Martin Rees

I mean, what is the equivalent of one more pop above that? No words for it.

You know, Martin Rees did a very poetic description of it in his Worthy Successor episode, but like unbearable expanse of complexity, etc.

We can't imagine that that's all stuff we can just imagine now.

Oh, surely it'll be made of GPUs and Guanyin.

That's the thing that the scientifically rational people who want to deny the universality of computation leap to.

They say, well, Martin Rees argues this way.

I think Roger Penrose argues this way as well, that it can't be true because future theories are going to show that it can't be true, that the brain is just a computer and that kind of thing.

What it's doing is computation.

That's interesting.

And I think the mathematician guy, is his name Lord Rees? Is that him? He was also, a lot of these people, right, in the British public intellectual establishment, they're also part of the British intelligence, right? And I don't think that makes all these people necessarily bad.

The problem is that a lot of these people thought in the Cold War they were really fighting Soviets.

I don't think that's true about Lord Rothschild.

And it-- you don't have to be one of these tech bros to think that there's something to that either.

So to give a, a different example, Martin Rees, Lord Rees, a very prominent astrophysicist, former president of The Royal Society, leading futurist in Britain, made a similar kind of argument, but with a different, I guess, ethical and political basis.

He suggested that states shouldn't be investing huge amounts of money into particularly manned space flight, that it's a waste of money.

The resources would be better spent dealing with issues of inequality, of poverty.

Wells, or is there a new, never mind counterculture, but culture, popular culture? Is it actually now Star Wars and Star Trek? Is there a literature around this? Is there another set of cultural ideas, which is the thing that's informing this, or does it have its roots in the roots of transhumanism?

It will vary individual to individual.

So for example, when I interviewed Martin Rees, I asked him about what, if any, science fiction he read, and the first person he mentioned was Olaf Stapledon.

Grew up reading that kind of thing.

Um, and the living, thriving process, getting more access to nature, getting more expanded powers and experience in more myriad forms, knitting into each other and expanding, I suspect would bubble into things wholly beyond myself.

Martin Rees, when he was on "Worthy Successor", you know, he ran the Royal Society or whatever is the, whatever their big dog title is, you know, uh, director or what have you, I forget.

Um, Re- Rees, you know, f- famed kind of, um, uh, cosmologist, et cetera, um, he, he had mentioned the win condition would be I would hope for wildly thriving, diverse e-expansion of sort of living stuff, entities, processes, et cetera, as far beyond I as I am beyond like a nematode, and maybe I would hope that, like, good conscious experience is part of that 'cause that feels like something that's relevant.

But, like, that would sort of be what a win would ultimately look like in the longer term, right? He's not saying, "Let's kill humans tomorrow." Um, and, and again, I don't think he or I feel like pushing a button and having AI take over today will lead in any way to that direction.

Like, I'm a little bit attached to it." Some of them have a wistfulness.

Some of them are like, "Well, at a, at a certain far enough time horizon, you know." Like Henry Shevlin was kind of like there was some wistful.

Martin Rees though wasn't really that wistful, but it wasn't malicious either.

You know? It wasn't like, "Yeah, and I hope they burn." You know, it wasn't any of that.

The original Longitude Prize was set up with the Astronomer Royal.

So we've also set it up 300 years later with the new Astronomer Royal, who was the then Lord Martin Rees.

And we had a big campaign on the BBC.

as to what should be the new equivalent problem that we could get innovators all around the world to tackle.

We always start...

We have on, you know, we just had on Martin Rees, Lord Martin Rees last week, and he, uh, spoke about his book.

And we always do a scenario called Judging Books by Their Covers, where we look at the cover of your book, and we judge it, and, and how did you come up with the name, and hopefully entice, you know, a, a, a tenfold increase in book sales instantaneously.

[laughs]

In- indeed, uh, uh, uh, uh, Roger Penrose is, is very well known, uh, to that, and he was, of course, a, a collaborator of, uh, of Steve Hawkins, who was my, my neighbor in, in Cambridge.

So, uh, and actually I had, um, a lunch with Martin Rees, uh-

Oh, wow

... yesterday, who was another one-

So I am like you in the sense that I don't-- it's, it doesn't matter if this is a simulation, because you can never take away that conscious experience.

And I strongly hope that that is unique, because if we were able to compute it, you know, we would get into that endless chain of simulation until the entropy comes to a halt and we have another singularity moment for a big crunch, and it all starts over again, I guess.

So, so it's interesting you should say that because the, uh, conversation I had with Martin Rees and, uh, my good friend Carlos Frenk, who I did my, uh, PhD with at King's College in Cambridge, he has become one of the foremost, uh, uh, cosmologists.

And, uh, he is very well known for his, uh, cold dark matter theory.

Is

Martin Rees at Oxford? I don't know, I'm not sure.

He's very good.

He's my absolute favourite, powerful man of academia.

I don't have the tools.

But since he was a mathematician and a scientist, he felt, "Well, maybe I can investigate those things in an area where I have some tools to understand it." And he stumbles over this book by Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers, a non-Christian, but a leading astronomer in England.

And he is presenting, Martin Rees is presenting the latest finding within cosmology.

And this is an area that Charles can understand.

And he says, "And so it is that I read Just Six Numbers and came away thinking that I had no choice.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Well, uh, it seems to been a real rebirth too of the, the teleological argument, the argument from design, with, uh, writers like St- Stephen Meyer, uh, who you've, you've talked about, and Martin Rees as well.