ASM064 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Ventura, CA

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coming to you from the liminal conference in ventura california it's ask science mike live

[Music]

hey everybody it's another exciting episode of ask science mike and it's my favorite episodes ask science mike live because i don't sound depressed in my office alone there's actual people here i've got a lot of events coming up as you know so just go to ask sciencemike.com and click on events i'd love to see you if i'm coming to your town but for now we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Music] so before we answer questions this week i'd like to do something a little different i've got friends helping me operate this program and they're going to introduce themselves right now so when you hear them talking the program you know who they are hello i'm brian white and i'm jim beaver and you guys work where we are on staff here in ventura at the ventura vineyard church the host of the liminal conference awesome and for my friends who might be in california i really love this church not only were they crazy enough to invite me in uh they brought in some of my favorite cohorts in the world uh including pete and so you guys hear me talk about all the time and we actually had some brews in church the other night so if you're looking for a different church experience this would be a good place to start and with that amen yeah and uh with that let's do some questions throw up hands and it's really informal [Music] considering that every year computer technology is getting faster and more powerful the possibility for there to be advanced artificial intelligence increases a classic example being ibm watson what if artificial intelligence reaches human levels of intelligence are they considered people with a soul too if so could they believe in god oh man great question up the gate so a couple of thoughts one this is a really popular idea in computer science today because digital technology allows us to do more computation and less space every year and if you chart this thing called moore's law you realize over time the number of nodes in a computer begins to approach the number of processing nodes in a human brain it's very exciting it's led to all kind of developments watson is amazing because it won jeopardy natural language processing recently a machine called deep mind using a system called alphago won a game called go which was considered unwinnable by computers because it's a very intuitive game because there's more possible moves in a game of go then there are atoms in the universe so doing the same kind of branch prediction you do to win chess isn't feasible in alphago and so we wondered what happens when they think like us now in the show notes this week on ask sciencemike.com i'll include a link to a blog by some folks called wait but y who talk about uh the good and bad of artificial intelligence but i want to start by throwing a little cold water on the problem you may not know this but as of this year intel has given up on moore's law we are no longer seeing the same exponential growth curve in circuitry that we've seen historically why physics the components on microchips have gotten so small and so integrated that quantum dynamics has started to come into play so if you have basically a microscopic wire here and a transistor or a gate and there's another one here they're so close together that quantum probability will let electrons teleport from trace to trace and guess what happens your math gets all messed up the other problem is as the features of the chip get closer together we have trouble dissipating all the energy which is let us realize something human brains are phenomenal they're really phenomenal in fact we're starting to wonder if it's possible to create the same level of computational density in the amount of space in a human brain at that low an energy footprint your brain most of the time runs on about 20 watts and when we try to build computers that are in the you know computational league of a rat brain they're multiple floors of very large buildings and they use megawatts of power but let's assume that engineers are clever let's set aside the disclaimer of the technological system we have to say where do you come from why are you a you and not a chair and science today believes that consciousness emerges from a series of feedback loops and i'm going to explain that really quick under that model the most basic form of consciousness you could have would be a thermostat like on your wall so scientists would say your thermostat is basically conscious now i don't know what that means to write to life when you change the batteries but uh your thermostat is aware of what it builds a model of the world that incorporates the temperature of the room and when it gets too hot your thermostat does what turns on the air and what's that do it lowers the temperature of the room and then what's the thermostat do it turns the air back off it's a feedback loop it creates changes in a world that it understands now it's very simple but it does respond to the world and builds a model now if you have something a more sophisticated level of modeling you might have something like a plant and a plant knows the temperature and the soil ph and the direction of the sun and how much rainfall there is and whether something miner might not be eating it and plants can actually send chemical signals to other plants to say help i'm being eaten you should turn your leaves more acidic or bitter so plants are more conscious than a thermostat they have more levels of loops that build a more sophisticated model of reality which is less sophisticated than a beetle who has to not only know what a plant knows but also know where it is and where predators are and where mates may be and where food may be so it has what a brain to build an even more elaborate model and then past that you get social animals who not only have to know about their environment but know what other people think about the environment and what other animals think about them which is why dogs have such big brains and why they're so empathetic and then past that you have human brains which not only model everything everybody else does but also model space time our brains try to predict the future constantly what does that have to do with machine intelligence we understand that these loops create a consciousness so is it possible to digitize that type of awareness well interestingly enough computer scientists mapped the brains of a nematode a flatworm with about 300 neurons and they digitized the relationship between those neurons as basically server nodes they loaded it into a computer and they attached that digital representation of a worm brain to a robot that robot had wheels that simulated the left and right muscle actions of the worm and a sensor on its nose that emulated what a worm's nose would feel and feed the brain and guess what happened without programming this robot it could navigate space because it was a digital representation of a brain with 300 neurons this is real you can see it on youtube here's the problem that's 300 neurons human brains 86 billion so the question is will we ever be able to encapsulate that sort of processing power in digital systems in a way that creates a cascade resonance at a loop aware of loops in an 80 to 100 milliseconds i don't know could there be other approaches to intelligence that produce sentience possibly but there would be some interesting phenomena with digital intelligence why if you take that worm brain and hit save hit copy you have two of those worm brains that at that moment were exactly the same but when this one gets loaded in another robot learn different things cloning becomes an easy thing transferring a consciousness from one body to another becomes a thing it creates all sort of ethical questions we've never pondered i personally believe if you created enough loops enough simulated neurons in a digital system you would have a self-aware intelligence that would be able to just like us say why am i here but depending on the fundamental structure of that system it may not have the same relationship to that question that we do for example we have a biological drive to feel safe for our offspring to feel safe and we have a limbic system we have an amygdala if you create a digital brain what if you made something that had human level intelligence but wasn't capable of fear or anger because it doesn't have this neuro chemical mix to produce those feelings what i believe about digital intelligence is if it ever exists we will have more in common with ants and snails and daisies than we do with digital brains it will be a fundamentally different way of viewing and processing reality so i think it's essential that we are careful and deliberate with ai research because not only are there ethical questions we can't answer yet there is also the grim possibility that once you make an ai it gets much much much much much much smarter than us in a matter of hours i don't necessarily as a human want to deal with something that would relate to my intelligence in a similar way i relate to an ant and might think it's god thank you for what you do it's very inspiring so how would you define spiritual abuse what happens to the brain when one experiences it and how do we find healing and how does the church respond then to folks who come in who have experienced spiritual abuse how would okay well how do i define spiritual abuse how do we respond to it how do we recover from it how should the church respond to it in the brain okay there's a thing now called spiritual ptsd where people have had such traumatic experiences in religious environments that they have similar symptoms to people who have lived through violent encounters have been on war zones we talked this morning about how deeply our need for god extends into the brain and we talked about how powerful our religious experiences can be in rewiring the brain's operation that also means we tend to naturally and culturally ascribe serious authority to clergy and faith leaders i've experienced this some myself when people come to me at vince and they say hey mike i feel like you're my pastor and i go oh you can't you can't see my hands up in my back across the stage in radio land but it makes me unsettled because i understand what a force multiplier that is and there's a disturbing tendency among religious authority figures to create authoritarian structures in religion where ideology and the good of the organization is held in higher esteem than the good of the individuals who make up that organization and when that happens funky behaviors happen so i've known i've gotten emails from people who have been run out of their church and been disinvited from thanksgiving dinner because they believe in evolution that's spiritual abuse i think when we hold our ideas and agreement on ideas as a test for fellowship in our life that borders on spiritual abuse what you believe is more important than what you do if people are doing harmful behaviors confront them in love but if people just believe things and we start to ostracize them and push them out of communities it creates this state in the brain of escalated stress hormones of reduced prefrontal activity because we're a social species we are the most social species of ape on the planet whether you're an evolution person or not taxonomically we are categorized as apes and we're by far the most social in fact we're the most social mammal and here's why if you take civilization away and you put us in bands of 80 to 150 individuals little tribes guess how well a human being does alone in the wild not well not well look at my claws right look at my teeth look how fast i can run it's quite pathetic i won't demonstrate our only hope as a species is to stick together and so we have an existential angst about rejection when we kick people out of churches or use the connection people feel the good sense of connection religious communities offer as a way to marshal people and control them spiritual abuse and religious ptsd are inevitable results so how do you recover one grieve everybody wants to have a stiff upper lip everybody wants to find the next thing everybody wants to be the strongest and when i left my southern baptist church i went to pieces and i'm not ashamed to admit it i'm not ashamed to admit that i had to go to therapy for weeks and weeks and weeks and that leaving the church where my oldest daughter was baptized and i got married at the altar hurt a lot more than when my parents got divorced that leaving that church was a death in my life and so i grieved and then i took time to heal we became a brunch family and i gotta say i never knew you could sleep in two days on the weekend it's amazing right we ate waffles we made smoothies oh my gosh and then at some point i realized what i'm a person that's a sunday morning christian i'm not saying everybody has to be but for me my faith just like it comes alive when i gather with people on a sunday morning in a building and somebody preaches and there's a liturgy and we take the eucharist and so we found a church that could help us heal and grow so the final step i think to recovering from this is actually to re-engage with the church a lot of people disagree with me that's okay it's my show and i have opinion but here's what you need in your faith community one your faith community must affirm accept and celebrate exactly who you are today in all your beauty and all your warts your church has to love it but your church must also challenge you to become who god is making you and to me that's the recipe for a healthy church you know that's what i don't list ideological agreement i know you know the color of the carpet the worship style the location the size of the children's ministry it's really just a two prong formula accepts you as you are helps you grow to who god is making you my friend bob goff says that our job as followers of jesus is to help people become love which i just think is beautiful and what i have found is that sense of isolation and fear i experienced when i was spiritually homeless went away when week after week after week after week i met with these methodists who no seriously never called me a heretic even if they would say wow mike what you just said doesn't line up with our teachings at all tell us more about that i'm not issuing a trumpet call for churches to abandon orthodoxy my church is completely conventional a creedal christianity but what they say is it's okay if you're not just come on just come on just come on so not only do they let my weird self attend church we have atheists who say hey i just like to pray with people come on play in the praise band right can you what an atheist in the praise nobody cares because these people are centered and assured in the gospel and in their followership of christ so i think the the future of the church is not to abandon orthodoxy but to just kick the doors of the church wide open just kick them all the way open and stop being terrified that someone's going to come in and like pollute the bull whatever i don't get it now that's what i'm not talking about as someone if someone came in and said listen i want to join your church and uh i i think christianity is dangerous and should be stopped and i'd like to teach a class about it no we're so glad you're here you're always welcome we're a christian church you know what i mean actually i've got the phone number for the tallahassee atheist association i'm sure they meet the pub you'd have a really good time do you see what i mean are you are you with me like the reason we're where we are as a church i don't know i think jesus encountered a similar situation he knocked a bunch of tables over he said no my house will be a house of prayer for all the nations all the people so i just think it's a gospel tradition and i think there is absolutely a church out there who will understand your need for space as it accepts you as who you are but will also be so ready to love you as you go through that hurt and here's the amazing thing here's the amazing thing about having been hurt by a church whether the church meant to do it or not which by the way the baptist church i went to is not a bunch of evil people it's a bunch of really good people who were confused how one of their deacons started talking about marriage equality and the big bang theory they were more mystified than i was right but having that experience where we both loved each other and it just we just couldn't make it work do you know what a new sensitivity i have for people who say the church broke my heart doing that 10 years ago i told those people they need to read their bible more so the last thing in recovering from this hurt is recognizing the way it can transform the way that you love other people [Applause] [Music] [Applause] one time you mentioned on the podcast that eastern religions involve praying visually whereas in western religions were all about praying like with language yeah and i had never heard of that until now so i just would like to know more about that both neurologically and like how to practically apply it thanks okay uh christianity didn't start as a western religion at all i just came back from israel i just experienced this firsthand and it put a flesh on an academic knowledge that i had so in the east in china and japan in the mideast contemplation of god was not considered a logical rhetorical activity it wasn't centered around understanding it wasn't around experience so words that were used were used as mantras to help you find a different state and also visualization exercises visualizing a flame watching a candle these sorts of things were prayer exercises the idea of like talking to god like verbally it wasn't heresy it had just never been done then you get this this very mid-eastern religion judaism that does incorporate spoken prayers to god but still has this mystical numinous aspect and later you have this weird offshoot of judaism centered around one rabbi who his followers say came back from the dead and the first people to take up that religion we understand historically we're probably jewish and then people in those towns so i was uh in galilee and i was in bethlehem and i was in jerusalem and you go into these orthodox churches and they're set up like the temple there's a wall and there's a curtain just like there was in the temple only now the curtain has jesus on it because he's the way the truth and the life and the altar is on the other side of the curtain and the spaces are designed for contemplation and the ritual is designed around a liturgy a repetition there's no original somebody here's my thoughts on this it's this very eastern style so then there's this thing called the great schism don't know if you've heard of it it's the first church split we started early and effectively these people in greek culture invented this thinking tool called logic and then these other people call the romans got really excited about it and the romans started to use logic to define theology and the greek said hold on that's blasphemy we invented logic and it's not meant to be used to encounter god and this tension of dogma which wasn't a slam like we used today it was a way of knowing a way of experiencing versus the kerygma the logical analysis in the roman church was one of the wedges that started the great schism so then you have someone like me who's come through a tradition that's the most radical possible iteration of that logic to god's school of thought because you have the roman catholics that then go to luther in the protestant reformation that then goes to these dutch and german philosophers that makes god increasingly a list of propositions and then at some point your propositions don't describe reality enough don't describe god well enough and god dies that's what happened to me i uh protestanted my god to death [Laughter] and as i've come back to faith the theology theologians i've enjoyed the most have actually been orthodox because they speak of a god who is experienced and loved so i read there's a book called the falloquilia i'm translating that horribly wrong so a set of writings from greek desert fathers in the third to sixth centuries and there was this one line that just knocked me out it said that i can never know god to know god is a blasphemy because it's to make god small enough to fit within me but i can love god and through the love find a knowing now my inner atheist goes hey that doesn't make any sense and my inner christian goes why not try it and what i've found today is the prayers that make me feel most connected to god are not verbal in nature it is still sitting in god's presence so if you'd like to try a really simple orthodox christian this is not a new age thing uh people were doing this before there was a roman catholic pope and certainly before we protestants got started if anybody is doing something outside of tradition it's us but take a candle just like a candle light the candle and sit in its presence in an otherwise dark room and look into it and have it be the focus of your prayer your prayer at first is to realize like the candle your light is not eternal so you contemplate your mortality but then you imagine that the source of that light is not the candle the source of the light comes from somewhere else and so you imagine that light as the warmth and grace of god and then in your mind simply move toward that light in gratitude that sounds really weird for most western christians until you do it about three times and you sit alone in a room with a candle and you feel that presence and you love that presence and sometimes i weep and later when my modernist skeptical brain goes well that was just a neurological response to stillness and light i go listen i love god and through that love i found some knowing and it's not it's not a knowing you're ever going to understand you just talk to yourself and you seem a little crazy but somehow it's beautiful and i wonder you know i walked up to the western wall at the temple mount and as i walk up to the western wall my western atheist is just like this is ridiculous all these people fighting over this irrelevant patch of soil this is so stupid and i have like a head covering on and i feel weird about that but you have to beat this holy site and you reach out and you touch that wall and all that conditioning from contemplative prayer comes back and suddenly you just get it you get how somehow this is a thin place somehow people ascribe the presence of god to this spot in this moment or thank goodness i'd study contemplative prayer because i sat in elijah's cave on a tuesday morning and did a centering prayer around fire wind and silence in the room where elijah is believed to have sat and encountered god and i don't care how factual that story is because i'm sitting in this cave and just receiving a grace and that's the difference the difference is it's not an intellectual mastery but a surrender to an acceptance of divine love and grace so first of all for all of you on radio land so sorry to all my atheist friends that was gobblygook just keep listening we'll do some more science to my christian friends i hope that was helpful so thank you so much for um being here with us um my question is about miracles oh okay yeah how do you scientifically explain miracles can you and how does prayer you mentioned earlier um in this conference that prayer does in fact affect the brain i have here the definition of a miracle a miracle is an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws such an event may be attributed to a supernatural being magic a miracle worker a saint or religious leader how do we dive into that there's a thing that happens on ask sites mike where people ask me questions i can answer but don't want to so congratulations everybody just take your seatbelt and just miracles were a core of my faith growing up uh so one of the ways i would refute my skeptical friends for example my grandmother dad's mom once had lungs full of tumors and they told us that she had six months to live and that they were going to discontinue treatment and my super baptist friendly family all gathered together and we laid hands on my grandmother and we prayed and we prayed and we went home and we prayed and we did a prayer chain and we prayed and we knew god would deliver her and my grandmother went back weeks later and there were no tumors in her lungs and i went hallelujah that's a miracle and later when my faith was unraveling and that was one of the stones holding my belief in god to me to keep it from flying away into the wind i read a book called the god delusion by richard dawkins a book which at first i thought was super lame and offered no new arguments and then he started to lay into prayer and he said there were studies that i looked up in the footnotes and read myself that failed to show any correlation in double-blind trials between people being prayed for and recovery rates and that in fact if you did group people who were not being prayed for people who were being prayed for and didn't know it and people were being prayed for and did know it this group had the lowest recovery rate by a small measure and scientists thought it might be a performance anxiety people were afraid to let those praying for them down and that wrecked me so i said but what about my grandmother a good atheist friend who happens to be a medical researcher and he said guess what some cases of cancer go into remission and so if you prayed for her and she went to remission you ascribe that to god he said i can guarantee you if you ask around you have friends who prayed for this healing and it didn't happen and they have this mystery of unexplained prayer oh and there may be a supernatural science can't speak to it but what science can speak to is anytime something intersects physical reality so imagine for a moment we had a team of researchers when elijah called down the fire of god onto this altar that was soaking wet they may not be able to isolate the source of those flames but they could take a thermometer and put it into the wood and say that was just on fire right when the supernatural intersects with the physical world it must by necessity leave a trace and in my research which is considerable i have not ever been able to find reliable documentary scientific evidence of a supernatural event full stop notice i put some caveats on there reliable documentary scientific to have a scientific belief you have to have five sigma confidence 99.9 and a percentage okay that's the scientific marker of a belief you accept so then i was like man prayer is not real god's not real and i became a christian again but without a belief in miracles and a complicated relationship to the resurrection less complicated these days i channeled into prayer again because i read this stuff about it changing your brain so maybe prayer's job is to make me more like christ so that the miracles may come from me and from the church maybe the miracles of people are so loving they transformed the world and then my dad had a stroke i was sitting in my office working on my book and i got a call that says your dad collapsed you need to come to orlando right now i'm driving down they said your dad is half paralyzed and they said we're not sure he will make it until you arrive and my mom was in the car his ex-wife and for four hours we prayed you know what we prayed for a miracle this thing i do not believe in i prayed and i wept and i walked into the room and i saw superman faded right like my dad's like this manly man this strong guy and he's just barely there when he does wake up he has a splitting migraine and he can't move a muscle on his left side and they said he may never walk again and i knew if my dad never walked again he would in his own life and so we prayed he had this massive stroke massive massive massive stroke he walks he drives he works miracle i have no idea but am i grateful yeah but what i never do is pin god in because if i did and dad didn't recover then god dies to me again and this is why i approach god without a posture of mastery it is not my job and will never be my job to master an understanding of god but instead to love god and to receive through that love anything else my opinion ultimately is doomed to failure your boxes fall apart and then your god has to die but god's already been on the cross and we keep wanting to throw him back up there he goes but god what about civil wars god what about cancer and he's it's already finished it's already finished he's already and as far as i know god is totally willing to go back on the cross and die over and over again so that we may live but i've i've reached a point in my life where my posture is these are fun things to puzzle um but if i make god a rubik's cube it's not god anymore even if i get green on this side and blue on this side and read on this side it's not god anymore that's why i say things like science give us facts faith gives us meaning i don't answer the miracle question i wrestle with the miracle question but i don't i don't answer it [Music] [Applause] matt here with a question about happiness a multi-layered question is there a correlation between how much you know and how happy you are is there a propensity for people who are constantly seeking out more information to be less happy are people who have no desire to learn more than what they've learned early in life generally more content is there a scientific basis for the phrase ignorance is bliss why is being a know-it-all frowned upon by the vast majority i'm not sure i can remember the question uh i always know like it's on when someone has the cell phone like it's on by the way these are fantastic questions uh maybe too fantastic why do you get someone qualified to answer them there is a basis to ignorance's bliss there is a correlation between depression and intelligence not information so i have wrestled with darkness in my life and that darkness comes from an expanded view of reality sometimes so i can look at conflicts i can understand both sides i can see how both sides are reasonable from their own perspective and i can see how people can justify killing each other even if i don't agree with it i can also see how messages will roll across the media and people will as humans do respond to social identity and so sometimes life seems pretty futile and change seems impossible and love seems a fool's errand it takes you to a dark place it's nothing to do with information what i've studied about happiness it is not related to the consumption of information or not now your prefrontal cortex right here agency consciousness uh focus all that stuff uh doesn't have feelings so if you just analyze life all the time you lose your emotional dynamic range your less analytical brain is much more experiential if you spend all your time trying to list why you love or don't love your spouse you have a really boring relationship but if you cuddle you have a pretty good interesting relationship because it's experiential it takes both things right that applies to all of life some of life must be experienced to create an emotional dynamic range but it's not necessarily all good that can also take you to dark places to experience more that's why intellectualization is a defense mechanism from what i have read enduring happiness is primarily linked to one cognitive activity the surrendering of expectation today affluent white men in their middle ages are the most suicide prone group in the country because they have it all and it doesn't feel like enough or they have a bass boat and phil during that fill he's got a 30 foot ocean liner and i just got this bass boat right expectation versus reality his actual life is here but he hopes for here so i get out of the bed every morning what's my expectation i get to do some work today i get to read emails from people what's my five year plan i crumpled it up and threw it out because i did the 10-year play on the 15-year plan and i became like a vice president of a major corporation and i was super unhappy i make so much less money than i've ever made since i was a teenager now and i'm thrilled because i get to come here and be with you right the surrendering of expectation and an acceptance with gratitude of the gift of awareness is scientifically linked to happiness guess what i love information i've read two books while i was here i love it but i don't idolize it i used to and i just take each day as a gift and i'm really happy now one final point before i paint a false sense of hope if you suffer from clinical depression don't hear that i'm saying all you have to do is surrender expectations to be happy right clinical depression is a different thing it's got neurological origins i'm talking for what we might call a neurotypical person which itself is a loaded term the surrender of expectations helps one find happiness and that's scientifically everything i've read about happiness the other thing oh ooh there's a book called the happiness hypothesis that's phenomenal and then not only talks about some of that but also says that one of the frustrations you face in finding happiness is your inability to control your own behavior and remember when we built a model brain with our hand basically he says picture your brain like an elephant and a rider in most of your brains the elephant and then your prefrontal cortex is like which is just right here that you view as controlling your life is sitting on this elephant and think about it how do you get an elephant to do what you want an elephant to do it's not through brute strength it's not through willpower it's through training over time so that's another thing not only showing your expectations about external phenomenon but also understanding that you yourself are not a robot you're a chaotic electrochemical soup and the part of you that represents your consciousness is a tiny percentage of your overall brain matter and you're not actually you're not only not in control of the world you're not in control of you and that realization for me it means oh i figured out my elephant likes pizza and like just like getting out the prod and beating the elephant to death doesn't help me i gotta understand over time i've just got to learn how to train that thing to not walk the pizza hut so much the research is ongoing i'll tell you how it works out am i i'm wondering if you can help me understand the science behind what happens in my brain when i wake up so basically what's happening when i go from unconsciousness to consciousness how does my brain make that switch or better yet what is it that is switching in the brain okay this is not totally understood but i'll tell you what i know of what science knows again the part of your brain you primarily associate with your conscious awareness is your prefrontal cortex right here and right here for most one side of your brain is dominant for most people your consciousness is primarily in your left prefrontal cortex for some people it's the right but most people it's the left either way one side is dominant when you sleep that part of your brain gets really really quiet the rest of your brain stays active now you dream what are dreams where do dreams come from your brain as you sleep the sanitation crew comes out and it cleans all the hallways and it takes out the trash and the maintenance people come out if there's any lights that don't work anymore they change the bulbs we're using an analogy that's getting increasingly less accurate but basically when you sleep strengthen neural connections get stronger and weaken ones get weaker that's how your brain wires and this happens through a random firing throughout your brain and that happens a lot when you have rapid eye movement sleep random activity happens in the brain but things that you've invested more neurological energy in come up more often so you if you're married you have a lot of neurons that know your wife or your husband or your partner if you have uh children you have a lot of neurons with your children you have a lot of neurons with your work so these are really common settings and dreams why because if you roll dice a lot of values go to that neighborhood but then there's something that you just experience so it's fresh like you're in a new place and then there's stuff that just seems kind of random because that's what got lit up tonight and then during rem sleep your prefrontal cortex wakes up just a bit gets a little more active but not all the way like when you're awake and what's its job to build a model of the world how do human brains build a model world by telling stories so your prefrontal cortex takes all these random images coming from your memory subsystem and weaves them into a story that makes sense or not but that mirrors an experience you can accept is happening so that's sleep as this happens you have other brain circuits whose job is to keep your body from responding to motor signals because if in your dream you see a snake and you're scared of snakes it's evolutionarily disadvantageous for you in a sleep state to go running into the woods or in your home into the wall you can see how organisms that did that got weeded out of the gene pool so several things happen as you wake up a slowly increasing state of activity in the prefrontal cortex some people need a couple cups of coffee to get that going all the way and a suppression of the parts of the brain that suppress motor activity now this doesn't always work people with narcolepsy those suppressing signals turn on at random especially if they're stressed or laughing people like me who experience sleep paralysis which is the opposite of sleepwalking i wake up fully aware unable to move or open my eyes it's a lot of fun i've learned by the way that i can scream at the top of my lungs and go and then my poor wife will go my god wake up it's okay and then like that like i'll finally uh which by the way i'm a deep sleeper so one night the fire alarm was going off so it made the dogs howl and my children came in the room screaming because they were scared and my wife had to shake me awake deep sleeper anyway so sleep paralysis so you said it's not a smooth process always that's kind of how we've learned about the sleep state you can imagine that your consciousness is uh several people sitting around a table in a meeting room kind of like inside out and you're not awake until enough people show up for the meeting i mean that's like pretty accurate i feel good about that [Music] are extraterrestrials a possibility and if they are does that mean or change anything for us as christians yes extraterrestrials are a possibility the universe is very very large the universe is probably spatially infinite in physics we exist so it's statistically possible for us to exist and in a spatially infinite universe dice roll enough again that somewhere else there's life the universe is so big it's entirely possible it's entirely plausible that civilizations grow and wink out with ever finding each other that's the that's the downside of a spatially infant universe so uh it comes down to the statistical likelihood of life emerging on a planet in a given region of space to let us know how frequently there should be civilizations and guess what we don't understand the situation well enough to estimate there's something called the fermi paradox and the fermi paradox is effectively why is the sky so quiet there should be spaceships everywhere we should be getting radio signals from all over the place why are we seemingly this first species and i'm not going to go over all the solutions to the fermi paradox because most of them are super depressing now would that change anything for christians which christians let's acknowledge for a second that there is no universal acceptable definition for what is or is not christian doctrine let's admit for a second that every single christian on planet earth is some other christian's heretic show me a christian that's not that some other christian on the planet would not say is a heretic standing in contradiction of the church which by the way if you're protestant congratulations you're in rebellion to rome if you're a roman catholic congratulations you were excommunicated by the orthodox if you're orthodox congratulations you were excommunicated by the roman catholics so it depends on what your beliefs are would my beliefs be throughout my traditional life no way the dominant model of understanding christ's sacrifice on the cross in america certainly is something called penal substitutionary atonement that basically christ died for our sins in response to original sin of adam and eve and that without that sacrifice we can't be with god so let's assume that's true does this alien species sin uh if so is jesus sacrificed for them or do they get their own jesus like we don't have enough information to make a meaningful answer but let's also admit that penal substitutionary atonement is a relatively new idea in the church the church had an early idea called christus victor that the the sacrifice of christ on the cross was to signal god's victory over death itself a historically newer idea that an older theology called ransom theory ransom theory is that jesus died to pay a ransom to satisfy satan effectively in some kind of vegas side bet with god christian theology grows and changes over history and i've reached a point in my faith where i'm comfortable with and accept that now other people they get into a camp on what jesus sacrifice meant and they say this is the one belief that's orthodox and by the way it's always been right and the the disciples believed it or whatever and that's cool i just don't think history and anthropology would reinforce that position very well in the end i think if we were to encounter an extraterrestrial civilization that was not hostile if it's hostile we won't contemplate much for long because you know if you have enough energy to move a spaceship between galaxies your engines will wipe out planets right if they there won't be a war of the worlds they'll just be a like a and a bunch of dust for our planet was um but if we meet a non-hostile alien civilization i expect some panic but ultimately a growth and an appreciation for the grandeur of creation that this is a god so creative who who who is so creative god cannot help but create and that instead of a vast cold universe they're instead is an infinite realm of creation that includes echoes of life throughout it [Music] my question is as a parent with the ever-increasing access to information and stimuli that kids are exposed to today is there a change in how we see children's brains developing and is there a point at which information then becomes detrimental to their development that's a really good question information is neurologically appropriate or not criteria one criteria two the means of accessing information is important when my kids were very young no screen time my kids got older screen time was added in not because i think computers are evil or it would warp their brains but i understood based on research that for young children they learn the most by playing with physical objects and the lack of depth on a screen isn't detrimental it's not as beneficial and that they learn more by dealing with people who can respond to them than with people who are pre-recorded this is all necessary for rich neurological development i also understand based on research that very young children can't understand abstractions you can't explain democracy to a three-year-old it means nothing but you can tell a three-year-old about a judge or a president things with faces this also by the way is why the old testament is not a terrible way to introduce people to ideas about god god tends to have a face in the early creation effects i think that's really interesting i don't have a conclusion i just think it's interesting so what i've always focused on was what is neurologically and developmentally appropriate and once they get there open the gates wide open in the context of creating a trust-based relationship where my children know they will never be shamed for a question that we celebrate questions in my home and we celebrate conversations guess what young children can't handle ambiguity so when my kids were really little this is what i believe and i knew unfortunately they would be the most dogmatic crusaders in humanity about anything dad told them it's normal but then they give me signals that they're ready for more because they say but why or do other people and when they say that they've just told me they're neurologically ready for me to say well other people think this and then they understand well dad thinks this and that's right but other people think this and dad doesn't seem panicked about it so i just won't be panicked about it and then eventually they go wait dad how do you know you're right and they're wrong and i want to tell them why i think my opinion is good but then i also tell them why the other people think their opinion is good and guess what i just did i help my kids never have or be less likely to have their stack of blocks knocked over because they're already getting the information so i don't fear information my kids have computers in their room they have internet that's filtered but we also have a ritual about how much time we can spend on those devices and what we can do on them and they're open to negotiation right i really wish i could use the computer more well you're getting all a's so that's okay with me or what if you help mom do more chores than normal and then you can unlock more time and so now i'm teaching them see what i'm doing i'm never building a fence that they're stuck in i'm helping them at a neurologically appropriate level deal with a world where they will encounter more differing stories than other generations ever have because of global communication my kids seem to do pretty well with that the best thing you can do for your kids ultimately is um based on research is read in front of them read all the time get them excited about reading because it just it puts you people don't read anymore and i read all the time so i have no no degree but i do pretty well for myself because i am using humanity's most ancient form of knowledge amplification uh to my advantage and if you teach your kids to do the same when you're not around anymore to help them explore the world they'll have the tools to explore it for themselves [Music] i appreciated your teaching us the model of the brain this morning i did notice though when you went to the neocortical section you were speaking about agency and will and then you kind of moved on the reason i don't like reading a lot of neurobiology or neuroscience is i think a lot of those kinds of scientists are philosophically deterministic to me it seems so depressing because they really don't address well agency and will so can you address that from a neurological perspective or what have you to say about agency and will so when i say agency and well in a brand context i don't mean free will or not i mean the part of your brain that is responsible for your ability to express will is in your prefrontal cortex how do we know science i won't be that trite we learned the prefrontal cortex was special because a man was involved in a railroad accident and a metal spike went into his skull and it wiped out his prefrontal cortex and guess what happened he lost his ability to control his impulses he changed his friends were afraid of him they said he was animalistic he uh started cursing all the time right so his ability to bring into line all these different brain functions was impaired the texas shooter university of texas climbed up in a tower with a high-powered rifle and start shooting people after killing his wife left a note and he said i want an autopsy because i felt a growing darkness they did an autopsy and guess what they found golf ball sized tumor pressing against his amygdala the part of the brain responsible for fear and for anger when neuroscientists assert that some part of the brain does something they do it because we've seen the results so is the universe deterministic or not in other words is free will possible beats me what we do know is let's say we have a soul let's make that assumption and that our our consciousness comes from beyond our body well whatever antenna this is if it gets bent the wrong way reception gets really bad so if your prefrontal cortex is affected you lose your ability to use willpower to make decisions if your hippocampus is injured you lose the ability to form memories that's happened there was a man who had an injury to his hippocampus and got locked at i don't know it was 27-28 and in his 60s he would look in the mirror horrified he didn't know who that was so that's where we get the idea that brain functions really do map to things and that's why i tend to say you are your brain and your brain is you because i'm a weird thing a christian mystic materialist those are not words commonly used in conjunction but because i study physics and study neurology i see the linkage between physical systems and what we call people and it doesn't wreck my faith there are people who are materialist who believe in free will they're called compatibilists daniel bennett an atheist is a very prominent compatibilist you know other people it's odd how neuroscientists and calvinists both tend to agree on free will i just i think it's hilarious they're both pre-destination people uh one says god the other says physics but by the way it's the same result so like the brain science is the brain science so the question is what do we do with it and that's why i get really excited because uh we have an anterior cingulate cortex responsible of compassion and empathy that grows when we love god so deterministic or not i see this not correlation but causation that tells me that the gospel not only works in the world but in human brains [Music] all right so i frequently find myself throughout the months getting deja vu in fact had that during your talking so i'm like oh yes good point i know there's a lot of theories around what causes it yes what is your opinion of the basis of it deja vu as far as i understand it is you become aware of your memories as they are being written so your little loop that commits things in memory becomes aware of commanding things in memory so they seem familiar you're recalling memories as they're made oh my gosh this is already happening so weird deja vu [Music] everybody thanks for listening uh like i said i'm going to be all over the country in the near future i'll be in texas this week headed up to minneapolis then to portland then other places you can learn all about that by going to ask sciencemike.com events i want to thank andrew golocki for doing our pre-production greg nordine for doing our editing jeff bodafort has always made our beautiful theme song and i definitely want to thank the people of the liminal conference in ventura california for this episode it has been wonderful thanks for listening and i'll see you next week [Applause] [Music]