This changed my life – Confessions of Sabine Hossenfelder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRssqttO9Hg&t=4s

“ The trouble with science is that sometimes it tells you things you’d rather not have known. Today I want to tell you about one such thing, which is that’s free will is an illusion. Because that had quite an impact on my life, both bad and good. And I began to think there is a deeper lesson in that, which I hadn’t previously appreciated, that’s becoming more relevant now that artificial intelligence is approaching human level, and might go beyond.

The way we learn physics in school, it’s about things. Electric circuits, atoms, planets. We don’t think of physics as something that’s about us. But if you study physics there’s a point where I think everyone realizes, it’s very much about us. Physics tells us how the universe works, fundamentally. What the laws of nature are that everything obeys. And that includes the stuff that we are made of. So it includes us.

Humans ultimately, are big bags of particles. And we know the equations that those particles obey. Yes there are a lot of these particles in humans and the result is complicated and we don’t use physics to describe it because that’s impractical. But that doesn’t change the fact that, deep down, we’re all particles.

And the laws that dictate the behaviour of those particles art partly deterministic and partly random. This means that to a big extent what those particles do is a direct consequence of what happened earlier, that’s the deterministic part.

And then there are some quantum jumps on top of this, which are unpredictable and uncontrollable.

And that’s it.

That’s me, that’s you, that’s all of us.

Some people think that once you combine all these particles to a brain, there must be something else that happens, something that goes beyond what those particles do. Well first of all, we don’t have evidence of that, it’d actually be in conflict with the laws we have already established.

But second, even if that was the case, if there was some new law coming into play with larger number of particles, there isn’t even a theory for it that isn’t also a combination of determinism and randomness.

Other people think that they can somehow control the quantum randomness, but that’s not how quantum physics works. That it’s fundamentally random means that nothing controls it.

And then there are those who throw around words like „physicalism“ or „scientism“ in the hope to make to make the facts go away.

But the uncomfortable truth that science gives us is that human behaviour is predetermined, except for the occasional random quantum jump that we can’t control.

And this is what humans are, for all we currently know. A lot of particles that obey differential equations. Or, as Roxy Music put it: „More than this, there is nothing.“

This is difficult to make sense of, and I have struggled with this myself. It’s a scientific truth that is hard to accept. A lot of people strongly reject the idea that their behaviour is determined by the law of physics. And the reason this becomes more relevant each day, it that this is the reason why they’re also convinced that a computer system, which they accept is determined by the laws of physics, will never acquire human-like cognitive abilities.

The human brain is a machine

They think there is something special going on in our brains that microchips can’t do. Something more than just particles. But more than this, there is nothing. There is nothing going on in the human brain that a computer can’t simulate. This is why we can, and I am sure we will, build computers that will be as conscious and as intelligent as humans, if not more so. We’re not a long way off. And those who say that this might be the end of humans dominating this planet are right. We are literally in the process of building a new species that will outperform us.

I think it’s about time that we accept that the human brain is a machine. A complicated machine, a machine we don’t fully understand, a machine that’s still very different from the machines we can build. But a machine, nevertheless.

What’s the point of doing anything if my entire life was written?

When I was a student, I struggled with this a lot. Because what’s the point of doing anything if my entire life was written already in the initial conditions of the Big Bang. And to the extent that it wasn’t, I can’t do anything about it. Existential threat brought to you by physics.

It changed my life

So what happened? Ultimately, they way I dealt with it was to ask, well, if am just a machine running some algorithm, then what do I do with this knowledge. I think I should use it wisely. And this shift of thought changed my life.

For one thing, it’s removed the tension between how I think about myself and what and what physics tells me about myself. I’m here to find useful information and do something with it. You could say I’m determined to make sense of it. And what’s the problem with that?

So, my message for today is that, yes sometimes people misunderstand scientific facts.

But sometimes they don’t accept facts because they’re hard to cope with. And maybe the way to deal with it is not by hitting the over the head with more facts but helping them cope. So if you’ve struggled with this too, maybe this helps? A little.“