Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel talks to Sam Kimpton-Nye about whether aliens do science the same way we do.
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Terms apply. When I say the phrase aliens have arrived, what comes to your mind? Do you think about humans getting sliced to pieces and served for a dinner, or alien ships blasting our cities from space. Well, here in our happy corner of the podcast universe, we'd like to be optimistic. There are potentially huge upsides to an alien arrival for the curious among us, and among those I count not just the hosts of this podcast, of course, but you, the listeners in our community of wonderers. For those of us who are curious about the universe, meeting aliens who are technologically advanced enough to arrive on Earth seems like a great opportunity. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle fist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I want to know the secrets that aliens have learned about the universe. And welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. My co Hostge Champ can't be with us today, so it's just me and a guest to talk about the secrets of alien science. Imagine for a moment the best case scenario. Aliens arrive on Earth and they are friendly, and we can figure out how to talk to them, and our scientists can talk to their scientists. Maybe these aliens know things about space and time or quantum mechanics that we haven't figured out yet. Maybe we could fast forward human science a thousand years or a million years In this picture, you can imagine human and alien scientists are like together, engaged in some grand project to unravel the secrets of the universe. If we can talk to them, and if they do science like we do, and if we can make sense of what they've learned, it could be an incredi of a moment, really a pivot in human history. But is that possible? As one listener asked a few weeks ago, could we even grocket or would they be too advanced? So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question could aliens teach us science? Could we establish a common enough understanding to communicate about complex intellectual questions like particle physics? Would they be interested in the same questions we are, Would we be able to understand their science? Could it be incompatible with ours? Are we certain they would even have developed science in order to be technological. To help me explore these questions, it's my pleasure to introduce today's guest, Samuel kimpton I. Samuel is a research associate at the University of Bristol. He works on issues at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Currently, he's working on the Meta Science Project which seeks to unify the natural sciences, but he agreed to join me on the podcast to talk about aliens and how they think about science. Sam, Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much for having me, Daniel.
So tell me first, how often does the topic of aliens and their scientific minds come up in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Is it totally fringe or is there like a whole journal devoted to this topic.
Good question.
Far from a whole journal, No, that would be a stretch. I mean, philosophers are very interested in thinking about wacky, far out possibilities and scenarios, so aliens do come up occasionally. There are also other monsters in there, sometimes zombies, vampires and the like. So I wasn't completely surprised that you woul choose to ask a philosopher to talk about this sort of thing.
It seems to me exactly the kind of things philosophers might love to talk about, because it's a great way to ask one specific question, you know, asking the question how do aliens think about science? Could we understand their science? Seems to me a great way to reflect on whether or not our science is universal or just human, whether it's something we've discovered or something we've invented. So I would be a little surprised if it's not something philosophers are already thinking about.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, it's something that I've been thinking about recently actually in the context of the philosophy of the laws of nature and to what extent we should be kind of realist or pragmatist about these things. And maybe we can get into that in some more detail. But there's definitely some value, certainly in thinking about how just beings with very different modes of cognition might explore the world and kind of systematize their experiences as well. Right, So, you know, we've got our five senses, and that seems to be completely integral to up to how we're going to explore the world, and so we're going to be systematizing the world on the basis of our sense experience. But it seems certainly imaginable that some other creatures would have very different senses, and so the way they systematize the world and do science would be quite different.
Indeed, And senses are something that philosophers, I know, talk about a lot. This person isolated in a room who's never seen the color red and the notion of qualia. But it seems to me it needs to be sort of a difficult topic to explore because we are limited to our senses, and so we're sort of in a box, and it's hard to imagine, like what it's like to be in a different box where you experience the universe with totally different senses. It's the goal there to think about, like what it would be like to experience the universe if you could like taste electrons, or if you had some sense for dark matter or neutrinos. Is it possible for us to really take that jump into sort of logic our way into what it's like to be a bat? You know, what it's like to be an alien? Or is that really impossible?
Exactly right?
I think that's the exact sorts of issues that that people might like to wrestle with in this area, right, And yeah, you've got the reference in there to what it's like to be a bat. And famously, philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that we can't possibly know what it's like to be a bat. But while that might be the case, at least we can sort of start to think about why that's so right. So the bat navigates by sonar as opposed to kind of visual experiences, and while we can kind of do some science of sonar, it seems a lot step from that to actually being able to know what it's like to be that bad. And so it certainly seems imaginable that there are just other actual creatures out there, or possible alien creatures that would just experience the world so dramatically differently to us that it would be impossible to kind of get into their perspectives and their minds. And so this is quite mind boggling to think that the way that we're experiencing the universe is potentially quite limited in a way.
And we know that it's limited. I mean, physics at least has told us that most of the universe is invisible to us. You know, most of the universe is dark matter, which we don't even know what it is. And even of the matter that we are familiar with, like neutrinos, are streaming in front of us all the time, but we can't see them. And so there's a lot. We know for a fact that there's a lot going on in the universe that we do not sense, and that therefore, our mental picture of the universe is a very particular one, and it seems frustrating but enticing to me at the same time. Like, if aliens are so alien that they might be impossible for us to like the digest, that also suggest that they have some very valuable insight, Like the more alien they are, the more valuable it is to try to understand their minds. But then paradoxically, the more impossible it might be.
Yeah, interesting, right, So, like you say, it's tantalizing because even if we were to encounter these creatures, maybe we just have no way of communicating with them, so we'd have no into their insights. But then I guess there are there might be kind of two dimensions to this issue. So what you said there suggested the possibility of creatures that might be able to perceive things that maybe we have some sort of knowledge of, but no direct perception of, things like nutrinos and that. But I suppose another thing that we might think is just that, going back to the bad example, they kind of the mode of perceiving one's environment might just be very different for the alien. So if they perceived by you know, reflecting sound waves or surfaces that would just give them a very different kind of experience. I also often think about the example of the aliens in that the Ted Chang's story Stories of Your Life or the film Arrival, and they have this very different if I remember correctly as well, I guess so I read the short story, but they have this very different perception of time, right, And it seems plausible to me that there could be a creature with a very different perception of time, and then that would just make the way they systematize and think about their world so different from ours.
Absolutely, And I think one of the really fun things about that story and the movie is understanding and appreciating how difficult it might be to communicate with aliens, not to mention, like talk about, you know, their notions and quantum mechanics, but just like get the basics down, you know. And that's a whole other question, you know, and maybe for today we should put that aside, that the question of whether we could discover alien messages, whether we could develop a common language with them. We recently had Gnom Chomsky and Kareem Jabbari in the podcast to talk about, you know, the universality of language and something that comes up often in these conversations is not necessarily like could we understand their lingo and their slaying and how they communicate, but that there might be a deeper way to communicate something that's common, something that's universe. This is I think widely held belief that we can avoid this whole question of language by focusing on the mathematics and the physics, which might be more universal. And Carl Segen famously argued that we could use mathematics to find a common intellectual context. But how much can we say about like the universality of mathematics itself. What do we know about whether it's likely to be just the way humans think, like an abstract, sort of succinct way to describe the thought processes that we have, or something that actually reflects the objective structure of the universe. How do we probe that kind of question?
Yeah, that's a great question, Daniel. And this is a whole area of really fruitful research and philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, which I certainly can't claim to be any kind of expert on. But it's tantalizing for sure. I Mean, there's this problem right that you might have encountered a problem of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. And it seems kind of surprising and really cool that mathematics turns out to be so good at describing the physical universe that we find around us, right, this abstract formal system that we've perhaps invented, you know, a lot of branches of mathematics come about just by mathematicians thinking in the abstract kind of having fun and doing puzzles, if you like, and then turn out to be applicable to real physical systems. And this is kind of remarkable and maybe something like a hint at the fact that the universe is in a way kind of made in these mathematical terms, and there's something objective going on here.
So that's an interesting thought.
Yeah, maybe there's some hope that that could be something of a universe, or that even crazy arrival type aliens might be able to communicate with us in terms of.
I'd love to believe that, and I'd love to think that mathematics is somehow the language of the universe itself, you know that, like, if we're in a simulation, then mathematics is the way that the source code has been written in some way. But it seems to me a little bit presumptuous, And let me take the devil's advocate position there and argue against it. The thing that makes me wonder about whether mathematics really is fundamental is not that mathematics is not effective, because you're right, it absolutely is. It's incredible how well our physical theories work. And I'm a particle physicist, and we make mathematical predictions to like ten decimal places, and we go out in the universe and we do experiments and while they're bang on right, and that gives you this feeling like, wow, maybe this isn't just a description of the universe. Maybe it is the way the universe does these calculations. But the problem with that argument is that every theory that we have, every mathematical description we have of the universe, we know is an effective theory, not a fundamental theory. We know that it has domains of validity. You know, for example, Newton's theory works really really well until we measured very precisely the orbit of mercury. We were like, wow, this might be the way the universe works. Maybe Newton had revealed the truth of the universe. And so there are many theories out there that only work in sort of a region, you know, under certain conditions or in certain systems, And can you say that they are a fundamental description of the universe, a true description of the way the universe works? Definitely not right. Newton was not correct about the real nature of space and time and gravity, and yet his theory worked really well. And today we have theories that work really well, but we suspect, or we are fairly confident, that they aren't the deepest theories of the universe. The current standard model, for example, will break down at the plank scale, where it needs a description of gravity. So how do we know that there are mathematical descriptions that are really fundamental, not just effective in some regime. Are we just looking at sort of like a patchwork of mathematical ideas, not like a true revealing of the nature of the universe.
Yeah, interesting, Daniel, A very good point there, and it reminds me of a debate in the philosophy of science, realism versus anti realism. Roughly, the debate over whether or not science kind of gets at the truth of how things are, and the anti realists say that you say that it doesn't get that the truth have an argument along those lines, right, They say, Look, all of these past scientific theories have proven to be false, so you know, why could we hold out any hope that our current theories are anywhere near the truth.
But then the flip side of that, like you say.
The perhaps you alluded to that these kind of false theories that are mathematized, as we've mentioned before as well, nonetheless seem to be kind of doing quite well, and we can do some good work with things like Newton's theory. We can send people into space and stuff like that. Right, So although they might be strictly speaking false, they might be kind of getting at something that's kind of almost right, And we might think that the better theories nonetheless preserve something of the structure of Newton's theory. So then, something that some metaphysicians and philosophers of science have said in response to this kind of pessimistic argument for antirealism and a slightly more skeptical stance, is that maybe what we're doing when we're describing the universe kind of imperfectly but in a way that kind of works and is then built on, is we're getting at some underlying deep structure. Right, So then maybe our mass, maybe even something like Newton's theory, is nonetheless latching onto some sort of objective structure in a much kind of broader or deeper sense than whether it's directly true. And so there might be some hope there that the maths is describing something that is fundamentally correct that's then sustained through the theory change.
The idea there, I guess is maybe alien physicists also hit on Newton's approach before they hit on Einstein's approach that is not just a human description of the universe, but it really is an effective approximation of the way the universe really works. I guess that is that the argument.
I think that might be the idea.
Yeah, right, I mean we can also think we know that Newton's theory is false, but but we can still wonder why it's so kind of effective and useful for us. And perhaps an answer to that is that it is getting at some sort of underlying structure in some sense. It might be kind of slightly grappling and groping in the dark at this thing, but it might be kind of getting close, you know. And so that's why we might be able to nonetheless use Newton's theory for all sorts of interests and purposes that we have.
Yeah, all right, well, I have a lot more questions about how we might probe the universe and how alien scientists do as well. But first let's take a quick break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price you thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So ditch your overpriced wireless with Mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash Universe. Forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi fees and restrictions apply. Seement Mobile for details.
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If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Apple Card, apply for Apple Card in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more. All right, we're back and we're talking to my guests, Samuel kim Deny, a philosopher of science and metaphysics, about how aliens might think about science. And when we took a break there, we were examining the question of whether our approximate theories like Newton's series, whether they're just sort of like human versions of the truth, or whether they might be universal alien physicists likely to stumble into sort of the same ideas as we are, or are these just sort of the way the humans think about the universe. And I think one way to maybe probe that is to think about why it's even possible to do what Newton did. I mean, if the universe has some fundamental theory down at the string scale of quantum gravity, whatever is going on down there, why isn't everything at the human scale totally chaotic? You know, if you try to describe a hurricane in terms of its fundamental bits, the rain drops, it's a huge difficult problem. We don't have like a simple equation that tells you where a hurricane is going to land. It's a massively chaotic problem, and you have to model every tiny little rain drop, and if rain drop moves over a meter, it could change the entire path of the hurricane. But in our world, it's possible to do what Newton did and describe the path of a ball through the air without knowing anything about quantum gravity. Right, you can make chicken soup without knowing what the soup is really made out of, and to me, that seems like the key there. If these things are emerging in these descriptions, these simplified mathematical stories of the universe are universal. Everybody else should find them as well. But do we even know why they exist? Why is it possible to find these simplified mathematical stories of the universe. It seems to me key to understanding whether aliens are also going to find them?
Right, Yeah, I mean again, this is a thing that philosopher, science and metaphysicians really puzzle over. It's why do we need to have all of the different sciences? Why can't we just have fundamental physics and may be chemistry. Why do we need biology and psychology and economics as well?
Right, that's a little bit aggressive. Why do we need anything but physics? Really, physics is the only science. I'm not sure I would go it.
Could be taken like that, but it could more be Yeah, a puzzlement once once we kind of realize or think that, hey, it looks like everything's kind of composed of fundamental particles or fields or something like that. Why can't we just do it all in fundamental terms? And yeah, I think, like you say, it's something of a mystery. I don't know if this is really an answer, but this is just kind of refraining the issue. But what sort of seems to happen is that we can effectively abstract away from certain details, right, because when we look at the level of the weather systems or the ball flying through through space, we don't need to think about certain details at the fundamental level. We can kind of coarse grain the information, and then that presents a picture that's far more useful and tractable for us given our interests. Right, And this is what we do, and this is how we navigate the world, Like you say, we can we can make our chicken soup without worrying about what the what the electrons or the fields are doing.
Right, But you said something really interesting there, you said based on what our interests are. It makes me wonder if the universe is sort of like Rassaman. You know what if we look at one system and we say, oh, the interesting thing here is a ball flying through the air, and look, I can tell a simple mathematical story about it, and an alien physicist would be like, ball, what even is that? I'm more interested in the flow of these particles over here, and I call that a blah blah blah, And here's my equation for the blah blah blah, and it's beautiful. And you know, is there a patchwork of mathematical story that are only interesting to us? Or are these stories likely to be universal? And I know that the real answer waits until we meet the aliens, we've talked science with them, and we figure out if they've developed completely independent branches of science. But I wonder you think it's possible to approach that question and address that question today before we've met the aliens, just by looking at the structure of our theories and looking for a hints that these things might be arbitrary or might be universal. How can we possibly pull those things apart today before we get to talk to the aliens?
Nice?
I mean, I happen to be somewhat skeptical about the idea that there really is an objective way of kind of I guess so if we think about the ball or the chicken soup, talk of that as like a way of coarse graining the low level information to suit our interests, I'm kind of skeptical that there is an objectively right or best way to do that, and it seems kind of plausible to me that, yeah, the aliens might be interested in some very different course grainings. Right, So we're interested in the of matter that kind of corresponds to what we call the ball, But why not be interested in the lump of matter that we call the ball and also my nose every Tuesday?
Right?
So this would be a very strange kind of thing to be interested in because it kind of jumps over time and space in strange sorts of ways. But look, I can define that object, right, this lump of matter that we call the ball and my nose on Tuesdays? And why not try and describe the behavior of that thing. Maybe that's a bit too silly, but I think that the point is it turns out to be very difficult to say why objectively we should be interested in the things that we are interested in. And do we think that an alien species would be wrong for having some very interested in very different kind of coarse grainings or would it be impossible for aliens to have interested in very different kinds of course grainings.
I'm not sure.
I don't see why it would be wrong if they had these different interests. It doesn't strike me as impossible either if they're again like going back to what we're saying at the beginning, their modes of perceiving that their central sense experiences were very different to us, or maybe if they perceived time very differently than we did, why not you.
Know, right? And to me it goes to really the heart of the question of the human experience and the context of it. In the same way that we want to know are we alone because we want to understand, like is life rare? And we also like to know are there other kinds of life that does biology have lots of different options and we just got one? Or is this basically the only way it can work? Meeting aliens can answer that question, and in the same way meeting alien physicists could tell us like, oh, look, it turns out they got their own Newton and they got their own Einstein, and this is the path you take to understanding the universe and it basically everybody follows the same path, or you know, did they take a completely separate path? And a thought experiment I'd love to do in reality is to take like a thousand earths and have humans evolve intelligently and then let science progress independently, you know, Newton almost didn't even become a scientist. What would have happened if he hadn't, if we hadn't had Einstein, or if somebody else had been even smarter. You know, it feels to me like the path of human science rests so much on these tiny moments, these tiny accidents, these tiny choices that people make, that it could have very well gone a different way, and we have really no way to probe, you know, the different paths that might have taken, because we haven't met those aliens yet. One way I've thought about it to probe that is to look at the sort of history of the development of intellectual scientific thought here on Earth. Do you know anything about like the history of you know, Mayan science and Chinese science and Egyptian astronomy, and whether they can tell us whether independent groups of humans tend to come to the same ways of thinking about the universe, or whether there really are divergent ways to attack this problem.
I think that's exactly the right way to kind of go about investigating this thing a bit more empirically.
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea to me.
Unfortunately, I don't know about any investigations along those lines. Although I'm sure there are some something kind of similar that I have heard about in philosoph is there's a recent movement in experimental called experimental philosophy, which basically surveys the kind of philosophical intuitions of the folk on various philosophical puzzles and things like that. So philosophy has kind of philosophical intuitions have been kind of put in the spotlight recently because it's like, hang on a minute, these are the intuitions generally seem to be the interesting intuitions of Western philosophers, and maybe they wouldn't be shared across the board, or they wouldn't be shared even just by people who aren't kind of indoctrinated into the academy as it were. And the experimental philosophers have done some work in this area, and I think they've uncovered more divergence in kind of philosophical intuitions than the kind of Western canon would have us believe. So I think there is some good reason to think that something similar might be the case with science as well, right, And I mean, I suppose another thing. I guess why I think this is relevant is because I think, really at the fundamental level. You can't draw sharp dividing lines between a kind of philosophical blue sky approach to thinking about the world and the scientific approach. We've all got to kind of start somewhere. And so if there's some evidence to suggest that these kind of broad philosophical intuitions on big questions are quite divergent between different people and different cultures, then I don't see why that wouldn't maybe lead us to think that plausibly different ways of doing science and different kind of foundational thoughts and intuitions on scientific issues might vary quite radically across people in different cultures as well.
Yeah, pascinating. Well, we'll have a scientific anthropologist on to talk about how indigenous cultures do science and the history of the development there. But I think that'd be a lot of fun. I'm going to turn us back to the question we were discussing a moment ago, which is, you know, whether these emergent theories, these mathematical descriptions of the world that we see it, are universal or whether they're just sort of culturally dependent and could be different for aliens. But let's zoom down and talk about maybe like the fundamental theory of the universe. Some listeners out there might think, well, perhaps we have different descriptions of balls versus noses, But at his heart, the universe is a certain way. There are fundamental vibrating strings, or there are space pixels or something at the quantum gravity level, and what if we all zoom down there, would we inevitably find the same description of the universe because it is one way. So. Kareem Jabbari from the Institute of Future Studies was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. He made a claim that I found a bit shocking. He said that you could have two fundamental theories of the universe that both work in the sense that they succeed at describing what we see, but internally are fundamentally different pictures of the universe, or like completely different mental descriptions and mental structures telling us a story about what's happening at the deepest scale. Do you agree with that? Do you think it's possible to have multiple accurate theories of the fundamental nature of the universe?
Yeah, very interesting.
I think nice like the approach there to think, Okay, maybe if we zoom down then we can then we can hope for some more objectivity. I suppose one thing that comes to my mind is that kind of approach hopes or assumes that there is such a thing as a fundamental level. For all we know, it could be infinitely infinitely divisible all the way all the way down right, And then I don't know, if we'd be in trouble. Then that might kind of scuffer our our aspirations for objectivity.
It might mean a lot of work for particle physicists for a long time, though we just keep building bigger and bigger atom.
Smasures potentially good news.
Then yeah, so that's something that I would worry a bit about. I mean, so, like, I suppose the worry, the kind of anti objectivist or or pragmatist approach or kind of worry would be that maybe all there is to the universe is just some kind of homogeneous blob of matter, and we just kind of cut it up in ways that serve our interests. And so then your perhaps counterproposal here is, but but what if we could just get to the very nature of the homogeneous blob matter stuff itself? Well, yeah, I don't know. Perhaps it it depends what we mean by homogeneous exactly. I suppose and how homogenous this blob stuff could be and what there really would be to say about it independently of how we carve it up. So I think it's it's the right way to go, but I think it depends on a fair amount of kind of hope that there is going to be some fundamental structure beyond which we can't make any further subdivisions, and that it's going to be some way that we're going to be able to latch onto. And maybe I think that's more likely, but I'm a little bit skeptical, as perhaps you can.
You can the sense, well, you know, my fantasy is that aliens come and they've been thinking about physics the way we have. They're just like a million years advanced, and they can like guide us through what would have taken us a million years to figure out in just one hundred years, and we zoom forwards, you know, But that relies on us having sort of the same principles. And the flip side of that, my nightmare scenario is that there is no fundamental true description of the universe and that everything we have learned is just this like patchwork of effect theories or like a ladder of effective theories where we have like a description at the galaxy scale, we have a description at the Solar system scale, and at the human scale, and at the atom scale and at the quark scale. None of these things are like deeply true. They're just like our mathematical stories about the noses we find interesting. And aliens might have their own ladder, They might pick different scales to explore, they might tell totally different stories. And so when we go to that first Interstellar Physics conference to share notes that we basically have nothing in common with these folks, and I wonder what we could learn at that point, you know, I mean, you work on this project of unifying the sciences of your metascience project, and we thought about, like what it might be possible to try to incorporate a new emergent theory that sort of straddles our various sciences into our structure, Like how do we absorb that into our sort of mental canon and make use of it If the aliens are fascinated in this thing that we've never even.
Thought about, Yeah, very interesting.
I mean I certainly don't share your your concern with the so called nightmare scenario. That doesn't necessarily seem worrying to me. I mean, for sure, it seems threatening to a certain sort of hypothesis, something along the lines of, yeah, that the sciences are all unified and they're all kind of ultimately getting at one fundamental objective truth. And so one could think that that situation would be evidence for a kind of radical disunity of the sciences. And I take it that that's the kind of thing that you're you're finding nightmarish, But why right, like that that would be an interesting empirical discovery in its own right, and so why not just kind of wonder at that right that that seems pretty interesting to me?
That would be a nice meal for the philosophers if it would be disappointing for the physicists, right.
Yeah, well no, look, I mean I'm not particularly confident about this, but I think there are a great many philosophers, maybe the majority, who probably do hold out for something like the unity that you that you sounded like you were keen on there. So then your other question was, like, Okay, if if we did find these these aliens who had this very radically way different way of thinking about the universe and carving things up and doing their science, what could we learn from that. Well, again, that would strike me as a very interesting empirical discovery in its own right, and it looks like it would tell us something along the lines of, you know, what's kind of important when we're doing science is doing something and kind of carving up the world and thinking about the world in a way that suits us. So then when we're doing science, we're kind of learning as much about ourselves as we are about the universe. And again, that seems kind of okay to me. Maybe it's not what most scientists have directly in mind when they're doing science, but that seems again like an interesting discovery and a very very worthwhile pursuit to find out about what we're like as beings and how we carve up the universe to suit our needs and interest.
Absolutely, it's like if we meet the Aliens and we discovered they don't like hamburgers or pizza, They've invented this other weird kind of food, and that tells us something about the Aliens, and you know, that's why you go traveling to eat weird kinds of food. That tells you about what those people are like. But their music is like it it's an insight into that culture. And that's only possible if we have enough in common to even really understand it, you know, to understand. Oh, this is a science question, and here is your answer. I want to turn a little bit to that sort of question. Like we talked earlier about whether it's likely that aliens even have mathematics, and whether that's universal or not. What about the other question of whether aliens are even doing science? Like could science itself be a fundamentally human pursuit? Not in the sense that we might be the only curious people about the universe, but you know, science is something we've only been doing in this form for a few hundred years. Isn't it possible to have a technological civilization that doesn't use this particular method of building internal mathematical models to describe the universe in order to make technological achievements. Do philosophers think about this question or the universality of science itself?
Yeah, for sure.
I mean now I'm tempted to give a very stereotypical philosopher's answer to this thing, which is like, come on, we don't really know what's science is. We can't demarket between science and nonscience, and so and so that would be a kind of a deflection of the question, I suppose. But I think ultimately the kind of the history of this topic of trying to kind of define what constitutes science shows that's that's hard, if not impossible, to do, right, And so given that observation, I'd certainly be reluctant to rule out whatever these aliens are doing as counting as science, because we're not really sure where to draw the line anyway, right, But perhaps more positively, I suppose the point just is, well, we should be kind of quite broad and quite permissive in what we mean by science. And it seems plausible that even if these things were radically differently kind of cognitively wired than we are, if they're going about trying to kind of, you know, find their way in the universe, build machines that suit their interests, inquire into questions they find interesting and fascinating, then why not call that science?
Right?
But I mean, maybe that's not quite what you were getting at. Maybe what you are getting out was more with the science that they're doing be sufficiently similar to our science for there to be any interesting points of contact between us and them.
Was that more what you had in mind.
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All right, we're back and we're talking to philosophers science and metaphysics. Samuel can Deny about the possibility of talking to aliens about science, learning from them, or maybe just being puzzled at the way they think about the universe. And when we broke off, we were talking about whether or not aliens do something that we recognize as science. And you're right, it's not about like whether or not we can officially call what they are doing science. It's about whether what they're doing is close enough to what we're doing that we could learn from them. I guess my brain naturally goes to these nightmare scenarios where, for example, we meet starfaring aliens. They come to Earth in their spaceships that have crossed the cosmos because they've developed warp drives, And our first question is, of course, how does your warp drive work? But I imagine maybe there are species that have developed technology not through the methodical development of physical models, but just sort of by trial and error. I think about, for example, you know, the swordsmiths of ancient Japan or Spain or whatever. They didn't have an understanding of why their technique made the metal extra hard. You know, they developed this technique mostly through trial and error. You dip it in this, you dip it in that, you heat this temperature, then you cool it. You get a really hard sword. It's definitely a slower way to make progress, but it's possible. Isn't it possible that we meet, you know, a starfaring race of aliens that have been doing this for a million years and sort of like stumbled their way into a warp drive or you know, lightspeed travel or something without having a deep understanding of it that they could communicate to us.
Yeah. Yeah, interesting nice.
So, like one way of kind of reading that scenario is that these aliens needn't be any more intelligent than us or any kind of radically different to us, But they could have just been around a lot longer, right, and so had more time to kind of, yeah, do the trial and error procedure and come up with some things, but then some great technology and perhaps innovations that kind of get them to other star systems or something like that. But then they're not able to communicate to us how they've done it because of how they got there. Yeah, that that certainly seems plausible. But then I guess, like like we were saying, that that's different from this other worry, which is that they've got there in kind of more of a theoretical ways, that they do have something that we might want to call understanding of the of the underlying physical theory that's underpinning their technology, but that it's just kind of so so different and again, they're kind of carving up and thinking about the world in a way so different from how we think about it that they're not going to be able to communicate their technologies and their insights to us. For that kind of reason, something that I do wonder in the kind of this vicinity, and more related to the latter scenario, where the worry that these creatures might just be so radically different from us that we just can't learn anything from them. So one sort of optimism might just be that we might think that the kind of counter as an agent in a sense, right where that's a very broad term, but it's a kind of a bit of a philosophical term of art. But you know, we're agents. We have some sort of some sort of aims and goals and consciousness. But to count as an agent and to have these sorts of interests in exploration and building technology, there might have to be some sort of commonality to what it is to be an agent, right, So to be that highly evolved, to be pursuing those sorts of pursuits and building those sorts of technologies, it might just kind of be the case that they'd have to have something somewhat in common with other agents, namely us, that we could find at least some sort of common ground. And again that's a little bit speculative and hopeful, but it's something that I kind of and somewhat persuaded by sometimes. So yeah, that might be a cause for optimism.
I think that is an attractive argument, you know, to suggest like, in order to develop in the universe, you have to be curious, and you have to build mental models to explain why things happen in your life, and those mental models naturally develop into you know, scientific thinking. I think that's an attractive argument, but it also feels to me a little bit too easy, you know. It's sort of like the kind of argument you make where you say, like, well, everybody drinks coffee in the morning because you know, everybody wakes up and they're tired and coffee helps, so therefore all humans must drink coffee. Right. It's sort of like and the argument you make, I don't mean to be too negative, but it's an argument from ignorance, right. It's to say I can't imagine something different, therefore this must be universal. Where the whole reason we want to meet aliens is precisely to confront those boxes and understand the limits of our imagination. And so that's exactly the kind of argument that I'm very tempted by, but I reject for that reason that I want to push my way out of it and understand if there are other ways to explore this. But fundamentally, I think it's frustrating because I don't think we can get out of that box without meeting those aliens, the way people can't really understand other cultures without doing some traveling or being exposed to them, Because sitting in your little village at home, it's probably impossible to imagine other ways humans can be.
Yeah, that's right.
That would be the best thing, wouldn't it, if we can meet these aliens. I mean, I'm not like completely pessimistic that there are other ways of doing it.
Like we've touched on, I think maybe maybe we.
Could push ourselves really hard to kind of think outside the box. I mean, something that comes to mind. And I don't ask too many follow ups on this, because I'm by far an expert on the topic. But there's this new thing in physics constructor theory, right, which we're told is supposed to be a whole new approach to the foundations of physics, which is nothing like anything anyone has ever done or thought of doing in terms of thinking about the universe before. And if that's all it's cracked up to be, it might be something along these lines right away of kind of thinking from first principles in a completely different way. If we think that there is the potential to really shake up our foundational thinking in these sorts of ways, then then yeah, again, maybe we could have some optimism that if there were this radically different species of aliens that we came into contact with, that at first it looked like we had no hope of interacting with them, maybe after some work and some reconceptualizing of our founders we could get there, right, And so I think there might be some some reasons to be optimistic.
But yeah, well, if the aliens do arrive and they don't just like fry Us from space, do you think we should send the philosophers first or the physicists.
Oh?
I think maybe the philosophers and the physicists should probably be working in tandem on this one. I think they've probably got the strengths and weaknesses in this kind of situation that could complement each other.
So send a team of both.
I asked Niam Chanski if he thought that scientists would be allowed to talk to the aliens, and he was pretty cynical about whether military and political structures would allow scientists and philosophers to speak on behalf of Earth, which is a whole other reason to be pessimistic and not a road I want to go down today. I think another question people think about when they imagine speaking to aliens is putting aside all these philosophical questions and say they have similar structures, and they've thought about physics in similar ways. They're just really far advanced from us. A basic question is how could they teach us what they know? How could we possibly understand the science of a super advanced race. It's sort of like if you gave Galileo a laptop, where would you even go to explain to him how it works and what you could do with it. People think about, like, you know, how to bootstrap humanity up to the level of potential galactic aliens?
Well, I think there I'd be inclined to be a bit more optimistic, maybe just from the kind of observation that we teach children all sorts of complicated things and I've seen many child I mean, this is not necessarily a good thing, but you see kids these days just taking to laptops and iPads as if it was kind of innate in them to use these objects, which strikes me as kind of crazy, but then also makes me think, look, if we can teach kids to use these strange new bits of technology, and we can educate our children to do all sorts of funky things like maths and logic and art and poetry, then yeah, why couldn't they a Why couldn't we be the children of the aliens? Why couldn't they take us under their and teach us their way? So I have a little bit of optimism there.
I think, Yeah, let me take your optimism and turn it back into a nightmare scenario, which seems to be my role in this conversation, which is, the aliens come and they have super advanced science, and US physicists who have grown up thinking one way can't rock it. But we send our children to the alien schools, and you're right, to them, it probably feels totally natural. Then there's this generational divide where one set of humanity is like super charged in thousands of years ahead of the old ancient of gray haired folks like me who just never really understand the modern world.
Right, and we've got something of a toned down version of that, it feels like today, like the Internet natives, and that the technology native people growing up do seem to be somewhat separated from the older generation.
So yeah, it's.
Conceivable that that sort of divide that we actually observe could just be a lot more dramatic, right, Yeah, so that will be nightmarish for sure.
So I guess the answer is, don't give Galley of the laptop. Give Galileo's kids the laptop and they'll be playing a wordle within ten minutes. That's it exactly, all right. So then to wrap it up, what do you think is something we can do to prepare? I mean, I don't know if aliens are going to come. I don't know if aliens even exist. I don't know if we will hear a message from aliens. But these are deep and important questions and we haven't really resolved any of them today. What do you think are the most sort of important directions for humanity or philosophy to sort of prepare for that moment so that when it does happen, we have a plan or a thoughtful structure in which to explore these questions.
Yeah, good question.
I mean I think actually one thing we could do to prepare for that scenario is to look hard at the sorts of things we take for granted. Right, So I think scientists do this, but non scientists do this as well. Of course, we go about the world and we take all sorts of things for granted about the nature of our reality.
And really what this is is.
A kind of a philosophical commitment that we have to various assumptions and premises and background kind of structures ways of thinking, but that we're not particularly aware of because we don't scrutinize them.
So perhaps we could do something like that.
We could think about what some of these most basic assumptions that we take for granted in science but also in everyday life, and see if they could possibly be questioned, because look, these aliens might have very different foundational assumptions to us, and so I think engaging in this sort of exercise could maybe come close to preparing us for this kind of encounter.
Yeah, I totally agree. It's like preparing for travel. You should be asking yourself I wonder if they do drink coffee where I'm going, or you know, if they have a totally different kind of toilet where you don't squat or you don't sit, or you don't stand, or who knows what. Preparing your mind for the breadth of possibilities, And for me at least, I totally look forward to that day when aliens blow our little minds and tell us how there are other ways to think about the universe, to explore the universe, even to ask questions. What questions are they asking? You know, not just what answers do they have, but what do they find strange and fascet about the universe. It seems to me like a lot of what we think about as objective in science is driven by aesthetics. A lot of the questions we're asking in theoretical particle physics are driven by like this looks weird, or I think it would be prettier that other way. Even the discovery of the Higgs boson came about because people were thinking, this theory seems kind of ugly, and it would be much prettier if we added this one other piece. And so there's a lot of you know, aesthetics and subjectivity and you know, personality in how we explore the universe. And so I think you're right that we need to look at that and put that under a microscope and wonder whether there are other choices that could have been made great.
Yeah, so we could even spend some time in some art galories thinking about why we like what we like and dislike what we dislike. I very much agree with that, Danah, Yeah, that sounds very sensible to me.
Yeah. And you know, as much as I'd like to send artists on that first contingent also to meet the aliens, I think it's almost impossible we will ever understand alien art. And I don't know if that bodes well or not for alien philosophy and alien visits, but I'll look forward to one day finding app all right, Thanks very much, Sam for joining us with this crazy and wide ranging conversation on how aliens think about science and whether we might ever be able to understand it.
Thank you, Daniel, that was really fascinating.
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