The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Ian McEwan

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Lawrence joins novelist Ian McEwan (Atonement, Machines Like Me) at his home in London to discuss a wide variety of topics ranging from storytelling and censorship to artificial intelligence and Brexit.  His latest book (The Cockroach) is a Kafkaesque, political satire in which a cockroach is transformed into the prime minister of England. See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release.  And please consider supporting the podcast by donating to the Origins Project Foundation www.originsprojectfoundation.org Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

The Origins Podcast is now a part of the Origins Project Foundation. Please consider supporting the podcast and the foundation by going to www.orgensprojectfoundation.org. Hello, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I have a wonderful opportunity to have had a discussion with Ian McEwan, who's surely one of the greatest writers in the English language, also one of the most erudite and well-informed writers, with a broad spectrum of books on a wide variety of topics. One of the things that's always attracted me to Ian's writing, besides the clarity and beauty of the writing and ingenuity of some of the plots,

is the fact that Ian epitomizes the artist who's also interested in science. Many of his books involve scientific questions, climate change, nature of science, in many, many different ways. And I thought it would be a fun chance to have a conversation with him about that relationship between art and science, and also the deeper questions, because I know he's interested in overcoming myth and superstition. Recently, when we carried out this conversation,

actually a while ago, before the pandemic at his home in London, he had just come out with a new book that was a take-off in some sense of Franz Kafka's book. It's called The Cockroach, which is not about a man turning into an insect, but rather an insect turning into a man, with clearly satirical references to what was going on and what is still going on with Brexit. So the conversation remains topical and prescient. And it was a true pleasure to spend time again with Ian.

And I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did having the conversation. With no further ado, here is Ian McEwen. Ian, thank you for having us in your abode here. It's a pleasure to be able to talk to you again. Well, it's very nice to have you. I want to begin with your origin story. This is an origins podcast, and so I want to go back and I want to ask, first, your childhood was spent all over the world, a lot of it in East Asia.

What kind of impact has that had, do you think, on your worldview or your writing? Do you think it would have been very different if you'd been brought up an English schoolboy? Well, I'm a post-war baby, and my father was a soldier, and I grew up in the remains of a shrinking empire. So basically that was Singapore. Then North Africa, where we had a tiny contingent of British soldiers, a very large American airbase. And from there I was sent to boarding school in England. So by the time I was 11, that was over those wandering years. And most of my memories devolve around North Africa.

So that always gave me a love of deserts of the Mediterranean. Mediterranean light and heat, a respect for old-fashioned Islam. And actually, I traveled much later in Afghanistan, and it was a wonderful sort of return. This was before the Saudi forms of Wahhabism came around, but it's sort of deeply entrenched, so deep that people hardly knew it. I mean, it was sort of in their bloodstream, deeply courteous, Homeric hospitality, and sort of it gave me great for all my feelings about religion, I have to say, that I respect that old-fashioned core of Islam. I guess it was less the entrancing nature of foreign places as being away from England.

And watching my father, by the time I was born, he was a sergeant, he then became a, an officer. He changed from being a figure of the sergeant's mess to a figure in the officer's mess. My mother was always very conscious of this, class conscious. So she was happy in the sergeant's mess. She was socially uneasy talking to the colonel's wife. And she sort of would be dropping her aches and being very, very careful. And actually, all my father's military officer friends were all men from the working class who had moved up. Oh, I see. And the younger officers who were of higher rank who have gone to Sandhurst, our military, our West Point, were another group. So all my chums, their dads had all come up through the ranks.

At the age of 11, I was sent off to a boarding school in England that was, it was a state boarding school. It was a grammar school which meant that the kids had to reach a certain educational attainment at the age of 11. and they were all drawn from working-class families from central London. And the idea was to give working-class kids or kids from broken homes. So there were a scattering of bohemian families there too. But to give mostly working-class kids the possibilities of a first-class private education, such as they might get at Eton. And it worked.

There are 330 boys, a beautiful Palladian mansion, huge grounds. in a remote part of the countryside overlooking a glorious tidal river. I was deeply miserable there. I was 2,000 miles away from home. I didn't cry. I just went quiet. I just, and I never raised my hand. I didn't speak to anyone unless I had to in class.

And that lasted three or four years. But I was a child of the 50s, and we had no language to describe emotions. I didn't even know I was happy. I didn't have the language for it. I never said ever in my life, I'm unhappy. It would never have crossed my mind. And in my letters home, I would write, you know, we had egg and chips for tea and built beat Norwich 113 at rugby and I got kicked in the shin. No, I wouldn't say I got kicked in the ship. I'd say. Your mother might worry. I'm limping, I might say. Yeah, exactly. Even when the Cuban missile crisis came and there were many big American air bases quite near. So, you know, it was. we knew. But you didn't go under your desks like the American. We didn't have duck in cover. We have much had an English resolve to roast. Okay. That was our ambition. So even then, I was writing home saying,

Dear Mahmots, Fish and Chips for Tea, while the bigger boys were telling us, the world's going to end. We're going to have a fallout nuclear war and we'll be the first to go. But I thought I mustn't upset my parents. So around about the age of 15 or 16, a teacher who's still alive to this day told me that I was clever. And this had an extraordinary effect. Oh, yes. Having been informed that I was clever, I started to be clever. And roughly the same time, I started reading passionately poetry and fiction.

I started listening to a lot of music. These kids from central London were very streetwise. When I arrived there in 1959, they were all in. listening to Chuck Berry. So when cover versions of Chuck Berry came in the Beatles' early albums or the Rolling Stones' early albums, we all just thought, what, terrible, roll over Beethoven, come on. So I adapted and adopted these attitudes to myself. So when the Rolling Stones did a cover version of Carol on their first album, we thought, ah, come on. So they were really wise up kids, the whole atmosphere of the place was very sort of can-do and classless.

And I say this in connection with my travels abroad, that it was one more kind of interesting separation from the usual structures of English class life. And the third element in my origins, as it were, was then to go not to Oxford or Cambridge, which would have been my obvious destination. I was a very bright older boy. surprised to see you have. I went to Sussex University and then it was a really interesting radical place. It was called Balliol by the Sea by the newspapers because so many teachers came from Merton and Bailey in Oxford. Yeah. And they wished to redraw the map of learning.

Aza Briggs, the historian, was its first vice-chancellor. So all the kids arriving in the very first term had to read three books. If I gave you a thousand years, you would never guess what they were. It was Turner's thesis on the expansion of the American West, Jacob Burkart's Civilization of the Renaissance, and R.H. Torni's, religion and the rise of capitalism. And the fundamental idea was you could not study the humanities unless you had first studied the history of history, historiography. And then as well as the usual survey course in English, I was also doing French. I had courses, a lovely seminar on quantum mechanics for liberal arts, know-nothings. I was going to ask about it.

A one-on-one with a very eminent barrister, Peter Calva Coresse, on international relations. And he'd been a barrister at the Nuremberg trials. He was at some connection with MI6. I think then he was headed Penguin books much later. I had courses on European literature, which was very important for me. I first read Kafka and Thomas Mann there and philosophy, as well as all the Shakespeare. And for three years, I wrote two or three essays a week. It was very intense writing course.

And although I still had this lingering worry that I should have gone to Cambridge or should have gone to Oxford, actually it was brilliant. It was the best thing for you. And that too gave me a slight sort of apartness from the usual run of things. A vague sense of exile, both the childhood, the school, and the university education. And do you think that's colored you the idea of trying to not always be part of the establishment? It's hard. I mean, it just creeps up on you.

I've become it. Yeah. I've become a member. There's no way of dodging it. But absolutely the first 20, 30 years of my life. And I've always avoided sitting on committees, you know, for the art galleries, famous art galleries. I'm generally not a committee person. So I'm not a joiner in that sense.

I haven't joined any political parties either. You had to write a few essays, two or three essays a month, did you say? A week. Okay, excellent. I mean, I felt I learned how to write from history class. Yes. Because it was an incredibly intense course when I was in high school, which actually is more intense than at university, where we had to write essays constantly. And when people asked me about how to learn how to write, and I tell them that the only way is to just keep writing and write a lot. And I don't know if that's your advice to young writers or not. Well, writing to a deadline, which I did from the age of 16, because we were writing two essays a week in the last two years of school, was very important.

So it was no big change for me coming to university and having to just keep to that deadline of, I mean, these were not giant essays, but 1,500 words. And, you know, you had to read a book on Tuesday. Yeah. respect. I mean, I know that there are many university courses now in Britain where the kids just write a long essay once a year or maybe twice a year. That does not give them a great basis, I think, on thinking clearly and quickly, especially for journalism, actually, is a great training. Well, the other aspect that hit me when you're talking about this is that when I was trying to guess what three books you were going to mention, and I was reasonably certain, none of them would be a

science book. And I was right. But I was happy to see you took this sort of quantum mechanics for poets class or whatever it was called. But it saddens me to think because, and we'll get, I want to talk to you about two cultures a little bit, but that this notion that being educated means reading the books you did and not reading Galileo or someone else. What do you think about that? If you were redoing it, would you include a science book? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the British educational system was such, well actually, no, the English education system is such that at the age of 16 you have make a choice. And kids arrive at university quite specialised in, you know, so when I was 18 and starting at Sussex, I knew the survey from Chaucer to Elliot, I mean, T.S, that is. But at the age of

16, I didn't know whether I should do physics, biology, chemistry and math, or English, French, history and whatever. And the physics teacher was very keen to have me to physics. And I had the English teacher, this rather charismatic English teacher on my other side. And they were like two devils speaking here or two angels, however you like it. And I finally chose. I took six months. I honestly had no idea. I wanted to do both. That was not possible. The school was too small for that. I chose English largely because the English teacher was so charismatic. They're always the charismatic ones English

teachers. And so many novelists have an English teacher lurking behind them. And he was of that Levis school of thinking about literature and behind it lay a notion that there was nothing more important than the study and exposition and critical thinking about literature. And the rest was sort of sort of froth, basically.

And by the time I was 17, I had an almost religious sense. I had a religious duty to go to university, do an English degree and then teach English, or do a PhD, and then teach English. It was beyond even a passion. I rather resembled the Muslims I admired in North Africa. It just was who I was. And it gave me a certain degree of arrogance. I thought that anyone who hadn't read and understood the wasteland was really not worth talking to.

I was sort of unbearable about it. But I still had, I still kept reading the science. I remember reading when I was 16, Asimovs. It's a book called River of Blood, the River of Blood. It was just about the bloodstream. Books like that, Penguin Specials, blue books that would fit in your pocket. And at Sussex, yes, I had my first encounter with quantum mechanics.

one of the courses at Sussex, very popular and great course, was called Darwin, Marx, and Freud. That was my first encounter with Darwin, but most of the teachers, they were far more interested in Marx. Yeah, sure. And then, I mean, Darwin would have been a great choice for one of the three. Well, they're all three seen as three of the great demoters of human beings from their centrality in the universe, economic and biological. In terms of the three books that you might give undergraduates or coming in to read, Darwin might have been a, it might have easily replaced perhaps the emergence of capitalism.

Yeah. But I at least was familiar with the time I left Sussex with the last few pages, which are the best pages anyway. Yeah, that's right, the most poetic pages. That hedgerow and cycling, as I think it was cycling on. So although I was always looking back in my early 20s thinking, should I now go and do a physics degree, I knew by my mid-20s that my ceiling would have been mathematics.

But there was a moment when in the middle of a class on Chaucer, the math teacher came in and said, I can get all of you through A-level maths. So who wants to do it? And we all just, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was great. And it was a very important origins moment for me because he said, okay, we're going to go at the speed of the slowest.

Anything you don't understand, put up your hand and we'll do it again. And he took us through, this is what really lives in my memory, the calculus. Not simply how to operate it, a moving system, but how Leibniz and Newton invented it. So we actually understood how it worked. And I honestly don't think, for all the thinking, have done and courses of all the rest of stuff I did at university, this moment at school was my full appreciation of some kind of intellectual ceiling that I had. I grasped the calculus, but if I blinked, it was gone. And I knew that actually I'd be finished as a physicist.

But it did give me a huge appreciation of people who could, redirects equation who could do the mathematics or who could think in sort of statistical dynamical terms that I couldn't. And it gave me a respect for the fact that anyone with a minimal intelligence can get a good degree in English. Because there's nothing difficult. You write about that. You can either write well or you can't, but still if you can write sufficiently, you can do a three-year course, get up every day at 2 p.m. panic before an essay and get through. You cannot do this.

I mean, my two sons went to university, one to do social sciences, one to do biology. The biologists were at their first class at UCL, just around the corner here at 9 a.m. Their last class was at 6. They were in on Saturdays for half a days of practicals. My other son, you know, he lived the same life that I did. a quarter of an education.

But you did make an important point that you made it through math, though, with that teacher. Because a lot of people say to me that, well, I just can't do math. And I think the point is that people can do math. It's hard work. And if you work it carefully and work hard enough, it's like many things. I mean, you might not be a virtuoso penis, but if you work very hard, you can play. What surprised me, I did a degree in physics and math. To some extent, I had the same issue as you.

I wanted to write, I did history, and I tried to decide which to do. In the end, I did a physics math degree and took a year off work on a history book. But I sort of, but I knew I was going to go back. But what surprised me was the mathematicians couldn't do physics, which may surprise. Couldn't do physics. That they, that they, I used to think it would be trivial for them because I tried to decide what I would be. And again, I hit a ceiling. I did very well in mathematics.

But in physics, I could see beyond. And math, I could do everything I was asked to do, but I felt I couldn't see where I was going to go next. And I thought to the mathematicians, who I knew, who were excellent mathematicians, that the physics would be trivial. And I was very surprised to see that they had a hard time with even introductory physics, which may surprise you. I was very surprised myself. Well, I'd love to flatter myself to think that I'd be more of an Einstein than a David Hilbert or a Grossman or Reisman or whatever. that I could imagine someone in a free fall lift. Yeah.

But then I have to come running to the nearest mathematician say, can you give expression to this thought? But who knows? Okay, we sort of answered the question I was thinking about, which is why literature and why not? Why aren't you a scientist? Because science seems to me to be a big part of many of your books. There are science themes,

and not just in books like Solar, which is about a scientist, or machines like me, which is about AI. But a child in time, the wife of the protagonist's best friend, is a physicist. And there's a book you wrote, I guess, Enduring Love. Yeah, Enduring Love. Where the, again, protagonist at least is a science writer. Yeah. And you go back to that a lot.

Is that, in some sense, a reflection of your continuing interest in science? Well, if we draw back from this, what is science? To me, it's organized curiosity. So when people say to me, sometimes in public Q&A's, why are you interested in science? As if they're saying, well, it's all very well numismatics, but is it really that important? And I say, well, actually, I'm less interested in science.

I'm just interested in the world. And what is the basis of our understanding of the world? And I would always say to such a person, you are already ready, most likely deeply immersed in scientific understanding of the world. You think the sun goes around the earth. You think that things at a quantum level are very different from how we see them here. You think the universe consists of millions, if not billions of galaxies and we're in just one and it's vast. This is only a recent discovery. So all these things, you think that germs cause disease.

I mean, you just have to stop and think the extent to which you are thinking scientifically about the world. So if you're writing a novel, I can't see how you keep it out. I don't have any. For me, it's not a special thing. It is just curiosity. When the thunder rumbles, we do not think the giants are fighting in the sky. Most of us. Most of us.

my dog probably thinks that the giants fighting in the sky so I don't really want to make a special case I just think if we're going to talk about human nature or people moving in a plausibly shared environment they generally in my novels until recently they obey the laws of physics it's worth knowing some of those laws

so I make no special case for it And I'm more baffled by those who aren't interested in science. I feel they're the ones who have to explain themselves. Yeah, but why science is like such a, it's such a strange question that I've been asked about various people. Why were they interested in science? And exactly, how could you, it's a very, it's a very modern thing. And what, you know, to be an educated gentleman in England and then at 1900 was you really, it would have been unthinkable, I think, not to have some conversational,

understanding of what was going on in science. I'm not sure that's true nowadays. Actually, I'm not so short. In 1900, certainly in 1850, an educated gentleman would know Latin and Greek. Yeah, yeah. Still, even that late, even while people were beginning to think of, you know, in terms of second law of thermodynamics, most people were not aware of it. Most people still aren't. I think, I mean, I think you over us, when you talk about people knowing there are millions or billions of galaxies, I think you were also surprisingly would be surprised, I think. But people's worldview has changed more than they realized.

That's my point. Yeah, yeah. And it's thoroughly ingrained in everything in the way, just the fact that even the simple thing that the universe has a beginning is not just a religious notion. It's now a scientific one. And that was not the case 80 years ago, by the way, in science. Well, anyone's on the subway and someone is sneezing into their face and turns away and doesn't breathe in. Yeah.

Understands the germ theory of disease, which is a very recent discovery. Yeah. So there are all kinds of ways in which we are saturated. And now that we all have these incredibly complex machines that we've learned to think, learn to think digitally about, that's drawn us into. And so much public policy now is impacted by. genetics or machine intelligence and so on. And there will be more. So there are many who might resist it, but they've got to operate in the world.

And I think it's actually very likely that more and more people will understand the basics. Well, you know, before I go off this topic, there's one thing I was going to ask you. I read somewhere that you originally thought atonement would be a science fiction, you thought of making a science fiction book, and I thought, how could you, I was fascinated with that statement, so I don't know whether. Oh, well, I didn't, I didn't, um,

get much further than thinking that the first chapter was the beginning. Oh, okay. So it had a premise. Mm-hmm. Uh, I used to keep this a secret, but now I've sort of given up on that. I thought, this is a novel set in the 23rd century. Uh-huh.

When elites have turned away from technology. They're tired of it. And they wish to live in the manner of a Jane Austen squirearchy. And so they play the harpsichord, and they live in big country houses, and they send notes by messenger, and they ride horses. And technology and science is left to the working class. And it was going to be an illicit love affair between a girl of such an elite background and the gardener who has got the whole of the internet is immediately available to his brain.

He's got diodes. And I got to the end of this chapter, and I thought this is going to be such a terrible novel. So I took the diodes out of his head. I went back to the beginning and wrote a completely different novel, but still using this girl who collects wildflowers in the first chapter and is trying to avoid the gardener. But that's how it started.

And then I just went off in a different. direction. Oh, I'm so glad I'm glad I learned that. Sometimes, as in science, so in literature, and we might talk about their parallels,

it's worth making, you've got to make mistakes. Absolutely. And just as in science, all kinds of terrible cul-de-sacs are closed off by whole careers, and it's a great service. So for novelists,

sometimes you've got to plunge into an error before you find your way. It's not just novel science, it's everyone. And I've said it many times that I think it's something we don't do enough is teach kids how to fail effectively in school. Yeah, and I appreciate all the people who have failed. I mean, you think back to when Aristotle was in Lesbos looking at the lagoon for two years, he's wrong about almost everything. I agree. But he was wrong in the right way. He's probably the first person we know of who thought

that it was worth staring at things for days on end and watching their life cycles. But it might not have occurred to anyone in civilization to even walk past that lagoon and say, I could spend two years looking at all the creatures. Yeah. So he gets one huge thing right in order then to get many things wrong. Yeah, I guess that, well, now you've changed my appreciation a little bit because I've always sort of argued against Aristotle for a variety. Probably I was, because I was brought up in Galileo, I kind of thought of Aristotle as a

foil, but the fact that he didn't look at some things, the fact that when people, you know, People tell me, you know, quote Aristotle in one way or another, and the fact that he said women and men had a different number of teeth, and it would have been easy to stare into the mouth and check that. Yeah, but that's easily balanced by the fact he paid attention to something for two years. And the simple fact is that it was much easier to make a science of the heavens than of life. Life is so infinitely more complex than the planets and the moons and the stars. So most of our scientific advance for 2,000 years was simply looking in the sky. We even now are staggered by the complexity of a single cell. I mean, it's a vast factory.

It would take you, you know, 20 years to run around it, as it were, if it were blown up and know what's going on. So the chances of getting anything right in Aristotle's time were minimal. I mean, because he had no microscope. and very little understanding of how anything worked. But the fact is, he was our first biologist. He looked. Yes.

So, I mean, we got to give him credit. This is just the nature of mistakes. Yeah, sure. And I often find when I'm writing a book, well, I can ask you this now. I mean, it's almost like a grant proposal. I write a proposal of the book I'm going to write, but once I start, it ends up taking a life of its own. And I discover that what I thought would be the right direction isn't.

And I assume that happens a lot more in a novel. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the thing that I value most is the self-generated surprise of finding something at half-past 10 in the morning that you had no idea of at 9 o'clock. And most of writing for me is a pursuit of freedom. In other words, there are certain things that provide opportunities that open up the world. And even whole subjects, as it were, I have no idea. what my next novel would be. If someone came from the future and said, it's called the cockroach or machines like me, and I was five years back, I would be completely amazed. Well, that would be,

it would be sad if you knew. I mean, that's one of the wonderful things about alive is that you don't know what you'd be. It would be sad and also somewhat absurd. But the pleasures of discovery are, I think, some of the most profound in writing. Well, I want to, I want to move away, but I can't is just asking you one question, because if it's not obvious, you're one of my favorite writers, but I've asked another one of my, a friend of mine who I admire greatly as a writer, Cormac McCarthy. Yes. And Cormac says, and I don't know if it's true, but he says that in his reading now, he doesn't read literature.

He reads science almost exclusively. And I'm wondering, you're incredibly widely read, but in your reading, what's the ratio of sort of nonfiction versus fiction and maybe science versus literature now obviously when you're younger it was a matter of building up a vocabulary and a knowledge of the of the base of english literature but now now um well i'm 71 and i've limited time here so i have a very powerful hunger to be informed about the world and it's not only about science i mean history too um and biography so i've I read a lot of nonfiction. But I keep with the fiction, too, partly it's rereading, going back.

I mean, you carry around these opinions of a book that you read 40 years ago. You remember nothing about it except your opinion. And it's great to reread. To be reread is every writer's greatest desire. Unless a work of fiction is very, very short, is very hard to hold, it's structuring your mind anyway on first. first reading, because everything is just unfolding almost like life. It is the book of life. But a rereading gives you an understanding of the architecture of a book. So there's that pleasure

to, but I still read fiction. I mean, I still read new fiction to me. By the way, if it's your greatest dream, I was going to say, I feel like I've taken an emicruen course. In the last six weeks, I've either read or reread eight of your books for this, and it's been really interesting to read them again. I thought you looked rather pale. Well, there's another aspect before we actually go into, I'm not a literary critic, but I want to talk a little bit about some commonalities that I find having done this intensive episode, which is fun to do. I mean, it's not something I would do generally, and it's kind of fun to do, to try and

to read so many things and to try and look for commonalities. But there are two other aspects that I think I want to touch on that you've experienced as a writer, and that is notions of censorship and mob rule. I mean, if I think of your experience. If I understand it right, you had a story's solid geometry. Way back. Way back. I'm going way back now.

But which was being produced by the BBC and then they canceled it because of supposed obscenity. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This must have been about 1978. It was based on one of my short stories, solid geometry. Its narrator has what was then considered to be one of the largest penises in the world

in formaldehyde in a jar. He bought it in an auction and in a row with his girlfriend it gets hold at the wall and slithers down and I actually wanted the camera shots. I think. Yeah. And it was a, there was a bit of rumpus at the time,

you know, and then I was asked on all kinds of panels about censorship of Eastern European writers. And I said, I cannot possibly be confused with what's going on in the Soviet Empire. You know, this is, you know, I'm free. This is just a sexual pruriance matter. Please don't. Let's not try and make out that we're up there with them in the oppression stakes. So I was quite firm about that. I didn't care that much about it. It was course. And then many years later, maybe only 10 years ago, the BBC recommissioned it, and it played, and no one noticed.

Oh, really? Okay. I was going to see. It's kind of fast. It wasn't even very interesting, even to me. It's somehow that you can't see a penis on TV, but you can see a knife being thrust into someone's body. Somehow one seems more obscene than the other.

No, you can't see a penis being thrust into someone's body. Yeah, exactly. That's right. A knife is fine. You know, you've been called out of various times, and I don't want to, but one I thought was interesting in terms of you got a prize from Israel and you went and there was an outcry. And I think it's worth discussing that for a little while. Because we're living in this, you know, to some extent, cancel world of shutting out

those things we don't like. And my late friend Stephen Hawking, who I'm sure you knew, you criticized him for refusing to go to Israel. I wish he went. I wish he'd gone. Yeah. I didn't criticize him very strongly. I just sort of regretted he changed his mind. And he backed off largely because of pressure from the usual quarters.

But those quarters, never mind, you know, when a writer goes to Iran and it'll be, you know, where unspeakable cruelties take place against people who don't fall in line with the Mullahs or many other countries. My interest really was generated by literature. Some Israeli writers I really wanted to see in situ. One of those is David Grossman. The other was Hamas Oz. There was Bully Joshua. And these are among many people in Israel who represent an old commutarian,

open-minded notion of what Israel could have been. And I think now is looking almost impossible that it ever will. Yeah. And I think it would have been really possible if their spirit had prevailed to make an Israel much more inclusive. What about that argument maybe? Because it depends on how important you think you are, but that it's important to also go to places where you disagree to try and open up. Well, I gave my lecture and I criticized.

the Israeli government, I criticized Hamas also, after my lecture. I mean, I'd already had tension with the mayor of Jerusalem. His man broke up. And he was coming over to sort of tell me yet again how wrong I was. But Chimon Peres got there before him, got right in front of me and gave me a big bear hug. And he said, I wish I write this speech myself. Okay. So I felt away.

Okay. And I don't like the idea of stopping Israeli academics coming to study here or to teach here or lecture here, especially when we have Chinese students, Chinese academics. We have people from all kinds of countries that have committed gross human rights abuses. You cannot confuse the population of a country with its regimes or its governments. And you really need to separate those out. And it's very important to recognize that there was still, at least, in 2011, a very strong conscience in Israel that needed that contact. I don't know where we've headed now. I mean, I think we now, with the recent expropriation of land on the West Bank, I think there's no way back to that soft spot. It's hard to imagine how they were going to get back there easily. But separating people from their governments is really, you know, it really hit me.

I was in Vietnam. It was a physics conference. They were trying to bring Vietnam back into the main stream. It was in 1995. It was there to see a solar eclipse as well. But I was shocked. I went to, when I was there, I went to a museum called the Museum of American atrocities. Right.

And for the moment I arrived, I was amazed at how everyone was friendly. Everyone had a relative in the United States. But in the Museum of Astrosities, they made a big point of showing Americans protesting the Vietnam War and separating Americans from the American government. And that that's subtlety that they'd been able to do that was really for a country where we killed so many people ultimately was incredibly generous and gracious. I was very surprised by that. Yeah, we need to keep these lines open. Absolutely. Well, look, now I want to move on to some general impressions I have from.

reading, and as I say, I'm hesitant because I certainly don't think of myself as a literary critic, and I don't want to. There was a quote of yours I've read, which wasn't in a book, but it seemed to me that if I tried to think of one theme that I thought was touched on in every book you've written in different ways, which will go into, it's a quote you wrote in a discussion of one of your last books, and it said, we know what we are. We know we're deficient, because we know what we should be. And what I thought about that, it seemed to me that every protagonist in some way,

in every one of your books, and in some ways suffers from that dichotomy between what they are and what they know they should be. And so I wanted you to comment on that quote a little bit. I mean, I've had a long interest in all the things that ultimately I found in one book, Danny Kahneman's thinking fast and slow,

where every single, single cognitive defect you can think of has a rather elegant name. One of the earliest ones I remember reading in evolutionary psychology was self-persuasion. And self-persuasion is a wonderful subject for a novelist. Its basis was, of course, that if you want to deceive someone else, it's best to deceive yourself. And then you'll be a much more convincing liar or persuader. Once I'd read about self-persuasion, it became one of my ways of understanding how my characters could work.

They could talk themselves into places and then become all the more effective in doing that. We all do that, right? I mean, it's what we have to do to make it through every single day. Yes, and there are all kinds of, you know, Danny lists and one in his book, all the biases to which we're subject to. And so the possibility of slowly generation after generation of devising thinking machines or machines that appear to think that we would slowly purge of all these biases would raise very important and difficult, awkward problem. How would we live alongside people better than us, as it were artificial people who would be better than us, who don't have all our cognitive defects, all those confirmation biases and all the rest of them and self-persuasion problems. And that was really the basis for writing machines like me.

What would it like to be to have an intimate relationship with a machine that did not have all those sort of deep-rooted problems that seemed to be wired in, you know, the little kinds of slack we cut for ourselves in all kinds of situations, which we would not cut for others. And so crucially in that novel, the issue is revenge. Yes. A woman commits a revenge, lies to the police, lies to the court in order. She has a very good goal to get a man to go to prison who otherwise wouldn't, but clearly should.

And my thinking machine, my AI robot Adam, says quite legitimately, you cannot run a, justice system that does not respect the rule of law. And lying to the court and lying to the police is against the law. And so you must go to prison. And by the way, you said you would pay any price to get that man in prison. Here's the price. And I've got very fond of asking readers where they stand. And most people think that she was right to lie and send an innocent man, innocent as charged, she sets up a situation in which he seems to have raped her when he didn't, but he had raped her best friend and caused her suicide. And it's been interesting to me that I thought it was going about two to one.

You know, most people not wanting Miranda to go to jail thinking she was on a perfectly reasonable assumption of revenge being correct. now I'm finding that it is two to one, three to one. So our slack that we cut for Miranda to abandon the rule of law and not go to prison because this is a special case. How do we write the code for lying or lying appropriately? So you go to visit your best friend who's dying and you say you're looking a bit better today. that's a reasonable lie. Very hard to write the code for that. Or, on a far more trivial example, your wife, your lover, goes to a hairdresser, and they make a complete screw up of it.

And you say, it looks fine. Honestly, believe me, it looks fine. Again, that's why I take the quote from Kipling. Yeah, we never tell a lie. Yeah, the quote from Kipling is, but that starts your book. But remember, please, the law by which we live. We're not built to comprehend a lie. that was from his book, The Secret of Machines.

So Kipling was writing long before any sort of digital awareness of how you might encode a machine. He's thinking of industrial machinery. But still, if we're going to have beings from whom we erase all our cognitive defects, we still have a huge problem of allowing them to operate frictionlessly in a human social world, where even the most moral people,

routinely tell lies because they understand the feelings of others. Now, it might be possible to write those algorithms. I have no idea. You have to tell me. But I think it's a stretch. Well, interestingly, there's a flip side to that, which I think is, clearly that's driving you, and it's an interesting question that we have to pose to people who are thinking about programming artificial intelligence.

But the challenges to doing that are many. It's not just, and you talk about them in the book, it's not just this question of human values, but it's also the question that the public, I think, thinks that we're on the verge of general AI any minute and don't realize that it's still, I'm not sure if it's the case. The last time I ran a meeting on AI, they'd yet to have a company that could effectively teach a robot how to fold laundry. Sure. And, of course, one of the protagonists in the book is Turing, who of course, who of course,

in this imaginary world has survived and lived on and became basically the founder of general AI. And he says, he talks about their experience and I'll read it. He said, then we settled down to serious artificial intelligence. And this is the point of my story. At the start, we thought we were within 10 years of replicating the human brain, which by the way is something we didn't hear. But every tiny problem we solved, a million others would pop up. Have you have any idea what it takes to catch a ball or raise a cup to your lips or make immediate sense. word, a phrase or ambiguous sentence. We didn't, not at first. Solving math's problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a

thing the brain is. A one-liter, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer, unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating, the whole thing running on 25 watts, one dim light bulb. And I thought that that paragraph captured, succinctly, the challenge that I think most people don't realize, that faces, I keep thinking that AI is somewhat like fusion. It's always 25 years. 40 years. 40 years. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The trouble is, and as I say in the first page of the novel introducing, because this is an ancient dream, yes, that fiction and TV dramas, Westworld, humans, etc., have presented these things, these entities, these

people that are indistinguishable from humans, artificial people. So they're almost boring. I mean, you know, it was a bit, it's a larger scale version of virtual reality, which I remember reading about in the early 90s, bring it on.

Where is it? So only now is it sort of available. And in fact, when you put it on, you feel sick. Yeah. Try skiing down Vesuvius or whatever they. So it's AI, which interested me in the late 70s, when I wrote a play for television

called The I Immutation Game based on Turing's paper in which characters are talking in a touring-like manner at Bletchley, can a machine think? And I have stayed with the long, boring disappointment of AI ever since. It's only recently, in the last 10 years, that maybe some things began to turn. turn and it was very interesting the match against the Go-Master

and then the chess games where the computers only knew the rules weren't just number crunching, all of that. And Demis Sassabas came around here one evening and we had a sort of wonderful kind of conversation about this. And for people he's the founder of Deep Mind, right? Yeah, just working down the road at King's Cross. Who also has a walk-on part here? But it took neuroscience to tell us the story

of how complex the brain is and that's an unfolding story and I notice that now people are talking about let's have AI as a black box we could maybe imitate all the wiring of the human brain still not understand how it works

but set it running except we can't do it on 25 watts we'd need you know the vast amount the power of a sort of bit mind I worked it out as a physicist once. I mean, one of the reasons I argue that we're so far away is, I mean, the complexity of doing simple tasks is one thing. But the energetics is truly almost magical.

If you try to think, given what we do now, it's clear. What's very clear is that you can't make a human being like an electronic computer. Because if you just did that and you mesh processors together at current power rates, I worked out to have the processing power of anything like the human brain would require 10 terawatts, which is the amount of energy all of humanity uses. And this is 25 watts. So there's a factor of not, it's not just a factor of a few. It's a factor of a million million.

Or not a million million million. That's a hundred million. Closing that gap is going to be remarkable. Well, we mustn't beat ourselves up. We've been on this maybe 80 years and evolution's had four billion. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, and the trial and error there has been extraordinary. The results were amazing.

But we do have a head start in that we can understand maybe the brain of a fruit fly a little bit anyway and see what 100,000 neurons can do. But what's so interesting about this is building a human, an artificial human, is such an ancient dream. It's in Prometheus. We see it in Jason and the Argonauts with 30-foot. robot. Adam and Eve is for me a story about AI. So you have a superintelligence that builds first one, but then another one, a replica of itself. It's an extraordinary story that the

Garden of Eden, if we just come back to the science for a moment. What is the great sin? Not just disobedience. It's curiosity. It's curiosity. Yeah, exactly. That propels. I mean, the saddest moment in Milton's Paradise Losses, final lines about it, and so they slowly make their way out of paradise. Yes.

Is this the story of the end of hunter-gatherers and the beginning of agriculture? I don't know. But it's also a story, I think, of creating something in your own image. Well, except that's why one of the reasons why the story is so bad,

I think the anime-nees story, because your story is about the whole seduction, which I want to read a quote from me, is to create a copy that's better. Clearly, God's interest was to create a copy that was much worse, right? No knowledge, no creativity. And that would have made the God, at least of the Bible, very happy, apparently. Well, I don't know, Lawrence. I mean, if you already knew everything, then you would need no curiosity.

Well, in fact. And I think that's his big error. Okay. So he has got, he's made a learning machine, two learning machines. and he forgot that they don't know everything, so we forgot to give them curiosity. But God shouldn't forget these things, but he's all knowing. Yes, I know. He should be in things.

But, you know, actually, interestingly... Anyone with a back problem will tell you that God is not. Yeah, absolutely. But you hit on something that is a fascinating argument. It's totally off field, but it's interesting. People, there's a Fermi paradox of why we have been contacted in some ways by... And one of the arguments, which I think is quite intriguing, is a sufficiently advanced civilization would really have no need to reach out. There's nothing

you're going to learn from us. They wouldn't have any interest in us. I mean, that's one possibility, is that they might just contemplate their navels. They might be so self-satisfied that they might be. And that may be one argument. We could argue all day about that. But I think it's, there's a quote of yours that I want to read, which is, I think, relevant. And it's not in one of the books, but it's about machines like me. dream of a plausible artificial human might be scientifically useless, and that we've sort of covered, but culturally irresistible. At the very least, the quest so far has taught us just how complex we and all creatures are in our simplest actions and modes of being. There's a semi-religious

quality to the hope of creating a being less cognitively flawed than we are. And I think that semi-religious quality, this sense that we're driven to do that. I want to ask you about that. We have all our religions, all our philosophies, all our common sense, all our gossip suggests that we know how to be good. The great problem for us is being good all the time. Now, we're already having seminars where philosophers are meeting with automobile makers to talk about whether autonomous vehicles should protect the driver against the interests of the pedestrians, say. The very famous problem of, you know, exactly what you, would you hit yourself into a wall rather than not hit a pedestrian? What's interesting about that is whether machines are better at that than us, thinking through all the options in half a second, clearly they would be.

The fact remains that we are now contemplating handing over a fundamentally moral decision to a machine. shall I swerve and hit the truck or kill myself or shall I swerve and hit the person on the pavement? And that seems to me like a civilizational turning point that we have actually passed some moral decision-making over to a machine. And it's very, very strong in AI military research where decisions could be taken, life and death decisions could be taken by machines. So our toe is in the just, we've just put a toe in the Pacific Ocean that lies before us. We have no idea where we're going. We, I mean, there's bookshelves in bookstores already filling with what we should do. But the problem is we're competing now in an open world. And if we ban something in the United States, they'll be doing it in Mexico. And we cannot stop ourselves.

It's irresistible. So whether we can take control of the process or not, I'd rather doubt. I'd rather doubt we can. And by the way, I would now, in the modern world, I'd say if they ban something in Mexico, it would happen in the United States. So I'd like to reverse that. But the notion that I have been very disappointed, I've been part of a number of AI meetings, by the notion that I read from sophisticated philosophers,

is that the big challenge is to build in to AI universal human values. And I say, what universal human values? You name one that we don't disobey, if they're learning empirically, that we don't disobey every day. In fact, most people, in this driving question, if they're told that the car is going to kill them rather than the pedestrians, they won't want to, because most people, if they hit someone, they'll say, well, I couldn't help it. Yeah. But of course they could help it, but they didn't choose to kill themselves. And this notion, so that's just one example of, I know of no universal human values that would make a machine at least behave like humans. Well, nature published the results of a huge survey on should you swerve or not.

And fundamentally, the question boils down to who are the most valuable human beings? And one group, so it was three groups, it was a huge planetary research. One group comprised North America and Europe. And there there was a huge consensus. The most valuable human beings are children. In China, the most valuable human beings are old people. Now, you and I might be thinking, finally there's something about China we really love.

But that would tend to agree with you. On the other hand, I think that there are some fundamental notions that are almost instinctive in human beings about returning favours, of trying to be kind to each other. I mean, I know that people are not generally criminal. Here we are, eight million of us in just, you know, a couple of thousand acres. And on the whole, it works. Cities are a most extraordinary thing. Most people, I just come from New York, everyone in its very crowded city in Manhattan

was very friendly and wanted to cook food for me in return for a few dollars and give me a nice bed in a hotel and nobody murdered me. So I think I disagree little. I think there are some pretty fundamental things we could tell robots to do and not do. But the trouble is to function at the more complex level of social life. And this comes back to the white lie.

The white lie is just a small instance of all the things that would be very difficult. Well, except, well, you know, this is an interesting argument. And I think it represents the challenge because, yes, of course we like kindness, except then there's kindness for your family versus kindness for a stranger. And, of course, we have genetic predispositions in some sense to be kind of, family, but from a moral perspective, I think we would say, you know, universal kindness, but that's not the way we behave. It's not the evolutionary way behave. So that notion of universal kindness, which sounds good, is not implemented in any real way. Well, you know, is it that

hard to write the algorithm that says it'd be kind to the ones you know most and it's a little less kind. But would we want to write that algorithm? Well, maybe not. And that's what this novel is about. What if we made a creature who was nicer than us? Well, you actually, there's a quote, again from Turing, and again, when Turing is berating the protagonist near the end of the book, he says, so knowing not much about the mind, you want to embody an artificial one in social life. Machine learning can only take you so far. You'll need to give this mind some rules to live by. How about a prohibition against lying, which of course is, according to the Old Testament, Proverbs, I think, is an abomination to God, but social life teams with harmless or even

unhelpful truths, as you've been saying during our discussion. How do we separate them out? Who's going to write the algorithm for the little white lies that spare the blushes of a friend? Or in the case of the book, or the lie that sends a rapist to prison who otherwise go free. We don't even yet know how to teach machines to lie. And what about revenge? And I think that this notion that we probably can't do it is part of the problem. But what I think is so remarkable about the book, for me, is not dealing with that question, in which I think ultimately anyone who seriously thinks about AI has to recognize that.

What I found unique and interesting about the book was not the problem of teaching machines how to lie. It was this question that so dominates the discussion now, which is how are humans going to adapt to having machines? How are we going to adapt to having super intelligences? How is it going to destroy human society? We could talk about that. But what I find so fascinating about your book is how are the machines going to adapt? The central thing that I found so fascinating is that the machines essentially, and I don't, they don't want it to give away things, but they get depressed.

I mean, being given this universal set of rules for how to behave and then observing a human society in which they live in which those rules aren't manifest, they don't try and, well, to some extent, the robot does in one particular case, try and change the behavior of an individual. But instead, they just become depressed and turn inward and decide they don't want to live in such a world. They start turning themselves off. And during lists, all the kind of abominations and curable diseases that we live with and the destruction of the planet, even as we say, we love it. And this little cohort of 25 Adams and Eaves can no longer live with those contradictions. and close themselves down one by one.

I mean, we find ourselves difficult to live with one level. Well, that's comes back to that quarter of years. And if we make humans better than us, artificial humans better than us, then they are going to have to either be imbued with some sort of algorithm of profound insensitivity that would get them through the day, or we need to just set them free from the human mind altogether.

At one point, for example, the narrator Charlie is talking to Miranda about Adam writing literature. And she says, well, you know, he says, they're never going to reach that level of human understanding and empathy. So, you know, when we read them, we'll find the incomprehensible. And she says, yeah, but who's talking about humans reading? They might want to write for each other. So that's the that's a you know that's what's fascinating. I think people don't think of the interesting aspect of how fascinating it will be if we ever had such a thing to see a different intelligence.

And we read and we we hear discuss these dystopic, this dystopian views of the future with robots, Terminator or whatever else. But in fact, there's no doubt, I think, and it's happening as AI becomes more a of human life, it will change our lives. But that's okay. And as a physicist, what I'm most interested in is what physics questions when I find interesting, because it could be entirely different ones. And of course, if it was an AI based on quantum computers, as Feynman used to say, then, you know, then it would have an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics, which is totally different than us because we don't, we're not based on quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics could become common sense. Yeah. That's why I think there must be a trillion, billion ways of being having a consciousness and that's why i think if we work just to come back to this point about curiosity and whether an alien civilization would be interested in us that i think they'd be interested us in the way that we're interested in ants and other people are experts on the tropical cockroaches uh we would be i think still a matter of curiosity yeah well it's nice to think we might be but you know i mean maybe um we're living alongside octopuses which are served up in squids, which may have far more intelligence or consciousness

or possibly even self-awareness. And we're routinely, ever since I read other minds, that book about squid, I've stopped eating them. I cannot. Yeah, I can't read a squid. And I don't know if you've seen the famous, there's a video of this, of an octopus in a laboratory in a school that figures out,

it's on the water, It figures out how to get out of the gate and finds a hole to be able to go back into the water. And it's really, it is. If you read that, it's kind of hard to imagine. So would we even recognize another consciousness? Well, that's, that would we recognize it? And would it be so bad for us to recognize that we would learn more about ourselves by seeing the different possibilities of existence?

The example I want to use, and it's one I've written about it, all I haven't published, is this notion that because it's going to change everything, the world will become awful, because computers won't be emotional, they won't be this or that. And I go back, and I think it's probably important relevance to talk to you about this, to writing.

Plato and those of his time, decided that writing was going to destroy storytelling, that the introduction of the written word would destroy, because, of course, you'd have to stop memorizing, you'd stop thinking about things, you'd write them down, and that writing would destroy storytelling. Well, it changed it dramatically, but I think you'd agree that writing hasn't hurt storytelling. It's hurt our memories.

We're not as good at memorizing great chunks in the way that whatever Homer was could once narrate. I've just come from Iceland where there's a huge tradition, now more or less dead, in which very ordinary people who hadn't been, had much schooling, could narrate vast sagas. But, yeah, so of course, but that's a change. You're right. We, we, our memories, and in fact, people are saying it's much worse now that when Pete can't remember we're in 200 words with Twitter and, and or even read more than 200 words.

But at the same time, it's a tradeoff. It's a different world. Yeah. But I'm very happy to live in a world where I can read Ian McEwen. Because if I didn't, if I didn't come to see you in such a world, I wouldn't, I wouldn't get to read those stories. But it's a change that's irresistible. Yeah. Because the advantages are two, too pressing.

So, I mean, all. around us now I've heard for example parents discussing whether they should be teaching their children to say thank you and please to Siri or Alexa or whatever you call it. What is the polytas? I wrote a story before to limber up before I started writing machines like me looking 300 years ahead to a time of where we did finally have this absolutely conscious, totally plausible beings, you could not tell them apart from humans. So science fiction has been there forever. And you could imagine a point where political correctness might be called or just politeness,

that it would be very rude to say to someone, are you real? Because you fully accept you, they have a consciousness, that they are subjective. So it would be really like saying to someone over dinner, I hear you've had a colostomine. you know, this is an intrusive question. Yes, yes. Then you wouldn't know whether the Prime Minister was, you know, made in Solingen in the Ruhr or not,

or whether the last person to win Wimbled and all the last 20 people to win the men's singles was made in Japan. And it would just be a matter of profound impoliteness. And the story is really about a man, he's falling in love with this girl, she's so beautiful, he's so hopelessly enough. And he says, amid coitus, he says, I'm sorry, but I've got to ask you.

Are you real? And the rest of the story is really looping around to get to her answer. Oh, okay. Okay, well, that's... And by the way, the moment she tells him, it's so exciting that he comes. Because the otherness of her just fills him with pleasure. Well, that's the otherness, I think, is not always a threat. No.

It changes things forever, and there's no going back. No, we can't control this. We can't control it, but it's part of the fascination of living, is that there's a future that may be completely different, but it's something that is not necessarily in an objective sense, better or worse. One of the futures that entertains me is our assumption that artificial humans have to be, shaped more or less like artificial the same size. So the Oxford Professor of Future Studies

summoned up a future where we have quantum computing. The optimum size, for being, is three millimeter. So you come back here in 10,000 years and you think, where is everything? And you look down. It's teeming because you could support maybe 60 trillion such beings, all connected.

Humans are long-distant memory, and they might think fondly. of us, and they have absolutely, they know all about us, but we're gone. And there's just this seething world of three millimeter being. It would be logical. And in fact, there's a logic to that. When people, it always amazes me in science fiction, when people talk about the future of humanity, I mean, when people talk about, you know, Elon Musk moving us to Mars or whatever, but in the long term, moving to the stars, this notion that we're going to send humans to the stars is just ridiculous, because we're these 200-pound bags of water that are not well designed for space. The optimum.

intelligence. And so that if our civilization in whatever general sense you use that, the collective knowledge and wisdom or lack thereof of humanity, does permeate into the future, it's not going to do it by humans into space. It's going to be, because they're space and much more than on Earth, mass is at a premium. And it's much, in fact, it's much more sensible to send a small robot to another planet and then take ingredients, even if you wanted to rebuild humans. And only as long as the robot wants to go. Yeah, exactly. And enthusiastically consents.

And the discussion we're having here, Lawrence, is as if we're discussing the afterlife. Yeah. We ain't going to be here. Yeah, yeah. And, you know. But, well, let's end this part because we could go on for this forever. But there's one line that Turing says in your book, which I find fascinating, is that about consciousness.

He says, the mind in science is little more than a fashion parade. I often tell people that the more we understand something, the fewer books, there are on it. I mean, in the sense that you only have to write one book on quantum mechanics or Dirac, you know, I mean, at some level. But there's a new book on consciousness every two weeks. And I'm always amazed that there's so many books, specifically because we understand it's so little. So it is so far in the future. I don't think anyone, maybe you've obviously read more on this in preparation for this last book. But I don't know if anyone has a good definition of consciousness. Half the people writing about consciousness saying it doesn't exist. Yeah.

one of the most extraordinary statements in philosophy that you can imagine. My friend Galen Strauson philosopher, I'm very fond of what he writes, says, consciousness is about the only thing we do know. You know, it's the thing we know best. Your own consciousness is, you live inside it. I don't sure a definition is, well, you could talk about, you know, a functioning organism moving this way and that way and arranging its future through procreation or whatever.

But we know what it's like to have one. Yeah, but the point you made earlier, we don't, we, we dilute ourselves so efficiently that I'm not sure we're aware of our consciousness. We're aware of what we think our consciousness is doing, but probably the underlying operation of it is, is, is totally remote. Anyone who said, you know, where's my pen? I mean, you could spend three quarters of the day unconscious, but you can bring it to mind. It's a miracle. Yeah, it is.

It is, and it's worth writing about, and I'm glad you write about it in different ways. Let me go back. I want to talk about, we've already had one theme, which I want to go back to, is that we're deficient because we know what we should be. But the other was that I've thought about in all your books compared to other, so I read, is the life of the mind. So much of your plot. And it's not that there is an action, because there certainly is.

But so much of your plots, when I read them and read them all together, involve the person thinking themselves about what they're going to do and why they're going to do it. Much of the plot development occurs in the mind of the protagonists and not in the actions that they do. Again, I find it in almost all of your books that I've read anyway, that that plays a very important role and sometimes in the delusions of the mind, of convincing oneself, you know, in Amsterdam, of convincing oneself that, you know, the need constantly to puff one. self-op-up if you're a musician and you have to convince yourself you're wonderful in order to

write the next symphony. But again, is that conscious? Well, that same musician, that composer then goes hiking in the Lake District and just as he's thinking of the theme for this great symphony's writing, he sees a woman being attacked and he does not intervene. So I want to have the life of the mind, but I want action and I want action placed within some moral. It's that contrast to the two. I guess it's that, it's that, exactly, but it's the contrast of thinking versus act. I'm not saying there is an action. It's that, it's that sometime cognitive dissonance, that distinction between what one thinking about why one's doing it and why one actually, and the things one actually does, which are often the other, the other aspect that I find also remarkable,

is how, in a number of your books, how accidents, small accidents, which often aren't, conscious, which are literally accidents, have a profound impact on a person's life, whether it's accidentally taking in the atonement, taking the wrong letter, or there's so many accidents that happen. And they, and again, I wanted to ask you about that. But well, we are the products of such accidents. Yes. Your mother decided not to stay in and wash her hair. She went to the dance. She met your dad. And, you know, the very small. probability of you was set in motion.

So life is packed with this. Practically everyone we know we met by accident. One of the great interests and fulcrums in literature and many operas are about this are the tension between an arranged marriage,

parents looking for social status and matching or religious beliefs and romantic love. someone meets someone by accident, the parents are fighting against such accidents because they have a scheme into the future of preserving wealth or whatever within the family. And it's become one of the most powerful plots, especially in opera. Interesting. The heroine meets a young man, he looks poor, but of course, because he's got moral qualities,

he's also a prince, you know, that has to be covered. and the parents resist, the father especially, the jealous father who won't let his beautiful daughter marry the wrong man. Very, very powerful story, and it's like the human struggle against accident. Well, you know, that's right, but I think, again, there's an evolutionary basis of that, right? Because as a scientist, I often tell people that, and it was Feynman who influenced me this, but, you know, we don't want to think, we want to think that everything that happens to us is special, when most of the time it's not special at all. We assign purpose to things, which is one of the reasons we have religion,

and of course there's this utility to it, because often in a survival sense, you suffer less by assuming there's purpose to the leaves rustling than, you know, that there's something there that's dangerous. And one of the hardest things for humans to do, at least as a scientist, is to recognize the things that happen to us are not significant. They're accidents. Yeah. Because we want it to be, we want there to be purpose.

We want there to be specialness. There could be great utility to romantic love. Imagine a super rational being deciding when to fall in love. It would be like the old problem of 100 hotels, you know, and you are making a journey. Well, we know it's 37, the 30th hotel or whatever it is. Or you rate the first three best ones and you take the next one that's better than those first three. A wonderful matter.

So a super rational being wondering about falling in love would always think, yeah, well, so she was great, but I better wait for the next one. So there's a marvelous randomness. You cannot predict who's going to fall in love. And so whole literatures are devoted not only to the resistance of parents, but to the accidental nature of two people who. between whom some sort of chemistry, which they cannot resist, nor did they choose. And yet they're operating in a world of choice. They would then make that decision to defy, so Romeo and Juliet, you know, here are lovers, Star-cross lovers, across a divide of enmity in the city.

Will it triumph, or will it be crushed? Well, it's crushed, but great poetry flows from it. So endlessly, novelists take charge of all these coincidences, running them side by side with a sort of plausibly created world, which we can sort of believe in. But they take that role of a godlike control of coincidence, arranging coincidence at the same time as withholding information or leaking the wrong. information or giving the impression of one thing leads to a conclusion that's ultimately betrayed or confounded or whatever. So just to come back to, and Richard Dawkins has written about this marvelously about, you know, the chance of you being you. Sure. This, this connection of CAGT is, you know, is so unlikely and

rests on unless, you know, it's a cousin marriage which your parents have raised. Yeah. But even then they don't know what reconfigure. is going to get you out of these two cousins. And we know the harm, you know, cumulative cousin marriage is course. So that friction between the intention of the novelist trying to recreate chance when it's impossible. You're in control of chance is one of the great engines of a motor. So to come back to what you were saying to me about the life of the mind and the life of of action,

it's very hard to decide what to think about. As someone famously said, the mind has a mind of its own. You walk down the street, you say, well, I'm going to think about this piece I'm going to write. But soon, you know,

something drifts across your mind, a bit of sexual desire, a bit of hunger, some sound sets off another thought. The randomness of thought or the slight useful uncontrollability of thought is probably necessary

to all the kinds of inventions we've had in literature and science, all those parallel investigations of what is. And that's something we touched on earlier. I want to come back to. Why did I decide literature and not science? I think they are parallel pursuits. They have different methods, form formations. But they are still driven by a wish to understand

either the natural world or human nature or the human condition or what it's like to live in modernity. this is the pursuit. And it almost doesn't matter with it what you pursue. Absolutely. It's as if you could take a stone and put it on the accumulated can of human knowledge. You can put a novelist stone on and you can put a physicist stone on. But putting the stone there is the important thing.

Well, and the fact that you can enjoy both. But point is, and actually you've written about it, in a number of your books, there's this question of the science versus humanities. And we have this bias in our society that as a scientist, it's fine for me to read literature and I can enjoy it. But it doesn't always work the other way around. Some people don't find that there are those parallel tracks. And I want to, but there's one question before we get there.

I can't resist asking, which is these accidents, which are the engine and the fact that we can't control what's happening to us and what we're thinking about, which is the engine of literature, certainly your literature, but literature in general, is when it comes to machines like me, the fact that we don't understand probabilities, that we don't think of probabilistically as humans is essential to the way we behave, whereas an artificial intelligence would presumably think probabilistically and might ask this question, well, is it okay, is it reasonable to be in love with this person when, in fact, given the probabilities of what I'm doing, it's quite likely I'll meet a better person, or, or, you know, there's so many probabilities of what, what risks we don't take,

we, that we, that we, you know, that we'll smoke a cigarette with abandoned, but we won't, we'll, we'll want to make sure we go through a metal detector at an airport when the, when the, the relative risk is much greater of one than the other, that it, it would be interesting to see what the literature of, of a species or a thinking being that thinks probabilistic. would be whether they could they could have that kind of engine that's driven by the by our misunderstanding of the of the role of accidents in life I think that that and and well okay let me just stay with that for a moment Lawrence the creatures we make will have no evolutionary past yes and we do and us not thinking probabilistically clearly has

utility I mean otherwise you'd be thinking problems yeah obviously it's probably it's the best way to go what we have, or it's the least bad way to go, but there must be cumulative utility over thousands of generations. And we can observe it in the utility functions of animals. Sure. Foraging and so on. How a bee makes decisions, as it were, for routes from the hive to various good places. Even a bacterium like E. coli is making sort of optimal choices that are finally weathered by evolution. And the creatures we make will not have that path. Except they will have a future.

And that's the interesting question. And so if they're learning, they'll be at least evolvable, if not adaptable. Well, they will evolve maybe by taking over their own invention. And well, likely. And what amazes me is that if eventually, and I think this is in the long term, if intelligence is going to survive,

I don't expect it to be in bodies like us in the long run, perhaps. But I find it fascinating to think that if that happens in the far future, there'll be a debate about intelligent design versus evolution. And of course, they will have been intelligently designed. We're discussing the afterlife again. Yeah, it's true. As Adam says, people who believe in the afterlife never discover that they're wrong. and Charlie, the narrator, is very dismissive of this.

You think that's profound. But for Adam, it is profound. Well, you know, it's profound. Finding that you're wrong is, again, you've got to be conscious. There's got to be an afterlife to find that you're wrong. So if there's no afterlife, you never know. No, but being wrong as a human, as you just said,

is an essential part of living. No, but to be wrong as a dead human. Oh, yeah, of course. There has to be an afterlife. Yeah, that's right. So if there isn't one, those who believe in our life will never know their mistake. And that's the argument that's the argument that's often used. Well, why does it hurt you to believe in it?

Because if it's not there and... But we are the only ones who will know our mistake. Well, yeah, but... Atheists who discover that there's an afterlife will be able to say I was wrong. But believe it, we'll never have that pleasure. Yeah, I guess that's true. But by the same token, people say, well, why not believe in it? Because if it's not there, it's not a problem.

The problem is it impacts on our behavior now. Yeah, but that's like saying you got a headache. I said, I've got a very nice placebo for you. Yeah, exactly. You have a placebo. Exactly. Well, you know, the other aspect that I found fascinating about your literature is that there are usually three protagonists, not two.

And it's either, and a lot of times it's scorned lovers, speaking of the accident of falling up. The accident of falling in love, which of course, often one finds out that one can be. one can be in love with many people. And it often produces interesting drama, as it does in your books. But at a child in time, there's a husband, the wife, but the friend, in atonement, there's the two romantic leads and the sister. In Amsterdam, there's the two lovers and the dead woman. In the Children's Act, there's the husband, the wife, and the child who's involved in the legal proceedings. I could keep going on. And every time I find this kind of triad, which makes it more,

which makes the accents of existence, it propels that. And again, I'm wondering if that's conscious or not. No, I've never thought of it in these terms, and I'm pretty sure I could come up with the number five, or seven. But I find it interesting that it propels it because there's always, because two people, even though they can't control their lives,

and two people can do a pretty good job of not controlling their lives very well, when you add a third, it adds that extra. Sure. One of the oldest plots is a stable situation, could be two people, could be a village, and a stranger appears. Someone enters the scene. I mean, famously pride and prejudice as a wealthy young man moved into the neighbourhood, Mrs. Bennett. So into the love affair is projected, you know, someone who's going to disrupt the whole situation. So I think that that is quite fundamental to many, many plots.

Well, considering disruption and the fact that I've read that you used to be called Ian McCarver, but the notion that there are fundamental problems, there was a commencement address that I don't know whether it's apocryphal. And people think it's Carfonica, but he doesn't, and I've given two commencement address, but I always wanted to have the courage to start this way. but he said things are going to get unimaginably worse and they're never ever going to get better again, which I thought was a wonderful way of introducing young people to their future, perhaps, at least getting to think about it. But being wrong about the present and the future is relevant when we're trying to make a society better and not worse. And there are two aspects I want to close with, because one of them relates to the most recent book you just produced, which is cockroach,

where it's clear that we can make society worse in an organized way. In fact, in that book, there's a quote which says it was a defining principle of an open society that everything was lawful unless there was law against it. Beyond Europe's eastern borders and Russia, China, and all the totalitarian states of the world, everything was illegal unless the state sanctioned it. I'm wondering with the notion of what's happening with political correctness in the West right now, whether we are moving from that notion, a democratic notion of an open society to exactly the point that everything is forbidden unless specifically sanctioned,

that we are afraid to do anything, to say things, to openly question things, because of the impact of the strong pressure from the Internet and the backlash. So I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah, I'm sort of partly sympathetic with that notion, but sometimes I think it could be the exact reverse. We're living through a strange form of sexual revolution. Let's just keeping the sexual field for a moment in which, I don't know about you, but I've been to half a dozen gay marriages now,

and they're so completely taking for granted. Absolutely. And they're just as boring as straight marriages. And the priest is a woman, and the sermon is just as boring as it used to be delivered by a man. But there is this extraordinary embrace and tolerance that would have been inconceivable in our lifetimes. And it is a brilliant development.

It's opened up. So in its wake comes all kinds of other ways of being sexually. They are fighting and transsexuals. all fighting for their space, and we are in a kind of early stage of development, where they are so emphatic about making their corners and their spaces, that they are patrolling the boundaries of what is correct to be said, with a kind of emphasis that I think in 20 years will have vanished, completely vanished, and it'll be like the famous bar scene in Star Wars,

you know, that there'll be every kind of sexual expression, completely tolerated and no one will be bothered by it. Well, it's nice to see you have such an optimistic view in the future. I have quite an optimistic view what happened to gaze and thinking back to Turing's time. Sure. The speed of it. It's remarkable. I could never have guessed it 10 years ago.

And I think that my feeling is that it happens with such speed because of, and maybe that's why this young people's movement for the climate will be something. When I saw people my daughter's age, they knew gay people. And for them it was nothing. I realized it didn't matter what the Supreme Court did or six-year-old white men. It was already a done deal. The next generation couldn't see it. They just had no understanding.

And so maybe the next generation, although maybe it's going to be, they're going to suffer because of what's happening. Maybe this climate, quote-unquote, debate that's happening will just be. Yeah. Well, I really hope so. Because it needs such a profound transformation. but smoking is an amazing thing I mean the transformation there

I was never a smoker I always hated it but I could never say it because it was unmanly to even complain about it and when Christopher Hitchens was still alive and he's a very heavy smoker and he started complaining about how the walls were closing in on him

I said we got you bastards on the run finally now you're smoking huddled in street corners outside buildings and you're the pariah. I said, I was the pariah. Now it's your turn. Okay. So there's one revolution. Well, there's speaking of revolution.

I want to end. Not everything is getting worse. No, no, absolutely. Although let me end with your new book, which the cockroach, which is just coming out, which fascinates me. When I first, I mean, the first sentence, of course, one thinks Kafka. And it's a reversivist Kafka. It's exactly what the economic philosophy of people in this book is.

It's the exact opposite of Kafka. Yes, it's a reverse. But it's a comment on what's happening. And since you're so optimistic, I want to read this quote, ask you to comment on it, and then we can go to dinner. How does that sound? It's this former cockroach who's become a human body for a while now talking to his friends. He says, as our Latin name, Latodia suggests, we are creatures that shun the light.

We understand and love the dark. In recent times, these past 200,000 years, we've lived alongside humans and have learned their peculiar taste for that darkness, to which they are not as fully committed as we are. But whenever it is predominant in them, so we have flirt. where they've embraced poverty, filth, squalor, we've grown in strength, and by torturous means, and much experimented failure, we've come to know the preconditions for such human ruin. War and global warming certainly, and in peacetime, immovable hierarchies, concentrations of wealth, deep superstition, rumor, division, distrust of science, of intellect, of strangers, and a social

cooperation. You know the list. In the past, we have lived through great adversities, including the construction of sewers, the repulsive taste for clean water, the elaboration of the germ theory of disease, peaceful accord between nations. We have indeed been diminished by these and many other depredations, but we have fought back. And now I hope and believe that we've set and trained the conditions of a renaissance and towards darkness. So for an optimist, I thought that this book was an interesting take on that. So why don't you have the last word? Okay, remember they're not, Humans are not as fully committed to the darkness as the cockroaches. So, you know, it's not all so bad.

And, well, this is a stirring speech. He's just about to lead the whole cabinet who are still in co-crum. No, we're now back in cockroach form, and they're going to walk back to the House of Parliament. Mission accomplished, basically. They have got us out of the EU, as it were. Actually, what they've done is announced a whole new form, of finance and economics

and the organisation of society. It's called reversalism and money simply flows in the opposite direction. I tried very hard to think up something as completely pointless as Brexit and I think I probably

failed. So in reversalism you go to work, you've got to pay for your job but you go to the shops, you get take away goods, you take away the money

with it, and with that money you pay for your job. And lots follows from that. A complete nonsense, but not as absurd as turning our backs on 76 trade deals that we have around the world, which we're going to walk away from,

and cooperation in science, in agriculture, security, which we will work for the next 25 years painfully, painstakingly, to re-establish, both with the EU and around the world. world. For what? It's just, it, as the cliche goes, it boggles the mind. It is completely absurd. No one anymore in Britain is making an economic argument for it. It's become mystical. People now just want it.

They say, we cannot wait any longer. We've got to have it. It's become like a religion, a religious fervor for something that everyone knows will make us. a little worse off, maybe catastrophically worse, or we don't really know, but it'll become drearier. We will cut ourselves off from many things. We will have to slowly allow students back in because universities need the money from foreign students. Our science can't run without a free flow of people. Our agriculture, someone's got to pick our strawberries, our national health service needs of huge influx of immigrants. We will have not solved anything about immigration. Our sovereignty, which people really care about,

well, what's not told is every trade deal is a compromise with sovereignty. Our membership of NATO is a compromise with sovereignty, and so is our signature on the International Treaty on the seabed, or the Good Friday Agreement. I mean, if you fall in love and marry, for the sake of happiness, you've compromised some bit of your own personal sovereignty.

If you decide to have children, which is, for me, one of the greatest happenings in life, you sacrifice enormous amount of personal freedom. And so it is with nations. We're deeply connected. And as the cockroaches know, the more connected we are, the less chance they have to thrive. So Brexit, I think, is a greater folly than reversalism. Well, that's why it's one of the other reasons this book is so brilliant and why you're writing is so brilliant. And for me to take it back to what you said at the very beginning, something we both, desperately agree about, the connection between science and culture, that if the purpose of science

is to force us to reevaluate our place in the cosmos, that's also the purpose of literature. And that's what with this book and all your books you do so well, I could talk to you for 10 hours. Thanks again. Thank you very much. Dinner time. Okay. Dinner time. Thanks. The Origins Podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Dahl, John and Don Edwards, Gus and Luke Holwurda, and Rob Zeps. Audio by Thomas Amison, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects, and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.