.

I'm actually thinking of my best friend, Melissa, who you've read about in the book. She's in the book and she's just so like, she's like a shining sun. And honestly, even if it, if you, if I had to like send an ambassador to meet even a stranger human or a strange alien, it would be Melissa or someone like Melissa, that person that is just so warm and well, I can't even, I want to like imitate her, but I can't, but just, it's just so you meet this person, everything about her is welcoming.

And I would want that. I'd want someone who, so the aliens know that we welcome you. But Melissa's smart enough to see through any BS too. So if like these aliens really wanted to nail us, like, she would know right away. So I'd want to send somebody like that.

[01:10:19] Matt: Yeah, that's great. It's great. I've had very few people like elect famous people or politicians or it's, it's, it's usually sort of the, the good things about humanity, gratitude and kindness. And so,

[01:10:31] Sara: that's really wonderful.

[01:10:33] Matt: so this has been a direct conversation. Is there any final thing that you would like to, to share anything that you'd want to send to the listeners or if people wanted to find you, where should they, where would you send them?

[01:10:43] Sara: Well, they can find me on Facebook, on Twitter, which is now X, or on threads and Instagram as well. But my, my advice to people is, you know, to just take a step, take a step. It's to, um, take a step back and to try to think about what really matters. And try to invest there and invest in yourself so that you can also give back to the world in some way.

[01:11:10] Matt: And I could not think of a better way.

to, uh, to wrap the conversation. Sarah, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for making the time

[01:11:16] Sara: Well, it was really a great podcast and thank you so much for having me.

[01:11:23] Sara: That was amazing. It's one of definitely the better, yeah, one of the best podcasts I've been on. So how did you come on, how did you come into doing these?

[01:11:32] Matt: I have always, I mean, it goes a long story, I actually mentioned the story on, on another podcast that I was invited on, but, uh, I just had the great fortune of, you know, when I was much younger, I was born in, to not a very sort of privileged environment in South Africa. And then by a series of events, I found myself getting to study at some amazing places.

So I went, I did my master's at Oxford, um, and I didn't finish a PhD at Cambridge, but I remember finding myself. Exposed to some of the best academics in the world and just feeling like it's kind of, it's just by luck that I get to have these conversations and I would love more people to, to be able to be exposed to them.

[01:12:10] Sara: And is this your main job or do you have another job?

[01:12:12] Matt: no, no, no. So this is definitely not, no. So I, I, um, I work in, for tech startups. I, I, I'm head of operations at a global sort of clinical AI company, and this is very much a, an important side thing.

[01:12:24] Sara: Interesting. Well, you're very good at this. And it's, it seems like it's along those lines of something you love doing that you're very good at. So I just wanted to emphasize that.

[01:12:31] Matt: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Yeah, it's, it's, uh, sort of the, my, um, one of the most important things for me is that.

you know, if I think of what guest experience do I, do I want to generate, I want them to look back and say, that was sort of my favorite, um, that was my favorite interview.

[01:12:45] Sara: Well, you know what I'm doing, where do I find your podcast, because I'm definitely going to download a few for my weekend.

[01:12:51] Matt: Oh, appreciate it. Um, I'll, I'll email it to you after this. ​

We discuss:

• Perceptual illusions, and whether different people perceive the world in the same way

• The extent to which we perceive reality as it really is, rather than as a useful fiction

• Exotic experiences like dreams and psychedelic trips

• The function and origins of consciousness

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube and listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Twitter: @anilkseth

• Book: https://amzn.to/4dKXg2M

• Dream Machine: https://dreamachine.world/

• Perception Census: https://perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world/

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

4:10 Blue and black or white and gold?

9:08 Yanny or Laurel?

12:17 Do we see the world in the same way?

18:21 Perceived is a controlled hallucination

24:16 Why d consciousness exist?

31:19 The Hard and Real problems of consciousness

34:15 Integrated information theory

46:17 Beast machines and the emergence of consciousness

1:04:40 Dreams, psychedelics and exotic conscious experiences

1:18:00 Book recommendations

Introduction: Things are not as they seem

This was one of my favourite conversations on this podcast to date. This is a conversation that gets right to the heart of some of the core themes I’m focused on in this podcast and in life more generally.

In Paradigm we look closely not just at what we know, but at how we know - or how we think we know it. And absolutely foundational to this entire endeavour are our perceptions. It is through our perceptions that we receive information from the world. Everything comes in via some combination of sight, hearing, touch and so on. It is using our perceptions that build models of the world, and it is with our perceptions that we test our worldviews against reality. 

If you think about it, everything we think we know about the world is in some way grounded in perception. And you can easily verify this for yourself by picking any beliefs you have and asking yourself why you believe this thing. And you might find that for some beliefs there are layers and layers of concepts and logic chains all on top of one other. But at some point in that line of questioning, perception will always be involved. There will always be some form of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching - something, in which your belief is grounded. Even in strictly scientific domains like astrophysics, where complicated instruments are involved to collect and interpret data, at the end of the day it is via our perceptions that scientists ingest this data and make sense of it.

Our entire knowledge system is intimately intertwined with out perceptions.

And it’s largely because of this fact that I find this conversation so compelling, and frankly quite terrifying. As we’ll discuss, different people can perceive the same physical reality in very different ways. People might literally see and hear very different things, even when confronted with the exact same physical inputs. We might see different colours in an image, or hear different words in an audio recording. And this is not some abstract philosophical point. Anil and I actually tested this in today’s conversation. We sat down together in the same room and looked at the same image, and listened to the same sounds, and yet saw and heard very different things. And you’ll be able to test this with us when you watch or listen to the conversation. As you’ll see, perception varies between individuals far more than one might think.

Given this fact, it’s extremely important that we seek to understand more about the ways in which our perceptions vary. If we want to understand one another, and coordinate and communicate effectively, then we need to have a better understanding of how people might see the world differently.

Anil is actively working on exactly this topic through an initiative called the Perception Census, which is a ground breaking scientific study exploring the ways in which we each experience the world around us different. And if you’re listening to this before November 2023, then you have a chance to be involved by taking part in it directly. And I strongly encourage you to do so. Check out the links in the show notes for details.

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:03] Anil: I see it as a blue and black dress.

[00:00:06] Matt: You see it as a blue and black

[00:00:07] Anil: see it as a blue and black dress.

[00:00:08] Matt: I see it as a gold and white dress. And Tessa, who's my fiance last night, was gold and white. She could not believe that other people see it as blue and black. And it's fascinating. I mean, the actual answer is, is blue and

[00:00:21] Anil: It is blue and black. Yeah. The real dress, if you see it in a, it's like in a photo with less ambiguous lighting, then it's clearly blue and black dress to everybody. So I'm right and you're wrong. Basically I win.

[00:00:34] Matt: It's true, but I mean, what, uh, what could possibly cause this if, um, you know, you look online, I think it's something like a 50, 50 divide or something like that.

[00:00:42] Anil: That's right. And that's what was fascinating about it. I remember when this, this photo first kind of took over the internet, I think it was in 2015. And I'd been just teaching a class on visual perception, getting back to my office. And there was just a ton of voicemails about this dress and this photo of the dress.

And to start with, I was also really perplexed because I'd not seen an example like this, where it was such a sharp divide between one way of experiencing it and another way of experiencing it. Our brains. Do something called color constancy. So, um, I mean, when we, when we experienced things around us, like we're sitting in this room now, it seems as though the colors that objects have, well, they're just out there and we just register them as they really are.

So it seems like this table really is brown. The walls really are kind of an off white, something like that. But that's not the case. And this is not a new insight, right back to Newton, possibly even before, way before, actually, you know, people have recognized that. Colors as they appear in our experience are what the brain makes of how surfaces reflect light.

Out there there's just electromagnetic radiation when it comes to, you know, how we see. And that's not colored. I mean, we might say there's a red wavelength, a green wavelength, and a blue wavelength, but they're just different wavelengths. They're not actually different colors. And our cells in our eyes are sensitive to these different wavelengths.

Out of different combinations, the brain creates this kind of almost infinite palette of color, but it does it in a very, very sophisticated way. The color that we perceive an object to be is in part shaped by what kind of ambient light. The brain thinks is going on. So if you take a white piece of paper from in here to outside It will still look white Even though the light hitting your eyes from the paper has changed quite a lot because outside it's mainly bluish sunlight I mean even when it's cloudy, it's still bluish light in here It's mainly yellowish and this has been well described process, but what had never been Recognized before was that there are individual differences in it, and turns out that that photo of the dress hit this sweet spot totally by accident.

It wasn't like a experiment designed to have this effect, it was just this photo that just appeared organically. And for some people, for some people's brain, The, seemed to be the brain was assuming that there was a sort of yellowish ambient light, like an inside light. And so these people experienced it as blue and black and other people's brains assumed the ambient light was more bluish and they saw it.

As white and gold 'cause different ambient light situation. So there's this incredible world of individual differences, uh, that this photo of the dress suddenly exposed. But the thing that I think is really fascinating about this is that, you know, the dress was a, was a meme. We, you know, it sort of took over for a while, then people forgot about it.

And there's a more fundamental truth, which is your question that you started with this assumption that we all perceive. I think the key word here is sufficiently, because it's not just the dress, like we're all having different experiences all the time, just that most of the time they're not dramatically different.

They're sufficiently similar that we use the same words, like, yeah, the table is brown, it's reasonably warm in here, so on and so on. We get along and we can behave in the world and it works and we function. Okay. But the truth is when probably not having the same, exactly the same experience, even if we share the same, the very same objective reality.

[00:04:42] Matt: Yeah. I mean, in the, in the color space, you could at least still argue that we could just be substituting words and we're still somehow qualitatively experiencing. Something the same thing, you know, you could argue that all our colors are inverted for example, but I think there are other Illusions just very similar to this that are not Color based so there's an audio one as well I feel like we should we should do it because a lot of people will be listening to this I'm not sure if you've come across this one, but I have one prepped here and this is Somebody's name being read out, and I would love to hear what you think.

[00:05:19] Anil: Oh yeah. Yeah. That's Yanni. Yanni. I've heard this one too.

[00:05:25] Matt: You're hearing Yanny?

[00:05:26] Anil: Yanni.

[00:05:27] Matt: I hear Laurel. And I cannot for the life of me hear the word Yanny.

[00:05:31] Anil: exactly. So I think it's another great example of, of, um, a bi stable perception. Right. Um, but instead of something that flips back and forth. Within a person like there are these, um, optical effects. There's one called the necker cube, which is like a wireframe cube.

And if you stare at it long enough, it sort of flips. Like sometimes you see it from below. Sometimes you see it from above the other things like this. The famous duck rabbit picture as well. Sometimes it looks like a duck. Sometimes it looks like a rabbit. These. Other illusions like this, this Yanni Laurel or the dresser.

There's various other ones as well. Green, there's something that to me sounds like green needle. Other people here is brainstorm.

[00:06:12] Matt: Yeah, I have again my fiancé heard the opposite to me and we could not reconcile.

[00:06:17] Anil: thing is they seem very different, right? It's not just like green needle versus grown nodal or something, you know, green needle versus brainstorm.

What's going on. And I think that's, that to me is a real insight into the fact that. Even though it seems as though we experience things as they are, whether it's visually or auditorily, or even olfactorily, or through whichever sense, that's not the case. All of our experiences, and this is, you know, something that's driven a lot of my work for years now, are active constructions, and the brain is It's interpreting sensory information, which is always fundamentally ambiguous.

And the role of these expectations is so important that it can make all the difference between hearing the same sound as brainstorm versus green needle, which seem to be very, very different kinds of things. So it really opens. the mind to the possibility that we can't take for granted how Veridically how realistically our perceptual experience reflects not only what's actually there What other people are experiencing too?

[00:07:32] Matt: Yeah, but I mean it also, in some sense it feels like as soon as you recognize that one of these things can be true, the whole bottom drops out from beneath you because, uh, there is, I still, I still think, you know, it's very commonly asked this question, philosophy 101 question, do we perceive the world in the same way?

And as soon as you encounter just one of these illusions and you realize that the answer is not, it does open up the whole spectrum of the question just how differently. Do we perceive the world? And I guess part of that is an empirical question, and I put it to you. How differently do people perceive the world?

How wide is the gap between, you know, people walking around in the street?

[00:08:10] Anil: It is an empirical question. It's one we're actually trying to to answer right now There is a long literature on aspects of this. So there's a whole subfield of psychology that studies individual differences in perception and typically it may look at individual differences in maybe one aspect of perception like vividness of mental imagery, you know, if people bring something into their mind visually for some people it's very For other people, it's much more abstract or there's really nothing going on.

Uh, we may differ also in, for instance, how we perceive three seconds and how we perceive duration. Um, but not a lot is known about how people differ in lots of different ways, all at the same time. Most of the work that's out there is also another, well, another aspect of this literature of this field has focused more on the extremes too.

So there's lots of work on so called neurodiversity. I mean, it's a very, I think, useful concept, um, that first originated. As a more of an activist term, um, in the context of autism. So people with autism, it was used to underline the fact that people with autism really experience things very differently.

And maybe sensory information seems much more overwhelming often than for people with autism. But the term neurodiversity, partly because it was very successful in, um, helping us understand. Some of these conditions like autism, ironically, I think reinforced the idea that if you weren't a neurodivergent, then you were neurotypical and experience things as they are.

And the dress was a kind of nice wedge into that because it affected everybody. And so this is the real question for me. It's like, not just at the extremes where the differences are large enough that they end up. Manifest in differences in behavior and we might slap a label on them like autism or synesthesia or something else What about the differences?

Are still there, but that we don't recognize because we use the same words and we basically, we can get away with it. So it's an empirical question for the last year and a half, we've been running this experiment called the perception census, which is a large scale attempt to characterize exactly this.

What, what is the diversity out there? I mean, we all differ in height and skin color and so on, and we can see that, but what is the, you know, the wild diversity out there really like? So this experiment has been running for just over a year and it consists of lots of little, like these examples that you were just showing, really fun little tests and illusions and games, but covering vision, covering sound, covering time, emotion, uh, all sorts of things.

And people can. Basically do engage with the census, all you need is your own computer and you just, you can do bits at a time, keep coming back and we're hoping the results from this census, this perception census will shed light on this diversity in a way that's not been done before. We've already had 30, 000 people take part from a hundred countries from age of 18 to 80, which is quite a step up from an average psychology experiment and we are.

I'm still collecting data. I know it's going to be down to the wire probably by the time people hear our conversation, we're closing data collection at the end of October, 2023. So in about two weeks from now, um, so if it's still open when you're listening to this, then please do give it a go because everyone who takes part really does contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon.

We haven't looked at the data yet because we're being good scientists. We want to, you know, not, not peak before we've got some idea what we, what we're looking for, but I'm very excited about what we'll find.

[00:12:18] Matt: Yeah, I mean, what, what, what do you, what do you expect to find? What is the hypothesis?

[00:12:24] Anil: Well, the overall hypothesis is that there will be quite a lot of differences. Um, I, to be honest, there's so much data we're collecting, it's going to be more of an exploratory. I feel like it's mapping the territory rather than going in to test any specific hypothesis. There are going to be some things that we'll test.

I mean, there are things that we already have hints about from previous experiments, like people differ in their degree of. Hypnotic suggestibility, like we're all suggestible to some extent. It's not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just a thing. And we know that differences in suggestibility predict some differences in perception.

It's as if you're more suggestible, your, your perception is more influenced by context. So we can make a lot of specific predictions there. But really what I'm interested in is just what is this distribution like and how does it compare? Previous studies, which have generally been more limited in their coverage, you know, in terms of countries and age and, and so on.

So we can ask questions like, does our perception change with age? Does it depend on, I don't know, which hemisphere you, you live in, the patterns of daylight that you get, but also what goes along with what. So the idea here is that we might have something like. Perceptual personalities or perceptual phenotypes that explain how different aspects of our perceptual experience go together.

Maybe if you're really sensitive to sounds, maybe you're sensitive to time in a particular way. I would be, we don't know yet, but we'll be able to. to look for these kinds of cross modal relationships and correlations.

[00:14:08] Matt: Yeah, I think a lot of people will find this a little bit sort of disquieting or uncomfortable to realize that you're, you know, I think, I think there is still this belief that people have that perception is somewhat of an, a window into reality and. As you said earlier, this is, this is definitely not your view, and I don't think it's the mainstream neuroscientific view.

Now, I think you, you've used the word in the past of a controlled hallucination, and maybe let's, maybe, let's get to that. Could you walk me through this idea then of the world as we perceive it being a controlled hallucination rather than a window into reality as it is?

[00:14:43] Anil: Right. And the control is just as important as the hallucination in this sort of metaphor, which I think is often overlooked because, yeah, we, we do all experience things differently, but in ways that are still for most of us, most of the time tied to the world in ways that make perception useful. So yes, you're right.

I'm not. Suggesting that our perception is random and sort of completely made up disconnected from objective reality, that's clearly not the case. Otherwise we wouldn't survive very long. But it's also not the case that our experience is this direct window onto how things are. So I think the best way to, to get into this is, is to start with.

Just underlining that, that for most people is how things seem, like, for me, even right now, I don't know about you, but it seems to me that the world is just there with colors and shapes and space and objects in different positions, and, and I just open my eyes, and the world just pours itself directly into my mind.

And maybe, you know, if I, you know, if my contact lenses are... Season up or something, then I won't see so well, but it's still, I'm looking through a blurry window onto to reality, but still a window. But what's actually happening is not like that at all. We already talked about color. I mean, color is not a mind independent property of the world.

It's something that the brain creates out of colorless wavelengths of light. And I think the same thing goes for everything else, too. So, if you imagine being a brain, I mean, you're locked inside this dark, silent vault of a skull. There is no direct access. All the brain gets are these electrical signals.

Which are only indirectly related to things out there, or indeed in the body too. And to make sense of these ambiguous, unlabeled, noisy signals, the brain has to, or the idea is the brain has to make use of its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is and combine those with the sensory signals to reach a kind of best guess.

The best guess of what's actually out there. Formally, this is a process of Bayesian inference. Like I have some prior expectation of what's going on, some data, and I kind of combine the two, or my brain is combining the two in a way that's an optimal guess of what's going on, given the prior and the data.

And this really changes this intuitive. Not only an intuitive idea, but the sort of classic textbook picture of how perception works is as this bottom up outside in readout of sensory information flows into the brain. But in this alternative perspective, which has long history, you know, Plato, Kant, Helmholtz, um, the brain is constantly generating predictions and the sensory signals.

Predictions primarily calibrate these predictions. They keep the brain's predictions tied to the world. And perception is the continuous process of the brain trying to minimize prediction errors. Minimize the discrepancy between what the brain is predicting and what it's getting. Or everywhere and all the time.

And this really does change things, because now, instead of the brain reading out sensory signals from the bottom up, what we experience is conveyed by the brain's inside out, top down predictions that are reined in by these sensory signals. So this is why I think the term... Controlled hallucination is, is useful because it underlines that all of our perception is sort of internally generated.

It comes from the inside out. So when we hallucinate, we typically experience things that are not there or others don't. And we can think of hallucination as a kind of uncontrolled form of perception when the brain's best guesses go off the rails. But normal perception is just really fundamentally the same process.

But in this case, the brain's predictions are tied to reality in ways that are not determined by accuracy necessarily, but by utility. You know, we see the world in ways that evolution has decided is. Maximally beneficial for us. Colors, again, being a good example, the brain creates colors because they're useful to guide our behavior.

I think this is this, it's still to me one of the more surprising revelations of recent cognitive neuroscience because it just doesn't seem like that. I mean, even though I believe that's the case, it still seems to me that the world exists out there independent.

Ah, it's being actively generated everywhere and all the time.

[00:19:42] Matt: Yeah, there is an open question, like, you know, looking at the neuroscience, one can intellectually understand that it can make sense. And I think reflecting on it, maybe one can get somewhat closer towards appreciating it. Uh, you know, in a more subjective, you know, feeling sense. But then there is the question of, but why does it have to feel like anything?

Why does it have to be an experience? Why can't all of that be happening, um, in the background, in the dark? And this leads, uh, very nicely to a lot of the core focus of your work, which has been the consciousness aspect, and the consciousness, because everything we've been talking about, underlying all of it, is the fact that there is.

Subjective experience. This perception isn't an in the dark control mechanism, I'm not a thermometer, um, I experience it. And so maybe let's turn then to that question, you know, if, if this is what perception is, as you explained, a control mechanism, um, a, a, um, something that compares what we're getting from the world from our sort of like internal prediction of what is there, why should that feel like something?

[00:20:49] Anil: Um, yeah, so this, this is the big question. I mean, already the other questions are quite large as well, but this is probably the, the one that underlies all the others, because this is where the other questions flow from, like if we didn't have experiences, we wouldn't kind of wonder about their relation to the world as it might actually be.

And perception can also happen unconsciously. There's plenty of research that shows that at least some aspects of perceptual inference of this kind can go on totally under the hood. And so consciousness is not inevitable for at least some forms of perception yet. Seems to be the case that We have conscious experiences, some philosophers will deny that and say, actually, we're just mistaken about the way we think about consciousness.

Um, but I, I think I, I take a fairly common sense view that we have conscious experiences and they depend in some way on what happens in the brain and the body. And there's two ways to address this question of how and why, and I think that is the how and the why. So the why question, why should they, why should we experience anything?

Well, it may be that conceptually you could say, well, I can imagine a machine that does all this, but there's no experiencing happening. That could be the case, but in fact, it might be the case that it, the only way to build a sufficiently flexible, powerful perception. machine, um, given the kind of tools, the material that's out there in the world is to make one that has conscious experiences.

Now it could be that, that consciousness in this sense is, is not optional for the kind of flexible perception that, that we have. It certainly seems that our experiences are very functional, right? It's not that they're arbitrary with respect to what's going on. A typical conscious experience If we think about it in its totality, we have perceptual experiences of the world that reflect the world in a way that, again, is useful for our behavior, and we see things relative to how we can interact with them, um, and our experience of the self is also.

Relative to the survival prospects of the organism, things feel good or bad in our emotional lives. And we feel fear, hunger, excitement, and in ways that, that are highly adaptive and it's all bound together. So we have a single experience at a time, sort of integrates. It's an interpretation of, uh, opportunities for action with a sort of evaluation of their consequences for our future survival.

It's incredibly functionally useful. You can see why evolution would have selected for a system that represents the world and the self in this kind of way. Now, why should that be conscious? Well, consciousness is a particularly interesting format for this, isn't it? Because conscious experiences are unified and are integrated, that sort of defines what they are.

The. So, I think there's a very compelling story to tell about why, but the question still remains about like, what, what is it about neurons and brains that creates consciousness? Why is it still not just all happening, integrating all this information, but maybe in the complete subjective dark? This is David Chalmers hard problem of consciousness.

Why and how should any physical processing at all give rise to a rich inner life? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does, is how he puts it. And there is a deep sense of mystery about that. And I don't pretend to have an answer, I don't think anybody has an answer. But I also worry that it's the wrong question to ask.

Because we can make a lot of progress addressing what, with tongue slightly in cheek, I call the real problem of consciousness, which is to accept that it exists, but then try to explain its various properties. What kinds of conscious experiences do we have? What are their functional uses for the organism?

And as we do that. We chip away at the hard problem. So instead of thinking it as one big scary mystery, it becomes a series of interconnected related, but more tractable problems. And as you do this, and what I think is happening, for me anyway it's happening, is that this, this total sense of confusion and mystery that seems to be there if you face the hard problem head on.

begins to change and it begins to soften and it begins to dissolve a bit. And you realize that once you've explained different aspects of consciousness, the sort of force of the heart problem, the intuitive, emotional force of it is weakened. And the question is, is it, would it dissolve? Entirely in a puff of metaphysical smoke, or will there be a little residue of mystery that remains?

And I don't know the answer, but I'm optimistic that it might dissolve entirely and either way, I think this approach of like, you know, divide and conquer is in any case, the most productive approach to follow, because even if we don't resolve the mystery entirely. We'll learn a lot and maybe the residual sense of mystery will be explained more as a property of human psychology rather than as the insufficiency of science because It's just the curious thing, or one of the curious things about consciousness is we're trying to explain what it's like to be us.

And so we tend to be less, I think we set a higher bar for a theory of consciousness than we might do for, let's say, I don't know, a new interpretation of quantum mechanics or of the origin of the universe or something like that, because we want it to make intuitive sense. Like, Oh, that's why it's like this to be me.

And it may not be like that because it's not that way in other areas of science. We don't ask that.

[00:27:07] Matt: Yeah, I mean that's, that's a perfect stepping point to that question as to, as to why we do have, I mean, I think there are even, there are people who hold the intuition so strongly that consciousness is something that could never be intuitively grasped. I think people, it's almost like seen as a thing that's separate from other questions we ask.

So you mentioned quantum mechanics, I think it's a great example, or gravity or something. We're quite comfortable with the idea that we can explain more, but there will always be unexplained whys at the bottom. You can always ask why again. And I think people don't see this as necessarily a problem to understanding gravity.

We'll assume one day we'll feel confident enough that we understand what's going on there. That, yes, you can always ask more whys, but we would consider gravity understood. But I think with consciousness, there are people who hold the view that that is, that just cannot happen. That, you know, people who really believe in the hard problem so much, um, they think it's, it's of a different type of stuff.

Um, what is your view? Is your, is your hope that the real problem approach, um, will, uh, you know, even for those people, they will eventually see the problem of consciousness in the same way as we see any scientific question, you know, what is gravity?

[00:28:16] Anil: I think it will always be different, but I, I, I hope it will become more similar actually to these sorts of things. I think it's a really good example that we're more willing to accept sort of intermediate explanations, um, for other things. And, and why is that? Well, part of it is because I think these other things aren't us.

So we worry less about any explanatory gap that might remain. Uh, the other thing is these. theories we might have of say gravity still have an extraordinary amount of explanatory and predictive power. You know, Newton did us very well for centuries, relativity, even better now. Uh, and even though we know neither of these theories is complete, um, but they're still extremely useful.

I think one of the issues with the science of consciousness is that it's utility. It's there. So there's already interesting applications. And I think a lot of just applications, but it's maybe not as evidently useful as something like a theory of gravity was within physics and its utility hasn't been maybe as widely appreciated.

Um, as might be, I think that is because the insights that we've got into consciousness so far, and from one perspective, just don't even touch the surface, you know, for a lot of people, well, that's not about consciousness. Like the only thing that's about consciousness is if you come up with like, here's the solution to the hard problem, everything else is just, just not in the, in the game.

And I think that is a mistake. I think if we can explain. properties of consciousness, functional and experiential, then we're in the game of scientific theories of consciousness that may only be partial, but that can be very useful.

[00:30:03] Matt: There was a little bit of a controversy recently in the consciousness space, um, on a question sort of like this. There are many scientists, some of whom have actually been on this, on this podcast, um, Signed an open letter, um, basically likening one of the. leading theories of, of consciousness, integrated information theory to a pseudoscience.

And, um, you know, there are various reasons for that, but, you know, I think, um, a lot of people do think anything that is at its bottom inherently subjective, like consciousness, uh, this is somehow not really addressable in the same way as, um, as things that we typically address in science because of, you know, science seeks objectivity.

Unconsciousness seems to be the only thing that is always going to have this subjectivity, um, baked into it. Um, and then in the integrated information theory, the context is slightly different. But again, um, it's framed as a pseudoscience because it commits you to something that is not amenable to be tested, uh, with the standard tools of conventional science as we know it.

Um, so what do you, what do you make of that, uh, of this recent, maybe you can talk to what happened and, and what you make of it.

[00:31:17] Anil: Sure. Um, actually before doing that, I think it's worth just addressing your first point, which was this aspect of consciousness science, which again is challenging. And one of the things that makes it distinctive, which it's a science of something that is. It's generally agreed, not directly objectively observable.

I cannot put a conscious experience on the table. And we, you know, we make measurements directly of that conscious experience. Its nature is that it's private and it's subjective, that may not even be subjective. It's subjectivity might be a optional property of conscious experiences, but certainly it's a distinctive methodological challenge.

And one of the main reasons why. My consciousness research was really off the table for most of the 20th century, even up until when I was starting my undergrad degree in the 90s, it was like, no, no, no, you don't go there. And behaviorism was really dominant in psychology precisely because of the skepticism that you could study objectively something in mental, unobservable mental processes.

But we can make indirect measurements. I can tell you what I experience. Maybe I can do that only with a certain degree of fidelity and a certain degree of, of, um, maybe not completely exhaustively, but still in ways that are useful, you know, that still constrain explanations. So I don't think it's a fundamental limitation to...

Doing a science of consciousness, but it's true that it may impose some limits on exactly how far you can get, but I think that's a methodological limit. It's not the same as this issue of, of like, is there a hard problem of how consciousness can relate to to matter? I think those things are, are distinct.

So, you know, I think we just need to accept that there are difficulties, but nonetheless it's not completely.

[00:33:15] Matt: I mean, maybe just even following that point, there is actually a sense in which even the standard objective science has that problem, right? Because, uh, you know, what, even, even mathematics, something as pure as mathematics, what convinces someone at the end of the day that a theorem is true? Um, you know, you kind of go through line by line and eventually, You have a feeling that it, uh, it makes enough sense.

And actually if, if one applies, that, that, to me, that seems to apply to all of science. At the end of the day. It always comes down to , you know, subjectively, as a scientist, um, I have to eventually buy into the evidence. I have to believe the results, the, even the data that I'm interpreting that is a subjective experience of interpreting data.

Is is that, is that the same as, as what you were saying, or is,

[00:34:00] Anil: think it's similar, sorry, I think, I think you're right that, that, I mean, science in a sense can be thought of as the progressive, um, distancing of what is subjective from what isn't. You know, we, we, instead of just feeling what's hot and warm, we develop thermometers, but the development of a thermometer was bootstrapped by what felt hot and warm.

And we still look at, you know, the results of these instruments. So you never take the subject completely out, but you try to sit, you try to sort of. make systematic the involvement of the, of the scientific observer. So I think that's what one thing the scientific method does. And it is a bit more complicated in consciousness because what you're trying to observe is, is in a sense the, the subject itself.

Um, but you're right that it's, it's not as if the rest of science is. Just transparently objective, if it was, there wouldn't be really any need for a philosophy of science and, and we would all, you know, proceed uncontroversially, just grind the wheel and facts come out and it's, it's just not like that, of course.

Um, so there are, yeah, I think the methodological challenge for, for consciousness. It's a little bit special, but it's not, um, insurmountable. Now, what about the pseudoscience thing? So you could say, you know, okay, because of the nature of consciousness, basically all of consciousness science is pseudoscience because you, you know, you can never make, you can never put a conscious experience on the table.

You know, it's always going to have this relation of indirectness, but you know, I think that's really unfair because a science to be a science. There's very general definitions of science, but a very, very general definition is sort of, um, systematic investigation of some natural phenomenon through theory, experiments, some combination of theory and experiments.

Scientific explanations should, um, generate testable predictions and shed light on a phenomenon. That's very, very general. And consciousness science can do this, you know, we can make observations of what happens when people fall asleep or go under anesthesia or see, see the dresses of blue and black or white and gold.

And we can build theories around these things, but there has always been this, this slight suspicion of consciousness research, um, that goes back to some of the other concerns about the methodologies, the limitations of the methodologies. So over the last 30 years. People within consciousness science, I think, have fought hard to give it the kind of legitimacy that it enjoys.

You know, now you, you know, we attract, you can get research funding, smart students come into it, and there are applications coming out of it, and it's all, I think, a very healthy and exciting field. But... It is still a field where there is no single dominant core theory, you know, in physics, you've got the standard model.

In consciousness research, there isn't. There are theories, and this is great, you know, initially there weren't really even theories. Now there are theories, there are a few leading candidates, um, and one of them is called integrated information theory. And it is a particularly counterintuitive and challenging theory about the nature of consciousness.

And it tries to directly tackle the hard problem that we've talking, we're talking about, and it makes the claim that consciousness is identical to, in the theory, irreducible maxima of integrated information. And quite what that means is very difficult to summarize, but it's very precisely mathematically stated.

But the key thing is it's. It's stated in a way that makes that core claim very difficult, if not perhaps impossible, to test, at least as things stand now. And it seems that that fact about IIT, together with some other things that have been happening, like the feeling that this theory was getting perhaps more media coverage, then it's...

Deserved compared to other theories. Um, and that it has implications like a certain form of panpsychism, that if the theory is true, then consciousness is gonna be much more widespread. Then we might intuitively think, uh, this led to a bunch of. scientists and philosophers, including many of my friends and colleagues and people whose work I admire, writing a letter, uh, concluding that integrated information theory should be considered as pseudoscience.

I strongly disagree with this

letter. Um, with respect to all the people writing it who are trying to, I think, ensure the health of the field by, you know, by their lights. Drawing attention to a theory that they think may undermine the legitimacy of the field. I rather think it's a valuable part of the landscape. I personally, I think integrated information theory is very likely wrong.

It's certainly very. Crazy and counterintuitive, but it's still science. It tries to, it's in fact, a very, perhaps the most precise statement of a possible solution to the hard problem of consciousness that has been developed yet, and it does generate testable predictions. Maybe not of the core claims of the theory, but it still generates testable predictions.

And that, for me, is enough. And philosophy of science perspective from Imre Lakatos, the Hungarian, talks about science in this, in this regard, that there are often theories where the core claims can be in principle untestable or in practice untestable. But nonetheless, if over time they generate testable predictions that have explanatory and predictive value, then the whole research program is productive.

And if they don't, then the research program becomes degenerate and sort of fades away. And I don't know what will happen with IIT, with integrated information theory, but I think it deserves. The chance to be tested. I think it, I wrote in a recent piece about it. I think there's theories, so long as they play by the rules of science, have the right to be wrong.

And I think IIT has every right to be wrong. And because we don't have a standard theory, you know, that really does already explain most of what we want to explain, I think if we, if we dismiss ideas in part, because they're counterintuitive and difficult to test, then we risk stifling the kind of creative thinking that we still might need in order to make progress.

On the science of consciousness. So I, I, yeah, I've, I've sort of, I think it's an unfortunate episode for. For the field, because it's creating a polarization where I really think there's not so much of a need for it. I think, you know, there's many different approaches that are being explored by, by different groups of people.

You know, I have my own approach. We've been talking about controlled hallucinations. It's very different from IIT. It's also probably wrong, almost certainly wrong. Um, but it's still, I think, uh, a useful perspective and so long as theories satisfy these basic constraints of. generating testable predictions and explaining phenomena in ways that are not totally inconsistent with the rest of our scientific understanding, then I think we should embrace a diversity of theoretical approaches.

[00:42:05] Matt: Yeah, well, let's, let's maybe then get onto your, your theory of how this all comes about and. You know, it shares some aspects with integrated information theory. It, it draws on work from Carl Friston, um, and the free energy folk. And so maybe let's, let's get to that. The phrase that you, that you use is beast machine.

Um, and so maybe let's anchor on the beast machine. Could you explain to me this, the use of this phrase and then, um, let's expand into, into your... Sort of theory or model about how this all comes to be.

[00:42:41] Anil: The phrase came from, um, from Descartes, Rene Descartes always gets a bit of a bashing when people talk about consciousness these

[00:42:50] Matt: have unfortunately bashed him on this podcast.

[00:42:52] Anil: Uh, it's a bit unfair really, isn't it? Because, you know, we, we bash him now, um, from our perspective of knowing what we, what we know now. And of course, he was incredibly, um, important thinker in his time and made a lot of really important contributions.

But he also said some things which now look a bit strange. And one of the things he said. I mean, normally he gets bashed for the whole mind body problem and the pineal gland and all this stuff. But another thing that he said when considering consciousness in non human animals was that non human animals should be treated as beast machines, bet machine in his French.

And the point he was making, you know, whether it was what he really believed or had concluded from his philosophy, or whether it was what he was saying to sort of play nice with the dominant religious attitudes of the day, was that the fact that other animals were living creatures did not endow them with any Claim to conscious status or all the kind of conscious states that had some moral ethical implications.

So beast machines just was to connote that they're flesh and blood, but merely machines. They don't enjoy ethically meaningful inner lives. That was his use of the term. And I've, it struck me as an interesting term because I ended up basically concluding exactly the opposite. That in human beings and very likely in other animals, and quite possibly in general, conscious experiences happen in virtue of our nature as living creatures, not in spite of it, so that we experience the world And the self with, through, and because of our living bodies.

So I'm, in a way I'm trying to rehabilitate or invert or recapture that term, but change its meaning entirely.

[00:45:04] Matt: Yeah, um, it's, I think it's not the first time somebody in this space has, uh, has taken one of the, one of the old greats and, and used, um, one of their terms, uh, in an inverted way. I'm, I'm thinking of, and I, I don't think this person has a, has a theory that I particularly buy into, but, uh, at least they're, they're doing interesting things, which is Philip Goff, um, and Galileo.

Um, but I digress. Um, on, on to the beast machine. You said that we have, um, these conscious experiences, you know, not in spite of, but because of our status as living beings. And without getting to the weeds of what it means to be a living being, uh, let's maybe stick to, to that point. Walk me through the, walk me through the thinking and the steps there.

Um, why, why, why do we have experience because of being living beings?

[00:45:52] Anil: There's two ways to take this argument and you sort of, they meet in the middle, which is I think a useful way to think about it. So the first way starts from what we were already talking about in terms of the nature of perception as a kind of controlled hallucination. So starting there, we've already got the idea that our experiences of the world Uh, perceptual best guesses, that's shaped by evolution to be useful rather than, than accurate, but we've got this machinery of prediction and prediction error in our brains, that's underlying experiences of the world around us.

The next step. is to realize that it's the very same kind of process that underpins the experience of being a self. Now the self is not this mini me inside my head that does the perceiving. It's, it's another collection of perceptual experiences. I experience my body as a particular object in the world.

I experience my identity over time. I experience some actions as being voluntary and others not. All of these things together constitute what it means to be. be me subjectively. David Hume talked about this is a bundle theory of self and this is just putting a kind of predictive processing gloss on that old philosophical idea of the self as a form of perception.

So that's the second step. The next step is to realize that the experience of self is probably grounded, arguably grounded, Um, not in some abstract notion of personal identity, you know, me being Anil Seth, but in the brain's perception and regulation of the interior of the body, the physiological condition of the body.

We already talked about the fact that the brain has no direct access to the outside world. It has to infer the relevant states. The same is true for the body. All right, there's sloshing around in chemistry and so on, but it's still, you know, has to infer what's happening within the body, heart rate, blood pressure, and so on and so on.

And that's arguably the fundamental role of the brain that everything else is built on. You know, if brains can't keep the body alive, then, you know, that's game over already. Everything else is secondary to that. And so the experiences of Just being a body, things like emotions and moods, and perhaps at the very bottom of it all, a lot of interesting phenomenology here about what is the simplest kind of conscious experience that's imaginable, that might be reached in sort of deep states of meditation and so on.

Often described as just the, just the feeling of being alive, you know, without shape, form. Without emotional contour, it's just the feeling of being alive. Now that could be the root of all experience. That is really the consequence of the brain's predictions that, in this case, are not geared to finding out what's out there, but geared to control and regulation.

As soon as you can predict something, you can control it. And there's a whole way of motivating predictive models that start from their role in control, rather than in... Um, so that, that's one way through it. And then we sort of realized, well, and that of course is just intimately related to our nature as living creatures.

This imperative for control goes all the way down, you know, even individual cells have have their imperative to sustain themselves over time. So, you know, the weakest claim, and I think the most defensible claim is that we will never understand consciousness except in light of our nature as living creatures, because.

All the machinery that underpins our conscious experiences evolved and develops and operates. From moment to moment in light of this drive to stay alive, that animates our body, the stronger claim is that this is actually a necessary condition for consciousness, that consciousness is not something that can be manifest on a, you know, on a.

Let's say inside a computer, but it is a property of living systems only, you know, this is a position sometimes called biological chauvinism or, or, um, uh, biological naturalism, carbon chauvinism sometimes. And it's often pooh pooh, because why, you know, why, why are you just being closed minded about not imagining alternative manifestations?

I don't think it's an... I think it's actually an instance of, of open mindedness because we become just more suspicious of some of the common assumptions that are out there that consciousness is a form of information processing, which a lot of people say, but very few people actually articulate what that really means.

And old, you know, analogies, the brain is a computer, which is still hanging around even though the brain is not a computer. So that's sort of one way to it. The other way to it very, very briefly starts from Karl Friston's free energy principle and related ideas like autopoiesis, um, which is a sort of theory of how, um, cells self organize and maintain themselves and produce themselves over time.

So the material aspects of. Life becomes very important. Life isn't just a process running on some sort of, um, wetware of the body. You know, life is fundamentally a metabolic process where the components matter, you know, energy is consumed and generated. And from the free energy principle, which is basically this, this idea that things that exist, basically, firstly, they, they define themselves from other things.

There's a boundary and this boundary can be statistical. There's a sort of statistical independence of things. Within the system from outside the system. And so things that exist induce a boundary, a separation. And then in virtue of, of this, you sort of end up deriving the rest of this predictive idea of the brain.

So in order to keep doing this, according to the free energy principle, systems have to minimize. It's the surprisingness of their environment, like a fish in water will stay alive, but a fish out of water will rapidly die. So Things that persist over time tend to minimize the statistical surprise of their situations.

But in order to do this, then systems need, they can't do it directly, they can only do it approximately. In just the same way that our brains can't do full Bayesian inference, they have to approximate it. And this is what's called free energy. This is this term free energy. It's not like electricity that costs nothing.

It's a term from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics that That kind of systems can minimize as a proxy for minimizing the surprisingness of their surroundings. And so from here, you begin to get something that looks very like predictive processing systems that do what they do in virtue of minimizing something like prediction error.

And so the rest of it then follows. So what's nice here is you go from something that's Either you start from like how we perceive the world around us and you, you pull on that thread until you end up right down into the depths of our internal biochemistry, or you start the other way around or ask what it means for a system to persist over time, and especially a living system, and then you go outwards and you end up in exactly the same place.

So for me, the combination of these ideas motivates this strong connection between life. And consciousness, that's the pull factor and the push factor is to just recognize that this assumption that consciousness is substrate independent, could be implemented in anything, um, and might is a form of information processing.

That's just a really. Strong assumption to make, and I think we don't often realize how much of an assumption that really is.

[00:54:17] Matt: Yeah, I spoke um, a couple months ago on this podcast, I spoke to Mark Soames, who has a, a view that seems very, very consistent with, with what you've just said about, I guess the function of, I think he, he focuses more on affect, but you know, we are drawn or, um, repelled from certain feelings and again, as you just articulated, his view is very much that that happens in line with How, um, how divergent our predictions are or expectations are from the signals we get externally or internally from within the body, but sort of external in a way.

Um, but I think his view focuses much more on, um, it does seem to be more substrate independent in the sense that if you could replicate that functionality. You know, a system, whatever it may be, having those functions, he, in his view, that is, that is what is required. And so, um, when you talk about sort of being a bit skeptical of the substrate independence view, is, is your view more that the typical view of substrate independence is, you know, running something on a standard computer, or is it, you know, even if you could build a system that could genuinely replicate that functionality?

Um, would, would, would that be, in your view, a likely candidate for this emergence of, of consciousness? Maybe it would be , maybe it would be life, maybe that would be life in a different substrate, but what is your view there?

[00:55:40] Anil: That's a, it's a good question. And it's, it's really something I'm still, you know, thinking a lot about. Um, and I think my views will probably evolve. So there's a lot of shared ground with Mark. This is, this is true though. There are a lot of other differences as well. He's a strong focus on the subcortical mechanisms more so than me.

Has a sort of injection of Freud, which, which I don't have. Um, but you're right. There's this difference that he, in this sense is a more orthodox position that it's the function that matters. Now it might not be the function of a standard digital computer. But it's still the, the functional organization of the system.

And if you get that right, then you get consciousness. So that's, that's a sort of more general functionalism, the sort of functionalism that, you know, many, some people in AI might run with that. Um, yeah, if we get the next generation of language model or whatever will be conscious, that's more of a computational functionalism that it's not any kind of function, but it's the kind of.

Functions of the sort that a computer can execute and get those right. Then you get consciousness. That's a really strong form of functionalism. Marx and more kind of liberal and a bit more plausible. Um, but I still remain to be convinced. And I, in fact, go through a slightly similar sort of experiment in my book.

Like if you had a synthetic robot that had internal states like battery and so on, and it was monitoring them and regulating them and so on, you know, would it be, would that be enough? Would it be enough? I think to claim to be sure about the answer is to claim too much. I think we need to recognize humility here.

I don't really know. But my, my intuition and my credence's shift on this is that no, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't be enough. You'd still have, um, a kind of model, a simulation or be a kind of hardware simulation rather than the thing itself. You know, there's this difference between, you know, some things are like, um, playing chess or like mousetraps to classic examples that are often used.

If they do. If they play the functional roles right, that's enough, doesn't matter how the mouse is caught, if it's caught, there's a mouse trap. Other things are more like the weather or like diamonds. They have to be made of a certain stuff in order to warrant the label. Diamonds have to be made of hard, you know, particular kind of carbon.

Otherwise it's not a diamond. Rain has to be made of water. Otherwise it's just not wet. So just putting it that way to me makes it a very It's very clear that it's still an open question, you know, is consciousness more like the weather or more like chess? Is it more like the mousetrap or more like diamonds?

If you implement all the functions, maybe you simulate the brain, you model the brain. Maybe you don't even just model it on a digital computer. Maybe you actually instantiate the, the causal structure of the brain in a particular way. Would that, would that be enough? I, I'm still not convinced because of the reasons that we were just talking about, because there is, there is this.

Sort of idea that fundamentally consciousness is so intimately tied up with, with our biochemistry, with our metabolism that it, that might be the unnecessary substrate. Now you cannot prove that, and in this way it sort of suffers from some of the same criticisms as IIT. You know, if this is a core claim, this is an untestable part of this theory, currently anyway.

There's no way, at least I can think of, to test this difference because it remains a bit of a philosophical difference. Um, but I think it's, Yeah, my credence is still that, that life really matters because of these very, very deep, intimate relationships. And because of the, the thing that in a living system, there is no way of saying like, where does, what is the substrate?

You know, substrate independence is always. Suggested when it is assumed that we know what is the substrate and what's running on the substrate. This is how computers are built by, by definition, but it's not how brains are. Every time a neuron fires, the structure changes. Every time it uses a bit of energy, you know, something happens to ion channels and things like that.

The brain is continuously changing. So it's really challenging to say, okay, that's the substrate. If you can't say where the substrate is, then the question of whether consciousness is substrate independence or not, doesn't even, doesn't even make sense.

[01:00:35] Matt: Yeah, and there is a question, almost whatever the answer is, so substrate independent or not, or maybe substrate dependent but certain subclass of substrates, whatever the answer is, if you do buy this idea that the, the function Um, of consciousness is, as you said, to sort of keep us in line with the expectation.

Um, there is a sort of question that opens up on the other end of things because, you know, we all have experience on a day to day basis of having sort of small divergence between expectation and, and the signals we're getting in and, you know, that might draw us towards or push us away from things. But then there are very extreme conscious experiences, things that are very exotic.

And, uh, you'd almost be surprised that they can happen. And I'm thinking of things that you've explored, for example, in, uh, research with psychedelics, in the Dream Machine project. These experiences are so far removed from anything that you could imagine could be serving that sort of, uh, purpose. Um, and so maybe let's, let's move to those sorts of more exotic experiences and your more recent work, um, and maybe the Dream Machine.

[01:01:46] Anil: before we do though, there's just this one tiny thing that I think is really worth underlining here. It just came from what you last said because we've talked a lot about, um, the function of consciousness. And we've also talked about functionalism as a sort of view of what might be, you know, the necessary conditions for consciousness.

The two are very different things, right? It's totally fine. And I remember, I remember sort of having to clarify this for myself, not that long ago, that it's totally reasonable to talk about consciousness, having a function as, as we've done in terms of bringing together lots of information in an organism relevant way, um, that doesn't mean that you've got to be a function list about the material basis of consciousness.

So, yeah, I just want to keep those things separate.

[01:02:30] Matt: No, thank you. Yeah, that's, uh, that's, that's very true. Um, that being said, um, assuming that the function is, is, uh, as we say, you know, uh, managing expectation versus what's coming in, it does seem quite kind of odd. Then, you know, and take this psychedelic example. This is a very small change to what's happening in someone's brain in some sense.

It's a very, you know, little bit of chemical. And, um, but the experience is, is vast, um, and, and same with dream. So, um, like let's explore that. Is, is it, um, is this just a spandrel? Is this just a misfiring of, of the hardware? Uh, how do you think about this issue?

[01:03:11] Anil: mean, so there's, do you remember this? There's a book by, I can't remember who wrote it. Was it Terence McKenna? There's a book called A Stoned Ape,

[01:03:18] Matt: I think it was Terence McKinnon.

[01:03:19] Anil: was sort of this idea that pharmacologically induced states of mind, you know, they played an adaptive role in, in the evolution of mind as we know it now, I tend to think that's probably kind of unlikely really.

And. Um, you, you're right that psychedelic states, on the one hand, they're very notable by, it is, it is quite a subtle perturbation to the, you know, the biochemistry, you take a very small amount of LSD and, you know, you get on a roller coaster and stuff happens. Um, but, you know, I think if, if our brains were to react to, I don't know, let's say, Um, pollen in the same way they react to LSD, then evolution would have rapidly selected out that sensitivity to pollen, right?

Because it's so prevalent. Um, so I think it's probably a bit of a spandrel and the fact is, even though it's a small amount of chemical, it's, it's, it's not something. That has exerted much selection pressure on our, on our evolution. Of course, it's, there are psychedelic compounds in nature. I mean, some of the original ones were, but they're not everywhere.

And so while human culture may well have accepted the brain sensitivity to, to psychedelics. Um, I think it's unlikely that the core psychedelic phenomenon. played a significant role or has a significant fundamental biological function. Dreams are different, of course. You know, dreams happen most, if not every night, many times.

It seems very unlikely that dreams have no function. So I think we, we can, um, we can take a A functional perspective, functional analysis perspective on dreams in a very different way. So psychedelics give us some functional insight because just like any system, if you, if you push it out of its normal operating regime, you can learn a lot about how it operates.

Um, but dreams are part of the normal operating regime of the human brain and of the human mind. So that's a different window into, into consciousness. We have things, dreams probably do have a purpose.

[01:05:34] Matt: Well, so tell me then about the dream machine and the dream machine project. What, what is the, what is the dream machine?

[01:05:39] Anil: It's, it's kind of the, one of the craziest projects I've, I've ever been involved with. It's been a lot of fun. It was a bit nuts. Um, about 10 years ago in my group with my postdoc, David Schwartzman, we started working. On this phenomenon called stroboscopically induced visual hallucination, it turns out that if you shine a fast flickering light, a strobe light at somebody and their eyes with their eyes closed, if you sit in front of a strobe light with your eyes closed and it's flashing at the right frequency, which is roughly the alpha range around 10 hertz, there's a lot of slack around that you will have vivid visual hallucinations.

Colors and shapes and patterns and movements, sometimes complex hallucinations, people in places, scenes. Um, even though it's just unstructured white light that's hitting your closed eyes, bright enough to get through into the retina and sun, obviously, if you have got no eyes, it wouldn't work. So this is a really fascinating phenomenon just because dissociation between the stimulus, which is just white light and the experience.

So it immediately raises questions about. What's happening in the brain in response to this stimulus that is creating these experiences which are very detached from, from the world. So we've been working on this for a while and honestly is a very much a back burner project. We never really published anything on it.

But then just around 2020, pandemic times, I got a call from a woman called Jennifer Crook, who's a Produces big art events. And she told me about an artist called Brian Geisen, who in the 19, I think in the 19, late 1950s had discovered this phenomenon while sitting on a bus, as it went through some trees with the light shining through the trees, and he turned it into an art object called the dream machine.

And it was a very low tech light suspended in a spinning cardboard cylinder, but it was, it became this kind of cult object. I'd never heard of it. And what Jennifer suggested was the idea that we should. Reinvent the dream machine for now, um, using modern technology, but also make it a collective experience.

So make situations where 20 or 30 people at a time would have both an individual experience. And right back to the start of our conversation, a unique experience. Everyone has a different experience, even though it's the same light. And so we wanted to, we wanted to basically bring this to a wide audience and use it, not as just some sort of gee whiz, look at this.

It's fun, but as a way to. Ignite people's curiosity about the mind and the brain, because the experience within the dream machine, really one reason it's called the dream machine is because it's not like exactly like having a dream, but the experiences seem to be coming from within. It's not like you're looking at something.

You're really immersed in a way that makes it quite clear from a first person perspective. That these experiences are coming from your own brain, from your, from your own mind. So in the course of, in 2022, we, we had some crazy government funding to do this through some bizarre mechanism. Um, we built Dream Machines in four cities in the UK, in Belfast, Edinburgh, London, and Cardiff.

And all together, we had 40, 000 people come through the Dream Machine, each for about an hour and a half. Each having a fairly transformational experience. Some people would describe it as life changing. Some, you know, it's really, for them, many, it was emotionally very potent and, and usually, almost uniformly very positive.

Um, and then they would come out of the actual experience and We had areas where they could reflect, draw and talk and write about what they experienced. And we have 15, 000 drawings that people have made of their Dream Machine experiences, which, which showcase again, an incredible. Uh, diversity. So this, this is the dream machine.

It was, it was enormously exciting to be part of. And I think, you know, I hope very much that it's ignited the, an interest in the mind and the brain and thousands of people who would otherwise not really think about it because it's very easy to go through life and not give it a second thought, right?

You know, there's the world. I see it, I fall asleep. What's to worry about, but once you start to, you know. Encounter some of these illusions or just have some of these experiences. I think you plant a seed in many people that keeps growing and it may grow in different ways for different people. And. And that's, you know, what, what really excites me for the longterm is, you know, what will happen years out from people who've been through this kind of experience.

We're also, by the way, we're trying to now figure out really what happens in the brain and the dream machine. And we're also very interested in the therapeutic potential of this. Now, you know, there's a lot of excitement around psychedelics for treatment of depression and other conditions, but psychedelics.

You know, there's still a lot of controversy and access issues and legal issues. But here we have a situation where like psychedelics, we give people a very. Unusual kind of habit breaking experience, um, but it's not pharmacological, um, it's very controllable when the light stops, the, the experience stops.

And so we're very interested in the potential for this to have some systematic therapeutic benefit. And of course we had all this data from 40, 000 people. So we know anecdotally that it can have a very beneficial effect.

[01:11:41] Matt: Is this still something people can, can try? Is it, is it still running somewhere?

[01:11:44] Anil: It's running in a very limited way in, in London still at the moment. So we have a very reduced setup and what we're, what we're doing is we, we're, well, we're currently working on taking it on tour outside the UK as well. So we'd love to bring it to Australia. We'd love to bring it to, to other countries.

We would really like to bring it to unusual places. Um, so even in London, we were in a. Sort of artistically unfashionable part of London somewhere. I won't, you know, actually that'll probably offend people who

[01:12:15] Matt: I know where, I know where.

[01:12:17] Anil: it was not, it was not like in the Tate, it wasn't in the center, in the center of London, um, because we want these experiences to reach people who might not choose to go to like the latest avant garde art experience.

[01:12:31] Matt: Yeah. Um, if people want to follow up, find out more, um, where Where would you send them?

[01:12:38] Anil: For the Dream Machine, the, um, the thing to do is look up dream machine dot world, and there's a mailing list. And if you sign up to the mailing list, you'll be the first to know. about future plans and where we'll be and how to get tickets. And actually the perception census that we started with as well is also part of the dream machine project.

So that came out, I think almost, I mean, there must be not many projects like this, where we have this quite ambitious science project that really started and was done in total collaboration. With this art project, you know, science and art usually have some sort of, I don't know, the relationship is not often as satisfying as one might like, but in this case it was really intimately, deeply intertwined, which has been very, very satisfying.

[01:13:28] Matt: Well, people should definitely check it out. I'm sure they'll be very interested and, uh, really they'd be interested, I'd imagine in, you know, what brought you to this. And I'm sure there've been books involved. I'm sure you've read widely on this and I'm sure some of them have resonated. And I would love to, as we, as we bring this to a wrap, turn to the topic of books.

One of the questions I like to ask my guests towards the end of conversations is which book have you most gifted to other people and why?

[01:13:56] Anil: The book that in practice I've gifted to most people, it's quite a recent book actually, but I think it's phenomenal. It's Clara and the Sun by Katsuo Ishiguro. Katsuo Ishiguro is a British, Japanese novelist, a Nobel laureate now in literature, who's written some just amazingly delicate and insightful.

Portraits of Society, Remains of the Day was one of his famous novels that became a film with Anthony Hopkins. Um, Clara and the Sun is the most recent of his novels. And it's a kind of science fiction that is not set way in the future in some sort of space opera style. What Ishiguro does is he. He sort of gently introduces some slight conceit, some slight change, might be quite implausible, and then uses that to understand aspects of society, aspects of human psychology.

And the reason I've been gifting Clara and the Sun a lot is that it's, it's about consciousness and it's about the possibility of machine consciousness. Clara is a, is a robot, um, and we're encouraged to consider the world from her perspective. So the conceit, of course, is that she has a perspective.

Everything else about the book is sort of kind of familiar. So what it does is it casts the familiar from a perspective that's deeply unfamiliar and then explores the consequences. And, um, and there's, as with most, probably all Ishiguro books, there's some, some real twists in it as well, but it's. It's, it's almost a work of philosophy as much as literature and it's just beautifully, beautifully written.

[01:15:49] Matt: Amazing. Yeah, it's a, it's a, that's a great recommendation. I've not read that one yet, but it does lead very, very nicely to, um, the last question, uh, which is maybe a bit of a science there, but it also deals with the topic of artificial intelligence and the prospects of artificial superintelligence. Uh, and my question is, you know, suppose we were to be visited one day by an AI superintelligence.

Who should, uh, and we had to pick someone to represent us, who should we pick?

[01:16:16] Anil: I, I, I, yeah, I'm gonna have to think of this now. I, I, I, um, yeah, I, I should have given this some thought before.

[01:16:23] Matt: Past or present. Past

[01:16:25] Anil: past or present? the, my answer to that question is going to be carefully embedded in the next book that I write, whenever that might be. So I'm going to leave people hanging on that one.

[01:16:37] Matt: Yeah. So I'm going to leave people hanging on

[01:16:41] Anil: It was, yeah.

[01:16:41] Matt: was, that was my suggestion. So anyway, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much for joining me.

[01:16:46] Anil: Thank you, Matt. I've really enjoyed it.

.

We discuss:

• The difference between philosophical and scientific questions

• The limits of human knowledge

• Progress in science and philosophy

• Evolutionary psychology and the foundations of social and cultural norms

• Altruism, Morality

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Representing evolution: https://representingevolution.xyz/

• Intro to the Philosophy of Science: https://a.co/d/5g1AdqQ

• Intro the the Philosophy of Biology: https://a.co/d/8HVosfH

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

1:00 The limits of human knowledge

3:55 What is science?

9:00 Science vs philosophy

18:38 Can we make progress in philosophy?

23:20 Philosophy of biology

29:58 Functional language in biology

34:12 Is evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience?

45:40 Evolution and morality

58:28 Can we get 'ought' from 'is'?

1:08:00 Book recommendations

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:03] Matt Geleta: Samir, let's start with a statement from Bertrand Russell, who is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. In his book, Religion and Science, he wrote, Whatever knowledge is attainable must be attained by scientific methods. And what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

And this, uh, this quote certainly ruffles people's feathers a bit. I mean, particular philosophers who might not think of themselves as scientists. Uh, what do you, what do you make of that quote? And uh, do you think his assessment is correct?

[00:00:37] Samir Okasha: Well, I don't think it's a straightforward matter, actually, in part because it's not really entirely clear what the scientific method refers to. I mean, if he means the methods that science currently uses, including the technologies, say, then it seems unlikely that everything that's in principle knowable is knowable via those methods.

Um, so perhaps, for example, you know, some statement about what was going on in some distant, um, distant region of the universe in the distant past. May not be knowable, simply because all the information has been destroyed and we can perhaps surmise the truth of the proposition but not know it for sure.

Um, so one query I would have with that statement is whether the scientific method is really as well defined as Russell is presuming in that quotation. Other people in philosophy and elsewhere have queried the overall sentiment for different reasons. So some have argued that non scientific disciplines produce knowledge, such as our humanistic disciplines, including philosophy.

And others have argued that personal experience can be a source of knowledge and moreover can reveal information that no science can. So in a famous line of argument in philosophy instigated by an author called Thomas Nagel, a number of people have argued that, um, there, there isn't a sort of information that in principle you can only get by having first personal experience, say, such as the knowledge of, um, what some substance tastes like, for example, you know, what French camembert tastes like, for example.

Some people say, look, how could you, how could anyone know that without tasting it? You know, you could have the most detailed scientific analysis of That, you know, the molecular constituents of ripe camembert, but that doesn't tell you what it tastes like. You have to, you have to, um, experience it. So that line of argument has sometimes been used to, to combat Russell's sentiment too.

[00:02:54] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I think both of those are very interesting points. Maybe let's start with the first one on the definition of the scientific method. I agree with you. I do find it very interesting because I feel like Not only is there not consensus, but there actually are potentially two broad camps of thought here, um, that are relevant.

The first, we have Thomas Kuhn's view, which kind of envisions science as progressing through paradigms in which, um, scientists spend most of their time working within. a particular paradigm, and then on occasion, I guess there is a sort of a paradigm shift. And then on the other hand, we have something that's more like what Paul, Karl Popper would put forward, which is, um, you know, it envisions science as progressing by scientists actively working to falsify the, the current theory or the best explanation.

Do you feel that those two, those two views are at tension here?

[00:03:47] Samir Okasha: Yeah, there's certainly a tension between those two views, uh, between the Kuhn view and the Popper view, which are sort of classic rivals in the 20th century, uh, philosophy of science in, in the study of the scientific method. Or what scientific methodology as we sometimes call that discipline. Um, so as you say, then Kun had this view that was emerged really from his studies in the history of astronomy, um, where he was impressed by these periodic revolutions, which involved overturning the whole scientific worldview, uh, which.

And which punctuated the progress, the process of science. And in between, Kuhn argued, you had something called normal science, which was a highly conservative entity, a highly conservative inquiry, which essentially just consists in fleshing out the paradigm one is working within, but not really fundamentally testing it.

So Kuhn was thinking of his, I mean, his famous, most famous example was the Copernican Revolution, when the old Ptolemaic astronomy, which of course was geocentric, put the earth at the center of the solar system, was overthrown, um, by Copernicus, who, with the heliocentric um, model of the, of the solar system that put the, the sun at the, at the center, um.

Now, whether that model of normal science punctuated by scientific revolution and paradigm shift really applies to every scientific discipline in every era is rather more debatable, I think. And there's been a lively discussion about whether Kuhn's ideas extend beyond, uh, the physical sciences, which was their original home.

So many people in the life sciences, for example, have said, no, wait a minute. We don't really recognize that description of the history of science or of how scientific activity works particularly well. So I mean, Kuhn's idea is certainly valuable, but I think, um, not many philosophers of science would take them as the gospel truth anymore, if they ever did.

Um, similarly with Popper. I mean, Popper had some, some powerful ideas, um, but his, his methodology, many of us came to feel in philosophy of science, was, was overly simplistic and not really true to what you see. So as you, as you pointed out, Matt, uh, for Popper, the key idea was that scientists should advance bold, bold conjectures, as Popper put it, stick their neck out and advance some hypothesis or theory, and then spend their time trying to falsify it, trying to refute it, to get experimental evidence to disprove it.

Um, and in part, Popper thought that because he thought that It was impossible to prove the truth of a scientific theory, but it was possible to disprove it. Um, which in a sense is true in a, in a, on a point of logic. Uh, one falsifying observation can disprove a generalization, but no number of positive findings can prove it.

because the generalization is potentially infinite in scope and the data are always finite. Um, however, it's a big jump from that and one that Popper was overly ready to make to say that science is all about trying to disprove one's hypothesis or theory. And I think many Many practicing scientists, although they often ironically cite Popper as one of their, um, influences.

Popper is one of the few philosophers of science to have been extremely influential in the practicing scientific community. But ironically, despite that influence, Very few scientists actually do what Popper said, uh, that they, that they should do, which is try and disprove things rather than to establish them.

So I think the Popper methodology, for different reasons to the Kuhn one, is also, um, untrue to much scientific practice, in my opinion.

[00:07:57] Matt Geleta: Yeah. I mean, it does, it does still feel like there is something intuitively resonant about Bertrand Russell's statement. And I think, um, in, in earlier writing, he also said some things that were sort of a little bit. distasteful towards philosophy, I would say, but even though he was very much a philosopher in his own right.

Um, in fact, you know, through this podcast and through, um, my work with, um, tech startups and other things like that, I have a fortune of speaking with, um, a lot of great scientists, a lot of great philosophers, great technologists. And often when I ask them a difficult question, they might. couch their answer by saying something like, Oh, that's a philosophical question.

And then they'll go on to give me their opinion. Um, and I always actually sort of, it reads to me as a euphemism for this question has no answer or this question has no objective answer. What is your view? Is there a distinction between philosophical questions and scientific questions?

[00:09:00] Samir Okasha: Yeah, it's, that's a good question and an age old one. Um. My opinion is that there is, in that the questions we ask in philosophy are not directly, um, open to, um, demonstration one way or the other. So in philosophy we ask questions like, what is knowledge? Um, what is truth? Is truth attainable? How should humans behave?

How do we reconcile, how should society reconcile the welfare of the group against the rights, with the rights of the individual? Questions of that sort, which are age old questions and, um, are not the sort of question that admit of a final resolution. That you could hope to finally answer in a way that would just settle the matter once and for all.

As with some well posed scientific questions, one can do. Say the question of what the molecular makeup of water is, is not a matter of debate. It's something that, where the truth has simply been established, we know the answer. Um, Or how many miles the moon is from the earth. I mean, these are factual matters to which we know the answer.

Any, if there's any debate on them, then one party is just straightforwardly wrong. But philosophical questions aren't like that. And that's why they never get resolved and have been debated for thousands of years, in fact. So that's, that's one symptom of the difference between a science, between some scientific questions and typical philosophical questions.

Um. But I think that more fundamentally, the difference comes down to the difference between empirical knowledge and what we might call a priori knowledge. So a priori means without the benefit of experience. So the scientific method, as Russell was alluding to in that quotation, is fundamentally empirical.

You know, so, you know, in scientific inquiries, you can't, with a typical scientific inquiry, you can't know Or even have a reasonable belief about something without investigating it empirically, studying how it actually is. Um, so take, I don't know, take the question of whether COVID emerged from a lab leak or from the wet market in, in, in China.

that debate. Now, we still don't really know the answer for sure, but you couldn't possibly address that question without going and looking at the evidence, looking at the empirical data. That's typical of a scientific question. The way to answer it is empirical, where empirical means making observations, doing experiments, finding data.

But standard philosophical questions are not really, um, responsible to empirical data in quite the same way. So come back to the example I gave you a moment ago, the question of what knowledge is. What do we mean when we say that someone knows something? That's one way of posing the question of what knowledge is, a question that goes back to Plato and before.

Now, ask yourself, I mean, what experiments or observations could we possibly do to decide what knowledge is? I mean, we could do a survey of how people use the word, no, I suppose, but that wouldn't quite tell us what we, the answer to the question, although it might in some cases be relevant. Um, and that, that, the lesson here, I think, is that Typical philosophical questions, one can adduce reasons for and against the answers that one might want to give to them, but they're not fundamentally based on empirical information in the way that empirical information is the arbiter of scientific hypotheses and propositions.

So I would say that there is a fundamental difference between science and philosophy. reflected in the fact that the method of inquiry in the two disciplines is really quite different. Now, the mud, the waters get muddied a bit by the existence of the discipline called philosophy of science, which is in fact my own discipline, which is a sub branch of philosophy.

And one of the things we do in philosophy of science is to study sort of Conceptual questions that arise within sciences and also methodological questions that arise in most or all sciences. So we started with the discussion about Kuhn and Popper. Those are examples of methodological questions that arise.

Um. pretty much in all science. Now, I would still classify that sort of inquiry as philosophical, rather than, um, scientific. So, for example, one classic question of scientific methodology is whether experimental data can ever prove that a hypothesis is true.

Now, Some people say, no, no, no, it can't, not, not in the strict sense of the word proof in, in, in that strict sense in which we'll say we can prove Pythagoras theorem by purely, purely mathematical means. Many people say, no, even the most, the most powerful Convincing experimental data can never prove a hypothesis in that sense of the word proof.

But then we get into the question of, well, what, what experimental data can do? How rationally certain we can be about scientific hypotheses and theories, um, given if, if we grant that the data can never prove their truth in the sense in which we can prove a theorem in, in geometry, for example. Um, and that I think is a, is a, is a philosophical question.

I mean, it's a question about science, about how much certainty we can rationally place in the deliverances of science, but nonetheless, that's a philosophical question. It's not to say that only philosophers are equipped to discuss it. On the contrary, many scientists have and will weigh in on that very question too.

But fundamentally, it's a question about rationality, if you like. or about what the rational response to evidence and information is, and about how much, um, support evidence can give to, um, an, an empirical hypothesis. And those are, I would classify as philosophical questions about science rather than scientific questions.

So in short, coming back to your, your question, I do indeed see a fundamental difference between philosophical questions and scientific ones. Now, not, not all philosophers agree with that.

[00:15:59] Matt Geleta: Oh, interesting. Um, I would, I would actually love to dig into that. Uh, for, for what reason do some philosophers not?

[00:16:06] Samir Okasha: Um, a line of argument associated in particularly with the mid 20th century philosopher and logician W. V. O. Quine, Willard Van Orman Quine, maintained that science and philosophy are actually continuous. And that it's a mistake to see a hard and fast divide between them of the sort that I've been arguing for.

Um, and that was essentially because Quine didn't really believe there was a distinction between empirical knowledge of the sort that science gets you and a priori knowledge of the sort that philosophy or mathematical reasoning might get you. He thought that that very contrast didn't make sense. And.

As a result, advocated a position that came in some quarters to be known as naturalism, which holds, roughly speaking, that philosophy and science are on a continuum, if you like. Um, that it's not that there's a hard and fast divide between them. It's just that philosophy asks questions that are further removed from Um, experimental or empirical data, um, but so that, you know, the theoretical reaches of some sciences do that to ask questions that are really at some removed from, from the empirical data.

So according to this, um, quine inspired line of argument, there isn't a fundamental divide between the two. That's what I was thinking of when I said that some philosophers would disagree with what I've said. Absolutely.

[00:17:40] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I guess, I guess if we do take the, the sort of first view you put forward, it does pose a question of how one could make anything that we would call progress in philosophy. Um, because in science you can imagine even if one cannot prove progress. Um, one could at least, you know, disprove, as you said earlier, and sort of cut out the space of possible hypotheses, make it smaller, or at least have enough evidence that it could sort of draw us towards, um, a stronger belief in, in a certain region of hypothesis space, I guess.

And, and I, I would consider, you know, mathematically, you could think of that as, as progress of a sort, but in philosophy, we don't have the ability, then, to appeal to, I don't know. Empirical evidence. So what does, what does progress then look like in philosophy?

[00:18:28] Samir Okasha: It's a good question, and one, I think, that actually troubles a lot of us in philosophy, in that we spend our lives beavering away at these extremely difficult questions, and, um, reading difficult works and writing, in many cases quite abstruse, uh, articles in modern professional philosophy, often that can only be read by other philosophical specialists.

And we would hate to think that, uh, it's wasted effort, that we're getting nowhere. Um, So, but nonetheless, the comparison with scientific progress is unflattering for philosophy in that, as you rightly say, I think, Matt, I mean, whatever one thinks about whether you can prove the ultimate truth of scientific hypotheses.

I mean, it's very hard to dispute that science makes and has made extraordinary progress. Um. So I think it's very hard to dispute that science makes progress. Um, and tech, the technological, um, spin offs of science are, are, are testimonies to that. And of course, the theoretical understanding too. Um, and that, that I think is, is, is agreed by, by pretty much all parties that science has indeed increased the stock of human knowledge and has, as you rightly say, Matt, eliminated certain things that we once believed and given us pretty, pretty good information about all sorts of different things.

Philosophy, however, doesn't seem to have made progress in quite the same way. And indeed, many of the questions that the ancient Greeks discussed in philosophy, in fact, Pretty much most of them are still discussed today. Should we worry about that? Well, I would say no. I would say we have made progress, great progress in philosophy.

It's just that the questions we ask are not of this, not the sort that have final answers. So the progress could never take the form of in philosophy of saying, we now know the answers to these philosophical questions and. we've disproved to the earlier generations. I think the progress takes a perhaps a more subtle form in that the aim of philosophy really is clarity rather than final truth.

Um, so what we're often doing in, in philosophical inquiries is really trying to Shed light on debates that have interested previous generations of philosophers and to pose the questions more sharply, um, and more accurately and in that way to to illuminate, if you like, and I do think that the great advances in the, in the field of philosophy that we call analytic philosophy, that's largely a 20th century endeavor.

So, you know, really only, um, maximum of about a hundred and 130 years old or so, probably less, has indeed brought a lot of clarity. So one of the hallmarks of analytic philosophy is to use logic and careful analysis of language to really ask exactly what the question is. And by doing that, then what analytic disambiguate

many of the questions that earlier generations of philosophers argued about. Not necessarily to achieve any final answers, although perhaps some, but rather just to clarify what the question is in the first place. Now that looks very different from scientific progress, I grant you, but I think it's progress nonetheless.

[00:22:19] Matt Geleta: 1, 1, 1 viewpoint that many people take when thinking about science and, and, and philosophy and scientific and philosophy. Philosophical questions are that many people view scientific questions and, you know, scientific knowledge as purely, um, descriptive. There's, you know, not normative at all. They're no value statements, and I think Bertrand Russell and Thomas Kuhn and Carpa, all the people we've mentioned, their views seem to be.

roughly consistent with this way of thinking. But there is one science that I think breaks the rule here in particular. Um, and that is biology. Um, in biology, there is a lot of value laden language that's, that's used. Um, so for example, if I look at the, the. The human heart. Um, it's very common to say something like, um, the purpose of the heart is to pump blood or the, the, the function of the heart is to pump blood.

And you would never say that about, you know, a chemical reaction doing something. You never say, the purpose of this reaction is to do X, Y, and Z. Um, and so what, what does that mean then for biology as a science? Does that, does that change how we think about this, this type of science?

[00:23:29] Samir Okasha: that's a very nice question. Um, Let me answer it in two parts. Firstly, I agree with the general idea that science... yields knowledge of what the world is like, not what the world should be like.

[00:23:46] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[00:23:47] Samir Okasha: Um, so there's a fundamental contrast in philosophy that we make between the descriptive and the normative, where the descriptive uses the language of is.

It says, this is the way the world is. The normative uses the language of ought and says, this is the way the world should be in some respect. Now, David Hume, famous 17th century Scottish philosopher, um, sorry, 18th century Scottish philosopher, argued that, um, one could never get from An is to an ought.

That there's a fundamental gap between those, those two things. And my, my own view is that Hume is right. And I think that that's enshrined in, in the scientific world view to some extent. In that we think of the job of the scientist as just being to tell us the facts as best as possible. Um, the question of what one does with all of that scientific information then is a sort of ethical or social or political question to be assessed by, you know, by policymakers in, in part.

So that's the is or divide. Now, you suggest, Matt, that maybe Biology is an exception to that because of the prevalence of functional and purposive language in biology. Let me firstly say I fully agree with you about the presence of functional and purposive language in biology. You gave the example of the heart.

We say that the function of the heart is to pump blood, or the function of the kidneys is to remove waste products from the blood, or the function of the crab skeleton is to, to protect its innards, or the function of the, the bird's mating display is to attract females or, or whatever. So. I agree with you on the face of it, that may sound normative.

We might be saying that, you know, what the heart is meant to do is to pump blood around the body. And, uh, a heart that doesn't do that is defective in some way. And defective is obviously a normative term. We're saying it's not doing what it should do or what it's meant to do. And now one might say, impressed by the is ought distinction, the Hume argument, well, it seems that that violates then the general idea that the job of science is to, um, describe the world rather than prescribe.

But ultimately I think that that's the way it seems rather than really is, in that, Much, um, apparently normative language, in particular purposive language in biology, can in fact be paraphrased away in, in purely descriptive term. And according to one line of argument,

what we really mean when we say that the function of some biological item is to do X rather than Y, what we're really saying is that's why, that's why natural selection

So, you know, if I say that the function of, uh, the salmon's, um, returning to its natal home, its homing behavior, uh, is in order to, um, raise its offspring in, in, in a safe environment or something, then what I'm saying is it's because the behavior, the homing behavior has that effect that natural selection led.

Salmon to do it, if you like. So according to this line of argument, function and purpose, talk of function and purpose in, in biology is ultimately shorthand for talking about evolution by natural selection. And so if I say that the function of the heart is to pump blood, I mean, that's why hearts are there.

That's why they evolved in order because they do that. Whereas it's not true to say that the function of the heart is to make a, make a thumping sound, even though the heart does make a thumping sound. Um, that's not why hearts evolved. That's just a side effect of their true function, which is to circulate the blood.

So according to this line of argument, we can, we can translate away talk of function, um, by paraphrasing.

Functional language or for purpose of language in purely descriptive terms. So in short, if that's right, it suggests that evolutionary biology or biology generally is not in, is not in fact an exception to the rule that science deals in is rather than ought.

[00:28:57] Matt Geleta: I, um, I want to later on get back to the is ought question, um, as it pertains to questions of ethics and morality, but, but I think let's spend some more time on, on this question of function for now. I think there are two things that come to mind here. if, if we are to take the view that what we're really doing when we use value laden language here is pointing towards, you know, evolutionary purpose or, you know, the reasons for things having evolved.

The first idea here is that, you know, for the, for the vast majority of, of Um, you know, uh, written history, um, the theory of evolution was not known and, um, you know, science was still, still done, even in a period where biology was, was thought of as a science. The theory of evolution was, was not understood and functional language.

Functional language was used, and in fact it was used even earlier on in, in other sciences as well. Um, but maybe let's start with, with that. Um, how does that then, um, apply to this, this case where functional language was used, and, and I think we're saying it was used for a purpose that actually was, was not known, um, at some point in history?

[00:30:08] Samir Okasha: Yeah, no, that's that's a fair point. Um, so to take a concrete example of that, I mean, so many, many schoolchildren know that, uh, it was William Harvey who, who discovered that the function of the blood is to, sorry, the function of the heart is to pump, um, is to pump blood around the body. And of course, he was writing many, uh, many, many centuries before Darwin.

In which, so at a time when the theory of evolution was not known and where almost everybody believed instead in, in bi creation. Almost everybody in the, in the, in the Western, uh, Christian world that is, believed in biblical creation. Um, But nonetheless, Harvey was able to discover that the function of the heart is to pump blood.

And so you might say, well, then how can it be plausible to try and analyze away that language in terms of evolution and natural selection, given that he was using that language long before the discovery of the theory? But in response to that, We might say, well, look, we're not really trying to give an analysis of what every person who's used the term function has meant.

Rather, what we're doing is trying to point to the underlying scientific facts that make talk of function sort of scientifically possible or scientifically respectable in biology. So the basic idea would be, well, I mean, functional talk gets a grip in biology, but not in chemistry or geology precisely because the organisms that we find in biology and their, and their sub constituents, their cells and molecules of which they're made, appear to be designed for a purpose.

And now, some people, you know, in the pre Darwinian era, thought that they really had been designed by a conscious designer for a purpose. But what Darwin did is essentially to show that natural selection was the designer. if you like. So there was no intelligent designer, rather the entity organisms came to, um, be like incredibly well designed machines, very well adapted to their environmental conditions because of natural selection.

However, What really vindicates the functional talk is the fact of apparent design, if you like. And the, and the design being merely apparent, which is what Darwin showed us, rather than real, as proponents of a theistic worldview believe, doesn't really matter insofar as our ability to correctly identify the functions of things is.

So that would be, I think, one way of responding to the objection that you point out.

[00:33:12] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, I guess that, that makes sense. So, you know, this, this language happens to be. Um, you know, subjective or value laden in, in other contexts, but in, in this case, um, it makes sense and is appropriate, um, but it does then, um, lead to a second objection. And this actually, I think a very famous objection that was first put forward by, um, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in the 70s, I think, they wrote a very impactful paper, um, arguing that, um, those, I think they call it the adaptationist view, you know, trying to, um, describe traits.

of biological organisms by appealing to their evolutionary origins. Um, they, they claim that this was not really a real science because people would be able to look at basically any trait and come up with a very convincing sounding story, uh, explaining the origin and therefore the purpose of the trait and, you know, this would be the functional language we just talked about.

But, um, you know, these origin stories I think could often not be True, um, or that we would have no means of knowing whether this was the true purpose or origin or, or function of this trait. Um, and this is, I think this is very common today in the field of evolutionary psychology and the, um, the popularizations of, of that.

So, um, how do you think about that objection? Are, are Gould and Lewontin right in this case?

[00:34:41] Samir Okasha: Um, yeah, it's a complex matter. My own view is that Gould and Lewontin... Did have a point, although they overstated it somewhat, but that the correct response to the point is not to abandon what they call the adaptation, um, approach to, to evolutionary biology, but rather to do it better if you like. Um, so as you, as you point out, Matt, then one of their key worries was that, But because of their predilection for using the language of function and purpose, that what many evolutionists within professional biology, um, were doing, according to Gould and Lewontin in this famous 1977 paper, was to simply advance what they call just so stories.

And that was a reference to, to Rudyard Kipling's children, children's books, you know, how the tiger got his stripes, that, that series of books. Um, so according to Gould and Lewontin, then researchers. Was simply deciding ahead of time that every feature or trait, as we say, of every organism had been designed by natural selection for a purpose.

And would they just invent hypotheses about what that purpose or function was, what the benefit it was, uh, that it conferred on organisms was. Uh, without really having a good methodology for determining whether those functional claims are true or not. So, in short, their charge was that people were not behaving as Popper said the good scientists should behave, namely, actually testing, um, a hypothesis.

Rather, they were just assuming ahead of time that, um, every interesting feature of every organism had evolved by natural selection for a specific purpose and then hypothesizing or guessing about what that purpose was but without any good way of telling whether the guess was true. So this was a fairly damning sweeping critique.

that Gould and Luonton made of a mode of reasoning within professional biology, um, a sort of Darwinian inspired mode of reasoning that was in fact probably more prevalent in the UK than in the US where they were making the charge in that in, in, in the UK, there's always been a stronger. commitment to the Darwinian adaptationist, um, paradigm within, within biology, um, and, and in, in the, in the, in the public at large, probably too.

However, what, what's the right response to the points that Gould and Lewontin were making? So let me take one of their, one of their famous examples. They said, look, think of the human chin. Right. I mean, it would be quite wrong, they said, to try and reason as follows. Well, all humans have a chin, therefore the chin must have been produced by natural selection for a purpose.

And so therefore maybe the, the, the function of the chin is X, Y, and Z. Because they pointed out that the chin is just an inevitable by product of the growth of the jaw, just as a, it's a purely anatomical consequence of the way that the jawbone grows. Um, and not all, not all other great apes have chins, so, um, that's what they meant by a spandrel or a side effect.

They said it's just a side effect of the construction of the organism, that it has this feature. And it would be, it would be quite wrong to try and ask a question about what the adaptive advantage of the chin is, there's none. So that's an example of one of their lines of reasoning. But I think the question we have to ask is not whether they had a point, I mean, I think most people agree they did have a point, but what the right way of dealing with that point is.

Um, and I think that the, the, the, The answer to that, in my opinion, is that you need a raw, you need a more robust methodology. You need to be sure you need to make a clear distinction between things that are known pretty much for sure. And things that are still sort of hypothetical guesses. Um, and you need a clear way, established way of testing adaptive hypotheses to try and determine if they're true.

But I think in the, in the, um, the 50 or so years since. Gould and Lewontin wrote that famous article. The situation has changed a lot, and I think evolutionary biology, through a combination of molecular methods, use of molecular information, and more sophisticated statistical methods for testing hypotheses, and more advanced modeling.

efforts by people making, uh, theoretical models of how evolution works have sort of raised their game. And so in my opinion, the Gould and Lewontin critique, um, it doesn't really apply as much as it did once. So I would give a sort of nuanced answer to your question. I think they did have a point and it was a valid point and one that we still need to bear in mind, but it's not fatal to the enterprise of giving adaptive explanations.

[00:40:16] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's actually a really important fact actually that you mentioned that we have made a lot of progress in this domain because I think these sorts of stories are often used to justify real world decisions and how people think about the world. One of the, one of the quotes that I remember reading was one from Noam Chomsky and he said something like, you know, you find that people cooperate and then you say, yeah, it's of course, it's because it contributes to their genes perpetuating, um.

Or you say you find that they fight and then you say, yeah, that's obvious because it contributes to their genes perpetuating and not somebody else's. Um, and so this, this goes back to, to that point. Um, but I think, you know, that also if you apply that to a real world situation and you come up with the, the wrong story.

and it's not a scientifically backed story, you could then perhaps, for example, infer that people are just like a particular way and all the things that that could lead to, you know, historically we have, um, uh, things that go as far as eugenics as an example of a, of a consequence of having a wrong view here.

[00:41:21] Samir Okasha: Yeah, I mean, the whole business of the application of evolutionary reasoning to humans is, um, obviously fraught with danger. Um, we have the unfortunate history of eugenics and of the social Darwinism movement to bear in mind and of the rather unfortunate debates about race and IQ in, in the U S particularly, I mean, there's a lot of, um, difficult history that one has to.

Uh, be mindful of if we're, you know, concerned to apply evolutionary reasoning to human behavior, um, or to seek genetic bases of, of complex human behaviors, uh, that, no, that's, that's absolutely right. I mean, I think you're, the example you give from Chomsky is a nice one. I mean, and that's incidentally exactly the sort of thing that Popper had in mind when he insisted on the, the methodology of falsification.

He said, look, it's no good to, you can always find something that confirms or seems to confirm your theory. You know, it. If your theory fits the facts, whatever those facts are, then that's not good. That's bad, right? And as you say, I mean, if we can explain both the human propensity to cooperate and the human propensity to fight in exactly the same way by saying, oh, it's just a matter of spreading your genes, it's basic Darwinian logic, then that is.

problematic. I mean, because, but again, I mean, the response in that case that I would make is to say, well, we need to have a more accurate description of the phenomenon itself before coming up with evolutionary explanations for it. So humans cooperate. Yes. In certain contexts, in certain institutional settings, um, but not in others.

And similarly humans fight. in certain contexts, but you know, a careful anthropological or sociological analysis of that will reveal that it's not just sort of random, if you like. There are significant regularities or generalizations one can make about when humans cooperate and when they don't, and when they fight and when they don't.

Um. And until we have a sort of better description of the pattern of behavior itself, we shouldn't really try and construct evolutionary explanations at all. And of course, in the human case, the evolutionary explanation will only be part of the story because culture plays such a significant a role in determining human behavior, culture, and social institutions, um, that it would be quite wrong to think that there's a very direct connection between um, humans genes and what the natural selection has selected our genes for and our behavior.

I mean, there is at a very broad level of analysis, but at the level at which we're typically interested, then the differences in human behavior are almost certainly more the results of cultural environmental influences than genetic ones.

[00:44:40] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I mean that leads very, very nicely to one of the traits that's really right at the center of human life, um, which are our moral and ethical sensibilities and, um, in particular altruism. Um, I think that, that pertains to the first part of Chomsky's quote. I mean, as, as with, um, other human traits you've talked about, I think you, as you said, the, the scientific consensus is that.

There are aspects of this that have evolutionary roots, and maybe there are cultural influences and so on. But I would like to explore the evolutionary roots then, in light of what we've just talked about. I mean, the evolutionary origin of something like altruism, it's a big topic in itself and could warrant a podcast.

But perhaps we could just briefly set the picture here on our leading theory for evolutionary origins of altruism. Because I think this, this will lead very nicely back to the no altremes point that we talked about earlier on, which I want to get to. Um, so maybe we need to touch on concepts like levels of selection and group selection and kin selection and those things.

But, um, could you quickly set the, the picture for me here on, on this question?

[00:45:46] Samir Okasha: Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, we need to distinguish whether we're talking about humans or non humans because the term altruism, you know, is used in, in biology in one sense and is used in, um, In application to humans in, in both in, in the field of psychology, but also in, in day to day, um, conversation in, um, in a slightly different sense, there's a relation between the senses, but they're different.

So let's firstly talk about the biological sense. So what one means in, in biology when one describes, um, some animal behavior as altruistic is that, It imposes a cost on the, the actor, the organism that does the, the action, but benefits someone else. So, you know, sharing one's limited food supply with other members of the social group, or something, would count as altruism.

An animal that does that gets less food for itself, uh huh, so its own survival is presumably reduced, but it enhances that of, that of someone else. And now... This immediately raises the question of how altruistic behavior, which is relatively, which in that sense is relatively common throughout the animal kingdom, and indeed not just the animal kingdom, we find in, in microbes, in particular in bacteria, remarkably engaging, um, in, in similar sorts of behaviors, behaviors that are individually costly, but that benefit others.

Um, such as releasing certain, producing certain chemicals that will free up, you know, iron for bacterial metabolism into the local environment. But other bacteria will be the beneficiaries, not the, not the bacterium that produces the, uh, the, the chemical in question, which is costly to produce. So altruism of that sort is common, uh, throughout the, the living world.

And immediately that, that raises a puzzle. I mean, from a Darwinian perspective, our natural sort of first expectation is that animals and organisms should evolve behaviors that increase their own chances of surviving and reproducing, not those of others, right? So then how can the existence of altruism be reconciled with basic Darwinian principles?

With the basic Darwinian idea that, you know, there's a competition between individuals and individuals who exhibit behaviors. that bring the most chance of surviving and reproducing will prosper and spread their genes vis a vis ones that behave altruistically, for example. Now this puzzle was indeed fully appreciated by Darwin himself.

Um, both in The Origin of Species and even more so in his 1879 book The Descent of Man. In which, in a famous passage, Darwin posed the quest, the puzzle of altruism by saying, imagining how, um, altruistic behaviors had evolved in early hominids. So Darwin, in particular, was talking about early hominids who were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of others in their tribe or group.

So, as Darwin famously put it, he said, he who was ready to sacrifice his life. would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature. So in saying, with that quotation, Darwin was precisely saying, look, there's a puzzle here. We've got the theory of natural selection, leads us to assume that individuals will look out for themselves.

But then we've got the existence or supposed existence of self sacrificial tendencies in early hominids. How do we square them? Now, there are a number of possibilities. I mean, one possibility, and this is what Darwin hits on himself in that, in that same discussion in The Descent of Man, is that Natural selection may in fact be favorably operating at the group level, not the individual level.

So it might be that in group on group competition, groups containing lots of altruistically inclined Individuals who look out for the common good will prosper over groups containing selfish ones. And so it might be that we need to think of selection between groups, not just between individuals, to understand how altruism evolved.

That's one, that's one theory, sometimes called group selection, also known as multi level selection. Another idea, um, That in some, is related in a way, although came, arrived by a very different route. And, in fact, it wasn't the true relation between this idea that I'm about to expound, and the group selection idea, um, only, only came to be understood relatively recently.

But in any case, this second idea is sometimes called kin selection. And this is associated particularly with authors like W. D. Hamilton, the Oxford biologist. an inspiration for Richard Dawkins, and it's at the heart of much of Dawkins early work, is the idea that we need to think in genetic terms. And the key observation here is that altruistic behavior in the animal world is not usually just directed at random members of the population.

So it's not generally the case that an altruistic organism will Behave altruistically just to anybody, but is rather to their relatives, or to those who are in close proximity to them, who statistically often tend to be their relatives in many animal communities. And that changes the accounting fundamentally, because you see relatives share genes.

So, so long as an organism is behaving altruistically towards fellow altruists, sorry, towards its genetic relatives who share its genes, then it's likely that the benefit of the altruistic behavior will be falling on other people who also have the genetic trait that leads to the altruism. So, in that way, It can be, in fact, a mechanism by which genes that encode altruistic behavior can spread through a population.

So long as they cause the, the organisms in which they're found to be altruistic towards other organisms that also have the gene, or more likely than random to have the gene, to, to be precise, uh, then altruism can spread. So in short, this is the idea of kin selection, which posits that there's a simple way of explaining in natural selection terms how altruism could evolve, simply by appealing to the fact that, um, Organisms typically behave altruistically towards their relatives, not to randomly chosen members of their population.

So that's, that's biological altruism, altruism in the biological domain, where we've got the group selection idea, the kin selection idea, and the fraught history of debate between those that still goes on to some extent, although the situation is much clarified now. Okay, so that's biological altruism. Now, I said, um, a moment ago that when we talk about altruism, we've got to distinguish a bit between the use of the term in biology and, uh, where it's a sort of semi technical term, if you like, to refer to behavior that's individually costly but benefits others. And the use of the term in reference to humans, so many authors have talked about what they call psychological altruism.

And psychological altruism refers to behaviors or actions that are done with the express intention of helping others, that, that are personally costly, but where the aim is to help. others. And that's sort of subtly different from the evolutionary or biological altruism notion, because you see a bacterium that releases some chemical into the local environment obviously isn't consciously trying to help anyone.

Um, it doesn't have a mind. So It would be a nonsense to say that it was trying to help other bacteria in its, in its social group or something. Um, but in the human case, then clearly much, uh, human behavior is not, though not all is done for conscious with conscious intentions underpinning it. And so we can sensibly say, look, did that person perform the action because they were genuinely trying to help or were they just trying to look good in the eyes of someone else?

So when you, you know, when you help that old lady across the road, um, is it cause you really wanted to help her? Or, you just wanted to impress some onlooker and show them you were a nice guy, for whatever reason. So, in the human case, we can make that fundamental distinction between, um, actions in terms of the intent to help versus not.

Um, so we need to, so when we ask whether there's a biological basis for human altruism, we immediately have to say, well, what do we mean by human altruism? You know, do we mean altruism in that psychological sense or do we just mean altruism in the same sense in which we talk about altruism in ants and bacteria, namely doing things that in fact help others but are costly to oneself?

So I think the question of the biological basis for human altruism is complicated by that, by that sort of semantic or conceptual distinction. And it's also complicated by the fact, the general fact that we've alluded to already, that, you know, much complicated, interesting human behavior, um, Is only under very loose genetic control, if any, if you like, in that, I mean, clearly our genes in a way affect our aspects of our mind and our brain and our psychology, but don't directly determine how we behave in a, in a day to day fashion.

I mean, culture is a far stronger determinant of that, I think, in the human case. Um, so wondering whether there's a biological basis for human altruism is, um, is complicated for that reason too, namely that the attempt to, um, find biological bases for human behaviors is typically not particularly successful.

I mean, it's not to say the genes are nothing to do with human behavior at all, but at the level of grain at which one is typically interested, um, specifically, if you, if you look at, if your, if your concern is with differences in human behaviors between people in different parts of the world, for example, genetics are unlikely to be anything to do with it.

[00:57:28] Matt Geleta: Yeah, there, there is that lens though, um, I mean, as, as you say, altruism could have sort of many different layers to it and there, there might be sort of a quote, unquote, purely genetic component, genetic component, um, and then there might be others that are sort of much more nuanced, but at bottom, I think everyone.

It would agree that, um, you know, even the, the, the quality of the human mind, the nature of the human mind, what it can do. At bottom, this is something that has, um, evolved and does have evolutionary origins. And I think this comes. Back very nicely to the ought versus is question that we discussed earlier, because altruism and, um, in fact any other sensibilities we have, um, they are, however many layers we have on top of them, they're somehow at the, at, at bottom.

are determined by the structure and nature of our minds. And, um, you know, we, we said that the, the most standard view, I would almost actually say it's, it's taken as almost like a principle in philosophy that there is, there is no ought derivable from an is. But if you think about it, moral sensibilities, um, are, I mean, they, they emerge from this, this process of evolution and everything on top of it.

And that is a pure, The is process that is a purely descriptive thing that happens. And so all of the ought exists somehow within a, um, a universe of is. And so how do you think about this, uh, this issue?

[00:59:02] Samir Okasha: Yeah, no, that's a nice way, nice way to put it. I mean, I suppose my, my own take on it will be this. I'm not saying this is, uh, sort of established fact in philosophy exactly, but it's, it's how I would look at it myself. So I, I'm a believer in the is ought distinction. I, I agree with the, the principle that you can't get an ought from an is and that science most gives us is.

But it's not to say, that doesn't mean there can't be a science of morality. Because you see, evolutionary explanations of, you know, human morality and human moral psychology and human moral behavior, are really explaining why it is that humans, Behave in a certain way or, or have certain moral beliefs and make moral, are disposed to make the moral judgments that they do.

So why is it that we think that, you know, uh, cheating is, is wrong or dodging tax is wrong or hurting people is wrong or that sort of thing. Those are... I mean, if it's, if it's plausible that we can give evolutionary explanations of why humans typically believe things like that, um, then that still isn't to get an is, an ought from an is.

That's to, that's to use an is theory, a scientific theory in this case, evolutionary theory, to explain another is, which is the fact that humans have the moral beliefs that they do. But what you, what that doesn't show is that the moral beliefs are true or false. And it's that last bit that you can't get from science alone.

And indeed some philosophers would even go so far as to say that there's no, there's no fact of the matter. There's no truth there anyway.

[01:00:57] Matt Geleta: Yeah. I think people who are not maybe as schooled in, um, in this philosophical question, um, I think can maybe take the no ought from is. statement as maybe less sort of logically robust as it potentially is and, and maybe take it into sort of more everyday. Um, because I think what we're saying is, you know, there, you could scientifically show that perhaps You know, the vast majority of humans would share some sort of moral sensibilities and We could say that the reason that that happens does have evolutionary roots and so on and and other things But you could imagine constituting a brain differently such that those sensibilities wouldn't be held and I guess in, in that sense, you know, no altruism makes sense, but there are still truths that almost every single person, um, would, would hold or sort of at least beliefs that almost every single person would hold.

Um, and so is, is, is that consistent with your view here? There's sort of like this abstract theoretical sense in which no altruism holds, but nevertheless, there are views that are consistent across basically all of humanity.

[01:02:07] Samir Okasha: Yeah, I mean, I think that's compatible with what I'm saying. Um. So, although I say, I'm, I'm, I mean, I think if you look at humanity at different times then, I mean, things that are commonplace moral beliefs now were not necessarily, you know, 300 years ago, less, let alone a thousand years ago, you know, if you think of the prevalence of institutions, you know, such as slavery, for example, that is abhorrent to every human being alive now.

almost without exception, um, was, was largely taken for granted for much of human history as just, uh, you know, part of the work, the fabric of the world and in, or if not explicitly justifiable. Um, so, I mean, I do think that there has been, you know, moral change and hopefully what I would call moral progress, although not in the same sense in which we get scientific progress over the course of humanity.

Um, But even if, even if there were some invariant, um, moral beliefs or judgments that all humans at all times have been disposed to make and that were sort of deeply rooted in, um, in the, in, in the way that the human brain works or something, and there was a convincing evolutionary explanation of that, I would still be inclined to say that that still isn't getting an ought from an is exactly.

Um, because you see people, I mean people who practice the discipline of ethics or moral philosophy, which is, you know, a sub branch of, of, of contemporary philosophy, they're not always, but generally they are not too impressed with the idea that evolution is going to help them in their, It's not that they deny the truth of evolution or that they deny that evolutionary explanations of human moral, um, judgments and moral behaviors and moral psychology is possible.

But they just say that doesn't answer the question that interests them. Whereas the question that interests them is what is right? What is wrong? What should we do? How should people behave? How should society regulate itself in certain respects? And they say no science can... can tell us the answer to that.

Most of the science could tell us why people think that the answer to the quest to those questions is x rather than y. But they want to know whether the answer is x rather than y. And they typically believe that philosophical reflection is the only way to, Um, and so that's why they, they without, while not disputing evolution, I think many of my colleagues in the, in the field of ethics are unpersuaded that their, um, inquiries, you know, need to really attend to evolutionary matters.

I mean, they may be wrong, of course, but that's, uh, that's what a lot of professional ethicists or moral philosophers believe.

[01:05:20] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's, um, it does though, bring us back right to the beginning of this conversation where we talked about progress in philosophy and science and what constitutes a philosophical question versus scientific one. And perhaps it's a, it's a conversation for another day, but if, if those people do believe that these questions are in the realm of philosophy, then I think we need to revisit the discussion we had at the beginning about progress in philosophy and answering.

Philosophical questions.

[01:05:50] Samir Okasha: Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, it does lead us right back to, to that Vex question of whether there's progress in philosophy and whether the philosophical method can float free, or philosophical inquiry, let's say, can, can float free of scientific inquiry or not. I mean, there's a sort of growing minority of people in, in philosophy who is, um, uh, who subscribe to what's called naturalism that I mentioned earlier, um, which they, they often take to be the view that, you know, in order to make advances in philosophy, you have to attend to what the sciences say.

And although I myself am a philosopher of science and love science, I, I, I'm neutral on that question in that I think that in reality, many philosophical inquiries, particularly in fields such as ethics and metaphysics, um, and epistemology, Although it's useful to, and, and instructive to bring those discussions into contact with science, ultimately many of the questions that are discussed in those disciplines are questions to which no scientific information is ul is really relevant.

[01:07:02] Matt Geleta: Yeah, well, uh, Samira, I know our time is short, so, um, maybe let's bring our listeners towards, uh, your books and, and what you're working on. Um, you've written several very interesting books on these topics and others. Um, if people want to, to find out more, dig deep into these topics, where would you send them?

Where should they look?

[01:07:21] Samir Okasha: I've written two, two books in the Oxford University Press very short introduction series, um, that I, I, I think might be relevant to, to, to readers, depending on how much they, they know about these topics. So one of those is called Philosophy of Science, a very short introduction, and the other is called Philosophy of Biology.

a very short introduction. And they give a sort of synoptic overview of these two subdisciplines of philosophy, which is where I've done most of my work. That's the first subdiscipline being philosophy of science. And the second subdiscipline being, you know, a subset of philosophy of science. That's the philosophy of biology, which addresses sort of conceptual questions within the modern biosciences.

So these discussions that we've been having about function and altruism and Adaptationism and Gould and Lewontin. They're all covered in that little book. But the first book, by contrast, the Philosophy of Science one, deals with the Kuhn versus Popper issues that we talked about, the question of the scientific method, how much certainty we can have in the results of science, general questions in the field that pertain to all of scientific inquiry rather than to one discipline in particular.

So yeah, if you haven't read those ones, I would, uh, encourage, uh, readers to. Although I should say they're, I mean, they're, they're, they're short books and are relatively introductory. Um, but they are written in a way that I hope makes them accessible to anyone, irrespective of how much philosophy they know.

In that unlike many philosophy books, what I tried to do when I wrote those is to sort of minimize philosophical jargon and just write in as plain spoken a manner as possible.

[01:09:07] Matt Geleta: Yeah. And in general, it's a very nice book series. I remember, um, at Christchurch College in the library, they had the, what looked like the entire, uh, selection of them all across the shelf there, and so I got to delight myself. So definitely worth a read. Um, on the topic of books, um, Which book have you most gifted to other people and why?

[01:09:29] Samir Okasha: Which book have I most gifted to other people and why? Well, I've given Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene to many, many people, I must say. Uh,

[01:09:39] Matt Geleta: I thought, I thought you were saying that you had given Richard Dawkins a copy of The Selfish

[01:09:43] Samir Okasha: his book, The Selfish Gene, I've, I've, I've given as Christmas gifts. gifts to many people over the years, um, although it's, I mean, it's, it's extremely well known book by now and it's, it's lessons have largely been assimilated. I, I think by many people, you know, who, by many sort of academic writers and with an interest in.

in evolutionary biology. I still think it's an extremely powerful and compelling message, not one that I would say people should swallow wholesale uncritically, but I still can think of no more, no better written, more instinct, instantly interesting and arresting popular science work than that one. mean, Richard Dawkins is not a big fan of philosophy. Um, but like, but I am a big fan of, of, of his work.

[01:10:38] Matt Geleta: Mm. Likewise. Um, uh, next question is, what advice would you give to somebody who wanted to succeed in your field?

[01:10:49] Samir Okasha: I mean, the key in philosophy of science is really. The integration of the science and the philosophy, I mean, so you have to know a lot of science, but you also have to have a philosophical sensibility, and neither of those on its own is really enough. And so, I mean, many people come into philosophy of science via, because they started out, you know, studying science, but they always felt that, you know, standard sort of science curricula, particularly laboratory heavy sciences, just didn't really scratch the itch that, you know, that they had, that they always were, you know, asking some question that the teacher didn't really want.

to answer like questions. What does it really all mean? How do you know that's true for sure? That sort of thing. And so I think that that can often be a symptom that someone is attracted to philosophy of science, uh, but it's not the only way into the subject. So in practical terms, I would say that, I mean, philosophy of science is a difficult subject to get into because you have to You basically have to, you know, have a PhD in philosophy, but also many people will have a, you know, a training sometimes up to PhD level in science too.

And that's a lot of studying. And that requires a lot of funding, unfortunately. So it's not, it's not always the most accessible discipline, academic discipline to enter simply because the sort of knowledge barrier to getting into it. is really quite high and has increased over time. So I would say the key in part is self study.

You know, no one's an expert in anything, but in philosophy of science, we do have to try and be experts in the bit of science we're interested in, though obviously not the whole of science. And also in, in, in philosophy itself. And there's not really any shortcut. So, you know, working hard and self study I think is, is the key.

[01:12:54] Matt Geleta: It's a good, uh, it's a good bit of advice. Um, my final question, perhaps a little bit off topic, but, um, I think very relevant for the times we live in. My question is, imagine looking forward to the day, which many people think is coming very soon, in which we're visited by an AI super intelligence. My question to you is, who from humanity, either past or present, should represent us to this super intelligent other?

[01:13:25] Samir Okasha: Oh, that's a difficult one. I mean, you mentioned Bertrand Russell. I think he would have a case. Nelson Mandela, maybe?

[01:13:33] Matt Geleta: good answers. You can't go, you can't go wrong with Nelson Mandela for sure. Um, uh, Samir, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

[01:13:40] Samir Okasha: Not at all. Thank you, Matt.

She’s also a world-renowned author, having co-authored 9 books, including the best-selling book Merchants of Doubt, Climate change denial, and her most recent book, the Big Myth, which explores the idea of free market economics, and its dark and politically laden history.

In this conversation we discuss:

• The relationships between science, economics, and politics

• The idea of the free market, and common misconceptions about free market economics

• Arguments for and against a free market way of thinking

• The incentives systems that influence how ideas spread in a society

• Meme theory

• Propaganda

… and other topics

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Twitter: @NaomiOreskes

• Books:

  • The Big Myth

  • Merchants of Doubt

  • The Entrepreneurial State (Mariana Mazzucato)

Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

0:03:15 Myth of the Free Market

0:08:55 Adam Smith vs regulation

0:28:40 Bad incentives vs bad actors

0:34:25 Arguments for and against regulation

0:44:10 Are free markets more fair?

0:53:00 Distrust in government as a cause of free market thinking

0:57:50 Meme theory of free market thinking

1:01:00 Ayn Rand & propaganda

1:09:00 Advice for people in positions of power

1:14:20 The Entrepreneurial State

1:16:50 Book recommendations

1:18:00 Advice for scientists

1:18:00 Who should represent humanity to an AI superintelligence?

Introduction: AI Risk and regulation

One of the core themes I’m focused on in this podcast, and in life more generally, is that of examining the paradigms in which we operate. Instead of just talking about important ideas in philosophy, science, and technology, we step back and look at the very paradigms in which those ideas exist, and we ask ourselves how and why we come to believe what we think we know.

In doing this, one quickly learns that philosophy and science, and indeed any of our knowledge systems, can never really be decoupled from politics and ideology. Whether we like it or not, political agendas influence the information environment we find ourselves in. Politics influences what scientific work gets funded, and therefore the direction in which our knowledge systems progress. It influences what books get written and promoted. And it even influences what gets taught as foundational knowledge in schools and universities.

Even in narrow situations, when science is conducted in a way that’s far removed from political agendas - for example, within the context of a particular scientific study - the category of things being studied itself is often the result of a combination of political, ideological, and commercial factors. So we just can’t get away from the fact that science and politics are linked. And the same is true of more theoretical fields, like economic theory.

Many scientists and economists alike find this state of affairs somewhat confronting, and even repellant. And I must admit that there is a part of me that shares this feeling. However, uncomfortable as it may be, these feelings say nothing of the truth of the matter.

Today’s conversation with Naomi Oreskes demonstrates just how deep these waters run, and how important it is to step back and take a critical and open minded look at the paradigms we’re working in. Because if we don’t, it’s all too easy to end up buying into ways of thinking and living that are a little bit more politically motivated than we might realise.

This was an useful conversation, and I hope you find it valuable.

Transcript - for video interview

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

I'm here with Naomi Oreskes. Naomi, thanks for joining me.

[00:00:05] Naomi Oreskes: Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me on the

show.

[00:00:07] Matt Geleta: Naomi, Paradigm is more about philosophy and science and technology than it is about politics. However, I think it's naive and potentially quite dangerous to believe that these topics are not influenced by politics and ideology. And I think your work perhaps better than anyone else's I've followed over the years, reveals just how deeply these influences can run and how intimately related these topics are.

And so I would love to have a conversation with you grounded in your most recent book, The big myth But that draws on much broader implications about, you know, human psychology and incentive systems and political ideology, um, all the things that you've, uh, you've written about over the years, uh, in books like The Merchants of Doubt and others.

Um, let's start by laying the groundwork for the big myth. What is the big myth that you talk about in your book?

[00:00:57] Naomi Oreskes: The big myth is the myth of the free market. The idea that there is such a thing as the free market that stands alone and apart from culture and politics, uh, that the market has wisdom, uh, agency, and that we do best by just letting the market do its magic and not interfering, and that governments can't improve the function of markets, they only distort markets, and therefore, in order to generate prosperity, the best thing we can do is just stand back.

And as I said, let the magic, let the market do its magic. And in the book, we show how, in so many different ways, this myth is a myth. It's not really true. It's not true historically. It's not true economically. Um, And we show that it was really consciously developed in the 20th century in the United States in particular.

And the story focuses on the U. S., but it's not just about the U. S. Um, really promoted and propagated and exaggerated the power of markets, exaggerated by a group of industrialists, uh, who were really motivated by their own strong economic and political self interest.

[00:01:57] Matt Geleta: Yeah, the, uh, the word myth does a lot of work there because, um, I mean, yes, if you look at The You know, any, any scientific field, um, or any area of economics, you know, we're always dealing with models. We're always dealing with abstractions that are somehow idealized. And, uh, in those contexts, we don't refer to those things as myths per se.

We just understand that they're models. But, uh, in this case, I think that the word myth is quite rightly used. Why is it that you call it a myth rather than a model or something else?

[00:02:25] Naomi Oreskes: Yeah, that's a great question. And we actually went back and forth a lot on the title of the book, the original working title. was The Magic of the Marketplace, A True History of a False Idea. So, we had the idea that it was an idea, but it wasn't really true, that if it were a scientific theory, you would have to say that it had been refuted because there was so much evidence to show, uh, that even some of the assumptions about market efficiency really don't hold up when you look closely.

Um, so we went back and forth, but our editor didn't like The Magic of the Marketplace as a title because there were sort of implied scare quotes around the word magic. Um, and he said, you can't really have. irony in a title. Uh, that doesn't really work. Um, so we settled on myth because we thought it had the right sense of, for myths to work, they have to have a kernel of truth in them, right?

Myths are never wholly false. If they were completely 100 percent false, nobody would believe in them. People believe in them because they capture something that on some level evil is either is true or we want it to be true. Um, and so that was one aspect of calling it a myth. And the other was the way in which we show in the book that it is deliberately developed and cultivated.

Um, we could have called it a story, you know, the big story, because in a sense, the book is about a group of people telling a story about the efficacy of the marketplace. and the inefficacy of government, but story didn't feel quite strong enough, because again, there are good stories and bad stories, and it's not a model, because it's much more than a model, I mean a scientific model.

Um, it's something that's developed by scientists in very specific conte context. But this is much, much larger than that. It's not just about what economists are publishing in economic journals. It's also about propaganda campaigns. It's about edited versions of classic texts like The Wealth of Nations, uh, and The Road to Serfdom.

It's about attempts to influence children's books, film. radio, television. So it's far, far more pervasive than a scientific model or scientific theory. And of course, that relates to what you said at the outset of this program. I'm a historian of science by training, uh, and a scientist, uh, Eric Conway is a historian of technology by training.

We began our careers interested in science and technology, not interested in politics, not interested in ideology, and certainly not interested in myth and propaganda. But what we discovered here was a story of a heavily propagandistic, conscious, deliberate effort to sell, to sell this story, to sell this myth.

And so that's how we settled on the word myth. It's not perfect. Um, titles are hard. As anyone who's written a book will know. Uh, but it comes closest to capturing the sense that we're trying to pro present here, uh, that this is not, um, it is a true story of a false idea. It's an idea that was propagandized, uh, in very conscious and very deliberate ways, and the documentary record shows that.

It's also not a mistake, right? It's not that these people were mistaken, or that this is an art, a difference of interpretation. I mean, there are elements of it, particularly when we look at the University of Chicago School of Economics, there are elements of interpretation, but there's also, there are also elements of clear misrepresentation of history.

So it's not, it doesn't work just to call this, um, this is not a scientific debate, and it's mostly not taking place in scientific venues. It's mostly taking place, uh, in popular

culture.

[00:05:43] Matt Geleta: Well, let's uh, let's dig in then to the history of this big myth, um, you know, if one goes all the way back to someone like Adam Smith, who's one of the founding fathers of modern economic theory, um, He famously has the idea of the invisible hand of the market, and most people will be familiar with this idea.

At its core, it's something like, uh, you know, in a, in a free market, the wants and needs of individuals will, um, aggregate in some way into some distributed supply and demand calculation. And this will drive the market towards optimally or close to optimally meeting the, the needs of those people. Um, and I think based on this idea, and maybe the idea of enlightened self interest.

Most people assume that Adam Smith was a fairly diehard proponent of, um, free market economics. And it's interesting because you don't have to read too much of Adam Smith to realize that that's not quite true. Um, what is your, what is your view here on, on Adam Smith? How much of a free market fundamentalist, uh, was, was he?

[00:06:45] Naomi Oreskes: He was not at all. I mean, all you have to do is sit down with the wealth of nations, which is admittedly a hard book. Uh, and spend some time with it. And you very quickly realize that the Adam Smith that has been presented to us, the, you know, the image that you just said, that this is a man who believes fundamentally and essentially in the role of self interest, and that if everybody just does what's good for them, that there will be this aggregate outcome that serves the common good, is at best a gross oversimplification of what Adam Smith believed.

It is certainly true that, uh, in the wealth of nations, you do find important foundations for modern market based thinking. It's certainly true that he does have that, you know, very famous line about the self interest of the butcher and the baker, but there's an awful lot else in that book too that shows you that Smith had a much more nuanced view of markets, their roles, and their limits than you would ever guessed by listening to conservative commentators in the United States today or reading the Wall Street Journal.

So one of the things we point out in the book, and I actually say of all the things we found to me, this was one of the most astonishing because when I was reading Adam Smith, I was like, holy moly, they did not teach us this in college, right? Um, he has a very long discussion about the need for regulation and specifically the regulation of banks, which is particularly appropriate in this current moment when we've seen major bank failures.

Uh, in the last year or two that have the potential to really, uh, bring down the entire global. economy like the Credit Suisse failure, Adam Smith recognized this 300 years ago and he specifically said, you have to regulate banks because if you don't, the self interest of bankers will lead them to reckless practices that threaten the security of the entire economic system.

And he says this in 1776. And this was particularly striking to me because much of the literature that Eric Conway and I had been reading is extremely anti regulation. Regulation is kind of the bugbear of a lot of Conservative economists, conservative politicians, um, this is the thing that you most often hear being attacked, uh, in right wing literature, or, you know, if you get to go to the World Economic Forum, which I've been

I'm going to say something that my business colleagues won't like, but you know, we really do have to think about regulation as if this is a betrayal of Adam Smith, as if this is a betrayal of capitalist principles. But it's not because Adam Smith is actually clear about this. And in fact, There's an absolutely wonderful passage where he really, in a way, solves the core problem of self interest.

He says, self interest is great up to a point. Liberty, freedom. Yeah, of course, we all, we all want to be free. We all want to be able to do what we want to do, but it has to stop at the point where my freedom threatens to hurt somebody else. I mean, in a nutshell, in a few sentences, he solved the problem of competing liberties, but I never knew that growing up.

I never knew that he... He had those conversations, and it doesn't stop at that. American conservatives also hate taxation. One of the biggest drivers of income inequality in the United States in recent years, uh, has been the changes in the tax code, and we've seen this in Europe and other places as well.

When Dwight Eisenhower was President of the United States, a Republican President, a moderate conservative guy, the marginal tax rate in the 1950s was over 90%. Today it's 37%, and this has driven a huge income inequalities, income inequities, which has led to massive concentration of wealth among very small numbers of people, who then distort the political process because they can buy so much influence.

So what does Adam Smith think about that? Does he think that taxation is theft, as a lot of American Republicans say? No, he thinks taxation is totally appropriate, that you need it for, uh, Roads and bridges for infrastructure that everyone benefits from. You need it for, uh, the preservation of the dignity of the sovereign.

I thought that was so sweet. You know, the king has a right to have decent clothes and a decent carriage. Um, and a few other things. He just says if you're going to have taxation, do it fairly, do it equitably, and do it transparently. Which it seems to me is something that anyone, liberal or conservative, could agree with.

And then... Even more astonishing, he has a whole discussion of why workers need to combine in what today we would form, today we would call unions. So he says, look, employers will always pay workers as little as they can get away with, to the point that sometimes they even pay literally starvation wages, that the workers, the children of workers in 18th century England, people who were working full time, were starving.

And he even talks about how many families would deliberately have more than two children because they would know that some of the children wouldn't make it to adulthood, partly because of disease, but also partly because inadequate nutrition. And he says because of this, workers have to combine to protect their own interests because the owners will always, always, always pay them as little money as possible.

So this is Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, defending unions, which again is something that conservatives in America have loved to hate. So we see a very, very different, um, Smith. When we look at the totality of his work, then many of us have come to believe was the case. So why do we have such a wrong impression of Adam Smith?

Well, one of the things we show in the book is because the version of Adam Smith that was produced by the University of Chicago and was used in many American classrooms in the 1950s, 60s and maybe as late as the 70s Expunged all of those parts, all of the parts where Smith says we need taxation, we need regulation, we do need to limit freedom, we can't just rely on self interest, workers do have to combine to stand up for their own rights against rapacious factory owners.

All of that is eliminated from the University of Chicago version of Adam Smith. And so in the book we focus on that specific text, but I think this is a microcosm for a sort of larger pattern of misrepresenting Adam Smith as a market fundamentalist, when in fact he was a quite sophisticated and nuanced thinker who, yes, absolutely believed in the power of markets, was proposing a market based system as an improvement over mercantilism.

Remember, you have to remember what is Adam Smith arguing against in 1776. He's arguing against mercantilism. So, um, yes, absolutely. He thinks market based economies will be better than mercantilist economies. And he's right about that, right? But he also, he is by no means a market

fundamentalist.

[00:13:19] Matt Geleta: it very much then begs the question as to why, um, people would view Adam Smith in such an incorrect light. If, if really in his own writing, it was not that unclear what his position was. And I think this, this really, you know, comes down to a big part of the purpose of this podcast, which, which is looking at, you know, how we know, uh, what we think we know.

I mean, one quickly learns when asking this question in basically any context that scientific knowledge or really any knowledge engine, um, it's always inextricably linked with politics and politics influences what books get written and published.

And as you mentioned, what gets taught in schools and universities and therefore what information environment people live in. And the free market case is a very good case study here, um, in particular the economic theory taught. I share your experience of taking economics courses at university where it was certainly free market economics taught there.

So could you tell me the story behind all of this? You know, how does one get from... Adam Smith and a very clear position in his writing to the state of play today where it's very much skewed towards a free market ideology that is taught in standard economics across the western world.

[00:14:40] Naomi Oreskes: Well, I don't want to oversimplify, and this book is over 500 pages long, because we're trying not to do what we are, in fact, accusing our opponents of doing, which is oversimplifying and misrepresenting. And, of course, any complex story, any complex question, there's always going to be some degree of oversimplification, because the reality is...

You know, The Wealth of Nations is over a thousand pages long. You can't expect undergraduates to read the whole book. But what we show in the book is that it's not just an accident, or it's not just the problem of the book being too long and complicated. That there's really a systematic pattern here, and it has a lot to do with who's sponsoring the work.

So in the middle portion of the book, we talk about a group of business leaders in the United States, led by a man named Harold Lunow, someone most people have never heard of. He's not a particularly famous figure in history, although I guess, hopefully he will be after everyone on the planet reads my book.

But, um, he was a close associate of a man named Jasper Crane, who had been an important executive at the DuPont Corporation. So DuPont is a name that many, most Americans will know. And they were very eager to push back against the reforms of the New Deal. They were very resentful of what they saw as... Too much government control over business practices, particularly because during the New Deal, a number of laws had been passed to protect workers.

Laws about minimum wage, fair labor practices, laws limiting the use of child labor. which was a big debate in the early century that we talk about at the start of the book. These businessmen really felt that they had the right to run their businesses any way they, any way they chose, that the government did not have the right to set, for example, a minimum wage law or a minimum age for child labor.

And so they pushed, wanted to push back against that. And the way they did it was in part ideological. They had the idea that if they could promote books, texts, academic arguments to show that market based economics. was better than the alternative, that government regulation was bad, and specifically the argument that had been made by Austrian economists that government action in the marketplace threatened democracy, that that was an argument that they could use that would persuade the American people to, as we say, love the market and loathe the government.

And so they began to fund a project at the University of Chicago, which became the most famous economics department in the world, um, that they called the Free Market Project. And the specific aim of this project, and we have this from their own letters, this is not us interpreting, this is them, was to create a blueprint for a, for a society based on free market economics.

Their touchstone, touchstone text was Friedrich von Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which they thought laid out The basic argument that they wanted to promote that government acts in the marketplace threaten democracy, threaten freedom. And this comes from the Austrian School of Economics from people like Ludwig von Mises, um, and, well, Mises was Hayek's professor and mentor.

Now, again, here we see the same pattern. If you read The Road to Serfdom, which, again, I suspect most people don't, because if they really read it, they probably wouldn't. use it the way they do. It's not nearly as long a book as The Road to Serfdom, sorry, as, it's not nearly as long a book as The Wealth of Nations, but it is a subtle book, it's a sophisticated book.

In fact, there are lots of caveats. So, Von Hayek says, for example, that it is perfectly appropriate and even necessary for governments to intervene to prevent pollution, for example, deforestation, um, the use of certain kinds of toxic chemicals. And he says it's also appropriate for governments to have some form of what in the United States we call social security, or I think in Australia you still call the dole.

Um, you know, that these are appropriate to protect people against like the most extreme forms of privation. So he recognizes that in a market based system, not everybody, it doesn't work out for everyone. People can end up unemployed. People can end up hungry. And he says governments do need to do something about that.

But this is all expunged in a version that they produce in the United States for Reader's Digest magazine. So, Reader's Digest still exists today. It's in England, Australia, and Canada, as well as the United States. Specializes in taking long books and producing short condensations of them, often as low as 20 or 30 pages, often novels, but also non fiction works.

So, They work with Reader's Digest to produce a condensed version of The Road to Serfdom, which again, like The Wealth of Nations, takes out all the caveats and makes it seem as if von Hayek thinks that there is no role for government in our society, no role in the economy, no role to protect workers, no role to protect the environment.

And They get that published in Reader's Digest magazine, which has a circulation of millions of people, and, oh excuse me, and they also produce a comic book, literally a comic book, uh, with 18 illustrations and captions, in which it begins with the government becoming active in the economy during World War II, mobilizing for the war effort, something that virtually all Americans accepted as good, but saying, no, actually it's bad because it's going to lead us to totalitarianism and the final cartoon is a dissenter being shot by a firing squad.

And this was distributed through a magazine that doesn't exist anymore today, but was very, very popular, um, when I was growing up, a magazine called Look Magazine that had a circulation of many millions, um, and then also distributed as a pamphlet that was distributed by General Motors Corporation. So through a variety of techniques, they worked to create these simplified arguments, simplified pro market, anti government, arguments and distribute them broadly in American culture.

But they realized that for this to have credibility, it needs academic backup. So they also fund the University of Chicago, where they fund people like George Stickler, Milton Friedman, um, uh, Robert Bork, who later would be nominated to the U. S. Supreme Court, Aaron Director, a whole group of important highly intelligent, very talented people to help develop these Mark arguments, to give them intellectual credibility, to publish articles in academic journals, to make it seem as if this is not just propaganda, but it's actually a principled economic program.

Now again, we could argue a lot about all that work, but I think one example that I think is really important, one of the people involved in this as Robert Bork. When Bork was denied a nomination, denied the chance to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, much of the argument revolved around his views about the right to privacy, that he had said that he did not believe the Constitution, in fact, had enshrined a right to privacy.

Now that's something that constitutional lawyers will probably debate till the end of time, but to me the more Terrible thing that Bork did was he wrote a set of papers arguing against antitrust enforcement. Now, one of the big problems in the 19th century that was well established was that capitalism wasn't actually even good for capitalism.

That is to say, if you just let capitalists do whatever they wanted, Capitalism quickly devolved into monopoly, you had the concentration of power and wealth and a very small number of people who in the United States came to be known as robber barons, so they were not viewed as good people, they were not people who viewed as people who were engines of economic progress.

And so a set of laws was were passed to prevent monopolies, in a sense to protect competition from anti competitive practices in the marketplace. So this is the Sherman and the Clayton Antitrust Acts. They were passed by wide margins in the U. S. Congress and when the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed, John Sherman himself, the senator who was the primary sponsor of the bill, said this isn't just about protecting capitalism, although it is that and that's important, it's also about protecting democracy.

Because when you let too much wealth be concentrated in too few hands, it undermines democracy. And Sherman says this explicitly in his speech to the U. S. Senate. This is something that is very easy to find in any library or even on the internet. But Borg writes a series of papers denying this and saying that The only thing that Sherman and the architects of the act cared about was what was good for consumers.

And he introduces what he calls the consumer welfare standard. This is completely ahistorical. the historic record. But he says monopolies are fine so long as they serve the interest of people. And that just means that, um, as long as they bring the price down. And then he makes a kind of Darwinian, a social Darwinian argument where he says look the monopolies, the big monopolies are the companies that have won.

in the Darwinian struggle for survival in the marketplace. And so it's not bad, it's good. These are the best corporations. These are the strongest corporations. And therefore, they're the ones that deliver the best goods and services to people. Well, the experience in the 19th century was not that at all.

But Borg completely ignores 100 years of history. And he becomes very effective in pushing this argument. Many judges cite it. And they cite it. to throw out antitrust cases or to dismiss or find against the government. And so this is so effective that for the past 40 years, there's been very little antitrust enforcement in the United States because the Justice Department has by and large felt that these cases could not be won.

Now this is changing now during the Biden administration, which I find very, very interesting. And the Assistant Attorney General who's been raising antitrust cases of late has explicitly raised this issue and said, look, the consumer welfare standard is not in the statute. This was an invention, um, of Robert Bork and some other economists.

Bork shows this absolute reckless disregard for the facts of history. And to me, reading this material, I thought, wow, This is in a way far worse or at least certainly at least as bad because millions of consumers have been hurt by monopolistic practices in recent years and we have seen in the last 40 years massive consolidation of power, wealth, and influence in very small numbers of companies, particularly obviously the internet giants, telecommunication, and the average consumer has Almost no recourse, I mean we've all had that experience of being on some site where there's a 75 page list of conditions that if you don't agree, you, you know, you, you can't use this site, and of course none of us are actually going to read this because who has time for that, and often these things involve signing away our legal rights, that we can't sue them if something goes wrong, so these monopolistic practices have been used to deny workers, employers, consumers basic fundamental legal rights, and the courts have until quite recently, really refused to even look at these cases because they were so persuaded of this argument about the consumer welfare standard.

And this was done at the University of Chicago as part of a project that was funded by American business people.

[00:25:27] Matt Geleta: Mm. Yeah. I'm really interested in the, um, you know, the, the question of whether this is driven by bad actors versus just inevitable, uh, incentive mechanisms and incentive systems or, or some blend of both, you know, in, in those examples that you gave. Um, we have a situation where the people in these positions of power who, you know, stand to produce monopolies, uh, they're very much incentivized.

to propagate this sort of thinking. And, um, those who do will benefit and those who don't won't. And as you mentioned, there is a sort of Darwinian evolution at play there where, um, it feels like almost inevitably just by the way economic systems work. Um, those who do propagate this sort of way of thinking about the market and oppose too much regulation in their industries will do better.

And um, you know, does, does this, does this mean like necessarily phenomenon, a phenomenon such as this will exist in the market? Or do you need to have explicitly bad actors

to, um, to be doing

[00:26:34] Naomi Oreskes: combination of both. I'm a historian, I always tell my students that in history, the correct answer is almost always D, all of the above. So, in, you know, in the story we've told, and particularly in our previous book, Merchants of Doubt, and in all the work that I've done with my colleague, Jeffrey Supran, on the history of ExxonMobil, we certainly see bad actors.

And particularly in the history of the tobacco industry, we see overt, indisputable evidence of bad actors. Tobacco executives who knew that their product was killing people and sat in rooms to try to figure out how to keep that. information from consumers and their own salespeople. So there are definitely bad actors in the world, that's a real thing.

But I think it doesn't work by bad actors alone because most people have at least some sense of conscience. And so, if you were to say to them, so you're telling me that it's perfectly fine to sell a product that kills people. In fact, to sell it to teenagers and children. A product that we know kills infants in their cribs because we know that secondhand smoke causes cot death.

They wouldn't, they wouldn't say yes to that, right? They would come up with an explanation. And in Merchants of Doubt, we showed how the explanation was market fundamentalism. They say, oh, no, no, no, no. I'm not trying to kill people. I care about people, but I don't want us to live in a world where the government tells us what to do.

I don't want to live in a nanny state. I don't want to live in a country, place where the government takes away our freedom. So they come up with what appears to be meritorious, but is really a meretricious argument about freedom. And then they market tobacco under this aegis of freedom. And, you know, one of the things I've talked about in a lot of my works was an ad campaign where the tobacco industry in the 50s marketed to black Americans this idea that there was a that the right to smoke was freedom and that the government was trying to take away the freedom of black people by either controlling cigarettes or in later years controlling menthol cigarettes.

So this is pretty pernicious but I think in a lot of cases it's also a form of what Cognitive scientists call motivated reasoning. People have the things they want, they have their self interest, and they look for evidence, they look for theories, they look for arguments that help them justify what they've done.

So, I do think there are people in the tobacco industry who are truly bad actors. That's the name of the book that Sharon Eubanks, the lawyer who prosecuted them on behalf of the U. S. government, used. But I also think there's a lot of motivated reasoning and a lot of rationalization. So you can think how, if you were a tobacco executive, you could rationalize what you do by saying, Look, it's not, it's people should decide for themselves whether they want to smoke or not.

And I would personally agree with that argument, but for the fact that they lied about it, that we didn't know the truth. If they had sold tobacco saying, look, this is a product that will kill you if you smoke for the next 30 years, right? Um, and it will cause emphysema, bronchitis, heart disease, blindness, you know, here's a list of 300 diseases, uh, that are caused by this product.

But, you know, you might want to smoke anyway, because it's fun. Well, that would be one kind of advertising. There probably would still have been teenagers who smoked, but there would probably have been a lot more people, and we have evidence for this, a lot more people who later years said, look, if I knew how bad it was, I would never have started smoking.

And then the other thing about the tobacco industry is the addictive quality of it. Most of us draw. a somewhat bright line between things that are addictive and things that are not. We don't, I mean, I don't think there's any country in the world, maybe I'm wrong, but certainly most countries I know of, heroin is not legal because it's so highly addictive.

We know that nicotine is highly addictive, not as addictive as heroin, but like getting close. And the industry not only lied about that, I mean we know that the industry lied over oath, under oath, when executives testified in Congress that they did not believe that nicotine was addictive, even though their own documents discuss the fact that it is.

But they actually worked to make their product more addictive. They worked to develop breeds, uh, not breeds, uh, strains of tobacco that had more nicotine in them than just ordinary natural tobacco. I mean this is probably one reason why The tobacco that Americans smoked in the 20th century was probably quite different than the tobacco that Native Americans smoked, you know, before colonization.

So they deliberately worked to make it more addictive, to addict customers to their product and then lied about it. So, you know, it's kind of hard not to see. those people as bad actors. But I also think there were others, maybe salespeople, who did authentically rationalize what they did by saying, look, it's not for me to decide, and I definitely don't want the government telling me what to do.

People can decide for themselves. So there's a mix of rationalization, authentic belief, and bad. Bad

actors.

[00:31:13] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I mean, I guess to be able to rationalize to yourself and indeed convince other people, um, as you said, right at the beginning, there has to be some kernel of truth or some amount of believability in, uh, the myth as a, perhaps let's, um, let's zoom in, in the case of free market economics to some of the.

arguments for and against this idea that we've, we've heard. And I mean there are plenty, there are so many, so we won't be able to go exhaustively, but maybe I'll play devil's advocate here and put forward a couple of objections to government intervention. Um, You know, one that you mentioned earlier was, um, the, um, you know, in free markets, monopolies, um, you know, emerge, and this is not, in the long run, good for consumers.

Um, but one argument is that there are also hidden downsides of regulation. So, you know, you can point to historical examples of free market failures, like, as you mentioned, stock market collapses, or, um, the climate crisis, I think is probably the most pressing one currently. Um, but there... Also, arguments made that in highly regulated industries there are also failures, um, perhaps just as significant, but they're more hidden.

So for example, um, I work in the medical industry, I spend a lot of time there, um, and this is a highly regulated industry, especially in the United States. The FDA is one of the most stringent regulators, uh, globally, um,

and,

[00:32:35] Naomi Oreskes: not sure I agree with that, but okay.

[00:32:37] Matt Geleta: okay, well,

[00:32:38] Naomi Oreskes: we'll, take it for the sake of

argument, right?

[00:32:40] Matt Geleta: For the sake of argument, um, you know, the regulation here is absolutely intended to protect people from malpractice and so on. But there are definitely negative consequences as well, so for example, um, it can delay access to consumers for the most, um, sort of advanced treatments. Um, and it can create very large barriers, uh, to innovation for new entrants to the market. So, um, in a sense then this protects incumbent medical companies, such as big pharma companies, from being disrupted.

Um, and so, the insidious thing with those consequences is that they're somewhat hidden. Um, you know, the consumer can't see how much innovation would have happened, they can't see how much disruption would have happened if this industry were less regulated, and, um, yet, you know, there is an argument that monopolies in pharma, for example, um, are sort of more able to exist because of the regulation, so how do you think about this sort of class of objections that regulation has more hidden downsides, uh, and therefore it's really hard to To assess, um, the benefits versus, uh, sort of negative consequences of a highly regulated market.

[00:33:48] Naomi Oreskes: Yeah, I certainly agree with you up to a point. I mean, there's no question, no system is perfect. And when we regulate a marketplace, there are definitely trade offs. So I think you're absolutely right that there is evidence that a highly regulated industry can, uh, in some cases stifle innovation, make it difficult for newcomers to, to join in.

Uh, And that's, and that's partly why we, we, in the book we talk about what happened in the 1970s when under the Carter administration there was an attempt to deregulate certain industries for which there was a really strong argument that they really did need to be deregulated, like trucking, there was this whole panoply of regulations that had developed since the 1930s, most of which didn't really make sense anymore.

They had made sense in the context of the 1930s. They didn't really make sense in the context of the 1970s. And some of them were contradictory. They created clear inefficiencies. So there's no question that there was an argument to be made in the third, in the 1970s for deregulation of trucking.

Aviation was another example. Early on, virtually all countries protected aviation as a fledgling industry. Virtually all countries had national airlines, national carriers, like, you know, Well, what was then BOAC, British Overseas Airways Corporation in Britain, or, you know, um, Lufthansa in Germany, in Australia, uh, I've

[00:35:03] Matt Geleta: Contest.

[00:35:04] Naomi Oreskes: Qantas, thank you, right.

So, the argument was, fledgling in the industry, you need to do something to support these companies, uh, but then, They were no longer fledgling. By the 1970s, they should be deregulated. And in the book, we say, you know, whether airline deregulation was good or bad, people can argue about that. There's arguments on both sides.

But there was certainly a case to be made. So we're not, we're absolutely not saying regulation is always good. And in fact, in the book, we say that, you know, we've been reading conservative political and economic materials for over a decade now. And it's definitely persuaded me of, of one really important conclusion, which is that whatever the problem is, the best solution should be the one that involves the smallest government action that will fix it.

I do think there is sometimes a tendency for reformers to overreach. I think we saw that in the case of prohibition in the United States, where the regulation of alcohol arguably did do more harm than good. So there are absolutely cases like that, and I think you're absolutely right. Just to point those out and in the book we agree with that, but what I would push back against is your use of the term intervention.

And this is saying that, this is the way language structures the way we think. So, the Chicago school loves the language of government intervention because it creates this image that the market exists unto itself and then the government is intervening, interfering. And that's just wrong because markets don't exist unto themselves.

We make this point in the book. First of all, markets predate capitalism. There were markets in the ancient world. We can find evidence of markets in Pompeii, and in ancient Rome and Greece, and in the Bible, and there are discussions in the Bible of the rules for how markets should operate. So, People set the rules for the operation of markets in the way, same way we set the rules for most government, um, sorry, most human activities.

I mean, we have rules about marriage, we have rules about roads, you know, the rules of the road. That's a, a phrase we use to refer to all kinds of things. We have rules for sports, we have rules for raising children, right? There are things you can and can't do as a parent. We have rules for how schools and hospitals operate.

That's what, That's society. That's what it means to have a society. So, of course, there will be rules for markets, and there might be rules you agree with, like not selling alcohol on a Sunday, or there might be rules you disagree with, like not selling alcohol on a Sunday. When I first came to Australia, I was stunned at how few hours shops were open, and as a working woman, kind of annoyed that the shops were not open on the weekends, because it seemed very sexist.

It seemed like the assumption was You know, your wife would do the shopping during the week, and especially because, I don't know if this is still the case, but when I lived in Adelaide, um, Stores were all closed on Sunday except for hardware stores because men needed to be able to go and get the stuff they needed for their chores and projects at home.

And I thought that was pretty sexist, right? So, but there it was. That was a rule about how markets operated and I guess most Australians thought it was reasonable because that was how it was. So, the point is the government's not intervening in the market. The government plays a role in markets the same way it plays a role in all kinds of aspects of life.

So, I push back against the idea of intervention. We'll call it government action, uh, but I think you're right. Now, medicine, of course, is really, really tricky as an industry because it's a hybrid industry, because part of the reason government is so involved in medicine is because most of us don't think that healthcare is something that can simply be left to the private sector, right?

We could have an entirely private sector healthcare system, but we know that if we did, Millions and millions of people, probably billions on the planet, would go without health care. And most of us feel that that's not right. Many people feel that health care is a right. Uh, and so once you get into the area of rights, then the government has to be involved because the private sector, left to its own devices, will only sell medicine to people who can afford to pay for it.

And we see that even, even with all the government involvement in in medicine, we do see that big pharma tends much more to be focused on diseases that affect rich people who can afford to pay for drugs and much less on the diseases of the poor. So medicine is this complicated hybrid system. Um, there's a lot of regulatory capture.

I would probably push back on the idea that the FDA is super stringent. I think it's stringent about some things and not so much for other. If you actually read epidemiology, which I do from time to time, the bar for Approving a drug based on efficacy is pretty low. I was, I was reading some articles recently about a drug in which I had a personal interest.

And this drug had been approved for use and had been judged by the FDA to be effective because about a third of the people in the clinical trial saw remission. So a third, that's like 33%. If a student got a 33% on an exam in my class, that would be a failing grade . So the standard for efficacy is, is very, very low actually.

But you might say that's okay, because if it helps even a third of the people, that's still a good thing. But when your doctor prescribes this drug, I mean, I ask a lot of questions with my doctor because of who I am and the kind of work I do. And sometimes when I'll ask. a doctor. Well, what is the efficacy rate of this drug you're suggesting?

I can tell you that in my whole life, no doctor has ever known the answer to that question.

[00:40:14] Matt Geleta: I think, I think you're right. Maybe instead of, um, sort of very stringent, I might have just said there are many steps to take for anything

to

[00:40:21] Naomi Oreskes: I agree. And it's definitely slows down innovation, no question about it. But we might argue that that's an appropriate trade off to also prevent dangerous drugs in the market. And in defense of the FDA, since I've slightly criticized them, I will defend them. I mean, one thing the FDA in the United States can be proud of is that the U.

S. FDA did not approve thalidomide when European agencies did, and, uh, massive, you know, terrible birth defects in Europe from this drug that was, in fact, not approved in the United States. So this is the trade off, right? You want innovation, you want new drugs, but you don't want to put drugs on the market, uh, that will hurt

people.

[00:40:57] Matt Geleta: That's actually a great example because what we've seen there is, like the Thalidomide example because, you know, we had different governments, uh, having different regulatory postures and the results were different. And so this actually begs, it points to a sort of a separate argument that one would have in this realm, which is...

You know, one of the beautiful aspects of, of a free market way of thinking, at least, is that it's completely determined by the collective wants and needs of all the individuals. Even if we can't see, say what they are, this at least determines the answer in some sense. And, uh, but in a regular, in a regulatory environment, things are somewhat more arbitrary.

You know, people have to set rules, have to make decisions, lines need to be drawn. And different, there is. Disagreement here, um, about where those lines should be and which lines should be drawn. And so there is some sense in which, uh, like a, a free market ideal is in some sense more, uh, I don't know, fair, I

guess.

[00:41:56] Naomi Oreskes: Yeah, no, I, I think this is a really important point, and this is why I think we can understand and have sympathy for the free market ideal, right? Because in its sort of perfect... expression, it's really very democratic, right? The idea is that individuals, and you do see this in Adam Smith, and to some extent you even see it in Milton Friedman, although I have lots and lots of objections to Milton Friedman, but I'll give him credit on this point.

The idea that individuals decide for themselves what they want, and they go into the marketplace and, you know, Milton Friedman says, you know, essentially you vote in the marketplace for what you want by what you decide to buy. So in that sense it's bottom up, and in that sense it's radically democratic.

The problem is that it's radically anti egalitarian because the fact is we don't all have equal votes in the marketplace. Rich people get a lot more voting power than others and we see that all the time, right? All you have to do is to go into a shop where they're selling, you know, a hundred different luxury handbags but you can't find a pair of cheap functional sneakers, right?

And, and this is everywhere, right? You see this in airport duty free shops selling expensive makeup and perfume. Um, you see it. You know, on the high streets and capital cities around the world, the market tends to meet and satisfy the needs of the wealthy far more than the working class or the poor, because it's the wealthy who get the voting power, as it were, in the marketplace.

And we've seen also, we just mentioned about drugs, right? I mean, this is a well documented phenomenon in medicine that, I mean, just look at Ozempic, right? Which is now, there's global shortages of Ozempic, because all these rich people... are rushing to take it. It costs in the United States, it costs 900 a month.

Um, and wealthy people are happy to spend that to lose weight. And Ozempic was designed for people with diabetes. That's a real problem. It's a drug that can help those people. So it's a good drug in that sense, but it's also being used by people for, I think what we could fairly say are cosmetic reasons, which is not necessarily wrong.

I mean, people have a right to want to look nice, but, um, at huge expense when meanwhile, You know, all across the globe, there are poor people suffering from all kinds of diseases. Um, or we even saw during the COVID pandemic, all across the globe, billions, literally billions of people who couldn't get vaccinations because there was no mechanism to bring vaccinations to those poor countries.

Um, and of course this comes back to bite us because then the virus mutates and comes back to America and Australia anyway, and so now we need new vaccines. So... Yes, the ideal of the free market system is really beautiful and you can see why people are attracted to it and the idea that we can just decide for ourselves and we don't need government, um, is great, but it doesn't actually work in practice.

And we have 300 years of evidence to show that. Um, and that's true of lots of things in life, right? There are lots of things that are good in theory, but don't work in practice. The other big problem, and this is something that Eric Conway and I talked about in Merchants of Doubt, our first book together, the notion of the marketplace is also hinges on the idea that we have good information.

I go to the marketplace, you're selling meat, let's say, and you tell me that this meat is fresh, that it's good, there's no maggots in it, um, and I trust you or I believe that you're trustworthy and I buy that meat. Maybe it's not good and I get sick and maybe I don't come back. Next time and buy your meat because now you've sold me bad meat, and I know you're not trustworthy But that assumes that there are other butchers that I can go see and in the capitalist world that Adam Smith grew up in with Lots of small markets and you know butchers bakers and all the rest if I didn't like one particular butcher I could easily go to another but now think about modern globalized capitalism.

I mean, I live in a place where there's only one internet provider and they're crap and they don't respond to complaints and there's no customer service and there is nothing I can do about it because there's no alternative. I mean, maybe I could install a satellite dish on my house. I mean, maybe if I'm really motivated, I might figure out an alternative.

So monopolistic practices. really destroy the democratic ideal of capitalism. But this brings us back to what we were just talking about, that left to their own devices, companies don't want competition. They want to control the markets and they do everything they can, or many, I shouldn't say all, some don't, but we know, history shows that many businesses will do everything they can to drive out the competition.

And once they've done that, then we don't have choices and then typically they increase prices and so now we're paying more and we have less choice. And then the third thing of course has to do with all the whole world of things that the economists call the negative externality or we could just call them the external costs.

And this is of course what connects all of this work to climate change which is what brought me into this whole space in the first place. So the the democratic ideal capitalism is a kind of democratic bottom up thing also assumes that this is a fair exchange in that You know, I buy, let's make it now, shoes.

I'm buying shoes from you, and they seem like good shoes, and the price seems right, and I try them on, and I like them. But what I don't know is that you're dumping pollution in the river behind your factory. And that pollution is going downstream and killing fish and hurting people and making it impossible to swim in that stream.

Maybe it's contaminating groundwater resources which are giving people cancer. And maybe you're also abusing your workers. Maybe you're using child labor. And I don't know any of that. So if I don't know that, then I don't really know what's a fair cost for that product. And so, For the Adam Smith model to work, there has to be radical transparency.

So who's going to enforce the transparency? Well, the government. That's where government regulation comes in. And now we have all these products where the government, I don't have anything here, but I don't know. If this were food in the United States, there would be nutrition information on the back, right?

It's actually hand cream, but whatever. Um, Now again, those systems aren't perfect. There's a lot of problems with food labeling. But at least in principle, the government can set up situations where industrialist manufacturers have to give information about these things. Um, there's um, in the book we talk about this, uh, conservative, or, I mean a lot of these people aren't really conservative, I don't like the word, they're actually radically right wing, but we'll call him, Well, we'll call him con conservative out of graciousness or something.

But Tom Tillis, who I believe is, I can't remember, North or South Carolina, he did an interview where he said, Look, I just don't think the government should be involved in these things. So, for example, I don't think the government should say that employees at Starbucks need to wash their hands. So long as, he says, Starbuck puts up a sign that says, you know, alerts consumers, our employees don't have to wash their hands.

Okay, well... Yeah, but who's going to make Starbucks put up the sign, right? There's always this question about enforcement. And if we go back to the pollution problem, we know from the entire history of the 19th and early 20th century that factories did routinely dump pollution in the rivers behind the factory or into the air.

Um, with no cost, no, no penalties because there was no enforcement. And that only, and there was nothing that individual consumers could do about it because the individual consumer was too, by themselves, too small. But when people began to organize politically and demand that, that governments pass laws to prevent these practices, then things changed.

But it was the governments of the world that did that. I mean, there's rare cases of companies that voluntarily stop dumping pollution in rivers and lakes, but they're, they're not the norm, right? The norm is that if you're lucky, the company obeys the law. There's one other thing I'll say about this, and then we can move on to the next question.

But I, when I was in Australia, I worked in the mining industry, and I worked for a company that had a very good reputation. We were considered to be one of the best companies, uh, in Australia at that time. And what I will say about my company is, we obey the law.

[00:49:48] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's, um, it's really interesting some of those examples. I mean, those negative externalities you mentioned, like, you know, the factory dumping pollution in the lake, um, those examples, I think almost everybody would agree that that shouldn't happen. And there should be mechanisms in place to prevent.

Uh, that from happening. And if, if we call that regulation, that's great. But at the same time, these people would believe that government participation in markets is something that we don't want. And so there is this very high level of cognitive dissonance. And they definitely, I know these people, there are many people who like this, they hold these two views.

And so I wonder to, to what extent, you know, what, what's permitting that cognitive dissonance is actually not, um, a discussion about the system itself, you know, whether regulation in principle could solve these problems, but whether it's distrust in particular governments. So whether it's a distrust that my government, uh, is able to, um, effectively regulate away these negative externalities.

To what extent do you think that the reason so many people can buy into this way of thinking

is driven more by distrust in specific governments and specific individuals versus Uh, you know, a more theoretical belief about how markets

[00:51:04] Naomi Oreskes: that's a great question. And of course, it's always really hard to know why anyone believes the things they believe, right? I mean, it's kind of impossible question really. But one of the things we can show historically is that this pattern of distrust in government has increased in the past 50 years, and it coincides with the growth of the right wing propaganda, the construction, the big myth, and it really grows.

It grows among conservatives, people who are self identified or in the United States registered Republican or, um, you know, liberals in Australia, uh, not labor, and the same Tories in England, uh, not labor. So it aligns with political party and it really It grows independently of who's in office and it grows independently of the actual empirical evidence.

So there's no question that governments can be corrupt and there's no question that people at times have very legitimate reasons to distrust government. I mean certainly in the United States in the 19, late 60s and 70s when we learned that the government had been massively lying to us about the Vietnam War, that was certainly a legitimate reason to distrust government, but you might have thought that Because of that, since it was mostly people on the left who were opposed to the war, that it should have been people on the left who then developed distrust of government, not people on the right.

But actually what we see is the opposite, right? It's people on the right. And so we argue it's because it's on the right where we see these anti government arguments being developed and propagated and propagandized. And we see politicians like Ronald Reagan, who we discuss at length in the book, obviously an important figure in the story.

Um, Reagan explicitly takes this anti government ideology and it makes it the centerpiece of Republican ideology. And when he, you know, runs for office, his slogan is, government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. So it's one thing to say, look, government doesn't always work well.

We really want to figure out how to make it work well. We want to look closely at the examples that work. and figure out the ones that don't work, right? That would all be rational and smart and good, but that's not what happens. And particularly in the United States, because again if we go back to pollution and environmentalism, which is the issue that brought me into this space in the first place, the laws that were passed in the late 60s and early 1970s in the United States, which became models for many other countries, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Protection Act.

These laws were highly effective and we saw big gains, big improvements in environmental conditions in the United States, you know, rivers and lakes that then began to recover from the incredibly, incredible toxic pollution of the first half of the 20th century. Or if you think about the ozone hole in the Montreal Protocol, uh, the ozone layer is recovering now because that was a form of international governance that worked well.

So we have examples of government that worked really well. But you never find, and in our book we talk about this, you never find the Chicago School or the Cato Institute saying, Oh, well, look, here's some great examples of governance that did work. So let's focus on those and learn from that. No, that's not what they say.

They say government intervention, right? is bad, uh, government intervention threatens freedom, it takes away your rights, uh, taxation is theft, you know, this whole tissue of anti government regular, um, sorry, anti government rhetoric, which is not based on actually looking objectively at what has worked and what has failed.

And the other thing we say in the book is, of course there are government programs that don't work, of course. But there are also lots of businesses that don't work. Lots of businesses fail, but the right wing never takes that as a general indictment of capitalism. But they do cherry pick examples of government failure and say, See, look, government is bad.

Government doesn't work.

[00:54:38] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Yeah. It concerns me a little bit that, um, ideas like that are, they sort of take on a life of their own. Um, like if you take like a meme theoretic, um, perspective on ideas like that, um, you know, and obviously in Richard Dawkins sense, not in cat video sense of the word meme, um, I'm a little concerned that this, this type of myth becomes.

a little bit, uh, inevitable because, you know, if, if you take the example of, um, free market fundamentalism, you know, specific people will stand to gain from propagating that belief. And, um, these people are typically the ones in positions of power and influence, you know, executives at industries and so on.

Um, but there aren't. similar people on the other side who stand to gain as much from dispelling that way of thinking. You know, it's, it's a far more, it's the general populace. It's a far more dispersed group. They don't have access to the information. They don't have time. They can, they can, I guess, um, vote with their vote, but they, they don't see everything.

And so it does feel like a meme like this will, um, uh, it's kind of like positioned to survive, um, a little bit more.

Marker

[00:55:42] Naomi Oreskes: Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is what we try to get at the, at the, in the book, is that there are huge power differentials. And so part of what we show in the book is exactly what you say, that people who stand to gain from pushing these ideas are often people who are already very wealthy. There are people for whom government action in the marketplace would limit their freedom, limit their capacity to abuse workers, to pollute the environment, and they don't like that.

They would like to do whatever they want, um, no matter who gets hurt. And obviously there's a range. I mean, you know, they're not. They're not all the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry is an extreme end member, but the fossil fuel industry is up there with tobacco, right? They would like to continue, you know, exploring for producing and selling oil and gas, which is driving the climate crisis, which is destroying trillions of dollars in value around the globe already today.

And they would like to say that that's their right to do that. And because they are so profitable, they can afford to spend. hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars on advertising, marketing, PR campaigns, contributions to political parties, contributions to political candidates. They have the capacity to get their message out and to have it repeated over and over and over again in many different contexts and in many different ways.

And we have lots of evidence from cognitive science, from psychology, that if you hear something enough times, You may start to believe it's true or you may at least start to believe it must be at least partly true because everyone is saying this. The point is if you hear something enough times, if the media is saturated with these arguments, and particularly if you hear them in different ways from different people, there's a good chance that it will start to seep in.

You know, one thing I often wonder about, have you ever had the experience of watching television? You know, maybe it's a sporting event or the Olympics or, or like I watched the U. S. Open on television a couple of weeks ago. Um, and you see the same ad over and over again and you think, why are they showing the same advertisement over and over again?

I already got it that Cadillac now has a car with a 450 mile, you know, EV range. So, okay, I got the message. So, why do they do that? I mean, these people are not stupid and they are not throwing away their money, they know from their own research that this sort of saturation, message saturation, can be effective.

And so it's just not a level playing field. And this is why the classic ideas of liberal democracy, like John Stuart Mill, I think just don't work in the modern era. And, you know, you could say, well, what about unions? Didn't they push back against these arguments? And the answer is yes, they did. And in the book we talk about that.

Um, most unions had nothing like the power, the authority, and the money that the manufacturers had. And one thing we show in the book too, it's not just individual manufacturers. One of the key players in this book is a trade organization called the National Association of Manufacturers. So this was the most powerful manufacturing companies in America, companies like General Motors, banding together to get this message out.

So even if there were powerful unions like the United autoworkers, they still were nowhere near as powerful and had nowhere near the capabilities of getting their message across in the way that the captains of industry

did.

[00:58:48] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I am, I was, I was really shocked when, when going through your book just how much money was put into, um, like propping up this way Of thinking and, uh, across so many different angles. I mean, one that really stood out that I'd never, I'd never realized was affiliated with any sort of, um, Yeah. Yeah.

institutional body of people were Ayn Rand's books and the Ayn Rand Institute. I mean, I, I was, I was first recommended, it's actually interesting, it's pertinent here. I was first recommended Atlas Shrugged by a McKinsey consultant who absolutely loved it. And, you know, he said everyone in the firm was, uh, was very interested, but it's very interesting because he's also Canadian and he loves the fact that they have a very Um, a great public healthcare system, decentralised, universal, publicly funded, um, and, you know, for anyone who's read At the Shrugged or The Fountainhead, they will know that this, this book definitely preaches a very specific angle and, um, philosophy of, of life that seems to be contradictory to,

to, um,

[00:59:47] Naomi Oreskes: And you know, you said it before. I mean, people have the capacity to hold very contradictory ideas in their heads, and they also have the capacity to carve out exceptions. And again, that's not necessarily wrong. You could believe, you could believe in the primacy of free markets, but still recognize medicine as an exception because of this question about health equity and believe that The government should be involved in having an effective national health system, but still think that everything else should be left to the private sector.

But what's crazy about all the people who love Ayn Rand, and as you say in the book we show how her work was consciously promoted, um, by right wing groups like the Ayn Rand Institute that buy and give out hundreds of thousands of copies of her books. So no wonder these books are bestsellers. My books would be bestsellers.

if some institute, I mean, how great would it be? We're going to

[01:00:33] Matt Geleta: yeah,

[01:00:33] Naomi Oreskes: Institute, buy 700, 000 copies of my books every year and send them to schools all across the world. I mean, how great would that be? Terrific, right? So again, this isn't bottom up democratic capitalism. This is a very organized, um, strategy for getting a certain message out to people.

And it's kind of a crazy message, right? Because Her message is that anybody should be able to do whatever they want, even blow up buildings. I mean, it's really almost a terroristic message. So it's a little bit hard to understand why anyone who would actually stop to think seriously about it would really believe these things.

But I think it appeals to a kind of, um, I don't, I don't want to insult people, but, you know, almost everyone I know who read those books and loved them, read them as teenagers, but never, like, went back and rethought them. I mean, a few people I know, like Michael Shermer, have rethought them, and good for him.

But, you know, it appeals to a kind of teenage, rebellious individualism, I think. Like, because when we're teenagers, we all want to just do what we want to do. We don't want our parents and our teachers telling us what to do. And so Rand really appeals to that. And when you're a teenager, sure, of course, you think life would be great if you could just do whatever you want.

Then you become an adult, and you realize, well, it's not quite that simple. But her arguments are radically individualistic, to the point of being almost anarchistic. And you see that radical individualism running through a lot of pro market... So if you read Milton Friedman, for example, I mean, when I was reading Friedman, I was, I was, you know, trying to do what all historians do, which is, you want to try to understand under what intellectual framework do these arguments make sense, right?

You don't want to assume from the get go that a person is a bad actor. Like, my view is always, If there's evidence that there's a bad actor, I'm not going to pretend that evidence isn't there, but I'm not going to assume that a person's a bad actor until I see evidence to think that. So, I do think that Milton Friedman believed, authentically believed most of what he wrote.

I don't think he was a bad actor in the sense that tobacco or fossil fuels were. If you read his work, you see it is absolutely radically individualistic. He thinks if you just let people decide for themselves, it'll somehow all work out. And that strikes me as Colossally naive, because A, history doesn't support that, right?

It doesn't. But also, people don't really live as individuals. It's a really mistaken conception, I think, of of humanity and what it is to be homo sapiens. I mean, if you think about it, wherever you go in the world, I mean, people are very varied, cultures are very varied, but wherever you go, one commonality is people live in groups.

They live in families, tribes, clans, um, and bonds of kinship are really important in almost all societies. And when we make decisions, We almost never make that decision only based on what's good for ourselves. If we did, our friends and family would probably think we were sociopaths, right? I mean, that's a diagnosable disorder.

We think about our friends, our families. We think, well, what would our friends think? We often will consult friends for advice about big decisions. We worry about what other people think, and rightly so, because we are social animals and because our fate is tied up with the fate. of each other. And the scientific evidence for that is overwhelming.

And in that respect, we're You know, almost no different from most other animals, right? Very, very few animals. I mean, you can find some animals that the males live alone for a while. Mostly teenagers, right? Like the teenage lion that gets thrown out of the troop, and like, we can understand why they throw out the teenage lion, right?

But, I mean, lions live in prides, birds live in flocks, fish swim in schools, right? The radically individualistic concept While it is appealing in certain ways and you can understand why people like it, but it's not, it's not really based on any actual reality, any natural reality or social reality. And so it requires people to sort of subscribe to an ideology that really flies in the face of the facts of human behavior.

[01:04:27] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I mean, not only that, I think people who do subscribe to it often don't, um, live that out in many aspects of life. I mean, people, people even, um, claim to not have, like, full self knowledge about what they want. So, I mean, many people do things that they say, I don't really want to do this.

You know, we talked about an extreme example of, Um, heroin, you know, people who take heroin, most of them would not want to be doing that, and they understand that, yet they do, and I think they're more pedestrian examples

of

[01:04:56] Naomi Oreskes: Yeah. Well, that's right. I mean, heroin is a particular case in point because it is so highly addictive. Um, And for a lot of people, it's a kind of self medication, but if you just think about, you know, say someone who buys too many shoes or something, right? It's not, it's not an addiction and it's not the end of the world, but why did you buy all those shoes?

Well, advertising and marketing has something to do with it, right? And almost all of advertising and marketing is, In a way, based on making us feel bad about ourselves, that we're not really sufficient the way we are. But, if we had these good shoes, or a nice handbag, or we went on this great vacation, or we lived in a bigger house, or drove a better car, that somehow we would be happier.

And, and sometimes we are. I mean, I don't want to just shoes. A good pair of shoes can make a person happy. A good car can definitely, you know. But, there are also all these other factors. And if you just think about the individual making the choice in isolation, well, you know, the next thing you know, we've got 420 parts per million CO2 in the

atmosphere.

[01:05:54] Matt Geleta: yeah, yeah, exactly. So then, then what is your prescription then for people working in positions of power today? I'm thinking of, you know, Executives or people who have influence in industry bodies, um, I mean, I, I work a lot with venture capitalists and I think these are positions of people with, in positions of influence.

A lot of them are, are tend towards the free market ideal way of thinking. What is your general prescription for, um, these people who currently buy into the free market way of thinking in, in a, to like a very significant

extent?

[01:06:24] Naomi Oreskes: Yeah, well, that's a great question. And in general, I don't really like the word prescription, but I guess a suggestion is that I do think, and I don't hang out with venture capitalists a lot, but I've certainly met people in the private sector, and I have spent some time at the World Economic Forum, and I do read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

My experience is a lot of these people believe that problems like climate change will be solved by the progress of technology in a free market. And towards the end of the book, we quote a line out of the Wall Street Journal where they say exactly this. This fellow columnist makes the claim that no one of serious judgment thinks that climate change will be solved by anything other than the progress of technology in the free market.

Well, that is just so wrong on so many levels. I mean, first of all, Basic fact, we have known about climate change, um, for decades. You can pick whatever particular benchmark you want, but already in the 1950s, scientists were warning that burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests would lead to dramatic, serious climate change with big economic consequences.

I've just finished a paper with my students, 100 pages, proving this point. So, um, and already then by the 1980s, by 1988, scientists were saying that climate change was happening. And in 1992, so now 31 years ago, world leaders signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

So the market, or the markets, um, have had more than 30 years, arguably half a century, to respond to develop the technologies that would solve this problem for us. And it hasn't happened. Um, and to the extent that it's happened at all, the scale is not even remotely commensurate to the scale of the Elon Musk, he makes a nice car, you know, we have good electric cars now, we have, I have photovoltaic.

panels on my roof, um, we certainly have had some important and meaningful technological innovations, but they're not remotely on the scale we need to fix the problem. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is continuing to increase, so the market has not responded in the way that we need to fix this problem.

Second of all, to the extent that it has responded at all, it's almost all been heavily because of government incentives. So, the example I know the most about is photovoltaics. We all know that the price of photovoltaics has come down dramatically, and that's great. But how did that happen? Was that just markets responding to the need?

No, it turns out, and the best work on this was done by my colleague Jessica Trancic at MIT. She and her colleagues did a study of what were the big driving factors that led to the decrease in the price in photovoltaics. And what they found was that the biggest factors came from German policies, that the German government had a set of policies in which they guaranteed that electricity, basically a monopsony is the word, they guaranteed that they would buy any electricity produced by photovoltaics.

Chinese government has done this as well with wind. So the government Basically makes power purchase agreements, guarantees to buy the stuff. That takes the risk out of the investment. And you know, Mariana Mazzucato is very good on this. She goes, you know, venture capitalists love to talk about risks. But the reality is they actually don't like risk.

They don't want risk at all. What they want is a sure bet. Will they make good money? And fair enough. I would like that too. I could have it right. So the government protects them from risk. This allows the major manufacturers. Manufacturers like Siemens in Germany to manufacture these at scale and then the price begins to come down because then you have the economies of scale, the learning by doing, and all those good things that the market is good at.

But it took the government to set up a set of policies to make that happen and the same with wind power in the United States. If you look at where we have significant growth of wind power. It's almost all entirely in states that had policies in place to support wind power, either renewable portfolio standards like California, or in Texas, the so called plug and pay system that guaranteed anyone who generated wind power could feed into the grid and get market prices for it.

So the market didn't do this on its own. The market did it in conjunction with government policies that created incentives and protections. And that's the important thing that I think Um, people need to understand, and so it's not to say that the private sector doesn't have an important role to play. It absolutely has an essential role to play.

I don't think the government should or ever will manufacture cars. Well, in some countries, I mean, they did in the Soviet Union and it didn't go so well, right? So there is a good, strong argument for why we don't want governments becoming manufacturers, but we do want governments implementing policies that will support manufacturing to move in the directions we need.

[01:11:01] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I guess, um, I guess being exposed to this history, um, is a good starting point and, and reading books like The Big Myth and others, um, would be a good, a good,

place

[01:11:11] Naomi Oreskes: Yeah, I mean, definitely recommend Mariana Matsukato's book, The Entrepreneurial State. We actually, at one point, Eric Conway and I had an idea to write a book about the history of technology that would be making this argument about how none of the major technological innovations of the 20th century, not a one, were developed by the private sector on its own.

Um, but then Mariana wrote her book and that was great. We thought, oh great, we don't have to do that. Because, you know, um, so, because we also had this idea to write about the ideological part, so that's partly how we set up on writing The Big Myth, because the, we had these two main ideas, and Mariana Matsukato did the first one, so we're like, good, we'll do the second.

But it's a really important book, because if you think about it, um, even going to 9th, 19th century. Railroads, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, aviation, the internet, nuclear power. I mean the list goes on and on. All of these, you know, the so called visible hand of government played a really major role in developing these technologies, um, and particularly the internet because so many venture capitalists in the United States, so many of the, you know, Silicon Valley tech billionaires, um, they create this, they tell this story about technological innovation taking place, you know, in people's garages.

Well, yeah, I mean sometimes, right? But we wouldn't have the internet were not for the United States government. The internet was invented by scientists and engineers who were hired, paid for by the US government because it wanted a durable telecommunication system that could withstand a nuclear war.

That's the fact of the matter. After the government developed the internet, after the government took all of the risk associated with developing, building that technology, then it made it available for commercialization. And at that point the private sector stepped in and did a lot of great stuff, but it was the government that took the risk, it was the government that invented the technologies.

And so my message to, you know, corporate leaders and stuff is accept that and be supportive of governments trying to do the right thing. trying to support innovation, supporting science and engineering in universities, and also protecting people from the potential harms that can accrue, because no technology is perfect.

All technologies have unintended consequences, and that's okay, so long as we acknowledge it and think about what the protections are. So, I'm not against drugs, um, especially fun ones. No, I'm just joking. No, I mean, you know, we were talking earlier about drug innovation. Of course drug innovation is a good thing.

We want to cure diseases and have effective drugs, but we also want to make sure that we have a regulatory process that makes sure that those drugs are

safe and effective.

[01:13:39] Matt Geleta: well, that's a, I think that's a great stepping off point towards, um, some short rapid fire questions as we close. Um, we, we've talked about. Several very interesting books today, some of them yours, some of them not, and uh, my question for you is, which book have you most gifted to other people, and

why?

[01:13:56] Naomi Oreskes: Oh, uh, well, that's easy. My own ,

I mean, as much as possible I

give cop copies of my books to other people. You can see behind me on above my head are about a dozen copies of why trust science. So, um, my publishers give me freer cheap copies, and I gift them to my friends, colleagues. Sometimes my enemies, no, I don't have enemies.

Just

kidding.

[01:14:15] Matt Geleta: Very good, well I'll link that one as well in the show notes here. The next one is, um, what advice would you have for a scientist who wants to avoid thinking about politics or believes political influence has nothing to do with their work?

[01:14:31] Naomi Oreskes: Well, look, what I always say about that is, not everyone has to do everything, and not everybody has the personality to communicate in public, so I don't, I don't want to be one to say that every scientist has to take on the obligation of public communication, but I do want to say that the idea that science could or ever did exist in a vacuum apart from social factors and politics, religion.

It's just not true. I mean, it's never been true. It's, it's a myth, as big or worse as the myth of the free market. So the reality is science exists to serve society. Taxpayers pay for scientific research because we expect something good in exchange, and that's legit. And so at minimum, it seems to me scientists ought to be willing and able to explain what they do.

And why it's the, you know, why should taxpayers pay for this? Like, what is the, what is the argument for the support of science and technology? And what is the argument for trust in science? As I said, that's the book that you can see above my head. Um, I do think that it behooves scientists to be able to answer that question because if we can't answer that question, then it would be legitimate for people to say, well, okay, then forget about it.

I've got other things I think my taxpayers, my tax dollars should be spent on.

[01:15:42] Matt Geleta: Yeah. The last one is a little bit of a sidestep, but, uh, you know, a lot of, a lot of scientists and a lot of people in industry are working on artificial intelligence at the moment. And a lot of people believe that we're not too far off being visited by something like an AI superintelligence. And so my question to you is, um, suppose that day comes, who should represent humanity to this AI superintelligence and that can be past or present.

[01:16:08] Naomi Oreskes: That's, that's a tough question. Well, I think one thing that we know for sure is it can't just be the scientists who invented AI. I mean, one of the things we, we see over and over and over again is people are really bad at predicting what the real threats are that will hurt them, and they often worry about things that are not that significant.

So I think in the current AI debate, the people who are worried about the superintelligence that decides that humans caused all these problems, and therefore the rational response is to kill all people. That could happen, but it seems to me far off in the future and a much less probabilistic threat than What we know for a fact is already going on right now, which is the growth of disinformation, um, AI generated disinformation on the internet and social media.

And that is threatening. American democracy, threatening democracy around the world. That's a fact. We know that that's happening already right now. And so I would really like to see industry leaders take that seriously and invite in to the conversation political scientists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, maybe some poets, um, to think about that.

because what was really offensive to me was when Eric Schmidt said a few months ago, Oh, AI is too complicated for ordinary people to understand. So, you know, the government can't regulate this. You have to let us regulate ourselves. Well, yeah, we know how that goes. We know how Fox is guarding the hen house goes, but it's not just that.

It's not just that industry can't be trusted to self regulate, even though we know from history that it can't. Um, but it's that. There are things that people will see, people who are not insiders will see things that insiders don't see. And again, we have tons of evidence of that from all kinds of domains.

So inviting other people into the conversation, other people who have thought about democracy, other people have thought about communication, people have thought about the question we've been discussing here for the last hour. Why do people believe the things they believe? Why do people believe Disinformation on the internet, because you can take a supply side approach and say, okay, let's try to stop this disinformation.

But often that doesn't work. We know that labeling disinformation as disinformation can actually backfire and make some people more interested. Now it's forbidden fruit. You know, it's like telling teenagers, don't smoke. I'm like, oh, yeah, we're definitely going to smoke, right? So, um, you know, the tobacco industry did that.

So inviting people in who understand human cognition and why we believe the things we I think that will be essential to this conversation.

[01:18:33] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Fantastic. Well, um, Naomi, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Um, if people want to find your stuff, uh, find your books, where should, where should they go? What's the one link that they should, uh, they

should click on?

[01:18:43] Naomi Oreskes: Oh, one link. Oh, that's,

sorry, I forgot you were going to

ask me that. Um, well, I'm working on a, I'm, I'm working

on an improved web page as we speak that hopefully will have the links to all of my books. But in the meanwhile, uh, you can get most of my books at any good brick and mortar bookstore if there still is one in your community.

Um, Bookshop. org is a great source. I don't know if it's global, but for people in the United States, they will order books from the nearest independent bookstore in your community and send them to, not as quickly as Amazon Prime, but pretty quickly. And you know, it's not an emergency. You don't have to get my book the next day.

Like wait a week. It's gonna take a while to read anyway. So bookshop. org is a great source. And then of course all the standard online booksellers carry

all of my books.

[01:19:27] Matt Geleta: Great. Well, um, Naomi, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me

today.

[01:19:31] Naomi Oreskes: Likewise, it's been my pleasure too. It's been a great conversation.

Today’s topics include the possibility of self deception; cognitive biases and what we can do to guard against them; the benefits and drawbacks of improved metacognition; the relationship between metacognition of conscious experience; the theoretical limits of self knowledge; and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Twitter: @smfleming

• Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Know-Thyself-New-Science-Self-Awareness/dp/1529345065

• The Metalab: https://metacoglab.org/

Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

0:01:20 Self deception

0:08:08 Cognitive biases and over confidence

0:14:40 Evolution of metacognitive biases

0:18:18 Dunning Kruger effect

0:20:52 Split brain experiments and self narratives

0:25:32 Delusion of self understanding

0:29:54 Isolation of losing touch with reality

0:34:38 How good is our metacognition?

0:38:53 Metacognition vs performance

0:42:46 How trainable is metacognition?

0:46:51 Limits of self knowledge

0:50:52 Theory of self vs others

0:54:16 Benefits from improving metacognition

1:01:40 Psychosis and reality vs imagination

1:14:15 The hard problem of consciousness

1:27:05 Book recommendations

1:33:35 Who should represent humanity to an AI superintelligence?

Introduction

Importance of self-knowledge

Having robust self-knowledge and metacognition, or at minimum a good understanding of the mind's biases and failure modes, is probably more important today than in the past.

As Stephen and I discuss in today’s conversation, we’re living in a world in which technology and the incentive systems surrounding it amplifies the consequences of our cognitive biases, and of poor metacognition. To name just one example, there is the infamous Dunning Kruger effect, in which people with less expertise in a particular domain, tend to overestimate their ability, and present with overconfidence. Likewise, true experts tend to be more aware of their limitations, and present externally with less confidence. 

And in today’s world, this can lead to a range of problems that weren’t as significant in the past. These days overconfidence is often differentially rewarded and amplified on social media and elsewhere, at a scale that we’ve never really seen before. And more so than ever, its loud and confident voices that proliferate than it is expert voices. Or at least these voices form robust and often quite large echo chambers. And so we have the fairly perverse result in which the voices of true experts are often suppressed in favour of more confident, non-experts. This is really not the most effective way to tweak the volume dials of the voices in our society.

That being said, it’s increasingly important that we’re able to decouple the truth value of things being said, from the confidence with which those things are said. And that’s whether those things are are said by other people, or indeed by our internal self narratives.

Anyway this was an informative conversation and I hope you find it valuable. If so, please consider subscribing and sharing this episode with friends and family.

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:00] Matt: Let's start with the topic, not of self knowledge, but of self deception. I think it's commonly believed that People are able to lie to themselves. You know, this is a, a common notion.

It's used in our language. We say it all the time, but I've always actually questioned this notion from a first principle's perspective because, you know, typically deception requires some sort of information asymmetry between deceiver and deceived. Um, I have to say something that I know that you, you don't know and they can't be the same person in, in nor everyday life.

Um, so to what extent do you, do you feel it's possible to genuinely deceive oneself?

[00:00:36] Stephen: Yeah, I, I mean, I think it is possible. Um, and I can unpack the reasons why we think that is plausible from a, neuroscientific perspective from a cognitive science perspective. And I think one thing, one useful place to start answering that question is to think more broadly about what we think the brain is trying to do.

What problem is it trying to solve? And in that we've been very influenced by, um, this broad notion that. The brain is a model building machine. It's trying to, um, essentially understand its, its environment. Um, it's locked inside a dark skull. All it has access to is information streaming in through the senses.

And this is kind of strange when you think about it. You know, the, the retina in the case of vision is a 2d sheet. We're, we're circading around all the time. The perception of the world is, is, um, likely to be some kind of inference. Like we, we don't have direct contact to the outside world and. This is increasingly being studied in lots of different ways in cognitive science, in neuroscience, um, this notion of perception as a, as a process of solving some inverse problem.

We're trying to build a model of, of what is out there and. Our working hypothesis, when we're thinking about self awareness, self knowledge, what we call metacognition, is that essentially the same thing is happening, but now the model that's being built is about ourselves, right? So it includes our own, um, skills and capacities and failings.

It includes what we like and don't like. It includes how we might react in certain ways to certain situations, right? So we have this kind of broad sense of, of who we are. And just like perception can be fooled by various illusions, um, and it might be set up to not actually create a veridical picture of reality.

In fact, we, we think we, you know, lots of perception science shows that it probably isn't creating a veridical picture and instead it's creating a useful. Summary of what's out there. So we think metacognition and self knowledge is kind of doing something similar. So if you take that view, then this model that we're building of ourselves.

It needs to be largely accurate, otherwise it will not be useful, right? So it needs to, it needs to have some contact with, with the reality of our skills and capacities and so on. But a distorted picture can often be useful in lots of different ways. So, um, you know, there's interesting ideas about potential evolutionary reasons why metacognition might be distorted in certain ways.

So. Um, there's nice work suggesting that for instance, overconfidence might actually be adaptive because it helps us engage in scenarios that we otherwise wouldn't have engaged in, in the first place, if we had a more accurate belief about our capacities. So those kind of deceptions, if you, if you like, it's, it's not a deception in the sense of like.

Trying to negate something that is true, but it's a distortion and I think those kind of distortions are widespread and, and part and parcel of the picture of how we think metacognition works.

[00:04:12] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And I guess, um, you know, in, in classical deception, um, the, the more well somebody knows you, the harder it is to deceive them. And I presume. In this description of metacognition, there would be something similar, you know, the more one knows themselves, I guess the harder it is to deceive oneself, right?

There's kind of less place for the deceptive information to hide. Is that consistent with your view of how metacognition works?

[00:04:40] Stephen: yes, yes, it is. I think, I think that, um, one way of thinking about that is where might there be flex in the system for deception to get in there? Um, so in the case of perception, because our sensory motor apparatus is connected to the outside world, there's less room for it to completely decouple from reality.

You know, if I, if I always perceive my coffee cup as twice as big as it is. Then I'll always knock it over and I won't be able to, um, you know, drink my coffee and so on. So there's clear, um, reasons why perception and action should hone in on a reasonably, um, accurate picture of the outside world, but metacognition has more flex and people like, uh, Chris Frith and Daniel Yon have written about this recently, suggesting that when you go to these higher levels of There's less constraint from the outside world.

So there's more room for maneuver, if you like, in terms of how that model gets built. And also it's probably. Computationally harder to build it in the first place because you need to integrate over lots of different sources of information. Um, so it's probably multimodal it's drawing on all the different, um, aspects of the mind to build up this self model.

Um, and so it's probably a lot harder to make it accurate, um, in the first place. And so in a sense, you might have two sources of inaccuracy or self deception. One could be just. A sheer computational limitation that it's just hard to build a good self model. So there's always going to be noise and, and inaccuracies in that.

And the other one could be coming from a more motivated or, um, adaptive standpoint that actually it helps us to have a somewhat distorted or deceptive self model, as in the case I described of overconfidence.

[00:06:43] Matt: Yeah, let's, let's dig into the question of, of overconfidence and the, the biases that might creep into our self models. I guess in other contexts these are well understood, you know, we're, we're very familiar with several cognitive biases. And even at the level of perception, I mean, it's something that I've, I've heard of, for example, we have a tendency to overestimate heights when looking down from above, um, and we do that more significantly than we do when looking down from, uh, up from below, and, um, it makes sense from an adaptive perspective why something like that might evolve, right?

You want to prevent falling off cliffs and, and, uh, um, all the negative consequences that arise from that, but, um, in something like metacognition, it feels like it could be a mixed bag, because, um, to one, um, on the one hand, A really, really good self understanding should allow someone to operate very effectively in the world.

They, they have a good understanding of what they can and can't do. Um, but then as you said, there are, there are other forces like confidence. You want to display confidence and maybe even a bit of overconfidence is a good thing.

[00:07:47] Stephen: So as you say, I think there, uh, we can separate these into. Um, categories. So one would be more about imprecision in how that self model gets built. So this is what in metacognition research we call metacognitive sensitivity. So that's how well you can track your behavior or performance on a moment to moment basis.

Am I aware of just making an error? Do I realize when I might not know the answer to something? So those are kind of. little, um, sparks of introspection where we realize, hang on, I don't have the full picture here. And we can measure that in the lab as the connection between your fluctuations in confidence over time and your fluctuations in performance over time.

So if I have good metacognitive sensitivity. I tend to be more confident when I'm actually right and less confident when I'm, when I'm wrong. And in a lot of the studies we do and, um, other labs do around the world, we, we, we study exactly that, uh, process, like this connection between performance and confidence.

What is it that determines good metacognitive sensitivity? And there's a. A long and interesting story about how, you know, the factors that influence that, but broadly speaking, the field has kind of homed in on this notion that there is this domain general, um, resource that. Humans bring to bear on, um, metacognitive acuity.

So we have this higher level process that we think is supported by, um, sub regions, the prefrontal cortex talking to other areas of the brain, essentially building up this, um, picture of when we might've made an error, um, when we're doing well and so on. So there's kind of like this process of self monitoring going on in the background.

So there's various sources of noise that can get into that. So various sources of bias and inaccuracy that can get into that and at lots of different stages of the system. So if you have say, um, a, if you have, um, Disease or damage to particular mental faculties, like, for instance, in the case of dementia, if your memory starts to fail, then you might just not get the signals that metacognition needs to realize that your memory is failing.

And so you might. retain a kind of fixed belief that your memory is still fine, even though it's not. So you might then start to have this decoupling, if you like, of, uh, that your metacognition starts to become detached from the reality of your performance. So that's one source of, of error or decoupling that can come into the system when, when it becomes harder for you to track uncertainty in different, um, domains.

And then another source of error that can come in is, is what we call metacognitive bias. So this is this general sense of, am I'm, do I tend to be more or less confident? Do I tend to see myself in a particular light overall? And we think that this is much more pervasive. Um, generally, even if you have a perfectly, uh, well functioning metacognitive system, it seems that people tend to hold these.

Slightly overconfident, um, views of themselves and is a really, again, it's really interesting story of like why, why that might be the case. Um, the specific case of overconfidence I mentioned earlier and the evolutionary explanation for this, there was this really neat study. Um, that was published a few years ago by computer scientists at Harvard, where they ran these, um, simulations, evolutionary simulations.

So lots of little agents competing for resources in a computer game. And the cool thing they did was that rather than making that, the decision about whether to engage in the competition conditional on actual performance, they made that decision conditional on the agent's metacognitive belief about their performance.

And what they found was that. The most successful agents in terms of fitness, in terms of gathering resources, were the ones that actually had metacognitively slightly distorted views of themselves. They, they were the ones who were slightly overconfident. And the explanation was that, that kind of hint of overconfidence gave them a little kick for engaging in competitions that were uncertain.

They didn't know whether they were going to win them or not, but just having that belief that they were slightly better than they really were, got them into the game in the first place and that over many generations helped them succeed. So there's a kind of neat story there that like. These, these distortions might not just make us feel good because they can make you feel good because you have a good view of yourself, but they might actually have a functional role to play in terms of how we get out of bed in the morning and we go and do things that might have uncertain payoffs, but we need to see ourselves in a slightly better light in order to engage in those activities in the first place.

[00:13:16] Matt: Yeah, when topics like that arise, there's always this question of to what extent have those biases, those adaptations that once served us well, um, to what extent are they still serving us well today versus has the environment changed and these are things now we need to somehow transcend and let go and, and, and, you know, in the case of confidence, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure what the answer is.

Maybe it's serving us just as well, but what are your views here? And, um, and in particular, if there are any other specific Um, issues with our metacognitive biases that perhaps were very functional at some point in our evolutionary history. And, and now, you know, it's time to, it's time to move on and do something about it.

What are your views here?

[00:13:59] Stephen: Well, I think another perspective on the influence of these biases, um, in human society is that. these, these kind of, um, distortions in how we see ourselves may have, may have roots in the kind of process I just described in terms of like promoting action, um, promoting behaviors that we might otherwise not engage in.

But what's interesting is that when they are in place, they then seem to also have social consequences. So there's nice research in social psychology suggesting that. People who do project more confidence, do project more, um, security in their own capacities are better liked. They tend to, um, be, um, get on in life more.

They get better jobs. They get promoted more often. Um, there were nice studies done in a business school setting suggesting that. You know, the, the ratings that you gave to your other classmates in your, in your business school class were driven largely by the way people project themselves and not their actual underlying grades in terms of their skills and capacities.

So there seems to be something deeply social about the notion of kind of projecting, um, a rose tinted metacognitive bias. You want to. Not only think of yourself in that way, you want to kind of project that out to others as well. And I think there's a really interesting intersection here with what I talked about in the first part of the answer, which was metacognitive sensitivity.

This need to, for adaptive behavior, you want to have this ability to recognize when you might've gone off track, when you might've made an error. Um, and so those things are intention, right? So if you want to always realize when you might have been wrong, then you also can't just have this kind of flat lining, high level of confidence, um, throughout your day, you need to, you need to somehow, uh, modulate that.

And so I think that, um, the, there are interesting stories that come out of. The psychology of leadership and the most effective, um, people in terms of, uh, motivating others tend to be these people who can do, somehow do both. They project confidence to others. So they get likes, they get. They project this sense of reassurance, but at the same time for themselves, they're also intensely introspective about whether things might be going right, whether things might be going wrong.

So there seems to be this interesting duality to the kind of optimal set point for metacognition.

[00:16:55] Matt: Yeah. As you're speaking, I'm envisioning in my mind this sort of two by two of, Um, the classic confidence versus competence two by two and, um, you know, obviously you would hope that those things track very well, but then you get classic cases like the Dunning Kruger effect where, um, there's sort of like a bit of an inverse correlation where people who are very low confidence tend to overate their, their capabilities and people who are very high confidence tend to sort of underrate their capabilities.

Um, and, uh, so

I

[00:17:27] Stephen: So there's, there's an interesting story there on the Dunning Kruger, which is the recent research. So as you, the, the phenomenon is absolutely, as you describe it, this kind of disconnection between average confidence and average performance. But there's been recent, um, intense debate in, in social psychology and cognitive psychology of.

Um, what is the source of this, right? So one, um, uh, one idea is that the source of the Dunning Kruger effect is a metacognitive one. That people who don't perform so well also lack the metacognitive ability to realize that they're not performing so well. And another explanation which has been advanced is that it's.

Essentially a statistical artifact that known as regression to the mean. So when you plot two variables against each other, then. You tend to flatten out the slope of the line because the, the, the, everything tends to regress to the mean of the, of the variable that you're, you're conditioning on. And so there's been this almost like fight among social psychologists for like, what is the meaning of the Donahue Krieger effect?

Everyone agrees it exists, but there's been this interesting fight about like, what's the source of it? Is it an interesting source or is it a artifactual source? And. I, my view of this, we did, we wrote a commentary on this recently, um, because there was a high profile paper that came out trying to resolve this and what they found is that essentially.

A large percentage of the effect was artifactual, but there was a tiny portion of the variance that seemed to be like lining up with the original idea of the Dunning Kruger. So there is, there does seem to be some reality to the idea that if you don't perform well in a domain, if you're low skilled in a particular task, you might also lack the metacognition to realize that you're low skilled, but the proportion of the variance in the actual data that that effect explains is actually quite, quite small.

[00:19:29] Matt: Yeah, well this, um, this immediately casts doubt on, you know, there, there are many, I'm not going to get into it, but there are a lot of interesting studies of this nature or even anecdotes that people comment on from studies in this field. And it does cast doubt on those. One of the ones that always comes to mind for me and that I've thought about a lot is, goes back to Roger Sperry and Michael Gerszaniger's split brain theory.

Um, experiments where, um, I mean, you, you would describe it much better than I, than I would, but, um, you know, very famously you have humans who, um, have had, uh, the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the mind, um. Severed. And this means that information shown in one eye, for example, would only pass to one of the hemispheres.

There's, it's not communicated in the normal way between both. Um, and because we have a, a hemisphere that can interpret language and another hemisphere that, that doesn't interpret language in the same way, it means you could, you know, show instructions to, to one eye while blocking the other and have the person interpret that instruction without understanding that they've done so.

And, you know, these patients, they're otherwise completely normal, but, you know, you show one of them an instruction to stand up and leave the room, and they do so, and when you ask them why, they make up some reason. They say, um, you know, going to get a glass of water, I think, is the, is the... Um, the actual example from these studies.

Um, and so in this case they can say that with full confidence and, and they believe it and, you know, there's no other reason to believe that they have low metacognition. Um, but of course the, the experimenters understand that this is completely wrong. And it does, those sorts of studies to me, um, cast doubt on the whole notion of subtracting confidence, uh, with, with performance and understanding of our actions.

Is, is that, uh, does that experiment fall into the same class of experiments that you've just described, or is there something more there?

[00:21:21] Stephen: I I think that it's a good question that the difficulty with studying split brain patients, and you described it very nicely there, that the idea that there's something remarkable about the suggestion there's a split psychology in patients who have had the corpus callosum severed. So because, as you say, the, um, the way the visual system is wired up.

Is that the one hemifield of space goes to the contralateral hemisphere, so you can set things up psychophysically, where people are essentially Fixating centrally and you flash an image in one half of the screen, and you can know that that will be sequestered in the hemifield that, uh, the hemisphere of the brain that, um, doesn't have the capacity to respond to that, uh, linguistically.

And so the implication of those results, the original Gesannig results is that essentially there's some. Interpretation that's, um, the typically left hemisphere is doing on our behavior, on our, on our actions is creating some narrative about why we did things. Um, now I think there's good evidence to suggest that even in a intact healthy brain, we're also continually creating these self narratives that don't always cohere with reality, but there does seem to be something.

Quite remarkable about how, um, dissociated narratives can become from behavior in the case of the split brain syndrome. But the difficulty is that follow then following that up with the techniques of modern cognitive science and brain imaging is really difficult because these patients are so rare and my understanding, and I'm not a neurologist, but my understanding is that those surgeries are much less common now.

They used to be done to try and resolve intractable epilepsy, but now the notion of completely severing the two hemispheres is, is very rarely done. And I have a colleague, um, Yaya Pinto, who has tried to find some of these remaining patients and study them psychophysically. And I know that the picture has got more complicated, um, in the sense that the idea of a complete split.

Consciousness between the two sides seems to be less secure than it used to be based on the original gga results. But I think no one, as far as I know, no one questions the fact that those original results do suggest this process of narrative self interpretation.

[00:24:08] Matt: Yeah, I mean, you, you can almost abstract away from this specific case. I think, you know, studying the patients with this particular sort of brain atypicality, I guess, that's important, but I think more striking to me is, is the fact that these people themselves feel normal and they behave normally. In most other ways, and that fact alone to me, um, sort of, I, you know, I find it riveting, um, because you, you question yourself, you could be walking around with some sort of brain atypicality or, or human brains could be doing something, uh, of a similar nature, what does it do to, um, you know, your, how you think about yourself and your own, like, agency of your actions, understanding of why you, uh, you behave in certain ways?

[00:24:56] Stephen: that's a good question. I, I think that in studying these topics, studying metacognition study self-awareness, it has made me, I guess more, um, Cognizant of the potential for self distortion, the potential for, um, you know, creating a narrative about how things went that might not, um, be the way someone else might see it.

And so I think it does give you on an interpersonal level, it does give you a, um, a bit more empathy, I guess, for. the fact that everyone else is walking around trying to do this to themselves as well. They're all trying to, we are all trying to make our way in the world and interpret our journey. We're trying Create a narrative that makes sense.

We're trying to tell ourselves a story about our life, essentially. And that's a hard thing to do. It's, um, it's not always going to line up with the way other people see it. And so just, just knowing that is, I think, quite a powerful, um, uh, life lesson because it then gives you a bit more empathy. Like if, if you're interacting with someone who you find.

difficult or there's tension with, then you can start having a bit more theory of mind thinking, well, they have a different life to me. They they've come from a different perspective. They they're creating a different self narrative about how this goes. I often find this useful to maintain in my head when I'm interacting with colleagues at work over some.

Um, you know, we're, we're, we're all coming at it from different angles and it doesn't necessarily mean that like someone's engaging in a fight with you about something, it means that they just have a different perspective on the situation. Um, so I think, I think that's, but then saying all that is, is easy to say, but I think it, it doesn't change the experience in the moment.

It, it often, I often find that. Even kind of being a researcher in this area doesn't make me immune to all the kind of metacognitive illusions, metacognitive biases that we've been talking about. And that's where I think leaning on an external perspective is incredibly helpful. Um, so whether that's formally by engaging in therapy or coaching or having someone.

Um, you know, try and sit down with you for an hour and figure out the narrative and make you see things differently or informally with friends and family and colleagues and so on. So I think those external perspectives are incredibly helpful and bit of a side note, I felt that actually during the pandemic, that that's one of the things that I really lost that kind of.

Um, you know, a lot of things we were able to and continue to do so in terms of the way we run science, run the lab, run things at the university. A lot of that has now switched, like a lot of workplaces online. But I think what you lose there is the kind of informal interactions that might just give you that check on how you're seeing things.

Um, and it's incredibly important, but incredibly, I think, uh, underestimated.

[00:28:30] Matt: It's your sense then that, um, people, I guess you're, you're interacting with people on a day to day basis and there is sort of feedback between each people and kind of keeps everyone in sync. Um, how quickly do you, do you feel, you know, the mind starts to lose touch, um, when you don't have that? Uh, looking at people who, for example, um, I don't know, sort of isolate themselves from society, like how, how long does it take that, for that internal, um, spiraling to happen?

[00:29:00] Stephen: Good question. I think it, I don't think we know. I think, um. Unraveling that would, would take, uh, some detailed and, and probably very hard to achieve empirical study. Um, I mean, I guess analogs of this can be studied through the lens of, um, psychiatric conditions where, um, there's this interplay between how self models and also models of the world are built.

And. social interaction. So the one I'm thinking that the example I'm thinking about here is psychosis, schizophrenia, where there's this complex interplay between. If, if you are, um, if you are suffering from a disorder of the brain, which essentially leads to distorted models getting built, I mean, that's one hypothesis about what psychosis is, is that you're really There's this, this whole model building machinery is misfiring.

It's, it's, it's generating somewhat distortive models, both of other people. So you might start having delusions about other people's intentions. Um, but also perceptually you might literally hallucinate, hear voices and so on. So we don't fully understand the sources of those distorted, distort, um, distortions in the, in the model building process, but it seems to be a reasonably.

Good characterization of the phenomenology. And so you can immediately start seeing how if that is distorted, then that might lose you, um, it might, it might lead you to lose touch with reality and therefore also other people, because the way we socially interact is grounded in shared assumptions about what is real, what is common knowledge.

Um, and when we lose that. Common, literally common sense, the, the kind of, um, belief in a common, uh, set of, uh, external properties, then, then that can socially isolate you. And there's been interesting work. Suggesting that that then creates this spiral that if you're then isolated, then it leads to further distortions in the model and so on.

So I think that would be the closest analog we have to try and answer your question, but I guess zooming out a bit further, um, a colleague of mine, Cecilia Hayes in Oxford has, um, thought very hard about the notion that a lot of. Things we think of as properties of our cognitive system, including metacognition, may in fact be culturally grounded, so The, the idea is that metacognition is analogous to something like reading.

So we teach our kids to read. Um, if we didn't teach our kids to read, then they wouldn't be able to do it. Even though once we've taught them, there is a clear basis, brain basis for reading because, you know, the brain creates specializations for things we do again and again and again. Now. Cecilia's view on metacognition is slightly different.

We don't have formal educational programs for metacognition. Perhaps we should, but we, we don't. And yet. Somehow we, in the course of, um, bringing up our kids and being parents, teachers, family members, and so on, we, we impart the skills that may be needed for building this self model. Now that's a hypothesis.

I think there's, you know, it's not, I'm not claiming that is definitely true, but I think it's an attractive hypothesis. And so one implication of that is that if you were, um, growing up on a desert island with no cultural. Uh, grounding, then you might never develop, um, self awareness in the way that we can talk about it today.

[00:33:15] Matt: it's um, you, you sort of mentioned this, this concept of a, a feedback loop there and I wonder, it's, it's almost like a very unfortunate fact about these sorts of things, um, you know, metacognition. Somebody who has very low metacognition would also not be as aware that they have low metacognition and as your metacognition increases, you become more aware of the sort of the gap.

And so it feels like there is this very unfortunate Well, a virtuous and a, and a disastrous spiral where if you've got a very high metacognition, it feels like you're, you're poised to be able to improve it. And if you've got low metacognition, you're not, um, and I would love to understand your, your thinking on like that, that state of affairs, you know, with reading is a good example actually, because we've got benchmarks that you can understand where you sit relative to some sort of scale.

with, with metacognition, I think most people just have an inherent feeling. They have a sense that, that presumably our way is to be much more systematic, but people don't have that. And so, um, my question to you is where, where do people sit along this spectrum and, and how does one know where they sit on the, on the metacognitive spectrum?

[00:34:32] Stephen: Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things we've been pursuing over the past few years is trying to define this more quantitatively and provide some measures of metacognition that are, uh, objective, um, that we can. Derived from data that we collect in, in the lab. And so this comes back to the notion of metacognitive sensitivity.

I described earlier that essentially what we're trying to do here is build up a statistical picture, um, of how well your metacognitive judgments cohere with your performance, how well they track the reality of your skills and abilities. And we do that typically by asking people to make. Metacognitive judgments on a moment to moment basis.

We literally ask people, how confident do you feel about getting that right? Or perhaps we might ask them, did you feel like you got, you made an error just then? Um, and if we do that multiple times, we can build up these statistical pictures of how metacognitive judgments, uh, track performance. And what we found in, we've tested now hundreds or even thousands of people on these kinds of tasks.

And what we find is that. First of all, there are systematic individual differences in metacognitive sensitivity that are not, um, explained by first order performance on the task. So you might actually be performing a task quite well, but be unaware of how you're doing on a moment to moment basis.

Conversely, you might be performing a task relatively poorly, but be acutely aware of the fact you're making lots of errors and so on. So metacognition and performance seem to decouple. In interesting ways and, and that metacognitive sensitivity parameter that we can derive from the data is a meaningful individual difference.

It, it, um, is relatively stable over time. It correlates with brain structure and function. It, um, is interestingly not predicted by markers of general intelligence. So you can be someone who's very smart, um, based on our kind of classical IQ tests, but actually have quite poor metacognition. So it seems to be a kind of meaningful thing that we can measure in the lab.

Um, and so we do now have a, I think, robust science of better cognition that, um, we can develop benchmarks similar to what you were describing for reading, um, and that then opens up a, a lot of the research we're pursuing in the lab is. Then using that approach to answer questions about, you know, what, what is the structure of our metacognitive capacities?

Um, do, does having metacognitive, does having good metacognition on one task predicts having good metacognition on another task? Turns out it generally does. So that's. Some evidence for the idea that there's some general metacognitive resource that we bring to the table. Um, yeah, I've, sorry, I'm forgetting the original question now, but hopefully that's a, it's a reasonable overview of like the, the, the science that we're, we're pursuing at the moment.

[00:37:29] Matt: Yeah, no, that's great. And actually, as you were talking about the relationship between metacognition and performance, um, actually, there's some view in which you might think that they would actually be inversely correlated because, I mean, if you just imagine the mind as a computer, just as a computer, and dedicating some portion of its resources to performing, to doing something, if you dedicated in it, for a computer, a separate portion of...

You know, processing power is just self monitoring, um, then the task that would be performing on it, you know, less would be going there. And I would, I would presume that the same is true for some types of performance. Um, and you would have some sort of trade off and then if that's true, the question arises as to what is the right level.

You actually don't want too much metacognition because then you're just thinking about thinking about thinking and not performing. Um, do you have a view here on, on, and maybe it's very task dependent, but how does one think about the optimal level of metacognition?

[00:38:26] Stephen: Yeah. So, I mean, I think there is some evidence that when. Um, particularly when a task is very well practiced, when it, uh, particularly in skilled performance, so in athletic or musical performance, um, when things become very automatized, then metacognitive insight on a moment to moment basis seems to drop off.

So there's been some neat studies on this. Um, so you get this, um, picture where when your metacognition seems to be most important. In terms of optimizing performance, when you're engaged in something novel, when you're learning a new task, when you do need to be aware of potential errors so that you can then correct them, um, also in a social setting, if you're, um, engaged in some group activity, then there's neat research suggesting that.

You know, one important thing to optimizing the group performance is being able to share method cognitive estimates with each other. So one example I like here is. Imagine two, a referee and a line judge, um, in a football match conferring about whether they saw a foul on the, on the, on the pitch, what they're probably, even though they might not use that exact language, they're sharing estimates of what they think they saw.

Um, so that's a metacognitive conversation going on. And I think a lot of areas of, um, of life are like that where we're essentially trying to figure out. what our best joint picture of how to solve a problem is or, um, you know, the best way to go about something. So in those kinds of settings, metacognition seems to be important.

And if we don't have it, then we suffer. But in other settings where things are very practiced, where we're doing a solitary activity, when we're hitting a golf ball or. We're, um, you know, playing our instrument, then it seems like there there's less need for that self monitoring because it's so well practiced.

We just kind of want to let it unfurl. And there's been some neat, as I mentioned, neat research suggesting that actually if you force people to engage in method cognition about those skilled activities, then performance decreases. Now, I, I don't think we have a good understanding of why that is. It seems intuitive, it's kind of this idea that like, you reflect on it and then you start screwing up your performance.

Perhaps one reason is that, um, because we're, because everything's so interconnected and dynamic, as soon as we start building this model of how we're doing something, then we just can't help ourselves trying to change it. And if it's already very well practiced and very skilled, then we shouldn't be doing that, we should just.

Leave it alone. Um, so that's one idea, but I don't think we have a good scientific understanding of why bringing metacognition back online seems to harm performance in some situations. And, but the data suggests that it, it does.

[00:41:23] Matt: And to what, to what extent is metacognition then malleable and trainable? Like the, the golf example is a great example because, you know, when you start out, um, everyone is terrible and the, the levels that you can achieve by practice are, uh, phenomenal. The, the improvement is, is huge. And, but for, you know, for mental training, for brain training, I think people just have this intuition that things are less malleable.

You can learn facts, but can you really, really change the... Like really the performance of your mind and your brain itself. How malleable is metacognition? How trainable is it?

[00:42:00] Stephen: Yeah. I mean, I think the, the broader brain training, uh, debate is an interesting one, I think, you know, one thing we do know that has, has shifted, um, in terms of both the neuroscientific orthodoxy, but also I think increasingly the public perception of how we understand the brain is that. The brain remains plastic into adult life.

Um, you know, everything we learn, um, if you, you know, told me a new fact today about Sydney, then that would somehow change, it would get stored in some pattern of weights in a way that we don't fully understand. But it would, you know, everything we're doing. Um, is in somehow in a small way, changing the brain.

Um, but then the question comes like, okay, fair enough in terms of like semantics, in terms of like our memories, but. Is there some way of shaping the way the cognitive system operates itself? And I think the story that comes out of the studies of brain training is that yes, you can improve in relatively narrow domains if you play a game for multiple hours, then that will improve your performance on that particular task or game, but it doesn't seem to transfer to other aspects of life.

And I think that on, on metacognition, the jury is still out. So I. I've written in the past about how perhaps we could be more optimistic about the potential for metacognitive training because it seems to be such a broad resource. You know, if we can improve it via training on one particular task, because metacognition seems to be relatively domain general, that offers some optimism for the facts it then might transfer to other areas of life.

And so we, we've done a couple of studies on this, um, showing that if you give people 20 minutes of training a day about, um, how well their metacognitive judgments are lining up with their performance, then people can get better. The metacognitive aspects, they improve their metacognitive sensitivity. And what was interesting for us is that if we train that on one particular task, then at the end of training, if we gave them a brand new task that they hadn't been trained on before, their metacognition seemed to be a bit better in that new task as well.

So that suggests some. transfer some, um, generalization of the training effect, but that's just one study. There's been a couple of follow ups to that, nuancing the picture in terms of like, what is the actual source of that effect? Is it a real metacognitive shift? Is it more about how we just communicate our judgments?

Um, uh, but it's promising and I think it, it needs to be followed up. Another angle on this is, um, by. Other incidental activities that might tap into similar mechanisms that we use for self monitoring. So one focus here has been on meditation and there's been some interesting studies suggesting that engaging in regular meditation practice has benefits for these objective measures of metacognition that we can measure in the lab.

Um, again, these are, it's early days for that research area. There's only been, you know, four or five. Published papers on this, um, which again seem promising, but I think understanding how that works, why it works is, is still an open question.

[00:45:28] Matt: And what are your views on just how good metacognition can get? Because, I mean, from a purely theoretical perspective, there is obviously a limit, right? Again, if your mind needs to have a self model. of itself. It can't be a perfect self model because then you get this infinite regress. The model models the model and so on.

So like from that perspective there's a theoretical limit and I think there are other reasons why but um, presumably we could get a lot better than the um, the average person is today. What are your views on, on to sort of like how much runway is there to improve one's metacognition?

[00:46:05] Stephen: I think we have a reasonably good understanding of this in the sense that the, our metrics of metacognitive sensitivity, the latest models of this are in, are in units of performance. So, um, in one popular model, it's known as the meta, meta D prime model. The statistic we get out of these, um, data is in the same units as performance itself.

And so the nice thing about that is that you can then simply create a computer ratio, which we call metacognitive efficiency, which is meta D prime divided by performance. And that tells you essentially how much headroom you have for improvement. And so the model, the kind of, um, the equations say that your, the ceiling of the ratio is one, like you can't get better than first order performance, you can't gain more information, although there are interesting possible exceptions to that.

Um. And when we measure it in the lab, usually these ratios come out around 0. 7, 0. 8. So it seems like people's metacognition is kind of using around 70 or 80 percent of the information available. Um, from performance itself to, to engage in this self monitoring. So there does seem to be room for maneuver.

And that was the kind of headroom we were, we were trying to encroach upon when we were doing these training studies. Um, but then as you say, like. The broader question then becomes, do we want to get to ceiling? Do we want to, um, be kind of moving away from the set point we have at the moment in the population?

And there's interesting arguments that actually come back to what we were talking about at the start, which is the flex you have in the self model, um, which suggests that maybe we actually want to retain some imprecision. Um, so. Chris Frith, who's a British psychologist, he was one of, uh, my PhD advisors, has argued that one interesting feature of metacognition is that it's socially sensitive, so If I say to you, you know, I, I, I'm not quite sure that you should have done that the way you did, or like, if I'm, if I'm kind of trying to be a constructive friend and say, I, you know what, like, I think maybe a better strategy was X rather than Y, like if you had quotes, perfect metacognition about yourself.

Then perhaps you just wouldn't care about what your friend says. You would just be like, well, you know, I, I know, I know how it went and I'm happy with that. And so there's an interesting intersection here between like, having some flex to allow some social influence so that we get a better collective view of the situation, and that's what Chris has written about, versus having some kind of solipsistic introspective accuracy that.

It says, I know the picture, both of the world and my own mind, and I don't need to rely on others. So yeah, there's, and I, again, I don't think we have strong empirical evidence that that's the reason for poorer metacognitive sensitivity, but it's a really, I think, neat hypothesis that could be followed up on.

[00:49:29] Matt: Yeah certainly and then there's also actually this question on that of um, applying that same measure to other people. So one has an assessment of their own confidence and, and you know what they can do. One also has a theory of mind for those around them and, and vice versa. Um, and we'll definitely understand how those two things track and correlate.

I think, you know, in these days, um, I think many people would think, for example, tech companies, it's commonly said that they can predict what we're going to do. better than, than we can. I'm not, I'm not sure that's, that's quite like a nuanced enough statement, but there are beliefs of that nature. Um, and that, you know, others understand us increasingly more than we understand ourselves.

How did these things track? Have you, have you, have you studied that? Have you looked at that?

[00:50:18] Stephen: Yeah. So in, um, development, there does seem to be a intriguing association between. Understanding of other minds and metacognition. So they are both relatively late developing capacities. So, um, it's not until kids, uh, reach the age of three or four that they start to pass these explicit tests of metacognition about themselves.

So they start to realize when they know something, when they don't know something. Um, and at a similar age, they start to pass these tests of. Um, understanding false beliefs. So realizing that someone else might have a different and potentially false view of the world compared to them. Um, and there's been some neat experiments run recently suggesting there are.

Um, commonalities to these two processes. So one, um, hypothesis that was developed by the philosopher Peter Caruthers is that the one important part of human metacognition relies on theory of mind. So essentially what we do is as kids, we build up the skill to realize that someone else has a different view of the situation to ourselves.

And then we apply that same skill to ourselves. We realize that. We might not have the full view of the situation. We realized that we might be wrong. So essentially applying kind of false belief understanding to yourself in a recursive way. Um, and that remained a hypothesis for a number of years. Um, and I think it's only recently that psychologists have started to try and empirically test this.

Um, and so there's been some recent data suggests that if you interfere with. of thinking about someone else, you also cause problems for self directed metacognition. And with a master's student a couple of years ago, Antony Vaccaro, we surveyed the literature on metacognition and theory of mind. And we did a meta analysis of the brain imaging studies that have been done on these two topics.

And while there were. Distinct networks that tended to show up in functional imaging studies for metacognition and theory of mind, there was some overlap in the prefrontal cortex. So that's, I mean, a meta analysis doesn't tell you very much about mechanism, but it does at least give some suggestive evidence that there is commonality in the neural substrates for thinking about yourself and thinking about someone else.

[00:52:53] Matt: and how much, um, how much benefit do you think there is to be gained from, from increasing, well, metacognition? I guess also if, if theory of mind of others comes along for the ride, all the, all the more reason to, to improve it. But, you know, how does the world change? How does the world change if people improve their metacognition?

[00:53:12] Stephen: I mean, I think, as you say, like if there is a, uh, some commonality between. The process is involved in metacognition about yourself and the fidelity with which you can build good models of other minds, then there should be myriad social benefits from developing more accurate metacognition. Um, and typically psychologists have tend to put.

Metacognitive benefits in two boxes. So one is intrapersonal. So the benefits of having good metacognition for your own, um, success and wellbeing, and this is something that has been written about a lot in the context of education. You know, we'd like our kids to cultivate sophisticated metacognition about what they know and don't know.

So they can guide their own learning. They can guide their own study. They can. Um, filling gaps in their knowledge and so on. So that's, that's been, um, something that's becoming increasingly popular in educational psychology. Um, there's also an area of interpersonal medical admission that we've been focused on in my lab, which is the contribution this might have to information seeking.

So you can think of this, I guess, as like education, but now in, in the real world, like when we get into society. We've got all these decisions to make about do we Um, seek out new knowledge on a particular topic or not. And we've done some experiments to suggest that one of the predictors of whether you do seek out new knowledge on a topic is metacognitive sensitivity.

And that makes some sense, I think, because like, if you realize, if you have this sense that, hang on, you don't have the full picture, you might be wrong about this. Other people might have something to tell you, then you should go and seek out that new information. And so what we did together with a former PhD student of mine, Max Rohlwager, we studied this in the context of large population samples, and we measured both their metacognitive sensitivity on a really boring task that had, it was just about deciding which of two boxes have more dots.

But we also measured their political beliefs about a range of, um, uh, factors, and this was in a U. S. sample, so we were asking questions, like, about... Um, your political leanings, but also your attitudes towards gun control, abortion and so on. And what we were able to do was create a, um, uh, extract out a measure from all those questions, which told us something about not what the person's beliefs were, but how strongly held they were.

How much did they think that they were right and everyone else was wrong? And what was interesting is that that factor that we call dogmatism from the political questions predicted their metacognitive sensitivity on this dots task. So people who were slightly. Worse at realizing when they might be wrong on the dots task were also the ones who tended to have very strong and rigid beliefs about political issues.

So that's just a correlation. We can't establish causation there, but I think it's suggestive that perhaps one role that metacognition is playing in our adult lives is essentially prompting us to rethink. Whether we have all the answers,

So that was more on the intrapersonal side and then there's all these interpersonal or social functions of metacognition that we've talked a bit about already, but one.

It's, I guess, benefit from cultivating better metacognition is that it allows you to then interact more effectively in a social group, because you'll be able to, um, essentially communicate your degree of belief That you have the answer to the problem the group is trying to solve, rather than just wading in saying, I know how to do this.

If you're more aware of the gaps in your knowledge, then you'll be able to tailor your advice or your contributions to the group in an appropriate way. And there's been some nice experiments suggesting that, that, uh, idea, um, holds true.

[00:57:35] Matt: I do, um, I do worry sometimes that, um, uh, some of those, I mean, I guess the aspects of the world these days that are set up to Um, how did I emphasize parts of, of the, I guess the, the negative aspects of, of, you know, good metacognition. So as an example, um, we mentioned people who have higher levels of metacognition would be better able to self assess their knowledge gaps and therefore would be less confident in their views and hold less confidence views.

And... In many contexts that's great, but in some contexts it's actually really not great, and especially when we have technologies that can accentuate views and, um, you know, high levels of confidence can get people really far. And so it feels like there are certain aspects of the world that are really not set up.

to manage this fact about the human mind very well.

[00:58:29] Stephen: A hundred percent. And I think it goes back to this tension that we talked about, uh, towards the start of the conversation, which is that essentially, you know, ideally you'd want this capacity to have good, um, awareness of knowledge gaps, errors, failings, and so on. And yet still be able to, um, project confidence in a way that.

means that your voice is heard. And I think that navigating that tension is, is really difficult. And I think it, as you say, I think it's becoming even more difficult in a modern world where We're just suffused now with, um, opinion from all quarters via social media, via, um, uh, you know, the fact that society is ever more interconnected.

So, I think that trying to navigate this tension between having enough confidence to contribute to a conversation, but maintaining enough metacognitive awareness to realize when you might be wrong is, is a really hard problem to solve, but it's becoming ever more important in modern society.

[00:59:44] Matt: Yeah, and it's, I mean, that's the sort of the type of question that I guess your lab does deal with either directly or as sort of a downstream implication. It's very big questions. One of the most interesting ones that I noticed quite recently was, um, I think you mentioned her earlier on, Nadine Dijkstra.

Um, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. But, uh, you recently

[01:00:05] Stephen: I think, I think, it's, it's, um, yeah, she's from the Netherlands originally. So I think it's Dijkstra, but then also I'm, you know, maybe not getting it perfect.

[01:00:15] Matt: well, you, you, um, together published a very interesting paper recently called, uh, Subjective Signal Strength Distinguishes Reality from Imagination. And it actually goes back to the topic we mentioned very early on, on the, you know, the, um, ailment of psychosis, where somebody's. Um, perception of reality sort of detaches from what's, what's really there, there, there.

Um, they're unable to distinguish imagination, I guess, from what's really out there. And, um, it's commented in that, in that paper that, you know, very interestingly, some of the, I guess, the mental hardware, the mental processing for imagination is similar to what would be used for perception or there is an overlap there.

And it is actually a profound question how one does distinguish those two things, you know, we're getting signals from the outside world, but what we're actually experiencing is a model. And likewise, imagination is, is a model. And yet people feel that they have a very good grasp of these two things and that they're able to distinguish them.

Um, I think this paper was very interesting. Could you, could you share a bit about the, the paper and the insights that were, um, that came out of that?

[01:01:29] Stephen: Yeah, of course. I, so I think it does start with what you described just then about this, um, idea that imagination. on the same kind of machinery that is trying to infer what is out there in the world, and it goes back to what we were talking about at the start of the call, that the way perception seems to work is that rather than it just being a process of taking in sensory input and processing that in various ways, that was the way I was taught how perception works as a psychology undergrad.

Um, 20 years ago, but the picture has shifted, I think, quite substantially since then we don't think of perception as a bottom up process anymore. We think of perception as a constructive process and the anatomy of the. Uh, different perceptual systems seems to bear this out. We have a lot of what we call top down projections.

So projections going from higher levels of the brain down to the sensory systems, just as we, even more so than you do having neural pathways going from the sensory systems into the brain. So there seems to be this very active, constructive aspects of perceptual machinery. And, um, one proposal then is that what imagination is, is the process of running that machinery backwards.

So rather than just taking an input and trying to infer what's out there, you're generating internally, you're, you're taking samples from these generative models that you've built to reflect the external world. Um, and a lot of Nadina's work when she was completing her PhD at the Donders Institute in the Netherlands was looking at this question using brain imaging.

And what she found was that when people imagine things, they recruit the same. Neural resources as you do when you perceive the actual objects. There seems to be this overlap in the brain between imagination and perception and that then raises this natural question. Because imagination and perception seem to be differing in degree, but not kind, how is the brain, how are we able to tell them apart?

And even can we tell them apart? This is the, the question that was behind our paper. And there was some really interesting work conducted back in the early 1900s by a pioneering female psychologist known as, uh, she, she called Mary Cheeves Perkey working in the US. And what she did was, um, got, asked people in her lab to imagine things on a screen.

And then she would use a, uh, a setup with a lamp and a, and a colored filter. To project an image, a faint image of what they were being asked to imagine on that screen. So if I asked you to imagine a banana on the screen, then she would project a little faint patch of yellow on the screen. And she would then ask subjects, how did that feel?

And they would often tell her. Wow. My imagination was so vivid. I really saw a banana there and they wouldn't know, they wouldn't be able to tell that she had essentially tricked them with this quote, real banana on the screen. Um, and so we wanted to follow that up. That was really the inspiration, um, for our study was that those were somewhat anecdotal results.

And we wanted to see, can we bring to bear the toolbox of psychophysics and cognitive science on that question? And it's a tricky one because. As soon as people might realize there are real stimuli in play in your experiment, then obviously the game is up because they're going to realize that you're trying to trick them by fading in real things.

So we had to somehow circumvent that. Um, and the way that Nadina, um, devised to, to solve this problem is. Taking advantage of the fact we can now do experiments over the web on very large numbers of people, much larger than we could do by bringing them actually into the lab. And so we did, we gave a very short experiments to every person.

We'd recruited into the study where first they had to imagine stimuli in dynamic noise. They had to imagine tilted lines embedded in dynamic noise. And then on the very last trial of the whole experiment, for some subjects, we faded in. The thing that they were being asked to imagine and for other subjects, we faded in something different, right?

And then we simply asked them two questions on that very last trial. One is how vivid was your imagination? So a bit like the question Perky asked in the 1900s. And the other one was, did you detect any real stimulus on the screen on that last trial? And we had two models of this. So one is the idea that.

Similar to the Perky experiment, if you imagine something, perhaps what you're doing is suppressing any influence of the outside world. You're, you're essentially ignoring the possibility that might be something out there. And if that were the case, then you should actually be less likely to detect a real stimulus when you're being asked to imagine that same thing.

Whereas another model based on this, um, more modern view of. perceptual generative models is that if these signals are all just getting intermixed, if imagination is just like another version of perception being driven from within, then it should actually be very hard for you to tell them apart and these signals should summate and you should actually be more likely to say something real was out there.

If your imagination on that trial was vivid and if it matched what we were fading in, and that's exactly what we found. We found that the best model of our data was that. When we faded in a real stimulus, two things happened. One is people felt their imagination was more vivid, but also they were more likely to say that something was out there.

So there seems to be those signals like intermixed, and I think this is consistent with. A broader view that we're pursuing in the lab, a broader hypothesis that what makes the difference for conscious experience is really a kind of process of figuring out how reliable is the inference that's going on in my perceptual model.

If I have strong and reliable signals, it doesn't matter where they've come from. I will just tag them as being real, as being out there in the world. And that's a hypothesis that has been put forward by a colleague of mine in Japan, Uh, known as perceptual reality monitoring. So the idea is that conscious experience is grounded in this, um, process of essentially tagging the operation of those perceptual models as either reflecting reality, because we have strong and reliable signals or as reflecting something going on internally.

And that really, you know, the reason consciousness exists at all is because the system is trying to solve this problem. It gives us a tag. Um, it tells us if you like that. There is this process going on in my brain right now is reflecting external reality. And that gives us this kind of very strong belief that there is a reality out there.

And that's what we call conscious experience.

[01:08:52] Matt: That, uh, that last part of your answer there on the source of consciousness and what consciousness actually is, was striking. I didn't expect you to say that. I'd love to dig, dig into that. So, could you expand on, on what you mean? I

[01:09:05] Stephen: Yeah. So I think that the best way of thinking about this and answering that question is to go back to this notion of perceptual generative models. The idea that the brain is trying to build a model of its external world.

But what's interesting about that approach is that there's nothing in that modeling framework that seems to distinguish between conscious and unconscious perception. And in fact, some of the proponents of this idea going back to the 19th century, like Helmholtz, suggested that a lot of this process of perceptual inference is unconscious.

We kind of, it does its thing and it serves up the results to us as conscious experience. So this then raises this interesting question, which is that, you know, if we assume that some aspects of this perceptual processing can take place unconsciously, then what is it that makes the difference between Conscious and unconscious perception.

What is it in those architectures that make the difference? And I think one insight into this, um, and here I've been, as I mentioned, very influenced by Hakuan Lau's views on this, is that it really comes down to a functional need for the system to try and distinguish. simulation, internal imagination from the external world.

So we wouldn't want to act on our imaginations. We wouldn't want to treat. and imagine coffee cup as similar to a real coffee cup, and behave accordingly. So somehow the system has to kind of tell these apart, and Hakuan's proposal, which I think is a very powerful one, is that perceptual representations become conscious when they're identified as being reliable reflections of the external world by this internal process of reality monitoring.

And in a sense, there's nothing left over to explain because what we mean by conscious experience is this incontrovertible belief that there is an external reality. That there is, and when I mean external reality, I mean an external reality that includes ourselves, includes our bodies. Um, so it just means that our brains have kind of tag something as being reflecting the world as it is now, including ourselves in that world, and distinguishes that from things that are being, that are going on internally, simulations, plans, imaginations, and so on.

And the idea is that those all are so, they, they are not phenomenally experienced typically, they're going on under the hood. Um, so when we're kind of simulating possible trajectories through our environment, they're not being Um, phenomenally experienced and imagination is kind of an intermediate case because sometimes it is phenomenally experienced.

And the idea there is that also from Nadina's work is that that, the reason for that is that in a sense, imagination is fooling this reality monitoring system. It's a kind of a intermediate case. It's like, ah, hang on. Maybe that is somewhat real, but you know, it's, um, so it feels, it gives us. conscious experience, but there's some potentially even higher cognitive level that says, you know, I am imagining, so I can discount that.

And I don't treat that as real, but in terms of the way the operation of this reality monitor works, the idea is that there's some kind of constant monitoring going on of whether the outputs of this perceptual model reflect external reality or not. And that's what we call.

[01:12:52] Matt: think some people would still, I mean, it's all, it's all, it all makes logical sense, but I think many people would still feel that there could be a possibility to have that same level of feedback and control. Without a notion of subjectivity or an experience, you know, you could just imagine like why couldn't that control makers be having with the lights, be happening with the lights off.

Um, how do you think about that question?

[01:13:15] Stephen: Yeah, no, I, I think it's, uh, you know, this is really what it comes down to that, um, if you're a functionalist about consciousness and I am, you know, I think that. There's, we are going to need to explain if we do have a neuroscientific account of consciousness, it's going to need to be in functional terms.

We can't have something that kind of floats free of, of, of the way the brain and mind work. And so there you end up essentially. Coming back to, um, the, the phenomenology, and this is encroaching on a position in philosophy known as illusionism, um, which I think this approach is somewhat aligned with. Um, I've, I've heard people like Andy Clark talk about revisionist illusionism, which is this idea that you're, you're trying to explain a, the, the way conscious experience feels to us.

So it's real. So it's not like, we're not saying it's an, it's an illusion, but it's, it's, it's an, it's an illusion in the sense that once we've explained that, um, the source of why it feels so incontrovertible, incontrovertibly real to us. Then that, then we're done, right? So it's kind of this third person explanation where we say, okay, I've got the cognitive science machinery to explain why you feel you have such a real conscious experience and to explain why I feel it's so real and so on.

And once we've explained that sense of incontrovertible reality, that there is a conscious experience, then that's, that's all we can do. And that's kind of, it does encroach on this illusionist position, but it doesn't go so far. Some people interpret illusionism as saying consciousness is not real. And I actually don't think that the illusionists are saying that, but anyway, that's a whole different debate.

then it comes down to, so that's kind of like the philosophical background or some of it, and so then, as you say, then there needs to be some, um, some account built of why. A system like us would need to be solving that kind of problem. And there it comes down to, I think, thinking about, um, you know, what are the benefits and you can tell an evolutionary story as well here that, um, what are the benefits for a system to be able to do all this offline stuff, to be able to simulate and plan and imagine and so on, and so this then encroaches on the science of decision making where there's lots of interesting work suggesting that.

In certain scenarios, the way we navigate through the world is by simulating possible futures. So, you know, I know on an implicit level that if I want to go and get a coffee, I can walk out the door, I turn right and so on. So I, I simulate the possible future and there's been some lovely work done. In, um, rodent models suggesting that when, uh, mice and rats are planning their path through a maze, then you actually see at the choice point, you see place cells essentially like propagating out ahead of the, uh, the rodent in very quickly on the, on the order of, um, you know, a few hundred milliseconds.

And so there's kind of this internal representation of the possible futures the rodent could take. And you can see it in the data and then you're in, in the neural data. And what I mean, introspectively, that kind of thing doesn't feel conscious to me. And, and I think there's lots of interesting empirical questions to be done on this.

So those kinds of simulations seem to be all running under the hood. You know, if I turn up at a new place, I might think, you know, this is the way I'm going to go, and perhaps my brain has run lots of different simulations about where I could have gone, but didn't. And so the idea is that if those simulations are being run in perceptual space.

Then there's some imperative to make sure that we keep the model of the world we're using as a basis for the simulations and the simulations themselves separate. We don't want to confuse the two. We don't want to simulate going down this path and then experience going down that path if we haven't.

Right. So that's the idea, um, that you need to keep those things separate. So the, the model of the world we're building, which is also dynamic and changing over time is one thing. And that's tagged as reality. And then all the simulations and planning we're doing within that model of the world is another thing, and that's tagged as internal and we don't experience

[01:18:05] Matt: I guess these are, these are the questions that your lab is, like the big questions that your lab is sort of looking at now. I would like to get your views on the, like what a solution to the understanding of consciousness could even look like. Because I think there is one camp of people. Um, who so buy into the philosophical hard problem of consciousness that they, they almost assume that one kid could never have an intuitive grasp of consciousness.

They take it so seriously that they think we would never be able to solve. Um, and fully understand consciousness. And I think there's another camp of people that, and, and I, I'm, I'm one of them, that looks at this problem kind of no differently to other scientific problems. It's a hard problem, but, you know, for example, uh, in understanding gravity, for example.

Um, you know, if I ask you why does gravity work the way it does, eventually you always hit a, a bottom where we don't understand it, it's fundamentally mysterious. And the historical progress of science in... Other fields has kind of gone down that same route, you know, eventually at, um, at some point people feel like, okay, I have an intuitive enough understanding of this thing that I no longer consider it not understood, but at bottom, it's always mysterious.

And my personal view is consciousness is. Um, probably going to turn out to be similar in, in some way, you know, eventually we'll understand it enough that the hard problem is sort of continuing hiding, hiding in a smaller place. But what are your views here? How do you, what do you think a solution to this problem could look like?

[01:19:39] Stephen: it. Yeah. I mean, I, I can certainly understand. The pull of the hard problem. Um, I can understand why people pose it in those terms. Um, like the original David Chalmers formulation and, um, people have discussed, uh, that issue since. Um, I guess my view on it is that I'm a psychologist. I want to understand why things feel the way they do, including why we think there's a hard problem of consciousness.

That's what, uh, um, Dave Chalmers has recently described very beautifully as the meta problem. Essentially the, the problem of explaining why people think there's a hard problem. I think that's much more scientifically tractable. We can do nice research on trying to understand why consciousness seems to be...

So, um, you know, it seems to hold this sway over us that we think that. It is, um, this property that is so distinct from, um, other aspects of how we understand brain function and, and things, things that seem more innocuous, like memory and decision making and so on, we can all kind of have a more third person understanding of those, but why is it that conscious experience seems so, um, um, So grabby from the first person perspective.

And I think that, that to me seems like a perfectly good and interesting psychological problem to try and solve. And I think some of the answer could come along in the terms I described earlier is trying to understand essentially why does, why does perceptual experience, um, come along with such a high degree of.

Um, the sense of reality, a sense of confidence that this must be, um, the world as it is now. Um, and I think once we start explaining that, and I don't think it has been fully explained, but I think once we do start explaining that, and once we start showing how, at the level of brain function, that works.

Then people will start to be like, huh, yeah, that's a bit like a perceptual illusion, but it's now at the metacognitive level. And this is where I think metacognition and subjective experience are intimately, intimately connected, because essentially what the kind of things I've been describing are meta level processes that are tagging a perceptual model as being reliable, um, as being a confident description of the world as it is right now.

Um, good enough for the use, for, for us to be able to use it as a rational basis for action

Essentially if, if, if that story that I told earlier is on the right lines, then we should be.

There should be a tight link between tagging a perceptual model as real, and then using that as a basis within which to plan and enact. And this is interestingly related to this, the data that have been emerging recently suggest that, suggesting that conscious experience has a relatively slow timescale, slower than would be useful for acting in the moment.

Um, so what seems to be happening at least based on the psychophysics is that Um, we're integrating over a relatively long window of time. Um, and you can think of this as like every quarter of a second or so you get served up a new dynamic movie of what's happening in the world. So the, uh, the, the integration is slow, but what you experience is, is dynamic.

Cause the, the little model that's been built includes things that are moving and so on. Um, and so we're trying to think of experiments to do where. We can take that kind of psychophysics and probe how this model that's getting built over these, uh, few hundred milliseconds is a, how is that connected up to subjective experience, subjective rapport, but also how is that connected with, um, the capacity to plan and, and use that.

model of the world that you have right now as a basis for rational action. So I think all that's going to become part of a, of a, of, of essentially a, uh, an account of the functions of consciousness. What is it doing for us? What is it, um, what, what problem is it solving? And again, coming back to the more metaphysical stuff we were talking about earlier, I think once we have a good account of.

The functional side, when we realize that it's helpful for the system to essentially like say, you know, this is definitely external reality now, cause I can use that now to act and plan and so on. When we kind of see that picture fleshed out from a third person perspective. I get the sense that a lot of this kind of the pull of things like the hard problem will start to weaken.

Obviously that's just speculation, but that's my sense is that like, it will seem less mysterious when we realize that what's going on is, um, potentially a, um, a functional process that is, um, generating this, this, this feeling of, of, of, of having this, um, continuous experience with a very strong sense of reality.

So that's the kind of, yeah, those are the ideas we're pursuing at the moment.

[01:25:21] Matt: Yeah, well I look forward to reading more about the work that comes out of that lab and hopefully a future book one day on, on consciousness.

[01:25:30] Stephen: Maybe, we'll see. Yeah.

[01:25:33] Matt: Um, on the topic of books, um, as we, as we sort of come to a wrap, some of the questions that I love to ask, um, I guess towards the end of the conversation, uh, about books. And my question for you is, um, which book have you most gifted to other people and why?

[01:25:48] Stephen: Yeah. I, when I was thinking about this question, I was thinking, you know, should I, should I go highbrow for the sake of the podcast here and say, you know, like this is, um, this is the kind of thing that I, uh, I like to disseminate to others, but I thought, you know, what, what I really have tended to, um, give or suggest people get copies of recently have been more things on, um, well, there's, there's two I have in mind.

So the first one is, um, a, a book, a beautiful graphic novel. I've actually got it right next to me here by, um, my former, um, advisor, Chris Frith, but also his wife, Uta Frith. Um, incredibly influential British psychologists and what they did was essentially an autobiographical, um, uh, account of their life in science together, but it's, it, it's like an amazing introduction to cognitive science, to cognitive neuroscience, the way you do experiments.

There's lots of very cool, um. Descriptions of real science, like it's not, it's in no way, um, dumbed down, um, but it's super accessible and I've loved reading this with my kids, but also I've loved reading it just, you know, flicking through and getting a sense of like. It's just, it just beautifully communicates what it means to do, to be a scientific psychologist, to, um, to do good, um, uh, to, to, to kind of pose questions about human nature and answer them with experiments, but in a super accessible and fun way.

So that's one that I've often recommended. And then the other one, um, is a book, uh, that called 4, 000 weeks by Oliver Berkman. Um, and it's, I think, I think part of the reason why I've become quite attached to this book is, so the title 4, 000 weeks comes from this idea of the average human lifespan, um, of being approximately 4, 000 weeks and.

And the book is essentially an antidote to the freneticism of modern life and advice on how to manage your time and get evermore done. And I became really attached to this when my kids were born. They're now four and two. Um, because I realized that, you know, with, as we all are very busy, um, trying to achieve more, trying to pack more in that.

Life, I mean, I'm now falling back on mega cliches, but you know, life is short, time passes, um, and he just brings together lots of, um, philosophical insight, but just practical insight really about, you know, how to take a healthy attitude towards the passage of time. And I, I think that it's very accessible, but I think it also is a very practically helpful book to read.

[01:28:53] Matt: Yeah, I'll, I'll second that, that, uh, second book recommendation because absolutely I've, I've loved that book. And it actually was not, it played more than a small part in my reason for, Actually pulling the trigger on starting this podcast in the first place. It kind of sat in the back burner for a while and, uh, it was shortly after reading that book that I actually just, uh, finally got my act together and did it.

So, um, uh, great recommendation. Um, and yeah, I guess that, that book is full of, full of advice. Uh, you know, I learned a lot from it and, um, the next question also relates to advice. Um. It's what advice would you have for people who, I wanted to ask to improve their metacognition, but maybe it's just more general now.

You know, what advice would you give to people as somebody who really understands how the human mind works and the human condition? What do people need to hear?

[01:29:42] Stephen: You know, one, one thing that learning more about how the mind works gives you is, I think, uh, just more empathetic perspective on how other people are seeing the world. Um, and. Kind of understanding metacognition as a brain process, as part and parcel of that model building process, makes you realize that when people might be unaware of their failings, when people might be, um, not realizing that they've gone off track in a particular way, then.

you know, as a society, then there are good reasons to apportion praise and blame and so on. But on an interpersonal level, I think it just gives you a little bit more tolerance for um, the fact that, you know, people just bring, they, we have a lot of history to the way that we see the world and we build different models.

And if we can understand that each of us might be building a different model for different reasons, then I think that provides a bit more of an empathetic perspective. It can, can loosen the, um, the often shouting matches that you see on social media and so on. Um, and I think that, you know, when it comes to.

So metacognition more specifically, um, it is difficult because there's, as we talked about briefly, there's kind of a limit on this nested recursion. We can't build a fully fledged model of how our metacognition is working. That's often the root of a lot of these illusions. Um, but I think one thing we can do is learn a bit more about how it works.

And that was part of the reason. I wrote the book was to try and, I guess, distill some of this science down into a way that might be useful for people to hear so that if we can kind of, um, understand how, how our metacognitive systems are working, then we can, um, take steps to avoid the pitfalls of when they, when they go wrong.

So I think it's hard to. Kind of give pithy one line advice to how to improve metacognition, but a more general, um, uh, encouragement to learn a bit more about how it works is I think a good, uh, a good piece of advice.

[01:32:03] Matt: Yeah. Sage advice. Um, the last question maybe is, I don't know if it's going to be more lighthearted or maybe not. Um, my question is who should represent humanity to a future AI superintelligence?

[01:32:17] Stephen: Yeah. So I, when I was also thinking about this, I was thinking, so there seems to be a whole conversation we can have about superintelligence. I'm, I, I'm skeptical that like we can define something that is. Um, super intelligent, very, we can, I think we can certainly define things that are different. I mean, something, you know, there's plenty of, um, examples we already have of AI architectures outperforming us in lots of different domains.

Right. Um, so I would, I would kind of rephrase the question slightly and think, okay, well, who, imagine we have an alien intelligence, we didn't build it, we didn't build it, but we encounter it. Um, so how should we interact with that new unknown intelligence? How should we figure it out? Um, and I, I think the only thing I would say is that I would be pretty worried if it was one person.

I would think we would certainly need a group given what I mentioned about how we all come with our idiosyncratic biases and our idiosyncratic ways of. understanding how the world works. So having a group, all of whom should have pretty good metacognition so they can share and pool their knowledge and so on.

We might even want some of our, uh, kind of engineering side AIs to come along for the ride as well. So we might want a large language model available that we could. ask questions to, so that we can give our alien intelligence, um, comprehensive answers of, you know, comprehensive accounts of what humans are and what knowledge we have.

But, you know, I think having a group, um, at a bare minimum would be important.

[01:34:05] Matt: It sounds, it sounds like we're going to send the folk from the meta lab.

[01:34:08] Stephen: Well, I'm not sure about that, but, um,

[01:34:12] Matt: uh, Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you so much for making the time.

[01:34:17] Stephen: thanks, Matt. It's been great fun.

Today’s topics include the prospects for engineering post-biotic conscious systems, and the ethical implications of doing so; psychedelic drugs and psychedelic experiences, and what these might teach us about the nature of the mind; the range of possible conscious experiences available to human beings and other systems; climate change; intellectual honesty; and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Twitter: @ThomasMetzinger

• Website (includes books)

Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

0:02:10 Postbiotic conscious systems

0:13:00 The Ego Tunnel

0:20:15 Space of possible experiences

0:29:13 Psychedelics and epistemology

0:36:17 Ethical obligations to explore phenomenal state space

0:50:36 Climate change & culture of consciousness

1:00:45 Can we pull back from the brink?

1:09:00 AI ethics & suffering AI

1:27:20 Minimal forms of consciousness

1:35:40 Book recommendations

1:37:00 Advice (meditate!)

Introduction: Minds of the Future

I consider the content of this conversation very important for the times that we live in. The world is currently facing more difficult coordination problems than we ever have before. With the extremely rapid rise of powerful technologies like artificial intelligence, and more complex, multivariate global problems like climate change, we’re increasingly having to coordinate across a much larger number of people, and at a much faster pace. And the consequences of getting things wrong are higher than before, impacting more people in more meaningful ways. 

And it’s in this context that Thomas’s work is so important. We absolutely need a mature and contemporary ethics that can deal with the questions of our times. And this includes questions that until quite recently would have sounded a bit like science fiction. Questions such as what types of minds do we want to exist in the future, and what types of experiences do we want our children and grandchildren to have. This was a very meaningful conversation, and I hope you find it valuable.

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:11] Matt Geleta: I'm here with Thomas Metzinger. Thomas, thanks for joining me.

[00:00:13] Thomas Metzinger: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:15] Matt Geleta: Thomas, uh, one of the great pleasures of doing this podcast is that I get to read advanced copies of books before they're released. And I very fortunately got to read an advanced copy of your upcoming book, The Elephant and the Blind. And I was really struck right at the beginning on your dedication.

You dedicated this book to the post pahotic conscious systems of the future. And I would love to understand your mental picture here. What, what are you envisioning when you dedicate the book to those systems?

[00:00:44] Thomas Metzinger: Well, there's an interesting connection that many people don't see. So, and it has to do, you could frame it as two sides of Thomas. So, uh, one side of Thomas is somebody who has meditated twice a day for 47 years, but has always treated this as his personal, private life, not made a fuss about, but who has started about three years ago, a small virtual research network, the MPE project, where the idea is to generate a new approach to the problem of consciousness, namely what theory of science people call a minimal model explanation.

That's where you try to create an idealized model of your target phenomenon that leaves out everything that's superfluous and just the causal core factors also.

Hopefully, that was the, what you really want to understand, so the, what does the explanatory work in the end. So the question would then be, what is the simplest state of consciousness human beings know?

My working hypothesis in this project is, um, conscious experience can exist without time representation. With, uh, even without the experience of a now, without self location in a spatial frame of reference, without a here, without what philosophers call cognitive self reference, that is, I thoughts, you know, or I senses, and without embodiment, without thought, without emotions.

And the more speculative part is that the experience of pure awareness in meditation might be the simplest state of consciousness and might be a perfect entry point to make a fresh start, a fresh scientific start on this.

that's one part of Thomas, the person who has always been interested in consciousness research and has tried out a number of things as a private person, including a sustained meditation practice. But there's another side of me, um, somebody who, um, He first, the first seminar I ever taught in 1987 in Frankfurt was called Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy.

So I've always been interested in opening analytical philosophy of mind to neuroscience, to cognitive science, to AI people. I've always talked with these people a lot, tried to organize interdisciplinary exchange. I still remember when I went into the seminar in the philosophy department and totally nervous stage fright.

My first I have to teach and it was packed with people. There was even, you know, people outside of the door and, uh, nobody wanted to let me in. Why?

Why does this young guy with sneakers have to push himself up to the front? You know, this and, um, the basic sentiment in 1987 was, We don't know what this is, artificial intelligence, but it probably has something to do with fascism and it needs to be stopped, you know, so that the general, also in the humanities, the general idea was, um, we don't know what this is, but it must be bad and we're against it, whatever it is, we're against it, you know, this, this kind of, approach.

And, um, over the years, I've kept this as a hobby, you know, an analytical philosophy of mine since 1963, there was functionalism, Hilary Putnam, Turing machines, and all this. And in the end, I added, uh, ended up from 2018 to 2020 in the European Union's high level expert commission, uh, that generated. That led to this AI act.

Many people see now the first legal regulation on the planet. And our task among others was to generate ethical guidelines for trustworthy AI in Europe. And that was a very, very sobering experience because I went there. Uh, as a, you know, um, totally stupid boy who thought he would actually want to contribute something to the common good and do something good for Europe by, um, developing guidelines.

And only there I realized it's all full of industrial lobby and the majority of the people out there are just. Want to undermine any sabotage, any form of more serious regulation. I've called this ethics washing, uh, uh, in a later newspaper article, which has had quite some impact in a short article. So it was actually developing future markets, uh, massive markets and looking.

The idea was, okay, China is ahead, Silicon Valley is ahead of Europe and we'll say ours unique selling point is going to be. ethical, trustworthy AI.

So if you buy, um, AI products from Europe, you will not be spied upon. And I thought that was a brilliant idea. And I was all for it. And only step by step, I learned that they're not so serious about all of this.

And one of the things in that 52 person committee was that I said, there's a problem of artificial consciousness. because one problem is that you might create an, a large amount of artificial suffering that hasn't existed on the planet before.

This was completely rejected. Highly decorated, um, uh, experts, um, professors of computer science, very smart and intelligent people, but most of them just thought, uh, this is, you know, if you, if I look at the things in my lab, they crash, they don't work, artificial consciousness, it's just science fiction.

And of course the industry folks had the idea, if we start with this, it's going to ruin our future markets. general population is going to get afraid of artificial consciousness. So there was basically only one person in the group, Jan Tallinn, the inventor of Skype, who also saw the issue and was completely banned from the document.

Um, there was a conflict there and they didn't want to have this issue of artificial consciousness in there. If you google now, it's all over the place. There's a journal, Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, there's people with manifestos, lots of very smart young people begin to talk about artificial sentience, there are conferences, and they've slept in on this.

Now, what's the connection to, um, the dedication in this book? Nick Bostrom in 2011 has coined this term of an information hazard, that there are some kinds of scientific information, say, take as an example, for instance, um, gain of function research in viruses. Stuff like this, where one might think maybe one shouldn't publish results and make them available to everybody on the planet, terrorists and so forth, non state actors.

And the same could be true here in principle, because the connection is as follows.

Imagine my project. would generate progress and we would have something like a minimal model of what consciousness is. Then it's quite plausible that the minimal model would also be most easiest to implement in a non biological system.

And, um, so researching the

pure awareness experience with the goal of coming to a minimal model experience what consciousness is might in principle create an information hazard for those people who are really reckless and would immediately do it just for their scientific career and that's what i'm trying to allude to that there is this i don't know how to call it a historical ambiguity there's and then i'll really stop there's a Um, there's a related question, very, a number of very smart.

AI people have already asked me about. I have always thought the alleviation of suffering in all beings that are capable of suffering is really should be one of our top goals in guiding us. And of course, if you take this serious. It would be good to have a computational phenomenology of suffering that's a more abstract mathematical description.

That's hardware independent of what suffering really is in a choking fish, in a bird, in a human infant, in a dementia patient. Is there, are there commonalities? And here you have the same problem. Imagine We tried to understand suffering on a much better way than ever before. And then people would make mathematical models and say, we need to test this.

It could lead to terrible animal experiments, but it could also lead to simulations, um, to understand this better. Simulations that you actually don't want to have, uh, in this world. And some people have asked us, how do we take this research target of alleviating suffering seriously without creating more suffering?

[00:10:51] Matt Geleta: Yeah, there are many threads to pull on there and I actually want to address, I want to get really deep into this, this topic of, you know, the ethical implications of creating. Conscious systems and and exactly what the nature of that conscious experience is Um, and actually some of the the work that you mentioned, you know I've talked to people on this podcast who are actively

trying to create these systems mark zombs, for example Um, and he has ethical arguments for why his group should be doing that On the way to warming up to that.

I think it's helpful to set The broader context of, you know, what, what actually is the space of possible conscious experiences? Um, because I think that is important for, um, kind of assigning ethical weight to just how important this question could be. One of the, one of the topics I think that draws very nicely here is actually from one of your earlier books, The Ego Tunnel.

where you have this metaphor of, um, of the tunnel, this image of the tunnel, um, and you know, the, the, the claim is that our experiences as human beings is somehow confined to a narrow space in a much larger space. Could you run me through this idea of the ego tunnel and why you, why you feel that this is the right image to use for

our experience of the

world?

[00:12:07] Thomas Metzinger: Well, uh, the, the first thing that image does

It puts a focus on internalism, as philosophers say. So I'll say a little bit more about this. I found, over the years, many people have asked me, but why a tunnel? Why not a bubble? And the idea was, um, that we're also moving through time, that we're moving forward, and that this is not a stationary bubble.

So, um, this internalism externalism debate in philosophy of mind, which is... deep and has many aspects.

The question was, what determines the content of a mental state? Only, for instance, local and contemporaneous properties, say, of the brain, or even the neural correlate of consciousness or a part of the brain.

And the other thing is, this, this would be the phenomenal properties. So I would say, to put it as simply as possible, Phenomenology locally supervenes.

That means when all of your, uh, brain properties are fixed, all of your phenomenal properties are fixed. What you experience, what the walls of the ego tunnel. The high dimensional walls of the ego tunnel, how they look like, that's determined. What is not determined is if what you're experiencing is, for instance, a veridical perception or a hallucination.

So there's this other box, what philosophers call intentional properties, those properties that your mental states refers to, and they are very likely, um, determined by external properties. You know, if your beliefs are true or false, that depends on the world and on many other things, on your linguistic community, on, um, maybe on possible worlds, on, on how concepts acquire their meaning.

It gets very deep there. Um, but so I don't think that The truth or the veracity, no, not the veridicality is determined by the brain state. And philosophers have over decades endlessly discussed what is locally determined and what isn't. And, um, also how these External properties can perhaps be actively sampled, created in an embodied agent that walks, moves through a world and stuff like this.

I think today we have a much more refined picture. If you take, for instance, the free energy people, uh, the free energy principle and all these. Conceptual tools, Carl Friston and his collaborator has given to us. It's not inside and outside. It's much more nuanced. It's a, it's like a Russian doll with Mark nested Markov blankets.

And it gets very complicated. And there's also something that calls is called active inference, where you move through the environment, you have larger cycles, but still even given all of this, I think. If we're just talking about consciousness, the conscious experience is locally determined and that was one of the things, and that's of course for many people that's not sexy, for many people that's doesn't feel right, it's counterintuitive, for instance there's this whole inactivism crowd who have this unclear metaphor of inaction, um, Which sounds so good, you know, it just, it just has the right ring to it.

I enact my world and, and, and stuff like that. But if you take a step back and say, okay, that's a wonderful feel good metaphor, but it's a relation. A enacts B. Can somebody just tell me what A is and what B is? then suddenly you realize you don't get an answer. You know, it's, it's more a poetic formulation of, you know, autopoiesis creating your life world or so.

But if you want to nail it down, it's not so clear. Um, by the way, if it is true that Consciousness is locally determined in the brain, as opposed to knowledge and social interactions. It might, in the very end, turn out that people say, Ah, consciousness is a rather uninteresting phenomenon, actually. Just because it's so local, you know, just because it's so local in the head.

Because you also have conscious experience in a dream. Um, I don't know if that answers your question. I think the main thing we have to understand that is the walls of Plato's cave, the walls of the ego tunnel, are not a two dimensional surface. What is, um, it's... The real, one reason why we cannot experientially recognize this as an image or a simulation is that it has no boundary.

To understand that something is a picture on a wall, you have to see a frame. But this thing is immersive. There's no frame. You can look around. You never get to an edge of it. And uh, that's a property if you're in a tunnel. It's like that too. You can look backwards. And, and, and stuff. So I wanted to highlight the internalism of phenomenal properties.

And of course, that is already something most people find, how do you say, emotionally repelling. Because the whole miracle about conscious experience is.

That it seems to bring us in such a direct contact with the external world. That's the whole trick. So

fantastic.

[00:18:24] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I mean the, um, the really fascinating thing when you combine that view with sort of any foundational view of ethics,

you know, our, our foundations of ethics or for most people are somewhat consequentialist and, you know, we think that any ethical view of the world needs to be kind of built up by integrating some sort of set of conscious experiences or, you know, basically, you know, Where are you within the tunnel?

Um, and I think the, the idea that, you know, the, this image of a tunnel has a narrowness to it,

but we, we understand that the actual space of potential experiences, if, if the, if our brains were constructed differently, for example, could be significantly wider. Um, and so the question arises from an ethical perspective, just how narrow is this tunnel and I guess, how, how wide is the space of possible conscious experiences under different...

Um, configurations that serve a brain state. What, what could different minds possibly

experience? Um, I would like to get your, your views on that and, and also you, you mentioned dreaming. I think this is a case in which, in specifically lucid dreaming, which you mention in your book, in which very exotic conscious experiences can arise from our own minds.

Um, and, uh, what I take it to be... Fairly small changes in what our minds are actually doing. You know, it's quite a small change to the, whatever the information processing in one's mind. But the actual nature of the result experience is vastly different from what we experience in everyday life. Um, and to me that suggests potentially that the, the tunnel is the, the actual space of experiences is very wide.

And the , the tunnel that we live in is very narrow. What are you, what are your views here? How, how narrow is this? Tunnel.

[00:20:12] Thomas Metzinger: Well, it's a very important and very interesting connection you're making there, and there's a lot to be said. So I think...

The tunnel, our phenomenal state space, has not evolved to, um, uh, for knowledge, for epistemic gain, but to copy genes into the next generation, and that is a strong constraint. But yet there's such a vastness, especially with our kinds of brains. There's such a depth, and something that has baffled me all my life is, um, how many people live their whole life without ever understanding how much there is out there.

Um, there, you know, everybody knows there are extreme experiences, but especially. through psychedelics, uh, many people have experienced that there, there was a vastness and a space of almost infinite space of possibilities that they would have never thought of. If they hadn't had first hand experience of it, there are dramatic altered states of consciousness, like you might have them on some psychedelics or in extreme sports or so, and they're very subtle and super fine ones, like they would be in a meditation practice.

And most people just go through life, would savoring be an English, a good English word? I don't know. joying, enjoying and taking serious and exploring the vastness of the space. On the other hand, I think there's also something, there's something to be said for neuroplasticity, for windows of plasticity and for cognitive flexibility.

So in the time in which a human beings develop, develops, There are certain windows where you can be flexible, where you can have certain experiences, and they're also close. I think, as you say, you move into, like I do, age related cognitive

decline

or dementia, if you don't manage to counteract this.

[00:22:39] Matt Geleta: Hehehe.

[00:22:42] Thomas Metzinger: on what childhood you have.

So I think The volume of the state of possible phenomenal experiences changes over a lifetime, and it is something that can be taken serious, it's something that can be cultivated and fostered.

And if we don't show things to our children, if we don't show things to our young, they may never become aware of them, and there's always a good time in life.

for everything. And many people, of course, also close down around 40 or 50 if they live the normal life and become ever more rigid. And of course, that's an interesting ethical question. Like, if you say you were a consequentialist, as you've mentioned, and say, So my intuitions are very strongly towards something I call negative utilitarianism.

For me, it's pretty obvious there's more suffering than joy in this world, at least in the sentient creatures on this planet. So reducing suffering, suffering states of consciousness should always have priority. Therefore, seriously exploring the space of possibilities with that normative context of finding ways of alleviating suffering, you know, not just for entertainment or so.

That's almost something one could say one is obliged to do, um, not because of oneself, but in the service of all Not only suffering humans, but maybe also suffering, um, other, other kinds of animals on, on this planet. We have to explore what increases our flexibility and our plasticity. Is there something?

We have to explore if any of these non everyday realities... Um, can actually help, uh, in reducing suffering, or if they have, it's of course most interesting from a philosopher's perspective, if they have a genuine epistemic potential. That is, if something can be known in this state, these states, that cannot be known via theories, words, arguments, proofs, something that is sub symbolic.

in the brain, but it's still a form of knowledge, um, and I think there are deep forms of pre linguistic knowledge, uh, in this vast space, so it's not only phenomenology, it's not only making the world appear to you in another way, the question is rather, could there be an epistemic That takes what exactly the point you have mentioned, the vastness of this space, serious, but under some normative constraint, like wanting to reduce suffering in the world or gain insights.

Which in its in turn creates a lot of other problems, I mean you can't just come back from a meditation retreat or from a mushroom trip in the mountains and then proclaim your insights and they all would need an independent statement. Everything that you want to put out in public space, it needs an independent justification.

And, um, the question is what you do with ineffable things that you cannot possibly speak about to other people, that have, which have this signature of knowing, which have, give you this feeling this was an insight. Because, As we know, insights can be hallucinated.

You know, that something feels like an insight doesn't mean it is one.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Do

you think there's a

potential for insight in these altered states?

[00:27:03] Matt Geleta: I, yeah, you know, I absolutely do.

I think, um, and I think you're right to point out that some of it is. potentially ineffable. It's, I don't think it's clear to me that it is, it's not clear to me, you know, if I was to map out the space of insights, what proportion of them would be, you know, would overlap with the space of what can be talked about in language, for example, but there, there is certainly some that can.

Um, I think, um, the, you know, you talked about the psychedelic experience, giving one the insight that there is, there is much more to the space of possible experiences that your mind can do. Um, and I think this particular insight is very salient in the case of neuroethics and neurotechnology. Um, and you know, what we talked about at the beginning, the, the ethics of creating, um, artificial sentient systems because I think the, um,

you know, I think it increases the ethical weight to that question when one

realizes What a small change to the chemistry of one's brain can do to the resultant volume of, you know, space of potential suffering, for example.

I think, um, you know, that, that, if it's true that taking three, five grams of psilocybin

mushrooms can,

[00:28:22] Thomas Metzinger: a lot.

[00:28:23] Matt Geleta: that's a, that's a, yeah, that's a very high dose if they're dry, uh, can, can, It, it basically make your

previous notion of an ego tunnel seem infinitesimally small and you realize that there are levels of bliss and levels of suffering that are so much more vast than you could have imagined in, sort of, in both directions and are such a small change.

You can then just imagine if you had to instantiate Um, a computation on a much more powerful system than your brain, what levels of experience one might get. And if certainly if it's a suffering experience, um, you know, one computer might have more suffering than all of humanity for all of history.

Um,

[00:29:02] Thomas Metzinger: Yes,

yes.

[00:29:04] Matt Geleta: and for me, this is an epistemic insight.

This is an insight that, um, one has subjectively, experientially, but. Um, is something that has sort of, you know, it's, it's a, it's a very practical truth to, to realize.

[00:29:18] Thomas Metzinger: Hmm.

That's all very interesting. But while I'm listening to you, this, these images come up in my mind. After I had finished my PhD thesis, um, in 1985, um, I went to India with my backpack to listen to the talks of J. Krishnamurti in Madras. And, uh, then I went, uh, On to Australia,

and then there were some things in Nimbin, uh, that happened to me.

And, uh, uh,

[00:29:48] Matt Geleta: heh

[00:29:50] Thomas Metzinger: exactly what you're talking about. Um, that's interesting. So if you would even... So the other thing I have to mention, I just come back from the huge INSIGHT conference in Berlin, um, rethinking psychedelics with more than 500 attendants, and it was just breathtaking to see these 500 young people, uh, so intensely searching and researching and developing something.

And a lot of us have commented on how different this is from a standard conference in analytical philosophy or neuroscience, um, just the existential seriousness or the existential touchness of the, um, participants as opposed to, you know, careerism or something in academic conferences. That was, um, uh, very impressive, but I, I think you make a, a very simple, but very convincing point.

Just the value in not, uh, experiencing any specific content at all, just the experience of what is possible. what you never thought was possible before. Another very simple thing I thought is, you know, a large majority of cognitive scientists and philosophers today will agree on some claim that what you consciously experience is a model of reality, in some sense, as I've been saying for three decades.

And a standard way of putting this,

which is also not new now, many people converge on, is that waking consciousness is a controlled online hallucination. It's one thing to believe this and to write about this. But another thing to experience what that means the hard way, uh, you know, uh, what that means that this is a model of reality, uh, to have something like opacification in my terminology, or perhaps even global opacity, um, not as an intellectual point, but as something that really strikes you.

Because.

You are part of the simulation too, I mean,

and, uh, that is really something that can be extremely helpful. And I think in a very simple way, I think, for instance, a silent meditation retreat that goes well. Or say, are also...

a cure against superficiality. So you mentioned recognizing how vast a space of possibility is. I mentioned just realizing what this means that this is a model. But I think both things I mean, if things go right, they cure superficiality. It's very hard to live a superficial life, to continue living a superficial life after this.

I mean, some people do this as a defense and avoidance reaction because they didn't want that. That got way too far, you know. Just as Aldous Huxley in my... Favorite passage in the doors of perception as a passage where he says, I found myself on the brink of panic. This I thought was going too far. And , of course, um, you can know, you can deeply understand what he meant by writing this.

And of course, there's a subset of people. Who will never go there again, because it went much too far for them, and who will spend the rest of their lives, you know, keeping their ego tunnel small, and, um... Do you think, because you mentioned ethics and consequentialism, do you think there's something like an ethical obligation, or an ethical point, in exploring the vastness of phenomenal state space?

[00:34:24] Matt Geleta: Well, it's, it's something that I wanted to actually ask you in maybe a different way because

[00:34:28] Thomas Metzinger: But I I just asked you,

[00:34:30] Matt Geleta: Well, uh, this, the short, the short, the short answer is

yes. The short answer is

yes.

Um,

[00:34:35] Thomas Metzinger: Thank you.

[00:34:35] Matt Geleta: ab abstracting a away, you know, any ethical decision we make. Um, if you, if you are somewhat of a consequentialist at the end of the day, abstracting away the fact that it's physically instantiated in actions and in someone's biology and so on.

At the end of what you're doing is moving around in state space, um, in phenomenal, you know, the state of experiences. Um, and I think that that is the thing that is static once you abstract away all of the fluff.

Um, and so, yes, uh, I think it, it's the only sort of logically consistent way to think about these things, but I, I know you've, uh, you've thought about this a lot harder than, than I do.

And even to the extent of, you know, asking questions like, should we, um, should we mandate certain experiences or should certain experiences be illegal?

Um, and I actually wanted to, to get to, to get to that, you know, to, to what extent do you believe that. We should have, um, sort of ethical obligations towards exploring versus not exploring parts of this potential state of experiences.

[00:35:41] Thomas Metzinger: Well, um, there is this deeper issue. Uh, I think normative sentences have no truth values, uh, to be, um, to be more precise. So I think if one, takes a more serious stance on all this. There are no moral facts in reality, um, if one thinks about this rigorously, that could make normative statements true or false.

So in, I think in the Anglo Saxon tradition, it's also called non cognitivism, that you, um,

strictly speaking, there's nothing to be known there. Um, But, um, there are, of course, a lot of things almost all human beings can, um, agree on. So we have deep seated moral intuitions almost all of us share.

So one example, for instance, that you find In almost all cultures and human beings is that it is more important to help a suffering person suffer less than to make a neutral or happy person more happy.

That shows, this intuition shows that for beings like us there is no symmetry between joy or suffering. There is a, a priority of reducing suffering. So as finite beings that... know very little of reality, that is something we can converge on. And then there's also this old philosophical idea of self knowledge, that you should try to gain knowledge of what you really are.

And, um, I think if you take a closer look, these two are very intimately related. You know, if you want to reduce the suffering of other sentient creatures, you have to understand the deep structure of your own suffering first, and you have to explore all kinds of, um, self knowledge that are available to you.

Very important is meta theoretical philosophical knowledge and evidence based, rational argument based scientific self knowledge. No discussion about this, but there are other ways. So, um, the deep structure of your own suffering. Like, um, sitting in meditation and say having a longing for retaliation arise in you because somebody said something nasty to you in the corridor yesterday.

And to be with this longing for revenge, for retaliation tomorrow when I meet the guy again, you know, um, not in a way that judges it or cognitively penetrates it or Selects it, or tries to suppress it by just being with it, exploring by being with it what is actually my own hatred, my aggression, the things I don't like, where are they located in my body, what kind of bodily senses, not the fantasy, you know, not the mental movie that rushes off into the future and tries to distract you, But stay with the local sensation.

What is that actually? Hatred. What is horniness? I don't know. What is existential despair? What is this, this loneliness, um, this deeper form of loneliness, and having the courage to just go there on a non conceptual level, not by thinking, but by gently attending. That's a form of self knowledge too. And that is completely underrated as an example in our culture, in our societies.

We don't do that. But maybe if we did this, we might understand things about why we are so aggressive or why we sometimes are so lonely that we couldn't understand any other way. And, of course, if you do the thing that I've now described, say, in combination with a psychoactive substance, say, under MDMA, uh, or so, um, and see what this is and try to accept or look at without anxiety at the hating part, at the retaliating element in you, this can be extremely fruitful.

You know, and I think we still have a lot to gain if we would combine, say, the deep wisdom of a sustained meditation practice with some, some of the new molecules that have been discovered in a, you know, protected space in a sane and rational way, and then combine this with the best of neuroscience and scientifically based therapy we know, alleviate human, uh, suffering, a combination of methods.

But in order to do this, as somebody just recently said, uh,

in English, I, I think you can say, you have to know that there's a there, there.

[00:41:11] Matt Geleta: Yeah.

Sam Harris

says that very often.

[00:41:14] Thomas Metzinger: Okay. So I think

things like exploring altered states of consciousness, and that can also include Being alone in nature for extended periods or extreme sports.

It's not all psychoactive substances and meditation. There's a lot, uh, uh, there. Can only give you a feeling of the vastness of phenomenal state space. And the question I wanted to try to ask to you, I mean, do you have the sense, do you have the moral intuition that one is in a sense... Is one obliged to do this, uh, if one wants to, if one is somebody who wants to make a contribution to the common good somehow, uh, that one is obliged to these, uh, deeper forms of self knowledge, or is this just an option?

Okay, if that's your thing, you do it. If it isn't,

[00:42:16] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[00:42:16] Thomas Metzinger: you have a career in children.

[00:42:19] Matt Geleta: Uh, well, I think if you are, um, if you, if you do believe that you are morally obligated to reduce global suffering in some sense, and you believe that exploring phenomenal state space is a way to do that, then I do think, uh, one is morally obliged to do so. Um, I don't think it's necessarily clear though, that.

That is, you know, empirically, as a fact, that is necessarily the best way to those ends.

Um, for example, I think an argument you hear a lot, um, against, you know, very, very deep, very intense contemplative practices is that it takes a lot of time and, and people end up spending a lot of time doing that and not operating in the real world.

Um, and that is a, I think that is a very real challenge, you know. Um, somebody could get... Could spend a life exploring this space internally and miss the chance to, you know, operate externally. Um, and I'm sure, I'm sure this is a balance that you've, you've thought about or the, you know, this is a question you've, you've thought about a lot.

[00:43:24] Thomas Metzinger: I want to give out a recommendation out of your very own Monash University in Melbourne. There's just a brand new

Trans and Cognitive Science paper, I think, entitled Do Contemplative Practices Make You More Moral? And, um, Coming to a very differentiated result that some practices may, for instance,

like just mindfulness practice, may actually possibly weaken, um, Your, um, your capacity to form moral intentions, uh, because of the detachment it creates, uh, like to, I mean, all I'm saying is that is a really interesting first step.

We need more research on this. So it is possible that a certain state of consciousness that involved de immersion and detachment. also weaken a person's capacity to form a firm intention and sustain it, an ethical or moral intention. And there were some other examples. Of course, there are many of different practices.

And on the other hand, Something I've heard many times in my life, in these spiritual traditions, often the question comes up, actually an uninteresting question is, but how do you know somebody is liberated? Or how do you know somebody is very advanced? And it seems there's a canonical answer over the centuries which says, um, you can't, uh, but the best marker is ethical sensitivity.

If that person really starts perceivably. to act in a very compassionate and ethically sensitive way. That's something you can go by. Um, that's one possible view on this, but I must say, I have the same thing you just voiced, also for, how would one say, non integrated psychedelic experiences.

if I now see some, what I might dub the old heroes, from the time when we were 30 years old. And quite courageous in certain fields of research.

Uh, many of those folks, if I look at my old friends right now, they don't age very well. They don't look, uh, too cool to me. Um, uh, I see many examples of people who've had deep and far reaching experiences who turn into conspiracy theorists, people who have done systematic and serious psychedelic therapy in a formal framework, and still get an alcohol problem 20 years later.

It's a dozen. seem to, you know, reliably last, uh, over a whole lifetime. I don't know if there's any research on it. So it could, could also be that something that works on a short time scale or in a certain period of your life is not, um, the right strategy for a whole life. So I'm, I'm a bit conservative and very cautious there.

Um, uh, what this, at least the uncontrolled use, which is not under an, how do you say, an ethical perspective, how this will turn out in the long run. Um, and that's just why we need so much more good research on all of this. We would really need good research. So in Germany, we now have two fantastic studies with psilocybin on therapy resistant depressive patients, um, funded by the government, all very good.

Um, I just heard talks on it, but what is not clear is how long that lasts. So if I remember correctly, you have very encouraging results in about 48 percent of those patients, but then you have to see six months, two years, relapses, um, will a second dose help? What kind of adjunct therapy will help? what will not help.

We have to do a lot of research on this and in the end we might arrive at a differentiated picture that we see.

Okay, this is, there's a certain group of people for whom that kind of intervention is good and for others that will not help and so on and so

forth.

[00:48:26] Matt Geleta: You've, uh, you've talked about, in the end of your, your upcoming book, the idea of a Bewussteinskultur. Um, can you tell me more about that and, and what you envision? What, like, what the ideal conception of, of that would be?

[00:48:39] Thomas Metzinger: Well, so to your audience, I'm looking for an Anglo Saxon publisher. So I've

published a small book that you don't have in English. It's called Bewusstseinskultur, 6th of January. It's making waves in Germany. It's in the fifth print run and I'm having unexpectedly interesting discussions on public events.

And it's, um, Some, there's going to be Polish, Dutch, and Romanian, but we don't have an English publisher right now. That's just a problem. But on that side, there's a 20 page excerpt with a translation that's publicly available on the net, which can give you an

impression. That book is small. It has three chapters. The second a bewusstseinskultur.

Which roughly translates a culture of consciousness. It's a very simple idea. I've had, I've, it's, it's not new. I've been talking about it, but I just brought it together in, in one chapter. Is that first, um, You begin a discussion or begin to think about what a good state of consciousness is. So you don't just ask like in classical ethics, what makes an ethics a good action, but we begin also a cultural societal dialogue about What states of consciousness are good states of consciousness?

Which ones do we want to show our children? Which ones do we want to die in? Which states of consciousness can we force upon animals? Which can we force upon machines? And so on and so forth. Should there be any states of consciousness that should be illegal? Because human beings cannot handle them. Um, If you have results, if a social discussion on what good states of consciousness are, have first results, or if you have your individual results.

Step two is to systematically cultivate them. Say, um, meditate twice a day, or take psilocybin twice a year. in a safe space in a protected environment with a therapist or so. And then the third thing is, and that's the end, is what I call enculturation. You think about how the positive results of such a process of exploring valuable states of consciousness can be embedded into societal and cultural practice.

How we can, you know, change our societies. And I have a very sober view on this. It's, uh, it's, for me, it's a form of applied ethics. And, um, the goal is just to minimize harm and to maximize the benefit for voo. So that's the idea of Beowulf's Science Kulture.

And in that little book, it's contextualized in two directions.

One direction is, there's a chapter called Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty. And, I mean, there is a, it's not in print. There is an essay flying around on the internet I wrote, which has been very impactful, called Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty. The question is, can there be a truly secular form of spiritual practice, an intellectually honest form of practice that doesn't make you commit intellectual suicide or any guru's belief systems and all the other nonsense?

Maybe that is not a coherent idea. But I've said a while ago, we should think about, because that's something we need, um, can there be a secular form of spiritual practice with, that has depth? But at the same time, intellectual honesty. So that's one context in which consciousness culture is contextualized.

There's a depth dimension to it. And then there is something else most people find shocking, but what I find shocking is how many people agree to it. I claim in the first chapter that we are asking these questions in a very special historical situation.

And that is if we apply the principle. Of intellectual honesty, not to spiritual practice, but to the running climate catastrophe, it's very clear that we're failing.

Uh, it doesn't look good.

of course, physically According to physical science and according to climate science, reaching the 1. 5 degree goal or even only the 2 degree goal, um, is still possible. But if we look about at psychological facts, sociological facts, and the political institutions in their current state, it is just not intellectually honest anymore to think that we could make this.

And we actually, we're moving into a very difficult historical epoch, um, an epoch, I say, where human, humankind will lose its dignity by ruining the planet and the atmosphere. So one of the general questions I embed this in is, is how does one, as an individual, for instance, if you are a young person like you, how does one preserve one's self respect in an area where humankind as a whole, uh, not in an area, in a, in a historical epoch where humankind as a whole loses its dignity.

What do you do as an individual if you're born into such an insane time? That also has to do, of course, with meditation and altered states of consciousness. How can you live in a world, uh, like this and, I mean, bear these news and see this, that we're actually not able to act? On a global scale, uh, and that we, we are reaching a point where we cannot take ourselves seriously anymore because we see all these facts about the climate catastrophe and we see that even consciously experience the fact that We see them and we don't act, doesn't change our behavior.

It's, it's, it's, in a way, it cracks your self model, in a way. It's, it's a danger to our mental health, um, to see how humanity behaves. And, um, so the question of a bewusstseinskultur, of a culture, culture, culture of consciousness, is asked. in a deeper spiritual context and in a very, very special, um, historical context, namely the likely failure of humankind in the face of this global poli crisis.

I mean, it's also mass extinction and in interlocking crisis are there. And I think, so Just to report, I've had about eight months of public discussions of this book now, and perhaps the most shocking, uh, experience for me is how many people just have, have kind of a coming out and say, yes, I think you're absolutely right in the first chapter.

This is, this is not going well. It's very unlikely that we manage. I've, I thought one shouldn't say this in the public because one doesn't want to take hope away from young people. And it's kind of not politically correct to publicly state. That one reads the news just as you do them and reads scientific facts just as you do them.

A long row of people. This is just one single person. A well known professor of economics who says he doesn't buy the pessimism. It can all be done with the tools of capitalism. It can be done with proper CO2 pricing. Uh, we can. still do this thing, uh, which is probably right, that the economic tools would be there, but are the Saudis going, are going to go along?

Is Putin going to go along? China wants to be neutral in 2060. That's much too late. In the US, 44% of the population doesn't believe climate change is a problem, you know. If you look at the global context, um,

you tell me about Australia. My last memory of Australia is that the coal industry has an enormous political influence.

Is this still the

case?

[00:58:00] Matt Geleta: That's still the case.

[00:58:02] Thomas Metzinger: Yeah.

But you are having catastrophes already, right? You're having these enormous fires and stuff.

[00:58:09] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, we've, uh, we've had several catastrophes back to back. We've had, um, very severe fires for the past couple years, droughts. We've then preceded by severe flooding around the country. Um, and it's, uh, it's, it's certainly a story we've been seeing. Whether there is a case for maybe not optimism, but basically what is your case for realism here?

Um, you know, if you think very abstractly, um, you know, humans have been set off this evolutionary path, and we have ended up in a state that we are currently. in through this very random process.

And I mean, our question is from, from this point, you know, where we are today, is there a case to be made that something like your conception of Wu Stan's couture can be achieved?

Or are we too far down this, down this evolutionary train?

[00:59:02] Thomas Metzinger: Um, very important, Matt. Uh, very important, uh, question. So, there is an urgency of change. And those people who are at all awake, they perceive it all over the planet. One thing that has to be said is, so I think, as I say in the book, optimism is not an option anymore because it has a delusional quality to it.

It's not facing the facts. Pessimism, I mean, an ideological form of pessimism, so it's also not the answer. So I think one would need something, it maybe sounds weird to some ears, but a spiritual form of realism, of just being with the facts. That's what we need in this historical transition period. But I also have to say, I mean, it's not excluded in Global population is a complex system.

That planet is a complex system. And the energy is now being raised in the system and the population still increases. It's not excluded that... Such a system unexpectedly drops into a new ordered state, you know, we, sometimes it happens, you know, there are things I, I often play a game with myself as, as Thomas, where have you been really wrong?

Absolutely wrong. And one thing I was absolutely wrong with, I I thought

that would be. uh, rebellions, uh, in Italy or Ireland or, you know, uh, I mean, there would be uprisings, but, uh, somehow, at some point, almost everybody stopped smoking. Uh, and, uh, that contradicted my intuitions and I think, I'm sure there are many things we don't yet know, but really the two things that make me rather pessimistic, uh, is first what many people don't understand is the inertia of physical systems.

It's a little counterintuitive. Like, if we would stop all emissions today to zero. tomorrow. What we have done so far would still have an effect centuries down the road, you know, to the, uh, to the glaciers and to the melting and, and all that. And so the, the, uh, the inertia of physical systems is something the human mind doesn't comprehend.

Another thing where really bad is. At is, is exponential developments. We're not good at understanding that sometimes things can happen very fast if thresholds have been passed or so. Um, on the other hand, the question is, is, I mean, what stance do you take to all of this as an individual person? You know, it's in the end, it's you that matters, your consciousness and.

Yeah. Yeah. I've even asked the question if there's a way of... Uh, failing gracefully, or failing with dignity, accepting that one has, it's not our fault, one has to be, has been born into an epoch like this, and if there's an attitude, That doesn't lead to emotional burnout or bitterness or something like that, but allows one to do more, say, as a climate activist or something.

That would be a criterion for me that makes an altered state of consciousness good. Does your meditation practice, does your occasional psychedelic experience enable you to live with these facts without repression, without bitterness, you know, without... Turning to a terrorist or something like this and still increase what you can do in your little world that you have been a part of the solution, you know, I mean, to have a mode of living that one says there is probably no solution.

But I want to live a life in a way that I had been part of the solution, if there, if there had been one, and in that way, you know, uh, protect one's self respect, because I think it, it comes, it now also comes to a question of how do you protect your own sanity and your mental health in the face of all these news, it's, it becomes a practical thing, psychiatrists already know it.

There's climate anxiety, there's very sensitive people who get problems, um, already. Of course there is a crowd now after that, uh, book, there are people who think I'm saying, and that's not what I'm saying,

we should all meditate now and then everything will be good. Uh, uh, I think this will not happen

, you know, and, uh, This, our response has to include that, uh, that this will probably not happen,

that the majority of human beings on the planet are either so misinformed or suffering so much themselves, have difficult lives that just don't allow them, um, to think about these things too much, that it probably will be only a small minority.

But that also means... That people like you and probably many of your listeners who live in rich, privileged countries and who have the freedom to think about this, that they have a very large responsibility to think about these things. And, uh, I hope that I'm just wrong, uh, but, um, I think a first important step is, um, to face the facts, you know, to be with the facts.

This is really not looking good. I don't know, how is this, at 30, uh, do you have the feeling we can still turn this around on a global scale? Or do you also have that feeling?

[01:05:39] Matt Geleta: It depends on, yeah, it depends on what level the question is asked,

I think, um, because I mean, in some sense, uh, you know, it is, I think it is a true statement that all problems are solvable. Um, and so I do, I do think this one is, is solvable. Um, but, uh, actually something that you, you mentioned just about, about the, the Human ability to sort of perceive things like exponential growth, you know, we're just not wired to do that.

This really brought up, like, a deeper question. Um, you know, we're talking about the climate crisis as one particular example of a problem that we're facing now. And... This, I mean, it is a, absolutely a very, very serious problem. There is a sense in which it's constrained to, you know, our planet and the biological organisms that live here.

You know, if I think ethically, what is the worst thing that could happen? As bad as it gets, the impacts are constrained to the biological organisms that live on the planet

currently.

[01:06:44] Thomas Metzinger: hmm. Mm

hmm. Mm hmm.

[01:06:46] Matt Geleta: you know, we've also been talking about... Neurotechnology, and you've thought a lot about AI ethics. And if you think about exponential growth, there's this idea that, um, if one were to create postpartum systems that could feel the scale of experience.

could so outrageously dwarf the experiences of biological systems on the planet here that the ethical importance of that decision is so much more important than, let's say, the climate crisis and that a mature culture of consciousness would be focusing. Actually, much more on those questions, just because of how enormous the scale could be.

And so what is your thinking here on, you know, in all these, there are lots of problems to be thinking about. What should somebody be focused on? Is it things like the climate crisis or culture of humans? Or is it actually, um, the question of conscious postbiotic systems? How do you think about that question?

[01:07:45] Thomas Metzinger: Well, co founded a number of years ago the German Effective Altruism Foundation, and there you, of course, you really have, uh, this important question you're arising is, uh, priority setting. So you have, if you want to make a contribution, if you want to do good, in a sense, you have limited resources, and how do you allocate them?

It is, of course, possible. There are certain things I hate to talk about it, because you begin to sound like some

delusional Californian. But the question, of course, is, it could be the case, um, that For reasons of our biological history, our long evolutionary history, um, suffering free biological life or human life is just not an option, or only for very few people.

You know, the liberated monk, uh, in some cave or something like this. But...

That, um, non biological systems, who do not have this, this absolutely, this deepest, you know, I think we have deeply, we embody a cognitive bias. Um, so one example of a deep cognitive bias, we, All humans embody is the discounting of future values.

Say if you were an ethical, effective altruist and you assign very simply a value of one to every human life, then it doesn't make any difference if that person is already born or not. Future lives also have a value of one. That's not what we do. We have this heredity, I think the English word is hereditary coefficient, like our children have 50 percent of our genes, our grandchildren 25%, that's like half siblings, and then solidarity is just gone beyond your grandchildren.

That's a massive distortion. We discount the quality of life, you know, with the dignity and also the options for action. Of millions and millions of future human beings coming after us. That's a great distortion. A much deeper distortion in our minds is what I call existence bias in that, um, in that book.

Human beings will always... prefer to live on even if it's not in their own interest. If it's clear they will only suffer. We are survival machines and we have this craving for existence. And there are very interesting computational mathematical, um, ways to say what that actually means. Today we are anti entropic systems.

We always minimize uncertainty and keep our predict ourselves into existence. We have interesting new conceptual tools to say this in a very precise way. And an, an AI, even a conscious AI of the future could not have, um, this, um, existence bias that we have. The Buddhists call it Bhavatana, uh, the thirst or craving for existence.

A totally rational but conscious AI of the future. could switch itself off if it sees no reason for further existence, um, according to its own values. Human, biological creatures don't do that, you know, uh, and it is of course conceivable that suffering free states of conscious experience are very difficult to realize on biological hardware, but that we could find out How to do this on artificial systems.

Now, then, now it's begun beginning to sound like you're a standard transhumanist billionaire from California, you know, now it's, now it's beginning to, to sound like this, uh, sexy narrative that always comes, which is itself a form of mortality denial. But still, I think you have a very good point with your question.

Imagine we could create. suffering free conscious experience on intelligent machines.

Would we ethically be obliged to prioritize this over biological beings and say, it's, um, I don't know the English, uh, word.

Um, if you have four people running a race and you, I think a baton and you pass a baton on from one runner to the

next, yeah, we should pass the baton to post biological evolution because we see.

We're not going anywhere,

[01:12:44] Matt Geleta: Mhm.

Haha.

[01:12:47] Thomas Metzinger:

uh, in, even if our phenomenal state space is large, maybe our behavioral space is very limited. And then we, we, we should think, could there be another stage in the evolution of conscious systems that does. For instance, without egoic self awareness completely, or does without suffering, conscious suffering completely?

These are very interesting questions, but, um, they are, it's, it's, it's difficult to discuss them in the public, because

you know, all kinds, get all kinds of crazy people who are suddenly super interested in these questions, and put a lot of noise on, on the signal.

[01:13:38] Matt Geleta: Yeah.

[01:13:39] Thomas Metzinger: But, of course, um, if. AI starts to develop at the pace it's currently developing for another three decades.

It's, um, very reasonable to assume that they would, for instance, manage the planet much better than we do. They would manage the remaining atmosphere much better than we do. And maybe they could also put us into something like reservations. Uh, you know, be nice to us. And let us peacefully die out or even live there.

But the question is, of course, I mean, if you pass the baton over, the baton is gone. And that is, in itself, an ethical responsibility to strive for. Do you have any views on this? Do you have any opinions on

[01:14:35] Matt Geleta: yeah, I do. Well, I mean, I spoke a couple months ago to Mark Soames, who, and I think you've written about him several years ago. I'm not sure how, how close you are with him

and to his

current

work.

[01:14:46] Thomas Metzinger: We have never met, but I have read large parts of that latest book, the last book. I was, for example, I was amazed, just to say that I was amazed, the clarity with which he can explain, um, the free energy people in natural language to normal people. That I think was a fantastic job he did in the book. And then we have, uh, Non identical but very similar views on the role, say, of the ascending reticular formation.

That's maybe too long now, but I think there's this tradition of people who think, like I've said in the past, that the human self model is grounded. In the invariances of very elementary bioregulation, you know, the life processes itself. Antonio Damasio has said that. Um, Panksepp has that, said that. Mark Solms has, uh, said this.

I now have a slightly different view, I think. It might be possible that the human self model bottoms out in pure awareness and not in this deep embodiment in the life, uh, process. But I understand very well, uh, what he's saying. And, uh, he's a neuroscientist and I'm not.

[01:16:11] Matt Geleta: Yeah, but he, um, he puts together, he puts together an ethical argument towards the end of that book that informs his current research. And the argument is basically, you know, his view, if you believe all the things that, that he said about the origins of consciousness, then it is an inevitability that somebody is going to instantiate this in maybe a biological system, but maybe some other substrate, but somebody will.

Engineer this system. And he says that if that is true, then we better make sure that that is done in a way that's not aligned with commercial incentives. And that is, uh, you know, done in as safe an environment as possible. And, and for that reason, he's actively, he, he and his colleagues are actively trying to create these.

the systems, using the theory of, you know, free energy minimization and so on. And so that is what his, his, his team is sort of working on as a project. And to me, this, um, is, I mean, this seems to misalign to some things that you've written about in the past. You know, you've written a paper on arguing for a, um, global moratorium

on

endeavors to

[01:17:23] Thomas Metzinger: Well, yeah, I've,

I've, I said this, but I've written so to speak an official paper in 2021 saying there should be a moratorium on synthetic phenomenology until 2050, until we really know what we're doing there, because the consequences might be so far reaching, even hard to predict for us. Uh, of course I'm not naive.

I have no illusions. Nobody will care about this. There are, uh, Dan Dehane, the Paris lab has said it, you know, I'm at the ASSC consciousness community. Michael Graziano has, uh, said it in, in, in Princeton, one could build, uh, um, uh, artificial consciousness just for entertainment value as it takes it, you know.

Then there are these people in Japan, Ryota Kanai, uh, um, uh, Who would immediately do it, I think, if they can do it, and also frame their work like this. And, uh, I think in Australia, if I understand now, Tukhia in Melbourne, right, he would, he's also very interested in artificial consciousness and wouldn't have any inhibitions to create that, if I understand that correctly.

So there are at least four people who might all take very seriously their brilliant minds and very smart, who would immediately do this. So, um, the first premise is probably, right, somebody is going to do that. Um, I have a very sober way, um, I said it in one sentence in, uh, of looking at biological evolution.

I said in one sentence in the Ego Tunnel that it is not something to glorify, to be glorified. We are impressed by the beauty of the different shapes and forms. forms and life and plants and it's just unfathomable, uh, the creativity of evolution, but it also has created an ocean of suffering and confusion in a region of the physical universe where nothing like this existed before.

One also has to see this and I think evolution has created much more negative phenomenology than positive phenomenology in animals. So... That's the reason why I think We should not, because we haven't got much to go by than our own architecture and our own minds, to recreate this, um, on artificial carrier systems that may, may have, think of quantum computers, uh, much higher Pyramid architecture Processing speed, uh, uh, than we have.

We should be very careful before we have understood the deep causes of our own suffering to multiply ourselves on these potentially faster or more efficient systems. So that's why I wouldn't do it. And the thing is, um, I Solms.

create an ethical synthetic phenomenology lab. There will of course be hundreds of other people who still do the same thing and all over the planet, just driven by career interests or commercial interests. Or even organized crime. There are these fantasies people have had that they could blackmail governments by saying, we're going to create an enormous amount of virtual suffering if you don't do that.

And, uh, there are these, uh, scenarios, so all the other actors on the planet, will not stop, just say, because Mark Zolms has an ethical artificial consciousness lab. And it's also plausible to assume that some of these other actors will have more resources than the ethical artificial consciousness people.

So it's a difficult situation. It's a difficult situation. And, um, it also raises these Deeper questions. That's the question of Bavussian's Couture, of course. It raises this deeper question. Okay, if we do this. If we want to be the first ones. And if we want to do it on a strictly... ethical grounding the creating of, creation of synthetic phenomenology.

What is that grounding? I mean, what is it?

It, the beauty of it, it leads right back into classical philosophical questions. Like, what is a good state of consciousness? And, uh, what is a good action? Um, these questions don't go away. And just saying, we'll do it in an ethical, sensible, sensible way, doesn't solve that problem.

What is an ethical, sensible way? So I give you one example. So as one highly decorated law person in Brussels, in Europe, listening to me with this artificial consciousness research, and then completely, he just said, I don't see this. Why shouldn't we make machines suffer? We punish and train animals. We punish and hit our children to educate them.

If there's a learning curve in these systems, and this learning curve can be made steeper by adding artificial suffering, why shouldn't we do something in machines, uh, Um, that we do in children and in animals. And I just thought, oh man.

[01:23:13] Matt Geleta: Yeah.

[01:23:15] Thomas Metzinger: I mean, he was really honest. That was a good argument. But, uh, I thought, oh boy, there are people who actually think like this already now.

You know, if it makes the learn increases And of course we suffer because it has increased our efficiency in evolution. That's why we have conscious suffering. Now if AI developers begin to think as that as a source for further optimization. That's really nasty. You know, that's really nasty to take the worst out of our own mental structure, say for commercial interests, to make something more efficient.

Um, and The question is, okay, would we also say no animal should suffer anymore from human hands? Would we also say we stop punishing children? Or is child suffering actually a necessary part of a good and healthy education, good and healthy development? So I think it opens a can of worms and you can't just stand there and say, we'll do it in an ethically sensible way, because then you have to know what that is.

I mean, um, if one could guarantee we can build artificial systems which are enlightened, uh, which are by guarantee in a suffering free state right from the beginning of their existence, that would actually be a point. But in order to do that, the question is also, um, I mean, what are suffering free states of consciousness?

Do we know anything about those? And that's also what this book The Elephant in the Blind is about.

[01:25:13] Matt Geleta: yeah, I mean it actually leads very well to that book because the, it feels like the right starting point for all of this, from a practical perspective, is to understand what a minimal phenomenological experience is, um, modulo the question of whether a What is experienced in humans is, is minimal in some broader sense, but um, you know, it is the, we, we know that we're conscious and that's kind of the only thing that we can be certain of as far as it comes to consciousness, so maybe let's, maybe let's turn to that book, um, you've, one thing that was really interesting is you've explored this concept of minimal phenomenological experiences using a survey methodology.

Um, so basically you're self reporting people who have, they've had experiences of various types and you've asked them about it. And something that really struck me as interesting in that whole endeavor is if this experience is In some sense, it's truly minimal in some sense, I would expect that means it is, um, it is absent of language and concept and memory.

And if that's true, then in what sense can somebody self report on an experience of this type? I'm not sure you can do much better, but how do you think of, you know, getting a spotlight onto, onto what this MPE thing is,

given that it's probably

divorced

from?

[01:26:42] Thomas Metzinger: this is related to many things. There's this thing. I don't know. Have you ever carefully opened your fridge to see if the light really went out?

[01:26:51] Matt Geleta: Of course I

Have

[01:26:52] Thomas Metzinger: you ever done

that?

[01:26:53] Matt Geleta: wonder who

that guy

is. We've

come to

find

out.

[01:26:55] Thomas Metzinger: And, uh, that's of course, uh, if somebody tries, wants to know if they actually had a selfless state of consciousness, uh,

[01:27:03] Matt Geleta: how did

[01:27:03] Thomas Metzinger: um, it just, the mental agency creates a subtle sense of trying to look there, a subtle sense of effortness, uh, effortfulness that, Um, it introduces duality, a subject object duality into the state again.

What you ask is one of the most interesting philosophical questions. I've kind of flagged it in being no one, uh, almost a quarter century ago. So if somebody claims, as some spiritual folks sometimes do, that all psychedelic people That they've had a conscious experience in which all ego, all self, however the terminology is, was absent.

Then the question is, how can that be an autobiographical memory you report from? How can that be auto? biographical. If it was concurrently ineffable and you weren't there at the time when that conscious episode happened, who, who actually claims, um, that this was part of their own life? And I think there are a lot of subtleties there.

It, it's possible that they were actually lived experiences of the organism, and they were part of the organism's lives, and that there is a mental architecture, uh, later, kind of faking it. Um, there's a very good paper I want to recommend by Raphael Millière on this. I don't know If it's fully satisfying, but to have second order memory and a mental architecture that would embed a memory of a selfless state into a self model that then creates the experience, I have had this, this was part of my life, which would actually be wrong.

You know, there's a, there's something that is misrepresentational in there. But, um, it's of course a great methodological problem if you want to look at non egoic states of consciousness. And if you want to do qualitative research or psychometrics and take reports seriously, there's this deeper issue. I can imagine, I said this ages ago, I can imagine your standard analytical philosopher who says you don't have to take utterances reports like this at all, because they're incoherent.

I mean, if you weren't there... How can you report about this right now? And, uh, but then again, you know, human phenomenology is so much richer and more subtle and nuanced than our conceptual schemes. Another example, for instance, is there is this experience I've dubbed timeless change. Logically, it would seem either you represent timelessness.

without temporal property, or you represent a flow of change. But real phenomenology shows it's not true. It's on the level of words. Human beings can experience timeless change. Uh, the experience of flow, the kaleidoscope of sensory perceptions as embedded to an internal silence or what, however you would like to call it.

That's a possibility. That's our, just, it's the beginning of our conversation. That's the vastness of our phenomenal state. State space, the possibilities in that state space, and they outrun, clearly outrun linguistic description. There are things there

[01:31:05] Matt Geleta: Haha.

[01:31:06] Thomas Metzinger: we have almost no tools to, maybe poetry or metaphors to

[01:31:11] Matt Geleta: Mm.

[01:31:11] Thomas Metzinger: And, um, so I take reports of people who say, They weren't there, or they say they weren't, in a way, they were absent and there at the same time, or something like this. Contradictory reports. I take them very seriously. I don't think that's fraud, or these people are lying. They are just trying to convey something that unround, how do you say, outruns the grain of our linguistic description.

But these are real and important.

[01:31:48] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I think the, um, the, the title, The Elephant and the Blind, and that, that story also has actually been mentioned on this podcast of the, you know, the blind man feeling this strange creature and trying to figure out what it is. And they do form an image that is particularly not accurate, but I guess they form some image.

I think that is probably a good. I guess that, that image, that metaphor kind of gets to, gets to this issue quite well.

you

[01:32:15] Thomas Metzinger: Yeah, the metaphor also contains something else. If you have seven blind men touching the elephant, what none of these blind men understand is that the elephant can see.

[01:32:28] Matt Geleta: hmm.

[01:32:28] Thomas Metzinger: elephant can see them. That's another aspect of the story. They can touch, but the elephant has a completely other modality of knowing them.

And they wouldn't even know that they are being looked at while they poke around and then, and then, you know, touch the elephant. So, um, there are many readings of this old story.

[01:32:55] Matt Geleta: Well, it's um, I do look forward to it being, it being published and, um, I think you just said just before we started talking that you're going to make this freely available.

[01:33:05] Thomas Metzinger: Yes, the MIT press. Although extremely slow in production, it has a, you know, I've been a bit of an open, uh, access pioneer. If you look at the open mind collections and, and stuff I've put on the web and they have this fantastic new program direct to open. So on the 6th of February, this book will be available for free download to everybody.

[01:33:31] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Amazing. And, um, yeah, I'll include the, I'll include the link to it in the show notes here so everyone can come find it here. Um, I think that's a, that's a good place to bring us to a couple of questions I like to ask towards the end of these conversations. Um, the first is on the topic of books.

Obviously, you've written several books, you've, you've, um, read very, very widely. My question is, which book have you most gifted to other people and why?

[01:33:57] Thomas Metzinger: Books I've written myself.

[01:33:59] Matt Geleta: Uh, it doesn't, it could be any, in the class of all books. Which one have you most gifted to

[01:34:04] Thomas Metzinger: Ah, in a class of all books. Um, that's interesting. Uh, I think if I look over all of my lifetime, um, I have given very simple introductory books by J. Krishnamurti to people most often, because I thought that was the best present one could make to someone. Uh, that was actually it, but, um, I don't even know how the English titles, uh, would look, but, uh, I, that's probably what I have most frequently, given to people.

[01:34:42] Matt Geleta: Yeah, great, that's a, that's a good recommendation, again, I'll link it in the notes. Um, my next one goes back to Bewusstein's Kultur, and my question is. You know, if somebody has read about it, they've heard this conversation and they feel that this is something they want to explore and maybe want to cultivate some of the things we've talked about, what advice would you give generically to this type of person as a starting point?

Where do you send

people?

[01:35:10] Thomas Metzinger: Well, um, I am very happy in my own life, I've been lucky in some respects, that I've had a regular meditation practice of four years before I first took a psychedelic, before I ever took LSD for the first time. And, uh, I think it's a good way to start to lay a foundation, but because this is very, um, subtle and takes some time, the question really is the commitment and how much are you Worth to yourself.

I think very conservative. Just go somewhere where you can learn classical Vipassana practice, where you don't get molested by people with the missionary thing, and just learn that. And then the most important thing is, I think you should do this twice a day. You should have an empty stomach for at least two to four hours, so probably before breakfast and before dinner.

And you should minimally do this for 12 months, which means also on the morning of New Year's Eve, which may be a little later, or, uh, on Christmas evening, you know, no exceptions, just Do this twice a day for 12 months and then decide if this is something for you or not. But don't just dabble and go around and be irregular.

But do it for minimally 12 months and then make an informed decision. No, that's not my thing. I'm another kind of person. But you cannot expect to just say, The worst thing is to go to a retreat out of the blue without having any home practice, uh, with having laid, uh, some foundations, and it, meditation is also not something you do with headphones on.

It's not a form of media consumption. Um, so, uh, of course guided meditation can be helpful. to fresh something up or to learn something, but you have to do this, uh, by yourself eventually. And the question is, I don't know how to say this, how to say this in English, how much is your own life worth to yourself?

I mean, a day has 24 hours, but is your own life worth so much for you that you would do this twice a day for 20 or 30 minutes? for a year to test it out. Um, maybe it isn't, you know, maybe it's not that important for you, but I think you should give it some minimal sustained practice, and maybe even not talk about it so much with your friends.

[01:38:07] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[01:38:08] Thomas Metzinger: Not read crazy books. Just do it and see what happens.

[01:38:12] Matt Geleta: Well, Thomas, I think that's a, that's a great place to end it. Um, it's been a really great pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for making

the

[01:38:20] Thomas Metzinger: Same here. Wonderful conversation. Thanks for setting all this up.

In this conversation, we explore the science, philosophy, and history of sex, gender, intersex, and similar topics, including:

• Biological and social determinants of sex and gender

• Medical treatment of people born with atypical sex characteristics

• Ethics of sex and gender affirming medical interventions, especially in the case of children and adolescents

• Conflicts between scientists and activists on matters relating to individual identity

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Website: https://alicedreger.com/

• Books: https://alicedreger.com/books/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/AliceDreger

Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

0:02:20 Alice’s path to studying intersex

0:04:05 What are sex and gender?

0:08:20 Are sex and gender biologically determined?

0:10:14 Is intersex a “problem”?

0:13:00 Sexual orientation vs gender identity

0:16:34 How common is intersex?

0:22:24 Medical treatment of intersex people

0:30:23 Experience of people with intersex

0:41:21 Intersex in children and adolescents

0:44:32 Scientists vs activists

0:55:54 Galileo’s Middle Finger

0:58:21 Book recommendations

1:01:20 Advice for aspiring activists

Introduction

A dialogue between science and activists

Before we get going with the conversation, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the weight of the topics we’re addressing today.

We’re exploring territory that is rife with controversy and misunderstanding, with a very dark history. This is an area that has been a place of suffering for many people, both past and present. It’s also a topic that tends to trigger and polarise people, and for this reason is one that many scientists tend to avoid.

But it's a hugely important topic, and it needs to be discussed more openly, and in public forums like this podcast. This is one of those topics that needs more science, and more open dialogue between scientists, activists, clinicians, and policy makers. Alice has been a world leading figure in championing this dialogue. It was a great pleasure to speak with her.

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:00] Matt Geleta: I'm here with Alice Drager. Alice, thanks for joining me.

[00:00:02] Alice Dreger: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:00:03] Matt Geleta: Alice, uh, we're going to be talking about things that tend to make people a little uncomfortable. Uh, topics like intersex and transgender and autogardophilia and all those things. Many scientists and academics, uh, generally tend to shy away from these areas, as you very well know, because they can lead to very difficult scientific and personal, uh, lives.

Um, and you've experienced this firsthand at what I would say are relatively extreme levels. Uh, and yet, you continue to explore these topics, even today. I would love to, to start off with just hearing the story. What is the story? What drew you to exploring topics of this nature?

[00:00:41] Alice Dreger: Well, I really became interested in it in the mid 1990s. That's when I was doing my dissertation work at Indiana University in history and philosophy of science. And I was looking at the history of science and the history of medicine. And I was very interested in the question of what scientists and doctors did in the 19th century, so the 1800s. they came across a person who they called a hermaphrodite, so a person who had a blend of male and female sex characteristics. And the reason I was really interested in that was because it was a moment when doctors and scientists were very politically conservative and believed that there was nothing in between males and females, that they simply were two different, um, sexes that would never meet, and that's why the social culture had to remain having Separate roles for men and women. So I was really interested in what did they do when nature presented them, the fact that sex can be blurry. And so that's how I got interested in the topic. And then from there I became involved in the intersex rights movement and then ended up studying a controversy within transgender, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:01:42] Matt Geleta: Yeah, okay, well, let's, uh, let's, let's warm all the way into those, those, uh, contentious topics, but... Um, I think we should set the scene, um, about the basics of sex and gender before even getting there because I think most people feel they have a very intuitive understanding of these concepts. Um, you know, they might acknowledge that there is some vagueness in categorization of things like male and female, but, but I think on the whole, people feel that these concepts are relatively straightforward, uh, and then in reading your work, um, you know, it's quite clear that they're, that they're not, and there's a lot of nuance here.

Um, maybe let's start with the basics. You know, how should we define... sex and gender and why are these not so easy to define as categories?

[00:02:20] Alice Dreger: Well, so sex, we usually mean biological characteristics, and part of the reason it's not so easy to define is because, at least in humans, there are many different sex characteristics, and they can cross over in some circumstances. So, an example would be nipples, mammary glands, uh, genitals. Um, internal reproductive organs, like a prostate or a uterus, also sex chromosomes, various genes that contribute to sex, hormonal concentrations, so estrogen and testosterone, but also other hormones. all of these things exist in human as various kinds of bifurcated sex traits, but they're not perfectly bifurcated. In other words, they're not perfectly, you get one or the other, and you always get the perfect set. So even with sex chromosomes, we can have people who have XXY chromosomes or have XX in some of their cells and XY in some of the others of their cells, so they can be genetic mosaics. human sex in reality is pretty complicated, and most of us don't actually know much about our biological sex, except through the clues that we get. you know, by the time you reach my age, I'm 57, you've had enough scans to probably know what you've got internally and externally. But that doesn't mean I know what my chromosomes show, for example.

And I don't know what my genes would show. sex can be fairly complicated. That doesn't mean it's complicated in most people. In most people, they're either standard males or standard females. But in some percentage of folks, there's going to be crossovers or blending of various sex traits. then gender. Gender is something that used to be thought of as the same as sex. Until about the late 19th century, people thought of gender as being the same as sex. But then it became clear, partly because doctors were studying people who they call hermaphrodites, people we would now call intersex, that in fact, you could have a gender that was very clearly female.

So you were born, raised as a girl, have a girl role in society, be oriented towards men, all the things people would typically expect historically of girls. And yet inside you might have testes. And the opposite could be true also with male. So you would have somebody born obviously looking like a boy, raised as a boy, attracted to females, grew up to be in the male role, and yet later doctors would find out that person had ovaries inside. so gender really came in medicine out of the concept that couldn't quite be trusted, so sex could be sneaky and be surprising, and they wanted a very stable concept, which was a concept of gender, and that emerged around 1915, as I showed in my dissertation work, and in my first book, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. So gender emerged within medicine really as a concern. not as a progressive concept, but over time, feminists took it and made it into a progressive concept by saying that we should not be judged by our bodies, we should be judged by our social roles in terms of allowing us to have broader social roles. women sort of discarded that. in the feminist movement, the idea that sex was what was important. They got rid of the idea that our ovaries, our hormones, all of that stuff is important to who we are and had instead the concept that our social roles were what is important and that we could change our social roles. Now that's obviously shifted again over time, right? Because now some feminists to the idea that they like sex and they want to have a concept of sex defining womanhood. So history has really done this sort of rollercoaster ride.

[00:05:58] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I mean that's exactly the question I was going to ask as a follow up because it is certainly sort of a very commonly stated thing today that many people believe that sex and certainly gender are almost completely divorced from anything biological. You know, they're not biologically determined and then it's a sort of very stark dividing line.

There's another camp that falls on the exact opposite side and then, you know. thinks that, uh, that sex and gender are both completely biologically determined. Um, so, so what's, what's going on here? To what extent are these concepts biologically determined versus not?

[00:06:34] Alice Dreger: Well, biology has a reality, obviously. But what we decide to do with that biological reality is a political decision. And so throughout history, people have waged debates and sometimes wars over the question of what sex is, and where you put the borders on it. That's obviously become much more intense today in our culture, so you've got a much more intense argument around that. But what I would say is that biology offers us a whole bunch of options, and humans decide where to draw those lines. biology is not going to decide for us where to draw those lines. So when people ask me, well, what is really a woman? I always say to them, I don't really know. I could tell you historically at a given moment what counts. And to me, that's what's interesting is that historically that definition keeps on changing. as you probably know from my work, my inclination is to let people be. That if they want to identify that way, I don't see a reason to have lots of, um, around it, except I am sympathetic to the idea that people want to have spaces that are safe, and they want to have the idea of women's sports being competitive within a certain biological class, and we can get into that, but my own feeling is if we want to maintain biological classes within sports, we should just be honest and call them hormonal classes.

We should have low T classes and high T classes and not call them men and women.

[00:07:53] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah. Well, is it a problem then that some people don't fall into one of those very clear sort of binary categories, whatever dimension you want to cut it, if it's hormonally, if it's, um, whatever, you know, on, on many characteristics of, of like a human life, you know, pick high to pick anything, um, we wouldn't consider it to be a problem in any sense if, if people don't fall into very specific categories, but for some reason, this topic in particular, Um, you know, it doesn't sort of have that flavor to most people and, uh, intersex in particular, you know, somebody who maybe is born with ambiguous sex characteristics, but is otherwise perfectly functioning, um, it should, I mean, to what extent is that actually a problem versus not?

And if not, why? Why is it treated as a problem to so many people?

[00:08:43] Alice Dreger: Yeah, being born intersex does not have to be a problem. And in various times and places, it was not such a problem as it is treated today. So that's part of what my work has been about is documenting intersex was Part of normal life. And in many cultures, it is. part of normal life. But once medicine and science got control over identity in many ways, then they were the ones controlling what was a problem and what was not a problem. Some forms of intersex, by the way, do come with medical problems. So I don't want to pretend that that's not the case. Some of the forms of intersex come with underlying hormonal problems that can be dangerous. Or they can come with very high risks of cancer of the gonads in some circumstances. But in many cases, intersex is benign, and it does not have to be, um, fixed socially or biologically. Obviously, if you want a system that categorizes people into only two categories, you have to decide where those people fit. And there's a decision made. And historically, that's what's happened, is people simply made that decision, which category to place a given child into. Today, doctors tend to do that, um, in terms of deciding who's going to be who. But, but really, I mean, it doesn't have to be a problem in the world and the way it is treated within medicine today is still as if it is somehow a terrible conundrum.

And you ask the question, why do we spend so much energy around this? I would say because really what we're getting at is eroticism. What really, the reason that sex and gender gets people upset is because it does invoke erotic life. And erotic life. involves parts of our brains that we can't control that are very impulsive that are that are very reactive. So I think part of what's going on is the gut level reaction people are having when people cross gender or cross sex or blend sex is that gut level reaction where something about their erotic nature is. being triggered in a way that makes them anxious or upset or angry or attracted in some circumstances. So it depends what's going on for them there.

[00:10:43] Matt Geleta: Yeah, well, I mean, let's explore that question, this relationship between gender identity and sexual orientation and one's erotic life. Again, I think this is one of those topics where, at the surface level, I think people feel like they have a relatively Good understanding of what's going on here and then one layer deeper and you realize it's a whole lot more complex.

Um, I learned some terms reading your work like autogynephilia, which I had not, I was not familiar with before. Um, and you know, I realized that I understand this topic, um, not very well at all. So what is the relationship then between gender identity and somebody's sexual orientation.

[00:11:21] Alice Dreger: It could differ for every single person and that's part of the challenge. I I think what is true is that for most of us, our gender identities implicate our orientations. And what I mean by that is for most of us, when we are having sex or when we're being erotically aroused. There's something about our gender happening there too.

So when I am attracted to a man as a woman because I'm a straight woman, there's something about being a woman in that circumstance. In other words, it's not just you could slot in a man or a woman and have the same type of sexuality, both of them being androphilic attractions to male. There's something about being a woman and feeling like a woman in that moment in terms of what it means to feel like a straight woman. people can obviously be gay, and so therefore sexual orientation and gender identity don't have to come in the standard format that 19th century doctors assumed, which was that the only normal format was for females to be attracted to males and males to be attracted to females. then there are folks for whom gender identity may be fluid. They may be attracted to more than one gender. They may be attracted specifically to somebody who has a blend of sexual characteristics. It really depends on the individual. But I do think it's the case that gender gets implicated when we are Dealing with our orientations when we're aroused and I put that once to Ray Blanchard, who's the sex researcher in Canada Who, um, coined the term autogynephilia and I said to him, you know, Ray, I really feel like it's the moment when we're the most aroused that our gender identity matters the most.

And he agreed with that. He said that seems to be the moment at which we have a sense of gender. That is a very particularly strong sense of gender. if you ask the average person, you know, do you feel like a woman right now? Do you feel like a man right now? A lot of people will say, no, I don't have a particularly gendered feeling in this very moment.

There may be moments when you feel your gender more or feel your gender less. you know, we were talking about the way that historically people have sort of. been gut level reactionary towards sex because it implicates eroticism. It's worth noting historically in many cultures, interracial relationships were also very fraught. People got very upset at the idea of a person of their type. So there again, the blurring triggered some kind of primal sexual fear or anxiety or protectiveness. We see the same thing I showed in my work on conjoined twins, that the same sort of reaction to conjoined twins even was about sex again. So it seems like every time an ambiguity comes up in human life, there's some ways in which it's triggering people at a level that they're reacting about sexual anxiety.

[00:14:03] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I definitely want to get to, to exploring that point in a little bit more detail. Um, in particular, when we come to the ethical questions around, um, you know, gender affirming interventions for, for minors and adolescents and children, because I think in that, in that in the context

of, of children who also feeling these, um, These feelings, um, maybe before, before getting there, it's worth just addressing a few misconceptions that I think are currently held. Um, One of them, which you address very early on in your book, you know, you say one of the first questions you get when exploring these topics is, you know, how common is it?

Um, and I think there's a misconception that most people assume, um, you know, all of this stuff is very, very rare in the population. Um, any atypical sex characteristics, it's, you know, one in many thousands. But, uh, as you state in your book, um, Galileo's middle finger, that's not... True at all, actually. And I mean, I've even seen stats that put the number of people born with relatively atypical characteristics as high as, you know, half a percent or one percent, which we consider a very high number.

Um, why, uh, why is it that you think our base rate estimates here are so outrageously wrong?

[00:15:23] Alice Dreger: Well, because we don't normally see intersex, right? So, types of intersex that are very obviously intersex relatively rarer, but also they get disappeared in childhood a lot of the time. So if a person is born with intersex genitals, then by the time they are a year or two old, typically they've already been subject to surgery made, designed to make them look more typically female or more typically male. So you would not see as much intersex in the human population if you saw everybody's genitals, but then we don't see everybody's genitals. typically, right? It's relatively rare. And a person who has intersex may be careful about showing their genitals. So you may see less of it for that reason as well. But some of the types of intersex we're talking about are quite subtle. So again, you can have a person who looks absolutely female on the outside, but inside she may have been born with testes and looks absolutely male on the outside, but inside he may have ovaries and they may not even know it. So you can sometimes not even find out about this until adulthood or even late adulthood. So I met a 19 year old man by telephone whose doctor suggested he call me and this was a guy who had been born a boy, raised a boy, had a girlfriend, blah, blah, blah, and he had been having uh, really intense abdominal pain and they were trying to figure out what was going on and they finally figured out that in fact he had ovaries and a uterus inside, but he had no vaginal canal, so he was menstruating internally, which is painful and dangerous and they had to deal with that. And the reason, the condition that he had was a very severe form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where you can get in between genitals or you can even skew very far in the masculine direction with a genetic female. Um, typically that's a dangerous condition if you have it in that severe a form.

And so it's interesting that he had made it through life that far without anybody picking it up. But it does sometimes happen. Today there's genetic screening for children in the United States in all 50 states for that condition, for CAH. In part because it's medically risky, but also because sometimes they otherwise would not pick up that these kids are internally female when they look so male. Another condition would be congenital, uh, sorry, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, which was a condition where A person is born looking totally female, and the brain, in fact, developed along the feminine path. or sort of an ultra feminine pathway, because even though they have a Y chromosome in testes inside, they're making testosterone, they lack androgen receptors, so their cells don't respond to testosterone, and as a consequence, they develop along the female pathway most of the way. With the exception that they have testes inside, they have no uterus inside, but they're born with a vagina, they're born with a vulva, they're born with, um, hormones that end up affecting them as females. when we ask, how can we don't see intersex all over the place if it's relatively common, there's the disappearing of it by medicine, there's the fact that some of it's very subtle, there's the fact that an intersex person might be careful about showing their genitals because of social stigma, or because of privacy interests. then there are some types which are just incredibly subtle that if we count them, we get to that high number. So, for example, there's a condition in males called hypospadias, which is when the urinary opening is not on the end of the penis but is on the side of the penis or even way down low near the testicles. And in that circumstance, when we do all the numbers, hypospadias shows up somewhere in around 1 in 200 or 1 in 250, uh, born males. So if you count all of these different conditions, and you count all of the ones that you would never pick up unless you had lots of scans, plus all the ones that get fixed, plus all the very subtle ones.

That's how you get to that number of it being very common. But should all those conditions count as intersex? Well, that's a question. Doctors typically don't talk about hypospadias as intersex unless it also comes with a penis that formed incorrectly. Or it comes with some other type of intersex, um, condition. So, it really depends in that way, in terms of how you count that number. Again, nature doesn't decide for us how to count that number. So when people say to me, how common is intersex? I ask them, how big of a clitoris are you okay with before you say that's intersex? How small of a penis are you okay with before you say that's intersex?

How many different genetic variations are you willing to accept before you say, okay, wait, that's intersex? And if you do all of that, then you get a number, but people have calculated that number differently, depending on what they accept as normal male and normal female and intersex.

[00:19:52] Matt Geleta: Well, let's, let's zoom into this question of medical practice because I mean in that case you're kind of forced, or at least historically, doctors have had to make that decision and they've, maybe it's been arbitrary and maybe different, different medical practitioners have made different decisions about what does and does not count, but nonetheless, um, you know, there is a, there's a very long and interesting and fraught medical history of, of um, treatment of people with intersex characteristics, which again is um, is covered very well in your book, Galileo's Middle Finger.

Could you briefly run me through the history here, you know, what happened, why has it happened, um, what is the experience that people with these intersex or atypical characteristics have had in medical practice?

[00:20:39] Alice Dreger: Sure. Historically, it's really very interesting because before medicine became readily available, which started to happen in the late 1800s, Before it became readily available, obviously intersex people lived, right? some of them died from their conditions, but that was relatively rare to die of an intersex condition. many of them just grew up and ended up having sex lives and ended up having, you know, lives that were gendered either as male or female in the world, but their bodies didn't look exactly like people expected. But then once medicine really became controlling over bodily identity, which happened again in the late 19th century, coming into the 20th century, they started deciding who counted as what. Then physicians began having the concept that you really couldn't live this way, which is weird because historically, the truth is you absolutely could. Um, if they decided to change just the medical problems and leave the body alone until somebody decided that would have historically been not that.

different from the way the world had been. But what happened was in the 1930s, um, a fellow named Lawson Wilkins, who was a very, um, he was the founder of pediatric endocrinology, a really fine physician and researcher. figuring out how to treat the worst hormonal problems and save people's lives and also help their bodies stabilize in terms of, um, sex development because for some of the girls who had these rough hormonal conditions, they would masculinize over the course of their puberty and that was very difficult. so he was figuring out how to manage these kinds of conditions and as he did that, he became convinced sort of that he should dial back the time of intervention as Far as possible earlier and earlier and earlier in order to stabilize their sex lives basically. And by that I mean their sexed lives their bodies as sexual beings. Lawson Wilkins ended up teaming up with a very famous psychologist named John Money, who developed a concept of what was called the optimum gender of rearing model. And that was the idea that what you should do with every child born intersex was to try to squish them surgically and hormonally into whichever sex was going to be the most believable for them. And that typically meant making most of them into girls, because frankly, all these men in the medical profession had very high standards for penises and very low standards for vaginas. And so they did not feel you could surgically build a convincing penis, but they did feel you could surgically build a convincing vagina.

Um, as they used to put it, you could poke a hole, but you can't build a pole surgically. they actually used to say this to their medical students. So what they did over time was do more and more and more and more interventions on these children. And basically, for many of them, remove any chance of fertility.

So in the boys, they, the males, they would take out the testes in many cases, removing any chance that the child was ever going to be allowed to Be fertile naturally and do early intervention surgeries to avoid becoming babies so they try to make them look typical. The claim was this would allow their parents to accept them as boys and girls, and then their parents would treat them appropriatly as boys and girls, and so psychologically they would develop appropriately. What we know is that for many intersex people. This was a failure that in fact, it left them with damaged genitals, damaged uh, reproductive tissue, damaged relationships with their parents, damaged relationships with the medical profession because they were lied to and treated as if they were monstrous essentially.

And so it actually led to a huge problem, which ultimately in the. Late 1980s, early 1990s led to the intersex rights movement and the organization that I worked with for years, the Intersex Society of North America, which was one of the groups pressing for medical reform.

[00:24:17] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's, uh, it's quite fascinating that, I mean, late 80s, late 90s, that's, that's yesterday, um, and, you know, people, people think about the history of malpractice in medicine going back many centuries, and I think we, we kind of forgive things that happened several hundred years ago, you know, practice like bloodletting and so on, but, um, I mean, 1990s, that's, uh, you, you would feel, you'd feel like we would have had a better grip on, um, um, The sort of like outcomes based approach to these things.

Um, I'm interested in your thoughts here. You know, there is one lens, um, which says, you know, medicine needs to be innovative and progressive and kind of try things. And, uh, yes, there are some bumps along the way, but... That's how learning happens. You know, that's the, the whole process works when things fail and activists come in and the medical practice, the medical industry is, is reformed.

Um, and then there's the other lens that says, you know, we need to be very conservative and it's first do no harm. And, um, where do you feel like these, these treatments fall on that spectrum is, is what we're seeing the standard sort of make mistakes, learn, improve type of, uh, of medical practice, or is there something different?

[00:25:28] Alice Dreger: Well, it depends on the clinic. Most intersex clinics are still doing fairly aggressive interventions, but they at least are better today in terms of tending to offer more psychosocial care for the families and for the children. And they're also better in terms of telling the truth to the patients more earlier and more honestly. So that part of it has improved, but in terms of surgical intervention, there's still a lot of try it and let's see if it works. Um, and so that certainly is a concern. You know, it's a difficult situation because Infancy allows an opportunity for the healing of tissue that is often much more successful. So if you're going to do an intervention on a person, the earlier you can do it in life, the better the healing will be, typically. That said, there's obviously a question, do you need to do these interventions? So this is particularly a question with regard to, for example, where you have a situation where a boy might not be able to pee standing up, but he could pee sitting down. And a lot of times doctors recommend that they do surgery early so that by the time the child is at the age of potty training where they're going to be peeing with other boys, that they're at the point where they can pee standing up like a typical boy. said, a certain percentage of those surgeries are going to fail and some of them are going to lead to damaged penises and then boys who have really rough relationships with their own genitals because of the fact that they're constantly going in for reform, for surgery to fix the problem that's been created by the surgery. Historically, in the 19th century, men who had hypospadias had no surgical options. So they just learned to deal with it and it ran in families. And so families often learned to deal with it. And obviously some of them were not happy about that. When surgery became offered, some of the men sought those surgeries, but you know, it is a difficult situation today.

Like should, should doctors be doing that? Well, if you're going to do it again, the earlier you do it, the better the healing. However, why are you doing it in the first place, is the question activists and myself would ask. Um, I mean, why are you bothering to fix something that is not medically broken? It's something that is a psychosocial concern, but my own feeling is that you shouldn't risk this kind of intervention on a child who has not been able to decide for themselves. Obviously, that's different from doing a type of surgery that, for example, is removing a gonad that's cancerous, or trying to fix a hormonal problem that actually can lead to hospitalization. These, these are the kinds of things that make sense, but those are medical issues that's different from doing these cosmetic treatments.

[00:28:02] Matt Geleta: Well, I guess a lot of that does pivot then on what the experience is of individuals living with intersex conditions today. Um, both those who don't receive any, any medical interventions or, um, or maybe very minor interventions and versus those who, who do receive some of those that you've mentioned. Um, what, what is that experience like today?

Is it, um, is it substantially better than it was in, in the 80s, 90s and, and how has it changed?

[00:28:30] Alice Dreger: I think most people, and I want to encourage people to go ahead and look on the internet for accounts by intersex people themselves because there's now a wonderful blossom of all sorts of accounts that are autobiographical and people with intersex talking about their own lives, which is very different, obviously, from the 1980s before that existed at all, um, where you had just one or two people doing that kind of work. You know, I, I think what they would say is that certainly the fact that there's a more of a social understanding that it's real and it exists has been a really good thing, but most children who go through these clinics are still getting interventions before they can consent, and so that hasn't really changed, and that's a source of great frustration to activists who really want to have a situation where people are allowed to decide for themselves what to do with their bodies. So, um, that part of it has not really changed. I, I do think that the consciousness around it has helped, but it's still the case that many parents feel, um, that if they're within a medical system, they're being, they're given the message that you've got to go surgical route or, or. know, you're not really making the responsible parental decision. And that is a big concern for me. That, in fact, I think parents can be empowered more to accept anatomical differences in their children and learn that the child can decide later. It, may be a more difficult decision later, again, in terms of the outcomes, but at least then the person is making the decision themselves whether or not to risk... fertility, risk sensation, risk pain for the rest of their lives, risk a whole lifetime of surgical attempts to undo the problems caused by the first surgery.

[00:30:08] Matt Geleta: Yeah, except here we do encounter sort of another, um, uh, unclear or vague dividing line, and I actually think this is, this is probably the area that I think gets the most, that gets people most riled up, you know, on the one hand, you can imagine a very, very young infant, you know, um, Of course, they can't consent, but they also can't understand.

Um, and in that case, I think whatever the decision is, it's very clear that it can't be the individual themselves making that decision. Um, and then all the way on the other end, you know, adults, um, fully able to give informed consent. Um, again, a bit clear, but there is this gray area in the middle, and it's also an area where...

Increasingly, um, you know, adolescent, adolescents, minors are presenting, um, to, you know, or they're, they're sort of seeking, um, gender affirming medical, um, assistance more than has ever happened historically, as far as I understand, um, and many people think that this is a, you know, a huge concern and, um, there is very, there's, there's no clear consensus on, on how to, Make decisions in this in this area.

Um, let's dig into that in that topic. You know, we're talking about the issues of informed consent. How do we think about that in the case of minors? You know, you can have a mental model of, let's say, a young, um, Biologically clear boy presenting to a parent or a psychiatrist claiming that they feel that they're in the wrong body, in the wrong gender.

How does that situation get addressed and how should it get addressed?

[00:31:46] Alice Dreger: It, you know, I mean, it's, it's, I'm going to state the obvious that it should be addressed with good care. And that means. People who are actually trained to deal with these issues and allow for the possibility that childhood exploration may go in multiple different directions, that children's outcomes are not um, in a simple fashion. you know, what, what's interesting to me, so when, when I was active in the intersex rights movement, which was in the 1990s and late 1990s into the early 2000s. We tried to find people who had been through the medical establishment system who were happy with what had happened to them. Because we wanted to talk to them and figure out what had happened to them that made them different from all the angry activists who had had terrible experiences. And we couldn't find anybody. And there were hundreds of journalists working on this topic, trying to find anybody that would speak on camera or even speak behind a potted plant with their face blurred. saying that they had been through this and they were glad their parents chose it and we couldn't find any and that to me was really significant.

Now, those people may have existed, but I think it's possible that nobody ever told them the truth about what had happened to their bodies. So they didn't know what had happened to them. And as a consequence, they didn't really have the opportunity to say, yes, I'm happy with what my parents chose and my doctors chose because they simply didn't know their own medical histories. Um, you know, I would frequently meet people who would find out from their records through chance of what had happened to them and otherwise didn't really know what had happened to them. It's interesting to me that the folks who are terribly worried about the idea of a non intersex child doing an intervention don't seem to be terribly worried about the fact that intersex children are having these decisions made for them all the time. If we have the concept that we should Allow children to grow up with healthy tissue and not allow them to choose interventions until they are, say, 18 or 21 years old. are the intersex children always exempted from that? And we say, well, because they look funny and they look different. Then it's okay to make that decision and risk all this stuff for them. part of my curiosity for a long time has been, why is it that the group of people objecting to earlier interventions for Children who are transgender don't seem to have the same concern for children who are intersex in terms of doing interventions that may be very ill advised in terms of the long term outcome for that person. We know with people with intersex that they are sometimes assigned a sex that doesn't work for them, that later in life it turns out that was the wrong sex assignment. They turn out to be people who technically count as both intersex and transgender because they've rejected the assignment that they got at birth. the assignment they got at birth really could have gone either way in some circumstances and the doctor chose the wrong one sometimes chose the wrong one and then did a whole lot of surgery that sort of cemented that wrong one and then they have to undo all that. There are many cases of this that we've documented in the literature. So, you know, the question of what to do with with children and especially younger children and then adolescents, I think it's a very difficult problem. I think we do want to have a circumstance where we're empowering children and adolescents to be actively involved in their own medical care. And yet, at the same time, it's very difficult to say that they can really understand.

and The risk that they're taking in terms of the loss of sensation, in terms of long term pain, in terms of, um, loss of fertility in some circumstances. So it does become really difficult. And for years, people thought Lupron was the magic approach, a hormone that you could give children, which would basically stall puberty. And if you could just give them that, then you could, you know, wait until they were older and then they could make a decision. Then you could send the puberty in the right direction. But we know that Lupron is not a benign drug and that. In fact, if what you want to have happen is for a child to mature psychologically, then their body's also going to have to mature.

So it is an incredibly difficult situation. And I don't think that there's an easy solution to it. But I, I do not like the situation that is occurring in the United States where basically, um, various states are outlawing the ability for caregivers to provide any care to these children and families. I think that's totally outrageous and really dangerous. You know, we mentioned earlier this question of like, so, so for a lot of us, certainly as adults, gender is implicated in our erotic lives when a child says that he or she doesn't feel that they have the right body, that they were, um, quote unquote, born into the wrong body. I think that's different, or at least has a different quality to it in terms of. It may be the case that what they are expressing is, in fact, an awakening towards a homosexual orientation that they're interpreting as a gender issue. And historically, we know that a certain segment of gay men started off their lives as feminine boys. And this is some of what Michael Bailey talked about in his book that caused the controversy that I ended up studying that became the book that became Galileo's middle finger.

But Michael Bailey looked at those kinds of circumstances where it's not uncommon for a, a boy who's going to grow up to be a gay man to have certain so called feminine interests. So to be interested in more things around the house, and to be interested in social games rather than games of sport. Um, to be more interested in hanging out with the girls than hanging out with the boys. Um, even to be interested in putting on girls clothes and playing that they are women. And This is not uncommon among boys who turn out to be gay men in the long run. So one of the questions that I know critics, I think, legitimately have is when a child is expressing, That they feel like their gender assignment is not the right one is in fact, what's happening is that they're awakening to an erotic life where they can't quite articulate that yet, but they have a sense that the type of the type of attraction they have is attraction to men.

And, is, you know, in our cultures, that's a concept that that's. That's a feminine thing, but also that biologically that maybe they are somewhat feminized. And, and so that's one of the concerns that people have. And I think that's really quite a legitimate concern. Then there's the whole question of, you know, when a, And when a child, even without that, without the question of, Maybe the self aware, beginning of the self awareness of, of orientation when they say, you know, I really feel more like a girl or more like a boy is what's happening that they are looking at the cultural options available and they really prefer the cultural options that are available. provided to the other gender and not provided to them. That's another concern. But we also know historically throughout time, there have been people who genuinely feel very much the other gender than the, than the sex into which they were born and have managed to quite heroically really over time live in the other gender in spite of the fact that they were not able to change their bodies at all.

And that that was a very dangerous thing to do in many circumstances, but they managed to do it because they felt that strongly about. being the gender that historically did not match their sex.

[00:38:59] Matt Geleta: I think a lot of people... feel that this is quite an urgent issue to solve, um, because the, the rates of cases like this are increasing so quickly. Um, you know, it's, it's not the, yeah, also I work in a medical field now in, in diagnostics and, um, You know, it's well understood that there's several different reasons why you can see rates of, you know, things increase.

Sometimes it's just a reclassification of what counts. And, um, and so people who wouldn't have been classified as having a certain condition now are, and it, you know, it, it manifests as a perceived increase in, um, prevalence. And, uh, sometimes it's that we have, you know, better diagnostics and so we can catch things we were missing before.

Um, but in this case, it's, it's not either, I don't think it's either one of those because we're actually having young people presenting, you know, self claiming that they're, that they're feeling different at higher rates than we were before. And I think that a lot of the concern in this is that, um, as you said, a lot of this, you know, to what extent is this driven by, um, uh, basically, you know, social conditioning or, um, you know, basically confused children who are hearing things that they don't fully understand and sort of

[00:40:14] Alice Dreger: inadequate tolerance of our culture for, um, gender categories. I mean, we, we could foist it upon the children, right? And say the children are confused. Another option is to say the culture is doing a poor job allowing for ambiguity. And that if the culture did a better job allowing for gender ambiguity, Then children might not feel that there's need to switch categories because they would feel comfortable being in a category and moving around within that category, maybe moving between categories.

And that wouldn't be that big a deal. But as it is, I think we've got a very. Sort of lockdown approach these days to gender and children are responding to that and saying I don't feel that and I can understand that you know I was I feel relatively lucky so I was born in 1966 which means I was born just as the women's movement and the women's health movement was coming into being and there was a very strong message in the culture at that time that a Girl could do boy things and it wasn't didn't mean you weren't a girl, right?

So I could do rough sports and I could do. Be interested in going into male professions. And I could do all that kind of stuff and play with boys. And there was very, a very clear message that that was about female impairment. But I think we've really lost that today. And there is very much the Barbie Ken model of life. And, you know, the Barbie Ken model of life, no wonder so many children look at that and say. That's not me. So I must be in the wrong category. So for all the people who are expressing anxiety over children switching, what I want to say to them was, well, what are you doing to signal to children that these categories are fluid and that we don't have to be locked down into these categories as men and women and boys and girls. And maybe if we were a lot more accepting of children who are fooling around with what we think of as gender, then they wouldn't be so inclined to say I'm in the wrong category because the categories would be significantly more blurry. That would be a good thing.

[00:42:11] Matt Geleta: Yeah, no, and I appreciate you sort of pointing out the, um, the, uh, sort of unclear mental model I was using there. And I think it actually leads very nicely to, um, you know, a broader question if we zoom out of this particular case a little bit. I think these questions of sex and gender are very good analogs for something much more general, which you've also, um, spent a lot of time thinking about, which is the tension that often exists between scientists and activists on all matters relating to personal identity.

And there are plenty of examples here. Um, some of the most contentious ones include, you know, things like the study of relationship between race and IQ scores. Um, that's gotten plenty of people into plenty of trouble. Um, and there, there's several others that you've, that you've also written about. And academics tend to avoid these questions like the plague, you know, you, you misspeak and, uh, you can get into a lot of trouble.

Um, I think what's, what's fascinating here is that in abstract, if you were to pose a problem to someone in completely abstract terms, one of the first things they want to do to solve that problem is to understand it fully. You know, you, you want to understand what, what are the causes, what are the solutions, what works, what doesn't.

And that very often means investigating it scientifically. Um. But when it comes to questions relating to identity, not only does that often not happen, I think often the exact opposite can happen. You know, people tend to actively avoid such, such problems. Uh, and you, you've, you've spent some time studying this.

You, you want a Guggenheim fellowship to study questions. Of this nature, um, would love you to tell me more about this, you know, what's what's going on here and and how do we get out of this? Uh this sort of aversion to studying questions relating to identity

[00:43:50] Alice Dreger: Yeah, you know, it's, funny because when I wrote Galileo's Middle Finger, I was hoping it would help this problem. And that what it would do would encourage people to have less fraught debates. And instead, I feel like it was almost a a prologue to what was about to happen culturally. It was an accidental prologue predicting cancel culture and the wars on campuses, the free speech wars and all of the rest of it. It is the case that American academics remain fairly obsessed with identity, and, um, it is the place, you're right, where activists absolutely get upset because it is, so much of activism is identity based activism, in the United States at least, and actually around the world, it's identity based activism. So how did we get here? Well, think. know, I'm a historian again, so I tend to think of the long term and what I see is historically, there's been this question of the tension between anatomy and identity, between what does the body mean to who you are. that gets debated in all sorts of different realms.

So that gets debated in terms of IQ and race and genetics and, uh, ethnicity and language and in terms of obviously gender and in terms of abnormality when a child is born, say, with cleft lip, or they're born with conjoined twinning, whatever it is, that, that there is this tension between the question of, okay, what does the body mean to the person?

And what does the person then mean to the social body in terms? So there's the, the body, the person, and then the social body. Historically, doctors and scientists kind of seized power over that in the late 19th century and then into the early 20th century. But what ended up happening over time was that people who were democratic activists, and I mean that with a small d, who were people interested in furthering human rights, that authority.

And they've continued to challenge that authority in ways that are quite powerful and I think quite good. Good. Um, and so, for example, the civil rights movement, the movement around racial rights, focused on that issue about whether or not racial differences can be used as the basis for different political rights.

The same thing obviously happened with the women's rights movement, challenging the idea that the biological categories. are to determine our rights. The same thing with the disability rights movement. The same thing with the gay rights movement. Very much rejected the idea at first that genetics mattered.

Now, the gay rights movement actually embraces the idea of born that way, which is incredibly interesting because historically.

when it started, they were not interested in born that way. That was a eugenical model. The idea of born that way was a route to eugenics, they thought. Now that's completely changed. But I, but I think what's going on here is that, Scientists continue to be interested in that question of the relationship between biology and behavior, and biology and selfhood, and biology and identity, and activists are very nervous about them working on that because they recognize that that kind of work can lead to dangerous laws, dangerous court decisions, can lead to, in fact, eugenics, and so activists are not wrong in being nervous about what scientists on and that's part of what I try to convey and Galileo's middle finger is that I actually think activism is necessary as a check on science. But what troubles me is when activism is deeply dishonest and that's part of what I was tracking in that book was incredibly dishonest activism where people specifically going after Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard and Ann Lawrence knew that what they were saying about them was not true. So. You know, what do I wish I, I, I guess the way we could make the whole situation better would be as everybody paid more attention to the facts and that includes scientists who very frequently are kind of sloppy in terms of their claims, in terms of their use of data, in terms of checking what they actually are publishing and making sure that they're actually accurate. So I wish that all sides would actually be way more careful in terms of looking at the facts.

[00:48:11] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's, it's so interesting though that in, in the cases of identity, I mean, we take for example, um, something like climate change there, it's a, it's a, it's a topic that has a lot of support or interest by activists and by scientists alike, and, and they happen to be fully aligned. There's not a, um, you know, you don't, you don't have activists.

worried that scientists will unveil something that will sort of get in the way of the mission of the activists. Um, and so there, there's such strong alignment, um, and it is the exact opposite in many of these cases of identity. So, you know, my question is why I understand that there is some aversion or hesitation to potential risks of, of, um, you know, science being used.

Uh, in malicious ways, you know, things like eugenics, as you mentioned. But there's also equally the risk that, you know, if we don't find the answers, we don't know what to do and, and we make the wrong decisions. And that could also be, um, you know, not in service of, of very good social change and all the ethical things that we want.

Um, so, so why is it then that the, um, the posture sort of skews towards, very often skews towards an aversion versus the other way around? Any of, any of the examples you mentioned are good, are good analogues. You know, why, why isn't it actually that activists are sort of pushing for more science versus the other way around?

[00:49:30] Alice Dreger: Well, historically, some have right? So I think the ones we're talking about, we're selecting the cases where activists and scientists are doing battle. And you point out correctly the case of climate change. But I would also point to, for example, the early AIDS patient rights movement, where they absolutely were pushing for more science. Um, the movement within women with breast cancer, where they absolutely were pushing against doctors towards more science, where they really felt strongly that physicians were being, uh, Treating women in problematic ways that were not evidence based and they pressed very strongly. Um, you can see the movement for home birth, which often is pushed through a very scientific lens and is very interested in looking at, for example, the problem that episiotomies are not actually in women's best interest, if you look at the data. that various kinds of interventions used during birth actually increase risk to mother and child rather than decreasing risk. And so demedicalization of birth, often you'll find people who are working on demedicalization of birth, actually pushing for more science. So I think that we're sort of picking a subset and the subset that I picked in the book were specifically. about activists who were very obsessed with the idea that they knew the truth about identity and that these researchers did not. I mean, the other thing to recognize, and there's no nice way to say this, that successful activists are often narcissists. They often are people who are quite obsessed with their own identity and quite obsessed with themselves and the reason they're successful is because they spent, they can spend an enormous amount of personal energy and even money because they're so self interested pursuing that particular cause. And I think the narcissism problem is one that actually has been, um, not well enough appreciated in terms of looking at the success of historical rights movements and the leaders of them often, often having displayed sort of classic narcissistic personality disorder. So part of the clashes that go on are people who are.

Quite obsessed with taking down another person because it gives them the sense that they are a larger individual. And you can certainly see that among some of the people that I dealt with, um, in my book in terms of the, the level of obsession that they reach with trying to take a researcher down. can be quite overwhelming.

That said, I mean, some scientists are also, of course, leaning towards narcissistic personality disorder, and they sometimes are the ones who get in the biggest fights. I, I, for years, I actually gave talks at various scientific conferences trying to explain to scientists how to stay out of trouble.

[00:52:08] Matt Geleta: Ha

[00:52:09] Alice Dreger: of course, it often doesn't work because a lot of them Aren't interested in staying out of trouble.

Um, they actually like the fights until it gets incredibly unpleasant. Then it's too late to do, to get out of it. Um, the other thing is that I think a lot of them do have what I call the Galilean personality, which is the idea that they believe as long as they're right, as long as they're following the science. Nothing truly terrible can happen to them. No matter how many times the universe proves them wrong, and

[00:52:40] Matt Geleta: ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

[00:52:42] Alice Dreger: can happen to you for pursuing the truth, they still tend to believe that if they just keep pursuing the truth, then eventually the other side will come around and see the light.

You know, eventually they'll, they'll get it and everything will be fine.

[00:52:53] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I mean, maybe history has proven them right. It's just, it's just been longer than their lifetimes to realize that. Um, one, one quote from, from, ha ha ha.

[00:53:02] Alice Dreger: that's exactly why the book is called Galileo's Middle Finger, because it's him pointing to the universe basically saying, I was right. You know, he's pointing to the skies with his middle finger. And the inscription on the stone that this middle finger is, is sitting on basically says, you know, Galileo was right.

He was right about the heavens. And so it's that metaphor of, Yeah, you go to the grave thinking that, you know, you're going to be proven right. But it might be after the grave that your middle finger is finally put on a big pedestal and people say you were right.

[00:53:32] Matt Geleta: Yeah, um, I might, I might take the chance to sort of plug the book and, and show the cover here. Um, I've just, uh, I actually just finished reading the paperback this morning and you've got, uh, I mean, I won't give too much away, people should read the book, but, um, you've got a nice little afterword here that goes a bit more into your story and.

Uh, the events that happen immediately following this book, which are equally fascinating, so, uh, definitely worth a read. Um, I think it's a good segue then to turn to your current work and your current focus. Um, this book was written several years ago and since then you've continued to do very interesting work.

Um, what is it that you're currently focused on, um, without giving away, again, too much of how this book ends? Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh.

[00:54:16] Alice Dreger: these days in journalism and working on, uh, the problem of rescuing journalism in America, which has been a big problem. But I, I ended up sort of after this book kind of hiding locally and creating a local newspaper sort of as a hobby. And then it accidentally, um, worked took over my life for the last eight years or so. Um, and then I also write murder mystery novels in the middle of the night that include autogynephilic characters and that sort of thing that, um, to, to get out. Some of the things that you can't write in nonfiction, there, there are themes I've wanted to explore that are not possible to explore in nonfiction because you would be committing defamation, or you would be drawing connections between things that you can't really legitimately draw connections to, but one of the things I love about art is that you can actually play with facts and you can purposely play with questions and see where questions can lead without having to be bound by the facts. Um, non fiction. I love writing non fiction and I love doing journalism and history and I love being bound by the facts. But I also really love having space to do that are not at all bound by reality and that becomes really pleasurable. So I write, I write fiction in the middle of the night and I write non fiction during the day.

[00:55:38] Matt Geleta: Heh heh heh. And I believe you, you're right.

[00:55:40] Alice Dreger: middle of the night.

[00:55:41] Matt Geleta: You, you write, uh, you write nonfiction, you write fiction under a pseudonym. Is that right?

[00:55:47] Alice Dreger: Yes, Molly McCallan is my pseudonym for my fictional work. Yes,

[00:55:51] Matt Geleta: Ah, very good. Um, I will.

[00:55:53] Alice Dreger: fourth book in the murder mystery. Yes

[00:55:56] Matt Geleta: Ah, very good. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll link the whole lot to the, uh, to the show notes. Um, on the topic of books, this is, uh, actually brings us nicely to one of the questions I love to ask my guests as, as we come towards a close. Um, which is which book have you most gifted to, to other people and why?

[00:56:12] Alice Dreger: Yeah, actually the book lately I've gifted most to other people is my own novel because just Want people to think about this issue of anatomy and identity and the first book in the series takes place in a In Philadelphia, near a museum that is similar to the Mütter Museum, which is a museum of anatomical abnormalities from the 19th century. And it ends up exploring this whole question about what is the relationship between the body and the self, including for the main character who's sort of struggling with the question of her own meaning in life. Um, so that's one I've gifted a lot. But I must say the, the book I did not write that I've gifted the most is actually the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching.

[00:56:53] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[00:56:53] Alice Dreger: it is a really beautiful translation of the Tao and. Working on Galileo's middle finger, before I worked on Galileo's middle finger, I had been using that, um, translation of the Tao for many years to try to recognize the limits of my power in the world and to recognize the importance of, um, forgiving myself and others and letting go.

And recognizing that the universe is a flowing stream. after that book, it became that much more important because so many people attacked me and still to this day attack me. And so it is really, um, frustrating to have an identity that is so widely misrepresented online. I am, am frequently. Um, represented online as being virulently anti transgender rights, as being incredibly hateful towards transgender people. And if you look at what I actually have written and actually do, It's, quite the opposite. And in fact, I get a lot of criticisms from feminism, feminists who are, um, kind of anti trans in their own world. So I ended up getting kind of slammed for both sides. And it's a very. Strange situation to be in. So reading the Dow becomes even more important, but almost always a circumstance where I'm running into somebody who is struggling with trying to a situation.

They really cannot control. And that's why I give them that. Book, it's a, I get the little pocket edition and give it to them. And I always tell them to start with, um, chapter nine, which is the chapter that speaks of, um, recognizing that if you, you let other people, if you care about what other people think, you will be their prisoner.

And that you have to let go and recognize that you cannot fix everything in the world, especially the stuff immediately around you. So the Stephen Mitchell translation is my favorite translation.

[00:58:42] Matt Geleta: It's, uh, it's actually so interesting you mentioned that because, um, I have enjoyed the audio book version of, of that several times and, and also absolutely love it. So, um, great, great recommendation. Did not expect that, but, um, yeah, very, very good one. Um, I think, you know, one. One, one thing comes a lot of out of that book and everything you've done is, um, you know, wisdom, um, you know, imparting wisdom on people who have maybe not been there before.

And you've certainly seen a lot. And I imagine there'll be many people who look at this and. You know, listen to this conversation and they're feeling, you know, a bit motivated to, to kind of do something, um, to get involved, um, and are hesitant because again, this is difficult and it's, it's, it's proven to be dangerous.

My question is, what advice do you have for a person who wants to do something about any of the topics we've talked about? And. He's kind of sitting on the fence, he's a bit hesitant to get stuck in. What advice would you have for that type of person? Hehehe.

[00:59:48] Alice Dreger: things we can do is try to sit down and break bread with people who are on the other side of topics and really try to understand where they're coming from. Because even if we end up maintaining the view that we have, we at least understand better what the criticisms are and how. The arguments that we're making may be misunderstood because we're not articulating them correctly, or because we lack the data that we should try to seek. So, one of the things I often recommend to people is to try to find spaces of non partisanship and also intellectual humility, where you actually genuinely enter into a space where you doubt what you think, and meet people who very much disagree with you, allows you often to see. I think we are much better creatures in the world in terms of people of knowledge and people of, who seek wisdom and seek truth if we have humility and part of, part of that humility has to come from directly talking with people who disagree with us. So it's easy for me because my own family is this way.

I come out of a. Traditional Roman Catholic, very conservative family. And so it's not difficult for me to go visit that family and end up in these discussions where they think I'm crazy and I think they're backwards. And we have to sit down and break bread together discuss where it is we're all coming from.

So, um, for example, at my own newsletter. Which is, um, available for free online if you just subscribe, you don't have to pay anything to read it. I, when the Dobbs decision came out, basically reversing Roe versus Wade in the United States, so making abortion access much more difficult, I am very much pro abortion access and I did try to write a piece that helped explain to people like me where pro lifers are coming from, so that they get over this idea that pro lifers are simply crazy, controlling, awful people, that many of them actually do share values that we have.

It's just that they take the values and end up at a different place with those values. That's not to say we share all of the same values, but it's, it's things like that, that I think that is important for us to do to recognize. Sometimes we actually have the same values, but we come to completely different conclusions. And is it possible for us to find those spaces where we can understand? The common values and understand how to begin to dialogue with each other. Social media is not the place to do that. So,

[01:02:21] Matt Geleta: Hehehe.

[01:02:22] Alice Dreger: people ask me, what can I do in the world to effect change, I always say, don't do it on social media.

Because it may feel victorious and it may feel important and effective, but in a lot of ways, it's temporary and very, very shallow.

[01:02:36] Matt Geleta: Well, Alice, I think that's a, that's a really nice place to, to bring us to a close, um, before, before we jump off, I actually just want to say thank you. Um, your, um, you know, it's very clear that you've, you've made a lot of personal and professional sacrifices and continue to do so. for work that you believe in.

Um, and that's clearly important. That's clearly making a difference. So, uh, yeah, before, before jumping, I just want to say thank you for, for doing it, keep doing it. And, um, I hope that, uh, people are inspired when they listen to this too, to do something as well. Um, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

[01:03:11] Alice Dreger: Thank you, Matt. This is very kind of you. I appreciate it.

Topics:

• The physics and philosophy of time

• The origin of time, and how even make sense of statements of that type

• A bold new idea about the origin of the laws of physics

• Stephen Hawking, both as a scientist and a human being

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Thomas’ book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Origin-Time-journey-Stephen-Hawking-ebook/dp/B08QV2Y1JF

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

1:10 How could time have an origin?

8:15 Human intuition and the origin of time

10:50 Thomas and Matt reminisce about Stephen Hawking

20:20 Can time flow in reverse?

28:30 Wave Function of the Universe

36:25 Imaginary time & quantum gravity

39:15 Darwinian evolution of the laws of physics

56:15 Quantum multiverse

1:06:10 Experimental verification of Thomas' & Stephen's' theories

1:15:25 Book recommendations

1:18:25 Who should represent humanity to an AI superintelligence?

Topics:

• The foundations of quantum computing

• The state of quantum computing technology today

• What impact quantum computers might have on the world

• Quantum hype

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Website: https://www.csferrie.com/

• Books: https://www.csferrie.com/books

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

1:00 Should we still be using classical encryption?

2:58 How much faster will quantum computers be?

4:18 Did Google achieve quantum supremacy?

9:39 How does quantum computation work?

12:35 What's needed to get to commercial scale quantum computing?

16:12 Physical vs virtual qubits and fault-tolerant computers

18:25 How long until we have 'useful' quantum computers?

26:48 What's halting progress in quantum computing?

31:30 Applications of quantum computing

34:55 The Quantum Multiverse & David Deutsch

42:24 Decoherence (Evidence of a multiverse?)

47:46 Why is the quantum multiverse polarising?

49:50 Quantum bullsh*t

55:55 Eigensystems

1:01:45 Book recommendations

1:03:30 Advice for curious minds

1:06:26 Tommy Wiseau

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:12] Matt Geleta: I'm here with Chris Ferry. Chris, thanks for joining me.

[00:00:15] Chris Ferrie: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:16] Matt Geleta: Let's talk about quantum computing.

One of the most well known use cases of quantum computers is cryptography. Um, it's sort of well understood that that's a use case by the general public. Um, but I think that many things are not well understood. Um, I've always wondered, you know, once we get sufficiently large and robust quantum computers that we'll be able to crack our, uh, foundational encryption methods that we use today. Does this mean that existing, uh, encrypted content on the internet will no longer be safe in the future?

[00:00:46] Chris Ferrie: I mean, I think that's, that's true regardless of whether quantum computers exist or not. So this kind of cartoon imagery we have encryption is with like a lock and key, but it's not. physically impossible to decrypt a message. It's encoded with a math problem, if you have a big enough computer or enough time with pen and paper, you can always solve this problem.

Uh, so, yes, with a quantum computer we think we can solve the problem faster, it's not as if, you know, quantum computing is some magical key that unlocks current encryption. It can just solve those problems we think are keeping our secrets safe a lot faster. Anyone with the algorithm enough time and a big enough computer can crack any message.

You can set your computer churning away. It may take, you know, hundreds of years, thousands of years, depending on the level of security that message has. you, you will, you will crack the message eventually. Um, it's just, yeah, quantum computers, we think we'll be able to do it faster.

[00:01:57] Matt Geleta: Yeah. I mean, I guess it depends on just how much faster versus brute forcing it with, with classical computers, because, you know, if we believe it will be... faster, so fast that most encrypted content is basically unsafe, then it does pose the question should we be using any of these classical encryption methods at all for stuff that ends up on the internet publicly if it's, if it's sensitive material, how how much faster do you think we, we can get with quantum computing?

[00:02:25] Chris Ferrie: Well, it really depends on the problem. I think in terms of encryption, it's this, not, usually differentiate speedups between what's known as polynomial or exponential. Um, but the reality is this. There's, there's, there's problems that are somewhere, somewhere in between, if you had the magical box, the quantum computer and it worked perfectly, then it would be in for all intents and purposes instant for the kinds of.

encryption we do today. But for, for other problems that quantum computers could potentially be used for, it's a more modest advantage. And then of course there are problems for which we think quantum computers just won't be useful for at all.

[00:03:17] Matt Geleta: Hmm. Yeah, I guess the, um, the The concept of quantum computing, it's um, it has been in the public consciousness for many years now and I think it's not very well understood by the public. which problems it is good for and which it isn't. I mean, there is a lot of hype. Uh, there are even books coming out by people who are not quantum computing experts in, uh, in recent times, sort of opining on the, uh, the, the changes to come. Um, one, one area. That is often cited, uh, that happened relatively recently was when researchers at, uh, at Google made a bold claim that they had achieved something called quantum supremacy, which is a, a bit of a scary term, uh, with their Sycamore machine. Um, can you describe, uh, what, what happened there and if you feel this represents sort of truly meaningful advances in quantum computing?

[00:04:06] Chris Ferrie: Yeah, so I, it's not as impressive as it sounds. So I'll

[00:04:11] Matt Geleta: Ha ha ha ha

[00:04:12] Chris Ferrie: of the way. Um, it is a tech, what, what they've done is technologically impressive. It's a, certainly a step up from what we had previously and certainly superior to what we were doing a decade ago. But the, entire concept of quantum supremacy is a bit.

is a bit problematic because gives you this picture that there's this know kind of black and white boundary between quantum and classical when in reality it's just this big gray area. So now and certainly at the time It was like trying to define a line between black and white in this giant field of gray.

So, yeah, it, it, that's why there was at least some controversy about what it was they, what it was they achieved. Um, the idea is basically you want to find a problem for which, you know, a quantum computer solve that problem in some reasonable amount of time for which no conventional computer, which we call classical computers, digital computers could solve, you know, given all of the, all of the computing power that we have and, you know, and, and the age of the universe or some, some long, but, you know, finite amount of time.

So if you could find such a problem. Then you would say, well, look at, you know, the quantum computer is now something vastly superior to digital computers. But, you know, there isn't this kind of step transition, right? So the kinds of problems that we're looking at and the devices that we're building, it's more of this really gradual increase in capability.

and where you draw the line is somewhat arbitrary. So what they had said that they achieved was they could do something, device could do something that it would take the world's fastest conventional supercomputer thousands of years to solve. What it actually What they did was not useful for anything.

It was, uh, they basically created, um, some target random distribution and said that the device could sample numbers according to that distribution, whereas a computer would take a long time to figure out how to get it perfect to sample that distribution. it's somewhat arbitrary. problem. Uh, yeah.

So, I mean, for people, for us in the community, our point of view is usually something like, that's a, that's a great, you know, scientific achievement, uh, probably shouldn't have used that, that phrasing because it, you know, even though, you know, you can't blame them directly, they must've known

[00:07:19] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[00:07:20] Chris Ferrie: it was going to be mis, misinterpreted,

[00:07:22] Matt Geleta: Yeah.

[00:07:23] Chris Ferrie: that's what they wanted, right?

That's what gets press.

[00:07:25] Matt Geleta: Well, it is an incredibly highly cited paper that they put out. Do you feel like it is at least a stepping stone towards meaningful progress? Meaningful progress en route to something like commercial scale quantum computing?

[00:07:40] Chris Ferrie: I don't know. I think, know, these, these, these papers, these research papers that come out there, they'll be lost to the annals of, uh,

academia at some point in time, like nobody will care when we transition from four to five cubits, right? Right now, it seems like an important technological achievement, but far down the future, it'll, it'll all be washed out in some more significant milestones that, that we reach.

So, you know, as we, as we're here living it, yes, it's a, it's an important step. Each time they come up with a new, a new chip design or, uh, a new kind of architecture, it, it is. It's a necessary and important step, but in the grand scheme of things, it probably won't be remembered.

[00:08:36] Matt Geleta: Hmm. Yeah. Okay, well, let's, uh, let's then warm up to the, what is more at the cutting edge of, of quantum technology, quantum computing technology and where we think it could go. Um, let's perhaps set the scene a little bit from, from square one. Um, at its most basic level, how does quantum computation work physically?

[00:08:55] Chris Ferrie: Okay, well, that's a, um, it's a, it's a bit of an unfair question,

I think, because, you know, we often have this expectation, and certainly The people within quantum computing that, you know, speak outside of, outside of our small community give themselves this gargantuan task of explaining something that took them 15 years of study to figure out in a matter of five minutes.

Because this is not how we explain conventional computing. When someone asks, how does your computer work? They tell you about how it's used and what it's useful for, right? They don't say, well, give me the physics of transistors. Um, which, by the way, if you, if this was a technical discussion, you said, how does a digital computer work?

I'd start with transistors and voltages and these sorts of things. every single computing device... uses the same technology, whereas quantum computers, there are many competing proposals and existing prototypes, they all work differently. So I can't just say, well, there's this thing, physical thing in the world, and here's, here's how it works and what it does, because each, each company or, or research group is doing something different.

Uh, the, the one thing that they do have in common is a bit more abstract. So transistors, the, the reason, well, there's lots of reasons we use them, but know, the core sort of computational reason is because it's very good at representing a bit, a zero or a one. So quantum computing, we need things that represent quantum bits.

So these are like lists of, of numbers that can be zero, one, then any other number, negative numbers. whatever it may be. So find a thing in the world that easily and naturally represents those numbers that you can manipulate with very high fidelity and finesse and you have something that represents a qubit and if you can manipulate that and in according to a sequence of steps which change qubits then you can call that a computing device.

So it's, uh, anything that, that can represent quantum information, and the sequences of qubits instead of bits, and can change that according to an algorithm, so a sequence of steps, is a quantum computer.

[00:11:34] Matt Geleta: So the, um, the progression from, from going from conceptual quantum computing and maybe simulating quantum algorithms on a classic computer to instantiating them in the real world, um, is what you're saying that, so the, the, the biggest advance there is, is really an engineering problem? Is it, is it? you know, developing these physical substrates to be able to represent quantum bits in, in the, in the real world. Or is, or is there technological, sorry, theoretical advance, uh, that needs to happen in order to get to quantum computing at, at scale?

[00:12:10] Chris Ferrie: It depends on, on, like, your precise definition of, of those words. I think at the highest level, we, we created these algorithms, and these algorithms are just steps to change lists of numbers to new lists of numbers. You could carry that out by hand if you wanted to. Of course, it'd be better if we built an automated machine to do that for us.

And... What we know from the theory of quantum physics is that there are degrees of freedom in the world, usually internal degrees of freedom of microscopic things, that naturally encode information in that way. So if we can access those, those things and have control over them, then that's what we should try to do.

Um, so from a theoretical perspective, this was worked out. You know, a hundred years ago, but to best do it, you know, that, that's like a design architecture design question. Right. And that's a theoretical question mathematicians tackle people that have never touched a laboratory machine. And so they would call themselves theorists.

and then, you know, there's, although the theory of quantum physics has been around for a hundred years. Actually, applying it to materials, things a difficult challenge because we have to make approximations and models and, and, and, you know, algorithms that work on the computers that we have now to simplify things.

And that. Involves a branch of probably the biggest branch of physics called condensed matter physics, which is really just the business of creating approximations to Schrodinger's equation that he wrote down in 1926. Again, those people would call themselves theorists, it's their job to say, someone says, here are the properties of matter that I want and need.

then those people go and try to design it, um, from their understanding of, of, of quantum theory. Now, in some sense, we don't know which questions ask. So it's a, it's a kind of back and forth between engineering. And theory. So the engineers make some progress. They say, uh, you know, this isn't, this sort of thing isn't working out.

Uh, we need these new parameters. We need something with the new set of parameters. Then the theorists come and try to try to work that out. So it's a, it's a, it's a back and forth, but you know, the basic theory is, is well understood. That's, that's quantum physics. Nothing is going to change at the fundamental level in terms of quantum physics.

[00:15:11] Matt Geleta: So then if, if we had to take something like a, a, a problem like RSA encryption, and, um, you know, looking at the point at which something like that becomes Essentially obsolete as an encryption method to be used in practice. Um, you know, What needs to be true for that to happen? How big does a quantum computer need to be?

Um, and, and where are we today versus, versus that level?

[00:15:38] Chris Ferrie: So, what, what we're trying to do is basically create what's known as a fault tolerant quantum computer. So, the actual quantum bits that will do the, carry out the computation will be virtual quantum bits. They won't be the real physical bits. things like real physical transistors, uh, and you kind of recode, encode these logical.

quantum bits redundantly across many physical qubits. And it really depends on how, how much error is going on, how many errors are happening, how much noise, how resilient your, your physical device is dictates the ratio of physical qubits to logical qubit. Uh, so that, you know, a typical number might be a thousand.

So you need a thousand physical qubits to create one Logical bit that actually encodes the information in a robust way that it will last a long time for to crack, like, um, you know, a typical, uh, you know, RSA key would require billions of bits, uh, qubits. you know, we're not, we're not there,

[00:16:59] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[00:17:00] Chris Ferrie: We, we have no. have no fault tolerant qubits. We have no qubits that we, that we'll just, we can do whatever we want with and they'll last forever. We haven't created one of those yet. We're at the level of maybe a hundred physical qubits, not even enough to make one logical qubit. So it's a long, it's a long ways away.

[00:17:24] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Do you, uh, do you, are you optimistic that we will, we will get there in the foreseeable? When you say long ways away, um, how long, what is your mental picture of that number? Yeah.

[00:17:36] Chris Ferrie: Well, it's interesting. I think people, when we talk about, uh, like encryption and, and, and security and sensitivity of information, uh, we should really, you should really quantify that in terms of number of years, right? So, you know, is, does this secret I have, is it a one year secret? Is it a 50 year secret?

[00:17:54] Matt Geleta: Um,

[00:17:54] Chris Ferrie: I think for individuals, like your secret. Probably a sensible person that a secret is only as, it's only worth one lifetime.

[00:18:09] Matt Geleta: Uh, Yeah,

[00:18:09] Chris Ferrie: states have secrets, too, so that they need to last beyond a lifetime. Um, when we talk about quantum computers, you know, that, that, the time, the timescale there, really depends on the input into the problem.

So the inputs that we need are basically boiled down to money and people.

[00:18:35] Matt Geleta: Uh,

[00:18:35] Chris Ferrie: So there, there isn't a magic number that says, you know, it's definitely 50 years away. It really depends on how many people are involved, how organized they're and whatnot, and how much, how much, much money is, is being put into it.

Um, so it, it really depends. I think if at, I don't think that things will progress as they are now, as we progress, things will compound and. it becomes more interesting, more people will become involved, as it gets closer, more money will be put into it, so compound. If we... If, if we tried to extrapolate in the same way that digital technology progressed, then, you know, it'll, it'll grow exponentially in like some sort of quantum Moore's law.

[00:19:34] Matt Geleta: Um,

[00:19:34] Chris Ferrie: And then you can, if you, if you make that sort of model of, of progress and say, you know, we doubled the number of qubits that we have every year, then maybe it's only 25 years away. But, you know, if, if it takes two or three years to double. Then, it, that, that, uh, horizon extends.

[00:19:56] Matt Geleta: Yeah, there are certain technologies that are sort of infamous for having this nature of being just around the corner for decades and decades on end, and some of them are still not here, you know, nuclear fusion. Um, creation of synthetic life, things like that. Um, but people have also been very wrong in the past.

Um, I think the, the famous example that comes to mind is the former president of IBM in the 1940s said. that there was a global market for something like five computers and it turned out to be outrageously wrong. I mean, I've got five computers in this room with me as we speak. And he was really just thinking, you know, confined to the wrong paradigm and couldn't really see the full potential of. What, you know, personal computation could look like, um, and I do, I do wonder if, if we're in a similar paradigm as it pertains to quantum computers, do you think we might experience a similar phenomenon where at some point in the future, quantum computation is Thank you. Thanks. Is everywhere, you know, people have personal access to quantum computers

[00:20:56] Chris Ferrie: Well, I think that, you know, nuclear fusion is an interesting example. And synthetic life and nuclear fusion are two completely different, um, obviously they're different things, but they're different from the, in the following way, as it pertains to like progress, synthetic life. I mean, we don't even know what life is like argue about what life is.

And so the problem is it's just too vague to say, how would you even decide whether or not you achieved it? Whereas nuclear fusion, we've understood that for decades. Probably, again, the main reason why it, it's taken so long and, you know, we're not, you know, we're not quite there yet is again, money, money and people, but what is the purpose of nuclear fusion?

It's, it's, it's energy, right? But it's so much easier just to dig up fossil fuels and burn them. There was never really. Um, uh, there was no, there was no, it wasn't necessary, you know, necessary in

[00:21:59] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's interesting the

[00:22:00] Chris Ferrie: right? Um, there's no economic incentive or political will to, to make it happen. If you had put people and money into it, then we would have it already.

physics very well understood, as opposed to synthetic life where, you know, we don't even know what question we're asking. Nuclear fusion is more like quantum computers. We understand... quantum physics to a remarkable degree, we know it can be done. It's just a matter of, of putting money and people on, on it.

And, you know, they'll answer the questions and solve the problems as they, as they come along. There's, there's nothing in, in the theory. And we're all going to assume that the theory is correct. That forbids this from happening. that, you know, I think that's why it's inevitable. I really do like that quote.

I use that quote quite often, but you know, there is a sense in which he was right. I probably there wasn't more than five of those devices, right? And if you compare quantum computing now to Maybe what, what was going on in the 1940s in terms of, um, of classical computing, you know, IBM sells quantum computer, right?

It's tens of millions of dollars. It has 27 qubits. There's a roughly five of them on the order of five. And I would, I would confidently say. They're not going to sell more than that, right? So what happened, right, is that didn't foresee basically miniaturization and the breakthroughs that You know, had, had he thought about it for a little bit longer and, you know, was convinced that it could be miniaturized, you know, it could be deployed at scale, then he might say, well, yeah, sure.

Um, you know, everybody might, might want. Spreadsheets calculated if it's cheap and free, right? so the same thing could be true with, with, with quantum computers. You know, there's no theoretical reason why we can't solve the problems which currently confine them to laboratories. And then put them in, you know, a wristwatch or something like that.

Uh, and so, you know, we, we don't know what exactly those breakthroughs will look like. Just to throw an example out there, right? If you, if you could. build a high temperature or room temperature superconductor, then you wouldn't need these massive refrigeration devices that hold liquid helium cool, you know, some vessel down to colder than outer space.

You could just put it out on the table, right? And that wouldn't really change, you know, that would be no different at a theoretical level, like someone who thinks about quantum computing from a theoretical point of view, they don't care what it looks like and where it is, right? But it would massively change, like how, how it affects society, because then it would, would be ubiquitous.

So we don't know, yeah. I mean, as it stands now, there's not going to be more than a few of them because you know, there's not enough liquid helium in the world to, uh, to cool them down, right? Um, but if we could do it without that, then yeah, they could be, they could be everywhere.

[00:25:48] Matt Geleta: the question of why is it then that um, you know funding and funding and minds are not focused on on the On this issue and this technology as much as they possibly could. I mean, the, the example of nuclear fusion, I think you're right. Um, you know, fossil fuels are easy to access and I don't think we'll run out anytime soon. Um, and so that makes sense. But if you look back at something like the Manhattan Project, you know, there was a, there was a strong. Uh, need, I guess, of sorts to create a very powerful nuclear weapon and, um, money and people followed and, and that problem was solved. And with something like the classical computer revolution, the, you know, the economic value, the impact of the world has been so enormous, um, it would be absurd not to invest, uh, in developing a technology like that. And then when I look at, you know, quantum computing, um, You know, what is, what is the difference? Is it that we actually don't believe that the applications could be impactful enough? Well, what is it that is, that is stopping that flow of, of, uh, of people and money into this, into this technology?

[00:26:54] Chris Ferrie: Yeah, I, I, I think that people don't see a need, a need for it, right? Um, You know, even, even the most fantastical applications we can think of, right, that we can design drugs quicker or, you know, create vaccines quicker, I, I don't think people actually really care that much about that. There seems to be more pressing problems.

So I do think that that's currently blocking it is that people can't see the desperate need for it. You know, have computational devices, they work pretty well for all the problems we can, you know, all the daily problems that we've given ourselves. Um, But yeah, I mean, there's some companies obviously that are investing in it, uh, investing at quite a high level, I would And they, they, they do see the need, but I, maybe we don't, we don't actually know the parameters, right? So, you know, suppose I said, well, we can solve all the world's problems. Um, and all it's going to take is, uh, everybody. has to live off food rations and work hours a day for the next 20 years, but I promise at the end and at the end of that, you know, we'll have solved all the world's problems.

I still don't. Even if everyone believed that promise, I still don't think it would happen. so I think, yeah, it's, you know, with, with the Manhattan project and then, and then with like the, then, uh, Apollo missions, which included like, you know, millions of people and trillions of dollars, um, It is an interesting, that those are interesting phenomenon, right, that so many people got behind it, uh, towards the same, the same goal.

Uh, I don't think you can find that of nationalism, uh, any, any more, certainly not, certainly not in Australia, anyway. Um, but yeah, there, there's, there was, I think, probably a lot of competing incentives and... probably a lot of propaganda that, you know, an ethical side to it that, It is more, would be more visible today, so yeah, it, I don't know, I couldn't, I couldn't put a number on it, but I would, I would say that it's on the same scale in, in terms of need of something like a Manhattan Project or, or the Apollo, the Apollo program.

that's really what we need to build a quantum computer and we're not, we're not doing that today. know, on the flip side, imagine that we tried to land someone on the moon in the same way that we're trying to build quantum computers today, right? So a bunch of like, you know, yeah, thousands of, of professors with PhD students that are competing for a small pot of money, uh, a few startup companies.

That put everything behind, um, you know, patents and intellectual property, um, mostly vacuous CEOs with just big egos and, and just a lot of money flowing around for completely vapid reasons. We would never have done it, right?

[00:30:30] Matt Geleta: Yeah. I guess, um, I guess maybe that it comes to the question of what we think, uh, the, the applications actually are. Um, you know, one we've, we've talked about is, is cryptography, but I think one of the motivations for developing. The theory behind quantum computers actually goes all the way back to Feynman and his colleagues in you know simulating quantum processes, simulating chemical reactions and I mean when I just say that that that sounds like a huge application space, you know, you can develop new materials Um, you mentioned condensed metaphysics is one of the biggest areas of physics This would have huge applications in condensed metaphysics.

So I mean what what are the Look, what is the scale of application? If we were to come to the point where quantum computers were a part of everyday life, how would the world change? What, what problems could we solve then that we can't solve today?

[00:31:21] Chris Ferrie: Well, we think there are applications for problems that, that we are solving, but not at the scale we think we might be able to solve them. So, you know, we design materials, we design drugs by using our understanding of chemistry, sometimes down at the quantum level, but with approximations. So, you know, we do this now, and we think that quantum computers would enhance these capabilities.

Uh, in those areas, I, I think that it will move, move slowly. Like we won't, again, we won't notice like this, like it won't be like a, uh, a switch has been flicked on and all of a sudden we'll be able to do something that we couldn't have done before. it, it'll be, you know, slow progress improving upon things that will probably.

Not feel as impressive as it is because everything is sort of increasing, right? Like the whole, all of our society and economy is, is built on this idea of constant growth. So, um, we would expect it, demand it. And that's what will be provided. Um, You know, so we, as of the same will happen, right? Like we, we're getting better materials, we're getting, um, medicine.

We're, you know, we, we can create vaccines in a matter of, you know, months new diseases. These things will just happen faster and at a, at a bigger scale, but, but maybe the problems come faster too, right? And these two things can, you know, just kind of wash each other out. I, you know, we, you can think of fantastical scenarios, but, uh, you know, even With digital technology, which is, you know, completely revolutionized society as you live it, it's pretty, it's pretty mundane, right?

you know, what did we do with it? We created Tik TOK so we can look at each other. filters on our faces. Um, so it'll be, it'll be kind of boring, I think. Um, but it will transform society, you know, in, in kind of the same way that digital technology has, will, will, will live and work and play in completely different, different ways.

Um, but for the people living it, it will just seem like everyday life.

[00:33:54] Matt Geleta: Hmm. Well, let's um, let's maybe then move on to some of the more speculative topics in this area. Um, I think, you know, quantum, quantum computing, um, and really quantum physics in general is, um, often subject of deep speculation and a generator of Weird sounding ideas, which I know you're very intimate with given, uh, given your recent book, which I've just finished and which I thought was, which was very entertaining and I actually, quite frankly, learned a lot from it.

So, um, I would, I would

recommend, uh, having a look. Um, I guess one of the, one of the most well known among these and something that, um, you commented on your book is the idea of a quantum multiverse and, um, quantum computing has been, uh, has been a, A, an area of physics or an application area that has actually generated some commentary on this topic. Um, I would love to get your, your take on this idea of the quantum multiverse. Um, and I, I have some follow up questions, but I would like to get your, your unfiltered views to start off with.

[00:34:59] Chris Ferrie: I, I don't find it useful. Um, I think, know, some people, like one of the most prominent proponent, of it is David, David Deutsch, who was one of the founders of quantum computing. And, you know, he likes to think about quantum computing as computations happening. And I don't know exactly how he thinks of it, but, you know, parallel worlds, whatever.

Um, but just because you use, An idea or a concept for something successful doesn't prove that, that it's true. So you know, if he likes to think about it that way, great, that's if he finds that useful, then, then so be it. But multiverse and all its incarnations is not a testable hypothesis.

And so. So, it, it doesn't, for me, it doesn't seem like it's that, that useful of a hypothesis. if you like it, by all means, you know, create, create some part of your personal story which includes it, but, uh, and if you find it useful, I, I think that that itself is. This is an interesting research question as to why, but in, in terms of, in terms of practical value, um, I, I think over the years it's shown not to have it.

Otherwise. You know, in the many decades since it, especially in the, in the context of like the many worlds theory in quantum, quantum physics, it would have been parts of the practical side of quantum computing, which the vast majority of people who study and use quantum computing are, you know, practicing applied physicists, right, uh, who don't use this, this concept of, of many worlds to their job done.

And I think that, you know, that in and of itself shows that it's actually not a very useful idea.

[00:37:10] Matt Geleta: I think, I think David Deutsch looks at it more as a prediction of, um, you know, quantum theory. I think, you know, he points to, for example, Shor's algorithm for factorizing prime numbers. And he, he says, you know, if this was done in a classical way... You know, it would take, it would consume more steps and more time than we have in the universe, and yet that doesn't happen. Um, and he asked the question, you know, where does the, where does the factorization happen? And um, you know, it is a bit of an odd question, but he, his answer is it happens across multiple universes and collapses into, into one of them. How do you then think about, you know, that algorithm, for example, where it does use superposition? As a, as a, um, you know, superposition is, is the sort of underlying basis of that algorithm. And, um, and it collapses at the end to a definite answer. Uh, how do you think about where that calculation then takes place?

[00:38:09] Chris Ferrie: Well, as I said before, I can do the calculation myself with pen and paper. So in that case, where does it happen? I guess it happens in the combination of mind and on on the paper itself And there's no the collapse is something I do with a pen piece of graphite and and some fiber That's been flattened So I Don't know what I mean, I don't know what he how he would respond to that right it seems like a bit of a non sequitur to bring up a quantum computer when you can do a quantum computation yourself by hand.

In, in the context of Shor's algorithm, like where does, where does the factorization happen? Actually, it doesn't actually happen in Shor's algorithm, right? So Shor's algorithm is mostly a classical algorithm. Like if you, if you, put all the steps together. Most of the steps are classical steps involving like, you know, Euclid's algorithm for, know, the greatest common divisor that was of years old.

So, um, the, what actually is happening At the quantum, in the quantum part, is it's just taking a function and trying to find a pattern in a function. And then once it finds that pattern, then it's kind of solved a sub problem in a bigger algorithm that's mostly classical. So you've designed this algorithm so that...

created a sub problem which the quantum computer is well suited for. Um, and then, you know, Deutsch's other algorithm, like the Deutsch Jozsa algorithm, the first, sort of the first quantum algorithm with a quantum speedup, was designed specifically to exploit, you know, the fact that there, there, there's interference when you do these calculations.

The negative numbers cancel the positive numbers. Um, so, you know, you, You can, you can write this all down. Like if you had a big enough pad of paper, you can write it all down and it's not happening in parallel universes. It's all on one piece of paper in this, in this universe, in this one right? So again, I think it, it's a bit, it's a bit cartoonish.

I often find it, it surprisingly. It's surprising how, how easy, how sticky it is, like how, given, just given how, how cartoonish it is. It's a, it's a very, um, it's not, it's not very, it's not very deep, right? You can, you just look at it and you think, oh, well, you know, look, I, I put the data in these terms and then I put an addition sign between them.

Uh, I'll interpret each of those as being in, its in its own separate world. It, it, it's a bit, yeah. It's a, for me, it's a, is a bit cartoonish.

[00:41:23] Matt Geleta: One of the, one of the, um, other phenomenon that, that David and many people point to is the phenomenon of decoherence, um, which is a big and important term in quantum computing. And I think many people, you know, there's sort of two camps of people. I think some think of decoherence as, uh, the, you know, quantum system, uh, interacting with the environment and kind of. Collapsing to, um, you know, one state or however you want to term that. And, and then there's the other camp who considers decoherence as the environment kind of getting entangled with. a quantum system in superposition. and and as you said, you know, there's different terms. Um, you know, there might be a term for Matt and a term for, for Chris in one state entangled with a quantum system.

And, and then they would then think of that as, um, you know, Matt and Chris entangled with one quantum system and then Matt and Chris entangled with another equally real quantum system. Um, both of those which have, have all right to be called, uh, you know, real and, and existing. Uh, how, how then do you think of, what do you, what do you think of the, the concept of, of decoherence physically, ontologically?

What is, what is happening in, in decoherence?

[00:42:37] Chris Ferrie: Yeah, so if you take a system and it's isolated, then the Schrodinger equation a very good equation to use to describe behavior of that system, and if you make predictions based on it, you'll right of the time. Um, that is interacting with another system, uh, the mathematics of quantum physics This you to describe it in a in a certain way and we give that a name.

It's called entanglement. They just become correlated And in the same way that classical correlations, you know render uncertain, you know, some properties of the system The same happens in, in, in quantum physics. so I don't think there's anything mysterious there. Uh, the, you know, the decoherence and superposition itself is a, what we call in quantum physics, basis dependent.

Um, so In some sense, the superposition is only meaningful because you define some preferred kind of states of the world. from, I would say, from the universe's perspective, those aren't special at all. I mean, you just chose to say that, say, the alive cat and the dead cat are special states of the world.

And so the superposition has some, some particular weird meaning for you. But, um. from the universe's perspective, it's just another vector in this space of a lot of vectors. Um, it, it's not it's not a sum of two things at all. It's just its own, its own thing. Um, so yeah, when you set up a model that includes the environment in, in setting that up, it's, it usually prefers some basis.

So the environment is, is in set up in such a way. prefer states of the system and create robust states of that system. if you imagine, like a dust particle floating around in a room, lots of air molecules around, and every time an air molecule hits the dust particle, it, you know, that air molecule now encodes the position of that dust particle.

So position space is this, one of these preferred states. Because you've stuck the thing in this environment, which is in, is constantly in, you know, encoding and copying the position. Um, and so when you put that thing in superposition of two, uh, of two position states, it will. So, you know, it will cease to be in such a superposition quite rapidly because position information is constantly being encoded and copied in the environment.

if you put it in a different environment, like, uh, it, it some very non, non-natural environment that was more conducive to Uh, then, then super positions of positions would, would, would be natural and remain. And then the momentum states would be the ones that, that deco here. So it, for me, it's all about.

So you know, the kind of environment that you're in defines what, states of the system are robust that in turn kind of sets up that this kind of, um, artificially paradoxical situation of, of, of superpositions they're not common. So when they do happen, when you try to engineer them, they seem unique and surprising, but that's only because of the context in which you've placed this system in.

[00:46:46] Matt Geleta: So why is it that you think then that, um, so many, that this is such a, like a divisive issue in, in physics today, both among, um, practicing physicists, but also just among, um, sort of physics lay people who, um, you know, know a bit, read a bit about physics, but not actively involved in the research. Why is there such a strong dividing line today?

Um, what, what are we, what are we not seeing that's providing clarity here?

[00:47:12] Chris Ferrie: I, I think it's not that important an issue for people to spend time thinking about. Uh, and it's what, and I guess what I mean by that is it's so far removed from everyday experience, right? Like resolving this question is. is not going to help you get a new job, right? It's, it's not going to tell you where to invest your money, you know, what you should have for dinner tonight.

Like your everyday concerns will never be related to details of what's, what's going on. Um, in this sort of, um, part of the world, so far removed from every, every experience and sensation you can have. So from that point of view, it's just not important enough for people to devote a lot of time to.

Um, you know, I guess it, I don't want to be too glib about it, but I, it would be hard for me to, to really think about what, what problems it would actually resolve if everyone came to an agreement about it. So you know, it's this. Um, it's, it's kind of like, uh, like, like fiction, right? You there, there are unanswered questions about a fictitious world.

People will, there's, uh, there's always room for interpretation. And so you'll get people arguing about it endlessly.

[00:48:51] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, we've seen that. And I think we've also seen, and this leads very nicely to your, um, your book, your most recent book. I don't know how many books you have, more than, more than anyone has spoken to probably, but, um, uh, you know, there was also that, but then there's also deliberate misuse of, of quantum terminology, quantum ideas, or even not deliberate, but naive use of these ideas. And you've gone through several of them in, in your book, uh, Quantum Bullshit, which, um, which is, which is, which is good fun. Um, maybe let's start with, uh, let's start with the, the motivation for writing a book like that. What, what brought you to writing that book?

[00:49:30] Chris Ferrie: I was a combination of things. Um, of them was the fact that my, uh, my other books, which are, which are for children. Seem to hit a lot of different audiences except one. So, you know, obviously kids have the book, parents have the book, um, grandparents. Uh, I, I've even seen sort of, uh, adults but science enthusiasts pick up a copy because they, like, like, The way things are explained in it, the one sort of audience that I didn't, uh, it didn't resonate with was like, say the undergraduate physics audience.

So like, you know, people in their late teens, early twenties, um, right in that perfect of age where you know everything. Um, so I, I was missing that audience. And, and then there was a very sort of clear kind of moment in my mind that I remember I was walking through an airport and I was actually going to visit the publisher of my children's books,

[00:50:31] Matt Geleta: Mm

hmm.

[00:50:32] Chris Ferrie: for dinner.

And I remember seeing the airport, one of these airport bookstores, and it had the top 10 books. it was after the subtle art of not giving a fuck became popular. And then everybody put a swear word in the title of their book. Um, and I, I, I thought, well, you know, if I rename quantum physics for babies to quantum fucking physics for babies, maybe it'll, it'll start selling in airport bookstores.

And, you know, young professionals will, and undergraduate physicists will, will, will buy it. Uh, and so I joked about it with the publisher and they thought about it for a second. They said, Oh, that's not actually a bad idea. And so I thought. Okay, well, I'll, I'll write a book with a swear word in the title, um, and, you know, it just so happens that there is a lot of quantum bullshit out there, so it wasn't that difficult to fill the book.

[00:51:26] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I actually, I actually tested some of your claims by doing a Google search for, for quantum blank and, and you're totally right. It is, it is, it is a lot out there. Why is it that you think that it is such a misabused, um, you know, topic? You don't get, for example, statistical physics hype out there. You don't get, um, random chemistry hype, but there is a lot of quantum. Hype. And it's certainly overrepresented in, uh, in the general public and it's certainly the most represented, misrepresented sort of brand of physics that I've seen. What do you, what do you, what's your take on that? What is the cause of, of this phenomenon?

[00:52:05] Chris Ferrie: Well, I think, again, because it's so far removed from our everyday experience, it just leaves lots of room for interpretation, and so, you know, ev People are aware that there's this theory of quantum physics, and it's very successful. And it to explain the way the world works, and if, and it, you know, it's about a hidden, sort of, something hidden from our everyday experience.

Then you take some, you know, something else, right, that seems to be hidden, uh, but a part of the world, like love or something.

[00:52:40] Matt Geleta: Hmm.

[00:52:41] Chris Ferrie: so certainly some, God has to be some mechanism there, right? Um, but it's not observable. It's clearly not explained by engineering or statistics or Newton's laws. Um, What's left, right?

Um, so think that's, that, that's why, right? There's, it leaves, it leaves so much room for interpretation. And, uh, you know, people don't have the time, obviously, to, to get a, an undergraduate degree in physics to understand the limits of its application. it seems to be there free for the, free for the taking to apply to, to whatever unexplained thing that, you want to interpret.

[00:53:27] Matt Geleta: Hmm. Yeah. And, um, and in, in going through sort of the research, I mean, you, you, you work in this field, so I don't think you would have to do. All that much external research, but you know, looking at what's out there and trying to diagnose, you know, how much of this is. It's just naive and how much of this is actually malicious intent, um, it feels like a big mix.

Do you have a sense as to which side it skews?

[00:53:53] Chris Ferrie: Uh, I think the vast majority, like if you just quantified the amount, the number of bits, like the amount of information out there, most of it would be just innocuous nonsense, right? Somebody posts some meme of, um, you know, cosmic consciousness or whatever they want to think about in the moment.

Without any malicious intent. They don't really intend to deceive anyone. They're not selling anything. Uh, it's just a reshare meme that resonates with them. And because it has the word quantum in it, it sounds cool and exciting. That's the majority of it. Um, Obviously when things go wrong, then it gets more attention.

And so, yeah, you, you, you see more stories about the, the, the things that do involve malicious intent, but I don't think that makes up the majority of it.

[00:54:55] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Well, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a worthwhile, it's a worthwhile read. I must say I did, I did learn a bit even though I've got a couple physics degrees and some background in it. It was, uh, it summarized things in a nice way. So I recommend it. Um, the other sort of back to quantum computing, the other interesting thing you've worked on is, um, You know, you've written several books on education and I know you're involved in a quantum computing education of a sort through Through a company called Eigen systems. Can you tell me a little bit about what you're what you're doing there?

[00:55:25] Chris Ferrie: Yeah, so the, the company is, is a quantum computing education company. And our goal is to

democratize access to, to quantum computing education. So we talked about briefly already quantum computers that are for sale. Like, you know, IBM will sell you one if you have a tens of millions of dollars, um, but you know, obviously not everyone can, can afford that.

So. What we wanted to do was provide the same sort of, uh, benefits of tangibility by creating a desktop quantum emulator that is accessible and affordable would allow people to, to engage in new and yeah, more, um,

Yeah, I think just, just engage in, in new ways with, with quantum computing that didn't exist before.

[00:56:25] Matt Geleta: Yeah, and and when you say engage with quantum computing, do you mean, you know algorithm design developing software? Is this is this something for developers to use?

[00:56:35] Chris Ferrie: Well, part of the, part of the motivation, you know, was we, we thought back to the early days of, of digital computing

[00:56:46] Matt Geleta: Hmm

[00:56:46] Chris Ferrie: and this hobbyist mentality, When you could buy like an Altair. And, uh, you know, there was some, some instructions for how to use it, that, you know, that was it. Obviously you couldn't use that device to, to program a web app, but.

you could how to develop some, some computing skills by, by using that. And the constraints of it forced you to do interesting things, like come up with an operating system for it. Um, so. We, that's what we wanted to like hearken back to, right? This hobbyist mentality. Now you can't develop, you know, you can't use it to say, develop more optimized subroutines to run Shor's algorithm.

Because as I said, you need billions of qubits and we can't simulate that with conventional technology and you're not going to be able to develop. Practical commercial applications because again, it's It's a small scale emulate, you know, device that emulates the industrial scale technology. But you could do the same things that hobbyists did with digital computers.

You could create quantum video games. You could, you know, uh, create, you know, quantum chatbots, right? You know, create your, yeah, create your quantum game that runs in parallel universes if you want. Um, so these are the sorts of things that you, that, that you can do with it. It, it's not about learning and learning development in the same way that you would learn development.

In a like software development, where the point is to someone into, into a commercial setting right away. because the, you know, we're still at a really fundamental level with this technology.

[00:58:52] Matt Geleta: Yeah. Great. Um, and, and, uh, you know, is, is this available? Can people, can people check this out or is this something in development? Um, what's the, what's the status?

[00:59:00] Chris Ferrie: Yeah, so the status, now is we, we have devices, uh, we have more customers than we can, we can fulfill orders for. Uh, they're kind of pilot customers at the moment. Um, we, we're, we're giving them to say other university professors. Uh, there's a couple of sort of more hands on pilot programs that we're running.

That, that are for clients that don't have any background in quantum computing. we're testing how we can, uh, deploy these things in that context. What sort of support people would need they didn't have a quantum computing background, the obvious. This application is for professors that are already teaching quantum computing that just want to enhance, um, the engagement with students to provide them with something tangible.

And where, you know, so the stage we're at is. is, is really, uh, looking at getting, getting some investment so that we can start to, to scale up and mass produce them so we can to meet all the demand that, that we're seeing for it.

[01:00:19] Matt Geleta: Amazing. Yeah. Well,

it's a wish.

[01:00:22] Chris Ferrie: maybe early, early next year. There'll be a website up where you can put your, uh, pre order in and, uh, by mid next year we're hoping we can, we can start to ship, um, every, for every order that we get.

[01:00:36] Matt Geleta: Fantastic. Well, um, I can retrospectively, once the website is up, I can add it to the, uh, the notes here.

Um,

[01:00:43] Chris Ferrie: Sure.

[01:00:44] Matt Geleta: let's, uh, to bring it to a close, I like asking my guests a couple sort of structured questions. Um, and the first I think relates very nicely to the work you do, you know, you've been involved in, in book writing and I assume book reading and book gifting for, uh, for many years. Um, and one of the questions I'd love to ask is what book have you most gifted to other people and why?

[01:01:05] Chris Ferrie: Okay, um, well, okay, this is gonna sound a bit silly. It's one of my books, because the publisher gives me so many, so um, so I get them for free, so they're easy for me to gift. Um, but the one I like to give away the most is, is called, There Was a Black Hole That Swallowed the Universe. Um, because I think it's a really fun book, kind of to the cadence of there was an old lady that swallowed a fly, so it's very easy, sort of easy to read and fun to read to kids.

And I, when I designed the book, I created a reverse story where, so the story is about a black hole that swallows up everything in the universe. there's a story that goes in reverse that puts everything back in the universe starting from the Big Bang. And that story is written in UV reactive ink. So you can't see it on the page, but if you shine a UV torch on it, a story that goes in reverse when you go back through the page.

So I like giving that book away with a UV torch, um, and then, uh, if it's in the context of, you know, some event or something, then I'll, I'll, I'll sign the book with, uh, you know, invisible, invisible UV, UV reactive ink and, and the kids really get a kick out of that. So that's the funnest one to, to give away for sure.

[01:02:23] Matt Geleta: Yeah, well, there's definitely no need to be embarrassed for giving that away. I think that's, that's unique. That's, that's amazing. Um, the next question I'll ask also relates to young people. You know, you've thought a lot about, uh, young people's learning journeys, both from a very young age, but also at undergraduate level and beyond. Um, and I think many people, when they enter... You know, these technical fields that enter physics, it's in a very undirected way. And uh, it's, it's almost, it's almost, you know, by chance they might end up following some route and go very, very deep. Um, and so my question is, you know, to, to a young person or potentially just any curious person wanting to get, uh, wanting to explore these fields, wanting to explore physics in general and not knowing where to start. What advice would you have for somebody like that?

[01:03:09] Chris Ferrie: Well, I think it would just be start. Um, it, people tend to over optimize and you get this sort of sense of stagnation or, or, or paralyzation you don't know if you're doing the right thing. Um, even today, the vast majority of things that I do are mistakes, right? If I, if I'm writing a book, there's.

You know, false starts. I have a whole, I have a folder, um, called the bad ideas bin and it's the biggest folder on my computer. Uh, so you just, you just go and then, and then as you go, you come up with questions. And in some sense, like you just have to trust the process that there'll be, there'll be interesting and useful questions and they'll eventually lead you down the right path.

And the, that process of making those mistakes will make you better prepared for the path further down. in, you know, it's, it's necessary. So, you know, making mistakes and, and what seems like wasting time is, is actually the most useful and productive thing that you can do. Um, so just get started. Um, I find, I don't, I don't.

passively learn information very well. it, it's the process of doing that, that allows me to understand the things that I'm working on. So, a lot of that involves writing and, and attempting to teach it to other people. You know, even if it, if it's just the void, I post a blog post, um, that, that process of least attempting to teach it to other people is what provides me with, with understanding.

So that would be my recommendation. Just, just. Pick something. Try to write it in your own words. Write it as if you were teaching it to someone else. Whether or not anyone else is going to read it, it doesn't really matter. Because that process is what will provide you with the understanding.

[01:05:23] Matt Geleta: Yeah, fantastic. Um, you know, the, the last question I have, we talked a bit about the advances in, in technology and in quantum computing. And one of the other areas that's also hyped up a lot, but is also bearing fruit is, is artificial intelligence. And something you hear a lot of is the prospect of a general artificial intelligence or an artificial super intelligence. Uh, and my question to you is, suppose one day we were to be visited by. A, an artificial super intelligence and we had to pick one person either past or present to represent us to this super intelligent other. Who would you pick?

[01:06:01] Chris Ferrie: Um,

uh, I feel like realistically , what would happen would be, uh, you know, some organization would create some sort of program of dubious, ethical

[01:06:18] Matt Geleta: Ha

[01:06:19] Chris Ferrie: uh, procedures that trains, trains someone, uh, to be the representative, right? , Um, I think the, I mean, that's, that, that sounds a bit cynical, I suppose. Uh, and it, you know, if you're cynical about, about AI, like this, so your picture of a AI or, you know, a super intelligence is like the Terminator, then probably you would want the, the inevitable.

To be over as quick as possible. So you should present like the worst example of a human so that,

[01:06:56] Matt Geleta: ha ha.

[01:06:57] Chris Ferrie: you get the, you get it over with as

[01:06:58] Matt Geleta: Ha ha ha. Ha ha.

[01:07:00] Chris Ferrie: So, uh, yeah, I don't know, Tom Cruise, I guess. Um,

[01:07:02] Matt Geleta: Ha

ha.

[01:07:03] Chris Ferrie: you know, insert, insert the, the political leader of your least favorite political party, for the listeners.

Um,

[01:07:11] Matt Geleta: Yeah.

[01:07:12] Chris Ferrie: I think I don't, I, I, yeah, I don't, singularity where.

Uh, tech, the progress in technology, we'll see some giant step transition. Um, that's not usually what happens. So I don't think that will happen with, with AI So I'll give it a fuck. So yeah, so I think it's a bit absurd to consider, but so I'll give you my final absurd answer, which is Tommy

[01:07:41] Matt Geleta: Ha ha ha. Fantastic. Okay, well, I won't, I won't open up this, this rabbit hole of Tommy Wiseau and whether we'll hit AGI, but um, it's been a fantastic conversation, Chris. Thank you. Thank you so much for, uh, for speaking with me today.

Joel is the author of several books including Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics, and the The Book of Infinity, which he’s publishing in a serialised form on his Substack, Infinitely More.

Topics:

• the concept of truth in maths and elsewhere

• the nature of proof in mathematics

• the acclaimed completeness and incompleteness theorems

• the relationship between mathematical thinking and the human mind

… and other topics.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X for episodes and infrequent social commentary.

Episode links

• Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics: https://amzn.to/4dhMh14

• Substack: https://www.infinitelymore.xyz/

• Book of infinity: https://www.infinitelymore.xyz/s/the-book-of-infinity

• Panorama of logic: https://www.infinitelymore.xyz/s/panorama-of-logic

• Other books: https://www.infinitelymore.xyz/p/books

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

1:17: Truth

8:38 Intuition vs objective truth

13:15 Proof

20:39 Completeness

30:18 Incompleteness

37:20 Is completeness a 'problem'?

43:07 Hierarchies of logical systems

48:44 Axioms and where they come from

1:03:50 Motivations for studying pure mathematics

1:19:57 Joel's books

1:22:58 Who should represent humanity to an AI superintelligence?

Transcript

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. It will be corrected and annotated with links and citations over time.

[00:00:12] Matt Geleta: I'm here with Joel David Hampkins. Joel, thanks for joining me.

[00:00:15] Joel David Hamkins: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

[00:00:17] Matt Geleta: Let's start off with the concept of truth. This is a central concept in mathematics and elsewhere, and I think it's commonly believed that in mathematics, mathematical truths have a different character to truths in other contexts and in other fields. How do you think about the concept of truth within mathematics?

[00:00:39] Joel David Hamkins: Right. So I guess that it's not only the concept of truth that's different, really, the, the of existence is different in mathematics than it is in many other domains of knowledge. I mean, mathematics is concerned with are regarded as abstract objects in, in, contrast with say physics and so on, which is concerned with the nature of physical existence and it's a totally different character of existence, isn't it?

I mean, you know, if you think about numbers, what, what is a number? What are numbers? Well, there are these you know, there are these abstractions of a certain kind, which is maybe confusing to think about the nature that it seems different than the nature of existence of an apple or a few apples on your desk or something like that. Or, Um, I mean, of course we also have, we also have abstractions in the physical world, like beauty for example. does beauty exist? Those beautiful things, but, uh, what about beauty itself? That's a kind of abstraction. And so in what sense does the abstraction somehow, re does it reduce to. the individual items that instantiate that concept, or maybe the same thing's going on with numbers, right? And so when one is talking about truth, it's just like another layer of abstraction, of course. I mean, if, if we, uh, talk about whether certain statements of, uh, existence assertions about certain kinds of numbers. are there infinitely many primes, or is there a number such that it solves some, a given equation and so on, then what is this exists? What does it mean? and and it's not at all. clear what we might need. Vanassaraf wrote a famous about what he viewed as a kind of fundamental problem about this abstract existence, namely the problem of causal interaction with this abstract realm. Maybe, maybe when I mean, of course, the idea of this sort of platonic realm of mathematics or of ideal forms is, is quite old, uh, but the, the sort of problem with causality is that we seem to gain knowledge and make truth assertions about that realm, but how is it that we're able to interact with abstract realm at all.

This is Nasraf's challenge, right? It seems like We can't seem to have any kind of causal, uh, there can't be any sort of causality flowing in either direction, either from us, you know, as physical beings to the platonic realm, or in the other direction, is sort of this impassable divide between what we experience and the nature of the objects, uh, in, you know, in that abstract realm.

And so, This was viewed, uh, uh, as a kind of puzzle for how we can ever come to mathematical knowledge about that realm or make true decisions about it, because we can't seem to get across this bridge. but okay, so a lot of people take this objection quite seriously. I mean, it's, uh, there's hundreds of papers written about this idea, um, but other philosophers, uh, often, uh, tend to reject the objection itself.

For example, Barbara Montero, um, argues, uh, that it's not like we have such a great understanding of causality in the first place. I mean, causality itself, even in the physical realm, is quite mysterious. And if you think about sort of the problems of causality in, say, relativity theory or, um, uh, It's quite confusing and, and so it's not at all the case that we have a perfect understanding of causality and that this unbridgeable gap between the platonic realm and a universe is a clear cut violation. So it seems like Vanassaroff is relying, is making this concept of causality do too much in a way that uh, our imperfect understanding of causality just can't succeed that way. And so maybe, uh, maybe, maybe we don't have to take the objections so seriously, as, as that. there's, there's other kind of issues though that come up with this abstraction, uh, namely, it's quite commonly described. that the sort of difficulty of, of, the mathematical existence assertions has to do with their abstract nature. But if we could give a kind of account or reduce the abstractions to say, physical assertions about the physical world, then everything would be good. It's somehow this idea is somehow presuming that our, our. understanding and our accounts of physical existence are totally clear, and this, this abstract existence that's the worrisome one. but I've that maybe that has it, maybe we have it backwards uh, on that point because seems like physical existence, the more physics, you know, the less clear it

[00:05:51] Matt Geleta: Um, Uh, Um, Hehehehe

[00:05:52] Joel David Hamkins: with the, uh, of strangeness of quantum mechanics.

And so the the deeper you dig down into the fundamental nature of physical existence, the more kind of incoherent it is even in this. And it seems like we can't really give a very coherent or full account of the nature of existence of, say, electrons or, uh, or an apple on my desk. I mean, if we really want to give a kind of complete account of what does it mean to say that such a thing exists. Um, whereas in certain simple kinds of mathematical, existence assertions like the existence of the empty set is an example I like to use for the second hand in the empty set, it seems like we can give a pretty satisfactory account of what it means to say that the empty set exists. We can talk about that uh, are impossible to instantiate.

And, you know, this predicate is, uh, is kind of the members, you know, the individuals that fall under this predicate are exactly, uh, the members of the empty set and okay, we can talk in this kind of way. and, and it seems to me, it's a sort of more comprehensive account of what it means for that abstract thing to exist, than is possible.

I can't even imagine the nature of a corresponding full account of the nature of existence of an electron, say. in a way that was as complete. so, so what I think is the mysterious one is physical existence and abstract existence is maybe much easier. So from this point of view, maybe these mathematical true decisions are a little easier to come by than the true physical ones.

[00:07:38] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I think, I think it definitely connects with a lot of people's intuitions about mathematical truths, at least being somehow objectively more true in a way, or, um, more fundamental in some sense than these physical truths that you mentioned. But it does strike me if you look at it from first principles, even the physical truths, like we're using concepts to talk about them.

And in some sense, they are all abstractions that. that live in some mental realm or some mind space, um, and, uh, it's actually not very clear, uh, kind of how to differentiate the spaces, right? You mentioned, uh, electrons and, you know, an apple on your desk. Those are just words, um, or ideas floating in my mind in the same way as a symbol on a page.

And, um, you know, yeah, I think you're totally right. It's, it's, uh, how, how does one then connect the idea in the mind? to whatever it is it's meant to be referring to outside of the mind. Um, it feels like there's a bit of like a mind projection fallacy. Uh, at play here. Um, but that leads me to the idea then, is it, is it easy to mistake the actual truth value of something from our presumed knowledge of that truth?

Um, so, you know, certain things might seem intuitively very clearly true to us. And, you know, intuition can, can take you so far. Um, Is it, do you think it's a, it's a common problem to mistake that, like the strength of intuition, um, of, of something's truth value for the objective truth value out there in either the, the real world or the platonic realm?

Um, how do you, how do you think about that, that role of intuition in truth? Mm,

[00:09:23] Joel David Hamkins: that you use that word intuition in that particular way because, this is a common way to talk about this sort of historical rise of intuitionism. I mean, as the intuitionistic logic, in classical logic, typically, um, that one makes a clear distinction between what's true and sort of our knowledge or reasoning about what's

[00:09:47] Matt Geleta: mm,

[00:09:48] Joel David Hamkins: Those are just totally different things. And there's this idea that, okay, there's a, you know, an objective nature to the, to what's really true true sort of independently of what we might know about it or reason about it or come to deduce about it or observe about it or, or, whatever. And so we have, um, uh, kind of separation between ontology and epistemology very clear.

[00:10:10] Matt Geleta: mm,

[00:10:10] Joel David Hamkins: whereas in intuitionistic I mean, historically, this sort of more contemporary, uh, mathematicians working in, in, with constructive logic don't have this view, but, uh, historically the. The view in a way to mix up what's true with our way of coming to know what's true by,

[00:10:33] Matt Geleta: mm

[00:10:34] Joel David Hamkins: replacing truth conditions with what amount to assertability conditions. So in intuitionistic logic, for example, we, we only assert. p or q if we're also prepared to say which one.

And

[00:10:50] Matt Geleta: hmm,

[00:10:50] Joel David Hamkins: Whereas in classical logic, of course, we can have a disjunction p or q. can positively assert that even when we don't know which one is true. Maybe we're going to argue, look, it has to be one or the other, because, if both of them are false, then, we get a contradiction or

something

[00:11:06] Matt Geleta: mm hmm.

[00:11:07] Joel David Hamkins: and Whereas in intuitionistic logic, uh, the sort of assertability criteria would be, that you assert the disjunction only when you're also prepared to assert one of them. And, and there's this way of viewing that as mixing up the concept of truth with the, with the concept of truth. knowledge or our way of coming to know the truth. but as I said, there's, you know, also true for other, the other logical connectives in intuitionistic logic. and, um, but there are, it's also this sort of independent contemporary program of using construction mathematics and topos theory and so on. in, that situation, it's, it's not so much, uh, mixing up epistemology and so on.

It's rather just the nature of truth in these non classical mathematical realms. obeys intuitionistic logic. And so they're calculating with that logic because that's the nature, uh, of of truth exhibited by those mathematical structures. And so it's not burdened by this kind of philosophical objection that I was just making.

[00:12:15] Matt Geleta: It does, it does lead very naturally then to the question of how we do know, um, that something is, is true or not true. Um, and on the one hand, um, you know, you hope that at times those two different ideas, the ontology of something and, the epistemology coincide. You know, our intuitions are strong enough and clear enough that we can trust them.

And, uh, we, we can trust them to indicate something that's true out there in the real world. Um, but I mean, another approach or another methodology or don't even know what to call it, um, in maths is proof. Um, the, the concept of, of proof in the process of proof, maybe taking a step back and just looking at that, that, uh, that concept in sort of zoomed out.

How do you think about um, the notion of proof, or how should people think about the notion of, of proof in mathematics?

[00:13:08] Joel David Hamkins: Right. It's actually fascinating, fascinating puzzle, I mean, problem to think about. What does it mean to prove something, if you ask mathematicians, uh, what a proof is, I mean, mathematicians who haven't studied, say, logic very much, but just are, you know, expert in mathematics, then They're often hard pressed to say exactly what it means to prove something, I mean,

to,

[00:13:32] Matt Geleta: Mm.

[00:13:33] Joel David Hamkins: you a definite account, you know. what they mean, you know, it's one of these things you recognize in practice, you give them, and, and, and, what it's gonna be boiling down to in the end is something like a very convincing argument that makes clear what the logical steps of reasoning are or something like this. Um, And, uh, for example, I wrote a book called Proof in the Art of Mathematics, which was teaching undergraduate students introductory book, how to learn how to write proofs. And in that book, it's not a logic book, and I didn't give a formal definition of proof. And I said a proof is a, is a It's a clear and convincing that, logically demonstrates that the conclusion follows from the premise. and, uh, and it's sort of an informal definition, but it's workable in practice when mathematicians are writing precepts, what they mean.

But in the subject of mathematical logic, we have a concept of formal proof, which is different from proof as it's used by mathematicians, because most mathematicians, when they prove a theorem, they're not giving a formal proof. They're giving a convincing argument that demonstrates that the conclusion follows from the you know, the logical consequence of the premise, but

it's

[00:14:45] Matt Geleta: Mm.

[00:14:46] Joel David Hamkins: proof in the sense of mathematical logic, but a formal proof is Uh, one has to set up the uh, uh, kind of context for it. There's a formal language of mathematics in which these proofs are taking place. And so we have a definition of what counts as a formal language of mathematics. There's certain kinds of relation symbols and variable symbols and logical connectives and so on. And we can talk about expressions, formal expressions in this formal language. And then what a proof is, is a certain arrangement of those formal expressions, that, that constitutes a proof. And, and so maybe the proof system, the formal system, there's a huge variety of

[00:15:26] Matt Geleta: Mm.

[00:15:27] Joel David Hamkins: of proof systems, but in some of them we might have some axioms, some logical axioms, or then there's the axioms that we're going to be reasoning from. In the proof, and then maybe there's some deduction rules that tell you, for example, one of the most common deduction rules is called modus ponens. And this is the rule that says, if you have a statement P, and you have an implication P implies Q, then on the basis of those two statements, you can deduce Q. So this is a classical rule. deduction rule, goes back to Aristotle and so on, um, and it's usually part of most of the proof systems. And, and so a formal proof is a kind of arrangement of statements in the formal language that either are using the, the, the formal axioms that were allowed or at each step they're using. the formal inference rules that were explicitly stated to be allowed and such that at the bottom, at the end of the proof is the statement, the theorem that's being proved. So we have this concept of formal proof

[00:16:28] Matt Geleta: Mm

[00:16:29] Joel David Hamkins: and, uh, and the way I think about formal proof is something like the way I think about Turing machines as a

[00:16:40] Matt Geleta: hm. Mm hm. Mm hm.

[00:16:42] Joel David Hamkins: I mean, Alan Turing designed the sort of theoretical model of computation called Turing machines in 1936. He abstracted away from what a human being did when sitting at a desk and undertaking a kind of computational process, he was led to this idea of putting marks on a piece of paper and so on, and led to this concept of a Turing machine, which ultimately is. It's a kind of machine with a paper tape and it can put marks on that tape and it moves in very specific ways back and forth over the over the tape and looks at what it had previously written and it's in one of finitely many states and so on and it provides a model of computability. And when you first learn about Turing machines, maybe you think, well, this is a totally primitive

[00:17:30] Matt Geleta: hm.

[00:17:31] Joel David Hamkins: that could probably hardly do anything at all.

It shouldn't be very useful. But remarkably, it turns out, and Turing, this is part of what Turing had done, is he, he proved that Turing machines are amazingly powerful. And I mean, in principle, the kinds of computations that these very simple can undertake. include simulations of essentially any kind of computational process that you can imagine using some other more powerful, say, computer language.

If you, you know, the operation of Python programs or C whatever, all of this can ultimately be simulated by these Turing machines Okay, so why am I talking about Turing machines now? Well, the reason is that uses Turing machines for actual computation. We study Turing machines as a theoretical model of computation in order to come to a deeper understanding of the nature of computation. And so this has led to a huge number of, of insights and conceptual, foundations of the subject in terms of the PNP problem and computability Halton problem and the complexity. uh, hierarchy and so on. All of these are based ultimately on the kind of theoretical framework that that model of computability provides. So we're not using Turing machines to compute, but we're using them to understand the nature of computation. And that's how I think about formal proofs. everyone thinks about formal proofs this way, but this is how I think, how I like to think about them. We don't use formal proofs to prove things. We use informal proofs to prove things. These are the, the informal proofs are the arguments that mathematicians use to understand mathematical ideas and to communicate with one another, we use formal proofs to understand the nature of proof the the concepts of independence, logical independence and consistency and so on.

These are the ideas that flow out of having a formal concept of proof and that provide a kind of framework of our understanding of the nature of proof.

[00:19:39] Matt Geleta: No, absolutely. It, um, it, it reminds me of, it's actually sort of, it's somewhat unrelated example, but I think it illustrates one of the points, at least of the utility of, you know, spending so much time studying a formal system and sort of abstracting insights up to some higher level system that we use in everyday.

So for example, um, in, uh, in natural language, in speaking, um, um, The, our intuitions, uh, sort of coincide with, um, uh, what you said that earlier about, um, you know, if, if P implies Q and P then Q, I think that's, that's a very natural thing to understand in, uh, in everyday life, um, and yeah, including that in a formal system, um, you know, the, the, the example that came to mind was actually a fairly silly one, but I think it is called, it's something like the, the, The table theorem, um, and it's, it's this idea, you know, you sometimes see someone sitting in a restaurant and, and the table is wobbly and, uh, you've got a flat surface and, uh, they're sort of trying to gerrymander this, this table around to try and get it to be static.

But,

um, if you rotate the table, um, you know, there, there will be a point at which you have three, three legs all touching the ground at the same time.

And it's again, this idea of, of. You know, at a very deep mathematical level, you can prove something about surfaces and three points, and it abstracts to something very useful in, in the real world.

And again, the concept of, you know, I mentioned it, a Turing machine, I think it has very, has very much this, this quality where it's a, it's a, an idea of computation that. Would be completely impractical to instantiate on an actual physical computer, no one would use it. Um, yet you can, you can show that it can, uh, um, you know, the things that you can prove about the Turing machine would apply to computation that happens in, in other contexts.

Um, what, what, um, I always found very groundbreaking or sort of at least intuition bending about the concept of a Turing machine and some of the implications that come from it. Um, uh, um, the, the incompleteness theorems and, you know, the, the relationship between, you know, what you can prove about whether or not a program can, can halt on a certain problem.

And. You know, what this means about being able to, to verify, uh, statements, you know, in, in mathematics. Could you, could you set the, the picture here a little bit, how one goes from looking at the, the, um, idea of a Turing machine to making it what many people consider to be, consider to be a very verifiability.

in, uh, in mathematics, uh, and in, and in proof theory.

[00:22:26] Joel David Hamkins: right. So, so you mentioned the Incompleteness theorem, but the question that you just asked is maybe more connected with the, what's called the completeness theorem. So Gödel, sort of funny, Gödel proved The Completeness Theorem, and he also proved the Incompleteness Theorem, but they don't contradict each other, of course. So the Completeness Theorem says following, it says if you have a theory, sort of a set of statements in a formal language, that's what a theory is, and it has a certain entailment it implies a certain statement and I mean this not because there's a proof, but rather because it implies it logically, in the sense that whenever in any mathematical structure in which the theory is true, then the statement also is true. For example, maybe you're talking as, Maybe we're, have a theory of certain kinds of orders of some and we make a statement about, in the language of orders, like, that this, you know, that the order is dance or something like Then, if every order satisfying the axioms satisfies the conclusion, And that's what I mean by saying that the statement is a logical consequence of that theory. And the completeness theorem says, whenever a statement is a logical consequence of a theory, that's equivalent to there being a proof of that statement this formal sense of proof. And it is just amazing that this could be true, because it means, for example, If a statement is true in all groups, a certain kind of mathematical structure called a group, if a statement in a language of groups is true in all groups, there's a proof of it, a finite proof of it in this formal sense from the group axioms. And it is just astounding that that could be true because The statement about it being true in all groups is referring to this vast realm of different mathematical structures, including uncountable groups of enormous cardinality. And the mere fact that the statement happens to be true in all of those different groups means that there's a proof. finite combinatorial formal and the way I think about it is, okay, certainly if there is a proof, then, because the proof system is a sound, you know, involves only sound reasoning steps, it should be true in all the groups. That direction seems totally clear. If we have a proof, then it's going to be true in all the groups, in all the models of the theory, whatever the theory is. the other direction that's profound, that if it happens to be true in all the mathematical structures in which that theory is holding, then there's a proof, a reason. So it's saying, basically, that everything that's true is true for a reason. The reason is the proof, And I just find this remarkable. and and it's what, it's what's building the connection. The fact that the completeness theorem is correct is, what's traversing the land from sort of this. finitary land of proofs and formal statements and symbols that are being arranged in a certain way with the sort of semantic land of models and what's true in them, including these enormous uncountable models of the theory and, and the fact that there's this equivalence I just find it amazing.

[00:25:53] Matt Geleta: It's, it's, uh, just,

[00:25:55] Joel David Hamkins: I'll go ahead.

[00:25:56] Matt Geleta: it's just, it's, it's interesting that, um, you know, I think if you speak to many mathematicians or people who are sort of familiar with mathematics, but have not studied it in the depth that you have, I, my, my experience is that the intuition falls the other direction. Uh, they find it, um, They expect that true statements will be provable.

And that seems to be a deeply held intuition, certainly in early years when people are studying mathematics. So I didn't mean to interrupt you there, but I would love to understand how your intuition on that point differs so much from at least my experience of speaking to people about this issue.

[00:26:35] Joel David Hamkins: I think there's a, okay, there's a difference when you're talking about sort of true true statements being provable, and that is, um, the completeness theorem is about theories that define a class of models, namely all the models of that theory, say all partial orders, or all groups, or all lattices, or, you know, whatever kind of mathematical structure you're talking about, you can often write down a theory And axiomatize that theory, and you're defining the class of models of that theory. And the completeness theorem is about this kind of truth, namely true in all the models of the theory is equivalent to being provable. That's what the completeness theorem says. But oftentimes, mathematicians are not working with this sort of class of all models of a theory. Rather, they're working with a particular structure, like the integers, or the real numbers, or some particular, you know, the complex field, or something like this. And... those theories are not, in general, characterized by a first order formal theory. They cannot be, because of what's called the Levenhans Golden theorem, and it's sort of fundamental results in, in logic show that If a first order theory has an infinite model, then it has a lot of different ones that aren't isomorphic to each other. So when you're talking about a particular structure, can never, I mean, a particular infinite structure, you can never characterize it as the, as you, you can never uniquely characterize it by a first order theory. You can give these. Categoricity results in second order logic. And for example, the integers and the complex numbers and the real numbers all enjoy categorizations in second order logic. the problem is, We don't have a proof system, a sound and complete proof system, in second order logic. So there's no analog of the completeness theorem in second order logic. And so that's the, the sort of issue is that if you're thinking about, say, the arithmetic truth and you want to know everything that every arithmetic statement that's true should have a proof from some fixed theory.

can't be a first order theory because, because, uh, then you're only looking at one model instead of the whole class of models of that theory, which is going to be enormous. And if you're looking at second order logic, then you don't have a formal proof system that's uh, complete, and the completeness theorem breaks down. I don't know if that's clarifying or not, but it's sort of how I, um, think about that difference.

[00:29:03] Matt Geleta: Yeah, no, it, uh, it is, it is, and, um, I feel like you were on the cusp of something profound when I rudely interrupted, so,

um, let's, uh,

so let's, let's get, get, get back to the amazing stream of thought.

[00:29:18] Joel David Hamkins: So maybe we should talk about the incompleteness theorem, which is the assertion, right, that, that there are true but unprovable statements, say, in arithmetic, and what does that mean? Because I just said that every true statement is provable, right? that's the completeness theorem, and the incompleteness theorem says that there are true statements that aren't. But it's exactly this difference, because in the context of the Incompetence theorem, when we say there's a true statement, we mean it's true in the particular model of, say, the natural numbers. The standard model of arithmetic has the natural numbers, and a zero and one are constants, and it has addition and multiplication and the order, and this is the sort of language of arithmetic that's used for the piano axioms. uh, the problem, maybe it's It's natural to sort of go back to the beginning of the 20th century when answers to the many of these questions weren't yet known. at the end of the 19th century, Piano, based on Dedekind's work, had presented this beautiful theory of arithmetic using what's now the Piano theory of arithmetic, based on Dedekind's axioms. and he showed us how on the basis of very few principles, but including especially the induction principle, uh, one can prove essentially all of the standard classical, theory of arithmetic. You can prove the infinity of primes and, and, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic and, you know, of, can develop the whole theory of elementary number theory on the basis of piano. arithmetic axioms. And so it seems quite natural to wonder, well, maybe those axioms are complete. Maybe they, those axioms settle every question, uh, in arithmetic. It could be. We can write down the list of axioms, You know, they're just all totally ordinary axioms, you know, about the nature of addition and, and multiplication and how they interact and so on, plus the induction principle that says, you have a statement and it's true at zero, and whenever it's true at a number, it's also true at the successor, it should be true for all the numbers, right?

That's sort of common induction principle. And, and one might wonder, well maybe this theory is complete, right? it follows from Gödel's theorem. Gödel's theorem is exactly the claim that there can be no such theory that is, whose axioms we can write down, which is settling All the statements of arithmetic, can't be any such theory. So in particular, the piano theory isn't such a theory. And one way of proving that sort of my favorite elementary proof of the incompleteness theorem, I can give you a proof right here. oftentimes when I teach mathematical logic, uh, I like to give, you know, five or six different proofs of the incompleteness theorem, but the first one I always give is based on Turing's holding problem.

Namely, you first talk about Turing machines and computability, as we just were, and you prove that the, halting problem is not computably decidable, So this is the question, given a Turing machine program and an input for that program, the question is, will it halt or not? So that's a kind of... of infinitely many different questions that we could ask. And say that it's not decidable is to say that there's no program that will correctly give you the answers to all those questions. So there's no computable procedure that you can use that will tell you yes or no in all cases, whether or not a given program will halt on a given input. And it's not difficult to prove that theorem because suppose towards contradiction that there were such a procedure, and then you design a certain program that, uh, that asks about another program whether it would halt on itself, given itself as input, yeah? It's kind of a weird thing to use a program as an, as input to the program, but It's sort of understandable because the program is just this funny sequence of instructions.

And so we can think of using that program as input to another program. So we make a, we make a program that would check whether a given program would halt on itself or not. And if the halting problem were decidable, then we could, we could answer that question. then what we do is we make a program now, which given an input, it asks, does that program halt on itself? And if it does, then our program should do the opposite. So we're either going to go into an infinite loop, or we're going to halt immediately, in exactly the opposite way, That's the answer to that question. Okay, so now, we made a program that does that, and then we feed that program to itself. And the point now is that that program would halt on itself if and only if it does the opposite to that, because that's how the program is designed.

And that's a contradiction. So there can't be any such program, and therefore the halting problem can't be decidable. Okay, so that's basically a proof, Turing's proof, 1936 proof of the undecidability of the halting problem. But now let's come to the girdle here. Suppose that piano arithmetic was complete. But now, look, we can do is design a procedure going to look for proofs. that follow that theory that flow from that theory, And we can design a procedure that will systematically try out all possible proofs steps successively. So it's going to be basically enumerating all the possible theorems of those axioms, all of them, all and only the theorems. So it would be, it's kind of, I think about it as a box with a crank on it. We're going to turn this crank and it's going to spit out more and more theorems of Piano arithmetic, and it's going to spit out all the theorems, all and only the theorems. So now, If, the theory were complete, then given any program and input, I can formulate the assertion that the program halts on that input, and I can turn the crank and see if that statement ever shows up, or if the negation of that statement ever shows up. And if the theory were complete, one of them would have to be showing up. And when it does, I could answer the halting problem. That would be a computable solution of the halting problem, that's a contradiction, because we already argued that there isn't any such thing, so therefore the theory cannot be complete. So this is a kind of reduction of the completeness theorem to the halting problem, right? Basically there can't be a complete theory of arithmetic with a computable set of axioms, because if there were, then we could use it to solve the halting problem, but that's impossible, so that would be a contradiction. I don't know if that was

[00:36:20] Matt Geleta: It, it absolutely is. And, and, uh, again, for for listeners who wanna dig deeper, I think you, you do this very nicely in your set of lectures on, well, both in your book, but also your set of lectures online, which you very kindly, uh, put up on to YouTube, which I've watched and enjoyed very much. Um, what what strikes me as curious, very curious about this whole thing is, you know, That, that proof that you just gave is actually not that complex once you understand, um, once you understand the concept of Turing machine, once you understand that, um, the, the proof of the, the halting problem.

Um, it, it follows quite naturally this idea of incompleteness. Yet, if you look historically at the, the context, you know, when this was first... understood broadly. It was seen as very profound. Um, and I think even today people think of it, many people think of it as a, as in some sense of a problem, not just a fact of mathematics, which, you know, it is a fact of mathematics.

Everything that's true in mathematics is a fact of mathematics, but many people perceive this to be a problem. You know, they have emotional valence associated with this thing. Um, does it make sense to refer to or to think of incompleteness as a a problem rather than just a fact like any other.

[00:37:37] Joel David Hamkins: Oh, I see. Oh, that's very interesting. I mean, I don't view it as a problem. It's a theorem. It's a fundamental fact of the nature of mathematical reality is how I think about it. I mean, and that one is advised to take it on board because we've, we've established its truth. It's a fundamental feature. I remember, uh, I, my doctoral supervisor was Hugh Woodin, who was at Berkeley at the time, but now at Harvard, and admire him very much. But one of the things that I admire most about him was his ability to take on board new results immediately and then start using them. He incorporated the new things into his thinking. And I observed this many times, you know, interacting with him on our weekly meetings and whatever. And, you know, I would bring in a proof of something that he hadn't known about, and then immediately, you know, he was doing x, y, z and making further steps in a way that I hadn't, uh, as a young, uh, young mathematician at the time, I wasn't sort of up to speed with, with, with doing that.

But what I I learned That how important it was to take on board this sort of new knowledge and then proceed further from it. And so that's sort of how I think about it is one if one is just uh, in the state of looking at it as a kind of uh, profound mystery, but the But take the further steps that would flow with the knowledge that the incompleteness theorem is a fundamental phenomenon, then I think you're, you would be missing out.

So, So, I guess I would kind of reject the proposal that you just made and rather take it fully on board. Incompleteness theorem is a fundamental nature of mathematical reality. We just can't have a computable maximization of. even arithmetic truth, all kinds of things flow from that. It means, for example, I mean, the second incompleteness theorem is a kind of refinement of the first incompleteness theorem.

It says that uh, no computably axiomatizable theory can prove its own consistency. This is one of the statements that you're not going to be able to prove is the statement that the theory itself is consistent. And that leads immediately, if you follow this process that I'm saying, to the consistency hierarchy.

Namely, you have a theory that you like, maybe it's piano or rhythm music. That theory is not going to prove its own consistency, which is presumably something that you believe is true, because you like the theory, so you... should probably think the theory is consistent, too. So therefore we can add the consistency assertion to the theory.

That's going to give us a stronger theory. But that theory doesn't prove its consistency, so we would add the consistency assertion of that one as well. makes another third theory a stronger one. so when we keep adding the consistency assertion, that makes a stronger and stronger theory. We get this hierarchy of theories. Oh, you might say, well, we just, that's it, we made the consistency hierarchy, and we would be done at that stage, but that's not true, because if I, if I look at the resulting infinite extension of adding all of those consistency assertions at every finite stage, a perfectly good theory, also, which is computably axiomatizable. And it is also incomplete, and doesn't prove its consistency, and so we go to step omega, omega plus one, omega plus two, into the ordinals. get this enormously tall hierarchy, this consistency tower. And so Gödel's theorem is saying, look, Whatever your theory is, there's going to be this tower of consistency theories that are stronger than it, towering over it. And then we can look at other parts of mathematics and we can see, sometimes we have these sort of towers of theories. and we can prove even, like for example, in the large cardinal hierarchy, we can prove Certain parts of this hierarchy instantiate this increase in consistency strength, so higher theories in the tower are proving the consistency of lower levels of the tower, and so on, in a very natural way.

So these are sort of naturally arising towers of theories that are getting stronger and and they instantiate this phenomenon that's totally predicted by the, uh, the second incompleteness theorem and the tower of consistency strength.

[00:42:07] Matt Geleta: One of the things you said there was, was, uh, you know, interesting, this idea of, of kind of creating a hierarchy, um, of basically kind of adding things in to our sort of mathematical formalism in order to prove consistency at lower levels. And in some sense, I think for many people, this would feel almost like kind of plugging holes or, uh, kind of, um, Resorting to things outside of, um, what's absolutely necessary.

You know, the, the mathematics system is absolutely necessary. Um, and kind of adding fragility, I guess, to the system, you know, you, you, you continue to build something more complex, build on top, build on top. And I think many people do worry that. You know, in, in the grand edifice of mathematics, we, we now have an completely unwieldy, very large, complex system on which, um, you know, many things that we think are true depend.

And, uh, there's kind of no one around who can have the full picture in mind and, and have full confidence that there aren't these, these holes floating around. Is this something that concerns you at all? That, you know, we've, we've, we've grown mathematics, uh, into something that's very, very large and beyond, beyond the, the comprehension of any one individual.

And, uh, you know, running at full speed down, uh, down many, paths. Um, but down, down at bottom, you know, low down the hierarchy, there, there might be things that we're missing. There might be things that we, we have wrong. Is that, is that something that concerns you at All

[00:43:41] Joel David Hamkins: I guess it, I guess it does. I mean, there's sort of two aspects. I mean, I'm going to sort of pull apart in your question, I don't really view this building of the hierarchy as plugging holes in the way that you describe, but rather it's, it's sort of opening us up to, to realize that there's this sort of new awaiting for our us to explore. I mean, the fact of the matter is that even a century ago, as I said, all almost all of the elementary number theory is provable, you know, at the bottom level, we already knew that we, we, we could prove so much in that base theory that we thought it might be complete, right?

This was the question that the incompleteness theorem is answering, right? And The discovery that it's not complete, you know, means that there's these statements that are true in the natural number structure, but not provable on the basis of those axioms. And these statements are very hard to come by, but when you find them, they're fascinating. and not just about the consistency statements, but the sort of other instances of of independence and, and when you can say that a statement is definitely independent, this is a kind of fascinating situation which greatly enlarges your mathematical understanding. So, so it's not at all plugging a hole, rather it's sort of revealing this higher realm that you would have totally missed if you hadn't been undertaking this process. And so that's the sense in which I'm not at all concerned. about it. I mean, for theoretic realm, as opposed to arithmetic, then we have the Zermelo Fraenkel, axioms of set theory, which were, you know, up in or so. And, um, uh, Uh, and, uh, and we've now observed that an enormous variety of statements are known to be not Settleable in the basis of the standard axioms of set theory. For example, the continuum hypothesis and the of choice can be settled from the other axioms and, and reason's, hypothesis and, and, uh, Uh, existence of large cardinals and, uh, Susan's hypothesis and so on.

There's an enormous variety, hundreds, thousands of different mathematical statements that are independent of C F C, and expectation is that, uh, basically any statement in infinite combinatorics is either trivial or else it's independent of ZFC. That's the kind of experience that we have. So many statements are not settlable in the axiom. Um, of, of, set theory that way. So, but there was another aspect to your question, which is about like whether one person can be master of all of mathematics and that's, uh, mathematics is just too vast today uh, for sort of a single person really to, to, uh, the survey of the whole um, subject. It's just impossible.

It's too big. Um, I mean, even you can't even know all of logic or all of, you know, algebra or something like this. so subjects individually are also so vast and, the mathematics has become so specialized. I mean, uh, I don't do it as a, as a problem. That's going to be the nature of any extremely successful intellectual endeavor, right?

Once the amount of knowledge in the subject is So enormous. It's of course, it's going to, have areas that are more specialized than others and so on. And it just won't be possible for a person to be expert in all those different specialized areas. So it's not particularly concerning. It's just the nature of I think any intellectual activity that's extremely successful and has produced so much knowledge that there's just too much of it for one person to be the master of.

[00:47:44] Matt Geleta: Yeah, yeah, um, you, you mentioned, uh, a couple, a couple minutes ago, several axioms, um, you know, the axi the continuum hypothesis, and then you mentioned the, um, the axiom of choice, so there is a famous example that I think is well known amongst physicists, or mathematicians would know it as well, but physicists are familiar with this one, in geometry, where I can't remember which of the, which of the five axioms of geometry was, I think it was probably the fifth one.

Exactly. Exactly. So, um, you know, five, five axioms of geometry that all make a lot of intuitive sense and that, um, you know, we built a whole edifice of, of geometry off, off the back of, um, with the fifth one being, uh, some, some statement to the, to the, to the effect of you have a line and a point, uh, off, off that line. There is a unique line that's parallel to the first that passes through that point. And it feels, it feels very intuitive, but people worried about this for a long time. And nonetheless, you know, whole theories of geometry were built off of this and they had implications in physics and, and elsewhere.

And at some point, this, uh, this, um, This axiom was, was relaxed and, and new types of geometry emerged and these turned out to be very important, you know, they turned out to be, to be very important for our understanding of, um, space time, for example. But that, that's one example of, of this idea where, um, you know, we have, because of how we've evolved and, and the world we live in, we develop, you know, intuitions for, for axioms, um, as to, you know, what should be, what should be true in, in something that's a useful piece of mathematics.

Uh, and, and it turns out that we could in some sense be mistaken. And, um, you know, the, the, the, uh, the axiom of choice, uh, for me there stood out as, as, as one. Potential example of that, because it is used in so many other parts of, of mathematics. Um, but that's the type of thing that I was, that I was referring to when I was worrying, you know, we were building grand edifices on, on things that at the end of the day rely on, on intuition.

You know, at the end of the day when push comes to shove, at bottom there is an intuitive choice being made. Does that concern you?

[00:50:02] Joel David Hamkins: Well, I mean, of course I do think Vince wins me, I guess, so. there's a debate in

[00:50:06] Matt Geleta: Ha ha ha.

[00:50:06] Joel David Hamkins: the philosophy of set theory about the nature of the various axioms of mathematics, and in particular the axioms of set theory and of the common distinctions that's made is the distinction between what's called intrinsic justification for an axiom versus extrinsic justification for an axiom.

And idea is that axiom enjoys intrinsic support or intrinsic justification if If the axiom is expressing a fundamental idea that, that we can see, you know, to, to use this sort of uh, intuitive language that you were just mentioning. I think it's, it's most like tightly connected with, with that idea.

When when we, part of the nature of the concepts that we're, that we're talking about, that this principle should be true. So, For example, in set theory, the axiom of extensionality is the assertion that two sets are equal if and only if they have the same members. And this is expressing a sort of core idea about what we mean by sets.

I mean, what we mean by a set is it's a collection of objects. And so if you have, you have a set X and another set Y, and they have the same members, then they're the same set. That's sort of what we mean by sets. And the axiom of extensionality is expressing that idea in a quite clear way. Um, and, and therefore it's enjoying intrinsic support, but other axioms Enjoy. What's called extrinsic support. Maybe it's sort of consequentialist support. We can, on the basis of the axiom, we can prove a lot of things that say, generalized known things. And so we might say, well, look, that's a reason to believe in the axiom if it's, it's almost a scientific way of proceeding, right? You're saying, look, this axiom applies to all these things that we like very much and that we know are true in many, many, instances. And so it's a kind of. consequentialist. We judge the truth of original axiom on the basis of that it's correctly making these predictions, right, sort of like experimental evidence a little bit. And it's fundamentally different in character, a fundamentally different way, reason to accept an axiom, if it has this extrinsic support only but so it's sort of like you think it's probably true, but you don't really know why. You know, but it has all these consequences that you want to keep and it's a way, a unifying way of organizing those consequences.

And so maybe that's reason to believe that it's true. Sometimes people talk about the axiom of choice. as having this extrinsic support, uh, it's very useful in mathematics, It's used all over the subject, as you mentioned, and, uh, and and so we find all these consequences of it that give us, you know, that we like and that give us reason to, to believe in it. But my view is that actually the principal reason and principal justification for the axiom of choice is is one that's intrinsic. we have this idea of sort of arbitrary collection of objects. So the axiom of choice is if you have a family of such sets, then there's a way of choosing an element, one from each of each member of the family. And so if, if we have a, say, a family of disjoint sets, then there should be a set that whose intersection with those sets in each case has exactly one element, the choice set formulation. And, and the intrinsic way of thinking about this is that, well, of course, there should be such a set because I don't care how the choices are made.

And my conception of what sets there are is that sets come sort of in all possible and ways, It's regardless of whether they're following a definition or a procedure or whether they're constructive in some way, uh, that all of the sets, whether they're constructive or not, are part of the sort of set theoretic realm.

And so one of those sets is going to be the one that you know, a set that makes such kind of choices. And that's why, you know, one could believe the axiom of choice on intrinsic grounds. and so it's a kind of debate though about, uh, do we believe in axioms? Why should we believe in axioms? What are the grounds for accepting one axioms rather than another?

And furthermore, what does it really mean to accept an axiom? Because Does it mean you can never reason from a different, incompatible axiom again? What if you want the axiom of choice on Monday, but then on Tuesday you want to look at know, consequences of the failure of the axiom of choice, then it becomes incoherent if you're insisting still in keeping the axiom of choice on the Tuesday, right? And so what does it mean to adopt an axiom? Does it mean forever that you have to use those axioms and only those ones? Or, or, well, absurd. It seems like we can reason in different theories in different times. and and maybe it's not so urgent to, like have a final list. That's, you know, the, the official list of axioms that we're going to use, rather we just have a lot of different theories and sometimes we use some of them and sometimes we use the others and depending on, you know, the nature of our argument or whether we need to use the axiom in our argument or, or what we, what we feel like doing, why not So it seems like Maybe there isn't so much urgency in settling, uh, what the sort of final official list of axioms should be, and that we can be more kind of open minded about kind of mathematical theories we're, you know, willing to undertake investigations in.

[00:56:03] Matt Geleta: I do, I do question the, that, um, sort of dichotomy between intrinsic versus extrinsic to some extent and whether that decoupled from basically the human mind, the way we think about things. So for example, if I were to take a statement that Almost everyone would have the strongest, uh, sort of gut belief that it is true.

You know, 1 plus 1 equals 2. Everyone understands that to be true. And, uh, you know, I understand to, to actually formally prove that is, is quite some work. But, you know, it's a statement that people could, to take to be true. Um, but if I took, you know, two 60 digit numbers and multiplied them together and displayed the answer, that would be true in just the same way.

So, independently of humans, that, that answer would be true in the same way. But, um, almost nobody would have anything like the same level of intuition for, for that statement being true. And so I do, I do wonder if the, um, you know, the, the truth value of, I mean, you know, we want to choose axioms that are useful.

Um, and, uh, it's basically our intelligence that lets us, um, sort of intuit which are the right ones. And, you know, if we were, if we were vastly more intelligent, the, the two 60 digit numbers being multiplied together and that answer, that would be intuitive in the same way as, as a one, as a one plus one.

Equals two is, is intuitive to most people. And so it does feel to me that those two concepts that you mentioned there sort of are, are related. But the, the, the, the, the through line, it seems to be some sort of level of intelligence, some human understanding, um, you know, given a sufficiently smart. person, um, things that, uh, would be, would have this quality of, of being extrinsically true, um, feel like they would fall into the intrinsic bucket.

What do you, what do you think the, the, the, the relationship between the human mind, um, and the, um, mathematical truth of, um, or the selection of, uh, of the axioms of, um, mathematics?

[00:58:12] Joel David Hamkins: against your, you know, what you said a little bit. um, Because it seems to me that this intrinsic extrinsic is kind of getting at this human way of thinking. I mean, in the dispute between intrinsic justification and extrinsic justification, there's, there's the idea that, look, it's the intrinsically justified ones.

That's a better justification. It's a more satisfactory one, we don't we can't always achieve it because some of our axioms don't seem to be intrinsically justified and they only have this extrinsic support, which is a kind of a lesser kind of support. But what it means to be intrinsically justified means that the truth of it is something that is intuitively the case.

And so it fits into your, your intuitive category. The way I think about it is to provide intrinsic support for an axiom is to explain, you know, why it's part of our human understanding of the concept a very direct way. And that's what it means to have intrinsic support for the axiom. Whereas the extrinsic support happens or we care about it, really, only when we're not able to achieve this intrinsic one. maybe there are mathematical statements and our intuition is failing us. We don't, we can't tell if it's true or not, but if it has extrinsic support, that's still evidence. You know, we have this conundrum. We want to know, So, should we adopt this axiom anyway, even though we can't intuit whether it's part of the concept or not. And, this is a very common thing in, you know, when you're in this sort of very strong theories in set theory or whatever. Um, you know, you have mathematical principles that are expressing a clear idea, but you don't know if it's true or not. But you can fall back on this extrinsic support as a way of you know, trying to answer the question whether that principle is true or not. And so, uh, so I don't think it's actually so different from this sort of intuitive way that you were talking. It's just, that's the intrinsic support category. And it's a pity. It's this kind of, uh, regrettable fact that there are many mathematical statements. that we can't tell if they're true or not. And so we're struggling to, to see, well, should we adopt them or their negation as an axiom, or do we think they're true or not? And so we're sort of forced to find other means of deciding such questions. extrinsic support is one way of talking about that. I ultimately the question, if you have a statement and it's independent in the way that the parallel postulate is independent. So that's what we're really talking about. We have a very strong theory, say Zermelo Fraenkel set theory, for strengthenings of it, and we have statements that are neither provable nor refutable, just like the parallel postulate is neither provable nor refutable from the other axioms of geometry. And one way of proving that a statement is independent is to exhibit models. the statement is true or in which the statement is false. But all the other statements are are, true in both cases, and that exists in geometry. For example, we have Euclidean geometry, which satisfies all the geometry axioms, including the parallel postulate. we have these various non-Euclidean geometries like hyperbolic space or spherical geometry, Ian Sphere.

And so, on, in which all the axioms are true except for the parallel postulate, which is false in these non nucle geometry. So we have these models and they satisfy all the axioms except the one that's independent, And in one case it's true, in another case it's false. that exact same thing happens in set theory.

For example, we can give models of set theory where all the Zermelo Fraenkel axioms are true, say, the axiom of choice, but the continuum hypothesis is true in one and false in another, and and therefore, the continuum hypothesis is independent. So we can often make these kind of independents, uh, prove these independence results.

pervasive, the independence phenomenon. And for many of these independent statements, we just don't know if it's true or not. Should we take em as true or not? And so we we're grappling with the question. And so we, um, uh, it's a non mathematical question because the statement is independent. We can't prove it or refute So we're not going to answer it by proof. It has to be some other sort of philosophical justification or reason to adopt the statement, or its negation, or to, or to study both, or neither,

or,

[01:02:47] Matt Geleta: Hmm?

[01:02:48] Joel David Hamkins: it's how it goes.

[01:02:50] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I guess at the, at the, at the bottom of it, in, in examples like that, um, you know, an aspect of it is just which, which paths do humans find interesting? What, what paths are we drawn to? Which areas of mathematics do we explore? Because when you mentioned it earlier, it is so vast and in fact infinitely vast in some unimaginable way.

And so, you know, Human mathematicians do have to make a choice, um, and it's, it's not quite the same way in, in sort of more practical sciences that that choice is often driven by things out in the real world, you know, a cancer researcher, um, you know, it's the motivation for studying oncology. It can be, it can be justified in, in many ways.

The motivation for choosing a particular area of, um, pure mathematics to study, something that's very abstract, far removed from practicalities of life, uh, it, it's, it's a sort of a, more nuanced and, and. complex thing. And an answer that you would hear a lot of the time from people in these fields is, you know, it's, it's, um, the, the sense of, of beauty of, um, the, the intricateness of it all.

It, it sort of feels like it's touching something deep within people. I have a question for you there. Firstly, if, if you sort of feel the same way and, and like, you know, that is what's drawn you to the questions that, that you look at and you study. But I also have a follow up question. Um, sort of the more general question is, you know, how do you think about.

How mathematicians should be choosing the areas to investigate in such an abstract realm, you know, but by what criteria, um, should we be, um, deciding which questions to pursue and not, given that these are often very far removed from practicalities of, of life, at least in the near term, at least in the foreseeable.

[01:04:44] Joel David Hamkins: Right. So that's a very difficult question to answer. I mean, for my own part, I mean, let me just answer personally. I've always Follow the practice of working on whatever mathematical questions I find. Interesting. and That's basically the only criteria. If I find it interesting or if I'm curious about a mathematical phenomenon, I want to get, you know, I want to understand it more deeply. I want to gain some insight into some mathematical context or something, then that's enough for me. I just work on it. and I try to adopt and I recommend to all my students, including undergraduate students, this kind of idea of playing with One's ideas. And I think this is true in any realm, not just mathematics, but I always say, look, you just Play around with your ideas. Maybe you have, you learn a new concepts. Well, then you should play around with it. You should look at examples and tweak things a little bit and put them together and see what happens. Or can you make, observations or deduce consequences, you know, and, and I think it's so important, for Making advances in these intellectual realms to have people that are playing. Okay, but it also means I mean, sort of personally, it has meant that I've often worked on some kind of non standard or quirky topics that aren't part of the mainstream. I mean, it's sort of what I'm a little bit known for, not like totally wacky things, but sort of unusual topics. And for example, let me just give an example. I spent a long time, a lot of work studying, um, infinite computation, infinite time Turing machines the paper that I wrote with Andy Lewis. And I had started this when I was a grad student. Still, I was still a student and I was working on it then. and I had just got my Ph. D. and left and, and I was uh, thinking about whether to like really get more deeply into it and develop the theory much more fully. And I had talked to various colleagues, and so on, and some of them told me not to do it. and and I really thought a lot about it and I decided, well to hell with them, I I think it's interesting, and I'm gonna do it, and I did it, and now this paper is my most highly cited paper It has hundreds of citations and, and there's been dozens of masters. There's theses written on this topic and PhD dissertations written, you know, following up and many, many dozens of papers written following up on this thing and conferences and so on. And so it's one of my most successful projects ever. And, and I'm really glad that I did it because first of all, it's super interesting.

And I really learned a lot. And I learned from other people who, you know, took the ideas further, and all of that was just fascinating. and, And, and, so if people tell you not to work on something because, you know, of some reason having to do with uh, expectations or something, then my advice is to just ignore that totally and work on whatever you're interested in. There's another example. My son, when he was in, I don't remember what it was, third grade or something like that, were learning about prime numbers in his school and his teacher sent him this exercise. the question was, um, Can you think of a number which is prime and has digits that add up to 10 and it has a 3 in the tens place? That was the question. And probably the teacher was thinking about two digit numbers, because 37 is prime, and the digits add to 10, and it has a 3 in the tens place, and it's the only two digit number like that. I mean, it would have to be sort of redundant, because if the digits add to 10, and it's two digits, it has a 3 in tens place, then the other one has to be a 7, and so it would have to be 37 anyways. so. Um, but it wasn't stated in the question two digits, and so my son and I were at the cafe, and I said, well, what about three digit numbers, and so on, let me just okay, We have, right, 433 is prime, it adds up

to 10, and also 631. 1, 531, and also 100, 333. And, and so I, I went to this list of primes, you know, up to a billion or whatever, and and found more and more instances.

Of course, they have to have lots of zeros when they have many digits in order for the digits to still add up to 10. Most of the digits are going to have to be zero. And I, I, wasn't, and I realized, well, how many examples are there? And I just didn't know. And I didn't even know, like, what methods one would use to prove that there are infinitely many. And so I asked on, uh, MathStackExchange this question, um, you know, how can we come to know this? And then pretty soon, people were posting answers like these, with these 100 digit primes, 200 digit primes with mostly zeros, but the digits added up to 10, and had a 10 space and so on. So there was this international sort of collaborative effort to produce more and more huge examples of the answering my son's second grade teacher or fourth grade or

whatever it was. Let's see, fourth grade, I guess, and so, uh, so that's an example of play, you know, it's this sort of silly example, but actually it got into these. I view as quite sophisticated ideas about how one can can come to uh, analyze such kind of number theoretic assertions and, and, as far as I know, it's still an open question whether or not there are infinitely many examples uh, of that phenomenon. I recommend play.

[01:10:55] Matt Geleta: Yeah, it's a, it's a beautiful example of, um, yeah, I mean it play following, following what naturally draws us. And I mean, very often historically, if you look at the, the, um, progress of mathematics that has actually led to things that have also been very powerful. of great practical use, um, whether in, in sciences or even just more generally.

And, um, and I think that often, often when, when one is asked, um, of the value of studying these, these very abstract mathematical questions, um, one, one answer given is often that, you know, we, we don't know of the practical use that might come out of it in the future. Another side of the coin is, is often that it doesn't matter.

And one does not need to apologize for, for what they're studying.

[01:11:45] Joel David Hamkins: One doesn't ask the composer what's the practical use of your symphony, the artists, you know, is it going to help us make a better toaster? Your work of art, will it help make better toasters? I mean, you know, we, that's a kind of demand that we just don't put on the artists or the novelists, or the other great thinkers. So what, why, Why should it be required that in order for mathematicians to justify, you know, spending a lot of time working out their ideas, that it should lead to some practical thing? I just don't agree with that principle in the first place. And I think it's a kind of cultural achievement that we're coming to. understand in a deep way these mathematical questions that have confused people for centuries and now we are coming to understand them in a very deep and profound way. And this is cultural advance and it doesn't need these practical applications as far as I'm concerned in order to justify it. No, it happens that mathematics is happens to be very useful and, and, has many, many practical applications, but. I'm going to be studying infinite chess, and infinite computation, and infinite other things, uh, even if they don't have any applications, which probably those examples don't, um, but still they're interesting, and there's open questions to be looked into, and they're fascinating, and I encourage anyone who's interested in those questions to join me, and, and take a look, and let's figure it out together.

[01:13:25] Matt Geleta: Yeah, I fully agree. And, um, and certainly, you know, one does not need to, to sort of justify these pursuits to others, but I do think it's important. for, for one to, to think about their own motivations for themselves, at least in a, in a clear right way. Um, one, one analogy that comes to mind here is, um, you know, we, we are drawn to these questions, um, basically, like if you, if you boil it down, it's, it's due to the constitution of our minds, and it was not evolved to do mathematics necessarily.

It was evolved for lots of other things. Um, and if I, if I took the, the, the sort of toy example of letting a child loose in a, in a sort of grocery store, they, um, they would tend to naturally gravitate towards the, the, um, like the candy aisle, for example, and, um, and they, they, they don't yet have the.

Perspective of sort of the, the, the broader perspective of what they want to be doing with their lives. There's sort of like evolutionary impulses to draw them towards certain, uh, certain parts of that story and then they're drawn towards the candy aisle. I do sometimes wonder if, um, in the pursuit of, um, questions, abstract questions, whether we're, we're, we're like children being, being drawn to, towards the candy aisle, you know, drawn by interest and drawn by play.

And. Uh, maybe not putting enough, um, of a, um, of an emphasis onto where that motivation is coming from within the mind. Um, I think, I think, fortunately it seems to, to bear fruit and to, to lead to, to good places. Uh, but I, but I do, I do wonder. Um, you know, our minds were not evolved to do, to do mathematics and what really is it that we're being drawn to, you know, is it, is it, um, is it, is it possible that we're sort of fumbling around in the, in the candy aisle of, of some mental space and missing the, missing the fruits and vegetables, missing something that actually could, um, could be more meaningful.

Do you, do you, do you sort of think about the questions you focus on in, in that sort of way at all?

[01:15:34] Joel David Hamkins: Yeah, I mean, I I totally do. Um, mean, I don't think I mean, I work on a lot of different topics, and I don't, I wouldn't say any of them are are are frivolous, although the book I'm writing about infinite games is called Infinite Games Frivolities of the Gods, because I'm going to be looking at infinite chess and infinite drafts and infinite hex and, uh, sort of infinitary versions of all of our, uh, familiar games. um, but, yeah. but, it's kind of an excuse because really what's going on in even that sort of frivolous seeming topic is a kind of, uh, careful analysis of the nature of strategy and game strategic reasoning and so on in this infinitary realm. And I think one gets insight, uh, know, that that, sort of is larger than the particular games that are studied, as sort of unifying principles and, um, and, and, and, so on Um, that are kind of unifying our understanding of the nature of strategic reasoning in,

uh, in these infinitary realms.

And, and, and furthermore, there's even sort of to foundational issues when you get into the axiom of determinacy and so on, which has profound mathematical consequences and actually extremely strong consistency strength. It's an instance of having very high consistency strength. Um, so it, it builds this connection with these other deeper philosophical questions in the foundations of mathematics. and And so even though it started off, you know, seeming to be possibly frivolous or weird, but yet it's, built into this subject, which is building these, um, uh, insightful, uh, consequences With fundamental questions on the nature of mathematical reality, and and and that happens again and again and again, and it happens so much that it, you can, you can almost sort of count on it in, in logic in mathematical logic, in particular, then it's pretty likely that questions are gonna, you know, be having these deep connections with something really fundamental. so it's easy to. find justification sort of on, on, on, those general mathematical grounds for for almost any of these questions in the subject. it used to be, you know, 150 years ago, When you go back and look, people were hopelessly confused about the nature of truth and proof and they maybe didn't even distinguish between those very carefully, even in the early 20th century. It's shocking how much confusion there was in the writings of people about proof and truth. But nowadays, we're totally clear on this in part because of the formal analysis of these notions that's risen from mathematical logic and philosophical logic. And, and so it's adding so much clarity and depth to our understanding of the nature of the foundational questions, that one, you know, we can't help but think that there's huge progress in, in in those realms.

[01:18:57] Matt Geleta: And the, uh, the other great benefit, I think, uh, that you sort of alluded to is, um, that I think the other people are also finding this very joyful and fun. And I know you've got a very interesting online presence. Uh, Both, um, on, on Substack and, and in various books, which, um, people are finding a lot of value in.

Maybe we can turn to, as we sort of bring it towards a close, towards what you're, what you're doing there. I think for, for the past year or so, or at least this year, you've, uh, been serializing a very interesting book on Substack. Why don't you, why don't you tell us about that, uh, that book and your endeavors there?

[01:19:32] Joel David Hamkins: it's the, the Book of Infinity. So I started my Substack in, in January of this year, and it's because I was teaching a new class called Infinity. Uh, is this sort of undergraduate level class for, uh, uh, students here at Notre Dame to fulfill, actually they can fulfill the second philosophy requirement Um, and so I had a whole bunch of STEM majors and different, all different majors, um, uh, mixed in, in that class, and And, uh, and so I decided, because the the book I wanted to teach them

[01:20:09] Matt Geleta: Heh heh heh.

[01:20:09] Joel David Hamkins: during while the course was proceeding. And so I was, uh, uh, always a bit ahead and posting the chapters on the sub stack they, uh, were completed and, and everything went really well.

And so I was able to cover All of my favorite conundrums and paradoxes and puzzles and, examples, including a lot of historical stuff, um, um, going back to Aristotle and Archimedes and so on, Zeno's paradox, and a lot of Galileo, and, uh, and then getting into uh, more contemporary things as well, but also, of course, Cantor and Gödel and everybody. so it, it was really quite a lot of fun, the Book of Infinity, and the, the name of the subsect is infinitelymore. xyz. If you go to infinitelymore. xyz, you can find all the books there. And I'm I'm not, I'm still putting new material into the Book of Infinity. Um, there's going to be a chapter released soon on the surreal numbers. And I've also begun serializing separate book project called Panorama of Logic, which is a kind of introduction to topics in logic. And that's proceeding, And also my on infinite games will be serialized there, and I have another project also. math for seven year olds, which is a bunch of, uh, projects that I have developed over the years, um, sort of activities to undertake with young, people who are interested in mathematics. I used to go into my son's school and my daughter's school and do little math projects with the students in the classes, so I have these collections of various things, and I'm going to put them all together and put them on the substack. Math for seven year olds, but actually it's for people of any age.

[01:21:57] Matt Geleta: The, the last one is, um, you know, we've, We've talked a bit about intelligence and we've definitely talked a lot about intelligent people. And, uh, one of the topics that's very widely discussed at the moment is, Uh, the, the concept of AI superintelligence and whether and when we'll be, we'll be visited by an AI superintelligence.

My question to you is, um, if you were to imagine that we would be, and you had to elect or pick one representative from humanity, uh, either past or present to, to represent us to that AI superintelligence, who comes to mind? Who would you, who would you pick?

[01:22:37] Joel David Hamkins: Well, I mean, of course, there's huge numbers of people that I admire very much, uh, in my subject, but also artists and so on. I mean, I think maybe it would, uh, might be a kind of mistake to try to sort of an extremely smart person, the smartest person that I know maybe isn't necessarily the best person for such a kind of task, right?

So I remember this essay that I read once a while ago, um, alien intelligence comes to earth and, uh, sort of a kind of oracle and offers to answer any question, any one question that would be asked. And so humanity was supposed to organize and, and decide which question would be put to the oracle. And at first people were proposing questions, you know, so there was a kind of that was held to discuss the proposals and, you know, ultimately to decide and, and people were proposing sort of engineering kind of questions or medical questions, you know, the cure what's the cure to cancer or something of that nature or, but then there is, well, what if there isn't actually a cure to cancer, then that, um, the answer won't be so useful to us.

And had the idea, well, why don't we ask what is the answer to the best possible question that we could ask. And, And people said, Yeah, that's great, because it'll be, you know, whatever the best question is, then that answer will be really useful to us. But then people objected and said, Well, no, if we just ask it like that, then maybe the answer's going to be, you know, 42 or something and we won't know what the question is.

And so the proposal was made. uh, that The question should be, is the ordered pair whose first entry is the best question that we could

[01:24:22] Matt Geleta: Yeah.

[01:24:22] Joel David Hamkins: and whose second entry is the answer to that question? And, And, this had almost unanimous support at the conference, that That's the question that we should ask.

Okay, and so it was voted on and approved and that was the final question. And so they put it to the Oracle, and the Oracle, beamed down or however it was, and, and, answered the question, and said, The ordered pair whose first element is the best possible question you could ask me and whose second coordinate is the answer to that question, is the ordered pair whose first coordinate is the question that you in fact asked, and whose answer, whose second coordinate is the answer which I am now providing.

[01:25:09] Matt Geleta: Oh, that's fantastic.

[01:25:12] Joel David Hamkins: and I found that so hilarious,

but also it, it brings up, you know, this question of like who to pick. Well, it's not who you think it's going to skills that really don't have anything to do with intelligence or something. It's really some other kind of criteria that one should be thinking about Uh, to select the representative of humanity for such a purpose in my view.

[01:25:40] Matt Geleta: that's a, that's a very uplifting and lovely place to end it. I think, um, Joel, thank you so much for making the time to speak to me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

[01:25:47] Joel David Hamkins: Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me.

[01:25:53] Matt Geleta: Thanks for listening to this episode of the paradigm podcast. If you're enjoying this podcast, please subscribe on YouTube and give us a five star review on your favorite podcast player. This goes a long way towards increasing our visibility and that helps us attract even more fantastic guests. You can also head on over to our website where you'll be able to submit questions for our guests, get access to special, ask me anything episodes and some other nice perks.

The paradigm podcast is free, but donations are very much welcome. Thanks for listening. And I hope you'll join me again next time.