Time to Speak About the Gods?? (Freeman Dyson via Esther Dyson)

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: mark () tmtstrategies com
> Date: June 16, 2018 at 8:09:01 PM GMT+9
> To: Dave <dave () farber net>
> Subject: [DL-] Time to Speak About the Gods?? (Freeman Dyson via Esther Dyson)
> Reply-To: "Digital Life" <dl () tmts topicbox com>
>
> https://www.52-insights.com/freeman-dyson-i-kept-quiet-for-30-years-so-maybe-its-time-to-speak-interview-science/
>
>
> SCIENTIST • 15TH/JUN/2018 •  •  •  
> Freeman Dyson
> "I kept quiet for thirty years, maybe it’s time to speak."
> One of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, Freeman Dyson, is as much known for his significant contribution 
> to science as he is for courting controversy throughout his life. Over six decades, he built a body of work that sits 
> alongside some of the most renowned physicists, mathematicians, and intellectuals of our time.
>
> On closer inspection, it feels as if Dyson has lived a double life, on the one hand, playing the role of philosopher, 
> the other a scientist labouring over some of mathematics most complex problems all without a PhD we might add.
>
>
> In the latter part of the 20th century, Dyson became known for espousing some incredibly speculative and wonderful 
> ideas, from the enormously imaginative Dyson sphere to the equally inspiring Dyson Tree, both sparking fierce debate 
> amongst sci-fi circles across the world.
>
> But what he has become most known for in the last decade is his ability to uphold his heretical views on climate 
> change. His belief that climate change is happening yet we do not have an idea as to why or how has irritated the 
> scientific community to no end.
>
> Nearing his centenary years, Freeman Dyson now heads into the tailwind of another controversy this time the theory of 
> evolution as his target. Contrary to Darwin’s widely accepted theory of natural selection at 94 Dyson is ready to 
> defy the status quo once again.
>  
>
> One of the things I like a lot about you is that you’re not afraid to disagree even in the face of the status quo. 
> Your close colleague Steve Weinberg said about you, “Freeman Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice”. Where do you 
> think you got that particular trait from?  
>
> I suppose it started out when I was quite a small kid. In England where I grew up, there were the people who went 
> shooting with guns and playing a lot of football, that was the majority, and then there was the minority who were 
> people like me who spent their time reading books. We always felt ourselves to be an endangered species. I was always 
> used to being part of a threatened minority when I was young and I suppose that lasted. 
>
> I guess what I’m asking is, is it important to you to not accept things at face value?
> Yes. Of course, I read a lot of sceptics. The people I read most as a teenager were Robin Holliday, the biologist, 
> and Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead. These were all heretics in one way or another.
>
> Looking at the contributions that you, Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein have made to our culture, 
> do you worry that they perhaps contributed negatively just by looking at their nuclear legacy?
> Yes of course they do, but I wouldn’t call that negative. Of course, they’re all different, but I think they all made 
> very positive contributions, Einstein in particular. I mean he was a real politician as well as a scientist, he knew 
> how to play to the crowd, and he did it very well.
> I would say, anybody that takes an important part in politics particularly and military affairs, has to make hard 
> choices. So no matter how it comes out you always regret something, and you might have done better.
>  
>
> Freeman do you think that the egos of scientists sometimes get in the way of doing good work? 
> Yes. I would say quite frequently. On the other hand, ego also helps, it goes both ways. It makes people 
> overconfident and inclined to believe things that are nonsense, and on the other hand, it gives them the confidence 
> to go boldly into the future. So you need both.
>
> If you were awarded the Nobel Prize for something in your career, what particular achievement do you think would be 
> fitting? 
> I didn’t ever earn a Nobel Prize, that’s not my style. I have a short attention span, I solve problems for fun, but I 
> don’t think deep thoughts about nature. I don’t think any of my work is of Nobel quality.
>
> Of the achievements in the scientific body of knowledge in the last few decades, which Nobel Prize would you say has 
> been the most distinctive to you?
> Well, of course, I think of the ones that were not given. It was a scandal that Stephen Hawking did not get the Nobel 
> prize; he should’ve had it thirty years ago. And every year I waited to see if Stephen would get it and he never did.
>  
>
> That was a scandal. I don’t know why people didn’t value his work; he was a great scientist as well as being a great 
> human being.
>
> Did you meet him? 
> Yes. I mean this is, of course, a digression, but I happened to be staying in a hotel in Tokyo, and Stephen Hawking 
> was there also in the same hotel, and he said he would like to go for a walk to see what Tokyo looked like, so I said 
> I’d be happy to come with him.
>
> So we went, him in his wheelchair and we walked through the streets of Tokyo, with huge crowds of Japanese people 
> were silently following us wanting to touch the wheelchair, they thought there was some magic in it. The Japanese 
> people worshipped him like a god.
>
> I found that delightful and of course Stephen enjoyed it too; he had a sense of humour, so he played up to the crowd, 
> just like Einstein.
>  
>
> Yeah, I can imagine they have quite similar traits.  The first time that I heard about you, with my limited technical 
> proficiency in science, I was fascinated and intrigued by the idea of the Dyson Sphere. And I think it’s an idea that 
> has captured the imagination of pop culture.  
> Well, it’s a joke actually. It was a misunderstanding. I used the word biosphere which means a habitat for aliens.
> I was proposing searching for heat radiation which would be an indication of an advanced civilisation somewhere in 
> the sky, so we should look with infrared telescopes for heat radiation and that what we’re looking for is a 
> significant habitat in which the aliens might be living.
> But I called it a biosphere and somehow that was misunderstood as a big round ball which had nothing to do with that. 
> So the whole thing was rubbish.
>
> But of course, it was a serious proposal to look for this infrared radiation, and that was done about twenty years 
> later. The original plan was proposed in 1960 I think and around 1980 we had a little satellite telescope in the sky, 
> called the IRAS (the infrared astronomy telescope) which did the first sky survey looking for heat radiation.
>
> And of course, the joke is that we found the sky crawling with these objects. There are millions of these objects in 
> the sky, and the problem is they’re all natural because what they are is very young stars which condensed out of dust 
> clouds, so they still have the dust around them. So instead of shining with visible light what you see is, in fact, 
> heat radiation from the dust. So the search for aliens was not a success.
>
> But we’re still equally looking for that anomaly. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of Tabby’s star.  
> I have indeed, that’s another piece of hype of course. It’s an exciting mystery, but the sky is full of mysterious 
> objects that we don’t understand. You have to observe for several years usually to find out what’s going on.
>
> With Tabby’s star, it’s exciting but it’s nothing very startling, and it’s been brutally exaggerated.
>
> Why do you say that? If it elicits the observation of many scientists why do you say it’s an exaggeration?
> I mean the way it’s discussed on the internet and in popular literature, it’s regarded as something extraordinary but 
> it’s not, it’s one of many such objects that we see, and gradually you discover what’s going on.
>  
>
> Freeman, I want to put a quotation to you, “science can bring you to the Big Bang, but it can’t take you beyond it, 
> you need a different kind of apparatus to peer into that”.  Do you think that the mysteries of the world can be 
> answered by science alone? 
> No, it certainly does not come down to science. We have all kinds of sources of knowledge, literature, history, art, 
> architecture, all kinds of wonderful things that are part of human culture that we need in order to find our place in 
> the universe.
>
> Not just science, science is a small part of it. It happens to be going ahead very fast just in recent years. But 
> religion, of course, is also important, and religion is much deeper in our culture than science.
>
> As you look through the long lens of science and the history and the culture that it’s brought us and the 
> understanding of our universe, how do you view humanity’s progress and development as a species?
> Well, I would say it’s sort of miraculous how well we’ve done and it’s still to me very mysterious that humans are so 
> capable. If you just look at the struggle for existence in the last million years when most of the time we were 
> living in caves with ice ages coming and going, it was a very tough and rugged existence most of the time.
>
> And in order to survive that why did we need Beethoven and why did we need Shakespeare? It’s quite amazing that our 
> cultural lives are so rich compared with how we were living in caves.
>
> The important invention in a way for the human species was grandparents. Grandparents were the beginning of culture 
> when we could sit around the cave fire and the grandparents would sing songs to the children and the parents would be 
> out hunting so having three generations was what made us what we are.
>
> I want to ask you about another proposal you made besides the Dyson Sphere. It’s this idea that you talked about a 
> while ago that potentially intelligent beings may be capable of thinking an infinite number of thoughts in an open 
> expanding universe. Do you know which proposal I’m talking about? 
> Yes well, of course – in those days when I wrote that, about thirty years ago, everybody then believed that the 
> universe is expanding linearly with a constant velocity of a given object.
>
> And now we know that in fact, the universe is accelerating, that’s the discovery of the last ten years, and in an 
> accelerated universe everything is different so that whole discussion, in fact, is now wrong. I don’t think we know 
> enough about the accelerating universe to go over it and see how it’s changed.
>
> Are you saying that due to the idea that the universe is accelerating it potentially changes your idea about how we 
> think and the capability of thinking?  
> Yes. In a very drastic way. It’s bad news if we really are accelerating all the time in the future.
>  
>
> Is consciousness a word which is particularly attractive to you? Is it something that keeps you up? 
> It’s certainly an interesting mystery. I regard it as a huge mystery on a level with the origin of life. All the big 
> mysteries like the origin of the human species are things we don’t understand, and consciousness is one of the 
> biggest and we understand it least in a way.
>
> I think the key should be studying babies. The real mystery is what is going on in the head of a six-month-old baby 
> that enables the baby to make sense of all the things that are going on around it. So if we can somehow study the 
> brains of babies in real detail, we might get a feeling for how consciousness begins. But of course, we are very far 
> away from being able to do that.
>
> If it was thirty years ago and you were just as speculative in your proposals, what is something that you would 
> perhaps propose today that you’ve been sitting on? 
> I’m thinking a lot about evolution at the moment.
>
> It happens that I corresponded with two heretics on the subject of evolution. Motoo Kimura who was a Japanese 
> biologist and Ursula Goodenough, an American biologist. Both of them had heretical ideas about evolution which I 
> think were probably correct.
>
> I’m preparing a talk which discusses the idea that Darwin was correct up to a point but he didn’t tell us the whole 
> story.
>
> Because the biologists are very defensive about Darwin. If you say anything critical about Darwin you’re regarded as 
> an enemy. It’s a very dangerous subject to tread on. I kept quiet for thirty years so maybe it’s time to speak.
>
> Just to clarify here for our readers, obviously, you’re poking holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution but you’re 
> saying it only tells the story up to a certain point. What do you mean by that?  
> Well that he believed that evolution was driven by selection. That’s essentially Darwin’s contribution. And it’s true 
> for big populations, but it has limits.
>
> The limits are you need big populations in order for selection to be dominant. If you have small populations, then 
> random drift is actually more important than selection. That’s the Kimura theory. Kimura called it the neutral theory 
> of evolution and he wrote a book about it which was widely ignored by all the orthodox biologists.
>
> But I think he was right. And in fact, it happens that small populations are very important in evolution. In fact, 
> you have to have a small population to start a new species, almost by definition. So small populations have a 
> controlling effect on starting new species and also in the extension of old species.
>
> So this neutral regime where the selection is not important may, in fact, be the real driving force of evolution when 
> you come to a new species. And of course, if that’s true, it changes the picture in many ways.
>  
>
> What do you think Richard Dawkins would make of this?
> I mean let him speak for himself, but he is generally very dogmatic that selection dominates, and he talked about the 
> selfish gene which is correct of course if you have a big population. If you have small populations, not so much, 
> genes come and go mostly by random chance.
>
> Darwin understood the difficulty. He asked the question “why is nature so diverse?”, he asked, “why do we have 
> millions of species?” Darwin asked the question, in a beautiful way, “why did God love beetles? There are half a 
> million species of beetles, why did God make so many?”
>
> And it’s hard to understand that on the basis of selection. If selection were dominant, then you’d expect that there 
> would be a few species of beetle which would prevail. They would be the best adapted and the others would disappear.
>
> But in the real world, you have this enormous richness of species, many kinds of beetle and there are birds of 
> paradise and there are all sorts of weird peacocks with peacock feathers which seem to be peculiarly unfit. And all 
> those weird creatures which have prevailed for reasons that Darwin couldn’t explain. He understood that there was a 
> problem and I think that the neutral theory of Kimura really does help a lot to understand that.
>
> Let’s move to another area you’ve come known for questioning climate change. The idea that there has been a 40% rise 
> in CO2 over 130 years, that’s not something you disagree with.
> But you do disagree with this idea that the climate is predictable or we know why it is happening. Is that correct? 
> Yes. I mean we don’t understand climate. The most extreme examples of climate change were the ice ages and they were 
> really a catastrophe for life in many parts of the world. And we don’t understand them.
>
> We just don’t know why they started or why they come and go in a more or less periodic fashion. It’s all a big 
> mystery. And if we don’t understand ice ages we don’t understand climate.
>
> So to counteract the rise in CO2 what has been your suggestions to the scientific community?
>  Well, the only paper I’ve written on the subject, sort of in the official literature, was recommended growing trees. 
> In fact, we could grow enough trees to take care of the carbon in the atmosphere. And that’s still true. If you 
> planted all the wasteland over the globe with trees, it would be just about enough to absorb the carbon from the 
> atmosphere.
>
> The carbon in trees is about equal to the carbon in the atmosphere. So the trees could be a way of managing the 
> climate up to a point.
>
> Do you believe that we face an imminent crisis on earth and that the pandemonium that seems to be sweeping the 
> public, the media and the scientific community is appropriate?  
> No, I don’t. It is starting to subside I would say. I don’t read much of what’s published but I have the feeling that 
> the point of view of the sceptics is being listened to a bit more now than it was.
>  
>
> What are your thoughts on where this incredible advancement in scientific technology is taking us? 
> No. I think nature loves to take risks. That’s what evolution is all about if you don’t take risks you don’t evolve. 
> So we are in the business of taking risks, whether we like it or not.
>
> To me, the really urgent risks are still war and peace and that’s far more serious to me than anything that can 
> happen as a result of climate change.
>
> Certainly, one of the risks that we’re taking is the development of artificial intelligence and the artificial 
> intelligence people also are now, I would say exaggerating the dangers and pretending to be more dangerous than they 
> really are, but that remains to be seen.
>
> Certainly, something to worry about is that artificial intelligence could in principle take over civilisation and 
> leave humans behind. That would be a disaster at least for us.
>
> I want to end on one final very speculative question, what would you say if I asked you what is the meaning of life 
> to you?  
> Yes well, I would say it’s a mystery. You may say it’s the biggest of all mysteries, is there a purpose to life and 
> does the universe have a purpose? I think it’s certainly an open question.
>
> I tend to believe the answer is yes. There are so many details in the universe that seem to favour life and 
> intelligence. It looks as if there is some purpose there, but certainly, we cannot decide that. It’s a matter of 
> religion, not of science.
>
> It would seem like that sentiment is a real anomaly in the scientific community though?
> No that’s not true. I mean, of course, atheists always have the loudest voices. There are many of my scientific 
> friends who also are quietly religious in the way that I am. They don’t go shouting around the world.
>
> But purpose seems to you the most important set of circumstances that you can attribute to the question of what is 
> the meaning of it all?  
> Yes, in fact, I would say it’s more probable that there are many different purposes for competing. If there is a God, 
> there probably is a collection of gods rather than a single one. The polytheistic view historically came first. 
> Ancient religions all had many gods rather than one. Monotheistic religion was a later development.
>
> But I think it’s quite likely that the older views were right, and really there’s a competing bunch of Gods, like the 
> ones that the Greeks believed in, and that explains why the universe is full of contradictions.
>
>  
>
>  
>
>
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