3min chapter

Existential Hope Podcast: Adam Brown | A Theoretical Physicist's Take on the Future

The Foresight Institute Podcast

CHAPTER

The Cosmological Constant and the Laws of Physics

There's a whole field called thermodynamics that says you need to extract usable useful low entropy energy from the universe in order to do work. 1997 really threw it into perspective if here is a theorem if the cosmological constant really is constant and the laws of physics as we currently understand them are correct we only have a limited amount of free energy. We can't for any given galaxy extract more than a finite Amount of Free Energy. If we cannot evade the cosmology constant then our long-term future is to end in a heat death after some finite amount of computation has been released.

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Speaker 2

And you can also see how that system can be manipulated in the fact that you, and the flaws in that system in that if you, there's some experiments with pigeons, you might be able to remember this as well about where if you give a pigeon a treat when it presses a button, then it will press the button sometimes. But if you give the pigeon a treat and there's a 50, 50 chance of getting a button, the pigeon will actually press way more and we'll just continually doing it, do it. And that's sort of the, if you've ever seen like the social dilemma, that's a sort of basic fundamental psychology that's exploited by social media companies because every time you check your notifications, all right, there sometimes is a notification, sometimes there isn't. And for whatever reason, that actually turns out to be a hack in our psychology. Like a gamble. Yes, it's a gamble. And a gamble is actually, even though it's less reliable, it's for some reason more addictive. You'd think that if you got a food every time, then you'd be more addicted to the thing. But actually, if you get the food less often, but sometimes it's more addictive than if you get it every time, which doesn't really make sense, but it's sort of a weird hack in our psychology. So we talk about this on the podcast quite a lot, right? I mean, so people

Speaker 1

will probably be quite aware of this. We are basically just building on top of everything that came before us, right? That's kind of how evolution works. You lose things here and there, you lose a tail, still with that tailbone though, but everything is built on top of everything else, right? And understanding doesn't matter at all. And what also doesn't matter is doing the best thing. What works is the best thing, right? The best thing to do is the thing that bloody works. It doesn't matter if it is actually the best thing to do statistically. You just need to survive long enough to create offspring. So we are now a species that's walking across this earth that doesn't really have an innate understanding of odds. And our command of logic is shoddy at best. You know, all of these things that are kind of like, you know, not the sort of like, you know, humans or mind brain, the kind of lower stuff, it doesn't matter all of the stuff that we care about now about, you know, odds logic, all of that. All of that matters is surviving long enough to have kids. And I think that's one of those reasons that we look at sort of a dog and our pattern recognition in our brain goes dog able to talk. Dogs able

Speaker 2

to talk.