Noam Chomsky: Elon Musk, SETI, Harper’s Magazine, JK Rowling & Artificial Intelligence

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic great well it's a great it's a great pleasure to welcome noam chomsky to the into the impossible podcast which is a production of the university of california san diego's arthur c clarke center for human imagination we've been doing this for over a decade and uh or so and the podcast is relatively recent and the name into the impossible podcast takes its name from one of sir arthur c clarke's famous three laws uh the first one being any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic the second law of sir arthur was for every expert there's an equal and opposite expert and the third law is the only way to find out what is possible is to venture a bit beyond into the impossible and i thank you for agreeing to come on and we're gonna maybe touch upon the different areas that interested sir arthur c clarke uh in particular the melding of multiple cultures writing uh technology and science um these these different aspects that we perceive as disparate but uh perhaps there are some uh common threads that we can pull on and uh in doing so reveal more about the underlying nature of these intellectual pursuits that you've been participating in for for many decades i should first say welcome gnome thank you so much for coming on glad to be with you this is the second time we've met we met in 2017 at the science of consciousness conference organized by stuart hameroff who's a mutual friend and he had the or um the conference that was held here in 2017 when you were here and i was speaking uh featured a brain uh riding a surfboard as the logo of the of the conference and i want to talk a little bit about some ideas that i haven't stopped thinking about since you gave that that lecture back in 2017 and i want to uh couple that to these thoughts about consciousness and how it intersects with your specialty of linguistics linguistic reasoning etc but before we do that for most of my listeners are in the physical sciences uh some are you know culturally interested in aspects of art and we've had on guests ranging from pulitzer prize winning poets to nobel prize winning astrophysicist but we've never had a linguist on and i wonder if it's possible for you to give a brief overview of why linguistics is important and what inspired you many years ago to pursue it the it's been understood for millennia actually that since classical greece that possession of language is the uh almost the defining characteristic of human beings it's a species property it's common to all humans who's assumed for centuries that it's common to all humans now we have good evidence for it there's doesn't seem to be any group variation it's a apparently a very recent development last couple hundred maybe 200 000 years ago roughly about that which is nothing in evolutionary time it has it is its properties have no analog in the animal world essentially none so it's a true species property common to humans distinctive of humans and it's the core of our creative capacities uh the reasons why people get nobel prizes are thinking it's just central to all of our lives so if you follow the uh elfic oracle let's say and assume that our goal is know thyself then this is the place to look and in the context of linguistics i have a couple of things again i i beg your forbearance as we proceed to things that are possibly of interest to me but uh and me alone but these will be related to my role as a father of many young children and uh and and some of the constructs are hypotheses that i've tried to test throughout unwittingly using my children as experimental uh research uh subjects but uh perhaps we'll get to those in a little bit i think uh what was so interesting to me is that you drew a connection in your 2017 talk uh between consciousness and linguistics and i wonder uh first of all is it uh is it possible in a sense to uh to link a mathematical uh construct of what is linguism or what is linguistically um a a statement that can be proven because it seems to me that there are or vast relevancies between linguistics and mathematics and that's no accident you contributed a lot to the quantitative interpretation of it but uh let me let me uh flesh out what i'm trying to explain uh in mathematics according to girdle it's possible to prove that there is an incompleteness in mathematical uh formal logic that you uh there'll be statements that cannot be uh could not be proven consistently within the system of formal mathematics itself is there an analog of girdles in completeness theorem uh in linguistics is there uh is there a formal system that can define what is outside the bounds of linguistics or is it uh just a com combination of uh neurological motor skills etc um how is there a relevant or is there an analog of girdles theorem for linguistics it's not really gurdle's theorem which only applies in very specifically defined formal systems languages not a foreign so of course it doesn't apply but in fact in california once i spent some time with alfred tarski and he couldn't understand why anybody understands language because you can formulate the logic but the liar's paradox you know so you're interested in but it's an organic system you're interested in its properties you can immediately find things that aren't in it by looking at its properties take a look at the visual system begin to understand it now you can find things that aren't going to be accommodated by the visual system but has nothing to do with girls theorem that's just that's what happens when you look at any physical entity and the language system encoded in the brain is just one physical entity so we can find we can search for its properties we will find things that are outside those properties in fact you can there's very interesting work on this incidentally even neuroscientific neuro-linguistic work so for example you can construct formal invented languages which violate the principles of the universal principles of human language and then you can ask what happens when people are exposed to these insistence and you get some interesting results so for example one of the deepest and in some ways most surprising properties of language is that the rules of the core rules of language the part of language that is concerned with basically constructing thoughts is you go back a step you can divide the language system into basically two parts one part is concerned with constructing linguistic expressions which are expressions of thought the other part is externalizing it to some sensory motor system it's kind of like the internal program in your laptop and the printer you attach it to you can attach it to one or another printer and in fact the internal system of language we happened to be using speech but if we were deaf we'd be using sign and it's essentially comparable it's just a different printer it's the same internal system so if we keep the internal system the core of language turns out it pays no attention to things like linear order only pays attention to the structure of expressions which has a very funny consequence it means that your children for example when they're acquiring language pay no attention to 100 of what they hear and only pay attention to what they never hear they hear things in linear order but the rules that they use pay attention to structure which they don't hear they construct it in their minds now this principle called structure dependence allows you right away to develop impossible languages namely languages that use linear order so for example you could construct a language which is like ordinary language except the way it uses negation say is not the way ordinary language is do by structural positions but rather by linear order so suppose you invent a language which in which if you want to negate a sentence the third word with transcends will be not okay that's a trivial problem to solve but if you give it to him to humans in invented languages turns out that they can solve the problem as a puzzle but the language areas of the brain are not the ones that are activated rather you get diffuse activation is for puzzle solving uh if you give them a invented language which keeps to the rules of ordinary language then they can learn it but the language areas at work so there you can find you can indeed study impossible languages and the way the brain reacts to them and uh this is what strikes one of the most striking examples in fact one thing i wanted to discuss maybe segway's into it and i'm sorry to use up my uh my uh my perhaps one request that your forbearance uh so soon in our conversation gnome but um i wanted i was thinking about the communication problem the so-called communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence and i want to understand if you have a perspective on this because as you make the case so often a lot of language is as you're saying is is not even the verbal or structural or even the the linear processes by which language can be acquired by human beings and uh and yet if you imagine the problem of communicating with an extraterrestrial civilization using purely using a printer or using binary code or some such uh form of flashing uh lights converted into into morse code perhaps is it and assuming the intelligence could decipher such a thing first of all assuming they exist by the way do you believe that there are extraterrestrial civilizations i promise this won't be a long uh what's that fear me bird yes do you believe that they exist or do you have a reason to suspect that they might not intelligent communicating technological intelligence they may in fact they may be all up there if they have any intelligence and they pay any attention to what's going on on earth they'll get far away with people as creatures like us that's right i think that's probably the answer to the fermi paradox as a joke but there may be extra maybe not and then assuming that notice intelligence is a very rare property uh you may have seen ernst meyer's article on this responding to carl sagan you've seen that discussion interesting discussion so carl sagan's from a point of view and astrophysicists is it's got to be all these planets out there very much like ours it's got to be like this now meyer from the point of view of biologists he was the grand old man of american biology says well maybe but he says we have one case that we know about earth there have been about 50 billion species some of them are biological biologically successful that means they survive and proliferate some of them are not the ones that survive and proliferate are the dumb ones things like bacteria mutate very quickly no problems or say beetles you remember old dane's famous comment that god must have loved beetles he made so many of them right they're fine they find a niche they just stick to it and they get by but as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence survival gets lower and lower large mammals for example are very rare the only reason there's a lot of cows is because we domesticate them but if you look at wild in the wild say apes very few they don't survive very well and if you take humans it's probably only the last couple hundred thousand years which means that several billion years of life went by and never know humans nothing with what we call higher intelligence that's right to extrapolate and ask what might happen on other planets chances of developing higher intelligence might not be very high yeah they just might not survive and even if they're intelligent it doesn't mean that they're technologically advanced um that they're able to interpret and feel build devices you know i always say it takes you can't build a solar panel you know solar panels weren't built using solar panels to provide power in other words there's a hierarchy of energy scales that were needed to construct something as sophisticated or not as a photovoltaic cell tiny percentage of human life but let's suppose that they that there's something like human intelligence there would there be ways to communicate well i think the thing to do is not to look at the printer no they could have used one just like humans we can use one or another sensory motor system we can use our hands you can use touch you can even learn language from touch yes you can learn we use sound because it's convenient you use some other so i don't really think that's the issue the issue is the internal system a system that constructs infinitely many thoughts basically and if you look at that there's a good reason to think that there might be a mode of interaction namely arithmetic if you take a look at the structure of language it's the internal system there's pretty good evidence by now that it's based on the most elementary computational device namely binary set formation and if you take a look at binaries from that you can construct the infinitely many structures and so on and if you take a look at that you can from binary set formation with a lexicon of one element you basically get the basis for arithmetic uh there's a kind of another direction from which you could look at this uh marv minsky 50 or 60 years ago did some experiments in which he just took the simplest touring machines fewest states and and uh symbols and asked what happens if you just let them run wild you know turns out almost all of them crash either they get into an infinite cycle or they or they terminate uh but some survive and turned out they all had the successor function so and then he concludes well suppose evolution is getting to the point where it's developing systems that have some of the capacities of turing machines it's going to hit on the simplest things and the simplest things will give you something like the basis for arithmetic and maybe they'll give you language that's a point where there's possible convergence in order to pursue it you have to show that so for example this point i made about structure dependence that actually follows directly from the fact that the basic computational system for language is minor reset formation because that does not yield linear order so if that's the system that's in your child's brain it's never going to use linear order it'll use it for communication but that's because of the sensory motor system the sensory motor system requires linear order we can't talk in structures so you have to linearize the thing but that's a property the printer has basically nothing to do with language sensory motor system was in place hundreds of thousands millions of years before language emerge and it's basically nothing to do with it just as your printer has nothing to do with the program and the laptop so in in the absence of all systems though uh so the absence of a neural mechanistic touch uh sound uh with these aliens it merely communicating only with arithmetic um you know symbolic symbolic logic that would be sufficient i assume that they have some mode of externalizing what's in their heads now if we can latch on to that mode of communication that printer that they're using then we could go back to the internal system it's good reason to believe that they would have the successor function in addition because the successor function addition it's part of our language so maybe that should be an entry point interesting so you mentioned um you mentioned artificial intelligence hopefully we'll get to around to that in a little bit um are there you know subject models um do does linguistics benefit from from as i know um uh colleagues here at uc san diego have studied you know consciousness and and uh sensory perception uh in in subjects that have had damage to their brains and and the problems that they illustrate have revealed patterns of of uh understanding of how actually the brain works and i'm wondering is that the case in linguistics too are there uh deficiencies in in subjects that from from which you learn more about how uh those of us who are blessed not to have deficiencies in that realm uh how we actually process language well there's quite a lot of work done language pathologies deficiencies of one sort of other its work actually began about 50 years ago with some classic work by eric leneberg a old friend of mine who founded with the modern biology of language and there's a great deal of recent work on it so there so let's take one example there's a well-studied case of a subject called his name the name that's given to him is chris he's a young man who has virtually extremely limited cognitive capacities but he can do almost nothing but he has amazing linguistic capacities him to a language learns it very quickly he's mastered dozens of languages and he's kind of obsessed with it all he wants to do is learn another language actually they tried this test with him that i mentioned before about impossible languages so the language that you give if you and they tried the same test with chris so give him an invented language you've never seen before or even an invented language that keeps to the linguistic principles learns it very quickly given a system which uses something like linear order for negation or other violations of structure dependence total blank you can't make any progress not because you can't solve puzzles and there are lots of different kinds of cases um there are cases of subjects who have almost no cortex tiny amount of cortex but complete language capacity you know i mean this actually just began with the study of aphasia back in the early 19th century and but since then there's been especially since leonard's work extensive study of a range of different language pathologies and the effects that they have so i want to get into some other speculations perhaps not as well founded as some of the other topics we'll get into when we come back to your talk on consciousness um when uh is is it true that um you know richard feynman used to say that uh he was surprised when he realized that not everybody counted the way that he counted in other words i believe he would count and he would hear in his mind uh the numbers one two three etc and he realized that that was you know that was just the way that he visualized or heard numbers if you will and that's the way that he counted he realized that some of his colleagues at mit or you know fellow students that they would see numbers moving across their mind is is there um is there oh first of all there there is this continuing running monologue that i always say you know if somebody heard my inner monologue you know they might think i'm saying you know if i if they didn't hear it but they certainly wouldn't feel i'm saying you know just the endless bombardment of of language is it uh is it the case though as with feynman's you know finding uh do people some people see words or you know when they're when they're having these internal monologues you've spoken about uh in the past or do they merely hear them kind of the way i do uh is is that something that's universal or is it does it you know bimodal and some people hear it some people see it how do people um let me ask you a question when you're typing a letter not paying a lot of attention you know and just typing not paying much attention do you ever notice that you make typographical errors where you type a word that sounds the same way yeah isn't like you you suppose you're planning to say write w-r-i-t-e would you write r-i-g-h-t sometimes yeah does that mean i'm crazy or they should be committed or that's me too i think what it means is you're hearing the things i think you're writing but you're actually hearing and that writing is a kind of a very peripheral activity hearing is much deeper embedded writing is just it's even more remote than the printer you know it's a way of mapping the printer into something else secondary printer so actually when you are doing something like typing you're often just hearing yourself and that's why you make mistakes like that are there differences in the way people do this as far as i know it hasn't been investigated much it's way out of the periphery one of the deep questions or you know what's going on with the kind of things we're talking about before yeah if some if you have certain kind of brain injury what's that going to do to your language faculty here there's lots of work are there any analogs in you know ramachandran's brief tour of human consciousness he speaks a lot about you know synesthesia and and kind of pathological circumstances brain injuries people will you know smell the color orange or things like that have the linguistic differences between such patients been studied in other words you know how does it affect their ability to do just what we said you know typing writing hearing seeing at the level of typing i've never seen anything but the level of speech errors it's so cool there's quite a lot of work actually susan curtis and your university is one of the leading specialists on this cadet yeah and i definitely like to have her on the podcast as well uh so um getting you know just a couple more language um you know maybe popular myths or whatever as i said i have many children and i'm very fortunate to have so many but uh i've i heard it once said by a mathematician that he uh he made sure to speak several thousand words a day to his children uh and that they he believed that there had been some studies that showed that children begin to speak only after they've heard a million words so that would be a year's worth of 3000 words a day roughly so you're shaking your head so i guess almost nothing good actually what the studies show is the children they don't pay much attention to what their parents are saying they pay the ambient environment but you can ask yourself i don't know your background but take say my background my parents were immigrants yeah so they're they knew english perfectly well but with accents i don't speak like them i talk like the kids on the street a good dialectician could figure out quickly that i come from northeast philadelphia not from ukraine and that's pretty nobody understands why but children usually pick up the dialect of their peers and not really the parents try to train them and the kids may listen within those ordinary behavior and very little impact of uh parents efforts there was at one point a belief in the child language literature that there's something that used to be called mother ease mothers talk to children in very special ways and that's supposed to help them learn but as the careful studies took place it turned out the kids just weren't paying any attention so there's a there's another myth that children start learning language in utero i guess from what you just said that is true well they learn something so fast what they learn in utero is probably prosody but what the experimental evidence is that shows with the work of jacques mcclare the french cognitive scientists you take a two month two day old child about as early as you can begin to test anything and the tests usually have to do with the intensity of sucking it's about the only thing you can measure you get surprise reactions if uh the intensity of sucking increases means the infant is interested so you can distinguish things that cause surprise from those who done and just using that experimental technique that he was able to show that a two-day-old infant can distinguish the language of its mother from uh the same from the same language spoken by a perfectly a different language spoken by a bilingual woman who speaks the both that language and the second language he could just the infant could distinguish the voice he's never heard talking his mother's language and talking some different language and since then there's been that shows something's going on in utero and since then there's been quite a lot of study of it and it turns out it's it's not the actual language it's a certain category of languages ones that have similar exotic structure uh this has even gone to the point of people putting uh sound devices on the uterus of a cow and seeing what you can hear when you hear sort of muffled speech so you can something's coming through that's that the infant is picking up something about it the point is that children are pre-programmed to acquire language it's a very striking fact that i mean an ape for example a chimpanzee has about the same auditory systems humans and uh if you put it if you give in an ape and an infant exactly the same uh environment where the infant immediately hears speech and picks up language in a regular fashion almost reflexively they just hears a noise doesn't matter how much training you do can't do anything so it's just an internal your your genetically approached child is genetically programmed to pick up all the noise in the environment and say i'm going to be looking at this and as i said it's kind of striking but in fact an infant doesn't pay attention to 100 of what it hears linear order pays attention to it it never hears the structure that its brain constructs which is a pretty dramatic finding are there languages this is the last of the myths that i'm going to ask you to bust or or i don't know what the opposite is but uh bolster um there uh i had a phenomenal professor of uh high energy particle physics when i was a graduate student at brown university since deceased uh kian so kang and he used to tell us in a you know kind of a mercurial smile on his face he used to say korean is the most logical language because the pictograms the glyphs of the language were in some sense reminiscent of the facial motor system that was to be employed in the position of the tongue etc is that a myth or does that have any validity there's some truth to it but it's not about language it's about the writings the writings yes right right it's very peripheral language writing is a very recent phenomenon under a very small part of the human population until recently and it's true that the korean writing system does not so much facial expressions but it does reflect the phonological properties to an unusual perspective and an unusual uh uh like extend to the green level so there's something to it but it has essentially nothing to do with language right that's pure writing yeah but i guess in the sense of um the written language as a tool for acquisition of verbal language i mean there there's some at least peripheral knowledge if i can read the language and i can write in the language it may you know assist in some of the breakdown of some of the cognates perhaps especially if you translate from one language to another but um but notice that that's very late in language oh yes sure absolutely yeah the two or three year old has an enormous language capacity yeah and that aren't exhibited so for example when infant is in what's called the two word stage it just says two words you know uh you know me hungary or something yeah whatever you know now yeah more but at that stage the child is understanding much more complex sentences now you can show that by trying to introduce errors into the more complex sentences the kid can't understand it in fact there have been studies in which this is called telegraphic speech you know you're talking just none of the small words just nouns and verbs so you give a kid who's in the telegraphic speech stage uh three conditions one normal speech one the child's own telegraphic speech the third telegraphic speech with the small words randomly introduced so three different conditions it turns out the kid can't understand its own speech can't understand the random the distributed ones but it can't understand normal speech because what's going on in the head is much beyond the what's coming out of the printer right um and so maybe there was uh one more um one more comment that i had uh that was sort of related to popularized uh myths perhaps rather than you know fundamental uh mysteries and i'm trying to find in my notes oh yeah here it is um so we have in language uh of course it's written but in this particular context but um but but uh there is a connection to the spoken language as well uh there's a sense that um linguistics if it's if it is to be a um you know a hard discipline a regularized discipline with the rules etc how is that consistent with the fact that language at least in the realm of vocabulary uh changes regularly i i'm sure i was dismayed a few weeks ago to learn that merriam-webster's dictionary now no longer marks as incorrect spelling the word irregardless which was always the bane of whenever my students would use such a word in spoken or written language they now accept it and in fact you can type it into your computer and my computer will not flag it as making a spelling error or even a grammatical error um if we add to the vocabulary um why is it is it is it not impossible to imagine that even grammatical things such as subject subject-verb agreement uh is that a slippery you know shifting language zeitgeist or are there certain laws that are immutable almost uh laws of nature when it comes to language if you don't understand something it looks as if it varies all over the place so if you go back say 60 years biologists believe that organisms were so diverse that you have to study each one on its own nothing to say about them by now we know that they're so uniform that there's even serious thought about the possibility of a universal genome because if all organisms are basically the same the ones that came out of the cambrian explosion you have very few different life forms it's very small number they look diverse when you don't understand them same about languages when you go back again about 50 or 60 years it was commonly believed by major professional linguists that languages differ so enormously that each one has to be studied on its own without any preconceptions by now we know that that's totally false it's very much like biology if you get into the deeper parts of them it turns out they're very much cast to the same mold in fact if that were not true no child could ever learn the language it's got to be i mean what the child knows let's say two or three years old is way beyond any evidence that's been presented like one example that i gave for example you can't learn that and it turns out that these principles are apparently uniform across across all languages i mean in a sense we know that they have to be otherwise language couldn't be learned so the task of the field is to show what we know must be true that is to find the the mold to which all of these things are cast it's got to be there we have to find it and the more you look the more you find it it's even for the meanings of words um the meaning of a word is so rich that you could never pick it up from exposure and in fact we know that children learn words from almost no exposures at the peak period of language learning two or three years old the kid is picking up a word virtually every waking hour which means almost one exposure and they know the rich and complex meaning now the things that you were talking about like irregardless they're on the order of table manners i mean it's like how should we behave you know and you talk differently when you're giving a formal lecture than when you're talking to somebody on the street so we learn those uh conventions about how you're supposed to talk in different places but they are they have almost nothing to do with language the point is to understand the word regardless requires enormous internal knowledge you don't have anywhere near enough evidence in your entire life to acquire by induction anything like the meaning of the word regardless or in fact anything like the word river or tree uh almost any word you look at soon as you begin to study deeply what their meanings are turns out it's way beyond anything you get from the environment so the they're the same in all languages so they have it kind of has to be the case otherwise you learn couldn't learn anything uh but so again it's kind of like if i look at an x-ray i see just a lot of noise if a radiologist looks at it they see a tumor in a certain place well the infant is like the radiologist they're genetically primed to look for particular things so they miss the noise and go after the particular things and that's true of word meaning it's true of every aspect of language you're so now we're going to switch gears a little bit and talk about consciousness and maybe segway if you have time into discussion of artificial intelligence and language natural language processing and i have some questions related to those and hopefully maybe be able to tie them together in the cognitive scientific miasma that i want to to construct but in your 2017 talk at the science of consciousness yield here in san diego uh sponsored by the university of arizona where you're currently located uh you have some uh very interesting perspectives in which at various times i felt hopeful and at various times i felt hopeless and i'll say there's this running debate it's the so-called hard problem of consciousness and the easy problem of consciousness and there are those that believe that there's consciousness in every um and subatomic particles perhaps depending on what what definition one uses for consciousness but i want to start with the very beginning when you uh really tied into something very important to me uh which is the scientific method and of course you're extremely well known for using the scientific method you know first in the cognitive revolution to use and study cognition in its own right for the first time in that talk you coined a term called the galilean challenge do you remember can you explain what that uh what the relevancy of that topic is why what was galileo talking about as the as this fundamental challenge that came from language and perhaps superseded the challenges that he had employing the physical the scientific method perhaps first of all one scientific method i'm sure in your physics department there isn't a course on scientific now yes there is no scientific method it's just being intelligent you know i've never once sat down and said i'm going to form a hypothesis i'm going to assemble an apparatus we do it in our lab classes but you're absolutely right yeah there is no and some believe there is no scientific method period not not only that in in practice do we not use it but at first method is making smart conjectures and seeing if they work by looking at the data in some scientific method in a nutshell but the galileo remember this is the beginning of the scientific revolution 17th century and there was a real revolution let me go back to neoscholastic physics they had an answer to everything so you know you're holding a glass of water with hot boiling water your hand over it you let it go the glass falls the steam rises we have an answer they're going to their natural place you pick a big lead bowl and a small lead bowl and you drop them the big one is going to go faster because that's our experience you perceive a triangle of the form of the triangle goes through the air and implants itself in your brain well the scientific revolution began when people decided to be puzzled about those things they said why should i believe any of this in fact as soon as you think about it some of them are wrong like the greater fall galileo disproved it by thought experiments never carried out any experiments but it was able to show you obviously it's false one of the things they looked at and the same with the rest that's when the scientific revolution began well one of the things they looked at was language they were puzzled by that and what galileo and others were puzzled by in fact regarded as kind of an amazing incomprehensible fact is that with a few symbols we somehow are able to construct infinitely many thoughts in our mind and even find a way to get others who have no access to our minds to comprehend what riff of the inner workings of our mind that's what that's a miracle you know yeah they're right it's a very hard problem you don't know how to solve but that's the galilean challenge how can that take place up to the present and now we have parts of it that we can understand other parts remain mysterious so um you speak uh in these talks on consciousness about sort of this internal system and external system or the you know the system of making something external can you explain what do you exactly mean by internal system is it is it it sounded slightly uh ill-defined in that it's it's very difficult to say well here's my internal system and a mechanistic reductionist point of view but what do you mean by the internal system and the interaction to make it very precise i mean we're just talking loosely but if we start with the simplest combinatorial operation as i said binary set formation we ask how it applies we take a look at some other conditions so for example there's good reasons to believe that the way the brain works it keeps the principles of computational efficiency you have some understanding of those you bring those in it tries to limit the use of resources so so for example one of the striking things about the brain is that it's extremely slow uh if you look at the visual system say the retina a single cell of the retina is picking a photon of light yes it's passing a huge amount of information into the system but the brain is much too slow to deal with it so it throws almost all of it out of some way of keeping the resources limited to try to work out these notions of resource limitation uh computational efficiency other things you pretty soon begin to get sharper ideas about how the internal system is working and you can make it quite precise then comes the question how is it coded in the brain that's the next question notice that's a very hard question for ethical reasons not for scientific reasons remember that the language system is unique to humans we can't study other organisms they don't have it right so the kinds of invasive experimentation that have been used to lead to understanding of the neurology the visual system can't be carried out now we can't carry out experiments with say children in isolation and see what would happen ethical reason so you have to in order to study something that's unique to humans almost all the modes of direct experimentation are excluded they're just not allowed to do it for ethical reasons yeah that was sort of related to the you know thought experiment of communicating with an alien that you would avoid presumably the ethical implications although i'm sure there were awful experiments done during the nazi regimes on living subjects and maybe not in the era where we could appreciate their impact on consciousness or whatever but yeah you're right that is that is a difficult there's no true uh way to to you know provide a null hypothesis with which to compare um is there is there in physical could be clear yeah you do neuro linguistics got to be smart about it experiment i mentioned at the beginning about uh the impossible and possible languages and their brain correlates that's neurolinguistics okay so you can figure out indirect ways to learn things but you can't do the experiments that immediately come to mind like sticking an electrode in broca's area and see what happens you just can't do that but but you can do it indirectly it's a little like cosmology you can't go back a couple billion years and say i'd like to see what's happening not yet and it's very much like that but you can learn things so going back to your question at the level of the computational system and how it works you can get fairly precise when you ask how is it coded in the brain somehow you're running into very hard problems which are limited because you can't do the experiments and come to mind you have to do indirect experiments so there it you know becomes harder but these are all within the bounds of scientific inquiry in science uh again turning back to feynman but but even back to for matt and and others uh there's a notion of what's called the principle of least action which is an expression of parsimony in nature that the shortest paths geodesic paths are taken in physical systems that minimize a certain quantity called the action which in turn is related to certain dynamical variables that characterize a phys system in physics is there an analog and that's one of by the way the most you know cherish sacred principles of all of physics in fact it halts for everything you know including the propagation of light and quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory even you know from the 1600s up until you know the modern day is there an analog in linguistics i mean you mentioned that we are forming thoughts we have meta thoughts uh we're throwing out a lot of data how does the mind know how to do that is there an analog to this principle of least action yeah computational efficiency principles of computational efficiency are analogs to the laws of least action and they show up very immediately in our i mean let's take a sentence like the boys expect to meet each other at the beach uh each other goes back to the boys that picks the closest thing suppose you say which girls do the boys expect to meet each other at the beach each other doesn't go back to the boys it goes back to something that's not there what's in your mind is which girls do the boys expect the girls to meet each other that's in your mind and each other goes back to the unheard the girls but why don't you pronounce the girls principle of least effort the printer wants to do as little as possible so it eliminates a lot of stuff it just does so minimal it can get away with it has to pronounce something where you don't know the question was even asked so it pronounces just the most prominent thing none of the others that leads to major problems in communication in fact for people who do automatic parsing one of the biggest problems is what are called filler gap problems you hear a word like which girls you gotta find the place where it's not there and that's it for this sentence it's easy when you get to more complicated sentences it can be a huge problem so because of computational efficiency the analog to the law of east action you're getting huge compute communication problems but the internal system is working with maximal efficiency it doesn't erase anything that would be an extra operation that's done for so and in fact this is related to the questions of into what we call talking to ourself internal language we're not talking to ourself in inner language when you think the sentence which girls did the boys expect to meet each other you thinking it the way it's pronounced you're not thinking what's going on in your mind that's inaccessible to you that can only be understood the way you can understand how your visual system works by external investigation so almost all of our thinking is inaccessible we're only getting a periphery of it what's around the printer level uh and what's really going on you have to study as if it's some physical system that you have no access to because there's no way it's introspecting to it if you could introspect linguistics would be really easy you just think what it is but you can't do it because it's all inaccessible now this bears on the consciousness issue because what we're conscious of is little bits and fragments that kind of come out from whatever's going on inside in fact if you really introspect and you think what's coming to your mind it's it's not sentences it's bits and pieces of this and that and the other thing you can make decisions very quickly microseconds that are complex decisions about a variety of different things like you walk into a room see some guy sitting over there who you wanted to say something to so you go over to him but you notice somebody else is sitting there who will be insulted if you say it so you decide not to and then you decide to say something else and so on but this happens instantaneously but bits and pieces of the conversation that you're having do reach consciousness so you'll get a fragment of this fragment of that and so on but reaches consciousness is a very superficial partial reflection of the internal computation that's going on that means if you want to seriously study consciousness you're going to have to learn about the internal processes that are putting forth the bits and pieces that pass through the filter and reach consciousness very small superficial amount i hear some language from a mammal in the background there or working from home yeah i don't know if that if there's a way to uh i don't want to muzzle the dog but if the dog can uh can keep it down while we're on the podcast that would be great um so i want to turn now uh from well consciousness in the state of uh something you said at the at the science of consciousness uh actually you said this the sec the next year in 2018 and i wonder you know if there was a change between 2017 and 2018 perhaps not perhaps i missed it but um you said the following the inner workings of the mind are inaccessible to consciousness that's a very profound statement what what do you mean exactly by that and and since i don't remember in 2017 you said in 2018 maybe there's a chance you'd no longer no longer maintain that statement but you said the inner workings of the mind are inaccessible to consciousness what does that mean i just gave an example the inner workings of your mind for the sentence that i gave yeah produce the sentence which girls the boys expected the girls to meet each other that's inaccessible we can find it indirectly by studying the way words like each other work they do work by picking out the nearest element that's again least effort but they're doing it on something that you can't be conscious can't be conscious of any of the operations that are taking place so the inner workings it's very much like the inner workings of your like you have a gut brain yeah it's called the enteric nervous system nervous system that's carrying out these huge operations for the keeping your body functioning you can't introspect into it um the only thing you know about it is i have a stomachache you know something's going wrong but and it's very much the same with the brain that's in our head we can see little bits and pieces at the surface but we can't figure out what we can interest we were totally unconscious of what's going on and there's no way to become conscious of it the same is true the meanings of the simplest words you know like take the first case that was studied in the history of science was heraclitus the pre-socratic he asked a very profound question now how can you cross the same river twice okay you think about it not a trivial question the second time you cross it it's totally different it's a different variety same river you start playing with this you realize that you could make radical changes in the river it would still be the same river you can make tiny changes like [Music] a phase change that switches it to the glassy state and then run cars on it it's not a river it's a highway almost undetectable change but it's not a river huge changes it will still be a river now every infant knows this and it's very complex when you look into it you can't introspect into them you have to do experiments to figure it out like these thoughts exotics elements uh and that's with every word in the language and of all the constructions in the language all the methods for constructing the thoughts that we're producing constantly totally beyond the level of consciousness so so it may sound strange but if you think about it for a minute it's kind of almost obvious so we spoke about uh you know the ethical implications of of of testing you know consciousness and impact and human cognition i want to turn to artificial intelligence now and ask you first of all are there applications uh that art or artificial intelligence uh could shed light or perhaps already has shed light on these problems of consciousness in your opinion artificial intelligence divided into two fields uh one of them which marvinski was interested in was trying to find out something about the nature of intelligence that's science it's indistinguishable from cognitive science it just happens to be using different devices so it's doing it by modeling with computers instead of modeling on paper but it's uh it's basically some cognitive science that's one part of artificial intelligence the other part is engineering trying to construct something that's useful like say a google translator it's done by brute force force no scientific interest whatsoever kind of low-level engineering machine learning most of what's not in deep learning is brute force yes you try to do massive computation of rapid computation of huge amounts of data and see if a pattern emerges okay it's okay like a google translator is useful i'm glad to have it i'm glad to have a bulldozer but it's not there's nothing to do with science now if you ask about the language side it wasn't possible to answer because the part of a.i the sort of minsky blood that's is essentially indistinguishable from cognitive science so the answer is automatic language is just part of it now the other side doesn't have anything to do with science so it basically doesn't tell you anything like if you have a word processor like one of mine you know there's a bit part of it which is a pain in the neck it constantly tries to predict the next word you're gonna say it's emotions because it gets no f-typing well that's an ai pedic learning program you know you study massive amounts of text with some super computer you do a lot of statistical work you can get a pretty good prediction of what the next word it's often going to be it's totally meaningless and it's like looking at billions of chemical experiments and getting to the point where you can predict that if you mix these two things it's going to turn blue okay don't tell anything about chemistry that's just nonsense right so that's one scientific the other part is just science and when we uh think about things well first of all when i want to get back to the predictive text one of my friends is a very popular podcaster named james altucher he says that you know one day he was doing that and he was frustrated by it as it sounds like you are uh but uh but then he realized actually this ai was helping him be a better natural human being intelligence in other words it was it was telling them things like suggesting how are you you know what's uh how is your day and thank you so much and and these are things that he wouldn't say why are you bothering me but it was actually um you know humiliating or moderating some of his more gruff personality traits and and i wonder yes it's a nuisance but uh but then you know there are there are you know artificial intelligence has a role in in some sense to do uh to make predictions uh based on experience and that experience can only come through you know the brute force approach at least for now uh but i wonder you know in when we speak about artificial general intelligence and and so forth um it was a famous turing test and and i wonder um you know nowadays you've probably seen there's these captchas you know there are these images where your computer asks you to prove that you're a human being it's sort of you know an inverse turing type like you have to prove you're a human being to a computer uh which is sort of the a little bit of an inversion of the classical turing test but uh does you know does language uh play a crucial role in the turing test like i can't imagine my two-year-old you know being able to tell the difference between a decent you know ai that one of my st you know undergraduates could program versus the most sophisticated deep mind that you know google might have currently uh so it seems to me that the ability to pass the turing test almost is dependent on the cognition and language abilities of the human operant at the terminal what do you feel about the turing test as a as this modality distinguished uh general artificial intelligences well let's begin by asking what turing thought about it so if you look back at his famous 1950 paper on machine thinking he says the question whether machines can think is too meaningless to deserve discussion okay that's what turing thought about it he thought that the imitation game as he called it could be a useful device for stimulating construct better construction of machines of software and so on i said it might in 50 years and just modify the way we think about thinking but it's a question where the machines can think is too meaningless to deserve discussion it's kind of like asking whether submarines can swim they want to call that swimming okay they can swim in fact language is different in some languages airplanes fly and other languages they glide you know that's uh these are just uninteresting conventions now you take the turing test itself and go back to the 17th century the origins of modern science they had something like the during test uh descartes asked the quest he was part of this galilean challenge was galileo and many others descartes asked how can a person carry out the normal creative use of language you know what to say in particular circumstances you're producing sentences constantly which are novel you never heard before nobody ever heard them before but others can understand them they're appropriate to situations but they're not caused by situations you could have said something else so it's not as they put it you're you're inclined to say certain things but not impelled this property of being able to and then some of his followers jacques courtemois another cartesian proposed test experimental tests said suppose there's another creature that looks like us we want to find out if he has a mind like ours so we run experiments not to ask him that would he say the kind of thing that's appropriate in particular circumstances that's the turing test but it was different in the 17th century there it was science for them remember it's a question of existence there's a mind which is a thing in the world there's a body which is a thing in the world we want to know whether another creature has the mind it's like asking does he have a liver you know it's asking a question of the physical sciences that's right for the cartesians for the galileans the analog of the turing test it's a straight scientific question for touring it's not a scientific question it's a way of stimulating your imagination or something like that so in a way the 17th century tests were much more serious uh but this you know going back to your you know your computer that tells you something yeah that's fine i mean if alexa helps you to think of something who cares but there's no science involved right it's like saying my electric stove works is that uh does that parlay with or you know dovetail with your well-known views on the elon musk's neuralink project where you've said that you know trying to move your arm uh you know with a neuro embedded chip like neurolink is perhaps feasible at some point but to find out what you're thinking uh there seems to be you claimed in in 2018 i believe that there's no way to do that because we don't understand how to proceed and i think that i don't think your views have changed much right right that we don't even know if we're looking at the right thing how thinking may not involve neural nets in fact there's pretty good reason to believe that it doesn't the neural nets for one thing or neural transmission is pretty slow as we were you know by the relevant corrector by the criteria of what we were talking about before how rapidly you think by that criterion is known back to helmholtz in fact the neural transmission is pretty slow furthermore neural nets don't have the right at the right architecture you have to what we need is something like touring architecture some something that has basically the control unit of a touring machine you know right dress you can't do that in the world that's they just don't have the right properties that's why stuart hammer off what you mentioned before is uh looking at things like microtubules uh things in the the internal structure of a neuron which has vastly more computing power roger prenrose is working on this main work on it was done by randy galliston very good neuroscientist who's done very interesting work arguing what i just said i'm just quoting him that the neural net systems are just the wrong place to look they don't have the kind of architecture which is involved in thinking we have to find something else it might turn out to be at the molecular level with the level of rna you know molecular level you're really getting massive possibilities of computation so maybe just duplicating a neural net will tell you nothing because you're not looking in the right place we don't know i mean the thing to do is do the science first then worry about the engineering so i wonder now if we can turn to the topic of of the university in academia and i always like to ask guests such as yourself who are uh public intellectuals plus academicians for many many decades uh i want to ask you uh what you see as the future of the university um and especially in this era of covid and and so forth uh and then after that a follow-up question will be if there was a chomsky university what would you have on offer there well i would treat it the wave old friend of mine a physicist who you know very well at mit treated vicky vice cup and his he was famous in his freshman introductory courses when a kid would ask him that what are we going to cover in the semester he would say it doesn't matter what we cover it matters what you discover that's what an educational system should be and i think you can extrapolate from that in every direction so the worst kind of education imaginable is what's called teaching to test what we do in the schools every one of us knows you've had a boring course where you bothered to learn the stuff and you aced the test and a week later you forgot what the course was about okay that's what we impose on children the worst possible kind of education the right kind is what vice cup was talking about so the right kind of education let's stay in a science course and there are very good programs there's one example take a kindergarten and give the kids each kid in the kindergarten is given a shell and on the show there are several things a bead you know a piece of grass a seed and a bunch of things and then the teacher poses a problem that which one of these is going to grow okay and then the kids have a scientific conference they try to figure out some way to decide which ones can get would grow a little supervision from the teacher you know sort of keep it in the right direction but finally they figure out you know one way to do it is put it in the earth and water it now they finally figured that and finally they've figured out how to do it and something grows then at the end the kid the teacher gives them each a microscope and splits the seed in half you can see what's inside it that's making it grow that's education okay teach it to test you could say here's the answers learn them repeat them in a test zero effect you know you don't personally you don't learn anything and you don't understand how to learn which is the most important thing i should say all of these topics were discussed in the 17th and 18th century and they used the model of uh pouring water into a vessel one kind of teaching the kind they said it's absolutely no good right you don't want to just pour water into a vessel that's useless uh the right kind was actually described by wilhelm von humboldt founder of the modern research university what it is is the teacher lays out a string along which the student follows in his or her own way with some structure and guidance but one of the best math courses i ever took in my life a graduate course in real variables another very good mathematician university of pennsylvania he would come into the class and clean the blackboard and write something down on the blackboard and say is that a and the rest of the class would be trying to figure out if that's a theorem based on our reading for you know so can you get a limit from which it would be proven maybe so can you figure out a way to do that and that's education and you can do it at every level from kindergarten humanities yeah i agree that as you said the you know the the analogy of pouring water into a vessel literally the word educate comes from latin educare which means to draw out as i remember which is kind of in concert with with exactly the way you're describing it my friend mario olivio who's an astrophysicist at johns hopkins and space telescope research institute he has a book called you know why what makes us curious and he claims you know epistemic curiosity is the key to education and in fact you know that instead of teaching your kid you know why uh the inverse square law of gravity he says no don't start with that start with dinosaurs you know ask them do you know how the dinosaurs died and every kid loves dinosaurs and they're going to want to know and especially tell them an asteroid you know is likely the reason for their demise and and then you're just increasing the level of of tension in the spring and it just wants to unwind uh so badly and release that that is the way to educate and yet we're stuck in this model i mean the modern university system is you know far better than i am and it goes back thousand years to bologna and and perhaps before in the 10 in the you know end of the beginning of the second millennium and i wonder you know that hasn't changed and and i wonder with things like ai and you're obviously not a super as as your colleague former colleague at mit max tag mark is as as perhaps as anglin about the benefits or the future potential of ai um and yet you know why should somebody take a class with brian keating in physics at uc san diego when he or she someday could take a class with galileo himself or marie curie or or whoever is there is there a needed change in the university system to break the sage on a stage you know scratching one rock of chalk on another blackboard rock is is this model due for a change or do you feel like the in-person learning model that we've had for a thousand years will persist well first of all i think in the best cases it does persist like the cases i mentioned the math class i took vice cops physics class air gordon case and many others i was at mit most of my life i'm now at the university of arizona and there's an interesting change it's very old-fashioned yes i was able to use black words and chalk no no it's not chalk it's some other gimmick but you could write things on a blackboard and you come to i've noticed from talking at other universities in here you got to use powerpoint yes okay i can sort of learn how to use it i find it much easier just to go to the blackboard and think you know maybe what i thought about the powerpoint isn't what i feel talking about and also interact so the student comes up with something you can write in the blackboard and let's talk about that it's uh i i think you know i'm not entranced by these educational advances i'm not sure young people seem to like them it's kind of key to the video culture that they live in even i even see students like it if the professor has a powerpoint and reads off the thing on the on the screen i don't understand that i like it the way my old math teacher did it but i i don't think the that's really the issue with the universities i mean you can do a good class anyway but it's the question whether like the person you just mentioned are you going to encourage curiosity or dull it i mean the children are naturally curious they're always asking why does it work this way what's the answer and so on now you can either stimulate that curiosity or kill it and unfortunately a lot of the educational system kills it yeah but it doesn't have to can stimulate it in all the ways we've been talking about yeah and that's if you're a country school house a little red schoolhouse just a blackboard and chalk and everything every grade together you can do it there you can live in a fancy university uh classroom with all kind of kind of extra bells and whistles that you can push uh here's a random question for you um have you ever meditated and i'll explain why in a second have you ever meditated say if you don't have time for it then you need to do three hours a day uh so the reason i ask is that one and i've tried this and it's become increasingly popular in many different realms from even the military to you know to um you know peak performers not just for deepak chopra who helped helped us meditate when we were at the science of consciousness together and part of the goal is to stop your inner monologue and and i wonder you know there are those that claim when you do such a thing you achieve enlightenment and i'm not such a huge fan of that but um but the mass industry of the meditation industry literally millions billions of dollars perhaps apps and books and seminars and gurus and mantras um i've tried to you know dial into what it really means and it seems like you're trying to stop the inner monologue you're trying to stop this incessant fire hose and it's almost as if the human being is is some are ashamed of it or it's negative in a way that you know saying we're much more comfortable talking about you know sex or you know things that are uh used to be taboo maybe but people don't go around saying every thought that they have and i wonder why is that why why why is the inner monologue sort of the last taboo that you know these these incessant thoughts that are bombarding every human brain why is that so taboo to speak about or is it maybe it's not i work on the inner mind all the time students of language that's what they're doing studying visual perception that's what you're doing uh anything in the cognitive sciences you're studying the inner mind if what you're talking about you know the bits the bits of trifold we're not aware of there are ones we're only aware of bits and fragments that come out every once in a while there's a machine there that spits out a little bit of this and that that's what we're aware of but it's not the inner line the inner mind you can only study from the outside as it's the same way you study the gut brain can't no introspection uh but uh sure we can study on the other hand why don't you go around talking constantly whatever's on your mind well there are people who do they're called children and if you listen to your three-year-old kid they're talking constantly anything that's on their mind they're saying you know they haven't learned and keep it quiet yet so it's okay with a two-year-old it would be a pretty awful world of 40 year old i keep my inner child and and permanent time out um so we're almost done here i appreciate your time so much i want to just finish up with a question from a friend of mine an intellectual as well mathematician eric weinstein um and it kind of relates to you know this perception of you as this controversial figure uh and and just recently there was a letter that you were a co-signatory of i believe the title of it is a letter on justice and open debate and you and jk rowling were the two you know kind of featured uh co-signatories although there were hundreds of people over 100 people and i i wonder what um and eric weinstein asks the following question will liberalism survive this diversity movement or the moment that you guys were sort of decrying in this letter um that you wrote the open letter on justice and debate first of all let me mention turn to the point that we were the doom engine that's a sign of the utter irrationality incurable irrationality of the intellectual culture anybody who thinks for one second can see that you don't evaluate a statement by the signers if you did there would never be a statement for a very simple logical reason i'm sure you get plenty of statements you're asked to sign you don't know who's going to sign them later so if you care about who's going to sign a letter you'd never decide so therefore there wouldn't be any statements at all so even to pay attention to the assignments reveals profound irrationality what matters is the content of the statement makes no difference who signs it for elementary reasons of elementary logic just what i just said yeah so i don't care who signed it you can't know who's going to sign it's impossible the center company the fact that this anodyne statement received the flood of reaction is very interesting it's a simple straightforward statement almost too elementary to sign it says what everybody ought to believe that doesn't mean it's not important to say um there are different tendencies in the university and you're all familiar with them which are limiting discussion we can say that's not a good thing period there shouldn't be one article in any newspaper referring to it okay the fact that there's the only interesting thing about the statement is the reactions why are there reactions to such an elementary comment and why do they focus on signers when if anybody thinks for a moment if they can figure out that if you could pay attention to signers there'd never be a statement on anything you know okay so i think we're looking at an interesting case of the radical irrationality of the intellectual culture it's about the only interesting thing to say about this so is there hope do you feel that the this irrationality is is uh going to is on the upswing so to speak from your perspective or is it is it likely to dissipate and and what role if any does linguistics or or have to say about it i'll mention why in a second i said that but do you find it's it's diminishing or do you feel for fear for the worst that it's going to get more and more ideologically entrenched that even these anodyne statements in your words cannot be countenanced well i think there's an interesting thing going on uh you go back to earlier years there was a very high degree of uniformity so for example i could give you examples from my own experience but anything that shifted a little bit from the ideological mainstream was just them get in now there's been a good thing that's happened is there's more concern for other issues that weren't talked about before uh women's rights rights of blacks you know uh human rights general a lot more a diversity now one of the effects of diversity is it can be overdone so you're getting a kind of a confluence and uh it's got good things it's got bad things that we should be rational enough to pick out and emphasize and develop good things and put to the side the bad things and the question is up to us can we do that do you feel that there is a role that perhaps linguistics might be uniquely capable of our language in general might be capable of uh uprising in in the sense that you know it's it's sort of a a trope or whatever that when you hear an accent from some play you know the south it's it's you know there's jeff foxworthy makes a bunch of jokes about this he's from the south he'll say you know the last thing you want is your brain surgeon to say yeah what you're gonna do is go down and cut open you know and they may be fully qualified and you know he's uh he's joking about that but there is you know in in some of that there's a stereotype that certain accents sound uneducated uh british english for example sounds sophisticated even if the person who's uttering the words might be uh a total ignoramus um why why does why do we have these reactions i mean why why is that encoded why do we encode a prejudice based on the sound not even you know it's a meta form of the language itself not even the structure of grammar it's much more than language uh if you go to a formal party dressed the way you are now it would be improper yeah not because it's wrong just because that's the convention okay so there are a uh hierarchies of power and authority which say you got to behave like me so you don't talk with a southern cracker accent in a you know in a formal occasion it's not it's we shouldn't accept it's it's not a problem of language it's a problem of the authority structures they shouldn't have that authority you say it's only your business how i talk you know i talk the way i talk by and that's the authority structure of this issue so let's go after that not the superficial symptom like what clothes you wear or you know did you comb your hair the right way you know that you remember to shave this morning or whatever that says of no interest what are you saying that's what matters kind of like this statement what's in it not who decided to sign it uh that's uh we have to just overcome these prejudices now they're like a lot of others you know a lot of them are quite pernicious a lot of them we have overcome things you could that were considered quite normal not many years ago are considered totally unacceptable now uh plenty of them and that's good but we can't overdo it you can't get to the point where nothing can be said without the tiptoeing on eggshells you know you've got to find the right boundary between those and that holds not only for language but for all kinds of behavior yeah i don't think linguistics really has anything to say other than every language is the same as every other language which okay that's true yeah like if all the power were in the hands of those southern crackers we have to talk like that uh so uh numb there's two more questions if you'll beg my uh indulgence here uh the first question that i like to ask all my guests on the into the impossible podcast relates to sir arthur c clarke's book 2001 a space odyssey and made into a film by stanley kubrick you'll probably remember in the film there were these monoliths there were these uh very imposing uh objects that were found on the african savannah by some primates and then later found on the the moon's surface and they're allegedly left in the book series they're left as a as sort of a a way to communicate messages to humanity placed by an ancient civilization that was obviously far advanced of where we are now but meant to be discovered at a certain time when humans were capable say of going to the moon for example and so my question for you the first of these two questions relates to a time capsule if you were able to make a time capsule that was going to last a billion years like this monolith uh what would you put on it or in it or what what synoptic view would you like to engrave and code and crypt into such an object to last for a billion years well actually that problem is very real since it's very likely that humans will extinguish themselves within a couple of generations the problem is very much alive either nuclear war or environmental catastrophe if we continue on our present course we're not going to survive so the question is not abstract uh the uh what we should put first the first thing we should do is try to see if we can avert those outcomes it's still time to do it that's the major question in human history okay i suppose we can't what you put in them is the greatest works of science of art of literature any aspect of human achievement see that's what you people a billion years now from now and should be striving for on some planet maybe not this one that's right and the last question gnome uh involves going backwards in time not forwards in time and as i mentioned the name of this podcast is called the into the impossible podcast in uh allusion to sir arthur c clarke's third law so-called third law which states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible and accordingly i would like to know in your life what aspect of your life perhaps you know as a 20 year old a 30 year old as a young academic what perplexed you seemed impossible uh and then uh makes sense to you now in with the retrospective time uh so what sorts of in uh advice would you give to your former self perhaps as a 20 or 30 year old let me give the advice that i in fact gave to myself at the time the field went in didn't exist in fact the first book i published submitted mit press and got a very sensible reviewer reaction saying this field doesn't exist this can't publish it was right you know but the advice i didn't bother giving advice i just said i don't care i'm gonna do what looks interesting and that's the right advice if it doesn't work too bad it does work okay uh what looked impossible at the time was what we were talking about at the time it looked as if languages just differed totally from one another each one had to be looked at it alone in its own way when you think about it that can't be true plus if it were true nobody could ever learn language since what they know is way beyond any evidence so there's a real paradox and it didn't seem to be any way to solve it in fact i think by now we're just about getting to the point where maybe we can find an answer to it all right well i hope to have you back on the podcast when that happy day comes uh but for now gnome i want to thank you for your time i want to wish you uh a happy and maybe cool summer in arizona i don't know if that's that's that's impossible perhaps uh to envision but we got below 100. very good gnome thank you so much for joining us on the into the impossible podcast [Music] any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic if you enjoyed this episode of into the impossible please subscribe comment share rate and review for a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book send a screenshot of your review to info imagine.ucsd.edu we appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes for more information go to imagination.ucsd.edu find us on twitter at imagineucsd watch us on youtube listen on itunes into the impossible is a production of the arthur c clarke center for human imagination in the division of physical sciences at the university of california san diego eric very director brian keating co-director patrick coleman associate director produced by stuart valco

Channel: Dr Brian Keating

Views: 78,449

Rating: 4.8431373 out of 5

Keywords: linguistics, noam chomsky, elon musk, neuralink, jk rowling, cancel culture, mit, alan turing, turing test, harpers magazine, grammar, generative grammar, cognitive science, Dr Brian Keating, noam chomsky manufacturing consent, noam chomsky 2020, noam chomsky jordan peterson, imitation game, rene descartes, rene descartes documentary, artificial intelligence, noam chomsky elon musk, neuralink presentation, neuralink elon musk, marvin minsky, harpers letter, noam chomsky trump

Id: Iaz6JIxDh6Y

Length: 97min 36sec (5856 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020