Brian Cox on What it Means to be Human | Joe Rogan

And all these things that we talked about, this word meaning that we used earlier that we all understand, can't define, is that a emergent property that has to emerge if you've got something that's intelligent enough to replicate itself and live and, as you said, be the... I don't know the answer, but it is worth considering that this thing, this emotion, meaning, love and fear and all those things, are just the things that happen when you are intelligent. I don't know the answer to that, but it could possibly be. And does consciousness have to have a local origin? Like, does it have to come from a thing? Like, if you think about cellular communication, if you send me, if you're in England, and you send me a video from your phone and it reaches my phone, it's getting to me through space. It's going through the sky. It's like literally from a device not connected by any wires or anything, it's coming to me. If there's a possibility to create some sort of global intelligence through electronics that's non-local, if one piece of it falls off, it just repairs itself or figures itself out, but it's the same consciousness existing on a global scale through some sort of an electronic network that instead of the idea that you and I have that Brian and Joe are... You have your mind, I have my mind, and we exist as intelligent beings separate from each other. But instead of that, that all of it is connected and that all of it is something that we can't even conceive of because our brains are too crude, like trying to explain to Australia, Pythicus, what a satellite is. Yeah. I mean, yes. I mean, if you think about our brains, they are ultimately what are they? They're just a distributed network of cells connected by neurons. And I mean, they're very complicated, but they are a colony of things that are autonomous in a sense, and they're communicating with each other. So yeah, I don't see why you can't scale that up in principle. I mean, I should just... The caveat is always that we don't know about this. It's just not understood. Well, I think there's something weird happening. It's physical though. I'm damn sure it's physical. I'm damn sure that there's nothing going on in my head other than what is allowed by the laws of nature as we understand them. So eliminating you, you mean? The idea of a soul being some sort of a divine thing that's inside the housing of the body. Yeah. I mean, I would say we can rule that out actually. I've argued in the past. How do you rule it out? I've argued we can rule that out in the following manner. So here's my arm, right? So it's made of electrons and protons and neutrons. And if I have a soul in there, something that we don't understand, but it's a different kind of energy or whatever it is that we don't have in physics at the moment, it interacts with matter because I'm moving my hand so whatever it is, it's something that interacts very strongly with matter. But if you look at the history of particle physics in particular, which is the study of matter, we spend decades making high precision measurements of how matter behaves and interacts. And we look for example, for a fifth force of nature. So we know four forces, the gravity, the two nuclear forces called the weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism. And that's what we know exists. And we look for another one with ultra high precision, and we don't see any evidence of it. So I would claim that we know how matter interacts at these energies, so room temperature now, these energies, we know how matter interacts very precisely. And so if you want to suggest there's something else that interacts with matter strongly, then I would say that it's ruled out. I would go as far as say it is ruled out by experiment, or at least it is extremely subtle. And you would have to jump through a lot of hoops to come up with a theory of some stuff that we wouldn't have seen when we've observed how matter interacts, that is present in our bodies. And presumably, if you believe in the soul, you want it to exist outside when you die, you still want the thing to be there, and you might believe in ghosts and things like that. I mean, look at a ghost, I mean, it's a, it is something that carries the imprint of you, presumably, it looks like you. So that means that it interacts strongly with the matter that is you, because it carries a pattern. If it carries a pattern, it carries information. If it carries information, there has to be an energy source that allows that information to persist and the pattern to persist and so on. So again, you end up with a theory that is postulating something interacts with light. Because if you think a ghost is the soul, then it's something that people see sometimes. So that means it interacts with light. But we know how light interacts. And we ruled out anything but the most subtle further interaction that we haven't seen. So I would I claim, and I started off as a joke, this actually I wrote it in an Infinite Monkey Cage book, this radio show that I do, but he ended up when I'd written it down, I thought actually that it makes sense. And I read something similar, actually, I think, Sean Cowley, I don't know if you've had Sean on this show a couple times. He's said something the same, I think in the book, they wrote the big picture, I think he has a similar argument, actually. So it's occurred to him as well, is roughly the same argument. So if you so this energy that's interacting with matter, even if you're not moving at all, if you're just thinking it's interacting with the matter that encompasses your mind or your brain, or your nerves or your neurons, it's something in there that's interacting with matter, whether you like it or not. So even just a simple thought process or a dream is still something that's interacting with matter. Yeah. Well, obviously, because it, you know, you it's your will, isn't it? And that's when you move, presumably, right. But even if you're not moving the idea like you're saying you're like your body's interacting with matter as you're moving your arm, but even if you're not moving, if you're just thinking, and you're completely still, which is not totally possible, because your heart's beating and your breathing and all that stuff. But if somehow or another, you were able to isolate just the thought the thoughts themselves are still interacting with matter because they're interacting with the brain itself. Yeah. So there's something in there. There's something that interacts with the physical structure of your body. And I would say there isn't. So that's the woo woo version is that the brain itself and the body, the physicals, this, this, this spiritual self, you are merely an antenna that's tuning into the, the, the great consciousness of the universe. But why? But then you have to answer what it we know what we are made of. Yeah. So we know how those particles behave and interact. Right. So, so why do the particles not in any way interact with that stuff? Because we interact we don't, if that's true, we don't only just interact with it, we interact extremely strongly with it. We're interacting with it now. Yeah. Every movement I make is the interaction between that every matter you have. Yeah. Yes. Well, everything, if I move my fingers, everything that I'm doing, right, is an interaction between that stuff and me. So it's a very strong interaction with matter, but we don't see it in all our precision measurements. Well, the answer for that, the answer is because it's not there. The answer is Jesus. And you can't measure God. That may be an answer. But the point is, as we talked about earlier with absolute space, if you can't measure it, it's not there. Right. It's but for whatever reason, for people, there is some incredible motivation to find a divine something or another that's there's something greater than this physical being. There's something, what do you think that is? Like, what is that compulsion? We've already talked a bit about it. I think it goes to the heart of this question of what it means to be human. So I would say that being human, the answer, right, to the, I don't have the answer to the meaning of it all. But an answer would be, we are small, finite beings, right, which are just clusters of atoms, as we said before, they're very rare. But we understand roughly how they how they came to be. And we have a limited amount of time, not actually, unfortunately, but because of the laws of nature, that the laws of nature forbid us to be immortal, they, they, they, immortality is ruled out by the laws of physics. But also, actually, what it what's interesting about if you look at the basic physics of the universe going from the Big Bang to where we are today, then the physics is driven by the fact that the universe began in an extremely ordered state. So it was a very highly ordered system. And it is tending towards a more disordered system at the moment. And that's called the second law thermodynamics. And it's that basic common sense thing that things go to shit. Basically, it's a second law thermodynamics. What we strongly suspect, and I would say no, is that in that process of going from order to disorder, complexity emerges naturally for a brief period of time. So it's a natural part of the evolution of the universe that you get a period in time when there's complexity in the universe. So stars and planets and galaxies and life and civilizations, but they are they exist because the universe is decaying, not in spite of the fact the universe is decaying. So our existence in that sort of picture is necessarily finite, and necessarily time limited. And it is a remarkable thing that that complexity has got so far, that there are things in the universe that can think and feel and explore it. And I think that is the answer. If you want an answer to the meaning of it all, it's that you are part of the universe. Because of the way the laws of nature work, you are allowed to exist, but you're allowed to exist for a temporary and for a small amount of time in a possibly infinite universe.