remain free of dirt dust and splinters which could of course destroy the engine then it is the turn of the camshaft components when it is fully assembled the shaft will be 6 meters long and weigh 400 kilograms to ensure that everything fits together the mechanics work with liquid nitrogen they sink dozens of small guide pins in a nitrogen bath with a temperature of minus 198 degrees Celsius the liquid gas chills the metal pins and makes them contract the super-cold guide pins can be tapped into the flange of the camshaft segment


with ease as they heat up they expand to give a really firm fit guide connections have to be greased and running surfaces oiled the men then push the camshaft into the 6 metre long channel section by section making sure nothing gets tilted a bit lower okay the next babies like then you'll see it coming down a bit more the initial phase is completed the guide neck is now in the channel the men slowly push it in further once again this is precision work there is ZERO room for error should something tilt the engine would be blocked up again optimal

Exceptional Engineering | Mega Diesel Engine | Free Documentary


just hold it like that when the three segments have been bolted together the two fitters carefully push the unwieldy component through the engine the camshaft is made of surface hardened steel and will not be replaced throughout the entire life of the engine after two days the work at station 1 is completed one of the 25 mega diesel engines manufactured here each year is transported to the next station by overhead gantry the rotary station is even bigger than the first station here fitters will turn and wheel the Colossus


several times and even turn it upside down the crankcase is the biggest component of the mega diesel engine now the second biggest is added the gigantic crankshaft six meters long and weighing six thousand kilograms it is the crucial element at the heart of the engine [Music] operating at full speed the heavy crankshaft will rotate at a staggering twenty revolutions per second [Music] for installation of the crankshaft the engine has to be turned upside down the fitters wheel the cage suspended from the overhead gantry the


huge chef now moves towards the crankcase once again every millimeter counts very slowly six tons of high-grade metal are approaching the interior of the engine if the component were to slough the irreparable damage would be caused [Music] after 20 minutes the difficult task is completed the fitters now turn the huge frame a few more degrees to gain better access to the engines inlets over the next few hours they will install 20 of these cylinder Pistons later the entire combustion process will take place in


the power units as they are known each power unit has a capacity of 17.5 litres and is basically an independent single cylinder engine the workshop also contains the pre assembly site for the power units before assembly of the cylinders can get underway the huge connecting rods have to be measured this includes measuring the bearing shells because if the bearing shells are too small this could damage the crankshaft all the measurements are recorded exactly to ensure precise positioning then the war can begin the fitters first prepare the


Pistons each of which has a diameter of 27 centimeters weighing 100 kilograms each con rod can only be moved with a crane the con rod is carefully lowered into the piston the retaining bolt is then slid into place it takes a quarter of an hour to install the first of 20 Pistons next the focus is on the complex cylinder head on the rotary table the fitter inserts four bolts and secures the cylinder liner with another 24 bolts to guarantee precision they are tightened automatically by a machine the process is fully automated and monitored


to ensure that I haven't forgotten the bolt and that every bolt has the right torque the computer determines the next operation and records every action by the fitter now the piston together with the con rod is introduced carefully and slowly into the cylinder a single error would cause considerable damage later 20 of these power units will make the 16 crankshaft rotate at a speed of 1,150 revolutions a minute a final components and assembly will be complete this is part of the exhaust the power unit weighs 750 kilograms in future it


will have to withstand a great deal the ignition phase forces the piston downwards turning vertical motion into the circular motion of the crankshaft the crankcase is turned once more and again the overhead gantry comes into action as it brings up the power unit [Music] the men slowly lower the cylinder unit into the engine in its interior the connecting rod grips the crankshaft with millimeter accuracy the team installed 20 power units in one day the con rods are provisionally secured with white dummies because the engine will be


turned once again and nothing must be allowed to shift its position the fitters reposition the engine block in order to install the 20 bearing shells in its underside the shell weighs 25 kilograms and is pushed on to the bolts of a con rod later it is this area that will have to withstand the greatest forces the up and down motion of the piston causes the crank shaft to rotate 20 times a second the forces involved are extreme and all the components will have to withstand them for many years a special procedure


is followed to secure the con rod the men equipped the bolt with a hydraulic clamping cylinder they then attached oil pressure lines [Music] the hydraulic system forces the bolt apart at a pressure of 1,600 bar now the nut can be screwed on and the pressure reduced again the threads of bolt and nut are pulled together in a solid link installation of the power units is now finished along with the preliminary work on the fuel lines and the exhaust and cooling systems the gantry transports the engine block on to station 3 where a


two-man team focus on the gear train here it is about to be sealed with a cover but beforehand the main coat the edges with a special sealing compound [Music] weighing 200 kilograms the cover is now attached it is secured with dozens of bolts in the years ahead the gear train will not be opened again depending on its application the mega diesel engine will have a service life of up to 35 years only then will maintenance be required back to the Mediterranean and put Salah Harbor on Sicily where the high speed ferry jean de la Villette is


birthed three levels below deck a team is working against the clock the men have eight hours in which to replace two power units from one of the four diesel engines the maintenance work can only be carried out by specialists while the covering is being removed at the top one of the men crawls under the still warm engine to drain the cooling liquid he then opens the heavy covers to gain access to the interior of the engine above him two mechanics are loosening the bolts on the cylinder unit so far everything is going according to plan


a crucial moment the power unit has to be taken out the fitter has to open the eye of the connecting rod which encloses the crankshaft the nuts can only be loosened with a hydraulic bolt tensioning cylinder now pressure of up to 1,600 bars applied through hoses to ensure that all the bolts are loosened the four main bolts on the upper side of the power unit are also loosened with the help of the hydraulic system finally the power unit is free using nothing more than a pulley and their own strength the men maneuver the power unit


out of the crankcase centimeter by centimeter 750 kilograms make their way upwards working at a temperature of 50 degrees Celsius the men now all the unit through the engine room until it is under the service hatch where the hook from the small truck mounted crane on deck is already waiting after three hours the first power unit is taken aloft care is still vital because the component is by no means scrapped it will be given a complete overhaul and at some time or other be installed in another series 8000 mega diesel engine


today the part is first placed in a special transport frame but why did it actually need to be replaced it is suspected that because of minut cracks in the cylinder head cooling water was able to get into the combustion chamber but only examination under a microscope will provide exact information in flicks half and on lake constance mt you technicians have made good progress the mega diesel engine is now being fitted with a turbocharger group a complex component the supercharger group gives the engine it's impressive height of 3 meters 50


comprised of several thousand separate parts the turbochargers are responsible for a huge increase in the performance of the marine diesel engine every year fitter Tobias Haider assembles 25 such turbochargers for series 8000 engines the purpose of the turbocharger is to increase the oxygen content of the combustion chamber this is the intake for the exhaust gases here we have the blade wheel which can rotate here exhaust gases flow out again and on this side drive the blade wheel this is where the air is then drawn in here it is


compressed and here it enters the intercooler 40,000 revs per minute and the boost pressure the four and a half bar compared with two and a half to 3 bar for a car tire lyta needs about a week to assemble the two-ton turbocharger today he's sealing the housing airtight to prevent any toxic exhaust fumes getting into the machine room later the turbocharger group is then transported by overhead gantry to station five now the turbocharger can be attached to the engine block two men connect apart with the exhaust circuit


the series 8000 mega diesel engine now weighs around 40 tons the clutches then flange mounted the fitters maneuver the huge part to the end of the crankshaft and once again they need special tools the 15 this is the cylinder with which the clutch flange will later be pushed to the back [Music] here to the components have to expand hoses ensure a high oil pressure of 1500 bar [Music] the flange expands and little by little the clutch moves on to the shaft two minutes later the men release the pressure again the connection is solid


the second part of the clutch is now bolted on above all the giant torque damper is designed to prevent the clutch breaking off when the mega diesel engine enters operation once again in fleet lease often it's a case of ready for takeoff then the overhead gantry transports the massive engine through the workshop it will now be lowered on to the mega diesel engines oil pan the 40-ton Colossus is placed securely on six stilts the oil pan is filled with two-thirds of maximum capacity that's 1600 liters which is the volume


pumped through the engine twice every minute with total precision a hydraulic hoist raises the sump to be bolted on to more in the middle should be fine the fleet leaks off an engine plant all the tasks for the day have been completed but on Sicily there is still a lot to be done the high speed ferry jean de la Villette is still birthed at the key side the maintenance team on board the catamaran have got a tough job in their hands to power units need to be replaced and the men now have only six hours to install


them the replacement unit which has been given a complete overhaul is lowered into the machine room through the service hatch the seven-man team are all specialists who have been specifically trained for this engine series slowly they lower the 750 kilogram part in the crankcase tough manual work with the help of a pulley and the confines of the machine room there is no space for an automatic ceiling crane the con rod cover then makes its descent since it weighs only 25 kilograms it is no problem for the mechanics skillful hands easily slip the


cover on to the threaded bolts to nuts and the job is done the team don't talk much each man knows what he has to do only in this way will they be able to meet their deadline the next step is to get the injector ready it has to be cleaned greased and have new seals fitted on the cylinder head the tolerance of the rocker arms and the valves also has to be reset each feeler gauge has a specific thickness enabling the mechanic to adjust the valve clearance exactly [Music] the cover is put on and the men have reached the halfway stage the first of


the two power units has been replaced the teams still have four hours for the repeat procedure removing the cylinder unit lifting it on deck with the crane and packing it safely for transport the new power unit is then lowered into the machine room installed bolted greased and adjusted all the men can do now is hope that the engine will spring to life immediately the fitters are still working but the ship's crew are already closing the maintenance hatch the first trucks will soon be driven on board everything is


still going to plan but will the overhauled engines start up [Music] at MTU on lake constance the new engine block is again being transported by crane through the workshop in the meantime the mega diesel engine has become even heavier just before its final assembly station it now weighs nearly 48 tons at station six the fitters focus on the electronic system and on pumps and lines of all kinds the series 8,000 marine diesel engine is a complex structure of circulation lines for fuel oil air and exhaust fumes


several hundred meters of copper pipes tubes cables and hoses have been installed in and on the engine two thousand liters of diesel fuel per hour and hundreds of cubic meters of air in exhaust gases along with three thousand liters of oil every minute will flow through the engine all the lines are special home and custom-made products like the pipe for the sea water cooling system the fitter assembles the separate elements of the coiled pipe in a gauge anything that's slightly out is ground to size so that it fits with millimeter


precision [Music] this is I this site needs to fit now it fits first of all a welder joins the various sections loosely together they're made of a very special material it's a cute print achill ferrous alloy the ship's engine is exposed to salt water but that can't affect this pipe welding curved sections while the workpiece is turning is a big challenge for any welder the seam has to be absolutely watertight if any sea water got into the engine it would destroy it the final pipe for the engine block is now ready it has been a long road over


the last five weeks around 20,000 parts have been attached to the crankcase the result is an extra-large marine diesel engine made in Germany once again the team of 35 fitters has done a great job but one thing is still missing the test run no engine leaves the plant without having been tested there are 46 test benches here and our mega diesel engine from series 8000 is placed on the biggest we start up the engine with an air starter that operates with 40 bar it drives the flywheel which causes the engine to start up before it


started immortal finally the big moment comes the mega diesel engine springs to life for the first time at the control console hold on Luthor and a colleague increased the speed the engine's performance is measured with the help of a water break attached to its transmission the water break has a paddle wheel which rotates in the water creating an artificial resistance [Music] after half an hour it is clear that the engine has passed the test it functions flawlessly in the hull of the Jean de la Villette ferry still birthed in Sicily another


diesel engine of the same type still has to pass its test a team of fitters had just eight hours in which to replace the heart of the engine the two power units with cars and trucks now queued up in front of the ferries loading ramp the engine just has to start up otherwise well that doesn't bear thinking about no way but in fact the engine won't start so the fitters have to check all the lines and try again [Applause] success the engine is running again and to the ears of the fitters the deafening noise sounds like music the pitstop has


taken 8 hours and cost thousands of euros but the high speed ferry is now ready once again to make the crossing to Malta the ship's engineer just has to give the green light then the team of fitters can call it a day the diesel engine can now look forward to a long service life these engines run virtually forever and ever under typical conditions we're talking about 70 mm to operating hours after that the engines are taken out and checked for wear and if everything is okay they are reassembled and put back into service


it's already dark when the Jean de la Villette reaches malta its engine is working perfectly after performing a final skillful turn in the narrow Basin the captain reverses the ship alongside the key [Music] the high-speed catamaran will again be able to cross the Mediterranean three times a day taking cars and trucks boots and tourists for Malta to Sicily and back in record time and reliably thanks to four mega diesel engines in its hull power made in Germany [Music] by lake constance the brand new engine has passed its test with flying colors


now the 7 meter long Colossus is heading for the wash unit the biggest of its kind far and wide you have molecules every large engine is washed here on average the procedure takes five hours at a temperature of 70 degrees the engine is washed with the detergent and then dried for paint spraying it's a really tough job clad in a heavy protective suit the man with the high-pressure cleaner has to cope with heat noise and damp after five hours the engine is spotless above all it is free from grease essential if it is to be sprayed later


with a special type of paint the roughly one thousand cubic meters of water that are used will be treated and recycled [Music] prior to paint spraying parts of the engine are masked the sensitive cables and pipes must be kept free of the paint which could change their thermal and electrical properties finally the engine has given its coat this too is a process that takes time the Motown big slice we apply two coats first a primer then it's left to dry for about four hours then we apply a thick coat which also


takes about four hours to dry it's a lot of work for the two paint sprayers who go through 200 leaders of paints including drying time the mega diesel engines spend 16 hours in the cabin now it is ready the colossus took five weeks to manufacture and will power a vessel for several years the series 8000 mega diesel engine has a capacity of 350 liters and an output of thirteen thousand six hundred horsepower total cost the lower end of a scale between 1 and 10 million euros well packed the engine is ready for delivery worldwide


Thank you. It's a great pleasure to see all of you here tonight. The festival has had conversations about science and religion over the years. Perhaps some of you have come to some of those. And oftentimes, there are two sides represented in that conversation and sometimes the two sides, you know, science and religion, sometimes they're contentious, sometimes they're harmonious, but tonight we're doing something differently. We really only have one side here tonight. So the group of people who are going to come out for this discussion, they're all scientists.

The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct


They all come from the background of science, but our goal is to see if by walking this one side, this one trajectory of science, we can gain some illumination into the other side. Into the side of religion side of faith. Before I bring out our esteemed group of panelists, I just want to set some context and to do so, I'm going to begin with something which is presumably familiar to many of you. So this is what a beautiful midnight sky brimming with stars looks like in New York City. Now, I also have a little cabin, Upstate New York in the Catskill Mountains and when I'm


up there and it's a nice, dark night sky, I can look up and see something that looks just like this. Maybe not just like this. This is takes a Hubble Space Telescope, you know? But you get the idea and when you see a wondrous sky like this, you can't help but ask yourself, how does it all work? How did it all come to be? And I have spent part of my professional life trying to advance the scientific understanding of some of these questions, and because I work on the more mathematical end of physics, when I look up, I tend to see order and harmony in a peculiar language.


The language of mathematics, a language of symbols. But, many others, when they look up at a sky like this, it brings to mind other things, right? Ideas of soul, of eternity, of divinity, of God. And for some, that kind of talk, it feels kind of loose or vague. For some, it's even off-putting. But when you look at the data, you see something utterly remarkable, right here in the 21st century, the modern technological age and we have long since cracked the atom, explored the surface of Mars, detected gravitational waves and so much more.


There are still many of us who are believers. So if we look at some of the numbers, about say 2.2 billion of us identify as Christians. About 1.7 billion is Muslims. Hindus, Buddhists, that gives us another two billion, plus, if we throw in my little tribe, it's about 14 million, right? And then if we add in the atheists, this takes us to one and half billion which is just to say there's a lot of people on this planet who would look to the heavens and think of heaven. So if aliens were able to sweep down toward planet Earth, and let's say they had some


wondrous equipment that allowed them to detect religious belief, to give us a kind of heat map of faith, this is what our planet would look like. You could probably work out the color scheme for yourself. Blue is Protestant, Red is Catholic and so forth. You get the idea. We are a religious planet. Personally, I am not religious in any conventional sense, but I do consider myself spiritual and I certainly do consider myself curious. One thing that I have certainly gotten ever more curious about is why do we believe?


Now, the simplest answer is we have religious belief because what religion tells us is true. That raises a whole lot of challenges that we're all familiar with and perhaps the most relevant for tonight's discussion is there are over 4000 distinct religions practiced on Earth and if we just take one of them, say we parse Christianity a little more finely, there are over 33,000 distinct denominations. They can't all be right. So the natural supposition is that at most one of them is right, which would mean that


if Sarah here, happy in her own beliefs, she denies therefor the beliefs of all others, like Terrik over here who again, happy in his own faith, denies the validity of all others and that goes true for Pim and for Ofryim and also for Amalyia and it even holds for, say this guy over here, Richard, who not only denies in the validity of all other beliefs, he denies the validity all beliefs. We may be a believing planet, but most of us deny the validity of most beliefs, which means that even if Sarah holds to her religion because it is true, she still needs to explain


why everybody else holds to their own misguided faiths. And that holds true for everybody else. So this takes us to a simple but remarkable conclusion. Normally, the discussion of science and religions, you know, it all comes down to what's right, what's wrong, what's true, what's false. But here we see that even if a given religion is true, it hardly changes the question at all. We still need to ask why it is that so many of us have a tendency to believe. We have to ask yourself, what is it about the human species that drives us to find order


and meaning and, in particular, to find the turn toward the supernatural so utterly natural. 1936, this guy over here, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to a school girl named Phyllis who had asked Einstein about his own religious beliefs. Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifested in the laws of the universe. One that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.


Much has been made about Einstein's use of this phrase, religious feeling, but his later writings made very clear that he was speaking of an abstract spirituality, not a conventional religion. The word of God is, for me, nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses. The bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can, for me, change this. Charles Darwin, the Father of Evolution by natural selection, he allowed for the possibility


of God. I have never denied the existence of God. I think the theory of evolution is fully compatible with faith in God. I think the greatest argument for the existence in God is the impossibility of demonstrating and understanding that the immense universe, sublime above all measure and man, were the result of chance. At the same time, Darwin also noted that a religious belief, a religious sensibility could emerge from the interplay between biological and cultural evolution. Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief of God on


the minds of children, producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains, not yet fully developed that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake. The Dalai Lama has his own iconic perspective on these issues. Both Buddhism and modern science shared a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal unchanging principal such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality.


Both Buddhism and science prefer to account for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect. From the methodological perspective, both the traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. In the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerate a scripture may be. Years ago, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with the Dalai Lama in an event that


took place down in Texas and I had an opportunity to ask him a question. The question is asked was, I said, "Look, there are all these books out there that make the case that what we're doing in modern physics is somehow a recapitulation or a reflection of ideas that ultimately find their origin in eastern religious thought." So I asked him, "Is this true? Is this your perspective?" And he very forthrightly said, he said, "Look, when it comes to questions of consciousness, that's where we have something to offer science."


But he said, "When it comes to understanding the fundamental laws and the particles and all that detail about how the world actually works," he said, "We need to look to science." So it was a kind of remarkable moment where this great spiritual leader showed this remarkable and broad embrace of science. At the same time there are great scientists who show a similar embrace of religious thought. Here's Nobel Laureate, William Phillips. The point is that there are plenty of scientists who see no difficulty in being serious about


their science and serious about their faith. I know plenty of others, and you’ve see the statistics that support that idea, but nevertheless there is a common misperception in society that this isn’t the case. And here's Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health. I think most people are actually kind of comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it's not the whole story and there's a place also for religion, for faith, for theology, for philosophy. But that harmony perspective doesn't get as much attention.


Nobody's as interested in harmony as they are in conflict, I'm afraid. 2015, Pew Research Foundation found that the percent of Americans that agreed with the statement that science and religion are often in conflict, they found that agreement with that was almost 60% and that again is often how the conversation is framed. Science versus religion. That is an important question. It may come up here tonight, but it's not the focus of what we're talking about here tonight. And so we're asking ourselves, can we use science to illuminate religion?


Can we gain some understanding of why people have a need to look to a power beyond themselves, beyond the laws of physics? Is that need written into our DNA? The natural selection for that kind of worldview, right? Why in the world does this world have so many brains that want to believe? That's the question. And to deal with this question, try to gain some insight, we have a great group of thinkers and I'd like to now bring them out to the stage. Our first participant is professor emerita from the College of William and Mary, where


she taught anthropology for 28 years, author of numerous books, including Personalities on the Plate, How Animals Grieve, and Evolving God. Please join me in welcoming our first guest ... Barbara King on the fly. Our next guest is a research scientist at NYU Langone Medical Center. He's also professor of cognitive and affective neuroscience at NYU, co-founded the Nonduality Institute where he is the principle science investigator. Please join me in welcoming neuroscience, Zoran Josipovic. Also with us tonight is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University


with appointments at Harvard Medical School and the Mass General Hospital. In addition to the book, How Emotions Are Made, she has published over 100 scholarly papers. Please join me in welcoming Lisa Barrett. All right, finally. Our guest is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist and author of the bestselling books including, How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct, a pioneer and champion of evolutionary psychology, named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People, please welcome Steven Pinker.


All right, so we're going to have a pretty free form discussion here, where we're going to try to address some of these questions and we're going to organize the discussion into three parts, roughly speaking. A kind of trinity of parts, befitting for tonight's discussion. We're going to talk about some of the history of religious belief. We're going to talk about the longevity, the fact that this is something that has stuck with us for some time. Then we're going to focus on the benefit, if at all, for this kind of way of interacting


with the world. What I'd like to do before getting started, if you don't mind, especially since it's a nice small group here, it's good to get a sense of where people are coming from in this kind of discussion, so if we could just sort of go one by one, just sort of give us a sense of where you ... We'll do it ... If you don't mind, and you don't have to, but if you're willing to share it, just a couple of words on where you come from in the religious spectrum. Steven, you willing to just say a few words? You mean our own beliefs personally?


If you don't mind. You don't have to, but if you're willing to. Yeah. Well, I don't believe in the existence of supernatural entities, including God, souls, spirits, genies, devils, and so on. I am a ... I belong to the same tribe as you. I'm Jewish and appreciate many of the iconography, the traditions, the community of my own and other cultural groups, but that doesn't mean you have to sign on to the content, and I don't. Right. Lisa. I would say Steve pretty summed it up pretty well for me too. We practice some rituals in our home as sort of, I don't know, not exactly archeological


artifacts, but they are kind of artifacts of the past, you know? If we decide to light candles on Friday night, I'm using candlesticks that my great-grandmother schlepped from Russia and that people have been doing this for over 5000 years, and that's meaningful. I also think that Judaism is an interesting moral code that is somewhat ... emphasizes somewhat more behavior over intent, which is appealing to us in some ways. I would say we're ... colloquially we're atheists as a ... definitely in our house, although


we do have trappings of, as I said, of ritual in the way that I described. Yep. Zoran. I was raised as atheist, but later discovered that really my family believed in scientism. Like, science has an answer to everything. It's a form of religion, I think for some people. Personally, I have practiced meditation for over 35 years and I'm mostly interested in this mystical unitary states are known to us as the consciousness where people experience both unitary consciousness, either alone or unitary consciousness with experience.


I'm interested what it does to a person and what it does to the brain. Right. Barbara. Growing up in New Jersey, I was raised as a Presbyterian, spent a fair amount of time in church. I know identify also as an atheist. When I travel, I do find myself drawn to churches, to sitting in the stillness of a church and to looking at the art and the architecture. I think that is a beautiful part of our history, but I do that as an atheist. And for my own sense of spirituality, I go to a Springsteen concert. Right. So, you know, there are some curious human behaviors that strike us as unusual, like,


I think ... I don't know how much of this is true, but Beethoven is said to have always dunked his head in a bucket of ice water every morning. Ben Franklin is said to have stood naked in front of an open window every morning. Nikola Tesla, you know, a great champion and iconic scientific figure, apparently used to curl his toes a hundred times each night before going to sleep. So you sort of hear those, you raise your eyebrows, it's kind of curious and so on. But, we don't feel the need to explain that kind of behavior, but when it comes to a behavior


that is pervasive and that lasts for thousands of years, then it feels like it deserves an explanation and that's really why we're having this conversation here tonight. So, maybe start with you, Barbara. When I hear the word faith or religion, my mind automatically goes toward one of the major religions that are practiced in the world today. Is that too limited of you? Yeah, I think it's a very natural view, but speaking anthropologically, if we were to do that heat sensing map of the world, we would see people who not only believe in God,


or don't believe in God, but also many, many people who believe in gods, plural, spirits in the forest, venerate ancestors, or have an enormous range of beliefs. So, I think broadening our view to understand that there's numbers of ways, not just in the past but now, to believe is a very helpful starting point. Now, you've also done work where you've gone beyond this species, right? Absolutely, yes. My work is in animals and there's a fascinating conversation going on now about whether it is reasonable to suggest that other animals than us, do have a sense of either spirituality


or religiosity and there's very invigorated debate going on. You know, Jane Goodall was the very first person to suggest, as far as I'm aware, that chimpanzees may be spiritual. But this is continued over decades. This is not my view. I am not suggesting that chimpanzees are spiritual or religious. Where I come in is suggesting that their behavior is an evolutionary platform, so that what we see in our closest living relative gives us and understanding of the building blocks of what later became our religiosity.


So, we know that chimpanzees, for example at a waterfall, can show what we might understand as a sense of awe and wonder. We know that chimpanzees can take the perspective of another through theory of mind. We know that they can show empathy, compassion, that they have their own rituals and their own rules. And so I think that we wouldn't be where we are today without our primate past, which includes, of course, not only living apes, but what we'll talk about later I imagine, other human ancestors. Early Homo sapiens, Neanderthals.


So, just as culture evolved, language evolved and technology evolved, I believe that that human religious imagination evolved. So, Steve, part of what we're doing here is trying to think about behavior and think about evolution and sort of how they can play off of each other, and I know that the field of evolution in psychology is dedicated to trying to make those kinds of connections precise. Can you just give us a sense of what evolutionary psychology actually does and how it can give insight into these kinds of issues?


Well, the brain, like other complex organs, owes its non-random organization to natural selection. That if there are circuits in the brain that accomplish improbable feats, then natural selection is the explanation for how they got wired up the way they are. And we're going to ask of various psychological features whether they are adaptations. That is, whether they increased the chances of reproduction in our ancestors. For a lot of psychological features that's pretty straightforward to do. It's no mystery why we see in stereo, because it's a ... for many reasons, highly adaptive


to get a sense of the third dimension. Why we're repulsed by kinds of substances that are likely to carry disease. Why we find certain partners sexually attractive. For religion, it's a religious belief. For supernatural belief, it's not so obvious. I don't think there's any accepted theory that religious belief, per se, is an adaptation. Rather, it can be a by-product of other adaptations. In particular, the ability to attribute minds to other people. We can't literally get inside people's heads. A mind is invisible, colorless, odorless, tasteless, but we couldn't survive as social


beings unless we assume that other people had minds as we do. We interpret their behavior in terms of their beliefs and desires. From there it may be a short step to attribute minds to entities that aren't other human beings, such as to trees and rivers and the wind, in which case we call it animism. We attribute minds to inanimate entities, to our own artifacts, in which case we call it idolatry. Or to no hunk of matter in particular, in which we call it ... in case we call it spiritualism. Disembodied souls and spirits and father-like entities that don't have any material existence,


but have this thing that we naturally attribute to one another. So it would be an extension. One would then have to explain why the adaptation of attributing minds to others, sometimes called theory of mind, or mentalizing or mind reading, or intuitive psychology, why should be so easy to overextend it to entities that aren't in fact brains. And there, part of the answer comes from experience, what kind of input do we have in living our lives that makes this belief congenial and a number of anthropologists have pointed out


that before the advent of modern neuroscience, the idea that minds can exist independently of brains was not so farfetched. There's actually some compelling and empirical data. Edward Tyler I think was the originator of this observation, that when we dream for example, it's apparent that some part of us is up and about, walking around in the world and our body's in bed the whole time. A natural hypothesis is that our ... some locus of experience is not wedded to the body, but can part company from it. Or in death, if someone suddenly collapses, they may look identical to the way they were


a few minutes ago, but something seems to have left their body that animated shortly beforehand. And reflections in still water, shadows, seem to capture the essence of a person, including their activity, their expressions, their goal directed actions. And again, divorced from the actual hunk of flesh. If you're in a trance from lack of sleep, or a fever, or a drug, again, the experience is that your mind can part company from your body. So, if you combine those experiences with our natural habit of attributing minds, it's


not farfetched to think that minds can exist separately from bodies. Now we know better. We know that the brain is the locus of experience, that there are many ways in which the brain can be vulnerable to illusions, dreaming being an obvious case. There's brain activity when we're asleep and that's why we experience things. But, before modern neuroscience, it wasn't such a crazy belief. One other ingredient is that we depend for our beliefs on other people, on experts.i believe a lot of things that I have no basis for believing in my own experience.


Like quantum physics. Yeah, like superstrings. I really believe- You believe in superstrings? I do, because very smart people tell me that they exist and I trust them. I don't say they exist. They may exist. That they may exist. I give some non-zero probability of that. That opens up a niche for people to market all kinds of beliefs about unobservable entities including gods and messiahs, and devils and so on, and a whole set of questions which I won't talk about now is, what are the incentives for the purveyors of supernatural beliefs?


What's in it for them to get other people to believe in gods and souls and spirits. There are plenty of reasons, but that's the other part of the story. Now presume the overactive assigning of agency out to the world is better than an underactive version of it, right? If you're walking around and there's a rock and you happen to think that it has a mind, so be it, but if you're walking around and there's a snake and you don't think it has a mind, you don't think it can attack you, that's probably not a good thing.


So, evolutionary speaking, presumably this overactive assigning of agency has adaptive value. Possibly. It's not so clear. If it involves making sacrifices that are ultimately irrational, if it involves being manipulated by others, maybe not. But it may just be that the overall benefit of being able to attribute minds outweighs the cost in cases where others can exploit us. In the case of animals, of course, animals actually do have minds so it's not such a crazy thing. Indeed, a lot of ... In some hunter-gatherer peoples, they do attribute enormous amounts


of intentionality to the animals they hunt and with good reason, 'cause the animals really are trying to escape them for the same reason that we try to escape from threats. So, that degree of extension is not so farfetched. It's when it comes to rocks and rivers and mountains and trees and wind, that it becomes more problematic. Right. So, Lisa, what is your view in terms of are we at some level wired for belief, or is that not an important part of the equation? I think it is actually. When we say ... When you ask are we wired for beliefs, I think that that can mean a


couple of different things, right? So, in a sense, you could say, well, all brains, actually every brain on this planet, to some extent, is wired to make predictions about what's going to happen next based on what's happened in the past. So, brains are not wired to react to things in the world, they're wired to predict. It's metabolically efficient to predict. Physiologically, most of the biological systems we have in the body are predictive to some extent. And so, if you mean ... A lot of people talk about predictions where ... When I say prediction


I mean, our brains for example, change the firing of their own neurons in advance of sensory input arriving to the brain. That's how you're understanding the words that I'm speaking to you right now. You've had a lifetime of experience of patterns, encoding patterns of what these sounds refer to and the patterns in their temporal contingencies. All brains work like this and if you believe that a prediction is like a belief, which scientists do write about predictions this way, as if they are beliefs or explanations


that are preemptively offered to anticipate and explain incoming sensory inputs, then yes, we are wired. Another way in which we're wired, you could say, is that- But that's for belief in things presumably that are demonstrably true. That's belief in any case, right? So, the idea that the brain is wired for prediction as opposed to reaction, is a general explanation, it's a general computational approach to understanding meaning making of any sort. So, that means making meaning of fluctuating changes in light, which you experience as


sights, as vision. It's making meaning of fluctuating changes in air pressure, which you experience as sounds. And it's also making meaning of changes that happen longer ... longer temporal sensory changes which we would think of as an episode or an event. Little infant brains, you know, newborn brains ... A newborn brain is not like a miniature adult brain. It's not completely ... it's wiring isn't completely finished and we ... So, what infants are doing to some extent, is they're waiting for a set of wiring instructions from the


world. The brain expects certain inputs in order for it to wire itself normally and it wires itself both to the physical circumstances it grows up in, but also to social circumstances it grows up in. We encourage ... So, that's sort of the normal aspect of brain development that's related to being wired for belief, but we also wire our children for belief in other ways. We indulge them. In our culture, we indulge them in believing in animacy of their blankets and their little cars and their little toys and some people in this room might believe that their cars


have minds, right? So, we do ... that's another way in which brains can become wired for belief in the sense of development actually influences the wiring of the brain. Then there, we could also talk about feelings as the root of belief. That to some extent feeling is believing. When you believe ... When you feel something very strongly, you are more likely to believe it and feeling is at the core of the wiring of our brains, and really you could argue most mammalian brains. Some people would like to make that argument, pull that argument even earlier.


I'm going to come back to that in a for Zoran, you've spent some time studying the human brain. Do you feel that there's evidence that we're ... there's an internal physiological predilection for religious belief? Yeah, I wouldn't so much ... Yes. As much as brain is I think organized to be conscious, it's organized for spiritual experiences and indirectly for beliefs just as Steve and Lisa pointed out. I think something happened to us, to our species, right? We don't know when, maybe 3000 years ago, 5000 years, maybe longer.


Suddenly, we became conscious. We became conscious in very unique way. It's not just we have experience, or that we have conscious experience, but we know that we are conscious. We have implicit knowing that we are conscious. We have an expression of religiosity going as far as we have records, you know, around 3000 years ago, maybe longer actually, but we don't have records any more of that, that people were really trying to figure out what is this thing. We're conscious, what is it? Who is this person who is conscious?


What is it that's conscious inside us. And also, what is this universe? The way it appears when we perceive it with the depth of our consciousness, not just with the surface of our mind, but with the deepest part of ourselves. And so that gives rise to some very kind of a deep core sort of explorations in the nature of human mind that we have records of. When we look at the ... What I personally feel is sort of the innermost core of the religious practices, pretty much in every religious traditions we find this, this unitary


experiences, experiences of consciousness itself. They can be either very deep mental silence in which all mental processes quiet down and then there is either just complete blackness and then within it, there's just awareness. Consciousness itself. Doesn't think, doesn't feel, doesn't need to do anything, but it's aware and knows that it's conscious innately, directly. Doesn't have to think. Doesn't have to take itself as an object. Just consciousness itself. Then, that deepest part of ourselves, if it wakes up suddenly, and within our experience,


then the quality of our experience changes dramatically, from this ordinary experience where I'm over here, I am limited to my body, I'm limited to my surface of my skin, whatever my mind has constructed and learned over the course of my life, who I am, what the world is, how to relate to each other, how I relate to others. So, we have this elaborate self-world model inside our head that filters everything you experience. That takes a break temporarily, however briefly, and suddenly we experience that everything


is one reality. One interdependent, but also at the same time, one consciousness that seems to extend, that's the experience and encompasses everything. I think that religiosity tried to capture what this is. When the theistic religion says that God is simultaneously transcendent and immanent in all things. So, in all things. In this experience here that we're having, right now sitting in this wonderful place, this is the experience of God being transcendent and immanent at the same time. That is one way of saying it, right?


I didn't look at it that way, but that's very true. So, another way to say it is that we have two sides to our consciousness. One side is mind that creates experience. The other side is awareness which is just like a mirror. It simply register what is happening without doing anything to it. The two are different. In this view, they're separated by the substrate which is kind of like an unconscious film. Matrix. It actually exists in the universe, they say. I don't. What's interesting, what happens is when the mind wants to find what consciousness is,


it just finds itself. It finds attention, it finds intelligence, and it finds vigilance, but it can't ... If it doesn't know how, it can't penetrate through this unconscious substrate. And then it's basically concludes there is no consciousness. It's just a mental processes, right? From the side of awareness, what the substrate does is awareness can't recognize itself. It can't recognize what it is directly so it experiences itself as a subject who is having experience. From that perspective, spirituality and spiritual beliefs are consciousness trying to find itself.


It's trying to figure out what it is. So, Barbara, can you take us back to the earliest evidence that we have for that kind of internal self-reflection that ultimately we think may have been the seeds for religiosity? The first thing I'd like to start and say is that, yes, it's certainly true that we attribute intentionality to a lot of animals, but the fact also is that they are intentional. So, we certainly don't have a corner on the market of intentionality or consciousness or sentience or any of these other things.


But if we're going to talk about the human evolutionary trajectory, we know that our species is about 200,000 years old. Our genus is around 2.4 million years old. So the question becomes when do we start seeing any of these symptoms, if you will. It's very interesting that there's a cave in South Africa, Rising Star cave, that is the home of this human, perhaps ancestor, but hominid in any case, called Homo naledi and apparently there were numbers of individuals who were literally dragged by others into a very deep, subterranean chamber in this cave.


So, Rising Star is a very famous project in paleo anthropology and one can watch often live feeds of the scientists trying to study these chambers and they have to crawl through these incredibly small passageways. And yet, we know that approximately 250,000 years ago, people were disposing of their dead in very intentional ritual ways, going through a lot of effort and a lot of energy to do this. The problem becomes- Is that controversial or is that why? Beside the fact that they're bringing the people to the chamber is not particularly


controversial. The next step… But whether it was a ritual burial. Exactly. The next step is controversial because of course we have this small problem, which is that belief doesn't fossilize, so we don't know, and we have people, we have a chamber, and we have our minds and as we're talking about we're searching and yearning always to figure this out. But isn't it the case though that it's ... the people of ... anthropologists have already discovered, let's say Homo neanderthals skeletons that are ... You know, they've been buried


and posed in a particular way with things around them and so, it's- Like in Sungir, right? Right, but we're going in a kind of order so I'm starting a little earlier than Neanderthals. We have the roots of Neanderthal populations this time, but what's so fascinating is that the Neanderthal burials don't come to a hundred thousand years ago or 60,000 years ago in Sungir in Russia, which is a Homo sapiens site just mentioned, is like 27,000. So, my idea is that, again, we have some glimmers and some intriguing hints, 250,000 years ago.


Now, let's just fast forward, let me leap over many thousands of years, we've come to Neanderthals. They are not our ancestors. They are our cousins. We used to say that they lived from 200 something thousand to 40,000 and then they went extinct. We no longer say that because here in the audience there's tons of Neanderthal genetic material and many populations, except some populations in Africa because we did not have Neanderthals in Africa, we find just as you were saying, Lisa, that there are very intentional


burials with all kinds of grave goods. So people didn't just stick people in the earth. They marked the graves as something special. To give you one example, there's a 40,000 year old burial of a toddler in what's today Spain, with a hearth all around, 60 sets of oryx and bison horns, a rhino skull. This was a place that mattered. In some sense we can think of it as a sacred place. The question is, is there belief in an afterlife? Is there belief in supernatural beings? How would we know? We're imposing a great deal of our framework onto the past.


Keep going in time, we come to cave art. And, of course, we're familiar with the cave paintings. These are not only early Homo sapiens, but also in some cases Neanderthals. We do know that now. This is a relatively recent discovery, that we are not the only cave painters, but what's fascinating for me about this is you have these glorious depictions of animals that these people hunted, but in addition to that, some very mystical and fantastic figures. A bird-headed man in Lascaux cave in France. A human that is part bison.


Some other just wild figures. So this is not just people representing the reality they saw before them, but rather there's an interest in what is not in front of you, what is not just here and now. We fast forward one more time. We go to Turkey, to this particular, perhaps temple, Gobekli Tepe, is dated to that period on a hill in Turkey. Massive 50 ton blocks that people moved onto a hillside and carved with, again, elaborate, largely animal, images. We think this is a ritual space. Not everyone agrees. This is contentious.


But in every single case there is a good argument to be made for the possibility of the human brain uncoupling itself from the here and now, to think about these questions of the supernatural. And we have hints. We have to go forward in time again before we come to a really institutionalized religious system. But again, the reason that I think the human religious imagination evolved because of all these earlier cues. Right, right. I think it's important ... I think that Barbara's bringing up something really important and


that is, we're all talking ... We're sort of fluidly talking back and forth as if spirituality and religiosity are identical forms of meaning making and they're really not. There are many, many ways to be spiritual. Some involve belief in a supernatural deity with agency, but not all of them do, right? Some of them ... sometimes spirituality means just being full of awe and wonder at something larger than you, that transcends itself transcendence, like in connecting with nature for example. As Einstein was saying in his book.


Exactly, and I think ... So, one way to think about this is that when we're talking about the evolution of religious thought or spiritual thought or we're talking about the biology of spiritual thought, we have to be thinking about the fact that we're talking about different psychological features here. One has to do with connecting to something in the moment that's bigger than you and that might transcend you. One element or feature is about explanation, right? Another is about agency. And so those may not have all evolved at the same time, or perhaps they're not all meaningful


for all people, so maybe everyone in this room has had a spiritual experience. They might not call it that, but they've had an experience where they've connected to something that's bigger than themselves that leaves them feeling awestruck, but not everyone would take the additional steps of trying to find an explanation in that or trying to find agency in that and so forth. But if we do go and focus on beliefs that do transcend just a sense that there's a larger reality that you were a part of and goes toward a supernatural belief in things that science


typically would not confirm, do you see the potential for an adaptive value, for a progression that would lead to a brain that would have a tendency to do that? It's hard to give an adaptive explanation for belief in entities that don't exist. There can be an adapter of explanation for the search for explanations which obviously are not infallible and they can be misled by absence of evidence, by people who have an interest in promulgating certain explanations. I think what you have to direct the question at not the content of beliefs that we associate


with particular religions, but just in particular ways of thinking, but ways of interpreting the world, ways in which people influence the beliefs of one another. What are the kinds of things that we can hypothesize and then what does that leave us vulnerable to hypothesizing which, from the perspective of science, we know may be incorrect, but can nonetheless be very seductive to a mind that is apt to think in certain directions. So what's your view say of those who've made the case that the adaptive value is not so


much in the actual belief in things that perhaps don't exist, but it is from the cohesion, the group cohesion that that can yield if there are many people for whom that belief is shared, then all of a sudden you've got a stronger group bonding? Does that hold any weight for you at all? There is a folk theory of evolution that adaptations are all for group cohesion because whenever there is some mysterious aspect of human psychology for which it's not clear what the adaptive value is, people will say, "Well, it fosters group cohesion."


Why do we enjoy music? Group cohesion. Why do we dance? Group cohesion. But there a couple things wrong with that style of explanation. I'm very deeply suspicious of the explanation always says group cohesion. One of them is, group cohesion is not, in fact, what natural selection selects for. It selects for propagation of genes. Sometimes groups, cohesive groups can help the individuals that compose those groups, but if a group is too cohesive, you could be exploited by the group. You could be cannon fodder.


You could be a sacrificial victim for the benefit, for the cohesion of the group. But any gene that would allow you to be exploited by the group would be selected out because genes are selected much more quickly than groups. Also, I think it's too easy to use our own intuition that we like to bond over music, over religion and so on, but that is itself a part of our psychology that needs an explanation. Why would beliefs in invisible entities make a group coherent more? You can't take that for granted. That's as much of a puzzle to a psychologist as…


But we do see, we do see evidence of that even though we may need to explain it. We do, although ... the supernatural beliefs can also divide a group, needless to say. There are wars of religion and precisely because they ... The content of those beliefs aren't derived from shared experience. They're not things that everyone can just open their eyes and see. They're things you have to be told. And that means that if you're told by different shamans or different priests or imams than you can go to war over those beliefs.


That's why I think that group cohesion doesn't strike me as a satisfying explanation for belief. Lisa, do you have a different view of that? I have ... yes, I think I have a different view or maybe I want to add some information. You can be contentious. You could just like- Believe me, I have no problem with being contentious, at all. Anyone who knows me, knows this is true. Here's what I want to say, that I think that there is an immediate advantage potentially, which is there are two that I can think of that relate to the functioning of a nervous


system in the following way. First of all, uncertainty is tremendously stressful for a human nervous system. And I don't mean stress in a euphemistic way. I mean it adds a metabolic burden to a nervous system which if it persists can actually make someone sick and I think religious beliefs can reduce uncertainty. They sometimes explain the unexplainable. Things that we now might explain through science, used to be thought of as magic or as caused by a deity. So, I think in some ways it is not just psychologically comforting, it's actually physiologically


potentially less ... it reduces people's stress. It reduces their, what scientists would call allostatic burden. Very simply, just step back one minute and say, partly our brains evolved not to think and see and feel, but in order to regulate the systems of our body. As our bodies got more complex, brains got bigger. A brain's main job is to keep the systems of your body alive and well so that you can propagate your genes to the next ... let me just finish. I know you're going to disagree, but ... Your brain is constantly running a budget


for the resources in your body and it's not budgeting money, it's budgeting glucose and salt and so on and so forth. And so, if you think about your brain running a budget for your body, uncertainty just drains that budget. Drains that budget much faster and makes it really harder for people. There's also, I think, a social aspect to this too, in the sense that we are social animals, we evolved to be social animals. It's one of our major adaptive advantages, to be social animals. But what that means is that we regulate each other's nervous systems.


We don't bear that body budget on our own. We have other people to help us do it. There are other social species, right? So, insects are social, and they regulate each other's nervous systems through chemicals, through scent. Rats, and some mammals, add touch and they might add hearing and primates add vision. We, as primates, have all of those ways to regulate each other. Plus, we have ideas that we share. And so, there are many ways in which religious belief can actually reduce the metabolic burden on the nervous system.


Is there data for that? I mean, is there data that really makes a convincing argument that religious belief does reduce ... There actually is. I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying as a scientist, there is data. There are data to show that people who ... I want to say this, you know, I'm not negating any of the challenges or problems that religious belief introduces to a fitness argument. I'm just saying that there is this other side where there are data to show that people who are religious actually are somewhat happier and healthier and have greater well-being.


But that's because, of course, they're living amongst other people who believe what they believe. Steve, you had a response again. Barbara ... yeah. I just really wanted to make the point that we're actually operating in a framework of human exceptionalism when we keep asking things like, was social cohesion part of the reason that we were religious, or did being religious drive social cohesion, because, you know ... Why are we not asking about orcas, for example. Orcas are exquisitely cohesive and they do things as a group and they regulate each other


as individuals and they solve their problems as a group and they manage to do that without God. And chimpanzees manage to do this without God. So, I think that in addition to the problems that Steven pointed out with social cohesion arguments, that they're thrown out constantly that we can just look at the natural world and we can see that there are so many different pathways for this. If we only look at our species and we don't take this comparative approach. We're not going to get answers to these questions.


Yeah. Steve. Lisa, I agree that are religious belief can reduce stress but I don't think that that can be an explanation as to why it's adaptive. Because the fact that uncertainty leads to stress is itself an adaptation, namely there ... we're missing some information that's critical to our well-being and we're ... when we get stressed and nervous that motivates us to seek out that information or to act in a way that keeps us safe even in the state of ignorance. But there can't be an adaptation to reduce stress by false certainty.


That is, by being certain about something, some claim about the world that in fact is not true. Because if I'm really nervous, say because I think there might be a predator, and someone convinces me, no, it's actually a rabbit appearing in the guise of a predatory cat, that might reduce my stress, but it's not an adaptation. Fair enough, fair enough. So Barbara, you gave us some history of where you think this may have begun all the way back in human history. What's your sense of why it has persisted for so long?


I tend to come back to this issue of community and practice. Because I think if we shift the perspective from looking so much at belief and sacred texts, which we tend to do in today's world. You know, you put up a slide that talked about the percentage of the pie in terms of Christianity and Islam and that's one important aspect of this, but I think that for many of the world's people, there is just something that's irreplaceable about that sense of community, that sense of ritual practice and that sense of familiarity.


And it is ... Sure, it's possible to try to replace that with some other ways to find those same things, but there is something about the connectivity that comes through the transcendence that I think is important. When you bring those two elements together, the community and the transcendence and sharing that emotional meaning making. And one of the things that i like very much about the people who are discussing whether there's faith in other animals is the idea of breaking the link between making religion


always be about text and belief. So I think that that helps us understand this question a little bit. The idea ... I think about what Martin Buber wrote, coming from the tradition of Judaism, when he wrote that all of real life is encounter. There's something that's particularly transporting about sharing encounters of transcendence and I really feel it has something to do with the persistence that we see. But clearly, when we talk about the spirituality instinct, that's a very fraught term because of the secularization that's happening in the world.


If that really were to be considered an instinct, how do we explain the tremendous transformation that we're undergoing? So people are finding humanism communities, other communities with a different type of transcendent connection. I think there's a balance between what continues as very, very strong tradition that carries communities forward together with new ways of imagining some of these very same things that are coming about. The ways that people can experience religion now. I mean, they extend into communities with AI.


They extend to virtual realities, virtual churches, virtual connection, virtual mosques, but also the idea that we're beginning to think just differently about animals and nature. We know Emily Dickinson's church, right? Well, we also know that one of the beauties of the evolutionary perspective among many others, is not only understanding our own place in the world, but our really deep sharing with other animals. And so, I think there's the possibility that we are going to continue this shift of finding different ways of sharing transcendence as I feel with nature, with animals.


So does that transcendence relate to ... I mean, Steven J. Gould, I believe once said that all religions begin with an awareness of death. So, is that transcendence profoundly connected with death or is it somehow independent of it? I think you've hit on an important thing. Part of my last six years of my work has been very profoundly taken up with the question of animal grief and animal mourning. And I'm not suggesting, again, to be very clear that animals have some kind of sacred sense of death, but they have a deep awareness of loss, so that we find over and over again-


Can you give an example? I mean, that's… Yeah, I can give loads of examples. For example, with elephants we know that the entire community responds if a matriarch dies. There was one particular example in Africa. A particular community of scientists who followed for seven days, a parade of mourners who came to this particular matriarch who had died. Her name was Eleanor. Not only her family, but matriarchs of other families. Some stood vigil over the body, some rocked over the body. Others showed distress. So my definition of animal grief involves some kind of symptom of distress.


Social withdrawal, failure to eat, failure to sleep, some vocalizations. But it's not only the, what I call the usual suspects, the big brained mammals like chimpanzees, cetaceans and elephants where we see this. My research is showing that we find it in animals as different as collared peccaries in Arizona, chickens, all sorts of domestic animals, the animals that we live with. And again, what I think is so important about this is not necessarily that the animals have the same awareness of death that we have, but that they feel this profound sense of


loss. That is emotional meaning making and that's where they enter into this community of sort of a transcendent experience in an animal sort of way that I think is the foundation for this discussion. So, Steve, let me ask you. Transcendent experience, community, is one powerful way of thinking about what religion provides. On the other side of the discussion, you've got people like Dan Dennett. You got people like Pascal Boyer, and various others, whose explanation tends more toward a mechanism. The spreading of ideas.


The spreading of memes, you know? An idea jumps from brain to brain, to brain and it naturally tickles certain receptors that we are naturally attuned to and therefore certain ideas have a tendency to stick and spread, among them being the very ideas that constitute religious belief. Is that an approach that you think gives us insight or is that not a useful way of thinking about it? Yeah, because what puzzles us when we try to explain the prevalence of religious belief, is not so much why people mourn the dead, feel a sense of loss, feel it profoundly affects


their lives because it does profoundly affect their lives, it ought to. If you didn't mourn someone when they were dead, when they die how could you have loved them when they were alive? That is, in a sense an easier set of reactions to explain. What puzzles about religion is belief in the Trinity and in hell and in 72 virgins and all of the other contentful beliefs that go well beyond a sense of awe at the immensity of the cosmos or loss in the sense of death. That's where Pascal Boyer and Dennis Barbour and others going to step in to why we're vulnerable


to such specific beliefs as opposed to emotional reactions to major events that affect us. There, I should actually credit Pascal Boyer for linking the idea that we are mentalizing, we're apt to attribute minds to others as one of the core explanations for why we are subject to religious beliefs that leads to spiritualist beliefs. Right. So, Lisa, what's your view on these two sort of poles, the need for community transcendent experience and perhaps something that just speaks to the way in which certain ideas naturally


stick inside a brain that evolved to perform certain tasks and survive? I think that both of those explanations to some extent are phenomena. I'm not really sure if you're referring to them as explanations or just phenomena, are actually rooted in our sociality as a species, so I think it's not a metaphor to say that we regulate each other. We do, in very substantial ways and in ways that we're completely unaware of and part of how we do this is we create meaning that is shared and realities that emerge only by


virtue of collective agreement. What I mean by that is ... We're talking here, for example, about grief and that animals, non-human animals feel grief and so on. Non-human animals feel loss, for sure. I think there's no question that that's the case, and they suffer. I think there's no question that's the case, but research on emotion suggests pretty clearly that there is no inherent emotional meaning in any set of physical signals that occur from your body. What we do is ... humans, is we learn to impose meanings on those signals, right?


So, a scowling face for example, is not a universal display of anger. People only scowl about 25% of the time when they're angry and they scowl at many other times when they're not and there are many cultures around the world, including hunter-gatherers who don't recognize a scowl as anger, for example. In many cultures, and it's an interesting question about why this is the case, but we'll just hold that aside for a moment, what we do is we impose meaning on a scowling face, we impose meaning on a scowl and by virtue of that meaning that we've imposed, the scowl


actually literally takes on that meaning and we can easily predict what's going to happen next. What I mean by this is it sort of works in the same way as money works, right? There's no inherent ... Nothing that's ever served as currency in human cultures does so by virtue of its physical nature alone. What happens is a group of humans impose a meaning on pieces of paper, or little rocks, or salt, or barley, or big rocks in the ocean that can't be moved, or mortgages, or any number of things and all of a sudden, those things literally take on value.


They can be traded for material goods only because we all agree that they can and when someone moves their agreement, when people withdraw some number, people withdraw their agreement, those things no longer have value. Well, emotions are kind of built in the same way. Heart rates change, faces move, distress can occur out of loss when you lose someone who helps to regulate your body budget and you lose that person, you feel like you've lost a part of yourself because sort of you have actually lost someone who's helped you regulate


your nervous system. We impose meaning on those physical events that take on that meaning. I mean the physical events take on those meanings by virtue of the fact that we, as a culture, agree that that's the case. I think that in my view, this is partly why memes occur, because ideas are contagious in a sense because we often as part of our ... one of our superpowers as a species is the ability to create meaning. The ability to create something real where there used to be nothing real, only by virtue of collective agreement.


We impose meaning on something physical and then that physical thing takes on a bigger meaning. To some extent, I think we also do this with what we think of as transcendent experiences. So, when a group of people are all together having a similar experience at being awestruck or wonderstruck at something in nature, there's an opportunity for creating social reality, for creating a meaning that wasn't there before, that supersedes just the shared wonder of the moment and so, I don't see these ends as really different.


I see them as kind of emerging out of the same capacities- So, in the remaining time, maybe we can just focus on humans and on religious belief and maybe we could start with you, Barbara. Mm-hmm (affirmative). There's been a view that's been around for a long time that as science progresses, it kind of pushes out the need for religion, in terms of its explanatory capacities and so forth. Now it's suggested over time that the role of religion would decrease. Do you imagine that that is the pattern that will play out or is that a completely wrong


and oblique way of thinking about the role of religion and therefore what its future will be? Yeah, it's interesting. I feel two things at the same time. I do think that the increasing tendency towards humanism and secularization is a very welcome thing. I mean, I did say that I am here speaking as an atheist, as a person who is a non-believer. We certainly want to be able to think clearly about science and about the forces that act in this world and we know, all of us know that religion is not always helpful in that


particular way. At the same time, I think it's really important to think again about the cross-cultural patterns and the number of people in the world who don't fall into believing in big sky gods, who don't even, in some cases, have a word for religion. I'm not suggesting that that makes them different in any kind of scale of intelligence, not at all. We know that all human populations have the same capacities. But sometimes, just being religious is just the way life is. It's so much a part of the era, of the way that you live that it's not something that


is going to change. I think these are two different ways of looking at it and I'm not sure how to weigh them. I'd be interested to hear what other people would say about that. Why don't we go right down the line. Zoran, do you have any ... I think that at its best, it gives us a framework to experience the spirituality, to be able to connection to something that's larger than ourselves. And so, if it fulfills that role for people, I think then that's, you know, that it's its purpose. I hope that as the ages go, the science and spirituality basically flow through each other


smoothly. I think that for that, really we just need more research in these topics. Lisa, thoughts on the future? I think I would stand by my descriptions that I think that there are some advantages to religious belief, but I think there are also some major, major disadvantages, some of which Steve has talked about and I think it ... From my perspective it's probably about time to wonder whether or not the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, frankly. Because there are other meaning making systems that are available to humans to help them


make sense of the world, some of which may not have the disadvantages. They may have the advantages of religious belief, but they might not also have the disadvantages. So, I probably lean more in the direction of wondering how it would be possible to test that, to investigate that. Steve, thoughts on that? Several trends in the overall historical archival of disbelief when there's a lot of religions have become more humanistic. They don't take their literal beliefs as seriously as they used to. If you're a real, believing Christian and that if you don't accept Jesus then you're


going to go to hell, then you really ought to try to convert people at sword point. And you really ought to slay heretics. You'd be doing ... It's like a great public health measure. You're saving eternity of suffering in hell for billions of people. But most Christians, no matter how seriously they take their belief, don't try to convert people at sword point anymore. They don't have inquisitions and they're not completely consistent and that is a kind of benign hypocrisy among many believers that they fortunately don't act on the totality


of their religious beliefs and that's been a very beneficial trend. The institutions persist with the all-encompassing nature of the beliefs, we get deluded. Another is that when people switch their religious affiliations, the overwhelming tendency is toward no religion at all, so the world is becoming less religious. There are two reasons why that may seem hard to believe. One of them is that religious people have more babies and so the number or religious people is actually increasing, and projected to increase even as the number of people who


switch are switched in the direction of no religion. The other is that religious groups tend to be more politically organized. So, the problem with secularists and humanists, and so called nones, N-O-N-E, not N-U-N, that is people with no religion, is they don't vote. Evangelicals all vote. I shouldn't say all. Something like 80% of evangelicals vote, 25% of just the unaffiliated vote. And so there's a outsized influence of religion in politics because of this organization. Our perception of the growing influence of religion is in, not exactly an illusion, but


it is pushed along by the greater fecundity and greater political organization of the religious, even as the overall direction is away from religious belief with secularization, including the United States, which was a ... for a long time was an outlier that every other western democracy had become less religious than the United States. The United States is now moving in that direction as well. One final question which is sort of the inverse of the topic that took up some of our time in thinking about animals and their reactions and beliefs.


What if we flip it the other way? So, a hundred years from now, or 500 years from now, we get visited by an alien civilization and we show them what we've learned in math and physics and they nod their tentacles and they ... you know, we're all sort of good. But then we show them our religious beliefs. Do you think that they'll look at that and say, "Yeah, yeah, we get it. You know, we've got out Jesus too." Or will they be completely baffled as to what this thing called religion is? Barbara, thoughts on that?


Wild speculation. I have no idea the answer to that question. Fair enough. If I had to guess, I would guess baffled. I think that if you think about how 500 years ago, we didn't know much about electromagnetism right? And now, we can go all kinds of things with and we can actually entertain ourselves with. Well, think of the aliens come and they understand the function of consciousness in the universe, right? And they can use consciousness that we use for all kinds of things. It's not any kind of mysterious thing for them.


That's I think where it's going. Lisa? I don't think they'll be baffled and I don't think that they'll necessarily share ... I mean, I'm just ... I'm not even speculating, I'm imagining. I think that they will see it as part of the evolutionary trajectory of ... Or evolutionary development of a species and maybe something that was a necessary step along the way, but became unnecessary at a certain point. Final thoughts on that one, Steve? I tend to agree there. It may be similar to our attitudes towards the animistic beliefs of people that we've


come across. We can ... or an intelligible but we might consider them obsolete. Do you think that they will have had a similar evolutionary trajectory? I know there ... Is this an intrinsic part of the way in which a living system would evolve that can survive that will necessarily ascribe agency in the world and tell stories about what those agents do and the role that they play or is this some peculiar thing that happened to the human species? A great question, a profound one, but I suspect that ... I guess the question is, does sociality


all right so I'll talk these two parts to my talk about three parts so one is about a little bit of kind of state of the art of supervisor on you in France Maroni and and then the second part about supervised running and that's the title really of the talk and with an introduction to something I call energy based running which is sort of a way of sort of a general framework or paradigm if you want to approach to approach learning in general should I use this all right much better oh this is just for recording I guess okay so we all

Self-Supervised Learning


know what supervised running is about I'm told you all know what supervised learning is about and this is the situation where you train a machine by telling it where the correct answer is for a bunch of training samples and this works really well if you have lots of data it works for image recognition translation natural language processing speech recognition you're all kinds of applications but those are applications where the economics are such that it's worth actually labeling a lot of data by hand and and of course you know with

Self-Supervised Learning


that context machine learning is basically comes down to finding a good form for a parameterize function preferably differentiable at least almost everywhere in such a way that by using gradient descent type algorithm you can tune the parameters to optimize the performance of the system right so everything is differentiable or almost differentiable you can optimize using gradient or sub gradient and and it all works we all know about that and there is you know guarantees of generalization if the capacity of the machine is

Self-Supervised Learning


limited is of course another form of running which I'm not going to talk about very much called reinforcement learning and if respect running has seen a lot of success over the last several years this success are almost all can be restricted to gains or virtual environments there are also applications of reinforcement running in situations where you can collect lots of data really quickly to have like a really fast adaptation so if you are you know you want to control you want to show people content and you want to kind of figure

Self-Supervised Learning


out you know well where you want to rank the content there is no differentiable objective function because you don't know what people are gonna are gonna do so you can use whether they click on a piece of content or not as kind of a reinforcement and then optimize the the policy as to what you show to people to maximize the to maximize that but these are you know on these situations where we get lots and lots of feedbacks and otherwise it works for games because you can get wishes to look to to play games really quickly and so you so they can

Self-Supervised Learning


play millions of games per you can run it in parallel on lots of computers and so you can train which is to carry games to play go to play Starcraft dot you know whatever what kind of games and it's only due to the fact that you can run those games faster than we all-time on many machines if the machine had to run at the same speed as as we do which means real time play the games in real time it basically wouldn't be practical it would take about 80 hours for the best current algorithms to learn to play a single Atari game - level of performance

Self-Supervised Learning


that a human can reach in about 15 minutes so the efficiency the sample efficiency of this type of enforcement running is horrible compared to humans at least for go so you've probably heard of alphago alphago 0 from from deep mind whether the details are not fully released and there is no open source code there is a system called alpha pango which was released by Facebook and this one you can just download and run or trade it yourself it's used by a lot of different people who are interested in this this one required about 20

Self-Supervised Learning


million South play games running on 2000 GT use for 2 weeks to reach superhuman performance so this is not cheap in terms of computation as you can tell if you were to to buy this on a on a you know cloud computing server it would cost you a couple million bucks and and it you know it's more games that you know a single person can play in a lifetime probably more than all your humanity is played in a in a number of years there's a very interesting paper recently but it mind by our vineyards group alpha star which plays a single

Self-Supervised Learning


map on StarCraft with a single type of player and the training for this to the equivalent of two hundred years of real-time real-time play which is definitely more than any single Starcraft player has been able to do there's no paper on this as far as I can tell yet so they all use you know deep architectures they all use conventional Nets actually with the combination of other things transformers and start quite a few particular but as you can tell in terms of sampling efficiency it's very bad and it's a huge problem

Self-Supervised Learning


because what that means is that we can't really use me for my training for other than in simulation to Train real-world systems like a car to drive itself or robot that grabs objects unless you have a room full of robots you know training all day so if you were to use we first went running at the moment to train a car to drive itself it will have to you know drive itself with millions of hours and cause tons and tons of accidents and and and it's just not practical right so people do it in simulation it kind of

Self-Supervised Learning


works simulators are not very accurate so there is a problem of sort of transferring from simulation to the real world it's got to be to work on this but it's a big mystery there which I'll come back to in the second half of the talk and the mystery is is how is it that humans can learn to drive a car in about 20 hours of training without causing any accident and the sort of preview of the answer to this is that we have internal predictive models of the world that allows us to predict that if we drive near a cliff

Self-Supervised Learning


and we turn the wheel to the right the car is going to run off the cliff because the gravity is going to fall and nothing good is going to come out of it we don't need to actually try it to predict this and so perhaps the answer is for eventually machines to learn to to learn to have those predictive models of the of the world that will allow them to predict the consequences of your actions before before they occur and plan plan ahead and to some extent we can say that the essence of intelligence is the ability to predict but for now

Self-Supervised Learning


let's stick with supervised running so I'm sure so who isn't who doesn't know what the condition that is don't be shy okay that's great I can skip a lot of stuff okay so a combination that of course is an architecture that is designed to you know recognize images but in fact it's designed to recognize array data where the property is that there is strong local correlations in the in the features and and some sort of translation invariance of the statistics of the signal so it's true for images is true for audio signals it's true for

Self-Supervised Learning


basically anything that comes to you in the form of an array where the locality in the array has some meaning and of course you know the first applications of this were on character recognition but we quickly realized that we could recognize multiple objects with those things not just single objects by kind of scanning if you want or doing the equivalent of scanning a commercial net on the only big image which of course you don't have to do it stupidly because it's all the layers are convolution you don't actually need to explicitly

Self-Supervised Learning


recompute the converse on that every location you just make each layer bigger and then you you know make every layer convolution people rename these fully conventional Nets afterwards but it's just complex on nets and when you apply this to natural images you can you know you can train systems like this to detect objects and natural images you can apply them locally you can apply accomplish on that locally to an image to have it label every pixel in the image with for example the category of the object it belongs to and the conversation that has

Self-Supervised Learning


some sort of you know each output of the network has some sort of window of influence on the input which in this case is actually quite large so to decide of the category of a single pixel the the network here looks at a wide contextual window around this pixel and and then gives you an output for that particular pixel and and this is done sort of conditionally so it's very cheap so the system that was built about ten years ago and it could run at about thirty frames per second on a on the specialized Hardware actually an FPGA

Self-Supervised Learning


and of course with what you probably all know is that around 2012 2013 those networks started you know beating other methods for object recognition for by a large margin largely due to the fact that the data sets we can became bigger those systems are pretty hungry in terms of data more than whatever methods people were using before and so the appearance of things like data sets like image net of you know sort of made it possible to sort of really exploit the capacity in those in those networks and then the second thing was the

Self-Supervised Learning


availability of GPUs which allowed to run those systems really quickly but you all know this and what you all know also is that there's been an inflation in a number of layers using in those networks over the over the years where you know some of the workhorse of image recognition nowadays is you know some sort of backbone convolutional net similar to resonate for example so ResNet is a composition on that where every pair of layers I mean a block or residual block I'm sure again many of you have heard of this but you basically

Self-Supervised Learning


have pairs of layers completion non-linearity completion sometimes you have subsampling pooling as well but this one this one doesn't and then you have some sort of connection that can skips pairs of layers and so essentially what you can think of the function of one of those blocks as basically computing the identity function and those those those layers compute the deviation of the function of that layer from the identity so that sounds kind of a waste to just have a layer that computes the identity function and it is in fact many of the

Self-Supervised Learning


layers in those systems don't do much you can kind of get rid of them actually after after training but what it does is that it makes the system sort of fault tolerant if you want so if the learning algorithm somehow kind of gets into a situation where some layers die which can happen it's not catastrophic because you always have the information going through the bypass connection and so that you know a pair of layers just you know kind of checks itself out of the network so it's not it's not used but it doesn't kill the entire entire effort so

Self-Supervised Learning


that's one of the advantages of ResNet you can you can think of the the long succession of layers as sort of progressively we finding the the answer and cleaning up the the the output or the representation between variations of this where you have you know skipping connections that skip multiple layers etc that's called dense dense net so I'm sure a lot of people will talk you know talk to you about progressing purpura vision over the next few years and there's been a huge amount of progress over the last few years with things like

Self-Supervised Learning


Maersk our CN n which is sort of a two pass image recognition system that can pick out every instance of every object in an image and with you know really good performance so there's sort of a first first few layers that kind of identify regions of interest and then you kind of apply a second no neural net to the conditional net to the the regions of interest that you've identified by the first one there's also kind of one pass systems that my colleague at in Menlo Park at Facebook use the you know call rich internet or

Self-Supervised Learning


future pyramid network and you can think of this as let's say you want to produce a dense map of everything that's in the image so for every pixel in the input you want to give a category of an instance or or category whether it's an object or kind of a background region if you want so you have you know a bunch of layers of a commercial net where the spatial resolution goes down as you go up because of subsampling and then you have sort of a similarly architected network that can it goes the other way from low

Self-Supervised Learning


resolution to high resolution you have kind of skipping connections that go from one map in the in the sort of you know abstraction pyramid if you want to the corresponing that in the output you know the part of the network that produces the output and you can train this end to end with sort of weekly supervised architectures you can plug classifiers taking inputs from sort of various levels in the in the network and this works amazingly well so this is result from a scarf CNN actually not from the retina net or future I mean

Self-Supervised Learning


network but it's the results are quite similar you can get every instance of every object outlined together with a box so the colors are actually produced by the network and correspond to two categories and you know it's pretty it's pretty amazing how well this works you need data these are results from this sort of single-pass sheeter pyramid network again the colors indicate so the individual objects but this system actually labels not just the object but also the background regions so it's sort of they call this panel optic vision so

Self-Supervised Learning


these this type of architectures we have sort of a commercial net with decreasing resolution followed by another one with sort of increasing resolution which some people called accomplished on that this is a paper from I guess 2012 or so or 11 by my colleague Bob Fergus on this idea geek on visual net and this architecture is used quite a lot in image segmentation particularly for applications in medical image analysis and some people call this kind of architecture a unit because of the of the shape when you represent it this way

Self-Supervised Learning