Neuroscientist: This Is How To Defeat Stress! Sam Harris

Neuroscientist: This is How to Defeat Stress!with Sam Harris Transcript Brian Keating:Hey, everybody. Welcome to a very special episode with Sam Harris. On the Into the impossible podcast, my longest episode ever. I’ve never done an episode this long. And this audio essay I’m about to give you is going to add to the length of it, but I wanted to express a little bit of my kind of inner workings and what goes through my mind when I’m doing a podcast with somebody, a big name podcaster like Sam Harris. And in that sense, it’s, incumbent upon me to try to do my best and make it so that people can really benefit from the wisdom of my guest. And and this time, I I kind of made a mistake as you’ll find out. I did not ask Sam, some tough questions, especially about Donald Trump. Brian Keating:And you’ll see almost every question he will reflect upon Donald Trump, even when we’re talking about, diverse topics as generative AI images and their wokeness. And, he’ll come back to Trump. He’ll talk about psychedelics, Trump. And we’ll talk about, we’ll talk about meditation, Trump. So the question is, how can we learn from such people that seem to be obsessed with people that, you know, many of my listeners and audience members support? So I don’t know. I don’t know the best way to, to attack that except that I feel I let down my audience. My my job in this podcast is to ask questions that you guys wanna ask, not to be a star, not to show off, not to do, kind of the, verbal gymnastics to ingratiate myself with my guests. If that’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. Brian Keating:And it didn’t really work with a big name guest like Sam Harris because I lost many, many subscribers on the podcast. And, it’s unfortunate, at least on the video, they tell me they’re unsubscribing. And I see a lot of unsubscribes from people that watch the clips on Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube and the shorts that I put up there prior to this episode being aired, today. So I lost many, many subscribers, and the the point of doing that is not to say that sad or I miss them. Although, you know, it’s it’s it’s always better not to lose subscribers than to than to try to gain more subscribers, you know, keep it to have in the leaky boat from going under. But in this case, you know, it’s not really my concern. I’m not gonna just do things to pander to what the audience, wants. I mean, obviously, can you imagine me going off and accusing him of Trump derangement syndrome? And it it would be it would be, you know, kind of a very brief conversation and a pointless one at that. Brian Keating:And so I didn’t do that, but I did fail. Of course, you know, he views Trump and he does it. You hear him compare Trump unfavorably in some ways to Hitler. And I had to bite my tongue really hard during that, but let him talk. And for all the things that he said and and done online and elsewhere, he’s incredibly courageous, and he just doesn’t give a you know what. But, you know, during those comparisons, I did fail to really ask the question that I should have. And I mentioned this in my Monday Magic mailing list, which you should all subscribe to Briankeating.com/list. Brian Keating:I mean to communicate with you guys, tell you about cool things coming up, like my upcoming appearance at TEDx San Diego, April 10th. But the, the main question I really should have asked him, and I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t, is knowing his, Sam’s, opinions about free will that we don’t have free will, how is it appropriate in any way or logical any way to ascribe these evil, you know, just malevolent, malicious notions to Donald Trump if they’re not caused of his own volition. He doesn’t choose to be this way according to Sam. I don’t believe that. And you’ll hear me pushing back extraordinarily hard but respectfully on that notion from Sam about the nonexistence of free will and the non behaviorist activities. Nobody behaves as if they have no free will as I mentioned with Sapolsky. And Sapolsky admitted as he said, quote, to my everlasting shame. So Sam, you know, is in a unique category in that he believes nobody has free will, and yet he believes Donald Trump is to blame for much evil and much more evil if he is elected again as president in November. Brian Keating:So we didn’t talk only about politics. You’ll find that we also talked about religion. And as my wife told me, you know, maybe I should have ended the episode early. This is as you can tell from the podcast, indication, a linked timer. So that was, embarrassing foible. Chalk it up to, you know, trying to let the guest speak and not interrupt too many times with my own opinions because I know most of you wanna listen to Sam. Although, it’s very very, pleasing to me how many of you just reach out and always say things, to me that give me such love and support, including that they loved how I brought out stuff in him that no other podcast host has brought out ranging from interviews he’s done with, you know, Ben Shapiro or Chris Williamson or Stephen Bartlett, Diary of the CEO. I don’t think that people ask the kinds of questions that I do. Brian Keating:And certainly, I didn’t get into, I don’t wanna have any gotchas and get some clips and stuff of him just, you know, going off on Trump. So, it just it’s kinda counterproductive. The audience hates it because they’ll be turned off because they hate people that they perceive as

Why There’s No Such Thing as Free Will w/ Robert Sapolsky

Why There’s No Such Thing as Free Willwith Robert Sapolsky Transcript Robert Sapolsky:I admit it to my intellectual shame and ethical shame because I respond all the time as if there is free will. Brian Keating:Today, we’re featuring renowned neuroendocrinologist, best selling author, and Stanford University professor, Robert Sapolsky. He’s one of Stanford’s top rated professors, and you’ll see why in today’s episode. Robert’s journey has led him from studying stress and neuronal degradation in wild baboons in Kenya to exploring the relationship between schizophrenia disorders and the emergence of a shamanism in the major Western religions. Robert Sapolsky:The most relevant thing is how I came about wasting the first 20 years of my life studying baboons. Brian Keating:But more recently, Sapolsky has plunged into philosophical waters, studying free will, or rather what he claims is the illusion and lack thereof. Robert Sapolsky:I was 14 when I decided there’s no free will. Brian Keating:He’s come up with a new narrative to describe the science of life without free will. In his book Determined, he combines neuroscience, anthropology, quantum physics, chaos theory, and philosophy to tackle some of the most important questions of the human species. You’ll see I push back on him with my requisite love and respect, but no one gets a free pass on the Into the Impossible podcast. I wanna ask the questions I know you wish you could ask my guest and you will. Today, he’s here to present his case and you’ll be the judge. Who’s right? Is free will an illusion or do we have control and are we the determinants of our future? Let’s go. Brian Keating:Robert, as you know, I’m a physicist. I’ve had many physicists. I love talking to physicists, but I also love talking to biologists, neurobiologists, and all sorts of folks. I always have a problem with these people, when I talk to people like David Chalmers, bang that it seems hopeless. Cosmology seems hard, but consciousness seems impossible. And to me, how can we understand the notion of free will if we don’t have a notion of consciousness that everyone accepts? So is that am I making a, fallacious experiment? Or is it really the case that you could not understand free will until you understand how consciousness itself emerges? Robert Sapolsky:Nicely. I think, fortunately, one could ignore consciousness and I completely agree with you. Once once a decade, I force myself to read a review paper on sort of neurobiology of consciousness and see with great relief that, like, it still isn’t making any more sense to me. And I don’t think it’s making any more sense to the people working on it, because it’s such a damn intractable problem. But fortunately, in my view, the issue of consciousness is not terribly relevant to assessing free will. And that’s because I think the problem people get into when believing in free will and just having such a strong intuitive sense of it is they get caught up in the notion that if there is conscious intent and there is conscious awareness that you have alternative behaviors available to you, that’s it. Case closed. That’s the requirements for deciding that there’s free will. Robert Sapolsky:And in my view, whether or not that intent is conscious or otherwise, whether or not there’s alternatives, whether your brain decided milliseconds before you were consciously aware that you had intent to do something. All of that is kind of cool and fascinating and has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not there’s free will. Because in my view, focusing on that is like asking somebody to read the last theory pages of the book and assess what they think of a book. Because what you’re doing there is not asking the only question possible which is, okay, hooray, you have conscious intent to do that. And when you did that, you felt a sense of ownership over your intelligence. Where did that intent come from? How did you turn out to be the sort of person who would have that intent at that moment? And it’s in that realm that I think one can find that there’s not a shred of space for free will to operate in. And all we are the outcomes of all of those priors that made us the sort of person who would have that intent in that moment. And the trouble is in that moment, it’s so tangible bang we’re so conscious of having that intent that we have to have done that freely. Robert Sapolsky:And that doesn’t begin to address the issue. How do you become that sort of person? Brian Keating:You mentioned person. And throughout the book, I can’t help but wonder because I I have a lot of respect for my consciousness colleagues. It’s hard not to when you talk to people like David Chalmers or Philip Goff. But again, they some of them resort to the last refuge of the scoundrel, and they will come up with they will come up with panpsychism. Now I’m a physicist, so I understand the properties of particles extremely well. And I understand that electrons are fungible. You’ve seen 1. You’ve seen them all. Brian Keating:They basically have 3 properties, mass, charge, and spin. So at what level can you obliterate the notion that consciousness perhaps is panpsychic, that it exists in an electron? Or where do you come down on the panpsychism? Because again, you mentioned person. And I agree we could talk about free will. But it would seem that you might have to extend it to, you know, to the top quark, if they’re right. So where do you come down in panpsychism? And before we pivot to the notion of what I call scale dependent, free will. But please, what do you think about, panpsychism? Robert Sapolsky:Basically, the notion of the emergence of things like consciousness, and I’m basically winging it here, coming out of  Brian Keating:They are too, by

Daniel Dennett: Do We Have Free Will?

Daniel Dennett:Do We Have Free Will? Transcript Brian Keating:Everybody, just a little bit of a somber note as we start the podcast, something that’s never happened before. But I have to report on the passing of today’s guest, Daniel Dennett, who I spoke to just a few weeks ago. I think this was his final interview on a podcast. He passed away today, I’m informed. This is Friday, April 19, 2024. And as you hear, I had such a great conversation with him. I already recorded an intro, both the video and an audio intro. And, I was just so delighted and touched by him and had so much fun with him. Brian Keating:He influenced me greatly even though I really only got to delve into his work in the last few, months before leading up to the interview before, of course, I knew about him. He’s a world famous intellectual and contributor to many fields of philosophy and many other things and so it’s a great shock to me. Brian Keating:I wanted to release this, as a, you know, token of my gratitude to him for this wonderful interview. You’ll see he, you know, he just come back from a dentist experiment and, you know, we’re talking and, you know, part of me feels guilty to have spent, you know, an hour and a half, 2 hours, whatever it turned out to be with, you know, the final, you know, weeks of his life. But on the other hand, it’s a great gift. And hopefully, his family will see this and share in the, in the delightful conversation that we had together. I view it as a great honor and privilege to have hosted him and especially now made more experiment by his passing. It’s, truly affected me, and I hope the interview will be meaningful to you as much as it was to me as well. So with that, I’ll start with the intro that we had planned before theorists sad, announcement came a few days ago before the release of this episode. And, and, I hope that Bang is is happy and resting in peace wherever he is. Thanks, Dan. Brian Keating:Today, on Into the Impossible, we welcome a renowned philosopher of the human mind, a man who’s a legend, a cognitive scientist, professor. He’s also a vocal theorists, and yet he makes common cause with people like me who call themselves practicing agnostics. Daniel Dennett is a legend, and he’s known as one of the 4 horsemen of new atheism, not the apocalypse. Daniel Dennett:Free will isn’t a metaphysical condition that you’re blessed with or not. It’s an achievement. Brian Keating:He’s been at the forefront of discussions on consciousness, free will, and the impact of Darwinian evolution on religious belief. His incisive wit, good humor, and keen intellect made him a must get guest on the Into the Impossible podcast. He’s been a major figure for decades in debates, conversations, and writings about the existence of God and the nature of belief and free will. His works are tremendously influential and they include Brains the Spell, Consciousness Explained, and many more that have provoked admiration, controversy, and challenged readers to reconsider their most deeply held beliefs about the mind and its relationship to the physical world. Daniel Dennett:It’s a user illusion. It’s not a bad illusion. It’s a good illusion. We are not the victims. Theory the beneficiaries of this illusion. Brian Keating:Today, I have the opportunity to explore these topics along with your questions for this phenomenal renowned professor. So without further ado, let’s jump right in and discuss this magnificent new memoir from one of the heroes of the new atheist movement. How are you doing, Dan? Daniel Dennett:I’m doing just fine. How are you? Brian Keating:It’s a great pleasure to, connect to you. I listen to your latest book in audio format, and, it’s not your voice. And so it’s good to hear your actual voice. And as you know, Dan, we love to judge books by their covers because what else do you have to go on on a Bayesian reasoning sense? So I want you to take us through the book, and it is unique in terms of all the 2 or 300 books I’ve had the pleasure of authors appearing on theorists the Impossible podcast. This is the, probably, the first one that doesn’t have a subtitle. So tell me tell me the origin of the title, the cover illustration art, and the absence of the subtitle. Take it away, Dan. Daniel Dennett:Okay. Here’s the book. I take it everybody can see it. Yeah. I’ve been thinking. I didn’t want a subtitle because I thought that’s enough. I wanna talk about my thinking and how I got there, and it’s not about the nonacademic, non research parts of my life. I deliberately didn’t want to go on and on about adventures I’ve had outside of academia. Daniel Dennett:I thought this is a book to talk about what I think is how I think I think and why it’s a good way to think. So it’s all about the wonderful thinkers who’ve who’ve helped me. And the the first thing to say is, if you if you wanna do some good thinking, surround yourself with the smartest people you can find and talk to them. And that’s that’s the trick. Brian Keating:And I’ve had, the pleasure of having a lot of brilliant thinkers on the podcast, 9 18 Nobel Prize winners. And many of your colleagues and friends and people that appear in this book in one form or another, including, folks like David Chalmers. And when I had David Chalmers on, he’s, he’s from Australia. And I said to him, you know, David, I I if I had the rock band C, also from Australia, and I had them on and I did not ask them to play, you shook me all night long, I would be a derelict

Richard Dawkins On Genes, Memes, AI, Religion, and Life Beyond Earth

Richard Dawkins On Genes, Memes, AI, Religion,and Life Beyond Earth Transcript Richard Dawkins:40%, 45% of the american people believe literally in Adam and Eve. Believe literally that the world is only 6000 years old. I mean, that’s a shocking figure and you can’t duck out of it. Brian Keating:Imagine being able to decipher the history of every creature ever to have lived on earth based on its evolution. Why are men’s sect drives so powerful? Why does this peculiar desert lizard have such intricate patterns on its back? And what does it tell you about its long dead relatives? Today we have the extraordinary privilege of exploring these topics and more with one of our greatest living treasures, Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most influential and thought provoking scientists. Richard Dawkins:Genes are predicting the future because they will not survive unless they get the prediction right. Brian Keating:Richard is a renowned evolutionary biologist, zoologist and author. A prominent figure in the new atheism. Along the other so called horsemen of the apocalypse past guests Sam Harris and the late, great Daniel Dennett. He’s well known criticism of creationism and intelligent design. Richard Dawkins:You can’t opt out of science because it goes against a traditional faith. Brian Keating:In our widely ranging conversation, we explore the evolution of sex drive and the aesthetic appreciation of genetics as well as the way genetics intersect in theoretical and experimental science. We talk about the potential evolutionary outcomes of artificial intelligence as it augments humanity. We talk about what it’s like to be a scientist and a scholar with a career ranging over 50 years. And we encounter along our journey some of the greatest figures in all of science. I know you’re gonna love this episode. So let’s go. Richard, I’ve always wanted to ask you, why is the sex drive in men so strong? I mean, surely we could have gone through the replication of the species if it were 10% less powerful, maybe even 25% less powerful. I mean, what accounts for the behavior in men such that they will copulate with female angler fishes in ways that allow them to be digested or ingested into their female target? Or, say, a male human being who buys a social media app when he already has a quarter trillion dollars and eleven or twelve children. Brian Keating:What is make? What is the reason, the biological necessity that the male sex drive is as strong as it is? Richard Dawkins:I think perhaps you’re misled when you say something like replicate the species. It’s not about replicating the species. It’s about replicating genes. And genes that are in males have a different way of getting themselves into the next generation than genes that are in females. And because sperms are so numerous and eggs are rather few in number, eggs are economically valuable. Well, endowed with food, sperms are not, and therefore they can afford to be much more numerous. What this means is that in general, throughout the animal kingdom, males can pass on their genes by mating with lots of females, whereas with a female, mating with lots of males doesn’t benefit her, because once she’s in a mammal, pregnant, let’s say, talk about mammals, there’s no benefit in mating with another male, whereas in the male’s case, once he’s mated with a female, there is some benefit in mating with another one, because you’ve got lots of sperms to go round. And therefore the male sex drive is when there’s any difference between them. Richard Dawkins:The male sex drive does tend to be stronger, males tend to be more promiscuous, tend to be more open to mating with lots of different females. Males tend to be less fussy about who they mate with, etcetera. So that’s, I think, the answer. It’s about gene replication, not species replication. Brian Keating:And if it were diminished by a few percent, would that affect the relative fecundity of replication of genes? Or is that level that we have it at as males? Does that seem to be a necessity, or could it be diminished a bit? Richard Dawkins:It varies from species to species. I mean, not all species are promiscuous. In the males, there are many species in which the sexes contribute equally to reproducing and to nurturing the young. And that’s different. I mean, different species differ according to their ecological circumstances. So you’re talking about diminishing. Yes, it does happen. It happens. Richard Dawkins:In some species, monogamous species, it is diminished. Yes. Brian Keating:We in physics, and especially our friend Sir Roger, have looked at the possibility of the destruction of information, what’s called the information paradox of black holes, where there’s actually pretty vehement disagreements, agreement between scientists on whether or not information is truly conserved, or can it be destroyed? And hawking radiation plays a significant role in that? Can genetic information be destroyed? Richard, is there a sense in the same way that at some level, you cannot destroy genes any more than you can destroy information, even when you throw it into a black hole? Richard Dawkins:I think it’s less philosophically interesting than in the case of the physics you’re talking about. The information in DNA is preserved in living organisms over millions of years. But if you want to actually look at the DNA itself, ancient DNA people who, for example, dig up neanderthal people and look at their DNA that decays. So there’s almost certainly no hope of Jurassic park of actually getting dinosaur DNA. It decays. You’re talking about 10,000 years, maybe 100,000 years, but not millions of years. So, yes, it does decay. Brian Keating:Some have suggested that DNA is sort of the nucleator, the originator of life in some sense. And I do want to talk to you about that. I’m here at UC San Diego, wherever Jeffrey and Margaret Burbage, the late, great Burbage duo, used to work. And they would bring,

What Do Our Genes Reveal About Our Past? w/ Richard Dawkins

What Do Our Genes Reveal About Our Past?with Richard Dawkins Transcript Brian Keating:Why does this peculiar desert lizard have such intricate patterns on its bang? And what does it tell you about its long dead relatives? Today, we have the extraordinary privilege of exploring these topics and more with one of our greatest living treasures, Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most influential and thought provoking scientists. Richard Dawkins:Genes are predicting the future because they will not survive unless they get the prediction right. Brian Keating:Richard is a renowned evolutionary biologist, zoologist, and author, a prominent figure in the new atheism along the other so called horsemen of the apocalypse. Past guest Sam Harris and the late great Daniel Dennett. He’s well known criticism of creationism and intelligent design. Richard Dawkins:You can’t opt out of science be because it goes against a traditional faith. Brian Keating:In our wildly ranging conversation, we explored the evolution of sex drive and the aesthetic appreciation of genetics, as well as the way genetics intersect in theoretical and experimental science. We talk about the potential evolutionary outcomes of artificial intelligence as it augments humanity. We talk about what it’s like to be a scientist in a scholar with a career ranging over 50 years. Then we encounter along our journey some of the greatest figures in all of science. I know you’re gonna love this episode, so let’s go. Brian Keating:So would you do us a favor of doing what you’re never supposed to do, which is to judge the book by its covers? Tell us the name, choice, the subtitle, and cover of art. Richard Dawkins:Well, here can can you see the book there? Or Yeah. Is that visible? Yes. Okay. Yeah. It will be. So that’s the front cover, and that that’s the back cover. It’s called the genetic book of the dead. It’s a kind of play on the Egyptian books of the dead which were, books that were buried with important people in ancient Egypt and as a sort of guide book to guide them into the into the afterlife. Richard Dawkins:The connection is pretty tenuous, but I suppose you could say that the genes Clarke, guiding the animal into, how to propagate the genes into not exactly the afterlife, but into the next the next generation. The subtitle is a Darwinian reverie, and it means it’s a kind of meditation on evolution. It’s it’s not a particular one theme. It’s a it’s a meditation by the author of The Selfish Gene 40 or so years later. And not, climbing down from The Selfish Gene, but expanding in various directions. The the art on the back cover is, cobbled together from the art in the book which is, drawn by Jana Lentsover, in color, computer art in color. The theme of the book, insofar as there is a single theme, is this. The animal, any animal, and its genome can be regarded as a description of a written description, a book about the ancestral worlds in which the animal’s ancestors survived. Richard Dawkins:The animal is a product of Darwinian natural selection of its ancestor’s genes. Those genes that were successful in the past in getting themselves passed on are the ones that survive to the present, obviously. And therefore, they can be regarded as a kind of description of those selection pressures, those worlds in which the ancestors survived and reproduced, were successful in reproduction, successful in attracting mates, successful in rearing offspring. The book begins the the first illustration in the book is a is a picture of a Mojave Desert lizard which has its desert environment painted on its back, so to speak. It looks as though somebody’s come along and literally painted the desert stones and sand on the back of the lizard. And you can see the same kind of thing in any camouflage animal, camouflaged Arthur camouflage, snail a camouflaged frog, etcetera. Natural selection has favored those ancestral animals that resembled their background, and in some cases, the resemblance is uncannily exact. It’s really remarkable. Richard Dawkins:It really does look as though somebody’s come along and painted the background, painted the desert in this case on the animal’s back. The thesis of the book is that this painting is not limited to the superficial skin of the animal but goes right through the animal. Every single detail of the interior of the animal must be a description of desert in the same kind of way, but more indirectly as the picture on its skin. So the chemistry of the blood, for example, if you were sufficiently educated in biology, which we’re not at present, then theorists of the future can would be able to read the biochemistry of the blood as being having a desert written all over it. And same applies to any animal. Any animal will have its environment, the environment of its ancestors written into every detail of the interior as well as the exterior of the animal. Brian Keating:It’s quite a beautiful book. It’s beautifully written and, I assume it will be beautifully bound. It looks like it it is behind you. I I did some primary source research. So I I looked up the Egyptian book of the dead, and how it begins, began. And it seems to begin with an homage to, to Ra, Akhenaten Ra, the the art whose disc, thou great god, art in my boat. Thou hast risen on the horizon. Thou hast filled the lands with radiance. Brian Keating:Thou art beautiful. Thou art young. Thou art mighty. Thou art born forever and ever. Are genes sort of like this all animating force or do they do they only live? Do they die? Are Arthur they like this this all powerful disk that illuminated the worlds of the Egyptians? Richard Dawkins:Well, that’s very interesting. They sort of are. I mean, that going on forever and ever is exactly what they do in the form of copies.

Will We Ever Find a Theory of Everything? Brian Keating & Curt Jaimungal

Will We Ever Find a Theory of Everything?with Curt Jaimungal Transcript Brian Keating:Experimentalists are kinda like exterminators. Our job is to kill off the bugs, skin theories, and destroy theories that don’t comport with evidence. We’re not required to create new theory, and also look, what are the limitations of experiments? So most of our time is looking for ways to prove ourselves wrong, which is Feynman said is the job to not be, to not be fooled. Curt Jaimungal:First of all, let’s get get through the questions 1 by 1. What are your goals? Explain to the audience what you do with your channel, what your goals are as you as a professor for your life. Brian Keating:Yeah. So, my basic dictum in life is that it’s incredibly short, and you have to make the most of it, and you have to do everything you can until we invent time travel. We have to do everything we can in order to make each moment as meaningful as invested in with meaning as possible. And so I do that in in different ways, different habits, rituals, practices. But one thing I’ve always wanted to do is to write a book and leave a legacy as a as an author. And I’ve learned so much from other authors that I wanted to start something, especially during this time of COVID, to give back to people that have been my silent mentors or distant learning mentors, namely folks like, as you mentioned, Michael Shermer has been on my podcast. We’ve had people like, we we had David Kaiser, a very famous and and well known physicist, all the way down to people that have influenced my life personally that haven’t written books, such as Jim Simons who we had on the podcast for Father’s Day. And, again, following Carl Sagan’s dictum that books are magic, books are proof that human beings can work magic. Brian Keating:You have an author’s voice, possibly a long dead author from communicating from 100 or maybe 1000 of years ago in the case of you know, I read a lot of the bible and and things like that we can get into. And, how it influences me is, you get to create this sort of, artificial I call it artificial wisdom. We hear a lot. I’m sure you’ve had a lot of contact with people that study artificial intelligence. What I’m more interested in is artificial wisdom, namely, how can you accrue wisdom without going through all the experiences that other brilliant people have gone through. So I love to, read books. I love to write books. I’m thinking about my second book now as we speak and putting it together based on a lot of the interviews and, things that have emerged from the conversations with these luminaries that I’m really fortunate to talk to. Curt Jaimungal:How are you defining wisdom in artificial wisdom? Brian Keating:So artificial wisdom is just kind of a playoff on artificial intelligence, namely that, that you have bang awful lot of knowledge that’s available to humanity through theory, Wikipedia, the Internet, etcetera. But, and in fact, I remind people that the word science in Latin means knowledge. It doesn’t mean wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to synthesize fat pieces of knowledge in a way that we don’t know but may be uniquely human. And I think synthesizing it to avoid we we I’m also a private pilot. I fly tiny little planes. And one of the things we say is, you have to learn from the mistakes of others because you won’t live long enough to make them all yourself. So that’s sort of the, you know, kind of the 10,000 hour rule applied to pilots, which I think is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s examples of of, you know, truly outstanding pilots are those that have obtained 10000 hours. Brian Keating:And you can only get that far if you’ve done things and benefited from others’ wisdom. The situation that they’ve been in so that you don’t have to go through it. So it’s not just about knowledge. I mean, I think Derek Sievers once said, you know, if it was all about knowledge, we’d all be billionaires with 6 pack abs. There’s an abundance of knowledge. Wisdom is synthesizing it, distilling it, and catalyzing the many disparate pieces that you get into some coherent form of of of life message or with or vision, which is what I try to maintain. Curt Jaimungal:Have you heard of John Varecki? Brian Keating:No. I haven’t. Who’s that, Curt? Curt Jaimungal:Cognitive science from U of T. So plug plug there. Because I also interviewed there’s 2 interviews with him on my channel. Oh, cool. He extensively studies wisdom from a cognitive science perspective. I think he made Brian Keating:Yeah. I would definitely like to. Yeah. Okay. Maybe we’ll get in touch. You’ll help me get in touch with him. Curt Jaimungal:Them. Now you mentioned that the mind might not be the human mind might be uniquely predisposed or capable of wisdom that is the distilling of so much knowledge down to something that’s practical, which implies a goal, and then we can talk about what where do you get those goals from later when we get to the biblical section. Do you happen to do you think that the mind can be mechanized? That is what I mean is that a machine can simulate the mind. Brian Keating:Yeah. So I’ve had some conversations with people about this. And, actually, the most interesting people I’ve talked to are people, in the realm of music and the arts. I I interviewed a a controversial, but interesting very interesting person named Zubie. He’s a musician in the UK, that, he does a lot of, rap and improv based rap music. He’s also very knowledgeable about, jazz, etcetera. And I also interviewed a very my one of my best friends, Stefan Alexander, who’s a professional jazz musician, but

Extra Dimensions Could Change Everything We Know About Physics | Dan Hooper

Extra Dimensions Could Change Everything We Know About Physics with Dan Hooper Transcript Brian Keating:Is the universe igniting extra dimensions we can’t see? Could a graviton, a particle we don’t even know exists, change everything about the cosmos? Dan Hooper:The only particles that can move through the extra dimensions of space are the gravitons. Brian Keating:And what does the future of physics hold if the standard model should happen to fail? Dan Hooper:It would actually surprise me if the standard model of cosmology holds up to scrutiny over the next decades as we learn more and more about this piece of time. Brian Keating:I had the pleasure of exploring all these advanced concepts and more with the renowned cosmologist and physicist Dan Hooper in his former office at the University of Chicago. Now he’s moved to the University of Wisconsin Madison, go Bang, where I spent some time at the end of my graduate student career. In this thought provoking conversation, Dan and I challenge and explore how hidden dimensions and mysterious particles can fundamentally challenge our understanding of the universe. So let’s dive deep into the fabric of the cosmos. Brian Keating:Welcome to a very special episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with a colleague and friend and a past guest on the podcast, doctor Dan Hooper of the University of Chicago and Fermilab for now. Can we say what else is happening? Dan Hooper:It’ll be announced next week. Brian Keating:So something else is happening. By the time this comes out, it’ll be out there. We’re actually in person even though it looks like we’re recording on Riverside. Say hi to Dan. There he is. So this is dueling laptops across the beautiful dot eduroam network. So we have a new tradition since you’ve been on for your last book, Brian Keating:At the Edge of Time. What was it? Dan Hooper:At the Edge of Time. Yeah. Yeah. Brian Keating:Phenomenal book. Everybody should pick that up. 1 of your how many books have you written now? Dan Hooper:3 plus the textbook. Brian Keating:Awesome. And then the textbook is right here, and I was gonna buy a copy, but you saved me $75. This is an incredible, addition to the oeuvre of graduate student level cosmology bang actually covers and updates a classic that we’ve talked about before, which is, Colvin Turner. And I’m interviewing your colleague, Rocky Colb, tomorrow on the podcast along with Wendy Freedman while I’m here. You guys are blessed. So what we do on the podcast is we love to do what you’re not supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So Dan, take us through this wonderful book’s title. And, there’s no subtitle, but what does this cover? Are these epicycles? What’s going on? Dan Hooper:You know, I don’t know if it’s, like, literally Keating. But so Fermilab for many decades had an artist in residence, Angela Gonzales. She did many of the posters and much of the artwork around the lab. But she retired and then passed away years ago. But this is actually a piece that she did before working at Fermilab. And to me, it just struck me as evocative of cosmology, even if I can’t point to the objects in the painting and say, like, these are such and such. You know? Yeah. It’s more Yeah. Dan Hooper:More abstract. Brian Keating:I’ve been looking through a couple of your recent, research. I should also mention you’re the host of the, of the Why This Universe. Mhmm. Dan Hooper:Along with Shama Wegman. Yeah. Brian Keating:Shama Wegman. She’s in Columbia? Dan Hooper:Well, she’s in New York, but, she she’s, working in tech these days. Brian Keating:Oh, she is? Okay. Great. I’ll put a link to the podcast down below. You should all subscribe. It’s one of my favorites. But today, I wanna talk about a research paper that we read about as a way to kind of do, do the impossible, which is to kind of break down some of the most advanced concepts, which actually have some of their origins a 100 plus years ago. And that’s a Kaluza Klein theory in this new paper that you have about extra dimensions and gravitons in the early universe and how they could potentially decay. And I wanna ask you, first of all, Kaluza Klein, can you explain that in, you know, relatively straightforward terms? What is it what were Kalusa and Klein trying to do, and what has their legacy been? Dan Hooper:So it goes back into the 19 twenties. These mathematical physicists, Theory Kalusa and Oscar Klein, independently made contributions to this idea that you could maybe fit the equations of electricity magnetism, what we call Maxwell’s equations, into the general relativity framework that Einstein had for gravity. But to do this, you needed a 5th dimension. So the 3 plus one normal dimensions of space and time along with a 5th dimension. Now if you casually look at our universe, it doesn’t seem to have an extra dimension of space. So they tried to to make this all hold together consistently by saying, well, that that big dimension is curled up in a little circle. So imagine that we’re taking our macroscopic universe and imagine that if you went far enough in that direction, you’d eventually come out the opposite side. Okay? So that’s what we call compactifying a dimension. Dan Hooper:So imagine now that there’s a 5th dimension and it’s compactified, but it’s compactified in a very theory short distance. So you kind of go around in a very rapid circle and it’s so that circle is so small that you don’t notice it. This is the sort of thing that Clarke and Klein posited to try to make these theories play well together. Turns out not to work for a bunch of technical reasons and I don’t think it’s super enlightening to go into it. But jump several decades later and people in

Is There EVIDENCE for Intelligent Design? | Luke Barnes and Jay Richards

Is There EVIDENCE for Intelligent Design?Luke Barnes and Jay Richards Transcript Brian Keating:We share 99.8% of our chromosomes with apes. What we’re made up of makes up something like 0.001% of all the energy in the universe. To say that we’re insignificant because we aren’t as big as a gas giant planet, we share the same number of chromosomes as a fruit fly, those are empty soulless arguments. Peter Robinson:I’m Peter Robinson. A senior lecturer at Western Sydney University in Australia, the astrophysicist Luke Barnes received his doctorate from Cambridge. Doctor Barnes is co author of A Fortunate Universe, Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. The cosmologist Brian Keating completed his doctoral work at Brown. He now serves as professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego and is director of the Simons Observatory in Chile. Brian Keating:Simons Observatory? Peter Robinson:Simons Observatory. Did I mispronounce both? It’s the Simons Observatory in Chile. Brian Keating:From the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory in Chile. Peter Robinson:I will never forget, and no one will anybody else. Doctor Keating is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor. Jay Richards holds a doctorate from the Princeton Theological Seminary. He serves as senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and as a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Doctor Richards is the co author of The Privileged Planet, How Our Place in the Cosmos is designed for Discovery, a book that will celebrate its 20th anniversary in, Jay Richards:August of 2024. Peter Robinson:August of 2024. Excellent. Alright. Cosmic Fine Tuning, Luke Barnes in A Fortunate Universe. The fundamental particles from which everything is constructed and the fundamental forces that dictate interactions appear to be fine tuned for life. You have before you a total layman. What do you mean? Luke Barnes:Well, the first thing to realize is that you’re made out of fundamental things, physical things. And one of the things we’d like to know as a general, you know, curiosity about the universe is why are they this way? Why aren’t they some other way? And a and a way that we could start to get a handle on that question is, well, let’s take our best physics and let’s see what would have happened. Let’s, in theory, just change some of the fundamental numbers. Yeah. Let’s let’s turn some of these dials according to our best theories that, you know, these dials can be changed as far as we know. Everything’s still mathematically fine. And what we find is that it’s okay. Some of the dials, not much of a change, but there’s a couple of very important ones that involve the the the particles, the forces, and and the universe as a whole, where seemingly rather small changes would make a dramatic effect to the way our universe would have played out. Luke Barnes:So, for example, you’re made out of a variety of very interesting chemical experiment, but change those numbers and suddenly particles don’t stick to each other. You can’t make complexity anymore. These are the sorts of things that happened. So suddenly you change this dial and and some particles that were would have held together, that do held together in all of us suddenly don’t don’t do that anymore. Things decay, things fall apart. So our universe, the ability of us here to do this, the ability of stars, planets, galaxies to form, it’s a rare talent. It’s not one that every universe that we can calculate, that we can imagine has. Peter Robinson:Okay. So am I allowed to leap ahead to the idea that it is all as if it were designed for us, or is that a very is that is that theorists that’s an unscientific proposition I suppose. But, so what do you wanna say? You wanna say, we should not just take it all for granted it could have been wildly different if even a few of how many variables by the way? Give me some idea. Luke Barnes:Within the standard models, there are 31 numbers you need to to describe the way matter works and the way the universe as a whole works. Within those 31, a lot of them are just sort of weird properties of neutrinos, particles you’ve never heard of and not made out of, so who cares? With there’s a core of, I would say, maybe 10, where interesting, dramatic, and often catastrophic stuff starts to happen if you if you mess with those dials. Peter Robinson:Alright. From the fortunate universe again, we go from the universe to this planet, or the difference between this planet and the universe. We usually take air for granted, but the density of the air you are breathing is 10 to the 27th times the average density of material in the universe. Luke Barnes:Yeah. Peter Robinson:So we just got theory, very lucky. Luke Barnes:Well, did we? There’s one point of Keating, are we in a lucky place in the universe? And and I don’t think there’s a reason to treat the surface of the Earth as a random spot. Of course, we’re where the matter is, where we are, you know, we’re made out of it. Peter Robinson:Right. Of Luke Barnes:course, we can only be in an environment where there is enough stuff for me to be made made out of, and I’m 10 to the 30 times more dense than the the universe, and that’s, you know, Keating worse with time. The, the point is is not so much that we’re in a lucky place relative to space in the middle of nowhere. Although, there’s some interesting things about that. The point is that will the will the universe that where we change these stars, will it make a place where there can be structure at all? Because you can make a universe. I could make it very easily. Just turn a dial a little big, and

The Higgs Affects Everything in the Universe with Matt Strassler

What is the Higgs Field?with Matt Strassler Transcript Brian Keating:That’s not actually what people wanna know. People wanna know how do things get mass from a field. Matt Strassler:Had physicists been wrong about the Higgs boson all this time? What if it’s not what we think, but something far more elusive? What does the origin of mass in the universe have to do with music? Brian Keating:The universe is not playing music. The universe is a musical instrument. Things happen Matt Strassler:on it. Music is happening. Is empty space truly empty? Or is it a strange sea with invisible forces shaping our existence? What if particles of matter like us are just waves moving through a cosmic ocean? Here today to discuss all these fascinating questions and more is theoretical physicist, Nat Strassler, who takes us on a journey into the unseen depths of the universe. We’ll dive deep into the mysteries of quantum physics, the nature of space and time, and how waves, not just particles, are actually the building blocks of reality. Brian Keating:I don’t think you can define any new concept without an analogy. You build on analogies in creating knowledge. Matt Strassler:That will reveal how the Higgs boson, often oversimplified, may hold the key to understanding all of the forces and fields that impact our existence. Buckle up, take your Dramamine, and get ready for a wild voyage on a cosmic sea as we take a journey stranger than science fiction where space isn’t empty and the cosmos just might be playing its own symphony. Let’s go. What I wanted to do is start with a reaction. I’m gonna call this game one of the games I like to play is Deepak or Matt. And I’m going to read you 2 quotes. 1 is from Deepak Chopra, past guest, many time guest, friend of the show, and one is from you, Professor Matt Strassen. And I’m going to ask you to tell me which is which or who said what. Matt Strassler:Okay. Here’s the first one. Vibration is the inherent dynamism of the universe knowing itself that creates the creative force that we experience through the universe as a cosmic And then the other quote goes like this. Like any musical instrument, the cosmos resonates with a pattern of frequencies, one that can be translated directly into the bricks of the material world, the quietest tones. The universe rings everywhere in everything. Okay. So which is you and which is Deepak? Brian Keating:Well, the second one is me. And the difference the similarities are striking, but the differences are also extremely important. The, differences lie in the details and in the fact that the words that I used are based on mathematical equations. I am essentially translating the mathematical equations of physics into a language that everyone is familiar with, which is the language of music. And so I would say that, you know, the the notion that the universe has something to do with resonance and vibration and music, these are not obviously new ideas. These go back to ancient times. They are one of many, ancient ideas. But this is an ancient idea which turns out in some way to be instantiated in the equations that particle physics have, have found really work for describing the world. Brian Keating:And their differences are as important as the similarities. That is to say, there really are things that are similar to what Mr. Chopra would say, but then there are things that are different. And, a cosmic is not one of them, for example. Matt Strassler:He brings up something that you make clear, the the origin of the word wave in romance languages comes from undulate, ahunde, wave. And he brings up, in Sanskrit, the word for vibration is spanda, which means the creative pulse of consciousness. So, there might be more here than meets the eye. I want to do what you’re never supposed to do which is to play a game called judging books by their covers. And you know you talked a little bit about probability and experimental level. You know, so they say don’t judge a book, but what the hell else are you going to go on? You know, I mean you and I are just meeting each other now and I wouldn’t have read this. Brian Keating:The pre publisher knows that people judge a book by its cover. Matt Strassler:They always do. In fact, if you try to sell this book which I would never do, God forbid. Let me see what it’s going for on Amazon. No. This is a this is just a wonderful book. If you try to sell it and it doesn’t have the cover, it’s worth 10%. And I always used to say, you know, when I wrote my first like, who cares? Like, how much dust is raining down on books, like, throughout Brian Keating:the like, it can’t be that. Matt Strassler:And, of course, you know, dust is the villain of my my first book. But I wanna ask you, can you take us through the title, the subtitle, and the beautiful artwork on the cover, Kind of Blue? I I was thinking of the musical notes from Miles Davis when I looked up. That’s Stephan’s influence on that. Brian Keating:That’s a connection. Yeah. I haven’t thought about that. Waves in an impossible sea is very much what the book is about. A space time, the the the essence of the universe is in some ways like a sea, but it has properties that no physical material sea could possibly have. And so it really is in some way extremely mysterious and, that seems an appropriate way to characterize it. And waves in that sea are what material things like ourselves are are made from. And so the point of the book is to explain how it can be that we could actually be made from waves and how ordinary life could somehow

Did JWST Just Solve the Biggest Crisis in Cosmology? | Wendy Freedman

Did JWST Just Solve the Biggest Crisis in Cosmology?with Wendy Freedman Transcript Brian Keating:Did the James Webb Space Telescope just solve the biggest mystery in cosmology? The discrepancy between different measurements of the Hubble constant has been causing a lot of ajda in the astronomical community for the past few decades. But Wendy Freedman, a renowned astronomer and professor at the University of Chicago, is at the forefront of efforts to alleviate and solve this cosmic conundrum. Wendy Freedman:Data are convincing. I wanna be convinced by data. Brian Keating:Known for her pioneering work on the Hubble Key project, the very reason the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in part, and her significant contributions to measuring the Hubble constant and properties of stars throughout the universe. Freedman is now leveraging the cutting edge capabilities of the Webb Space Telescope to tackle the Hubble tension head on. Wendy Freedman:The only way that we will understand how we’re limited by systematics is to make the measurements very precisely in each case. Brian Keating:With decades of experience and a deep understanding of the intricacies of cosmology, of measurements, of accuracy and precision, there’s simply no one better to shed light, if you will, on this issue. So join us as we take a deep dive and perhaps resolve the tension, the frustration, and the anxiety plaguing astronomy today, courtesy of the brilliant Wendy Freedman. Let’s go. Brian Keating:Wendy Freedman, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, your second time on the podcast. Wendy Freedman:Glad to do so. Brian Keating:Yeah. And thanks for hosting me in your beautiful office here at the University of Chicago. It’s, it’s always a pleasure to come here. I get to experience humidity whenever I come from Southern California, where you used to live for many theory. Wendy Freedman:I did. Brian Keating:Director at Carnegie. So we’re gonna talk about your your career and your current research and this really cool looking model in the background over there that you’re so intimately connected with. But the theorists thing I think I would be interested in talking about here are these recent results that you have, been participating in and leading to large part with the James Webb Space Telescope. So how did that come about? Because I understand from my friend, Adam Rees, who’s been on many times, it’s very difficult to get time on the James Webb Space Telescope. They don’t even know of all your accomplishments because everything is blind. The the the pros walk us through the process. How did you come up with the idea? What is it telling us, and how is it perhaps resolving the Hubble tension without the need for a psychotherapist? Wendy Freedman:You’re you’re right. It’s very difficult to get time on JWSTs, highly oversubscribed Brian very competitive. At this juncture, we’re trying to measure the Hubble constant more accurately than it’s ever been possible to do before. And as you know, there’s this possibility that there’s a discrepancy between the nearby values of the Hubble constant that we measure locally and what you get infer from measurements of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. So we need higher accuracy than we’ve ever had before in the local distance scale, because the microwave background observations now are so precise that we need to make sure that, locally, we can have a a comparable competitive decision to see if the discrepancy is real. So our, focus with JWST, and we wrote a proposal that depends not only on Cepheid variables, which we use, for example, with the Hubble Key Project, which the CHUs team also uses, but including also 2 other methods, the, tip of the red giant branch and a new fossil carbon stars we’re calling JAGB stars. Yeah. And the premise is that because there are systematic uncertainties in any method, they all have their own. Brian Keating:Yep. Yep. Wendy Freedman:The only way that we will understand how we’re limited by systematics is to make the measurements very precisely in each case. So you need distance indicators that are very precise internally and compare those. So that was our proposal to measure the distances to nearby galaxies that have hosted type 1 a supernovae. None of the methods I’ve just described goes out far enough that you can get into the smooth Hubble flow. The cure your motions induced by gravitational interactions are too large to measure it accurately at the 1% level that is now a goal. Brian Keating:Mhmm. Wendy Freedman:And it’s a very challenging goal. Let me ask you. I’m sure. Yeah. And and so what we’re doing is measuring the distances to the same C using these theory techniques. So we didn’t know, are they all gonna agree? Will there be 3 different answers? And will there be an outlier? Let’s see. And and if there’s systematics, we’ll try and cover that. Brian Keating:Any and so do the tip of the red giant branch, the carbon stars, the cepheids, do they have kind of orthogonal systematic effects? Do they share common effect systematic effects, you know, that that have to be mitigated and you learn something from one branch and apply it to another one, or are they distinct? Wendy Freedman:Well, the nice thing about them is they’re computers different populations. So Cepheids are young stars. We find them in regions nearby to where they actually form because they haven’t had time to, move away, diffuse away from the locations where they were formed. And so we can only find Cepheids in the disk, and these are young stars. The tip of the red giant branch, we can find them in the disk and the halo, but the advantage of the tip of the red giant branch is that you don’t have to work in the disk because in the disk, you have lots of dust, You have high surface density of stars, so you have potential crowding and blending of the objects, and that means you can’t measure