Part Two: Quantum Mechanics Breaks Our Idea of Time. Dr. Stephen Wolfram Explains How the Universe Contains Infinite Timelines Unfolding Simultaneously in a Multi-Threaded Structure

What if everything you know about reality, intelligence, science, aliens, and even your own body…is wrong? In this mind-expanding conversation of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Stephen Wolfram — the legendary computer scientist, theoretical physicist, mathematician, founder of Wolfram Research — reveals how the groundbreaking technologies he created are re-shaping our understanding of the universe itself. We dive into the limits of science, the secrets of biological evolution, and why computational irreducibility may explain why some mysteries of nature can never be predicted, only experienced. Dr. Wolfram breaks down whether his computations suggest humanity is cosmically significant…or completely insignificant in a universe built from the same atoms repeating the same rules everywhere. Discover why the objective reality you experience as a human might be totally different for other species, and why this could be the key to understanding alien intelligence, extrasensory perception, and why there might be alien minds all around us right now that we simply can’t perceive. Dr. Stephen Wolfram also breaks down: - Does the body have its own language? (And, if so, what autoimmune disease might be “saying") - What can truly be built from random mutation, and why evolution even works at all - How reductionist science is limiting medicine, and how living matter actually behaves - Why AI may function as an alien mind, and what that reveals about the shocking simplicity of human language - What makes the human mind special, how we evolved this way, and why that very fact proves we are not the most advanced species possible - Do computers use a form of telepathy to communicate with one another? He even takes us behind the scenes of his work as a consultant on the hit film ARRIVAL, explaining how alien logograms connect to his research on how language shapes human thought, what abstract concepts a bigger brain could comprehend, and what kinds of ideas we might be biologically incapable of imagining. If you’re fascinated by astrophysics, AI, consciousness, aliens, evolution, mathematics, language, or the limits of human understanding, this episode of MBB will challenge everything you think you know! Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MAYIM at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/mayim ⁠ https://incogni.com/mayim%20 Learn more about Dr. Stephen Wolfram and his work: ⁠https://www.stephenwolfram.com/⁠ https://www.stephenwolfram.com/ Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:07Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. This is part two of our conversation with Dr. Stephen Wolfram. He's the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Language. He's a pioneering figure in computational thinking for over four decades. He also was the science consultant on the movie Arrival, which is something we're going to talk about with him in part two. We're going to talk about his thoughts on aliens and alien communication. We're going to talk about language and how human language is actually simpler than we thought, as well as trying to understand how computers communicate as a model for how maybe we are communicating with each other. We'll discuss free will and consciousness, and is time linear? We can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Dr. Stephen Wolfram.

• 0:52Mayim Bialik?

  Break it down. Let's go into aliens, because not just for the flashiness of it, which we are sometimes interested in, you know, what do people who are thinking at these high levels think about things like this? But from also an astrobiological perspective, from a alternate perception of reality perspective. I mean, I don't think we're asking the question, are we alone in the universe? I think it's pretty clear that we're not. But tell us where you want to talk about aliens.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's a sort of philosophically muddled concept, that we have minds that work in a certain way. There are many things in the universe that we might say do mind-like things. I mean, a favorite thing people say is, you know, the weather has a mind of its own, right? And what does that mean? Well, there's fluid dynamics processes in the atmosphere. They're doing all kinds of complicated things. Just like in our brains, there are electrochemical processes that are doing all kinds of complicated things. How do we compare kind of the electrochemistry of our brains with the fluid dynamics of the weather? They're both doing complicated things. Can we say one is fundamentally simpler than another?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Well, I happen to have done a bunch of science to do with the thing I call the principle of computational equivalence. That kind of says, there isn't really a way of saying, no, the weather is somehow fundamentally simpler than a brain. They're kind of computationally equivalent things. Now, we say, well, the brain, the, the, the weather might have a mind of its own, but it's not a mind like ours. It's a, it's a different kind of mind. Well, lots of things in the physical universe, I think, do quotes mind like things. The issue is, how closely aligned are they with minds like ours? How much are they minds where we can recognize them as being kind of, uh, as, as being minds like ours?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  And I think this is a thing, you know, you're talking about sort of spirituality and so on. And there's the question, you know, the spirit of the wind, so to speak. You know, is it a mind, is the wind a mind like thing? Well, I think at a sort of computational level, yes, the wind is a mind like thing, but it's not a mind like ours. And so the question is really, out in the physical universe, there are many things which are computationally as sophisticated as our minds. In fact, many things that are much beyond the computational sophistication of our minds in terms of having more components than we have neurons in our brains or whatever else. But yet, the question is, are the things that are going on in those things, are they, are they somehow aligned? Are they, are they minds like ours?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Are they sufficiently aligned with, with our minds that we will, that we can, for example, communicate with them? You know, communicating with the weather, you know, tough, tough. Tough thing. I mean, you know, it's not communicating with a dog a little bit closer. Um, you know, I think that um, uh, this is, so to me, this question of sort of, are there aliens out there, so to speak, the answer is there are aliens all over the place. There are alien intelligences all over the place. The issue is, are they close enough, in the way I try to describe these things in what I call ruleal space, the space of sort of possible rules for describing how things work, are they close enough

• 4:15Speaker 01

  that we can communicate with them in some way. The universe, as we were talking about before, is quite big. It's a long way from here to the next nearest star and so on. Um, you know, the physical universe that you might traverse with spacecraft is pretty big. The ruleal universe, as I call it, the universe of all possible rules, is in some respects vastly bigger than that. So this question of can you get from a mind like ours to this alien mind, the distance you have to go is much greater than the sort of distance you'd need to go in a spacecraft to get to the next nearest star, so to speak. So, in other words, the, the distance to that alien mind is, is very great.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  And for us to be able to kind of align the way we think with the way that alien mind thinks is a big challenge. Now, you know, we have a test case in, in terms of AI. Because, you know, AI is a thing that is an alien mind. We attempt to align it. I mean, a raw neural net doesn't do human-like things. A raw neural net just hangs out and has random bits flying around. After you train the neural net, you can align it to do things that are quite human-like, like tell pictures of cats from pictures of dogs and so on. And um, the, the, then the question is, well, uh, so, so now we've got kind of this, this

• 5:37Speaker 01

  mind that we can sort of experiment with, that we can align with our mind by training it in the right way. I've done some little experiments which are kind of like artificial neuroscience experiments. Where you take a trained neural net and you say, let's say it's a neural net that makes pictures of cats. You've told it to make a picture of a cat. The ordinary neural net makes a picture of a cat. Now you start sort of You know, changing pieces of that neural net. So you make it go from a mind that was aligned with a human mind to sort of an alien mind by changing the innards of the network.

• 6:12Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, does it make a cat?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  It does not make a cat. It starts off making a cat, but as you start changing it, it, it actually, one of the more bizarre things that happens, if you, if you just, just increase the weights in this neural net, the picture it makes, uh, looks like it's blowing its mind. It starts, you know, the cat starts turning into funny colors and it puffs out and it, it's very bizarre. It's, it's, um, and you know, it really is, it's something where you're, you're seeing uh, sort of in this, you know, it, it, as you see it going to a more alien mind, it is producing a thing which we can still see it's a collection of pixels, but it looks less and less like what we would recognize as a cat. And one of the things to realize is that, that to me, it's like there's, there's, you

• 6:57Speaker 01

  know, in some part of the sort of space of things that can produce this picture of a cat, there's a lot of other stuff it can produce. The, the way I think about it is, you know, there's, there's things like cats that we have words to describe. There's lots of stuff out there that we don't have words to describe. I tend to call that inter-concept space. It's kind of the, you know, there's little islands, tiny islands actually, that we have sort of human language to describe and vast domains that are still producible by an alien mind, by an even slightly alien mind, but which are completely undescribable by us humans.

• 7:36Mayim Bialik?

  We talked about this with Adam Frank, we talked about it with Avi Loeb, we've talked about it, I think with Jan Levin. Uh, the, the notion that we can only see what we can see, we can only perceive what we can perceive, but in a universe that is made of the things that our universe is made of, there is no reason to not be able to project that there are other beings, other perceptions, other systems, many of which are likely far more advanced than us in theory and are using AI, possibly are farming us to be obedient underlords. Uh, no, but, but I'm just saying the notion that you can extrapolate out and say, in a universe made of this,

• 8:20Mayim Bialik?

  Absolutely. There are many, many ways to compute this, for lack of a better word.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  There is computation going on everywhere. You can think of it as mindlike computation going on everywhere. But the question of whether we can understand what's going on in that in that mindlike computation, that is the role of science. Science is about going from, you know, the complicated fluid flows of, you know, turbulent fluid flow or something and saying, now we've got this narrative that allows us that we can get into our minds, that allows us to connect the ways we can think about things with what's actually going on in the natural world. What's special about minds like ours? That's one thing you might ask. Why is a mind like ours, what's fundamentally different between the weather and a mind like ours?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  And I think one of the things that is characteristic of of minds, brains like ours, is we tend to do one very definite thing, which is we take in lots of sensory input, you know, gigabytes a second or something of sensory input. And then what do we do with it? In the end, maybe 10 times a second, we decide we're going to move this muscle, we're going to do this thing. We're kind of taking this vast amount of of data from the outside world and we're focusing all it down it all down into what should we do next? And I think that's one feature of kind of, that's sort of an essential feature of our kind of consciousness, is that we we have this kind of thread of experience that comes out, you know, all this stuff is going on in the world. We whittle it all down.

• 9:55Mayim Bialik?

  To do I look fat in these pants?

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yes, or something, right? I mean, it's, you know, but but the the thing is, that's a feature of sort of systems like us. When it comes to something like the weather, it's not doing that. It's just doing every little piece of the weather is doing what it's doing. It's not doing this concentrating down to get this kind of one thread of experience. We're not the only things that do that. You can certainly make a, you know, certainly AI systems do exactly that. They go from all the different possible pixel arrangements of a picture, a cat and a dog. And they say that's a cat, that's a dog. That's doing the exact same kind of thing that we're doing when we take all that sensory input and kind of, you know, concentrate it down.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  So, so I think that's one, that's one sort of thing that in a sense is kind of disappointing to realize because we might have thought, you know, with our minds and brains, we're the, the most computationally fancy things in the universe. It's not true. We're actually ones that are rather specialized, that have a rather definite way of operating. I mean, my, my, you know, my slight guess is that, how did we get that way? Uh, I think it may be something very mundane, like a couple billion years ago, you know, there had been organisms that were spread out and were just, every little piece of the organism was doing a different thing. And then suddenly an organism realized, I can be mobile. And, you know, there's a, there's a little blob of stuff and it has to, when you're

• 11:22Speaker 01

  a single blob of stuff that's mobile, you have to be able to decide, am I going to go left or am I going to go right? And once you need to make that decision, you start to have to do this thing of saying, let's take all the sensory input I have and turn it into, do I go left, do I go right?

• 11:37Mayim Bialik?

  That's still an astounding, it's an astounding event.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Uh, well, yes and no. I mean, there are plenty of system, look, any, you know, you make a landscape, let's say, you know, out of, you make a clay landscape or something like this, and you put a ball, you know, ball bearing somewhere on this landscape, and you rattle it around a bit, the thing will roll down to, you know, a lowest point on that landscape. It doesn't matter where you put the ball, it'll still roll down to that same, you know, if it's, if it's within that catchment basin for that, that place, it will roll down to that, that lowest point. And that's an example of this phenomenon of taking lots of possible inputs and saying, yep, it's going to, you know, it's closest to that point, where it's closest to that point.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  I, I don't consider that a, you know, it's a, it's a thing that very naturally happens in lots of kinds of systems.

• 12:29Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna push you on this though, because the notion to say that, that a blob quote realized, there's no realizing.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  No, there's no realizing. That's a mere anthropomorphism on my part.

• 12:41Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, you look at you anthropomorphizing, single-celled blob goo-iness, and me saying that's remarkable, that a blob would do that. It, I mean, to me, that's. Look, it's why I chose to study what I studied. It may not be why you chose to study what you studied, but that's remarkable. You know, I remember the first time I started thinking, okay, I have a mother and she had a mother, and then she had a mother. What, who, how far do you go back? How did we get all the people? Like, that was, you know, this was as a teenager. When I started thinking, like, wait a second, what? How? And this is not that my conclusion was that evolution didn't happen. It was this notion that how did we get here?

• 13:23Mayim Bialik?

  You know, which is really the essence, I think, of all of these parts. My and Be Alex Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? The bag you carry everywhere? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets, and cozy cashmere scarves, and gloves, to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch.

• 14:07Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:52Mayim Bialik?

  And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was My and Be Alex Breakdown. It's the best way to support our show. So, the real thing that I have been waiting to talk to you about, and I wanted to talk about all these other things so you would think that I'm a legitimate person, is Arrival is one of my favorite movies. And it's a movie that means a lot to me because of its significance. And I didn't know that it was essentially because of you.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  No, not because of me. I was, I was just a small piece in the, in the, in the machine.

• 15:24Mayim Bialik?

  But now that I know where you fit into this, it's really, really beautiful. And I've, you know, read the piece that you wrote and even just like, even looking at the diagrams. I mean, it makes me emotional because this was a movie that, I mean, I've showed my kids. Like, it's like many conversations, it brings up so many things about is time linear? Is love linear? Is love the ultimate glue, right? That's binding us together and what does it look like? And what are the risks of stepping out of the way we think things operate? Into a completely different level of understanding. And that is what is needed if you're going to think about aliens.

• 16:07Mayim Bialik?

  It's what's needed if you're going to think about quantum mechanics. It's what is needed if you're going to think seriously about anything outside, really, of the reality that you were dropped into. So can you talk a little bit about your relationship with this movie? And what you were able to bring from your research? That is immortalized in, I think, one of the most beautiful movies about not only the possibility of aliens, but communication, love and time.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it, the, you know, the dynamics of these things, you're in the movie business. I'm not. This is one of my rare, you know, dippings into that kind of world. It's, you know, I think one feature of that movie, you know, one of my kids worked on that movie with me. And he wrote, one feature of that movie that's kind of fun is that, you know, there are all these sort of images that come from the aliens. And the question is, what do they mean? And there's a bunch of code you see in the movie. That's an attempt by the scientists to understand those images and so on.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  The code that makes the the sort of the the the things the scientists are figuring out, if you run that code, it actually makes those images. It's it's, I think, a pretty much unique movie in which Wow. the code that you see is is the code that actually makes the, you know, makes the the the ways of analyzing those images. And it was kind of was also fun because, you know, that was done on on the set, a bunch of that movie, that code was written in real time, so to speak, of, you know, this is, this is what we get. This is the technology stack I've been building for years, that I have to say, my my youngest son is probably better at operating than I am. That's that's just the way it works. But but no, in terms

• 18:02Speaker 01

  of the, you know, the the movie, that the whole sort of notion of the way that you describe things affects the way you think about things, that's a that's a very interesting kind of question of, you know, much debated by people. I I I'm, you know, the the the question of, is the language that you use to describe things, the thing that drives the way you can think about things? And that's certainly a central idea in that movie. And it's something which, for me, as a person who's spent a large part of my life as a computational language designer, I like to believe that the things that I'm inventing in the language that I'm inventing affect the ways that people think about things. And

• 18:47Speaker 01

  I and I think that is that is very demonstrably true for computational language. It's something that's less obviously true for human languages. But, you know, I I think the other, I mean, in the in the dynamics of the practicalities of movies, you know, the movie has a bunch of interstellar spacecraft. And there was a moment when it was like, there's a whiteboard, and I guess it was Amy Adams is, you know, doing something in front of the whiteboard. And it's like, can you draw a whiteboard that has a sort of plausible theory for what physicists in the 21st century would say about, you know, about these interstellar spacecraft? And by the way, leave a piece of the whiteboard, you know, blank, because, you know, Amy Adams' hair goes in front of that part. And it's really hard to composite, you know, with

• 19:31Speaker 01

  the with the frizzy hair type thing.

• 19:34Mayim Bialik?

  One of the, I think, neat things about Arrival. And I don't, I mean, if people haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. I mean, if you, if you watch Contact, that's obviously, you know, that's one perspective from a very different era about, you know, communication. If you watch Interstellar, you know, Kip Thorne, you know, if you watch Interstellar, that's also, that's leaning kind of closer. But Arrival, you know, is this notion of, you know, what happens if the person who is trying to understand what possible alien communication is, was a linguist? And I remember when I saw the movie, I was thinking, what? She's a language special, like, what? Because I'm thinking aliens, physics, right?

• 20:19Mayim Bialik?

  Astronomy, all these things. And the, the fact is, what is revealed is, and I can't give it away, because if people haven't seen it, you have to see it.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was, I was trying to avoid doing spoilers here.

• 20:31Mayim Bialik?

  But what I, what I will say is, what if it takes someone who knows more about communication and intention than equations to be able to breach what it would be like to step outside of your own perception, right? And the, the other notion that I'd love for you to touch on, and you may not have had a part in this, but I am curious, your take on it. You know, we think of time as a line, right? There's, I was born, then I have my hyphen, and then I die, and that's it. And if you study, you know, relativity, you get to see like, oh, there's actually a bend, right?

• 21:14Mayim Bialik?

  Like, things are different depending on the perspective you're looking from. And that's all, quote, relative, right? But this conversation is more about...

• 21:25Mayim Bialik?

  Is it possible that there is a plane of time or spacetime that either loops back on itself or exists in some sort of, you know, the way that, you know, Thomas Campbell describes it, some sort of like beautiful undulating field, which if you've ever done psychedelics, you strike me as someone who may not be into it, no. But people who report, you know, essentially this kind of like undulating field that physicists, you know, often depict, where each particle is also a wave and it's a simultaneous existence. Is time like that as well?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  You had two pieces to this. So the first one is about linguists and language and so on. And I think, you know, as I've been saying a few times, you know, science is this attempt to bridge from the natural world to things that we understand in our minds. Language is this way of packaging up thoughts so that we can express them. And these are two very, you know, very related kinds of things. Now, the question of when it's a, when you're trying to understand something that hasn't been understood, it's not clear how far sort of the study of human language can take you in understanding, you know, human language has certain structure, much of which we don't understand very well. The big, one of the big things

• 22:48Speaker 01

  that has come out of LLMs and the sort of modern AI is something, you know, people are very surprised that it's possible to have this neural net to produce fluent, you know, human language. I think the main thing that that reveals is that human language is simpler than we thought. In other words, you know, we've known that human language has the feature that, you know, like in English, sentences are constructed with, you know, noun, verb, noun structure. But what has never really been classified is which noun, which verb, which noun. And it turns out there is sort of a statistical structure of, well, this kind of noun goes with this kind of verb. And that's kind of what the AI discovered. And that's kind of the way those patterns work. So the thing that was the surprise

• 23:32Speaker 01

  was that human language is simpler and Structure than we thought it was. And so if you ask the question, is human language the right raw material for understanding something, for example, from, uh, you know, from, from the natural world? My, my in- immediate take would be that it's actually not a particularly strong, you know, the, the, the, the human language as such is, is actually pretty weak compared to what we already know in more formalized systems from computation and so on. But this is a, I mean, this is a non-trivial, look, there's, there's, you know, for example, one question I was curious about recently is, is, you know, we humans

• 24:13Speaker 01

  have, you know, use compositional language. We, we have, you know, we can take pieces of sentences and fit them together with other pieces and so on. Uh, you know, dogs probably can't. Maybe they understand one word at a time, but they don't understand, you know, the, the whole sort of compositional structure of human language is probably, you know, lost to them.

• 24:35Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, they understand fear from, you know, a hundred yards away, so they have different abilities.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yes, for sure. But, but this whole sort of structure, this formalized structure that we have of compositional language, they probably don't have. And, you know, it's sort of interesting that if you look at, uh, you know, our brains, their brains a thousand times smaller or whatever. If you, you know, one of the discoveries in the world of AI is as you make the neural net progressively bigger, the set of things that it ends up being able to do gets progressively larger, like it can start recognizing images at a certain size. It can start generating language at a certain size. So that raises the question, if we had brains that were a thousand times bigger than our brains, what kinds of abstract concepts would we invent that are really not accessible to us right now?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  And that's for somebody like me who likes to think about sort of foundational questions and abstract things. It's a little bit frustrating to imagine that there might be a level of abstraction that, sorry, but brains like ours just don't manage to reach that.

• 25:36Mayim Bialik?

  Right, but but even with the development of, you know, the frontal lobe as we know it, and we sort of know a bit about that course, at least in our brief time, you know, here on this planet, tracking primate development, we do know that there was a solution, right? How do we get the most matter through the birth canal, right? We, I mean, I mean, all those, all of those details, right? Biology helped us program, right?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Right, there's a particular solution that electrochemical brains use. And, you know, as you get bigger brains, more of the brain is full of wire, basically, connecting things.

• 26:13Mayim Bialik?

  Exactly.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  And, you know, if the brain is 1,000 times bigger, it's all wire, the way that brains are architected like ours. But, you know, the concept of of having a brain-like thing, it doesn't, you know, even in digital electronics, it doesn't have to be all wire in the same way. There are different solutions.

• 26:32Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, but also it makes me wonder, you know, well, never mind. We can talk about this over drinks sometimes, Stephen. But, you know, I'm thinking like, is there more association cortex? Would we have a further, you know, evolution in the frontal lobe? Like, is there, I mean, I, I'm gonna sort of go on, you know, what the evolution of of structures are like, and those are similar from basically reptiles on. Well, even, yeah, you could even say fish in some case. Well, even the sea slug. But, you know, there's a certain, I don't know, there are certain limiting factors, right, to what's going to expand. Is it more association cortex, right? Is that what AI is essentially modeling?

• 27:10Jonathan Cohen?

  Think about how many more song lyrics you would have in your head.

• 27:12Mayim Bialik?

  I could remember so many more song lyrics.

• 27:14Jonathan Cohen?

  She already has a lot.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, right. No, I mean, but but there's always, there's complicated trade-offs because if you have, like, we have 50,000 words in typical languages. That is probably determined by the size of our brains. That that that number is 50,000. In other words, if if we had smaller brains, probably the number of distinct concepts that we could deal with, probably, we don't really know how this works, but would probably be smaller.

• 27:40Mayim Bialik?

  Doesn't President Trump only use a certain number of words? I once heard an analysis that says that he just, he just uses a smaller number of words. Like, everything's like, great.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I thought he was accused of inventing words. That was the...

• 27:53Mayim Bialik?

  Also, because he doesn't have enough in there. Different story.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  One thing to realize is, if you had more words, you don't have to have as much depth in describing things. In other words, if every, you know, if the, if the shape of that plant behind you was, you know, if I could say that was a, you know, a blah, blah, blah, plant shape, I wouldn't have to, you know, I wouldn't have it to use any depth.

• 28:19Mayim Bialik?

  This is fascinating.

• 28:20Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, it's like the number of words that certain cultures have for snow.

• 28:24Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 28:24Jonathan Cohen?

  Or love.

• 28:26Mayim Bialik?

  Yes. We will often have a conversation where there will be two words that are very similar, and I am 1,000% certain that I know very subtle differences between these words. I know how I would use them differently. And Jonathan is a brilliant person, but I am the child of English teachers. And I know deeply that these words have different meaning. You cannot interchange them. I mean, I could literally teach a class, right, about these different things? And some people just don't hear it the same way. I feel like I can be very articulate because I've got all these intricate words, but it also depends who you're speaking to, because to him, it may all feel the same. So like, maybe we would never have to speak if we could just neural net

• 29:11Mayim Bialik?

  all of the words that I like distinctions of into your brain.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that, that's of course an issue. I mean, this relates to the thing we were talking about, about, you know, you have to take the internal thoughts that you have, you know, encoded in lots of neuron firings and package them up in a, in a kind of transportable way. For example, if you imagined, you know, connecting the neurons directly, the neurons in your two brains are definitely not architected in detail in the same way.

• 29:38Jonathan Cohen?

  Hers are like salsa dancing and mine are like relaxing.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  But, but you know, it's not like this is neuron number, you know, two billion, whatever, is going to be the neuron that represents the color red or something. And you can connect that to somebody else's neuron of the same kind. It's the, you know, the encoding of, of what's going on is very different. And the fact that we can package it in terms of concepts that are transportable is a non-trivial fact about the world and about the way that we perceive the world. Because it's not obvious, it could be the case that everything about the world was kind of this incoherent mush, that, you know, the random collection of pixels and so on, that we couldn't have any higher level description of. The fact that there are higher level descriptions is, I mean, from a science point of view,

• 30:27Speaker 01

  that's a very fundamental thing that makes science possible. There might not be any, any higher level descriptions that you could make, but there are.

• 30:35Speaker 03

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• 31:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Another form of communication that we're hearing more and more about these days is telepathy. Instead of having to communicate and articulate and choose the right word, you're, some people believe that they have the ability to just send the message directly.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  It's always nice to see when these things come back. That was a big 1950s thing, right? Telepathy. And it's, it's, um, it's, it's always interesting, the, you know, it's one of these things where you could say, do computers have telepathy? Okay, question. So, back in the day, when the first computer that I used, which was the size of a large desk and very primitive object, it had a tone generator. And, you know, it, it would make, you could also, you could take a radio and put it next to that computer, and it would be, you know, squawking all over the place. That, that's less true of modern computers. But, you know, computers emit electromagnetic radiation.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Computers are affected by electromagnetic radiation. So the question is, could computers reasonably have telepathy? And the answer is probably not for the following reason. That the details of that signal are a total mess. You know, they're, they're the result of, you know, individual transistors doing this and that thing. The way that some other computer is working won't be exactly the same. You know, the way that computers actually communicate is through doing things like what we do with, with language. That is, they package up those microscopic, you know, digital bits into larger scale things that are sort of known and in common to the two computers.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Our detailed thoughts and brains are encoded not in some, you know, if you, if you're having some, maybe if you're having epileptic seizure, there's some large scale, you know, electrical effect in your brain.

• 32:49Mayim Bialik?

  Yes, but we're talking about like explicit memory, right? This person died. I learned it in the field. There's no other way I would have known that. I know when they died. I know how it happened because I was told telepathically. That's a leap.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And that's in the category of, I can't imagine how that could possibly work, which is not to say that there's no way it can work. It's just that, that, you know, there's some kinds of things where somebody says, I bet we can sense magnetic fields. I would say, yeah, I can kind of imagine how that might work. This question of what's possible in science, what's not possible, you know, the, the story of kind of, you know, things that are possible, things that are not possible. There's a, there's a terrible history of saying such and such a thing is not possible. I mean, you know, give me an example. Let's say, you know, when you scramble an egg, can you unscramble the egg? You might say, it's just not possible to unscramble it.

• 33:49Mayim Bialik?

  No, because the protein's been unfolded. We can't refold that.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what if you had little nanobots that were all programmed and operating at this molecular scale and, you know, carefully re-knitting the protein and so on. And that's, it's again, it's something where you say, well, but we just couldn't actually do that. But that becomes a more complicated story that, um, and so, you know, it's like another one that comes up is, you know, can you travel faster than light? Okay, so the the usual theories of spacetime say, no, sorry, that's not possible.

• 34:24Mayim Bialik?

  Or if you can, I can't detect it because I can only see at the speed of light.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  That's not the only issue. I mean, so so it turns out the, you know, in these models that we have of spacetime now, we can kind of really address that question in a more serious way. So I'll give you an analogy. So if you're, you know, let's say you you're in air in a room. And you're saying, can I, if I was at a molecular scale, how do I get from one side of the room to another? Well, every molecule in the room is traveling at roughly the speed of sound. But it only goes for a micron before it hits another molecule and gets sort of thrown off in a random direction. If you could know which molecule to hop on at every at every stage, you could go across the room at the speed of sound.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  But in fact, you say, well, but we couldn't do that because, you know, certainly we couldn't take us and make us be riding on these molecules because we're pretty big compared to these molecules. You know, maybe you could imagine a molecule, but then you have to have that molecule has to be able to do the computation to figure out which molecule to hop on. And that's not going to work at the scale of a molecule and so on. Turns out the same kind of thing happens in spacetime. It turns out that if you could operate at the level of the atoms of space, you could make a thing that would sort of hop between the atoms of space. And you could effectively make something which in certain conditions would be able to effectively go faster than light. The problem is you couldn't do that. The thing that, you know, a thing like us that is a mind like ours

• 35:55Speaker 01

  just wouldn't possibly fit in what it takes and wouldn't be able to do. The thing that can operate at that at that scale couldn't do the computation to figure out what to do next. So the statement, it's not possible, has to be a little bit footnoted.

• 36:09Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, and I think the question is also what's measurable and how? And one of the challenges with psi phenomenon is that you cannot always replicate something. It doesn't have to be a system that is observing the other laws of things that we can predict. So when people say, "Well, if any sort of, you know, precognitive ability was possible, everyone would always be winning a lottery." And that's not true. For me, again, I'm trying to frame this. We're talking about what are the genetic, environmental, epigenetic components that might lead a system to be able to perceive something that I do not understand?

• 36:50Mayim Bialik?

  And is there a way to legitimately quantify it, right? So that we could say with some statistical significance, this is meaningful, right? And the notion that the materialist perspective is if it doesn't obey the same things it takes to get on the cover of Nature Neuroscience, it doesn't hold water. To me, that's not fair, meaning we have to adjust the expectations to the situation that we're actually trying to observe.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Right, well, I mean, look, one of the conceits of science is you can do reproducible experiments. It is possible to have an experiment where you can take this thing and have it work this way, and, you know, if you do the same thing again. Now, it's not self-evident that that's ever possible. It could be the case, because the universe is in a different state when you next do that experiment. And it could be the case that you can't separate off the thing that is just that experiment from the rest of the universe. This question of what, you know, what matters? I mean, this is the essence of doing scientific experiments, is to be able to tell what matters. I mean, in other words, you don't know whether, you know, you do some experiment and, you

• 38:01Speaker 01

  know, maybe it turns out the air pressure that day critically matters, and you just don't know.

• 38:07Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and with humans, you know, one of the things that in the telepathy tapes, which we've spoken about a lot here in terms of veracity and many other things, you know, if you take a child, let's say, that's nonverbal and you try and, you know, say, is this child really able to read minds, whatever that means? You know, if you remove them from the person that they're closest to and you try and do it with an experimenter, in many cases, this introduces a level of strangeness for them, especially if they're nonverbal, if they're on the spectrum, they don't feel safe, they don't feel comfortable. So, yeah, this is a question of also, of course, you want to eliminate the possibility that they're getting some sort of coding, right, from the parent or the person they're close to, but also if someone's got these special abilities,

• 38:50Mayim Bialik?

  my guess is they need to be in some sort of safe state to be dropping into a place where they can even access whatever's going on. And that's true of anyone.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  This is where it all gets very muddy and complicated, right? Because it's like, you know, did they pick up some micro facial expression from somebody? Or, you know, or is it, is it a thing? And then is the actual ability one that is about picking up micro facial expressions?

• 39:13Mayim Bialik?

  Which is also fascinating.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, which, you know, it could be the people have, you know, some people have, you know, greater ability to do that. That's a thing that wouldn't be super surprising from a neuroscience point of view. You know, in the 1950s, sort of people had the view that telepathy would just be a thing. And, you know, and then it, then it sort of disappeared. And it's interesting to hear that it's back. My own guess about sort of looking at the arc of, of sort of the history of science and things which people seem thought were implausible and so on, usually what seems to happen is there's sort of possibility A and possibility B, and there are definite schools of thought that go after one or other of those possibilities. The truth ends up being something bizarre that's in the middle.

• 39:54Mayim Bialik?

  You prepare for A and B and X, Y, and Z happens.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, like, you know, you think you're doing some telepathic thing and it turns out, you know, there's pheromone secretions from humans that people pick up in some olfactory way that, you know, goes directly into some part of the brain or something like this, which was just something that wasn't, you know, just wasn't part of what you were thinking might or might not be happening.

• 40:16Mayim Bialik?

  We recently spoke to Federico Fagin, who, among other things, created the microprocessor and also had a very, very profound spiritual experience, inexplicable. And also, his book is called Irreducible, which is a word that you also favor. So I thought that was sweet. One of the things that he says, though, and this goes back to really what you talked about in the opening, he says that consciousness and free will have always existed, meaning they are foundational, kind of, to our understanding of the formation of the universe. He believes that there's this sort of one, which, you know, I think some of us would call God, but that there's some one unity that is part of this sort of evolution. But that consciousness and free will both exist as part of this

• 40:59Mayim Bialik?

  oneness and that they're foundational. What is your sort of take? I know it's like a big question to end on. But where does this fall in terms of also our computational understanding?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  People thought, you know, in the science fiction movies of the 1950s, for example, once there was a program for the robot, everybody knew what the robot was going to do. And the robot clearly didn't have free will because it was programmed and you knew what it was going to do. The thing that comes out from sort of this idea of computational irreducibility is just because it was programmed, doesn't mean you know what it's going to do. And I think that's the essence of what we perceive as being free will. That is, just because you know, sort of the reductionist view of what's inside the thing, doesn't mean that you can outrun the actual process of the thing doing what it does. So in other words,

• 41:54Speaker 01

  you say the thing doesn't have free will, if you can say, well, you know, I can tell what you're going to do, therefore, you're obviously not, you know, freely doing what you're doing.

• 42:04Mayim Bialik?

  You could just be predictable.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  For it to be free will, that seems to be free of its underlying laws, what I think makes it seem free of its underlying laws, is that you just have to run those laws and see what they do, rather than just saying, I know the laws, therefore, I can predict what will happen. So I view sort of that notion of free will. As being something that is absolutely ubiquitous in the computational universe, in the universe, in lots of systems that we see in nature, we can't predict what they're going to do, just like we can't predict what minds are going to do. So I I view that as as definitely being a a very ubiquitous thing. As far as consciousness, I think that's much more special.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  And in a sense, much more kind of uh much lower level at some level. In the sense that, you know, as I was saying, I think one of the essential features of the thing that is consciousness for us is this phenomenon of taking all this external data and sort of uh, you know, pulling it down to this single thread of, so what our our thread of experience, what are we going to do next and so on? So I I think that that seems to be the essence of kind of consciousness as we operate it, so to speak. And I think that's a thing that, you know, when you look at the universe as a whole, you know, that's happening in different places in the universe, but it's not the generic behavior of things in the universe.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Our our perception of that is very significant to us. The fact that, you know, the the ball can roll down into that one hollow rather than another one and so on is, you know, a similar kind of phenomenon, but, you know, less interesting to us than our own perception of of of consciousness. You know, one question is, is consciousness kind of the top of the pile for what happens in the universe? And my answer is no, it's not. It's it's one of the things that is a subcase of one of the things that can happen in a universe like ours. And it's one that's very significant to us. But, you know, to the weather, for example, it's not terribly significant. You know, the weather's view of our, you know, oh, gosh, you know, look at those organisms.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  And of course, I'm anthropomorphizing ridiculously here um by by, you know, attributing to it some kind of communication like that. Um, you know, it's it's like those organisms are doing this weird thing, taking in all this input data and just doing one thing as a result. You know, as opposed to taking all that input data and having all those different pieces of input data all do their own separate thing. You'd asked about time and the sort of linearity of time. Quantum mechanics, you have this sort of many threads of time. There is not a single thread of time in the universe. There are many threads of time in the universe. We are aggregating some number of those threads of time and that. That is the thing that we perceive. We perceive a single thread of time.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  You could imagine a brain that was kind of a multi-way brain that was perceiving more than one thread of experience. That's not what we do. Interestingly, inside a quantum computer, that's what's going on. And the main problem of quantum computers is can you take those many? If we were, if we had sort of quantum experience, we would be happily using a quantum computer. We'd be following all those independent threads of quantum computation. The difficulty is that knitting all those threads together to get a definite answer of the kind that our single thread of experience brains deal with, that's a difficult thing, and that's something I don't think is going to work. But that's a, that's a quite different story.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  But so this, to this point about, you know, is there a single thread of time in the universe? The answer is, I think, no. But we aggregate some number of threads and have, you know, we, we pick out this single thread of experience. How do you know that time is passing? Well, the state of the universe is changing. And that's kind of the passage of time is the progressive changing of the state of the universe according to some kind of rules. What if the state of the universe at a later moment is identical to the state of the universe at a previous moment?

• 46:13Mayim Bialik?

  Does that mean that time has not passed?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Right. And so there is a notion that I've just been working on that I'm calling sub-time, which is what might actually happen at the level of individual sort of updates of the, of the universe. And then the question of time as we perceive it.

• 46:31Mayim Bialik?

  Because there's a delta, it's because there's a change, right? We have a, an internal referential point in theory, right? I mean, not everyone, but hopefully most people. We have a reference point that tracks, right? No matter what's happening in this, it is, I'm, I'm tracking it based on my internal reference point.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  You can only sense a change in the state of the universe. If the universe is identical and your mind is identical, it's as if no, nothing had happened. And so what can happen is that it's, it's slightly tricky. Because things can happen intermittently, but then you're back to where you were before.

• 47:07Mayim Bialik?

  When you return to a place, even emotionally, right? You're never in the same place that you were before, even if you think you're having deja vu.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  I'm operating at like 10 to the minus 100 meters type scale. I'm not talking about wandering around the neighborhood type thing. That's a, that's a far reach from, from that, from that low level.

• 47:27Mayim Bialik?

  So your parents were refugees, correct? They immigrated to England where you were raised. What languages were you raised hearing and speaking?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  English, nothing else.

• 47:39Mayim Bialik?

  Nothing else?

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Nothing else.

• 47:41Mayim Bialik?

  I was very curious if you grew up with many languages, since you are a specialist, right? In communicating in all these different ways.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  You know, when I was growing up, it's like, I'm an English kid. I don't know anything about the history. So that, that, that's a, you know, I kind of didn't, didn't have that big connection. It's funny because I, I've worked a lot on language and computational language and things like that. And I have, you know, my efforts to learn language, you know, I learnt Latin and Greek and French when I was a kid. French was the only one you could speak. The, I guess some people can speak Latin, but that's, that's, that's a rare case. But, you know, but I never did it and I never had the confidence to do it. And I had the definite self-image that I'm absolutely useless at learning languages.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  This may be completely untrue and just a consequence of kind of the dynamics of, of my particular education. But, but that means I've never, you know, I am a, you know, I have some level of knowledge about kind of the, at an analytic level about languages. But, you know, and I do find it interesting that, you know, as I try and imagine what it's like to think with another language as one's base for thinking. It is interesting that, you know, I can see that, that, that, you know, that there are concepts that just aren't quite the same. But I see that much more clearly in computational language. Because I know, you know, it's an interesting experience for me because I've invented a bunch of constructs.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  And you know, once I've invented them and made them part of our language, I can think in terms of them. And I can see other people who just couldn't think in those terms, as I couldn't think in those terms. Once they're exposed to those constructs, they start thinking in those terms. It's really a neat thing. It's a very, people don't recognize that the construction of languages, you know, which usually doesn't happen with human languages. I mean, there haven't been successful constructed human languages. But with computer languages, computational language, they're all constructed. And, you know, what you get, the kind of, there's a, it is in a sense, it's a, it's a surprisingly powerful lever that one has in determining kind of how one can think about things, the way that one constructs those languages.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  And that's, that's, you know, I've just spent a few decades doing those kinds of things. So I, I, I think a bunch about that.

• 50:07Mayim Bialik?

  We really, we so appreciate your time and also just the, the scope that you allowed us to kind of play in with you. And we're just, we're very grateful. I also do want to direct people to your website. You have this beautiful scrapbook. I don't know who put it together, but you can follow your progression, both in pictures, in images, like some of the drawings from when you were a child.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know whether those should be on the web, but, but.

• 50:32Mayim Bialik?

  No, I think it's, no, but it's like, one of the first things was like, how many spikes were on the tail of the stegosaurus? And I'm thinking, that's what child Steven was thinking about. And also, you know, I don't want to embarrass you, but there's not many people, you know, who have achieved what you did, especially at a young age, you know, to get your doctorate, really, when you were, I think, 20. And to have also this much kind of like, ability to, to interact and to converse on so many different levels with us. We're just so, so honored to get to, to meet you and to speak with you. So we really appreciate it.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Nice conversation. You got me to talk about all kinds of things that I have never talked about.

• 51:16Jonathan Cohen?

  There's nothing more to say.

• 51:17Mayim Bialik?

  He was saying, "You got me to talk about so many things that I never talk about."

• 51:21Jonathan Cohen?

  And he talks about a lot of things.

• 51:22Mayim Bialik?

  He talks a lot, a lot of things, but I don't think people usually ask him about free will, consciousness, telepathy, you know, psi phenomenon, and aliens.

• 51:31Jonathan Cohen?

  How dogs communicate.

• 51:32Mayim Bialik?

  How do... I could tell that you felt insulted when he said, "Like, dogs don't think like that." I knew you were thinking, "He doesn't know our dog."

• 51:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Last night, our dog, I was trying to go to sleep.

• 51:45Mayim Bialik?

  Like you do.

• 51:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Our dog has started to try and wait me out.

• 51:52Mayim Bialik?

  So he can get in bed with you?

• 51:53Jonathan Cohen?

  So he can get in bed, because he's got this, like, little mattress at the foot of the bed that I try to encourage him to sleep on.

• 51:58Mayim Bialik?

  And he usually does.

• 51:59Jonathan Cohen?

  And for the most part, he will, but then he'll, like, climb into bed around, like, when the sun comes up, maybe 6, 6:30. He kind of waits for the sun to come up, and then he's like, "You know what? He's still sleeping, but I'm gonna climb into bed."

• 52:12Mayim Bialik?

  It's a calculation he's doing.

• 52:13Jonathan Cohen?

  The last two nights, he's refused to come to bed when I go to bed. Two nights ago...

• 52:20Mayim Bialik?

  He's like, "Don't mind me, just hanging out on the couch."

• 52:23Jonathan Cohen?

  He just, like, stays on the couch, and I'm like, "Dude, who are you fooling? You are like the most codependent animal I know. You never want to be by yourself." And now, all of a sudden, all the lights in the house are going out, and you're just, like, hanging out by... like, something's fishy. And so, two nights ago, I close all the lights, and pretty much as soon as I close all the lights and lay down, I hear the tick, tick, tick, tick of his nails on the hardwood, and then he tries to climb into bed. I turn the light on, and I look at him, and then he and I just have this staring competition of him looking at me like, "Really?", and I'm like, "Really?", and then I'm like, pointing to his bed, and he's like, ignoring me, and then it becomes a whole thing.

• 53:06Mayim Bialik?

  That's a whole thing.

• 53:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Last night...

• 53:10Jonathan Cohen?

  Not only did he stay there, but I went and got him. And I, he wouldn't come. I gave him a treat, nothing. I pull his paws off the couch and like scooch his bottom a little bit. Bring him into bed. He kinda settles. I turn the lights off. He gets out of bed. Goes back and he's pacing and he's like anxious and I'm like, what's going on? Do you have to pee? We go outside. We spend 10 minutes.

• 53:37Mayim Bialik?

  Oh no.

• 53:38Jonathan Cohen?

  He pees. He comes back inside. He goes back to bed. I turn the lights off. He does it again. And I'm like, dude, you are not waiting me out.

• 53:47Mayim Bialik?

  He's trying to communicate. Speaking of which, I thought that Dr. Wolfram was gonna say like, "I grew up hearing many languages and like it made me able to compute language." Nope, just, he's just amazing. He's amazing. I also keep, I mean, not just from the pictures on his website where you can kind of see him through the ages, but I think like, what was he like? To graduate college at 17? What was that like? What was he like?

• 54:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Is it that he just has a structurally different brain? His brain is the same structure as everyone else's? Like they said Einstein's brain had more folds to it?

• 54:22Mayim Bialik?

  Said, no, it had more, I don't know if it was white matter, gray matter, I don't remember.

• 54:26Jonathan Cohen?

  All the matter it had.

• 54:30Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I guess there were some things about, um, soul sigh.

• 54:35Jonathan Cohen?

  Here's what I really like about him the most.

• 54:38Mayim Bialik?

  His charming smile?

• 54:39Jonathan Cohen?

  His continual return to, there's a terrible history of science saying what's not possible.

• 54:48Mayim Bialik?

  I really loved his perspective. I loved it. I, every time we talk to someone like him, I wanna put Steven Pinker on with him. Cause I feel like there's a way, there's a way to talk about things we can't explain and I really loved how he talked about it. He, he said, "It could be essentially limited perception." That's what it, and everything that we don't understand, maybe instead of saying, "That's not true. You're wrong. I don't like your politics. I don't like this." Maybe it's just, it's not matching my perception, but you're allowed to have your own. And also, think about how big the universe is. We're all made of the same things. Just, we do not need to stress so much and you don't look fat in those pants. It's just how you look in those pants.

• 55:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Oh, here's what we didn't get to ask him. Does he think that humans and machines are gonna merge? And our brains are not gonna have to communicate language? Because we'll just be able to share images and feelings that get packaged into little bits and bites?

• 55:42Mayim Bialik?

  I think he would say yes.

• 55:44Jonathan Cohen?

  I think he would say yes.

• 55:45Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I think that there's components of that that he would say is a broadening of the capabilities of our computational system combined with another computational system. Yeah. I mean, I think that he had the best answer to aliens. Did you understand the second time I tried to get him to explain it?

• 56:00Jonathan Cohen?

  I would say that there is alien communication even amongst humans. Like, some humans you just can't communicate with because their operating system and your operating system-

• 56:10Mayim Bialik?

  You don't need to air our dirty laundry in front of all of our listeners.

• 56:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Are just not compatible. It's like when you try to communicate something-

• 56:16Mayim Bialik?

  Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. He was right.

• 56:19Jonathan Cohen?

  Sometimes the dog knows more about what it should be doing.

• 56:22Mayim Bialik?

  I think that was too far. I think this episode also demonstrates what it's like to engage with someone who really wants to be understood in a particular way and is very comfortable adapting his particular framework to include the myriad questions that we have about why we're here, how we got here, and essentially where we're going.

• 56:48Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, I'll give him a very special accolade. He may have been the best guest at tracking dropped questions and points.

• 56:58Mayim Bialik?

  He was phenomenal.

• 57:00Jonathan Cohen?

  I think you actually have to write him and tell him-

• 57:03Mayim Bialik?

  I think I will tell him.

• 57:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Both of us are just like pinging just-

• 57:07Mayim Bialik?

  Yep.

• 57:07Jonathan Cohen?

  We needed our ADD medication, and him, he just doesn't let a single thing drop.

• 57:13Mayim Bialik?

  We're gonna go ahead and diagnose him with no ADD.

• 57:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Very impressive. That's how you make computational systems. You and I would just be like error in the code all the time because we would have forgotten the backslash.

• 57:26Mayim Bialik?

  Can you imagine going to college and graduating college at 17?

• 57:30Jonathan Cohen?

  I was still in high school.

• 57:31Mayim Bialik?

  I'm- wow, bro.

• 57:34Mayim Bialik?

  I'm saying, can you imagine?

• 57:35Jonathan Cohen?

  No, I couldn't imagine, because I was thinking, am I gonna graduate high school?

• 57:39Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so this is a different reality I'm asking you to entertain, where, you know how every electron has this possible spin? Pick all the other spins that you picked, from like 12 till 17. Imagine a path where 17-year-old Jonathan would not have been where he was, but graduating college and heading into a doctoral program.

• 58:01Jonathan Cohen?

  I could have done it.

• 58:02Mayim Bialik?

  What would your doctorate be in?

• 58:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Computational science.

• 58:04Mayim Bialik?

  Shut up, no!

• 58:07Jonathan Cohen?

  No, I don't know.

• 58:08Mayim Bialik?

  Can it be in?

• 58:10Jonathan Cohen?

  It would have been in hockey trivia. No, it wouldn't have.

• 58:13Mayim Bialik?

  It would be in Grateful Dead.

• 58:15Jonathan Cohen?

  No, I, so in-

• 58:16Mayim Bialik?

  Basketball.

• 58:17Jonathan Cohen?

  8th grade, I, straight A's in math. I was a mathematician. I really loved math. I loved understanding.

• 58:23Mayim Bialik?

  You didn't have dyslexia problems with math?

• 58:25Jonathan Cohen?

  Oh, no, not at all. But I also liked the creative of writing and of literature. I probably would have ended up being in math, because I liked that there were right answers in the type of math that we were doing.

• 58:38Mayim Bialik?

  As in many conversations, this is the point at which, if I was talking to Valerie, she'd be like, "What would your doctorate have been in at 17, Mayim?"

• 58:46Jonathan Cohen?

  I just assume it's the same as it would have been-

• 58:48Mayim Bialik?

  Well, that's interesting. No!

• 58:50Jonathan Cohen?

  What would it have been in?

• 58:51Mayim Bialik?

  I think I probably-

• 58:52Jonathan Cohen?

  Marxist philosophy?

• 58:53Mayim Bialik?

  Possibly. Adjacent?

• 58:55Jonathan Cohen?

  Sartre and-

• 58:56Mayim Bialik?

  Women's studies. I think I-

• 58:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Interesting.

• 58:57Mayim Bialik?

  I actually probably would have studied, like, Simone de Beauvoir. I would have studied, like, female philosophy and in early feminism. I think that's probably what I would have done.

• 59:06Jonathan Cohen?

  So you would have been unemployed?

• 59:08Mayim Bialik?

  I think that's gonna get you some hate.

• 59:11Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm just saying that there are only a certain number of positions you would have had to have gone into academia.

• 59:17Mayim Bialik?

  You know what? There's a lot of liberal arts colleges that would have loved to have me on their staff.

• 59:21Jonathan Cohen?

  You would have been a tenured track professor at Sarah Lawrence. You would have been living, where is Sarah Lawrence? In Vermont?

• 59:28Mayim Bialik?

  In New York. No, it's in Bronxville. Riverdale, yeah.

• 59:32Jonathan Cohen?

  It's like upstate New York, which is basically Vermont.

• 59:36Mayim Bialik?

  No, I'd be, yes, anyway. Maybe New Hampshire. I don't even know where New Hampshire is. I'd have to look at, that's where I'd be a professor, in New Hampshire.

• 59:43Jonathan Cohen?

  You would have, the seasons would be lovely. You'd have the best pair of galoshes.

• 59:47Mayim Bialik?

  In another universe, I'm already doing that. And I have a shaved head and lots more piercings.

• 59:53Jonathan Cohen?

  And a lot of mittens.

• 59:54Mayim Bialik?

  That's right. I think that we will computationally end there.

• 59:59Jonathan Cohen?

  If you want more exploration into this conversation, particularly the notion of multiple timelines, I think we want to unpack that. And the idea of how our perceptions can change, moving, for me, beyond five senses, what we can experience. Join us on Substack. Mind B Alex Breakdown on Substack.

• 1:00:20Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.