Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / What could aliens teach us about the Universe?

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What could aliens teach us about the Universe? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Have you ever had trouble getting your message across to someone?
0:12
Speaker 1: Maybe you've had an argument with a friend or a
0:14
Speaker 1: disagreement with a coworker, and try to talk it through. Sometimes,
0:18
Speaker 1: if you can get to a point of common understanding,
0:20
Speaker 1: you can find a way out the other side. Other times, well,
0:24
Speaker 1: it can feel like you're seeing the same facts in
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Speaker 1: a different light. Maybe where you grew up, it's not
0:29
Speaker 1: rude to belch at the table, or maybe it's rude
0:32
Speaker 1: do not belch at the table. When misunderstandings come from
0:35
Speaker 1: deep cultural differences, it can be very hard to bridge
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Speaker 1: the divide and understand each other. Now consider this, what
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Speaker 1: are the chances we'll be able to make that kind
0:44
Speaker 1: of connection with alien intelligence? Are we likely to accidentally
0:49
Speaker 1: belch or not belch our way into planet wide extermination? Hi?
1:09
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I have so
1:12
Speaker 1: many questions about how the universe works, from basic questions
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Speaker 1: like what's inside the electrons and quarks that make us up?
1:20
Speaker 1: To deeper questions such as why these particles and not
1:23
Speaker 1: other particles? To cosmic questions like is what we are
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Speaker 1: learning about the cosmos something that's true and universal? Or
1:32
Speaker 1: hopelessly human centric and Welcome to the podcast. Daniel and
1:36
Speaker 1: Jorge Explain the Universe, where we ask all of these
1:39
Speaker 1: questions and much more and dive into what science does
1:42
Speaker 1: and does not know about the answer. We don't shy
1:45
Speaker 1: away from exploring the biggest and deepest of cosmic mysteries
1:49
Speaker 1: because we think that everyone out there wants to know
1:52
Speaker 1: the meaning and the context of our lives. How did
1:55
Speaker 1: it all start, how does it all work? How will
1:58
Speaker 1: it all end? And every one deserves to share in
2:01
Speaker 1: our understanding, limited as it may be, and in our confusion,
2:05
Speaker 1: extensive as it is. Because science is just people being
2:09
Speaker 1: curious and methodically building knowledge about the universe, and we
2:12
Speaker 1: are all curious creatures. You might be curious why we
2:15
Speaker 1: call it. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe When today
2:18
Speaker 1: is just Daniel, My friend and co host Jorge is
2:20
Speaker 1: away today, so it's just me. But you are in
2:23
Speaker 1: for a very special treat today. We have an interview
2:25
Speaker 1: today with a guest who I am super excited to
2:28
Speaker 1: talk to, Professor Noam Chomsky, world famous linguists and world
2:32
Speaker 1: class intellectual. I invited Professor Chomsky on the show today
2:35
Speaker 1: to talk about a question that I suspect nobody has
2:38
Speaker 1: ever asked him before. As regular listeners of the show
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Speaker 1: are no doubt awhere. I am very keen to believe
2:44
Speaker 1: in aliens, not that I'm hoping to be abducted and probed,
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Speaker 1: but that I am desperate to meet extraterrestrial intelligence. Desperate
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Speaker 1: because just meeting them would answer one of the biggest
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Speaker 1: and most important questions in modern science. Are we alone
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Speaker 1: in the universe? I suspect the answer is no, and
3:02
Speaker 1: that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent beings, but we
3:05
Speaker 1: can't know until we actually know, so I'd like to believe,
3:09
Speaker 1: but as a scientist, I'm also a skeptic. We did
3:11
Speaker 1: a fun program recently on those Navy UFO videos where
3:14
Speaker 1: Mick West gave us some pretty convincing non alien interpretations
3:18
Speaker 1: of those videos. I know that some of you out
3:20
Speaker 1: there are not fans of his and his relentless debunking,
3:23
Speaker 1: but I have respect for the skeptical approach as long
3:25
Speaker 1: as you stay open minded enough to be persuadable given
3:29
Speaker 1: enough evidence. But today's episode is not about whether there
3:33
Speaker 1: are aliens or whether they have visited Earth. That's very
3:36
Speaker 1: well trodden territory today's episode is about what happens next.
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Speaker 1: Say that aliens do exist and do visit the Earth,
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Speaker 1: and don't fry us from space with the planet wide
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Speaker 1: death ray. Here's what really excites me about that alien visit.
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Speaker 1: Beyond knowing that we're not alone, what excites me is
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Speaker 1: that we might be able to ask them science questions.
3:58
Speaker 1: If they have traveled tween stars to get here, assuming
4:02
Speaker 1: they are octopied from seas under Europa, then they must
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Speaker 1: know more about the universe than we do. At the
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Speaker 1: very least, they probably know different things about the universe,
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Speaker 1: and so we could compare notes and learn rather than
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Speaker 1: just struggling for decades or centuries to unravel the puzzles
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Speaker 1: of the universe ourselves. We could get the answers straight
4:21
Speaker 1: away from our new alien friends, or could we could
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Speaker 1: we manage to set up a communication system that would
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Speaker 1: allow us to talk to the aliens, to communicate with
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Speaker 1: them deeply enough that we can get past the welcome
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Speaker 1: to Earth, please don't kill us all the way to
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Speaker 1: what's inside an electron? Or what happened before the Big Bang?
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Speaker 1: Or even just how does your warp drive work? Is
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Speaker 1: that actually possible? So on today's episode, we'll be asking
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Speaker 1: the question will we be able to learn science from aliens?
4:55
Speaker 1: To help me explore this topic, I'm very pleased to
4:57
Speaker 1: introduce Professor G. Noam Chomsky, pleased to be with. Well,
5:00
Speaker 1: let me get it started with something of a less
5:02
Speaker 1: serious question. One thing you're famous for is answering all
5:06
Speaker 1: of your emails, and that's something that I try to
5:08
Speaker 1: do as well, though I'm sure I don't receive nearly
5:11
Speaker 1: as many as you do, and I'll admit to having
5:13
Speaker 1: been inspired by your approach here, but it's very much
5:17
Speaker 1: counter to what most of our colleagues in academia do,
5:20
Speaker 1: who treat email from the public as a nuisance. So
5:23
Speaker 1: what motivates you to be so accessible and so responsive? Well,
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Speaker 1: first of all, I I don't answer all of it.
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Speaker 1: Anything that's within the realm of sanity, moderate seriousness witches
5:37
Speaker 1: a lot I try to answer. I just assume that
5:41
Speaker 1: people ought to be taken seriously, well wonderful. I hope
5:45
Speaker 1: that when aliens arrive and start talking to us, that
5:47
Speaker 1: they also take us seriously. So the question we're diving
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Speaker 1: into today is first, how do we begin to talk
5:53
Speaker 1: to aliens? And then I want to get deeper into
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Speaker 1: the question of whether we could actually learn things from them,
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Speaker 1: understand their mental model, also the universe. But let's start
6:02
Speaker 1: with imagining what it might be like as a linguist
6:05
Speaker 1: to work on this problem. How do you begin? Say
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Speaker 1: you receive a recording from CT and they ask you
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Speaker 1: if you think a series of pulses from spaces language,
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Speaker 1: if it has information? Is it possible to know whether
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Speaker 1: there's information in there without being able to decode it
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Speaker 1: first and actually translated. If there are any intelligent aliens,
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Speaker 1: which is an open question, and if they exist, we
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Speaker 1: could ever get in contact with them, which is an
6:32
Speaker 1: even more open question, then the question would arise. It's
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Speaker 1: a pretty remote question, and the only way to proceed,
6:42
Speaker 1: as usual would be to try to find some common ground.
6:46
Speaker 1: Begin with that. So what's the likely common ground? Well,
6:50
Speaker 1: there's some closable openings. There's an interesting article by Marvin Minsky,
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Speaker 1: you want, of the founders of artificial and diligence, maybe
7:01
Speaker 1: thirty years ago, when he addressed this problem in an
7:06
Speaker 1: interesting way. He pointed out that he and one of
7:09
Speaker 1: his students had done a thought experiment with the touring
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Speaker 1: machines abstract computers and had it's known that you can
7:20
Speaker 1: have a universal touring machine, one in which you can
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Speaker 1: put a program for any possible algorithm and it will
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Speaker 1: implement it, and it can be reduced to a small size.
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Speaker 1: I think the smallest is maybe two states and three
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Speaker 1: symbols or something like that. So they what they did
7:41
Speaker 1: was pick the simplest possible touring machines, the ones with
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Speaker 1: the smallest intrinsic characteristic states and symbols, and just let
7:51
Speaker 1: them run freely and see what they did. Most of
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Speaker 1: them either got into endless loops or crashed, but some
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Speaker 1: of them lived and what they produced basically was the
8:04
Speaker 1: successor function. So Minski suggested that maybe if an intelligence
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Speaker 1: existed somewhere, they would at least have the successor function,
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Speaker 1: and that might be a way to establish contact with them,
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Speaker 1: says some linguistic interests, because you can show that if
8:27
Speaker 1: you take the simplest possible human language, one which has
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Speaker 1: only one word in its vocabulary and uses the simplest
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Speaker 1: version of the computational principles that are used in human language,
8:45
Speaker 1: if you do that, you basically get the successor function.
8:49
Speaker 1: So maybe there's a point of contact these systems. Also
8:54
Speaker 1: with a little bit of tweaking give you arithmetic. So
8:58
Speaker 1: maybe that's a broader point of contact. You could established
9:02
Speaker 1: that for you could try to spread the range of
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Speaker 1: intercommunication beyond. There's a lot of things you can do
9:09
Speaker 1: with just a arithmetic, coding thoughts and expressions. For example,
9:15
Speaker 1: she really get sophisticated about it. You can do girdle number,
9:19
Speaker 1: and you get to the assumption there is that they
9:22
Speaker 1: may have discovered similar mathematical principles which they would recognize
9:27
Speaker 1: if we sort of expressed our version of them, they
9:30
Speaker 1: might identify them and then recognize us as intelligent creatures
9:33
Speaker 1: worthy of discussion. Well, there's a good chance that at
9:36
Speaker 1: least a arithmetic maybe not mathematics, but at least the
9:41
Speaker 1: arithmetic is universal and absolutely To really get fancy, there
9:46
Speaker 1: are models of non standard models of arithmetic that don't
9:50
Speaker 1: satisfy on those axioms, but we can put that aside.
9:55
Speaker 1: Basic arithmetic is very possibly an absolute system, as the
10:00
Speaker 1: rest of mathematics is. Import at least the human construction
10:04
Speaker 1: can be done in different ways and still be consistent.
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Speaker 1: Some of the major results of modern mathematics have been
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Speaker 1: to demonstrate then, so it could be that if you
10:15
Speaker 1: go off into broader demands, Like said theory, you might
10:19
Speaker 1: find other ways of looking at things. Fair gus that
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Speaker 1: at least the arithmetic would be close enough to be absolute,
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Speaker 1: so that anything we might call intelligence, that we would
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Speaker 1: recognize as intelligence would at least hit on that. How
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Speaker 1: do we know the difference between what's absolute and what's
10:36
Speaker 1: just human thinking? I mean, is it a question of
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Speaker 1: definition that these is the class of intelligence that we
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Speaker 1: can communicate with, and therefore we define intelligence to be
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Speaker 1: people who think with a mathematical basis, Or can we
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Speaker 1: actually make some argument that basic mathematics is inherent to
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Speaker 1: the universe rather than just a property of our thinking. Well,
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Speaker 1: you're reaching into a my debated and rather obscure area
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Speaker 1: of foundations of mathematics. That there are viewpoints like Kurt Kirtle,
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Speaker 1: for example, who argued, these are just the truths of mathematics,
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Speaker 1: or like the truths of physics, they're just part of
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Speaker 1: the world. You know, nothing to do with us. We
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Speaker 1: can grasp them the way we can grasp other phenomena.
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Speaker 1: The numbers are there in some ideal platonic world, and
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Speaker 1: we grasp them the with same way I can see
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Speaker 1: the sun in the sky. Just perception. There are others
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Speaker 1: who try to argue that these are human creations, the
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Speaker 1: characteristic of the mind that we construct these things. I
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Speaker 1: don't know of a really solid way of resolving this question.
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Speaker 1: There are many sophisticated debate about it. It strikes me
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Speaker 1: that in some sense we ask similar questions about the
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Speaker 1: nature of biological life, even putting aside aliens and intelligence,
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Speaker 1: we wonder what life might look like on other planets.
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Speaker 1: To make educated but ignorant guesses based on the diversity
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Speaker 1: or the lack of diversity here on Earth, So we
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Speaker 1: imagine common structures that are everywhere on Earth might be
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Speaker 1: universal to all life. Can we play the same game
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Speaker 1: and think about how alien languages might work based on
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Speaker 1: the diversity or the universality of elements of language here
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Speaker 1: on Earth. Are there common structures to human languages or
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Speaker 1: Earth languages that might be universal. You can make some
12:42
Speaker 1: speculations based on what we know. What we know is
12:46
Speaker 1: not enormous, but there's speaking of human language, there's fairly
12:51
Speaker 1: solid evidence that it's an essential species property common to
12:58
Speaker 1: human support severe pathology, and without any analog in other
13:08
Speaker 1: organic systems. So it seems to be something unique to
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Speaker 1: humans and common to humans. No archaeological evidence is not
13:18
Speaker 1: definitive by any means, but there is substantial archaeological evidence
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Speaker 1: that indicates fairly strongly that before Homo sapiens appeared, roughly
13:32
Speaker 1: two to three hundred thousand years ago, there's no significant
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Speaker 1: sign of symbolic activity, maybe a scratch on a piece
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Speaker 1: of wood or something like that. Not long after modern
13:45
Speaker 1: humans appear, means in evolutionary time, like maybe tens of
13:50
Speaker 1: thousands of years, and not long after that you do
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Speaker 1: start to get rich symbolical evidence of extensive symbolic act
14:00
Speaker 1: of it. Pretty soon you get really remarkable examples like
14:04
Speaker 1: the cave drawings and so on. There's genomic evidence now
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Speaker 1: that humans began to separate at least a hundred and
14:14
Speaker 1: fifty thousand years ago now, and evolutionary time that's not
14:19
Speaker 1: long after humans appeared. So putting all this together to
14:23
Speaker 1: plausible speculation that along with anatomically modern humans came some
14:31
Speaker 1: rewiring of the brain which led to the basis for
14:37
Speaker 1: human language, human symbolic activity, human thought, which doesn't exist
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Speaker 1: elsewhere and hasn't changed since it emerged, which is a
14:47
Speaker 1: short period of time. If that's true, we can then
14:50
Speaker 1: ask is there something about human language that makes it
14:55
Speaker 1: possibly maybe as universal as arithmetic might be. So if
14:59
Speaker 1: you think about the nature of evolution, what kind of
15:02
Speaker 1: a process is evolution? Well, what happens is, first some
15:07
Speaker 1: accident takes place. You have a functioning system, maybe bacteria,
15:13
Speaker 1: around for millions of years. Then some accident takes place.
15:17
Speaker 1: In this case, the accident apparently was one bacterium swallowing
15:23
Speaker 1: another microorganism. By accident, Well, that broke structural barriers. Could
15:30
Speaker 1: be a mutation, could be gene transposition. There are lots
15:33
Speaker 1: of possible kinds of accidents that can happen. Could be
15:37
Speaker 1: a shower of cosmic race, you know, volcanic eruption. But
15:43
Speaker 1: some diseruption took takes place in this case back a
15:47
Speaker 1: couple of billion years ago, it was apparently a bacterium
15:51
Speaker 1: swallowing another microorganism. Well, then the second stage of evolution
15:56
Speaker 1: is nature comes along and it tries to construct the
16:00
Speaker 1: simplest way of handling the system that was disrupted. There's
16:05
Speaker 1: a standard principle, sometimes called the Galilean principle, that nature
16:10
Speaker 1: is simple and it's the responsibility of scientists to prove it.
16:14
Speaker 1: Then it is an assumption, but it has been so
16:18
Speaker 1: successful that it's not challenged really, so I think we
16:21
Speaker 1: can take it to be a plausible assumption. So nature
16:25
Speaker 1: steps in constructs the simplest answer to how to deal
16:29
Speaker 1: with this disruption. Then comes the third stage of evolution,
16:33
Speaker 1: which is winnowing basically, of the organisms that survived the
16:38
Speaker 1: second stage, which ones are more reproductively successful, and then
16:43
Speaker 1: it will turn out those proliferate. That's natural selection. Going
16:48
Speaker 1: back to the case of language, what may very well
16:51
Speaker 1: have happened is that some disruption took place which lead
16:56
Speaker 1: to modern humans. They're different obviously and anyways, and we
17:01
Speaker 1: can roughly time it on the order of two to
17:04
Speaker 1: three thousand years ago. Then nature came along found the
17:09
Speaker 1: simplest way of dealing with it. That's the basis for
17:14
Speaker 1: human language and human thought. It was fixed. We have
17:18
Speaker 1: some idea of what it might be. We're getting to
17:21
Speaker 1: the point where you can begin to explain complex phenomenal
17:26
Speaker 1: language on the basis of the assumption that nature picked
17:31
Speaker 1: the simplest possible computational system. Then it never changed because
17:36
Speaker 1: there everybody's gone it. So that's a possibility if you
17:41
Speaker 1: count heads among linguists and people who study evolution almost
17:46
Speaker 1: nobody accepted. But I think it's very likely correct, and
17:50
Speaker 1: I think we're moving towards showing it well. I suppose
17:53
Speaker 1: you could. Then we would have reason to believe that
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Speaker 1: if the kind of disruption that led to intelligence, life
18:03
Speaker 1: ever occurred elsewhere in the universe could very well follow
18:08
Speaker 1: the same course. It's essentially you're arguing that our language
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Speaker 1: might be some optimal solution to this problem and therefore
18:15
Speaker 1: a common point in evolution even on other planets. Um
18:18
Speaker 1: there is a thesis as a names called the strong
18:21
Speaker 1: minimalist thesis, which sets as an ideal to see if
18:26
Speaker 1: you can show the language is the simplest form of
18:30
Speaker 1: a computational system that will meet an external criterion, And
18:35
Speaker 1: the external criterion is that it constitutes thought. Means it
18:41
Speaker 1: has to have semantically significant atoms which can combine. Has
18:47
Speaker 1: to meet that condition. So the simplest way of conforming
18:51
Speaker 1: to pro properties of computational efficiency could be language. Now,
18:57
Speaker 1: we're very far from having demonstrated that their steps towards
19:01
Speaker 1: Does that mean therefore, that we should be able to
19:03
Speaker 1: decode every human language? And is that the case? Aren't
19:07
Speaker 1: there examples of human languages that we've had a great
19:10
Speaker 1: difficulty decoding, for example, Egyptian hieroglyphics. Would we have unraveled
19:15
Speaker 1: their mysteries without the Rosetta stone. In the past several
19:19
Speaker 1: decades serve been thousands of human languages of every typological
19:26
Speaker 1: variety that have been studied in some depth, and when
19:32
Speaker 1: you first look at them, they seem very diverse. The
19:35
Speaker 1: same is true if you look at anything you don't understand,
19:39
Speaker 1: it looks wildly diverse. Or if you go back in biology,
19:44
Speaker 1: well for their fifty years, it was assumed that organisms
19:49
Speaker 1: are so radically diverse that each one has to be
19:53
Speaker 1: studied on its own terms, can't throw any conclusions from
19:57
Speaker 1: one to others. But now that's them to be radically false.
20:02
Speaker 1: It turns out that organisms are sharply restricted in the
20:06
Speaker 1: forms that they can too, and the nature of the
20:10
Speaker 1: way they're can constituted. It's so extreme that it's even
20:14
Speaker 1: been suggested tentatively that there might be a universal genome,
20:20
Speaker 1: just basically one organism and then minor variations on it.
20:26
Speaker 1: It's not considered an impossible assumption, applausible, though not demonstrated.
20:32
Speaker 1: Some well, the same has happened in the case of language.
20:36
Speaker 1: You go back to the days when I was a
20:38
Speaker 1: student nineteen forties, the virtually universal assumption was languages can
20:46
Speaker 1: vary in every possible way, and each one has to
20:50
Speaker 1: be studied on its own, and you can't draw any
20:52
Speaker 1: conclusions from one about other. Kind of a foundation of
20:57
Speaker 1: philosophy of language liquids sticks and and still pretty widely held.
21:04
Speaker 1: I think we're moving in the same direction as biology.
21:08
Speaker 1: It's as you study would appear to be radically diverse languages,
21:13
Speaker 1: seems that it's a deeper level you do find uniformities,
21:18
Speaker 1: and it's even becoming increasingly possible to see component of
21:24
Speaker 1: language which basically creates thoughts, is close to uniform or
21:31
Speaker 1: maybe even uniform on humans. And that the very the
21:35
Speaker 1: locus of variation is in the superficial aspect of how
21:41
Speaker 1: you externalize it. Like as if you had to take
21:44
Speaker 1: an analogy, it's take your laptop computer which as a
21:49
Speaker 1: program and another program doesn't care what printer you link
21:53
Speaker 1: it up to. Language maybe something like that, there's an
21:56
Speaker 1: internal program you can link it to one or another computer.
22:01
Speaker 1: In fact, it doesn't even have to be sound, could
22:04
Speaker 1: be signed, could even be touched any sufficiently rich sensory
22:08
Speaker 1: motor system seems to be available as a means of
22:13
Speaker 1: externalizing the internal thought system. This incidentally, is taking up
22:19
Speaker 1: on a tradition of about several millennium which lasted into
22:25
Speaker 1: the twenty century. There was a sharp break in the
22:28
Speaker 1: twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism and the structuralism
22:35
Speaker 1: and linguistics, both of which were kind of like operationalism
22:40
Speaker 1: and physics. You should just look at the phenomenon the data,
22:45
Speaker 1: no complicated theories, that was it. And the conception of
22:51
Speaker 1: language changed in the twentieth century. Became viewed as basically
22:55
Speaker 1: an instrument of communication, because that's what you can observe.
23:00
Speaker 1: I think we're no learning lest the tradition was correct.
23:05
Speaker 1: It's basically a form of constituting thought with communication and
23:11
Speaker 1: ancillary property. Okay, very little of our use of languages communications.
23:17
Speaker 1: It's almost all internal what we call thinking. Well, this
23:21
Speaker 1: is super fascinating and I have a lot more questions,
23:24
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back,
23:39
Speaker 1: and we're talking to Professor Noam Chomsky about the possibility
23:42
Speaker 1: of communicating with aliens, whether we could understand what's going
23:46
Speaker 1: on inside an alien mind and whether we might actually
23:49
Speaker 1: eventually be able to steal their physics ideas. So the
23:54
Speaker 1: picture you're painting is of language is just a way
23:57
Speaker 1: to get a thought from one brain to an other,
24:00
Speaker 1: and that there is some sort of internal concept which
24:04
Speaker 1: might be much more universal. And the details of whether
24:07
Speaker 1: you're sending an email or using social media or using
24:10
Speaker 1: semaphore flags don't matter as much as the information that's
24:14
Speaker 1: being communicated. But how do we know that that information
24:17
Speaker 1: could be universal? And doesn't there have to be some
24:20
Speaker 1: sort of internal representation inside the brain of that information.
24:24
Speaker 1: Doesn't that require some assumption of, you know, a basis
24:28
Speaker 1: set of vectors to define the space of that information.
24:31
Speaker 1: How could we ever know whether the aliens or or
24:35
Speaker 1: any other species for that matter, I really do share
24:38
Speaker 1: that universal sort of internal thought, or whether the differences
24:41
Speaker 1: are just in the communication patterns. How could we unravel that?
24:45
Speaker 1: Imagine you met the aliens, how would you go about
24:48
Speaker 1: figuring that out? Experimentation start by trying to find common grounds,
24:53
Speaker 1: maybe arithmetic, maybe even some aspect of what called universal
25:01
Speaker 1: grammar core six properties of language. If you can really
25:05
Speaker 1: show that these are the optimal solution to the problem
25:10
Speaker 1: of restructuring and organizing a computable function, the cursor function
25:17
Speaker 1: that generates intinto the many things. That's the basis of language.
25:21
Speaker 1: So if language is a kind of an optimal solution
25:25
Speaker 1: to that, you can explore whether that's shared. At some
25:29
Speaker 1: point you may get the points that are not shared, okay,
25:32
Speaker 1: and you try to discover what they are. It's not
25:34
Speaker 1: fundamentally any different than trying to find out what are
25:38
Speaker 1: the elementary particles, what's the chemical composition of water? We
25:45
Speaker 1: don't perceive it, you know, it's a foreign universe or us.
25:49
Speaker 1: We have found very extensive and successful ways to understand
25:55
Speaker 1: a great deal about these totally alien systems, namely all science.
26:02
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a very interesting history of this. I
26:06
Speaker 1: don't know if you want to go into it, but
26:08
Speaker 1: to go back to the early modern science, Galileo and Newton, Leibnantz,
26:14
Speaker 1: you know, Wigan's the great figures who founded modern science.
26:18
Speaker 1: Because they had a conception of what the world must be.
26:23
Speaker 1: It must be what they called the mechanical universe, the
26:27
Speaker 1: kind of thing that an artisan could construct out of
26:31
Speaker 1: years and levers and so on. That was what the
26:35
Speaker 1: world must be. That's the basis of modern science. Newton's
26:40
Speaker 1: great discovery was to show that there are no machines.
26:45
Speaker 1: There's nothing mechanical. Everything has what we're considered to be
26:50
Speaker 1: ghostly property's interaction without contact, and repulsion without contact, and
26:56
Speaker 1: so on. Newton thought this was completely observed. He wrote
27:01
Speaker 1: that no one who has the slightest scientific understanding could
27:07
Speaker 1: believe any of this, and in fact, if you look
27:10
Speaker 1: at his great work Principia, it's mathematical principles, not physical principles. Course,
27:17
Speaker 1: Newton felt along with his contemporaries, that he had not
27:21
Speaker 1: found a physical basis for motion interaction, and so he
27:29
Speaker 1: only had a mathematical theory of it. For the rest
27:32
Speaker 1: of his life he tried to find some mechanical formulation
27:36
Speaker 1: of this, of course, in vain. In later years, a
27:41
Speaker 1: major change took place in the pursuit of science. Scientists
27:45
Speaker 1: gave up the hope of finding an intelligible universe. All
27:51
Speaker 1: they wanted was intelligible theories of the universe. Newton's theories
27:56
Speaker 1: where intelligible. Leibniz could understand Newton's theories like Newton live,
28:02
Speaker 1: that's considered them observed. Basically, the goals of science were lowered.
28:08
Speaker 1: Let's just try to find theories that are intelligible and
28:11
Speaker 1: explain things, even if the universe that it provides is
28:16
Speaker 1: unintelligible to us, because it doesn't matter what's intelligible though.
28:20
Speaker 1: That's a fact about our cognitive systems. So any child
28:26
Speaker 1: will assume that the world is mechanical, Like when you
28:30
Speaker 1: do experiments with young children and you have see two
28:34
Speaker 1: lines that move in common, a child will automatically assume
28:39
Speaker 1: there's an invisible bar connecting them. Let's just have to
28:43
Speaker 1: have a mechanical universe. Well you don't. Unfortunately, it's not
28:48
Speaker 1: a mechanical universe. So that's a case where cognitive capacities
28:54
Speaker 1: just don't happen to inform to the nature of the universe.
28:57
Speaker 1: So we have to proceed in other ways, like trying
29:01
Speaker 1: to find intelligible theories that will explain things. And I
29:06
Speaker 1: think it's the same growth as we deal with an
29:08
Speaker 1: alien might be that they have a form of intelligence
29:12
Speaker 1: that is inaccessible to us. It's fine. If so, we'll
29:17
Speaker 1: try to discover explanatory theories which account for their form
29:21
Speaker 1: of intelligence, maybe account for theirs and theirs A super
29:25
Speaker 1: theory will show what kinds of intelligence there might be.
29:30
Speaker 1: It's such a far off dream that you can barely
29:33
Speaker 1: speculate about it. But I think that's the way, were
29:36
Speaker 1: the only way I can imagine. We just to proceed,
29:38
Speaker 1: in fact, using our own experience, with our own history
29:42
Speaker 1: of science. It strikes me that you draw such a
29:45
Speaker 1: sharp line between humans and every other species on the planet.
29:49
Speaker 1: If I've understood correctly, you arguing that humans are the
29:52
Speaker 1: only intelligent species on the planet and the only ones
29:54
Speaker 1: with its capacity for symbolic thought and expression. What about
29:58
Speaker 1: other species like dolphins, or whales or pigs, which are
30:01
Speaker 1: known to be intelligent and have some examples of communication.
30:06
Speaker 1: Can we exercise these principles on dolphins? Every organism ass communication,
30:11
Speaker 1: Trees communicate, so communication is kind of the universal and
30:16
Speaker 1: if you think that language is just an instrument of communication.
30:20
Speaker 1: The modern behavior structuralist approach, which essentially rejects the conception
30:30
Speaker 1: of inner structure, which is radically anti scientific. In my view,
30:36
Speaker 1: all of science is talking about inner structures, not just
30:40
Speaker 1: arrangement and organization of data. But structuralism and behaviorism as
30:46
Speaker 1: chewed the search for inner structures not allowed to do that.
30:50
Speaker 1: You can only look at the data and the organization
30:54
Speaker 1: of the well that's a sure way of guaranteeing you'll
30:56
Speaker 1: never find anything, And exactly pretty much that's what's happened. Well,
31:01
Speaker 1: I think we've extricated ourselves from that period of human thought,
31:07
Speaker 1: at least we should have, and we're now back to
31:10
Speaker 1: what great physicists Jean Baptiste and his Nobel laure ed
31:16
Speaker 1: address described the essential nature of science as finding the
31:23
Speaker 1: hidden invisibles that makes sense of the complex visibles. I
31:29
Speaker 1: think every scientist knows that behaviorism was a sharp departure
31:33
Speaker 1: from it, but it's a pathology which I think has
31:37
Speaker 1: to be overcome. When we overcome it, we see the communication. Though.
31:43
Speaker 1: It's what we observe is the complex visibles. It's not
31:48
Speaker 1: the hidden invisibles. The hidden invisibles turn out to be.
31:53
Speaker 1: I think pretty much what the tradition assumed the construction
31:58
Speaker 1: of thought. Now, what about in religience? That's too loose
32:02
Speaker 1: a concept. So I happen to live in Arizona, not
32:07
Speaker 1: far from the desert out in my backyard. There are
32:10
Speaker 1: desert ants that have cognitive capacities that humans can't begin
32:16
Speaker 1: to approach. I mean, they can navigate in ways which
32:21
Speaker 1: are impossible for humans, knowing figuring out from where the
32:25
Speaker 1: sun is, whether they're in the northern or southern hemisphere.
32:29
Speaker 1: Using solar evidence solar asimus to carry out what's called
32:35
Speaker 1: dead breckoning, you can wander around the desert and finally
32:40
Speaker 1: something to eat when you go on a straight line
32:42
Speaker 1: back to the Humans can't do that. We can do it.
32:45
Speaker 1: We need complex technical instruments to be able to duplicate that.
32:50
Speaker 1: Sailors on the ocean have to have complex instrumentation to
32:55
Speaker 1: head back to port. They can't just do it the
32:58
Speaker 1: way in AUNT. So are they more intelligent than we are?
33:02
Speaker 1: Open some dimensions? Point is intelligence at least if it
33:06
Speaker 1: means things like ability to solve problems as many dimensions.
33:10
Speaker 1: Humans are very good at some of them, awful at others.
33:14
Speaker 1: Other organs and them is different when you get the
33:16
Speaker 1: whales and dolphins. They have big brains, big even relative
33:22
Speaker 1: to bodies. It's complex pains. They do communicate over long
33:28
Speaker 1: distances in the ocean for them, and they have complex behavior.
33:34
Speaker 1: They cooperate, they've worked together as I've watched dolphins. I
33:39
Speaker 1: used to sail when I was younger. You could sail
33:42
Speaker 1: through areas where they were dolphins and you could see them.
33:46
Speaker 1: If they caught a bunch of fish, they'd start circling
33:50
Speaker 1: around the area the fish, driving them into a smaller
33:54
Speaker 1: area and finally eating them all up. All right, that's
33:57
Speaker 1: complex cooperative behavior. You woman's couldn't do it that easily.
34:02
Speaker 1: We'd have to have a more complicated way of doing it. Well,
34:07
Speaker 1: do they have anything like human language? The kind of
34:12
Speaker 1: stranger if they did, but there's no evidence for it.
34:15
Speaker 1: They have their capacities accommodating to their ecosystem. We have ers.
34:23
Speaker 1: Something peculiar happened in the history of life on Earth.
34:30
Speaker 1: Couple hundred thousand years ago, a very strange organism emerged accidentally.
34:36
Speaker 1: You look at the history of the long evolution of humans,
34:39
Speaker 1: it's a long series of accidents, and started with them,
34:44
Speaker 1: as I said, the formation of complex sells back billions
34:50
Speaker 1: of years ago. Then many other accidents, one of them
34:54
Speaker 1: sixty five million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth,
34:58
Speaker 1: wiped out about eight percententive species and at the age
35:02
Speaker 1: of the dinosaurs that we're some small mammals around but
35:07
Speaker 1: managed to survive. Okay, that's us pure accident. A million
35:12
Speaker 1: other accidents along the way, and this series of accidents
35:17
Speaker 1: ended up at a point where one last accident seems
35:22
Speaker 1: to have provided a computational procedure or a human language
35:28
Speaker 1: which is not found elsewhere in the organic world, and
35:33
Speaker 1: then seems that nature just found the simplest way to
35:37
Speaker 1: deal with it. Maybe that's what happened, We don't know,
35:41
Speaker 1: but that's what it begins to look like. If so,
35:43
Speaker 1: it's very unlikely that we're going to find anything like
35:47
Speaker 1: human language in dolphins or whales. In fact, take our
35:51
Speaker 1: closest relatives, chimpanzees. There have been extensive efforts, totally pointless
35:57
Speaker 1: in my opinion, but very extensive effort to see if
36:01
Speaker 1: you could, with massive training from infancy, see if you
36:06
Speaker 1: could elicit any language like behavior from a chimpanzee or
36:12
Speaker 1: total failures. A lot of my students were involved in this,
36:16
Speaker 1: and very good psychologists. My own feeling is that it's
36:19
Speaker 1: about us ridiculous as trying to teach humans to do
36:24
Speaker 1: the waggle dance of bees. I mean, you could probably
36:29
Speaker 1: train graduate students to do something that look kind of
36:32
Speaker 1: like the waggle dance, but totally pointless endeavor. They're not
36:36
Speaker 1: doing it the same way. It's a different organisms functioning
36:39
Speaker 1: differently we're not at the peak of intelligence. There's no
36:43
Speaker 1: great chain of being, you know, starting with bacteria ending
36:47
Speaker 1: up with us. That's a long abandoned idea. There's many
36:51
Speaker 1: different branches. Organisms do in many different ways, and they
36:55
Speaker 1: have their own forms of what we might call intelligence.
36:59
Speaker 1: We have or desert ants of theirs, dolphins of theirs.
37:03
Speaker 1: It would be absolutely a biological miracle if we found
37:07
Speaker 1: that chimpanzees could acquire a language. It would be like
37:13
Speaker 1: saying that chimpanzees have this amazing ability with enormous survival value,
37:19
Speaker 1: but they never thought of human using it until humans
37:22
Speaker 1: came around. This is if someone were to come along
37:26
Speaker 1: and show humans how you can fly. You can get
37:29
Speaker 1: away from that lion that's chasing you, Why don't just fly?
37:34
Speaker 1: And humans said, oh, I never thought of that, and
37:36
Speaker 1: you go like that and you started flying. That's not
37:38
Speaker 1: going to happen. That's not the way biology works. If
37:41
Speaker 1: there's a capacity that's of survival value, you're going to
37:45
Speaker 1: use it. So the message I'm getting is that you
37:48
Speaker 1: don't consider there to be sufficient intelligence in other creatures
37:52
Speaker 1: on the Earth to develop the kind of symbolic language
37:54
Speaker 1: that we could decode. So it's not a fair proxy
37:57
Speaker 1: for the question of could we understand and alien intelligence? Okay, well,
38:01
Speaker 1: I have a lot more I want to ask you about,
38:03
Speaker 1: but first let's take another break. Okay, we're back and
38:18
Speaker 1: we're discussing with esteem Professor Chomsky. It's a possibility of
38:22
Speaker 1: communicating with aliens and whether or not anybody in the
38:25
Speaker 1: scientific community takes this prospect seriously. You mentioned something earlier,
38:29
Speaker 1: you said that the possibility of trying to decode an
38:32
Speaker 1: alien language is a remote possibility, and I'm wondering if
38:36
Speaker 1: it's something that linguists as a field are excited about
38:40
Speaker 1: or think about. You know, biologists, If you told a
38:43
Speaker 1: biologist I have a sample of life from another planet,
38:47
Speaker 1: they would be very excited. They would dive in immediately,
38:49
Speaker 1: they would be salivating at the opportunity. Are linguists excited
38:52
Speaker 1: about this as well? Or is this something that just
38:54
Speaker 1: is so remote that nobody really takes seriously. Some linguists
38:58
Speaker 1: are interested in it. Actually, I'm one of the very few.
39:02
Speaker 1: We I'm a co author of a couple of articles
39:06
Speaker 1: and what's called xeno linguistics. What could you do if
39:10
Speaker 1: you found an alien intelligence? And what we suggested is
39:15
Speaker 1: something along the ones of what it discussed. I don't
39:17
Speaker 1: think it's a topic that interests many linguists because there's
39:20
Speaker 1: nothing to say about it. First of all, we have
39:23
Speaker 1: no idea whether an intelligence of anything we'd call intelligence
39:28
Speaker 1: even exists. You're familiar, I'm sure with Fermi's paradox. Where
39:33
Speaker 1: are they? You know? I mean, from a point of
39:36
Speaker 1: view an astrophysicist, Fermi could show that there's huge numbers
39:42
Speaker 1: of planets which have conditions for life pretty much like ours.
39:48
Speaker 1: So there ought to be lots of life. It should
39:51
Speaker 1: have evolved into higher intelligence. We've made massive efforts to
39:56
Speaker 1: investigated searching for any signal of intelligent life. So far
40:03
Speaker 1: total zero nothing. So where are they? Well, one possibility
40:09
Speaker 1: is they're just not there, that the series of accidents
40:13
Speaker 1: that led to humans was so totally improbable that just
40:17
Speaker 1: wasn't duplicated. In fact, is even I'm not confident to
40:22
Speaker 1: judge their accuracy, But there are studies published in serious
40:29
Speaker 1: pere reviewed biological journals arguing that even the complexity of
40:33
Speaker 1: RNA is so improbable that it's very unlikely to have
40:39
Speaker 1: found in any accessible part of the universe. Of course,
40:43
Speaker 1: lots of the universe just isn't accessible, but the parts
40:46
Speaker 1: that we can conceivably have contact with, or maybe that's true.
40:52
Speaker 1: If so, there won't be any the answer to Family's paradoxes.
40:57
Speaker 1: There aren't any. There are other possible answers. Actually we're
41:01
Speaker 1: in the process of giving an answer. There's several aspects
41:05
Speaker 1: to intelligence. One is the capacity to destroy. Human intelligence
41:11
Speaker 1: has discovered the capacity developed the capacity to destroy everything.
41:17
Speaker 1: The domesday clock of the atomic scientists measures that every
41:22
Speaker 1: year now has the human species developed the moral capacity
41:27
Speaker 1: to constrain its ability to do everything? Well, so far
41:32
Speaker 1: the evidence on that is not very strong. Maybe it doesn't,
41:35
Speaker 1: and it may turn out that one aspect of intelligence
41:41
Speaker 1: is that the capacity to destroy simply exceeds the capacity
41:45
Speaker 1: to constrain it. If so, there might have been any
41:48
Speaker 1: number of human civilizations and they all destroyed themselves because
41:53
Speaker 1: just natural law, that's the way it works. Could be
41:56
Speaker 1: another answer to Fermi's parados. But the fact of them
42:00
Speaker 1: utter is they're just not there, or at least we
42:02
Speaker 1: can't find them. So given that it's doesn't attract a
42:06
Speaker 1: great deal of interest to look into how to deal
42:08
Speaker 1: with it, except just kind of thing we're talking about
42:12
Speaker 1: amusing puzzle to think about, how could you proceed to say,
42:15
Speaker 1: in my own opinion, and we proceed very much in
42:18
Speaker 1: the way that humans proceeded with human science, which is
42:22
Speaker 1: an alien world. The universe is an alien world, totally alien.
42:27
Speaker 1: We have no grasp with it, but nevertheless we've been
42:30
Speaker 1: able to learn a lot about it. Well. I think
42:32
Speaker 1: it's a very intriguing question because it goes to the
42:34
Speaker 1: heart of lots of fascinating topics about whether what we've
42:38
Speaker 1: learned is universal. And of course we won't know anything
42:41
Speaker 1: until we actually meet aliens, if that ever happened. But
42:43
Speaker 1: you know, as a scientist, I see the depiction of
42:46
Speaker 1: my field of science in popular literature all the time,
42:49
Speaker 1: and sometimes it's very accurate and sometimes it's cringe inducing.
42:52
Speaker 1: There are lots of fictional descriptions of how linguists might
42:56
Speaker 1: communicate with alien intelligence. I wonder what your thoughts are
43:01
Speaker 1: on various fictional depictions. Are there a particular fictional depiction
43:06
Speaker 1: of linguist decoding alien language that you find plausible or
43:09
Speaker 1: at least amusing. The only thing that I think is
43:13
Speaker 1: clausible is what I just destroyed. It's like the problem
43:18
Speaker 1: of finding out the inner nature of organic compound. We
43:24
Speaker 1: don't have any intuition about that. It is what it is.
43:29
Speaker 1: There was a period of human science, a flourishing, active,
43:35
Speaker 1: vigorous period created modern science basically got Leo to Newton
43:41
Speaker 1: in which there was such a picture. Turned out there
43:45
Speaker 1: isn't any such picture, so we give up on that hope.
43:49
Speaker 1: We now study everything from the outside, including our own
43:54
Speaker 1: intelligence or intuitive belief of what it all will be.
43:59
Speaker 1: Is an interesting comment about our cognitive nature, but it
44:03
Speaker 1: tells us nothing about what we're studying. That was a
44:05
Speaker 1: lesson of new Tony in physics, and I think, well,
44:09
Speaker 1: I think the deep question that I'm curious about here
44:11
Speaker 1: is whether the invisible truths that we're revealing, as you say,
44:16
Speaker 1: we use the visible evidence to try to decode with
44:19
Speaker 1: the invisible truths about the universe, are whether those really
44:22
Speaker 1: are universal? And the way you're describing and it sounds
44:24
Speaker 1: to me like you use the universe as fundamentally ununderstandable.
44:29
Speaker 1: We are putting together sort of mathematical stories that we
44:33
Speaker 1: tell ourselves as humans to make sense of it. But
44:36
Speaker 1: doesn't that mean that it's very likely that, for example,
44:39
Speaker 1: alien scientists are coming up with completely different stories that
44:44
Speaker 1: makes sense to them, you know, even the human stories
44:46
Speaker 1: have varied over the last few hundred years, or our
44:49
Speaker 1: understanding for what might be going on inside. So is
44:52
Speaker 1: there a chance if we ever met aliens that we
44:54
Speaker 1: could talk science with them, that we shared some sort
44:57
Speaker 1: of fundamental mental constructs about what's going on inside the universe? Well,
45:02
Speaker 1: I can only repeat the only way we could find
45:05
Speaker 1: out is by starting with common ground. No other way.
45:11
Speaker 1: Common grounds might be arithmetic. Maybe it could be something
45:17
Speaker 1: like the universals of human cognition, human language. Maybe if
45:24
Speaker 1: it's a fact that that's the optimal way for nature
45:29
Speaker 1: to construct any system of infinite generative capacity, then it's
45:34
Speaker 1: likely that it will be universal in all forms of intelligence.
45:38
Speaker 1: It's about as far as we can go after that.
45:41
Speaker 1: It's just asking forgetting aliens. What might we discover about
45:48
Speaker 1: the nature of elementary particles? Who knows? You know, discover
45:54
Speaker 1: it when you discover it. Well, episode of sociological questioning
45:59
Speaker 1: for you, which is, if aliens made themselves known and
46:03
Speaker 1: arrived on Earth and were curious and peaceful and wanted
46:07
Speaker 1: to communicate with death, you think that linguists and scientists
46:11
Speaker 1: would be allowed contact. You think that the society and
46:14
Speaker 1: politicians would allow sort of unfettered scientific communication with extra
46:18
Speaker 1: refuels forward to know what humans will do. Take a
46:21
Speaker 1: look at the United States, with the country we know best.
46:25
Speaker 1: There's a couple of dozen states where the state legislatures
46:30
Speaker 1: are passing laws. Let's say that parents can sue teachers
46:38
Speaker 1: if they teach things that parents don't like. Okay, that's
46:42
Speaker 1: the kind of creature we are installing. As Russia, you
46:45
Speaker 1: could be sent to the gulag for it in states.
46:48
Speaker 1: In the United States, you can be suited by parents
46:51
Speaker 1: for it. Will going back to your question, will politicians
46:58
Speaker 1: allow scientific communication? Many of them don't evelow human communication.
47:04
Speaker 1: We speaking of communications, there is some history. We have
47:07
Speaker 1: sent some messages out into space. There's you know, encodings
47:10
Speaker 1: on the voyager. There's a message we've sent from aris Ebo.
47:14
Speaker 1: Looking back on those messages, which we're designed with some
47:18
Speaker 1: attempt to be founded in mathematics, do you think that
47:21
Speaker 1: it's possible for alien intelligence to decode those you look,
47:25
Speaker 1: you find those to be well constructed in general, or
47:28
Speaker 1: do you think that they're sort just reflective of the
47:30
Speaker 1: thinking at the moment. Well, we have to begin with
47:33
Speaker 1: things like simple arithmetical truth. If you have two things
47:39
Speaker 1: over here, three things over there, do you have five
47:43
Speaker 1: things altogether? If you can get that for we can
47:47
Speaker 1: go on from there. So it seems to me that
47:49
Speaker 1: to summarize what I think is your view is that
47:51
Speaker 1: it's likely that mathematics is at the core of all
47:55
Speaker 1: intelligence and language. From that we might be able to
47:58
Speaker 1: build up some grammar based on the most basic operations.
48:02
Speaker 1: That fair summary. It's a fair summary tempted by platonism,
48:07
Speaker 1: the idea that numbers are real, they're just there. We
48:12
Speaker 1: discover them, we don't create them, contentious idea. It's not
48:16
Speaker 1: very clear what it means, but something on that order
48:19
Speaker 1: seems at least plausible. If so, they're going to be
48:23
Speaker 1: there for every form of intelligence as far as language
48:26
Speaker 1: and thought are concerned. That depends on the answer to
48:31
Speaker 1: an open and significant scientific question. Is human language the
48:40
Speaker 1: optimal solution for meeting the minimal external condition of expressing food,
48:49
Speaker 1: having ways to express thought, agents, actions, events, and so on.
48:56
Speaker 1: I think there's this work pointing in that direction. They're
49:00
Speaker 1: steps towards the conclusion. It's a minority opinion. Most languists
49:05
Speaker 1: don't pay any attention to this, but and those who
49:08
Speaker 1: don't doesn't make any sense. But I think there is
49:11
Speaker 1: a work tending strongly in that direction. If it turns
49:16
Speaker 1: out to be true, well then we have another way
49:21
Speaker 1: to deal with an intelligence if it is really optimal,
49:26
Speaker 1: basically as a natural law should show up everywhere where
49:30
Speaker 1: nature operates. Okay, that's a possible, whige possible based on
49:37
Speaker 1: a lot of empirical assumptions. Well, let me ask you
49:40
Speaker 1: a silly question then to end, which is all human
49:42
Speaker 1: culture and all human languages seem to have a uniform
49:45
Speaker 1: concept of what is a joke? You think that it's
49:48
Speaker 1: likely the hact aliens. If they're intelligent and communicate in
49:51
Speaker 1: some way that's intelligible to us, we'll be able to
49:53
Speaker 1: make jokes. We'll get our jokes that we could understand
49:56
Speaker 1: alien humor. Actually, I just read an interesting book about
50:00
Speaker 1: that about humans. It's social history to study of early
50:07
Speaker 1: modern conceptions, behavior, and so on, including what we're jokes.
50:12
Speaker 1: So it turns out that one of the great jokes
50:15
Speaker 1: in uh, I guess the eighteenth century was massacreing cats.
50:20
Speaker 1: The book is called The Great Cat Massacre. It's a
50:23
Speaker 1: very interesting book. That's a study of the ways in
50:27
Speaker 1: which people looked at things. It's not mostly about cuts,
50:31
Speaker 1: just one example, the way they looked at things, and
50:35
Speaker 1: the early modern period not that far from us eighteenth century,
50:39
Speaker 1: and a lot of things that look like jokes. Jokes
50:42
Speaker 1: does all right? Well, I'm I hope when the aliens
50:49
Speaker 1: arrived they leave our cats alone. Thanks very much, Really
50:52
Speaker 1: appreciate your humoring me for these silly but I think
50:55
Speaker 1: are fascinating questions that probe not just the needs of
50:58
Speaker 1: our language, but the nature of our thoughts and to
51:00
Speaker 1: be the nature of our understanding of the universe. So
51:02
Speaker 1: thanks again very much for coming on the podcast. Well,
51:05
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us for this conversation
51:08
Speaker 1: with Professor Chomsky. His reactions gave me a lot to
51:11
Speaker 1: think about, especially on the topic of whether or not
51:14
Speaker 1: some of the ideas the stories we tell about elementary
51:17
Speaker 1: particles are fundamentally true, universal to alien physicists as well,
51:23
Speaker 1: or just sort of mathematical stories that we tell ourselves
51:27
Speaker 1: in our ongoing effort to understand is crazy bonkers universe
51:31
Speaker 1: that's out there. To me, one of the deepest ways
51:34
Speaker 1: to get a handle on this mystery will be to
51:36
Speaker 1: talk to aliens physicists about it if it ever happens,
51:39
Speaker 1: because they might reveal that the way we are looking
51:41
Speaker 1: at the universe is very human centric, that we have
51:44
Speaker 1: missed something obvious because we don't have one of the
51:47
Speaker 1: senses that they have, where we have not developed a
51:49
Speaker 1: branch of mathematics, or maybe even mathematics is holding us back,
51:53
Speaker 1: but we won't know until we have a chance to
51:55
Speaker 1: interview one of them on the podcast. So thanks very
51:58
Speaker 1: much for joining us to an in next time. Thanks
52:08
Speaker 1: for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The
52:11
Speaker 1: Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. Or more
52:14
Speaker 1: podcast from my heart Radio visit the I Heart Radio app,
52:17
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.