Daniel Dennet Discussion with Marvin Minsky: The New Humanists 2/2

values of the variables that permit life to permit our universe to be one in which life can evolve because carbon atoms are sticky enough to be a sort of great glue you know for the fundamental glue that holds things together in fancy mechanisms maybe those aren't so much constant it's just locally constant maybe there's a whole lot of universes out there and we just happen to be in one of course we couldn't be in any other where all the laws are just right if you're in it if you're in a if you're in a universe that has life it's gonna have to have laws that are life friendly that make it possible this is the anthropic principle now so then God gets demoted from law giver to not even to law chooser because now we suppose well the part of the universe that we're in has these laws of its no no no accident that that should be so we don't need God to choose the laws because the other parts of the universe where there are other laws they also exist or may exist for all we know so we so God is demoted again so what's God's now well he's sort of a a master of ceremonies I guess or maybe you know our Father who placed air guitar or something like that so we've watched this somewhat graceful and somewhat graceless retreat where God has given less and less to do to the point where it's no longer such a mystery that he should be omnipotent if you don't have any job then it's not so hard to be omnipotent now these ideas may amuse some of us but they they strike terror and repugnance in the minds of many people who want the traditional top-down view of an intelligent designer to prevail and it's fascinating to see how many how even the most resourceful and wily scientific speculators can be drawn back again and again to the idea that maybe there's some way where we can we can save the idea of an intelligent designer after all well in a way I think we should all be agnostic about that maybe there is but by the time we've established that it is going to be so different from the original imagined creator that if those who are religious want to say something like well we told you so we'll say well if you have to say that go ahead but of course it isn't it's so remote from anything you've ever imagined or could have imagined using your traditional point of view that that it doesn't really count now if Li were here if I may go on for just another minute or so playing the lead role what's fascinating about about Lee Lee's work is that he's found some ways to take seriously I mean very seriously as a physicist the idea that evolution can actually apply below the biological level to the level of in effect universes or sub universes themselves that you can have an evolution of universes so that the universe can indeed design itself and if he was here he would he would give you a version of that I'm going to give you the joke version of it this story I like about the the young aspiring tenor the operatic tenor who finally gets his his debut opera let's say it's at La Scala where they take their opera very seriously and at the end of the first act he does his Aria and this roaring applause standing applause it goes on and on and on he buys some boughs and boughs and they keep yelling encore so he does it again and at the end of it the second time they'd plot again and and if he goes off and he comes out and takes the bow he goes off and comes out things about they're still applauding so he sings to the third time he goes off and they're still fighting and he's of course delirious with joy but he's getting worn out at this point he comes and somebody jumps up and says no we're gonna make you do it again until you get it right and that in effect is the Lee Smolin theory about universes - we're gonna do it again until we get it right that that that whole universes can in effect be rough draft semi rough drafts penultimate drafts and so forth that there can be a process of evolution of universes and at first when you encounter this idea if you're like me or sort of cross-eyed and you think this is just too extravagant there can't be any way of taking this seriously from the point of view of science and that's an important point we you know I'm a philosopher I'm not a scientist and one thing I know is that imagination is cheap we philosophers are love to invent imaginary universe as possible worlds and think about what's possible and what's not possible but we're stuck with rather crude tools in a certain way and that beyond brute logical possibility which is a very weak notion we're not very good and we we don't have any way of keeping ourselves honest many people thought of evolution before Darwin he was not the first person to think of evolution by natural selection but he was the one who figured out how to bring the empirical demands into the picture in such a way that you had to take the idea seriously now Lee Smolin has done something which I would not before he wrote thought possible and that is come up with the physics that at least requires you to take seriously the idea which is not that hard to imagine that there could be an evolution of universes themselves that there could be an evolution of the very laws of physics that makes biological evolution possible that doesn't mean that he's shown it's possible but he has shown that we have to take it seriously and that's where you can't do that if you're just the philosopher that's one of the limitations of our trade is that we don't have the leverage to sort out the imaginable and to those things that are imaginable and also that should be taken seriously for that you need you need to make the game harder you need to do some serious work so that people have to say yeah okay that that's a possibility we have to take seriously I probably said enough now from Marvin to come in and contradict something maybe we should I can't think of anything I don't know these theory I know the who's the guy who makes the Gaia theory love in which the earth evolves so love Locke's theory is quite popular but it doesn't it's hard to make it work because if there's only one planet he argues that as the history of the planet proceeds the earth learns to stabilize is temperature and that their various mechanisms that get selected so that finally we get a really stable planet of course all of us are interested to know if we're alone in the universe and if not why aren't we get an email from from the rest of it and one possibility is that these this delicate collection of parameters like the temperature has to be between water freezing and boiling stuff like that has to remain those constants have to remain or non constants have to remain bound for billions of years because it took 500 and it's about six 600 million years since the first multicellular creatures arrived plants and animals both but if the earth made a mistake there's no way it could learn from that mistake because there's only one of it so I'm not sure what Lee's idea is a single universe can't have selection and it's hard to have evolution unless there's some selection what's interesting is that he his theory proposes that again to be crude about it that black holes are in effect birth options but or do they make copies of things they main copies with variation that's the whole that's the whole point okay yeah I'm sorry Lee isn't here I can see sure that we should just maybe drop that topic because I don't want to do injustice to Lee's army is there something about Lee's perspective and what Marvin was just saying about the need for a long period of constancy for evolution to take place well even a billion years is just a just a fraction of them it's not even a it's an infinitesimal fraction of infinity so that you could have a stretch of a billion years of pattern is not in itself improbable it's important for people to realize since you can take it personally that this particular situation we have here is only good for another three or four billion years because that's when the Sun becomes a red giant so we've really got to get out of here pretty soon and what's interesting is that people laugh when you say that because it's ridiculous to try to survive isn't it I think there is something wrong with people that they're not very much concerned with the future they want to live a normal life and I've interviewed a lot of people as a result of writing an article on longevity in the Scientific American and in a typical audience if you ask people if you want would they like to live 500 years they all say no almost all and you say why and they say well because you'd be very creaky and you have arthritis and I say well but suppose you could stay at your own age or half your present age and they still don't want to and now you ask why and they say it's boring however if you talk to an audience of scientists which is what I mostly do it's completely different they all have problems that they can't solve now and they could use a couple of hundred years and and so it's interesting that that culture the second culture is wild about the idea of immortality whereas the first culture really doesn't have any goals it's trying to live a comfortable life it goes to football games and wastes at synapses on stuff like that and generally things are pretty boring so that's a problem about the two cultures and we should we should be doing something open it up in form of an empties the hall there is a microphone right in the central Highland members to come to the microphone here if you'd like to ask a question we do have time for a few questions if you'd like to come up and ask you a question from the microphone so that both our panel members and everybody can hear thank you the CIA we have great microphones we have one array of questionnaire coming to the market I got up quickly anticipating a rush and discovered I was the only one coming out so it just relax the idea that we're part of a large ensemble of universes has been getting a lot of currency lately I read a couple of interesting papers by Max tegmark that that have had some very interesting implications one of the things that he notes is actually that the idea that there's an ensemble of universes is simpler than the idea that there is one because there's less you know there's less algorithmic information density and ensemble in fact close to none whereas a single one ironically has has far more complexity to it I I was wondering you know if you know I mean if any of you well dr. muskie was mentioning the idea that you know that perhaps there you know that the question of whether or not the universe exists is not an interesting one perhaps you know as tegmark actually has suggested elsewhere that you know that any mathematically consistent set of rules that could give rise to life is going to be internally experienced yeah I was wondering if you might want to expand upon that no I think there's there's no way you could tell whether you're in one that exists or not and so it seems like you shouldn't spend any of your 30,000 days worrying about that I don't yet know how to assess max tegmark s-- ideas or David deutsches ideas or Lise Mullins ideas to name three and there's and and South Floyd and others as many but but I know this much they're really interesting ideas that are have more hooks on them than some of the old philosophical chestnuts if you just ask yourself the question why is there something rather than nothing you're just sort of gobsmacked there's nothing you can do with that question you don't know what the background is you don't know anything about what would count as an answer now in one sense that's by my lights that's what philosophy is philosophy is what you're doing when you don't know what the right questions are and you don't know what yet what would count is a good answer but one of the reasons that I is a philosopher I'm interested in these proposals by the physicists is that they they have shape they have structure they have a detail there's something you can do with it maybe some of them are completely crazy in the end but we're gonna be able to figure that out they're not just waffling ideas they're ideas that have implications that can be very carefully and rigorously developed and that's the reason that I'm interested in because I didn't bring it with me there's a nice quote by a philosopher named John Searle who says that you know 150 years ago the latest thing was the Telegraph and people said oh maybe that's how animals work the nerves are like telegraph wires and then there was the telephone and radio and he says artificial intelligence or the computational idea of psychology is just the latest fad and it will pass too because non philosophers always adopt the latest technological breakthrough as their worldview I just wanted to say that and it's related to what Dan said that I can't well when the students come in September and they say I say what do you want to study and they say I'm going to study computer science I usually say well that's just a fad in the sense that if you study computer science rather than mathematics for four years then by your senior year you'll have to start all over because you know computers sciences obeys Moore's law and the amount of it doubles every four years so there's just no point in trying to keep up with that but seriously I think computer science is a new thing it has nothing to do with computers those are just things for computing what computer science did starting around 1950 was to take up where mathematics had run flat how do you describe very complicated systems well mathematics is great for describing the system that depends on a few axioms or laws geometry as about ten axioms beautiful thing called group theory that has for maybe it's five and you can explore them in great depth but if there's 50 assumptions mathematics is sort of helpless and if one of the assumptions says there's a switch where it can either go this way or that way it's a pretty bad so what happened starting around 1950 was the development of new ways of describing things in terms of procedures that people had barely imagined and then you had the computers to see what the consequences of these assumptions would be even if you couldn't figure them out so I think that in some sense this is the last fad but it will change into unrecognizably more powerful forms and the idea of psychology being a collection what happens if you have a whole collection of highly evolved computers interacting in highly ways is probably the answer to a lot of questions that had no answers at all before this question is to start start with Dan this is in regard to your book freedom involves which I read a couple months ago and I very much enjoyed and can recommend now you know you're you start off the book by positing you know freewill compared to determinism and in way it's a false opposition because we can look at freewill freedom is something that clearly evolves from rocks to simple organisms to birds to humans something has changed in that progression and we have to honor it and consider it and think about the implications legal religious etc but somewhere near the end of the book you make a statement if I'm remembering correctly where you say that still doesn't get us past the the conundrum of determinism because as you go from one step let's say the mind is a hole down to cognitive modules down to neurons down to molecules down to atoms determinism still holds but there's so many levels of so much complexity that we will never be able to do the computation let's say from the atom to to the human mind and therefore we don't have to worry about it no that's a reading that might be invited but that's not what I meant can you elaborate because because I see I still got your point about freedom is something that evolves and therefore we but we can't we must throw out the whole deterministic conundrum what I was trying to argue was that freedom and determinism are entirely compatible determinism doesn't go away I mean who cares for the determinism is true actually because we can we can Marvin says a switch we can have a switch turn determinism on turn determinism off make it in deterministic nothing changes in in at the levels that matter to us you're not going to be better off if you're living in an indeterminate ik world and if you're living in a deterministic world the whole determinism in determinism at the level of physics issue I argue is simply orthogonal simply irrelevant to the issues that really matter about freedom what we want is to have free will that's morally important there are I can define varieties of free will which are of no moral significance whatever and then I can show that we either have them or don't but who cares the kind of freewill that we're interested in is the kind that aisle astray by thinking about cases where yeah I I invite you to think of the worst thing you ever did and then you think well you know could I have done otherwise and and is my regret is it is it rational or or am I somehow just involved in some absurd game and I try to show why it can be rational why it is rational to conceive of your life in terms of free choices and it's not an illusion it's but you have to understand that what free choices means and ought to mean is not what the philosophical tradition says it is does that help well yeah because I do recall you you would say that we have free will but it's not the free will that most of us thought we hello I haven't read any of your books but I thought it'd be kind of fun to take God's side for just a little bit sure and by means of kind of yo Wilson's sociobiological interpretation of what religions about you guys both seem to suggest at least that religion is something that the species kind of adopted cuz we needed some quick answers and we've been kind of hesitant to get rid of because it explains things of course Wilson's point is that religion is actually a very successful adaptation that the species made and it's been so successful because it reinforces things like altruism and the family and social cohesion and so it actually is no big problem well I'm saying the words I'm saying but he wrote them in on human nature yeah and that it's you know been a very successful idea well you know here's another really successful idea evolute on the evolutionary timescale if it's sweet eat it the sweet tooth is is a fine adaptation or was we've outgrown that adaptation it is now not Fitness enhancing at all in our hunter-gatherer days the sweet tooth was a was a great adaptation to have it really helped us but now it's the bane of our existence and we're working very hard to figure out how to overcome this natural deeply ingrained love of sweet thing and and we're succeeding to Somerset at least we understand the problem so it might be true that our religious sweet-tooth was a great idea for a long time and it might also be true that it isn't a good idea anymore it might be turning on us now the fitness of an adaptation or the fitness enhancing power of an adaptation is not guaranteed to last forever and in fact we often one of the great sources of evidence about evolution is what we see adaptations which have outlived their usefulness and are now becoming positively harmful it's a simply an open question whether whether religion whether the sort of cohesiveness of religion is still good for us I like the analogy with with what my my farmer friends in Maine have told me they call it a nurse crop when I replanted my hay fields of some years ago one of the local farmers said well you want to put down oats as a nurse crop when you plant the Timothy the hay I said what do you mean a nurse crop he said well you plant that both seeds at once and the oats come up first and they keep out the weeds and they protect the Timothy until it can grow up and the oats grow up first and you can harvest the oats if you want or you can just leave them they're just sort of a protective shield a nurse crop for that for the Timothy and I think that religion may well have been a sort of cultural nurse crop I don't think we need it anymore however valuable it may have been in the early days of civilization I'm lost Jenny you'll be glad to know about computation and I suppose that makes it more dr. Minsky's province although I'm not fussy there is no question that access to computation is transforming the sciences do you think that scientists are asking different kinds of questions because of that or are they simply pursuing the questions they would have asked with greater efficiency or in greater depth or does it depend on what kind of science they practice very broad question there certainly are specific ones that when you see a complicated system you used to expect to find that there was a complicated source for it and one of the things that became widely understood since computer science was that simple processes can generate unlimited variety and so you get these chaos theories and you're no longer need to assume that there's anything random in a system that looks random there could just be a 30 bit shift register or something like that so I don't can't think of more general things to say but we know about processes that we haven't imagined before a little uncomfortable about saying that because in the 1920s there were people like Ackerman and post in the 1930s who understood chaos and even Planck array and the late 19th century knew that there would be some day something like mathematics that that would understand these things but it's since nineteen fifty or sixty the idea that complexity can appear where you wouldn't have expected it before incidentally the public has some idea that quantum mechanics involves uncertainty and that the quantum world is indeterminate and the physicists have allowed that to go on for a long time in the current pictures of quantum mechanics the Schrodinger equation is a continuous function and so forth and for a long time nobody could think of why packets of light would go this way in that way apparently in random and now there are theories about that which don't have any randomness at all it's interesting the public still thinks things are random gentlemen I think we just have time for one more question thank you on the matter of design and designer could both of you comment what perhaps was Einstein's views of that problem or that conundrum and how come what has happened to bring your ideas of that to bear now I have a quick answer to that which is looking on the past Einstein is famous for many interesting accomplishments one is that he was perhaps the most skillful politician of the previous century he made lots of remarks in public to the press and so forth and he never made a mistake in his strategy so he steers the way between the atheists and the religious people so skillfully I wish well I don't want to do it anymore but I wish I had known how to in the past saying that the Lord is malicious but he also complained bitterly and often that he didn't himself believe in any personal god of any sort that was just a metaphor he was very clear that that he did not mean by that or any other reference to God a personal God who could actually be subtle or malicious and of course George Williams the the biologist John mentioned him earlier is one of our one of our our leading Darwinian Xand and George has famously turned Einstein's famous quote upside down and said that mother nature is vicious but stupid thank you all very much dan Dennett latest book is in the store it's called freedom evolves Marvin Minsky is now nine years late delivering his book so if you'd like to encourage him please do so on the way out thank you [Applause] our thanks to all our guests John Brockman Daniel Dennett Marvin Minsky find out more about these authors works and other events at Barnes & Noble online at bien comm next New York Times correspondent John fountain talks about his childhood and the role of faith in his life he also talks about his career in journalism in his book true vine this event from the Southern Festival of Books is about 45 minutes welcome one and all I don't know about you but this is a weekend that I keep circuit on my calendar it's one of those weekends and I look forward to with a great deal of anticipation so welcome once again to the Book Festival our session this afternoon that's with John fountain who will be talking about his book true vine he has been on a book tour since June one city after another and he really thought that he was in Dallas today but he ran into Porter Wagner with his rhinestones and he knew he was in Nashville he is weary I've had a chance to read this book and I find it extraordinary and I told John it reminds me of Rickey Bragg

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Keywords: p2, the, new, humanists, panel

Id: mbkvpJmHtDE

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2012