Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC7etaZ2AL4
the jurogan experience you think that this is a process that is leading towards what do you extrapolate do you do 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 a tendency or a law yeah no it's i think it's the most mysterious question there is um so is there an ultimate goal right uh so uh what i do think is that uh this increase in complexity is inevitable but like i said it's not this straight march of progress there's like constantly these challenges there's massive existential challenges and that is the only thing that pushes us uh to create solutions so there's this principle in the book that i call poppers principle named after uh philosopher of science karl popper and uh the idea is that um yes so that that our challenges uh are what force us to find solutions so if progress is going to always continue that means the challenges won't stop so even if we do attain some like globally unified state i would like to see like some sort of agreement among nations that says okay we're all going to demilitarize and we're going to put this money into like medicine or technology whatever else you know all the other things that you know we could be funding that could help you know human society uh and you know we could have something like that but there were there could still be like pandemics there could still be someone crazy that takes over and starts to you know try to reverse that so the point is you can never reach a utopia and even if we did it wouldn't be a utopia for a long time because the world is always changing it's this you know reality is this noisy thermally fluctuating thing and there is chaos chaoses uh needed for complexity too um actually when a system transitions to a state of higher order
uh you need some chaos in the system so that's because like if a system is too rigid and too um so you could think of like things seemed we had democratic presidents like you could think about um just like how things were under obama for a while you know we didn't there wasn't the craziness that we're seeing today so you might think like oh well whatever that system was it was a good thing or it was better than what we have now but no system no model no way of doing things will work forever because uh the external world is always changing so we're always going to be going through these cycles and phases where we have uh temporary stability but then the system needs to change and i think right now when we're seeing all this chaos it is indicative of what uh complexity scientists call a phase transition and so basically uh the chaos uh is basically the system screaming for change um so you see all of this chaos and that provides uh it creates flexibility within a rigid system that allows the system to transition into something new and higher so you think that this is a function of the universe the universe has a tendency towards complexity and that we are one of the driving forces of this yes so we're a biological driving force of a greater law of the universe yeah and but what do you think the universe wants like what's the ultimate goal of this so um you know when you talk about what the universe wants we're already getting into like a little language trap because yeah are we saying that the universe is conscious that it has a conscious intent i don't think so well let me ask it in a different way where do you think this is going well no it so it's it's good to kind of break that down and be like does the universe have a conscious intent so i don't think it does but i think it has a sort of design and when i say design it's something that's not mystical i'm saying that the laws of physics
are such that complexity increases and the universe does have something like a goal so it may not have a conscious intent but life emerges inevitably and that the laws of physics plays something uh you know analogous to uh dna in an organism so the laws of and constants of physics are sort of cosmic dna that ensures that this evolutionary program plays out so uh maybe the universe is moving towards something like a cosmic attractor and an attractor is a term that physicists use to describe a state of order so 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 gravity is attracting the water down the pipe and yep so so you have these attractors which are basically kind of this goal state of system in living systems attractors are basically states of stability that that the system that the living system is trying to maintain against this second law of thermodynamics and uh so um it seems like cosmic evolution is a process of generating increasingly complex attractors so when i say that there are these evolutionary transitions which are versions of phase transitions that i just explained so 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 so atoms come together to make molecules which come together to make cells which come together to make multicellular organisms which come together to form societies and now we have something like the emergence of a global brain which is uh the network of humans connected by the internet as well as ais and so when humans uh leave the planet like people out there like elon musk with spacex are trying to get humans off the planet i'm saying that that's part of
this natural evolutionary process it wasn't just like a decision someone made or you know something that we decided to do because we're clever or something it's actually baked into this process and uh that's because if life is going to continue to persist it has to get off the planet before its star dies so it's sort of it creates like a game clock that forces life to spread what is the end state maybe something like this cosmic attractor where some very legitimate scientists have speculated people like paul davies ray kurzweil you know technology guy may seem you know futurists may seem a little bit more out there but there's this idea that you know the universe is evolving uh and waking up and that there could be this integrated state where something like a cosmic mind emerges from this process is uh is it an egocentric way of looking at consciousness to think that the universe is waking up i mean we are this tiny speck that's riding on one planet that is but a molecule in the vast infinity of the universe yeah for us to say oh one day the universe will catch up with us yeah be conscious like us isn't that kind of goofy like but isn't it like if you think about it isn't it kind of an egocentric biological function the 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 but the universe is literally they have stellar nurseries out there they're creating stars we have hypernovas stars are exploding that create carbon which is literally the the building blocks for all carbon-based life that's all that stuff is happening we're like yeah one day they're going to catch up it's going to be conscious why is consciousness even important well first of all you need stars and planets to have consciousness right that's part of the process too the first ordered structures that were created by this
cosmic evolutionary process which includes life are those those ordered structures and uh so um well one point you made was that you know we're on this small planet uh what the book argues and what a lot of origin of life researchers are arguing is that life isn't improbable it's probably not only here that where you have the right conditions life emerges inevitably so if you have the right ingredients it'll cook something up uh and that will be life so there uh are estimated to be something like you know billions to maybe trillions of earth-like planets out there that life may have emerged on and maybe intelligent life to assume that we are the only intelligence out there is to say that what happened on this planet is extremely almost infinitely improbable and i don't think that's the case people like richard dawkins have argued that life emerging on other planets will evolve according to darwinian mechanisms and these new processes of self-organization that we're describing and so if the universe is waking up through life and so when i say that i want to be very clear i'm not talking about pan psychism when i'm saying the universe is awake i'm talking about just you know conscious agents like us are awake and the universe used to be all inanimate matter prior to life so in a very literal sense the matter in the universe is waking up so if there is this process and we find ourselves on this planet at this point it's of course going to look you know like there's not much other life out there and that consciousness doesn't have this cosmic significance but that's just how it looks right now at this stage and we're already starting to see how technology can bring life off the planet i mean you know
a couple hundred years ago people thought it was impossible to fly actually i learned this from a friend there 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 like you know aircraft um so we can already see that this process um basically has no limits uh and um so the the other thing you said was that you know is it kind of like anthropocentric uh to like you know people think we're projecting human qualities on the universe when you say maybe like the universe is waking up but i think that's a mistake to to to talk about humans as if we're not part of the universe we're part of that physical system so i don't think it's right to be like oh consciousness is something that only you know applies to humans and it's this like quirky thing we are part of the cosmos and you can't strip away consciousness from the description of the universe without taking away one of its most interesting aspects