Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes | Lex Fridman Podcast #87
the following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins an evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene the blind watchmaker The God Delusion the magic of reality and the greatest show of Earth and his latest Al growing God he is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and Science in general including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene which in the context of a gene centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea he's outspoken bold and often Fearless in the defense of science and reason and in this way is one of the most influential thinkers of our time this conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic for everyone feeling the medical psychological and financial burden of this crises I'm sending love your way stay strong we're in this together we'll beat this thing this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube review it with 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vehicles and artificial intelligence systems in general so again if you get cash app from the app store Google Play and use the code Lex podcast you get $10 and cash app will also donate $10 to First an organization that is helping to advance Robotics and stem education for young people around the world and now here's my conversation with Richard Dawkins do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe well if we accept there's intelligent life here and re accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic I mean 10 to 22 Stars has been estimated it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere but also intelligent life If you deny that then you're committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable I mean ludicrously off the charts improbable and I don't think it's that improbable certainly the origin of life itself there really two steps the origin of life which is probably fairly improbable and then the subsequent Evolution to intelligent life which is also fairly improbable so the Jos of those two you could say it's pretty improbable but not 10 to the 20 to improbable it's an interesting question maybe you're coming on to it how we would recognize intelligence from Outer Space if we if we encountered it the most likely way we would come across them would be by radio it's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us but um it's not it's not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals and then we would have to have some means of deciding that it was intelligent um people have with people involved in the seti program discuss how they would do it and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to an obvious an obvious way for them to broadcast to say we are in intelligent we are here um I suspected probably would be obvious actually that's interesting prime numbers so the mathematical patterns it's an open question whether mathematics is the same for us and as it would be for aliens I suppose we could assume that ultimately if if we're governed by the same laws of physics then we should be governed by the same laws of mathematics I think so I suspect that they will have Pythagoras Theorem Etc I mean I don't think their mathematics will be that different do you think Evolution would also be a force on the AL I planets as well I stuck my neck out and said that if we do if ever that we do discover life elsewhere it will be darwinian life in the sense that it will it will work by some kind of natural selection the non-random survival of non of randomly generated codes uh it doesn't mean it that the genetic would have to have some kind of genetics but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics probably wouldn't be actually but it would I think it would have to be darwinian yes so some kind of selection process yes in the general sense it would be darwinian so let me ask kind of uh an artificial intelligence engineering question so you've been an outspoken critic of I guess what could be called intelligent design which is an attempt to describe the creation of a human Mind and Body by some religious folks religious folks used to describe so broadly speaking evolution is as far as I know again you can correct me is the only scientific theory we have for the development of intelligent life like there's no alternative Theory as far as as far as I understand none has ever been suggested and I suspect it never will be well of course whenever somebody says that 100 years later I know it's a it's a risk it's a risk but um want to bet I mean I I I but it would look sorry yes it would probably look very similar but it' be it's almost like uh Einstein general relativity versus Newtonian physics it'll be maybe um an alteration of the Theory something like that but it won't be fundamentally different but okay it so uh so now for the past 70 years even before the AI Community has been trying to engineer intelligence in a sense to do what intelligent design says you know uh was done here on Earth what's your intuition do you think it's possible to build intelligence to build computers that are intelligent or do we need to do something like the evolution process like there's there's no shortcuts here that's an interesting question I I'm committed to the belief that is ultimately possible because I think there's nothing non-physical in our brains I think our brains work by by the laws of physics and so it must in principle be possible to replicate that in practice though it might be very difficult and as you suggest it might it may be the only way to do it is by something like an evolutionary process I'd be surprised I I suspect that it will come but it's certainly been slower incoming than some of the early Pioneers thought thought it would be yeah but in your sense is the evolutionary process efficient so you can see it as exceptionally wasteful in one perspective but at the same time maybe that is the only path to it's a paradox isn't it I mean on the one side it is deplorably wasteful yeah uh it's fundamentally based on waste on the other hand it does produce magnificent results um I mean the the the design design of a soaring bird an albatross a vulture an eagle um is is superb an engineer would be proud to have done it on the other hand an engineer would not be proud to have done some of the other things that Evolution has served up um some of the sort of botch jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical Origins but they don't look welld designed you have examples of bad bad design my favorite example is the recurrent lingal nerve I've used this many times this is a nerve it's one of the cranial nerves which goes from the brain and the end organ that it supplies is the voice box the the larynx but it doesn't go straight to the larynx it goes right in down into the chest and then loops around an artery in the chest and then come straight back up again to the larynx uh and I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck which happened to have died in a zoo and we watched the we saw the recurrent lenal nerve going whizzing straight past the larynx within an inch of the larynx down into the chest and then back up again um which is a a detour of many feet um very very inefficient the reason is historical the ancestors our fish ancestors the ancestors of all mammals and fish um the most direct pathway of that of the equivalent of that nerve there wasn't a larynx in those days but it innovated part of the gills the most direct pathway was behind that artery and then when the mammal when the tetrapods when the land vertebrae started evolving and then the neck started to stretch the marginal cost of changing the embryological design to jump that nerve over the artery was too great or rather was was each step of the way was a was a very small cost but the marginal but the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large as the neck lengthened it was a negligable change to just increase the Len the length of the detour a tiny bit a tiny bit a tiny bit each millimeter at a time didn't make any difference and so but finally when you get to a giraff it's a huge detour and no doubt is very inefficient now that's bad design any engineer would reject that piece of design it's ridiculous and there are quite number of examples as you'd expect it's not surprising that we find examples of that sort in a way what's surprising is there aren't more of them in a way what's surprising is that the design of living things is so good so natural selection manages to achieve excellent results um partly by tinkering partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes and and as it were making the best of a bad job that's really interesting I mean it it is surprising and and beautiful and it's a it's a mystery from an engineering perspective that so many things are welld designed I suppose the thing we're forgetting is how many generations have to die oh yeah that's the inefficiency of it yes that's the horrible wastefulness of it so yeah we we Marvel at the final product but uh yeah the process is painful Elon mus describes human beings as potentially the what he calls the biological Bootloader for artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence is used as the term it's kind of like super intelligence do you see superhuman level intelligence is potentially The Next Step In The evolutionary process yes I think that if if superhuman intelligence is to be found it will be artificial I I I don't have any hope that we ourselves our brains will go on uh go and getting larger in ordinary biological evolution um I think that's probably come to an end it it is the dominant Trend or one of the dominant Trends in our fossil history for the last 2 or three million years brain size brain size yes so it's been it's been swelling rather dramatically over the last 3 million years that is unlikely to continue the the only way that that's that happens is because natural selection favors those individuals with the with the biggest brains um and that's not happening anymore right so in general in humans the the selection pressures are not act I mean are they active in any form any well in order for them to be active it would be necessary that the most int let's let's call it intelligence not that intelligence is is simply correlated with brain size but let's let's talk about intelligence in order for that to evolve it's necessary that the most intelligent beings have the most individuals have the most children um and um uh so intelligence may buy you money it may buy you um worldly success it may buy you a nice house and and a nice car and things like that if you're successful career uh it may buy you the admiration of your fellow people but it doesn't increase the number of offspring that you have it doesn't increase your genetic uh Legacy to the next Generation on the other hand artificial intelligence um I mean computers and Technology generally is evolving by a non- gentic means by Leaps and Bounds of course and so what do you think uh I don't know if you're familiar there's a company called neuralink but there's a general effort of brain computer interfaces which is to try to build a connection between the computer and the Brain to send signals both directions and the long-term dream there is to do exactly that which is expand I guess expand the size of the brain expand the capabilities of the brain do you uh do you see this as interesting do you see this is a promising possible technology or is the interface between the computer and the brain like the brain is this wet messy thing that's just impossible to interface with well of course it's interesting whether it's promising I'm really not qualified to say what I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small as it is compared to computer and the and the individual components being as slow as they are compared to our electronic components it is astonishing what it can do I mean imagine building a computer that that fits into the size of a human skull um and with the equivalent of transistors or integrated circuits which work as slowly as neurons do uh it's there's something mysterious about that something something must be going on that we don't understand so I I've uh I've just talked to Roger penos I'm not sure if you're familiar with with his work and he he he also describes this kind of um mystery in in the mind in the brain that he's a materialist so there's not there's no sort of mystical thing going on but there's so much about the material of the that we don't understand the that that might be quantum mechanical nature and so on so there are the ideas about Consciousness do you have any have you ever thought about do you ever think about ideas of Consciousness or a little bit more about the mystery of intelligence and Consciousness that seems to pop up just like you're saying from our brain I agree with Roger Penrose that there is a mystery there um I I I mean he's one of the world's greatest physicists I I I can't possibly argue with with with with his but nobody knows anything about Consciousness and in fact you know if if we talk about religion and so on some the mystery of Consciousness is so on inspiring and we know so little about it that the leap to sort of religious or mystical explanations is too easy to make I I think that it's just an act of cowardice to LEAP to religious explanations water doesn't do that of course um but I I I accept that there may be something we don't understand about it so correct me if I'm wrong but in your book selfish Gene the the gene centered view of evolution of allows us to think of the physical organisms as just the medium through which the software of our genetics and the the ideas sort of propagate uh so maybe can we start just with with the basics what in this context does the word meme mean it would mean the cultural equalent of a gene cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the transmission of culture and the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense and it's only a useful word if there's something darwinian going on obviously culture is transmitted but is there anything darwinian going on and if there is that means there has to be something like a gene which is which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population so it can replic at it can replicate well it clearly does replicate there's no question about that uh the question is does it replicate in a sort of differential way in a darwinian fashion could you say that certain ideas propagate because they're successful in the meme pool um in a sort of trivial sense you can um would you wish to say though that in the same way as a animal body is modified adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes is it also machine for propagating memes Could you actually say that something about the way a human is is is modified adapted um for the function of meme propagation that's such a fascinating possibility if that's true if that that it's not just about the genes which seem somehow more com comprehensible like these things of biology the the the the idea that culture or maybe ideas you can really broadly Define it yes operates under these mechanisms even morphology even an anatomy does does evolve by mimetic means I mean things like hairstyles um uh styles of makeup um circumcision the these things are actual changes in the body form yes which are non- gentic and which get passed on from generation to generation or sideways like a virus um in in in a quasi genetic way but the moment you start drifting away from the physical it becomes interesting cuz the space of ideas ideologies political systems of course yes so what's what in your what's your sense is um are memes or metaphor more or are they really is there something fundamental almost physical presence of memes well I think they're a bit more than a metaphor and and I think that um I I mentioned the physical bodily characteristics which are a bit trivial in a way but when things like the propagation of religious ideas um both longitudinally down generations and transversely as in a sort of epidemiology of of ideas when a charismatic preacher converts people um that that's that resembles viral transmission um whereas the the longitudinal trans from grandparent to parent to child Etc is is is um more more like conventional genetic transmission that's such a beautiful especially especially in the modern day idea uh do you think about this implication in social networks where the propagation of ideas the viral propagation of ideas and hence the the new use of the word meme to describe the the internet of course provides extremely rapid method of tra adiss and before when when I first coined the word the internet didn't exist and so that I was thinking then in terms of books newspapers um broad radio television that kind of thing now an idea can just leap around the world in in all directions instantly and so the internet provides a a step change in uh the facility of propagation of memes how does that make you feel isn't it fascinating that sort of ideas it's like uh you have galpagos islandss or something is the 70s and the internet allowed all these species to just like globalize and and in in a matter of seconds you can spread a message to millions of people and these uh ideas these memes can breed can evolve can mutate can there's a selection and there's like different I guess groups that of all like there's a Dynamics that's fascinating here do you think yes basically do you think your work in this direction while fundamentally was focused on life on Earth do you think it should continue like to be Tak I mean I do think it would probably be a good idea to think in a darwinian way about this sort of thing we conventionally think of um the transmission of ideas from an evolutionary context as being limited to in our ancestors um people living in villages living in small bands where everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village and they might hop to a neighboring Village occasionally and maybe even to a neighboring continent eventually and that was a slow process nowadays Villages are international I mean you you you have people um it's been called um Echo Chambers where where people are in a a sort of Internet Village um where the other members of The Village may be geographically distributed all over the world but they just happen to be interested in the same things use the same terminology the same jargon um have the same enthusiasms that people like the Flat Earth Society they don't all live in one place they find each other and they talk the same language to each other they talk the same nonsense to each other um and they but so this is a kind of distributed version of the Primitive idea of of people living in in villages and propagating their ideas in a local way is there uh is there darwinist paral parallel here so is there um evolutionary purpose of villages or is that just a uh I wouldn't use a word like evolutionary purpose in that that case but V Villages or Villages would be something that just emerged that's the way people happen to live and uh and it just the same kind of way the Flat Earth Society societies of ideas emerge in the same kind of way in this digital space yes yes is there something interesting to say about the I guess from a perspective of Darwin could we fully interpret the Dynamics of social interaction in these uh social networks or is there or some much more complicated thing need to be developed like what's your sense well a darwinian selection idea would involve investigating which ideas spread and which which don't um so I mean some ideas don't have the ability to spread I mean the flat earth flat Earth ism is is there are few people believe in it but it's not going to spread because it's obvious nonsense but other ideas even if they are wrong can spread because they are um attractive in some sense so the the spreading in the selection in the darwinian context is uh it just has to be attractive in some sense like we don't have to Define like it doesn't have to be attractive in the way that animals attract each other it could be attractive in some other way yes it's it's all that matters is all it's needed is it to spread and it doesn't have to be true to spread me truth is one Criterion which might help an idea to spread but there are other criteria which might help you to spread as you say attraction in animals is not necessarily valuable for survival cele the famous peacock's tale yeah doesn't help the peacock to survive it helps it to pass on it jeans similarly um an idea which is actually rubbish but which people don't know is rubbish and think is very attractive will spread um in the same way as a peacock's Gene spread it's a small side step I remember reading somewhere uh I think recently that in some species of birds sort of the idea that beauty may have its own purpose and the idea that some some birds um I'm I'm being in eloquent here but there is some aspects of their feathers and so on that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever there was somebody making an argument that there are some things about beauty that animals do that may be its own purpose that does that ring a bell for you does that sound ridiculous I think it's a rather distorted Bell um um Darwin when he coined the phrase sexual selection yes uh didn't feel the need to suggest that what was attractive to females usually is males attracting females that what females found attractive had to be useful he said it didn't have to be useful it was enough that females found it attractive and so it could be completely useless probably was completely useless in the conventional sense but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on D Darin didn't call them G but in sense of reproducing um others starting with Wallace the co-discoverer of natural selection didn't like that idea and they wanted um sexually selected characteristics like peacock's Tales to be in some sense useful it's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock's tale as being useful but in in the sense of survival but others have run with that idea and have brought it up to date and so there's a kind of there are two schools of thought on sexual selection which are still active and about equally supported now those who follow Darwin in thinking that it's just enough to say it's attractive and those who follow um Wallace and say that um it has to be in some sense useful do you fall into one category or the other no I'm open minded I I think they both could be correct in different cases oh I mean they've both been made sophisticated in a mathematical sense more so than when Darwin and Wallace first started talking about it I'm Russian I ra romanticize things so I I prefer the former yes or the where the beauty in itself is a powerful uh so attraction is a powerful force in evolution on religion do you think there will ever be a time in our future where almost nobody believes in God or um God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society yes I do I think it may happen after a very long time I think it may take a long time for that to happen so do you think ultimately for everybody on Earth earth religion other forms of doctrines ideas could do better job than what religion does yes um I mean following truth reason well truth truth is a funny funny word uh and reason to there's yeah it's a it's a difficult idea now with um truth on the internet right and fake news and so on I suppose when you say reason you mean the very basic sort of inarguable conclusions of science versus which political system is better yes yes uh I I mean uh truth about the real world which is ascertainable um by not just by the more rigorous methods of science but by um just ordinary sensory observation so do you think there will ever be a time when we move past it like I guess another way to ask it are we hopelessly fundamentally tied to religion in the way our society functions well clearly all individuals are not hopelessly tied to it because many individuals don't believe um you could mean something like Society needs religion in order to function properly something like that and some people have suggested that some what's your intuition on that well I've read books on it um and they're persuasive I I don't think they're that persuasive though I mean I some people suggested that Society needs a sort of figurehead which can be a non-existent figurehead in order to function properly I think there's something rather patronizing about the idea that well you and I are intelligent enough not to believe in God but the plebs need it sort of thing and I think that's patronizing and uh I'd like to think that that that was not the right way to proceed but at the individual level do you think there's some value of spirituality sort of uh if if I think sort of as a scientist the amount of things we actually know about our universe is a tiny tiny tiny percentage of what we could possibly know so just from everything even the certainty we have about the laws of physics it seems to be that there's yet a huge amount to discover and therefore we're sitting where the 99.999% of things is just still shrouded in mystery do you think there's a role in a kind of spiritual view of that sort of a humbled spiritual I think it's right to be humble I think it's right to admit that there's a lot we don't know a lot that we don't understand a lot that we still need to work on and we are working on it what I don't think is that it helps to invoke Supernatural explanations what we if our if our current scientific explanations aren't adequate to do the job then we need better ones we need to work more and of course the history of science shows just that that as science goes on uh problems get solved one after another and the science advances the science gets better uh but to invoke an a non-scientific non-physical explanation is simply to lie down in a cly way and say we can't solve it so we're going to invoke magic don't let's do that let's say we need better science we need more science uh it may be that the science will never do it it may be that we will never actually understand everything and that's okay but let's keep working on it a challenging question there is do you think science can lead us astray in terms of the humbleness so there's some aspect of science maybe it's the aspect of scientist and not science but uh of sort of um a mix of ego and confidence that can lead us astray in terms of discovering the you know some of the big open questions about yes about the Universe I think that's right I mean there are there are arrogant people in any Walk of Life And scientists are no exception to that and so there are arrogant scientists who think we've sold everything of course we haven't so humility is a proper stance for a scientist I mean it's a proper working stance because it encourages further work um but in a way to resort to a supernatural EXP explanation is a kind of arrogance because it's saying well we don't understand it scientifically therefore the uh non-scientific religious Supernatural explanation must be the right one that's arrogant what is what is humble is to say we don't know and we need to work further on it so maybe if I could psychoanalyze you for a second you have at times been just slightly frustrated with people who have super you know have a supernatural um has that changed over the years have you become like how do people that kind of have like seek Supernatural explanations how do you see those people as human beings as like do you see them as dishonest do you see them as um sort of um ignorant do you see them as I don't know it like how do you think of certainly not not not dishonest and and and I mean obviously many of them are perfect nice people so I don't I don't sort of despise them in that sense um I think it's often a misunderstanding that that um people will jump from the admission that we don't understand something they will jump straight to what they think of as an alternative explanation which is the supernatural one which is not an alternative it's a non-explanation um instead of jumping to the conclusion that science needs more work that we need to actually get do some better better science so um I I I don't have I mean personal antipathy towards such people I just think they're they're misguided so what about this really interesting space that I have trouble with so religion I have a better grasp on but um there's a large communities like you said Flat Earth Community uh that I've recently because I've made a few jokes about it I saw that there's I I've noticed that there's people that take it quite seriously so there's this bigger world of conspiracy theorists which is a kind of I mean there's elements of it that are religious as well but I think they're also scientific so the the basic uh Credo of a conspiracy theorist is to question everything which is also The Credo of a good scientist I would say so what do you make of this I mean I think it's probably too easy to say that by labeling something conspiracy you you therefore dismiss it I mean occasionally conspiracies are right and so we shouldn't dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand we should examine them on their own merits flat eism is obvious nonsense we don't have to examine that much further um but um I there may be other conspiracy theories which are actually right so I've you know grew up in the Soviet Union so I you know the space race was very influential for me on both sides of the coin uh you know there's uh conspiracy theory that we never went to the moon right and it's uh it's like I can understand it and it's very difficult to rigorously scientifically show one way or the other it's just you have to use some of the human intuition about who would have to lie who would have to work together and it's clear that very unlikely uh good PE behind that is my general intuition that most people in this world are good you know in order to really put together some conspiracy theories there has to be a large number of people working together and essentially being dishonest yes which is improbable sh the share number who would have to be in on this conspiracy and uh the share detail the attention to detail they have had to have had and so on I'd also cons worry about the motive and why would anyone want to suest that it that it didn't happen what's the what's the why is it so hard to believe I mean the the physics of it the mathematics of it the the idea of computing orbits and and and trajectories and things it it all works mathematically well why wouldn't you believe it it's a psychology question because there's something really Pleasant about um you know pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when everybody like uh you know thinking outside the box and coming up with the true answer where everybody else is diluted there's something I mean I have that for science right you want to prove the entire scientific Community wrong that's the whole no that that's that's right and and of course historically lone Geniuses have come out right sometimes yes but often people with who think they're a lone genius much more often turn out not to um so you have to judge each case on its merits the the mere fact that you're a Maverick the mere fact that you you you're going against the current tide doesn't make you right you got to show you're right by looking at the evidence so because you focused so much on on religion and disassembled a lot of ideas there and I just I was wondering if if you have ideas about conspiracy theory groups because it's such a prevalent even reaching into uh presidential politics and so on it seems like it's a very large communities that believe different kinds of conspiracy theorists is there some connection there to your thinking on religion and is curious it's a matter it's an obvious difficult thing I I don't understand why people believe things that are clearly nonsense like well Flat Earth and also the conspiracy about not landing on the moon or um that um the that the United States engineer 911 that that kind of thing um so it's not clearly nonsense it's extremely unlikely okay it's extremely unlikely um that religion is a bit different because it's passed down from generation to generation and so many of the people who are religious uh got it from their parents who got it from their parents who got it from their parents and childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force but these things like the 9/11 conspiracy theory the um Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory the man on the moon conspiracy theory these are not childhood indoctrination these are um presumably dreamed up by somebody who then tells somebody else who then wants to believe it and I don't know why people are so eager to fall in line with some just some person that they happen to read or meet who spins some yarn I can kind of understand why they believe what their parents and teachers told them when they were very tiny and not capable of critical thinking for themselves so I sort of get why the great religions of the world like Catholicism and Islam Go on p persisting it's because of childhood indoctrination but that's not true of Flat Earth ISM and sure enough Flat Earth ism is a a very minority cult way larger than I ever realized well yes I know but but so that's a really clean idea and you've articulate that in your new book and and I'll grow God and in God Delusion is the early indoctrination that's really interesting you can get away with a lot of out there ideas in terms of religious texts if um the age at which you convey those ideas at first is a young age so indoctrination is sort of an essential element of propagation of religion so let me ask on the morality side in the books that I mentioned God Delusion all growing God you described that human beings don't need religion to be moral so from an engineering perspective we want to engineer morality into AI systems so so in general where do you think morals come from in humans a very complicated and interesting question it's clear to me that the moral standards the moral values of our civilization changes as the decades go by certainly as the centuries go by even as the decades go by and we in the 21st century are quite clearly labeled 21st century people in terms of our moral values we there's a spread I mean some of us are a little bit more ruthless some of us more conservative some of us more more liberal and so on um but we all subscribe to pretty much the same views when you compare us with say 18th century 17th century people even 19th century 20th century people um so we're much less racist were much less sexist and so on than we used to be some some people are still racist and some are still sexist but the the the spread has shifted that the gaan distribution has moved and moves steadily as the centuries go by and that is the most powerful uh influence I can see on our moral values and that doesn't have anything to do with religion I mean the the the religion of the the sorry the morals of the Old Testament are Bronze Age models models they're deplorable um and um they are to be understood in terms of the people in in the desert who made them up at the time and so Human Sacrifice um uh an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth um Petty Revenge killing people for breaking the Sabbath all that kind of thing um inconceivable now so at some point religious texts may have in part reflected Ed that Gan distribution at that time sure they did I'm sure they always reflect that yes and then now but the the the sort of almost like the meme as you describe it of uh ideas moves much faster than religious text do than you religion yes so basing your morals on on religious texts which were written Millennia ago yeah um is not a great way to proceed I think that's pretty clear so um not only should we not get our morals from such text but we don't we quite clearly don't um if we did then we we'd be discriminating against women and we'd be we'd be um racist we'd be killing homosexuals and so on um so so we we we don't and we shouldn't now of course it's possible to by the to to use your 21st century standards of morality and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry-pick uh particular verses which conform to our modern morality and you'll find that Jesus said some pretty nice things which is great but you're using your 21st centur morality to decide which verses to pick which verses to reject and so why not cut out the middleman of the Bible and go straight to the 21st century morality which is where that comes from is a much more complicated question why is it that morality moral values change as the centuries go by they undoubtedly do and it's a very interesting question to ask why it's a it's another example of cultural Evolution just as technology progresses so moral values progress for probably very different reasons but it's it's interesting if the direction in which that progress is happening has some evolutionary value or if it's merely a drift that can go into any direction I'm not sure it's any direction and I'm not sure it's evolutionarily valuable what it is is um Progressive in the sense that each step is a step in the same direction as the previous step so it becomes uh more gentle more decent as by modern standards more liberal um less violent see but more decent I think you're using terms and interpreting everything in the context of the 2st century because genas Khan would probably say that this is not more decent because we're now you know there's a lot of weak members of society they were not murdering yes and I was careful to say by by the standard of the 21st century by by our standards if we with hindsight look back at at history what we see is a trend in the direction towards us towards our present right our our present value system for us we see progress but it's it's an open question whether that won't you know I don't see necessarily why we can never return to genas cont well we could um I suspect we won't uh but um it but if you look at the history of moral values over the centuries it is in a progressive I use the word Progressive not in a value judgment sense in the sense of of a transitive sense each step is the same is the same direction as the previous step so things like we don't um derive entertainment from torturing cats um we don't derive entertainment from from like the Romans did in the Coliseum from from that state or rather or or rather we suppress uh the desire to get I mean to have PL it's probably in us somewhere so there's a bunch of parts of our brain one that probably you know limic system that wants certain pleasures and that's uh I I don't I mean I I wouldn't have said that but um you're limited to think that you like well no there's a there's a Dan Carlin of Hardcore History that's a really nice explanation of how we've enjoyed watching the torture of people the fighting of people just the torture the suffering of people throughout history as entertainment uh until quite recently and now everything we do with sports we're kind of channeling that feeling into something else so I mean there there is some dark aspects of human nature there are underneath everything and I do hope this like higher level software we've built will keep us at Bay I'm also Jewish and have history with the uh the Soviet Union and the Holocaust and I clearly remember that uh some of the darker aspects of human nature creeped up there they do there have been uh there have been steps backwards admittedly and the Holocaust is obvious one but if you take a broad view of History it's it's the same direction so Pamela mordic in machines who think has written that AI began with an ancient wish to forge the gods do you see it's it's a poetic description I suppose but uh do you see a connection between our civilizations historic desire to create Gods to create religions and our modern desire to create technology and intelligent technology I suppose there's a link between an ancient desire to explain away mystery and um and science but um intelligence artificial intelligence creating Gods creating new Gods um and I forget I read somewhere a somewhat factious um paper which said that we have a new God is called Google and yeah and and we we we pray to it and we worship it and we and we ask its advice like an Oracle and so on um that's fun and and but you don't see that you see that as a fun statement a fous statement you don't see that as a kind of truth of us creating things that are more powerful than ourselves a natural sort of it has a kind of poetic resonance to it which I get I wouldn't I wouldn't but not I would I wouldn't have bothered to make the Point myself it that way all right so you don't think AI will become our new go a new religion a new Gods like Google well yes I mean I I can see that um the future of intelligent machines or indeed intelligent aliens from outer space might yield beings that we would regard as gods in the sense that they are so Superior to us that we might as well worship them that's highly plausible I think but I see a very fundamental distinction between a God who is simply defined as something very very powerful and intelligent on the one hand and a God who doesn't need explaining by a progressive step-by-step process like Evolution or like or like engineering design so um the different suppose we did meet an alien from outer space who was marvelously magnificently more int ENT than us and we would sort of worship it and for that reason nevertheless it would not be a God in the very important sense that it did not just happen by to be to be there like God is supposed to it must have come about by a gradual stepbystep incremental Progressive process presumably like darwinian Evolution there all the difference in the world between those two intelligence design comes into the universe late as a product of a progressive evolutionary process or Progressive engineering design process so most of the work is done through this slow moving exactly progress exactly yeah the yeah it's but there's still this desire to get answers to the why question that if if we're if the world is a simulation if we're living in a simulation that there's a program like creature that we can ask questions of this okay well let's let's pursue the idea that we're living in a simulation which is not not totally Ridiculous by the way um there we go um then you still need to explain the programmer the programmer had to come into existence by some even if we're in a in a simulation the the programmer must have evolved or if if he's in a in a sort of or she if she's in if she's in a meta simulation then the The Meta Meta programmer must have evolved by by by a gradual process you can't escape that fundamentally you've got to come back to a a a a gradual incremental process of explanation to start with there's no shortcuts in this world uh exactly but maybe to linger on that point uh about the simulation do you think it's an interesting basically talk to uh board the the heck out of everybody asking this question but uh whether you live in a simulation do you think first do you think we live in a simulation second do you think it's a interesting thought experiment it's certainly an interesting thought experiment I first met it in a science fiction novel by Daniel galloy called um counterfeit world uh in which um it's all about I mean our heroes are running a gigantic computer which which simulates the world and um and something goes wrong and so one of them has to go down into the simulated World in order to fix it and then the the the Deno of the thing the climax to the novel is that they discover that they themselves are in another simulation at a at a high level so I was intrigued by this and I love others of Daniel Gallo's science fiction novels then um it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrom Bostrom talking to him in an hour okay um and um he goes further not just treat it as a science fiction speculation he actually thinks it's positively likely I mean I think it's very likely actually well he's he makes like a probabilistic argument which you can use to come up with very interesting conclusions about this the nature of this universe I mean he think he thinks that that that that we're we're in a simulation done by so to speak our descendence of the future that the products but it's still a product of evolution it's still ultimately going to be a product of Evolution even though the super intelligent people of the future um uh have created our world and you and I are just a simulation and this table is is a simulation and so on I don't actually in my heart of hearts believe it but but I I like his argument well so the interesting thing is um I agree with you but the interesting thing to me if I would say if we're living in a simulation that in that simulation to make it work you still have to do everything gradually just like you said that even though it's programmed I don't think there can be Miracles otherwise well no I mean the the programmer the the higher up the upper ones have to have evolved gradually however the simulation they create could be instantaneous I mean they could be switched on and we and we come into the world with fabricated memories true but what I'm what I'm trying to convey so you're saying uh the the broader statement but I'm saying from an engineering perspective both the programmer has to be slowly evolved and the simulation because it's like I from an engineering perspective oh yeah it takes a long time to write a program uh no like Ju Just I don't think you can create the universe in a snap I think you have to grow it okay well uh that's that's a good point that's an arguable Point by the way um I I I have thought about using the Nick Bostrom um I idea to Solve the Riddle of how we talking we were talking earlier about why the human brain can achieve so much MH um I thought of this when my then 100-year-old mother was marveling at what I could do with a with a smartphone and and I could you know call look up anything in the encyclopedia I could play her music that she liked and so said is it all in that in that tiny little phone no it's it's out there it's it's in the cloud it's and maybe what most of what we do is in a cloud so maybe if if we're if we are a simulation yeah then then um all the power that we think is in our skull it actually may be like the power that we think is in the iPhone um but is that actually out there in it's an interface to something else I mean that's what um including Roger Penrose with pism that Consciousness is somehow a fundamental part of physics that it doesn't have to actually all reside inside our brain but Roger thinks it does reside in in in the skull whereas I'm I'm suggesting that that it doesn't that it that that it's that that there's a cloud that'd be a fascinating uh a fascinating notion on a small tangent have you um familiar with the work of Donald uh Hoffman I guess maybe not saying his name correctly but just forget the name the idea that there's a difference in reality and perception so like we biological organisms perceive the world in order for the natural selection process to be able to survive and so on but that doesn't mean that our perception actually reflects the fundamental reality the physical reality underneath well I do think that um although it reflects the fundamental reality I do believe there is a fundamental reality um I do think that what that our perception is constructive in the sense that we um construct in our minds a model of what we're seeing and so this is really the view of people who work on visual Illusions Like Richard Gregory who point out that things like a NECA Cube um which flip from this a two-dimensional picture of a cube on on on sheet of paper but we see it as a three-dimensional Cube and it flips from one orientation to another uh at regular intervals what's going on is that the brain is is constructing a cube but the sense data are compatible with two alternative cubes and so rather than stick with one of them it alternates between them I think that's just a uh a model for what we do all the time when we see a table when we see a person when we see a when we see anything we're um using the sense data to construct or or make use of a preps previously constructed model um I noticed this when when I meet somebody who actually is say a friend of mine but I until I kind I realize that that it is him he he looks different and then when I finally clock that that it's him his features switch like a NE Cube interes into the familiar form is as it were I've taken his face out of the filing cabinet inside um and grafted it onto or used used the sense data to to to to in to invoke it yeah we did some kind of miraculous compression on this whole thing to be able to filter out most of the sense data and makes it makes sense of it that's it's just a magical thing that we do so you've written several many amazing books but let me ask what books um technical or fiction or philosophical had a big impact on your own life what um what books would you recommend people consider reading in their own intellectual Journey Darwin of course uh and um the original I've actually ashamed to say never uh read Darwin he's astonishingly preent because considering he was writing in the middle of the 19th century um Michael gelin said he's working a 100 years ahead of his time everything except genetics is amazingly right and amazingly far ahead of his time um and of course you need to read the the updatings um that have happened since his time as well I he would be astonished by well let Al Lear um whats on criek of course but he'd be astonished by meling genetics as well and yeah it' be fascinating to to see what he thought about D what he would think about DNA I mean yes it would because in many ways it it um clears up what appeared in his time to be a riddle um in the digital nature of genetics um clears up what what was a problem what was a big problem gosh there's so much that I could think of I can't I can't really is there is there something outside sort of more fiction is there when you think Young was there books that just kind of outside of kind of the realm of science religion that just kind of sparked your yes well actually um I I have I suppose I could say that I've learned some some science from science fiction um I I me I mentioned Daniel galloy and that's one example but another of his novels called Dark Universe which is not terribly well known but it's a very very nice science fiction story it's about a world of Perpetual darkness and we don't we're not told at the beginning of the book why these people are in darkness they they stumble around in some kind of underground world of caverns and passages using echolocation like bats and whales um to to get around and they've adapted presumably by darwinian means to survive in perpetual total darkness but what's interesting is that their mythology their religion has Echoes of Christianity but it's based on light and so there's been a fall from a from a an a paradise world that once existed where light Reigns Supreme and um because of the sin of mankind light banished them so they they no longer are in light's presence but but light survives in the form of Mythology and in the form of sayings like a great light Almighty oh for light's sake don't do that and I and I I hear what you mean rather than I see what you what you mean so the some of the same religious elements are present in this other totally kind of absurd different form yes and so it's a wonderful I wouldn't call it SATA because it's too good natured for that a wonderful parable about Christianity and the doctrine the theological doctrine of the Fall um so I find that that kind of Science Fiction immensely stimulating Fred hil's the black cloud oh by the way anything by Arthur C Clark I find very very wonderful too uh Fred Hall is the black cloud his first science fiction novel um where he well I I learned I learned a lot of science from that it has It suffers from an obnoxious hero unfortunately but apart from that you can learn a lot of science from it um another of his novels the um AA Andromeda which by the way the the the theme of that is taken up by Carl Sean science fiction novel another wonderful writer carlan um contact where the idea is again we we will we will not be visited from Outer Space by physical bodies we will be visited possibly we might be visited by radio but the the radio signals could manipulate us and actually have a concrete influence on the world if they make us or persuade us to build a computer which which runs their software so they can then transmit their software by by radio and then the computer takes over the world and this is the same theme in both um hil's book and Sean's book I I presume them I don't know whether Sean knew about H's book probably did um and and but it's a idea that that that that we we will never be invaded by physical bodies The War of the Worlds of HD wells will never happen but we could be invaded by radio signals code coded information which is sort of like DNA and and um we we are we we are I've called them we are survival Machines of of our DNA so it has great resonance for for me because I think of us I think of body physical bodies biological bodies as being manipulated by coded information DNA which has come down through through generations and in the space of memes it doesn't have to be physical it can be transmitted through the through the space information that's a fascinating possibility that uh from outer space we can be infiltrated by other memes by other ideas and thereby controlled in that way let me ask the last the silliest or maybe the most important question what is the meaning of life what gives your life fulfillment purpose happiness meaning um from a scientific point of view the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA but that's not what I feel that that's not the meaning of my life so the meaning of my life is something which is probably different from yours and different from other people's but we each we each make our own meaning so um we we we set up goals we want to achieve we want to write a book we want to um do whatever it is we do write a quartet we want to win a football match um and these are these are short-term goals well maybe even quite long-term goals which are set up by our brains which have goal-seeking Machinery built into them but what we feel we don't feel motivated by the desire to pass on our DNA mostly um we have other other goals which can be very uh moving very important uh they could even be called called spiritual in some cases um we want to understand the riddle of the universe we want to understand Consciousness we want to understand how the brain works um these are all noble goals some of them can be noble goals anyway and they are a far cry from the fundamental biological goal which is the propagation of DNA but the Machinery that enables us to set up these higher level goals is originally programmed into us by natural selection of DNA the propagation of DNA but um what do you make of this unfortunate fact that we are mortal do you Ponder your IM mortality does it make you sad does it I I ponder it um it it would it makes me sad that I shall have to leave um and not see what's going to happen next um um if there's something frightening about mortality apart from sort of missing as I've said something more deeply Darkly frightening it's the idea of Eternity but eternity is only frightening if you're there eternity before we were born billions of years before we were born and we were effectively dead before we were born as I think it was Mark Twain said I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience that's how it's going to be afterward after we leave so I think of it as really eternity is a frightening Prospect and so the best way to spend it is under a general anesthetic which is what it'll be beautifully put Richard it is a huge honor to meet you to talk to you thank you so much for your time thank you very much thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Dawkins and thank you to our presenting sponsor cash app please consider supporting the podcast by downloading cash app and using Code Lex podcast if you enjoy this podcast subscribe on YouTube review with five stars and APPA podcast support on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman and now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Richard dokins we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born the potential people who could have been here in my place but will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats scientists greater than Newton we know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people in the teeth of these Stupify odds it is you and I in our ordinariness that are here we privileged few who won the lottery of birth Against All Odds how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred thank you for listening and hope to see you next time