← Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Quantum Mechanics Breaks Our Idea of Time. Dr. Stephen Wolfram Explains How the Universe Contains Infinite Timelines Unfolding Simultaneously in a Multi-Threaded Structure
01:12:36
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Cohen
Are we bound by the nature of some physical reality? Or can we really perceive almost anything we want?
- [00:06]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
The role of science is to try and make this bridge between what the universe actually does and the narrative that we can carry in our minds. In ordinary physics, you throw a ball, goes in a definite trajectory. Quantum physics, the big idea is, no, it doesn't just go in one definite trajectory. There are many different paths it follows, and those give you many possible threads of time, many possible histories for the universe.
- [00:30]
Jonathan Cohen
How much can we change what we perceive?
- [00:33]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Things that people have believed for a long time often have a lot more to them than one might imagine.
- [00:38]
Maya Bialik
Theoretical physicist Dr. Stephen Wolfram is the creator of the computational engine behind Siri and the tools, helping scientists model everything from AI to the fabric of the universe.
- [00:50]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
This idea of a soul is this notion that there's something about what's happening in minds that isn't the physicality of brains. The fact that there is an objective reality for humans is a consequence of the fact that we're talking about humans. There are alien intelligences all over the place. For us to be able to align the way we think with the way that alien mind thinks is a big challenge.
- [01:13]
Maya Bialik
If you're going to think about aliens, if you're going to think about quantum mechanics, it's what is needed if you're going to think seriously about anything outside of the reality that you were dropped into.
- [01:24]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
The universe will not be three dimensional. The alien mind might very well sense different laws of physics. The universe could be one dimensional, infinite dimensional. Are they close enough that we can communicate with them in some way?
- [01:36]
Maya Bialik
You might make people believe in aliens.
- [01:39]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Right now, what's really out there is something much bigger and more alien than one had imagined.
- [01:53]
Maya Bialik
Hi, I'm Iron Bialik.
- [01:54]
Jonathan Cohen
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
- [01:56]
Maya Bialik
And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be talking about a little bit life, the universe and everything. We have one of the most incredible pioneers in the field of computational mathematics, linguistics technology. We have someone who literally created his own language that is used all over the world. And we get the fantastic opportunity to ask him, really, everything under the sun, why are we here? How did we get here? How did we evolve? How do we understand the way that we evolved? How did his learning take him to the set of arrival where he was the science consultant on one of, I think, the greatest movies about alien communication that has been made. Stephen Wolfram, he's the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram language. He's the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. This is the kind of person you may have never heard about, but you, your life is touched by him in so many ways. One of the incredible things about Steven is that he got his Ph.D. in theoretical physics when he was 20 years old from Caltech. He, he graduated college at 17. He's an intellectual savant and also a really, really congenial, lovable, funny guy who entertains our questions about aliens, telepathy, psy phenomenon. Can we understand the nature of reality as consciousness being a plane where we can dip and cut into time.
- [03:40]
Jonathan Cohen
He explains how evolution works. What's underneath time and space? Can we move faster than the speed of light? And one of the most important questions, how we have a terrible history in science of saying that things cannot happen. His open mindedness and curiosity and exploration are something to behold.
- [04:01]
Maya Bialik
If you've liked any of our episodes where philosophy and physics seem to blend together, where science and spirituality actually intersect, you're going to love this episode. Is consciousness fundamental? Is free will fundamental? We also asked Dr. Wolfram to weigh in on what medicine is getting wrong and how biology as a system is not able to be understood the way other systems are. And what that means for pharmaceutical companies, for our health, and for how we even approach healing. Please welcome to the breakdown, Dr. Stephen Wolfram. Break it down.
- [04:40]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Thank you.
- [04:40]
Maya Bialik
It's very exciting to have you here. You're. You're one of these people that I think everyone should know about because so much of your work has been really foundational to what many of us take for granted. However, I'm gonna be honest, a lot of people don't understand what exactly it is that you do. So we're gonna let you start from there, explain what your work does and what the most important thing is that you're working on now.
- [05:06]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Gosh, I've spent my life kind of alternating between doing technology and doing basic science. It's pretty cool because you do technology for a while, you build a bunch of tools that let you do more things in basic science. You do basic science for a while, gives you ideas that let you build more technology. I've iterated that about five times so far in my life. I've been building this kind of tower of things in technology and things in science that's pretty tall by now. And I feel like we can see a long way from that tower. So what can we see? I think the thing that's been really interesting is the foundations of a whole bunch of fields have turned out to be somewhat related in their kind of Conceptual setup and places where we can make progress. So one big one is physics trying to understand sort of what the universe is made of, what's underneath space and time and so on. That's one big area. Trying to understand kind of the foundations of mathematics turns out to be closely related to, in ways that I certainly didn't expect. A bunch of things recently about the foundations of biology and things like why does biological evolution work and what actually is living matter? What, what kind of, you know, what, what strange thing is this kind of arrangement of molecules that is a living system? And so there are a whole bunch of applications. And also turned out that a lot of questions that have been kind of long time philosophical questions that seemed like they couldn't be addressed by science, we can start to talk about in scientific ways, things like what free will is and why it exists and what's going on with that. Even questions like why does the universe exist? These are questions that I had not expected we'd have anything to say about from science. And turns out we do. Now, in terms of sort of the kind of stack of ideas, kind of a lot of what I've done starts from one thing that I discovered back in the 1980s that was really surprising to me. And I think it's sort of the thing that broke my previous intuition. And here's what it is. If you say, imagine that you set up some rules for how something operates. And it might be a little program that you write for a computer. You just tell the computer, just keep running those rules, see what happens. You might think if you know the rules by which something operates, that that would kind of tell you what the thing is going to do. And at some level, if you follow the rules, you just run one step, the next step, the next step. You can see what happens after a billion steps or whatever else. The question is, can you kind of jump ahead, can you, with your mind and your mathematics or whatever else, can you kind of be smarter than this little program and just say, I know what you're going to do in a billion steps. Here's what it is. I can look at how you're set up or the rule that you're set up with, and I can just jump ahead and say, this is what's going to happen in a billion steps. A lot of exact science in the past is really based on the idea that yes, you can predict what's going to happen in systems. And the thing that I kind of discovered is that, no, that actually doesn't work when you are kind of out in the computational universe of possible little rules, possible little programs, a large number of those kinds of programs have this thing that I call computational irreducibility. You kind of can't tell what's going to happen except by running each step and seeing what happens. So that's kind of a thing that at one level is sort of a limitation on what you can know in science. You can know the fundamental rules, but if you say, okay, I know the rules by which, you know, some little piece of a brain works, okay, so how does. What is the whole brain going to do? The answer is there's a limitation to what you can say about that. So that was kind of an early discovery. Then there are questions like, so one of the things that's really surprising from that is very simple rules can do very complicated things. So then you start asking, well, okay, the biggest thing we know about is the universe. So could it be the case that the universe just operates according to some very simple rule, and everything we see, all the complexity that we see in the world, is just a consequence of kind of irreducibly running that rule? And so that's the thing I thought about for many, many years. And about five years ago, kind of made what was at first kind of a rather technical breakthrough and then became a much bigger story. And it's kind of the question of what is the universe actually made of? And I think we have a pretty good idea at this point. And it's kind of exciting because a lot of progress was made in physics about 100 years ago with relativity and quantum mechanics and so on, and things kind of got to a point where sort of rather incremental progress. Back when I was a kid, I was involved in that incremental progress and I think contributed a bit to it. I happened to work on those things at a time when a lot was just becoming possible. But now I think we're able to actually make some progress again. So the question starts off. You start off with, well, what's the universe made of? So we usually think that sort of space is the sort of fundamental thing in the universe. And we have space, we have time. And the question is, is space made of something? So it's been sort of a question about things in the universe ever since antiquity, which is, is the universe made of discrete stuff? Or is it made of continuous kinds of things? Are there atoms that are sort of discrete elements that things are made of? Or does everything kind of flow like a fluid, like water or something like this? People wondered about that for a Long time. It wasn't really resolved until the end of the 19th century that matter is made of discrete stuff. Matter is made of atoms and molecules and so on. They became clear you could think about light as being made of discrete photons and so on. Early part of the 20th century, most people believed that space would also turn out to be discrete. But people couldn't make that work sort of in the technical mathematics of what was going on then. What we figured out a few years ago is yes, you can actually make that work. And you can think of space and sort of everything in it as being this thing that is made of just these, these sort of atoms of space, these just points and then relations between points. So it's as if there's sort of a giant friend network of the atoms of space. And that's kind of everything that exists in the universe. There's this giant kind of network of points that is the stuff that the universe is made of. And then you can ask, well, what does that thing do? Well, you say, well, every time there's a little piece of it that has a particular form, it will get transformed to a piece that has some other form. That sort of computational step applied many, many times, is the thing that leads to the progress of time in the universe. Now, the big deal is that you can go from the kind of more precise version of that description to say, okay, this is what the universe will seem like to an observer like us on a large scale. And the way it will seem turns out to follow what we know about the structure of space, time and the way gravity works and things like this. So it's a very exciting to me a non trivial thing that you can go from this very simple underlying description to kind of the things that we, as, you know, rather large entities relative to the atoms of space perceive is going on. I mean, you know, it's the same kind of story. If you think about, you know, something like a glass of water or something, you might say it's a continuous thing. It just flows, you know, as water flows. But actually, we know at a microscopic scale there's a bunch of molecules bouncing around in that water. It's just to us at the scale we're at, it seems like it's just this continuous thing. And it seems like that's the same story with space. We may or may not be lucky in the sense that in the beginning of the 20th century turned out molecules are big enough that with the equipment one had at the time, one could tell they exist to know that there are atoms of space. We may or may not be living in the right century to have the equipment that we need to be able to actually say yes, we can absolutely tell that there are discrete atoms of space. But so the kinds of things that this idea that you can have sort of very simple rules that lead to very complicated behavior that corresponds to behavior that we kind of care about, like knowing how our universe works, for example, that's the kind of thing that I'm I spent a lot of time thinking about it.
- [13:41]
Jonathan Cohen
This episode is sponsored by Wandering Jews, an open door media brand.
- [13:46]
Maya Bialik
If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Bittone and Noam Weissman, dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and practically probably shout in disagreement at least once. Michal and Noam tackle the tough topics like anti Semitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion with guests like Bret Stephens, Michael Rapoport and Sarah Hurwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life, from food to music and comedy. Thoughtful, joyful, and always honest. That's Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam, a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast, Apple, or on YouTube and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam podcast and subscribe at Unpacked Bio NMX
- [14:48]
Jonathan Cohen
Mind Bialix Breakdown is supported by Bioptimizers.
- [14:51]
Maya Bialik
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- [15:43]
Jonathan Cohen
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- [15:47]
Maya Bialik
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- [15:53]
Jonathan Cohen
That's a $20 product, free on top of your discount already.
- [15:58]
Maya Bialik
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- [16:17]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
The other big thing that I do is developing tools that make use of this kind of computational paradigm, this idea of thinking about everything in terms of computation. And once you know that the whole universe is ultimately made of computation, it kind of motivates taking sort of the concept of computation seriously. And so then the. The big thing I've been interested in is how do you describe the world computationally? People, you know, the story of science has been a big story of kind of how do you formalize your description of the world? Do you use, you know, for example, you can use mathematics to kind of formalize certain things about the way the world works that's taken one a certain distance last 300 years. That's been a good thing. That's led to lots of engineering and technology and so on, but it isn't a good way to describe lots of kinds of systems. There isn't a good mathematical equation that you can solve that describes how, you know, I don't know how a brain thinks or something like this, or even how some simple biological organism works inside. And so the question is, well, if that isn't the raw material, if mathematics isn't the raw material that you should use for those kinds of things, what is? And that leads to kind of the idea of using computation for that. And then it turns out that sort of formalizing things in terms of computation is a really powerful thing to do in the history of these things in mathematics. People kind of maybe 500 years ago now was sort of this transition from you just talk about math to you have this notation like plus signs and equal signs and so on that let you kind of think about math in a streamlined way. So a big Part of my life has been involved with figuring out how to make a similar kind of notation for computation that allows one. Just like the notation for mathematics allows one to build, you know, algebra and calculus and mathematical science and so on. Notation for computation allows you to build sort of computational X for all fields. And that's been, you know, lots of people use the things I built and to do those kinds of things. And that's, that's been a powerful lever in letting one understand lots of kinds of things in the world. So that's a, that was a brief attempted summary of the last half century of my life.
- [18:35]
Maya Bialik
You did, you did a really good job. I'm, I'm struck in particular by this notion of kind of difference in scale because, you know, for, for most people, especially those who are not, you know, trained in fields of physics or quantum mechanics or even mathematics, to the level that we're talking about, there's this notion of like, the universe is so big, right? Like, that seems like something that everybody can get on board with. The universe is so big, right? And that means that we are very, very small. But as you have just described it, this shift in scale perspective is also that there are certain things that if you look close enough, right, they're all the same. So what we are made of is the same thing that the table is made of, the same thing that an ant is made of, the same thing that a single celled organism is made of, the same thing that algae is made of, right? It's all the same. Can you talk a little bit about even some of the more esoteric implications of that in terms of understanding our place? Are we significant? Are we insignificant? How do we sort of juggle both of these?
- [19:44]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing to realize is we are, give or take a meter in size, the universe is maybe 10 to the 26 meters across, a one with 26 zeros. So we're really pretty small compared to the universe, as you say. But actually the scale of atoms of space is probably, we don't know what it is yet, but it might be 10 to the minus 100 meters. So it's. Instead of, you know, whatever, 10 to the 26 is like a trillion trillion, roughly a trillion trillion meters. We're saying that the atoms of space are a trillion trillion, trillion, trillion something or other Earth of a meter. So in other words, we're actually pretty big on this general scale of the universe. But, you know, this point about sort of everything is made of the same stuff. And what does that mean actually that rabbit hole goes even deeper than one might think. We know that sort of material objects in the world are made of atoms. And there are roughly 90 kinds of atoms that correspond to the different chemical elements that everything that we deal with is made of. And every one of those atoms of carbon or something is the same as every other atom of carbon. So it's sort of surprising that all this stuff that we experience is made of a bunch of copies of the same thing. But actually, that rabbit hole goes much, much deeper than that. So, first of all, all those physical atoms like carbon and so on, they're ultimately made of things that come from the structure of this network where everything is just made of sort of the connectivity of these atoms of space. But then it gets much sort of worse than that, because the question is, you know, what's the rule by which that network that represents space and everything in it progresses? Well, you might say there's a particular rule that represents our universe. And the question then would be, okay, so let's say one day we find that rule. Then we might say, well, why did we get rule number such and such rather than another rule? Why did. Why were we the sort of lucky ones that got that particular rule? It's very confusing. It confused me for a while, and then I realized that actually the right answer is that what's underneath is basically running all possible rules. The tip off, actually, is the way that quantum mechanics seems to work. So in ordinary physics, you know, you say in sort of ordinary, classical physics, you throw a ball, goes in a definite trajectory. Quantum physics, the big idea is, no, it doesn't just go in one definite trajectory. There are many different paths it follows. And we only get to say the probabilities for different things that can happen. So in a sense. So in these models that I'm talking about, where you're taking this whole network that represents space and everything in it, you're saying, well, you apply these rules. But it turns out there are many possible ways you can apply the rules. And those many possible ways to apply the rules give you many possible kind of threads of time, many possible histories for the universe. Each possible sequence of applications of the rule gives you a different detailed sort of thread of time for the universe. And so one of the things that you then start realizing is quantum mechanics is this story of kind of these many threads of time. And then the big mystery of quantum mechanics is, why do we think that definite things happen? And so the answer to that, I think, is that our minds are also doing the same kind of multi threaded branching and merging thing that the universe is doing. So sort of the story of what we perceive is the story of how does a branching, merging mind perceive a branching, merging universe. And that turns out to be, it seems, the thing that is we call quantum mechanics. But so, so the, the first step is kind of understanding this. These many branches of time that in the usual case of quantum mechanics, we're perceiving sort of one lump of that as the thing that is the reality that we perceive. What we then realize is actually instead of just a particular rule being applied in lots of different ways, you can say, well, the answer to why do we get one rule rather than another is we don't. All possible rules are being applied. And then the point is that our minds effectively are at some particular. In the space of all possible rules being applied. We kind of exist at some place in that kind of space of all possible rules. And so we perceive the universe to work in some particular way. One way to think about this, I'm sorry, this is a deep rabbit hole
- [24:19]
Maya Bialik
I'm in there with you.
- [24:20]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
There's this, this thing I call the ruliad, which is kind of the entangled limit of the result of all possible rules being applied. And the kind of. The idea is that different sort of minds are perceiving different parts of this ruliad object. So in other words, there is this thing underneath that is this very complicated thing that sort of represents all possible computations. And our perception of it is based on existing as. You know, we have a mind that is sort of in a particular place in that ruliad, and different minds are in different places, while we are all
- [25:04]
Maya Bialik
essentially made of the same things. And we are. There's an individual difference in perception, there's an individual difference in interpretation, right? All of these things are theoretically subjective. I have a colorblind child. And so the question is, what color is? It was something we talked about, you know, for decades in our home. And the fact is there is a wavelength that I can describe, right? I can describe to the best of my ability the wavelength to. We are both seeing the same wavelength, but our interpretation, our perception, right, is different. So the only people who would not be surprised at this explanation would be really intensely spiritually dialed in, you know, yogis and mystics for thousands of years who have basically said exactly what you're saying, but from a much more. I don't want to say you're not huggable, but a much more huggable kind of perspective.
- [26:05]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
You know, it's a General feature of kind of these questions, deep questions in science and so on, that these kinds of questions have been asked for a really long time. And back before about 300 years ago, the most serious answers came from theology, philosophy, and so on. And then kind of science took off and was very successful in lots of kinds of areas.
- [26:25]
Maya Bialik
It did a really good job.
- [26:26]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Right? And, you know, but those questions were not ones that science, as it had been configured, was really able to talk about. And we're finally back to a point where we can start to talk about some of those questions. And, I mean, I think to your point, I mean, in, you know, one of the things to realize, one of the important realizations about thinking about sort of foundations of science is, you know, in the end, what matters is how we perceive things. What's actually out there in the universe. The ruliad doing all its complicated stuff, that's all sort of irrelevant. What's relevant is what a mind like ours perceives in the ruliad.
- [27:04]
Maya Bialik
Is that true?
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Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Yes, I think so.
- [27:07]
Maya Bialik
I mean, you're saying it, so I'm assuming it's true. But I want to ask you to elaborate a little bit on it, because some people might say, well, what if my perception is off? What if I'm not feeling grateful? What if I'm depressed? I mean, I'm really trying to bring this into the level of like. I mean, I'm really asking you what is real, Right?
- [27:26]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
And so I think what is real to each one of us is what we internally perceive.
- [27:32]
Maya Bialik
But it may not be accurate.
- [27:34]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Well, what does that mean?
- [27:36]
Maya Bialik
Right?
- [27:36]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
So just to say one piece of science and then to come back to that, one of the big things that has come out of things we've discovered in the last few years is in this ruliad object, this kind of entangled limit of all possible computations. Observers like us inevitably observe the laws of physics that we know to be the laws of physics. If we were not observers like us, we would not observe these laws of physics. Let me give a very simple example which actually relates to scale. Again, it's like we believe in space. We think there's a thing like space. You look around, you're in some room there, it's maybe 10 meters across or something, and you look at the other side of the room, and the photons, the light that's coming from the other side of the room arrives in microseconds from the other side of the room. Your brain. Our brains take milliseconds, thousands of seconds, thousands of times longer to process what we see. So to us, it's kind of like we're gulping in everything that's in the room in what seems like one moment of time to us. If our brains thought a million times faster, we wouldn't have that perception. We would have. And so that's one very simple example of where. And the idea that, oh, there's a notion of space, and you can say this is the state of the room in space at a particular time, and then at another time, there's another state of the whole room in space. That notion wouldn't be a natural one for us to have if we had a different kind of perception of. Of what was going on.
- [29:17]
Maya Bialik
So, Steven, do you frequently freak people out, like you make them lose their minds?
- [29:21]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
I don't think so. Not in that way.
- [29:24]
Maya Bialik
But this is a very. I'd like to know how you do freak people out if not in that way. But the question is really, you know, th. This rabbit hole, you know, it. It can be maddening. And I think one of the things that makes it easier is math. One of the things that make it easier is having nomenclature around it. It's having computation around it. It's having a structure and a place to put it. And as someone who spent many, many years in the joys of calculus and learning this other language and then trying to learn the language of organic chemistry but not being able to, and that's why I didn't go to medical school. I wonder, for people who don't have that sort of math language, for people who don't have, you know, that understanding, it can be very intimidating. I mean, it's intimidating for me, and I'm trying to get my head around it. What's the best way, you know, that you can help people understand big concepts without also feeling like you're exploding people's consciousness outside of their brains?
- [30:31]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Well, for me, the big thing is visualizing stuff. You see, you know, I'm talking about simple programs. They do complicated things. Just see some pictures of that. You know, it's really kind of clear what's going on. And it's a funny thing because, you know, I'm always trying to persuade, you know, scientists actually do some computer experiments. The computational universe is much wilder than you can possibly imagine. People have all these ideas. I had all these ideas about what would happen there. As soon as people actually do those experiments, their intuition changes. They start realizing things, like, you can have a very simple program. It does a very complicated thing. That's something very unintuitive to us. Because usually if you want to make something complicated, you expect you're going to have to go to a really lot of effort. You're going to have to have some complicated plan for how it works and so on, but it isn't true. And you can just have a little tiny program. You just keep running it, keep running it. It makes this really complicated pattern. You know, I think it's worth saying something about what I at least see science is, so to speak. So, you know, there's the universe out there. It's doing all the things the universe does, and there's our minds, which are capable of certain kinds of things. I think the role of science is to try and make this bridge between what the universe actually does and the kind of narrative that we can carry in our minds. So in a sense, it's the, you know, it's the goal of science to try and make that translation now, you know, how that lands and how complicated the thing that the narrative ends up being to be able to describe things in certain ways. That's a detailed question. Over the course of the history of our civilization, so to speak, the level of sophistication of that narrative has gotten greater. And we've, you know, we've been able to deal with sort of higher levels of abstraction. There are things, you know, one of the things that I suppose is sort of difficult at some level is, you know, we all grow up in a world where there are physical objects we can pick up and, you know, we're used to certain kinds of things about the way the sort of mechanical world works. Then we say, well, let's talk about this abstract world, which is perhaps a generalization of that mechanical world. That abstract world is not one that we just spent, you know, decades, you know, learning about from our everyday experience. It is one where, if you do computer experiments and so on, you do get, you know, I've spent enough time in sort of the computational universe. I don't know. I don't know what the ratio. It's probably a small fraction of my total lifespan, but I've spent enough time kind of in the computational universe that I feel somewhat at home there. And I think that's, you know, I think I'm not unique in that, in the fact that that's what's going to happen if you spend time there, you know, if. If you only spend time kind of in the physical universe, then then that's all the intuition you're going to get, right?
- [33:18]
Maya Bialik
And I think that's sort of the divide that Jonathan and I are so interested in, you know, we have this podcast where we talk about the intersection of science and spirituality. There is a common language, there is a common understanding. How we can articulate that, I think is the, the question that humanity is, you know, kind of poised with mind.
- [33:36]
Jonathan Cohen
Biox Breakdown is supported by Bioptimizers.
- [33:39]
Maya Bialik
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- [35:04]
Jonathan Cohen
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- [35:08]
Maya Bialik
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- [35:24]
Jonathan Cohen
So representing the non scientists side of the equation, when I hear you say that only what's real is what we perceive, the question a lot of people have is, well, how much can we change what we perceive? And you know, are we bound by the nature of some physical reality or can we really perceive almost anything we want Right.
- [35:46]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
I mean, I think your colorblindness example is an interesting one. There are, you know, the sensory inputs that we happen to have that biology has given us allow us to perceive certain kinds of things. It's easy to imagine, and even we can do it with scientific instruments and so on. We can perceive things which are not our natural level of perception, so to speak. And, you know, a fair amount of what has been discovered in science has been discovered by extending that kind of sensory, you know, level of sensory experience.
- [36:17]
Jonathan Cohen
The next follow up is many of the spiritual people consider that we have more than five senses and that there's an entire realm happening, interacting, the connections between each one of us that can be sensed and that information is available as data in the universe and that can also be sensed as we expand beyond our five senses. What does your time in the computational universe tell us about that?
- [36:45]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Things that people have believed for a long time often have a lot more to them than one might imagine. And just because science didn't manage to nail down how that works doesn't mean there's nothing to say there. That's the first thing.
- [36:58]
Maya Bialik
That's very generous of you.
- [37:00]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
It's. Well, I think it's. Look, an example I sort of think about from my own life when I was a kid, you know, grew up in England. Lots of, you know, there's compulsory religious education in England. That's post Henry viii. That's the way it's worked. And so, you know, you would hear about, you know, the soul, and it's like, what the heck is a soul? And, you know, a typical question if you're a physics kid is something like, how much does a soul weigh? Everything, if it exists, must weigh something. You might say. Well, in later life, I realized that's just completely the wrong question, because this idea of a soul that people had is this notion that there's something about what's happening in minds that isn't the physicality of brains. There's something that is more of an abstract thing about minds that isn't what's just there in the brain. And now that we understand computation, we understand a way of thinking about that abstract thing that can be sort of the abstract thing minds do, which is this abstract computational thing independent of the details of how neurons happen to work and so on. And so I kind of realized that, you know, this idea of a soul that's really old in the history of kind of, you know, theology and so on, is actually, you know, reaching at this idea that, at least for me, is a late 20th century idea, so to speak. But that was kind of a version of that idea expressed in terms, you know, the eternal soul, so to speak. It's expressed in terms that sound from the point of view of science and mathematical science, very primitive, but yet it actually is talking about something that ends up being a real thing, so to speak, when you understand the science in a different way. But I think in this question of sort of what is there to sense in the universe, in the concept of the ruliad, there's a lot to sense in the universe. The alien mind would sense very different things than we sense. The alien mind might very well sense things, will, will sense different laws of physics. To the alien mind, the universe will not be three dimensional, for example, the universe could be one dimensional, infinite dimensional.
- [39:15]
Maya Bialik
I wasn't going to go there so soon, but let's go there. You know, one of the things that people who often don't have a lot of knowledge about in terms of science is exactly what you're talking about. And yet they will make many, many claims about things that can or cannot be possible. Right. According to the way we view the world or the way we experience reality. And you know, I think UAPS is one of those things. There are many, many explanations for the things that people see. I don't have any particular horse in this race. However, you know, the notion that, well, that can't be real and you could insert anything that can't be real because that's not the way that things are supposed to happen. Right. That notion is something that you're basically saying is, it's subjective. Right. So when people who believe that UAPS are, let's say, aliens sending spaceships and the notion of like, oh, well, it didn't move at a trajectory that according to the laws of physics, the explanation, again, I'm not saying it's my opinion, but the explanation would be, well, what if this doesn't have to obey the laws of physics? What if it doesn't even have to obey the laws of observation of objects moving at the speed of light. Right. I mean, like, you might make people believe in aliens right now.
- [40:37]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Okay, so. So, well, there's a bunch of things to say about aliens that I think are fairly interesting. But, but to, to this point, the fact is we all perceive more, we all perceive similar laws of physics because we're all biologically very similar, I mean,
- [40:51]
Maya Bialik
identical from, of distance.
- [40:53]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Right, right. And I mean, you know, even if you imagine that different timescale of thinking that would lead one to have a Different view of how space works. It is. The fact that there is an objective reality for humans is a consequence of the fact that we're talking about humans. The objective reality, even for a dog or an ant, might be somewhat different. A dog, it's mostly smelling things, not seeing things and so on. It will have a different view of physics, so to speak. But now the question of when you say, well, what's really out there? What I'm saying is, what's really out there is something much bigger and more alien than one had imagined. The fact that physics works the way that physics works is a consequence of the fact that we are the way we are. Now, if you say, well, can you probe another piece of physics by being different from the way we are?
- [41:48]
Maya Bialik
We can't, because we only have. Right. We only have the way that we are in order to do physics the way we do it.
- [41:53]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Right? Except that we have a little bit of extension because technology gives us some extensions. You know, we can have spacecraft that go out other places. We can have, you know, telescopes that see in X rays and so on. Those are things that do let us probe other parts of the universe than the ones that we are immediately able to sense.
- [42:11]
Maya Bialik
Okay? But also, like, if we're going to go to aliens, let's go here. There are people who might be in this room who believe that they have perception that is outside of the perception that other people have. And the notion is not that everyone has that same, different perception, but sometimes people receive training or there are ancient traditions that are passed down with cohesion, right? And those people believe that they can experience things that other people do not experience to the point of, you know, just like there are wavelengths we can't see, just like there are wavelengths we can't hear, Right. Are there other wavelengths that people are tuning into which would fit very neatly into this conversation, including the doubts, the mocking, Right, the teasing, the dismissing, the materialistic saying, you're all crazy people being put in insane asylums, who in other eras would have been shamans, Right? How far can you take this difference in perception?
- [43:20]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Right. I think one of the issues is what each of us perceives internally is a thing that only we know. You know, it's. It's. I tend to think, you know, even if, you know, your average laptop has an internal feeling, it's just not one that we, you know, it's not our feeling. And it happens to not seem very much like us. So we don't, you know, attribute to it things that we would attribute to another human but you know, there's the question of, well, you've got that internal feeling now, can you externalize it? You know, it's a non trivial thing that we can externalize anything. You know, in our brains we've got 100 billion neurons firing away. And the fact that we can take all that neuron firing and package it up into something which turns into a word that we can say to somebody else that they'll understand and then unpack it as a bunch of neuron firings in their brain, the fact that that communication is possible is a non trivial thing. And you know, the question of whether you say, well, you know, I don't know, I wouldn't be very good at describing smells, let's say, or tastes. You know, I would say, well, it kind of tastes a bit like this and a bit like that. And it wouldn't be something that is easy for me. Even though I have an internal sensation of it. It's not something that's easy for me to externalize. And I think the question is really if it is going to be useful as a thing that is of collective, part of our collective knowledge base, there has to be a way to externalize those internal perceptions, those internal feelings. And I think that's a thing where, you know, one of the questions is, do you have a language to express those things? Now, you know, if you were thinking about mathematics 2,000 years ago, you might very well have things where you sort of are imagining this, you know, polyhedron in, you know, geometric object and so on. You've got it in your mind, but you have no way to externalize the way to talk about that. So it's all well and good inside you, but it's not something that we can think of as part of this sort of collective knowledge base. The kind of the things that we can meaningfully discuss with each other. Because it's only a one person internal feeling, so to speak. So I think that's, you know, it's really a question to me of, you know, somebody says, well, I have this internal feeling. Great. You know, we all have internal feelings about things. If you can't externalize it, if you can't go, you know, it could be that in your brain there's, you know, 10,000 neurons somewhere shouting out like that, somewhere in your brain. But you have no way to turn that into something that is a communicable, you know, I've got words to say to describe what's going on and you know, then where do we go with that? Well, you could Say, well, you can probe it with, you know, fmri. I don't think that works terribly well. But, you know, let's imagine you have some. You know, that's actually one of. To me, that's one of the sort of foundational questions in areas like neuroscience is we know individual neurons, they do their thing. At the end, the person says yes or no. But the question is, is there something, Is there sort of some higher level representation of what's going on inside that's beyond just saying the person says yes or no. So, I mean, I think what we're saying here is that if there is an internal feeling, there might be some way to probe the brain and say, oh, this person's having that internal feeling that's sort of externalizable. The main way we tend to externalize things is through saying things, moving around, doing things and so on. And I think absent that, it's kind of hard to know what's going on inside.
- [47:03]
Maya Bialik
Well, yeah, I mean, one of the applications would be people who believe, let's say, in remote viewing. And we've had kind of mixed, you know, mixed reviews here in our conversations with remote viewing because we've spoken to people who were trained by the army to do remote viewing, who, you know, had strange and unusual abilities in childhood that were then honed in a specific way. And she spent her career solving crimes that we know were solved in ways that no one could predict. You know, the notion that sort of consciousness exists outside of the body and like, you don't have to have a physical body to be in a field of consciousness, like these are, these are bigger concepts and in many cases scarier applications of this notion of how much is about what we're perceiving. So I guess my question would be if there is a way to quantify something, right? If you're looking at remote viewing, which again, I don't think is something that everyone can learn, but I do believe there may be certain brains that have different abilities. Is there an ability, for example, to try and quantify, right, the accuracy with which someone can predict something? They don't have to be correct 100% of the time. I mean, nothing else in the world is.
- [48:17]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Look, we have a good test case in modern AIs. What can modern AIs really do? They have sort of brain like things and there's a lot of mystery about what they can actually do. I mean, I studied the science of them quite a bit and can say a whole bunch about what we know about what they can do. And the Sort of computational irreducibility problems of being able to say, given that we know how the thing is set up, we still can't say what it can do. Type thing. One could break these things into two, maybe two big buckets. One is things that are mysterious about the way collections of neurons work or whatever else, or the way that neural nets in AI's work. That's one thing. That's sort of an abstract science problem. Second bin is physical phenomena that we didn't know were phenomena. Like, for example, there's pretty decent evidence that pigeons can sense the Earth's magnetic field. Right. Who knows whether we can? Maybe we can too. And that's something that would seem like it's a bizarre kind of extrasensory capability. And so there are questions about how deep do things like that go in physics. One is used to the simple explanation is usually the right explanation. In biology, it's usually there are footnotes to footnotes to footnotes. Nothing is simple. And I think I actually understand from a foundational point of view why that is the case in biology.
- [49:52]
Maya Bialik
Well, if everything was simple, we never would have evolved. That's my short guess.
- [49:56]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Well, that's an interesting. Okay, so I recently worked on this question about why biological evolution can work. In other words, why do you not get stuck? Why is it the case that given some fitness criterion that you can kind of make things that can actually get to that fitness criterion, rather than just saying, sorry, with this raw material, you just can't get there.
- [50:20]
Maya Bialik
Right. And we were taught that the answer is random mutation.
- [50:23]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Yes, but the question is whether what can you build with random mutation? What can it do? And the answer is, if you think about that mutation changing the rules by which the system operates, which is basically what's happening when you change the DNA changes the program that makes the organism, then the question is, well, what kind of a thing can it make? As you change that program a bit, how can it change the thing that's made? And the answer is it makes because of this phenomenon that very simple programs can do very complicated things. Sort of a consequence of that is you make these small changes to the program, you can get these bizarre changes to the overall behavior. And the big point is that the, the things we try to achieve in sort of to be fit organisms in the world are very coarse kinds of things. It is not the case. So, for example, if every organism, when it was born, immediately had to be able to work out a thousand digits of PI, no organisms would make it. You'd never be able to get that DNA program to be the one that has those digits of PI programmed into the organism. You just wouldn't, you know, this random mutation would never reach an organism that could do that. It's because the actual criteria for the success of an organism are quite coarse that it turns out to be possible to that in the space of possible programs that you can actually find these paths that will get you to an organism that will be successful in this kind of course fitness.
- [51:54]
Maya Bialik
So you're putting the big rocks in first, you're putting the coarse rocks in first, and then you're filling it in with all of the smaller rocks.
- [52:00]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
No, actually, it's really that, that it, you know, the things that it takes to be a successful organism are just not that detailed. There's a lot of, you know, you can have, you know, I'm sure we would have done fine with, you know, six fingers instead of five. It doesn't matter much. We would have found a way to do the things we want to do, you know, with slightly different, you know, physical apparatus. And it's that fact that makes it possible, combined with this phenomenon, that there is sort of all this richness in the computational universe of possible programs. That's what allows it to be the case that you can reach this thing. And by the way, it's the same phenomenon that makes machine learning work. It's the fact that if you try and teach a neural net to distinguish a cat from a dog, fine, you can do that. If you want to teach a neural net to do some very complicated piece of math, it's not going to work. It's because the, you know, distinguish a cat from a dog is this rather coarse thing where it's kind of very fuzzy. Exactly what the boundaries of catness and dogness are and so on. That makes it something that you can hit with something where you're just adjusting this neural net to get it to recognize a cat from a dog.
- [53:20]
Jonathan Cohen
You know, the, the idea of, well, if you feel something internally. I felt like that conversation might have slightly missed the mark, because while I appreciate how it's being described, the question is almost like, is there math and science catching up to expanding the possibility of human perception so that it's not simply either some person making believe. And now you can qualify the making believe by having those intuitions or signs translated into what is more objectively considered real? Like, oh, that premonition happened and that event actually happened in the real world. But what I'm hearing in parts of these conversations is that as we expand our understanding of what's possible, we may be unable to expand our perception of these possibilities.
- [54:20]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing to realize this point about, you have an inner thought, and can you package that inner thought into something that anybody else can understand? And that has to do with what language can you use to describe that inner thought? What formalism have you built? And kind of the progress of kind of science knowledge in general is this sort of progressive expansion of the kind of paradigms that we can use to describe things, the ways that we can take those raw thoughts that we have and sort of make them formal and structured so that we can communicate them. And so, you know, there's plenty of examples of things where it was very vague before some kind of sort of formal structure was invented that let people do that kind of communication. And that that was, you know, that's been true. I don't know, even take logic as an example. You know, before Aristotle and friends, you know, people were talking about all kinds of things, but nobody was saying, I suspect, oh, that's a valid argument because it has this and that structure.
- [55:25]
Maya Bialik
Right. And the notion also that culture is shaping the language and the capabilities to even want to communicate things. I mean, that's, you know, possibly, I think, one of the most fascinating components of this, but I think where it also leads us to. And we're going to get back to aliens, you know, I'm going to ask you a simple question. Does the body have a language?
- [55:46]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
I mean. Okay, that's not a simple question.
- [55:50]
Maya Bialik
I meant I'm going to use a very few words to ask the question I'm asking.
- [55:55]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Yes. Okay. So, I mean, that's a. That's a very interesting question. And I think this issue of how do we best describe the things that go on in biological systems? So in something like the abstractions of mathematics, we do have something that is, language like, that allows us to describe that. Brains, the immune system, these are all complicated, dynamic systems. And we can ask, what is our way of having sort of a human understandable narrative? What's going on in them? That's what we operationally mean by saying we have a language for them. Is, is there a kind of way that we can take what's going on in them and capture some piece of what's going on and fit it in our minds?
- [56:40]
Maya Bialik
I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. What was my body trying to tell me when it says we don't recognize the thyroid, we think it's attacking and we're gonna kick it into overdrive cuz it's a negative feedback loop. What was my body trying to tell me is kind of the question.
- [56:56]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Right, well, so it's a good question. I mean, so in the immune system you've got a bunch of T cells that are going and you know, and attacking the, you know, cells in the thyroid and whatever else. Those T cells, you know, they interact with each other. We don't know all the dynamics of what's going on. It's a bit similar to how neurons interact with each other. There is a, you know, there's a complicated thing that's happening in the immune system and you know, can we find a way of describing that that is a narrative that we can understand or are we stuck just saying oh well, these T cells, one T cell interacts with another in this particular way and we've got a trillion T cells a little less than that, 100 billion T cells, whatever it is, that are just doing their thing. And the end result is autoimmune attack of the thyroid, so to speak. Or is there a higher level description?
- [57:49]
Maya Bialik
The higher level spiritual description is. It's my, it's this chakra, right? And it's, I'm. Something's blocked about my, my voice and it's probably trauma that didn't allow me to speak. And now my body's attacking itself at the level where the energetic consciousness is blocked. I'm partly, this is tongue in cheek
- [58:09]
Jonathan Cohen
or there is some sort of environmental factor that's negatively impacting the system as a whole and that's where it's expressing itself.
- [58:17]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Right. I mean, look, this question of whether there are sort of description, you know, biology has not been a field that's had theories mostly. You know, the main theory of biology is natural selection. And you know, the other sort of thing which you can think of as a theory is that genetic information is digital. Those are the two big things that have been sort of theories in biology. When you get beyond that, it's, you know, it's surprisingly devoid of theory. People don't believe there can be a theory. And by the way, the kinds of things I've thought about, about foundations of biology, you build up these kind of very complicated structures and if you say why does the structure work that way? The answer is there's no real answer to that. So here's an analogy that I think is also relevant to machine learning. If you have an objective like your objective is build a wall, one way to achieve that objective is the sort of engineering way you make bricks that are very indefinite shapes you build up the wall, you can understand how the wall was built. Another approach is you're just seeing a bunch of rocks lying around on the ground. You pick up the rock that happens to fit, you fit it in, you build up a thing that functionally is a wall. But if you start saying, well, you know, explain this wall to me, why does the wall have this particular pattern? You won't be able to have an explanation. It's just, it happened to fit in that way. And I think that's a question for biology. A lot of biology is it happened to fit in that way. That was the way that the role of the dice and random mutations happened to in the particular history of life on Earth. It happened to work that way. This is what we got. This is how life on Earth works in doing that particular kind of thing. So, I mean, I think. But the question of whether there is a. Whether there's a higher level description of what's going on, I mean, that's a highly interesting question in biology. It's been rather unsuccessful at a scientific level. Whether these kind of things that come from outside traditional science, whether those descriptions, like I was mentioning with the notion of a soul, are the humors as valid as the soul, so to speak. I don't know. It's a reasonable question. And it's not, you know, I think to say, well, because the tradition from which those things came was a tradition that doesn't happen to align with the kind of tradition of mathematical science. So it must all be nonsense. That would be a mistake in my view. But, you know, can one actually make these connections? Not yet. I mean, I think that, you know, I was very pleased with the fact that I think I figured out something actually about two weeks ago about the nature of living matter. So back in Victorian times, people would have said, you say, what is inside a living organism? Is it a liquid? No, it's not really a liquid. People would have said in Victorian times, they would say it's protoplasm. What is protoplasm?
- [61:15]
Maya Bialik
It's goo. We're made of goo.
- [61:16]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Yeah, we're made of goo. Right. In fact, even in the thing I wrote about this, I used the term gooey in some part of some. Some description, but yes, I mean. And so what is that goo? Well, one of the things we know from molecular biology is there's a lot of kind of active transport processes. Molecules are kind of moving other molecules around in a way that looks somehow purposeful, cooperative. Right. And so the question is, there's this sort of Orchestration that's happening with these molecules. We are the result of a kind of bulk orchestration of molecular processes. And the question is, can one find a way to describe that notion of bulk orchestration? And I was excited that I have found such a. You know, I've got the beginnings of a way to describe that. The main result is that anything that was evolved for a computationally simple purpose, that fact that the whole system was evolved for some computationally simple purpose turns out to have consequences for what the system looks like at a microscopic level.
- [62:22]
Maya Bialik
You're exactly, I think, supporting, you know, for us, this notion of does the environment matter? Oh, we know that it does. Does the cellular environment matter? What does it mean to say that the cellular environment matters even from cells outside of the nervous system? We recently got to speak to Nikolaju Kushkin, you know, who showed this sort of storage of memory, as it were, in cells that are not within the nervous system. The notion of, where are we holding things? What environment? Right. Are our cells operating in? That leads to breakdowns in any of these transport systems. You know, a breakdown in any one of these systems could bring the entire organism to a halt. You know, and the, the Kabbalistic quote that I always say is that there's this notion that if God would stop thinking about us for one second, we would say cease to exist. Right. That there's a constant creation.
- [63:17]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
That's a very Spinoza like view of the universe.
- [63:20]
Maya Bialik
I'm very spin. Yes, I'm a Spinoza. Look, he clocked me.
- [63:23]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
The universe is the thoughts of God actualized, so to speak, Correct?
- [63:27]
Maya Bialik
It. It. It is. But, but also for me, I'm very interested as a person of faith, which my children think I'm lying because they really just think I'm a good scientist. The separation of a religious concept of a divine concept, right. You can actually separate it and say, there is something going on here that is remarkable. There's something going on here that defies all of even Steven Wolfram's computation. There's something here that's mysterious.
- [63:53]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
See, that's the place where you slightly lose me, okay? Because this is the thing. My intuition 45 years ago was, if I can say how something works underneath, I can tell you how it's going to work. And that is the traditional intuition. Turns out that just isn't the way things work. It's not the way the computational universe works. People have this view that you kind of understand what's underneath. It's sort of the reductionist view of science. And if we can do successful reductionist science. We're done. Whenever we can't see a reductionist explanation for something, you say there's some phenomenon about your immune system or something like that, and we can't point to the sort of reductionist thing that answers it. Then we say it's mystery. Well, I don't think it's mystery.
- [64:44]
Maya Bialik
Okay, so what is it? We just can't explain it yet?
- [64:47]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
No, it's this phenomenon of computational irreducibility. It's like, sorry, you just can't. There isn't a simple narrative that explains what's going on. It does what it does. The question is, and you're asking, I think, a very good question, which is, is there a language to describe what happens? Which is essentially saying, is there a science of the kind of the way that we usually think of science? I think of science as this thing taking the natural world as it is, with all its complexity, and finding a way to describe the things that we care about, about the natural world in a narrative that fits in our minds. There are features of the natural world we don't care about. We, you know, when we look at some, you know, glass of water, we might talk about, you know, the eddies in the water and things like this. We're not, when we're thinking about it at the level of water, we're not thinking about all those molecular motions. That's not what we are concentrating on.
- [65:42]
Maya Bialik
I sometimes do.
- [65:44]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Well, so do I, but it's not. It's not our typical everyday way of thinking about the world.
- [65:50]
Maya Bialik
Right.
- [65:51]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Is there a way of describing things that can fit in our minds? One might believe science is so powerful that everything about the world can be described in a way where this narrative that fits in our minds can be derived with science. That's what I would have believed 45 years ago. Then I discovered computational irreducibility. And then I realized that that's just not true, that there are plenty of things where you can know the underlying rules, but to say the whole story of what happens is not. There is no language.
- [66:25]
Maya Bialik
This is also, I mean, not to make you talk about everything, but I kind of want to make you talk about everything. This is what's wrong with Western medicine because they keep telling you that if you give me a problem, I'll give you the solution. And when it comes to things like women, hormones, mental health, these things, there's not a computational analysis you can do to explain why. Fill in the blank. Right. And you can work with functional medicine doctors who are basically Biochemists, you know, that are on call 24 7. Right. You can get a functional medicine doctor who will say, well, you're not converting this to that. And oh, you have the L version of this instead of the. They can do that. And it's fascinating, it's wonderful. And let's see what happens if we give you a vitamin k supplement for 30 days. Let's see what happens if this, this, that, the other. And still there is, there is something that happens for many people that does not obey the laws. Whether it's trauma, whether it's environment, whether it's the bad codependent choices you're still making. These are all the things that say to the biological system, you're not behaving. And all those commercials on TV tell me that there's a solution. That's why I don't believe them.
- [67:37]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Right? I mean, look, the thing is science, reductionist science had a great 300 year run. A lot of things people thought, we've been successful, we can send spacecraft all over the place, we can build smartphones, we can do all these kinds of things. Science in that pattern must be able to do everything. It simply isn't true. And this computational irreducibility phenomenon is the kind of thing that gets stuck and you just can't say what's going to happen. Now you mentioned medicine. I was sort of surprised myself recently by trying to understand something about the foundations of medicine. And the question is, what is the fundamental problem of medicine? I think something close to what you described. So an organism like us has been evolved by a couple of billion years of evolution. We've gotten to where we are now. The organism has a natural way of being, but the organism will get perturbed, maybe because of something in the environment, maybe for all kinds of different reasons. You can take some computational model of a simple organism that has been evolved, you can poke it, you can perturb it, you'll see that it no longer does what it would normally do. Then what's the problem of medicine? The problem of medicine is to poke it again and see if you can get it to go back to what it was otherwise going to do. That problem turns out to be a computationally very difficult problem. That problem is a. You can kind of see why it's hard. And your point about everything connects to everything. Yes, you see that in these simple computational models, you see that the thing as a whole works. But if you say, well, if you take this piece out, is it still going to work? The sort of reductionist approach of you look at that one part of it and say, does that work on its own? The answer is no. And that's, that's something that is not a, you know, that is not a non scientific statement.
- [69:37]
Maya Bialik
No, that's all of perimenopause. You just described perimenopause.
- [69:42]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
The kinds of things I study with, you know, computational experiments and things like this. This is kind of very mainstream from the point of view of the way that one thinks about kind of formalized science. Yet what is interesting is from within that very mainstream way of thinking about formalized science comes the message that there are limitations to what formalized science can do. And we're seeing, we are a walking example of kind of the effect of computational irreducibility. We are the way we are because of sort of the details of what happened over a couple of billion years. And when you start sort of reductionistically taking pieces out, the whole thing doesn't fit together. It's very unfortunate. It would be nice if you could just poke us in a certain way and have everything go back to the way it was. I was a little disappointed to realize that there is sort of a fundamental computational problem in sort of solving medicine, so to speak. But it's not one of these things where it's like we're just going to find this magic cure. I mean, I think the main message actually is that sort of replacing things by regenerating them is the thing that can work. And poking them to make a change is much more difficult, which is, by the way, what biology already discovered. Because that's why we have successive generations of organisms. One organism does its thing and then we have children who do their thing. And it's like, like with a computer. It's like your computer is running its operating system, Things go wrong. Eventually it crashes, it reboots, it starts again, and all is, you know, all is happy.
- [71:18]
Maya Bialik
That's what being a parent is like. You just watch them crash and reboot.
- [71:23]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Well, that's each successive generation you can think of being, you know, there's a crash and then you're rebooting from the same operating system. Well, our kids aren't quite the same as us as, as one.
- [71:35]
Maya Bialik
Well, this, this is actually what I was thinking. For people who repeat the same things that were inflicted on them to their children, which we all hope that we won't, what you're actually doing is not allowing their spontaneous musicians to show how they can achieve more emotionally.
- [71:52]
Jonathan Cohen
I'm wondering from your perspective, is it the problem of computational irreducibility or is it that we actually don't know enough about how the system work? Meaning that there are probably more factors and more variables than we could have possibly tracked given how unique everyone's life is. And there's so much about how our perceptions interact with our biology that couldn't have previously been mapped, that potentially with AI now we may be on the forefront of a explosion of new data and a better understanding of how the system operates that could give us new breakthroughs to better understand, for example, autoimmune conditions and map patterns that, for example, Gabor Mate talks about in terms of the upbringing and psychological profiles that can maybe impact how the biology is functioning.
- [72:45]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Yeah, I mean, look, the point I'm making is that even if we know all the details about sort of the underlying biochemistry of what's happening, it's still the case that there's a fundamental problem of medicine, so to speak. It's not just that we didn't do the reductionism well enough. There's a different problem when you put all those pieces together, they do things that aren't things that you can readily predict from just knowing the underlying rules. Now I think to your point about this relates to, is there a language of biology, so to speak. In other words, we get all this data. Biology is absolutely drowning in data. There's some, there's tons of data, there's
- [73:25]
Maya Bialik
no theories, there's no shortage of rats that they are breeding to then do experiments on and sacrifice.
- [73:31]
Jonathan Cohen
There's no theories, right?
- [73:32]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
There aren't theories. And this is a, there's a sort of a big gap in theory and that's been partly a matter of not having the raw material to make theories with and partly a more sociological thing that people kind of just gave up. They said, you know, whenever we try and do something, you know, we have this drug, it's supposed to work, but then it has this weird side effect that we didn't expect, etc, etc, etc. The only thing we can do is do these kind of probabilistic experiments and say, you know, in a randomized trial this is what happens.
- [74:02]
Maya Bialik
And usually they're lying to work for profit.
- [74:06]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Well, they choose the. When you say randomized, there's a question of which exact random number. Who did you pick? Right. That's always the, you know, that's a very high tech part of the business.
- [74:17]
Jonathan Cohen
Why do you think there's a shortage of theories?
- [74:21]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
Because there has not been a conceptual framework with which to make theories of the kinds of things that show up in life and I think that that's the thing, my own efforts in trying to understand sort of this computational paradigm, I think we finally have the raw material to be able to make such theories. And we're sort of in the very, very early stages of being able to do that. And I think that what we will discover, we will make theories of certain kinds of things, like the immune system is one that's very ripe for that. I happen. One of my kids happens to be interested in theoretical immunology, so I have to avoid immunology. I'm not allowed to work on immunology.
- [74:59]
Jonathan Cohen
Well, that takes away my next question, which was, do you have any theories that you're cooking up? But if you're not allowed to play
- [75:05]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
in that space, the fundamental problem of the immune system, right, is how we are. Some antigen comes in, and we can make antibodies that fairly specifically target that antigen. And it's, you know, how that works, what the space of possible shapes of antibodies is like and how that sort of maps into the space of possible antigens. And why, you know, the antibodies, roughly, antibodies that you made happen to, you know, lock into some protein in your thyroid gland. You know, we don't. We don't know how that works.
- [75:42]
Maya Bialik
Surprise. I'm working with your child on immunology. That's the surprise of the day. We're gonna hit pause on our conversation with Dr. Stephen Wolfram. I know you're wondering, what else could you possibly cover? You've covered so much. Well, guess what, people. In part two, we're going to talk about aliens. Are they out there? How are they communicating? How. How are we possibly mistaking the way to perceive alien activity? We're going to talk about his role on arrival as science consultant. He's going to tell us what it was like to blend physics and mathematical linguistic computation with Hollywood. And we're also going to talk about free will and consciousness. Is it fundamental?
- [76:23]
Jonathan Cohen
Part two of the episode also touches on telepathy, how computers communicate, and is it similar to how psi phenomenon may operate or not? And how our perception of linear time may be misleading us.
- [76:39]
Maya Bialik
Stay tuned for part two of our conversation with Dr. Steven Wolferman. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.
- [76:45]
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
It's Maya Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two, and now she's gonna break down. So break down. She's gonna break it down.