Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Ian Hutchinson,

00:00:02.480 | a nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT.

00:00:06.400 | He has made a number of important contributions

00:00:08.360 | in plasma physics, including the magnetic confinement

00:00:10.960 | of plasmas, seeking to enable fusion reactions,

00:00:14.880 | which happens to be the energy source of the stars,

00:00:17.840 | to be used for practical energy production.

00:00:21.240 | Current nuclear reactors, by the way,

00:00:23.200 | are based on fission, as we discuss.

00:00:25.920 | Ian has also written on the philosophy of science

00:00:29.460 | and the relationship between science and religion,

00:00:32.520 | arguing in particular against scientism,

00:00:35.280 | which is a negative description of the overreach

00:00:37.680 | of the scientific method to questions not amenable to it.

00:00:41.560 | On this latter topic, I recommend two of his books,

00:00:44.120 | his new one, "Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?"

00:00:47.000 | where he answers more than 200 questions

00:00:48.880 | on all aspects of God and science,

00:00:51.000 | and his earlier book on scientism

00:00:53.440 | called "Monopolizing Knowledge."

00:00:56.200 | As you may have seen already,

00:00:58.200 | I work hard on having an open mind,

00:01:00.820 | always questioning my assumptions,

00:01:02.420 | and in general, marvel at the immense mystery

00:01:04.620 | of everything around us and the limitations

00:01:07.420 | of at least my mind.

00:01:10.540 | I'm not religious myself, in that I don't go to the synagogue,

00:01:14.020 | a church, or mosque, but I see the beautiful bond

00:01:17.760 | in the community that religion at its best can create.

00:01:21.500 | I also see, both in scientists and religious leaders,

00:01:25.760 | signs of arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, and a will to power.

00:01:30.760 | We're human, whether Buddhist, Christian,

00:01:34.500 | Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, or atheist.

00:01:38.620 | This podcast is my humble attempt

00:01:40.420 | to explore a complicated human nature,

00:01:43.500 | what Stanislav Lem in his book "Solaris"

00:01:45.980 | called our own labyrinth of dark passages

00:01:48.700 | and secret chambers.

00:01:50.660 | I ask that you try to keep an open mind as well,

00:01:54.100 | and be patient with the limitations of mind.

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00:02:36.340 | at Lex Friedman.

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00:05:27.060 | And now, here's my conversation with Ian Hutchinson.

00:05:31.120 | Maybe it'd be nice to draw a distinction

00:05:33.980 | between nuclear physics and plasma physics.

00:05:37.100 | What is the distinction?

00:05:39.100 | - Nuclear physics is about the physics of the nucleus

00:05:41.700 | and my department, Department of Nuclear Science

00:05:44.520 | and Engineering at MIT, is very concerned

00:05:47.180 | about all the interactions and reactions

00:05:50.820 | and consequences of things that go on in the nucleus,

00:05:54.300 | including nuclear energy, fission energy,

00:05:57.140 | which is the nuclear energy that we have already,

00:05:59.460 | and fusion energy, which is the energy source

00:06:02.660 | of the sun and stars, which we don't quite know

00:06:05.740 | how to turn into practical energy

00:06:07.740 | for humankind at the moment.

00:06:12.100 | That's what my research has mostly been aimed at.

00:06:16.840 | But plasmas are essentially the fourth state of matter.

00:06:21.840 | So if you think about solid, liquid, gas,

00:06:26.040 | plasma is the fourth of those states of matter.

00:06:29.960 | And it's actually the state of matter which one reaches

00:06:33.580 | if one raises the temperature.

00:06:35.320 | So cold things, like ice, are solid.

00:06:40.940 | Liquids are hotter, water, and if you heat water

00:06:45.180 | beyond 100 degrees Celsius, it becomes gas.

00:06:48.640 | Well, that's true of most substances.

00:06:51.640 | And plasma is a state of matter in which the electrons

00:06:56.640 | are unbound from the nuclei, so they become separate

00:07:03.240 | from the nuclei and can move separately.

00:07:06.240 | So we have positively charged nuclei

00:07:09.640 | and we have negatively charged electrons.

00:07:12.320 | The net is still electrically neutral,

00:07:17.320 | but a plasma conducts electricity,

00:07:21.480 | has all sorts of important properties

00:07:23.740 | that are associated with that separation,

00:07:27.240 | and that's what plasmas are all about.

00:07:29.420 | And the reason why my department is interested

00:07:31.720 | in plasma physics very strongly is because most things,

00:07:35.400 | well, for one thing, most things in the universe are plasma.

00:07:38.140 | The vast majority of matter in the universe is plasma.

00:07:40.600 | But most particularly, stars and the sun are plasmas

00:07:45.600 | because they're very hot.

00:07:48.800 | And it's only in very hot states

00:07:51.240 | that nuclear fusion reactions take place.

00:07:54.760 | And we want to understand how to implement

00:07:57.880 | those kind of phenomena on Earth.

00:08:00.560 | - Maybe another distinction we wanna try to get at

00:08:03.720 | is the difference between fission and fusion.

00:08:06.240 | So you mentioned fusion is the kind of reaction

00:08:08.100 | happening in the sun.

00:08:09.000 | So what's fission and what's fusion?

00:08:10.520 | - Sure.

00:08:11.540 | Well, fission is taking heavy elements like uranium

00:08:16.440 | and breaking them up.

00:08:18.280 | And it turns out that that process

00:08:20.320 | of breaking up heavy elements releases energy.

00:08:22.960 | - What does it mean to be a heavy element?

00:08:25.120 | - It means that there are many nuclear particles

00:08:28.200 | in the nucleus itself, neutrons and protons

00:08:32.240 | in the nucleus itself, so that in the case

00:08:36.200 | of uranium, there are 92 protons in each nucleus

00:08:41.200 | and even more neutrons so that the total number

00:08:46.000 | of nucleons in the nucleus, nucleons is short

00:08:50.000 | for either a proton or a neutron,

00:08:52.340 | the total number might be 235, that's U-235,

00:08:57.800 | or it might be 238, that's U-238.

00:09:01.640 | So those are heavy elements.

00:09:03.020 | Light elements, by contrast, have very few nucleons,

00:09:07.140 | protons or neutrons in the nucleus.

00:09:09.820 | Hydrogen is the lightest nucleus.

00:09:12.740 | It has one proton.

00:09:14.700 | There are actually slightly heavier forms

00:09:16.680 | of hydrogen, isotopes.

00:09:19.340 | Deuterium has a proton and a neutron

00:09:22.980 | and tritium has a proton and two neutrons.

00:09:26.180 | So it has a total of three nucleons in the nucleus.

00:09:30.860 | Well, taking light elements like isotopes of hydrogen

00:09:35.860 | and not breaking them up but actually fusing them together,

00:09:40.300 | reacting them together to produce heavier elements,

00:09:43.660 | typically helium, okay, which is, helium is a nucleus

00:09:47.660 | which has two protons and two neutrons,

00:09:51.660 | that also releases energy and that, or reactions like that,

00:09:56.660 | making heavier elements from lighter elements

00:09:59.900 | is what mostly powers the sun and stars.

00:10:04.860 | Both fusion and fission release approximately

00:10:09.860 | a million times more energy per unit mass

00:10:14.540 | than chemical reactions.

00:10:16.240 | So a chemical reaction means take hydrogen,

00:10:19.200 | take oxygen, react them together, let's say,

00:10:21.900 | and get water, that releases energy.

00:10:24.940 | The energy released in a chemical reaction like that

00:10:27.320 | or the burning of coal or oil or whatever else

00:10:30.880 | is about a million times less per unit mass

00:10:34.480 | than what is released in nuclear reactions.

00:10:37.360 | - So, but it's hard to do.

00:10:38.800 | - It requires very high energy of impact

00:10:43.800 | and actually it's very easy to understand why

00:10:46.360 | and that is that those two nuclei,

00:10:49.520 | if they're both, let's say, hydrogen nuclei,

00:10:51.760 | one is, let's say, deuterium

00:10:53.240 | and the other is, let's say, tritium,

00:10:55.240 | they're both electrically charged

00:10:57.400 | and they're positively charged,

00:10:59.240 | so they, like charges, repel.

00:11:01.800 | Everyone knows that, right?

00:11:03.440 | So basically, to get them close enough together to react,

00:11:07.720 | you have to overcome the repulsion,

00:11:09.920 | the electric repulsion of the two nuclei from one another

00:11:14.920 | and you have to get them extremely close to one another

00:11:18.600 | in order for the nuclear forces

00:11:20.360 | to overtake the electrical forces

00:11:23.160 | and actually form a new nucleus.

00:11:25.640 | And so, one requires very high energies of impact

00:11:29.480 | in order for reactions to take place

00:11:31.240 | and those high energies of impact

00:11:33.040 | correspond to very high temperatures of random motion.

00:11:37.840 | - So that's why you can do stuff like that in the sun.

00:11:40.880 | So we can build the sun, that's one way to do it,

00:11:43.560 | but on Earth, how do you create a fusion reaction?

00:11:48.560 | Engineering-wise.

00:11:51.360 | - Nature's fusion reactors are indeed the stars

00:11:56.280 | and they are very hot in the center

00:12:00.200 | and they reach the point where they release more energy

00:12:05.200 | from those reactions than they lose by radiation

00:12:08.920 | and transport to the surface and so forth

00:12:10.840 | and that's a state of ignition.

00:12:13.920 | And that's what we have to achieve to give net energy.

00:12:19.280 | It's like lighting a fire.

00:12:21.160 | If you have a bundle of sticks

00:12:23.760 | and you hold a match up to it

00:12:25.920 | and you see smoke coming from the sticks,

00:12:28.680 | but you take the match away and the sticks just fizzle out,

00:12:33.120 | the reason they fizzled out is that,

00:12:36.360 | yes, they were burning, there was smoke coming from them,

00:12:38.800 | but they were not ignited.

00:12:41.240 | But if you are able to take the match away

00:12:43.560 | and they keep burning and they are generating enough heat

00:12:46.840 | to keep themselves hot and hence keep the reactions going,

00:12:50.440 | that's chemical ignition.

00:12:52.800 | But what we need to do, what the stars do,

00:12:55.920 | in order to generate nuclear fusion energy

00:13:00.200 | is they are ignited.

00:13:02.400 | They are generating enough energy to keep themselves hot

00:13:07.080 | and that's what we've got to do on Earth

00:13:09.960 | if we're going to make fusion work on Earth.

00:13:13.640 | But it's much harder to do on Earth

00:13:16.920 | than it is in a star

00:13:19.160 | because we need temperatures of order

00:13:23.560 | tens of millions of degrees Celsius

00:13:27.480 | in order for the reactions to go fast enough

00:13:31.120 | to generate enough electricity to keep it,

00:13:33.360 | or enough energy to keep it going.

00:13:35.520 | And so, if you've got something

00:13:40.280 | that's tens of millions of degrees Celsius

00:13:43.040 | and you want to keep it all together

00:13:45.360 | and keep the heat in long enough

00:13:47.280 | to have enough reactions taking place,

00:13:49.400 | you can't just put it in a bottle,

00:13:51.080 | plastic or glass, it would be gone in milliseconds.

00:13:56.240 | So, you have to have some non-material mechanism

00:14:02.200 | of confining the plasma.

00:14:06.080 | In the case of stars, that non-material force is gravity.

00:14:10.880 | So gravity is what holds a star together,

00:14:13.200 | it's what holds the plasma in long enough

00:14:16.280 | for it to react and sustain itself by the fusion reactions.

00:14:21.280 | But on Earth, gravity is extremely weak.

00:14:24.800 | I mean, I don't mean to say we don't fall,

00:14:26.360 | well, yes, we fall,

00:14:27.360 | but the mutual gravitational attraction of small objects

00:14:32.360 | is very weak compared with the electrical repulsion

00:14:36.880 | or any other force that you can think about on Earth.

00:14:40.240 | And so, we need a stronger force

00:14:43.480 | to keep the plasma together, to confine it.

00:14:46.840 | And the predominant attempt at making fusion work on Earth

00:14:52.800 | is to use magnetic fields to confine the plasma.

00:14:57.360 | And that's what I've worked on

00:14:59.000 | for essentially most of my career,

00:15:01.640 | is to understand how we can and how best we can

00:15:05.960 | confine these incredibly hot gases, plasmas,

00:15:10.000 | using magnetic fields with the ultimate objective

00:15:13.400 | of releasing fusion energy on Earth

00:15:16.200 | and generating electricity with it

00:15:19.200 | and powering our society with it.

00:15:22.320 | - Dumb question.

00:15:23.480 | So on top of the magnetic fields,

00:15:25.440 | do you also need the plastic water bottle walls

00:15:28.320 | or is it purely magnetic fields?

00:15:30.340 | - Well, actually, what we do need walls,

00:15:33.060 | those walls must be kept away from the plasma

00:15:36.720 | 'cause otherwise they'd be melted.

00:15:37.900 | Well, the plasma must be kept away from them

00:15:39.720 | inside of them.

00:15:42.240 | But the main purpose of the walls

00:15:44.760 | is not to keep the plasma in,

00:15:47.120 | it's to keep the atmosphere out.

00:15:49.120 | So if we want to do it on Earth where there's air,

00:15:52.880 | we want the plasma to consist of hydrogen isotopes

00:15:57.200 | or other things, the things we're trying to react.

00:15:59.600 | And by the way, the density of those plasmas,

00:16:04.160 | at least in magnetic confinement fusion, is very low.

00:16:07.000 | It's maybe a million times less

00:16:09.940 | than the density of air in this room.

00:16:11.920 | So in order for a fusion reactor like that to work,

00:16:17.480 | you have to keep all of the air out

00:16:19.340 | and just keep the plasma in.

00:16:20.720 | So yes, there are other things,

00:16:22.640 | but those are things that are relatively easy.

00:16:24.320 | I mean, making a vacuum these days

00:16:26.840 | is technologically quite straightforward.

00:16:29.200 | We know how to do that, okay?

00:16:31.280 | What we don't quite know how to do

00:16:32.960 | is to make a confinement device

00:16:35.940 | that isolates the plasma well enough

00:16:39.600 | so that it's able to keep itself burning

00:16:42.440 | with its own reaction.

00:16:43.860 | - So maybe, can you talk about what a tokamak is?

00:16:47.360 | - The Russian acronym from which the word tokamak is built

00:16:51.520 | just means toroidal magnetic chamber.

00:16:53.960 | So it's a toroidal chamber.

00:16:56.680 | A torus is a geometric shape which is like a donut

00:17:00.440 | with a hole down the middle, okay?

00:17:02.640 | And so it's the meat of the donut, okay?

00:17:05.400 | That's the torus.

00:17:06.520 | And it's got a magnetic field.

00:17:10.640 | So that's really all tokamak means.

00:17:13.280 | But the particular configuration

00:17:15.120 | that is very widespread and is the sort of best prospect,

00:17:21.600 | at least in the near term, for making fusion energy work

00:17:26.080 | is one in which there's a very strong magnetic field

00:17:30.480 | the long way around the donut, around the torus.

00:17:35.020 | So you've got to imagine that there's this donut shape

00:17:38.760 | with an embedded magnetic field

00:17:40.400 | just going round and round the long way.

00:17:43.280 | The big advantage of that is that plasma particles,

00:17:48.280 | when they're in the presence of a magnetic field,

00:17:54.640 | feel strong forces from the magnetic field.

00:17:57.120 | And those forces make the particles gyrate

00:18:01.120 | around the direction of the magnetic field line.

00:18:04.240 | So basically, the particles follow helical orbits,

00:18:09.240 | following like a spring

00:18:11.580 | that's directed along the magnetic field.

00:18:13.920 | Well, if you make the magnetic field

00:18:15.640 | go inside this toroidal chamber

00:18:17.720 | and just simply go round and round the chamber,

00:18:20.340 | then because of this helical orbit,

00:18:24.720 | the particles can't move fast across the magnetic field,

00:18:29.700 | but they can move very quickly along the magnetic field.

00:18:33.760 | And if you have a magnetic field

00:18:35.200 | that doesn't leave the chamber,

00:18:37.240 | it doesn't matter if they move along the magnetic field.

00:18:40.560 | It doesn't mean they're going to exit the chamber.

00:18:44.200 | But if you just had a straight magnetic field,

00:18:47.080 | for example, coming from a Helmholtz coil or a bar magnet,

00:18:54.240 | then you'd have to have ends.

00:18:55.280 | It would come to the ends of the chamber somewhere

00:18:58.880 | and the particles would hit the ends

00:19:00.480 | and they would lose their energy.

00:19:02.840 | So that's why it's toroidal

00:19:04.440 | and that's why we have a strong magnetic field.

00:19:07.040 | It's providing a confinement against motion

00:19:12.040 | in the direction that would lead the particles

00:19:15.460 | to leave the chamber.

00:19:16.940 | It turns out that,

00:19:17.840 | here we're getting a little bit technical,

00:19:20.120 | but it turns out that a toroidal field alone is not enough.

00:19:23.140 | And so you need more fields

00:19:25.200 | to produce true confinement of plasma.

00:19:28.740 | And we get those by passing a current as well

00:19:31.560 | through the plasma itself.

00:19:33.280 | - Like to make sure it stays on track.

00:19:34.720 | - Well, what that does is makes the field lines themselves

00:19:37.880 | into much bigger helices.

00:19:40.520 | And that's for reasons that are too complicated to explain,

00:19:44.460 | that clinches the confinement of the particles,

00:19:48.760 | at least in terms of their single particle orbit.

00:19:51.240 | So they don't leave the chamber.

00:19:53.300 | - So when the particles are flying along this donut,

00:19:58.300 | the inside of the donut,

00:19:59.920 | where's the generation of the energy coming from?

00:20:03.920 | Are they smashing into each other?

00:20:06.140 | - Yeah, eventually, I mean, in a fusion reactor,

00:20:09.820 | there will be deutrons and tritons

00:20:12.300 | and they will be smashing in.

00:20:13.820 | They will be very hot.

00:20:15.500 | There'll be a hundred million degrees Celsius or something.

00:20:18.740 | So they're moving thermally

00:20:20.640 | with very large thermal energies in random directions,

00:20:24.120 | and they will collide with one another

00:20:25.880 | and have fusion reactions.

00:20:28.280 | When those fusion reactions take place,

00:20:30.620 | energy is released, large amounts of energy is released

00:20:33.080 | in the form of particles.

00:20:35.120 | One of the particles that's released is an alpha particle,

00:20:37.920 | which is also charged and it's also confined.

00:20:40.600 | And that alpha particle stays in the donut

00:20:44.140 | and heats the other particles that are in that donut.

00:20:46.980 | So it transfers its energy to those and it keeps them hot.

00:20:50.440 | There's some leaking of heat all the time,

00:20:52.880 | a little bit of radiation, some transport and so forth.

00:20:56.200 | There's also a neutron released from that reaction.

00:20:58.640 | The neutron carries out 4/5 of the fusion energy

00:21:02.320 | and that will have to be captured in a blanket

00:21:04.680 | that surrounds the chamber in which we take the energy,

00:21:09.680 | drive some kind of electrical generator

00:21:16.960 | from a thermal engine, gas turbine or something like that,

00:21:21.960 | and power the--

00:21:25.140 | - And you got energy.

00:21:26.360 | So where do we stand?

00:21:28.040 | - Where do we stand?

00:21:29.280 | - On getting this thing to be something

00:21:32.180 | that actually works, that generates energy.

00:21:33.880 | - Yep.

00:21:35.240 | Well, there have been experiments

00:21:37.960 | that have generated net nuclear energies

00:21:41.600 | or nuclear powers in the vicinity of a few tens of megawatts.

00:21:47.400 | For a few seconds.

00:21:49.600 | So that's 10 megajoules.

00:21:52.640 | That's not much energy.

00:21:54.440 | It's a few donuts worth of energy.

00:21:56.480 | Okay.

00:21:57.320 | Literal donut.

00:21:58.160 | - Literal donut, that's right.

00:21:59.860 | - But we have studied how well Tokamaks can find plasmas.

00:22:07.400 | And so we now understand in rather great detail

00:22:12.400 | the way they work.

00:22:15.280 | And we're able to predict what is going to be required

00:22:19.080 | in order to build a Tokamak that becomes self-sustaining,

00:22:22.880 | that becomes essentially ignited

00:22:24.840 | or so close to ignited that it doesn't matter.

00:22:27.660 | And at the moment, at least if you use

00:22:33.640 | the modest magnetic field values, still very strong,

00:22:38.200 | but limited magnetic field values,

00:22:41.560 | you have to build a very big device.

00:22:44.560 | And so we are at the moment,

00:22:46.400 | worldwide fusion research is at the moment

00:22:52.400 | in the process of building a very big experiment

00:22:55.640 | that's located in the South of France.

00:22:57.960 | It's called ITER, I-T-E-R, which means the way

00:23:01.660 | or just means the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor

00:23:05.080 | if you like.

00:23:05.920 | And that experiment is designed

00:23:10.720 | to reach this burning plasma state

00:23:13.000 | and to generate about 500 megawatts of fusion power

00:23:18.000 | for hundreds of seconds at a time.

00:23:21.240 | It'll still only be an experiment.

00:23:24.320 | It won't put electricity on the grid or anything like that.

00:23:27.560 | It's to figure out whether it works

00:23:31.480 | and what the remaining engineering challenges are.

00:23:34.320 | It's a scientific experiment.

00:23:36.120 | It won't be engineered to run round the clock

00:23:38.520 | and so on and so forth, which ultimately one needs to do

00:23:42.760 | in order to make something that's practical

00:23:44.400 | for generating electricity.

00:23:46.120 | But it will be the first demonstration on earth

00:23:50.040 | of a controlled fusion reaction for a long time period.

00:23:55.040 | - Is that exciting to you?

00:23:57.160 | - It's been an objective that is in many ways

00:24:02.440 | motivated my entire career

00:24:04.520 | and the career of many people like me in the field.

00:24:09.980 | I have to admit though that one of the problems with ITER

00:24:14.020 | is that it's an extremely big and expensive

00:24:16.820 | and long time to build experiment.

00:24:20.660 | And so it won't even come into operation until about 2025,

00:24:25.380 | even though it's been being built for 10 years

00:24:28.780 | and it was designed for 30 years before that.

00:24:32.100 | And so that's actually one of the big disappointments

00:24:37.180 | of my career in a certain sense,

00:24:39.660 | which is that we won't get to a burning fusion reaction

00:24:44.460 | until well past the first operation of ITER.

00:24:47.260 | And whether I'm alive or not, I don't know,

00:24:50.340 | but I certainly will be well and truly retired

00:24:52.700 | by the time that happens.

00:24:54.380 | And so when I realized maybe some years ago

00:24:57.380 | that that was gonna be the case,

00:24:59.460 | it was a discouragement to me, let's put it like that.

00:25:02.260 | - But if we can try to look maybe in a ridiculous kind of way

00:25:08.100 | look into 100 years from now, 200 years, 500 years from now,

00:25:12.380 | and there's folks like Elon Musk

00:25:15.580 | trying to travel outside the solar system.

00:25:18.660 | I mean, the amount of energy we need

00:25:20.380 | for some of the exciting things we wanna do in this world,

00:25:23.420 | if we look again, 100 years from now,

00:25:26.020 | seems to be a very large amount.

00:25:29.200 | So do you think fusion energy will eventually,

00:25:32.000 | sometime into your retirement,

00:25:35.900 | will be basically behind most of the things we do?

00:25:40.900 | - Look, I absolutely think that fusion research

00:25:44.500 | is completely justified.

00:25:47.200 | In fact, we should be spending more time and effort on it

00:25:49.900 | than we currently do.

00:25:51.700 | But it isn't going to be a magic bullet

00:25:55.100 | that somehow solves all the problems of energy.

00:25:59.460 | By the way, that's a generic statement

00:26:01.340 | you can make about any energy source, in my view.

00:26:04.340 | I think it's a grave mistake to think that science

00:26:07.460 | of any sort is suddenly going to find a magic bullet

00:26:10.660 | for meeting all the energy needs of society,

00:26:12.780 | or any of the other needs of society, by the way.

00:26:15.460 | And we can talk about that, I hope, later, okay?

00:26:18.580 | - Yes, definitely.

00:26:19.980 | - But fusion is very worthwhile and we should be doing it.

00:26:24.360 | And so my disappointment that I just expressed

00:26:29.660 | was in a certain sense a personal disappointment.

00:26:32.980 | I do think that fusion energy is a terrific challenge.

00:26:36.580 | It's very difficult to bring the energy source

00:26:39.660 | of the sun and stars down to Earth.

00:26:42.200 | This does contrast, in a certain sense, with fission energy.

00:26:47.200 | By contrast, fission energy,

00:26:49.500 | to build a fission reactor proved to be amazingly easy.

00:26:53.600 | We did it within a few years of discovering nuclear fission.

00:27:00.620 | People had figured out how to build a reactor

00:27:04.100 | and did so during the Second World War.

00:27:07.620 | - Which is, by the way, fission is how

00:27:09.480 | the current nuclear power plants work.

00:27:11.260 | - Yeah, and so we have nuclear energy today

00:27:15.620 | because fission reactors are relatively easy to build.

00:27:20.460 | You've gotta have, what's hard is getting the materials,

00:27:23.620 | okay, and that's just as well,

00:27:25.060 | because if everyone could get those materials,

00:27:27.500 | there would be weapons proliferation and so forth.

00:27:30.420 | But it wasn't all that long

00:27:33.660 | after even the discovery of nuclear fission

00:27:37.740 | that fission reactors were built,

00:27:39.340 | and fission reactors, of course,

00:27:40.620 | operated before we had weapons.

00:27:42.680 | So I think nuclear power is obviously important

00:27:49.000 | to meet the energy challenges of our age.

00:27:57.020 | It is completely, intrinsically,

00:27:59.460 | completely CO2 emissions free,

00:28:03.980 | and in fact, the wastes that come from nuclear power,

00:28:07.820 | whether it's fission or fusion for that matter,

00:28:10.340 | are so moderate in quantity

00:28:14.020 | that we shouldn't really be worried about them.

00:28:18.300 | I mean, yes, fission products are highly radioactive

00:28:21.180 | and we need to keep them away from people,

00:28:23.640 | but there's so little of them

00:28:24.900 | it's that keeping them away from people

00:28:26.520 | is not particularly difficult.

00:28:28.540 | And so while people complain a lot

00:28:31.260 | about the drawbacks of fission energy,

00:28:35.140 | I think most of those complaints are ill-informed.

00:28:39.060 | We can talk about the challenges and the disasters,

00:28:42.300 | if you like, of fission reactors,

00:28:45.860 | but I think fission, in the near term,

00:28:49.060 | offers a terrific opportunity

00:28:51.460 | for environmentally friendly energy,

00:28:54.860 | which in the world as a whole

00:28:56.800 | is rapidly being taken advantage of.

00:28:59.240 | You know, China and India and places like that

00:29:01.360 | are rapidly building fission plants.

00:29:03.720 | We're not rapidly building fission plants in the US,

00:29:07.000 | although we are actually building two at the moment,

00:29:09.600 | two new ones, but we do still get 20% of our electricity

00:29:15.140 | from fission energy and we could get a lot more.

00:29:18.160 | - So it's clean energy.

00:29:19.600 | - So it's clean energy.

00:29:20.880 | - Now, again, the concern is,

00:29:22.840 | there's a very popular HBO show

00:29:25.500 | and it just came out on Chernobyl.

00:29:28.500 | There's the Three Mile Island, there's Fukushima,

00:29:30.560 | that's the most recent disaster.

00:29:32.380 | So there's a kind of a concern of,

00:29:34.360 | yeah, I mean, of nuclear disasters.

00:29:37.460 | Is that, what would you make of that kind of concern,

00:29:40.860 | especially if we look into the future

00:29:42.380 | of fission energy-based reactors?

00:29:44.780 | - Well, first of all, let me say one or two words

00:29:46.580 | about the contrast between fission and fusion,

00:29:48.660 | and then we'll come onto the question

00:29:49.980 | of the disasters and so forth.

00:29:52.840 | Fission does have some drawbacks

00:29:54.660 | and they're largely to do with four main areas.

00:29:59.660 | One is, do we have enough uranium or other fissile fuels

00:30:04.660 | to supply our energy needs for a long time?

00:30:07.980 | The answer to that is we know we have enough uranium

00:30:12.980 | to support fission energy worldwide for thousands of years,

00:30:18.160 | but maybe not for millions of years, okay?

00:30:22.320 | So that's resources.

00:30:25.160 | Secondly, there are issues to do with wastes.

00:30:28.800 | Fission wastes are highly radioactive

00:30:31.960 | and some of them are volatile.

00:30:33.840 | And so, for example, in Fukushima,

00:30:38.840 | the problem was that some fraction

00:30:42.120 | of the fission waste were volatilized

00:30:44.600 | and went out as a cloud and polluted areas

00:30:49.360 | with cesium-137, strontium-90, and things like that.

00:30:54.360 | So that's a challenge of fission.

00:30:56.640 | There's a problem of safety beyond that,

00:31:02.200 | and that is that in fission,

00:31:06.160 | it's hard to turn the reactor off.

00:31:08.440 | When you stop the nuclear reactions,

00:31:11.640 | there is still a lot of heat being liberated

00:31:14.720 | from the fission products.

00:31:16.480 | And that is actually what the problem was

00:31:19.200 | at Fukushima.

00:31:20.520 | The Fukushima reactors were shut down

00:31:23.800 | the moment that the earthquake took place,

00:31:26.880 | and they were shut down safely.

00:31:29.720 | What then happened after that at Fukushima was,

00:31:33.040 | you know, there was this enormous tidal wave,

00:31:36.220 | many tens of meters high that came through

00:31:40.200 | and destroyed the electricity grid feed

00:31:45.200 | to the Fukushima reactors.

00:31:47.320 | And their cooling was then turned off.

00:31:50.840 | And it was the afterheat of the turned-off reactors

00:31:54.360 | that eventually caused the problems that led to release.

00:31:57.640 | And so that's a safety concern.

00:32:01.240 | And then finally, there's a problem of proliferation.

00:32:06.240 | And that is that fission reactors need fissile fuel,

00:32:10.080 | and the technologies for producing,

00:32:12.920 | and enriching, and so forth, the fuels,

00:32:16.040 | can be used, can be,

00:32:17.600 | by bad actors to generate the materials needed

00:32:23.880 | for a nuclear weapon.

00:32:25.160 | And that's a very serious concern.

00:32:27.200 | So those are the four problems.

00:32:29.280 | Fusion has major advantages

00:32:32.280 | in respect of all of those problems.

00:32:34.440 | It has more longer-term fuel resources.

00:32:39.440 | It has far more benign waste issues.

00:32:44.240 | The radioactivity from fusion reactions

00:32:47.240 | is at least 100 times less than it is from fission reactions.

00:32:51.240 | It has essentially none of this afterheat problem

00:32:55.960 | because it doesn't produce fission products

00:32:57.960 | that are highly radioactive

00:32:59.640 | and generating their own heat when it's turned off.

00:33:03.160 | In fact, the hard part of fusion is turning it on,

00:33:05.240 | not turning it off.

00:33:06.280 | And finally, you don't need the same fission technology

00:33:11.920 | to make fusion work.

00:33:13.840 | And so it's got terrific advantages

00:33:16.800 | from the point of view of proliferation control.

00:33:19.280 | So those are four main issues

00:33:23.640 | which make fusion seem attractive technologically

00:33:26.640 | because they address some of the problems of fission energy.

00:33:31.240 | I don't mean to say that fission energy

00:33:33.200 | is overwhelmingly problematic,

00:33:36.040 | but clearly there have been catastrophes

00:33:39.040 | associated with fission reactors.

00:33:41.800 | Fukushima actually is, I think in many ways,

00:33:44.880 | often overstated as a disaster

00:33:47.400 | because after all, nobody was killed by the reactors,

00:33:50.800 | essentially, zero.

00:33:53.520 | And that's in the context of a disaster, a tsunami,

00:33:58.520 | that killed between 15 and 20,000 people

00:34:02.440 | instantaneously, more or less instantaneously.

00:34:05.560 | So in the scale of risks,

00:34:10.040 | one should take the view that, in my estimation,

00:34:15.040 | that fission energy came out of that looking pretty good.

00:34:19.360 | Of course, that's not the popular conception.

00:34:22.600 | - I mean, with a lot of things

00:34:25.360 | that threaten our well-being,

00:34:26.920 | we seem to be very bad users of data.

00:34:31.920 | We seem to be very scared of shock attacks

00:34:35.960 | and not at all scared of car accidents

00:34:38.400 | and this kind of miscalculation.

00:34:40.360 | And I think from everything I understand,

00:34:43.880 | nuclear energy, fission-based energy,

00:34:46.240 | goes into that category.

00:34:47.640 | It's one of the safest,

00:34:48.680 | one of the cleanest forms of energy.

00:34:50.600 | And yet the PR,

00:34:52.320 | whoever does the PR for nuclear energy

00:34:55.800 | has a hard job ahead of them at the moment.

00:34:59.560 | - Well, I think part of that

00:35:00.520 | is their association with nuclear weapons.

00:35:02.960 | Because when you say the word nuclear,

00:35:04.280 | people don't instantly think about nuclear energy,

00:35:06.960 | they think about nuclear weapons.

00:35:08.960 | And so there is, perhaps, a natural tendency to do that.

00:35:13.960 | But yes, I agree with you,

00:35:15.360 | people are very poor at estimating risks

00:35:18.480 | and they react emotionally, not rationally,

00:35:20.960 | in most of these situations.

00:35:22.800 | - Can we talk about nuclear weapons just for a little bit?

00:35:26.260 | So fission is the kind of reaction

00:35:30.160 | that's central to the nuclear weapons we have today?

00:35:32.960 | - That's what sets them off.

00:35:34.960 | - That's what sets them off.

00:35:36.520 | So if we look at the hydrogen bomb,

00:35:38.040 | maybe you can say how these different weapons work.

00:35:41.080 | - So the earliest nuclear weapons,

00:35:43.240 | the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan,

00:35:45.720 | et cetera, et cetera, were pure fission weapons.

00:35:49.960 | They used enriched uranium or plutonium

00:35:53.760 | and their energy is essentially entirely derived

00:35:58.040 | from fission reactions.

00:36:00.520 | But it was early realized that more energy was available

00:36:06.360 | if one could somehow combine a fission bomb

00:36:11.200 | with fusion reactions.

00:36:15.600 | Because the fusion reactions give more energy per unit mass

00:36:22.080 | than fission reactions.

00:36:26.680 | And this was called the super.

00:36:29.480 | You might have heard of the expression the super,

00:36:31.240 | or more simply, hydrogen bombs.

00:36:35.360 | Bombs which use isotopes of hydrogen

00:36:37.960 | and the fusion reactions associated with them.

00:36:40.160 | - Like you said, it's hard to turn on.

00:36:41.760 | - It's hard to turn on

00:36:42.800 | because you need very high temperatures

00:36:44.880 | and you need confinement of that long enough

00:36:48.760 | for the reactions to take place.

00:36:50.880 | And so a bomb, actually a thermonuclear bomb,

00:36:55.080 | or a hydrogen bomb,

00:36:56.320 | has essentially a chemical implosion

00:37:05.000 | which then sets off a fission explosion

00:37:09.160 | which then sets off and compresses hydrogen isotopes

00:37:15.840 | and other things, which I don't know

00:37:18.160 | because I've never had a security clearance, okay?

00:37:21.200 | So I can't betray any secrets about weapons

00:37:25.240 | 'cause I've never been a party to them,

00:37:28.040 | 'cause I know a lot about this problem, I can guess, okay?

00:37:33.440 | And sets off fusion reactions in the middle, okay?

00:37:36.520 | So that's basically, it's that sequence of things

00:37:39.680 | which produce these enormous multi-megaton bombs

00:37:44.040 | that have very large yields.

00:37:46.120 | And so fusion alone can't get you there.

00:37:52.120 | It is actually possible to set off

00:37:55.240 | or to try to set off little fusion bombs alone

00:38:00.080 | without the surrounding fission explosion.

00:38:05.080 | And that is what is called laser fusion.

00:38:08.840 | So another approach to fusion,

00:38:11.840 | which actually is mostly researched in the weapons complex,

00:38:16.840 | the national labs and so forth,

00:38:19.480 | because it's more associated

00:38:21.840 | with the technologies of weapons, is inertial fusion.

00:38:25.960 | So if you decide instead of trying

00:38:29.040 | to make your plasma just sit there in this torus,

00:38:32.680 | in the tokamak and be controlled steady state

00:38:35.760 | with a magnetic field, if you're willing to accept

00:38:38.080 | that I'll just set off an explosion, okay?

00:38:41.960 | And then I'll gather the energy from that somehow,

00:38:44.480 | I don't quite know how,

00:38:45.520 | but let's not ask that question too much,

00:38:48.360 | then it is possible to imagine

00:38:53.000 | generating fusion alone explosions.

00:38:57.360 | And the way you do it is you take some small amount

00:39:01.520 | of deuterium tritium fuel,

00:39:03.840 | you bombard it with energy from all sides.

00:39:07.880 | And this is what the lasers are used for,

00:39:09.840 | extremely powerful lasers,

00:39:12.080 | which compresses the pellet of fusion and heats it.

00:39:16.640 | It compresses it to such a high density and temperature

00:39:20.240 | that the reactions take place very, very quickly.

00:39:22.240 | And in fact, they can take place so quickly

00:39:23.920 | that it's all over with before the thing flies apart.

00:39:27.320 | - Wow, so heat it up really fast.

00:39:29.880 | - That is inertial fusion, okay?

00:39:33.200 | - Is that useful for energy generation for outside?

00:39:35.960 | - No, not yet.

00:39:37.680 | I mean, there are those people who think it will be,

00:39:40.320 | but you may have heard of the big experiment

00:39:42.680 | called the National Ignition Facility,

00:39:45.160 | which was built at Livermore starting in the late 1990s

00:39:48.720 | and has been in operation since roundabout 2010.

00:39:53.200 | It was designed with the claim

00:39:56.040 | that it would reach ignition, fusion ignition,

00:39:59.080 | in this pulsed form where the reactions are got over with

00:40:02.760 | so quickly before the whole thing flies apart.

00:40:05.520 | It didn't actually reach ignition

00:40:07.040 | and it doesn't look as if it will,

00:40:09.000 | although we never know.

00:40:10.200 | Maybe people figure out how to make it work better.

00:40:12.720 | But the answer is, in principle,

00:40:16.840 | it seems possible to reach ignition in this way,

00:40:20.260 | maybe not with that particular laser facility.

00:40:23.080 | - Are you surprised that we humans

00:40:27.240 | haven't destroyed ourselves,

00:40:29.320 | given that we've invented such powerful tools of destruction?

00:40:32.940 | Like, what do you make of the fact that for many decades,

00:40:38.080 | we've had nuclear weapons now?

00:40:39.980 | Speaking about estimating risk,

00:40:42.120 | at least to me, it's exceptionally surprising.

00:40:43.940 | I was born in the Soviet Union,

00:40:45.800 | that big egos of the big leaders,

00:40:51.440 | when rubbing up against each other,

00:40:53.360 | have not created the kind of destruction

00:40:55.880 | everybody was afraid of for decades.

00:40:59.800 | - Well, I must say I'm extremely thankful that it hasn't.

00:41:02.400 | I don't know whether I'm surprised about it.

00:41:05.440 | I've never thought about it from the point of view of,

00:41:08.560 | is it surprising that we've avoided it?

00:41:11.060 | I'm just very thankful that we have.

00:41:12.760 | I think that there is a sense in which cooler heads

00:41:16.160 | have prevailed at crucial moments.

00:41:19.120 | I think there is also a sense in which

00:41:22.320 | mutually assured destruction has in fact worked

00:41:27.320 | as a policy to restrain the great powers from going to war.

00:41:32.440 | And in fact, the fact that we haven't had a world war

00:41:38.720 | since the 1940s is perhaps even attributable

00:41:47.400 | to nuclear weapons in a kind of strange and peculiar way.

00:41:52.400 | But I think humans are deeply flawed and sinful people.

00:41:57.600 | And I certainly don't feel that we're guaranteed

00:42:04.380 | that it's gonna go on like this.

00:42:06.360 | - And we'll talk about the sort of

00:42:07.600 | the biggest picture view of it all.

00:42:09.520 | But let me just ask in terms of your worries of,

00:42:15.120 | if we look 100 years from now,

00:42:16.720 | we're in the middle of what is now a natural pandemic

00:42:19.960 | that from the looks of it,

00:42:21.960 | as fortunately is not as bad as it could possibly been.

00:42:27.680 | If you look at the Spanish flu,

00:42:28.920 | if you look at the history of pandemics,

00:42:30.880 | if you look at all the possible pandemics

00:42:32.560 | that could have been,

00:42:33.760 | that folks like Bill Gates are exceptionally terrified about.

00:42:37.120 | I know many people are suffering,

00:42:41.500 | but it's better than it could have been.

00:42:44.480 | So, and now we're talking about nuclear weapons.

00:42:47.160 | In terms of existential threats to us as sinful humans,

00:42:52.160 | what worries you the most?

00:42:55.280 | Is it nuclear weapons?

00:42:57.280 | Is it natural pandemics, engineered pandemics,

00:43:01.680 | nanotechnology?

00:43:02.960 | In my field of artificial intelligence,

00:43:05.200 | some people are afraid of killer robots.

00:43:08.880 | - Robots, yeah.

00:43:09.720 | - Do you think in those existential terms,

00:43:14.280 | and do any aspect, do any of those things worry you?

00:43:17.660 | - I am certainly not confident

00:43:21.440 | that my children and grandchildren

00:43:23.920 | will experience the benefits of civilization

00:43:27.320 | that I have enjoyed.

00:43:29.720 | I think it's possible for our civilizations

00:43:32.120 | to break down catastrophically.

00:43:34.240 | I also think that it's possible for our civilizations

00:43:39.820 | to break down progressively.

00:43:43.500 | And I think they will,

00:43:45.160 | if we continue to have the explosion of population

00:43:49.540 | on the planet that we currently have.

00:43:51.760 | I mean, it's quite wrong to think of our problems

00:43:56.760 | as mostly being CO2.

00:43:59.000 | If we can just solve CO2,

00:44:00.720 | then we can go on having this continually expanding economy

00:44:05.720 | everywhere in the world.

00:44:06.800 | Of course you can't do that, okay?

00:44:09.160 | I mean, there is a finite bearing capacity

00:44:13.200 | of our planet.

00:44:14.120 | - On the resources of our planet.

00:44:15.560 | - On the resources of our planet.

00:44:17.240 | And we can't continue to do that.

00:44:19.580 | So I think there are lots of technical reasons

00:44:22.200 | why a continually expanding economy

00:44:26.680 | and civilization is impossible.

00:44:31.480 | And therefore, actually I'm as much nervous

00:44:34.760 | about the fact that our population

00:44:36.980 | is eight billion or something right now worldwide

00:44:40.760 | as I am about the fact that a few million people

00:44:44.800 | would be killed by COVID-19.

00:44:48.000 | I mean, I don't want to be callous about this,

00:44:51.120 | but from the big picture,

00:44:53.120 | it seems like that's much more of a problem.

00:44:55.920 | Overpopulation, people not dying

00:44:58.960 | is ultimately more of a problem than people dying.

00:45:03.960 | So that probably sounds incredibly callous

00:45:07.200 | to your listeners,

00:45:08.520 | but I think it's simply a sober assessment of the situation.

00:45:13.520 | - Is there ways from the way those eight billion

00:45:18.120 | or seven billion or whatever the number is live

00:45:21.440 | that could make it sustainable?

00:45:23.340 | 'Cause you've kind of implied there's a kind of,

00:45:27.560 | we have especially in the West,

00:45:28.840 | this kind of capitalist view

00:45:30.160 | of really consuming a lot of resources.

00:45:33.160 | Is there a way to,

00:45:35.020 | if you could change one thing or a few things,

00:45:38.260 | what would you change to make this life,

00:45:41.840 | make it more likely that your grandchildren

00:45:45.440 | have a better life than you?

00:45:48.000 | - Well, okay, so let's talk a bit about energy

00:45:50.640 | because that's something I know a lot about

00:45:52.880 | having thought about it most of my career.

00:45:55.600 | In order to reach a steady state CO2 level, okay,

00:46:00.160 | that's acceptable in terms of global climate change

00:46:03.040 | and so on and so forth,

00:46:05.500 | we need to reduce our carbon emissions

00:46:09.880 | by at least a factor of 10 worldwide, okay?

00:46:13.120 | What's more, you know,

00:46:16.440 | the average energy consumption and hence CO2 emission

00:46:21.780 | of people in the world is less than a 10th

00:46:25.400 | of what we per capita of than what we have in the West,

00:46:30.400 | in America and Europe and so forth.

00:46:33.240 | So if you have in mind some utopia in the future

00:46:36.100 | where we've reached a sustainable use of energy

00:46:39.900 | and we've also reached a situation

00:46:43.380 | in which there's far less inequity in the world

00:46:47.900 | in the sense that people have,

00:46:49.660 | share the energy resources more uniformly,

00:46:53.600 | then what that is equivalent to

00:46:56.060 | would be to reduce the CO2 emissions in Western economies,

00:47:03.140 | not by a factor of 10, but by a factor of 100.

00:47:05.140 | In other words, it has to go down to 1%

00:47:06.940 | of what it is now, okay?

00:47:09.220 | So, you know, when people talk about,

00:47:11.380 | you know, let's use natural gas

00:47:14.220 | 'cause maybe it only uses 60% of the energy of coal,

00:47:18.580 | it's complete nonsense.

00:47:20.060 | That's not even scratching the surface

00:47:22.300 | of what we would need to do.

00:47:24.620 | So, you know, is that going to be feasible?

00:47:27.980 | I very much doubt it.

00:47:31.460 | And therefore, I actually doubt that we can reach

00:47:34.380 | a level of energy,

00:47:37.440 | of fossil energy use that is 1%

00:47:42.980 | of the current use in the West

00:47:45.180 | without totally dramatic changes,

00:47:47.380 | either in, you know, our society,

00:47:50.060 | our use of energy and so forth,

00:47:52.540 | which actually, of course,

00:47:53.860 | much of that energy is used for producing food

00:47:56.580 | and so on and so forth.

00:47:57.520 | So it's actually not so obvious

00:47:59.060 | that we can cut down our energy usage by that factor.

00:48:02.980 | Or we've got to reduce the human population.

00:48:06.820 | - Population.

00:48:07.780 | So you run up against that number.

00:48:09.060 | That's increasing still.

00:48:10.500 | And you don't think that could be--

00:48:13.140 | - Sorry if that's depressing.

00:48:14.220 | - No, it's not depressing.

00:48:17.780 | It's difficult, like many truths are.

00:48:22.460 | Do you have a hope

00:48:27.020 | that there could be a technological solution?

00:48:29.380 | - In short, no.

00:48:31.620 | There is no technological solution to, for example,

00:48:35.660 | for population control.

00:48:37.180 | I mean, we have the technology

00:48:38.900 | just to prevent ourselves bearing children.

00:48:41.780 | That's not a problem.

00:48:42.780 | Technology's in, okay?

00:48:44.300 | Solved.

00:48:45.140 | The challenge is society.

00:48:47.980 | The challenge is human choices.

00:48:51.020 | The challenge is almost entirely human and sociological,

00:48:55.140 | not technology.

00:48:57.940 | And when people talk about energy,

00:48:59.900 | they think that there's some kind

00:49:02.060 | of technological magic bullet for this,

00:49:04.140 | but there isn't, okay?

00:49:05.940 | And there isn't for the reasons I just mentioned.

00:49:08.140 | Not because it's obvious there isn't,

00:49:09.620 | but actually there isn't.

00:49:11.500 | And in any case,

00:49:13.580 | that it's true of energy, it's true of pollution,

00:49:17.660 | it's true of human population,

00:49:19.260 | it's true of most of the big challenges in our society

00:49:22.940 | are not scientific or technological challenges.

00:49:27.220 | They're human sociological challenges.

00:49:30.580 | And that's why I think it's a terrible mistake,

00:49:34.980 | even for folks like me who work at, you know,

00:49:37.460 | well, the high temple of science and technology

00:49:40.580 | in America and maybe in the galaxy.

00:49:43.740 | I mean, you know, it's--

00:49:45.780 | - MIT.

00:49:46.620 | - It's at MIT.

00:49:47.580 | - Best university in the world.

00:49:48.900 | (laughing)

00:49:50.260 | - It's a terrible mistake if we give the impression

00:49:53.820 | that technology is going to solve it all.

00:49:55.900 | Technology will make tremendous contributions.

00:49:58.700 | And I think it's worth working on it.

00:50:01.580 | But it's a disaster if you think

00:50:04.220 | it's going to solve all of our problems.

00:50:05.980 | And actually, you know, I've written a whole book

00:50:09.420 | about the question of scientism

00:50:13.020 | and the overemphasis on science,

00:50:15.060 | both as a way of solving problems through technology,

00:50:18.740 | but also as a way of gaining knowledge.

00:50:20.540 | I think it's not all of the knowledge there is either.

00:50:23.420 | - Yeah, I think that book and your journey there

00:50:27.620 | is fascinating, so maybe you can go there.

00:50:29.980 | Can you tell me about your, on a personal side,

00:50:33.660 | the personal journey of your faith,

00:50:36.460 | of Christianity and your relationship

00:50:38.380 | with God, with religion in general?

00:50:42.940 | - Yeah, in my latest book,

00:50:45.020 | Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?,

00:50:46.700 | I devote most of the first chapter

00:50:50.540 | to telling how I became a Christian,

00:50:53.340 | why I became a Christian.

00:50:54.900 | I didn't grow up as a Christian.

00:50:57.100 | - Which is fascinating.

00:50:58.300 | I mean, you didn't grow up as a Christian,

00:50:59.780 | so you've discovered the beauty of God

00:51:02.820 | and physics at the same time.

00:51:04.380 | - That's a very poetic way of putting it,

00:51:07.620 | but yes, I would accept that.

00:51:09.940 | I became a Christian when I was an undergraduate

00:51:11.820 | at Cambridge University.

00:51:14.780 | I had gone to a school in which there was religion,

00:51:17.580 | kind of was part of the society.

00:51:20.180 | There were prayers at the daily gathering

00:51:24.900 | of the students, the assembly of the students,

00:51:28.620 | but I didn't really believe it.

00:51:30.460 | I just sort of went along with it

00:51:32.060 | and it wasn't particularly aggressive or benign.

00:51:36.580 | It just sort of was there, but I didn't believe it.

00:51:39.420 | Didn't make much sense to me,

00:51:43.300 | but I came across Christians from time to time.

00:51:45.420 | And when I went to Cambridge University,

00:51:47.500 | two of my closest friends, it turned out, were Christians.

00:51:53.580 | And I think it was that was the most important influence

00:51:56.820 | on me, that here were two people who were really smart,

00:52:01.820 | like me, I'm giving you my impression.

00:52:09.460 | - The way you felt at the time.

00:52:10.300 | - The way I felt at the time.

00:52:12.100 | And they thought Christianity made sense

00:52:17.740 | and testified to its significance in their lives.

00:52:22.740 | And so that was a very important influence on me.

00:52:26.340 | And ultimately, I mean, the reason,

00:52:29.660 | I didn't see Christianity as some kind of great evil,

00:52:35.580 | the way it's sometimes portrayed

00:52:37.140 | by the radical atheists of this century.

00:52:39.660 | I mean, I think that's nonsense.

00:52:41.260 | So I think there were certain attractive things.

00:52:45.060 | If you go to a university like Cambridge,

00:52:47.180 | you're surrounded by Western culture

00:52:51.340 | from about the 15th century onwards,

00:52:54.940 | and that's saturated with Christian art

00:52:59.140 | and architecture and so forth.

00:53:01.220 | And so it's hard not to recognize that Christianity

00:53:06.220 | is in fact the foundation of Western society

00:53:09.380 | and Western culture, Western civilization.

00:53:12.620 | So I mean, maybe I was in that sense,

00:53:16.340 | favorably disposed towards Christianity as a religion,

00:53:20.780 | but as a personal faith, it didn't mean anything to me.

00:53:22.980 | But I became convinced really of two things.

00:53:26.340 | One is that the evidence for the resurrection

00:53:30.420 | of Jesus Christ is actually rather good.

00:53:32.900 | I mean, it's not a proof, it's not kind of some kind

00:53:35.900 | of scientific demonstrate or mathematical demonstration,

00:53:39.140 | but it's actually extremely good.

00:53:40.740 | It's not scientific evidence by and large,

00:53:42.940 | it's historical evidence.

00:53:43.900 | - Historical evidence, yeah.

00:53:45.900 | - So that was one thing.

00:53:47.100 | And the other thing that came to me when I was at Cambridge,

00:53:51.260 | it became clear that Christianity ultimately

00:53:55.420 | is not some kind of moral theory

00:53:59.420 | or philosophy or something like that.

00:54:04.380 | It is, or at least it claims to be,

00:54:08.060 | a personal relationship with God,

00:54:10.180 | which is made possible by what Jesus did

00:54:14.340 | on the cross and His life and His teaching.

00:54:17.540 | And it's a personal call to a relationship with God.

00:54:21.460 | And that, I'd never really thought of it in those terms

00:54:25.060 | when I was younger, and that thought became

00:54:29.020 | attractive to me.

00:54:31.260 | I mean, I think most people find the person of Christ

00:54:34.980 | and His teachings compelling in a certain sense.

00:54:38.940 | - What do you mean by personal?

00:54:40.460 | Do you mean personal for you, like a relationship,

00:54:42.820 | like it's a meditative, like you specifically,

00:54:46.740 | you, Ian, have a connection with God.

00:54:50.980 | And then the other side, you say personal

00:54:54.180 | with the actual body, the person of Jesus Christ.

00:54:57.700 | So all of those things, what do you mean

00:54:59.260 | by personal connection and why that was meaningful?

00:55:02.620 | - So as a-- - I'm sorry

00:55:04.180 | for the stupid questions. - No, that's okay,

00:55:05.780 | no problem.

00:55:06.680 | As a Christian, I believe that I have a relationship

00:55:09.980 | with God, which is best expressed

00:55:12.200 | by saying that it's personal.

00:55:13.700 | And that comes about because Jesus, through His acts,

00:55:19.540 | has reconciled me with God, me, a sinner,

00:55:24.540 | me, someone full of sins, of failings,

00:55:31.060 | of ways in which I don't live up to even my own ideals,

00:55:34.420 | let alone the ideals of a holy God,

00:55:37.120 | have been reconciled to the creator of everything.

00:55:41.500 | And so Christians, myself included,

00:55:47.220 | believe that prayer is, in a certain sense,

00:55:50.060 | a connection with God.

00:55:51.980 | And there are times when I have felt

00:55:54.460 | that God spoke to me, I don't mean necessarily orally

00:55:58.500 | in words, but showed me things or enlightened me

00:56:02.180 | or inspired me in ways that I attribute to Him.

00:56:07.180 | So I see it as a two-way relationship in a certain sense.

00:56:14.100 | Of course, it's a very asymmetrical relationship,

00:56:18.060 | but nevertheless, Christians think that it's a two-way street.

00:56:21.900 | We're not just talking into the air

00:56:24.040 | when we say we are going to pray for someone.

00:56:27.840 | - In this two-way communication,

00:56:29.740 | is there a way that you could try to describe on a podcast,

00:56:33.980 | what is God like in your view?

00:56:38.900 | If you try to describe, is it a force?

00:56:44.760 | Is it, for you, intellectually, is it a set of metaphors

00:56:50.660 | that you use to reason about the world?

00:56:54.300 | Is it kind of a computer that does some computation,

00:56:59.300 | that's an infinitely powerful computer?

00:57:03.920 | Or is it like Santa Claus, a guy with a beard on the cloud?

00:57:07.680 | Like, I don't mean what God actually is.

00:57:11.780 | I mean, in your limited cognitive capacity as a human,

00:57:16.780 | what do you actually, what do you find helpful

00:57:19.300 | for thinking of what God actually looks like?

00:57:21.660 | What is God?

00:57:23.100 | - Well, let me start by saying none of the above, okay?

00:57:26.480 | I mean, clearly God, the Christian God,

00:57:29.360 | the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, et cetera,

00:57:33.520 | is not any of those things,

00:57:37.920 | because all of those things you just mentioned

00:57:40.760 | are phenomena or entities in the created world.

00:57:45.760 | And the most fundamental thing about monotheism

00:57:50.280 | as Abraham and Moses and so forth handed it down

00:57:55.280 | is that God is not an entity within the creation,

00:58:00.400 | within the universe, that God is the creator of it all.

00:58:04.440 | And that's what Genesis, first two chapters of Genesis,

00:58:06.880 | is really about.

00:58:07.920 | It's not about telling us how God created the world.

00:58:12.240 | It's about telling us and telling the early Hebrews

00:58:15.760 | that God created the world, okay?

00:58:19.160 | And that therefore he is not simply an entity within it.

00:58:22.680 | On the other hand, our finite minds

00:58:26.160 | have a pretty hard time encompassing that.

00:58:28.640 | So one has to therefore work in terms of metaphors

00:58:33.160 | and images and so forth.

00:58:35.840 | And I think we would know very little about who God is

00:58:40.840 | if we were simply left to our own devices.

00:58:47.880 | If we were just, you know, here you are,

00:58:49.880 | you're in the universe,

00:58:51.080 | try to figure out who made it and so forth.

00:58:54.680 | Well, you know, philosophers think

00:58:55.900 | they can do a little bit of that, maybe,

00:58:57.920 | and theologians think that they can do a little bit more.

00:59:01.120 | But Christians think that God has actually helped us along

00:59:06.120 | a lot by revealing himself.

00:59:09.520 | And we say that he's revealed himself supremely

00:59:14.280 | in the person of Jesus Christ.

00:59:17.080 | And so, you know, when Jesus says to his disciples,

00:59:20.320 | "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father,"

00:59:22.720 | then that is in a certain sense a watchword

00:59:26.640 | for answering this question for Christians.

00:59:29.200 | It is that supremely,

00:59:31.800 | if we want to help ourselves understand who God really is,

00:59:36.200 | we look to Jesus.

00:59:37.240 | We look to what he did, we look to what he said,

00:59:39.920 | and so forth.

00:59:42.360 | And we believe that he is one with the Father,

00:59:47.360 | and that's why we believe in the Trinity.

00:59:51.320 | I mean, it's basically because that revelation

00:59:54.480 | is extremely central to Christian belief and teaching.

00:59:58.740 | - So in that sense, through Jesus,

01:00:03.240 | that's kind of a historical moment that's profound,

01:00:07.440 | that's really powerful.

01:00:08.640 | But do you also think that God makes himself seen

01:00:13.280 | in less obvious ways in our world today?

01:00:17.200 | - Absolutely, absolutely.

01:00:18.960 | I mean, it's certainly been the outlook

01:00:23.680 | of Jews and Christians throughout history

01:00:28.680 | that God is seen in the creation.

01:00:32.040 | When we look at the creation,

01:00:34.480 | we see to some extent the wonder, the majesty,

01:00:39.160 | the might of the person, the entity,

01:00:43.160 | but the person who created it.

01:00:46.300 | And that's a way in which scientists particularly

01:00:50.280 | have over the ages,

01:00:54.120 | and certainly over most of the last five centuries

01:00:57.960 | since the scientific revolution,

01:01:00.280 | scientists have seen in a certain sense

01:01:03.960 | the hand of God in creation.

01:01:05.840 | I mean, this leads us perhaps to a different discussion,

01:01:09.440 | but I mean, it's remarkable to me

01:01:12.200 | how influential Christianity and religion in generally

01:01:17.080 | has been in science.

01:01:19.880 | - Yeah, most of the scientists through history,

01:01:21.880 | as you described, I mean,

01:01:23.800 | God has been a very big part of their life

01:01:26.560 | and their work and their thinking.

01:01:27.400 | - Yeah, certainly up until the beginning

01:01:29.960 | of the 20th century, that was the case.

01:01:32.720 | - So maybe this is a good time to,

01:01:34.320 | can you tell me what scientism is?

01:01:36.560 | - Yeah, I mean, the short answer is that by scientism,

01:01:40.040 | we mean the belief that science

01:01:43.440 | is all the real knowledge there is.

01:01:45.360 | And that's a shorthand.

01:01:48.000 | There are lots of different facets of it

01:01:49.800 | and which one can explore.

01:01:51.360 | And the book in which I explored it most thoroughly

01:01:56.360 | was actually an earlier book called "Monopolizing Knowledge."

01:01:59.800 | And the purpose of that title is to draw attention

01:02:04.560 | to the fact that in our society as a whole,

01:02:07.600 | particularly in the West today,

01:02:11.040 | we have grown so reliant on science

01:02:15.480 | that we tend to put aside other ways

01:02:19.920 | of getting to know things.

01:02:21.720 | And so, of course, at MIT, we are focused on science

01:02:26.160 | and we do focus on it very much.

01:02:29.760 | But the truth is that there are many ways

01:02:32.760 | of getting to know things in our world,

01:02:35.640 | know things reliably in our world,

01:02:38.320 | and a lot of them are not science.

01:02:40.800 | So scientism, in my view, is a terrible intellectual error.

01:02:45.120 | It's the belief that somehow the methods of science

01:02:48.360 | as we've developed them with experiments

01:02:51.240 | and in the end, it relies particularly

01:02:55.000 | upon reproducibility in the world

01:02:57.400 | and on a kind of clarity that comes from measurements

01:03:01.080 | and mathematics and related types of skills.

01:03:06.040 | Those powerful though they are

01:03:08.960 | for finding out about the world

01:03:11.640 | are not all the knowledge,

01:03:13.560 | do not give us all the knowledge we have,

01:03:16.320 | and there's many other forms of knowledge.

01:03:18.840 | And the illustration that I usually use

01:03:21.960 | to try to help people to think about this

01:03:25.600 | is to say, "Well, look, let's think about human history."

01:03:27.840 | I mean, to what extent can human history

01:03:30.720 | be discovered scientifically?

01:03:32.120 | The answer is essentially it can't.

01:03:34.240 | And the reason is because human history is not reproducible.

01:03:37.880 | You can't do reproducible experiments or observations

01:03:41.040 | and go back and try it over again.

01:03:44.520 | It's a one-off thing.

01:03:46.160 | History is full of unique events.

01:03:49.760 | And so you can't hope to do history

01:03:54.320 | using the methods of science.

01:03:56.280 | - Yeah, I mean, in some sense,

01:03:58.960 | history is a story of miracles.

01:04:00.920 | I mean, they don't have to do with God.

01:04:03.640 | It's just one- - Their uniqueness is anyway.

01:04:05.400 | Unique events, that's for sure.

01:04:06.480 | - Unique events.

01:04:07.320 | And that science doesn't like that

01:04:09.720 | because it's unique events by their very definition

01:04:12.920 | are not reproducible.

01:04:14.480 | Can I ask sort of a tricky question?

01:04:17.680 | I don't even know what atheist or atheism is,

01:04:21.200 | but is it possible for somebody to be an atheist

01:04:24.920 | and avoid slipping into scientism?

01:04:28.640 | - Oh, yeah, absolutely.

01:04:30.480 | I mean, these are two separate things, okay?

01:04:34.580 | I'm quite sure there are many people

01:04:37.240 | who don't believe in God and yet recognize

01:04:39.640 | that there are many different ways that we get knowledge.

01:04:43.120 | Some is history, some is sociology, economics, politics,

01:04:47.840 | philosophy, art history, language,

01:04:52.400 | literature, et cetera, et cetera.

01:04:54.240 | There are many people who recognize those disciplines

01:04:57.200 | as having their own approaches to epistemology

01:05:00.360 | and to how we get knowledge and valuing them very highly.

01:05:04.720 | I don't mean to say that everyone who's an atheist

01:05:09.720 | automatically subscribes to a scientistic viewpoint.

01:05:14.600 | That's not true.

01:05:16.040 | But it's certainly the case that many of the arguments,

01:05:20.400 | in fact, most of the arguments of the aggressive atheists

01:05:24.680 | of this century, people are sometimes called new atheists,

01:05:28.760 | although they're actually rather old,

01:05:30.420 | most of their arguments are rather old,

01:05:32.360 | are drawing heavily on scientism.

01:05:36.700 | So when they say things like,

01:05:38.920 | there's no evidence to support Christianity, okay?

01:05:43.120 | What they are really focusing on is saying

01:05:48.080 | that Christianity isn't proved

01:05:49.520 | or the evidence for Christianity is not science, okay?

01:05:53.600 | Science doesn't prove it.

01:05:55.140 | And if you read their books,

01:05:59.120 | that's what you find they really mean,

01:06:00.880 | is science doesn't lead you necessarily to believe

01:06:05.800 | in a creator God or into any particular religion.

01:06:12.240 | I accept that, that's not a problem to me,

01:06:14.480 | because I don't think that science

01:06:16.000 | is all the knowledge there is,

01:06:16.840 | and I think there are other important ways

01:06:18.400 | of getting to know things,

01:06:20.120 | and one of them is historical, for example,

01:06:22.120 | and I mentioned earlier that I became persuaded,

01:06:24.480 | and I still am persuaded,

01:06:26.960 | that the historical evidence for the resurrection

01:06:29.600 | is very persuasive.

01:06:31.780 | Again, it's not proof or anything like that,

01:06:35.200 | but it's pretty good evidence, okay?

01:06:38.440 | - Yeah, I've talked to Richard Dawkins on this podcast,

01:06:41.840 | and I saw you debate with Sean Carroll,

01:06:46.280 | so I understand this world, it makes me very curious.

01:06:51.280 | Maybe, let me ask sort of another way,

01:06:54.400 | my own kind of worldview, maybe you can help,

01:06:58.280 | as by way of therapy, understand.

01:07:02.300 | You know, 'cause you've kind of said

01:07:05.560 | that there's other ways of knowing.

01:07:07.440 | What about if I kind of sit here

01:07:11.540 | and am cognizant of the fact

01:07:13.800 | that I almost don't know anything?

01:07:16.040 | I'm sitting here almost paralyzed by the mystery of it all,

01:07:21.200 | and it's not even, when you say

01:07:23.200 | there's other ways of knowing,

01:07:24.760 | it feels almost too confident to me,

01:07:28.880 | because yeah, when I listen to beautiful music or see art,

01:07:33.880 | there's something there that's beyond the reach

01:07:39.080 | of scientism, I would say.

01:07:40.480 | So, beyond the reach of the tools of science.

01:07:45.340 | But I don't even feel like that could be

01:07:48.820 | as an actual tool of knowing.

01:07:50.920 | I just don't even know where to begin,

01:07:55.220 | because it just feels like we know so little.

01:07:58.100 | Like if we look even 100 years from now,

01:08:00.880 | when people look back to this time,

01:08:02.300 | humans look back to this time,

01:08:04.480 | they'll probably laugh at how little we knew,

01:08:06.580 | even 100 years from now.

01:08:07.900 | And if we look at 1,000 years from now,

01:08:09.980 | hopefully we're still alive or some version of ourselves,

01:08:12.100 | or AI versions of ourselves are still alive.

01:08:14.620 | (Lex laughing)

01:08:16.940 | You know, they'll certainly laugh

01:08:18.820 | at the absurdity of our beliefs.

01:08:21.060 | So, what do you,

01:08:22.280 | so you don't seem to be as paralyzed

01:08:26.500 | by how little we know.

01:08:28.180 | You confidently push on forward,

01:08:30.440 | but what do you make of that sense of just not knowing

01:08:34.780 | of the mystery of it all? - First of all,

01:08:35.900 | we need to be modest or humble,

01:08:40.900 | even, about what we know.

01:08:43.420 | I accept that, and I certainly think that's true.

01:08:46.060 | Not simply because in the future we'll know more science

01:08:50.300 | and there will be more powerful ways

01:08:53.940 | of finding out about things,

01:08:55.700 | but simply because sometimes we're not right.

01:08:59.540 | We're wrong, okay, in what we think we know.

01:09:04.940 | So, that's crucial, but it's also a very Christian outlook.

01:09:09.940 | That kind of humility is what Jesus taught.

01:09:14.460 | So, I don't know whether this was in the back of your mind

01:09:18.100 | when you were thinking about this,

01:09:19.040 | but it's often the case that people of religious faith

01:09:24.040 | are accused of being dogmatists, okay?

01:09:26.980 | And there is a sense in which dogma, teaching,

01:09:29.380 | accepted teaching, is part of religions, okay?

01:09:34.060 | But I don't think that necessarily

01:09:36.460 | that leads one to blind dogmatism.

01:09:41.980 | And I certainly don't think that faith,

01:09:43.940 | we can talk about this later if you'd like,

01:09:46.020 | but I certainly don't think that faith means

01:09:49.980 | thinking you know something

01:09:51.400 | and not listening to counter-arguments, for example.

01:09:54.540 | So, I think that's crucial.

01:09:58.180 | - Yeah, what does faith mean to you?

01:10:01.020 | What does it feel like?

01:10:03.020 | What is it actually, sort of, how do you carry your faith

01:10:06.540 | in terms of the way you see the world?

01:10:09.140 | - Well, I think faith is very often misunderstood

01:10:12.900 | in our society at the moment,

01:10:15.420 | because it's often portrayed as being nothing

01:10:20.220 | other than believing things you know ain't true, you know?

01:10:25.220 | Or believing things that are not proven, okay?

01:10:33.200 | And this, and faith does have a strand,

01:10:38.200 | which is to do with, you know,

01:10:40.080 | basically believing in concepts or propositions.

01:10:45.080 | But actually, the word faith is much broader than that.

01:10:50.280 | Faith also means, you know, trusting in something,

01:10:55.280 | trusting in a person, or trusting in a thing,

01:11:00.700 | the reliability of some technology, for example.

01:11:04.560 | That's equally part of the meaning of the word faith.

01:11:07.600 | And there's a third strand

01:11:09.480 | to the meaning of the word as well,

01:11:11.720 | and that is loyalty.

01:11:13.520 | So, you know, I have faith in my wife,

01:11:17.520 | and I try to act in faith towards her,

01:11:21.160 | and that's a kind of loyalty.

01:11:23.320 | And so, those three strands

01:11:24.920 | are the most important strands of the meaning of faith.

01:11:28.260 | Yes, belief in propositions

01:11:31.840 | that we might not have, you know, full proof about,

01:11:35.000 | or maybe we have very little proof about,

01:11:38.080 | but it's also trust and loyalty.

01:11:41.880 | And actually, in terms of the Christian faith,

01:11:45.500 | Christians are far more called to trust and loyalty

01:11:49.640 | than they are to belief in things

01:11:51.160 | they don't have proof of, okay?

01:11:54.560 | But the critics of religion generally

01:11:58.020 | tend to emphasize the first one and say,

01:12:01.060 | "Well, you know, you believe things

01:12:02.460 | "for which you have no evidence, okay?

01:12:03.920 | "That's what they think faith is."

01:12:06.100 | Well, yeah, there is a sense

01:12:08.540 | in which everybody has to live their lives

01:12:12.140 | believing or making decisions in situations

01:12:19.020 | when they don't have all the proof, or evidence,

01:12:24.320 | or knowledge that enables you to make a completely

01:12:27.840 | rational, or well-informed, or prudent decision.

01:12:32.300 | We do this all the time.

01:12:34.860 | My drive down here, I nearly took a wrong turning,

01:12:37.540 | and I thought, "Which way do I go?

01:12:39.620 | "Do I keep going straight on?"

01:12:41.340 | And so, my voice came out, and I think,

01:12:45.360 | "Go straight, okay?"

01:12:46.860 | (both laughing)

01:12:50.140 | So, you have to make decisions,

01:12:52.680 | and sometimes, you don't have a navigation system

01:12:55.860 | telling you what to do.

01:12:56.820 | You just have to make that decision

01:12:58.260 | with insufficient evidence,

01:13:00.580 | and you're doing it all the time as a human,

01:13:03.100 | and that's part of being sentient.

01:13:05.440 | And so, that kind of action and belief

01:13:10.300 | on the basis of incomplete evidence

01:13:12.460 | is not something that I feel uncomfortable doing,

01:13:15.420 | or that I feel that somehow my Christian commitments

01:13:19.340 | have forced me to do when I wouldn't have had

01:13:21.420 | to have done it otherwise.

01:13:22.480 | I would have had to do it anyway.

01:13:24.140 | And so, there's a sense in which I think it's important

01:13:28.860 | to see the breadth of meaning of faith,

01:13:31.220 | and to recognize that, certainly in the case of Christianity,

01:13:35.220 | it's trust and loyalty that are the key themes

01:13:39.280 | that we're called to.

01:13:40.660 | - And, I mean, another interesting extension of that

01:13:45.060 | that you speak to is kind of loyalty

01:13:48.380 | is referring to a connection

01:13:50.300 | with something outside of yourself.

01:13:52.340 | - Yeah.

01:13:53.340 | - So, I think you've spoken about existentialism,

01:13:56.280 | or even just atheism in general,

01:13:57.880 | as leading naturally to an individualism,

01:14:01.940 | as a focus on the self,

01:14:04.140 | and ideas that maybe the Christian faith

01:14:08.080 | that can instill in you is allowing you

01:14:12.160 | to sort of look outside of yourself.

01:14:13.560 | So, connection, I mean, loyalty fundamentally

01:14:16.400 | is about other beings, and yeah, other beings.

01:14:21.600 | I mean, I think, I don't know what it is in me,

01:14:24.720 | but I'm very much drawn to that idea,

01:14:27.300 | and I think humans in general are drawn to that idea.

01:14:31.260 | You can make all kinds of evolutionary arguments,

01:14:33.740 | all that kind of stuff,

01:14:34.600 | but people always kind of tease me

01:14:38.040 | 'cause I talk about love a lot. (laughs)

01:14:40.840 | And, I mean, there's a lot of non-scientific things

01:14:44.140 | about love, right?

01:14:44.980 | Like, what the heck is that thing?

01:14:46.520 | Why do we even need that thing?

01:14:48.660 | It seems to be an annoying burden

01:14:50.760 | that we get so much joy in life

01:14:54.240 | from a connection with other human beings,

01:14:55.780 | deep, lasting connections with human beings.

01:14:59.240 | Same thing with loyalty.

01:15:00.560 | Why do we get so much value and pleasure

01:15:03.800 | and strength and meaning from loyalty,

01:15:06.440 | from a connection with somebody else,

01:15:08.440 | going through thick and thin with somebody else,

01:15:11.080 | going through some hard times?

01:15:12.200 | I mean, some of the closest friends I have

01:15:15.260 | is going through some rough times together,

01:15:18.760 | and that seems to make life deeply meaningful.

01:15:22.320 | What is that?

01:15:24.360 | - Yeah, that resonates with me,

01:15:29.720 | and obviously I would affirm it.

01:15:32.020 | I think, just to correct an implication that you made,

01:15:38.160 | I don't think it's necessarily the consequence of atheism

01:15:43.160 | that we lose track of those kinds of things.

01:15:48.520 | I mean, I think that atheists can be loyal, okay,

01:15:51.480 | if you like.

01:15:52.320 | The question more often comes up in the context

01:15:56.800 | of where does morality come from?

01:15:59.760 | And loyalty, I think, and duty are related to one another.

01:16:04.760 | If we have loyalty to someone,

01:16:06.400 | then we have a duty to them as well.

01:16:09.760 | And I think that insofar as we see ourselves

01:16:12.400 | as having any kinds of duties or moral compulsions

01:16:17.780 | with respect to our relationships to other people,

01:16:20.600 | I think it's a question that always arises,

01:16:24.060 | well, where do these come from?

01:16:26.580 | And there are various approaches that people have

01:16:29.700 | towards deciding what makes ethics or morality moral, okay.

01:16:34.700 | But I do think it's the case that it's very hard

01:16:43.020 | to ground morality in any kind of absolute way

01:16:48.020 | or persuasive way in mere human relationships.

01:16:54.900 | And so it's certainly the case that in Christianity,

01:16:59.540 | there is a sense in which morality and, you know,

01:17:05.660 | the morality of morals comes from a transcendent place,

01:17:12.300 | from a transcendent deity,

01:17:15.180 | and that we ground the compelling force of morals on God

01:17:20.180 | more than we do on individuals.

01:17:28.420 | Because after all, you know,

01:17:29.780 | if you've got nothing but, you know, other people,

01:17:34.620 | why should you, you know, treat your neighbor well?

01:17:39.100 | Why shouldn't you defraud your neighbor

01:17:41.620 | if it's good for you?

01:17:43.380 | Well, you know, you can construct all kinds of arguments,

01:17:45.980 | and some of them are, you know,

01:17:47.020 | obviously arguments that are commonplace in religion too.

01:17:50.420 | You should do as you would be done by

01:17:52.380 | and all this kind of thing.

01:17:53.940 | But none of that seems any more than mere pragmatism

01:17:57.420 | to most people, okay.

01:17:59.180 | And so that's one of the things that Nietzsche,

01:18:03.220 | amongst others, you know, really identified.

01:18:05.920 | If God is dead, if the idea of God

01:18:08.300 | as grounding our moral behavior

01:18:10.700 | is no longer viable in the West,

01:18:12.940 | which Nietzsche thought that it wasn't, okay,

01:18:15.820 | then what does ground it?

01:18:17.460 | And he had no good answer for it.

01:18:19.900 | In fact, he claimed there was no answer,

01:18:21.660 | but then he couldn't live with that.

01:18:23.620 | And so he invented the idea of the Ubermensch,

01:18:27.900 | you know, this superior human being, okay.

01:18:31.740 | And this was a different way of trying to ground morality,

01:18:36.500 | not a very successful one.

01:18:38.100 | You know, you could argue that it's a forerunner

01:18:40.900 | of the sort of racism of Hitler's regime and so forth

01:18:45.900 | that, you know, we've in the West,

01:18:50.180 | thankfully shied away from in the past

01:18:53.900 | half or three quarters of a century.

01:18:57.280 | But, you know, I think it is the case

01:19:01.220 | that Christianity gives me a basis

01:19:06.460 | for my moral beliefs that is more than mere pragmatism.

01:19:11.460 | - Yeah, but there is, so stepping outside of all that,

01:19:16.740 | there does seem to be a powerful stabilizing,

01:19:20.260 | like we humans are able to hold ideas together,

01:19:23.500 | like in a distributed way,

01:19:25.460 | outside of whether God exists or not or any of that,

01:19:29.660 | just our ability to kind of converge together

01:19:32.300 | towards a set of beliefs into sometimes into tribes.

01:19:36.780 | It's kind of, I don't know if it's inherent

01:19:39.660 | to being human beings.

01:19:41.500 | I hope not because now if I look on Twitter

01:19:44.820 | and there's the red team and the blue team, right?

01:19:48.500 | (Luke laughs)

01:19:49.340 | It's almost like it's some kind of TV show

01:19:52.740 | that we're living in that people get into these tribes

01:19:55.940 | and they hold a set of beliefs that sometimes don't,

01:19:59.900 | I mean, they are beliefs for the sake

01:20:02.780 | of holding those beliefs.

01:20:03.860 | And we get this intimate connection between each other

01:20:07.100 | for sharing those beliefs.

01:20:08.780 | And we spoke to the things about loyalty and love,

01:20:12.920 | and that's the thing that people feel inside the tribe.

01:20:16.020 | And it seems very human that within that tribe,

01:20:19.500 | those beliefs don't necessarily always have

01:20:22.180 | to be connected to anything.

01:20:24.240 | It's just the fact that, you know,

01:20:25.860 | I've did sports my whole life.

01:20:29.180 | Whenever you're on a team, the bond you get

01:20:31.500 | with other people on the team is incredible.

01:20:34.180 | And the actual sport is often the silliest.

01:20:38.800 | I mean, I don't play ball sports anymore,

01:20:41.280 | but the ball, when I played like soccer or tennis,

01:20:43.580 | I mean, all those sports are silly, right?

01:20:45.980 | You're playing with a little ball,

01:20:48.060 | but there's the bond you get is so deeply meaningful.

01:20:51.100 | So I just, it's interesting to me

01:20:53.340 | on a sociological level that it's possible to me,

01:20:57.760 | whatever the beliefs of religion is,

01:21:00.280 | whatever they're actually grounded in,

01:21:04.340 | they might be, they might have a power in themselves.

01:21:08.780 | - I think there is tribalism everywhere.

01:21:11.660 | And I think tribalism in the US at the moment

01:21:14.300 | is rather difficult to bear from my point of view.

01:21:17.680 | And it's, I think, fed by the internet

01:21:21.380 | and social media and so forth.

01:21:22.880 | But historically, tribalism has been a trait

01:21:27.620 | and remains a trait in humans.

01:21:30.160 | The genius of Christianity is that it supersedes tribalism.

01:21:35.160 | I mean, yes, when the Hebrews thought about Yahweh,

01:21:41.300 | initially they thought about him as their tribal deity,

01:21:48.460 | just like the tribal deities round about them.

01:21:52.900 | And so, but, and yet from early on in Hebrew history,

01:21:57.900 | the crucial thing that Yahweh came to mean,

01:22:03.860 | or I would say revealed of himself to them,

01:22:08.860 | was that he wasn't just a tribal deity.

01:22:11.740 | He was the God that created the whole thing.

01:22:15.260 | And if he is the God of the whole thing,

01:22:17.260 | then he's not just the God of the Hebrews,

01:22:20.660 | or in the case of Americans,

01:22:24.620 | God is not just the God of Americans,

01:22:26.700 | he's the God of everybody.

01:22:28.060 | And that is a way, in a way,

01:22:31.780 | the most amazing transcending of tribal loyalties.

01:22:36.780 | And one of the crucial occasions in the New Testament,

01:22:43.860 | when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost,

01:22:49.820 | the apostles and the disciples speak in other tongues,

01:22:54.180 | and there are people from all the countries round about,

01:22:58.020 | hear them in their own languages.

01:23:00.240 | And so, whether you take that as factual or not,

01:23:05.100 | that is a statement of the transcendent aspects

01:23:10.100 | of Christianity, or the claimed transcendent aspects

01:23:14.460 | of Christianity, that it transcends culture.

01:23:17.220 | And that's certainly something which I find appealing.

01:23:20.220 | - When I kind of touch on this topic in my own mind,

01:23:25.220 | one of the hardest questions is,

01:23:27.880 | why is there suffering in the world?

01:23:31.780 | Do you have a good answer?

01:23:33.700 | - Well, I have some answers, but you're right,

01:23:37.460 | that it is one of the toughest questions.

01:23:39.820 | The problem of pain, or the problem of suffering,

01:23:43.100 | or the problem of theodicy, as theologians call it,

01:23:47.540 | is probably one of the toughest.

01:23:49.860 | I think it's important to say that there are

01:23:54.380 | certain types of answers to this question,

01:23:57.160 | but there are aspects of this question

01:23:59.100 | to which there is no intellectual answer

01:24:02.180 | that is going to satisfy.

01:24:03.740 | And the fact of the matter is,

01:24:07.560 | when I'm speaking to an audience,

01:24:11.100 | let's say at some kind of lecture,

01:24:15.580 | I can be sure that there are people in that audience

01:24:20.140 | who are either personally suffering,

01:24:22.020 | they've got illness, they've got pains,

01:24:24.180 | maybe they're facing death,

01:24:25.700 | or someone in their family is in similar sorts of situations.

01:24:28.940 | So suffering is a reality, and there is nothing

01:24:32.800 | that I can say that is gonna solve their feeling

01:24:37.220 | of agony and angst and maybe despair

01:24:42.220 | in those types of situations.

01:24:44.900 | There is really only one thing that I think humans can do

01:24:48.780 | for one another in those kinds of situations,

01:24:52.380 | and that is simply to be there,

01:24:54.520 | to be there alongside your friend or your colleague

01:24:59.520 | or whoever, family member or whoever it might be.

01:25:04.820 | And that's the only really sense

01:25:07.300 | in which we can give comfort.

01:25:08.780 | If we try to give intellectual solutions to these problems,

01:25:13.780 | we're going to be like the comforters

01:25:16.740 | that were in the book of Job in the Bible,

01:25:20.460 | who brought no comfort to Job himself

01:25:23.900 | with their intellectual answers.

01:25:27.620 | But if they had been there, and some of them were there,

01:25:30.220 | they sat alongside, that is some level of comfort.

01:25:34.480 | And after all, that's the meaning of the word compassion.

01:25:39.100 | It means to suffer alongside of somebody.

01:25:42.820 | And I would say, first off,

01:25:45.180 | what does a Christian say about suffering?

01:25:47.540 | The first thing a Christian should say is,

01:25:51.400 | compassion is all that really counts.

01:25:54.020 | And what's more, we say that God has acted

01:25:58.360 | in compassion towards us.

01:26:01.500 | That is to say, He has suffered with us

01:26:04.720 | in the person of Jesus Christ.

01:26:06.600 | And when we see the passion of Jesus,

01:26:09.360 | we recognize that God takes suffering deadly seriously,

01:26:14.360 | has taken it so seriously that He's been willing to come

01:26:18.480 | and be a part of His creation in the person of Jesus Christ

01:26:23.360 | and suffer death, the most horrible death on the cross,

01:26:27.640 | for our benefit.

01:26:30.080 | So that's one side of suffering.

01:26:32.560 | But the philosophical question remains,

01:26:37.560 | surely if God is good and God is omnipotent, benevolent,

01:26:42.680 | why doesn't He take away all the suffering?

01:26:47.820 | Why doesn't He cause miracles to occur

01:26:50.580 | that will take away all the suffering?

01:26:53.180 | I think there are some good answers to that question

01:26:56.220 | in the following sense,

01:26:58.740 | that we live in a world where the consistency of the world

01:27:03.740 | is an absolutely crucial part of it.

01:27:11.140 | The fact that our world behaves reproducibly in the main

01:27:16.140 | is absolutely essential for the integrity of our lives.

01:27:21.260 | Without it, we wouldn't exist.

01:27:23.460 | And so there is a sense in which the integrity of creation

01:27:28.700 | calls for there being consistent behavior,

01:27:31.780 | which these days we think of as being the laws of nature.

01:27:35.680 | And so the consistent behavior of nature

01:27:39.840 | is very, very important.

01:27:41.220 | It's what enables us to be what we are.

01:27:43.760 | And if you're calling upon God in your critique

01:27:50.020 | of why isn't this benevolent creator fixing things,

01:27:55.320 | one answer is He's fixed things in a certain sense

01:27:59.640 | to have an integrity in them.

01:28:02.840 | And that integrity is the best thing.

01:28:07.520 | It's the way we have our existence.

01:28:10.080 | It's the way we live and move and have our being.

01:28:12.840 | And if you want something different,

01:28:15.460 | you've got to show that there is a way

01:28:18.880 | in which you could invent a world that is better,

01:28:22.480 | that it has the integrity that we need to exist, okay,

01:28:25.800 | and to be able to think and love and be,

01:28:30.620 | but you are gonna do it better.

01:28:33.620 | And the atheists think that maybe

01:28:36.240 | they have got a better idea,

01:28:37.880 | but if they thought about it a bit more carefully,

01:28:40.080 | they'd realize no one has put forward a better idea, okay?

01:28:43.960 | - So another way to say that,

01:28:46.380 | I mean, is that suffering is an integral part of this

01:28:52.560 | of a consistent existence.

01:28:57.360 | So sort of in a philosophical sense,

01:29:02.360 | the full richness and the beauty of our experience

01:29:08.120 | would not be as beautiful, would not be as rich

01:29:10.960 | if there was no suffering in the world.

01:29:14.400 | Is that possible?

01:29:15.920 | - Well, I think you said two different things

01:29:17.440 | that aren't exactly, at least that aren't exactly the same.

01:29:20.360 | One is that suffering is an integral part of our experience.

01:29:25.280 | You know, that might be considered a challenge

01:29:28.720 | to certain types of Christian theology

01:29:31.500 | or even Jewish theology.

01:29:33.720 | In other words, Christians talk about the fall

01:29:36.720 | and talk about Adam and Eve in the garden

01:29:40.400 | and have a vision of there being some kind of perception

01:29:45.320 | from or perfection from which we have fallen.

01:29:49.240 | And I think there is a perfection from which we've fallen,

01:29:51.680 | but I don't think that perfection

01:29:53.120 | is some kind of physical perfection.

01:29:56.920 | In other words, I don't subscribe personally to the view

01:29:59.600 | that some Christians do,

01:30:01.840 | that there was some state prior to the fall

01:30:05.980 | in which death did not occur.

01:30:08.740 | I don't think that that's consistent with science

01:30:11.080 | as we know it.

01:30:12.160 | And I think that death, for example,

01:30:16.440 | has been part of the biological world

01:30:19.680 | and the universe as a whole from billions of years ago.

01:30:24.680 | So just to be clear about that,

01:30:27.640 | on the other hand, I do think,

01:30:31.760 | so if that's the case,

01:30:33.880 | then certainly in that sense, at the very least,

01:30:36.800 | suffering or at least death, okay,

01:30:40.440 | is part of the biological existence.

01:30:45.280 | And that probably seems so completely obvious

01:30:48.160 | to somebody who is au fait with science,

01:30:51.760 | whether they're a scientist or not.

01:30:54.600 | - Well, and I apologize if I'm interrupting,

01:30:57.080 | but it's the obvious reality of our life today,

01:31:01.280 | but there's a lot of people,

01:31:02.400 | I think it's currently in vogue,

01:31:04.480 | I've talked to quite a few folks

01:31:06.200 | who kind of see as the goal of many of our pursuits

01:31:09.920 | as to extend life indefinitely,

01:31:12.240 | a sort of a dream for many people is to live forever.

01:31:16.020 | But in the technological world,

01:31:19.920 | in the engineering world, in the scientific world,

01:31:21.880 | I mean, that's the big dream.

01:31:23.760 | To me, it feels like that's not a dream.

01:31:28.760 | I certainly would like to live forever,

01:31:32.200 | like that's the initial feeling, the instinctual feeling,

01:31:35.500 | 'cause life is so amazing.

01:31:37.960 | But then if you actually,

01:31:39.680 | kind of like you've presented it,

01:31:41.360 | if you actually live that kind of life,

01:31:44.720 | you would realize that that's actually a step backwards,

01:31:47.840 | that's a step down from the experience of this life.

01:31:50.360 | In my sense, that death is an essential part of life,

01:31:54.440 | about, essential part of this experience,

01:31:57.560 | death of all things.

01:31:58.640 | So the fact that things end somehow,

01:32:02.320 | and the scarcity of things somehow create the beauty

01:32:07.920 | of this experience that we have.

01:32:10.920 | - Yeah, transhumanism doesn't look

01:32:12.800 | very attractive to me either,

01:32:14.920 | but it also doesn't look very feasible.

01:32:17.060 | But that's a whole big topic

01:32:21.240 | that I'm not exactly an expert,

01:32:23.840 | but I'll say, but I, but, you know,

01:32:26.000 | I'm of a certain age where my mortality is more pressing

01:32:30.160 | or more obvious to me than it once was, okay?

01:32:32.880 | And I don't dread that.

01:32:38.720 | I don't see that as, in a certain sense,

01:32:43.100 | even the enemy, okay?

01:32:44.960 | - You're not afraid of death?

01:32:46.240 | - Well, I'm afraid of lots of things in a conceptual way,

01:32:50.640 | but it doesn't keep me awake at night, okay?

01:32:53.240 | I think like most people,

01:32:57.460 | I'm more afraid of pain than I am of death.

01:33:00.740 | So I don't want to put myself forward

01:33:02.520 | as some kind of hero that doesn't worry about these things.

01:33:05.760 | That's not true.

01:33:07.200 | But I do think, and maybe this is part

01:33:10.400 | of my Christian outlook,

01:33:13.680 | that there is life beyond the grave,

01:33:16.420 | but I don't think that it's life in this universe

01:33:22.280 | or in this, certainly not in this body,

01:33:26.440 | and maybe not in a certain sense in this mind.

01:33:28.680 | I mean, you know, Christian belief in the afterlife

01:33:31.560 | is that we will be resurrected,

01:33:33.880 | we will be, in a certain sense, be with God.

01:33:35.740 | I don't know what that means,

01:33:36.820 | and I don't think anybody else really quite knows

01:33:38.760 | what that means, but there are lots of ways

01:33:40.760 | that over history, people, artists,

01:33:43.280 | and writers and so forth have pictured it,

01:33:47.320 | and these are all perhaps, some of them,

01:33:49.000 | helpful ways of thinking about it.

01:33:50.520 | - Do you think it's possible to know

01:33:52.200 | what happens after we die?

01:33:53.660 | - I don't think we find out by near-death experiences

01:33:58.840 | or those kinds of things,

01:34:00.080 | but I think that, you know, that we have sufficient.

01:34:06.000 | I feel I have sufficient information, if you like,

01:34:10.700 | in terms of God's revelation to be confident

01:34:13.760 | that I will go somewhere else, okay?

01:34:17.860 | But it won't be here, and I, to me,

01:34:22.100 | the aspirations of transhumanism are horrific.

01:34:27.100 | I mean, I think it would be a nightmare,

01:34:31.580 | not a dream, a nightmare, you know,

01:34:34.020 | to be somehow downloaded into a computer

01:34:37.660 | and live one's life like that,

01:34:40.020 | because it completely discounts the integrity

01:34:44.980 | of our bodies as well as our minds.

01:34:46.900 | I mean, we aren't just disembodied minds.

01:34:51.180 | It would not be me that was in the computer.

01:34:55.540 | It would be something else

01:34:57.180 | if that kind of download were possible.

01:34:59.940 | Of course, it isn't possible,

01:35:01.100 | and it's a very long way from being possible,

01:35:03.540 | but, you know, amazing things happen,

01:35:05.220 | so we shouldn't be too certain.

01:35:07.460 | - So this is a place that, again,

01:35:09.580 | maybe taking a slight step outside

01:35:12.100 | wherever philosophizing a little bit,

01:35:15.500 | let me ask you about human-level

01:35:19.420 | or superhuman-level intelligence,

01:35:21.660 | the artificial intelligence systems.

01:35:23.920 | What do you make from almost a religious,

01:35:30.340 | or a perspective that we've been talking about

01:35:32.980 | of the special aspect of human nature,

01:35:36.520 | of us creating intelligence systems

01:35:39.820 | that exhibit some elements of that human nature?

01:35:43.540 | Is that something, again,

01:35:45.020 | like we were talking about with transhumanism,

01:35:47.540 | there's a feasibility question

01:35:49.020 | of how hard is it to actually build machines

01:35:50.860 | that are human-level intelligence,

01:35:52.280 | or have something like consciousness,

01:35:54.280 | or have all those kinds of human qualities,

01:35:56.740 | and then there's the do we want to do that kind of thing?

01:36:01.900 | So on both of those directions, what do you think?

01:36:05.380 | - Well, okay, so, you know,

01:36:07.060 | since your podcast is called AI,

01:36:08.820 | I don't want to offend too many of your listeners out there,

01:36:12.380 | but I think one should be a little bit more modest

01:36:16.180 | about one's claims for AI

01:36:18.020 | than have typically been the case.

01:36:20.300 | I think that actually a lot of people in AI

01:36:22.580 | are somewhat chastened,

01:36:23.820 | and so there are more modest claims

01:36:26.300 | than are common with the transhumanists and so forth.

01:36:31.420 | And, you know, I used to play chess when I was a kid.

01:36:36.420 | I was pretty good at it, okay?

01:36:38.700 | I won competitions and so on and so forth.

01:36:41.620 | And I, when I, and I'm talking about

01:36:43.820 | when I was in high school,

01:36:44.740 | I thought it was pretty unlikely

01:36:47.140 | that a computer would be able to become good at chess,

01:36:50.740 | but I was dead wrong, okay?

01:36:52.260 | And so, you know.

01:36:53.900 | - How did that make you feel, by the way,

01:36:55.140 | when you blew a big chess barrel?

01:36:57.420 | - I stopped playing chess seriously

01:37:00.380 | when I encountered computers that could beat me, okay?

01:37:04.140 | (both laughing)

01:37:05.500 | I still play with my grandchildren a little bit,

01:37:07.580 | but yeah, it seemed like, in a certain sense,

01:37:11.660 | it became a solved problem

01:37:13.740 | when AI was able to do it better than I could.

01:37:17.100 | So I think that there are ways in which today

01:37:20.020 | we've seen computers do things

01:37:23.220 | which historically were regarded

01:37:25.140 | as being very characteristic of human intelligence.

01:37:29.580 | And in that sense, there is some success to AI.

01:37:34.260 | I also think that, you know,

01:37:36.500 | there are certain things which one might think of

01:37:38.940 | as being AI, which are, you know,

01:37:41.420 | completely widespread in our society.

01:37:43.460 | I'm thinking about the internet search engines and so forth,

01:37:48.460 | which are enormously influential

01:37:51.140 | and obviously do things more powerfully

01:37:54.140 | than any individual human

01:37:56.380 | or even any combination of humans could do,

01:37:58.900 | much faster, and accessing databases

01:38:03.900 | and so on and so forth.

01:38:05.420 | All of this has outstripped our human intelligence.

01:38:10.420 | I'm not sure the extent, though,

01:38:14.020 | to which that is really intelligence

01:38:16.340 | in the way that was traditionally meant,

01:38:19.420 | but it's certainly amazingly facile,

01:38:24.020 | and it multiplies our ability to access human knowledge

01:38:29.020 | and data and so forth.

01:38:32.020 | - So is that something,

01:38:33.260 | is that into the realm of something

01:38:35.140 | we should be concerned about?

01:38:37.420 | So in the realm of religion,

01:38:39.540 | you talk about what is good, what is evil,

01:38:41.700 | what is right, what is wrong.

01:38:43.060 | You have a set of morals, set of beliefs,

01:38:45.820 | and when you have an entity come into the picture

01:38:48.300 | that has quite a bit of power,

01:38:51.620 | if we potentially look into the future,

01:38:53.660 | and intelligence and capability,

01:38:56.200 | do you think there's something that religion can say

01:39:00.780 | about artificial intelligence,

01:39:03.460 | or is that something we shouldn't worry about

01:39:07.100 | until it arrives, you think,

01:39:08.860 | just like with the chess program?

01:39:10.980 | - You know, religious writers

01:39:12.380 | have thought about this for centuries.

01:39:14.280 | You know, there's been a long debate

01:39:17.900 | about what is historically called the plurality of worlds,

01:39:23.180 | and it was actually more about whether there are places

01:39:27.220 | where other intelligent creatures live

01:39:30.700 | than it was about us creating them.

01:39:33.020 | But I think it's largely the same question.

01:39:36.100 | - It's almost like aliens, like other intelligent.

01:39:38.380 | - So if there is other intelligent life in the universe,

01:39:41.340 | what is its relationship to God?

01:39:43.620 | Okay, that is, in a certain sense,

01:39:45.420 | the puzzle that religious thinkers and writers

01:39:48.460 | have thought about for a long time,

01:39:49.820 | and there's a whole range of different opinions

01:39:52.720 | about that.

01:39:53.560 | I mean, personally, I think it's an interesting question,

01:39:57.060 | but it's not a very pressing question at the moment.

01:40:00.260 | And I think the same way about the question

01:40:03.500 | of what happens if we're able to build

01:40:05.860 | a sentient robot, for example.

01:40:08.580 | I think it's an interesting question,

01:40:09.980 | and we'll have to think about it when that happens,

01:40:12.860 | but I think we're still quite a ways away from that,

01:40:15.020 | and so I don't have a good answer.

01:40:17.180 | But I think there's a literature

01:40:19.660 | that one could tap to think about.

01:40:22.440 | (Lex laughing)

01:40:23.280 | - Do you wanna start early on the question?

01:40:25.080 | (Lex laughing)

01:40:26.460 | Well, let me ask you another possible question,

01:40:29.000 | from a religious or from a personal perspective,

01:40:31.240 | what do you think is consciousness?

01:40:33.440 | This subjective experience that we seem to be having.

01:40:38.440 | Does the Christian religion have something

01:40:43.560 | to say about consciousness?

01:40:45.160 | Does your own, when you look in the mirror,

01:40:47.980 | do you have a sense of what is consciousness?

01:40:50.240 | - I think the Bible doesn't have much

01:40:53.560 | in the way of answers about that directly,

01:40:55.840 | in the sense that you're perhaps asking it,

01:40:57.680 | which is more like, I think you're asking

01:40:59.560 | for some kind of quasi-scientific,

01:41:02.440 | or maybe indeed scientific description of consciousness.

01:41:05.840 | - Desperately looking for one, yes.

01:41:07.640 | - I think that there, it's an interesting question.

01:41:11.680 | I think it's actually, it's a jump too far.

01:41:16.880 | I think we don't even know the answer to the question,

01:41:19.500 | what is the mind, let alone consciousness?

01:41:22.100 | So if you distinguish between those two things,

01:41:24.460 | I think the question that's being addressed

01:41:26.260 | more directly, scientifically, as well as in other ways,

01:41:31.260 | it is what is the mind?

01:41:33.940 | And that is certainly a very topical question,

01:41:37.140 | even in places like MIT, which is not historically involved

01:41:40.220 | with philosophical questions,

01:41:41.700 | you know, the people doing neuroscience and so forth.

01:41:45.500 | I think it's a very important question,

01:41:48.100 | and I think that we're going to find

01:41:50.920 | that we are not computers.

01:41:54.700 | In other words, I think the commonplace theory

01:41:59.700 | of what mind is, is generally speaking,

01:42:04.980 | by analogy, that we are basically wetware, okay?

01:42:11.120 | That we're some computer-like entity,

01:42:15.760 | and that the analogy to digital computers

01:42:20.840 | is a pretty decent one.

01:42:22.840 | I mean, that's of course a viewpoint

01:42:24.840 | which drives the aspirations of the transhumanists.

01:42:30.400 | I mean, they so much believe that our minds

01:42:32.880 | are nothing other than, you know, in a certain sense,

01:42:35.580 | some kind of implementation of software in biology

01:42:39.200 | that they say to themselves,

01:42:40.360 | "Well, of course we're going to be able to download it

01:42:42.720 | "into a digital computer."

01:42:45.640 | I don't think that's true.

01:42:47.360 | I think it's most likely that quantum mechanics

01:42:52.920 | is very important in the brain.

01:42:55.260 | It seems most unlikely that it's not, to me.

01:42:59.880 | I know that that's contrary to the opinions of many people,

01:43:03.360 | but that's my view, and it's also a view, for example,

01:43:06.440 | of people like Roger Penrose and people like that

01:43:09.640 | who've written about it rather extensively.

01:43:13.160 | And if that's the case, then really my mind

01:43:17.080 | is not reducible to some kind of software

01:43:22.080 | which can be considered to be portable.

01:43:25.160 | It is so connected to the hardware of my body

01:43:30.160 | that the two are inseparable, okay?

01:43:33.240 | And so if that is in fact what we find,

01:43:35.900 | as I suspect will be the case,

01:43:39.040 | then the aspirations of the transhumanists

01:43:41.040 | will be very long in coming, if at all.

01:43:45.280 | So I think that actually physics and chemistry

01:43:48.600 | are in a sense involved with the brain and in the mind,

01:43:56.880 | but not in a very simple way like the computer analogy,

01:44:01.800 | in a much more complicated way.

01:44:06.680 | And I also think that it's philosophically ignorant

01:44:11.680 | to speak as if when and if the actions of the brain

01:44:19.520 | are understood at the physical and chemical level,

01:44:25.600 | that the mind will vanish as a concept,

01:44:30.600 | that we'll just say, "We're nothing but brains," okay?

01:44:34.360 | Of course it won't.

01:44:36.000 | I mean, it may well be that our mind

01:44:38.120 | is an emergent phenomenon that comes out

01:44:41.220 | of the physics and chemistry and biology, okay?

01:44:44.380 | But it's also something that we have to encounter

01:44:48.320 | and take seriously.

01:44:49.880 | And so it's not the case that the mind is reducible

01:44:54.880 | to nothing but physics and chemistry,

01:44:59.920 | even if it's embedded continuously

01:45:03.600 | into physics and chemistry, as I rather suspect it is.

01:45:06.820 | So that's my own view.

01:45:10.840 | I mean, another way of putting it is that the mind

01:45:14.640 | or the soul is not something added into humans,

01:45:19.000 | as might have been the viewpoint historically.

01:45:23.360 | I do think there is something added to humans,

01:45:26.280 | but it's not the mind, it's the spirit.

01:45:29.200 | And that takes us beyond the physical,

01:45:30.880 | it takes us beyond this universe.

01:45:32.960 | But I don't think that consciousness,

01:45:35.760 | the mind, et cetera, et cetera,

01:45:37.360 | is that thing which is necessarily--

01:45:39.360 | - It's added in explicitly.

01:45:40.720 | It could be emergent in some ways.

01:45:42.480 | - I'm not a substance dualist in that sense, okay,

01:45:45.680 | if you want to put it philosophically.

01:45:47.920 | - I mean, but your sense is,

01:45:51.640 | so the mind and the intelligence and consciousness

01:45:54.080 | could be these emergent things.

01:45:55.720 | Do you have a hope, a sense that science

01:45:59.400 | could help us get pretty far down the road

01:46:03.120 | of understanding-- - Oh, we will get much further

01:46:05.600 | than we have, and it'll be interesting.

01:46:09.600 | I mean, right now, our methods of diagnosing the human brain

01:46:16.000 | are extremely primitive.

01:46:18.000 | I mean, the resolution that we have,

01:46:20.000 | that comes out of NMR and brain scans and so forth

01:46:25.920 | is miserable compared with what we need

01:46:28.820 | in order to understand the brain at the cellular level,

01:46:31.880 | let alone at the atomic level.

01:46:34.080 | But we're making progress.

01:46:37.480 | It's relatively slow progress, but it's progress,

01:46:40.120 | and people are working on it,

01:46:40.960 | and we're going to get better at it,

01:46:42.280 | and we will find out very interesting things as we do.

01:46:45.380 | The time resolution is also completely hopeless

01:46:48.760 | compared with what we need to understand the thought.

01:46:51.840 | So there's a long way to go, and we will get better at it.

01:46:58.240 | But I'm not at all worried, as some people are,

01:47:01.300 | and some people speak as if this is a good thing,

01:47:03.700 | that somehow the concepts of humanity

01:47:07.940 | and the mind and religion and consciousness

01:47:12.940 | are going to vanish because we're going to have

01:47:16.300 | complete physicochemical description of the brain

01:47:20.460 | in the near future.

01:47:22.240 | We're not gonna have that.

01:47:23.540 | And secondly, even if we had it,

01:47:25.200 | the mind and all these other things

01:47:26.500 | aren't gonna vanish because of it.

01:47:28.780 | - Well, I find kind of compelling the notion

01:47:31.860 | that whoever created this universe and us

01:47:36.700 | did so to understand itself, himself.

01:47:42.500 | I mean, there's a powerful self-reflection notion

01:47:47.500 | to this whole experiment that we're a part of.

01:47:52.140 | - Well, I certainly think that God takes delight

01:47:54.540 | in his creation, and that it was created for that delight

01:47:59.060 | as much as it was for any other reason,

01:48:03.260 | and that, you know, that therefore,

01:48:06.160 | there's reason to be hopeful and awestruck by the creation,

01:48:11.060 | whether it's on the very small or on the very large.

01:48:14.660 | - I'm not sure if you're familiar,

01:48:15.780 | there's something called the simulation hypothesis

01:48:18.940 | that's been fun to talk about with the computer scientists

01:48:22.820 | and so on, which is a kind of thought experiment

01:48:26.540 | that proposes that, you know,

01:48:29.680 | the entirety of the world around us

01:48:31.500 | is a kind of a computer program.

01:48:33.540 | That's a simulation, and then we're living inside it.

01:48:36.580 | I think there's, I think from a certain perspective,

01:48:40.220 | that could be consistent with a religious view of the world.

01:48:45.100 | I mean, you could just use different terms, basically.

01:48:50.100 | But it feels like a more modern, updated version of that.

01:48:55.100 | But what's your sense of this,

01:49:00.940 | of the simulation hypothesis?

01:49:02.300 | Do you find it interesting, useful to think about it?

01:49:04.620 | Do you find it ridiculous?

01:49:06.140 | Do you find it fun?

01:49:07.300 | What are your thoughts?

01:49:08.460 | - It's fun, and it's been, of course,

01:49:11.180 | the subject of various movies,

01:49:12.980 | that some of which are very well known.

01:49:17.940 | You know, I don't think it makes sense

01:49:22.420 | to think of it as a simulation hypothesis

01:49:26.380 | in the sense that we're really lying in banks of,

01:49:30.940 | on banks of beds, having our energy drained away from us,

01:49:39.140 | and the simulation is going on in our individual brains.

01:49:42.900 | That makes no sense to me at all.

01:49:45.160 | I don't think that's what's meant

01:49:46.480 | by the simulation hypothesis as you're using it now.

01:49:49.980 | But I think that there is a,

01:49:51.380 | there is very little distinction

01:49:56.100 | between saying that an intelligent creator

01:50:00.460 | has set up the universe according to his will and his plan

01:50:05.460 | and set it in motion and is allowing it to run out.

01:50:13.180 | Maybe, as Christians say, he's sustaining it, actually,

01:50:18.020 | by his word of power, it says in the book,

01:50:21.920 | the letter to Hebrews, okay,

01:50:23.580 | in this amazingly consistent and integrated way.

01:50:31.280 | I don't think there's very much difference

01:50:35.040 | between saying that and saying that it's a simulation, okay?

01:50:38.120 | I mean, I think it's almost the same thing, okay?

01:50:41.400 | But I think it's important to recognize that

01:50:45.600 | the simulation in that concept,

01:50:50.000 | the simulation and the creation of the universe

01:50:52.240 | are the same thing, okay?

01:50:53.720 | In other words, it's a simulation

01:50:57.300 | that is billions of light years across, okay?

01:51:02.300 | - Yeah.

01:51:03.320 | I mean, there's a sense in which it helps one understand,

01:51:07.160 | especially if you're not religious,

01:51:09.080 | that there is something outside of the world

01:51:11.280 | that we live in, that there's something bigger

01:51:14.240 | than the world we live in.

01:51:15.560 | And that, I mean, that's just another perspective

01:51:18.240 | on that humbles you.

01:51:21.860 | So in that sense, it's a powerful thought experiment.

01:51:25.120 | - One shortcoming of that is the following,

01:51:28.120 | is of the analogy, is this,

01:51:31.240 | that we think of a simulation

01:51:32.800 | as something taking place in the universe.

01:51:35.780 | It's taking place in my computer, okay?

01:51:40.720 | I don't think that's the right analogy

01:51:43.000 | for a Christian view of creation, okay?

01:51:48.000 | I don't think it's taking place

01:51:50.320 | in some other universe that God has made, okay?

01:51:55.160 | I think maybe it's taking place in the mind of God.

01:51:59.320 | Christians might hypothesize also.

01:52:01.680 | But I think that it's important to recognize

01:52:05.480 | that Christian theology at any rate

01:52:07.920 | is that God is not one of the entities in the universe,

01:52:11.920 | and presumably, therefore, is very different

01:52:15.680 | from a simulation that we might run on a computer.

01:52:18.320 | - Let me ask you, Adam and Eve,

01:52:22.160 | Eve and Adam ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge

01:52:24.760 | of good and evil.

01:52:26.000 | Does this, is this story meaningful to you?

01:52:27.960 | What does this story mean to you?

01:52:30.180 | - Yeah, it is meaningful to me.

01:52:32.680 | I take the writings of the Bible very seriously,

01:52:36.040 | and I think that most Christians regard them

01:52:39.000 | as having some kind of authoritative role in their faith.

01:52:44.000 | What do I get from it?

01:52:48.040 | I mean, I think the most important thing

01:52:49.680 | that Christians get from the story of Adam and Eve

01:52:52.280 | and eating the apple and so forth

01:52:54.400 | is that the relationship between humans and God is broken,

01:52:59.400 | has been broken by man's disobedience.

01:53:03.240 | That's what the story of Adam and Eve

01:53:05.600 | and the apple is all about.

01:53:07.760 | And that broken relationship is, for Christians,

01:53:12.760 | what Jesus came to redeem,

01:53:17.060 | came to overcome that brokenness

01:53:20.880 | and restore that relationship with God

01:53:25.160 | to some extent, at any rate, on Earth,

01:53:31.240 | and ultimately, you know, in eternity, to restore it fully.

01:53:36.240 | So that's really what Christians mean

01:53:40.520 | and gain from the story of Adam and Eve.

01:53:43.200 | Of course, lots of people ask the questions

01:53:45.500 | about how literally should we take these stories

01:53:50.000 | of particularly the first few chapters of Genesis,

01:53:52.840 | which is an important question,

01:53:54.320 | but we tend to get bogged down with it a bit too much.

01:54:00.240 | I think we should take away the message.

01:54:02.560 | And I think what actually we would have seen

01:54:08.920 | if we'd been there, okay,

01:54:10.920 | is something which is a matter of speculation,

01:54:14.120 | and it's certainly not terribly important

01:54:15.920 | from the point of view of Christian theology.

01:54:18.200 | - But it seems like a very important moment.

01:54:20.400 | As a man of faith, do you wish that,

01:54:26.520 | I think it was Eve first.

01:54:28.760 | - Yeah, it was Eve.

01:54:30.280 | (Luke laughs)

01:54:31.320 | - It wasn't an apple, by the way, it was just a fruit.

01:54:33.120 | - It was a fruit.

01:54:33.960 | - You said it very carefully.

01:54:34.800 | - It was the fruit of the tree, right?

01:54:36.640 | (Luke laughs)

01:54:38.680 | Do you wish they wouldn't have eaten of the tree?

01:54:42.000 | I mean, this is back to our discussion of suffering.

01:54:44.760 | Was that like an essential thing that needed to happen?

01:54:47.760 | - You're gonna have to read "Paradise Lost"

01:54:52.640 | to get your answer to that.

01:54:54.240 | (both laugh)

01:54:56.320 | - Beautifully put.

01:54:57.160 | Okay, well, let me ask the biggest question,

01:55:01.520 | one that you also touch in your book,

01:55:03.160 | but one that I ask every once in a while,

01:55:06.360 | is what is the meaning of life?

01:55:08.080 | - The meaning of my life is many different things, okay?

01:55:15.240 | But they are all kind of centered around relationships.

01:55:19.800 | I mean, for a Christian, one's relationship with God

01:55:25.840 | is a crucial part of the meaning of life,

01:55:30.840 | but one's relationship with one's family,

01:55:33.560 | wife, parents, children, grandchildren, in my case,

01:55:37.840 | and so forth, those are crucially important.

01:55:42.400 | These are all the places where people,

01:55:45.720 | whether they're religious or not, find meaning.

01:55:49.000 | But ultimately, I think a person who has faith

01:55:55.480 | in a creator who we think has an intention,

01:56:00.480 | many intentions, but a will

01:56:08.160 | in respect of the world as a whole,

01:56:12.160 | that's a crucial part of meaning.

01:56:14.480 | And the idea that my life might have some small significance

01:56:23.360 | in the plan of that creator

01:56:26.360 | is an amazingly powerful idea that brings meaning.

01:56:31.360 | I tell a story in my book that when I was a student,

01:56:38.720 | before I became a Christian, I read a philosophy book

01:56:41.720 | whose approximate title was "What is the Meaning of Life?"

01:56:45.480 | And that book basically said,

01:56:48.160 | "There is no meaning to life.

01:56:49.360 | "You have to make up the meaning as you go along."

01:56:51.880 | And I think that's probably the predominant secular view

01:56:56.400 | is these days, that there is no real meaning,

01:56:59.280 | but you can make up a meaning,

01:57:00.640 | and that will give you meaning into your life.

01:57:03.000 | I don't subscribe to that view anymore.

01:57:08.040 | I think there is more meaning than that.

01:57:10.280 | But I do think that those things which give meaning

01:57:12.520 | to our life are very important,

01:57:13.840 | and we should emphasize them.

01:57:15.400 | - And you have said that as the part of that meaning,

01:57:20.920 | as the part of your faith, love and loyalty are key parts.

01:57:25.920 | So can you try to say what is love and loyalty?

01:57:31.600 | What does it mean to you?

01:57:40.400 | What does it look like?

01:57:43.640 | If you were to give advice to your children,

01:57:49.240 | grandchildren of what to look for

01:57:52.440 | in looking for loyalty and love,

01:57:56.800 | what would you try to say?

01:57:58.520 | - Well, I think it's something like

01:58:01.360 | yielding your will or desire to another.

01:58:06.360 | It's valuing others more highly,

01:58:13.320 | or at least as highly as yourself.

01:58:16.200 | But that's just the start of it,

01:58:17.600 | because true love, you reach a point

01:58:21.440 | where you feel compelled by the other.

01:58:25.420 | And that, I think to some people, sounds very scary,

01:58:32.640 | but actually, it's terrifically liberating.

01:58:35.460 | And I think that love then brings you

01:58:40.680 | into service towards another.

01:58:45.160 | And I'm reminded of the phrase

01:58:50.120 | from the Anglican prayer book,

01:58:52.560 | where it talks about Jesus,

01:58:55.440 | whose service is perfect freedom.

01:58:57.640 | In other words, for us Christians,

01:59:00.280 | to serve God is what perfects our freedom.

01:59:03.800 | And I think there is an amazing love

01:59:06.360 | is in part captivity,

01:59:11.640 | but in a kind of paradoxical sense,

01:59:16.080 | it's also an amazing freedom.

01:59:18.640 | - Love is freedom.

01:59:19.880 | I don't think there's a better way to end it.

01:59:22.240 | We started with fusion energy and ending on love.

01:59:26.320 | Ian, it was a huge honor to talk to you.

01:59:27.960 | Thank you so much for your time today.

01:59:29.240 | - Thanks, it was a pleasure.

01:59:30.640 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:59:33.400 | with Ian Hutchinson,

01:59:34.680 | and thank you to our sponsors,

01:59:37.120 | Sun Basket and PowerDot.

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02:00:05.520 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

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02:00:14.640 | spelled somehow without the letter E,

02:00:17.600 | just F-R-I-D-M-A-N.

02:00:20.080 | And now, let me leave you with some words

02:00:22.280 | from Arthur C. Clarke.

02:00:24.360 | "Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist,

02:00:27.000 | "Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends

02:00:29.840 | "that I am sincerely happy

02:00:31.640 | "that the religion which chance has given you

02:00:34.320 | "has contributed to your peace of mind.

02:00:36.440 | "And often, as Western medical science now

02:00:39.440 | "reluctantly admits to your physical well-being,

02:00:43.160 | "perhaps it is better to be unsane and happy

02:00:46.320 | "than sane and unhappy.

02:00:49.240 | "But it is the best of all to be sane and happy.

02:00:53.200 | "Whether our descendants can achieve that goal

02:00:55.760 | "will be the greatest challenge of the future.

02:00:58.220 | "Indeed, it may well decide whether we have a new future."

02:01:02.600 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:01:06.640 | (gentle music)

02:01:09.220 | (gentle music)

02:01:11.800 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Ian Hutchinson: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and Religion | Lex Fridman Podcast #112

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