Speaker 1: It is great to have back on the program. A Zarian, who's a cognitive
neuroscientist, blogger for Psychology Today and whose new book is The Romance of Reality
How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness and Cosmic Complexity.
Bobby, great to speaking to you again. Speaker 6: Thanks for having me back, David.
Speaker 1: So, I mean, the book is fascinating because it starts with these are just big topics,
right? How what what are the origins of life? What is what is consciousness? What is sort of
our place? How do we understand our ability to perceive and understand? But it also has
very much real world kind of day to day nitty gritty implications about how we solve individual
problems, political questions, how people relate to each other, how we understand what is real and
what is not real and kind of epistemology. Can you talk just like generally what what was the main
point you wanted to get across in the book? Speaker 6: So yeah, there are a lot of
points that you mentioned, but the general idea is that. So it's, I guess to contrast it to the
old paradigm. The old paradigm, the kind of reigning scientific worldview was known as
the reductionist paradigm. And it basically says that life is something of a cosmic accident and
that life is transient and has no larger cosmic significance. But the story that's emerging from
complexity science is challenging, that basically says that the universe isn't getting increasingly
disordered as once thought, it's getting more and more complex. And life is a part of that
complex ification process. And once life emerges, it becomes the driver of that process. So we're
not an accident. We are a natural manifestation of the laws of physics and the evolutionary dynamics
that emerge from those laws. And this means that life has something like a purpose in the universe,
and that's to see that life continues to persist and spread throughout the cosmos.
Speaker 1: What's fascinating about that, to put a pause there, is if people listen to 90%
but not 100% of what you're saying, they might misunderstand what you're saying as meaning
either one, that there is purpose in the way that some attribute to religion or God,
which is not what you're saying here. You're saying that the purpose of life is is to persist.
Life wants to continue so so to speak. And number two, if people listen to 90%, but not 100% of what
you're saying, they might think you're saying that the preexisting ideas, for example, about entropy
are being contradicted by what you're saying, but you're not really you're sort of expanding
on that in a sense, if I understand correctly. Speaker 6: Yes. So to address those two points,
let's start with the entropy point first. There's a lot of confusion about what the second law
of thermodynamics means. Yes. And there's a statistical interpretation of that law that
basically says that ordered systems will naturally move toward a more disordered state, and that
that's true for closed systems. So closed systems are systems that aren't open to energy coming in
from an outside source. So the planet Earth is an open system, and that is because we have a star,
we have our sun that is radiating all of this energy down on the planet. And those energy flows
basically organize life. And we so energy flowing through a simple chemical system will organize it.
And that is the mechanism that creates life on a planet. So the idea basically is that life can
continue to persist against this tendency towards disorder as long as it can continue to extract
energy from the environment because the energy is used to sustain itself. But in using that energy,
it uses up ordered energy and it dissipates that energy as heat, and that creates entropy too.
So complexity can grow and grow and grow if life can spread and find more energy.
And the second law of thermodynamics really just says that there's an energetic cost to creating
order, that you have to use some of this available energy and basically turn that energy into entropy
so it doesn't violate the second law unless you think the second law applies to the whole
universe and says that the universe is growing increasingly disordered. This challenges that and
says we need to understand that entropy is this complex term. It takes on a number of forms and
that life doesn't have to be transient. If we can solve our problems and continue
to extract energy, then we can persist. Speaker 1: The religious purpose that is
often debated by Christian apologists and others. You're talking about purpose in a different way,
and it makes intuitive sense if you think about, for example, evolution, right? And the idea well,
when we when we talk about purpose, you could say the purpose here is evolution is fueling more fit
species so that they can continue to live so that life persists. As you're talking about,
we don't have to talk about purpose ideologically necessarily or as a
designed thing and still acknowledge that maybe purpose could be an appropriate word
in terms of life wanting to preserve and continue. Speaker 6: Yes. So there was a big movement to
kind of get purpose. Out of biology in the 20th century. Right. But where understanding
that purpose or agency is really the defining characteristic of life. So if you compare life
to an inanimate object, like a rock or a chair, those things don't do anything interesting. And if
they move, if Iraq, you know, tumbles down a hill, it's because of the force of gravity. Or if you
see Iraq moving on the street, it's being pushed by a gust of wind. But life moves according to
survival goals. So it has agency. And this agency is basically a product of the information stored
in living systems, which are adaptive systems. So it's really helpful to talk about purpose.
But if you zoom out and you look at the universe and you understand that life isn't any sort of
magical, it doesn't have some sort of magical ingredient propelling it. Then you see that
the inanimate matter in the universe is waking up in the form of life. And so you don't see it
so much as just life trying to persist. You see it as the universe sort of waking up through life and
being able to experience itself. So there are some big what I would call spiritual implications of
this theory, but it is an entirely mechanistic, naturalistic picture because we can understand
these processes that generate complexity. We can formalize them with mathematics. So
there's no magic in this framework. However, I will say it is still really mysterious why the
universe is so fine tuned to give rise to life. And if you believe the argument in this book,
it doesn't just allow life. It necessitates life and basically ensures that life will
continue to adapt and spread. Speaker 1: So along those lines,
when we look at societies and the way that human society is organized, we can find lots of
relatively persistent. You know, I'm talking here about hundreds of years, which is still a
relatively small amount of time. But but in modern society, we see lots of mechanisms that seem like
they would run counter to that. Right. World Wars, for example, the seeking and obtaining
of nuclear weapons, which, you know, it's hard to argue that nuclear weapons in some longterm way
will preserve life. They seem only only able to potentially destroyed or at best do nothing at all
conflict. So we what is the role at the sort of more medium term society level of some of these
systems that seem to run very contrary to to life? Speaker 6: So there's a principle in the book
that I call Popper's principle, named after the philosopher of science, Karl Popper. And it
basically says that problems create progress. So you mentioned World War Two, and it was a terrible
time. A lot of bad things happened, but that same time period produced the computer and information
technology, and the computer was kind of a need to do a couple of things. People have seen a movie
about Alan Turing where the computer was used to crack Enigma, the Nazi code. Yep. And the computer
was also used to try to create nuclear weapons by von Neumann and others. So you do get this kind
of paradoxical thing where you have technology that has terrible uses and really good uses.
So it does seem a little bit contradictory, but not when you realize that it's the problems
that we face that pushes us to find solutions and pushes us in the direction of progress.
Mass extinctions. Basically, if you look at the trend as far as like biological complexity and
diversity, after every mass extinction, the biosphere went to new levels of complexity
and diversity. So it's like life adapts and evolves and evolves because it has challenges. So
this will lead people to kind of question this idea of progress because they see all these things
going on, these mounting existential challenges like climate change and the threat of nuclear war,
rising income inequality. But it is precisely those challenges that push us to
find solutions that ultimately lead to progress. Speaker 1: Now, that doesn't mean we ignore the
like. So for example, someone might hear that and say. Hey, listen, based on what Bobby said,
we just shouldn't worry about climate change, because no matter even if it is
as destructive as the worst hypotheses say it is,
eventually life will persist and things will just kind of like reorder themselves and everything
will be okay. But it sounds like what you're saying is these are opportunities for humans
to do things and to figure out solutions. Speaker 6: Yes. So that thing that you
said earlier would be like the the worst way to interpret this. Yes. We can't the process doesn't
happen on its own. And it goes back to the point that we're part of this process. Yes. So we need
to try our very best to overcome these solutions. If not, we will be the errors that get corrected
by natural selection and the people who come after us or the, you know, species or civilization that
comes after us will do something different. Hopefully they'll learn from our mistakes.
But yeah, it's this process of continually learning from failure. Right. And yeah, we.
We have to do everything in our power to overcome these existential challenges. And one thing that
this theory kind of shows about society is that societies work in a very similar way as organism
organisms, biological organisms. So you are an organism, and you usually think about that as
being one single thing. But you're a collective of cells, right? At working together in an integrated
fashion. Your brain is a collection of 80 billion neurons, all connected by 10,000 connections each.
And the output of that collective computation is your intelligent behavior and your productivity.
So you can look at a society as being a social organism, and you can even look at the network
of humans that spans the planet as forming something like a global brain because of the
Internet and social media, and now blockchain systems connecting us in a very similar way.
And if we want to overcome our existential challenges, we have to use the full computational
power of the global brain. And this gives us some principles for how to optimize our social,
political and economic systems. Speaker 1: So on that note,
in the limited time we have left all of this, if we go down to the kind of like the nitty gritty
level. What are the immediate things that in human society could be done, as you see it,
to better orient ourselves towards this future? And this could be regulating social media,
passing some laws about carbon. I mean, like if we just were to say what what are the bullet points
of things that could be done by governments and organizations at this point to better
serve our future? Is there a sort of short list? Speaker 6: Yes. There's a long list and a short
list. So everything that, you know, people are fighting for right now, those are, you know,
worthy things that we should be tackling. But there are some more basic principles that come
from complexity science, which just tells us how to get the maximum amount of computational
power out of a system. So computational power is a function of how complex a system is.
A system is more complex if there are more components and there are more connections
between those components. And you also want a variety of different types of components.
So we want to be connected in a way similar to how neurons are connected in the brain. So any nation
that cuts their people off from the Internet is stopping that free flow of information.
And the free the free flow of information allows for greater social awareness and
knowledge exchange. So, you know, countries like North Korea, Russia, China that are doing that,
that's not intrinsically good for a complex adaptive system in the long run. The other
thing I mentioned was the need for diversity among components. So the human body has over 200
cell types because they're doing a division of labor, a society of all doctors or society
of all engineers or musicians wouldn't do well. So we need specialization because it allows for
a division of labor and we so we need diversity and not just cultural diversity, but a diversity
of ideas. So any system, any nation that doesn't allow for criticism of the current system,
that's also intrinsically bad because you want new ideas that challenge the status quo.
That's sort of how progress happens to the last thing that I would say is income inequality.
So we're seeing levels of income inequality higher than we've ever seen before, and that means all of
the resources are concentrated in these small pockets. So that would be so if society is a
social organism that would be like all of the resources, like the blood, the nutrients, all in
certain areas and not systemically flowing right to all the appendages. And if that is the case,
then ultimately that super organism will die because those parts will fester and then affect
the rest of the body. So we want to have a way to kind of redistribute these resources. I don't
think like a communist model or like a socialist model is necessarily the best way to do that
because you don't want like a government with all this power, like calling the shots,
you want some sort of natural way to do that. And I think the decentralization movement made
popular by cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin is a way to do that because Nfts will allow for a
new crowdfunding mechanism that will allow, you know, normal people to raise money for a business
project. And then the people who are donating to that project, like they would Kickstarter, they
actually become investors, right? So there's a lot of creative ways, you know, and to think about how
to structure society, maybe we need some optimal balance between socialist and capitalist policies.
Decentralization could provide, you know, new ideas about how to find that balance.
But yeah, we need to look at how nature has optimized systems through evolutionary processes
to kind of teach us how to best optimize society. Speaker 1: We've been speaking with cognitive
neuroscientist and blogger Bobby Azari, and the new book is The Romance of Reality How
the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life Consciousness in Cosmic Complexity.
Bobby, always a pleasure having you on. Speaker 6: Thank you so much, David,
and congratulations on being a new father. Speaker 1: Thank you.