Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes | Lex Fridman Podcast #87

the following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins an evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene the blind watchmaker The God Delusion the magic of reality and the greatest show of Earth and his latest Isle growing God he is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene which in the context of a gene-centred view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea he's outspoken bold and often fearless in the defense of science and reason and in this way is one of the most influential thinkers of our time this conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic for everyone feeling the medical psychological and financial burden of this crisis I'm sending wealth your way stay strong we're in this together we'll beat this thing this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube review it 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autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence systems in general so again if you get cash app from the App Store Google Play and use the collects podcast you get ten dollars in cash up will also donate ten dollars the first an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world and now here's my conversation with Richard Dawkins do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe well if we accept that intelligent life here and reassess the number of planets in the universe is gigantic I mean 10 to 22 stars has been estimated it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere but also intelligent life if you deny that then you're committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable I mean ludicrously off-the-charts improbable and I don't think it's that improbable certainly the origin of life itself they're really two steps the origin of life which is probably fairly improbable and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life which is also fairly a problem so the juxtaposition of those two you could say is pretty improbable but not 10 to the 22 in problem it's an interesting question maybe you're coming on to it how we would recognize intelligence from outer space if we if we encountered it the most likely way we would come across them would be by radio it's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us but um it's not it's not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals and then we would have to have some means of deciding as it was intelligent people have people involved in the SETI program discuss how they would do it and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to and always an obvious way for them to broadcast to say we are intelligent we are here I suspect it probably would be obvious actually that's interesting prime number so the mathematical patterns it's an open question whether mathematics is the same for us and as it would be for aliens I suppose we could assume that ultimately if we were governed by the same laws of physics and we should be governed by the same laws of mathematics I think so I suspect that they will have Pythagoras theorem etc and I don't think that mathematics will be that different do you think evolution would also be a force on the alien planets I stuck my neck out and said that if we do if ever that we do discover life elsewhere it will be Darwinian life in the sense that it will but it will work by some kind of natural selection the non-random survival of non of Rann the regenerated codes it doesn't mean it that the genera have to have some kind of genetics but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics probably wouldn't be actually but it would I think it would have to be Darwinian yes there's some kind of selection process yes in the general sense it will be Darwinian so let me ask kind of artificial intelligence engineering questions so you've been an outspoken critic of I guess what could be called intelligent design which is an attempt to describe the creation of a human mind a body by some religious folks that really just folks used to describe so broadly speaking evolution is as far as I know again you can correct me is the only scientific theory we have for the development of intelligent life like there's no alternative theory as far as as far as I understand none has ever been suggested and I suspect it never will be well of course one of the somebody says that a hundred years later I know but um that I mean not what he would look sorry yes they would probably look very similar but it'd be it's almost like Einstein's general relativity versus Newtonian physics it'll be maybe an alteration of the theory or something like that but it won't be fundamentally different but okay it so so now for the past 70 years even before the a a committee has been trying to engineer intelligence in a sense to do what intelligent design says the you know was done here on earth what's your intuition do you think it's possible to build intelligence to build computers that are intelligent or do we need to do something like the evolutionary process like there's there's no shortcuts here that's an interesting question i I'm committed to the belief that is ultimately possible because I think there's nothing normal in our brains I think how our brains work by by the laws of physics and so it must in principle it be possible to replicate that in practice though it might be very difficult and as you suggest it might it may be the only way to do it is by something like an evolutionary process I'd be surprised I suspect that it will come but it's certainly been slower incoming than some of the early pioneers I thought I thought it would be yeah but in your sense is the evolutionary process efficient so you can see it as exceptionally wasteful in one perspective but at the same time maybe that is the only path it's a paradox isn't it I mean on the one side it is deplorable it wasteful yeah it's fundamentally based on waste on the other hand it does produce magnificent results when the the the design of a soaring bird an albatross has David and a vulture an eagle is superb an engineer would be proud to have done it on the other hand an engineer would not be proud to have done some of the other things that evolution has served up some of the sort of botched jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical origins but they don't look well designed your examples well bad design my favorite example is there a current laryngeal nerve I've used this many times this is a nerve it's one of the cranial nerves it goes from the brain and the end organ is that it supplies is the Voicebox theme the larynx but it doesn't go straight to the layers it goes right in done to the chest and then loops around an artery in the chest and then come straight back up again to the larynx and I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck which happened to have died in a zoo and we watched the we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve going whizzing straight past the larynx within an inch of the larynx down into the chest and then back up again which is a detour of many feet very very inefficient the reason is historical the ancestors are fish ancestors the ancestors of all mammals and fish the most direct pathway of that of the equivalent of that nerve there wasn't the larynx in those days but it did innovated part of the gills the most direct pathway was behind that artery and then when the mammal when the tetrapods were in the land vertebra started ever evolving and then the next started to stretch the marginal cost of changing the embryo logical design to jump that nerve over the artery was too great a rather was was each step of the way was of was a very small cost but the marginal but the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large as the neck lengthened it was a negligible change to just increase the length the length of the detour tiny bit a tiny bit a tiny bit each millimeter time didn't make any difference and so but finally when you get towards araf it's a huge detour and no doubt is very inefficient now that's bad design any engineer would reject that piece of jade design is ridiculous and there are quite a number of examples as you'd expect it's not surprising that we find examples of that sort in a way what's surprising is there aren't more of them in a way what's surprising is that the design of living things is so good so natural selection manages to achieve excellent results partly by tinkering partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes and in as it were making the best of a bad job that's an interesting I mean it's it is surprising and beautiful and it's a it's a mystery from an engineering perspective that so many things are well designed I suppose the thing we're forgetting is how many generations have to die oh yeah for that's the inefficiency of it yes that's the horrible wastefulness of it so yeah we we marvel at the final product but yeah the process is painful he almost describes human beings as potentially the well he calls the biological bootloader for artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence is used as the term is kind of like super intelligence do you see super human level intelligence that's potentially the next step in the evolutionary process yes I think that if superhuman intelligence is to be found it will be artificial I don't have any hope that we ourselves our brains will go on in go on getting larger in ordinary biological evolution I think that's probably coming to an end it is the dominant trend or one of the dominant trends in our fossil history for the last two or three million years raised eyes yes so it's been it's been swelling rather dramatically over the last two or three million years that is unlikely to continue that the only way that that's that happens is because natural selection favors those individuals with the biggest brains and that's not happening anymore right there so in general in humans the the selection pressures are not I mean are they active in any form well in order for them to be active it would be necessary that the most intelligent intelligence not that intelligence is simply correlation with brain size but let's let's talk about intelligence in order for that to evolve it's necessary that the most intelligent beings have the most individuals have the most children and so intelligence may buy you money it may buy you worldly success it may buy you a nice house and a nice car and things like that if you successful career it may buy you the admiration of your fellow people but it doesn't increase the number of offspring that you have it doesn't increase your genetic legacy to the next generation well on the other hand artificial intelligence I mean computers and technology generally is evolving by a non genetic means by leaps and bounds of course and so what do you think I don't know if you're familiar there's a company called neural link but there's a general effort of brain computer interfaces which is to try to build a connection between the computer and the brains with their scent signals both directions and the long-term dream there is to do exactly that which is expand I guess expand the size of the brain expand the capabilities of the brain do you do you see this is interesting and do you see this is the promising possible technology or is the interface you see in the computer in the brain like the brain is this wet messy thing that's just impossible to interface with well of course it's interesting whether it's promising I'm really not qualified to say what I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small as it is compared to a computer Andy the individual components being as slow as they are compared to our electronic components it is astonishing or it can do I mean imagine building a computer that that fits into the size of a human skull and with the equivalent of transistors or integrated circuits which work as slowly as neurons do it something mysterious about that something something must be going on that we don't understand so I have I just talked to Roger Penrose I'm not sure he's familiar with this work and he also describes this kind of mystery in in the mind in the brain that is receives a materialist so there's not there's no sort of mystical thing going on but there's so much about the material of the brain that we don't understand at the that might be quantum mechanical nature so on so they're the ideas about consciousness do you have any have you ever thought about do you ever think about ideas of consciousness or a little bit more about the mystery of intelligence and consciousness that seems to pop up just like you're saying from our brain I agree with Roger Penrose that there's a mystery there I I even he's one of the world's greatest physicists III can't possibly argue with his but nobody knows anything about consciousness and in fact you know if we talk about religion and so on some of the mystery of consciousness is so awe-inspiring and we know so little about it that the leap to sort of religious or mystical explanations is too easy to make i I think that it's just an act of cowardice to lead to religious explanations and what it doesn't do that of course but I I accept that there may be something we don't understand about it so correct me if I'm wrong but in your book Selfish Gene the the gene-centred view of evolution Allah allows us to think of the physical organisms as just the medium through which the software of our genetics and the ideas sort of propagate so maybe can we start just with a little basics what in this context as the word meme mean it would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the transmission of culture and the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense and it's only a useful word if there's something Darwinian going on obviously culture is transmitted but is there anything Darwinian going on and if there is that means there has to be something like a gene which it which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population so it can replicate it can replicate well it clearly does replicate there's no question about that the question is does it replicate in a sort of differential way in a Darwinian fashion could you say that certain ideas propagate because they're successful in the meme pool and it's not a trivial sense you can would you wish to say though that in the same way as a animal body is modified adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes is it also machined for propagating memes could you actually say that something about the way a human is is is modified adapted for the function of beam propagation there are such a fascinating possibility if that's true if the that it's not just about the genes which seems somehow more come from comprehensible so that these things of biology the the the the idea that culture or maybe ideas you can really broadly define it yes operations of these mechanism II it does does evolve by pneumatic means I mean things like hairstyles styles of makeup circumcision these things are actual changes in the body form yes which are non genetic and which get passed on from generation to generation or sideways like a virus um in in a quasi genetic way but the moment you start drifting away from the physical a big interesting is a space of ideas ideologies political system of course yes so what's what in your what's your sense is our memes are metaphor more or they really is there something fundamental almost physical presence of memes well I think they're a bit more than a metaphor and and I think that um and I mentioned that physical bodily characteristics which are a bit trivial in a way but when things like the propagation of religious ideas both longitudinally down generations and transversely as in a sort of Epidemiology of ideas when of charismatic preacher converts people that that's that resembles viral transmission whereas the the longitudinal transmission from grandparent to parent a child etc is is more like conventional genetic transmission this is such a beautiful expression especially in the modern day idea do you think about this implication social networks where the propagation of ideas the viral propagation of ideas enhancing the new use of the word meme the describe the the the Internet of course provides extremely rapid method of travel ambition and before when I first coined the word the internet didn't exist and so I was thinking that in terms of books newspapers broader radio television and that kind of thing now an idea can just leap around the world in in all directions instantly and so the Internet provides a step change in the facility of propagation of memes how does that make you feel isn't it fascinating that sort of ideas it's like you haven't go up against islands or something is the 70s and the internet allowed all these species is just like global eyes and and in a matter of seconds you could spread a message to millions of people and these ideas these memes can breed can evolve can mutate and there's a selection and there's like different I guess groups that of all like there's a dynamics it's fascinating here do you think yes basically do you think your work in this direction while fundamentally was focused on life on Earth do you think it should continue like to be well yeah I do think it would probably be a good idea to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing we could mention you think of the transmission of ideas from in evolutionary context just being limited to I mean in our ancestors people living in villages living in small bands where everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village and they might hop to a neighboring village occasionally and maybe able to a neighboring continent eventually and that was a slow process nowadays villages are international I mean you have people it's been called echo chambers where people are in a sort of Internet village where the other members of the village may be geographically distributed all over the world whether they just happen to be interested in the same things use the same terminology the same jargon have the same enthusiasm so people like the Flat Earth Society they don't all live in one place they find each other and they talk the same language to each other they talk the same nonsense to each other and they but so this is a kind of distributed version of the primitive idea of of people living in in villages and propagating their ideas in in a local way is there is there a Darwinist parallel parallel here so is their evolutionary purpose of villages or is that just the I wouldn't use the word like evolutionary purpose in that play at that case but vient villages or religious will be something that just emerged that's the way people happen to live and in it just the same kind of way the Flat Earth Society societies of ideas emerge in the same kind of way in this digital space yes yes is there something interesting to say about the I guess from a perspective of Darwin could we fully interpret the dynamics of social interaction and these social networks or is there or some much more complicated thing need to be developed like what's your sense well a Darwinian selection idea would involve investigating which ideas spread in which which don't so in some ideas don't have the ability to spread in the flat earth flatter earth ism is is there are a few people believe in it but it's not going to spread because it's obvious nonsense but other ideas even if they are wrong can spread because they are attractive in some sense so the the spreading in the selection and in the Darwinian context is it just has to be attractive in some sense like we don't have to define like it doesn't have to be attractive in the way that animals attract each other it could be attractive and some other one yes it's it's all that matters is all it's needed easily to spread and it doesn't have to be true to spread increases one criterion which might help an idea to spread but there are other criteria which might help it to spread as you say attraction in animals is not necessarily available for survival the celebrated of the famous Peacocks tail doesn't help the peacock to survive it helps it to pass on its genes similarly an idea which is actually rubbish but which people don't know is robbed we shouldn't think is very attractive will spread in the same way as a peacocks gene spread it's a small sidestep I remember reading somewhere I think recently that in some species of birds sort of the idea that beauty may have its own purpose and the idea that some some birds I'm being in eloquent here but there is some aspects of their feathers and so on that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever there's somebody making an argument that there are some things about beauty that animals do that may be its own purpose that does that ring a bell for you it sound ridiculous he's rather distorted Bell okay Darwin when he coined the phrase sexual selection yes didn't feel the need to suggest that what was attractive to females usually as males attracting females the what females found attractive had to be useful he said it didn't have to be useful it was enough that females found it attractive and so it could be completely useless probably was completely useless in the conventional sense but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on don't augment in column genes but essentially reproducing others starting with Wallace the co-discoverer of natural selection didn't like that idea and they wanted sexually selected characteristics like peacock tails to be in some sense useful it's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock say was being useful but in the in the in the sense of survival but others have run with that idea and have brought it up to date and so there's a kind of there are two schools of thought on sexual selection which are still active and about equally supported now those who follow Darwin in thinking that is just enough to say it's attractive and those who follow Wallace and say that it has to be in some sense useful do you fall into one category or the other no I mean you're into minded I think they both could be correct in different cases well I mean they've both been made sophisticated in a mathematical sense more so than when Darwin and Wallace first started talking about it I'm Russian I read a romanticized thing so I prefer the former yes with it or the beauty in itself as a powerful so the attraction is a powerful force in evolution on religion do you think there will ever be a time in our future where almost nobody believes in God or God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society yes I do I think it may happen I'll for very long time it may take a long time for that to happen so do you think ultimately for everybody on earth religion the other forms of doctrines ideas could do better job than what religion does yes I mean following in truth at least what truth is a funny funny word and reason to theirs yeah it's a it's a difficult idea now with truth on the Internet right and fake news and so on I suppose when you say reason you mean the very basic sort of inarguable conclusions of science versus which political system is better yeah yes yes I mean truth about the real world which is ascertainable by not just by the more rigorous methods of science but by just ordinary sensory observation so do you think there will ever be a time when we move past it like I guess another way to ask it are we hopelessly fundamentally tied to religion in the way our society functions well clearly all individuals are not hopelessly tied to it because many individuals don't believe you could mean something like society needs religion in order to function properly or something like that and some people have suggested that some what's your intuition on there well I've read books on it and they're persuasive I don't think they're that persuasive though I mean I've some people suggested that society needs a sort of figurehead which can be a non-existent figurehead in order to function properly I know there's something rather patronizing about the idea that well you and I are intelligent enough not to believe in God but the plebs needed sort of thing and I think that's patronizing and I'd like to think that that that was not the right way to proceed but at the individual level do you think there's some value of spirituality sort of if I think as a scientist the amount of things we actually know about our universe is a tiny tiny tiny percentage of what we could possibly know so just from everything even the certainty we have about the laws of physics it seems to be that there's yet a huge amount to discover and therefore we're sitting where 99.999% of things is just still shrouded in mystery do you think there's a role in a kind of spiritual view of that sort of a humbled spiritual I think it's right to be humble I think it's right to admit that there's a lot we don't know a lot that we don't understand a lot but we still need to work on we're working on it what I don't think is that it helps to invoke supernatural explanations what we found if our current scientific explanations aren't adequate to do the job then we need better ones we need to work more and of course the history of science shows just that that as science goes on problems get solved one after another and the science advances as science gets better but to invoke an non-scientific non-physical explanation is simply to lie down in a cowardly way and say we can't solve it so again to invoke magic don't let's do that let's say we need better science we need more science it may be that the science will never do it it may be that we will never actually understand everything and that's okay but let's keep working on it a challenging question there is do you think science can lead us astray in terms of the humbleness so there's some aspect of science maybe it's the aspect of scientists in that science but of sort of a mix of ego and confidence that can lead us astray in terms of discovering them you know some of the big open questions about yes about the universe I think that's right I mean there are there are arrogant people in any walk of life and scientists an exception to that and so there are arrogant scientists who think we've sold everything of course we haven't so humility is a proper stance for a scientist and when it's a proper working stance because it encourages further work but in a way to resort to a supernatural explanation is a kind of arrogance because it's saying well we don't understand it scientifically therefore the non-scientific religious supernatural explanation must be the right one that's arrogant what is what is humble is to say we don't know and we need to work further on it so maybe if I could psychoanalyze you for a second you have at times been just slightly frustrated with people who have supernet you know have a supernatural has that changed over the years have you become like how do people that kind of have to seek supernatural explanations how do you see those people as human beings as it's like do you see them as dishonest do you see them as sort of ignorant do you see them as I don't know is it like well I mean how do you think of certainly not not not dishonest and I mean obviously many of them are very nice people so I don't I don't sort of despise them in that sense I think it's often a misunderstanding that that people will jump from the admission that we don't understand something they will jump straight to what they think of as an alternative explanation which is the supernatural one which is not an alternative it's a known explanation instead of jumping to the conclusion that science needs more work that we need to actually get do some better better science so I I don't have I mean personal antipathy towards such people I just think they're they're misguided so what about this really interesting space that I have trouble with so religion ever but a grasp on but there's a large communities like you said flat earth a community that I've recently because I've made a few jokes about it I saw that there's I've noticed that there's people that to take it quite seriously so there's this bigger world of conspiracy theorists which is the kind of I mean there's elements of it there are religious as well but I think they're also scientific so the the basic credo of a conspiracy theorist is to question everything which is also the cradle of a good scientist I would say so what do you make of this I mean I think it's probably too easy to say that by labeling something conspiracy you therefore dismiss it I mean occasionally conspiracies are right and so we shouldn't dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand we should examine them on their own merits Flat Earth is amiss obvious nonsense we don't have to examine that much further but I mean there may be other conspiracy theories which are actually right so I've go a grew up in the Soviet Union as I you know the space race was very influential for me and both sides of the coin you know there's a conspiracy theory that we never went to the moon right and it's it's like I can understand it and it's very difficult to rigorously scientifically show one way or the other it's just you have to use some of the human intuition about who would have to lie who would have to work together and it's clear that very unlikely good behind that is my general intuition that most people in this world are good you know in order to really put together some conspiracy theories there has to be a large number of people working together and essentially being dishonest yes which is improbable it the sheer number who would have to be in on this conspiracy and the sheer detail the attention to detail they'd have had to have had and so on I'd also can worry about the motive and why would anyone want to suggest that it but it didn't happen what's the what's the why is it so hard to believe I mean the the physics of it the mathematics of it the the idea of computing orbits and trajectories and things it all works mathematically well I like wouldn't you believe it it's a psychology question because there's something really Pleasant about you know pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when everybody like you know thinking outside the box and coming up with the chewy answer where everybody else is deluded there's something yeah I mean I have that for science right you want to prove the entire scientific community wrong that's the whole now that that's that's right and of course historically loan geniuses have come out right sometimes yes but often people with who think they're alone genius and from much more often turn out not to so you have to judge each case on its merits then the mere fact that you're a maverick the mere fact that you you you're going against the current tide doesn't make you right you've got a FRU show you're right by looking at the evidence so because you focus so much on religion and disassembled a lot of ideas there and I just I was wondering if you have ideas about conspiracy theory groups because there's such a prevalent even reaching into presidential politics and so on it seems like it's a very large communities that believe different kinds of conspiracy theories is there some connection there to your thinking on religion and here is it's a matter it's an obviously difficult thing IIIi don't understand why people believe things that are clearly nonsense like well Flat Earth and also the conspiracy about not landing on the moon or that the that the United States engineer 9/11 that that kind of thing so it's not clearly nonsense it's extremely unlikely though a it's extremely unlikely the religion is a bit different because it's passed down from generation to generation and so many of the people who are religious got it from their parents who got it from their parents got it from their parents and childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force but these things like the 9/11 conspiracy theory the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory the man on the moon conspiracy theory these are not childhood indoctrination these are presumably dreamed up by somebody who then tells somebody else who then wants to believe it and I don't know why people so eager to fall in line with some just some person that they happen to read or meet who spin some yarn I can kind of understand why they believe what their parents and teachers told them when they were very tiny and not capable of critical thinking for themselves so I sort of get why the great religions of the world like Catholicism and Islam go on for as persisting is because of childhood indoctrination but that's not true of Flat Earth ISM and sure enough flat earth ISM is a very minority cult way larger than I ever realized well yes I know but so that's a really clean idea you've articulate in your new book and and and I'll groan God and then God Delusion is the early indoctrination that's really interesting you can get away with a lot of out there ideas in terms of religious texts if the age which you convey those ideas at first is a young age so indoctrination is sort of an essential element of propagation of religion so let me ask on the morality side in the books that I mentioned God Delusion I'll go on God you describe the human beings don't need religion to be moral so from an engineering perspective we want to engineer morality into AI systems so in general where do you think morals come from in humans a very complicated and interesting question it's clear to me that the moral standards the moral values of our civilization changes as the decades go by certainly as the centuries go by even as the decades go by and we in the 21st century are quite clearly labeled 21st century people in terms of our moral values we there's a spread I mean some of us are a little bit more ruthless somewhat more conservative some of us more more liberal and so on but we all subscribe to pretty much the same views when you compare with say 18th century 17th century people even 19th century 20th century people so we're much less racist or a much less sexist and so on than we used to be some some people are still racist in some are still sexist but the the spread has shifted that the Gaussian distribution has moved and moves steadily as the centuries go by and that is the most powerful influence I can see on our moral values and that doesn't have anything to do with religion I mean the religion of the these are the morals of the Old Testament Bronze Age models morals they're deplorable and they are to be understood in terms of the people in in the desert who made them up at the time and so human sacrifice an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth petty revenge killing people for breaking the Sabbath all that kind of thing inconceivable No so at some point religious texts may have in part reflected that Gaussian distribution at that time I did I'm sure they always reflect that yes and then now but the the sort of almost like the meme as you describe it of ideas most much faster than religious annual is yes so basing your morals on on religious texts which were written millennia ago um it is not a great way to proceed I think that's pretty clear so not only should we not get our morals from such text but we don't we quite clearly don't um if we did then we would be discriminating against women and we'd be we'd be racist we'd be killing homosexuals and so on so so we don't and we shouldn't now of course it's possible to buy the to use the 21st century standards of morality and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry-pick particular verses which conform to our modern morality and you'll find that Jesus has a pretty nice thing which is great but you're using your 21st century morality to decide which verses to pick which verses to reject and so why not cut out the middleman of the Bible and go straight to the 21st century morality which is where that comes from is a much more complicated question why is it that morality moral values change as the centuries go by they undoubtedly do and is a very interesting question to ask why it's another example of cultural evolution just as technology progresses so moral values progress for probably very different reasons but it's a it's interesting if the direction in which that progress is happening has some evolutionary value or if it's merely a drift that can go into any direction no choice any direction and I'm not sure evolutionarily valuable what it is is progressive in the sense that each step is a step in the same direction as the previous step so it becomes more gentle more decent as by modern standards more liberal less violent see but more decent I think you're using terms and interpreting everything in the context of the 21st century yeah because Genghis Khan will probably say that this is not more decent because we're now you know there's a lot of weak members of society we're not murdering yes I was careful to say bye-bye the stands the 21st century by up by our standards if we with hindsight look back at history what we see is a trend in the direction towards us towards our present right a present value for us we see progress but it's it's an open question whether that won't you know I don't see necessarily why we can never return to Genghis Khan test we could I suspect we weren't but it but if you look at the history of moral values over the centuries it is in a progressive I use the word progressive not in a value judgment sense in the sense of of a transitive sense each step is the same in the same direction of the previous step so things like we don't derive entertainment for torturing cats we don't drive entertainment from from like the Romans did in the Coliseum from from that state rather or rather we suppress the desire to get I mean to have play it's probably in us somewhere so there's a bunch of parts of our brain one that probably you know limbic system that wants certain pleasures and that's this I didn't I mean I I wouldn't have said that but your Liberty to think that like well there's a there's a den Carlin of hardcore history there's a really nice explanation of how we've enjoyed watching the torture of people the fighting of people just the torture the suffering of people throughout history as entertainment until quite recently and now everything we do with sports or kind of channeling that feeling into something else so I mean there's some dark aspects of human nature there are underneath everything and I do hope this like higher level software we've built will keep us at bay yes I'm also Jewish and have history with the Soviet Union in the Holocaust and I clearly remember that some of the darker aspects of human nature creeped out there they do that there have been they have been steps back was 200 admittedly and and the Holocaust is obvious one but if you take a broad view of history it's it's in the same direction so Pamela McCord ik in machines who think has written that AI began with the ancient wish to forge the gods do you see it's it's a poetic description I suppose but DC connection between our civilizations historic desire to create gods to create religions and our modern desire to create technology in intelligent technology I suppose there's a link between an ancient desire explain away mystery and and science but what elegance artificial intelligence creating gods creating new gods and I forget I read somewhere somewhat facetious some paper which said that we have a new goddess called Google and and we pray to it and we worship it and we ask its advice like an Oracle and so on that's fun and we you don't see that you see that as a fun statement of a seizure statement you don't see that as a kind of truth of us creating things that are more powerful than ourselves and naturally it has a kind of poetic resonance to it which I get but I wouldn't but now I wouldn't have bothered to make the point myself put it that way all right so you don't think AI will become our new got a new religion and you gods a Google well yes I mean like I can see that the future of intelligent machines or indeed intelligent aliens from outer space might yield beings that we would regard as gods in the sense that they are so superior to ask that we might as well worship them that's highly possible I think but I see a very fundamental distinction between a God who is simply defined as something very very powerful and intelligent on the one hand and a God who doesn't need explaining by a progressive step-by-step process let's like evolution or like or like engineering design so the difference of suppose we did meet an alien from outer space who was mm-hmm marvelously magnificently more intelligent than us and we would sort of worship it and for that reason nevertheless it would not be a god in the very important sense that it did not just happen by to be to be there like God is supposed to it must have come about by a gradual step-by-step incremental progressive process presumably like Darwinian evolution is that there's all the difference in the world between those two intelligence design comes into the universe late as a product of a progressive evolutionary process or a progressive engineering design process so most of the work is done through this slow-moving exactly exactly yeah yeah it's but there's still this desire to get answers to the why question that if we're if the world is a simulation if we're living in a simulation that there's a programmer like creature that we can ask questions over then let's put let's pursue the idea that we're living in a simulation which is not not totally ridiculous by the way um there we go then you still need to explain the programmer the programmer had to come into existence by some the even if we're innocent in a simulation the the programmer must have evolved or if if he's in a sort of more she or she she she had a meta simulation then the the meta meta programmer must have evolved by a gradual process you can't escape that fundamentally you've got to come back to a gradual incremental process of explanation to start with there's no shortcuts in this world but maybe to linger on that point about the simulation do you think it's an interesting basically talked to board the the heck out of everybody asking this question but whether you live in a simulation do you think first do you think we live in a simulation second do you think it's an interesting thought experiment it's certainly an interesting thought experiment i first met it in a science fiction novel by daniel gal I called counterfeit world in which it's all about I mean III our heroes are running a gigantic computer which which simulates the world and and something goes wrong and so one of them has to go down into the simulated world in order to fix it and then the the the Dynamo of the thing the climate so novel is that they discover themselves in another simulation at a high level so I was intrigued by this and I love others of Daniel gallows science-fiction novels then it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrom boss from talking to in an hour okay and he goes further not just treated as a science fiction speculation he actually thinks it's positively likely yeah I mean it's very likely actually well he's he makes like a probabilistic argument which you can use to come up with very interesting conclusions about the nature of this universe I mean he think he thinks that that that we are in a simulation done by it so to speak are descendants of a future that the products but it's still a product of evolution it's still ultimately going to be a product of evolution even though the super intelligent people of the future have created our world and you and I are just a simulation in this table is a simulation and so on I don't actually in my heart of hearts believe it but that I like his argument well so the interesting thing is that I agree with you but the interesting thing to me if I would say if we're living in a simulation that in that simulation to make it work you still have to do everything gradually just like you said that even though it's program I don't think there could be miracles otherwise we'll know I mean the the programmer the higher up the upper ones have to have evolved gradually however the simulation they create could be instantaneous I mean it could be switched on and we come into the world with fabricated memories true but what I'm what I'm trying to convey so you're saying the the broader statement but I'm saying from an engineering perspective both the programmer has to be slowly evolved and the simulation because it's like yeah I'm an engineering perspective yeah it takes a long time to write a program no like just I don't think you can create the universe in a snap I think you have to grow it ok well that's and that's a good point that's an arguable point by the way um I I have thought about using the Nick Bostrom eye idea to solve the riddle of how we were talking we were talking earlier about why the human brain can achieve so much I thought of this when my then hundred year old mother was marveling at what I could do with it with us Bart phone and and I could you know Koren look up anything in the encyclopedia I could play her music that she liked and so on Jen please it's all left in that tiny little firm no it's it's out there it's in it's in the cloud it's and maybe what most of what we do is in a cloud so maybe if if we're if we are a simulation yeah then all the power that we think is in our skull it actually may be like the power that we think is in the iPhone but is that actually out there it's an interface to something else yeah I mean that's what beautiful including Roger Penrose with Penn psychism that consciousness is somehow a fundamental part of physics that it doesn't have to actually all reside inside network but Roger thinks it does reside in in the skull whereas I'm suggesting that it doesn't that it's that there's a cloud that'd be a fascinating fascinating notion and a small tangent are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman I guess maybe nothing is named correctly but just to forget the name the idea that there's a difference between reality and perception so like we biological organisms perceive the world in order for the natural selection process to be able to survive and so on but that doesn't mean that our perception actually reflects the fundamental reality the physical reality or in you well I do think that although it reflects the fundamental reality I do believe there is a fundamental reality I do think that what the perception is constructive in the sense that we construct in our minds a model of what we're seeing and so and this is really the view of people who work on visual illusions like Richard Gregory who point out other things like an echo cube which flipped from a two-dimensional picture of a cube on on on sheet of paper but we see it as a three-dimensional cube and it flips from one orientation to another at regular intervals what's going on is that the brain is is constructing a cube but the sense-data are compatible with two alternative cubes and so rather than stick with one of them it alternates between them I think that's just a a model for what we do all the time when we see a table when we see a person when we see a let me see anything we're using the sense data to construct or or make use of a preps previously constructed model I noticed this when when I meet somebody who actually is say a friend of mine but I until I kind of realized that that is him he looks different and then when I finally o'clock that it's him his features switch like a neck and cube just into the familiar form as it were I've taken his face out of the filing cabinet inside and grafted it onto or used used the sense data to to to you to in to invoke it yeah we do some kind of miraculous compression on this whole thing to be able to filter out most of the sense data it makes it make sense of it that's just a magical thing that we do so you've written several many amazing books but let me ask what books technical or fiction of philosophical had a big impact on your own life what what books would you recommend people consider reading in their own intellectual journey darling of course and the original I've actually ashamed to say I've never read Darwin he's nearly prescient because considering he was writing in the middle of the 19th century Michael Uslan said he's working a hundred years ahead of his time everything except genetics is that amazingly right and amazingly far ahead of his time and of course you need to read the the up datings that have happened since his time as well and he would be astonished by well let alone Watson and Crick of course but he Brist honest by Mendelian genetics as well and fascinated to see what he thought about the he would think about oh I mean yes it would because in many ways it it clears up what appeared in his time to be a riddle in the digital nature of genetics clears up what what was a problem of the big problem gosh there's so much that I could think of I can't I can't really advise there so is there something outside sort of more fiction is there when you think young was there books it just kind of outside of kind of the realm of science yeah Jim they just kind of sparked your yes well actually I have I suppose I could say that I've learned some some science from science fiction um I may I meant I mentioned Daniel gallo but and that's one example which another of his novels called dark universe which is not terribly well known but it's a very very nice science fiction story it's about a world of Perpetual darkness and we don't we're not told a beginning the but why these people are in darkness they stumble around in some kind of underground world of caverns and passages using echolocation like bats and whales to get around and they've adapted presumably by Darwinian means to survive in perpetual total darkness but what's interesting is that their mythology their religion has echoes of Christianity but is based on light and so there's been a fall from a from a paradise world that once existed where light reigned supreme and because of the sin of mankind light banished them so then they no longer are in lights presence but but light survives in the form of mythology and in the form of sayings like their great light or mightier other lights sake don't do that and I and I I hear what you mean rather than I see what you don't want you mean so there's some of the same religious elements are present in this other totally kind of absurd different form yes there's a wonderful I wouldn't call it set up because it's too good-natured for that I mean there were a wonderful power all about Christianity and the doctrine the theological doctrine of the fall so I find that that kind of science fiction immensely stimulating Fred Hoyles the black cloud oh by the way anything by arthur c clarke i find very very wonderful - fred horns the black cloud his first science fiction novel where he well I learned I learned a lot of science from that it has it suffers from an obnoxious hero unfortunately but apart from that he couldn't learn a lot of science from it another of his novels the a for Andromeda which by the way the the theme of that is taken up by Carl Sagan science fiction novel another wonderful writer Carl Sagan contact where the idea is again we will not be visited from outer space by physical bodies we will be visited possibly we might be visited by radio but the the radio signals could manipulate us and actually have a concrete influence on the world if they make us or persuade us to build a computer which which runs their software so that they can then transmit their software by radio and then the computer takes over the world and this is the same theme in both Hoyles book and Sagan spoke I presume them I don't want to say canoe but halls book probably did and and but it's a clever idea that the that we will never be invaded by physical bodies the War of the Worlds of HG Wells will never happen but we could be invaded by radio signals if code coded information which is sort of like DNA and and you know we are we are we are I call them we are survival machines of our of our DNA so it has great resonance from for me because I think of us I think of bodies physical bodies biological bodies as being manipulated by information in DNA which has come down through generations and in the space of memes it doesn't have to be physical it can be transmitted yeah this information yes that's the fascinating possibility that from outer space who can be infiltrated by other memes by other ideas and thereby controlled in that way let me ask the last the silliest there may be the most important question what is the meaning of life what gives your life fulfillment perfect a weapon is me from a scientific point of view the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA but that's not what I feel that's not the meaning of my life so the meaning of my life is something which is probably different from yours and different of other peoples but we we each make our own meaning so we we have we set up goals we want to achieve we want to write a book we want to do whatever it is we do writer quartet we want to win a football match and these are these are short-term girls won't me begin quite long term goals which are set up by our brains which have goal seeking machinery built into them but what we feel we don't feel motivated by the desire to pass on our DNA mostly we have other other girls which can be very moving very important they could even be called as called spiritual in some cases we want to understand the riddle of the universe we want to understand consciousness if you want to understand how the brain works these are all noble goals some of them can be noble goals anyway and they are a far cry from the fundamental biological girl which is the propagation of DNA but the machinery that enables us to set up these higher-level goals is originally programmed into us by natural selection of DNA the propagation of DNA but what do you make of this unfortunate fact that we are mortal do you ponder your mortality does it make you sad the I I ponder it it would it makes me sad that I shall have to leave and not see what's going to happen next if there's something frightening about mortality apart from sort of missing as I've said something more deeply darkly frightening it's the idea of eternity but eternity is only frightening you feel their eternity but before we were born billions of years before we were born and we were effectively dead before we were born as I think was Mark Twain said I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience that's how is going to be afterward after we leave so I think of it as really it eternity is a frightening prospect and so the best way to spend it is under a general anesthetic which is what it'll be beautifully put Richard there's a huge honor to meet you to talk to you thank you so much for your time thank you very much thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Dawkins and thank you to our presenting sponsor cash app please consider supporting the podcast by downloading cash app and using colex podcast if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on youtube review with five stars an apple podcast supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter Alex Friedman and now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Richard Dawkins we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born the potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats scientists greater than Newton we know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people in the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I in our ordinariness there here we privileged few who won the lottery of births against all odds' how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you

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Keywords: richard dawkins, religion, god, evolution, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence podcast, lex fridman, lex podcast, lex mit, lex ai, lex jre, mit ai

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Length: 67min 20sec (4040 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020