Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Futurist, Author, Pundit: David Brin — Where Are We Headed? (#072)

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

  Watch my previous conversation with David from April 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HXf22FVVXk?sub_confirmation=1 Watch David’s recent talk at Google: https://youtu.be/eBqeIKx93A8 Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeati Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is interstention for magic. Dr. David Bryn, it's always a pleasure to speak to you. It's a greater pleasure to see you. It's a wonderful delight to learn from you. And furthermore, it's just, it's great to share these conversations with our lovely audience at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imaginations into the Impossible Podcast. Welcome, good doctor. And glad to see you, Brian.

And by proxy, talk to your elite audience of smarty pants. I guess we should say smarty, all garments. So I want to start off with something provocative that I saw on contrary Brin, David's website, Davidbrin.net, I think. Is it David Brin.com? Well, Davidbrin.com is my website. Yep. And then contrary brin is my blog.

Yeah. So I saw a couple of things. One I think is pertinent to the situation that we are in. I want to get an update from you from our last conversation in April when things involving a certain beer named virus were just developing and we were just entering quarantine. By the way, David, you, I'm sure know the origin of the word quarantine, right? What it means?

I'm sure I knew it at some point. Oh, yeah, four. 40. 40, yes. Oh, sorry, 14. Yeah, so originally you would quarantine. 14 days. Yes.

14 days you were supposed to stay on the ship before you were allowed to shore. And that's like, so we're on our 10th quarantine, 10th, 14 day period, maybe 11th. How have you adjusted to it? Have you seen any green shoots or are they all concrete bunkers? Well, I mean, we've seen that some states like New York have handled things very similarly, and they had a worse strain of the virus. But New York handled things very much like the Western Europeans have, and that is that they developed a sense of community.

community, they shut down, everybody wore masks, and within maybe two quarantine periods, what had looked like a train wreck in New York turned out to be a model for the nation. The problem is that we were forced to be 50 nations, and many of them decided that they knew better than the experts. So the United States is a, is a hodgepodge of, well, arguments for Brexit, actually, because the fact is that we have no borders between these states. And so they can't be separate experiments. That was the idea behind federalism was separate experiments.

But the notion was that a disastrous experiment in one state will not necessarily affect its neighbors. Well, we've learned that that's not true. Yeah. I'm supposed to have Ben Shapiro on my podcast not too long from now and connection to his new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, which I received a pre-publication copy of kindly from his people. And that book makes an argument that America could be disintegrated, as he calls it. And I know your politics are very different from his.

We take all people on this podcast and we do not get into politics specifically. but one thing he talks about is very much in consonant with what you just said. And in my critique of the book, I basically lay out a couple of different scenarios where the conclusion comes down to the fact that federalism is not a law of nature. It is not something that is guaranteed for our country to remain these 50 unified states. And I wonder, if I had asked you in February, is the United States going to endure for another 254 years, 44 years, what would you have said the odds would be of that remaining 50 contiguous, 50 United States? And what do you think the odds are now?

Well, it hasn't changed that much because back then before COVID, I knew we were under attack. Explain that, sorry, under attack. All right, look. Big picture perspective are us. That's what I do. You know, when I do science fiction, I do big picture perspective of the future. But most science fiction authors, it's believed that science fiction was badly named. It should have been called speculative history. Yes, or thought experiments. Yeah. Right.

Because science per se, only 10% of science fiction authors are scientifically trained as I am. I got my doctorate where you now work at UCSD. Proud some of UCSNN. Similar field. The only maybe 10% of us have some. scientifically trained and bring as much science in as I do. But all of us are imbued with history, which is the great tragic story. It is the great story of millions upon millions of our ancestors trying their best and with just horrifically stupid, dumb ideas in their heads,

and implementing them, and sometimes they move things a bit forward. And we are the beneficiaries of all of that. But one great plague, infest to. human history, and that was humans propensity for delusion. We're all deluded. Science gave us tools, like the magic incantation, I should say the holy incantation of science, that we are all taught to recite, which is, I might be wrong. Let's find out. Now, that should be the incantation of all maturity, especially something that all males should recite. Yes. But, Even that catechism in science only lets us find maybe half our errors because we're delusional. The great discovery that we made in the few Enlightenment experiments, Paraclean Athens, Da Vinci's Florence,

and this 250-year experiment that we've been trying has been letting rulers rule from the top down. allows them just to nurse their delusions. And they make horrible mistakes, and with this litany of mistakes is what we call history. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer

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And yet, there is a cult spreading across both wings of the political axis, but one considerably more than the other, that we should return to a pyramidal. type, feudal, based on inheritance and or race. And these societies were never as successful as ours. Never, anywhere near or close. So this experiment that we're engaging in now, vastly more successful than Pericles in Athens or Da Vincius Florence, it has had crises across the last 250 years. And I call them eight phases of the American Civil War. Because if you go back,

the one we call the Civil War was a really gruesome one, but it was phase four. You have to go back to 1778 when Cornwallis came south to the American South and found a great many more royalists and Tories there. And it's the same basic division where just a lot of Americans have different dreams. And that reminds me of a quote that you are a topic that you briefly addressed on your on your blog. That also involves a multiple of the number two, as does your eight phases of the Civil War.

And that's called the fourth turning. And I have not read this book. I've seen this book. I have been intrigued by this book. I have connections to one of the two authors, Strauss and How. one of them is deceased, unfortunately, but the other one is alive. I'm hoping to have him on the podcast someday. Of course, I'll have to learn his name by them. But I know you've spoken with some amusement, perhaps that's too light a word. But can you talk a little bit about that book and why

it so enervates you? Well, the, again, big picture perspective. If you look across history, there have been romantics. And left and right is not a sacred thing. being locked in stone. Most people on the left and most people on the right do not map onto what used to be called left or right, either in the French Assembly of 1789 when it got started or the old notions of Marxism. For instance, market capitalism, all the metrics, fiscal responsibility, entrepreneurship, all of these things do better under Democrats. So go figure. But what we loosely call left and right are two romanticisms. And what really, really is common among them is this.

Almost all people who have called themselves leftists believe in a teleology of history. That is teleology means history is foreordained. And that teleology is upward with a lot of violence or revolution and all of that, if you're a Leninist or a Maoist. But it has a purpose. It has a endpoint, an endpoint. That's right. Which makes them much more like Christians.

Yeah. Now, the right has a tendency to also believe in teleology, but it's cyclical. And so they tend to believe in rise and fall, rise and fall. Civilizations get old. They get lazy. There's something called the titler sequence. Y-T-L-E-R, you can look that up and my name or look down below where Brian will give you a link to my article about this, where the right, people on the extreme right really, really cling to this

notion of cyclical history. And this is why those who call Nazism a phenomenon of the left, this is the fundamental rejection of that notion, because while Stalin was a murderous, horrible person, he murdered for a progressive cause that was, he thought was climbing upward. Hitler and the Nazis believed that ice moons came regularly and caused everything to go through the same cycle over and over again. Now that leads us to Strauss and Howe. Strauss and Howe's magical incantation is the fourth turning. That is that every 80 years, four generations, Perfectly rigidly timed 20 years each have four different personalities, and these personalities lead them to raise their kids in different ways

so that they will have the next personality. And every fourth, every third turning, wasteful, lazy, self-righteous, indignant generation causes a crisis that their kids have to clean up. And the clean-up, first cleanup was the American Revolution. The second one, four-score years later, was the Civil War, Phase 4, I call it. The next one was World War II, and now we're 80 years after that, and the new hero generation has to clean up that mess. Well, it's an alluring tale.

I write alluring tales. I recognize a magical incantation that is meant to entertain, draw people in, and have them feel it's plausible to be it any of my novels. And I promise you, I promise you out guys out there, you will be entranced and you will fail to feed the cat. You'll fail to get your work done because I'm good at it. I recognize masters. Strauss and Howe did the same damn thing. They made a magical incantation. and boy does it read plausible.

Yes. And it is jibboring looting. It has attracted attention on many fronts. And again, you didn't know I was going to ask you about this, but since you mentioned this odd octet multiple of two, I couldn't resist. So let's move on from there to something much less provocative in some sense, but more provocative to others of us who are of the nerdy persuasion.

And that involves so-called, theories of everything. As you know, I've partnered with PBS Spacetime Studios, Matt O'Dowd and his team, along with the friends at the Arthur C. Clark Center. And great show. Great show. Thank you. Yeah, it was several good shows. Thank you. Yeah, we put out two shows so far. And we're hoping to get input from people like you, people in the audience. Please send us comments on the videos and let us know who you think we should involve next. Because this is the 100th anniversary of the very famous great debate, so-called the great debate. And in my book, losing the Nobel Prize, a belitary plug here, I don't know, do I have a copy here? I've got existence here, but I don't know

if I have my own book here. That shows you the high esteem in which I hold David. Anyway, I talk about the fact that we've actually had multiple great debates, starting with Galileo and probably even before, the notion of the centrality of human beings, the Earth, space and time itself being centered on us, has evolved from thinking the Earth, is the center, to the sun is the center, to the galaxy is the center, to the universe is all there is, to the multiverse must exist. And now we find this confluence of the very biggest things in the universe, namely the universe itself, possibly the multiverse, with the very smallest things in the universe, the quantum realm of particles, forces, fields. And the quest to unify the very big and the

very small goes through what are called theories of everything. And there's been a very flow, a very flourishing, a renaissance, if you will, of new theories of everything, from your friend in mind, Stephen Wilfrum, to Eric Weinstein, who's become a good friend of the show, to Garrett Leasy, and many other people have come up with novel ideas for how the universe is large and scale and small scale can play nice. First of all, I want to ask you, are these important questions? Why should Jane Bag of Donuts out in Al Cajon, you know, our standard listener, Why should she care about such minutia? Well, she should care because it's extremely cool to have a civilization that cares,

that has built the prosperity, so that it's not just a few high priests or monks living their cauterized, neutered lives in some monastery who are arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin, but instead are convoking these angels. in wonderful cathedrals of science where we smash nature and say, God, are you here? Are you here? Are you here? You know, you don't have to be an atheist in order to be impudent now. You can be a person who has religious faith, and yet you believe that it was set up for us to chase him down, or her down. And you hear the giggles in the corners as we shine light into corners that no one's ever seen before, no one imagined before.

And you hear, you see this world of dust as if he or she has ducked behind the next curtain giggling. See, though, that's not the metaphor that one of these strong atheists would use. Right. I think that there is theological import and implication to the fact that we're the kind of people who can subsidize not only elites to do this search, but also demand and lure those elites online into PBS shows to share it eagerly with a

amused and and highly empowered community of amateur scientist citizens. So having said that, let me say that I've participated in this a little bit. I offered a couple of insights that Roger Penrose included in his conformal mapping cosmology, which I think is one of the coolest things. if you want to my recent lamented dear departed friend

Freeman Dyson I awarded him the prize of the great theologian of the 20th century because he won the debate with Frank Tippler over what the universe would be like and Freeman thought that it would

expand forever and he gave us the theology of how super advanced beings might try to endure after even all the protons have decayed. Frank Tipler had this wonderful Baroque, incredibly amusing and frustrating book called The Physics of Immortality that talked about what might happen in the last million years if the expansion of the universe slowed down because of gravity and then came together in the big crunch. Yes.

And our distant, distant descendants became effectively. God. And because they could collect all the infrared rays that you have emitted when you've laid in a blanket outside at night, they know you and they resurrect you at the end of time. What an amazing, amazing, wonderful. And if it weren't true, it ought to be. And now Roger comes and he says, stop, you're both right. It's going to be expanding forever. The protons and electrons, everything will decay. And when the last proton decays, it all simply becomes a big bag. Yes, it's very poetic. It has some overtones of Judeo-Christianity, perhaps, as well. And I think there are some beautiful aspects of it. What intrigues me so much is the,

was the comity that I observe for most of these debates. There was some pugilism that came in. And as I said, you know, they don't say that physicists are going toe to toe for nothing. That's a good one, right? I just lost a toenail last night. Oh, no. I'm so sorry. We won't go toe to toenail then. All right.

But these folks have widely disparate, you know, conjectures. And, you know, in some sense, there can be only one. It's not as if, you know, one is Newtonian talking about the, you know, low mass limit of a higher dimensional, higher, you know, encompassing field theory, such as Einstein's field theory. It's that one has, you know, field theory, Einstein's field theory, and the other one has, you know, cellular automata, as Stephen does, you know, as a fundamental generating force. So I wonder, you know, how do we reconcile this in the scientific method? You've written about this recently as well, and I'll put a link to that. How is it possible that so many different things can flourish? Or are we being too,

comitists accommodating however you will correct me why do we seek this when or should we seek a sense of conciliance or should we instead be more suited up for intellectual battle because there can be only one or well other than your your reference to the movie Highlander um that the only one you like that movie because they're movies i know you have different That movie violated the third movie syndrome of the 80s and 90s, where it was the third movie that was crap. Was crap. Yeah, that one went straight to number two in all ways.

But no, what has happened very often is that we find that two very good theories turn out to be different versions of the same thing. I wrote a little song to remind you, Choice Hotels, get you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A rooftop ball, have a ball. Cocktails up here feel just right. Is Cambria homemade?

Bring a date, your team, or even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com. See you on the roof. Mathematical presentations. Summary comes along and says, Oh, did you know that this completely different maps directly onto, onto this other map. I actually did that for my master's dissertation

in the theory of polarized life, showing that these two different models were essentially the same thing. Yes. So that can happen. And then you can have winners and losers. And if you're losing theory was really, really cool, then you don't lose your tenure.

I mean, you don't lose your respect. I just gave an example of that. Frank Tipler, it was, It was honored and people still talk about his book. I'm talking about his book 30 years later because it was a fantastic science fiction novel. Let me put it this way. This whole left-right thing has another insanity, and that is that the right supposedly declares the virtues of competition but hates regulation.

because it interferes with competition. The left is suspicious of the word competition, and would like everybody to cooperate. That's a gross oversimplification. But to the extent people believe it, it's treason to what made everything work for us, and that is regulated competition. Because if you look across those 6,000 years of pyramidal cultures,

cheating abounded, and you don't get the creativity of competition if those on top are cheating. What Adam Smith talked about and FDR and his cousin Teddy Roosevelt and so on was how to regulate away the cheating so that we get the benefits of competition. Now there are five great arenas in which we've learned how to do this. One is markets, democracy, both of them being deletion. deliberately poisoned now, but we have proved that you can do that. You can have regulated competition

in those that create vast wealth. Justice courts, science is regulated by holding each other accountable. Yes, adversarial and adversarial. That's right, it's adversarial. I point out that this notion, the scientists are these me clemmings following the same paradigm. Oh, yeah, climate change. We all have to do the same thing. It's ridiculous. Scientists are the most competitive humans our species ever created. And I'm looking at one right now. And but we don't need a lot of regulation because we have an ultimate arbiter, an ultimate referee, called objective reality. I mean, it's going to tell us sooner or later which of us is right.

And that leaves the fifth arena, which proves the case. it's sports. Try to imagine a sporting league that removed all regulation for one Saturday, including the rules against murder. It would dissolve in violence and death. The purge. And that would be the end of the sporting league. Look at roller ball. They tried that and roller ball. So what I'm trying to get at is that competition is the wellspring of creativity, but it's always ruined by cheating unless it's regulated by something. Now, you were talking about competition between these different theories of everything. Well, objective reality supposedly is going to be the arbiter,

and so we can remain kind of courteous. to each other, kind of collegial as we eviscerate each other's theories and criticize each other's theories and use that criticism to make our theories better. But what you alluded to is very important. We are now entering territory where what becomes modelable and plausible includes a lot of things that can never be tested. And Max Tagmark and your other guest were talking about that last time on your show on the theory of everything. Does everything have to be Popperian after Carl Popper?

Does everything have to be testable? And as a science fiction author, who's also a scientist, I know there are realms in which these things overlap and we are just not going to be able to test them. but we can continue to develop a sense of plausibility. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And if we look forward to, you know, future debates, I'm curious as to what would be stimulating in your mind, what other kinds of big mysteries,

we kind of cover the fundamental laws of nature and these, and I've had interviews with Stephen and Wolfram and Eric Weinstein. I'll put links to it in the podcast as well. but and others critics such as Sabine Hassenfelder who was a guest who's extremely critical of the both the pursuit of what you called earlier kind of the tenure getter papers you know the elegant beautiful uh resplendent theories as a guideline as a guidepost to to the future of physics she's actually quite negative pessimistic curmudgeonly about it and she says as much even to the extent of not thinking it's warranted to build a future high energy physics particle collider, such as the future circular collider, which would have a price tag of 20 billion euros or dollars.

They're about the same nowadays, but maybe maybe less so in the future. And by the way, whenever you hear a number like that, people listening out there, if somebody comes to you, ask you to write a check for a particle accelerator, I just had a philanthropist asked me to speculate on a very interesting experiment and had a price tag of several million dollars. and I said to this person, I said, and how much is it going to be to operate this thing? Because you don't build a nuclear-powered submarine just to have it sit there, right? So these things that cost 20 nuclear-powered submarines, such as the future circular collider, she claims we could use it for other things, such as what you've spoken about, climate change. If you were more of a king than you are in your realm and you could set the budgets for physics as a function of GDP, where would it sit?

And then would you fund things that have no guarantee of paying out? Well, if I were the family friend whispering in Benjamin's ear in the graduate, instead of plastics, I would say cosmic rays. I mean, after all, we're never going to make an accelerator more powerful than a great many cosmic rays, which we see piling into our atmosphere or passing. through our spacecraft all the time. Now, they are diffuse. But I would put money into finding ways of making detector systems that are very, very large,

that can be in space and that can pick up and that can analyze these cosmic rays that are so vastly more powerful than anything we would ever make. Now, the argument for the collider is that we can make seven, eight, nine, ten orders of magnitude more of these high energy particles and refine them so that we know exactly what they were before they collided. And that's an argument. But I also see the argument to trying to repair our civilization and giving that top price. priority. I am wary of the left's notion that it's a zero-sum game. But there are times when the money is that it is taking things away. So it's not totally positive sum. And by the way, that is the most important concept of our civilization. And that is the notion of the positive sum game.

those five arenas were set up in order to try to create competition so that there are winners and losers but everybody's getting more so you know my aim in the marketplace or in science is to is to be victorious over you while we both win and and that's kind of game actually it's actually amazing that human beings are capable of even understanding it. Because almost all of our ancestry, from the caves to the tribes to the, to the empires, was all zero sum in order to win you had to make someone else lose. So the notion that we are capable of positive sum, and more than half of Americans pull as being able to understand the,

basic idea of positive some games. I think that's remarkable. Yeah, I agree. David, I'm running short on time. I have to interview several more geniuses like yourself. I always like this. I want to do it more regularly than once a month, or than once every four months. Let's try to do it monthly, as I originally had hoped, if you will accommodate it. I'm happy to, and I want to raise a glass of whatever we've got in honor of our dear friend Andy. Andy Friedman, you were talking about the theory of everything in the multiverse. Well, we were the three physicists. It's not that often I get to wear that hat.

So Andy was brilliant and wonderful and one of the sweetest, and he and his dear wife were probably the cutest couple I have seen outside of them are. And I have good news for you. final paper, which is a test of Lorentz invariance violation using distant cosmological objects, a project that he pioneered, stewarded, led through analysis, all the way... He's on opposite ends of the universe. Yes. He, he, he, that paper, we just received word that the, has been accepted for publication in physics review D, which is a hugely high impact journal. I'm planning to do a special podcast tribute to him and maybe also speak about that paper in

particular because it's a tour to force. It was a masterpiece. The cosmos has lost one of its greatest luminaries. And I'm emotional thinking about it. It's been only a month since we lost him recording this in August 12th. Margaret Burbage's birthday would have been 101 years old. And unfortunately, Andy did not come close to that. So we miss him. We miss Margaret too. We love you, David. Thank you so much. Be well. Stay well. Let's talk again very soon. All right. Take care, Brian. Best of luck. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible,

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in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko.