Genius Philosopher: The Law of Physics That Explains Why Your Life Falls Apart. Rebecca Goldstein - #549

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, philosopher, novelist, and author of The Mattering Instinct. Her verdict on why human beings are driven to matter — and what threatens that drive — might change how you think about your own life. Check out her recent appearance on Mindscape here. In this conversation, we discuss why every human being is haunted by the need to matter, the four types of people and how each one tries to satisfy that longing, why Ludwig Boltzmann's tragic death is a thermodynamic story, how depression maps onto entropy, whether AI can ever have a mattering instinct, and why heroic strivers are the most threatened by artificial intelligence. We also get into what Freud got wrong about what women want, the physics of matter versus the philosophy of mattering, and why the second law of thermodynamics may be the most personal law in all of science. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Genius Award recipient. She is the author of multiple books including Plato at the Googleplex and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Her newest book, The Mattering Instinct, is one of Apple's most anticipated books of the year. 00:00 Why every human being needs to matter — and what happens when they can't 03:30 The second law of thermodynamics and what it has to do with your life 13:10 The 4 types of people: Transcenders, Socializers, Heroic Strivers, and Competitors 16:25 Why fame-seeking millennials will give up everything — including relationships 22:05 Zero-sum mattering: the competitor who was happy for 15 minutes after winning a Nobel Prize 23:20 Ludwig Boltzmann solved one of physics' greatest paradoxes — then despaired 28:45 All tragedies are thermodynamic — and so is depression 35:40 Life as resistance to entropy: what flourishing actually means 48:35 Can AI have a mattering instinct? What that would mean for human rights and everything we think we are ➡️ Follow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein 🌐 Website: https://rebeccagoldstein.com/ 📚 The Mattering Instinct: https://www.amazon.com/Mattering-Instinct-Deepest-Longing-Divides/dp/1324096853 🐦 Twitter/X: https://x.com/platobooktour ✍️ Substack: https://rebeccanewbergergoldstein.substack.com/ Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #philosophy #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #mattering #entropy #meaningoflife #RebeccaNewbergerGoldstein #thermodynamics #AIandhumanity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  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 matter. This is how I judge people. Are you increasing entropy? Or are you decreasing it? If these agents begin to have a longing to matter, if they do this, then we'll have non-carbon-based humans.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  She's a MacArthur genius, a philosopher who's trained in physics. And she just used the second law of thermodynamics to explain why 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.

• 2:00Brian 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?

• 2:12Speaker 03

  When I studied physics as an undergraduate, and then I had gone, when I went into philosophy, it was into philosophy of physics, you know, 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 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. 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.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  I thought, 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, that the laws of biology are, in some sense, 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 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 can get out of the system, and eventually, the system will go to thermal equilibrium, it

• 3:38Speaker 03

  will, you'll be able to get no more energy out of it, it's somewhat the end of the system. And in fact, Rudolf Clausius, the antecedent physicist who formulated a concept of entropy, which means literally transformation from within. There's poignancy in that. It's transformation from within is going to... The end of the system. And he had said, you know, that the universe itself will 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, I mean, 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. He's saying, you know, what's, how can I live? What, what's there to live for?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  You know, the sun is going to go out and, and, 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.

• 4:29Brian Keating?

  It's in Annie Hall, right?

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Annie Hall, yes, that's right.

• 4:32Brian Keating?

  He goes, yeah. What do you care? Brooklyn's not expanding, right?

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, that's what it was. It was expanding. Right. That's right.

• 4:39Brian Keating?

  Classic. You studied physics as an undergrad, yeah? And you write in the book how you've been haunted since your early, you know, 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.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is really good because it really ties back to your previous question, you know, about the types of scientists, the different types of, you know, scientists, types in terms of their personality. And to me, the formative feature of personality is how you minister to this longing to matter, you know? So there was this great paradox, which is probably most of the processes that we observe are irreversible. If you film them, like, let's say I crack open an egg and I stir it up and then I fry it. And somebody, somebody filmed this and then they reversed the film.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Anybody who sees the reversal of that film is gonna know it was reversed. That cannot happen in nature, that its egg is gonna uncook itself, unscramble, the yolk is gonna separate from the albumen and then jump into the shell and seal up. 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 it and then reversed the film, perfectly, perfectly normal, you know, not contrary to nature at all. So how can that be?

• 6:33Speaker 03

  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. It boggled the mind, and it was called a paradox. And Boltzmann solved this problem. He really has only two premises here. That matter has constituents, and that order is much less probable than disorder.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Those constituents can only be in a certain configuration. You can switch them around a little bit when you have the egg cracked open with the yolk and the albumen surrounding it. Once you scramble it up, you can change, you can shuffle those parts every which way, and it's it's still going to look the same. The features of the system are going to stay the same. Instead of order going to disorder, you could talk about shuffleability. One of my physics professors had described it in terms of shuffleability. The more entropy there is, the more shuffleability, you know, you can change around the parts, and you're still gonna end up with the same system.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  There are just so many more by orders of magnitude, so many more ways of getting disorder than order in terms of the constituent states. This is the amazing thing. So here was this this real paradox, a real mind-boggling paradox. All you need is the Matter is made of constituent parts and the laws of probability. You know, it's the laws of large numbers applied to microstates. And that's why it's the supreme law of physics. I think it was Eddington who at first called it that. But it's repeated by Einstein and by Stephen Hawking, but really all physicists. That is, we know it is never going to be falsified.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  All laws of nature are open to falsification. That's what makes them scientific laws, right?

• 8:47Brian Keating?

  A provisional.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Well, it's always provisional. We're going to get more evidence. We're going to have to go back to the drawing boards. But this, and Einstein puts it very, very beautifully, and as does Eddington. If something doesn't agree with the second law of thermodynamics, too bad for your theory. Give up. You are not going to get that Nobel Prize. You are going to give it up. In that sense, it's the supreme law of physics. Ludwig Boltzmann, and he solved this amazing problem. And get this, none of his peers accepted it because of bad philosophy. They were all in that day, you know, it was Ernst Mach, was it like a leading Austrian? And he's a great, great, great physicist, you know? But he was a positivist.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  He did not believe in molecules and atoms. If you couldn't observe it, it didn't exist. I would call positivism bad philosophy. That philosophy was sinking an amazing piece of scientific work that has proved so fruitful. The ramifications of this are all over, including I want to make them even, you know, I want to draw even more consequences out of the law of second thermodynamics.

• 9:59Brian Keating?

  You write beautifully, you say, all tragedies are thermodynamic. He's mentioning in the context of his daughter Elsa finding her father's dead body. And it wasn't like he showed any sign, and we can't go into the minds of someone who dies by suicide. Right? But, but at the same time, you'd think that this would be a more common thing. And I guess my question to you is, why do some scientists kind of fall victim to even bad philosophy? Whereas others, so I'm thinking of Ignaz Semmelweis, who you write about. And we, we had Matt Kaplan on from The Economist who wrote a book basically about Semmelweis not being accepted called I Told You So. And, and then he didn't commit suicide, but, but he, he did kind of die tragically young and of illnesses probably precipitated by some of his melancholia.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  He was in an asylum when. Was, yes, they tricked him into an asylum.

• 10:49Brian Keating?

  My friend, Patty Carrico, invented mRNA COVID vaccine. She, you know, thrived despite even worse circumstances than people not believing her. They certainly didn't believe, they wanted to deport her. A postdoc advisor threatened to deport her if she got another job. And yet she came back resilient as ever and won the Nobel Prize. So why do some scientists fall victim to, I mean, physicists love to make fun of philosophers. You know that, I'm sure.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  I love to make fun of philosophers.

• 11:17Brian Keating?

  Well, tell me, why do some, you know, have, we sort of have arrogance or, you know, and then other times seem to fall prey to their, to their predations? Why is that?

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Temperament plays such a large role in this. I was not a person who was raised to think big ideas. I wasn't raised to think at all. I was really raised to be a good Orthodox Jewish wife and mother. And my temperament didn't go that way. I could just feel this sort of something, you know, the restlessness, the intellectual restlessness and whatever. Alzmann, he knew he had solved something incredibly important. He said, you know, it, it must be wonderful to be a general, leading great armies and into the battle and great victories. But as for him, the only thing he wants to do is sit in a little room and solve, and

• 12:10Speaker 03

  solve big problems that will contribute to knowledge. Now, to contribute to knowledge means that other scientists must accept it. He wanted to happen what exactly did happen to him only post-death, post-mortem, which is that he would, he would make science grow. He has made science grow amazingly, but he despaired that would ever happen. And he had a temperament, he might have been bipolar, you know, but it, but so it hurt him so much. And towards the end of his life, I mean, he was really desperate and he committed such a sad, sad thing. And as you say, I mean, You know, that his teenage daughter found him is just, it's such a tragedy. It was the day before he was supposed to return to teaching. And he was a beloved teacher.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  He had been a very funny teacher and very engaging. But he got more and more depressed. We are creatures of matter who long to matter. You can only say that in English, but I'm so glad you could say that in English because it's I'll get incredibly poignant. You know, we're creatures of matter who are subject to the laws of physics, including the second law of thermodynamics. But we long to matter. And so much of the book is trying to explain how that transformation from within, within us, within our species, happens. You know, that's a normative transformation, an ethical transformation. And it's really what distinguishes us, that we, in some sense, want to justify the fact

• 13:38Speaker 03

  that we matter so much to ourselves, that we pay so much attention to ourselves. And that we actually can pinpoint the place in human history where this emerged during the period when all the religions emerged that are still extant, which is so interesting. And also, Western philosophy emerged during the period of history that's called the Axial Age. And that's when we became these creatures who long to matter and who are searching for the right values to help us justify ourselves first and foremost. So I've been thinking about this forever, actually.

• 14:10Brian Keating?

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

• 14:31Speaker 03

  I've noticed that there are four general strategies. And that's what I sketched out. This is like the four continents of the mattering. And I asked AI to help me with how big to make them, how the proportions of humanity are, how they split up. And AI was very, very helpful in this. There, first of all, let's start with transcenders, what I call transcenders. And transcenders, which we, humanity has been for a long part of our history, up until, I guess, we would say, the Enlightenment. We all Sud are mattering religiously. We had a metaphysical premise that there is a transcendent presence in the universe, whether we call God or something vaguer, and that this God

• 15:16Speaker 03

  made the universe, created something out of nothing, created the laws of nature and the moral order within, and He created each one of us. You know, the fact that we are here is the proof that we have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. This is a very grand story. I get goosebumps when I even just, you know, say it. Very grand way of conceptualizing our mattering. It's a kind of cosmic mattering, that the God who created everything, created us, and we are here to try to figure out how He wants

• 15:58Speaker 03

  us to behave. These are the people I call transcenders. Then, most of the people I talk to, even if they go to church, or mosque, or synagogue, they're not transcenders. In this way, you know, in that their, that life would not be worth living if they didn't have this metaphysical belief. Most of the people I have spoken to are what I call socializers. They understand this question, "Do you matter?", that I ask them. They understand it as, "Do I matter to others?" And very often, the others to whom they need to matter are the people who are already in their lives. We all need people in our lives. Transenders, heroic strivers, competitors, these are the four branches of four continents that I delineate.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  We all need people in our life. We're gregarious creatures, evolved from gregarious creatures.

• 16:47Speaker 00

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• 17:17Speaker 03

  But for a socializer, there is no mattering other than mattering either to their people who are already in their lives, their children, or their romantic partners, or their community, colleagues, neighbors, people in their lives. But there are other socializers, and I've found this particularly with millennials, who it's not so much people in their lives, it can be perfect strangers. Many millennials want to be famous. That is how they want to appease the longing to matter. They want to be influencers. They really want to be famous, and they're willing to give up. I've read a lot of psychological literature on this. They're willing to give up, like, you know, having children, having romantic partners,

• 17:57Speaker 03

  having any connection with their family for fame, which is to be, to matter to a bunch of strangers, which is an odd thing, really.

• 18:05Brian Keating?

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

• 18:33Speaker 03

  I understand a little bit the rationale, because the way I understand this longing to matter is really trying to convince ourselves, which I find endearing about our species, that we have to convince ourselves. But the evidence that a lot of people are paying attention to us seems to be overwhelming evidence that we ourselves matter, that we deserve this attention. So I understand it in some sense. But in fact, most of the people I've spoken to who are famous, it's very, very insecure. They're not particularly happy people. The public is very fickle. There's that. Then heroic strivers. And heroic strivers, mattering doesn't mean mattering to God. It doesn't mean mattering to others.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  It means having certain standards of excellence that you are committed to, if not realizing at least. Potically approaching, you know, getting closer and closer to it. And it could be intellectual, it could be artistic, it could be athletic, military, entrepreneurial, ethical. All of these types are profiled in the book. Their mattering project, whether it's intellectual or ethical or artistic, is what, you know, keeps them going. And failures in that are existential failures. You know, those setbacks are existential. You know, I don't feel like my life is worth anything. That sort of thing is what you hear. And the last group are competitors.

• 20:00Speaker 03

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

• 20:41Speaker 03

  It's seminal work. And so I would say for all of these types, socializers, transcenders, competitors, heroics, strivers, it can be good, it can be bad. And I try to define what are the good ways, what do, you know, how do we judge the good ways of trying to appease this longing we have? What are the creative ways? What are the destructive ways? And once again, entropy comes to the rescue.

• 21:11Brian Keating?

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

• 21:32Speaker 03

  I have spoken to a lot of people who suffer from clinical depression. And I want to say first of all, that the US hotline for suicide prevention is www.YouMatter.gov.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  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 out of terrible, terrible. And what this means is they cannot, they cannot abide their own presence. I mean, I really think it shows how strong this mattering instinct is in us. You know, if you can't somehow appease it, you can't abide your own presence. The people I've spoken to, and one is a very, very good philosopher who has suffered from depress- depression, told me is that phenomenologically, this is exactly what it feels like. It feels like psychic disintegration. It just feels like an unraveling.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  And it's a kind of death within death. You know, where you don't have the counterentropic drive to push on against entropy into your life.

• 22:41Brian Keating?

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

• 23:26Brian Keating?

  could you be ten times happier? But I say to somebody, and this really only kind of works for people that are, have very tight, you know, either children or relationships in their life that are like children, if they don't have biologicals. And that's that I could make your life infinitely worse. Like, you, I don't even like to say it, right? I'm not even going to vocalize what it is, but you and I know, as being parents, how our life could be get infinitely worse, right? So, the converse of that to me is you should do those things, that which, if they were taken away through an entropic destroying process, you would be devastated. Okay, maybe not that. But like, the more of those things you have, I think the happier, or at least you can progress towards happiness. You speak about happiness not as a state of being, but as a, almost like a journey.

• 24:08Brian Keating?

  Does that comport with this entropic, you know, overarching, I would say, architecture that you speak about?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  We're not closed systems. Being a closed system is not compatible with being alive. We take in energy in the form of food and sunlight and certain chemicals. And taken in through the work of metabolism. Keeping up the order that life needs, you know. Life is a highly ordered system. So ordered, it's scary to think because the more ordered, the more ways it can go wrong. And all of this order is maintained, you know, in the face and in resistance to entropy. That's what life, you know, viva la resistance. That's this is what life is. That's what it is, resistance to entropy.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  While we're, of course, exporting high entropic waste, you know, heat and other waste into the environment. Life is a local violation of

• 25:09Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  the law of entropy. But the life with the environment, that system is obeying the law of entropy. There are no violations to the law of entropy. This is what life is. This is what flourishing is. It is a counterentropic resistance, defiance. And happiness, you know, happiness is a very ordered state. And I would say, I would go even further. Everything worth living for is an ordered state. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Clarity is better than confusion. Flourishing is better than suffering. Love is better than hatred. Beauty is better than ugliness. These are truisms, you know, that we all accept.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  But if, and if you look at the thing that's better, it's an ordered state. Its negation is a disordered state. So I think I would argue this is a very kind of a spinozist argument. Trying to get out of the laws of nature, some ethical enlightenment, some ethical guidance. Because that's what we want. We want ethical guidance, you know. We know we want to matter. We know we do all sorts of things to matter. Some people do very bad things in order to matter. Some of the people I've spoken to, they want power over others. They want dominance. And they want to make other people's life miserable, you know. These are bad things, right? They cause an increase in entropy. This is how I judge people. Are you increasing entropy or are you decreasing it?

• 26:37Brian Keating?

  Well, one of my favorite lines in a book that caused me to laugh out loud while I was playing golf with one of my kids and listening to the audio book, which everyone should get all versions of it. At one point, you say, and I'm like about to hit, you know, my 16th shot on the hole, and you say that we burn 320 calories per day just by thinking. So if this book is pushing you to step up your thinking, even only to disagree, then you're burning extra calories. So, Brian, you're welcome. And so I read the book twice, Rebecca, so I could have that extra croissant. But it raises a real question. If people or situations are anti-entropic, you just said, like, you judge people, but I'm going to ask you a very provocative question, which is, can people who don't have children, and children

• 27:20Brian Keating?

  could mean biological, but it could also mean ideological children, it could mean mentees, it could mean proteges, it could mean people that you sponsor, your big brother, big sister, do they matter less? I know it's provocative, but can we say something about them?

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Any mattering project that depends on making others feel like they matter less is wrong. I think I have a good proof. I didn't put it in this book because my editors, they wanted the book to sell. There couldn't be too much philosophy. That's right. But I think I have very good proof for why we all morally matter. And I think I've actually even broached it here. There's something ennobling about wanting to matter and try and devoting so much of our energy to these mattering projects. We devote so much. It's hard enough to live, right? But no, we devote so much of our energy to these mattering

• 28:17Speaker 03

  projects, writing books, studying, bringing up our children, fighting for justice, all, you know, so many different ways. What are the bad ways? Well, anyone that, you know, any, you know, anything that depends on making others feel like they matter less, either those in your life, or, you know, ideologically, or whatever. But I would also say that some mattering projects can be bad because they're not actually working for you. I mean, sometimes as a professor, you know, you have students and they want to study a certain thing. And you don't know really why they want to study it. They don't love it. They're not doing well in it. But somehow their mattering seems to depend on this.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  It's kind of a responsibility to say, look, you're very smart. You have many talents. I don't think this is the best use of your talent. So to answer your question, here's what I would say. Because I want to be extremely pluralistic. And I know people who I think live wonderful lives, who don't have people that they're particularly caring for in their lives. That's not, they're just not caretakers. And I'm going to go back to Hillel the Elder, the great rabbinic sage of the first century. He said, you know, if I'm not for myself, then who will be for me? We can translate that into entropic language. I have to be for myself. I have to be constantly fighting entropy and trying, and just to survive and to thrive. And because of that, you know, I pay a lot of attention to myself. I'm not, it's not that we're self-centered,

• 29:47Speaker 03

  but we have to feel ourselves deserving of attention, of our own attention. I mean, our whole planning, our whole sense of engagement with life demands this.

• 29:57Speaker 00

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• 30:26Speaker 03

  And so of course I have to be for myself. But if I'm only for myself, then what am I? You're right. So the way I would translate that is if your mattering project is only working for you and it is not having, it's not helping in any way to enforce the counter entropic process, which is life and flourishing, then you're selfish, you know, you're selfish. But that there are so many ways of doing that, you know? I mean, even, you know, plant a

• 31:02Speaker 03

  Garden in your, in a park, you know, so others can enjoy it. There's so many ways that you can, in, in, in some way be a force or save, save the animals, you know, right? They're, they're suffering too, right?

• 31:16Brian Keating?

  This book, We Have to Do What You're Not Supposed to Do, which is judge a book by its cover.

• 31:33Brian Keating?

  Take us through the book, the title, the subtitle, and this map of meaning or this braided thread. It's, it's mercurial. I love the title, the cover and the subtitle. So take us through it, Rebecca, please.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, The Mattering Instinct, the subtitle, How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. And this divides us was very, very important to me. And that was sort of after germinating these ideas for decades, what finally got me to write is what seems to be a crisis of mattering that we're going through and that is, you know, so dividing us to the point that it's hard to have a civil union. I did want to offer this book as a way of perhaps being able to see the deep humanity in all of us and where we diverge. A lot of the divergence is in good faith, you know, to be able to see each other as generously as possible. That was really the motivation.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Because frankly, you know, I'm trained in analytic philosophy, analytic philosophers like very little problems. Puzzles, we like puzzles, puzzles in language are the best, right? I'm suspicious of big theories, but somehow this theory kept growing in my mind from physics to biology, to psychology, to philosophy, to ethics, you know? And I was suspicious, I would say maybe afraid even to put it out. I was like, who the hell am I to put forth a broad, broad theory? But it, I, I think it was really the sense of, it helps me when I get very angry when I'm reading the newspaper and it's like, what's wrong with my species?

• 33:11Speaker 03

  It helps me to go through the ideas that I work out here and to just... To grow the generosity toward one another. So it's in that spirit. And that's how I understand this braid. We're together, we're together, we're so together. We are all, you know, the whole scientific story of how we come to have this longing to matter and to justify ourselves. It's a common story. We share it. But then the way we appease this longing to matter, this mattering instinct, find a way of living with this self-justificatory longing that requires us to have values, which is elite. The values don't follow from all of this.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  If there's free will anywhere, it's here, where we branch off and we become undivided and go off in our... That's what I understood by this. I had turned down a whole bunch of covers because it's a very abstract idea. And a lot of the covers they gave me looked like introduction to differential geometry. It just looked like a math book.

• 34:19Brian Keating?

  Fear that a lot of people have nowadays is about artificial intelligence, kind of replacing, you know, what we do that we have a sense of mattering from, what we derive our matter, you know, and you quote Freud in the book. Freud said, you know, all of life is work and love. And if AI can replace the work of knowledge workers like you and me, and it can replace the love because of things like character, AI, and all these artificial relationships that, you know, don't require me to go out and ask a woman on a date, or, you know, nowadays for men. So I want to ask you the question, can AI have a mattering instinct? Or is it encoded in this wet supercomputer that we carry on our shoulders?

• 35:02Brian Keating?

  You know, is it possible, you're right, that AI is making everyone feel that redundancy is threatening to us, but will the AI rob ourselves of our mattering?

• 35:10Speaker 03

  There are two, you know, two different questions there. You know, one, which is really, I think, you know, going to be upon us, maybe already is. You know, that some of the most creative ways of...

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Appeasing or mattering instinct will be superseded by what AI can do. Prove math theorems faster, make discoveries in science, write novels, write music, paint pictures that have led to flourishing and led to great achievements that we can all take pride in. I take great pride in our species producing, you know, Bach and Shakespeare and Michael Jordan. I'm a big basketball fan. Here's some, one thing I would say, you know, the heroic strivers, what I call heroic strivers, it's really going to threaten them. I don't think that the socializers are going to look to, I mean, to some extent, maybe

• 36:05Speaker 03

  for romantic partners or, but mothers are not going to have little babies, AI agents that are acting like they're babies. There's, I don't think this is going to happen, but I think heroic strivers, what I call heroic strivers, are going to be severely threatened. One of the ways to be a heroic striver is ethically, and that will still remain to us. AI can't, will not be able to do that. They could write our novels or our poetry or our music or prove our math theorems, but they're not going to be able to, to do that for us. And so, and wouldn't that be a wonderful, you know, as wonderful turn of events of that's, if somehow there was a change, an incredible ethical change, and

• 36:48Speaker 03

  that's how we got our status, you know, from, from how much good we're actually doing in the world, how much counterentropic good we're doing in the world. You know, it, this is a big thing that's upon us, is all I can say. I, I can't think of anything else, not the industrial revolution, not, not the enlightenment, nothing, that is, has the possibility of so changing what we are and what are, we see our lives as being about.

• 37:16Brian Keating?

  Even the very name of our species, you know, homo habilis man, you know, toolmaker or handyman.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:22Brian Keating?

  And homo sapiens, man who knows, right?

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly.

• 37:26Brian Keating?

  We're not the only things that know.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  And your other question, if. You know, God forbid, if these agents begin to have a longing to matter, want to justify their own, you know, it would take self-reflection, you know, of the sort that we have, you know, being able to step outside themselves and say, oh, my God, I pay so much attention to myself. Am I worth it? Do I deserve this? If they do this, then what we have are non-carbon-based humans. These will be humans, and that means we're going to have to think about their rights. We're going to have a whole different way of having to think about ethics, because we will have created, and we've always been creating humans, but we will have created humans in a

• 38:11Speaker 03

  new way. You know, philosophers have been at it for over 2,000 years since the ancient Greeks. This is the moment for philosophers, because these are philosophical problems. So show us what you've got, philosophers, right? You've been thinking about this for 2,000 years. Show us what you've got.

• 38:27Brian Keating?

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

• 38:37Speaker 03

  I had him at Princeton.

• 38:39Brian Keating?

  You did? Oh, you're so lucky. Your career is legendary. I mean, I just love your writing and your books. But Wheeler said, maybe you heard him say it, maybe not. He said, matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move. And this book, The Matter Instinct, was one of the most moving books to me. And hopefully, we'll have many more. You'll write many more books, or we'll talk about your other books, too, that have been so important to me and my colleagues and the intellectual circle that I move in. But the movement of this book, it was surprising to me, just how deep it is, how accurate it is, and how precise it is. It's a wonderful book. It's one of Apple's most anticipated books of the year. It's got, you know, hundreds of incredible reviews already. And I just

• 39:21Brian Keating?

  thank you so much for sharing your time and just your ideas and your brain, your giant brain with the Into the Impossible audience. Thank you so much, Rebecca.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you so much. I knew it was gonna be fun.

• 39:31Brian Keating?

  And I'll do it again sometime.

• 39:34Speaker 02

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

• 40:09Speaker 06

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