back to indexRoger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe | Lex Fridman Podcast #85
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The following is a conversation with Roger Penrose,
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physicist, mathematician, and philosopher
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at University of Oxford.
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He has made fundamental contributions in many disciplines
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from the mathematical physics of general relativity
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and cosmology to the limitations
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of a computational view of consciousness.
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In his book, The Emperor's New Mind,
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Roger writes that, quote,
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"'Children are not afraid to pose basic questions
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that may embarrass us as adults to ask.'
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In many ways, my goal with this podcast
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is to embrace the inner child
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that is not constrained by how one should behave,
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speak, and think in the adult world.
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Roger is one of the most important minds of our time,
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so it was truly a pleasure and an honor to talk with him.
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This conversation was recorded
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before the outbreak of the pandemic.
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For everyone feeling the medical, psychological,
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and financial burden of the crisis,
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I'm sending love your way.
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Stay strong, we're in this together, we'll beat this thing.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
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support it on Patreon,
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or simply connect with me on Twitter
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at Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
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As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now
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and never any ads in the middle
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I hope that works for you
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and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
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Quick summary of the ads.
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And now, here's my conversation with Roger Penrose.
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You mentioned in conversation with Eric Weinstein
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on the Portal podcast that 2001 Space Odyssey
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is your favorite movie.
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Which aspect, if you could mention,
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of its representation of artificial intelligence,
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science, engineering connected with you?
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There are all sorts of scenes there which are so amazing.
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And how science was so well done.
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I mean, people say, oh no, Interstellar is this amazing movie
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which is the most scientific movie.
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I thought it's not a patch on 2001.
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I mean, 2001, they really went into all sorts of details.
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And regarding getting the free fall well done and everything,
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I thought it was extremely well done.
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So just the details were mesmerizing in terms of this.
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And also things like the scene where at the beginning
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they have these sort of human ancestors
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which are sort of apes becoming humans.
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Yes, and well, it's the one where he throws the bone
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up into the air and then it becomes this.
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I mean, that's an amazing sequence there.
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What do you make of the monolith?
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Does it have any scientific or philosophical meaning to you,
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this kind of thing that sparks innovation?
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That comes from Arthur C. Clarke.
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I was always a great fan of Arthur C. Clarke.
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So it's just a nice plot device.
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Yeah, that plot is excellent, yes.
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So Hal 9000 decides to get rid of the astronauts
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because he, it, she believes that they will interfere
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Yeah, well, there you are.
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I don't know whether I disagree with it
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because in a certain sense it was telling you it's wrong.
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See, the machine seemed to think it was superior
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to the human and so it was entitled to get rid
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of the human beings and run the show itself.
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Well, do you think Hal did the right thing?
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Do you think Hal's flawed evil?
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Or if we think about systems like Hal,
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would we want Hal to do the same thing in the future?
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What was the flaw there?
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Well, you're basically touching on questions.
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You see, it's one supposed to believe
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that Hal was actually conscious.
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I mean, it was played rather that way,
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as though Hal was a conscious being.
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Because Hal showed some pain, some cognizance,
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Hal appeared to be cognizant of what it means to die.
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And therefore had an inkling of consciousness.
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Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that aspect
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of it was made completely clear,
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whether Hal was really just a very sophisticated computer,
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which really didn't actually have these feelings
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and somehow, but you're right,
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it didn't like the idea of being turned off.
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How does it change things if Hal was or wasn't conscious?
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Well, it might say that it would be wrong to turn it off
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if it was actually conscious.
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I mean, these questions arise if you think.
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I mean, AI, one of the ideas,
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it's sort of a mixture in a sense.
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You say, if it's trying to do everything a human can do,
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and if you take the view that consciousness
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is something which would come along
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when the computer is sufficiently complicated,
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sufficiently whatever criterion you use
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to characterize its consciousness
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in terms of some computational criteria,
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computational criterion.
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So how does consciousness change our evaluation
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of the decision that Hal made?
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I guess I was trying to say
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that people are a bit confused about this,
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because if they say these machines will become conscious,
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but just simply because it's a degree of computation,
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and when you get beyond that certain degree of computation,
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it will become conscious,
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then of course you have all these problems.
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I mean, you might say, well,
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one of the reasons you're doing AI
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is because you want to send a device
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out to some distant planet,
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and you don't want to send a human out there,
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because then you'd have to bring it back again,
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and that costs you far more
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than just sending it there and leaving it there.
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But if this device is actually a conscious entity,
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then you have to face up to the fact that that's immoral.
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And so the mere fact that you're making some AI device
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and thinking that removes your responsibility to it
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would be incorrect.
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And so this is a sign of flaw in that kind of viewpoint.
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I'm not sure how people who take it very seriously,
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I mean, I had this curious conversation
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with, I'm going to forget names, I'm afraid,
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because this is what happens to me at the wrong moment,
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Hofstadter, Douglas Hofstadter.
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Douglas Hofstadter, yeah.
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And he'd written this book,
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God Will Let You Up, which I liked.
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I thought it was a fantastic book.
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But I didn't agree with his conclusion
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from Gödel's theorem.
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I think he got it wrong, you see.
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Well, I'll just tell you my story, you see,
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because I'd never met him.
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And then I knew I was going to meet him,
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the occasion I realized he was coming in,
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he wanted to talk to me, and I said, that's fine.
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And I thought in my mind,
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well, I'm going to paint him into a corner, you see,
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because I'll use his arguments to convince him
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that certain numbers are conscious.
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Some integers, large enough integers are actually conscious.
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And this was going to be my reductio ad absurdum.
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So I started having this argument with him.
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He simply leapt into the corner.
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He didn't even need to be painted into it.
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He took the view that certain numbers were conscious.
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I thought that was a reductio ad absurdum,
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but he seemed to think it was perfectly
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a reasonable point of view.
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Without the absurdum there.
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Interesting, but the thing you mentioned about how
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is the intuition that a lot of the people,
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at least in the artificial intelligence world,
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had and have, I think.
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They don't make it explicit,
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but that if you increase the power of computation,
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naturally consciousness will emerge.
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Yes, I think that's what they think.
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But basically that's because
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they can't think of anything else.
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Well, that's right.
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And so it's a reasonable thing.
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I mean, you think, what does the brain do?
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Well, it does do a lot of computation.
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I think most of what you actually call computation
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is done by the cerebellum.
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I mean, this is one of the things
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that people don't much mention.
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I mean, I come to this subject from the outside
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and certain things strike me,
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which you hardly ever hear mentioned.
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I mean, you hear mentioned about the left right business.
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They move your right arm,
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that's the left side of the brain
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and so on and all that sort of stuff.
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And it's more than that.
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If you have these plots of different parts of the brain,
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there are two of these things called the homunculi,
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which you see these pictures of a distorted human figure
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and showing different parts of the brain,
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controlling different parts of the body.
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And it's not simply things like,
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okay, the right hand is controlled
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and both sensory and motor on the left side,
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left hand on the right side.
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It's more than that.
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Vision is the back basically,
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your feet at the top.
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And it's as though it's about the worst organization
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you could imagine.
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So it can't just be a mistake in nature.
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There's something going on there.
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And this is made more pronounced
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when you think of the cerebellum.
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The cerebellum has,
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when I was first thinking about these things,
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I was told that it had half as many neurons
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or something like that, comparable.
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And now they tell me it's got far more neurons
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than the cerebrum, and cerebrum is this sort of
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convoluted thing at the top people always talk about.
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Cerebellum is this thing just looks a bit like
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a ball of wool right at the back underneath them.
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It's got more neurons.
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It's got more connections.
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Computationally, it's got much more going on
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than this from the cerebrum.
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But as far as we know, that's slightly controversial,
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the cerebellum is entirely unconscious.
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So the actions, you have a pianist
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who plays an incredible piece of music
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and think of, and he moves his little finger
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into this little key to get it, hit it,
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just the right moment.
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Does he or she consciously will that movement?
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Okay, the consciousness is coming in.
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It's probably to do with the feeling
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of the piece of music that's being performed
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and that sort of thing, which is going on.
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But the details of what's going on are controlled.
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I would think almost entirely by the cerebellum.
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That's where you have this precision
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and the really detailed.
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Once you get, I mean, you think of a tennis player
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or something, does that tennis player
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think exactly which muscles should be moved
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in what direction and so on?
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No, of course not.
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But he or she will maybe think,
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well, if the ball is angled in such a way in that corner,
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that will be tricky for the opponent.
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And the details of that are all done
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largely with the cerebellum.
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That's where all the precise motions,
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but it's unconscious.
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So why is it interesting to you
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that so much computation is done in the cerebellum
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and yet it is unconscious?
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Because it doesn't, it's the view
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that somehow it's computation
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which is producing the consciousness.
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And it's here you have an incredible amount
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of computation going on.
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And as far as we know, it's completely unconscious.
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So why, what's the difference?
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And I think it's an important thing.
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What's the difference?
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Why is the cerebrum, all this very peculiar stuff
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that very hard to see on a computational perspective,
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like having the, everything have to cross over
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under the other side and do something
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which looks completely inefficient.
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And you've got funny things like the frontal lobe
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and the, what do we call the lobes?
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And the place where they come together,
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you have the different parts, the control,
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you see one to do with motor
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and the other to do with sensory.
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And they're sort of opposite each other
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rather than being connected by,
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it's not as though you've got electrical circuits.
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There's something else going on there.
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So it's just the idea that it's like a complicated computer
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just seems to me to be completely missing the point.
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There must be a lot of computation going on,
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but the cerebellum seems to be much better at doing that
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than the cerebrum is.
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So for sure, I think what explains it is like half hope
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and half we don't know what's going on.
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And therefore from the computer science perspective,
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you hope that a Turing machine can be perfectly,
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can achieve general intelligence.
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Well, you have this wonderful thing about Turing
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and Gödel and Church and Curry and various people,
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particularly Turing, and I guess Post was the other one.
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These people who developed the idea
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of what a computation is.
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And there were different ideas of what a computation,
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developed differently.
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I mean, Church's way of doing it,
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was very different from Turing's,
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but then they were shown to be equivalent.
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And so the view emerged that what we mean by computation
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is a very clear concept.
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And one of the wonderful things that Turing did
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was to show that you could have
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what we call the universal Turing machine.
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It's you just have to have a certain finite device.
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Okay, it has to have an unlimited storage space,
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which is accessible to it,
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but the actual computation, if you like,
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is performed by this one universal device.
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And so the view comes away,
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well, you have this universal Turing machine,
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and maybe the brain is something like that,
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a universal Turing machine,
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and it's got maybe not unlimited storage,
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but a huge storage accessible to it.
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And this model is one,
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which is what's used in ordinary computation.
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It's a very powerful model.
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And the universallness of computation is very useful.
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You could have some problem
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and you may not see immediately
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how to put it onto a computer,
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but if it is something of that nature,
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then there are all sorts of subprograms
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and subroutines when all the,
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I mean, I learned a little bit of computing
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when I was a student, but not very much.
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But it was enough to get the general ideas.
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And there's something really pleasant
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about a formal system like that.
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Where you can start discussing about what's provable,
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what's not, these kinds of things.
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And you've got a notion, which is an absolute notion,
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this notion of computability,
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and you can address when things are,
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mathematical problems are computably solvable
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And it's a very beautiful area of mathematics,
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and it's a very powerful area of mathematics.
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And it underlies the whole sort of,
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I won't say, the principles of computing machines
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that we have today.
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Could you say, what is Gayle's Incompleteness Theorem?
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And how does it, maybe also say,
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is it heartbreaking to you?
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And how does it interfere with this notion of computation
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and consciousness?
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Well, the ideas, basically ideas,
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which I formulated in my first year
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as a graduate student in Cambridge.
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I did my undergraduate work in mathematics in London,
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and I had a colleague, Ian Percival.
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We used to discuss things like computational
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and logical systems quite a lot.
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I'd heard about Gayle's theorem.
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I was a bit worried by the idea that it seemed to say
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there were things in mathematics that you could never prove.
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And so when I went to Cambridge as a graduate student,
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I went to various courses.
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You see, I was doing pure mathematics.
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I was doing algebraic geometry of a sort.
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A little bit different from what my supervisor and people,
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but it was algebraic geometry.
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And I was interested,
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I got particularly interested in three lecture courses
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that were nothing to do with what I was supposed
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One was a course by Herman Bondy
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on Einstein's general theory of relativity,
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which was a beautiful course.
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He was an amazing lecturer,
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brought these things alive, absolutely.
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Another was a course on quantum mechanics
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given by a great physicist, Paul Dirac.
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Very beautiful course in a completely different way.
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It was, he was very kind of organized
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and never got excited about anything seemingly.
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But it was extremely well put together.
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And I found that amazing too.
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Third course that was nothing to do
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with what I should be doing was a course
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on mathematical logic.
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I got excited, as I say, my discussions with Ian Percival
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was incompleteness theorem already deeply
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within mathematical logic space.
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Were you introduced to it?
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I was introduced to it in detail by the course, by Steen.
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And he, it was two things he described
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which were very fundamental to my understanding.
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One was Turing machines and the whole idea
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of computability and all that.
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So that was all very much part of the course.
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The other one was the Gödel theorem.
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And it wasn't what I was afraid it was
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to tell you there were things in mathematics
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you couldn't prove.
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It was basically, and he phrased it in a way
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which often people didn't.
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And if you read Douglas Soft status book,
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he doesn't, you see.
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But Steen made it very clear.
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And also in a sort of public lecture
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that he gave to a mathematical,
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I think it may be the Adams Society,
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one of the mathematical undergraduate societies.
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And he made this point again very clearly.
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That if you've got a formal system of proof,
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so suppose what you mean by proof
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is something which you could check with a computer.
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So to say whether you've got it right or not,
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you've got a lot of steps.
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Have you carried this computational procedure?
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Well, following the proof, steps of the proof correctly,
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that can be checked by an algorithm, by a computer.
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So that's the key thing.
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Now what you have to, now you see, is this any good?
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If you've got an algorithmic system,
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which claims to say, yes, this is right,
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this you've proved it correctly, this is true.
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If you've proved it, if you made a mistake,
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it doesn't say it's true or false.
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But if you have, if you've done it right,
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then the conclusion you've come to is correct.
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Now you say, why do you believe it's correct?
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Because you've looked at the rules and you said,
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well, okay, that one's all right.
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Yeah, that one's all right.
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Oh, yeah, I see, I see why it's all right.
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Okay, you go through all the rules.
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You say, yes, following those rules,
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if it says, yes, it's true, it is true.
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So you've got to make sure that these rules
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are ones that you trust.
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If you follow the rules and it says it's a proof,
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is the result actually true?
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And that your belief that it's true
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depends upon looking at the rules and understanding them.
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Now, what Gödel shows, that if you have such a system,
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then you can construct a statement of the very kind
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that it's supposed to look at, a mathematical statement,
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and you can see by the way it's constructed
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and what it means that it's true,
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but not provable by the rules that you've been given.
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And it depends on your trust in the rules.
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Do you believe that the rules only give you truths?
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If you believe the rules only give you truths,
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then you believe this other statement is also true.
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I found this absolutely mind blowing.
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When I saw this, it blew my mind.
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I thought, my God, you can see that this statement is true.
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It's as good as any proof,
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because it only depends on your belief
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in the reliability of the proof procedure, that's all it is,
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and understanding that the coding is done correctly.
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And it enables you to transcend that system.
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So whatever system you have,
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as long as you can understand what it's doing
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and why you believe it only gives you truths,
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then you can see beyond that system.
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Now, how do you see beyond it?
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What is it that enables you to transcend that system?
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Well, it's your understanding
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of what the system is actually saying
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and what the statement that you've constructed
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is actually saying.
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So it's this quality of understanding, whatever it is,
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which is not governed by rules.
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It's not a computational procedure.
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So this idea of understanding is not going to be
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within the rules of the, within the formal system.
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Yes, you're only using those rules anyway,
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because you have understood them to be rules
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which only give you truths.
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There'd be no point in it otherwise.
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I mean, people say, well, okay, this is,
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it's one set of rules as good as any other.
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Well, it's not true.
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You see, you have to understand what the rules mean.
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And why does that understanding of the mean
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give you something beyond the rules themselves?
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And that's what it was.
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That's what blew my mind.
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It's somehow understanding why the rules give you truths
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enables you to transcend the rules.
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So that's where, I mean, even at that time,
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that's already where the thought entered your mind
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that the idea of understanding, or we can start calling it
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things like intelligence or even consciousness
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is outside the rules.
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See, I've always concentrated on understanding.
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You know, people say, people come and point out things.
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Well, you know, what about creativity?
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That's something a machine can't do is create.
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Well, I don't know.
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What is creativity?
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You know, somebody can put some funny things
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on a piece of paper and say that's creative
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and you could make a machine do that.
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Is it really creative?
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You see, I worry about that one.
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I sort of agree with it in a sense,
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but it's so hard to do anything with that statement.
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But understanding, yes, you can.
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You can make, go see that understanding, whatever it is,
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and it's very hard to put your finger on it.
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That's absolutely true.
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Can you try to define or maybe dance around
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a definition of understanding?
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To some degree, but I don't, I often wondered about this,
link |
but there is something there which is very slippery.
link |
It's something like standing back.
link |
And it's got to be something, you see,
link |
it's also got to be something which was of value
link |
to our remote ancestors.
link |
Because sometimes, there's a cartoon
link |
which I drew sometimes showing you how all these,
link |
there's in the foreground, you see this mathematician
link |
just doing some mathematical theorem.
link |
There's a little bit of a joke in that theorem,
link |
but let's not go into that.
link |
He's trying to prove some theorem.
link |
And he's about to be eaten by a saber tooth tiger
link |
who's hiding in the undergrowth, you see.
link |
And in the distance, you see his cousins
link |
building, growing crops, building shelters,
link |
domesticating animals, and in the slight foreground,
link |
you see they've built a mammoth trap
link |
and this poor old mammoth is falling into a pit, you see,
link |
and all these people around them are about to grab him,
link |
you see, and well, you see, those are the ones who,
link |
the quality of understanding, which goes with all,
link |
it's not just the mathematician doing his mathematics,
link |
this understanding quality is something else,
link |
which has been a tremendous advantage to us,
link |
See, I don't think consciousness is limited to humans.
link |
Yeah, that's the interesting question,
link |
at which point, if it is indeed connected
link |
to the evolutionary process,
link |
at which point did we pick up this?
link |
A very hard question.
link |
It's certainly, I don't think it's primates,
link |
you know, you see these pictures of African hunting dogs
link |
and how they can plan amongst themselves
link |
how to catch the antelopes.
link |
Some of these David Attenborough films,
link |
I think this probably was one of them,
link |
and you could see the hunting dogs,
link |
and they divide themselves into two groups
link |
and they go in two routes, two different routes.
link |
One of them goes and they sort of hide next to the river.
link |
And the other group goes around
link |
and they start yelping at these, they don't bark,
link |
I guess whatever noise hunting dogs do,
link |
the antelopes, and they sort of round them up
link |
and they chase them in the direction of the river.
link |
And there are the other ones just waiting for them,
link |
just to get, because when they get to the river,
link |
it slows them down.
link |
And so they pounce on them.
link |
So they've obviously planned this all out somehow.
link |
I have no idea how.
link |
And there is some element of conscious planning,
link |
as far as I can see.
link |
I don't think it's just some kind of,
link |
so much of AI these days is done on what they call
link |
bottom up systems, is it?
link |
Yeah, where you have neural networks
link |
and you give them a zillion different things to look at
link |
and then they sort of can choose one thing over another,
link |
just because it's seen so many examples
link |
and picks up on little signals,
link |
which one may not even be conscious of.
link |
And that doesn't feel like understanding.
link |
There's no understanding in that whatsoever.
link |
Well, you're being a little bit human centric, so.
link |
Well, I'm talking about, I'm not with the dogs, am I?
link |
Sorry, not human centric, but I misspoke.
link |
Is it possible that consciousness
link |
would just look slightly different?
link |
Well, I'm not saying it's biological,
link |
because we don't know.
link |
I think other examples of elephants
link |
is a wonderful example, too.
link |
Where they, this was, I think this was an Attenborough one,
link |
where the elephants have to go from along,
link |
the troop of them have to go long distances.
link |
And the leader of a troop is a female.
link |
They all are, apparently.
link |
And this female, she had to go all the way
link |
from one part of the country to another.
link |
And at a certain point, she made a detour.
link |
And they went off in this big detour.
link |
All the troop came with her.
link |
And this was where her sister had died.
link |
And there were her bones lying around.
link |
And they're going to pick up the bones,
link |
and they hand it around, and they caress the bones.
link |
And then they put them back, and they go back again.
link |
What in the hell are they doing?
link |
That's so interesting.
link |
I mean, there's something going on.
link |
There's no clear connection with natural selection.
link |
There's just some deep feeling going on there,
link |
which has to do with their conscious experience.
link |
And I think it's something that, overall,
link |
is advantageous, our natural selection,
link |
but not directly to do with natural selection.
link |
There's something going on there.
link |
Like I told you, I'm Russian,
link |
so I tend to romanticize all things of this nature,
link |
that it's not merely cold, hard computation.
link |
Perhaps I could just slightly answer your question.
link |
You were asking me, what is it?
link |
There's something about sort of standing back
link |
and thinking about your own thought processes.
link |
I mean, there is something like that in the Gödel thing,
link |
because you're not following the rules.
link |
You're standing back and thinking about the rules.
link |
And so there is something that you might say,
link |
you think about you're doing something,
link |
and you think, what the hell am I doing?
link |
And you sort of stand back and think about
link |
what it is that's making you think in such a way.
link |
Just take a step back outside the game you've been playing.
link |
Yeah, you back up and you think about,
link |
you're just not playing the game anymore.
link |
You're thinking about what the hell you're doing
link |
in playing this game.
link |
And that's somehow,
link |
it's not a very precise description,
link |
but somehow it feels very true
link |
that that's somehow understanding.
link |
This kind of reflection.
link |
The reflection, yes.
link |
Yeah, it's a bit hard to put your finger on,
link |
but there is something there,
link |
which I think maybe could be unearthed at some point
link |
and see this is really what's going on,
link |
why conscious beings have this advantage,
link |
what it is that gives them advantage.
link |
And I think it goes way back.
link |
I don't think we're talking about the hunting dogs
link |
and the elephants.
link |
It's pretty clear that octopuses have
link |
the same sort of quality,
link |
and we call it consciousness.
link |
Seen enough examples of the way that they behave
link |
and the evolution route is completely different.
link |
Does it go way back to some common ancestor
link |
or did it come separately?
link |
My hope is it's something simple,
link |
but the hard question if there's a hardware prerequisite.
link |
We have to develop some kind of hardware mechanisms
link |
Like basically, as you suggest,
link |
we'll get to in a second,
link |
we kind of have to throw away the computer
link |
as we know it today.
link |
The deterministic machines we know today
link |
to try to create it.
link |
I mean, my hope, of course, is not, but...
link |
Well, I should go really back to the story
link |
which, in a sense, I haven't finished
link |
because I went to these three courses, you see,
link |
when I was a graduate student.
link |
And so I started to think, well, I'm really,
link |
I'm a pretty, what you might call a materialist
link |
in the sense of thinking that there's no kind of mystical
link |
something or other which comes in from who knows where.
link |
Are you still, throughout your life, been a materialist?
link |
I don't like the word materialist
link |
because it suggests we know what material is.
link |
And that is a bad word because...
link |
But there's no mystical.
link |
It's not some mystical something
link |
which is not treatable by science.
link |
That's so beautifully put,
link |
just to pause on that for a second.
link |
You're a materialist, but you acknowledge
link |
that we don't really know what the material is.
link |
I mean, I like to call myself a scientist, I suppose,
link |
but it means that...
link |
Yes, well, you see, the question goes on here.
link |
So I began thinking, okay, if consciousness
link |
or understanding is something
link |
which is not a computational process, what can it be?
link |
And I knew enough from my undergraduate work.
link |
I knew about Newtonian mechanics,
link |
and I knew how basically you could put it on a computer.
link |
There is a fundamental issue, which is it important or not?
link |
That computation depends upon discrete things.
link |
So you're using discrete elements,
link |
whereas the physical laws depend on the continuum.
link |
Now, is this something to do with it?
link |
Is it the fact that we use the continuum in our physics?
link |
And if we model our physical system,
link |
we use discrete systems like ordinary computers?
link |
I came to the view that that's probably not it.
link |
I might have to retract on that someday,
link |
but the view was no, you can get close enough.
link |
It's not altogether clear, I have to say,
link |
but you can get close enough.
link |
And I went to this course by Bondi on general relativity,
link |
and I thought, well, you can put that on a computer,
link |
because that was a long time before people,
link |
and I've sort of grown up with this,
link |
how people have done better and better calculations,
link |
and they could work out about black holes,
link |
and they can then work out how black holes
link |
can interact with each other, spiral around,
link |
and what kind of gravitational waves can out.
link |
And it's a very impressive piece of computational work,
link |
how you can actually work out the shapes of those signals.
link |
And now we have LIGO seeing these signals,
link |
and they say, yeah, those black holes spiral into each other.
link |
This is just a vindication of the power of computation
link |
in describing Einstein's general relativity.
link |
So in that case, we can get close,
link |
but with computation, we can get close
link |
to our understanding of the physics.
link |
You can get very, very close.
link |
Now, is that close enough, you see?
link |
And then I went to this course by Dirac.
link |
Now, you see, I think it was the very first lecture
link |
that he gave, and he was talking about
link |
a superposition principle.
link |
And he said, if you have a particle,
link |
you usually think of particle can be over here
link |
or over there, but in quantum mechanics,
link |
it can be over here and over there at the same time.
link |
And you have these states which involve
link |
a superposition in some sense
link |
of different locations for that particle.
link |
And then he got out his piece of chalk.
link |
Some people say he broke it in two
link |
as a kind of illustration of how the piece of chalk
link |
might be over here and over there at the same time.
link |
And he was talking about this, and my mind wandered.
link |
I don't remember what he said.
link |
All I can remember, he's just moved on to the next topic,
link |
and something about energy he'd mentioned,
link |
which I had no idea what it had to do with anything.
link |
And so I'd been struck with this
link |
and worried about it ever since.
link |
It's probably just as well I didn't hear his explanation
link |
because it was probably one of these things
link |
to calm me down and not worry about it anymore.
link |
Whereas in my case, I've worried about it ever since.
link |
So I thought maybe that's the catch.
link |
There is something in quantum mechanics
link |
where the superpositions become one or the other,
link |
and that's not part of quantum mechanics.
link |
There's something missing in the theory.
link |
The theory is incomplete.
link |
It's not just incomplete.
link |
It's in a certain sense not quite right
link |
because if you follow the equation,
link |
the basic equation of quantum mechanics,
link |
that's the Schrodinger equation,
link |
you could put that on a computer too.
link |
There are lots of difficulties
link |
about how many parameters you have to put in and so on.
link |
That can be very tricky,
link |
but nevertheless, it is a computational process.
link |
Modulo this question about the continuum as before,
link |
but it's not clear that makes any difference.
link |
So our theories of quantum mechanics
link |
may be missing the same element
link |
that the universal Turing machine
link |
is missing about consciousness.
link |
Yeah, this is the view I held is that you need a theory
link |
and that what people call the reduction of the state
link |
or the collapse of the wave function,
link |
which you have to have,
link |
otherwise quantum mechanics doesn't relate
link |
to the world we see.
link |
To make it relate to the world we see,
link |
you've got to break the Schrodinger equation.
link |
Schrodinger himself was absolutely appalled by this idea,
link |
I mean, that's why he introduced
link |
this famous Schrodinger's cat as a thought experiment.
link |
He's really saying, look,
link |
this is where my equation leads you into it.
link |
There's something wrong,
link |
something we haven't understood,
link |
which is basically fundamental.
link |
And so I was trying to put all these things together
link |
and said, well, it's got to be
link |
the noncomputability comes in there.
link |
And I also can't quite remember when I thought this,
link |
but it's when gravity is involved in quantum mechanics.
link |
It's the combination of those two.
link |
And that's that point
link |
when you have good reasons to believe,
link |
this came much later,
link |
that I have good reason to believe
link |
that the principles of general relativity
link |
and those of quantum mechanics,
link |
most particularly,
link |
it's the basic principle of equivalence,
link |
which goes back to Galileo.
link |
If you fall freely,
link |
you eliminate the gravitational field.
link |
So you imagine Galileo
link |
dropping his big rock and his little rock
link |
from the leaning tower,
link |
whether he actually ever did that or not,
link |
pretty irrelevant.
link |
And as the rocks fall to the ground,
link |
you have a little insect sitting on one of them,
link |
looking at the other one.
link |
And it seems to think, oh, there's no gravity here.
link |
Of course, it hits the ground
link |
and then you realize something's difference going on.
link |
But when it's in free fall,
link |
the gravity has been eliminated.
link |
Galileo understood that very beautifully.
link |
He gives these wonderful examples of fireworks.
link |
And you see the fireworks and explode,
link |
and you see this fear of sparkling fireworks.
link |
It remains as fear as it falls down,
link |
as though there were no gravity.
link |
So he understood that principle,
link |
but he couldn't make a theory out of it.
link |
Einstein came along,
link |
used exactly the same principle.
link |
And that's the basis
link |
of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
link |
Now, there is a conflict.
link |
This is something I did much, much later.
link |
So this wasn't at those days,
link |
You can see there is a basic conflict
link |
between the principle of superposition,
link |
the thing that Dirac was talking about,
link |
and the principle of general covariance.
link |
Well, principle of equivalence.
link |
Gravitational field's equivalent to an acceleration.
link |
Can you pause for a second?
link |
What is the principle of equivalence?
link |
It's this Galileo principle
link |
that we can eliminate, at least locally.
link |
You have to be in a small neighborhood
link |
because if you have people dropping rocks
link |
all around the world somewhere,
link |
you can't get rid of it all at once.
link |
But in the local neighborhood,
link |
you can eliminate the gravitational field
link |
by falling freely with it.
link |
And we now see this with astronauts,
link |
and they don't, you know, the Earth is right there.
link |
You can see the great globe of the Earth
link |
right beneath them.
link |
But they don't care about it.
link |
As far as they're concerned, there's no gravity.
link |
They fall freely within the gravitational field,
link |
and that gets rid of the gravitational field.
link |
And that's the principle of equivalence.
link |
So what's the contradiction?
link |
What's the tension with superposition
link |
Oh, well, that's technical.
link |
So just to backtrack for a second
link |
just to see if we can weave a thread through it all.
link |
So we started to think about consciousness
link |
as potentially needing some of the same,
link |
not mystical, but some of the same magic.
link |
You see, it is a complicated story.
link |
So, you know, people think,
link |
oh, I'm drifting away from the point or something.
link |
But I think it is a complicated story.
link |
So what I'm trying to say,
link |
I mean, I try to put it in a nutshell,
link |
but it's not so easy.
link |
I'm trying to say that whatever consciousness is,
link |
it's not a computation.
link |
Or it's not a physical process
link |
which can be described by computation.
link |
But it nevertheless could be,
link |
so one of the interesting models
link |
that you've proposed
link |
is the orchestrated objective reduction.
link |
Yes, well, you see, that's going from there, you see.
link |
So I say I have no idea.
link |
So I wrote this book through my scientific career.
link |
I thought, you know, when I'm retired,
link |
I'll have enough time to write a sort of a popularish book
link |
which I will explain my ideas and puzzles,
link |
what I like, beautiful things about physics and mathematics,
link |
and this puzzle about computability
link |
and consciousness and so on.
link |
And in the process of writing this book,
link |
well, I thought I'd do it when I was retired.
link |
I didn't actually, I didn't wait that long
link |
because there was a radio discussion
link |
between Edward Fredkin and Marvin Minsky.
link |
And they were talking about what computers could do.
link |
And they were entering a big room.
link |
They imagined entering this big room
link |
where at the other end of the room,
link |
two computers were talking to each other.
link |
And as you walk up to the computers,
link |
they will have communicated to each other
link |
more ideas, concepts, things than the entire human race
link |
So I thought, well, I know where you're coming from,
link |
but I just don't believe you.
link |
There's something missing.
link |
So I thought, well, I should write my book.
link |
It was roughly the same time Stephen Hawking
link |
was writing his brief history of time.
link |
In the 80s at some point.
link |
The book you're talking about is The Emperor's New Mind.
link |
The Emperor's New Mind, that's right.
link |
And both are incredible books,
link |
The Brief History of Time and The Emperor's New Mind.
link |
Yes, it was quite interesting
link |
because he told me he'd got Carl Sagan, I think,
link |
to write a foreword for the book, you see.
link |
So I thought, gosh, what am I gonna do?
link |
I'm not gonna get anywhere unless I get somebody.
link |
So I said, oh, I know Martin Gardner,
link |
so I wonder if he'd do it.
link |
So he did, and he did a very nice foreword.
link |
So that's an incredible book,
link |
and some of the same people you mentioned,
link |
Ed Franken, which I guess of expert systems fame,
link |
and Minsky, of course, people know in the AI world,
link |
but they represent the artificial intelligence world
link |
that do hope and dream that AI's intelligence is.
link |
Well, you see, it was my thinking,
link |
well, you know, I see where they're coming from.
link |
From that perspective, yeah, you're right.
link |
But that's not my perspective.
link |
So I thought I had to say it.
link |
And as I was writing my book, you see,
link |
I thought, well, I don't really know anything
link |
about neurophysiology.
link |
What am I doing writing this book?
link |
So I started reading up about neurophysiology,
link |
and I read up, and I think,
link |
now, I'm trying to find out how it is
link |
that nerve signals could possibly
link |
preserve quantum coherence.
link |
And all I read is that the electrical signals
link |
which go along the nerves create effects through the brain.
link |
There's no chance you can isolate it.
link |
So I thought, this is hopeless.
link |
So I come to the end of the book,
link |
and I more or less give up.
link |
I just think of something which I didn't believe in.
link |
Maybe this is a way around it, but no.
link |
And then, you see, I thought, well,
link |
maybe this book will at least stimulate young people
link |
to do science or something.
link |
And I got all these letters from old, retired people instead.
link |
These are the only people who had time to read my book.
link |
Except for Stuart Hameroff.
link |
Except for Stuart Hameroff.
link |
Stuart Hameroff wrote to me, and he said,
link |
I think you're missing something.
link |
You don't know about microtubules, do you?
link |
He didn't put it quite like that.
link |
But that was more or less it.
link |
And he said, this is what you really need to consider.
link |
So I thought, my God, yes.
link |
That's a much more promising structure.
link |
So, I mean, fundamentally, you were searching
link |
for the source of, noncomputable source of consciousness
link |
within the human brain, in the biology.
link |
And so, what are, if I may ask, what are microtubules?
link |
Well, you see, I was ignorant in what I'd read.
link |
I never came across them in the books I looked at.
link |
Perhaps I only read rather superficially, which is true.
link |
But I didn't know about microtubules.
link |
Stuart, I think one of the things
link |
that impressed him about them was,
link |
when you see pictures of mitosis, that's a cell dividing,
link |
and you see all the chromosomes.
link |
And the chromosomes, they all get lined up,
link |
and then they get pulled apart.
link |
And so, as the cell divides, half the chromosomes go,
link |
they divide into the two parts,
link |
and they go two different ways.
link |
And what is it that's pulling them apart?
link |
Well, those are these little things called microtubules.
link |
And so, he started to get interested in them.
link |
And he formed the view, well, he was,
link |
his day job or night job or whatever you call it,
link |
is to put people to sleep,
link |
except he doesn't like calling it sleep
link |
because it's different.
link |
General anesthetics in a reversible way.
link |
So, you want to make sure that they don't experience
link |
the pain that would otherwise be something that they feel.
link |
And consciousness is turned off for a while,
link |
and it can be turned back on again.
link |
So, it's crucial that you can turn it off and turn it on.
link |
And what do you do when you're doing that?
link |
What do general anesthetic gases do?
link |
And see, he formed the view that it's the microtubules
link |
And the details of why he formed that view is not,
link |
well, they're clear to me,
link |
but there's an interesting story he keeps talking about.
link |
But I found this very exciting
link |
because I thought these structures,
link |
these little tubes which inhabit pretty well all cells,
link |
it's not just neurons,
link |
apart from red blood cells,
link |
they inhabit pretty well all the other cells in the body.
link |
But they're not all the same kind.
link |
You get different kinds of microtubules.
link |
And the ones that excited me the most,
link |
this may still not be totally clear,
link |
but the ones that excited me most
link |
were the only ones that I knew about at the time
link |
because they're very, very symmetrical structures.
link |
And I had reason to believe
link |
that these very symmetrical structures
link |
would be much better at preserving a quantum state,
link |
quantum coherence, preserving the thing without,
link |
you just need to preserve certain degrees of freedom
link |
without them leaking into the environment.
link |
Once they leak into the environment, you're lost.
link |
So you've got to preserve these quantum states at a level
link |
which the state reduction process comes in
link |
and that's where I think the noncomputability comes in
link |
and it's the measurement process in quantum mechanics,
link |
So something about the measurement process
link |
and what's going on,
link |
something about the structure of the microtubules,
link |
your intuition says maybe there's something here,
link |
maybe this kind of structure allows
link |
for the mystery of the quantum mechanics.
link |
There was a much better chance, yes.
link |
It just struck me that partly it was the symmetry
link |
because there is a feature of symmetry
link |
you can preserve quantum coherence
link |
much better with symmetrical structures.
link |
There's a good reason for that.
link |
And that impressed me a lot.
link |
I didn't know the difference between the A lattice
link |
and B lattice at that time, which could be important.
link |
Now that could even, see, which isn't talked about much.
link |
But that's some, in some sense, details.
link |
We've got to take a step back just to say
link |
in case people are not familiar.
link |
So this was called the orchestrated objective reduction
link |
idea or ORCOR, which is a biological philosophy of mind
link |
that postulates that consciousness originates
link |
at the quantum level inside neurons.
link |
So that has to do with your search for where,
link |
where is it coming from?
link |
So that's counter to the notion that consciousness
link |
may arise from the computation performed by the synapses.
link |
Yes, I think the key point.
link |
Sometimes people say it's because it's quantum mechanical.
link |
It's not just that.
link |
See, it's more outrageous than that.
link |
You see, this is one reason I think
link |
we're so far off from it,
link |
because we don't even know the physics right.
link |
You see, it's not just quantum mechanics.
link |
People say, oh, you know, quantum systems
link |
and biological structures.
link |
No, will you starting to see that
link |
some basic biological systems does depend on quantum.
link |
I mean, look, in the first place,
link |
all of chemistry is quantum mechanics.
link |
People got used to that, so they don't count that.
link |
So he said, let's not count quantum chemistry.
link |
We sort of got the hang of that, I think.
link |
But you have quantum effects,
link |
which are not just chemical, in photosynthesis.
link |
And this is one of the striking things
link |
in the last several years,
link |
that photosynthesis seems to be a basically quantum process,
link |
which is not simply chemical.
link |
It's using quantum mechanics in a very basic way.
link |
So you could start saying, oh, well,
link |
if photosynthesis is based on quantum mechanics,
link |
why not behavior of neurons and things like that?
link |
Maybe there's something
link |
which is a bit like photosynthesis in that respect.
link |
But what I'm saying is even more outrageous than that,
link |
because those things are talking
link |
about conventional quantum mechanics.
link |
Now, my argument says that conventional quantum mechanics,
link |
if you're just following the Schrodinger equation,
link |
that's still computable.
link |
So you've got to go beyond that.
link |
So you've got to go to where
link |
quantum mechanics goes wrong in a certain sense.
link |
You have to be a little bit careful about that,
link |
because the way people do quantum mechanics
link |
is a sort of mixture of two different processes.
link |
One of them is the Schrodinger equation,
link |
which is an equation Schrodinger wrote down,
link |
and it tells you how the state of a system evolves.
link |
And it evolves according to this equation,
link |
completely deterministic,
link |
but it evolves into ridiculous situations.
link |
And this was what Schrodinger
link |
was very much pointing out with his cat.
link |
He said, you follow my equation,
link |
that's Schrodinger's equation,
link |
and you could say that you have to get a cat,
link |
a cat which is dead and alive at the same time.
link |
That would be the evolution of the Schrodinger equation,
link |
would lead to a state, which is the cat being dead
link |
and alive at the same time.
link |
And he's more or less saying, this is an absurdity.
link |
People nowadays say, oh, well, Schrodinger said
link |
you can have a cat which is dead, that's not that.
link |
You see, he was saying, this is an absurdity.
link |
There's something missing.
link |
And that the reduction of the state
link |
or the collapse of the wave function or whatever it is,
link |
is something which has to be understood.
link |
It's not following the Schrodinger equation.
link |
It's not the way we conventionally do quantum mechanics.
link |
There's something more than that.
link |
And it's easy to quote authority here because Einstein,
link |
at least three of the greatest physicists
link |
of 20th century who were very fundamental
link |
in developing quantum mechanics,
link |
Einstein, one of them, Schrodinger, another,
link |
You have to look carefully at Dirac's writing
link |
because he didn't tend to say this out loud too much
link |
because he was very cautious about what he said.
link |
You find the right place and you see he says
link |
quantum mechanics is a provisional theory.
link |
We need something which explains
link |
the collapse of the wave function.
link |
We need to go beyond the theory we have now.
link |
I happen to be one of the kinds of people,
link |
there are many, there is a whole group of people,
link |
they're all considered to be a bit mavericks,
link |
who believe that quantum mechanics needs to be modified.
link |
There's a small minority of those people,
link |
which are already a minority,
link |
who think that the way in which it's modified
link |
has to be with gravity.
link |
And there is an even smaller minority of those people
link |
who think it's the particular way that I think it is.
link |
So those are the quantum gravity folks.
link |
You see, quantum gravity is already not this.
link |
Because when you say quantum gravity,
link |
what you really mean is quantum mechanics
link |
applied to gravitational theory.
link |
So you say, let's take this wonderful formalism
link |
of quantum mechanics and make gravity fit into it.
link |
So that is what quantum gravity is meant to be.
link |
Now I'm saying you've got to be more even handed
link |
that gravity affects the structure of quantum mechanics too.
link |
It's not just you quantize gravity,
link |
you've got to gravitate quantum mechanics.
link |
And it's a two way thing.
link |
But then when do you even get started?
link |
So that you're saying that we have to figure out
link |
a totally new ideas in there.
link |
You don't have a theory.
link |
That's the trouble.
link |
So this is a big problem.
link |
If you say, okay, well, what's the theory?
link |
So maybe in the very early days, sort of...
link |
It is in the very early days.
link |
But just making this point.
link |
You see, Stuart Hammeroff tends to be,
link |
oh, Penrose says that it's got to be a reduction
link |
of the state and so on, so let's use it.
link |
The trouble is Penrose doesn't say that.
link |
Penrose says, well, I think that we have no experiments
link |
as yet, which shows that.
link |
There are experiments which are being thought through
link |
and which I'm hoping will be performed.
link |
There is an experiment which is being developed
link |
by Dirk Baumeister, who I've known for a long time,
link |
who shares his time between Leiden in the Netherlands
link |
and Santa Barbara in the US.
link |
And he's been working on an experiment
link |
which could perhaps demonstrate that quantum mechanics,
link |
as we now understand it, if you don't bring in
link |
the gravitational effects, it has to be modified.
link |
And then there's also experiments that are underway
link |
that kind of look at the microtubule side of things
link |
to see if there's, in the biology,
link |
you could see something like that.
link |
Could you briefly mention it?
link |
Because that's really sort of one of the only
link |
experimental attempts in the very early days
link |
of even thinking about consciousness.
link |
I think there's a very serious area here,
link |
which is what Stuart Hammeroff is doing,
link |
and I think it's very important.
link |
One of the few places that you can really get
link |
a bit of a handle on what consciousness is
link |
is what turns it off.
link |
And when you're thinking about general anesthetics,
link |
it's very specific.
link |
These things turn consciousness off.
link |
What the hell do they do?
link |
Well, Stuart and a number of people who work with him
link |
and others happen to believe that the general anesthetics
link |
directly affect microtubules.
link |
And there is some evidence for this.
link |
I don't know how strong it is
link |
and how watertight the case is,
link |
but I think there is some evidence pointing
link |
in that kind of direction.
link |
It's not just an ordinary chemical process.
link |
There's something quite different about it.
link |
And one of the main candidates
link |
is that these anesthetic gases
link |
do affect directly microtubules.
link |
And how strong that evidence is,
link |
I wouldn't be in a position to say,
link |
but I think there is fairly impressive evidence.
link |
And the point is the experiments are being undertaken,
link |
I mean, that is experimental.
link |
You see, so it's a very clear direction
link |
where you can think of experiments
link |
which could indicate whether or not
link |
it's really microtubules which the anesthetic gases
link |
That's really exciting.
link |
One of the sad things is as far as I'm,
link |
from my outside perspective,
link |
is not many people are working on this.
link |
So there's a very, like with Stuart,
link |
it feels like there's very few people
link |
are carrying the flag forward on this.
link |
I think it's not many in the sense it's a minority,
link |
but it's not zero anymore.
link |
You see, when Stuart and I were originally taught by us,
link |
we were just us and a few of our friends,
link |
there weren't many people taking it,
link |
but it's grown into one of the main viewpoints.
link |
There might be about four or five or six different
link |
views which people hold,
link |
and it's one of them.
link |
So it's considered as one of the possible
link |
lines of thinking, yes.
link |
You describe physics theories
link |
as falling into one of three categories,
link |
the superb, the useful, or the tentative.
link |
I like those words.
link |
It's a beautiful categorization.
link |
Do you think we'll ever have a superb theory
link |
of intelligence and of consciousness?
link |
We're a long way from it.
link |
I don't think we're even,
link |
whether we're in the tentative scale.
link |
You don't think we've even entered the realm of tentative?
link |
Yeah, that's right.
link |
Now, when you see this, it's so controversial.
link |
We don't have a clear view
link |
which is accepted by a majority.
link |
I mean, you see, yeah, people,
link |
most views are computational in one form or another.
link |
They think it's some, but it's not very clear,
link |
because even the IIT people who
link |
think of them as computational,
link |
but I've heard them say,
link |
no, consciousness is supposed to be not computational.
link |
I say, well, if it's not computational,
link |
what in the hell is it?
link |
What physical processes are going on which are that?
link |
What does it mean for something to be computational then?
link |
Well, there has to be a process which is...
link |
You see, it's very curious
link |
the way the history has developed in quantum mechanics,
link |
because very early on,
link |
people thought there was something to do with consciousness,
link |
but it was almost the other way around.
link |
You see, you have to say the Schrodinger equation
link |
says all these different alternatives happen all at once,
link |
and then when is it that only one of them happens?
link |
Well, one of the views, which was quite commonly held
link |
by a few distinguished quantum physicists,
link |
that's when a conscious being looks at the system
link |
or becomes aware of it,
link |
and at that point, it becomes one or the other.
link |
That's a role where consciousness
link |
is somehow actively reducing the state.
link |
My view is almost the exact opposite of that.
link |
It's the state reduces itself in some way which...
link |
Some noncomputational way which we don't understand,
link |
we don't have a proper theory of,
link |
and that is the building block of what consciousness is.
link |
So consciousness is the other way around.
link |
It depends on that choice which nature makes all the time
link |
when the state becomes one or the other
link |
rather than the superposition of one and the other,
link |
and when that happens, there is what we're saying now,
link |
an element of proto consciousness takes place.
link |
Proto consciousness is, roughly speaking,
link |
the building block out of which
link |
actual consciousness is constructed.
link |
So you have these proto conscious elements,
link |
which are when the state decides
link |
to do one thing or the other,
link |
and that's the thing which when organized together,
link |
that's the OR part in ORCOR, but the ORC part,
link |
that's the OR part at least one can see
link |
where we're driving at a theory.
link |
You can say it's the quantum choice
link |
of going this way or that way,
link |
but the ORC part, which is the orchestration of this,
link |
is much more mysterious,
link |
and how does the brain somehow orchestrate
link |
all these individual OR processes
link |
into a genuine, genuine conscious experience?
link |
And it might be something that's beautifully simple,
link |
but we're completely in the dark about.
link |
Yeah, I think at the moment, that's the thing,
link |
you know, we happily put the word ORC down there
link |
to say orchestrated, but that's even more unclear
link |
what that really means.
link |
Just like the word material, orchestrated, who knows?
link |
And we've been dancing a little bit
link |
between the word intelligence
link |
or understanding and consciousness.
link |
Do you kind of see those as sitting
link |
in the same space of mystery as we discussed?
link |
Yes, well, you see, I tend to say
link |
you have understanding and intelligence and awareness,
link |
and somehow understanding is in the middle of it, you see.
link |
I like to say, could you say of an entity
link |
that is actually intelligent
link |
if it doesn't have the quality of understanding?
link |
Now, you see, I'm using terms I don't even know how to define,
link |
I'm just relating them.
link |
They're somewhat poetic, so if I somehow understand them.
link |
Yes, that's right, we don't, exactly.
link |
But they're not mathematical in nature.
link |
Yes, you see, as a mathematician,
link |
I don't know how to define any of them,
link |
but at least I can point to the connections.
link |
So the idea is intelligence is something
link |
which I believe needs understanding,
link |
otherwise you wouldn't say it's really intelligence.
link |
And understanding needs awareness,
link |
otherwise you wouldn't really say it's understanding.
link |
Do you say of an entity that understands something,
link |
unless it's really aware of it, you know, normal usage.
link |
So there's a three sort of awareness,
link |
understanding, and intelligence.
link |
And I just tend to concentrate on understanding
link |
because that's where I can say something.
link |
And that's the Gödel theorem, things like that.
link |
But what does it mean to be,
link |
perceive the color blue or something?
link |
I mean, I'm foggiest.
link |
It's a much more difficult question.
link |
I mean, is it the same if I see a color blue and you see it?
link |
If you're somebody with this condition,
link |
what's it called then?
link |
Or where you assign a sound to a color.
link |
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
link |
You get colors and sounds mixed up.
link |
And that sort of thing.
link |
I mean, an interesting subject.
link |
But from the physics perspective,
link |
from the fundamentals perspective, we don't.
link |
I think we're way off having much understanding
link |
what's going on there.
link |
In your 2010 book, Cycles of Time,
link |
you suggest that another universe may have existed
link |
before the Big Bang.
link |
Can you describe this idea?
link |
First of all, what is the Big Bang?
link |
Sounds like a funny word.
link |
And what may have been there before it?
link |
Just as a matter of terminology,
link |
I don't like to call it another universe.
link |
Because when you have another universe,
link |
you think of it kind of quite separate from us.
link |
But these things, they're not separate.
link |
Now the Big Bang, conventional theory.
link |
You see, I was actually brought up
link |
in the sense of when I started getting
link |
interested in cosmology,
link |
there was a thing called the Steady State Model,
link |
which was sort of philosophically very interesting.
link |
And there wasn't a Big Bang in that theory.
link |
But somehow, new material was created all the time
link |
in the form of hydrogen,
link |
and the universe kept on expanding, expanding, expanding,
link |
and there was room for more hydrogen.
link |
It was a rather philosophically nice picture.
link |
It was disproved when the Big Bang,
link |
well, when I say the Big Bang,
link |
this was theoretically discovered
link |
by people trying to solve Einstein's equations
link |
and apply it to cosmology.
link |
Einstein didn't like the idea.
link |
He liked a universe which was there all the time.
link |
And he had a model which was there all the time.
link |
But then there was this discovery,
link |
accidental discovery, very important discovery,
link |
of this microwave background.
link |
And if you, there's the crackle on your television screen
link |
which is already sensing this microwave background,
link |
which is coming at us from all directions.
link |
And you can trace it back and back and back and back.
link |
And it came from a very early stage of the universe.
link |
Well, it's part of the Big Bang theory.
link |
The Big Bang theory was when people tried
link |
to solve Einstein's equations.
link |
They really found you had to have this initial state
link |
where the universe, it used to be called
link |
the primordial atom and things like this.
link |
There's Friedman and Lemaitre.
link |
Friedman was a Russian, Lemaitre was a Belgian.
link |
And they independently, well, basically Friedman first.
link |
And Lemaitre talked about the initial state,
link |
which is a very, very concentrated initial state
link |
which seemed to be the origin of the universe.
link |
Primordial atom is what he called it, yes.
link |
And then it became, well, Fred Hoyle used the term
link |
Big Bang in a kind of derogatory sense.
link |
Just like with the Schrodinger and the cats, right?
link |
Yes, it's like sort of got picked up on
link |
whereas it wasn't his intention originally.
link |
But then the evidence piled up and piled up.
link |
And one of my friends and I learned a lot from him
link |
when I was in Cambridge was Dennis Sharma.
link |
He was a great proponent of steady state.
link |
And then he got converted.
link |
He said, no, I'm sorry.
link |
I had a great respect for him.
link |
He went around lecturing and said, I was wrong.
link |
The steady state model doesn't work.
link |
There was this Big Bang.
link |
And this microwave background that you see,
link |
okay, it's not actually quite the Big Bang.
link |
When I say not quite, it's about 380,000 years
link |
after the Big Bang, but that's what you see.
link |
But then you have to have had this Big Bang before it
link |
in order to make the equations work.
link |
And it works beautifully except for one little thing,
link |
which is this thing called inflation,
link |
which people had to put into it to make it work.
link |
When I first heard of it, I didn't like it at all.
link |
Inflation is that in the first,
link |
I'm gonna give you a very tiny number.
link |
Think of a second.
link |
That's not very long.
link |
Now I'm gonna give you a fraction of a second,
link |
one over a number.
link |
This number has 32 digits between,
link |
well, let's say between 36 and 32 digits.
link |
Tiny, tiny time between those two tiny,
link |
ridiculous seconds, fraction of a second,
link |
the universe was supposed to have expanded
link |
in this exponential way, an enormous way.
link |
For no apparent reason, you had to invent
link |
a particular thing called the inflaton field
link |
And I thought this is completely crazy.
link |
There are reasons why people stuck with this idea.
link |
You see, the thing is that I formed my model
link |
for reasons which are very fundamental, if you like.
link |
It has to do with this very fundamental principle,
link |
which is known as the second law of thermodynamics.
link |
The second law of thermodynamics says more or less,
link |
things get more and more random as time goes on.
link |
Now, another way of saying exactly the same thing
link |
is things get less and less random.
link |
As things go back, as you go back in time,
link |
they get less and less random.
link |
They go back and back and back and back.
link |
And the earliest thing you can directly see
link |
is this microwave background.
link |
What's one of the most striking features of it
link |
is that it's random.
link |
It has this, what you call this spectrum of,
link |
which is what's called the Planck spectrum,
link |
of frequencies, different intensities
link |
for different frequencies.
link |
And it's this wonderful curve due to Max Planck.
link |
And what's it telling you?
link |
It's telling you that the entropy is at a maximum.
link |
Started off at a maximum and it's going up ever since.
link |
I call that the mammoth in the room.
link |
I mean, it's a paradox.
link |
A mammoth, yeah, it is.
link |
And so people, why don't cosmologists worry about this?
link |
So I worried about it.
link |
And then I thought, well, it's not really a paradox
link |
because you're looking at matter and radiation
link |
at a maximum entropy state.
link |
What you're not seeing directly in that is the gravitation.
link |
It's gravitation, which is not thermalized.
link |
The gravitation was very, very low entropy.
link |
And it's low entropy by the uniformity.
link |
And you see that in the microwave too.
link |
It's very uniform over the whole sky.
link |
I'm compressing a long story
link |
into a very short few sentences.
link |
And doing a great job, yeah.
link |
So what I'm saying is that there's a huge puzzle.
link |
Why was gravity in this very low entropy state,
link |
very highly organized state, everything else was all random?
link |
And that to me was the biggest problem in cosmology.
link |
The biggest problem, nobody seems to even worry about it.
link |
People say they solved all the problems
link |
and they don't even worry about it.
link |
They think inflation solves it.
link |
It doesn't, it can't.
link |
Because it's just that...
link |
Just to clarify, that was your problem
link |
with the inflation describing some aspect
link |
of the moments right after the Big Bang?
link |
Inflation is supposed to stretch it out
link |
and make it all uniform, you see.
link |
It doesn't do it because it can only do it
link |
if it's uniform already at the beginning.
link |
It's, you just have to look at,
link |
I can't go into the details, but it doesn't solve it.
link |
And it was completely clear to me it doesn't solve it.
link |
But where does the conformal cyclic cosmology
link |
of starting to talk about something before
link |
that singular and the Big Bang?
link |
I was just thinking to myself,
link |
how boring this universe is going to be.
link |
You've got this exponential expansion.
link |
This was discovered early in the,
link |
in this century, 21st century.
link |
People discovered that these supernova exploding stars
link |
showed that the universe is actually undergoing
link |
this exponential expansion.
link |
So it's a self similar expansion.
link |
And it seems to be a feature of this term
link |
that Einstein introduced into his cosmology
link |
for the wrong reason.
link |
He wanted a universe that was static.
link |
He put this new term into his cosmology.
link |
To make it make sense,
link |
it's called the cosmological constant.
link |
And then when he got convinced
link |
that the universe had a Big Bang,
link |
he retracted it complaining this was his greatest blunder.
link |
The trouble is it wasn't a blunder.
link |
It was actually right, very ironic.
link |
And so the universe seems to be behaving
link |
with this cosmological constant.
link |
Okay, so this universe is expanding and expanding.
link |
What's going to happen in the future?
link |
Well, it gets more and more boring for a while.
link |
What's the most interesting thing in the universe?
link |
Well, there's black holes.
link |
The black holes more or less gulp down
link |
entire clusters of galaxies.
link |
The cluster, it'll swallow up most of our galaxy.
link |
We will run into our Andromeda galaxy's black hole.
link |
That black hole will swallow our one.
link |
They'll get bigger and bigger
link |
and they'll basically swallow up
link |
the whole cluster of galaxies, gulp it all down.
link |
Pretty well all, most of it, maybe not all, most of it.
link |
Okay, then that'll happen to,
link |
there'll be just these black holes around.
link |
Pretty boring, but still not as boring as it's gonna get.
link |
It's gonna get more boring because these black holes,
link |
you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait
link |
an unbelievable length of time
link |
and Hawking's black hole evaporation starts to come in.
link |
And the black holes, you just, it's incredibly tedious.
link |
Finally evaporate away.
link |
Each one goes away, disappears with a pop at the end.
link |
What could be more boring?
link |
It was boring then, now this is really boring.
link |
There's nothing, not even black holes.
link |
Universe gets colder and colder and colder and colder.
link |
And I thought, this is very, very boring.
link |
Now that's not science, is it?
link |
But it's emotional.
link |
So I thought, who's gonna be bored by this universe?
link |
Not us, we won't be around.
link |
It'll be mostly photons running around.
link |
And what the photons do, they don't get bored
link |
because it's part of relativity, you see.
link |
It's not really that they don't experience anything.
link |
That's not the point.
link |
Photons get right out to infinity
link |
without experience any time.
link |
It's the way relativity works.
link |
And this was part of what I used to do in my old days
link |
when I was looking at gravitational radiation
link |
and how things behaved to infinity.
link |
Infinity is just like another place.
link |
You can squash it down.
link |
As long as you don't have any mass in the world,
link |
infinity is just another place.
link |
The photons get there, the gravitons get there.
link |
They've run into infinity.
link |
They say, well, now I'm here, what do I?
link |
There's something on the other side, is there?
link |
The usual view, it's just a mathematical notion.
link |
There's nothing on the other side.
link |
That's just the boundary of it.
link |
A nice example is this beautiful series of pictures
link |
by the Dutch artist MC Escher.
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You may know them.
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The one's called Circle Limits.
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They're a very famous one with the angels and the devils.
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And you can see them crowding and crowding
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and crowding up to the edge.
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Now, the kind of geometry that these angels and devils
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inhabit, that's their infinity.
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But from our perspective, infinity is just a place.
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I'm sorry, can you just take a brief pause?
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In just the words you're saying,
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infinity is just a place.
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So for the most part, infinity, sort of even just going back,
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infinity is a mathematical concept.
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I think this is one of the things...
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You think there's an actual physical manifest...
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In which way does infinity ever manifest itself
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in our physical universe?
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Well, it does in various places.
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You see, it's a thing that if you're not a mathematician,
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you think, oh, infinity, I can't think about that.
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Mathematicians think about affinity all the time.
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They get used to the idea and they just play around
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with different kinds of infinities
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and it becomes no problem.
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But you just have to take my word for it.
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Now, one of the things is,
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you see, you take a Euclidean geometry.
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Well, it just keeps on going and it goes out to infinity.
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Now, there's other kinds of geometry
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and this is what's called hyperbolic geometry.
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It's a bit like Euclidean geometry,
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it's a little bit different.
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It's like what Escher was trying to describe
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in his angels and devils.
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And he learned about this from Coxeter
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and he think that's a very nice thing.
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That's why I represent this infinity
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to this kind of geometry.
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So it's not quite Euclidean geometry,
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it's a bit like it,
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that the angels and the devils inhabit.
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And their infinity, by this nice transformation,
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you squash their infinity down
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so you can draw it as this nice circle boundary
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to their universe.
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Now, from our outside perspective,
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we can see their infinity as this boundary.
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Now, what I'm saying is that it's very like that.
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The infinity that we might experience
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like those angels and devils in their world
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can be thought of as a boundary.
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Now, I found this a very useful way
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of talking about radiation,
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gravitational radiation and things like that.
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It was a trick, mathematical trick.
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So now what I'm saying is that
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that mathematical trick becomes real.
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That somehow, the photons,
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they need to go somewhere
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because from their perspective,
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infinity is just another place.
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Now, this is a difficult idea to get your mind around.
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So that's one of the reasons cosmologists
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are finding a lot of trouble taking me seriously.
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But to me, it's not such a wild idea.
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What's on the other side of that infinity?
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You have to think, why am I allowed to think of this?
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Why am I allowed to think of this?
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Because photons don't have any mass.
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And we in physics have beautiful ways of measuring time.
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There are incredibly precise clocks,
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atomic and nuclear clocks, unbelievably precise.
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Why are they so precise?
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Because of the two most famous equations
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of 20th century physics.
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One of them is Einstein's E equals MC squared.
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What's that tell us?
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Energy and mass are equivalent.
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The other one is even older than that,
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still 20th century, only just.
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Max Planck, E equals h nu.
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Nu is a frequency,
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h is a constant, again, like C.
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Energy and frequency are equivalent.
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Put the two together,
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energy and mass are equivalent, Einstein.
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Energy and frequency are equivalent, Max Planck.
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Put the two together, mass and frequency are equivalent.
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Absolutely basic physical principle.
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If you have a massive entity, a massive particle,
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it is a clock with a very, very precise frequency.
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It's not, you can't directly use it,
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you have to scale it down.
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So your atomic and nuclear clocks,
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but that's the basic principle.
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You scale it down to something you can actually perceive.
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But it's the same principle.
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If you have mass, you have beautiful clocks.
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But the other side of that coin is,
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if you don't have mass, you don't have clocks.
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If you don't have clocks, you don't have rulers.
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You don't have scale.
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So you don't have space and time.
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You don't have a measure of the scale of space and time.
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Oh, scale of space and time.
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You do have the structure,
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what's called the conformal structure.
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You see, it's what the angels and devils have.
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If you look at the eye of the devil,
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no matter how close to the boundary it is,
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it has the same shape, but it has a different size.
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So you can scale up and you can scale down,
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but you mustn't change the shape.
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So it's basically the same idea,
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but applied to space time now.
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In the very remote future,
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you have things which don't measure the scale,
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but the shape, if you like, is still there.
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Now that's in the remote future.
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Now I'm gonna do the exact opposite.
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Now I'm gonna go way back into the Big Bang.
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Now as you get there, things get hotter and hotter,
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denser and denser.
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What's the universe dominated by?
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Particles moving around almost with the speed of light.
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When they get almost with the speed of light,
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okay, they begin to lose the mass too.
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So for completely opposite reason,
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they lose the sense of scale as well.
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So my crazy idea is the Big Bang and the remote future,
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they seem completely different.
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One is extremely dense, extremely hot.
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The other is very, very rarefied and very, very cold.
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But if you squash one down by this conformal scaling,
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you get the other.
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So although they look and feel very different,
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they're really almost the same.
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The remote future on the other side,
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I'm claiming is that where do the photons go?
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They go into the next Big Bang.
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You've got to get your mind around that crazy idea.
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Taking a step on the other side of the place
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So I'm saying the other side of our Big Bang,
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now I'm going back into the Big Bang.
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There was the remote future of a previous eon.
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And what I'm saying is that previous eon,
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there are signals coming through to us,
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which we can see and which we do see.
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And these are both signals,
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the two main signals are to do with black holes.
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One of them is the collisions between black holes.
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And as they spiral into each other,
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they release a lot of energy
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in the form of gravitational waves.
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Those gravitational waves get through
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in a certain form into the next eon.
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That's fascinating that there's some,
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I mean, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong,
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but that means that some information can travel
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That is fascinating.
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I mean, I've seen somewhere described
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sort of the discussion of the Fermi Paradox,
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you know, that if there's intelligent life.
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Being, you know, communication immediately takes you there.
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We have a paper, I have my colleague,
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Vahid Guzajan, who I worked with on these ideas for a while.
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We have a crazy paper on that, yes.
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Looking at the Fermi Paradox, yes.
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Right, so if the universe is just cycling
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over and over and over,
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punctuated by the, punctuated the singularity
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and then intelligent or any kind of intelligent systems
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can communicate through from eon to eon,
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why haven't we heard anything from our alien friends?
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Because we don't know how to look.
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That's fundamentally the reason, is we.
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I don't know, you see, it's speculation.
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I mean, the SETI program is a reasonable thing to do,
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but still speculation.
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It's trying to say, okay, maybe not too far away
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was a civilization which got there first, before us,
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early enough that they could send us signals,
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but how far away would you need to go before,
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I mean, I don't know, we have so little knowledge
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about that, we haven't seen any signals yet,
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but it's worth looking, it's worth looking.
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What I'm trying to say, here's another possible place
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where you might look.
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Now you're not looking at civilizations
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which got there first,
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you're looking at those civilizations
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which were so successful,
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probably a lot more successful than they're likely to be
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by the looks of things,
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which knew how to handle their own global warming
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or whatever it is and to get through it all
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and to live to a ripe old age in the sense of a civilization
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to the extent that they could harness signals
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that they could propagate through for some reason
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of their own desires, whatever we wouldn't know
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to other civilizations
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which might be able to pick up the signals.
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But what kind of signals would they be?
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I haven't the foggiest.
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Let me ask the question.
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What to you is the most beautiful idea
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in physics or mathematics or the art
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at the intersection of the two?
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I'm gonna have to say complex analysis.
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I might've said infinities.
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And one of the most single, most beautiful idea
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I think was the fact that you can have
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infinities of different sizes and so on.
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But that's in a way, I think complex analysis.
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It's got so much magic in it.
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It's a very simple idea.
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You take these, you take numbers,
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you take the integers and then you fill them up
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into the fractions and the real numbers.
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You imagine you're trying to measure a continuous line
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and then you think of how you can solve equations.
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Then what about X squared equals minus one?
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Well, there's no real number which has to satisfy that.
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So you have to think of, well, there's a number called I.
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You think you invent it.
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Well, in a certain sense, it's there already.
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But this number, when you add that square root
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of minus one to it,
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you have what's called the complex numbers.
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And they're an incredible system.
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If you like, you put one little thing in,
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you put square root of minus one in
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and you get how much benefit out of it.
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All sorts of things that you'd never imagined before.
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And it's that amazing, all hiding there
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in putting that square root of minus one in.
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I think that's the most magical thing I've seen
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in mathematics or physics.
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And it's in quantum mechanics.
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And in quantum mechanics.
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You see, it's there already.
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You might think, what's it doing there?
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Okay, just a nice beautiful piece of mathematics.
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And then suddenly we see, nope.
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It's the very crucial basis of quantum mechanics.
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It's there and the way the world works.
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So on the question of whether math
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is discovered or invented,
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it sounds like you may be suggesting
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that partially it's possible
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that math is indeed discovered.
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Oh, absolutely, yes.
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No, it's more like archeology than you might think.
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So let me ask the most ridiculous,
link |
maybe the most important question.
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What is the meaning of life?
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What gives your life fulfillment, purpose,
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happiness, and meaning?
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Why do you think we're here on this?
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Given all the big bang and the infinities of photons
link |
that we've talked about.
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All I would say, I think it's not a stupid question.
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I mean, there are some people, you know,
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many of my colleagues who are scientists,
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and they say, well, that's a stupid question,
link |
meaning, yeah, well, we're just here
link |
because things came together and produced life
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I think there's more to it.
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But what there is that's more to it,
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I have really much idea.
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And it might be somehow connected
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to the mechanisms of consciousness
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that we've been talking about, the mystery there.
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It's connected with all sorts of, yeah,
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I think these things are tied up in ways which are,
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you see, I tend to think the mystery of consciousness
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is tied up with the mystery of quantum mechanics
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and how it fits in with the classical world,
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and that's all to do with the mystery of complex numbers.
link |
And there are mysteries there
link |
which look like mathematical mysteries,
link |
but they seem to have a bearing
link |
on the way the physical world operates.
link |
We're scratching the surface.
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We have a long, huge way to go
link |
before we really understand that.
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And it's a beautiful idea that the depth,
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the mathematical depth could be discovered,
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and then there's tragedies of ghettos
link |
and completeness along the way
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that we'll have to somehow figure our ways around.
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So, Roger, it was a huge honor to talk to you.
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Thank you so much for your time today.
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It's been my pleasure.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation
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with Roger Penrose,
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and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
link |
Please consider supporting this podcast
link |
by getting ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash lexpod
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If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts,
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or simply connect with me on Twitter at lexfreedman.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom
link |
that Roger Penrose wrote in his book,
link |
The Emperor's New Mind.
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Beneath all this technicality is the feeling
link |
that it is indeed, quote unquote, obvious
link |
that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer,
link |
even though much of what is involved
link |
in mental activity might do so.
link |
This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see,
link |
though the child may later in life become browbeaten
link |
into believing that the obvious problems
link |
are quote unquote, non problems,
link |
to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning
link |
and clever choices of definition.
link |
Children sometimes see things clearly
link |
that are obscured in later life.
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We often forget the wonder that we felt as children
link |
when the cares of the quote unquote, real world
link |
had begun to settle on our shoulders.
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Children are not afraid to pose basic questions
link |
that may embarrass us as adults to ask.
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What happens to each of our streams of consciousness
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Where was it before we were born?
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Might we become or have been someone else?
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Why do we perceive it all?
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Why is there a universe here at all
link |
in which we can actually be?
link |
These are puzzles that tend to come
link |
with the awakenings of awareness in any of us
link |
and no doubt with the awakening of self awareness
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within whichever creature or other entity it first came.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.