back to indexSean Carroll: The Nature of the Universe, Life, and Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #26
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The following is a conversation with Sean Carroll.
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He's a theoretical physicist at Caltech
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specializing in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology.
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He's the author of several popular books,
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one on the arrow of time called From Eternity to Here,
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one on the Higgs boson called Particle
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at the End of the Universe,
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and one on science and philosophy called The Big Picture
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on the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.
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He has an upcoming book on quantum mechanics
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that you can preorder now called Something Deeply Hidden.
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He writes one of my favorite blogs on his website,
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preposterousuniverse.com.
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I recommend clicking on the Greatest Hits link
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that lists accessible, interesting posts
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on the arrow of time, dark matter, dark energy,
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the Big Bang, general relativity,
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string theory, quantum mechanics,
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and the big meta questions about the philosophy of science,
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God, ethics, politics, academia, and much, much more.
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Finally, and perhaps most famously,
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he's the host of a podcast called Mindscape
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that you should subscribe to and support on Patreon.
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Along with the Joe Rogan experience,
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Sam Harris's Making Sense,
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and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History,
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Sean's Mindscape podcast is one of my favorite ways
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to learn new ideas or explore different perspectives
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and ideas that I thought I understood.
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It was truly an honor to meet
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and spend a couple hours with Sean.
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It's a bit heartbreaking to say
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that for the first time ever,
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the audio recorder for this podcast
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died in the middle of our conversation.
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There's technical reasons for this,
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having to do with phantom power
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that I now understand and will avoid.
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It took me one hour to notice and fix the problem.
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So, much like the universe is 68% dark energy,
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roughly the same amount from this conversation was lost,
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except in the memories of the two people involved
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I'm sure we'll talk again and continue this conversation
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on this podcast or on Sean's.
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And of course, I look forward to it.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes,
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support it on Patreon,
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or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, here's my conversation with Sean Carroll.
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What do you think is more interesting and impactful,
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understanding how the universe works at a fundamental level
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or understanding how the human mind works?
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You know, of course this is a crazy,
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meaningless, unanswerable question in some sense,
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because they're both very interesting
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and there's no absolute scale of interestingness
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that we can rate them on.
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There's a glib answer that says the human brain
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is part of the universe, right?
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And therefore, understanding the universe
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is more fundamental than understanding the human brain.
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But do you really believe that once we understand
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the fundamental way the universe works
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at the particle level, the forces,
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we would be able to understand how the mind works?
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No, certainly not.
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We cannot understand how ice cream works
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just from understanding how particles work, right?
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So I'm a big believer in emergence.
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I'm a big believer that there are different ways
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of talking about the world
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beyond just the most fundamental microscopic one.
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You know, when we talk about tables and chairs
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and planets and people,
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we're not talking the language of particle physics
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So, but understanding the universe,
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you didn't say just at the most fundamental level, right?
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So understanding the universe at all levels
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I do think, you know, to be a little bit more fair
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to the question, there probably are general principles
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of complexity, biology, information processing,
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memory, knowledge, creativity
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that go beyond just the human brain, right?
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And maybe one could count understanding those
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as part of understanding the universe.
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The human brain, as far as we know,
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is the most complex thing in the universe.
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So there's, it's certainly absurd to think
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that by understanding the fundamental laws
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of particle physics,
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you get any direct insight on how the brain works.
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But then there's this step from the fundamentals
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of particle physics to information processing,
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which a lot of physicists and philosophers
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may be a little bit carelessly take
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when they talk about artificial intelligence.
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Do you think of the universe
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as a kind of a computational device?
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No, to be like, the honest answer there is no.
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There's a sense in which the universe
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processes information, clearly.
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There's a sense in which the universe
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is like a computer, clearly.
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But in some sense, I think,
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I tried to say this once on my blog
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and no one agreed with me,
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but the universe is more like a computation
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than a computer because the universe happens once.
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A computer is a general purpose machine, right?
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That you can ask it different questions,
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even a pocket calculator, right?
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And it's set up to answer certain kinds of questions.
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The universe isn't that.
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So information processing happens in the universe,
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but it's not what the universe is.
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And I know your MIT colleague, Seth Lloyd,
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feels very differently about this, right?
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Well, you're thinking of the universe as a closed system.
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So what makes a computer more like a PC,
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like a computing machine is that there's a human
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that every once comes up to it and moves the mouse around.
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And that's why you're saying it's just a computation,
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a deterministic thing that's just unrolling.
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But the immense complexity of it
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is nevertheless like processing.
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There's a state and then it changes with good rules.
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And there's a sense for a lot of people
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that if the brain operates,
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the human brain operates within that world,
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then it's simply just a small subset of that.
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And so there's no reason we can't build
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arbitrarily great intelligences.
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Do you think of intelligence in this way?
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Intelligence is tricky.
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I don't have a definition of it offhand.
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So I remember this panel discussion that I saw on YouTube.
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I wasn't there, but Seth Lloyd was on the panel.
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And so was Martin Rees, the famous astrophysicist.
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And Seth gave his shtick for why the universe is a computer
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and explained this.
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And Martin Rees said, so what is not a computer?
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And Seth was like, oh, that's a good question.
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Because if you have a sufficiently broad definition
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of what a computer is, then everything is, right?
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And the simile or the analogy gains force
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when it excludes some things.
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You know, is the moon going around the earth
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performing a computation?
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I can come up with definitions in which the answer is yes,
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but it's not a very useful computation.
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I think that it's absolutely helpful
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to think about the universe in certain situations,
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certain contexts, as an information processing device.
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I'm even guilty of writing a paper
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called Quantum Circuit Cosmology,
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where we modeled the whole universe as a quantum circuit.
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As a circuit, yeah.
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With qubits kind of thing?
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With qubits basically, right, yeah.
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So, and qubits becoming more and more entangled.
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So do we wanna digress a little bit?
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So here's a mystery about the universe
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that is so deep and profound that nobody talks about it.
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Space expands, right?
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And we talk about, in a certain region of space,
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a certain number of degrees of freedom,
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a certain number of ways that the quantum fields
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and the particles in that region can arrange themselves.
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That number of degrees of freedom in a region of space
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is arguably finite.
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We actually don't know how many there are,
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but there's a very good argument
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that says it's a finite number.
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So as the universe expands and space gets bigger,
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are there more degrees of freedom?
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If it's an infinite number, it doesn't really matter.
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Infinity times two is still infinity.
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But if it's a finite number, then there's more space,
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so there's more degrees of freedom.
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So where did they come from?
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That would mean the universe is not a closed system.
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There's more degrees of freedom popping into existence.
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So what we suggested was
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that there are more degrees of freedom,
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and it's not that they're not there to start,
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but they're not entangled to start.
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So the universe that you and I know of,
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the three dimensions around us that we see,
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we said those are the entangled degrees of freedom
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making up space time.
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And as the universe expands,
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there are a whole bunch of qubits in their zero state
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that become entangled with the rest of space time
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through the action of these quantum circuits.
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So what does it mean that there's now more
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degrees of freedom as they become more entangled?
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As the universe expands.
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That's right, so there's more and more degrees of freedom
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that are entangled, that are playing part,
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playing the role of part
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of the entangled space time structure.
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So the basic, the underlying philosophy is
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that space time itself arises from the entanglement
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of some fundamental quantum degrees of freedom.
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Wow, okay, so at which point
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is most of the entanglement happening?
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Are we talking about close to the Big Bang?
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Are we talking about throughout the time of the life?
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Throughout history, yeah.
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So the idea is that at the Big Bang,
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almost all the degrees of freedom
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that the universe could have were there,
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but they were unentangled with anything else.
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And that's a reflection of the fact
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that the Big Bang had a low entropy.
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It was a very simple, very small place.
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And as space expands, more and more degrees of freedom
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become entangled with the rest of the world.
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Well, I have to ask John Carroll,
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what do you think of the thought experiment
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from Nick Bostrom that we're living in a simulation?
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So I think, let me contextualize that a little bit more.
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I think people don't actually take this thought experiments.
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I think it's quite interesting.
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It's not very useful, but it's quite interesting.
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From the perspective of AI,
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a lot of the learning that can be done usually happens
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in simulation from artificial examples.
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And so it's a constructive question to ask,
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how difficult is our real world to simulate?
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Which is kind of a dual part of,
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if we're living in a simulation
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and somebody built that simulation,
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if you were to try to do it yourself, how hard would it be?
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So obviously we could be living in a simulation.
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If you just want the physical possibility,
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then I completely agree that it's physically possible.
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I don't think that we actually are.
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So take this one piece of data into consideration.
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You know, we live in a big universe, okay?
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There's two trillion galaxies in our observable universe
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with 200 billion stars in each galaxy, et cetera.
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It would seem to be a waste of resources
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to have a universe that big going on
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just to do a simulation.
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So in other words, I want to be a good Bayesian.
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I want to ask under this hypothesis,
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what do I expect to see?
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So the first thing I would say is I wouldn't expect
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to see a universe that was that big, okay?
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The second thing is I wouldn't expect the resolution
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of the universe to be as good as it is.
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So it's always possible that if our superhuman simulators
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only have finite resources,
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that they don't render the entire universe, right?
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That the part that is out there,
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the two trillion galaxies,
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isn't actually being simulated fully, okay?
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But then the obvious extrapolation of that
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is that only I am being simulated fully.
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Like the rest of you are just non player characters, right?
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I'm the only thing that is real.
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The rest of you are just chat bots.
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Beyond this wall, I see the wall,
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but there is literally nothing
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on the other side of the wall.
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That is sort of the Bayesian prediction.
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That's what it would be like
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to do an efficient simulation of me.
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So like none of that seems quite realistic.
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I don't see, I hear the argument that it's just possible
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and easy to simulate lots of things.
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I don't see any evidence from what we know
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about our universe that we look like a simulated universe.
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Now, maybe you can say,
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well, we don't know what it would look like,
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but that's just abandoning your Bayesian responsibilities.
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Like your job is to say under this theory,
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here's what you would expect to see.
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Yeah, so certainly if you think about simulation
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as a thing that's like a video game
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where only a small subset is being rendered.
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But say the entire, all the laws of physics,
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the entire closed system of the quote unquote universe,
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Yeah, it's always possible.
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Right, so that's not useful to think about
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when you're thinking about physics.
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The way Nick Bostrom phrases it,
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if it's possible to simulate a universe,
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eventually we'll do it.
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You can use that by the way for a lot of things.
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But I guess the question is,
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how hard is it to create a universe?
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I wrote a little blog post about this
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and maybe I'm missing something,
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but there's an argument that says not only
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that it might be possible to simulate a universe,
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but probably if you imagine that you actually attribute
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consciousness and agency to the little things
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that we're simulating, to our little artificial beings,
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there's probably a lot more of them
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than there are ordinary organic beings in the universe
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or there will be in the future, right?
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So there's an argument that not only
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is being a simulation possible,
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it's probable because in the space
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of all living consciousnesses,
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most of them are being simulated, right?
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Most of them are not at the top level.
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I think that argument must be wrong
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because it follows from that argument that,
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if we're simulated, but we can also simulate other things,
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well, but if we can simulate other things,
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they can simulate other things, right?
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If we give them enough power and resolution
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and ultimately we'll reach a bottom
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because the laws of physics in our universe have a bottom,
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we're made of atoms and so forth,
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so there will be the cheapest possible simulations.
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And if you believe the original argument,
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you should conclude that we should be
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in the cheapest possible simulation
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because that's where most people are.
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But we don't look like that.
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It doesn't look at all like we're at the edge of resolution,
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that we're 16 bit things.
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It seems much easier to make much lower level things
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And also, I questioned the whole approach
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to the anthropic principle
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that says we are typical observers in the universe.
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I think that that's not actually,
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I think that there's a lot of selection that we can do
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that we're typical within things we already know,
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but not typical within all of the universe.
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So do you think there's intelligent life,
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however you would like to define intelligent life,
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out there in the universe?
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My guess is that there is not intelligent life
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in the observable universe other than us, simply
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on the basis of the fact that the likely number
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of other intelligent species in the observable universe,
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there's two likely numbers, zero or billions.
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And if there had been billions,
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you would have noticed already.
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For there to be literally like a small number,
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like, you know, Star Trek,
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there's a dozen intelligent civilizations in our galaxy,
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but not a billion, that's weird.
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That's sort of bizarre to me.
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It's easy for me to imagine that there are zero others
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because there's just a big bottleneck
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to making multicellular life
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or technological life or whatever.
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It's very hard for me to imagine
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that there's a whole bunch out there
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that have somehow remained hidden from us.
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The question I'd like to ask
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is what would intelligent life look like?
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What I mean by that question and where it's going
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is what if intelligent life is just in some very big ways
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different than the one that has on Earth?
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That there's all kinds of intelligent life
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that operates at different scales
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of both size and temporal.
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Right, that's a great possibility
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because I think we should be humble
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about what intelligence is, what life is.
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We don't even agree on what life is,
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much less what intelligent life is, right?
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So that's an argument for humility,
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saying there could be intelligent life
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of a very different character, right?
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Like you could imagine the dolphins are intelligent
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but never invent space travel
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because they live in the ocean
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and they don't have thumbs, right?
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So they never invent technology, they never invent smelting.
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Maybe the universe is full of intelligent species
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that just don't make technology, right?
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That's compatible with the data, I think.
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And I think maybe what you're pointing at
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is even more out there versions of intelligence,
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intelligence in intermolecular clouds
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or on the surface of a neutron star
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or in between the galaxies in giant things
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where the equivalent of a heartbeat is 100 million years.
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On the one hand, yes,
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we should be very open minded about those things.
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On the other hand, all of us share the same laws of physics.
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There might be something about the laws of physics,
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even though we don't currently know
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exactly what that thing would be,
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that makes meters and years
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the right length and timescales for intelligent life.
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Maybe not, but we're made of atoms,
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atoms have a certain size,
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we orbit stars or stars have a certain lifetime.
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It's not impossible to me that there's a sweet spot
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for intelligent life that we find ourselves in.
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So I'm open minded either way,
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I'm open minded either being humble
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and there's all sorts of different kinds of life
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or no, there's a reason we just don't know it yet
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why life like ours is the kind of life that's out there.
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Yeah, I'm of two minds too,
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but I often wonder if our brains is just designed
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to quite obviously to operate and see the world
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in these timescales and we're almost blind
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and the tools we've created for detecting things are blind
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to the kind of observation needed
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to see intelligent life at other scales.
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Well, I'm totally open to that,
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but so here's another argument I would make,
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we have looked for intelligent life,
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but we've looked at for it in the dumbest way we can,
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by turning radio telescopes to the sky.
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And why in the world would a super advanced civilization
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randomly beam out radio signals wastefully
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in all directions into the universe?
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That just doesn't make any sense,
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especially because in order to think
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that you would actually contact another civilization,
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you would have to do it forever,
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you have to keep doing it for millions of years,
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that sounds like a waste of resources.
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If you thought that there were other solar systems
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with planets around them,
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where maybe intelligent life didn't yet exist,
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but might someday,
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you wouldn't try to talk to it with radio waves,
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you would send a spacecraft out there
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and you would park it around there
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and it would be like, from our point of view,
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it'd be like 2001, where there was a monolith.
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There could be an artifact,
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in fact, the other way works also, right?
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There could be artifacts in our solar system
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that have been put there
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by other technologically advanced civilizations
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and that's how we will eventually contact them.
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We just haven't explored the solar system well enough yet
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The reason why we don't think about that
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is because we're young and impatient, right?
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Like, it would take more than my lifetime
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to actually send something to another star system
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and wait for it and then come back.
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So, but if we start thinking on hundreds of thousands
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of years or million year time scales,
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that's clearly the right thing to do.
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Are you excited by the thing
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that Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX in general?
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Space, but the idea of space exploration,
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even though your, or your species is young and impatient?
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No, I do think that space travel is crucially important,
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Even to other star systems.
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And I think that many people overestimate the difficulty
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because they say, look, if you travel 1% the speed of light
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to another star system,
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we'll be dead before we get there, right?
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And I think that it's much easier.
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And therefore, when they write their science fiction stories,
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they imagine we'd go faster than the speed of light
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because otherwise they're too impatient, right?
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We're not gonna go faster than the speed of light,
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but we could easily imagine that the human lifespan
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gets extended to thousands of years.
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And once you do that,
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then the stars are much closer effectively, right?
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And then what's a hundred year trip, right?
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So I think that that's gonna be the future,
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the far future, not my lifetime once again,
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Unless your lifetime gets extended.
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Well, it's in a race against time, right?
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A friend of mine who actually thinks about these things
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said, you know, you and I are gonna die,
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but I don't know about our grandchildren.
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That's, I don't know, predicting the future is hard,
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but that's at least a plausible scenario.
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And so, yeah, no, I think that as we discussed earlier,
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there are threats to the earth, known and unknown, right?
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Having spread humanity and biology elsewhere
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is a really important longterm goal.
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What kind of questions can science not currently answer,
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When you think about the problems and the mysteries
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before us that may be within reach of science.
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I think an obvious one is the origin of life.
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We don't know how that happened.
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There's a difficulty in knowing how it happened historically
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actually, you know, literally on earth,
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but starting life from non life is something
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I kind of think we're close to, right?
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You really think so?
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Like how difficult is it to start life?
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Well, I've talked to people,
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including on the podcast about this.
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You know, life requires three things.
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Life as we know it.
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So there's a difference with life,
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which who knows what it is,
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and life as we know it,
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which we can talk about with some intelligence.
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So life as we know it requires compartmentalization.
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You need like a little membrane around your cell.
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Metabolism, you need to take in food and eat it
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and let that make you do things.
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And then replication, okay?
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So you need to have some information about who you are
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that you pass down to future generations.
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In the lab, compartmentalization seems pretty easy.
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Not hard to make lipid bilayers
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that come into little cellular walls pretty easily.
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Metabolism and replication are hard,
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but replication we're close to.
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People have made RNA like molecules in the lab
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that I think the state of the art is,
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they're not able to make one molecule
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that reproduces itself,
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but they're able to make two molecules
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that reproduce each other.
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That's pretty close.
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Metabolism is harder, believe it or not,
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even though it's sort of the most obvious thing,
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but you want some sort of controlled metabolism
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and the actual cellular machinery in our bodies
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is quite complicated.
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It's hard to see it just popping into existence
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It probably took a while,
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but we're making progress.
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And in fact, I don't think we're spending
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nearly enough money on it.
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If I were the NSF, I would flood this area with money
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because it would change our view of the world
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if we could actually make life in the lab
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and understand how it was made originally here on earth.
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And I'm sure it'd have some ripple effects
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that help cure disease and so on.
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I mean, just that understanding.
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So synthetic biology is a wonderful big frontier
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where we're making cells.
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Right now, the best way to do that
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is to borrow heavily from existing biology, right?
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Well, Craig Venter several years ago
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created an artificial cell, but all he did was,
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not all he did, it was a tremendous accomplishment,
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but all he did was take out the DNA from a cell
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and put in entirely new DNA and let it boot up and go.
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What about the leap to creating intelligent life on earth?
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Again, we define intelligence, of course,
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but let's just even say Homo sapiens,
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the modern intelligence in our human brain.
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Do you have a sense of what's involved in that leap
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and how big of a leap that is?
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So AI would count in this, or do you really want life?
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Do you want really an organism in some sense?
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AI would count, I think.
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Yeah, of course, of course AI would count.
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Well, let's say artificial consciousness, right?
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So I do not think we are on the threshold
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of creating artificial consciousness.
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I think it's possible.
link |
I'm not, again, very educated about how close we are,
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but my impression is not that we're really close
link |
because we understand how little we understand
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of consciousness and what it is.
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So if we don't have any idea what it is,
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it's hard to imagine we're on the threshold
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of making it ourselves.
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But it's doable, it's possible.
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I don't see any obstacles in principle.
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So yeah, I would hold out some interest
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in that happening eventually.
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I think in general, consciousness,
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I think we would be just surprised
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how easy consciousness is once we create intelligence.
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I think consciousness is a thing
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that's just something we all fake.
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No, actually, I like this idea that in fact,
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consciousness is way less mysterious than we think
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because we're all at every time, at every moment,
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less conscious than we think we are, right?
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We can fool things.
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And I think that plus the idea
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that you not only have artificial intelligent systems,
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but you put them in a body, right,
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give them a robot body,
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that will help the faking a lot.
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Yeah, I think creating consciousness
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in artificial consciousness is as simple
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as asking a Roomba to say, I'm conscious,
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and refusing to be talked out of it.
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Could be, it could be.
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And I mean, I'm almost being silly,
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but that's what we do.
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That's what we do with each other.
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This is the kind of,
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that consciousness is also a social construct.
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And a lot of our ideas of intelligence is a social construct.
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And so reaching that bar involves something that's beyond,
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that doesn't necessarily involve
link |
the fundamental understanding of how you go
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from electrons to neurons to cognition.
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No, actually, I think that is an extremely good point.
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And in fact, what it suggests is,
link |
so yeah, you referred to Kate Darling,
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who I had on the podcast,
link |
and who does these experiments with very simple robots,
link |
but they look like animals,
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and they can look like they're experiencing pain,
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and we human beings react very negatively
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to these little robots
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looking like they're experiencing pain.
link |
And what you wanna say is, yeah, but they're just robots.
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It's not really pain, right?
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It's just some electrons going around.
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But then you realize, you and I are just electrons
link |
going around, and that's what pain is also.
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And so what I would have an easy time imagining
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is that there is a spectrum
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between these simple little robots that Kate works with
link |
and a human being,
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where there are things that sort of
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by some strict definition,
link |
Turing test level thing are not conscious,
link |
but nevertheless walk and talk like they're conscious.
link |
And it could be that the future is,
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I mean, Siri is close, right?
link |
And so it might be the future
link |
has a lot more agents like that.
link |
And in fact, rather than someday going,
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aha, we have consciousness,
link |
we'll just creep up on it with more and more
link |
accurate reflections of what we expect.
link |
And in the future, maybe the present,
link |
for example, we haven't met before,
link |
and you're basically assuming that I'm human as it's a high
link |
probability at this time because the yeah,
link |
but in the future,
link |
there might be question marks around that, right?
link |
Yeah, no, absolutely.
link |
Certainly videos are almost to the point
link |
where you shouldn't trust them already.
link |
Photos you can't trust, right?
link |
Videos is easier to trust,
link |
but we're getting worse that,
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we're getting better at faking them, right?
link |
Yeah, so physical embodied people,
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what's so hard about faking that?
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So this is very depressing,
link |
this conversation we're having right now.
link |
To me, it's exciting.
link |
To me, you're doing it.
link |
So it's exciting to you,
link |
but it's a sobering thought.
link |
We're very bad, right?
link |
At imagining what the next 50 years are gonna be like
link |
when we're in the middle of a phase transition
link |
as we are right now.
link |
Yeah, and I, in general,
link |
I'm not blind to all the threats.
link |
I am excited by the power of technology to solve,
link |
to protect us against the threats as they evolve.
link |
I'm not as much as Steven Pinker optimistic about the world,
link |
but in everything I've seen,
link |
all of the brilliant people in the world that I've met
link |
So the army of the good
link |
in terms of the development of technology is large.
link |
Okay, you're way more optimistic than I am.
link |
I think that goodness and badness
link |
are equally distributed among intelligent
link |
and unintelligent people.
link |
I don't see much of a correlation there.
link |
Neither of us have proof.
link |
Again, opinions are free, right?
link |
Nor definitions of good and evil.
link |
We come without definitions or without data opinions.
link |
So what kind of questions can science not currently answer
link |
and may never be able to answer in your view?
link |
Well, the obvious one is what is good and bad?
link |
What is right and wrong?
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I think that there are questions that,
link |
science tells us what happens,
link |
what the world is and what it does.
link |
It doesn't say what the world should do
link |
or what we should do,
link |
because we're part of the world.
link |
But we are part of the world
link |
and we have the ability to feel like something's right,
link |
something's wrong.
link |
And to make a very long story very short,
link |
I think that the idea of moral philosophy
link |
is systematizing our intuitions
link |
of what is right and what is wrong.
link |
And science might be able to predict ahead of time
link |
but it won't ever be able to judge
link |
whether we should have done it or not.
link |
So, you're kind of unique in terms of scientists.
link |
Listen, it doesn't have to do with podcasts,
link |
but even just reaching out,
link |
I think you referred to as sort of
link |
doing interdisciplinary science.
link |
So you reach out and talk to people
link |
that are outside of your discipline,
link |
which I always hope that's what science was for.
link |
In fact, I was a little disillusioned
link |
when I realized that academia is very siloed.
link |
And so the question is,
link |
how, at your own level,
link |
how do you prepare for these conversations?
link |
How do you think about these conversations?
link |
How do you open your mind enough
link |
to have these conversations?
link |
And it may be a little bit broader,
link |
how can you advise other scientists
link |
to have these kinds of conversations?
link |
Not at the podcast,
link |
the fact that you're doing a podcast is awesome,
link |
other people get to hear them,
link |
but it's also good to have it without mics in general.
link |
It's a good question, but a tough one to answer.
link |
I think about a guy I know who's a personal trainer,
link |
and he was asked on a podcast,
link |
how do we psych ourselves up to do a workout?
link |
How do we make that discipline to go and work out?
link |
And he's like, why are you asking me?
link |
I can't stop working out.
link |
I don't need to psych myself up.
link |
So, and likewise, he asked me,
link |
how do you get to have interdisciplinary conversations
link |
on all sorts of different things,
link |
all sorts of different people?
link |
I'm like, that's what makes me go, right?
link |
Like that's, I couldn't stop doing that.
link |
I did that long before any of them were recorded.
link |
In fact, a lot of the motivation for starting recording it
link |
was making sure I would read all these books
link |
that I had purchased, right?
link |
Like all these books I wanted to read,
link |
not enough time to read them.
link |
And now if I have the motivation,
link |
cause I'm gonna interview Pat Churchland,
link |
I'm gonna finally read her book.
link |
You know, and it's absolutely true
link |
that academia is extraordinarily siloed, right?
link |
We don't talk to people.
link |
And in fact, when we do, it's punished.
link |
You know, like the people who do it successfully
link |
generally first became very successful
link |
within their little siloed discipline.
link |
And only then did they start expanding out.
link |
If you're a young person, you know,
link |
I have graduate students.
link |
I try to be very, very candid with them about this,
link |
that it's, you know, most graduate students
link |
are to not become faculty members, right?
link |
It's a tough road.
link |
And so live the life you wanna live,
link |
but do it with your eyes open
link |
about what it does to your job chances.
link |
And the more broad you are
link |
and the less time you spend hyper specializing
link |
in your field, the lower your job chances are.
link |
That's just an academic reality.
link |
It's terrible, I don't like it, but it's a reality.
link |
And for some people, that's fine.
link |
Like there's plenty of people who are wonderful scientists
link |
who have zero interest in branching out
link |
and talking to things, to anyone outside their field.
link |
But it is disillusioning to me.
link |
Some of the, you know, romantic notion I had
link |
of the intellectual academic life
link |
is belied by the reality of it.
link |
The idea that we should reach out beyond our discipline
link |
and that is a positive good is just so rare
link |
in universities that it may as well not exist at all.
link |
But that said, even though you're saying you're doing it
link |
like the personal trainer, because you just can't help it,
link |
you're also an inspiration to others.
link |
Like I could speak for myself.
link |
You know, I also have a career I'm thinking about, right?
link |
And without your podcast,
link |
I may have not have been doing this at all, right?
link |
So it makes me realize that these kinds of conversations
link |
is kind of what science is about in many ways.
link |
The reason we write papers, this exchange of ideas,
link |
is it's much harder to do interdisciplinary papers,
link |
And conversations are easier.
link |
So conversations is the beginning.
link |
And in the field of AI, it's obvious
link |
that we should think outside of pure computer vision
link |
competitions on a particular data sets.
link |
We should think about the broader impact
link |
of how this can be, you know, reaching out to physics,
link |
to psychology, to neuroscience and having these
link |
conversations so that you're an inspiration.
link |
And so never know how the world changes.
link |
I mean, the fact that this stuff is out there
link |
and I've a huge number of people come up to me,
link |
grad students, really loving the podcast, inspired by it.
link |
And they will probably have that,
link |
they'll be ripple effects when they become faculty
link |
and so on and so on.
link |
We can end on a balance between pessimism and optimism.
link |
And Sean, thank you so much for talking to me, it was awesome.
link |
No, Lex, thank you very much for this conversation.