Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Can Scientists Be Spiritual? Alan Lightman | Into The Impossible Podcast (#306)

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Please support the podcast by taking our short listener survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/intotheimpossible Watch the video of this episode here: https://youtu.be/R5DXUZet7HE?sub_confirmation=1 Is the brain a computer? Where does the soul lie? Can quantum mechanics explain consciousness? Alan Lightman takes on these ancient questions and more in this fabulous new book chock-full of cutting-edge research and the latest discoveries in brain science. Watch Alan's first episode on the Into the Impossible Podcast https://youtu.be/MG2cPltzCdY Lightman is currently a Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alan has written several books on topics ranging from relativity and gravitation to personal development. The topic of this episode of the Into The Impossible Podcast is his new book, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science. Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join To advertise with us, contact [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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One thing that we've learned from modern science, which you know as well as I do, is that the 20th century science, especially 20th century physics, has shown us that our senses lead us astray when it comes to certain fundamental properties of nature, such as the time is not absolute, and that at the subatomic level that particles take on a wavy, dualistic character, and a particle can be in several places at once. The experiences that I call spiritual, for example, looking up at a starry night and feeling connected to the cosmos, or making eye contact with a wild animal, or feeling connected to nature, those experiences may originate with the senses, but ultimately they are mental experiences. We can trust our senses for most things that we experience in daily life. In the spiritual world, I think the essence of the experiences are not sensory. that they are mental and that the senses may be triggers to the feelings that we call spiritual feelings, but ultimately it's not about the senses.

Welcome, everyone, to Into the Impossible. In this episode, physicist and award-winning best-selling science writer and novelist, Alan Lightman, makes his second appearance to discuss his latest book, The Transcendent Brain, spirituality in the Age of Science. Together with your host Brian Keating, Professor Lightman, addresses the nature of consciousness and the relationship between science and spirituality. How can they coexist? You're going to get some unique insight into Professor Lightman's personal philosophy and some of his opinions about quantum theory and the mechanism and

evolution of consciousness. You'll discover how the author of the beloved Einstein's dream thinks about the nature of reality and thinking itself. Keep in touch with Professor Keating by joining his email list at Brian Keating.com slash list to receive his Monday Magic newsletter. And if you have a dot edu domain, we'll send you a bit of space dust in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Keep into the impossible in your feed by subscribing. And for some extra credit, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating and subscribe there too, where we just broke the 100,000 subscriber milestone. Please help us make the show better by filling out our listener's survey linked to in the

show notes. And please let us know what you think of the show in the form of a review like this one. From Wiser Tomorrow. Dr. Keating's podcast is among the best for anyone interested in science and technology or for anyone who is simply curious about the world. And now, attune your consciousness to Into the Impossible with Brian Keating and his special guest, Alan Lightman. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable. from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please. This is our guest today on The Into the Impossible podcast.

A man who, on his last episode, I called him Astronomies Tolstoy. He didn't object. Maybe he didn't watch the episode, but I really believe it, Al. I've been in love with your books and your way of thinking for 30 plus years now since Einstein's dreams. And actually, no, that's a lie. Before that, your best book, the book that's changed my life, more than any book, perhaps, that I've read of yours or maybe any others. It's a page turner. It's called the problem book in relativity and gravitation. And it came out when I was in grad school or just before I started grad school, I think.

And it's in multiple printings. It is one of the best books ever written. I actually just saw Bill Press recently, who is your co-author. He's a great guy. I'm going to send him this interview when we're done. And Alan Lightman, thank you for joining us today on the Into the Impossible podcast for your second appearance. Thank you, Brian. It's great to be on your program. I love your books and there's no difference, no change in my opinion after this wonderful new book that your folks were kind enough to send to me in both written, printed hard copy in PDF and in audio format. And I loved all three. I read all three versions. It's a lovingly and tenderly illustrated with great pictures of guys that look like this and other characters we're

going to talk about, including my hero Galileo Galilei, and even Sir Roger Penrose. I will reconnect to the book I just mentioned, a problem book in gravity and relativity. So stay tuned for that. We're talking today is St. Patrick's Day. You're in the city that's most closely associated with this phenomena of St. Patrick's Day, as I remember it, which is Boston, Massachusetts, just outside slightly. And I have a connection to this day in Boston because eight years ago, I can't believe it. My team and I announced the discovery, the nominal discovery of the cosmic microwave

background, inflationary B-mode polarization. Actually, it was nine years ago. I mis-tweeted today. I sent out a tweet. I'm going to correct my own tweet. But the discovery was announced, and it heralded a new way of thinking about the universe, in that the universe began not only with a big bang, not only with an inflationary epoch, but according to your colleague, Max Tegmark, it was unequivocal evidence for the multiverse,

which makes an appearance in this. Yeah, well, I totally disagree with that conclusion. As I thought you would. So this wonderful new book is called The Transcendent Brian. Oh, Brain. Sorry, I always get that. My mom says she named me that specifically so that people would make that mistake. And actually, we have an interview that'll probably be out.

Yes, it will be out by the time you're watching this video with Alan. And it's by my, with my colleague, Alison Motry, who is growing organoids, brain organoids in outer space on the International Space Station. And we're going to get to that in this conversation and your thoughts on the future of brain technology, of human mind, machine interfacing with folks like Elon Musk's, Neurlink, et cetera, and your colleague, Noam Chomsky, who I've spoken to on the podcast before. But the reason I bring this up is because Allison, when he was on the podcast, we were coordinating, and he wrote me, and he called me Brain. And I just thought it was so funny because he's a brain scientist. So I've got an official recognition that a brain scientist thinks that I actually

have a brain. This book is an incredible tour to force, and it's very much unlike your other books. And the first thing I want to ask you is I ask all my esteemed guests. I don't know if I asked you this two years ago when I interviewed you for the first time. But we've started a new segment

on the podcast, and it's called judging books by their cover. So you're never supposed to judge a book by their cover, but what other Bayesian priors do you have? So the way I do it is I ask the author to describe the cover illustration, the title, and the subtitle and what went into it.

And most of the time it said, my publisher forced me to do it. But I don't think they can have that much leverage over intellect like you. So, Alan, please help us judge this wonderful book. By its cover. Well, I can talk about the title first. The subtitle, spirituality in the age of science, sort of nails the subject matter. And the main title, the Transident Brain, is supposed to be a little bit more poetic and metaphorical, but just suggests that the brain is capable of really amazing phenomena and experiences.

The image on the cover, I don't know what to say about that. That was chosen by the publisher. I'm not at all unhappy with that image, but so be it. And the subtitle is spirituality in the age of science. So those are two words that don't usually go harmoniously together. So was that a hurdle to get past your editors and publisher? No, I've been writing about this subject for some years. This book was intended to be sort of a codification of what I've been writing about before.

So my editor at Random House was willing to go with me on that journey to put spirituality next to science because he understands the way that I mean that. And my view of spirituality is such that the two that is completely consistent with a scientific view of the world. So he understands that. Very good. So this book has so much in it. And I want to take it from the standpoint of sort of steelmanning and opposite perspective that I have. I've mentioned to you last time that I'm a practicing Jew. I'm not an Orthodox Jew, but I attend synagogue and temple.

I learn Hebrew. I read the Old Testament, the Torah, the Bible, and the original Hebrew, and can get my way around the Talmud and Aramaic. And I'm often, you know, kind of chastised by that. We've had on some of the militant atheists. Well, we haven't hung on the new atheist that you talk about the most, and you, in fact, had a very, very intense skirmish with. It's described at the end of the book with Richard Dawkins. But Richard Dawkins wrote the foreword to one of my previous guests, who was a scholar at MIT. one time Lawrence Krauss and he wrote a forward to the universe from nothing book and he called it

basically the cosmological equivalent of on the origin of species which I even think I even think that Lawrence was embarrassed by but nevertheless when I had Lawrence on I was sort of struck and I've been on his podcast as well I've been struck by how little the scientific community understands or even appreciates about religion not only you know obviously not from a believer's perspective. But are you, you know, kind of surprised by how little someone like a Dawkins or, for example, Lawrence Krause did not know the order, and he's a Jew. I mean, he was born Jewish and he's not practicing, but obviously, but he had a bar mitzvah, which I didn't have. And so he's educated. I asked him, Lawrence, you know the meaning of the word Israel in the Jewish language? Do you

know the meaning of the word Jew in Hebrew, which is the language of Judaism? No, he didn't know anything. And so I was struck and I told him this. I'm like, Lawrence, you know, you've got a great mind. But you're accepting the word of a 13 year old and you're just taking that word. And he's like, what's 13 year old? I said, you, when you were 13, you gave up on ever studying religion again, as most Jewish boys do. And I know you've born Jewish too, but I don't believe your practice. What do you make of the level of knowledge and rigor that scientists approach or grapple with the question of religion? Is it sufficient? Are you asking me? Yeah, I'm asking you. Yeah. Sorry, the long-winded question.

Yes. Yes. Well, I think everybody should not just scientists, but everybody should know about the history of religion and the meaning of religion. I mean, of course, there are many religions, you know, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. I think that everybody should have an understanding, some understanding of those religions and their origins and a little bit about their cultural history. because religion and science are the two greatest forces that have shaped our civilization, in my opinion. And so if you don't understand the history of religion and the cultural significance of religion, then you really have a big gap in your understanding of who we are and who our society is.

So that's my view. I don't know whether scientists are any more ignorant of religion than other people, but I do think we should all understand religion. And I think that you asked about, you said that Lawrence Krauss didn't know the meaning of the word Israel. Doesn't it mean something like grappling with God or? Yeah, it means wrestling or fighting with God against God, meaning, and in contradistinction, I should point out to Islam,

which means submission to God. And I feel like people like, and I told Lawrence, I said you're actually an Israelite because you, for all the vitriol, that you and Richard Dawkins kind of espoused towards religious practitioners, you nevertheless are wrestling with God on a daily basis. Yeah, well, I don't think that my interpretation of that wrestling with God is not that you are necessarily fighting or denying the existence of God, but that you are working, you're trying to understand God's place in the cosmos. just you know as the talmud as you mentioned has has these dialogues in conversations that

we're trying to understand though that's my interpretation of that phrase yeah i think you know the beauties of a religion that is open to questioning and and yes is is is that and the basis of the religion is really this kind of struggle and and and and kind of in contrast i say it's it's in contradistinction to other religions that view it as a higher motive to have belief in the case of Christianity and just pure faith and or Islam which has you know the submission to God as its catechism or its main pillar of faith I had on the podcast my very first guest was a near and dear friend I was Freeman Dyson and I love Freeman and he used to spend his summers uh his winters out here because I guess Princeton New Jersey isn't the greatest place to do one's time in the middle

of winter and La Jolla is pretty nice they come over and we talk and he was the first guest the podcast I said. I asked him in that podcast. I said, Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic. But what does that mean? Because it seems to me, I asked him, do you go to, do you go to church on Sunday? No, I don't do that. Do you read the scriptures? And he had won the Templeton Prize and he had been kind of embarrassed by that. In fact, he told Martin Reese, we talked about this on the podcast I did with Martin in October. He said, Martin, I'm so glad you won the Templeton Prize because now there's someone who deserves it even less than I did. Hey friends, just a quick request while you're enjoying this video to leave a thumbs up.

My thumb's a little bit preoccupied with all Carl Sagan over here, but I hope yours is free enough to leave a like. It really helps me with the algorithm. And for extra credit homework assignment, leave a comment down below what you're enjoying about this video. Now back to the show. But Freeman, yeah, he's such a mischievous, my title of his biography is Science Rebel, a Rebel of Science. So anyway, I said, I said Freeman, how would someone intelligent alien looking at you and looking at Richard Dawkins, how would they distinguish between the two of you? You both don't go to the same church and you both don't study the same.

So how do you define this notion of spiritual but not religious? What does that mean? And how do you, I'm a behaviorist. So how do you instantiate that in your life? Yeah. Well, I think an alien could all they would need to do is to learn the English language, which I think they could do in five minutes. And then read the articles and books that those people have written.

and they can see a very clear difference between them. So when you, I take it, you practice more of a Buddhist tradition or do you have the Well, I'm Jewish like you and we do observe the Jewish holidays. But I also have a lot of admiration for Buddhism. I don't believe in rebirth, which is part of Buddhism. but I do like many of the tenets of Buddhism, such as being present in the moment and trying to detach the ego from things that we do

and the temporary nature of existence. All of that is something I subscribe to. When we spoke last, we spoke a lot about Einstein and obviously for Einstein's dreams. And it's one of the books I recommend most of the people when I'm asked to give a book recommendation of the, probably 1,000 books. I've had the chance to read over the course of my life. And one of the, you know, obviously, Einstein is the main character. And I've really kind of two

questions about Einstein. He doesn't really appear very much in this book. He's in there and we'll get to kind of some of the aspects in which you connect to him. But in the conception of him as a man of faith or perhaps an atheist, it seems his ambiguity spread like, you know, a Schrodinger cat-like state. You know, he, he was maybe purposely ambiguous. Was he religious? Was he not? What's your take? And do we make too much of like trying to ape our heroes and emulate them? What was Einstein's take on spirituality, if not religion? Well, we actually know what his take is because a journalist asked him that, I think it was around 1933. You know, point blank, are you an atheist? And Einstein said, no, I'm not an atheist. And then he said, I think that the question,

being the existence or non-existence of God is too big a question for our little minds. And then he went on to elaborate a little bit. He said that I view our connection to the cosmos as a child who walks into a huge library, a very large library, and looks around and sees lots and lots of books written in foreign tongues and knows that somebody wrote those books, but they don't know who, and they can't read them. I mean, and during his lifetime, Einstein tossed off various, you know, flip comments like God doesn't play dice and things like that.

I don't think that those comments represented his real religious views, but I do think that this answer to this journalist in 1933 did represent his actual views. And we hear about, you know, his famous quote about kind of the Spinozaan god, the god of of Spinoza, who, you know, kind of is manifest in the unity of all things. But impersonal. Impersonal, yeah. So that not intervening, that still leaves open. I mean, in Judaism, not to give a theology lecture, but, you know, God has really two

main purposes to start the universe, which is, you know, our domain in cosmology, perhaps, but then to be a personal God, right? Not to be the unmoved mover of Aristotle, et cetera. So I want to pivot from Einstein to an earlier generation, and that was the man that Einstein called one of the greatest contributors to Western civilization essentially. And that was Galileo. And I actually had the honor with your fellow MIT colleague, Frank Wilcheck, to record the first ever audiobook by Galileo.

And it's the dialogue, the dialogue on two world systems, which is the Copernicus and the Aristotelian kind of doing battle. And Frank Wilcheck narrated the introduction by Albert Einstein to this book. and I read the voice of one of the characters Carlo Rovelli read another one and I was really struck by the kind of visceral nature that Galileo had

and he was greatly admired by Einstein obviously and he talked about the visual kind of impression and you show in the book this famous woodcut from Sidarius Nunchius and you also show a picture of his telescope and you actually went there and I went to Archetri just a few years just a few months ago I was in his his prison

I don't know if you actually went to his final imprisonment place. No, I didn't see that. But you talk about the fact that looking at the moon, which was previously thought to be smooth, perfect crystalline, he said, anyone would then understand Galileo,

with the certainty of the senses that the moon is by no means in down with a smooth and polished surface, but it's rough and uneven. And then you talk about a letter in 1812 to an Italian scientist. And of course, he was wrapped up in religion. He was very deeply religious.

This kind of speaks of the next kind of section I want to get into, which is the interface between the physical and the spiritual. And a lot of that is appreciated via the sense of sight. And the Torah is very skeptical about the eyes. The Shma, which is like the catechism, the Our Father of Judaism, says, do not stray after your eyes. They cause you to whore yourself, to be a prostitute to your eyes.

To what, in an extent, should we trust the visual sensations, the appreciation as a way that Galileo did, to prove things whether scientific or spiritual. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

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stay. Hilton for this day. Sure. Well, of course, one thing that we've learned from modern science, which you know as well as I do, is that the 20th century science, especially 20th century physics, has shown us that our senses lead us astray when it comes to certain fundamental properties of nature, such as the time is not absolute, and that at the subatomic level that particles take on a wavy, dualistic character, and a particle can be in several places at once, those behaviors of nature contradict our common experience. So the senses, when you get to very high speeds, relative speeds, or very small sizes, our senses give us an inaccurate intuition or understanding of nature.

In terms of spirituality, well, it's a great question, because the experiences that I call spiritual, for example, looking up at this starry night and feeling connected to the cosmos, or making eye contact with a wild animal or feeling connected to nature. Those experiences may originate with the senses, but ultimately they are mental experiences. And so when you say yes, whether we should trust our senses, I think that in the physical world that we can trust our senses for most things that we experience in daily life. In the spiritual world, I think the essence of the existence of the experiences are not sensory, that they are mental, and that the senses may be triggers to the

feelings that we call spiritual feelings, but ultimately it's not about the senses. And you explore in the next chapter, you start, or in a later chapter, you start to encounter a man that I briefly knew at Caltech, Christoph Kock, who's now, I believe, up in Washington, in Seattle area. And you and you kind of get into the real application of modern scientific tools and apparatus in terms of the understanding of consciousness. And I've had, I haven't had him on. I'm hoping to get him on eventually.

The problem is he wrote his book so long ago. It's not likely he's going to get that patented Keating bump that you'll surely enjoy. And they will pay for another, another beach house in Maine someday for you, Alan. I can send me an invitation. But you talk about kind of the computational aspects of the mind. And I wonder, you know, of the different perspectives that are explored, of the four or five major perspectives that you explore, is one more convincing or less convincing? We'll get to, you know, some comments by past guests, Donald Hoffman and Roger Penrose in just a bit.

But what was Cox, like, when you look at the modern application and the breakthroughs that they've had, I still come away feeling like we still don't know what it's like to be a bat. We still have had on, you know, now I'm blanking on his name at NYU's, the progenitor. David Chalmers, I've had him on. We did an episode. It's still the hard problem. So, I mean, what, it doesn't seem to be getting any easier. I wonder, you know, is it just too hard?

This computer on our shoulders, if it is a computer, which I don't think it is, and Penrose doesn't think it is. Will we ever be able to answer the most basic questions? And to the extent we can't answer, what does it like to be a bat say? What hope is there to understand the deeper origins of consciousness? Yeah. Well, it's a wonderful question. And I agree with you that we're a long way from understanding how consciousness emerges from the brain.

But I think that it's perfectly reasonable to take the position that consciousness and all of our mental sensations, consciousness, according to being the fundamental mental sensation, it's perfectly reasonable to take the point of view that all of our. of those mental experiences ultimately originate in the material neurons in the brain. Even if we cannot fill in all the blanks to get from those material neurons to the really incredible, extraordinary, unique sensation of consciousness, we can still believe that its origin is material, even though we can't fill in all the blanks to say how that gets to this incredible first-person subjective experience we call consciousness. I totally agree. that we don't know what it feels like to be a bat. We don't know what it feels like to be a computer.

Most people in AI, including Chris Cox, believe that any finite list of attributes that you associate with consciousness, any finite list of manifestations of consciousness, and you say, this is the sign of consciousness that we will someday be able to build a computer that checks all the boxes. But whether or not we will know that that entity is conscious or not,

that's a different question, Because to know that, you have to really know what it feels like to be a computer. We don't know what it feels like to be a dolphin or what it feels like to be a crow. And surely, consciousness, whatever it is, is a graded phenomenon. You know, an amoeba is almost certainly not conscious, but a crow and a dolphin have exhibited behavior that we associate with consciousness. They have some level of consciousness, not equal to humans, perhaps. But even with those other animals, you know, dolphins and crows,

we don't know what it feels like to be a dolphin or a crow. Right. You know, it's conceivable to me that someday in the distant future, we may understand brain science well enough that we can implant a chip in our brain that somehow connects our neurons to the neurons of a dolphin or a crow. It seems that in principle that that's not ruled out. And if that's ever possible, then we may begin to start, begin to know what it feels like to be a dolphin or a crow.

And now when I use that as a springboard to try on you, a thought experiment, a Godunken experiment, as our good friend, Albert would say, I'm looking for my finger puppet. You know, someday I'll have a finger puppet of you somewhere. Oh, no, this is not him. This is Newton. This is Galileo. So we were talking about Galileo. He'll have to stand in for Einstein, the old one. So Einstein said, as happy as thought, can you, it's like when I talked to David Chalmers, I said, I have to ask you to define the hard problem because it would be like I had on.

Aba, another famous product of Australia where David Chalmers is from, I said, it'd be like, I have Aba on the podcast, and I don't ask him to sing Dancing Queen. So I said, David, define the hard problem. I can't resist you to define, to remind my audience what Einstein called his happiest thought. Well, I think that he meant by that, his happiest thought was to realize that gravity is equivalent to acceleration. Am I right about that? Yeah. And he envisioned the The Duncan experiment was that if he was in free fall, he'd experience no gravitational acceleration. So I want to use that to pivot to what you just said.

We can't know what it's like to be Einstein. We can't know it. But can a computer, A, have a happiest thought. What does that even mean? And B, can it experience a thought based on a thought experiment based on a visceral sensation of free fall? I think it's totally impossible. But I'm curious what you might say.

Well, of course, a computer could have sensory input. I mean, you could, in fact, in the public television series that I was involved with, I have a conversation with it, with an advanced Android. And she has photo cells where she can see me. She has earphones where she can hear me and she can interpret those sounds in terms of language, which then reflect back on her vast database. So I think that we can build a computer that has sensory input into the computer. What was the What was that Happiness?

Well, first of all, you have to define what thinking is to answer that question. And we could define thinking as taking certain information as input and then having some output. And if you define thinking in that way or some way that's equivalent to that, certainly we can build a computer that can think. I mean, it may be more complicated than that. Happiness. Well, that's, you know, I'm. I'm deconstructing your statement, happiest thought. So first we talked about thinking.

Now we talk about happy, which is an emotion. And could a computer have an emotional state? Yes. That seems to me a harder one than whether it can think. I mean, you could probably put artificial tear ducts on a computer and make it cry. We could have a robotic arm and it could shake its fist at you out of anger. But I don't know. whether we will be able to build a computer that truly has emotions.

That's a tough one. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It seems almost impossible. And pivoting from one Nobel Prize winner to another, which is Sir Roger Penrose, who's talked about quite a good deal and respectful and quite interesting terms. And you know his collaboration with Stuart Hammeroff emerged from his book, The Emperor's New Mind, which was actually the first popular science book I ever read.

And he honored me by putting his name on this book and behind me, my losing Nobel Prize book. He endorsed that book a long time ago. But the reason that that book made such an impact on me is because it really portrayed the future as being incredibly exciting and having first defining what computation is and then ultimately being ambiguous

and uncertain as to whether or not at that point computation was what was really the essence of consciousness. And later with Hammeroff, who I've interviewed both of them, and we'll have links to those interviews above, I interviewed in the two of them. And, you know, they really maintain that not only is consciousness not a computational or amenable to pure computation via basically an abstract analogy from Girdle's incompleteness theorem, which, you know, we can refer people to my chats with him.

But that consciousness is actually instantiated via some gravitational. interaction with this classical GR phenomenon. So it's not even a quantum. It has to do with the wild curve, vile curvature, et cetera. So I'm going to ask you to harken back to that first book, problem book on gravity and general. What do you make of their theory? Microtubules are quantum phenomena that interact with the classical gravitational field. Is I, I don't believe it for one minute. Why is that? And I think that it was roundly dismissed by my neuroscientist that book and his thesis. Well, Roger Penrose, of course, understands all of physics much more than I do, including quantum physics. But I'll just say the elementary thing, that the fundamental unit of action and the brain is the neuron.

And, of course, we know that each neuron is connected to between 1,000 and 10,000 other neurons. And the neuron is not a quantum object. It's a macroscopic object, even though we can't see it with the naked eye. It's that a neuron has trillions and trillions of atoms in it. It's far beyond, you know, the realm where quantum physics acts. There's no such thing as you can't have entanglement or coherence between neighboring neurons because there's way too much noise in the brain which would destroy any kind of, you know, global entanglement or coherence.

So I think it's absolutely, you know, impossible that quantum physics or GR could play a role in the brain. So I don't, I mean, first acknowledging that Roger Penrose knows a lot more physics than I do, I just think that that's a crazy idea. And neuroscientists, as I said, roundly dismissed it. So I don't know what else to say about it. I mean, Penrose is a brilliant guy and he came up with Bill. Penrose tiles and worked with Hawking on general relativity and all kinds of incredible discoveries. But I think he got into deep water on that book. Yeah, he told me in person in the first interview I ever did about five years ago with him that, you know, when he wrote the book, he thought and he hoped that he would get

tons of letters, written letters back then, 1989, from young people saying, oh, I'm so excited and turned me on to science. And it did for me, I didn't write him a letter. But he said, no, he just got all these letters from old guys with, you know, their own theories of consciousness and computation. But the one who was, I guess, middle age at the time, 40 plus years ago, was Stuart Hammeroff, who's an anesthesiologist, who says, you know, his greatest joy is, you know, turning off consciousness. But that's a topic for another day.

Roger, as you know, one of his books is called Faith and Fantasy and Physics. And the fantasy part, I don't know if you've read that book, it revolves around the concept of cosmological inflation. And cosmological inflation was pioneered by your collaborator and friend next door to you, if I remember correctly, or not too far away, Alan Gooth. who went unconscious when I spoke there in 2016 at a colloquium. But I've heard he does that not in free. He does that all the time. So you should, it's not personal. Thank you, Alan.

That salvages what's left of my ego. But I have a question here from another pioneer who's closely related not only to inflation, but to the inflationary multiverse, who's a big fan of your work. And his name is Andre Linday. And I wrote him this week to tell him he's coming on. the podcast in a few weeks. And he agreed to, he agreed to come on the podcast,

but he sent me, I asked him, you know, do you have any thoughts about Alan and his writing and his new book, which he hasn't seen, but he's also mentioned in your previous book, which we talked about last year,

and I'll have a link to that awesome interview. Well, awesome guest. I don't know how good an interviewer I am, but anyway, he writes, Dear Brian, I like Alan,

and I respect him very much. He is great and he writes beautifully. I did not know about the new book, so I don't know what he says about me, but I've seen his article in the Atlantic. It is wonderful. If I understand him correctly, he believes in spirituality, but assumes that is possible only in the presence of ordinary matter, like protons, atoms, or molecules. This is an economic assumption. And in science, we should always look for the simplest, most economical explanation of everything. However,

since some people may have different assumptions in this respect, you may ask, Alan, if this is just an assumption, like a statement of faith. So that's the first question. Is this an assumption, this postulate that because there's matter always present and spirituality kind of runs on a is a software layer that runs on the hardware layer, the it from bit, can you comment on that? Is this just an assumption? Or can we actually, did you make this assumption basically for Occam's Razors purposes? Certainly it's an assumption. I mean, all of science is an assumption.

You know, science is a continuing endeavor to make better and better approximation. about the behavior of the world. But we make certain assumptions in science, for example, that the laws of physics that we observe on Earth are the same as the laws of physics in outer space, that laws have a universality. We assume that a cause and effect relations. And we make the assumption that there are no additional forces or essences, ethereal essences beyond the atoms and molecules and energy that we observe and can quantify. We make that

assumption. You can't prove that assumption. I mean, that's why we call it an assumption. Right. It's Lucretius. He's got a lot of citations of that that paper. Right. Yeah. So we can't, we can't prove it just the same way that God, that the science can't prove whether God doesn't exist and religion can't prove that God does exist. That these are statements that we, we, we, we, we or reject on the basis of faith. And science makes the fundamental assumption of science, I think, is that the universe is orderly, you know, that it obeys laws and that in principle that human beings will eventually discover those laws, or at least very good approximations to those laws. And so, yes, I think it's an assumption, and I agree with Andre said. It's an economical

assumption, but it is an assumption. So here's a follow-up question. And he does this by way of analogy. He says, before the invention of general relativity, everyone believed the gravitational field only appears in the presence of massive bodies. And this gravitational field does not have any independent degrees of freedom. But it turned out this belief was incorrect. In GR, one may have an evolving universe without any electrons and protons filled by an oscillating gravitational field, gravitational waves, having their own degrees of freedom.

Thus, space time in GR is alive. It's not just a mathematical tool for describing behavior of ordinary matter. It has its own degrees of freedom can involve, propagate even in the absence of matter. It took 100 years and billions of dollars since the invention of GR to observe gravitational waves by your colleague and past guest. Ray Weiss and Barry Barish, who's my co-author on my second book, into the impossible. Bicep tries to find gravitational my experiments of another type which may have existence to Big Big Big. So the essence of my questions, whether it is possible at all with respect to consciousness, the subject of this magnetism, magnificent book of yours and spirituality that we're just at the beginning of the place that

physicists were at a hundred years ago with respect to space time before Einstein and before the billions of dollars were spent and he has a link to a paper that he wrote dedicated to john wheeler 20 years ago i'll send you later yeah go ahead well if i can go back before i answer that question yes when when lindy says that the gravity can exist without the presence of matter Einstein's theory and even his theory of special relativity which you know very well is that matter and energy have some equivalence. And a gravitational wave has energy in it. So when Lindy says, can gravity exists without the presence of matter? It can exist without the presence of matter or energy. And a gravitational wave has energy in it. That's what makes the two mirrors on LIGO,

you know, oscillate back and forth. So the question whether we are in understanding consciousness are we at the same stage that physicists were 100 years ago or scientists? I don't know whether it was 100 years ago, but I certainly agree that we're at an infant's stage. You know, we're in our infancy of understanding consciousness. We do know a lot about the brain. We know pretty much how neurons work, and we know how neurons send electricity, how electricity flows through individual neurons. We know how they communicate with each other with chemicals, neurotransmitters.

But when you put 100 billion neurons together, each connected to 10,000 other neurons, or even if you put 1,000 neurons together, we can't even simulate 1,000 neurons, you get emergent phenomena. You get behavior of that system that you can't predict on the basis of individual neurons. And it might be a very long time before we understand how that qualitative behavior comes about. Philip Anderson coined the term, you know, more is different only in the 1950s. And that launched the field of, you know, condensed matter physics. But, you know, atoms and molecules have been around for, you know, thousands of years since egregious, as we said. Turning to that kind of subjective experience, and you did mention, you know, kind of this notion of, you know, perception. another past guest on the podcast, Donald Hoffman,

who's also spoken a lot about conscious. You can tell I'm very interested in conscious. I've had all these great minds and brains and your contribution was not surprisingly influential on me, but it was different enough for your perspective is different enough from say Hoffman's or even Penrose's that I thought it would be interesting to get your take. So he asserts that there is a evolutionary,

that what we experience is consciousness is basically evolutionary low-pass filtering, that we see reality as sort of a dashboard where they're icons, the icons of PowerPoint or Microsoft Excel, they look different, they represent different pointers in our neurons, and the emergence comes about

as a sense of perception that's evolutionarily optimized for our benefit. In other words, we're conscious is just another level of perception, but there's nothing to say that say an osprey, which we'll talk a lot about in just a minute, but there's nothing that an osprey couldn't actually perceive. And perhaps not even the electrons in the screen might also have consciousness, so-called pan-psychistic or pan-psychism. What do you make of this?

A, consciousness, I hate asking these double-bauer questions, but we only have a few more minutes left. Double-barre question is, is consciousness an evolutionary phenomenon, which would seem to me that electron couldn't be conscious because they don't evolve. Let me just, start with that and then I'll pivot to selection of course I'm not an evolutionary biologist but I do think it's very plausible that consciousness evolved and that if you could go back to prior to homo sapiens go back you know several million years that you might find uh this pre-human some member of the homogenes uh that that had a lower level of consciousness than what we have now so I think that's very plausible that it evolved

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Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. So, you know, thinking of coffee and chocolate and, you know, that I'm having here with my Irish, you know, addition because it's St. Patrick's Day, right, Alan? So you got to Irish up the coffee for the professor before I start to teach. I thought a lot in this book about, you know, there are maybe unintentionally a lot of Judaic themes that run through it. And, you know, we've talked a little bit about that. But as I said, you know, one of the things that Lawrence Krause and the other, you know, you know, self-described militant atheians didn't know.

What does the word Jew mean? Where does his name come from? I think it's very important. I was having lunch with a very good friend who's Persian. And I said, where does the word Iran come from? What does it mean? And I knew it meant Aryan or it meant Aryan. But what does that actually mean?

Like, Aryan, it's misused by Germans, obviously, in World War II. But so we looked it out. We used chat GPT, which I don't think we're going to have enough time. I wanted to talk a lot about the perils and pitfalls of chat. but I'll wait for your next book, which I assume you're writing as we're talking right now. I just love it. We'll do that another time. But we asked chat GPT, what's the origin of Aryan?

And we kept drilling down into it. And it comes out, the meaning of it in an Indo-European dialect, the meaning of Aryan, is nobleman or free person. In other words, Aryans are free people. And they should endeavor in the Persians and the Iranians. They should endeavor to be free. In Judaism, the word Jew comes from Yehuda, which means Hodea, which means gratitude. You talk a lot. Yeah.

You talk a lot in this book. So that Persians are on me. I mean, this is not a mandate, but you should least think about it. Like, we should be noble. We should be free people.

And I wish that the Iranian government would practice more freedom, especially for the women that are being subjugated so violently there. But anyway, we're not going to virtue signal too much today. But the point is, you know, who do you give gratitude to? You see an Osprey.

I find a problem with modern scientist is that most experiences, is Lord Rabbi Sachs, who passed away as chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. He said that it's natural when you have a transcendent peak experience to want to give gratitude. You see the Grand Canyon. You see Concord Lake. You see an Osprey swooping over your head. You want to give gratitude. It feels so great.

And religious people have an outlet. Who do you give gratitude to? Osprey, evolution, Darwin. How do you manifest that sense of gratitude which is so inculcated in you personally and in your spirit and in the essence of spirituality as you define. I have above my desk. I know this is not visual. I don't know whether you can.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I see that. Yeah, I see Salman Rusty, right? I have above my desk a poster of about 20 people that I've known in my past who have been influential, who have mentored me. Some of them have passed away now. And every day, I look up at that poster and I look at all those faces and I express my

gratitude to those people. Wow. That's amazing. So, you know, my take on Rabbi Sachs's, you know, statement is that we scientists. And, and that's very, I mean, that's just, I'm blown away by that sentiment out, but just in the interest of time. So, so the thing that I notice is that we as scientists are, when you saw the, you know, moons of Jupiter, where you saw a rainbow, when you saw the Osprey, you have a very deep scientific knowledge beyond the average person, you know, 10 sigma above, but then that's fine. And an average person can experience transcendence. My child can experience it. But when we experience it, in Judaism, there's actually blessings. Like, you see a rainbow, you see a meteor shower, give a blessing, because it's so overarching. But when a scientist

sees, you know, see something every single day, I believe they kind of get inured to the sense. Like, we kind of lose track of like, we're studying the origin of the universe. We're made of matter. And this matter is comprehending how it came about possibly. And then we have all these squabbles. And isn't it, isn't it just like, you get overwhelmed? Like, I get very much. over one and I find it can be paralytic I feel like you can appreciate beauty so much my daughter's smile you know I'm putting her to bed I'm like she's not gonna be this age forever she's not gonna want me in the bed with her you know you know when she turns five or what who knows how do you how do you grapple with that can you give my listener some

advice about like how do you how do you handle the blessings just even if your life is crap it's still pretty damn good how do you handle the blessings of gratitude if you don't have a director you know a gift giver to give gratitude too well I think that it's a wonderful question and I think that in general that none of us express gratitude enough and as a scientist my witness of a rainbow or a wild osprey making our contact my scientific understanding of that does not in the slightest diminish my awe and I love the Buddhist idea of being present of mindfulness that if we can learn how to to even if it's only a few minutes a day, just turn off our cell phones, turn off our computers,

and just pay attention to the moment. And the moment is so beautiful. I mean, we're so lucky to be alive. If you think of it, you know, out of the trillions and trillions of sperm cells and trillions of trillions of eggs and your mother, that one of them became you. And all of those other ones never became a living being. I mean, just that fact alone. Life in the universe is incredibly rare. Life and if you look at all the matter in the universe, life that the fraction of matter in the universe that it's alive is one billionth of one billionth. It's like one grain of sand on the Gobi Desert. So when you think of those things, you realize how lucky and precious life is and just keeping your eyes open and being mindful for a few moments. That's what

I recommend. And it's increasingly been shown to be the case that from brain scientists, you know, more knowledgeable than I, that yeah, it's giving gratitude in the morning, grading gratitude at night, bullet journaling, however you like, leads to pronounced improvement in mental health and well-being. Alan, the last thing that we've added in the last two years since you've been gracing us while your presence on this podcast are the four final questions, a final four existential questions, not unlike the final four of NCAA basketball, which I know the MIT-Beaver will be playing the San Diego Tritons in a hotly contested battle.

I doubt it. So I ask my audience these questions. I don't think I had time to ask you. We only have five minutes this time. I'm going to ask you at least. I'll see how many we can get. First one of the existential question has to do with what you'll put in your ethical will, which is in Hebrew called a Zava-a.

These are sort of a template of not material wealth, but spiritual or intellectual or perhaps a wisdom will. What would you leave to your offspring? Not only biological, but also ideological, like the hundreds of thousands of people listening to this podcast. I don't think we can do better than the golden rule. Do unto others that you would have them do unto you. Very good. Richard Feynman said many things, including about consciousness and appreciation and gratitude.

He said in contraistinction to, I think it was Walt Whitman maybe, or whoever wrote the poem, I heard the learned astronomer. who was dismayed that the knight had been turned to numbers he said who am i as a man who cannot appreciate the knowledge of jupiter just because i know he's made of nitrogen uh meaning the planet jupiter rather than just looking anyway feyman uh was asked the question if in some cataclysm all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed and only one sentence passed to the next generation of creatures what statement would contain the most information the fewest words and this comes back to the hero of this the beginning of the story lucretius who mentioned adams I know what he said, Adams.

Adams, that's right. They're whirling around. Anyway, what would you put, how would you answer the cataclysm question? What, what single sentence most best encapsulates maybe a little bit of swagger for the, for humanity to have in perpetuity that we figured out something truly tremendous about the universe since, since Feynman, perhaps? The physical universe had a beginning. Very good, very good.

And to that, you can turn to a problem book in general relativity and gravitation, which is, I just love that book, Alan. I'm so glad you wrote it. Well, thank you. And next question, third question. I'm not meaning to insult you, although the interview is almost over, so I could get away. No. Sir Arthur C. Clark, who is the namesake of the center that I am the associate director here of, called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, said when a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, he is almost certainly right.

But when he says something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. I want to ask you, Alan, what thing, topic, you know, conjecture have you been wrong about recently or in the past? Conjecture have I been wrong about. Not the only scientifically. It could be about your own life. Like, could or, you know? I've been wrong about many things. Well, let me think. I mean, I've been wrong about so many things that it's hard to think of one particular thing to mention. I think that I was wrong in thinking my wife is a very people-centered person.

And she lives in the moment. She's much better in her people relations than I am. And I think that when we first got married, I thought that I would never be able to change my ways. and be more of the kind of person that she would be compatible with. And we both have grown closer to each other in our mannerisms and our behavior. So I was wrong about that. And I'm very happy that I was wrong about that. All right.

Well, we're going to have to send her a copy of this interview. Okay, Alan. Last time. Last question, the final one, we have one minute left. Lastly, going back in time, Arthur St. Clark said the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. It's the origin of the name of my podcast. What mysterious aspect of your life perplexed you at age 20 or 30 and gave you the courage in hindsight to perhaps give yourself advice to that 20 year old to give yourself the courage to go into the impossible?

What advice would you give to your 20, 30 year old self? What advice would I give to my 20 year old self? Yes, they give you that courage. Well, these are profound questions and it's hard to quickly come up with answers. Don't worry, you've got 10 seconds. Okay. Right. I think I would tell myself that you can fall in love with more than one person.

Ah, wow. And that could even be with a mind, with a conscious mind or a spiritual being, a God. Well, Alan, we're in love with your mind and your writing and you're welcome back here anytime. I'm going to pass the interview on to Andre. He's going to come on. I'm going to ask you in a few minutes or weeks or whatever. Please send me a question for Andre. That would be a love to touch.

Alan, thank you so much. Shabbat Shabbat Shalom. And it's such a pleasure. Thank you for your contribution to our intellectual rapaciousness and slaking our humphier for a little bit. You're a great intellect yourself, Brian, and it's really a pleasure to have conversation with you. I learn a lot by talking to you. Thank you. I love it. Thank you, Alan. Have a great day. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to Into the Impossible. Keep in touch by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday Magic email at Brian Keating.com

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