#87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, The Greatest Show on Earth, and his latest Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea. He is outspoken, bold, and often fearless in his defense of science and reason, and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Support this podcast by signing up with these sponsors: – Cash App – use code “LexPodcast” and download: – Cash App (App Store): https://apple.co/2sPrUHe – Cash App (Google Play): https://bit.ly/2MlvP5w EPISODE LINKS: Richard’s Website: https://www.richarddawkins.net/ Richard’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins Richard’s Books: – Selfish Gene: https://amzn.to/34tpHQy – The Magic of Reality: https://amzn.to/3c0aqZQ – The Blind Watchmaker: https://amzn.to/2RqV5tH – The God Delusion: https://amzn.to/2JPrxlc – Outgrowing God: https://amzn.to/3ebFess – The Greatest Show on Earth: https://amzn.to/2Rp2j1h This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter https://twitter.com/lexfridman, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman, Medium https://medium.com/@lexfridman, or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence/id1434243584, follow on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL, or support it on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman. Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 02:31 – Intelligent life in the universe 05:03 – Engineering intelligence (are there shortcuts?) 07:06 – Is the evolutionary process efficient? 10:39 – Human brain and AGI 15:31 – Memes 26:37 – Does society need religion? 33:10 – Conspiracy theories 39:10 – Where do morals come from in humans? 46:10 – AI began with the ancient wish to forge the gods 49:18 – Simulation 56:58 – Books that influenced you 1:02:53 – Meaning of life

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magical Reality, and The Greatest Show of Earth, and his latest, Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including, funny enough, the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, which, in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution, is an exceptionally powerful idea. He's outspoken, bold, and often fearless in the defense of science and reason, and

• 0:41Lex Fridman?

  in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic. For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis, I'm sending love your way. Stay strong. We're in this together. We'll beat this thing. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at LexFriedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience.

• 1:25Lex Fridman?

  This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEXSPodcast. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to send and receive money digitally, peer-to-peer, security in all digital transactions is very important. Let me mention the PCI data security standard that Cash App is compliant with. I'm a big fan of standards for safety and security. PCI DSS is a good example of that, where a bunch of competitors got together and agreed that there needs to be a global standard around the security of transactions. Now, we just need to do the same for autonomous

• 2:06Lex Fridman?

  vehicles and artificial intelligence systems in general. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store, Google Play, and use the code LEXSPodcast, you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Richard Dawkins.

• 2:48Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Well, if we accept that there's intelligent life here, and we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic, I mean, 10 to the 22 stars has been estimated. It seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life. If you deny that, then you're committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable. I mean, ludicrously off-the-charts improbable. And I don't think it's that improbable. Certainly, the origin of life itself, there are really two steps, the origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable. And then, the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also fairly improbable. So the juxtaposition of those two, you could say, is pretty improbable, but not 10 to the 22 improbable.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  It's an interesting question, maybe you're coming on to it, how we would recognize intelligence from outer space if we encountered it. The most likely way we would come across them would be by radio. It's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us. But it's not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals. And then, we would have to have some means of deciding that it was intelligent.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  People have, people involved in the SETI program discuss how they would do it, and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to, an obvious way for them to broadcast, to say, "We are intelligent, we are here."

• 4:17Speaker 01

  I suspect it probably would be obvious, actually.

• 4:19Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting, prime numbers, so the mathematical patterns. It's an open question whether mathematics is the same for us as it would be for aliens. I suppose we could assume that ultimately, if we're governed by the same laws of physics, then we should be governed by the same laws of mathematics.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  I think so. I suspect that they will have Pythagoras theorem, etc. I mean, I don't think that their mathematics will be that different.

• 4:43Lex Fridman?

  Do you think evolution would also be a force on the alien planets as well?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  I stuck my neck out and said that if we do, if ever that we do discover life elsewhere, it will be Darwinian life, in the sense that it will, but it will work by some kind of natural selection, the non-random survival of non, of randomly generated codes. It doesn't mean that the genetic, it would have to have some kind of genetics, but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics, probably wouldn't be, actually. But it would, I think it would have to be Darwinian, yes.

• 5:14Lex Fridman?

  So some kind of selection process?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yes, in the general sense, it would be Darwinian.

• 5:20Lex Fridman?

  So let me ask kind of an artificial intelligence engineering question. So you've been an outspoken critic of, I guess, what could be called intelligent design, which is an attempt to describe the creation of a human mind, a body, by some religious folks, religious folks used to describe. So broadly speaking, evolution is, as far as I know, again, you can correct me, is the only scientific theory we have for the development of intelligent life. Like, there's no alternative theory, as far as, as far as I understand.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  None has ever been suggested, and I suspect it never will be.

• 5:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, of course, whenever somebody says that, a hundred years later.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I know. It's, it's, it's a risk.

• 6:02Lex Fridman?

  It's a risk.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  But you want to bet? I mean, I, I'm.

• 6:06Lex Fridman?

  But it would look, sorry, yes, it would probably look very similar, but it'd be, it's almost like Einstein general relativity versus Newtonian physics. It'll be maybe an alteration of the theory or something like that, but it won't be fundamentally different. But, okay.

• 6:22Lex Fridman?

  So now for the past 70 years, even before the AI community has been trying to engineer intelligence, in a sense, to do what intelligent design says, you know, was done here on Earth. What's your intuition? Do you think it's possible to build intelligence? To build computers that are intelligent? Or do we need to do something like the evolutionary process? Like, there's no shortcuts here.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  That's an interesting question. I'm committed to the belief that is ultimately possible, because I think there's nothing non-physical in our brains. I think our brains work by the laws of physics. And so it must, in principle, be possible to replicate that. In practice, though, it might be very difficult. And as you suggest, it may be the only way to do it is by something like an evolutionary process. I'd be surprised. I suspect that it will come. But it's certainly been slower in coming than some of the early pioneers thought.

• 7:23Lex Fridman?

  Thought it would be, yeah. But in your sense, is the evolutionary process efficient? So you can see it as exceptionally wasteful in one perspective, but at the same time, maybe that is the only path.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  It's a paradox, isn't it? I mean, on the one side, it is deplorably wasteful.

• 7:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  It's fundamentally based on waste. On the other hand, it does produce magnificent results. I mean, the design of a soaring bird, an albatross, a vulture, an eagle,

• 7:54Speaker 01

  is superb. An engineer would be proud to have done it. On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud to have done some of the other things that evolution has served up. Some of the sort of botched jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical origins, but they don't look well-designed.

• 8:10Lex Fridman?

  Do you have examples of bad design?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  My favorite example is the current laryngeal nerve. I've used this many times. This is a nerve, it's one of the cranial nerves. It goes from the brain, and the end organ that it supplies is the voice box, the larynx. But it doesn't go straight to the larynx, it goes right in down into the chest. And then loops round an artery in the chest and then comes straight back up again to the larynx. Uh, and I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck, which happened to have died in a zoo. And we watched the, we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve going whizzing straight past the larynx. Within an inch of the larynx. Yeah. Down into the chest and then back up again. Um, which is a, a detour of many feet.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Um, very, very inefficient. The reason is historical. The ancestors are fish ancestors, the ancestors of all mammals and fish. Um, the most direct pathway of that, of the equivalent of that nerve. There wasn't a larynx in those days, but it innovated by the gills. The most direct pathway was behind that artery. And then when the mammal, when the tetrapods, when the land vertebrate started evolving and then the neck started to stretch. The marginal cost of changing the embryological design to jump that nerve over the artery was too great. Or rather was, was each step of the way was a, was a very small cost.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  But the marginal, but the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large. As the neck lengthened, it was a negligible change to just increase the length, the length of the detour a tiny bit, a tiny bit, a tiny bit. Each millimeter at a time didn't make any difference. And so, but finally, when you get to a giraffe, it's a huge detour and no doubt is very inefficient. Now that's bad design. Any engineer would reject that piece of design. It's ridiculous. And there are quite a lot, a number of examples, as you'd expect. It's not surprising that we find examples of that sort. In a way, what's surprising is there aren't more of them. In a way, what's surprising is that the design of living things is so good. So natural selection manages to achieve excellent results.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Um, partly by tinkering, partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes and, and as it were, making the best of a bad job.

• 10:31Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting. I mean, it, it is surprising and, and beautiful and it's a, it's a mystery from an engineering perspective that so many things are well designed. I suppose the thing we're forgetting is how many generations have to die.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:47Lex Fridman?

  For that.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  That's the inefficiency of it. Yes, that's the horrible wastefulness of it.

• 10:51Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah, we, we marvel at the final product, but, uh, yeah, the process is painful.

• 10:57Lex Fridman?

  Elon Musk describes human beings as potentially the, what he calls the biological boot loader for artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence is used as the term. It's kind of like superintelligence. Do you see superhuman level intelligence as potentially the next step in the evolutionary process?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that if, if superhuman intelligence is to be found, it will be artificial. I, I don't have any hope that we ourselves, our brains will go on, uh, go on getting larger in ordinary biological evolution. I think that's probably come to an end. It, it is the dominant trend or one of the dominant trends in our fossil history for the last two or three million years.

• 11:41Lex Fridman?

  Brain size?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Brain size, yes. So it's been, it's been swelling rather dramatically over the last two or three million years. That is unlikely to continue. The, the only way that, that's, that happens is because natural selection favors those individuals with the, with the biggest brains. Um, and that's not happening anymore.

• 11:59Lex Fridman?

  Right. So in general, in humans, the, the selection pressures are not, I mean, are they active in any form?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Well, in order for them to be active, it would be necessary that the most intel, let's, let's call it an intelligence. Not that intelligence is simply correlated with brain size, but let's let's talk about intelligence. In order for that to evolve, it's necessary that the most intelligent beings have the most individuals have the most children. And so, intelligence may buy you money, it may buy you worldly success, it may buy you a nice house and and a nice car and things like that, if you successful career. It may buy you the admiration of your fellow people, but it doesn't increase the number

• 12:48Speaker 01

  of offspring that you have, it doesn't increase your genetic legacy to the next generation. On the other hand, artificial intelligence, I mean, computers and technology generally is evolving by a non genetic means, by leaps and bounds, of course.

• 13:04Lex Fridman?

  And so, what do you think, I don't know if you're familiar, there's a company called Neuralink, but there's a general effort of brain computer interfaces, which is to try to build a connection between the computer and the brain, to send signals both directions. And the long term dream there is to do exactly that, which is expand, I guess, expand the size of the brain, expand the capabilities of the brain. Do you do you see this as interesting? Do you see this as a promising possible technology? Or is the interface you see in the computer and the brain, like the brain is this wet, messy thing that's just impossible to interface with?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Well, of course, it's interesting. Whether it's promising, I'm really not qualified to say. What I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small as it is compared to a computer and the and the individual components being as slow as they are compared to our electronic components, it is astonishing what it can do. I mean, imagine building a computer that that fits into the size of a human skull. And with The equivalent of transistors or integrated circuits which work as slowly as neurons do.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  It's something mysterious about that, something, something must be going on that we don't understand.

• 14:25Lex Fridman?

  So I have, I've just talked to Roger Penrose, I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work. He, he also describes this kind of mystery in, in the mind, in the brain that, as he's a materialist. So there's not, there's no sort of mystical thing going on, but there's so much about the material of the brain that we don't understand. As the, that might be quantum mechanical nature and so on. So there, the ideas about consciousness. Do you have any, have you ever thought about, do you ever think about ideas of consciousness? Or a little bit more about the mystery of intelligence and consciousness that seems to pop up, just like you're saying, from our brain?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  I agree with Roger Penrose that there is a mystery there. I, I, I mean, he's one of the world's greatest physicists, so I, I can't possibly argue with, with, with his.

• 15:17Lex Fridman?

  But nobody knows anything about consciousness. And in fact, you know, if, if we talk about religion and so on, some, the mystery of consciousness is so inspiring and we know so little about it, that the leap to sort of religious or mystical explanations is too easy to make.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I, I think that it's just an act of cowardice to leap to religious explanations and Roger doesn't do that, of course.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  But I, I, I accept that there may be something that we don't understand about it.

• 15:48Lex Fridman?

  So, correct me if I'm wrong, but in your book Selfish Gene, the, the gene-centered view of evolution allows us to think of the physical organisms as just the medium through which the software.

• 16:01Lex Fridman?

  Of our genetics and the ideas sort of propagate. So maybe can we start just with the basics? What in this context does the word meme mean?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  It would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene. Cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the transmission of culture and the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense. And it's only a useful word if there's something Darwinian going on. Obviously, culture is transmitted, but is there anything Darwinian going on? And if there is, that means there has to be something like a gene which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population.

• 16:44Lex Fridman?

  So it can replicate?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  It can replicate. Well, it clearly does replicate. There's no question about that. The question is, does it replicate in a sort of differential way in a Darwinian fashion? Could you say that certain ideas propagate because they're successful in the meme pool? In a sort of trivial sense, you can. Would you wish to say, though, that in the same way as an animal body is modified, adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes, is it also a machine for propagating memes? Could you actually say that something about the way a human is, is modified, adapted for the function of meme propagation?

• 17:30Lex Fridman?

  That's such a fascinating possibility, if that's true. That it's not just about the genes, which seem somehow more comprehensible, like these things of biology. The idea that culture or maybe ideas, you can really broadly define it.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:48Lex Fridman?

  Operates under these mechanisms.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Even morphology, even anatomy.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  It does does evolve by memetic means. I mean, things like hairstyles,

• 18:00Speaker 01

  styles of makeup, circumcision, these things are actual changes in the body form.

• 18:06Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Which are non genetic and which get passed on from generation to generation, or sideways like a virus. In a quasi genetic way.

• 18:16Lex Fridman?

  But the moment you start drifting away from the physical, it becomes interesting because the space of ideas, ideologies, political systems.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Of course, yes.

• 18:28Lex Fridman?

  So what's what in your, what's your sense is, are memes a metaphor more or are they really, is there something fundamental, almost physical presence of memes?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Well, I think they are a bit more than a metaphor and and I think that, and I mentioned the physical bodily characteristics, which are a bit trivial in a way, but with things like the propagation of religious ideas,

• 18:55Speaker 01

  both longitudinally down generations and transversely as in a sort of epidemiology of of ideas. When a charismatic preacher converts people,

• 19:09Speaker 01

  that that's that resembles viral transmission.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Whereas the the longitudinal transmission from grandparent to parent to child, etc. Is is is more more like conventional genetic transmission.

• 19:24Lex Fridman?

  This is such a beautiful, especially especially in the modern day idea. Do you think about this implication in social networks where the propagation of ideas, the viral propagation of ideas, and hence the the new use of the word meme to describe.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Well, the the internet, of course, provides extremely rapid method of transmission. And before, when when I first coined the word, the internet didn't exist. And so I was thinking then in terms of books, newspapers,

• 19:54Speaker 01

  broad radio, television, that kind of thing. Now, an idea can just leap around the world in in all directions instantly.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And so the internet provides a step change in the facility of propagation of memes.

• 20:12Lex Fridman?

  How does that make you feel? Isn't it fascinating that sort of ideas? It's like you have Galapagos Islands or something. It's the seventies and the internet allowed all these species to just like globalize. And in a matter of seconds, you could spread a message to millions of people. And these ideas, these memes can breed, can evolve, can mutate. And there's a selection and there's like different, I guess, groups that are all like there's a dynamics. It's fascinating here. Do you think?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:46Lex Fridman?

  Basically, do you think your work in this direction, while fundamentally was focused on life on earth? Do you think it should continue like to be taken further?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  I do think it would probably be a good idea to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing. We can mentally think of the transmission of ideas in evolutionary context as being limited to in our ancestors, people living in villages, living in small bands where everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village. And they might hop to a neighboring village occasionally and maybe even to a neighboring continent eventually. And that was a slow process. Nowadays, villages are international. I mean, you have people, it's been called echo chambers, where people are in a sort of internet village,

• 21:42Speaker 01

  where the other members of the village may be geographically distributed all over the world, but they just happen to be interested in the same things, use the same terminology, the same jargon, have the same enthusiasm. So people like the Flat Earth Society.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  They don't all live in one place. They find each other and they talk the same language to each other. They talk the same nonsense to each other. Um, and they, but so this is a kind of distributed version of the primitive idea of, of people living in, in villages and propagating their ideas in, in a local way.

• 22:16Lex Fridman?

  Is there, uh, is there Darwinist parallel, parallel here? So is there evolutionary purpose of villages? Or is that just a?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Oh, I wouldn't use a word like evolutionary purpose in that, that case. But villages or villages will be something that just emerged. That's the way people happen to live.

• 22:32Lex Fridman?

  And, uh, in, in it just the same kind of way, the flat earth societies, societies of ideas emerge in the same kind of way in this digital space.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Y- y- yes, yes.

• 22:45Lex Fridman?

  Is there something interesting to say about the? I guess from a perspective of Darwin, could we fully interpret the dynamics of social interaction in these, uh, social networks? Or is there, or some much more complicated thing need to be developed? Like, what's your sense?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Well, a Darwinian selection idea would involve investigating which ideas spread and which, which don't. Um, so in some ideas don't have the ability to spread. I mean, the flat earth, flat earthism is, is, there are a few people believe in it, but it's not going to spread because it's obvious nonsense. But other ideas, even if they are wrong, can spread because they are attractive in some sense.

• 23:33Lex Fridman?

  So the, the spreading and the selection in, in the Darwinian context is, uh, it just has to be attractive in some sense. Like, we don't have to define, like, it doesn't have to be attractive in the way that animals attract each other. It could be attractive in some other way.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Yes, it's, it's, all that matters is, all that is needed is that it should spread. And it doesn't have to be true to spread. I mean, truth is one criterion which might help an idea to spread. But there are other criteria which might help it to spread. As you say, a- a- attraction in animals is not necessarily valuable for survival. The celebrated, the famous peacock's tail doesn't help the peacock to survive. It helps it to pass on its genes. Similarly, um, an idea which is actually rubbish, but which people don't know is rubbish and think is very attractive, will spread. In the same way as a peacock's gene spread.

• 24:27Lex Fridman?

  It's a small sidestep. I remember reading somewhere, I think recently, that in some species of birds, sort of the idea that beauty may have its own purpose and the idea that some

• 24:42Lex Fridman?

  some birds, I'm being in eloquent here, but there is some aspects of their feathers and so on that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever. There's somebody making an argument that there are some things about beauty that animals do that may be its own purpose. Does that ring a bell for you? Does that sound ridiculous?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  I think it's a rather distorted bell.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Darwin, when he coined the phrase sexual selection, didn't feel the need to

• 25:17Speaker 01

  suggest that what was attractive to females, usually is males attracting females, that what females found attractive had to be useful. He said it didn't have to be useful. It was enough that females found it attractive. And so it could be completely useless, probably was completely useless in the conventional sense, but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on, John Darwin didn't call them genes, but in a sense of reproducing. Others, starting with Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, didn't like that idea and they wanted

• 25:51Speaker 01

  sexually selected characteristics like peacock's tails to be in some sense useful. It's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock's tail as being useful, but in the sense of survival, but others have run with that idea and have brought it up to date. And so there's a kind of, there are two schools of thought on sexual selection, which are still active and about equally supported now. Those who follow Darwin in thinking that it's just enough to say it's attractive and those who follow Wallace and say that it has to be in some sense useful.

• 26:25Lex Fridman?

  Do you fall into one category or the other?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  No, I'm open minded. I think they both could be correct in different cases.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  I mean, they've both been made sophisticated in a mathematical sense, more so than when Darwin and Wallace first started talking about it.

• 26:39Lex Fridman?

  I'm Russian. I romanticize things, so I prefer the former.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:46Lex Fridman?

  Where the beauty in itself is a powerful, so attraction is a powerful force in evolution.

• 26:54Lex Fridman?

  On religion,

• 26:57Lex Fridman?

  do you think there will ever be a time in our future where almost nobody believes in God? Or God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society?

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. I think it may happen after a very long time. I think it may take a long time for that to happen.

• 27:13Lex Fridman?

  So do you think ultimately for everybody on earth, religion, other forms of doctrines, ideas could do better job than what religion does?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, following truth.

• 27:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, truth is a funny, funny word.

• 27:34Lex Fridman?

  And reason too.

• 27:37Lex Fridman?

  There's, yeah, it's a, it's a difficult idea now with truth on the internet, right, and fake news and so on. I suppose when you say reason, you mean the very basic sort of inarguable conclusions of science versus which political system is better.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I mean, truth about the real world, which is ascertainable by, not just by the more rigorous methods of science, but by just ordinary sensory observation.

• 28:10Lex Fridman?

  So do you think there will ever be a time when we move past it? Like, I guess another way to ask it, are we hopelessly, fundamentally tied to religion in the way our society functions?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Well, clearly, all individuals are not hopelessly tied to it because many individuals don't believe. You could mean something like society needs religion in order to function properly, something like that. And some people have suggested that.

• 28:41Lex Fridman?

  What's your intuition on that?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Well, I've read books on it and they're persuasive. I, I don't think they're that persuasive though. I mean, I, some people suggested that society needs a sort of figurehead, which can be a non-existent figurehead in order to function properly. I think there's something rather patronizing about the idea that, well, you and I are intelligent enough not to believe in God, but the plebs need it, sort of thing. And I think that's patronizing and I'd like to think that that was not the right way to proceed.

• 29:18Lex Fridman?

  But at the individual level, do you think there's some value?

• 29:24Lex Fridman?

  Of spirituality, sort of, if I think sort of as a scientist, the amount of things we actually know about our universe is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of what we could possibly know. So just from everything, even the certainty we have about the laws of physics, it seems to be that there's yet a huge amount to discover. And therefore, we're sitting where 99.999% of things are just still shrouded in mystery. Do you think there's a role in a kind of spiritual view of that, sort of a humbled spiritual?

• 29:57Speaker 01

  I think it's right to be humble. I think it's right to admit that there's a lot we don't know, a lot that we don't understand, a lot that we still need to work on. We're working on it. What I don't think is that it helps to invoke supernatural explanations. What we, if our, if our current scientific explanations aren't adequate to do the job, then we need better ones, we need to work more. And of course, the history of science shows just that, that as science goes on, problems get solved one after another and the science advances, the science gets better. But to invoke a non-scientific, non-physical explanation is simply to lie down in a cowardly way and say, we can't solve it, so we're going to invoke magic. Don't let's do that.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Let's say we need better science, we need more science. It may be that the science will never do it. It may be that we will never actually understand everything. And that's okay, but let's keep working on it.

• 30:56Lex Fridman?

  A challenging question there is, do you think science can lead us astray in terms of the humbleness? So there's some aspect of science, maybe it's the aspect of scientists and not science, but of sort of a mix of ego and confidence that can lead us astray in terms of discovering the... You know, some of the big open questions about

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:21Lex Fridman?

  About the universe.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I mean, there are arrogant people in any walk of life, and scientists are no exception to that. And so there are arrogant scientists who think we've sold everything. Of course, we haven't. So humility is a proper stance for a scientist. I mean, it's a proper working stance because it encourages further work. But in a way, to resort to a supernatural explanation is a kind of arrogance because it's saying, well, we don't understand it scientifically, therefore, the non-scientific religious supernatural explanation must be the right one. That's arrogant. What is what is humble is to say, we don't know. And we need to work further on it.

• 32:03Lex Fridman?

  So maybe if I could psychoanalyze you for a second. You have at times been just slightly frustrated with people who have supernatural, you know, have a supernatural.

• 32:17Lex Fridman?

  Has that changed over the years? Have you become like, how do people that kind of have like seek supernatural explanations? How do you see those people? As human beings, as it's like, do you see them as dishonest? Do you see them as sort of ignorant? Do you see them as, I don't know, like, what, how do you think of?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Certainly not, not dishonest. And I mean, obviously, many of them are perfectly nice people. So I don't, I don't sort of despise them in that sense.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I think it's often a misunderstanding that, that people will jump from the admission that we don't understand something. They will jump straight to what they think of as an alternative explanation, which is the supernatural one, which is not an alternative. It's a non-explanation. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that science needs more work, that we need to actually get do some better, better science. So I, I don't have, I mean.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Personal antipathy towards such people. I just think they're misguided.

• 33:28Lex Fridman?

  So what about this really interesting space that I have trouble with? So religion I have a better grasp on, but there's a large communities, like you said, Flat Earth community that I've recently, because I've made a few jokes about it, I saw that there's, I've noticed that there's people that take it quite seriously. So there's this bigger world of conspiracy theorists, which is a kind of, I mean, there's elements of it that are religious as well, but I think they're also scientific. So the, the basic credo of a conspiracy theorist is to question everything,

• 34:11Lex Fridman?

  which is also the credo of a good scientist, I would say. So what do you make of this?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's probably too easy to say that by labeling something conspiracy, you therefore dismiss it. I mean, occasionally conspiracies are right. And so we shouldn't dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand. We should examine them on their own merits. Flat Earthism is obvious nonsense. We don't have to examine that much further. But I mean, there may be other conspiracy theories which are actually right.

• 34:44Lex Fridman?

  So I've grew up in the Soviet Union, so I, you know, the space race was very influential for me on both sides of the coin. You know, there's a conspiracy theory that we never went to the moon, right? And it's, it's like, I can understand it and it's very difficult to rigorously scientifically show one way or the other. It's just, you have to use some of the human intuition about who would have to lie, who would have to work together. And it's clear that very unlikely good, behind that is my general intuition that most people in this world are good.

• 35:21Lex Fridman?

  You know, in order to really put together some conspiracy theories, there has to be a large number of people working together and essentially being dishonest.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yes, which is improbable. The sheer number who would have to be in on this conspiracy and the sheer detail, the attention to detail they'd have had to have had and so on. I'd also worry about the motive. I mean, why would anyone want to suggest that it didn't happen? What's the, what's the, why is it so hard to believe? I mean, the physics of it, the mathematics of it, the idea of computing orbits and trajectories and things, it all works mathematically. Why wouldn't you believe it?

• 36:01Lex Fridman?

  It's a psychology question because there's something really pleasant about, you know, pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when everybody, like, you know, thinking outside the box and coming up with a true answer where everybody else is deluded. There's something, I mean, I have that for science, right? You want to prove the entire scientific community wrong. That's the whole.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  No, that's right. And of course, historically, lone geniuses have come out right sometimes.

• 36:29Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  But often people who think they're a lone genius much more often turn out not to. So you have to judge each case on its merits. The mere fact that you're a maverick, the mere fact that you're going against the current tide doesn't make you right. You've got to show you're right by looking at the evidence.

• 36:47Lex Fridman?

  So because you focus so much on religion and disassemble a lot of ideas there, and I just, I was wondering if you have ideas about conspiracy theory groups? Because it's such a prevalent, even reaching into presidential politics and so on. It seems like it's a very large communities that believe different kinds of conspiracy theorists. Is there some connection there to your thinking on religion?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  It is curious. It's a matter, it's an obviously difficult thing. I don't understand why people believe things that are clearly nonsense, like, well, Flat Earth and also the conspiracy about not landing on the moon or that the United States engineered nine eleven, that kind of thing.

• 37:34Lex Fridman?

  So it's not clearly nonsense, it's extremely unlikely.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Okay, it's extremely unlikely. Religion is a bit different because it's passed down from generation to generation. So many of the people who are religious. Got it from their parents, we got it from their parents, we got it from their parents. And childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force. But these things like the nine eleven conspiracy theory, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, the man on the moon conspiracy theory, these are not childhood indoctrination. These are presumably dreamed up by somebody who then tells somebody else, who then wants to believe it.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  And I don't know why people are so eager to fall in line with some, just some person that they happen to read or meet, who spins some yarn. I can kind of understand why they believe what their parents and teachers told them when they were very tiny and not capable of critical thinking for themselves. So I sort of get why the great religions of the world like Catholicism and Islam go on persisting. It's because of childhood indoctrination. But that's not true of flat-earthism. And sure enough, flat-earthism is a very minority cult.

• 38:54Lex Fridman?

  Way larger than I ever realized.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Well, yes, I know.

• 38:58Lex Fridman?

  But so that's a really clean idea. You've articulated in your new book and then I'll go on God and in God, Delusion is the early indoctrination. That's really interesting. You can get away with a lot of out there ideas in terms of religious texts if the age at which you convey those ideas at first is a young age. So indoctrination is sort of an essential element of propagation of religion. So let me ask on the morality side, in the books that I mentioned, God, Delusion, I'll go on God, you described that human beings don't need religion to be moral. So from an engineer perspective, we want to engineer morality into AI systems.

• 39:43Lex Fridman?

  So in general, where do you think morals come from in humans?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  A very complicated and interesting question. It's clear to me that the moral standards, the moral values of our civilization changes as the decades go by, certainly as the centuries go by, even as the decades go by. And We in the 21st century are quite clearly labeled 21st century people in terms of our moral values. There's a spread. I mean, some of us are a little bit more ruthless, some of us more conservative, some of us more liberal and so on.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  But we all subscribe to pretty much the same views when you compare us with, say, 18th century, 17th century people, even 19th century, 20th century people.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  So we're much less racist, we're much less sexist and so on than we used to be. Some people are still racist and some are still sexist, but the spread has shifted. The Gaussian distribution has moved and moves steadily as the centuries go by. And that is the most powerful

• 41:04Speaker 01

  influence I can see on our moral values. And that doesn't have anything to do with religion. I mean, the religion of the, sorry, the morals of the Old Testament are Bronze Age models, morals. They're deplorable and they are to be understood in terms of the people in the desert who made them up at the time. And so human sacrifice, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, petty revenge, killing people for breaking the Sabbath, all that kind of thing, inconceivable now.

• 41:41Lex Fridman?

  So at some point, religious texts may have in part reflected that Gaussian distribution at that time.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  I'm sure they did. I'm sure they always reflect that, yes.

• 41:49Lex Fridman?

  And then now, but the sort of, almost like the meme as you describe it of ideas moves much faster than religious texts do, than your religion.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basing your morals on religious texts, which were written millennia ago, is not a great way to proceed. I think that's pretty clear. So not only should we not get our morals from such texts, but we don't. We quite clearly don't. If we did, then we'd be discriminating against women and we'd be racist, we'd be killing homosexuals and so on. So we don't and we shouldn't. Now, of course, it's possible to

• 42:34Speaker 01

  By the, to, to use your 21st century standards of morality and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry pick, uh, particular verses which conform to our modern morality. And you'll find that Jesus says some pretty nice things, which is great. But you're using your 21st century morality to decide which verses to pick, which verses to reject. And so, why not cut out the middleman of the Bible? And go straight to the 21st century morality of which is, where that comes from is a much more complicated question. Why is it that morality, moral values change as the centuries go by? They undoubtedly do. And it's a very interesting question to ask why.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  It's a, it's another example of cultural evolution, just as technology progresses. So moral values progress for probably very different reasons.

• 43:27Lex Fridman?

  But it's, it's interesting if the direction in which that progress is happening has some evolutionary value, or if it's merely a drift that can go into any direction.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  I'm not sure it's any direction, and I'm not sure it's evolutionarily valuable. What it is, is, um, progressive in the sense that each step is a step in the same direction as the previous step. So it becomes, uh, more gentle, more decent, as by modern standards, more liberal, um, less violent.

• 43:54Lex Fridman?

  See, but more decent, I think you're using terms and interpreting everything in the context of the 21st century.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:01Lex Fridman?

  Because Genghis Khan would probably say that this is not more decent because we're now, you know, there's a lot of weak members of society that we're not murdering.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yes. And, and I was careful to say by, by the standards of the 21st century. By our, by our standards, if we with hindsight look back at, at history, what we see is a trend in the direction towards us, towards our present.

• 44:22Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Our, our, our present values.

• 44:24Lex Fridman?

  For us, we see progress, but it's, it's an open question whether that won't, you know, I don't see necessarily why we can never return to Genghis Khan times.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Well, we could, um, I, I suspect we won't, uh, but, um, it, it, but if you look at the history of moral values over the centuries, it is in a progressive. I use the word progressive not in a value judgment sense, in the sense of of a transitive sense. Each step is the same is the same direction as the previous step. So things like we don't derive entertainment from torturing cats. We don't derive entertainment from from like the Romans did in the Colosseum from from.

• 45:09Lex Fridman?

  Or rather, or rather, we suppress the desire to get, I mean, to have. It's probably in us somewhere. So there's a bunch of parts of our brain, one that probably, you know, limbic system that wants certain pleasures and that's.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  I didn't, I mean, I I wouldn't have said that, but you're you're a liberty to think that.

• 45:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, there's a there's a Dan Carlin of Hardcore History. There's a really nice explanation of how we've enjoyed watching the torture of people, the fighting of people, just the torture, the suffering of people throughout history as entertainment until quite recently. And now everything we do with sports, we're kind of channeling that feeling into something else. So I mean, there there is some dark aspects of human nature that are underneath everything. And I do hope this like higher level software we've built will keep us at bay.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:04Lex Fridman?

  I'm also Jewish and have history with the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. And I clearly remember that some of the darker aspects of human nature creeped up there.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  They do. There have been, there have been steps backwards, admittedly, and the Holocaust is an obvious one. But if you take a broad view of history, it's it's in the same direction.

• 46:28Lex Fridman?

  So Pamela McCordick in Machines Who Think has written that AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods. Do you see it's a poetic description, I suppose, but do you see a connection between our civilizations, historic desire to create gods, to create religions, and our modern desire to create technology and intelligent technology?

• 46:53Speaker 01

  I suppose there's a link between an ancient desire to.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Explain away mystery and um and science, but um intelligence, artificial intelligence creating gods, creating new gods. Um, and I forget, I read somewhere a somewhat facetious um paper which said that we have a new god, it's called Google, and and and we pray to it and we worship it and we and we ask its advice like an oracle and so on. Um, that's fun.

• 47:25Lex Fridman?

  But you don't see that, you see that as a fun statement, a facetious statement, you don't see that as a kind of truth of us creating things that are more powerful than ourselves and natural.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  It it has a kind of poetic resonance to it, which I get.

• 47:39Lex Fridman?

  But.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't.

• 47:41Lex Fridman?

  But not.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  I I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have bothered to make the point myself, put it that way.

• 47:46Lex Fridman?

  All right. So you don't think AI will become our new god, a new religion, a new gods, like Google?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Well, yes, I mean, I can see that um the future of intelligent machines, or indeed intelligent aliens from outer space, might yield beings that we would regard as gods in the sense that they are so superior to us that we might as well worship them. That's highly plausible, I think. But I see a very fundamental distinction between a god who is simply defined as something very, very powerful and intelligent on the one hand, and a god who doesn't need explaining by a progressive step-by-step process like evolution

• 48:32Speaker 01

  or like or like engineering design. So um the difference, so suppose we did meet an alien from outer space who was marvellously, magnificently more intelligent than us, and we would sort of worship it and for that reason. Nevertheless, it would not be a god in the very important sense that it did not just happen by to be to be there like God is supposed to. It must have come about by a gradual, step-by-step, incremental, progressive process, presumably like Darwinian evolution. There's all the difference in the world.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Between those two, intelligence, design, comes into the universe late as a product of a progressive evolutionary process, or progressive engineering design process.

• 49:23Lex Fridman?

  So most of the work is done through this slow-moving.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:27Lex Fridman?

  Progress.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 49:34Lex Fridman?

  The, yeah, it's, but there's still this desire to get answers to the why question that if, if we're, if the world is a simulation, if we're living in a simulation, that there's a programmer-like creature that we can ask questions of.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Okay, well, let me, let's, let's pursue the idea that we're living in a simulation, which is not, not totally ridiculous, by the way.

• 49:53Lex Fridman?

  There we go.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Then you still need to explain the programmer. The programmer had to come into existence by some, even if we're in a, in a simulation, the programmer must have evolved. Or if, if he's in a, in a sort of.

• 50:12Lex Fridman?

  Or she.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Or she, if she's in, if she's in a meta-simulation, then the, the meta, meta-programmer must have evolved by, by, by a gradual process. You can't escape that. Fundamentally, you've got to come back to a, a gradual incremental process of explanation to start with.

• 50:31Lex Fridman?

  There's no shortcuts in this world.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  No, exactly.

• 50:34Lex Fridman?

  But maybe to linger on that point about the simulation, do you think it's an interesting, basically talked to, bored the, the heck out of everybody asking this question, but whether you live in a simulation, do you think, first, do you think we live in a simulation? Second, do you think it's an interesting thought experiment?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  It's certainly an interesting thought experiment. I first met it in a science fiction novel by Daniel Gallois called Counterfeit World, in which.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  It's all about, I mean, our heroes are running a gigantic computer which simulates the world. And something goes wrong, and so one of them has to go down into the simulated world in order to fix it. And then the denouement of the thing, the climax to the novel is that they discover that they themselves are in another simulation at a high level. So I was intrigued by this, and I love others of Daniel Gallois's science fiction novels. Then it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrom.

• 51:40Lex Fridman?

  Bostrom, talking to him in an hour.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Okay. And he goes further, not just treat it as a science fiction speculation, he actually thinks it's positively likely. I mean, he thinks it's very likely, actually.

• 51:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, he makes like a probabilistic argument, which you can use to come up with very interesting conclusions about the nature of this universe.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  I mean, he thinks that we're in a simulation done by, so to speak, our descendants of the future, that the products, but it's still a product of evolution. It's still ultimately going to be a product of evolution, even though the super intelligent people of the future have created our world, and you and I are just a simulation, and this table is a simulation and so on. I don't actually, in my heart of hearts, believe it, but I like his argument.

• 52:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, so the interesting thing is, I agree with you, but the interesting thing to me, if I was to say, if we're living in a simulation, that in that simulation, to make it work, you still have to do everything gradually, just like you said, that even though it's programmed, I don't think there can be miracles.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Well, no, I mean, the programmer, the higher, the upper ones have to have evolved gradually. However, the simulation they create could be instantaneous. I mean, it could be switched on, and we come into the world with fabricated memories.

• 53:05Lex Fridman?

  True, but what I'm trying to convey, so you're saying the broader statement, but I'm saying, from an engineering perspective, both the programmer has to be slowly evolved, and the simulation, because it's like, from an engineering perspective.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it takes a long time to write a program.

• 53:22Lex Fridman?

  No, like, just, I don't think you can create the universe in a snap. I think you have to grow it.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Okay, well, that's a good point, that's an arguable point. By the way, I have thought about using the Nick Bostrom idea to solve the riddle of how you were talking. We were talking earlier about why the human brain can achieve so much.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  I thought of this when my then hundred year old mother was marveling at what I could do with it with a smartphone. And I could, you know, call, look up anything in the encyclopedia, I could play her music that she liked and so on. She says, all in that, in that tiny little phone? No, it's out there, it's in the cloud. And maybe what most of what we do is in a cloud. So maybe if we're, if we are a simulation.

• 54:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Then all the power that we think is in our skull, it actually may be like the power that we think is in the iPhone. But is that actually out there?

• 54:23Lex Fridman?

  It's an interface to something else. I mean, that's what, including Roger Penrose with panpsychism, that consciousness is somehow a fundamental part of physics. That it doesn't have to actually all reside inside our brain.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  But Roger thinks it does reside in the skull, whereas I'm suggesting that it doesn't, that it, that it's, that there's a cloud.

• 54:45Lex Fridman?

  That'd be a fascinating, a fascinating notion. On a small tangent, are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman, I guess?

• 54:56Lex Fridman?

  Maybe not saying his name correctly, but just forget the name, the idea that there's a difference in reality and perception. So like we biological organisms perceive the world in order for the natural selection process to be able to survive and so on. But that doesn't mean that our perception actually reflects the fundamental reality, the physical reality underneath.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Well, I do think that although it reflects the fundamental reality, I do believe there is a fundamental reality. I do think that what, that our perception is constructive in the sense that we construct in our minds, a model of what we're seeing. And so this is really the view of people who work on visual illusions, like Richard Gregory, who point out that things like a Necker cube. Um, which flip from a two dimensional picture of a cube on, on, on sheet of paper. But we see it as a three dimensional cube and it flips from one orientation to another. Uh, at regular intervals.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  What's going on is that the brain is, is constructing a cube. But the sense data are compatible with two alternative cubes. And so rather than stick with one of them, it alternates between them. I think that's just a, uh, a model for what we do all the time. When we see a table, when we see a person, when we see, uh, when we see anything, we're, um, using the sense data to construct or, or make use of a perhaps previously constructed model. Um, I noticed this when, when I meet somebody who actually is, say, a friend of mine. But I, until I kind of realized that, that it is him, he, he looks different.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  And then when I finally clock that, that it's him, his features switch like a necker cube.

• 56:52Lex Fridman?

  Interesting.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Into the familiar form, as it were, I've taken his face.

• 56:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Out of the filing cabinet inside, um, and grafted it onto, or, or used, used the sense data to, to, to, to, to invoke it.

• 57:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we do some kind of miraculous compression on this whole thing to be able to filter out most of the sense data. It makes, it makes sense of it. That's just a magical thing that we do. So you've written several many amazing books, but let me ask, what books? Um, technical or fiction or philosophical had a big impact on your own life?

• 57:30Lex Fridman?

  What, um, what books would you recommend people consider reading in their own intellectual journey?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Darwin, of course, uh, and, um.

• 57:40Lex Fridman?

  The original, I've actually ashamed to say I've never, uh, read Darwin.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  He's astonishingly prescient because considering he was writing in the middle of the 19th century.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Michael Geislin said he's working a hundred years ahead of his time. Everything except genetics is amazingly right and amazingly far ahead of his time.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Um, and of course you need to read the, the updatings, um, that have happened since his time as well. And he would be astonished by.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Well, let alone Watson and Crick, of course, but he'd be astonished by Mendil in genetics as well.

• 58:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it'd be fascinating to see what he thought about DNA, he would think about DNA.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, it would, because in many ways, it clears up what appeared in his time to be a riddle. The digital nature of genetics clears up what was a problem, what was a big problem. Gosh, there's so much that I could think of, I can't, I can't really.

• 58:45Lex Fridman?

  Is there, is there something outside, sort of more fiction? Is there, when you think young, was there books that just kind of, outside of kind of the realm of science?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:55Lex Fridman?

  Religion, that just kind of sparked your.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Yes, well, actually, I have, I suppose I could say that I've learned some, some science from science fiction.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  I mentioned Daniel Gallois, and that's one example, but another of his novels called Dark Universe, which is not terribly well known, but it's a very, very nice science fiction story. It's about a world of perpetual darkness. And we don't, we're not told at the beginning of the book why these people are in darkness. They stumble around in some kind of underground world of caverns and passages, using echolocation like bats and whales to get around. And they've adapted, presumably by Darwinian means, to survive in perpetual total darkness.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  But what's interesting is that their mythology, their religion, has echoes of Christianity, but it's based on light. And so there's been a fall from a paradise world that once existed, where light reigned supreme. And because of the sin of mankind, light banished them. So they no longer are in light's presence, but, but light survives in the form of mythology and in the form of sayings like, "The great light almighty, for light's sake, don't do that." And I, and I hear what you mean, rather than I see what you, what you mean.

• 1:00:25Lex Fridman?

  So some of the same religious elements are present in this other totally kind of absurd, different form?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yes, and so it's a wonderful, I wouldn't call it satire, because it's too good natured for that. I mean, a wonderful parable about Christianity and the doctrine, the theological doctrine of the fall.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Um. So I find that that kind of science fiction immensely stimulating. Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud. Oh, by the way, anything by Arthur C. Clarke, I find very, very wonderful, too. Uh. Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, his first science fiction novel. Um. Where he, well, I I learned I learned a lot of science from that. It has it suffers from an obnoxious hero, unfortunately, but apart from that, you learn a lot of science from it. Um. Another of his novels, the um Afa Andromeda, which, by the way, the the the theme of that is taken up by Carl Sagan's science fiction novel, another wonderful writer.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Carl Sagan, um Contact, where the idea is, again, we we will we will not be visited from outer space by physical bodies. We will be visited, possibly, we might be visited by radio, but the the radio signals could manipulate us and actually have a concrete influence on the world. If they make us or persuade us to build a computer, which which runs their software. So that they can then transmit their software by by radio. And then the computer takes over the world. And this is the same theme in both um Hoyle's book and Sagan's book. I I presumably, I don't know whether Sagan knew about Hoyle's book, probably did.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Um. And and but it's a clever idea that that that that we we will never be invaded by physical bodies, the war of the worlds of H G Wells will never happen. But we could be invaded by radio signals, code, coded information, which is sort of like DNA and and um. You know, the we we are, we are, I call them, we are survival machines of our of our DNA. So it has great resonance for for me, because I I think of us, I think of bodies, physical bodies, biological bodies, as.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Being manipulated by coded information in DNA, which has come down through generations.

• 1:02:53Lex Fridman?

  And in the space of memes, it doesn't have to be physical. It can be transmitted through the space of information. That's a fascinating possibility that from outer space, we can be infiltrated by other memes, by other ideas and thereby controlled in that way. Let me ask the last, the silliest or maybe the most important question. What is the meaning of life? What gives your life fulfillment, purpose, happiness, meaning?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  From a scientific point of view, the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA. But that's not what I feel. That's not the meaning of my life. So the meaning of my life is something which is probably different from yours and different from other people's, but we each make our own meaning. So we set up goals we want to achieve. We want to write a book. We want to do whatever it is we do, write a quartet. We want to win a football match. And these are, these are short term goals, well, maybe even quite long term goals, which are set up by our brains, which have goal seeking machinery built into them. But what we feel, we don't feel motivated by the desire to pass on our DNA mostly.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  We have other, other goals which can be very moving, very important. They could even be called spiritual in some cases. We want to understand the riddle of the universe. We want to understand consciousness. We want to understand how the brain works. These are all noble goals, or some of them can be noble goals anyway. And they are a far cry from the fundamental biological goal, which is the propagation of DNA. But the machinery that enables us to set up these. Higher level goals is originally programmed into us by natural selection of DNA.

• 1:04:51Lex Fridman?

  The propagation of DNA, but what do you make of this unfortunate fact that we are mortal? Do you ponder your own mortality? Does it make you sad?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Does it? I I ponder it. It would it makes me sad that I shall have to leave and not see what's going to happen next.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  If there's something frightening about mortality, apart from sort of missing, as I've said, something more deeply, darkly frightening, it's the idea of eternity. But eternity is only frightening if you're there. Eternity before we were born, billions of years before we were born, and we were effectively dead before we were born. As I think it was Mark Twain said, I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience. And that's how it's going to be after we after we leave. So I think of it as really eternity is a frightening prospect. And so the best way to spend it is under a general anesthetic, which is what it'll be.

• 1:05:58Lex Fridman?

  Beautifully put. Richard, it was a huge honor to meet you, to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 1:06:04Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Dawkins, and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App. Please consider supporting the podcast by downloading Cash App and using code LEXPODCAST. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Richard Dawkins. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.

• 1:06:48Lex Fridman?

  Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.

• 1:06:56Lex Fridman?

  We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few who won the lottery have birthed against all odds. How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.