The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Alex Garland: Fundamental questions inspire art and science

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

Alex Garland is probably best known to the world for writing and directing the blockbuster film Ex Machina about the consequences of the coming of age of an AI humanoid robot. Before that, he wrote the film 28 days later, about the fictional aftermath of a mysterious incurable virus that spreads through the UK. Most recently he directed a television series for FX called Devs, about many things, but hinging on quantum mechanics and issues of a multiverse. The human implications of new technology seem to play an ever present role in his films, and I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to chat with him about science and art in the past, and was eager to sit down and record a podcast. He is remarkably thoughtful and at the same time self-deprecating. Since the origins podcast tends to focus on issues of science and culture, Alex was the perfect guest, and he seamlessly blends the two. We sat down and talked about his own origins, emerging from a period of more or less complete disinterest in science to returning to the kind of questioning that his scientist grandfather used to embark on with him when he was a young boy. Recorded in the building in which his most recent TV series Devs was being recorded, we had to talk about the quantum universe as well. It was a fascinating and thoughtful conversation about the human interface with modern science, as displayed in film, writing, and art. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers . Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Orgence podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. One of the things this podcast tries to do is celebrate the connections between culture and science and celebrate science as an important part of our culture. And I was therefore particularly happy to be able to sit down some time ago with the wonderful writer and director Alex Garland, who's known for his writing of books, but also films, including, 28 days later and his directing of that blockbuster ex machina about artificial intelligence. He went on after that to create a series called Devs, which is really about actually quantum mechanics in the multiverse. And I was really happy to be able to sit down and talk to him about all of these things. He's incredibly interesting, thoughtful, and self-deprecating, and his background is interesting because of the way it merges if you wish art and science. His father, his grandfather was a Nobel prize-winning scientist, and yet as he described to me, he really felt he had no aptitude or

interest in science early on. A developing interest in art and literature caused him to begin to ask fundamental questions, and that in his 20s got him interested in science. And then he carried that interest clearly in his writing and has merged beautifully this fascination of science and science fiction that's led to his success as a writer and film director. And it was great to talk about this interesting questioning and also the relationship between science and art, many of the similarities in the way it's carried out, the collaborative nature of science and art, both of which are often thought to be individual pursuits, but are really quite collaborative. I hope you'll be as fascinated by this discussion with this remarkably

interesting man as I was. And you can watch it without advertisements on the Critical Mass Substack site. If you subscribe, if you become a paid subscriber to that site, and I hope you'll consider that because subscriptions to that site go to help support the nonprofit foundation, the Origins Project Foundation that produces this podcast. Otherwise you can watch the podcast on our YouTube channel or listen to it anywhere you can listen to podcasts.

No matter how you watch or listen to this, I hope you'll be inspired and, provoked by Alex Garland and you'll enjoy the discussion as much as I did with him. Well, Alex, thank you very much for having us at your studio in the final stage of the post-production of your new project and I really appreciate you taking time out to talk to me. Pleasure. Now, I want to start with your origins. There are many reasons why I've enjoyed talking in the past but and now why I want to talk to you.

And one of them is the relationship between your words. and creatively exploring scientific themes. Your grandfather was Peter Medore and a very famous Nobel Prize winning scientists. Did that have any impact on you? Did he influence you at all or anything like that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, big influence, absolutely, yeah. I mean, because from a very early age, I knew that,

I knew he was a scientist who was taken very seriously and it meant that people in the family saw him a certain kind of way. And he was also, he was a scientist who was interested in disseminating information. Yeah, he wrote, I remember reading a wonderful book by him when I was a kid that was thinking radish. Yeah, thinking radish. Yeah, thinking radish, that's it, yeah. So he didn't want to keep science behind.

a kind of intellectual firewall. He wanted to disseminate stuff about science. And that included to his grandchildren. So, but he also, I think he had a disconnect between what he knew and what I could possibly know. So for example, I remember when I was about 10, he asked me to explain, which would be to speculate on why it is that wheels on cars look like they're going back. sometimes. The answer to that is incredibly complicated. Literally, no way a 10-year-old would be able to get anywhere near the answer. And so then I would sort of struggle for a bit, and then he tried to explain it.

And the explanation lost me very, very quickly. In that, he's trying to sort of provoke interest. Yeah, you know, think about how to answer questions regardless of whether the right answers. Yeah, and the other thing he used to do, he was sort of, you know, chatty and sort of yeah like he wanted to pass things on um one of my main memories of him is uh playing chess with him and and he was a very very good chess player and uh and i think when i played him as a child his challenge was trying to find ways in which i could win and he was putting his his chess playing ability to to that end uh i certainly wasn't playing him in any meaningful

sense. But yeah, so, so I knew, I knew exactly who he was and I knew, I knew that he meant something in the scientific community and I knew he had a principle which was to, to get people who weren't scientists interested in science. That said, I had no facility for science at all as a child. So the exams we do when you turn 16, are they like SATs? Is it essay? Well, it's probably more rigorous than SATs. But, but that age. Yeah. Right. So in my school, the school I went to, I was, I was in the end, not allowed to take either chemistry or biology or physics for that 16 age exam because they said there's just no point you'll fail them. So I did something called environmental science, which was the thing they gave you if you couldn't add all mass or chemistry

or physics. So, and actually that was true across the board with me. I wasn't, I wasn't very adept at school at all except really the English I could manage, I suppose. Was it, you know, I was going to ask whether, well, was it that you weren't adept or you just didn't want to spend time working on it or? I think it was, I mean, did school bore you or? Yeah, I found school really difficult. I was, I just wasn't very good at participating in it. I think, But it did bore me, but I think it was very, very badly taught. I mean, I'm about to turn 50, and so it's an era of school where they weren't really interested in interesting pupils. They were just giving you a bunch of shit to, you know, eat and then repeat back again.

And so it wasn't until my 20s. By then my grandfather was dead. unfortunately that I began to get an interest in science and try to put together some sort of knowledge base, I suppose. Well, you know, the interesting thing is it's kind of sad. I do think that we tend to turn off kids. I mean, kids are natural scientists. And the kind of thing your grandfather was doing, which is asking questions and getting to think

about things. I mean, exploring the world around you, playing when you're a kid is really science. And then we tend to teach it in such a way. have, in many cases, hot in such a way that turns people off. It's just wrote memorization or regurgitation, not a sense of discovery, or even the sense that you're asking questions.

I mean, I was really intrigued to hear that your grandfather did that. I'm not surprised because I've always admired him from afar reading. But the idea of getting kids to ask questions is so much more important than telling kids the answers, I think. Yeah, yeah. And it was also just for what he followed that through. I know in his lectures he would use certain kinds of language. He would keep it, he would keep it at a sort of understand,

I guess, in a very kind of, if it may be a particular kind of lecture, it would have got very, very technical. But I know he was very obsessed with, with not making science and also philosophy sort of beyond reach, I suppose. Well, as I say this, the reason I think it's interesting, that impact on you is intriguing because the idea of asking questions rather than giving answers seems to me to be some sense characteristic of a lot of your work. If I think about the movies and in particular, the idea that you're leading people to think

about things but not necessarily always resolving it for them. Is that appropriate or not? I came to science very late. I would then, I then ask, uh, basic questions like what's an atom, uh, how big's the universe? Is it infinite? Uh, what happened before the universe? Sure. And, and then you come across a bunch of answers.

And then a thing happens where it becomes sort of, I think, I think the American word is sophomoreic to continue asking those questions. Like, look, come on, we've got past that. This is like the sort of stowa. stuff of people age 19 or 20 at university looking up at the stars going wow man isn't it all so big and and then you move past that and you stop asking basic questions of fundamentals of science and fundamentals of philosophy and I never moved past those questions I always just kept circling and circling and circling

them so so when when you talk about me asking questions it's probably for that reason because I keep saying but hang on a minute we this isn't figured out yet I if if it's sophomoric to keep asking okay I'm sophomore but I really haven't figured this out and well you know an internal understanding at least you know no I think that's what I think that's one of the reasons about we've been so drawn to you because of course that's what I I mean as a scientist that's what I do for a living right it's just the idea is is the fundamental questions are of interest and you keep pushing and keep trying to answer them

Don't go beyond what you what you can learn in some ways. But but not mine, not knowing. And that's what drives you rather than what, you know, so it's the not knowing in some sense that keeps you going. Yeah, and there seems to be something like a kind of arrogance to say, yeah, that's juvenile. Yeah. Now we've met.

And you think, what? The size of the universe is juvenile or how it began is, are you kidding? But there is a, there is a, sense and this is not, of course, this is not true for people like you. This is not true of scientists, completely legitimate to keep asking these questions. But outside that, it's somehow seen as not exactly childish, but sort of just beyond child. Well, people are often, it amazes me how people are often afraid to ask questions that are basic questions that everyone has. They know they have it, but they kind of feel like they're the only ones that are having it. I mean, it's the same

true about religion. A lot of people questioning existence of God, but they're afraid to say. they do. I think the reason people don't ask those questions is that very quickly after they start asking questions they get to death. Yeah. Yeah. They get to their own death. Yeah. And they think, oh, Christ. And then they stops everything. Yeah.

Did your, did your, did your, before I leave your grandfather in your youth and get on to the other things a little bit more, um, did he, was he disappointed? Did he encourage you? Did all or? He was disappointed. Yeah. He was disappointed. He was, he was not, he was just disappointed in me. I think he was disappointed in a way in all of his grandchildren. I don't

know if it was a very meaningful disappointment. And I also personally, I get the sense that his, like the needle of his interest and impulses was so, so sort of aimed towards his work, that disappointments in that area would be pretty limited. I don't think he cared that much. But there was a thing. I remember when all the grandchildren were young, we got told, well, It was the first of us to get a medical degree would get the physical object of the Nobel Prize. Oh. And so that was supposed to be an incentive for us to get a medical degree. No one, none of you got.

No one, no one of you got. No, no one. He kept the Nobel Prize. It's your mother's father, right? Yeah. And so, but she was she wasn't, did he, was she a scientist in any way or did he? No, she was a psychoanalyst and he was in a sort of oppositional position. to psychoanalysis because he'd have been very, well, not very, would have been, it was,

very accented towards a sort of psychiatric way of looking at the way thinking happens. It would have been sort of, you know, electrochemical stuff rather than Freudian stuff. So, so, you know, probably for Freudian reasons, that's why she did it. Okay, now, well, maybe that's another thing then. So she did that. And then you did a degree about as far away from, you did agree in history of art, is that right? Yeah, but I only did a degree in the most sort of glancing forms.

I mean, I said like, you know, the era in which I was educated, it was a long time ago. Back then, university was free. And it was quite easy, relatively speaking, to get into university. I think everything is much, much harder now. And so I did agree in history of art, which was a degree that you could stumble into if you'd had a certain kind of bourgeois upbringing, which I had. So I stumbled into it, did it, but checked out within like two months or something.

Like I said, I had no academic ability at all. And it wasn't until after university that I discovered that retrospectively I might have had. Well, you know, I think that that's not so unusual, especially since even of people who are, academic like someone like me i've certainly learned more about physics after i got my phd than before i think oh that's interesting and i but i think it's really important that that the if you're alive and human that that learning process continues past school because school is somehow if it's best in my opinion school should prepare you for lifelong learning and not not fill you with all the stuff you need to know but but get you teach you how to learn so that later on you can access

that's what you need to know. I think with my own kids, I've seen that schools are trying harder to be interesting. Yeah. They weren't trying at all. What you'd have is you'd have the odd teacher who sort of got that and then would try and light a fire. Was there an English teacher for you?

I mean, because you became a writer. So it's often English teacher. It was an English teacher. When I was 17 who basically taught us Hamlet and showed us. that there's stuff going on here behind the words and things that mean a lot to people in general, but also the sort of psychology of the characters. And I suddenly thought, oh, I get that.

Like, that makes sense. I sort of, what he's saying, I can see it's true, and it's also interesting. And he was super passionate, like rabidly passionate. And so, so, yeah, that struck a chord. But did you decide you wanted to be a writer or did you fall into that? No, no, I fell into it.

Yeah, I fell into it. I thought my dad worked in newspapers. He was a cartoonist. Oh. And he was a cartoonist, but he knew lots of journalists. And so I really grew up around journalists much more than scientists. I mean, it was one scientist and lots of journalists. So I thought maybe I'd be a journalist.

And then journalism or trying to be a journalist actually led me into writing fiction. Okay. It's interesting. So by the way, was the fact that your father cartoonists affect your decision to do art or no? Yeah, sure. Because I could draw. He taught me how to draw. And so I sort of, that was the one thing I could do when I was like 15. I couldn't.

I was terrible. Terrible at sport. Socially useless, just a complete, completely hopeless. But what I could do was draw and do English. and actually drawing and English is sort of what my job is now, because drawing is a bit like storyboards, and English is the writing, and so that's my job. Well, okay, I was going to ask whether the history of art,

whether, I mean, you describe, to someone I heard you say, you describe yourself as a writer more than a director that you think of yourself that way, but to move from writer to director requires sort of artistic, some artistic sense, and did you think your background in art, impacted on that? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, sure. It wouldn't have been anything to do with my degree

because like I said, I basically checked out of it. It would have been to do with my dad, yeah. And it did, yes, it had an impact. It partly has an impact because sometimes when one's talking about, say, a visual effect shot that you can't show because there's nothing there. There's, say, a green screen or something. you can sketch out what the frame will look like

and that gives people a touchstone for how it will all fit together. Okay, well, and that's become presumably progressively more important in your life as a director is the need to do that and as you reach and presumably A as you reach and B as you have the funds to utilize more. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, actually visual effects exist much more

in a way than people think because they're employed in invisible ways the whole time. But yeah, sure, sure. I mean, it's been, it has definitely been very useful. It means that with like the people, say this guy I work with Andrew Whitehurst, who's the visual effects supervisor, both of us draw, and we can often, we often find it easiest to communicate with each other by having a sharpian two bits of paper and just scribbling stuff.

But it's collaborative. Totally. Which, by the way, much like science, people tend to think science is. but it's really collaborative and people playing back and forth. I think it's very light science in one respect, which is that I've often been aware.

Actually, one of the things my grandfather said is he said, you can get anything you want done as long as you don't mind someone else getting the credit. And one of things in the science world and also in the film world is there's a lot of people

who are very skilled at doing kind of land grabs of credit. Yeah, yeah. So yes, it's collaborative, but it often isn't presenting. that way. And I think it's because in both worlds, it's much easier for people to get their head around in science. It would be like to get their head around

the idea of a genius. That makes it sort of apprehendable or explainable. But if what you really say is there's a large team of people. I saw that reflected recently on a very, very brilliant television program called Chernobyl, which was a... Oh, yeah, I love that program. It was spectacular. But one of the things they did was conflate many characters into one. It's one.

Because you can get the story if it's one person fighting through it. And film does that with directors. It all sort of focuses attention on the director at the expense of all the people that are really making the film. So, yes, collaborative. Yeah.

And it's important for people to realize that. And especially, as being Einstein foiled it for everyone because everyone thinks that science is done by people in there, they have insights that laid it night in the room thinking alone. It's just not done that way. I don't know of any intellectual pursuit or many intellectual pursuits that aren't collaborated. It must have been a bit like that with him. I mean, that is to say him or Newton or Galileo or whoever you want to go to, they're involved in

conversations, but there are with those people. I mean, in a way, they're the true exceptions. Well, Newton wasn't human. He was from the shimmer or something. But Newton was, was, yeah, I think a unique character. And he would have been in an insane asylum now, I think, if he, if he'd been born now. Why? He was just, he was, he was, he was, he was basically insane. I mean, he really, I mean, most of his time was spent interpreting the Bible, believing that God was telling him special messages. He sort of did science on the side. It was just off-scale, brilliant. And, and also, there are a few people, with Einstein, for example, if you're a scientist, you could, you could, you could, say, well, if I knew, he asked the right questions, but if I asked those questions, I could

see how to get from here to there. Newton and a few other rare individuals, you just don't know. It just comes. Oh, yeah. Okay. I get, yeah, I understand that, yes, so my point of empathy there would be Shakespeare, who is inexplicable. Yes. He's just inexplicable.

You can see the words are there, so someone's actually done it, but you have no idea how they got there. Exactly. That's a great analogy. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, but it's, it's, I know you've described, you know, making, I heard you said, which struck me as an interesting way of using the word, the collaborative.

You talked about making movies and you called about the collaborative. The collective, yeah, like the, like the Borg. Right. When you use that word, I thought, okay, well, but presumably they're not all assimilated. They're, everyone contributes their own. I mean it in a more kind of hippie way. Yeah, sure. You know, that sort of collective.

It just is, it just seems to me like a statement of fact and I'm working, I'm working typically with people I've worked with for a very long time, sometimes 20 years. That's great. Well, that's good. That means it works, right? I mean, that's the point. Yeah. Now, let's go, let's talk, I want to talk about even, well, to Beach to some extent,

but sort of the fantasy world or at least the fiction world, science fiction clearly plays a key role. in a lot of your work. And I was really pleased to see that, I think 28 days you said were influenced by one of my favorite books. One of my favorite science fiction writer was John Wyndham. Did you read a lot of science fiction?

I read John Wyndham. Well, then that's all you have to read as far as I'm concerned. I read, I read, yes, I did. I did read a lot of sci-fi. It was John Wyndham and J.G. Ballard, and in a way, George Orwell, which is a sort of science fiction sometimes. Yeah, sure, sort of.

I think 1984 sort of counts. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I think so. Aldous Huxley, I guess that science fiction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so yes. And well, did it, you know, and I think this is what I, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think that the sense I get from the films is the same idea. Stephen Hawking wrote the foreword for one of my books of physics of Star Trek, and he said science fiction, you know, we're relating science fiction and science.

and the idea said science fiction serves an important purpose. It inspires human imagination. It inspires you to think about the kind of questions that if you thought were science questions, you might be intimidated to think about. I mean, often as I wrote that book because people are often afraid to talk about physics concepts, but if you put them in the context of Star Trek, time travel or whatever, then people get excited. Do you think that those questions that started to interest you when you were 20, science fiction was a great medium because it not just for you but if you want to communicate to

people and you decided to do a science documentary you wouldn't reach as many people as if you're to do a fiction book um yeah yeah i i guess so i mean i mean yes but but i think actually i feel my motivation came out of neuroses in some respects that i always felt i went through i went from a funny kind of transition from thinking I was thick to thinking I wasn't thick. So, and then feeling always like several steps behind other people I'd meet. So they would have gone to a great university like Oxford or Cambridge. And, and you could sort of feel their intellect and intelligence sort of radiating off them. And so in some ways, I'd be trying to, I always, and still feel, that's still very much feel.

like I'm trying to catch up. And then the stories are the act of me catching up. So I will, I'll get very, very interested in, say, in ex-Machner, it was sentience and machine learning and issues to do with gender. And so in my sort of obsessive reading and trying to get my head around it as much as possible, a story which is like an illustration of that attempt to, understand it then floats out of it and and also even even in the very early days there's a there's a conversation in the beach I sort of remembered this dimly the

other day and then went back and looked at it so I wrote that when I was 24 there's a conversation in it which is which is essentially about that if and I always worry particularly if I'm talking to a scientist I'll get these terms wrong that sort of the the quilted multiverse version where it's infinity that starts to create repeating, you know, universes. Yes. We'll get to the multiverse, I think. Sure.

I know, well, I think it's relevant to the new projects. Yeah, absolutely it is. Yeah. And so I can see myself age 24, get trying to get my head around the idea, well, hang on, if, if space and matter are infinite, then inevitably, you will get precise repetitions. Sure. And so variations on precise repetitions. And in the number of the same and an infinite number is slightly different. Infinity is a wonderful thing.

You can do a lot with it. So, but, but it's not, well, quite, but, but it's not motivated by me trying to provoke questions and other people. It's, it's more me trying to figure it out. And then my means, for whatever reason, my means of, of then sort of processing that becomes writing a story. Well, you know, again, I don't, I don't, I, I don't think it's a different. People tend to think even a scientist that are trying to save the world or whatever. People can't do hard work unless they're really doing it for themselves. I think ultimately in terms of creative work anyway.

The notion that you're really writing for yourself or it's very self-involved when you're doing science, at least from my experience and almost all the scientists. I know you're trying to, it's something you're interested in. You want to do for yourself. You want to figure it out. And I guess I find similar things. When I write books, it's, hey, I want to, you sure, there's a topic I want to deal with, but this gives me an opportunity to think about in a way that I just wouldn't been able to spend time doing.

And if you're not, and it's like a teacher, too. If you're not passionately interested in yourself, I don't think you're going to, that's going to relate. It's going to be successful for other people. Yeah, if you're bored of your job, the kids will be sure as. Yeah. And if you're not fast, if you're writing, if you're making a movie or writing a book or whatever, unless you're passionately interested in it, I don't think that, passion is going to go out to the rest of the world.

But it is interesting to me that one could go in a lot of different directions to understand the world, but generally, not completely, most of your films are science fiction related, or at least fantasy related, even from 28 days. The science, well, right. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, no, you go. I mean, they're not, they're not, honestly, they use science as a starting point at some level or science fiction.

Either science or something sort of philosophical. One or the other, yeah. Yeah. Now, I have to ask you his question, the film Sunshine. Yeah. You read an article

about what the far future of the universe that got you interested? I think I was trying to understand entropy. Entropy. Yeah. The heat death of the universe.

Basically, yeah. Do you remember what the article was? It was from Scientific. I just wondered, because I wrote a bunch of articles of American. Maybe it was you. On the far future of the universe.

It's interesting. Yeah, well, this is exactly how it works. So here I am as a layperson. And then you come across an idea like velocity and speed are related to each other. You think, what? You know, you're kidding? And try and figure it out. And one of the ones I remember when I came across the idea, it was a real kind of bolt from the blue.

It really made me sit up and reappraise all sorts of things. And I think that's one of the things science can do. do it. Yeah. Open up to it. It has huge philosophical implications. And, and one of them was to do with heat death. That, that it, in a way, it didn't really matter what you did or what advances you made or if you managed to find a way of crossing these staggeringly big distances in space, which is one of the most basic things that is most commonly misunderstood. Yeah. I think it's just how big this thing is. Sure. And how hard it is and how long it takes to get around it, you know. But then thinking, okay, well, let's say we, you know, we get a, let's say we figure out wormholes.

They actually exist and you can bump across to the other side of the universe. It's not really going to help you. It means you get to see more places before you inevitably die. So, so it, that, yeah, that really hit me hard. And the idea of sunshine, which I think, I sort of regret, I think it sort of got lost in the end. was a sort of philosophical position, which is there's a, the earth's going to die. Some people go to save the earth by going to the sun.

Yeah. It's completely spurious. Kickstarting with a massive bomb. Makes no sense at all. But the earth's going to die. Some people are going to try and save it. And someone who's previously been on a mission to do this, then tries to stop them. And the reason he tries to stop them is because he makes an argument,

which is if we save Earth now, all we're doing, is putting off this imminent horror of extinction to our great, great, great, great, squared or whatever you want, grandchildren. And that's an act of cowardice. We're just handing on existential horror to our children's children, children, children,

and that's ethically sort of unsound. And we should face this horror. And I thought that was quite an interesting idea and partly an interesting idea because I think it might actually be true. I think it might be true. I mean, that's not to say, I think we should let global warming. Yeah, I was going to say, you could say,

we're already making miserable for our children. Yeah, sure. But it's more just like it's an interesting question to sort of wrestle with, I suppose. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I often say the future is miserable and it's going to end badly. But on the other hand, we have the present. And by the way, maybe I can help you here. I wrote a book about an atom.

And the good thing about regardless of how it ends, whether the sun eats the earth or whether we destroy ourselves, for our atoms, the future is going to be almost identical. It doesn't matter whether part of us, but they're going to be in the same part of the cosmos, whether the atmosphere blown off. Maybe that doesn't help me. It doesn't because I don't ascribe huge amounts of meaning to atoms in and of themselves.

Yeah, too many people do. The emergent property, the atoms, great. Yeah. Atoms themselves, okay, they can keep going as long as they like. But, okay, well, now in that, okay, there was another aspect. That's fascinating for me to learn about sunshine because I was trying to, I read that you sort of, it was that heat death that went to sunshine. I couldn't quite see you the connection and you just made it for me, which is really

good. Now I understand a little bit better. But there was something else. That's a failure of the film. Essentially, it's a failure of the film. The film in that respect definitely failed. and it actually was a wake-up call for me to start working a bit harder. But one thing that, and I was talking to my crew here about sunshine,

and they were saying that they like various aspects, but one thing I think that is interesting is the attempt to capture what it's like to be a scientist on such a mission. That, I think, is, and did you work hard in that, or did that just come out? And the idea of... That's the problem is I didn't work hard on it. I...

I... There's lots of things I really love about sunshine, but there's lots of things I think are lazy. And I think I got more rigorous following the sunshine. If I was doing it again now, I would approach it with more research. Okay. Okay, no, that's...

Well, and okay, now actually that allows me to move to, I mean, the film that I get, I don't know whether it's fair to say breakout film, but the first directing experience, an ex-Maconet, which was a huge success. And from my point of view, which first introduced me to you, that's the way I first. And that, which is a fascinating film, you did a lot more research, right? You were interested in neuroscience thinking about the issue of, I, I, there's a, there's a friend who actually in the last couple of years has descended into, um, uh, dementia but for for for 20 years or so he was someone who who I could talk to

about these things and we had a long-running argument I suppose about what is where consciousness was seated so he knew a lot about this because he had a huge interest in neurology and and I knew very little but in talking with him I learned more and more and out of those conversations I didn't, so I had almost, well, probably it was around about 10 years, we probably were talking about it. And that's proper research. He knew his stuff. I didn't.

But in testing my arguments out against him, it would lead me to learn other things. And by the end of it, I felt unlike Sunshine, I now have enough of a grasp of this subject to be able to meaningfully write about it. Well, yeah, no, I think it was. I mean, robots are not an untested territory in films, but I thought in terms of exploring key issues having to do with artificial intelligence, that film was groundbreaking in many ways. For one reason in particular,

which I got from the movie, but then I must admit, I think I read you saying it too, which is to think of things from the perspective of the AI, rather than perspective of the person interacting with the AI. So instead of a human interpreting what's going on, sort of trying to see how the AI is reacting to the world, which I think is, from my mind, the most interesting aspect of Artic intelligence.

Was that an intentional aspect of? Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things I kept running into, in a way I think this is not exactly told explicitly, but it's sort of more, more as Allegory or maybe, but just that there's no way

you can reasonably assume that a self-aware machine would have a consciousness that was like our consciousness and there's also no way that one would be able in talking to that machine to really be able to understand

what its sense of its own consciousness would be like. So it was that kind of thing, I guess. Yeah, but an interesting question. think you get us, is it just an assumption when you're talking to another person that you have a sense of their consciousness? Well, it is. That ultimately was one of the thrusts of it, which is that actually we're doing a kind

of rolling, Turing test on everybody in the counter. And you and I are making assumptions about each other's consciousness that are not based on actual knowledge at all. In fact, there is no actual knowledge or almost no actual knowledge that we can sort of ascertain about the the experiential side of our own consciousness yeah you know so yeah that that was definitely part of it but that then also was able to to sort of include things like gender for example so one can talk about consciousness one can talk about something which is even perceived as being as fundamental as gender and then you can figure out is consciousness

a sense of consciousness and gender something that is conferred on someone else by the way they look or behave, or is it actually contained within them? And I mean, so it goes on. It's to do with this funny air gap, this vacuum gap, that exists between us and the ways we try and bridge it intuitively, I suppose. Absolutely. And I think that's a fascinating way of putting it,

because I think we know, very little about consciousness. Someone pointed out to me that the more when we understand a subject, there are not many books on it. Quantum mechanics, you only one. But consciousness, there are a zillion books because we don't really understand it very well.

I think that, and I think Fiamen talked about understanding quantum mechanics better by building a quantum computer, but my assumption is that the more we try and direct artificial intelligence and actually ran a meeting with some neuroscientists and some computer scientists, the more we try and think about that, the more that will tell us about our own consciousness. By potentially developing a consciousness, if that is ever possible, that is, and seeing

what it's like, will teach us about the varieties of consciousness if that's possible. If you only have a sample of one, you don't know very much. Yeah, you'd think so. That would appear to make sense as a sort of progression. It's just, I wish actually the guy. I used to talk to was here. I know what he'd say is he'd say maybe not. Yeah.

Because what he would say is that there's something so big and so fundamental we don't yet understand about consciousness that at the point we understand it, it will render a lot of these other thought processes completely redundant. And I know what he means. I think I often get a sense of something like that with science is that there are some really really very big things that we're not getting. I hope so. That's why I continue to do it.

But there are often principles. The question is the extent to which the big things and the things we do have correlate. Yeah. Which depending on the scale of the big thing, they may or may not, I suppose. And whether you have the freedom that you think you have. For example, I've debated with a lot of people. Well, sure, I'm reasonably certain there's lots of life in the universe. Yeah.

And the interesting question to me, and that's why it's so, important to look for it, just like thinking of machine consciousness, is that we have a sample of one here on Earth. And the question is, would life be similar or not elsewhere? And I don't mean just whether they look like humans. I mean, would it be based on the same chemistry? Is there a unique solution? Are there chemical principles that said life explored this whole channel?

Will there be four base pairs? Will they be the same? And I've actually, the more I've tried to learn about that, I kind of think there may be some principle and may be very similar, although a lot of my colleagues completely disagree. Yeah, I mean, both are very reasonable arguments. That's the nature of the thing. Actually, the film I did after X-Machner Annihilation was an attempt to look at that to an extent.

Yeah. Because I was thinking a bit like the way an AI consciousness, if you got a truly self-aware machine, would not really be like our consciousness very much at all, or very possibly wouldn't be? I thought, we often ascribe to, aliens, things that are really very human. Now that could be carbon-based, but very often it's to do with their intentions. They want to eat us, enslave us, teach us about galactic federations,

unravel, you know, the answers of the universe, or whatever it is. But all of these are very human preoccupations. And you could easily have an alien that not only did not have human preoccupations, but had no, there was no conceptual way we could understand even the idea. idea of preoccupations with regard to that thing. And conversely, it would not really be able to meaningfully interact with us because we were just simply so different from each other. I mean, I mean, I'm so constantly in the danger of sounding like a bullshit about these things, but it makes me think about octopuses and the way, I mean, in a way that that would support what you're saying because you have these two very different evolutionary lines that end up with

things that are actually able to interact with each other and do have all sorts of commonalities despite being so very different. Yeah, well, it's hard to know. I mean, the great thing, the wonderful thing about evolution is it is it you explore a lot of channels and the ones at work are successful. And the question, I guess, is always, are there many different channels that can be equally successful? It's interesting. In evolution, there are many independent, you know, In Africa and South America, there's independence, identical solutions to the same problem, evolutionary ones. You're going to ask a question? I was, yeah.

I am sure, you know, like intuitively, I'm sure you're right what you said about alien life. But specifically to do with it existing somewhere. Yeah. But what's your, why do you think there's this silence? I think, well, part of it is what you said before. It's very, very big. And I was, by the way, but I was thinking about it often, that's not explained in science fiction. I was thinking of Douglas Adams and the beginning of what I love that book because he talks about how big space is compared to going to the chemist.

But I think it's just, well, it's really a big universe and we haven't been allowed very long. And it's actually not so easy to know how the communication changes. channels would take place. I actually wrote a lot about this in the physics Star Trek and another book I wrote after that. Also, people say, well, you know, sufficiently advanced civilization. The universe is 13 billion years old and we're only 4.5 billion years old here on Earth. There could be civilizations that began billions and billions of years earlier. Of course, there's the key question, does intelligence survive very long? Is it a 10,000 year, 100,000 year process before it destroys itself? That's one.

question. Yeah, I don't see how you could possibly quantify that. Yeah, you can't quantify that, but there's there's there's there's also the question of well, how if you're trying to listen, what are you listening for? There's so many different things to listen for. And then there's another thing I think that is even more maybe more relevant to what you're talking about, which is that well actually there's one physical thing I haven't I don't think I've ever written about but it could be that life has to have been recent. That can be as a, I've often said, the atoms that make you and I up required lots of starst to process material. So you couldn't have had complex, you know, carbon systems really early on in the history

universe, and it may be a relatively recent phenomenon. And of course, you require very special conditions. But beyond that, let's say there were really advanced civilizations. Would they have any desire or need to try and communicate with them? But also, how would they find us? Well, exactly. They wouldn't know we're here, but would they even care. Yeah, no, I guess that, I guess that's what I would imagine to be right. I mean, that is to say, in some ways, it's actually pretty early. We could be quite early.

Yeah, we could be among the earliest. And if we're not, we could just be of no great interest. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes. And actually, and this is exactly the kind of sophomoric stuff I can't get away from. Yeah, well, no, but I think when you have a successful, anything, it's because you're tapping into something.

I think many people have those questions. They're turned off from asking them. But we all ask, I think everyone who looks up at the universe has asked, are we alone, why are we alone, what's going to happen in the future, where did we come from? Those are universal questions. And at some level, that's what's so nice to me about connecting science with culture, and that's one of the things that's great about the kind of films you make,

is that you're asking the same questions. And the impact is exactly the same. You said your view of the, of, the world change when you realize that my heat death might be there in my if I define what I think the goal of science is it's the same as the goal of art which is to change our perspective of our place in the cosmos where we come from where we're going and and and one can do that in a lot of ways one can do that in science or one can do it by artistically by by literature fiction or movies which is to provoke people to think about those things which is the most fun thing we can do it's the

humans I think but yeah anyway let me let me let me we get to annihilate you and then I want to get to the new project too. But the AI I want to get there. You didn't, the question was an interesting philosophical question that you asked, which is, and the gender aspect is kind of fascinating too. It hadn't hit me until you just said that. But one ignores, of course, how we get from here to there. And it's interesting to me to think that there may be,

did you think about that or you just said, well, that's not a question. I'm going to assume we've gotten there. I'm not going to worry about how we've gotten there because that's too, there are a lot of daunting questions about whether we can even never get there. Yeah, sure. I think that the way in which science fiction works is that it assumes a bunch of precepts and it doesn't worry about how we got there. We have a spaceship that can go near the speed of light.

That's just what we managed to do. Because you need it for the plot. You need it for the plot. Yeah, that's fine. I'm fine with that. Yeah. So I didn't know. I didn't think too much about it except to think that a good way to give a machine data about how to communicate with humans would involve the kind of a massive accumulation of data that you get from search engines to the internet. But past that I didn't really think about it.

it too hard. I mean, I don't know. There were thought processes, but they're so kind of banal and so I don't feel like they're worth repeating, but no, I was more interested in the sort of step past that. And in particular, I was also thinking really X-Mackner is much more about the nature of just consciousness in general than it is specifically about machine consciousness. Okay. Well, you know, because the more I think about how you might do it, the more obvious is to me that it would be different. I was just talking to the writer Ian McHun, who's written a book about robots too, about the same question. Because we would, if you, when I've talked to AI people and they say, well, we really have to input human values into this. It's worrisome by area.

And they say, what are human values? And you'd assign it the kind of ability to assess things logically and probabilistically that humans don't use. but you'd want to put it in there. Risk management. What's the likelihood? Because it would have all this data, it would be able to, you'd think it would be able to make a rational decision,

but we are the slaves of passion. Yeah. The big difference I do think with a machine is that you can put an enforced parameter into it, which you can't do with humans. Well, I don't know. I mean, Levolution may have put in force parameters into us.

It can put in some enforced parameters, but I'm talking about much vaguer social ones, such as we attempt to put a parameter in which is don't murder people. Lots of people do murder. Exactly. But you could actually with a machine say you cannot murder people. There would be ways of doing that. You think so if it was, if it was.

Yes, I do. So there's not volition in an AI in the same sense of, I mean, the question of free will, it's always a big one. In humans, but also in a sufficiently intelligent, self-aware machine, would the machine override any instructions just like children do from their parents? But you can make. it so that the machine cannot override it in the same way as you could make it that a human cannot override the metal box that it's been put in. Unless it's self-programmable, which I assume. But even if it's, even then, you could have things that it would not be able to overcome. I mean, they're not gods. They don't have an infinite power available to them. You can, you can

if you intentionally choose to do it. Now, you could retrospectively say, hang on, this machine's got a bit too powerful, I'm going to try and curb its power and then fail. Well, yeah, I mean, but the question is, but there's no universals for, thou shall, thou shall not murder. You don't matter. But of course, you have to murder. If you're an intelligent machine driving a car and you have a choice. Sure, between the bus queue.

Yeah, all of that. You have to murder. And so you have to, at some level, it's hard to find universals the more I think about it. But maybe. No, it is, but I'm talking about different kinds of universals. So if you're saying, I want to curtail the power. of this machine. One thing you could do, which we have a version of and you could give a more extreme version to the machine, is say, after a year you will switch yourself off. Or not you will

switch yourself off, something else. A machine that has no sentience, it's just simply pressing a button after 12 months, it switches it off. So it's very within our ability to curtail these things, if we have the intention to do that, which we might not. But that's a different question. Yeah, it's interesting. And actually, you've reminded me in this book by machines like me, where it's exactly put in there that there's a switch off button and the robot, the machine basically ensures that that doesn't work eventually. Well, I think that's the speculation of it always make, which is what if, what if this is too powerful and we can't switch it off?

But given that man's figured out some pretty complex things in the past, that's not. I think people, you're right. I think what you're getting at is really interesting, which is that we, people are afraid of this, you know, the Terminator and all. But in fact, it's, first. First of all, we're so far away, but also it's easy to imagine supreme beings. It's harder to create them. We routinely deal with much more serious existential problems than that.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. And, okay, now speaking of the parameters, I want to move to annihilation at some level, which, by the way, well, I was surprised you said it was based on self-destruction. I was reading somewhere or listening to something you'd said. Why don't you talk about that for a second, but I want to also get to the parameters. That's just very simple, which is that I had sort of noticed, I think, that everybody I would encounter, including myself, once I got to know them sufficiently well, would turn out to have some very, very irrational, self-destructive impulses. Sure. And I think that people often present that very differently.

so someone you know who's a heroin addict is sort of offering up their apparent self-destruction to you and other people seem incredibly sort of bulletproof in their self-confidence and assertiveness and the way they swim through the world. Yeah. But actually get to know them and you suddenly discover these weird sort of, you know, dark matter. Yeah. Sort of counterpoints to the sort of bright, glowing, radiant being that you feel you're encountering. And so I just started thinking, why are we all self-destructive?

And my, the sort of the feeling I got to is that it was something to do with mortality. It was something to do with death. That whatever we're doing, whatever path we're taking through life, we do have this background thing, which is we're going to die. And it's not something we're going to do to ourselves, typically. It's something that is going to be done to us. And so it's like we grab a little. bit of that destruction of the self and own it in some unconscious way.

So that was the principle. That plus strange aliens was annihilation. Yeah, well, and more than just strange aliens, I want to get to that strangeness of annihilation, which is very strange. And remember, our first conversation, you were in the process of making it. And you emphasized how strange it was going to be to me. So it was fun for me to go to watch it. But getting the sense.

self-destructness, I can ask, I think I certainly agree with you in many ways. It's this insecurity, and I've often wondered whether the more successful, in myself, the more self-doubt you have, the more success you have in some level because of the question of whether you're fooling everyone else. I doubt that. I doubt that because I think you'll find lots of unsuccessful people with a lot of self-doubt and lots of successful people with very little, but I thought the self-destructive thing was pretty universal.

Okay, well, now there's self-destruction and strange aliens, but there's more than strange aliens. It's strange laws of physics. I mean, speaking of being constrained by the parameters of the universe, in that region, your time, but as far as I can see, it's everything that's open. And I wanted you to riff on that a little bit. It's exactly what you just said. I think that I think X machina is quite a rigorous film.

And so it's bound by its own desire to be rigorous. And with annihilation, I wanted it to be more intuitive and hallucinogenic. Maybe the hallucinogenic comes from it being intuitive. But there is this other whole side of our thinking, which does not have any rigor in it. It's much more compulsive and helpless. And I think annihilation is a kind of, well, I suppose literally in a way, a manifestation of that.

Okay. Was it much more difficult to, or maybe was it easier for you to just sort of open that up? That's fucking odd. Yeah, I was wondering, I mean, if you're constrained, in some ways it's easier than if you open up the... Well, it's testable. Yeah. So I could... I could in the thing I'm doing at the moment and in ex-Machina,

I could literally contact people and test things. So I could say, is this a fair representation of, you know, Mary in the black and white room? Yeah, yeah, yeah. As a thought experiment. Is this a good representation of that thought experiment? And then they could say yes or no. And annihilation was not testable in that way.

I actually heard you say someone. I really like the fact that you were impressed with the eye of a fact. And I've actually had a dialogue with Elizabeth Loftus, who's a psychologist, who has testified about how bad eyewitnesses are. Yeah. But the idea that empirical evidence is so much better than memory or eyewitnesses, I was really impressed that you talked about how impactful that was for you. Yeah, yeah. It's a, I suppose that's, yes, that's the annihilation of it. But what was it?

The one I think of is like cops talking about how useless witnesses are. Yeah. You know, one person says they had a knife. Another one says they had a gun, shot four times, stabbed three. Yeah. And there's also, actually, if you'll go to empirical evidence, there's lots of evidence that, you know, I mean, what am I,

you know, and probably everyone is watching this knows that the sort of, the way in which the brain is really making its best guess. about the information that arrives at the optic nerve, you know, and can easily be tricked into making a wrong best guess. And so that strange jump, I suppose, the annihilation existed past the optic nerve, you know. It was in the best, worst guess territory. Okay, speaking of best and worth guess, something we have no intuitive. way of guessing is quantum mechanics. And I, and I, I, I, I, I don't know a lot about the new series that you're developing, but I remember you're telling me that, it had something to do with quantum

mechanics. So, you want to talk about it a little bit or, and, and do you want to ask me any questions about it? Well, I, I, I would have had tons of questions. Now I'm worried to ask the questions in case I get answers that contradict what I've just done. It, it, it, it began, it, it began with, with sort of concerns by which I mean literally a sense of concern about determinism and the the sort of implications of determinism and the most the most immediately impactful for us is free will and and then so I then began to read about it and try to understand it and sort of encounter what various philosophers and scientists have talked about in a way it very quickly gets you to quantum mechanics.

Yeah, which I, yeah. Yeah, it does a lot of people, it's the out. Well, all the people who worry about Newtonian clocks covering the world, they say, oh, but we have quantum mechanics and that's the out for free will. I don't think it is, by the way. Well, look, it may or may not be, but it doesn't seem obviously an out to me. I think it has problems, which is say quantum mechanics is probabilistic and so fine. But that doesn't actually mean that the probabilistic thing involves a decision.

It's probabilistic. So in a way, you have something making a decision about the driving of the car that you're not controlling because it's happening within a probabilistic space. You don't derive free will from that. Yeah. And it's even worse, actually. That quantum mechanics is deterministic. It's based on mathematically what's called a second-order differential equation.

You've given the initial conditions of what's called the wave. function and everything is pretty is what the measurements are probabilistic but the underlying laws that are governing what's evolving is completely deterministic well right so uh so so that's exactly the kind of argument i'd encounter so so so then you start asking two questions i suppose one is what are the implications of uh no free will for us um and the other is if if you live in a in a deterministic sort of in a deterministic universe without all the other caveats if you if you live in a deterministic universe what does that allow us to do in terms of predicting behavior and understanding what behavior must have preceded the state that we're in so the degree

to look forwards and the degree to look backwards from from any given set of circumstances So, okay, well, that we've sort of discussed this very philosophically. Do you want to talk about the context in which it's implemented? So this is a series, unlike a movie, right? Yeah, it's a series. Eight-part television series. Eight-part television series. And it's called devs.

It's about a development division within a company. Well, we were talking earlier about, you know, one takes a conceit and says, this is the conceit. So the conceit here is that, uh, quantum supremacy in terms of quantum computers has been achieved some time ago. And now we're in the world of really spectacularly powerful quantum computers, which aren't running 53 or 100 qubits. They're running, you know, thousands.

Yeah, gigabytes or more. Yeah, okay. So more, actually. So, and then the ability of a machine like that to deal, with spectacularly large data. So we could make a very good prediction about where the Earth will be in relation to the sun in 73 years and 10 days and 7 minutes or whatever you want it to be. Because we understand a lot about the mass of the sun and the mass of the Earth and the orbits

and the way gravity works and so on. And so we can make a good prediction. but what if you hugely enlarged those kinds of parameters? So it is a mixture of what happens if we don't have free will and what happens if we are able to predict and backwardly understand the state of not having free will. There's that way sense? Yeah, well, I'm wondering if it's, you know,

one of the arguments that I often give for, what the world appears, it looks like we have, if we will, because it's just so complicated that that you can't, that, that, that, that, that is deterministic at a basic, basic level and so many things are happening that you can't predict what's, what easily what's going, what decision you're going to make. But I guess what I'm trying to understand is, are you saying that the system can actually know that the 10 to 23 particles that are in this room and work out what's going to happen at a precisely, yeah, yeah. And the, the, the thing you said about it looks like we have free will because things are so complicated.

I guess that's right. I think more like we have, it's not like we arrive at the sense we have free will by a sort of step of rational thoughts that says I can see how complicated the world is. Yeah. You know, therefore I have free will. It's more just we have a very strong intuitive sense

that we have free will. But at the same time, we have also intuitive senses, I think, that we don't have free will. So if, if a friend of yours had been stabbed in a mugging, it wouldn't be hard, it might be difficult with the friend, but it wouldn't be hard for me to persuade you that the person that did the stabbing had come from a background.

They were a junkie, their parents were junkies, they were hooked on crack by the time they were 12, and that they didn't wake up that morning thinking, I intend to do something bad and stab, but they are essentially a victim or a crime, consequence of circumstances, that's a very easy way we can intuitively understand that that person didn't really have much free will or maybe any. And so it's a funny kind of mixed state we're in with regard to free will. Cause and effect. We intuitively are very bound to cause and effect.

And usually whenever I'm having this conversation, I'm testing it out, I suppose, What I, the question, if we go back to questions that I tend to ask, is can you give me an example of something that that is completely spontaneous and random and doesn't belong to some prior state in some way or another? And if the answer is that's very difficult to do or I can't do it, then that does lead you very quickly towards a lack of free will. And you, but this could be to do with me not understanding sufficiently well the arguments. But it seems to me that the arguments that then try to reintroduce free will get quite tortured. Oh, yeah. I think so. I think that my own way of saying this is that we live, there is no free will.

The world is deterministic. But for all intents and purposes, we appear to live in a world that's indistinguishable one from one that has free will. And there is no doubt reasons why I do virtually everything I do. But then the question is, do I have responsibility? And at some level, because the world is not so distinguishable from a world that has free will, I do need to take responsibility from actions, even if there are inherent reasons. Which is absolutely the case now.

Then what if one lived in a world where that wasn't the case? Yeah. Where the deterministic nature of the universe allowed for incredibly accurate predictions. And so you could say that in some respects, that's a little bit like minority report. Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about that. But it goes in a different direction. And it's not really concerned with that kind of thing. I can't wait to watch it.

Now, to what extent, though, does, well, I've heard two words applied to the series. You talked to me about quantum mechanics, and I heard the word multiverse applied. And do those manifest? Again, I don't want you to reveal anything you don't want to reveal. But to what extent do those explicitly arise in the context? Because there's a conversation about decoherence and the collapse of the way function. And so, and then what interpretation one applies to that? because also different interpretations have different ethical consequences.

So Copenhagen has a different ethical consequence to Everett, for example. So what the series is concerned with in some respects is ethical consequences. And so there's an ethical consequence to determinism. And there's also an ethical consequence to multiverse. Certainly an emotional consequence. And let me just for the listeners and viewers clarify what context of multiverse you're talking about, because they may not know Everett, which is to ultimately say one classical interpretation of quantum mechanics is that every time you make any kind of measurement or observation or interaction,

the world literally branches because the quantum system is doing many things at the same time. When you observe one, the world branches and there are many other universes, which you'll never be a part of, in which you'll never be a part of, in which, in which the other stuff is happening. So they're always, they're an infinite number of worlds. And at every instant, it's branching into an infinite number of other worlds. It's an interesting, from a, it's a very, it's one way to interpret the mathematics of quantum mechanics. Just so, and that's the kind of multiverses.

There are other multiverses that physicists talk about, which is namely many, many universes. And say, in string theory where there are 11 dimensions, there can be many parallel universes, that's a very different one. But you talk about that. There's tons of different. multiverses, the one that this is concerned with is the one that is derived from the Everett interpretation. But it is also talking about other things. I mean, in effect, it's also talking about Copenhagen and name checking other things like Roger Penrose was not different in terms. So, but not name checking as in just ticking a box, but acknowledging that there are different ways

of looking at this. Well, it's going to be fascinating to think about it. By the way, I, after some other time we'll have a conversation. I don't think interpret... I learned from a colleague of mine who was... When I was at Harvard, I still think it was one of the most... He's dead now, but one of the smartest people there. And he said the problem with it, we shouldn't talk about the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

We should talk about the interpretation of classical mechanics because the world is quantum mechanical. And any way you try and interpret the real world in terms of this rough approximation, you're going to come up with stuff that sounds like nonsense. What you really have to understand is the world is quantum mechanical. And any Everett or any other way of interpreting is just a way for us to try and understand using our limited intuitive capabilities, something that is fundamental.

And maybe we have a quantum computer, it can explain quantum mechanics to us. But if one was able to demonstrate that we lived in a completely entirely deterministic universe, that we could really demonstrate it, we live in a deterministic universe, and say, just for the sake of argument, we could sort of demonstrate that the Everett-type many worlds is the thing that exists. I don't think we would then revert to the same kinds of life issues that one has in the classical interpretation. I think there would be things that would be different. To have free will taken away, I think would make a difference to the way the world function. explicitly taken away where it was obvious to at every step that you know.

Where is it precisely? And I also think it makes the difference if you really, really do believe that as you're driving down a motorway, there is not in a speculative way, but there is an actual equal state in which your tire explodes and you crash and die. That I don't believe that would, would, the truth of that would end up not impacting the way people, live. I think it would. But anyway. Whether there'd be a quantum morality and a quantum ethics. Well, you know, I think the point, our conversation demonstrates to me, and I hope I can't, I look forward to seeing the series, that it's the questions that drive us. And I'm so happy you raise these questions. And I hope you keep doing it. And it's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Thanks so much. Thank you. Cheers. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsprojectet Foundation.org.