The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The World Itself: Consciousness and the Everything of Physics by Ulf Danielsson

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

The World Itself: Consciousness and the Everything of Physics by Ulf Danielsson There is a wonderfully weird but real world out there, and we are a part of it. It is time for physics to take life seriously. Can we ever truly comprehend the universe before we fully understand consciousness and the wonders, and limits, of the mind? Ulf Danielsson, an acclaimed theoretical physicist who has dedicated his career to probing the deepest mysteries of nature, thinks not. As he dismantles the arguments of esteemed mathematicians and scientists, who would substitute their mathematical models for reality and equate the mind to a computer, he makes a lucid and passionate case that it is nature, full of beauty and meaning, which must compel us. In challenging established worldviews, he also takes a fresh look at major philosophical debates, including the notion of free will. Fearless, provocative, and witty, The World Itself is essential reading for anyone curious about the profound questions surrounding life, the universe, and everything.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show. Once once again my family and friends the chris fa show the family that loves you but doesn't judge you at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law

anyway guys we have another amazing author on the show he's written many books and we're gonna be talking about his latest book uh and so we've got some excitement there coming and we're gonna be talking about stuff that will educate your mind expand your thinking help you learn new things at least i think i will and uh you'll learn new things and probably become sexier you know maybe your significant other will be like hey you're smarter i can tell there's something different about you i'm more attracted to you than ever before or maybe i'm just distracting you in the first place anyway guys before we get to that as always you know refer the show to your family, friends, relatives, guilt and shame them into subscribing to the show.

No, I don't quite do that, but you know what I mean. YouTube.com, 4Chest Chris Voss. Goodreads.com, 4Chest Chris Voss. And LinkedIn, the LinkedIn newsletter, that thing's killing it over there. We put all the smart stuff over there. And the show just kicks butt. So check that out as well. He's the author of the newest book and he joins us here today

Uh, this is his first book that's been printed in english or converted to english I suppose they'll tell us more about what that means we have oof Danielson on the show with us today. We got his name perfectly right Absolutely perfect. There we go. He had the newest book that just came out february 21st 2023 It's called The World Itself, Consciousness and the Everything of Physics. And we're going to be talking about his amazing journey through life and what he wrote in the book and everything else. physicist with a PhD from Princeton University, whose research concentrates on dark energy and a string theory with a special focus on applications in cosmology.

He's a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and professor of theoretical physics at Uppsala University. Yeah, Uppsala. There we go. There we go. I need to work on my Swedish meatballs. Swedish meatballs. He has delivered lectures throughout the world

based on his award-winning popular science books, which were translated in several different languages. His newest book is coming out and appears in English. Welcome to the show. How are you, my friend? Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. I'm fine.

There you go. Well, we're glad to have you as well. Give us a.com or wherever we want people to find you on those interwebages in the sky. Sorry, I didn't get it. Give us a.com or wherever we want people to find you, get to know you better on the internet. Oh, you mean, okay. It's oofdonielson.com. There you go.

There you go. It's as easy as that. Now, you have about, I think you said five or six books out? Yeah, it's popular science books. Most of them are, I mean, they're written in a kind of a personal tone, all of them, and treating various subjects, which I sort of got interested in. But they are related to physics in one way or the other,

and that's certainly true for this latest book. Absolutely. What are physics for the layman out there? You know, we have over here in America, we have a Gen Z that they skipped through some of school with COVID. What is physics in a general

sense, and why is it important to write books about physics? Physics deals really with the fundamentals of the world i mean how the world is is built up what what what what its constituents are what what are the laws basic laws of nature why does why are we here what what explains the origin of the earth the matter everything and it's actually also very important for applications in technology. Everything our technology builds upon, like electricity or nuclear power or whatever, everything, you need to have some knowledge of physics in order to understand and to make all of these inventions.

It's really the foundation of the knowledge about the world. There you go. So it's like, is gravity physics? Is that part of physics? Gravity is absolutely physics. I mean, in some sense, maybe everything is physics, but there is a kind of a hierarchy. Physics is sort of at the bottom of everything.

And from physics, you can derive chemistry, and from chemistry comes biology, and from biology, well, all the humanities, social science, and everything is sort of higher up in the ladder. I think my biggest problem with gravity is my age. As I get older, everything seems to be sagging. I think we need to go back to that Newton guy and declare his gravity thing debunked

so that we can come up with some sort of new physics for gravity because it's not working out for me right now. That's not the point of physics. I know i know i do it sounded like a good joke i think i stole it from some crazy gal on youtube um so give us an overview of the book from 30 000 okay okay so the book is a kind of uh in in a way it tries to provide a world view so this is a book I thought quite a lot about when I wrote it. I wanted to write a book that describes what I have learned about the world in general by my study, my lifelong study of physics. So it's a book which has a lot of philosophical implications. It deals with not the least things like consciousness.

What does physics tell about consciousness? What about the nature of mathematics? Is everything mathematics? Is our world the only one? Does it exist other worlds? Do you have a free will? Lots of things like that is treated in the book. And I try to sort of make, give my answers,

my attempt to answer all of those questions and put them together in some kind of a, in a worldview, in a sense. There you go. So you try to explain the world itself in the book then? I think that my main message in the book, and this is something which might sound a little bit trivial, but it's not. And that is the world is real and it exists out there.

We are not living in some kind of a virtual reality. We are not living inside of computers or anything like that. It's a real world of flesh and blood, which needs to be taken seriously. And mathematics is something which sits inside of our heads. It's not out there. So it's a book where, which I think the main message is to take reality

seriously and i think that is something which is necessary in in our day and age yeah it really does because we live in a reels over feels sort of environment especially here in america where um we we if it hurts your feelings because it's reality we go oh no let's change reality and it's not working out very well when you're trying yeah um and so yeah i you know i'm an atheist and you know people can believe what they want to get through this little uh ride or journey that we're on from beginning to end or what we or what we're aware of is the beginning to end. And it seems like the universe does work on mathematical sequences for everything in life. I mean, is that true or is it not true?

Is it kind of true? Actually, I think that one of my most important messages in the book is, of course, that mathematics is an incredible, valuable tool, and it's fun, too. I mean, the way that i got into physics was that i that i loved nature and the stars and the sky and everything as a kid and i also found that mathematics was really fun to to learn and use that's the way to understand what's going on out there but it's also true that for me and that's that's main message of the book that

mathematics is a tool. It's not that the world is mathematical in itself. I sincerely believe that mathematics is inside of our heads. It's a tool that we use in order to describe the world, and our models, our laws of nature that we construct, they are really our inventions, and we use them in order to make predictions and describe the world. But it's not that the universe is governed by our laws of physics. It's just that our laws of physics mimic what the universe does for whatever reason. So that's sort of my worldview, my point of view, that are we are here in a big mysterious universe and we try as best as we can to describe it and mathematics is an important tool so why what you're saying

if i'm understanding correctly correct me if i'm wrong would a would a theory be that basically the universe and everything doesn't really operate by mathematics. That's just the way that we're consciously choosing a way to evaluate it, measure it, and predict it. Absolutely. I think that's a very important point. And I don't think that nature needs to do any calculations. It just does what it does. And we try to mimic it using mathematics. We set up all of these laws, which always are imperfect.

They're provisionary. With time, we improve them. We learn more. But that's basically what we do. And we cannot, I mean, the universe, I mean, it does what it does. And we try to understand it as best as we can. We are limited. And that is something that we need to remember with our

limited abilities after all we are these organic beings which have evolved on this planet i mean we have grown up literally out of dirt and we have these brains with a little bit more than a one and a half kilograms roughly and clearly i mean clearly we cannot understand all what's going on in the universe we have a limited capacity to to understand to grasp reality but we do our best yeah we we we try to you know we we do a lot of different understandings i mean anytime you see what's going on you we see the infiniteness of seemingly infiniteness of space and time and different things like that it's are we are we different as a species as human species where we you know i mean i don't see like snakes and monkeys and rhinos sitting around plotting the future based on the past and being consciously aware

what's going on but i could be wrong maybe they maybe they are they're just good at hiding it yeah you know that's that's an interesting question actually i i i think it's actually a matter of degree to some extent i mean clearly uh also i think that other animals maybe most animals are conscious in some sense they have an eye they have a subjective feeling of existing in the world. And also one of the most important aspects of life, all living organisms, is that they need to survive. They need some capacity to predict what's going on, to predict what will happen. They have to act on the impressions that they get from the environment.

So they need to somehow predict what will happen. In some sense, set up laws, some rules of thumb, something which can lead them to make the correct decision. So that's a property of all living organisms. And then it's just that we, with our brains, have evolved that a little bit further so we have a greater capacity to do this and we call it science at some point but i think it's more a graduate it's a different in degree in a sense rather than something which is really qualitatively different

yeah i mean i have i mean me and my bank have discussions i think there's a million dollars in there based on the checks i write and they say there's five dollars in there and so uh we're constantly having that battle over over mathematics so i don't know maybe the universe works on mathematics or maybe just works on how i feel i mean as long as i have checks it's an old check joke uh so you know know, and considering, you know, one of my girlfriends who just pounds Amazon all day long and fills up the front door with boxes at her house, you know, I don't think maybe she needs to be introduced to mathematics as well. Or maybe it's just a matter of time. But, you know, did we really have to learn all that algebra in high school? Was that really necessary being forced upon us?

Well, it depends on what you want to do i mean it's clear that in in some sense i'm sure that we unconsciously or even not in our brains but also our bodies as a whole is doing quite a lot of advanced well not mathematics perhaps but in, let's just think of a soccer player who shoots the ball and hits the target or something. It's an enormously complicated thing to actually do if you sit down with pen and paper and try to calculate the path of the ball and all of that. But that's something that you still can do with your body and your brain.

You can do these things quite accurately if you have practiced a lot. So it's clear that you can do quite advanced stuff even without knowing all of this mathematics. But if you want to know about how things work in areas where you don't really have any experience of what happens inside of the atom or for that matter inside of a computer, if you want to construct a car or whatever, things which you don't have a real experience of what's going on, and incredibly accuracy is needed, then you need math. Then math is what makes technology work. You really need mathematics to do all of that. And then then of course if you're curious about what's what's happening in the other parts of the universe i mean then mathematics is the language that you need to be able to speak if you want to understand what's going on absolutely do you do

you feel like people need the importance of your book is getting people to understand you know how this is redundant how important physics and the mathematics in life are i mean i see people they go through the universe and they there's a lot of miracle claimers as they like to call it where people go oh this happened because you know a boogeyman under my bed or up in the sky decided it should happen or you know some of it makes me really mental you'll see like a storm that will kill 100 people and one person lives and they they claim it's a miracle and that someone ordained them as the sole survivor and you're just like yeah but like 90 90 other people suffered a

horrific death i mean that doesn't doesn't seem like uh if that's a perfect world in your mind of of some sort of selection of of uh of a ultimate being that seems a little bit seems a little bit off in its uh in its caring and empathy um and and so you know people will do stuff you know like a car crash they'll they'll blame the oh you know something you know a lightning storm or you know whatever sort of thing of thing happens in the universe that ends up being catastrophic. It gets, you know, tamed to some sort of boogeyman entity instead of like, well, this is the randomness of the universe sometimes. And maybe the universe isn't random.

Maybe there is a mathematics to a certain degree. Well, I mean, the book is, I think it speaks to different people in different way. I mean, sure, this is a book about physics and it tells us about how physics is behind everything that happens in the world, even though, and I think this is a real important message as well. And that is that we don't know about all of that physics. There are so many things that we do not know about. So it's also a kind of appeal to being a little bit humble, because there are also many people who really have kind of an overconfident view of what we can do and what our capacities are, and do not realize that we are these limited organic beings

which are also very fragile in a world which is also quite hostile, to be frank. I mean, the universe is not a very nice place to be in. I mean, the earth is a local exception, but otherwise it's a pretty harsh place. So it's also trying to put ourselves in a perspective from that point of view. And just as you indicated in the beginning, I'm not a big fan of dualism in the sense that there is some supernatural force that is governing the world. In fact, this book is an attempt to construct, to suggest a worldview which is naturalistic, materialistic, where physics is

everything but still has the room for mystery and even for our conscious minds and our inner feeling of existence, which I think is still a big, big mystery. I do not think it has been explained it's a natural phenomena but the natural phenomena based on on on things which we do know very little about so let me ask a question of that then since our since our rudimentary understanding of the universe we use mathematics in our language and terminology to try and understand it but there are things in this universe that we don't understand like why we're here maybe there is no reason why we're here maybe that's the point uh it could be that's the feature not the bug um it could be uh but uh is that because maybe we haven't formulated something as dynamic beyond mathematics or whatever to where we just can't define it.

Or maybe it is on its basis or face undefinable because it is the universe. Yeah. I mean, it could be due to many things. It could be just due to the fact that we haven't been here sufficiently long. I mean, after all all science is evolving and if we can sort of be nice to each other and keep developing society and even science, I'm sure that we'll learn a lot more over the next decades, hundreds of years or thousands of years or whatever time scale. So a lot more to know a lot more questions to to answer and a lot more questions to discover as well but then i'm sure there could also be lots of questions which we

are too stupid to even be able to formulate there are deep truths about the universe which we are not able to understand, while one could imagine maybe other beings on other planets with other kinds of bodies and brains that have a science which is much more developed than ours and can easily understand things which we have no idea about. So again, I mean, you were comparing us with other animals and suggesting that we are sort of qualitatively better in some way. And sure, we are. I mean, certainly you and I, we have a much more developed worldview than a dog or a cat or something like that, as far as what are the stars and what is matter and so on and so forth. But similarly, there could exist beings on other planets which understand things. Not only because of the science that they've developed further, it's simply because they have minds which are greater than ours. Yeah.

And over here in America, we're kind of known for using as least of our brains as we possibly can. What is it, like 5% or less of our brains as we possibly can. What is it, like 5% or less of our brains we actually use or something? I don't know. For some people, it's far less than that. I think George Carlin had that famous statement that 50% of people are dumber than the average. So there goes society. And you can see what's going on in our world.

Some of that explains it. So it's good that you put in this framework. And you've raised some different things that i'm going to be thinking about that'll be haunting me in my nightmares and dreams about how we don't really still fully understand the universe and and uh but physics appears and mathematics appear to be the best way to try and measure it and understand it for you know what our limited knowledge is is is there is there you know elon musk and people have talked about how you know we could be living in a simulation and i think you talk about that a little bit in the book don't you i i do and i i find that this is one of the the the the really ridiculous ideas which i try to argue against in my book.

I find it so sad. Really? One can start to think in those terms. I find it just as ridiculous as it sounds. It's sort of these kind of ideas which you can try to boast with and try to impress people at the party. You're so intelligent that you can come up with ideas like that. For me, they are just very, very silly.

And I think the reason why you come up with things like that is simply because we are so used to... It's the society we are living in. We are so used to the ideas of virtual realities and so on. We are living on the internet or whatever, that we are losing touch with reality, and then we start to imagine things like that. So for me, this is just a very, very silly idea,

which I don't believe in at all. And in fact, this is partly what I'm arguing against in the book. Now, does both your books in each simulation say the same thing about that or does the other simulation i hope i hope so i hope so i had to cover that yeah you know there's lots of people that do that on like tiktok and social media there's entertainment factor to it where you go but you know it's it's i it's always interesting to me to ponder stuff but yeah once you start suspending reality to fantasy to to placate your your insecurities and your delusions and and coming

up with all sorts of things i do think it's interesting how as a people or as as in some religions are are many religions are bad at doing this but but they describe that we're a dominant top being of enlightenment in the universe, and therefore we probably created it. And I think when you really study the biology of man and how we're built, we're really not the perfect entity in biology. We're really awful, actually, when you look at how...

Yeah, I mean, take a look at us. How could we be sort of the top of the, I mean, the best in the universe? I mean, it's a ridiculous thought. Yeah. I mean, clearly snakes know they are because they're kind of assholes, but I think that's more narcissism on snakes. I don't know why I have issues with snakes this morning, but it seemed like a good...

It seemed like a good idea we could pick on during the show. But no, you, you know, there's kind of a, it's interesting. You know, I told my, I told my niece and nephew this when they graduated high school. I said, look, there's three things that you need to be aware of in life. And one's really important. One is what you know. Okay. And everyone knows what you know, or at least hopefully you do.

Two is what you know you don't hopefully you do uh two is what you know you don't know and that's important to also find out and learn but the third biggest one is what you don't know you don't know isn't that donald rumsfeld that said something like that it might have in one of his 50 000 emails that were insecure yeah it might have i'm not sure i've scribed anything of intelligence to that man but the author of iraq war um but uh no it probably was uh you probably have to be correct but but you know learning these things reading books like yours discovering and delving through the material and trying to get a real grasp of how this how this world works um and i think a lot of people are overcome by the harshness of this world

and they're trying to explain it you know why does a man die why do people in in a country die of famine why why do tragedies happen and things like that and they try to ascribe some sort of human mathematics or human elements to it and like we've talked about before in this in the broadcast it's important that people realize that you know things happen why are we here because we're here if i can quote the band rush and neil peart um why are we here because we're here roll the bones um you know we spend so much time sometimes pondering our own navels that maybe we should just get on with the the survival game that we're yeah and try to take care of each other instead of finding excuses of various kinds why things why things go wrong absolutely yeah and the tribal

nature of how we divvy that up uh you know where we try to say well this camp decides that mathematics and physics aren't important and there's no rule to a universe and somehow there's some benevolent or sometimes really angry narcissistic sadist that wants to torture people on this planet. And somehow that's some sort of, you know, going to get you to a higher place in some sort of tier of afterlife or something or real estate. It's also that this kind of perspective that I try to argue for in my book, I mean, it connects, of course, to another very, very, very important theme, which has to do with the climate change and what we are doing to the earth

and so on, and the need of having a different kind of view of the world, which in some sense needs to be a little bit more collective when it comes to other human beings on this planet, but also to feel a kind of a belonging, a belonging to the natural world, including definitely the living world, the planet as a living thing where we play a role and are a part. And I think that this is something that we desperately need

because now we have also through this living in these virtual realities, we are not only separating ourselves from reality, we are separating ourselves from the natural world and think that we are living outside of it. We are independent of nature in some sense. We have all of these in some sense. We have all this technology which protects us. But still, as is obvious, we are completely dependent upon our survival, that the natural world works and that we work with it.

And I think that's probably one of the most important things that we need in the way that we view the world. We that we need in the way that we view the world. That change in the way that we appreciate nature. And this is easy to say and very difficult to do anything about. But it's a profoundly different frame of mind that is needed, which where we really in at every moment are aware of who we are and what role we play in the cosmos and the place of the earth. There you go. And I think there's an insecurity or a panic reaction to it where, you know, when a tragedy happens, you know, people die, uh, a tree falls over and kill somebody, lightning strikes,

there's earthquakes and floods. People, people want to ascribe something to it. It does. That seems, that seems to have some sort of benevolence where maybe it's a half angry God who cares, but I don't know.

He had a bad morning that morning or that there's a, that there's a fear or a panic that the universe is random or there's some sort of mathematical quality to it but still there's like you say the unknown and then around this and and one is kind of more of a security blanket to ascribe to that and one is a theory in reality uh that deals, hey, man, this world, it's a survival game in my opinion, where, you know, the universe seems to be a big survival game, you know, whatever your species is, you know,

you might be going to stink this week and, you know. Yeah, it's a tough place. And that's where we have our capacities here, which have evolved our brain. That's our way to survive and we are not very strong but we are, it is smart compared to other animals

and that's I mean it's both a blessing and a curse in our case because we are also using it to destroy our environment. Now this is not, I mean, ironically, this is not the first time in the history of the world where life has more or less destroyed itself. I mean, it has happened several times, if you go back a few billions of years.

When the Earth was two billion years old, there were some bacteria, microscopic organisms that discovered photosynthesis and realized that they could use the sunlight to get energy, and they converted carbon dioxide into oxygen and destroyed, actually, this went in the other direction, they destroyed the greenhouse effect, which was due to methane at the time, through the production of the oxygen, which meant that the temperature dropped and Earth was thrown into an ice age that went on for hundreds of millions of years, and the Earth was a big snowball. And it could have been the end of life on Earth due to life sort of overreaching itself so we are not the first life form that is threatening the our own existence and and other life on the planet

it has happened before so it's that so things like this happen in a sense i mean it's so random and the fact that we are here depends on so many accidents during the the history of the earth i mean including the the extinction of the diner source 65 million years ago if that hadn't happened if that that asteroid hadn't collided with the earth there wouldn't probably be any big mammals around. Maybe the dinosaur had developed some intelligence or something like that. Who knows? The world would have been completely different. Yeah.

I mean, for all we know, they're walking around with, you know, reading books and stuff, those dinosaurs, writing. Maybe they would have been writing even better books than we are. Yeah. They had those little eyepieces that make you seem smart in England. And, you know, maybe they were like Sherlock Holmes, and they talked really good language or something. For all we know, you know.

Yeah, so it's clear that there is not really direction in that sense in history. There are lots of randomness. But this is something that you have to accept that there's no one that will going to take care of you or protect you not as a species not as a civilization it's up to us there is no guarantee that we will survive i mean if you look at what happens with the climate wars whatever there is no guarantee that we will survive and that's something that one needs to really realize that it's not it's not someone else that will do it for us we have to do it ourselves you know it's and i think that's the other fear that people get into where they're afraid of

the future and and the fear of you know what if know, um, big, a meteor comes and destroys us, uh, you know, next week, then, you know, there's the fear of, you know, does this matter? Does it, does my life matter and everything else? You know, I, I have that question posed to me constantly as an atheist where people say to me, um, you know, how do you have morals if the world seems dystopian because you're going to live and die and that's going to be the end of you and what you did here didn't mean much? And I'm like, it does mean much what you do here between the front and the beginning. But it's interesting how people, I don't know, they measure and deal with it and they look for something to placate their fears and their, you know, their scaredness of what's under the bed or what they think is under the bed, the boogeyman and you know, whatever. But, you know, I think

Jurassic Park proved that dinosaurs really didn't develop a good language. I think that movie flushed out the reality of it. Anyway, that's just for me, I mean, I sort of probably have a worldview which is very similar to yours. And I hope that one can live a moral and ethic life without just referring to some external force that will punish you if you don't live like that. I mean, I would think that you could do it on your own somehow.

But it's also for me, there is something else. I mean, when I look at the stars, when I look at the sky above me and the dark night, I mean, I know that some people, they feel afraid when they see this. They get worried. I mean, the universe is so big and I am so small and it's so dangerous and I'm so meaningless. Everything is pointless.

I don't see like that at all. When I look at the stars, I feel a sense of belonging, in the sense that, okay, this is the universe, which I'm not just observing it, I'm a part of it. This is me in some sense. I'm built out of the same kind of matter, which means that maybe I could even argue that I, as a living being, organic living being, is rather unique. I'm even more important than all of these stars up there in the sky.

So in this universe, we here on Earth and other living beings on other planets, that might be the whole point with the universe. So one can turn it around in that sense and rather feel a belonging to a universe which is so fantastic and beautiful and intricate that it can produce something as great as us here on Earth. There you go. There you go. So do you see that a lot of problem, you talk about this in the book, do you see a lot of problems is our dualistic views where we have some of the things I've talked about and we need to identify and get away from this? I think so, absolutely.

And one argument in my book in order to make it a little bit easier to throw out dualism is to make sure that even without dualism, you can still have the room for consciousness. You can still have the room for meaning. It's just the universe is what it is. Consciousness, everything is natural phenomena. And it's just that we don't fully understand what's going on in our brains. We don't understand that part of ourselves. That doesn't mean that it has to be something which is outside of this world. It's something, it's a property of this world, a wonderful world that

can produce all of that which we cherish and love, including our consciousness and our ability to do culture and whatever, poetry, literature, and all of that, all of the humanity. It's also part of this material world. And I think that's what I'm trying to argue for, that you don't need to think about the the the dead materialistic world and then in order to make it meaningful you have to have something else these souls or god or whatever which is flying around and then interfere in the material world i don't think that you need

that yeah it's interesting how we base some of these, what's the right word, mythological sort of dualistic nature towards reality and physics. And we usually do them in our own image and usually subject to the own limitations of our minds and what we believe. different things kind of from a parental aspect of like well this there's a you know a big puppet master in the sky who sometimes if he has a bad day as a sadist and kills you know floods the world and kills millions of people or you know sometimes he's the benevolent one who you know loves us this week in some sort of narcissistic manner if we jump through certain hoops um and it's interesting how we put those in those contexts when really there, there may not be a male or female or even a central being overseeing the universe. It could just be that it just exists and always has, or, you know, whatever you want to sort of believe. But, you know, it's here and now, so you might as well run with it.

You know, it's, it's interesting. It's interesting how big life is. And, uh, you know, like I'll, I'll go sit in and on the beach and watch the beauty of the ocean and the magnificent of, of the universe. I look up at the stars and you hear the waves lapping and you realize they've been lapping that way for eons of time. And, you know, I'm just some little speck of dust or sand on the beach that, you know, the water will just keep pouring over. You know, unless we decide to nuke it, but I'm sure there'll be some sort of survival earth that will come out of me. I think so too. Yeah. You know, there's an old joke Carlin used to do that maybe the earth and mother nature created us so she could have plastic and maybe a few other chemicals that we created.

But now she really wants to get rid of us. And it seems like COVID was a real test of our survival mechanism as a species. Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure. I don't know. Maybe there's a map. I don't think so. It's, I mean, probably most of the disasters

that we are, and some of them, we are causing ourselves. And other ones, they simply come without any connection to us. So that's something that we have to cope with all of this if we want to survive. Then, of course, the question is, how long will we survive?

There will be some limit to that. I mean, that's something which makes it, that's really a kind of thought which is even a bit difficult for me to grasp. I mean, on the one hand, you can sort of imagine the end of your own life and so on. But what's more difficult to think about is the fact that our civilization our species and even the earth have a finite extent at some point will reach the moment where the last human being will die that moment will come and eventually all

what we have done will be forgotten yeah i mean i mean then the aliens will probably come up and play archaeologists with us and be like hey everyone's smiling in all their pictures they must have been a happy society on instagram what do you think about uh vr and ar my last question about vr and ar is it should we really be embracing as much as we are because it sounds like we're going to go down a road where we're just going to be creating more of a fiction instead of dealing with reality. No, I think that hopefully,

I hope that somehow that reality will get sort of hot and modern again. And people get tired of all the virtual realities. And that's my hope. It almost seems like an escapism where, once again, we're going down a rabbit hole. I'm not saying there's anything bad with AR and VR or escapism. Sometimes as a species, we kind of need to escape from reality and suspend it for a little bit. Yeah, maybe.

But maybe it's the other way around that that is exactly what causes our problems that we're escaping it a little bit too much we might need to face reality a little bit more often and maybe that's the way also to get a little bit more of meaning back into into life and in in reality as opposed to some sort of fantastical thing. Yeah, there are so many things that we need to fix in the real world that I think we should probably focus a little bit more on that.

There you go. Well, we definitely do because escaping reality, and we seem to live in a society now that is really hell-bent on feelings over reals or what I call, i think someone else's term is feels over reels where people want to fight reality because it makes them feel bad they don't like the results of it like i'm you know i i drink way too much mountain dew and ate

a lot of fatty foods when i was young and i'm fat now and i could have feelings where i could be like yeah it's not fair oh it's it's bullshit that people judge me because I'm fat um no you just lose some weight get healthy there buddy uh it's bad for you to be uh fat um so you know there's your reality but you know it seems like reality is thing people are fighting nowadays so I think your books like yours are important to get us back to that core thing. Anything more you want to tease on in the book before we go? No, I mean, it's, again, I mean, it's a book which deals with many, many things that I think many people are interested in, the sciences and the technology. Think about now.

It's also lots about computers and whether computers can get conscious and stuff like that, and including virtual realities. And it's a bit about quantum mechanics and what it tells us about the world. So there are many things which, well, have the philosophical implications, which I try to connect together in some coherent sort of worldview, basically. I try to read out the philosophical implications of many questions which are on our minds if you're interested in sciences.

There you go. There you go. Well, this is all important. Span your mind. Learn new stuff. Learn your new things. It sounds like you wrote the book in a way that isn't a math manual or a physics manual. No, no, no.

I try to. It's a book which partly is a very personal journey as well. So the subject is difficult, but it's not a difficult book. There you go. There you go. Order it up, folks, wherever fine books are sold. The World Itself, Conscious, and the everything of physics. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

We really appreciate it, man. Thank you. It was a pleasure. There you go. And give us a.coms where we want people to see you on the interwebs, please. So that's ulfdanielson.com with two S. There you go. There you go.

And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, 4-6-ChrisVos, YouTube.com, 4-6-ChrisVos, and the big LinkedIn.com, 4-6-ChrisVos. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.