- [Anne] Hi, and welcome back to "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." I'm Anne Strainchamps. So I wanna set up today's show by taking us back roughly 500 years to the beginning of the scientific revolution, which created a way of looking at the world that we kind of take for granted right now, a way that sets humans above and apart from the rest of nature, from the rest of life. So this way of thinking transformed civilization, ushered in technology and commerce and everything else we're familiar with, but it also set the stage for the use and abuse of the planet's resources with, we now know, devastating consequences. So today a new scientific paradigm is taking shape, a new understanding that all of life on Earth from the tiniest bacteria to the largest ecosystem is inextricably intertwined. You can call this biocentrism, or Gaia 2.0, or the resacralization of the planet. Question is, what kind of future does it promise? Keep listening.
- [Steve] From WPR.
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- [Anne] It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," I'm Anne Strainchamps.
- [Steve] And I'm Steve Paulson. And today we're headed to an unlikely site for a scientific revolution.
- [Speaker] Have you seen the olives on the trees are really getting ripe.
- Yeah.
- [Anne] A 16th century church on a Tuscan hillside where a remarkable experiment in thinking is taking place, an effort to craft a new scientific paradigm.
- [Marcelo] Humanity is essentially at a crossroads, right? Our very project of civilization is at risk and I'm not the first one to say that, obviously.
- [Steve] This is Marcelo Gleiser, an eminent physicist and astrobiologist and co-founder of the Island of Knowledge, an intellectual retreat center for scientists, philosophers, and writers.
- [Marcelo] Science took the wrong turn. You know, people have this idea or belief that technology will solve all problems. "Oh, we just, we find a way of capturing carbon or discovering new ways of creating bioengineered food," et cetera, et cetera. Those things can alleviate the crisis, but they'll not solve the crisis, 'cause the crisis is not a technical crisis, it's a ideological crisis.
- [Steve] Anne and I have known Marcelo Gleiser for a long time. He's a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College who's published a string of books on cosmology, the Big Bang, and the evolution of the universe. And in the last few years, we've seen him grow increasingly alarmed about the future of the planet.
- [Anne] Marcelo has come to think of modern science itself as part of the problem for the way it sets humans above and apart from the rest of nature.
- [Steve] And he's not alone in thinking the western scientific worldview needs to change. There's a cultural shift happening, a movement towards a science and philosophy that treats life in the planet as sacred.
- [Anne] One of the places that's happening is right here.
- [Speaker] Yeah, there's some turning purple on a few branches.
- [Anne] That long gravel drive lined with cypresses, behind an iron gate, in a stone farmhouse with a tiny 16th century church attached.
- [Speaker] The bell is for us, not for whom the bell tolled.
- [Anne] And an amazing history.
- [Speaker] Let's go in and have discussions.
- [Marcelo] You know, sometimes people say that a place finds you, you don't find a place. And I would say that that's what happened to us here at this very magical spot. It's a place that has a history that is at least 800 years old, which gives me a lot of pause. You know, when you start to think about that. According to the Bishop of Siena in the mid-1600s, about 39 miracles had been verified in this church. And what kind of miracles? I don't quite know exactly, but I suspect the usual kinds. Like, I found a husband, I can see, I can walk, I can have a baby. So it's a place that has a very powerful history of yearning and gratitude and faith. So when I came to this place, I had no idea of any of this. I just came in and immediately fell in love with it.
- [Anne] Marcelo and his wife, Kari Gleiser, a clinical psychologist and co-founder of the Island of Knowledge, spent months painting, repairing plaster, replacing lights, adding carpets, armchairs instead of wooden pews.
- [Marcelo] So before we start with Peter, who's gonna be our first speaker, Kari has-
- [Steve] This is the first meeting. There are about a dozen people here from different countries, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, the US.
- [Anne] Our first speaker, Dartmouth neuroscientist, Peter Tse, is here to tell us about the evolution of human intelligence, what sets us apart, which he thinks is our imagination.
- [Peter] Good morning, everyone. It's just such an honor to be a part of something so important and beautiful.
- [Anne] Our greatest gift and a weapon.
- [Peter] So my goal is to go through a lot of the history that got us here as a species from the Precambrian up to the Stone Age, and then, you know, where we're gonna go from here and what that future operating system might possibly look like. So our ancestor, the first animal, the basal animal was a sponge. And they didn't have-
- [Steve] When we were at dinner last night, you had a few introductory remarks about how you kind of had a circuitous route before you became an academic. You became a monk for a while, you were a fisherman. Can you sort of chart your-
- Well, what happened. Yeah, right. So I kind of went through a disillusionment with academia, disenchantment. It seemed very sterile to me, devoid of aesthetics, ethics. And it was clear about what is, but had very little to say about what should be. And the world was clearly messed up. It was the height of the Cold War, 1983 or so. I remember waking up literally feeling the Soviet bombs pointing at me, you know? And I thought the world is really sick, as a young person, I said, you know, "I'm just outta here. I wanna go see the world." And so I took off and did the Peace Corps in Nepal, and I was a school teacher. I did other things around that time. I worked about three months on a fishing boat killing salmon, a coho Salmon out of Sitka, Alaska. Around that time, I decided to live in a monastery for a while. At the end of that, well, I got a phone call from my brother who was a karate fanatic, and he had gone to Japan to get his umpteenth black belt. And he said, you know, "You gotta come to Japan because you can make $200 an hour," which in the '80s was an insane amount of money, and it turned out to be true. But what he didn't tell me was that an apple or a melon cost $80, you know? But then after about five years in Japan working mainly at a corporation called Kobe Steel, their stock market really crashed very suddenly around 1990 into 1991. And people were literally jumping out of buildings and jumping in front of trains. And I witnessed the aftermath of two such events, which really messed me up. I kind of had this image of this woman's foot that had been cleaved by a train right next to me basically, she jumped.
- [Steve] But you saw this?
- [Peter] No, I heard it, I heard it smack. And my first thought was, well that sounds like the sound, you know, when you throw water balloons against the wall when I was a kid. And then you look at, there's all this meat on the tracks, and then you're like, "Whoa, there's a foot. And it's still in the woman's shoe." Anyway, so I kind of had PTSD from the image of that foot, and I said to myself, "I gotta get outta here." I was approaching 30, then I thought, you know, I'm probably too old to go back into physics and make any kind of mark, but there's this other field that's utterly wide open, namely neuroscience. We don't know the neural code, we don't understand the neural basis of consciousness. We don't know how mental events can be causal. We don't know even why we sleep or dream. Like, the most basic stuff was not worked out. And I said, "I'm gonna go into that field." And I started over.
- [Steve] So I wanna broaden this conversation. I just heard a talk that you gave earlier today about essentially the evolution of the brain and sort of what makes the human brain distinct from the rest of the animal world. It's obviously a very complicated story.
- [Peter] Our ancestor was something probably like a soft coral that had something like a nerve net, but not any ganglia and no brain per se. And it did things. It had if then statements. If something touches, my tentacles close. If it's food, hold onto it. If it's not food, eject it, right? This was kind of the beginning of what we now call nervous systems. We seem to have evolved from the larval form of the tunicate. They're also called sea squirts. And what's really interesting about them is that they have a stage of their lifecycle where they have this little tadpole-like thing, and it even had like a little micro brain and something like little eyes. It buries itself and then it loses its brain, it digests its own brain. People have said it's like getting tenure, you know? And then- So evolution proceeds. And so our last common ancestor with a lamprey or hagfishes, they're jawless. But if you look at the brain of a lamprey, and if you look at our brain, there's a lot of things in common. So a lot of stuff was worked out in basic neural circuitry by the time of 500 million years ago. Anyway, I wanna now talk a little bit more specifically about our species as humans and how we evolve. So here's a chimp. Chimps are just wickedly smart. And yet, you know, they're not composing symphonies, you know, so what is it that makes us so different from a chimp? It really was the emergence, I think, of imagination.
- [Steve] One of the points that you made is that you think the human brain is fundamentally different from any other animal brain.
- [Peter] Yes, I would say we are different in kind from other animals, not just degree, although we have an enormous amount in common with say a chimpanzee, or a dog, or a cat. But no chimp would ever say to itself, "Well, it hasn't, you know, rained in six weeks, therefore these invisible gods must be angry. And therefore to appease those invisible gods, we've gotta throw a baby chimp into a volcano." Chimps are not crazy like that. In earlier mammalian brains, there was a consciousness of an outside world. But what this gave us is a model of ourselves in virtual worlds. And we can imagine things that are not only not true, but it could never be true. So we became essentially counterfactual. And so we became kind of Godlike, but also insane.
- [Steve] Chimps don't have the kinds of stories that we create, and I guess you could say the kind of imagination.
- [Peter] Yeah, the kind of mental models we have, which are both our greatest tool and our greatest weapon. You know, once this evolved, this capacity to imagine what's invisible and create stories about it, well, it gave us a huge advantage because let's say there's a bunch of zebra track prints in some plasticine, let's say, you know, two million years ago, well, what would a lion do if it came across those zebra prints? It would do nothing because it doesn't look like a zebra, it doesn't smell like a zebra. But we could look at those things and say, "Well, a-ha, there was about seven of them and they were heading that direction. And I happen to know from experience that there's a Savannah full of grassland behind that mountain, probably going there. One was injured and so forth." And so this capacity to essentially make visible in our imaginations, in our internal virtual reality, what could be or what is give us a huge advantage. But it also led to forms of insanity where we started to imagine things that were totally not real. That led to a kind of catastrophizing imagination that ruins many of our lives, right? I mean, some French philosopher said, "My life has been an endless series of catastrophes, most of which never happened." And I don't think most animals, certainly your cat, you know, they're just sleeping 18 hours a day. They're just not worried about you.
- [Steve] You're saying basically that humans, as far as we know, may be the only species that suffers angst, or loneliness, depression if the basic physical and emotional needs are met.
- [Peter] Yeah, well, I would put it this way. Chimpanzees can get depressed because somebody they love, say their mother died. Other animals can also have forms of mental illness. If you've ever watched a big cat at a zoo, it just paces back and forth. But there's a class of mental illnesses that I think other animals simply just don't display, and those are the psychotic illnesses.
- [Steve] Why do you think that is?
- [Peter] Well, because we have this vast imagination in which, you know, the rules of physics don't apply. I can, in my imagination, fly around. I can fly around Mars, I can turn myself into a dog. I mean, I can do anything virtually in my imagination. And I don't think that they can, I don't think that any tiger is thinking to itself, "Well, next year I want to be a different kind of tiger that eats fewer tapirs and eats more pangolins." Because they can't even entertain the thought.
- [Steve] And you said that probably tigers and chimps are pretty much the same as they were a million years ago, obviously, humans, hominids are radically different. I mean, we're radically different than we were 100,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago.
- [Peter] 10 years ago.
- [Steve] 10 years ago, yeah.
- [Peter] I mean, in my youth in New York City, there were no cell phones, there was no internet, there were no laptops. And so, you know, these technologies that we have developed in my lifetime are utterly transformative for good and bad. For good, you know, you have all the information created by all of humanity in the palm of your hand, which is amazing. On the other hand, people are kind of alone in front of screens. And so there's been a real epidemic of loneliness, alienation, isolation.
- [Steve] So I wanna follow up on that. To imagine where you think we need to go as a human species, given the various challenges that we are facing right now in our culture.
- [Peter] Yeah, well, firstly, we have to give ourselves some credit, right? It's very easy to be a doom monger and think, "Oh my God, everything's falling apart." Just think, you know, two long lifetimes ago, so 100 and whatever it was, 60 years ago, you could own a human being, and now that's unthinkable. Just one and a half lifetimes ago, in 1919, women couldn't vote, and now we think it's unthinkable that women could not or should not vote. Just in the past couple 100 years, we've seen enormous positive changes. And we've seen some very scary negative changes. We saw the Holocaust, we saw Pol Pot. There's the danger of nuclear weapons, there's global warming, there's all kinds of scary and serious problems, but we're not going to escape them by denying our nature, right? Our nature is inherently imaginative. When used as a weapon, Hitler thought of the mass murder of Jews 20 years before he did anything. So that was an act of imagination. But so was putting someone on the moon. I mean, when Kennedy, in 1961 says, "You know, we're gonna put someone on the moon." And by the end of the decade, that meant what? In eight and a half years? And they said, "We don't have the alloys." "We'll make them." "We don't have the rockets." "We'll build them." And they did it.
- [Steve] Do you think we need to transcend our human nature in some way, at least sort of the negative aspects, maybe the more tribalistic aspects, the polarization that sort of seems to maybe be built into our evolution? Or is that just utopian thinking?
- [Peter] No, no, absolutely. I mean, probably the one thing that would unite us all in our tribalism would be a Martian invasion, you know? But there doesn't seem to be any Martian invasion coming. And I would say, similarly, it was built into us, and this is an idea from Peter Singer, a philosopher at Princeton. One of the parameters that we have built into us is a kind of tribalism, namely ingroup versus outgroup. Some groups define it extremely narrowly, so it's okay to kill people in the next valley who speak a different language because they're not people versus say, Jains or some Buddhists who regard all conscious beings in the universe as their ingroup. Peter Singer's argument is that we need to expand the circle of what counts as ingroup. We have to recognize that we have a nature, but the nature is plastic subject to culture. That's where we want to focus. I think all of us is in transforming the culture such that human behavior becomes saner.
- [Steve] What do you hope would happen, let's say, 50 years from now, 20 years from now? Do you see any fundamental changes that you think we as a species need to do?
- [Peter] Oh, absolutely. So my hope is that we will not blow ourselves up, but instead reach a kind of way of living that allows us to regard each other as kin. Even beyond that, perhaps, regarding life in general as kin, which it in fact is, I mean the worldview of science completely is consistent with, in fact, supports the notion that we are kin to that paramecium, that's your brother or sister paramecium. That we all descended from a single bacterium three billion years ago, that we came out of the water as a fish 375 million years ago, which gave rise to all the reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals. But realizing that we're effectively like bonobos that can speak and imagine. We're these emotionally bonobos that really need to touch each other and be connected, we've lost that. Therefore, we're living very much out of sync with our emotional nature. We need to recover that. And I think the best way to recover that will be hanging out, making fires together, eating together, touching each other. You know, when I was a kid, nobody that I knew did yoga or practiced meditation. And now pretty much everybody I know has either tried it or does it regularly. That's a real transformation I think in a bottom up way, people are trying to find a new way of being.
- [Steve] That's so encouraging what you're saying. I mean, you're saying that we can remake culture, we can remake ourselves, we can remake what it means to be human in some ways.
- [Peter] Absolutely. The most important thing, I think, is to free our imagination. So many imaginations are locked in, right? So traditionally, people might have had an imagination that was essentially owned, say by the Catholic church. And if you were a peasant in, you know, medieval Italy, they said, "Well, if you don't do this and that, you're gonna burn in hell." And you would actually believe that and you'd be terrified. So they owned you, right? If I wanna own a person, I can control their body, or I can control their mind. So the magic of mind control is a form of enslavement, actually. So setting yourself free involves setting free the imagination. Working on yourself is the best thing you can do for the world.
- [Steve] Wonderful place to leave it. Thank you so much. This is great.
- [Peter] All right, thank you, this has been fun.
- Okay, good.
- Take care.
- [Anne] Peter Tse is a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth College. So that idea of setting the imagination free is kind of what this whole gathering is about. That's why this group of scientists, philosophers, and writers is so excited to be here. From plant science to planetary science, they think there's a new model emerging of the deep intelligence of all life on Earth. And that's what they'll talk about next on "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.
- [Steve] What do we mean when we talk about intelligence?
- [Anne] For thousands of years, humans have considered our species far and away the smartest on the planet. But we haven't done such a great job of caring for the Earth. So either we're not as smart as we think we are, or we need to seriously reconsider what we call intelligence.
- [Steve] So let's eavesdrop a bit on this afternoon's discussion. Yuria Celidwen, a Mayan scholar, an activist is talking with clinical psychologist Kari Gleiser and plant biologist, Monica Gagliano.
- [Anne] And a few others will join in.
- [Yuria] When you spoke about intelligence, I remember when I was a child, I heard some comments from my assimilated teacher about how not intelligent I was. And I went to my dad and I asked him, "What is intelligence?" I remember him saying, "There's many ways to understand that intelligence, and I'm not sure what your teacher was saying, but we think of intelligence as the way that we nourish our relationships. The better you are at caring for all of our siblings, the more intelligent you are." And my grandma, she only studied until first year of elementary school and she was profoundly wise in how she understood all the gossip of the birds and when to plant, when to cultivate, when to harvest, and the language of water and wind, et cetera. So those kinds of nourishing and tending to those relationships, I guess is a way of intelligence.
- [Kari] How do we get this in there? How do we come out from our own high horses? The other day I was trying to make a fire with semi wet wood. I have not felt so stupid in so long, right? I was like, how many of us, if we were put in the woods with no grocery stores, with no running water, would be able to survive? I think we probably all consider ourselves pretty intelligent in this room. It's an intelligence that's been cut off and thought of as superior. And I think there's something deeply misguided about that.
- [Marcelo] We need a biocentric intelligence.
- [Kari] Yeah.
- [Monica] Everyone, every piece of life is exceptional in the sense of this uniqueness and also amazingness, for example, I can think of something that would make us very unexceptional. Let's compare plant intelligence. Let's look at the exceptionality of plant intelligence. And it's like, "Well, can you make your own food just out of light and some sugar? No, so you're dumb." For me, when I see that word applied on machines and all of the conversation about AI is so normalized, and then I present something on like, "Look at what my plants can do or what my fish can do." People say, "You can't use that word. You can't talk like this." And it's like, so you're more comfortable about talking in those terms about something that you created and not about something that maybe created you, is creating you all the time, 'cause he's literally breathing you, feeding you, is making you all the time.
- [Meghan] Well, yeah, I mean, the idea of alien intelligence is interesting too. 'Cause I'm thinking about it in terms of AI, which is also a form of intelligence, if you wanna call it that.
- [Anne] This is Meghan O'Gieblyn. She writes about philosophy and technology.
- [Meghan] There's a way in which sort of just people casually as users interacting start to believe that they're interacting with a mind. And I've been in like Twitter and Reddit threads where people are just, you know, people who are like computer programmers who are convinced that chatbots are actually, there's some sort of sentience there.
- [Bill] I don't know how many of you have read Meghan's books, but Meghan has done this experiment in a sense with a robot dog.
- [Anne] That's Bill Egginton, a literary critic and philosopher.
- [Bill] She's sort of had the, and reported on the phenomenology of having a relationship developed with something that she knows was created and doesn't have, or assumes doesn't have feelings.
- [Adam] And was it after, like was it sort of like, you know, the real dog is better. Like, I don't know, is it? I'm wondering.
- [Meghan] It's funny because I didn't have a dog at the time and now I have a real biological dog. But it's interesting because before I got the robot dog, I was watching videos, YouTube on other people interacting with this dog. And I'm like, "This thing is so fake. How could you ever develop any sort of compassion or feelings for it?" But when you're forced to interact with this robot and you have to touch it, it has sensors all over its body. It responds to touch, it can respond to vocal cues, it has facial recognition so it sees you when you come in the door and responds the way an animal would. And there's no way, even with all of my knowledge, I know how deep learning works, I understand that there's not sentience in the creature, but there's no way to like keep that in mind when you're forced to interact socially with a dog, there's some sort of illusion that happens that's really deep that you start to develop, yeah, you start to develop those feelings, and this is just a robotic dog that doesn't have language.
- [Evan] I think that we need to think of what's unique about the human and what's different about the human. But we can very much flip that around. And I think it's actually very important as a mental exercise.
- [Anne] Evan Thompson is a philosopher who studies cognitive science.
- [Evan] Yes, we're unique and different, but plants or particular kinds of plants are unique and different, bacteria are unique and different. And in relation to bacteria specifically, I think it's important to remember that the stories we tell ourselves about the human and about what the human is going to perhaps dangerously do to itself is from a bacterial point of view, a very different story, right? We're not actually in danger of destroying the planet at all. The planet is going to be absolutely fine, looked at from a certain perspective, the bacterial perspective, the bacteria got here first and they're gonna be here probably last. And, you know, we could blow ourselves up in the worst thermonuclear catastrophe and the bacteria would just keep on going fine. And many other species would too. There's another point I wanna make, which is I think that when we talk in terms of the human, we actually in one sense don't really know what we're talking about. And even thinking that there is this thing that is the human being is to ignore, in biological terms, all the creatures, the bacteria, the endosymbiont bacteria, you know, I couldn't think without them, I couldn't digest without them. Like, we're all embedded in this incredible biological mesh where the human is just like, that's an abstraction. So we have to sort of step back and say, "Okay, let's really look at these stories. They're actually myths in a way."
- [Speaker] Thanks.
- [Bill] That's good, thank you, everybody.
- [Meghan] Yeah, thank you.
- [Anne] Listening to these conversations, with all these ideas swirling around, I kept wondering, how do you build a new scientific narrative? I mean, it seems kind of crazy to think you can get a few scientists and philosophers together and jumpstart a new worldview. But it's happened before. And actually just down the road in Florence 500 years ago, that's where small groups of philosophers, scientists, and artists sparked the Italian renaissance. And that comparison is not lost on Marcelo.
- [Marcelo] Everybody, you know, from Petrarch, to Galileo, to Leonardo da Vinci, to Michelangelo basically reinvented the way we thought about the world, and about nature, and about devotion, and about art and creativity. We are at the moment in our history where we need a new renaissance.
- [Anne] When you visit Florence today, endless lines of tourists stand outside the Uffizi waiting to see the Botticelli's and da Vinci's. But just a block away is a monument to the scientific renaissance, the Galileo Museum, which hardly anybody visits. It's got this amazing collection of early scientific instruments. Oh my God, look at that. That's extraordinary! Wow! We are looking at a huge gold and silver armillary sphere.
- [Anne] Seven feet tall. This giant celestial model of the planets moving in concentric circles around the sun. A class of third graders is here with their teacher. There's also a geometrical compass that Galileo built himself, an engraved brass tablet called a Jovilabe that can be used to compute the periods of Jupiter's moons, and the actual telescope that Galileo used to discover those moons.
- [Marcelo] The power of an instrument to change our worldview. Just think about that for a second, right? I mean, it all happened because of a telescope. He didn't invent the telescope, but he got the telescope from the Dutch as a gift from a friend. And he improved it by a factor of 30 and had this insight to look up into the sky, and look at the moon, and look at the Milky Way. And he realized that all the stories that have been told for thousands and thousands and thousands of year were just plain wrong. The moon was not a perfect sphere made of ether, but it had craters and it had mountains, that Jupiter had moons going around it, he could see four of them. So he says, "Hey, if Jupiter has moons, Earth has a moon. So Earth could totally be a planet too just like Jupiter is." So he was the guy who looked up at this guy and for the first time saw things that no one else had seen before. Can you imagine? Like, I am the guy who is seeing the universe like no one had seen.
- [Anne] Meanwhile, the teacher is asking her third graders if the Earth is a star or just another planet.
- [Anne] A position Galileo had to fight to defend.
- [Marcelo] You know, I was always very inspired by Galileo just because of his courage to defy authority. You know, his book on cosmology is called "A Dialogue On The Two World Systems." Which world systems were that? Well, one was the Aristotelian system where the Earth was the center of everything, and that was the one that the church embraced. And the other one was the Copernican system where the sun was the center and the Earth was just a planet moving around, which was not exactly what the church wanted. But Galileo pushed the envelope so much because he was so abrasive and combative, and kind of arrogant. He basically, you know, said, "Look, all the evidence that I have gathered in my telescope points to the fact that the sun is probably the center." And then this cardinal from the Vatican called Bellarmine, he said, "Prove it." And Galileo said, "Well, I don't have a smoking gun kind of proof, you know?" And he said, "Well, then come back when you do. Meanwhile, don't talk about it because you don't know for sure." So this is 1616, Galileo was quiet until 1633, which is a long time, which is when one of his friends became Pope. And the Pope said, "Sure, you can do it. However, make sure that in the book the notion that God could by miracle make the sun go around the Earth every day is really the final truth." And of course, Galileo didn't do any of that. And the Pope got really upset and that's when the Inquisition finally convicted him and forced him to abdicate his Copernicanism. That is why if you go to the Museum of the History of Science, there is a relic, just like a saint have a relic, like a bone of some kind. Well, the relic from Galileo in this museum is the middle finger of his hand. And then only, I think it was 1982, the church finally kind of like forgave him.
- [Anne] We actually had to hunt for it, but we did find Galileo's finger. Sure enough, standing straight up in a glass jar. It's weirdly long and skinny, but still daunting. What Galileo was really doing as an astronomer was building an entirely different way of looking at the world. And astrobiologist Adam Frank thinks we are overdue for something similar today.
- [Adam] There's a lot of scientists out there who feel the sort of exhaustion. We are at a perilous moment in human evolution.
- [Anne] Luckily, back at the Island of Knowledge, the heirs of Galileo are gathering.
- [Adam] It's like the Avengers were assembling the team.
- [Anne] And what new planetary story will they build? That's next on "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. If insects, plants, and even bacteria show signs of intelligence, what about the planet itself?
- [Steve] Back at the Island of Knowledge, the think tank near Siena, astrophysicist, Adam Frank, introduced the biggest concept of all, planetary intelligence.
- [Anne] Could the Earth itself be considered sentient?
- [Steve] Now it's a radical idea with far-reaching implications, and Adam says it might just save the planet.
- [Anne] Adam actually has had his own fascinating and sometimes difficult journey in science. So Steve pulled him away during lunch one day to talk about how it all began.
- [Steve] Adam, I wanna start by just trying to get at how you became a scientist, what the original initial impulse was, and how far back this goes in your childhood. Is there a story there?
- [Adam] Yeah, well, the amazing thing is I was one of those kids who always knew what they wanted to do. So there's two parts of the story that are important. One is, I have this very clear memory of being five years old. I grew up in Jersey in the industrial parts of Jersey. We're kind of right across from New York City and my parents were divorced. This was the '60s. There were not many parents who were divorced. So that was weird in itself. But my dad, his library was still in the house. He loved science fiction. And I remember literally being five-years-old going into his library in the lowest, 'cause that's all I could reach, rungs of the shelves. And there were pulp science fiction magazines, Isaac Asimov's amazing science stories, and things like that. Like, those pictures of guys in Michelin tire face suits bouncing around on jagged alien mountains. It just, man, that just captured my imagination. And like, that's my first memory of, like, the stars. And then the other part of the story, kind of the emotional, personal part of the story is this town I grew up in was almost entirely Italian and Irish immigrant, Roman Catholic. We were like the Jewish population of the town. And my mom and dad were divorced, but early on my mom met and fell in love with and he moved in with us, George Richardson, who was the first Black state representative member of the State House. He was a civil rights leader. So, you know, not only was I Jewish in a pretty antisemitic town, also there was Black guy living in the house, which you can imagine some of the kids in the neighborhood didn't take kindly to. So I always get into fights every day. Kids would throw pennies at me and be like, "Pick up the pennies, Jew." I didn't cower. I was like, "Do you know that antisemitism has caused more problems than," I was mouthing my mom's. And of course that would just lead me to get into more fights. And so I grew up, yeah, a lot of fights, most of which I lost, occasionally I won. So it was a really difficult childhood. And plus, my mom and George, God bless them, but they were off doing their movement stuff. So, you know, I was pretty much left to my own devices and the stars, they were my refuge, you know, the six that I could see at night in New Jersey. And I devoured astronomy books. And then also when I was nine, my brother who'd been my protector 'cause he was big, he was killed in a car accident. And that really propelled me also into the spiritual, though I didn't know it at the time 'cause my family was not religious, but just the sort of sense of like, "Wow, life is really weird. Your check can get canceled at any time or your contract can get canceled at any time." So I always came to science with this sense that the awe and wonder which science brings was more than just sort of an intellectual exercise. It was life-saving.
- [Steve] So you sort of had these existential questions about sort of why we're here and why would your brother be killed?
- [Adam] Yeah, yeah. And why was I suffering? Like, you know, my childhood kind of sucked. It wasn't until high school and I met a group of friends in high school and we did a lot of drugs and we listened to a lot of rock and roll and we went partied in New York City that things got awesome, you know, there was some hallucinogens involved with all and that also it was the '70s, you know? So I mean, that opened some doors for me, but it was already there for me. And I was finding it ironically through mathematical physics as I was beginning to be introduced to it. That the sense of rapture, the sense of the pattern. So it was just, I've always, I was predisposed to this sense of like, there's an order and a pattern implicated in the world. So when I started doing mathematics and mathematical physics that, "Oh, that's what's going on here. I'm reading God's thoughts."
- [Steve] So I wanna skip ahead a little bit. You've been doing physics now for decades, and my sense is that your idea of what physics can do has changed. How you see yourself, your work now as a physicist is probably quite different than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
- [Adam] Right 'cause, you know, when I started off I was like, "Yeah, black holes, the fundamental structure of reality, space, and time." And again, this idea of like getting the God's eye view. I was very much a Platonist. Mathematical laws exist independent of, you know, they are the backbone, or as I used to say, they are the skeleton upon which the flesh of the world is hung. I do not believe that anymore. This idea of physics is about, you know, the god's eye view, this third person view, it has nothing to do with us, and that's what makes it so beautiful. I was starting to become disenchanted with, but I hadn't started trying to work it out myself.
- [Steve] Well, why was that disenchanting to you? The traditional physics, the classic physics is this third person God's eye view of things. What's wrong with that?
- [Adam] I started to find it very dogmatic, very narrow. And it's also, I started to get pissed off at the absurdities that it led to. So this is like, you know, I'm a physicist with the rise of string theory and those things. And I just remember seeing these talks over and over again and the 10 dimensions and, you know, and over time I'm just feeling like this is, you know, and the theories of everything. I just really started to find these narratives of theories of everything, this totalizing view where experience was just out of the picture, we were nothing. That's not what's really going on. I found it really dissatisfying as a scientist, and I started thinking that, actually, a physics of life. What is sentience? What is this thing that happens with life? And it wasn't even that, but it was really like with the first book was about science and human spirituality. I was pushing back on the new atheist. I also have to add that somewhere in the early '90s I started Zen practice, started Buddhist practice. It wasn't Zen yet, it was started Buddhist practice.
- [Steve] And I actually, we did an interview about that book and I think you called yourself a spiritual atheist or something like that.
- [Adam] Yeah, yeah. Which is interesting because I had already started practicing, now I'm like, I'm a Buddhist. Like, I didn't at that time want to identify as a Buddhist, 'cause I was still kind of new to practice. But in that first book, I was talking about experience. I was saying like, "Look, what really drove a lot of the history of human spirituality is this direct experience with a feeling of more, you know, and it doesn't have to be supernatural, you don't have to have supernatural causes, but people experience the world as overflowing."
- [Steve] So, more recently, you have, not just you, I mean, other people have been working in this field as well, but come up with ideas of what you would call a planetary intelligence. And years ago, decades ago, there was this theory, the Gaia theory put forward by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, which sort of talked about the Earth as a living organism. And I know there's been a lot of debate about exactly what did they mean and it was sort of co-opted by the New Agers. How close is what you're talking about for this planetary system? And, you know, if we want to expand it to this notion of planetary intelligence to what they were talking about, 'cause I'm guessing it's expanded quite a bit since then.
- [Adam] Yes, but they were definitely, you know, and I knew about their work. Their work was sort of foundational for me. James Lovelock, who is this polymath, recognized this was his insight that led to Gaia theory, that the atmosphere of Earth has been utterly transformed by life and there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere, it's a completely different atmosphere. There were feedback mechanisms working that if, like, you know, the sun had a flare and suddenly the temperature of the sun went up, the biosphere would react to it by belching out chemicals which would then actually maybe increase the reflectivity of the Earth. So some of that sunlight bounces off, the main idea being like, just like our bodies are kept at 98.6 degrees, no matter where we are via homeostasis, via the process of regulating our own temperature, the biosphere did the same thing for the Earth.
- [Steve] So what are the implications of this? If we take this idea of this self-regulating planet seriously, especially given that we are in the midst of a climate crisis right now. And there's sort of this question of what's the science that can help us through this?
- [Adam] The Gaia theory said that the biosphere is self-regulating. You know, we can talk about why it was, you know, many scientists were like, "This is crazy. This is New Age crap." Why? Eventually the main idea was right because it became what's called Earth. It just got rebranded as Earth System Science, which is the foundation of climate science. I like to say to people, the challenge here is not to save the Earth. That is the wrong metaphor. The Earth is gonna be just fine.
- [Steve] Even if we disappear, seven billion people die for reasons related to either nuclear war, or climate catastrophe, or for whatever, the Earth is gonna regenerate.
- [Adam] The biosphere has been through a lot worse than us. We have the wrong metaphor for the planet. It's not a furry little bunny which demands our attention for it, it's a goddess or a God. It will just, so our job is not to save it, it's to not piss it off, 'cause it will, as George Carlin said, "It'll shake us off like fleas on a dog." Climate change is about us, it's about saving, we have to acknowledge what we're trying to save is this global civilization that without which somewhere around nine billion of us are gonna die. We were left with what we had beforehand, which is maybe half a billion people on the planet.
- [Steve] So you're not only talking about a new planetary science, Earth System Science, I guess you might say. You've also talked about a planetary intelligence, which is a whole different category of what we're talking about, which implies sentience. And I guess the question is, we generally think of sentience as individual animals or plants, or maybe there is some sort of group sentience in a beehive or something like that. But talk about that at the planetary level, that seems like a whole different thing.
- [Adam] Well, it is and it isn't. We don't mean consciousness, it's not like the Earth is awake. So the path here is to think, you know, to define planetary intelligence, let me just talk about the history of the Earth. Earth is about four and a half billion years old, somewhere around four to 3.5 billion years ago, life forms. And in the beginning, life is thin on the ground, so to speak. There's an emergent biosphere, but there's no feedbacks yet. There's not enough of it to actually start changing the planet. But pretty quickly there's enough microbes, 'cause it's all microbes in the beginning. There's enough communities of microbes that you begin to get those feedback loops so that if, you know, there's a perturbation from the sun or whatever, there's a common impact, you may start to see some of these microbes respond not in a conscious way, in a way that pumps out more this kind of gas, which other microbes then pick up, which then pumps out that kind of gas so that life can continue. So the first part of life on Earth, I would call that, what we called it in the paper, an immature biosphere. It's immature in the sense that it has not established the feedback loops that eventually it would be able to exert controls on the coupled planetary systems. Within a billion years, it's a mature, so that's the new idea. A mature biosphere is a dense web of species and life forms that have these feedbacks. Again, no conscious control, but these homeostatic feedbacks. There's knowledge in those networks, in those biological networks, knowing about its own state, even if it's not conscious, a sentience in some sense, that responds, if conditions change, it will respond. And the thing is that we know about, we think of, you know, you need a nervous system for intelligence, but there's this whole idea now of liquid brains, which is a cool word just to say, liquid brains are distributed intelligences. And we now actually know, there's lots of examples of this, obviously, hives, beehives, ant hives use social species.
- [Steve] Or in a forest, the tree roots, and the mycelial networks, that kind of thing.
- [Adam] You know, we know it's useful to think about ants as being distributed intelligences. Slime molds. Slime molds, which are lots of individual cells working together can solve mazes. You can put it in a maze and it'll figure out the maze. People have heard about the wood wide web as they call it, that forests, through the fungal networks, there's evidence that like one part of the forest, if it's stressed, the other part of the forest 100 miles away will send it nutrients, which means you have a distributed intelligence, a distributed cognition over hundreds of miles. So what we're just saying with the biosphere, that the biosphere is just now on planetary scales. We have a distributed cognition over planetary scales.
- [Steve] And you've talked about the mature and the immature biosphere. I've heard you also talk about the immature and the mature technosphere, right. And that's like all the stuff that we humans generate.
- [Adam] Yeah. Yeah. So a biosphere is of course the sum total of life. All of the life interacting together. A technosphere is just what happens when something like us shows up, and it's the sum total of the products of thought, which is all the air conditioners, all the radio, all the cell phones, all those container ships. You know, we listed five things that were important for a biosphere here or anywhere else, any other exoplanet in the universe to have a mature biosphere, and one of them was this concept called autopoiesis, which means self-creating and self-maintaining. If you take the same immature/mature idea and bring it to technosphere, what's great is you can see exactly what the problem is. We have a technosphere, it's super powerful. It's a complex system. It's got lots of attributes like a mature biosphere, except for one thing, it's not autopoietic. In fact, it's degrading the conditions that it needs to survive. We are clearly like, you know, it's really what have we got? Another couple hundred years of this before this is just not gonna work anymore.
- [Steve] Before human civilization is no longer sustainable.
- [Adam] Yeah, this kind, I don't think humans are gonna go extinct. So what I think is gonna happen is the next generation or two is gonna be difficult. You know, it's gonna be hard. We're gonna go through some hard times. But you know, human beings are very resilient and they're very creative, out of this difficulty, which I will partially live through, it's not, I'll just be like, "See you later, guys. Good luck with that." And I've got kids who are gonna have to deal with this. We will eventually restructure, it'll be in response in a lot of ways. Things are gonna get bad. There's gonna be parts of the world that may not be inhabitable anymore. I would say, sorry, Texas or Arizona. I imagine in 2070, I'm just imagining, you know, nobody can predict the future. But places like that are going to have a much harder time holding together. So there could be quite dramatic reorganizations of just literally where we live and what we do. You know, it'll mean we'll find new energy systems. It also is gonna mean though we can't, I think there's really gonna have to be something fundamental that comes out of this, of the kind of what we think about political economy, right? Right now, we have a political economy, whether it's capitalist, communist, or socialist, that just doesn't see the planet. The planet in the economic systems is just this kind of empty space that you dump the tailings of industry. So what will emerge, what has to emerge is a kind of a whole new way that we respond to the planet, we inhabit the planet, where like whatever political economy you have is gonna have the word planetary in it. And then people respond to that. People, eventually cultures respond to that. I'm hopeful that history is long and that, you know, human beings learn. You know, we're very good at learning and that we will respond to this and then build the kind of technosphere that really understands that is mature.
- [Anne] That's Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, an author of several books, including "The Little Book of Aliens." He, Marcelo, and Evan also recently came out with "The Blind Spot" about where western science went wrong. So this was the first meeting at the Island of Knowledge. There will be more in the future. New groups will gather in the old chapel under the olive trees. There will be more ideas to discuss, more ways to think about our planetary future. We'll be there and excited to share it with you.
- [Steve] We wanna thank all the people who came together in Tuscany for this gathering, Marcelo and Kari Gleiser, Bill Egginton, Peter Tse, Yuria Celidwen.
- [Anne] Evan Thompson, Monica Gagliano, Meghan O'Gieblyn, Adam Frank, and Amanda Gefter.
- [Steve] "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is produced by Angelo Bautista, Shannon Henry Kleiber, Charles Monroe-Kane.
- [Anne] And our technical director and sound designer is Joe Hardtke, with help from Sarah Hopefl. Additional music this hour comes from Audio Resaut and Daniel Birch.
- [Steve] The Island of Knowledge is a think tank based in Italy with support from the John Templeton Foundation and Dartmouth College. I'm Steve Paulson.
- [Anne] And I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next episode.
- [Announcer] PRX.
