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[Music] uh first of all thanks for coming man thank you for having me well when i got the request and i read the the title and the subject of your book i was immediately hooked i was like dude i gotta get this guy in quickly the romance of reality how the universe organizes itself to create life consciousness and cosmic complexity yep does the how do we know this how do we know how the universe organizes is this are you guessing first of all tell people what you do i mean i think it was an intuition that i had um can you tell people like what you do like what your field of study is but yeah so you know this is this is all backed by complexity science and when i say complexity science uh that's really not one field it's an integration of all the sciences so physics biology cognitive science uh computer science and uh 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 so my background i'm a cognitive neuroscientist i got my phd from george mason university i was really interested in the problem of consciousness so how does the brain create consciousness what is the connection between consciousness and complexity and cosmos um so yeah it it was sort of an intuition that i had when uh i guess i was an undergraduate and i started taking like all the basic science courses like uh physics course and you learn about the second law of thermodynamics and uh the kind of popular interpretation of that law uh is that the universe tends towards disorder and 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 and then on this planet we see organization all around us um 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 and time and those books uh kind of painted life as this improbable kind of statistical fluke not a regularity and um so you know some of those ideas didn't seem quite right to me and i was really interested in this increase in complexity and so i started like looking up these sorts of topics and i found out about the uh research being done at the santa fe institute which is kind of like the uh mecca for complexity science and then uh there was this emerging world view that the universe is becoming more and more complex and it doesn't violate the law of second uh the second law of thermodynamics at all can we get you to turn your phone off or just shut the it dinged let's just shut that just put it on uh do not disturb or something like that um so somewhere along the line the idea was that the universe tends towards chaos like why do you think they were thinking that like what was the philosophy behind that so yeah it's kind of complicated um the second law of thermodynamics started off being about uh heat flow thermodynamics is uh the science of energy or energy flow and so originally the law said that um uh heat will flow from a hotter to a colder body so there's this just natural tendency for um heat to kind of spread out and for energy to kind of disperse and dissipate
and uh this had to do with uh steam engines and steam engines basically uh convert energy from heat flow to a mechanical energy that can power locomotives uh sari carno and rudolph clausius ii european scientists um were trying to understand this in the 1800s and they found out that this uh energy conversion process wasn't always a hundred percent efficient that uh some of the energy uh some of the useful energy would uh get dissipated basically uh when this physical process creates heat and so what the second law said originally was that uh the useful supply of energy in the universe was always dwindling because every mechanical process requires energy to do work and it creates some heat and heat is basically like you creating body heat right now you 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 it's still there there's the first law of thermodynamics which is about conservation of energy you can convert one type of energy into another type but uh this uh useful supply is uh getting turned into entropy and entropy was uh originally uh a measure of the quantity of energy no longer available to do work it wasn't until later that there was a statistical interpretation of this law by a scientist named ludwig boltzmann and he basically tried to understand the second law in terms of the i guess the evolution of many particle system and what he saw was that if you had an ordered system there would be this natural tendency towards disorder simply 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 so then the law became about this order to disorder transition and we hear about that all the time the popular examples are rooms get messier they don't organize themselves um but the paradox that emerged from that was that life seems to uh defy this tendency and so the question is if systems tend towards decay uh what's going on with the biosphere and all this organization we see and erwin schrodinger one of the founders of quantum mechanics actually wrote a very influential book uh on biology called what is life and he explained this paradox he explained that basically the second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems and open systems have energy coming in so the earth is an open system we have a sun and it's beaming down energy on the planet and that systems can evade this tendency toward decay if they can extract useful energy from the environment for plants at sunlight for us we need to eat food as long as we can continue to do that we can sustain order against this second law tendency towards decay so you were uh looking at this idea of the universe tending towards chaos and it didn't sit right with you like how long did you theorize about this like what what led you to write a book about this so as i mentioned i was really interested in this mystery of consciousness because uh it seemed like you know kind of the last frontier of science now we know there's there's lots of mysteries to be solved there's like dark matter and dark energy all types of stuff but in the 90s uh people were thinking that physics had essentially 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 so it sort of leaves those things out of the picture but you know you can have a physics of those things too and that's what complexity science is so um 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 now i'm not saying the most simple life forms are conscious but what i understood was you know you can think about a bacterium uh performing a process called chemotaxis and that's kind of a scary word but all it means is that uh the bacterium swims towards chemical food and away from toxins so it has this uh very rudimentary intelligence and if you're trying to understand the brain and consciousness and intelligence it seemed to me that you have to understand uh life as well and so at george mason uh there was a professor named harold morowitz and he came from the santa fe institute so he's a big complexity guy and one of the premier origin of life researchers and 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 and so he had a book called the emergence of everything which was like looking at the big picture because life is one emergence consciousness is another emergence as the universe gets increasingly complex new phenomena emerge with surprising properties and this is a lot different than
the other approach that i mentioned reductionism which is focused on how nature's simplest components like particles uh act in isolation so complexity science cares about how uh more complex systems uh have you know their dynamics their evolution and um you see that systems uh experience uh are are display properties like consciousness that aren't um there when the components exist in isolation so meaning like the amino acids what do you mean yeah they're not conscious so yeah so do we know that though uh no i know you had on a guest philip gough who is a pan psychist and those people believe that there's a little bit of consciousness in everything and i don't think that's right but um 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 like everything in terms of information but consciousness when i use that word i'm talking about subjective experience so you're having a unified conscious perception of the world there's there's a light that's on and i don't think there is a perspective a subjective perspective uh for an amino acid what is the argument against that like what is the argument that there is a subjective experience yeah everything yeah so um basically uh consciousness is kind of mysterious still um and uh there's the heart problem of consciousness which uh was uh put forth by a philosopher named david chalmers in the 90s and it basically said um we can explain all of the physical processing in the brain in terms of uh mechanical processes and interactions
um but how how does the interactions of these physical things give rise to the qualitative world of experience and sensation and since that's such a hard problem how does experience arise uh one solution to that was thinking that it doesn't emerge and suddenly like 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 the little bits of consciousness kind of add up and create more uh richer conscious experience so you don't believe that but you do well we can all agree that human beings have consciousness everybody agrees on that that's like pretty simple yeah but like it what well no actually no some people don't believe that so um yeah it's kind of funny i mean so the materialist position is like pretty much opposite of pan psychism so materialism is the idea that there are only material things in the world and that would seem to exclude consciousness because consciousness seems to be this immaterial thing but is it just immaterial because we can't measure it i mean there's obviously something going on there's some process going on so whatever that process is that it enables creativity and communication self-awareness correction like all those different things that that there's obviously something happening so the idea that you can't measure it is that just because we don't understand what it actually is like yes i think so right because consciousness is a thing right we can we're talking about it it's even if it's theoretical it is a thing so yeah i don't think it's necessarily right to call it immaterial right 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 we're starting yes we did we did and that's kind of why those um philosophies got big um well actually our tools you know and our theories that
are being used to start to quantify it one of those theories uh interpreted as cert in a certain way seems to support the pan's psychic view or a sort of modified version saying 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 so what i was going to ask you is if we agree that humans are conscious what is not is a single cell so i mentioned materialism so since uh it was thought that consciousness was immaterial or kind of defined that way going back to rene descartes they wanted to ignore it altogether and so that position is called illusionism and the idea is that consciousness is an illusion and 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 materialist or physicalist is kind of the the modern term for that position they say consciousness is an illusion and it's not even really clear what they mean by that i mean they explain it but at the same time they say they do have experience so yeah it's they do have experiences meaning they have consciousness yeah they have consciousness so like what is like what is their definition of what consciousness is it's like so the thing that we're calling conscious consciousness if they're saying it's an illusion yeah what do they think the process of creativity is with the process of cognitive function there's something yeah it's interesting it'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 there is no point in the brain where you can uh you know locate consciousness it's a global phenomenon so it's something that emerges from this harmonized collective activity of uh you know 80 billion neurons interacting and 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 uh 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 like an automaton so how are you aware of this output what is that so basically they say consciousness is what's called an epiphenomenon and that means that it's there but it's not doing anything so they then they admit that we have conscious experience but if they're saying it's there but it's not doing anything it's still there it's still that's real so if you're moving because of an algorithm but you realize that you're moving because of an algorithm isn't that conscious yes so it's it's kind of a ridiculous thing that they call it an illusion and then other materials might say it's not an illusion it's an epic phenomenon um so yeah there's lots of confusion there but the question about like you know so let's say we all accept consciousness okay in in the practical way of talking let's say we accept consciousness as in human human beings without the double talk yeah what what if we go back to single-celled organisms do we believe that they were conscious so it's a really complicated uh topic and uh i argue in the book that uh single-celled organisms probably are not conscious but they are these information processing systems these computational systems um so they do have some type of intelligence or cognition you see a difference in the way any living system behaves compared to an inanimate system like a rock or a trash can those things don't do anything um if you see a rock move it's because like a gust of wind pushed it right couldn't the same be said for trees except you're looking at slow motion you actually do see them well so grow trees uh so i 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 so they're doing photosynthesis and yeah they might not move the way like a mammal or some other organisms do they're very slow but plants will perform something that's analogous to what i explained uh about uh bacteria doing chemotaxis they swim towards food and away from uh toxins so that's gonna grow towards water exactly heliotropism so a plant will track the sun in the sky so it has some sort of abstract model of its environment some sort of statistical mapping of the environment is encoded in organisms and it gives them this quality that philosophers call agency and so agency is kind of the defining characteristic of life uh living systems pursue goals intrinsic survival goals while inanimate systems don't so consciousness is an integral part of living systems yes but you can have living systems i'm arguing without consciousness that consciousness probably emerges with brains um what do you say about the way plants react to things the way they react to predation the way they react to even the sound of predation do you know about those studies so yeah they're they're definitely intelligent they're definitely communicating using electrical signals and chemical signals but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're having a conscious experience so do you think that plants have this actual subjective perspective is there an observer they're experiencing something or is it a system that philosophers call a zombie system and basically you will have like intelligent uh behavior without actually having subjective experience is that just a guess though i mean they don't have it yeah
so uh what i argue in the book is that uh basically to have a self to have an observer or an eye some sort of witness to this experience it's not good enough to just store some sort of model of the world the model has to start modeling itself and that brains create mental models of the world but uh in that process uh the 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 an observer so to answer your question yeah it's kind of a guess um you know maybe someone could argue that very simple life forms do do a very simple form of self-modeling the biologist michael levin would argue that and that could be right but i think we can reasonably agree that it at least starts with life but i do think it probably you know requires some more sophisticated uh information processing modeling machinery and that it's most likely uh to be in systems with brains and when we're talking about consciousness where we're talking about consciousness when we're first of all we're talking about consciousness in terms of the way human beings view consciousness but when you get into other animals at what point i mean is it a function of avoiding predation or becoming predators is it a function of foraging for food like what is it that enables consciousness to emerge yeah so um it's all those things so an organism must be able to anticipate events in the environment if it's going to survive uh and it must be able to as we said like capture energy if it's going to uh evade this tendency towards disorder
and uh so it has to model the world right and uh consciousness is a mental model so if you close your eyes you can imagine yourself in this room you can zoom out and you can see the whole building you can zoom out and imagine how earth looks from outer space you can imagine your friend and what kind of personality they have what jokes they tell so you've modeled all of these things in the world uh and you've even modeled other modelers and it's this uh modeling that uh is necessary that uh leads to the phenomenon of consciousness so 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 do you think that there's a reason why we have this incredibly advanced version of what we accept as consciousness like are we designed for something are we building towards something as the universe gets ever and never com more complex are we a part of that because this is like a part of the whole system yeah so uh i guess it depends on what scale you want to talk about um you can talk about the brain uh emerging and consciousness emerging to model the world to uh find solutions to these survival problems but 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 uh when life emerges and you have conscious agents it's the matter in the world that's starting to experience the world so you could look at this uh process of increasing complexity that is this sort of cosmic scale evolutionary process as the universe itself coming to life or even waking up so carl sagan uh has this famous quote he says we are a way for the cosmos to know itself and uh this book takes that statement very seriously it says it's not just poetry uh literally the universe is coming to
life not in this pan psychic view that you know kind of says the universe is already conscious i don't think that's as interesting it's kind of reducing consciousness to something trivial if you think it's in everything already i think it's way more uh you know way more interesting way more kind of psychedelic that the universe starts to wake up as a result of this evolutionary process and 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 so this world view if you're to accept that says life's not an accident it's not transient life has this larger cosmic significance and it's basically assisting the universe in coming to life when 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 like the way we structure life the way we structure civilization we constantly move towards greater and greater levels of complexity with our electronics with the the sophistication of our societies and our cultures if you go back thousands of years to today it's a very clear trend yeah that things are so do you think that's a function of the universe itself like that is how the universe operates and we would probably find that if we could travel to other galaxies we could probably find that all over the place absolutely so it's something that emerges from the laws and constants of physics and the evolutionary dynamics that naturally emerge from those laws so it is built in to the design of the universe when you use the word design um you know some people could think that you're getting at something maybe like spiritual or religious and so that's like another conversation as to why there seems to be this apparent fine-tuning of the laws to allow for life and 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 and so yeah it does seem to be baked into the fabric of reality what do you think is going on like when when you're saying it in this way you're saying almost like as if you're hinting that there's some sort of a design behind it all um so yeah it sounds like it when i say that there are all these different options as to why there could be this fine-tuning um but 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 um also something that you know you can describe and articulate uh mathematically uh in computational terms so there's no mystical force pushing this it's just uh basically uh components in nature interacting and evolving and adapting but uh there does seem to be this larger design so for example um i know elon musk is a friend of the show he believes in this uh simulation theory yeah 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 those agents aren't conscious yet but could it be possible maybe maybe not but that idea that we are living in a simulation to me is not that different from any sort of intelligent design theory of religion uh so you could see um 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 i'm not sure i follow you so simulation theory is similar to intelligent design yeah so the simulation theory is uh well it depends on okay so there's the intelligent design movement which says that life is uh like a product of god being like okay i'm going there's a universe already a
better word yeah and i'm gonna i'm gonna create life right now okay and that violates like the causal closure of the universe basically the idea that um things can happen in the world that aren't caused by other physical causes um so that's a bad theory uh it it doesn't uh it's it's not a scientific theory but the idea that the universe is a simulation created by intelligent agents that are somehow outside of this reality is very similar to uh deism and a lot of our most famous physicists and scientists of history were deists so the the difference between deism and theism is that uh deism uh imagines a creator that set the laws of physics and then let the system evolve according to those laws so many of our greatest physicists uh newton uh later even more mod you know ones that came after him like uh maxwell and uh sir arthur eddington was a proud mystic these were men of science uh kurt godel the mathematician was religious um so uh the idea that this universe has some sort of design created by an intelligent agent i'm not saying that's the case but i'm saying people who are considering simulation theories there's not much of a like functional difference between those models um you're talking about an intelligent agent that designed this process here's the thing uh that agent even if you're saying it's something like a god could have been created by an evolutionary process as well so all we're doing is acknowledging that this level of reality might not be base reality i see what you're saying so even though it is a biological thing like the evolution created life but life created
a simulation theater that could be possible this is this is what people think i think that if 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 yes so how do we know if we're not in that already expressions we don't yeah and so when they the 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 percent eventually attempt at least to create which is some sort of an artificial artificial environment i mean that's what facebook is doing with meta right all those commercials yeah whether they're jazzing you up for this idea that you're not going to have to live in reality anymore metaverse yeah this is the baby steps when you know you've seen i'm sure you've seen that commercial right where the uh the kids are at the they're at a painting and the painting comes alive have you seen it yeah i haven't it's very compelling but it's also interesting because you're what we'll show them the commercial you're watching it and you're like wow like is this a good thing like what are we saying like you have these um these p these kids so watch this so they're at an art gallery and they're looking at this painting and they all step towards this painting and then the painting comes alive yeah it's pretty tricky this is the dimension of imagination [Music] hey [Music] so all of a sudden the environment around them becomes just like this painting and they're dancing and having the best time ever look they're bobbing their head like they're at an awesome concert this is going to be fun is it [ __ ] really going to be fun i'm not sure yeah i don't know what that is like that's a weird commercial but it's it's almost like it makes it look fun yeah it's like it's it's it's it's a little honey pot
trying to drag you into this weird world yeah that they're about to create it looks cool i want to be there but it's a little scary that's facebook well it's um it is a little scary because the amount of people that use and how quickly it will be adopted yeah yeah i mean and what is that like what what are we doing and is that inevitable like if we're talking about increasing levels of complexity that seem to be inevitable it 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 like if you looked at the the the earth you looked at the human civilization from afar if you had no context you you had no cultural connection to it but you watch the way people interact and move you'd say oh this is a life form that creates better and better stuff yeah because that's what we do so what and also there's this tendency towards materialism like what is materialism well it's this obsession with objects and you know in this romantic idea that those that's futile and you should be out there in nature and you don't need much and but what is why is it intrinsically why is it like it's inexorably connected to humans that they want more stuff they want better stuff well i feel like because that is the engine that fuels innovation if you constantly want newer and better things there has to be a desire for that and one of the desires for that is materialism materialism is almost like a built-in instinct that enables innovation and if you look at where that goes it goes to some sort of symbiotic interaction and connection with electronics because that's our number one creation that's the thing that we make that's better than anything else if 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 that are our connection to the cyber world our connection through phones and computers and watches i mean there's something going on and we're in the middle of it and the way i liken it
i i say that we are like some caterpillar that is becoming an electronic butterfly and we don't even know why we're making the cocoon we're just doing it i've heard you describe that idea before i don't know who you're talking to if it was like roger penrose or sean carroll but you you alluded to that and i was like joe sees it like that's exactly what's happening it's this process that we're not aware of and uh you know nature is carrying that out but we're at a really interesting time uh because we're at a point in the process we're we're actually becoming conscious that we're part of the process yeah and um some of them there's there's yeah some of us so so the idea is if we become conscious of it uh and that's part of the process also becoming aware of this um we can start to shift society in the direction that we want to see so this you know materialism all you know these like desires to have like more and more and more um it's a natural part of this but uh evolution occurs because life is always adapting and it's correcting its errors it's self-correcting so this march toward progress isn't a straight line uh life 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 so do i think like all this technology with like these like you know the metaverse all this stuff is inevitable uh yeah you can't really stop that that's part of the process but uh it doesn't mean that we're just supposed to go along with it or supposed to go along with faults like consumerism like what facebook is like telling us to do and buy um i don't think that we can slow it down and have this kind of uh you know uh luddite uh civilization where we just
get rid of all of our technology and try to live in some you know natural utopia that won't work um so we can't like stop the train but we can try to push it in the right direction so we might want to go away from certain things so um there is a trajectory that the book argues does uh argues is inevitable and that's really what it's trying to articulate is all the mechanisms that uh make progress inevitable because for a long time uh biologists were against that idea of progress mostly for like cultural reasons um cultural world wars going on inside science but um yeah it's an inevitable process and we have to try to steer it in the right direction and if we don't uh it could be the end of our civilization so when i say there's progress that's inevitable i don't mean our civilization has to succeed but those who come after us will learn from our mistakes so when you say it'll be the end of civilization like what do you mean by that you know i i'm i'm more of an optimist i i don't think there's going to be this end but i mean nuclear war could uh destroy a lot of the population and kind of like put us into like something like a dark age again yeah um but i don't think that's gonna happen there are all these like checkpoints along the way preventing people from doing that i mean it does world war two happened it was terrible lots of people died but at the same time that time period uh uh spawned the computer and all kinds of technology that we didn't have so if you like look at like this kind of uh trend line of like you know social and technological progress like it didn't really slow down by world war ii there seems to be this uh exponential trend towards uh greater complexity so what do you think is stopping world war iii though i don't understand like why do you think that that's not going to happen what checks are in place it could happen but i mean to to become a president i mean so well this is a funny example i was going to say like you can't be totally crazy but like i mean a lot lots of people look at people who would argue with that yeah no of course yeah no no so be a dead man
and be president look at biden yeah yeah so um uh i guess the the point would be that um they know that if they do that they're going to harm their people so they're i mean he hasn't done it so far right what has stopped him from doing it um so that's not to say he won't do it you mean putin yeah so there's i mean we have all of these he doesn't want to see he has a family he's supposedly dying of cancer yeah well so someone in that kind of position could do something totally crazy yeah it could definitely happen uh but what would happen was a lot of people would die and then we would put greater checks in place to make sure that crazy people like putin don't become president boy i don't know if you're right about that i wish you were but what about xi jinping like what about the world no this is after this is after the disasters would already happen yeah but then china would be running the world the way they run china like that's a that's a real possibility it's a possibility for an amount of time but i don't think it's sustainable because so one thing i talk about in the book is complexity is kind of a function of a couple of things for system to be like optimally complex it has to have a lot of parts and those parts have to be connected so the more parts with the more connections the more complex something is but you also want a diversity or variety amongst those parts so all of so when i'm saying parts you could talk be thinking about um a civilization a society like chinese society or american society it's composed of all these people these people uh basically form something like a social organism or uh something like a brain and 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 so uh basically yeah um uh chinese
ideology uh it has one good aspect they believe in this concept of the interdependent whole so people should kind of uh care about like society as a whole um you should put you know the greater good uh before your individual good but um so so that will allow the emergence of something like this social organism which is a natural part of evolution but uh china specifically doesn't allow uh criticism of the government and uh new ideas uh so there's not a diver diversity of ideas in that culture and so the social organism that is that nation uh can't evolve uh optimally it won't be sustainable um you need this uh diversity of ideas to have the most functional um productive society that doesn't mean in the short term china can't be like super productive but when something happens when [ __ ] hits the fan like we saw with the pandemic i don't know if you saw those videos of people just like screaming out of their apartment buildings we know like they had all these lockdowns when their freedoms are taken away and like there's some sort of existential threat looming then uh the system gets chaotic and it's just people yelling i mean i don't know the system's been around for a thousand years i mean china has been functioning in one form or another as a dictatorship for a long long time well so uh with the society you want this optimal balance of like top down and bottom up control or uh centralization and decentralization we hear about decentralization with the crypto and blockchain movement um so china has this like 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 uh that's necessary for this balance yeah to steal ideas from yeah yeah which is another problem which is fascinating yeah i mean it's a big thing that they do in intellectual property
theft yeah yeah i know so um with you know these sorts of authoritarian governments you can get a lot done quickly because people at the top are making decisions and um sometimes you know those decisions will be good for the people but in the long run i would argue that it's not a sustainable model and you think this is because of the access of the information also seems to exponentially be increasing i 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 and as the society expands the access to information increases technological innovation increases and all these things work functionally together and what china's trying to do now is uh they're trying to create a bottleneck right they're trying to stop that and lock things down they're trying to keep people from accessing the full internet and people are getting around that through vpns and all sorts of different things they're trying to you know hide things about tiananmen square and all the atrocities of the of the ccp and they're doing their best to try to keep everybody scared and locked down but you think that like ultimately this is only they have short-term success in doing this but the system itself is far too complex and expanding and they won't be able to like keep all the water in the net that's what i think um i mentioned that you know there are these two uh aspects to complexity where you want a diversity of parts and you want uh connections between those parts and so us becoming connected through the internet through blockchain systems um uh allows it's basically like creating like uh synapses that are in the brain you have like this structure of the brain where you have 80 billion neurons and every neuron is connected to another neuron by 10 000 connections and so everything is connected so that's kind of what the internet is doing in social media and blockchain and it's allowing for greater information
exchange among individuals and so when you try to cut people off from the internet um you're basically like cutting these connections off uh that the system really needs to uh do computation and like collective computation is what nations do they're very similar to uh standard biological organisms which are communities of cells working together in an integrated fashion so one thing that i talk about in the book is how basically we can look at evolutionary principles because evolution is really optimizing systems to be as robust and energy efficient and stable as possible we can look at these systems we can look at how brains work and we can try to model society after those principles and so 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 as 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 a 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 gonna demilitarize and we're gonna 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 chaos is 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 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 better 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 uh 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 multi-cellular 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 his technology guy may seem you know futurists may seem a little bit more out there but um 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 yeah 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 uh life emerging on other planets will evolve according to darwinian mechanisms and these new uh 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 interesting to us but why is it interesting to the universe like if the universe doesn't care if stars blow up and like if there's if there's no consciousness to the universe right other than ours why is consciousness even critical so um i do believe there is an
intelligence to the universe in the sense that uh there is fine tuning of parameters that allow for this so uh oak seed evolving into an oak tree uh i don't think many people think that seed is conscious it doesn't have any experience any subjective experience but there's still an intelligence there that ensures that the seed develops along this trajectory into this complex thing so you can look at the laws of physics as uh serving as something like cosmic dna that's leading to something greater and if that's true it means that reality is fundamentally purposeful or goal oriented and philosophers use this term teleological and uh for a long time it was you know it was it was it was considered like wrong think for 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 the physics and mathematics of biological agency we you know we move with purpose where we are you know material systems that have acquired information so it's starting to seem like reality is intrinsically purposeful now what sort of spiritual implications you might you know take from that you know that's very subjective but uh let me give you one example of a theory that would explain this design and this uh movement towards something conscious um that is not religious in nature okay so there's a theory called cosmological natural selection uh by a physicist named lee smolin and he put this out in like the 90s and string theorist leonard suskin he uh said this theory should you know should get a lot more attention um it's kind of strange that it doesn't people like richard dawkins and dan didn't it uh like this theory so basically it says what if our universe uh is not the first universe in this model basically uh
so we have singularities right we we know about the big bang that's the beginning of the universe but we also have black holes that are singularities this is a little bit complex but i promise it's going to be simple in a second so the idea is that when a black hole forms in this universe it creates a baby universe so it creates like this you know there's this pocket of universes that evolve through this process now the baby universe will inherit the laws and constants of physics of the parent universe but with a slight variation because nature is fundamentally noisy it's it's not going to give rise to the exact same thing so now you have a picture of a universe that gives rise to offspring universes and uh those universes uh the ones that are good at creating black holes uh will thrive the way organisms that are good at reproducing thrive and 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 so over time even though you start with this lifeless universe you will get this tendency to create universes with order that are stable and then you can take the theory a little bit farther and say that an intelligent technologically advanced civilization can create new universes by creating black holes with something like a particle accelerator cosmic inflation theorists like alan guth people have talked about how it could be possible theoretically to create a universe the idea would be that since life technologically advanced life could create universes you get this natural tendency
towards life not only life-friendly universes but these universes that become increasingly complex over time so 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 so the the idea is that consciousness ultimately leads to the birth of the universe uh so are a universe yeah so so it's interesting uh you know it depends on the sort of language you use because now it's starting to sound like paying psychism again right no no not necessarily that look i used to have a joke about this that you know the big bang is one of the great mysteries of science right they didn't they don't know why it created and yeah 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 the super geniuses and one guy makes a big bang button and uh and he just goes off i can press it and he hits it boom and every 14 billion years people get smarter and smarter and to the point where they can create a big bang well it sounds like you already have this seriously like a control alt delete reset for the universe yeah we need to create a wiki page and show you as the founder of this brilliant theory i think no i i think it may no i think it makes sense but the question is where did they come from right well yeah what came first the chicken or the egg yeah and why but the the thing i'm getting at is like why is if ultimately stars die and ultimately they consume all the the gases around them and the planets around them like what is so important about biological life and 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 power i had michio kaku on yesterday i heard yeah it was really fun really interesting
conversation but one of the things we talked about was the different types of civilizations that we are about uh zero seven to ten in uh in in terms of like a type one universe that cartage seven out of ten yeah and that a type one excuse me type one civilization type one civilization has the ability to control the weather we have the ability to stop natural disasters and ward off asteroids and that as you get to type two and then type three civilizations which could take what was the timeline he gave us i believe is millions of years right there's a thousand to get to type two two a hundred to get to type one thousand to two and i think maybe it's a hundred thousand for type three so in type three if we can keep it together yeah until we get to type three we will be able to control black holes we will be able to transmit our our consciousness throughout the universe we 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 and this is what you're talking about when you're talking about something that can actually create a black hole or create a universe like 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 and that supermassive black hole is one half of one percent of the entire mass of the galaxy you could scale it yeah right but that the idea was that if you got inside of that black hole you would find a whole nother universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies each one with a supermassive black hole in the center of it you go through those you find hundreds of billions of galaxies like and the idea was that that's real infinity and that it's not just infinite in terms of the amount of galaxies the space in the universe itself but the amount of universes like it's impossible for anybody to comprehend the scale of this thing yeah you know i'm not really familiar with that model it sounds pretty cool and trippy um and it may be right in some way um but the idea is that
life is this robust uh phenomenon that uh evolves and it learns almost like an ai program like like let's say a chess playing ai program and you invent it and it's not very good at first and it loses to human players but it keeps storing those patterns storing all that information so knowledge just accumulates that's what the biosphere is evolution is a learning process that accumulates knowledge knowledge 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 a human civilization so you have like collective memory in people's brains but then you get books and then you get uh you get the internet you get wiki pages and so it's all of these memory systems storing knowledge about how to survive um and evade this tendency towards disorder they say has to stay far from thermodynamic equilibrium so you have all this complexity growing you have life getting smarter more robust and better at manipulating the world around it and so the idea is that this process doesn't end and so um this kind of challenges the heat death narrative but so the idea is that maybe uh life uh isn't destined uh for death and that um by using the uh free energy supply in a universe that's uh expanding um that that could potentially power life forever if that uh is not possible it's possible that life could propagate life uh into other universes i'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 but yeah the idea is that reality is in some way biocentric even if this model that i mentioned cosmological natural selection is true and it kind of you know some atheists might think oh well that explains the fine tuning and the design the apparent design in our universe you have this process where you know the laws are getting more and more fine-tuned for life you still have an existence
where life has to emerge inevitably and then it starts to take over the whole structure of the cosmos so that's why i call the book the romance of reality there's this intrinsic mystery and we're not talking about anything supernatural we're talking about natural processes but the fact that it's not just life friendly the universe doesn't just support life it seems to necessitate life and then life is potentially propagated forever uh i think that's just like the trippiest like most mind-blowing thing possible and it has spiritual implications to me and when you're looking at it this way if you're looking at this as a function of life you the way we know of at least is we are the most advanced thing in terms of our ability to manipulate our environment that we that we're aware of in the cosmos and if you look at how we got to where we are we got to where we are by solving problems and avoiding conflict so without those problems without conflict there would really be no incentive for innovation there would be no reason like if we all achieved some sort of oneness and spiritual enlightenment and we had no desire to make better cell phones where would we go like what would we do and also the problem of natural issues whether it's super volcanoes asteroid impacts pandemics yes all sorts of crazy things that can happen that are natural they create the need to innovate and to create the create the need to advance society to avoid potential catastrophes like this in the future problems create progress yeah and that's one of the reasons why you kind of need the chaos you need the yin and the end yes yes that's order and disorder life and entropy so there's this like 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 you know taoism thing exists well the chinese figured it out so long ago it's like it's really interesting when you look at that yin yang like that they they knew that this all this and if you look at the yin yang like what's fascinating about that symbol is that it looks like it's in motion it's not as simple as like there's a circle and one
half is black one half as white no it's like it is a it's it's almost like it's in motion yeah yeah no that's really cool i didn't think about that the image of the yin yang one of the things that i also love about it is there's a little bit of both in each one yeah yeah there's a tiny dot of black in the white look at that and a dot of white and the black and this that's what's so interesting it's unfortunate that that is on so many stoners walls and it's become trite you know yeah 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 it is because it's deep cool it's super deep and i let the designs like minimalist and beautiful and i i have some ideas about you know why they came up to came up with this but um what are your ideas so i think um you know humans are information processing systems and we are natural manifestations of the laws of physics and of the evolutionary process and our brains are computing all of these things you know things all the time that's what intelligence is um there's a lot of computation that's going on uh like below like our conscious thoughts like the subconscious mind and so i think um a lot of times especially maybe like eastern cultures that were you know big on like meditation and reflective uh practices that uh they sort of uh through those practices um we're having very deep intuitions about like the structure and the organization of the world um and 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 they were articulating that in simple language back then because they had this intuitive understanding of it what do you think where is that intuitive understanding coming from do you think it's just coming from introspective
thought self-reflection examination of the natural world around them examination of culture like what yeah all those things but um i guess kind of like the kind of like magical aspect of that is that the brain is this computational system that is this product of four billion years of evolution and that there's uh a lot of knowledge in there that we may not be consciously aware of that are you know creating insights like when intuition's still really mysterious to people like where do mathematicians come up with these ideas there's uh i forget what 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 about you know whatever a train whatever it was um and that instantly uh some deep mathematical insight came to them um so i think what is going on is that the brain's doing a lot of computation uh that is below uh the threshold for consciousness and that our subconscious minds uh have a lot more intelligence than we think and that uh these ideas that are correct about nature are just kind of spontaneously emerging from complex computational machinery shaped by you know eons of evolution what are your thoughts on extraterrestrial intelligence and whether or not we are in contact or have been observed by extraterrestrial intelligence um so i recently wrote an article on this and uh you know it's really hard for me to to say whether you know we're in contact or anything like that but so i i will talk about that though i won't dodge that but i will say that i do think there's uh intelligent extraterrestrials and um richard dawkins would agree with that uh basically the idea is that on these other planets with sufficiently
earth-like uh planetary chemistry we get life inevitably and then the book really argues that uh there is this uh that the evolutionary process um creates this statistical tendency towards more intelligent life forms now that was uh in in the 20th century there was a evolutionary theorist um named steven j gould who was very influential and he tried to kill this idea of the evolutionary process being this progressive process and that's for a couple of cultural reasons so 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 you know we're super special and that it's all about us um first of all um yeah that's not right it didn't necessarily have to give rise to humans but um that's not what most of the evolutionary biologists who do believe in this you know narrative progress we're saying they're just saying it has to lead to higher intelligence it doesn't have to be a human made in god's image or anything like that the 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 so if religion said reality has meaning and life has purpose then science kind of had to assume this uh opposite stance that doesn't seem very scientific yeah no and that that's what's so scary no it's it's it's not and and and we are pretty blind to how uh culture and social norms things like that have like really shaped science at the time um so uh yeah what i learned was that uh he and it was from a book called complexity by roger lewin uh exposed that gould was so against it because the nazis used this idea of uh progress towards uh something higher
this sort of ladder of progress um to uh justify ideas about their being like superior and inferior races oh okay and and this this theory that you know i describe in the book is definitely not saying there's anything like that it's actually very important that we understand that like for this global super organism that's emerging that is human civilization you need diversity diversity is super important so um uh yeah this idea that there was this progressive evolutionary process for a long time um scientists were just like we shouldn't talk about that actually evolutionary theory was sort of banned from every field other than biology because there was this scare of that so 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 and he talked about social evolution but his ideas uh which were actually really good got uh appropriated 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 and it's only been recently that this idea of progress has been revived a lot a lot of it has to do with the work being done at the santa fe institute and you know complexity science in general and uh so now we're seeing that those ideas um were probably you know the ideas of herbert spencer he was on something seeing the universe as getting more and more complex this process would occur on other planets so you would get something like intelligent aliens uh because more complex niches emerge so life starts out simple and it has a simple energy extraction task plants get sunlight bacterium bacteria can live off like chemical molecules like that's their source of
food it's pretty easy to capture that but a random genetic mutation will cause a change in an organism's design that will unlock a new source of energy so for example suddenly life will be able to eat other things life the earliest forms of life were autotrophic meaning they could survive off like inorganic inputs but then a more complex life emerged that eats other organisms now when you have that now your food source isn't just like you know plants we talked about tracking a sun in the sky that's a pretty simple energy extraction problem but 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 in the brain and basically uh life gets increasingly complex because we have a complex world around us so you should see this trajectory where on alien planets you would get uh a more intelligent system that has more mental states more computational states because they can respond to more challenges in the environment and so they may be out there but they maybe haven't been able to get here yet because it's possible that it's everything is emerging sort of according to the same timeline so maybe but maybe they're not just here maybe they are though right but our planet is only what four point whatever billion years old whereas the universe is 13 plus billion years old yep so the concept of like it's not like we're on the same starting point as every other planet no we're not on the same starting point but you still need like stellar and planetary evolution so you're not going to have like life emerging elsewhere in the universe like 10 billion years ago because you could have a 10 million years ago easily yes that's true but the universe is a
big place right but think about life on earth right yeah life on earth you know if it wasn't for the giant asteroid that hit the yucatan we would be dominated by giant lizards i mean that would be what was running the planet maybe not maybe there would be some sort of catastrophe such that uh dinosaurs wouldn't make it and basically uh a lot of the organic material that comes from like dead dinosaurs like okay but listen to this yeah imagine if that didn't take place imagine if the world that existed post yucatan was the world that emerged from scratch so there was no dinosaur period so the mammals and the intelligent mammals that ultimately became primates that ultimately became human beings evolved far earlier 100 million years ago yeah like that's what we could be looking at in terms of the sophistication of alien life on other planets totally but do you think that they have contacted us do you think that they have visited us do 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 like what do you think that is so i absolutely think you have a good point about it uh potentially happening earlier intelligence happening earlier elsewhere and there's so many potential models that have taken place yeah so so they could have developed like you know that intergalactic traveling technology earlier than us such that they could have made it here totally possible and so they may be among us but um then you have a lot of questions like why haven't they made themselves known to everyone you have a lot of good answers to that too maybe it would be too shocking maybe it has to be in this gradual way maybe this is how they do it they kind of show these little signs they let you know the government release like these videos of their existence as to not like create total panic um so i'm not one of those people that says it's not possible but uh we have to consider other theories we have to consider that it's advanced military aircraft um i heard some things from a friend who kind of like follows uh oh i think um
i think it was a recent guess you had it was a i think it was a i didn't watch it so i don't know for sure but i think it was a transgender woman from the military and maybe talking about kristen beck yeah so and did she say something about that like there are like uh ideas that um the government has like created these videos uh uh using like drone technology to make it look like uh that these are aliens but it's actually like some sort of is that something you should do like psyop or something jamie maybe she didn't mention that maybe it was like uh there was something maybe he was talking about about projecting things in the skies right like that right like holographs or something like that yeah but so could it be a psyop i mean there are psyops there's yeah but there's there's weird things there's but there's other things that are the undeniable proof of uh advanced technology that we don't understand yeah technology yeah so i'm with you there i i just was throwing that out there because you know we want to consider all possibilities like this is some sort of psyop it's just kind of strange that the government suddenly it's like is coming out with this and like if it was true like would they be coming out with it in this way so i'm not saying that's not true i'm saying there's a bunch of weird [ __ ] going on the only way to get to the bottom of it is to consider all possible theories it's kind of a bayesian approach and we need to lay out the evidence for each theory and so we need to rate how likely each is to be true given what we know then we need to make predictions with those theories about if one was true what would we expect to see and then we need to go out and investigate and then we need to update the probabilities of each of those being through being true after we've uh done more investigation one 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 that 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 his eyes out would roll their eyes out yeah but the preponderance of evidence that 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 in 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 we don't know what that is yeah and 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 there'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 in in his eyes has not been explored currently on earth yeah so i think we're at you know the most interesting point in history because uh assuming that the kind of conspiracy theory that i just mentioned isn't true that these videos are somehow faked um then we have two possibilities which both are mind-blowing uh either it is aliens and they're here or there's advanced military aircraft so advanced that uh it 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 because physics existed right so who could do that though that's the real question well okay here's me going into kind of like you know conspiracy theory territory but um so because any any possible explanation we go with they're all far out and that's what's so trippy about this whole thing like they're all crazy like the military advanced military aircraft that can kind of defy the laws of physics as we know them um or actual aliens like those are two crazy options
um so if i'm not going to aliens route which i'd like to talk about in a minute um uh and we're going with the uh theory that it's advanced military aircraft i would think it would be something that was a product of something like the manhattan project so we had the manhattan project uh we had this um research facility in los alamos and we brought the best scientists in the world over here to solve the problem of creating uh an atomic bomb before the nazis did that was the uh the impetus for doing that um we had brilliant people like einstein richard feynman john von neumann um who were working on this project and it's obvious to me that once that project ended it's not like the military was just gonna let go of all of this stuff they're gonna try to do more advanced projects in the name of national defense mostly so john von neumann genius uh pretty much the inventor of the modern computer architecture um uh some people say he's the smartest guy that ever lived we don't hear his name much but his colleagues would say that like his ability to do calculations in the head in his head would just like dwarf einstein's ability so john von neumann uh died from a sickness i can't remember what it was but he wasn't that old and uh on his deathbed this is a side fact but he did convert to he had like a priest come in and he was uh made a catholic or something like that but um for his mom or something maybe or maybe he was scared yeah i thought he was just like freaked out and like you know because maybe it's a good way to hedge your bets it's the yeah there's uh what's that called it's the the wager i forget who's wager but it was um basically the idea that if you
uh go with god that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose yeah um 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 making sure that he didn't say anything didn't give out secrets spill the beans um 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 um not defying the laws of physics but using some sort of exotic physics i 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 what where they're from like yeah why would they even say that they're not that transparent normally about anything yeah why would they even broadcast the fact these things exist yeah why would they why wouldn't they just ignore the videos just like they ignore videos of bigfoot yeah i've i have leaned back and forth and back and forth and also in both directions i think i think certainly it's possible that there is an advanced species from another planet that's observing us and making sure that we don't [ __ ] everything up because if we are on that critical breakthrough point like a like a little baby check knocking on the egg and opening it up if something came along and stomped that egg right there it would [ __ ] it all up and what we could do with our nuclear weapons and our crazy desire to conquer we could [ __ ] up the whole thing and start from scratch and nuke ourselves back to the stone age and then you know it's another 100 000 years before we come back around and figure out life again and that unfortunately might have happened in the past you know we don't know and 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 up so maybe the aliens go oh we know what happens here let's make sure these idiots don't ruin this like they did in alpha centauri or wherever like that is possible i think it's a cool theory but 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 yeah and physics and they can use some gravity in some unique and novel way and make things go faster than we could ever possibly imagine well a scary thought is that it is a military weapon but it's not ours it'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 they're truly stumped and yeah maybe they're being transparent about this um well that's also the like the big the big sighting was off the coast of the nimitz that was the tic tac ufo yeah from commander david fraver the reason why that's big is because multiple jets saw it they had uh they they used the the data from the nimitz so they were using tracking devices that's the thing that they saw that went from above 50 000 feet to 50 in a second or so whatever that is they're right near san diego they're right near all those military bases they're right near the nimitz like if you were gonna experiment with advanced propulsion systems and advanced drones that's where you would do it yeah i think it makes sense um so i guess the other possibility is that it truly is uh intelligent aliens and i like your theory um why would they care about us that's a big question why would why wouldn't they i mean if you well yeah yeah that's how i feel about it neil degrasse tyson i was gonna bring him up because he's the one who says that we would just be like ants like he would come here just to see stupid little ants well he said that i mean i don't know what's going on with him he was talking the
other day about why would people care about eclipses why they care about solar and lunar eclipses it's just an alignment of the planets and it happens all the time because it's [ __ ] interesting neil like why do you care about constellations why do you care about the northern lights why do we care about any of these things because they're fascinating because we live in a beautiful complex nuanced bizarre universe and it's interesting to observe these phenomena and when something like a lunar eclipse happens the idea that like this famous astrophysicist wouldn't understand why people would be interested in that like it's yeah i would have to hear the context but that seems very he was tweeting unlike the kind of things he usually says because he's talked about like you know this cosmic perspective and that we are you know imagining uh just just thinking about that we're part of this whole big story so it seems pretty weird that he was because he's the kind of person who would be interested in eclipses like he's the kind of nerdy person who would love that stuff so i can't really speak to that but um his point about um here it is right here lunar eclipses occur on average every two or three years and are visible oh i see what people see who can see the moon when it happens so contrary to what you may have been told lunar eclipses are not rare no that's not that's not yeah no no no that's not all okay no he said something where he was joking around about it it's this is it i think he's interested lunar lunar eclipses are so unspectacular that if nobody told you what was happening to the moon you'd probably not notice at all just saying i don't know about that that's what i'm talking about like this is some weird cynicism that i've noticed from him over the last few years and i don't understand i i think he's reacting to like stuff in the news and he's trying to make like a a viral tweet but i think he's just kind of talking about like you know just something happens and everyone's like crazy there's some phenomenon like maybe people don't care about things that are really interesting but for eclipses like
everybody just like loses their [ __ ] over them so well it's a it's interesting too yeah maybe he's saying maybe he's in compare like people who like compared to the other stuff that they don't make a big thing about comparing it yeah i don't know that's the problem it's only being cynical yeah i think it's social media and people trying to just say something that you know is kind of contrarian well i also think he's on social media too much and 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 like what do you think that is if if 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 yeah that's connected to social media where i've i feel like in some way it allows us to exchange information at a greater rate than ever before in human history it's unprecedented but in another way it's almost like we're we're handling raw uranium i was gonna say it's like giving a child a gun or it's like the early nuclear explosions yeah like i'm sure you've seen those tests that they did with the government where they had these uh with the military rather where they had these soldiers in a ditch and they blew up these nuclear bombs and had them run towards the blast yeah i haven't seen it you haven't seen that yeah okay we need to show you this because it's 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 yeah in order for us to recognize it and i think it took for the bombs to be dropped during world war ii for us to realize like hey don't [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] insane with our understanding today of the dangers of nuclear radiation and blast exposure but pull up one of these videos they had these poor [ __ ] soldiers and they had them in a ditch and they blew up this bomb well watch
this this is the same thing but they put five guys specifically right on the detonation site and told them to like hang out what yeah that's what it says right here hang out what do you mean uh five men agree to stand directly under an exploding nuclear bomb under it so they blew it up in the sky yeah oh my god they weren't crazy they weren't being punished all but one volunteered to do this which makes it all the more astonishing well that's not what i'm talking about when i'm talking about is some stuff they did it was black and white footage before 57. so this is something i want to watch this though yeah because it's just so crazy oh so they blew it up in the sky and these guys have to cover their eyes one guy's got sunglasses on people in the 50s oh so they blew this up god people are so nuts they really are so nuts well just stand here boys congratulations we did it we're all going to die of cancer this guy's smoking a cigar he doesn't give a [ __ ] about cancer look at him hey shake my hand so i was looking for that a lot of videos are popping up but i was trying to find the one we've played before it was yeah showing up atomic test in nevada 55. i don't know if that's it yeah that might be it or it's one of them there's more than one of these videos that that exists but so they blew up some building and then these guys jump out of the ditch and run towards this explosion why what's the point of running toys i 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 isn't the bomb supposed to kill them well the bomb kills a lot of them but i mean i don't think you killed it yeah see if you can do a atomic bomb test
touched soldiers in ditch i typed in running towards the thing that wasn't it so because so what about atomic bomb soldier in trenches try to try that because uh these soldiers were in a trench and the the blast you could see the dust and everything go across the top of their heads it's crazy but you know they would do stuff like this to these [ __ ] soldiers and we didn't understand the ramifications we didn't understand the dangers and this could be it they someone a pie may have but didn't care ah maybe that's even more horrible yeah i think this is it right so okay so back it up a little bit so the blast happens these guys go down in the ditch and then yeah here is boom so there's the blast and these poor guys are in the distance like okay the blast happened the [ __ ] thing is it's a mile away yeah and these guys are gonna run toward they're looking they're literally staring at a nuclear explosion i mean it's [ __ ] insane either they were completely ignorant or the kind of conspiracy theory side of me is saying maybe they wanted to uh people hire up find out like the uh results of like radiation exposure look at these people duck down as the waves of the explosion and look then they run towards it with their guns we'll get them now boys um but but i wonder i don't know what happened to him it'd be interesting to see yeah well they're probably all dead anyway but i i would wonder if like this the chaos that we're seeing in terms of like government upheavals all the exposure of corruption and the the infighting and the polarization of america which is so not just america the world itself it's it's so radical and so different in the way people are at ease 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 yes we don't understand the the dangers of this new technology we don't so um when we develop technology as a society we're not always ready to deal with that technology we kind of catch up later as far as like ethics
so uh the argument i make in the book which i explained a little bit ago talking about like these phase transitions that you do have a period of just widespread chaos before these transitions to higher order and it's specifically because yeah we do have to learn from those mistakes uh a guy named peter turchin he actually predicted the age of unrest that we're experiencing right now um in 2010 he said 2020 was gonna be an age of unrest that we haven't experienced for a long time i don't remember if like he was comparing like the previous ages like world war ii but his work basically shows that there are these predictable evolutionary cycles where just things get totally crazy like the hindus have the yugas like they they predicted that we are in kali yuga which is like it's like see if you can pull up something on kali yuga but this is uh that civilizations go in these cycles they called them the yugas that's very cool and kali yuga is like the the most confusing and chaotic and that it's you know 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 [ __ ] up because of that yeah it goes back to what i was saying about this you know kind of magic of insight i think these people did have these intuitions i'm sure they um i'm sure they had things going on in their times which kind of led them to these like theories um this understanding of human nature and how it plays out over long stretches of time yeah um so what did this guy in 2010 when he predicted this what was he basing it on uh just past historical trends so you look at the data and you see that like every so often kind of like semi predictably you will have uh this period of chaos um and what i think is really interesting is that you
uh you know it's not just that you you can explain it in terms of past data but i think it's really this evolutionary story that i tried to describe where you do have these periods of phase transition phase transitions social phase transitions and that uh basically a system that's too rigid uh 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 um um did you get anything about kali yuga it was just a job it was getting deep i was trying to find something good to bring up so i didn't know if you wanted an article or pictures yeah an article so the four stages of kali yuga too there's like yeah so i was trying to find one that was explaining it quickly and i got lost and one it wasn't explaining it quickly at all okay well it might it actually might be too complex to explain quickly quick what happens in kylie hugo so the maximum duration of life for human beings in kali yuga will become 50 years men will no longer protect their elderly parents in kali yuga men will develop hatred for each other even over a few coins giving up all friendly relations they will be ready to lose their own lives and kill even their own relatives and this is uh that's not like the best explanation of it that's not good either that's okay all right but you know it's obviously that people recognize that there are patterns to to civilization itself and that as you were saying before is that you use you need problems because problems create solutions and solutions they empower or at least motivate innovation yeah exactly and interestingly this guy peter turchin who predicted these things his father was named valentin turchen and he had this concept of the meta system transition and i think i saw a video of you and uh ben gortzel i'm saying his last name right i
think he mentioned uh turchin but uh 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 super organisms and so uh in peter turchen's work i uh haven't seen him like reference his dad but i think his dad actually gave a more uh like a deeper explanation of why this happens uh other than just like there are these like social you know there are these patterns to history um it's actually about these transitions now 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 these these yugas or whatever they are and that this is a part of the solution of the greater intelligence of these advanced beings that they they work their way through this they figure out that this is a this is an actual pattern that doesn't occur and that they solve it yeah 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 [ __ ] hitting the fan and then having to deal with it but i don't think that ever ends so i think they're let's say you do have the technology to like leave your planet and maybe your civilization has achieved some sort of peace what if you bump into another civilization that uh doesn't have the same philosophy there's going to be a period of war maybe and then some sort of integration under some like you know larger worldview but i do think there's a tendency towards um world views for any civilization where um the civilization starts to understand the importance of cooperation don't you think we could get to a point or 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 when you get to a type three 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 it could get to the point where it's just intelligence plus ability it makes all those things inevitable one of the things that i um discussed with michio kaku yesterday is that the things that motivate us to innovate and to conquer and to achieve material success a lot of that are these primate instincts and 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 that 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 and 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 but we may realize like those things that create this the i mean we've never had a point ever in human history where there's no war right if we could get to that we would might be able to say like hey one of the things that's [ __ ] us up is we're we're still monkeys yeah and we can get out of that yeah 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 um compete and uh i guess you've had on the show a friend of mine howard bloom he has a book called the global global brain and it's all about how you know in
certain instances uh animals will like for example sacrifice themselves uh uh even when it isn't you know to the benefit of propagating their genes that was sort of the selfish narrative that richard dawkins made famous so i think evolution is about these two processes it's about competing and it's about cooperating and basically both of them really have a point so when you're competing when you have darwinian evolution a sort of survival of the fittest uh that's a learning process because basically the ones that lose or that die out the organisms that die out or societies that die out basically that's a filter that's a natural selection filter so nature is weeding out the dysfunctional sub-optimal designs and so competition will create progress it will create learning so you know there's a lot of people who uh don't like capitalism right now and you know people are considering like socialist models even communist models um but capitalism is very much uh natural uh because it's um when you have these different corporations which are also super organisms 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 the problem with capitalism is when the people at the top start changing the rules of capitalism to benefit themselves right so um competition's good but uh cooperation uh is even better because uh basically what cooperation is is you uh 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 um working together always makes any sort of task like that easier for each individual because there's a division of labor
and uh with the division of labor um you have to you don't have to uh uh use as much like work and energy to accomplish the same goals right the competition is good corruption and collusion is bad yeah the problem is we equate all of those with the same thing we always think corporations are evil and they're they're but it'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 so 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 and if you can get to an escape velocity you can then avoid the ramifications of the things you've done yeah so i think that's that that kind of primal instinct that you were talking about like at work so there's like there's good and bad uh you know and it creates problems and the problems create solutions right yeah yeah billionaires like elon musk you know like i think income inequality is a massive problem and i'll explain why in a second but at the same time uh you need really wealthy people to create things like spacex right uh you need those resources right so evolution is kind of this balance of like centralized power forming because when you have centralized power like you have this like top-down uh system uh the people at the top who are maybe really smart creative innovative people can tell society what to do and kind of achieve these big goals but you always get the problem of those people bending the rules to benefit themselves and they can and um and all isn't this all because of their primate instincts yeah so uh we have to be aware of that and uh 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 these are complex adaptive systems our organisms that's like you know the more technical name for these systems these things can be realized at these different scales so a social organism is very similar to a biological organism but uh so when you have wealth that's concentrated uh so much like we have today there's like billionaires like the the amount of wealth that's concentrated at the top is just far more than it's been in america it's like having an organism where uh the resources uh aren't flowing throughout the whole system so it's like having blood that's cut off from reaching like your hand or your leg you're gonna get festering uh limbs you're gonna the the super organism isn't gonna be healthy overall if all of the resources are in one place so that's what the decentralization like kind of like crypto blockchain movement um as far as like the people who are you know i mean there's big governments trying to take over that technology and turn it into something that is against the spirit of like what satoshi nakamoto envisioned at first but the idea is that we need to sort of spread out this uh centralized uh wealth and power and control because it makes for a healthier super organism when you write a book like this how do you know when you're done this seems like i got a good ques i got a good answer for that um you're done when your publisher says if you take any longer you got to give the money back how long did it take to write this um so uh yeah what happened was um uh 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 in the atlantic now you know i should be able to get a book deal so i was doing that and um but i really wanted to write this book so i was covering like politics from
like a scientific aspect things that were like relevant to the news but uh i felt like i was at a point where i could pitch this and i'd actually uh written a novel that was sort of about this like 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 gonna come and go so uh when my agent pitched that and it didn't get an offer um i was like okay i'm not giving up i'm going to write the non-fiction book that i've kind of wanted to write my whole life and i pitched that to ben bello which is my publisher and uh they were really interested in it and uh 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 i it so it was just like intense focusing like in a room the pandemic started it 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 but it still doesn't feel like it's done there's things i see about it i'm like oh you know i want to go back and like revise some stuff but i do feel like i've told a complete story and it's the whole story i mean you know most of it focuses on like evolutionary mechanisms that create like you know towards intelligence on like earth but the last chapter gets into all the cosmic stuff the bigger pictures is their fine tuning is their design um quantum mechanics what does that mean you know interpretations of quantum mechanics so i felt like i covered as much as i could uh you know what was humanly possible um
and yeah i i i hope people think it makes sense i hope people think it makes sense too thank you very much for coming here man and uh for everybody that wants to get this book the romance of reality did you read the audiobook uh when you asked for it i had it i didn't know it was finished but so i listened to the first chapter and i loved it um did your narrator was great another narrator somebody narrated it yeah this guy who did uh deepak chopra wrote a book with a physicist menace kofatos and the guy is called you are the universe and uh we got that guy and he's a pro so you didn't want to do it yourself i was going to at first i i wanted to um and uh then i heard the guys like the the few people that they were suggesting and i listened to it and it was like this is like watching one of those national geographic shows where they have someone fancy like morgan freeman narrating and i was like there's no way i can compete so well it's your book either way um it's available now yeah so you can pre-order the book and it's out on the 28th and 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 uh using these principles to think about how we can optimize like social systems economic systems political systems and yeah uh beautiful yeah all right well thank you bobby appreciate it i enjoyed talking to you thanks so much this was the most fun conversation i've ever had it's awesome i really appreciate it appreciate you all right bye everybody [Music] [Applause] you