Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Cosmic Insignificance Therapy (#274)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying your Thanksgiving weekend here in the United States. I just wanted to express my gratitude for all of you for coming along on this audio extravaganza with me the past few years of pandemic podcasting. And give you what's commonly called an in-between-isode in the biz. Just a little tidbit to slake your thirst or wet your appetite on this Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S. Just some meditations on gratitude, on meaning. and the biggest picture existential questions of all. Hope you'll enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

Starting point is 00:00:34 And to all of you out there, wherever you are, know that I'm grateful and thankful for you being a part of this into the impossible mission. Now let's go. Into the impossible. So let's talk about so-called cosmic insignificance theory. This is a notion promulgated in books such as 4,000 weeks, which postulates that the human existence is

Starting point is 00:00:59 so inconsequential and insignificant in the grand sweep of the universe that there is essentially nothing to get upset about. And it taken to its extreme, and by the way, it's been promulgated by people like Tim Ferriss and Neil deGrasse Tyson, to some extent almost every secular thinker, including those names and people like Scott Galloway, who's put forth a similar sort of claim that he gets solace and comfort from his atheism, that knowing that there is no existence beyond this realm gives him comfort, and that he says when he'll look at his kids' eyes on his deathbed, he'll replay all his memories, and somehow it's not quite clear, he claims that will give him great comfort. And I would just like to question these thinkers, all from my respect and

Starting point is 00:01:53 listen to, that the notion that somehow your physical size or your lifespan gives you an added measure of significance, that even such a thing is necessary that you need to have, you know, kind of multisigma deviations from some standard is kind of ludicrous in my mind. And that what, first of all, defines size, what is the size of the earth? What is we don't even know exactly what the size of the coastline of a continent is. It's not that it's unknowable. It's that it's not dimensional. It's fractional.

Starting point is 00:02:30 It's a fractal. And therefore it depends on your frame of reference, how you measure it. And to think that it's necessary to be big like Jupiter or, you know, some nebula in order to have significance is quite preposterous. Seemingly, similarly, when you have very small. things. Are they not significant? Is a radioactive isotope of uranium not significant? Because it's so much smaller than a little kitty cat, it's quite silly. A virus is not significant because aside from not being able to determine conclusively among all expert biologists, whether or not it's truly alive, does it not have significance? Because it's maybe barely alive, it's certainly not very big

Starting point is 00:03:16 compared to a golf ball. So I think these are sort of fairy tales that secular people tell themselves in order to sort of cope with the existential enwee or dread that they must feel, both from not actively or affirmatively believing in an supernatural entity of God, but not even valuing the infinite self-worth of every human being, that we think that there's something associated with the existence of consciousness that's undefinable and that we sort of know it when we see it perhaps, but that everything could be conscious. Even that is sort of preferable in a way to a sense of the kind of nihilism of those who proclaim cosmic insignificance theory,

Starting point is 00:04:06 especially when it's used to give them bolstering of their spirits. It is kind of silly when you think about it. Because all you need to postulate is the infinite significance of a human being. And you can call it a soul, but you don't have to. You can ascribe it to a god, but you don't have to. And if you do, it's not necessarily clear that it's in any way less intellectually rigorous than saying that we're essentially cosmic pollution, as someone like Lawrence Krause has said. So this is really kind of a pushback again on the...

Starting point is 00:04:40 notion of whether or not your worth somehow can be measured by things that have metrics ascribed to them, like lifespan or size. Because when you think about our lifespan, for example, turning now from size to scale and time, you know, dark energy has dominated the energy budget of the universe for the last something like 8 billion years, 7 billion years before that mattered on. nominated for several billion years and radiation for a few tens of thousands of years. But because it will last potentially forever if it's truly a cosmological constant, is that more significant than, you know, my neighbor's son?

Starting point is 00:05:25 I certainly don't think so. So I think it's dangerous to ascribe meaning, significance, literal significance, to what fraction of the cosmic energy pie chart a given entity like a human being or a grasshopper our quark exists for. I want to talk about happiness and entropy. I want to talk about Maxwell's demons. What is Maxwell's demon? You heard about it several times in discussions with very eminent, so-called quantum thermodynamicsists,

Starting point is 00:05:59 and like Nicole Younger Halper. So let's go back to 1867, shall we, when a young physicist, James Clerk Maxwell he was actually reaching the end of his life, sadly, because he would only live to his early 40s. Nevertheless, he came up with a thought experiment to seemingly violate the most sacrosanct of all physical theories, which is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And he doesn't call the object, he calls it a finite being, which is not what we call it. Nowadays, we call it a demon. and the demon, or daemon, as the Brits I think would call it, was inaugurated by none other than Lord Kelvin.

Starting point is 00:06:42 And in Maxwell's thought experiment, the demon controls a tiny partition that's massless between two chambers, each containing gas. And as the individual gas molecules, or atoms, approach the door partition, the demon quickly opens and closes the door only to allow fast-moving molecules to, say, occupy the chamber on the left. left. And in so doing, leaves a deficit of fast-moving objects on the right, or therefore more slower molecules are on the right. Slower molecules have lower temperatures, lower kinetic, average kinetic energies, which in the molecular level constitutes their temperature. So the demon's action eventually caused one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down, which is a paradox because we have started off with a gas at, say, some constant temperature, say room temperature, and we're sorting out the molecules according to their velocity.

Starting point is 00:07:32 So this is a paradox because it would decrease the total entropy of the two gases, organizing the higher entropy, higher temperature, gas on the left and the lower entropy energy gas on the right without doing any work. Just smoothing a massless partition cost the demon no work. Therefore, it violates the second law of thermodynamics. Now, this was a big deal in the 19th century, and it actually stoked a tremendous amount of developments in thermodynamics, even in information theory where there's a concept of so-called Silard demon or Silard's teapot. You can listen to my conversation with Nicole about that.

Starting point is 00:08:12 And I think it's fascinating to think about these thought experiments and think about how you could explain it. And the key to explain it is that the demon needs information and that information is coming from its senses. And even though the door has zero mass and zero work to slide open and closed in a vacuum, or without any friction, even if it was possible to make such a partition, you would not necessarily have a entropy-reducing entity in that, the finite agent. It would require some amount of information, if not actual energy, and therefore the information constitutes and comprises some amount of entropy. So the total entropy does get conserved by virtue of the fact that information is a form of entropy. Now, how do I relate that to happiness? This subject of today's monologue is about

Starting point is 00:09:06 happiness and entropy. Well, I often have described kids as sort of organized energy and to sort of extend our time with our kids, which is our dream as parents, is to kind of allow them to grow up, but also pause them. And the paradox of parenting is sort of like a Maxwell's demon, where you have this desire to sort out the boring moments and make those go fast. the kind of parent teacher conferences, which I just endured this week, you want those moments to go fast, but then you want the times when you're walking with your toddler and she's holding your finger so sweetly and gently and just relying on you for everything. You want those moments to last forever. And so it makes me think about the fragility

Starting point is 00:09:48 of information, of connectedness, and that kids can create great amounts of happiness. And I think when we talk about happiness, it's to create something with a purpose. And we overanalyze this, I think, a lot. And the purpose of life, I think, could be to create and lower entropy locally. And that's not a contradiction. It means organization. It means bonding with other human beings. Creating a network of organizations. Organizations intrinsically are fragile. It's much harder to assemble a sand pile or sand castle than it is to destroy it. You can almost break it without any expenditure of energy whatsoever. So how can we do that? We can make bonds and organization in a variety of ways, and we don't have to reinvent the wheel. And this is why it perplexes me when people think about the meaninglessness of life. And you can, in a certain sense, think about organizations persisting throughout time. It's been said that, you know, the United States Senate has never really fully turned over because, you know, I guess Thomas Jefferson, you know, whoever was the first senators back in the late 1700s, early 1800s, they overlaid.

Starting point is 00:10:59 with the next six-year terms of the successive generations, and those overlap with the third generation and so on. And we're in like the, you know, the 26th generation of senators. It's a hundred and something Congress. So these organizations never have turned over completely. They've never been completely non-overlapping throughout time. And they're fragile too. We know that, as it said, democracy dies in darkness. Democracy is fragile. So organizations, you know, have to be attended to, and so too do relationships. And I've talked about this before, in my mind, the things that one should attempt to do are those very things that would devastate you if you lost them. And you should try to make as many of those as possible. Things that are fragile,

Starting point is 00:11:46 that can be removed, and that must be safeguarded and protected and insulated and insured, but also that evolved through time, like a Senate. And that's the implicit paradox of Maxwell's demon, sort of applied to parenthood. And I think the sense of devastation can be summed up by Ryan Holiday and his co-author Stephen Hanselman who wrote in The Daily Stoic, devastation is that feeling that we're absolutely crushed and shocked by an event. It is a factor of how unlikely, how surprised, right, how unlikely we considered that event in the first place. No one is wrecked by the fact that it's snowing in the winter because we've accepted and even anticipated this turn of events. What about the occurrences that surprise us. We might not be so shocked if we took their time to consider the

Starting point is 00:12:33 possibility. And therefore, some things that would surprise us and also depress us, we want to endeavor to approach those and create as many of those as possible. So I want to leave. I kind of mentioned in maybe slightly condescending terms or deliberately upsteperous terms, Sam Harris. But I do want to point out a good thing that Sam did say once. He said, you can't really be happy. He said you can only become happy. In other words, if you're on a slope of happiness, hopefully increasing, that's very unstable. That's not a stable equilibrium.

Starting point is 00:13:10 Stability, meaning resistant to perturbations to your altitude. So you perturb your altitude on the side of half dome, and you're very unlikely to make the excursion in such a way that you end up at the top of. half dome. And there are many, many more possibilities and therefore much more probable that you end up a disorganized mess of primordial soup at the bottom of the Yosemite Valley floor. So you have to protect that position. And you can work to keep climbing up the mountain, the dome of happiness. But you never really get there. You know, people don't live at the top of hafdom to use a torturing of the analogy at this ultimate limit. So I just wanted to leave you with those thoughts around Thanksgiving

Starting point is 00:13:52 and hope that you enjoy your long weekend if you're here in the U.S. If you're in Canada, you observed it over a month ago. So I hope you did have a happy Thanksgiving and hope you will exhibit gratitude for all the blessings and greatness that we do have. And I certainly do for you too. I have great amounts of gratitude for you being a journey, person, male or female, on this destination. I don't really know where we're going all the time, but I'm sure that we're making progress along the way. So thank you for your continuing patronage of the End of the Impossible podcast. Take care and have a magical weekend.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Cosmic Insignificance Therapy (#274)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.