Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I hear that you went to New York and came back with some audio goodies for us. That's right. I went up to the two thousand and eighteen World Science Festival in New York City. Uh, it's a it's a festival that I go to a lot. I don't get to go every year, but I've been, uh several times since I believe two thousand and eleven, and this time, I yeah, I brought back three many interviews that I wanted to share with everybody. Uh, these are gonna definitely state that these are essentially field recordings. These are these are green room interviews, so they're not gonna have the fidelity of an in studio interview or even one of our phone interviews. Necessarily, it's going to be a slightly new beast for long time listeners to the show. So maybe girds your ears. But you think we got some good stuff in there that will make it worth the audio? Yes, I believe so, because we're gonna you're gonna hear me chatting with physicist Brian Green, uh, as well as physicist Max Tegmark, as well as anthropologist Barbara ja King. Now, each one of these people you talked to, h. Of course, Brian Green is one of the founders of the festival, right, but each of these people you talked to were involved with panels that took place at the festival this year, right, correct, Yes, Green, of course, being with the founder, he moderated uh, different panels as well. All right, we'll give us a little background on the World Science Festival and then maybe we can set up one of these interviews here. Alright. So, founded in two thousand and eight, World Science Festival has a stated mission to cultivate a general public informed by science, inspired by its wonder and uh, convinced of its value and prepared to engage with its implications for the future. And it was indeed co founded by Clem be a University physics and mathematics professor, string theorist, author and just overall science communicator, Brian Green, along with his wife Tracy Day. The World Science Festival is a it's a production technically of the World Science Foundation, which is a five oh one nonprofit organization headquartered in New York City, and so each year, uh they host a week long slate of science panels, salons, performances, and even a street fair. So it's it's the kind of thing that that really reaches out to all levels of of science enthusiasts. You see academics there, you see graduate students, you see younger students, you see science communicators, children, old people. Um, the whole nine yards. What's the street fair? Do they have funnel cake? It's a lot of stuff for for kids, uh, as well as adults. So just a lot of tents set up, a lot of like cool science activities, robots, science experiments, that sort of thing. Did you take your son? I haven't brought him yet. So my on is just now six years old, and I think we're at the level now where he is he is perhaps ready to travel to New York City and do all of the walking that that entails. But I am looking forward to bringing bringing him at some point because uh, my again, I've been several times, and I've been there with my wife, but I haven't been able to really engage in all of the kids stuff. That is also an important part of the festival. All right, Well, to get to your first interview, this was with festival founder and physicist Brian Green, right, that's right. Yeah, I got to sit down with Brian Green. This was after he had moderated one of the opening discussions of the festival, Darkness Visible, shedding new light on black holes. Black Holes are fascinating and there's something that I've wanted to go into more depth on on the podcast before, because not only are they one of the most strange and interesting things in the physical universe, I think the story of how we came to know about them and how we arrived at the modern consciousness of black holes not just sort of as some thought experiment, but as like a real physical reality is really interesting too. Yeah. I I really enjoyed this particular talk, and this is one of the talks that that was filmed and is actually already available for everyone else to view on YouTube for free. I'll include a link to that on the landing page for this episode at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But yeah, I I greatly enjoyed it. It really Uh, it opened opened my mind up to some of the certainly some of the details about about black holes and our our sort of journey towards our understanding black black holes, as well as just an update on just where we are, you know, at the bleeding edge of understanding them. Well, what's the scoop? I mean, the basic scoop is that we have we have gone on this journey from a black hole is just this mathematical possibility, this thought experiment in math, and we are at the point where they are. They are a reality. Like experts tend to agree that, yes, there's without a doubt there are black holes. We have black holes as the result of of dead stars. We have massive, super massive black holes at the center of galaxies, including our own Milky Way galaxy, and we're on the cusp of being able to uh to to to really learn a great deal more about them, and in doing so, uh we really find out what we truly know about the fabric of the universe. So on that note, let's go ahead and dip into the interview here, and then afterwards Joe and I will discuss some of the concepts that are discussed. Which world science best will offering. Are you most excited about this year? Well, I'm biased because I'm in a few of them, so that's probably uh, not the completely objective answer that I might give. But we have a program on a conversation between religion and science, and oftentimes that conversation out there in the world is a contentious one, with each side basically trying to say that the other is wrong or that their approach is the only way forward. And we're not going anywhere near that because that's just not a productive way to have a melding between these two ways of looking at the world. Instead, we're looking at whether science can give us insight into whether the behavior that we have evidence for tens of thousands of years, which is looking for some larger stores, some larger narratives, some bigger picture into which we could fit Could that have had adaptive value? Could the brain have evolved in such a way that we have a predilection for that way of thinking about the world in some sense? Could that perspective in the world be imprinted in our d n A And if signs can illuminate some key aspect of human behavior, how exciting is that? And that's really what the focus of this conversation is going to be. It's called the believing brain. Excellent. I'm looking forward to that great one and I tend to be a black hole. Oh you did great. What do you think when you have a topic like that? You I really admired the legwork that you kind of had to do to bring everyone in the audience up to speed on it, because obviously you have uh you have academics and students and graduate students in the audience, but then also just regular people children, even uh, yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, the goal really is to be broadly accessible but still take people up to the cutting edge all, you know, in that case, in the space of two hours. Usually our programs are ninety minutes, but I decided that one deserve the full two hours. And yeah, talking about the observational side of black holes, talking about the new ways of examining them with gravitational ways, gravitational radiation, and then if you're theoretical frontiers, were really describing the quantum nature space and time and how information could be encoded on the surface of a black hole. It's pretty amazing time to be thinking about these objects that now we know with a high degree of certainty are really out there in the universe. Now. In in the past of various talks of incorporating some level of performance or performance art. Do you have anything like that lined up for this year's after Well, we do have works that our performance oriented's. We kicked off the festival with the Celebration of Women in Science. You may be familiar with that program where we had Broadway stars and wonderful performers who were telling the audience through narrative and song about some of the greatest women scientists of the last two hundred years. So that certainly was a melding of the two. We also have some theater pieces that are part of the festival this year, some film as well, and that's the majority of the footprint that's in the art space. We are next year going to have some original new works that put art and science together in some pretty compelling ways. But I'll just dangle that out there so you'll be compelled to join us again next year. Now, on the topic of black holes and I guess other scientific topics that are kind of in that that same realm, do you think mainstream media, mainstream science fiction in particular, could be doing more to sort of prepare general audiences for these concepts, for instance, with black holes. Uh, even even though I come back to the topic time and time again as a podcaster and writer, I still can't shake the old Disney movie vision of it and all its absurdities out of my head. What was that the black hole or vent arizing? What was it called something like that? Or there wasn't there was a rising, but the Disney black hole where it was just um it was it was? It was certainly not two thousand and one right right, or even Interstellar. I mean, now, if you want to see what a real black hole looks like, just go to Interstellar. I mean the visuals they were driven by the mathematical equations, so this is actually a very precise rendition of what it would look like to be in the vicinity of a black hole. But yes, you know, I'm My view, which I think is widely shared, is the culture needs to integrate with science in an organic way. So that's not as a scientist some separate subject that's out there that you take in school. Rather, you really need to be the case that we use all the tools and all the things that matter to people from film and theater and science and science fiction in order that the ideas are in the air and the imagery is front and center when relevant and to do it correctly. Sometimes it's more work, maybe even a little more expensive. But if you get the real picture of a black hole into people's minds through some wonderful story, how great is that so that we as a culture really being to embrace these ideas far more fully and far more accurately. In your opinion, what's the single most exciting research frontier in physics right now and wine, Well, it's a tough question. Certainly one is gravitational waves, because whenever you open up a whole new way of engaging and observing and interacting with the universe, you're bound to find surprises. You know, so far there have been some surprises, but for the most part, we've been seeing the kinds of things that we anticipated, seeing the kinds of things that computer simulations had already given us some insight into. And now the observations are agreeing with the computer simulations, which is wonderful. Yeah, there are still some surprises there as well with neutrust our collisions, But the real wondrous moments gonna be when we get some data from the gravitation way of observatory that fits no template, that's no previous computer simulation and forces us to go back and figure out what kind of exotic new structure out there in the universe is giving rise to these very peculiar ripples in the fabric of space and time. That's gonna be an astounding moments. That's certainly one area. The other area in physics, at least if I focus on that, is trying to really understand quantum mechanics as it relates to space and time. And there are hints that we may be finally putting our finger on the fundamental entities, the ingredients that may stitch together the very fabric of space and time itself. And if that work bears fruit and turns out to be correct, that's going to be a real watershed moment in human kinds understanding of the universe. So it's kind of a follow up here. If you had limitless resources to dedicate to one future experimental physics or cosmology project, what would it be and what would be we'd be seeking to learn from it? Limitless resources? Wow, Well, I think certainly one one major undertaking would be to build a fantastically powerful accelerator. So we have been examining the universe on scales roughly a thousand to ten thousand times the massive a proteon. Those are the energy scales involved. But we know that there's got to be something wondrous happening between there and the plank scale, which is ten to the nineteen times the mass of a proteon. So there's fifteen orders of magnitude in there to examine. And it's an expensive thing to build ever bigger machines to floor ever higher energies, ever smaller distances. But I've had unlimited resources, truly unlimited resources. Let's try to build a plank scale accelerator and really see whether we can see the effects of quantum gravity in this futuristic laboratory. That would be a spectacor the thing to do excellent. So one last question, and I apoloticiste little wenk think. But so, as as discussed last night, black holes started out as more more in the real thought experiment and math curiosity, but but now we largely accept in the physical reality. Do you think there are ideas like that out there in physics today, Things that we are current that are currently only a cetical math entities, etcetera, but that will want will someday will accept a real physical objects in the universe. Well, I certainly hope so, because otherwise I've been barking up the wrong tree for a very long time. So the work that I've been focused on in my colleagues as well, coming Bathroom from last Night program to is string theory, and it's ring theory does posit the existence of new physical entities, really small entities down at the playing scale tents of the mind is thirty three centimeters and that's fantastic smallest hard to even think about how tiny that is. And right now it is just mathematics. It is just in the exact same template as black Holes where it say, back in the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties. So the hope is that we will follow the same trajectory and that one day we'll be sitting here having a conversation and you'll say to me, now that strings are accepted as real physical entities. It wasn't it, And and that's that's where we hope that things will go all right. So that was that was my mini interview with Brian Green, and I appreciate him taking time out of his state chat with me. Uh, We're definitely going to come back to black holes on stuff to blow your mind. It's the kind of topic that it's probably gonna take it at least two episodes to really give it full coverage. But I do want to touch on some of the things that the Green is talking about here. So the key thing that Green is describing is how black holes began again as a mere thought experiment on the for on the on you know, first the nature of gravity. So we have this idea of dark stars and the Newtonian concept of a of a star that becomes too massive for light to escape from it, but mostly as a byproduct of crunching spacetime in Einstein's general theory of relativity and the calculations of German astronomer Karl Schwartschild who died in War One. Yeah, and it's amazing to think back that there was a time where you could have explored black holes as a sort of thought experiment, playing around with gravity. But a lot of people might have laughed at you if you proposed that there were actually black holes out there in the universe. Yeah, they were not things that we observed. Rather, there are the things that we expected to be there based on the math. So for decades they were pure, purely theoretical, but now we've reached the point where experts are pretty certain. We know for certain that stars collapse into black holes when they die, and the supermassive black holes lurk at the center of the gut of our galaxies, again, including our own. We have twenty five years of supermassive black hole studies under our belt, and they've revealed quite a lot. So one of the issues here is that, you know, we create these templates for what we observe based on the map, and then we see how the template matches up to our observation. That's kind of how a lot of things work in science. You know, you're you're creating expectations based on the data you have, and then you see what occurs when you bring that template to nature. It's a model testing. You make a model and see is the model right to match the data. And this is all actually going down as we speak, as we record this, even because we have the Event Horizon Telescope project, which is a global network of radio telescopes that essentially turns the Earth into a telescope large enough to observe and measure the environment surrounding the Milky Way. Supermassive black hole uh Sagittarius A. And in doing it, we're not only verifying the existence of black holes, but as Green astrophysicist Andrea Guez and astronomer Sheep Doleman pointed out, we're actually putting Einstein's general theory of relativity to the test, and we may be forced to move beyond it in our understanding of the universe. That's weird because we generally think no pun intended. We generally think of general relativity as something that's sort of beyond dispute at this point, right, Yeah, Well, but as they point out in this talk, it's you have kind of a trust but verify situation with it, Like we have to trust it because we've built so much of how we view the universe is built upon it. But as we learn more, we're inevitably reaching the point where that too is a template that must be put to tests, that we must hold up to nature as we develop better and better ways of observing it. Well, I mean, there are some ways in which we know that it is at least partially right. But yeah, that's the question of like, at the margins of our understanding, are are there ways we need to sort of updated, I guess right now. Another topic that Green touched on here is quantum mechanics, and of course we recently did a fairly deep dive into some of the properties of quantum mechanics and our quantum immortality episode, so I don't know that we really need to refresh a lot there. We just say if you if you have questions about what this whole quantum mechanics thing is about, do check out our recent episode on quantum immortality, or again check out this talk in full from the World Science Festival. But I know one of the things in that arena that Green is interested in is the idea of discovering quantum gravity, right, like, what is what? How does gravity apply at the quantum scale? Yeah, and a Green touches on towards the very end of this interview. Uh, there is of course the realm of superstring theory, and this is certainly one of Green's core areas of studies and core area of contribution. This is the idea that miniscule strands of energy vibrating across multiple dimensions create every particle enforce in the universe. So particle physicists define elementary particles or fundamental particles as the smallest building block in the universe. In other words, particles such as leptons and courts have no substructure there as small as it gets. Ultimately, string theorists are aiming to fulfill Einstein's unrealized goal of unifying general relativity with quantum theory. And one of the interesting points brought up in the in the talk and black holes is that string theory actually helps us make sense of the entropy problem with black holes. Now, what is that problem? Okay, so the basic idea here and ultimately Green presents us a lot better in in in the actual world Science Festival talk, but they give us the bad version. That the bad version, if you will, or the rough version, is how can a black hole be in a high entropy state if everything inside is super crunched down to a state of less entropy than normal matter? Where is the missing entropy? So, according to string theory, you find that missing entropy and the six microscopic spatial dimensions that exist in addition to the three spatial dimensions that we can observe earve And the example Green often uses to explain like low versus high entropy, is that it's essentially you're talking about a high ordered state and a low ordered state. In his frequent example is if you do you have a book of pages without a binding and they're in order, high order, right, throw that in the air and then all the pages, uh fall to the ground and now they're in disorder. Loss of information organization. So speaking of black holes, when you talked to Brian Green, was we're all trying to talk about Event Horizon. The Event Horizon. Was that like sort of coming to the surface? It did kind of, yeah, because I brought up Disney's The black Hole, and I'm not not sure he was familiar with or had a you know that's necessarily remembered that film, which of course gives us a very ridiculous notion of what a black hole would be. It's basically just a big, you know, glowing vortex in in in the least realistic space you could possibly imagine. And he thought you were talking about what's name Sam Neil, And oh, yeah, an Event Horizon, which is a film that I really enjoyed, and now we know Brian Green's seen it. I I can't even imagine Brian Brian Green responding to the science of event Horizon, which of course is a is a horror movie, a haunted house movie set in space, with some black holy science thrown in there, but basically the idea being that a black hole takes you to Hell and and does Hell raise your things to you. I want to hear Brian Green's thoughts on the the scientific accuracy of Mortal Kombat Annihilation. Well, you know, but I do love that he brought up Interstellar though it's a film in which the mathematics is is very sound. Uh. That definitely makes me want to sit down and watch Interstellar again, which I enjoyed the first time. But but but I do feel like I need to give it a review. Well, one of my favorite things about an Interstellar was the way it took seriously the time dilation of texts of the Unian that came a crucial plot point is is how the passage of time changes in relation to say, your proximity to a supermassive object or you know, travel through space and all that. I thought that was one of the most interesting things about the story, and I'm glad they did that. Yeah, you don't. You really don't see enough of it in science fiction films anyway. And I think that's exactly what Green is talking about when he said, you know, he says in his discussion with you that the culture needs to integrate with science in an organic way, right. You know, He's like, essentially, we should work to make our current best understanding of science not a thing separate from popular culture, but a fundamental part of popular culture. The same way that you might get a mostly accurate picture of what, say, well, actually, I don't know how accurate this is, but you might get a somewhat accurate picture of what the streets of New York look like in two thousand and sixteen by watching a movie shot that year. Uh. You know that that's like cultural information is being embedded in that popular culture media. Shouldn't we also get a sense of what the science looks like in sixteen embedded in popular culture and media. Yeah, which, of course brings me back to Jurassic Park in Jurassic World, like you wouldn't You wouldn't have a movie set in New York and and go out of your way to represent two thousand and ten New York or or or you know, nineteen eighty New York. So why would you do that with your depiction of these dinosaurs, Why wouldn't you give them feathers of coloration or even you know, some symbolance of behavior that matches up with our best understanding, our best current understanding of what they were. Well, because you're making Jurassic World and you don't care about life. Uh, But I totally agree with with Green's perspective there. I think it is a noble thing to try to do two more deeply integrate our best picture of science with popular culture. And in fact, uh, I'd say that's something we tried to do a lot on the show. Right, We're constantly trying to lay a real science and other aspects of culture like movies and books and religion and mythology side by side so they can sort of get wrapped up together into one world of thought and one conversation. At least I hope that's what we do. Yeah, that that's certainly the aim. So what do you think about doing a science fiction film about a plank scale accelerator. I love that idea. I love I love him talking about the you know, the future of particle colliders. What energy level could we get up to? And I think that's something we could also do an episode on someday. What what would a plank scale accelerator look like? Uh? Is such a thing even possible to build on Earth? Given you know we we were asking him a hypothetical question about limitless resources, given real resources, could you do such a thing? Alright? Well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back we will dive into another interview and discuss what Max Tegmark had to say. Thank you, thank you. All Right, we're back. So, Robert, you talked to mad Max. Yes. Us. This was definitely one of the highlights of World Science Festival two thousand and eighteen for me getting to set down with Max tag Mark, president of the Future of Life Institute, UH physicist advocate for positive use of technology. He's also a professor doing physics and AI research at m i T, author of Our Mathematical Universe, as well as his most recent book Life three point oh Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Now, I do want to warn everybody this one is probably this one probably has the roughest audio quality of the three that we're airing here. This was recorded in a fairly noisy green room, but the content is so good. I just just really, we just really have to share it with you. You're not going to be confused about which voices. Max's right, Max is Swedish Americans. You'll you'll detect a slight accent here. But yeah, this was a fabulous little talk. Max's super chill and I really appreciate him taking time out of his day right before he went in and participated in a panel discussion to talk about these topics. And here we go. So what is your most optimistic model for a post technological singularity world? Well, everything I love about civilizations is the product of intelligence. So if we can amplify our intelligence with machine intelligence, you know, we have the potential to really solve the toughest problems that are stumping us today and tomorrow. I came. I was in the hospital recently visiting a friend had been diagnosed with an uncurable cancer, for example. But it's obviously not uncurable. Humans just weren't smart enough to figure out how to cure it. This is an example I think AI can completely transform healthcare and medicine together with the rest of science. Similarly, the fact that we struggle with a lot of people in poverty is not because there really aren't enough atoms on Earth. With more intelligence, we can have it do enough great stuff with our resources to help life flourish like eleven before here on Earth and throughout the cosmos too, if you want, you know. Okay, now on the pessimistic end of the spectrum, what are some of the negative possibilities that we were least prepared for anticipating a well. Some people seem to take it in an article of blind faith that all new technology is automatically good, and then disrepeat this over and over and again as a mantra. But the truth is, of course, the technology isn't good, nor is it evil. It's neutral. It's just an amplifier of our ability to do stuff. It's fire good or bad one it's good to heat your home within the winter and bad to use for arson, and AI is really no different except much more powerful. So to me, the really interesting question is how can you win the wisdom race between the growing power of technology and the growing wisdom with which we manage it. I think my concern comes from the fact that we're we haven't realized we have to change strategies to win this race. We used to staying ahead of the game by learning from mistakes. You know, we invented fire and screwed up a bunch of times and invented the fire extinguisher, but with more powerful tech like nuclear weapons and super human AI, we don't want to learn from mistakes. We want to plan ahead instead and get things right the first time, which might be the only time we have some I'm optimistic that if we do plan ahead, we can create a really inspiring future. But it's going to take planning and hard work. We can't just bumble into this. That's a lot of the culture at large, science fiction of I didn't need to particular science fictions you potentially partially particularly helpful. I just rewatched Kubrick's two thousand and one the other night with my family, and I think it's not only the one of the oldest, but also one of the best, actually, because when Hal says I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that, it illustrates the point that we shouldn't worry about AI turning evil, because how isn't evil. We should just worry about AI turning very competent and having goals that aren't aligned with ours, because that's exactly what we're wrong. On that Jupiter mission. It doesn't matter so much if the machines goals disagree with yours, if the machine is much dumber and less powerful than you, because you just switch it off, right. But if you have a he's taking missile chasing after you and you feel that you don't like its goal, it's not so easy to just switch it off. And if we create a computer system that's literally smarter than than humans in the future, then we better make sure that we shared our goals, because what's given us more power on this planet than any other species, isn't there we have bigger biceps that were smarter. How will digitize consciousness of play a role in humanity future? I think we need to distinguish between digital consciousness artificial consciousness on one hand, and artificial intelligence on the other hand, because there are two very very different things. Artificial intelligence, if we make it really powerful, well well beyond that, the best thing ever, the worst thing ever, depending on how it's used and who or what you know controls it. Consciousness this subjective experience that you and I have when we drive down the street. We experienced colors and sounds someone We don't know whether self driving car experiences anything at all, whether it feels like anything to be it, and the world leaning experts actually argue passionately about this. Some think, uh, the stupid question. Of course machines can't be conscious. Others say that's a stupid questions because, of course consciousness is the same thing as intelligence, so a robot that talks like a human will feel like a human. I think the answer is neither of those two. I think it's somewhere in between. Because we know that most of the information processing happening in your brain right now you're actually not aware of, like your heartbeat regulation and a gazillion other things. But consciousness, it's sort of like the CEO of your brain, a small part of the information. So I think it's gonna be really important to figure out actually what information processing is conscious and what isn't. You might want to have a home helper robot that isn't conscious like the zombades you just so you only need to feel guilty when switching off or giving it boring chores. Or maybe you would want it to be conscious so you don't feel creeped out when it acts as if it were conscious. And either way, there's a really tough science question here. What is consciousness, and I think we should have been humble and realize that it's actually not just philosophy, it's actually an unsolid science question, and we should tackle it. We believe we will find an answer in their future because we will have a definite model of human conscious I'm in a small minority actually thinks yeah, and that we are going to make real progress. We've wondered about this for thousands of years with very little progress because we had almost no data. But now we're getting incredibly good data from our brains. I can put you in our many Magneto and Pholography machine at m I T and read out from six three and four Superconducting Center a bunch of stuff and tell you in real time which of a bunch of objects you're thinking about, for instance, and and that and opens up the possibility of doing some really cool experiments that it mast have been done, Like if someone has a consciousness theory that predicts which information in your brain is conscious and which isn't, you can sit in the machine and just test that on yourself. If it predicts that you are conscious of things that you aren't and rice versa, theory goes in the garbage can, right, And once someone comes along with a theory that passes those sorts of tests will start taking it seriously, and hospitals will start to have consciousness detectors in the emergency room, so when an unresponsientation comes in, the doctor knows whether they are actually in a coma or have locked in syndrome. And that should just add in the longer term. This is, of course incredibly important because imagine one day if someone like great Hurts File, who wants to upload himself into a robot, managed to do that and it talks like Ray and actually like Ray, and he's like, yes, awesome, now it's okay if my biological body gives up the ghost. If it turns out that this robot is actually just a zombie, isn't conscious at all, he will be pretty bummed. Right. And imagine if humanity one day has these robot descendants were very proud of and they go on and do all this cool stuff but they aren't conscious. Wouldn't that be the ultimate zombie apocalypse where the whole universe just goes back to being a play for empty benches. Well, because I guess you're potentially creating all these zombies because then it's also potentially we're nothing zombies as well. Well. I think you know subjectively that you are not because you are conscious, You are aware of these things. But I think we have to be humble. That doesn't mean that every system that does clever stuff is actually experiencing anything. It's not at all clear that a self driving car has any subject of experience it at all, and that it feels like anything to be it. And for some devices, again that's probably the way we wanted. But if we create really sophisticated machines that we want to people want to upload themselves to, or that we want to be able to have view as beings with ethical with moral rights and that maybe feel proud of the sentence, we better know whether there as someone home, whether it feels like something to be them, or whether they're just zombies. The aims we could discuss. Then you talk about the problems of the kind of propagation and they spreading and it's truly every interest. It's like you can't do your process managing an I development where the AIS do not quote unquote want to oppligate. If they don't want to change and evolved it, maybe they want to terminate. Certainly, I think it's important to remember that the mind space m kind of AI motivations you can build is vastly larger than the mind space of evolved organisms, because all of us, of all the organisms, have this very strong urge to eat, to drink, to not get destroyed, to reproduce, because that's what evolution and you know andvowed us to do, right. Whereas if you build something, if you build a laptop, there's no reason why you should build it, so it's afraid of being turned off or any of those things. So we should rather than ask what will these machines ultimately want, we should ask what do we want them to want? And try to understand how can we actually put goals into machines. Anyone like me who's a parent knows how hard it is to make children and understand my goals and adopt my goals and then retain them right. And we also know his parents that there's a big difference between our kids understanding where you want to actually doing what we want right. Yet that's exactly what the problem we have to solve if we ever build machines that are as smart as us or smarter, and also if these machines keep getting ever more smart, we'd like them to keep the goal of being nice to humans. My sons were very excited about Legos when they were little, and now and when they're teenagers, you know, not so much. And we don't want arm machines to become his board with this goal of taking be nice to humans. My kids are with Legos either. So there are many nerdy technical problems and AI safety research of this kind how to make machines understand our goals, adopt them, retain them that we really need to solve before anyone the scientists which in a super intelligence, and those problems are so hard it might take that case to solve them, which is why it's so important that we actually research them now, not the night before someone hits the on switch. I think I probably have templed one more question here. Um. So it seems to be the case that certainly we can have a human level or higher intelligence that is not conscious through computing. You would you agree or when I think this is an open question, we don't know. I have college to think the answer is obviously yes. I have college to think the answer is obviously no. Um. Right, My guess is that it could be either yes or no. Like we have pocket calculators today. They are vastly better than any human that multiplying numbers fast, but they're probably not conscious at all. So there's no guarantee that just because you're better than humans and some things, you're going to be conscious. Okay, but how about biological intelligence do you think? What do you think it would be possible for a biological intelligence of human level or above to be not to be non conscious or at least not conscious in the same way that we think of I think biology is a bit of a red herring here. Actually, I have many colleagues. We think of intelligence and consciousness is something mysterious that can only exist in biological organisms. Um, but I feel that this is carbon chauvinism. You know, this attitude that you can only be smart or conscious if you're made of meat. I'm basically food rearranged, and I'm made of exactly the same kind of electrons and quirks as my food and as my laptop. It's all. The only difference is the pattern and with the arrange the information processing that happens. So I certainly don't think it's impossible to have machines that are as intell isn't at us as us that aren't made of meat, or as conscious as us that aren't made of meat. But we have to practice sized problem of what isn't specifically about the information processing that makes it intelligent and it makes it conscious? All right, So there you go. Max has interesting thoughts about artificial intelligence. One of the things is that he he says something that a lot of the people I read on the subject would probably disagree with, but then ends up I think in the same places them. Uh. Max makes the technology is a neutral argument, and there are some people who I think to really would really disagree with that to some extent. For example, I think about many of the critics of social media, like jarn Lanier and Tristan Harris, who we've talked about, who I definitely don't want to put words in their mouth, but I think they would say something like, you know, there are some kinds of technology that possess something like a will of their own, not any not in any spooky or conscious sense, but just in the sense that there are certain applications for which they will be most easily and eagerly deployed by humans, and that sort of technological will often favors evil or negative applications. So there are technologies that, you know, you can say, well, technology isn't inherently moral or immoral, but they're definitely technologies that lend themselves very easily to immoral or evil or destructive applications. Wouldn't you agree, Robert? Yeah. I mean, for instance, if you're talking about like some of the big ones we've talked about, of course, uh, atomic energy, Um, certainly chemistry, Yeah, the emergence of both chemical weapons and many favost lifesaving chemicals that emerged during the twentieth century. But then other things like I don't know, fabric science, uh, some meta materials. You could probably make an argument that these maybe lend themselves more for more towards non violent, non destructive uses than others. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think about social media algorithms being a thing that you could easily make the argument that, oh, that's just a neutral technology. You know, it could be used for good, could be used for evil, and I guess that's technically true. But which way is it most likely to be used given what it's capable of doing. Yeah, And of course, of a lot of it, as as Max touches on, here, is is going to come down to human will and the humans involved in shaping it and and sense raising it so that the title of this particular panel discussion that Max was about to participate in was Teacher Robots Well, and it was about the idea of essentially, how do we prepare AI for the potential technological singularity when they will be the entities with the power. Yeah, and whether you think the say the Kurt Swiley and sense of the singularity is realistic or makes any sense at all, there is at least another version of it you can entertain that might be more plausible, which is just the idea that at some point AI will surpass human intelligence in many important ways. Right. But I do want to come back to what I said about tech Mark because I don't want to put him to at odds with with the other idea I was just explaining, because ultimately I think Techmark ends up in the same place saying that we we have to be very careful with certain types of technology, specifically AI, that can't be allowed to just grow in the wild. Right, Sometimes we let technologies just grow in the wild of the marketplace and see what happens with them AI. We can't treat that way right certainly, And in Max Tegmark, he did not specifically mentioned James P. Cars, the author of Finite and Infinite Games, which we talked about recently. Yeah, he didn't. He didn't bring that up specifically. But one of the things that he was was pressing is the idea that as we develop AI, we should develop it in a way that it benefits humanity as a whole, you know, rather than fulfilling political or national or or or a particular social function or business function. In other words, we need to raise AI, develop AI so that it is playing an infinite game rather than any number of potentially destructive finite games. Right Because, as Max talks about, like the idea, the really scary version of how AI could go wrong is not terminators. It's not that AI decides I'm evil and I must kill humanity. I mean, of course anything is possible, but that doesn't seem very likely. What seems far more likely is that there are lots of negative side effects that are very destructive and harmful to us as a byproduct of it attaining some finite goal. It's it's playing a finite game. It's trying to do X y Z for some business purpose, and they're just happened to be some really negative side effects to it achieving that goal. And so anyway, I mean what this comes back to is that we have to have a guided type of development for AI. It it has to be informed by our desire for AI to do good and not evil. You could put other types of technology in this category. As we were just talking about nuclear fission seems like a good candidate for something that could be used for good, could be used for evil. If you just allow it to develop naturally in the wild, it's probably going to be far more destructive than it is beneficial, right. I think it's a valid argument. Yeah, and it's one of It's another example if you if you had definite guidelines that said this must be developed in a way that benefits everybody, uh and and does not further particular finite game. Uh, then it would be we'd all be better off in the long run. Now, I guess the big question is, so like, even if you can get people to agree to that, say, okay, we won't we won't develop AI in the wild. We'll do it as some part of some part of a global project to develop wholly beneficial AI that will treat everyone well and be aimed towards the betterment of humanity as a whole. How do you get people to sign on to that? That sounds like a whole other Maybe maybe you need an AI to solve that problem to begin with. Yeah, you get into this hilaria than you know, who's who's governing the AI? What are they? What are the mechanisms in place? There's like a problem of politics that sort of proceeds us getting to the stage where we're ready or mature enough to develop AI. Yeah. Which makes me glad though that we have people like Max tech Mark out there that are participating in conversations about this, not only with with World Science Festival attendees or with podcast host but actively setting down, uh and having these discussions with some of the people that are in a position to do something about it and to and to lay the framework for the future. Yeah. So if you're influencing the influencers, you need to be bringing this question up. Uh. So here's another thing. Tech Mark mentions machine consciousness as quote, not philosophy, but an unsolved science question. And I think this is interesting because you will definitely get a lot of people who don't agree with that. Right, Let's say, how could it be a science question? You can never really know, You can never really have fully, you know, a fool proof objective test for for detecting consciousness in some other creature. I don't know what I think the answer to that question is, I'm, you know, of two minds. I see the wisdom in both camps there. But tech Mark definitely thinks the question of detecting consciousness could be a scientific question, and I think that's an interesting perspective. Yeah, I should also know. You know, we discussed the work of Susan Schneider and the AI test for consciousness. You can hear it Susan Schneider in the background of my conversation with with Max. Because she was on the same panel. I thought maybe you were going to get to talk to her. It was in the cards, but there are a lot of moving pieces putting together a panel like that. Ultimately ended up having only time to chat with Max. But hey, maybe we'll get to have Susan on the show sometimes that'd be great. Well, she I mean, she has I think, what is a really interesting step toward trying to come up with objective frameworks for detecting consciousness. It's obviously, Uh, it's it's a very limited kind of step. I mean, as we discussed in the AI Consciousness Test episode, there are a lot of there are a lot of limitations to to what these types of psychological test could do, you know, like asking it asking a machine if it understands the concept of souls, or trying to see if it understands movies like Freaky Friday. Uh. I think that's really clever and that's a good step, but obviously that's not there yet to like a full understanding of where of how we could see consciousness in an objective way outside of ourselves. And I don't know if we'll ever get there where, but it sounds like Max thinks we could. Yeah. I like that. Max brought up two thousand and one a Space Odyssey Yeah in the interview, and it just drove home for me that since this is a landmark year for two and one Space Odyssey film, it is what what's the landmark? Oh, it's a fifty years, half a century if two came out. Yeah, So given that it is such a pivotal piece of science fiction, with so much one a full science in it. Uh, we really need to do a whole episode about it this year. But where we really discuss uh the movie, perhaps the book as well, and just why it has stood the test of time as a work of science fiction. Yea discussed ancient aliens. Yeah, yeah, well do you know we're into that? So wait are we? Well, we're into exploring the possibility we are not ancient aliens enthusiasts, not ancient aliens advocates. No, no, no, we're at least as into discussing the idea as Karl Sagan was into discussing the idea. That's the good place to be. Yeah, yeah, the Sagan zone. Alright, Well, on that note, we're going to take one more break, and when we come back, we will feature the interview with Barbara J. King. Thank alright, we're back. Okay, So, Robert, you the third person you spoke to here was the anthropologist and author Barbara J. King. What was the deal here? Okay? So this was the third interview. These are These are featured in order that they occurred. Um And she is an anthropologist in Arthur author for twenty eight years. She taught biological anthropology Primate Behavior and Human Evolution at the College of William and Mary. She's the author of six books, including two thousand and thirteens How Animals Grieve, and she's the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. She's also the author of her latest book two thousand seventeens, Evolving God, a Provocative view on the origins of religion, and she participated in the Brian Green moderated The Believing Brain, Evolution, Neuroscience and the Spiritual Instinct alongside Stephen Pinker, neuroscientists and psychologist Lisa Barrett, and neuroscientist Zoron Joseph Avich. So this was an interesting interview too. I I guess we should play the interview and then we can talk about it all. Right, here we go. So I'm gonna start with the pretty broad question here, and that is our humans hardwired for belief, as the saying sometimes goes. I think we're hardwired for connection, for belongings, as I call it, and for mattering to each other. In some cases this does take the form of religion spirituality, but I don't think we're necessarily hard wired for any specific type of religious imagination. So my work really looks at the deep evolutionary roots of religion and puts that right in the being wired for connection. Okay, um, Now, I understand this question might not be going back deep enough to really do your area of expertise, But do you have any thoughts on what are perhaps some common mistakes that we make and trying to understand earlier or ancient people or even truly prehistoric people's concepts of religion. Yeah. I think many people do focus on belief, and of course belief doesn't fossilize, So what I try to do is shift a little bit and talk about practice. So I'm looking for the material culture that can get us a window onto practice and to get your misconception part of the question. I think there's a tendency, for example, to equate a burial automatically with a belief in the afterlife. We can't do that. The material culture cannot reveal to us whether there's a belief attached to that or not. So it's quite tricky looking at the evolution of belief. When I speak about practice, I'm talking about some kind of ritual that takes us beyond the here and now. But to ascribe a particular belief to that really tough. So you've written on how animals grieve? Are there any Now? Obviously these are not rights, uh as you say, But did you see any anything like the roots of religion in the practices that if you want to lit not practice behaviors of animals. I do, yes, I've written quite a lot about this. I look for rule following and empathy, compassion and imagination, all of these things I see in our close living relatives, for example, chimpanzees, binobo, some monkeys, and some people would like to interpret those things as spirituality full stop, and I don't. I do see them as the building blocks. The idea of deeply profound emotions in other animals is coming back into science. Darwin did it, but then it disappeared for a good long time. And those profound emotions that are felt around social behavior, love, death, I think do play into an understanding of deep religious roots. Can I say one more thing? I mean. Part of the reason I say that is because for me, religion is about emotional meaning making. So when I look at religion, I want to look at that sense of transcendence, that sense of being suffused with emotion, and that's where I start making the connection with other animals and how they feel so deeply. Do you see there? Do you see there being a distinction between religion and belief? Can one have religion without belief? One can have religion without belief in a particular type of God. But I think belief has to be part of the picture when we're talking about contemporary societies. Again, though, I want to disentangle that when we're talking about the past. And that's what makes it hard to draw a linear line, if you will, between the past and the present, because at some point we want to pick up with that belief when we haven't necessarily been able to trace it all the way back into the past. So, in broad strokes, where does human religion come from? I think it comes from all these pieces that we see in our primate relatives, the empathy, the compassion, the need to belong, the need to follow rules, the need to kind of cooperate, And then throughout the hominid trajectory, our brains began to take on an ability to see more and more beyond the here and now, to ask questions that are hard to answer without projecting into the supernatural. So I really do think just as technology evolves, and language evolves and culture evolves. We can see a process. So it doesn't come from some particular society or some particular moment. It comes from this trajectory of constantly exacerbated abilities to bond, to see beyond the here and now, and then begin to attach those things to other forms of being supernatural beings that I don't think other animals care about or imagine at all. You mentioned the distinction be made between your burial practices and then actual religious rights. Uh do do we do? We currently hold that the Neanderthals likely had religion. Yeah, that's a fantastic quest, and I think that there's a very good argument to be made that yes, Neanderthals did, But it's an argument with a question mark attached. So we know, for example, that Neanderthals not only were very smart and hunted cooperatively, but that they hunted raptors to take their feathers and adorn their bodies with feathers as part of their identity. They would bury their toddlers who died with bison skulls, rhinos skulls, or x horns elaborate sort of funeral ceremonies. It is possible to imagine these in the absence of any religion, to simply think about respect for the individual who died. But I also think it's compatible with their big brains, the way they're beginning to interact with the world. So I think we have a very good likelihood for yes, without a certainty for yes. UM. So one last question, UM, and you have any thoughts about where religion is going. Religion is still evolving, um, if we are changing the ways we interact with religion, I think that certainly increasing secularization is an important trend to look at. But there is this strong need, as I mentioned, for connection and belongingness, and so if those needs are not being filled by religion, they need to be filled by something else. And so it's a very good question. I don't know where we're going, but we need something, We need something else to fill in and I think that that is the question that I have as well. What is going to replace, if you will, this community? Because religion is so much about community and practice, and I really do think that's under estimated in our most of our discussions about religion. I've read a little bit about the side of hyper real religion, where individuals will will take same a concept and fandom. They might be like Jeties or The Big Lebowski, and they will it times it's kind of a playful, you know, spaghetti monster type of international music religion. But then there's this argument it becomes more that it perhaps fulfills that need you're talking about. Right, Well, I think about this a lot because my particular brand of transcendence happens at a Springsteen concert. And you know, I'm not thinking of that in a particularly religious sense, but it does. It's a community of people who become transformed in the moment in concert with another being. So how is that really different than what we're talking about? Right? It's not something supernatural, So perhaps we are changing to lose part of that belief in things that aren't is material, that aren't, is concrete. We can turn to the Springsteen and the Jedi model in place of some of these other more supernatural beings. So I love this interview because this is something I wonder about all the time, that the actual or a gens of religion. Now a lot of times when religion and science come up together, it's like people want to have they want to fight out that question, like do religion and science conflict. Can they co exist? I'm much more interested in the question of the scientific investigation of what religion is and where did it come from? Like what what what were the first religions? What do they look like? How did this instinct arise in our brains? And what's happening in our brains when we practice religion? How do we get this way? Yeah? I think a lot of what she presents is uh. It really squares with some of our recent explorations of consciousness. For instance, the idea presented by Susan Schneider's test for consciousness in AI, the notion that anything with consciousness must be able to grasp concepts of the soul mind transference or or transmigration of the soul. Uh. And one can easily imagine the roots of this in animal contemplations of loss. Perhaps it's even unnecessary, you know, precursor for consciousness. This is something Susan Schneider's writing really made me think about. I guess I just never considered before how important the link is between ideas about souls and the presence of consciousness. For example, the whole basis of the AI consciousness test is that a machine that wasn't conscious, say, it knows how to use language, it knows how to have a conversation, But if it's never heard anything about disembodied souls, how would it even make sense of religions ideas about disembodied souls if it did not have something that it could imagine being separated from its physical substrate. You know, Yeah, And I mean the idea is that the Barbara J. King presents here, They do make me sort of rethink all that, and and wonder, well, if you have any species for which death is a reality, then to what extent is it inevitable that they would reach this, this point in their cognitive evolution, that they would develop these ideas of based on the question where did they go? Where is the where is the force that animal ated this being? The force that made it a thing that was of value to my life? Yeah, she's got a point of view on religion that resonates very strongly with me that I think it's it's got that truthiness feel. I mean, you know, I can't judge if it's true, but it seems true at least that in religion, the emotional and social aspects of religion precede and pre date the literal dogmatic beliefs of religions, and that the literal dogmatic reliefs of beliefs of religions are outgrowths of those social and emotional functions. Yeah. And and to her point, if you can find that at a Bruce Springsteen concert, yeah, or in you know, jeddi is m or Judaism, Uh, then you don't necessarily need these older models of religion. But on the same note, like that I think is one of the key things that people prize in their religious organizations that they're still a part of, or the religious movements that they're still a part of. Yeah. I think a lot about what will, if anything, what will replace religion in secularizing societies. So if you've got a society where people are losing their their literal beliefs in the dogmas of religion, like they stop believing, Okay, there is literally a God that literally created the world and all that. But if king is right and that the basis of religion is still all these instinctual drives we have for things like belonging, this connection, mattering to each other, rule following, cooperation, that they blend together into this kind of emotional stew that makes us want something like a religion. What do we fill that void with? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a number of different directions you can go with that. I think some corporations kind of fulfill that purpose, either as an outsider to it perhaps you just really like apple products, or as an insider. I mean, I think a lot of us know somebody maybe who works at a at a particular business or corporation, and it's it's it's managed well enough where it has the right atmosphere or mix of benefits to where it is like a truly inspiring place to work and it and it perhaps fulfill some of the roles. You know, it's like people looking out for each other and an organizational structure looking out for them and forming informing some aspect of their identity. But then also I think, uh, I think that maybe it's sports. It's not a god that I necessarily follow, but perhaps it's organized sports and the fandom for particular organized sports teams. Can I tell you my nightmare scenario is that in secularizing society, is that the literal beliefs of religion are going to be replaced by social media religions. Oh I don't know what to think about that. I'm gonna have to sleep on that one and have a few nightmares. The social media app is where you get your use, where you fulfill your need for connection, for belongingness, for mattering to each other, for rule following, for cooperation. It all happens on there, and you can you can come up with with sort of like ritualistic, systematic ways for it to happen. Right, The programmers of the apps can can sort of like almost design the liturgy of your social media religion. Can can you see it? Yeah? I just wonder if they'll be able to skip ahead on the religion or we have to go through like all the dark days of a particular faith evolution through the social media app. Like maybe one version one point oh is very optimistic and individual based, and then version two point oh is very chaotic, Version three point oh and entales of crusade. Then again, I guess we all we also have to question our assumption. So maybe it's not true that something has to replace it, you know, Maybe it's true that you can have the literal beliefs of religion vanish, and so all the trappings of religion go along with it, and people don't necessarily need a thing to fill that whole. Maybe they're maybe they're just other ways for them to feel empathy, compassion, belonging, rule, following, cooperation, and all the things came to talks about. Yeah, I mean one thing that I you know, I've talked about religion on the show a lot, and I have various ideas about how I process it. I kind of think of it in terms of lenses. There are certain lenses I can choose to lay over my perception of reality, and sometimes it's helpful to use one that is the religious inform and other times I'm just gonna, you know, fall back to the base sort of scientific and skeptical view of the world. But on the other hand, I have to realize that like not you know, and everybody else isn't necessarily like me. We all have different minds, different brains, that different different backgrounds, So I can't I don't feel comfortable just going around saying, hey, everybody, you should think about religion exactly the way I think about it, because that's that's probably not um that's not a realistic expectation, either culturally or just cognitively. I think also just the experimental problem that King talks about is really interesting, you know, like, how do how do you infer from the physical remains of the ancient world? Old? What what kind of lens is they were using? Where you're talking about how minds can be different in process religion differently, how can you infer just from artifacts and paintings and burials and stuff like that. What the what their picture looked like? Yeah, it's just how similar it was to yours? Yeah, yeah, but but specifically her answer in the Neanderthals found very interesting. Yes, Um, you know, to what extent can we just look at these very basic remains and and and and see something like belief like religion in their in their activities, in the remains of their activities. Yeah, and all the while being very conscious of the fact that we could easily be misinterpreting things. That's what we're good at, it is, all right. So there you have it again. I want to give my thanks to to Brian Green, Max teg Mark, Barbara J. King, and just the World Science Festival as a whole. They were very accommodating of me and uh and uh and and allowing me to to attend these talks and to actually score a little interview time with these three individuals. And I want to remind everybody that, hey, if you're interested in attending the World Science Festival, this is something that is very open to the public. If you live in the New York area, you should definitely check out of whichever panels or activities appeal to you the most. Um And if you live outside of New York, make a trip of it. New York City is a place with a million things to offer, and during the World Science Festival, uh, science is an excellent reason to visit the Big Apple, New York's Great science City. Anyway. Yeah, you give the Museum of Natural History right there waiting for you. That is an American treasure. It is. If you've never been, you should go sometime, right And if you are just not going to New York City anytime soon, you can still check out World Science Festival dot com. You can. You can. You can find just years worth of various panels. Not everything that that goes on there is necessarily filmed, but a lot of it is. And you can go back and view these different scientific discussions. And as for us, well, our website Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find every episode of the podcast, and you'll find links out to our various social media accounts. 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