Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Caleb Scharf: The Ascent of Information (#163)

Starting point is 00:00:01 Any sufficiently advanced technology is in distinction of the friend, Caleb Scharf of Columbia University, the award-winning author of the zoomable universe, the Copernicus Complex, Gravity's Engines. He is the director of the Astrobiology Center at Columbia, and he's written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Scientific American. He's been very generous with me. I've spent some time in the very office that he's in now looking at that very whiteboard. Caleb, how are you doing today?

Starting point is 00:00:32 Very well. Thank you, Brian. This book is fascinating. I own all your books. I have yet to get one of them signed by you, but that's okay. It's someday when we get together, we will sign up all of your books for me, so they will become collector's items. And we'll talk about what the nature of signing and imprimatur's and so forth have to do with this book, this wonderful book called The Ascent of Information. Now, your first books, the zoomable universe and the Copernicus complex and gravity's engines, all in some way or another have to do with astronomy, astrobiology, etc. This book, although it has wonderful, delightful prose, and Doug's talk scientifically about many different topics, ranging from blockchain to William Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Caleb, how does an astronomer, an astrobiologist, the director of the astrobiology center, how do you come to write a book about information?

Starting point is 00:01:27 Well, it's interesting. For me, it actually, it's part of a continuum. And I think, you know, so the of information, as we'll talk about, really does touch on some of the deep questions that we address or try to address in astrobiology about the nature of life, both here on Earth and potentially elsewhere. And so there is a connection. There's a deep connection between the nature of this thing we call information and the nature of biological life, and an extension to that, which is, again, as we'll get to, you know, information at large in the cosmos in the universe, and certainly the information that we generate as a species and surround ourselves with

Starting point is 00:02:12 and interact with. So the interesting thing is that book came about in part from thinking about questions in astrobiology to do with quantifying. the nature of intelligence, quantifying the nature of species that have technology, thinking about what we might stumble across in the rest of the universe, perhaps or perhaps not. And one of the things that I realized was that there's a quality in us, in the way that we generate information around ourselves, that could be a market, could be a quantitative way of evaluating, in some sense, a measure of intelligence, a measure of technology, a quality

Starting point is 00:02:55 of life that allows us to separate stuff like us from things like microbes at some level. So yeah, so there's actually, this is how I come to write a book about information and computation and thermodynamics and Shannon entropy and all these fabulous things. And of course, Bitcoin. We cannot not mention Bitcoin. I do you try to explain Bitcoin a little bit. Yeah, it's very well presented. I really did enjoy it.

Starting point is 00:03:25 And I've had on the foremost evangelist of Bitcoin in the known universe, and that's Michael Saylor. He's the CEO of Microstrategy. And I've also had on his alter ego, Peter Schiff. So what I like to do is have on alter egos from different perspectives, getting what's called a red team approach, which means that you get the best thinkers on one side of an issue, the best side from the other side. and they debate with love. You can't debate with antipathy, hostility, et cetera. I won't have it. And I know that you're too much of a gentleman to do so anyway. But I do want to talk about the origin

Starting point is 00:03:58 of information in the context of a past guest that I had on, Stephen C. Meyer, who is the works at the Discovery Institute, which is an intelligent design facility, although he is also a PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge University, a very deep thinker. And we'll talk about his notions and some of the questions that he raised with me that I want to raise with you. But first, Caleb, as I often do, the first piece of information you ever get about a book is its cover and its title and its subtitle. And you always hear, ignore that, ignore that information. Suppressed that.

Starting point is 00:04:33 Don't judge a book by its cover. But I want to judge it. How did you come up with the title? How did you come up with the subtitle and the cover design? I'm always fascinated by this. Well, it's an interesting process. I mean, you're an author, so you've been exposed to this as well. I think many, many titles for books come out of almost a panel discussion with editors and

Starting point is 00:05:00 publicists at a publisher. Yeah, in this case, the original working title of the book was actually the weight of ideas, that notion that ideas themselves carry a burden in the world. And that felt good because it does speak to some of the discussion in the book, but it also a little obscure for most people. And so the ascent of information was actually a suggestion by my editor, and it's an homage to earlier writings and ideas like the Ascent of Man, in its relationship to discussing Darwin's work and so on.

Starting point is 00:05:39 And then the subtitle was a way to try to actually pack as much information into the data of those characters on the front page of the book as possible. And to give a sense of the scope of the book, because as much as it's about information, it also necessarily covers everything from language and symbolic representation to even a bit of neuroscience, but also it does talk about books, and it talks about computation, and it talks about an algorithmic approach, understanding the nature of life and the nature of everything that has happened here on Earth. So the long-winded subtitle is purposeful. And then the cover design was tricky.

Starting point is 00:06:29 You know, what do you do to try to capture all of this? And so, you know, the idea of something is assembling on the cover, perhaps. There's a suggestion of assembly of structure forming out of little segments, little bits, if you will. So there was a lot of thought that went into this. And as you know, with any book, there's always there's a back and forth between designers and author and editor to try to meld to get to a satisfactory balance. So, yeah, that's the long and short story. Well, I want to begin with the end of the book. you get into the topic of Boltzmann brains, and I see you've got a brain behind you, in

Starting point is 00:07:12 addition to the brain inside you, there's a brain behind you back there. Was that, did that just spontaneously materialize out of a red fluctuation? Yeah, there's a little brain just over my shoulder. It's a terrible plastic version of a brain that I used in one class once, and it sat on my shelf ever since, because it's barely anatomically correct. Yeah, and the book, you know, so by the end of the book, you know, so the, by the end of the I try to do a couple of things. One is to take a step back and take a really grand overview of the nature of information,

Starting point is 00:07:48 the nature of the universe, topic near and dear to your heart, nature of cosmology, and in particular ideas about the potential future of our universe, our accelerating, expanding universe that may be headed towards a, deep, deep future of relative inaction where there's really not much left to happen. And, yeah, Boltzmann brains, this is kind of interesting idea that really, my understanding of it, part of it came from an effort to actually ridicule some ideas that were going on. back, people like Boltzmann and the work coming from his work in statistical mechanics and entropy, asking whether our entire universe is a kind of statistical blip, a fluctuation from

Starting point is 00:08:46 something else, a fluctuation of perhaps a low entropy fluctuation that is now sort of gradually creeping back to being something of higher entropy and remarging with some Uber universe that created it. And people pointed out that, you know, in that picture then entire universes can just pop out of some other sort of meta-universe. And they didn't really like that idea terribly much. And there were some good reasons for that. The sort of underlying physics really doesn't quite correspond to what we now understand or think

Starting point is 00:09:25 we understand about the nature of the universe. One way to sort of ridicule it was say, well, if you can pop an entire universe out of something else as just a statistical fluctuation, then you could pop entire brains, functional human brains, complete neurons out of nothing. Those brains could be completely isolated, hanging in space, but think that they're real living things and have experiences already built into them. And so it was brought up as almost a point of ridicule saying, you know, that's kind of ludicrous, because also if that were the case, it's much more likely that we're one of those spontaneously produced brains than we are what we think we are. But of course, the interesting thing is, as we've learned more about the dynamics of the universe,

Starting point is 00:10:18 it does seem that there could be this very, very long future ahead of us. and in that very, very long future, there is perhaps a possibility of sort of spontaneous assembly or production of things as complex as brains, as human brains, but trillions and trillions and trillions of years in the future and perhaps only occasionally.

Starting point is 00:10:43 So, yeah, so it's an interesting topic. And I put it in there because that piece of the book is about endpoint. You know, does information last forever? Does it go away? How does that mesh with our understanding of the evolution of reality itself? Yeah, to me, when I thought of, and knowing about information, yeah, I thought of this parable from the Talmud, which is concerned with some of the activities of daily life as a practicing Jewish person. And one of the things you're supposed to be forbidden to do is to speak gossip.

Starting point is 00:11:23 And there's a tale about a man who tells gossip, which is true. In other words, you're forbidden to lie, so you can't tell a mistruth anyway. So there's no prohibition against lie, I mean, against gossiping about false things. That's just lying. But gossiping about true things, you know, Caleb's getting this big promotion and he's, you know, he's going to whatever. And you're just telling tales out of school, so to speak. And the parable is a man feels really bad. and he goes to his rabbi and says, how do I make amends for telling this gossip about my good friend, so-and-so? And the rabbi says, it's very simple.

Starting point is 00:11:53 Just go get a pillow. Guy says, ah, pillow, I can get a pillow. It gets a feather pillow, brings us the rabbi. Am I done? Nope, the rabbi says, you're not done. Cut it open. All right. If you want me to cut it open, I guess it's expensive way to do sacrifice.

Starting point is 00:12:04 Better than killing the chicken that went into it. So he cuts it open, and the wind scatters the feathers. And the rabbi says, are, he says, are you, am I done, rabbi? And the rabbi says, no, one last thing. and then you're done, just go pick up all the feathers, meaning that these things propagate throughout the universe, and the question that I had when I saw the cover is, you know, is information, is it possible not destroy,

Starting point is 00:12:30 black hole paradox, but is it possible to even erase information, even in a practical sense? We have so much of it, and it just seems to be growing as you document in this book so accurately. How do we broach that subject that there's something that seems to be, indestructible about it, whether by the sheer force of magnitude of it, or by its intrinsic, fundamental, irreducible nature. How do we deal with the problem of information erasure, not just generation? It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar

Starting point is 00:13:03 flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. It's a very good question. And I think, you know, so when you think of it in very sort of down-to-earth terms,

Starting point is 00:13:37 and say, well, what do we mean in practical terms with our way of incorporating information to the world when we talk about erasure. So even if you have a piece of silicon memory, an electrical charge sitting in there that represents a bit of information, and you want to erase that bit, while that involves an exertion of work, which means utilizing energy to perhaps move that electrical charge away from where it was. So now you turn that one into a zero.

Starting point is 00:14:09 You say, okay, well, it's gone for good, right? but then you have to step back and say, well, wait a minute, I had to do all these things to make that happen. In doing all those things, I will have inevitably made other alterations in the world as a consequence of trying to erase that little one and zero in my computer memory. And I think that's part of the puzzle there is that we can evaluate how much energy is required to erase a piece of information. But to then actually in practice examine how that takes place, you would inevitably end up having to change something in the rest of the world in order to accomplish that.

Starting point is 00:14:54 And I think perhaps this is what you're speaking to is that there's no escaping. You can't just sort of magically make a bit of information suddenly erase itself. You have to go and do something to it or you have to have something else go and interact with it. And that very active interaction is going to do something to the rest of the universe. Now, it may be that it obscures what the original information was, but nonetheless, there is some kind of memory or imprint of that active, supposed erasured. And so, yeah, it's very, very fascinating, whether, you know, information feels very, very persistent. It's like that it you can never get rid of. But at the same time, just to add to the other side of this,

Starting point is 00:15:46 you know, there's this extraordinary puzzle that understanding of the nature of the universe is that 13.8 billion years or so ago, it was pretty boring. It was much more uniform than it is today, that it actually existed in a state of a lower entropy, so in very crude terms, lower disorder. I mean, entropy and disorder aren't quite the same thing, but they're close, as you know. And yet, as time has gone by, it has not only become more disordered, it's also become more structured, and structure has seemingly emerged out of nothing, and structure can qualify as information. There is information embedded in structure. And so not only has information seemingly emerged out of a universe that had very little information,

Starting point is 00:16:41 it is now also quite difficult to see how to fully erase information, at least when we're not talking about things like black holes and so on, fully erase information without setting in motion other changes in the world that somehow are still imprint of your action of erasure. So it's, yeah, it's very, it's very intriguing and strange. So throughout this book is the concept of the Daytona. Can you give a brief summary of what the Daytona is, this neologism? So you're contributing not only to new information, but also new words.

Starting point is 00:17:17 And I want to explain that from my audience, please. Yeah, I'm always loath to introduce new words, but sometimes it's just become so cumbersome not to. So, yeah, the datum is my, invention to try to just have a snappy label for really everything that we, you know, you can apply it specifically to humans, but it may apply to other species elsewhere, elsewhere in the universe, perhaps. To me, the data home is the word that describes all of that externalized information that we generate. And when I say externalize that actually is perhaps not quite accurate. It's all of the information that is not encoded in our DNA, yet we use it,

Starting point is 00:18:05 we utilize it, we generate it, and we propagate it through time with us. It co-exists with us. It's in our books, it's in our computers, everything we've talked about before. It's in the physical structures that we build in the world around us. If you look at the office behind me, there are bookshelves, there's lights, there's a whiteboard. To me, that is all part and parcel of this thing that I call the data own. So the data home really is all of the information that spills out of us, but that we also nurture and maintain and find essential to our existence. And a big piece of the book is making a case or trying to make a case through a series of arguments that not only is that externalised information critical for our existence as humans

Starting point is 00:19:02 and has been for our evolutionary success and continued existence, that we of course are critical to it, that it exerts itself back on it. So it's not an inert thing. In that sense, the data own is more akin to really an alternate kind of living system sitting here with us on the earth. And the data om, the own part is a reference to things like genome and microbiome concepts that we're more familiar with that are about the entirety of something, but they're also kind of informational in nature. When we look at it, yeah, the own part of it, you know, is sort of intrinsic and you talk about the microbiome and these similarities. And of course, we say, you know, it's well known that, that, you know, we are outnumbered by this microbial biome that we support

Starting point is 00:20:02 kind of parasitically or symbiotically, right? But I don't think anyone says, you know, I identify with my microbiome. You know, like, I relate to my, if you do, I know a good psychotherapist in the Upper West Side where Caleb is right now. But the point being, you know, I mean, to what senses our data ourselves? And this is a provocative thing, I think, that you call your Eureka moment, that it is really kind of this alien almost elevated to the level of life itself, as your colleague, or our colleague, Max Tegmark, up the road at MIT, has suggested that, you know, the next generation of life is sort of sentient information.

Starting point is 00:20:40 So it's impossible not to talk about, you know, where evolution goes with information. Where do you see it going? Do you see it going in this decentralized, you know, defy and so forth? you see that being more responsible, or will we hit fundamental limits, such as we're hitting with high-performance, high-thru-put computing, where the computers are doubling with Moore's law, but as they double at that rate, the number of people who want to use it and the kind of demands on it is growing faster than Moore's law. So the net effect is a slower growth than Moore's law. Are we going to hit some fundamental physics limitation on generation of information,

Starting point is 00:21:16 on disposal of information, some information heat death? going to happen in the future of information evolution? That's a great question. To backtrack a tiny bit, I think, for me, the idea of the data home gives a slightly different perspective on this and adds to that discussion, adds to how we see things playing out in the future. And part of the reason for that is, as I argue in the book, if you look at all the threads of evidence, the dataome does seem to be this symbiotic entity. Yes, it emerged from us originally,

Starting point is 00:21:55 but it has kind of taken on its own form, taken on its own existence, and it's to a certain extent autonomy, although it's entirely dependent on us, we are also effectively entirely dependent on it. So in other words, we are in a symbiotic relationship, just like we are with our microbiome. And what that means is that the interests of two entities in symbiotic relationship are not necessarily always aligned perfectly. So there will be times when one side of that symbiosis wants to steer things in one direction, the other side would prefer to steer things in the other direction in the Darwinian sense of survival. So a good example, you talk about the sort of growing burden or energy use and growth in something like the data home, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of resources to support all of that externalized data.

Starting point is 00:22:52 And again, it's something I explore in the book. And that's been going on for a long time, even with books, it takes a lot to support a world of books, just printing the books themselves and even our physical interaction with the books expends energy. When we get to electronically stored information, we see this exponential growth taking place right now, while there is improved efficiency in computation and storage, it's not clear that it will fully keep up with the demands that we think we're making of it, but in fact, you could look at it as the demands of the data home. And we know that that expenditure, especially in the future if it continues to grow,

Starting point is 00:23:35 has or can have detrimental effects on the planetary environment. So to me, that's an example of different interests in this symbiotic relationship. The data home, in a Darwinian sense, just wants to grow and grow and grow and fill every nearshet possibly cat, just like any other kind of organism or living system. But to do so requires more and more energy and resources, which are having a detrimental effect on the environment for biological life. So it's things pulling in slightly different directions. So to come back to the question of the future trajectory, I think one has to incorporate

Starting point is 00:24:14 my feeling is that one has to incorporate this perspective of this dataome and us in a symbiotic relationship. Some people would use, or I perhaps would use the term holobiont, which is a slightly more sophisticated way of talking about symbiosis when there are many, many things involved in that symbiosis. You know, data home is not a single, simple thing. It's this sprawling entity. and in some sense, humans are also rather a sprawling entity. So that means that the future, you know, there's a possibility that the future will remain somehow stable because it's to the mutual benefit of data omen humans to work together.

Starting point is 00:24:58 In fact, we're sort of inextricably tied together. So there may be things that stabilize our coexistence. And so perhaps our urgency to not, use so much energy to support the data home. While the data home may not want that, because it may reduce it in some way, we may win out, in fact, and maintain a stable coexistence into the future. But, you know, long term, where are we going? What are we going to become? Are we going to change because of the data home? And I think that's, you know, that's probably already happening. evolution is kind of tricky to see when you're inside it.

Starting point is 00:25:42 And we know that having externalized information changes our brain structure. When we become literate, parts of our brain literally undergo structural changes. And especially in the visual cortex and visual handling, because reading, being literate, involves interpreting symbols, visual symbols, and so on. So in that sense is evolution of us not happening because of our genes, but because of this symbiotic entity affecting us after we're born and coercing us into being literate. But really long term, some people land on the side of, well, the machines will take over. And actually, I feel a little differently about that in as much as there's, and perhaps it's a more hopeful picture, which is that at the moment, one thing that no machine, no machine learning algorithm or AI or anything like that seems

Starting point is 00:26:41 to be able to do is to create endless novelty, to resolve the question of what's called open-enderness in the world in computer science. And it may be that we'll build machines that do do that in the future, but perhaps not. And it may be that the sheer complexity of biological life is what's necessary in the end for that kind of endless novelty. Humans and life in general are incredibly creative. We see this in the diversity of species on Earth through four billion years of the history of life. We see it in our own output, our own creative output,

Starting point is 00:27:22 but also in our biological forms. So there's a possibility, I think, and I speculate on this in the book, that even if the machines become pretty smart, they may want to keep us around. The data may need us to retain certain elements of our humanity, including our creativity and our ability to create endless novelty, because that goes hand in hand with not just solving problems, but coming up with the next problem to solve. Right. And I've had this debate with my friends who are really super bullish on blockchain and its potential to decentralize, even for academics and for, not just to make us even more

Starting point is 00:28:05 wildly profitable than we already are, of course, as professors. The hardest three-hour-a-week job in the world. But also, you know, I bring up the fact that, you know, it's no longer a question if humans are better than computers, AI, at chess, right? We know humans will never be better. Once you hit that Roger Bannister moment, you're never going to go back, right? so you don't slip back into five-minute mile after that, right? So in this case, though, what I care about is not whether or not computers can beat human

Starting point is 00:28:33 beings at chess, but I always say, I care, can computers invent chess? Or, you know, people like Max Tagmark, again, you know, just mentioning him because he's so prolific in this area, you know, he talks about artificial, you know, fine men or something like that, and I say, well, let's just see, could you, and I want to ask you, Caleb, if you had, you know, this general artificial intelligence and such a thing were possible, and you fed it Newton's laws, and you fed it the anomalous procession of Mercury, is it going to come up with the theory of spacetime curvature as a completely creative, imaginative, new instantiation of something never before conceived of? It's not just plotting along doing things faster like a computer can do.

Starting point is 00:29:18 So is that an example of this novelty problem that you think, as I do, just spoiler, that I don't think we'll ever be, you know, subject to computers inventing some new form of game like chess or inventing the analog of theory of everything, for example, out of just observations and pure machine learning. Yeah, I mean, I'm always hesitant to say, you know, never, because that's a tricky thing. But, you know, I think my inclination is very much like yours, and that's a great example, this jump from, you know, these basic observations about the world around us and even from special relativity to jump to general relativity. Yeah, it feels that whatever the underlying inspirations were to take that leap, they probably came from your human experience,

Starting point is 00:30:15 right, stumbling around in the world. I mean, Einstein, of course, was very fond of his thought experiments, and we also, when we talk about his work endlessly come up with it. Well, there's a thought experiment, someone falling off a ladder or in an elevator in free fall. Right. And those things are incredibly powerful when they're done right, but they require a capacity to have both experience of the world, an incredibly diverse experience of the world.

Starting point is 00:30:43 I mean, think about, imagine each of us, when, after we're born, think about every second of every day since you were born and all of the different things that are bombarding you endlessly and all of the changing scenarios and all of the sensory inputs that your brain is sifting through. I mean, it is extraordinary. And I think unless you could somehow both expose a machine to that same endless, endless, endless bombarding. bombardment and complexity and give it the capacity to deal with that in a way similar to us. You're not going to be able to make these connections, these leaps of that seemingly come from nowhere. But of course, you know, they do come from somewhere, but it's something that's so complex and multi-threaded.

Starting point is 00:31:35 Yeah. When you're bringing up that Einstein quote, the equivalence principle, you know, makes me think. What did he say when he... had that realization, he said it was the happiest thought of my life. Now, can you imagine a computer, you know, like assessing, well, what metric is it happy or not? You know, I like to think, maybe one thing that's missing from AI is, is this notion of, you know, kind of feedback that comes from the human experience. So my father used to speculate, well, maybe we need to, like, you know, cause it to, you know, pull out a capacitor here and there, you know, when it does something wrong or,

Starting point is 00:32:10 you know, train it, like, blow up a diode or two. Another, words, cause it physical, quote-unquote, pain. But then you start to get the horrific notion that, you know, perhaps, you know, if they did become sentient in that sense, then could you even turn them off? You know, in other words, is it a matter of, and you go through the calculations in the assentive information about, you know, different brain-to-body mass ratios, and you go through and show it's not really that, and it's not the brain capacity and the connectivity. I mean, it might be the connectivity, actually, but it's not necessarily, you know, the broad kind of macroscopic properties of the human brain that make it so unique. And there I want to pivot to

Starting point is 00:32:48 this kind of conversation. I say, you know, friendly debate. I don't come down on this intelligent design side, you know, trying to proselytize or anything. I don't even necessarily accept the arguments that he uses. But he, Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, I'll put a link to the video here for those that want to see it. And that was about the fundamental claim being that anything that contains information can ultimately be traced back to some mind, meaning that a program can be traced back to a coder, a hieroglyphic can be traced back to a chisel, you know, chisler, whatever, a building, anything like that, the microchips that you talk about using such capacious and rapacious amounts of energy. So his thesis, everything gets traced back

Starting point is 00:33:33 to a mind, and I know that's not the initial conditions problem and so forth, But you can't escape when you talk about Boltzmann brains and the concept of entropy, the concept from cosmology, obviously, is the low entropy starting point of the universe. So we don't have a great explanation for that. It arises in many different models as basically, I think one of your colleagues, you know, is basically the past hypothesis. It's basically inserted by hand. So talk about that.

Starting point is 00:34:01 Where do you come down? I'm not, you know, we don't have to get into God or anything like that, but just the notion that information seems to be connected to mental processes or to some overarching process. It can't be derived ab initio from just evolution itself once it gets started. But what are the initial conditions of information look like in your mind? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Starting point is 00:34:29 Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

Starting point is 00:34:46 When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Well, that's quite a tough one. Well, here's the thing. So, and this is just me thinking out loud. You know, and again, something I dabble with. the book that as I was working on this and thinking about all of our externalized information

Starting point is 00:35:13 and the generation of that, yes, absolutely. It's intimately connected with the existence of brains and us and our actions in the world. But of course we've had for a while this informational notion of life itself. This goes back to people like Richard Dawkins and his selfish genes and kind of trying to distill out the sort of essence of function and natural selection in biological life as an informational thing. The gene is somehow an encoding of information. And for us, the way we interpret it is we see it as, well, that's a code to build a protein. There's a code for transcription rates and so on. But, you know, it was.

Starting point is 00:36:04 ever written for us to read, it is because it is, it is because it persists in the world. And Dawkins has also talked about quite a while back about the idea of an information bomb going off on Earth four billion years ago with the origin of life. So, you know, so in a sense, your information in that sense should pre-exist, right? it comes before mind. Information is already there. And I find that reasonably compelling in as much as we see that there are deep connections

Starting point is 00:36:47 between quantification of information through things like Shannon Entropy and Thermodynamics. Okay, so in Thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of microstates, and so in a sense, the number of arrangements of matter in any given moment. And you have to think about, what do we mean by number of arrangements? Number of arrangements means that there has to be some way of ticking the boxes. There's some kind of coding going on. And so this is partly why information theory and entropy all merge together because information theory tells you that, well, yeah, you can think of the list of instructions

Starting point is 00:37:27 for the endless rearrangement of matter in the universe. I would agree that all of that. All of that does rest on a constructs or a number of constructs from the human mind, right? We have constructs like coordinate systems. So we say, well, that atom is at this X, Y, and Z coordinate, this atom has this quality. And so the question is, well, do those coordinates and qualities exist without a mind to say that, to emplace them? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:37:58 The physicist John Wheeler, of course, discussed this idea of it from people. bit and talked about the idea of a participatory universe where it's not necessarily the case of a conscious observer causing things to come into existence, but it's the interaction of stuff in the physical world. It's the interaction of things at a quantum level that gives rise to their qualities. I mean, if something is sitting isolated, nobody can ever know what it is. I mean, it's like the old tree falling in the forest. Do you hear it?

Starting point is 00:38:36 Does it make a sound of no one's there to listen to it? If a particle, what we call a particle, is a smeared out quantum probability forever, is it really there at all? Does it have any quality? It's only when it interacts with anything else that qualities emerge. I would say qualities and information are largely the same kind of thing. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm wheezzling out of a direct answer to you, to your very good question. I mean, I'm absolutely fascinating.

Starting point is 00:39:09 I mean, I am not, I definitely feel that it's likely that one could avoid notions of intelligent design in all of this. I mean, that is my predisposition. But it's good to be challenged by ideas like that, I think, especially when they're sophisticated like this. Yeah, and, you know, there are absence of evidence or even absence of a hypothesis as a late-grade Carl Sagan, who wasn't a guest on my podcast, but his wife, Anderrian, and his daughter, Sasha Sagan, where he used to say absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so just not being able to explain it under our current laws. For example, he claims the origin of the universe via the Big Bang and Born Goose-Villinkin theorem basically mandates a singular origin and Those are very controversial. There are alternative hypotheses by our mutual friend Paul Steinhart, Roger Penrose, and others. So anyway, I think we, as cosmologists have to sometimes say, well, time will tell, you know, just give us some more time. But, you know, it could be a billion years or two. But I want to talk about something less controversial than God. Caleb, I want to talk about alien species, visiting our Earth and our planet. And then we'll get into politics.

Starting point is 00:40:24 No, we're not going to get into politics. But the implications are astounding in this book, as you point out. you know, the existence of n equals one, of our information, of our datum, and, you know, basically, in your opinion, all but mandates the existence of alien, you know, day tomes, essentially, alien to our earth, and then maybe not with prosthetic foreheads, like our mutual friend, Adam Frank, you know, decries in the light of the stars who's just on last week. But tell me about what speculations that are most intriguing to you as an astrobiologist, as a director at Columbia, what kind of are the implications for alien datomes? And why would they waste their time and energy with all these UFO sightings

Starting point is 00:41:06 when they could just, you know, zip around at the speed of light and send their daytom to do the dangerous work, right? Yeah, absolutely. And actually, I had a really interesting conversation with someone else. I think perhaps we both know David Grinspoon, where we started riffing on the idea of alien data owns. And so, again, going back to the beginning of this conversation, Part of what motivated me to think about the question of our information was thinking about how do we quantify intelligence or technology and in astrobiology, what are the things we're really looking for?

Starting point is 00:41:41 So we talk about looking for things like techno signatures, which could be structured radio transmissions, but it could also be the signs of large-scale industrial change in a planetary environment or all sorts of things like that. And I would argue that actually, just like when we look for biosignatures, we're really searching for alien genomes. When we look for techno signatures, we're really searching for alien dataomes. And so, you know, much like with how we extrapolate from the nature of life on Earth to think about the possibilities of alien life, I think it's reasonable to extrapolate and think that technological, intelligent life, whatever that truly means, but life that is intentionally restructuring its environment, intentionally transforming energy in ways that

Starting point is 00:42:36 are not solely in aid of immediate survival. Then data homes feel like they have to be another inevitability. And the interesting thing about the data homes, and you kind of just, touched it, you almost beat me to the post there was the idea that, well, physical transfer or between different star systems looks to be enormously challenging, as much as we might love to live in a Star Trek universe or a Star Wars universe. But we know that we can get signals to other stars at the speed of light, which as far as we know is the ultimate limit on the velocity of anything in the universe.

Starting point is 00:43:21 So day homes kind of have us beat in that respect. because data omes can transmit parts of themselves or their entirety through space using electromagnetic signals or other forms. And potentially that is how stuff could spread in the universe. And an interesting thing that comes out of this is that actually, if the data arm really is like this parallel living system, if we ever succeed with something like SETI, if we ever have even communication with an alien species, our data own will be instantly inoculated with information from an alien world and vice versa.

Starting point is 00:44:06 And so in fact, if this goes on at all, it could mean that data owns evolve towards the same state around the universe. Once they communicate with each other, they're going to exchange and actually kind of inocular, each other with the same sort of stuff and potentially either take each other over or just become a hybridized sort of version of each other. So there are some interesting implications

Starting point is 00:44:32 of this for what happens to life in the universe as it begins to communicate because this is the final punchline. If the data home is always in symbiosis with something like a biological living system, if you change the data home, there's the potential to then change the biological system itself may not happen immediately, but it could happen over time in the Darwinian sense. So the communicating data arms could actually end up morphing or evolving the life that they're cohabiting their planets with, which brings us all back to, you know, should we even be trying to communicate with anyone? Maybe it's really dangerous because we risk contaminating our data owns.

Starting point is 00:45:17 Yeah, exactly. The cross-pollination, it may not be, it may be that we do as they do in Independence Day, that great movie, where they, fortunately, the aliens had a USB A connector that you could plug into. That's always helpful, yeah. Yeah, those pilots were super lucky. Well, we've got about 10 minutes left before we have to break. So I want to ask you about one of the most provocative claims in this wonderful book,

Starting point is 00:45:42 the Ascent of Information. We're talking with Professor Caleb Scharf of Columbia University, author of the Zimable universe, Copernicus Complex, fascinating book. I'm really influential for me in my five great debates section of losing the Nobel Prize. Caleb's book was. And then lastly, Gravity's Engines. And this newest book is really the best one yet. Caleb, congratulations on it.

Starting point is 00:46:04 But you talk about this, you know, we're talking about Moore's Law and this hockey stick. And, you know, I always think, well, you know, if you're, let's say you're trying to lose 10 pounds and you're trying to lose it 1% a day. You know, how many, how many days will it take till you lose half of that five pounds? It could be 72 days or so. And then the last 72 days, you'll lose the next one. So in the first couple of days, first couple of weeks, you lose like an ounce or two or a couple of, you know, and it's only at the last second you get this hockey sick, exponential growth.

Starting point is 00:46:35 I want to ask you, you talk about the real data explosion or information explosion, not taking place in the future, the singularity of Cursewile and so forth, doesn't lie ahead of us. It lies in our past. Talk about that. Yeah, so it's a great topic to discuss. So yes, futurists love to talk about these ideas of transcendence, so perhaps we'll get to a point where we can upload our minds into machines and kind of take on new forms. And then, you know, Kurzweil's singularity, the idea that at some point there may be this exponential change in the status of things like AI and machines, and it will happen so quickly that we simply don't realize what's going on and the world will be transformed irrevocably.

Starting point is 00:47:29 And what's interesting about that to me, when I started thinking about the implications of this vision of the data. home, is that really that, you know, it's sort of, there isn't going to be this sudden sort of step function, there's, you know, sudden change, the sudden leap. Yes, things are changing exponentially in terms of data growth and our expenditure on that. But really, this isn't new. This happened the moment our Homo sapiens ancestors scrawled on a cave wall or, came up with some kind of coherent language system or, you know, built a tool and potentially our hominid cousins as well more than 200,000 years ago, like the Neanderthals, who clearly

Starting point is 00:48:21 were doing similar things. It's just their biological forms, didn't fully make it into the future. Of course, some of us contain Neanderthal DNA, so at some level they did. And so, you know, it's meant to be a little provocative, but what I would argue is that, you know, transcendence singularity, yeah, yeah, whatever. No, it actually already happened. It happened 200,000 years ago. And if you think about what life on Earth was like up to that point, you know, it really was a transcendence moment.

Starting point is 00:48:55 They suddenly had a species that was intentionally recording things about its informational world in matter around it. It was restructuring matter in aid of storytelling, in aid of language and aid of communication in a way far beyond anything else. I mean, other organisms definitely construct things around them, but there's direct utility for all of that. None of them are putting pictures on the wall as far as we know. So I would argue, the transcendence moment or singularity,

Starting point is 00:49:28 whatever you want to call it, is behind us. It happened then, and it's been sort of spilling out across the world ever since. And so in that sense, we're still within this sort of origin event. There was an origin event some four billion years ago with the first living systems on the planet. And I would argue there was another one around 200,000 years ago, with the emergence of this data, this new kind of informational instantiation in the world, building stuff out of biology into other substrates in the world. And it's taken on this new form.

Starting point is 00:50:06 So it's sort of fun to poke the futurists with this. Yeah. So no, no, no. You've got it all wrong. It already happened. And not just, it didn't happen, you know, 10 years ago with, you know, the latest Intel processor or, you know, the alpha zero playing go. It happened 200,000 years ago. Well, you know, I think you're a brilliant scientist, one of the greatest authors in the world.

Starting point is 00:50:33 And you do so much outreach and so forth. you're not as good at marketing, unfortunately, as our friend Ray Kurzweil, because he has, in addition to his theory on the singularity, he has transcend longevity, which is a vitamin company. So you can start your journey towards the singularity, according to them, and this is not sponsored by them. I actually think they're being sponsored by him. I have some sponsors, but that's not done. So yeah, so you have all sorts of coverage, you know, thanks to Ray Kurzweil. So maybe your next book. You can put in some merch. I should come up with some

Starting point is 00:51:08 kind of health product, right? Well, just don't do it about something that happened 200,000 years ago. Do it something's going to happen like 20 days from now. If they only buy your book and it makes a bestseller as it should. It's the ultimate regression therapy. You need to go back, not to your pre-birth, but 200,000 years

Starting point is 00:51:26 ago. Well, on this podcast, we often do the thrilling three final questions where I ask people about their advice to their former self and also their ethical will, what they want to leave to the future. But I'm going to forego that today and ask the only one of the three questions that I'm just dying to hear your comment on. And all three of them have to do in some way with Arthur C. Clark, who is the namesake of the center that I co-direct here, called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.

Starting point is 00:51:58 And that has to do with the book, the Sentinel and the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, where these primates first encounter this structure, obviously engineered by a mind, conveying information. Perhaps it's a time capsule. Perhaps it's a warning. It seems to last for millions or billions of years to be discovered, Caleb, when we can just appreciate it for the first time and later appears on the moon and astronauts are grappling with it. I'm going to ask you, Caleb, if I guaranteed you a time capsule that would last for a billion years, what would you put on it or in it? And it relates a little bit to Richard Feynman, who had some of the first accounts of micro-information and so forth. In this famous essay, there's plenty of room at the bottom, and you talk a lot about, you know, conservation of information, etc.

Starting point is 00:52:47 But I want to ask you, what would you put on a billion-year-lasting time capsule, what piece of information? Wow. Great question. And I also just to thank you for your very generous comments about the work that I do. What would I put? Well, I think I would assume that if there were intelligences to see it in a billion years' time, they would know a lot more than me, potentially. But what they might not know is how we experience the world, how us, peculiar little hominid creatures with our data, um, experience the world. So I think I would want to leave something that would tell them the uniqueness of our experience together with our ignorance and our creativity and our intelligence, but also just to give them a window into our experience of the world,

Starting point is 00:53:45 what humans went through to be what they are. Because that's something we have a hard time reconstruct, reconstructing. We don't know what our ancestors 200,000 years ago really experienced of the world. That's right. Because they weren't making movies. They weren't, you know, they weren't making reality TV to leave us. And I feel that could be the most valuable thing one could possibly leave. There wouldn't be a point in leaving our ideas about mathematics or science because if there's continuity, we would assume that would have been subsumed into this future. life, that something to express the fundamental nature of our existence feels like the kind of thing

Starting point is 00:54:30 I'd want to leave. Well, this wonderful book, The Ascent of Information, contains a tremendous amount of valuable information. I especially enjoyed the acknowledgments, to be honest with you. In addition to an extremely thorough reference material, as you'll find here, the acknowledgments are worthy of a book or an essay in and of themselves. Caleb Sharf offer so many great books that have influenced me and to be a better writer and to be a thinker as well. I hope we can get together again in your office or mine.

Starting point is 00:55:02 You're always welcome out here. And I want to thank you for going into The Impossible with me today. And I want to wish you the ascent of this book on the bestseller list and nothing but positive information coming as it has from Science Magazine and many other reviews of this wonderful book as all your books. Caleb, thank you so much for going into the impossible. My absolute pleasure and thank you for doing this, Brian. It's wonderful. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews.

Starting point is 00:55:41 We appreciate hearing from you and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. All. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Caleb Scharf: The Ascent of Information (#163)

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