Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Ian Hutchinson, a nuclear engineer and plasma physicist at MIT.
00:00:06 He has made a number of important contributions in plasma physics, including the magnetic confinement of plasmas,
00:00:12 seeking to enable fusion reactions, which happens to be the energy source of the stars,
00:00:17 to be used for practical energy production. Current nuclear reactors, by the way, are based on fission, as we discuss.
00:00:25 Ian has also written on the philosophy of science and the relationship between science and religion,
00:00:32 arguing in particular against scientism, which is a negative description of the overreach of the scientific method to questions not amenable to it.
00:00:41 On this latter topic, I recommend two of his books, his new one, Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles?,
00:00:46 where he answers more than 200 questions on all aspects of God and science,
00:00:50 and his earlier book on scientism called Monopolizing Knowledge.
00:00:56 As you may have seen already, I work hard on having an open mind, always questioning my assumptions,
00:01:02 and in general marvel at the immense mystery of everything around us and the limitations of at least my mind.
00:01:10 I’m not religious myself in that I don’t go to the synagogue, a church, a mosque,
00:01:15 but I see the beautiful bond in the community that religion at its best can create.
00:01:21 I also see, both in scientist and religious leaders, signs of arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, and a will to power.
00:01:31 We’re human. Whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, or atheist,
00:01:38 this podcast is my humble attempt to explore a complicated human nature.
00:01:43 What Stanislav Lem in his book Solaris called our own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers.
00:01:50 I ask that you try to keep an open mind as well and be patient with the limitations of mind.
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00:05:26 And now here’s my conversation with Ian Hutchinson.
00:05:32 Maybe it’d be nice to draw a distinction between nuclear physics and plasma physics.
00:05:37 What is the distinction?
00:05:39 Nuclear physics is about the physics of the nucleus.
00:05:41 And my department, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT,
00:05:46 is very concerned about all the interactions and reactions and consequences of things that go on in the nucleus,
00:05:54 including nuclear energy, fission energy, which is the nuclear energy that we have already,
00:05:59 and fusion energy, which is the energy source of the sun and stars,
00:06:03 which we don’t quite know how to turn into practical energy for humankind at the moment.
00:06:12 That’s what my research has mostly been aimed at.
00:06:16 But plasmas are essentially the fourth state of matter.
00:06:22 So if you think about solid, liquid, gas, plasma is the fourth of those states of matter.
00:06:29 And it’s actually the state of matter which one reaches if one raises the temperature.
00:06:36 So cold things, you know, like ice are solid.
00:06:40 Liquids are hotter water.
00:06:43 And if you heat water beyond 100 degrees Celsius, it becomes gas.
00:06:48 Well, that’s true of most substances.
00:06:51 And plasma is a state of matter in which the electrons are unbound from the nuclei.
00:07:01 So they become separate from the nuclei and can move separately.
00:07:06 So we have positively charged nuclei and we have negatively charged electrons.
00:07:12 The net is still electrically neutral.
00:07:17 But a plasma conducts electricity, has all sorts of important properties that are associated
00:07:25 with that separation.
00:07:27 And that’s what plasmas are all about.
00:07:29 And the reason why my department is interested in plasma physics very strongly is because
00:07:34 most things, well, for one thing, most things in the universe are plasma.
00:07:37 The vast majority of matter in the universe is plasma.
00:07:40 But most particularly, stars and the sun are plasmas because they’re very hot.
00:07:48 And it’s only in very hot states that nuclear fusion reactions take place.
00:07:54 And we want to understand how to implement those kind of phenomena on Earth.
00:08:00 Maybe another distinction we want to try to get at is the difference between fission
00:08:05 and fusion.
00:08:06 So you mentioned fusion is the kind of reaction happening in the sun.
00:08:09 So what’s fission and what’s fusion?
00:08:11 Well, fission is taking heavy elements like uranium and breaking them up.
00:08:18 And it turns out that that process of breaking up heavy elements releases energy.
00:08:23 What does it mean to be a heavy element?
00:08:25 It means that there are many nuclear particles in the nucleus itself, neutrons and protons
00:08:33 in the nucleus itself so that in the case of uranium, there are 92 protons in each nucleus
00:08:42 and even more neutrons so that the total number of nucleons in the nucleus, nucleons is short
00:08:49 for either a proton or a neutron, the total number might be 235, that’s U235, or it might
00:08:58 be 238, that’s U238.
00:09:01 So those are heavy elements.
00:09:03 Light elements, by contrast, have very few nucleons, protons or neutrons in the nucleus.
00:09:10 Hydrogen is the lightest nucleus.
00:09:12 It has one proton.
00:09:14 There are actually slightly heavier forms of hydrogen, isotopes.
00:09:19 Deuterium has a proton and a neutron and tritium has a proton and two neutrons.
00:09:26 So it has a total of three nucleons in the nucleus.
00:09:31 While taking light elements like isotopes of hydrogen and not breaking them up but actually
00:09:38 fusing them together, reacting them together to produce heavier elements, typically helium,
00:09:45 which is helium is a nucleus which has two protons and two neutrons, that also releases
00:09:52 energy and that or reactions like that, making heavier elements from lighter elements is
00:10:00 what mostly powers the sun and stars.
00:10:05 Both fusion and fission release approximately a million times more energy per unit mass
00:10:14 than chemical reactions.
00:10:16 So a chemical reaction means take hydrogen, take oxygen, react them together, let’s say,
00:10:22 and get water, that releases energy.
00:10:25 The energy released in a chemical reaction like that or the burning of coal or on oil
00:10:29 or whatever else is about a million times less per unit mass than what is released in
00:10:35 nuclear reactions.
00:10:37 So but it’s hard to do.
00:10:38 It requires very high energy of impact.
00:10:44 And actually, it’s very easy to understand why.
00:10:46 And that is that those two nuclei, if they’re both, let’s say, hydrogen nuclei, one is,
00:10:52 let’s say, deuterium and the other is, let’s say, tritium, they’re both electrically charged.
00:10:58 And they’re positively charged, so they like charges repel.
00:11:02 Everyone knows that, right?
00:11:03 So basically, to get them close enough together to react, you have to overcome the repulsion,
00:11:09 the electric repulsion of the two nuclei from one another.
00:11:15 And you have to get them extremely close to one another in order for the nuclear forces
00:11:20 to overtake the electrical forces and actually form a new nucleus.
00:11:25 And so one requires very high energies of impact in order for reactions to take place.
00:11:31 And those high energies of impact correspond to very high temperatures of random motion.
00:11:37 So that’s why you can do something like that in the sun.
00:11:41 So we can build the sun.
00:11:42 That’s one way to do it.
00:11:43 But on Earth, how do you create a fusion reaction?
00:11:47 Yeah.
00:11:48 Well, nature’s.
00:11:49 Engineering wise.
00:11:50 Nature’s fusion reactors are indeed the stars, and they are very hot in the center.
00:12:00 And they reach the point where they release more energy from those reactions than they
00:12:07 lose by radiation and transport to the surface and so forth.
00:12:10 And that’s a state of ignition.
00:12:15 And that’s what we have to achieve to give net energy.
00:12:19 That’s like lighting a fire.
00:12:21 If you have a bundle of sticks and you hold a match up to it and you see smoke coming
00:12:27 from the sticks, but you take the match away and the sticks just fizzle out.
00:12:33 That’s not the reason they fizzled out is that, yes, they were burning, there was smoke
00:12:38 coming from them, but they were not ignited.
00:12:41 But if you are able to take the match away and they keep burning and they are generating
00:12:45 enough heat to keep themselves hot and hence keep the reactions going, that’s chemical
00:12:51 ignition.
00:12:52 But what we need to do, what the stars do in order to generate nuclear fusion energy
00:13:00 is they are ignited.
00:13:02 They are generated enough energy to keep themselves hot.
00:13:08 And that’s what we’ve got to do on Earth if we’re going to make fusion work on Earth.
00:13:13 But it’s much harder to do on Earth than it is in a star because we need temperatures
00:13:22 of order tens of millions of degrees Celsius in order for the reactions to go fast enough
00:13:31 to generate enough energy to keep it going.
00:13:37 And so if you’ve got something that’s tens of millions of degrees Celsius and you want
00:13:44 to keep it all together and keep the heat in long enough to have enough reactions taking
00:13:48 place, you can’t just put it in a bottle, plastic or glass, it would be gone in milliseconds.
00:13:57 So you have to have some nonmaterial mechanism of confining the plasma.
00:14:05 In the case of stars, that nonmaterial force is gravity.
00:14:10 So gravity is what holds the star together, it’s what holds the plasma in long enough
00:14:16 for it to react and sustain itself by the fusion reactions.
00:14:22 But on Earth, gravity is extremely weak.
00:14:24 I mean, I don’t mean to say we don’t fall, yes, we fall.
00:14:27 But the mutual gravitational attraction of small objects is very weak compared with the
00:14:35 electrical repulsion or any other force that you can think about on Earth.
00:14:40 And so we need a stronger force to keep the plasma together, to confine it.
00:14:48 And the predominant attempt at making fusion work on Earth is to use magnetic fields to
00:14:55 confine the plasma.
00:14:57 And that’s what I’ve worked on for much, essentially most of my career, is to understand how we
00:15:03 can and how best we can confine these incredibly hot gases, plasmas, using magnetic fields
00:15:11 with the ultimate objective of releasing fusion energy on Earth and generating electricity
00:15:18 with it and powering our society with it.
00:15:21 A dumb question.
00:15:23 So on top of the magnetic fields, do you also need the plastic water bottle walls or is
00:15:28 it purely magnetic fields?
00:15:30 Well, actually what we do need walls, those walls must be kept away from the plasma because
00:15:36 otherwise they’d be melted or the plasma must be kept away from them inside of them.
00:15:42 But the main purpose of the walls is not to keep the plasma in, it’s to keep the atmosphere
00:15:48 out.
00:15:50 So if we want to do it on Earth where there’s air, we want the plasma to consist of hydrogen
00:15:56 isotopes or other things, the things we’re trying to react.
00:15:59 And by the way, the density of those plasmas, at least in magnetic confinement fusion, is
00:16:06 very low.
00:16:07 It’s maybe a million times less than the density of air in this room.
00:16:13 So in order for a fusion reactor like that to work, you have to keep all of the air out
00:16:19 and just keep the plasma in.
00:16:20 So yes, there are other things, but those are things that are relatively easy.
00:16:24 I mean, making a vacuum these days is technologically quite straightforward.
00:16:29 We know how to do that.
00:16:31 What we don’t quite know how to do is to make a confinement device that isolates the plasma
00:16:38 well enough so that it’s able to keep itself burning with its own reaction.
00:16:43 So maybe can you talk about what a tokamak is?
00:16:47 The Russian acronym from which the word tokamak is built just means toroidal magnetic chamber.
00:16:54 So it’s a toroidal chamber, a torus is a geometric shape which is like a doughnut with a hole
00:17:00 down the middle.
00:17:02 And so it’s the meat of the doughnut, that’s the torus, and it’s got a magnetic field.
00:17:10 So that’s really all tokamak means.
00:17:13 But the particular configuration that is very widespread and is the sort of best prospect
00:17:22 in the least in the near term for making fusion energy work is one in which there’s a very
00:17:28 strong magnetic field the long way around the doughnut, around the torus.
00:17:35 So you’ve got to imagine that there’s this doughnut shape with an embedded magnetic field
00:17:40 just going round and round the long way.
00:17:43 The big advantage of that is that plasma particles when they’re in the presence of a magnetic
00:17:53 field feel strong forces from the magnetic field and those forces make the particles
00:17:59 gyrate around the direction of the magnetic field line.
00:18:04 So basically the particles follow helical orbits following like a spring that’s directed
00:18:12 along the magnetic field.
00:18:13 Well if you make the magnetic field go inside this toroidal chamber and just simply go round
00:18:18 and round the chamber then because of this helical orbit the particles can’t move fast
00:18:27 across the magnetic field but they can move very quickly along the magnetic field.
00:18:33 And if you have a magnetic field that doesn’t leave the chamber it doesn’t matter if they
00:18:38 move along the magnetic field it doesn’t mean they’re going to exit the chamber.
00:18:44 But if you just had a straight magnetic field for example coming from a Helmholtz coil or
00:18:52 a bar magnet then you’d have to have ends that would come to the ends of the chamber
00:18:57 somewhere and the particles would hit the ends and they would lose their energy.
00:19:02 So that’s why it’s toroidal and that’s why we have a strong magnetic field.
00:19:07 It’s providing a confinement against motion in the in the direction that would lead the
00:19:14 particles to leave the chamber.
00:19:16 It turns out that here we’re getting a little bit technical but turns out that a toroidal
00:19:21 field alone is not enough and so you need more fields to produce true true confinement
00:19:27 of plasma and we get those by passing a current as well through the plasma itself.
00:19:32 I can make sure it stays on track.
00:19:34 Well that what that does is makes the field lines themselves into much bigger helices
00:19:40 and that for reasons that are too complicated to explain that clinches the confinement of
00:19:47 the particles at least in terms of their single particle orbits so they don’t leave the chamber.
00:19:53 So when the particles are flying along this this this donut the inside of the donut are
00:20:00 they what’s where’s the generation of the energy coming from?
00:20:03 Are they smashing into each other?
00:20:07 Yeah eventually I mean in a fusion reactor there will be deuterons and tritons and they
00:20:12 will be smashing in.
00:20:13 They will be very hot there’ll be a hundred million degrees Celsius or something so they’re
00:20:19 moving thermally with very large thermal energies in random directions and they will collide
00:20:24 with one another and have fusion reactions.
00:20:28 When those fusion reactions take place energy is released large amounts of energy is released
00:20:33 in the form of particles.
00:20:35 One of the particles that’s released is an alpha particle which is also charged and it’s
00:20:39 also confined and that alpha particle stays in the in the in the donut and heats the other
00:20:45 particles that are in that donut so it transfers its energy to those and they it keeps them
00:20:49 hot.
00:20:50 There are there’s some leaking of heat all the time a little bit of radiation some transport
00:20:54 and so forth.
00:20:56 There’s also a neutron released from that reaction the neutron carries out four fifths
00:21:00 of the fusion energy and that will have to be captured in a blanket that surrounds the
00:21:06 chamber in which we take the energy drive some kind of electrical generator from you
00:21:17 know thermal thermal engine gas turbine or something like that and power the power.
00:21:25 You got energy.
00:21:26 So where do we stand?
00:21:28 Where do we stand?
00:21:29 I’m getting this thing to be something that actually works that generates energy.
00:21:35 Well there have been experiments that have generated net nuclear energies or nuclear
00:21:42 powers in the vicinity of you know a few tens of megawatts for a few seconds.
00:21:49 So that’s you know 10 megajoules that’s not much energy it’s a few donuts worth of energy
00:21:56 okay.
00:21:57 A literal donut.
00:22:02 But we have studied how well tokamaks can find plasmas and so we now understand in rather
00:22:11 great detail the way they work and we’re able to predict what is going to be required in
00:22:19 order to build a tokamak that becomes self sustaining that becomes essentially ignited
00:22:24 or very so close to ignited that it doesn’t matter.
00:22:29 And at the moment at least if you use the modest magnetic field values still very strong
00:22:38 but limited magnetic field values you have to build a very big device.
00:22:44 And so we are at the moment worldwide fusion research is at the moment in the process of
00:22:53 building a very big experiment that’s located in the south of France.
00:22:58 It’s called ITER which means the way or just means the international tokamak experimental
00:23:04 reactor if you like.
00:23:08 And that experiment is designed to reach this burning plasma state and to generate about
00:23:14 500 megawatts of fusion power for hundreds of seconds at a time.
00:23:21 It’ll still only be an experiment.
00:23:24 It won’t put electricity on the grid or anything like that.
00:23:28 It’s to figure out whether it works and what the remaining engineering challenges are.
00:23:34 It’s a scientific experiment.
00:23:36 It won’t be engineered to run round the clock and so on and so forth which ultimately one
00:23:41 needs to do in order to make something that’s practical for generating electricity.
00:23:46 But it will be the first demonstration on earth of a controlled fusion reaction for
00:23:53 you know long time periods.
00:23:55 Is that exciting to you?
00:23:59 It’s been an objective that is in many ways motivated my entire career and the career
00:24:05 of many people like me in the field.
00:24:09 I have to admit though that one of the problems with ITER is that it’s an extremely big and
00:24:15 expensive and long time to build experiment and so it won’t even come into operation until
00:24:23 about 2025 even though it’s been being built for 10 years and it was designed for 30 years
00:24:31 before that.
00:24:33 And so that’s actually one of the big disappointments of my career in a certain sense which is that
00:24:40 we won’t get to burning fusion reaction until well past the first operation of ITER and
00:24:47 whether I’m alive or not I don’t know but I certainly will be well and truly retired
00:24:52 by the time that happens.
00:24:54 And so when I realized maybe some years ago that that was going to be the case it was
00:24:59 a discouragement to me let’s put it like that.
00:25:03 But if we can try to look maybe in a ridiculous kind of way look into a hundred years from
00:25:09 now two hundred years five hundred years from now and we you know there’s folks like Elon
00:25:14 Musk trying to travel outside the solar system.
00:25:18 I mean the amount of energy we need for some of the exciting things we want to do in this
00:25:22 world if we look again hundred years from now seems to be a very large amount.
00:25:29 So do you think fusion energy will eventually sometime into your retirement will be basically
00:25:38 behind most of the things we do?
00:25:41 Look I absolutely think that fusion research is completely justified.
00:25:47 In fact we should be spending more time and effort on it than we currently do.
00:25:51 But it isn’t going to be a magic bullet that somehow solves all the problems of energy.
00:25:59 By the way that’s a generic statement you can make about any energy source in my view.
00:26:04 I think it’s a grave mistake to think that science of any sort is suddenly going to find
00:26:09 a magic bullet for meeting all the energy needs of society or any of the other needs
00:26:13 of society by the way.
00:26:15 But and we can talk about that later.
00:26:21 But fusion is very worthwhile and we should be doing it.
00:26:25 And so my disappointment that I just expressed was in a certain sense of personal disappointment.
00:26:32 I do think that fusion energy is a terrific challenge.
00:26:36 It’s very difficult to bring the energy source of the sun and stars down to earth.
00:26:42 This does contrast in a certain sense with fission energy.
00:26:47 By contrast fission energy efficient to build a fission reactor proved to be amazingly easy.
00:26:54 You know we did it within a few years of discovering nuclear fission.
00:27:00 People had figured out how to build a reactor and did so during the Second World War.
00:27:07 Which is by the way fission is how the current nuclear power plants work.
00:27:11 And so we have nuclear energy today because fission reactors are relatively easy to build.
00:27:21 What’s hard is getting the materials and that’s just as well because if everyone could get
00:27:26 those materials there would be weapons proliferation and so forth.
00:27:30 But it wasn’t all that long after even the discovery of nuclear fission that fission
00:27:38 reactors were built and fission reactors of course operated before we had weapons.
00:27:44 So I think nuclear power is obviously important to meet the energy challenges of our age.
00:27:57 It is completely intrinsically completely CO2 emissions free.
00:28:04 And in fact the wastes that come from nuclear power whether it’s fission or fusion for that
00:28:09 matter are so moderate in quantity that we shouldn’t really be worried about them.
00:28:18 I mean yes fission products are highly radioactive and we need to keep them away from people
00:28:23 but there’s so little of them it’s that keeping them away from people is not particularly
00:28:27 difficult.
00:28:28 And so while people complain a lot about the drawbacks of fission energy I think most of
00:28:36 those complaints are ill informed.
00:28:39 We can talk about you know the challenges and the disasters if you like of fission reactors
00:28:45 but I think fission in the near term offers a terrific opportunity for environmentally
00:28:53 friendly energy which in the world as a whole is rapidly being taken advantage of.
00:28:59 You know China and India and places like that are rapidly building fission plants.
00:29:03 We’re not rapidly building fission plants in the US although we are actually building
00:29:08 two at the moment, two new ones.
00:29:12 But we do still get 20 percent of our electricity from fission energy and we could get a lot
00:29:17 more.
00:29:18 So it’s clean energy.
00:29:19 So it’s clean energy.
00:29:20 Now again the concern is there’s a very popular HBO show and just came out on Chernobyl.
00:29:28 There’s the Three Mile Island, there’s Fukushima, that’s the most recent disaster.
00:29:32 So there’s a kind of a concern of yeah I mean nuclear disasters.
00:29:37 Is that, what do you make of that kind of concern especially if we look into the future
00:29:42 of fission energy based reactors?
00:29:44 Well first of all let me say one or two words about the contrast between fission and fusion
00:29:48 and then we’ll come on to the question of the disasters and so forth.
00:29:53 Fission does have some drawbacks and they’re largely to do with four main areas.
00:30:00 One is do we have enough uranium or other fissile fuels to supply our energy needs for
00:30:06 a long time?
00:30:08 The answer to that is we know we have enough uranium to support fission energy worldwide
00:30:16 for thousands of years but maybe not for millions of years okay.
00:30:23 So that’s resources.
00:30:25 Secondly there are issues to do with wastes.
00:30:29 Fission wastes are highly radioactive and some of them are volatile and so for example
00:30:36 in Fukushima the problem was that some fraction of the fission wastes were volatilized and
00:30:44 went out as a cloud and polluted areas with cesium 137, strontium 90 and things like that.
00:30:55 So that’s a challenge of fission.
00:30:58 There’s a problem of safety beyond that and that is that in fission it’s hard to turn
00:31:07 the reactor off.
00:31:09 When you stop the nuclear reactions there is still a lot of heat being liberated from
00:31:14 the fission products and that is actually what the problem was at Fukushima.
00:31:20 The Fukushima reactors were shut down the moment that the earthquake took place and
00:31:27 they were shut down safely.
00:31:29 What then happened after that at Fukushima was you know there was this enormous tidal
00:31:35 wave many tens of meters high that came through and destroyed the electricity grid feed to
00:31:45 the Fukushima reactors and their cooling was then turned off and it was the after heat
00:31:52 of the turned off reactors that eventually caused the problems that led to release.
00:31:57 And so that’s a safety concern and then finally there’s a problem of proliferation and that
00:32:06 is that fission reactors need fissile fuel and the technologies for producing and enriching
00:32:13 and so forth the fuels can be used by bad actors to generate the materials needed for
00:32:24 a nuclear weapon and that’s a very serious concern.
00:32:27 So those are the four problems.
00:32:29 Fusion has major advantages in respect of all of those problems.
00:32:34 It has more longer term fuel resources, it has far more benign waste issues, the radioactivity
00:32:45 from fusion reactions is at least a hundred times less than it is from fission reactions.
00:32:51 It has essentially none of this after heat problem because it doesn’t produce fission
00:32:57 products that are highly radioactive and generating their own heat when it’s turned off.
00:33:02 In fact the hard part of fusion is turning it on not turning it off.
00:33:07 And finally you don’t need the same fission technology to make fusion work and so it’s
00:33:15 got terrific advantages from the point of view of proliferation control.
00:33:19 So those are the four main issues which make fusion seem attractive technologically because
00:33:28 they address some of the problems of fission energy.
00:33:31 I don’t mean to say that fission energy is overwhelmingly problematic but clearly there
00:33:36 have been catastrophes associated with fission reactors.
00:33:41 Fukushima actually is I think in many ways are often overstated as a disaster because
00:33:47 after all nobody was killed by the reactors essentially, zero.
00:33:53 And that’s in the context of a disaster and tsunami that killed between 15 and 20,000
00:34:02 people instantane more or less instantaneously.
00:34:05 So you know in the scale of risks one should take the view that in my estimation that fission
00:34:17 energy came out of that looking pretty good.
00:34:19 Okay.
00:34:20 Of course that’s not the popular conception.
00:34:22 Okay.
00:34:23 Yes that’s good.
00:34:24 I mean with a lot of things that threaten our well being we seem to be very bad users
00:34:31 of data.
00:34:32 We seem to be very scared of shock attacks and not at all scared of car accidents and
00:34:38 this kind of miscalculation.
00:34:40 And I think from everything I understand nuclear energy, fission based energy goes into that
00:34:46 category.
00:34:47 It’s one of the safest, one of the cleanest forms of energy and yet the PR, whoever does
00:34:54 the PR for nuclear energy has a hard job ahead of them at the moment.
00:34:59 Well I think part of that is their association with nuclear weapons because when you say
00:35:03 the word nuclear people don’t instantly think about nuclear energy, they think about nuclear
00:35:07 weapons.
00:35:09 And so there is perhaps a natural tendency to do that.
00:35:14 But yes I agree with you, people are very poor at estimating risks and they react emotionally
00:35:20 not rationally in most of these situations.
00:35:22 Can we talk about nuclear weapons just for a little bit?
00:35:27 So fission is the kind of reaction that’s central to the nuclear weapons we have today?
00:35:33 That’s what sets them off.
00:35:35 That’s what sets them off.
00:35:36 So if we look at the hydrogen bomb maybe you can say how these different weapons work.
00:35:41 So the earliest nuclear weapons, the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan etc. etc.
00:35:47 were pure fission weapons.
00:35:50 They used enriched uranium or plutonium and their energy is essentially entirely derived
00:35:57 from fission reactions.
00:36:00 But it was early realized that more energy was available if one could somehow combine
00:36:09 a fission bomb with fusion reactions.
00:36:17 Because the fusion reactions give more energy per unit mass than fission reactions.
00:36:26 And this was called the super, you might have heard of the expression the super or more
00:36:31 simply hydrogen bombs.
00:36:35 Bombs which use isotopes of hydrogen and the fusion reactions associated with them.
00:36:40 Like you said it’s hard to turn on.
00:36:41 It’s hard to turn on because you need very high temperatures and you need confinement
00:36:47 of that long enough for the reactions to take place.
00:36:50 And so a bomb actually, a thermonuclear bomb or a hydrogen bomb has essentially a chemical
00:37:03 implosion which then sets off a fission explosion which then sets off and compresses hydrogen
00:37:15 isotopes and other things, which I don’t know because I’ve never had a security clearance.
00:37:22 So I can’t betray any secrets about weapons because I’ve never been party to them because
00:37:28 I know a lot about this problem I can guess.
00:37:33 And sets off fusion reactions in the middle.
00:37:36 So that’s basically it’s that sequence of things which produce these enormous multi
00:37:41 megaton bombs that have very large yields.
00:37:47 And so fusion alone can’t get you there.
00:37:52 It is actually possible to set off or to try to set off little fusion bombs alone without
00:38:00 the surrounding fission explosion and that is what is called laser fusion.
00:38:08 So another approach to fusion which actually is mostly researched in the weapons complex,
00:38:17 the national labs and so forth because it’s more associated with the technologies of weapons
00:38:24 is inertial fusion.
00:38:26 So if you decide instead of trying to make your plasma just sit there in this Taurus
00:38:32 and in the tokamak and be controlled steady state with a magnetic field, if you’re willing
00:38:37 to accept that I’ll just set off an explosion and then I’ll gather the energy from that
00:38:43 somehow I don’t quite know how but let’s not ask that question too much.
00:38:49 Then it is possible to imagine generating fusion alone explosions and the way you do
00:38:58 it is you take some small amount of deuterium tritium fuel you bombard it with energy from
00:39:06 all sides and this is what the lasers are used for extremely powerful at lasers which
00:39:12 compresses the pellet of fusion and heats it.
00:39:16 It compresses it to such a high density and temperature that the reactions take place
00:39:21 very very quickly and in fact they can take place so quickly that it’s all over with before
00:39:25 the thing flies apart.
00:39:27 Wow.
00:39:28 And that is.
00:39:29 Heated up really fast.
00:39:30 That is inertial fusion okay.
00:39:33 Is that useful for energy generation for outside?
00:39:36 Not yet I mean there are those people who think it will be but you may have heard of
00:39:41 the big experiment called the National Ignition Facility which was built at Livermore starting
00:39:46 in the late 1990s and has been in operation since around about 2010.
00:39:53 It was designed with the claim that it would reach ignition fusion ignition in this pulsed
00:39:59 form where the reactions have got over with so quickly before the thing whole thing flies
00:40:04 apart.
00:40:05 It didn’t actually reach ignition and it doesn’t look as if it will although you know we never
00:40:09 know maybe people figure out how to make it work better.
00:40:14 But the answer is in principle it seems possible to reach ignition in this way maybe not with
00:40:20 that particular laser facility.
00:40:22 Are you surprised that we humans haven’t destroyed ourselves given that we’ve invented such powerful
00:40:31 tools of destruction?
00:40:33 Like what do you make of the fact that for many decades we’ve had nuclear weapons now
00:40:39 speaking about estimating risk at least to me it’s exceptionally surprising I was born
00:40:44 in the Soviet Union that big egos of the big leaders when rubbing up against each other
00:40:53 have not created the kind of destruction everybody was afraid of for decades.
00:40:59 Well I must say I’m extremely thankful that it hasn’t I don’t know whether I’m surprised
00:41:03 about it I’ve never thought about it and from the point of view of is it surprising that
00:41:09 we’ve we’ve avoided it I’m just very thankful that we have I think that there is a sense
00:41:14 in which cooler heads have prevailed at crucial moments I think there is also a sense in which
00:41:22 you know mutually assured destruction has in fact worked as a policy to restrain the
00:41:30 great powers from going to war and in fact you know the the the fact that we haven’t
00:41:38 had a world war you know since the 1940s is perhaps even attributable to nuclear weapons
00:41:49 in a kind of strange and peculiar way but I think humans are deeply flawed and sinful
00:41:59 people and I certainly don’t feel that we’re guaranteed that it’s going to go on like this.
00:42:06 And we’ll talk about the sort of the biggest picture view of it all but let me just ask
00:42:12 in terms of your worries of if we look a hundred years from now we’re in the middle of what
00:42:18 is now a natural pandemic that from the looks of it as fortunately as not as bad as it could
00:42:26 possibly been if you look at the Spanish flu if you look at the history of pandemics if
00:42:30 you look at all the possible pandemics that could have been that folks like Bill Gates
00:42:35 are exceptionally terrified about we’ve I know many people are suffering but it’s better
00:42:42 than it could have been so and now we’re talking about nuclear weapons in terms of existential
00:42:48 threats to us as sinful humans what worries you the most is it nuclear weapons is is it
00:42:58 natural pandemics engineered pandemics nanotechnology in my field of artificial intelligence some
00:43:05 people are afraid of killer robots and robots yeah is there do you think in those existential
00:43:12 terms and do any aspect to any of those things were you I am certainly not confident that
00:43:21 my children and grandchildren will experience the benefits of civilization that I have enjoyed
00:43:29 I think it’s possible for our civilizations to break down catastrophically I also think
00:43:37 that it’s possible for our civilizations to break down progressively and I think they
00:43:44 will if we continue to have the explosion of population on the planet that we currently
00:43:50 have I mean it’s it’s quite it’s quite wrong to think of our problems as mostly being co2
00:43:58 if we can just solve co2 then we can go on having this you know continually expanding
00:44:05 economy everywhere in the world of course you can’t do that okay I mean there is a finite
00:44:10 you know bearing capacity of our planet on the resources of our planet on the resources
00:44:16 of our planet and and we can’t continue to do that so I think there are lots of technical
00:44:21 reasons why a continually expanding economy and and and civilization is impossible and
00:44:32 therefore actually I’m as much nervous about the fact that our population is eight billion
00:44:37 or something right now worldwide as I am about the fact that you know a few million people
00:44:44 would be would be killed by COVID 19 I mean I don’t want to be callous about this but
00:44:51 from the big picture it seems like that’s much more of a problem over population people
00:44:57 not dying is ultimately more of a problem than people dying so you know that probably
00:45:05 sounds incredibly callous to your listeners but I think it’s simply you know a sober assessment
00:45:11 of the situation is there is there ways from the way those eight billion or seven billion
00:45:18 or whatever the number is live that could make it sustainable you know because you’ve
00:45:24 kind of implied there’s a kind of we have especially in the West this kind of capitalist
00:45:29 view of really consuming a lot of resources is there a way to like if you could change
00:45:36 one thing or a few things what would you change to make this life make it more likely that
00:45:43 your grandchildren have a better life than you well okay so let’s talk a bit about energy
00:45:50 because that’s something I know a lot a lot about having thought about it most of my career
00:45:55 in order to reach steady state co2 level okay that’s acceptable in terms of global climate
00:46:02 change and so on and so forth we need to reduce our carbon emissions by at least a factor
00:46:10 of ten worldwide okay what’s more you know the average energy consumption and hence co2
00:46:21 emission of people in the world is less than a tenth of what we per capita of them what
00:46:28 we have in the West in America and Europe and so forth so if you have in mind some utopia
00:46:35 in the future where we’ve reached a sustainable use of energy and we’ve also reached a situation
00:46:43 in which there is far less inequity in the world in the sense that people have share
00:46:50 the energy resources more uniformly then what that is equivalent to would be to reduce the
00:46:58 co2 emissions in Western economies not by a factor of ten but by a factor of a hundred
00:47:05 in other words has to go down to one percent of what it is now okay so you know when people
00:47:10 talk about you know let’s use natural gas because you know maybe it only uses sixty
00:47:16 percent of the energy of coal it’s complete nonsense that’s not not even scratching the
00:47:21 surface of what we would need to do so you know is that going to be feasible I very much
00:47:30 doubt it and therefore I actually doubt that we can reach a level of energy of fossil energy
00:47:40 use that is one percent of the current use in the West without totally dramatic changes
00:47:47 either in you know our society our use of of energy and so forth which actually of course
00:47:53 is much of that energy is used for producing food and so on and so forth so it’s actually
00:47:58 not so obvious that we can we can get we can cut down our energy usage by that factor or
00:48:03 we’ve got to reduce the human population so you run up against that number that’s increasing
00:48:09 still and you don’t think that could be it’s not it’s not that it’s not it’s not depressing
00:48:17 it’s it’s difficult like many truths are do you have a hope that there could be a technological
00:48:28 solution in short no there is no technological solution to for example for population control
00:48:37 I mean we have the technology just you know to prevent ourselves bearing children that’s
00:48:41 not a problem technology is in okay solved the challenge is society the challenge is
00:48:49 human choices the challenge is almost entirely human and sociological not technology not
00:48:57 technology and when people thought talk about energy they thought they think that there’s
00:49:01 some kind of technological magic bullet for this but there isn’t okay and and there isn’t
00:49:06 for the reasons I just mentioned not because it’s obvious there isn’t but actually there
00:49:10 isn’t and and in in any case that it’s true of energy it’s true of pollution it’s true
00:49:18 of human population it’s true of most of the big challenges in our society are not scientific
00:49:25 or technological challenges they’re human sociological challenges and that’s why I think
00:49:32 it’s a terrible mistake even for folks like me who work at you know well the high temple
00:49:38 of science and technology in in America and maybe in the galaxy yeah I mean you know it’s
00:49:45 it’s MIT it’s at MIT best university in the world it’s it’s a terrible mistake if we give
00:49:52 the impression that technology is going to solve it all technology will make tremendous
00:49:57 contributions and I think it’s it’s worth working on it but it’s a disaster if you think
00:50:04 it’s going to solve all of our problems and and actually you know I’ve written a whole
00:50:09 book about the question of of scientism and the and the over emphasis on science both
00:50:15 as a way of of solving problems through technology but also as a way of gaining knowledge I think
00:50:20 it’s not all the knowledge there is either yeah I think that book and your journey there
00:50:27 is fascinating so maybe you can go there can can you tell me about your on a personal side
00:50:33 your the personal journey of your faith of Christianity and your relationship with with
00:50:39 God with religion in general yeah in my in my latest book Can a Scientist Believe in
00:50:46 Miracles I I give a first I devote most of the first chapter to telling how how I became
00:50:52 a Christian why I became a Christian I I didn’t grow up as a Christian which is fascinating
00:50:58 I mean you didn’t grow up as a Christian so you you’ve discovered the beauty of God and
00:51:02 physics at the same time concurrent that’s a very poetic way of putting it but yes I
00:51:07 would accept that I became a Christian when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University
00:51:13 I I had you know I had gone to a school in which there was religion kind of was part
00:51:18 of the society there were prayers and at the at the at the daily you know gathering of
00:51:25 the of the students of the assembly of the students but I but I didn’t really believe
00:51:30 it I just sort of went along with it and it wasn’t particularly you know aggressive or
00:51:34 benign you know benign it just sort of was there but I didn’t believe it I didn’t didn’t
00:51:41 make much sense to me but when I but I came across Christians from time to time and when
00:51:45 I went to Cambridge University two of my closest friends turned out were Christians and I think
00:51:54 it was that was the most important influence on me that that here were two people who were
00:52:03 really smart like me I’m giving you my yeah my impressions the way I the way I felt at
00:52:11 the time and and they thought Christianity made sense and and you know testified to its
00:52:21 significance in their lives and so that was a very important influence on me and I and
00:52:28 ultimately I mean the reason I I hadn’t I hadn’t I didn’t see Christianity as some
00:52:34 kind of great evil the way it’s sometimes portrayed by the by the radical atheists of
00:52:38 this century I mean I think that’s nonsense but but but I so I think there were certain
00:52:43 attractive things if you go to a university like Cambridge you know you’re surrounded
00:52:48 by by by Western culture you know from from about you know the 15th century onwards and
00:52:55 that saturated with Christian art and architecture and so forth and so it’s hard it’s hard not
00:53:03 to recognize that Christianity is in fact the foundation of Western society in Western
00:53:09 culture most Western civilization so so I mean maybe I was in that sense favorably disposed
00:53:17 towards Christianity as a religion but as a personal faith it didn’t mean anything
00:53:22 to me but I became convinced really of two things one is that the evidence for the resurrection
00:53:30 of Jesus Christ is actually rather good I mean it’s not a proof it’s not kind of some
00:53:35 some kind of scientific demonstrate or mathematical demonstration but it’s actually extremely
00:53:40 good it’s not scientific evidence by and large it’s historical evidence historical evidence
00:53:44 yeah so that was one thing and the other thing that came to me when I was at Cambridge it
00:53:51 became clear that Christianity ultimately is not you know some kind of moral theory
00:54:01 or philosophy or something like that it is or elite or at least it claims to be a personal
00:54:08 relationship with God which is made possible you know by what Jesus did and on the cross
00:54:14 and his life and his teaching and and it’s a personal call to a relationship with God
00:54:21 and that had I’d never thought of it in those terms when I was you know when I was younger
00:54:26 and that that thought became attractive to me I mean I think most people find the person
00:54:33 of Christ and just teachings you know compelling insert in a certain sense what do you mean
00:54:39 by personal do you mean personal for you like a relationship like it’s a meditative
00:54:44 like you specifically you Ian have a connection with God and and then the other side you say
00:54:52 personal with the actual body the person of Jesus Christ so all of those things what do
00:54:59 you mean by personal connection and why that was well so as I’m sorry for the stupid questions
00:55:05 no it’s okay no problem as a Christian I believe that I have a relationship with God which
00:55:11 is best expressed by saying that it’s personal and that comes about because you know Jesus
00:55:18 through his acts has reconciled me with God me a sinner me someone full of sins of failings
00:55:31 of ways in which I don’t live up to even my own ideals let alone the ideals of a holy
00:55:36 God have been reconciled to the creator of everything and and so Christians myself included
00:55:47 believe that prayer is in a certain sense a connection with God and there are times
00:55:53 when I have felt you know that God spoke to me I don’t mean necessarily orally in words
00:55:59 but showed me things or enlighten me or inspired me in ways that I I attribute to him so I
00:56:09 see it as a as a two way you know relationship in a certain sense of course it’s a very asymmetrical
00:56:17 relationship but nevertheless Christians think that it’s a two way it’s a two way street
00:56:21 we’re not just talking into the air when we say we won’t I’m going to pray for someone
00:56:28 in this two way communication is there a way that you could try to describe on a podcast
00:56:33 what is God what is God like in your view if you try to describe is it a force is it
00:56:46 a set is it a for you intellectually is a set of metaphors that you use to reason about
00:56:53 the world is it is it is it kind of a computer that does some computation that’s the infinitely
00:57:02 powerful computer or is it like Santa Claus a guy with a with a beard on the cloud like
00:57:08 I don’t mean I don’t mean what God actually is I mean in your limited cognitive capacity
00:57:15 as a human what do you actually what do you find helpful for thinking of what God actually
00:57:21 looks like what is God well let me start by saying none of the above okay I mean clearly
00:57:27 God in the Christian God the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob etc it is is not any of those
00:57:37 things because all of those things you just mentioned are phenomena or or or entities
00:57:45 in the created world and the most fundamental thing about monotheism as you know Abraham
00:57:52 and Moses and so forth handed it down is that God is not an entity within the creation within
00:58:00 the universe that God is the creator of it all and that’s what Genesis first two chapters
00:58:06 of Genesis is really about is it’s not it’s not about telling us you know how God created
00:58:11 the world it’s about telling us and telling the early Hebrews that God created the world
00:58:18 okay and that therefore he is not you know simply an entity within it on the other hand
00:58:23 you know our finite minds have a pretty hard time encompassing that so so one has to therefore
00:58:31 work in terms of metaphors and images and and so forth and I think we would know very
00:58:38 little about who God is if we if it was simply up if we were simply left to our own devices
00:58:47 you know if if we were just you know here you are you’re in the universe try to figure
00:58:51 out who made it and and so forth well you know philosophers think they can do a little
00:58:56 bit of that maybe and theologians think that they can do a little bit more but but Christians
00:59:03 think that God has actually helped us along a lot by revealing himself and and we say
00:59:11 that he’s revealed himself supremely in the person of Jesus Christ and so you know when
00:59:18 Jesus says to his disciples if you’ve seen me you’ve seen the Father then that is in
00:59:25 a certain sense a watchword for answering this question for Christians it is that supremely
00:59:31 if we want to help ourselves understand who God really is we look to Jesus we look to
00:59:37 what he did we look to what he said and so forth and we believe that he is one with the
00:59:48 Father and that’s why we believe you know in the Trinity I mean it’s basically because
00:59:53 that revelation is extremely central to Christian belief and teaching so in that in that sense
01:00:01 through Jesus there was a that’s kind of a historical moment that’s profound that’s
01:00:07 really powerful do you also think that God makes himself seen in less obvious ways in
01:00:15 our world today absolutely absolutely I mean it’s it’s certainly been the outlook of Jews
01:00:26 and Christians throughout history that God is seen in the creation that we when we look
01:00:32 at the creation we see to some extent the wonder the majesty the might of the person
01:00:41 or the entity but the person who created it and and that’s a way in which scientists
01:00:49 particularly have over over the ages and certainly over most of the last five centuries since
01:00:58 the scientific revolution scientists have seen in a certain sense the hand of God in
01:01:05 creation I mean this leads us perhaps to a different discussion but I mean it’s it’s
01:01:10 remarkable to me how influential Christianity and religion in generally has been in science
01:01:19 yeah most of the scientists through history as if you described I mean God has been a
01:01:24 very big part of their life and their work certainly up until the at the beginning of
01:01:29 the 20th century that was the case so maybe this is a good time to can you tell me what
01:01:34 scientism is yeah I mean the short answer is that by scientism we mean we mean the
01:01:41 belief that science is all the real knowledge there is that’s a shorthand there are lots
01:01:48 of different facets of it and what which one can explore and the book in which I explored
01:01:52 it most most thoroughly was actually an earlier book called monopolizing knowledge and and
01:02:00 the purpose of that title is to is to draw attention to the fact that in our society
01:02:06 as a whole in particularly in the West today we we have grown so reliant on science that
01:02:15 we that we tend to put aside other ways of getting to know things and so of course at
01:02:23 MIT we are focused on science and we do focus on it very much but the truth is that there
01:02:31 are many ways of getting to know things in our world know things reliably in our world
01:02:38 and a lot of them are not science so scientism in my view is a terrible intellectual error
01:02:45 it’s to believe it’s the belief that somehow the methods of science as we develop them
01:02:49 with you know experiments and in the end they it relies particularly upon reproducibility
01:02:56 in the world and on a kind of clarity that comes from measurements and mathematics and
01:03:02 related types of of skills those powerful though they are for finding out about the
01:03:10 world are not all the knowledge do not give us all the knowledge we we have and there’s
01:03:16 many other forms of knowledge and the illustration that I usually use to to try to help people
01:03:24 to think about this is to say well look let’s think about human history I mean to what extent
01:03:28 can human history be discovered scientifically the answer is essentially can’t because and
01:03:34 the reason is because human history is not reproducible you can’t do reproducible experiments
01:03:40 or observations and and go back and you know try it over again it’s it’s a one off thing
01:03:46 you know the history is full of unique events and and so you you know you you can’t hope
01:03:53 to do history using the methods of science yeah I mean in some sense history is a story
01:04:00 of miracles I mean they don’t have to do with God it’s just uniqueness is anyway unique
01:04:05 events unique events and that science doesn’t like that because it’s unique events by their
01:04:12 very definition are not reproducible can I ask sort of a tricky question I don’t even
01:04:18 know what atheist or atheism is but is it possible for somebody to be an atheist and
01:04:25 avoid slipping into scientism oh yeah absolutely I mean it I mean there these are two separate
01:04:33 things okay I’m quite sure there are many people who don’t believe in God and yet recognize
01:04:39 that there are many different ways of we get knowledge you know some is history some is
01:04:44 sociology economics politics philosophy art history language literature etc etc there
01:04:54 are many people who recognize those disciplines as having their own approaches to epistemology
01:05:00 and to get how we get knowledge and valuing them very highly I don’t mean to say that
01:05:05 everyone you know who’s an atheist automatically you know subscribes to the scientistic viewpoint
01:05:14 that’s not true but it’s certainly the case that many of the arguments in fact most of
01:05:21 the arguments of the aggressive atheists of this century people are sometimes called new
01:05:27 atheists although they’re actually rather old most of their arguments are rather old
01:05:33 you know are drawing heavily on scientism so when they say things like there’s no evidence
01:05:40 to support Christianity okay what they are really focusing on is to say is saying that
01:05:48 Christianity isn’t proved or the evidence for Christianity is not science okay science
01:05:54 doesn’t prove it and and you you know if you read their books that’s what you find they
01:05:59 really mean is science doesn’t lead you necessarily to believe in a creator God or into it in
01:06:08 any particular in religion I accept that that’s not a problem to me because I don’t think
01:06:15 that science is all the knowledge there is and I think there are other important ways
01:06:18 of getting to know things and one of them is historical for example and I mentioned
01:06:22 earlier that I think I became persuaded and I were and I still am persuaded that the historical
01:06:28 evidence for the resurrection is very is very persuasive again it’s not proof or anything
01:06:34 like that but it’s but it’s pretty good evidence okay yeah I’ve um I talked to Richard Dawkins
01:06:40 on this podcast and um uh and uh I saw you debate with Sean Carroll so I I understand
01:06:48 this world it makes it makes me very curious maybe uh let me ask sort of another way my
01:06:54 own kind of uh world view maybe you can help as by way of therapy understand um you know
01:07:04 because you’ve kind of said that there’s other ways of knowing what about if we if if I kind
01:07:09 of sit here and am cognizant of the fact that I almost don’t know anything so sort of I’m
01:07:17 sitting here almost paralyzed by the the mystery of it all and it’s not even when you say there’s
01:07:23 other ways of knowing it um it feels almost too confident to me because uh yeah when I
01:07:30 when I listen to beautiful music or uh see art there’s something there that’s and that’s
01:07:36 uh that’s beyond the reach of scientism I would say so beyond the reach of uh the the
01:07:43 tools of science but I don’t even feel like that could be as an actual tool of knowing
01:07:52 it um yeah I just don’t even know where to begin because it just feels like we know so
01:07:57 little like uh if we look even a hundred years from now when people look back to this time
01:08:02 humans look back to this time they’ll probably laugh at how little we knew even a hundred
01:08:07 years from now and if we look at a thousand years from now hopefully we’re still alive
01:08:11 or some version of ourselves or AI version of ourselves you know they they’ll certainly
01:08:18 laugh at the absurdity of our beliefs so what do you uh so you don’t seem to be as paralyzed
01:08:26 by how little we know you confidently push on forward but what do you make of that sense
01:08:31 of uh of just not knowing of the mystery we need to be modest or or humble if even about
01:08:42 what we know I accept that and I certainly think that’s true not not simply because in
01:08:48 the future we’ll know more science and and there will be more powerful ways of finding
01:08:54 out about things but simply because you know sometimes we’re not right we’re wrong okay
01:09:01 in what we think we know um uh so that’s crucial but it’s also a very Christian outlook that
01:09:11 kind of humility is what Jesus taught so I so I don’t know whether this was in the back
01:09:17 of your mind when you were thinking about this but it’s often the case that um people
01:09:23 of religious faith are are accused of being dogmatists okay and there is a sense in which
01:09:27 dogma teaching accepted teaching is is part of religions okay but I don’t think that
01:09:35 necessarily uh uh that leads one to blind dogmatism and I don’t I certainly don’t
01:09:42 think that faith we can talk about this later if you’d like but I certainly don’t think
01:09:47 that faith means thinking you know something and not listening to counter arguments for
01:09:53 example um so I I think that’s crucial yeah what is uh what does faith mean to you what
01:10:01 does it uh feel like what does it actually sort of how do you carry your faith in terms
01:10:06 of the way you see the world well I think faith is very often misunderstood in our society
01:10:13 at the moment um because uh it’s often portrayed as being nothing other than uh believing things
01:10:23 you know ain’t true you know um or or believing things that are are are not proven okay um
01:10:34 and um and this and faith does have a strand which is to do with you know basically believing
01:10:41 in um in concepts or um propositions but actually the the word faith is much broader than that
01:10:50 faith also means um you know trusting in something trusting in a person or trusting in a thing
01:11:00 uh the reliability of some technology for example um that’s equally part of the meaning
01:11:06 of the word faith and and there’s a third strand to the to the meaning of the word as
01:11:10 well and that is loyalty um so you know I have faith in my wife and and I try to act
01:11:19 in faith towards her and that’s a kind of loyalty and so those three strands are the
01:11:25 are the most important strands of the meaning of faith yes belief in uh in propositions
01:11:31 that we might not have you know full proof about or maybe we have very little proof about
01:11:38 but it’s also trust and and loyalty and actually in the in terms of the Christian faith Christians
01:11:46 are far more called to trust and loyalty than they are to belief in things they don’t you
01:11:51 know don’t have proof of okay um but but the critics of religion generally um tend to emphasize
01:12:00 the first one and say well you know you believe things for which you have no evidence okay
01:12:03 that’s what that’s what they think faith is well yeah there there is a sense in which
01:12:09 everybody has to live their lives uh believing or or or making decisions in situations when
01:12:19 they don’t have all the proof or evidence or knowledge that enables you to make a completely
01:12:27 um rational or well informed or prudent decision we you know we do this all the time you know
01:12:34 my drive down here I nearly took a wrong turning and I thought which which which way do I go
01:12:39 do I keep going straight on and so my uh voice came out and I think go straight okay so so
01:12:50 you have to make decisions and sometimes you know you don’t have a navigation system telling
01:12:56 you what to do you just have to make that decision with no with insufficient evidence
01:13:00 and you’re doing it all the time as a human and that’s part of being sentient um and so
01:13:06 that kind of um action and belief on the basis of incomplete evidence is not something that
01:13:13 I feel uncomfortable doing or I feel that I feel that somehow my Christian commitments
01:13:19 are forced me to do when I wouldn’t have had to have done it otherwise I would have had
01:13:22 to do it anyway um and and so you know there’s a sense in which um I think it’s important
01:13:28 to see the breadth of meaning of faith and and and to recognize that in certainly in
01:13:33 the case of Christianity um it’s trust and loyalty that the the key themes that we’re
01:13:39 called to and I mean another interesting extension of that that you speak to is kind of loyalty
01:13:48 is referring to a connection with something outside of yourself yeah um so I think you’ve
01:13:54 spoken about like existentialism or even just atheism in general as um as leading naturally
01:14:00 to an individualism as a focus on the on the self and uh ideas that maybe the Christian
01:14:07 faith can um instill in you is um allowing you to sort of look outside of yourself so
01:14:13 connection I mean loyalty fundamentally is about other beings um and yeah other beings
01:14:21 and I mean I think I don’t know what it is in me but I’m very much drawn to that idea
01:14:27 and um I think humans in general are drawn to that idea you can you can make all kinds
01:14:32 of evolutionary arguments all that kind of stuff but uh people always kind of tease me
01:14:37 uh because I talk about love a lot and I mean there’s a lot of uh non scientific things
01:14:44 about love right like what the heck is that thing why why do we even need that thing it
01:14:48 uh it seems to be an annoying burden that uh that we we get so much uh joy in in life
01:14:54 from a connection with other human beings deep uh lasting connections with human beings
01:14:59 same thing with loyalty why why do we get so much value and pleasure and strength and
01:15:05 meaning from loyalty from a connection with somebody else uh going through uh thick and
01:15:09 thin with somebody else going through some hard times I mean some of the you know the
01:15:13 closest friends I I have is going through some some rough times together and that seems
01:15:19 to make life deeply meaningful what is that so yeah um I that’s that resonates with me
01:15:29 and I obviously I would I would affirm it um I think just to just to correct the implication
01:15:37 that you made I I don’t think it’s necessarily the the consequence of atheism uh that we
01:15:45 that we lose track of those kinds of things I I mean I think that atheists can be loyal
01:15:51 okay if you like um the question more often comes up in the context of you know where
01:15:57 does morality come from and loyalty I think and duty are related to one another you know
01:16:05 if we have loyalty to someone then we have a duty to them okay as well and I think that
01:16:10 insofar as we see ourselves as having some kinds any kinds of duties or moral compulsions
01:16:17 with respect to our relationships to other people it’s I think it’s a question that always
01:16:23 arises well where does these where do these come from and there there are various approaches
01:16:28 that people have towards deciding what makes ethics or or morality moral okay but I do
01:16:37 think it’s the case that um it’s very hard to ground morality um in a in any kind of
01:16:48 absolute way or a persuasive way um in mere human relationships and so it’s certainly
01:16:57 the case that in Christianity um there is a sense in which um morality and you know
01:17:07 the morality of morals comes from a transcendent place from a transcendent deity and that we
01:17:16 um that we ground are the compelling force of of morals on God are more than we do on
01:17:27 individuals because after all you know if it if you if you’ve got nothing but you know
01:17:33 other people why should you you know treat your neighbor well why shouldn’t you defraud
01:17:40 your neighbor if it’s good for you well you know you can construct all kinds of arguments
01:17:45 and some of them are you know obviously arguments that are commonplace in religion too you should
01:17:50 do as you would be done by and all this kind of thing right but none of that seems any
01:17:55 any more than mere pragmatism to most people okay and so that’s what that’s one of the
01:18:00 things if that Nietzsche amongst others you know really identified you know if God is
01:18:06 dead if the idea of God is grounding our moral behavior is no longer viable in the West which
01:18:13 Nietzsche thought that it wasn’t okay then what does ground it and he had no good answer
01:18:18 for it in fact he claimed there was no answer but then he couldn’t live with that and so
01:18:23 he invented the idea of the ubermensch you know this this superior human being okay and
01:18:32 this was a different way of trying to ground morality not a very successful one you know
01:18:38 you could argue that it’s a forerunner of the sort of racism of Hitler’s regime and
01:18:46 so forth that you know we’ve in the West thankfully shied away from in the in the past
01:18:53 half or three quarters of a century but you know I think it is the case that Christianity
01:19:03 gives me a basis for my moral beliefs that is more than mere pragmatism yeah but there
01:19:13 is a stepping outside of all that there does seem to be a powerful stabilizing like we
01:19:20 humans are able to hold ideas together like in a distributed way outside of whether God
01:19:27 exists or not or any that just our ability to kind of converge together towards a set
01:19:32 of beliefs into sometimes into tribes it’s kind of I don’t know if it’s inherent to being
01:19:40 human beings I hope not because now if I look on Twitter and there’s a there’s the red team
01:19:46 and the blue team right it’s almost like it’s a care it’s some kind of TV show that we’re
01:19:53 living in that people get into these tribes and they hold a set of beliefs that sometimes
01:19:58 don’t I mean they are beliefs for the sake of holding those beliefs and we get this intimate
01:20:05 connection between each other for sharing those beliefs and we spoke to the things about
01:20:11 loyalty and love and that’s the thing that people feel inside the tribe and it seems
01:20:17 very human that within that tribe those beliefs don’t necessarily always have to be connected
01:20:23 to anything it’s just the fact that you know I’ve did sports my whole life whenever you’re
01:20:29 on a team the bond you get with it with other people on the team is incredible and the actual
01:20:35 sport is often the silliest I mean I don’t play ball sports anymore but the ball when
01:20:42 I played like soccer or tennis I mean all those sports are silly right you’re playing
01:20:46 with a little ball but there’s the bond you get is so deeply meaningful I just it’s interesting
01:20:52 to me on the sociological level that it’s possible to me whatever the beliefs of religion
01:20:59 is whatever they’re actually grounded in they might be they might have a power in themselves
01:21:09 I think there is tribalism everywhere and I think tribalism in the US at the moment
01:21:14 is rather difficult to bear from my point of view and it’s I think fed by the internet
01:21:21 and social media and so forth but it’s but historically tribalism has been a trait and
01:21:27 remains a trait in humans the genius of Christianity is that it supersedes tribalism I mean yes
01:21:38 when the Hebrews thought about Yahweh initially they thought about him as their tribal deity
01:21:48 just like the tribal deities round about about them and so but and and yet from you know
01:21:56 early on in Hebrew history the crucial thing that Yahweh came to mean or I would say revealed
01:22:06 of himself to them was that he wasn’t just a tribal deity he was the God that created
01:22:13 the whole thing and if he is the God of the whole thing then he’s not just the God of
01:22:18 the Hebrews or in the case of you know Americans God is not just the God of Americans he’s
01:22:26 the God of everybody okay and that is a way in a way the most amazing transcending of
01:22:36 tribal loyalties and one of the crucial you know occasions in the New Testament you know
01:22:45 when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost you know the the apostles and the and the disciples
01:22:52 speak in other tongues and there are people from all all the countries you know round
01:22:57 about hear them in their own languages and so you know whether whether you take that
01:23:02 as factual or not that is the a statement of the transcendent aspects of Christianity
01:23:12 or the claimed transcendent aspects of Christianity that it transcends culture and that’s certainly
01:23:18 something which I find appealing.
01:23:20 When I kind of touch on this topic in my own mind one of the hardest questions is as why
01:23:29 is there suffering in the world do you have a good answer well I have I have some answers
01:23:36 but you’re right that it is one of the toughest questions the problem of pain or the problem
01:23:41 of suffering or the problem of theodicy as as theologians call it is is is probably one
01:23:49 of the toughest I think it’s important to say that there are certain types of answers
01:23:55 to this question but there are aspects of this question to which there is no intellectual
01:24:01 answer that is going to satisfy and and the fact of the matter is you know when I’m speaking
01:24:09 to an audience let’s say at at at some kind of lecture I can be sure that there are people
01:24:18 in that audience who are either personally suffering they’ve got illness they’ve got
01:24:23 pains there maybe they’re facing death or someone in their family is in similar sorts
01:24:28 of situations so suffering is a reality and and there is nothing that I can say that is
01:24:35 going to solve their feeling of agony and angst and and maybe despair in those types
01:24:43 of situations there is really only one thing that I think humans can do for one another
01:24:50 in those kinds of situations and that is simply to be there to be there alongside your friend
01:24:57 or your or your colleague or or whoever you know family member or whoever it might be
01:25:04 and that’s the only really sense in which we can give comfort if we try to give intellectual
01:25:11 solutions to these problems we’re going to be like like the comforters that were in the
01:25:17 book of Job in the in the Bible who who brought no comfort to Job himself with their intellectual
01:25:26 answers but if they had been there and some of them were there they sat alongside that
01:25:32 is some level of comfort and and after all that’s the meaning of the word compassion
01:25:39 it means to suffer alongside of somebody and I would say first off you know what does a
01:25:45 Christian say about suffering the the first thing a Christian should say is compassion
01:25:52 is all that really counts and what’s more we say that God has acted in compassion towards
01:26:00 us that is to say he has suffered with us in the person of Jesus Christ and when we
01:26:07 see the passion of Jesus we recognize that God takes suffering deadly seriously has taken
01:26:15 it so seriously that he’s been willing to come and be a part of his creation in the
01:26:21 person of of Jesus Christ and suffer death the most horrible death on the cross and for
01:26:29 our benefit so that’s one side of of suffering but the question you know the philosophical
01:26:35 question remains you know surely if God is good you know and God is omnipotent benevolent
01:26:44 you know why doesn’t he take away all the suffering why doesn’t he cause miracles to
01:26:50 occur that will take away all this suffering I think there are some good answers to that
01:26:54 question in the in the following sense that you know we live in a world where the consistency
01:27:05 of the world is an absolutely crucial part of it you know the fact that our world behaves
01:27:13 reproducibly in the main is absolutely essential for the integrity of our lives without it
01:27:22 we wouldn’t exist okay and so there is a sense in which the integrity of creation calls for
01:27:29 there being consistent behavior which you know these days we think of as being the laws
01:27:34 of nature okay and so the consistent behavior of nature is very very important it’s what
01:27:41 enables us to be what we are and if you’re calling upon God in in in in your critique
01:27:50 of why isn’t this benevolent creator you know fixing things one answer is he’s fixed things
01:27:58 in a certain sense to have an integrity in them and that integrity is the best thing
01:28:07 it’s the way we have our existence it’s the way we live and move and have our being and
01:28:13 you know if you want something different you’ve got to show that there is a way in which you
01:28:19 could invent a world that is better that it has the integrity that we need to exist okay
01:28:25 and and and to be able to think and and and love and and be but but you were going to
01:28:32 do it better you know and the atheists think that maybe they have got a better idea but
01:28:38 if they thought about it a bit more carefully they’d realize no one has put forward a better
01:28:42 idea okay so the so another way to say that uh i mean is that suffering is an integral
01:28:50 part of this of um of a consistent existence so so sort of uh and the philosophical in
01:29:02 a philosophical sense uh the full richness and the beauty of our experience would not
01:29:08 be as beautiful would not be as rich uh if there was no suffering in the world is that
01:29:14 is that possible well i think you said two different things that aren’t exactly at least
01:29:18 that aren’t exactly the same one is that suffering is an integral part of our experience you
01:29:25 know that might be considered a challenge to certain types of christian theology or
01:29:31 or even uh jewish theology in other words um christians talk about the fall and talk
01:29:37 about uh adam and eve in the garden and and have have a vision of there being some kind
01:29:43 of perception from or perfection from which we have fallen and i think there is a perfection
01:29:50 from which we’ve fallen but i don’t think that perfection is some kind of physical perfection
01:29:56 in other words i don’t subscribe personally to the view that some some christians do that
01:30:02 there was some state um prior to the fall in which death did not occur i don’t think
01:30:09 that that’s consistent with science as we know it and i and i think that um death for
01:30:15 example has been part of the biological world and the and the universe as a whole um from
01:30:23 from billions of years ago so so just to be clear about that um you know i on the other
01:30:30 hand i do so if that’s the case then certainly in that sense at the very least um suffering
01:30:38 or at least death okay is part of the biological existence and that probably seems so completely
01:30:47 obvious to somebody who you know is au fait with science whether they you know whether
01:30:53 they’re a scientist or not well so and i apologize if i’m interrupting but it’s the obvious reality
01:30:59 of of uh our life today but there’s a lot of people i think it’s currently in vogue
01:31:03 i’ve talked to quite a few folks who kind of see as the goal of many of our pursuits
01:31:09 as to extend life indefinitely a sort of uh you know a dream for many people is to live
01:31:15 forever uh but in the in the technological world in the engineering world in the scientific
01:31:21 world i mean that’s that’s the big dream to me it feels like that’s not a dream it’s i
01:31:29 certainly would like to live forever uh like that that’s the initial feeling the instinctual
01:31:34 feeling because you know life is so amazing but then if you actually kind of like you’ve
01:31:40 presented it if you actually uh live that kind of life you would realize that that’s
01:31:45 actually a step uh backwards that’s a step down from the experience of this life in my
01:31:50 sense that death is an essential part of life uh about an essential part of this experience
01:31:57 death of all things so the thing the fact that things end somehow and the scarcity of
01:32:04 things somehow create the beauty of this experience that we have yeah transhumanism doesn’t look
01:32:12 very attractive to me either but it also doesn’t look very feasible um but that’s a whole big
01:32:20 topic that i’m not exactly an expert but i’ll say but i but you know i’m of a certain age
01:32:27 where my mortality is more pressing or more obvious to me than it once was okay um and
01:32:35 and i don’t dread that i don’t see that as in a certain sense even the enemy okay you’re
01:32:45 not afraid of death well i’m afraid of lots of things in a in a in a conceptual way but
01:32:50 it doesn’t keep me awake at night okay um i i’m i think like most people i’m more afraid
01:32:58 of pain than i am of death so i i don’t want to put myself forward as some kind of hero
01:33:03 that doesn’t worry about these things that’s not true but i i do think and maybe this is
01:33:10 part of my christian outlook um that there is life beyond the grave um but i don’t think
01:33:19 that that it’s life in this universe or in this um certainly not in this body and maybe
01:33:26 not in a certain sense in this mind i mean you know christian christian belief in the
01:33:30 afterlife is is that we will be resurrected we will be in a certain sense be with god
01:33:35 i don’t know what that means and i don’t think anybody else really quite knows what that
01:33:39 means but there are lots of ways that over history people artists and and and writers
01:33:45 and so forth have pictured it um and these are all perhaps some of them helpful ways
01:33:49 of thinking about it do you think it’s possible to know what happens after we die um i i don’t
01:33:55 think we find out by near death experiences or those kinds of things but but i but i think
01:34:02 that uh you know that we have sufficient i feel i have sufficient information if you
01:34:09 like um in terms of god’s revelation to be confident that that i will go somewhere
01:34:16 else okay but it won’t be here and i to me the aspirations of transhumanism are horrific
01:34:29 i mean i think it would be a nightmare not a dream a nightmare you know to be somehow
01:34:34 downloaded into a computer and live one’s life like that i because it it completely
01:34:42 discounts the integrity of our bodies as well as our minds i mean we aren’t just disembodied
01:34:49 minds it would not be me that was in the computer it would be something else if if that kind
01:34:58 of download were possible of course it isn’t possible and it’s very long way from being
01:35:03 possible but you know amazing things happen so we shouldn’t be too certain so this is
01:35:08 this is a place that uh again maybe taking a slight step outside uh wherever philosophizing
01:35:14 a little bit uh let me ask you about uh human level or superhuman level intelligence uh
01:35:21 the artificial intelligence systems do you what do you make from um from almost a religious
01:35:30 or a perspective that we’ve been talking about of the special aspect of human nature of us
01:35:37 creating intelligence systems that exhibit some elements of that human nature is that
01:35:43 something again like we were talking about with transhumanism uh there’s a feasibility
01:35:48 question of how hard is it to actually build machines that human level intelligence or
01:35:52 have something like consciousness or have all those kinds of human qualities and then
01:35:57 there’s the do we want to do that kind of thing so on both of those directions what
01:36:03 do you think well okay so you know since your podcast is called ai i don’t want to offend
01:36:10 too many of your listeners out there that’s but i but i i think one should be a little
01:36:15 bit more modest about one’s claims for ai than have typically been the case yeah i think
01:36:20 that actually a lot of people in ai are somewhat chastened and so there there are more modest
01:36:25 claims than are common with the transhumanists and yes and and so forth um and you know i
01:36:33 used to play chess when i was a kid i was pretty good at it okay um won competitions
01:36:39 and so on and so forth and i when i and i’m talking about when i was in high school i
01:36:44 thought it was pretty unlikely that a computer would be able to become good at chess but
01:36:50 i was dead wrong okay and so you know um how did that make you feel by the way when um
01:36:56 t blue big i stopped playing chess seriously when i had when i encountered computers that
01:37:03 could beat me okay i still play with my grandchildren a little bit but but um but yeah it it seemed
01:37:10 like in a certain sense it became a solved problem uh when ai was able to do it better
01:37:15 than i could so i think that there are ways in which today we’ve seen um computers do
01:37:22 things which historically were regarded as being very characteristic of human intelligence
01:37:29 and in that sense there there is some success to ai i also think that um you know there
01:37:36 are certain things which one might think of as being ai which are you know completely
01:37:41 widespread in our society i’m thinking about the internet search engines and so forth which
01:37:49 are enormously influential and obviously do things more powerfully than any individual
01:37:55 human or even any combination of humans could do much faster and and and accessing databases
01:38:04 and so on and so forth is all of this is outstripped our human intelligence um i’m not sure the
01:38:12 extent though to which that is really intelligence uh in the way that was traditionally meant
01:38:19 but it’s certainly amazingly um facile and um it it multiplies our ability to access
01:38:28 human knowledge and and data and so forth so is that something is that is that enter
01:38:34 the realm of something we should be concerned about so in the realm of religion you talk
01:38:39 about what is good what is evil what is right what is wrong you have set of morals set of
01:38:44 beliefs and when you have an entity come into the picture that uh that has quite a bit of
01:38:50 power if we potentially look into the future and intelligence and capability um do you
01:38:58 think there’s something that religion can say about artificial intelligence or is that
01:39:05 something you we shouldn’t worry about until that arrives you think just like with the
01:39:09 chess program um you know religious writers have thought about this for centuries uh you
01:39:15 know there’s been a long debate about what is what was historically called the plurality
01:39:21 of worlds and it was actually more about whether there are places where other intelligent creatures
01:39:29 live than it was about us creating them but but i think it’s largely the same question
01:39:35 it’s almost like aliens like other intelligent so if there is other intelligent life in the
01:39:40 universe what is its relationship to god okay that is in a certain sense the puzzle that
01:39:46 religious thinkers and writers have thought about for a long time and there’s a whole
01:39:50 range of of different opinions about that i mean personally you know i think it’s it’s
01:39:55 an interesting question but it’s not a very pressing question at the moment um yeah and
01:40:00 i think the same way about the the question of what happens if we’re able to build a sentient
01:40:06 robot for example um i think it’s an interesting question and we’ll have to think about it
01:40:11 when that happens um but i think we’re still quite a ways away from that and so i i don’t
01:40:16 have a good answer um but i think there’s a literature that you one could tap um to
01:40:21 think about if you want to start early on the question well let me ask you another impossible
01:40:28 question from a religious or from a personal perspective what do you think is consciousness
01:40:33 this this uh subjective experience that we seem to be having there’s uh this there’s
01:40:41 uh the christian religion have something to say about consciousness does your own when
01:40:46 you look in the mirror do you have a sense of what is consciousness um i think the bible
01:40:52 doesn’t have much in the way of answers about that directly in the sense that you’re perhaps
01:40:57 asking it which is more like i think you’re asking for some kind of uh quasi scientific
01:41:02 or maybe indeed scientific uh description that’s really looking for one yes um i i think
01:41:08 that i think that there it’s an interesting question i think it’s actually um it’s a
01:41:15 jump too far i think we have we don’t even know the answer to the question what is the
01:41:19 mind let alone consciousness so if you distinguish between those two things i think the question
01:41:25 that’s being addressed more directly um scientifically as well as in other ways it is what is the
01:41:32 mind um and that is certainly a very topical question even in places like mit which is
01:41:38 not historically involved with philosophical questions you know that people are doing neuroscience
01:41:43 and so forth i think it’s a very important question and i think that we’re going to find
01:41:50 that um we are not computers in other words i think uh the the commonplace theory of what
01:42:01 mind is is is generally speaking by analogy that we are basically wet wetware okay um
01:42:11 that we’re some computer like um entity um and that that the analogy to digital computers
01:42:20 is is is a pretty decent one i mean that that’s of course a viewpoint which um you know which
01:42:27 drives the aspirations of the transhumanists i mean they they so much believe that our
01:42:32 minds are nothing other than you know in a certain sense some kind of implementation
01:42:37 of software in biology that they say to themselves well of course we’re going to be able to download
01:42:42 it into a into a digital computer i don’t think that’s true i think it’s most likely
01:42:50 that quantum mechanics is very important in the brain uh it seems most unlikely that it’s
01:42:58 not to me i know that that’s contrary to the opinions of many people but but that’s my
01:43:04 view and it’s also a view for example of people like roger penrose and and people like that
01:43:09 who’ve written about it um rather extensively and if that’s the case then really my mind
01:43:17 is not reproduce reducible to some kind of software which can be considered to be portable
01:43:25 it is so uh connected to the hardware of my body that the two are inseparable okay and
01:43:33 so if that is in fact what we find um as i suspect will be the case then the aspirations
01:43:39 of the transhumanists will be very long incoming if at all um so i think that actually physics
01:43:47 and chemistry um you know are in a are in a sense um involved with the brain and with
01:43:56 in the mind but not in a very simple way like you know like the computer analogy um in and
01:44:03 a much more complicated way and i and i also think that um it’s philosophically ignorant
01:44:14 to speak as if um when and if the actions of the brain are understood at the physical
01:44:23 and chemical level that will mean that the mind will vanish as a concept you know that
01:44:31 we’ll just say no we’re nothing but brains okay of course it won’t i mean it may well
01:44:36 be that our mind is an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the physics and chemistry
01:44:42 and biology okay but it’s also something that we have to encounter and take seriously and
01:44:50 so um you know it’s it’s not the case that it that the mind is reducible to nothing but
01:44:58 physics and chemistry even if it’s embedded in you know continuously into physics and
01:45:04 chemistry as i rather suspect it is um so i that that’s my own view i mean another way
01:45:12 of putting it is that the mind or the soul is not something added into humans as might
01:45:19 have been the viewpoint um historically i do think there is you know there is something
01:45:25 added to humans but it’s not it’s not the mind it’s the spirit and that takes us beyond
01:45:30 the physical it takes us beyond this universe but i but i don’t think that that consciousness
01:45:35 the mind etc etc is that thing which is necessarily added in so i i’m not be emergent in some
01:45:42 way i’m not a substance dualist in that sense okay if you want to put it philosophically
01:45:47 i mean uh but you see your sense is um so the mind and the intelligence and consciousness
01:45:54 can be these emergent things do you do you have a hope a sense that science could help
01:46:00 us get it pretty far down the road of understanding we will get much further than we have and
01:46:07 we it’ll be interesting um i mean right now our our methods of diagnosing the human brain
01:46:15 are extremely primitive i mean the resolution that we have you know that comes out of uh
01:46:22 out of nmr and and brain scans and so forth is miserable compared with what we need in
01:46:28 order to understand the brain at the cellular level let alone at the atomic level um but
01:46:36 you know we’re making progress it’s relatively slow progress but it’s progress and people
01:46:40 are working on it and we’re going to get better at it and we’ll find out very interesting
01:46:44 things as we do um the time resolution is also completely hopeless compared compare
01:46:49 with what we need to understand of a thought you know so um so there’s a long way to go
01:46:55 and we will get better at it um but i’m but i’m not at all worried as some people are
01:47:01 and some people speak as if this is a good thing that somehow the concepts of humanity
01:47:07 and the mind and religion and and consciousness are going to vanish because we’re going to
01:47:15 have you know complete uh physicochemical description of the brain in the near future
01:47:21 that we’re not going to have that and secondly even if we had it the mind and all these other
01:47:26 things aren’t going to vanish because of it well i i find kind of compelling the the notion
01:47:31 that whoever created this universe uh and us uh did so to understand itself himself
01:47:42 i mean there’s a there’s a there’s a powerful self reflection notion to this whole experiment
01:47:50 that we’re a part of i certainly think that god takes delight in his creation and that
01:47:57 it was created for that delight as much as it was um for any other reason and that you
01:48:04 know that therefore are there’s reason to be hopeful and and awestruck by the creation
01:48:11 whether it’s on the very small or on the very large i’m not sure if you’re familiar there’s
01:48:15 something called the simulation hypothesis well that’s been fun to talk about with the
01:48:21 computer scientists and so on which is a kind of thought experiment that proposes that um
01:48:29 you know the entirety of the world around us is a kind of a computer program that’s
01:48:33 a simulation and then we’re living inside it i think there’s um i think from a certain
01:48:39 perspective that could be consistent with a religious view of the world i mean you could
01:48:45 just use different terms uh basically uh what are your but it’s a it’s a it feels like a
01:48:51 more um modern updated version of that but what is what’s what’s your sense of this uh
01:49:01 the simulation hypothesis do you find interesting useful to think about it do you find it ridiculous
01:49:06 did you find it fun what are your thoughts uh it’s fun and it’s been of course the subject
01:49:11 of various movies yeah um that that some of which are very well known um you know i don’t
01:49:21 think it makes sense to think of it as a simulation hypothesis in the sense that we’re really
01:49:28 lying in uh banks um of of uh on banks of of beds having our energy drained away from
01:49:38 us um and and the simulation is going on in our individual brains that that makes no sense
01:49:43 to me at all i don’t think that’s what’s meant by the simulation hypothesis as you’re using
01:49:48 it now but i think that there is a um there is very little distinction between saying
01:49:57 that a an intelligent creator has set up the universe according to his will and his plan
01:50:07 and set it in motion and is allowing it to run out maybe as christians say he’s sustaining
01:50:16 it actually um by his word of power it says in the book of the letter to hebrews okay
01:50:23 um in in in in this amazingly consistent and um integrated way um i don’t think there’s
01:50:34 very much difference between saying that and saying that it’s a simulation okay i mean
01:50:38 i think it’s almost the same thing okay but i but i think from but i think it’s important
01:50:44 to recognize that the simulation in that concept the simulation and the creation or the universe
01:50:52 are the same thing okay in other words it’s a simulation you know that is billions of
01:50:59 light years across okay yeah um i mean there’s a sense in which it helps one understand especially
01:51:07 if you’re not religious that there is something outside of the world that uh we live in that
01:51:13 there’s something bigger than the world we live in um and that i mean it’s just another
01:51:17 perspective on uh that humbles humbles you um so in that sense one shortcoming of that
01:51:26 is is the following is of the of the analogy is this that we think of a simulation as something
01:51:33 take taking place in the universe you know when we it’s it’s taking place in my computer
01:51:39 okay i don’t think that’s the right analogy for um a christian view of creation okay i
01:51:48 don’t think it’s taking place in some other universe that god has made okay i i think
01:51:55 maybe it’s taking place in the mind of god christians might hypothesize also but i but
01:52:02 i think that that that it’s important to recognize that christian theology at any rate
01:52:07 is that god is not one of the entities in the universe and and presumably therefore
01:52:14 is very different from a simulation that we might run on a computer let me ask you adam
01:52:21 and eve even adam ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil does this
01:52:26 is this story meaningful to you what does the story mean to you yeah i it is meaningful
01:52:31 to me um i i take the you know the writings of the bible very seriously and i think that
01:52:37 most christians regard them as having some kind of authoritative um role in their in
01:52:43 their in their faith um what do i get from it i mean i think the most important thing
01:52:49 that christians get from the story of adam and eve and they’re eating the apple and
01:52:53 so forth is that the relationship between humans and god is broken has been broken by
01:53:01 man’s disobedience that’s what the the story of adam and eve and the apple is all about
01:53:07 and um that that broken relationship is for christians what jesus came to redeem came
01:53:17 to overcome that brokenness and uh restore uh that relationship with god um uh to some
01:53:29 extent at any rate on earth and and ultimately um you know in in the in eternity to restore
01:53:36 it fully so that’s really what christians mean and gain from the story of adam and eve
01:53:43 of course lots of people ask the questions about how sort how literally should we take
01:53:48 these stories of particularly the first few few chapters of genesis which is an important
01:53:53 question but but i mean but we tend to um get bogged down with it a bit too much i think
01:54:00 we should take away the message um and i think the the the uh what the what actually we would
01:54:08 have seen if we’d been there okay is something which is a matter of speculation and it’s
01:54:14 certainly not terribly important from the point of view of christian theology but it
01:54:18 seems like a very important moment um as a man of faith do you um do you do you wish
01:54:25 that uh i think it was eve first uh yeah well see do you wish that by the way it was just
01:54:32 a fruit as a few what you said it very carefully as the fruit fruit of the tree right uh do
01:54:38 you wish they wouldn’t have eaten of the tree i mean this is a back to our discussion of
01:54:43 suffering was that like an essential thing that needed to happen you’re gonna have to
01:54:50 read paradise lost to get your answer to that beautifully put okay well let me ask the the
01:54:59 biggest question one that you also touch in your book but one that i asked every once
01:55:05 in a while is what is the meaning of life the meaning of my life is many different things
01:55:13 okay but it but they are all kind of centered around um relationships um i mean for a christian
01:55:24 one’s relationship with god is a crucial part of the meaning of life but one’s relationship
01:55:32 with one’s family wife’s wife parents children grandchildren in my case um and so forth those
01:55:40 are crucially important um these are all the places where people whether they’re religious
01:55:46 or not find meaning um but ultimately um i think a person who has faith in a creator
01:55:56 um who we think has a an intention or many intentions but a but a but a will um in respect
01:56:10 of the world as a whole that’s a crucial part of meaning and the idea that my life might
01:56:19 have some small significance in the plan of that creator is an amazingly powerful idea
01:56:30 that give that brings meaning um i i tell a story in my book that um when i was a student
01:56:38 before i became a christian i read a philosophy book with whose approximate title was um what
01:56:44 you know what is the meaning of life and you know that book basically said there is no
01:56:48 meaning to life you have to make up the meaning as you go along and i think that’s probably
01:56:52 the the predominant secular view is these days that there is no real meaning but you
01:56:59 can make up a meaning and that will give you meaning into your life um i don’t subscribe
01:57:05 to that view anymore um i think there is more meaning than that um but i do think that those
01:57:11 things which give meaning to our life are very important and we should emphasize them
01:57:15 and you you have said that as the part of the as the part of that meaning is the part
01:57:21 of your faith uh love and loyalty are key parts so can you try to say what is uh love
01:57:31 and loyalty like what what does it mean to you what does it look like if you were to
01:57:45 give advice to uh to your children grandchildren of what to look for in in looking for loyalty
01:57:54 and and and love what would you try to say well i think it’s something like yielding
01:58:02 your will or desire to another um it’s valuing others more highly or at least as highly as
01:58:14 yourself but that’s just the start of it because true love you reach a point where you are
01:58:22 you feel compelled by the other uh and that i think to some people sounds very scary but
01:58:32 actually it’s terrifically liberating um and i think that love then brings you into service
01:58:43 towards another and i’m you know reminded of um the phrase from the anglican uh prayer
01:58:52 book where it talks about um jesus whose service is perfect freedom in other words for us christians
01:59:00 to serve god is what perfects our freedom and i think there is an amazing love is um
01:59:08 is in part kept captivity but in a kind of paradoxical sense it’s also an amazing freedom
01:59:18 love is freedom i don’t think there’s a better way to end it we started with fusion energy
01:59:24 and ending on love in there’s a huge honor to talk to you thank you so much for your
01:59:28 time today thanks it was a pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with ian
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02:00:13 at lex friedman spelled somehow without the letter e just f r i d m a n and now let me
02:00:21 leave you with some words from arthur c clark finally i would like to assure my many buddhist
02:00:27 christian hindu jewish and muslim friends that i am sincerely happy that the religion
02:00:32 which chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind and often as western
02:00:38 medical science now reluctantly admits to your physical well being perhaps it is better
02:00:44 to be unsane and happy than sane and unhappy but it is the best of all to be sane and happy
02:00:53 whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future
02:00:58 indeed it may well decide whether we have any future thank you for listening and hope
02:01:05 to see you next time