- In principle, what we are is just a big collection
of elementary particles.
And yes, it's really complicated, and no one
in their right mind would try to describe a human being
in terms of those elementary particles.
But particle physicists have collected elementary particles
in what's called the standard model of particle physics.
And those particles for all we currently know,
make up everything around us,
the entire universe, including us.
Now, a lot of people seem to be
a little bit uncomfortable with this.
They're wondering, isn't there something more about me?
Am I not a little bit more
than just those fundamental particles?
Where's my consciousness come from?
Whatever happened to my soul?
Personally, I don't think
that to describe our observations, our experience
of us thinking requires anything more than particle physics.
I'm happy to leave the understanding of consciousness
to neurobiologists or whatever those fields are called.
But I also don't think that we need to add anything
to the fundamental laws of nature
that we have collected in physics.
I think it's sufficient.
But a lot of people have difficulty with that.
They want there to be something else,
this thing that they call the soul.
So one possible route that you can take is
what's called dualism that just says
we have all those fundamental particles and atoms
and gravity and interactions and all that kind of stuff.
And on the other side, we have the soul.
And it just lives in an entirely non-physical realm.
And this is where I reside in some sense.
And this is perfectly fine.
It's compatible with all we know, so long
as this soul does not interact with the physical side.
Because once it starts interacting with it
they would have to be part of our theories
in the foundations of physics.
So for all we currently know from
the foundations of physics,
everything that isn't in the standard model
of particle physics plus gravity is emergent
from those particles and the forces between them.
And by emergent, I just mean that it can be reduced
to the properties of those fundamental particles
like the color of a metal or something like this.
And this is something that is known
under the word reductionism.
There's no observation
that we have ever made that contradicts this idea
of reductionism, that fundamentally everything is made of
and everything derives from the properties
of those fundamental particles.
But the properties of collective assemblies
of particles that in principle you could calculate.
In most cases, we cannot.
There are certainly no particle physicists who
can calculate what your eye color will be
if you give them the properties
of all the particles in your body.
But in principle, you know it should be possible.
If you had a big enough computer
you would be able to calculate it.
So on some level you could say that, yeah
we are really just constituted
of all those elementary particles
and all that we can do comes
about from the interaction of those particles,
even though that might be an
entirely useless description of us.
It's nevertheless correct.
But I think that actually
we're much more than that on a different level.
You could say we're somewhat less than that.
By which I mean that what's important
about us is not the particles that we are made of.
It's what those particles can do.
And that's what's contained in the information
of how those particles are put together.
That they make up a human body.
Someone who can walk and talk
and think and write books or fly to the moon.
Where does this come from?
Well, it comes from the way that those atoms are arranged.
And I actually think that this is a very hopeful message
because it means that in principle
it should be possible to upload your identity
and actually not just your thinking apparatus
but your entire body to a computer
because there's nothing that stands in the way.
All this information about the configuration
of the atoms in your body, you can formulate it
in mathematics and put it onto a computer.