Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Daniel Dennett: Do We Have Free Will? [Ep. 406]

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! Welcome everyone to a fascinating deep dive with the late Daniel Dennett! In our interview, we tackled fascinating problems like free will, human consciousness, ethics, and the philosophy of science. He also explained why he’s sounding the alarm on AI! Shortly after our interview, Daniel sadly passed away at the age of 82. He was a renowned philosopher, thought-provoking writer, brilliant cognitive scientist, and vocal atheist. He was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, a member of the editorial board for The Rutherford Journal, and a co-founder of The Clergy Project. Known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, he was at the forefront of discussions on consciousness, free will, and the impact of Darwinian evolution on religious belief. Dennett's works, including "Breaking the Spell" and "Consciousness Explained," have provoked both admiration and controversy, challenging readers to reconsider deeply held beliefs about the mind and its relationship to the physical world. Needless to say, I was thrilled to have Dan on the show! The world has truly lost an extraordinary soul and a groundbreaking thinker. RIP Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:09:27 Judging a book by its cover 00:12:29 Dan's critique of Sam Harris's position on free will 00:21:43 The evolutionary advantage of music 00:29:01 Language, nonverbal communication, and artificial intelligence  00:34:33 Are brains computers? 00:46:04 Sounding the alarm on AI 00:51:38 Bioengineering and bioethics  00:57:21 Philosophy of physics  01:02:47 The evolution of academia 01:09:08 Audience questions  01:23:10 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everybody, just a little bit of a somber note as we start the podcast, something that's never happened before. But I have to report on the passing of today's guest, Daniel Dennett, who I spoke to just a few weeks ago. I think this was his final interview on a podcast. He passed away. Today, I'm informed. This is Friday, April 19th, 2024.

And as you hear, I had such a great conversation with him. I already recorded an intro, both the video and an audio intro. And I was just so delighted and touched by him and had so much fun with him. He influenced me greatly, even though I really only got to delve into his work in the last few months before leading up to the interview. Before, of course, I knew about him. He's a world famous intellectual and contributor to many fields of philosophy and many other things. And so it's a great shock to me. I wanted to release this as a token of my gratitude to him.

for this wonderful interview. You'll see he, you know, he'd just come back from a dentist appointment and, you know, we're talking and, you know, part of me feels guilty to have spent, you know, an hour and a half, two hours, whatever it turned out to be with, you know, the final, you know, weeks of his life. But on the other hand, it's a great gift. And hopefully his family will see this and share in the delightful conversation that we had together. I view it as a great honor and privilege to have hosted him. and especially now made more poignant by his passing.

It's truly affected me, and I hope the interview will be meaningful to you as much as it was to me as well. So with that, I'll start with the intro that we had planned before this sad announcement came a few days ago before the release of this episode, and I hope that Dan is happy and resting in peace wherever he is. Thanks, Dan.

Hey there, friends, just a note opening up this. podcast with another renowned atheist scientist PhD in the tradition of Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky. This episode with Dan Dennett was a real treat, most of which came from the fact that he's incredibly open, honest, and just a lot of fun. I really had no idea how to expect with him. He can range in interviews I'd seen with him previously with Michael Shermer and others. I would check out on his podcast, the skeptic podcast or Michael Shermer's show, I think it's called now,

that he can be a little bit cantankerous, he can be a little bit brusque, always entertaining, he's always brilliant, but I really had no idea what to expect. I'd never talk to him and never read his books before this most recent book of his, which is his memoir, his scientific career. What I realize is it really is a guidebook on how to be a good scientist. And I appreciate that because there are so few guides for becoming a scientist. Most of what we find out in life is in the self-help realm, personal relationships, being a better parent. And these are, of course, incredibly important things in a day-to-day life.

But there aren't really good manuals and how to be a good scientist. I've sort of tried to do that with my previous books, losing a Nobel Prize and think like a Nobel Prize winner. But I always felt that came up a little bit short because it's very difficult to capture those perspectives. especially since I feel like my career is continuing to grow and I have the blessing and benefit to be working with so many amazing students and researchers and fellow faculty and engineers on the Simon's Observatory, the Simon's Array, and other projects I get involved with. It's really, truly the best job in the world. I call it the hardest three hour a week job in the world, being a professor. It's changed a lot in the 20 years, my 20th anniversary of being a professor. But talking with Dan,

Dennett really made me appreciate how great it is to be a professor to live the life of the mind and how sad it makes me feel when I realize how hard it is almost impossible. It's actually harder in some sense to break into the professoriate from the previous level down, which is called postdoctoral scholars or fellows. It's harder to do that nowadays than it is to break in from the level down from the major leagues in baseball, which is AAA baseball. In other words, you have a higher chance of getting to be a professional baseball player if you're already playing AAA baseball, then if you're a postdoc trying to become a faculty member. We had 400 applicants for one job in the last hiring cycle at UC San Diego, and I'm sure they're even more selected universities than

ours. This is a conundrum. Do you do anyone a favor by encouraging them to pursue academia? I'd like to think the latter hasn't been pulled up behind me. I do my best to mentor, and I've had great success with four of my previous employees or professors now at various places around the country and the world. And these are top institutions, and it really does fill me that that's the greatest source of pride, really, is in the words of the great rabbi Monacham Schneerson, who said that a good leader creates many followers, but a great leader creates many leaders. And I feel like people like Dan and others inspire me to be better at my craft and listening to him recount in his inimitable way the adventures that he's had over the years, ranging from computer science to laboratory experiments to pure philosophical conferences to smuggling items across the iron curtain and during the Cold War.

He's really a legend. And is inspirational. I don't have the opportunity to kind of deal with such weighty, lofty issues and my day job as a cosmologist. But I do have the same responsibilities that he has to be a good mentor, friend, advisor. You know, we spend almost as much time, if not more, with our students and faculty colleagues as we do with our family. So there are very few books written about how to be a good scientist, how to science. I'm working on a second volume of think like a Nobel Prize winner, which is actually called Into the Impossible, named after this podcast.

subtitle, think like a Nobel Prize winner. But some people have criticized that book for kind of aspiring to the unattainable, which is not only to be a professor, but tend to win the Nobel Prize, of which there are actually, literally, you know, fewer people that have that accolade in science and physics than play in the NBA, you know, fewer Nobel laureates in physics than NBA stars. And I've interviewed a great deal of them, 19 of them so far. And so the second half of, you know, nine more people are coming into a new book. It'll be out. hopefully by the end of this year, calendar year 2024, working on that with Scribe publishing and my great co-authors and friends that help edit and put that book together.

So look for that soon, and I'm going to focus in that book on really how to be a good scientist. The first volume of it came out in 2021, great success. But it really was kind of a panoply of different observations that I've learned about Nobel prize winners rather than how to be like them in the sense of how do you collaborate with competitors? How do you overcome the imposter syndrome? How do you struggle with colleagues that sometimes are your competitors? And how do you retain an open mind to criticism? Those are the real traits of a good scientist. And I never get the chance to really explore that with my students, either undergraduates or graduate students. So this will be kind of mind ever to do that. And I'll carry

lessons from Dan and others, even though Dan obviously has not won a Nobel Prize, at least not yet. I don't know if that will ever happen. I don't think so. But he is a brilliant scientist. He's got an incredible personality. And it's just refreshing to talk to somebody who's got such an unabashed, unafraid, opinionated kind of perspective. He'll talk about people that he's nominally associated with, Dawkins, Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, late great Christopher Hitchens. And he'll talk about them critically. But it's all done with bon homie and with not conciliatory. I think Dan loves to win arguments, but he does so collegially friendly, unless you kind of provoke him to evoke his ire. So I know you're going to enjoy this. It's kind of a bit of a theme this year

so far. We are going to have Donald Hoffman back on for part two. And that interview, I love Don. I think he's a wonderful, he's a mention of a person, but I'll push back as I did with Dan and with Sam and with Robert Sapolsky. So I hope you don't fault me for that, because I think it's part of My job is to ask hard questions and push back with tender love and respect. And I know that sometimes irritates you because I don't always merely parrot what my guests are saying. But I think this is more interesting. If you like that kind of interview style, I can recommend a lot of other podcasts that you should listen to. But I hope you'll stay and listen to this one and give me feedback.

Also let me know what you think about these audio essays. Plain to do more of them. So I hope you like them. I don't have plans to do them every single episode. but with kind of marquee names literally like Dan or Sam or Robert, I feel the need to kind of provide a little supplementary commentary and color to the interview. And I hope that you will very much appreciate this wide-ranging discussion

with a true legend. And that's Professor Dan Dennett. And now sit back and enjoy as we go into The Impossible. Stay tuned for another intro for the next minute. And then we'll go right into the interview. Enjoy it, friends. Today, I'm Into the Impossible. We welcome a renowned philosopher of the human mind, a man who's a legend, a cognitive scientist,

professor, and a raconteur par excellence. He's also a vocal atheist, and yet he makes common cause with people like me who call themselves practicing agnostics. We'll see what that means later on. But Daniel Dennett is a legend, and he's known as one of the four horsemen of new atheism, not the apocalypse. He's been at the forefront discussions on consciousness, free will, and the impact of Darwinian evolution on religious belief. His incisive wit, good humor, and keen intellect made him a must-get guest on the Into the Impossible podcast. He's been a major figure for decades

in debates, conversations, and writings about the existence of God and the nature of belief and free will. His works are tremendously influential, and they are include breaking the spell, consciousness explained, and many more that have provoked admiration, controversy, and challenge readers to reconsider their most deeply held beliefs about the mind and its relationship to the physical world. Today, I have the opportunity to explore these topics, along with your questions, for this phenomenal renowned professor. So, without further ado, let's jump right in and discuss this magnificent new memoir from one of the heroes of the new atheist movement. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the pod bay doors. How are you doing, Dan? I'm doing just fine. How are you? It's a great pleasure to connect to you. I listened to your latest book, an audio format, and it's not your voice, and so it's good to hear your actual voice. And as you know, Dan, we love to judge books by their covers, because what else do you have to go on? a Bayesian reasoning sense. So I want you to take us through the book and it is unique in terms of all the two or 300 books I've had the pleasure of authors appearing on the Into the Impossible podcast. This is probably the first one that doesn't have a subtitle. So tell me, tell me the origin of the title, the cover illustration art and the absence of the subtitle.

Take it away, Dan. Okay, here's the book. I take it everybody can see it. I've been thinking. I didn't want a subtitle because I thought that's enough. I want to talk about my thinking and how I got there. And it's not about the non-academic, non-research parts of my life. I deliberately didn't want to go on and on about adventures I've had outside of academia. I thought, this is a book to talk about it. to talk about what I think is how I think I think and why it's a good way to think. So it's all about the wonderful thinkers who've helped me.

And the first thing to say is if you want to do some good thinking, surround yourself with the smartest people you can find and talk to them. And that's the trick. And I've had the pleasure of having a lot of brilliant thinkers on the podcast, the 18 Nobel Prize winners, and many of your colleagues and friends and people that appear in this book in one form or another, including folks like David Chalmers. And when I had David Chalmers on, he's from Australia. And I said to him, you know, David, if I had the rock band ACDC, also from Australia, and I had them on and I did not ask them to play, you shook me all night long, I would be a derelict in my duties as a host. So I want to sort of ask you, you've had some very deep criticisms of them, obviously always

with respect and always from a scholastic, scholarly perspective. But in this book, you talk about your differences with critiques of everybody, all these guests that I've had on, Penrose, Hammeroff, Hoffman, Chalmers, Sapolsky, Harris, even. So let's start there. Let's start with Sam Harris and then we'll kind of work away through for the audience's benefit. We hear all these things, Dan, some pleaded consciousness is an illusion. Some say it's, you know, completely nonsense. There's no such thing.

And associated with free will. Who says that? Who says there's no free will? Oh, yeah. Various people say that, but I know. Yeah. No, I know that. So what is the critic of the critique that you have of, say, Sam in your book, Freedom Evolves?

I'm mentioning this because he was just on the podcast and we had a very long debate in which I asked him similar questions that I asked Robert Sapolsky. And I said, you know, if there is, you know, no such thing as free will, then how can you blame somebody for, God forbid, you know, killing your pet dog? And Robert said, he said literally to my great shame and humiliation, I'd want them punished. So where do you come down on, say, crime and punishment in a world with the free will perspective that you adopt? I think there's a definite role for punishment and have argued that and think there's nothing antediluvian or anti-scientific about it because free will isn't what Sapolsky thinks it is. I'm just astonished at how both Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky and some other. scientists have been, I think, persuaded, conned really into thinking that free will depends on indeterminism by some philosophers who have inflated free will beyond what it actually is.

Free will isn't a metaphysical condition that you're blessed with or not. It's an achievement. And it's the achievement of mature self-control. You don't have it when you're a baby. You don't have it until you've reached adulthood, really. And so we don't hold you responsible for things until you're an adult. And we don't hold you responsible then if you don't have self-control. That's self-control is the key notion.

And the thing about self-control, it amazes me that Sopolsky doesn't realize, This is one of the best ways of looking at evolution. Evolution begins with the simplest imaginable agents, single-celled agents. And then you get multicellular agents. And then we get multicellular agents that aren't, you know, plants or fungi or coral polyps, but that move. And once you've got motion, you've got control. And in order to have control, you have to look ahead.

And evolution has designed things that can look ahead. Before there was life, nothing could look ahead. Nothing at all in the whole universe could look ahead. Once you have look ahead, then you have the possibility of making choices based on what you see. Now, maybe what you see isn't what's going to happen. And then you may make choices that are bad. But over the long run, probabilistically, evolution,

let's replicate the agents that are the best at self-preservation, that duck the incoming bricks and then find the food before they starve, that find mates, and so forth. I haven't said anything controversial. That's textbook. Oh, hum. That's right. That's how evolution works.

But it makes things that do things for reasons. And once you have things that do things for reasons, you're on the way to free will. I wouldn't say that an octopus or a clam or even a crop. have reasons that they understand. They don't have to, but they still do things for reasons. Trees do things for reasons. Trees don't have to understand the reasons they do the things they do, but they do things for reasons. That's a theme in my book from bacteria to Bachembach. There's competence without comprehension. We're the one species that so far evolved that doesn't just do things for reasons, but represents reasons to ourselves and argues about

reasons and tries to reason others into behaving better and so forth. And this creates the social contract. It creates the environment for civilization where we can judge that some of our fellow human beings have reached the age of reason. They can be reasoned with. And we can trust them. They're safe. We can let them run free.

You know why we don't let lions run free or bears run free, or small children. And once you're capable of listening to reasons and being moved by reasons, as can't put it, then you can have freedom. It has nothing... Notice I haven't mentioned the word determinism. It has nothing to do with determinism.

Determinism and free will are completely disjoint categories. There's no implication one way or the other between them. So this is what's called a pattern interrupt. It's a way to rejuvenize, refresh your mental synapses as I know you're getting a slight charge out of hearing each word that Daniel and I say. But I need to take a quick moment to invite all of you subscribe to this podcast or YouTube channel, no matter where you're listening or watching. I promise you it's causing me to up my game. You see the phenomenal guests we're getting, just in the realm

of consciousness, including Dan and Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky, just in the last three months. It's been a phenomenal ride. And unfortunately, it's a numbers game. And I'm trying my best to up my game and become a better interviewer. This is my side hustle after all. It's a labor of love. I don't make very much money on it. But the one thing you can remunerate me with is by subscribing. Only about 50% of you are actually subscribed or following the podcast. So please do me a favor.

Subscribe and share. It really helps out and it will help us grow and continue to get great guests like Dan, Sam, and Robert. And stay tuned for a special episode coming up with Don Hoffman. When I mentioned to both of them, I hear a lot of people, as you know, will deny the existence of free will. And I mean, that's a title essentially of books by those authors. And I say, have you ever met somebody, Dan? I say, have you met somebody who behaved as if they don't have free will?

That's not a psychopath. And they can never say, yeah. I mean, nobody behaves like they have no free will. The way you would behave if you had no free will is you'd sit there like a tree and just take your lumps and not think ahead. And it's possible to talk people out of their free will. Because if you've got free will, you can be moved by reasons, and you can be moved by reasons good and bad.

And so that's why I think books like Sapolsky's and Sands are actually a little bit socially destructive. their acts of high-class social vandalism in that they weaken our conviction, our perfectly naturalistic conviction, that we are what we obviously are, forethinking, reasonable human beings who can figure out how to do things together in concert, avoid harming others. that's that's the glory of human civilization yeah it really is and it should be it should be celebrated and I feel like they get into these sort of almost solipsistic or you know self self-referential

definitions where they can't admit that there are possibilities where the very notion that they're trying to criticize undermines their own argument and for me why are they arguing for yeah exactly right what I on earth do you think you're doing, Robert? It's impossible not to, you know, be swayed, you know, again, when you make it personal, et cetera, that they, you know, that they don't stand by the courage of their convictions. But to their credit, I think, at least, at least Robert does. And he admits to his shame, as he literally said in the interview. Robert Sopoldsky does, and those are some of the best parts of his book where he confesses that he can't, sometimes he, he just has

to act as if he has free will. Good for him. Of course he does. I trust him. And you talk in the book about the kind of difficulty in an understanding from an evolutionary point, the evolutionary or selective purpose of sense of humor, which is almost probably uniquely a human trait. Maybe there are some higher primates that have it. But what about the origin of music? It would seem that, again, if you're sitting around a campfire and you're clucking or you're dancing or whatever. It makes you kind of very, very unfit to survive, you know, the lions that are prowling around you. I always wonder, what is the evolutionary advantage or point of music, which is not unique to the human civilization, obviously, but especially in humans,

what would be an advantage, if any? Well, let's look at some non-human species. We have birds, for instance, some of whom have remarkably wonderful bird song, and that, that don't just have a caw, a char, or a chirp, but very elaborate songs. And there it's pretty clear that the point of that is sexual selection. It's like the peacock's tail. It's also beautiful. Sexual selection, well studied by Darwin. It's not just the survival of the fittest.

It's the survival and procreation that matters. That's the finish line. You've got to procreate. You've got to replicate. and the crossing that finish line means you've got to attract them mate. You've got to get somebody to mate with you. Certainly, that has a lot to do with the ornamentation and the beauty that we see in many animal species. And it's in sort of an arms race because it depends on the females in almost all cases,

the sexual selection. The females are the ones that do the judging and the males that do the showing off. And the costly signaling theory, Zahavi's wonderful contribution to this, is that you can't have a cheap advertisement of your own excellence. It's that will not, it's not because the females will understand that these are, cheaters, it's just that they won't be attracted to them. It's got to be something difficult. It's the same thing as with starting or pronging in

antelopes that do these incredible leaps and get the lions not to chase them. They're saying, don't bother. Don't waste your energy on me. I'm too good for you. Look, I can throw these leaps. Only an expensive costly signal can send that message.

And only an expensive, costly signal can send the message, hey, you want to mate with me because I'm really, I got energy and time to burn. That idea, that motive sells a million guitars a year. That's right. But some of those guitarists decide they'd rather make music than love. Yeah, it is sort of evolution has, has, you know,

not done us physicists and professors any favors in the mating. I'm okay with mating. I've done okay. I've done my fair share. But happily married for 16 years with a bunch of kids. But the kind of question that always comes up to me is I had on the physicist, Mitchie O'Cock. And again, I'm always astonished on how, you know,

kind of self-referential again that that, you know, it's believed and he claimed in the interview I did with him that, you know, evolution takes over and then that's how you get life from inorganic, you know, hydrogen and helium. And no, there's nothing of the sort. And so I wanted to ask you, what is the minimum viable product? What is the minimum thing that evolution needs to operate on? I had Craig Venter on and he said anything that has DNA, but I mean, we can imagine things that don't have DNA, right? So what do you think? What's the minimum viable product that Mother Nature could produce or even be contemplated to produce in the entire universe to originate life? And then how does evolution take over from there? We know something about this. We can sketch out some of the requirements.

There has to be some fairly stable, non-volatile macro molecules because there has to be structure. The chematon was the sort of simplest life form that was described in some detail by the Hungarian scientists. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. 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. His name is escaping me at the moment, but the Kynaton, look it up, C-H-E-M-A-T-O-N. Tibur Ganty? I learned about him from Ersch-Zat-Larry, the Hungarian co-author with John Maynard Smith. of the wonderful book on major transitions and evolution. And what you have to have is you've got to have a protective envelope. You've got to have a tissue that surrounds you, a cell wall, and effect.

And it has to be permeable. It has to be controlled entrance and exit for raw material. and waste products, and it has to have reproduction, and it has to have a source of energy. So metabolism, a protective skin of some sort of reproductive system. One of the points that I think is worth making is that to get evolution started, this is still a deep puzzle. there are lots of but the beautiful thing is

there's more than enough theories out there there's an embarrassment of riches lots of ideas there's the DNA the RNA first world there's various other ideas out there Nick Lane in England

has some excellent ideas about the original sources of energy we don't know yet for sure but we're closing in I hope I live enough to get somebody really, really hitting the target and everybody agreeing, which could happen, which could happen, which could happen soon.

But the first thing that reproduces doesn't have to reproduce fast. If it takes a million years for it to make a copy of itself, who's counting? And until there's competition, you can reproduce slow and still get the benefits of the evolutionary ratchet. The evolutionary ratchet is the key. You've got to have replication and selection. And speaking about replication selection, you make the case in the book. And based on your earlier works, that language is almost also certainly an evolved process. And there are higher order and lower order languages. Although we don't see, you know, Denise Evans walking around. We still do see primitive languages with, you know, even non-written languages that exist on the planet.

I interviewed your crosstown rival, Noam Chomsky, and he sort of made a persuasive case that, to me, had implications for artificial intelligence. And that was that, you know, the communication, there's so much nonverbal and even the most durable form of communication might be generated nonverbally. And that made me think, what extent can these LLMs that you mentioned in the book as well, can they ever achieve, you know, a Turing test level? We'll talk about the deficiencies and problems you have with the Turing test later. But could it, could an LLM that doesn't have a body or, you know, doesn't have the ability to pop a circuit, you know, to cause it to feel pain when it does something wrong? Could it ever hope to evolve, you know, or to be present itself as, you know,

almost, you know, human level artificial intelligence if it doesn't have embodiment. Well, of course, it has to have embodiment in one sense. You have to have some hardware to run the software on. One of the points that I like to stress these days is that brains are not at all like von Neumann machines. They're not, they're not, one of the amazing things about computers, and touring was very clear about this, is that they have to be very bureaucratic. They have to be very rigid. They have an operating system. And they have to do, you have to know exactly what they're going to do in

order to program them. Their design depends on the uniformity, on the fact that there's billions, trillions of exactly identical elements, almost to the, yes, to the atomic level, your flip-flops, your registers and you have timing pulses and all. Brains aren't like that. Brains are made of billions of individualistic neurons. No two are exactly alike and they don't act in quite the same time scale. So it's an entirely different underlying structure. Now, could you nevertheless build such a structure in,

a silicon digital computer. Yeah, sure you could because you can you can simulate it. In the same, I mean, you can simulate an analog machine in a digital machine. You can simulate a parallel machine in a

serial machine. You pay big prices for that in time and energy. LLMs are incredible energy hogs compared with human brains, energy is really key. And some people, for instance, Terry Deacon, argues that for all the wonders of computers, they ended up getting us to explore the wrong

part of design space because all the computers that were designed following touring and von Neumann and the like were in a, a sense, he calls them parasitic. They didn't have to worry about energy. They were provided for by their plug into the power. And this means that all the designs, all of the space that we've explored has been space that depends on there being a sort of steward, shepherd, nursemaid, to take care of the machine to make sure it's energy. No, no, no, neuron, no circuit has to worry about whether it's going to be alive or whether it gets enough energy. Whereas the neurons in your brain are working for a living. They will die if they don't

connect. And so your brain is made of neurons and glial cells even more. The neurons are looking for work. And there's no HR director. There's no human resources director or N our neuron resource director. And when a part of the brain dies, neurons, hungry

for work, will take over those tasks. We don't have anything much like that in digital computers yet. So brains are, they are computers, of course. They're not radiators. They're not for cooling the blood.

They're control centers. They are the control headquarters for movable arms and legs for mobile things. That's what brains are. And so they're computers, but they're not much like digital computers. Still, still, you could simulate all in principle. I want to get your thoughts on Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner, good friend of the show. His take is that human consciousness is non-alorithmic, and so it is not even capable of being modeled by touring machines. And he actually believes in sort of a quantum mechanical understanding of human consciousness.

He implies that not only quantum mechanics is responsible for consciousness, but gravitational forces are at work via what's called the vile curvature, which is a derivative of Einstein's stress energy tensor and gravitational curvature tensor, GMU Nu. So what do you make of these physical interpretations where the microtubules are caused to their wave functions collapse caused by the local variance of a classical field? So quantum mechanics propitiates a, is provisciated by a classical mechanical structure like Einstein's relativity. that GMEU is a classical tensor.

It is not quantum at all. What do you make of these physical interpretations? I think it's malarkey. And I thought so, you know, I think I wrote perhaps the first review of Roger Penrose's Emperor's New Mind. And I pointed out the problem right there. He has the wrong notion of algorithm that he's using there. He's thinking of algorithms for things.

And look, there's a... There's no feasible algorithm for chess. There isn't. It's not an infinite game, but there's no feasible algorithm for it, almost certainly. That means computers can't play chess, right? No, it doesn't mean that at all.

It means that they can play very good chess. It's just that the algorithms that they use are algorithms for playing legal chess. And how many of those are there? There's gazillions. And some of them are better than others. There's no algorithm for being a perfect mathematician, but there's algorithms for learning a hell of a lot and doing pretty well.

And don't expect that you're going to have an algorithm that guarantees truth ever. He's just setting up a preposterous standard for what a mind is. And right. So does that mean the more? mind is not algorithmic? No. It means there isn't the master algorithm. Even some people in AI sometimes talk about the master algorithm, but it's not a master algorithm in the sense that Penrose thinks. It's an algorithm. They're doing pretty darn well. And how many of those are there? Cazillions. That's right. More than stars in the sky.

The big mistake, this big mistake goes back to Descartes, who wondered if he could trust his clear and distinct ideas. And he decided he could if God would guarantee them. And so he tried to prove the existence of God so he could trust his clear and distinct ideas. That's a hopeless quest. The best we can do is gather the smartest people around we could find. let them compete to find the truth and see where you find conciliance, see where you find a grief. And that's the best you can do. It's good enough.

It gets us to the moon. It gets robots to Mars. It builds bridges and cures diseases and allows us to predict eclipses years in advance. All of that knowledge is defensible. It's not like geometry. And even in the context, you know, staying with Einstein for a bit, my favorite, you know, kind of counterpoint to the claims of AI, you know, apocalypse is the so-called story of Einstein's happiest thought, which you may know,

but I'll repeat it. So Einstein said, quote, my happiest thought was that an observer in free fall would experience no gravitational forces. And it led to the conception of the so-called Einstein equivalence principle. And the reason I bring that up is because I'm curious how a computer might be expected to, A, visualize what freefall might feel that sensation in the pit of one's stomach as you crest a hill or on a roller coaster or launch on a SpaceX rocket, A, and B, whether or not said computer could identify with this happiest thought. In other words, there seems to be something, you know, sui generis, something I don't know, that Einstein could have felt. And I don't know,

I propose that as the Keating test, you know, can algorithms come up with completely new laws of physics, laws of nature, things that are verifiable, empirical, connected to data such as the type that my colleagues and I collect through our telescopes. What's your take on that? Are there possible worlds where, you know, possible in areas where AI can actually create new laws of physics, not discover, oh, well, the Navier-Stokes equation behaves like this, so he should render smoke like that. No, no, no. Truly new. A Newton's sixth law, you know, something, a fifth law of thermodynamics. Can you envision that, Dan? Yeah. I'll tell you why. Yeah. All learning, all invention, all discovery is a matter of generating test. It's all.

That's what evolution does. It's what we do. Right now, you've got lots of possible thoughts running through your head. Some of them are getting thought, and some of them are dying. They're not rising to the level of you're not going to say them, and you're not even really going to think them. But that's what's going on in your head. It's what's going on in my head right now.

We're all cherry pickers. Now, cherry pickers, first you do it rough, Then you do the quality control. You have the fountain that generates lots of stuff. And then you have the critic, the judger who decides what's worth further work. I think that LLMs, for instance, can be very valuable in the fountain roll, in the generation roll. They can be very good at generating off the wall things that you or I would never think of. Why?

Because they're not like you and I. They're different. They're enough different that they can come up with gonzo ideas that might, for someone, someone might say, oh, I wish I'd thought of that, but I never would have thought of that. Now, we all have styles. Chopin had his style. Mahler had his style. Beethoven had his style.

Wonderful. But that means Chopin doesn't have Rimsky Korsakoff style or Rachmanana's style. Don't expect Chopin to write a Gershwinton. You could hear it just fine, but it would never occur to him. And I think that LLMs feeding on the scrapings of the Internet for years and years and tremendous data mining and digesting, but not just the way we do it. They might be a great source of thinking outside the box, off-the-wall ideas that we, who are humans, would just not, it wouldn't occur to us, and they'd be right.

Look, when we look at the history of great science, we see the really wonderful breakthroughs are often where people come up with an idea that first seemed sort of daft and even outrageous, even impossible, and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, maybe something here. And I think that we've now got a new generator to go with our testers. And we're still going to rely on human testers.

Now, they can do some testing too. The AIs can do some testing. But I think we want to keep them as smart machines, not artificial colleagues. We don't want to give them the autonomy they could have because then they'll be dangerous. How do we enforce that? By keeping them parasitical,

making them machines that don't, half defend for themselves that we can unplug. In principle, we don't have to do that. We could try to make them as self-sustaining, as a gential, as autonomous as we are. But we shouldn't. And one of the things that I used to point this out of you, I say, just imagine that you learned that there was some person

or some institution that had your on-off switch, what would you one of the highest priority goals be for you? My welfare. You're getting resting control of that switch. And if they're that smart, they're going to be pretty good at it. And we already see inklings of that in the red team testing where I think it was GPT4, that conned a human being into identifying a capture because it didn't have eyes.

So look out. We don't want that. We don't. We have enough psychopaths and sociopaths running around as it is. And AI agents will be sort of natural psychopaths if they may because they are sort of immortal. They're immortal up to planetary constraints, right? The paper, I pointed this out to Nick Bostrom and others, you know, there aren't infinite amounts of, you know, iron and nickel and so forth in the Earth's crust that are easily

exploitable by fellow, you know, AIs and agents. But you're right. And it is interesting. I ask Sam Harris, and I'll ask you, I'll tell you, but I said, Sam, you don't believe that humans have free will, but do you believe AI has free will? What do you think he said? I don't know. He said yes. He thinks it does. So, and I love to say it. He thinks AI has free will. He thinks he says he believes they can develop free will. Maybe not now, but they can develop a free will. I mean, he's a very significant opponent and really believes that we should be extremely cautious with AI. Well, so am I. I am sounding the alarm. I have a piece about counterfeit people in the Atlantic.

and other pieces in progress, and I've been talking about this, basically with every audience that I get. We're really in danger of being lulled into fascination with large language models, things like TPP4, to the point where we're going to be turned into puppets because we will be reasoned with and cajoled and fascinated and seduced and lied and lied to and we won't know who to trust and once we lose trust civilization is in deep trouble

We rely on trust. Hey, it's me again. So sorry to interrupt the end of the deep dive, but I need to assign you a little bit of homework, but there's something in it for you. Besides the intellectual knowledge that you'll gain from joining my Monday Magic messages that I send out each and every Monday,

I share everything from around the universe of ideas that I explore, exclusive content highlights, the latest science news, and of course the occasional fun facts that you can impress your friends with magnificent dad jokes and memes. To get on the mailing list, just head over to briankeating.com slash list and join. That's briankeeting.com slash list.

And you will be entered also to win one of these chunks of space schmots, a real 4 billion-year-old piece of the early solar system. And I send one out every month to a lucky listener and subscriber to the Monday Magic mailing list. But I always send one out, guaranteed if you have a dot edu email address. And to get that, go to briankeed.com slash edu. Thanks. Now let's get back to boggling the brain with Dan Dennett. I agree. And, you know, the thing that I point out, you know, how many phone numbers can you remember right now, Dan? I mean, you might be able to remember more, but because we grew up in an age, you and I without cell phones. But I know my wife's phone number and my own phone number. And that's about it. And how many people know directions, you know, to any new place or can derive, you know, across town. We've outsized. these things. So it's obvious we're going to outsource thinking to these machines, right? And

they're not vetted. In regards, yes. Yeah, and they're not vetted. And they're wonderful and they're alluring because they do the work of 100 graduate students and they get it more or less right, except when you ask it point of fact, you know, render a picture of George Washington and you get a beautiful, you know, Oprah Winfrey-like character with a white wig. So they're still Obviously, guardrails put in accidentally by, you know, probably some, you know, 21-year-old, you know, interns at Google. And that'll be taken care of. But eventually, we won't know who to trust because I trust them to, you know, with questions I won't ask my rabbi. But then sometimes I'll get advice that, you know, it tells me, I ask it, what books has Brian Keating written?

And it'll say, losing the Nobel Prize. Okay, fine. It'll say into the impossible. Yes, thank you. Then I'll say, a brief history of time. I'll say, no, no, no. That was, you know, Professor Hawke. Oh, I'm sorry.

My apology. So I think we're going to have to have some way of vetting these entities and understand. Well, I think what I think the first. That's why I like the term counterfeit. I don't know about you, but do you look carefully at every $20 bill you get? No, never. No, either do I. Why?

Because we have laws in place. It's a. Very serious crime. You can go to jail for 10 years if you get caught passing counterfeit money or making it. The technology is very good. Not perfect, but it's just not worth people's while to make counterfeit money. We can make it so it's not worth people's while to make counterfeit people. We can put in place the watermarking, the systems.

For starters, every hardware manufacturer, who makes anything that connects to the internet could have, and be required by law, to have the detection. It's like colored copiers in Europe, where they have a lot of colored currency. If you put euros in a high-end color copier, it won't copy them.

And we can have things like that. which will and it will be particularly against the law to introduce a counterfeit person that doesn't have the watermark on it. That would be something which is clearly not inadvertent. And when they catch people doing it, they will know they're doing it for nefarious reasons. And there will be penalties for that. That's right. And especially when the stakes are, I mean, I feel like we've already reached the tipping point, right? this year is an election year. And can you imagine the robocalls that you get from Joe Biden saying it's not important to come out to vote. You know, I need your help to get me out of jail. You know,

it could be so nefarious. And there's a plethora of brilliant. We tend to be very Ameriocentric, right? But we don't think about the brilliant engineers working in Iran or in Russia or any of these that are malevolent and would like to see nothing in this chaos agent sowing the seeds of discord among the, our democracy. And so we've already passed a Rupaccon in some sense. This year, I'm very worried about the election this year, you know, considering whether or not it will be manipulated by artificial agents, counterfeit humans, as you say. I want to talk about your amazing book from bacteria to Bach and Back. It inspired me to want to write a book called From Rocks to Rock Mononoff and back. We'll see if that ever comes out. So it talks about the effects of

evolution on human cognition. And in particular, I'm curious about the field of bioengineering and bioethics and how might our understanding of evolution and maybe a responsibility, not to viruses, but if we have ethical responsibilities, perhaps to artificial humans, what ethical quandaries could come up in the age of CRISPR and genetic modifications? What do you see? Are you optimistic? about, you know, human's ability to keep the, you know, ethical controls in place? Or what would be your equivalent warning, if you have one, for bioengineering? First of all, the biologists are ahead of the AI people, in that they've been sensitized to this for quite a few years.

And they have the various levels of safety for not letting artificially created or genetically modified organisms loose because they realize that they can they can replicate and and create horrible catastrophes and that's true also of AI's that's one of the points I make in my piece about counterfeit people is they can replicate computers are great at replicating things and this is this Jeff Hinton and I agree entirely about this is this is a real danger is that they they can replicate, and it doesn't even need evil age actors. It doesn't need bad actors. It just needs a few slips by second-rate engineers and we'll have replication getting on. This has been a concern for years over since the field of artificial life got started. CRISPR and other technologies

in the pipeline are going to make a huge difference. One of my favorite biologist. Francis Arnold is breeding proteins that don't exist in nature, using artificial evolution. And she's trying to make proteins that will, you know, turn trash into butane or fuel. And it's entirely possible. And her thesis supervisor said to her, But Francis, there's no proteins in nature that do anything like that. She says, that's because there hasn't been selection for them. And now there is. And is she making progress?

Well, she got the Nobel Prize in chemistry. So yes. So we got some great scientific advances in the future there. but I think people are being suitably, suitably cautious about it, and maybe the current furor about AI will get everybody thinking a little bit more carefully about some of these prospects.

And there are, I was involved in a National Academy of Sciences group that was asked about whether we should allow human fetal stuff, stem cells to be zingno transplanted into chimpanzees. And we decided no. No. This is, we do not want to risk creating a hybrid primate that is problematic. in the way such a hybrid. The

the gaps in the species that Darwin noted, they're very important. It's very important that there be gaps. That there be boundaries to reproduction and boundaries, and that we have

some pretty clear cases that we have islands, not all archipelagos attached to each. other. And we don't, we really don't want to make chimpanzees that have in the womb brains that have human, human DNA in them. Exactly. I want to take the opportunity to talk with you about the philosophy of science, in particular the philosophy of physics. And that's to raise, you know, sort of a question to you that I've asked to several other philosophers like David

Albert who is visiting me last month. I say often that, you know, a lot of social scientists, they're accused of having physics envy. You've probably heard that canard. But I actually believe that physicists have mathematician envy in that at least a mathematician has girdled to lie back, fall back on, to say what is possible to be considered as part of the program of mathematics. But physicists, if you ask a physicist, they'll probably mumble something about popper and falsification. But I think that's really out of vogue these days. So what would you suggest to me and my graduate students as a physicist, experimentalist in my case, what would you suggest as a good, you know, alternative definition for them to decide what is,

you know, crack pottery and what is legitimate science for us to take a deeper? interest and invest our most valuable resource time into? First of all, I'd like to draw attention to a distinction that one of my philosophical heroes, Wilfred Sellers, made between what he called the manifest image and the scientific image. The manifest image is that's the world we live in. It's got tables and chairs and rainbows and colors and baseball and money and consciousness and free will and all those things. And then there's the world of physics or science in general, and that's where you have the atoms and the molecules and the quarks and the law of gravity

and all of that. What's real? And as you know, there have been times when some physicists wanted to say, well, it's the tables and chairs that are real, and physics is all sort of Just, well, as my friend David Moser once said, wonderful lie, he said, Quarks are the dreams stuff is made of. And then, of course, you have others who say, no, it's just atoms in the void. And there aren't really minds or bodies or colors or anything. Well, those are, I think, myopic positions that. We all live in the manifest image and we couldn't get through the day and thank goodness for evolution.

It's provided us with the manifest image. Evolution including cultural evolution has provided us with a well-behaved world of middle-sized dry goods, hardware, cars, boats, people, dogs and cats. colors, rainbows, baseball, et cetera. Let's call that real. Even though we can recognize that in some sense, it's all a user illusion. Nature has provided us with these smearing the boundaries,

fuzzling it up. It's a user illusion. It's like the user illusion of your cell phone. It's not a bad illusion. It's a good illusion. We are not the victim. where the beneficiaries of this illusion, as same way you're the beneficiary of the user illusion on your cell phone.

Let's get rid of the idea that the claim that this is illusory is, as it were, derogatory. No, yippee, we've got this wonderful user illusion that nature has provided for us. And now we have software engineers who are copying nature nature and making other user illusions for us so that we don't have to understand what's going on inside our cell phones. Now, is the user illusion real? Well, yeah, it's real. And, you know, it's in terms of LED patterns on the screen and little sound effects and things like that,

which are all quite adjustable. Now, how about the user illusion in our heads? Is that real? It's It's real, but it isn't what you think it is. There aren't any colors. There's no screen in your head. It doesn't have to be. Because you got eyes. You look at the screen and, or you look at the world and the user illusion is made for you to use.

And you use it and what it's of, what it's made of is tables and chairs and dollars and music and poems. and people and all the rest of the things in the manifest image. So that's reality. And it's also, in the sense that physicists and biologists and others can understand. It's all sort of illusory. One thing that's, you know, kind of struck me over the years is how academia has changed. And your book is really a wonderful sort of series of time capsules.

I don't know if such a thing has even been invented, but it's a memoir and it's describing, in your own words, how side quest, how academia has changed. That's the way I read it. And we're really delighted to see that. And I wanted to get your take on the future of academia, especially in light of things like we've already discussed, artificial intelligence. I often make the case, you know, why should students learn, you know, special relativity from Brian Keating when they can learn it. from Albert Einstein through the 10 million words that he has recorded in print, and we can make a LLM and a holographic rendering using NVIDIA graphics chips to render everything down to the last wrinkle.

So our profession of the professoriate hasn't changed since the year 1080 in Bologna, Italy. Do you feel like... You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we say? 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. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At risk that we might be the last generation to profess in the way that we do, is, you know, or is it more resilient? I felt like COVID would be the end of professorship if it were vulnerable. But, but, but it's, it's resilient. So what do you make of academia? How much has it changed and what do you see for the future? Are you advising a bright young graduate student?

Should she go into this field? Well, the immediate future, I think, is we're going to have to douse the flames of polarization between the woke and the anti-woke, that's a great distraction and a great mistake. Well-meaning, as most things are, put forward by well-meaning people, but I think deeply problematic. I blame it a lot on the postmodernist. We said we don't have to worry about truth. No, we need to worry about truth. Truth matters. And we have to be the defendants of truth, and we have to be the defendants of academic freedom. And we have to recognize that there are hard truths. Well, let me say something a bit surprising, maybe. Is truth, as it were, all you need to worry about? No.

There are truths that we don't need to assert and that we don't need to discover. And if you wonder about that, just ask yourself if there's truths about yourself that you don't think the world would be better knowing. Certainly, you wouldn't be better knowing them. Nor would anybody else be better. Secrets have their place, and we just don't have to explore them. And there are areas of scientific research that we could just, don't do it, man, don't do it, lady. These are, these will just make more trouble than they're worth.

And find another topic for your curiosity. But the truth does matter. And it's truth. And people aren't entitled to their own truth. They're not even really entitled to their own beliefs. If their beliefs are stupid enough and ill-informed enough, and if they're radically victimized by disinformation, then at some point we should hold them responsible for that.

I think this is one of the hardest things to figure out. how do we make people responsible for their own beliefs? And we all rely on our informants. I have my informants that I trust. In every field, there are the scientists, philosophers, whose opinion I trust. And I may have made some mistakes. I may have had some curious informants whose views I shouldn't trust. And I'm on guard for that.

And of course, in my books, I've gone after a few that I think shouldn't be trusted to the extent that they are. Academic bullies, for instance. You know Goodhart's law. is that when a symptom becomes a target, it ceases to be a good symptom. Pubbishop is a good example. Yes. We come up with something which is a pretty good symptom of excellence. And then people gain the system.

And nature games the system. Evolution discovered Goodheart's law. billions of years ago. And there are plenty of examples where nature games the system. It's, don't, whenever you make laws, for instance, you have to expect that there are going to be loopholes, that if there are any loopholes that would be found and you can't make a law without loopholes. Expect some people. You made the law because people wanted to do something and they shouldn't. They're still going to want to do it and so they're going to look for loopholes. So Goodheart's law is a very important principle, and it's a basic principle of nature.

And it governs academia as it governs all other things. So don't expect a perfect fix. We're just going to have to roll with the punches and keep fixing things as we go and recognize that people, some well-intentioned, some not-so-well-intentioned, are going to gain the system when they can. Yeah. So sticking with academia, but only tangentially, do you remember a former student of yours named Jonathan Blackley? He was a physics major, and he is a video game designer. He's actually credited with designing the original Xbox. He was a physics major at Tufts in the 1980s, late 1980s. And he used to call, you used to call him, he took a, he took a class with you, and he said he was called by you an example of the scientific mind.

But the thing that he wants to thank you for, well, two things. One, he wants to thank you for recommending the chef's choice knife sharpener that he still has from 30 plus years ago. So he thanks you for that. But he also wants to thank you for leaving Twitter. Now, I, you know, I didn't do that research. Why did you leave Twitter? You criticize Elon's, you know, you don't want to be a part of it.

Can you explain? What did you mean by that? Oh, I think it's obvious. I don't have any deep reasons for leaving Twitter. I just thought that Elon Musk was the worst sort of loose canon and that he was not taking seriously the problems that Twitter is causing. And I was involved in Twitter because Deb Roy was originally an MIT professor. Wonderful thinker, roboticist, an AI person, computer scientist.

And Deb was actually the, I think the vice president for research at Twitter for a while. And Deb encouraged me to get on Twitter. And he's left. I've left. I think Deb is left. He's certainly very worried about the. harm that can be done by social media. And he started out being very optimistic about it,

and I sort of convinced him that it was more problematic than that. There's a paper we did together in Scientific American called Our Transparent Future, where we talk about how transparency is good, but we don't want perfect transparency. Perfect transparency is more than corrosive. It's absolutely destructive of responsible agency. David Brin here at UC San Diego and elsewhere has written a lot about that. It's transparent society. So, Dan, I've got a few questions from the audience besides that one that you answered.

The first one is how do we raise children from in this time where they have such a small attention span to focus on things like you did in your grand career in an environment where they're, basically flooded with dopamine releasing stimuli. What advice do you have for parents? This comes from one of my viewers, Nan'an 33-47. That's a very good question. And I don't know if I have any, I don't think I have any original wisdom on that.

I'm worried about it. I have grandchildren. And I'm happy to say I see the grandchildren really getting interested in books, not all of them, but some of them, and really interested in making things and not just spending their time doing video games and social media, although they, at least some of them do quite a bit of that. I think this is a problem, and I encourage people to create periods of potential boredom. for your children where nevertheless you put them in a room with some things they wouldn't look at them if they had a phone or a television in there but if they just have to stay there they probably will look at them although there was a study at Stanford you know one of the not too dissimilar from the prisoners survey a study i think where they they gave children not children but they gave freshmen

or, you know, sophomores at Stanford, the opportunity to be in a room without any cell phone for 30 minutes, or they could use the cell phone. They still had to stay in there, but they had to endure a significant electric shock. And suddenly like half of them took the electric shock so that they could use their cell phones. And that was 30 minutes. So I'm not that saying. Well, that's a recent experiment, obviously. Stanford has done some other wacky experiments in the past.

They have, that's right. The famous prison experiments. That's right. So another listener, viewer, Zaggy 21. Reminder, you can always ask my esteemed guest questions at my YouTube channel, a community page, as Dr. Brian Keating or Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram, anywhere you like. What does Dan think that Hitchens would have thought about? or become given if he had survived to be in this era of culture wars.

Would he have remained a champion of free speech and liberty, or would the woke mind virus had changed him in some way? Oh, I think he'd be entirely on the side of free speech. I learned a lot from Hitch. I didn't get to know him well. It was only during that era of the four horsemen that I spent some time with him. But he, one of the things he taught me is that you could be outrageous with impunity. If you're British, Dan, if you're British, you can.

Yeah, yeah. Something with the accent. But when I wrote Breaking the Spell, my book on religion, which is the most ecumenical and mild of the four books. Yeah. A lot of people who thought they were very smart and are very smart, told me that, you know, I was going to have to have bodyguards and I was going to have to change my phone number and everything and really start protecting myself that the religious right was really dangerous.

To satisfy my wife largely to placate her, I took some significant precautions for a while. And then Hitz just went all over the Bible belt without tempering his speech at all. He did just fine. So that was an important lesson to learn. I think that the religious rite is a sort of, it's what's sometimes called an apple growing a distress crop. When you feel that you're losing, you get desperate and you start and you start striking out. And we're in that desperate period now because religion is losing a lot of ground and fast. And so the ones that see that happening all around them are getting desperate.

And we have to calm them down and ease them into their reduced influence. in the world. Talk about and we'll wrap up with just two more questions from me if I can beg your forbearance for just a few more minutes, Dan. And that's related to Richard Feynman. And you mentioned Feynman and meeting him, you know, towards the end of his life and having some interactions with him. And the relationship that I really want to ask you about maybe is his famous claim called the cataclysm question, where he said, what statement conveys the most information in the fewest words about the universe? And he claimed it was the atomic hypothesis that everything's made of little atoms that are whirling around and moving at tremendous speeds and

pair up and make interesting combinations through various permutations, et cetera, et cetera. I want to ask you, if you had to, you know, sort of speculate on the most powerful statement in science, philosophy, could be from your career. something that humans have a right to have a little bit of putzpah, a little bit of swagger, having invented, discovered, or come upon. What would that be? What is sort of the paradigmatic example of the majesty of the human mind? No, I had no difficulty with that question at all. By the way, it was his books that really influenced me. I didn't have that much interaction with him, but I thought, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, and the second one, who's the second one,

The title slips my mind right now. What do you care what other people think? Yeah. Yeah. Everybody should read those books, in part because he's so good and so willing to share his tricks. Yeah. And when I wrote intuition pumps, I wanted to do the same sort of things. Look, a lot of this is just tricks.

You can all do them. Here are ways you can be smarter if you do these tricks. I think, as I've said, if I were to give up. prize for the best idea anybody ever had, it would be Darwin's. Because it's Darwin's idea that ties the world of science to the world of art and culture and humanity, that it is Darwin's idea, which is a strange inversion of reasoning. It's the idea that intelligence isn't the source. It's the effect of mindless, purposeless turning.

And that turns everything upside down, and it's still there and it's even more wonderful. That's right. And it's always fun for me to point out that both Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein were deeply suffering from what we call the imposterouser. syndrome. And Darwin famously said, I am very poorly today and very stupid. And I hate everyone and everything. One lives only to make blunders. I'm going to write a little book from Murray on orchids today. And I hate them worse than everything. So farewell. And in a sweet frame of mine, I am ever yours, Charles Darwin. And Einstein, I came upon this. I'm giving a TED talk, which will undoubtedly get at least a logarithm of the number of views that your wonderful, famous TED Talk got, and you discussed that in your new book. But I'm giving a talk about

the imposter syndrome entitled, Am I Good Enough to Have the Imposter Syndrome? And I came up... I love it. Thank you. Thank you. I hope, as I say, it does... It's a fraction of your TED Talk's views. We'll put a link to that talk in this show notes. But Einstein said, I consider myself an involuntary swindler, and I am not deserving of all the attention people give. me. But on that note, I want to finish with the last question kind of tied into another quote by Richard Feynman. And Feynman said, you know, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. And my podcast is called Into the Impossible. And it's named after Sir Arthur C. Clark, who said the only way to know the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

So that's where I got the name of this podcast. But he also said a few other things, including for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. I like to hit my department chair with that every now and then. But he also said the following, and that's how you close your book with a chapter called, What If I'm Wrong? And that's to ask you this comment on this question or this statement by Sir Arthur C. Clark. He said, when an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is impossible, he is very certainly right. But when he says something is impossible, he is very likely to be wrong. I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about, Dan?

If anything. Oh, gosh. I've changed my mind about quite a few things. And sometimes in order to, I would be seduced by a wisecrack. In my first book, I said about an idea about the language of the brain. brain, I said it seemed to have all the virtues of replacing the little man in the brain with a committee, which was, I thought, a pretty good gag. And then later I realized, no, no, that's right. Replacing the little man in the brain with the committee is exactly the way to go.

Homuncular functionalism, as it's often called, thanks to Bill Lichen, who gave it a name. The idea that we big human agents are made of actually about a trillion smaller agents, human cells, and a lot of cells that aren't even more cells that aren't human. And this is the road to understanding what we are. We're colonies of agents. We do replace the little man in the, the brain with the committee. That's how you make progress. Well, Dan, this has been a true treat for me. It's a first time meeting. I hope we get to meet in person someday because the simulacrum should be

replaced wherever possible. I can't thank you enough for this wonderful interview and I can't wait to share it with the world. Thank you so much, Dan, for people. Well, very good. I look forward to seeing what you edit out of it. That is, I'm interested in the finished product, not the, I don't worry about what you ended up with. Absolutely. Oh, thank you, Dan. Have a good day. Feel better. Feel well. Bye. Bye. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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