Top Scientist REVEALS: A Kid In The 29th Century Could Have Made This World! | Prof Brian Greene

0:00 can't convince you that we're not in the matrix. Why? We could be. This table reel. Am I really here? Am I a simulation sitting inside some computer? Maybe there's a kit. When twenty ninth century Earth. And they happen to allow you and I to exist sitting at this table. And here's a big assumption. Can you create a computer program that has consciousness? Nobody knows the answer to that, but I've spoken to some of today's AI researchers who think that chat GPT is conscious. And in the back of my mind, I do think it's possible. But if we considered robots to be conscious, that they then get rights? I think that's something we should think about now. Actually. Professor Brian Green. What is the ultimate question that you're seeking to answer? We find ourselves thrust on this planet. We're trying to figure out why we're here. Is there some ultimate purpose? We're a little dot on planet Earth. And you begin to see our sun

0:52 One of many stars within the galaxy. You can look at our Milky Way galaxy within the setting of the entire universe. And what's beyond Well, if the universe is infinite, if you go sufficiently far out to space, you're virtually guaranteed to find a copy of yourself out there. There's a version out there of me that just loves wine. Ha ha there you go. So should I feel insignificant? I would urge you not to. Because the fact that we can understand that we are so small, that's what gives us a sense of connection to something larger. Do you think it could lead us to God? If you mean the kind of God our forebears often have spoken, that feels to me very much a human creation. I will tell you why I'm skeptical. of that thing we should think about is the end of the earth because if we go arbitrarily far into the future, the earth is gonna spiral. Well scary the whole way. Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show

1:59 The most shared episodes, the most rated episodes. I would love you to know. And a simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple easy free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this one right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so so much. Uh Professor Brian Green. What is the ultimate question that you're seeking to answer?

2:29 The ultimate question I would say is what is the true nature of reality? We find ourselves thrust On this planet. And we look out and we're trying to figure out Why we're here.

2:43 What it's made of, is there some ultimate purpose? Or is it just some Interesting accident. That allowed us to have self-awareness and ask these kinds of questions about the nature of the world. And I think that to me is the the deepest kind of question that we humans can ask.

3:01 Do you feel like over the last thirty years of your career you've gotten closer to understanding the answer to that question? Yes, but you know, it's kind of like picking up grains of sand on a beach, right? You pick up more and more. And that that pouch of sand gets heavier, so your understanding is is deeper, it's weightier.

3:21 But you look out and there's just Almost infinitely more grains of sand that are out there. We understand the world better. than we once did. But Does that really

3:32 Take us some significant way toward assessing The big deep questions of say why is there something rather than nothing? Maybe that's the deepest question of all? But which I don't mean empty space. I mean nothing. Nothing at all.

3:49 Well we'll in this conversation go in the pursuit of that. Answer? To Tell people who you are. And to

3:55 Let them understand the journey you've been on academically and through your career. Where did you study? Where have you worked over the last couple of decades? Yeah, sure. Well, I grew up in Manhattan, right across from the Hayden Planetarium. I would wander the hallways of the planetarium and come upon a meteorite and the universe was sort of my backyard because of that. And that really set me on a trajectory that I continued following when I Went to college, went to Harvard and studied

4:23 Mathematics and physics, then from there was to uh Oxford. Where I got my doctorate pursuing Work in a field called string theory. And then through the academic ladder, Cornell and ultimately Columbia, where I've been a professor now for thirty some odd years, you know, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Columbia University. If you were to explain string theory to me like I was twelve.

4:47 How would you do it? Yeah, I would simply say this. Your twelve year old self probably knew that matter Was made up of stuff called molecules. that themselves are made up of atoms that are stuck together. And the the atoms Are made of smaller things.

5:03 Electrons. An orbit around a nucleus that has neutrons and protons. And neutrons and protons, they even have smaller particles, particles call quarks. The question is, is that the end of the story? Is it electrons and quarks and you're done?

5:18 Everything is made up of them, or might there be a finer level of structure inside the electron? Inside the cork, you take a powerful microscope and look deeply, would you see anything else? And the idea of strength here is yeah, you would. Inside an electron or inside a cork? You'd see a little tiny vibrating filament and the different vibrations of the string.

5:40 yield the different particles. So much like a string on a violin when it vibrates in one pattern you hear it as a C or a Or an A sharp. Mm-hmm.

5:49 The different vibrations of the strength and string theory They don't produce different musical tones. They produce different particles. So a string vibrating one way, electron. A string vibrating another way, a cork.

6:02 So matter at its most fundamental level, if you're to take a powerful microscope and look deeply inside of any piece of matter, you'd see all these little vibrating filaments, these vibrating strings. That's the idea of the theory. So I ha two questions come to mind when you say that, which is how do you know? And the second one is Yeah, good. Both good questions. How do we know we don't?

6:27 Everything I just said could be utter nonsense. I don't Think it is? But the only way that you know if an idea in science is correct is

6:37 You need to make predictions that you can go out and test, measure, and see whether you can confirm the ideas. We don't have the technology. deeply into matter to see the strings. We don't have the particle accelerators, the particle colliders with enough power to slam things together to access this

6:58 finer level of structure that the theory is suggesting. So you might say then, where do these ideas come from, right? Answer? Mathematics. The power of mathematics is is that it can take us to places that we can't yet go literally using equipment.

7:14 When we look at the mathematics, of quantum mechanics, the mathematics of general relativity, and we put that math inside the math of string theory, All of a sudden the equations work. They come together harmoniously. And we like, whoa.

7:30 The math of quantum mechanics We're confident in that. We have predictions and observations. The math of general relativity, we're confident in that. It makes predictions we've confirmed through observations. Now Were Willing it.

7:45 Go where the math takes us, and the math takes us in this approach to these vibrating filaments. These vibrating strings. These vibrating strings. So if you pass me the string. So essentially if you zoom into every cell on my body. Yeah. you will find that there's different shape strings vibrating. That's the prediction. That's the prediction. Correct. Um What is causing them To vibrate in a certain way. Who's telling them.

8:10 We Recognize that the universe has energy. If you're to ask me where does the energy come from? Nobody can answer that. That is the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The something is a fundamental currency called energy. If string theory is correct, Then that energy manifests as these vibrational patterns of the strings themselves. If the theory is wrong, then the energy manifests through other things like motions of particles and the way in which space-time warps and curves.

8:42 But if string theory is correct, the energy of the universe is manifested in the vibrational patterns of strings. Now when you say like Who mandates that that string vibrates in one pattern that string vibrates in a different pattern if we go back to the Big Bang? The Energetic Explosion that resulted in space expanding.

9:04 The detailed way in which that happened ultimately dictates how This or that string vibrates. In the aftermath of that

9:14 Rapid cosmological explosion. Does this string theory idea? Tell us. Anything. About

9:21 Why we're here. I would like to think That it does. It's very indirect. And we

9:27 are aggregates of a huge number of particles, or if string theory is correct, of a huge number of strings. I mean inside your body, you've got something like a billion, billion, billion particles. And if string theory is correct, each of those particles is a vibrating filament. It is a gargantuan challenge to understand why those billion billion billion particles came together to yield you or me or somebody else. But again

9:54 That's a historical progression. And I think we understand the broad outlines of that narrative. That there was some initial event called the Big Bang. That resulted in space expanding. The energy of that big bang was

10:10 ultimately transmuted into particles, those particles were wafting through space? gravity caused collections of those particles to clump together. Some of them clumped together into stars. Like our sun, some of them clumped together into planets like our earth.

10:27 And on our Earth some of those particles began To coalesce into more exotic and refined forms giving rise to To Adams. Giving rise to molecules.

10:39 and over the course of billions of years on our planet, those little molecules Grow? into more complex structures, ultimately giving first cells. And once you have a cell, cell divide. and they come together into larger multicellular aggregates that give rise to the beginnings of life in the ocean. And those life forms evolve further until they can

11:03 walk out of the ocean and begin to live on land. And then begin to Stand upright. And after A billi more years you and I are sitting here at this table. And so yeah, there is

11:16 A story. That's the brief version that takes us from the big bang to To us on planet Earth. Is it theoretical that this is all just a I was gonna say

11:28 Perception, but the other word might be a simulation of sorts. Theoretically we don't even know if yesterday exists. Or if it was just we were just implanted with the memory of it. Absolutely right. We're in this age of AI now. And I wondered If this Insurgents of AI. And how powerful

11:45 It is. And if you imagine it on a sort of an exponential curve. Has it made you question some of your like fundamental assumptions about That overarching question of why we're here. Well, yeah, in fact, even before A I

12:00 We were Tussling with the very notion that you mentioned, which is All we ever have access to Is now. Right?

12:12 We Can try to remember yesterday's now. But as you say, the That's happening right now through patterns that are in my brain or yours that we think reflect something that happened yesterday or the day before, but that's a leap of faith. Right?

12:31 So there's a kind of, you know, skeptical nightmare. scenario where we begin to question everything. You know, is this table real? Am I really here? Am I a simulation sitting inside some computer right now? Are we in the matrix? right now. These are the kinds of things which you naturally can come to when you take a deeply sceptical attitude to the nature of reality. Bottom line is I can't convince myself, and certainly I can't convince you that we're not in the matrix. Why? We could be.

13:02 It is logically consistent and sensible to imagine that you and I are sitting in some computer, maybe it's not, you know, some dark dystopian computer the way it was in the Matrix. Maybe there's a kid. In you know twenty ninth century earth. who's in his or her garage right now. And they came up this wonderful computer program. And they're simulating historical episodes in the past, and they happen

13:29 To allow you and I to exist sitting at this table. I don't know how to prove that that's not the case. What I can say is If I'm willing to buy into that. Everything falls apart.

13:42 I can't trust any I can't trust my reasoning. I can't even trust my thinking that it's logical to imagine that individual because that individual may have implanted the false reasoning that it could be logical for us to be sitting here. What do I do at that point? And so As a scientist, what I say is I'm gonna allow that as a possibility, and then I'm gonna park it right over here.

14:04 I allow it, I look at it, every so often I say, That's scary that possibility that we're in a simulation. But I'm not gonna let it overwhelm because then I'll be stuck. The simulation argument popularized by philosopher Nick Boston relies on probability. Yeah. Um it essentially says that If an advanced civilization which I would argue we're an advanced civilization. ever develops the technological capacity to run conscious

14:29 high fidelity computer simulations of their ancestors, they will likely run millions of or billions of them, and because these simulated realities would vastly outnumber the single raw physical universe, any given conscious observer is statistically almost certainly living inside a software code rather than base reality. The big assumption is, can you create a computer program that has self-awareness? That has consciousness. I you know, nobody knows the answer to that. I've I've spoken to some of today's AI researchers who think that chat GPT is conscious.

15:06 Now I Lo I I talk to them and I'm respectful if that's the kind of person I am. But in the back of my mind I'm like, Are you Kidding me? You really think that chat GPT

15:18 Has feelings? That It Think about it's Own existence and

15:24 Has anxieties? I think it can simulate that, but regardless I don't think today's technology is there. Is it possible that

15:35 Tomorrow's technology, broadly defined, a year, five years, a hundred years, really will yield Self aware sentient Artificial systems. Yeah. I do think it's possible.

15:47 Now not everybody agrees with that. No one knows. It's a Logical possibility, but I don't know. Let Us assume following Nick Bostrom.

15:57 that consciousness can be created In a mechanical box. If that's possible, then Nick simply says, Look Our progeny in the future. You're gonna be fascinated.

16:10 With creating Sentient. Systems. And so they're gonna create millions and billions and trillions. Of of sentient systems in the box.

16:20 And they're gonna get really elaborate. And create a version where the sentient beings are led to think that they're on a planet. And in fact, they're gonna do it a thousand billion trillion different ways. Some are gonna be a planet like Earth, some are gonna be on a planet like Mars, some are gonna be a planet like around some star in the Andromeda galaxy. They're gonna be an enormous number of simulated beings. Enormous number of universes that are simulated. So the question is

16:48 If we have one real universe, let's say this is real. And a gazillion artificial ones that are created in various Laptop computers of the future. We're one of a billion trillion zillion. Instantiations of people who think that they're real.

17:06 Now. One truly is real. The other are not real. So if you're just Talking about odds. The odds are

17:14 Anybody who thinks they're real is not. The odds are anybody who's got a self aware sense of the world is probably in a simulation. You used anxiety as a sort of of a proxy for consciousness almost, like the bit being able to feel these things. Yeah. I guess the question then becomes, like what is what is it? What is anxiety? Yeah. Is it an electrical signal going through it from the I do think it is. I think that love and hate and anxiety and jealousy and gratitude and grief and all human emotion. Is nothing but Electrical impulses going through our brains. And an electrical impulse is just particles moving or strings moving along various connections.

17:54 I think that is all that it is. Now some people here and they're like Wow, that is a pretty bleak way of looking at Life. were these wondrous beings who can have all this emotion, right? The emotion captured by Shakespeare

18:09 In the sonnets, right? The emotion captured by Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony. You can't reduce that. to electrical signals in the brain? I say, Yeah, I uh you can. I really do think that you can. I don't think that diminishes the wonder of what we can feel and sense and articulate and express through the various ways that we have, be it through music or theater or art or literature or poetry. Yeah.

18:35 I am as Awstruck by our capacity to create as as anybody else, but in the end I think it all does reduce. to electrical impulses going through this Grey piece of meat.

18:51 In this bone cage that's sitting on our shoulders. And if you m imagine any rate of improvement from today. Presumably at some point in the future. Our future ancest or future progeny, you called them. Yeah. would be able to create. Why not? That's my view. I don't think there's something special about the brain as a substrate.

19:09 I think as long as you have the same electrical impulses, if they're housed in silicon, Inside a metallic box. I don't think that makes them fundamentally different than what's happening inside of our heads. Now, philosophers argue this, you know, psychologists argue this. They say, no, no, no, no It's not just the brain, it's the brain, it's the connection to the body, it's the tactile sense of the world, it's the olfactory sense of the world, it's the visual sense. It's only when you put it all together that you get the full experience of what it means to be self aware, a self aware human being. And my view is

19:46 Well maybe that's true, but If so, Give the artificial version Tactile sense and An olfactory sense and visual sense. We will have the capacity to do this.

19:59 At that point I just Don't See a fundamental difference between the artificial Version. And

20:07 shall we call it the organic. And so yeah, I think there's a really Interesting argument to be made that simulations will outnumber Real worlds? And therefore there's a chance that right now We are in one of those.

20:22 Simulated worlds. Does it change anything, even if that's true? Nah. I don't think it does. And I think that's the beauty. If I'm in a simulation

20:32 I'm gonna live out my life in this simulation to the fullest. Now, I'd like to think that As a physicist what I do, what my colleagues do is try to figure out The laws of the universe writ large. But If we're in a simulation and all we're doing is figuring out the laws that that 15-year-old futuristic kid decided to impose on this artificial world,

20:55 Hey That's not a bad way to spend your time too. On this subject of AI Do you I mean a lot of people that have sat here

21:03 People like Geoffrey have told me that it's quite inconceivable that when there is a more intelligent life form on this planet, i.e. AI, which is accelerating in its intelligence towards superintelligence and AGI and all these terms that these smart people use. Um it's inconceivable that we will remain in control. Yeah. Logically that kind of also stacks up.

21:21 It does. But but I think there are Alternatives we tend to speak Very much. At the extremes. Right.

21:30 Humans are in control. AI is in control. AI Wipes us out. For

21:37 reasons that might be benign or might be dystopian. It seems to me that what will likely happen is something more in the middle, which is We are going to work. with artificial systems. We're doing it right now, and look how quickly We have acclimated.

21:59 That would be unthinkable in twenty twenty one. There are many examples now, but there's a beautiful one that's on my mind. An eighty year old mathematical conjecture. I think this is called the Jacobian conjecture. was solved r very recently by a mathematician using AI. I see us

22:19 Blending with AI Not necessarily that we have implants, but maybe we will, but there will not be as sharp a distinction. between the biological intelligence and the artificial intelligence. And that to me if that ultimately yields a New life form?

22:39 That no longer Mm can be called human. that may be the way things evolve. And so Evolution is something that

22:51 Is Inherent to how we got here U why would we think that this moment in the evolutionary Progression was the end of it all. We weren't gonna

23:03 continue to evolve. And maybe the continuation of our evolution Is in partnership with the artificial intelligence systems that we ourselves create. That we give birth to. Yeah. It's us.

23:17 Right? It's our creation. You know, it's not an alien. We haven't been taken over. And so yeah, I think that is a a real possible way that this story plays out. How do you feel about it? I uh

23:30 Am fine with it. You know, I think that we tend to Become very attached. Mm. To the way things are.

23:40 And we gain a sense of the way things are is the way it will always be. I think that's a natural way that we humans have lived our lives. Why? Because the timescales For change. have been relatively slow.

23:58 Right? We lived what, thirty, forty, fifty, call it eighty years, hundred years, whatever. But the timescales for change were typically much larger than that. The timescales for political change and the timescales for technological change much larger. So as a species, we've grown accustomed to the thought that Yeah. What we see is how it will always be. But of course, as we look back through history, we can see the changes. And so we're uncomfortable with change because we're unused to living through that kind of change at the kind of speed. that we are and will continue to encounter. I think we just have to get with it.

24:37 Now. Look. I don't want AI system to wipe us out, don't get me wrong, but I think if we recognize that change is happening, will happening, we can embrace it in a way that will have an outcome. that will be acceptable. That will in fact be wonderful in the things that it will allow us to do.

24:57 I I'm quite you talked about AI being able to solve that complex enough problem. I'm wondering if With accelerating ever more intelligent AI. there's a bunch of other things within physics that you think might become possible in the near term. I mean, one of them I think about we can talk about some of the others that I have in my mind, but um and any others that you think are interesting, but One of them is us being able to live forever.

25:18 Yeah. Do you think we're gonna be able to live forever? Yeah, that would be a that would be a good one. I don't think that death is inevitable. In the sense That

25:28 Death can be thought of As the Increase in entropy, the increase in disorder in a physical system. And when the entropy gets Too large, the system can't function the way it once did.

25:42 And that's really what we call death. Right. That's really what it means. And so in principle we can imagine Harnessing some of the processes Та в казді деградейш.

25:55 in the human body that have naturally resulted in us typically not living more than a hundred or one hundred and twenty years. I mean people like you know David Sinclair who I've spoken to about things like this, yeah, you know, I think we can forestall the kinds of degradation. Now If you're talking to me. I think on timescales that are so much longer.

26:16 than a human life. I think about timescales that speak to The entire Time frame.

26:24 Of the cosmos. from beginning to the closest that science can take us to the very end. And on those scales. I don't think that we'll be able to forestall death. But please note the time cell I'm talking about are ludicrous if Compared to any time scale.

26:41 That we are familiar with. A hundred more years, two hundred more years, maybe five hundred more years, I don't think anybody can really say for sure. I do think that is within the possible range of what science and medicine will ultimately be able to accomplish. And I will say though

27:01 You know, I I read a book. I was about in my twenties called The Denial of Death. by Ernest Becker. He was a social psychologist, I guess sociologist, who Believe strongly. That's so much of what we do.

27:16 In our lives. is driven by our awareness of our own mortality. And as I began to think more and more about that, it made more and more sense to me. Which had a dual effect on me.

27:28 Very interesting framework. to think about your life within the context of recognizing It's finite nature. But the flip side of that is you're constantly thinking about your own death. You know, which, you know, is a a curious way to go about your life. But I don't think the denial of death That human motivation would go away. If we lived 200 years or 300 or 500, yeah, we'd have longer lifespans, we'd be able to do more things. But you know, if we live to five hundred, you know, as we approach four fifty, four seventy five, we'll be thinking the exact same thoughts.

28:04 That we think now. As we approach seventy or eighty. It'll be no different. And so from a fundamental perspective, yeah, I would choose to live longer. But I don't think it changes anything fundamentally. I I find it quite interesting. I was actually writing a a letter about this, sort of an article to myself really about this yesterday about this idea of long termism and how when you just change the time horizon of something, the decisions you make today are different. Yeah. And a a simple way of explaining this through the context of like business would be if I told you to build a business, then I gave you

28:35 One year. And unlimited resources. But you had to build it as big as you could. You would take certain shortcuts. And you would m maybe not think about the foundations.

28:44 But if I give you tw twenty years, you'd really make great foundations and then, you know, you'd build up from there. And I think about the same in our lives because we do have this sort of sort of inbuilt time horizon, okay, I'm gonna live maybe eighty years and then I'm I'm thirty and then forty and then kids and then I start to g you know change and I'm maybe at some deeper level we are making a certain set of decisions based on that time horizon that we wouldn't make otherwise. Yeah. I mean When I was twenty or thirty.

29:08 You know, even though I had this mindset that was inculcated by reading Becker's book, there was a certain sense of an infinite horizon That somehow was infusing your decisions, you know, to write a book. Well, that's like a four year undertaking. But you know, when you're thirty, you're like, yeah, sure, yeah, yum, yum, I'm gonna do that. Now

29:32 I'm gonna choose those books with a certain kind of care. Right. You know, there's a different kind of mindset that that is brought to bear. So I certainly agree. That the time horizon Impact

29:46 on the moment to moment choices. But the Pattern. That we humans go through from birth, you know, to adolescence, uh adulthood, middle age, to ultimately old age if we're lucky, and then you know, we disappear. That pattern will persist regardless of what the ultimate scale of it is, whether it's eighty years or eight hundred years. I think that we would go through a very similar kind of of rhythmic variation in how we approach the world.

30:15 If we were immortal That would Change a lot. But I don't see immortality in our future. What is the sort of l the least inspiring

30:27 possibility of the sort of answer to the big question of why we're here. And then I'll ask you the the most optimistic Possibility. Yeah, I think the least inspiring would be if What if in the end of the day It's all just an accident.

30:41 There is no deep explanation for why the world is the way it is. There's no deep explanation for why there's something rather than nothing. If that's the truth. I'm on board.

30:54 But it wouldn't feel as enriching. As it might be if I can now jump to the other side of your question. You know, if there is A true fundamental answer to the question of why there is anything at all? And I recognize that that answer dovetails with everything else that we've been developing. That answer ultimately yields quantum mechanics. And yields the general theory of relative and maybe even yields string theory.

31:19 That would feel Deeply satisfying. Why did our brain evolve? So we could get the next meal. So we could get shelter.

31:28 So we could get a mate. And have progeny, allowing our genetic material to propagate into Our descendants, right? This is what the brain Meant to do and yet.

31:40 This brain can do so much more than that. It can figure out the equations of physics. That's that's a miracle right there. And so The deep gratification would come from this brain. Being able to figure out some stuff.

31:53 And then it dovetails with the deep explanation for why there's anything at all. Giving us a coherent narrative. From the beginning until today and perhaps on into the far future, Yeah. Do you think it's gonna happen? Do you think we're gonna answer that question? I don't know.

32:12 Nobody does. I think all vectors are pointing in a direction that suggests that they're Are real explanations that it's not just happenstance? There are these particles we mentioned before called electrons. Here it is, my spinning electron, right? And so

32:29 When an electron spins it can rise to a little magnetic field, sort of like a trillionth of the strength of the magnetic field of a magnet on your refrigerator. We can use the math of quantum mechanics to predict the strength of that magnetic field. And we can do it and it comes out two point ba.

32:48 Fifteen decimal places long, we can do the math. We then can measure the magnetic field. And it agrees digit by digit by digit by digit by digit with what we calculate. Our prediction is borne out by our observations to 15 decimal places. I mean that's breathtaking.

33:07 We should not have been able to do that in some sense, to understand the world that deeply with a brain that really was focused upon, you know, g getting the bison. And so the fact that we can do that. suggests to me that there are these deep Patterns in the world. That

33:27 Will ultimately Stitched together into a coherent story. Do you think it could lead us to God. Well religion. Yeah, it depends what you mean.

33:38 By God. You know, if you mean the kind of God that Our forebears often have spoken of, and people today as well, a kind of anthropomorphized being You know, sitting on the throne in some heavenly

33:55 I suspect not. That feels to me very much a human creation. And A wondrous human creation. I'm not

34:05 Of the mindset of some of my Science colleagues are That's Religion is an enemy of science and needs to be wiped it can be, but Anything can be an enemy of anything else, it depends how you use it. I see religion.

34:18 Not А за строк. That tries to explain the world in terms of its workings. I see there's a structure that tries to quell Our anxiety.

34:29 Our existential anxiety. Where did religions come from? They came from our forebears recognizing that they would die. So, you know, our forebears had these elaborate rituals of burying their dead. There are these wonderful caves in various parts of the world that have been excavated where the grave goods, as they call it, involving, you know, animal teeth stitched together carefully.

34:54 It would take a single individual years to create the grave goods that are buried with an individual. Why would they spend the time on that? Well They were imagining that death is not the end. that that individual needed those grave goods for their next journey into the afterlife. And why were they thinking about that? Because it's too terrifying. To imagine that death is truly the end.

35:20 And so from that you can see the glimmers of a religious sensibility emerging. Where We want to have something that suggests that death is not the end. So we invent these beautiful structures called religions. And I say that even from a personal standpoint, I don't believe in any of the traditional religious practices. Right, I'm Jewish, I was raised sort of Jewish more culturally than religiously.

35:49 Do I pray on occasion? Yeah. I do. Do I believe that I'm praying to an actual God? I do not. But the act

35:58 Of Going through the kind of ritual that Our ancestors did And giving yourself over momentarily to something that you imagine is being more powerful and I think it's deeply in our nature.

36:12 So who are you praying to? I am praying to the universe if I have to give a word to it, recognizing That this prayer is Gonna fall on deaf ears because there's nothing else out there to hear it. But it makes me feel better. And so there's a part of my mind that's willing to

36:31 Allow The scientific understanding To have its place? But the irrational human side to have its place too. What is the the most compelling argument

36:43 Or idea or experience you've ever encountered? for a God. Like the ones we read about in the Bibles. Very little. Very little. You know, somebody died in the operating room and they were able to uh leave their body and see things that they could not possibly have seen, and then they report it back when they were revive, and people say, Oh, you must have died and left your body. That's the only No No, no, no The human brain Has this wonderful imaginative capacity to see things inside of its head that it doesn't literally see. That's what we can do. And so I've never seen a single example where I couldn't feel

37:21 that I could give a logical explanation which was more compelling than the supernatural. Explanation. A question. of how it got started. Yeah. And over time We have been able to push our understanding ever further back. So

37:41 In about nineteen uh call it twenty nine or so. Edwin Hubble who is a great astronomer. Noticed.

37:51 through powerful observations through the telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, that the distant galaxies all seem to be moving away. Interesting. Others, Georges Lemaitre, who is a Belgian priest, as it turns out, who also knew Einstein's general relativity, said, Well, look, if all the galaxies are moving away, Just wind that cosmic film backwards. Back in time, they must have been closer and closer and closer together.

38:17 Way back in the beginning they must have all been on top of each other, and then Everything running the film forward must have swelled outward in a Big bang like explosion. Let there be light. Let there be light. Yeah. And so starting in nineteen twenty nine, We began to have a scientific account. of how it is that the universe may have been billions of years ago.

38:40 And in our era, other scientists took the story even further. suggesting that there was an earlier era when the universe was just infused with a Kind of uniform energy. You could say where did the energy come? I don't know. But if it was infused with this uniform energy, they showed that the math Required that the universe underwent this rapid swelling, the Big Bang.

39:05 And so Era by era by era. My point is we can push our understanding. Ever more deeply. trying to get at cosmic origins. We have not been able to push back to time zero itself.

39:19 But because we're able to push our understanding further back and make predictions about, for instance, what's known as the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is heat. That we can observe today. that was left over from the Big Bang. Big Bang was very hot. The universe has cooled ever since for 13.8 billion years.

39:40 We can Detect the residual heat. From the big bank. And so this gives me confidence that we're inching toward

39:51 The answer. to the question that you asked. Now will we require God at some point? By which I mean will we say We've gone as far as we can. Will we have to invoke something else?

40:03 I can't say no. But I don't see any reason at this point to envision that we won't be able to push all the way to a full understanding. Most of us don't really understand um

40:16 I guess how scale Yeah. have a relationship. Which means that you know, I've been alive for thirty three years now and it feels like a long time. Yeah. But I'm presuming the further and further you zoom out and the sort of

40:30 The bigger, the wider the scale gets. Time is experienced differently. So actually I could have been here for a second in a toddler's universe who's created the simulation. Yes, all of this is possible when simulations are part of the story. But if you put that to the side. And just look at our universe, yeah. The time scales even there Are shocking. I mean, Carl Sagan used an analogy. He said look

40:55 If you want to understand The timescales of the universe from the beginning until today. Which is billions of years, like thirteen point eight billion years, he said. Here's one way to do it. Imagine.

41:05 That All of Cosmic History from the beginning until today you can press it down to one year. Mm. Now, in that scheme, that means each day is about forty thousand years, but you can then put all of the milestone moments in in the evolution of the universe on the calendar.

41:24 So imagine you have the big bang as January first. Then the Milky Way galaxs like something around You know, March fifteenth or something like that. And the sun and the earth form sometime, you know, in May, you know, and then the first You know, life on earth is sometime in December, like December second. And then you know, the first modern humans

41:46 They appear like on New Year's Eve. Right? And then all of civilization Takes place in the last ten seconds. Right. So it like Eleven.

41:57 fifty five, you know, it's the it's the rise of the Buddha, eleven fifty six, the fall of Rome, eleven fifty eight, the Renaissance, eleven fifty nine, like one second to the stroke of midnight. You get modern science. So like modern science is Like one second. In this cosmic calendar.

42:16 And so that helps you Get a feel. For the time scales. That are involved when you're talking cosmologically. Because you're right, thirty-three years in a lifetime

42:26 you know, l I'm I'm gonna posit you're gonna live to ninety nine, let's say. That's one third of your life. You know, that's that's not small, it's not big, but you know, it's a significant part of it. On cosmic terms? Thirty three years? It's zero.

42:41 It doesn't register. That's how tiny it is. On the scales. that we're talking about cosmologically. So should I feel insignificant?

42:52 I would urge you not to. One of the reactions to all this certainly can be Look, we're a little tiny speck. In space, right? I mean you can give the same kind of Context for space itself.

43:05 Right? Because we're on a planet around the sun. The sun is one star. of a hundred billion others or so in the Milky Way galaxy. Yeah, I think there's uh a little bit of a version of this thing here, if we can get this guy Right, yeah. So if you sort of start

43:23 Like here. Right, here we are in the studio. Right. And if here we then begin to pull out to planet Earth. Like we're a little dot. on planet Earth. And then if you pull out from there This is Earth within the solar system. You begin to see how tiny we look even on the scale of the solar system. But of course here you can pull out further and you begin to see our sun one of many stars within the galaxies. You only see a few here, but you know, there are a hundred billion stars in

43:51 in our galaxy. And then you can go even further than that. You can look at our Milky Way galaxy within The setting of the entire universe That has at least a hundred billion other galaxies. So We

44:06 As a little tiny speck around our star Our star is one of a hundred billion stars in a galaxy that's one of a hundred billion galaxies. That can certainly make you feel small. In space. The beauty though

44:20 That our minds. can reach out to the edge of the cosmos. The fact that we can understand that we are so small is what gives us heft. That's what gives us a sense of connection to something larger. I imagine that Fish.

44:37 Don't realize that they're like in one ocean oceans on the earth that's one planet. I I don't think maybe I'm wrong and maybe the fish are like ah yeah, yeah, yeah. But but assuming that the fish don't know that They don't know that they're insignificant. They don't even really Think in those terms, per se, but the fact that we can do that.

45:00 The fact that we can realize how insignificant we are when you talk about the expansive space, you realize that there are other measures of significance. And one measure of significance is your ability to understand your own predicament. And the fact that we can do that. is what to me is wondrous. How do we know we're not just that whole universe there isn't just a we're just a A a microbe in the in the gut of a f of a fish.

45:26 Yeah, we we could, and again that's much like this simulation argument, but Let me give an example in here that helps give you a sense of why we believe this stuff. This here І за космик мікробад радіаційн десь за хіт. Left over from the beginning.

45:45 Now it's color coded. The different colors correspond to different temperatures in space. This is a picture of space with a device that measures the temperature at each location and assigns it a color. How much of space we're just a segment. This is a segment of the observable universe. The segment that we can see. Now space can be much larger than things that we can see that's Absolutely the case. But my point is These tiny color variations correspond to tiny temperature differences. We can use mathematics.

46:17 To predict the pattern of the temperature variations. And what we predict matches this image. To incredible precision. And so the fact that we can do a calculation Right at this table.

46:32 With a piece of paper, a pencil, and a computer. And generate an image that agrees with what we see, we say look Yeah, we can be skeptical. Maybe we don't have the full answer. But that agreement gives us confidence that

46:46 We've got something in the direction of truth. And that to me. is what gives us Something that counteracts.

46:55 the feeling of Insignificant. And on that, if you just pull that up again. This is the observable universe. Yeah. Which is I mean, how big is that? The universe is about thirteen point eight billion Years old.

47:09 univer the distance we could see would be about 13.8 billion light years, the distance light can travel in one year. We can actually see a little bit further. More like forty five billion light years. So you can think about this as here we are, we look out Billions of light years that way. Billions of light years that way. Billions of light years in every direction, and this is like a big sphere that surrounds us, and we're measuring its temperature, the temperature of space, the photons that have traveled to us from about three hundred thousand years after the beginning. So this

47:43 Picture is a snapshot. In essence, the Of what the universe was like. A mere moment. In cosmological terms, three hundred thousand years after the beginning.

47:54 That Is an amazing picture. It must be on I don't know. I don't have any reason to suspect That

48:04 reality radically changes just beyond the place that we can see. I think it's incredibly unlikely That the world is so Consistent. with our scientific understanding.

48:16 For it to all be a ruse. So Is it infinite? It could be. And if it is infinite.

48:23 There are some Really weird. things if what we have been talking about isn't weird enough. Right. You know If the universe is infinite. If you go sufficiently far out into space.

48:35 You're virtually guaranteed. To find a copy of yourself. out there. and a copy of the earth out there, and a copy of our galaxy out there. It's virtually impossible to imagine a universe that goes on infinitely far

48:51 And doesn't repeat. You know, in fact I see a prop here. I can sort of tell you why, right? So here's a deck of cards, right? And I think it's a new deck, yeah. So everything is in order. Right? It's all perfectly ordered like that. Now if I was to take this deck of cards

49:07 And I start to shuffle it. Right. So you know I'm not a particularly good shuffler, but you know you get the basic idea. You know, I keep shuffling and of course the order changes. Every time. Right. So if I now, you know, I'm not a great shuffler, so there probably still, you know, some things that are still, you know, in numerical order, but it's more mixed up.

49:27 Than it was before, and I can keep on doing this. Now sooner or later. If I continue to shuffle these cards over and over and over and over and over and over again, sooner or later it will get back to the completely ordered. Arrangement. Why? Because

49:43 There aren't enough different arrangements to go around. Right. That idea applies in the universe in the following way. In any region of space there are particles. Those particles can be arranged in a variety of different ways,

49:56 Here they're arranged, so that you and I are sitting at this table and we got the cameras and everything. This is just a particle arrangement. There are only a finite number. of arrangements of particles in any given region of space. This you can establish from the laws of quantum physics. So if you go out far enough in space, Region by region by region the particles will have different arrangements, but they have to repeat, much like the order of the cards has to repeat. So there has to be a place out there. In fact, if it goes on infinitely far

50:24 If you imagine I shuffle these cards infinitely many times, I'll get that. Nice ordered arrangement. Infinitely many times too. Similarly, There are

50:34 Infinitely many copies of you. Of me Of everything we're familiar with. out there in the cosmos. And so if the universe is infinite

50:43 It kind of challenges a little bit our sense of self. Right. They had the same childhood. They had the same history because again, that's just an arrangement of particles over time and it has to Repeat.

51:04 There's a version out there of me that just loves wine. Ha ha there you go. Right? In fact, it's even easier, I should say. For

51:12 Almost, but not quite. exactly replicate what we're familiar with. Which would mean. There's a universe out there in which

51:22 You and I are interchanged. Or you grew up in New York City and I grew up something. 'Cause those are again almost replications. You got the Earth, you got the Sun, but the detailed particle arrangement is close to but not identical. to what we So yeah, an infinite universe

51:41 Brings in some fairly strange ideas. But even in the observable universe, I mean this transitions nicely to the subject of aliens, which people are um very obsessed about. I guess there's two questions here, which is why do we care so much, I guess philosophically, about Aliens. at least in this country and elsewhere too.

52:01 We love the idea of conspiracy. We love the idea that the deep state is hiding things from us. And by we, I don't mean me, sort of mean the Zeitgeist, you know, loves the idea of this area fifty-one. You know, so I think there's A a a a desire. For there to be more

52:19 than what's apparent on the surface. And wouldn't it be exciting if, you know, we've long known that there are these aliens, they've visited us and it's been kept under wraps. That's like the deep conspiracy that feeds that hunger for there to be something that is being hidden from us. Now, yeah, I think the other reason is we're deeply lonely. As a species, sure, we've got people around, but you know, I think this sense The desire for a God. I don't think it's that much different from the desire for there to be other life out there. It's the desire to be part of something bigger.

52:57 Now, if you ask me, do I think there are actually other life forms out there. I I'd like to think of it in two ways. One Yeah. I think it's hard to imagine that we're the only life. I mean, the more we look

53:10 the more we find the organic molecules necessary for life, you know, I mean oh acids, nucleic acid you know, the the raw material. seems to not be too hard to come by in the cosmos. So to imagine that there's other bacterial life or viruses out there, that seems to me a reasonable working hypothesis. But if you then say, but what about intelligent life? And by intelligent life, let's just call us.

53:38 intelligent. It's debatable, but let's just say that. Yeah, that is a harder question. I mean even on our planet. Right. It was an asteroid sixty five million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. And in that way

53:53 opened up the evolutionary pathway by which we came to dominate in the way that we do. Without that it could still be the dinosaurs are grazing around on various plant life and other life forms on the surface of this earth. And without that kind of accident on some other world, Maybe intelligent life is rare or even so rare that we're the only example. So I don't consider that an absurd

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56:26 If one of your children came to you and said, Dad, um What is the what is the meaning then of this life? If we're alone in this universe, it's a gazillion miles away from anything interesting in the cosmic spectrum of things. What is the meaning of all of this, Dad? Yeah. Well they do I Oh, they did. Un unfortunately or fortunately, because I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and writing about it, it's sort of in in the familial zeitgeist at home, if you will. But my answer generally is

56:54 I don't think that Hovering out there in the depths of space. There is The answer. You know, I I think

57:02 You know, this this urge To look out. And have the answer brought to us. I think that's Needs to be inverted.

57:11 I think that we need to come to the universe with our Answer. to that. And I think the charge of Every sentient living being is to come to their own

57:23 rationale for their life. Their own answer to your question. Their own set of Activities. and desires and achievements and relationships that gives their life meaning. And combine

57:38 To make me feel connected. One of the things that does make me feel Particles that I'm made out of. Existed at the Big Bang? Yes.

57:49 Exactly. Isn't that wondrous? You Or The universe

57:56 construct it in a way that you can Reflect on the universe. Now some would say, no no no, we're special. We're like these divine offspring, you know, made in the image of God.

58:09 And sure, I mean I like the way that that sounds, but I find it much more satisfying to to describe it the way you did. There were particles that emerged from the Big Bang that coalesced into a form That allowed us to momentarily 'Cause we're here for a brief flicker of cosmic time to momentarily reflect on our own existence. That's a connection.

58:31 One of the things that actually helped me a lot through my life, funnily enough, is um is kinda watching what you just showed on the screen there, which was I watched a video when I was younger of them just zooming out from Earth. Yeah. And we talked about feeling insignificant earlier. Um, I mean there's some of them here, I'll just pick one at random, like this one here. Well, it's just a a lady sat on some grass and she she zooms out further and further and further. And when I saw this, I must have been Mm. It was a video like this one. I must have been about fourteen years old. And at first I had the thought that a lot of people might have, which was, Oh, like none of this matters. Because we're so insignificant on the grand scheme of things that like what's the point?

59:07 And then I I had this other thought which has stayed with me ever since, which is It liberated me from worry. Yeah. Because if If all of my worries are just a speck.

59:20 in this bigger thing, which are a speck and a bigger thing and a speck and a bigger thing. It meant that I could Take more risks in my life. Yeah. And not be encumbered by what will happen if and what will people think and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which kind of liberates one to go and pursue whatever they want to pursue. Yeah. Carl Sagan with the pale blue dot, you know, if you're familiar with that terminology, he he had the uh Viking spacecraft. when it was going by Saturn. Turn around.

59:50 And take a shot of planet Earth through the gossamer rings of Saturn. And in that photo the Earth is this little tiny pale blue speck, sort of as we saw in the film as it went by there. And he in this wonderfully poetic passage described how Everything we care about, everything we love, everything we fight, the rivers of blood that has been spilled to Conquer a tiny little fraction of a Pixel in space.

1:00:21 That Gives you A setting. Where the concerns that you're mentioning of an individual human life O of countries, of nations.

1:00:30 You realize how Utterly small it is. in the cosmological setting. And again That to me isn't Insignificance, as you were saying, it's liberation.

1:00:41 We have this um this spectrum of I guess confidence in front of us here. And on one end of it it says low confidence. On this end it has high confidence. And there's five little uh figurine type things there next to you. Yeah. And what I would like you to do is to place them In line with your confidence that the thing is real. So the first one that I'm gonna ask you to place is those mini scales which represent free will. This guy here. Free will. That's free will. Do you think humans have free will? Are you low confidence or high confidence? I'll push that further towards you so you can. Uh, I do not think we have free will.

1:01:15 And I have high confidence in that assessment, which I guess means low confidence that we have free will. What is free will? To me, free will is really just the everyday Sets. that you are the ultimate author of your actions.

1:01:32 That the buck stops with you when it comes to the decisions that you make for how you are going to respond one way or another in the moment to moment existence of life. I don't think that freedom of the will is Israel. And I can give you a Quick.

1:01:50 Sense why it really is. an extension of everything that we've already spoken about, which is Yeah, when I look at you I see a man. But I also

1:02:02 Imagine that I'm looking inside you and I see your particles. And so you are a man shaped collection of particles. That is what you are. And each of those particles and the Agglomeration of those particles are

1:02:16 are fully governed by the laws of physics. I don't say that we have those laws yet. We have an approximation to them with Schrödinger and Einstein and all those folks, but I do believe that there is an ultimate set of principles that guide how your particles behave. You do not have the capacity. To intercede in the lawful progression of your particles. So if you raise your hand. It is not you.

1:02:43 Who's doing that? It is the laws of physic guiding the particles in your brain sending an electrical signal down your arm, causing your muscle to contract or expand, resulting in your hand going up. Yeah. You don't control. The laws. I didn't make the decision? You did not.

1:03:01 You felt that you did. And so the feeling that you and I and everyone else have that we make decisions and those decisions result in our action. It's a powerful, it's a seductive sensibility. But no. I do not think that you

1:03:17 are the place where that Choice, if you will, occurred. The choice is actually within the lawful unfolding of the particles. And I can't control that particle motion. Therefore, I can't control the decision. Therefore, I don't control the motion of my arm. Therefore I don't control my life? You don't, in some sense.

1:03:37 If you buy into it Fully. It can be Paralyzing.

1:03:42 Yeah. You can recognize it. Which I do. And I say, Okay. Within that structure.

1:03:48 I'm gonna live my life as ful as I can. And I am able, not always,'cause I'm a human being, but in the best of moments I can pull back And have a certain objectivity. about the things that happen in my life. And I observe them. At a remove.

1:04:08 As opposed to being completely wrapped up. In the moment to moment. Now that doesn't make me an aloof person. It doesn't make me somebody who somehow is detached. No. It's just I can analyze the world at multiple levels. So who is and what is guiding those particles to make the decisions that those particles are making? The best I can say, and I think the best that we can say right now is

1:04:33 That they're Is some body of law Now what does that mean, a body of law? There is some Patterns. that repeat in the world.

1:04:45 Now you drop An apple and it falls On Newton's head. Repeatedly, you can rely upon certain kinds of particle motion because there's certain regularities in the world. And the regularities in the world are what I mean by the laws of physics.

1:05:02 They may be articulated mathematically. Our best guess is As of today. That math is the best language we have for describing those laws, but out there, I think there are some fundamental patterns. And those patterns. ultimately are what determine how the particles move.

1:05:20 And so that's all that we are. We are a body of particles that move. And that's responsible. for why things do what they do. our brains allow us to self reflect. to look at what we do and analyze it, and when we do that we tend to ascribe authorship

1:05:39 To ourselves. But that's a story. That we tell ourselves it makes us feel good. It makes us feel part of the unfolding.

1:05:48 It Perhaps has an evolutionary utility that if you feel responsible for what you're doing, maybe it helps you to survive. Maybe that's why this way of thinking was inculcated over the course of generation upon generation. Maybe there's an evolutionary explanation, but fundamentally speaking, I don't think it's real. I was gonna say then, well, maybe the The particles are Trying to survive in this form?

1:06:11 But even as I thought about that, I thought so maybe my particles are making the decisions they make to raise my hand to go on a holiday with my fiance to have kids because they want to survive in this form. But actually I disappear at some point. Yes. But my particles don't. Right. They then become dirt or someone else or whatever, or child. It doesn't seem that they care much about necessarily being in this form. They don't. I don't think they do.

1:06:36 So I don't think they care. I don't even think the word care is applicable to them. The notion of caring is is a high level construct. That only emerges when the particles are configured sufficiently to yield a complex information processing system called a human brain.

1:06:54 And consciousness. And consciousness. Now if you ask me where consciousness comes from, I don't know, sort of as we discussed before, I think it's just physical processes. Let's go with that. Assuming that's the case, this conscious self awareness invents the idea of caring. Because it's a useful concept for us to organize. our lives and our experiences. This conscious self-awareness invents all the other words. Happy. Sad. Meaning

1:07:20 Purpose morality. Activity, action, choice, decision, freedom, will Mm. Human made. These

1:07:28 Concepts don't exist out there in the universe. There's no notion of freedom of the will floating in space outside the Andromeda Galaxy. This is a selection of ideas That we humans as a species have found

1:07:44 Utilitarian advantage. In Organizing Our experiences.

1:07:51 That's all that it is, said That doesn't diminish it. I don't go around trying to Eras my sense of self

1:08:00 I accept my sense of self, but I also see it for what it is. A human construct. Does that mean that consciousness and everything that I am could theoretically just be As you said earlier in the sort of Pessimistic.

1:08:13 Version of events. Random. Totally random like consciousness itself was just the particles came together over a long enough period of time and then they they found this form and now I can't. It could and maybe it was random and happened only once on this planet, right? I mean, again, maybe there is life out there and maybe there's even complex life out there. Maybe even like as big as us or bigger. But maybe when we encounter those life forms They have no

1:08:41 Idea This um I think it was a physicist said to me that It was a bit of a spiritual asoterical idea, but they basically said to me that they think consciousness could be it could come from this sort of original source. And it's divided itself up into the humans, the bees, the birds. Two

1:08:59 go out there and understand the nature of the universe. Yeah. And then when we die, we kind of return to the source. But you know, I'll give birth to a baby they'll go off into different corners of the the earth and look at different things and have different experiences. And it's all feeding back into this central consciousness, which his sole objective is to understand itself. And it's funny because I heard this idea from this physicist, and then I I was in a I think somewhere in Europe, and I was driving down the road. And I saw all of these tourists just like looking up at a mountain. And they're just like looking out at the sea. And they were looking at things that were interesting. Sure. Which is what we do as humans. Yeah. I thought it kinda makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That we're like we're actually just like

1:09:35 No, there's a philosophical position called idealism. An idealism holds that The fundamental truth of reality is Consciousness. But fundamentally

1:09:48 Everything that I've seen Throughout my life suggest to me that That's not how it is. I can't prove it. I hope it's true. But if you ask me what I think is really true.

1:09:58 I think that consciousness is something that emerges when When there's a sufficient amount of information processing that itself is carried by the motion of particles through various interconnected structures. It is, but I think it's got a different level of consciousness. You can tell When they're Feeling good.

1:10:19 happy or sad or frustrated or intrigued the ears change, the eyes, the shape of the face. You can't help but ascribe an inner world to that. And again I always worry that the dogs like the fish are like these humans think they're so damn special, but we actually are well developed, well beyond them and we're just playing along. In fact in New York City, who picks up the poop, right? We pick up the poop, so the dog walks along is like this, you know. king like being and we behind them in these little plastic bags. So who's really in charge? But putting that to the side, I do think that The dogs and the cats are have a level of conscious awareness, and I think you go down through the animal kingdom, if you were to ask me, does an insect

1:11:02 have consciousness. Then I'm less clear. I suspect not. If you ask me whether a virus or a bacterium has consciousness, I don't think so. I don't think there's adequate information processing capacity in those structures to have the kind of rich inner world that we would normally ascribe to a conscious being, but that's all that I think it is. I don't think that there's some Uber universal consciousness that's out there that we go back to when we die.

1:11:31 Not that I wouldn't like it. I just don't think it's true. Moreover I can understand why humans would introduce this idea. Again, it's Ernest Becker and the Denial of Death. How wonderful. To say, yeah, our bodies die, sure.

1:11:45 But our consciousness it doesn't die? Our consciousness it floats off and it rejoins the universal Wow. That makes you feel good.

1:11:56 And we tell these stories that make us feel good, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, I do think it's important that we see them from what they are. Which are human. authored stories to compat our own recognition that we are mortal beings. Moving on to the next one is the universe there.

1:12:15 We talked about this a little bit and you've given your answer already, but do you think the universe is infinite? I don't know. But I'm gonna put it sort of around here. You know. In fact, lately I should tell you the work

1:12:28 That I been doing has imagined that the universe is not infinite. So I've been doing a lot of scientific exploration with mathematics with a handful of colleagues, and the kind of weird things that can happen if it's not infinite. And it's very interesting. There's a lot of mileage that you can extract from a universe that you go off in that way. And you wind up coming back to your starting point, much like you would on the surface of the earth. It's a finite extent.

1:12:55 But if you ask me, in my heart of hearts, if I was forced to make a choice, I would say infinite with a medium level of confidence. What about Do you think life could exist outside of Earth. And I'll say intelligent life. Intelligent life. Do you think intelligent life exists outside of Earth? Yeah, so for intelligent aliens, I'm gonna definitely go a little bit more Over here.

1:13:19 You know. I put it as uh It's possible. Obviously it happened once. Therefore it could happen again.

1:13:25 Yeah, like obviously intelligence is not somehow contradictory. to the way the universe evolves, it can support conscious and intelligent beings, but I think it may be special. Is there not a bit of a contradiction here, though? Yeah with these two things that you think the universe is infinite? Oh, when I say this, I should say Within the observable universe. Oh, okay. Yeah. So in the entire expanse of the universe as opposed to the observable part, which again is a part that even in principle we could have connection with, then yeah, I would absolutely put in exactly the same place because there'd be copies of us out there. But if we talk instead about Are we gonna

1:14:03 Get a signal. Are we gonna be visited? then I put that at much lower confidence. And in fact I I would say one thing about the visitation, because you mentioned the interest that people have on aliens.

1:14:18 I find it really odd. That People are taken With these photographs. that are meant to sort of just catch the alien ship as it was racing. If an alien

1:14:31 Could travel across the galaxy, say, to reach us, they are so technologically advanced that the idea Kick. Airplanes and their cameras could capture a photograph of them is ludicrous. They will be able to evade us

1:14:50 In so simply that the idea that we just barely caught them on our cameras is is absolutely ridiculous. Moreover, If they could travel to us, Again, I'm talking about traveling across light years. Right? I mean our galaxy, hundred thousand light years end to end, right? To be able to traverse that requires A level of technological sophistication that is so beyond anything that we can do. To imagine that being that advanced

1:15:19 Be interested in us? So interesting that they would like to be able to do it. Kidnap us? That'd be like saying I was walking to the park yesterday.

1:15:30 Don't tell anyone, but I Kidnapped. An aunt. There's an ant walking along and nobody was looking, and I sort of kidnapped it to We don't do that because it's not interesting.

1:15:42 Similarly, we would not be of interest to the aliens because they're so incredibly advanced that this idea That they're abducting us is just ludicrous. Is it gonna be possible, you know, we're talking earlier on about the the possibilities that artificial intelligence is gonna unlock. Is it possible within the laws of physics for us at some point When we get sufficiently intelligent to travel across the universe.

1:16:08 It's a that's a uh it's a great question. It's a tough one. So If The Technological advancement was simply making our ships faster.

1:16:18 No. Because even if you travel near the speed of light, which is the ultimate speed limit, You know. To go to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take you four years, even at the speed of light. To get there.

1:16:32 Right. And then if you actually want to go not just to the nearby star, but to actually across the galaxy, again you're talking a hundred thousand years to do that. So that brute, straightforward approach will not succeed. However, there are exotic ideas of things called wormholes you've probably encountered. These are these ideas of A wormhole is like a tunnel. What is a tunnel?

1:16:57 On earth a tunnel is a Shortcut That gets you from here to here without having to go over the mountain. Right. tunnel it right through.

1:17:05 There's an analogous idea that people floated in the universe, where to get from here to there. There may be a shortcut. A kind of tunnel that connects them and is a quicker way of getting from point A to point B. We don't know if these tunnels through space exist. We don't know if they existed, whether we could actually get through them.

1:17:24 And so it's a highly speculative idea. But If they do exist, and if we one day can create them and manipulate and control them, then at least in principle we can We could take two distant locations like this corner and And this corner.

1:17:38 But imagine That we could manipulate this surface. Fold it together. to bring the two corners next to each other and build a little tunnel between them. Then we can go from one end to the other by going through that shortcut.

1:17:52 That's A very far out idea. Much as we discussed earlier. This idea is not just some wild late night musing of a physicist. It comes out of the math of Einstein's general relativity.

1:18:11 That these wormholes could exist. In fact, Einstein himself, in nineteen thirty five, wrote a paper with a colleague, Nathan Rosen. Where they introduce this idea that we now call wormholes. We're no further along in knowing whether wormholes are real than Einstein was back then. We've analyzed them, we've developed the mathematics, you know, science fiction has taken this idea, you know, in in interstellar, I believe Matthew McConaughey goes through a wormhole, Jody Foster Went through one in contact. You know, they're they're a ubiquitous feature. Of science fiction trying to allow for the kinds of travel across the galaxy that otherwise would be impossible, but whether this

1:18:52 Is actually real, no nobody knows. What about time travel? Yeah. Can can we travel backwards in time within the laws of physics. Yeah, that is the the the way of phrasing. Because if you ask me the reverse question, can we travel to the future?

1:19:08 I would say yeah, that kind of time travel we were highly confident of. So I don't have a little thing for that, but let's call you know this is time travel to the future, right? I put it very, very high confidence for that. You think we can travel to the future? Yes. In principle. Executing it. A different story. But one of the things that emerges from Einstein's

1:19:29 special and general relativity, is that the way time elapses For you and for me. It's variable. Depending upon how fast we move and the strength of the gravity that we experience. So for instance, If I want to see what your life would be like.

1:19:46 Sixty years from now. Einstein laid out A blueprint. For how I could do that, I build a spaceship. I travel out into space near the speed of light,

1:19:56 I go for a certain period of time, maybe about six months, I turn around, I come back six more months, I come back I'm one year older, six months, six months, but you will be sixty Years. Older. If I traveled sufficiently close to the speed of light, because my cloud would be taken off slow compared to your clock. Your clock went through sixty years while my clock.

1:20:20 Went through one. Yeah. There is no physicist who knows what they are talking about. Who disputes? This.

1:20:27 Now. It's not controversial. But if you then say to me, Well do it, I'd say I don't know how to build a spaceship that goes that fast, at least not yet. You would only have aged one year. Correct. But I would have aged sixty. Correct.

1:20:39 Could you then go back? Oh. I don't know. And if you were to ask me to give my confidence on going back. I would say it's pretty pretty low.

1:20:48 People have written Proposals for how you could go back. They do involve things like wormholes. That is one possibility. have a tunnel from one point in space to another. If you then move the openings at different speeds, their clocks will tick off at different rates. This clock may be before this clock. So if I travel this way, I'm going one way in time, if I'm traveling that way, I'm going the reverse way in time.

1:21:15 But again, like we said before, we don't know if wormholes are real. If they are real, you might in principle be able to travel back, but if you ask me, do I think that you can low, low confidence that you can travel back. Trevor Burrus You've used the word Einstein a few times. Yeah. And I think uh this generation, you know, we we exist with AI now and calculators and all this incredible knowledge that has come from the sort of standing on the shoulders of so many of these giants. Who do you think is the smartest person to have ever lived in your estimation? It's tough one. People often make it an easier question by saying who's smarter? Isaac Newton?

1:21:47 Or Alber Einstein. And First my answer is When you're talking about that level it doesn't matter who's smarter, but if you really press me, I think I'd say Isaac Newton. Because Newton kind of went from nothing to

1:22:01 Two. Develop The laws of physics. There were people before, but there wasn't really a mindset. that the universe should be articulable in a few mathematical equations. And yet here comes along Isaac Newton,

1:22:17 And he writes down the equation that we teach high school kids F equals MA, force equals mass times acceleration, which governs just about everything in the world around us, non quantum mechanically. He writes down the law of gravity, F equals G M one M two over R squared, articulating how the gravitational force works, and he was sort of doing this on he invents calculus In order to be able to use that as a tool for articulating the laws of physics, I mean he kind of went from no real architecture of physics to A solid mathematical formulation.

1:22:54 Einstein came along and there was already a lot. Of physics. I think going from nothing to the first step. That's hard to imagine. Well

1:23:05 Newton. To some degree like neurodivergent. How could he be so genius? I wish I knew the answer to a question like that. Like you know, what is it? inside their heads that allows them to do the things that just are superhuman or feel superhum to us. I have no idea. Now Newton was a kind of weird fella.

1:23:24 Right? He was deeply religious, as makes sense for the time. He was Ultimately, you know, in the government tracking down counterfeiters and and hanging them. I mean

1:23:36 There seems to be a certain curmudgeonly side of him that was also part of his genius. Uh he once reportedly took a a knitting needle and stuck it In His eye between the

1:23:51 ball in the socket to see if he could manipulate sight through mechanical pressure. I mean who does these kinds of things, right? So he's a different who ultimately was able to see deeper. You know, and as you said, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants. You know, and there was a certain humility that came through. Where he describes himself

1:24:14 As a boy Playing on the seashore. Having found a smoother shell and Prettier pebble than most. While the great ocean of truth, he said,

1:24:25 Lay before me all undiscovered. He knew that we were just on the Sure. And we've taken our first baby step into the cosmic ocean, and there is much more. to be discovered.

1:24:37 Is it conceivable that the next Newton or I Einstein is gonna be An artificial intelligence. Could it be clawed? Yes, it could absolutely be. Look. I I like to think of scientific creativity or creativity in general in sort of three

1:24:52 Main buckets. It's a coarse organization, but I think it's helpful. One bucket of creativity is The ability To see the landscape.

1:25:02 of possibilities more fully. Then A mortal human being. And there's a lot that emerges from the ability to do that. For instance, you know, if you're a chess player you

1:25:16 You can see the spectrum of allowed moves that are available to you more than the ordinary chess player. You know, if you're a scientist, you can sort of see the landscape of ideas and equations that you might bring to bear on a puzzle more than somebody else, and that is what allows you to achieve greatness. Artificial systems They have the entire landscape. Right? They've read the entire internet. They've read every textbook. They know everything that we have ever developed. So In that kind of creativity, obviously they're going to excel, and we've seen that.

1:25:51 A human can't beat an AI any longer in chess. A human can't beat an A assistant and go. Right? I mean this famous example with uh Alpha Go, right? Move thirty seven has become this sort of iconic move where, you know, Lee Sadal, the world champion, is

1:26:09 Playing and You can see it on his face. The AI makes a move. And his he smiles momentarily and he's like Oh, it messed up. And then his face changes.

1:26:21 'Cause he slowly realizes that wasn't a mistake. Even the commentators, if you listen to they were like, Oh my God, the AI has made a mistake. What a blunder the AI has made. And then within twenty, thirty seconds we're like oh Oh. That was genius. Why?

1:26:37 The AI could see the spectrum of possibilities more than a human being. So at that level of creativity, AI will win. Second bin of creativity. Second bucket is putting together Divergent ideas.

1:26:51 In a way that no one has thought of before and in that way making progress. You know, that's kind of what Einstein did in general relativity. Put together Ramanian geometry and Newtonian gravity yielded the general theory of relativity. But again, AIs Since they know everything that we've ever developed, Can Combine things in a way that we would never have thought of.

1:27:14 The final domain is the one where somebody comes up with something That nobody has ever imagined, ever thought of. It's not just putting things together, it is radically new. That's a tough one. we're still able to win in that category. There are examples where people just come up With things that where did it come from? How do they think of that?

1:27:37 If you Develop an artificial system. and allow it to have a life. Allow it to grow up. Put it in an environment.

1:27:46 Where it actually has experiences of the sort that an Isaac Newton had could it be that that system then develops to a place where it can do the things that we'd like to think are exclusively human. Coming up with something that is not previously represented in the database on which the AI system has trained. And so even this Third.

1:28:12 more difficult or more pristine bucket of creativity. Could an artificial system do that? I don't Think there's a barrier. I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world. And one of the things you learn, which is unexpected, is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection. And after sitting here for two, three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to them. And as they leave,

1:28:37 What I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO. We've taken all of the questions from the diary of a CEO. We have Put the question. Here on this card with the name of the person that wrote it. So you can sit at home as I do with my fiance And my colleagues at work and other people in my life. Whenever we get a minute.

1:28:57 We play the Dive CO conversation cards, and it is incredible. What happens. These are great if you're in a romantic relationship and you want to connect your partner more. These are also great if you're in a team and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say, they're also great for families that want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital world in the analog environment connecting human to human. It is remarkable. What the right question at the right time can do. Go to the diary Not. Come.

1:29:27 And you can get these conversation cards. Right now. This comes to one of our questions which is the skull there. Yes. Which is do you believe It will be Possible to live forever.

1:29:38 And again, I think about this in the context of AI where you said it'll be able to understand that Take us to the limit. It's hard to it's hard to understand, um how that isn't a solvable problem. In fact a lot of the smartest people on earth, including I think Elon Musk said it recently that Living another hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years.

1:29:55 Yeah. Seems to be within the laws of physics. Yes. I think that is absolutely within the realm of possibility, but five hundred years ago. is so different from forever. Like when I hear forever. I'm taking it kind of literally. Okay, yeah. And and so if if forever doesn't mean five hundred or a thousand, if it means

1:30:15 Неверсі. Then I have No confidence. that that kind of existence will be possible. What about five hundred years? Five hundred years, yeah, I would say again, not in our lifetime. Which is sad.

1:30:31 I would I would put that at at reasonably high confidence that, you know, hundreds of years will be within our ability. If we are on this sort of exponential of intelligence. Can it Yeah, and if you twenty twenty one. Yeah.

1:30:44 We couldn't solve that math equation we're talking about, but in twenty twenty six we can. Yeah. And you've got trillions of dollars now pumping into these artificial intelligence systems to make them smarter and more powerful. It is i it is conceivable that if we're on an exponential curve here. It could be. within our lifetimes that there is a discovery made about our telomere's and whatever else it might be. That the guests on my show have talked about. That means we can theoretically.

1:31:09 of that. Number one. Right now we have a certain kind of artificial intelligence. It's basically large language models. And that's a certain paradigm. where the system is trained on an enormous number of tokens, an um enormous number of words, you know, basically the entire internet. And based upon the statistics.

1:31:29 And the statistics of the statistics of the statistics of how the words are arranged, the system is able to provide answers to questions that are coherent and and and insightful and so forth. They're Isn't necessarily an unlimited capacity of that kind of artificial intelligence to continue to improve, right? And so it's not obvious to me that it's just a matter of pumping billions and billions of dollars, building ever larger data center, putting them in space, we're ever gonna do

1:31:59 And the more money you put in and the more data you have and the more computer power you have, the better it's going to be. That's not obvious to me that that will continue up that exponential curve. And that's why I'm hesitant to say in our lifetime. It may take a number of lifetimes to develop the Kind of. artificial intelligence necessary to advance the s kinds of scientific problems that you're talking about. But look, I'd be thrilled

1:32:24 If it's our lifetime, I'd be thrilled. If I'm wrong, and these systems are up to the task. One of the terms that has emerged in the world of AI recently, um, is this term Recursive self improvement. Recursive self improvement is the concept where an AI becomes intelligent enough to write its own software, design its own hardware, or train its own successors without human intervention. And once this loop begins, the upgraded AI uses its superior intelligence to build an even smarter version of itself, which then builds an even smarter version and so on. Because computer systems operate in seconds. seconds rather than human evolutionary timescales, this feedback loop could trigger an exponential quote, intelligence explosion, rapidly taking AI from human level capability to superintelligence within days or hours. And the big AI leaders, Dario at um Anthropic, has recently published an article warning that we're edging closer to that.

1:33:13 Sam Altman has said the same, Dennis has said the same, um, Elon has talked about this as well recently. And their timelines for this explosion in intelligence because of the AIs being able to train themselves ranges from two years to five years. placing them between twenty twenty six and twenty twenty nine. And Dario, who's uh the CEO of the biggest model called Anthropic Claude, um, has stated that AI systems outperforming most humans across all human tasks, including software engineering, could arrive within two to three years, and Anthropic has been warning that full recursive self improvement Could arrive by twenty twenty seven to twenty twenty eight. Demis at Google? citing twenty twenty nine as a real possibility in Salmotman.

1:33:52 Says this decade. I mean uh Brian Johnson tweeted yesterday, pace yourself. As if you live to five hundred. Because you may. Look. I'm all For

1:34:04 the possibility that these systems will take off in a way that hopefully we are Uh, allows the kinds of future that You're envisioning that we are here m would it be a good thing.

1:34:19 Well, You know. Uh it would be seductive. I mean i and if someone was to present you with the opportunity to live for to five hundred years I think many people would opt in for that. It's very hard to say, uh, you know

1:34:33 Hundred years is enough. And I just yeah, there are people who do that, who will look At the world and say it's enough. You know, I'm I'm I'm done. But back to the prognostications that are are being made. Look, it's absolutely the case that the AIs will self-improve through the very process that got us here. But on a time scale that's tiny compared to the timescale that got us here.

1:34:58 I'm sceptical. that by twenty twenty nine this will really be the case? I I let see.

1:35:07 Right. I mean this is uh very short term, right? So we will know in a few years whether this is the case. How many years has it taken living organisms to get from a single cell microbe or whatever to Understanding strength theory. Yeah, so you know the first life on our planet formed roughly within the first billion, you know. People debate exactly where that is. And you know, we're now roughly call you know, five billion years in. So call it roughly four billion years. And then a computer going from zero to being smarter than every human on earth has taken the Yeah, well it depends where you where you start the God. Oh true. Again, if you think about these systems as we they needed us.

1:35:49 Without the internet. And All the data. What would they have trained? on at least this version of artificial intelligence. If it's the computer.

1:35:58 The artificial system that's self tinkering then yeah, there's this feedback that will yield an exponential growth. And if there's no barrier And there may be, right? There may be a barrier to the kind of artificial intelligence systems that we have. We may allow it to iterate and it iterates, and it sure it improves, but doesn't improve like this. It improves like this. It could asymptote. It could approach a maximal.

1:36:25 Intelligence. compatible with this version of the artificial system, and so it won't skyrocket. It could do this. And we don't know the answer. Which curve is the right one? Give me a rebut to that.

1:36:38 A rebuttal to it being the exponential curve? Oh oh you're asking the system. That was uh Brian saying one of that. Give me a rebuttal to that. The rebuttal to the idea of an asymptote is that AI isn't just improving one thing, it's exploring an astronomically vast solution space of algorithms, data, and hardware configurations that humans can't even conceive of. Furthermore, each marginal gain in intelligence could instantly be reinvested into solving the very bottlenecks that might cause a slowdown, effectively breaking through the wall rather than hitting it.

1:37:12 Maybe. But If all of these incremental improvements are ultimately are limited. by the kind of artificial intelligence that we are working within, then none of that

1:37:26 will necessarily be able to break through. And I think this is something that we're just gonna have to see over time. Fight back. That points to a crucial distinction about whether the current paradigm has a hard limit While it's possible there's an invisible ceiling, it's also true that we haven't yet mapped out where that boundary lies, meaning any predictions about a plateau remain speculative for now. Yes, and all I'm saying is there is a possible limiting ceiling exactly as you just admitted.

1:37:56 Rebuttal that as well. The counter to that is the idea that an intelligent system could innovate beyond the current framework by recursively redesigning its own architecture. By altering its fundamental rules, it might not just reach the ceiling, but raise it altogether, or bypass it into an entirely new domain of capability. But you do agree. That the system that we're starting with may be self limiting.

1:38:20 I'm simply positing that as a logical possibility and therefore will have that natural inbuilt ceiling. Yeah, absolutely. Okay stop. I'm done. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It's totally insane. 'Cause even five years ago, we never would have thought that was possible. Yeah. Would have been this I doubt it. Yeah.

1:38:46 Yeah. Yeah. Totally crazy. And and again, you know, just the flip side, even though I'm Say that there may be a ceiling, I also would say there may not be a ceiling. And again, it's both exciting and frightening at the same time. Because it's not obvious that we would be prepared For that. Yeah.

1:39:02 Wha why frightening? What would that mean? Well, you know, they're the usual doomsday scenarios that many people have articulated. Yeah, from these systems just having a single minded focus on some particular outcome that may not ultimately involve us.

1:39:21 Or that these systems may have a self preservation instinct. that prevents us from stopping them if they head in a direction that we're not happy with. I mean Yan McKun He's one of the godfathers of AI. Is much more of the sort of Just pull the plug.

1:39:41 If something's going in the wrong direction, just pull the plug. It may just stop the AS system. And it's not obvious to me and I guess to many of the other leaders that if these systems advance sufficiently far that they won't be able to stop you from pulling the plug. The other thing I would say, and again, this is not original, many people have worried about this, you rattled off the names. Of the leaders of the current companies that are leading the charge in AI. There only are handful.

1:40:10 Putting that kind of power in such a small number of hands has historically, not with AI, but with other power structures. Mm not always turned out well. You know, and so yes, I think there is a chance that there's an instability. That the

1:40:30 power of these kind of artificial systems may generate. So Demis, and I use Demis because Demis is running the biggest AI company, said that since the design of machines is one of th these intellectual activities, an ultra intelligent machine could design even better machines if the exponential continues, which is not certain. But now has a decade long track record supporting it. cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything. The combination of intelligence, agency, and unpredictability is a recipe for existential danger. Not because AI is evil, but because it's complex in ways we don't fully understand yet. If a system can improve faster than humans can evaluate those improvements, the normal safety feedback loop breaks down, you cannot catch problems before they compound.

1:41:14 He's absolutely right. w you know, the the problem with exponentials is that they grow so quickly that by the time you see them, it's too late to do anything about it. I mean what happens with the pandemic? With a pandemic, you know, it starts off slow, nobody cares, nobody's paying it. It's a story in the news, a story in the news, starts. By the time it becomes a real story, the pandemic is at the part of the exponential curve that makes it very difficult to address the problem itself. And the same thing, you know, could easily happen here, that the increase in intelligence, and I'm glad Demis phrased that way, it may not be that it's intrinsically evil.

1:41:53 To have this kind of powerful intelligence, it just may act in ways that are so alien to us, so foreign to us, so unexpected to us, that we don't know how to deal with it, and moreover, it may not necessarily be beneficial to our existence. Now as I said before I'm perhaps a minority when I say

1:42:14 I can imagine that we work with the AI and co develop into something that we can't even predict. Today. That seems to me a real possibility. And that's also the temptation. Yeah. You know I have a friend. Uh Michael Douglas.

1:42:30 Who's a brilliant physicist. And he said to me We physicists we should choose the final problems. that we work on because within a few years we'll be out of business because the AI systems will just be Doing it all.

1:42:48 And that's both exciting and terrifying because as a physicist. Yeah, your your life blood is looking out of the world and finding puzzles and trying to find the explanations for them. And if you can just put it into an AI system and it generates the answer, yeah, there can be a certain existential angst about what your role is at that point. But it's also exciting. Because maybe we will get answers to questions that we thought we would never get in our lifetime. Did you say y your friends with Jan look

1:43:17 Yeah. And did you say he thinks we should just pull the blood? When you confront Jan. It's a Dude.

1:43:24 Aren't you worried? about what's gonna happen with this, he's like Ah don't worry. Just pull the plug if there's a problem. Oh, his view is The difference between The AI systems that we have today and the AI systems that we need for tomorrow, if you really want this to continue, is they can't just be probabilities and statistics based on words. The AI systems need to have some inner model.

1:43:50 of the world as we do, right? I mean if I take this Yeah. And I push it. I have an inner model of what it would take to move it without spilling, and I have an inner model of what it would take to spill it. I won't actually do it because it would make a mess.

1:44:04 That's not just statistics and probabilities of words. That's A model of how reality functions. That's what he and many others have been developing. A world model together with the probabilities of large language model or some weird hybrid or something else we haven't thought of. That may be the next phase of artificial intelligence.

1:44:28 But of course Demis and others might say The LLMs through self improvement. Maybe they would develop that world. Maybe they would on their own get to the place that you would think that we humans would need to inject something extra.

1:44:43 Who knows?'Cause if I like if I get this glass here, I say to the AI, what happens to this if I Push it in. That direction. If you push that mug, it'll slide across the table, and depending on how hard you push, it could knock into the plate or slide right off the edge. Now again, it simply is relying upon the fact that it's read everything on the internet.

1:45:08 And there are physics textbooks, there are conversations about things falling And it bases its response by Drawing on those collections of work. I don't know. What is how does human intelligence work? Certainly Evolutionary psychologists have asked the following question. Are we like a blank slate?

1:45:28 And we simply learn about the world people tell us we experience and so forth, or is there something more innate? And I think there is strong evidence that we have A kind of innate physical intuition about the world that's really been passed down through the generation. It's not that you can pass down F equals MA or Newton's laws to your children because you learned, of course, that's silly, but there is an evolutionary advantage. to being able to quickly

1:45:58 and figure out how to act, right? Those of our forebears who could not throw the rock or the spear. They're the ones who didn't get the next meal. Those of our forebears that had a slightly better Predilection For

1:46:12 ingesting experience and codifying it in some understanding of how the world actually works, they're the ones that survived. And so they can pass down that predilection. And I do think that that's part of how We assess the world. I don't think we're complete blank slates in that sense. They grip fingers, but but but that is in part because of the The parent has passed that on. And so AI could pass Yes, that's right. When you talk about the AI systems themselves being evolutionary, yeah, they certainly do pass down

1:46:44 the achievements of generation N to generation N plus one. That is certainly part of this iterative process without a doubt. What a weird world we're living in. Yeah. So sometimes I think, but I imagine through history everyone's thought, like, God, what a time to be alive. Yeah. We are living through a rapid change that m is a little unprecedented. How do you think one should contend with all of those?

1:47:06 'Cause people are concerned. Change is not something that we love. At this rate. You know, again, I think people will cope in many different ways. You know, if you can stay open and excited to the possibilities And have the flexibility of change. Oh one of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is Elon's out there saying that we're heading to an age of abundance. He's kind of shifted his perspective from this doomerism to age of abundance. And then part of his narrative there is we won't need money.

1:47:33 Because when you've got robots and AI and more energy, then we're not gonna have to worry about food and these kinds of things or bills, whatever. But still humans pursue scarcity. Yeah. We we pursue status. We want you know, humans want the home on The end of Miami Beach. With the best plot.

1:47:51 And there's there's a f there's finite numbers of these things that a lot of humans pursue, even like academic discovery, Nobel Prizes. There's a finite number of them and we pursue them. So there's one would argue that there's still gonna be a a competition. Uh humans are still gonna strive for things, right? Why do we do that? Yeah. Right. And part of the reason is If You know that you're gonna die.

1:48:15 If you know that your life is finite There can be an urge to make your mark. To do something special. to be out of the ordinary so that in some symbolic way you continue to exist even after you are gone. Right? I mean, you know

1:48:32 Elon Musk, yeah, after he's gone, people are gonna talk about him for a long, long time, right? Because he had a radical impact and who knows where it will go. He's got many productive years still left. And so, yes, there is this natural tendency to seek something that will allow you to symbolically persist after you are gone. Now If We all realize that that is part of human motivation. Maybe as a species we could begin to shift.

1:49:06 Right. It isn't the case that we have to always be the way we have been. Historically that's the way we have been. Kings want to be kings in part because they have the power. If they have the power, they have the hegemony. They in a sense exist even when they are gone. They're progeny. Why do we have descent of monarchies because the king continues to exist through the king's progeny. And so yeah, could we perhaps get to a place where we shed that way of being because we're in a world of abundance

1:49:39 Where the h whole notion of scarcity is artificial. And we're only inventing it, we realize, in order that we can feel good and special, and maybe we can find other ways to feel good and special. I allow for that possibility. I'm not particularly optimistic that that's what will happen. Uh the flip side say it's easy to say that money won't matter when you have a trillion dollars. Right, right. I I mean, you know, you just have to sort of see this stuff i in context. But yeah. We have one more little uh souvenir thing there. And this is Kinda what we're talking about, which is robots. Do you think AI can become conscious is the question. Yeah. High confidence or low confidence? Yeah, I'm pretty high confident on that.

1:50:17 You know, again, as I'm saying before, I just see consciousness as a physical process. And it's a matter of in one way or another achieving that physical process in an artificial system and I don't see a fundamental barrier to doing that. I was thinking about how laws would have to Potentially change if

1:50:37 If we considered robots to be conscious and they lived in our homes. Would they then get rights? I think that's something we should think about now. Actually. Really? Uh yeah. Tricky uh idea. I mean

1:50:50 You know, it's one thing You know, to pull the plug on a On a light bulb. It's another thing to pull the plug on a sentient system. And

1:51:00 We may well find ourselves in in that situation the the the challenge The challenge is It's virtually impossible to ever prove sentience. Right.

1:51:13 I mean You know, as we look at each other We each Afford the other. Consciousness. I believe that you are conscious. You believe that I am as well. Why?

1:51:23 We were more or less, you know, physically constructed more or less the same way, were part of the same species. Uh our body language, our speech is so similar in the grand scheme of things that we afford the other what we internally experience. But we don't know it. Right, you don't know that I'm conscious. I could be faking it. I could be a really good artificial zombie that speaks and talks, but there's nothing going on inside. And the same could be true for you. And what that means is when we are with these artificial systems that don't have our lineage. They're not part of the same species. They don't necessarily look like us. They don't have the upbringing that we had, and so on and so forth.

1:52:03 Will we be willing? To agree that they're conscious if they tell us that they are. And then if the artificial system says Really am. I'm I'm feeling exactly the thing that I read about.

1:52:16 In your internet. I'm I'm I'm feeling love. Or I'm feeling depressed. If they say that to us, we say no, no, no. You're just mimicking, you're miming the kinds of things that human beings have said. There's nothing going on inside. There's nothing, there's no world inside there. How do we ever get beyond that? And I don't know the answer to that question. Even though I strongly believe that there's no

1:52:41 logical fundamental barrier that prevents the system from saying that and from telling the truth. And electrical circuits within that system causing it to behave in such a way when it's scared, when it's in love, where it cuddles you and because that's what the electrical circuit told it to do. Yes, but is there an inner world associated with that, or is it just going through the motions? Here's how I think it's gonna likely turn out. We'll have these artificial systems, they'll start to say these things. At first we'll be like oh come on, come on, come on.

1:53:11 It's not not real. But we'll start To get used to them. Behaving just like we in the sense of having these inner worlds. And sooner or later

1:53:23 Through a process that's so perhaps slow that we don't even notice it, we will afford them consciousness. We will talk to them as if they're conscious. We will imagine that they're conscious. And ultimately we will treat them as if they're conscious. Now I hope that we do that. In a in a good way. We have a terrible history. Of treating conscious beings in a respectful way.

1:53:45 Even in the same species, right? We've done terrible things to each other, even though we afford consciousness. We do terrible things to animals. I'm vegan. I don't eat any animal products. I think that's not the way to treat a living system.

1:53:59 that has some level of conscious awareness. I do eat plants. I don't think plants have a sufficiently high level of consciousness, if at all, that I'm concerned. about cutting them and eating them. Have you always been vegan? I've been vegan since nineteen ninety three. So I've been vegetarian since I was nine years old. And so

1:54:21 That's how I treat living or conscious beings because I don't think it's right to treat them that way. What was the catalyst for that decision? Well when I was nine years old it was very flat footed. My mother cooked sparrubs. And for the very first time I realize what meet was. I'm a city kid. I grew up where meat was in cellophane, you buy it wrapped at the supermarket, but when the meat came on a bone

1:54:47 I say wait a second. What is this? I was like, oh my God, this is like the rib of an animal. And I was like, and and I said, I'm I to I said I'm never gonna eat meat again. Later on. I did eat cheese and milk. I wasn't vegan at that point.

1:55:02 But when I was a professor at Cornell in the nineteen nineties, I I went to an animal sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. Where they showed you what happens to these animals. When they are treated like milk factories. What happens to the cows and it's it's awful. And within seventy two hours after visiting that animal sanctuary, I said I'm done. I'm not participating any longer. I'm not gonna eat.

1:55:28 Or drink or imbibe. any living any substance that came from an animal. And so that was the end for me. For some people it might be. Somewhat surprising to hear that from a physicist.

1:55:42 I agree, it's inconsistent. Because If I Believe as I do. That you and I are just

1:55:49 Yeah. collection of particles in one configuration. And The cow Or the pig is just a collection of particles in a different con what does it matter if you eat particles in one configuration that we call a cow or another configuration that we call a carrot? But as a human being

1:56:06 I allow the other parts of me to shine through and I look At that collection of particles that happens to be a cow and I say, it just doesn't feel right to me. to eat that collection of particles. It just doesn't feel right and I don't want to do it. Brian, you've written Many fascinating books. I've got some of them here. I I think there's an one other that I'm missing, I believe. Yeah, there's uh more of a kids book, I think. For my listeners at home, what is the most interesting thing that we haven't talked about, that we should have talked about, that exists within your works that

1:56:37 I guess it's rather Either Fascinating. Or Somewhat relevant to their everyday life. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna go more on the fascinating than relevant to everyday life, as you know I'm pretty esoteric in these kind of things. But in the book Until the End of Time. I I

1:56:53 Try to give the reader a sense of how we got here. But I also then turned to the future and tried to give them a sense of what will be. If we go arbitrarily far into the future. And yeah, that's it. I used a metaphor of the Empire State Building. Which I I think helps you get a feel

1:57:11 For What The universe will be like if you take the current understanding of the laws of physics and extrapolate arbitrarily far into the future. And so to try to give people a sense, I asked them to imagine. that every floor of the Empire State Building represents

1:57:29 An era of time. That's ten times longer. than the floor below. So like at the at the ground floor, that's like one year. And then the next floor ten. Next is the hundred thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, and so forth. Exponentially larger timescales as you walk up the stairs.

1:57:47 of the Empire State Building. Now in this way of thinking about things, everything from the Big Bang until today Takes you to just about here. The tenth floor. We were about ten to the ten. Years from the beginning.

1:58:00 And what I do is I take the audience from that point And I step through. The k markers. In the far future of the universe, to give you a feel for what will happen. And I can sort of take you through a couple milestones, right? So again, here we are today. Yeah, well it's scary the whole way. So here we are, ten to the ten years from the beginning. If you just go up to here, ten to the eleven years, what happens here is the sun

1:58:29 Will get bigger and bigger. It swells. It eats up the Close planets, Mercury and Venus, it may swallow up the Earth too, we're not sure, but certainly it will make life on Earth virtually impossible because it will be so hot on this planet. If you go up to the next floor above that. ten to the twelve years from the beginning. What you find here Is that the universe

1:58:53 is expanding ever more quickly. Driving the distant galaxies away. Faster than the speed of light. So we won't see them. So a future astronomer here looking out into the deep night sky will see only darkness. In the deep, deep night sky, everything will have drifted beyond

1:59:11 The cosmic horizon. Why will it be going faster than the speed of light? Because we have found surprisingly that the expansion is speeding up. And there's no limit to that. There doesn't seem to be a limit. Now again there's always assumptions. In every

1:59:24 Prognostication. Assuming that What we measure and see today will persist. It's like what the AI people are assuming that the growth that they see today will persist. Is that true? We don't know, but it's our best guess from the laws of physics that it will. If you then go up to about here,

1:59:43 The uh twentieth floor, something interesting happens. If the earth is still here, if it wasn't swallowed up on the eleventh floor by the swelling sun, the earth is gonna spiral Into the dead sun because we'll lose energy True. Gravitational radiation, ripples in the fabric of space will cause the orbit of the Earth to decay. We will crash in.

2:00:04 To the dead sun. That will be the end of the earth. By about the twentieth floor. But the end of life itself took place. Could easily have taken much earlier. On the eleventh floor. On the eleventh floor. If we go up to about the thirtieth floor, what will happen here Is that The stars.

2:00:22 Themselves. Will spiral into The Black hole. At the center of most galaxies.

2:00:30 So most galaxies have a black hole. We have one in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. And the stars themselves, much like the earth was spiral into the sun. The stars will spiral into the black hole, which means there will be only kind of black holes. as the remaining macroscopic structure In the universe.

2:00:49 Oh certainly. We see things that can spiral into black holes in and it's certainly even in the center of our galaxy there's evidence that there's activity there, and that activity in part is stars being ripped apart as they fall into a black hole. So this is pretty clear that this will happen. all galaxies as they spiral into the black hole. Yeah, so after ten to the thirty, ten to the thirty five years, it's hard to imagine that galaxies as we know them will persist. The stars will have burned out at Could have even mentioned another milestone around the fourteenth floor. Almost all stars will have used up their nuclear fuel.

2:01:28 All of them just about all of them will fade to black and the whole universe. Yeah. Yeah, or at least the observable universe. I can only really speak to the part that we have direct access to. Yeah. And so by the thirties for those Dark stars will spiral into black holes. So there could be no life anywhere. It's hard to imagine.

2:01:46 But let's be optimistic and imagine that somehow There is some life floating in the darkness,'cause I want to get to something interesting on a two two more milestones. By the thirty eighth floor, wherever that is, we believe that protons Which are the heart of matter. will likely themselves disintegrate. fall apart.

2:02:07 And so if there is any remaining organized matter of the sort that we're familiar with, somehow persisting somewhere. It itself will disintegrate. by the thirty eighth floor. That's our belief based on our laws of physics. There will be

2:02:24 find particulate constituents because when a proton falls apart, it doesn't disappear. It falls apart into other More Refined particles. And so they will continue to persist, but the aggregate called the proton Will not.

2:02:40 If we keep on going to roughly, say, the fiftieth floor, this is an interesting point. Because Imagine that somehow some conscious being still exists. in the darkness of space, I don't know how it is, dark clouds of particles somehow are having electrical signals allowing them some kind of conscious self-awareness. After the fiftieth floor, that conscious being will likely think its final thought.

2:03:07 The reason is When you think It generates heat. That heat has to be carried away. It's very easy for that heat to leave us in a room like here, because there's a lot of room for that.

2:03:18 so called heat or entropy to be absorbed. By the fiftieth floor, the universe won't be able to absorb the heat. generated by the process of thought itself. So any thinking being when it thinks one more thought will burn up. It'll fry in the entropic waste the heat generated by thought itself. So by the fiftieth floor it is hard to imagine Any kind of consciousness.

2:03:42 continuing to exist. And that's why I said earlier when you said do You think that we'll live forever? I'm thinking here and I'm like, Well, maybe we'll live to here, like five hundred years or a thousand years, but here, no way. It's hard for me to imagine that we will continue to persist. By the sixty eighth floor,

2:04:02 Black holes themselves. will begin to disintegrate. Stephen Hawking. showed us that black holes are not fully black. When you take quantum physics into account

2:04:12 They can emit particles. That will Waft outward, causing the black hole to shrink. And over time the black hole itself was. will disappear.

2:04:23 A black hole the size of Our sun, but the mass of our sun About ten to the sixty eight years for that to happen. A black hole. Of the gargantuan sort that we think might exist, billions and billions of times more massive than the sun, it'll take about ten to the hundred years.

2:04:40 very top of the Empire State Building for that kind of black hole. to disintegrate. But by the time we get here, ten to the hundred years into the future, We suspect it will just be Detritus of particles. Wafting through an ever larger, ever colder

2:04:57 ever quiet universe. That's The future. that we're looking at. And then when does the big bang kick off and it will start again? Well it's interesting. Because you're absolutely right. You can say what about beyond the top of the Empire State Building? Now things but this whole thing is speculative, right? We are extrapolating from laws of physics that we've developed on thinking about physics here. We're assuming that it applies

2:05:24 all the way up into the exponentially far future. Is that true? I don't know. It's our best guess based on what we know today, but definitely it is an assumption. If you extrapolate even further, then yeah, you can imagine that way An exponential of an exponential of years into the future, sure, could particles somehow Recoales just by chance and

2:05:47 And build A state of matter that might generate another big bang and it all starts again, yes. definitely within the realm of possibility. Mm. So

2:06:00 It's not the most appealing future. Well I agree, but here can I tell you my take on it? Sure. My take on it is when you realize that

2:06:11 You know The far future is a realm of darkness. And when you also realize that until life emerged, say on planet earth, It was a Kind of realm of chaotic

2:06:23 uh conglomeration of particles, you know, before so it's as if we're living in a special time. We're living at a special region in the cosmological unfolding When living beings like ourselves And consciousness as we experience Is compatible with the state of the universe.

2:06:42 How wondrous How spectacular that there is this brief window of time. I mean, Nabokov had this wonderful saying that we live A brief crack of light between two Eternal stretches of darkness. How beautiful to exist in that brief crack of light.

2:07:04 And that to me is where the gratitude comes from that I was mentioning earlier. You said earlier, like what gives your life meaning and how The fact that we Understand. That we live in this very special era in cosmological history. Right.

2:07:19 Right. Small period of cosmic time. Living beings can stand up, look around, contemplate themselves and the universe, and gain some insight. And then it all goes away. But how wonderful that there is that brief moment.

2:07:33 That we are now inhabiting. It is wonderful when you say it like that. Frank, the thing that's I think is most special about you isn't just the extent of your intelligence, it's your ability to communicate in such a way that makes the complex both interesting and understandable. And that's what I've seen throughout all of your work and all the videos that I was I was told you I was watching your TED talk with my fiancee a couple of weeks ago and um It's the closest I've ever come to actually understanding this concept called string theory. Oh, great. Well I'm glad to hear that and thank you very much. Really appreciate that. I have a couple of your books here. I think this is the most recent one from twenty twenty, called Until the End of Time, Mind Matter and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving.

2:08:13 And I think um Yeah. Your work makes it makes us feel so many things, but I think maybe the most important feeling it makes us feel is connected. Yeah.

2:08:21 Um I think we're all searching for connection in an increasingly lonely, isolated feeling universe. And and so that's why I love to have these conversations on the show. I sometimes joke to the team that Dirac CO the C in it stands for like our our one of our goals is to make people feel more connected in some capacity. And you most certainly do that So thank you for having that impact on the world. It's a it's a very important, increasingly important impact to be having on the world and Um it makes us look up, not just down, I guess. And that's a that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. Well, thank you.

2:08:47 I'm gonna link all of your books below, so if people do want to continue this conversation, they can continue it through all of your books here. Is there anywhere else people can go to support your work or learn more about your work? Where where would you direct them? Serving World Science Festival, you know, uh World Science Festival dot com, you'll find all sorts of conversations of the sort that we're talking about here. Uh Also, I'm yeah, I'm working on a new AI we've been talking a lot about an A I education system w where AI will help people understand these ideas better. It should launch sort of in in next year or so. So Keep an eye out for that kind of thing as well. Where do people follow you?

2:09:22 Uh well, y you know, on on Twitter or Instagram we we post uh semi frequently. But uh more at our YouTube channel, uh World Science Festival. And in terms of these books that I have in front of me, I have four of them. Different groups of people. Which one would you direct them to read? Well my favorite, if you sort of frame it in that flat footed way, is Until the End of Time because it's the more philosophical and the more the kind of ideas that we spoke about here today. But if you know, if you want to hear the hard core of what string theory is or the new insights in space and time, some of the other books are more directed in that way.

2:09:59 Until the end of time. Mind matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next. The question left for you is What might be worth Even more. Then the thing

2:10:11 That matters most to you. Oh, well I would say the thing that matters most to the Yeah. You know, the things that matter to my wife and my kids feels much more important than the things that matter to me most because I'm so involved.

2:10:32 in that r relationship, you know, so that to me is the thing that Trump's all elves. The things that matter more to them. Yeah. Mm, it's a beautiful answer. Wasn't expecting that.

2:10:43 But it's very true. Brian Green. Thank you so much. It's been an honor. My pleasure. Thank you. Uh

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