Emergence Explained with David Krakauer

Summary

StarTalk Radio Episode Summary: "Emergence Explained with David Krakauer"

Podcast Information:

• Title: StarTalk Radio
• Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Guest: David Krakauer
• Release Date: August 8, 2025
• Description: In this enlightening episode, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute and Professor of Complex Systems, to delve deep into the concepts of complexity and emergence. Together, they explore how these phenomena influence various disciplines, from physics and biology to artificial intelligence and consciousness.

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1. Introduction to Complexity and Emergence

[01:17] Chuck Nice: "Complexity and emergence. Two terms that I think in modern times should be on everyone's tongue."

The episode kicks off with host Chuck Nice highlighting the significance of complexity and emergence in today's scientific discourse. Recognizing that this is the first time these subjects are being thoroughly explored on their show, the guests set the stage for an in-depth discussion.

2. The Santa Fe Institute and Its Mission

[03:14] Chuck Nice: "We've got with us David Krakauer. David, welcome to StarTalk."

David Krakauer introduces the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), emphasizing its interdisciplinary approach aimed at "searching for order in the complexity of evolving worlds." He underscores the institute's foundation in 1984, spurred by the need to bridge gaps between social sciences and natural sciences—a legacy rooted in collaborations with notable figures like Eugene Wigner and Enrico Fermi.

Notable Quote:

"Searching for order in the complexity of evolving worlds." – David Krakauer ([04:48])

3. Roots and Foundations of Complexity Science

[11:08] David Krakauer: "The roots are the study of machines—machines that were made in the industrial revolution, like steam engines, or machines that evolved like organisms."

Krakauer traces complexity science back to the Industrial Revolution, distinguishing between manufactured machines and naturally evolving organisms. He introduces the concept of "problem-solving matter" versus "regular matter," highlighting questions unique to complex systems, such as efficiency, adaptation, and evolution.

Notable Quote:

"Problem-solving matter versus regular matter is a fundamental distinction in complexity science." – David Krakauer ([11:08])

4. Defining Emergence

[28:24] David Krakauer: "Emergence is about new states or phases of matter or organization, with new languages and descriptions, typically mathematical."

The conversation delves into the definition of emergence. Krakauer explains it as the phenomenon where higher-level properties arise from the interactions of lower-level components, creating new systems with distinct behaviors and rules.

Notable Quote:

"Emergence involves new states of organization with their own language and predictions." – David Krakauer ([28:24])

5. Intelligence, AI, and Problem-Solving

[37:21] David Krakauer: "Intelligence is basically someone or something that makes a hard problem easy."

Krakauer distinguishes between genuine intelligence and current artificial intelligence (AI) systems. He criticizes AI for being "fake intelligent," capable of retrieving information quickly but lacking true problem-solving abilities. The discussion touches on the limitations of the Turing Test and the necessity for AI to demonstrate understanding and reasoning beyond mere data processing.

Notable Quote:

"Intelligence is about making hard problems easy, not just retrieving answers." – David Krakauer ([37:21])

6. Consciousness: Understanding the Unfathomable

[52:05] David Krakauer: "Consciousness is not about solving the hard problem. It's about that little window of attention that is focused on some part of the problem."

The topic of consciousness is approached with skepticism regarding current scientific theories. Krakauer emphasizes that consciousness remains largely misunderstood and criticizes the overemphasis on finding quantifiable metrics. He relates consciousness to limited attention mechanisms rather than a comprehensive understanding of complex problems.

Notable Quote:

"Consciousness relates to the limited window of attention, not the solution of the hard problem." – David Krakauer ([52:05])

7. The Role of Tools and Artifacts in Human Intelligence

[58:36] David Krakauer: "Human intelligence has always been about ingenious outsourcing to artifacts and tools, including mathematics."

Krakauer discusses how human intelligence leverages tools and artifacts to extend cognitive capabilities. He categorizes tools into "complementary cognitive artifacts" (e.g., pencils, abaci) that enhance intelligence and "competitive cognitive artifacts" (e.g., GPS, large language models) that may diminish our innate problem-solving abilities.

Notable Quote:

"The choice of tools determines whether we outsource our capabilities to become smarter or dumber." – David Krakauer ([58:36])

8. Life as a Universal Problem-Solver

[60:35] Gary O'Reilly: "You said life is problem solving, so why has the universe created life, and what is the problem it's trying to solve?"

Krakauer presents two philosophical perspectives on the purpose of life. The cynical view posits that life is the universe's mechanism for achieving thermodynamic equilibrium by generating entropy. In contrast, the idealist view suggests that life allows the universe to "know itself."

Notable Quote:

"Life is the most efficient generator of entropy." – David Krakauer ([61:04])

9. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The episode wraps up with reflections on the intricate balance between understanding complex systems and recognizing the limitations of current scientific paradigms. Krakauer and Tyson agree on the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to unravel the mysteries of emergence, intelligence, and consciousness.

Notable Quote:

"Emergent phenomena require new languages and descriptions to be understood effectively." – David Krakauer ([31:07])

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Key Takeaways:

• Complexity Science: Explores the intricate interactions within systems, seeking patterns and order amidst chaos.
• Emergence: The arising of new properties at higher levels of organization, requiring distinct frameworks for understanding.
• Intelligence vs. AI: True intelligence involves problem-solving and adaptability, which current AI systems lack.
• Consciousness: Remains a profound mystery, with current theories insufficient to fully explain its nature.
• Tools and Artifacts: Play a crucial role in extending and potentially limiting human cognitive abilities.
• Philosophical Perspectives on Life: Offers contrasting views on whether life serves a self-aware purpose or is a natural mechanism for entropy.

This episode of StarTalk Radio provides a comprehensive exploration of complex systems and emergent phenomena, offering listeners a nuanced understanding of how these concepts intersect with various aspects of science and human cognition.

Transcript

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Chuck Nice]

Complexity and emergence. Two terms that I think in modern times should be on everyone's tongue.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They will be after this show instead of what we have right now, which is stupidity and ignorance. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition, which means I got Gary O'Reilly sitting right next to me.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Hi, Neil.

[Chuck Nice]

Gary O' former soccer pro.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Good to have you, man who knows nothing about sucker. Nothing.

[Chuck Nice]

That's cause you're American.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's right, Mirkham, baby.

[Chuck Nice]

So you guys always come up with fun topics and today is no exception.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Complexity. Oh my gosh, Complexity.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

And I'm amazed this is our first time we've ever handled this subject.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's been one we've been waiting to find the right guest to enter the arena. Okay, and guess what? We have.

[Chuck Nice]

We have. All right, take us there.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Let me frame it this way. As we come to grips with the reality of the lives we live, I ask myself, is there anyone out there considering the Complexity of everything.

[David Krakauer]

Right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Asking the big questions. How did intelligence evolve in the universe? Does intelligence have limits? How do ideas evolve? Are there laws of life? And then here, though, the biggie, what is life?

[David Krakauer]

Right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So happy to say there isn't just one individual, but an institution that's set to these tasks. Neil, if you would kindly introduce our guest.

[Chuck Nice]

I would be delighted to. We've got with us David Krakauer. David, welcome to StarTalk.

[David Krakauer]

Fantastic to be with you.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. And you are? President of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. This is a world famous place where deep thinkers go and the question is and die. That's what I said. Do they ever come out, is the question. So you are the William H. Miller professor of Complex Systems. I'm impressed that that's even a title you can have.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's a great. Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

Professor of Complex Systems.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Imagine how big his door is. Just to get that name on, I.

[Chuck Nice]

Want to be professor of Simple Systems.

[Gary O'Reilly]

There are those.

[Chuck Nice]

What else I have. You have a background in evolutionary theory. Good. With also a background in computer science and math. So it sounds like you've got just the right pedigree for this. And I think if we have time, we'll get to that. You're founder of the Interplanetary Project at the Santa Fe Institute. I only just now first heard of that, but we wouldn't get to the bottom of that as well. So let me just lead off here. We've had a couple of guests on our show who have either spent time at the Santa Fe Institute or were on the faculty there. If that's the right way to say it. Can you just remind everybody what the mission statement is of the Santa Fe Institute and what distinguishes it from any other place that believes they're having deep thoughts about the world?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And can you simplify that into one sentence?

[David Krakauer]

Yes.

[Chuck Nice]

No. He's a complexity professor.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, that's right. That's right.

[David Krakauer]

That's right. Well, I'll tell you the mission, which is one sentence. It won't help, but it's searching for order in the complexity of evolving worlds. That's the mission statement. And I guess this whole conversation is what does that even mean?

[Chuck Nice]

Which. Which has its own bias because you're presuming there is order within the complexity to begin with.

[David Krakauer]

Absolutely. And I assume the fact that we're here having this conversation is some kind of evidence of that fact.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, okay. All right.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah. So essentially, the Institute was founded in 1984 in the mountains of New Mexico. There's a reason we're Here because of Los Alamos. And we can discuss that history because it's sort of interesting, actually. I think of us as the sort of more generative, optimistic, fissile material in this part of the landscape, just to.

[Chuck Nice]

Remind people, Los Alamos, I mean, it's a national lab. Right, okay. And where nuclear reserves are kept and managed in and overseen. Very important place. And it's not an accident that it's in the middle of fricking nowhere. Right, okay. You're not going to put that in.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

A city just in case of an accident. It's in the middle of fricking nowhere.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. So you have sort of genetic history, overlapping history with Los Alamos.

[David Krakauer]

Los Alamos, absolutely. In fact, it's sort of interesting that there's an interesting cultural history here. The founding president, George Cowan, he was a child prodigy, and he had worked very early with two people from your world. He'd worked with Eugene Wigner, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on symmetries applied to physics, and with Enrico.

[Chuck Nice]

Fermi, famous for the paradox. Among other things.

[David Krakauer]

Yes, among many other things. And so he then became eventually the director of research at Los alamos. In the 1950s, he was asked to give a talk at the Aspen Institute, which is kind of just down the road in Colorado, and he gave a talk on social entropy. So the notion of entropy we're familiar with from physics, that systems tend towards disorder. And he thought, well, maybe that's true of society. He gives the talk and he flames out. No one understood what he was talking about. Is this a metaphor? Do you actually have something in mind mathematically? That was in the early 50s, 30 years elapsed, and you're thinking there's something wrong with the world where the social sciences and the natural sciences, the mathematical sciences, are not communicating as they should be. And that's really the origin story. In the 80s, a group of rather illustrious people came together. Several Nobel laureates said, what would it take to build an institute where we don't start with the divisions of departments and the divisions of knowledge, but we actually just kind of short circuit them and have people compressed in a very high density in one place in the high desert? And that's sort of the premise.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm interested. Interplanetary project.

[Chuck Nice]

What is that?

[Gary O'Reilly]

There's a niche that needs scratching right now, Please.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[David Krakauer]

Okay, so given our perspective on how the world works, how the universe works, our belief that life is probably universal, there's no evidence, but I think it's a reasonable assumption to make. What would it Mean to have a theory of the universe or a festival of the universe that included not just physics but economics and sociology and poetry and art and music. Right. In other words, astrobiology, as Neil well knows, is dominated by physics. But if it's true that there's life elsewhere, there might be extraordinary sport, extraordinary music to be discovered on another planet. So we wanted to expand the range of thinking about life in the universe to encompass all disciplines. And again, that's the kind of spirit of sfi.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But are these really disciplines that are created by life, or are they our perception of our preeminence in life?

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, that. I mean, that's a really deep question that relates.

[Chuck Nice]

I didn't understand it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Really.

[Chuck Nice]

No.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So. So here's what if you find another.

[Chuck Nice]

If you find aliens and they play music? Is that what you're saying or what?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, My point is this. We think that that would happen because we do it.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You understand, that's an interesting bias. We have a. We have a. We have a perception of preeminence.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In the itself. And so even in the movie, why would we make the supposition that encounters the third kind? Right.

[Chuck Nice]

They play music.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They play music back to.

[Chuck Nice]

Back to each other. Yeah.

[David Krakauer]

Look at. Look at our other bias. Let me just turn this around on you a bit, which is that. No, everyone would say, look, maybe chemistry is universal, right? So we're going to find DNA or rna that's universal. But you. But mathematics. Well, we could describe things mathematically, but is. Mathematics can be universal, Is music? I mean, what is the, if you like, set of beliefs we have that make the most fundamental constituents universal and everything else somehow anthropomorphic? And I would like to question that premise.

[Chuck Nice]

Gotcha.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And that. I'm down with that.

[Chuck Nice]

And that flows in and through your thinking about an interplanetary project, Is that correct?

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, I mean, and in fact, the slogan of the interplanetary project was changing the world one planet at a time.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's actually very.

[David Krakauer]

Because I want to change this world. I don't want to particularly change others. And the question is, could a more expansive, humanistic, decent perspective on things allow us to make progress on this planet?

[Chuck Nice]

Well, we did discover a planet that's completely inhabited by robots. It's called Mars.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, how long have you been sat on that, Joe?

[Chuck Nice]

Waiting to put it in out there? So now we got the institute understood. Now tell us about complex complexity.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, right. So, I mean, this is. This is. There are several ways to do this, and you just tell me which you like and don't like. And I'll just throw out options because I'm going to take different slices through this idea. Right.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Let's start with roots. What are the roots of complexity science?

[David Krakauer]

Okay. Aha. Well, okay, so, all right, so I just wrote a whole series of books on this, so it's a very good question for me. So essentially, one way to say this is the roots are the study of machines. Machines that were made. Right. In the industrial revolution, like steam engines, or machines that evolved like organisms.

[Chuck Nice]

Just to clarify, you're not referring to the five basic machines of physics here?

[David Krakauer]

No.

[Chuck Nice]

You're referring to industrial machines that we have made, manufactured in our. In our civilization.

[David Krakauer]

Exactly. Like the steam engine, like the centrifugal governor, or like an organism. So. Exactly. So mechanisms in the natural world that do work of one kind or another.

[Chuck Nice]

Gotcha.

[David Krakauer]

And right. So sometimes we call that problem solving matter, in contrast to the regular matter that's studied by physicists and chemists.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Because in physics class, there's a frictionless pulley on pulling a mass on an inclined plane. We're not thinking that has consciousness or anything else. It's not doing anything interesting other than fitting into my problem set. Right. So, yeah, I like that distinction. Continue, please.

[David Krakauer]

Right, so, okay, so that's one way to go. Right. So problem solving, matter versus regular. And then there's a whole bunch of questions, in fact, you just did it. That feel very natural when you talk about problem solving matter. Like, for example, how efficient is it? How did it originate? How does it adapt? Right. How smart is it? How does it store information? How does it evolve? How does it fail, and how eventually does it go extinct? And some of those questions are shared with physics. Many of them are not. It's not really meaningful to say, how smart is the moon? I mean, some people probably do, but we tend to ignore those people. Right. But it's totally natural to say, how much information does an economy store? Right. How does a society of insects compute? So in a way, you can define it by the questions that feel natural for it. And all of those are natural to all the scales we study.

[Chuck Nice]

I like that. Because when you have that awareness, it means you're not gonna force a square peg into a round hole if you're looking at a different system. Just because certain questions and solutions work with one system of machines doesn't mean.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

They work for all of them.

[Chuck Nice]

And so if you keep your interactions native to the phenomenon, you're surely likely to get deeper into what's going on. For it is That a fair characterization of what you just said?

[David Krakauer]

No, it's exactly right. And I think what happens and this happened to history of physics is that the domain, what we would call the ontology, the reality, requests from us a certain methodology or set of approaches we call epistemology. And so the physical world loves principles of symmetry which we encode in various principles. In physics, typically conservation laws in complex systems we like broken symmetries and noise irregularities that get fixed that sometimes we call frozen accidents. And that means a different kind of theory and a lot of SFIs about finding the theory for the messier domain that lives between order and chaos.

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[David Krakauer]

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[David Krakauer]

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[Chuck Nice]

I'm here with my son Ernie because.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We listen to StarTalk every night and.

[Chuck Nice]

Support StarTalk on Patreon.

[David Krakauer]

This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So this is Chaos Theory. So you're looking for patterns out of Chaos Theory, but if you take a step back, arguably.

[Chuck Nice]

But he didn't say it Was chaos.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, he didn't.

[Chuck Nice]

He said it's in between.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In between. I did.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, but you're not the guess I know. No, what he said was it's in between pure chaos and order. And order. And there's messy systems that might yield to analysis.

[Gary O'Reilly]

As you're saying, does chaos actually present with certain regularity of pattern?

[David Krakauer]

Yeah. So actually, I mean, just. Okay, let me. As an aside, I'll get there in a second. A footnote to that. The answer is yes, Neil's right. I mean, chaos theory is a tiny, tiny, tiny part of complexity. And in fact, weirdly enough, it's a part of complexity that fits very naturally in physics. It came out of the study of things like the so called three body problem, classical systems, right. That are completely deterministic. There's no noise in chaos. It's deterministic irregularity. So it does present as order. That appears superficially to be random. And we're interested in subjects that have that property, but they add real randomness, like thermal randomness noise to them. So early in our history, because of a book that was written by James gleig actually in 92. Oh yeah, it's called Chaos. Right. And it was an important book for SFI because he talked a lot about our work. But it's actually a tiny part of what we do and it's the part that's very close to physics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, so it could.

[Chuck Nice]

So there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That. Not.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Now I know I am better educated, so thank you.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, so how about other elements?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm just going to say, but are you looking in the messiness for reason? If you want to call it order, if you want to call it non messiness, that. So that the messiness itself really isn't messy. We just see it that way. We don't understand it.

[David Krakauer]

Yes. Okay. So. Right. So interestingly so where does this word complexity come from? And it gets exactly to your question in. In 1948, Warren Weaver, who was a mathematician, he wanted to classify all of regularity or irregularity in the universe. Right. And he said, and we can debate whether this is useful. I find it quite useful. He said, there are simple phenomena. That's classical physics. It doesn't mean it's easy to understand. But it's. To Neil's earlier point, it's simple. There are beautiful laws, elegant mathematical formalisms that explain it. Then there's the world of what he called disorganized complexity. That's the sort of the study of gases, what we would now study with thermodynamics and Statistical mechanics, irregular things, but have beautiful descriptions. And then in the middle, there's organized complexity. It's not a gas, it's an organism, it's an ant. Right. It's a brain, it's a city. And in that space, what we realized really at the end of the 19th century is we don't have good theories for it. We can do irregularity beautifully, we can do simplicity beautifully. And then you move to everything that we actually care about. In some sense, as human beings and as animals, living beings, we kind of under theorized beautifully described beautiful artworks. But what is the kind of mathematics of that zone of organized complexity? And I think you make a really important point, which is that how much order you see is a function of the observer. And if the observer has more computational power, it's going to see more order. Right. So complexity is observer dependent in a very profound way. Rather like quantum mechanics is observer dependent in a very different way. Wow. But this has to do with our computational capability, if you like.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm going to tell you the truth right now. I'm just going to come out and say it. I actually thought when we started that this was going to be bullshit. But he is making some great points here.

[Chuck Nice]

That's why he's on this, why we got the man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's why he's here.

[Chuck Nice]

That's why we got the man.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So when, when you look for adaptive functions, is that the sort of pattern that you're looking for, how it's reacted to one of a better term, environmental circumstances?

[David Krakauer]

Definitely. I mean, I think, you know, one of the challenges, right, is going from. And I think you've had some of my friends on that show who talk about this. I mean, maybe Sean and maybe.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, we have Sean. Sean Carroll. Yes. He's a friend of the show.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah. And so that's a good example. So you go from, you know, what's the difference between a ball rolling down a hill? Right. So it's minimizing some function and an organism adapting. And that distinction to this day, people debate, is there adaptation in physics, you know, maximizing some function or minimizing some function, or is it unique to the living state? And so for US Agency, the agent, it could be an organism, could be a machine, actually it could be an AI, has some characteristics that a ball rolling down a hill do not have that we need a new theory for, and we can talk about what that new theory looks like. But adaptation is absolutely central to complexity, because without it, there isn't any.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I will tell you this much, an AI rolling down the hill is a hell of a lot more expensive than a ball rolling down a hill. You have lost a lot, lot of money other than that ball.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, so this approach seems potent enough so that it does not need to be constrained to any one discipline. And I'm impressed to see efforts to apply this to society, economic systems, civilization itself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

So do you have enough confidence in your modeling and its foundations to then go into something that's way more complex than basic physics because you're now involving human behavior?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. In other words, can you solve stupidity? Because we are living in a very high time of stupidity.

[David Krakauer]

Well, that's actually. We'll get that. My area of interest. So I can't solve it, but I can diagnose it. And so. But we can talk about what it means. Let me just address both. I feel this question, I don't know, is the real honest answer to this question. I think that something interesting happens that's sometimes surprising, and this is very familiar from other sciences. If you try to understand an individual particle floating about, it's really hard, trajectory is essentially random. But you have enough particles and you average and order emerges. So, for example, a fluid will flow. And so we have equations of fluids that look at things like viscosity and average density that don't worry about the individual particles and all their peculiarities. And in just the same way, humans that are fundamentally, I think, unpredictable, I mean, there are things we do that are predictable, alas. But in aggregate, there are predictable regularities in societies. And economists and psychologists and sociologists exploit those facts. So if you aggregate. Right, right. Then irregularity and a pattern can emerge again. And I think the big question for us is, is a city, is a civilization one of those things that actually shows emergent regularity which will give us some handle on them that we might be able to control?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is not a pushback. But I need some clarification here, because when you talk about a city and you talk about, let's just say, the aggregate of a group. Okay, all right.

[Chuck Nice]

People.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

People. Thank you. When you talk about people. All right. A neuroscientist will tell you that we are predictable enough that if given enough data on the person, I can tell you exactly what they're going to do.

[Chuck Nice]

And if given enough, advertisers know that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, scientists, Right. And if given enough data on a group, I can tell you exactly how to manipulate them, for them to become violent, for them to become difficult, docile, for them to become agitated. So where is the emergence in that.

[Chuck Nice]

Because we haven't talked about emergence yet.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, well, you're right. Okay, okay. But still a great question. I felt like he was moving towards emergence with that. No, no, what he just said.

[Chuck Nice]

But the bridge there is. He's brilliantly analogizing the fact that you have gas fluid particles.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I agree with you individually.

[Chuck Nice]

You don't. There's no. There's no flow loss.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're not worried about the particle, but when they come together, they actually present these properties that make them, as a whole, act differently.

[Chuck Nice]

And you basically just said what he said, that in aggregate, we behave in ways that may be predictable and be describable. Analytically.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. But here's the difference as human beings, that's due to the fact that each one of us has to be in a very particular place for that to happen. Do you understand what I'm saying? Unlike particles, all the particles is going to do the same thing, all of them, all the time. All right, David, that's good for you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

If you go back to the reference point of cities, does it change for an unplanned to a planned city where the predictability is as same or very different?

[David Krakauer]

Well, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, good question. I mean, I think that for the things that we study, not so much interestingly. Okay. I want to somehow. I want to thread these points.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right.

[David Krakauer]

Because they're all really good, and they're actually getting at the heart of why this is difficult. So the first point about, you know. Yes. Humans are not like little, you know, Brownian motion particles. We have histories, we have desires, we have beliefs. Right. And so we're heterogeneous in a way that particles are not. That is absolutely right. It's what makes.

[Chuck Nice]

And that's really all Chuck was.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's what I'm saying.

[David Krakauer]

Yes. That's just point.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Sorry for taking so long to get there.

[David Krakauer]

No, but I think that is really important. Right. And yet. Right. If I. Half the price of the groceries, you're going to go out and buy more of them because you're fearful that the price will go up again next week. But you see what I mean? There are regular patterns of behavior, despite all of that heterogeneity, which is important in our lives. And so the question is, at what scale? So now let's go to cities. It turns out, actually, that cities are so constraining of the supply of energy and the supply of resources and the interactions between people and neighborhoods that there are emergent regularities that come out of those constraints. So, for example, if you look at the growth of GDP as a city gets larger, it follows a universal law that looks like it's a lot of physics. You get a scaling of GDP that goes as essentially the population size to the 1.15 power. So whatever. But the point is that weirdly enough, when you impose these strong constraints on society, they start looking more like physical systems. They have emergent regularities.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, man, that's great.

[David Krakauer]

As you remove those constraints. Right. Then, of course, many of these systems, these kind of theories fail.

[Chuck Nice]

So let's blow open the topic now then, of emergence, because that's of a topic of great fascination, especially in biology. But to the extent that that can apply to other systems, that would be amazing to get some insight into what's going on on the frontier where we don't understand what's going on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And for. And just, Just because you and Neil and Gary probably too, because he's did all the research on this. Can you please define emergence? Because I hear people use the term and I think a lot of times they're not using it correctly. So can you please just tell us what is emergence?

[David Krakauer]

That's a completely fair observation. I spend most of my life, you know, in horror. So. Okay, first of all, I want to say it's a difficult concept, and I think it would be completely accurate to say that we still have huge amounts of work to do to understand formally what it means. But I'm now going to. Having said all that little caveat, I'll tell you what I think it is. So let's just start with physics, because it's easy. So we just talked about it. We talked about gases, like the kinetic theory of gases. Put loads of those particles together and you can get solids at the right temperatures and pressures and you can get fluids. And it turns out that the mathematical equations you use to describe those two systems are different, right? And the dimension, the simplicity, if you like, the number of terms in those equations are different. And so we like fluid dynamics because it's actually quite a elegant way of describing the behavior of loads and loads of particles in a particular temperature and pressure. That is emergence. The fact that you have two things, a new state of matter with properties that wouldn't really seem to apply at the individual particle level. And it has a new language, a new language of description and a new language of prediction. Those are the two hallmarks. Now, it's interesting, you were talking about psychology, advertising and neuroscience, and that's a beautiful example. So let's imagine, right, that in order to be a really good psychologist or marketer, you had to be a great neuroscientist. Of course, a really good marketer doesn't need to be a good neuroscientist because all of that detail is a little bit like a particle in a gas relative to a fluid. A good marketer is doing something like fluid dynamics by analogy. They're understanding collective properties that have their own language. And I think a lot of kind of pseudoscience, to be honest, is where a level that has its own perfectly adequate language starts using the more reductionist language to give it legitimacy. So emergence, one, new states or phases of matter or organization, two, new languages and descriptions, typically mathematical. It doesn't have to be. And three, the tricky one is not everything deserves to be called emergent. And so finding that emergent level is actually part of the challenge. And a lot of, we would argue, a lot of economic theory would be better off being replaced by psychology because the language it's derived or invented doesn't really work. It's not like fluid dynamics. So the failures of emergence are also really interesting.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Cool, man.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So when you get to the state of emergence, what is, what is the prediction accuracy for you? Being able to say this is most likely going to be happening here?

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, that's actually the criterion, right? That, if you'll allow me, I'm going to use another analogy. Helps. Okay, so let's say that I'm proving a mathematical theorem, okay? The way that works, you write down your axioms, right? Your assumptions, you put down your equations, and then you have a bunch of kind of a toolkit for doing deduction. You apply calculus or group theory, whatever you like, and out pops an answer, right? And the correctness of that answer has nothing to do with your psychological state, nothing to do with what you have for breakfast in the morning, nothing to do with the economy, nothing to do with neurons. It has to do with the formal logic of mathematics. And that's the most beautiful example of emergence for me, because you wouldn't gain additional insight into the correctness of a proof by knowing what the neurons were doing. They're irrelevant. And the technical term for that is screened off. Truly emerging phenomena screen off microscopic degrees of freedom. That's some fancy language. And we know it's true, right? But we know it's true of mathematics. It's probably the best example, I think, of a truly emergent language. And because to your point, it does predict, it does deduce, you do get to the right answer, right? You don't have to go down.

[Chuck Nice]

So I'M curious about something here. So when we look at flocking birds, that is a macroscopic group behavior where, as far as I understand it, you cannot. There's no known way to analyze a single bird in any way that will tell you that in the company of other birds it will flock. And I've always thought of emergence as just such a system. And you hinted to that with the gas particle and the gas as a fluid or as a solid or as a gas. Well, yeah, depending on temperature and pressure. Sorry. The molecule as a solid, liquid or gas. So would you agree that these other kinds of systems. You can't look at a termite and say, one day it will build a termite mound? Is it because we don't know enough about it? Do we need to be more reductive or less reductive in our analysis of the organism to know what it would do macroscopically in a group?

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, no, that's really interesting. So, okay, so I think sometimes that and sometimes the opposite. So let me give you an example.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So you're right. He's right.

[David Krakauer]

No, no, it's really interesting because. Let's say it's sort of interesting, right? If you said, I know everything about the neuroscience of an ant, right. Or termite or a starling, you know, I know about fluid dynamics, hydrodynamics and what feathers do. I know how far they can see, all of that. So I could predict if I put a bunch of them together, how they would behave. And I think that there are going to be cases where that is true. But that doesn't mean emergence isn't still useful, because you might say, yes, I can. I needed deep thought, the computer from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to work it out, and it took the lifetime of the universe to do so. But I could do it as opposed to. You know what, Neil, I've got a pencil and paper here. I'm going to write down my little emergent theory and I'm going to do it in five seconds. And so there is a cyto emergence, which is just about practicality, Efficiency.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Efficiency.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, so we're going to see an equation on a T shirt sometime soon.

[David Krakauer]

We have many of those, unfortunately. We have too many.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Too many problems.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right, well, let's. I mean, Chuck mentioned AI earlier on, and we don't want to roll it down the hill because it's too expensive.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Absolutely.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Can you predict the emergence of consciousness in something like an AI?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Chuck Nice]

Or define the complexity of life itself in this context?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Want to Go even deeper.

[Chuck Nice]

Fair. I mean, why not?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, yeah. I mean, honestly. And wouldn't that kind of be the same? Because if. If an AI really does have emergent consciousness and truly, truly emergent intelligence, it's life, then it really is us at that point. It's just us or that point? No, it's us in a different form.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, let's find out.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, let's find out.

[David Krakauer]

I might annoy you now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, go ahead.

[David Krakauer]

So the first thing I'm going to say is that AIs have no intelligence, right? Okay. And then we'll discuss what that means. But they have tons of capability. And I tell you the difference. I mean, here's my thought experiment. I was asked these kind of zealots of the technocratic era, which is the following. You have two students, okay? And let's call them A and B. And you set them the same exam. It's just a general knowledge quiz, right? And they come back, get all the answers. Right. All right. And I said to you, which is the better student? You'd say, I don't know. They got the same answer. Now I say to you, A did the exam in the library where every time a question came up, they looked up the answer and B actually took the exam. I don't know, by the side of the ocean. And you say, well, clearly B is the better student. Now, the problem is so knowledgeable, we know the difference between fake knowledgeable and real knowledgeable because we can ask, did you do it in a library or not? And the problem with a lot of AI at the moment is it's basically fake intelligent, as far as I'm concerned.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's a very quick lookup. It's really just.

[David Krakauer]

It's very quick. Essentially a really clever lookup. It's a plus. And I'm not saying it's not an amazing technology, I'm just saying. But it's a very capable technology if you ask. And again, now we get to intelligence. Kind of my field. What is intelligence? Intelligence is basically someone or something that makes a hard problem easy. If you went to school and you're sitting down trying to work out a problem, you look over at the person next to you and they've made a problem look effortless. You'd say, oh, my God, that's pretty intelligent. No, no, no.

[Chuck Nice]

You're the intelligent one looking over the shoulder because you got the answer easier than they did.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that's true.

[David Krakauer]

That's like a strategic intelligence.

[Chuck Nice]

If I may echo your story with an example I give often where let's say, I'm an architect, and I'm gonna hire a summer intern. And they're both the same on paper, right? And so therefore, they get to come in for an interview. And I want to pick one from the interview. And this is a contrived example, but I think you'll agree, David, that there's a church steeple outside my window. And I say, just for grins, how tall is that church steeple? And the person says, oh, it's 135ft. I say, well, how do you know? I memorized all the church steeple heights. It's a thing I do. The other person says, I don't know. I'll be right back. It goes away for 10 minutes, then comes back and says, somewhere between 130 and 140ft. I said, well, how did you find out? He said, well, I know how tall I am. And I measured my shadow, then I measured the shadow of the church steeple, and then I did some simple math to get this answer. Who are you gonna hire?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm actually gonna hire the second guy.

[Chuck Nice]

The second one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because clearly, what he was able to do was problem solve.

[Chuck Nice]

I didn't say he or she. But that's okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I said he. I'm sorry. I apologize to. Because they were able to. Because they were able to problem solve.

[Chuck Nice]

To problem solve. And is my example resonate with you here?

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, very much so. And I think you can see where. Notice, right, that in the era of the Turing Test, the Imitation Game, you just ask, how high is the steeple? And if it gives you the right answer, you say, look, there you go. It's indistinguishable from another human being. But you then went a bit further and asked for an explanation. Right. Tell me how you arrived at that answer. Prove to me you understand. And I think these ideas of it, understanding and explanation are really important to intelligence. And under discussed in place of what Alan Turing did. And, you know, he's my compatriot. I love him. But the idea of the Turing Test did a lot of harm because it allows for this possibility, essentially, of cheating.

[Chuck Nice]

I had not thought about it that way, but you've just convinced me because that's the litmus test that has always been applied. And then everyone is left thinking there's intelligence on the other side, but they would just unpack that and lays it bare for what it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

However, in defense of Turing, I think it was just the wrong terminology because basically, the idea was you wouldn't know the difference. That was the Test, you would not know the difference.

[Chuck Nice]

Correct?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Correct. So he's not necessarily saying that they're the same. He's just saying that one is represented in a way that is indistinguishable from the other.

[Chuck Nice]

Unless you went further and said, how did you figure this out?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, now you just screwed them. Sometimes an identity threat is a ring of professional hackers. And sometimes it's an overworked accountant who.

[David Krakauer]

Forgot to encrypt their connection while sending bank details.

[Chuck Nice]

I need a coffee.

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[Gary O'Reilly]

David, you spoke about your research into intelligence in the universe on Aeon. You published an essay Problem Solving Matter, September 2024. Eon. Aeon.

[David Krakauer]

Eon.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes. It's a journey.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah. Either way.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And you suggest that life is less chemistry and physics, more like a computational process that is born out of our need to be problem solvers. You're gonna need to.

[Chuck Nice]

Shots fired there.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, no, no. You're gonna need to do a little bit more unpacking there because that's. That's got people thinking now. I've even just said that.

[Chuck Nice]

Can you only say that when there's not a biologist within a mile of him that he can say, I think.

[Gary O'Reilly]

David has the capability to answer this?

[Chuck Nice]

You'd Think. All right, go for it.

[David Krakauer]

So in that. In that paper with my co author, Christopher Kempes, we address this question of problem solving. Matter transcends its materials, which is essentially that question. Right? But let me give you. Here's the food experiment, and it's extraterrestrial. You're going to like it. Which is. So you imagine some extraterrestrial being visits the Earth, and they want to know what a computing device are, right? Or is. And they arrive in the Earth at the time of the Jacquard Loom, which was like a first, essentially, digital computer. And they say, oh, digital computer is something made out of wood, out of silk. Right? And. Right, okay. And it's. All right. And then.

[Chuck Nice]

With a foot pedal.

[David Krakauer]

With a foot pedal. Right, exactly right. And. And it's used to make beautiful items of clothing. That's what I give you. Wait, okay, so 50 years pass, they come back again, maybe a bit more 75 years. And they said, what is a computer? It's. Well, it's this thing with these giant vacuum tubes, right? Thermionic valves, and they're made out of quartz and they're made out of molybdenum and so on. And another 50 years passes, and they come back and say, what's a computer? Actually, no, that's not a computer. It's not something made of wood and silk. It's not something made out of glass and tungsten or whatever you want. It's something made out of metal oxides, and it's based on transistors. And what you realize is, you know, computing isn't about the material, it's about the logic. They all implement a logic now. They might. They implement, as it happens, binary logic, Boolean logic, right? And we know that if you have enough transistors and you put them together, you can do computations. So this is actually another thing that came from Turing that he got completely right, right. Is that it's not the material, it's the logic. And you need the material that can instantiate the logic. So not any material will do. Unfortunately, the history of the study of the origin of life has been obsessed with the material, because we are made of material and we're the only example we know. And so you look at the materials that we're made out of, or all life, and you kind of reach this weirdo conclusion that that's the only way it could be done.

[Chuck Nice]

That's clever and insightful. What that also does is it distracts. No, it misleads us into projecting what things might be like in the future. So, for example, in 2001, A Space Odyssey, that was 1968, and they're imagining the year 2001. That's the whole point of the movie. So in 1968, computers were, like, big. And in 2001, the computer was even bigger. Right. Okay. And it was even more centralized. And no one is thinking that we'd all have computers in our pocket. So they're thinking that it's the material now, just get more of that to make that happen.

[David Krakauer]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

So it completely distorts how you might be thinking about the future, unless you take David's sensibility to task here.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

True, true. In addition, could we then think that the materials are us and then seek to replicate not a silicon version of ourselves, but an actual biological merger of the AI and what causes us to have true intelligence?

[David Krakauer]

Again, I mean, two things there. So one is just a lot of the things and concepts that we've been wrestling with, even, you know, consciousness that you asked about, life, intelligence in their early phases of development, get mapped onto a machine or mechanism or matter that's familiar to us. And there's good reason. I mean, that's nothing wrong with that. It makes perfect sense. You've got to start somewhere, right? And then as our ideas evolve, they become, in some sense, more abstract. And eventually we culminate in a kind of logical description. But the material matters. Right? And so, to your point, it's really interesting, I mean, and this is an unknown question, there are people out there and they call themselves functionalists. And Turing was one, and he wrote this beautiful essay where he said. I mean, he didn't say it this way, but he essentially said, I don't give a shit whether the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. He said, the matter doesn't matter. And, you know, that was his view. But, you know, we don't know.

[Chuck Nice]

The matter does matter.

[David Krakauer]

The matter. Matter matters. Right.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm all for mattering, right?

[David Krakauer]

But does any kind of matter matter? Right? And I think that's sort of the question. And I think, and it is an open question, whether the kind of sensorial, sensual existence we experience does depend on the particular kind of matter we're made from. Does consciousness depend. Our kind of consciousness depend on our kind of matter? I actually think there's a strong claim to be made. The answer is yes. Doesn't mean there couldn't be other kinds of life, right? Other kinds of intelligence. But this one depends on our matter.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, it's the one that we know for a fact does, because it's us and we're experiencing it. So from an experiential frame of reference, we understand it. So my point is, why wouldn't we just look for exactly how we become conscious and intelligent in our formation? And then if it truly isn't something that just happens because all of these disparate things come together, then we might be able to take that and graft it onto a machine of our making.

[David Krakauer]

Well, you could argue that that's exactly what's just happened. So if you. Well, look, I mean, if you look at the history of AI 30 years ago, it now gets called GoFi, good old fashioned AI. And it was all about, we're going to build a computer that can play chess using symbolic logic, checkers. We're going to build expert systems that we're going to inform with human understanding. And then this big shift took place in neural networks and they said, you know what, we're not going to start top down, we're going to start bottom up. And we're going to start bottom up with a system that resembles a brain. And it's exactly. So they did exactly what you just said. They'll say, let's just try and rebuild something that looks a bit like a brain with lots of units that are kind of like neurons that are connected, kind of like neurons. You have enough of them, they'll do something interesting. So I would argue that this kind of biomimesis approach to intelligence that you're describing is the AI revolution of the current moment.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, all right, but I gotta get to the bottom of something here. Let's bring back emergence into the conversation. We have neurons that ostensibly are nicely suited for our survival. Okay. When we're hungry, we look for food. If there's danger, we escape it or fight it. And so the brain is doing its thing. And any creature has similar, any creature.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That cares about similar functionality in their brain.

[Chuck Nice]

In their brain, in their brain. But we want to say that we have consciousness as something beyond what we might ascribe to a plant. So what is going on inside of us, either in complexity or from bottom up or top down, that you can call consciousness. And the reason why I ask that in that way is everyone is making a big deal of consciousness today. And the fact that people still writing books about it is evidence to me that we still don't know what it is. Because if we knew what it was, the last book would have been written and there'd be no further books on the shelf. But everyone's talking about it like we fully Understand it. And so can you give me some access to consciousness given your tools that you have built to ask questions?

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, I share your skepticism. I think a lot of this is just baloney, the consciousness stuff, to be honest. And I think we really don't understand it, and hence more and more terrible books being written on the topic.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think this is a good time for me to announce my forthcoming book, the Last Book on Consciousness.

[David Krakauer]

There are. Well, you know this. There are just many schools of thought here. And in my world, most of the rigorous work. And I'm not saying it's great work, I'm just saying it's rigorous work is looking for quantifiable metrics, measurements that correlate with the conscious state. So let me make that clear. So I measure your brain, right? I write down some equations, I calculate some number, and I measure your brain when you're sleeping. I measure your rate when you're awake and solving a problem, and I measure your brain under anesthesia. And it turns out that that number that I calculated, I say, wow, look at that. That number's high when you're waking and solving a problem, and it's near zero when you're under anesthesia or sleeping. And so this is sometimes called the neural correlates approach to consciousness. Let me tell you what it is. It just says that there's some formalism that allows you to.

[Chuck Nice]

You found a correlation, right?

[David Krakauer]

You found a correlation, right? And maybe that's useful, right? If you go under anesthesia and you're going to have your big toe removed. I'd rather that thing was near zero than at its maximum. But that's sort of the best of it when it comes to actually theories of what it is. Honestly, qualitatively, it seems to be something about the tiny little attention window that the human brain has to operate on large sets of data. And just to be explicit about this, every mathematician knows that every hard problem is solved by their unconscious mind. There is a very famous book written on this by someone called Hadamard, and it's called the Mathematician's Mind. And he interviewed everyone, interviewed Einstein, Poincare, looked at the journals of Gauss, and they all say the same thing. They say, you know, it's a really hard problem. The best thing I can do is think about it and then stop thinking about it. You know, I have a nice meal, I go for a run, whatever you do. And then somehow, through some epiphany, the solution presents itself to me.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm pretty sure Einstein didn't go on runs I'm just pretty sure about that.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, yeah, he played the violin.

[Chuck Nice]

I don't think he was a fitness guru.

[David Krakauer]

He smoked his. You know, he did something in place of going for a run.

[Chuck Nice]

He played his violin, even.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, sure, he played his violin. He went walking with Kurt Godel, you know, he did his thing. But the interesting point there is that. So consciousness is not about solving the hard problem. It's about that little window of attention that is focused on some part of the problem. And most of the current formalisms don't really give us much of an insight into how that might work. So I actually do not like a lot of this stuff, to be honest.

[Chuck Nice]

So I didn't read the book, but I saw the film iRobot, which is based on the story by Isaac Asimov.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The Will Smith one.

[Chuck Nice]

The Isaac Asimov.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But yes, Will Smith.

[Chuck Nice]

The Will Smith story.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, the Will Smith story.

[Chuck Nice]

So the robots, all humanoid robots, they are these large vans that have robots that are not. That are decommissioned or that. But they're still kind of alive, but they just have no purpose until they're programmed for their utility. To be your partner, to be your whatever. And in the van, the robots grouped with each other. They weren't just maximizing their distance, and their pattern was not random. And someone asked about that, what do you know about this? And they said, we don't know what's causing this. What we do know is that there's a lot of residual programming that was never fully cleared out when we added new utility to these things. And this is exactly evolution, okay? There's leftover stuff in us from a time that we don't need it anymore. So what the hell is it doing in our head?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's the reason why sometimes I feel the need to eat flies.

[David Krakauer]

That explains a lot.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's my reptilian brain, your gecko brain, just going crazy.

[Chuck Nice]

So I was intrigued that it was the leftover programming that was not refreshed in the continued evolution of humans or in the case of those robots, the continued layering on to the functionality of them. And there's legacy software that you don't know what it's doing. So that was. I was intrigued by that. I just want to share with you that observation.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, I mean, again, I mean, a lot to talk about, and I think. You know, actually, my colleague here, who you probably all know, who recently passed away, Cormac McCarthy, the novelist, he wrote a beautiful essay on this that he called the Kukule Problem, which is about this moment of insight and this was the discovery by Kikule of the benzene ring. They say, oh my. Oh, he saw it in a dream. And Cormac was fascinated as a writer, as a novelist with this question of where is this coming from? I'm sitting down to write a book and somehow my brain is instructing my hand. But I couldn't tell you exactly what's going to happen at the end of that sentence. This is coming out. And so he, over the course of time, introspectively came to believe that he was getting these instructions from his unconscious mind. Not in a mystical sense, just he wasn't working it out.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right.

[David Krakauer]

And to your point, if you look at the history of life on Earth, most of evolution up until very recently took place without language, right? And presumably most organisms being run by a set of automatic programs of the kind that you just described in the van with the robots huddling like starlings and that we superimposed above that this kind of very thin layer of abstraction and self awareness. But most of the computation is not being done by that thin layer. And so what is true is that that little thin layer gives us one thing that we're not aware any other animal can do, which means that we can communicate our understanding. They can communicate other things, but we can communicate our understanding. I can give you Newton's laws, I can tell you about Darwin's theory of evolution. Right. And that superpower of humans that comes from very few neurons, I imagine, right? Sits on top of exactly all of that programming that evolution gave us over the course of hundreds of millions of years.

[Chuck Nice]

So I got one last question for.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You, but I've still got more. No, no, we're asking more questions. I'll sit and talk to myself then.

[Chuck Nice]

We're in rap mode. We're not the mc. No, I know what kind of rap mode. We're rap mode here. So I just have to go there because it fascinates us all. Well, I think about it all the time. I can't speak for others. Can you estimate based on your toolkit how intelligent we are relative to how high intelligence can get in the universe?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck Nice]

Are we smart enough to figure out how the universe works or are we just complete idiots and some higher alien is just gonna come down and just look at us like we are earthworms in our capacity to deduce the nature of the world?

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, one of the areas I work on is on tools and artifacts. You know, the abacus, the sextant, the quadrant, the Rubik's Cube. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All that comes the shelves.

[Chuck Nice]

Got my sextant here, and I've got three Rubik's Cubes up on the other shelf. Just show and tell, you know, that's. We can.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And I'm sitting on the abacus.

[David Krakauer]

I hope not. I mean, it's an important point in that. Because human intelligence has always been about ingenious outsourcing to artifacts and tools, including mathematics. Right. You could not calculate the orbit of a planet without conic sections or the calculus. Right. And I think that. So I think human intelligence in that respect is unlimited because we'll just continue to build tools that are kind of adjuncts to our capabilities. And what makes AI interesting.

[Chuck Nice]

I just want you to know that I can compute orbits with abacus.

[David Krakauer]

Nice. No, I love it.

[Chuck Nice]

No, I'm lying. I'm totally lying right there. Yeah. This is an authentic Chinese abacus.

[David Krakauer]

Yeah, I can see. I can see that. But I think. So just to your point, I think that what's really. And I. Okay, I'll just tell you very quickly. I classify tools into two categories. What I call complementary cognitive artifacts. That's like a pencil or an abacus or a sextant. And there's another kind of tool that I call a competitive cognitive artifact, and that's like a GPS machine or a large language model. Right. One of those sets, the complementary ones, makes you smarter. One of those sets makes you dumber. And I think it's the choice of humanity to decide what kind of tool it wants to be dependent on. And so my fear now is we're outsourcing our capabilities to competitive artifacts and not to things like future abaci, which actually would make us smarter. Wow.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Do I have time for my question?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I've got.

[Chuck Nice]

I. I don't know. I don't think so.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Well, I'm asking it anyway.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Go ahead, ask it. Come on. All right, all right. So let the man ask David's question.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You said life is problem solving, so why has the universe created life, and what is the problem it's trying to solve?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh.

[David Krakauer]

So I, you know, I can. I can tell you the horribly cynical answer to that question.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Go on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, please.

[David Krakauer]

This horribly cynical answer to that question is that life is the most efficient way of returning to thermodynamic equilibrium.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oh, man, that's terrible.

[David Krakauer]

Because life is the most efficient generator of entropy.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Krakauer]

And if you think about what we do when we build factories and what we're essentially doing is we're turning ordered states into disordered states. And that the cynical answer to Your question really is life is a kind of suicide by the universe.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. I was about to say what you really just said is it's all for nothing, but that's not true either. It's what we make it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Is there an answer that isn't cynical just so as we can have it on a downbeat?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, I like the cynical answer. No, I love it.

[David Krakauer]

And I think that the non cynical answer came from the sort of idealist philosophers, and they said life was the universe way of knowing itself. And that's also true. So that's the non cynical version. Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

That's very poetic.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I like that.

[Chuck Nice]

That was Cosmos, 1980. That was a major theme. Life is a way for the universe to know itself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Know itself.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Yeah. All right. We got it. We kind of have to, like, end it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Time's up.

[Chuck Nice]

But we could have gone on three more hours. Clearly. Clearly. Well, we're delighted to first meet you and to hear what you're into. And I'm glad as president of the institute, you get to still do work in your favorite topic.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. But the question is, are you glad?

[David Krakauer]

I am glad. I am glad. You can't do the job unless you also do science.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes. Good. That's as it should be. And often how it's not. Yes, absolutely. David, thank you for joining us here on starcraft.

[David Krakauer]

Thank you so much for having me in these horribly dark times. So I appreciate the fact that we get to talk about intelligent things in a stupid world. I value that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you for that.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go. There you go.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, Chuck, It's a pleasure.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Pleasure.

[David Krakauer]

Neil.

[Chuck Nice]

Feeling good here? Yeah. This has been StarTalk's special edition, the complexity version of our special edition. Neil Degrasse Tyson here as always, bidding you to keep looking up.

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