Transcript

Brian Keating:
There’s a law of physics that governs everything. Your happiness, your depression, and even whether your life has meaning. And guess what? It can’t be broken.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Life is a local violation of the law of entropy. It is a counter entropic resistance. The thing that the suicidally depressed people feel is that they don’t matter. Others do, they don’t. Nothing they can do will ever make them. This is how I judge people. Are you increasing entropy or are you decreasing it? These agents begin to have a longing to matter. If they do this, then what we have are non carbon based humans.

Brian Keating:
She’s a MacArthur genius, a philosopher who’s trained in physics, and she just used the second law of thermodynamics to explain while your life feels like it’s always falling apart. What Rebecca did next is what no physicist has ever done before. She took the second law of thermodynamics and built an entire theory of human meaning on top of it.

Brian Keating:
What took you from MacArthur genius, your many, many works of philosophy, and your great contributions to literature from the genius grants, et cetera. To write a book that’s basically a stealth physics book.

Rebecca Goldstein:
When I studied physics as an undergraduate, and then I had gone, when I went into philosophy, it was into philosophy of physics. So I’ve always been interested in physics. When I first learned about the second law of thermodynamics, I couldn’t quite conceptualize it. I couldn’t quite completely wrap my head around it. But it seemed to have implications for us, right? I mean, we are physical systems. We are subject to the second law of thermodynamics. There’s a tragic dimension to this law, and that we live in resistance to it. All living things live in resistance.

Rebecca Goldstein:
In fact, when I was a graduate student, that occurred to me, oh, my gosh, biological systems are really just organized to resist the second law of thermodynamics. I said, this is so exciting. Has anybody discovered this? And then I read Schrodinger’s what is Life? Other people had. In fact, Boltzmann himself had realized this at the laws of biology are substance biology’s response to this supreme law that tells us that in closed systems entropy never decreases. And if there’s any way for it to increase, it will. And what that entropy is, is the measure of the disorder of the system. The disorder is the more disorder, the higher the entropy, the less efficient work you get out of the system. And eventually the system will go to thermal equilibrium.

Rebecca Goldstein:
You’ll be able to get no more energy out of it. It’s somewhat the end of the system. And in fact, Rudolph Clausius, the 19th century physicist who formulated a concept of entropy, which means literally, transformation from within, there’s poignancy in that. It’s a transformation from within is going to the end of the system. And he had said, you know, that the universe itself go to thermal equilibrium, to what we call the heat death. And so there’ll be no more energy to be gotten out of it. This sounds like a joke from Woody Alley. His mother brings him to a shrink because he’s discovered that eventually the sun is going to go out.

Rebecca Goldstein:
He said, you know, how can I live? What’s there to live for? You know, the sun is going to go out. And the mother says to the shrink, you know, I don’t know why Alfie is so worried about it. It’s not going out over Brooklyn.

Brian Keating:
It’s in Annie hall, right?

Rebecca Goldstein:
Annie Hall. Yes, that’s right. What do you care?

Brian Keating:
Brooklyn’s not expanding, right?

Rebecca Goldstein:
Y that’s what it was. It was expanding, right? That’s right.

Brian Keating:
Classic. You studied physics as an undergraduate and you write in the book how you’ve been haunted since your early days as an undergrad by the second law of thermodynamics. So let’s start with that story that you tell first about Ludwig Boltzmann, who solved one of the great paradoxes of physics, the irreversibility paradox. Talk about that. And then why did, in your mind, was he so traumatized, perhaps, or full of dread of his equation that he took his own life? So talk about that.

Rebecca Goldstein:
And this is really good because it really ties back to your previous question about the types of scientists, the different types of scientists, types in terms of their personality. And to me, the formative feature of personality is how you minister to this longing to matter. So there was this great paradox which is probably most of the processes that we observe are irreversible. If you film them, like, like, let’s say I crack open an egg and I stir it up and then I fry it, and somebody filmed this and then they reversed the film. Anybody who sees the reversal of that film is going to know it was reversed. That cannot happen in nature. That it is going to uncook itself, unscramble. The yolk is going to separate from the albumen and jump into the shell and seal up.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Impossible, right? So almost, you know, everything that we. That we see is irreversible. What’s going on. There is a matter of what’s going on in the molecules that constitute this process. And if you filmed all of the motions of the molecules and then filmed in and then reversed the film. Perfectly, perfectly normal, you know, not contrary to nature at all. So how can that be? That the macroscopic state is just constituted by the microscopic state. On the microscopic state we find complete reversibility and on the macroscopic state, irreversibility.

Rebecca Goldstein:
It boggled the mind and it was called a paradox. And Boltzmann solved this problem. He really has only two premises here. That matter has constituents and that odor is much less probable than disorder. Those constituents can only be in a certain configuration. You can switch them around a little bit. When you have the egg cracked open with the yolk and the aluminum surrounding it, once you scramble it up, you can change. You can shuffle those part every which way and it’s still going to look the same.

Rebecca Goldstein:
The features of the system are going to stay the same. Instead of otter going to disorder. You could talk about shuffleability. One of my physics professor had described it in terms of shuffleability. The more entropy there is, the more shuffle ability. You can change around the parts and you’re still going to end up with the same system. There are just so many, many more by orders of magnitude, so many more ways of getting disorder than order in terms of the constituent states. This is the amazing thing.

Rebecca Goldstein:
So here is this real paradox, a real mind boggling paradox. All you need is the matter is made of constituent parts and the laws of probability, it’s the laws of large numbers applied to micro states. And that’s why it’s the supreme law of physics. I think it was Eddington who at first called it that. But it’s repeated by Einstein and by Stephen Hawking. But really all physicists, that is, we know it is never going to be falsified. All laws of nature are open to falsification. That’s what makes them scientific laws, right?

Brian Keating:
They’re provisional.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Well, it’s always provisional. We’re going to get more evidence. We’re going to have to go back to the drawing boards. But this, and Einstein puts it very, very beautifully. And as does Eddington. If something doesn’t agree with the second law of thermodynamics, too bad for your the give up. You are not going to get that Nobel Prize. Give it up.

Rebecca Goldstein:
In that sense, it’s the supreme law of physics. Ludwig Boltzmann and he solved this amazing problem and get this, none of his peers accepted it because of bad philosophy. They were all in that day. It was Ernst Machine was it like a leading Austrian and he’s great, great, great physicist, you know, but he was a positivist. He did not believe in molecules and atoms. If you couldn’t observe it, it didn’t exist. I would call positivism bad philosophy. That philosophy was sinking.

Rebecca Goldstein:
An amazing piece of scientific work that has proved so fruitful. The ramifications of this are all over, including. I want to make them even, you know, I want to draw even more consequences out of the law of.

Brian Keating:
Second, thermodynamics are beautifully. You say all tragedies are thermodynamic. You mention it in the context of his daughter Elsa finding her father’s dead body. And it wasn’t like he showed any sign. And we can’t go into the minds of someone who dies by suicide.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
But at the same time, you’d think that this would be a more common thing. And I guess my question to you is, why do some scientists kind of fall victim to even bad philosophy, whereas others. So I’m thinking of Ignaz Semmelweis, who you write about. And we had Matt Kaplan on from the Economist, who wrote a book basically about Semmelweis not being accepted, called I told you so. And event he didn’t commit suicide. But. But he. He did kind of die tragically young and of illnesses probably precipitated by some of his melancholia.

Rebecca Goldstein:
He was in. In an asylum when he was. Yes, they tricked him into an asylum.

Brian Keating:
He was my friend Patty Carico invented MRNA COVID vaccine. She, you know, thrived despite even worse circumstances than people not believing her. They certainly didn’t believe. They wanted to deport her. A postdoc threatened to deport her if she got another job. And yet she came back resilient as ever and won the Nobel Prize. So why do some scientists fall victim to. I mean, physicists love to make fun of philosophers.

Brian Keating:
You know that I’m sure.

Rebecca Goldstein:
I love to make fun of philosophers.

Brian Keating:
Well, tell me, why do some, you know, have. We sort of have arrogance or, you know, and then other times seem to fall prey to their. To their predations?

Rebecca Goldstein:
Why is that temperament plays such a large role in this? I was not a person who was raised to think big ideas. I wasn’t raised to think at all. I was really raised to be a good Orthodox Jewish wife and mother. And my temperament didn’t go that way. I could just feel this sort of something, you know, the restlessness, the intellectual restlessness and whatever Altman, he knew he had solved something incredibly important. He said, you know what? It must be wonderful to be a general leading great armies into the battle and great victories. But as for him, the only thing he wants to do is sit in a little room and solve big problems that will contribute to knowledge. Now, to contribute to knowledge means that other scientists must accept it.

Rebecca Goldstein:
He wanted to happen. What exactly did happen to him? Only post death, post mortem, which is that he would make science grow. He has made science grow amazingly. But he despaired that would ever happen. And he had a temperament. He might have been bipolar, you know, but so it hurt him so much. And towards the end of his life, I mean, he was really desperate and he committed such a sad, sad thing. And as you say, I mean, you know, that his teenage daughter found him is just.

Rebecca Goldstein:
It’s such a tragedy. It was the day before he was supposed to return to teaching, and he was a beloved teacher. He had been a very funny teacher and very engaging, but he got more and more depressed. You know, creatures of matter who long to matter. You can only say that in English, but I’m so glad you could say that in English because it’s, again, incredibly poignant. You know, we’re creatures of matter who are subject to the laws of physics, including the second law of thermodynamics. But we long to matter. And so much of the book is trying to explain how that transformation from within, within us, in our species happens.

Rebecca Goldstein:
You know, that’s a normative transformation, an ethical transformation. And it’s really what distinguishes us, that we, in some sense, want to justify the fact that we matter so much to ourselves, that we pay so much attention to ourselves, and that we actually can pinpoint the place in human history where this emerged, during the period when all the religions emerged that are still extant, which is so interesting. And also Western philosophy emerged during the period of history that’s called the Axial Age. And that’s when we became these creatures who long to matter and who are searching for the right values to help us justify ourselves first and foremost. So I’ve been thinking about this forever, actually.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, you say it’s the hardest book. It was the longest book, which is surprising with all your other, you know, just enormous contributions to literature. It’s a beautifully printed and bound book. Prominent throughout it is this concept that you came up with, which is the maps of mattering. Talk us through the maps of mattering. What are the they and where do scientists, like my audience members, maybe, where do they find themselves?

Rebecca Goldstein:
I’ve noticed that there are four general strategies, and that’s what I sketched out. This is like the four continents of the mattering. And I asked AI to help me with how big to make them, how the proportions of humanity are, how they split up. And AI was very, very helpful in this there. First of all, let’s start with transcenders, what I call transcenders and transcenders, which we humanity has been for a long part of our history, up until, I guess we would say, the Enlightenment, we all sought our mattering religiously. We had the metaphysical premise that there is a transcendent presence in the universe, whether we call him God or something vaguer, and that this God made the universe, created something out of nothing, created the laws of nature and the moral utter within, and he created each one of us. You know, the fact that we are here is the proof that we have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. This is a very grand story.

Rebecca Goldstein:
I get goosebumps when I even just, you know, say it. Very grand way of conceptualizing our mattering. It’s a kind of cosmic mattering that, that the God who created everything created us. And we are here to try to figure out how he wants us to behave. These are the people I call transcenders. Then most of the people I talk to, even if they go to church or mosque or synagogue, they’re not transcenders in this way, you know, in that life would not be worth living if they didn’t have this metaphysical belief. Most of the people I have spoken to are what I call socializers. They understand this question, do you matter? That I ask them.

Rebecca Goldstein:
They understand it, as do I matter to others. And very often the others to whom they need to matter are the people who are already in their lives. We all need people in our lives. Transcenders, heroic strivers, competitors. These are the four branches of four continents that I delineate. We all need people in our life. We’re gregarious creatures, evolved from gregarious creatures. But for a socializer, there is no mattering other than mattering either to their people who are already in their lives, their children, or their romantic partners, or their community, colleagues, neighbors, people in their lives.

Rebecca Goldstein:
But there are other socializers. And I found this particularly with millennials, who it’s not so much people in their lives, it can be perfect strangers. Many millennials want to be famous. That is how they. They want to appease the longing to matter. They want to be influencers, they really want to be famous. And they’re willing to give up. I read a lot of psychological literature on this.

Rebecca Goldstein:
They’re willing to give up, like, you know, having children, having romantic partners, having any Connection with their family for fame, which is to be to matter to a bunch of strangers. Which is an odd thing, really.

Brian Keating:
Completely unique in human history. There’s a trillion dollar industry predicated on the need to matter, to get affirmation from strangers. A lot of people you don’t like, like I, I always feel like you go to a comedy club and it’s almost impossible for the comedian to really like the audience or whatever, but they want to be famous. But the most terrifying thing you quote in the book in that chapter on fame seekers had to do with the fact that they don’t care what they’re famous for. That’s terrifying.

Rebecca Goldstein:
I understand a little bit the rationale because the way I understand this longing to matter is really trying to convince ourselves, which I find endearing about our species, that we have to convince ourselves. But the evidence that a lot of people are paying attention to us seems to be overwhelming evidence that we ourselves matter, that we deserve this attention. So I understand it in some sense, but in fact, most of the people I’ve spoken to who are famous, it’s very, very insecure that they’re not particularly happy people. The public is very fickle. There’s that then, then heroic strivers and heroic strivers. Mattering doesn’t mean mattering to God. It doesn’t mean mattering to others. It means having certain standards of excellence that you are committed to, if not realizing, at least hatically approaching, you know, getting closer and closer to it.

Rebecca Goldstein:
And it could be intellectual, it could be artistic, it could be athletic, military, entrepreneurial, ethical. All of these types are profiled in the book. Their mattering project, whether it’s intellectual or ethical or artistic, is what, you know, keeps them going. And failures in that are existential failures. You know, those setbacks are existential. You know, I don’t feel like my life is worth anything. That sort of thing is what you hear. And the last group are competitors.

Rebecca Goldstein:
That’s the one group where when I talk about to them about mattering, they get a little uneasy. I can always tell by the reactions at this point, you know, like where you are, sometimes I’m wrong and sometimes it’s very, very tricky. But competitors really see mattering as zero sum. The more others matter, the less they matter. Just not enough mattering to go around. And it can be against individuals. It could also be group against group. And one of the people I profile, I really wanted to talk to a neo Nazi.

Rebecca Goldstein:
That’s somebody you know. It’s a group against group, zero sum mattering. And look he’s done great work. I’m glad for, you know, for his work. It’s seminal work. And so I would say for all of these types, socializers, transcenders, competitors, heroics, drivers can be good, it can be bad. And I try to define what are the good ways? How did we judge the good ways of trying to appease this longing we have? What are the creative ways? What are the destructive ways? And once again, entropy comes to the rescue.

Brian Keating:
You do write that once the disintegration from within has sufficiently progressed, it takes that much more energy to reverse it. A law that holds for our psyches as for all else. And so is depression sort of a, you know, they used to think miasmas and things in the area right about that. But is depression at heart an entropic collapsing process?

Rebecca Goldstein:
I have spoken to a lot of people who suffer from clinical depression, and I want to say first of all that the US hotline for suicide prevention is www.umatter.gov. the thing that the suicidally depressed people feel is that they don’t matter. Others do, they don’t. Nothing they can do will ever make them matter. A terrible, terrible. And what this means is they cannot, they cannot abide their own presence. I mean, I really think it shows how strong this mannering instinct is in us. You know, if you can’t somehow appease it, you can’t abide your own presence.

Rebecca Goldstein:
The people I’ve spoken to, and one is a very, very good philosopher who has suffered from depression, told me, is that phenomenologically, this is exactly what it feels like. It feels like psychic, psychic disintegration. It just feels like an unraveling and it’s a kind of death within death. You know, you don’t have the counter entropic drive to push on against entropy into your life.

Brian Keating:
You lack energy, you lack that innervation, positive and negative. And you know, when I read sometimes I get asked is, I’m sure you know, what’s the meaning of life? I usually say something like this, Rebecca, I usually say, and it relates to your theory and your, what you posit in the book, which is it relates to entropy in the following way. If I said to you, Rebecca, could I double your happiness right now? Well, you have grandkids, right? Like pretty hard. Like maybe you have two grandkids, you know, and then you go to four. But eventually it’s going to start to decrease, right? Like as wonderful as they are. You know, I know somebody with like 72, I mean, he’s a Chabad rabbi, his grandfather has 72, you know, grandchildren. I’m like, does he know all their birthdays and whatever? That’s probably like every day of the year or whatever. If I gave you a billion dollars, yeah, you’d be a lot happier.

Brian Keating:
But would you be, you know, like, could you be 10 times happier? But I say to somebody, and this really only kind of works for people that are. Have very tight, you know, either children or relationships in their life that are like children, if they don’t have biological. And that’s that. I could make your life infinitely worse. Like you, I don’t even like to say it, right. I’m not even going to vocalize what it is. But you and I know as being parents how our life could be get infinite words worse, right? So the converse of that to me is you should do those things that which if they were taken away through an entropic destroying process, you would be devastated. Okay, maybe not.

Brian Keating:
But like, the more of those things you have, I think the happier or at least you can progress towards happiness. You speak about happiness not as a state of being, but as a. Almost like a journey. Does that comport with this entropic, you know, overarching. I would say architecture that you speak about, about.

Rebecca Goldstein:
We’re not closed systems. Being a closed system is not compatible with being alive. We take in energy in the form of food and sunlight and certain chemicals and take it in, do the work of metabolism, keeping up the order that life needs. You know, life is a highly ordered system, so ordered it’s scary to think because the more ordered, the more ways it can go wrong. And all of this order is maintained, you know, in the face. And resistance to entropy. That’s what life, you know, viva la resistance. This is what life is.

Rebecca Goldstein:
That’s what it is. Resistance to entropy. While we’re of course exporting high entropic waste, you know, heat and other waste into the environment. Life is a local violation of the law of entropy. But the life with the environment, that system is obeying the law of entropy. There are no violations to the law of entropy. This is what life is. This is what flourishing is.

Rebecca Goldstein:
It is a counter entropic resistance, defiance and happiness. You know, happiness is a very ordered state. And I would say I would go even further. Everything worth living for is an ordered state. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Clarity is better than confusion. Flourishing is better than suffering. Love is better than hatred.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Beauty is better than ugliness. These are truisms, you know, these are that we all accept. And if you look at the thing that’s better, it’s an ordered state. It’s negation is a disordered state. So I think I would argue this is a very kind of Spinozist argument trying to get out of the laws of nature some ethical enlightenment, some ethical guidance, because that’s what we want. We want ethical guidance. You know, we know we want to matter. We know we do all sorts of things to matter.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Some people do very bad things in order to matter. Some of the people I’ve spoken to, they want power over others. They want dominance. They want to make other people life miserable. You know, these are bad things, right? They cause an increase in entropy. This is how I judge people. Are you increasing entropy or are you decreasing it?

Brian Keating:
Well, one of my favorite lines in the book that caused me to laugh out loud while I was playing golf with one of my kids and listening to the audiobook, which everyone should get, all versions of it. At one point you say, and I’m like about to hit my 16th shot on the hull, and you say that we burn 320 calories per day just by thinking. So if this book is pushing you to step up your thinking, even only to disagree, then you’re burning extra calories. So, Brian, you’re welcome. And so I read the book twice, Rebecca, so I could have that extra croissant. But it raises a real question. If people or situations are anti entropic. You just said, like, you judge people.

Brian Keating:
I’m going to ask you a very provocative question, which is, can people who don’t have children? And children could mean biological, but it could also mean ideological children. It could mean mentees, it could mean proteges. It could mean people that you sponsor, your big brother, big sister, do they matter less? I know it’s provocative, but can we say something about that?

Rebecca Goldstein:
Any mattering project that depends on making others feel like they matter less is wrong. I think I have a good proof. I didn’t put it in this book because my editors, they wanted the book to sell. There couldn’t be too much, too much philosophy. That’s right. But I think a very good proof for why we all morally matter. And I think I’ve actually even broached it here. There’s something ennobling about wanting to matter and try and devoting so much of our energy to these mattering projects.

Rebecca Goldstein:
We devote so much. It’s hard enough to live, right? But no, we devote so much of our energy to these mattering. Writing books, studying, bringing up our children, fighting for justice. All of you know, so many different Ways. What are the bad ways? Well, anyone that you know, any, you know, anything that depends on making others feel like they matter less, either those in your life or you know, ideologically or whatever. But I would also say that some mattering projects can be bad because they’re not actually working for you. I mean, sometimes as a professor, you know, you have students and they want to study a certain thing and you don’t know really why they want to study it. They don’t love it, they’re not doing well in it.

Rebecca Goldstein:
But somehow their mattering seems to depend on this. It’s kind of a responsibility to say, look, you’re very smart, you have many talents. I don’t think this is the best use of your talent. So to answer your question, here’s what I would say. Because I want to be extremely pluralistic and I know people who I think live wonderful lives who have people that they’re particularly caring for in their lives. That’s not, they’re just not caretakers. And I’m going to go back to Hillel the Elder, the great rabbinic sage of the first century. He said, you know, if I’m not for myself, then who will be for me? We can translate that into entropic language.

Rebecca Goldstein:
I have to be for myself. I have to be constantly fighting entropy and trying just to survive and to thrive. And because of that, you know, I pay a lot of attention to myself. I’m not, it’s not that we’re self centered but we have to feel ourselves deserving of attention, of our own attention. I mean our whole planning, our, our whole sense of engagement with life demands this. And so of course I have to be for myself. But if I’m only for myself, then what am I? Right? So the way I would translate that is if your Mannering project is only working for you and it is not having, it’s not helping in any way to enforce the counter entropic process which is life and flourishing. Then you’re selfish, you know, you’re selfish.

Rebecca Goldstein:
But that there are so many ways of doing that, you know, I mean even, you know, plant a garden in your, in a park, you know, so others can enjoy it. There’s so many ways that you can in some way be a force or save, save the animals, you know, Right. They’re suffering too. Right.

Brian Keating:
This book, we have to do what you’re not supposed to do, which is judge a book by its cover.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Hey book lovers, we’re judging books by the covers. We know we’re not supposed to do it, but I answer the impossible. There’s nothing to it. Let’s take a look and judge some books.

Brian Keating:
Take us through the book. The title, the subtitle and this map of meaning or this braided thread. It says Mercurial. I love the title, the COVID and the subtitle. So take us through it, Rebecca, please.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Yeah. The Mattering Instinct. The subtitle. How our deepest longing drives us and divides us and this divides us was very, very important to me. And that was sort of. After germinating these ideas for decades, what finally got me to write is what seems to be a crisis of mattering that we’re going through and you know, so dividing us to the point that it’s hard to have a civil union. I did want to offer this book as a way of perhaps being able to see the deep humanity in all of us and where we diverge. A lot of the divergence is in good faith, you know, to be able to see each other as generously as possible.

Rebecca Goldstein:
That was really the motivation because frankly, you know, trained in analytic philosophy, analytic philosophers like very little problems. Problems. Puzzles. We like puzzles. Puzzles and language are the best, right? I’m suspicious of big theories, but somehow this theory kept growing in my mind from physics to biology to psychology to philosophy to ethics, you know, and I was suspicious, I would say maybe afraid even to put it out. Like who the hell am I to put forth a broad theory? But I think it was really this sense of. It helps me when I get very angry when I’m reading the newspaper and it’s like, what’s wrong with my species? It helps me to go through the ideas that I work out here and to just to grow the generosity toward one another. So it’s in that spirit, and that’s how I understand this braid.

Rebecca Goldstein:
We’re together, we’re together. We’re so together. We are all, you know, the whole scientific story of how we come to have this longing to matter and to justify ourselves. It’s a common story, we share it. But then the way we appease this longing to matter, this mattering instinct, find a way of living with this self justificatory longing that requires us to have values, which is a leap. The values don’t follow from all of this. If there’s. There’s free will anywhere, it’s here where we branch off and we become undivided and go off in.

Rebecca Goldstein:
That’s what I understood by this. I had turned down a whole bunch of covers because it’s a very abstract idea and a lot of the covers, they gave me looked like Introduction to Differential Geometry. It just looked like a math book.

Brian Keating:
Fear that a lot of people have nowadays is about artificial intelligence kind of replacing what we do, that we have a sense of mattering from what we derive our matter. And you quote Freud in the book. Freud said all of life is work and love. And if AI can replace the work of knowledge workers like you and me and it can replace the love because of things like character AI and all these artificial relationships that don’t require me to go out and ask a woman on a date or nowadays for men. So I want to ask you the question, can AI have a mattering instinct or is it encoded in this wet supercomputer that we carry on our shoulders? You know, is it possible you’re right that AI is making everyone feel that redundancy is threatening to us, but will the AI rob ourselves of our mattering?

Rebecca Goldstein:
The two, you know, two different questions there, you know, one which is really, I think, you know, going to be upon us maybe already is, you know, that some of the most creative ways of appeasing or mannering instinct will be superseded by what AI can do. Prove math theorems faster, make discoveries in science, write novels, write music, paint pictures that have led to flourishing and led to great achievements that we can all take pride in. I take great pride in our species producing, you know, Bach and Shakespeare and Michael Jordan. I’m a big basketball fan. Here’s some. One thing I would say, you know, the heroics drivers, what I call heroic strivers, it’s really going to threaten them. I don’t think that the socializers are going to look to, I mean to some extent maybe for romantic partners or. But mothers are not going to have little babies.

Rebecca Goldstein:
AI agents that are acting like they’re babies. There’s. I don’t think this is going to happen. But I think heroic strivers, what I call heroic strivers, are going to be severe. One of the ways to be a heroic striver is ethically. And that will still remain to us. AI will not be able to do that. They could write our novels or our poetry or our music or prove our math theorems, but they’re not going to be able to do that for us.

Rebecca Goldstein:
And so wouldn’t that be a wonderful, wonderful turn of events of that’s if somehow there was a change, an incredible ethical change. And that’s how we got our status from how much good we’re actually doing in the world, how much counter entropic good we’re doing in the world. You Know, it’s, this is a big thing that’s upon us is all I can say. I can’t think of anything else. Not the industrial revolution, not the Enlightenment, nothing that has the possibility of so changing what we are and what we see our lives as being about.

Brian Keating:
Even the very name of our species. You know, Homo habilis meant, you know, tool maker or handyman.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Homo sapien means man who knows, Right.

Rebecca Goldstein:
So exactly, exactly where do we go

Brian Keating:
when we’re not the only things that know?

Rebecca Goldstein:
And your other question, if, you know, God forbid, if these agents begin to have a longing to matter, want to justify their own, you know, it would take self reflection, you know, of the sort that we have, you know, being able to step outside themselves and say, oh my God, I pay so much attention to myself, am I worth it? Do I deserve this? If they do this, then what we have are non cards, carbon based humans. These will be humans. And that means we’re going to have to think about their rights. We’re going to have a whole different way of having to think about ethics because we will have created, we’ve always been creating humans, but we will have created humans in a new way. You know, philosophers have been added for over 2000 years since the ancient Greeks. This is the moment for philosophers because these are philosophical problems. So show us what you’ve got. Philosophers, right? You’ve been thinking about this for 2000 years, show us what you’ve got.

Brian Keating:
Rebecca. This has been such a wonderful conversation. This book is incredible. It reminds me of a famous quote by John Archibald Wheeler, the man who coined the term black holes and matter.

Rebecca Goldstein:
I had him at Princeton. He was.

Brian Keating:
You did. Oh, you’re so lucky. Your career is legendary. I mean, I just love your writing and your books. But Wheeler said maybe you heard him say it, maybe not. He said matter tells space time how to curve and space time tells matter how to move in this book, the Matter Entirely was one of the most moving books to me and hopefully we’ll have many more. You’ll write many more books or we’ll talk about your other books too that have been so important to me and my colleagues and just the intellectual circle that I move in. But the movement of this book, it was surprising to me just how deep it is, how accurate it is and how precise it is.

Brian Keating:
It’s a wonderful book. It’s one of Apple’s most anticipated books of the year. It’s got, you know, hundreds of incredible reviews already. And I just thank you so much for sharing your time and just your ideas and your brain, your giant brain with the into the impossible. Audience thank you so much.

Rebecca Goldstein:
Rebecca oh, thank you so much. I knew it was going to be

Brian Keating:
fun and I’ll do it again sometime.

Brian Keating:
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein just used the second law of thermodynamics to explain depression, meaning, and why AI might create new species. If that changes how you think about what matters, hit subscribe and turn on notifications. Drop a comment which of the four types of person are you? And if you want to go deeper on entropy and explore a provocative new theory that perhaps there is a new arrow of time, click here and watch my interview with Michael Long. You won’t be disappointed, and your life may just keep it together a bit longer. Go ahead, click it now.