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[Applause] I'm very excited to introduce my friend
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and colleague and scientific collaborator Brian Greene brian is a
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professor of mathematics and physics and the director of Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Physics and brian
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has made incredibly important contributions to string theory which we'll talk about
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he has many New York Times bestselling books including the elegant universe
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fabric of the cosmos and the hidden reality and now the book we're here to celebrate until the end of time so
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please join me in welcoming Brian Greene
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Brian I often complain that we don't get enough of a chance to talk so I've seen
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you in like three or four years it's great it's ridiculous so we're gonna pretend nobody else is
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here and we're just gonna have like our own little private communion so I do
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want to discuss to begin and I am gonna speak on behalf of the audience for a
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second because I would be remiss not to ask you about your contributions to string theory but string theory in
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general so one of the things I love about what you did with string theory is that your discoveries were unanticipated
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and that's that's like the mark of some creative moment when you make an
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unanticipated discovery and and so in the field in physics you're very known
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for that accomplishment but also in the world for having being a spokesperson
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for this this this model of the world and so I need to ask you on behalf of
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everyone else for a Lightning primer on string theory Oh string theory my goodness so Albert
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Einstein way back in the 1920s 30s 40s 50s dreamed of finding what it called a
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unified theory of physics which would be a single mathematical equation a single
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mathematical sentence if you will that would be able to put together all of nature's forces
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and all matter into a single tight package that would allow us to
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understand the workings of the universe from a very basic starting point and he
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sought this unified theory til the very end there's a famous story that he was
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on his deathbed in Princeton New Jersey in 1955 and was still scribbling
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equations at the very end in the hope that he'd complete the unified theory and he didn't and string theory is our
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hope that we may have it and in a nutshell the new idea is simply that
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instead of the fundamental constituents being little dot particles as we have long thought of them the electrons the
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quarks and neutrinos little tiny dots of no structure the new idea is that they're actually little tiny filaments
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of vibrating energy and the different vibrations of the string like entities
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the different notes if you will that it can play correspond to the different particles making up the world so
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everything is united under the rubric if you will of the music that these strings can play that's the basic idea and it's
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absolutely beautiful in that description really conveys to you why it's so important ly unifying it so here you are
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you're thinking about this incredible unifying idea which really is it's mathematically incredibly challenging
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it's totally profound you're basically saying anything anyone has ever seen or
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ever will see or understand or think about or be is asked or played out on
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the harmonics of these fundamental strings and you lift your head up from the page glaring at these stunning
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equations and you look around and you say what's it all about yeah that's like
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unnerving because we're kind of relying on you have all our introduction we've heard what it's all so you know you
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you're you're bringing us all this sense of meaning and import and in all of your
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previous books and your previous work on string theory and then you're like you're like leaving us on the precipice and you're lifting your head up and
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you're telling us you don't know what it's all about so did you have like an existential crisis what happened you know I think we all should have an
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existential crises sort of all the time I think it's good for the soul but the the motivation for this book was not
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really to say I don't know what the answer is even though I don't really know what the
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answer is but it was to give a certain perspective on the journey toward an
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answer and the perspective I take in this book is one that has gotten a bad
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rap I would say over many decades it's a highly reductionist view of the
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world but at the same time injecting the part of the reductionist program that
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often physicists give short shrift which is the synthesis you need to know what
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things are made of you need to know what the fundamental laws are you need to know the ingredients and how they operate interact and so on but to tell a
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full story you have to understand how the ingredients come together to build the structures of the world be those
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molecules or cells or living beings there's conscious self reflective beings and when you see all of those stories
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nested together in one narrative arc to me it gives a deeper understanding of
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where we came from and what's happening at the moment and ultimately where we're
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going and I think that's vital to the search for trying to understand why it
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is that we're here at all so it very much feels like that it very much feels like a rationalists search
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for meaning and you discuss the sort of many scales of meaning and and having
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sought meaning in physics found it but not found all of it not found all the
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ways in which to understand it what kind of march through some of the things that you describe but there's something else which is kind of the provocation of
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death that you talk about yeah and you write so beautifully you have a line and I'm gonna see if I can render it
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correctly you say and the ledger of birth and death with entries more numerous than stars in the galaxy will
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balance with dispassionate precision in other words we live we die and that will
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always balance and that is such a it's such a beautiful line but the also
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intellectually the motivation of that does that spark some creative motivation
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yeah well I mean I can give my own personal journey toward that perspective
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which is you know way back I guess it must be in the 1980s I encountered a
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book that had a profound impact on me it was a book called the denial of death by Ernest Becker I mean how many people
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have are familiar with that book - yeah one or two yeah it was fantastic
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it's amazing how books that are so well known in one ERA can just sort of
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disappear as you go forward but what Becker was doing was basically channeling the ideas of otto ronk who is
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a early Freud in broke with Freud at some point who as Becker articulated had
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this view that the real motivating force behind us human beings is actually the
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recognition that we are mortal and we really are as far as we can tell the unique species on the planet
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that recognizes that we have these finite life spans and the question is
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what does that do to us and Becker's argument which has now been carefully
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furthered by a whole group of social psychologists is that we try to deny the
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possibility that we can be fully erased from the world we try to leave some kind of legacy it can be a real legacies
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right we we build monuments we build pyramids but it can also be a symbolic legacy where we create creative work or
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we have a family I mean there are many ways in which we feel that we can integrate our existence in a manner that
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will not be wiped out when we are gone and the thing that struck me about that
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idea as I was studying physics alongside of it is the more you study physics you realize that there is a recapitulation
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of the death of the human being at the level of the universe the universe itself had a beginning it has aged it
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matures and if you follow laws of physics in the manner for instance that I described in some detail toward the end of the book there is strong reason
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to believe that there is a sense in which the universe itself will die and so this interplay between the death of
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the universe is described by physics and the death of the individual well known to all of us to me felt like a very fertile place to
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explore yeah you very much open the book and mirror it in the end which is as
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though you're not satisfied with the sense of dread that every human being
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has that is aware of their own death you want to make sure that you're like hanging us off the glass with this
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hollow sense of dread that it will all be gone like the end of everything in
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time and so what the hell's going to want to read this book you know so there's a turn that happens in the now
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that may be worth discussing which is I am quite upbeat about the death of the
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universe look I mean you know we were talking about longevity but there has to
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be an end to life itself I mean nobody wants to live forever I mean there's one of these novels where where the
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character at the end says you know is in heaven for if for ages and says well is
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there an alternative to all this bliss and the joy and the golfing and everything I want and they're like yeah you know this like right over and he
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says does anyone ever take that path and I think it's the angel says everyone yeah right you know there are so many
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works that have explored the possibility of immortality and in the vast majority
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of them it does not turn out very well so it's a it's a deep human wish and
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desire but at the same time when you think it through in some detail it's unclear that it yields the return that
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we can envision but but the point that that I think is really important to
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stress and it's one that I develop as you know from reading the book is that when you recognize that we are the
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product of purposeless mindless laws of physics playing themselves out on our
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particles because we are all bags of particles and think as I mentioned this
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is a line that came out in a Stephen Colbert interview on The Late Show and he shot back immediately that is a great pickup line and it is I
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should tell you feel free to use it at any time but but when you realize that that's all that we are it changes
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the way you search for meaning and purpose you recognize that looking out to the
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cosmos to find some answer that sort of floating out there in the void is just
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facing the wrong direction in the end of the day we have to manufacture our own
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meaning our own purpose we have to manufacture coherence which is what we do as physicist and what artists and
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everybody else in the world does in their everyday lives to try to make sense of existence and when you
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manufacture purpose that doesn't make it artificial that makes it so much more
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noble than accepting purpose that is thrust upon you from the outer world so
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in the end the final story that you're led to from this kind of journey I think is one that is and no bling not one that
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leads you to the darkness and you feel this so much in this journey and so I
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would like everyone just to have the opportunity to kind of start where you start in the book and and how you get to
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this very optimistic telling of you know in some sense the story of our lives
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and you begin with these very austere principles these forces that basically
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carve reality out of the space of possibilities which are dual entropy and
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evolution so let's let's talk about the person because their evolution is a little more familiar to people entropy
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everyone's heard of and uses but is a difficult concept or one destroys one
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builds and does that work together so so the rough description is the one that you describe I think many of us use the
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phrase entropy in everyday life as a description of going from good to bad
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you know order to chaos you know the degradation of structure
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that's the feeling that the notion of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics which describes the
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relentless increase in entropy across the universe throughout time that's what it brings to mind and that's partly true
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but the point that I stress in the book is one that isn't as emphasized as
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perhaps it should be which is even though the universe is on
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to have ever increasing disorder ever increasing entropy there can be the
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forces of nature in fact ensure that pockets of order can form within the
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overall drive to disorder and the pockets that are most prevalent are stars you might ask yourself how in the
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world could stars form if the universe is heading toward disorder there these orderly beautiful structures in the
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heavens how could they ever come to be and a careful discussion of the force of
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gravity and how it talks to this principle of the increase in entropy allows you to conclude that when a star
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forms yes you get order here but in the process it releases so much disorder to
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the environment that on balance the entropy goes up even though order forms
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in a local region of space and it's something I call the entropic to step to
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give you a sense of it's really an entropic dance where the entropy goes down here the entropy goes up in the
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surrounding environment and that's how it's not totally the destruction of
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structures in the world it's actually building up structures so long as in the
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process they yield enough disorder to balance it all out so our friend Sean
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Carroll has said things like when you make an omelet you're taking an ordered egg and making a disordered omelet
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you're doing cosmology because it's a reflection of the fact that the Big Bang began in an incredibly ordered stage
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that's right and so somehow this idea of the second law of thermodynamics the increase of entropy that that is also
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the era of time that our past is ordered our future is disordered we live with
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this great fortune that our past was ordered yes and we don't know why we don't know why and do you think there's
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going to be a resolution to that question why was the past ordered why will you know why are we so fortunate as
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to be able to do the entropic two-step yeah point you're making is absolutely right if the Big Bang itself is highly
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disordered then there wouldn't have been the opportunity for order to form in the
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future because we'd go from incredible disorder to yet more disorder but we began for some reason that remains
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mysterious in a configuration near the Big Bang that itself had very low entropy a lot
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of order and we have been living through in some sense the degradation of that order through cosmological history so
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the question is can we explain where that ordered first configuration of the
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world came from and I don't know I know I've I've written papers on this I I
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don't believe the papers that I've written on them they they felt right at the time but you know you rethink things
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and it's less convincing and and the and the other thing is it's unclear that it's even a question because you know if
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if the use a one way of framing the issue is this when things are highly
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ordered we often think about them as highly unlikely to have randomly arisen
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right you throw all your stuff on your desktop and it will fall in some
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disordered high entropic State because that's the easy way the simple way for
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the ingredients to fall you would be surprised I think if you threw all your
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junk on your desktop and it just happened to be the case that the pens and pencils all went right into the
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holder the pages just landed all in order you know on your desktop that's
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such an unlikely highly ordered state of affairs that you just don't think it
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could possibly happen without a guiding intelligence so could you have a highly ordered beginning to the universe without a guiding intelligence and the
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supposition in there is that a highly ordered Big Bang is itself unlikely just
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like throwing your junk on the desk and getting an order configuration is unlikely but is it really unlikely if
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the Big Bang happened once then there's kind of a hundred percent certainty that it happened as it did right there is no
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other opportunity it's not although you are throwing darts at a wall and where the dart lands determines what the Big
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Bang was like there is simply an event that took place that had certain properties and maybe you just need to accept it for what it was and move
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forward from there well so I want to ask you this said this to you once at Columbia when we were hanging out and you you looked
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at me like I was crazy so a chicken gives birth to an egg not a
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scrambled egg yeah so why you know we understand that as being an execution of
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certain DNA codes and yes overall the entropy increases of the whole larger system yeah but in that process there
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was a code that was executed it was a very prescriptive and made something very ordered actually why can't we think
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the laws of physics that way that when the universe began there were these laws of physics and it created an ordered egg yeah I I don't I if I looked at you like
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you were crazy indigestion or something you know maybe they're reading more into it than it was
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it could well be that the laws of physics themselves when playing out in a
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cosmological setting guarantee that some first event would be highly ordered you
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know giving birth to the universe like giving birth to the egg the problem I have with turning that into a real full
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explanation is I don't see how that happens in our current configuration of
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the laws of physics they tell us about how things evolve over time but they don't tell us the initial conditions so
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is it the case that we could come up with laws that determine the conditions
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as opposed to laws that tell us how the conditions change and that's the part of the story that that feels okay really
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fun this gonna be like a good DeLeon setting its own initial data like awesome good talk about this later
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but then you bring us from the idea of entropy and evolution and evolution you
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haven't really touched upon but you will I think in this next step which is the
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emergence of life so somehow we get from these austere physical laws or principles at least to life and and
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that's a big leap and life is incredibly ordered right and has to do what you're describing which is this kind of
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entropic to stuff so life is somehow maximized or not if not maximizing exploiting the entropic potential of the
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universe yeah so take us to that step of life yeah well I think many of us certainly it was a case for me when I
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first learned about evolution in high school mrs. Goldberg Stuyvesant High
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School remember it was all in the context of the framework within which Darwin and Wallace really wrote their
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initial ideas down which is understanding the great wealth of species on planet Earth and in that
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setting we all know what they told us right in the descent from parent to
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progeny there's descent with modification and those modifications are such that some of the progeny are worse
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at surviving and those are the ones that will be less likely to reproduce some are better at surviving they're the ones
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that are more likely to reproduce and their first spread that particular mutation widely through the genetic pool
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now of course that version of evolution assumes that life already exists a question is does evolution give us any
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insight perhaps into how life itself may have first gotten started and they're
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our versions of natural selection and evolution which haven't developed over
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the decades which do go further back there is a version called molecular Darwinism and molecular Darwinism is a
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kind of evolution of the universe in which you're starting with atoms and particles and you recognize that once
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those atoms learn a very specific trick once they learned how to replicate make
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copies of themselves that's not all that hard if you have a bunch of atoms that are stuck together in a configuration
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and they're very good at drawing in the very same ingredients out of which they are made they can form the template that
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copies that atomic configuration that molecular configuration yielding copies of itself so once a collection of
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molecules learns how to replicate then you're in an interesting situation because if mutations if some copy is not
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identical to the original and if that copy is even better able to make copies of itself it will draw in more of the
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raw material in the environment and dominate the molecular demographics and if in that replication process you
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get another mutation that's even better replicating it will then take over and indeed you can have molecules coming
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together in even more complicated structures and in that way making copies and holding on to information that
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allows them to not only make copies but direct the creation of copies and so
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this idea a kind of chemical combat that is a molecular version of Darwinian
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natural selection maybe how we go from a bath of particles to collections that
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are ever more ordered ever more complicated ultimately taking us to the molecules necessary for life and you say
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life is physics orchestrated it do you you you do not have any illusions of trying to make some magic step yeah you
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very much are a physicalist and a reductionist in that sense you see life is physics orchestrated but no less magical exactly I mean there was a time
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in the 1800s when scientists didn't have that perspective the view was how can
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you make life out of lifeless particles and the answer was you can't you have to
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inject something else the life force has to be put into these particles but as we
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have studied life with ever greater intensity nobody says that any longer no
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scientists say that any longer the recognition is that the laws of physics and the particles of matter coming
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together in the right configurations that kind of choreography allows life to emerge you don't seem to need anything
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but the ingredients and the laws and these processes that put the particles
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together so you're marching us from this completely austere inanimate world of
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these theoretical principles towards a consciousness where life becomes a
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vehicle of consciousness that can reflect and begin to ask these questions reflect on meaning and so it's really at
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this next step when you you you bring in life as a vehicle for consciousness may begin to think about well is
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consciousness exactly the same way is it absolutely reducible to the orchestration of physical particles and
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their relationship that consciousness emerges and there's magic there and this is of course still a very aggressive ongoing debate
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although there are very few people who say it's anything other than yes I mean I mean there's some of course that do
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say that you need more but you're absolutely right I mean the progression is you have living beings that
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ultimately emerge from these processes some of those living beings acquire some degree of conscious self-awareness
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conscious self-reflection and the very same conundrum that for the browser
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scientists in the 1800's comes to the fore here again because you can just articulate the same question but swap
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out some words how can mindless thoughtless particles come together in a
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configuration that somehow yields the inner sensation of thought feeling emotion how can they possibly generate
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that if they themselves don't have any intrinsic version of those conscious
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qualities from the get-go now some people respond much as those in
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the past did with life they say those particles can't create consciousness on their own there has to be something else
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a consciousness field that we somehow tap into or the particles themselves may
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themselves have a little proto conscious quality so the electron might have
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electric charge and mass and quantum mechanical spin david chalmers idea exactly yeah and in addition to the
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properties of particles that we are familiar with maybe they have a little bit of consciousness and when you put a
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lot of them together you got a lot of consciousness and that's what we are my own feeling and there's no proof to this
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but my own feeling is that we are recapitulating the same story with life and that at some point when we fully
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understand or better understand the brain and mind we will no longer invest
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such mystery in the emergence of consciousness we'll look back at these days and kind of quaintly smile at the
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ideas that were put forward and we will recognize as we do with life that consciousness is nothing but particles
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coursing through a gloppy gray in our particular structure head and within that motion those particles generate the
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conscious sensations that we all experience so there is this very interesting
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transition we can think about with consciousness which sort of helps which is the idea that some distant relative
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in the past first developed before consciousness attention this idea of you
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know maybe there was some worm that needed to decide between the heat or the light or the food and began began to
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develop a map of the external world and this idea I think of simplifying or
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making a map of the world is a very interesting attitude towards consciousness because it since we're kind of over inflating it in some sense
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consciousness might be a consequence of our inability to analyze all the data right that there's just too much data
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coming from the outside we can't possibly do it in terms of the number of the frequencies or the exact
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temperatures but so instead we make an approximate map of the external world and that's probably the first step and the next step is a map of the internal
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world yes exactly so so one person has articulated a view like that as Michel
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Graziano Princeton and he has basically stressed the fact that we look out at
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the world we see patterns and we make models of those patterns in order that we can navigate reality but those models
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are always imprecise incomplete and when we take that same idea and apply it
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internal to understand not only say what's happening inside my head but as I look at you right now I'm kind of trying
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to figure out what's happening inside your head - right like am I going on too long you want me to do something you're
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right and these are important things for us to do as a social species so that we can engage in a manner of mind exactly
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another matters I see right and but my map of your mind as well as my map of my
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own mind is incomplete its imprecise and with that imprecision we lose the full
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link to all of the physical processes responsible for conscious sensation
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which is an explanation perhaps for why it is that it feels like that voice up here is floating untethered is floating
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unmoored in our mind the reason it feels unmoored is because we have this imprecise incomplete map of what's going
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on and we leave out the very ingredients that Woodmoor it that would tether it to physical processes and that
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makes it feel so ethereal that we invest it with qualities that may in fact not
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be justified so if we imagine an incredible ai that it's able to do all
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the computations necessary to understand the room in terms of every single bit of data that reaches it would it need to
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develop consciousness would it need to think and feel and have emotions and yeah well need is an interesting
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question what it at all what are you if it doesn't need to with Darwinian adaptation suggest it wouldn't yes so it
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could simply be the case that when you have this kind of complexity and when
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you have a structure able to undertake the kind of information processing that we are familiar with each and every day
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every scene every moment of our lives and maybe that conscious self-awareness
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emerges as a byproduct of that kind of information processing it may simply be
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the case that it has to be that way that it can't be any other way as this is part and parcel of the same
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system and that really leads us to the very thorny concept of free will
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yeah because it's only with consciousness that you begin to reflect on having choices yeah and and you know
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freewill is a is a bitter bitter debate and not a very popular concept anymore
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and I and I do believe that also you are very skeptical about the existence of free will but not totally about the idea
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of freedom so start us with annihilating free will and then we'll think about how to resuscitate some notion of freedom
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yeah well let's throw them a little buoy after we like drown them well about we throw one one buoy first I'm happy to go
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to freewill I love to talk about that subject but even just unconsciousness again to my mind when you describe
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consciousness in the manner that we have just now I don't think that in any way
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diminishes consciousness some I've had these conversations you know I remember
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having an on stage discussion of this sort a couple years ago and when this discussion of
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consciousness happens someone in the back yelled out you're describing hell you know and it's like and I get it
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because if we're used to thinking of consciousness as this pristine spectacular quality that we are endowed
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with from something magical in the external world to frame it in a reductionist way can feel like you're
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flattening it however I think it's utterly spectacular that the very same
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physical processes that are responsible for this picture of water or the structure of this table is what's
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responsible for conscious self-awareness how miraculous that collections of
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particles can do and think and feel what we do that I think is the conclusion it
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amplifies and elevates the wonder of it all it doesn't take away from it now to
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turn to freewill or if you want to know it's the reductionist defense to say it
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does not take the shine off of the experience ya are still conscious we still feel it it doesn't you don't by
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magically analyzing it this way annihilate the experience of feeling right now when it comes to free will
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though I think we do annihilate it you know so it's holding hands and humming you know and and and the
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argument you know I think is is quite straightforward which is if we buy into
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this version of consciousness we recognize that every decision every
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thing that we thought we were the ultimate author of is in fact at the
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level of particles nothing but those particles coursing through our minds going this way or that resulting in us
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saying either yes or no or going left or right and if the motion of those
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particles is nothing but physics articulated in the language of particles
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if there is no place for us to intercede in the mathematical unfolding and I assure you there's no place in the
33:00
fundamental laws of physics where it says keep on chugging along but when you get to this point
33:05
ask ask the person what they want to do at that point you know that there's simply no place for us to insert
33:11
ourselves in the mathematical unfolding of physical law and that being the case there is no justification for the
33:20
intuition that we are the ultimate authors of our actions that we can somehow supersede the strings that are
33:28
pulling us that are governed by the equations of physics so that version of
33:34
free will which is the strongest one that we are fully calling our own shots
33:39
we are the authors of our actions we are autonomous that notion of free will
33:44
seems to be completely incompatible with our understanding of the physical world so this is your line to colbert when you
33:51
said to him you're just a bag of particles controlled by the laws of physics yeah yeah and yet you you do a little about-face
34:00
it's any not an about-face that's not fair to say but you do a little you give us a bone you give us the buoy
34:06
I don't know I'm losing my metaphors but you know this idea that there is still some sense of freedom
34:12
yeah and that we're more complex than Iraq right exactly yeah so so I I don't
34:18
really consider it a bone per se but I understand exactly why you frame it that way but my view is that there is an
34:26
alternative notion of freedom not the freedom of the will that I think we all
34:32
intuitively have and the one that I described the absence of but there's a kind of freedom that we humans have that
34:39
distinguishes us from the inanimate world and the point that you're making Iraq is a good counterpoint rocks can't
34:47
respond in any interesting way to stimuli from the external world we can
34:55
why can we do that not because we have free will in the traditional sense but rather because our arrangement of
35:02
particles is so exquisite compared to the arrangement of particles in Iraq
35:07
that our particles are able to respond in a wealth of different ways to stimuli
35:13
that we receive from the environment so our freedom is not the freedom from the
35:20
tyranny of mathematical laws that doesn't exist instead our freedom
35:26
is a freedom to execute a range of behaviors that are unavailable to the inanimate world we have unshackled our
35:33
behavior through evolutionary development which has allowed us to do things that rocks simply cannot and I
35:41
really do mean that as a substitute not as a bone I truly feel in my bones
35:48
that this resolution is is really satisfying me right now I just
35:54
articulated a sentence how do I view it I say to myself how my particles just
36:00
you know they came together and and they they got that sentence out and I'm
36:05
really pleased that they they did get that sentence out and and and thank goodness for those particles doing you
36:12
know the good thing doing the good work and and and there's a gratification that
36:18
comes with it's a little different from the kind of gratification from free will but I feel responsible for my actions
36:24
because heck it's my particles doing it yeah it's the laws of physics that are guiding at all but who cares
36:30
fundamentally it's me because I am impressing my individuality on what I do because my responses to stimuli are
36:39
highly iconic to me in the particular arrangement of particles in my brain as it is for everybody else now this
36:46
reminds me a little bit of this theory of mind question that you raised earlier you're trying to figure out what I'm
36:52
thinking I'm trying to figure out what you're thinking and I look at you and I don't have a perfect theory of other minds and so to some extent I have to
36:59
attribute to you the kind of freedom that you're describing simply in my uncertainty of being able to reduce to
37:06
the mechanics of the particles and the arrangements and the interactions in your mind because of that I'm left with
37:12
the complexity so vast and a range of options so vast the rock doesn't have that I ascribe to you a sense of freedom
37:18
yes and so I I guess I want to ask you in the same way that you do to yourself for the same reasons and I guess what I
37:24
want to ask you is are you to some extent saying that the illusion of free will is equal to this variety of freedom
37:32
that that we can live with yeah I don't know if I need to equate them
37:38
and I rather would describe them in terms of the role that they play in my
37:45
thought process of how I am in the world and and I I'm I'm willing and feel
37:53
forced to jettison the intuition that I have free will but this other variety of
37:59
freedom feels really good to me so I don't consider them to be the same or equal but this latter version of freedom
38:07
makes it such that I don't pine so much after the old version so you really are
38:13
marching us towards even being able to frame the question of what is the meaning of life to some extent and and
38:22
the next step is really development of language and storytelling yeah in this March and you you reflect on the
38:31
Darwinian explanation possibly of language and you kind of take it and
38:37
leave it and you take it and leave it but I think it's interesting to reflect on a scientific explanation for the
38:44
emergence of language but even more of storytelling yeah and and then doesn't matter if we understand the Darwinian
38:51
explanation yeah or another it's a good question and it all depends on the kinds of mysteries
39:01
that excite you and the kinds of mysteries that you hunger to have an explanation for and one of the mysteries
39:10
that has certainly captured the attention of a community of researches and one that certainly has captured my
39:16
attention is why in the world after we developed language and there many
39:22
theories of where language comes from and as you discuss I described a number of them in the book but there is
39:29
reasonable evidence that language has evolutionary utility right we are able
39:36
to communicate we can coordinate actions we can do things more effectively as a group if we can speak to each other and
39:41
communicate so imagine that language plays that role but after we have language why in the world would we start
39:49
getting together and telling each other fictional tales of non-existent beings in realms that
39:56
have no relevance to the real world why would we spend time doing that that's an
40:01
interesting question to explore yes a storytelling it's really is really the country you and fictional storytelling
40:08
in particular but you know it strikes you as why wouldn't they go out and sharpen some Spears as opposed to talk
40:15
about demigods you mean why wouldn't they gather more fruit and nuts as opposed to you know spending all this
40:21
time we're both members of the conversation know what they're talking about is utterly false from the
40:28
perspective of alignment with things in the outer world and do you feel compelled by a adaptive explanation III
40:34
do I mean it's highly controversial and you're entering a realm where people can
40:40
make up all sorts of just-so stories that you need to be skeptical of because
40:47
you're entering a realm where it's not as though we can go back and think and
40:52
interview those folks who are telling the first tales and figure out why it is that they were doing what they were
40:59
doing but nevertheless there is an interesting idea that researchers have developed that storytelling prepares us
41:06
for challenges in the real world in a very safe way much as ethology right you know play among animals widely
41:13
documented as rehearsing practicing for encounters in the real world right some
41:19
plays very rough hopefully the animals don't get hurt but they're preparing themselves it appears to be the case so
41:25
that when they're in a real fight out there in the world world they have practiced certain kinds of moves and
41:32
responses we may do the same thing with fictional storytelling we may enter a
41:39
whole realm of distinct worlds and encounter a realm with distinct
41:45
personalities and deal with a whole range of distinct challenges and problems all from the safety of
41:52
storytelling as opposed to going out in the dangerous world and having to encounter these situations in order to
42:00
gain the practice and expertise in nuance in response that story to can give us it's kind of like
42:05
theoretical physics versus experimental physics thank you so yeah yeah you see math allows us to commune with other
42:13
realities and language and storytelling allows us to commune with other minds
42:18
yes I'm the deepest way for us to get inside the head of another and they know
42:23
another way of saying it is this you know if you imagined a group of
42:28
individuals say you know some other species of human I'm a human I'm Foreman
42:34
on planet Earth and imagine that they were completely rational I mean maybe in the in the Vulcan sense if you don't
42:40
mind me invoking you know an old Star Trek you know trope so imagine you have these individuals and all they ever do
42:46
is the sensible thing right they never tell fictional accounts waste of time
42:51
they go out they get the food they sharpen the spears and so forth now you know if they were in competition with
42:57
individuals like us who do these wild things where we make up ideas and we
43:02
pursue these crazy which do you think well which would be the better dinner
43:08
companion right you know you have the Vulcan over and all they're talking about is the molecules and atoms and the
43:14
tape and you're like I'm not going to invite that person again right you know but in terms of competition between the
43:19
two I think it's clear that innovation ingenuity surprise discovery is going to
43:25
be the purview of the species like us and I think we ultimately would triumph
43:32
in that kind of a competition so yes could there be could there be I'm not saying that there is could there be an
43:38
evolutionary basis for this kind of behavior I think the answer is possibly yes you also invoke Tony Morrison and
43:46
connecting an idea that you open the book with with this bringing it to the
43:51
point of thinking about language where Tony Morrison says we die that might be the meaning of life but we do language
43:58
that might be the measure of our lives yeah I mean it's really with language that we can articulate a vision of the
44:05
world that is so much richer than the mere facts of existence and you know
44:13
people have taken these ideas in different directions right victims and had this notion that language might
44:19
actually set the border limits yeah the limits and and nobody knew what he was talking about well actually
44:25
you're the expert on this talk about this you know again correct me if I'm
44:30
wrong but that always struck me at least in the naive interpretation as a very
44:36
limited perspective on the nature of reality and nature of truth there are so many things in the world that I feel
44:44
like I engage with that I understand to some degree that I don't have any means
44:49
of articulating in language in fact the number of times that I have felt like if only would there was a word for that but
44:57
there is no word for that and it resolves itself in a different way in my
45:04
understanding so just in defense of Vick and Stein who really should not be defended just cuz
45:09
he was such a nut but you know he he said he was talk about the limits of language and as he said the rest should
45:15
be passed over in silence to that effect but I always interpreted Vic and Stein as saying it just cause something
45:22
actually closer to what you're saying because he said the limits of language are the limits of my world but I I think
45:27
really ultimately he was seeing something else that there was like this negative space almost that he fell into
45:33
to experience something beyond that that that could not be summed up by language
45:38
but also the beauty of Vic and Stein is we can project whatever we want right on top and so there's another quote that
45:45
you raised in which also connects this idea of railing against mortality which is just really motivating force in your
45:52
book is one of Shakespeare's and I'm gonna see if I can get this one right he
45:57
says when all the breathers of this world are dead you still shall live such
46:03
as such virtue has my power yeah and so
46:09
here we are trying to be immortal yeah it fits right into the theme because
46:14
here's an example of two deaths being described within the context of a single
46:21
work and the reality is quite distinct from the words that Shakespeare actually
46:29
uses he's BAE saying aye Shakespeare will be forgot the next right part is how he will die
46:35
threatening an epitaph he's running up imagine writing epitaph assume the dot and says you will carry on because my
46:41
words my pen is so powerful that symbolically you will achieve immortality whereas the poet will not be
46:49
remembered now how many people remember Shakespeare and how many people remember the epic did the person for the whom the
46:55
epitaph was written so it's a symbolic version it's exactly sort of reflects right back on ronk and becquer it's a
47:01
symbolic version of reaching beyond the mortal nature that we have and you know
47:08
that the question arises you know in some sense which is where do you get
47:17
that symbolic immortality from so one of the things that captivated me in in in
47:24
reading the various perspectives on these questions is a question that I was
47:30
asked you know many years ago after a conversation like this which was you
47:35
know which would trouble you more learning that you are gonna die saying
47:42
six months or learning that the entire species is going to be wiped out in six
47:50
months and it's a curious question to reflect on because at least for me my
47:55
response to each of those two is completely different you know my response to learning that I'm going to
48:00
die I think would be a desire to wring as much life out from the final six
48:08
months that I have if however I learned that the species are going to be wiped out in six months there's a sense of is
48:15
there any point doing anything any longer because there'll be no longer descendants who will be able to receive
48:22
anything that we create either real or symbolic that we imagine being passed on to the future so it's an interesting
48:29
question where do you put the weight of your own desire to not be as Robert
48:36
Nozick described it wiped out erased and
48:41
that brings us in this sort of pilgrimage to thinking
48:48
about myths and religion which you describe to some extent in your own sort of intuition as being railing precisely
48:55
against oblivion to mollify the anxiety of understanding our impermanence yeah I
49:03
mean there's exactly I mean there's a sense in which every religion is stephen jay gould noted that every religion
49:08
began with a recognition of our own mortality and it's not the only role that religion plays but a powerful way
49:17
of dealing with the recognition that your time is finite is to imagine that
49:23
it's not finite to invent myths where we're in the center and we triumph in we yes exactly and that's and there's and
49:31
if you think about it that's actually incredibly creative it is an amazingly
49:38
impressive move to ameliorate the otherwise debilitating impact of
49:45
recognizing that everything you care about everything that you're part of everything that has been within the
49:51
reality that you've experienced will go away how do you deal with it imagine that it doesn't now I'm going to by the
50:00
way he's going to tell us it does so but we'll get there but I do I do want to ask are you a religious person it
50:08
depends exactly what one means by religious person and I think you probably anticipated that would be the
50:14
answer that I'd give you IIIi don't consider myself a religious person in following the dictates and the
50:24
dogmas of any specific religion right I mean you know I was raised Jewish I
50:31
don't I don't practice that religion in in any systematic manner but I certainly
50:37
do consider myself to be a spiritual person and by that I simply mean I think
50:43
there's great value in not just trying to understand the external world which is pretty much what we have done with
50:50
our lives trying to understand the basic laws and the particles and cosmology and
50:55
things of that sort but there's something deeply important and wondrous of turning that lens inward and
51:02
trying to understand our own inner world our own inner experience and I consider
51:08
that to be a spiritual quest to figure out how we're part of this reality so in
51:14
that sense yes I mean you also describe both with language and with myth and religion these narrative layers that
51:21
give you a higher level truth within the rubric of being physical exactly and and
51:28
today I also wanted to ask you cuz I know that you have this unusual relationship with your brother where your view become this very influential
51:36
theoretical physicist and your brother is quite a religious person yeah very much in the sense of doctrines that are
51:44
adapted from history yeah I don't know if he's actually here at the moment Joshua okay I'll talk more freely no no
51:54
I say exactly what I said if he was here you know my brother's a good deal older than I am about 13 years older and so he
52:02
was growing up in the 60s a very different time and found things
52:08
distressing as many did in the late 60s and left America and traveled to Europe
52:14
and India and various places and became a Hari Krishna devotee your father
52:20
taking you to Central Park to watch the Hari Krishna's and this realization that one of them was your brother yeah it was
52:26
a nice way of introducing you to his brother's turn no it's exactly right you know one sunny Sunday afternoon I don't
52:33
know a seven or eight years old and my dad took my sister and he took me and we
52:38
went strolling you know and I think it's called poets walk right by the Birdman show and as we're walking along we
52:45
stopped because there was this big group of Hari Krishna devotees drumming and chanting and things of that sort and
52:51
over there in the corner I look and it's my brother and I had no idea I thought
52:57
it was a college I had no idea that this is the direction that his life had taken but you know he had you know the shaved
53:03
head with with just a hair and in one spot and the flowing robes and was out there uh you know energetically
53:11
part of this this ritual and does he remain with that same group um he does
53:20
and it's been an interesting and and curious and and long journey I mean
53:25
there were times you know when my brother would visit my father and you
53:31
know the the apartment in Manhattan and ultimately came to the conclusion that he couldn't visit any longer because he
53:37
couldn't bear to be in the room with somebody who was not a hard Christian devotee that's how it was in the early
53:43
days and you know this was hard my dad would would would cry with with
53:48
ferocious intensity at having lost what he viewed as losing his son because you
53:56
know of this perspective over time it has definitely mellowed and now you know
54:03
if my brother was here he no longer wears the robes and no longer has a particular outfit but he still deeply
54:10
devoted to that kind of spiritual journey and do you engage in conversations about your different paths
54:16
to meaning well we we do and we have certainly in the in the early days you
54:22
know when I was a graduate student in physics you know there are times that we would meet and I would tell them the
54:27
things that I was doing and working on even the discovery here there and at the
54:32
time almost everything that I told him about he would be like yeah Vedic text
54:38
number twelve you know so I was a little frustrating at some level but but at the
54:47
same time I recognized with hindsight now that what he was really saying was there was a resonance with the kinds of
54:55
questions that were firing me up and the kinds of questions that were firing him
55:00
up even though our pathways to try to come to terms with those questions were radically different yeah I'm glad you
55:07
reminded me of that because you have described how Hinduism and Buddhism are often touted as already having predicted
55:13
string theory or quantum mechanics or something else and you have a very good response to this I think in in in
55:18
particular in your conversation with the Dalai Lama so I'd love for you to have a chance to adjust that because it is a question I'm
55:25
sure you often get wasn't it already predicted quantum mechanics and all physics in in ancient texts right so so
55:32
there actually was an event some years ago down in down in Texas where I was
55:38
doing an event with the Dalai Lama and I had the opportunity to ask him some questions and one of the questions I
55:44
asked him was precisely that which was I said look there's so many books out there which claim that Eastern
55:52
traditions have long ago come upon the insights of modern physics and do you
55:58
think that's true and he just immediately answered with complete honesty and said I do not
56:05
he says when it comes to figuring out the deep nature of reality it is you guys it is the physicists that we need
56:12
to follow and we are happy to update our understanding of reality based on the
56:17
discoveries that you make at the same time he said when it comes to consciousness we have much to teach you
56:24
and that's the domain in which the insights from our practice can give
56:31
incredibly deep insights into nature of self-awareness and in the path of
56:36
self-awareness art looms large right it's the next kind of step in the ascent
56:41
and you describe in a really interesting way kind of the uselessness and from a
56:47
Darwinian perspective of art like why use all of these resources on something
56:53
that has no adaptive or survival value in the face of an angry bear or drought and and it's a kind of like sexual
57:01
selection argument but again I think you you kind of play that dance with maybe we know maybe we don't know about the
57:07
rejection what you think is the best that you can do in in these kinds of domains I don't think there's a
57:13
slam-dunk argument in any of these humanistic undertakings as to their
57:20
adaptive role or lack thereof but there are interesting arguments on both sides of the story and you know perhaps Steven
57:28
Pinker is well known for articulating one of the strongest statements about
57:33
the lack of a to utility of certain art forms music in
57:38
particular being one that he stresses he even goes so far as to say and I think many people are familiar with the quote
57:45
that these forms of art are nothing but mental cheesecake right right junk food
57:52
so so we have certainly adapted certain delight in eating things that are dense
57:59
with fat and sugar because in the ancestral world those of our forebears
58:05
who had a predilection for eating fleshy fruit and and ripen nuts they're the
58:11
ones that stored up on the calories that allowed them to survive when times turned lean but now here in the modern
58:17
world we create things like cheesecake that prey upon those adaptive sensibilities even though the Cheesecake
58:24
itself offers no nutritional value of its own and that's his view for certain
58:29
art forms they're preying upon our highly attuned say sonic sensitivities
58:35
right those of our forebears walking around the African savannah who were well attuned to a noise over there or a
58:41
sound over there were the ones who better understood their environment had a better chance of surviving music comes
58:46
along and then leverages that sonic sensitivity by pushing our pleasure
58:52
buttons in a way that offers in today's world no adaptive survival value at all
58:59
so that's sort of an extreme position of the exact of uselessness of art but he's
59:04
not making a comment about our appreciation or experiential the same way that you have been defending
59:10
consciousness is not being diminished by the reality of its physicality nor this
59:16
experience of some sense of freedom nor art yeah it is a mistake to assume that
59:22
the ultimate arbiter of value is whether something has an adaptive role it's not
59:29
it's simply a fact equality an element of how the world operates so Pinker
59:36
himself has great respect for and highly values artistic exploration and works of
59:43
art he's simply asking is it the case that these behaviors
59:48
are of value in one particular domain helping us to survive and in that one
59:56
barometer he's saying that they don't so do you agree with Pinker well I
1:00:01
personally don't my my you know it could be that you know my dad was a composer
1:00:07
was a musician I grew up around music from from the time I was crawling around right so that maybe has biased my
1:00:15
perspective but it feels to me and it feels to me deeply that artistic
1:00:21
exploration is vital to the ability to innovate the ability to think about
1:00:27
things in a different way you know Glenn Gould has this wonderful remark where he talks about a Bach fugue
1:00:35
and the way in which the melodic lines can be inverted and turned in on
1:00:41
themselves and yet even with that miraculous rearrangement of the notes
1:00:46
yields something that is deeply wondrous in its melodic line and I see physics in
1:00:54
much the same way what do we do we rearrange the building box of reality what did Einstein do in developing the
1:01:00
special theory of relativity he took the old ideas of space and time in the speed of light and he rearranged them in a
1:01:07
sparkling new configuration in which the speed of light was constant forcing space and time to be relative and that
1:01:13
rearrangement of the building blocks yielded a radically new picture of the world that turns out to be correct
1:01:18
and it feels to me that artistic exploration over the course of a hundred
1:01:23
thousand generations is what primed the brain - rearranging structures in the
1:01:29
world and creating new patterns and within those new patterns creating new insights into how the world actually
1:01:34
works it's a beautiful description and I often say theoretical physics is one of the
1:01:41
last places or one of the last disciplines in which with a straight face you can describe beauty as being a
1:01:47
motivating factor yeah and it really is I mean we can see one solution and another solution it comes to the same
1:01:54
answer at the bottom of the page but one is beautiful and want to somehow clumsy one is elegant one is elegant like the
1:02:00
universe yes and all of this really these assessments are assessments of conscious
1:02:07
minds that have some experience of freedom if only by the complexity of the internal prodigious arrangements that
1:02:13
they're allowed yes that you know came from exploiting the entry potential of
1:02:18
the universe you know came from this very austere beginning in a Big Bang that was just these principles driving
1:02:24
us to this point we are pretty sure we exist because after all consciousness is the only thing we're really sure of true
1:02:31
and then you bring us to the frontier of the end of time which returns us it sort
1:02:40
of leaves behind this complex tapestry for a second of these of these things
1:02:46
that emerged from from this complex evolution and and returns us to the austerity of entropy and the unfolding
1:02:53
of the universe you have an absolutely beautiful description of the to the best
1:02:59
of our knowledge the end that we face to a cosmological time yeah and I was
1:03:05
wondering if you would be willing to take us through some of that yeah sure um in in the book I use a metaphor to
1:03:11
try to help give the reader and frankly me as well an intuitive understanding of
1:03:18
time scales that really defy human intuition because to really talk about the far future of the universe you need
1:03:25
to talk about time scales that are fantastically longer than even the stretch all the way back to the Big Bang
1:03:32
so to do that I asked the reader and I'll ask you here now to go with me
1:03:37
imagine that we use the following metaphor imagine we have the Empire State Building and imagine that every
1:03:43
floor of the Empire State Building represents a duration that's ten times that of the previous floor so ground
1:03:49
floor is one year first floor ten years second floor 103rd floor a thousand and so forth so in this scheme we are going
1:03:56
exponentially far into the future as we climb up the stairwell of the Empire State Building now in this scheme
1:04:03
everything that's happened from the Big Bang until today extends to just above the 10th floor roughly 10 billion years
1:04:10
and as we go forward we're just going expand beyond that and I'll just take you through a couple of the floors to give a
1:04:17
sense of what happens by floor 11 the Sun is going to swell to over 200 times
1:04:22
its current size engulfing the inner planets and maybe even the earth as well by floor 14 most stars will have used up
1:04:30
their nuclear fuel and will fade to black by floor 19 the earth if it wasn't
1:04:36
swallowed up by the Sun on floor 11 it's now going to spiral into the dark Sun having lost energy through gravitational
1:04:42
radiation by floor 30 most stars will fall into the galaxy's central black
1:04:49
hole by floor 38 protons the very heart of complex matter are likely to
1:04:57
disintegrate showing that complex matter will be gone when you pass by the 38th floor by floor
1:05:03
50 any cogitating beings that still exist and there may simply be none
1:05:08
around once protons decay but if there are cogitating beings left in the universe they will think their final
1:05:15
thought because the actual process of thinking creates waste heat entropy that
1:05:21
the universe needs to absorb but by the floor 50 the universe won't be able to absorb it which means that when that
1:05:27
thinking being thinks one more thought it will fry in the own heat that it's thought generates between between floors
1:05:38
68 and the peak even black holes will disintegrate through a process that
1:05:43
Stephen Hawking taught us about they will radiate energy into space and disperse into a bath of particles that
1:05:50
will simply walk through an ever larger and ever colder cosmos that's it
1:06:03
so this really is the apex of the journey the idea that not just do your
1:06:11
particles cease to be organized in your particular way but that ultimately the
1:06:17
entire universe actually has an end an end where thought cannot be anymore and
1:06:25
I think it's very much embedded in your title until the end of time you don't you say something to the effect that
1:06:33
it's a noble charge that we have to try for ourselves to find meaning until the
1:06:40
end of time because after that shrug shrug there's one little epilogue that's
1:06:47
Brad as a footnote just to bring up when you have all these particles floating in
1:06:53
the void and when you have virtually unlimited time for them to meander around the cosmos there is something
1:07:00
weird that on occasion can happen those particles can slam into each other and
1:07:06
sometimes stick together in groups of two or groups of three or maybe even groups of four sometimes they'll disperse but sometimes they'll continue
1:07:13
to group into ever large configurations there is a nonzero chance that those
1:07:19
particles can come together to yield a particularly interesting structure a
1:07:24
human brain floating in the void imprinted say with the thoughts that say
1:07:30
it's my brain my brain there's actually a nonzero chance that if wait long and if my brain will reconstruct out there
1:07:37
in the void and if that were to happen that brain would think that it's having this conversation right now even though
1:07:45
that brain had no history whatsoever because it just spontaneously formed under the motion of particles so there
1:07:52
is a bizarre way in which thought may be resurrected over fantastically long
1:07:58
timescales I should just say what the time skills are the Empire State Building took us up to say ten to the
1:08:03
hundred years that's a really long time scale the time scale for a brain to form
1:08:09
in the void from the random two particles is 10 to the 10 to the 68
1:08:16
that is a fantastically long time scale but think about it there would be nobody
1:08:21
waiting around for that brain to form say hey come on brain like what's going on there and therefore if you have the
1:08:28
virtual eternity these weird things may possibly happen you also raise the
1:08:33
separator that the universe is infinite and we won't even go near the multiverse that actually they're called Boltzmann
1:08:39
brains yeah that the number of Boltzmann brains will exceed the number of what we call ordinary brains yeah that's quite
1:08:44
disturbing disturbing because if I if I were to ask anyone in the audience human
1:08:51
brain yeah well I say you know where did your brain come from and you say that's a little personal but I don't really mean it in that sense you know your
1:08:57
brain you would tell me emerged you know when you were born when you were conceived and you'd go through the whole
1:09:03
lineage you know your parents and grandparents and so forth and you might take us right back to the Big Bang that
1:09:08
might be the story you tell of where your brain comes from but as Janet just mentioned these weird so-called
1:09:14
Boltzmann brains that form out of the random motion of particles they can happen for a near eternity while your
1:09:21
story only holds water between roughly the 1st and the 10th floor of the Empire
1:09:26
State Building or maybe let's go to the 30th floor to be really generous in our assessment beyond that range there
1:09:33
simply aren't the particles to yield the kind of story that you just told
1:09:39
which means sheerly based on probabilities there are so many more Boltzmann brains out to Eternity than
1:09:46
there are brains that form in the traditional manner that you describe that if you're rational and and think
1:09:52
just about the numbers and probabilities it's far more likely that your brain just formed out of the void and thinks
1:09:58
it's having these experiences so the story you told was really beautiful and
1:10:04
quaint but it has no basis in reality if you allow for these brains to form in
1:10:10
the void which is a very disturbing conclusion even to physicists I should say because it undercuts rationality
1:10:17
itself if my brain could possibly have just formed in the void thinking that it
1:10:23
studied quantum anacs and general relativity and thinking that it understands the data
1:10:28
that supports those theories but if all that is wrong because it never happened
1:10:34
then i can't trust even the very laws that lead us to conclude that these brains should form in the void so we
1:10:41
really undercut our own sense of rationalism if we allow these crazy things to happen which means just to
1:10:48
summarize we physicists pretty much used this as a diagnostic tool if our theories really allow for these
1:10:54
spontaneous brains to form and avoid we think that our theory needs to be
1:10:59
reanalyzed reassessed modified in some way to get rid of this quality so you've
1:11:09
brought us to this precipice in which there is this ultimate death of even thinking itself in a universe that faces
1:11:18
a kind of oblivion that is totally profound and not specifically human and much more severe than that and yet in
1:11:24
the opening of this conversation you said but yeah yeah but yeah but i view this in a wonderful way and you I very
1:11:31
much feel that we're on this trip with you that this was something you were going through yes and and you come to
1:11:38
this point where you describe your own kind of epiphany this moment where you felt this calm connection and you
1:11:45
described a feeling of gratitude yeah like for experience itself yes and I
1:11:50
think that would be a beautiful place to hear you close this trip yeah well that
1:11:55
is is a good summary again because when you recognize that we are the product of
1:12:01
these laws that have no purpose they have no meaning they're they're not endowed with anything beyond the
1:12:07
mathematical qualities that they have and when you recognize that you realize
1:12:13
that there isn't some answer that's floating out there and rather you change your perspective and recognize that we
1:12:21
are the product of these laws acting themselves out from the Big Bang to the
1:12:28
present time and that involves a nearly infinite collection of quantum processes
1:12:34
right each of which could have turned out that way instead of yielding a reality which neither you nor
1:12:40
I nor any of us would exist and yet against those astounding odds we are
1:12:46
here and it's more than that it's not just that we're here we are collections
1:12:51
of particles as we describe that have the incredible capacity to think about
1:12:57
the world to reflect on reality and that to me gives me an incredible sense of
1:13:03
gratitude that collections of particles through a flitting burst of activity can create beauty can experience wonder can
1:13:12
illuminate mystery and that recognition is something that for me borders on
1:13:18
reverence how remarkable how stunning that we are here and that we can do the
1:13:23
things that we do and frankly in a world that has qualities that many of us find
1:13:29
distasteful dark chaotic destructive debilitating to have a sense of
1:13:34
reverence for our moment in the cosmic timeline adds something which I think is
1:13:39
deeply valuable Brian thank you so much
1:13:44
[Applause]
1:13:57
I am so thrilled that we've had Brian here and I and I got to hog the
1:14:04
conversation and we want to give everyone a chance to ask some questions so let's just keep those mics moving
1:14:10
we'll do about 10 minutes of questions keep those mics moving if you have a mic ask a question as soon as you're done pass it on and move that mic to somebody
1:14:16
else yes hi I have a question it's about I'm right over here
1:14:22
hi it's about Einstein and Einstein's idea about free will and when Michele
1:14:30
Besso died Einstein said to his widow essentially he's not dead because for physicists the
1:14:39
past the future the present are all illusions of course he believed in this
1:14:45
concept of a block universe so I my question is do you feel that basically
1:14:52
his belief was the future already exists so is there free will probably not but I
1:14:59
know that you support ideas that are closer to a multi Multi universe so I'm
1:15:05
just wondering like do you think the difference between the existence of freewill could be do we live in a block
1:15:10
universe something that's already said where the future exists or does every decision that every individual make
1:15:15
create a new universe yeah so it's a very good question and and one way of
1:15:21
framing that question which I think retains the essence of what you're asking is Einstein was viewing the world
1:15:30
in terms that we consider to be classical physics quantum physics was
1:15:35
something that didn't really move him in the way that it moves physicists today
1:15:41
and in a classical world you have the situation where if you tell me the state
1:15:48
of the world right now the equations dictate precisely what the world will be like later on and in that world it seems
1:15:56
virtually impossible to talk about freewill at all the future is locked in
1:16:01
place by virtue of the knowledge that you have of it today in a quantum world
1:16:06
things are a little bit different the quantum laws do not predict what things will be like tomorrow based on
1:16:13
how they are today they predict the likelihood the probability that they'll be one way or another tomorrow based on
1:16:19
how they are today now some people see in that an opening for free will they say aha it's the choice in some sense of
1:16:27
the outcome that's where we're able to intercede in the unfolding and the problem is that's utter nonsense because
1:16:36
the way quantum mechanics works is the outcome from the realm of possibilities
1:16:42
is a random choice that comes out of features of the world that we don't even
1:16:47
fully understand right now but we know that it's not something that comes from a volitional decision so if you learned
1:16:54
that the way your particles move was say governed by somebody flipping a coin
1:16:59
backstage with that probabilistic freedom give you a sense of autonomy I
1:17:05
don't think so that's not what we mean by autonomy that's not what we mean by free will and therefore the real way of
1:17:14
framing this problem from my perspective is not whether you're in a classical or quantum world it's not whether you have
1:17:20
deterministic laws or probabilistic laws the issue is do you have laws is the
1:17:27
universe lawful does it progress from here to there by a lawful progression
1:17:32
and if the answer to that question is yes and I think most physicists and I think most people think deeply about it
1:17:38
think the answer is yes then there is no room for the traditional notion of free
1:17:43
will because you cannot intercede in that lawful progression excellent we
1:17:49
have another mic question if you got the mic feel free to speak hi everyone
1:17:55
my question first I'm going to say I spent it and now an hour on the phone
1:18:01
with a quantum mechanic in Australia I went to school with and his question for you was was Peter Brock correct and I
1:18:08
thought it was a joke because Peter Brock was a racecar driver and now I've been listening you have to look him up
1:18:14
the quantum mechanic is a his name is Rob Proctor he's an based out of Niro -
1:18:22
Trey Leah but question is I geek out on blockchain and it's a bit off-topic
1:18:27
but could we use blockchain to travel back from the future well I'm gonna
1:18:34
leave this to Janna no I'm throwing it back at you but I'm gonna rephrase it there you you your it
1:18:41
doesn't matter if it's blockchain or anything else the question ultimately is there any mechanism by which we could
1:18:48
travel backwards in time we know we can time travel and you often point us out we know we can travel into someone
1:18:54
else's future yes through special relativity we know that that's absolutely possible that you and I could
1:18:59
part ways and travel at different speeds and you're different black holes and one I'll come back into your future and
1:19:05
we'll have lost sync but the question can I go into my own past is actually one that Einstein thought about yeah I
1:19:12
think many many many others have thought about this and I think the the Ferriss statement is that there's still a
1:19:19
possibility that you could travel to the past people have actually proposed mechanisms by which you could do that
1:19:26
usually the most prominent one involves wormholes wormhole you may know as a
1:19:31
tunnel from one location in space to another it's kind of a shortcut through space if you move the mouths of a
1:19:38
wormhole the openings lose synchronicity with each other and then you're no
1:19:43
longer just traveling from one position in space to another position in space you're moving for one moment in time to
1:19:49
another moment in time one directions going forward in time the other direction is going backward in time
1:19:54
although the mathematics in principle can work I think most physicists believe
1:20:00
that you could never realize this in the physical world first of all we don't know if wormholes are real I mean there
1:20:06
are in Deep Space nine and other you know so many sci-fi films we don't know if they're actually real we don't know
1:20:12
if you could actually traverse a wormhole so wormholes might be real out there but you can't actually travel
1:20:17
through them in the manner that you imagine with the tunnel so I think most physicists would say that when we
1:20:23
understand the laws of physics more fully travel to the Past will be ruled out but there's still the doors open a
1:20:30
crack I think is the most fair way of describing it so there are chronology protection conjecture switch asserted
1:20:36
that exactly that that when we fully understand the laws of physics that will not that will be just allowed but there are also stories and I think
1:20:42
Fineman told her really one of the great versions of the grandfather paradox where you you know a grandson goes back
1:20:50
in time kills his grandfather before his father was born and therefore could not
1:20:55
have been born to go back and because grandfather but you can try to make it since there is no freewill anyway that
1:21:02
the stories are totally self consistent and nobody can execute a test that's inconsistent with the laws of physics
1:21:07
right so that even if you can go into your past you simply won't be able to kill your grandfather you won't you
1:21:13
might graze him which makes him kind of psycho which makes your father not so good which makes you want to go back and
1:21:19
kill your grandfather right and as long as it's consistent everything's fine right anyone else about roediger I mean
1:21:30
he was trying to reconcile biology with physics and I thought that that some
1:21:36
biologists thought that was sort of problematic but I've heard a lot of biologists refer to biology has sort of
1:21:42
the messy science and then physics doesn't really explain everything in
1:21:47
biology and then also in terms of biology talk a lot about natural selection but somebody I'll just start
1:21:53
talking about survival the luckiest know that there is an actual such utility to
1:21:58
a lot of the traits that now in your book you make reference to Schrodinger's book on life yeah I mean Schrodinger
1:22:06
wrote a book you know called what his life in 1943 based on lectures that had
1:22:13
given the previous year and he was one of the rare physicists who was willing to move outside his domain of expertise
1:22:21
and try to use physics to address questions that other scientists have been pondering for some period of time
1:22:27
so I think now as we reflect back on what Schrodinger said he got a lot of
1:22:33
things wrong in that book you know it was the 1940s it was before the discovery of the structure of DNA
1:22:39
nevertheless he had many ideas that hinted at the right direction and and
1:22:46
the point that you're making is a good one as science progresses we challenge old ideas
1:22:51
try to refine them we try to ensure that they're better able to describe the better data that we acquire through our
1:22:58
intense investigations of the world and things will change over time but I think
1:23:04
the the bottom line assessment of Darwinian natural selection is that it's
1:23:09
rock-solid sure there are details around the edges that people are going to think
1:23:14
about and work on and refine over time but the core idea that Darwin gave us is
1:23:21
is alive well and solid let's take one more question if you've got a mic feel
1:23:29
emboldened I've got a mic if you don't
1:23:35
yes okay someone's getting one gotcha okay this may be a weird question so if
1:23:45
the structure of things from macro to micro is really kind of similar from
1:23:51
universe to galaxies to solar systems to have it in earth and having condors and cities and families and those families
1:23:57
are made of people and people are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms couldn't we all be tiny conscious
1:24:05
particles within a live evolving universe instead of you know like a God
1:24:12
and a religion and maybe that's the tethering life force have you seen an animal house that question was was was
1:24:24
asked by the frat boys you know could we be in the fingernail of some giant being
1:24:30
and and you you know the answer I think
1:24:35
one way of thinking about an answer to that question is we as scientists look
1:24:43
out at the world we have certain theories about how the world works and
1:24:48
over time were forced to move incrementally away from all theories by
1:24:54
virtue of the new data the new experiments the new observations that we encounter but we're fairly loath however
1:25:01
while the ideas that we may have discussed here tonight we're fair loath to move to a place that's not
1:25:07
dictated by an observation by a measurement by a mathematical equation
1:25:13
emerging from ideas that themselves have already received a mountain of
1:25:18
experimental support so is it possible that the chain of conscious awareness
1:25:24
that you're describing may extend in the manner that you imagined it's possible
1:25:30
but there's nothing that leads us in the manner that I've been describing
1:25:35
incrementally from what we know to that very big version of conscious awareness
1:25:42
floating out there in the void so is it possible yes is it compelling not at the
1:25:48
moment so I have the privilege of being able to ask you the last question and I
1:25:55
was reminded in this conversation that you quote also Emily Dickinson and you say forever is composed of nouse and so
1:26:03
here we are now and so what how are you
1:26:08
going to seize this moment having been on this really I think quite provocative
1:26:14
evolution of your own what's now I don't know and that's really what makes it exciting you know I I think I think many
1:26:22
of us and and I think it's even more prevalent among kids today because I see it in my own kids there's a desire to
1:26:29
kind of map out the world map out the life impose the coherence that will
1:26:35
allow you to answer questions of that sort in terms of where you're going to be what you're gonna do and I think and
1:26:41
personally I think this partly comes from the focus on electronic gadgetry where we are constantly engaged with
1:26:49
something and never allowing the mind just to be so for the moment having spent this time writing this book
1:26:56
thinking about these ideas I just want to let my mind be and see where it goes
1:27:01
Brian such a pleasure thank you so much for joining us [Applause]
