Brian Greene: Physics vs. the Existence of God [INTERVIEW 1/2]

Transcript

my intuition tells me that Consciousness somehow emerges your brain and my brain and everybody's brain is made up of molecules and atoms and particular configurations if the particles don't have that how is it that by putting a lot of particles together you do yield an inner world of sights and smells and emotions this inner world that we all have playing out inside of our heads where does it come from maybe the particles do do have some kind of version of Consciousness a little bit of Consciousness in the electron in the Quark in the proton this chair from this perspective would embody a certain rudimentary kind of Consciousness because the ingredients themselves would embody that if that's all that Consciousness is then you pretty inviolably come to the conclusion that there is no free will religions a beautiful really spectacular invention of the human mind of course physics can allow for [Music] God it's a great honor having you here and my opening question to you is don't you think that we were not programmed to understand the universe but does only to survive absolutely our brain like the rest of our bodies like every species on planet Earth is here because it survived and it survived because survival of the fittest we evolve over time to have the capacities that allow us to get the next meal or to find shelter or to avoid a predator that's why we are here and our brains do that by finding patterns in the external world because if you see a pattern out there you've got to leg up in the battle for survival if you can maybe predict with some certainty what's going to happen next while your competitor can't you're more likely to win to survive that's why we're here so as a physicist you are fighting with nature I wouldn't say that we're fighting with nature what I would say is once our brains gained the capacity to recognize patterns that aided survival that capacity then went overboard it evolved to a place where it could spot patterns that are irrelevant to survival and then as we began to conquer the natural world where we didn't have to spend all our time gathering fruit and nuts or throwing a spear at an antelope when we had enough time we could use that pattern recognition capacity to start to think about things like the pattern of the motion of the planets the pattern of the motion of objects that we throw or even then the pattern of the motion of the electron in the atom or the pattern of the energy that comes out of the accretion disc around a black hole these are just extensions of our capacity to recognize patterns that were at first in the service of survival but now we have not fought against nature we've leveraged that capacity to go even further what's about the molecules can molecules be involved in the natural selection process I think molecular Darwinism as we often call it is a vital part of how the world has evolved many of us when we learn about evolution by natural selection in school at least here in the United States it's always at the level of living systems living systems they have progyny the progyny won't have exactly the same characteristics as their parents and those new characteristics which Aid in survival they will spread widely because the bearer of those characteristics will have a better chance of living to the age of reproduction now that's only at the level of living systems there's a version of that that happens at the level of molecules molecules can have children so to speak they can have progeny molecules can learn the trick of replication and once a molecule can make a copy of of itself we recognize that no coping process is ever perfect there will always be mutation slightly different molecules and those mutations that Aid in the process of making more replicants they will spread widely so the molecular demographics will become dominated by those molecules that can reproduce swifter faster with greater economy and greater stability so in that sense molecules themselves fight other molecules UL chemical combat that ultimately yields refined molecules and those are the molecules that ultimately make up living systems what's about the enthropy in the universe can the actions the molecules increase effects increase enthropy in the universe yeah every physical process by and large except for you know very unlikely events results in an increase in entropy for the basic reason that entropy is simply a measure of the number of ways that a given system can be realized and if there are more ways that A system can be realized it's more likely that that configuration will come to be and so over time entropy increases at every level at the level of molecules at the level of living systems at the level of the universe now it may not always seem that way because we can do things things that seem to decrease the amount of entropy decrease the amount of disorder we can order a system using our brains and using our volitional capacities but if you take into account the amount of entropy that our bodies create in the process of yielding that ordered system then the overall entropy always increases over time uh entropy and evolution of the Universe are what mainly determine operations in the universe all operations in the universe yeah when I think about the dominant forces at work guiding the cosmic Evolution I do think of it in terms of entropy and evolution entropy is this drive toward ever greater disorder evolution is this drive toward ever greater refined systems that are able to replicate with greater capacity and so they kind of seem like at opposite ends of the spectrum entropy driving us toward disorder evolution in a sense driving us toward order now in a sense there for these two forces they kind of battle against each other during the unfolding of the cosmos ultimately entropy wins if you look at the far future of the universe as we can understand it using our mathematical equations that describe the laws of physics it's pretty clear that every ordered system in the universe ultimately decays falls apart every single system every single system so Stars ultimately run out of nuclear Fuel and either explode or turn to a a simmering smoldering Mass they lose that beautiful ordered structure that gives rise to heat and light that comes out of a star during its living system even black holes ultimately stepen Hawking taught us mystery of black hole a big mystery of black holes but there's some aspects that we understand well and Stephen Hawking taught us that black holes emit radiation slowly but they emit radiation over time so their configuration ultimately gives rise to a bath of particles disordered particles that waft through the universe so every system that May embody order at a given cosmological Epoch ultimately disintegrates falls apart gives rise to a disorderly end product we have a mystery of black hole we will back to the topic but we have also mystery of human consciousness uh all we know about the human consciousness is that I have Consciousness you have cons ious this director chair does not that's only one thing we know about the Consciousness well there would be people who would debate even the statement that the chair doesn't have Consciousness I agree I don't think that it does but when we try to understand the basis of Consciousness we run up against what's known as the hard problem and the hard problem is simp simply that your brain and my brain and everybody's brain is made up of molecules and atoms and particular configurations if the individual particles don't have inner worlds of subjective experience conscious self awareness if the particles don't have that how is it that by putting a lot of particles together you do yield an inner world of sights and smells and emotions this inner world that we all have playing out inside of our head where does it come from some have suggested that the starting point of that puzzle is incorrect maybe the particles do have some kind of version of Consciousness some kind of Proto Consciousness a little bit of Consciousness in the electron in the Quark in the protons and maybe that little inside of things and therefore this chair from this perspective would embody body a certain rudimentary kind of Consciousness because the ingredients themselves would embody that this is not an approach that has convinced me but I understand why people introduce this idea because I cannot answer the question of how can a collection of mindless particles gain mindfulness how does that happen nobody can answer that question for you it's it's more physics biology or chemistry well my view which comes from years of thinking about these puzzles and my intuition as a physicist my intuition tells me that Consciousness somehow emerges an emergent phenomenon when you have particles molecules atoms in a sufficiently coherent Arrangement but if you ask me how does that happen I remain at a loss because I don't know and nobody knows the mechanism by which Consciousness emerges from orderly structures my guess is that one day we will understand how that happens but there are some who say that's too optimistic a Viewpoint you can't get Consciousness from something that's not conscious you can't take a bunch of particles Each of which has no consciousness whatsoever put them together and have Consciousness emerge some people feel that very very strongly maybe Consciousness is born in the quantum phenomenon we spend so much time with r Penrose he deeply believe that the human consciousness is born in Quantum level in a Quantum phenomenon deeper inside a human brain yeah I have I have no doubt that quantum physics in some way shape or form is important to Consciousness because quantum physics is important into the way physical things in our universe behave and those physical things include of course the particles that make up the atom and the atoms that make up the molecules and the molecules that make up the cells and the cells that make up the brain which somehow has conscious awareness so quantum mechanics has to be at some level part of the story but I do not think or at least I do not see any evidence that the structure of quantum mechanics per se necessarily yield s Consciousness to me it's more it's the laws of physics together with the orderly structures that are the substrate within which Consciousness takes place and so I don't see a direct root from quantum mechanics to Consciousness at least not in the way that I think Roger has imagined it uh I remember my interview uh with Robert sapolsky from Stanford University and I need to ask you about free will if do you feel if do you understand the difference between Free Will and Consciousness Professor sapolsky deeply believed that there is no free will we are biological machines everything is determined by the cells by molecules uh by atoms do you feel the difference between Consciousness and will yes so the question of Free Will hinges on your perspective regarding Consciousness if you believe as I do but I do not have proof but if you believe that Consciousness is ultimately reducible to physical processes biological processes chemical processes if that's all that Consciousness is then you pretty inviolably come to the conclusion that there is no free will why is there no free will it's so sad it is sad in a way but in a way it's actually I think quite liberating but again the argument is if the ingredients from which Consciousness emerges the particles the molecules the atoms if they are governed by physical law you and I and nobody else has the ability to intercede in the lawful progression the lawful behavior of those particles so when you in your mind make a decision or have a thought ultimately if that conscious awareness is nothing but molecules moving one way or another you can't control those motions and therefore you can't control what's happening inside your head you mean that we are not determined to answer the question what Consciousness is well it depends what you mean by determined so there's two kinds of determination within physics and they've been used in different periods of time in the old classical physics prior to quantum physics the idea of having a determined system is you tell me the state of the system right now the positions and the velocities of all the particles and I'll simply use the laws of physics to predict what that system will be like 5 minutes later or an hour later or a year later the initial conditions and the laws of physics determine how things will be period end of story that's classical physics quantum physics which has supplanted Classical physics says something a little bit differently it says tell me how things are now as best as possible describe the state of the system and I will use the laws of quantum physics to predict the likelihood that things will be one way or another way or another way still in the future you can only predict probabilities but those probabilities are just as determined in quantum physics as the outputs were determined in classical physics it's just just you're determining something else so to my mind you can sort of have your cake and eat it people worry if I don't have free will does that mean you can predict what I'm going to say in two seconds answer is actually no the best you could do is predict the probability that I'd say one thing or another or another still and so there's an open quality to the Future in quantum physics that you would not have in classical physics so yes I do not believe that I have free will but I also understand that you can't use the laws of physics to predict with 100% certainty what I will do because you can only predict probabilities of one or another outcome what's about a human thoughts I remember your own quot that human thoughts itself it's a lifetime limitation in the universe what does it mean well if you believe as I do that thought are physical processes that there's no structure beyond the physical that somehow is the place where thoughts originate and take place I'm not going to go to any of those ideas I don't even know what they mean so if I think of thought as a physical process every physical process results in an increase in entropy energy little bit different every thought and every physical process requires energy but the output of the process through which that energy is used is to increase entropy the amount of energy can stay fixed but the energy degrades over time and that degraded energy is what we mean by disorder or entropy the reason why this is important is the following right now as we're talking I am producing a lot of entropy hopefully not in the idea that I'm communicating but rather because I am giving off heat I am emitting waste to the environment and if you had the right instrument you'd see the infrared light coming off of my head that is turning energy into less useful energy that infrared radiation is hard to make use of that is what we mean by entropy in this room this room is very good at being able to absorb the heat the waste the entropy I'm producing but in the far future fut as the temperature of the universe comes down you can argue convincingly with mathematics that there will come a point when the universe can't absorb the entropy it can't absorb the heat that thought itself creates at that point if a thinking being thinks one more thought they will burn up in the entropic waste produced by the process of thought itself they will die there will be no further capacity for thought to take place human being determine entropy human beings create entropy create entropy yes as does every other living system as does every other physical process in the universe how do you define the truth what truth is for you well I think truth comes in a number of varieties there is something that I like to think of as objective truth which speaks to the qualities of the external world that we attempt to describe using mathematics be it the general theory of relativity be it Quantom mechanics these are mathematical approaches to try to get at the truth of the physical processes that take place in the universe that have been holding sway since the Big Bang giving rise to stars and galaxies and planets and on this planet living systems there's also another variety of Truth was a more internal subjective truth these are the truths that every human being yes these are the truths that every human being holds within their mind there are things that deeply matter to me my family my parents the things that I spend my time on my perspective on the political situation these are vital truths to me as a human being but but they're not objective not everybody will agree that these are fundamental truths of the universe they're things that matter to me as an individual human often we get these mixed up things that people think of as objective truths often times are just subjective truths that matter to them and having a clear understanding of the truths that are external and out there versus the ones that are internal is a vital distinction to make I ask you because I I found your Tweet uh published maybe two three years a days ago about the mathematics and ideas that you think that we can discover mathematical idea it's fully different approach that represent all mathematicians that I know yes most mathematicians mostly people think that mathematical idea exist they are who created nobody knows that but they are you think that we can discover mathematical ideas yeah I would use a slightly different word I would say we invent mathematical ideas we don't discover them to discover them would suggest that they're out there waiting to be found you just need to unearth them somebody else created them or the universe created them and they're out there and I don't think there could be any possibility that this is true mathematics is a language that we humans developed in order to find a very quantitative and accurate approach to embodying the patterns that we see in the external world we invent mathematics maybe that language there is only two to understand something that is that's how most mathematicians will describe it but the theorems and the proofs that mathematicians proudly publish in papers and journals around the world it's not that they don't have value but they are truths that emerge with in the language of mathematics that we invent there is no meaning to these statements to these theorems to these proofs without the language of mathematics itself and we invent that language and so take the Pythagorean theorem A2 + b^2 = c^2 we invent the idea of a triangle there's no real triangle in the external world we invent the idea of a line we invent the idea of a right angle there's no real right angle in the external they're close to right angles but we invent the ideas and then we find interesting features about the concepts that we invent now most mathematicians Rec coil at this idea because somehow the validity and value of what they're doing for many rests upon finding external truths things that are out there that will always be true and my answer to that is the Pythagorean theorem a s plus b squ plus c s it only has meaning when it's resonant inside of a head that can understand it and in the far future when there are no thinking structures left when there's nobody able to think anything at all the Pythagorean theorem will not exist where will it be if it's not resonating inside of a mind that can understand it to say that math is out there independent of us has as little validity as saying that there is a deity out there independent of us doing things and if you're willing to go in that direction then I believe you're undercutting the logical structure of the insights that we're able to gain about who we are and what we do can physics allow for God evidence of course physics can allow for God it could be that there is a God I can't prove that there isn't a God just like I can't prove that mathematics isn't out there the best that anyone can do is Marshall the most convincing argument based upon things that we know about things that we've seen that we've observe the data that we have there is no data there is no evidence that I've ever seen that gives me any confidence that the idea of a God is real that is not proof that God is not real it's merely giving you insight into my thinking and the thinking of many others as well as to why this might not be true but could it be that there's a God out there and carefully has arranged things so that there won't be any evidence so that the God has hidden their role in the world and just maybe given clues that only the world's priests and imom's and and rabbis can find maybe but I don't find that a plausible way of looking at the world I've found that I can have conversations with anyone and we can leave that conversation feeling good because my Approach To The World Is Not to undercut some 's position but rather to hear them and to see the degree to which their perspective can be integrated into my own so unlike some of my colleagues who say religion should be wiped off the face of the Earth that it's the most egregious and awful result of civilization I don't feel that way at all I find religion to be a beautiful structure that speaks to who we are and what matters to us and the ideals that we have of course religion can be used for bad just the way nuclear understanding can be used for bad or good and so religion as a tool can have some very negative consequences but viewed in the most positive light religion's a beautiful really spectacular invention of the human mind the thing that we're most terrified about as human beings is our mortality how wonderful to invent a structure whereby our death is not the end of our existence our death is merely a step within a much larger story and so that's a very beautiful way of quelling the existential anxiety that comes with mortality awareness that to me is an internal Truth for those who believe it it is not an objective external truth but internal truths matter they're valuable there is a William James book from 192 do you know that yes I why vities of religious experience why we need religion why we need to be under control superpower yeah absolutely William James is a hero of mine because here you have a a scientist trying to understand The Human Condition through the lens of rational thought and rational Gathering of data and rational evaluation of people's experiences and when William James came out of that experience you know understanding the worldwide experience of religion and religious phenomenon from very different perspectives and came with a very beautiful perspective on how religion meets certain needs that we have how religion serves certain purposes for we as human beings crawling around the surface of a nondescript Rock orbiting around a nondescript star in the outskirts of an ordinary Galaxy who wouldn't suffer from anxiety who wouldn't suffer for Terror and fear to be thrust into that reality and if religion can help quell those fears if religion can tell a larger story that can make an individual feel that their life matters in the grander scheme of things then yeah that's a powerful structure and it's a powerful role for this idea that we have invented called religion