back to indexIan Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion | Lex Fridman Podcast #112
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The following is a conversation with Ian Hutchinson, a nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT.
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He has made a number of important contributions in plasma physics, including the magnetic confinement of plasmas,
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seeking to enable fusion reactions, which happens to be the energy source of the stars,
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to be used for practical energy production. Current nuclear reactors, by the way, are based on fission, as we discuss.
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Ian has also written on the philosophy of science and the relationship between science and religion,
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arguing in particular against scientism, which is a negative description of the overreach of the scientific method to questions not amenable to it.
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On this latter topic, I recommend two of his books, his new one, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?,
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where he answers more than 200 questions on all aspects of God and science,
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and his earlier book on scientism called Monopolizing Knowledge.
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As you may have seen already, I work hard on having an open mind, always questioning my assumptions,
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and in general marvel at the immense mystery of everything around us and the limitations of at least my mind.
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I'm not religious myself in that I don't go to the synagogue, a church, a mosque,
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but I see the beautiful bond in the community that religion at its best can create.
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I also see, both in scientist and religious leaders, signs of arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, and a will to power.
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We're human. Whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, or atheist,
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this podcast is my humble attempt to explore a complicated human nature.
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What Stanislav Lem in his book Solaris called our own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers.
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I ask that you try to keep an open mind as well and be patient with the limitations of mind.
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Quick summary of the ads. Two new amazing sponsors, Sunbasket and Powerdot.
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And now here's my conversation with Ian Hutchinson.
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Maybe it'd be nice to draw a distinction between nuclear physics and plasma physics.
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What is the distinction?
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Nuclear physics is about the physics of the nucleus.
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And my department, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT,
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is very concerned about all the interactions and reactions and consequences of things that go on in the nucleus,
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including nuclear energy, fission energy, which is the nuclear energy that we have already,
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and fusion energy, which is the energy source of the sun and stars,
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which we don't quite know how to turn into practical energy for humankind at the moment.
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That's what my research has mostly been aimed at.
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But plasmas are essentially the fourth state of matter.
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So if you think about solid, liquid, gas, plasma is the fourth of those states of matter.
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And it's actually the state of matter which one reaches if one raises the temperature.
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So cold things, you know, like ice are solid.
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Liquids are hotter water.
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And if you heat water beyond 100 degrees Celsius, it becomes gas.
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Well, that's true of most substances.
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And plasma is a state of matter in which the electrons are unbound from the nuclei.
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So they become separate from the nuclei and can move separately.
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So we have positively charged nuclei and we have negatively charged electrons.
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The net is still electrically neutral.
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But a plasma conducts electricity, has all sorts of important properties that are associated
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with that separation.
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And that's what plasmas are all about.
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And the reason why my department is interested in plasma physics very strongly is because
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most things, well, for one thing, most things in the universe are plasma.
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The vast majority of matter in the universe is plasma.
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But most particularly, stars and the sun are plasmas because they're very hot.
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And it's only in very hot states that nuclear fusion reactions take place.
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And we want to understand how to implement those kind of phenomena on Earth.
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Maybe another distinction we want to try to get at is the difference between fission
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So you mentioned fusion is the kind of reaction happening in the sun.
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So what's fission and what's fusion?
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Well, fission is taking heavy elements like uranium and breaking them up.
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And it turns out that that process of breaking up heavy elements releases energy.
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What does it mean to be a heavy element?
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It means that there are many nuclear particles in the nucleus itself, neutrons and protons
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in the nucleus itself so that in the case of uranium, there are 92 protons in each nucleus
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and even more neutrons so that the total number of nucleons in the nucleus, nucleons is short
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for either a proton or a neutron, the total number might be 235, that's U235, or it might
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be 238, that's U238.
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So those are heavy elements.
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Light elements, by contrast, have very few nucleons, protons or neutrons in the nucleus.
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Hydrogen is the lightest nucleus.
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It has one proton.
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There are actually slightly heavier forms of hydrogen, isotopes.
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Deuterium has a proton and a neutron and tritium has a proton and two neutrons.
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So it has a total of three nucleons in the nucleus.
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While taking light elements like isotopes of hydrogen and not breaking them up but actually
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fusing them together, reacting them together to produce heavier elements, typically helium,
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which is helium is a nucleus which has two protons and two neutrons, that also releases
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energy and that or reactions like that, making heavier elements from lighter elements is
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what mostly powers the sun and stars.
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Both fusion and fission release approximately a million times more energy per unit mass
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than chemical reactions.
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So a chemical reaction means take hydrogen, take oxygen, react them together, let's say,
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and get water, that releases energy.
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The energy released in a chemical reaction like that or the burning of coal or on oil
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or whatever else is about a million times less per unit mass than what is released in
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nuclear reactions.
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So but it's hard to do.
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It requires very high energy of impact.
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And actually, it's very easy to understand why.
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And that is that those two nuclei, if they're both, let's say, hydrogen nuclei, one is,
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let's say, deuterium and the other is, let's say, tritium, they're both electrically charged.
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And they're positively charged, so they like charges repel.
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Everyone knows that, right?
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So basically, to get them close enough together to react, you have to overcome the repulsion,
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the electric repulsion of the two nuclei from one another.
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And you have to get them extremely close to one another in order for the nuclear forces
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to overtake the electrical forces and actually form a new nucleus.
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And so one requires very high energies of impact in order for reactions to take place.
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And those high energies of impact correspond to very high temperatures of random motion.
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So that's why you can do something like that in the sun.
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So we can build the sun.
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That's one way to do it.
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But on Earth, how do you create a fusion reaction?
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Nature's fusion reactors are indeed the stars, and they are very hot in the center.
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And they reach the point where they release more energy from those reactions than they
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lose by radiation and transport to the surface and so forth.
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And that's a state of ignition.
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And that's what we have to achieve to give net energy.
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That's like lighting a fire.
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If you have a bundle of sticks and you hold a match up to it and you see smoke coming
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from the sticks, but you take the match away and the sticks just fizzle out.
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That's not the reason they fizzled out is that, yes, they were burning, there was smoke
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coming from them, but they were not ignited.
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But if you are able to take the match away and they keep burning and they are generating
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enough heat to keep themselves hot and hence keep the reactions going, that's chemical
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But what we need to do, what the stars do in order to generate nuclear fusion energy
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is they are ignited.
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They are generated enough energy to keep themselves hot.
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And that's what we've got to do on Earth if we're going to make fusion work on Earth.
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But it's much harder to do on Earth than it is in a star because we need temperatures
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of order tens of millions of degrees Celsius in order for the reactions to go fast enough
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to generate enough energy to keep it going.
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And so if you've got something that's tens of millions of degrees Celsius and you want
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to keep it all together and keep the heat in long enough to have enough reactions taking
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place, you can't just put it in a bottle, plastic or glass, it would be gone in milliseconds.
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So you have to have some nonmaterial mechanism of confining the plasma.
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In the case of stars, that nonmaterial force is gravity.
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So gravity is what holds the star together, it's what holds the plasma in long enough
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for it to react and sustain itself by the fusion reactions.
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But on Earth, gravity is extremely weak.
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I mean, I don't mean to say we don't fall, yes, we fall.
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But the mutual gravitational attraction of small objects is very weak compared with the
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electrical repulsion or any other force that you can think about on Earth.
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And so we need a stronger force to keep the plasma together, to confine it.
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And the predominant attempt at making fusion work on Earth is to use magnetic fields to
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confine the plasma.
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And that's what I've worked on for much, essentially most of my career, is to understand how we
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can and how best we can confine these incredibly hot gases, plasmas, using magnetic fields
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with the ultimate objective of releasing fusion energy on Earth and generating electricity
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with it and powering our society with it.
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So on top of the magnetic fields, do you also need the plastic water bottle walls or is
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it purely magnetic fields?
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Well, actually what we do need walls, those walls must be kept away from the plasma because
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otherwise they'd be melted or the plasma must be kept away from them inside of them.
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But the main purpose of the walls is not to keep the plasma in, it's to keep the atmosphere
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So if we want to do it on Earth where there's air, we want the plasma to consist of hydrogen
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isotopes or other things, the things we're trying to react.
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And by the way, the density of those plasmas, at least in magnetic confinement fusion, is
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It's maybe a million times less than the density of air in this room.
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So in order for a fusion reactor like that to work, you have to keep all of the air out
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and just keep the plasma in.
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So yes, there are other things, but those are things that are relatively easy.
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I mean, making a vacuum these days is technologically quite straightforward.
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We know how to do that.
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What we don't quite know how to do is to make a confinement device that isolates the plasma
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well enough so that it's able to keep itself burning with its own reaction.
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So maybe can you talk about what a tokamak is?
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The Russian acronym from which the word tokamak is built just means toroidal magnetic chamber.
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So it's a toroidal chamber, a torus is a geometric shape which is like a doughnut with a hole
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And so it's the meat of the doughnut, that's the torus, and it's got a magnetic field.
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So that's really all tokamak means.
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But the particular configuration that is very widespread and is the sort of best prospect
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in the least in the near term for making fusion energy work is one in which there's a very
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strong magnetic field the long way around the doughnut, around the torus.
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So you've got to imagine that there's this doughnut shape with an embedded magnetic field
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just going round and round the long way.
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The big advantage of that is that plasma particles when they're in the presence of a magnetic
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field feel strong forces from the magnetic field and those forces make the particles
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gyrate around the direction of the magnetic field line.
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So basically the particles follow helical orbits following like a spring that's directed
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along the magnetic field.
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Well if you make the magnetic field go inside this toroidal chamber and just simply go round
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and round the chamber then because of this helical orbit the particles can't move fast
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across the magnetic field but they can move very quickly along the magnetic field.
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And if you have a magnetic field that doesn't leave the chamber it doesn't matter if they
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move along the magnetic field it doesn't mean they're going to exit the chamber.
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But if you just had a straight magnetic field for example coming from a Helmholtz coil or
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a bar magnet then you'd have to have ends that would come to the ends of the chamber
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somewhere and the particles would hit the ends and they would lose their energy.
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So that's why it's toroidal and that's why we have a strong magnetic field.
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It's providing a confinement against motion in the in the direction that would lead the
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particles to leave the chamber.
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It turns out that here we're getting a little bit technical but turns out that a toroidal
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field alone is not enough and so you need more fields to produce true true confinement
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of plasma and we get those by passing a current as well through the plasma itself.
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I can make sure it stays on track.
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Well that what that does is makes the field lines themselves into much bigger helices
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and that for reasons that are too complicated to explain that clinches the confinement of
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the particles at least in terms of their single particle orbits so they don't leave the chamber.
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So when the particles are flying along this this this donut the inside of the donut are
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they what's where's the generation of the energy coming from?
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Are they smashing into each other?
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Yeah eventually I mean in a fusion reactor there will be deuterons and tritons and they
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will be smashing in.
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They will be very hot there'll be a hundred million degrees Celsius or something so they're
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moving thermally with very large thermal energies in random directions and they will collide
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with one another and have fusion reactions.
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When those fusion reactions take place energy is released large amounts of energy is released
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in the form of particles.
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One of the particles that's released is an alpha particle which is also charged and it's
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also confined and that alpha particle stays in the in the in the donut and heats the other
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particles that are in that donut so it transfers its energy to those and they it keeps them
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There are there's some leaking of heat all the time a little bit of radiation some transport
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There's also a neutron released from that reaction the neutron carries out four fifths
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of the fusion energy and that will have to be captured in a blanket that surrounds the
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chamber in which we take the energy drive some kind of electrical generator from you
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know thermal thermal engine gas turbine or something like that and power the power.
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So where do we stand?
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Where do we stand?
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I'm getting this thing to be something that actually works that generates energy.
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Well there have been experiments that have generated net nuclear energies or nuclear
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powers in the vicinity of you know a few tens of megawatts for a few seconds.
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So that's you know 10 megajoules that's not much energy it's a few donuts worth of energy
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But we have studied how well tokamaks can find plasmas and so we now understand in rather
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great detail the way they work and we're able to predict what is going to be required in
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order to build a tokamak that becomes self sustaining that becomes essentially ignited
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or very so close to ignited that it doesn't matter.
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And at the moment at least if you use the modest magnetic field values still very strong
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but limited magnetic field values you have to build a very big device.
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And so we are at the moment worldwide fusion research is at the moment in the process of
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building a very big experiment that's located in the south of France.
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It's called ITER which means the way or just means the international tokamak experimental
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reactor if you like.
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And that experiment is designed to reach this burning plasma state and to generate about
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500 megawatts of fusion power for hundreds of seconds at a time.
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It'll still only be an experiment.
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It won't put electricity on the grid or anything like that.
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It's to figure out whether it works and what the remaining engineering challenges are.
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It's a scientific experiment.
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It won't be engineered to run round the clock and so on and so forth which ultimately one
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needs to do in order to make something that's practical for generating electricity.
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But it will be the first demonstration on earth of a controlled fusion reaction for
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you know long time periods.
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Is that exciting to you?
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It's been an objective that is in many ways motivated my entire career and the career
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of many people like me in the field.
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I have to admit though that one of the problems with ITER is that it's an extremely big and
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expensive and long time to build experiment and so it won't even come into operation until
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about 2025 even though it's been being built for 10 years and it was designed for 30 years
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And so that's actually one of the big disappointments of my career in a certain sense which is that
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we won't get to burning fusion reaction until well past the first operation of ITER and
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whether I'm alive or not I don't know but I certainly will be well and truly retired
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by the time that happens.
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And so when I realized maybe some years ago that that was going to be the case it was
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a discouragement to me let's put it like that.
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But if we can try to look maybe in a ridiculous kind of way look into a hundred years from
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now two hundred years five hundred years from now and we you know there's folks like Elon
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Musk trying to travel outside the solar system.
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I mean the amount of energy we need for some of the exciting things we want to do in this
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world if we look again hundred years from now seems to be a very large amount.
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So do you think fusion energy will eventually sometime into your retirement will be basically
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behind most of the things we do?
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Look I absolutely think that fusion research is completely justified.
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In fact we should be spending more time and effort on it than we currently do.
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But it isn't going to be a magic bullet that somehow solves all the problems of energy.
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By the way that's a generic statement you can make about any energy source in my view.
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I think it's a grave mistake to think that science of any sort is suddenly going to find
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a magic bullet for meeting all the energy needs of society or any of the other needs
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of society by the way.
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But and we can talk about that later.
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But fusion is very worthwhile and we should be doing it.
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And so my disappointment that I just expressed was in a certain sense of personal disappointment.
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I do think that fusion energy is a terrific challenge.
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It's very difficult to bring the energy source of the sun and stars down to earth.
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This does contrast in a certain sense with fission energy.
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By contrast fission energy efficient to build a fission reactor proved to be amazingly easy.
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You know we did it within a few years of discovering nuclear fission.
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People had figured out how to build a reactor and did so during the Second World War.
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Which is by the way fission is how the current nuclear power plants work.
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And so we have nuclear energy today because fission reactors are relatively easy to build.
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What's hard is getting the materials and that's just as well because if everyone could get
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those materials there would be weapons proliferation and so forth.
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But it wasn't all that long after even the discovery of nuclear fission that fission
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reactors were built and fission reactors of course operated before we had weapons.
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So I think nuclear power is obviously important to meet the energy challenges of our age.
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It is completely intrinsically completely CO2 emissions free.
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And in fact the wastes that come from nuclear power whether it's fission or fusion for that
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matter are so moderate in quantity that we shouldn't really be worried about them.
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I mean yes fission products are highly radioactive and we need to keep them away from people
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but there's so little of them it's that keeping them away from people is not particularly
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And so while people complain a lot about the drawbacks of fission energy I think most of
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those complaints are ill informed.
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We can talk about you know the challenges and the disasters if you like of fission reactors
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but I think fission in the near term offers a terrific opportunity for environmentally
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friendly energy which in the world as a whole is rapidly being taken advantage of.
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You know China and India and places like that are rapidly building fission plants.
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We're not rapidly building fission plants in the US although we are actually building
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two at the moment, two new ones.
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But we do still get 20 percent of our electricity from fission energy and we could get a lot
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So it's clean energy.
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So it's clean energy.
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Now again the concern is there's a very popular HBO show and just came out on Chernobyl.
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There's the Three Mile Island, there's Fukushima, that's the most recent disaster.
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So there's a kind of a concern of yeah I mean nuclear disasters.
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Is that, what do you make of that kind of concern especially if we look into the future
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of fission energy based reactors?
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Well first of all let me say one or two words about the contrast between fission and fusion
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and then we'll come on to the question of the disasters and so forth.
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Fission does have some drawbacks and they're largely to do with four main areas.
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One is do we have enough uranium or other fissile fuels to supply our energy needs for
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The answer to that is we know we have enough uranium to support fission energy worldwide
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for thousands of years but maybe not for millions of years okay.
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So that's resources.
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Secondly there are issues to do with wastes.
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Fission wastes are highly radioactive and some of them are volatile and so for example
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in Fukushima the problem was that some fraction of the fission wastes were volatilized and
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went out as a cloud and polluted areas with cesium 137, strontium 90 and things like that.
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So that's a challenge of fission.
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There's a problem of safety beyond that and that is that in fission it's hard to turn
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When you stop the nuclear reactions there is still a lot of heat being liberated from
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the fission products and that is actually what the problem was at Fukushima.
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The Fukushima reactors were shut down the moment that the earthquake took place and
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they were shut down safely.
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What then happened after that at Fukushima was you know there was this enormous tidal
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wave many tens of meters high that came through and destroyed the electricity grid feed to
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the Fukushima reactors and their cooling was then turned off and it was the after heat
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of the turned off reactors that eventually caused the problems that led to release.
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And so that's a safety concern and then finally there's a problem of proliferation and that
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is that fission reactors need fissile fuel and the technologies for producing and enriching
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and so forth the fuels can be used by bad actors to generate the materials needed for
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a nuclear weapon and that's a very serious concern.
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So those are the four problems.
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Fusion has major advantages in respect of all of those problems.
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It has more longer term fuel resources, it has far more benign waste issues, the radioactivity
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from fusion reactions is at least a hundred times less than it is from fission reactions.
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It has essentially none of this after heat problem because it doesn't produce fission
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products that are highly radioactive and generating their own heat when it's turned off.
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In fact the hard part of fusion is turning it on not turning it off.
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And finally you don't need the same fission technology to make fusion work and so it's
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got terrific advantages from the point of view of proliferation control.
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So those are the four main issues which make fusion seem attractive technologically because
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they address some of the problems of fission energy.
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I don't mean to say that fission energy is overwhelmingly problematic but clearly there
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have been catastrophes associated with fission reactors.
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Fukushima actually is I think in many ways are often overstated as a disaster because
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after all nobody was killed by the reactors essentially, zero.
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And that's in the context of a disaster and tsunami that killed between 15 and 20,000
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people instantane more or less instantaneously.
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So you know in the scale of risks one should take the view that in my estimation that fission
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energy came out of that looking pretty good.
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Of course that's not the popular conception.
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I mean with a lot of things that threaten our well being we seem to be very bad users
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We seem to be very scared of shock attacks and not at all scared of car accidents and
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this kind of miscalculation.
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And I think from everything I understand nuclear energy, fission based energy goes into that
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It's one of the safest, one of the cleanest forms of energy and yet the PR, whoever does
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the PR for nuclear energy has a hard job ahead of them at the moment.
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Well I think part of that is their association with nuclear weapons because when you say
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the word nuclear people don't instantly think about nuclear energy, they think about nuclear
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And so there is perhaps a natural tendency to do that.
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But yes I agree with you, people are very poor at estimating risks and they react emotionally
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not rationally in most of these situations.
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Can we talk about nuclear weapons just for a little bit?
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So fission is the kind of reaction that's central to the nuclear weapons we have today?
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That's what sets them off.
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That's what sets them off.
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So if we look at the hydrogen bomb maybe you can say how these different weapons work.
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So the earliest nuclear weapons, the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan etc. etc.
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were pure fission weapons.
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They used enriched uranium or plutonium and their energy is essentially entirely derived
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from fission reactions.
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But it was early realized that more energy was available if one could somehow combine
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a fission bomb with fusion reactions.
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Because the fusion reactions give more energy per unit mass than fission reactions.
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And this was called the super, you might have heard of the expression the super or more
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simply hydrogen bombs.
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Bombs which use isotopes of hydrogen and the fusion reactions associated with them.
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Like you said it's hard to turn on.
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It's hard to turn on because you need very high temperatures and you need confinement
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of that long enough for the reactions to take place.
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And so a bomb actually, a thermonuclear bomb or a hydrogen bomb has essentially a chemical
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implosion which then sets off a fission explosion which then sets off and compresses hydrogen
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isotopes and other things, which I don't know because I've never had a security clearance.
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So I can't betray any secrets about weapons because I've never been party to them because
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I know a lot about this problem I can guess.
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And sets off fusion reactions in the middle.
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So that's basically it's that sequence of things which produce these enormous multi
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megaton bombs that have very large yields.
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And so fusion alone can't get you there.
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It is actually possible to set off or to try to set off little fusion bombs alone without
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the surrounding fission explosion and that is what is called laser fusion.
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So another approach to fusion which actually is mostly researched in the weapons complex,
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the national labs and so forth because it's more associated with the technologies of weapons
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is inertial fusion.
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So if you decide instead of trying to make your plasma just sit there in this Taurus
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and in the tokamak and be controlled steady state with a magnetic field, if you're willing
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to accept that I'll just set off an explosion and then I'll gather the energy from that
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somehow I don't quite know how but let's not ask that question too much.
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Then it is possible to imagine generating fusion alone explosions and the way you do
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it is you take some small amount of deuterium tritium fuel you bombard it with energy from
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all sides and this is what the lasers are used for extremely powerful at lasers which
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compresses the pellet of fusion and heats it.
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It compresses it to such a high density and temperature that the reactions take place
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very very quickly and in fact they can take place so quickly that it's all over with before
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the thing flies apart.
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Heated up really fast.
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That is inertial fusion okay.
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Is that useful for energy generation for outside?
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Not yet I mean there are those people who think it will be but you may have heard of
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the big experiment called the National Ignition Facility which was built at Livermore starting
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in the late 1990s and has been in operation since around about 2010.
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It was designed with the claim that it would reach ignition fusion ignition in this pulsed
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form where the reactions have got over with so quickly before the thing whole thing flies
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It didn't actually reach ignition and it doesn't look as if it will although you know we never
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know maybe people figure out how to make it work better.
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But the answer is in principle it seems possible to reach ignition in this way maybe not with
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that particular laser facility.
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Are you surprised that we humans haven't destroyed ourselves given that we've invented such powerful
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tools of destruction?
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Like what do you make of the fact that for many decades we've had nuclear weapons now
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speaking about estimating risk at least to me it's exceptionally surprising I was born
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in the Soviet Union that big egos of the big leaders when rubbing up against each other
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have not created the kind of destruction everybody was afraid of for decades.
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Well I must say I'm extremely thankful that it hasn't I don't know whether I'm surprised
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about it I've never thought about it and from the point of view of is it surprising that
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we've we've avoided it I'm just very thankful that we have I think that there is a sense
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in which cooler heads have prevailed at crucial moments I think there is also a sense in which
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you know mutually assured destruction has in fact worked as a policy to restrain the
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great powers from going to war and in fact you know the the the fact that we haven't
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had a world war you know since the 1940s is perhaps even attributable to nuclear weapons
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in a kind of strange and peculiar way but I think humans are deeply flawed and sinful
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people and I certainly don't feel that we're guaranteed that it's going to go on like this.
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And we'll talk about the sort of the biggest picture view of it all but let me just ask
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in terms of your worries of if we look a hundred years from now we're in the middle of what
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is now a natural pandemic that from the looks of it as fortunately as not as bad as it could
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possibly been if you look at the Spanish flu if you look at the history of pandemics if
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you look at all the possible pandemics that could have been that folks like Bill Gates
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are exceptionally terrified about we've I know many people are suffering but it's better
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than it could have been so and now we're talking about nuclear weapons in terms of existential
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threats to us as sinful humans what worries you the most is it nuclear weapons is is it
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natural pandemics engineered pandemics nanotechnology in my field of artificial intelligence some
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people are afraid of killer robots and robots yeah is there do you think in those existential
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terms and do any aspect to any of those things were you I am certainly not confident that
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my children and grandchildren will experience the benefits of civilization that I have enjoyed
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I think it's possible for our civilizations to break down catastrophically I also think
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that it's possible for our civilizations to break down progressively and I think they
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will if we continue to have the explosion of population on the planet that we currently
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have I mean it's it's quite it's quite wrong to think of our problems as mostly being co2
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if we can just solve co2 then we can go on having this you know continually expanding
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economy everywhere in the world of course you can't do that okay I mean there is a finite
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you know bearing capacity of our planet on the resources of our planet on the resources
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of our planet and and we can't continue to do that so I think there are lots of technical
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reasons why a continually expanding economy and and and civilization is impossible and
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therefore actually I'm as much nervous about the fact that our population is eight billion
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or something right now worldwide as I am about the fact that you know a few million people
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would be would be killed by COVID 19 I mean I don't want to be callous about this but
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from the big picture it seems like that's much more of a problem over population people
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not dying is ultimately more of a problem than people dying so you know that probably
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sounds incredibly callous to your listeners but I think it's simply you know a sober assessment
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of the situation is there is there ways from the way those eight billion or seven billion
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or whatever the number is live that could make it sustainable you know because you've
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kind of implied there's a kind of we have especially in the West this kind of capitalist
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view of really consuming a lot of resources is there a way to like if you could change
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one thing or a few things what would you change to make this life make it more likely that
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your grandchildren have a better life than you well okay so let's talk a bit about energy
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because that's something I know a lot a lot about having thought about it most of my career
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in order to reach steady state co2 level okay that's acceptable in terms of global climate
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change and so on and so forth we need to reduce our carbon emissions by at least a factor
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of ten worldwide okay what's more you know the average energy consumption and hence co2
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emission of people in the world is less than a tenth of what we per capita of them what
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we have in the West in America and Europe and so forth so if you have in mind some utopia
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in the future where we've reached a sustainable use of energy and we've also reached a situation
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in which there is far less inequity in the world in the sense that people have share
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the energy resources more uniformly then what that is equivalent to would be to reduce the
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co2 emissions in Western economies not by a factor of ten but by a factor of a hundred
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in other words has to go down to one percent of what it is now okay so you know when people
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talk about you know let's use natural gas because you know maybe it only uses sixty
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percent of the energy of coal it's complete nonsense that's not not even scratching the
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surface of what we would need to do so you know is that going to be feasible I very much
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doubt it and therefore I actually doubt that we can reach a level of energy of fossil energy
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use that is one percent of the current use in the West without totally dramatic changes
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either in you know our society our use of of energy and so forth which actually of course
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is much of that energy is used for producing food and so on and so forth so it's actually
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not so obvious that we can we can get we can cut down our energy usage by that factor or
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we've got to reduce the human population so you run up against that number that's increasing
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still and you don't think that could be it's not it's not that it's not it's not depressing
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it's it's difficult like many truths are do you have a hope that there could be a technological
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solution in short no there is no technological solution to for example for population control
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I mean we have the technology just you know to prevent ourselves bearing children that's
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not a problem technology is in okay solved the challenge is society the challenge is
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human choices the challenge is almost entirely human and sociological not technology not
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technology and when people thought talk about energy they thought they think that there's
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some kind of technological magic bullet for this but there isn't okay and and there isn't
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for the reasons I just mentioned not because it's obvious there isn't but actually there
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isn't and and in in any case that it's true of energy it's true of pollution it's true
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of human population it's true of most of the big challenges in our society are not scientific
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or technological challenges they're human sociological challenges and that's why I think
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it's a terrible mistake even for folks like me who work at you know well the high temple
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of science and technology in in America and maybe in the galaxy yeah I mean you know it's
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it's MIT it's at MIT best university in the world it's it's a terrible mistake if we give
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the impression that technology is going to solve it all technology will make tremendous
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contributions and I think it's it's worth working on it but it's a disaster if you think
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it's going to solve all of our problems and and actually you know I've written a whole
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book about the question of of scientism and the and the over emphasis on science both
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as a way of of solving problems through technology but also as a way of gaining knowledge I think
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it's not all the knowledge there is either yeah I think that book and your journey there
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is fascinating so maybe you can go there can can you tell me about your on a personal side
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your the personal journey of your faith of Christianity and your relationship with with
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God with religion in general yeah in my in my latest book Can a Scientist Believe in
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Miracles I I give a first I devote most of the first chapter to telling how how I became
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a Christian why I became a Christian I I didn't grow up as a Christian which is fascinating
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I mean you didn't grow up as a Christian so you you've discovered the beauty of God and
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physics at the same time concurrent that's a very poetic way of putting it but yes I
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would accept that I became a Christian when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University
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I I had you know I had gone to a school in which there was religion kind of was part
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of the society there were prayers and at the at the at the daily you know gathering of
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the of the students of the assembly of the students but I but I didn't really believe
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it I just sort of went along with it and it wasn't particularly you know aggressive or
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benign you know benign it just sort of was there but I didn't believe it I didn't didn't
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make much sense to me but when I but I came across Christians from time to time and when
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I went to Cambridge University two of my closest friends turned out were Christians and I think
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it was that was the most important influence on me that that here were two people who were
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really smart like me I'm giving you my yeah my impressions the way I the way I felt at
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the time and and they thought Christianity made sense and and you know testified to its
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significance in their lives and so that was a very important influence on me and I and
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ultimately I mean the reason I I hadn't I hadn't I didn't see Christianity as some
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kind of great evil the way it's sometimes portrayed by the by the radical atheists of
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this century I mean I think that's nonsense but but but I so I think there were certain
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attractive things if you go to a university like Cambridge you know you're surrounded
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by by by Western culture you know from from about you know the 15th century onwards and
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that saturated with Christian art and architecture and so forth and so it's hard it's hard not
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to recognize that Christianity is in fact the foundation of Western society in Western
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culture most Western civilization so so I mean maybe I was in that sense favorably disposed
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towards Christianity as a religion but as a personal faith it didn't mean anything
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to me but I became convinced really of two things one is that the evidence for the resurrection
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of Jesus Christ is actually rather good I mean it's not a proof it's not kind of some
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some kind of scientific demonstrate or mathematical demonstration but it's actually extremely
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good it's not scientific evidence by and large it's historical evidence historical evidence
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yeah so that was one thing and the other thing that came to me when I was at Cambridge it
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became clear that Christianity ultimately is not you know some kind of moral theory
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or philosophy or something like that it is or elite or at least it claims to be a personal
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relationship with God which is made possible you know by what Jesus did and on the cross
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and his life and his teaching and and it's a personal call to a relationship with God
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and that had I'd never thought of it in those terms when I was you know when I was younger
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and that that thought became attractive to me I mean I think most people find the person
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of Christ and just teachings you know compelling insert in a certain sense what do you mean
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by personal do you mean personal for you like a relationship like it's a meditative
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like you specifically you Ian have a connection with God and and then the other side you say
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personal with the actual body the person of Jesus Christ so all of those things what do
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you mean by personal connection and why that was well so as I'm sorry for the stupid questions
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no it's okay no problem as a Christian I believe that I have a relationship with God which
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is best expressed by saying that it's personal and that comes about because you know Jesus
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through his acts has reconciled me with God me a sinner me someone full of sins of failings
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of ways in which I don't live up to even my own ideals let alone the ideals of a holy
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God have been reconciled to the creator of everything and and so Christians myself included
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believe that prayer is in a certain sense a connection with God and there are times
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when I have felt you know that God spoke to me I don't mean necessarily orally in words
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but showed me things or enlighten me or inspired me in ways that I I attribute to him so I
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see it as a as a two way you know relationship in a certain sense of course it's a very asymmetrical
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relationship but nevertheless Christians think that it's a two way it's a two way street
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we're not just talking into the air when we say we won't I'm going to pray for someone
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in this two way communication is there a way that you could try to describe on a podcast
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what is God what is God like in your view if you try to describe is it a force is it
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a set is it a for you intellectually is a set of metaphors that you use to reason about
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the world is it is it is it kind of a computer that does some computation that's the infinitely
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powerful computer or is it like Santa Claus a guy with a with a beard on the cloud like
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I don't mean I don't mean what God actually is I mean in your limited cognitive capacity
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as a human what do you actually what do you find helpful for thinking of what God actually
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looks like what is God well let me start by saying none of the above okay I mean clearly
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God in the Christian God the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob etc it is is not any of those
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things because all of those things you just mentioned are phenomena or or or entities
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in the created world and the most fundamental thing about monotheism as you know Abraham
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and Moses and so forth handed it down is that God is not an entity within the creation within
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the universe that God is the creator of it all and that's what Genesis first two chapters
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of Genesis is really about is it's not it's not about telling us you know how God created
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the world it's about telling us and telling the early Hebrews that God created the world
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okay and that therefore he is not you know simply an entity within it on the other hand
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you know our finite minds have a pretty hard time encompassing that so so one has to therefore
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work in terms of metaphors and images and and so forth and I think we would know very
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little about who God is if we if it was simply up if we were simply left to our own devices
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you know if if we were just you know here you are you're in the universe try to figure
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out who made it and and so forth well you know philosophers think they can do a little
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bit of that maybe and theologians think that they can do a little bit more but but Christians
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think that God has actually helped us along a lot by revealing himself and and we say
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that he's revealed himself supremely in the person of Jesus Christ and so you know when
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Jesus says to his disciples if you've seen me you've seen the Father then that is in
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a certain sense a watchword for answering this question for Christians it is that supremely
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if we want to help ourselves understand who God really is we look to Jesus we look to
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what he did we look to what he said and so forth and we believe that he is one with the
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Father and that's why we believe you know in the Trinity I mean it's basically because
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that revelation is extremely central to Christian belief and teaching so in that in that sense
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through Jesus there was a that's kind of a historical moment that's profound that's
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really powerful do you also think that God makes himself seen in less obvious ways in
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our world today absolutely absolutely I mean it's it's certainly been the outlook of Jews
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and Christians throughout history that God is seen in the creation that we when we look
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at the creation we see to some extent the wonder the majesty the might of the person
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or the entity but the person who created it and and that's a way in which scientists
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particularly have over over the ages and certainly over most of the last five centuries since
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the scientific revolution scientists have seen in a certain sense the hand of God in
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creation I mean this leads us perhaps to a different discussion but I mean it's it's
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remarkable to me how influential Christianity and religion in generally has been in science
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yeah most of the scientists through history as if you described I mean God has been a
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very big part of their life and their work certainly up until the at the beginning of
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the 20th century that was the case so maybe this is a good time to can you tell me what
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scientism is yeah I mean the short answer is that by scientism we mean we mean the
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belief that science is all the real knowledge there is that's a shorthand there are lots
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of different facets of it and what which one can explore and the book in which I explored
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it most most thoroughly was actually an earlier book called monopolizing knowledge and and
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the purpose of that title is to is to draw attention to the fact that in our society
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as a whole in particularly in the West today we we have grown so reliant on science that
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we that we tend to put aside other ways of getting to know things and so of course at
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MIT we are focused on science and we do focus on it very much but the truth is that there
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are many ways of getting to know things in our world know things reliably in our world
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and a lot of them are not science so scientism in my view is a terrible intellectual error
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it's to believe it's the belief that somehow the methods of science as we develop them
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with you know experiments and in the end they it relies particularly upon reproducibility
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in the world and on a kind of clarity that comes from measurements and mathematics and
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related types of of skills those powerful though they are for finding out about the
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world are not all the knowledge do not give us all the knowledge we we have and there's
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many other forms of knowledge and the illustration that I usually use to to try to help people
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to think about this is to say well look let's think about human history I mean to what extent
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can human history be discovered scientifically the answer is essentially can't because and
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the reason is because human history is not reproducible you can't do reproducible experiments
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or observations and and go back and you know try it over again it's it's a one off thing
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you know the history is full of unique events and and so you you know you you can't hope
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to do history using the methods of science yeah I mean in some sense history is a story
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of miracles I mean they don't have to do with God it's just uniqueness is anyway unique
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events unique events and that science doesn't like that because it's unique events by their
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very definition are not reproducible can I ask sort of a tricky question I don't even
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know what atheist or atheism is but is it possible for somebody to be an atheist and
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avoid slipping into scientism oh yeah absolutely I mean it I mean there these are two separate
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things okay I'm quite sure there are many people who don't believe in God and yet recognize
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that there are many different ways of we get knowledge you know some is history some is
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sociology economics politics philosophy art history language literature etc etc there
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are many people who recognize those disciplines as having their own approaches to epistemology
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and to get how we get knowledge and valuing them very highly I don't mean to say that
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everyone you know who's an atheist automatically you know subscribes to the scientistic viewpoint
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that's not true but it's certainly the case that many of the arguments in fact most of
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the arguments of the aggressive atheists of this century people are sometimes called new
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atheists although they're actually rather old most of their arguments are rather old
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you know are drawing heavily on scientism so when they say things like there's no evidence
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to support Christianity okay what they are really focusing on is to say is saying that
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Christianity isn't proved or the evidence for Christianity is not science okay science
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doesn't prove it and and you you know if you read their books that's what you find they
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really mean is science doesn't lead you necessarily to believe in a creator God or into it in
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any particular in religion I accept that that's not a problem to me because I don't think
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that science is all the knowledge there is and I think there are other important ways
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of getting to know things and one of them is historical for example and I mentioned
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earlier that I think I became persuaded and I were and I still am persuaded that the historical
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evidence for the resurrection is very is very persuasive again it's not proof or anything
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like that but it's but it's pretty good evidence okay yeah I've um I talked to Richard Dawkins
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on this podcast and um uh and uh I saw you debate with Sean Carroll so I I understand
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this world it makes it makes me very curious maybe uh let me ask sort of another way my
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own kind of uh world view maybe you can help as by way of therapy understand um you know
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because you've kind of said that there's other ways of knowing what about if we if if I kind
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of sit here and am cognizant of the fact that I almost don't know anything so sort of I'm
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sitting here almost paralyzed by the the mystery of it all and it's not even when you say there's
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other ways of knowing it um it feels almost too confident to me because uh yeah when I
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when I listen to beautiful music or uh see art there's something there that's and that's
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uh that's beyond the reach of scientism I would say so beyond the reach of uh the the
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tools of science but I don't even feel like that could be as an actual tool of knowing
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it um yeah I just don't even know where to begin because it just feels like we know so
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little like uh if we look even a hundred years from now when people look back to this time
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humans look back to this time they'll probably laugh at how little we knew even a hundred
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years from now and if we look at a thousand years from now hopefully we're still alive
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or some version of ourselves or AI version of ourselves you know they they'll certainly
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laugh at the absurdity of our beliefs so what do you uh so you don't seem to be as paralyzed
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by how little we know you confidently push on forward but what do you make of that sense
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of uh of just not knowing of the mystery we need to be modest or or humble if even about
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what we know I accept that and I certainly think that's true not not simply because in
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the future we'll know more science and and there will be more powerful ways of finding
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out about things but simply because you know sometimes we're not right we're wrong okay
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in what we think we know um uh so that's crucial but it's also a very Christian outlook that
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kind of humility is what Jesus taught so I so I don't know whether this was in the back
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of your mind when you were thinking about this but it's often the case that um people
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of religious faith are are accused of being dogmatists okay and there is a sense in which
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dogma teaching accepted teaching is is part of religions okay but I don't think that
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necessarily uh uh that leads one to blind dogmatism and I don't I certainly don't
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think that faith we can talk about this later if you'd like but I certainly don't think
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that faith means thinking you know something and not listening to counter arguments for
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example um so I I think that's crucial yeah what is uh what does faith mean to you what
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does it uh feel like what does it actually sort of how do you carry your faith in terms
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of the way you see the world well I think faith is very often misunderstood in our society
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at the moment um because uh it's often portrayed as being nothing other than uh believing things
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you know ain't true you know um or or believing things that are are are not proven okay um
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and um and this and faith does have a strand which is to do with you know basically believing
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in um in concepts or um propositions but actually the the word faith is much broader than that
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faith also means um you know trusting in something trusting in a person or trusting in a thing
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uh the reliability of some technology for example um that's equally part of the meaning
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of the word faith and and there's a third strand to the to the meaning of the word as
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well and that is loyalty um so you know I have faith in my wife and and I try to act
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in faith towards her and that's a kind of loyalty and so those three strands are the
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are the most important strands of the meaning of faith yes belief in uh in propositions
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that we might not have you know full proof about or maybe we have very little proof about
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but it's also trust and and loyalty and actually in the in terms of the Christian faith Christians
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are far more called to trust and loyalty than they are to belief in things they don't you
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know don't have proof of okay um but but the critics of religion generally um tend to emphasize
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the first one and say well you know you believe things for which you have no evidence okay
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that's what that's what they think faith is well yeah there there is a sense in which
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everybody has to live their lives uh believing or or or making decisions in situations when
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they don't have all the proof or evidence or knowledge that enables you to make a completely
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um rational or well informed or prudent decision we you know we do this all the time you know
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my drive down here I nearly took a wrong turning and I thought which which which way do I go
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do I keep going straight on and so my uh voice came out and I think go straight okay so so
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you have to make decisions and sometimes you know you don't have a navigation system telling
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you what to do you just have to make that decision with no with insufficient evidence
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and you're doing it all the time as a human and that's part of being sentient um and so
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that kind of um action and belief on the basis of incomplete evidence is not something that
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I feel uncomfortable doing or I feel that I feel that somehow my Christian commitments
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are forced me to do when I wouldn't have had to have done it otherwise I would have had
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to do it anyway um and and so you know there's a sense in which um I think it's important
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to see the breadth of meaning of faith and and and to recognize that in certainly in
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the case of Christianity um it's trust and loyalty that the the key themes that we're
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called to and I mean another interesting extension of that that you speak to is kind of loyalty
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is referring to a connection with something outside of yourself yeah um so I think you've
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spoken about like existentialism or even just atheism in general as um as leading naturally
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to an individualism as a focus on the on the self and uh ideas that maybe the Christian
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faith can um instill in you is um allowing you to sort of look outside of yourself so
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connection I mean loyalty fundamentally is about other beings um and yeah other beings
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and I mean I think I don't know what it is in me but I'm very much drawn to that idea
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and um I think humans in general are drawn to that idea you can you can make all kinds
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of evolutionary arguments all that kind of stuff but uh people always kind of tease me
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uh because I talk about love a lot and I mean there's a lot of uh non scientific things
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about love right like what the heck is that thing why why do we even need that thing it
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uh it seems to be an annoying burden that uh that we we get so much uh joy in in life
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from a connection with other human beings deep uh lasting connections with human beings
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same thing with loyalty why why do we get so much value and pleasure and strength and
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meaning from loyalty from a connection with somebody else uh going through uh thick and
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thin with somebody else going through some hard times I mean some of the you know the
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closest friends I I have is going through some some rough times together and that seems
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to make life deeply meaningful what is that so yeah um I that's that resonates with me
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and I obviously I would I would affirm it um I think just to just to correct the implication
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that you made I I don't think it's necessarily the the consequence of atheism uh that we
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that we lose track of those kinds of things I I mean I think that atheists can be loyal
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okay if you like um the question more often comes up in the context of you know where
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does morality come from and loyalty I think and duty are related to one another you know
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if we have loyalty to someone then we have a duty to them okay as well and I think that
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insofar as we see ourselves as having some kinds any kinds of duties or moral compulsions
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with respect to our relationships to other people it's I think it's a question that always
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arises well where does these where do these come from and there there are various approaches
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that people have towards deciding what makes ethics or or morality moral okay but I do
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think it's the case that um it's very hard to ground morality um in a in any kind of
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absolute way or a persuasive way um in mere human relationships and so it's certainly
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the case that in Christianity um there is a sense in which um morality and you know
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the morality of morals comes from a transcendent place from a transcendent deity and that we
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um that we ground are the compelling force of of morals on God are more than we do on
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individuals because after all you know if it if you if you've got nothing but you know
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other people why should you you know treat your neighbor well why shouldn't you defraud
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your neighbor if it's good for you well you know you can construct all kinds of arguments
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and some of them are you know obviously arguments that are commonplace in religion too you should
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do as you would be done by and all this kind of thing right but none of that seems any
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any more than mere pragmatism to most people okay and so that's what that's one of the
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things if that Nietzsche amongst others you know really identified you know if God is
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dead if the idea of God is grounding our moral behavior is no longer viable in the West which
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Nietzsche thought that it wasn't okay then what does ground it and he had no good answer
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for it in fact he claimed there was no answer but then he couldn't live with that and so
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he invented the idea of the ubermensch you know this this superior human being okay and
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this was a different way of trying to ground morality not a very successful one you know
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you could argue that it's a forerunner of the sort of racism of Hitler's regime and
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so forth that you know we've in the West thankfully shied away from in the in the past
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half or three quarters of a century but you know I think it is the case that Christianity
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gives me a basis for my moral beliefs that is more than mere pragmatism yeah but there
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is a stepping outside of all that there does seem to be a powerful stabilizing like we
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humans are able to hold ideas together like in a distributed way outside of whether God
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exists or not or any that just our ability to kind of converge together towards a set
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of beliefs into sometimes into tribes it's kind of I don't know if it's inherent to being
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human beings I hope not because now if I look on Twitter and there's a there's the red team
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and the blue team right it's almost like it's a care it's some kind of TV show that we're
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living in that people get into these tribes and they hold a set of beliefs that sometimes
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don't I mean they are beliefs for the sake of holding those beliefs and we get this intimate
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connection between each other for sharing those beliefs and we spoke to the things about
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loyalty and love and that's the thing that people feel inside the tribe and it seems
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very human that within that tribe those beliefs don't necessarily always have to be connected
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to anything it's just the fact that you know I've did sports my whole life whenever you're
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on a team the bond you get with it with other people on the team is incredible and the actual
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sport is often the silliest I mean I don't play ball sports anymore but the ball when
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I played like soccer or tennis I mean all those sports are silly right you're playing
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with a little ball but there's the bond you get is so deeply meaningful I just it's interesting
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to me on the sociological level that it's possible to me whatever the beliefs of religion
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is whatever they're actually grounded in they might be they might have a power in themselves
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I think there is tribalism everywhere and I think tribalism in the US at the moment
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is rather difficult to bear from my point of view and it's I think fed by the internet
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and social media and so forth but it's but historically tribalism has been a trait and
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remains a trait in humans the genius of Christianity is that it supersedes tribalism I mean yes
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when the Hebrews thought about Yahweh initially they thought about him as their tribal deity
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just like the tribal deities round about about them and so but and and yet from you know
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early on in Hebrew history the crucial thing that Yahweh came to mean or I would say revealed
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of himself to them was that he wasn't just a tribal deity he was the God that created
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the whole thing and if he is the God of the whole thing then he's not just the God of
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the Hebrews or in the case of you know Americans God is not just the God of Americans he's
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the God of everybody okay and that is a way in a way the most amazing transcending of
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tribal loyalties and one of the crucial you know occasions in the New Testament you know
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when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost you know the the apostles and the and the disciples
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speak in other tongues and there are people from all all the countries you know round
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about hear them in their own languages and so you know whether whether you take that
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as factual or not that is the a statement of the transcendent aspects of Christianity
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or the claimed transcendent aspects of Christianity that it transcends culture and that's certainly
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something which I find appealing.
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When I kind of touch on this topic in my own mind one of the hardest questions is as why
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is there suffering in the world do you have a good answer well I have I have some answers
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but you're right that it is one of the toughest questions the problem of pain or the problem
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of suffering or the problem of theodicy as as theologians call it is is is probably one
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of the toughest I think it's important to say that there are certain types of answers
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to this question but there are aspects of this question to which there is no intellectual
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answer that is going to satisfy and and the fact of the matter is you know when I'm speaking
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to an audience let's say at at at some kind of lecture I can be sure that there are people
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in that audience who are either personally suffering they've got illness they've got
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pains there maybe they're facing death or someone in their family is in similar sorts
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of situations so suffering is a reality and and there is nothing that I can say that is
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going to solve their feeling of agony and angst and and maybe despair in those types
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of situations there is really only one thing that I think humans can do for one another
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in those kinds of situations and that is simply to be there to be there alongside your friend
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or your or your colleague or or whoever you know family member or whoever it might be
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and that's the only really sense in which we can give comfort if we try to give intellectual
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solutions to these problems we're going to be like like the comforters that were in the
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book of Job in the in the Bible who who brought no comfort to Job himself with their intellectual
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answers but if they had been there and some of them were there they sat alongside that
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is some level of comfort and and after all that's the meaning of the word compassion
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it means to suffer alongside of somebody and I would say first off you know what does a
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Christian say about suffering the the first thing a Christian should say is compassion
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is all that really counts and what's more we say that God has acted in compassion towards
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us that is to say he has suffered with us in the person of Jesus Christ and when we
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see the passion of Jesus we recognize that God takes suffering deadly seriously has taken
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it so seriously that he's been willing to come and be a part of his creation in the
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person of of Jesus Christ and suffer death the most horrible death on the cross and for
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our benefit so that's one side of of suffering but the question you know the philosophical
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question remains you know surely if God is good you know and God is omnipotent benevolent
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you know why doesn't he take away all the suffering why doesn't he cause miracles to
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occur that will take away all this suffering I think there are some good answers to that
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question in the in the following sense that you know we live in a world where the consistency
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of the world is an absolutely crucial part of it you know the fact that our world behaves
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reproducibly in the main is absolutely essential for the integrity of our lives without it
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we wouldn't exist okay and so there is a sense in which the integrity of creation calls for
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there being consistent behavior which you know these days we think of as being the laws
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of nature okay and so the consistent behavior of nature is very very important it's what
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enables us to be what we are and if you're calling upon God in in in in your critique
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of why isn't this benevolent creator you know fixing things one answer is he's fixed things
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in a certain sense to have an integrity in them and that integrity is the best thing
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it's the way we have our existence it's the way we live and move and have our being and
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you know if you want something different you've got to show that there is a way in which you
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could invent a world that is better that it has the integrity that we need to exist okay
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and and and to be able to think and and and love and and be but but you were going to
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do it better you know and the atheists think that maybe they have got a better idea but
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if they thought about it a bit more carefully they'd realize no one has put forward a better
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idea okay so the so another way to say that uh i mean is that suffering is an integral
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part of this of um of a consistent existence so so sort of uh and the philosophical in
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a philosophical sense uh the full richness and the beauty of our experience would not
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be as beautiful would not be as rich uh if there was no suffering in the world is that
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is that possible well i think you said two different things that aren't exactly at least
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that aren't exactly the same one is that suffering is an integral part of our experience you
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know that might be considered a challenge to certain types of christian theology or
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or even uh jewish theology in other words um christians talk about the fall and talk
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about uh adam and eve in the garden and and have have a vision of there being some kind
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of perception from or perfection from which we have fallen and i think there is a perfection
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from which we've fallen but i don't think that perfection is some kind of physical perfection
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in other words i don't subscribe personally to the view that some some christians do that
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there was some state um prior to the fall in which death did not occur i don't think
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that that's consistent with science as we know it and i and i think that um death for
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example has been part of the biological world and the and the universe as a whole um from
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from billions of years ago so so just to be clear about that um you know i on the other
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hand i do so if that's the case then certainly in that sense at the very least um suffering
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or at least death okay is part of the biological existence and that probably seems so completely
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obvious to somebody who you know is au fait with science whether they you know whether
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they're a scientist or not well so and i apologize if i'm interrupting but it's the obvious reality
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of of uh our life today but there's a lot of people i think it's currently in vogue
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i've talked to quite a few folks who kind of see as the goal of many of our pursuits
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as to extend life indefinitely a sort of uh you know a dream for many people is to live
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forever uh but in the in the technological world in the engineering world in the scientific
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world i mean that's that's the big dream to me it feels like that's not a dream it's i
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certainly would like to live forever uh like that that's the initial feeling the instinctual
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feeling because you know life is so amazing but then if you actually kind of like you've
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presented it if you actually uh live that kind of life you would realize that that's
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actually a step uh backwards that's a step down from the experience of this life in my
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sense that death is an essential part of life uh about an essential part of this experience
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death of all things so the thing the fact that things end somehow and the scarcity of
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things somehow create the beauty of this experience that we have yeah transhumanism doesn't look
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very attractive to me either but it also doesn't look very feasible um but that's a whole big
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topic that i'm not exactly an expert but i'll say but i but you know i'm of a certain age
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where my mortality is more pressing or more obvious to me than it once was okay um and
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and i don't dread that i don't see that as in a certain sense even the enemy okay you're
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not afraid of death well i'm afraid of lots of things in a in a in a conceptual way but
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it doesn't keep me awake at night okay um i i'm i think like most people i'm more afraid
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of pain than i am of death so i i don't want to put myself forward as some kind of hero
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that doesn't worry about these things that's not true but i i do think and maybe this is
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part of my christian outlook um that there is life beyond the grave um but i don't think
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that that it's life in this universe or in this um certainly not in this body and maybe
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not in a certain sense in this mind i mean you know christian christian belief in the
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afterlife is is that we will be resurrected we will be in a certain sense be with god
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i don't know what that means and i don't think anybody else really quite knows what that
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means but there are lots of ways that over history people artists and and and writers
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and so forth have pictured it um and these are all perhaps some of them helpful ways
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of thinking about it do you think it's possible to know what happens after we die um i i don't
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think we find out by near death experiences or those kinds of things but but i but i think
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that uh you know that we have sufficient i feel i have sufficient information if you
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like um in terms of god's revelation to be confident that that i will go somewhere
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else okay but it won't be here and i to me the aspirations of transhumanism are horrific
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i mean i think it would be a nightmare not a dream a nightmare you know to be somehow
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downloaded into a computer and live one's life like that i because it it completely
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discounts the integrity of our bodies as well as our minds i mean we aren't just disembodied
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minds it would not be me that was in the computer it would be something else if if that kind
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of download were possible of course it isn't possible and it's very long way from being
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possible but you know amazing things happen so we shouldn't be too certain so this is
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this is a place that uh again maybe taking a slight step outside uh wherever philosophizing
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a little bit uh let me ask you about uh human level or superhuman level intelligence uh
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the artificial intelligence systems do you what do you make from um from almost a religious
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or a perspective that we've been talking about of the special aspect of human nature of us
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creating intelligence systems that exhibit some elements of that human nature is that
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something again like we were talking about with transhumanism uh there's a feasibility
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question of how hard is it to actually build machines that human level intelligence or
link |
have something like consciousness or have all those kinds of human qualities and then
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there's the do we want to do that kind of thing so on both of those directions what
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do you think well okay so you know since your podcast is called ai i don't want to offend
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too many of your listeners out there that's but i but i i think one should be a little
link |
bit more modest about one's claims for ai than have typically been the case yeah i think
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that actually a lot of people in ai are somewhat chastened and so there there are more modest
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claims than are common with the transhumanists and yes and and so forth um and you know i
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used to play chess when i was a kid i was pretty good at it okay um won competitions
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and so on and so forth and i when i and i'm talking about when i was in high school i
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thought it was pretty unlikely that a computer would be able to become good at chess but
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i was dead wrong okay and so you know um how did that make you feel by the way when um
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t blue big i stopped playing chess seriously when i had when i encountered computers that
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could beat me okay i still play with my grandchildren a little bit but but um but yeah it it seemed
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like in a certain sense it became a solved problem uh when ai was able to do it better
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than i could so i think that there are ways in which today we've seen um computers do
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things which historically were regarded as being very characteristic of human intelligence
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and in that sense there there is some success to ai i also think that um you know there
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are certain things which one might think of as being ai which are you know completely
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widespread in our society i'm thinking about the internet search engines and so forth which
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are enormously influential and obviously do things more powerfully than any individual
link |
human or even any combination of humans could do much faster and and and accessing databases
link |
and so on and so forth is all of this is outstripped our human intelligence um i'm not sure the
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extent though to which that is really intelligence uh in the way that was traditionally meant
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but it's certainly amazingly um facile and um it it multiplies our ability to access
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human knowledge and and data and so forth so is that something is that is that enter
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the realm of something we should be concerned about so in the realm of religion you talk
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about what is good what is evil what is right what is wrong you have set of morals set of
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beliefs and when you have an entity come into the picture that uh that has quite a bit of
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power if we potentially look into the future and intelligence and capability um do you
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think there's something that religion can say about artificial intelligence or is that
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something you we shouldn't worry about until that arrives you think just like with the
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chess program um you know religious writers have thought about this for centuries uh you
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know there's been a long debate about what is what was historically called the plurality
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of worlds and it was actually more about whether there are places where other intelligent creatures
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live than it was about us creating them but but i think it's largely the same question
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it's almost like aliens like other intelligent so if there is other intelligent life in the
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universe what is its relationship to god okay that is in a certain sense the puzzle that
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religious thinkers and writers have thought about for a long time and there's a whole
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range of of different opinions about that i mean personally you know i think it's it's
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an interesting question but it's not a very pressing question at the moment um yeah and
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i think the same way about the the question of what happens if we're able to build a sentient
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robot for example um i think it's an interesting question and we'll have to think about it
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when that happens um but i think we're still quite a ways away from that and so i i don't
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have a good answer um but i think there's a literature that you one could tap um to
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think about if you want to start early on the question well let me ask you another impossible
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question from a religious or from a personal perspective what do you think is consciousness
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this this uh subjective experience that we seem to be having there's uh this there's
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uh the christian religion have something to say about consciousness does your own when
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you look in the mirror do you have a sense of what is consciousness um i think the bible
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doesn't have much in the way of answers about that directly in the sense that you're perhaps
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asking it which is more like i think you're asking for some kind of uh quasi scientific
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or maybe indeed scientific uh description that's really looking for one yes um i i think
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that i think that there it's an interesting question i think it's actually um it's a
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jump too far i think we have we don't even know the answer to the question what is the
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mind let alone consciousness so if you distinguish between those two things i think the question
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that's being addressed more directly um scientifically as well as in other ways it is what is the
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mind um and that is certainly a very topical question even in places like mit which is
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not historically involved with philosophical questions you know that people are doing neuroscience
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and so forth i think it's a very important question and i think that we're going to find
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that um we are not computers in other words i think uh the the commonplace theory of what
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mind is is is generally speaking by analogy that we are basically wet wetware okay um
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that we're some computer like um entity um and that that the analogy to digital computers
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is is is a pretty decent one i mean that that's of course a viewpoint which um you know which
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drives the aspirations of the transhumanists i mean they they so much believe that our
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minds are nothing other than you know in a certain sense some kind of implementation
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of software in biology that they say to themselves well of course we're going to be able to download
link |
it into a into a digital computer i don't think that's true i think it's most likely
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that quantum mechanics is very important in the brain uh it seems most unlikely that it's
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not to me i know that that's contrary to the opinions of many people but but that's my
link |
view and it's also a view for example of people like roger penrose and and people like that
link |
who've written about it um rather extensively and if that's the case then really my mind
link |
is not reproduce reducible to some kind of software which can be considered to be portable
link |
it is so uh connected to the hardware of my body that the two are inseparable okay and
link |
so if that is in fact what we find um as i suspect will be the case then the aspirations
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of the transhumanists will be very long incoming if at all um so i think that actually physics
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and chemistry um you know are in a are in a sense um involved with the brain and with
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in the mind but not in a very simple way like you know like the computer analogy um in and
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a much more complicated way and i and i also think that um it's philosophically ignorant
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to speak as if um when and if the actions of the brain are understood at the physical
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and chemical level that will mean that the mind will vanish as a concept you know that
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we'll just say no we're nothing but brains okay of course it won't i mean it may well
link |
be that our mind is an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the physics and chemistry
link |
and biology okay but it's also something that we have to encounter and take seriously and
link |
so um you know it's it's not the case that it that the mind is reducible to nothing but
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physics and chemistry even if it's embedded in you know continuously into physics and
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chemistry as i rather suspect it is um so i that that's my own view i mean another way
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of putting it is that the mind or the soul is not something added into humans as might
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have been the viewpoint um historically i do think there is you know there is something
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added to humans but it's not it's not the mind it's the spirit and that takes us beyond
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the physical it takes us beyond this universe but i but i don't think that that consciousness
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the mind etc etc is that thing which is necessarily added in so i i'm not be emergent in some
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way i'm not a substance dualist in that sense okay if you want to put it philosophically
link |
i mean uh but you see your sense is um so the mind and the intelligence and consciousness
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can be these emergent things do you do you have a hope a sense that science could help
link |
us get it pretty far down the road of understanding we will get much further than we have and
link |
we it'll be interesting um i mean right now our our methods of diagnosing the human brain
link |
are extremely primitive i mean the resolution that we have you know that comes out of uh
link |
out of nmr and and brain scans and so forth is miserable compared with what we need in
link |
order to understand the brain at the cellular level let alone at the atomic level um but
link |
you know we're making progress it's relatively slow progress but it's progress and people
link |
are working on it and we're going to get better at it and we'll find out very interesting
link |
things as we do um the time resolution is also completely hopeless compared compare
link |
with what we need to understand of a thought you know so um so there's a long way to go
link |
and we will get better at it um but i'm but i'm not at all worried as some people are
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and some people speak as if this is a good thing that somehow the concepts of humanity
link |
and the mind and religion and and consciousness are going to vanish because we're going to
link |
have you know complete uh physicochemical description of the brain in the near future
link |
that we're not going to have that and secondly even if we had it the mind and all these other
link |
things aren't going to vanish because of it well i i find kind of compelling the the notion
link |
that whoever created this universe uh and us uh did so to understand itself himself
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i mean there's a there's a there's a powerful self reflection notion to this whole experiment
link |
that we're a part of i certainly think that god takes delight in his creation and that
link |
it was created for that delight as much as it was um for any other reason and that you
link |
know that therefore are there's reason to be hopeful and and awestruck by the creation
link |
whether it's on the very small or on the very large i'm not sure if you're familiar there's
link |
something called the simulation hypothesis well that's been fun to talk about with the
link |
computer scientists and so on which is a kind of thought experiment that proposes that um
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you know the entirety of the world around us is a kind of a computer program that's
link |
a simulation and then we're living inside it i think there's um i think from a certain
link |
perspective that could be consistent with a religious view of the world i mean you could
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just use different terms uh basically uh what are your but it's a it's a it feels like a
link |
more um modern updated version of that but what is what's what's your sense of this uh
link |
the simulation hypothesis do you find interesting useful to think about it do you find it ridiculous
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did you find it fun what are your thoughts uh it's fun and it's been of course the subject
link |
of various movies yeah um that that some of which are very well known um you know i don't
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think it makes sense to think of it as a simulation hypothesis in the sense that we're really
link |
lying in uh banks um of of uh on banks of of beds having our energy drained away from
link |
us um and and the simulation is going on in our individual brains that that makes no sense
link |
to me at all i don't think that's what's meant by the simulation hypothesis as you're using
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it now but i think that there is a um there is very little distinction between saying
link |
that a an intelligent creator has set up the universe according to his will and his plan
link |
and set it in motion and is allowing it to run out maybe as christians say he's sustaining
link |
it actually um by his word of power it says in the book of the letter to hebrews okay
link |
um in in in in this amazingly consistent and um integrated way um i don't think there's
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very much difference between saying that and saying that it's a simulation okay i mean
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i think it's almost the same thing okay but i but i think from but i think it's important
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to recognize that the simulation in that concept the simulation and the creation or the universe
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are the same thing okay in other words it's a simulation you know that is billions of
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light years across okay yeah um i mean there's a sense in which it helps one understand especially
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if you're not religious that there is something outside of the world that uh we live in that
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there's something bigger than the world we live in um and that i mean it's just another
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perspective on uh that humbles humbles you um so in that sense one shortcoming of that
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is is the following is of the of the analogy is this that we think of a simulation as something
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take taking place in the universe you know when we it's it's taking place in my computer
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okay i don't think that's the right analogy for um a christian view of creation okay i
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don't think it's taking place in some other universe that god has made okay i i think
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maybe it's taking place in the mind of god christians might hypothesize also but i but
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i think that that that it's important to recognize that christian theology at any rate
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is that god is not one of the entities in the universe and and presumably therefore
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is very different from a simulation that we might run on a computer let me ask you adam
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and eve even adam ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil does this
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is this story meaningful to you what does the story mean to you yeah i it is meaningful
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to me um i i take the you know the writings of the bible very seriously and i think that
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most christians regard them as having some kind of authoritative um role in their in
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their in their faith um what do i get from it i mean i think the most important thing
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that christians get from the story of adam and eve and they're eating the apple and
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so forth is that the relationship between humans and god is broken has been broken by
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man's disobedience that's what the the story of adam and eve and the apple is all about
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and um that that broken relationship is for christians what jesus came to redeem came
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to overcome that brokenness and uh restore uh that relationship with god um uh to some
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extent at any rate on earth and and ultimately um you know in in the in eternity to restore
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it fully so that's really what christians mean and gain from the story of adam and eve
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of course lots of people ask the questions about how sort how literally should we take
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these stories of particularly the first few few chapters of genesis which is an important
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question but but i mean but we tend to um get bogged down with it a bit too much i think
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we should take away the message um and i think the the the uh what the what actually we would
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have seen if we'd been there okay is something which is a matter of speculation and it's
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certainly not terribly important from the point of view of christian theology but it
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seems like a very important moment um as a man of faith do you um do you do you wish
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that uh i think it was eve first uh yeah well see do you wish that by the way it was just
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a fruit as a few what you said it very carefully as the fruit fruit of the tree right uh do
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you wish they wouldn't have eaten of the tree i mean this is a back to our discussion of
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suffering was that like an essential thing that needed to happen you're gonna have to
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read paradise lost to get your answer to that beautifully put okay well let me ask the the
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biggest question one that you also touch in your book but one that i asked every once
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in a while is what is the meaning of life the meaning of my life is many different things
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okay but it but they are all kind of centered around um relationships um i mean for a christian
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one's relationship with god is a crucial part of the meaning of life but one's relationship
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with one's family wife's wife parents children grandchildren in my case um and so forth those
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are crucially important um these are all the places where people whether they're religious
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or not find meaning um but ultimately um i think a person who has faith in a creator
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um who we think has a an intention or many intentions but a but a but a will um in respect
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of the world as a whole that's a crucial part of meaning and the idea that my life might
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have some small significance in the plan of that creator is an amazingly powerful idea
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that give that brings meaning um i i tell a story in my book that um when i was a student
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before i became a christian i read a philosophy book with whose approximate title was um what
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you know what is the meaning of life and you know that book basically said there is no
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meaning to life you have to make up the meaning as you go along and i think that's probably
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the the predominant secular view is these days that there is no real meaning but you
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can make up a meaning and that will give you meaning into your life um i don't subscribe
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to that view anymore um i think there is more meaning than that um but i do think that those
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things which give meaning to our life are very important and we should emphasize them
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and you you have said that as the part of the as the part of that meaning is the part
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of your faith uh love and loyalty are key parts so can you try to say what is uh love
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and loyalty like what what does it mean to you what does it look like if you were to
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give advice to uh to your children grandchildren of what to look for in in looking for loyalty
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and and and love what would you try to say well i think it's something like yielding
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your will or desire to another um it's valuing others more highly or at least as highly as
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yourself but that's just the start of it because true love you reach a point where you are
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you feel compelled by the other uh and that i think to some people sounds very scary but
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actually it's terrifically liberating um and i think that love then brings you into service
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towards another and i'm you know reminded of um the phrase from the anglican uh prayer
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book where it talks about um jesus whose service is perfect freedom in other words for us christians
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to serve god is what perfects our freedom and i think there is an amazing love is um
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is in part kept captivity but in a kind of paradoxical sense it's also an amazing freedom
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love is freedom i don't think there's a better way to end it we started with fusion energy
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and ending on love in there's a huge honor to talk to you thank you so much for your
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time today thanks it was a pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with ian
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hutchinson and thank you to our sponsors sun basket and power dot please consider supporting
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at lex friedman spelled somehow without the letter e just f r i d m a n and now let me
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leave you with some words from arthur c clark finally i would like to assure my many buddhist
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christian hindu jewish and muslim friends that i am sincerely happy that the religion
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which chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind and often as western
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medical science now reluctantly admits to your physical well being perhaps it is better
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to be unsane and happy than sane and unhappy but it is the best of all to be sane and happy
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whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future
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indeed it may well decide whether we have any future thank you for listening and hope
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to see you next time