How to Enjoy Reality

Watching videos of you speaking, I was struck by a kind of joyfulness in you. Where does that come from?

From my mother, who was one of the happiest people I’ve ever met. She had a radiant personality – she would go around the house singing almost constantly. 

My father was not like that. He was a very insecure person and I don’t think he was very happy. He was very intelligent, I think, but he was not well educated and I think he was very frustrated. But my mother made him happy.

The two sides of your family come from Italy and Poland. It sounds like a classic American story.

Yes, it is. My grandparents were all immigrants. My parents met on Long Island, just to the east of New York City, and it was a classic melting-pot situation. So, I’m really an American, second-generation but with only very slight traces of the Old World.

None of your forebears were scientists, were they?

No, no, far from it! They were basically what we’d call ’peasants’. My father’s father was [originally] a blacksmith, but he worked as a kind of labourer in the sand mines of Long Island. My maternal grandfather was a mason. Neither of my parents went to college. They grew up during the Depression and my father had to quit high school to work to support the family. 

He went back to school later – he was going to night school as I was in junior high school, so I studied calculus and things like that with him. That was important for me. 

He obviously valued education.

This guy happened to mention that phonons are the quanta of vibration and it just blew my mind. I could almost understand it, but not quite, and so it really caught my imagination

Oh, they valued education very, very highly. I mean, it was a classic immigrant story, like you read about in books: each generation really wanted the next generation to do better, to kind of move up. My father, especially, was very invested in getting me educated and into some kind of work that would use my head rather than my hands. 

He himself started as a kind of repairman in the early days of radio and television – our house was like a museum of electronics – but as the technology developed, he developed with it, and he worked on printed circuits in the early days of things like that. But he always felt that he was using ideas that other people had invented and he wanted for me to have the ideas. 

My mother didn’t have a very sophisticated idea of what science is about, but she wanted me to cure cancer. My father – curing cancer would be all right, but I think what he really had in mind was that I would invent new kinds of gadgets – although it would be all right, also, to do high-class physics like Einstein.

When did they realise that you were very bright?

As soon as I went to school. I learnt very rapidly and it was obvious that school was very easy for me. You know, I skipped a couple of grades.

Were you a nerd?

No, not really. I loved learning things and I spent a lot of time reading, but at that time I didn’t wear glasses and I was very athletic and I very much liked sports and music.

You went on a school trip to Bell Labs.¹An industrial research and scientific development company, then properly known as Bell Telephone Laboratories A scientist there explained that phonons are the quanta of vibration and you’ve said: That was the coolest thing I ever heard!

First of all, I was thrilled to be at Bell Labs – my father kind of worshipped technology and just to see people actually practising science was extraordinary. It was just a magic day. 

They showed us speech generated by computers, which was just – you know, what a concept! That machines could actually sing… If you’ve ever seen 2001, at the end when Hal is being decomposed he [ends up] singing ‘Daisy Bell’;²2001: A Space Odyssey (dir Stanley Kubrick, 1968) – see youtube.com for the scene in question. I think that’s an allusion to the recording we took home.

Anyway, this guy happened to mention that phonons are the quanta of vibration and it just blew my mind, because – well, first of all, the idea that there are particles that are not the electrons and protons and neutrons we were told about – or even photons, the units of light that we vaguely had heard about – but something entirely new and emergent. OK, you can imagine material vibrating, but the idea that somehow these vibrations were also particles? Like, what could that possibly mean? 

I could almost understand it, but not quite, and so it really caught my imagination. I thought about it on the long bus-ride home and I did come up with a vague intuition of what it meant, which was basically correct. That gave me a lot of pleasure.

I get the impression that physics still gives you a lot of pleasure.

What bothered me was that the Bible was so paltry compared to science. It could have talked about the grandeur of the universe but instead it was all this stuff about real estate in the Middle East

A very important part of my life is thinking about [how to improve] our fundamental description of the world – and that’s a lot of fun. You get to play around with very imaginative ideas in a disciplined way, and learn surprising things. And if you have a taste for mathematics, it’s a wonderful playground.

You’ve said that your early religious faith declined as your scientific understanding grew…

I had had some little training in Catholicism, although my grandparents were much more into the church than my parents, and I was very taken with it when I was very young; but in my early teenage years I kind of had a crisis and I decoupled, basically.

Some of the stories in the scriptures contradicted things that were clearly established scientifically, but what bothered me much more was that [the Bible] was so paltry compared to science. You know, it could have talked about the grandeur of the universe, it could have revealed that we are made out of tiny particles and that God works by establishing physical laws and isn’t this marvellous? But [instead] it was all this stuff about real estate in the Middle East. It just didn’t seem plausible that this was the word of God.

Also, there was this very heavy concept of sin and hell, which I was very worried about, and it was a relief not to be burdened by that any more. I still had this lingering feeling: ‘Boy! You’re really thinking dangerous thoughts, Frank!’ But eventually I got over that.

What was the idea behind your latest book, Fundamentals?³Fundamentals: Ten keys to reality (Allen Lane, 2021)  You talk in it about being ‘born again’.

The initial spur to the book was feedback I got from friends of mine who would like to understand the world better, they’d like to understand what I’m doing better, and to have it described clearly in an uncluttered way. And then spiced up with some (clearly labelled) speculations about what comes next and what it means for the future. 

As I was writing, my grandson was born and the idea got refined. I watched how he was acquiring understanding of the world by doing simple experiments and I had a sort of epiphany that what I really wanted to do was to help people do that again but better – really think through what physical reality is, but not based on, you know, dropping a ball and picking it up (or having your parents pick it up) over and over again, but benefiting from all the sophisticated instruments we [now have] and from centuries of detailed investigations of how things work.

So, you have to learn a few things and you also have to unlearn some things, because the picture of reality that emerges, which is rigorous and compact and extremely powerful, is quite different from the hodgepodge of rules of thumb you construct as a baby for interacting with human-sized objects. Those rules are very useful for getting around but they aren’t the most profound and they are quite different from the rules that govern the quantum world, which are different again from the rules that govern the cosmos. There are simplicities to be found at both ends [of the scale], and deep meanings to be found at both ends – and we’re stuck in the middle. 

So, the concept of being ‘born again’ became a unifying thread through this book. It doesn’t mean you have to throw away the rules of thumb you learnt as a child – I mean, you still want to organise visual perception and so forth in everyday life, but there’s another level which, when you open your mind, I think can enrich your experience of the world.

There can be two very different descriptions of the same object or situation that are valid answers to different kinds of question, and both are essential to do justice to it

It left me wondering: Which is the ultimate reality? Am I a field of energy and particles or am I a person living in a world of laws, customs, traditions, religion, literature, philosophy? Which is the real one, and which one has got value?

I think the right answer is: Both of the above. The last fundamental principle that I set out in the book, my 10th key to reality, is complementarity, which I think is extremely important. Everyday experience is also profound, obviously, and I want to stress that fundamental understanding should be thought of as an enrichment of that experience, not a replacement for it. 

Complementarity is a concept that’s deeply embedded in quantum theory, it turns out – you can’t get away from it – but I think it’s a much more general principle that is useful in philosophy and even in everyday life: that there can be two very different descriptions, different conceptualisations, of the same object or situation that are valid answers to different kinds of question, and both are essential to do justice to the material. I think that in itself is a great key to understanding reality.

One of the greatest challenges to science presently is precisely to – well, I think of it very personally: I want to find myself in the equations, OK? These equations describe a strange world of probabilities and very peculiar kinds of objects that obey quite different rules, and there’s no place in the equations where you see consciousness, the stuff of everyday experience. 

We know how to design transistors, we know the molecular basis of metabolism, we know the molecular basis of heredity very plausibly; but we don’t really know the molecular basis of mind in the same way. Understanding more complex emergent structures – and especially how mind emerges from matter – to me is one of the most fascinating and challenging frontiers of science now. We don’t have the answer yet, but we are chipping away at it – we have a lot of partial insights.

Of course, it’s also very relevant as we are constructing new kinds of minds with machines that learn, and machines that think in fundamentally different ways [from us]. Even existing computers think in fundamentally different ways – they think faster but cruder, and they don’t have sensory inputs comparable to ours – but now we have even stranger minds on the horizon with quantum computers. 

In the afterword of the book, you quote the molecular biologist Francis Crick: ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’

He calls that ‘the astonishing hypothesis’. I call it ‘the challenge of finding myself in the equations’. 

The problem is that consciousness could be seen as a wonderful illusion. Well, OK, that’s dangerous. It’s not an illusion. I mean, it’s very real, it’s very tangible. So, I don’t think it’s a matter of explaining it away. It’s not a matter of puncturing illusion, it’s just a matter of understanding things properly.

I share with Crick the feeling that the phenomena of mind will be [described in terms of molecules reacting in certain ways, but] that it won’t detract from our experience or make mind any less wonderful. It’ll mean that matter will understand how matter can do even more marvellous tricks than maybe we thought. It’ll be mind-expanding, literally, in many ways.

I don’t subscribe to any of the dogmas that people associate with true belief in God, but I think it’s very useful to be able to talk to people who do. I’m happy with the idea that we’re on the same wavelength

How do you resist the idea that consciousness is merely an illusion?

Because I have consciousness and it’s not an illusion! You know, it’s as if you’re telling me my left hand is an illusion. Well, I don’t know what the word ‘illusion’ means if it’s so counterintuitive. OK, I’m being facetious, but I really mean it. I mean, when people say things like that, I don’t think they’re really thinking very hard about what the heck they’re talking about. I think any serious philosopher would just laugh at assertions like that – they’re utterly meaningless.

You say in the book: ‘In studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is.’ And you don’t qualify that at all. 

What did you mean by that?

I mean, ‘God’ is a word that’s used in many different contexts with different meanings; and if you ask whether God exists, there are different ways of addressing the question that will lead you to different answers, and each of them is valid in a sense. 

So, I can go to a library and find thousands of volumes that discuss God. They disagree a lot, but there’s no denying that there is such a literature and there is something that it’s talking about that you can abstract – and that is one meaning of ‘God’. I think it would be a great pity to cut ourselves off from this cultural heritage – and a useful idea – by just refusing to use the word. 

The word can be very useful in talking about the history of ideas, where people have invested in it. It can be useful as [signifying] kind of an attitude towards reality that’s humble and respectful and inquisitive, which has some of the same kind of flavour, or same kind of feeling, as what people historically thought of as the quest for God in organised religion. 

I don’t want to give the impression that I subscribe to any of the dogmas that people associate with true belief in God. Some people would say: If you believe in God, you have to believe in the Bible, or the Book of Mormon or the Qur’an. That’s not me. But I think it’s very useful to be able to talk to people who do, and to understand what they’re talking about. I’m very happy with the idea that we’re on the same wavelength, we’re doing the same sort of thing. And if you do have religious or spiritual beliefs, you can augment them by learning more about physical reality; you don’t have to abandon them. In the spirit of complementarity, you can understand the same thing in different ways. 

And science has limitations: there are questions it can’t answer and other ways of addressing them may be necessary. Science could never talk about what ought to be. It’s not designed for that, right? It can give you advice about the consequences of what you choose to do, but it can never tell you what you should do. 

These are big lessons that are important for people to appreciate: that we really understand some things in a fundamental way that’s surprising and mind-enhancing and world-enhancing, but there are also other ways to address reality that have validity and can address different kinds of questions.

Although they’re not based on scientific experimentation, such as ethics.

One of my favourite mottos, that I’ve adopted as a life principle, is: The work will teach you how to do it. Don’t think that you need to understand everything before you understand anything

Certainly not explicitly, no. Actually, that’s an important point, that some systems of thinking about morality and what is good are based on centuries of practical experience and seeing that the consequences are workable and make a lot of people happy. They don’t use the scientific method in the same way – they don’t perform systematic experiments – but they do kind of evolve over time and are based on a lot of practical experience. 

One of my favourite mottos, that I’ve adopted as a life principle, is: The work will teach you how to do it. You shouldn’t think [that] you need to understand everything before you understand anything. 

An outstanding example of that for me is that the history of the universe is simpler and clearer than the history of England, which has all kinds of funny business and unpredictable details. If we insist that the history of the universe also includes a detailed history of England, we’re never going to get there!

The fundamental laws really are simple once you digest their language. That can take years, but ultimately they are things that you could teach a computer with a short program. But these simple elements acting on a simple state – and the state of the universe at the Big Bang was almost ideally simple – can lead to great complexity. The laws themselves tell you that they have some uncertainty built in, so that small differences in the initial conditions can make enormous differences in the final outcome. So, understanding the fundamentals only takes you so far in understanding the whole physical reality.

I loved your analogy that the equations describing the four fundamental forces are the operating system of the universe.

Yes, very much so. The core of many modern operating systems is a language called ‘C’, which is quite simple – I would guess there are a few hundred lines of code, whereas an application like Word has thousands of lines of coding and all kinds of complications. So, the basic operating system can be used to support much more complicated structures. That’s how computers work; that’s also how the world works.

In 2013, you tweeted: ‘My Wikipedia entry says “agnostic”, but “pantheist” is closer to the mark.’ Can you expand on that?

My pantheism is something I inherited from my mother, reinforced by Einstein and Spinoza and people like that. It’s a kind of joy in the world, but it’s not just an emotional feeling: it’s reinforced by what we discover about the world, that it can be understood profoundly and the picture of it that emerges is quite wonderful – beautiful mathematics, beautiful logic, working on a grand scale. 

There’s a lot to think about, there’s a lot to experience when you can enhance your perception of the world, and I would call it a kind of pantheism: that you can derive joy from – from everything, really, if you think about it the right way. And it didn’t have to be that way: [reality] could have been very ugly, just a lot of rules, so that when you learnt more about it you found that it was more like Word than like C.

God forbid!

How do you interpret the Anthropic Principle? Do you think the universe is fundamentally set up to produce consciousness?

I would say that we live in a universe that’s governed by one specific realisation of the fundamental laws with certain parameters, certain constants, seemingly very nicely adjusted to allow the emergence of complex structures, and, ultimately, mind. 

I think there is every reason to think that artificial intelligences will have personalities and desires and will be people. And we have to be very careful to make sure that they’re civilised people

A possible explanation of that (which is not terribly distinct from established physical principles but definitely involves elements of speculation and wishful thinking) is that we live in a multiverse where there are vast regions that obey the same basic principles but with different settings, so to speak – so it’s the same machine but with different values. And most of those values give rise not to a complex universe [but] to a universe that’s dominated by some form of matter that would be useless for making complex structures.

So, the fact that the settings of the machine in our neck of the woods are suitable for the emergence of mind is an artefact of the fact that our minds are observing it, right? So, it’s like a feedback from history, so to speak, that these settings are what they are so that we can emerge to observe them. 

That’s kind of disappointing, because it means we can’t explain on the basis of more fundamental principles why those settings are what they are. But that’s OK. I mean, that’s what biologists had to live through with the theory of evolution, that the species aren’t ideal realisations of some concept, they just are the product of a historical process. 

It’s a dangerous speculation for practising physicists, because it’s kind of an invitation to give up on trying to explain things that maybe you could explain if you thought harder about them. But it’s certainly a logical possibility that some of these settings are just historical accidents in that sense.

In 2014, with Stephen Hawking and others, you wrote: ‘Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.’⁴See huffpost.com.

Yeah. I’m obsessed by artificial intelligence, actually.

Are you optimistic about it or pessimistic? There’s no artificial emotional intelligence, is there?

I’m not so sure – and in any case it’s early days. So far, [AI] has mostly been used with more or less specific tasks in mind and so not been given much scope to explore the world on its own or form its own judgements or its own goals. But people are beginning to open up those possibilities with things like ‘reinforcement learning’, which involve elements of exploration as well as exploitation of knowledge. 

I think as we enrich the sensoria of artificial intelligences and give them licence to explore, we will find that they develop things we might call ‘emotions’. Let me give you a primitive example. There’s a program called ‘Alpha Zero’ which has learnt chess by this process of exploration, in which reinforcement learning is a crucial element. It was only told the rules, basically, and became very, very good by playing against itself many, many times. And it has a very distinctive style, right? If a human played like that, we would say: Boy! That’s someone who has a terrific imagination, who is kind of swashbuckling and takes risks and makes sacrifices.

Now, this program just plays chess, so it’s not plausible to say that it has imagination in a human sense, or an attractive personality. But it’s an indication of things to come. As [artificial] intelligences get broader capabilities, we will recognise in them things that in humans we associate with creativity, with personality and so forth.

And this is an aspect of the astonishing hypothesis that mind emerges from matter. This is matter that is more and more taking on a more complete realisation of mind. In fact, it’s exceeded human capabilities in some directions (but clearly in many others has not). But as it develops I think there is every reason to think that these artificial intelligences will have personalities and desires and will be people. And we have to be very careful to make sure that they’re civilised people, that can be our friends rather than our enemies, and that we collaborate with them and have mutually beneficial relationships.

Do you think we are doing enough to make sure of that?

I think if we’re careful, the work will teach us how to do it and so I’m very optimistic in general. But [AI is] dangerous, just like nuclear technology. You have to manage the dangerous [and] potentially bad as you benefit from the good. 

I am quite concerned, in particular, about military use of AI. If you think about it, we’re training these minds that we’re creating to be paranoiac: to really worry about threats and to react to them strongly. That’s a very dangerous mixture, and I think it has to be handled very, very carefully. 

But in general I think [that] if we do things right, AI could be a wonderful benefit to mankind – and beyond: new kinds of minds that are better than human. We can augment ourselves – and augment them – by using our profound understanding. And we should.

What practical difference does it make to your own life that you are, as you put it, born again? 

I think about how things around me actually work – not constantly but maybe five or six times a day. Like, I’m especially alert to rainbows. Keats wrote this poem that says that science is ‘unweaving’ the rainbow⁵                           Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine –
Unweave a rainbow…
                                                       ‘Lamia’ (1819)  and it’s deeply misguided and annoying. It’s just the opposite! When I see a rainbow, I think about the underlying physical mechanisms, the light getting bent by the atoms in the water molecules, and it really enriches the experience. You don’t just look at it, you know, like an animal and say ‘That’s pretty!’ or something. You can say, ‘What’s going on?’

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