Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Jeremy England: Life is on FIRE🔥 🧬🔥 (#189)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Introduction to today's guest, who is a very, very well-known scientist, a thinker, an author, and that's Jeremy England, and he is a rabbi and a doctor and a professor and senior director in artificial intelligence at Glaxo Smith-Kline. He's a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, and the former Thomas and, you know, and Virginia Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT, which, as I understand as a small technical college in Northeastern, Mass, and Boston. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a Hertz Fellow, and was named one of Forbes 30 under 30,

Starting point is 00:00:47 rising stars in science. And he has written this book, courtesy of basic books, a renowned imprint. I believe they published the Feynman Lectures, right, Jeremy? and he's joining us today to discuss this book, but also some of his very provocative and very intriguing theories. This is Entropy Month on The Into the Impossible podcast. We have Jeremy as well as Julian Barboor coming on, and we will have Lee Cronin, who's a professor in Glasgow coming on,

Starting point is 00:01:17 talking about life and entropy and all those good things. But Rabbi Jeremy, England, I want to ask you, as I ask all my guests who have sat down, written books, and shared their intellectual musings with the universe, I like to ask every author to do what you're never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. And I'm going to ask you, Rabbi England, if I may call you, Jeremy, this book, where do you get the title and the cover design from?

Starting point is 00:01:45 So the title of the book comes from the end of one of the later chapters, and it is a concept that I try to develop over the course of the book. It's in a sense, maybe I don't know what I want to call it the punchline, but the idea is to try to understand self-organization that starts to look lifelike, that starts to have different features of its behavior resemble what we think of as being distinctive of life. And part of the point is that this has to do with how energy is flowing through the matter and why the flow of energy is keeping it in a special shape instead of sort of smashing it to smithereens or randomizing it in the way that other kinds of energy flow would tend to do.

Starting point is 00:02:30 And so there's this question of what it means to be sort of both on fire and also still kind of sustained by that energy flow instead of torn apart by it, as you might expect. If you saw something on fire. And then, of course, also partly the book is a contemplation of passages in the Hebrew Bible that are connected with. some of these concepts to kind of put it in a poetic or philosophic frame. And so the idea of the burning bush that Moses encounters when he's in the wilderness is very much that same idea, right? Something, a living thing that's on fire, but not consumed. And so the title then comes from there.

Starting point is 00:03:10 And then the picture was, I think, some very nice cover art that someone developed in basic that is around that concept because there's the fire. there's a serpent, and so it sort of both looks like a flame and a serpent, and you kind of go from there. Very good. Very good. Yes, and I love the biblical passages throughout the discussion. I've had on more sort of Christian apologist or Christian supporters of intelligent design, which you do comment on in the book.

Starting point is 00:03:43 Maybe we'll get to that. But the preponderance of people on the show have not been of a Jewish or ordination. although one of my close friends and mentors is Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, who's this brilliant thinker and intellectual. I'm sure he'll be interested in this as well. He has his own podcast. So we've had on a lot of Christian perspectives on the podcast, and I thought, you know, because I am obviously a practicing Jew, my audience knows that I am not a proselyzer.

Starting point is 00:04:11 I do not believe that it is permissible, according to judic religion, to go out and try to convert people, although many of the people that, I have talked to in the course of the podcast, especially in the Christian realm, or been associated with people like William Lane Craig and maybe even James Tour and other people that are very famous intellectuals that do Christian apologetics. There always seems to me, Jeremy, to be kind of an interesting line that I find very challenging to me as a person of faith, but not necessarily as devout as they are or maybe even as you are. And that is, you know, there always seems to be a notion of everything that had a beginning had a beginner. So the universe

Starting point is 00:04:52 must have had a beginner. And then the next step is that there must be some entity that created the beginning of the universe and that entity sustains us and is personally related to us. In other words, the God that created the universe has a personal relationship with us, has demands of us. And it always goes from there to Jesus with most of the scholars that I've had on. And of course, as a practicing Jew cannot accept Jesus as the fulfillment of the role of Messiah as fulfilled or discussed in Tanakh and the Talmud and other places. But how do you approach that, you know, kind of the fact that we are maybe fellow travelers to some extent intellectually with people who support the notion of a God or God-like

Starting point is 00:05:34 force, maybe, you know, present at the only at the beginning, maybe continually present? How do you trace along with that, but not, you know, travel along with that? them, but not necessarily come to the same conclusion that Jesus must be there for the personal instantiation of God for us. Sure. So I think that clearly when talking about these kinds of theological questions, people come to a lot of different conclusions, and even within different religious systems, the same kinds of ideas can sound very different depending on who's talking about them.

Starting point is 00:06:09 So I'll start by just kind of speaking from my own. perspective of interpretation, which I don't want to claim, summarizes everything that every theological thinker, even in Judaism, has said, you know, over the last, however many thousands of years. I think for me, the whole approach to talking about the beginnings of the universe and the existence of God and those kinds of questions people tend to get very wrapped up. And they don't fit to me in how it seems to me the Torah, the sacred text that's at the core of the Jewish tradition is submitting itself for consideration. I don't think it's trying to be a text that puts forward a testable claim about a sort of fact about the universe where you could go out with your measuring device and sort of say, is there in fact a creator here or not? I've finally figured out whether the statements here in this document are true or false.

Starting point is 00:07:11 I think it's very different than that. It's more like a choice on the part of a person who chooses to be party to an agreement in how they interpret experience and act in the world. And it's like a playbook for that. It's a way of talking about the world that helps frame your thinking and helps you have a language for describing what you're doing and why you're doing it. And the thing I think it's so important about that is it means that contrary to the more sort of Hellenistic idea, the more Greek idea that I think ends up very heavily influencing Christian theology and then its devolutions even to come back and touch post-medieval Jewish theology as a result. We're not talking about is something there or isn't it there. If I read the Talmud, if I read the Hebrew scriptures, like the Hebrew Bible, the writings of the Hebrew prophets and the Torah, what it seems to me is it's more like making a recommendation about a procedure for interpreting experience, meaning the universe does exist. We have experience here. We have a world here to understand. And there are different interpretive frames that you can put on that experience. You can talk about it in different ways. You can try to describe it and make sense of it in different terms.

Starting point is 00:08:31 And one way you could do that is by relating to it as a personality, relating to it as an interlocutor, you know, someone with whom you're capable of having dialogue. And that's just kind of a proposal in a sense. The puzzle of the universe's existence is always a philosophical sort of conundrum of why it's there, where you can always start by saying, well, the answer is it's the expression of the will of a certain personality. And then the question is, how far does that interpretive frame get you? Like, is it predictive? Is it effective in explaining to you what happens to you and your nation or whoever in the world?

Starting point is 00:09:13 Does it end up giving you the power to make sense of, you know, and find coherence in the sets of events that you observe? And I think to that degree, the hard part is not convincing someone to try that out. I think the difficult claim, the one that it's not at all obvious is true from the perspective of Judaism in terms of what's being claimed there is that it is the God of the Hebrew Bible who is that personality. It would be much easier to just say, oh, I'll try to relate to the universe as a personality and see how that goes. But why would it be that that personality has very particular expectations, right? Like don't wear wool with linen in one woven fabric if you belong to this particular nation that descends from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and has this particular covenant. That shouldn't be obvious, right? You're not going to get that from trying to find personality in the statistics of experience.

Starting point is 00:10:11 So I think that's the real hard part, the challenge that shouldn't be easy for anyone and that is kind of the lifelong struggle of someone who's trying to make sense of the Torah. It's not, can one find a personality in the universe and kind of have an operating system that assumes that there's a kind of creative will behind the events you experience. It's more like, and why would I think that that personality is the same one that makes very specific demands that were given to Moses at a particular time that have real details to them and real content to them? like don't murder and don't like fires on Saturdays and don't eat pigs and things like that, as they pertain to not all of humanity entirely, but in some instances, just specific rules for a specific subset of humanity. You know, it's a very not obvious thing. And so I think that's where I'd start that off. Yeah, I mean, I always encapsulated as, you know, it's not as important to, you know, ask if I believe in God, but if God believes in me, because that would presuppose both his existence,

Starting point is 00:11:19 and his concern with me as a individual personal God. I think we see that in the Kedush that we do on Shabbat, where partially we testify to God's creating the universe, which is kind of the universal, literally universal God. That's kind of my purview in this conversation. And then there's the personal God side where he liberated us from Egypt and the House of Bondage. And those two aspects, those dual sides of a God who exists

Starting point is 00:11:46 to create the universe for everybody, not just for the Jews, and then a specific, as I said, instantiation of that God. I think that's, you know, very fascinating. Maybe it's paradigmatic and so forth. But from there, you know, from very believing, you know, kind of Jews and Christians who we both have, you know, admiration for and can consent with and many aspects of religion, I want to turn to the question of why are so many, why are there so many Jewish Nobel Prize winners? And why are almost all of them atheists, if not devoutly so? Have you, this is often pointed out, Jeremy, by friends of mine, like Eric Weinstein and others, and his conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe on the portal

Starting point is 00:12:30 podcast, you know, some sort of evidence for something interesting, like maybe you'd want to investigate that, just as you might want to look into, you know, why is this particular, you know, city in Kenya or in the, you know, really great at producing the world record holder marathon runners. And I think, I personally think they're unrelated. I think that it's almost accidental that so many of these Nobel Prize winners are Jewish. Do you ever think about that? I think it's almost chauvinistic, you know, pro for a change about Judaism, but, but yeah, but I think it's almost accidental because I know very few, especially in the physical sciences, or anything but irreligious, maybe anti-religious in the case of folks like maybe Stephen Weinberg and others.

Starting point is 00:13:13 So have you ever thought about this issue of Nobel secular or atheistic Jewish Nobel laureates or just eminent scientists in general? Yeah, I mean, you could develop different hypotheses about this. It's probably hard to prove anything definitively. But I think if I had to guess a clear reason for that, it would be argued in terms of the historical details. meaning that, you know, it is interesting that maybe you have a bunch of Nobel Prize winners in the 20th century, but you didn't have a huge number of Jews in the time of Faraday or Maxwell or Newton punching at the same way. So what was the difference, right?

Starting point is 00:13:56 And clearly the difference was the degree to which Jews in Europe were allowed access to a secular society of some sort in which they could participate. and also to the degree to which they sought that. And if you go further back in time, societies were just organized very differently. And so what I think was constant was that over more than 1,000 years and really close to 2,000 years, you had a culture within the Jewish world of trying to inculcate a sense of the value of learning a,

Starting point is 00:14:37 a system's way of thinking about a set of complex ideas and assumptions and rules and trying to kind of compute the consequences of those, not always numerically, sometimes really involving genuine mathematics, but often more sort of in kind of a legal sense, but where there's this cultural love for those kinds of discussions and examinations of arguments, where you're looking at something and say, but what if I change this rule of the system? Like, what would be the implications of that?

Starting point is 00:15:06 and trying to anticipate weird cases and realize ways in which altering your assumptions, you know, you can surprise yourself with what you can compute as the consequences of that. But that was applied to the study of the Torah for centuries and not really to the same degree elsewhere. And then you had this huge sea change, I don't know, post-Napologian conquests, like various things that caused all these shifts in European society that started granting Jews access if they wanted. to a kind of society that in principle wasn't about affiliation with separate religious groups that were either dominant or pushed to the margins in certain respects. So you, of course, had a bunch of people who still had a lot of kind of cultural interest in those kinds of ways of thinking, but suddenly who were kind of turning away from the traditional applications of those and at a time when a lot of ideas were coming together.

Starting point is 00:16:03 So it seems like, you know, I don't know, Nobel Prizes is obviously even a different thing than kind of participants in a profession. But if you had to kind of make that argument, I would say often, although not always, but often you get the biggest prizes in science for being able to kind of think outside the box, look at the system as a whole and say, but should we be assuming these things or could we devise a different system that is consistent with the same empirical data? And, you know, certainly you see that, you know, the grandest example, perhaps, is general relativity. And Einstein's insights there, right, to get gravity from the geometry of space time instead of from a force law, you know, it's a completely upside down way of thinking about the same empirical observations. And I think that maybe the plasticity of thinking that might have originated in a culture that prized at that kind of intellectual, gymnastics that then suddenly kind of allowed a huge portion of its populace to run into a new kind of society with a new set of

Starting point is 00:17:14 ideas and a new ways for them to succeed. Maybe that adds up to something. But it's kind of, you know, you can make up a theory like that and you can make up another one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:30 I think that there's a danger in kind of using any of these. I personally, as I wrote about in my book, believe that the Nobel Prize is sort of a secular religion and that the Nobel Prize is a voter Zara for people to, because they need a release, they need some form of religion. Even if you're an atheist, I had a debate with friends about this recently. Is atheism a religion? Does it have trappings of religion? Well, it may and may not.

Starting point is 00:17:55 But certainly the Nobel Prize does, as I convincingly, I think, if I have to pat myself on my own back, It has holidays. It has ritual ceremonies required regalia. It has a priesthood. It has patron saints. It has a founding father, a founding mythology rooted in death. And it also has a band of apostates in one of the roles that I'm fulfilling. I want to ask you.

Starting point is 00:18:19 Sorry, you provoke me. I think the other thing to say about this is that it has to do with idol smashing, Meaning that there's this tradition going back to Abraham that part of what Yadu, it's part of what Judaism is about is pointing out the pointlessness of prostration before a sort of arbitrary construction of human hands and saying, no, there's something more complex and more elevated and greater that you really should be sort of lifting your eyes to instead of worshiping something you've crafted yourself. And I do think that it gets to your point or your question about why are there so many, not just Jews who have ended up winning this prize, but why are so many of them such a vowed atheist? And I think part of what happened in this strange way is that the zeal for idol smashing is kind of part of the sort of fire in the belly of Jewish culture. And that's something that someone can maintain, even as they maybe become estranged from religious practice and sort of the whole religious system of Judaism.

Starting point is 00:19:27 And so you do have, and I can relate to this myself personally, because this is more sort of like the household I grew up in than the life I'm choosing to live now. But I think you definitely can have someone who's in this strange way very much trying to be true to their Jewish self and expressing that through their zeal for smashing idols, which is both good for doing paradigm shifts in science. also is going to make you feel like in order to be like the best you can be, you should be an atheist because all these things people are talking about that sound like religion are just kind of silly forms of idolatry. And sometimes versions of Judaism can very even appropriately appeal to someone as being too idolatrous to be acceptable. So I think maybe that's part of it as well. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time. to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill,

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Starting point is 00:20:48 Yeah, and I definitely agree with that. And I think there's kind of this eternal quest in Judaism. I also think the kind of adversarial approach in a good way to learning, you know, plays a role that has historically typified. You know, Jews didn't have opportunities, as you say, if it were being pogromed and run out of many areas, at least in Eastern Europe, and Stedda Life wasn't commensurate with being a gentleman scientist of the philosophical tradition of a Faraday or Herschel or somebody like that. But nevertheless, I think it is important to recognize that.

Starting point is 00:21:20 you know, there is some through line, perhaps, that Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants, but not only giants of physics, as we will now turn, but also maybe giants of the, you know, tradition that he was heir to, even though he, you know, certainly didn't practice it. And, you know, some say maybe even would have considered himself or, you know, rejecting it apostate or some other notion of God, you know, in the Spinozic tradition, which is, you know, typically thought to be pantheistic, or nature, you know, worshipping of nature or something like that. But I want to turn towards, you know, I think the most basic aspect of this book, which is about life.

Starting point is 00:22:00 And I always, you know, pick up these books. And there's a book by, you know, speaking of Jewish atheists, upcoming guest, Lawrence Krause, or by the time this comes out, maybe it'll already be out. Actually, no, I don't think that could violate, that will violate, you know, certain laws of continuity in space time. But Lawrence Krause is coming up. He wrote a book, you know, called The Greatest Story Ever Told. kind of mocking of the Bible, but then he said, why are we here? And there's no reason, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:25 there's no answer to that particular why question. And I've always been told that you can't ask why questions in physics, but you can ask what questions. And one of the through lines that runs in your book is this notion and the question or asked in Schrodinger's 1944 monograph entitled, What is Life? And unlike, you know, the why questions, which you shouldn't really an answer to. That book doesn't really answer the question. So I want to ask you, what is life, Jeremy? Try to maybe wriggle out of this question or maybe redefine it beyond all recognition to some degree by saying we think of this as a hard question, but if we want to, we can make it an easy question because what we can say is that we really know how to use the words life and death

Starting point is 00:23:23 or alive and dead. And we didn't learn that from the last several hundred years of progress in modern science. It's part of the vocabulary of regular everyday speech to just kind of say, okay, frogs are alive, rocks are not. And yes, maybe we can, if we look very closely, find things that are more sort of borderline, but that actually takes effort. And we have many examples that are very clear in how far they are on one side or the other side of that line. So you could start by just saying, look, we know what's alive and what's not. And what we should start trying to ask ourselves is how do we make a theory of from the perspective of physics what the boundary between those two groups of things looks like and how you kind of cross from one to the other? And that's not the same thing as sort of asking for the definition.

Starting point is 00:24:13 We know the definition empirically, and if we want to interrogate that through the lens of physics, then we can start saying, what are the distinctive behaviors of living things when talked about in physical terms that are not necessarily individually unique to life? But when you sort of bundle them all together, they start to sound like, okay, yeah, that sounds like life. So you have to start making a list. You have to divide and conquer. Living things make copies of themselves. They self-replicate. they get access to difficult sources of energy to access in their environment. They act in ways that seem to instantiate accurate predictions of their likely future

Starting point is 00:24:53 based on the statistics of their past and present. And you could go on and start making a list of various things like that. And each one of them, maybe if you just put it on its own, you'd say, okay, that's a well-defined physical phenomenon. And it reminds me of something the life is good at. But I could imagine maybe something that does that that isn't definitely not alive. So, for example, with self-copying, a very primitive form of self-copying is anything that spreads itself, like fire, for example. And you don't want to start saying, oh, yeah,

Starting point is 00:25:20 so fire must be alive because it spreads itself. That just completely, you know, changes the definition of life, you know, beyond recognition. But it does point out, okay, I could try to make a model of self-spreading things or self-copying things, and maybe I can progress in the physics that way. I can make a different model of spontaneous emergence of predictive behavior in matter that's subject to a predictable environment. And maybe some of that prediction will look like life and some of it will be more primitive. But I can make a theory of that thing. And if I do that over and over again, I maybe start to be able to sort of paint the gray spectrum going back from what we think of as highly developed life to all these more primitive emergencies that might have contributed at the beginning to the essential. of the first thing that we'd find very impressively alive.

Starting point is 00:26:14 And so when you read Schrodinger's book or his monograph, what did you, what's your takeaway? Do you think there is sort of importance to that monograph, the way that his contributions and quantum mechanics were? I sort of think of it as one of the first, you know, hints at some sort of, some of the themes you just mentioned, but, you know, not a precursor to DNA, which would be discovered 13 years later, or even notions of, you know, the thermodynamic art. arguments that you're making in this book, sort of more basic in physics. How influential was that

Starting point is 00:26:46 monograph to you? Well, I think what Schrodinger did very brilliantly in what his life is really kind of more pose and try to address from his perspective the question of how is what life is how is what life seems to be doing understandable to be possible in terms of physics that we know. I think it was sort of meant to be kind of let's just deal once and for all with notions of vitalism and say, you don't need some additional physics we don't know about in order to explain how it could be that atoms and molecules act this way. But if that's the case, then let's be careful and try to imagine how you would accomplish some of the things that life does. And he's very famous, for example,

Starting point is 00:27:35 for hypothesizing that there's some kind of a periodic crystal that might be needed in order to create the heredity of traits that you see being passed from a living thing to its offspring through the molecules that the offspring is built out of that come from the living thing. And so that's a pretty impressive thing given that people didn't yet know what the structure of DNA was. And they were still sort of chasing that down. I mean, although it wasn't too much later that Watson and Grick and Hershey and Chase and all these. famous experiments about DNA's the hereditary material and what it looks like started coming out. So he's famous for that. He's also famous for thinking about the thermodynamics and just making a starting observation that I don't think gets you all the way to go, which is just that if you think in terms of

Starting point is 00:28:24 life is a physical process, what it must be doing, it is a process that's capable of taking parts of its surroundings and kind of organizing them into copies of it themselves. And if it's going to do that, it can't do that according to the second law of thermodynamics without in the surroundings doing some kind of counterbalancing, increasing of the entropy of the universe, because otherwise you're going to have a total entropy change on average that's not positive, and that would seem to be in violation of the second law. I think that while he famously made that observation, you don't get a lot of a sense of, all right, so how is this actually accomplished? And I think also the real answer to the questions that he's posing can mostly be empirical, and they were answered empirically in the subsequent half a century, because a lot of it was sort of more like, life is doing. So how could it be doing that? And he had a lot of brilliant insights into what might be possible for someone who didn't have a lot of experimental data to work with. And then you start being able to just do experiments and a lot of your methods get more precise and accurate.

Starting point is 00:29:39 And you start people to say, oh, okay, so this is how muscles work. There are proteins and they have chemical fuel like ATP and they change their shapes when they burn the chemical fuel. And they're all strung together in such a way that when they change their shapes, there's this kind of concerted action that can produce a function. course. And so it's explaining life and its beauty and it's functioning at the macroscopic level by tracing that back to all of these molecular physical events. And that's really cool. But it's very much empirical and it's very much, let's look and see and let's try to understand. And it's a different question than why would matter get this way in the first place, right? Like if you started with matter that was not in any particularly interesting shape, none of that discussion really

Starting point is 00:30:25 touches the question of why it would get knocked into that shape and whether it would have to be put into that shape by something that sort of was already equally specially shaped or whether the special shapes can kind of get knocked together by somehow more primitive patterns in the environment. So I think that the emergence question is a separate one from the how is this possible question and it really took a half century of elaborating the answer to the question how this is possible to start really laying the ground for thinking more. precisely about the emergence question. So I think he was really seminal, clearly. And in another sense, the experimental findings that came afterwards were equally, if not more important to launching

Starting point is 00:31:07 any serious discussion about the emergence question, I would say. So this question comes from a friend Lee Cronin, the Regis professor at University of Glasgow. He'll be a guest on the podcast in the summer. And he's asking, you know, he's very provocative and a little bit quirky, but he does say, and he wants me to communicate to you, your thoughts on why is thermodynamics particularly relevant to this discussion? In other words, his question is why not have a gravitational description of life? You know, why is it thermodynamics as privileged in some sense? I have to kind of, I mean, it seems like a total evasion to answer this way. especially given the subtitle of the book, which mentions thermodynamics.

Starting point is 00:31:54 But in the sense, it's not about thermodynamics so much as a statement about dynamical systems with many pieces. You could talk about it in more general terms. But I think that the reason that thermodynamics is important is because it grounds you in a theoretical frame where you can speak with rigor about the probabilities of the probability of the, different events happening in a system and their relationship to a surrounding environment and exchanges of different kinds that can happen with that environment. That's what thermodynamics has always been from the beginning when it was first just kind of a theory of how heat engines can work and whether they can be more or less efficient.

Starting point is 00:32:40 And it has remained that way when you start to think of it more in microscopic terms. And I think that doesn't mean there aren't ways of thinking in these terms where maybe you could try to abstract away and say, I don't want to talk about energy. I don't want to talk about temperature, because really what this is about ultimately is you're going to make a model of a system and say, what is the probability distribution for different things that could happen in the future of the system, given the dynamical rules that I've made for how it kind of hops from one state to another? So I have these local changes that I can make, these more sort of incremental modifications to the structure of the system. and I have some rules mapped out for how that's allowed to happen.

Starting point is 00:33:22 So how do I predict the long-time behavior? And what thermodynamics is very good for is grounding you in things like conservation of energy. So energy from movies and stuff we tend to think of now as like glowing stuff that flies from one place to another and blows stuff up. And indeed, maybe it could be in a certain case like that. But if we really want to go back to the beginning of the idea of energy, what is it? is either just motion or the potential to produce motion, right? It gets more complicated with relativity and, you know, mass energy and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:33:56 But let's just, you know, bracket that we don't need it, and I don't think it fundamentally changes the point being made here. So if we just think in terms of Newtonian mechanics, you have stuff that's moving and it has kinetic energy, and you have potential energy, which is forces that could cause things to start moving. And the conservation of energy just allows you to think about exchanges of the stuff that either produce,

Starting point is 00:34:18 is motion or is motion from one place to another. And with living things always are, our open systems that are exchanging matter and energy with their surroundings. And I think the key thing is this feedback loop that you can point to that allows you to start thinking in evolutionary terms in a way that helps you to realize there's kind of the potential for an evolutionary adaptation that could be more general than what we usually think of as the Darwinian model. So the Darwinian model is things make copies of themselves.

Starting point is 00:34:49 The properties they pass on to the copies are going to impact those copies' ability to copy themselves. And so you end up with this kind of tendency to have persistence and amplification of properties that help things to copy themselves. If you don't have self-copying things, you can't make that argument. But if you have matter of any kind, especially if you have collections of lots of particles that are capable of lots of different kinds of shapes, the generalization of that argument, and it really rigorously, is a generalization, is the idea that you don't have copies and genes, but what you have is matter that's in a shape, and it could be in other shapes. It's building blocks that are assembled one way, and they could be taken apart and reassembled in a different way. And the key point with energy is just this. Energy is both the reason you're going to change your shape, and it also gets into or out of the system

Starting point is 00:35:39 in a way that's affected by your shape. So if it's the case on the one hand that the shape that your matter is currently in is going to have an impact on how energy can get in and what kinds of motions it's capable of producing. And at the same time, that access to energy is that the reason you're going to be changing your configuration and trying out a new shape, that is the feedback loop that closes where now you're going to do a biased exploration of the space of possible configurations that has to do with access to the flow of energy in and out of the system. And that's what I've tried to argue for in various published works, including this book, but also in research papers,

Starting point is 00:36:19 that we've called dissipative adaptation. The idea is basically that there's a selection principle you can argue for, or maybe a family of selection principles, depending on the type of system, where the way the matter in the system acts is a receiver for flow of energy in and out, given the state of the environment or the patterns in the environment,

Starting point is 00:36:41 that is the property, you should be looking at that's going to be kind of selected or or chosen perhaps to be in a very rare and special kind of configuration over time as a result of the fact that you're in this environment and getting kicked around by the patterns in it and the eventual impact of that energy flow is maybe going to care a lot about what shape you're in and what kind of access to that energy that shape grants. And so based on that question or that explanation rather, would we expect to find, you know, perhaps new experimental predictions or observations that could be observed as a result of experiments? Should the hypothesis should dissipative adaptation be correct?

Starting point is 00:37:27 In other words, he's wondering, how do you substantiate that it is capable of a novel predictive element? And I was thinking, as I was reading the book, you know, the shape of DNA and RNA are different. and there should be some way of using just those simple but also highly interrelated molecules, maybe in tests or some way to justify the flow of energy and dissipation of it. Are there new experimental probes? Am I totally way off base? Or is it too soon to tell, as they say? So I don't entirely think it's too soon.

Starting point is 00:38:03 What I would say is that whenever we're talking about actually living pha, in the standpoint of physics as being these incredibly complex many component systems that are in an exquisitely special initial condition that we don't know, right? Because they all are the progeny of things that have been copying themselves for eons and have been under this Darwinian regime of selection. And given that that's the case, then there's a lot that you could explain about what's very special about how they seem to be arranged using that argument. So in some ways, I think in order to see the potential for this other kind of selective pressure, it might be healthier to start by looking in places that are definitely not alive, although I can return to the question of what you maybe could look for in living things in a second. But we had a paper come out in Science Magazine at the start of 2021, for example,

Starting point is 00:38:55 where we were looking at this in swarm robotics, just trying to do this as a simple paradigm for experimentation in active matter. where what you say is, all right, I have a bunch of relatively simple particles that can sort of flap their arms according to patterns that I devise. And then I let them bang into each other and sort of knock into each other, cause each other to move. And they end up getting in these different kinds of regular dances together that are very spontaneous and emergent in the sense that if you change the pattern, then the dance they discover is different. But there are these kind of attractor states that are very stable, even though the space of all the possible arrangements is quite vast and diverse. And so you can start to look at what's the relationship between the pattern that I chose and the selected state, the selected dynamical state that the system ends up getting into. And in short, there is a predictive principle there that does have to do with this question of how the driving forces that are in a patterned way hitting the system are devolving that energy. and whether it's going to be randomizing, given the state you're in,

Starting point is 00:40:03 or whether it somehow can produce orderly motion. And so I think that in one sense, the thing I advocate for is, let's push this into an experimental setting where we're just trying to do proofs of principle on a tabletop that don't necessarily have to do with the emergence of life immediately, but more have to do with simpler emergence phenomena we can study carefully, where it's about saying, can I develop very good experimental and predictive control over a system where I show it patterns in terms of how I poke it,

Starting point is 00:40:32 and then I have predictive power over the emergence structure and its ability to respond to those patterns that the system is going to discover by being knocked around in that way. And I think if we did that for a while and got really good at it, it would kind of be like how we now understand where crystals come from, right? Like, we don't think anymore, well, how can there be crystals in the world? They're so organized. And there's no explanation for this. special organization of matter, other than that aliens came and put them in rows.

Starting point is 00:41:02 We know they're attractive forces between molecules. And actually, if the temperature is low enough, then that can overwhelm the tendency to randomize, and you can end up getting a very orderly state. So you can get very specially organized things from equilibrium crystallization, and we're not bothered anymore when we see crystals that we see lying on the ground. Life is obviously much more complicated than that. It's not at equilibrium. the things that it's doing are more impressive and cooler in some ways and more elaborate and variegated.

Starting point is 00:41:32 But I think there's a lot of things about life-like behavior also where you could say, oh, if we develop enough of an understanding on a tabletop, so to speak, of how to make those kinds of phenomena and do them in sophisticated ways, maybe we'll start to say, okay, so some of what impresses us about what life is doing, far from equilibrium, actually is realizable and emergeable, in an experimental setting. So that is, I bracket around that. The best tests in the short term for the theoretical ideas may not be about making life.

Starting point is 00:42:03 They may be more like getting better experimental control over more primitive, life-like forms of self-organization when you're showing patterns to systems that have lots of states that they could explore. That being said, that being said, at least, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, I enjoy that. It seems like in soft condensed matter, as I understand it, you could actually test, you know, from the most distinctive feature of dissipative adaptation is that, you know, there's more efficient and less efficient, you know, versions of things in shape space and that you could almost envision a non-biological evolutionary pathway. I'm wondering if I'm getting that right. If you could design experiments on non-living, you know, my colleagues use little tiny magnetic motors to simulate flagellas. I wonder, are there ways to utilize the shape, space, landscape, for lack of a better word, to evolve things not biologically but chemically and see what are their energy properties after thousands of generations, whatever that means of evolution?

Starting point is 00:43:09 Yeah. So I think that is that whenever you're talking about selection and adaptation, what this is ultimately about is the idea that there are many random arrangements of constituent parts. And there's a very tiny subset of those arrangements that have some special property. And that property has a measurable and clear definition in terms of the relationship between that particular set of arrangements of the system and some kind of pattern in the environment. And if you can set up a situation where you can predict and control what arrangements of the matter are going to be selected, given the pattern that you're showing, whether it's like your shining light of this frequency or your pulse, saying it in this way or you're also changing the temperature in this way, all the different ways you can kind of keep things away from equilibrium that might have some kind of pattern or predictable, but maybe also kind of complex structure to them, then you get the opportunity for the system to give back to you, something that's very recognizably sort of bearing the stamp of the barcode of what you were showing to it in the pattern of the environment. So you're not going through generations because there isn't the Darwinian sort of feedback process of self-copying. But what you're going through is a series of shapes the system was in.

Starting point is 00:44:26 And it's about, you know, you don't have parents and grandparents. What you have is antecedent shapes. Shapes you used to be in who had a particular ability to get pushed on by the environment in a certain way. And because they had that ability that allowed them to change their shape in a certain way, and that irreversible configurational change ends up getting written on the shape of the system and kind of accumulates in such a way that eventually you start to be able to, say, wow, I'm in a very rare and special shape I wouldn't expect to see. And I can tell that because I, so to speak, have a way that I've barcoded the environment in a very particular way

Starting point is 00:45:01 that it is complexly patterned. And then what I see is that the system has emerged an ability to compute something about it or respond to it in a recognizable way. So we have a paper or two about simulations of many body systems that do that, where it's kind of like a simulatory of a lattice of atoms that can flip their magnetic moments up and down, so like what's called a spin glass. And you just sort of knock on the atoms with a barcoded pattern where some of them are getting flipped up and some of them are getting flipped down. And then over time, the system kind of learns to not be rearranged

Starting point is 00:45:38 by the patterns of barcodes that you're showing it. And then if you start showing a new barcodes, then it goes crazy and jumps around and the work absorption goes way up. Sorry, it goes way up. And so in a sense, without programming anything, you've evolved in the system an ability to predict the future and kind of notice when that prediction turns out to be inaccurate. And so it sort of becomes this weird kind of backdoor into machine learning

Starting point is 00:46:04 where unprogrammed, disordered matter, if there's just a lot of particles and you show it patterns, is kind of optimizing input-output relationships in ways that kind of look like the result of a process of machine learning. I wondered as I read through the book, you make a convincing case that self-replicating molecules are somehow privileged or best at creating organized complex systems, but simultaneously doing so efficiently dumping heat or entropy into their surroundings. And it reminded me of this book that I had the author Caleb Sharf on recently called The Ascent of

Starting point is 00:46:45 Information with a play on the words of Darwin's Ascent of Man. And he talks about how information compression is getting less and less efficient. In other words, he says he talks about taking basically stone tablets and hieroglyphics and then movable type, and then eventually getting into information processing by way of microchips. And he says, the smaller chips get, the more inefficient it becomes to push electrons through all that increasingly narrow conducted material, and the more heat gets generated. and he talks about by the year 2040, the humanities computation will suck up 10 to the 20th joules of energy per year, which is about 100 trillion times the amount of energy that is being

Starting point is 00:47:34 used for information, transmission, and storage, et cetera, today. So 100 million in less than 20 years is quite startling well beyond Moore's law. But it made me think, you know, is it a correlation or is it a causation? In other words, are things more fissund and inheritable and more successful in terms of selection because they're more efficient at dumping heat or entropy to their surroundings? Or is it the other way around, you know, the ones that we, it's correlated rather than a causative feature of the conversion of, you know, of heat, of energy into waste heat or entropy?

Starting point is 00:48:16 What is there a Darwinian? principle that could be applied to entropy flow in, you know, microsystems. So I think we have to be careful about this for a few reasons. One is that in what we have called dissivative adaptation, it really breaks into cases that can have opposite long-term impacts on energy flow through the system. So the hallmark in either case would be you have some pattern in the environment and the system is becoming finely tuned to that pattern and how it processes it so that there's a recognizable exceptionality in the organization of the system as far as how it responds to the pattern. Sometimes that could be that it's going to get

Starting point is 00:49:00 better at absorbing energy from the pattern. And so, for example, when you have bugs, meaning like bacteria or something that copy themselves and make more of themselves and then they're going to eat more rapidly through the food that's around them, that's like a positive feedback loop where they're going to catalyze more dissipation more rapidly over time. But you also could have negative feedback loops that go to extinction of energy absorption. And they would also be considered instances of fine-tuning to an environmental pattern. So I think that the fundamental general thermodynamic argument doesn't guarantee that something should go up or down. It really starts to be about the details of the particular working material and the particular patterns that you're talking about,

Starting point is 00:49:42 whether you're going to see dominance of positive feedback effects or negative feedback effects. I think both of these actually lead to different kinds of life like behavior. Self-replication is obviously a famous one. Another less famous one, which maybe is closer to the title of the book, is about how life gets into these shapes that are absorbing energy from the environment, and despite the fact that they are, they're not being randomly rearranged, right? Like, I can't just stop eating sandwiches for lunch and start getting an equivalent dose of gamma rays in jewels and expect to be healthy afterwards, right?

Starting point is 00:50:12 And the reason for that is because random introductions, or I should say, unsuitable introductions of energy into the system will produce randomizing effects. There'll be a bull in a China shop and sort of rip things to smithereens. So the emergence of a structure that's stable despite all the energy flowing through it actually can happen as the system adapts to reduce the work absorption and make sure that the work it is absorbing is producing kind of closed loops that bring you back to the same state instead of kind of carrying you in new directions. And that's one of the things that life is also good at.

Starting point is 00:50:45 So life is this bundle of a lot of different things going on at once. And I think that it becomes very hard to just sit in the sort of armchair of thermodynamics and say, I know exactly what should happen over there because energy goes in and entropy has to be produced. What I always try to point out is that both Los Angeles and North Korea are equally possible according to the laws of thermodynamics, right? like, you know, that picture from space in terms of, you know, how much you can see lights on at night. It's all permitted. Like, the thermodynamics in one sense produces weak constraints on what's possible that are very hard if you try to run against them. But it's a very capacious playground for different kinds of dynamics.

Starting point is 00:51:31 And I think similarly, when talking about microchips, it's true that you can measure wattage in a lot of systems. And it's true sometimes that there are feedback processes that are least. to growth or decay of wattage or changes in efficiency, but operating near the limits of thermodynamic limits of efficiency is not necessarily always what we're doing with our engineering. And so it may not end up setting a bound that is necessarily relevant to where technology is going at a given moment. In your recent conversation with Paul Davies, Unbelievable with Justin Beirley, you talked a little bit about intel information and information information uh information management uh perhaps but you know of course

Starting point is 00:52:18 the most um the most amount of information that you could transmit you know typically would be something of order of a black body radiation in other words highly entropic very low distinguishing features you know the conveying the most amount of possible randomized complex information so what do you mean by saying that you know these these things are very good at information management, and even prediction. How does DNA make a prediction, or how does it have any predictive ability whatsoever? You're going to look at that question through the lens of biology, then what I would say is the genes of a living thing that's well adapted to its environment

Starting point is 00:52:56 imply a prediction about what that living thing expects to be there in its environment. For example, if you have genes that produce proteins that help you do oxidative metabolism, why would you do that if there were no oxygen? Right. So, but there's implicitly an expectation that there is going to be oxygen around for you to make use of, and that's why all of this machinery is in place to produce things that can exploit that oxygen for the sort of purpose of survival and reproduction of the living thing. So I think the teleology is kind of easier to think through if you are talking about DNA in a biological context. If you're talking about matter that isn't alive, then I think it has more, you have to be a little to step back a little bit further. just talk about it in terms of behaving in a way that could be used as a predictor of a complex signal. So in other words, let's say in this example that I was describing before, I'm showing a system a bunch of random barcodes. And let's say the barcodes have, you know, I don't know, 100 bits in them. So two to the 100 is a big number, right?

Starting point is 00:54:02 There's lots of different random barcodes you can make. Let's say I'm only going to show you 1,000 barcodes, but they're really. were randomly selected. So if I start showing you barcodes, that will seem to you to be kind of random because you won't notice any pattern initially. And yet, a thousand out of two to the 100 is a very, very tiny fraction. So in fact, there's a lot of correlations there. There's a lot of pattern there to learn if the right kind of learner gets to pick up on the lower dimensionality or the sort of rarity or special selectiveness of the particular subset of these barcodes that it's being shown. So,

Starting point is 00:54:37 dumb matter behaving according to very sensibly thermonamically defined dynamical roles can be knocked on the barcodes like that and get into a state where it will just keep on chugging along in terms of the flow of energy through the system if you keep showing it barcodes taken from the same deck of cards so to speak but if you start showing it new ones it'll suddenly spike up in terms of the energy that it's absorbing and you could use that as a novelty detector right you could say in a sense i've built a machine so to speak, that could detect novelty in a complex signal that I'm showing it. So it has learned something that implies a prediction, but only if you sort of look for it in the right way. And that's a less obviously life-like way to act, but I think it's kind of at the beginning of things that we think of life as being good at, because everything at the beginning, when you're trying to pull life together, it's going to be about, to what degree is this piece of matter, this hunk of the world in a state that seems highly specialized in its input-output relationship with patterns and its surroundings? And if I start to have a lot of that lying around as kind of a rough cut,

Starting point is 00:55:47 then maybe I get to pull that together into the first living thing in a way that makes it easier to assemble that than if I had some naive null model of, oh, well, everything I'm assembling is just totally inert and naive and doesn't know anything about the patterns around us. Very good. Now I'm going to take some questions from my audience that submitted them on YouTube. Reminder, you can submit questions to me on YouTube. Dr. Brian Keating, if you're listening to this, I do make the videos different than the audio that you're hearing. If you're listening to this in audio-only form, I try to add a lot of interesting background material and links to research and set it's hard to include in a couple of thousand-character information stories. unit that they give us in podcast.

Starting point is 00:56:35 So what I want to ask first is from a reader or viewer whose last name is Stankkevich, I think. The first initial is D. First one is he asked or she asked, could you talk about trends in biophysics research and what's the most exciting and next big thing

Starting point is 00:56:52 in that area according to your opinion? So I'm going to inject my own bias into this because I'm sure there's a lot of different kinds of exciting biophysics research, and I shouldn't claim to know the most interesting one by all standards. But I think a very exciting arena to explore is what's called the cytosol. So in a living cell, you have a whole lot of different kinds of proteins that have been produced from the genetic code and the DNA. And there's sort of the workhorse micromachines or nanomachines of the cell. So the cell is this very dense bag of all these different proteins that are each kind of these not.

Starting point is 00:57:30 little macromolecules that have different shapes. But the important thing is they can change their shape, and how they change their shape depends on what kind of chemical fuels they get to chew on. Also, how mobile they are can be impacted by what chemical fuels they're chewing on. How they change their shape can also be affected by how they bind to each other, and also they can cause changes in shape of other ones that are triggered by the chemical fuels that they're chewing on. So when you sort of close all those different feedback loops, what you have is this immensely high-dimensional, many-body system that has all these different states of assembly that it could be in, right?

Starting point is 00:58:06 All these different places the proteins could be, the shapes the proteins could be in while they're stuck to each other. And all of that is modulated by the flow of energy through the system via all these different kinds of small molecule chemical fuels that are catalyzed in different kinds of enzymatic reactions. So if you add that altogether, according to what I was just describing in the physics of dissipative adaptation, this should be a very ripe playground for the emergence of selected, fine-tuned many-body states that are responsive to the patterns of availability of different kinds of energy sources that have to do with the current condition or state of a cell. So what that means is there's a lot in principle that just a totally not, naive cell that has never sort of seen the patterns of its current environment could end up

Starting point is 00:58:59 computing in a self-organized way if you could figure out what the optimization principle is. If I know enough about what the inputs are going to look like to the network of interacting components I just described, then maybe I could say there's a kind of machine learning that the interior of the cell is doing every time patterns around it change. And if that's true, then some of what the cell might be doing that looks very specialized to us and looks very smart and adapted and responsive to what the environment is doing might not actually come from what we often assume, which is some kind of programmed response in the DNA that tells the cell all these things about its evolutionary history and how to respond. Maybe that there's a lot more adaptation that could be going on on faster timescales. And you start to see evidence of this in various kinds of research programs in cell biology that are going on at present. People like Yoav Soen and Zachipilpel at the Weizmann Institute here in Israel, for example, and many others as well.

Starting point is 01:00:07 So I think it's a very hot topic in cell biology right now is to what degree can you kind of self-organize what the cell needs from mechanisms that might actually be more responsive. and less ancient than what you have to kind of learn over the eons of selection that applies to the DNA. Very good. Okay, next question comes from John Hardy. He is a viewer he at wants me to ask you about combinatorial explosion of amino acid arrangements and the implausibility, according to him, of random biogenesis and evolution. What do you care to say about that, Jeremy? Yeah, so I think there's kind of a general comment to make, and then there's, maybe I'll start with just a very brief empirical comment that I think that different kinds of studies about protein function and the degree to which you can get things that look functional from randomly assembled proteins have pointed in different directions over the years.

Starting point is 01:01:12 On the one hand, if you string together a bunch of amino acids, you can see evidence that a lot of it tends to aggregate and it doesn't really fold into very effective enzymes. On the other hand, there's some very interesting work from the lab of Michael Hecht at Princeton and the chemistry department where you are kind of making a mostly randomly assembled protein that turns out a lot of weak and promiscuous enzymatic activities. and if you take cells that are lacking in enzymatic activities that can't survive on nutrient-poor media and kind of transform random hunks of protein into them, you actually can rescue them in some cases. So there are, instead of synthetic biology, some kinds of evidence that point towards, oh, well, if you wanted to sort of, I mean, this is crazy in a sense. It's like taking a living thing, I'll take out your liver, I'll pull it in a pine cone, and maybe that will help, you know. So that sounds like it shouldn't work. And I think at our macroscopic level, it obviously doesn't.

Starting point is 01:02:05 But cells are maybe, you know, primitive or maybe that's the wrong word, but they're down in the molecular scale noisy dumps enough in terms of all the different things happening that maybe just kind of blasting the system with some new different enzymatic activities can help it get back on its feet. So there's different kinds of evidence that maybe point different ways there. But I think that the other thing that it's just like a good general principle for these kinds of discussions is that whenever we're trying to argue that something that's something. about what life is doing, or the universe for that matter, other kinds of fine-tuning arguments people make. Whenever we're trying to make that argument, we have to be very clear with ourselves about how well we understand the process that produces the probability distribution of possible outcomes.

Starting point is 01:02:55 And that's kind of most obviously the case when you talk about, like, what's the probability of producing the universe with certain laws of physics, right? People like to talk about that, but I've never seen a universe producing process. happen and I don't know kind of what the random number generators contributing to that look like. But if you look at it in biology, I think it's even more kind of, it's easy to say we can be humble just in that it's so complex that the fact that we can't imagine how things could have gotten the way they are might just be a limitation of our imagination. So at the moment we compute some probability value and it seems very small, but it might be, again, because the assumptions that

Starting point is 01:03:34 win into that are the wrong ones. And once we realize how certain things are possible and make different assumptions, probabilities can suddenly be way different, orders of magnitude different. So any kinds of ID sorts of arguments that end up being based around, well, I thought really hard and I can't see how you get a protein motor without, you know, flipping heads a trillion times in a row on a coin, that's a model of the probability for the outcome that has been constructed according to certain assumptions. But maybe those assumptions have to be questioned.

Starting point is 01:04:07 And as long as you can play the game, it's very hard to disprove the possibility of something emerging without some kind of tampering because what we're always kind of saying is like, I give up. I can't think of how my P value is at this level. I'm done. And I'd rather point to the alternative hypothesis. But you can also keep thinking. and maybe you come up with a different set of assumptions that change the P-value to a more plausible one.

Starting point is 01:04:41 This one comes from a visionary friend of mine, Dillon Levy, who asks, how is it possible or why does maximizing the dissipation of heat cause structure and order to appear? I guess one answer to that question is whenever you have many pieces of something, that could be assembled in many different ways, and you take a property of their relationship to the environment, maybe any property, or at least a broad variety of properties, and you say, I'm going to maximize it, or I'm going to minimize it.

Starting point is 01:05:17 Either way, you are likely to get something that looks orderly to you, because what we mean by order and function, in a sense, is that this is a rare arrangement of the building blocks that is exceptional compared with a randomly chosen arrangement of its constituent parts. And so when we extramize, When we try to make something maximally good at something or minimally good at something, we end up finding very exceptional and rare arrangements. And that's almost the definition of function and order. It is not the case that matter is always trying to maximize the energy dissipation or the entropy production.

Starting point is 01:05:54 Sometimes matter ends up in dynamical states that make it try to do that. It also sometimes is trying to minimize it. But in both cases, you can get things that. look orderly as a result. So that's the way I would put that. And then the last question from my listeners and my viewers rather on YouTube, reminder, you know, when I put out a call for questions, people are delightfully encouraged to respond on the community page or my post there. And this comes from Scarlett Morgan. And she writes, Orthodox Rabbi England is the son of a Jewish mother descended from Holocaust survivors and a Lutheran father, who he, meaning you, did not formally

Starting point is 01:06:36 study Judaism until his attendance in Oxford. His spiritual story must be as intriguingly powerful as his amazing intellect. Please ask this generation's Charles Darwin and future Nobel laureate, well, maybe not after appearing in my show, but future Nobel laureate to elaborate further, Dr. Keating. And they are probably asking because they know I have the distinct. of being born to two biological Jewish parents, but also having been an altar boy in the Catholic Church for several years. But I want to ask you, Jeremy, so you're the second, or maybe, you know, you're the second guest slash host to have an unusual approach to Orthodox Judaism or practicing Judaism. Can you talk a little bit about your religious journey or worldline,

Starting point is 01:07:22 as we say in general relativity that brought you to become a rabbi and tell us a little bit about that, if you would? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. In that, you know, when I grew up, I had very warm feeling towards Jewish identity as something that was part of my family history. And I think that I actually got a lot of kind of cultural introduction to ideas I didn't really realize at the time were ones that I could have also learned from a more systematic exposure to Judaism. I just thought they were like, oh, that's my personal philosophy or something. And then in young adulthood, after already studying a lot of science and really kind of growing up as a scientist, I started reading in various ways at a time in life where I was asking a lot of questions. I'd visited Israel for the first time and was falling in love with the place and with a sense of connection to the Jewish people and lots of things were happening at once. I was reading Rabbi Jonathan Sachs.

Starting point is 01:08:26 a blessed memory. He passed away, unfortunately, in the last year. But he was a really influential early contribution to my thinking because he wrote very clearly about, in the language of Western philosophy, what is distinct about the position taken by Judaism or the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, and it really spoke to me. So it all kind of started from there. And then I think for a long time early on, what I just said was, I want to do this because of a feeling of personal connection and I understood it as a choice in how to act and how to talk and I didn't really get bothered much about what do I believe about the world and what it is and how it works and whether there is a God.

Starting point is 01:09:08 Like I used to love to say, I'm not sure whether God exists, but I know what he expects of me. And I would focus on committing to doing what the Torah proposes one should try to do because I was kind of embracing my heritage, and that felt like enough to me for a long time. I think that as time went on, I got more interested in kind of the, maybe you could call them more philosophical or theological aspects of the question. And as I studied the Torah and the Hebrew Bible more, and as it became clearly a more central, you know, set of choices I was making how to live my life and start a family and everything. And I would say now that it's clearer to me over.

Starting point is 01:09:55 time that the Torah knows what it is to reason about the world scientifically and to try to to predict the natural world using that way of reasoning. And both sees great potential and positive application in that, but also limitations in terms of what you can talk about in the world if you're going to limit yourself to that methodology. Because science is a process, a social process that is a compact based around certain kinds of targets you're aiming for. You're trying to go for reproducibility. You're trying to go for objectivity, things that seem the same to everyone.

Starting point is 01:10:36 But a lot of our experience actually is subjective. And then the question is whether you should discard all of that which cannot be made, you know, at least approximately objective, or whether you just should have different languages or methodologies for how you interpret. the parts of your experience that are subjective, and you sort of make that part of how you understand what the world is and what your place is in it. And I think what's funny, actually, I'll just close off. I maybe didn't give enough of a sense of my history, and there's more I could say,

Starting point is 01:11:08 but I'll close up by making this point that when we were talking about probabilities with amino acids before, I think the funny thing to me, the ironic thing is that when it comes to arguments about observations made within the scientific content, that may be skew in the direction of a kind of intelligent design argument, I tend to reject those because I frequently feel like science can always keep trying to uncover a better set of assumptions that will end up making the P values, like the probability of what we observe,

Starting point is 01:11:42 seem to cohere more with what the models we're making of the world, tell us we should be observing. And so at any point, you can just say, I give up, I don't want to keep doing science. And right now the P value on what I'm seeing seems really low, but you could always keep chipping away at it and working at it, right? But I think the irony is that when it comes to talking about personal experience, I think that the Torah really teaches, like the Hebrew Bible is very interested in how to teach us to look for the hand of the world's creator in the events of our lives and the events of the world. and in particular in the Hebrew Bible and the national history of the Jewish people, by in a sense,

Starting point is 01:12:24 looking for that same kind of improbability because when you're looking in the subjective space, it becomes more legitimate to just say, this seems like a message to me. The difference between a coincidence and a message is just many orders of magnitude in the likelihood of that, right? If you found a smudge of dust in your desk that kind of looked like your initials,

Starting point is 01:12:46 you'd be like, maybe that happened by accident. If you found a letter on your desk that said, you know, dear Brian, I would like to meet with you at this address on this date, you wouldn't just say, well, maybe a thermal fluctuation assembled that on my desk. It is a message. It has meaning, right? And the difference is just, you know, the relative likelihood of that happening, you know, by accident. So what's interesting is that you always kind of have the opportunity,

Starting point is 01:13:12 if you want, to look at the events of your life and your experience. experience and notice the things about them that seem too improbable to be anything other than sort of a message from the creator of the world. But that's kind of a dangerous way to go out into the world if you're not grounded in some way. And I think that in a very subtle way, what the Torah tries to do is on the one hand, give you the opportunity to relate to experience in a fashion that has to do with the kind of the personal dialogue that you. can have if you see the events of the world as part of the message. And at the same time, also to ground you and say, but don't just do what the message says, you know, mostly what you should be doing is reading this message that's here in this book

Starting point is 01:13:58 and that has very specific grounded expectations, you know, love your neighbor as yourself, don't murder people, et cetera. And then every so often lift your head up and try to sort of sense the personal relationship that's possible if you've grounded yourself where your creator wants you to ground yourself. And I think it's not an easy sort of path to walk, but these days I would say that's more sort of where I'm planting my feet. Yeah, I mean, I always say that, you know, in the Torah, there are, you know, 35 verses out of a possible 35,000 or so verses.

Starting point is 01:14:42 in the totality of the humash of the five books of Moses, the Old Testament, the Bible, if you call it that. And, you know, so that's 0.1%. And if you pick up a book, you know, let's say I pick up a book on, you know, it says, you know, introduction to cosmological physics. And then, you know, the first page is about, you know, cosmological physics. But then the rest of it, you know, all 999 other pages are about, you know,

Starting point is 01:15:08 the search for life on Mars or something. It's not actually accurately titled. And so I thought it would be fun to pivot to kind of the classic questions that I get and maybe rebut some of them with your imprimatur attached to them. I often hear things from my atheist friends, of which I have many and gladly host all the time. But they say things like, well, I don't want to teach lies. Religion has practical benefits. And I even said this to Freeman Dyson, the late great Freeman Dyson,

Starting point is 01:15:38 who is my first guest on The Into the Impossible podcast, of blessed memory. And he used to say, I'm an agnostic, and I used to say, well, looking at you as an intelligent alien, looking at you, how could he or she or it or they or whatever distinguish you from Richard Dawkins? I mean, you both don't go to the same church. So, you know, is it about practice? Is it about practicality? In other words, if you could get all the benefits of the religion that we just discussed, you know, from some secular pursuit, you know, would you say that they're equal or not. And, you know, from my perspective, there is, there's too much wisdom in the Torah to ignore. But as you point out in this book, if it's only a metaphor, or if it is a metaphor, then, you know,

Starting point is 01:16:22 it's not exactly clear. Are you bound to honor, you know, and obey a metaphorical God? So I want to ask you those big picture, you know, how can a scientist, you know, physicist, you know, Road Scholar, how can you take the Torah seriously? Do you process it in context of mainly, you know, kind of the Ten Commandments and this rules for living? Or is it a vivid presence in your life? Is the existence of God tangible, almost visceral to you? Or is it so abstract that we can't even approach it?

Starting point is 01:16:54 Say that the approach that I have, I shouldn't say settled on because it's always, you know, a process that keeps on going on and you keep learning and changing. and developing, et cetera. But I think where I am right now is, on the one hand, it is a very tangible and real and visceral sense in which I would say I assert that I feel in my bones, the world, the universe, everything that is was created by the God described in the Hebrew Bible, and that my experience of the world and what I study in the Torah, et cetera, combined to be a convincing testament to that. At the same time, I also don't think that what I've just said in my own head makes sense

Starting point is 01:17:46 if I were to read the Torah in the way that it sometimes is assumed you must read it if you believe what I just said, meaning that if you think really there is really one God who made the world, then you must also open up the book of Genesis and start reading it and assume that the genre of literature that you're reading is, in a sense, a write-up of a baseball game that is describing in dry terms a set of occurrences as observed by someone who was there, and that that's sort of the goal of the text.

Starting point is 01:18:30 The Torah is not a phone book, So there are clearly uses to which you can put sources of information or media of communication that are going to be unsuccessful and there are ones that are going to be successful. So I think there's a language or many languages in a sense that the Torah is trying to speak and it has a particular mission and goal. It's entirely focused on the reader being what it sees as an Ovan Hashem, meaning a servant of God. and it's trying to enable the mission of serving God. And in order to do that, it's going to talk about what the world is in a certain way. It's going to use a certain taxonomy and vocabulary.

Starting point is 01:19:09 It starts with the idea that, you know, Vioma Elohimia He Ogh, and God said, let there be light, and there was light, which I would say at least part of the point of is that the light by which you see the world comes from the way you talk about it. So you can talk about the same world in different ways. And if you want to,

Starting point is 01:19:28 be successful in the mission of serving God, then you don't start with, here's DNA, here's electrons, et cetera. You start with light and dark and land and sea and men and women and fish and birds. And this is the fundamental vocabulary from which you're going to build everything else. So the way that the Torah chooses to characterize and talk about what the world is, there's a lot. We should be trying to learn from that if we accept upon ourselves the mission to which the text. is calling its reader. But you can believe that the text was given to you by the hand of an all-powerful and all-knowing creator of the universe. And still it can be the case that he chose to write in a very elliptical way or in a way that carries things sideways a lot of the time. I mean, in one sense, you could say, if he's going to show you how he wants to talk to you and the first thing he does is say, well, plants came.

Starting point is 01:20:28 on day three and the sun came on day four, you don't have to be, you know, Richard Feynman to notice that that's a little weird because plants need the sun, don't they? And so it's not a typo, right? It's trying to be obvious. It's trying to say, look, your creator is talking to you and here's how he wants to talk to you. If he's going to talk to you about how he acts in the world, it's going to be weird. It's going to be hard to make sense of given your experience of how the world seems to work. And so I think I try to always avoid talking about what's metaphorical and what's literal. Because I think the distinction is deliberately blurred beyond recognition in how the Hebrew Bible tries to characterize the human experience for very good reasons. But I do think it is possible to relate to the text as having many meanings that require interpretation and extraction and that that's the real treasure to be found there.

Starting point is 01:21:26 And at the same time, you can relate to your experience of life and the world and also the authority with which you invest the text with the confidence of someone who says, I really am seeing the whole world as being the expression of the will of this personality. Because I do think it saps the confidence and sort of purpose and meaning of religious commitment. And if you sort of say, well, this is a book that has, you know, it's very good guidelines and stuff. But if you get hit by a bus or something like that, that was just random, right? That was just, you know, you can't control chaos. But while you're alive, you know, don't mix meat and milk or something. I don't think that that works for me. That doesn't make sense.

Starting point is 01:22:12 I, for better or worse, you know, as a theorist, I like total coherence. And so maybe I gravitate towards trying to make it fit together. So you mentioned Richard Feynman, and I can't resist hearkening back to his encounter recounted in one of his books when he met a young rabbi in seminary who asked him, is electricity fire? And apropos of your book and the fact that you're a rabbi, I'm going to ask you, not to Paskin, you know, Halacha, but could you please speculate? electricity on fire? Because it seems to me that the reactions that are most endemically human of human beings are not the fire aspects, you know, that we produce energy and now we use energy and we excrete waste entropy. But it's actually the, you know, process of our three-pound supercomputer that's running on chemical electricity, electrical signals and not fire. And that that was what

Starting point is 01:23:17 makes us fundamentally uniquely created in the image of God. So why is it, why is it that electricity is prohibited on the Sabbath, in your opinion? In Jewish law, it's a very interesting and complex issue. I mean, I could talk about, in what I understand about the history of Allah, why there are decisors of Jewish law who've chosen to prohibit it, but I don't necessarily think that there's uniform agreement about that, even among what you think of perhaps as being very conservative or religiously zealous thinkers in that regard. So, for example, well, yeah, but there are, you know,

Starting point is 01:24:07 in the early 20th century, for example, there were those who, while not permitting the use of electricity, even in what is usually thought of as being the very orthodox or perhaps ultra-Orthodox world, who said that the risk of using it on Shabbat more has to do with the uncertainty about what other prohibited activities on Shabbat might be going on in a complex contraption, and you don't really know what that is,

Starting point is 01:24:39 but in principle, there could have been the idea of making like a heckshare, like a kosher certification for an electronic device on Shabbat because the actual electrical things that are going on don't really fit the bill. There's different theories of what you shouldn't be doing on Shabbat. Are you building something by completing a circuit? Are you creating something new when you turn on a light? Is it fire?

Starting point is 01:25:01 Are you lighting a fire? Are you completing the, construction of something. I am not convinced actually personally by any of these. I think that there are some electronic contraptions where it probably is safer to avoid using them because of this issue of how complicated they are and not wanting to accidentally do something that is definitely prohibited. But if you sort of boil things down to a very simple device that is doing something where

Starting point is 01:25:30 you understand how it's working, like if you, for example, have an exposed circuit with an open switch that you can open and close and it's turning on an LED light, it starts to be much more possible to argue that there's nothing problematic there, although I think clearly that's not the consensus in the Orthodox world, but I think it's a discussion still worth continuing to have because it's such an expansive and constantly changing field of technologies that it doesn't really makes sense to ban it's whole hog, just, yeah, no pun intended, just because at a certain point, years ago at this point, people, I think maybe were, had the wrong priorities in some sense, and they were just worried that it felt like it was messing with what Shabbat felt like,

Starting point is 01:26:26 and it felt safer to just say, just don't do this. But I don't think that that's actually an acceptable basis for Paskin, like, to make rulings in Jewish law. And if you try to really base it in the fundamental sources, that should be a continuing discussion, I would argue. Very good. Continuing on about fire, as it is in the title of your book and the central theme, I think that fire is sort of the most creative or destructive thing, the most like Hashem that a, or God, that a human being can really do, where you transform, you know, utterly rearrange. the structure of an item, it produces something new that never existed before, and it completely,

Starting point is 01:27:10 in its wake, leaves something utterly unrecognizable ashes, which were present, perhaps, within it originally, and just had to be liberated and transformed. But there's only one other thing that comes to mind, which is not clear to me, it's prohibited on Shabbas, and that would be, you know, thermonuclear fusion or something like that, which is also kind of a fiery associated process. So maybe it's gamma rays that are the most unique to the creative process. But are there other things, you know, Malachah, forbidden work, or aspects of Judaism that are particularly impressive to you? I've often found, you know, little things. Of course, I don't believe you can prove the Torah.

Starting point is 01:27:52 I don't believe that there's any sense that you can prove the existence of God. And we could have a whole podcast about that. Maybe we will when we're in person someday. but the point being that, you know, it's sort of all encapsulating. Is there anything else that, you know, you could think about besides creating another human life, obviously, where it's ab initio, you know, it's really something that never existed before. In the case of fire, it's, you know, you took something that did exist and created something, you know, that's unrecognizable.

Starting point is 01:28:19 Are there other things about the Torah that are, you know, impressive to you on a scientific front? Or am I, you know, am I alone in sort of this appreciation of the uniqueness of fire? with a possible exception, as I said, of nuclear fusion, which I don't think is relevant to people's lives on any given Shabab. Well, there's sunlight. You can cook with sunlight on Shabat. Everyone agrees that's totally fine. If you can, you know, you have some mirrors or something and you want to fry an egg using sunlight,

Starting point is 01:28:47 which is really the product of nuclear fusion, go right ahead. So maybe Talmudic stages like nuclear fusion. But I don't know if they had developed. a power plant based on that principle. So let's see. I mean, there's a lot to unpack what you were just mentioning, but it's a favorite topic of mine. So I think one of the things I'll just mention is that we tend to relate now to

Starting point is 01:29:18 Melahot, meaning the crafts that are prohibited on Shabbat and the Jewish Sabbath, introduced in the Talmud as a list of positive things that were part of the construction of the tabernacle in the temple, the Michkan, the sort of tent with all of its different elements and sort of building blocks that was assembled in a very particular way. That was the place you were supposed to bring offerings in the temple. And I actually personally think that that's something that I would like to see rejuvenated in Judaism. We learn about what we're not supposed to do in Shabbat because the construction of the tabernacle was halted on Shabbat, but actually all of these crafts are things

Starting point is 01:30:04 we could be learning how to do. And knowing how to do them is a practical precondition for being able to operate a Mishkan and keep more of the Mitzvot of the Torah. And so I think

Starting point is 01:30:19 I'm very much one who doesn't think that we should be kind of waiting for a magical solution to the existential problem. presented by the contradictions of history and, you know, the enjoiners of the Torah. So it used to be that it was inconceivable to think that the Jewish people could be in the land of Israel and actually trying to have a national life there because that was centuries old and, you know, gone,

Starting point is 01:30:48 and it was centuries before that would happen again. And I'm sure if you ask someone in the 14th century, oh, yeah, don't we need to go and do that? Isn't that part of what the Torah is asking us to do? they just say, no, we have to wait for a magical deliverance. It turns out that wasn't true. And I think that also could be true for the temple in Jerusalem as well. And the point is you don't have to do that tomorrow, but you shouldn't sit on your hands. Like if what you can do now is you can learn how to weave and dye things and pour molten metal and all the things you need to do,

Starting point is 01:31:18 maybe that's something that we should take more of an interest in. So that's an aside. I think that we should embrace a positive aspect and not think of those things in the Torah only is about prohibition and sort of restriction. But I also think that what's interesting about those melechot, those crafts, is that they call your attention to the whole idea of what it is to create by combining different elements into a whole. And for example, one of the ways that I've argued for reading the opening passage of Genesis is, you know, it has this repetition, and it was evening and it was morning, and it was evening and it was morning, you know, the seven days of creation. So it's Vallehi Arev, Vaille, Vaille he Boker, and it was evening, it was morning. So Ereve and Bochir also sound a lot like O'Rev and Bakar.

Starting point is 01:32:13 So O'Reve is a raven, and Bakar is a cow. And it was interesting if you look at those themes and you can argue once you hit on that, there are other passages that are clearly referent to the creations, the passage at the beginning of Genesis elsewhere in the Bible that are putting birds and cows right next to each other in something called proshad Hasinu elsewhere in the Torah, that the raven and the cow become emblems for different kinds of motherly nurturing, right? Because the raven is the bird who sort of picks up food in one place and brings it over, to their children in another place to nourish them.

Starting point is 01:32:49 So it's the transportation of material from A to B. And then the cow will eat grass sort of standing in place, so to speak, and turn it into milk and nourish their young that way. And I think what's so interesting, therefore, is that if you think about any process of transforming qualitatively one thing, like grass, into milk,

Starting point is 01:33:08 which is another thing, the idea of chemical transmutation, on another scale, what that actually is, is taking material and moving it from one place to an another, right? Like it's the rearrangement of atoms, the same building blocks are getting disassembled and reassembled in a new way. So qualitative transformation at one scale is the result of spatial relocation of building blocks at another scale. And, you know, Vaihiro, Vaihibokir, you know, could be referent to that. Certainly insofar as the different things that it's talking about, you know,

Starting point is 01:33:38 setting the sun and the moon in the sky or, you know, separating the water from the earth, These are different kinds of spatial relocations that ultimately lead perhaps to qualitative transformation on other scales. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay.

Starting point is 01:34:12 or 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 that was, you know, an idea that popped into my head, you know, since you were raising it. And there are other things that you could look for as well. I really think that if you come to the Torah, assuming it knows everything you know and more, and you're looking for it to give you its commentary on how a servant of God should, few the things that you know about, then you can find passages that contain very deep insights,

Starting point is 01:34:52 even about sort of what it is itself to be a scientist. Like I think the story of Joseph, son of Jacob, is if you want, a commentary on the whole kind of idea of what it is to predict the world scientifically, and both what's good about that and also what the sort of dangers might be in sort of idolizing that relationship to nature. Very interesting. Yeah, I often look to when I'm, you know, I personally have more difficulty relating to prayer than to study. And so I find it much more, you know, distracting to study and read the Talmud and my rabbis and so forth and friends. But I want to ask maybe a conclusion because I know it's getting late. I'd love to talk to you more, but maybe we'll do it in person. I'd love to talk to you about dust. I study the cosmic dust. You study biological. dust, the famous passage that a man should have two pockets, one when he is haughty and one when he is feeling low. And basically, one says, I am but dust and ashes.

Starting point is 01:35:53 And the other one says the Olam universe was made for me. I'd love to kind of get into that someday. I think that could be another long podcast. But I guess the last one that I want to talk about today in light of the lateness of time is really this notion. of, you know, kind of the comments that I get as a scientist, you know, from people who are not anti-religious, like Frank Wilczek on my podcast, you know, is talking about the soul and saying, you know, the soul is this immaterial thing that, and Sean Carroll is also a guest on the podcast,

Starting point is 01:36:31 is that, you know, for these things to have any meaning, they have to interact and they don't have any place in the standard model, Lagrangian, you don't write down, well, here's the soul on, and that's where that comes in. So, you know, when you think about, and some of the arguments I think are less, less really impressive that Sean and others have made. I know you've been on a guest on his podcast as well, that, you know, as long as you can think of a simpler explanation for what God is, or what the universe is, could you create a simpler universe? Why is the universe so profligate? Then God is not a good theory. It doesn't disprove God, but it sort of takes away some of the wind in his sails.

Starting point is 01:37:07 I don't find those convincing to say, you know, there's a Hilbert space with one element, because you can always ask, well, what created or who created the Hilbert space and the laws of mathematics. They came from our minds or interpreted in our minds or they discovered or they invented. But I want to ask you, you know, this consequence of materialism, that anything that's real can be measured. And I phrase this as sensors and sensibility. You know, can we build a sensory device, an augmented reality to augment our senses to detect something about the existence of consciousness and something special about humanity, or are we forever kind of beholden to the mystery

Starting point is 01:37:48 that we will never be able to reveal, you know, what makes conscious beings conscious and what gives us free will and what breathes fire into the equations, as the late great atheist Stephen Hawking used to say. Although he concluded the book, you know, with if we can get a theory of everything, then we'll know the mind of God.

Starting point is 01:38:06 Some say that was to increase book sales. But anyway, Rabbi, I want to ask, you, are we, you know, could you conceive of a physical test or something, not even in Judaism, in religion at all, just something to detect or augment our senses as scientific apparatus do in my lab and in laboratories that you must be familiar with? Is there any way we can interact with the soul or something incorporeal, incorporeal, if that's the right way to phrase it? So it's an interesting way to bring things back to Schrodinger because I don't know if you read the end of what is life, but the last chapter or a few chapters, he starts thinking about consciousness and ends up getting into all this stuff with like Vedic philosophy from sort of ancient Indian texts, which I think is just such a great example of how, you know, back then when you were a scientist, you could just, you know, write a paper and at the end be like, and then what do I think about? consciousness and you know it's hard to get this kind of stuff through peer review these days um

Starting point is 01:39:11 nature doesn't look so timely but um i i think that uh the consciousness question it's a very important one to bring up because it exposes the philosophical mistakes uh that are at the root of so many scientific slash atheistic sort of trivializations of religious attitudes because I think at the end of the day, science, as I mentioned before, is trying to focus on that which can be idealized as objective. And it seems the same to you as it seems to me. And it's a process that we can all do together and we can find out certain things about the world, but it only produces for us theories of what the world seems.

Starting point is 01:40:06 like, so to speak, from the outside, right? Because that's what we can talk about together. So you can do all sorts of science on the behavior of conscious beings and whether they report themselves to be seeing red or whatever. But you never can do science on subjective experience by definition. You can do science on how living things act as though they have subjective experience and how they report about it and you can try to do science on the complexity of their behavior and impute or even kind of define, make a working definition in that behavior of something you'd want to call consciousness. Nothing in that whole process will ever touch what we actually think we're talking about

Starting point is 01:40:51 when we say, well, I feel like I'm sort of riding behind a pair of eyes and the world exists first and foremost as my own experience. And I think what that points do is that really all of these scientists who, you know, find it very easy to just say, oh, I think, you know, God is a useless theory or whatever. They're only actually willing to talk in terms that start with assumptions that don't have to be made and which are necessary in order to get rolling with what you call the scientific method in that whole process and which it's like a commitment made in some way. ways either out of aesthetic desire or arbitrarily that no one's willing to question. The real question, if people want to start playing that high stakes game, you have to roll it all the way back to why do I think there's anything else than my own experience, right? What proves to me that there is a universe other than sort of what I sense and what I feel? And I'm not posing that

Starting point is 01:41:54 question because I, you know, the grand conclusion here is, you know, oh, actually, I'm just an I'm just like a sort of a sensory experience for you or you're just a sensory experience for me. But I think that the point is that kind of epistemic, like radical epistemic skepticism doesn't have a scientific answer. The answer is I'll assume that a way and then I'll start doing science and let's not worry about it. But actually you have to make essentially ideological commitments in order to get past it. And there are different ideological systems that might deal with that in different ways. So the Torah deals with it in one way and someone else might deal with it differently. The reason I think that's important is because what it means is that when you're asking about things like the soul, if you want to relate to it as a measure of things, as an objectifier of things, as someone who's engaging in examination of the world as a scientist does, you're always going to be on the outside of the thing, sort of poking it and seeing how it responds.

Starting point is 01:42:59 And that's fine, and you can make predictive theories. And there are, I think, kinds of progress that can be made on modeling and describing and predicting the sorts of behavior that seem more conscious to us, right? Like, you can describe with a model with many parameters, much more accurately what the state of some complex conscious behavior is than if you do it with a few parameters. So I think we might make progress using machine learning,

Starting point is 01:43:29 on, you know, saying let's measure a thousand quantities in the brain at once or a billion quantities in the brain at once. And then we'll start to be able to kind of learn what that means and turn it into certain kinds of predictions. But I think that anyone, you know, in neuroscience, in, you know, more broadly, you know, talking as scientists sort of do as amateur philosophers from their armchair, I think usually unsuccessfully, whenever someone talks about that as sort of being what it would mean to measure the soul, they're making kind of a philosophical category mistake.

Starting point is 01:44:04 It's sort of a bait and switch where they're passing off the idea that all there is is that which can be scientized. And therefore, if there is such a thing as what you'd call the consciousness or the soul or all these things, they wanted to carry this sort of zest of what we really mean when we're talking about that, which has more to do with subjective experience. But actually, for it to be in the domain of that which can be scientized and objectified. In fact, I think they just have a methodology that by definition can't touch those

Starting point is 01:44:37 things. And if we want to talk about those things, then we need to roll things back further and talk about how do we come into that discussion as people who could share the same language about it. How do we come into that discussion and go beyond the individual

Starting point is 01:44:53 experience to the shared experience of a nation? And amazingly, I think that's a huge part of But this whole passage that is actually the focus of my book with regard to its commentaries in the Torah is about, you know, Moses is alone in the desert standing over a plant that is on fire and he sees some crazy stuff, right? So if I came to you and I said, well, I was in the desert standing over an unidentified plant that was on fire and I saw some crazy things like I saw a stick turn into a snake. So now that means I carry to you a message from the creator of the world. you'd be like, or maybe it was just the plan. You need to see a psychiatrist.

Starting point is 01:45:32 I don't think that the Torah is being accidental in doing that. It doesn't mean it was all just a bad trip, but what it's pointing to is that the problem is a very hard one. How do you bring into the common experience of a whole nation the idea of a relationship to the creator of the world that starts with subjective experience? That's not an easy thing to resolve. So the resolution of it,

Starting point is 01:45:57 comes in stages and comes in the path that Moses walks with the nation that he brings out of Egypt. And it starts with the signs that are given to him. And I don't even talk about this aspect of it at all in the book. But I think the first point is the staff that turns into a snake. It's exactly about this question about the choice of your frame you put on experience. You have one object, right? It's a staff. And it turns into not an elephant and not a mouse.

Starting point is 01:46:24 it turns into the animal that looks the most like a staff. It turns into a serpent. And the point there is that this is really about two different interpretive frames laid on the same experience. It could be that you look at it as an inanimate measuring object or measurable object, kind of the physicist's way of looking at the world that it's a collection of inanimate objects that stick together or that you can describe predictably. One end does what you make it what you want it to do when you push on the other end. Or maybe it's a serpent, which is not just like a living thing.

Starting point is 01:46:58 It's the talking thing, right? It's the talking animal, the nahash, the serpent from the Garden of Eden. So it's the same experience of the world. And you can either relate to it like your prophet with his hair on fire seeing sort of voices and messages. Or you can relate to it as, you know, the inanimate dust that we're all composed of where a physicist would say there's no difference between you and a table or you in a pile of ashes. And you can't dispense with either of those. You need both of those ways of looking at the world. And I find it very interesting that later on the zealot featured prominently in this week's Parcia, Pinkat.

Starting point is 01:47:36 Pankas, he uses a staff-like object to carry out the will of God zealously. But we won't get into why he did that because it's late there. And I really enjoyed this conversation, Rabbi Jeremy. I did as well. Just a phenomenal mind. and I do hope we can meet in person and maybe share a Shabbat together or something like this. This would be wonderful for me. And on behalf of all my guests, all my guests, all my listeners and all my viewers on YouTube,

Starting point is 01:48:06 Dr. Brian Keating there and Into the Impossible on all podcast channels, we thank you so much. You're one of my most requested guests. I want to thank David Klinghofer of Discovery Institute for putting us together. And I look forward to many, many more fruitful conversations together. Thank you so much, Rabbi. I have a wonderful and a Shabbat Shalom. Let me be the first of which you Shabbat Shalom. Batch alon. Take care. Thank you very much.

Starting point is 01:48:30 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

Starting point is 01:49:20 Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're... We're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. For citizens back.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Jeremy England: Life is on FIRE🔥 🧬🔥 (#189)

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