David Eagleman on Possibilianism

so by a show of hands how many people here have heard of the ultra deep field experiment by the Hubble telescope ok very few okay well strap in because I'm glad I get to tell you about this what happened some years ago was that NASA had completed a low-resolution map of the night sky and they decided that they wanted to go deeper so they picked a little tiny patch of space a patch of space that's about the size of a pencil tip at arm's length and it was black there was nothing there and what they decided they would do is point the finely-honed lens of the Hubble telescope at that little patch of space so every time the Hubble came around the earth they pointed the telescope that little patch to see if they could capture any photons and see if there was actually something in there that was too dim to see normally so every time the Hubble came around the earth they pointed it for 20 minutes and they pulled this trick off 400 times and at the end of that they compiled all the information they collected all the lonely photons that had trickled in from distant reaches of the universe and they put it together and they found that there was something in that little patch of space after all and it wasn't a star and it wasn't a cluster of stars it was 10,000 galaxies now a galaxy is a hundred billion stars so we're talking a thousand trillion stars in this little patch of space each one of those stars just like our Sun many of them presumably with planetary systems around them all of them with the potential to house unknown forms of biology right so I think this is a good consciousness razor to think about the the size of the mysteries that surround us so I am a scientist I've devoted my entire life to science because I figure if we want to understand what's going on in this strange world around us there's probably no better method than to directly study the blueprints and science in last 400 years has been tremendously successful we have cured smallpox and polio and gotten men to the moon and made the internet and triple lifespans but I think what you really get from a life in science is this knowledge that after you walk the pier of everything that we know in science at some point you reach the end of the pier and beyond the end is everything that we don't know it's all the uncharted waters the deep mysteries that we don't have insight into yet like why mass and energy are equivalent or what dark matter and dark energy are or why there are multiple spatial dimensions or how you build consciousness from mechanical pieces and parts that's the real lesson that you get from science is about the vastness of our ignorance now I have no doubt that every generation we will continue to add a few more slats to the pier but it's a huge ocean and we don't really have any guarantee how far we'll get and certainly in our brief twinkling of a 21st century lifetime we're not going to get to the end of that and so the lesson that you get from science is that what we know is so vastly outstripped by what we don't know so given that situation I have been interested in what has happened this last decade with with the books by by the Neo atheists and these books are some of my favorite books and they're very important and insightful books but what's been interesting to me is the public reaction to them because what they have led to as far as I can see is something of a misconception widely that scientists don't have the capacity to to gamble beyond the available data and that scientists are acting is that we've got it all figured out we understand it F equals MA equals MC squared we can put in equations or if we can't yet then we're pretty close and it should suffice to capture a description of the whole cosmos I think that's actually not a very good description of how science actually operates Ben's right when he said that science is about disproving other people's hypotheses but it's about so much more than that science is really about this creativity of making up new hypotheses and there's a part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time now what we actually do is we make up new stories in the laboratory every day and then we go and we seek evidence we gather evidence to weigh in favor of some stories over others but it's often the case that some questions are too far out right now they're beyond the toolbox of science and as a result we're unable to gather evidence for them and in that situation it's okay science is comfortable holding multiple hypotheses on the table that ambiguity is accepted as part of the relationship we have with mother nature it's part of the vast mysteries around us we have to have that ambiguity so I don't pretend like we've got it all figured out and as a result I have felt sometimes that perhaps we know too little to commit to a position of strict atheism now at the other end of the spectrum we know way too much to commit to any particular religious story right so there are 2,000 religions on the globe and hat and has it's been pointed out by others that everyone already knows what it's like to be an atheist because all you need to do is look at someone else's religion and you say well that's patently ridiculous that you would believe in that and of course they're looking back at you and thinking the same thing now the holy books written by the world's religions are often quite beautiful and they crystallize hard-won wisdom but in fact these were written millennia ago by people who didn't know about the size of the cosmos or the Big Bang or bacterial infection of DNA or computation or or even very much about neighboring landscapes and cultures so whenever I'm sitting next to somebody on an airplane I asked everybody if they've ever heard of the ultra-deep field experiment by the Hubble telescope so far nobody's heard of that but everybody is able to tell me all of the details of whatever cultural story they grew up on and you don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize that our nervous systems absorb whatever our cultures pour into us so if you grow up in Saudi Arabia you're gonna love Islam and if you're born in Rome you love Catholicism and Tel Aviv Judaism and Springfield Ohio Protestantism and it's not a coincidence that there's not a blossoming of Islam in Springfield Ohio and there's not a blossoming of Protestantism in in Mecca it's because we're products of our culture we accept whatever is poured into us right if there were one truth you would expect that it would spread everywhere evenly but clearly the data doesn't support that the crazy part is our culture's pour the stuff into us and then sometimes people are willing to fight and die over the particular stories Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out a while ago that the religious stories of one generation become the literary entertainment of the next generation and and you can see that nobody's fighting over Isis and Osiris anymore or the Greek and Roman Panna please not so much and so and so I want to give me an example this I don't know if any of you familiar with the the creation story of the Baku ba Kingdom in the Congo but their creation story goes like this there was a white giant named mumble who had a sharp pain in his belly and he vomited up the earth and the Sun and the moon and the stars I'm not making this up and then he had a second pain and he vomited up the animals and people and trees and included in that second ejection was and I quote the leopard the anvil the Eagle woman the monkey fumu firmament medicine man and lightning now if you find the creation story of the Baku ba an unlikely explanation for how we got here just keep in mind that if you were Baku Bo you would find equally bizarre the Western story of the naked couple in the talking reptile and the prohibited produce and if you were mokuba living in Kansas you would be fighting to get this in your children's textbooks now I'm not suggesting that the bukuvu story is wrong or the Adam and Eve story are wrong because there are competing stories I'm suggesting they're wrong because all the available evidence we can gather weighs against them so for example the the biblical story suggests that the earth is 6,000 years old our best science tells us that it's 4.5 billion years old so that means the biblical account has to somehow explain how the Japanese we're making pottery 4000 years before the earth existed so so for my money this puts me somewhere in the middle I have felt for a long time that we know too little to commit to strict atheism and we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story so what has surprised me is the amount of certainty that I find out there so when you walk into a bookstore what you find are the books by the near a theist and the books by the fundamentally religious and they argue with each other and they polarize each other and they're spending all of their energies on that and it has felt to me for a while like maybe there should be another voice here because that seems too limited for a modern discussion because if you think about the space of possibilities right so take the whole judeo-christian Islamic tradition that's one point in the possibility space take the Eastern religions that's another point take the idea that we're mechanical pieces and parts and we shut off when we died that's another point we were planted here by space healers and taking another point right when you start when you start populating the space what you realize is there are vast landscapes in between of possibilities and all of these points are infinitesimally unlikely right but but together they add up to this possibility space and I feel like there's not really enough discussion about that space instead the whole discussion has been limited to what I consider perhaps a false dichotomy this God versus no God and that's where the conversation has ended now some people in the middle position sometimes people use the term agnostic I I don't use that term because I the way I see it used it typically is used as a weak term often when people say they're agnostic what they mean is I'm not sure whether the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist right so I don't call myself an agnostic I call myself a possible in and the idea with possibility ISM is an active exploration of new ideas and a comfort with the scientific temperament of creativity and holding multiple hypotheses in mind so possibily anism is now 18 months old and I first announced it when I was on a live national interview on NPR I explained at night to find it and when I got done with the interview I got back in my truck and I drove over to my laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine where I'm a neuroscientist and I settle in for a day of work and I opened up my email and I had hundreds of emails from people and they all said hey I think I'm a possibily into so I thought that was pretty cool so I googled the word and it turns out the word didn't exist there were zero hits so I did what anybody would do I bought Posse building comm and then and then I said then I waited to see what would happen well what happened has been amazing what happened his group started popping up all over the place on Facebook possibility groups got started the New York Times didn't article on MSNBC didn't article on it spread worldwide the Ugandan Times just had a beautiful piece on possibilities on the India Sunday Times there are now 15,000 Google hits and and its really caught fire one thing I noticed that was funny is people who had heard about it on the radio didn't always know how to spell it or they forgot the name and so people started calling it possibility and also and all kinds of things and spelling it every way you can imagine and I thought you know what that's perfect that's right in the possibilities spirits but however you want to do it but the question started wondering about is why what is the reason that this movement is catching on given that it's a very strange movement in that we don't subscribe to anything so it struck me that maybe what's going on now that we've passed the first decade of this millennium I think maybe people are a little bit tired of people acting as though they're certain about things that they can't possibly be certain about so they're a little tired of the debates between Dawkins versus the Discovery Institute and as Voltaire said uncertainty is an uncomfortable position but certainty is an absurd position so I want to make two points of clarification about possibility ISM so one is sometimes people come up to me after a talk and they say that's terrific that you're a possibility and I'm so glad that anything goes in possibility isn't because that means you get me in terms of ESP and crystals and whatever No possum million ism is not anything goes it's anything goes at first and then we import the tools of science to rule out parts of the possibilities space so it would be terrific if ESP existed we could all love that but to the extent that we can measure things now we cannot find any evidence to support and so the idea is you import the tools to sculpt to structure the possibility space you can rule out whole areas and the interesting part of possibility of possibility ISM really picks up where the toolbox of science leaves out it's where we no longer have the tools to address it and we have to understand the space of possibilities that's where it's really important and the reason it is so important to keep that open-mindedness about the all the parts we don't know is because we know for certain about the magnitude of things that we don't know so in every generation of scientists people have always felt that they have all the pieces and parts that they need in order to answer what's going on around them and the cosmos but just imagine trying to explain the Northern Lights in the absence of understanding the magnetosphere or trying to understand trying to explain the heart before the concept of a pump was invented I'm trying to understand how muscles work before the before electricity is discovered you would make theories but you would be doomed to be incorrect well we're in that same position now so we've got Newtonian physics and I study in physics and quantum mechanics and we think okay we sort of got all the pieces and parts but on the one hand there's all the the unknown unknowns all the stuff we don't even know we don't know but what I want to emphasize is all the stuff that we know for sure we don't know so take something like dark matter right so astrophysicists look at the movement of the planets in the galaxies and they look at everything moving around and they look at the gravitational pull and what they realize is something's missing there's something out there that we can't quite see or smell or touch but it must be there to make the equations work out to make the movements in the cosmos explain and so we're gonna call this a fudge factor and we're gonna call it dark matter and the idea is that dark matter is the thing that we don't exactly know what it is but we require it to make the equations work out okay some of you may already know dark matter is not a tiny fudge factor 90% of the known universe is what we call dark matter that's a lot to sweep under the rug okay and this is what I study I go in a lab every day and study the human brain this is the most complicated device we have ever found in the universe it's essentially an alien kind of computational material and it is so dense in its connectivity that if you were to take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue there are more connections in there than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy so this is incredibly complex and yet somehow this wet mechanical network system here is you it's all your hopes and dreams and aspirations right somehow that's you if you were to lose a little part of your pinky you wouldn't be any different but if you lose an equivalently sized piece of neural tissue that completely changes your conscious state right well the problem is we don't know how to take mechanical pieces and parts and build private subjective experience out of that imagine that I give you a trillion tinker toys and I said okay hook it up so this is a lever and this touches that and that causes that and so on at what point do you add one more tinker toy and then you say ah it's experiencing the taste of feta cheese now right that's the problem we don't know we don't have any way to take our equations and say okay we'll just carry the two and do a triple integral and then that's you know that's feta cheese or that's the redness of red or the qualia of pain or something we don't not only do not have a theory of how the brain works we don't even know what such a theory would look like okay so all of this calls for a bit of intellectual humility now I was giving this talk recently and then somebody came up to me afterwards and said hey dr. eagleman good job on the talk he said you know what I think you should become a politician because you're unwilling to commit to anything and he said to me when it's just cowboy up and and commit to something so I thought about that so in in Texas where I come from we have this lovely expression to cowboy up and what it means is to firmly commit to a decision and we really value the straight people we like people who can firmly commit to decision so if you're trying to decide should I take the cattle out in the rain or should I marry this woman or should I sell the ranch we we like people who can make a really firm decision but what I'm going to suggest is that there are some domains where it's appropriate to cowboy up and there are some domains where it's not so appropriate so would you stop a guy on a ranch and say tell me if you think there are extraterrestrial civilizations do you care what his opinion is would you value it more than say an astrobiologist and if you wouldn't ask him about extraterrestrial civilizations that suggests that there are some domains in which it is not appropriate to commit and act like you know the answer in the absence of having good evidence so the next time someone says to you to cowboy up and commit to a decision I suggest that you tell them no I would rather geek out and the idea of geeking out is having a creativity for new narratives and a comfort level with holding multiple possibilities in mind and you should feel free to cite the gospel of science the most important three words that science ever gave to humankind so my message to you is this when you leave here and you go back out into this strange world try to seek comfort with having multiple narratives and an uncertainty and this is not just a plea for simple open mindedness but for an active exploration of new ideas I think this is important for our education for our legislation for perhaps the future of our warfare so when you leave PopTech full of ideas go back and look around the strange world you're in and see if you can live a life that is free from dogma and full of awe and wonder and see if you can celebrate possibility and praise uncertainty thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: PopTech

Views: 83,817

Keywords: PopTech2010, psychology

Id: lS0b4QCpFGc

Length: 20min 35sec (1235 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2010