Transcript for #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes

Well, if we accept this intelligent life here and we accept the number of planets in the universe is gigantic. I mean, 10 to 22 stars have been estimated. It seems to me how you likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life. If you deny that, then you're committed to the views that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable. I mean ludicrously of the charts improbable and I don't think it's that improbable. Certainly the origin of life itself, they're really two steps, the origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable. And then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also preferable. So the juxtaposition of those two, you could say, is pretty improbable, but not tend to the 22 improbable. It's an interesting question, maybe you're coming on to it, how we would recognize intelligence from outer space if we encountered it. The most likely way we would come across them would be by radio. It's highly unlikely they'd have a visit us. But it's not, it's not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals. And then we would have to have some means of deciding that it was intelligent. People have, people involved in the city program discuss how they would do it and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to. And I was an obvious way for them to broadcast to say, we are intelligent, we are here. I suspect it probably would be obvious actually.

I think so. I suspect that they will have Pythagoras theorem etc. I don't think that mathematics will be that different.

I stuck my neck out and said that if we do, if ever that we do discover life. elsewhere, it will be Darwinian life. In the sense that it will work by some kind of natural selection, the non-random survival of randomly generated codes. It doesn't mean it would have to have some kind of genetics, but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics, probably wouldn't be actually. But I think it would have to be Darwinian, yes.

Yes, in the general sense, it would be Darwinian.

None has ever been suggested, and I suspect it never will be.

But, um, what did that?

That's an interesting question. I'm committed to the belief that is ultimately possible because I think there's nothing non-physical in our brains. I think our brains work by the laws of physics and so it must in principle be possible to replicate that. in practice though it might be very difficult and as you suggest it might it may be the only way to do it is by something like an evolutionary process.

It's a paradox, isn't it? I mean, on the one side, it is deplorably wasteful. It's fundamentally based on waste. On the other hand, it does produce magnificent results. When the design of a soaring bird and albatross has evolved to an eagle, is superb. An engineer would be proud to have done it. On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud to have done some of the other things that evolution has served up. Some of the sort of botched jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical origins, but they don't look well designed.

Oh, bad design. My favorite example is that a current Larry and Jill nerve. I've used this many times. This is a nerve. It's one of the cranial nerves, which goes from the brain. And the end organ is that it supplies is the voice box, the larynx. But it doesn't go straight to the larynx. It goes right into the chest. And then loops round an artery in the chest and then comes straight back up again to the larynx. And I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck, which happened to have died in a zoo. And we watched the, we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve going, whizzing straight past the larynx. within an inch of the larynx, down into the chest, and then back up again, which is a detail of many feet. Very, very inefficient. The reason is historical. The ancestors, our fish ancestors, the ancestors of all mammals and fish. The most direct pathway of the equivalent of that nerve. There was larynx in those days, but it innovated part of the gills. The most direct pathway was behind that artery. And then when the mammal when the tetrapods when the lamb vertebra started evolving and then the next started to stretch, the marginal cost. of changing the embryological design to jump that nerve over the artery, was too great. Or rather, was each step of the way. It was a very small cost, but the marginal, but the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large. As the neck lengthened, it was a negligible change to just increase the length of the detail, or tiny bit of tiny bit of tiny bit, each millimeter to tiny, and making a difference. But finally, when you get to a giraffe, It's a huge detail, and no doubt is very inefficient. Now, that's bad design. Any engineer would reject that piece of did design is ridiculous. And there are quite a number of examples, as you would expect, it's not surprising that we find examples of that sort. In a way what's surprising is there aren't more of them, and a way what's surprising is that the design of living things is so good. So, natural selection manages to achieve excellent results. Partly by tinkering, partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes. And as it were, making the best of a bad job.

That's the inefficiency of it. Yes, that's the horrible wastefulness of it.

Yes, I think that if super human intelligence is to be found, it will be artificial. I don't have any hope that we ourselves, our brains will go on go on getting larger in ordinary biological evolution. I think that's probably come to an end. It is the dominant trend, or one of the dominant trends in our fossil history for the last two or three million years. So it's been spilling rather dramatically over the last two or three million years. That is unlikely to continue there. The only way that happens is because natural selection favors. those individuals with the biggest brains. And that's not happening anymore.

In order for them to be active, it would be necessary that the most intelligent intelligence, not that intelligence is simply coronation, is brain size, but let's talk about intelligence. In order for that to evolve, it's necessary that the most intelligent beings have the most individuals have the most children. So intelligence may buy you money, it may buy you worldly success, it may buy you a nice house and a nice car and things like that if you successful career. It may buy you the admiration of your fellow people, but it doesn't increase the number of offspring that you have. It doesn't increase your genetic legacy to the next generation. On the other hand, artificial intelligence, I mean, computers and technology generally is evolving by a non-genetic means, by leaps and bounds, of course.

Well of course it's interesting whether it's promising, I'm really not qualified to say what I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small as it is compared to a computer and the individual components being as slow as they are compared to our electronic components. It is astonishing what it can do. Imagine building a computer that fits into the size of a human skull. And with the equivalent of transistors or integrated circuits which work as slowly as neurons do, it's just something mysterious about that. Something must be going on that we don't understand.

I agree with Roger Penrose that there's a mystery there. I mean, he's one of the world's greatest physicists. I can't possibly argue with his.

I think that it's just an act of cowardice to lead to religious explanations, and what it doesn't do that, of course. But I accept that there may be something that we don't understand about it.

It would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene, cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the transmission of culture and the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense. And it's only a useful word if there's something Darwinian going on. Obviously culture is transmitted, but is there anything Darwinian going on? And if there is, that means there has to be something like a gene. which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population. So it can replicate. It can replicate. Well, they clearly does replicate. There's no question about that. The question is, does it replicate in a sort of differential way in a Darwinian fashion? Could you say that certain ideas propagate because they're successful in the mean pool? In a sort of trivial sense, you can. Would you wish to say though that in the same way as a animal body is modified adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes? Is it also a machine for propagating themes? Could you actually say that something about the way a human is? is modified, adapted for the function of beam propagation.

April, in terms of these mechanisms. Even morphology, even anatomy. It does evolve by mimetic means of things like hair styles, styles of makeup, circumcision. These things are actual changes in the body form, which are non-genetic, and which get passed on from generation to generation, or sideways, like a virus, in a quasi-genetic way.

Well, I think they're a bit more than a metaphor. And I think that, And I mentioned that physical bodily characteristics, which are trivial in a way, but when things like the propagation of religious ideas, both longitudinal down generations and transversely as in a sort of epidemiology of ideas when a charismatic preacher converts people. That resembles viral transmission, whereas the longitudinal transmission from grandparents to childhood, et cetera, is more like conventional genetic transmission.

Well, the internet, of course, provides extremely rapid method of crowd ambition and before when when I first coined the word the internet didn't exist and so I was thinking then in terms of books newspapers, broader radio television and that kind of thing. Now an idea can just leap around the world in all directions instantly and so The internet provides a step change in the facility of propagation of means.

Well, I do think it would probably be a good idea to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing. We can mention you think of the transmission of ideas from an evolution context as being limited to in our ancestors, people living in villages living in small bands where everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village and they might hop to a neighbouring village. occasionally and maybe even to a neighboring continent eventually. And that was a slow process. Nowadays villages are international. I mean, you have people, it's been called echo chambers where people are in a sort of internet village. where the other members of the village may be geographically distributed all over the world, but they just happen to be interested in the same things. Use the same terminology, the same jargon, have the same enthusiasm. So people like the Flat Earth Society. They don't live in one place, they find each other, and they talk the same language to each other, they talk the same nonsense to each other. But so this is a kind of distributed version of the primitive idea of people living in villages and propagating their ideas in a local way.

I wouldn't use a word like he looked me purpose in that case, but villages or villages would be something that just emerged. That's the way people happen to live.

Yes, yes.

Well, Darwinian selection idea would involve investigating which ideas spread and which don't. So, in some ideas, don't have the ability to spread. Flatter, earth is there a few people believe in it, but it's not going to spread because it's obviously nonsense. But other ideas, even if they are wrong, can spread because they are attractive in some sense.

Yes, it's all matters. It's needed as it is spread. And it doesn't have to be true to spread. Intruth is one criterion which might help an idea to spread. But there are other criteria which might help a spread. As you say, attraction in animals is not necessarily valuable for survival. It doesn't help the peacock to survive. It helps it to pass on its genes. Similarly, an idea which is actually rubbish, but which people don't know is rubbish and think is very attractive will spread. in the same way as a peacock's gene spread.

Is it sound ridiculous? He's rather distorted bell Darwin when he coined the phrase sexual selection. Yes. Didn't feel the need to suggest that what was attractive to females usually is male attractive females. The what females found attractive had to be useful. He said it didn't have to be useful. It was enough that females found attractive. And so it could be completely useless. Probably was completely useless in the conventional sense. but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on, you want out and didn't call them genes, but instead of reproducing. Others starting with Wallace, the code discoverer of that cross selection, didn't like that idea and they wanted sexually selected characteristics like peacock tales to be in some sense useful. It's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock tale as being useful but in the in the sense of survival but others have run with that idea and have brought it up to date and so there's a kind of there are two schools of thought on sexual selection which are still active and about equally supported now. Those who follow Darwin in thinking that it's just enough to say it's attractive and those who follow Wallace and say that it has to be in some sense useful.

I think they both could be correct in different cases. I mean, they both been made sophisticated in a mathematical sense, more and more so than when Darwin and Wallace first started talking about it.

Yes, I do. I think it may happen all for a long time. I think it may take a long time for that to happen.

Yes. I mean, following truth.

Yes, yes. I mean truth about the real world, which is ascertainable by not just by the more rigorous methods of science, but by just ordinary sensory observation.

Well, clearly, all individuals are not hopelessly tied to it, because many individuals don't believe. You could mean something like society needs religion in order to function properly, something like that. And some people have suggested that.

Well, I read books on it and they're persuasive. I don't think they're that persuasive, though. I mean, some people suggested that society needs a sort of figurehead which can be a non-existent figurehead in order to function properly. I think there's something rather patronizing about the idea that, well, you and I are intelligent enough not to believe in God, but the pleb's needed sort of thing. And I think that's patronizing and I'd like to think that that was not the right way to proceed.

I think it's right to be humble. I think it's right to admit that there's a lot we don't know a lot that we don't understand a lot that we still need to work on. We are working on it. What I don't think is that it helps to invoke supernatural explanations. What we if aren't if are current scientific explanations aren't adequate to do the job, then we need better ones. We need to work more. And of course, the history of science shows just that, that as science goes on, problems get solved one after another, and the science advances as science gets better. But to invoke an non-scientific non-physical explanation isn't clear to lie down in a cowardly way and say we can't solve it so again to invoke magic. Don't let's do that. Let's say we need better science. We need more science. It may be that the science will never do it. It may be that we will never actually understand everything. And that's okay. But let's keep working on it.

I think that's right. arrogant people in any walk of life and a scientist and no exception to that. And so there are arrogant scientists who think we've sold everything and course we haven't. So humility is a proper stance for a scientist. I mean, it's a proper working stance because it encourages further work. But in a way to resort to a supernatural explanation is a kind of arrogance because it's saying, well, we don't understand it scientifically. Therefore, the non-scientific religious supernatural explanation must be the right one. That's arrogant. What is humble is to say, we don't know. And we need to work further on it.

No, I mean, how do you think of certainly not not dishonest? And I mean, obviously, many of them are perfectly nice people, so I don't, I don't sort of despise them in that sense. I think it's often a misunderstanding that people will jump from the admission that we don't understand something. They will jump straight to what they think of as an alternative explanation, which is the supernatural one, which is not an alternative. It's a non-explanation. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that science needs more work that we need to actually get to do some better science. I mean, personal and typical words such people, I just think they're misguided.

I mean, I think it's probably too easy to say that by labeling something conspiracy, you therefore dismiss it. I mean, occasionally conspiracy is a right. And so we shouldn't dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand. We should examine them on their own merits. Flat earth is a misobvious nonsense. We don't have to examine that much further. But there may be other conspiracy theories which are actually right.

Yes, which is improbable. The sheer number would have to be in on the conspiracy and the sheer detail, the attention, the detail they'd have had to have had and so on. I'd also can worry about the motive. And why would anyone want to suggest that it didn't happen? What's the... Why is it so hard to believe? I mean, the physics of it, the mathematics of it, the idea of computing orbits and trajectories and things, it all works mathematically. Why wouldn't you believe it?

That's a whole... No, that's right. And of course, historically. Learn geniuses have come out right sometimes, yes, but often people with the thing that they're a learning genius whom much more often turn out not to. So you have to judge each case on its merits. The mere fact that you're a maverick, the mere fact that you're going against the current tide doesn't make you right. You've got to show your right by looking at the evidence.

It's an obvious difficult thing. I don't understand why people believe things that are clearly nonsense like Well, flat earth, and also the conspiracy about not landing on the moon, or that the United States engineered 9-11, that kind of thing.

It's extremely unlikely. The religion is a bit different because it's passed down from generation to generation. So many of the people are religious. got it from their parents, you got it from their parents, you got it from their parents and childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force. But these things like the 9 or 11 conspiracy theory, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, the man on the moon conspiracy theory, these are not childhood indoctrination. These are presumably dreamed up by somebody who then tells somebody else, who then wants to believe it. And I don't know why people are so eager to fall in line with some just some person that they happen to read or meet, who's been some yarn. I can kind of understand why they believe what their parents and teachers told them when they were very tiny and not capable of critical thinking for themselves. So I sort of get why the great religions of the world like Catholicism and Islam go on for his persistence because of childhood indoctrination. But that's not true of flatterism. And sure enough, flatterism is a very minority cult.

Very complicated and interesting question. It's clear to me that the moral standards, the moral values of our civilization changes as the decades go by, certainly as the centuries go by, even as the decades go by. And we in the 21st century are quite clearly labeled 21st century people in terms of our moral values. There's a spread. Some of us are a little bit more ruthless, some were more conservative, some were more liberal and so on. But we all subscribed to pretty much the same views when you compare us with, say, 18th century, 17th century people, even 19th century, 20th century people. We are much less racist, we're much less sexist and so on. Then we used to be some people are still racist and some are still sexist, but the spread has shifted that the Gaussian distribution has moved and moves steadily as the centuries go by. And that is the most powerful influence I can see on our moral values. And that doesn't have anything to do with religion. I mean the religion of the it's the morals of the Old Testament are Bronze Age models models that deplorable. And they are to be understood in terms of the people in the desert who made them up at the time. And so humans sacrifice. And I for nine or two for a tooth petty revenge killing people for breaking the Sabbath all that kind of thing inconceivable.

I'm sure they always reflect that.

Yeah. So basically your moral is on religious texts, which isn't millennia ago. Yeah. It is not a great way to proceed. I think that's pretty clear. So not only should we not get our morals from such texts, but we don't. We quite clearly don't. If we did, then we'd be discriminating against women and we'd be racist, we'd be killing homosexuals and so on. So we don't, and we shouldn't. Now of course it's possible to By the to use your 21st century standards of morality and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry pick a particular verse is which conform to our modern morality and you'll find that Jesus says a pretty nice things which is great but You're using your 21st century morality to decide which verses to pick which verses to reject and so why not cut out the middleman of the Bible and go straight to the 21st century morality which is Where that comes from is a much more complicated question. Why is it that morality, moral values change as the centuries go by they undoubtedly do? And it's a very interesting question to ask why it's another example of cultural evolution, just as technology progresses. So moral values progress for probably very different reasons.

I'm not sure it's any direction and I'm not sure it's evolution really valuable. What it is is Progressive in the sense that each step is it's step in the same direction as the previous step. So it becomes more gentle, more decent, as my modern standard is more liberal. Less violent.

They were not part of it. I was careful to say by the stands of the 21st century. By our standards, if we with hindsight look back at history, what we see is a trend in the direction towards us, towards our present. Right.

If you look at the history of moral values over the centuries, it is in a progressive, I use the word progressive, not in a valued judgment sense, in the sense of a transitive sense. Each step is the same direction of the previous step. So things like, we don't derive entertainment from torturing cats. We don't derive entertainment from like the Romans did in the Coliseum from

They do, they have been, they have been steps back was admittedly and the Holocaust is always one. But if you take a broad view of history, it's the same direction.

I suppose there's a link between an ancient desatta. explain a way mystery and science, but well intelligence, artificial intelligence, creating God's creating new gods. And I forget why I read some of our somewhat facetious paper which said that we have a new god is called Google and and we we we pray to it and we worship it and we and we ask its advice like an oracle and so on.

It has a kind of poetic resonance to it, which I get. But I wouldn't have bothered to make the point myself for that way.

Well, yes. I mean, I can see that the future of intelligent machines or indeed intelligent aliens from outer space might yield beings that we would regard as gods in the sense that they are so superior to us that we might as well worship them. That's highly plausible, I think. But I see a very fundamental distinction between a god who is simply defined as something very, very powerful and intelligent on the one hand, and a god who doesn't need explaining by a progressive step-by-step process, like evolution, or like engineering design. So the difference, suppose we did meet an alien from outer space, who was marvelously magnificently more intelligent than us, and we would sort of worship it for that reason. Nevertheless, it would not be a God in the very important sense that it did not just happen by to be there like God is supposed to. It must have come about by a gradual step-by-step incremental progressive process, presumably like Darwinian evolution, that's all the difference in the world between those two intelligence Design comes into the universe late as a product of a progressive evolutionary process or a progressive engineering design process.

Well, let's pursue the idea that we're living in a simulation, which is not totally ridiculous, by the way. There we go. Then you still need to explain the programmer. The programmer had to come into existence by some, even if we're in a simulation, the programmer must have evolved. Or if he's in a sort of, or she, if she's in a metacimulation, then the meta-mesor program must have evolved by a gradual process. You can't escape that. Fundamentally, you've got to come back to a gradual incremental process of explanation to start with.

It's certainly an interesting thought experiment. I first met it in a science fiction novel by Daniel Galloy called Counterfeit World, in which it's all about, I mean, our heroes are running a gigantic computer, which simulates the world. And something goes wrong. And so one of them has to go down into the simulated world in order to fix it. And then the day no more of the thing the climax to the novel is that they discover that they themselves are in another simulation at a higher level. So I was intrigued by this and I love others of Daniel Gallois' science fiction novels. Then it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrum.

And he goes further, not just treated as a science fiction speculation. He actually thinks it's positively likely. I mean, they think it's very likely, actually.

I mean, he thinks that we're in a simulation done by such a big kind of sentence of the future, the products, but it's still a product of evolution. It's still ultimately going to be a product of evolution, even though the super intelligent people of the future have created our world and you and I are just a simulation and this table is a simulation and so on. I don't actually, in my heart of hearts, believe it, but I like his argument.

Well, no, I mean, the program, the higher up the upper ones have to have involved gradually. However, the simulation they create could be instantaneous. I mean, it could be switched on and we come into the world with fabricated memories.

Okay, well, that's a good point. By the way, I have thought about using the Nick Bostrum idea to solve the riddle of how we were talking, we were talking earlier about why the human brain can achieve so much. I thought of this when my then hundred-year-old mother was marveling at what I could do with it with a smartphone. And I could, you know, call it, look up anything on the inside to pee there. I could play her music that she liked and so on. She said, all in that in that tiny little film, no, it's out there. It's in the cloud. And maybe what most of what we do is in a cloud. So maybe if we are a simulation, then all the power that we think is in our skull, it actually may be like the power that we think is in the iPhone. Um, but was that actually out there in an interface to something else?

But Roger thinks it does reside in in the skull, whereas I'm suggesting that if it doesn't, that it doesn't, that it doesn't, that

Well, I do think that although it reflects the fundamental reality, I do believe there is a fundamental reality. I do think that what our perception is constructive in the sense that we construct in our minds a model of what we're seeing. And so this is really the view of people who work on visual illusions like Richard Gregory, who point out the things like a necker cube. which flip from a two-dimensional picture of a cube on sheet of paper. We see it as a three-dimensional cube and it flips from one orientation to another at regular intervals. What's going on is that the brain is constructing a cube. But the sense data are compatible with two alternative cubes. And so rather than stick with one of them, it alternates between them. I think that's just a model for what we do all the time when we see a table, when we see a person, when we see anything. We're using the sense data to construct or make use of a perhaps previously constructed model. I noticed this when I meet somebody who actually is a friend of mine, but until I kind of realized that it is him, he looks different and then I finally clocked that it's him. his features switch like a neck and cube into the familiar form. As it were, I've taken his face out of the filing cabinet inside and grafted it onto or used the sense data to do to invoke it.

He's a universally prescient, because considering he was writing the middle of the 19th century, Michael Giesel and said he's working 100 years ahead of his time, everything except genetics is amazingly right and amazingly far ahead of his time. And of course, you need to read the updatings that have happened since his time as well and he would be astonished by Well, let alone what's in a creek, of course. But he was astonished by Mendelian genetics as well.

He would think about a deer. I mean, yes, it would. Because in many ways, it clears up what appeared in his time to be a riddle. The digital nature of genetics clears up what was a problem, what was a big problem. Gosh, there's so much that I could think of. I can't really find it.

Well, actually, I have, I suppose I could say that I've learned some, some science from science fiction. I mean, I mentioned Daniel Galloy, and that's one example, but another of his novels called Dark Universe, which is not terribly well known, but it's a very very nice science fiction story. It's about a world of perpetual darkness. And we're not told at the beginning of the book, why these people are in darkness. They stumble around in some kind of underground world of caverns and passages using echolocation like bats and whales to get around. And they were adapted presumably by Darwinian means to survive in perpetual total darkness. But what's interesting is that their mythology, their religion, has echoes of Christianity, but it's based on light. And so there's been a fall from a paradise world that once existed, where light reigns supreme. And because of the sin of mankind, light banished them. So they no longer are in light's presence, but light survives in the form of mythology and in the form of saying like they're great, light or mighty, or if a light's sake don't do that. And I hear what you mean, rather than I see what you mean.

Yes. And so it's a wonderful, I wouldn't call it set up because it's too good nature for that. Wonderful, parable about Christianity and the theological doctrine of the fall. So I find that kind of science fiction immensely stimulating. Fred Hoyles, the Black Cloud, oh, by the way, anything by Arthur C. Clarke, I find very, very wonderful too. Fred Hoyles, the Black Cloud, his first science fiction novel, where he, well, I learned a lot of science from that. It has itself a from an obnoxious hero, unfortunately, but apart from that. You learn a lot of science from it. Another of his novels, A for Andromeda, which by the way, the theme of that is taken up by Carl Sagan's science fiction novel, another wonderful writer, Carl Sagan, content where the idea is, again, we will not be visited from outer space by physical bodies. We will be visited possibly. We might be visited by radio. But the radio signals could manipulate us. and actually have concrete influence on the world. If they make us persuade us to build a computer, which runs their software. So they can then transmit their software by radio. And then the computer takes over the world. And this is the same theme in both Hoylesburg and Sagan's book. I presume I don't want to say a new but Hoylesburg probably did. And it's a clever idea that we will never be invaded. by physical bodies, the war of the worlds of HG worlds will never happen. But we could be invaded by radio signals, it code, code it information, which is sort of like DNA. And we are, we are, I call them, we are survival machines of our DNA. So it has great resonance for me because I think of us, I think of bodies, physical bodies, biological bodies. as being manipulated by coded information DNA, which has come down through generations.

Okay, what happens to me? From a scientific point of view, the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA, but that's not what I feel. That's not the meaning of my life. So the meaning of my life is something which is probably different from yours and different of other peoples, but we each make our own meaning. So we set up goals, we want to achieve, we want to write a book, we want to do whatever it is we do right up. quartet, we want to win a football match. And these are short-term goals. Well, maybe even quite long-term goals, which are set up by our brains, which have goal-seeking machinery built into them. But what we feel, we don't feel motivated by the desire to pass on our DNA mostly. We have other goals, which can be very moving, very important. They could even be called spiritual, in some cases. We want to understand the riddle of the universe. We want to understand consciousness. We want to understand how the brain works. These are all noble goals. some of them can be noble goals anyway and they are a far cry from the fundamental biological goal which is the propagation of DNA but the machinery that enables us to set up these high-level goals is originally programmed into us by that cross-election of DNA.

It makes me sad that I shall have to leave and not see what's going to happen next. If there's something frightening about mortality apart from sort of missing, as I've said, something more deeply, darkly frightening. It's the idea of eternity. But eternity is only frightening, he feels there. Eternity before we were born, billions of years before we were born. And we would effectively dead before we were born. As I think it was Mark Twain said, I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience. That's how it's going to be after we leave. So I think of it as really, eternity is a frightening prospect. And so the best way to spend it is under a general anesthetic, which is what it will be.