So by a show of hands, how many people here have heard of the Ultra Deep Field experiment
by the Hubble Telescope?
Okay, very few.
Okay, we'll strap in because I'm glad I get to tell you about this.
What happened some years ago was that NASA had completed a low-resolution map of the
night sky and they decided that they wanted to go deeper.
So they picked a little tiny patch of space, a patch of space that's about the size of
a pencil tip at arm's length.
And it was black.
There was nothing there.
And what they decided they would do is point the finely honed lens of the Hubble Telescope
at that little patch of space.
So every time the Hubble came around the Earth, they pointed the telescope at that little
patch to see if they could capture any photons and see if there was actually something in
there that was too dim to see normally.
So every time the Hubble came around the Earth, they pointed it for 20 minutes and they pulled
this trick off 400 times.
And at the end of that, they compiled all the information, they collected all the lonely
photons that had trickled in from distant reaches of the universe, and they put it together
and they found that there was something in that little patch of space after all.
And it wasn't a star, and it wasn't a cluster of stars.
It was 10,000 galaxies.
Now a galaxy is 100 billion stars.
So we're talking 1,000 trillion stars in this little patch of space.
Each one of those stars, just like our sun, many of them presumably with planetary systems
around them, all of them with the potential to house unknown forms of biology.
So I think this is a good consciousness razor to think about the size of the mysteries that
surround us.
So I am a scientist, I've devoted my entire life to science because I figure if we want
to understand what's going on in this strange world around us, there's probably no better
method than to directly study the blueprints.
And science in the last 400 years has been tremendously successful.
We have cured smallpox and polio and gotten men to the moon and made the internet and
tripled lifespans.
But I think what you really get from a life in science is this knowledge that after you
walk the pier of everything that we know in science, at some point you reach the end of
the pier.
And beyond the end is everything that we don't know.
It's all the uncharted waters, the deep mysteries that we don't have insight into yet, like
why mass and energy are equivalent, or what dark matter and dark energy are, or why there
are multiple spatial dimensions, or how you build consciousness from mechanical pieces
and parts.
That's the real lesson that you get from science is about the vastness of our ignorance.
Now I have no doubt that every generation we will continue to add a few more slats to
the pier, but it's a huge ocean and we don't really have any guarantee how far we'll get.
And certainly in our brief twinkling of a 21st century lifetime, we're not going to
get to the end of that.
And so the lesson that you get from science is that what we know is so vastly outstripped
by what we don't know.
So given that situation, I have been interested in what has happened this last decade with
the books by the neo-Atheists.
And these books are some of my favorite books and they're very important and insightful books.
But what's been interesting to me is the public reaction to them because what they have led
to as far as I can see is something of a misconception widely that scientists don't have the capacity
to gamble beyond the available data.
And that scientists are acting as though we've got it all figured out.
We understand it, f equals ma equals mc squared.
We can put it in equations or if we can't yet, then we're pretty close and it should
suffice to capture a description of the whole cosmos.
I think that's actually not a very good description of how science actually operates.
Ben's right when he said that science is about disproving other people's hypotheses,
but it's about so much more than that.
This is really about this creativity of making up new hypotheses.
And part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses
in mind at the same time.
Now what we actually do is we make up new stories in the laboratory every day and then
we go and we seek evidence, we gather evidence to weigh in favor of some stories over others.
But it's often the case that some questions are too far out right now.
They're beyond the toolbox of science and as a result, we're unable to gather evidence
for them.
And in that situation, it's okay.
Science is comfortable holding multiple hypotheses on the table.
That ambiguity is accepted as part of the relationship we have with mother nature.
It's part of the vast mysteries around us.
We have to have that ambiguity.
So I don't pretend like we've got it all figured out.
And as a result, I have felt sometimes that perhaps we know too little to commit to a
position of strict atheism.
Now at the other end of the spectrum, we know way too much to commit to any particular
religious story, right?
So there are 2,000 religions on the globe and it's been pointed out by others that everyone
already knows what it's like to be an atheist because all you need to do is look at someone
else's religion and you say, well, that's patently ridiculous that you would believe
in that.
And of course, they're looking back at you and thinking the same thing.
Now the holy books written by the world's religions are often quite beautiful and they
crystallize hard one wisdom.
But in fact, these were written millennia ago by people who didn't know about the size
of the cosmos or the big bang or bacterial infection or DNA or computation or even very
much about neighboring landscapes and cultures.
So whenever I'm sitting next to somebody on an airplane, I ask everybody if they've ever
heard of the ultra deep field experiment by the Hubble telescope.
So far nobody's heard of that, but everybody's able to tell me all of the details of whatever
cultural story they grew up on.
And you don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize that our nervous systems absorb
whatever our cultures pour into us.
So if you grow up in Saudi Arabia, you're going to love Islam and if you're born in
Rome, you love Catholicism and Tel Aviv Judaism and Springfield, Ohio Protestantism and it's
not a coincidence that there's not a blossoming of Islam in Springfield, Ohio and there's
not a blossoming of Protestantism in Mecca.
It's because we're products of our culture.
We accept whatever is poured into us, right?
If there were one truth, you would expect that it would spread everywhere evenly, but
clearly the data doesn't support that.
The crazy part is our cultures pour the stuff into us and then sometimes people are willing
to fight and die over the particular stories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out a while ago that the religious stories of one generation
become the literary entertainment of the next generation and you can see that nobody's fighting
over Isis and Osiris anymore or the Greek and Roman panoplies, not so much.
And so I want to give you an example of this.
I don't know if any of you are familiar with the creation story of the Bakuba Kingdom in
the Congo, but their creation story goes like this.
There was a white giant named Mombol who had a sharp pain in his belly and he vomited
up the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars.
I'm not making this up.
And then he had a second pain and he vomited up the animals and people and trees and included
in that second ejection was, and I quote, the leopard, the anvil, the eagle, woman,
the monkey fumu, firmament, medicine, man, and lightning.
Now, if you find the creation story of the Bakuba and unlikely explanation for how we
got here, just keep in mind that if you were Bakuba, you would find equally bizarre the
western story of the naked couple and the talking reptile and the prohibited produce.
And if you were Bakuba living in Kansas, you would be fighting to get this in your children's
textbooks.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the Bakuba story is wrong or the Adam and Eve story are wrong
because there are competing stories.
I'm suggesting they're wrong because all the available evidence we can gather weighs against
them.
So, for example, the biblical story suggests that the earth is 6,000 years old.
Our best science tells us that it's 4.5 billion years old.
So that means the biblical account has to somehow explain how the Japanese were making
pottery 4,000 years before the earth existed.
So for my money, this puts me somewhere in the middle.
I have felt for a long time that we know too little to commit to strict atheism and we know
far too much to commit to a particular religious story.
So what has surprised me is the amount of certainty that I find out there.
So when you walk into a bookstore, what you find are the books by the Neo-Atheists and
the books by the fundamentally religious, and they argue with each other and they polarize
each other and they're spending all of their energies on that.
And it has felt to me for a while like maybe there should be another voice here because
that seems too limited for a modern discussion because if you think about the space of possibilities,
so take the whole Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition, that's one point in the possibility
space.
Take the Eastern religious, that's another point.
Take the idea that we're mechanical pieces and parts and we shut off when we die, that's
another point.
We were planted here by space aliens, that's another point.
When you start populating the space, what you realize is there are vast landscapes in
between of possibilities and all of these points are infinitesimally unlikely, but together
they add up to this possibility space.
And I feel like there's not really enough discussion about that space, instead the whole
discussion has been limited to what I consider perhaps a false dichotomy, this God versus
no God, and that's where the conversation has ended.
Now some people in the middle position, sometimes people use the term agnostic, I don't use
that term because the way I see it used, it typically is used as a weak term.
Often when people say they're agnostic, what they mean is I'm not sure whether the guy
with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist.
So I don't call myself an agnostic, I call myself a possibility.
And the idea with possibilities is an act of exploration of new ideas and a comfort
with the scientific temperament of creativity and holding multiple hypotheses in mind.
So possibilities is now 18 months old and I first announced it when I was on a live
national interview on NPR, I explained it and I defined it and when I got done with
the interview I got back in my truck and I drove over to my laboratory at Baylor College
of Medicine where I'm a neuroscientist and I settled in for a day of work and I opened
up my email and I had hundreds of emails from people and they all said, hey, I think
I'm a possibility too.
So I thought that was pretty cool so I googled the word and it turns out the word didn't
exist.
The word zero hits so I did what anybody would do, I bought possibility.com and then I waited
to see what would happen, what happened has been amazing, what happened is groups started
popping up all over the place on Facebook, possibility groups got started, the New York
Times did an article on it, MSNBC did an article on it, it spread worldwide, the Uganda Times
just had a beautiful piece on possibility, the India Sunday Times, there are now 15,000
Google hits and it's really caught fire.
One thing I noticed that was funny is people who had heard about it on the radio didn't
always know how to spell it or they forgot the name and so people started calling it
possibility and also in all kinds of things and spelling it every way you could imagine
and I thought, you know what, that's perfect, that's right in the possibility spirit, spell
it however you want to do it.
But the question I started wondering about is why, what is the reason that this movement
is catching on given that it's a very strange movement and that we don't subscribe to anything.
So it struck me that maybe what's going on now that we've passed the first decade of
this millennium, I think maybe people are a little bit tired of people acting as though
they're certain about things that they can't possibly be certain about.
So they're a little tired of the debates between Dawkins versus the Discovery Institute
and as Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position but certainty is an absurd position.
So I want to make two points of clarification about possibilities.
So one is, sometimes people come up to me after a talk and they say, that's terrific
that you're a possibility and I'm so glad that anything goes in possibilities because
that means you get me in terms of ESP and crystals and whatever, no.
Possibilism is not anything goes, it's anything goes at first and then we import the tools
of science to rule out parts of the possibility space.
So it would be terrific if ESP existed, we would all love that but to the extent that
we can measure things now, we cannot find any evidence to support it.
So the idea is you import the tools to sculpt, to structure the possibility space, you can
rule out whole areas.
And the interesting part of possibility, of possibilityism really picks up where the
toolbox of science leaves out, it's where we no longer have the tools to address it
and we have to understand the space of possibilities.
That's where it's really important and the reason it is so important to keep that open
mindedness about all the parts we don't know is because we know for certain about the magnitude
of things that we don't know.
So in every generation of scientists, people have always felt that they have all the pieces
and parts that they need in order to answer what's going on around them in the cosmos.
But just imagine trying to explain the northern lights in the absence of understanding the
magnetosphere or trying to understand, trying to explain the heart before the concept of
a pump was invented or trying to understand how muscles work before electricity is discovered.
You would make theories but you would be doomed to be incorrect.
Well, we're in that same position now so we've got Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics
and quantum mechanics and we think, okay, we've sort of got all the pieces and parts.
But on the one hand, there's all the unknown unknowns, all the stuff we don't even know
we don't know.
But what I want to emphasize is all the stuff that we know for sure we don't know.
So take something like dark matter, right?
So astrophysicists look at the movement of the planets in the galaxies and they look
at how everything's moving around and they look at the gravitational pull and what they
realize is something's missing.
There's something out there that we can't quite see or smell or touch but it must be
there to make the equations work out, to make the movements in the cosmos explain.
And so we're going to call this a fudge factor and we're going to call it dark matter.
And the idea is that dark matter is the thing that we don't exactly know what it is but
we require it to make the equations work out.
Okay.
Some of you may already know dark matter is not a tiny fudge factor, 90% of the known
universe is what we call dark matter.
That's a lot to sweep under the rug.
Okay.
And this is what I study.
I go into the lab every day and study the human brain.
This is the most complicated device we have ever found in the universe.
It's essentially an alien kind of computational material and it is so dense in its connectivity
that if you were to take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are more connections
in there than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
So this is incredibly complex and yet somehow this wet mechanical network system here is
you.
It's all your hopes and dreams and aspirations, right?
Somehow that's you.
If you were to lose a little part of your pinky, you wouldn't be any different.
But if you lose an equivalently sized piece of neural tissue, that completely changes your
conscious state, right?
Well, the problem is we don't know how to take mechanical pieces and parts and build
private subjective experience out of that.
Imagine that I give you a trillion tinker toys and I said, okay, hook it up.
So this is a lever and this touches that and that causes that and so on.
At what point do you add one more tinker toy and then you say, ah, it's experiencing the
taste of feta cheese now, right?
That's the problem.
We don't have any way to take our equations and say, okay, we'll just carry the two and
do a triple integral and then that's, you know, that's feta cheese or that's the redness
of red or the qualia of pain or something.
We don't, not only do not have a theory of how the brain works, we don't even know what
such a theory would look like.
Okay, so all of this calls for a bit of intellectual humility.
Now I was giving this talk recently and somebody came up to me afterwards and said, hey, Dr.
Eagleman, good job on the talk.
He said, you know what, I think you should become a politician because you're unwilling
to commit to anything.
And he said to me, why don't you just cowboy up and, and commit to something.
So I thought about that.
So in, in Texas, where I come from, we have this lovely expression to cowboy up and what
it means is to firmly commit to a decision and we really value the straightened people.
We like people who can firmly commit to a decision.
So if you're trying to decide, should I take the cattle out in the rain or should I marry
this woman or should I sell the ranch?
We like people who can make a really firm decision.
But what I'm going to suggest is that there are some domains where it's appropriate to
cowboy up and there are some domains where it's not so appropriate.
So would you stop a guy on a ranch and say, tell me, if you think there are extraterrestrial
civilizations, do you care what his opinion is?
Would you value it more than say an astrobiologist?
And if you wouldn't ask him about extraterrestrial civilizations, that suggests that there are
some domains in which it is not appropriate to commit and act like, you know, the answer
in the absence of having good evidence.
So the next time someone says to you to cowboy up and commit to a decision, I suggest that
you tell them, no, I would rather geek out.
And the idea of geeking out is having a creativity for new narratives and a comfort level with
holding multiple possibilities in mind.
And you should feel free to cite the gospel of science, the most important three words
that science ever gave to humankind.
So my message to you is this.
When you leave here and you go back out into this strange world, try to seek comfort with
having multiple narratives and uncertainty.
And this is not just a plea for simple open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas.
I think this is important for our education, for our legislation, for perhaps the future
of our warfare.
So when you leave PopTech full of ideas, go back and look around the strange world you're
in and see if you can live a life that is free from dogma and full of awe and wonder
and see if you can celebrate possibility and praise uncertainty.
Thank you very much.
