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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops.
1:41
Today my guest is my friend Erik Hoel, who has a PhD in neuroscience, is a research assistant in neuroscience at Tufts, but is also an author of a wonderful book called, The Revelations: A Novel.
2:03
Erik, I told you just a moment ago that your book gets better the second time you read it.
2:03
So guys, I really recommend you, if you haven't read it, read it for the first time, I read it for the second time and it got better. Erik, welcome.
2:15
Erik Hoel: Thank you so much, Jim.
2:19
That's lovely to hear that it has something that survives a second reading. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
2:24
And maybe even a third and a fourth, given the fact that the subject of the book is kind of two or threefold really.
2:28
The narrative is a bunch of very, very smart people trying to figure out a murder, or if a murder even happened.
2:35
But you also give an excellent education in the hunt for consciousness.
2:43
And I often think of the Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark.
2:50
It seems like a very difficult thing for a layman, certainly like me, but as you've also said that it's hard even for you guys with the PhDs.
2:56
But before we get into that, what I'd love for you to do is just give a bit of background on yourself.
3:02
And then sort of what was the impetus to write the book?
3:07
Erik Hoel: Yeah, of course.
3:08
So, as you said, so I'm Erik Hoel, I'm a research professor at Tufts University right now.
3:12
I got my PhD in neuroscience and I was lucky enough to be able to kind of work on the very frontier of people trying to come up with a scientific theory of consciousness, which we still don't have for the brain.
3:24
We don't know any sort of lawful relationships between experiences, like the taste of coffee and neural events in your brain.
3:35
So we're looking for some sort of scientific theory that can give us these lawful correlations.
3:39
And this field was so intellectually stimulating and kind of brought up huge questions, not just about science, but also about humanity, how humans orientate themselves towards mystery, how humans pursue this field, that at a very high level is very difficult. It's very controversial.
3:58
There's a lot of egos involved.
3:58
There's a lot of human drama in science itself that I witness.
4:04
And that really kind of helped activate the novelist in me, because another fact about myself is that I grew up, also was lucky enough to grow up in my mother's independent bookstore on the East Coast, which is north, it's just north of Boston.
4:13
And I worked in that bookstore and I sold books.
4:18
So I've been kind of surrounded by books my whole life, and I've always loved reading fiction.
4:23
And so I ended up wanting to do something that was kind of like The Name of the Rose or these other kind of big dense books that are kind of unabashedly head first dives into some sort world that might not be familiar to every reader, like most readers aren't familiar with medieval monks and most readers aren't familiar with exactly what's going on in the latest of neuroscience.
4:44
But I think that you can, if you're careful, and it takes a lot of work, writing this took me almost 10 years, you can kind of craft something that both gets at a lot of the high level ideas, but also allows people to at least get a sense of what's going on in the field.
4:54
What it's like to do science at this very high level, what the personalities there are like, and at least that's what I kind of set out and hope to accomplish.
5:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, and the more I kind of dive down these rabbit holes, this one has been particularly fascinating for me.
5:10
Because as you say, there is no accepted cannon of, this is the accepted theory that many people are still trying to disprove.
5:17
We don't even have the theory that people are trying to disprove.
5:24
And you'll run the gambit from something that I read earlier in the week on panpsychism, which is the idea that everything is conscious, I'd love your opinion on that, but then you also have people saying, and this is the one that I really love.
5:42
We're actually not conscious, and this is a delusion of our brains.
5:42
And so we're just going to, we're going to eliminate even having to look for it. What are your thoughts?
5:51
Erik Hoel: Yeah, I mean, I think that within, one of the most amazing and interesting things about consciousness research is that there's this [inaudible] of perspectives on the problem, and many of them might be quite viable and no one quite has any sort of knock down ways to prove exactly what's going on.
6:05
So one example would be panpsychism, which again seems like a radical claim that maybe every physical event or dynamics or system involves some sort of consciousness.
6:18
And then the brain kind of just has the right sort of physical system to give us the consciousness that we have.
6:23
But, and then there's also things like eliminativism, which is you just eliminate it.
6:27
So you say, "Maybe there's no problem here."
6:32
I really don't think that the eliminativism is true.
6:32
I think there are true, highly relevant facts about consciousness.
6:36
Like for example, people who undergo wake ups during surgery, this happens actually probably more often than we'd like to think, where people wake up.
6:42
And of course, during surgery you're often paralyzed.
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So you can't say anything and you're awake and you're being operated on.
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Even worse, during surgeries you often get a drug that gives you amnesia.
6:57
So, we get reports from people who manage to kind of get their memories past the amnesia drug, and where like, "I was awakening operated on," but you can totally imagine a case for someone who was both paralyzed and suffered amnesia, but went through basically a terrible torturous experience.
7:11
And there's actually like a fact of the matter.
7:11
Like there's a fact of the matter about the universe, whether or not that experience occurred.
7:14
And a theory of consciousness would be able to tell us about that.
7:19
So there's literal medical facts online here.
7:19
However, I do think that as from like a literary perspective, from a perspective of your general interest, I think it's fascinating to have this field out there with so many diverse opinions.
7:29
And in fact, in the book these opinions kind of crop up both expressed about consciousness by the characters, but also involving this murder of a young scientist and the other scientist trying to kind of form this amateur noirish investigation into it.
7:42
And one of the issues that they face is that they're not even exactly sure that there's been a murder in the first place.
7:48
So it's kind of like a murder mystery wherein you're not even entirely sure that what you're investigating is a murder at all, maybe was just an accident.
7:56
And that kind of represents this eliminativism position within the book.
8:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which I think is really great.
8:02
I love the back and forth from my attention as I read your book, being given to.
8:09
Also, trying to solve the maybe a thing that maybe didn't really happen.
8:09
And you follow, what I think is now in my second reading a really brilliant way you let the book unfold.
8:20
And it's basically the days of the week, and I'm not going to say too much more about that because you don't want to, I want people to read it and follow along.
8:24
One of the things that I find fascinating about this is the intersection between the search for a workable theory for at least human consciousness, and the work that's going on in machine learning right now.
8:45
So for example, I had a fellow over last night, very interesting guy.
8:45
He's got his PhD in AI, but specifically with medical applications.
8:52
And one of the things that he was telling me about was that what they're seeing now in the best machine learning programs is their ability to essentially reduce say 15 pages of data down to a couple of symbols.
9:06
And what's interesting is that they then have another AI try to expand it.
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And what they're finding is that it often, 90% of the cases the other AI can expand it right to the original sort of text.
9:23
But that when the AI can't expand it, that's an anomaly.
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And that becomes a point of interest.
9:31
Is there anything similar?
9:39
Is there a doppelganger for this in the search for consciousness in human beings?
9:45
Erik Hoel: Hah, interesting.
9:45
I mean, they're probably talking about auto encoders where you're trying to compress data and it turns out that in a sense we've learned that understanding is a form of compression, or at least aspects of understanding are based on compression.
9:57
And the human brain kind of is operating under all these sorts of constraints that we don't have in AI.
10:02
Like you can kind of make things as big as you like.
10:07
The human brain is very metabolical.
10:07
It has a very, because of the metabolism is very limited, and it is kind of stuck with a smaller number of neurons.
10:09
Although right now, even right now the parameters of the brain probably outstrip even the biggest deep learning models.
10:18
But that I don't think will last for long.
10:18
As to whether or not there are, whether or not consciousness is an anomaly.
10:22
I do think it's, I think the use of anomaly is a good term when talking about consciousness, because it's a field of science that seems and feels when you're doing it very unlike other fields of science.
10:31
You immediately get the impression upon reading the latest in the attempt to find a scientific theory of consciousness.
10:36
That there's disagreement even about what that exactly would look like.
10:42
And then you can compare that to something like physics, where I think that people, you would generally would agree on what explanations of things would look like.
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For example, you might have a theory that unifies Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum physics.
10:56
We know that that's something that needs to be done.
10:59
And then there are kind of these workable proposals for how that might be done, and then people criticize these workable proposals.
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Within, but no one's like, "We don't know what that would even look like."
11:07
But with consciousness you have this paradox, which is that it seems as if we want theories about experiences, which are feelings or phenomenological events that occur to people.
11:19
So like the redness of red, the bitter taste of coffee, the sound of a saxophone in the hall, underground in New York, in the subway.
11:23
Those are very specific conscious experiences.
11:27
And we want something that relates those, or has a connection to the actual neural events of the brain.
11:34
But it's very unclear how or why that would be the case.
11:34
So for example, someone might always say, "Well, sure you have some neurons firing, but does there even need to be any sort of associated conscious experience to that?
11:44
And show me why that's necessary?"
11:50
And it seems as if you want a theory of experiences, not a theory of events or things, or relationships, and science normally talks about events or things or relationships.
11:58
So consciousness is sort of, consciousness research is in my opinion kind of an anomaly within science.
12:01
And in fact, that problem or that issue shows up within the revelations itself in what some of the opinions that the characters have about why consciousness is so difficult and how it may be unlike other parts of science. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
12:15
And I also admire David Deutsch who wrote The Beginning of Infinity.
12:17
And he's got a few thoughts about what he and you called qualia, which is this idea of the being able to describe sort of in a mechanical nature.
12:28
That's my word, you could use a better word, but these experiences.
12:28
And as I was preparing for chatting with you, I was also thinking about the idea that the qualia of an event, like the redness of red, the bitterness of coffee, et cetera, is going to vary probably greatly.
12:48
For example, someone who can't taste anything, or who has lost their sense of taste.
12:54
Or a blind person, trying to describe to someone who was never a sighted individual the nature of color.
13:01
They might have an equally difficult time describing to those of us who can see and use our eyes quite a bit the senses that they have relied on that are probably much better than ours, right?
13:14
Their sense of hearing or smell, or movement, does that come into play as well?
13:20
When you're doing the research, that you ever feel like, "Oh, maybe those guys who say that there is no consciousness, maybe that's just easier?
13:25
Erik Hoel: Well, I think we should distinguish between, you need a theory that can both handle the richness and diversity of conscious experiences, right?
13:36
So as you say, there are plenty of people who, for example, lack of sense.
13:40
There are some people who might have an enhanced sense, but what we're looking for here, that there seems as if there has to be some sort of fact of the matter here.
13:48
And an analogy I'll give is that, listen, the physical world is incredibly diverse and has all sorts of very phenomenon, but presumably laws of motion and things like that are governing the behavior of everything, right?
13:58
From a leaf falling to running water in a sink.
14:03
You have that every second or nanosecond of some physical system's activity is running along via these laws, via lawful connections.
14:09
And that's why we call them physical laws, right?
14:14
These lawful connections.
14:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
14:16
Erik Hoel: There is, in the brain there has to be a similar lawful connection wherein there are neurons that are firing, because they're firing in this way they are connected to, or generating, you can kind of choose your terms carefully here, some conscious experience.
14:27
And so there's some sort of fact of the matter.
14:31
But what neuroscientists normally look for is basically just correlation.
14:36
So they say, "Ah, I kind of saw enhanced firing in this region when people were seeing a face, maybe this is the region that kind of is important for faces.
14:41
Even though of course there was still activity all over the rest of the brain, but I kind of saw this statistical enhancement in this one fusiform area or something.
14:49
And so therefore maybe there's some sort of connection there."
14:54
And this is how people generally do neuroscience.
14:54
There's no search for a lawful connection of experiences.
14:57
And that means that the rest of neuroscience is basically just waiting for a theory of consciousness.
15:02
They probably wouldn't describe it that as such, I'll be honest and say, I'm a bit more of a radical in this.
15:05
But I really don't think that neuroscience will proceed appropriately until we have a scientific theory of consciousness and can understand the lawful connections between neurons firing and conscious experiences.
15:19
And right now all neuroscience is basically just digging around for loose correlations in these mom and pop labs that have small sample sizes and so on.
15:24
So, I just, the field is a bit blind to this.
15:29
And one of the reasons for writing this book is that I, maybe not one of the motivating reasons, but one thing that shows up in this book is, some of these character's attempts to convince other people that maybe this is a big problem.
15:37
Maybe there are some problems within neuroscience itself, and that's fine.
15:42
Science is always correcting, right?
15:42
This isn't some deeper criticism.
15:46
It's just like that currently there may be some problems within neuroscience itself.
15:50
And that shows up in the book.
15:50
And frankly, when you try to say that within academia or people's jobs and huge amounts of research money, all depend on kind of keeping the blinders on, you can get into some trouble for that.
15:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: See, I love that.
16:00
And it just immediately makes me think of Goethe's quote that, "All that is factual is already theory."
16:05
And what he means by that is that you have to have a governing theory for the other type of research to work.
16:11
And I love your observation that absent a governing theory, you're going to have, I just read something about babies, the number of neurons babies have when they're born. I have no idea.
16:21
Well, I lucky, because I have access to people like you and I can ask you this question, but I think a lot of people have no idea.
16:30
So the theory by the way was that babies are born with an excess of neurons and that many of them die after the baby's development is underway.
16:37
And that it was, the author was making the point that nature through evolution has really done something really cool here.
16:45
It has created an environment where there's a lot of extra neurons just in case, which I kind of thought was fascinating.
16:56
So I'm going to ask you about that, but then I also want to get back to this idea that absent a governing theory, how are you going to categorize, or maybe it's even wrong to think that we should categorize the work that's being done.
17:13
Go back to your idea of the people.
17:13
I mean, when you were telling me about waking up during surgery, I've never had surgery.
17:18
I've never been put under.
17:18
My wife has, and she had the amnesia effect and it extended well beyond after she woke up.
17:23
And I was fascinated by that, because I'd never experienced it personally.
17:30
And when you talk to your wife and you have this long conversation with the doctors and then couple hours later you're bringing her something to eat and she's like, "Well, when are the doctors going to come and tell me what I'm supposed to do?"
17:44
And I'm like, "They did that. I took notes."
17:44
Erik Hoel: It's actually pretty incredible how humans can operate without memory.
17:49
I mean, it's a bit shocking too.
17:53
And it brings up very interesting philosophical questions about, if she had consented to a procedure during that time and then the later has no memory of it? But humans are wonky.
18:02
We shouldn't expect humans to be these sort of like rational agents that are constantly capable of kind of like assessing the situation and then giving some sort of some sort of well-founded, like yes or no to it in the sense of like a medical procedure or saying like, "Yeah, I voted for this candidate, but do I actually know everything about them and so on?"
18:18
Regardless, just to get back to your earlier point about what's called neural pruning, which is that babies has this huge die off of neurons.
18:22
I mean, that's an example of something that was the attempted foundation for a big overarching scientific theory about how the brain works, not exactly searching for these lawful connections, but searching for big theories, which is something that neuroscience really desperately needs.
18:36
It was actually done by my scientific grandparent, who was the mentor of my mentor.
18:40
So, Jerry Edelman or Gerald Edelman is a neuroscientist who studied this neuro pruning, this die off in babies, and die off of neurons in babies.
18:51
And the idea was is that the neurons that fire the most are the ones that are going to survive, so that he advanced this theory called Neural Darwinism.
18:58
And you know, it's basically that what's going on is basically a Darwinian type of selection.
19:00
And I think that there's a sense in which babies are more intelligent than adult humans.
19:05
Because I think that if an adult human was thrown into an alien world where you don't speak the language at all, and you don't even know the physics of this world.
19:08
So imagine you're thrown into an alien world that's not just like it doesn't just have aliens, but all also the physics is totally different.
19:16
I think the number of people who would be able to speak the alien language and move around totally fine in this new physics after three years is basically zero for adults and a 100% percent for babies.
19:27
They all are just like, "Yeah, okay.
19:27
Physics is different, whatever. I'll just learn it."
19:32
And so it's a bit of a matter of perspective.
19:32
But yeah, there's a sense in which babies are more intelligent than us.
19:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
19:38
And having had the joy of having three of my own children, but now the joy of having three grandchildren, watching is just so cool, because especially when they're young, my youngest granddaughter just had her first birthday.
19:49
And just being able to watch the development, it does kind of freak me out a little bit.
19:54
To your point about an adult being dropped into an entirely foreign environment, babies just chip, they're totally chill with it.
20:05
And I just, I love that idea of the creativity that goes on and the patterned recognition.
20:12
And I mean, there's so many interesting offshoots here that like your book is one of them, right?
20:15
It's a really fascinating offshoot where you learn about some of these dilemmas and you learn, you have a passage in the book that I love, which you call a Occam’s broom.
20:24
And of course, Occam’s razor is the more famous from the Franciscan friar or monk.
20:30
But you're, I love this quote, which is, "Smart people sweep inconvenient facts under the rug to support pet theories."
20:36
And you note, or your character notes, let's be careful, your character notes, "Important discoveries are made by young people.
20:42
Not because they're vastly smarter, but because they have far less accumulated self-deception." I love that. Expand on that? Erik Hoel: Yeah.
20:56
I mean, there is a sense in which humans, I mean, I'm a bit of a, I'm not a nihilist when it comes to human nature, but I do think that there's an inherent aspect of tragedy that involves human nature.
21:03
And there's actually a great scene in the movie, Labyrinth with David Bowie where the- Yeah, the young woman character.
21:07
I generally watch it around Halloween with my family, we do a re-watch.
21:11
This young woman gets dumped into a dump graveyard.
21:11
And she finds all these old women, old people around, and they've piled on top of themselves all sorts of stuff, like Teddy bears and old things.
21:20
And it's all the stuff from the childhood and they lived hunched over.
21:24
So this is like a fairytale world.
21:24
And I think that that's a very good representation of human self-deception.
21:28
Particularly as we're getting older, we're kind of pretending that things, to ourselves that things went one way and maybe they went another way, like we're always constantly crafting a narrative of our own selves that suits our purpose and readjusting things in our past to suit that purpose.
21:40
And so now I think that when we kind of grow like crab, like we're hardening our shells with this sort of self-deception.
21:44
And I think that that's incredibly dangerous for a scientist.
21:49
But I also, to turn that around and say like, "It's very easy to look at science and go out and criticize these big egos or people who believe their own theories, even when there's some evidence pointing against it or so on."
21:58
I think that that's a very easy criticism to make.
22:02
But I also wanted to show the other side, which is that sometimes the egoism and mania of science, particularly at the highest level, is a necessary condition for any new work.
22:11
And the people who create big deal scientific theories are almost never normal, polite do well in academia types of people.
22:18
They're almost always maniac poets who have somehow, who are good at math, who have thought that maybe the universe works this way.
22:28
And they have this intuition, almost a poetic intuition that they're going to follow through with.
22:32
Because we always talk about the results of science.
22:32
Once you have a theory, how do you test it or so on?
22:35
But there's nothing about how theories are generated or how people generate ideas.
22:39
That is like this black hole.
22:39
It's like, well, we just, once the theories are out there, we do things right.
22:45
But it's like, how do you generate the theories in the first place?
22:48
And I think that that's a very human activity.
22:48
It's an activity with a lot of drama.
22:52
And that was something that just entrance me because I think that there's a literary aspect to science.
22:55
They said, "You can do literature about science because science contains all of the human drama in miniature."
23:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, wow.
23:03
I mean, yes, I couldn't agree more.
23:03
I just dropped a podcast with my friend Rory Sutherland, who's the author of Alchemy.
23:07
Brilliant, funny, wonderful raconteur.
23:13
But he made a quote that I actually realized afterwards that I disagreed with.
23:18
He was talking about, "The job of science is to do this."
23:18
And he made it kind of a mechanical, "This is why things work.
23:23
This is how we're going to benefit from that," et cetera.
23:23
And I think the metaphor would work much better if he said, "This is how the engineer works."
23:30
So the engineer takes something and makes it work for you.
23:36
Because I agree with your idea about having studied great scientists throughout history, they're absolutely far more artists, actually wild artists if you really look into their personal history.
23:49
And that active creation that gives birth to these new theories that other people of course are going to argue about and try to disprove in the proper sense that if you can't negate something, you really can't think of it as a theory.
24:08
You got to think of it as a belief, right?
24:08
So falsification is one of the nearest and dearest parts of true scientific theory, right, not a belief.
24:14
But the other thing that you noted there, I've actually written about, and it's this idea.
24:21
One of my heroes is Richard Feynman, who I'm sure you're well acquainted with.
24:26
And he was that kind of guy.
24:26
He was like bongo player, kind of a nut case really.
24:32
And one of his guiding quotes that I at the office still have taped on my monitor, which is the first rule is, "Don't fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
24:46
And that really has helped me so often, because it made me start writing journals, because the benefits are, there's multiple benefits to it.
24:54
But one that I realized kind of recently, is that what you said, your memory rearranges things, and it misremembers, so to speak, the outcome of things. Boy, is that true?
25:08
Because when you keep journals all the way back to when you were 18-years-old, and you're having a conversation with somebody, and they're like, in my instance, it happened about the first Gulf War, right?
25:18
Where Saddam had gone into Kuwait and George Bush senior said, "No, this won't stand."
25:25
And at the party where I was chatting with this person, I said, "Oh, I was totally in favor of that first Gulf war."
25:30
And then I was looking something up on another matter.
25:34
And it happened to be when I was writing, when that happened, I was not in favor of the first Gulf War. Erik Hoel: Yeah.
25:42
Yeah, I don't think, I mean, but I think it's asking too much, one could say, "This is a big flaw of humans."
25:46
But I think that that's asking too much, maybe it's not a flaw, maybe it's necessary or maybe it's good.
25:51
When it comes to science, I mean, science has been attempted to describe, be described algorithmically, but it's not an algorithm.
25:59
So it's just, it's not, there is kind of a scientific method and an incredibly abstracted sense of where you can think about it as you have all these theories and you go and you test the theories, and so on.
26:08
But like, just to be very clear, that breaks down into immense complication incredibly quickly.
26:13
So first of all, there's an infinite number of theories.
26:16
And we're not talking about easy infinities either.
26:16
We're talking about the big Cantorian infinities of kinds of theories you can have.
26:20
So which theories are even worth testing or worth pursuing?
26:24
How do you generate these theories?
26:24
And then, what are your standards of evidence and then how do you as a community make decisions and so on?
26:29
So science is very, very human. It's very human.
26:34
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't trust it.
26:34
I mean, like your people who have this obsession with coming to some sort of epistemological stance on science, I think there are very few people in the world who literally don't trust science.
26:43
I think most people trust most of science and then have issues with, a few small issues within it.
26:51
But I don't think science is all unique in that way.
26:51
I think it's a cultural institution that effectively is just an extension of the Republic of Letters that Erasmus set up in 1400.
27:01
But I mean, it's basically just very smart people who are using nature as a sounding board, and that's it, right?
27:08
You can come up with other descriptions of it, but fundamentally that description will include most of those other ones.
27:12
And it doesn't place any sort of, there's no like special cognitive trick that scientists figured out that no one else has, other than basically respecting what you get back from nature.
27:22
But other than just respecting what you get back from nature, and I would argue that actually a lot of people previously did respect what they got back from nature.
27:31
So, but anyways, I say this as someone who's deep within the sciences and has kind of seen it done.
27:35
So this is just based off of my experiences.
27:40
And I think that that's something that I try to kind of work into the book and it just is also the case that we shouldn't make academia too hostile to people who want to go out and do big things and think of some sort of grand idea.
27:49
And generally, as you said, those people are not always ways the people who are going to get straight A's and jump through all the academic hoops that you need to.
27:58
So, science has been slowing down now in terms of its discoveries for about 40 years, 40, 50 years of kind of getting harder to do science.
28:08
And I think that there are some cultural changes, particularly within academia itself, that at least are contributing to that.
28:12
And a lot of that is just that people really have to have that perfect GPA and have to be very good at doing what they're told.
28:16
And the whole point of a very good scientist that they do the exact opposite of that.
28:20
And that there is an ego involved.
28:24
There's like a, "Well, everyone else is wrong."
28:24
I mean, think about that.
28:24
That's an immense act of ego to just be like, "Everyone else is wrong.
28:27
The universe works this way."
28:27
It's like this crazy way that no one else has thought of.
28:32
That's insane, that's almost pathological.
28:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
28:35
Which is the part of it that is one of the reasons I'm so intrigued by it.
28:36
Because it, when you really go down the rabbit hole, that's what you find.
28:41
You find that some of the big, I mean, Newton, great example.
28:41
I mean, the number of pages he wrote about alchemy outnumber what he wrote about physics like 10 to one.
28:45
And he was a colorful character if you actually read any of his biographies.
28:51
So I totally agree with you on that.
28:57
And the challenge becomes in my mind, we have oriented towards this very sort of checklist.
29:05
As you put it, you have to have the great grades and you've got to have this kind of experience and this kind.
29:08
And I think that that really precludes in many instances the ability to find that brilliant person who is not going to play that game, they're just, they won't do it.
29:22
Erik Hoel: Yeah, I think it's, like all institutions, what does science run on? Human emotions.
29:27
Human emotions are this, are basically an engine that drive civilization. It doesn't drive itself.
29:33
Everything is emotionally driven at some point. Things are done.
29:33
People publish papers because they felt something about the paper.
29:38
They thought something, they felt something, they wanted to get something out.
29:43
Can't wait to put this paper out.
29:43
Everything is driven by human emotions, which are this vast engine.
29:48
And when you try to really tamp down on the emotionality of a discipline, what happens is, is that you can get an engine that runs smoother, but it'll run a lot colder.
29:58
I mean, I think when we look back to the people like Newton, or even early 20th century physics, we've got really big personalities and really high running emotions throughout science.
30:08
And you really don't see debates at that level anymore.
30:08
You really see, everyone's trying to be as incredibly nice as possible. And that's good.
30:12
We've got a huge advantage of that.
30:12
It's probably super necessary.
30:17
I bet that if any modern scientist went back to a scientific conference, from even like maybe like the 1950s, they'd be like, "This is a raucous, insulting, people are getting in people's faces. This is unacceptable."
30:26
And they probably be right to a certain degree, but then, maybe you can over correct for that.
30:32
Maybe you can end up in a situation where you've drained all the emotionality out of science and made it pretty hostile for anyone trying to do something a little bit more radical, which science always needs.
30:48
And so you get this sort of reduced engine.
30:48
And so you get, it is approval that science has been in terms of the progress that it's made, it just hasn't been making the progress that it did.
30:52
I mean, compare to the last 20 years of physics, to the first 20 years of physics of the 20th century.
31:00
It's just, there's no contest.
31:00
It's just, they're blowing us out of the water.
31:00
Even I think our understanding of neuroscience has slowed down quite a bit from the 60s, 70s, and 80s in its heyday.
31:08
And I think we're kind of repeating a lot of the same things.
31:08
We're rediscovering a lot of the same things that were already well known and well debated at those times. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
31:17
And sort of it, that's kind of the human life cycle that science itself is following along.
31:21
A lot of the enlightenment authors basically get to that point very quickly about emotions being the engine of everything, not just a human life and conclusions and everything, but passions, et cetera.
31:33
And that the Buddhist notion of attachment, the goal is anyway to be as unattached and as unemotional in the traditional use of the term emotional.
31:48
But I think you're absolutely, I think that insight is really fascinating about if you took somebody from now and you put it back at a conference, I was really reading about the physicist Bohm who basically got blacklisted by Oppenheimer et al for purely political reasons.
32:04
He had written a really fascinating theory.
32:04
I can't remember the name of the theory, you probably know it.
32:09
But anyway, it came down from on high, Oppenheimer et al.
32:09
to other, his colleagues saying, "We are to ignore him.
32:17
And if we don't ignore him, we are to discredit him."
32:17
And it had nothing to do with the theory.
32:25
It had everything to do with his supposed politics. Still going on?
32:32
Erik Hoel: Probably to a much lesser degree.
32:32
It is still going on in that established figures in the field have vast power about what papers get published.
32:42
And they can almost always put something in a higher profile paper and set the tone for the field.
32:46
But like frankly, you can generally get around that by just, there's so many scientific journals now, there's so many kind of ways to get around that, that it's not nearly as much of a big issue.
32:54
Even relatively smaller subfields like the search for scientific theory of consciousness.
33:00
Within that field you wouldn't, even if you tried to kind of control the narrative within it, you wouldn't be able to do it in any sort of totality, because there's just too many journals.
33:09
There's also archive, which allows for pre-prints.
33:09
So I think that in terms of top down control, maybe it's gotten a little bit better, but that's not quite, I'm not actually even necessarily sure that that's a good thing.
33:17
I mean, again, if science is being driven by anything it's being driven by almost a sort of artistic practice or which always involves ego of some kind.
33:28
I mean like why, when you say like, "Why do painters paint?"
33:31
Or something like that, if you ask that question and you don't answer it that in some way that somehow involves their own sort of personal quest or either for recognition or just something that they need to do personally.
33:42
And then the same is true for scientists, right?
33:42
I think it's a mistake to think about scientists as being immensely objective personally.
33:47
I don't think that they're objective personally.
33:53
Maybe as communities they've set things up to be as objective as possible.
33:57
So it's the objectiveness emerges out of this.
33:57
It's an emergent property of this entire community, but it's not really something that individual scientists have.
34:04
And also, it's very funny to me because I know a huge number of scientists personally.
34:09
And then if you go and you look at the archetypes that are displayed on TV, where it's like bones of somebody and all the scientists are, so basically somewhere on the spectrum and they have no social life and they're nerds and they're somehow also like they know about everything.
34:20
So it's like, rather than just being a physicist, they also are multipurpose, so they can just pull out any fact of a biology or whatever.
34:29
And this is, and they're kind of sexless and this is not the experience of scientists that I have.
34:32
The experience of science that I have is that they're very rich and human and just as kind of human in their own lives as basically any other discipline.
34:42
And that's something that I wanted to write about was to show kind of the fleshy aspect of science. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
34:49
And I think you succeed wonderfully there with the main character, Kirk.
34:49
And as I was reading him, I actually made a note here, which was, I wanted to ask you, is he an asshole?
34:55
Or is he just such a truth teller?
35:01
There's one particular passage that I've noted and I wanted to read to you and then get your feedback.
35:07
And it was him riffing to another character.
35:07
And he was saying, "You want to talk about population coding and macro causation?
35:13
You want to talk chaos theory and computational irreducibility?
35:18
Copenhagen versus many worlds? I can do them all."
35:24
He's kind of like really shut off, right? Erik Hoel: Yeah.
35:27
Yeah, I mean, he's not like a 100% of a good guy, right?
35:27
I mean, he is like a bit of an asshole sometimes.
35:31
He is rough around the edges and very purposefully.
35:31
So in writing him, I mean, I don't like books where the main characters are a 100% totally sympathetic in every respect.
35:37
I mean, I think every character in the book has something that's a little bit objectionable to them.
35:48
Like Carmen and other characters, she can be a bit cold and a bit dismissive.
35:48
And she's very overconfident in her own abilities, probably again for good reasons, but that can get her in trouble.
35:57
And so similarly with Kirk, he's also, this is a book, again about these very high levels of science, so he's obviously a smart guy.
36:00
He thinks he's very smart.
36:00
He may be very smart, you know?
36:05
I mean, and also I'll just say, I think intelligence is pretty cheap, right?
36:05
I mean, there's many, many very smart people in the world.
36:09
It's not a very meaningful quality.
36:09
But there's also some ways in which I think he's kind of an interesting or redemptive character.
36:14
I mean, I think one thing is that he throws himself against this problem of consciousness in a way that maybe is not, and trying to come up with a scientific theory of consciousness, which he's constantly struggling with throughout the novel, in a way that is probably unhealthy and maybe slightly disturbed, but is I think in a way admirable, in a way admirable.
36:31
And I don't know if you could have one without the other.
36:37
I mean, when you're writing a novel, your standpoint is that of agnosticism and ambiguity, right?
36:40
You portray characters, but your point is not to show that this character is a good person or bad person.
36:46
It's just to show their character.
36:51
And also, I would say that a novel's like this insight into someone's life.
36:57
And who hasn't sent, we're so bad at this as humans, but who hasn't sent a text message, an angry text message or something where if you only read that text message, that's like, "Hey man, F-off, or something like that.
37:04
This person's a total asshole.
37:04
This guy is, he's so mean, look at this one text that he sent.
37:11
He sent this mean text or whatever."
37:11
And you can get into more, people say stuff that's not great, right? I'm not saying that.
37:16
But the truth is, is that if someone excerpted some brief slice of a fight with your wife from 20 years ago for five minutes and they wrote that scene, you'd be like, "This guy."
37:28
But, and I don't think any human being survives a deep dive, survives a deep dive into their habits and personalized outside.
37:39
And this is why I do think that this is something that as I've gotten older, notions of forgiveness and notions of being humble and notions of like, almost religious notions of forgiveness about individual human beings have become more and more important to me, because I think that human beings are flawed.
37:53
But certainly yes, the characters in the novel are flawed.
37:53
And I think that that's fine.
37:57
I think it makes them dynamic.
37:57
I think it makes them interesting.
37:57
I think it gives it a bit of an engine.
38:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I totally agree.
38:02
They're not two-dimensional, which is the flaw in many of the sort of hack needs stuff that gets put out and people like for some apparent reason I hate that stuff.
38:10
And it's, I love your comment about if you isolate, you could take any human, any human, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, whoever, and you can isolate in their lives or things that they've said, and they're canceled.
38:25
That's why I hate this cancel culture of today, because that doesn't even come close to understanding the full spectrum of human beings.
38:38
And I love your thoughts about becoming more humble, becoming more wise, because that is what happened in my life.
38:44
As I went through the world, I came to understand the fragility of your average human being, including me.
38:52
And this idea that, "Oh, those people might be weak willed or weak minded, but I'm certainly not.
38:59
I am the only exception." No, you're not.
38:59
And coming to grips with that, I think is part of the cycle of moving towards wisdom.
39:06
And so I completely agree with that.
39:13
I can't remember whose quote this is, but it was something along the lines of, "Wisdom is knowing what to overlook."
39:18
Erik Hoel: No one wants to read their own biography.
39:21
You wouldn't want to do that, right?
39:21
I mean, I was reading a biography of Tolstoy, who's one of my favorite kind of historical figures.
39:29
And there's kind of this question of like, "Is Tolstoy a good person or not?"
39:29
And Tolstoy has some questionable stuff that he does and writes and thinks.
39:34
I mean, first of all like many people at the time, he probably doesn't have a great view on race.
39:39
He calls, he's the Lord of his manner.
39:44
He's always advocating for essentially communism and for wealth redistribution.
39:44
But at the same time he's always complaining about how all his peasants are super lazy and never do any work, and they never get anything done if it wasn't for him.
39:53
And then, he's got a troubled relationship with his wife, which is good at some point, but then it's bad.
39:57
But also at the same time, he's writing incredible art, he's producing incredible art.
40:02
And not only that, he's hugely influential in terms of things like animal rights.
40:08
He's probably the biggest direct influence on Martin Luther King, the biggest direct influence on Gandhi.
40:12
And so like, who are even we to look back at someone like him and be like, "Oh, are you a good person or not?
40:17
It's like, what does that even mean?
40:19
What does that, he's just a human, he's a human of Titanic proportions, but he's a human.
40:23
And that is I think a necessary understanding for both the religious, but also for the novelist.
40:23
So if you're a novelist, you have to look at people and just be like, "Okay, so you're just a human and these judgments."
40:34
And one thing that I tried really hard to do in The Revelations is that there's not really like a, there's not like a bad guy.
40:40
I think that probably one of most damaging mythologies in all of fiction is that there are bad people out there.
40:46
And those bad people are out there doing bad things.
40:46
And then the good guys are going to come in and the good guys are going to stop the bad people.
40:50
And like, this does happen occasionally, but it's incredibly small minority of even like world events.
40:54
I mean, even world events.
41:00
And not only that, but not only is it the minority, but even in those situations, those people are generally only doing the things that they're doing, because they think that they're the good guys and the other people are the bad guys.
41:08
And they're going to be like, "Listen, we are the good guys.
41:11
So we just, we either France is going to invade us if we don't invade France first.
41:13
And we've had these terrible tariffs put on us.
41:13
There's completely unfair economic tariffs.
41:18
So we are just going to invade France before they invade us.
41:18
We're acting," is really preemptive self-defense here.
41:23
And like, you can see how this sort of reasoning goes and so I worked quite hard to kind of make it such that it's very unclear that there were any characters who are evil or bad.
41:30
And in contemporary fiction my big humbug, the thing I cannot stand if I'm reading a contemporary novel is if there's just some fundamental character in there, who's only there to be this evil, bad guy.
41:41
And they get no redemption anywhere.
41:41
They get no real insight into their life.
41:47
They're just, it's not like ...
41:47
It's like, all I need is a little bit of something.
41:50
It's like a sexist Dean. Oh, fine.
41:50
And then they go home and are nice to their daughter or something.
41:55
Like all I need is a little bit, be like, "Okay, you're still talking about a person."
41:58
And so that's something that's important to me in fiction, but this goes back to the sort of agnosticism.
42:01
And that's why I like writing.
42:04
I really enjoyed writing this novel set in this world of consciousness research, because consciousness is still such an open, scientific field.
42:08
So in a sense you have to be agnostic about the theories that exists there.
42:14
And you're agnostic about this problem.
42:14
You're agnostic this problem even exists.
42:18
So I know agnosticism is not the best, hardest selling point for something.
42:18
But I do think it's necessary for art.
42:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, I think it's, listen, I think it's necessary for almost living life to its fullest, honestly.
42:31
Because if you descend into dogma, your brain is turned off effectively as far as I'm concerned.
42:37
And why would you want to live like that?
42:37
And as you were talking, I was thinking of Hannah Arendt's, The Banality of Evil.
42:41
These people, and you read, I was reading a quote from the wife of the German's arms manufacturer.
42:46
I can't remember her name right now.
42:46
And anyway, she was going on and on about all these nice things.
42:52
And the point was she was married to this guy who was arming Hitler and rounding up Jews and doing all these awful things.
43:03
And I love your observation that the bad guys, so to speak, are the good guys in their own eyes.
43:09
Because no one thinks of them, at least no one that I've actually met in real life thinks, "I'm Dr. Evil." Erik Hoel: Yeah.
43:15
And I post that those people just don't exist.
43:15
They're a made up fictional thing.
43:20
They're just there to be in a story.
43:20
There's no one who thinks, "I'm doing something evil and that's good."
43:24
There's a very small number of people who are born who are basically sociopathic.
43:33
And they're generally not Hannibal Lecter, in fact, one of the correlations of sociopath is low IQ, right?
43:36
So occasionally you get low IQ people who get some pleasure out of pain.
43:36
Like Jeffrey Dahmer, an example of this.
43:42
People who murder a lot of people in a gang or something.
43:47
You get people who might legitimately enjoy inflicting pain on others.
43:47
They're a tiny minority of the human race.
43:51
And they almost never have any real power.
43:55
They almost never have any real power because that sort of want is very self-destructive.
44:00
You might not even make it up your gang, right?
44:00
I bet that actually drug lords from some insane Mexican cartel, at the very top of the drug lords, they're actually not generally sociopathic monsters.
44:12
They're generally people who were born into that world. They climbed the ranks.
44:12
And generally one of the reasons they made it that high is that they're not sociopathic monsters.
44:18
So people can kind of trust them, that this person isn't going to just beat the crap out of you for no reason.
44:23
And then they probably justify things to themselves.
44:23
They think maybe drugs aren't that dangerous.
44:28
This is this whole thing is a joke.
44:28
Secondly, my country's been immensely oppressed maybe historically, and this is the economic way out.
44:32
And thirdly, maybe people are a bunch of squares and they should get off their high horse because they do stuff that's just as bad.
44:41
So even if you take away, so if you take away the slim minority of just complete sociopaths who get off on pain.
44:45
Just something I don't understand, and it's very difficult for me to understand, like enjoying, like the people who've kicked a dog to death or something.
44:50
It's like, I can't even get in your head. I can't understand.
44:54
But I can probably get into some German General's head like, I'm blanking on the name, Rommel.
45:00
I can get into Rommel's head, I understand Rommel.
45:02
And that's because I think Rommel's probably just a person.
45:02
And he probably thought he was a good guy for a long time.
45:06
And then he realized, "Eh, maybe not."
45:06
I think he eventually does an assassination attempt or tries to do an assassination attempt or something like that on Hitler, but he was a general.
45:12
But that is, I think fundamental for us to remember, and it's something that's completely lost.
45:16
And then to go back to the Tolstoy thing, it's like, imagine if instead Tolstoy had been amazing at everything and he gotten along with his wife.
45:23
He's got no drama in his life.
45:23
He has all the total correct opinions.
45:23
Like what a boring person, like what, I wouldn't even want that to be true counter factually.
45:30
If they were like, "Could you click your fingers and make Tolstoy have all the right opinions, never get in fights with his wife and so on."
45:37
And be like, I don't know if I would. And that's very strange.
45:37
And I feel like most people would make that, be like, "No, I don't want to change anything."
45:46
But then what are you complaining about?
45:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you can make the same arguments about art, painting, for example.
45:47
Vincent van Gogh on mood stabilizers probably wouldn't have been one of the greatest painters ever that paints.
45:58
And so I think that this desire to just make people one or two-dimensional at that- Erik Hoel: It's also, I think a desire to mechanize.
46:08
I do think that there's, as someone who studies, so I'm actually writing a book right now.
46:10
Tentative title is, it's all about the intrinsic perspective, which is also by the way a Substack that I run.
46:15
I'm writing this book for Simon [inaudible].
46:15
And at least one part of it is about the history of our relationship to conscious experience and how we think about consciousness.
46:23
And there's basically two views of the world, right?
46:23
And one is this intrinsic view of the world, the intrinsic perspective, where you're considering conscious experiences as real relevant things.
46:32
And the other view of the world is this extrinsic world where everything is kind of mechanism.
46:36
And that's the domain of physics generally.
46:36
But I think that as technology has progressed, as progress in the extrinsic world has been made, we kind of forget, or kind of abandon the intrinsic world and intrinsic explanations.
46:45
And let me just give a brief example of this, which is that the Freud's notion of, kind of this Freudian notion of trauma and of outside influences being the most important thing about people, rather than their innate cells.
46:59
And so nowadays, for example, if there's a fictional character in a movie or something, or like let's say Don Draper for Mad Men, it's like, "Why does Don Draper treat women poorly?"
47:07
It's like, "Well, because he grew up raised by prostitutes."
47:07
That's their explanations that they give.
47:12
It's like, "What a reductive simplistic explanation that you've decided to give for this character?"
47:16
Rather than maybe it's a slightly more interesting explanation, which is that like, what explanation.
47:21
Like he's a man of his times.
47:21
He's soaked in every aspect of culture.
47:26
Or just smarter things than just being raised by, spending time in a prostitution house when he was younger.
47:32
But instead we get this incredibly reductive, and everyone applauses this very complex character, Don Draper, for television he's one of the most literary characters on TV.
47:40
And I agree with that, but he's still subject to this sort of extrinsic explanation of like, "Oh, something happened to him and therefore this is why he is the way he is."
47:44
And you see this in novels and literature all the time.
47:48
But I think that if you go back, you actually see a bit less of it.
47:51
So, characters are much more like have an innate nature and they express that nature.
47:51
And the purpose of the story is for you to understand the complexities of their internal nature.
48:00
But now, because everything is so extrinsic, we don't talk, we've kind of deprivileged conscious experience from our explanations of the world.
48:03
Now it's like, why did this character do something?
48:09
Well, because this thing happened to them when they were younger.
48:12
Or this thing happened to them or so on.
48:12
So you can give these extrinsic explanations, which is basically treating people like machines, this mechanistic or algorithmic view of human nature.
48:22
And I think that when you do that, you can often be correct about it.
48:22
It's not to say that that view's not correct, but you over privilege that view and you underprivilege the alternative, then you can arrive at explanations of human nature that aren't really correct.
48:30
And I call this extrinsic drift.
48:34
It's like we just, as we understand more about the world, our urge to describe everything in mechanistic terms increases.
48:37
And I think you can even see that in the fictions that get written.
48:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow, that's fantastic.
48:44
I can hardly wait to read that new book.
48:44
And I agree entirely with you.
48:48
It's like Snow's idea of Two Cultures, art and science, and I'm sure you've read the book.
48:54
And like Rob Pirsig and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
48:54
All of these people are saying, "You can't silo.
48:59
If you silo, you're going to take away in some fundamental way, the ability at insight."
49:08
The ability like as you're just explaining, if you externalize everything, well, okay.
49:14
That might work for X, Y, and Z, but you've lost the entire, well you just, you said it earlier in our discussion. What has science been?
49:21
What are the really big stuff that science has given us in the last 40 years?
49:26
All the big stuff came with all those crazy people.
49:32
I mean, and almost artistic.
49:32
And I'm not saying that to diminish them in any way, quite the opposite.
49:36
I'm saying that the ability to unite, it's like The Master and His Emissary.
49:42
I don't know whether you've read that book, by McGilchrist. Erik Hoel: McGilchrist.
49:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that's a great book.
49:46
And it does seem to me that at this point in space time, that that idea is becoming more and more, it's bubbling to the surface.
49:55
Erik Hoel: Yeah, I think the internet has a big deal to do with that.
49:56
I mean, I do think that the internet allows for an interdisciplinary that was be completely impossible before.
50:00
I mean, I don't even know if my career, because I currently operate in dual worlds.
50:05
I have both a career as a professional scientist where I get research money from grants and research institutions, to research particular topics.
50:14
And then I also operate as a writer where I sell books and I write online essays.
50:19
And that would be, I think almost it would be much more difficult to enact even just 20 years ago.
50:24
Because luckily the internet has opened up this opportunity for people, for like a space for both, an audience for interdisciplinary thinking and something that exists outside the academy.
50:34
And having one foot in the academy and one foot out of it is to me personally ideal, but it's, I should acknowledge that I'm incredibly privileged just to have been born in this time.
50:47
I mean, privilege gets passed over by so many.
50:47
It's just like, just that you happen to be at somewhat the right time.
50:50
So right now it's amazing that I'm able to publish books and have an audience for my essays and do science.
50:54
And the reason for that is not because I just somehow manage it or so on, is that the internet has allowed for something like that.
51:06
It has allowed for interdisciplinary, it has allowed for kind of new kinds of voices.
51:11
And that is an amazing thing that I think we're hopefully, with my kind of my generational cohort, we're going to see more and more of people who are kind of outside traditional structures.
51:18
And I think that that is really important.
51:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I have a thesis that I call the great reshuffle.
51:24
I think we've been in it for a while.
51:24
I think we'll be in it for a while longer.
51:29
The sort of foundation of the great reshuffle is the internet, is the connecting and linking of all the various nodes, I. e. us human beings.
51:39
And that one good thing that came out of the pandemic for example, was something that might have taken seven or 10 years is now acceptable, right?
51:44
So time, space and geography have collapsed. They're gone.
51:49
And you can live in India and have a job here in the United States.
51:55
You can be a researcher in consciousness and all of the relevant things that you need to do to get that, like the grants and everything.
52:03
And you can also be a great writer.
52:07
And I think I love your observation that hey, right place, right time.
52:11
We lucked into the fact that we are existing in this world that I can interview you via Zoom.
52:18
And then we can rebroadcast that and a bunch of people can self-select into that conversation.
52:25
And I just think it's so cool.
52:25
And like you, at the same time you have this sort of pervasive pessimism about everything.
52:30
But I just think that also the observation that you've made, we lucked out, man.
52:37
I mean, we lucked out to be born now.
52:37
A lot of the things my wife always teases me.
52:42
She's like, "You do realize that you would have been burned at the stake long ago." Erik Hoel: Yeah.
52:47
Well, there's always, in Midnight in Paris there's that drive to go back.
52:49
So maybe the best life would be to live in 1920s, Paris, with Hemingway.
52:55
And then of course within the movie he meets this girl.
52:55
He's going back in time from modern day to that time, his favorite time.
52:59
And he meets this girl in the other time who wants to go back to like the Belle Epoque of Paris.
53:02
So back another 70 years or so, and I think that that's a very good lesson in that you always seem as if you would prefer that time, but I think that we should apply Rawls' veil of ignorance here and be like, "Listen, it sounds like, yes, it would have been pretty amazing to have been born, say in Roman times and hang out with Catullus."
53:21
Or it would be pretty amazing to have been born in some other time, but it's like, the actual probability is that you get born and stuff is not great.
53:23
Or you get born and you're one of the 50% who die in childbirth or something.
53:28
And so it is good to live in the modern world, even if I do think that these technological changes have driven vast and very fast changes in our culture that can drive pessimism.
53:40
Because you're like, "Okay, suddenly this whole thing is high school."
53:44
I actually have an essay coming out about that on my Substack called, The Gossip Trap, which is just about kind of the high schoolification of essentially all modern life due to social media.
53:54
Which I think effectively makes everything very similar to high school.
53:54
And so, you leave high school and being like, "I want to get out, I want to get out."
53:57
And then you're like, "Wait a minute.
54:00
This whole thing is, it's just this over again."
54:00
But you know, I mean, one cannot complain too much.
54:02
Here I am on a podcast, as you say, like on Zoom, I'm talking about a book I just published.
54:02
So- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I- Erik Hoel: People right outside.
54:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
54:02
I thought that was a good movie, Woody Allen movie.
54:02
And I thought that that was a great movie.
54:03
And in fact, I just did a podcast with an author, Thomas Bevan, who's an English guy.
54:07
And he wrote a great essay in which he says, "The internet is our Paris." And yeah. Erik Hoel: Go ahead.
54:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, go, please.
54:13
Erik Hoel: I was going to say, another essay I just did, I was saying that the internet is the new [inaudible].
54:14
I don't think people have realized that you can put a hand print on here and it will last forever.
54:19
Everything is, the people, stuff used to decay, but I mean, nothing is really lost on the internet.
54:22
And I think it's an incredible opportunity that we're not just communicating with each other.
54:26
We're also communicating with future humans in a way that previous humans were not communicating.
54:30
Like your letters might survive maybe if you're really famous.
54:34
Or like, some, if you build, if you're Hadrian and you build the Pantheon in Rome, then yeah, your architecture's going to survive for 2,000 years.
54:41
But that's a very, very rare case.
54:41
It said most people are kind of completely lost to history.
54:47
Everything they do is lost to history, and that changed in my generation.
54:47
So the first generation who were not lost to history, we don't get lost. So that's incredible.
54:53
That's like everything has become a lost calcade.
54:58
Everything is perfectly preserved.
54:58
Again, some people might say, "Is it really?"
55:01
But as time goes on more and more and more of it is preserved such that now I think we have kind of an eidetic cultural memory.
55:05
And that's an incredible, again, another incredible opportunity, because you get to communicate not just to yourself, but to any future people, whoever care, pay attention, that's available. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
55:17
And I agree with that and I think it's fascinating.
55:20
I had on and I'm going to have on again, a guy by the name of Brian Roemmele, who has invented a technology he calls memory keeper.
55:25
And the way I sort of shorthand it to people is, remember the first Superman where he goes to his fortress of solitude and he's got the crystal things that there's Jor-El, his father and everything.
55:37
And he can talk to Jor-El.
55:37
I don't think that's what you're going to be able to do with Brian.
55:42
But it's like a nascent science that is, as you point out, it's possible now.
55:48
And I do also agree with you on your observation that we are the first generation that there will be a memory, if you want it.
56:00
And I just think, I see again, maybe this might default to being a rational optimist gets me too optimistic.
56:06
But I think that this condition, like okay, so we've never seen it before.
56:06
And the invention of the printing press was the first thing that allowed humans to time bind their ideas and send them forward in time.
56:18
And so we have to remember before that they couldn't do it.
56:23
And there were all these people and God knows how many geniuses, how many Rembrandts, how many DaVincis.
56:29
But as we progress and can now time bind, and now we are going to be able to, a 1,000 years from now people might listen to this.
56:34
They probably won't, but they could, but they could.
56:40
Erik Hoel: But they could.
56:41
And I think that that's incredible, yeah.
56:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, as do I, as do I.
56:43
Well, I can hardly wait for the second book.
56:43
I'm going to subscribe to your Substack because it sounds like you are right up my alley.
56:47
When does the next book come out?
56:52
Erik Hoel: The publication date is a year from now.
56:52
So it'll be a little while, it'll be spring of 2023. I'm still writing it.
56:55
I still have a draft that I need to finish up.
57:00
I'm slightly over deadline on that.
57:00
But if people want to follow me or pay attention, I put out an essay every other Wednesday on this newsletter blog of mine called, The Intrinsic Perspective.
57:09
And that's a really good place to kind of receive these.
57:09
And they're kind of miss [inaudible] about any number of subjects, so.
57:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fantastic.
57:16
And also you're on Twitter and we'll put this all in the show notes. Well, okay.
57:16
So this has been absolutely as fascinating as I was hoping it would be, you are an amazing guy and so much fun to talk with.
57:25
So at the end of all of the podcasts we ask our guest the same question.
57:31
And that is, we're going to wave a wand and make you emperor of the universe or the earth for one day, you can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a reeducation camp, but that fits in really well with your idea that those kinds of people are so few and far between you wouldn't want to.
57:48
But what you can do is you can incept them and they go to sleep tonight and they wake up tomorrow and they have two ideas that they think are their own ideas.
57:55
What two ideas are you going to put into the minds of humanity so that they wake up tomorrow and they're like, "Yeah, I got to do it this way."
58:06
Erik Hoel: I probably would immediately abdicate given this responsibility, or if I figure out some way to destroy this from ever happening again.
58:13
So probably the idea that I would implant would be the knowledge that this is happening, and the knowledge that people are being chosen for this process and that you have to find some way to stop this process so you can get your free will back.
58:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. That's only one though. What's the second one?
58:33
Erik Hoel: Well, no, the knowledge that this is happening and then- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, okay.
58:35
And then make it [crosstalk] happen.
58:35
Erik Hoel: I guess give everybody the desire, that they could have their own desire.
58:37
I'm sure most would, most people would not want to have their brains interfered with while they're sleeping.
58:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. I love it.
58:45
Erik Hoel: I'll figure out some way to destroy the process from within.
58:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fantastic. What a great answer.
58:49
And you know, boy, I love that one.
58:49
Well, this has been absolutely delightful.
58:54
Thank you so much for chatting with me.
58:54
I hope to have you on when the new book comes out and chat about that.
58:59
I can guarantee you, you will have one reader. I will. Erik Hoel: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jim.
59:07
It's been an absolute pleasure.
59:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And for me as well. All right, cheers.