Lex Fridman Podcast - #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, The Greatest Show on Earth, and his latest Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea. He is outspoken, bold, and often fearless in his defense of science and reason, and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Support this podcast by signing up with these sponsors: - Cash App - use code "LexPodcast" and download: - Cash App (App Store): https://apple.co/2sPrUHe - Cash App (Google Play): https://bit.ly/2MlvP5w EPISODE LINKS: Richard's Website: https://www.richarddawkins.net/ Richard's Twitter: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins Richard's Books: - Selfish Gene: https://amzn.to/34tpHQy - The Magic of Reality: https://amzn.to/3c0aqZQ - The Blind Watchmaker: https://amzn.to/2RqV5tH - The God Delusion: https://amzn.to/2JPrxlc - Outgrowing God: https://amzn.to/3ebFess - The Greatest Show on Earth: https://amzn.to/2Rp2j1h This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 - Introduction 02:31 - Intelligent life in the universe 05:03 - Engineering intelligence (are there shortcuts?) 07:06 - Is the evolutionary process efficient? 10:39 - Human brain and AGI 15:31 - Memes 26:37 - Does society need religion? 33:10 - Conspiracy theories 39:10 - Where do morals come from in humans? 46:10 - AI began with the ancient wish to forge the gods 49:18 - Simulation 56:58 - Books that influenced you 1:02:53 - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author of the selfish gene, the blind watchmaker, the god delusion, the magic of reality, and the greatest show of earth and his latest all-growing god. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea. He's outspoken, bold, and often fearless in the defense of science and reason, and in this way is one of the most influential thinkers of our time.

This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic for everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis. I'm sending love your way. Stay strong, or in this together will beat this thing. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe by YouTube, review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, and Lex Friedman spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can

break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by CashApp, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use Co-Lex Podcast. CashApp lets you send money to friends by Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since CashApp allows you to send and receive money digitally, peer to peer, security in all digital transactions is very important.

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Well, if we accept this intelligent life here, and we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic, I mean, 10 to 22 stars has been estimated. It seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life. If you deny that, then you're committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable. I mean ludicrously of the charts improbable. And I don't think it's that improbable. Certainly the origin of life itself, they're really two steps, the origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable, and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also fairly improbable. So the juxtaposition of those two, you could say is pretty improbable, but not 10 to the 22 in problem. It's an

interesting question maybe you're coming on to it, how we would recognize intelligence from outer space if we if we encountered it. The most likely way we would come across them would be by radio. It's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us. But it's not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals. And then we would have to have some means of deciding that it was intelligent. People have, when people involved in the setty program, discussed how they would do it and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to, and always an obvious way for them to broadcast to say, we are intelligent,

intelligent, we are here. I suspected probably would be obvious actually. It's interesting prime numbers. So the mathematical patterns, it's an open question where their mathematics is the same for us as it would be for aliens. I suppose we could assume that ultimately if we're going by the same laws of physics and we should be governed by the same laws of mathematics. I think so. I suspect that they will have Pythagoras theorem, etc. I don't think that mathematics will be that different. Do you think evolution would also be a force on the alien planets as well?

I stuck my neck out and said that if we do, if ever that we do discover life elsewhere, it will be Darwinian life in the sense that it will work by some kind of natural selection, the non-random survival of randomly generated codes. It doesn't mean that the genetic would have to have some kind of genetics, but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics probably wouldn't be actually. But it would I think it would have to be Darwinian. Yes. So some kind of selection process. Yes. In the general sense would be Darwinian. So let me ask kind of an artificial intelligence engineering question.

So you've been an auspoken critic of I guess what could be called intelligent design, which is an attempt to describe the creation of a human mind, a body by some religious folks that religious folks use to describe. So broadly speaking evolution is as far as I know, again you can correct me, is the only scientific theory we have for the development of intelligent life. Like there's no alternative theory as far as as far as I understand. None has ever been suggested and I suspect it never will be. Well of course one other somebody says that a hundred years later. I know it's a risk. It's a risk. But what about that?

I mean, I would look sorry, yes. It would probably look very similar, but it's almost like Einstein's general relativity versus Newtonian physics. It'll be maybe an alteration of the theory or something like that, but it won't be fundamentally different. But okay. So, so now for the past 70 years, even before the AI community has been trying

to engineer intelligence, in a sense, to do what intelligent design says, was done here on Earth. What's your intuition? Do you think it's possible to build intelligence, to build computers that are intelligent, or do we need to do something like the evolutionary process? There's no shortcuts here. That's an interesting question. I'm committed to the belief

that it's ultimately possible because I think there's nothing non-physical in our brains. I think how our brains work by the laws of physics. And so it must in principle, it'd be possible to replicate that. In practice, though, it might be very difficult. And as you suggest, it might, it may be the only way to do it is by something like an evolutionary process. I'd be surprised, I suspect that it will come. But it's certainly been slower in coming than some of the early pioneers thought. I thought it would be, yeah. But in your sense, is the evolutionary process efficient? So you can see it is exceptionally wasteful in one perspective, but at the same time, maybe that is the only path.

It's a paradox, isn't it? I mean, on the one side, it is deplorably wasteful. It's fundamentally based on waste. On the other hand, it does produce magnificent results. When the design of a soaring bird, an albatross, a vulture, an eagle, is superb. An engineer would be proud to have done it. On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud to have done some of the other things that evolution has served up. Some of the sort of botched jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical origins, but they don't look well designed. Joe examples of that bad design. My favorite example is that a current laryngeal nerve, I've used this many times, this is a

nerve, it's one of the cranial nerves, which goes from the brain and the end organ is that it supplies is the voicebox, the larynx. But it doesn't go straight to the larynx, it goes right into the chest and then loops round an artery in the chest and then come straight back up again to the larynx. And I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck, which happened to have died in a zoo. And we watched the, we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve going, whizzing straight past the larynx within an inch of the larynx, down into the chest, and then back up again, which is a, a detour of many feet. Very, very inefficient. The reason is historical. The ancestors, our fish ancestors, the ancestors of all mammals and fish, the most direct pathway

of that of the equivalent of that nerve, there was no delirious in those days, but it innovated part of the gills. The most direct pathway was behind that artery. And then when the mammal, when the tetrapods, when the land vertebrates started evolving and then the next started to stretch, the marginal cost of changing the embryological design to jump that nerve over the artery was too great or rather was each step of the way was a very small cost. But the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large. As the neck lengthened, it was a negligible change to just increase the length, the length of the detour, a tiny bit, a tiny bit, each millimeter at a time didn't make any difference.

And so, but finally, when you get to a giraffe, it's a huge detour, and no doubt is very inefficient. Now, that's bad design. Any engineer would reject that piece of design is ridiculous. And there are quite a lot of number of examples as you'd expect. So it's not surprising that we find examples of that sort. In a way what's surprising is there aren't more of them. In a way what's surprising is that the design of living things is so good. So natural selection manages to achieve excellent results. Partly by tinkering, partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes and as it

were making the best of a bad job. That's really interesting. I mean, it is surprising and beautiful and it's a mystery from an engineering perspective that so many things are well designed. I suppose the thing we're forgetting is how many generations have to die for the inefficiency of it. Yes, that's the horrible wastefulness of it. So yeah, we marvel at the final product, but the process is painful.

Elon Musk describes human beings as potentially the cause of the biological bootloader for artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence is used as the term is kind of like super intelligence. Do you see superhuman level intelligence is potentially the next step in the evolutionary process? Yes, I think that if superhuman intelligence is to be found, it will be artificial. I don't have any hope that we ourselves, our brains will go on getting larger in ordinary biological evolution. I think that's probably coming to an end. It is the dominant trend, or one of the dominant trends in our fossil history, for the last two or three million

years. So it's been swelling rather dramatically over the last two or three million years. Brain size? Brain size, yes. So it's been, it's been swelling rather dramatically over the last 23 million years. That is unlikely to continue. The only way that that happens is because natural selection favors those individuals with the biggest brains. And that's not happening anymore. Right. So in general, humans, the selection pressures are not active in any form. Well, in order for them to be active, it would be necessary that the most, let's call

it intelligence. Not that intelligence is simply correlated with brain size, but let's talk about intelligence. In order for that to evolve, it's necessary that the most intelligent beings have the most individuals have the most children. And so intelligence may buy you money, it may buy you worldly success, it may buy you a nice house and a nice car and things like that if you're successful career, it may buy you the admiration of your fellow people, but it doesn't increase the number of offspring that you have. It doesn't increase your genetic legacy to the next generation. On the other hand, artificial intelligence, I mean, computers and technology generally is evolving by a non-genetic means by leaps and bounds of course.

And so what do you think, I don't know if you're familiar with this company called Neural Link, but there's a general effort of brain computer interfaces, which is to try to build a connection between the computer and the brain, to send signals both directions. And the long-term dream there is to do exactly that, which is expand. I guess expand the size of the brain, expand the capabilities of the brain. Do you see this as interesting? Do you see this as a promising possible technology or is the interface you've seen the computer in the brain? The brain is this wet, messy thing that's just impossible to interface with. Well, of course, it's interesting, whether it's promising, I'm really not qualified to say what I do find puzzling

is that the brain being as small as it is compared to computer and the individual components being as slow as they are compared to our electronic components. It is astonishing what it can do. I mean, imagine building a computer that fits into the size of a human skull. And with the equivalent of transistors or integrated circuits, which work as slowly as neurons do, it's something mysterious about that, something must be going on that we don't understand.

So, I've just talked to Roger Penrose, I'm not sure if you're familiar with this work. He also describes this kind of mystery in the mind, in the brain, that as we use a materialist, so there's no sort of mystical thing going on, but there's so much about the material of the brain that we don't understand. That might be quantum mechanical, nature, and so on. So they're the ideas about consciousness. Do you have any, have you ever thought about, do you ever think about ideas of consciousness or a little bit more about the mystery of intelligence and consciousness that seems to pop up just like you're saying from our brain. I agree with Roger Penrose that there's a mystery there. I, I mean, he's one of the world's greatest physicists. I can't possibly argue with with his, but nobody knows anything about consciousness. And in fact, you know, if we talk about religion and so on, the mystery of consciousness is so

unspiring and we know so little about it that the leap to sort of religious or mystical explanations is too easy to make. I think that it's just an act of card is to leap to religious explanations. And Roger doesn't do that of course. But I accept that there may be something that we don't understand about it. So correct me if I'm wrong, but in your book, Self is Gene, the Gene-centered view of evolution

allows us to think of the physical organisms as just the medium through which the software of our genetics and the ideas sort of propagate. So maybe can we start just with a little basics? What in this context does the word meme mean? It would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene, cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the transmission of culture, in the transmission of ideas, in the broadest sense. And it's only a useful word if there's something Darwinian going on.

Obviously, culture is transmitted, but is there anything Darwinian going on? And if there is, that means there has to be something like a gene, which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population. So it can replicate. It can replicate. Well, it clearly does replicate. There's no question about that. The question is, does it replicate in a sort of differential way

in a Darwinian fashion? Could you say that certain ideas propagate because they're successful in the meme pool? In a sort of trivial sense, you can. Would you wish to say, though, that in the same way as an animal body is modified adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes? Is it also a machine for propagating memes? Could you actually say that something about the way a human is, is modified, adapted for the function of beam propagation. That's such a fascinating possibility, if that's true. If that, that it's not just about the genes, which seems somehow more, come from, come

for examples, like these things of biology. The, the, the, the idea that culture, or maybe ideas, you can really broadly define it, operate in terms of these mechanisms. Even morphology, even anatomy does evolve by memetic means. I mean, things like hairstyles, styles of makeup, circumcision, these things are actual changes in the body form, which are non-genetic and which get passed on from generation to generation, or sideways like a virus, in a quasi-genetic way.

But the moment you start drifting away from the physical, it becomes interesting, because the space of ideas, ideologies, political systems. Of course, yes. So what's your sense? Is our memes are metaphor more, or is there something fundamental, almost physical presence of memes? Well, I think they're a bit more than a metaphor.

And I think that, I mean, I mentioned that physical bodily characteristics, which are a bit trivial in a way, but when things like the propagation of religious ideas, both longitudinally down generations and transversely as in a sort of epidemiology of ideas, when a charismatic preacher converts people, that resembles viral transmission, whereas the longitudinal transmission from grandparents to child, etc, is more like conventional genetic transmission. That's such a beautiful especially in the modern day idea. Do you think about this implication in social networks where the propagation of ideas, the viral propagation of ideas, and hence the new use of the word meme to describe the... The internet of course provides extremely rapid method of transmission. Before when I first coined the word, the internet

didn't exist. And so I was thinking that in terms of books, newspapers, broad-on radio television, that kind of thing, now an idea can just leap around the world in all directions instantly. And so the internet provides a step change in the facility of propagation of memes. How does that make you feel? Isn't it fascinating? There's sort of ideas. It's like you have Galapagos Islands or something. Is the 70s. And the internet allowed all these species to just like globalize and And a matter of seconds you can spread a message to millions of people and these

Ideas of these memes can breed can evolve can mutate can now there's a selection and there's like different I guess groups that have all like there there's a dynamics that's fascinating here. Do you think, yes, basically, do you think your work in this direction while fundamentally was focused on life on Earth? Do you think it should continue? Like to be taken further? Well, I do think it would probably be a good idea

to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing. We could mention, you think of the transmission of ideas from an evolutionary context as being limited to, in our ancestors, people living in villages, living in small bands where everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village and they might hop to a neighboring village occasionally and maybe having to a neighboring continent eventually. And that was a slow process. Nowadays villages are international. I mean, you have people, it's been called echo chambers where people are in a sort of internet village where the other members of the village may be geographically distributed

all over the world, but they just happen to be interested in the same things. Use the same terminology, the same jargon, have the same enthusiasm. People like the Flat Earth Society. They don't all live in one place. They find each other and they talk the same language to each other. They talk the same language to each other, they talk the same nonsense to each other. And they, but so this is a kind of distributed version of the primitive idea of people living in villages and propagating their ideas in a local way.

Is there a Darwinist parallel here? So is there a evolutionary purpose of villages? Or is that just a... I wouldn't use a word like evolutionary purpose in that case, but villages or villages would be something that just emerged as the way people happen to live. And in just the same kind of way, the flat earth society, the societies of ideas emerge in the same kind of way in this digital space. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Is there something interesting to say about the, I guess, from a perspective of Darwin, could we fully interpret the dynamics of social interaction and these social networks? Or is there, or some much more complicated thing need to be developed? Like what's your sense? Well, a Darwinian selection idea would involve investigating which idea is spread and which don't. So, in some ideas, don't have the ability to spread. I mean, the flat earth, the flat earthism is, there are a few people believing it, but there's not going to spread because it's obviously nonsense.

But other ideas, even if they are wrong, can spread because they are attractive in some sense. So the spreading and the selection in the Darwinian context is just as to be attractive in some sense. Like we don't have to define, like it doesn't have to be attractive in the way that animals attract each other. It could be attractive in some other way. Yes, it's, all that matters is all, it's needed is it should spread.

And it doesn't have to be true to spread. In truth is one criterion which might help an idea to spread. But there are other criteria which might help it to spread. But there are other criteria which might help with the spread. As you say, attraction in animals is not necessarily valuable for survival. The celebrated, the famous Peacock's tail doesn't help with Peacock to survive. It helps it to pass on its genes. Similarly, an idea which is actually rubbish, but which people don't know is rubbish and think is very attractive, will spread But people don't know his rubbish and think it's very attractive. We'll spread in the same way as a peacock's gene spread. It's a small size step.

I remember reading somewhere, I think recently, that in some species of birds, the idea that beauty may have its own purpose and the idea that some birds'm being ineliquin here, but there is some aspects of their feathers and so on that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever. There's somebody who's making an argument that there are some things about beauty that animals do that may be its own purpose. Does that ring a bell for you? It's a sound ridiculous. I think it's rather distorted bell. Darwin, when he coined the phrase sexual selection, didn't feel the need to suggest that what was attractive to females,

usually as males attractive females, that what females found attractive had to be useful, he said it didn't have to be useful, it was enough that females found attractive, and so it could be completely useless, probably was completely useless in the conventional sense, but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on to a Darwin didn't call them genes, but in sense of reproducing. Others starting with Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, didn't like that idea, and they wanted sexually selected characteristics like peacock's tails to be in some sense useful. It's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock's tail as being useful,

but in the sense of survival, but others have run with that idea and have brought it up to date. So there are two schools of thought on sexual selection, which are still active and about equally supported now. Those who follow Darwin in thinking that it's just enough to say it's attractive and those who follow Wallace and say that it has to be in some sense useful. Do you fall into one category or the other? No, I'm in your intuition.

You're in two different cases. I think they both could be correct in different cases. I mean, they both been made sophisticated in a mathematical sense. More so than when Darwin and Wallace first started talking about it. I'm Russian, I romanticize things. So I prefer the former, where the beauty in itself is a powerful

attraction, it's a powerful force and evolution. Unreligion, do you think there will ever be a time in our future where almost nobody believes in God, or God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society. Yes, I do. I think it may happen for a very long time. I think it may take a long time for that to happen. So do you think ultimately for everybody on Earth, religion, other forms of doctrines, ideas could do better job than what religion does. Yes, I mean, following truth. Well, truth is a funny word, and reason too. Yeah, it's a difficult idea now with truth on the internet, right, and fake news and so on. I suppose when you say reason, you mean the very basic sort of inarguable conclusions of

science versus which political system is better? Yes, yes. I mean truth about the real world, which is ascertainable by not just by the more rigorous methods of science, but by just ordinary sensory observation. So do you think there will ever be a time when we move past it? I guess another way to ask it, are we hopelessly fundamentally tied to religion in the way our society functions? Well, clearly all individuals are not hopelessly tied to it because many individuals don't believe. You could mean something like society needs religion in order to function properly, something like that, and some people have

suggested that. What's your intuition on that. Well, I read books on it and they're persuasive. I don't think they're that persuasive though. I mean, some people have suggested that society needs a sort of figurehead, which can be a non-existent figurehead in order to function properly. I think there's something rather patronizing about the idea that well you and I are intelligent enough not to believe in God but the plebs needed sort of thing.

And I think that's patronizing and I'd like to think that that was not the right way to proceed. But at the individual level do you think there's some value Do you think there's some value of spirituality? If I think it's sort of as a scientist, the amount of things we actually know about our universe is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of what we could possibly know. So just from everything, even the certainty we have about the laws of physics, it seems to be that there's yet a huge amount to discover. And therefore we're sitting where 99.99% of things are just still shrouded in mystery. Do you think there's a role in a kind of spiritual view of that sort of a humbled spiritual?

I think it's right to be humble. I think it's right to admit that there's a lot we don't know, a lot that we don't understand, a lot that we still need to work on. And we're working on it. What I don't think is that it helps to invoke supernatural explanations. If our current scientific explanations aren't adequate to do the job, then we need better ones. We need to work more. And of course, the history of science shows just that, that as science goes on, problems get solved one after another, and the science advances, the history of science shows just that, that as science goes on, problems get solved one after another,

and the science advances, the science gets better. But to invoke a non-scientific, non-physical explanation is simply to lie down in a carly way and say, we can't solve it, so we're going to invoke magic. Don't let's do that. Let's say we need better science. We need more science. It may be that Don't let's do that. Let's say we need better science. We need more science. It may be that the science will never do it. It may be that we will never actually understand everything. And that's okay, but let's keep working on it.

A challenging question there is, do you think science can lead us astray in terms of the humbleness. So there's some aspect of science, maybe it's the aspect of scientists and that science, but of sort of a mix of ego and confidence that can lead us to stray in terms of discovering some of the big open questions about the universe. I think that's right. I mean, there are arrogant people in any walk of life, and scientists and exception to that. And so there are arrogant scientists who think we've sold everything, and of course we haven't. So humility is a proper stance for a scientist.

I mean, it's a proper working stance because it encourages further work. But in a way to resort to a supernatural explanation is a kind of arrogance because it's saying, well, we don't understand it scientifically. Therefore, the non-scientific religious supernatural explanation must be the right one. That's arrogant. What is humbles to say? We don't know. And we need to work further on it. So maybe if I could psychoanalyze you for a second, you have at times been just slightly frustrated with people who have supernatural, has that changed over the years? Have you become like how do people that kind of have

seek supernatural explanations? How do you see those people as human beings? Do you see them as dishonest? Do you see them as ignorant? Do you see them as, I don't know, is it like what? How do you think of, certainly, not dishonest. And obviously many of them are perfectly nice people so I don't I don't sort of despise them in that sense. I think it's often a misunderstanding that that people will jump from the admission that we don't understand something. They will jump

straight to what they think of as an alternative explanation, which is the supernatural one, which is not an alternative. It's a non-explanation. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that science needs more work, that we need to actually get do some better science. So, I don't have, I mean, personal and tip-a-sit towards such people. I just think they're misguided. So what about this really interesting space that I have trouble with? So religion, I have a better grasp on.

But there's a large community, like you said, Flat Earth community that I've recently, because I've made a few jokes about it. I saw that there's, I've noticed that there's people that take it quite seriously. So there's this bigger world of conspiracy theorists, which is a kind of, I mean, there's elements of it that are religious as well, but I think they're also scientific. So the basic credo of a conspiracy theorist

is to question everything, which is also the credo of a good scientist, I would say. So what do you make of this? I mean, I think it's probably too easy to say that by labeling something conspiracy, you therefore dismiss it. I mean, it's occasionally conspiracies are right. And so we shouldn't dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand. We should examine them on their own merits. Flat Earth is a misambuous nonsense. We don't have to examine that much further.

But there may be other conspiracy theories, which are actually right. So I've grew up in the Soviet Union. So the space race was very influential for me on both sides of the coin. There's a conspiracy theory that we never went to the moon. And it's like, I can understand it. And it's very difficult to rigorously scientifically show one way or the other. It's just you have to use some of the human intuition about who would have to lie, who would have to work together.

It's clear that very unlikely good behind that is my general intuition that most people in this world are good. In order to really put together some conspiracy theories, there has to be a large number of people working together and essentially being dishonest. Yes, which is improbable. The sheer number who would have to be in on this conspiracy and the sheer detail, the tension, the detail they'd have had to have had and so on. I'd also, can worry about the motive. And why would anyone want to suggest that it didn't happen? What's the why is it so hard to believe? I mean, the physics of it, the

mathematics of it, the idea of computing orbits and trajectories and things, it all works mathematically. Why wouldn't you believe it? It's a psychology question because there's something really pleasant about you know pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when everybody like you know thinking outside the box and coming up with a true answer where everybody else is diluted. There's something. I mean I have that for science right. You want to prove the entire scientific community wrong. That's the whole. Now that's that's right and and of course historically

lone geniuses have come out right sometimes. Yes. But often people with who think they're a lone genius and from much more often turn out not to. So you have to judge each case on its merits. The mere fact that you're a maverick, the mere fact that you're going against the current tide doesn't make you right. You've got to show you all right, but at the evidence. So because you've focused so much on religion and disassembled a lot of ideas there, and I was wondering if you have ideas about conspiracy theory groups, because it's such a prevalent, even reaching into presidential politics and so on, it seems like it's a very large community

that believe different kinds of conspiracy theories. Is there some connection there to your thinking on religion or is it? It is a curious, it's a matter, it's an obviously difficult thing. I don't understand why people believe things that are clearly nonsense like, well, flat earth and also the conspiracy

about not landing on the moon or that the United States engineer 9-11, that kind of thing. So it's not clearly nonsense, it's extremely unlikely. So it's extremely unlikely. The religion is a bit different because it's passed down from generation to generation, and so many of the people who are religious. Yes, the religion is a bit different because it's passed down from generation to generation. So many of the people who are religious got it from their parents, we got it from their parents, we got it from their parents, and childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force.

But these things like the 9-11 conspiracy theory, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, the man on the moon conspiracy theory, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, the man on the moon, conspiracy theory. These are not childhood indoctrination. These are presumably dreamed up by somebody who then tell somebody else, who then wants to believe it. And I don't know why people are so eager to fall in line with some person that they happen to read or meet who spin some yarn. I can kind of understand why they believe what their parents and teachers told them when they were very tiny and not capable of critical thinking for themselves.

So I sort of get why the great religions of the world, like Catholicism and and Islam go on persisting. It's because of childhood indoctrination, but that's not true of flat earthism. And sure enough flat earth ism is a very minority cult. Way larger than I ever realized. Well, yes, I know. But so that's a really clean idea. You've articulated a new book and then and the algorithm got it and then got delusion is the early indoctrination. That's really interesting. You can get away with a lot of out there ideas in terms of religious texts if the age which you convey those ideas at first is a young age. So indoctrination is sort of an essential element of propagation of religion. So let me ask on the morality side in the books that I mentioned God, the illusion of Agora God, you describe that human beings

don't need religion to be moral. So from an engineering perspective, we want to engineer morality into AI systems. So in general, where do you think morals come from in humans? A very complicated and interesting question. It's clear to me that the moral standards, the moral values of our civilization changes as the decades go by, certainly as the centuries go by, even as the decades go by. And we, in the 21st century, are quite clearly label 21st century people in terms of our moral values. There's a spread. I mean, some of us are a little bit more ruthless, some of us more conservative, some of us more liberal and so on. But we all subscribe to pretty much the same

views when you compare us with, say, 18th century, 17th century people, even 19th century, 20th century people. So we're much less racist, we're much less sexist and so on. Then we used to be some people are still racist and some are still sexist, but the spread has shifted. The Gaussian distribution has moved and moves steadily as the centuries go by. And that is the most powerful influence I can see on our moral values. And that doesn't have anything to do with religion. I mean, the, the religion of the, the, sorry, the morals of the Old Testament are Bronze Age models, morals that deplorable.

And they are, to be understood in terms of the people in the desert who made them up at the time. And so human sacrifice, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, petty revenge, killing people for breaking the Sabbath, all that kind of thing inconceivable now. So at some point religious texts may have in part reflected that gauze and distribution at that time. I'm sure they did. They always reflect that. Yes.

And then now, but the sort of almost like the meme as you describe it of ideas moves much faster than religious texts do. Yes. And you religious. So, basically, you're morals on religious texts, which were written millennia ago, is not a great way to proceed. I think that's pretty clear. So not only should we not get our morals from such texts, but we don't, we quite clearly don't. If we did, then we'd be discriminating against women and we'd be racist, we'd be killing homosexuals and so on.

So we don't and we shouldn't. Now of course it's possible to use your 21st century standards of morality and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry pick particular verses which conform to our modern morality, and you'll find that Jesus says pretty nice things, which is great. But you're using your 21st century morality to decide which verses to pick, which verses to reject. And so why not cut out the middle man of the Bible and go straight to the 21st century morality, which is where that comes from. It's a much more complicated question.

Why is it that morality, moral values, change as the centuries go by, they undoubtedly do? And it's a very interesting question to ask why. It's another example of cultural evolution, justice, technology progresses. So moral values progress for probably very different reasons. for an evolution in justice, technology progresses. So moral value is progressed for probably very different reasons. But it's interesting if the direction in which the progress is happening has some evolutionary

value, or if it's merely a drift that can go into any direction. I'm not sure it's any direction, and I'm not sure it's evolution really valuable. What it is is progressive in the sense that each step is it's stepping the same direction as the previous step. So it becomes more gentle, more decent, by modern standards, more liberal, less violent. It's a bit more decent. I think you're using terms and interpreting everything in the context of the 21st century.

Because Genghis Khan would probably say that this is not more decent because we're now, you know, there's a lot of weak members of society that we're not murdering. Exactly. And I'm just careful to say by the standards of the 25th century, by our standards, if we with hindsight look back at history, what we see is a trend in the direction towards us, towards our present. Right.

Our present value. So for us, we see progress, but it's an open question whether that won't, you know, I don't see necessarily why we can never return to Ginghis Context. Well, we could. I suspect we won't, but if you look at the history of moral values over the centuries, it isn't a progressive, I use the word progressive, not an a value judgment sense, in the sense of a transitive sense. Each step is the same direction of the previous step. So things like we don't derive entertainment from torturing cats,

we don't derive entertainment from like the Romans did in the Colosseum from from that state or rather we suppress the desire to get I mean to have play it's probably in us somewhere. So there's a bunch of parts of our brain one that probably you know limbic system that wants certain pleasures and that's a... I mean, I wouldn't have said that, but you're a liberty to think that. Well, there's a Dan Carlin of hardcore history. There's a really nice explanation of how we've enjoyed watching the torture of people, the fighting of people, just the torture, the suffering of people throughout history as entertainment,

until quite recently. And now everything we do with sports, we're kind of channeling that feeling into something else. I mean, there's some dark aspects of human nature. There are underneath everything. And I do hope this like higher level software we've built will keep us at bay. Yes. I'm also Jewish and have history with the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. And I clearly remember that some of the darker aspects of the human nature creeped up there.

They do. There have been steps back, was admittedly. And the Holocaust is obvious one. But if you take a broad view of history, it's the same direction. So Pamela McCordock in Machines Who Think has written that AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods. Do you see it's a poetic description, I suppose, but the DC connection between our civilizations, historic desire to create gods, to create religions, and our modern desire to create technology, and intelligent technology.

I suppose there's a link between an ancient desire to explain a way of mystery and science. But artificial intelligence intelligence creating gods, creating new gods. And I forget, I read somewhere a somewhat facetious paper which said that we have a new god is called Google. And we pray to it and we worship it and we ask it's advice like an oracle and so on. That's fun. You don't see that. You see that as a fun statement of a seizures statement, you don't see that as a kind of truth of us creating things that are more powerful than ourselves.

And natural. It has a kind of poetic resonance to it, which I get. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have bothered to make the point myself for that way. All right. So you don't think AI will become our new, our new religion and you gods. Like Google. Well, yes, I mean, I, I can see that the future of intelligent machines or indeed intelligent aliens from outer space might yield beings that we would regard as gods in the sense that they are so superior to us that we might as well worship them. That's highly plausible,

I think. But I see a very fundamental distinction between a God who is simply defined as something very, very powerful and intelligent on the one hand, and a God who doesn't need explaining by a progressive step-by-step process, like evolution, or like engineering design. So suppose we did meet an alien from outer space who was marvelously, magnificently more intelligent than us, and we would sort of worship it, and for that reason, nevertheless, it would not be a God in the very important sense that it did not just happen to be there like God is supposed to. It must have come about by a gradual step-by-step, incremental, progressive process, presumably like Darwinian evolution. There's all the difference in the world between those two intelligence, design, comes into the universe late as a product of a progressive evolutionary process or a progressive

engineering design process. So most of the work is done through this slow moving... Exactly, progress. Exactly. Yeah. But there's still this desire to get answers to the wide question that if the world is a simulation, if we're living in a simulation that there's a programmer like creature that we can ask questions of the... Okay, well let's pursue the idea that we're living in a simulation, which is not totally ridiculous,

by the way. There we go. Then you still need to explain the programmer. The programmer had to come into existence by some... Even if we're in a simulation, the programmer must have evolved. Or if he's in a sort of mess, or she's in a mess simulation, then the methametra programmer must have evolved by a gradual process. You can't escape that. Fundamentally, you've got to come back to a gradual incremental process of explanation to start with. There's no shortcuts in this world. No, exactly.

But maybe to linger on that point about the simulation, do you think it's an interesting, basically, talk to board the heck out of everybody asking this question, but whether you live in a simulation, do you think first, do you think we'll live in a simulation? Second, do you think it's an interesting thought experiment? It's certainly an interesting thought experiment. I first met it in a science fiction novel by Daniel Galloway called Counterfeit World, in which it's all about, I mean, our heroes are running a gigantic computer which simulates the world and something goes wrong.

So one of them has to go down into the simulated world and it will defix it. And then the the the day no more of the thing, the the climax to the novel is that they discover that they themselves are in another simulation at a high level. So I was intrigued by this and I love others of Daniel Gallois, science fiction novels. Then it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom talking to him in an hour. Okay. And he goes further, not just treat it as a science fiction speculation, he actually thinks it's positively likely. I mean, the thing is very likely, actually. Well, he makes like a probabilistic argument, which you can use to come up with very interesting

conclusions about the nature of this universe. I mean, he thinks that we're in a simulation done by, so to speak, our descendants of the future, that the products, but it's still a product of evolution. It's still ultimately going to be a product of evolution, even though the super intelligent people of the future have created our world, and you and I are just a simulation, and this table is a simulation and so on. I don't actually in my heart of hearts believe it but I

like his argument. Well so the interesting thing is that I agree with you but the interesting thing to me if I would say if we're living in a simulation that in that simulation to make it work, you still have to do everything gradually, just like you said, that even though it's program, I don't think there can be miracles. Otherwise, it's... Well, no. I mean, the programmer, the upper ones, have to have evolved gradually. However, the simulation they create could be instantaneous.

I mean, it could be switched on and we come into the world with fabricated memories. True, but what I'm trying to convey, so you're saying the broader statement, but I'm saying, from an engineering perspective, both the programmer has to be slowly evolved and the simulation because it's like, from an engineering perspective, it takes a long time to write a program. No, like, just I don't think you can create the universe in a snap. I think you have to grow it. Okay. Well, that's a good point. That's a nalgable point. By the way, I have thought about using the Nick Bostrom idea to solve the riddle of how we were talking, we were talking earlier about

why the human brain can achieve so much. I thought of this when my then 100 year old mother was marvelling at what I could do with a smartphone and I could, you know, call, you look up anything on the encyclopedia, I could play her music that she liked and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and that and that and that tiny little phone. No, it's out there It's in the cloud. It's and maybe what most of what we do is in a cloud So maybe if if we're if we are a simulation. Yeah, then

All the power that we think is in our skull. It actually maybe like the power that we think is in the iPhone But is that actually out there in an interface to something else? I mean, that's what the including Roger Prenner rose with panpsychism that consciousness is somehow fundamental part of physics that it doesn't have to actually all reside inside of brain. But Roger thinks it does reside in in the skull whereas I'm suggesting that it doesn't that suggesting that it doesn't, that there's a cloud. That'd be a fascinating notion. On a small tangent, are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman, I guess,

maybe not saying his name correctly, but just forget the name, the idea that there's a difference in reality and perception. So like we, biological organisms perceive the world in order for the natural selection process to be able to survive and so on. But that doesn't mean that our perception actually reflects the fundamental reality, the physical reality, or the need. Well, I do think that although it reflects the fundamental reality, I do believe there is a fundamental reality. I do think that our perception is constructive in the sense that we construct in our minds

a model of what we're seeing. So this is really the view of people who work on visual illusions, like Richard Gregory, who point out the things like a necker cube, which flip from a two-dimensional picture of a cube on sheet of paper. We see it as a three-dimensional cube, and it flips from one orientation to another at regular intervals. What's going on is that the brain is constructing a cube, but the sense data are compatible with two alternative cubes, and so rather than stick with one of them, it alternates between them. I think that's just a model for what we do all the time when we see a table, when we see a person, when we see

anything, we're using the sense data to construct or make use of a perhaps previously constructed model. I noticed this when I meet somebody who actually is say a friend of mine, but I until I kind of realized that it is him, he looks different. And then when I finally clock that it's him, his features switch like a neck and cube into the familiar form, as it were, I've taken his face out of the filing cabinet inside and grafted it onto or used the sense data to invoke it. Yeah, we do some kind of miraculous compression on this whole thing to be able to filter most of the sense data and make sense of it. That's just a magical thing that we do.

So you've written several many amazing books, but let me ask what books, technical or fiction or philosophical had a big impact on your own life? What books would you recommend people consider reading in their own intellectual journey? Darling of course. And the original, I've actually ashamed to say I've never read Darwin in the original. He's a spiritually prescient because considering he was writing the middle of the 19th century, Michael Giseldin said he's working 100 years ahead of his time, everything except genetics is amazingly right, an amazingly far ahead of his time. And of course, you need to read the updates that have happened since his time as well. And he would be astonished by, well, little learn what's known, Crick Up Course, but he'd be astonished by Mendelian genetics as well.

Yeah, if you're fascinating to see what he thought about, he would think about it today. I mean, yes, it would. Because in many ways, it clears up what appeared in his time to be a riddle in the digital nature of genetics. Clear up what was a problem, what was a big problem? Gosh, there's so much that I could think of. I can't really, is there something outside sort of more fiction? Is there, when you think young, was there books

that just kind of outside of kind of the realm of science, religion? They just kind of sparked your narrative? Yes, well actually, I have, I suppose I could say that I've learned some I suppose I could say that I've learned some science from science fiction. I mentioned Daniel Galloway, and that's one example, but another of his novels called Dark Universe, which is not terribly well known, but it's a very, very nice science fiction story. It's about a world of perpetual darkness. And we're not told at the beginning of the book why these people are in darkness. They stumble around in some kind of underground world of caverns and passages using echolocation

like bats and whales to get around. And they've adapted presumably by Darwinian means to survive in perpetual total darkness. But what's interesting is that their mythology, their religion, has echoes of Christianity, but it's based on light. And so there's been a fall from a paradise world that once existed, where light reigns supreme. And because of the sin of mankind, light banished them. paradise world that once existed where light reigns supreme and

because of the sin of mankind light banish them so they no longer are in light's presence but but light survives in the form of mythology and in the form of sayings like they're great light almighty over lightsake don't do that And I and I hear what you mean rather than I see what you mean. So some of the same religious elements are present in this other totally kind of absurd different form. Yes. And so it's a wonderful, I wouldn't call it set up because it's too good nation for that. And a wonderful parable about Christianity and the doctrine, the theological doctrine of the fall. So I find that kind of science fiction, immensely stimulating. Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, oh by the way anything by Arthur C. Clarke, I find very, very wonderful too.

Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, his first science fiction novel, where he... well I learned a lot of science from that. It suffers from an obnoxious hero, unfortunately, but apart from that, you learn a lot of science from it. Another of his novels, A for Andromeda, which by the way, the theme of that is taken up by Carl Sagan's science fiction novel, another wonderful writer, Carl Sagan's contact, where the idea is, again, we will not be visited from outer space by physical bodies. We will be visited possibly, we might be visited by radio, but the radio signals could manipulate us and actually have a concrete influence on the world if they make us persuade us to build a computer which runs their software. So that they can then transmit their software by radio and then the computer takes over the world. This

is the same theme in both Hoyles book and Seagan's book. I presume I don't know whether Seagan knew about Hoyles book probably did. And it's a clever idea that we will never be invaded by physical bodies. The war of the worlds of HD worlds will never happen. bodies, the war of the worlds of HD worlds will never happen. But we could be invaded by radio signals, code, coded information, which is sort of like DNA. And we are, we are, we are, I call them, we are survival machines of our DNA. So it has great resonance for me because I think of us, I think of bodies, physical bodies, biological bodies, as being manipulated by coded information in DNA, which has come down through generations. And in the space of memes, it doesn't have to be physical, it can be transmitted through the space of the

information. That's the fascinating possibility that from outer space we can be infiltrated by other memes, by other ideas. And thereby controlled in that way. Let me ask the last, the silliest, or maybe the most important question, what is the meaning of life? What gives your life fulfillment purpose happiness means? From a scientific point of view, the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA, but that's not what I feel.

That's not the meaning of my life. So the meaning of my life is something which is probably different from yours and different from other people, but we each make our own meaning. So we set up goals. We want to achieve. We want to write a book. We want to do whatever it is we do write a quartet, we want to win a football match. And these are short term goals, well maybe even quite long term goals, which are set up by our brains, which have goal seeking machinery built into them.

But what we feel, we don't feel motivated by the desire to pass on our DNA mostly. We have other goals, which can be very moving, very important. They could even be called as spiritual in some cases. We want to understand the riddle of the universe. We want to understand consciousness. We want to understand the riddle of the universe. We want to understand consciousness. We want to understand how the brain works. These are all noble goals. Some of them can be noble goals anyway. And they are a far cry from the fundamental biological goal, which is the propagation of DNA. But the machinery that enables us to set up these higher level goals is originally programmed

into us by natural selection of DNA. A propagation of DNA, but what do you make of this unfortunate fact that we are mortal? Do you ponder your mortality? Does it make you sad? Does it make you sad? Does it? I, I, I ponder it. It would, it, it makes me sad that I shall have to leave. Um, and not see what's going to happen next. Um, if there's something frightening about mortality, apart from sort of missing, as I've said, something more deeply, darkly frightening. It's the idea of eternity. But eternity is only frightening if you're there. Eternity before we were born, billions of years before we were

born, and we were effectively dead before we were born. As I think it was Mark Twain said, I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience. That's how it's going to be afterward after we leave. So I think of it as really, it, eternity is a frightening prospect. And so the best way to spend it is under a general anesthetic, which is what it'll be. Mutually put, Richard, there's a huge honor to meet you to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Dawkins and thank you to our presenting sponsor, CashApp. Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading CashApp and using code LEX Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review with 5 stars and apple podcasts, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Richard Dawkins. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than kites, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupifying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinairiness that are here. We privilege few who won the lottery of birth against all odds. How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Thank you.