Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1829 - Bobby Azarian
Uploaded: 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1829 - Bobby Azarian' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-06-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1829 - Bobby Azarian' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-06-09. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1829 - Bobby Azarian

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Uh, first of all, thanks for coming, man.
Thank you for having me.
Well, when I got the request and I read the title and the subject of your book,
I was immediately hooked.
I was like, dude, I gotta get this guy in quickly.
The Romance of Reality, How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life Consciousness
and Cosmic Complexity.
Yep.
Does the, how do we know this?
How do we know how the universe organizes?
Is this, are you guessing?
First of all, tell people what you do.
I mean, I think it was an intuition that I had.
Can you tell people like what you do, like what your field of study is?
But yeah, so, you know, this is all backed by complexity science.
And when I say complexity science, uh, that's really not one field.
It's an integration of all of the sciences.
So physics, biology, cognitive science, uh, computer science.
And, uh, yeah, from those sciences, we're getting a new picture of the universe
and, uh, cosmic evolution and the role that life may play in the process.
So my background, uh, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist.
Uh, I got my PhD from George Mason University.
Uh, I was really interested in the problem of consciousness.
So how does the brain create consciousness?
What is the connection between consciousness and complexity and cosmos?
Um, so yeah, it, it was sort of an intuition that I had when, uh, I guess I was
an undergraduate.
And I started taking like all of the basic science courses, like, uh, physics
course.
And you learn about the second law of thermodynamics and, uh, the kind of
popular interpretation of that law, uh, is that the universe tends towards
disorder.
And that didn't completely match up with, you know, my observations and, you
know, what we understood about how after the big bang, you had the formation of
planets and stars.
And then on this planet, we see organization all around us.
Um, so most of the popular books at that time, like that was like, you know, I
graduated high school in like 1999.
And so popular books were like Stephen Hawking's, A Brief History in Time.
Um, and those books, uh, kind of painted life as this improbable kind of
statistical fluke, not a regularity.
And, um, so, you know, some of those ideas didn't seem quite right to me.
And I was really interested in this increase in complexity.
And so I started like looking up these sorts of topics and I found out about
the, uh, research being done at the Santa Fe Institute, which is kind of like
the, uh, mecca for complexity science.
And then, uh, there was this emerging worldview that the universe is becoming
more and more complex and it doesn't violate the law of second, uh, the second
law of thermodynamics at all.
Can we get you to turn your phone off or just shut the, it dinged?
Just shut the, just put it on, uh, do not disturb or something like that.
Um, so somewhere along the line, the idea was that the universe tends towards
chaos.
Like, why do you think they were thinking that?
Like, what was the philosophy behind that?
So, yeah, it's kind of complicated.
Um, the second law of thermodynamics started off being about, uh, heat flow.
Um, thermodynamics is, uh, the science of energy or energy flow.
And so originally the law said that, um, uh, heat will flow from a hotter to a
colder body.
So there's this just natural tendency for, um, heat to kind of spread out and
for energy to kind of disperse and dissipate.
And, uh, this had to do with, uh, steam engines.
And steam engines basically, uh, convert energy from heat flow to, uh,
mechanical energy that can power locomotives.
So, uh, Sadi Carnot and Rudolf Clausius, two European scientists, um, were
trying to understand this in the 1800s.
Uh, and they found out that this, uh, energy conversion process wasn't always
100% efficient, that, uh, some of the energy, uh, some of the useful energy
would, uh, get dissipated basically, uh, when this physical process creates
heat.
And so what the second law said originally was that, uh, the useful supply of
energy in the universe was always dwindling, uh, because every mechanical
process requires energy to do work.
And it creates some heat and heat is basically like you creating body heat
right now.
You eat food, you metabolize that.
And then that energy is dissipated as heat.
And you can't extract the energy, uh, that was dissipated as heat again.
So it becomes useless.
It's still there.
There's the first law of thermodynamics, which is about conservation of energy.
You can convert, uh, one type of energy into another type.
But, uh, this, uh, useful supply is, uh, getting turned into entropy.
And entropy was, uh, originally, uh, a measure of the quantity of energy no
longer available to do work.
It wasn't until later that there was a statistical interpretation of this law
by a scientist named Ludwig Boltzmann.
And he basically, uh, tried to understand the second law in terms of the, uh,
uh, I guess the evolution of, uh, many particle system.
And what he saw was that if you had an ordered system, there would be this
natural tendency towards disorder.
Simply because there's many more ways for, uh, a system of many components to
be mixed up and spread out compared to ways to be ordered.
So then the law became about this order to disorder transition.
Uh, and we hear about that all the time.
The popular examples are rooms get messier.
They don't organize themselves.
Um, but the paradox that emerged from that was that life seems to, uh, defy
this tendency.
And so the question is, if systems tend towards decay, uh, what's going on with
the biosphere and all this organization we see?
And Erwin Schrodinger, uh, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, actually
wrote a very influential book, uh, on biology called What is Life?
And he explained this paradox.
He explained that, um, basically the second law of thermodynamics applies to
closed systems and open systems have energy coming in.
So, uh, the earth is an open system.
Uh, we have a sun and it's beaming down energy on the planet and that systems
can evade this tendency toward decay.
Uh, if they can extract useful energy from the environment, for plants, it's
sunlight, for us, we need to eat food.
Uh, as long as we can continue to do that, we can sustain order against this
second law tendency towards decay.
So you were, uh, looking at this idea of the universe tending towards chaos and
it didn't sit right with you.
Like, how long did you theorize about this?
Like, what, what, what led you to write a book about this?
So, as I mentioned, I was really interested in this mystery of consciousness
because, uh, it seemed like, you know, kind of the last frontier of science.
Now we know there's, there's lots of mysteries to be solved.
There's like dark matter and dark energy, all, all types of stuff.
But in the nineties, uh, people were thinking that physics had essentially
solved all the major problems.
Um, but really it's because physics, it was reductionist physics.
Uh, and basically that approach doesn't think about life and consciousness and
human civilization.
So it sort of leaves those things out of the picture.
Um, but you know, you can have a physics of those things too.
And that's what complexity science is.
So, um, yeah, I was interested in consciousness, but what happened was I found
out to really understand how consciousness emerges and intelligence.
Um, it really starts with the origin of life.
And I'm not saying the most simple life forms are conscious, but what I
understood was, you know, you can think about a bacterium, uh, performing a
process called chemotaxis.
And that's kind of a scary word, but all it means is that, uh, the bacterium
swims towards chemical food and away from toxins.
So it has this, uh, uh, very rudimentary, uh, intelligence.
And, um, if you're trying to understand the brain and consciousness and
intelligence, it seemed to me that you have to understand, uh, life as well.
And so at George Mason, uh, there was a professor named Harold Morwitz and he
came from the Santa Fe Institute.
So he's a big complexity guy and one of the premier origin of life researchers.
And he was doing this work that, you know, got into the stuff I was just
talking about thermodynamics.
Cause to understand life, you have to understand it as a phenomenon that does
evade this tendency towards decay.
And to do that, it has to extract energy from the environment.
And so he had a book called The Emergence of Everything, which was like looking
at the big picture, uh, because life is one emergence, consciousness is another
emergence.
As the universe gets increasingly complex, new phenomena emerge with surprising
properties.
And this is a lot different than the other approach that I mentioned, reductionism,
which is focused on how nature's simplest components like particles, uh, act in
isolation.
So complexity science cares about how, uh, more, uh, more complex systems, uh,
how, you know, their dynamics, their evolution.
And, um, you see that systems, uh, experience, uh, are, are display properties
like consciousness that aren't, um, there when the components exist in
isolation.
So meaning like the amino acids, what do you, what do you mean?
Yeah, they're not conscious.
So, yeah.
So what do we know that though?
Uh, no, I know you had on a guest, Philip Goff, who is a panpsychist.
Yeah.
And those people believe that there's a little bit of consciousness in
everything.
And I don't think that's right, but, um, you can look at the universe itself as
this kind of computational machine.
And it's doing information processing.
So it's understandable to think about like everything in terms of information,
but consciousness, uh, when I use that word, I'm talking about subjective
experience.
So you're having a unified conscious perception of the world.
There's, there's a light that's on.
And I don't think there is a perspective, a subjective perspective, uh, for an
amino acid.
What is the argument against that?
Like, what is the argument that there is a subjective experience?
Yeah.
Everything.
Yeah.
So, um, basically, uh, consciousness is kind of mysterious still.
Um, and, uh, there's the hard problem of consciousness, which, uh, was, uh, put
forth by a philosopher named David Chalmers in the 90s.
And it basically said, um, we can explain all of the physical processing in the
brain in terms of, uh, mechanical processes and interactions.
Um, but how, how does the interactions of these physical things give rise to
the qualitative world of experience and sensation?
And since that's such a hard problem, how does experience arise, uh, one
solution to that was thinking that it doesn't emerge and suddenly, like, poof
into existence, that there must be a little bit of consciousness in everything,
uh, and that consciousness is fundamental.
And that when those things come together to form these more complex systems,
the little bits of consciousness kind of add up and create more, uh, richer
conscious experience.
So, you don't believe that, but you do, well, we can all agree that human
beings have consciousness.
Everybody agrees on that.
That's, like, pretty simple.
Yeah.
But, like, at what-
Well, no, actually.
No?
Some people don't believe that?
So, um, yeah, it's kind of funny.
I mean, so, the materialist position is, like, pretty much opposite of panpsychism.
So, materialism is the idea that there are only material things in the world,
and that would seem to exclude consciousness because consciousness seems to be
this immaterial thing.
But is it just immaterial because we can't measure it?
I mean, there's obviously something going on.
There's some process going on.
So, whatever that process is that enables creativity and communication, self-awareness,
correction, like, all those different things that, that there's obviously
something happening.
So, the idea that you can't measure it, is that just because we don't
understand what it actually is?
Yes,