A.C. Grayling on What We Now Know about Science, History and the Mind

well it's time for me to hand you over to our speaker for this evening he is a professor of philosophy the founder of the new college of humanities and author of over 30 books on philosophy biography and history of ideas please give a warm welcome to professor a.c grady thank you very much faye that's very kind thank you right so um my theme tonight is about a very very striking fact and the implications of that fact i want to talk about both those things if i may i'll come to the implications in a bit because they're interesting and perhaps significant the striking fact is that very recently there's been an enormous explosion of knowledge in science and history in thinking about the brain and the mind very very recently indeed i mean let me consider it's just in the last few decades really that we've been able to look at the brain actually at work using functional magnetic resonance imaging to see the brain at work when it's challenged with questions tasks asked to remember things uh to feel things and that is a very remarkable advance and it is one which has a lot of applications so when we think for example about um the clinical interest that attaches to knowing which bits of the brain are associated with which kinds of cognitive functions and psychological phenomena then thinking about how to repair or to deal with injuries and disease of the brain becomes much much more accessible so that's a really remarkable thing that's happened and as i say it is just a matter of the last two or three decades that huge amounts of progress have been made in that it's just in the course of the last century or so that an immense amount of knowledge has been accumulated in physics in fundamental physics particle physics thinking about the microstructure of matter and in cosmology thinking about the universe as a whole i mean if you consider the fact that it was just in 1897 that jj thompson detected the electron as it will negatively charged uh particle with less mass than the atom as a whole and it was less than 50 years after that that the atom bomb was exploded over hiroshima and nagasaki so the degree of knowledge that was uh accumulated about the the structure of the atom i mean if you think of max planck's um idea of the quantum which was just a heuristic was advanced only in 1900 and then einstein in his wonderful year of 1906 one of his papers on the future electric effect made use of that idea in the early 1920s quantum theory was formulated by heisenberg and others in fact it was given a kind of official welcome if you if you like at the famous um solve a conference of 1927. the nucleus of the atom was uh finally the structure of it was finally identified in the early 1930s and within a few years how to split it how to uh release all the huge amounts of energy contained in that tiny little bit of mass that had been arrived at so this is amazing and then the standard model of the atom which was just completed nine years ago in 2012 when the higgs boson was identified at cern in geneva the large hadron collider that completed a model which had more or less reached its final stages back in the 1970s but needed that discovery to finish it off but we're still talking about very very recent times this is just the last 100 years that we're thinking about here and also in cosmology it's extraordinary to think that it was in the 1920s only that the observations made by edwin hubble showed or confirmed anyway what had just begun to be suspected that our milky way galaxy is not the entire universe but just one galaxy among billions of galaxies in the universe and also that the universe is expanding which of course entails that it started from a much much a smaller point indeed perhaps the singularity hence the big bang theory about the origin of the universe it was in 1929 that hubble made that observation about the expanding universe so these are very very recent advances the same is true of history until the second half of the 19th century the stretch of history more or less went back just to about a thousand bce back to the period that was more or less uh spoken about in the hebrew bible what christians call the old testament uh and in herodotus really history after the what's now called the bronze age collapse which happened in about 1200 bce but before then there were at least 3 000 years of history of civilization reaching back to summer and acade and the earlier babylonian civilization and all that was only discovered by the archaeology of the 19th century especially second half of the 19th century and in the 20th century so expanding um the history of civilizations by double the length of time that had been known by the middle of the 19th century and then of course the discoveries in paleoanthropology the history of humankind stretching back hundreds of thousands indeed millions of years all the way back to where the hominid lines split from the the cannons chimpanzees and others about six million years ago so this extension of our thought and and uh investigation back so far in time this new quantity of knowledge about the universe from the smaller scale to the larger scale and then this new set of discoveries about the brain and the mind all so recent and in fact i can dramatize this a bit by mentioning that when i was born my father was 40 years of age and when he was born his father was 40 years of age and if you add up um those two numbers and my own a bit like jack benny i suppose i should claim to be 39 years of age but anyway if you do the arithmetic it turns out that my grandfather was at school in the 1870s and 1880s which is a remarkable thought but even more remarkable is the fact that when he was at school at that time none of this was known none of it was known so it is all extremely recent and it's been exponential the sheer volume of new knowledge that we've acquired but here's the thing that all this new knowledge has taught us something very surprising it used to be thought that the more we knew the less we were ignorant of that research inquiry discovery diminished the realm of ignorance the realm of the unknown until this very recent burst in discovery people really thought that they were approaching the truth about things and getting a handle on how things really are in our universe and in the past and getting a much better understanding of ourselves and yet what all this discovery of these very recent times has shown us is that the realm of our ignorance the great landscapes of the unknown are immensely vaster than we thought just take one consideration all that development in the natural sciences has shown us that we only have access to five percent actually less 4.9 percent of the mass of the universe whatever makes up the the total mass of the universe only 4.9 percent of it is accessible to us that's how little we really know of what there actually is and what the universe is really like everything else the other 95 consists of dark matter and dark energy indirectly um cosmologists know that there has to be something which is causing gravitational effects on the galaxies but we can't see it we can't detect it and there must be something which is pushing the universe apart expanding it at an ever increasing rate you know from about halfway through the life of the universe the universe has been expanding more and more quickly and this is the where the hypothesis of dark energy pushing the universe apart comes in and between them dark matter and dark energy constitute about 95 percent or just over of the mass density of the universe so it is pretty extraordinary that all these discoveries and all the all the applications that these discoveries have made possible when you think fire technology indeed the very technology that we're using at this moment come out of what we've discovered about that five percent of the universe and yet the the great unknown is even greater than we thought it's a bit like this just imagine occupying an island which is growing in the ocean as the island grows that's as our knowledge grows so the shoreline becomes longer and longer that is to say so the landscape of of of the unknown of what we're ignorant of becomes larger and larger so there is a a paradox which just by itself is interesting enough i suppose although now that we live as we do in such a technologized age that we've become rather used to it or we don't really think about it it's just the wallpaper of our thought but but here's another consideration which should be very surprising in the um long long period when our ancestors thought that their enquiries were diminishing the domain of the unknown the aim that was before them was achieving certainty achieving knowledge truth really knowing how things are but with this paradoxical situation wherein now we find that it's no longer a question of seeking for certainty but of trying to make sense of the increasing domain of the unknown through the best endeavors of inquiry in a way which makes the actual nature of inquiry rather different let me see if i can explain that as follows i know you were all reading uh descartes in bed last night so you will remember his uh effort was to try to show that we have something that we can be certain of you remember they said that well i cannot be i kind of doubt for a moment that i exist because i'm thinking cognitosum i think therefore i am so i can be certain about that now what else can i be certain of can i build certainty on the basis of this thing that i simply cannot doubt so his quest was for certainty and the model of knowledge that he therefore had in mind was the kind of thing that you have if you have a big faith commitment if you think that um absolute and final truths are available perhaps through revelation or intuition then that is the model that you have of the nature of knowledge but scientific inquiry finds that as it develops as it discovers more things so more and more questions arise so there are new problems to be solved so there are new things to be investigated that each discovery actually proliferates more things that need to be examined the open-endedness the uncertainty of knowledge the fact that instead of reaching for something which is going to be final and absolute what we're doing is we are managing the the very best understanding that we can of the phenomena that we're investigating and then finding that that opens up new landscapes a bit like climbing a mountain and finding each time you get to what you think is the summit that there are further assignments and when you reach those there are yet further summits and that is how we've discovered uh the nature of knowledge to be the nature of inquiry and this therefore changes the game it changes how we think about inquiry so in descartes time and in that whole tradition of thinking about knowledge and inquiry it was thought that what you had to do was you had to refute skeptical challenges which called into question the possibility of having certain knowledge might i be dreaming now might i'd be deluded that was the the heuristic device that descartes used he said well if i'm going to be absolutely certain of something even so simple is that one plus one equals two i have to be quite sure that there isn't an evil demon who's tricking me into thinking that one plus one equals two and that was the problem that he set himself but now the problem of inquiry is very different we don't because we're not any longer thinking that we're going to get certainty but instead that we are going to get the best theories we can arrive at we're looking at the nature of inquiry in a very different way we're looking for what we can best describe as the most powerfully supported theories that we can devise under the government of a principle of the feasibility the feasibility is not nice word it means that you have to be open to the possibility that new evidence might come along and change your mind so that new and better arguments might come along which will make you interpret reinterpret the data that you have that there is something intrinsically open-ended about our thinking about the world and that therefore what we mean by knowledge is not absolutely rock solid hard fast fact but it's something that you can rely on for just so long as it is supported by the evidence because our theories are always going to be feasible and that means that the the kinds of challenges that we meet with in inquiry are challenges like this we have to accept that we are observing the universe that we are investigating past time that we are thinking about ourselves from a very very limited and localized point uh in in space and in time um with very finite powers of investigation it's as if we're looking at the universe through a little pinhole at a certain scale after all we are a little bit over halfway between the very smallest length we can currently think of the planck length and the very largest which is the diameter of the visible universe and we are just a bit more than halfway between those two lengths but we have to ask ourselves the question are those two limits of the smallest and the largest just a function of what at the moment we're able to reach maybe they aren't the actual smallest or largest maybe this is just a function of our limitations and we're looking at these um phenomena of of nature at the micro level at the at the mega level using our very limited powers we extend our powers of course by using instruments like telescopes and microscopes and oscilloscopes and so on but even they ultimately have reference back to us into our ability to understand things so just one example of the kind of puzzle that that raises as you know there is a major difficulty about reconciling quantum theory which just is the theory used to talk about the very small it's a very powerful very very precise theory i mean just how precise it is it's illustrated by the remark that [Music] richard feynman made that if you asked what the distance is between you and the moon you could say well do you mean the distance from the top of my head to the moon or the distance from my feet to the moon and that is how precise the measurements would be using that theory but it cannot be reconciled with uh general relativity with the description of the way that space time and its curvature accounts for gravity and acceleration so this kind of of puzzle the fact that we find quantum phenomena you all know that stuff about the schrodinger's cat being both dead and alive i mean the the seeming weirdness of the quantum level means that we can't interpret it easily in our ordinary experience in what's sometimes called the classical world view and what does this tell us therefore about the relationship between the very best theories we have about the microstructure of the universe and our abilities to inquire into it and understand it and grasp it well what it does tell us is that we are trying to get to this understanding from this limited and finite point of view and so the challenges we have are no longer the kinds of challenges that descartes have refuting the skeptic but instead there are challenges about how we best apply the techniques of inquiry to overcome that problem the problem of our limited position but also other problems too like all our theories about uh things are going to be like maps and the relationship between a map and a country you may have come across that story by borges in which he talks about the perfect map being the same size as the country of which it is a map so it perfectly registered all the details of that country well obviously a map as big as the country would be useless your map needs to be small the scale the relationship between the map and the country has to be such that much is left out now all our theories are like maps of the phenomena we also in order to try to help ourselves understand things use metaphors i cited the example of the cat which is both dead and alive in the schrodinger experiment to explain superposition of quantum states well that's a a metaphor illustration an example and we have always to be very careful about the metaphors we use when we try to understand things i mean if you think about all the way through history how back in the beginning of the modern period in the 16th 17th centuries people used the metaphor of clockwork to explain how the universe functions and when space travel began in the 1950s somebody came up with the idea that golds might have been astronauts who visited our planet from outer space and another metaphor another something suggested by what happened to be you know in the air at the time we now use the metaphor of the computer for the brain and some of you may have come across the arguments put forward by roger penrose and others to the effect that mental that brain activity should not be modeled on computation because it actually has a different character according to them so once again the question of the metaphors we use the question of the relationship of the the map to the terrain these are questions which now face us new kinds of challenges to enquiry also you know that saying if your instrument is a hammer everything looks like a nail you use mathematics mathematics is the hammer used in the natural sciences is that tool that intellectual tool shaping and configuring the way the world seems um but leaving something out or making us miss something and what about the so-called lamplight problem this is that you know when you lose your keys at night the only place you can look for them is under the lamp light because that's the only place where you can see think about the enquiry into human history in paleoanthropology digging up human and hominin and nominated fossils in places where they're most likely to be found like in east africa or in the jokodin caves in in china that's looking under the lamplight it's so much else of the surface of the earth where there might be evidence but we we can't see it because we don't have access to it and so on and so on so these these are all different new kinds of challenges that this open-ended sort of inquiry in the face of the much much larger terrain of the unknown that our discoveries have revealed to us so having um dilated on on that point and and uh illustrated i hope um how this massive increase of knowledge has also been a massive increase in the unknown and pose the whole lot of new kinds of demands on us as we research inquire discover think about the world around us and about ourselves what are the implications of that well i think one of the most important implications of it is that this way of inquiring these sorts of um problems that need to be overcome in order to build theories which are really really well supported even though they are feasible requires of us that we think about how we educate and what we're educating for and and there are two aspects to this one concerns the very general question of how literature we are as a society in all these different fields the idea of of having scientific literacy not expertise don't have to be a physicist or a chemist or biologist to be involved but to be literate to have an intelligent um and sound overview of what's happening in all the major areas of science so that one can understand when one reads in the newspapers or watches a documentary on television one really has a a good understanding of what's going on the importance of that of course is that we are all of us going to have to take part in conversations about public policy on the applications of science let me give you an example at this very moment and indeed for at least the last couple of decades hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested by all the major military nations of the world the u.s china united states france the uk in autonomous weapons systems operated by ai so they're not operated by human beings they're programmed and set going but they're actually operated by art of artificial intelligence systems on board so this these weapon systems may be in the air on land under the sea now this use of ai technology uh in weapons technology may have some advantages the weapons may be much more precise and accurate they may they don't involve any of our own personnel so they solve the bodybag problem and they also unemotional they don't feel fear or anger or hatred for the enemy so they might be very efficient in that kind of way but on the other hand the idea that there would be autonomous weapon systems they're actually by the way called lethal autonomous weapon systems laws laws which is about the chilling acronym for them but this is something which is actually in development at this very moment and it's an application of all this new knowledge we have all the new science which has led to these very dramatic technological developments wonderful in one way and in another way very troubling but we all need to be literate about it we need to know about these things and understand them have some sense of how they work this really is an iteration of the point and many of you will remember cp snow back in the 1960s had argued that the widening division between the sciences on the one hand and the arts and the humanities on the other hand was resulting in the fact that the the two sides of the argument and especially from the arts humanities side really not understanding the implications of what was happening on the science side particularly wiring given that most politicians and those civil servants tend to be on the arts and humanities side of things that's what they graduated from therefore their insight into and their understanding of the implications of what's happening with technology and and the sciences is not quite what it might be hence the importance of a more general kind of literacy again as i say you don't have to be an expert in these things but to have an intelligent understanding of them is tremendously important and that is something which we've lost and we've lost it because we've been thinking about education in a very different way two points here are of importance the first is we are all of us very familiar with the cliche expression critical thinking it's such a cliche that people bandy it about and they don't really think of just how incredibly important it is and to illustrate just how important it is consider this when the internet became publicly and widely available from the 1990s we all thought that this was going to be marvelous great agora a great marketplace of conversation ideas opinions a sort of democracy where everybody could participate and have their say well it's turned uh of course as we're all too familiar into an absolutely horrible lavatory wall on which people scribble all their rubbish and graffiti and racism hate speech and falsehoods and their stupid opinions and so forth and in order to find the good stuff which is on the internet all the information that we can get hold of we have to be very good at knowing how to find it how to evaluate it how to be critical about what we meet with there so this idea of critical thinking is not just it's not just a cliche kind of thought it really is a crucial thought you know given that you can get almost anything in the way of information from the internet embedded in all this nonsense which is there as well it is of the first importance that the focus of what we do when we educate ourselves and our pupils and students is on this business of evaluating and critically uh thinking about what we meet out there and in order to do that in turn we have to have this general background literacy which helps us to put things into context and to make sense of them now it used to be the case when we go back now to when my grandfather and his his predecessors were in education that education was general and then people specialized afterwards a little bit like uh what is just about still the prevailing model in the united states where you might do a liberal arts degree and then go on to graduate school to do law or medicine or specialize in something so the idea of having a broad general education broad general literacy across the different fields of inquiry and then specializing in one provides this rather good basis for being even better at your specialism than you might otherwise be but now think of education in our country after the age of 16 people focus down on maybe three a levels then they go to university and study one subject so they've begun to specialize very very early and we leave up to them their general education after their formal education is over if they're interested enough to read and to find out and to become literate across the board we've reversed it and we've reversed it because education has become a way of providing foot soldiers for the economic battle for getting people jobs for fitting them for careers for making them sufficiently literate and numerous in ways that you know serve the economy and of course that's important i'm not for one moment saying that that shouldn't be the case but it is equally important that people who are not just their careers they are also voters and thinkers and lovers and parents and friends and travelers and neighbors they should also have this much much broader literacy conscious of the fact that the world is not a fabric of facts which have been settled and agreed and put in place by the discoveries to date but is an open-ended field where all our enquiries are generating new questions to ask new answers to be sought and that realizing this is not just fascinating in itself and very enriching but also very important from the point of view of how we decide how we as a society and how we as individuals are going to live how we're going to vote what choices we're going to make about what we do with what we currently think we know so these implications uh seems to me of this very paradoxical situation huge extension of knowledge with an even greater extension of of our understanding of what we don't know changing the way we think about research and discovery changing the way therefore we think or should think about education making different demands of us demanding of us that we be much more generally literate than most of us tend to be because i'm referring to people who don't attend intelligent square talks because i i take it that one of the premises of doing so of course is just an interest in being literate in that general kind of way so so that that is pretty well the the uh argument of the book but i also wanted in the course of the book not merely to to say these things but to show them because to demonstrate that it is possible to have this kind of overview of what we currently know in the natural sciences in history and paleoanthropology and also in discoveries about the brain and the mind and how these questions about inquiry how these new challenges about inquiry can be met uh or put to work in our further thinking i wanted to show this i also wanted to show where the frontiers of knowledge were and how they reached where they are now talking a bit therefore about the history of development of thinking about these things because that puts it in context also so the book both uh presents this paradox the paradox of knowledge increasing the quantum of our ignorance but an interesting and a valuable ignorance and let me illustrate that just with two final points very good uh friend of mine is a senior scientist at cern in fact he was one of the leaders of the compact muon solenoid experiment that's one of the two experiments that were looking for the higgs boson um to jin devadi he was knighted for his work uh on on the higgs project and when when the um announcement was made about the discovery of the hicks field in 2012 he and his colleagues of course were present at the announcement it was made public and it was on television and it was all very exciting it got to the front page of newspapers and after as i said to him it must have been absolutely wonderful to be able to announce this after all these years immense expense of billions of dollars have been invested in this tremendous experiment perhaps the greatest scientific experiment that had ever really been conducted by humankind and he said yes yes it was great it was absolutely wonderful but if we hadn't discovered the higgs boson that would have meant that there is a whole lot more physics that needed to be done now that attitude the attitude of being of welcoming new mysteries new problems of feeling a relish in the nature of of the challenge that that poses i think is absolutely marvelous it's the very best thing about the human mind wanting to find out more wanting to go further wanting to go and dig deeper and and try to make better sense of things that is a remarkable feature of the the very best of inquiry and of course it reminds me of what the french poet paul valerie said you may remember he said difficulty is a light but an insurmountable difficulty is the sun because our effort to try to chip away to dig at it to make some sense of it to try to find some way around that problem is so illuminating that we learn an enormous amount more as we do it and so the the in one way the fact that all our discoveries have opened even greater vistas of the unknown of what we need to inquire into these greater mysteries that 95 percent of the universe we don't have any access to at the moment that is exciting and it offers really really interesting demands on us to try to think of ways of finding out more about it but let me leave you then with this final thought also about why knowing about these things and taking an interest in these things matters in this connection think about what's happening in neuroscience at this moment we are right on the horizon on the imminent horizon of seeing uh medical technologies developing which involve interfaces between the human brain and computer chips actually implanting chips into the brain to do things like controlling parkinson's disease or epilepsy or perhaps helping to deal with very very serious depression mood control perhaps also helping to um get rid of very deeply troubling memories which cause post-traumatic stress so these are technologies which are are very close i mean there of course there are other ways there's surgery there's pharmacology drugs but but these brain chip interface technologies are very very very very near on the horizon in fact if you go on the website of darpa which is the defense department research and procurement agency of the united states government you will be astonished at all the projects they are funding now including projects of this kind brain chip interface projects now this is wonderful the clinical applications are very very positive but this same technology can also have malign uses think about mood control or the wiping out of memories or the maybe the implanting in memories or the control of behavior these things are not beyond the boundaries of possibility and there is a risk always that when new technological possibilities come into view like for example autonomous weapon systems and like these brainship interfaces when they come into view efforts will be made to make them happen there is a kind of law which says if something can be done it will be done despite all our best efforts to stop it if it can be done it will be done because it will bring advantage to somebody either a government a country or a private industry or a private agency who can afford to do it and therefore we need to be very literate about these things we need to know about these developments because we are all of us at some point going to be party to the conversation about whether or not we want them or the conversation about how where to manage them and for that reason too therefore we need to be conscious of the fact that this general kind of literacy is important and that therefore we should both inform ourselves and make sure that our formal education process really equips people to be good at thinking about these things so that's uh that that's the um the argument the fact that uh we have this great paradox of knowledge now in all our wonderful new discoveries uh and that has these implications for us how we're to think about it and how we're to manage it back to you faye thank you very much for that amazing lecture i'm sure we can agree that we've really started to think about how we think and the different areas in which knowledge is a question and coming onto questions we have a lot of questions from the audience first of all we have a question from rhys jass and he asks has your view on the importance of public scientific literacy changed through the covid19 pandemic no actually this is something which has been a a bee in my bonnet for for quite a long time um not being a scientist myself but being intensely interested in what the the different sciences um have been up to i mean just during the course of my own lifetime there have been extraordinary discoveries think for example of the publication back in 1990 uh of the um kobe uh examination of the microwave background radiation in the universe which is the signature of the big bang i mean it's quite extraordinary really to find that we can that we can detect the the what's left over from that event uh 13.72 billion years ago that's really extraordinary that's just one small example not one small example quite big example of really remarkable things that have happened uh in the sciences and i'm sure that scientific development is going to find an earphone that will stay in pretty soon too fingers crossed we also have a question this one's quite interesting is humanity sometimes guilty of prioritizing the wrong areas of knowledge eg should exploration of the universe take a back seat until we do more to solve problems on earth well my view is that uh you know this is not a zero-sum game after all there are people with different talents and interesting capacities working at different um you know faces of the uh enquiry um region and it so often happens the things that we discover in one domain turn out to have applications in or implications for another domain so we shouldn't shut down inquiry anywhere we should be working away on all fronts because you never know we may really discover something um of great importance in some given front that really changed things and as i say there could be applications and implications also for others so we should just keep going right across the board so on that note do you think there are limits perhaps to what we can discover this is a question from mark wardman and he asks is there a limit to the knowledge humans can eventually acquire if so what causes us to be limited our consciousness our intelligence or something else i take the view that we we should never um we should never accept that there are limits to to what we might be able to do we should always be boldly aspirational and and we should believe of ourselves that wherever the frontiers of knowledge lie we can extend them further there are people who say you know there are certain things like for example consciousness that we're never going to be able to understand by using consciousness a bit like the eyeball trying to see itself but somehow rather this is just going to be impossible well two things to say about that but one is that is a very defeatist attitude and that's why i think we should be aspirational and the other is there's a kind of of contradiction involved in the idea of limits which is that you can only really ever identify the limits to knowledge if you could transcend them and look back at them to see where they lie but then of course that's a you know that that's a contradictory notion so the idea should be keep going let us hope that we could reach the truth about things ultimately even if that is just an ideal of inquiry which we have learned from this very recent experience is something that may never happen because there will always be new questions new challenges new problems bill swanson asks how would you reform education to achieve the knowledge literacy that you describe and does a system the ideal system exists anywhere in the world currently well on the second part of that question i don't think so i mean i think there are some education systems which are a very great deal which have a great deal to recommend them um finnish education for example has a great deal to recommend it especially at the primary level which is very very important it's a crucial level that good platform for uh getting people uh to think you know in in our own country there is an organization called the philosophy foundation which goes into primary schools and they take ring donuts with them and they ask the six-year-olds what happens to the hole in the donut when you've eaten the rest of the donut and they get these absolutely wonderful answers because kids are great philosophers they really are quite natural at it and it's that aspect of them curiosity inquiry getting them to think to ask questions to be allowed to ask questions but alas you know what we do is as as our children mature and reach the age of university studies we have more and more narrowed the curriculum and turned it into a an exercise of jumping through hoops examination after examination now when you're educating on an industrial scale you tend to start to you know become very reductive and to use exams and examination results and so on as a way of screening people and moving people in one direction rather than another if i had a magic wand i would abolish exams all together because i think they are very artificial and constraining any uh experienced teacher will tell you that you can make very good judgments about people's capacities and interests indeed more accurate and much fairer and more more generous to the variety that exists in you know in human minds in human nature than than an exam system and i can tell you just to conclude on this point that i've interviewed students for places at university who are obviously so smart that they didn't get a good grade at a level because the examiner might not have got the point of what they were saying i mean that that does happen and you can see from that uh example that there is something that in a way over simplifies matters and our education system should promote creativity critical awareness a real genuine ability to evaluate and to ask questions and also on the exam question a lot of people have opinions about this similar to yours sue camilla ben says numbers seem to be the new religion do you have any thoughts on how to use numbers to be useful and not only to quantify things like mental health and well-being philosophy for example she says that effort by school children is being quantified which seems unhealthy and accurate to her well i mean one has to acknowledge the fact that uh the tool of mathematics is an extraordinarily powerful one and it's very very very useful not just in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences very very useful indeed uh you know statistical trends in society can be of a great value in thinking about public policy matters for example but i take your point i take the point of the question which is that sometimes if it's simply a matter of assigning a quantity a quantity to you know somebody's overall performance or how good somebody is at something there is a danger that you're going to miss things out because you're you're simplifying you're reducing everything to a single and a simple metric so where it matches that there should be something much more nuanced where we should really spend more time thinking about how we judge a performance or judge a person or judge a person's potential which is the most significant thing in education and we should be rather wary about just making everything a matter of percentages and and grades we have a question from will wyatt and he asks if you were able to invest several billion pounds in scientific discovery which areas would you prioritize uh well uh the the temptation would always be to go for those areas of medical research where there is a kind of you know epidemic of of uh disease uh especially in the cancers and cardiovascular disease so the temptation would be to do that especially in the diseases of of childhood um so what one would naturally think of of putting money there but if there were enough money going in that direction already then i i think the what sometimes called the blue sky almost literally so in cosmology and and looking for uh life elsewhere in the universe it almost certainly exists i mean i know that the world interest is in intelligent life and we have enough of a problem finding that on this kind of bitterness in the universe but the very idea of finding life in the universe is a very fascinating one statistically there's probably masses of it i mean the most recent investigations of our own solar system suggest that there might very well be life or at least the the rich conditions for life um on enceladus or one of the moons of of saturn so you know that that would be something really well worth doing because it would be transformative i think of um for for human beings to know that uh we're not just alone in this vast vast universe on a rock in a rather ordinary solar system around an ordinary sound but that we have lots of neighbours that would be nice to know how do you think that would affect humanity if they realize they perhaps weren't so special as they received well i think it would have a very salutary effect on humanity you know back in the 16th 17th century 17th centuries especially people finally came to accept that we weren't the center of the universe with all the planets and stars orbiting us and that we were the summit and pinnacle of creation and the whole theater of time history in the universe was for our benefit so that put us in our place a little bit and then darwin helped to give us a greater sense of appropriate humility when it turned out that we are primates and actually slightly troubling kind of primates in a way because all the other homo species that existed have vanished and because of us homo sapiens and also the seven billion of us on the planet uh now have almost eliminated all the other uh primates as well the numbers of chimpanzees gorillas orangutans gibbons is very very small among the ape families so you know we are a rather um troubling uh species by the way this is what raises questions for people who worried about um artificial intelligence if ever it were to reach the level of artificial general intelligence really you know being much much smarter than human beings but having something like a human type mind because it would almost certainly ask itself the question what is the most annoying disruptive and damaging thing on the planet and the answer is of course human beings what would it do let's see we don't have to find out too soon um i have a question from ronnie landau and they ask why do you think conspiracy theories have such massive following uh conspiracy theories um well firstly one must remember that very very simple theories recommend themselves to people for a rather interesting psychological reason which is that we human beings we like stories we like explanations which have a beginning a middle and an end and we like closure we like things to be tied up and signed off and so we have an answer to things in fact i sometimes say much to to the um annoyance generation of some interlocutors that you can explain the the major outlook and the the major uh teenagers of any religion in in about half an hour or less whereas it takes a bit longer than that to understand physics so this is you know part of what drives an interesting conspiracy theories because they tend to be very simplistic and then they feed something else in our human psyche which is that they they uh reach for the well i told you so aspect of us you know oh well i thought it is the rich or it is the french or it is the something you know you were to blame and you found somebody to point the finger at that has a kind of satisfying aspect to it as well so alas conspiracy theories recommend themselves for the kind of reason that daniel kahneman pointed out in his book thinking fast and slow that that all of us actually have a propensity to go for the easy answer the quick answer the explanation that seems you know uh plausible because it feeds into some emotional uh attitude that we have slow thinking as carmen describes it is more detailed questioning the right kind of skepticism digging into things a bit and asking whether they really stand up scrutiny and that is the kind of procedure which of course we want everybody to to engage in to deal with the great lavatory war of the internet to deal with conspiracy theories and to deal with this new landscape of inquiry that we've been talking about we have a question here from an anonymous attendee they say thank you for an illuminating lecture and sorry about the smarter like question but they say you advance a rule of procedure the proposed hypothesis should be diffusable that rule of procedure seems itself to be a hypothesis about how best to advance the state of knowledge is that particular hypothesis diffusable and what kind of evidence might defeat it well i i think one must draw a distinction between procedural and methodological principles on the one hand and what we apply them to so it might be that if you were investigating some natural phenomenon for example the way that a virus mutates let us say you may set yourself certain parameters of inquiry certain ways of going about answering questions that you pose about viral mutations you might say is it a function of the number of spikes or is it a you know is it matter of the dna is it this or that the other so you you give yourself certain questions that you want to answer and you have to have a clear understanding of what would count as an answer to it i mean it's not going to the fact that your dog has stopped fetching the ball when you throw it it's got nothing to do with viral mutations upon supposes so you can discount that as you know part of the evidence and get a clearer conception of what would count as either supporting or informing an hypothesis so there's the difference between the methodological principles you use and the target of inquiry that you use so the idea that you should treat all hypotheses about the targets of inquiry as the feasible is not quite the same thing as saying that you should treat all the principles of inquiry as being feasible in the same way they are diffusable in a rather different way namely that there might just be very poor principles or there might be ways of applying them more precisely or finally so you alluded to this particular question a bit earlier it's from tony but they want to know your thoughts about religion and belief and worship of higher beings and how that ties in with knowledge well one very very interesting thing about the this new landscape of inquiry and and how we view the whole process of of discovery and research is as i said in my presentation that it comes down to a matter of rationality now think about this think about the word rational first part of that word is the word ratio which means proportion so your hypothesis will be accepted and treated as a premise a stepping stone for further investigations and further thinking if it has a very very high degree of proportionality to the evidence in favor of it so in a way we're talking about rational belief belief which is powerfully uh connected to the evidence in its favor to the arguments that you give in support of it so if you think about um hypothesizing that there are fairies at the bottom of your garden you will see that the proportion of the evidence and reasons that you have for that and the claim itself is extremely low you could perhaps put it in terms of probability there's an extremely small probability so small that to use it as a premise in your thinking and acting would be irrational let me give you an example um you might think to yourself well uh all our reasoning is probabilistic it's inductive so my expectations about the future always based on the past but then the future might not wholly resemble the past so every time i've been in the rain without an umbrella in the past i've got wet but maybe the next time it rains i won't get wet if i don't take an umbrella so you look out of the window bucketing down with rain and you sally forth without an umbrella what's going to happen you're going to get wet what are your neighbors going to think they're going to think you're in egypt you know because you weren't being rational you weren't proportioning the evidence that you have to the action or the belief that you take so it's no longer a question of being certain or of knowing it's a question of rational commitment rational acceptance of hypotheses that's the thing which is so distinctive of science and which is now of course general to all our areas of inquiry are there instances in which things that seem completely improbable have happened and one has to sort of move away from rationality oh gosh yes yes well i could use a very very topical example but then i was told by the bbc earlier today that i mustn't mention brexit so i would there could be plenty of examples of highly improbable things that have happened with awful consequences uh and and some people might think that that's one but yes uh you know when you consider the fact that uh our expectations about how the world works and how society works and how people will behave all based on patterns which rely on their predictability we draw inferences from past experience and from our sets of expectations and our beliefs about things to try to make sense of what's going to happen next because as you are aware all our living is about the future even if it's the future of the next second or 10 seconds or minute or something we're always acting thinking with future reference that means that we are heavily reliant upon the past and upon experience and upon this network of concepts that we use to guide us in our behavior and our thinking and when something unexpected happens we can be very shocked very surprised may be very difficult to understand because it's so out of out of the pattern that it's hard to get one's head rounded and these things of course do do happen with sufficient frequency that is another feature in fact of the nature of inquiry that one if if one thinks if one thinks as people do in fundamental physics that you would not count as a discovery anything that wasn't 99.9 probable which is what sigma five is so that's the highest level of of uh assurance um the physics review uh letters is the journal which says it will only treat it as a discovery something which is at the rate of sigma five ninety nine point nine percent um probable but that means that there is a you know tiny little probability that the opposite might happen and sometimes it does one last question we've had so many but i'm just going to end with this what would you personally most like to find the answer to that you do not already know oh lord how does one choose i mean there is so many fascinating puzzles about uh the world but i suppose you know if i had a gun to my head and i had to choose one then it would be about consciousness it would be about how this extraordinary bit of kit that we've got in our skulls can produce the the phenomenology of consciousness the fact that it creates a world you know we all think that we look out of windows double glazed in some cases at a world arrayed out there in space but actually the world as it appears to us an experience is a virtual reality it's a construct of electrochemical activity which is happening in this immensely complex thing about 86 billion neurons with about 100 trillion connections between them generating a movie show you know a cinema show in color with sound textures perfumes and all the rest of it it's all happening here what you see is mainly happening in the v1 area of the occipital region of your brain and and it's it's extraordinary by the way um that connects with uh um something which i should have mentioned in talking about being literate if i may uh fail yes it is very very good friend of mine is a consultant neurologist and he had come into his clinic one day in the hospital where he practices in edinburgh an elderly gentleman who said to him i believe that i have had a vascular accident in the occipital right occipital region of my brain and my friend thought to himself hello somebody been self-diagnosing on the internet again so he said to him well why do you think that because because what he was talking about was i think had a little stroke in the visual center of the of the occipital region and this elderly gentleman said because in my left visual field i can see human forms floating up out of the floor passing through the ceiling now that phenomenon is diagnostic of a stroke in the visual center of the brain when they did a scan sure enough there was a blood clot and when within a few weeks the blood clotted resolved these forms had vanished this gentleman this elderly gentleman happened to be an emeritus professor from edinburgh university so when he saw human figures floating out of the floor he didn't think that he was being visited by jesus moses and muhammad he thought i've had a stroke and this is a perfect example of how being literate really changes the way you think about the world and how you live your life

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 8,996

Rating: 4.7990866 out of 5

Keywords: a.c. grayling, science, history, the mind, the bible, intellectual, thoughtful, nchum, new school of the humanities, intelligence squared, intelligence conversation, lecture, interesting lecture

Id: Li8uaxOuwVM

Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021