Diary

Since I don't do "light summer reading," I am reading almost nothing at the moment and am beginning to accumulate some books for potential winter reading. I have become somewhat interested in the ideas of Martin Rees in recent years, and I just listened to this interview conducted by Lex Fridman. The impression I got is that Rees is approaching death, and that he is trying to inspire young scientists in their future work. On the whole, I thought that Fridman did an acceptable job, but there were instances during which he displayed extreme naïveté. I don't think that he was the right person to extract some of Rees's better thoughts, so it seemed that the discussion got a little off track at times.

I think that astronomy is the best field for understanding human existence in the context of the universe. Because Rees is less of an egomaniac than many other public intellectuals, he tends to provide more nuanced answers and doesn't waste time on professional self-aggrandizement. For example, he recognizes that physics is much easier than biology, while physics itself is increasingly becoming less intelligible. For this reason, he is one of the first scientists I've heard who supports the use of AI in future research, because it is already evident that intractable human cognitive limitations place an upper limit on what we can understand. In this vein, I noticed recently that serotonin has been found to have less influence on depression than was previously thought, indicating that Robert Sapolsky and many other biological researchers have been getting it wrong. Many of the widely-accepted ideas of today will be refuted in the future.

The overall view that I've developed over the years is that humans are essentially sociable primates, i.e., we have evolved to cooperate more than any other primate species, while also possessing the capacity to communicate through language, and have thereby become more evolutionarily successful, mainly in the sense of having the largest population of any primate. While this situation has been beneficial in relation to other species, as time passes, the population grows and the environment deteriorates, some of the advantages of cooperative behavior have become less relevant. For example, with the increasing complexity of daily life, we unconsciously tend to attribute greater competency to political leaders, academics and intellectuals in general than they actually possess. To understand this, one need only follow the news. Because politicians have little control over short-term economic conditions, when voters blame them for poor conditions they pretend that they can fix everything. In other words, the proper actions are not necessarily taken, and the public maintains a poor understanding of economics. In the U.S., the idea that voters ever have to make sacrifices has been eradicated: when conditions become bad, they can just vote for a politician who requires nothing of them.  It's actually worse than this, because economists themselves don't necessarily understand the economic problems either. Since there is no recent precedent for a pandemic followed by inflation, most economists are winging it: this brings to light the fact that their models are never completely accurate. The lessons learned since the Great Depression may be insufficient to ward off future economic downturns.

What I am finding is that even highly-educated, scientifically-minded people often hold unfounded ideas based largely on their social backgrounds. Thus, as Rees notes in the interview, some tech entrepreneurs are following a path in which they will gradually become immortal and perhaps explore the universe at their leisure. My view is that we have not evolved to become immortal, and that we wouldn't necessarily like it if we were. I have been retired for fifteen years, which I think is an adequate amount of time to relax and pursue various interests. I don't have the slightest idea what I'd do if I were alive for another million years. In order to do so, I would have to evolve in directions which are completely unfamiliar to me, to such an extent that I wouldn't be recognizably human. In all probability, I would just be an expensive robot, and robots don't necessarily care whether or not they are alive. Conceptually, I think the key is whether you want to be a biological object or a non-biological object. To me, being non-biological would be about as exciting as becoming a clock. Our evolutionary past has prepared us to devote our resources to survival, not to understanding the universe. In any case, there is probably an upper limit on how well the universe can be understood by any being. What do you do when you reach that limit?

On a more mundane level, the issue can be seen as whether we really want to expunge the irrational animal impulses that are built into our brains, as discussed by Vinod Goel in Reason and Less. On the surface, that might be appealing to some people, and the world might indeed be a better place if it were governed more rationally. But my current thinking is that the transition to evolutionarily post-human life would require a kind of death that I would find unappealing. That is why I prefer an AI-controlled environment for the benefit of mankind to an immediate transition to post-human life. Strictly speaking, this is a subject that could in theory be studied. It is possible that species on other planets have actually made a transition to a post-human equivalent, and it may someday be feasible to study them. On the other hand, if post-human-equivalent extraterrestrials are never found, that fact itself may be indicative of something.