Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 2: Sir Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff: What is Consciousness? (#248)

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

A conversation with Nobel Prize Winner and renowned mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Dr. Stuart Hameroff about consciousness and quantum mechanics. Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff have tackled one of the most vexing problems in science -- how does consciousness work? Their theories of consciousness were selected by the Templeton Foundation for study. We will discuss Is the brain a sophisticated computer or an intuitive thinking device? Following on from their conference in Tucson which pitted Integrated Information Theory (IIT) against Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR), Sir Roger Penrose OM and Stuart Hameroff discuss the current state of theories that might explain human consciousness and objections to them from FQXI and others. Sir Roger Penrose describe examples of ‘non-computability’ in human consciousness, thoughts and actions such as the way we evaluate particular chess positions which cast doubt on ‘Turing’ computation as a complete explanation of brain function. As a source of non-computability, Roger discuss his ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) self-collapse of the quantum wavefunction which is a potential resolution for the ‘measurement problem’ in quantum mechanics, and a mechanism for non-computable physics. Dr. Stuart Hameroff reviews neuronal and biophysical aspects of Orch OR, in which ‘orchestrated’ quantum vibrations occur among entangled brain microtubules and evolve toward Orch OR threshold and consciousness. The nature, feasibility, decoherence times and evidence for quantum vibrations in microtubules, their role and correlation with consciousness, effects upon them of anesthetic gases and psychedelic drug molecules will be discussed, along with Orch OR criticisms and predictions of microtubule quantum vibrations as therapeutic targets for mental and cognitive disorders. Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join Shortform through my link Shortform.com/impossible and you’ll receive 5 days of unlimited access and an additional 20% discounted annual subscription! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast! On Apple devices, click here, scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast https://apple.co/39UaHlB  On Spotify it’s here  on @audible_com it’s here and other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast  Please join my mailing list; click here https://briankeating.com/list for your chance to win real space dust!! A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everybody to a fascinating discussion with two eminent scientists, Sir Roger Penrose, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Dr. Stuart Hammeroff, who unlike me, is a real doctor. Like me, he puts people to sleep. I do so in my lectures. He does so under anesthesiology. But we both share a fascination, both with the work of Sir Roger and of the deepest questions known to the human mind, including the human mind itself. So I hope you will enjoy this episode. This episode picks up where we left off yesterday, We're talking about the Emperor's New Mind. We got into state collapse. We were just about about Everettian many worlds theory.

We get into that in this episode. So the first episode, if you haven't listened to that, go back to Part 1, which Sir Roger a Happy Birthday and talked about the updates that he would make to Emperor's New Mind if he could. They booked that inspired me as a 15-year-old to someday write a book for popular scientists, which I did, and which Roger endorsed amazingly. So this episode, you're going to hear about things like alien intelligence, the simulation hypothesis.

And we're even going to get into the existential questions I love to ask my guests, including is there an afterlife? How did life emerge on Earth? And the answers to my patented Fantastic Four questions about things they've changed their mind on, what's the most magical form of technology, and how do they go into the impossible, the name of this podcast. So sit back, relax, enjoy. Don't forget to leave a rating and tune in tomorrow for some of you listening to this live or go up to the channel and find my conversation with Dr. Sabina Hasinfeldar.

And you can get that on YouTube live if you're listening to this before Tuesday, the 8th of August. You will be able to chat live with her on my YouTube channel. And that's Dr. Brian Keating. She'll be in the live chat for some time. So for now, enjoy this episode as we go into The Impossible with Stuart Hammeroff, Roger Penrose, and yours truly, Dr. Brian Keating. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinct.

from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please help. Guys. So we should be back, and hopefully there'll be some guests remaining on the channel, listening in to part two of this special interrupted interview with Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hammeroff. And I don't see it live. There it is.

Now we're live. There's one person watching. Good. That's at least more than could be expected. So let me continue. So where were we? We were discussing the, what? Yeah, we were having fun. What I was saying? Yeah, so we were talking about, yes, the role of the collapse of the wave function. And I mentioned, I would like to know if, let's say that there is not, the Copenhagen interpretation is not correct, and there is sort of an Everettian world, many worlds phenomenon,

could such a thing be, could microtubules play a role in it? In other words, do you need a collapse? If you don't have orch ORC-O-R, do you, can you have a theory of quantum mechanics that doesn't feature state reduction in the same way as it does in the standard Copenhagen interpretation? Do you get consciousness or does consciousness not arise in some sense? Well, the view is that orc, O-R by definition is or which means orchestrated in OAR. Well, it spells or, but it means objective reduction. So that theory simply doesn't occur. I mean, it's just, it needs the collapse of the way function.

And I've never understood how you can have many worlds. I mean, it doesn't really explain conscious experience or anything like that. Because if all the alternatives, the quantum alternatives coexist, why are we only aware of one of them? Right. And clearly doesn't have anything to say about that at all. It doesn't make, to me, to my, I hate to say this because there's so many philosophers in Oxford who are strong supporters in many worlds, so I should shut up.

I think that's very different from that. You've got to have things where there's just one world that survives and the other ones die off in a sense. But the alternatives, yes. Well, okay, well, you have to have that. So is it more an objection to the many worlds theory in that it doesn't seem to accommodate consciousness? Or is it, you know, sort of more evidentiary for, you know, for the standard or Copenhagen-type wave collapse, etc? In other words, if God tells you there are many worlds, how would you react? I mean, would you say, no, that can't be because there's no.

consciousness in such a state? Well, it doesn't live comfortably with consciousness because it doesn't explain why conscious experience only experiences one of these worlds. And even worse than that, and this was the thing I always objected to. It's all right. You could imagine that for some reason each person experiences one world, but why do we, all of us seem, I mean, well, all my friends come drifting off into other worlds and why do they They seem to be companions with consciousness just like myself and seem to be inhabiting the same world that I have.

So it's not, it doesn't make any sense to it. So why philosophers take it so seriously, I find it's very strange. But I think you see there's two wedded to the equations that we know. You see the equation, the Schrodinger equation, the Schrodinger was absolutely clear in pointing us out. His own equation does not explain the world we see. The world we see has to have some another ingredient, which is in some sense or other, the wave function collapses.

So you've got one alternative and not all these possible alternatives coexisting. I mean, they do if they're small enough. So that's the puzzle. You have to have a theory in which, okay, yeah, when you're talking about small things and you're talking about particles or atoms or, or molecules, as long as they're small enough,

they seem to follow the Schroding equation. So you need to have a theory which tells you when they get big enough, they don't follow the Schroding equation. And the idea is here that there's a scheme which tells you how long these superpositions can exist. And if they're very tiny, it's more or less longer than the age of the universe.

But if they're sizable, it might be microsecond. So you've got to sort of balance this right so that it comes about so that these collapses happen with structures that are about the right size. And that's the question. To make the theory work, you've got to make sure that these numbers come out right. And the numbers are how long the collapse takes come from a very pretty clear equation. It was due to Nyasiyoshi, actually. He had the idea before I did, but he didn't have the motivation that I did. And his version is different from mine.

But it's certainly the same idea. And this depends on gravity. So you have to have a theory which involves the ideas of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is the theory of gravity and curved space time and all that. And you try to fit that together with quantum mechanics. And many people regard it as one of the profound problems of physics, to what they call quantum quantized gravity. So they're thinking of imposing the rules of quantum mechanics on gravitational theory.

But to me, that's going the wrong way because it doesn't deal with the problems that are inherent in quantum mechanics. Namely this problem of superposition states not persisting. We don't see that in the world we observe. So you need a theory which is put right. And the claim is that Einstein's general theory of relative when appropriately combined with quantum mechanics, will do that for you, which is the other way.

It's gravitizing quantum mechanics rather than quantizing gravity. So is it true that you wouldn't have consciousness in Minkowski space? I mean, would it be impossible without gravitational force? I mean, obviously, you'd have matter, you'd have a brain, you'd have some gravitating.

But is it impossible then to have consciousness in a region that's either perfectly flat, has no matter, or is otherwise, free from perturbations? Well, yeah, that would be the claim, yes. Certainly the OrkoR theory claims you've got to involve gravity. So if you had things that didn't involve gravity, space time is flat, it's got to involve Einstein's theory,

not just gravity in the Newtonian sense. And you've got to have that. So I would agree, yes. If your systems were too small or something to affect the gravitational field significantly, they would not be conscious. And when you guys started this conversation 30 years ago, did you ever think there'd be experimental tests, both ongoing that seemed to support

and some that seem to contradict some of your results, Stuart, did you think that besides what you do where you put people to sleep, which I point out, I do that every time I give a lecture to my students, I do the same as you, Stuart, so don't feel too, you know, I'm not a real doctor, okay? But did you ever think outside of the brain, you know, the medical world that we do physics experiments on consciousness? Or is this totally, you know, a surprise to you? No, I was hoping for it, certainly.

And I'm not a physicist, but I was, I studied a lot of physics in undergrad and have followed it along. And what we've found is that because of the aromatic rings, the pie resonance, where the, where the, where the, where the, quantum stuff is happening, that quantum optical effects occur. And what we've been hearing about here at this conference, our reports from two different laboratories, one at Princeton with Greg Skols and Arrock-Kalra, where they did triptophan fluorescence lifetimes in microtubules and tubulin and found that if you

use zap a microtubule with a UV photon, there's a signal that propagates 15 nanometers or so along the microtubule. That's a quantum process. And if you then add anesthesia, it goes away or you dampen it. And we did it with two different anesthetics. One, a gas, although we did it in the liquid phase, and then the other soluble liquid anesthetic etamidate.

The gas was isofluorine. And that's being written up now, and should be a very nice paper. Arach Colorado was a postdoc and did a superb job. And the other is in a lab at University of Central Florida in the lab of RSD Dogarayu, who is a quantum optics guy, who got into biology, and he's been looking at a slightly different quantum optical effect

in microtubules called delayed luminescence, where you hit the microtubule with a photon, but a much lower energy photon, a visible photon. And what you see there is that the microtubule actually has what's called delayed luminescence, gives off photons for up to a second or longer, which is a very long time in quantum. quantum effects. And also in his experiments,

anesthesia took away the delayed luminescence, which we think may be a phenomenon called super radiance, that there's a subradiance state and at least super radiance, which is the prolonged state. And that seems to go away with anesthesia. What we want to do next is to do those studies in the gas phase so that we can have the microtubule in a chamber and a plexiglass chamber, let's say, with air, and then we introduce with the gas inlet, a little anesthesia and see if the delayed luminescence

goes away and then when you blow away the gas and anesthesia and go back to air that it comes back like a patient going to sleep and waking up that's that's what we want to see and then we will do it for different anesthetics which have different known potencies in putting people and animals to sleep and if the the potency in dampening the super radiance matches the potency in putting humans and animals and animals to sleep, I think we have a darn good argument that that's the molecular correlate of consciousness.

And I have to say, Brian, that that these experiments are, you know, preliminary, but they're very promising. They go in the right direction. And I think they're far more than any other theory of consciousness has, really, because we're not quite at the mechanism. We're not at Roger's objective reduction, but we think these quantum optical effects lead to the objective reduction. And how that happens is a whole other story that maybe we'll talk about when you talk about the controversy because that's relates to it yeah yeah well I want to get to that in a second but one thing you know came to me as a terrifying thought I heard I got a genetic test recently it's just part of a of a checkup and it came back that I'm 99.7% genetic garbage

but besides that I say nobody's perfect nobody's perfect but but it also said that there that I respond to anesthesia. In other words, that I don't have inhibitors or I don't re-uptake them or I forget exactly, you'll be able to correct me in about two seconds. But there are people the doctor told me that don't, that, you know, will have anesthetic applied, anesthesia applied, and they'll be fully conscious. And in other words, there are people you can't turn off genetically. They don't, they have a predisposition. Can you explain what that is? And then what if, could these types of people be sort of a control. In other words, obviously conscious, but not responding to anesthesia as a typical, you know, normal member of the society would or population. Can you explain what's going on here?

Well, I'm not aware of people being totally immune to anesthesia. There are genetic conditions where people are resistant and need more. But anesthesia always wins, at least in my experience. If we give enough, they'll go to sleep. And one of the genetic traits that is resistant to anesthesia is red hair. redheads require more. And so we have red hair redheaded patient. We give them a little bit more. No big deal. Another category of patients that is resistant to anesthesia are people who are taking the anti-cancer drug taxol, which stabilizes microtubules and they require more anesthesia. So those are two examples of people being resistant to anesthesia, but I'm not aware of anybody being totally. Totally resistant. Ah, I got it. Good. Good.

So, Roger, we heard recently some results from an experiment that was supported partially by the foundational questions initiative. This took place in Grand Saso, which is normally I think of as a particle physics laboratory, deep underneath the dolomites, I believe it is, in Italy, not far from Rome. And there are many experiments done there, xenon experiments, dark matter detection experiments. first of all, can you explain the experiment? Why was it put there? And what does it have to do with either bolstering or criticizing or go-R? Well, I should explain that the idea was to test an effect which people believed, or these people, believed should arise from a state reduction theory like mine.

Now the thing is it depends on a formula which tells you how long a superposition between two states will last, which is actually due not to me, but to Laias Diyoshi. And he had this idea before I did. I independently came across the same formula using ideas from based on general relativity. Where his, I don't know quite where he got the ideas from first. So this was something in common between his theory of state reduction and mine. And when I say it's tech production, I mean the collapse of the wave function. Now, the thing is that in his version, you would expect a certain effect of the substance

would be heated, but spontaneously. So if you have a material which is isolated as best you can from the rest of the world, it would slightly heat up spontaneously by itself. a little tiny bit. And the argument for that is that all the time you have super positions in the body and these super positions become one or the other all the time. And when they become one or the other, it sort of jumps. And this means this jumping is taking place all the time, and that has an effect that the body gets heated. And they did this experiment to try and test whether bodies would spontaneously heat. And they found that they didn't. Now to me,

that's not the expectation I have because although my model had the same time scale as the OShe did, it's not the same theory and it's subtly rather different and I suppose that's one of the reasons people didn't take it into consideration that it's, I can only put it in a rather strange way. So suppose the system is in a superposition, it becomes in a superposition of here and there. So it's originally in one place, then it becomes in a supposition of two places. But after a certain point, it becomes one or the other. Now, if it does that, the state sort of jumps to one or the other. But that's not my view. The view that I have is that when it reduces to one or the other, it's as though it been, suppose it reduces to this one rather than that one,

then that means state was in effect being this one all the time. And this is a strange theory, because it sort of looks as though the world behaves retroactively. That's just to say, you thought it was in a superposition, and then it becomes as though it had been one or the other all the time. And you have to try and understand how that kind of retroactive behavior can make sense and doesn't allow you to send signals into the past, which would be disaster. If you could do that disaster for physical theory. But it's the reason that people didn't think of that idea.

And I didn't think of it at first, but I had been think of it for, you know, a few years. I didn't feel two or three years I'd been taking that view seriously for, I think I was at one of Stewart's conferences on consciousness. And it occurred to me that's the way you had to look at it. It's a little bit more subtle because to make it make sense, you have to take the view that there are two slightly different kinds of reality. One of them is what I call classical reality. and the other is what I call quantum reality. And quantum reality, these superpositions kind of persist as two things at once.

And the classical reality, it's got to be one or the other. And it goes back to that classical state of being one or the other. But it does it as though it had been that all the time. So it's kind of retroactive in that sense. The decision of which to do comes later, but then it becomes as though it had been that one all the time. You have to make that kind of crazy-looking theory make sense and the reason it's a you know people don't think about it is because it's a

crazy looking theory and you have to realize why this theory although crazy looking does actually make sense and doesn't give you you know communication with the past and things like that it doesn't give you sort of scientific nonsense it really hangs together as a whole but I have these different points of view not even really fully together until a paper which I wrote, which should be coming out sometime this month, I gather. It's in a volume of different articles by a Chinese person called Shan Gao. It's published by the Oxford University Press. And Stuart has an article in it, and I have a separate article in it. In this article, I do explain this point of view and how you can have these two kinds

of reality and why it makes sense. And Stuart, there's some questions we're taking from the audience. And by the way, you can always ask questions for all my guests. I have Nick Bostrom coming up, Roger's colleague over there in Oxford. He's coming on Monday. I have Bernardo Castroe coming on. I've had Sabina Hassenfelder's episode is coming out. She did an interview with Sir Roger for her new book.

She's wonderful. Existential Physics comes out on Tuesday. So stay tuned. Also, you can ask questions on my YouTube channel or on my Twitter account. So there's some questions that have come in, and I want to start taking some of them, because I know you guys that's getting late for Roger, at least. Stuart, people are asking about psychedelics, which are, you know, maybe the opposite of anesthesia in a certain sense. Maybe they heighten awareness in certain ways. Is there a role for these, if you could arrange the permissions to do it?

And I know there are people at Johns Hopkins, Tim Ferriss is famously leading a big study or funding a big study for Stanford, I believe. Is there a role of psychedelics in addition to it? anesthesia and consciousness research. Yes, absolutely. In fact, we were discussing that, and we hope to do those experiments. They are tricky. The prediction is, or my prediction, is that they would have the opposite effect. And if you look at the molecules, LSD, psilocybin, and DMT, they're aromatic rings, just like the triptophan, very similar to chyptophan inside tubulin and so there these electron pie resonance orbitals that are fluorescent luminescent delayed luminescent super radiance all that kind of stuff and so the

prediction would be that if you and the other one prediction is that they will bind directly to microtubules now most researchers will say well they bind to the 5HT2A receptor on the membrane surface which they do but they're very they're small non-polar and they get inside and should bind to microtubules directly and would increase the quantum optical effects that we saw dampened by anesthesia. They would go in the opposite direction. So that's a very important, and we hope to show that. Can I address the experiments that Roger was referring to?

Yeah, please do. So they, so Diyashi was one of the investigators, and they were looking for radiation, which would prove his theory of OR, whereas Roger was. theory of OR does not predict radiation. And so they did this experiment and over two months and to make a long story short, they found no radiation. So what they could have done, I think, is say, well, okay, Diashi O.R is wrong. Penrose O.R. is correct. But they didn't want to accept that. And what they did was they said one of the parameters must be wrong. So the parameter that they looked at is it has to do with the nature of superposition. How can something be in two

places at once. What does that mean? And of course, Roger explained it by saying, by taking the equivalent curvature in space-time geometry and saying you have opposing curvatures. And when we did our first paper, Roger and I in 96, he said the first thing we have to do is calculate, you know, the superposition of the, how can a protein be separated from itself? And he gave me the homework assignment of look at it as the whole protein, partially separated from itself. Look at at the level of each atomic nucleus in that protein separated from itself, totally, side by side, or look at the nucleons, the protons and the neutrons. And he gave me the equations and I did the algebra and it was quite fun actually, something different for me.

And the point was that the atomic nuclei separated from themselves by 2.5 fermilites, femtometers, the radius of the carbon nucleus, was optimal, would be the dominant effect. So we used that to calculate the gravitational self-energy, the protein, and that gives us the time of how many proteins you need to collapse at a given time. And we did those numbers. It came out quite sensibly, actually. So anyway, after the Grand Saso experiments, the they didn't want to accept that there was no radiation. So they said the these this superposition separation that they had you apparently initially used our value of 2.5 Fermis

must be wrong. And the lower that number and ours was a small separation, the greater the radiation. If that's a bigger spread, then there would be no radiation. They said, well, there must be a much bigger spread so that there's no no radiation. And they calculated the smear factor, quite little, they call it the smear factor are zero it would have to be on the order of an angstrum

five orders of magnitude bigger than what we had said and that's for the nucleus which makes the atom bigger than the almost as big as a cell you know bigger than the protein for sure it'd be a micron so that didn't make any sense but but that that made them happy because then they could account for the lack of radiation and but then they kind of blamed us for some reason. They said that this was because Tenrose OR didn't work. And they said, and they tried to develop their own version of Ork ORC-O-R based on Diasi ORR, which they had apparently just refuted. So it didn't really make any sense to me. And I thought the, the criticism levied at us in those papers was, was bogus. And I think the headline in the FQXI press release, which said, collapsing a leading

theory of the quantum origin of consciousness was unfair and completely wrong. And right. So, Roger, one question comes to mind, you know, we think about gravitational effects. These, you know, systems are distributed in space and time. Typically, we think about the fundamental object of space time being the metric, and then from the metric we can derive all sorts of properties, including expansion and so forth. But when we, when we, when we we think about, you know, gravitational effects and perturbations, you know better than anybody, your, you know, incredible work on black holes, which resulted in you being the co-recipient in the Nobel Prize two years ago, that, you know, is involving massive objects. And it's always,

you know, occurred to people, you know, that this is, this is sort of strange. You know, how do gravitational perturbations manifest themselves on such small scales as microtubules? And how are they, how does a microtubule distinguish the wild curvature at a point, you know, at some three-dimensional point in my brain from something that's one nanometer away from it or a few nanometers away from it on the scale of these microtubules? I mean, isn't the wild curvature in classical GR, isn't it a smooth, continuous analog function that shouldn't vary so radically as to initiate different conscious experiences? In other words, how can the wild curvature, a classical object, how can that influence, you know, quantum mechanics?

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Well, it's all part of that. It has to be all part of one theory. I'm not completely sure I understand the question. I mean, it's a question of numbers. And sure, the gravitational effects are extremely tiny. And there's no question about that. I mean, you couldn't measure the gravitational attraction of a microtubor or something like that.

It's much too small. But then you have to, if you're looking at the collapse time, you have to compare it with a natural, how do I put this? You see, there's a natural unit when you combine quantum mechanics and gravity. There's a natural unit of mass. There's a natural unit of energy. Some of these things are big and some are small and you've got to get them in the right way. So, for example, the mass is what's called a plank mass, which in ordinary scales is pretty small. but from a point of view of a Nemebo or something is huge.

So, and then you've got the plank energy, which is huge anyway. That's a sort of massive explosion. And then you've got the, the plank time, or what's it's called, which is, you see, the time, you just have to get these numbers in the right place, that's all. So, so when you're looking at a small superposition, um, sure. the time scale for it to collapse into one or the other could be extremely long. But certainly if it was a hydrogen molecule or something like that, well that would be enormously long time. Two phases that one would be longer than the current age of the universe from the Big Bang to now.

So it's much longer than that. Whereas if you were looking at an amoeba, I'd have to think about it, you see. I think for an amoeba, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Certainly if you're thinking about, I mean, you're getting up to the scale where the collapse times could be very rapid. If you had a grain of sand, it would be a ridiculously small fraction of a second. But if you take a neighbor, I would have to think I haven't done the calculation. We've calculated that for tubulence, of course. We know that 10 to the 15th tubulins will reach threshold in 10 to the minus 7th seconds.

So roughly 10 megahertz frequency of these orca-or collapses in the brain. It's a question of getting the parameters. And also you're never quite sure whether you're simply putting the object in a superposition of two places. You have to worry about the environment it's in because it'll be. the things around it. And it also depends what size it is, too. So if it's the same mass but it's much smaller, then the effect would be quicker than if it's that mass and bigger.

So you have to look at all these factors. And Roger, when I look back in kind of the history of general relativity, I often bring up this fact, which I want to relate to computation, and that's artificial intelligence. I think about Einstein. And you know, as well as anybody, what he called the happiest thought of his life. And that was that if he was in free fall, he wouldn't experience gravitational field. And I want to ask you, at what level could a computer, even in principle, experience both the happiest thought of its existence, A, and B, the bodily sensation of free fall.

In other words, the emperor and the emperor's new mind, how could it even come close to this revelation, which then led to GR and the equivalence principle and everything else? In other words, are you sanguine about artificial intelligences becoming conscious? How could they, if so? Well, they wouldn't. I mean, my view is that if you're just looking at computation, that doesn't involve consciousness. And this is certainly one of the arguments I was making in the Emperor's New Manor, going right back to that. And it has to do with the fact that computers don't understand anything.

And the argument I'd use was the basically goes to girdle. For some reason, I always thought it was obvious, but other people have trouble understanding and I didn't quite understood this. But you see, when I was a graduate student in Cambridge, I went to three courses, which were nothing to do with what I was doing. I was doing pure mathematics, algebraic geometry. And I went to a course by Bondi on general relativity and by Dirac on quantum mechanics.

And you can see where these people had a big effect on me. But the third lecture I went to is, of course, by band called Steen on mathematical logic. And I've been puzzled by Girdle's theorem. It seemed to show there were things in mathematics you couldn't prove. And what it shows is nothing like that. It's that if you have a certain set of procedures

that you could put on a computer, so they are basically computational procedures, or checkable by a computer, put it like that, so they're computable in that sense, then if they are your, all you can use to prove things. You set these are the rules that we adopt to prove things. Then what Gurdell shows, it's an amazing thing.

I also was amazing. Here is a statement which you By virtue of your trust in these rules, you can see that it's true. Yet you can't prove it by the rules. Now I found this absolutely amazing because it means you don't use the rules to understand things. Because how do you know this thing is true? You know it's true but because you trust the rules. Well, if you're using the rules, then how do you know you know?

know that using the rules only gives you truth. Well, because you've looked at the rules and say, okay, they're all right. Yeah, I trust them. And what the girl of theory depends on is not using the rules, but your belief that these rules actually work. And that depends on understanding the rules. So it seems to me, what it shows you is the quality of understanding something isn't constrained by rules or any kind. And that's basically the argument which I've been using all the time and I it seems to me Gordle showed that very clearly I mean you have to bring in a few other things afterwards but it's basically the GERL theorem which says that what the way we believe in what things are true in mathematics is not governed by a fixed set of rules so what we use we use

understanding so I'm saying understanding it's not a fixed set of rules it's not algorithm it's not a computer is not capable of understanding so that's the argument sorry that that's along. No, no, I think that's very helpful. I guess, you know, from my perspective, physicists suffer from mathematician envy in that we don't have an equivalent of girdles incompleteness theorem for physics. And usually what people do is substitute in paparianism, you know, a falsification dialectic. And it doesn't seem to me to fully adequately solve, you know, what is properly held within the realm of physics and what lies without it. and what's incomplete or, you know, not about physics.

I mean, obviously, we don't think physics is complete or completable even. But I guess, you know, the question of what, you know, doing the best we can, I know you're not such a huge fan of Popper in terms of, you know, being the ultimate arbiter of what is scientific, but lacking an equivalent of girdle for physics and especially for consciousness. So I guess my question would be, what would it take to convince you that this is the true, you know, that OrkoR is the actual description of what's going on in conscious beings. And is there a definitive as Popper with a crisp experiment? Is there a crisp result?

Again, I know you don't believe that Popper is the last word. But is there some result that you'd like to see? It might be the experimental work of Yvette Fuentes, who I want to talk about in a different one, in a different conversation. But is there a possibility to have a test, Roger, that would definitively either prove you wrong, falsify you, or prove you and Stuart are on the right track? Well, I don't know about definitive. Because things in physics, you know,

even when they're very well tested, lots of people still argue on other, you know, general relativity is now very, very beautifully confirmed theory in all sorts of ways. But there's still people who, Even Einstein, curiously enough, I think would have thought that it was, well, he said this, but he didn't think it was the, I often wondered what Einstein would have thought about my theorem, you see, which showed gravitationality of singularities. My guess is that he, not that he wouldn't have believed my theorem, he would have thought, oh, well, that just shows you general relativity is wrong. The reaction I got from certain people.

I know Bob Dicky, and when I visited Kinsington after this, he slapped me on the back and said, you've done it. You showed general relativity is wrong. That wasn't what I thought I was thrown, you see. But I mean, you see, these things are, there isn't anything definitive in these experiments. You just sort of eventually have enough evidence to push the majority of people in a certain direction.

We're a long way from that now. I'm not sure. I don't see it happening very. And Stuart, if you look at, you know, kind of upcoming experiments, well, first of all, would either one of you would like to talk about the experiments of Fuentes and all in her campaign to use Bose-Einstein condensates? What is the, what's the background behind it? What's the experimental motivation?

And when can we expect results? Well, this is, it's basically an approach to, trying to test the OR part of Orca-R. You see, Orch O'K-O-R involves the physical idea that gravitational influences give you a collapse of a wave function. So you have a genuine formula for how long a collapse of a formula that the Diochi put forward with a different proposal from that. And this hasn't yet been tested experimentally. I had hoped that Dirk Baimister would have done it by now because he was doing an experiment which you put a little mirror in a in a superposition of two locations. And I thought by now he, it looked as like he was going to

have the answer by now, but I think he found out that the system was needed to be cooled much more than it had been. So he doesn't have a definitive answer. There are other schemes where people have a little tiny beads and they try to put them in a superposition. But all these things they're pretty far away yet from actually getting to this point. And Yvette Fuente's ideas is to use boson-sign condensates. And she's an expert on that area. I mean, using these things for gravitational wave detection is wonderful idea, I thought. But this is trying to use them.

You can put a bosin-stein condensate. This is a, you have to have it extremely cold. And these materials, when they get very, very cold, they behave. in a certain sense like big, big state, big quantum system. I mean, it makes like like being a big atom in a sense. The wave function is very macroscopic and you have to get them extremely cold. And these things are very good objects for getting them to test. If put it in two places at once, and will it become one or the other. This experiment is still a few years off, I'm afraid. But one reason she had a lot of problems getting funding.

I think she's got funding now, at least for getting it started. So you still have to wait five or ten years before that up. It may well be you can see effects earlier than that. The ideas that she has and other people have where you might be able to test before it actually becomes one or the other, the effects of it potentially going to become one or the other. maybe the way we'll actually get the test working. So there's a question from Siris K. Lee for both of you guys, and that is quantum mechanical effects in microtubules. The name microtubules suggests, you know, one-dimensional, you know, tubes, if you like.

Stuart, you've talked about matrices or crystalline, you know, sort of structures, perhaps. And now the question is as much as, you know, the dimensionality. argument, you know, is it possible to have, let me say, this translating the question, perhaps, could you have a two-dimensional conscious creature or effectively, you know, quasi-two-dimensional conscious creature? Is there something about three dimensions of space plus one of time that's crucial? I'd have to think about that. I mean, you could think of microtubule as a two-dimensional object wrapped in a cylinder, but the walls

of that cylinder are a lattice. individual proteins called tubulin. And there's about a billion tubulins in every neuron. And as far as memory, well, let me digress a little bit. We don't really know where memory is stored in the brain. People say in the synapses, but the proteins, the makeup synapses are transient and only last hours to days and yet memories can last lifetimes. And microtubules seem to be the best candidate for memory.

And each one of those billion tubulins in a neuron. can be in one of many, many different states. Genetic iso-isoforms. There's 22 different genetic forms in the brain, fewer and less tissues. Each tubulin can be post-transolationally modified. So you have probably 20-30 possibilities for each tubulins.

So it's, I don't know, 10 to the 9th, raised to the 10 to the 30th or something like that. An enormous amount of information capacity in, and these microtubials are frozen, not frozen per se, but a cap so that they retain their lattice position. They're not, they don't disassemble and reassemble

as they would in a cell it needs to divide from mitosis. Interesting. And of course, in the question, two dimensions can give rise to a three dimensional hologram. And whether that's happened, people have suggested that, and whether there's interference leading that is a possibility that's been raised for many years going back to prebrum and came up again at this meeting. But like I said, we found quantum optical effects and microtubules that go away with anesthesia and that's something you mentioned Popper.

Let me go back. Before we did this, I went out on a limb and Roger was not totally pleased with me because I said, if we don't don't find quantum optical effects in microtubules. Or if we find them and they're not inhibited by anesthesia, that or are would be falsified. Roger said, well, you know, it could be a different mechanism other than the quantum optical effects. I started a word a little bit. And he said, so you put all our eggs in one basket,

or both of our eggs in one basket. So I kind of was a little worried about that. But fortunately, the experiments proved exactly that. We showed quantum optical effects in microtubules and they go away with anesthesia, although we've only tried eloquots of a few different anesthetics. We want to do it more systemically. So I have another question from you guys. So in this context, as I mentioned, I'm talking with Nick Ballstrom.

I've talked to David Chalmers about these issues of ultimate AI, perhaps, in the so-called simulation hypothesis. Roger, are you familiar with your colleague over there on Oxford? and his ideas about super intelligence? You'll have to remind me what that is. I mean, I think in some sense it's a conjecture that, you know, with ever-increasing Moore's law, power, eventually, yeah, there'd be a supercomputer that could simulate even a human brain,

even our human experiences, perhaps perceptions. What do you make of that argument? I mean, I would take it that you're a skeptic, but how could something even be, reconciled. Does that fall within the realm of physics or is it pure philosophy? Well, I don't believe it. But you said you didn't think I believe it. It's just, I mean, you can fool people to a certain extent. I mean, you can maybe have a machine which, I mean, they're very far from what's called passing the Turing test even now.

You can make machines, as is, can you talk to a thing and distinguish whether it's a human being? being or a very powerful computer. And that's what people refer to as the Turing test. Because I think Turing considered this possibility and rather considered that maybe you could. But the view that I'm holding is that we're very, very long way from that. You might fool people for quite a long time.

Questions how long can you fool them? And you realize it's just, there's no person, well, a long way from it now. I mean, these devices, which are supposed to keep you happy the phone there's nowhere close to exhibiting anything like a conscious being there. But you could imagine with the future technology they could get pretty good at this. But that's not so surprising. I mean we can fool people in all sorts of ways. It doesn't mean it really is. I think it's not a bad test actually. To talk to a gadget. I mean I talk what was this machine?

Gene's name. I forgot my name there. She was completely hopeless. I tried to have a conversation with her. Is that Sabina or? No, that's a real person. Oh, you're saying you're saying you're conversing with a, okay, so that's like Lisa or, yeah, Elisa. Sabina's very much real, although she's German, so she's very, very precise. Can I ask Roger a question about that? Yeah, of course. Roger, is it true that you cannot simulate a quantum system? I'm going, the no cloning system, in which case that would kind of rule out the simulation hypothesis of chalmers and everything. I mean, it's pretty hard, but you can simulate a quantum system. But you can do it with a quantum computer if you like.

That's what they're for. That's what they're good for. But no, that's a computational procedure. I mean, that's okay, the Schrodinger equation. You can make it, you know, simulate the Schroeder. equation that as Strouding had pointed out that isn't what real things do because they collapse so you have to have collapse part too you couldn't simulate OR well that's the idea is that OAR is something which involves a non-computational process and that was the idea

yeah the The four-companes you can't simulate the simulation hypothesis is out the window Yes. I mean, it's just that it's not true in this view. This view is that the OR process is not computational. And some people say, well, what can I mean, there mathematically you can produce things which are not computational. There are theorems you can show. There's certain quite simple things are not computational. This is hard for people who don't know about these things to believe somehow. You can say, oh, you have a more powerful computer and that would solve the problem. No, there are certain things which you can see, even quite simple problems. Even things like if you're given a set of shapes, which are made up as square, things called polyominoes. These are plane shapes made out of equal squares glued together along their edges. And you're given a set of these shapes. And you want to know, can you tile the plane with those shapes? Can you fill up the whole plane with no overlaps and no gaps?

And whether you can or not is a non-computational question. There is no alibi. algorithm for doing this. And I think people find it's hard to believe without knowing by these things that you can have problems like this for which there is no algorithm. The answer yes or no is not algorithmic. So this is... And yet, does that imply that it's that, you know, there is something unique about the conscious experience or does that just reflect the limits of mathematics? In other words, yes, there are things that are not computable, but within the framework of mathematics. But is that all consciousness? You know, is that all there is? And I'm not getting metaphysical here, but surely there's more to being a conscious being than being able to

compute things. I mean, my infant can't compute anything, but it's very conscious. Being not being able to cute things is really, but no, no, no. I always argued. I make this very clear point, I hope, clear point, that I'm only talking about one tiny bit of what consciousness does for us. Yes. It doesn't tell anything about what the perception of the color green is. It doesn't tell us anything about love. It doesn't tell you anything about happiness. It doesn't tell us anything about pain. There are all these qualities which are to do with consciousness.

It doesn't tell you anything about any of them, except the one quality which is aimed at, which is that of understanding. And the only reason I'm focusing is that, because I can say something about it. And the argument is that whatever understanding is, and it requires consciousness, you understand something as a conscious procedure, that that particular quality of consciousness is not a computational process. And that I regard as a pretty clear argument. It doesn't tell you anything about the most of the other things people talk about when they talk about consciousness, but I'm not trying to argue in that direction. I'm trying to argue in the

opposite direction to say that the things that consciousness can do, at least some of them are not computational. And so there must be something else involved in them than something you could put on a computer. So it's not something to put on the computer. You can have a very, very complicated computer, which can answer all sorts of complicated questions, but it's still not conscious. Very good. So folks are asking a bunch of questions. I want to finish up in just a few minutes is getting late for Sir Roger. So one of them is how do people get involved in your work guys in particular in a physics student and maybe you know someone in biology or neuroscience neurobiology with you Stuart. So first of all Roger do you have recommend career

advice for folks on the channel? I shouldn't say this but I mean the point of writing a book like we wrote to reality was that it would guide people into science with relatively harmlessly so they could get some feeling for what these subjects are like without kind of getting too embroiled and too many complicated calculations and things like that so yeah i think getting people excited about a subject is the main thing and if you get excited about a subject then you're prepared to work hard and that's the main main point to say well that's a great yeah and or what about you on your side of things as the, you know, squishy wet representative, as opposed to the black hole and, you know, experimental Bose-Einstein condensate representative?

What do you recommend? Somebody's really fascinated by this. They want to get more involved. How do they do it as a student or maybe as a layperson? Yeah, well, the field of quantum biology is coming out of the closet, so to speak, coming out of the darkness. And because it was ridiculed by so many seemingly knowledgeable people, it's impossible, blah, blah, blah. But now it's a real phenomenon.

We see, you know, photosynthesis, maybe bird navigation, consciousness, probably even cognition in terms of binding, the binding problem in neuroscience and requires quantum effects. You know, brainwide gamma synchrony. it's hard to explain by nerve propagation and even with a factic transmission. So quantum biology is becoming real and I think it's going to open up a lot of avenues and a lot of opportunities in pharmacology, quantum optical pharmacology and that sort of thing. So the people that have been involved with the Templeton Project here, we're forming a group and we'll be going forward. So you may have to sneak up on it because you may come up against somebody who thinks,

thinks it hasn't gotten the word that it's not nonsense, which it was described after many years. But I think it's actually at the vanguard of the future of neuroscience. And neuroscience needs a revolution. Let me say that. The brain is a complex computer of simple neurons. It just doesn't work. And I think a better model is a multi-scale hierarchy.

And people go from neurons upwards into networks and then networks of networks of networks, but also going downward. And we've identified 18 orders of magnitude. going down from a level of neurons into the microtubule bundles, microtubules, the aromatic tryptophanes, the electron dipoles, and all the way down eventually to Rogers' space-time geometry. So I think this is going to be changing things.

And I think neuroscience needs a new paradigm because the old one really doesn't work. Very good. OK, guys, in the last couple of minutes, I want to do something that I've done with Roger in the past, which is to ask a bunch of existential questions. I used to call these the thrilling three. They're all based on Sir Arthur C. Clark's many, many laws, but I never asked Stuart, because this is your first time solo appearing on, or not solo appearing, but appearing on the podcast.

And I would be remiss if I didn't ask you these questions. So I'm going to first ask you both a question that I didn't ask Sir Roger. And that has to do with Arthur's, I believe it was his third law. Actually, it was his... We took it. Asimov, I think, you think. Oh, no. No, these are, Sir Arthur C. Clark had all these laws.

So one of which is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We'll get to that. Yeah, the first one I want to ask you, Sir Roger and Stuart, but I haven't asked Roger this. Roger, Arthur C. Clark said that when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong. I want to ask you, Roger, and then you, Stuart, what have you changed your mind about recently? You both are maybe not elderly. Well, Roger, let's face it, you're almost middle age, so that's maybe not elderly.

But how do you react? How have you or what have you changed your mind about, if anything, recently? recently which depends you see since you say i'm a youngster so i can modify that a fairly large factor she being almost 91 so um if i'm allowed to go back about 20 years i certainly had a big change of mine so i mean i mean does that count yeah it counts so what was it about what was the change of heart about cosmology you see i used to believe like everybody else that the origin of the universe was the big bang. I had a lot of problem with it because this fundamental problem which has to do is why is that event so very strange and peculiar. It's

very improbable. And then I formed a view, which is how it came about, which is it's not the beginning at all, that it's the continuation of what I call a previous eon. And it's the remote future of that eon sort of compressed down into what we think was the big bang and there are many observations now which seem to confirm this theory people seem to ignore it for some stream stream trees and paper which came out two years ago now in the monthly notices of oral astronomical society as far as i'm aware there is no paper of criticism of this there are people which criticised the previous version that was on the archive but that had to be taken out down when the actual article was published and in this thing we claim there are these spots or in the

sky which we call hawking points or hawking spots and these are seen and they're seen with great confidence level and i wouldn't have predicted those being there without having this theory and they are they do seem to be there in the observations i'm not quite sure whether this is answering your question or not well it's not exactly i mean I mean, the question is one, if you change your mind about it. But I think it's fair to say, you know, that having ideas, the boldness of your ideas and having conviction is certainly an important aspect of scientific success, as I think, you know, admitting mistakes or accepting challenges, et cetera, et cetera.

So I guess with, and we talked on your 90th birthday, I presented an update just for those of you who are interested. Stewart will send me the link again later. but we had a very fascinating conversation among cosmologists and neuroscientists. But when I spoke, I spoke about the current state of research into Hawking Points. I'll put a link to that somewhere below eventually or above. I don't know where it's going to be floating around. But Roger, have you ever thought about even more controversial things?

I'm thinking about now, at least in the kind of zeitgeist in America, there's a lot of talk about the existence of extraterrestrials and things like that. Have you ever contemplated that standard orthodox scientific lore could be wrong or might have a position when it comes to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence or technology? Well, I think it should be out there. The question is how far away? And there is this thing called the SETI program where people try and look for this in very, very distant galaxies you might get signals. Now, the point of view which Vahegosgen and I put forward in a paper was that if you have this previous Eon thing which I talked about, you might get signals from beings.

They probably would have to be gravitational wave signals because to get through from one to the next. It's a bit hard to see how to do this. And there are ways, but gravitational waves are probably the most likely. So you might see in gravitational wave signals evidence for some previous civilization, which would be quite possible. Could they use other signals like neutrinos, or would those suffer from degradation? It's a possibility.

Neutrinos and other possibility, yes. I think gravitation wears the best bet. Uh-huh. Okay, very good. Okay. Yeah, I never asked you about that, so it's good that we got the chat about that. Stuart, I want to go back to you now and ask you that same question. You're not elderly, but you're just thinking.

So I'd like to ask you, what have you changed your mind? Say that again? I am pretty elderly, but go ahead. You know, you remind me of some of the guys I see surfing down in San Diego. Stuart, tell me, what have you changed your mind about, if anything, recently? Well, I used to think, as other people do, that the brain is a computer. And I think instead, as I said before, it's more of a multi-scale hierarchical system, more like a musical system. more like a musical system in some sense.

I've referred to it as a quantum orchestra. And because I think the computational metaphor doesn't work because, well, it works to a point, but it treats neurons as simple on-off switches. And that's an insult to neurons. And I think, you know, if you go inside neurons, there's all this interesting, I hate to use the word complex because I think complexity is often the last refuge of the bewilder, just say it's complex and that explains everything, which I think is wrong. But you have all this structure, these microtubules, doing all this interesting quantum

stuff, and quantum computation, reducing by OR is not the kind of computation I was disillusioned with. So I'd say that one thing is that the brain is a multi-scale hierarchical system more like music than a classical computer. Ah, very good. Okay. Now I'm going to ask you. some of the questions I asked Roger about many, many times in the past and his many appearances. And I want to also remind folks, you can subscribe to my channel for updates. We'll have Sabina Hossensfelder coming on, and she'll be live in the chat room on Tuesday. This will be the, what is it, the ninth, I believe, the day after Roger's birthday.

So join in, and Roger features prominently in her book, which is around here somewhere in my underground bunker. It's quite, quite interesting. and she does talk about consciousness and quantum mechanics, as we have discussed. But if you join my mailing list, you'll get updates on all these things. And you may win a little tiny bit of space dust. Here's a little tiny meteorite that I'm giving away to the first 100 people that join my mailing list at Brian Keating.com slash list.

So I'll put that. Brian, can I say something about space dust? Because I've been working with planetary scientist Dante Loretta who put this probe out and scooped up carbonaceous material from the asteroid. Yeah. He's bringing back and he's looking for organic molecules and these polyaromatic hydrocarbons very similar to the organic molecules in our bodies and inside our microtubules are everywhere in space apparently including interstellar dust and they're these they have the aromatic rings

and so forth and these may be the and they radiate terrahertz so they may be a form of an origin source of the origin of life and consciousness. And Dante thinks that origin of life and consciousness are very closely related. And what about you? Since we're here, what do you think about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, technology? Are there people that could advance this field, millennia, by just the mere existence of extraterrestrial intelligence? Well, we've seen these images of these unidentified, what do they call it, unidentified? aerial phenomena.

Aerial phenomena. And they're very interesting. And I don't think you can just dismiss them as artifact or hallucination or fake. And I heard one interesting talk that when they suddenly move and accelerate, there's no heat trail behind them. And that they might have, you know, this is more Rogers area than mine, that they might have their propulsion mechanism might have something to do with gravity or, or bending space time or something like that. And they also might be some kind of meta material that's changing shape and whatnot.

So I don't know, I probably said more than I should about that, but I think there's probably a lot out there. And they've just chosen not to communicate with us and who can blame them because there's a lot of problems there. Right, exactly. Okay, next question that I ask all my beloved guests has to do with your, I would say, imminent future, but not too imminent, hopefully. When you depart this mortal coil at age 120 in the biblical sense, you will leave this earth.

Your material goods will go, I don't know, University of Arizona, your wonderful wife and family, I don't know. But what will be your ideological legacy, your ethical legacy? What would you like to impart to all of humanity after you leave? this earth in hopefully not for till 120 years old. What ethics or wisdom do you want to leave? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app

and save up to 20% to. get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Oh, that's for me? That's for you, yes. I asked Roger in the past. He's welcome to answer or he's welcome to rebut your answer, but that would be rude and he would never do that. Well, first of all, I might disagree with Roger about this, but I'm not ruling out of afterlife because if consciousness is happening in the fabric of space-time geometry, then it's And I was asked this about near-death and not-about experiences many years ago. And I said, well, you know, it could be that the quantum information dissipates to the universe but stays entangled as some kind of entity.

And I don't claim evidence for that. I'm not holding my own hopes for that. I'm not planning on it. But I don't think he can rule it out. Until we know what consciousness is, you know, between the years, we can't rule it out outside. And I think there's enough evidence for non-locality and consciousness and this and that. Roger, what do you think about the afterlife? I haven't actually asked you that.

I suspect you're not optimistic about it, but what are your thoughts directly? Well, to start with, I'm certainly an atheist. Yes. When you say, when I say an atheist, I mean, I don't believe in any religion I've ever seen. It doesn't mean that I'm agnostic. if you like with regard to the possibilities which are not religious possibilities. I mean whether one's consciousness can somehow continue in some form. The problem is there, if it did, I can't imagine that you carry any memories.

You see, if I, for example, was someone else before I was born, what's the use of that? Because I don't have any memory of that. So if there was some being who was me before I came along, become me sort of loses its point in a sense so I don't quite see how that could work there might be something else which is completely beyond our understand since we know so little about consciousness despite or or goa we know so little about it it's a bit hard to pontificase on what happens to it after it gets blown up or something It's an atomic nuclear bomb or something, you know, that's easily happening.

So, Stuart, now I'm going to ask you a question that's related to Arthur's C. Clark's famous statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And that is basically what object or theory or discovery in the history of humanity to date is most worthy of being preserved as sort of our most magical accomplishment as a species, something that we put on a monolith that might last for billions of years for these potential aliens to find someday. What do you think is the thing that human beings should have the most swagger about? It doesn't have to be your discovery. It could be something, anything that human beings have done. What should we brag about? Well, you know, quantum mechanics is closest to magic among our science, that, you know,

non-locality entanglement over distance and time and you know Roger brought together general relativity consciousness and quantum mechanics and in his recent work on retroactivity he didn't talk about it but he's added special relativity because he uses special relativity to come up with the fact that that that has to be there has to be this retroactivity it's kind of a the motivation for it. So, you know, if consciousness is, you know, might be the answer to your question because it seems like magic in terms of explaining it. People have gone to the extremes of saying, it will never, you know, ideal, not idealist, what they call them, mysterians say, we'll never understand it. It's impossible. It's like expecting a fish to read a diction. or something like that. But I don't think that's true. I think, you know, Roger is way smarter than

almost everybody, and I think he came up with this idea, and I think he's right. And because it makes the most sense. Now, it could be wrong, but it's logical, and I think that would be something that would stand forever. Very good. Okay, the last question, and Roger, you're welcome to chime on to this. And this involves your past. We've talked about the future a couple times already. I want to ask both of you guys if you could go back in time, as I like to say, that the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. That's the name of the podcast. I want to ask you guys both, if you could talk to your 20-year-old self and give him advice,

what would it be to give him the confidence to go into the impossible as you have done? So I'll start with Roger, and then we'll go to Stewart. So, Roger, advice to your 20-year-old self. What would you tell him right now? Oh dear, that's a hopeless question. I mean, you see, I couldn't tell him to do what I did because I didn't follow what I was doing, you see. I was doing mathematics, and I got tempted into talking about physics and things.

So I had no rational line which I followed from when I was young. There are a lot of accidental things which happened to be one way or the other, and they could easily have done a different thing. And I don't think there was any advice that I could have been given that would have helped me one way or another. I mean, maybe advice when it comes to emotional things. And if we're talking about science here, I think then then I really have no answer. I could get some suggestions in the other direction, but I'm not going to tell you. And lastly, Stuart, what would you tell your 20-year-old self if you could go back in time and violate all sorts of causes?

anxiety, etc. Yeah, well, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life and I would correct them if I could. But as far as my career choice and what I'm, you know, medicine, studying consciousness, being fortunate enough to meet and work with Roger and developing this theory has been a tremendous experience for me. And I've got, number one, I've gotten to see the world. I've been all over the world many time. And you meet the most interesting people, including you, and especially Roger,

who has been, you know, one of the great things in my life has been his colleague and friend. And so that part of my life I wouldn't change. Many other things I would just live with that. All right. Well, everybody, this has been phenomenal fun. Roger, happy early birthday. Stewart, enjoy Canada until you come back home. It's still sweltering down here in the southwest.

Everybody tune in on Monday for, submit your questions to Nick Bostrom. You can find them on my community channel or on my Twitter account, Dr. Brian Keating. You can find Stewart. We'll put links to Stewart and Roger in the video description and all their amazing accomplishments. I wish you guys all the best. Stay tuned on Tuesday the 9th. We have an interview live with Sabina Hassanfelder.

She'll be in the room. You can snark out with me and she. So guys, thank you guys so much. Enjoy the rest of your day. Roger, good night and happy birthday, my friend. Thank you for inspiring millions of people around me. Thank you, thank you, Brian. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, that is a wrap on a one and a half hour long conversation divided over two episodes with yours truly, Dr. Brian Keating, the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, many, many interviews with Sir Roger. and other luminary Nobel laureates. We have a spinoff podcast called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner,

which is the title of my second book. And you can get that book, which has an interview with Sir Roger, where we get into basically things that we just touched upon here, career advice, collaboration, ideas about things outside of the world of physics. He's such an enormous mind and generous spirit. But I like to humanize my subjects. And I do so by bringing them to you in a way that hopefully you can understand, interact with, as I believe we have a moral obligation.

a scientist to communicate to the public who pay our salaries. And all these people would do what we're doing for free even if we had to. So the fact we get paid by you guys out there brings me such joy. And I only ask for two things. One is for you to subscribe to my mailing list, which is briankeating.com slash list. And there you might win a chance or have a chance

to win one of 100 meteorite samples that I'm giving away. You heard about that end of this episode. And who knows? There might be some life on it. Hopefully not. That would be weird. But anyway, you might win it. And that would be a treat.

And the other thing is to go to my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, subscribe there. And that will allow you to communicate with my guests. I'm Nick Bostromo coming up soon. Bernardo Castroe coming on. Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royale, many, many phenomenal subject matter experts, including a fan favorite, multi-time guest, Dr. Sean Carroll, for his new book coming in September. So I wish you to do those two favors and a third one to leave a rating.

You can do that. Just look in your app right now and click five stars, leave a rating. You can do that everywhere you get your podcast. And if you do it on Apple, I'll even read your review. You'll have a written chance to leave a written review. And that written review could be something that really warms my heart. It could be advice. It could be something, you know, as simple as I love this podcast, as Mark in Chicago said,

always interesting guests in topics. Or it could be like Prof. Burjee said, Jay said. Highly recommend Keating has great guests and interesting conversations. I hope you find that as well. and we'll continue to do so. So for now, I wish you an impossibly good week. Stay tuned. We have many interviews again. Dr. Nick Bostrom is coming on. And Dr. Sabina Hassenfelder, possibly tomorrow, if you're listening to this before Tuesday, the 9th, I should have said, the 9th of August 22. But if not, go back and listen. You'll hear some questions from the audience.

Everybody, thank you so much. Have a great, impossibly great, impossibly magical rest of your week. Take care. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank. We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.