Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Could aliens teach us science?

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Daniel talks to Sam Kimpton-Nye about whether aliens do science the same way we do.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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There are potentially huge upsides to an alien arrival for the curious among us. And among those, I count not just the hosts of this podcast, of course, but you, the listeners in our community of wonders. For those of us who are curious about the universe, meeting aliens who are technologically advanced enough to arrive on Earth seems like a great opportunity. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I want to know the secrets that aliens have learned about the universe. And welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.

My co-host Jorge Champ can't be with us today, so it's just me and a guest to talk about the secrets of alien science. Imagine for a moment the best case scenario. Aliens arrive on Earth and they are friendly and we can figure out how to talk to them. And our scientists can talk to their scientists. Maybe these aliens know things about space and time or quantum mechanics that we haven't figured out yet. Maybe we could fast forward human science a thousand years or a million years. In this picture, you can imagine human and alien scientists are like together engaged in some grand

project to unravel the secrets of the universe. If we can talk to them, and if they do science like we do, and if we can make sense of what they've learned, it could be an incredible moment, really a pivot in human history. But is that possible? As one listener asked a few weeks ago, could we even grok it? Or would they be too advanced? So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question, teach us science? Could we establish a common enough understanding to communicate about complex intellectual questions like particle physics? Would they be interested in the same questions we are? Would we be able to understand their science? Could it be incompatible with ours? Are we certain

they would even have developed science in order to be technological? To help me explore these questions, it's my pleasure to introduce today's guest Samuel Kempton Nye. Samuel is a research associate at the University of Bristol. He works on issues at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Currently, he's working on the MetaScience project, which seeks to unify the natural sciences. But he agreed to join me on the podcast to talk about aliens and how they think about science. Sam, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Daniel. So tell me first, how often does the topic of aliens and their scientific minds come up in metaphysics and philosophy of science? Is it totally fringe, or is there

like a whole journal devoted to this topic. Good question. Far from a whole journal, no, that will be a stretch. I mean, philosophers are very interested in thinking about wacky, far out possibilities and scenarios. So aliens do come up occasionally. There are also other monsters in there, sometimes zombies, vampires, and the like. So I wasn't completely surprised that you would choose to ask a philosopher to talk about this sort of thing. It seems to me exactly the kind of things philosophers might love to talk about because it's a great way to ask one specific question. You know, asking the question, how do aliens think about science? Could we understand their science? Seems to me a great way to reflect on whether or not our science is universal or just

human, you know, whether it's something we've discovered or something we've invented. So I would be a little surprised if it's not something philosophers are already thinking about. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's something that I've been thinking about recently, actually, in the context of the philosophy of the laws of nature and to what extent we should be kind of realist or pragmatist about these things, and maybe we can get into that in some more detail. But there's definitely some value, certainly in thinking about how just beings with very different kind of modes of cognition might explore the world and kind of systematize their experiences as well, right? So, you know, we've got our five senses and that seems to be completely integral to how we're going to explore the world. and so we're going to be systematizing the world on the basis of our sense experience. But it seems certainly imaginable that some other creatures would have very different senses. And so the way they systematize the world and do science would be quite different indeed.

And senses are something that philosophers I know talk about a lot, this person isolated in a room who's never seen the color red and the notion of qualia. But it seems to me to be sort of a difficult topic to explore because we are limited to our senses. And so we're sort of in a box and it's hard to imagine like what it's like to be in a different box where you experience the universe with totally different senses. It's the goal there to think about like what it would be like to experience the universe if you could like taste electrons or if you had some sense for dark matter or neutrinos. Is it possible for us to really take that jump and to sort of logic our way into what it's like to be a bat, you know, what it's like to be an alien or is that really impossible? Exactly, right. I think that's the exact sorts of issues that people might like to wrestle with in this area, right? And yeah, you got the reference in there to what it's like to be a bat, and famously philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that we can't possibly know what it's like to be a bat.

But while that might be the case, at least we can sort of start to think about why that's so, right? So the bat navigates by sonar as opposed to kind of visual experiences. And while we can kind of do some science of sonar, it seems a long step from that to actually, being able to know what it's like to be that bat. And so it certainly seems imaginable that there are just other actual creatures out there or possible alien creatures that would just experience the world so dramatically differently to us that it would be impossible to kind of get into their perspectives and their minds. And so this is quite mind-boggling to think that the way that we're experiencing the universe

is potentially quite limited in a way. And we know that it's limited. I mean, physics at least has told us that most of the universe is invisible to us. You know, most of the universe is dark matter, which we don't even know what it is. And even of the matter that we are familiar with, like neutrinos are streaming in front of us all of the time, but we can't see them. And so there's a lot, we know for a fact that there's a lot going on in the universe that we do not sense and that therefore our mental picture of the universe is a very particular one. And it seems frustrating, but enticing to me at the same time. Like, if aliens are so alien that they might be impossible for us to, like, really digest, that also suggest that they also suggest that they.

They have some very valuable insight. Like the more alien they are, the more valuable it is to try to understand their minds, but then paradoxically, the more impossible it might be. Yeah, interesting. Right. So like you say, it's tantalizing because even if we were to encounter these creatures, maybe we'd just have no way of communicating with them, so we'd have no into their insights. But then I guess there might be kind of two dimensions to this issue.

So what you said there suggested the possibility of creatures that might be able to perceive things that maybe we have some sort of knowledge of, but no direct perception of things like neutrinos and that. But I suppose another thing that we might think is just that, so going back to the bat example, the kind of the mode of perceiving one's environment might just be very different for the aliens. So if they perceived by, you know, reflecting sound waves of surfaces, that would just give them a very different kind of experience. I also often think about the example of the aliens in that the Ted Chang story stories of your life or the film arrival. And they have this very different, if I remember correctly, it's while, I guess, since I, since I read the short story.

But they have this very different perception of time, right? And it seems plausible to me that there could be a creature with a very different perception of time. And then that would just make the way they systematize and think about their worlds so different from ours. Absolutely. And I think one of the really fun things about that story and the movie is understanding, appreciating how difficult it might be to communicate with aliens, not to mention like talk about, you know, their notions of quantum mechanics. but just like get the basics down, you know, and that's a whole other question, you know, and maybe for today we should put that aside with the question of whether we could discover alien messages, whether we could develop a common language with them. We recently had Noam Chomsky and Karim Jabari in the podcast to talk about, you know,

the universality of language and something that comes up often in these conversations is not necessarily like, could we understand their lingo and their slang and how they communicate, but that there might be a deeper way to communicate, something that's common, something that's universal. This is, I think, widely held belief that we can avoid this whole question of language by focusing on the mathematics and the physics, which might be more universal. And Carl Sagan famously argued that we could use mathematics to find a common intellectual context.

But how much can we say about, like, the universality of mathematics itself? What do we know about whether it's likely to be just the way humans think, like an abstract, sort of succinct way to describe the thought processes that we have or something that actually reflects the objective structure of the universe. How do we probe that kind of question? Yeah, that's a great question, Daniel. And this is a whole area of really fruitful research and philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics, which I certainly can't claim to be any kind of expert on, but it's tantalizing for sure. I mean, there's this problem right that you might have encountered the problem of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. And it seems kind of

surprising and really cool that mathematics turns out to be so good at describing the physical universe that we find around us, right? This abstract formal system that we've perhaps invented, you know, a lot of branches of mathematics come about just by mathematicians thinking in the abstract, kind of having fun and doing puzzles, if you like, and then turn out to be applicable to real physical systems. And this is kind of remarkable. And maybe something like a hint at the fact that the universe is in a way kind of made in these mathematical terms and there's something objective going on here. So that's an interesting thought. Yeah, maybe there's some hope that that could be something of a universal, but even crazy arrival type aliens might be able to communicate

with us in terms of. I'd love to believe that and I'd love to think that mathematics is somehow the language of the universe itself. You know, that like if we're in a simulation, then mathematics is the way that the source code has been written in some way. But it seems to me a little bit presumptuous. And let me take the devil's advocate position there and argue against it. The thing that makes me wonder about whether mathematics really is fundamental is not that mathematics is not effective because you're right. It absolutely is. It's incredible how well our physical theories work. And I'm a particle physicist and we make mathematical predictions to like 10 decimal places and we go out in the universe and we do experiments and wow, they're bang on right. And that gives you this

feeling like, wow, maybe this isn't just a description of the universe. Maybe it is the way the universe does these calculations. But the problem with that argument is that every theory that we have, every mathematical description we have of the universe, we know is an effective theory, not a fundamental theory. We know that it has domains of validity. For example, Newton's theory works really, really well. Until we measured very precisely the orbit of Mercury, we were like, wow, this might be the way the universe works. Maybe Newton had revealed the truth of the universe. And so there are many theories out there that only work in sort of a region, in under certain conditions or in certain systems. And can you say that they are a fundamental description of the universe, a true

description of the way the universe works? Definitely not, right? Newton was not correct about the real nature of space and time and gravity. And yet his theory worked really well. And today we have theories that work really well, but we suspect or we are fairly confident that they aren't the devious theories of the universe. The current standard model, for example, will break down at the plank scale where it needs a description of gravity. So how do we know that there are mathematical descriptions that are really fundamental, not just effective in some regime? Aren't we just looking at sort of like a patchwork of mathematical ideas, not like a true revealing of the nature of the universe? Yeah, interesting, Daniel. You're a very good point there. And it reminds me of a debate

in the philosophy of science. Realism versus anti-realism, roughly the debate over whether or not science kind of gets at the truth of how things are. And the anti-realists say that, who say that, it doesn't get at the truth have an argument along those lines right they say look all of these past scientific theories have proven to be false so you know why could we hold out any any hope that our current theories are anywhere near the truth but then the flip side of that is like you say the or perhaps you alluded to that these kind of false theories that are are mathematicized as we've mentioned before as well nonetheless seem to be kind of doing doing quite well and we can we can do some good work with things like newton's theory we can send people into space and stuff like that right um so

although they might be strictly speaking false they might be kind of getting at something that's kind of almost right and we might think that the better theories nonetheless preserve something of the structure of Newton's theory so then something that some metaphysicians and philosophers of science have said in response to this kind of pessimistic argument for anti-realism and a slightly more skeptical sense is that maybe what we're doing when we're describing the universe kind of imperfectly but in a way that kind of works and is then built on is we're getting at some underlying deep structure right so And then maybe our maths, maybe even something like Newton's theory, is nonetheless latching onto some sort of objective structure in a much kind of broader or deeper sense

than whether it's directly true. And so there might be some hope there that the maths is describing something that is fundamentally correct that's then sustained through the theory change. The idea there, I guess, is maybe alien physicists also hit on Newton's approach before they hit on Einstein's approach. that it's not just a human description of the universe, but it really is an effective approximation of the way the universe really works.

I guess that is that the argument? I think that might be the idea. Yeah, right. I mean, we can also think, we know that Newton's theory is false, but we can still wonder why it's so kind of effective and useful for us. And perhaps an answer to that

is that it is getting at some sort of underlying structure in some sense. It might be kind of slightly grappling and groping in the dark at this thing, but it might be kind of getting close, you know. And so that's why we're, might be able to nonetheless use Newton's theory for all sorts of interests and purposes that we have, yeah. All right. Well, I have a lot more questions about how we might probe the universe and how alien scientists do as well.

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I mean, if the universe has some fundamental theory down at the string scale, quantum gravity, whatever is going on down there, why isn't everything at the human scale totally chaotic? You know, if you try to describe a hurricane in terms of its fundamental bits, the raindrops, it's a huge, difficult problem. We don't have like a simple equation that tells you where a hurricane. hurricane is going to land. It's a massively chaotic problem and you have to model every tiny little raindrop and if a raindrop moves over a meter, it could change the entire path of the hurricane. But in our world, it's possible to do what Newton did and describe the path of a ball

through the air without knowing anything about quantum gravity, right? You can make chicken soup without knowing what the soup is really made out of. And to me, that seems like the key there, if these things are emergent, these descriptions, these simplified mathematical stories of the universe are universal. Everybody else should find them as well. But do we even know why they exist? Why is it possible to find these simplified mathematical stories of the universe? It seems to me key to understanding whether aliens are also going to find them. Right. Yeah. I mean, again, this is a thing that philosopher's science metaphysicians really puzzle over. It's why do we need to have all of the different sciences? Why can't we just have fundamental physics and

chemistry? Why do we need biology and psychology and economics as well, right? That's a little bit aggressive. Why don't we need anything but physics? Really, physics is the only science. I'm not sure I would go. It could be taken like that, but it could more be, yeah, a puzzlement once we kind of realize or think that, hey, it looks like everything's kind of composed out of fundamental particles or fields or something like that.

Why can't we just do it all in fundamental terms? And yeah, I think, like you say, it's something of a mystery. I don't know if this is really an answer, but this is just kind of rephrasing the issue. But what sort of seems to happen is that we can affect. abstract away from certain details, right? Because when we look at the level of the weather systems or the ball flying through space, we don't need to think about certain details at the fundamental level. We can kind of coarse grain the information. And then that presents a picture that's far more useful and tractable for us given our interests, right? And this is what we do.

And this is how we navigate the world. Like you say, we can make our chicken soup without worrying about what the electrons or the fields are doing, right? But you said something really interesting there, you said, based on what our interests are. It makes me wonder if the universe is sort of like Rashomon, you know, what if we look at one system and we say, oh, the interesting thing here is a ball flying through the air. And look, I can tell a simple mathematical story about it. And an alien physicist would be like, ball, what even is that? I'm more interested in the flow of these particles over here. And I call that a blah, blah, blah. And here's my equation for the blah, blah, and it's beautiful. And, you know, is there a patchwork of mathematical stories that are only interesting

to us or are these stories likely to be universal? And I know that the real answer waits until we meet the aliens and we talk science with them and we figure out if they've developed completely independent branches of science. But I wonder, do you think it's possible to approach that question or address that question today before we've met the aliens? Just by looking at the structure of our theories and looking for hints that these things might be arbitrary or might be universal, how can we possibly pull those things apart today before we get to talk to the Nice. I mean, I happen to be somewhat skeptical about the idea that there really is an objective way of kind of, I guess. So if we think about the ball or the chicken soup, talk of that as like a way of coarse-graining the low-level information to suit our interests. I'm kind of skeptical that there is an objectively right or best way to do that. And it seems kind of plausible to me that, yeah, the aliens might be interested in some very different coarse-graining. So we're interested in the lump of matter that kind of corresponds. to what we call the ball, but why not be interested in the lump of matter that we call the

ball and also my nose every Tuesday, right? This would be a very strange kind of thing to be interested in because it kind of jumps over time and space in strange sorts of ways. But look, I can define that object, right? This lump of matter that we call the ball and my nose on Tuesdays and why not try and describe the behavior of that thing? Maybe that's a bit too silly, But I think that the point is it turns out to be very difficult to say why objectively we should be interested in the things that we are interested in. And do we think that an alien species would be wrong for having some very interest in very different kind of coarse grailings? Or would it be impossible for aliens to have interests in very different kinds of coarse grailings? I'm not sure.

I don't see why it would be wrong if they had these different interests. it doesn't strike me as impossible either if they're again like going back to what we're saying at the beginning if their modes of perceiving that their sensual sense experiences were very different to ours or maybe if they perceived time very differently than we did why not you know right and to me it goes to really the heart of the question of the human experience and the context of it in the same way that we want to know are we alone because we want to understand like is life rare and we also like to know are there other kinds of life because biology have lots of different options and we just got one? Or is this basically the only way it can work? Meeting aliens can answer

that question. And in the same way, meeting alien physicists could tell us like, oh, look, turns out they got their own Newton and they got their own Einstein. And this is the path you take to understanding the universe. And basically everybody follows the same path. Or, you know, did they take a completely separate path? And a thought experiment I'd love to do in reality is to take like a thousand Earths and have humans evolve intelligently and then let science progress independently. you know, Newton almost didn't even become a scientist. What would have happened if he hadn't? If we hadn't had Einstein or if somebody else had been even smarter,

you know, it feels to me like the path of human science rests so much on these tiny moments, these tiny accidents, these tiny choices that people make that it could have very well gone a different way. And we have really no way to probe, you know, the different paths that might have taken because we haven't met those aliens yet. One way I've thought about to probe that is to look at the sort of history of the development of intellectual scientific thought here on Earth. Do you know anything about like the history of, you know,

Mayan science and Chinese science and Egyptian astronomy and whether they can tell us whether independent groups of humans tend to come to the same ways of thinking about the universe or whether there really are divergent ways to attack this problem? I think that's exactly the right way to kind of go about investigating this thing a bit more empirically. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea to me. Unfortunately, I don't know about any investigations along those lives. although I'm sure there are some.

Something kind of similar that I have heard about in philosophy is there's a recent movement in experimental, called experimental philosophy, which basically surveys the kind of philosophical intuitions of the folk on various philosophical puzzles and things like that. So philosophy has kind of philosophical intuitions been kind of put in the spotlight recently because it's like, hang on a minute, these are the intuitions generally seem to be the intuitions of, Western philosophers and maybe they wouldn't be shared across the board or they wouldn't be shared even just by people who aren't kind of indoctrinated into the academy, as it were. And the experimental philosophers have done some work in this area.

And I think they've uncovered more divergence in kind of philosophical intuitions than the kind of Western canon would have us believe. So I think there is some good reason to think that something similar might be the case with science as well, right? And I mean, I suppose another thing, I guess why I think this is relevant is because I think really at the fundamental level, you can't draw sharp dividing lines between a kind of philosophical blue sky approach to thinking about the world and the scientific approach. We've all got to kind of start somewhere. And so if there's some evidence to suggest that these kind of broad philosophical

intuitions on big questions are quite divergent between different people and different cultures, then I don't see why that that wouldn't maybe lead us to think that plausibly different ways of doing science and different kind of foundational thoughts and intuitions on scientific issues might vary quite radically across people in different cultures as well. Yeah. Fascinating. Well, we'll have a scientific anthropologist on to talk about how indigenous cultures do science and the history of the development there. I think that'd be a lot of fun. I'm going to turn us back to the question we were discussing a moment ago, which is, you know, whether these emergent theories, these mathematical descriptions of the world that we see it are

universal or whether they're just sort of culturally dependent and could be different for aliens. But let's zoom down and talk about maybe like the fundamental theory of the universe. Some listeners out there might think, well, perhaps we have different descriptions of balls versus noses, but at its heart, the universe is a certain way. There are fundamental vibrating strings or there are space pixels or something at the quantum gravity level. And what if we all zoom down there? Won't we inevitably find the same description of the universe because it is one.

way. So Karim Jabari from the Institute of Future Studies was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. He made a claim that I found a bit shocking. He said that you could have two fundamental theories of the universe that both work in the sense that they succeed at describing what we see, but internally are fundamentally different pictures of the universe. They're like completely different mental descriptions and mental structures telling us a story about what's happening at the deepest scale. Do you agree with that? Do you think it's possible to have multiple accurate theories of the fundamental nature of the universe? Yeah, very interesting. I think nice. I like the approach there to think,

okay, maybe if we zoom down, then we can hope for some more objectivity. I suppose one thing that comes to my mind is that kind of approach, hopes or assumes that there is such a thing as a fundamental level. Right. For all we know, it could be infinitely, infinitely divisible all the way down, right? And then I don't know if we'd be in trouble, then that might kind of scupper our aspirations for objectivity. It might mean a lot of work for particle physicists for a long time, though, if we just keep building bigger and bigger atom smashers.

Potentially good news then, yeah. So that's something that I would worry a bit about. I mean, so I suppose the worry, the kind of anti-objectivist or pragmatist approach or kind of worry would be that maybe all there is to the universe is just some kind of homogenous blob of matter and we just kind of cut it up in ways that serve our interests. And so then your perhaps counter-proposal here is. But what if we could just get to the very nature of the homogenous blob matter stuff itself? Yeah, I don't know, perhaps.

It depends what we mean by homogenous exactly, I suppose, and how homogenous this blob stuff could be and what there really would be to say about it independently of how we carve it up. So I think it's the right way to go, but I think it depends on a fair amount of kind of hope that there is going to be some fundamental structure beyond which we can't make any further subdivisions and that it's going to be some way that we're going to be able to latch onto and maybe i think that's more likely but but i'm a little bit skeptical

as perhaps you can you can sense well you know my fantasy is that aliens come and they've been thinking about physics the way we have but they're just like a million years advanced and they can like guide us through what would have taken us a million years to figure out in just a hundred years and we zoom forwards you know but that relies on us having sort of the same principles and the flip side of that, my nightmare scenario is that there is no fundamental true description of the universe and that everything we have learned is just this like patchwork of effective theories or like a ladder of effective theories where we have like a description at the galaxy scale. We have a description at the solar system scale and at the human scale and at the atom scale and at the

cork scale. None of these things are like deeply true. They're just like our mathematical stories about the noses we find interesting and aliens might have their own ladder. They might pick different scales to explore. They might tell totally different stories. And so when we go to that first interstellar physics conference to share notes, that we basically have nothing in common with these folks. And I wonder what we could learn at that point. You know, you work on this project of unifying the sciences of your metascience project. And we thought about like what it might be possible to try to incorporate a new emergent theory that sort of straddles our various sciences into our structure?

Like, how do we absorb that into our sort of mental canon and make use of it if the aliens are fascinated in this thing that we've never even thought about? Yeah, very interesting. I mean, I certainly don't share your concern with the so-called nightmare scenario. That doesn't necessarily seem worrying to me. I mean, for sure, it seems threatening

to a certain sort of hypothesis, something along the lines of, yeah, the sciences are all unified and they're all kind of ultimately getting at one fundamental objective truth. And so one could think that that situation would be evidence for a kind of radical disunity of the sciences. And I take it that that's the kind of thing that you're finding nightmarish. But why, right? Like that would be an interesting empirical discovery in its own right.

And so why not just kind of wonder at that, right? That seems pretty interesting to me. That would be a nice meal for the philosophers if it would be disappointing for the physicists, right? Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I'm not particularly confident about this, but I think there are a great many philosophers. was maybe the majority who probably do hold out for something like the unity that you sounded like you were keen on there. So then your other question was like, okay, if we did find these aliens who had this very radically way, different way of thinking about the universe

and carving things up and doing their science, what could we learn from that? Well, again, that would strike me as a very interesting empirical discovery in its own right. And it looks like it would tell us something along the lines of, you know, what's kind of important when we're doing science is doing something and kind of carving up the world and thinking about the world in a way that suits us. So then when we're doing science, we're kind of learning as much about ourselves as we are about the universe. And again, that seems kind of okay to me. Maybe it's not what most scientists have directly in mind when they're doing science. But that seems, again, like an interesting discovery and a very, very worthwhile pursuit to find out about what we're like as

beings and how we carve up the universe to suit our needs and interests. it's like if we meet the aliens and we discover they don't like hamburgers or pizza they've invented this other weird kind of food and that tells us something about the aliens and you know that's why you go traveling to eat weird kinds of food that tells you about what those people are like and what their music is like it does it's an insight into that culture and that's only possible if we have enough in common to even really understand it you know to understand oh this is a science question and here is your answer i want to turn a little bit to that sort of question like we talked earlier about whether it's likely that aliens even have mathematics and whether that's universal or not. What about the other question of whether aliens are even doing science? Like, could science itself be a fundamentally human pursuit? Not in the sense that we might be the only curious people about the universe, but, you know, science is something we've only been doing in this form for a few hundred years. Isn't it possible to have a technological civilization that doesn't use this particular method of building internal mathematical models to describe the universe

in order to make technological achievements? Do philosophers think about this question of the universality of science itself? Yeah, for sure. I mean, now I'm tempted to give a very stereotypical philosopher's answer to this thing, which is like, come on, we don't really know what science is. We can't demarcate between science and non-science. And so that would be a kind of a deflection of the question, I suppose. But I think ultimately the kind of the history of topic of trying to kind of define what constitutes science shows that that's that's hard if not impossible to do right and so given that observation I'd certainly be reluctant to rule out whatever these aliens are doing as as counting as

science because we're not really sure where to draw the line anyway right but perhaps more positively I suppose the point just is well we should be kind of quite broad and quite permissive in what we mean by science and it seems plausible that even And if these things were radically differently, kind of cognitively wired than we are, if they're going about trying to kind of, you know, find their way in the universe, build machines that suit their interests, inquire into questions they find interesting and fascinating, then why not call that science, right? But, I mean, maybe that's not quite what you were getting at.

Maybe what you were getting at was more, would the science that they're doing be sufficiently similar to our science for there to be any interesting points of contact between us and then? more what you had in mind absolutely and i want to dig into that a lot more but first let's take another short break i don't write songs god write songs i take dictation i didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years i think culture is any space that you live in that develops you on a recent episode of culture raises us podcast i sat down with warren campbell grammy winning producer pastor and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop.

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I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. head. Welcome to season two of the good stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back and we're talking to philosopher, science, and metaphysics. Samuel can deny about the possibility of talking to aliens about science, learning from them, or maybe just being puzzled at the way they think about the universe. Then when we broke off, we were talking about whether or not aliens do something that we

recognize as science. And you're right, it's not about like whether or not we can officially call what they are doing science. It's about whether what they're doing is close enough to what we're doing that we could learn from them. I guess my brain naturally goes to these nightmare scenarios where, for example, we meet star-faring aliens. They come to Earth in their spaceships that have crossed the cosmos because they've developed

warp drives. And our first question is, of course, how does your warp? drive work, but I imagine maybe there are species that have developed technology, not through the methodical development of physical models, but just sort of by trial and error. I think about, for example, you know, the swordsmiths of ancient Japan or Spain or whatever, they didn't have an understanding of why their technique made the metal extra hard. You know, they developed this technique mostly through trial and error. You dip it in this, you dip it in that, you heat it to this temperature, then you cool it. You get a really hard sword. It's definitely a slower.

way to make progress, but it's possible. Isn't it possible that we meet, you know, a starfaring race of aliens that have been doing this for a million years and sort of like stumbled their way into a warp drive or, you know, lights be travel or something without having a deep understanding of it that they could communicate to us. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Nice. So like one way of kind of reading that scenario is that these aliens needn't be any more intelligent than us or any kind of radically different to us, but they could have just been around a lot longer, right? And so had more time to kind of, yeah, do the trial and error procedure and come up with some things, but then some great technologies and perhaps innovations that kind of get them to other star systems or something like

that, but then they're not able to communicate to us how they've done it because of because of how they got there. Yeah, that certainly seems plausible. But then I guess like we were saying, that that's different from this other worry, which is that they've got there in kind of more of a theoretical ways that they do have something that we might want to call understanding of the underlying physical theory that's underpillar. their technology, but that it's just kind of so, so different. And again, they're kind of carving up and thinking about the world in a way that's so different from how we think about it, that they're not going to be able to communicate

their technologies and their insights to us for that kind of reason. Something that I do wonder in the kind of this vicinity and more related to the latter scenario, where the worry that these creatures might just be so radically different from us that we just can't learn anything from them. So one source of optimism might just be that we might think that to kind of of count as an agent in a sense, right? Well, that's a very broad term, but it's a kind of a bit of a philosophical term of art. But, you know, we're agents. We have some sort of, some sort of aims and goals and consciousness. But to count as an agent and to have these sorts of

interests in exploration and building technology, there might have to be some sort of commonality to what it is to be an agent, right? So to be that highly evolved to be pursuing those sorts of pursuits and building those sorts of technologies, it might just kind of be the case that They'd have to have something somewhat in common with other agents, namely us, that we could find at least some sort of common ground. And again, that's a little bit speculative and hopeful. But it's something that I kind of am somewhat persuaded by sometimes. So, yeah, that might be a cause for optimism.

I think that is an attractive argument, you know, to suggest, like, in order to develop in the universe, you have to be curious. And you have to build mental models to explain why things happen in your life in those mental models naturally develop into, you know, scientific thinking. I think that's an attractive argument, but it also feels to me a little bit too easy. You know, it's sort of like the kind of argument you make where you say like, well, everybody drinks coffee in the morning because, you know, everybody wakes up and they're tired and coffee helps. So therefore, all humans must drink coffee, right? It's sort of like the argument you make, I don't mean to be

too negative, but it's an argument from ignorance, right? It's to say, I can't imagine something different. Therefore, this must be universal, where the whole reason we want to meet aliens is precisely to confront those boxes and understand the limits of our imagination. And so that's exactly the kind of argument that I'm very tempted by, but I reject for that reason, that I want to push my way out of it and understand if there are other ways to explore this. But fundamentally, I think it's frustrating because I don't think we can get out of that box without meeting those aliens the way people can't really understand other cultures without doing something. traveling or being exposed to them because sitting in your little village at home it's probably

impossible to imagine other ways humans can be yeah that's right that that will be the best thing wouldn't it if we if we could meet these aliens i mean i'm not like completely pessimistic that there aren't other ways of doing it like like we've touched on i think maybe maybe we could push ourselves really hard to kind of think outside the box i mean something that comes to mind and i don't ask too many follow-ups on this because i'm by far an expert on the topic but there's this new thing in physics construct a theory, right, which we're told is supposed to be a whole new approach to the foundations of physics, which is nothing like anything anyone has ever done or thought of doing in terms of thinking about the universe before. And if that's all

it's cracked up to be, it might be something along these lines, right, a way of kind of thinking from first principles in a completely different way. If we think that there is the potential to really shake up our foundational thinking in these sorts of ways, then yeah, again, maybe we could have some optimism that if there were this radically different species of aliens that we came into contact with that at first it looked like we had no hope of interacting with them maybe after some work and some some reconceptualizing of our foundations we could get there right and so i think i think there might be some some reasons to be optimistic but yeah well if the aliens do arrive and they don't just like fry us from space you think we should send the philosophers first

or the physicists oh i think maybe the philosophers and the physicists should probably be working in tandem on this one. I think they've probably got the strengths and weaknesses in this kind of situation that could complement each other. So send a team of both. I asked Noam Chomsky if he thought that scientists would be allowed to talk to the aliens. And he was pretty cynical about whether military and political structures would allow scientists and philosophers to speak on behalf of Earth, which is a whole other reason to be pessimistic.

And not a road I want to go down today. I think another question people think about when they imagine speaking to aliens is putting aside all these philosophical questions and say they have similar structures and they've thought about physics in similar ways. They're just really far advanced from us. A basic question is how could they teach us what they know? How could we possibly understand the science of a super advanced race? It's sort of like if you gave Galileo a laptop, where would you even go to explain to him how it works and what you can do with it? People think about, like, you know, how to bootstrap humanity up to the level of potential galactic aliens. Well, I think there I'd be inclined to be a bit more optimistic, right?

Maybe just from the kind of observation that we teach children all sorts of complicated things. And I've seen many children. I mean, this is not necessarily a good thing, but you see kids these days just taking to laptops and iPads as if it was kind of innate in them to use these objects, which strikes me as kind of crazy. but then also makes me think, look, if we can teach kids to use these strange new bits of technology and we can educate our children to do all sorts of funky things like maths and logic and art and poetry, then, yeah, why couldn't we be the children of the aliens? Why couldn't they take us under their wings and teach us their ways? I have a little bit of optimism there, I think, yeah.

Let me take your optimism and turn it back into a nightmare scenario, which seems to be my role in this conversation, which is the aliens come and they have super advanced science, and us physicists who have grown up thinking one way can't rock it, but we send our children to the alien schools, and you're right to them, it probably feels totally natural. Then there's this generational divide where one set of humanity is like super charged in thousands of years ahead of the old ancient gray-haired folks like me who just never really understand the modern world. Right, and we've got something of a toned-down version of that it feels like today, like the internet natives and the technology native people growing up

do seem to be somewhat separated from the older generation. So yeah, it's conceivable that that that sort of divide that we actually observe could just be a lot more dramatic, right? Yeah. So that would be that would be nightmarish for sure. So I guess the answer is don't give Galileo the laptop, give Galileo's kids the laptop and they'll be playing Wordle within 10 minutes. That's it. Exactly. All right. So then to wrap it up, what do you think is something we can do to prepare? I mean, I don't know if aliens are going to come. I don't know if aliens even exist. I don't know if we will hear a message from aliens. But these are deep and important questions, and we haven't really resolved any of them today. What do you think are the most sort of important directions for humanity or philosophy to sort of prepare for that moment so that when it does happen, we have a plan or a thoughtful structure in which to explore these questions. Yeah, good question. I mean, I think actually one thing we could do to prepare for that scenario is to look hard at the sorts of things we take for granted, right? So I think scientists do this, but non-scientists do this as well. Of course, we go about the world

and we take all sorts of things for granted about the nature of our reality. And really what this is, is a kind of a philosophical commitment that we have to various assumptions and premises and background kind of structures, ways of thinking. But that we're we're not particularly aware of because we don't scrutinize them. So perhaps we could do something like that. We could think about what some of these most basic assumptions that we take for granted in science, but also in everyday life, and see if they could possibly be questioned. Because look, these aliens might have very different foundational assumptions to us.

And so I think engaging in this sort of exercise could maybe come close to preparing us for this kind of encounter. Yeah, I totally agree. It's like preparing for travel, you should be asking yourself, hmm, I wonder if they do drink coffee where I'm going or, you know, if they have a totally different kind of toilet where you don't squat or you don't sit or you don't stand or who knows what, preparing your mind for the breadth of possibilities. And for me, at least, I totally look forward to that day when aliens blow our little lines and tell us how there are other ways to think about the universe,

to explore the universe, even to ask questions. What questions are they asking? You know, not just what answers do they have, but what do they find strange and fascinating about the universe? It seems to be like a lot of what we think about as objective in science is driven by aesthetics. A lot of the questions we're asking in theoretical particle physics are driven by like, hmm, this looks weird or I think it would be prettier that other way. Even the discovery that Higgs boson came about because people were thinking, his theory seems kind of ugly and it would be much prettier if we added this one other piece. And so there's a lot of, you know, aesthetics and subjectivity and, you know, personality in how we explain.

for the universe. And so I think you're right that we need to look at that and put that under a microscope and wonder whether there are other choices that could have been made. Great. Yeah. So we could even spend some time in some art galleries thinking about why we like what we like and dislike what we dislike. I very much agree with that, Daniel. Yeah, that sounds very sensible to me. Yeah. And as much as I'd like to send artists on that first contingent also to meet aliens, I think it's almost impossible we'll ever understand alien art. And I don't know if that bodes well or not for alien philosophy and alien physics, but I'll look forward to one day finding out.

All right, thanks very much, Sam, for joining us for this crazy and wide-ranging conversation on how aliens think about science and whether we might ever be able to understand it. Thank you, Daniel. That was really fascinating. Thanks. iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. intersections of culture and leadership. I am a free black woman. From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Valicia's journey is a masterclass in shifting culture and using your voice to spark change. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'll take it off. I'm Manny. I'm

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