Speaker 2 00:01:52 You are listening to right on radio on cafe 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. I'm Josh Weber. And tonight on, right on radio, Ian Graham Leask is talking with Larry Watson about his latest novel, the lives of Eddie Pritchard, triumphant, engaging and perceptive Watson's novel examines, a woman, both aware of her power and constrained by it. And probes, the way perception of someone as small town can shape a life through the decades. Watson is the critically acclaimed author of 10 novels, including let him go. That was recently adapted into a film star in Diane Lane, Kevin Costner,
Speaker 1 00:02:27 And I'm Liz olds in the last part of the show. Josh talks with astrobiologist Caleb sharp about his work, the ascent of information, sheriff argues that information is truly a wive. All true data. We create all our emails, tweets, selfies, AI generated texts, funny cat videos, amounts to a life form that has its own goals needs and can influence our wellbeing. Caleb Scharf is the award author of the zoom-able universe, the cause the Copernicus complex and gravity's engines and the director of the Columbus Columbia astrobiology center, all of this and more. So stay tuned to write on radio.
Speaker 3 00:04:01 Larry, are you there?
Speaker 4 00:04:03 I'm here.
Speaker 3 00:04:04 Hi, Larry. Welcome back to ride on radio.
Speaker 4 00:04:08 Thank you.
Speaker 3 00:04:09 So you, you had a little passage, you were going to read for us.
Speaker 4 00:04:12 I'm going to read a little something from the very first, uh, section the lives of ed Prichard is a novel in three parts, and it looks at ed, uh, at 20 year intervals when she's 24, 44 and 64. And in this section, um, as the story opens, ed is married to Dean Linderman and, but she is traveling with his twin brother, Roy, they're going to a small Montana town to buy a truck and transport it back to their town. So here they are in the car together, ed slips off her flimsy, rubber sandals and hooks or toes up on the lip of the dashboard. He, Roy turns his head toward her and with his finger slowly traces in the air, the length of EDS, bare leg. Tell me something. He says, how do you get so tan working in the bank all day, ed quickly lowers both feet to the floor.
Speaker 4 00:05:13 She says, we've got a folding chair. We set up behind the building during breaks and lunch hour. I sit back there and I'm out on weekends. Of course, I wouldn't think you'd get much sun in that alley. Roy pinches, a cigarette between his lips and extends both arms me. I'm like a steak cooked on just one side. The car floats over the center line and ed starts to reach for the steering wheel. But then Roy takes hold of it. Once again, about the only time I get out of the store, he says, it's in the car. And then one arm hangs out the window when the other doesn't get any sun at all. The only other car visible on this stretch of highway is at least a couple miles ahead. And then it vanishes curving its way. The first of a series of low Hills, each stitch to the next, with a narrow, dark strip of Cottonwood or Baroque.
Speaker 4 00:06:06 Now you always says, you probably have to hike your skirt up plenty high to get so much sun. He leans forward to look at her and maybe undo a button or two. She doesn't say anything of course, but those miniskirts you've taken to wearing. Oh, for God's sake, Roy can't. We have a normal conversation. Roy smiles the smile of a man, confident of its power to heal or be guile. Why sure are you, what did you want to talk about? But she says nothing in turns her head away from her brother-in-law she knows women whose husbands would never let their wives get into a car with Roy Linderman, but not Dean. No, not Dean.
Speaker 3 00:06:49 Well, pretty good stuff. That's actually a good choice because that's exactly the kind of conversation I want to talk about, uh, with you. Uh, let me just reiterate a little bit of your bio. Um, you were raised in, in Bismarck, North Dakota, and, uh, as Josh told our listeners, uh, 10, uh, claimed novels, including the, uh, Montana 1948, um, you've been on the show, I think for several of those, uh, novels, mostly with me talking to you about them and, uh, I think some others. Um, and then since this film adaption of, uh, let him go with, uh, Kevin Costner and Diane Lane, and that was just, just been released. So I'm interested to talk to you a little bit about that, how that's affected you at the end of the discussion about ed. Um, but I gotta, I gotta tell you that this novel it's just coming in a time for me reading it when I'm working on a lot of, uh, material as a publisher, um, about how men affect women.
Speaker 3 00:08:02 And I thought this was the most extraordinarily sensitive work, um, of you showing us how male behavior, especially male behavior on women, especially attractive women, is so destructive and taking away all of their ambition and pushing them into various kinds of corners where they can't be themselves. And Roy Linderman is the character in this book that you've just introduced. You introduced him doing that. I mean, she's an object. He's looking at her legs, although he clearly all the way through the book, doesn't love her and his destructive behavior towards it probably isn't intentional. But my goodness, you, you, it's almost like a treaties that you produced here was that, um, I presume that that was intentional.
Speaker 4 00:08:57 Some of what you're talking about took me totally by surprise. Um, I don't think I, I agree with you absolutely about, uh, uh, male behavior that men do those things. Uh, is it, is it, uh, worse or, or not quite as bad, but for the most part, men do not do those things consciously.
Speaker 3 00:09:20 And I think you showed that very
Speaker 4 00:09:21 Good. You must be aware of. Yeah, it, it must be a way of, of, uh, w we must be terribly insecure or something, and that we're trying always to exercise some power, um, and, uh, by diminishing others and in the case of this novel and in the case of lots of people's lives, diminishing women. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:09:45 Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:09:47 To recognize them in their full humanity. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:09:51 The book caught me. It really caught me, um, right where it hurts. You know, I've got two, two daughters and three granddaughters and, um, you know, I've always loved women all my life. I don't think I've ever been an abuser, but, uh, but I bet you, when I was young, I did exactly what Royal Lynn did, you know, to women. I don't really remember it, but I can just imagine it's so typical, the kind of, uh, smarmy, stupid, uh, behavior when you're literally trying to impress somebody in a way. And, and, and what's remarkable about the book, you know, you've, as you said, in your little introduction, you run the book through these three times zones with her in the twenties or forties in her sixties, and it never stops the value of it never really stops at all. And then it's, you see it passed onto the daughter and her granddaughter. So where's that coming from in you? That's a very insightful, and, uh, you have, you got some women helping you with this and giving you some, some coaching about how they feel about these kinds of things. Give me the Genesis of, of how this thing came about, because it's really, really hitting the spot.
Speaker 4 00:11:05 Um, before I began this book, I thought this would be, uh, I, I thought Roy and Dean Lynn, it would be Ryan Dean Linderman story primarily about these twin brothers who were, uh, in love with the same woman. Um, and of course, uh, twins offer all sorts of possibilities of, of, uh, issues of, of identity. And, uh, and that, that didn't go away. What, what, what turned out in turned out to happen in the novel is that the identity that comes into question is EDS. And it's not, it's not her sense of self, but it's, it's how other people see her and, and, uh, impose an identity upon her that is useful to them, not, not to her. So she just sort of came to the fore early on in the novel. Um, and, um, I, I just, I just stayed with it. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:12:08 Well, there's a section in the, in the last, uh, in the third section where she's in her sixties and, uh, people are talking about remembering her and they remember her as they want to remember her. And she remarks upon this, that that's not her, she's not how she remembers herself. And I just sat back and contemplated that quite a bit and just thought, you know, I wonder how I do that. And I have, uh, people that, uh, you know, from back where I grew up, um, still kind of remember me and they tell me things that I did. I don't even remember the thing, some of those things, and I'm sure we all have to deal with some of that. And, um, I guess it's frustrating in our, how much does it change you? If you are a woman that's already been altered, partly by your beauty, you got lucky enough to be beauty, but the beauty, the, but the beauty itself is a double-edged sword and your, and your character either here. Go ahead.
Speaker 4 00:13:09 Yeah. So, um, uh, when they are seeing their, her beauty, they are blind to, uh, uh, other attributes that she has, uh, her intelligence, her courage, her, her self-sufficiency, um, and, um, you know, I don't want to make it out, uh, as though to be beautiful. It is a hardship. Uh, I think we all know that that beautiful people often have certain advantages in life, but you're exactly right. It's a double-edged sword. Yes. It's difficult to, um, um, to be seen as yourself when, when, when the surface is so lovely.
Speaker 3 00:13:53 Yeah. I see, I see past the humanity and there's this want that's in it. It's interesting I, to jump to the third section here, and she's a, um, a dental receptionist, um, which is really, really well done, very interesting dentists, by the way, we weren't going to her, but that was quite a character you created here. I hope, I don't know if I'd have her work on my teeth, but, um, uh, there's a gentleman that walks by the, uh, the dentist's office repeatedly. And, uh, he can't bring himself to come in and ask her out and she doesn't want that.
Speaker 4 00:14:37 Yeah, he's an, he's an elderly fellow. Uh, but because his behavior is what a, what a 15, 16, 17 year old boy would do. It's a curious, kind of almost stocking. And yet it's, it's, um, there's something pathetic about it too. And, and ed finally confronts him and, um,
Speaker 3 00:15:00 It's wonderful. And so basically, yeah, that's right. She says he wants to come in for a new, a new cleaning and the tooth of fine stay away. But I mean, it, I think that, that, that really hit the nail on the head for me with the whole book that scene. And of course, it's, I'm not, we're not going to give the way the ending at all, but, um, that's, as far as we'll go into the delving deep into the book, but it's because it's not massively part of the plot, um, as it moves forward. But, uh, what's so interesting about it is that you see certain kinds of males, even people who are very strong and have had good careers, not really growing up in this particular area and kind of form a stain childlike. Not that women don't do that too, but the whole point here is that this is a particularly attractive woman that tends to hold her attractiveness. She's got good genes and she still looks very attractive at age 64 or whatever she is. And, you know, there's this elderly chap walking by and what does elderly mean? You know, what do we mean by that these days? And, uh, you know, you kind of ask those questions too. And of course in the third part, she hooks up again, uh, with Roy Lindemann. Um, so do you want, let's shift off, um, each different moment and talk about the Lindemann twins, um, where do they come from in your thinking?
Speaker 4 00:16:32 Well, uh, uh, partly from my family background, we just have a, uh, uh, an awful lot of twins, uh, on my mother's side of the family. My mother was a twin and an uncle are twins. I have a nephew and a niece and, um, um, uh great-grandparents and, uh, twins, and, um, and I've always been fascinated. None of them are identical twins, but, but, uh, it, it's not necessary for, for them to be identical twins for, for them to be confused. I mean, I, I think back on, on the twins that I grew up with, and I know that sometimes people couldn't tell them apart, um, uh, and, and some people could, um, so I thought they would be at the heart of the novel. And as I said earlier, I thought, um, the question of identity and how she might see something in one of the men, uh, and, and that something might be absent in the other.
Speaker 4 00:17:33 Uh, and, and that's true, but it's not as though she finds something particularly appealing in one and its absence, um, uh, bothers her in the other, um, they're quite different men. Um, what part of what interested me is that, that Dean, her husband, who is a good man, that for some reason, uh, recedes, uh, purposely, and, and, um, and she says at one point she's been in the company of, of Roy in a perfectly innocent way. Um, and, and Dean was supposed to show up, but he didn't, and, and she, the next time she sees them, she confronts him and she says, are you trying to art? Are you trying to push me onto your brother? Do you want, do you want me to be with him? Um, and it's, uh, uh, I can't say I began to understand it myself, but it does seem, uh, something that's in those two, two men. And of course, Roy is, is, uh, he's glib. He's a salesman, uh, both by occupation and, and, uh, by character. And, uh, uh, Dean is shy and withdrawn. He's quiet. And, um, Dean is sort of person, I think, who, who has always been secure and worried that his wife is attracted to somebody like Roy. Yeah. And then, whoa, wait a minute. Not like Roy, but Roy. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:19:09 No, she's not, she's very faithful. And she's, he's very, she's a wonderful character in that way. And that people miss that of her and try to pull her off center with that kind of thing, but are to stay a little bit with Dean, um, Royal in-demand his brother, his twin brother. He's sort of trying to be the good guy he's trying to sort of stand back and not be this glib stupid thought, you know, thoughtless infant, um, that, that kind of wants something and just grabs for it. He's he tries to respect, uh, but he he's held back. And I, and I think a lot of men that, that, um, try to behave correctly, especially with younger women who don't really understand what's going on, don't understand that because there's still a part of them that wants to be pursued and wants to be chased. And she has a little of that going on. And, um, she has to learn about it through her life and learn that, uh, that go good. There are good men, you know, um, and then you kill him and you kill him off. So tell me about that. How do you choose, what you've you got good characters going on? How do you choose to murder them as an author?
Speaker 4 00:20:25 Well, it, wasn't somebody getting a sort of very spot on, uh, kill your darlings, uh, kill off your most likable characters or something. Um, yeah. Uh, you know, time passed, um, um, you know, uh, their marriage dissolved and decades passed and things changed and they're really changed for, uh, uh, for Dean. He had cancer and, and, uh, but before he dies, he would like to see ed one more time. Unfortunately, that message is not conveyed to Ady by Dean, but by Roy. And we know that Roy wants to see ed again as well. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:21:11 So how do you, as a, as a creative writer, forming character and forming plot and developing subplot, which you do a lot, we haven't even touched on that probably won't get time for it, but, uh, w you know, what made you choose to, um, to pull Dean out of, out of the text and to leave her alone with, with Roy and, and, uh, the, uh, an awful husband that she married and stays with for awhile?
Speaker 4 00:21:44 Yeah. Uh, I, yeah, I'm not exactly sure. It might've been that I was, uh, I know that I caught on at some point that I was doing some, some twinning in the structure of the novel as well. Uh, and in that the different sections of the novel sort of mirror, another section. So, um, in the first section, uh, right up start, uh, ed is left alone with Roy and Dean has facilitated that, um, not anything conscious, he fell ill and wasn't able to make the journey with, with Dean that was expected. So maybe it just seemed like, uh, uh, a nice way to carry on something in the next section. So now once again, she's going to be alone with Roy because Dean is, is ill. Um, but you know, um, you, you said early on that, that Roy and in his awful way sometimes, uh, loves ed. And I believe that's true. And I believe that ed has some feelings for Roy as well, but they're not the kinds of feelings that he has for her. And, and they just cannot communicate that to each other. They come a little closer. I think they come closer, uh, as the novel goes on.
Speaker 3 00:23:12 Yeah. He, uh, he does ask her again, you know, if they, they should run away together and that whole issue of running away, where are you going to run to? And what do you mean? And they, they end up going to Bismark where you come from originally. And, uh, you, um, you, you use land and landscape and, you know, massive distances that we have out here in the west part of the United States. And, um, you know, it's almost like those distances are somehow a metaphor for the distance between the, the, and Roy, I seem like they're so far apart and could never, never come together.
Speaker 4 00:23:52 Very nice.
Speaker 3 00:23:54 Very nice. Okay. So w w what about the places that you produce? Are they important to you in the book? Or are you just places that, uh, convenient
Speaker 4 00:24:08 A little bit of both. I mean, uh, so I'm, I'm, I'm sort of working territory that I've covered before. And I feel as though I, I know the terrain and I know something about the kinds of communities and the kinds of people who live in those communities in that part of the world. Um, and, and, um, uh, so I feel as though I can, uh, write about, uh, uh, about them with some, uh, believability, some authenticity. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 3 00:24:38 Certainly that is
Speaker 4 00:24:39 A part of the world that people have left also. I mean, uh, there are so many communities, um, in Perri communities that have, that have emptied out over the years.
Speaker 3 00:24:51 Oh my God. Um,
Speaker 4 00:24:52 Bismarck's and the Fargo's, and, uh, in some of the population so-called population centers have done pretty well, but the small towns have often suffered.
Speaker 3 00:25:03 Yeah. I'm headed up to a heading owner in a, uh, in a couple of weeks, which is, which is literally dying. And then outside of heading the, you probably know that that whole area, uh, places, uh, uh, are just completely emptying out and bizarreness, and there's just nobody there anymore. It's a ghost town. And, uh, you know, it's something about your work and also, um, Hanif and, uh, uh, other folks that write about the area that haunts me and not being a city boy from, from London, it's such, such a contrast me to go out there and see these massive open spaces. And, uh, you, you do a great job of hauling all that together. It's just really quite amazing. I've only got about a, um, a minute left here. Tell us a little bit about how let him go is, is going as a film. I think you were, you were on the show with that when it was a novel before it was, it was taken into a film how's that affected your writing as it affected anything in your life, having that done, having that filmed.
Speaker 4 00:26:09 Um, well, they, they, they did pay me, um, yeah, I don't know that it's made a tremendous difference. Um, you know, I, I, I don't think I write any differently. Um, um, I was very fortunate that, that, uh, somebody with talent and vision pulls that book off the shelf and, and read it and said, oh, I think, I think I could make a movie show on this. And that was Tom bazooka who wrote the screenplay and, and directed the film. Uh, so I was really lucky. Um, but beyond that, you know what I love, I like movies. I like good movies. And so I enjoyed watching that. I thought it was a good movie. I, I, by the time it w it, it appeared on the screen. Um, I, I didn't have any sort of proprietary interest anymore. Um, I did my thing, which was to write a book and then Tom bazooka did his thing, which was to make a movie.
Speaker 3 00:27:08 Well, I don't think you were lucky. I think you made your own luck there. And I think this would make a good movie too. And I'm really well done with all of this. Your you're you're, um, watching your career and it's just blossoming and you're doing such a fabulous job. You're a great human is what you've done with this job. This is a book that every man should read women too, but every man should read this. Yeah, no. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:27:32 I I'm. I'm just so, uh, thank you very much for that. I, you know, there are a lot of different ways that this book has been talked about, but nobody has ever addressed it in that way. And, um, yes, I really appreciate that. Thank you.
Speaker 3 00:27:46 Good. Well, I appreciate your work. Keep it coming. Can't wait to have the next one. All right. I'll do my best. All right. Great to see you again, Larry. And, um, we'll talk soon. Thanks for being back on, right on radio.
Speaker 4 00:28:01 You're welcome. Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 3 00:28:03 And now this
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Speaker 2 00:29:32 Today, I'm talking with Caleb Scharf. He's a renown astrobiologists and the award winning author for known works like the zoomable universe and the Copernicus complex sharp takes our understanding of the universe and human trajectory to the next level, with his new book, the ascent of information books, bits, genes, machines, and lives on ending algorithm. Welcome to write on radio. Thank
Speaker 7 00:29:53 You for having me.
Speaker 2 00:29:54 So, uh, just for our audience to get an idea of what this is about, this work is focused on the peculiar nature of humans, generating information, not just in the form of books or electronic media, but their means like language and even how physical environments operate as a function of an extended mind. I was curious though, was it really your trip to Shakespeare's gray, that acted as a catalyst for thinking about the variety of form information takes?
Speaker 7 00:30:20 I, you know, in retrospect it was at the time I didn't quite make the connection, but I do remember, uh, you know, I went with my family. We spent a day in Stratford upon Avon in England, birthplace of Shakespeare. And just by the end of the day, just thinking, wow, everything we did today is because this person wrote some things. And that's that, that information that those books and plays have persisted through time. So a whole day a behavior and actions would sort of dictated by that isn't that kind of strange. And then later I came back to that when I started thinking about these ideas of all of the information that we generate as a species and realizing, okay, that's a good example of one particular element of this, this larger thing. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:31:12 You can see a newborn as far as I know in the book. And I think I'm gonna say this, right. Is it data own? Yes, that's right.
Speaker 7 00:31:17 The data,
Speaker 2 00:31:19 What? Okay, so would this be the proper definition of the word, the toll, some of information we carry inside and outside ourselves as a, as a race, as a, as a human race?
Speaker 7 00:31:29 Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that's pretty much it it's the, yeah, it's the information that we, we generate. Some of it is built into the world, around us, in our books and, uh, language, you know, electronic devices. But yeah, some of it is also temporarily held in the electric chemical signals in our brain, but none of it is encoded in our DNA. None of it can be inherited. I can't pass on my genes for, you know, Shakespeare's plays to someone else. So it, but it persists through time with us, nonetheless. So is this sort of externalized information? We'll think that data, oh, that co-exists with us.
Speaker 2 00:32:10 So you mentioned books. I work in publishing and there's a great line that I think summarizes very well. How much I love the bookmaking process. It's the architecture of a book is a manifestation of an idea, but also maybe wonder, are there limitations to the data own to conceptualize all information or the manifestation of an idea?
Speaker 7 00:32:31 That's a really good question. Yeah. So, you know, what's so interesting about this. If you look at the world through lens is you start to think, well, everything has an informational basis. So you mentioned the structure of a book. So what is a book? It's a paper book. It has this cover has these pages. They're shaped a certain way. They're rectangular, they're bound together and so on. And they're all in service of presenting these symbols to your human eyes for you to interpret. But in that sense, there is information describing the nature of a book. And so the book itself is informational in its fundamental structure. And so you look around the world, uh, you know, I find myself doing this increasingly after having written the book and I'll pick up a pencil and I think, oh, wow. You know, so someone had to design a pencil somewhere. There's probably written instructions for the factory to make the pencils, you know, everything ultimately seems to be informational in nature, which other people have thought about. But until you really think about it yourself, you, you tend to ignore.
Speaker 2 00:33:46 Let's talk about a little bit, this process here of like making a book, for example, words on physical paper are still the primary means we feed our global appetite for written material books. You write are surprisingly demanding, little things. I was wanting to talk about that. The demands of the, the kind of energy that it takes to produce a book still today.
Speaker 7 00:34:08 Yeah. So one of the kind of deep scientific dives I take him in my book is just understand what's necessary to create the data over and all of this information around us and books are interesting. So books they're physical. So we have to make paper and manufacturing paper is pretty energetically demanding. So a sheet, a single sheet of reasonable quality paper, energetically the burden on as a species it's roughly equivalent to combusting five grams of high quality cult. And then you also have to think about while growing the trees and the first plates nurturing those treats. And then you have to think about that the inks that are used to generate the letters on, um, I'm sorry, did you hear a ping there? That was my machine. I heard
Speaker 2 00:34:57 I could probably edit out those.
Speaker 7 00:35:00 Um, yeah, so the physical production of books is, uh, is a big energetic burden on our species. And we make a lot of books, uh, who we, I think in the U S alone, there's something like 600 million to 700 million books printed there for year. And, but the interesting thing is the burden. Doesn't just stop there. You might think that once you have a book in your hands while it's not placing any further burden on the world, right, it's kind of this thing, but think about your interaction with a book, you have to pick it up, right? Well that act of picking up a book, moving something, maybe a meter also through, through the air takes energy, it's energy from your muscles, but you have to metabolize to, to generate that energy and salt. And so you're one of the little, uh, exercise that I do in the book is actually to ask, you know, how much energy have human arms expended in the reading of Shakespeare's plays across the last 400 years. And, you know, you can kind of approximate this. And it turns out to be the equivalent of combusting, perhaps hundreds of thousands of tons of coal, just to pick up a book, put it on the shelf, take it down from the shelf, open it and it, and then you've got the neurons firing that's using energy and so on. And so on. So the more you look at it, the more sort of overwhelming the sort of burden of information becomes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:36:26 And for large repositories of information, it also requires incredible amounts of energy to maintain and curate that information. I was wondering you talk about the energetic burden of trying to do that kind of work.
Speaker 7 00:36:40 Yeah. Well, it's our books, physical books of course have an energetic burden, but more than that, today is information held electronically. And not only is the quantity of information growing exponentially, there is an increasing energy burden to support it. So the amount of data that we produce every day now is every single day, we produce more new data, more new information than the equivalent of every word ever spoken by every human being who ever lived, which is pretty astonishing. And that takes resources. You have to build machines to hold that data, your flash drive, your hard drives your cloud servers and so on. And if you look at the figures on this and you look at the energy burden of that, some projections suggest that by 2040, so less than 20 years time from today, that electricity requirements for supporting all of our cloud servers and our smart phones and all of that stuff will exceed the total amount of electrical power that we generate as a global species today for everything.
Speaker 7 00:37:54 Now we can try to be more and more efficient and people are aware of this issue. People work in computer science and data are aware of this issues that we try to make more efficient processes, try to make more efficient data, serving systems and structures. But it seems that every time we do that, the amount of data we're interested in expands, again, I, we were the, there was exponential growth in the amount of data and information we're trying to support. So it's not clear that we're going to Dodge that particular bullet. Uh, and I don't know exactly what's going to happen. We may find a way to become sufficiently efficient, or we may a way to start rationing our information in the sense that so much information today, arguably has very little utility, you know, with theirs and it gets stored and it gets, you know, it's part of the burden. So all the pictures of, you know, our favorite pets or what we had for lunch, that's an informational, but, and that has to be implemented somewhere. It's not, you know, for us, it's just sort of Ethereum, but it actually has to be built into the world. And that takes energy. So maybe we're going to have to be better about, you know, not keeping everything all the time, but also kind of, you know, what we, what we do to add to this informational burden. But it is pretty shocking.
Speaker 2 00:39:21 I was going to ask you this later in the interview, but I think if this is a good time to ask about it now, um, there's an article I came across a few weeks ago. It was from a, it's a speculation from a Portsmouth physicist. Melvin Bob says he believes digital digital information will account for half of Earth's mass maintenance growth, impossible sustained by the year 22,500, he believes that we should define information as a new form of matter. I was curious to know your thoughts about this.
Speaker 7 00:39:49 Yeah. It was be a little bit familiar with that work. It's a really interesting point that is made that. Yeah. So the, the information that lives in the world, you know, you can consider it to have mass because it is a restructuring of matter. Every time, a bit is flipped, you're restructuring matter somehow. And so you can look at that as, as a mass and yes, the projection is that that mass will be growing, growing, become, uh, comparable to the entire mass of the biosphere. I think for me, um, you know, information it's already there in physics and computer science, people have been talking about information for a long time because it's deeply connected to an area of physical thermodynamics and to do with stuff like entropy, which we, we use the word entropy when often we're talking about disorder in the world. And it turns out that entropy and information are intimately related, whether or not thinking of information in terms of the mass that represents is quite the right thing to do. I'm not sure, but I definitely do believe that information is a quality of the natural world. It's a quality of the universe. It's not exclusive to us. I mean, biological organisms are based on information. Genes are informational in nature. And so it's something we probably should bring into our, uh, dictionary or physics or dictionary for describing the world much. Like we use energy and entropy and speed and mass. These are all qualities of the world. Information is another quality of the world that we, we probably ought to be thinking about a little bit more.
Speaker 2 00:41:37 So I think this is a good time to ask you then, uh, several thinkers have raised this question of whether information itself is the fundamental currency of the universe. I was you're one of you explain a little, uh, the basis for this reasoning.
Speaker 7 00:41:52 Yeah. So this actually goes to some pretty deep, fundamental physics than our understanding of the nature of reality. And it goes to quantum mechanics. In fact, and quantum mechanics describes the way the world works at very small scales, particularly at the scale of atoms and molecules. And as many people will have heard your quantum physics tells us that the fundamental nature reality is weird. It's kind of fuzzy and uncertain and things like particles aren't really particles until we observe them until we interact with them or something interacts with it. They exist in a sort of superposition of fuzzy probabilities. Maybe something is over there, maybe it's over there. It's not until you look that it kind of snaps to attention and you localize it in that sense. People have long speculated. The information is a part of that process when you interact with something and it suddenly is no longer a fuzzy probabilistic thing. It snaps to attention as a politics will, or as an atom or molecule, that's kind of like an informational process. It's asking a question of the world, where are you? And there's an answer that comes back. And so that suggests that information, maybe the thing beneath everything we see that everything ultimately comes down to a series of, yes, no questions or one or zero questions, uh, which is really mind blowing and fascinating.
Speaker 2 00:43:29 I have my notes here, which I really liked. There's a, there's a phrase you have in the book saying that our universe is a participatory universe.
Speaker 7 00:43:37 Yeah. So this is an idea that actually goes back to very famous physicist, John Wheeler, uh, who also coined the term black hole incidentally, it was re helped, helped coin that, that term. Yeah. He used this terminology of a participatory universe that in the end, his idea was again, based in quantum physics that arguably nothing really matters or exists until it's interacted with until it's observed until there's an exchange of information. And he also has a beautiful example of how a way to think about this is actually a really nice game you can play with, with friends. So we've heard of 20 questions the game, well, he has this description, a thing called negative 20 questions where nobody has really decided on what the answer is. But every time a question is asked a yes, no, is it a human? Does it have legs? You know, is it this color?
Speaker 7 00:44:35 And the response comes back. Anyone who answers has to answer in a way that is consistent with all previous answers, but nobody has as a whole agreed on what the answer is. So if you play that game, the remarkable thing is eventually you'll converge on some answer you'll converge on, oh, it was a puppy, oh, it was a cup of coffee. And nobody had fully agreed ahead of time on what that would be. But if every answer to every question is consistent with the previous ones, you will eventually convert. So that's kind of an example of how something sort of snaps into being, even though the wasn't announced at the outset, it was a series of participatory decisions that led you to that answer, which is also kind of mind blowing
Speaker 2 00:45:25 Demonstrates that reality almost builds itself based off the information. It kind of generates within itself.
Speaker 7 00:45:31 Exactly. It's the interaction between things, whatever those are, that, that give those things, their quality, because if they are not interacting, then it's meaningless to talk about the quality of anything.
Speaker 2 00:45:45 Let's take a step back here. There's a subject I thought was really interesting that you touch on in the book. I was wondering if you could talk about the potential energy demands that are going to come with cryptocurrencies as become more commonplace. And
Speaker 7 00:46:00 Yeah, I mean, this is obviously high on people's minds. And I, in the news recently, Elon Musk has even stated that, you know, Tesla, which has a certain amount of Bitcoin, won't utilize that until Bitcoin servers become more energy efficient until they become carbon neutral. So cryptocurrency is one example of a really extraordinary evolutionary development in our external information in our data own that is incredibly energy intensive. So cryptocurrency rests on this technique called the blockchain, which is a little complicated to explain, but it's essentially a way of making it very, very hard to subvert data. It's very hard to change stuff it's to do with cryptography. So stuff can be encrypted, but it's more about making it almost impossible to alter stuff to fake things, right? Turn currency would be great if I could forge currency. Well, crypto currency is incredibly difficult to forge because it would require almost an infinite amount of computing time and effort to forge the currency, but to construct the currency in the first place. And the currency is in the form of these complex algorithmic bundles of data. If you will, to construct those bundles of data that are very immune to being forged or altered, takes a amount of computing energy and type so much. So that right now, by some estimates, a currency like Bitcoin is actually already using up as much electrical power as the entire nation of Ireland generates.
Speaker 7 00:47:47 And it's because people want that currency. And one way you can get some of the currency is by doing what's called mining and mining is essentially solving a series of cryptographic puzzles in order to generate new currency, to build those sort of very resilient data packages. It's a lot of sort of computational chugging to do that. And that's why people are investing in it, but it means that it's one reason it's hard to buy certain kinds of, uh, microprocessors these days, graphic processing units, because they're being bought up by people who are generating cryptocurrency in order to get rich off of it, right? That's a really extraordinary development and it's so energy demanding that in a sense, we have to hope the cryptocurrency doesn't grow further because if cryptocurrency became the sole currency of our species, that could be very problematic in terms of the energy resources that would have to be devoted to it.
Speaker 2 00:48:46 I want to, I'm going to ask this question out. So I want to make sure we have enough time for you to respond to this. I never was aware of this before reading your book. I want you to discuss this study that are disputed a study called the artificial life or a life. What is it? What was your involvement? You went to, I think Tokyo for a group of people to discuss this, please explain it to me.
Speaker 7 00:49:08 Yeah. Not so many people have heard about artificial life. Uh, so this is a field it's been shortened to a life, uh, that really started out. I mean, arguably it started a long time ago when people started asking whether they could build simulacra of living things. And can you build a mechanical animal that essentially behaves and the way as a real animal thoughts. And then that developed over time into really the 1980s and 1990s, where people started using computers to see if they could generate in software, essentially digital organisms. So living systems, but built in software because we can look at the world and say, well, we sort of think we understand how cells work and we understand how genes work and inheritance. So can we build little software heats that have the equivalent of genes and that can reproduce and can see natural selection taking place can actually undergo Darwinian evolution.
Speaker 7 00:50:14 And that was the field of, or is the field of artificial life. Like the quant yachts placed on the question of, can we construct things in the world that are entirely equivalent to biological life? And it's a really interesting field. It has attracted some fantastic thinkers and some also some kind of strange and interesting people to it because it's kind of out there. The remarkable thing is though some of the work in a life artificial life over the years has actually ended up helping build our present world of machine learning and AI. Some of these ideas about artificial neural networks in software come out of thinking in a life and a life continues as a field, but it, you know, it hasn't yet succeeded and that's one of the big puzzles, but also one of the fascinating things about it, it turned out after initial enthusiasm.
Speaker 7 00:51:11 It wasn't easy to do this, right. You, you know, life didn't suddenly spring up in your computer program. You got things that were very interesting. Um, and entities that would do things like swarm like birds swarm or undergo a kind of genetic evolution, but it never was. Nobody was ever able to produce something that took off in the way that life on earth has taken off. And so it's a, it's a very cool and interesting field I've been involved in it. So peripherally through various projects in astrobiology, which is my field of study and the anthropologist about looking for life in the universe, but also understanding what life is
Speaker 2 00:52:11 You're listening to right on radio on cafe 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
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