In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I interview cognitive neuroscientist and author of The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, Dr. Carl Sagan. We talk about how the universe came to be, how consciousness came about, and the role that life may play in the process of cosmic evolution. We also talk about his new book, The Realest Reality: A Guide to Consciousness in the Universe, which is out now. It's available for pre-order on Amazon, and is available for purchase on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. You can also get a copy of the book for free by clicking here. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends, family, and colleagues! Cheers, Joe - The Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast by day, all day, and by night, all night, by night. Check it out! - All day, by day - by night - all day - all night! - all the time, all the days of the week. - by night by day. By night - by day all the hours of the day! by night! by night? (Joe Rogan Podcast by night! ) By day, Joe's Podcast by day: Joe's Train Train by Day, by Night - by Night, All Day, All Night, by Day by Night! By Night, By Night - By Night! by Night? , by Night , All Day by Day! , By Day, all Day, All Day? - By Day What's a day? by Day? by Night?! Have a question or a problem? or Night, & All Day ? or Day, By Day? / Evening? & Evening? / Night? / By Night? by Day/Night? (By Night? | By Day/By Night, etc., etc., All Day / Evening, by Evening, etc. , etc., by Day & Evening, etc., By Day | By Night , & Evening etc. etc., | Evening, What Day? | Day, etc.. ? , Evening, Evening, Day, & Evening?? And so on?
00:01:04.000And yeah, from those sciences, we're getting a new picture of the universe and cosmic evolution and the role that life may play in the process.
00:01:17.000So, my background, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist.
00:01:21.000I got my PhD from George Mason University.
00:01:23.000I was really interested in the problem of consciousness.
00:01:27.000So, how does the brain create consciousness?
00:01:31.000What is the connection between consciousness and complexity and cosmos?
00:01:39.000Yeah, it was sort of an intuition that I had when I guess I was an undergraduate and I started taking all of the basic science courses, like a physics course, and you learn about the second law of thermodynamics and the kind of popular interpretation of that law.
00:02:00.000Is that the universe tends towards disorder.
00:02:03.000And that didn't completely match up with, you know, my observations and, you know, what we understood about how after the Big Bang, you had the formation of planets and stars.
00:02:16.000And then on this planet, we see organization all around us.
00:02:21.000Um, so most of the popular books at that time, like, that was, like, you know, I graduated high school in, like, 1999, and so popular books were, like, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History in Time, um,
00:02:36.000And those books kind of painted life as this improbable kind of statistical fluke, not a regularity.
00:02:47.000And so, you know, some of those ideas didn't seem quite right to me, and I was really interested in this increase in complexity.
00:02:59.000And so I started looking up these sorts of topics, and I found out about the research being done at the Santa Fe Institute, which is kind of like the mecca for complexity science.
00:03:11.000And then there was this emerging worldview that the universe is becoming more and more complex, and it doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics at all.
00:03:23.000Can we get you to turn your phone off?
00:03:48.000The second law of thermodynamics started off being about heat flow.
00:03:56.000Thermodynamics is the science of energy or energy flow.
00:04:01.000And so originally the law said that heat will flow from a hotter to a colder body.
00:04:12.000So there's this just natural tendency for heat to kind of spread out and for energy to kind of disperse and dissipate.
00:04:21.000And this had to do with steam engines.
00:04:27.000And steam engines basically convert energy from heat flow to mechanical energy that can power locomotives.
00:04:40.000So, Sari Carnot and Rudolf Clausius, two European scientists, were trying to understand this in the 1800s, and they found out that this energy conversion process wasn't always 100% efficient,
00:04:59.000that some of the energy Some of the useful energy would get dissipated basically when this physical process creates heat.
00:05:11.000And so what the second law said originally was that the useful supply of energy in the universe was always dwindling.
00:05:22.000Because every mechanical process requires energy to do work, and it creates some heat, and heat is basically like you creating body heat right now.
00:05:31.000You eat food, you metabolize that, and then that energy is dissipated as heat, and you can't extract the energy that was dissipated as heat again, so it becomes useless.
00:05:45.000There's the first law of thermodynamics, which is about the conservation of energy.
00:05:49.000You can convert one type of energy into another type, but this useful supply is getting turned into entropy.
00:06:00.000And entropy was originally a measure of the quantity of energy no longer available to do work.
00:06:10.000It wasn't until later that there was a statistical interpretation of this law by a scientist named Ludwig Boltzmann.
00:06:20.000And he basically tried to understand the second law in terms of the...
00:06:29.000I guess the evolution of a mini particle system and what he saw was that if you had an ordered system, there would be this natural tendency towards disorder.
00:06:42.000Simply because there's many more ways for a system of many components to be mixed up and spread out compared to ways to be ordered.
00:06:54.000So then the law became about this order to disorder transition, and we hear about that all the time.
00:07:02.000The popular examples are rooms get messier, they don't organize themselves.
00:07:07.000But the paradox that emerged from that was that life seems to defy this tendency.
00:07:15.000And so the question is, if systems tend towards decay, what's going on with the biosphere and all this organization we see?
00:07:26.000And Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, actually wrote a very influential book on biology called What is Life?
00:08:35.000What led you to write a book about this?
00:08:39.000So, as I mentioned, I was really interested in this mystery of consciousness because it seemed like, you know, kind of the last frontier of science.
00:08:49.000Now we know there's lots of mysteries to be solved.
00:08:52.000There's like dark matter and dark energy, all types of stuff.
00:08:55.000But in the 90s, people were thinking that physics had...
00:09:00.000Essentially solved all the major problems, but really it's because physics, it was reductionist physics, and basically that approach doesn't think about life and consciousness and human civilization.
00:09:18.000So it sort of leaves those things out of the picture.
00:09:21.000But, you know, you can have a physics of those things too, and that's what complexity science is.
00:09:26.000So, yeah, I was interested in consciousness, but what happened was I found out to really understand how consciousness emerges and intelligence, it really starts with the origin of life.
00:09:41.000I'm not saying the most simple life forms are conscious, but what I understood was...
00:09:47.000You know, you can think about a bacterium performing a process called chemotaxis.
00:09:53.000That's kind of a scary word, but all it means is that the bacterium swims towards chemical food and away from toxins.
00:10:03.000So it has this very rudimentary intelligence.
00:10:10.000And if you're trying to understand the brain and consciousness and intelligence, it seemed to me that you have to understand life as well.
00:10:21.000And so at George Mason, there was a professor named Harold Morwitz, and he came from the Santa Fe Institute.
00:10:31.000So he's a big complexity guy and one of the premier origin of life researchers.
00:10:37.000And he was doing this work that, you know, got into the stuff I was just talking about, thermodynamics, because to understand life, you have to understand it as a phenomenon that does evade this tendency towards decay, and to do that, it has to extract energy from the environment.
00:11:13.000And this is a lot different than the other approach that I mentioned, reductionism, which is focused on how nature's simplest components, like particles, act in isolation.
00:11:28.000So complexity science cares about how more complex systems, their dynamics, their evolution, And you see that systems experience or display properties like consciousness that aren't there when the components exist in isolation.
00:12:16.000But you can look at the universe itself as this kind of computational machine, and it's doing information processing, so it's understandable to think about everything in terms of information, but consciousness...
00:12:32.000When I use that word, I'm talking about subjective experience.
00:12:36.000So you're having a unified conscious perception of the world.
00:12:58.000Basically, consciousness is kind of mysterious still.
00:13:04.000And there's the hard problem of consciousness, which was put forth by a philosopher named David Chalmers in the 90s.
00:13:15.000And it basically said, we can explain all of the physical processing in the brain in terms of mechanical processes and interactions.
00:13:29.000But how does the interactions of these physical things give rise to the qualitative world of experience and sensation?
00:13:42.000And since that's such a hard problem, How does experience arise?
00:13:48.000One solution to that was thinking that it doesn't emerge and suddenly poof into existence, that there must be a little bit of consciousness in everything, and that consciousness is fundamental, and that when those things come together to form these more complex systems,
00:14:07.000the little bits of consciousness kind of add up and create more richer conscious experience.
00:14:15.000So, you don't believe that, but you do...
00:14:19.000Well, we can all agree that human beings have consciousness.
00:14:57.000So whatever that process is that enables creativity and communication, self-awareness, correction, like all those different things that there's obviously something happening.
00:15:08.000So the idea that you can't measure it, is that just because we don't understand what it actually is?
00:15:24.000So yeah, I don't think it's necessarily right to call it immaterial.
00:15:26.000Right, so it has to be, there's something going on, so is it just that we lack the tools to measure it or the understanding of how to quantify it?
00:15:36.000And that's kind of why those philosophies got big.
00:15:42.000Well, actually, our tools and our theories that are being used to start to quantify it, one of those theories Interpreted in a certain way seems to support the pan-psychic view, or a sort of modified version,
00:15:57.000saying that not everything is conscious, but that you can have very, very simple systems that are conscious as long as they're integrating some amount of information.
00:16:10.000So what I was going to ask you is, if we agree that humans are conscious, What is not?
00:16:14.000Is a single-celled organism conscious?
00:16:17.000So since it was thought that consciousness was immaterial or kind of defined that way, going back to Rene Descartes, they wanted to ignore it altogether.
00:16:30.000It's called illusionism, and the idea is that consciousness is an illusion.
00:16:35.000And so when you said everybody agrees that we're conscious, yeah, everybody does when they're pressed, but they have this kind of, a lot of materialists or physicalists is kind of the modern term for that position.
00:16:50.000They say consciousness is an illusion, and it's not even really clear what they mean by that.
00:17:09.000So what is their definition of what consciousness is?
00:17:13.000The thing that we're calling conscious or consciousness, if they're saying it's an illusion, What do they think the process of creativity is, the process of cognitive function?
00:17:26.000It's kind of double talk because they will admit they have it, but when they say it's an illusion, I think what they mean, they mean a few different things by it, but...
00:17:34.000There is no point in the brain where you can locate consciousness.
00:17:43.000So it's something that emerges from this harmonized collective activity of 80 billion neurons interacting.
00:17:53.000And they also mean that consciousness doesn't have any causal power and by that I mean they don't think that your conscious thoughts actually do anything in the world like when you decide to raise your arm They think it's just the brain is getting sensory input and there's algorithms encoded in the brain and then that's creating a behavioral output almost like this reflexive machine
00:18:42.000So if you're moving because of an algorithm, but you realize that you're moving because of an algorithm, isn't that conscious?
00:18:49.000Yes, so it's kind of a ridiculous thing that they call it an illusion, and then other materialists might say it's not an illusion, it's an epiphenomenon.
00:18:59.000So, yeah, there's lots of confusion there.
00:20:08.000So, I'm arguing that the difference between life and non-life is that living things are these information processing systems, and that would apply to trees, too.
00:20:18.000So they're doing photosynthesis and yeah, they might not move the way like a mammal or some other organisms do.
00:20:26.000They're very slow, but plants will perform something that's analogous to what I explained about Bacteria doing chemotaxis.
00:20:39.000They swim towards food and away from toxins.
00:22:59.000But in that process, the individual and the brain is part of that world, so then it starts to model itself, and it's this phenomenon of the system kind of looking back on itself that creates a witness to experience,
00:23:21.000So, to answer your question, yeah, it's kind of a guess.
00:23:25.000You know, maybe someone could argue that very simple life forms do do a very simple form of self-modeling.
00:23:35.000The biologist Michael Levin would argue that.
00:23:40.000And that could be right, but I think we can reasonably agree that it at least starts with life.
00:23:50.000But I do think it probably, you know, requires some more sophisticated information processing, modeling machinery, and that it's most likely to be in systems with brains.
00:24:09.000And when we're talking about consciousness, we're talking about consciousness.
00:24:16.000First of all, we're talking about consciousness in terms of the way human beings view consciousness.
00:24:21.000But when you get into other animals, at what point, I mean, is it a function of avoiding predation or becoming predators?
00:24:29.000Is it a function of foraging for food?
00:24:34.000Like, what is it that enables consciousness to emerge?
00:25:05.000So if you close your eyes, you can imagine yourself in this room.
00:25:09.000You can zoom out and you can see the whole building.
00:25:13.000You can zoom out and imagine how Earth looks from outer space.
00:25:18.000You can imagine your friend and what kind of personality they have, what jokes they have.
00:25:24.000So you've modeled all of these things in the world, and you've even modeled other modelers, and it's this modeling that is necessary that leads to the phenomenon of consciousness.
00:25:47.000So, when you're talking about consciousness in the universe, do you think that consciousness is a property of the universe that enables things to happen?
00:25:57.000Do you think that there's a reason why we have this incredibly advanced version of what we accept as consciousness?
00:26:07.000Are we building towards something as the universe gets ever and ever more complex?
00:26:13.000Are we a part of that because this is like a part of the whole system?
00:26:17.000Yeah, so I guess it depends on what scale you want to talk about.
00:26:22.000You can talk about the brain emerging and consciousness emerging to model the world, to Find solutions to these survival problems.
00:26:33.000But if you zoom out and you look at the big picture, you see that basically the universe and the matter in the universe is starting to wake up when life emerges and you have conscious agents.
00:26:51.000It's the matter in the world that's starting to experience the world.
00:26:56.000So you could look at this process of increasing complexity that is this sort of cosmic scale evolutionary process as the universe itself coming to life or even waking up.
00:27:35.000Reducing consciousness to something trivial if you think it's in everything already.
00:27:39.000I think it's way more interesting, way more kind of psychedelic that the universe starts to wake up as a result of this evolutionary process.
00:27:54.000And so that would say that life is an essential part of the increase in complexity and life actually becomes the driver of this evolutionary process.
00:28:06.000So this worldview, if you're to accept that, says life's not an accident.
00:28:14.000Life has this larger cosmic significance and it's basically assisting the universe in coming to life.
00:28:21.000When you say the universe coming to life, that means like this trend of ever-increasing complexity is a part of the design or a part of just how the universe functions and that we are, in fact, like the way we structure life, the way we structure civilization,
00:28:38.000we constantly move towards greater and greater levels of complexity with our electronics, With the sophistication of our societies and our cultures, if you go back thousands of years to today, it's a very clear trend.
00:29:05.000So it's something that emerges from the...
00:29:09.000Laws and constants of physics and the evolutionary dynamics that naturally emerge from those laws.
00:29:15.000So it is built in to the design of the universe.
00:29:19.000When you use the word design, some people could think that you're getting at something maybe like spiritual or religious.
00:29:26.000And so that's like another conversation as to why there seems to be this apparent fine-tuning of the laws to allow for life.
00:29:35.000And if you believe in this paradigm I'm describing, that the laws don't just allow for life, that they necessitate life, and they necessitate intelligence and consciousness.
00:29:46.000And so, yeah, it does seem to be baked into the fabric of reality.
00:29:53.000Like, when you're saying it in this way, you're saying it almost like as if you're hinting that there's some sort of a design behind it all.
00:30:01.000So, yeah, it sounds like it when I say that.
00:30:05.000There are all these different options as to why there could be this fine-tuning.
00:30:11.000But while the story I'm telling in the book is purely mechanistic, so you can describe this process, which I think is very spiritual and psychedelic, it's also something that you can describe and articulate mathematically in computational terms.
00:30:32.000So there's no mystical force pushing this.
00:30:37.000It's just basically components in nature interacting and evolving and adapting.
00:30:45.000But there does seem to be this larger design.
00:30:49.000So, for example, I know Elon Musk is a friend of the show.
00:30:54.000He believes in this simulation theory that we're not in base reality and that there could be A base reality that sort of like encompasses this and we are maybe a simulated world the way we can create computer simulations and video games.
00:31:12.000Those agents aren't conscious yet, but could it be possible?
00:31:17.000But that idea that we are living in a simulation to me is not that different from any sort of intelligent design theory of religion.
00:31:29.000So you could see a sort of general version of the world's religions as being something similar to a simulation theory that says that this, you know, reality is created by some other intelligent agent.
00:31:56.000So there's the intelligent design movement, which says that life is like a product of God being like, okay, I'm going, there's a universe already.
00:32:07.000Yeah, and I'm gonna I'm gonna create life right now, and that violates like the causal closure of the universe basically the idea that Things can happen in the world that aren't caused by other physical causes So that's a bad theory it doesn't It's it's not a scientific theory But the idea that the universe is a simulation created by intelligent agents that
00:32:38.000are somehow outside of this reality is very similar to deism.
00:32:45.000And a lot of our most famous physicists and scientists of history were deists.
00:32:51.000So the difference between deism and theism Is that deism imagines a creator that set the laws of physics and then let the system evolve according to those laws.
00:33:08.000So many of our greatest physicists, Newton later, even more ones that came after him like Maxwell and Sir Arthur Eddington was a proud mystic.
00:34:24.000They think that if we are right now currently able to make things like virtual reality and Oculus Rift and all that stuff, that one day we will be able to create something that's indiscernible from reality itself.
00:34:38.000So how do we know if we're not in that already?
00:34:44.000The laws of probability theory, that's when this comes into play, when they take into account all of the potential life out there in the universe, all the potential intelligent life where we're going, what we will 100% eventually attempt at least to create,
00:35:03.000which is some sort of an artificial environment.
00:35:05.000I mean, that's what Facebook is doing with meta, right?
00:35:08.000All those commercials where they're jazzing you up for this idea that you're not going to have to live in reality anymore.
00:36:56.000We're talking about increasing levels of complexity that seem to be inevitable.
00:37:01.000It seems to be, like I've said this before, but this is my thought about people and technology, that I am fascinated by how we don't think about what we're doing, we just do it.
00:37:13.000Like if you looked at the earth, you looked at the human civilization from afar, if you had no context, you had no cultural connection to it, but you watched the way people interact and move, you'd say, oh, this is a life form that creates better and better stuff.
00:37:38.000Well, it's this obsession with objects and this romantic idea that that's futile and you should be out there in nature and you don't need much.
00:38:17.000It goes to some sort of symbiotic interaction and connection with electronics because that's our number one creation.
00:38:25.000That's the thing that we make that's better than anything else.
00:38:27.000If you think about all the stuff that we make, the one thing that's been most transformative over the last few decades has been technology and electronics, our connection to the cyber world, our connection through phones and computers and watches.
00:39:11.000It's this process that we're not aware of, and nature is carrying that out, but we're at a really interesting time because we're at a point in the process where we're actually becoming conscious that we're part of the process.
00:39:31.000So the idea is if we become conscious of it, and that's part of the process also, becoming aware of this, we can start to shift society in the direction that we want to see.
00:39:45.000So this materialism, all these desires to have more and more and more, It's a natural part of this, but evolution occurs because life is always adapting, and it's correcting its errors.
00:40:03.000So this march toward progress isn't a straight line.
00:40:07.000Life It basically progresses because it's faced with constant existential challenges, and these challenges force us to come up with solutions, and that's the engine of progress.
00:40:23.000So, do I think all this technology with the metaverse, all this stuff is inevitable?
00:40:36.000But it doesn't mean that we're just supposed to go along with it.
00:40:39.000We're supposed to go along with all its consumerism, like what Facebook is telling us to do and buy.
00:40:46.000I don't think that we can slow it down and have this kind of Luddite civilization where we just get rid of all of our technology and try to live in some natural world.
00:42:04.000I don't think there's going to be this end, but I mean, nuclear war could destroy a lot of the population and kind of put us into something like a dark age again.
00:42:40.000This kind of trend line of social and technological progress, it didn't really slow down by World War II. There seems to be this exponential trend towards greater complexity.
00:42:56.000So what do you think is stopping World War III, though?
00:45:01.000These people basically form something like a social organism or something like a brain.
00:45:09.000And because we're exchanging information in much the same way cells in a body or neurons in a brain communicate through chemical and electrical signals.
00:45:23.000Uh, basically, yeah, um, uh, Chinese, um, ideology, uh, it has one good aspect.
00:45:34.000They believe in this concept of the interdependent whole.
00:45:37.000So people should kind of, uh, care about like society as a whole.
00:45:42.000Um, you should put, you know, the greater good, uh, before your individual good.
00:45:48.000Um, So that will allow the emergence of something like this social organism, which is a natural part of evolution, but China specifically doesn't allow criticism of the government and new ideas,
00:46:04.000so there's not a diversity of ideas in that culture.
00:46:09.000And so the social organism that is that nation Can't evolve optimally.
00:46:20.000You need this diversity of ideas to have the most functional, productive society.
00:46:30.000That doesn't mean in the short term, China can't be super productive.
00:46:33.000But when something happens, when shit hits the fan, like we saw with the pandemic, I don't know if you saw those videos of people just screaming out of their apartment buildings when they had all these lockdowns.
00:46:44.000When their freedoms are taken away and there's some sort of existential threat looming, then the system gets chaotic.
00:46:56.000The system's been around for a thousand years.
00:46:59.000China has been functioning in one form or another as a dictatorship for a long, long time.
00:47:06.000Well, so with a society, you want this optimal balance of top-down and bottom-up control or centralization and decentralization.
00:47:16.000We hear about decentralization with the crypto and blockchain movement.
00:47:21.000So China has this top-down control, and they don't allow people to express opinions and criticism, so they're not having that bottom-up Influence of ideas that's necessary for this balance.
00:47:56.000You know, those decisions will be good for the people, but in the long run, I would argue that it's not a sustainable model.
00:48:04.000And you think this is because of the access of the information also seems to exponentially be increasing.
00:48:13.000I mean, if you go back to the invention of the printing press, to what we have going on today, one of the things you see consistently is that the access to information increases.
00:48:22.000And as the society expands, the access to information increases, technological innovation increases, and all of these things work functionally together.
00:48:30.000And what China's trying to do now is they're trying to create a bottleneck, right?
00:48:35.000They're trying to stop that and lock things down.
00:48:37.000They're trying to keep people from accessing the full internet, and people are getting around that through VPNs and all sorts of different things.
00:48:44.000They're trying to, you know, hide things about Tiananmen Square and all the atrocities of the CCP, and they're doing their best to try to keep everybody scared and locked down.
00:48:53.000But you think that, like, ultimately, they don't have short-term success in doing this, but the system itself is just far too complex and expanding, and they won't be able to, like, keep all the water in the net.
00:49:05.000I mentioned that there are these two aspects to complexity where you want a diversity of parts and you want connections between those parts.
00:49:15.000And so us becoming connected through the internet, through blockchain systems, it's basically like creating synapses that are in the brain.
00:49:28.000You have this structure of the brain where you have...
00:49:33.00080 billion neurons and every neuron is connected to another neuron by 10,000 connections.
00:49:40.000So that's kind of what the internet is doing and social media and blockchain and it's allowing for greater information exchange among individuals.
00:49:50.000And so when you try to cut people off from the internet, you're basically cutting these connections off that the system really needs to do computation.
00:50:03.000Collective computation is what nations do.
00:50:06.000They're very similar to standard biological organisms, which are communities of cells working together in an integrated fashion.
00:50:14.000So one thing that I talk about in the book is how...
00:50:19.000Basically, we can look at evolutionary principles, because evolution is really optimizing systems to be as robust and energy efficient and stable as possible.
00:50:32.000We can look at these systems, we can look at how brains work, and we can try to model society after those principles.
00:50:39.000And so you think that this is a process that is leading towards what?
00:50:49.000Do you really think that, like, do you wonder, like, what humans are actually doing, what consciousness is actually doing, why the universe has this as a tendency or as a law?
00:51:01.000Yeah, no, I think it's the most mysterious question there is.
00:51:23.000And that is the only thing that pushes us to create solutions.
00:51:29.000So there's this principle in the book that I call Popper's Principle, named after a philosopher of science, Karl Popper.
00:51:36.000And the idea is that our challenges are what force us to find solutions.
00:51:46.000So if progress is going to always continue, that means the challenges won't stop.
00:51:52.000So even if we do attain some globally unified state, I would like to see some sort of agreement among nations that says, okay, we're all going to demilitarize and we're going to put this money into medicine or technology,
00:52:10.000whatever else, all the other things that we could be funding that could help human society.
00:52:18.000And, you know, we could have something like that, but there could still be pandemics, there could still be someone crazy that takes over and starts to, you know, try to reverse that.
00:52:30.000So the point is, you can never reach a utopia.
00:52:34.000And even if we did, it wouldn't be a utopia for a long time because the world is always changing.
00:52:41.000Reality is this noisy, thermally fluctuating thing and there is chaos.
00:52:51.000Actually, when a system transitions to a state of higher order, You need some chaos in the system.
00:52:59.000So that's because, like, if a system is too rigid and too...
00:53:04.000So you could think of, like, things seemed...
00:53:08.000We had Democratic presidents, like, you could think about...
00:53:15.000Just like how things were under Obama for a while, you know, we didn't, there wasn't the craziness that we're seeing today.
00:53:23.000So you might think like, oh, well, whatever that system was, it was a good thing or it was better than what we have now.
00:53:29.000But no system, no model, no way of doing things will work forever because the external world is always changing.
00:53:40.000So we're always going to be going through these cycles and phases where we have temporary stability, but then the system needs to change.
00:53:51.000And I think right now, when we're seeing all this chaos, it is indicative of what complexity scientists call a phase transition.
00:54:01.000And so basically, the chaos is basically the system screaming for change.
00:54:09.000So you see all of this chaos and that creates flexibility within a rigid system that allows the system to transition into something new and higher.
00:54:23.000So you think that this is a function of the universe, that the universe has a tendency towards complexity and that we are one of the driving forces of this?
00:54:45.000So, you know, when you talk about what the universe wants, we're already getting into like a little language trap because are we saying that the universe is conscious, that it has a conscious intent?
00:55:01.000So it's good to kind of break that down and be like, does the universe have a conscious intent?
00:55:06.000So I don't think it does, but I think it has a sort of design.
00:55:11.000And when I say design, it's something that's not mystical.
00:55:14.000I'm saying that the laws of physics are such that complexity increases.
00:55:22.000And the universe does have something like a goal.
00:55:26.000So it may not have a conscious intent, but life emerges inevitably.
00:55:30.000And that the laws of physics play something analogous to DNA in an organism.
00:55:40.000So the laws and constants of physics are sort of cosmic DNA that ensures that this evolutionary program...
00:55:52.000So, maybe the universe is moving towards something like a cosmic attractor.
00:55:58.000And an attractor is a term that physicists use to describe a state of order.
00:56:07.000So, for example, when you take the stopper out of your bathtub, you will get the formation of a whirlpool, so you get this spontaneous order.
00:56:15.000Gravity is attracting the water down the pipe and...
00:56:18.000So you have these attractors, which are basically kind of this goal state of a system.
00:56:24.000In living systems, attractors are basically states of stability that the living system is trying to maintain against this second law of thermodynamics.
00:56:36.000And so it seems like cosmic evolution is a process of generating increasingly complex attractors.
00:56:50.000So when I say that, There are these evolutionary transitions, which are versions of phase transitions that I just explained.
00:56:59.000So if you look at the story of the universe, it's a story of nature's simplest parts coming together to form larger functional holes.
00:57:07.000So atoms come together to make molecules, which come together to make cells.
00:57:12.000Which come together to make multicellular organisms, which come together to form societies.
00:57:17.000And now we have something like the emergence of a global brain, which is the network of humans connected by the internet as well as AIs.
00:57:26.000And so when humans leave the planet, like people out there like Elon Musk with SpaceX are trying to get humans off the planet...
00:57:36.000I'm saying that that's part of this natural evolutionary process.
00:57:40.000It wasn't just like a decision someone made or something that we decided to do because we're clever or something.
00:57:48.000It's actually baked into this process.
00:57:51.000And that's because if life is going to continue to persist, it has to get off the planet before its star dies.
00:58:01.000So it creates like a game clock that forces life to spread.
00:58:08.000Maybe something like this cosmic attractor where...
00:58:12.000Some very legitimate scientists have speculated, people like Paul Davies, Ray Kurzweil, a technology guy, futurist, may seem a little bit more out there, but there's this idea that the universe is evolving and waking up and that there could be this integrated state where something like a cosmic mind emerges from this process.
00:58:39.000Is it an egocentric way of looking at consciousness to think that the universe is waking up?
00:58:46.000I mean, we are this tiny speck that's riding on one planet that is but a molecule in the vast infinity of the universe.
00:58:57.000For us to say, oh, one day the universe will catch up with us.
00:59:03.000If you think about it, isn't it kind of an egocentric biological function?
00:59:10.000The idea that consciousness, the way we term it, thinking about all our problems and the way we fit in with the universe and coming up with solutions for unique situations that we have to deal with, We think that's so amazing.
00:59:25.000But the universe is literally, they have stellar nurseries out there.
01:00:18.000That where you have the right conditions, life emerges inevitably.
01:00:23.000So if you have the right ingredients, it'll cook something up, and that will be life.
01:00:29.000So there are estimated to be something like billions to maybe trillions of Earth-like planets out there that life may have emerged on, and maybe intelligent life.
01:00:42.000To assume that we are the only Intelligence out there is to say that what happened on this planet is extremely, almost infinitely improbable.
01:00:54.000People like Richard Dawkins have argued that life emerging on other planets will evolve according to Darwinian mechanisms and these new I think?
01:01:24.000The universe used to be all inanimate matter prior to life, so in a very literal sense, the matter in the universe is waking up.
01:01:33.000So if there is this process, and we find ourselves on this planet at this point, it's of course going to look like there's not much other life out there, and that consciousness doesn't have this...
01:01:47.000But that's just how it looks right now at this stage.
01:01:50.000And we're already starting to see how technology can bring life off the planet.
01:01:56.000I mean, you know, a couple hundred years ago, people thought it was impossible to fly.
01:02:02.000Actually, I learned this from a friend.
01:02:04.000There was a New York Times article that came out something like 10 months before the Wright brothers created the plane that said it would take like 10 million years, some ridiculously long amount of time for humans to invent aircraft.
01:02:19.000So, we can already see that this process...
01:02:30.000And so the other thing you said was that, you know, is it kind of like anthropocentric to like, you know, people think we're projecting human qualities on the universe when you say maybe like the universe is waking up.
01:02:44.000But I think that's a mistake to talk about humans as if we're not part of the universe.
01:04:16.000It means that reality is fundamentally purposeful or goal-oriented, and philosophers use this term teleological.
01:04:27.000And for a long time, it was considered wrong-think for scientists to talk about teleology, but now it's coming back in a big way because of this story of complexity science and Us trying to understand the physics and mathematics of biological agency.
01:04:49.000We are, you know, material systems that have acquired information.
01:04:54.000So it's starting to seem like reality is intrinsically purposeful.
01:05:00.000Now, what sort of spiritual implications you might take from that, that's very subjective, but let me give you one example of a theory that would explain this design and this movement towards something conscious that is not religious in nature.
01:06:05.000We know about the Big Bang, that's the beginning of the universe, but we also have black holes that are singularities.
01:06:11.000This is a little bit complex, but I promise it's going to be simple in a second.
01:06:15.000So the idea is that when a black hole forms in this universe, it creates a baby universe.
01:06:22.000So it creates like this, you know, there's this pocket of universes that evolve through this process.
01:06:29.000Now the baby universe will inherit the laws and constants of physics of the parent universe, but with a slight variation.
01:06:41.000Because nature is fundamentally noisy, it's not going to give rise to the exact same thing.
01:06:47.000So now you have a picture of a universe that gives rise to offspring universes and those universes, the ones that are good at creating black holes,
01:07:03.000will thrive the way organisms that are good at reproducing thrive.
01:07:08.000And so Then you're going to have this gradual cosmic cosmological natural selection process where universes that reproduce are the ones that are favored and the conditions that favor black holes also happen to be the conditions that favor stable universes that produce life.
01:07:30.000So over time, even though you start with this lifeless universe, you will get this tendency to create universes with order that are stable.
01:07:43.000And then you can take the theory a little bit farther and say that...
01:07:51.000An intelligent, technologically advanced civilization can create new universes by creating black holes with something like a particle accelerator.
01:08:02.000Cosmic inflation theorists like Alan Guth, people have talked about how it could be possible theoretically to create black holes.
01:08:11.000The idea would be that since life, technologically advanced life, could create universes, you get this natural tendency towards not only life-friendly universes,
01:08:27.000but these universes that become increasingly complex over time.
01:08:30.000So now you can explain the fine-tuning of the laws and all this design in terms of an evolutionary process at the level of universes.
01:08:38.000So the idea is that consciousness ultimately leads to the birth of the universe.
01:09:03.000And my thought was that if you get enough time and people get more complex and develop more and more technology and you develop people that are socially disconnected and maybe on the spectrum and they're super geniuses and one guy makes a Big Bang button.
01:09:22.000And he just goes, I'll fucking press it.
01:09:53.000And why, but the thing I'm getting at is, like, why is, if ultimately stars die and ultimately they consume all the gases around them and the planets around them, like, what is so important about biological life?
01:10:10.000And I guess the answer could be If biological life leads to further and further complexity to the point where further and further competency, the ability to actually restart a universe or create a universe or create the kind of...
01:11:04.000To get to Type II. 100 to get to type 1, 1000 to 2, and I think maybe it's 100,000 for type 3. So in type 3, if we can keep it together until we get to type 3, we will be able to control black holes.
01:11:18.000We will be able to transmit our consciousness throughout the universe.
01:11:23.000We will be able to transport physically from one place to another instantaneously, and then we're going to be able to have Powers beyond our wildest imagination.
01:11:36.000And this is what you're talking about when you're talking about something that can actually create a black hole or create a universe.
01:11:42.000Like I remember there was a prevailing theory that inside, I think it's actually true, that inside every universe or like every galaxy has a supermassive black hole in the center of it.
01:11:54.000And that supermassive black hole is one half of one percent of the entire mass of the galaxy.
01:12:00.000But the idea was that if you got inside of that black hole, you would find a whole other universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each one with a supermassive black hole in the center of it.
01:12:13.000You go through those, you find hundreds of billions of galaxies.
01:12:16.000And the idea was that that's real infinity.
01:12:20.000It's not just infinite in terms of the amount of galaxies, the space in the universe itself, but the amount of universes.
01:12:26.000It's impossible for anybody to comprehend the scale of this thing.
01:12:31.000Yeah, you know, I'm not really familiar with that model.
01:12:38.000But the idea is that life is this robust phenomenon that evolves and it learns, almost like an AI program, like let's say a chess playing AI program.
01:12:52.000You invented and it's not very good at first and it loses to human players but it keeps storing those patterns, storing all that information.
01:13:04.000Evolution is a learning process that accumulates knowledge.
01:13:08.000Knowledge gets stored in different forms of memory, so it starts off with just genetic memory, and then brains emerge, and you have neural memory, then you have human civilization, so you have collective memory in people's brains, but then you get books, and then you get the internet,
01:13:25.000and you get wiki pages, and so it's all of these memory systems storing knowledge about how to survive And evade this tendency towards disorder.
01:13:35.000They say how to stay far from thermodynamic equilibrium.
01:13:37.000So you have all this complexity growing.
01:13:40.000You have life getting smarter, more robust, and better at manipulating the world around it.
01:13:48.000And so the idea is that this process doesn't end.
01:13:51.000And so this kind of challenges the heat death narrative.
01:13:56.000But so the idea is that maybe life isn't destined for death and that by using the free energy supply in a universe that's expanding...
01:14:13.000That that could potentially power life forever.
01:14:17.000If that is not possible, it's possible that life could propagate life into other universes.
01:14:24.000I'm sure Michio has a bunch of kind of far-out ideas about how life can continue to exist inside this universe or outside this universe.
01:14:33.000But yeah, the idea is that Reality is, in some way, biocentric.
01:14:39.000Even if this model that I mentioned, cosmological natural selection, is true, and some atheists might think, oh, well, that explains the fine-tuning and the design, the apparent design in our universe.
01:15:23.000And then life is potentially propagated forever.
01:15:28.000I think that's just the trippiest, most mind-blowing thing possible.
01:15:33.000And it has spiritual implications to me.
01:15:35.000And when you're looking at it this way, if you're looking at this as a function of life, you...
01:15:42.000The way we know of, at least, we are the most advanced thing in terms of our ability to manipulate our environment that we're aware of in the cosmos.
01:15:51.000And if you look at how we got to where we are, we got to where we are by solving problems and avoiding conflict.
01:16:01.000Without those problems, without conflict, there would really be no incentive for innovation.
01:16:46.000That's order and disorder, life and entropy.
01:16:49.000So there's this kind of dualistic aspect to nature when you look at it in this way that's super interesting and probably the reason that the whole Taoism thing exists.
01:16:59.000Well, the Chinese figured it out so long ago.
01:17:02.000It's really interesting when you look at that yin-yang.
01:17:40.000It's unfortunate that that is on so many stoners' walls that it's become trite, you know?
01:17:46.000Yeah, I was going to say, I was like, maybe that's not unfortunate that's on their walls, but that's become trite, yeah, and cliche, I think, yeah.
01:17:53.000It's super deep, and the design's, like, minimalist and beautiful, and I have some ideas about, you know, why they came up with this, but...
01:18:26.000There's a lot of computation that's going on, like, below, like, our conscious thoughts, like the subconscious mind.
01:18:35.000And so I think a lot of times, especially maybe like Eastern cultures that were, you know, big on like meditation and reflective practices, that they sort of through those practices were having very deep intuitions about like the structure and the organization of the world.
01:18:59.000And so that, you know, our brains as complex information processing systems might be, you know, picking up on patterns that now science is starting to explain.
01:19:11.000They were articulating that in simple language back then because they had this intuitive understanding of it.
01:19:17.000Where is that intuitive understanding coming from?
01:19:20.000Do you think it's just coming from introspective thought, self-reflection, examination of the natural world around them, examination of culture?
01:19:29.000Yeah, all those things, but I guess the magical aspect of that is that the brain is this computational system that is this product of 4 billion years of evolution and that there's...
01:20:03.000I forget which physicist it was, but it was like, you know, physicists from maybe 100 or 200 years ago, having this moment where like they stepped off a bus, or not a bus, you know, whatever, a train, whatever it was, and that instantly some deep mathematical insight came to them.
01:20:26.000So, I think what is going on is that the brain's doing a lot of computation that is below the threshold for consciousness and that our subconscious minds have a lot more intelligence than we think and that These ideas that are correct about nature are just kind of spontaneously emerging from complex computational machinery
01:21:01.000What are your thoughts on extraterrestrial intelligence and whether or not we are in contact or have been observed by extraterrestrial intelligence?
01:21:13.000So, I recently wrote an article on this, and it's really hard for me to say whether we're in contact or anything like that.
01:21:25.000But I will say that I do think there's intelligent extraterrestrials, and Richard Dawkins would agree with that.
01:21:35.000Basically, the idea is that On these other planets with sufficiently Earth-like planetary chemistry, we get life, inevitably.
01:21:46.000And then the book really argues that the evolutionary process creates this statistical tendency towards more intelligent lifeforms.
01:21:59.000Now that was, in the 20th century there was an evolutionary theorist named Stephen Jay Gould who was very influential and he tried to kill this idea of the evolutionary process being this progressive process.
01:22:16.000And that's for a couple of cultural reasons.
01:22:18.000So one thing, people weren't comfortable with it because it was this kind of Christian-seeming process that said the process inevitably gives rise to humans and that we're super special and that it's all about us.
01:22:37.000It didn't necessarily have to give rise to humans, but that's not what most of the evolutionary biologists who do believe in this narrative progress were saying.
01:22:49.000They're just saying it has to lead to higher intelligence.
01:22:51.000It doesn't have to be a human made in God's image or anything like that.
01:22:57.000The other reason he was so against the idea of progress, and I didn't know this at first, I thought it was mainly, you know, this war between science and religion where science basically was forced to kind of take the opposite stance of religion.
01:23:10.000So if religion said reality has meaning and life has purpose, then science kind of had to assume this opposite stance.
01:23:26.000And we are pretty blind to how culture and social norms, things like that, have really shaped science at the time.
01:23:36.000So, yeah, what I learned was that, and it was from a book called Complexity by Roger Lewin, Exposed that Gould was so against it because the Nazis used this idea of progress towards something higher,
01:23:55.000this sort of ladder of progress to justify ideas about there being like superior and inferior races.
01:24:05.000And this theory that I describe in the book is definitely not saying there's anything like that.
01:24:14.000It's actually very important that we understand that for this global superorganism that's emerging that is human civilization, you need diversity.
01:24:25.000So, yeah, this idea that there was this progressive evolutionary process for a long time.
01:24:34.000Scientists were just like, we shouldn't talk about that.
01:24:37.000Actually, evolutionary theory was sort of banned from every field other than biology because there was this scare of that.
01:24:46.000So, for example, Herbert Spencer, who is a contemporary of Darwin's, he actually was more popular than Darwin in his time, thought that society was evolving towards something higher.
01:25:00.000But his ideas, which were actually really good, got...
01:25:07.000Appropriated by the Nazis and this idea of social Darwinism and survival of the fittest, and it really hurt evolutionary theory for a long time because people thought, okay, we shouldn't talk about culture as a whole as evolving towards something higher or more complex.
01:25:26.000And it's only been recently that this idea of progress has been revived.
01:25:31.000A lot of it has to do with the work being done at the Santa Fe Institute and complexity science in general.
01:25:38.000And so now we're seeing that those ideas...
01:25:44.000We're probably, you know, the ideas of Herbert Spencer, he was on to something, seeing the universe as getting more and more complex.
01:25:51.000This process would occur on other planets.
01:25:54.000So you would get something like intelligent aliens because more complex niches emerge.
01:26:03.000So life starts out simple and it has a simple energy extraction task.
01:26:18.000But a random genetic mutation will cause a change in an organism's design that will unlock a new source of energy.
01:26:27.000So for example, suddenly life will be able to eat other things.
01:26:31.000The earliest forms of life were autotrophic, meaning they could survive off inorganic inputs, but then more complex life emerged that eats other organisms.
01:26:46.000Now, when you have that, now your food source isn't just like plants.
01:26:51.000We talked about tracking a sun in the sky.
01:26:57.000But if your food source is smart like you and it's trying to outrun you, then you have to have a lot more sophisticated predictive model encoded.
01:27:14.000Basically, life gets increasingly complex because we have a complex world around us.
01:27:22.000So you should see this trajectory where on alien planets you would get a more intelligent system that has more mental states, more computational states, because they can respond to more challenges in the environment.
01:27:38.000And so they may be out there, but they maybe haven't been able to get here yet because it's possible that everything is emerging sort of according to the same timeline.
01:28:01.000So the concept of, it's not like we're on the same starting point as every other planet.
01:28:06.000No, we're not on the same starting point, but you still need stellar and planetary evolution, so you're not going to have life emerging elsewhere in the universe like 10 billion years ago.
01:28:17.000Right, but you could have it 10 million years ago, easily.
01:28:20.000Yes, that's true, but the universe is a big place.
01:28:22.000Right, but think about life on Earth, right?
01:28:36.000Maybe there would be some sort of catastrophe such that dinosaurs wouldn't make it and basically a lot of the organic material that comes from, like, dead dinosaurs, like...
01:29:00.000So the mammals and the intelligent mammals that ultimately became primates, that ultimately became human beings, evolved far earlier, 100 million years ago.
01:29:16.000But do you think that they have contacted us?
01:29:19.000Do you think that they have visited us?
01:29:20.000Do you think that all this UAP UFO nonsense and all the stuff that you're seeing the Pentagon talk about and the front page of the New York Times in 2017, do you think that's real?
01:29:32.000So I absolutely think you have a good point about it potentially happening earlier, intelligence happening earlier elsewhere in the universe.
01:29:40.000Yeah, so many potential models that could have taken place.
01:29:42.000Yeah, so they could have developed that intergalactic traveling technology earlier than us such that they could have made it here.
01:29:53.000Totally possible, and so they may be among us, but...
01:29:58.000Then you have a lot of questions like, why haven't they made themselves known to everyone?
01:30:04.000You have a lot of good answers to that, too.
01:30:49.000Did she say something about that there are ideas that the government has created these videos using drone technology to make it look like these are aliens,
01:31:06.000but it's actually some sort of psyop or something?
01:32:01.000And we need to lay out the evidence for each theory.
01:32:06.000And so we need to rate how likely each is to be true, given what we know.
01:32:11.000Then we need to make predictions with those theories about if one was true, what would we expect to see?
01:32:16.000And then we need to go out and investigate, and then we need to update the probabilities of each of those being true after we've done more investigation.
01:32:28.000One of the interesting things about the conversation that I had yesterday with Michio Kaku was that at one point in time he thought that it was preposterous.
01:32:35.000That the idea of us being in contact with alien life, it was silly, it was one of those things that physicists, he said, would roll their eyes at.
01:32:45.000That there's so much evidence in terms of the video evidence that shows things behaving in a way that is not in line with our understanding of physics.
01:32:54.000In terms of propulsion systems that don't exhibit any sort of heat signature, they move in a way that we can't understand how something can go from 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet in a mere second or two.
01:33:13.000And he was explaining how these are sophisticated tracking systems that have found these things, and then multiple points of evidence, video, eyewitness accounts, tracking systems, and that all these things point to something that is a phenomenon that is clearly real.
01:33:29.000There's too many different Points of evidence that point to something actually taking place, but something that we don't understand, something that exists in a technological realm that has not been,
01:33:44.000in his eyes, has not been explored currently on Earth.
01:33:49.000Yeah, so I think we're at, you know, the most interesting point in history because assuming that the kind of conspiracy theory that I just mentioned isn't true, that these videos are somehow faked, then we have two possibilities which both are mind-blowing.
01:34:08.000Either it is aliens and they're here or there's advanced military aircraft So advanced that it's stuff that our world-leading physicists don't know how to explain because we didn't know that those kind of exotic physics existed.
01:34:45.000The advanced military aircraft that can kind of defy the laws of physics as we know them, or actual aliens, those are two crazy options.
01:34:55.000So, if I'm not going the aliens route, which I'd like to talk about in a minute, and we're going with the theory that it's advanced military aircraft, I would think it would be something that was a product of something like the Manhattan Project.
01:35:10.000So we had the Manhattan Project, we had this research facility in Los Alamos, and we brought the best scientists in the world over here to solve the problem of creating an atomic bomb before the Nazis did.
01:35:57.000Pretty much the inventor of the modern computer architecture.
01:36:04.000Some people say he's the smartest guy that ever lived.
01:36:07.000We don't hear his name much, but his colleagues would say that his ability to do calculations in his head would just dwarf Einstein's ability.
01:36:20.000So, John von Neumann died from a sickness.
01:36:24.000I can't remember what it was, but he wasn't that old.
01:36:29.000And on his deathbed, this is a side fact, but he did convert to...
01:36:36.000He had a priest come in and he was made a Catholic or something like that.
01:37:05.000Um, so, um, yeah, but so, uh, he, he had, uh, like, um, intelligence, you know, military officer, someone outside of his room when he was on his deathbed,
01:37:21.000making sure that he didn't say anything, didn't give out secrets, spill the beans.
01:37:27.000Um, so I have this kind of idea that, you know, maybe, uh, Military has taken the work of geniuses that has been classified for, you know, all this time, and that maybe that it could be something like super advanced military aircraft,
01:37:49.000not defying the laws of physics, but using some sort of exotic physics that we're not aware of.
01:37:57.000I thought that as well because I don't see any incentive for the government to openly state that we don't know why these things are here or where they're from.
01:38:27.000Certainly it's possible that there is an advanced species from another planet That's observing us and making sure that we don't fuck everything up because if we are on that critical Breakthrough point like a like a little baby chick Knocking on the egg and opening it up something came along and stomped that egg right there It would fuck it all up and what we could do with our nuclear weapons and our Crazy desire to conquer.
01:38:54.000We could fuck up the whole thing and start from scratch and nuke ourselves back to the Stone Age.
01:38:59.000And then, you know, it's another 100,000 years before we come back around and figure out life again.
01:39:04.000And that, unfortunately, might have happened in the past.
01:39:09.000And on other planets, it could be that, you know, civilizations have gotten to the point where we are right now and then moved towards thermonuclear war and nuked themselves.
01:39:19.000So maybe the aliens go, oh, we know what happens here.
01:39:22.000Let's make sure these idiots don't ruin this like they did in Alpha Centauri or wherever.
01:39:29.000But it also could be that the government wants to cover up for the fact that they have some super advanced technology that has some new propulsion method that violates what we understand about the laws of propulsion and physics, and they can use gravity in some unique and novel way and make things go faster than we could ever possibly imagine.
01:39:52.000Well, a scary thought is that it is a military weapon, but it's not ours.
01:39:56.000It's Russia's or China's and that they don't know what it is because they don't know how it works and then they're putting this out there because they're truly stumped and maybe they're being transparent about this.
01:40:08.000Well, that's also the big sighting was off the coast of the Nimitz.
01:40:12.000That was the Tic Tac UFO from Commander David Fravor.
01:40:16.000The reason why that's big is because multiple jets saw it.
01:40:20.000They used the data from the Nimitz, so they were using tracking devices.
01:40:25.000That's the thing that they saw that went from above 50,000 feet to 50 in a second or so.
01:40:31.000Whatever that is, they're right near San Diego.
01:40:35.000They're right near all those military bases.
01:41:03.000I was gonna bring him up because he's the one who says that we would just be like ants.
01:41:07.000He would come here just to see stupid little ants.
01:41:09.000Well, he said that, I mean, I don't know what's going on with him.
01:41:12.000He was talking the other day about why would people care about eclipses, why they care about solar and lunar eclipses, that it's just an alignment of the planets and it happens all the time.
01:41:22.000Because it's a fucking interesting deal.
01:41:26.000Why do you care about the Northern Lights?
01:41:29.000Why do we care about any of these things?
01:41:30.000Because they're fascinating, because we live in a beautiful, complex, nuanced, bizarre universe, and it's interesting to observe these phenomenon.
01:41:39.000And when something like a lunar eclipse happens, the idea that this famous astrophysicist wouldn't understand why people would be interested in that.
01:41:49.000Yeah, I would have to hear the context, but that seems very...
01:41:53.000...unlike the kind of things he usually says because he's talked about this cosmic perspective and that we are imagining, just thinking about that we're part of this whole big story.
01:42:05.000So it seems pretty weird that he would...
01:42:53.000This is some weird cynicism that I've noticed from him over the last few years, and I don't understand.
01:42:59.000I think he's reacting to, like, stuff in the news and he's trying to make, like, a viral tweet, but I think he's just kind of talking about, like, you know, just something happens and everyone's, like, crazy.
01:43:10.000There's some phenomenon, like, maybe people don't care about things that are really interesting, but for eclipses, like, everybody just, like, loses their shit over them, so...
01:43:32.000Yeah, I think it's social media and people trying to just say something that is kind of contrarian.
01:43:38.000Well, I also think he's on social media too much.
01:43:41.000And those people that are on social media, I think they gravitate towards negativity, which is another thing that I wanted to bring up to you.
01:43:49.000If you're talking about emerging intelligence and emerging complexity and how it keeps moving into these greater and greater forms of complexity, There seems to be a pitfall socially that's connected to social media where I feel like in some way it allows us to exchange information at a greater rate than ever before.
01:44:16.000But in another way, it's almost like we're handling raw uranium.
01:44:22.000I was going to say it's like giving a child a gun.
01:44:25.000Or it's like the early nuclear explosions.
01:44:28.000I'm sure you've seen those tests that they did with the military where they had these soldiers in a ditch and they blew up these nuclear bombs and had them run towards the blast.
01:44:42.000But because this is how I look at it because you know when you talk about emerging technologies and the dangers of them and how it almost we have to have disasters in order for us to recognize it and I think it took for the bombs to be dropped during World War two for us to realize like hey don't fucking do that ever again and we haven't luckily done that since then but there's been a there was a lot of tests that they did which are Fucking insane with our understanding today of
01:45:12.000the dangers of nuclear radiation and blast exposure.
01:46:57.000What's the point of running towards it?
01:46:59.000I think the idea was you would drop a bomb on the enemy, and then once the bomb was detonated, then you would run towards them in the middle of their confusion, and you would catch them with their pants down.
01:48:24.000Either they were completely ignorant or the kind of conspiracy theory side of me is saying maybe they wanted to, the people higher up, find out the results of radiation exposure.
01:48:51.000Well, they're probably all dead anyway.
01:48:53.000I wonder if the chaos that we're seeing in terms of...
01:48:59.000Government upheavals, all the exposure of corruption and the infighting and the polarization of America, which is so, not just America, the world itself.
01:49:09.000It's so radical and so different in the way people are at each other's throats that this is almost a form of like what they were doing back then when they were testing nuclear bombs.
01:49:22.000It's like, we don't understand the dangers of this new technology.
01:49:28.000So when we develop technology as a society, we're not always ready to deal with that technology.
01:49:37.000We kind of catch up later as far as ethics.
01:49:42.000So the argument I make in the book, which I explained a little bit ago, talking about these phase transitions, that you do have a period of just...
01:49:53.000Widespread chaos before these transitions to higher order.
01:49:58.000And it's specifically because, yeah, we do have to learn from those mistakes.
01:50:03.000A guy named Peter Turchin, he actually predicted the age of unrest that we're experiencing right now.
01:50:13.000In 2010, he said 2020 was going to be an age of unrest that we haven't experienced for a long time.
01:50:22.000I don't remember if he was comparing the previous ages to World War II, but his work basically shows that there are these predictable evolutionary cycles where just things get totally crazy and The Hindus have the Yugas.
01:50:37.000They predicted that we are in Kali Yuga.
01:50:53.000Kali Yuga is the most confusing and chaotic.
01:50:58.000It's just a general function of You know as societies grow and advance and they become more complex and they have more access to food and life becomes easier and then they create harder and harder Worlds because of that like things get more fucked up because of that Yeah,
01:51:19.000that goes back to what I was saying about this, you know, kind of magic of insight.
01:51:23.000I think these people did have these intuitions.
01:51:26.000I'm sure they had things going on in their times, which kind of led them to these, like, theories.
01:51:33.000This understanding of human nature and how it plays out over long stretches of time.
01:51:48.000So you look at the data and you see that every so often, kind of semi-predictably, you will have this period of chaos.
01:51:57.000And what I think is really interesting is that You know, it's not just that you can explain it in terms of past data, but I think it's really this evolutionary story that I try to describe where you do have these periods of phase transitions,
01:52:18.000And that basically a system that's too rigid needs to have a certain amount of flexibility, a certain amount of chaos or noise introduced to the system to allow it to be able to change into something new.
01:53:32.000But, you know, it's obviously that people recognize that there are patterns to civilization itself and that, as you were saying before, is that you need problems because problems create solutions and solutions, they empower or at least motivate innovation.
01:53:53.000And interestingly, this guy, Peter Turchin, who predicted these things, his father was named Valentin Turchin, and he had this concept of the metasystem transition.
01:54:04.000And I think I saw a video of you and Ben Gortzel, if I'm saying his last name right, I think he mentioned Turchin.
01:54:13.000But yeah, it's basically this process that I talked about earlier of evolutionary transitions of things coming together to make larger things or organisms coming together to make larger adaptive systems or superorganisms.
01:54:26.000And so in Peter Turchin's work, I haven't seen him like reference his dad, but I think his dad actually...
01:54:35.000Gave a more, like a deeper explanation of why this happens other than just like there are these like social, you know, there are these patterns to history.
01:54:46.000It's actually about these transitions.
01:54:49.000Now, when you apply that to alien civilizations, do you think that it's possible, whether it's through technology or just through some sort of an evolutionary process, that we recognize these pitfalls,
01:55:07.000And that this is a part of the solution of the greater intelligence of these advanced beings that they work their way through this.
01:55:17.000They figure out that this is an actual pattern that does occur and that they solve it.
01:55:24.000Yeah, I think if there are intelligent beings that they've gone through this same evolutionary trajectory of things being okay and then things sort of shit hitting the fan and then having to deal with it.
01:55:39.000Let's say you do have the technology to like...
01:55:45.000Leave your planet, and maybe your civilization has achieved some sort of peace.
01:55:49.000What if you bump into another civilization that doesn't have the same philosophy?
01:55:54.000There's going to be a period of war, maybe, and then some sort of integration under some larger worldview.
01:56:01.000But I do think there's a tendency towards worldviews for any civilization where the civilization starts to understand the importance of cooperation.
01:56:13.000Don't you think we could get to a point, or life I should say, intelligent life could get to a point where war is no longer even possible because the power that they possess would be far beyond what we're thinking about when we're talking about nuclear war.
01:56:29.000When you get to a Type 3 civilization, Something a civilization that has control of the very power that makes black holes like they can't go to war so yeah, maybe you could get to the point where it's just intelligence plus Ability it makes all those things inevitable one of the things that I are discussed with Michio Kaku yesterday is that The things that motivate us to innovate and to conquer and to achieve
01:56:59.000material success, a lot of that are these primate instincts.
01:57:03.000And we may one day find that that's the bottleneck to progress, is that our biological need to breed and to be recognized and the ego and all these different things that we think of as just an integral part of just being a human being in human society.
01:57:20.000That that might be a bottleneck to progress and that the solution to that might be some sort of an integration with technology, a symbiotic integration with technology, that we become some sort of cyborg.
01:57:36.000And it eliminates all of these biological problems that stem from survival of the fittest, natural selection, competition, all these things that led us to get to this point.
01:57:47.000But we may realize, like, those things that create this...
01:57:51.000I mean, we've never had a point ever in human history where there's no war, right?
01:57:56.000If we could get to that, we might be able to say, like, hey, one of the things that's fucking us up is we're still monkeys.
01:58:06.000Yeah, I think, um, that's probably a good way to look at it, uh, but, um, when you mention this, like, you know, kind of primitive way of being that is more, like, concerned with the individual, there is also this, I would say it's part of nature to also be part of a society and to want to cooperate rather than,
01:58:25.000um, I guess you've had on the show a friend of mine, Howard Bloom, he has a book called The Global Brain.
01:58:32.000And it's all about how, you know, in certain instances, animals will, like, for example, sacrifice themselves.
01:58:43.000Even when it isn't, you know, to the benefit of propagating their genes.
01:58:49.000That was sort of the selfish narrative that Richard Dawkins made famous.
01:58:52.000So I think evolution is about these two processes.
01:58:55.000It's about competing and it's about cooperating.
01:58:58.000And basically, both of them really have a point.
01:59:04.000So when you're competing, when you have Darwinian evolution as sort of survival of the fittest, That's a learning process because basically the ones that lose or that die out, the organisms that die out or the societies that die out, basically that's a filter.
01:59:34.000So, you know, there's a lot of People who don't like capitalism right now, and people are considering socialist models, even communist models.
01:59:46.000But capitalism is very much natural because when you have these different corporations, which are also superorganisms, they're collectives of people working towards a goal, and you have them competing, That's good because it drives progress and it brings down prices and all these good things.
02:00:06.000The problem with capitalism is when the people at the top start changing the rules of capitalism to benefit themselves.
02:00:15.000So competition's good, but cooperation is even better because basically what cooperation is...
02:00:26.000is you align interest with the other agents that you're competing with and from a thermodynamic perspective just going back to this theme of life trying to evade disorder and it needs to extract energy to do that working together always makes any sort of task like that easier for each individual because there's a division of labor And with the division
02:00:56.000of labor, you don't have to use as much work and energy to accomplish the same goals.
02:01:11.000The problem is we equate all of those with the same thing.
02:01:14.000We always think corporations are evil.
02:01:17.000It's only because they violate the actual rules that are established, because people have this mentality that the most important thing is success, and the best way to measure success is financial success.
02:01:30.000So you can abandon ethics, you can abandon morals, you can abandon principles and rules if you can get away with it, and you'll achieve greater and greater financial success.
02:01:38.000And if you can get to an escape velocity, you can then avoid the ramifications of the things you've done.
02:01:45.000Yeah, so I think that's that kind of primal instinct that you were talking about at work.
02:02:46.000And when we're talking about like billionaires, the reason I say it's a problem is if you imagine human society as this social organism, as this integrated organism, which I'm saying that's how we should look at it.
02:02:59.000These are Complex adaptive systems are organisms.
02:03:04.000That's like, you know, the more technical name for these systems.
02:03:08.000These things can be realized at these different scales.
02:03:11.000So a social organism is very similar to a biological organism.
02:03:16.000So when you have wealth that's concentrated so much like we have today, there's like billionaires, like the amount of wealth that's concentrated at the top is just far more than it's been in America.
02:03:30.000It's like having an organism where the resources aren't flowing throughout the whole system.
02:03:38.000So it's like having blood that's cut off from reaching your hand or your leg.
02:03:47.000The superorganism isn't gonna be healthy overall if all of the resources are in one place.
02:03:54.000So that's what the decentralization, like, kind of, like, crypto blockchain movement, as far as, like, the people who are, you know, I mean, there's big governments trying to, like, take over that technology and turn it into something that is against the spirit of,
02:04:10.000like, what Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned at first, but...
02:04:13.000The idea is that we need to sort of spread out this centralized wealth and power and control because it makes for a healthier superorganism.
02:04:27.000When you write a book like this, how do you know when you're done?
02:04:45.000So, yeah, what happened was, you know, I got my PhD and then I was doing science journalism, but really just to build up my credentials, like saying, oh, I've written for the New York Times and the Atlantic.
02:04:59.000Now, you know, I should be able to get a book deal.
02:05:02.000So I was doing that, but I really wanted to write this book.
02:05:06.000So I was covering like politics from like a scientific aspect, things that were like relevant to the news.
02:05:12.000But I felt like I was at a point where I could pitch this.
02:05:15.000And I had actually written a novel that was sort of about this crypto decentralization movement, but I think it was like too early, like no one knew what blockchain, people thought it was like a fad that Bitcoin was going to come and go.
02:05:27.000So, when my agent pitched that and it didn't get an offer, I was like, okay, I'm not giving up.
02:05:34.000I'm going to write the nonfiction book that I've kind of wanted to write my whole life.
02:05:38.000And I pitched that to Binbello, which is my publisher, and they were really interested in it.
02:05:44.000And Gave me a decent enough advance for me to decide to do it and I was supposed to have a year and then a year came and went and I turned in what would be like the first third of the book and I was just like here I knew it wasn't complete and like I was just giving them something to buy me time they were like yeah this isn't the book that you pitched it's just like a part of it and I'm like I know now let me have a little bit more time and they did And
02:06:16.000so it was just like intense focusing, like in a room the pandemic started.
02:06:23.000It was like super crazy, super unhealthy, like just in the whole time working on this, rushing so that I could get it done within two years instead of one year.
02:06:33.000But it still doesn't feel like it's done.
02:07:39.000Yeah, this guy who did Deepak Sherpa wrote a book with a physicist, Menes Kafatos, and the guy is called You Are the Universe, and we got that guy and he's a pro.
02:08:18.000Yeah, so you can pre-order the book, and it's out on the 28th.
02:08:23.000And I also have a Road to Omega sub-stack and a YouTube channel that basically takes the paradigm in this book And tries to turn it into something like a social or political movement, using these principles to think about how we can optimize social systems,
02:08:43.000economic systems, political systems, and yeah.