Inner Cosmos Inbox 2

Published Nov 30, 2023, 11:00 AM

Eagleman answers listeners questions.

Hey, this is David Eagleman on the Inner Cosmos inbox, and I'm going to answer your questions about the brain. Okay, Christina from Minnesota asks, what do I think about the claims of the government hiding evidence of aliens? Okay, we don't really know, but I'll make a general statement from the science point of view and one from the neuroscience point of view. From the science point of view, it certainly seems unlikely that we're the only intelligence civilization in the cosmos, given that there are at least one hundred billion other galaxies, and every galaxy contains about one hundred billion stars, and any number of those may have planets rolling around them, and so the number of planets in the so called Goldilocks zone where it's not too hot, not too cold, and could theoretically sustain life, this is a mind bogglingly high number. So there's no really good reason to think that we're all alone in the universe. So I would say that whenever we have interesting data, we should all be examining it, and therefore, if the government has data, we should be putting that immediately in front of the scientific community. On the other hand, I want to emphasize a general neuroscience point, which is that just because somebody asserts something to be true doesn't necessitate that it is true. There are dozens of ways that people can be diluted or fooled, or can pursue opportunities for attention, or can misunderstand what they're seeing even with the best intentions. And so the media coverage around this, I often hear things like, Oh, this guy is a decorated soldier, and this is being taken seriously by elected officials, And let me just make a general statement. I hope this is not offensive to anybody. But we all have the same brains. And whether you are a decorated soldier or an elected public official, when you go home and you're lying in your bed and you close your eyes and you're thinking about life and insecurity is in your own death and so on, you're no different than anyone else. All the rest, the resume and the titles and so on, that's all just decorations and it doesn't mean anything. And so I hope I'm not being offensive when I say that I have met elected officials and I'm not necessarily more impressed by their intelligence and insight than I am with other people I meet. One does not have to be a genius to get elected. One just needs to want it badly enough. So the fact that a few people with titles assert something to be true has little to no bearing on whether it is actually true. So my general take on this whole thing is that the data is totally insufficient right now for us to say there we have found alien life. And as far as I can tell, there are a lot of claims about the existence of clear data, but not a thing has been demonstrated yet or unveiled to the public. So we are in a position of having only a clear data and a lot of claims, and in a court of law that would translate to little or nothing. Let me just add one more thing. Some people make the false assertion that scientists tend to be closed minded about these alien claims, But I think you would see that scientists are the most willing to dive into data and completely change their minds in an afternoon, faster than you would believe if they see something that counts as meaningful data. A lot of people just stick with their views just as a matter of political positioning, but the scientific mindset is one that is always perfectly happy to change stance, even one hundred and eighty degrees, if the data support it. So the issue right now is that we're waiting on the claimed existence of some data, and if the weight goes on long enough, eventually it's going to start to look less and less likely that the data is actually there. Claims are not sufficient to convince data is Thanks for that question, Nathan from Colorado asks, how does being a neuroscientist affect your experience of the world? Does knowing about the mechanisms of perception diminish the pleasure of your conscious experience? Terrific question. First of all, one of the weird parts about life is that we can't run a control experiment to know what life would be like from a different heads. So it's hard to know how my experiences would be different if my trajectory through life hadn't been exactly what it was. But generally I would answer you a question by saying my knowledge of neuroscience affects my own sense of experience zero, not at all. So I should unpack that, which is to say, you know, let's imagine that you love mint chocolate chip ice cream. I could write a whole book on taste receptors on your tongue and the signals they send to your gustatory cortex and where the signals go through your brain and leads to the release of dopamine and serotonin and blah blah blah. The question is, if you read the book, would you enjoy the eating of mint chocolate chip ice cream any more or any less? And my assertion is that the information might be fascinating to you, but it wouldn't change your experience at all. Why because the information exists in one place, that of molecules, neurons, and so on, and the experience of the ice cream exists at the level of your conscious experience and never the Twain shall meet. Knowing everything at one level has no influence at another level. So the fact that I'm a neuroscientist, it doesn't really change much of anything about my experience in the world. Agga from Turkey asks, what if we have no free will? Does that depress you? I've had so many emails about free will that I'm going to do an episode on that very soon. But let me just summarize what I think is an interesting concept here, which is that what all the experiments have shown about free will is that it's problematic to trust our intuitions about the freedom of our choices. At the moment. We don't have perfect experiments to entirely rule free will in or out. It's a very complex topic, and one that our science might simply be too young to nail down thoroughly. But let's entertain for a moment the prospect that there really is no free will. The brain is just a big, giant, wet machine, and when you arrive at that fork in the road, your choice is predetermined every time. If I re history a thousand times, you'd take the same turn every single time. Now, on the face of it, a life that's predictable doesn't sound like a life worth living. The good news is that the brain's unbelievable complexity means that in actuality, nothing is predictable. So in my television show The Brain, I set up a tank with rows of ping pong balls along the bottom, and each one was delicately poised on its own mouse trap, which was sprung and ready to go. So when I dropped in one more ping pong ball from the top, it's pretty straightforward to mathematically predict where that ball will land. But as soon as that ball hits the bottom, it sets off an unpredictable chain reaction. It causes other balls to believe to be flung from their mousetraps, and those balls trigger yet other balls, and the situation quickly explodes in complexity. Any error in the initial prediction, no matter how small it is, it becomes magnified as balls collide and bounce off the sides and land on other balls on mouse traps. It takes just a moment before it's completely impossible to make any kind of forecast about where the balls are going to be and how things are going to end up. Now, the thing to note about the bing pong balls on the mouse traps is that these follow totally basic physical rules that you learn in high school physics, but where they end up is totally impossible to predict in practice. Now, by analogy, your brain is comprised of billions of brain cells and trillions of signals interacting every second of your life, and so even though it's a physical system, we could never predict precisely what is going to happen next. So our brains are like the ping pong ball tank, but massively more complex. You can fit a few hund ping pong balls in the tank, But your skull houses trillions of times more interactions than the tank, and it goes on screaming with activity every second of your lifetime. And from those innumerable exchanges of energy, your thoughts, your feelings, your decisions emerge. And that's only the beginning of the unpredictability. Every individual brain, yours and mind and everyone else's, is embedded in a world of other brains. So when you're sitting across a dinner table from people, or you're sitting in a lecture hall, or or you have the reach of the internet, you can contact all the human neurons on the planet. All the neurons are influencing one another, which creates a system of unimaginable complexity. And this means that even though neurons follow straightforward physical rules, in practice, it's always going to be impossible to predict exactly what any individual is going to do next, much less than months from now, a year from now. The Titanic complexity leaves us with just enough insight to understand a simple fact, which is that our lives are steered by forces far beyond our capacity for any awareness or control, and That's why I'm not too worried if we do run like a giant machine and don't have free will, because it is truly a colossal machine, one whose size alone makes it totally unpredictable, and who's embedding among other machines makes it totally unpredictable. Keep sending in your questions to podcasts at Eagleman dot com and listen to the full episodes of Inner Cosmos wherever you listen to your podcasts, and also on YouTube, where you can leave questions or comments. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is the Inner Cosmos inbox.

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman discusses how our brain interprets the world and what that  
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