Where Does It Begin?

00:00:00 so I would like to briefly introduce the participants alphabetically Chris MP he is the Stanley Kelly visiting Professor for distinguished teaching at the department of astrophysical Sciences at Princeton his home is Arizona where he is a university distinguished professor at University of Arizona and Deputy head of the Department of astronomy in charge of all academic programs he has obviously

00:00:31 huge number of Publications and honors just for our purpose today I will say that he's written three popular books The Living Cosmos which was published in 2007 How It Ends talking about life and one of the reasons why he's here his new book is called how it began Professor Joseph Cohn who's sitting to his right is professor emeritus of

00:01:02 mathematics at University at Princeton University he is also winner of numerous prizes including the society still prize and the Bergman prize and he's a member of the New York National Academy of United States National Academy of Sciences he has written numerous articles and spoken in many places Professor Tim Maudlin is sitting here he's a primarily his interest focuses on the

00:01:33 foundation of physics metaphysics and logic his books include Quantum non-locality he's a professor at NYU his books include Quantum non-locality and relativity truth and Paradox and the metaphysics within physics and also philosophy of physics space and time which is due in publication 2012 it's not yet published the last one any moment okay he has been a Guggenheim fellow a

00:02:04 visiting professor at Harvard and prior to going to NYU he was at Rutgers Mark Norrell has been with us a number of times he probably knows about people and geography more than anyone else certainly in this room if not in the world he's constantly traveling he is the chair of paleontology at the Museum of Natural History and he has also written many scholarly articles

00:02:36 and books and his recent book is called traveling the Silk Road ancient Pathway to the modern world so with that we will begin foreign

00:03:10 was asked in the in the link on the internet was why are we curious about beginnings maybe this doesn't work let's see let me put it now does this work or not can you hear me yeah okay maybe I should anyway I can hear myself now okay so um the question was why are we curious

00:03:43 about beginnings and um uh I think that um we're curious about Beginnings because that's how we can organize our our thoughts our beings and I want to uh quote here uh Borges who is Jose Luis borgas who is one of my favorite favorite authors who writes um I wrote a short story called aleph which is the Hebrew for Alpha

00:04:14 and he says as a boy I used to Marvel a Marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and um and lost overnight so so somehow you have to make order out of this world and the way to make order out of the world is to start somewhere and to start at a point and start counting so it's the first reason why we're

00:04:45 curious about about Beginnings now I also want to point out that the moment one thinks about beginnings one can't help but think about endings first of all it's coming in two weeks coming in two weeks but I think that's sort of inseparable let me start maybe with with the biblical uh kind of thing so alif is the word for Alpha is the

00:05:19 foreign Hebrew and uh and and it turns out that the the writing of the Bible starts instead of starting with the letter alif starts with the letter bet which is the same as beta in Greek or Simone and but in Hebrew it's written like a kind of a thing that's open on one end it's like like this more or less and so um

00:05:49 anyway there are two explanations for why should why doesn't it start with aleph which is the first letter so one explanation is sort of mystical and I say well uh aleph being the first letter is sort of humble and doesn't want to go first so that's one explanation but the other one which is by the um commentator uh Rashi which is uh short for Rabbi

00:06:22 it's it's a Rashi and he his explanation is that that this letter bet has an open end because and the other things that are closed because they're open and encourages to ask questions and you ask questions about everything but but the closed part means that

00:06:54 you're not allowed to ask about what comes before so uh so it sort of implies that when there is when you say something begins uh you saw it sort of implies that there was something before in some ways so anyway that's a theological thing so that is one connection with opening and ending but another connection is this that in mathematics the letter alef actually stands for a

00:07:28 kind of infinity in fact Infinities according to the mathematician Cantor were classified I left Sub-Zero out of sub 1 and so on and turns out after you take all the numbers collection then you can sort of adjoin still another number is called alif Sub Zero and then you can continue developing add one and keep going and then you reach still another number

00:07:58 out of sub 1 and so on so you have so you have the uh so Alice the first thing really refers to the end of the ordinary things the beginning of the new things and similarly in ordinary academic language you you go to commencement exercise when we're really ending one period and starting another periods so so um there is uh I think there's there's the

00:08:29 the property um uh let's see perhaps some other remarks uh maybe I should stop for a while Counterpoint yes please Counterpoint to the the desire to organize our Affairs and have a story that we can tell with the beginning and an end I think there's a tension because in historical terms preceding you know long before there was a scientific story of our Origins as humans and the origin of the Earth or the origin of the universe and long

00:09:00 before there was a judeo-christian tradition with the Genesis the major cultures of the world in non-com not in communication with each other had endless time cycles of time the myth of the eternal return and that's a tradition that goes back to prehistory as long as we have records so you know uh simultaneously in amongst the Aborigines with dream time amongst the early Asiatic cultures wherever we can understand their culture they did not have Origins they had cycles of time

00:09:32 Cycles embedded with in Cycles we've been made it familiar with the Mayans and their predictions recently but that's a pretty Universal trait of humans and to me that speaks to the fact that there's a predilection to avoid the notion of Beginnings or endings because as we've already seen it's a it's a bogus reassurance to say that you have a story that begins and ends because immediately you have a boundary and you and then you have to ask as Greek philosophers asked you know well if there's an edge to the universe what's Beyond the Edge and if

00:10:03 there's a beginning of time what started it or what was before that so you've not really finessed anything of the Infinities by declaring that you have a beginning and an end and I think the ancient cultures just went with that and posited themselves in essentially an infinite stream of events without maybe always thinking about it too deeply but they came up with that independently of each other around the world which is just meaningful to me well I mean I think there's something interesting just about the cycles of

00:10:34 time also because that I mean some of the set okay sorry better I think there's something interesting about this idea of cycles of time too because it's just it's how much time it exists because uh many of the central Asians that I work with and have been around as well as like a lot of the what I hear from the ethnologists that I work with at the museum that you know they talk about this idea of what time means and that I mean I think that you know us

00:11:05 we sit here with our you know our iPhones our calendars and everything we can say well okay tomorrow two days from now I'm gonna do this last week at this time I was doing this and whereas that uh you know so many of the nomads things that they'll talk about things and they'll say well then you'll try to figure out when did that happen and it turned out it happened like 125 years ago but they're talking about it was like the other day and so like I mean the whole notion of how long these Cycles are is very very culturally defined and very very different and that's an interesting phenomenon

00:11:36 itself because it makes you proximate in a community both in space and time you can have your neighbor who you shared a meal with the day before and then you can have this this thought of something that actually happened three generations before you're born exactly well I guess if it's my turn it's your turn I mean let me just if the if we start

00:12:07 with the question why do we care right what psychologically why do we care about beginnings and I guess we ought to get clear sometimes because and to take another part of a larger version of the Bible um also an Arcane and logos right in the beginning was the logos was the word because in a story like that what happens at the beginning organizes in a certain way rationalizes

00:12:38 explains everything that comes after um but I want to distinguish that because we also have an astrophysicist here from Simply being curious about how things began because I take it the story we have now is more or less that the the way things began if they did begin physically doesn't give us that right it's a it's an interesting story it's a fascinating story but it's not one that particularly is going to make sense out of everything that comes after so

00:13:08 you know if you want to start by thinking why we're interested in in in Beginnings I think it's worthwhile seeing that it's true in narrative often the beginning plays a very Central role but if we're expecting that of the universe we may be sorely disappointed exactly I mean maybe we should just pull the audience that does the knowledge that you are sitting on a planet in this room having a conversation as part of a 13.7 billion year story that led to the development

00:13:39 of 100 billion galaxies and probably 10 to the 22 habitable planets where analogs of this may or may not be occurring in a vast universe that's 45 billion light years across does that reassure you that or not I mean that's as good as we come up with and you know it's it makes cosmologists you know they pat themselves mildly on the back but not very much because the most of the universe is still enigmatic but that's that's our back story it's a pretty amazing backstory I'm not sure if it

00:14:11 satisfies the psychological requirement I think though even within the context of like life on this planet that we can look at it within this the same sort of thing I mean it's just that there's several historical events that have happened that uh you know at one point that the Earth was pretty close to to being completely by turning into an ice ball like very close to turning into a nice ball uh you know everything like this is not in the dis and distant past distant past

00:14:42 paleontologically it's maybe about 300 million years ago but certainly multicellular life certainly that there was organisms around and everything else that and that would have been a very dramatic thing I mean it would have like basically stopped all the develop the evolutionary development of organisms to that point and it would have been like you know start over time and that uh you know that that it life on Earth has had its ups and downs in the same way and each one of those you could look at as a beginning or that there's been massive Extinction and then there's been rebound after that so that's I mean that uh you

00:15:15 know the whole you know question of Beginnings is basically I think that what you could pose to people in astronomers and come up cosmologists you know beginnings of what so I mean one question I would want to ask the animals that I believe to be most highly sentient um is is do they have a do they have a question of about Beginnings there's you know it's it's controversial all the evidence of this nature that elephants mourn their dead and are aware of non-existent you know there's a small

00:15:46 set of higher mammals where there's apparently either some version of a perception of self or some awareness of the possibility of non-existence but that's not it's not proven at all but if I were wanting to interrogate an orca or an elephant or one of those animals that that's pretty much what I if they have a transmitted culture which is of course that very high bar that we might ask of an animal to declare them somewhere in a you know Plateau around about our

00:16:17 Mountaintop of intelligence that's one that's going forward and then I'd want to know what they think about Origins so it's a you know it does Mark out and then you wonder in the history of the planet you know no one's ever got to the stage we've got to ask such questions to talk about stories in this way has it happened elsewhere in the universe I mean yeah it's since nobody's going to take my money for sure I'll place a heavy bet that yeah it's happened somewhere else

00:16:49 well um I think that was my opportunity to tell the joke so uh one of the questions that comes up with uh important for Beginnings is the in the debates over uh over morality of abortion and contraception and whatever so there is um a joke which probably most of you know

00:17:21 but apparently some don't I don't know is that you have a rabbi a Catholic priest and a Protestant Minister are discussing the question of when does Life Begin and the Catholic priest says well we believe that life life begins at the moment of conception and Protestant Minister thinks about this and says well you know we've started

00:17:53 somewhat different view of things we believe that life begins when the fetus is becomes is liable and and Rabbi says well I I don't know from my experience we think I think that uh life begins When the Children leave and the dog dies so there could be these different these

00:18:25 different things about beginnings and how about like you know cultures several cultures that don't think there is a beginning they just think that this is the way it's always been so you know I've been wondering about this not so much in terms of beginning but in terms of uh everything that was being discovered in your field and I've often wondered why are we interested in it and so the issue of being interested in

00:18:57 the beginning is related to our interest in learning more about something and I'm not so sure why what makes I'm not saying why in terms of its validity why in terms of our psychology as humans at least not all humans but some humans so interested in it and fascinated by it I think I mean I would like to hear your

00:19:28 opinion on this I mean the idea of the sort of Victorian aspect of progress and the fact that I can talk about a cosmic version of this but the fact that we haven't always been here on this planet and that we evolved and that we were sculpted by the environment and natural selection and we have certain capabilities that we're overly impressed with obviously but you know they're legitimate capabilities and I think that's reasonable to want to know that the Cosmic Spin on it what might be that

00:20:01 the Universe contains carbon and without carbon organisms like us would be impossible and it's actually hard to even contemplate theoretically how to do you know as well without building blocks like that and so our stories are bound up with a history of star formation in the universe producing the heavy elements of fun which carbon chemistry depends and that's another Victorian notion of the universe getting better and better and more and more and more and more prone to

00:20:32 have life in it because when the Big Bang happened you had hydrogen helium little smattering of lithium and deuterium and that's it and you know the cosmic the great designer sitting there with hydrogen and helium and trying to stick them together can make exactly nothing one hydrogen molecule and then you're done so the universe in a strain you know maybe that's another anthropic thing we shouldn't be surprised to live in an old and vast Universe given that it's expanding it had to be old for there to have been enough generations of stars forming and dying and ejecting

00:21:03 their heavy elements to deposit enough of them on a rocky center around the middleweight star to lead to us but that's a terrible post-hoc story so that it leads to the question you know why did it go that way or how did it go could we have been could you posit us and technically you could posit us within half a billion years of the Big Bang there are part there were parts of the universe within which there had been enough heavy elements produced and almost certainly planets we found

00:21:33 exoplanets that are 12.7 billion years old so we know planets existed pretty early on so you could posit analogs of us very far back in Cosmic time but why do we care why why do we care maybe in the for astronomy and cosmology is probably bound a little bit in our uniqueness and whether the things that happened this crazy careening history of Life on this one planet is that a unique story or is that one of a large number of stories that could be

00:22:05 wildly different or maybe even similar either either of which is very interesting of course so but I mean the question why do we care you might you have to ask yourself to begin with um what kind of understanding are we are we aiming at and a lot of the time you understand something by understanding at least immediately how it came about so you're you're understanding what's going on now in terms of the situation a little bit

00:22:37 earlier right now if you if you then um are like obsessive about this the way philosophers are you then I say okay fine but now what about the earlier thing right um I now need to understand that um well you in a practical sense can't go on forever backwards so it's nice to find a place where you feel like okay I'm satisfied stopping there of course interesting that that you might call a kind of narrative beginning it's actually a stopping because what you're doing is thinking backward in time and finding a place where I'm happy with

00:23:09 that and and once I see how where we are arose from that I have a sense of of comprehension that would suggest that we don't start out interested in Beginnings we end up interested in Beginnings because we we're trying to stop ourselves in a continual iterated set of questioning well there's a kind of a forward version of that story which is uh illustrating Kafka I think a lot where there's always in kafka's stories

00:23:40 there's always this idea that just reaching for something and you can't get blocked and keep going forward it's trying to look for the beginning I think there's a short essay by him about about trying to find out what the law is and the Mankind and also in the castle there's a similar kind of thing that a man comes to to this place where the law is being kept he wants to get into it and there's a guard and he won't let him in and he said let

00:24:13 me in I have to go he says look if I let you in you'll go in there but there'll be a guard who's even more powerful than I am and we'll won't let you into the next room and if you do happen to get to the Next Room there'll still be another guard and so it's a kind of a it's going it's the same argument you have are going in the other direction which I I think and I think there's something deep about about people wanting to um get away from the present somehow

00:24:45 either going to the future or the past and then the things are sort of and they want to in order to find out what find the bearings in this world you know you feel where do you come from or where you're going to or what what what their what the law is or what the thing is so you're always knocking against these Beginnings one of us we are anxious about it because I think we're I think that that that's the way human beings

00:25:16 are organized that way because it's probably can be explained in evolutionary terms because we can do better if we try to visualize what's going to happen next and and try to organize ourselves and understand our environment better I think we it's it helps helps the survival and the going forward of then then otherwise so probably yeah we're a

00:25:47 wire probably we are wired to ask this kind of this kind of existential questions I think that one of the things that makes us you know fundamentally human is that we're naturally curious I mean that's like led to our are ascent and may lead to our demise but at the same time I mean that we are by Nature very curious and you know people as someone who works on dinosaurs people always ask me well why do people care about dinosaurs why are people so interested in dinosaurs and you know that on one level I say I don't know but I I really don't know but on the other

00:26:19 level that I think that it's just a way in which that uh you know people can you know visualize something that they can't see today that exists from the the ancient past and they're able to just work their minds out on it and you know and think about these things and what I mean think about them in very very thoughtful kinds of ways and that you know we are curious I think about the past we're curious about the future uh that you know everywhere you go in the world that you know people are you know wanting more understanding of that whether it's like from astronomy or

00:26:51 whether it's from you know paleontology whether it's from archeology and that uh you know you can talk to you know cab drivers in Cambodia and stuff and that they'll ask you questions about the past and you know what it tells us and things like I mean I think that it's it's just it's a characteristic of us in general yeah I think one indication of that is that uh in the uh this thing I think there's a kind of a general in politics here especially these last days it's kind of

00:27:23 a general anti-intellectual attitude yes so that people say well why should we spend our hard-earned money with these academics who do useless stuff nevertheless uh there is no opposition to research in astronomy and there have been astronomers I must say I have a great admiration for them not only for the scientific accomplishments but also for their accomplishments in getting these extremely expensive things funded

00:27:55 until we learn how to make black holes and then they're going to start locking us up no one no one objects them you can be the most uh right-wing anti-government person and nevertheless astronomy how can we deny those guys funds because you know the Stars I mean

00:28:29 telescopes so I don't think or maybe they do nowadays I don't know but I would I mean I wish it were true I wish I could tell myself it were true that people were interested in dinosaurs just out of curiosity but you know go to a guy who's working on paleobotany and who's working out the structure of long gone Ferns and I get you best you'll get a lot more people saying what the heck is that worth because dinosaurs are big and scary and exciting right I don't know I I disagree

00:29:00 with that I mean I think like you could really say that like uh that uh you know if you boil it all down to like that you know we are scientists and stuff that if we sit around we do science and there's two kinds of science you can do you can do science the same science on charismatic organisms as non-charismatic organisms if you work on charismatic organisms it's a lot more fun first because if there's more money in it as far as for your research second we can talk to groups of people who are actually interested in what we do right and also come to it with a lot more background knowledge and charismatic is

00:29:30 relative I mean Neil Wilson make and sexy no yeah exactly exactly exactly I think another part of the answer back to the curiosity question is um it's meaning we're looking for meaning and a little little worm-like aspect of meaning in our brains is not wanting to think that it's too accidental you know we it it has to make sense you know like I don't okay if I just woke up and I was a dog my I'd have probably three

00:30:01 thoughts I think oh I'm a dog and then I say I'm gonna die and then I get to why am I a dog you know and why not something else so and as a person you know my mom and my dad might have just you know threw some glancing encounter with a third party got drunk that evening and here I am or my dad might have been eyeing the girl behind my mom in line and it was misread or whatever and here I am you know now is

00:30:32 that does that accidental part of my story diminish me well no because I'll I'll rationalize it any way I like but we want to tell the same story about humans and and the story of how we came to be that it not be an entirely serendipitous role of the dice that the contingencies not be so overwhelming that there's and yet we also know the logical other point of this spectrometerology and and things that you know if you're not buying into a standard religious narrative you're not

00:31:03 wanting to posit yourself that way either so it's there's a that's a tension there between The Accidental and the inevitable let me just I mean it occurred to me one thing to mention on this topic which is the opposite side of the coin you just gave about finding out that your origin was more or less accidental right um is is of course you often hear and this goes back to the narrative idea people want to know where they came from to somehow find out the meaning invest their lives with meaning right

00:31:33 um am I here for a purpose was there some purpose um and I guess it's worthwhile pointing out as far as I can tell even if there was it doesn't help that doesn't help at all for most problems I mean if you went to your parents and you said why am I here and instead of this story about The Accidental meeting they said well you know we decided we wanted a chess playing progeny right and we very specifically um had you in order to train you as a chess player and from your childhood they you know drilled chess into you and

00:32:05 if you get to you know your middle age and you say you know I just don't find chess interesting you know my I don't find oh life is a chess player fulfilling or or important or satisfying um finding out that nonetheless that was your purpose right that was the purpose in your creation I doesn't help you at all right and say well sorry Mom and Dad you know right um I'm going to disappoint you but the fact that I'm here you put me here for that purpose just doesn't help me right so I think sometimes we again have way too high

00:32:38 expectations for what we even in principle could get out of an origin story there are certain kinds of desire for significance that no origin story of any sort could really satisfy it okay and you've got to live with that but then you start looking your for your significance elsewhere which I think is probably the best thing to do well yeah but um there is a kind of a sort of practical idea of putting things

00:33:10 in some sort of order right for example uh if you are applying for a patent right it's nice to figure out whether you were the first one to make this thing or something yeah it is economic and also well I I should say um that um it's also very uh to change things a little bit there's also a very useful thing of of not having Beginnings like for

00:33:42 example when people started counting you know everything was one two three and so on and it became within it said it became evident that when people started going backwards it was very uh useful to put in also zero minus one minus two and so on so that um so so that as I said there is a natural uh um thing that when you look for a beginning you are also looking for for the end of

00:34:14 what happened before in some ways and uh predictability feeling of wanting things to be predictable have something to do with it oh really probably people feel that if they understand the past they will learn from it or something like that it seems to be empirically not verified right people tend to make the same mistake over and over again at least within the context of biological evolution though I mean it's

00:34:45 just that it's very very hard to predict anything from it because it is so influenced by singular historical events I mean like you never know when a giant meteorite is going to hit the planet and wipe everything out or you never know when just basic geological processes are going to happen you never know like a lot of these things so it's like looking at the history of Western Europe I mean things happen and they don't happen and if you re-ran the tape it would be completely different completely different I mean so it's not as predictable as you know astronomy or

00:35:17 something like this where that you are looking at an event but you also have the large numbers and you have some more basic sort of mathematics that come to play on things so that I'm sure that maybe 500 years from now when we get down to the nitty-gritty and astronomy it's going to be just as dirty as it is of looking at biological evolution and stuff because that when you're looking at specific cases in the evolution of you know singular systems that it'll be just as hard in a sense that the fact that it is unpredictable like agree that that

00:35:49 should be liberating because you you have a story and whether you like it or not that we all you know evolve from you know slime mold that might be on your shower curtain or some relative of that you know we've made something of ourselves but you know really it sort of starts now I mean knowing the story doesn't tell you how to go forward the future is that unpredictable that you wouldn't even try I mean you know do you know how many teraflops of computer power is applied to weather forecasting

00:36:20 and the guy who's just told to say same as yesterday beats the computer beats the 100 million dollars or different stations tell you something totally different so you know so don't feel very comfortable about the power of Technology applied to things that are chaotic or intrinsically unpredictable in the evolution of life is going to be like that and then and then so then there you are you're we're here and we gotta we have a story it's first thing we can spin it whichever way we like you know but the truth is it all really starts now we're all having our oh

00:36:53 I'm a dog moment which is oh I'm an early 21st century human on a planet that's in some parallel with a sort of technologically sophisticated but fundamentally tribal World culture that's not quite getting its together and how's that going to work you know and do I have a part in it and can I help the whole picture as well as my little piece and that would be true whether the story started in a different way than it actually did it almost doesn't matter so Beginnings don't matter

00:37:25 do you think there'll be sunrise tomorrow um I'm persuaded Bertrand Russell told the story about that so I'm I always follow Bertrand when I can it's his story incidentally just the simple one um the the chicken the slightly smarter than an average chick and anyone who's been on a farm knows how smart chickens are or not the chicken that has experienced the sun rising and the farm were coming out to scatter feed and so inductively

00:37:56 concludes that um this Rising ball this this light in the sky leads to the food for the day and then one morning the sun rises and the farmer comes out and strangles the chicken for the dinner table the DraStic failure of inductive reasoning but then it's just it's just a chicken so so I believe in it slightly more than the chicken does or four different yeah but the chicken was right and believe

00:38:27 the Sun would rise right that's true yes we all have our stories it's fine but so that there is maybe there is some kind of value to knowing what happened before to predict what was going to happen in the future but that's only a probabilistic argument right right everything is a probabilistic argument of course

00:38:58 but they kind of uh curiosity that you are you you're using to explain why we are looking to find out more about Beginnings Origins and so on and cosmology you don't find that amongst all the people that you meet I mean in in your travels I said probably I mean I think it's pretty much a culturally it's a universal I mean people are interested in

00:39:29 that they're either interested in or they have a story of where they came from and so that's a form of a beginning and uh most of them have some apocalyptic story about what's going to happen to them in the end or what will happen in the end I mean it's just I mean you know as we were talking about earlier and stuff that seems to be sort of a universal sort of thing amongst culture around the world so so so here's a straightforward anthropological question you said before there are lots of cultures that yeah had

00:40:00 a sense that there wasn't a beginning that time was well they've always been there but is there a culture that doesn't have an origin myth An Origin some kind of origin myth that's passed down it may not sort of cohere with the idea that things have been around not that I'm familiar with but but you would think I mean it seems like one hears everybody has some narrative right every graduate develops some narrative that you 've originally right and it's also I think not that's not my field but what I've read about it is it's interesting that many of those cultures the

00:40:32 judeo-christian narrative you know with has its obvious moral uh underpinning and overlay but that's also true in these cyclic stories of time there's a Redemption rebirth there's apocalypse and so you know these are very common themes even when time can be considered cyclic and maybe not explicitly Eternal because it's not always conceptualized that way but operationally it might as well be Eternal but it still has a moral uh overlay and a cycle

00:41:03 which means something to the person who's posited within that cycle within a cycle within a larger cycle that becomes essentially infinite as far as they can tell so it does the timeline you know could be as close to infinite as makes no difference and it seems that there's a universal yearning to have a tether in it and to have a an operational sort of an action-oriented or moral tether in it

00:41:34 you know a reason to be connected to this chronology not just it's there very different from okay to take a completely a sort of crazily hypothetical different scenario as you some of you have probably read this and I'm sure you know all about it the um you know there's a there's a a premise out there that if there's intelligent life in the universe it's almost certain that we're not the first or the most advanced and you can follow

00:42:05 various arguments that include the possibility that you know we're living in a simulated reality created by aliens that are just a lot smarter than we are and they don't even have to be that much smarter just because we're only a few we're only a few centuries from this capability which is a you know nothing is the link of the eye and Cosmic time so if you think so then you have an interesting uh true question to ask yourself if you thought you're living in a computer simulation of some Superior an entity

00:42:36 That's So Sophisticated You can't really understand them does it change the way you view your life would you behave differently everyone should be able to ask themselves that question because I'm telling you right now there's a finite probability that it's true and the case so it's a completely sensible thing just like you know you walk out in the street and there's a big gold ingot sitting there and there's no one around and you should always ask yourself you know would I take it if I could lift it up and you may be confident in your answer you should always ask yourself all these

00:43:07 hypothetical questions but I think like you know some of the things about making us different from uh other you know animal species on the planet and stuff is just we get away from Instinct in that we actually are we have this curious aspect to ourselves and uh one of my friends who uh one time said like look you know humans became humans when that they they they got over what are the three most basical things that are instinctual amongst the animals

00:43:37 and one is that you know looking around a group of other animals you say like I eat that I run from that and I screw that so like once we became bigger than that and we began to be you know look at the world and try to explain why we did that I mean that was like the beginning that was like with the origin of humankind maybe 300 000 years ago and stuff I mean it's it it's interesting to notice it's also the of course the source of all our troubles as well I

00:44:08 mean that particular story if you look in in the Republic in Plato's Republic starts to First design an ideal city and and the idea is to say well what do we need we need food shelter clothing so let's figure out how many people it would take to make that in the most efficient way find out who's good at what bowl it out we have a small group of people and they don't have to work much because that's and then they they just um sing a lot and they they sleep

00:44:39 on on rough ground and uh having a wonderful life in the immediate response of glaucon and adamantis is you know if you were designing a city for pigs what else would you give them we need couches we need sofas we need luxuries right this is not a good city and it seems to be you know Plato's point was exactly the same one because you think my dog you feed them you give them a nice place to sleep he has no Ambitions beyond that right he's not driven by

00:45:09 insatiable desires insatiable Ambitions and Plato's point is then you see what happens because humans have these insatiable desires um and mostly it's bad but maybe one good one was a kind of insatiable curiosity as well right an insatiable sense of of wanting a further story about things that maybe leads to you know at least led to science it went properly harnessed but it also seems to be the thing that you know leads to all our troubles as well would you say

00:45:40 looking at the Arc of life on Earth or just the way that Evolution works as you understand it that it would this would be a dysfunctional capacity I mean we've sort of with technology we sort of transcended some of the natural limitations we had thousands of years ago but in general this this sort of insatiable thing it could be seen as being is very dis I think that like you know you've met like there's a lot of ways to look at the evolutionary process and certainly I mean that there's been a

00:46:12 lot of you know talk both from you know people looking doing experimental work as well as mathematical simulation about that evolution is all about escalation so that uh you know where that escalation takes you might not always be a good place you know that even that there's you know classic examples in our own bodies like our knees like if you're an engineer and you're going to design those that they don't work and that but it's just a combination of what we started with and

00:46:43 then what that when we became bipedal then that we ended up with which isn't necessarily a good way to be and that you know you can take to the more macro level and say that well you know that the evolution of ourselves the evolution of other animals and things like that hasn't always for the health of the planet if you could measure that in some empirical kind of way isn't the best place and it's a I mean what evolution optimizes on is not always good on the other hand you might sort of

00:47:13 discover mathematics and be so happy that you forgot to run away or run around or anything or screw anything and then I guess then you diet well too thales was looking up at the sky in front into a well I mean yeah and there are you know that I it's hard to deny that that insatiability has led to some of our current problems but there's this bizarre strand of of futurist thought you know there it's the

00:47:45 kurzweils of the world and others who really think that we have enough capacity to satisfy you know the you know once you've got okay I know this isn't true even in a city like this but once you've got you know seven or eight cars you can't really Drive anymore and once you've got seven Holiday Homes you can't really get to anymore so you know you can in a in a situation of a large capacity for wealth or creation of resources um where resources become essentially

00:48:17 free and there's some economic models that you know that you might just think they're just wildly optimistic and unrealistic but they exist and they have as much validity going forward into an uncertain future as anything um that say that we could get to this my wife was just reminding me there was a story on NPR about somebody it was about collecting they had different stories about collecting there was one guy who what he collected was copies of the Beatles White Album

00:48:51 as many as he could get his hands on right everyone exactly the same all I guess in a shelf that was nothing but copies of the White Album now you'd think one would be enough or maybe two if you want to be careful there's you know there's something you can get yourself in a frame of mind where and he's not even competing it's not like you know he's staying ahead of the guy who's got 499 and he has 500. um you know there's something in the human mind the human character that can I think I think the president had uh

00:49:23 maybe a hundred cars and it was collecting more yeah no so so the optimistic the optimistic read on this is that we also have the itch to create and there's no limit to that I mean I know young people who come up and they want to do popular music and they just think you know every popular song that could be worth listening to has already been written you know surely uh but of course it's not true so in the creative arts

00:49:54 potentials for future creation are nobody knows what the bounds are so there's an unlimited potential future resource that doesn't really negatively impact anyone I mean eventually we'll just all walk around groaning oh God not more beautiful poetry I don't have time for it you know I've already read 50 poems today you know I'm sated for whatever it is so that's a part of our insatiability that I don't know has a downside and you know we maybe can

00:50:24 conduit that or maybe there's there are external shaping circumstances that could lead that to be obviously more valued than it is now or uh because that that's something where you just follow it you can keep going there's no no reason to put a bound on it I mean the capacities of every person sort of limited if he's an unsatiable thing to do something and pushes or all else out

00:50:56 you know there's been a work out so well but a lot of it is also you know that I mean we say that yeah you know that every all seven billion of us on the planet can have a much better life well that's just us I mean that says nothing about the rest of the planet I mean definitely I mean we have the technology and the resources especially moving forward to probably have quadruple the population of the planet

00:51:27 and and that quadrupling of the population of planet have each individual person have a much better life but that the other organisms of the planet and the other thing about things that you know some people like hold dear like you know rainforests things like that that's not going to be part of the equation I mean that's going to be the sacrifice part of it and stuff so that you know that improving people's lives comes as a caught and increasing population comes as a cost to other things

00:51:57 I I actually think we'll get to the point of being able to create new beginnings you know I have to say this because I'm an astro geek but I think you know despite the doldrums you see around you of the space program and you know seven percent of the students I teach don't think we went to the moon which drives me crazy of course maybe it's even 10 I don't know it's a significant number but um and the shuttle is old and decrepit and just nobody likes the space station the whole thing's just kind of a mess and and you

00:52:28 then you look at the exponentiation of your electronic digital life and think what's going on where's the connection here um anyway I think that's just a bump I think we'll get through that um and so I think in a hundred maybe put a number on 100 years we'll have a new beginning which amounts to us going off Earth and that will be an extraordinary thing that will be a new story of us of and it won't and it'll stop being us they'll be different people they won't be us after a while but we'll be

00:52:58 invested in it and I won't get to live to see that but I think it's going to happen and so the beginnings can take turns that you didn't expect I think this is not it's not just one story I hope I believe we may generate multiple stories what do you think about that like going off the planet and becoming and changing not just oh of course I mean it'll it'll it'll be like Wally

00:53:29 will look totally different but uh yeah I mean I mean even within and it's not just the crackpot element and stuff who says this and stuff even though there are some pretty well-known biologists who really feel that even life itself may have come from someplace else on our own planet and stuff as far as that you know looking at the uh the chemistry of some meteorites that have uh amino acids in them and things like that so that could be that the basic building of blocks might not have been things that were assembled on our own Planet I mean

00:54:00 I disagree with that but I mean that this is not just like I said it's not crackpot stuff it's not outside the idea of rationality but um so I'm going to be a little bit of a contrarian here um I just don't see it as if it were to occur I'm not I'm not sure why it would be so significant I mean right now as you say have people who live through long periods in a space station that's orbiting here kind of unusual and 100 years ago you would have thought amazing we're kind of

00:54:30 bored by that right what are they they're up there we don't even know what they're doing we don't pay attention to what they're doing we don't think this is the beginning of a new Humanity if Newt had become president and we got a moon colony my guess is we put a lot of money into it and some people would live up there and every now and then we'd check in and say how are things on the moon they'd say fine but we wouldn't think it was a new beginning for Humanity or hit I mean people are kind of odd about this this idea issue well we should go to Mars because what if we ruin the Earth then we can terraform Mars and you think

00:55:02 we can do bad things to the Earth but we can't do anything so bad it'll make it look like Mars right if we if we could make Mars habitable we ought to be able to make the Earth habitable a heck of a lot more easily um so I think again I think there's a kind of Romanticism which you understand of this of it being new and it being amazing and but you know of course new things become quickly old and the amazement rubs off kind of quickly so I'm I'm if you ask me would even if we

00:55:34 were to invest in interplanetary travel or something like that would that be a new beginning to humanity I can't see why I can't quite see why it would be I mean we could we could right now send people to live down at the bottom of the sea it wouldn't be I guess that expensive be it a very different kind of isolated hermetic life and they would live differently and they'd look out the windows and see things we don't see every day I mean it is just a glorified reality show at the beginning I mean the space station right that's a good example

00:56:04 because that's that's no further straight up than you could drive in an afternoon so that's pathetic that's not space I mean it's expensive but it's not space no the way it would happen is in a hundred years because it could the technology is available I mean it will be people taking a one-way trip there's a coin toss uh it's that there's an Earth-like planet on one of the alpha around one of the Alpha Centauri a pair of stars that are sun-like it's a real and astronomers will know within a couple of years whether and and so that

00:56:36 would be amazing if in the universe what we think is littered with habitable planets but the distances are large we lucked into a habitable planet around the closest start it really could happen it's very interesting and at that point you would go you know someone would go so what kind of probabilities do you assign to all this the the existence of an earth isn't finding considerability of finding such a thing oh it's uh it's good I mean it's the techniques are

00:57:06 available to find Mars mass or even lower Mass to 10 20 30 light years so if those planets exist we'll know it and then we'll be out and you'll find plans that conceivably could have this kind of so you the detection of the planet and its mass and its orbit and whether it's in a habitable zone that's techniques already in hand yes but what's the probabilities oh it's actually how many of these planets are there and in the Milky Way There are a hundred

00:57:39 round numbers 100 million contestral habitable planets which is proportion of them would be habited oh that's we have no idea so then it's a that that's a question for you you have a hundred million Petri dishes right how many of them do you think something interesting happen or anything and then something interesting right I mean again it's a it's it's a very difficult question because it depends on something's going to happen a lot of them something interesting might happen in a very smaller amount but but you know going back to the habitable plan idea you know what about even like that uh uh you know

00:58:12 building an atmosphere on Mars so it just turns out that NASA you know you can pull off the shelf NASA have done that and it's it is you're right it's absolutely insanely difficult and expensive just terraforming Mars is a three-stage process and the minimum is about a thousand years and 100 trillion dollars minimum and they've costed it that's not just the ballpark number that's an all right actual massive people do this it's always more expensive when they actually get done thank you and so it was like ghost overruns Larry

00:58:43 Alton could do it cheaper and then the other thing you said is exactly right that it you know we're always better off not soiling our own you know place and making it better and or even finding parts of it we can live in living in domes or under the sea or whatever it's just so much easier than going to Mars so so yeah we're not going to go off Earth in that limited way I think it's more this more purely adventuristic thing where with a one-way ticket and an uncertain future you take the minimum

00:59:14 genetically viable population will be you know of order 100 I guess 70 80 individuals and they will go to some Earth-like planet where you've diagnosed the atmosphere and you know that it's breathable more or less and they are and within three generations they will start to not be us I mean they're they're their environment will be different enough if they survive of course they may not survive so um but that and yes the they'll be sending their information back and it'll be this crazy reality show

00:59:46 but so it's not necessarily A New Beginning of us of course we would rather I think most of us would rather have a new beginning here you know by resetting on some of the dysfunctional bad stuff but that's very hard to do because how do you get everyone in a room to push the reset right I mean that would be much more reasonable as I say we sort of invest our hopes in funny ways I mean even take the case it always occurs to me suppose in one of your habitable planets there's even already inhabited and there's a civilization and

01:00:18 so on and you know of course our our whole science fiction industry has been suggesting that it would be the Great it would be in a certain way this great thing to find this other intelligent civilization and of course it would be fantastically interesting but on the other hand I mean think about it from the other side what do they find they just find us right for them the big thing is to come here and what look at I Love Lucy I mean you know look at chairs like this wow

01:00:48 look you made a change I mean um it's not clear that this other civilization wouldn't somehow be intrinsically be different but whether it would be intrinsically higher or better or you know lend significance to our life in a deep way it's hard to see why because otherwise we have the capacity to do that to them we ought to do it to ourselves first right let's give our own lives meaning and you know do things nicely around here and show them something when they show up right but but it would be the fascinating part of that was that this is of course

01:01:19 making these crazy assumptions of roughly equivalent sentience intelligence and even communication which are implausible but they will have a story they will have an origin story and it will be different you know regardless of the cultural differences on this planet which have led us to slaughter each other in vast numbers so they're not trivial we still have the same story I mean it is in the end the same story it's one story to know that there were other stories in existence that is those sentient intelligent

01:01:51 entities evolved and Exist Elsewhere and then to actually learn one or more of those stories that would be extraordinary I mean it would recontextualize our story at some level it wouldn't negate it or trivialize it but it would sure be a an interesting thing to know about the difference between philosophy and cosmology none because we don't know you know cosmology you know I I'm not going to even I'm not

01:02:22 going to brag about it at all at some level there's been some success but the ultimate Endeavor you know runs into a brutal wall of ignorance because we don't know what the two major ingredients of the universe are dark matter Dark Energy each of them represents new and unknown physics at some level we have a story that that vectors backed points backwards towards us an initial state that we don't understand we don't have a good theory of and and so yeah I mean there's big

01:02:54 question marks all over the place so you know so the chronology from about a micro second forward yeah we can we can paint that nicely but you're exactly right you're driven if you're doing your job properly to not be satisfied with explaining everything that happened after a micro second after the big bang you want to know initial conditions why it got that way and no all bets are off that is truly natural philosophy at this point some very clever theories some great ideas and you know but I'm a kind of gritty you know show me let me point

01:03:26 my telescope at something you know give me some evidence and not yet not now so the same sorts of arguments go for the origin of life I mean like you know we have catalytic activity and even self-replicating activity and things that aren't right but organizing all of that into something which actually you know really works as a excuse me as a biological machine is something which is unexplained and that's a that's a fascinating part of of

01:03:57 what of your the origin of what you do which is it seems to me that the origin of life you know something we do care about it's our story it's the very beginning of our story because it's historical science we may never we might not ever know the answer right exactly I mean I think what we'll never know the real answer but we might be able to model it and come up with a proxy for it that we say well this is the best simulation that we can do but because it is historical that we're we're burdened by this historical contingency we weren't there

01:04:31 are you ready to take questions I'm sure sure go ahead yeah I think given that we're in a house of psychoanalysis that we we miss if we didn't reference something about the developmental aspects of curiosity um and you know Jacob Arlo in 1982 wrote a very interesting paper on the scientific and mythology

01:05:03 oh thank you thank you um Jacob Arlo wrote uh an interesting paper in 1982 called scientific cosmogony mythology and immortality and he basically uh saw the consilience between our theories about uh the origins of the universe mythology and the unconscious fantasies derived from

01:05:34 uh Early Childhood wishes and beliefs regarding procreation you don't have to go further than Corbett's the origin of the world uh to uh to gain understandings about unconscious processes related to how a child asks questions about the first really the first epistemological question is where did I come from where do babies come from and uh I think it's an interesting perspective to think about how we frame

01:06:06 questions as adults about beginnings and what connections that has to earliest mental life in solving the problem of where one originates as a child because a child is confronting a very bewildering world filled with intense motivations and in relation to your idea about you know people becoming something other than human I think as long as we are raised

01:06:39 in small cohorts where we're mapping our motivations on the relationships with parents there's their Beginnings will never be new in a certain sense because we'll always be starting off with the same kinds of questions anyway I mean that makes me wonder how these questions will change and the stories the the answers given when we start cloning when we start you know genetically modifying humans I'm not

01:07:10 creating issue obviously but you know that those will be different stories that the uniqueness the issue of uniqueness the the origin the motivation of the origin the story I don't think we're ready to answer questions like that even as we prepare the Technologies to do it is there I mean this is I I know nothing about Child Development it's relevant but I'm just curious when you say the world for a child is bewildering

01:07:42 um I'm just wondering what reason to think it is bewildering to them I mean they they it seems from what I understand children come with certain expectations basic physics expectations so that things can violate those expectations and they get startle responses or whatever from you know from essentially Time Zero um bewilderment really does suggest a kind of very sophisticated desire for

01:08:15 an explanation um and I just wonder why why I think that kids I mean I understand after a while they may come to ask certain questions but when you say the world is bewildering to them rather than say actually quite familiar I mean you know we've all seen the little kid who's who's trying to get the the Time Magazine cover to change right you know because they're so used to iPads well they grew up with you know they weren't Bill Wilder they're bewildered why it doesn't change now right so I mean it just doesn't meet their expectations

01:08:46 right they form certain expectations in a very rote kind of way so um when you when you have this description of the life I mean I always it's always curious to me you you know one thought is yes it's a world of bright vibrant colors and confusion and so on or for all I know it might be a world that actually looks rather dull and you know every day I don't know how do you tell I mean how do you think you can get yourself into this well I think psychological state of it well what I'm referring to is the disparity between the experience of reality and the

01:09:17 child's and the domination of fantasy see in early mental life and the difficulty that the child has in sorting out the two so that those early questions right are are at you know very much at the heart of that disparity to open it for questions go ahead there's the you'll have to walk to the microfundme

01:09:51 um it was pointed out that um every traditional Society has a creation that we live in a sort of aim ethical scientific worldview where we don't allow the scientific story of creation to fulfill a myth Mythic role in our society so my the question would be um or if it is a myth it's an anti-myth it's it's a myth of minimalistness and purposelessness kind of stoic existentialist story which

01:10:23 works for me some days of the week but not every day of the week but so um so uh so there's something antithetical about the way that we are trying to incorporate the new scientific origin story which has the benefit of being progressively true truer and and practical in all kinds of ways but something antithetical to something about human nature and human societies

01:10:54 which needs some framework of meaning and purpose in order to function coherently so how do we how might we address that all right since I was sort of been I mean I'm going to repeat myself a little bit here but because it was one of the things I kept coming back to I just think there's a kind of error in thinking that the origin story

01:11:26 even could play the sort of role people um so that the scientific I don't think the scientific story should bother you at all people have a tendency to have these thoughts that seem to render their lives meaningless like you say oh a thousand years from now who will know what conversation went on in this room or you know how well I did and this or that nobody will remember so what's the

01:11:57 point and I sort of never got it right why should I care what they know about a thousand years from now right if if my child falls down and skins her knee and I'm gonna comfort her I don't what's the point of thinking a thousand years from now no one will never know I comforted my child right well I'm not doing it for them a thousand years ago I'm doing it for her right now and why is it significant because she's hurt I'm making her better right um you know her life is better because I'm doing this I mean these sorts of and it's a very trivial kind of thing

01:12:29 but it seems to me um if you if you're expecting something from a kind of cosmic story that it couldn't give you no matter how it came out then of course you're going to be disappointed but I think it was always the wrong place to look and that's why I don't think the scientific you know replacing it with a scientific story should have really any effect at all Tim your answer is a philosopher or not as a sociologist or a psychologist or how so if you're asking me how do you

01:12:59 get people to realize that yes yes and you see that all around the world yes yes so right no so around you there's evidence that people care a lot right so I I absolutely so so the first part was to say if you if you sort of think it through deeply it's a misplaced you know emphasis now you're asking me

01:13:30 how do you get people to replace their irrational Thoughts with rational thoughts and if I could answer that I'd be very happy I'm unfortunate I have nothing to say they're much more trivial things like climate change and so on where you say well all the rational evidence goes One Direction how why is it we can't just convince people in everyday life that this is a real problem um against because there are people whose you know personal interests are such that they don't want you to realize it's a problem I no I have nothing on that wonderfully

01:14:02 important question of any used to say um so yeah my job is trying to trying to figure out how things are but then but then but then changing things how they should be is you know that's above my pay grade well my question is similar it's um one of the original question you asked is why do we care about this and we care about it because of you know the on the elephant in the room is God you know like if the universe is eternal we don't

01:14:33 need a Creator and if suddenly we find that it isn't um it was created then where did it come from so you have Lawrence Krauss who talks about a universe from nothing and then you have people who say okay well there's all intelligent design and so forth and there was a purpose and I think to a certain extent what everybody is asking if there is no purpose then of course there's no life after death there's none of the other perks that come along with somebody looking over your for you and I think you know not

01:15:04 that you know this is anything new but it's just I think that was the elephant in the room well but the elephant has been sticking its trunk in I mean Chris mentioned before what if we're all in a simulation and so our as we're accurate creation story is some extraterrestrial civilization created very powerful computers and gave to their fifth graders you know a take-home project create a simulated world and we happen to live in it right it's my preferred deistic right

01:15:36 the question he asked which I think is perfectly accurate is okay that interesting um so what right get up tomorrow morning you still got to make breakfast you know um all of that and and I think even if it's God I mean this was sort of the point I was saying about the children even if it's got none of that will will will give us we can't derive significance from that no but the people who ascribe to religious dictates tell you that God has a purpose and this is what you must do but you

01:16:09 know so why must I do it I mean maybe your your afterlife thinks that he's gonna beat me up forever if I don't but that's the kind of my thin way to we have people blowing you know flying into buildings and doing all sorts of terrible things because of these beliefs so absolutely Also regarding Cosmic the cosmic story told by science I don't really think there's any you know I I don't it's not a Stephen J Gould not an overlapping magisteria I mean because people individuals you know Mash these

01:16:40 things up amazingly I have I give science literacy type surveys to my students 18 year olds at a big State University and they show a fantastic ability to hold you know a reasonable comprehension of the major tenets of modern science plants alongside superstitions religious Faith all sorts of things everyone's a mashup it's a marble rye so but as far as the cosmology goes whether it's a you know a big bang that's all we can say or some

01:17:10 Eternal some Multiverse site you know endless timeline Eternal past Eternal future that that really does to me it has no connection or implication to to to the landscape it has no projection into the belief system particularly it's not required I think also like you know I mean I think that you know as a scientist one of the things that I try to point out is that you know that you know calling it the scientific creation story is not really what it should be called because it's not really a story I mean there's a big

01:17:41 difference between thinking and believing and that uh you know that as somebody who you know works and things you have to be every day prepared that you're going to go in to your office one morning you're going to turn your computer on and somebody is going to have written something which is going to cause you to say everything that I've ever done in my entire career is and I just got to like get on with it and think within this new paradigm and that's not the way the belief systems work I mean because belief systems continue to reinterpret all new data within the

01:18:13 construct of those belief systems instead of abandoning totally what they they've had before and like I mean you guys at that experiment would have really been right uh in in in uh in Europe a few months ago when that they had particles going faster than the speed of light if that would have been true that would have been a big problem for a lot of modern physics modern astronomy of course that's that's when it's fun most of us wanted that right right right yeah exactly exactly so

01:18:44 hmm but the but the GPS this is not my question yeah but but the uh blaming it on a miscalibrated GPS has been refuted so it's still an open Quest so um no it's been resolved has it yeah actually something was plugged in not completely yeah no it wasn't they were receiving the time signals and it goes into a calibrator and literally the connection wasn't quite made properly and it it introduced a 60

01:19:17 nanosecond delay and that was it they fixed it it's amazing everybody else you know you're overthrowing the laws of physics based on a you know connect or not quite in just just as it's it's one line of the aliens code it's more like tribal civilization that's all just one little line so here's the thing so I'm going to do something that's going to sound a little simplistic but I'm going to um bring this back to a neurobiological interpretation so uh one thing that hasn't been addressed directly is that

01:19:48 we are here talking about what we're talking about in a structure that started as an idea because of our complex encephalization specifically I want to talk about the frontal cortex where the planning the ability to plan to foresee a future to imagine a future largely occurs now that said and referring back to dimasio self come to mind in the case that the emergent self-awareness that every human being individually goes through that we went through as a species uh one I would imagine a great source of

01:20:22 anxiety uh that gives rise to religions and their stories is the fact that we are aware of our own mortality so I wanted to ask uh how many of you would care to respond to the to the question that once we have a robust functional and structural connectome and we really uh Advanced Technologies such as optogenetics and the next generation of fmri that goes beyond statistical analysis there are some already in play as you may know

01:20:53 once we understand the language of the brain do you think that will answer the question why we care from the from the frontal cortex that's the question I mean that's way outside my field my I as I understand the research though that that that if that hypothetical is is a huge one because you know that that area of research I mean if you think understanding the in the singular Singularity and the initial conditions

01:21:24 of the Big Bang is a challenge then you know go work on the mind brain problem for a decade or two decades or a whole career so I I I'm not familiar enough with the current state of the research but I think that's it's plausible it's just so far off we can't even see that that horizon yet even if we could take it one step further and say that we could do at some point in our life a total download of our entire brain ah right substrate independent Minds exactly and we would have all of our

01:21:55 memories we would have you know everything that I'm not sure that once it's divorced from your own body and stuff that we would have and yet that would be exactly what would be your cry for us to be in a simulation yeah but wait I'm not sure now I'm missing I thought that maybe the question has changed so let me just understand the question I understood the question to be would advances in neural Imaging say take them all the way down to you know what every synapse is doing over some period of time uh would that give us

01:22:27 insight into why we're so scared to die now the question is if if I could create a who didn't die if if I could create a replica of myself somehow functional replica would I no longer be afraid of dying and which question are we talking about they're both they're both implied by understanding the uh structure of the frontal cortex so let me instead position let me answer both of them then I I don't think um knowing the neural structure down to the finest details you like is going to give you much Insight at all well that's why I added functional connector to

01:22:58 structural into into the origin of our anxieties I mean it's just a different level of analysis you need a level of analysis that that should apply fairly independently of Hardware you know implemented why is that though because uh if anxieties are emotionally driven and emotions arise out of the older portions of the brain like a particular activating formation the limbic system and the rest of it and those uh interact with the mid and higher level functions of the more encephalized portions of the brain right why not be able to answer it in that

01:23:29 capacity well because the the type of of functional description of what's going on just isn't going to be tied that closely to neuroanatomy would be my guess well again again I'm not saying only Adam yeah I'm talking about function as well but as well time to go uh this gentleman how would the discovery and habitation of another planet different from the discovery and habitation of the New

01:24:00 World by the Europeans um so that's a good question it would be substantially different just because of course as the original denizens of all these parts of the world noted you know they were there first so there there weren't that many truly Antarctic apart they're you know humans the the pattern the patterns of human migration 60 to 30 000 years ago are extraordinary so there were very few places that were untouched and then it's

01:24:32 it's it's us and it's us in a home that we've evolved over tens of thousands of generations and adapted to the full physical range if we visited and even colonized a habitable world that could tolerate us and we could tolerate it um the you know the branching of evolution would happen and be sculpted very quickly and it would be it would be a new thing fairly quickly I think so

01:25:03 that's that's the sense in which it would be different also because of the time and space disconnect that that would be you know it would be a new start because you'd have have a generational lifetime light travel time or you know artifact travel time between civilization one and civilization two it would be something different so it would feel very different and and presumably civilization One Prime would not feel beholden or Bound by whatever had

01:25:36 happened before they would feel like a new hit a new start as well well like with any thoughts about perspective of the human beings at the time of Discovery discovery of the world in terms of how they perceive those discoveries and where they might lead as opposed to us yeah so I'm not a history I would not answer that question because I'm not really a historian I can't comment okay

01:26:08 let me just suggest that uh the mind particularly the unconscious moment is a developmental organ the the mind the unconscious mind particularly is a developmental organ that being developmental that we have beginnings and we have and we develop essence of our being May in fact be our development meaning of life so to speak may be to

01:26:40 develop um that um try to follow these assumptions with me that that mind this developmental mind May in fact have been a an aspect of matter that more recently evolved so that you could have primitive matter you could have big bang matter

01:27:12 and then you could have something that happened that evolved in mind that mind is another matter wave if all matters are waves if all If energy is a way of substance is a way if time is awake and so on that mind is another is another waveform that is a law so the question I guess I have is would this be a subject of interest to cosmologists and how did this new matter Wave evolve

01:27:43 and was it in fact the evolution of mine as a new matter wave that evolved life did the evolution of mind precede the evolution of life that is can we imagine any any form of life that doesn't require at least a little snitching of mine to survive in other words do we have a quiet Forest problem but the question to you all I think is is is that

01:28:14 would that be of interest to cosmologist is that what steps were necessary to form mine I mean I'd actually like to hear philosophy perspective on this but from there from just from my perspective of my field really we don't have a tool kit with which to answer that question all we can say is that in terms of the you know the ingredients and the raw materials for biological experimentation you know that

01:28:44 you've got time and space in abundance because you've as I think I alluded to you could have an earth clone with eight billion year head start on this planet so you've got a lot of time to work with and you've got 10 to the 22 round numbers habitable worlds so that's a lot of Petri dishes and you know and we know what happened here we also know that of the hundreds of millions of species you know only one of them sits in rooms like this and has conversations

01:29:15 like this so and even if we had like that like an exact twin world that's had the same starting conditions over there like you know 3.8 billion years of life and stuff it would have come out totally different right yeah and that's a famous debate you know Stephen J gold wrote that you know 100 Earths split by a hundred Suns come back in four billion years after Life Starts and what what odds would you place on you know animals at all primates Homo Sapien like entities and

01:29:47 of course the people in the field don't agree on that there's no way you can resolve that contingency question so I I don't actually have an answer real answer to your question I don't know well I I mean I think there are two questions um um bound up one of which is his is just really really really hard one of which is technically hard but we see the way through it and neither of which is exactly the one you asked so let me separate them

01:30:18 um if you start with matter you can ask yourself how do we get Consciousness when you're because you're just saying mind right how do we get awareness um that is I think the hardest question there is and that nobody has a clue pretty much how to even approach it of us do seem to know that States Of Consciousness are in very particular and precise ways dependent upon states of matter right that is you can get a tumor in a certain place in your in your brain

01:30:50 and lose very specific cognitive capacities right absolutely specific cognitive capacity so it's not as if there's a mind somewhere else that's unrelated to what's going on in your brain so I think the the origin or the evolution of consciousness is just intractable because we have no idea really how to connect the presence of Consciousness with material structure in a comprehensible way there's another question which is

01:31:20 the evolution of what we would think of as intelligent Behavior that we find among animals and living things and so on um there I take it um there's a pretty straightforward evolutionary story about why certain configurations when they become reactive to their environment are better computers I mean at least once we have some you know microbes competing there's a reasonable story to be told about the evolution of more and more sophisticated behavior and when you said can there be

01:31:51 life without mind I take it amoebas don't have my I don't know why we would have to think amoebas have anything like minds and they do enough to start an evolutionary process off right they they replicate they can vary they reproduce you get that and you you've started the evolutionary story or certainly in some sense you might say viruses are kind of alive and there's not much room for a mind and a virus so I don't think that we need mind before life but how you get Consciousness out of any process I think is but yeah

01:32:23 we're talking about Origins and the origin of mind is a is a wonderful question and I you know like to think of it again in this sort of hypothetical Cosmic realm where we have diagnosed through work of my colleague here and others that story more good chunks of the story of what led to us but we've also seen some interesting potentials and possibilities that might play out elsewhere differently so for instance if I were asking a hypothetical question about the evolution forward of life on

01:32:55 Earth I would say if we weren't here you know kingpins and sort of sculpting the planet to our will I would be very interested to see what social insects would turn into in a few hundred million years or I would be very interested to see you know bacteria use Quorum sensing and if you add up the bandwidth of their chemical communication it exceeds that of a conversation we're having now so it's not trivial and they work in commensual ways in Cooperative colonies and no one's pretending there's intelligence there or Consciousness or

01:33:26 mine I just like to see how that plays out in hundreds of different circumstances or with Evolution given the vast you know folding times available to it with time so I would not rule out the Inception of something we call mind from quite different architectures biological architectures to the ones that led to us and quite different lineages and past paths we can't do that we can't do the experiment except conceptually because social insects had 150 million

01:33:58 houses right I mean I I mean I wonder One does have the sense again there's a always a kind of sense that evolution The evolutionary process must be aimed at something like us and so if we weren't around you know the the the the the the the insects would evolve somehow higher intelligence what we think of is higher intelligence but we know that's not right I mean the dinosaurs had plenty of time um the insects as you say have had plenty of time the fact is what we know for sure because out of all the billions of species there's ever been only one

01:34:30 developed the kind of intelligence it's not evolutionarily very useful it can't be if it was like eyes right like sensors it would have evolved millions of times the the interesting question isn't what would my guess is if we weren't around and you left Let It Go nothing would evolve with our kind of technological intelligence the question is why us now you know one I I don't know I know there's an interesting book about the hand that said it's because we got hands

01:35:01 right I mean the fact is if you're a hyper-intelligent tree good for you it's not going to help you right you can't do anything with it even if you're a hyper-intelligent dog they're better ways to use your resources you know you've got hands there's lots you can do with your intelligence or maybe Voice or maybe language I mean you know they're all these different questions of what was the driver that suddenly made it useful enough for human beings to grow really big brains so that it actually became hard to give birth to them right because they're

01:35:33 because their crania got so big um and it's certainly not because there is a general purpose evolutionary advantage to that kind of intelligence because if it were that were the answer we'd see a lot more of it one last question well I was a lot of questions already been asked I was also thinking of Emily Dickinson speaking about the brain larger than the ocean and also of Life Beyond need I

01:36:05 mean even in the animal kingdom uh thinking of crows or Ravens they build structures to appeal to the mate there is a creative force that exists in the universe that's beyond immediate needs of food shelter and so and that and that is even more expanded in the human being so one has to even go into the whole realm of creativity the desire to go beyond the known to hit against the boundaries so it's not only the boundaries of the universe it's the boundaries within the self that wants to go exceed itself and exceed its limits

01:36:37 so I think that's a very important area of creativity okay