Richard Dawkins in Conversation with Jim Al-Khalili

would you please welcome back to the stage from earlier professor jim alcali and with him professor richard dawkins [Applause] hello hello good afternoon everyone there's a i can still see the queue sort of snaking back there they should have put us on the main blinking stage shouldn't they yeah should we all just get up and go and no so festival attire richard dawkins um this afternoon what we want to do i mean this is this is not an interview it's a conversation richard and i had a quick chat about this earlier and you know he would like to ask me some questions as well but essentially we want to talk about um his book a science in the soul and so i'd sort of been through and i thought get get a few questions together but i think we'll just see how it goes uh we'll have a chat with we i want to certainly leave enough time for for as many questions as possible from from you um so i want to start by saying that when when i read richard dawkins books i'm slightly annoyed not because there's anything i disagree with but that because actually so read it yup yup i agree i agree i agree it's because richard writes in a way that i so eloquently that i feel i wish i could have written said that or written it like that you know very very um persuasively um twitter different matter but won't go there um but you know can't you know carl you you quote carl sagan's uh demon haunted world you quote people like bonovsky you know that there's a poetry in writing about science that is is over and beyond just explaining you know science is it's hard and the interesting stuff is actually quite hard to explain but is there a process you go through in in rather than just explaining but trying to put it in a way that you feel you know has some literary value well first of all while we're trading compliments for rich thank you very much i didn't realize that complimented richard oh i had it um i i attended jim's talk uh earlier today i thought it was one of the best science talks i've ever heard in my life that wasn't true [Applause] um now as for as for tricks of the trade for writing i never know quite what to say when somebody asks me that i've i've never actually given a lecture on how to write about science i don't think um the obvious tip is put yourself in the position of the reader imagine yourself being the reader as you write and not just the reader but lots of different readers so i i imagine it being read by all sorts of random people maybe somebody who who just phoned me up and therefore they're in the front of my mind and so i think what would she think about this sentence that i've just just read would she get it would she be confused would she be annoyed how do i change this sentence and so in a way every time i read through my stuff which i do very very often while i'm writing it it goes through a kind of darwinian process of natural selection and every time i read through it comes out a little bit different because it's been selected is this the next door tent or is this our tent making this noise i i if it's if i in our tents i'd hope they'd have turned it down we can't be out next door i think we just yeah i think we just have to power through can people at the back hear us okay good there you go we'll just have to somebody said no that's very perceptive it i mean it actually it's more difficult it's more easy to project when you're giving a lecture than when you're having a a fireside chat is true yeah quite hard to project when you're talking to somebody who then yelled away we'll do our best so your latest book science and the soul which is a collection of essays and and lectures things that you've brought together but i'm interested in the title you know for for a renowned atheist a lot of people will say souls richard dawkins you believe in a soul so where did the title come from and why well that's part of the point um i rather resent the way the religious have hijacked the word soul hijack spirituality you mentioned carl sagan a moment ago jacob branowski's another where the poetic style of speaking is is redolent of soul the regiment of spirituality in the non-religious sense so if you look at the oxford dictionary definition of soul there are two different definitions and one of them is the the supernatural the soul that survives your death that kind of thing the other one is the the poetic sensibility and that's the oh um that's the the carl sagan i think that if carl sagan was still alive he should win the nobel prize for literature not for science but for literature it's high time a scientist won the nobel prize for literature absolutely you were going i think you said you'd like to read i mean on the issue of science in the soul just to read an extract from yeah okay introduction um i can read the uh introduction to the book most of the book as jim said is actually previously published essays plus a lot of footnotes and endnotes which uh arise today but the introduction is new and it kind of explains what i mean by soul i'm writing this two days after a breathtaking visit to arizona's grand canyon breathtaking still hasn't gone the way of awesome although i fear it may to many native american tribes the grand canyon is a sacred place site of numerous origin myths from the havasupai to the zuni harsh repose of the hopi dead if i were forced to choose a religion that's the kind of religion i could go for the grand canyon confers stature on a religion outclassing the petty smallness of the abrahamics the three squabbling cults which through historical accident still afflict the world in the dark night i walked out along the south rim of the canyon lay down on a low wall and gazed up at the milky way i was looking back in time witnessing a scene from a hundred thousand years ago but that is when the light set out on its long quest to dive through my pupils and spark my retinas at dawn the following morning i returned to the spot shuddered with vertigo as i realized where i had been lying in the dark and looked down towards the canyon's floor again i was gazing into the past two billion years in this case back to a time when only microbes stirred cyclists beneath the milky way if hopi's souls were sleeping in that majestic hush they were joined by the rock bound ghosts of trilobites and crinoids brachiopods and bellum nights ammonites even dinosaurs was there some point in the mile-long evolutionary progression up the canyon strata when something you could call a soul sprang into existence like a light suddenly switched on or did the soul creep stealthily into the world a dim thousandth of a soul in a pulsating tube worm a tenth of a soul in a cedar pants half a soul in a tarcia then a typical human soul eventually a soul on the scale of a beethoven or a mandela or is it just silly to speak of souls at all not silly if you mean something like an overwhelming sense of subjective personal identity each one of us knows we possess it even if as many modern thinkers of uh it is an illusion an illusion constructed as darwinians might speculate because a coherent agency of singular purpose helps us to survive thank you um throughout this book richard say that these are essays written over a number of years um but i think for me the the unifying theme is very much like carl sagan's demon haunted world the last book that sagan wrote it's sort of a a battle cry against fuzzy thinking against irrationality and sort of a but at the same time a love story for science yeah yes um carl sagan himself said uh if you're in love you want to tell the world and then he goes on to say for most of my life i've been in love with science and and i can't help myself wanting to express my love in a passionate way so that's part of it as you say but also as you say a battle cry against irrationality um it's a beautiful book if you haven't read it that the demon haunted world uh it is a a heart cry against irrationality against um homeopathy and telepathy and and and water divining and all the things that have no scientific justification but which have a kind of appeal almost like the appeal of science fiction which i love by the way but the appeal of the kind of romance of science without the rigor of science and so he does a beautiful job that i do strongly recommend his last book and in my own small way i've been trying to do the same thing as you say it comes through in that book do you think there's more of a call now than ever before you know we we live in a world of social media people shouting ever more loudly you know you get the impression the impression that there are more flat earthers around around today than ever before or is that just that they've now found a voice on yeah i i hope it's that they've just found a voice on social media um it is true i think the internet's a wonderful thing and and but but it is true that although there's a lot of sense on it a lot of nonsense as well and so you have to uh fine-tune your antennae for for the nonsense as well as for the sense and learn to be critical about it critical thinking has always been important and it's now moved into a new dimension of importance uh with the ubiquity of social media it has other consequences as well like the way in our primitive past we lived in local villages and you just kind of knew everybody in your local village now we still kind of live in local villages but they're internet villages so you you're connected with people in the rest of the world who are part of your own internet bubble uh and so it's a curious kind of meta village that you're now living in and we seem now to be more aware of this idea of cognitive dissonance you know where it it's so hard to change someone's view if they if they believe in something or want to believe it doesn't matter what logic what evidence you present to them yeah stick to it well you and i are both in the business of trying to convince people of of things and as you say it is it is difficult i really haven't developed any technique apart from just putting it out there i've been criticized for that as well i'm a lacking kind of soft soap of persuasion um uh i think it was neil degrasse tyson who accused me of that's that's not communicating they're just putting it out there he said um and i had to i think i said i gratefully accept the rebuke uh and i think i went on to say when i quote this i could quote the um editor of new scientist who was then alan anderson i once asked alan anderson what his policy was at new scientist as editor of new scientist and he said our policy at new scientist is this science is interesting and if you don't agree you can off [Laughter] [Music] i think all the mums and dads of young children are not clapping um i mean do you feel in a sense that that is your role that you know as on provocateur or to say something you know is going to get a reaction because someone has to do it well i wouldn't put it like that really i i genuinely want to be clear and i i genuinely want to communicate uh what is what is known or in some case what's not known but but which we can speculate about um so my my aim always is clarity is also the romance of science i've been talking about carl sagan as well um to try to make it poetic i think there are perhaps you don't agree with this i think you probably do um the the ways in which people try to make science appealing um i distinguish between just take an example of the space race how do you make that that appealing there's what i call the the non-stick frying pan approach yes which is the good thing about the space race is that the non-stick frying pan was a by-product of it so you make it useful you bring it down to earth you make it uh part of everyday life same thing about saving the brazilian rainforest you save the brazilian rainforest because you might discover useful new medicines like aspirin from bark well that's all very well but it demeans science i think it suggests that science is only there because it's useful and i want i think along with carl sagan and probably along with eugene to emphasize the romance the artistic aspect the aesthetic aspect the poetic aspect of science looking out at the galaxies looking inwards at the quantum world um and make science like one of the arts make it appealing in that in that kind of way and that's what i try to do there's a quote in your book where you you make this very point about the visionary poetic side of science science to stir the imagination as opposed to the non-stick frying pan school of thought but you you say and you say somewhat provocatively um uh you said a tendency i have uh to compare this you know looking for the usefulness of science only uh equivalent to the attempt to justify music as good exercise for the violinist's right arm that's right yes yes but somehow that's the only use of it yeah that has to have some practical applications we have music i'm playing music i'm fond of that and while we're on music um i think another way to put it would be to say you can appreciate music you could enjoy music at a fairly high level without actually being able to play the violin or play other kind of other instrument so many people are put off music because they're made to do five finger exercises on the piano or something um and and that might put them off appreciating music and as an aesthetic experience and you can do the same with science you don't actually have to know how to use a bunsen burner in order to appreciate the poetic aesthetic value and educational value of science and are we i i mean a lot of people say well you know you're putting funding into big your research projects whether it's something like like the work here at georgia bank looking for particles at a large hadron collider and that costs hundreds of millions of pounds shouldn't we be putting that money into finding cures for cancer and so on and sometimes you know we have to find the right way of communicating to people that we we're doing this because the curiosity defines our humanity it's always difficult because in anything that involves money and there's huge quantities of money in big science so it's always the case that the more you spend on peter the less you have to spend on paul and so there is a trade-off obviously necessarily we have to strike a balance um i i tend towards the the big science blue skies end of that of that balance while not neglecting the cure for cancer um end of the balance as well um i when i visited the large hadron collider when i visited great telescopes like on hawaii and the canary islands i i moved literally to tears by the the beauty of this magnificent gigantic enterprise and makes me proud to be a member of homo sapiens to be doing this this thing and also my pride in the fact that it's international you go to a place like cern and you're surrounded by people talking lots of different languages they come from all over the world same with the same with the giant telescopes it's i think it's one of the highest achievements of humanity along with beethoven and shakespeare and i guess a festival like blue dot is a good good evidence for that you know people come here to listen to music what use is that well they're also coming here to to listen to talks about science and we're not having to explain to them the latest developments in in technology we're just yeah feeding their their minds of science as well as music i'm enormously encouraged by the number of people who come to this kind of thing well they're still all queuing up outside trying to hear what you have to say [Applause] in in in the book you talk about science's goal or research in science is to seek a truth that there's an objective reality out there and we need to to find it because my area is quantum physics it wouldn't necessarily be the case that i would agree with that i happen to agree with it but because uh you know in quantum mechanics there are various interpretations of what the mathematics means and for a lot of people the traditional view of quantum mechanics which was espoused by people like niels bohr and heisenberg in copenhagen 1920s is that there is no objective reality that somehow we bring reality into sharp focus through the act of observing the universe around us which is a sort of a philosophical view in the sense that it's if it's the way we can do quantum mechanics where we can do the calculations but there are a lot of people who would say no there you know there isn't one truth or that there are more ways different ways of seeing the truth other than science you can come at it from different directions i having that we're having a conversation with sort of you know mutual backslapping agreeing with each other but you know i have to say that i do agree that there is an objective truth and objective reality either we may never reach it but we try to get ever closer yeah the way you would explain it um we need to unpack that a bit i think what we're talking about here is two different aspects of this there is no truth you were talking about the neil's ball point where in quantum mechanics uh you can't actually get at the truth because what the observer does influences what you what you get out get out of it i mean the the um schrodinger's cat is is is neither alive nor dead till you open the box and well the moon isn't there when i'm not looking at it well that's the second point that's the second point okay um so in the schrodinger's cat case by the way a lovely cartoon you probably know it of of a vet's waiting room and people with their dogs in those lampshade things and the nurse is coming out and saying to one of the people waiting there about your cat mr schroedinger i have some good news and some bad anyway so that that that that's that's one aspect is that quantum mechanics are deeply mysterious and there is a sense in which in quantum mechanics um that there is no truth but the other sense is the one the more philosophical one where the moon isn't there unless somebody's looking at it um and that i have much less time for i think that's a kind of human arrogance you know the humans haven't been here for that long yes and um i and the world the universe is going to go on being pretty much the way it is now long after we're extinct and i haven't pretty much contempt for the yes and how about the point about there being more than one truth you know that science is just one way of looking at the world bollocks okay good i mean okay [Applause] i have to say that the people who applauded you there are were some fraction of the audience yeah there are people who didn't applaud them but we don't think it's bad let me qualify that um there are important things which i wouldn't actually call truths but which are important to talk about like morals what's right and what's wrong uh what's beautiful and what's not beautiful those are all things which are at least not in a proximal sense not tacklable by science but in terms of truth about the real world that's a that's the purview of science i i'm the way i want to give lots of time for audience to ask questions and we're sort of coming up to the halfway mark but i know you said you wanted to quiz me on something oh well apology so i thought i'd like a chance to ask me i'm guessing quite a lot of people here came to jim's talk this morning fascinating on about quantum biology where he made the point that it's possible that quantum effects actually have an effect in biology especially molecular biology um i want to make two points about that you talked about um the fact that animals including european robins seem to be using a magnetic sense for their orientation and that magnetic sense could be being mediated by quantum events at a molecular level um you probably know that in some cases it's it is actually more simple than that um i think a lovely experiment done on lobsters where every time a lobster molds um it kind of gets everything renewed and lobsters have a sense organ in which there is a grain of sand which is influenced by gravity and uh when the when the um grain of sand is pointing if you put if you replace the grain of sand with it with an iron filing which you can do when the lobster molds um and then you put a magnet above the lobster it turns upside down and there are magnetic senses in animals which [Music] quantum mediated um the other thing more seriously i want to ask about was um there was a book written i think in the 1960s by a neurobiologist called delilah burns called the uncertain nervous system where he was making the point that there are i think he was talking about statistical mechanical randomness in the nervous system and um this might be responsible for sort of random events like we will get a new idea a new inspiration a new tune comes into the head of a yes there you go um and trying to interpret this in terms of a random event in the nervous system causing a neuron to file which wouldn't otherwise have done yeah i don't think he was talking about quantum effects but i imagine you you might broaden your your own ideas to include neuronal firing events which could be the inspiration for new ideas yeah well on your first point about so i talked about for the people who weren't in my talk earlier um the european robin migrates south from scandinavia down to the mediterranean every year in the autumn and it was discovered in the mid 1970s that it can sense the earth's magnetic field which is very weak but nevertheless it's able to sense it and that gives it directional information i remember um well i don't remember but i know at the time peter atkins chemist the good good friend of ours um accused the ornithologists who were presenting this idea as charlatans he said how how can something as weak as the earth's magnetic field um influence organisms you know and creatures and tell them which way to go so it's so weak but you know they they found that actually that that does work but you're right there are there are likely to be other mechanisms that may be at play um homing pigeons are another example um that was the that that we now know their consensus magnetic field and it was thought for some years that they had um magnetic sort of metallic crystals possibly in their beaks that would line up alongside the nerves and that by feeling the direction of the bird in the earth's magnetic field these magnetic crystals would move and tweak the nerves and send the signals to the first brain but um a colleague of mine at ucl mark lithgow carried out an experiment where he actually put a homing pigeon in an mri scanner and they studied it and they realized no that isn't the mechanism yeah but there may be there may be other less exotic explanations than quantum entertainment would we use the word exotic would you say that um other explanations are somehow more parsimonious is there any reason to regard the quantum explanation as a last resort or could you regard it as the first resort i i don't i don't see it as as any stranger than any non-quantum explanation you know if as i said in my talk you know life has had long enough on this planet to make use of whatever tricks subject to the laws of physics it can make use of in order to make the process of life more efficient and if any of those tricks involve reaching down into the quantum domain nature will have hit upon it i think that's absolutely right and there's a thing called pop's first law which biologists know which says natural selection is cleverer than you are yes can i tell you another story about about migrating birds which which you the gym this morning told us about the experiment with the european robins and the way it was actually done was to put them in the in the cage when they catch them when they're migrating put them in a cage a cylindrical cage with a cone-shaped bottom and the bottom of the cone is ink and so the birds get ink on their feet and when they try to get out of the cage which they do in the direction they're trying to migrate which might be south towards spain then the footprints appear on the side of the cage showing and you've got a great smurf of black footprints on say the south side of the cage and very few on them on the north that that technique was invented by stephen emlin in cornell and he used it for a slightly different purpose still migrating birds in this case night flying buntings and he was looking at star navigation using stars and i had this hypothesis that the buntings were navigating by using the constellations for example polaris the north star um and so he put these birds in a cage with the printing ink and so on at the in a planetarium so you can manipulate the night sky with the planetarium and he brought them up he actually managed to hire the planetarium while he brought these birds up and so he brought them up from young youngsters in a planetarium where the night sky in the planetarium did not revolve around the north star but revolved around the middle of orion's belt and then when he finally tested them they treated the middle of iran's belt as though it was the north star in other words what they were doing was it wasn't that they were born with that with that in their jeans a map of the stars what they were born with was a rule that said look at the stars every night look at the one bit of the sky that doesn't rotate as the night goes by and that's north and so this brilliant experiment showed that that's exactly what they were doing by actually fooling them into treating the middle of orion's belt as as though it works and and far more believable as a as a rule that they can inherit that's hard-wired and they're great it would be harder to imagine a map of the whole night that's right yes yeah i i've forgotten what the second question was you are you were going to ask me but i thought um about the lyle burns and the the nervous system did we have that about um getting getting ideas by random quantities oh yes yeah yeah yeah i think that's that's true that we there are many processes in biology that may benefit from what's called stochasticity randomness it may be quantum mechanics at play there are other sorts of other sorts of random randomness that may not require quantum mechanics well that's the point of constant biology it's a very speculative new area it may turn out not to be as interesting as people think but we need to think about it carefully to rule it out if you know if it's not if it's not the correct idea yes right yes over to you oh you quoted you quoted um niels bohr and said i think you understand quantum theory yes i think it was fine and said something said something similar if you think you understand quantum theory you don't understand the quantum theory indeed exactly right we're going to open up to the audience i'm sure there are lots of questions there's a guy even with two hands up he's so keen um so microphones are ready i we can't have house lights up so that i can see who's i can't see where they might oh the microphones are just coming out now fantastic so that there's a gentleman there in a quite colorful shirt with two hands up uh and and then we have a couple of hands at the front and then we'll we'll move around we try and get to as many as possible we've got what 15 minutes right so we'll do as many as possible yeah i'd like to bring your two sessions together go very clever channeling um your theories it's it's possible at this point i i think i know what that's getting at thank you i'd like to ask you a question right oh okay uh many birds fly many different directions bases on a belief that that is the correct direction based on possibly your solution that this new biology thing yeah emphasis on the belief that first of all in science when we use the word believe we mean something different from a lack of evidence faith-based belief so we we sometimes use the word belief rather sloppily when we maybe should use a different word but those birds are not doing something consciously they're subconsciously following something that they've been genetically they've evolved to do automatically they're not thinking about what they're doing not they don't have a belief in the right direction to fly if that's possibly influenced by quantum biology well but quantum if it's a quantum effect that's influencing what they do then that's no different to any other uh physical mechanism or chemical mechanism that any other organism makes use of to you know there's no uh you know dna doesn't believe it has to replicate itself in a certain way an enzyme doesn't believe it has to speed up a chemical reaction that they things are just well this chap's written about this stuff i mean do you have a succinct answer to that right now okay well that's enough well then my bumbling attempts is all what we could do you'll have to make do with sorry yes this is a question if science is about looking for truth how does that differ significantly from religion uh isn't it obvious we look for truth using evidence using evidence that we can actually go out and test experimentally and i think that is the utterly crucial difference right um trying okay yep and then we'll move further back there's a lady about five rows yeah hello this has been brilliant though thank you very much richard i wanted to ask for those recovering from religion and supernatural um do you have any advice on that profound shift yes that's that's a very interesting and difficult question i think um you've zeroed in on the more important part which is the uh the feeling of rootlessness the feeling of being in a alone in an empty universe where there's no um no guiding force um julia sweeney the american comedian has a very beautiful monologue which he gives on stage as an actress and she has a monologue on her uh really quite long lasting retreat from roman catholicism where she gradually realized that there was nothing in it and she has a rather moving part where she hears in her voice in her head a little small voice and it begins to whisper and says there is no god there is no god oh my god there is no god and then she says but then how do we go on i mean why do the planets go on orbiting in their in their elliptical orbits and oh yes newton's laws kepler's rules um and so she gradually sort of gets to grips with that uh some people find it scary to be alone in the in the cold wind of reality in in an empty universe you can see it the other way around you can see it as exciting and thrilling and enthralling to be to have the power to look out at the universe and say i'm going to try to understand this i'm on my own we're on our own as humanity um it's it's it's something that no other species has ever done we're privileged to be able to look out and actually understand what this universe is why we're here how we came to be here in the first place i find that exhilarating i find it an exalting uh feeling so i i i encourage that way to look at it the other problem when you're recovering from religion is what you do about your family and your your grandparents and your uncles and aunts who are shocked um and and that's a very difficult problem and i hear a lot from people in america who have lost their religious faith but but do not dare to admit the fact to their families and it's very hard to know how to advise them and and there are some really rather tragic stories of people being ostracized and cut off by their families because of this humanism of course [Music] [Laughter] we're both vice presidents of the british very good idea that adopt humanism much better yes and basically it stems from the fact that um a colleague of mine recently and when she found out that i was atheist informed me that i was going to hell now which obviously i was like i'm a bit shocked about but my question foreign is um if you know of any like movements towards workplace recognition and the fact that that that's me if i just said anything to her against her religion it would have been passed as a hate issue she can quite really say that to me but i have no sort of come back to it you know what i mean yes um well in a way that's a carry on from the previous question i i reiterate that it is a very difficult problem i i mentioned the problem of being ostracized by your family and you're mentioning the problem of having a friend who's actually says you're going to hell the the doctrine of hell i think is is deeply evil and and it's it's it's used to intimidate children and it even intimidates adults uh and um i i mean having said it's evil doesn't really help your problem i mean would be easy for me to say choose your friends more carefully but i guess that's not very helpful either um my way would be calm and patient arguing um where do you get that idea of hell from uh what's the authority for it uh why did why do you believe whoever it was who taught you about in the first place maybe a priest maybe a parent maybe a teacher what reason have you got for thinking that they know anything and the answer is probably none um so but common patient reasoning is is one way which i would try it might not work i mean what and an argument against that is that you know they're trying to proselytize and you know and tell you that their view is right that you are wrong is it is the opposite always the best way i mean because you talked about calm and careful yeah logical reasoning they would see that as proselytizing in the opposite way they would but i'm not sure that's actually right because i i wasn't saying just you're wrong i was saying where did you get that from you got it from a priest where did he get it from uh what is the fundamental authority that the priest had for telling you about hell is it based upon anything and i think they wouldn't really have an answer to that my uh attitude tends to be sort of indignation if people say you know that you need the religion to give you the moral guidance or ethical compass yeah and and if you are not religious then you don't have that and then then i'm i get very cross you know how dare you assume that if you don't believe in a supernatural creator you can't be a good person and also have you actually read the bible as if you have don't get your morals from there yes hello thank you very much for spending your time with us today and i'm just doesn't know how you uh fall on the free will discussion and in the deterministic universe and in one way even quantum randomness doesn't really breathe well a choice uh is there such a thing yes i i always hate the free will question um it's i think it's really a question for jim more i i rather admire christopher hitton's his answer when he gets the question where he got the question do you believe in free will he said i have no choice [Laughter] the audience were destined to laugh preordained i i think i come down on the side of saying uh yes free will is an illusion uh everything that i do is determined however it's such a powerful illusion that it might as well you might as well forget about that um we all of us behave as if and believe as if uh we do have free will um it is a separate question which is the sort of moral question um which is if somebody stands up in a court of law who's accused of murder and say milad it wasn't me that did it it was my quantum fields or my or my nervous system or something do you still punish them and i think dan dennett's view on that would be it doesn't make any difference whether you think you're ultimately determined if if punishment has any rationale at all might we say deterrence or something like that then it's still there uh whether or not uh you your your actions are predetermined um and uh i i'm not really sure i think i think it probably i don't think we could really run society if we simply said that nobody has any responsibility or blame for anything because their um their their genes or their molecules or their quantum fields or something responsible for its worth i i i agree answer that i know we we might be we live in a deterministic universe where ev you know the laws of physics will determine cause and effect into the future um and therefore we don't have free will uh if everything's preordained but we are unable to predict what the future would be we can't see the future unless we could step out of space yes so so we agree about that but i want to ask you a question is it still the case even in the quantum world is it does that make any difference to the deterministic universe um my view is no because the the quantum indeterminism that the true randomness in the quantum world is constrained to the to the quantum world uh and that once you get to large macrocopic objects that quantumness decreases you're a quantum biologist and then and then i've and i've just then talked about quantum biological mechanics may play a role in biology and and if a quantum event causes a mutation which can affect connectivity nervous system so that renders my whole argument obsolete and i have to go away and think look free will's a difficult question hello um my question is um it seems to me that nowadays science can change we can disprove things and prove other things do you think that science has existed since the universe has existed and we're just discovering it or do you think we're creating it by science do you mean um i mean i've heard that a question asked about mathematics for example so i'm not quite science is a method that we have developed to learn about the universe so what did you mean like the information that we get from schools per se the science we learned in schools the fact yeah so is it are we creating them by putting them into our own language or are we just discovering them and presenting them with information richard epistemology versus ontology um i i suppose it's true that to some extent what we think of as truth is colored by the way we put it and by the language that we use and by our preconceptions um i have occasionally met people for example quite interesting actually i idea that um uh in my own field of animal behavior it's been suggested that uh japanese people approach the study of studying primates monkeys and apes in a different way from western people and that these two points of view are both valuable i think they probably are both valuable in different ways in suggesting ideas suggesting inspiration but in the second part of the uh scientific enterprise when you actually test it against the evidence i think it should be the same should be the same whether you do it in japan or or or here um but i think it's probably perfectly true that the epistemology interferes in in a good way with the the inspirational part of science we have time for just one last question sorry the gentleman right at the front has been waving since the beginning so we'll we'll make it quick we have to wrap up in about a minute uh nice to see you both um do you have any questions supposedly do you have any ethical reservations about the uh improving ability we have to modify ourselves technologically to make us stronger better faster and is there an argument that needs to form a legitimate form of evolution yes that's very interesting i i unfortunately had to to miss most of kevin warwick's talk i imagine maybe that's that's relevant to what you're saying um i'm not sure ethical is the right word to use i think maybe um uh practical i i think you we need to apply the um precautionary principle to all sorts of things and this would be among them um is it a legitimate form of evolution uh in a loose way of using the word evolution yes if you want to apply the word evolution strictly then it didn't it we're talking about genetic changes in populations as generations go by so we're not talking about that now we're talking about something that looks like evolution and we already have that in the evolution of the car the computer and the airplane but if the human body becomes um merged in some way with technology in the kind of kevin warwick way uh then that's a little bit closer to talking about evolution it's still not genetic evil yeah the whole i mean transhumanism is is a big thing and a lot of people you know are concerned about it but more broadly i think things like genetic engineering um and artificial intelligence and so these are huge areas that are going to transform our world in the coming decades and and they're going to happen but we do need to have those ethical arguments just something like gene editing it's great if we can um cure sickle cell anemia and various other genetic disorders but it's not so great if we can then have designer babies and and and and choose you know those attributes so i think we need to have that dialogue we need to have it and i i would call it the precaution reproduction yes and exercise it very strongly and we've run out of time thank you all very much thank you for your questions which are talking about [Music] thank you [Applause] you

Channel: bluedot festival

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Keywords: bluedot, festival

Id: 735o-d62FGE

Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2020