Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Exploring the Intersection of Philosophy and Physics w/ Bernardo Kastrup [Ep. 416]

Episode Date: May 19, 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! Ever wondered what happens when the realms of physics and philosophy collide? You get an unparalleled intellectual odyssey that goes far beyond the limits of traditional discourse. Join me and the renowned philosopher and computer engineer Bernardo Kastrup as we explore the nature of reality, the mind-body problem, psychedelics, AI, and some of the most fundamental questions in cosmology.  Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental.  He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered).  Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association, and Big Think, among others. Bernardo’s most recent book is The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com. Our thought-provoking conversation was led by Fidias Panayiotou, who took us on an exciting journey from empirical observations to abstract speculations. Tune in!  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:06:11 My thoughts on Bernardo’s theory  00:23:41 The true potential of AI 00:39:11 Spirituality and God  00:45:47 Bernardo’s experiences with psychedelics  00:55:51 How I discovered Galileo  01:02:42 The problem of fine-tuning 01:07:50 Getting lost in abstraction  01:15:05 Why I have a podcast 01:24:37 The case for idealism  01:33:25 Why you should be interested in astrophysics  01:37:14 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 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Bernardo Kastrup: 💻 Website: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/  ➡️ Subscribe to the Fidias Podcast: 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@fidiaspodcast  ➡️ 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

Do you ever wonder what happens when the realms of physics and philosophy collide? They used to be one in the same. Natural philosophy, but now they couldn't be more different. When you do it, you get an unparalleled intellectual odyssey that goes far beyond the limits of traditional discourse. Join me and renowned philosopher and computer engineer, former recovering physicist Bernardo Castro. As we explore the nature of reality, the mind-body problem, psychedelics, AI, and some of the most fundamental questions in quantum physics and cosmology, today's pursuit of truth will take us on a multiversal, multidimensional, multifluous form and travel through the multiverse and back. Our thought-provoking conversation was led by our friend Fiddeus,

Penaiotto, who managed to take us on an exciting journey from an empirical observation to abstract speculations. So buckle up. Tune in, this is going to be a wild one. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors. Where do you think is the intersection between your work, guys? I'm really curious. Well, actually, what do you think? Because you've had on Bernardo before I've had on Bernardo on my podcast.

So what do you think is the intersection of our work? Well, if I knew the answer, I was going to not ask the question. But for what I put you both in science, that's. the most I can do. Well, I think we both like big, big topics. We like to tackle the most interesting and most engaging topics on Earth because we only have a limited amount of time that we live. So I think when I see Bernardo's work, I'm reminded of, you know,

how much a human can do. And maybe I'm slacking a little bit too much. But he keeps the BK, the BK reputation as the king, The king, not the Burger King, but the king. And philosophy, of course, touches with physics. It needs to touch. Otherwise, you have ungrounded philosophy. In other words, you have pure fantasy, human fantasizing.

So in that sense, of course, philosophy and physics touch and to some extent even overlap, in the sense that one can inform the other. But physics informs philosophy more than philosophy informs physics. I think also more interesting is where we differ, not intellectually, but in terms of what we do. So most people have never met an experimental cosmologist, which is what I do. It's very different than the theoretical and philosophical realms that Bernardo explores. Even though we have the same ultimate goal to understand the base layer of reality, we go about it different ways. And you've had on Avi Loeb, and actually, Bernardo had a wonderful conversation with Avi Loeb.

And, you know, Avi is one of my friends. But he's a theoretical physicist. He's an astrophysicist. He's not looking at the instruments, the building, the technology that actually acquires the hard physical evidence that then people like Avi and Bernardo can then use to approach and apprise how we know what we know about the universe. And there's a lot more people with theories about the universe, right, Bernardo, than there are people that can actually get data and get matter from the universe, right? because the philosophy of cosmology is a unique subject. And this I'm curious, because I didn't explore this with Bernardo, but the philosophy of cosmology, how do you do science?

Well, let me take a step back. Astronomy is really freaking hard because we only get a few things that come into Earth, come into our laboratories that come into our telescopes. We have light. We have gravitational waves. We have neutrinos. We have meteorites, which, by the way, I give away, if you go to my website, If you have a .edu email address, you get a free meteorite.

But besides that, right, Bernardo, there's not much. And so we have to make do with what we have. But at least astronomy has multiple stars, multiple galaxies, multiple clusters. Some say multiple universes. Let's, we're going to debate that. I'm sure. Actually, I think Bernardo and I agree on that nonsense. But there's only one universe, right?

So how do you do an experiment when there's no control? There's nothing you can leave, control, and vary something. So, Bernardo, what? I don't mean to take over, but Bernardo, how do you approach that, the philosophy of cosmology? When it can't, it's not an experimental science. It's not really in the realm of experiment. I think there is a compensation. I mean, you're correct.

The toughest question in science is how do you distinguish correlation from causation? And in experiments, we do that by perturbating the system so you can make that distinction. But we can't go and perturb the cosmos. And that's an issue makes it more challenging. On the other hand, you have a lot to look at. There is a lot of data. There is a lot of stuff happening around us in the cosmos. So maybe you can compensate that way, the sheer statistics.

And one thing at least that you also have going for you is that there is no well there is no bias is too much in cosmology of course there is bias in the sense of what you choose to look at but bias is less insidious than in experimental science because in experimental science bias can percolate the whole thing how you set up the conditions even your choice of what what to perturb what to experiment with and in cosmology it's all out there beyond our reach we can't really inject bias into that. We can only have observational bias. So I think if you take it all into account, I think cosmology is on solid grounds,

even though you can't introduce a perturbation. Bernando said about your field. I'm curious. I had your podcast guys that you did together in Brian's podcast, but Brian didn't say his opinion about what Bernando Castro's theory is on that podcast. Oh my God. And I'm curious to hear here, Brian's thoughts. When I think of Bernardo, I think of, you know, an incredible depth of intellect that he's not afraid to be bold and to assert, you know, his well-researched opinion.

I think it's interesting that he takes kind of a contrarian, I guess, perspective. when we look at things like consciousness, we talked about, you know, topics like panpsychism. And I've had on, you know, Philip Goff and talk with him. I've talked with, and he's, I would say, one of the foremost expositors of panpsychism. I just got an interview with him on his new book called Why. His previous one was on Galileo, his error, because, you know, Galileo is trying to separate the project of consciousness from, you know, in the dualistic sense. that it was outside the physical sciences. Of course, this is Bernardo's, you know, one of his many, many pet peeves about philosophers

of consciousness. But the thing that frustrates me, not about Bernardo, but about when I talk about consciousness, because what we're trying to do is understand how a universe came maybe from nothing, maybe from a preceding cycle of a preexisting universe, who knows, maybe in the multiverse, or whatever. But then from there was a state of pure radiation domination. and that we know for sure lasted many, many minutes, which doesn't sound not very long compared to 13.8 billion years, but actually that we only have one relic from that period of time, and that's the abundance of elements on the lightest left top edge of the periodic table. And that amount of information that we get are the only fossils that we as cosmic archaeologists can do to make sense of how the universe then would go on to make brains and minds and so forth.

And the type of stuff that evolved to what Bernardo specializes in. So I think, you know, I think one of the ways that was interesting to me is we kind of touched on religion, not per se, but there is a religious dogmatism, I feel, in both consciousness. in things like the multiverse and that there are people that adhere to them almost as if they're religions. And the irony is that there's some of the most atheistic, you know, non-practitioners of all. And that's fine. I don't have any qualms whatsoever. People accuse me of being a religious scientist. That's not really yet. I call myself a practicing agnostic. I can get into what that means. But essentially, I don't think it's knowable. That's what agnosticism means. But getting, you know, to the, you know, sort of sense of, you know, why do physicists believe things at a level of passion associated with religious fundamentalism?

I don't understand that. And that's probably because I'm not a sociologist or, you know, that's too hard for me. But I would say the most interesting things are the contrarian perspectives that Bernardo takes and that he's bold. And actually, one of the most admirable things about you, Bernardo. didn't tell you this because it happened afterwards. You basically disappeared from Twitter, right? You basically are not there anymore, or at least the last time I checked. And I found that very admirable, both from a, you know, kind of stand. I don't particularly, you know, feel the need to withdraw from Twitter. But, but I'm curious, how has that affected you? How have you, have you missed anything from not being, you know, around the kind of milieu that you and I would

traffic in with with you know people you know putting their hot takes on the internet for all to see how has that affected you in terms of your professional life and personally in terms of your mental health uh-huh oh there's so much i wanted to comment on everything you said but uh you ask you i have to i have to answer the question um you know i'm still on twitter i still tweet when i publish something or when essential foundation publishes something or occasionally I tweet a subject that I feel passionate about. But I no longer engage in Twitter debates. Because it's fruitless.

It leads nowhere. So I stopped that and did it do good to my mental health? Yes, it definitely did good to my mental health. I don't have anxiety about visibility. I never had that anxiety. So if I'm not much heard of or talked about, it's okay. And it doesn't bother me. You know, my diamond, my metaphor for, you know, this thing that wants to happen through me.

My diamond is all about putting things in the right words and making it available, but not about promoting it very. hard. I went to your podcast. There are some big podcasts I didn't go to. And some people around me who know it go like, how come? How would you not do that? And it's not like I have a bad opinion about other hosts or anything. It's not that. It's just that I don't feel that anxiety to be in the spotlight. But I also don't back off from from a debate if it presents itself, and I think you alluded to that before,

I don't back off from that, no, no. And I sympathize a lot, Ryan, with what you said earlier, about building the instruments as opposed to ungrounded, theoretical fantasizing, and in philosophy there is a lot of that. You will find a critic of philosophy in me, by the way, because I am in that environment, and so I get exposed to its less optimal aspect. And it's easy, you know, to keep on philosophizing.

If you don't ground your work on empirical, fact goes too far, but empirical observation. You know, careful, established empirical observations. If you don't have that kind of litmus test to your fantasizing, or you refuse to acknowledge when that litmus test can be performed, like constitutive panpsychism, which takes elementary subatomic particles to be spatially bound little marbles, which would lead to all kinds of contradictions in physics, because if that were the case, then vacuum fluctuations would be magical. You know, stuff would pop in and out of existence for no reason, and we wouldn't be able to make sense of particle decay.

How can the Higgs bosom decay into two muons? There are no mules inside the Higgs boson, and yet it decays that way. Or even inertia, you know, the Higgs boson explains inertia because it betrays the existence of the Higgs field. And it's the interactions with the Higgs field that leads to inertia. But if you think the Higgs boson is not a ripple on the field, but a spatially bound little marble, then you can't explain even inertia. And coming to grips with this, I think it's important if one wants to seriously philosophize. But a lot of philosophers just stick to their guns, stick to their favorite theories. And, you know, to hell with the rest.

They may change their minds, but usually they change their minds not because of new data, but because they are thinking about things from a different angle or they talk to someone. Hey there, it's me, Professor Brian Keating. I hope that you're enjoying my humble little podcast with a fellow B.K. Bernardo Castro. It was such a fun conversation. and I hope to have many more with great guests like Bernardo, but I can only do so with your help, and so I implore you, just beseeching you.

Please do subscribe and follow the podcast on podcast format audio or on video on YouTube, just follow it, extra credit homework assignment for giving it a thumbs up, liking it, giving it a review. And that really helps me get the greatest possible guest and continue the voyage that we're on. Right now, it's only about 50% of you who are watching are subscribed, and it only takes a second. It's totally free, like almost everything I do, and I'll charge for it at all.

Now, get back to the philosophy of life with Bernard Orchestra and myself. Go ahead. Yeah, no, sorry to interrupt, but you said something very interesting. You said, you know, the philosophy concern with the, you know, and that you're a critic of it, I want to make this a little maybe more provocative and say, I'm actually a big supporter of philosophy and a lover of it. But I also wonder why it's sort of, I don't want to say lost its way. But I want to say that in the old days, Galileo was a philosopher. They used to call them natural philosophers.

And he would make fun of other natural philosophers, that meaning physicists. And of course, you know, Ernest Mock and this guy over here, I have a series of things. I'm going to have a Bernard or Castro finger puppets. But this guy, Einstein, you know, all the things that he did, whenever you hear Godanken experiment. If everyone loves to say godanken, it's my second favorite German word. You know what my favorite German word is Bernardo? Which one?

Crank a wagon. Krancovagen. Oh, okay. Yeah. Ambulance. But when Sabina does it to me, yeah, I get really, really distracted when Sabina says crankavagand. But in reality, we needed philosophy for many,

many years. And I claim perhaps, and maybe you can push back on me, I I know you and I are actually aligned, but it's fun to kind of think about it. But perhaps what's causing the trouble with physics and where physics has gone astray and become lost in math, et cetera, et cetera, is because we've totally ungrounded from Godankan experiments. In fact, all that we can do are build, you know, CERN experiments and Simon's Observatory Experiments and Large Hadron Colle. So maybe do we need more philosophy? Let me ask you that.

Well, I think to the extent that some physicists do philosophy unknowingly, then yes, there needs to be some more awareness about how to do it right. You don't need to have a degree in philosophy to think straight. But there are some arguments coming out from theoretical physics already for a while that are surprising. Like, I think we are aligned on this. When people say, Everatian multiverses follow naturally. from quantum theory, it's like, wait a moment, what do you mean by follow naturally? Or when people say, because basically what they are saying is the following. We have not developed the theoretical capacity to predict the outcome of single observations,

single measurements, as opposed to laws of large numbers. ergo countless casillions of inaccessible parallel universes and it's like wait a moment

you're taking the epistemic limitation of an ape and you're translating that into an explosively inflationary

ontology and you think that this is what follows naturally I mean this is bad philosophy if you know

what I mean it's not thinking straight but how do you decide the theory is useful if it makes

good predictions and we don't need a variation multiverse to make good predictions. It's interpretations. And, you know, there's an old joke, you know, that you need, you know, quantum mechanics or physics needs, needs, you know, kind of the interpretation of quantum mechanics the same way birds need ornithology. It's not really, you know, it's a crutch that we need in order to explain weird things like, you know, spooky action at a distance, so called, or entanglement. in so many words. But in terms of how they actually affect us, we have no access to them.

And so you're free to speculate. I always say it's like software. And I'm sick of like making apologies and saying I love my software and data management. Of course, I'm not even going to say that anymore. But making theories and making predictions is like generating software. You can make it almost cost free. Making experiments is incredibly, incredibly demanding. expensive, painstaking, time-consuming. The amount of time that it took to confirm the Higgs boson

dwarfed the amount by a factor of two orders of magnitude to theorize it between 1956 and 1964, say, by almost an order of magnitude. So these are challenges that experimentalists face. Now, I cannot let my experimental counterparts off the hook because I think a lot of times we only get interested in the nuts and bolts and like setting up the new, the new detectors and the optics and having fun with it and thinking about all the different ways we can play around and get data. And we don't actually stop as often as we should. And I tell my graduate students they must to contemplate the meaning of what we're doing.

We're trying to unravel what happened in the earliest moments of the radiation-dominated universe and question not prove. That's another huge flaw that most people have. have. What do you hope to prove? I always get asked that, Bernardo. I don't hope to prove anything. I hope to falsify everything else. And we've gotten so far away from it that even nowadays, Bernardo, and we haven't touched upon this because it's happened in the year and a half since we spoke. But, you know, the notion that the Big Bang theory is under question and you have to question everything else and there's not, you know, more solid evidence for the universe's

expansion than ever. Just because philosophically, we have what philosophers, I think Schopenhauer, you would know much better than me, they're kind of like auxiliary hypotheses. Like, we have the Big Bang model. We have what's called Lambda CDM. And the Lambda and the DM are auxiliary components that are not part of the model. In other words, we have to tack them on to explain observations, but they're not inherent in the Big Bang model. Is that, Is there any other branch of science philosophy, Bernardo, where that's true? In other words, you need to add on something that has never been observed in order to explain the peculiar features of the universe we do observe. Calibration.

Yeah, I'm afraid. Yeah, there is. There is certainly precedent for this in engineering. For instance, in the field I used to be in technology until a few years ago, leading edge lithography. We always use this constants to calibrate things. Like the most famous equation in lithography is CD or critical dimension equals K times lambda over N.A. NA being the numerical aperture and lambda is the wavelength of the light you're using. And then you have this K in between which sort of summarizes are great many things about the process, the particular process.

So the chemicals, the zernicke tuning of your exposure tool, how the etching tool works, all kinds of things going to that. These calibrations are shorthand for effect that we do not have a good enough theory to model. So you just apply a sort of a calibration, a constant somewhere to make things match. there is precedence for that, but I agree with you that it reflects the incompleteness of some models or the incompleteness of our theorizing about what is actually going on. I mean, quantum fuel theory went a long way into eliminating some of this calibration stuff and making predictions out to, I don't know, 12 points after the decimal.

But it's still out there. Even at CERN, we used to do the, you know, right, I used to be at CERN when we were building the data acquisition system for the, well, for the Atlas and the CMS, but I was in the data acquisition system for the TIOCAL, the TIEO-Calimeter of the Atlas experiment. And we did that stuff too. You know, sometimes you have to do, experimentally, some are more flexible about it, especially if they have statistics. They are more flexible about being pragmatic regarding how you. go about stuff, you know. When we look at, you know, kind of the modern landscape, I mean, it's just amazing to think of how much has changed in the last few years, but getting back to the comment, you know, that I made about philosophy and physics and whether or not we need

physicists, physicists need philosophers anymore. And I think, you know, one of the things I like to get your opinion on, because it's come up in the news much more since you and I spoke, which is, if you recall, Einstein had a happy thought. He said it was the happiest thought of my life that if I were in free fall, I'd experience no gravitational field. Okay. That was, he called that the happiest thought of his life. He said it gave him palpitations. Okay. So an amazing story. And from that, he used that principle to guide him to construct the Einstein equivalent's principle, which Bernardo can verify, is the bedrock. on which general relativity rests.

So without that realization, without that happiest thought, that if he was in free fall, he would feel no gravity, there'd be no rel- someone else would have come along maybe, but maybe not, and it would have been later and so forth. But my question to you, Bernard, I want to pivot towards philosophy using that philosophical good-dankan experiment, thought experiment. To what extent do you expect that artificial intelligence

can construct new, laws of physics. In other words, can an artificial intelligence, A, perceive, visualize a sensation like free fall and that feeling in your gut that you get when you go over a ride too fast, a hill too fast? And B, can it have a happy thought? In other words, can it discern and make judgments based on visceral sensations and use that to bring it, joy. So I'm asking a long question, but Bernardo, can you speculate for us whether or not AI can really do what obviously millions of physicists have done, but in particular, that mode of G'danken experiment translates to actual equations. Can I AI do that? Well, that's a big one,

Brian. I was not expecting that our conversation would go to this depth so quickly. I don't think AI, as we understand it, whoever be conscious in the sense of having a private conscious in their life of its own somehow delineated by the boundaries of the computer. I think that's fantasy. It's a matter of us mistaking the simulation of something for the thing that is simulated. We don't do it for anything else.

I can run a kidney function simulation on my computer accurate at the molecular level and my computer is not going to pee on my desk. But when it comes to consciousness, we think the computer might be on its desk because we think the substrate is irrelevant. This requires such a leap of faith in abstraction. So I don't think that. I don't think an AI can visualize what it is like to free fall and all the emotion and feeling and subjectivity associated with that.

but I will add something that you may not have may not expect from me. I did work with neuronal networks, artificial neuronal networks for years. And what those things do is find regularities. And the more data you have, unless they drown in too much data, or unless you over-trained it and becomes too specialized. and myopic, chances are it will find even more regularities and its ability to handle large volumes of data is nothing like ours. It can handle much, much, much larger volumes of data fundamentally. So I don't think it will ever be conscious, but insofar as what we call the laws

of nature are behavioral regularities in nature. If you feed it a lot of data, it may find some unexpected regularities, maybe more specific. We, in the way we carry out science according to the scientific method today, which requires that we isolate the experimental conditions and control them. In other words, you cannot have any variable influencing the experiments that you don't know about or that you're not controlling. That means that when it comes to basic physics, foundations of physics, and the basic regularities of nature.

At the most fundamental level, we are restricted to experiments with very simple systems. So we can control all the variables under laboratory conditions. But there is no a prior reason why nature shouldn't have some fundamental organizing principles that are only triggered, that only kick in when you have fairly complex systems, fairly rich in degrees of freedom and variables involved. We will never find those, according to the current method,

because it's impossible to isolate and control all the variables, all the experimental conditions. These may be things that only kick in at large macro levels. And there could be that. There's nothing a priori etched in stone in nature that tells us, that all organizing principles should be microscopic. There could be complex, emerging,

macroscopic organizing principles that are as fundamental as conservation of momentum. And an AI in the future dealing with very, very large amount of data

could perhaps filter things in such a way as to pick out some emerging regularities at the macro level. And it probably has a better chance to do that than we do, which doesn't mean that it is conscious, that it has feelings and intuitions and inner life. It only means that it can crunch a whole lot of data better than our natural, wet,

moist, neuronal networks can. What do you think? I'm curious, because you ask the question, so you've been thinking of this. Yeah, no, I've been thinking about an answer. I'm asking lots of people ever since, you know, kind of had that realization that, you know, the physical body and the, you know, kind of mind state or intertwined. And, of course, I'm not the first person. I did, I didn't ask this of Noam Chomsky, but he's sort of the one who inspired me to think about it. Because, you know, as you know, his theory is that there's an intimate relationship, at least between contextual grammar and degenerative.

processes in in in in in in in in you know from infants on up that there's a relate there's a necessity almost for a visceral body in order to um um embody conversation and and the process that we associate with language and so since most of these a i's are natural language at least the ones i'm using or l ms uh it made me think of well you know is there a limit to the l the middle l you the language because of the limitations due to not having a body. In other words, maybe the ultimate AI, we haven't seen yet because it doesn't have the sense, you know, it hasn't been coupled to the Optimus Prime, you know, or to the, or to the, you know, to the embodied mechanical system.

And maybe it can't be. I used to think about it in terms of how do, you know, I have children and how do they learn. Well, they learn a lot from two different ways, you know, seeking pleasure. avoiding pain. And, you know, ultimately, you know, they learn the hard way sometimes. I certainly did. I learned that, you know, if I try to, you know, to impress my friends by leaning off a second story balcony, I'm probably going to end up in the hospital, as I once did when I was about seven years old. Or if I was too close to a, to a fireplace spraying some of my mother's hair gel on it, it would come back and singe my fingers. And it did. In other words, can a concede?

computer system, not only can it function as an intelligence without a body, but maybe we need to embody those bodies of AIs with pain. In other words, when it makes, does something like hallucinates, right now I use it to do this all the time. I say, you know, tell me chat GPT. What are some of the books that Brian Keating has written? You know, because I love doing that. I used to Google myself. You know, now I now I search on chat GPT. So Brian Keating has authored several books, including losing the Nobel Prize, think into the impossible, and why materialism is baloney. And I said, no, chat GPT. No, that's another BK.

That's Bernardo Castro, the last one. The first two are correct, but the first. I actually did it once, Bernardo. No, I just made that out now, but after your great book. but I did it. I did do it once, and it got the first two, and then it said I wrote a brief history of time. And so I started thinking, well, what if I took that chat GPT?

I've got one of my, Bernardo will recognize this from his time in MSL. What is this? This is a lithograph. Very fine lithograph. These are actually bicep. Yeah. It's a mask, right? No, this is actually the superconducting billometer array,

a 256 pixel billometer array that we used on Bicep 2. at the South Pole. That's a spare one. So it's a polarization-sensitive detector system that superconducts at 0.25 Kelvin. Anyway, so what if we took the chat GPT and when it did something wrong, we get one of these high-permability magnet,

and I erase it or I stab it or I shoot a cosmic ray beam into it. In other words, make it feel pain. But really, it's just a joke and ask you the question again, can these things actually, you know, be trained the way a person can. And if they can't, doesn't that imply that they can't do the unique thing that our wet supercomputer, as you call it, can do? I don't think it will feel pain.

I mean, I'm speaking about AI as we understand it now. So silicon-based, you know, using basically sand, metals, and oxides. Something built that way using encoded. symbols in its inner manipulations like binary encoded words and stuff like that. I don't think those will ever be conscious. I think we have, well, I think we have no reason to believe that they will ever be conscious in the sense of having a private conscious in their life of their own. But the problem you raised, which is technically called semantic grounding, large language

models, they have no semantic grounding. They are just digesting what humans have written. it's available on the internet. So they are just sort of reworking those symbols in a way that is coherent with the way they were originally written. So it comes out in a way that is understandable to humans because it was humans who wrote all the text that went into the training of an LLM, a large language model. They don't understand what they're saying.

Chat GPT has no understanding of what it's saying. It's just a natural language interface. a search engine. That's basically what it is. That's what a large language model is. It's a natural language interface to a search engine. It's just regurgitating back to you what it has read during its training, which is much more than any human being could ever read in a lifetime. So you get answers for everything. But there is no understanding because there is no semantic grounding. It's operating with letters. It doesn't know what those letters mean. There is no link between the sequence of letters

T-R-E and the image of a tree out there in the world and without that semantic link there is no understanding but it is theoretically possible and there is work done by a researcher back at Nokia research when

when Nokia was to a thing in the early 21st century around 2000 to 2003 his name is Pentihikonan he is a Finnish guy I think he's from Olo from the mid-north of Finland. And he wrote a number of books

about what he called conscious machines. I don't think the machines he proposed are conscious at all. It's a misnomer. But these are machines that are embodied in the way you meant. In other words, they have sensors that pick up data out in the world.

And instead of encoding information in binary, BCD, or ask key, whatever code you want, they operate directly with the inputs from those sensors. And they manipulate everything on the same basis as what those sensors pick out. So the machines then have, by construction, semantic grounding. All the inner operation is based on the inputs that come from its sensors. So it's manipulating real world data and not arbitrarily encoded stuff that has no semantic grounding.

And it's much more difficult to train. You cannot have a large language model type of training in that way. You don't have this neat, limited set of symbols that you are trying to figure out patterns in how those symbols are sequenced. it's much more difficult there's more analog stuff involved but theoretically yes theoretically you could train

an AI in a manner that is semantically grounded and embodied so to say I still think we would still have no reason to think of it as having a conscience in their life of its own but it would be more intelligent

for real as opposed to appearing to be intelligent like chat GPT. Chat GPT is not intelligent at all. It appears to be intelligent because it was trained on texts written by humans. And it's just regurgitating that stuff. So to us it looks like, wow, it really looks like it's intelligent. Well, it's because the humans who wrote the text it was trained with, those humans were intelligent.

That's where the intelligence is coming from, you know. We touched on a lot of topics that I had questions, but you guys took over and I loved it because Brian is a better podcaster than me. So it was a lot better than I could do. But we... For now. For now. That's right.

So I'm curious to hear your thoughts, Bernanto, because we touched on God topic, your thoughts about spirituality and God as well. Can I later ask? a couple of questions to Brian as well. Yes. As many as you are. Last time he was interviewing me, so it was not appropriate, but now here's the man.

So that's my chance. But I'll answer your question first. I feel that there's a lot of people around that I meet who seem to have an axe to grind either way. There are people who had the religious upbringing. And then they flip and then they want to take revenge on their former selves and they become vicious against religion. There are other people who are very fundamentalist along religious lines. I don't quite understand that because my upbringing, maybe it was unique. My mother is a practicing Catholic.

But she never pushed me to go to Sunday school or do confirmation. I never did any of that stuff. I was baptized because it was a social ritual when I was a baby. And I saw her pray regularly when I was growing up. But there was never any hint of pressure towards me. My father was very science-oriented, had subscriptions to scientific American, popular electronics. He was always doing experiments at home. He was an architect, but he was an electronics hobbyist.

He was a remote-controlled airplane hobbyist. oh, he was an aquarium hobbes. He would do all of that biology stuff to get rare fish to spawn in the aquarium. So he was involved with this very empirical, very scientific stuff, which influenced me a lot more. But the result was,

I grew up without an axe to grind. I don't have an axe to grind, if you know what I mean. I don't feel passionately for or passionately against any spiritual approach to life. my own character is more oriented towards

reason and evidence that's how I'm put together I am less oriented towards introspection perhaps because I am not good at it it's very difficult for me to shift my baseline analytic state of mind I have succeeded in doing that

a few times but very high dose psychedelics it, I'm very hard head. You know, it takes it takes quite a bit. But one, it happened. It did the thing at some point. You know, I kept on increasing the dose until it would do the thing. And even went to my doctor, had my liver checked, had my heart checked, just to make sure

I was doing something that is legal in the Netherlands, psilocybin or magic mushrooms. So you can discuss that openly with your doctor. You say, I'm going to do that. What should I do? And he said, well, in principle. put nothing, but to put you at ease, we'll check your liver and check your heart. And so I felt safe to amp the dose until it happened, but I can't do this on the natch. It happened to me only once on the natch in a completely unexpected way, and it was very mild.

So I don't have that physiological disposition towards religious insight, but I do have a religious attitude about life, a truly religious attitude, not in the sense of any particular religion, but in the sense that I don't see my life as being about myself at all. That idea that my life is about me has fallen by the wayside long ago, and it has come to the point that it's now so abstract to me. I know that this is how it is from most other people, but I know that conceptually. I am aware of it, but I can hardly relate to it emotionally anymore. It's like a parallel reality.

You could say that's a religious disposition, and it probably is. But to finally answer your question, I think religion, if it's not fundamentalistic in attitude, is healthy. I think a relationship to transcendence in some form is something we need. we are meaning seeking creatures. If we try to live in a vacuum of meaning with no relationship to something that survives your presence in this theater, it's tough. It's very hard to avoid falling into the black hole of nihilism and meaninglessness and senselessness and eventually suicide. And religion to me is a very reasonable admission. the admission is the following.

I am a monkey. Monkeys are not in the business of figuring out everything that's salient about nature. Therefore, we should be open-minded and humble when it comes to the meaning of life. Even if we can't articulate it, let's be humbled to know that monkeys are not in the business of figuring it out. So if somebody comes to you and says, I figure it all out and there is no meaning out there. Well, you know, be skeptical because that's a monkey talking to another monkey. And so I'm open to it at the same time that I would be the first one to admit that the greatest crimes in human history were perpetrated in the name of religion. And I'm not talking about Islamic terrorism, which is a very serious problem, but it's comparatively small if you think about what the Jesuits did in the new world.

world, how many lives they've destroyed preaching Christianity with good intentions. You know, the road to hell is paved by good intentions. So we have to be careful about that, but a religious attitude to life, that humbleness towards the great mystery in which we are inserted, I think that's very healthy. I want you to touch a bit more on your experience with psychedelics. It happened later in life. I was already well into my 30s. When I was younger, I didn't have an interest in psychedelics.

I was too busy with the wonders of science to have an interest in psychedelics. When I was at CERN, my religion was called Suzy. Brian knows what I mean by that. Super symmetry. Turned out it's not really true. Or if it is true, we'll never find out because the energy levels are just way too high. But that was my religion. That was the thing that could make me cry when I thought about it.

When I thought about the beauty of the, like, wow, I still get goosebumps when I think of it. But then at some point I started doing philosophy of mind. And I thought it would be irresponsible for me as a philosopher of mind to write about mind without having explored. you know, the edges of mental space that everybody is talking about. So I defined a program for myself. I did a lot of technical reading before. It was almost like I had gotten a grant from some scientific institute to carry out a research program on myself.

So it took like over a year before I actually started doing it and increasing the dose slowly. I never did it for fun. I never did it for pleasure because it is not pleasurable. It's something that sometimes before you do that, you really have to think, do I really have what it takes to do this? Do I really have the guts to do this again? So it was a learning experiment, a learning exercise. And it was very worthwhile to me.

I am not going to put down what psychedelics have done. for me. They have opened avenues in my mind that I didn't know existed. The level of neuroplasticity that I reacquired was just amazing. Whole new vistas opened up. I am very cautious against psychedelic noses when people come back from a trip saying, I'm at an alien from the Pleiades and they are irradiating our hearts with rays from the galactic center. I go like, okay, you didn't really get what psychedelics are about. Trips are symbolic. Trips reveal a lot about you as opposed to something that is fundamentally not you.

It's just that the you is much bigger than you think it is. There is a lot of stuff in there. So, yeah, I will honor psychedelics for what they did to me, but I think these are things one should do when one is an adult later in life. and not for fun and one should be very careful about psychedelic noses about coming back from a psychedelic trip

telling that there are real smirfs on the other side of the moon you know something like this it's symbolic and it's noisy a lot of your own bullshit comes up and you have to have the presence of mind

to discern that without these disclaimers I think it's a good thing it can help people if don't care carefully. Brian, did you have any experience with Cadellics? Yeah, I had very, very many bad trips in the middle of the night experimenting with a substance that my baby provided called Dark Matter in his diaper. No, I, I know what? I've never, you know, this will disappoint Bernardo because I'm hoping I'll visit him someday.

in his native land. You are welcome to come spend some days with us. I would love that. But I've never even tried marijuana. I'm probably the only per. I think I've been drunk twice in my life and once was on my 21st birthday. In America, that's when we start to drink. You know, in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, they give it to you in your bottle.

But no, I've never experimented. I'm of the opinion that my brain is more fragile and precariously, assembled in this, you know, sheet of silicon that if I dropped it from a couple more inches up, it would break. So I've never wanted to monkey around to use Bernardo's language with, with the neuronic, the neural nets that I'm given. There, I did get a brain scan recently, and this is very interesting for it. So I think you'll like this. And you too, Bernardo, I think you should start a podcast. But the, I got a brain scan a few years ago. There were some questions, you know, what, you know, my wife was, you know, why are you acting so stupid lately?

So I decided I'm going to get a part of his research program to get my whole brain MRI. And I also, sadly, this is true. One of my very close friends died of a very aggressive glioblastoma. And I started to get nervous. You know, he's exact same age as me. And, you know, I didn't want to, you know, leave my kids, my wife, you know, it's too soon. So I went in and did it. And this is about three years ago now, right in the beginning of COVID.

And then just recently I decided to go back because they say that you can get glioblastoma can develop in under six months. So you could actually go from nothing to dead in just a few months as my friend did tragically, again, in all seriousness. So I got it done again. And they did a comparison of the brain volume of all the different, you know, sections of the brain. And since 2020, my brain volume, not only it's supposed to go down, but mine didn't go down. In fact, it went up slightly in certain reasons. And it wasn't, you know, thank God it wasn't anything, you know, because I was growing something abnormal.

It was they claim that the vascularization and everything, they claim it's going up. And they're wondering, you know, why is this happening? And, you know, how can. And the only thing I can attribute it to is the, you know, this is when I started the podcast three years ago. It was exactly when I started it. I've been reading on average one to two books a week. I've been having, you know, one to.

three conversations a week. And I just love it. I listen to books. I fall asleep, listening to podcasts. I go on other people's podcasts. And so engaging with that has been really, I think, beneficial mentally when at an age, I'm 52. You know, in the age when people start slowing down, you know, I'm hoping that I'll keep it up and it'll be part of my career going forward in addition to being an experimental cosmologist and working on the Simon's Observatory. So no, I've never tried anything. I was always the designated driver. I don't, you know, my kids are very, very cautious. I've basically tried to, you know, you know, you have to, if you're a parent, you know this. You have to sort of bribe your kids, right? No parent has ever raised a healthy

kid that wasn't bribed in some way or another. And, you know, for me, it's, it's the one thing that scares me the most as a dad and my wife as a mom is not recognizing your child. And I think addiction can do that. And so I may have been worried about addiction, maybe too much, but I think that was one of the reason. I never wanted to play around. I never wanted to experiment up here. I want it to experiment. I don't look down on it. I do think, Bernardo, maybe you can, there are a lot of people here in, in America. It's become almost fashionable, especially in California to experiment in Austin, Texas, you know, the podcast capitals of the world. It's become extremely, you know, I was on Joe Rogan's podcast this summer,

and, you know, a couple times he'll turn and start talking about mushrooms and, and all sorts. And I have no interest in it, and I don't see any possible benefit. I see a lot of potential downside. As Bernardo said, people are very cavalier about their minds. And it should only be under a very supervised scenario. And you have these tech bros in San Francisco here that will, their ayahuasca, you know, is on a weekly basis because they're so, they're suffering from PTSD because, you know, they're, they didn't get the stock options that they thought they'd get or their, you know, their rocket coin, you know, crashed. And so I think people are very cavalier with the thing that is the most precious thing, you know, is close to a godly thing that we have,

which is our, which is our intellect. I did want to comment on the religion thing because Bernardo, we have another thing in common, I guess, besides BK. And I was baptized as well. But I wasn't baptized when I was a baby. I was baptized when I was nine years old. You see, I was born Jewish. Both my parents are Jews. And I grew up very minimally connected to Judaism. And when my mother got divorced from my father, my biological father, when I was seven, she then a year or so later met an Irish Catholic man named Ray Keating, which is why I have the name Keating. And Ray Keating came from a family of ten brothers and sisters, Bernardo. So I had ten aunts and uncle, nine aunts and uncles just on his side. And I loved it. I loved the Catholic tradition. I loved it so much more than the Jewish tradition that I actually completely was taken out of Judaism. And my older brother, my mom and I converted to being Catholic. And I was baptized, confirmed, and I became an altar boy. I became an altar boy at age 12, which is the age that, you know, my son will start preparing for his bar mitzvah.

And normally, Jewish boys become 13. They have their bar mitzvah. 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 high was 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. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. So at that age, I was in a Catholic church in New York State, you know, raising money for the Catholic Church and acting as an altar boy, passing out wafers at communion and giving the wine and donations and all sorts of things. I loved it until, well, two things happened. One was that I became interested in girls. And I realized if I wanted to go as far as I could possibly go as a Catholic, you know, that would mean no, none of these beautiful divine creatures named women could ever enter my life.

And I could not, you know, even more so I can't comprehend it now as a father and a husband. But back then, it was, oh, my God, this is the most amazing thing. thing that, you know, God or whoever is meant that a woman, a girl, a 13-year-old girl for a 13-year-old boy. So I just fell in love. I had girlfriends. But I also discovered a man. I think I have him somewhere around here, Galileo. So I've discovered Galileo. And this tool invented where, Bernardo? Where was this invented? In the Netherlands, but we don't get the credit for it. So I don't know, I don't know whether you agree. But no, no, no. I was going to say, Galileo, Gallo said a few months ago, I heard it a device invented by a certain Dutchman, but he didn't use, he didn't use Hans Leopperhey's name.

But anyway, so I became very fascinated with Galileo. And at that time, 1984, 85, I learned about the fact that the Catholic Church had persecuted him and actually had the final nine years of his life were spent in house arrest in our Chetri, Italy. And I said, I don't want to be a part of an organization that would imprison someone as amazing and magical. He was like a wizard. Galileo was truly a wizard. In fact, my friend Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book called Galileo's Dream in which he believes or he speculates that Galileo was transported by aliens from the 33rd century to the moons of Jupiter and taught all of modern physics by them in an attempt to save the universe. So anyway, not going to talk about that. But Galaya was like a wizard.

And how could you torture my favorite wizard? You know, so it became kind of an impediment to my religious upbringing. So bringing it back to that question that you asked Bernardo in terms of that. I told you, I treat myself as I call myself a practicing agnostic. So what does that mean? A practicing agnostic, it differs from an atheist and differs from a believer because we don't claim that we have absolute faith and we don't claim that we have proof that God doesn't exist. And I've asked this of many people, including Freeman Dyson. So Freeman Dyson was my first guest,

Bernardo, on The Into the Impossible podcast in 2017, I think it was. You started with a bang. Oh, yes. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was incredible. But it moved up from there. Yeah. Eventually, yes, eventually, yeah, he became a very close friend and I'm very sad and miss him. greatly. But I used to ask him, what are you? And he would say, I'm an agnostic. And I said, oh, that's very interesting. What church do you go to? And he said, church, I don't go to church. I told you. I'm an agnostic. And I said, wait a second. If an agnostic is different than an atheist, then you should do stuff that's different than an atheist. And you should do stuff that's different than a theist.

So what do you do? How would an intelligent alien looking at Freeman Dyson, how would it, it, how would it know that you're not an atheist because you don't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to? So what are you? And he kind of thought about it and he he kind of believed it and sounds like similar to Bernardo. It was cultural. Like he was, you know, in the Church of England and that was, you know, nice and they would have Christmas and but he didn't do anything. And so I said, well, I'm a practicing agnostic. To me, that means I go to a temple. I learned to read the Bible in Hebrew. I learned, you know, to what to, you know, keep kosher and not to eat certain things and restrict certain things and deny myself work,

even, which I love, on the Sabbath once a week. And for me, that, that doesn't mean I unquestionably accept the existence of God or that I believe every word in any case. And we can talk about that. But the bottom line is, for me, God is a very, it's too abstract. Like, when people say, do you believe in God? I'm like, I have no idea if that's even a proper question, you know, because if God exists, what does he need? He needs Brian Keating to believe in him? No. If God doesn't exist, it's irrelevant. But I'd like to think that there are, they'll never have proof of God. Otherwise, you'd have no need for faith. So for me, the question of God comes down to how do you act? Do you act as if there's a God? And which God do you act as if there is?

I mean, there's millions of gods, right? So, and I think science can be a God. And there's a great tendency in the materialistic world that Bernardo has written much more eloquently than I ever can opine upon, but that in the materialistic world, there is a transference of the innate human need to worship something other than himself, which scientists are very good at doing. As Bernardo said, He worship Susie. It's not a girl. It's not one of these beautiful women walking around. It's a different type of beauty, but it's transfixing.

And I think it's intoxicating. And we must guard against that lest we worship false idols. So for me, religion's been a compliment to science. Science in Latin, sciencia means knowledge. It doesn't say anything about wisdom. Sapienza means wisdom. Totally different things. Hey there.

It's me again. Your fearful guide in the realms of the. philosophical, Professor Brian Keating, and boy, do I have an offer for you. You know that I love to share the universe with you. And one of the best ways to do that is to send you a real chunk of it, a meteorite, just like this one, which can be yours if you are one of the lucky winners each month that I give away a chunk of real space dust. This is an honest-to-goodness piece of the early solar system. You can win it if you're the lucky winner each month at Briankeating.com slash list. You'll join my Monday Magic mailing list where I send out the coolest musings on the state of the universe,

other appearances and genius images from professional astrophotographers, always with explanations, always deep dives that I never, ever dumbed down. If you have a dot edu email address, you guarantee to win a chunk of the space schmutz right here. And that's going to briankeying.com slash edu. So do that if you have a dot edu email address in the U.S. Now, back to the end of the episode. You sound like even though you are an agnostic,

you have practices that could be seen as religious insights. some sense. Definitely. And you're a cosmologist. So how does this mix make you relate to the fine-tuning problem, which to me is the most vexing question for a naturalist. And I am a naturalist. So I'm confessing to something that vexes me. So I wonder how that comes across to you that problem. Yeah, I feel like the fine-tuning is incredibly beautiful. But I see the fine-tuning. as sort of more pronounced, it's hard to relate to the fine-tuning of universes as it is to look at the fine-tuning of DNA or the fine-tuning of biological life or the fine-tuning of consciousness. So for me, it's much, it seems like we're much more finely tuned as human beings, as homo sapien.

Homo sapien means a man who knows or is wise. And so what is man wise about? He's wise that he's going to die. In other words, we're the only creatures. Yes, there's some elephants that when they get sick, they take their dead and they move them to a different, you know, there are rituals in the animal kingdom, but they're not when they're 13, you know, and they're adolescent. They don't know that they're going to die. They don't know that life is finite, as we do, from a very early age. And that inculcates our lives with meaning because if we live forever, as the animals think they do, there'd be no impetus to do anything other than mate, eat, and, you know, seek pleasure and avoid predators.

So for me, that's fine-tuning, that there's something unique about humans. My friend, you know, here in San Diego will tell me, they're anthropologists, they'll say, well, there were other, you know, homo-s, say, like creatures. They weren't homo sapiens, obviously, but there were Neanderthals, there were Denisovans, there were all sorts of other species. And we don't know what they had. Do they lack the capability for language and that? I don't know, but I know right now there's only one species on Earth that knows it's going to die. And yet, and yet, Bernardo, we have 99.8% of the same chromosomes as a bonobo. That's remarkable. That's tuning to two. parts and a thousand identical. And yet we're not identical. Are you saying materialistically that

those 2.2,000, that those things, that is what makes us have the incredible godlike abilities that we have. So that's a greater mystery than the cosmological fine-tuning, which, by the way, there are friends of mine, like Fred Adams at University of Michigan, who claims that, no, the universe isn't that finely tuned, and we shouldn't be overawed at that, because there's a wide range of electromagnetic constants, gravitational constants, nuclear constants, that would yield what he claims is the sine qua non of the formation of cosmologists that can contemplate the universe, and that's star formation. So he said star formation as the rubric by which you can apprise is the universe fine-tuned or not? And he says, no, it's not that finely tuned. Others, Martin Rees, others disagree.

We can talk about that. But there's no one, you know, it's so much more tangible to think about those two one-thousths of a part that make us different from the bonobos. I think that's much more striking evidence, especially if you take literally, which I do not, the Bible, you know, that God made man in his image, meaning that we have these God. But if you look at the Bible, if you remember from the Bible, I don't know, Fiddeus, if you are biblically literate or if you are practicing in any way, if you are happy early Greek Orthodox Christmas, it's coming out. No, I, I, I, but I have read it. Yeah. God says, yeah. Yeah. So it says to, it says, God speaks and he says, let us make man in our image. It doesn't say let me make

man in my image. It says, let us, who is he talking to? So a lot of people, Dawkins and Sam Harris, who I'm speaking to soon on my podcast, they'll say, oh, you know, that proves that they believed in multiple gods. But actually, it's not, in Judaism, that question was answered a very long time ago. God was talking to the only other creatures that were alive at that time, which are the animals. So God is saying, let us make man with an animalistic side that drives him for passions, for love, for money, for Nobel Prizes. for supersymmetry. Let us give him the animalistic urges that those can note,

but also let's give him the divinity of a godlike entity that can then perhaps aspire to transcendence. And so I don't take it literally, but I take it seriously. And may I feed this? Just another one. I wonder how you personally, Brian, you're interviewing a lot of people. And I know more or less what your positions regarding certain theories and interpretations are.

And there are people there holding very respectable positions and brilliant people in every other sense, but which promote empirically unprovable stuff or even unfalsifiable stuff like evaration multiverses and undefined super deterministic hidden variables. Why do you think that happened? Because you know, you can have a situation where here is one very grounded person who is insisting on the empirical basis of physics, insisting that we don't get lost in abstraction and then promotes the ultimate abstraction. And it's not only one case. There are several. What's going on? Where is that coming?

Do you think it's merely psychological, social, or is it, was there real science behind some of that? I find this discombobulating. What is the most discombobulating aspect of it? Like inconsistency internally or? Strong belief in empirically unsubstantiated but highly inflationary ideas. Like certainty that there are gazillions of evarition parallel universes popping every infinitesimal fraction of a second. leading to a amount of empirically unprovable stuff that makes the Big Bang sound like a bang snap every infinitesimal fraction of a second.

And this can in principle never be confirmed because by the hypothesis of Eversian-parallel universe, you cannot have any empirical evidence for their existence. So this is a total and complete article of pure faith. and it's being put forward by serious, intelligent people. Yeah. So I did ask that of Sean Carroll. And he said that actually there are, you know, ways that you could get in what he called, you know, this branching, this branching state. And the only one that I sort of, I have to confess, you know, sometimes Sean says things that I find completely incomprehensible.

as much as I love, you know, talking to him. But, but that there was sort of, it could be possible that you could detect either the failure of the collapse of a wave function in, along a branch, say, or you could have a quantum process that would be sensitive to the discretization in time of branching rate. So the cadence of branching in the many worlds interpretation takes place at some level that's not infinitesimal. It's finite. It's very short, but it's finite. And I think if I recall from this conversation is actually the first real conversation when I started the podcast in December 2019 for real.

He was my first, you know, guest that I made it a weekly thing. And that was on his book, you know, something deeply hidden in person in California. and then COVID took place and then I amped up the podcast more. But at that time, he had said that, yes, that we were sort of, it was sort of imminent and we could expect to be able to detect the effects of the cadence at which wave functions branch. Whether that be through quantum computing, you know, or quantum, some quantum processes, that wasn't clear to me. It seemed to me to conflate together the problem of the multiverse with the problem of

Everettian many worlds multiverse. And then, you know, their question that you've talked about a lot in terms of, you know, paparian falsifiable, you know, if you could observe a collapse of a way, whatever that means, and you could advance the notion that there is no branching, you wouldn't prove, I don't need, I'm speaking very loosely, by the way, but it wouldn't prove, again, my job is an experimentalist is not to prove anything. I don't give a, you know what, about proving your theory or anybody's theory right. I care about proving everybody wrong, right? So if you could falsify, if there was a falsifiable prediction of the many worlds, in other words, that the branching is forbidden, or there's a no-go of branching, then you could falsify many worlds, but I don't know if it could be

proven. So I'm sorry if that's not a great, you know, kind of explanation. And I've talked with Max Tagmark as well. But these are kind of unsatisfactory, I think, attempts to explain the features of the universe that we do see by invoking mysterious things that are maybe even in principle unobservable. And that's my friend Paul Steinart is called that dangerous, not only for science and the 400-year-old scientific method, but for society. Because if science is compromised, so too society. I agree with you. The discussion may reach a point where even if he or they manage to propose a in principle experiment that could perhaps falsify it, they may claim that oh okay, we have the experiment, therefore it's true. You see how the goalpost shifts. The question is do we have any

reason to be peddling that story today. And I find this amazing in theoretical physics. I mean, I was at CERN. That's how I grew up, basically. And CERN is 99% experimental people, you know, 1% theoretical work. So I didn't really have that upbringing, which may color my view. But I find certain hypotheses today, like the undefined hidden variables of super determinism, that are defined in terms of the magic they need to do

so we can stick to physical realism even though 45 years of experiments tell us that it's not true, non-contextuality is not true. And so you have these factions in theoretical physics that operate on the basis of theoretical preferences and their intuitions as opposed to more level-headed stuff like what is the conceptual parsimony of your approach can we quantify that?

Do we have positive reasons to believe these or that? And what empirical reasons do we have to entertain certain hypotheses? I find this confounding sometimes, but yeah.

Yeah. No, I agree. 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. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your ocean front 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. You spoke so many times about how passionate you are about the podcasting that you are doing. And I asked in the previous time, Bernando, if you spoke to you, he enjoys the podcast and he said, actually no, but he feels that he's contributing and that's why he does it. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts about why you do it. Well, for me, it was really an outlet during COVID that I didn't really expect. And that was, you know,

one where, you know, I could talk to the greatest minds on earth, including Bernardo and, like I said, Freeman Dyson and many, many other people in order to. to satisfy my own intellectual selfishness, that I love the life of the mind. And when I'm not busy as a father or husband, son, brother, friend, that my favorite thing is to learn. I'm, like, addicted to learning. That's my one, well, I have a couple of vices, but most of them are healthy. I do tend to eat a little, a little bit too much. But in addition to that, it's learning and sharing and expressing curiosity.

So I started it off because I had what's called an unfair advantage. There's actually a book called The Unfair Advantage. So what do you do that no one else can do? So you have this amazing YouTube channel. It's huge. I'm envious of it. I'd love to grow and learn from you. And so when I had the opportunity as a professor at UC San Diego, one of the top universities in the world,

I had a chance to have all these great minds coming through my university and they would give a lecture to the physics department. And so you'd have Frank Wilczek or you'd have Barry Barish. And they'd come through and they'd give a lecture and then they were gone. And only the 200 people that were there got to benefit from the wisdom, knowledge, experience, and shared stories by these incredible Nobel laureates. And I started to realize that was a disservice to the mind of the universe of the planet and that I could help by recording conversations, not videotaping. their lectures. I think that's interesting, but you can learn what they did from any of their work, including the Nobel Prize lectures that they've given. But how do you learn who they are? How do you learn what makes them a human being? You can only get that, I think, in an intimate conversational

setting. And that's what I wanted to do. So I took them aside before or after their lectures, and I started to record. And before I knew it, I had recorded nine lectures from nine Nobel Prize. winners and gotten them to think about and answer questions that none of them ever answered, including getting, you know, some of them to admit that after they won the Nobel Prize, they still suffered from what's called the imposter syndrome, that they're not good enough, that they don't deserve it, that they're basically scam artists and fraud. And I thought, well, if they feel it after winning a Nobel Prize, so much more could they help people like me and young people, especially science, technology people like me,

Bernardo and our students and our colleagues help them overcome their limiting beliefs, as Arthur C. Clark called it. So I wanted to share it with the world. And then I realized I have enough. I could actually take it and turn into a book. So my second book was called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. It's life lessons to improve your career, your confidence, your public speaking, in your collaboration through these lessons I learned from Nobel laureates. And I think it's, it's been one of my, you know, more popular books. And so thanks to that, now I've interviewed 18 Nobel Prize winner. So I'm going to come out with a second book this year of their life lessons. And, you know, it's, it's been an incredible journey to me to get to engage with people

and to show the human side. You know, when you hear Bernardo speak about dualism, materialism, and, you know, he can be so eloquent. You know, millions of people have heard him speak about his technical work. But have you heard him speak about Psychic? I've never heard about you. And I'm not saying that, you know, is all that you are. But you made that very personal by asking him that question, asking me that question, even though I gave kind of a narc answer.

But the point being, I feel like that's what people need to see. because if we're going to save the world, whatever that means, extending humanity's reach into either the solar system in space or the universe in time and extend it, you know, to the ripe old age of our maximum potential, the only way we're going to do that. It's not with more, you know, gender studies departments and, you know, whatever, some cultural thing is maybe those are important, maybe those are not. But it's through science and technology and engineering. We're going to have to build our way, solve climate challenge, going to have to solve the energy problem. We're going to have to deflect asteroids. I mean, those are just basic things. I mean,

if the planet's roasted, we're not going to be here. It doesn't matter how many gender studies departments you have. There's no genders around anymore. So for me, my mission is to inspire millions of minds to become scientists. I'm just going to say it. That's what I want to do. I want millions of kids to do what me and Bernardo have done and become scientists and contribute to the age-old, you know, tradition of the scientific method. And by doing that, I hope to play a small role through my podcast, inspiring them by showing them that scientists are human beings. We're not just walking chat GPT robot, androids that just come up a brilliant thing.

Bernardo didn't just come up with the personality that he has sitting and like computing and no, he's a human being with with desires, with intentions with biases that make him unique. And so I want to show people that Einstein wasn't always Einstein and the Einstein's of today are coming on my podcast to inspire the children of tomorrow. And that's brilliant. This was amazing explanation. And I'm curious to hear why do you focus so much on Nobel Prize? Most of your work are not that. Yeah. That's a very good question. That's a very good question. So I said that I'm very keen. on the fact that human beings, even if they're atheists, they worship a religion. That could be

science. It could be planet Earth, mother Earth. It could be the many, many Greek gods, you know, that people still worship, not including Phidias. But we all have these things that we worship. And for many years, for me, I admit this in my first book, losing the Nobel Prize, that it was the Nobel Prize, that I wanted to win the Nobel Prize more than anything. Because it turned out my father was a scientist and he was very great. He actually won a very prestigious prize called the

Cole Prize in mathematics. That's like three orders of magnet three steps down from the Fields Medal. But he was at that level and then he turned to physics and actually into interpretations of quantum mechanics as many people do later in life. So he

wanted to be a great physicist in his end years and he died very young unfortunately. But I wanted to compete with him and outshine him. And the only way I thought I could do that is if I won a Nobel Prize. And nowadays you see it in everything. You know, you have a, you have a golden version of this silver thing I have in the back, one of these YouTube plaques, right? You have a golden one for your other channel with a million subscribers, right? I have something more value. I have this thing. I have a clay play button. I don't know if you've ever seen one of these.

This is made by one of my sons. And I treasure it. But the fact is, people worship idols and people that are different idols. There's play buttons. And for me, for a long time, it was the Nobel Prize. And for me, now, I still see that many people are driven to win the Nobel Prize as a way of achieving immortality because they don't believe in God, which is fine, but they don't believe in it. So this is as close as you can get to it. And I want to show people that no, Nobel Prize winners are human beings. And like I said, that will hopefully inspire people to do the work. I've never met a Nobel Prize winner who said, I did it to win the Nobel Prize. They all did it because they love the science. So maybe they're better than me.

I still have yet to meet one. I interviewed Kip Thorne. And he was the third of the three Nobel Prize winners for the LIGO experiment that detected gravitational waves in 2015. And they won the Nobel Prize in 2017. And I've become very good friends with the three of them over the years. But he finally came on. And he said, I said, was there any regrets that you have in your life or your career? And he went through them. And then one of his regrets is that, oh, the Nobel Prize only went to the three of us. It didn't go to the thousand people on the papers. I said, well, you could have turned it down.

Like, you didn't have to accept it. I mean, John Paul Sartre, he didn't accept the Nobel Prize in literature, right? There are, you know, many people didn't accept the Nobel Peace Prize. So there's nothing that prevented him. But, you know, I think he's a human being. And so it's important to humanize people. So that to me has been interesting as the foray into sociology of scientists. I love to study what makes people tick and analyze my own motivations as well.

Bernanto, I'm curious to hear. I have here written before one question that I wanted to ask you. So let's say if you are right and everyone agrees with your theory that consciousness is what fundamental, let's say. So how does the next day look for science? Exactly like tomorrow looks like for science right now. Science well done is metaphysically agnostic. If anything would change in science with the acceptance of a different metaphysical paradigm, it will be there will be more doors open to investigation because sometimes we think we don't need to investigate certain things because they are impossible if our metaphysical prejudices are correct and then we just don't look behind those doors.

So if anything at all would change, it is people will give themselves permission to open more doors and investigate more things. but nothing in the established results of scientific inquiry changes. Whatever was true yesterday will be true tomorrow with idealism because science doesn't depend on a metaphysical position. Science makes predictions about what nature will do next. And if those predictions have been confirmed by experiment, nature is not going to do something else because the monkeys decided to adopt a different metaphysical paradigm.

Nature will continue to do what it was doing before. So if we predicted nature correctly before, those predictions remain correct. Unless nature changes its mind, not the monkeys. That the monkeys change their minds, you know, I don't think nature cares much about. Idealism is not a different scientific methodology. It doesn't invalidate any established result in science. Idealism is a different lens through which to interpret nature. behavior, through which to interpret science, through which to answer the question of what is,

as opposed to what it's going to do next. So it's a different question than the question of science. So idealism, the acceptance of idealism does not require rebuilding science from the ground up. It doesn't even shake a tile on the roof, let alone rebuilding it from the ground up. what may change is that science may become more open, will look behind doors that people didn't think they needed to open before, and it will advance more quickly. That is my hope. I think science will advance more quickly to give you concrete examples.

Right now, the placebo effect is a vaccine thing. We know it's there because it's been demonstrated experimentally, but we don't know what to do with it. We don't know why, how, what are the causal mechanisms, involved, how can we use it to our benefit? Because we should. Now, the placebo effect is as good as medicine. So why don't we use it for our benefit? Well, because we don't understand the mechanisms. We don't have a narrative or an understanding in terms of which to relate to it, in terms of which to validate it, to give it a place in our ontology. So we don't look further. Well, maybe we could

look further under the idealist notion that the real states of the world out there are mental states and that physical states are representations, our dashboard measurements or representations of the real states of the world. So we could maybe be more able to exploit the placebo effect. Another thing that would change, and that's not to do with science, that has to do with culture and our psychology, is the notion that when you mature at great cost, at great suffering, and you finally learn how to be a decent human being, you finally understand the of things that you didn't understand when you were younger.

Finally, you got a little bit of wisdom, a little bit of comprehension, a little bit of insight, and then you diet's all gone, so everything's for nothing. Well, under idealism, that's not necessarily the case. Your personal agency is gone, right? I mean, if you lose your ego with psychedelics that reduce brain activity a little, imagine when you haven't got a brain anymore, you know? Something about your personal agency has got to go. but not the mental states that you've crafted and evolved at a great cost throughout life.

Those may be available to nature. So life may have some inherent meaning, not a meaning that we make up and project onto the world. That can change a lot of stuff. The way we relate to one another may change. Because, you know, if our mental lives are not epiphenomena with no relationship, the causal nexus of nature, if our mental inner lives are causative, and they define what we are. And by the way, everybody else is the same thing. It's the same field of subjectivity.

Well, that may change something about how we relate to one another to animals, to the rest of the planet. That's my hope. But I do not see any necessary reconstruction of the edifice of science at all. On the contrary, idealism takes a lot of its fundamental. foundations, its argumentation comes from empirical science. So it's idealism built on top of science. It's not science having been built on top of materialism or any other metaphysics. Science, if well done, is metaphysically agnostic.

It doesn't depend on metaphysics to be done right. So there is no hope for teleport. I think if there is hope it's coming from quantum optics and, you know, and foundations of physics, laboratories the world over. I don't think idealism will mean much as for the technologies we can develop. And this is, look, this is quite fundamental. I have been a technologist for a long time too. I started off as a scientist and then I figured I could make more money applying that stuff. So I've been a technologist for many years.

And what people get wrong about technologists is that people think that technologists need to have, they need to know truths. That's not how technology works. Technologists don't give a damn about what is true. Technologists give a damn about what works. And often what works is not true at all when we know it. For instance, everybody talks about lithography and chips and semiconductors in Taiwan with these advanced lithography machines from the Netherlands. We build those using Fourier optics, which is not true.

It's not true. That's not how light works. No, that's not what light is. but it's a good enough approximation to develop amazing chip machines, miraculous chip machines. We build mechanical stuff using finite modeling, finite element modeling. It's not true, but it works. In electronics, we model transmission lines through discrete elements, discrete inductors and capacitors and resistors. Is that how it works? No, the way it works is given by Maxwell's equations.

But yeah, it's too difficult to run on a computer. It takes too long. It's too complicated. So we use discrete element modeling of transmission lines. Is it true? No, it's not true. But it works. So we don't need to know the truth to develop technology in the same way that a world champion in a computer game does not need to understand computer and software engineering play the game well. All we need is an approximation, a narrative, a fiction that is convenient. In other words, a fiction that is such that nature behaves as though that fiction were right. Whether it's really right or not is irrelevant for technologies. So we will develop teleportation or not independent of even truth, let alone a particular metaphysics.

it's probably strange for you guys to hear a philosopher saying these things but yeah it's very interesting Brian because we didn't touch a lot of on the topic of you and astrophysics and all the stuff

I wanted to there is some people that are younger people that are listening to this podcast they are in my age so I'm curious to make a sales speech about why they should be interested in astrophysics

and the stuff that you are doing with telescopes and all this stuff. Yeah, well, I always say, you know, what I do is the kind of ultimate scientific endeavor because it actually encompasses all of science. Even biology can be part of cosmology or astrophysics. In other words, you need to understand chemistry. You need to understand engineering.

You need to understand the behavior of even how different molecules can assemble into making life. And that's part of cosmology or broadly speaking part of astrophysics. So astrophysics is the laws of physics applied to astronomical objects from stars, galaxies, black holes, up to the entirety of the universe itself, in the cosmological realm, which is what I study. And then to be an experimental cosmologist means that you build ten. telescopes. You don't merely, I don't mean merely as an insult, but you don't only think of different theories. There was a big bang. There was a different, you know, universe and multiverse. You actually have to take the technology and have constraints. And sometimes when you have constraints, you're more creative and you learn even more than if you said, oh, you could do anything you want.

And I think the theory allows you to do anything you want. You can conjecture, you know, 10-dimensional string theory or supersymmetry, but if nature doesn't do that, then it's only going to be in the realm of conjecture. So for me, being an experimental cosmologist means I have to understand the theory behind what I do in order to optimize the instruments to perform within the constraints of space, time, money, mass. And so we're building the world's highest telescope on Earth. It's in Chile. It's called the Simon's Observatory. It's at 17,200 feet, 5,200 meters above sea level. So you have to wear oxygen masks and hard hats and ultraviolet radiation is everywhere, destroying your

skin. And we're building a whole essentially an observatory from nothing. We started eight years ago. We're almost done with it in April. A little bit after this, we're going to get first light or, you know, take the first data that will hopefully take us back to understand the universe's first three minutes. And by understanding the first three minutes, it's like when a baby is born, the first thing you do is you measure its vital signs. You measure its height, its weight, it's, you know,

blood pressure. And then from that, you could predict how long it's going to live, right? You can actually have, based on statistics, have some model of what the future of the universe is going to be. And we're measuring that too. We hope to look into the ultimate expansion of the universe. Is it purely driven by a cosmological constant, dark energy? What's the role in the nature of dark matter? How do they contribute to the phenomena that we see in the universe? And then lastly, what can we say about the earliest moments, the first fraction of a second? And what's called the inflationary cosmos, which seems to fit a lot of the cosmological data that we see, but comes along with some unwanted quantum baggage like the multiverse.

And so by doing all this, the Simon's Observatory is poised to be the leading observatory in cosmology of the next decade of studying the so-called cosmic micro-ray background radiation, which is the earliest fossil, light that exists in the universe. And by looking at it, we hope to divine the beginning of the universe and its ultimate end. Unfortunately, I think that will come eventually, but keep paying your taxes, everybody. Thank you, Brian Kieran. You are amazing. It was so enjoyable conversation.

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