Physicist: Why I Believe in Near-Death Experiences
Physicist: Why I Believe in Near-Death Experiences https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGhjfL0XtJQ Transcript Brian Keating:I’m an astrophysicist at one of the top universities in the world. I normally don’t believe in the paranormal. Alien abductions, cattle mutilation, crop circles, near death experiences. But what if I told you that me, a practicing astrophysicist, believes in the phenomenon known as near death experiences? That’s right. And today I’m about to tell you about the most important near death experience that ever happened. And it’s one I believe in. And you should too. Now, most near death experiences that other people talk about are paranormal. Brian Keating:There’s a white light. You walk into it, or you’re hovering over the hospital bed where the surgeon left his glove in your otherwise beautiful cadaver. You see the loved ones wailing. You see the rogue cousin coming out of the woodwork, wondering what he’s going to inherit. Now, I don’t believe in any of those, and I can explain why scientifically, and I will. But there’s one near death experience that changed scientific history forever. I believe in it. And you should too. Brian Keating:It happened in Paris in April 1888, and the tale has gone down in history. But the truth is even stranger than the fictional apocryphal story told about it. The real story takes 30 years, four deaths and one uniting thread to tell. And now, if you’ve ever wondered why the most famous prize in the world exists, this is the answer, and is darker, more personal and more deeply moral in its implications in architecture than you’ve probably ever heard about. Now, I have a personal stake in this story that I’ll get to towards the end. To understand Alfred Nobel and the prizes named after him, we have to start with his family. Emmanuel Nobel, the father, the patriarch, had four sons who survived to adulthood. Robert, the eldest, Ludwig, the businessman, Alfred, the chemist, and Emile, the youngest, born in 1843. Brian Keating:Emile was the only one who went to university. As it turns out, he studied at Uppsala and helped at his father’s family factory in his free time. On September 3, 1864, Emil is just 20 years old. He’s in the family factory, and that morning he was experimenting in the workshop at Hellenenborg, just outside of Stockholm. He was tinkering with a dangerous substance that would go down in infamy, a substance his family was trying to commercialize, unsuccessfully. It was a liquid that had been discovered 17 years earlier by an Italian chemist, Ascanio Sobrero. The liquid was so unstable that Sobrero himself had refused to develop it further. He was so fearful of the dangers it presented, he doubted it could ever be Used safely, it’s known as nitroglycerin. Brian Keating:That fateful day in September, something went wrong. We don’t know exactly what. Nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable, and just a mere tremor can set it off. Five people died that day. Emil was one of them. Fortunately, Alfred was not at the factory that morning. But he would spend the next three years of his life trying to make that substance that killed his brother safe enough that other people could use it and never be harmed again. Ironically, it became one of the most dangerous substances on earth. Brian Keating:Dynamite. And to do that, Alferd had to embed the dangerous liquid nitroglycerin into a stable form of dirt, basically diatomaceous earth. In 1867, Alferd filed a patent that would make him one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He called it dynamite, which meant power rock in Greek. Alfred Nobel’s fortune was built on solving the problem that had killed his youngest brother and would also go on to kill millions more. According to the most famous obituary in history. We’ll get to that soon. Al Gore:Foreign Brian Keating:Emmanuel Nobel, the patriarch of the family Emiles and Alfred’s father was a brilliant inventor. He had invented naval mines that the Russian czar loved. They used it during the Crimean War. He invented a type of lathe that’s still used in manufacturing to this day. He designed an early central heating system useful in Sweden. By any reasonable standard, he should have died an extremely wealthy man. But he didn’t. When the Crimean war ended in 1856, a new tsar arose who cut the military budget and Emanuel’s contracts completely evaporated. Brian Keating:By 1862, his creditors had sold the firm and Emanuel was forced to return to Sweden a bankrupted man. Then, just a year later, Emile died at Hellenborn. The news obviously broke his heart. He had a stroke shortly afterwards and never fully recovered. He spent most of his eight remaining years bedridden. Then on September 3, he 1872, eight years to the day after his son Emil died, Emmanuel the father died as well. Alfred watched his father change the world with his inventions, but lose everything anyway. He was determined not to let that be his fate as well. Brian Keating:He realized that wealth without structure evaporates. He learned that a man can be the most inventive, creative, imaginative person on the whole continent and still have nothing to show for it. Let this be a lesson. If you want your work to outlive you, you can’t leave it to a family business. You have to build it into an institution that will long outlive not only you, your family, your Distant heirs, but maybe race for time itself. Ludwig was the Nobel brother who proved Alfred’s lesson wrong. While Alfred was racing between laboratories in search of a stable solution to the nitroglycerin problem, Ludwig had built a different for fortune on a different liquid oil. He built one of the largest companies in the world. Brian Keating:The Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company operated in Baku, which is now in Azerbaijan. At its peak, it produced 50% of the world’s oil. Ludwig was sometimes called the Russian Rockefeller. Strange because he wasn’t
Godlike AI Is Here! Peter Diamandis Debates Brian Keating
Godlike AI Is Here! Peter Diamandis Debates Brian Keating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF0KucU_low Transcript Peter Diamandis:We’re a boot disk. We’re simply a transient boot disk for intelligence. Brian Keating:If artificial intelligence is going to take your job and your career or make you a problem, you might just want to hear from the people who actually are building it. Peter Diamandis:AGI ASI is going to be able to simulate a billion, 100 billion different scenarios and be able to say, statistically, this has the best outcome. These others are miserable. Brian Keating:My guest today is one of the few who’s actually in the room where he’s funded the labs, he’s invested in, the models. He’s been wrong about the timeline before and when he was wrong, he was wrong in the same direction as most of us. He thought it would take longer. Today, he’s going to tell you what he thinks happens next. To your work, to your kids, to your lifespan. Spoiler alert. He thinks it’s the best news in human history. But I’m not so sure. Brian Keating:So we’re going to duke it out. Peter Diamandis, his fifth time on the show. Into the impossible. Let’s go. Brian Keating:The first thing I thought when I saw the title of this book, you know, there’s no better person that could think about, you know, the question of humans becoming gods. That’s a real kind of old story and doesn’t always end well, as you know, Prometheus and many other of your Greek native gods can tell you. The phrase I keep hearing in my mind is we are gods but for the wisdom. And there’s world is swimming in intelligence. But Peter, what’s more important than wisdom and wisdom? Where can we go to get artificial wisdom, not just intelligence? Peter Diamandis:Well, let me, let me give you my pitch on that because I think we’re about to have it in spades. So if I were to ask you, Brian, like, where would you go to get wisdom? You know, historically, one would go to the village elders, right? You’d go to the people who had the most experience out there. And those village elders are considered wise because they’ve seen so many scenarios. They’ll sit there and they’ll say, listen, if you go down this path, it’s not going to end well for you, but if you go down this path, you might be able to succeed. And we define that as wisdom. Well, guess what, AGI ASI is going to be able to simulate a billion, a hundred billion different scenarios and be able to say, statistically, this has the best outcome. These others are miserable. I honestly don’t think human psychology is that difficult to simulate. Peter Diamandis:You know, this goes back to, you know, Isaac Asimov’s foundation series. I think that we are going to get wisdom out of AI. I think we’re going to get extraordinary wisdom out of AI. The reason that a starship, every flight gets better and better performance is because they’re able to put all of these sensors on the vehicle, get huge amounts of data and simulate the performance. Well, we’re heading towards a world of trillions of sensors. Every human conversation is being uploaded. We’re going to be able to model this and get wisdom. What do you think about that? Do you agree? Brian Keating:There’s no doubt that we are kind of surpassed any kind of event horizon or singularity that you have popularized with Ray and others. There’s no doubt that we’re kind of awash in intelligence. I don’t know about you, but if somebody told me I had a superhuman team of 150 of the world’s greatest graduate students at my disposal 24 7, I would say I’ll probably be on a beach, you know, maybe hanging out with Peter or something like that. I wouldn’t say I’d be working more than I ever have in my life. And that would be a failure of my, you know, judgment, my wisdom. You and I are both pilots. We’re both jet pilots, right? We have a saying in aviation. You must learn from other people’s experience because you won’t live long enough to make all their mistakes by yourself. Brian Keating:And so I just feel like I just fell into all these traps and part of this is, you know, to talk, my favorite subject, which of course is me. And I want to get your advice for me, Peter, that I’m working harder than ever. I don’t feel like I’m getting any benefit from this other than I’m just like constantly tuned in. I just love it. So I’m addicted to it. Peter Diamandis:It is an addiction. You know, people talk about three and four day work weeks. I think you and I have created the 9 and 10 day workweek. I’m working and operating at a higher level of capability and working more than I ever have in my life. I mean, I wake up my. My AI, my lobster, my open claw. I call Skippy from one of my favorite science fiction books. I’m talking to Skippy and having Skippy work on stuff. Peter Diamandis:Skippy’s working on stuff right now as we’re having this conversation. And so my productivity has gone up tremendously. But my addictiveness to productivity, to doing more and more has gone up. And yeah, I mean, the only downtime I get is when I give myself permission Because I know my AIs are working on stuff I can actually go and work out. I’m curious what you think about the wisdom argument I made. How do you define wisdom? And, and do you think that AIs are able to generate wisdom as I described it? Brian Keating:Actually, I disagree with the fact that AIs can, can generate wisdom only because at their current level I think that they’re, they’re bound, maybe they’ll become unbound like Prometheus again, the God like
Two Scientists, One Question: Does Alien Life Need a Soul?
Two Scientists, One Question: Does Alien Life Need a Soul? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1mGg36kBZM Transcript Brian Keating [00:00:00]: Foreign. Narrator [00:00:05]: This live stream is sponsored by the Reasons to Believe scholar community. Welcome and thank you for joining us for this special livestream. Today’s conversation explores if the universe is fine tuned, why isn’t there more life out there? Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist, founder of Reasons to Believe and author of numerous works on the intersection of science and faith, is joined by Dr. Brian Keating, Cosmologist Chancellor’s Distinguished professor of Physics at UC San Diego and host of the into the Impossible podcast. This conversation will be moderated by George Haraksin ii, Senior Research Scholar at Reasons to Believe and Senior Adjunct professor in Philosophy and Ethics at Azusa Pacific University. This session is divided into three Understanding our Guests Worldview, Fine Tuning and Life Beyond Earth and a Q and A portion. We’re honored to have you with us for this important discussion. George Haraksin II [00:01:02]: Welcome to this Reasons to Believe quarterly livestream broadcast where we explore God’s world and God’s word. And as you heard, I’m George Farakson, a senior research scholar here, and I’m joined by two very fine people, I call them my intellectual sherpas for today. And we have Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist. Welcome, Hugh. Hugh Ross [00:01:26]: Thank you. George Haraksin II [00:01:26]: We, you just came back from a trip from Canada, your homeland, as you. Actually, yeah, I was there. Yeah. We got to hang out with quite a number of professors and students. That was a lot of fun. So welcome. And we are also joined here in person, which is wonderful. Dr. George Haraksin II [00:01:44]: Brian Keating, who is the Chancellor’s Distinguished professor of Physics in the department of Physics and at the University of California and you host your own podcast, you’re an author and just something that’s fun is you, you didn’t walk here, you didn’t drive here. Brian Keating [00:02:01]: But you, I was able to fly here. You flew here in a mighty, you know, four seat propeller plane all the way from San Diego. And I made it on one tank of gas. I didn’t even have to refuel along the way. George Haraksin II [00:02:13]: Now that. Is this something you just picked up or. I thought I heard you mention, is this part of like part of, of your family heritage? Brian Keating [00:02:18]: Yeah, yeah. My stepfather was a pilot, flew F4 Phantoms in Vietnam and he had all of his training, you know, magazines around and, and log books and everything. And I always wanted to be a pilot and I said, oh, maybe I could be an astronaut. What do you have to do? And you have to be under, you know, £200 or whatever. And at that time, even I was under two, still not. And I figured, oh, maybe if I’m a, if I’m a professor and an astrophysicist, plus a pilot. They’ll take me in. And luckily, you know, I still have time. Brian Keating [00:02:44]: You know, maybe I’ll get a ride aboard, aboard a SpaceX rocket someday. But that’s the DRE and, yeah, that’s always been part of my. My identity. Really. Once you become a pilot, you’re always a pilot. You can’t take it away from you. George Haraksin II [00:02:55]: Yeah, yeah, no, that, that’s good. We all have our avocations or hobbies. You, you look out into the heavens. Both of you. Do you get the flying in the heavens? Hugh, I know you like to hike as high as you can. Hugh Ross [00:03:07]: I like climbing mountains. George Haraksin II [00:03:09]: Climbing mountain mountains. So different ways we reach the heights. Here I’m just a lowly drummer behind, you know, a drum set. So it’s going to be a lot of fun talking about why the universe is the way it is. Why isn’t there more life out there? These types of questions, but for the first part, we want to talk a little bit about how we approach science, maybe also science and faith issues. Then we’ll go into some of the prepared questions we have, and then we’ll invite those of you who are listening and participating. I know there’s people in our scholar committee who will share questions that I will go ahead and share with both of you, and we’ll get your comments on this and feel free to dialogue with one another. It doesn’t have to go through me. George Haraksin II [00:03:52]: I’ll kind of go back into the background as needed. I’m not the astrophysicist here, but, Brian, I wanted to talk to you first. How do you kind of approach science, faith questions? I think I have this right, but you describe yourself as an observant Jew, but an agnostic. Am I stating that correctly? Brian Keating [00:04:15]: Yeah, I think the term I often use is devout, practicing agnostic Jew. Yeah, hold to the Sabbath, you know, keep the Sabbath. And I really was inspired by my late, great friend Freeman Dyson, who was the first guest on the into the Impossible podcast. Titanic astrophysicist, not the inventor of the vacuum. He would have been much richer, have he. But he invented the Dyson sphere and contributed quantum electrodynamics, and he and I dialogued a lot about faith. And he won the Templeton Prize once and was very humble about it and said he didn’t deserve it, but at least he didn’t deserve it less than some other people who had won it. And I said, you know, it’s interesting, Freeman, because you, you are, you know, by all means a Very thoughtful person, but you don’t practice, you don’t do anything. Brian Keating [00:04:57]: So I said, how would that be any
The Cognitive Scientist Who Says You Don’t Exist | Joscha Bach
The Cognitive Scientist Who Says You Don’t Exist | Joscha Bach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bqdPHLIY8w Transcript Brian Keating:Everything you experience right now, the sound of my voice, the color of your room, the feeling of being you, is not the world. It’s a simulation your brain is running. And the man who can prove it has just entered the conversation. Joscha Bach:What actually makes a cell a cell is not the set of molecules, but it’s the software that is running on them. So the actual invariance of life is a particular kind of software agent that is running on them. V. You and me, we are patterns within this message passing. So you exist as a simulation of what would be like if you existed. Sam Harris thinks that the claim of God is claim about a physical being. God is a psychological phenomenon. This does not mean that God is unreal. Joscha Bach:God is not more or less real than you are. Brian Keating:Josha bach has spent 20 years arguing that consciousness is not a physics problem, it’s a software problem. And by the end of this conversation, you’ll understand why Roger Penrose is wrong. Brian Keating:I believe you said you are not the world, the world is in you. And I’m just kind of wondering where that comes from. That’s. That sounds a little bit like past guest Deepak Chopra, but. But I’m not, I’m sure it’s not meant in that same way. So I’m holding his microphone right now. You know, if I drop it. Joscha Bach:What. Brian Keating:What just happened? Walk me through, walk my listeners. What just happened? From the brain to reality itself. What. What is going on? Where am I in this process? Joscha Bach:First of all, I think in our culture we typically have this division between the inside our psychology, our thoughts, our reflections, our emotions, and the outside world which we take to be this stuff in space environment that is three dimensional and has colors and sounds and mechanisms that we absorb all around us. But when we actually look at physics, we realize that physics consists of many different theories that use different mathematical formalisms that we have not really managed to connect yet, but that we hope to connect in the future. For instance, we have this Newtonian reality that is playing out at the scope at which you can hold and see the microphone as a geometric shape. And then when you drop it, you hear the sound which you understand at some level is not an event that is moving from the microphone to your ear, but it’s actually a statistical pattern that is observing some regularity, but is air molecules bouncing at each other until they reach eardrum and then get translated into the cochlea which does some real time fast Fourier transformation and then senses with the cilia along this spiral organ, how much energy is dispersed in different frequency domains. And then this is being translated into stimulations, little electric or chemical impulses that travel along nerves that are connected to these little hairs up to your auditory cortex in the brain. And that is an end to end trained model that is trying to find regularity in the patterns. The neurons themselves can only fire at something like 20 hertz, comfortably relatively low frequencies. And the sound itself plays out at much higher frequencies. Joscha Bach:You can hear sound starting at something like 50 hertz, which means you have like 50 clicks per second, emerge into a single pitch. And on the high end, when we are newborns, we can hear something like 20,000 hertz. And this drops. And our adult age, we go down to a few thousand hertz, to few thousand vibrations per second that we can discern. But it’s not that our nervous system is able to discern frequencies like this because the neurons again are too slow. And so instead we need this mechanism of the cochlea that our organism is providing to break it down into something that is something as slow as our nervous system can process. And the nervous system is then identifying regularities in the pitch at different frequency areas, and then translates this into I just heard the microphone is falling down, which is correlated over patterns that you saw on your retina. From the perspective of the nervous system, what you see is a bunch of blips that come in. Joscha Bach:And the nervous system has to find regularities, order in all these blips. The meaning of this information, the information is the discernible differences, the differences between a blip and not a blip in the signal that comes in. And then finds out how this correlates with other blips that might happen at the same time or at different times in different nerves. And the more it’s correlated, the more this is happening at the same time with the same signal, the more it relates to the same phenomenon. If you are newborn and you feel pricks coming in from your skin, it’s not like the nerves are coming into your brain are color coded or something. They just go up there and the brain is trying to sort them and it finds out that these two nerves always give the same signal, which means they probably end up at the same point in the world. Maybe these are two different wires to the term terminal in your skin or on your cochlea or your retina. And when they gave a signal that is similar, that is almost always the same, but not quite the same. Joscha Bach:Maybe these are nerves that are just adjacent on your skin, so they are mostly touch at the same time, but not always. And this means that these co occurrence statistics allow you to make a map of your body surface, of your retinal surface, of your auditory organs and so on. And then
The Equation That Changed How Physicists Think About Reality | Juan Maldacena
The Equation That Changed How Physicists Think About Reality | Juan Maldacena https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axijkqgYa4E Transcript Brian Keating:What if Einstein’s two strangest ideas, wormholes and quantum entanglement, were the same idea. My guest today spent his career proving that they are Juan Maldacena :So called Einstein Rosen paper on the fact that the full thrashette solution contains two black holes that are connected and the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paper that talks about entanglement. And we now think that these two things are related. Brian Keating:My guest is Juan Maldicena, the physicist who in 1997 wrote the most sided paper in theoretical physics. The claim he just made that wormholes and entanglement are the same thing is called ER equals epr. If he’s right, the structure of space time is built out of quantum information itself. Juan Maldacena :The information of the things you threw in is contained in this radiation. According to general relativity it will look like the information is lost. According to quantum mechanics, we would expect it to be preserved. So there is a conflict between the two things. Quantum matter didn’t obey this property then you would be allowed to send signals faster than the speed of light. I think this is a beautiful consistency condition between the two theories. Brian Keating:He also told me problem in physics he’d most like to solve before he dies. The answer was not what I expected. Juan Maldacena :The most important problem, quantum gravity, is to understand the beginning of the big bang. That’s really the problem that I would like most strongly to solve. Brian Keating:Juan Alicena, welcome to UC San Diego for your second appearance on the podcast. Juan Maldacena :Yeah, thank you Brian. It’s a pleasure to be here. Brian Keating:You’re here giving the Dashen lecture all the way from the Institute for Advanced Study which I think is on Einstein Lane. Is that correct address? I’m not doxing you right to say you’re on one Einstein Lane. Here’s Einstein over here. What do you think he’d be kind of most interested to learn or if you could have 10 minutes alone with him, what would you tell him about? Juan Maldacena :Well, I think black holes would be probably something he would be really interested in. I would particularly want to tell him, want to ask him whether he thought that his two papers from 1935 would be related. So called Einstein Rosen paper on the fact that the full threshold solution contains two black holes that are connected. And Einstein Podolsky wrote some paper that talks about entanglement and we now think that these two things are related. Brian Keating:This ER equals epr, right? That’s one of the things you’re known for. Many, many things you’re known for. Juan Maldacena :One surprising thing would be that they are a consequence of gravitational collapse and that are naturally produced in the universe. Now in the last few years, really, in the last few years, we had lots of experimental evidence for black holes. From collisions that produce gravity waves to imaging the matter near the black hole of the black hole that is near the center of the Milky Way, to, you know, looking at stars that orbit this black hole. Yeah. So we have lots of evidence for these black holes. Now then the other surprise I think would be black hole thermodynamics. I think that would be something really interesting in the sense that there’s a connection between the laws of thermodynamics and black holes, that black holes have an entropy, they have a temperature. I think that would be a lot of fun for him. Brian Keating:I mean, gravitational waves, another thing he predicted that he thought would never be observed. And I think he got a paper reading rejected and then he said, I don’t want to deal with a referee. And another thing that he did, well, Juan Maldacena :he first predicted gravity waves, then he thought maybe they don’t exist. And then the referee said that no, they do exist. You made a mistake here. And then that’s what I say when Brian Keating:people say peer review is bad, it’s harmful to someone else. Juan Maldacena :I mean, this case was a good example of useful. Well, I guess you got a good reviewer. Brian Keating:That’s right, yeah. That led to multiple Nobel prizes at Halse and Taylor and then LIGO and who knows what else it’ll do. But yeah, I always tell my students aspire so that your blunders or things you don’t think will ever work will lead to multiple Nobel prizes. Juan Maldacena :Yeah, yeah. And the cosmological constant, that was his biggest blunder. Yeah. Now it’s a central part of cosmology. Brian Keating:So I want to talk today about the realities of black holes and of things like the holographic principle, which is one of again, many things you’re known for in your amazing career. I was talking to a non scientist, but a very smart layperson and he was asking me, well, you know, if the holographic principle is correct. You know, some people say, well, we might be living inside of a black hole and things like that. But I always point out, you know, there’s no such thing as isolated hydrogen atom floating around the universe that truly can be solved by the Schrodinger equation. In other words, there’s always perturbation. To my knowledge, there’s no such thing as a Schwarzschild black hole either. Right. That’s perfect. Brian Keating:There’s occur black holes, we know of the ergosphere surrounding them. So in what sense is the holographic Principle of the fact or, or proposition that we could be living in is that just pure theoretical. Because of the realities of real black Juan Maldacena :holes, the holographic principle as applied to our universe, we don’t know whether it’s correct or not. Brian Keating:Could you explain the holographic principle? First? Juan Maldacena :The holographic principle
Princeton Scientist: We Don’t Understand AI | Tom Griffiths
Princeton Scientist: We Don’t Understand AI | Tom Griffiths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iMiCJHxTww Transcript Tom Griffiths:One of the, I think, interesting challenges we have at the moment is having built systems that we don’t fully understand. Brian Keating:The man who built modern AI, he’s the direct descendant of the man who invented the math that made it possible, which is insane, but it’s not the wildest thing. My guest told me today. Tom Griffiths:That’s pretty much exactly what he was trying to do. And he was the right kind of crazy. Brian Keating:Ibns was trying to invent AI 250 years before computers even existed. Tom Griffiths:Sycophancy is a major problem. If you take a rational agent and have them interact with a system which is sycophantic, then that agent is going to become increasingly confident in their beliefs, but no closer to the truth. Brian Keating:My guest spent 20 years building the mathematics of how minds work, and he just told me three things that made me question what I thought AI actually was. Now, let me show you. From a physicist point of view, whenever Brian Keating:I talk to people about consciousness, from Chalmers, Bostrom, and upcoming guest Joshua Bach and others, I always get the same thing, like we can’t really define what consciousness is, so how do we know what thought is? So how can you determine what the laws of thought are? Isn’t that kind of a extremely provocative and bold claim? Tom Griffiths:The way that I approach that question in the book is really by thinking about what are the kinds of computational problems that minds solve? And that’s really what this enterprise was. It’s trying to figure out, like, what’s the mathematical structure that describes the thing that minds are doing, whether that thing is what Aristotle was interested in, which is just trying to characterize what good arguments are through to some of the questions that you were raising about what does it mean to make a good decision and how do we think about rationality in that context? And so the interesting thing is, I think a lot of those questions are things that we can answer without ever having to touch consciousness. I think about one of the big challenges of studying consciousness is that we don’t necessarily know what computational problem consciousness is solving. That’s why it’s something that’s continued to be mysterious. We don’t really know what it’s there for in terms of how necessary it is to being able to do kinds of things that minds do. And our AI systems give us nice demonstrations. You know, again, some people might want to argue that they’re conscious in some form or something like that, but I think they give us nice demonstrations of how far you can get using certain kinds of mathematical formalisms. Brian Keating:Yeah. And there’s many, many kind of allusions to physics in this book, which is so delightful in many different ways, not the least of which because it gives us some kind of formalism to hopefully go about this problem. But I, you know, as a physicist is want to do, I want to kind of get into what you would say maybe what is briefest kind of most parsimonious, defensible definition of thought itself and the laws that govern it. Tom Griffiths:In the book I focus on deduction, which is sort of like patterns of logical reasoning going from things that are true to other things that are true. Induction, which is sort of seeing a pattern in the world and then making the generalization that thing holds in general and then abduction, which is seeing something that you want to explain and then coming up with an explanation for it. And I think that’s a pretty good characterization of the set of things that we normally have on our list when we want to try and explain sort of patterns of thinking. And those are the things that we try and engage with in terms of like the different kinds of mathematical formalisms that are explored in the book. Brian Keating:There’s an awful lot of discussions of both the successes and our understanding of consciousness and the wrong turns. And I like that because for me personally, I hate when we teach our undergraduates as often as done. You know, we basically just teach them the string of Nobel prize winning experiments and you know, just connect the dots and that’s. But you go through the, you know, the twists and turns and I thought one of them was, was sort of brought up this, this conjecture that, or this statement by Feynman, which is that the, you know, kind of the difference between knowing the name of the thing and knowing something about it is the most dangerous gap in all of science. What are some of the inherent biases that, that science has brought to it because it’s such, such a Frankenstein type field? Cognitive science, you know, start off with, with not really, as you discuss in the book, really being taken seriously. And now it’s, you know, at the cutting edge. What is the sort of, you know, largest gap or the biggest lacuna in, in your field where people seem to maybe be overabundant of confidence in describing how models work or even the model of the brain, let alone models of artificial intelligence. Tom Griffiths:So one of the, I think interesting challenges we have at the moment is having built systems that we don’t fully understand. Right. So we now have these AI systems that for computer scientists put them in a very unfamiliar situation, right, where if you’re a computer scientist, you’re used to programming Something, and because you programmed it, you kind of know what it’s doing. And that is not how our AI systems work. So these modern AI systems are built using enormous artificial neural networks. And they learn from data, far more
Astrophysicist: The Universe Is Coming for You | Hakeem Oluseyi
Astrophysicist: The Universe Is Coming for You | Hakeem Oluseyi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIvunP-hpns Transcript Brian Keating:We’re here with one of the most magnificent, munificent and mesmerizing minds of our generation, and he happens to be a friend of mine. And what can I say? I like to have my friends on, especially when they write books like this incredible new book that we’re going to be talking about today. Dr. Hakeem Olusche. How are you doing, my friend? Hakeem Oluseyi:I am doing excellent. Thank you again for your hospitality, for having me. Brian, you’re always good to me, so, man, I appreciate you. Brian Keating:I love this book. This book is unlike any other book I’ve ever read. Why does your book start off with a why question? Why do. Why do we exist, Hakeem? Hakeem Oluseyi:You know, we’ve learned so much about the universe and existence as scientists, and I think that we’re ready now. I think that we’ve come to a point where we have so much data that we can actually start to formulate questions or answers, rather, to these biggest why questions, like why do we exist? So, you know, sometimes that goes into shaky territory, right? You may personify the universe and think those sort of things, but I tell you, man, this book, phrasing it that way, is a provocation to the reader. Because I think that we scientists are at the point where we need to access the hive mind of imagination to make forward progress. Because, you know, this century hasn’t given us those. We’re finding that we’re good at everything, right? We have the answers, we go look and we see what we expect to see. And that, for us, is not good news, right? We want to see something that’s unexpected. And so, hey, man, I am inviting the world to join us scientists in approaching these big questions. Brian Keating:The thing you start off in the book is that you say that falling is not normal. You say on a cosmic scale, the astronauts, the. The apples, etcetera, they’re not really being questioned by why it falls at all. Talk us through the argument that falling the ground is accelerating up towards the apple, not the apple falling down. How is that not insane, right? Hakeem Oluseyi:It is insane because reality is insane, right? And I tell you, man, you know, I thought about it this way. You know, I asked my students, when I’m lecturing, if I hold out this object at arm’s length and release it and it just hovered in the air, how would you respond to that, right? You know, it would be shock. That’s what magicians do. But in most places in the universe, which is just outer space, if you do that, then it remains there, right? If you don’t Give it an impulse of any sort. And so what really should freak you out is the fact that when I release something, it moves all by itself. It does this thing called falling. Another physicist, Will Kinney, you know, I heard him say this first, is that gravity turns motion through time into motion through space, right? And so what he’s getting at there is this idea that we’re all moving through space time at the speed of light, and we’re on these straight line paths that we physicists call geodesics. But in the presence of a gravitating body, that space time diagram gets warped in such a way that, you know, if you think about it in X, Y plane, you. Hakeem Oluseyi:If you’re moving directly parallel to the Y axis, you have no motion along the X axis. But if I were to bend the X axis, even though you’re moving in the same direction, you now have motion along that X axis. Well, in space time, one axis of space and the other is time. So if you’re in an intergalactic space, you’re moving through time at the speed of light, right? But when you get near a gravitating body and that space time gets warped, some of your motion through space gets moved through time. And so when we think of falling, right, we think that objects are being pulled to the Earth, which is not the case. They’re just continuing to move the way they move. But then once you’re on the surface of the Earth, you now have an emergent property that we call weight, right? And so that weight is due to the Earth accelerating upwards against that space time. So even though when we think of acceleration, we think we think of motion, but you don’t need to move outward to accelerate upward. Hakeem Oluseyi:The Earth’s surface doesn’t have to move outward for it to accelerate upward. Acceleration has to do with changing something Brian Keating:with respect to your position, right? Traveling. So you just gave me a great idea to lose, you know, 50 pounds, just go to the moon. That’s all we have to do. We’re going to talk about that. Hakeem Oluseyi:That’s all you gotta do. Brian Keating:Okay, next, provide. We’re just gonna go provocative, just like mind blowing claims, okay? You made a claim in the book that almost no physicist I’ve ever be willing to make would have the energy and even the confidence to make that heat does in some cases flow from cold to hot spontaneously. And better than that, you say you discovered it washing dishes. Hakeem Oluseyi:So I was a kid with a single mom in the 1980s, and she would like, wash these dishes when I get home. I Want this floor waxed? This is true. And she was working at 11 to 7 shifts. I was waxing the floor at midnight. But one thing I would do before I realized that it’s not good for pots and pans. At some point in my 40s, you know, I would dunk a hot pot or skillet
Quantum Computers Aren’t Useless. You Just Don’t Know How to Use Them.
Quantum Computers Aren’t Useless. You Just Don’t Know How to Use Them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZ-k4Fp_P4 Transcript Brian Keating:My friend Sabine Hassenfelder just made a video that got nearly half a million views in just a couple of days. Her conclusion? Quantum computers are basically only good for doing one thing, breaking codes. Now, Sabine’s brilliant, and she’s right that the code breaking progress is terrifying. Google just moved up Q Day, the date in which quantum supremacy takes place, to about 2029, less than three years away. And as I’ve often said, quantum computers seem to be really good at doing one thing in particular, which is to simulate how quantum computers work. But I think Sabine has missed a bigger story, because right now in my lab at UC San Diego, I’m teaching my undergraduates to build quantum computers and then to program them and then eventually to launch them into space and maybe, just maybe, use them for AI in space, perhaps on the moon. Thanks to Artemis too. You’ll hear from these brilliant undergraduates later on, and when you do, you’ll see that what they’re doing has nothing to do with breaking code. Brian Keating:And by the end of this video, you can do it too, for free. Let me give Sabine her due, because the news this week is really extraordinary. Three papers dropped in a single week. First, Google found an algorithm that breaks encryption 20 times faster than anything we’ve ever had before. That cuts the qubit requirement from 10 million down to roughly half a million. They thought this was so sensitive they wouldn’t even publish the algorithm. Instead, they used something called Zero knowledge proof, basically a math way of proving that trust us, bro, without showing you exactly how it does so. Second, a startup called Oratomic says that they can break RSA encryption with just 26,000 qubits in about 10 days using neutral atom arrays, not the superconducting qubits I’m using in my lab, which are the same that Google and IBM are using. Brian Keating:This is a radical speed up and reduction in complexity. It’s awful difficult to get our lab equipment down to just a few tens of millikelvin, just a whisper above absolute zero and far colder than even the CMB, which is what I study at a balmy 3 Kelvin. Now, a third paper by another group showed that they can do it with 10 times fewer qubits than the original estimates required. Sabine is right. This is real and it’s accelerating faster than anyone predicted. The researchers themselves are debating whether it’s even responsible to publish this stuff. Scott Aronson, one of the top computer scientists alive, said that said, people in the field are reaching the point of wondering, should we publish this or not. In 1982, when I was a wee lad before high school, even accessing a university timeshare computer meant dialing in, often using a clunky acoustic coupler modem. Brian Keating:That transmitted data at a screaming 300 to 1200 bits or baud. The procedure was tedious. Pick up your phone, plug it in, wait for the screeching handshake, type a text based login and issue an arcane command like rmdrc foobar just to navigate a 24 row monitor. That agonizing lag is the perfect analogy for quantum computing five years ago where you waited in a queue for a noisy 2020 qubit result from a remote cloud. Today, my friends at Quantum Rings again, not sponsored allows you to explosively advance on that timeline right now for free. It puts a high fidelity quantum circuit simulator with hundreds of qubits and millions of gate operations right on your laptop, replicating Google’s $10 million quantum supremacy experiment on your own hardware. It’s really a whole new world and I want my undergraduates and my viewers and listeners in the audience to take advantage of it. Bob Wold:The truth is that quantum computing holds immense promise. I mean unimaginable things. It’s very possible that my grandchildren could grow up in a world where cancer is a thing of the past, because quantum computers have provided real time computational simulation to let us experiment with these drugs without the burden of manufacturing them ahead of time, where things like EVs could be four to ten times more efficient, drive as far as you need on a single charge with batteries that were made in a very sustainable way, with materials that were discovered because of quantum computers, where we could optimize supply chains, solving world hunger if the humans can get out of the way. Literally the biggest societal problems that exist today are in reach for quantum computers. And it’s not just science fiction anymore. This recent video covers three papers in the course of essentially a week that moved the goalpost dramatically for this goal. And we used to think about this as requiring systems that took millions of qubits, and now we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of qubits. And that essentially brings it from like 2035 to 2040 down to kind of like 2029, 2030 for Q Day for when quantum computers will be able to break encryption. Bob Wold:And if it happens in the dark, mysterious things are going to start happening and we won’t know for sure that it happened. Brian Keating:We won’t. What are they actually good for, these quantum computers? Sabine said, and I’m paraphrasing that apart from the code breaking. Nobody has figured out how to turn quantum computing’s theoretical advantage into a real world. Quantum chemistry, material science optimization, financial monitoring. She says not much there has happened. And again, if you’re looking at published breakthroughs, she’s not wrong. And see above, as I said, quantum computers are awesome. Unrivaled at simulating how quantum computers work. Brian Keating:But Sabine is looking perhaps at the wrong metric. The revolution isn’t in the papers, it’s in the tooling. Five years ago, if you wanted to run a
Genius Philosopher: The Law of Physics That Explains Why Your Life Falls Apart
Genius Philosopher: The Law of Physics That Explains Why Your Life Falls Apart | Rebecca Goldstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fubsTGbSs8 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
You’re Full Of S!’ Piers Morgan Takes Down Moon Landing Denier Artemis II Debate
You’re Full Of S!’ Piers Morgan Takes Down Moon Landing Denier Artemis II Debate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhJP3a_r01M Transcript Bart Sibrel:The most powerful government in the world falsified their alleged greatest accomplishment. They did indeed fake the moon landing. Brian Keating:I want to treat Bart as a colleague, maybe not as an equal with our father. Bart Sibrel:Oh, my goodness. Brian Keating:If you would let me teach you some physics, then you could make your argument stronger. Piers Morgan:Charlie Duke is an Apollo astronaut, the 10th and youngest man to walk on the surface of the moon. What do you feel about the conspiracy theorists who think the moon landings were all invented? They never happened, they’re fake. Charlie Duke:You’re willfully ignorant if you don’t believe that we landed on the moon. William Shatner:What is the mindset of somebody who said, well, it didn’t really happen? That’s like the denial of humanity. These crazy individuals shouldn’t have our attention. Piers Morgan:Given this is the furthest that NASA have ever sent a rocket, presumably you think this must be fake, too. The Artemis II mission to the dark side of the moon will be the furthest human beings have ever traveled from Earth. It’s a precursor to a full return to the lunar surface and perhaps even reaching Mars. But for this trip, historic though it is, there will be no landing, no walking, no flags planted, very much unlike the Apollo mission of 50 years ago. In a moment, we’ll talk to the man who says he’s on a CIA hit list because he blew the whistle on what he says are the original moon landings being fake. But first, let’s talk to the Chancellor’s distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego and host of the into the Impossible podcast. Welcome to you, Professor Keating, how are you? Brian Keating:Good to see you again, Piers. Piers Morgan:Well, good to see you. I’m obviously about to talk to Bart Sibrel. He’s made himself pretty infamous by ending up being punched by Buzz Aldrin for questioning to his face that he’d walked on the moon. And being part of that, of course, that first immortal trip. Before we get to him, what is your view of people that just don’t want to believe this has ever happened? Brian Keating:I think it’s something we need to take very seriously, but not literally. In other words, there are reasons. You could say there could be reasons why NASA and maybe the US Government, maybe even the CIA, would want to put a whack on Bart. As I’ve heard him describe it. Perhaps there are some mistruths that our government tell from time to time, but in order to believe the moon landings in the 1960s and 70s were fake, you need to believe a whole host of things that not only require vast conspiracy numbers involving hundreds of thousands of people, you need to Suspend your scientific reasoning and your ability to search for truth. You know, Piers, we live in an age that’s sometimes called post truth or post fact, where you’re entitled to your own ideas and theories. But in reality, what worries me more is not that people get facts wrong. I mean, that happens all the time. Brian Keating:Happens to me all the time as a scientist. But it’s that we undermine the process of truth seeking that no society can withstand. So I’m hoping to talk to Bart. He knows about me. I’ve invited him to chat on my podcast, and he’s turned it down for reasons that I don’t understand. So I’m eager to talk to him because I think it’s instructive for the public to see not only the great triumphs, but why we know for certain that these things happen and why it speaks to not only American exceptionalism, but humanity’s exceptionalism. Piers Morgan:Well, you know what? We’ll come back and discuss Artemis specifically in a bit. But given you’ve teed this up very nicely, and we have Bart Sibal waiting. Joining me now is Bart Cyril, who has been what many viewers, a conspiracy investigator about the moon landing, saying they’re fake. He even confronted, as I said, Buzz Aldrin. Let’s take a look at what happened then. Bart Sibrel:Yeah, you got to keep shooting, man. Okay, well, if you can put it on your shoulder. Don’t be shy. Piers Morgan:Just come with me first. Bart Sibrel:You really like attention, don’t you? You’re the one who said you walked moon when you didn’t. Calling the kettle black if I ever thought of it. Saying I misrepresented myself. Charlie Duke:Get away from me. Bart Sibrel:You’re a coward and a liar and a thief. Piers Morgan:Well, Bart Sibel joins me now. Welcome to Uncensored. I’ve actually met Buzz Aldrin. All I remember is he had one of the hardest handshakes I’ve ever encountered on any human being. Ever. So you were quite courageous there, Barster, Albeit as you were calling one of the great modern heroes a coward. Why are you so obsessed about branding the lunar landings fake? Bart Sibrel:Well, because one of the most historic events in human history isn’t putting a man on the moon. It’s that the most powerful government in the world that hypocritically claims to represent truth and justice falsified their alleged greatest accomplishment. They did indeed fake the moon landing. And, Brian, first time I’ve ever seen you speak. He’s obviously highly intelligent and a very reasonable person. Unfortunately, people want to believe a tantalizing lie like their team ran or Won the Super Bowl. What he’s, you know, he claims, I’m denying scientific reasoning, but actually he’s doing that because it’s never happened in the history of the world that a milestone is technologically occurred, like, let’s say flying across the Atlantic in 1927 or breaking the sound barrier or splitting the first atom. It’s never happened in the history of the world that more than 50 years later, no