00:09:05.100important well when we when we want to sort of baptize darwinism and say that this is god's way
00:09:09.900of of um of creating that the the the the proper darwinists will bristle and say no no no as darwin
00:09:18.280himself did and say no that's you're missing the whole point we're getting rid of any intelligent
00:09:22.440activity in the creation of new biological form and so it's nature doing the selecting not not god
00:09:29.020it's it's an attempt to explain the appearance of design without a designer and that's very
00:09:33.620actually very hard to reconcile with any meaningful form of theism.
00:09:36.980When I was learning about this in school, and the last time I studied this seriously
00:09:42.380was probably the eighth grade, so it never got very advanced, though I never got better
00:09:48.160answers even from my friends in college or elsewhere.
00:09:53.320The argument was, look, we can see the evidence of natural selection in all of these species
00:09:57.500and all these places of the earth, but we have no idea how life began in the first place.
00:10:03.620I said, well, listen to me. What am I? I'm a layman. That seems like a big problem for your theory.
00:10:09.340It seems like a big deal, right, yeah.
00:10:10.200And the last I heard was that there was this, the leading theory is there's a primordial soup, and a bunch of molecules were batting into each other.
00:10:21.780And then just one day, I don't know, enough molecules hit each other that you got a life form, a single cell or something.
00:10:28.360And scientists had tried to recreate these conditions and various beakers and petri dishes, and they've been successful.
00:10:37.360But there were problems with the methodology, and they were tainted with germs or whatever.
00:10:43.020And so, but anyway, we're pretty sure.
00:10:45.860Something like this is what explains it all.
00:10:48.920That's how you go from inorganic to organic.
00:10:50.840And then you get natural selection kicking in, and all the new forms arise, right?
00:10:55.320Yeah. So, right. This is what I did my PhD on. It was the origin of life biology. And I was working in the late 80s in Cambridge on this. At the time, it was pretty widely acknowledged, including by one of my PhD examiners that origin of life research had reached an impasse.
00:11:13.720She came back from the 1989 ISOL conference saying to me,
00:11:20.520Steve, our field has become populated with cranks and quacks.
00:11:24.660And I hate to say this, but the problem is everyone knows that everyone else's theory doesn't work,
00:11:31.080but they're unwilling to admit it about their own.
00:11:34.520And things have gotten no better in the ensuing almost now 30 years.
00:11:40.340And the problem is that, as Jim Tour, the organic chemist from Rice, has pointed out,
00:11:45.140is that with each passing decade, we learn more and more about the complexity of life.
00:11:51.320And if you want to explain the origin of life, you have to know what life is like,
00:13:28.700And so that's the real problem today. It's the problem in both branches of evolutionary theory. Where does the information come from that's needed to build new forms? To build biological form, you need information. And the key question in The Origin of Life is, where did the information in the DNA come from?
00:13:48.980Right. And, I mean, at a very basic level, how is it information?
00:16:19.440And so what we know from our uniform and repeated experience,
00:16:24.440which is the basis of all scientific reasoning,
00:16:26.440is that information always arises from an intelligent source,
00:16:30.440whether we're talking about computer code or a paragraph in a book or hieroglyphic inscription
00:16:35.440or the information transmitted as we're talking or across a radio signal,
00:16:43.440information is, in our experience, a product of intelligence.
00:16:47.440And so there have been numerous attempts to explain the origin of the information
00:16:50.440necessary to produce life apart from intelligence.
00:16:54.440This is what my book, Signature in the Cell, was all about and documented.
00:16:58.360But these different attempts have failed, and for very good reasons that we could talk about and explain.
00:17:04.360But what is left standing is our knowledge based on our uniform experience, which is that information is a product of mind.
00:17:12.580So this discovery of information at the foundation of life is a powerful indicator of the activity of a designing mind in the history and origin of life.
00:17:22.840But if I give a monkey a typewriter and I leave him on a long enough time scale, he will compose.
00:17:29.580He'll certainly compose my first book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
00:17:33.120But he'll compose the works of Shakespeare eventually.
00:17:36.100And so wouldn't the materialist come back and say, well, yes, we're all astounded by the complexity of nature and all these data that we find in the nucleotides.
00:22:02.060Let me answer the question you didn't ask first, and then I'll segue to answer the other one, okay?
00:22:06.760Because what is really fascinating in the origin of life discussion is that very serious scientists, biologists,
00:22:13.380no less a figure than Francis Crick himself, have posited an alien origin of life that they then propose was transported here to planet Earth.
00:22:26.800Because the conditions on the early Earth were not hospitable to the spontaneous chemical evolutionary origin of life, or even the slow and gradual chemical evolutionary origin of life.
00:22:37.040And so instead, they've posited that life might have arisen on another planet designed by an alien intelligence.
00:22:47.940Well, when Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins about whether there was a possibility that intelligent design could be part of the answer to the origin of life problem, which Dawkins acknowledged is a problem, he speculated that, well, maybe there, he said, there is a signature of intelligence, but it must have had, it must have arisen by an intelligence in outer space.
00:23:49.940The problem with that hypothesis is, well, first of all, there's never any specificity about how the information came from.
00:23:56.560It's not clear whether they're saying the alien designed the genetic information or whether the alien simply transported what had evolved on some other planet.
00:24:05.040And it's usually the latter, which means they haven't solved the information problem.
00:24:13.500Where did the alien come from in the first place?
00:24:15.100Exactly, because we also have this problem of fine-tuning. The universe is exquisitely fine-tuned in its basic physical parameters and properties. And that fine-tuning has been present from the very beginning of the universe. And it's an absolutely necessary condition of any future possible evolution of life. So no alien within the universe could be the explanation for the origin of the fine-tuning upon which its subsequent evolution would depend.
00:24:40.980Right. Nor could the alien explain the origin of the universe itself. So it's a bad overall theory of biological and cosmological origins. But this whole question about, well, is life inevitable somewhere in the universe? And it's a numerator and denominator problem. If you can go back to just basic math, it is true that the universe is vast beyond anything we had any inkling of even 100 years ago.
00:25:07.740In Return of the God Hypothesis, I used the figure 200 billion galaxies, and I was wrong.
00:25:16.200It's actually, the more current estimate is closer to 2 trillion.
00:25:31.780There's lots of places where life could have evolved.
00:25:33.820But the problem is that people who just simply assert that are not reckoning on the number of parameters and the improbability associated with each to make a life-friendly universe to start with.
00:25:50.040Just one of the fine-tuning parameters, the initial entropy of the universe, calculated by Sir Roger Penrose as one chance in 10 to the 10 to the 123.
00:26:02.400it's a hyper-exponential number you can't there's not even enough elementary particles in the
00:26:08.180universe to represent the zeros in that number it's it's just ridiculous you know so you have
00:26:13.300you have this ensemble of cosmic fine-tuning parameters that have to be just right and then
00:26:19.100you have to have the all the localized fine-tuning parameters to get a life-friendly solar system
00:26:26.060and planetary system, and so when you do the math, the localized fine-tuning parameters are more
00:26:33.060relevant to assessing whether there would be life somewhere else in the universe, but they end up
00:26:37.180dwarfing. The improbability of that ends up dwarfing the probabilistic resources provided by
00:26:43.000the two trillion galaxies, at least in the reckoning of an increasing number of physicists.
00:26:50.500This is at least now a very active area of debate.
00:26:57.060There was a book years ago in the mid-2000s by two astronomers at the University of Washington called Rare Earth.
00:27:04.420Two colleagues of mine a few years later wrote a book called Privileged Planet.
00:27:09.040And apparently a new book out by some Italian physicists making the same point that, yeah, big universe,
00:27:15.500but the probabilities are so small that even this vast universe doesn't render life inevitable.
00:27:22.800And again, even in a very favorable planetary environment like ours,
00:27:28.020we have no explanation for where the origin of the first cell came from
00:27:32.880and the origin of the information necessary to build it.
00:27:35.960So the complexity of life dwarfs the vastness of the universe in that kind of a calculation.
00:27:43.620But then when you tell people that, I don't say it verbatim as you did. It was a little more eloquent than my version of it. But when I tell people that, they say, so you just think we're special? That's what it comes down. What you think, this vast universe that we cannot possibly even begin to fathom, you just think that we're special? And my answer is...
00:28:05.880Yes. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that? Yeah.
00:28:08.380And what's your evidence to the contrary?
00:29:53.380How do you get across with, in a stimulus response evolutionary system,
00:29:59.640How do you get across the idea of something like what I would have done, the subjunctive tense, or what you should have done, Michael, the imperative?
00:31:06.700But it underscores our uniqueness as well.
00:31:08.840And I like, though I know it's erroneous to appeal to authority, and in this way I'm kind of doing, in a way I'm appealing to the opposite of an authority because Chomsky's wrong about everything, but he's pretty good on language.
00:31:20.300And I like that people who don't share my priors about a lot of things increasingly seem to be coming to the same dilemmas.
00:31:29.880Making concessions about really fundamental issues.
00:32:38.100When you subscribe, you get to choose a free meat that will be included in every single box for the life of your subscription with code Knowles.
00:36:11.640In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
00:36:14.120So this sets off a fascinating century-long dialectic in cosmology where many, many astronomers and physicists and cosmologists have resisted the Big Bang theory precisely because it challenges a materialistic understanding of the cosmos, which presupposes that the universe is made of material stuff, matter and energy that is eternal and self-existent and has always been here.
00:36:40.900So there's also this kind of irony that a lot of religious people think that the Big Bang is contrary to a theistic worldview or to a concept of creation, but in a way it's the ultimate creationist theory.
00:36:54.440Yes. I had a friend of mine, a very serious evangelical Protestant, and he was invading against me, this was many years ago, for believing in the Big Bang. I said, look, I'm not, it's not a matter of dogma for me. I don't totally scientifically illiterate. But I said, you know, it was formulated by a Catholic priest. And I don't know, it seems to jive pretty well with Genesis. So yes, people resist it because it's science-y.
00:37:21.740Well, the confusion, Michael, comes in when people think that the scientists are saying
00:37:26.620that the Big Bang is the cause of everything, that it is the creator, it's the first cause.
00:37:33.220But the Big Bang is not a theory of the first cause, it's a theory of the first effect.
00:38:56.840Not enough matter in the universe, even counting the dark matter, to cause a re-collapse.
00:39:00.580Even if you got a re-collapse, you would have no energy available left to do work.
00:39:05.720The entropy buildup would mean that you wouldn't get a subsequent expansion.
00:39:10.320So that was one of many cosmological models that attempted to retain the idea of an infinite universe, temporally infinite, and the one before it was known as the steady state, and I'll tell you there's a whole suite of new models being formulated because the mind of the mathematician and the physicist is infinitely creative, and there has been an impulse to try to retain the idea that the universe is infinite.
00:39:40.320in duration. If the universe has always been here, we don't need to think about what created it.
00:39:45.380Right. But the best evidence we have points to a beginning.
00:39:48.220That, yeah, okay. So, because that model, that's interesting, that it doesn't give you infinite space,
00:39:53.920but it does give you infinite time. Right, right.
00:39:55.920You know, ad infinitum, you know, in and out, in and out, in and out.
00:40:00.180Yes. But you're saying that one was debunked in the 80s, basically.
00:40:04.260Right, exactly. Okay, well, that makes sense that it's still, to this day, appears in popular...
00:40:08.320Exactly. Well, the chance hypothesis for the origin of life is, you know, it's in every sophomore dorm bowl session.
00:45:30.700Yeah, but no, if that's the best the other side can do, we smile and appreciate that.
00:45:36.660When I'm in debates and my opposite number starts with a lot of ad hominem or trying to characterize me or the Discovery Institute or my colleagues in the intelligent design research community, rather than address the issues, I quietly smile inside because I know he or she is wasting time that could be better spent making arguments.
00:45:58.380And I think invariably people see through that stuff.
00:46:01.640And I think the growth in our movement over the last 20 years where around 2004 and 2005 there was a court trial that brought us a lot of bad media.
00:46:13.660But I think we're in a very different day now.
00:46:15.580I think that those kinds of arguments are not working.
00:46:17.940Once we get past the multiverse, the next thing that the denizens of Reddit, they ask, well, don't you think we might just be living in a simulation?
00:46:28.380Okay. Is that, are we? And how would I know?
00:46:32.780Berlinski has an hysterical line about the simulation hypothesis in the film. So
00:46:38.860if people are interested, they should check that out. Well, the first thing they say about the
00:46:44.560simulation hypothesis is the idea that we have a kind of faux existence that's a consequence of
00:46:53.080some master programmer programming us as kind of bots. But notice what's implied there is that
00:47:01.040it is an intelligent design hypothesis. The implication is that there's a mind behind
00:47:06.820everything. So I would say the simulation hypothesis is at least halfway there. Where
00:47:11.560it falls down is that if the programmer has convinced us that we actually do exist, that
00:47:20.380we're not just have a faux existence in a simulated computer domain, then the master
00:47:30.260programmer has outsmarted himself and created real existence. It's a little bit like the old
00:47:35.780Cartesian argument about the evil demon that's convinced us that we exist, but we really don't.
00:47:43.960But realizing that if the evil demon has convinced us such that we think we exist, well, then we at
00:47:50.300least do exist. We at least do that. The rest of Descartes' proofs may not be that effective, but
00:47:55.600he, I think he refuted the idea that we can be, we can be talked out of an awareness of our own
00:48:02.820existence. And I think the simulation hypothesis implies that as well. And I think it fails on
00:48:09.060that grounds, but it does affirm the need for an intelligent agent to account for the things we see,
00:48:14.500which I think is kind of curious and gets us halfway there.
00:48:18.380Many, I would say actually maybe the most popular
00:48:23.460pastime for conservatives is to figure out
00:48:25.980when everything went wrong and whose fault it is.
00:48:28.400And so sometimes we say, oh, it was William of Ockham.
00:57:01.140But out of all of that came figures like Tom Holland, rediscovering the importance of Christianity for the cultural foundation of the West.
00:57:13.720And that, you know, his argument that we all are swimming in Christian waters and don't know it.
00:57:18.980That our concepts of universal human rights, human dignity, the care, the concern for the disenfranchised, the poor, the widows, the orphans.
00:57:28.440all of this is something that come into a currency in the West after the Nazarene,
00:57:34.900after the Sermon on the Mount. He said it doesn't exist in any of the ancient empires.
00:57:39.700So there's been this kind of rediscovery. I think there's a rediscovery of the cultural benefits
00:57:46.340and importance of Christianity to the West, but also I think the God question is percolating
00:57:52.800to the surface of the culture now among many unexpected figures. You have Ayan Hirsi Ali,
00:57:58.120who has announced a conversion away from the new atheism. She was one of Dawkins' sidekicks.
00:58:03.240She's a double convert. She went from Islam to atheism, and atheism to Christianity.
00:58:08.840But other figures, Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia, Charles Murray, the social scientist,
00:58:18.440taking religion seriously. You have figures like Joe Rogan himself, who's now
00:58:25.080attending church and exploring some of these things. So I think it's a very surprising
00:58:32.060kind of turn where it seemed, you know, the days of the London buses with the billboards saying,
00:58:38.520you know, relax and enjoy your life. God probably does not exist. Relax and enjoy your life was the
00:58:45.900new atheist mantra. I think that seems almost silly to people now. It certainly does. You know,
00:58:51.900back then, so this was 20 years ago, basically. It's not even 20 years ago, but this thing is
00:58:58.000a spent force, and I would say in about 15 years. Yeah, right, right. I guess in those days,
00:59:05.060your comment or the criticism that people have made of you that it's creationism in a cheap
00:59:10.240tuxedo. Oh, that tuxedo thing again. Says, oh, just dagger out. I came with a pocket square
00:59:15.720this time. Just to prove them wrong. Yeah, we can really dress. But that, I think that impelled a
00:59:21.540lot of people to try to gussy up their arguments in secular sounding language, jargony kind of
00:59:28.200language to say, no, no, no, I'm not grounding. I might be theistic. I might be a Christian,
00:59:32.520but I'm not grounding my views on that at all. I actually have these, I've come to these
00:59:36.920conclusions through entirely secular and rationalism. I don't know, to me now, it seems
00:59:41.780to flip. Like it's kind of like the IQ bell curve meme. The guy at the end of the IQ bell curve,
00:59:47.000the real dummy, he speaks- That's the creationist in the cheap tuxedo.
00:59:50.680He's the creationist in the cheap tuxedo.
01:00:10.760And he says, actually, you know, God made the world.
01:00:13.040Then you get to a Berlinski or a Dembski
01:00:16.120or some of the geniuses in our movement.
01:00:18.200Yes, yes. Berlinski wrote this incredible critique of the new atheist movement when it was still hot. And the devil's delusion. Yeah. Atheism and its scientific pretensions. And he saw a lot of them. But I had a conversation with him. I know you and I met him. Yes. You met him at a conference in the fall. Yes. And I'm quite taken with David Berlinski. But even before I met him. Yeah. He's, by the way, featured in the film. And every time he comes on, people start laughing.
01:00:46.460Yes, he, I mean, he's just this, so before I had met him, all I knew of him was his writing.
01:00:51.320And so I, but I really have enjoyed his writing for a long time as, as with yours.
01:00:56.180And yes, and then you meet this man and you say, how is he even more, he's 50 times more of a character than you expect, even from his writing, which is already called.
01:01:06.200But he and I were talking the other day and he said, no, actually the new atheists did us a favor because what they did is they, they effectively challenged people of a theistic bent.
01:01:15.460to up their game and to articulate and formulate the reasons they had for believing in God.
01:01:25.820And we were kind of doing that all along with our work on intelligent design,
01:01:30.600but they created an appetite for the kind of work that we were doing.
01:01:35.380And lo and behold, people have found that our arguments are actually better.
01:01:39.160And some of the new atheist arguments are incredibly weak and such that many atheist
01:01:44.220philosophers. For example, Dawkins' argument from complexity. If you invoke God, then you've
01:01:51.920invoked something more complex than the thing you're trying to explain, and that violates
01:01:55.920Occam's razor. No, no, no, no, it doesn't. That's not what Occam's razor says. It isn't that the
01:02:00.960entity can't be more complex than the thing being explained. If that were the case, then we couldn't
01:02:06.600explain the origin of the television set by reference to the engineers who designed it,
01:02:10.240because clearly the engineer, or you couldn't explain Dawkins' book, The God Delusion,
01:02:14.320by reference to Dawkins, because clearly he would have to acknowledge that his own mind and brain
01:02:20.540are more complex than the words on the page that he wrote.
01:02:24.660Occam's razor says you shouldn't multiply theoretical entities. Your explanation shouldn't
01:02:29.900be complex in the sense of being Baroque and convoluted with just adding new explanatory
01:02:36.260just-so stories to make your explanation still fit. God is actually a very simple explanation
01:02:43.140because the postulation of one God is much simpler than the postulation of a multiverse
01:02:49.700and all the theoretical entities that go with it from string theory and inflationary cosmology.
01:02:54.860Some would say he's so simple, he's described by divine simplicity.
01:02:58.640Well, there's that very ancient argument from classical philosophy, absolutely. So this is
01:03:04.700one of the go-to arguments of the scientific atheists, and even many atheistic philosophers
01:03:09.160say, no, this is a complete misapplication of Occam's razor.
01:03:13.080I remember reading Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great, when I was a teenager or
01:03:19.660something, and I read it, and I said, well, and I was quite taken with him, but it did
01:03:25.140occur to me later, he doesn't even make that argument. The book doesn't even give you what
01:03:30.960it sells you on the cover. He just whines about religion for 250 pages or so. And then I was
01:03:36.740taken with the analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga's description of the new atheism.
01:03:41.660They said, what do you think of the new atheists? He said, I think they're greatly inferior to the
01:03:46.400old atheists. I think Bertrand Russell was a lot better. Yeah, that's exactly right.
01:03:53.400Well, and that's a couple of things there. First of all, let's stipulate that Christopher Hitchens
01:09:11.380motor proteins, little rotary engines, inside cells on a miniaturized scale.
01:09:17.860This is what we're finding inside life.
01:09:19.420No materialist expected to find that kind of thing.
01:09:21.340So it's good that he's knocked on his side.
01:09:23.120When's he going to be knocked on his knees?
01:09:24.340How do you look at that with just the jaw-dropping complexity, intricacy, and not just say, you know, just not start reciting Psalm 8, you know, Lord, your works are manifest in the creation.
01:11:52.900And anyone who is worth their while who's ever written about writing points out that short, precise, Saxon words are preferable to polysyllabic, Latinate, you know, words that are less evocative.
01:12:09.360That a dummy or a midwit at best will try to impress you with all sorts of polysyllabic words.
01:12:17.640Unless he's Bill Buckley and he's just having fun.
01:14:36.320You know, it was quite polemical, let's put it.
01:14:37.940And so, yes, it just seems to me that, you know, 20 years ago when people would say, 15 years ago when people would say, well, you know, you have religious priors, and so that's why you're making the scientific argument.
01:14:50.060Then you would say, no, no, it's not because of it.
01:14:52.060Now I would say, yes, I have an integral view of the world.
01:14:56.140I, being an integral whole of matter and soul, yes, I have a view of the cosmos that includes this.
01:15:02.160I think of St. John Henry Newman and his great work, The Idea of a University.
01:15:06.720He points out that a university purports to universal knowledge.
01:21:46.220And so a purely physical object could not deal in an immaterial substance, and so there has to be a distinction between the mind and the brain.
01:21:55.180good enough for me. An argument from the First Vatican Council says that the existence of God
01:22:03.980can be known with certainty by human reason in the created world. Simple as that.
01:22:08.820Two things to say about that. One, just a quick experiment that Michael Egnor cites in his new
01:22:12.380book, when brain physiologists have, for various reasons therapeutic, needed on occasion to sever
01:22:20.180the two hemispheres electrically, and they find that a person who is still consciously aware
01:22:27.560can relate sense data that's presented to one hemisphere only to sense data that's been
01:22:38.480presented to the other hemisphere only, and can relate the two and make intellectual connections
01:22:47.400and draw analogies, and between the two,
01:22:51.720even though there is no physiological center of the brain
01:23:13.360I just, not 20 seconds ago, I said I believe it.
01:23:16.400And yet your description of the physical evidence for that just gave me a chance.
01:23:20.200Yeah, well, I would recommend Egner's work on this.
01:23:22.580I had the same experience when he explained it to me over the phone one time.
01:23:25.980But what it would just say that neuroscience is catching up with or providing additional evidential support for the dualist philosophy of the classical philosophers.
01:41:37.800What is the difference between this unthinking, god of the gaps, knuckle-dragging, dumb creationism and intelligent design?
01:41:48.740Well, the term creationist has been deployed as a pejorative term against those of us in our research community, our network, who are advancing the theory of intelligent design.
01:42:02.120And that's because there is a form of creationism which is committed to the proposition that the earth is very, very young on the order of, say, six or 10,000 years or maybe a bit older.
01:42:16.100And the days of Genesis are meant to be understood as six 24-hour periods.
01:42:22.780Our theory of intelligent design is different from that form of creationism in two ways.
01:42:28.940one is that it's not a deduction from scriptural authority first of all it's an inference from
01:42:36.080biological physical and cosmological data we're seeing evidence of the activity of a mind an
01:42:43.340intelligent mind and in the cosmological realm even a transcendent intelligent mind and secondly
01:42:49.320the theory of intelligent design is an age-neutral proposition it's not committed to a young earth
01:42:56.900or an old Earth, it's simply saying that there are certain means by which you can detect the
01:43:02.520activity of a mind or an intelligence, and we see evidence of those distinctive hallmarks of
01:43:09.280intelligent activity in the living forms that came on the planet before us, and even in, for
01:43:15.840example, the fine-tuning of the physical constants and parameters of the universe. So it's an inference
01:43:21.340some biological data, and it takes no position per se on the age of the earth. I myself hold to
01:43:28.720the great antiquity of the universe and life, but there are scientists who
01:43:34.280affirm intelligent design who might beg to differ with me, and maybe because they read
01:43:42.460the Genesis account differently than I do, hold to a young earth. But intelligent design is not
01:43:47.740um, is not, not, not affirming a young earth. Bound by that. Yeah. But, but I, I, we, even today,
01:43:53.280I mean, as we've, we have a new study center that we've started in Cambridge, England. And
01:43:56.740one of the, one of the libels against us is that we're, we're young earth creationists. And well,
01:44:02.020that's, that's, that's not what, that's not what the theory, uh, affirms.
01:44:07.060On the point of a distinction between the mind and the brain, what does this mean for AI?
01:44:12.500Right. Artificial intelligence. Because one thing I noticed that the head of
01:44:16.380nvidia claimed that they stumbled on artificial general intelligence right right they had reached
01:44:21.480it but then no one can define what that is everyone says does it mean uh the ai can run
01:44:27.840a billion dollar business does it mean that the ai is indiscernible from a human being in the way
01:44:31.520that he reasons a general task i don't know and it occurred to me i think they can't define
01:44:36.420artificial general intelligence because they they don't know what real intelligence is like they
01:44:41.540literally they no longer know what the intellect is. So is the, what does that distinction mean
01:44:46.800for AI? Let's set the definitional question aside for a minute, but there's a very significant
01:44:53.840result that's emerged out of the most cutting edge versions of AI, the large language models.
01:44:59.540And it's something called the model collapse or mod, yeah, model collapse. And I think it's the
01:45:07.260tell. It's the philosophical tell. The extraordinary thing about the AI technology,
01:45:14.700especially these large language models, is what they can do. It's amazing. And if you feed in lots
01:45:20.580of text written by actual human agents, you can then query that body of information and you will
01:45:29.420get coherent answers spit back out at you in response to your queries but if
01:45:36.380you take the output of those answers if you take those answers as output and
01:45:42.860treat that as more data to feed into the AI system or make that the basis of a
01:45:49.040new iteration of large language model modeling if you will and now you query
01:45:57.620that data set your next set of answers are not nearly as coherent and if you keep doing that
01:46:07.000iteration after iteration after iteration without correcting things without an input of a conscious
01:46:12.340intelligence correcting things you'll you'll get to pure gibberish within a couple of generations
01:46:17.480so you have a kind of devolution of informational coherence with each iteration that and what this
01:46:26.520shows is there's a fundamental asymmetry between the information that comes from the conscious
01:46:31.100intelligence, which is the source of the original data set, and then the artificial data that's
01:46:36.920output by the AI in response to your query of that first real data set that's come from agents,
01:46:44.500from conscious agents. So the AI is dependent on either both the initial input and subsequent
01:46:53.100inputs by way of correction in a way that the agent is not dependent on the AI for the production
01:47:01.800of genuine meaning. So this shows that the mind will not be replaced by the artificial intelligence.
01:47:09.200There's a great book coming out called Augmented Human Intelligence by Eric Larson and co-author
01:47:15.980with MIT Press. And his previous book was The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, which was a critique
01:47:21.700of claims for artificial general intelligence. And I would recommend these two books for readers
01:47:27.020that are interested. And he shows for a bunch of reasons, technical reasons and more than I've
01:47:33.500just stated, that there's a lot of reasons to doubt the almost utopian program of artificial
01:47:43.140general intelligence. And nothing in the LLMs, the large language models, the chat GPTs, that sort of
01:47:48.700technology undermines that conclusion. Listen, I'm going to preface this and say some of my best
01:47:54.600friends work in AI, but I mean, some of them will say we're building God. So they're describing
01:48:01.600the opposite process, that this thing is going to achieve liftoff and become much, much more
01:48:05.960intelligent. You're saying, no, no, no, if it's just feeding on itself, it degrades pretty quickly.
01:48:10.620My only challenge to that is I seem to observe the same phenomenon among actual human intelligence
01:48:17.980in society. I don't, you know. It can be degeneracy. Yeah, writing has declined low
01:48:22.660these last hundred years. Well, you know what turned me on to this, Michael, was an analogous
01:48:27.020problem in origin of life research, which has been my main field. And that is, there's a model
01:48:32.480called hypercycles that was meant to simulate how you could get in, produce something analogous to
01:48:39.980cellular metabolism. But with each cycle, there was a loss of information in what was called an
01:48:46.800error catastrophe, an accumulation of essentially genetic gibberish in the modeling of the origin
01:48:52.660of life. And that's what you have in the AI with the model collapse. It's an error catastrophe
01:48:57.620where you gradually lose meaning and coherence with each iteration unless you have a conscious
01:49:05.780agent inputting information. And so this also underscores one of our key principles in
01:49:11.560intelligent design research, which is the conservation of information, that the information
01:49:15.860the information, the specified or functional information of a system will either remain the
01:49:21.780same or degrade over time unless there is an input of information from a conscious agent.
01:49:28.580The initial input will exceed the output. Or sometimes if you have an error correction,
01:49:35.020you can maintain the fidelity of information across a channel, but that error correction has
01:49:40.400to have an input from an intelligence. So it's this fundamental connection between conscious
01:49:45.540intelligence and the creation and even the maintenance of information, that's not something
01:49:51.000that nature does on its own. Nor something that the computers do on the road. Even the computers
01:49:55.760are dependent upon us and not the other way around. Yeah. We use them. They're fantastic
01:50:00.980technology. There's all kinds of ways they are improving life. We need them in the medical
01:50:05.800industry. We need them in defense technology. AI has got a lot of great potential, but it also,
01:50:11.300like any technology, can be used for ill as well, and we have to watch that side of things.
01:50:16.860Right. On points that are called dumb and uneducated and all, we were talking about
01:50:22.900Galileo earlier, who got exactly what he deserved as far as I'm concerned, but not for scientific
01:50:27.280reasons because of impudence. His imprudence. Yes, exactly. Yes. But
01:50:35.140what Galileo upended was this idea that the earth is the center of everything,
01:50:40.740of the cosmos, these spheres on which the celestial body is moved. And now we find ourselves
01:50:50.200in Carl Sagan world where we say we're just some little rock far flung in the middle of
01:50:53.440nowhere and all. But I've heard that from cosmic background radiation, we have determined
01:51:00.000that actually maybe we are back at the center of things. And anyway, I really want that
01:51:04.520because one, I want to meet up- We're special for new and different reasons
01:56:25.880It goes back to Aristotle, the idea of a teleos,
01:56:28.720or an entelechy, the purpose for which something was made.
01:56:31.920And as you, I was a college professor for 15 years, and I used to talk to students a lot about this.
01:56:38.620This is part of what you're here to do in your educational experience, is to discern what your entelechy is.
01:56:45.160What is the thing that you were uniquely designed to do?
01:56:48.460Find that, run with it, and you will find a kind of joy, and you will be useful to other people.
01:56:54.360You will serve and bless other people.
01:56:55.780Yeah, I love that one can go from these mathematical calculations about the probabilities of all the aspects of the cosmos and figure out your purpose and do it in one conversation.
01:57:10.280And in fact, any story of everything that does not include both of those things probably does not comprise everything.
01:57:18.620That's fantastic, but we still haven't talked about cigars.