00:00:00.000 I am thrilled to be talking to you by this high-tech method of all humans who have ever
00:00:19.640 lived, the overwhelming majority would have found what we are doing here, incomprehensible,
00:00:26.160 unbelievable, because for thousands of centuries in the dark time before the scientific
00:00:33.040 revolution and the enlightenment, people had low expectations for their lives, for their
00:00:39.920 descendants' lives, typically they expected nothing significantly new or better to be
00:00:49.160 This pessimism famously appears in the Bible in one of the few biblical passages with
00:00:56.600 a named author called Cohellet, he is an enigmatic chap, he wrote, what has been is what will
00:01:05.840 be, and what has been done is what will be done, there is nothing new under the sun.
00:01:14.320 Is there something of which it is said, look, this is new, that thing was already done,
00:01:23.560 Cohellet was describing a world without novelty.
00:01:29.320 By novelty, I mean something new in Cohellet's sense, not merely something that has changed,
00:01:35.280 but a significant change with lasting effects, where people really would say, look, this
00:01:46.280 So purely random changes aren't novelty, okay, Heraclitus did say, a man can't step in
00:01:54.960 the same river twice because it's not the same river, he's not the same man, but if the
00:02:00.360 river is changing randomly, it really is the same river.
00:02:06.520 In contrast, if an idea in a mind spreads to other minds and changes lives for generations,
00:02:17.880 Human life without novelty is life without creativity, without progress.
00:02:28.960 That was the living hell in which Cohellet lived, like everyone until a few centuries ago.
00:02:36.400 It was hell because for humans, suffering is intimately related to statistic.
00:02:48.720 All sources of suffering, famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids, and things like war and slavery,
00:02:58.600 hurt people only until we have created the knowledge to prevent them.
00:03:04.800 As a historian, Somerset Moms novel of human bondage, about an ancient sage who summarizes
00:03:11.840 the entire history of mankind, as he was born, he suffered and he died.
00:03:21.560 And it goes on, life was insignificant and death without consequence.
00:03:28.520 And indeed, the overwhelming majority of humans who ever lived had lives of suffering and
00:03:35.400 grueling labor before dying young and in agony.
00:03:41.880 And yes, in most generations, nothing had any novel consequence for subsequent generations.
00:03:51.160 Nevertheless, when ancient people tried to explain their condition, they typically did so
00:03:59.600 in grandiose cosmic terms, which was the right thing to do, as it turns out.
00:04:05.920 Even though their actual explanations, their myths were largely false.
00:04:12.160 Some tried to explain the grimness and monotony of their world in terms of an endless cosmic
00:04:19.520 war between good and evil, in which humans were the battleground, which neatly explained
00:04:27.080 why their own experience was full of suffering and why progress never happened.
00:04:36.800 Amazingly enough, all their conflict and suffering were just due to the way they processed
00:04:45.640 ideas, being satisfied with dogma and just so stories, rather than criticizing them and
00:04:54.080 trying to guess better explanations of the world and of their own condition.
00:05:01.080 Twenty of century physics did create better explanations, but still in terms of a cosmic
00:05:07.000 war, this time the combatants were order and chaos or entropy.
00:05:13.280 That story does allow for hope for the future, but in another way it's even bleaker than
00:05:21.600 the ancient myths, because the villain entropy is preordained to have the final victory.
00:05:30.600 When the inexorable laws of thermodynamics shut down all novelty with the so-called heat
00:05:38.800 Currently, there's a story of a local battle in that war between sustainability, which
00:05:50.680 That's the contemporary take on good and evil, often with the added twist that humans
00:05:59.760 And recently, there have been tales of another cosmic war between gravity, which collapses
00:06:05.760 the universe, and dark energy, which finally shreds it.
00:06:10.640 So this time, whichever of those cosmic forces wins, we lose.
00:06:17.400 All those pessimistic accounts of the human condition contain some truth, but as prophecies,
00:06:26.640 they're all misleading and all for the same reason.
00:06:30.280 None of them portrays humans as what we really are, as Jacob Bernofsky said, man is
00:06:38.600 not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape.
00:06:44.000 In other words, humans are not play things of cosmic forces, we are users of cosmic forces.
00:06:53.120 I'll say more about that in a moment, but first, what sorts of thing create novelty?
00:06:59.640 Well, the beginning of the universe surely did.
00:07:03.280 The Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago created space, time and energy, everything physical.
00:07:11.800 And then, immediately, what I call the first era of novelty, with the first atom, the first
00:07:24.040 But then, at some point, novelty vanished from the universe.
00:07:30.600 Perhaps from as early as 12 or 13 billion years ago, right up to the present day, there's
00:07:36.800 never been any new kind of astronomical object.
00:07:41.800 There's only been what I call the Great Monotony.
00:07:47.000 So Cahillett was accidentally even more right about the universe beyond the sun than he
00:07:57.400 So long as the Great Monotony lasts, what has been out there really is what will be.
00:08:05.680 And there is nothing out there of which you can truly be said, look, this is new.
00:08:11.840 Nevertheless, at some point, during the Great Monotony, there was an event in consequential
00:08:21.880 And even billions of years later, it had affected nothing beyond its own planet, yet eventually
00:08:33.480 That event was the origin of life, creating the first genetic knowledge, coding for biological
00:08:50.680 Genes in the DNA of single-celled organisms put oxygen in the air, extracted CO2, put chalk
00:08:58.160 and iron ore into the ground, hardly a cubic inch of the surface to some depth has remained
00:09:09.040 The Earth became, if not a novel place on the cosmic scale, certainly a weird one.
00:09:16.480 Just as an example, beyond Earth, only a few hundred different chemical substances have
00:09:22.960 been detected, presumably there are some more in lifeless locations, but on Earth, evolution
00:09:34.080 In the first plants, animals, and then in some ancestor species of ours, explanatory
00:09:42.680 knowledge for the first time in the universe for all we know.
00:09:47.920 explanatory knowledge is the defining adaptation of our species.
00:09:53.280 It differs from the non-explanatory knowledge in DNA, for instance, by being universal.
00:10:00.480 That is to say, whatever can be understood, can be understood through explanatory knowledge,
00:10:07.280 and more, any physical process can be controlled by such knowledge, limited only by the
00:10:15.120 laws of physics, and so explanatory knowledge too has begun to transform the Earth's surface.
00:10:25.040 And soon, the Earth will become the only known object in the universe that turns aside
00:10:36.360 Cohelett was understandably misled by the painful slowness of progress in his day.
00:10:44.600 Novelty in human life was still too rare to gradual to be noticed in one generation.
00:10:51.360 And in the biosphere, the evolution of novel species was even slower, but both things were
00:11:00.080 Now, why is there a great monotony in the universe at large, and what makes our planet
00:11:10.760 Well, the universe at large is relatively simple.
00:11:16.720 Cars are so simple that we can predict their behavior billions of years into the future
00:11:21.880 and retrodict how they formed billions of years ago.
00:11:28.800 Basically, it's because big, massive, powerful things strongly affect lesser things and
00:11:42.120 For example, when a comet hits the sun, the sun carries on just as before, but the comet
00:11:50.800 For the same reason, big things are not much affected by small parts of themselves, i.e.
00:11:59.680 by details, which means that their overall behavior is simple.
00:12:06.440 And since nothing very new can happen to things that remain simple, the hierarchy rule
00:12:13.040 by causing large-scale simplicity has caused the great monotony.
00:12:19.920 But, the saving grace is the hierarchy rule is not a law of nature.
00:12:28.080 It just happens to have held so far in the universe except here, in our biosphere, molecule
00:12:34.520 sized objects, genes, control vastly disproportionate resources, the first genes for photosynthesis
00:12:43.520 by causing their own proliferation and then transforming the surface of the planet have violated
00:12:51.160 or reversed the hierarchy rule by the mind-blowing factor of 10 to the power 40.
00:12:59.760 This planetary knowledge is potentially far more powerful because of universality and
00:13:08.400 When human knowledge has achieved a factor 10 to the 40, it will pretty much control the
00:13:18.040 So humans and any other explanation creators who may exist out there are the ultimate
00:13:26.120 agents of novelty for the universe, where the reason and the means by which novelty
00:13:34.680 and creativity, knowledge, progress can have objective large-scale physical effects.
00:13:45.800 From the human perspective, the only alternative to that living hell of static societies
00:13:52.600 is continual creation of new ideas, behaviors, new kinds of objects.
00:14:00.920 This robot will soon be obsolete because of new explanatory knowledge, progress.
00:14:08.360 But from the cosmic perspective, explanatory knowledge is the nemesis of the hierarchy rule.
00:14:16.960 It's the destroyer of the great monotony, so it's the creator of the next cosmological
00:14:28.200 If one can speak of a cosmic war, it's not the one portrayed in those pessimistic stories.
00:14:35.040 It's a war between monotony and novelty, between stasis and creativity.
00:14:43.880 And in this war, our side is not destined to lose.
00:14:50.760 If we choose to apply our unique capacity to create explanatory knowledge, we could win.
