Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Genius Philosopher: The Law of Physics That Explains Why Your Life Falls Apart

Starting point is 00:00:00 There's a law of physics that governs everything, your happiness, your depression, and even whether your life has meaning. And guess what? It can't be broken. Life is a local violation of the law of entropy. It is a counter-entropic resistance. The thing that the suicidally depressed people feel is that they don't matter. Others do. They don't. Nothing they can do will ever make them matter. This is how I judge people. Are you increasing entropy? decreasing it. If these agents begin to have a longing to matter, if they do this, then what we have

Starting point is 00:00:37 are non-carbon-based humans. She's a MacArthur genius, a philosopher who's trained in physics, and she just used the second law of thermodynamics to explain while your life feels like it's always falling apart. What Rebecca did next is what no physicist has ever done before. She took the second law of thermodynamics and built an entire theory of human meaning on top of it. What took you from MacArthur Genius, your many, many works of philosophy, and your great contributions to literature from their genius grants, et cetera, to write a book that's basically a stealth physics book? When I study physics as an undergraduate, and then I had gone, when I went into philosophy, it was into philosophy of physics, you know, so I've always been interesting in physics. When I first learned about the second law of thermodynamics, I couldn't quite conceptualize it. I couldn't completely wrap my head around. it, but it seemed to have implications for us, right?

Starting point is 00:01:33 I mean, we are physical systems, we are subject to the second law of thermodynamics. There's a tragic dimension to this law and that we live in resistance, to it all living things, live in resistance. In fact, when I was a graduate student that occurred to me, oh my gosh, biological systems are really just organized to resist the second law of thermodynamics. I said, this is so exciting. Has anybody discovered this? And then I read Schrodinger's What is Life. Other people had, in fact, Boltzman himself had realized this at the laws of biology or, some sense, biology's response to the supreme law that tells us that in closed systems, entropy never decreases, and if there's any way for it to increase it will. And what that entropy is, is the measure of the disorder of the system. The disorder is the more disorder, the higher the entropy, the less efficient work you can get out of the system. And eventually, the system will go to, you know, thermal equilibrium. It will, you'll be able to get no more energy out of it. It's a somewhat the end of the system. And, and in fact, Rudolf Klausius, the anti-century physicist who formulated a concept of entropy, which means literally transformation from within. There's poignancy in that. It's such a transformation from within is going to the end of the system. And he had said, you know, that the universe itself will go to thermal equilibrium to what we call the heat death. And so there'll be no more energy to be gotten out of it. This sounds like, I mean a joke from Woody Alley. His mother

Starting point is 00:03:15 brings him to a shrink because he's discovered that eventually the sun is going to go out. He said, you know, how can I live? What's there to live for? You know, the sun is going to go out. And the mother says to the shrink, you know, I don't know why Althe used a word about it. It's not going out over Brooklyn. It's in Annie Hall, right? Annie Hall, yes, that's right. What do you care? Brooklyn's not expanding, right? Yeah, that's what it was. It was expanding, right? That's right. You studied physics as an undergrad yet, and you, right in the book, how you've been haunted since your early, you know, days as an undergrad by the second law of thermodynamics. So let's start with that story that you tell first about Ludwig Boltzman, who solved one of the great paradoxes of physics,

Starting point is 00:03:55 irreversibility paradox. Talk about that. And then why did, in your mind, was he so traumatized, perhaps, or full of dread of his equation, that he took his own life? So talk about that. Yeah, and this is really good because it really ties back to your previous question, you know, about the types of scientists, the different types of, you know, scientists, types in terms of their personality. And to me, the formative feature of personality is how. how you minister to this longing to matter, you know. So there was this great paradox, which is probably most of the processes that we observe are irreversible.

Starting point is 00:04:37 If you film them, like, let's say I crack open an egg and I stir it up and then I fry it. And somebody filmed this, and then they reverse the film. Anybody who sees the reversal of that film is going to know it was reversed. that cannot happen in nature, that its egg is going to uncook itself, unscramble, the yolk is going to separate from the album in and then jump into the shell and seal up. Impossible, right? So almost, you know, everything that we see is irreversible. What's going on there is a matter of what's going on in the molecules that constitute this process.

Starting point is 00:05:19 And if you filmed all of the motions of the molecules and then filmed in and then reversed, the film perfectly, perfectly normal, you know, not contrary to nature at all. So how can that be? That the macroscopic state is just constituted by the microscopic state. On the microscopic state, we find complete reversibility, and on the macroscopic state irreversibility. It boggled the mind, and it was called a paradox. And Boltzman solved. this problem. He really has only two premises here. That matter has, I don't know, if his constituents, and that order is much less probable than disorder. Those constituents can only be in a certain configuration, you can switch them around a little bit when you have the egg cracked open with

Starting point is 00:06:24 the yolk and the album and surrounding it. Once you scramble it up, you can change, you can shuffle those parts every which way, and it's still going to look the same. The features of the system are going to stay the same. Instead of otter going to disorder, you could talk about shuffleability. One of my physics professor had described it in terms of shuffelability. The more entropy there is, the more shuffleability. You know, you can change around the parts and you're still going to end up with the same system. There are just so many more by odors of magnitude, so many more ways of getting disorder than order in terms of the constituent states. This is the amazing thing. So here was this real paradox, a real mind-boggling paradox. All you need is

Starting point is 00:07:16 the matter is made of constituent parts and the laws of probability. You know, it's the laws of large numbers applied to micro-states. And that's why it's the supreme law of a physicist. I think it was Eddington, who at first called it that. But it's repeated by Einstein and by Stephen Hawken, but really all physicists. That is, we know it is never going to be falsified. All laws of nature are open to falsification. That's what makes them scientific law. You're right? Provisional. Well, it's always provisional.

Starting point is 00:07:49 We're going to get more evidence. We're going to have to go back to the drawing boards. But this, and Einstein puts it very, very beautifully. And as does Eddington, if something doesn't agree with the second law of thermodynamics, too bad for your theory, give up. You are not going to get that Nobel Prize. You are going to give it up. In that sense, it's the Supreme Law of Physics.

Starting point is 00:08:09 Ludwig Boltzman, and he solved this amazing problem. And get this. none of his peers accepted it because of bad philosophy. They were all in that day, you know, was Ernst Mach, was like a leading Austrian, and he was great, great, great physicist, you know, but he was a positivist. He did not believe in molecules and atoms. If you couldn't observe it, it didn't exist. I would call positivism bad philosophy.

Starting point is 00:08:41 That philosophy was sinking. an amazing piece of scientific work that has proved so fruitful. The ramifications of this are all over, including I want to make them even, you know, I want to draw even more consequences out of the law of second thermodynamics. You write beautifully, you say all tragedies are thermodynamic.

Starting point is 00:09:03 You mention it in the context of his daughter, Elsa, finding her father's dead body. And it wasn't like he showed any sign. And we can't go into the minds of someone who dies by suicide, right? But at the same time, you think that this would be a more common thing. And I guess my question to you is, why do some scientists kind of fall victim to even bad philosophy, whereas others, so I'm thinking of Ignace Semmelweis, who you write about, and we had Matt Kaplan on from the economist wrote a book, basically about Semmelweis not being accepted called I

Starting point is 00:09:35 I Told You So, and an event he didn't commit suicide, but he did kind of die tragically young and and of illnesses probably precipitated by some of his melancholia. He was in an asylum when he was, yes, they tricked him into an asylum. My friend, I'm Katty Carrico, vented MRNA COVID vaccine. She, you know, thrived despite even worse circumstances than people not believing her. They certainly didn't believe. They wanted to deport her. A postdoc advisor threatened to deport her if she got another job.

Starting point is 00:10:06 And yet she came back resilient as ever and won the Nobel Prize. So why do some scientists fall? victim to, I mean, physicists love to make fun of philosophers. You know that, I'm sure. I love to make fun of philosophers. Well, tell me, why do some, you know, have, we sort of have arrogance, you know, and then other times seem to fall prey to their predations. Why is that? Temperament plays such a large role in this. I was not a person who was raised to think big ideas. I wasn't raised to think at all. I was really raised to be a good Orthodox Jewish wife and mother.

Starting point is 00:10:40 And my temperament didn't go that way. I could just feel this sort of something, you know, the restlessness, the intellectual restlessness, and whatever. Alt's men, he knew he had solved something incredibly important. He said, you know, it must be wonderful to be a general leading great armies into the battle and greed victories. But as for him, the only thing he wants to do is sit in a little room and solve big problems that will contribute to knowledge. Now, to contribute to knowledge means that other scientists must accept it. He wanted to happen what exactly did happen to him only post-death, post-mortem, which is that he would make science grow. He has made science grow amazingly.

Starting point is 00:11:31 but he despaired that would ever happen. And he had a temperament. He might have been bipolar, you know, but so it hurt him so much. And towards the end of his life, I mean, he was really desperate. And he committed such a sad, sad thing. And as you say, I mean, you know, that his teenage daughter found him is just, it's such a tragedy. It was the day before he was supposed to return to teaching. And he was a beloved teacher.

Starting point is 00:11:55 He had been a very funny teacher and very engaging, but he got more and more depressed. You're creatures of matter who long to matter. You can only say that in English, but I'm so glad you could say that in English because it's, again, incredibly poignant. You know, we're creatures of matter who are subject to the laws of physics, including the second law there my dynamics, but we long to matter. And so much of the book is trying to explain how that transformation from within, within us, within our species happens.

Starting point is 00:12:27 You know, that's a normative transformation and ethics. transformation, and it's really what distinguishes us, that we, in some sense, want to justify the fact that we matter so much to ourselves, that we pay so much attention to ourselves, and that we actually can pinpoint the place in human history where this emerged during the period when all the religions emerged that are still extant, which is so interesting, and also Western philosophy emerged during the period of history that's called the Axial Age. And that's when we became these creatures who longed to matter and who are searching for the right values to help us justify ourselves, first and foremost. So I've been thinking about this forever, actually.

Starting point is 00:13:10 Yeah, you say it's the hardest book. It was the longest book. Which is surprising with all your other, you know, just enormous contributions to literature. It's a beautifully printed and bound book. Prominent throughout it is this concept that you came up with, which is the maps of mattering. Talk us to the maps of mattering. What are they? And where do scientists, like my audience members may be, where do they find themselves? I've noticed that there are four general strategies, and that's what I sketched out. This is like the four continents of the mattering. And I asked AI to help me with how big to make them, how the proportions of humanity or how they split up.

Starting point is 00:13:48 And AI was very, very helpful in this. Their first of all, let's start with transcenders, what I call transcenders. And transcenders, which humanity has been for a little. long part of our history up until, I guess, we would say the Enlightenment. We all sought our mattering religiously. We had a metaphysical premise that there is a transcendent presence in the universe, whether we call them God or something vaguer, and that this God made the universe, created something out of nothing, created the laws of nature, and the moral otter within. And he created each one of us. You know, the fact that we are here is the proof that we have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. This is a very grand story. I get goosebumps when I even just, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:44 say it. A very grand way of conceptualizing our mattering. It's a kind of cosmic mattering that the God who created everything created us, and we are here to try. to figure out how he wants us to behave. These are the people I call transcenders. Then most of the people I talk to, even if they go to church or mosque or synagogue, they're not transenders in this way, you know, in that life would not be worth living if they didn't have this metaphysical belief. Most of the people I've spoken to are what I call socializers.

Starting point is 00:15:19 They understand this question, do you matter, that I ask them. they understand it as joy matter to others. And very often the others to whom they need to matter are the people who are already in their lives. We all need people in our lives. Transenders, heroic strivers, competitors. These are the four branches of four continents that I delineate. We all need people in our life.

Starting point is 00:15:44 We're gregarious creatures. Evolve from gregarious creatures. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we say? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

Starting point is 00:16:04 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. But for a socializer, there is no mattering other than mattering. Either to their people who are already in their lives, their children or their romantic partners or their community, colleagues, neighbors, people in their lives. But there are other socializers, and I found this particularly with millennials who, it's not so much people in their lives. It can be perfect strangers. Many millennials want to be famous. That is how they want to appease the longing to matter. They want to be influencers.

Starting point is 00:16:47 They really want to be famous. And they're willing to give up. I remember a lot. lot of psychological literature on this. They're willing to give up, like, you know, having children, having romantic partners, having any connection with their family for fame, which is to be, to matter to a bunch of strangers, which is an odd thing, really. Completely unique in human history. There's a trillion dollar industry predicated on the need to matter to get affirmation from strangers. In fact, a lot of people you don't like. Like, I always feel like you go to a comedy club, and it's almost impossible for the comedians really like the audience or whatever, but they want to be famous. But the most terrifying thing you quote in the book in that chapter

Starting point is 00:17:28 on fame seekers had to do with the fact that they don't care what they're famous for. That's terrifying. I understand a little bit the rationale because of the way I understand this longing to matter is really trying to convince ourselves, which I find endearing about our species, that we have to convince ourselves. But the evidence that a lot of people are paying attention to us seems to be overwhelming evidence that we ourselves matter, that we deserve this attention. So I understand it in some sense. But in fact, most of the people I've spoken to are famous. It's very, very insecure that they're not particularly happy people. The public is very fickle. They're sad. Then heroic strivers. And heroic strivers, mattering doesn't mean mattering to God.

Starting point is 00:18:17 It doesn't mean mattering to others. It means having certain standards of excellence that you are committed to, if not realizing, at least a podically approaching, you know, getting closer and closer to it. And it could be intellectual, it could be artistic, it could be athletic, military, entrepreneurial, ethical. All of these types are profiled in the book. They're mattering project, whether it's intellectual or ethical or artistic, is what, you know, keeps them going, and failures in that are existential failures, you know. Those setbacks are existential.

Starting point is 00:18:54 You know, I don't feel like my life is worth anything. That sort of thing is what you hear. And the last group are competitors. That's the one group where when I talk about, to them, about mattering, they get a little uneasy. I can always tell by the reactions at this point, you know, like where you are. Sometimes I'm wrong, and sometimes it's very, very tricky. But competitors really see mattering as zero-sum. The more others matter, the less they matter.

Starting point is 00:19:21 Just not enough mannering to go around. And it can be against individuals. It could also be group against group. And one of the people I profile, I really wanted to talk to a neo-Nazi. That's somebody, you know, it's a group against group, zero-sum mattering. And look, he's done great work. I'm glad for, you know, for his work. seminal work. And so I would say for all of these types, socializers, transcenders,

Starting point is 00:19:50 competitors, heroic strivers, can be good. It can be bad. And I try to define what are the good ways. How did we judge the good ways of trying to appease this longing we have? What are the creative ways? What are the destructive ways? And once again, entropy comes to the rescue. You do write that once the disintegration from within has sufficiently progressed, it takes that much more energy to reverse it, a law that holds for our psyches as for all else. And so is depression sort of a, you know, they used to think miasmas and things in the area write about that, but is depression at heart an entropic collapsing process? I have spoken to a lot of people who suffer from clinical depression. And I want to say, first of all, that the U.S. hotline for suicide prevention is W.D.S. www.u-watter.gov. The thing that the suicidally depressed people feel is that they don't matter,

Starting point is 00:20:53 others do, they don't, nothing they can do will ever make them matter. A terrible terrible. And what this means is they cannot, they cannot abide their own presence. I mean, I really think it shows how strong this mannering instinct is in us. You know, if you can't somehow appease it, can't abide your own presence. The people I've spoken to, and one is a very, very good philosopher who has suffered from depression, told me is that phenomenologically, this is exactly what it feels like. It feels like psychic disintegration. It just feels like an unraveling, and it's a kind of death within death. You know, we don't have the counter-entropic drive to push on against entropy into your life.

Starting point is 00:21:41 You lack energy. You lack that enervation, positive and negative. And, you know, when I read, sometimes I get asked is I'm sure, you know, what's the meaning of life? I usually say something like this, Rebecca. I usually say, and it relates to your theory and what you posit in the book, which is, it relates to entropy in the following way. If I said to you, Rebecca, could I double your happiness right now?

Starting point is 00:22:01 Well, you have grandkids, right? Like, pretty hard. Like, maybe you have two grandkids, you know, and then you go to four. But eventually it's going to start to decrease, right? Like, as wonderful as they are, you know, I know somebody with like 72, I mean, he's a Habad rabbi. His grandfather has 72, you know, grandchildren. I'm like, does he know all their birthdays? Whatever.

Starting point is 00:22:21 It's probably like every day of the year. If I gave you a billion dollars, yeah, you'd be a lot happier, but would you be, you know, like, could you be 10 times happier? But I say to somebody, and this really only kind of works for people that are, have very tight, you know, either children or relationships in their life that are like children if they don't have biological children. And that's that I could make your life infinitely worse. Like, you, I don't even like to say it, right? I'm not even going to vocalize what it is, but you and I know, as being parents, how our life could be get infinitely worse, right? So the converse of that to me is you should do those things, that which, if they were taken

Starting point is 00:22:54 away through an entropic destroying process, you would be devastated. Okay, maybe not that. But like, the more of those things you have, I think the happier, or at least you can progress towards happiness. You speak about happiness, not as a state of being, but as a, almost like a journey. Does that comport with this entropic, you know, overarching, I would say, architecture that you speak about? We're not closed systems. Being a close system is not compatible with being alive. We take in energy in the form of food and sunlight and certain chemicals

Starting point is 00:23:27 and taken in through the work of metabolism, keeping up the order that life needs, you know, life is a highly ordered system. So ordered, it's scary to think because the more ordered, the more ways it can go wrong. And all of this order is maintained, you know, in the face, in resistance to entropy. That's what life, you know, Viva la resistance. This is what life is. That's what it is, resistance to entropy. While we're, of course, exporting high entropic waste, you know, heat and other ways into the environment. Life is a local violation of the law of entropy, but the life with the environment,

Starting point is 00:24:14 that system is obeying the law of entropy. There are no violations to the law of entropy. This is what life is. This is what flourishing is. It is a counter-entropic resistance, defiance, and happiness, you know, happiness is a very ordered state. And I would say, I would go even for it. further, everything worth living for is an ordered state. Knowledge is better than ignorance.

Starting point is 00:24:41 Clarity is better than confusion. Flourishing is better than suffering. Love is better than hatred. Beauty is better than ugliness. These are truisms, you know, these are that we all accept. And if you look at the thing that's better, it's an ordered state. Its negation is a disordered state. So I think I would argue this is a very kind of a spinozist argument, trying to get out of the laws of nature some ethical enlightenment, some ethical guidance, because that's what we want. We want ethical guidance. You know, we know we want to matter. We know we do all sorts of things to matter. Some people do very bad things in order to matter. Some of the people I've spoken to, they want power over others. They want dominance. They want to make other people life miserable, you know. These are bad things, right? They cause an increase in entropy. This is how I judge people. Are you increasing entropy or are you decreasing it?

Starting point is 00:25:38 Well, one of my favorite lines in a book that caused me to laugh out loud while I was playing golf with one of my kids and listening to the audio book, which everyone should get all versions of it. At one point you say, and I'm like about to hit, you know, my 16th shot on the hall, and you say that we burn 320 calories per day just by thinking. So if this book is pushing you to step up your thinking, even only, to disagree, then you're burning extra calories. So, Brian, you're welcome. And so I read the book twice, Rebecca, so I could have that extra croissant. But it raises a real question. If people or situations are anti-entropic, you just said, like you judge people, but I'm going to ask you a very

Starting point is 00:26:17 provocative question, which is, can people who don't have children? And children could mean biological, but it could also mean ideological children. It could mean mentees. It could mean pro-deges. It could mean people that you sponsor or your big brother, big sister. Do they matter less? I know it's provocative, but can we say something about them? Any mattering project that depends on making others feel like they matter less is wrong. I think I have a good proof. I didn't put it in this book because my editors, they wanted the book to sell. They couldn't be too much, too much philosophy. That's right. But I think a very good for why we all morally matter.

Starting point is 00:27:00 And I think I've actually even broached it here. There's something ennobling about wanting to matter and devoting so much of our energy to these mattering projects. We devote so much. It's hard enough to live, right? But no, we devote so much of our energy to these mattering. We're writing books, studying, bringing up our children, fighting for justice, all of, you know, so many different ways.

Starting point is 00:27:25 What are the bad ways? Well, anyone that, you know, anything that depends on making others feel like they matter less, either those in your life or, you know, ideologically or wherever. But I would also say that some mattering projects can be bad because they're not actually working for you. I mean, sometimes as a professor, you know, you have students and they want to study a certain thing. And you don't know really why they want to study it. They don't love it. They're not doing well in it.

Starting point is 00:27:59 But somehow their mattering seems to depend on this. It's kind of a responsibility to say, look, you're very smart. You have many talents. I don't think this is the best use of your talent. So to answer your question, here's what I would say. Because I want to be extremely pluralistic. And I know people who I think live wonderful lives who don't have people that they're particularly caring for in their lives.

Starting point is 00:28:22 They're just not caretakers. And I'm going to go back to Hillel the Elder, the great rabbinic sage of the first century. He said, you know, if I'm not for myself, then who will be for me? We can translate that into entropic language. I have to be for myself. I have to be constantly fighting entropy and trying just to survive and to thrive. And because of that, you know, I pay a lot of attention to myself. It's not that we're self-centered, but we have to feel ourselves deserving of our own attention.

Starting point is 00:28:51 I mean, our whole planning, our whole sense of, Engagement with life demands this. 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 Google Fi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay.

Starting point is 00:29:17 Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees, Google Fiore Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization. during times of high network usage. And so, of course, I have to be for myself. But if I'm only for myself, then what am I? You're right. So the way I would translate that is, if your mannering project is only working for you,

Starting point is 00:29:41 and it is not having, it's not helping in any way to enforce the counter-entropic process, which is life and flourishing, then you're selfish. You know, you're selfish. But that there are so many ways of doing that, you know. I mean, even, you know, plant a garden in a park, you know, so others can enjoy it. There's so many ways that you can in some way be a force or save the animals, you know.

Starting point is 00:30:16 They're suffering to, right? This book, we have to do what you're not supposed to do, which is judge a book by its cover. by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it, but it's the impossible, there's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books. Take us through the book, the title, the subtitle, and this map of meaning or this braided thread.

Starting point is 00:30:38 It says, it in Mercurial. I love the title, the cover and the subtitle. So take us through it, Rebecca, please. Yeah, the mannering instinct, the subtitle, how our deepest longing drives us and divides us. And this divides us was very, very important to me. And that was sort of, after germinating these ideas for decades, what finally got me to write is what seems to be a crisis of mattering that we're going through and that is, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:07 so dividing us to the point that it's hard to have a civil union. I did want to offer this book as a way of perhaps being able to see the deep humanity in all of us and where we diverge. A lot of the divergence is in good faith, you know, to be able to see. each other as generously as possible. That was really the motivation because frankly, you know, I'm trained in analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers like very little problems. Puzzles. We like puzzles. Puzzles in language of the best, right? I'm suspicious of big theories, but somehow this theory kept growing in my mind from physics to biology to psychology to philosophy

Starting point is 00:31:51 to ethics, you know, and I was suspicious, I would say, maybe afraid even to put it out, like, who the hell am I, to put forth a broad theory. But I think it was really the sense of, it helps me, when I get very angry, when I'm reading the newspaper, and it's like, what's wrong with my species? It helps me to go through the ideas that I work out here and to just, to grow the generosity toward one another. So, it's in that spirit. And that's how I understand this braid. We're together, we're together, we're so together, we are all, you know, the whole scientific story of how we come to have this longing to matter and to justify ourselves. It's a common story. We share it. But then

Starting point is 00:32:39 the way we appease this longing to matter, this mattering instinct, find a way of living with this self-justificatory longing that requires us to have values, which is elite. The values don't follow from all of this. If there's free will anywhere, it's here where we branch off and we become undivided and go off in our... That's what I understood by this. I had turned down a whole bunch of covers because it's a very abstract idea, and a lot of the covers they gave me looked like introduction to differential geometry. It just looked like a math book.

Starting point is 00:33:20 Fear that a lot of people have nowadays is about artificial intelligence, kind of replacing what we do that we have a sense of mattering from, what we derive our matter. And you quote Freud in the book, Freud said, you know, all of life is work and love. And if AI can replace the work of knowledge workers like you and me, and it can replace the love because of things like character, AI,

Starting point is 00:33:46 and all these artificial relationships that, you know, don't require me to go out and ask a woman on a date or, you know, nowadays for men. So I want to ask you the question, can AI have a mattering instinct? Or is it encoded in this wet supercomputer that we carry on our shoulders? You know, is it possible, you're right, that AI is making everyone feel that redundancy is threatening to us, but will the AI rob ourselves of our mattering? The two, you know, two different questions there, you know, one which is really, I think, you know, going to be upon us.

Starting point is 00:34:18 Maybe already is, you know, that some of the most creative ways of appeasing or mattering instinct will be superseded by what AI can do. Prove math theorems faster to make discoveries in science, write novels, write music, paint pictures that have led to flourishing and led to great achievements that we can. all take pride in. I take great pride in our species producing, you know, Bach and Shakespeare and Michael Jordan. I'm a big basketball fan. Here's one thing, I would say, you know, heroic strivers, what I call heroic strivers, it's really going to threaten them. I don't think that the socializers are going to look to, I mean, to some extent, maybe for romantic partners but mothers are not going to have little babies, AI agents that are acting like their babies.

Starting point is 00:35:16 I don't think this is going to happen, but I think Heroics Drivers, what I call Heroic Strivers, are going to be severely threatened. One of the ways to be a heroic striver is ethically, and that will still remain to us. AI will not be able to do that. They could write our novels or our poetry or our music or improve our math theorems,

Starting point is 00:35:35 but they're not going to be able to do that for us. And so, wouldn't that be a wonderful, you know, as wonderful turn of events of that's, if somehow there was a change, an incredible ethical change, and that's how we got our status, you know, from how much good we're actually doing in the world, how much counter-entropic good we're doing in the world. You know, this is a big thing that's upon us, is all I can say. I can't think of anything else, not the industrial revolution, not the, not the, enlightenment, nothing, that has the possibility of so changing what we are and what we see our lives as being about.

Starting point is 00:36:17 Even the very name of our species, you know, homo habilismant, you know, toolmaker or handyman. Yeah. And homo sapiens means a man who knows, right? Exactly. Exactly. We're not the only things that know. And your other question, if, you know, God forbid, if these agents begin to have a long to matter, want to justify their own, you know, it would take self-reflection, you know,

Starting point is 00:36:44 of the sort that we have, you know, be able to step outside themselves and say, oh my God, I pay so much attention to myself. Am I worth it? Do I deserve this? If they do this, then what we have are non-carbon-based humans. These will be humans, and that means we're going to have to think about their rights. We're going to have a whole different way of having to think about ethics, because we will have created, we've always been creating humans, but we've

Starting point is 00:37:10 created humans in a new way. You know, philosophers have been added for over 2,000 years since the ancient Greeks. This is the moment for philosophers, because these are philosophical problems. So show us what you've got philosophers, right? You've been thinking about this for 2,000 years. Show us what you've got. Rebecca, this has been such a wonderful conversation. This book is incredible. It reminds me of a famous quote by John

Starting point is 00:37:34 Archibald Wheeler, the man who coined the term black holes. said matter. I had him at Princeton. You did? Oh, you're so lucky. Your career is legendary. I mean, I just love your writing and your books. But Wheeler said maybe you heard him say it. Maybe not. He said matter tells space time had a curve, and space time tells matter how to move. And this book, the matter instinct, was one of the most moving books to me. And hopefully we'll have many more. You'll write many more books. So we'll talk about your other books, too, that have been so important to me and my colleagues and the intellectual circle that I move in.

Starting point is 00:38:07 But the movement of this book, it was surprising to me. Just how deep it is, how accurate it is, and how precise it is. It's a wonderful book. It's one of Apple's most anticipated books of the year. It's got, you know, hundreds of incredible reviews already. And I just thank you so much for sharing your time and just your ideas and your brain, your giant brain with the end of the impossible audience. Thank you so much, Rebecca.

Starting point is 00:38:30 Oh, thank you so much. I knew it was going to be fun. And I'll do it again sometimes. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein just used the second law thermodynamics to explain depression, meaning, and why AI might create new species. If that changes how you think about what matters, hit subscribe and turn out notifications. Drop a comment. Which of the four types of person are you? And if you want to go deeper on entropy and explore a provocative new theory,

Starting point is 00:38:55 that perhaps there is a new hour of time, click here and watch my interview with Michael Wong. You won't be disappointed in your life. and your life may just keep it together a bit longer. Go ahead, click it now.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Genius Philosopher: The Law of Physics That Explains Why Your Life Falls Apart

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