2019-10-14 TED Talks Daily After Billions of Years of Monotony the Universe Is Waking Up
Duration: 00:15:01
Transcript
David Deutsch
I’m thrilled to be talking to you by this high-tech method. Of all humans who’ve ever lived, the overwhelming majority would have found what we’re doing here incomprehensible, unbelievable. Because for thousands of centuries, in the dark time before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, people had low expectations for their lives, for their descendants’ lives. Typically, they expected nothing significantly new or better to be achieved ever. This pessimism famously appears in the Bible in one of the few biblical passages with a named author. It’s called Cohelet. He’s an enigmatic chap. He wrote, And what has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new under the sun. Is there something of which it is said, Look, this is new? Now, that thing was already done in the ages that came before us. Cohelet was describing a world without novelty. By novelty, I mean something new in Cohelet’s sense, not merely something that’s changed, but a significant change with lasting effects, where people really would say, Look, this is new, and preferably good. So, purely random changes aren’t novelty. Okay, Heraclitus did say, A man can’t step in the same river twice because it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man. But if the river is changing randomly, it really is the same river. In contrast, if an idea in a mind spreads to other minds and changes lives for generations, that is novelty.
David Deutsch
Human life without novelty is life without creativity, without progress. It’s a static society, a zero-sum game. That was the living hell in which Cohelet lived, like everyone, until a few centuries ago. It was hell because, for humans, suffering is intimately related to staticity, because staticity isn’t just frustrating. All sources of suffering, famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids, and things like war and slavery, hurt people only until we have created the knowledge to prevent them. There’s a story in Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage about an ancient sage who summarizes the entire history of mankind as he was born, he suffered, and he died. And it goes on, life was insignificant and death without consequence. And indeed, the overwhelming majority of humans who’ve ever lived had lives of suffering and gruelling labor before dying, young and in agony. And yes, in most generations, nothing had any novel consequence for subsequent generations. Nevertheless, when ancient people tried to explain their condition, they typically did so in grandiose, cosmic terms, which was the right thing to do, as it turns out, even though their actual explanations, their myths were largely false. Some tried to explain the grimness and monotony of their world in terms of an endless cosmic war between good and evil, in which humans were the battleground, which neatly explained why their own experience was full of suffering and why progress never happened. But it wasn’t true.
David Deutsch
Amazingly enough, all their conflict and suffering were just due to the way they processed ideas, being satisfied with dogma and just-so stories, rather than criticizing them and trying to guess better explanations of the world and of their own condition. 20th century physics did create better explanations, but still in terms of a cosmic war. This time, the combatants were order and chaos, or entropy. That story does allow for hope for the future, but in another way, it’s even bleaker than the ancient myths, because the villain, entropy, is preordained to have the final victory, when the inexorable laws of thermodynamics shut down all novelty with the so-called heat death of the universe. Currently, there’s a story of a local battle in that war between sustainability, which is order, and wastefulness, which is chaos. That’s the contemporary take on good and evil, often with the added twist that humans are the evil, so we shouldn’t even try to win. And recently, there have been tales of another cosmic war between gravity, which collapses the universe, and dark energy, which finally shreds it. So this time, whichever of those cosmic forces wins, we lose. All those pessimistic accounts of the human condition contain some truth, but as prophecies, they’re all misleading, and all for the same reason. None of them portrays humans as what we really are. As Jacob Bronowski said, Man is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape. In other words, humans are not playthings of cosmic forces, we are users of cosmic forces.
David Deutsch
I’ll say more about that in a moment, but first, what sorts of things create novelty? Well, the beginning of the universe surely did. The Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, created space, time and energy, everything physical. And then, immediately, what I call the first era of novelty, with the first atom, the first star, the first black hole, the first galaxy. But then, at some point, novelty vanished from the universe. Perhaps from as early as 12 or 13 billion years ago, right up to the present day, there’s never been any new kind of astronomical object. There’s only been what I call the Great Monotony. So, Kohelet was accidentally even more right about the universe beyond the sun than he was about under the sun. So long as the Great Monotony lasts, what has been out there really is what will be. And there is nothing out there of which it can truly be said, look, this is new. Nevertheless, at some point during the Great Monotony, there was an event, inconsequential at the time, and even billions of years later, it had affected nothing beyond its home planet, yet eventually it could cause cosmically momentous novelty. That event was the origin of life, creating the first genetic knowledge, coding for biological adaptations, coding for novelty. On Earth, it utterly transformed the surface. Genes in the DNA of single-celled organisms put oxygen in the air, extracted CO2, put chalk and iron ore into the ground.
David Deutsch
Hardly a cubic inch of the surface, to some depth, has remained unaffected by those genes. The Earth became, if not a novel place on the cosmic scale, certainly a weird one. Just as an example, beyond Earth, only a few hundred different chemical substances have been detected. Presumably there are some more in lifeless locations, but on Earth, evolution created billions of different chemicals. And then the first plants, animals, and then in some ancestor species of ours, explanatory knowledge, for the first time in the universe, for all we know. Explanatory knowledge is the defining adaptation of our species. It differs from the non-explanatory knowledge in DNA, for instance, by being universal. That is to say, whatever can be understood, can be understood through explanatory knowledge. And more, any physical process can be controlled by such knowledge, limited only by the laws of physics. And so, explanatory knowledge too has begun to transform the Earth’s surface. And soon the Earth will become the only known object in the universe that turns aside incoming asteroids instead of attracting them. Kohelet was understandably misled by the painful slowness of progress in his day. Novelty in human life was still too rare, too gradual, to be noticed in one generation. And in the biosphere, the evolution of novel species was even slower. But both things were happening. Now, why is there a great monotony in the universe at large, and what makes our planet buck that trend?
David Deutsch
Well, the universe at large is relatively simple. Stars are so simple that we can predict their behaviour billions of years into the future and retrodict how they formed billions of years ago. So, why is the universe simple? Basically, it’s because big, massive, powerful things strongly affect lesser things and not vice versa. I call that the hierarchy rule. For example, when a comet hits the Sun, the Sun carries on just as before, but the comet is vaporised. For the same reason, big things are not much affected by small parts of themselves, i.e. by details, which means that their overall behaviour is simple. And since nothing very new can happen to things that remain simple, the hierarchy rule, by causing large-scale simplicity, has caused the great monotony. But the saving grace is, the hierarchy rule is not a law of nature. It just happens to have held so far in the universe, except here, in our biosphere, molecule-sized objects, genes, control vastly disproportionate resources. The first genes for photosynthesis, by causing their own proliferation and then transforming the surface of the planet, have violated or reversed the hierarchy rule by the mind-blowing factor of 10 to the power 40. Explanatory knowledge is potentially far more powerful because of universality and more rapidly created. When human knowledge has achieved a factor 10 to the 40, it will pretty much control the entire galaxy and will be looking beyond. So humans, and any other explanation creators who may exist out there, are the ultimate agents of novelty for the universe.
David Deutsch
We’re the reason and the means by which novelty and creativity, knowledge, progress, can have objective, large-scale, physical effects. From the human perspective, the only alternative to that living hell of static societies is continual creation of new ideas, behaviors, new kinds of objects. This robot will soon be obsolete because of new explanatory knowledge, progress. But from the cosmic perspective, explanatory knowledge is the nemesis of the hierarchy rule. It’s the destroyer of the great monotony. So it’s the creator of the next cosmological era, the Anthropocene. If one can speak of a cosmic war, it’s not the one portrayed in those pessimistic stories. It’s a war between monotony and novelty, between stasis and creativity. And in this war, our side is not destined to lose. If we choose to apply our unique capacity to create explanatory knowledge, we could win. Thanks.
[Applause]
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