A splendid overview of the current state of cosmological natural selection, from the Infinite Loops podcast
In which I also discuss Lee Smolin, lots and lots of black holes of all sizes, the current crisis in cosmology, and the odd psychology of civilizations living in oceans under the surfaces of icy moons
I recently had a conversation about cosmological natural selection with Jim O’Shaughnessy, on his Infinite Loops podcast, after which my wife Solana told me “Oh my God, I finally understand what you’ve been talking about for the last three years!” That’s a big win! And several other long-term readers of my stuff have got in touch to say, this is the best single overview of the subject yet. So, I’m putting it here.
Some background on Jim O’Shaughnessy: Jim has run a lot of mutual funds, and written a bunch of books; his latest is Two Thoughts. He is also executive chair of the board of Stability AI, and runs O’Shaughnessy Ventures. (Who, full disclosure, awarded me an OSV grant last year to work on these theories.) I hugely enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you will too. I’ve cleaned up the full transcript, and laid it out below. (Partly to feed these ideas to the ravenous AIs that now stalk us all! But as a human, you’re still better off watching or listening to this one, as much of the information is in the delivery. Or, put another way, there’s a lot of waving my hands about and swearing, which might amuse some of you.) Video is in full, above (and again, below, where the transcript starts): it’s also available on
If you want to skip the biographical stuff at the start, and just head straight to the discussion of cosmological natural selection, it begins 39 minutes into the video.
If you want to skip to it in the transcript below, just click here, and you will be whizzed there as if by magic.
Please do share this with any friends you think might be interested in these ideas: as my wife’s reaction clearly shows, it’s a great entry point.
And now I’ll hand over to Jim’s written introduction to this podcast episode, from the Infinite Loops website.
JIM O’SHAUGHNESSY’S INTRODUCTION
Julian Gough sums up his career as follows: “I just sit in my room and write.”
Well, I think being an acclaimed children’s author, novelist, stage playwright, poet and top ten Irish musician is a little more impressive than he’s letting on… Oh, and I didn’t even mention that he wrote the ending to the computer game Minecraft!
His current project, The Egg and The Rock, puts all of this to shame. This book, which Julian is writing in public on Substack, seeks to do no less than redescribe the universe, arguing that is not some random, dead, purposeless sack of chemicals, but instead a living, evolving organism.
Julian joins me to discuss why the arc of human evolution bends towards man-made black holes, the hidden catastrophe at the heart of materialist science, the strange life of subterranean ice aliens, and MUCH more!
This was such an interesting conversation. We’ve shared some edited highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
[Julian here, butting in to say: This is a link to the Infinite Loops Substack, which is full of good stuff.]
Highlights
The Scientific Method Vs. Human Nature
“But the scientific method is in conflict with human nature. That's why it's so powerful. It's a way of escaping our human nature, but we can't escape it, and we constantly go back into it, and we're social apes. So what you end up with is social ape dynamics inside scientific fields, that can lock them off from truth over time. And that keeps happening. There's a sort of start-up energy to scientific fields, when it's just a bunch of guys, some gals, but historically, it was a lot of guys, coming up with a bunch of ideas. And there's like a hundred people know about this in the whole world, and they all meet up sometimes. And that's when all the breakthroughs happen. And then, the start-ups turn into corporations, and the corporations have structures. And you end up with this kind of management bloat, and you end up with what has happened to practically every science. They've gone from start-up energy to corporate bloat.”
The Strange Life of Subterranean Ice Aliens
“I am predicting lots of life in this universe. So where is it? I think this, what I've just described to you, gives a possible answer to that, right? This is an interesting one. If most life is in fact in the liquid water oceans of icy moons, imagine what their view of the universe is. They're under a hundred miles of steel-hard ice. They develop a civilization. They have no idea they're in a universe. They don't know why the center is warm and the surface is cold. They don't know it's a surface. It's just, that's the end. They don't have stars in the sky. They don't see a sun, they can't see planets. Would they ever dig through the ice a hundred miles and then fall into space? I don't know what the logic or the psychology of any kind of civilization that develops under those conditions is. I can't see space-faring civilizations coming out of that. I don't know. They may never leave.”
The Universe Is Behaving Like a… Dog?
“A storm is coming. Cosmology is going to get turned upside down by this, when they finally realize it's an evolved universe. What's here is, they are looking at a sack of chemicals, right? And they're trying to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals, and they're using really nice, simple models to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals. But the sack of chemicals is a dog. It's a dog, okay? Dogs do things for dog reasons, because they evolved, right? And if you're looking at the same sodium and carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen, but it's a dog, it's not just a bag of random chemicals. It just behaves differently. It develops differently over time. Look again at the universe. Is it behaving like a bag of chemicals randomly chosen with random properties, or is it behaving like a fucking dog? It's behaving like a dog.”
The Efficiency of Black Hole Energy
“Humans, and other intelligent life forms on other worlds, can tap, as David Deutsch would say, anything that doesn't break the laws of physics. Eventually, we're going to tap anything that doesn't break the laws of physics. And what are the limits of that, in our universe? What's the ultimate form of energy release in our universe that's realistically tap-able inside the laws of physics? It's black holes. If you can artificially make small black holes, you can use them to convert up to 42% of the mass of a piece of matter into energy, 42%. That's an incredible rate of return. Fusion in the sun, fusion reactions only give you 0.7% of the mass back as energy. Fission, primitive nuclear bombs, fission will only give you 0.1% of the mass back as energy. So 42 percent's unreal. And any technologically advanced civilization is eventually probably going to technologically produce small black holes for energy production, because that's the best you're going to get.”
Books & Articles Mentioned
The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science; by Robert Anton Wilson
Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge; by Paul Feyerabend
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles; by Lewis Carroll
The Life of the Cosmos; by Lee Smolin
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell; by Erwin Schrödinger
Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology; by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Did the Universe evolve?; by Lee Smolin
The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?; by Robin Hanson
Transcript & Links
A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRO
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I have been looking forward to talking to today's guest ever since I discovered him. My guest today is Julian Gough. Julian, it's going to take me five minutes to go over all of your accomplishments. You've written five beloved children's books, the first of which was nominated... Or actually, did you get Irish Book of the Year in 2016? You were nominated or shortlisted?
Julian Gough:
No, I didn't win that, though I won a prize in France for it, but the Irish never quite accept their writers till we're dead. But I have high hopes after my death. No, I was shortlisted. It was great. It was wonderful. It was all great.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love that comment about the Irish. That's right. "We'll give him the credit, but after he's gone."
Julian Gough:
Yeah. I'd be a bit worried if I got it in my lifetime.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, that would be a bad thing. So five incredible children's books. Four highly acclaimed novels on humans, one of which I am reading right now.
Julian Gough:
Interesting.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
A couple of BBC radio plays about God knows what. A charming stage play about, I love this one, an economic catastrophe caused by goats, and for our younger viewers and listeners, the ending of Minecraft known as The End Poem. Julian, welcome. We're not going to talk about those today. We're going to about what you're actually working on right now, but welcome.
Julian Gough:
Oh, good. Well, thanks, Jim. It's wonderful to be here. Yeah. Ever since I discovered you're a big Robert Anton Wilson fan, I've been interested in talking to you. It's an interesting global underground community of big Robert Anton Wilson fans.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Totally true, which I discovered later in life, as I was telling you before we started to record. I discovered Wilson through a rather circuitous path. A friend of mine had written a piece about why people should read Jed McKenna, or as I like to call him, the fictional character known as Jed McKenna, because he is a fictional character that tells us that we're all fictional characters and that there's no duality. Everything is non-dual. We all are part of the universe. We'll get to that later when we're talking about your current book, but the whole thing was through Dan, but then Rick and Morty. I don't know if you…
Julian Gough:
I'm aware of Rick and Morty. I'm quite aware of them, but I haven't really gone deep. I suspect I might not come back.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Julian, if nothing else gets accomplished by us chatting with one another, you absolutely must watch the entire... Because you make the comparison about The Simpsons actually covering a more broad and interesting group of topics than any novel that was written recently.
Julian Gough:
Yeah, the first nine or ten series, certainly. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Oh, you have such a treat in store for you, because Rick and Morty does that on steroids. But I wasn't even finished. You also were a very famous musician, singing in Toasted Heretic.
Julian Gough:
Locally famous. Locally famous.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, well, you hit some top 10 lists.
Julian Gough:
Yeah, yeah. Top 10 in Ireland. But yeah, to be fair, if all your relatives buy your single in Ireland, you've got a reasonable chance. But yeah, in Ireland, I would be surprisingly well known for a guy who just hides in his room and writes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And you are also the writer in residence or have been at Trinity, at the University of Limerick, at the University of Singapore. My god, I love how you demur and say, "I just sit in my room and write." You certainly seem to get around a lot, Julian.
Julian Gough:
I sat around in Singapore in my room and wrote. I was writer in residence. They send you over in a box and they don't even take you out. "Look, we have a writer." They point at the box. It's the perfect job. I love it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, that way you avoided all of their draconian laws about not spitting on the sidewalk or chewing gum. You're much safer in your room, I'm sure.
Julian Gough:
(Laughs)
WRITING THE EGG AND THE ROCK IN PUBLIC
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Today I really want to talk about your new nonfiction book called The Egg and the Rock.
Julian Gough:
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
What's very interesting to me... Well, it's very interesting to me in many, many regards, but the first thing that grabbed me is you're doing it in public. First off, I think that being creative, engaging in any artistic endeavor, requires a lot of courage just in and of itself, but to do it in public? Wow.
Julian Gough:
Well, it's the first one I've done in public.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
For a guy who sits in his room... Yeah. But what made you decide to do it in public, and in the format that you're doing it?
Julian Gough:
This is a very different book to my previous books. My previous books, I would not show them to anyone until they were done. I knew what I wanted to do, and I was very in control of the material. Well, you've never in control of the material, but I knew what I wanted to do. Even when what I wanted to do was extremely weird, I would just chase my obsessions and get it to the point where I was completely happy, and then I'd show it to someone. And then there was an editorial process and it went back and forth, or it got rejected or it got accepted, or whatever.
This one's different because this one, it's about the universe. It's about all of the universe. It's about the pre-history of the universe. The scale of this is so ridiculous. Look, I’m a writer. Writers have an ego. They're putting their ideas out into the world. They think they're great. I think I'm great, but I'm not great enough to do this on my own. Jesus. So I really wanted to try out everything in public, make my mistakes in public, have my successes in public, get feedback, get feedback, get feedback, build a community for the ideas, get other scientists involved who are domain experts, because I'm not a domain expert here, but who is? It's the universe.
So I've developed an extremely broad knowledge base over the last decade because I've been working on this book for over a decade, but in private for the first eight or ten years really, and it's only in the last two and a half years I've gone public. I've decided I had to start doing it in public. It's been so good. It's been an amazing experience.
I was terrified doing it. Yeah. I didn't want to do it. No writer wants to do stuff in public when it's not finished, but I had this moment that unfortunately, there was... Not unfortunately. Fortunately; it's turned out great. There was this moment that came up where I realized I had to start talking about these ideas in public because there was a way to test them. There was a way to test them, and it was time-constrained.
I had to get some of the ideas out before the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's and the European Space Agency’s and the Canadian Space Agency’s telescope. This new extremely powerful, extremely technologically accomplished infrared telescope was going to be launched, it was going to be online, and it was going to send back data, and I realized that if the theory I was working on about the universe had any value, it should be able to make predictions about the early universe that could then be either proved or disproved, found to be accurate or not, by the James Webb Space Telescope.
So suddenly I had a clock running, after a decade of just luxuriating in my room and just thinking, "Well, I love this theory. It's such fun. When the book is eventually finished in a decade, I think people will be interested." And suddenly I realized, "The timer is really running on this." So I started thinking everything through from first principles and I put some predictions up on Substack on the internet, and I sent them out to some subscribers that I'd built up, and suddenly the whole game was happening in public, and that's really changed things in a really interesting way.
That's the reason we're talking. The reason O'Shaughnessy Ventures got involved in the project, Emergent Ventures, Tyler Cowen's thing, got involved in the project. It's all because I started talking about this in public. And a lot of scientists are now interested. They're intrigued. It's been a wonderful experience, but yeah, it's very scary. You have no idea how scared I was the night I put up my predictions online and sent them out to the subscribers in public, when I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I just didn't want to press Send. I didn't want to press Publish. But yeah. Yeah, so this is an unusual book for me. I don't know what I'm doing either, man. I'm just trying it out in public, but you get great feedback. You improve all the time. I wish I'd done more of my work in public now. Yeah.
RUPERT SHELDRAKE, DAVID BOHM, ROBERT ANTON WILSON, AND HERESY IN SCIENCE
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. Rupert Sheldrake, who I've had on the podcast, told me once that there is a huge group of scientists like himself who are basically in hiding, and he says they're in hiding because of the draconian iron fist that is the materialistic worldview – that the universe is dead, it’s a one-off. That view is in the ascendancy. And it is very difficult, given the structure of how scientists get their work or get their grants or get any of that, to suggest something different. Rupert did and paid a huge price. He was vilified publicly for his first work. The editor of Nature, the premier British scientific journal, essentially... I love this, because he didn't even know that he was owning himself, but he was on BBC back in the '70s when Rupert published his book. His name was Sir John Maddox, and he said, "I have exactly the same right to excommunicate Professor Sheldrake that the Pope did with Galileo."
Julian Gough:
I remember it. Yeah. Yes, I know. I know. Actually, you don't know this, do you? I know Rupert. Yeah. And you are right, there is this underground. I've actually worked in a little email group with him a few years ago, on consciousness in the universe, where we were trying to work out ideas about that. But yes, there was the sense that you had to almost keep it quiet that you were working on this. I mean, eventually he wrote a great paper on consciousness and the sun, which was published in a very respectable journal [The Journal of Consciousness Studies], but getting it through their peer-review process... They were scared to publish it, in a way. There's so many things you can't talk about in public. He's completely right. I really like Rupert.
I actually sent him a draft of the new thing I'm writing, about early structure formation in the universe this week, and got feedback from him, so I still really like to get his ideas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's been demonized. Here's a funny thing. The theory I'm working on, cosmological natural selection, the first scientist to put that out there as a coherent theory was Lee Smolin, and Lee Smolin and Rupert have talked, but Smolin doesn't want to work with Rupert because I think he's scared. I think he's scared to be seen to be talking to Rupert about the universe, and that's crazy. Lee Smolin is a great guy, but so is Rupert. You should talk to each other. It's very sad. There's a real hidden catastrophe inside science at the moment. Yeah. It's very sad.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I agree, and I liken it often... Again, Wilson is my touchstone here with his book on the return of the Inquisition in the Citadel of Science, and it dismays me no end that the scientific method suddenly became scientism, trademark, with people saying, "You may never question the science. The science is always right." That is the anathema of the scientific method. I think of David Deutsch as another who will say, the scientific method is: question everything. We can call them theories. They do sneak in “law” a couple of times, but they're not laws. They're theories, and most of them represent the best guess, estimate, for what we think the universe is, how it proceeds, how it was created, etc. But that's what they are. They're theories. And like Galileo or Copernicus, why did this happen? Why did they assume almost pope-like infallibility in their assertion that they were right and anyone questioning them was a heretic and wrong?
Julian Gough:
Well, it's been a long, slow process. Something that Galileo set up, when he basically wrote the rule book for science at the start, was that it was going to be purely mathematical. It was going to be just: the language of science is just angles and lines, and it's just going to be purely mathematical, and I'm not going to speak beyond the mathematics. And I write about this in the book I'm working on. I think he was terrified by what had happened to Bruno a few years earlier, because Bruno applied for the same job that Galileo actually got, and was turned down, and then a few years later, Bruno gets burnt. He gets taken to the Field of Flowers in Rome, an iron bolt is driven through his cheek, through his tongue, so he won't speak his heresies to the crowd. He's hung upside down naked and jeered at for a while, and then he’s set fire to. That could have been Galileo.
And that happened to Bruno partly because Bruno went beyond the data. He went beyond the data and he said, "I think I know what it means," and he spoke about the fact that, "Look at these stars in the sky. They're probably suns like our own. Those suns probably have planets like our own. Those planets probably have life like our own. There are souls on these other worlds." And that's one of the things they kill him for. So he went beyond the data and said, "What does it mean?"
And Galileo never went beyond the data. He just looked at things. "That's a shiny thing. Not going to go beyond it. It seems to be that far away. Not going to go beyond it." And that was a vow of humility. He was saying, "There are more important things and I'm going to leave them to the Church." Right? "There are more important things, and that's not my territory. I'm not going to step on anyone's toes. I'm just going to do this little mathematical science." That was a vow of humility, and what it's turned into is exactly the opposite.
Now, all of the important truths that were outside of that narrow realm, which Galileo would tell you were more important than the mathematical sciences, they are now seen as beneath the mathematical sciences. It's an extraordinary shift that the only real truth is the mathematical truths of reductionist, materialist science. All the other truths, the truths that you get through literature and through singing, through comedy, through intuition, through transcendental experience, they aren't truths at all inside of mathematical science, and it's a real transformation into the opposite of what it set out to be. What we need is a reformation. We need a reformation in science. I'm actually thinking of printing out some of the things I've come up with in the book, and I'm thinking of actually nailing them to the door of the Royal Astronomy building in Greenwich, right on the line that divides the world into time zones. I'm thinking of nailing it to the front door. I think that might get the point across. I think we need dramatic actions here, because I think the way they'd react would be delightfully papal. I think they need to get a few more little pokes, because they don't understand, they don't understand. The humility of science – because humility is at the core of science, scientists say we're humble, we are always prepared to change in the light of the evidence – but a humility that says, "this is the only possible route to truth," that's not humility anymore. So I agree with you on this. Strongly agree with you on this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. It is, in fact, the height of arrogance. And I think one of the things, through all the rabbit holes I've dove down, that I've learned is, I don't know almost anything.
Julian Gough:
Yeah, sure. None of us do. We're mammals running around, trying to understand the universe.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
We're domesticated primates. As Robert Anton Wilson would call us, we are domesticated primates. And so, I think we need to be open to all of the various other views. Because again, as Wilson said, perceptions form opinion, opinions re-inform perceptions, and it is a tight loop that logic cannot get through to. And to see it done in the name of supposedly objective science-
Julian Gough:
I know.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... The scientific method… is just madness to me. And what's funny is, if you're familiar with the history of it, this is nothing new. Right? So David Bohm, who wrote about the implicate and explicate order-
Julian Gough:
Implicate order, yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... Was meant to be a communist, according to the higher-ups in Washington. And they told Oppenheimer, who had been a supporter of Bob's, "No, no, no, no, no, no. He's a commie. He's a commie. You can't." And so, there are letters with Oppenheimer to his other fellow scientists saying, "We must..." It's like Mean Girls, the movie. Right? "Don't sit at our table. You can't talk to us."
Julian Gough:
I know, I know.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Literally, there was a letter in which Oppenheimer said, "If we cannot disprove Bohm, we must ignore him." And this, I find it just incredibly crazy that science could become so reductionist and so deeply fearful of anything seen as uncertain. That's what the scientific method is for!
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD VERSUS HUMAN NATURE
Julian Gough:
But the scientific method is in conflict with human nature. That's why it's so powerful. It's a way of escaping our human nature, but we can't escape it, and we constantly go back into it and we're social apes. So what you end up with is social ape dynamics inside scientific fields, that can lock them off from truth over time. And that keeps happening. There's a sort of start-up energy to scientific fields, when it's just a bunch of guys, some gals, but historically, it was a lot of guys, coming up with a bunch of ideas. And there’s, like, a hundred people know about this in the whole world, and they all meet up sometimes. And that's when all the breakthroughs happen. And then, the start-ups turn into corporations, and the corporations have structures. And you end up with this kind of management bloat, and you end up with what has happened to practically every science.
They've gone from start-up energy to corporate bloat. And innovation has slowed down in every field, and it's sociological. It's a huge amount of sociology there. You need to go back to, like Paul Feyerabend, was it, who wrote Against Method, the book in the seventies, saying, "You need an anarchy of ideas. You need an anarchy of approaches…” That there isn't a scientific method, in real life. We think there is. But when you look at how the breakthroughs happen, they happen in the most extraordinarily odd, sideways, very human ways, unexpected ways down unexpected channels. They don't come through this iterative, iterative, iterative approach, where you're just expanding the horizon a little, expanding the horizon a little. Because what often happens is you've got an unexamined assumption underlying the entire field, that the field isn't structured to notice. And in fact, noticing the unexamined assumption under the field, which is wrong, is considered heretical.
And the trouble is the sociology of science; as they develop, they get cut off from the ability to fix their fundamental flaws. And that's exactly what's happened with cosmology. One of the things that's been really interesting over the last decade of studying this is, a huge part of the interest is, the science. Of course, it's the science, it's the data. But another part is the sociology. It's the extraordinary human dynamics that have basically suppressed an approach to cosmology that is far more productive and useful than their current approach. And it was suppressed for sociological reasons. You can actually trace out who kind of shot down who over a period, there was a little period of very polite warfare inside kind of physics, kind of cosmology. It was basically happening in theoretical physics, because that's where the idea that I'm playing with came from. But it was shut down by other people inside the field of theoretical physics for sociological reasons. Because the string theory guys didn't want an alternative explanation for why our universe was this complex and interesting.
They had a string theory approach. There's 500 million string theories, and with so many string theories, one of them could give you a complicated universe. They use the anthropic principle. And then, Smolin comes along and says, "I think there's this other approach using this stuff called evolutionary theory that comes out of this thing called biology that none of us fucking read. But I've actually read a bit of it. And there's this weird idea of a thing called evolution. Evolution gives you complicated things, inside a membrane, that develop over time. And our universe looks awfully like a complicated thing that develops over time inside a space-time membrane. And maybe evolution is the explanation for that."
And he came up with the pretty good basics of a theory, and it got shot down by a bunch of string theorists for completely sociological reasons. Because it was going to mess up their primacy in their theoretical physics field. And cosmology was just a kind of bystander to all of this, and it got robbed of a theoretical approach that is so powerful, an outsider like me, who doesn't have a profound knowledge of the specific domains, can make better predictions about the early universe than the mainstream. That's crazy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It is indeed. I'm a big proponent of the power of markets. And one that shows a lot of promise, in my opinion, is, if you tie these predictions that many make, in a variety of fields – not just science – if you tie them to some sort of bet with the people who are taking the opposite side, that makes people, for whatever reason, Annie Duke is a friend of mine, and she gave me the shorthand heuristic, which is, if you want to see how much somebody really believes in something that they're saying, all you have to do is look at them and say, "Want to bet?" And she said, all of a sudden-
Julian Gough:
Yeah, how much they really believe it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... Yeah, you can see them recalibrating right after that is said. But I also completely agree with your notion that we cannot... Ceteris paribus is – never happens – other things remaining equal. No, they're never remaining equal. And at the center of all of our endeavors sit us, we humans. You might remember the Pogo cartoon. “We've met the enemy, and it's us”. And the idea behind the sociological aspects of science, I find incredibly intriguing, simply because what you see is what you see in many other fields, a hierarchy emerges. What do people at the top of that hierarchy do? They want to remain at the top of that hierarchy. And what happens when the underlying ideas bubble up to a point where it hits a crisis mode? That's when you see the flips happening. So for example, do you know how long they tried to save Ptolemy's version of the cosmos, the Ptolemaic universe, with all of its-
Julian Gough:
Sure, epicycles.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... Circle, its epicycles, and everything.
Julian Gough:
And then, more epicycles.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And then, Copernicus and others come along and say, "Well, wait a minute, if we just do this," and I'm gesturing and making the sun the center of the galaxy, as opposed to the earth.
Julian Gough:
Solar system.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yes. But it was also an interaction, wasn't it? Right, because we often failed to understand how much of our worldview beyond science is formed by scientific beliefs. So back to Ptolemy, right? The Ptolemaic universe was one of order and hierarchy. God sat at the top of it, and God picked the kings and the Pope. And therefore, the kings were ruling by divine right. "God told me that I was meant to be king." The popes were infallible in matters of religion, because, "God told me." And then, when Copernicus comes along, all of that, slowly, slowly starts to dissipate. People start asking, "Well, wait a minute. If we're not the center of the universe here, I wonder what else is wrong?"
Julian Gough:
Yeah, it's very destabilizing. The changes in how we see the universe are very destabilizing in how we see ourselves and our political structures. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
THE UNAVOIDABLE PROBLEM OF AXIOMS, DOGMAS, AND UNEXAMINED ASSUMPTIONS
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Absolutely. And the challenge is, I'm also a fan of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, who wrote about this extensively. If you haven't read his very short piece, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, I recommend it, because it plays into Agrippa's trilemma or Münchausen trilemma, which says that, essentially, logic has three problems that you cannot surmount. The first is, it's often circular. And the second is, and this is where Dodgson or Carroll comes in, it goes into an infinite regress. Because each time you get to ask the question, "Well, if A implies B and you say B implies C, does that mean C implies D?" Well, yes, it does. And then, you keep going and going and going, and then, you finally get to the one that I'm really interested in, which is the planted axiom in all logical systems, which creates dogma. And that planted axiom is this, according to Carroll, when you get all the way down in a logical system, what are you going to find? You are going to find a base rule, an axiom, that a human simply asserted was true.
Julian Gough:
Yeah, of course.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
With no proof. With no proof, right? And so, again, to our mutually admired Wilson, the wrong software guarantees the wrong answer, right?
Julian Gough:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
If you keep feeding things into the wrong software, it's going to keep spitting back the same answer.
Julian Gough:
But that's what's happened with cosmology – cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics. The unexamined assumption there, which goes back to Newton, whatever, it goes back to Galileo, there's this unexamined assumption that the universe, well, that our universe is a one-shot universe, that the matter in it is just random matter obeying arbitrary laws that just happen to be these laws and there happens to be this matter and it happened to happen once, and it's just... Right? And if you make that assumption, you end up just trying to treat the entire universe as though you can just essentially use simple gas laws to work out what's going to happen next. And that's not how the universe behaves at all. It doesn't seem to obey simple gas laws. It's not all spread out evenly everywhere. It has all sorts of complex structure that we didn't anticipate at all until like 1978. It's the seventies. Punk was already past its bloom when we discovered that the structure of the universe is nothing like what we predicted.
Because that's the first time we got 3D maps of the universe. It's the first time we actually did a proper redshift survey of how fast galaxies were getting away from us, and we realized, "Holy crap, there's huge voids between these galaxies, and there's these huge structures." 80% of the universe has nothing in it, essentially nothing in it. It's like 80% of the universe, the average density in those parts is like less than 10% of the average density of the universe. They're very empty of stars and galaxies. Most of the matter in the universe is gathered in just these nodes, these clusters and super clusters of galaxies, which are connected by filaments – but the nodes only take up about 1%, one or 2%, of the volume of the whole universe. The other 18, 20% is filaments that join the nodes, going between these huge voids that have almost nothing in them, and the filaments are full of gas and some galaxies, some stars.
But that is a crazy structure that was not anticipated at all. And in 1978, we discovered this, oh! Up until that point, they were assuming that the galaxies were all spread out, analogous to just random molecules of gas obeying simple gas laws. That's a big mistake. And there's no humility when they realize, "Oh, we have been completely wrong about the structure of the universe." What they do is, they try to get it back to simplicity by just throwing more matter at it. And you end up using dark matter to solve every problem. But to solve the problem, you have to throw more and more dark matter at it, and then, you have to give it quirky little attributes that work in this situation, but not in that situation. But you don't synthesize the two and say, "Well, then it can't exist."
Instead you say, "Well, maybe it's like this, because that solves this problem. No, maybe it's like this, that solves this problem." And you have this completely incoherent response. After 50 years of dark matter, we still haven't seen any. We have no detections. And we still don't even know what kind of stuff it is. Is it axions? Is it sterile neutrinos? Is it an unknown particle of some kind? It gets less defined over 50 years of investigation, rather than more, which is exactly the opposite of what should happen in real science. In real science, you should say, "We've made a fundamental error here that's underlying all our assumptions. We need to go back down to that fundamental error and fix that." But they can't. They're stuck inside a paradigm that's based on assumptions that just aren't true, the idea that we're in a random one-shot universe, where matter just obeys arbitrary laws.
But they're not. Everything's fine tuned. You can't go from a hot ball of gas that doesn't even have the elements in it yet, they haven't even been formed yet, just hydrogen essentially, to you and me talking to each other, through advanced technologies, in abstract language. And while we're doing this, we're doing it inside a biosphere that sustains itself as a homeostatic, dynamic, out-of-equilibrium system for billions of years, with an external energy source, which is also a homeostatic, dynamic, out-of-equilibrium system that maintains itself for billions of years with an incredibly frugal output of power.
People say about hydrogen fusion, "Oh, it gives out so much energy!” Yeah, there's so much energy from each individual fusion incident, but the rate at which stars do it is incredibly frugal. It buys you the time for life to develop and evolve and so forth. Everything – the fact that the molecules that make up you and me exist – is down to multiple rounds of star formation, building out the elements, then distributing them, when the stars get to the end of their lives, as supernova explosions, to make the next round of stars, which will fuse the next round of elements, which will then explode out into the surrounding gas, to make the next round, so that, after three rounds of star formation, you can build planets.
This is an unbelievably sophisticated developmental process that leads to where we are now. And the idea that random gas happens to bump into itself under arbitrary laws and it ended up doing this by mistake is so fucking stupid. And to not even see that there's a problem here, that needs to be explained, it blows my mind. Like, "You don't think there's a problem here?" Because every time an astronomer looks down a telescope, they look through the telescope and they say, "I can just see random gas. It happens to interact in strange ways." But they're not looking down the other end of the telescope! There's an astronomer there, in an institution, built out of technology, using all these elements that were somehow assembled by that random gas. You've got to look down both ends of the telescope.
And I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by where we've ended up with cosmology and astrophysics and astronomy, where you can't say it means anything, because they're terrified. If you say, "This obviously means something, this self-complexification, and it needs an explanation," if you say that, they're terrified what you mean is, "And the explanation is God." And they're so scared of God, because the origins of science were so scared of God and scared of the church and everything else, that they're still scared. And the funniest thing is, the answer isn't God. The answer is evolution. So what you've got are people rejecting evidence of evolution, because they're terrified it's evidence of God. It's the most ironic, paradoxical situation. I just love it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
As do I. And you've set the table nicely for our listeners and viewers for a fuller explanation of the cosmological natural selection theory. I'm familiar with it from Lee Smolin's work in the nineties, I think, when he came up with that. But as you point out, I also want to just make an aside, what you were talking about, "Oh, the answer's dark matter," it sounds a lot like throwing more epicycles into the Ptolemaic universal model, doesn't it? Right?
Julian Gough:
Yes! And the thing is, you can do great with enough epicycles. You can do great, but it's just not true. That's the problem; it's just not true. And you can sort of make dark matter do a lot of interesting things, if you invent enough of it, and place it exactly where you want. But if you look at the simulations that they use to do this, to play out how you get structure in the universe, there's 9 or 10 free parameters that you can adjust. With that many free parameters, you can make anything happen, anything. It's CGI, you know? Marvel can do this too. They can give you a very convincing universe using computers and enough free parameters. It doesn't mean it's true.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love that.
Julian Gough:
It's crazy.
THE CURRENT, REMARKABLY HEALTHY, STATE OF COSMOLOGICAL NATURAL SELECTION
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But now, let's take a step back, because you extend Smolin's work by making predictions, by doing a lot of things that he didn't do with that theory, but if you would...
Julian Gough:
And there's good reasons why he didn't. There's been more data since. He just couldn't have come up with some of the conclusions I came to, because we didn't know enough at the time. But yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly. And we didn't have the James Webb and all of that, but let's give a layman's definition of the theory of cosmological natural selection. And then, I'm going to go into some of the specific, talk about brave, some of the specific predictions that you made. And there's a really exciting one, but I'm not going to do a spoiler before you tell our listeners about the theory itself.
Julian Gough:
Well, I think it's worth going all the way back. I think there's always been an intuition that something like this might be true, that the universe might have evolved. You see David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, intuiting that perhaps there were many labors, and many worlds lost, before this world came into being. He's talking about this kind of thing, but in a pre-Darwinian world. So there's no mechanism for this to happen. He's just saying, "It seems strange that we ended up with this complex world. Were there earlier failed worlds?" And then, Darwin comes along, and he comes up with a theory of evolution, but he comes up with a theory of evolution for DNA organisms, for biological organisms. He comes up with it at a time when the assumption is that the universe is infinite and eternal. The basic scientific assumption is the universe is infinite and eternal.
That's why it's called the universe! There's only one of it. And so, that assumption means everything happens inside this one eternal, infinite universe. Charles Peirce, after Darwin, the great American pragmatist philosopher, thinks, "Wait a minute, this is interesting, because natural laws are very odd things that probably need an explanation. And evolution seems like the natural explanation for something that seems fine-tuned, that seems to be precise, that seems to have consequences that are complex and interesting." So Charles Peirce was the first guy to say, "Wow, maybe there's an evolutionary theory behind the physical laws of nature." But he didn't know where to place the evolution, because he was still living inside an infinite and eternal universe. But he thought, "Maybe they somehow evolved inside this universe."
You get into the 20th century, and suddenly, we had this weird moment. It wasn't a moment. It was dragged out over a long time, that it took us a long time to work out this was the case. But you end up with this transition from the infinite, eternal universe, which we've always assumed to be the case under science, to the discovery of the Big Bang. And it's a slow burn, because they discovered the galaxies are flying apart, Hubble discovers that, and that's really freaky. Then they realize the implications of that are, they're flying apart from a point, from somewhere. Then we start looking for evidence of that.
Then we eventually discover the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, in the sixties. And we realized, "Holy crap, we can hear the Big Bang. There was a moment of creation. There's a moment of generation for this particular universe. This universe isn't infinite, and it isn't eternal. It started at a specific point, and it expanded from that. And you've got the speed of light constraining everything. So it's only a certain size, and it's only a certain age. And now, we think it's 13.8 billion years, and it's as big as it could expand in that time."
But that's just a bubble of space-time. It's not infinite. It's not eternal. That should have really made cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy, they should have all gone back to their absolute basic foundational beliefs at that point, and examined them again. And they didn't. They didn't. So what you've got now is a cognitive dissonance in those sciences, where they're kind of assuming, in some ways, that everything's infinite, eternal, but you've got this new piece of information. The universe started at a point and grew, developed rapidly, developed rapidly. We used to think we had an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of time for something complicated to happen. Fair enough, in an infinite amount of time, something complicated will probably eventually happen. We don't have that luxury anymore. We've only got 13.8 billion years, which is not very long.
And the person I think that made the big breakthrough in thinking about how you could square these various circles, this very complex universe we live in, which is very recent, was Lee Smolin. Lee Smolin was a... No, I'll actually go back to a mentor of his, John Wheeler. John Wheeler, at this point, realized, John Wheeler is a great American physicist, he realized there's two problems that we haven't solved yet in our universe that involves singularities. A singularity is a point of infinite density, where mass energy just gets crushed down to a point of infinite density, right? And weird shit happens at that point.
None of our rules work at that point. When you get down to a singularity, general relativity doesn't apply anymore. We can't do a quantum mechanical explanation. Literally none of our theories operate at that point. So we don't know what happens. And there's two of those in our universe now. One, black holes. When stars get to the end of their lives, they burn out their fuel. There's no longer radiation pressure to keep them expanded. So they collapse under gravity. And if they're big enough, they keep on collapsing to the point where they form a singularity. They're a black hole.
That mass energy vanishes from the universe, and we don't know where it goes. We don't know what happens. Information can't come back from a black hole. Mass energy has gone, that's a singularity.
The Big Bang is the other singularity. In the Big Bang, from a singularity, mass energy expands to form our space-time. And John Wheeler was the first person to say, "What if they're the same thing looked at from different sides? What if the collapse of mass energy to a point, that is a black hole in a parent universe, bounces to form the singularity that mass energy expands out of to form a baby universe? What if universes give birth to universes through black holes and Big Bangs?" Because remember, the Big Bang, the new baby universe, is outside the parent universe. It's not inside it. It's gone. So I think that was one of the great obvious, brilliant insights, but he didn't know what to do with it.
He said, "Maybe the child universe is randomly different from the parent universe, and maybe if there's enough random differences, you'll end up with a complicated universe like ours." Okay. It's not a great explanation, but he's groping towards something. But one of his students or one of the students influenced by him was Lee Smolin, a very good theoretical physicist. And Lee Smolin realized, because he was reading a lot of evolutionary theory on the side, that, if, instead of being randomly different, the child universe was only slightly different, then the basic parameters of matter, if they were slightly different in the child universe, that child universe would, as a result of that, be likely to either create more black holes or less black holes; be more reproductively successful or less reproductively successful. And, if that's the case, you get Darwinian evolution automatically, because you've got inheritance with variation. And so the child universes whose basic parameters of matter produce more black holes will have more offspring. That evolutionary line of the basic parameters of matter will be varied on again in the next generation. Some of those offspring will produce more, some will produce less… And you should get runaway reproductive success of universes, because universes aren't like biological organisms. They're not in conflict in a narrow constrained environment where there's only a limited amount of food or anything. You're generating a whole new space-time from scratch each time.
That's one of the really interesting things about our universe, which gives you, let's say, a clue towards the fact this might be an evolved thing. Our universe is essentially flat. The mass energy and the gravitational energy balance out to zero. You could make this universe for nothing, right? And if that's the case, universes can produce huge numbers of offspring for free.
And this isn't controversial. We know that we can pretty much make universes out of nothing, that they balance out to nothing. So you've got this ability to make very productive, fecund universes. And our universe produces… well, so far, it's probably produced something like 40 quintillion black holes. That's the latest survey, they think that we've probably got about 40 quintillion. So there's a lot. We produced a lot of black holes.
And that was kind of Smolin's idea, that you would basically get the basic parameters of matter fine-tuned to produce more and more black holes. And if that required more complex structures over time, you'd get more complex structures that were better at and more efficient at producing black holes. And it's a great theory. And I am really upset that it wasn't taken more seriously at the time and given more of the community's attention and budget.
But what happened was, sociologically, he was in trouble, because he published his first paper, Did the Universe Evolve?, in the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity. Who reads the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity? Like, a hundred guys, and all they're interested in is quantum gravity, right? That's it. So nobody who could do anything with it, read it.
So a few years later, he writes a book about it, The Life of the Cosmos. And I've been rereading it, and I used to be harder on it. It's actually a lovely, lovely book. But he hangs off telling you the really exciting, interesting part for about 150 pages, because I think he's scared to tell you. I think he's scared. It's like, it's too big and it's too weird, and he's not sure, and so on and so on.
And the book didn't really take off. And it was before the internet, so when he published that paper, that journal didn't go online for another six years, so nobody could stumble on it. It was on a hundred print copies in a hundred libraries in the Quantum Gravity section. You're not going to find it by mistake.
All the people that could have done something with it, they didn't even know about it. And then, when the book comes out, Leonard Susskind, the main String Theorist, King String, really tried to put it down. There's an online debate between Susskind and Smolin, on The Edge website. It's still up there.
And you can see them arguing back and forth about cosmological natural selection. And Susskind uses arguments against the theory that are completely wrong – but nobody notices, because they're all theorists. They're all physicists. His basic argument against Smolin was, if universes evolved to optimize for black hole production, they would produce the most black holes you could possibly produce. That's a mathematician's idea, right, of how evolution works.
So his argument is, “I can imagine a universe that produces loads more black holes, that's just nothing but little tiny black holes. And this isn't that, so this isn't evidence of optimization for black hole production.”
Now translate this into terms we're more familiar with, and you can see how stupid this argument is. It's like saying, "Giraffes can't have evolved, because giraffes only have one or two offspring a year. I can imagine giraffes that produce billions of offspring every second. So clearly giraffes were not optimized by evolution for reproductive success."
That's a theoretical physicist's idea of an argument, right? Because in real life, you have to have a direct evolutionary line from the beginning, to the universe you're observing. And all of the way along that line, all the intervening universes have to be reproductively successful, right?
If you can give me the evolutionary line from an ultimately primitive beginning that is not that reproductively successful at all, to trillions of black holes in every cubic meter, then I'll grant your point. But you can't fucking do it, can you?
So the problem was, nobody took this seriously as a genuinely evolutionary theory. And the theory then got expanded a little. One of the glories of this theory is it does explain the fine-tuning of the basic parameters of matter, because we've got a very fine-tuned universe here. If you change many of the parameters – the parameters would be things like the mass of the electron, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and so on.
If you change them by very much, you do not get complex structure. You don't even get atoms. You just get mush. And with any randomly-chosen set of parameters, you're nearly always going to get mush. The fact that we don't get mush, the fact that we get self-complexification at all scales, really needs explanation. And evolution gives you an explanation. Evolution will give you a fine-tuned set of parameters that gives you a giraffe or a complicated universe, from a bunch of sludge, if you give it enough generations.
So that was great. The theory wasn't there yet though. I mean, do you want to interrupt at this point and ask any questions or anything? Are we good? Okay.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Keep going.
Julian Gough:
Okay.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You're on a roll.
Julian Gough:
There was some development of the theory by people who thought, there's really something here. And the next breakthrough in the theory, which I find very interesting – and this is the bit where some people think this is too speculative, it's too science fictional, but I don't think it is, I think this is just logical – was by people like Clément Vidal. He's a very good Belgian philosopher of science, and he's worked on astrobiology, and the search for alien life, and stuff. Good guy. And John Smart, very interesting futurist and thinker. And Louis Crane, he's an excellent mathematician in Kansas. A few people worked on this theory. But you have to explain life. Why would you have life in a complex, evolved universe? Because the thing that's reproducing, the unit of selection, is the universe, right? So why would intelligent life be useful to a universe? And there's actually an answer to that, right?
In this universe, and I've worked a little bit with some of the guys on this, the intelligent lifeforms start to manipulate other matter, make technologies, and so on, and they want to optimize their energy sources, as everything does. As a cat does, a cat optimizes its energy sources. A fish, a bacterium, they all optimize their energy so that they don't die, so they can get the most chance to live and reproduce with the amount of energy that's available. And they'll tap whatever sources of energy they can.
Humans, and other intelligent life forms on other worlds, can tap, as David Deutsch would say, anything that doesn't break the laws of physics. Eventually, we're going to tap anything that doesn't break the laws of physics. And what are the limits of that in our universe? What's the ultimate form of energy release in our universe that's realistically tap-able inside the laws of physics? It's black holes.
If you can artificially make small black holes, you can use them to convert up to 42% of the mass of a piece of matter into energy, 42%. That's an incredible rate of return.
Fusion in the sun, fusion reactions only give you 0.7% of the mass back as energy. Fission, primitive nuclear bombs, fission will only give you 0.1% of the mass back as energy. So 42 percent's unreal. And any technologically advanced civilization is eventually probably going to technologically produce small black holes for energy production, because that's the best you're going to get.
And any universe that is accidentally, blindly exploring the possibility space for matter, if it ends up generating intelligent life that's able to manipulate technology, it will end up producing colossal numbers of small black holes, that couldn't have been produced by natural processes previous to life. So you'll have lots of stellar mass black holes – stars will still die and form black holes – but you'll also get far more technologically-produced black holes, which means far more efficient reproductive success.
It's going to be hugely conserved by evolution, if it ever happens, even once. So that's why you've got intelligent life. It makes sense from the point of view of the universe, which is the unit of selection. It will heavily select for that.
Okay, that's great. You need one more breakthrough for this theory to really kick off. And it didn't happen at the time, because we didn't know enough about supermassive black holes. And this is my contribution, I think, to the theory. Okay?
There's a supermassive black hole at the core of every galaxy. We've got very, very roughly a trillion galaxies in our universe. And every one of them that we've looked at in any detail seems to have a supermassive black hole at its core. Now, a supermassive black hole is really big. They range in size, but they're supermassive, they're really big.
Some of them are millions of times the mass of our sun. Some of them are billions of times the mass of our sun. The existing set of theories on how you get those supermassive black holes, how they came about, tended to just involve lots of small black holes in a trench coat, lots of stellar mass black holes in a trench coat. You get a lot of stellar mass black holes early enough, and maybe they'd merge, and then more of them would merge, and then more of them would merge. And they end up, somehow they're billions of suns. Okay, great.
My contribution to the theory was to rethink the whole process from first principles. If the theory was true, what are the implications from first principles? And this is what I did when I knew the James Webb Space Telescope was going to come online. The James Webb was going to show us the first billion years, which we'd never seen before.
Because I realized that, if you've got supermassive black holes in our universe, they are probably conserved from an earlier era of universes. Because, imagine the earliest, most primitive universes, where you didn't have complex matter, you didn't have ninety-something stable elements. You didn't have you and me talking to each other. You didn't even have stars. You didn't have galaxies. You didn't have complex systems for producing black holes. You just had big bangs and black holes. Just as with biological life, the earliest life forms were prokaryotic bacteria. All they did was reproduce.
They would split into whatever, they'd reproduce, and they didn't do much else. They didn't do complicated structures. They didn't even have a nucleus, right? They were just primitive reproducers. You're going to have to have something similar, if this theory is true, in the evolutionary history of the universe. Go back far enough, and all they're doing are big bang, black hole, big bang, black hole. It's just the earliest, most primitive matter, flip-flopping between big bang, and black hole.
If you eventually get one that produces two black holes, big bang, two black holes, great, now you've got Darwinian Evolution, and off we go, right. But they are producing – by direct collapse, no intervening stars or anything complicated, no technology, no life – direct collapse supermassive black holes. All they're doing is splitting into several parts that collapse. That's all they're doing. That is direct collapse supermassive black hole production.
If we have supermassive black holes in our universe, then evolution will not have invented a whole new complicated way of making them. It will have conserved the original way of making them, which was direct collapse (no intervening, bunch of stars or galaxies needed) supermassive black holes.
So my prediction then was, based on that insight – which I really can't believe didn't occur to anybody else, but I've never found anyone else it occurred to – was okay, that means that all the supermassive black holes in our universe must've been produced by direct collapse. When were they produced by direct collapse? Well, they weren't produced recently by direct collapse, because we'd bloody see, it's an amazing thing for billions or millions of stars-worth of gas just collapse in one go, without forming stars on the way. It's a very difficult thing to do. What are the conditions under which you can do that?
You can only do that if the gas is smooth enough. If it's not smooth, if there's little density fluctuations in it, denser parts, as it collapses, those denser parts will collapse into and form stars, right? That's how stars form. Little dense pockets collapse to form stars.
But if it's smooth enough, you can collapse smoothly, past the point where you would get localized nucleation into little stars. The whole area can collapse and form, by direct collapse, a supermassive black hole. Interestingly enough, the mathematics on that had already been done about 18 years ago by Priya Natarajan of Yale Astronomy Department. And a few other people, I think, both Volker Bromm and even Avi Loeb, a few heavy hitters, were involved in realizing that you could actually technically, in our universe, get, by direct collapse, supermassive black holes.
But it was a theoretical oddity. Nobody expected to find lots of them. It was just, under very difficult, very precise conditions, it might be possible. My prediction was, the conditions that allow for that are going to be the conditions right after the Big Bang when everything's really smooth. We know it's smooth from the cosmic microwave background radiation, unbelievably smooth gas in the early universe, which is a problem for star formation in the current set of theories, because you can't nucleate out stars when it's that smooth, right? But you can do direct collapse supermassive black holes.
So I predicted, what you're going to see, what the James Webb will ultimately see when it sees back far enough, is a huge wave, very early on, in the first 50 million years, a hundred million years, definitely inside the first hundred million, probably almost certainly inside the first 50 million, you're going to get a wave of direct collapse supermassive black holes, a trillion of them. The number you see in our current universe, they all form then.
And they are then going to generate the conditions for star formation. Conditions are optimized for supermassive black hole formation, and that's been conserved by evolution. But they then generate the conditions for star formation. And I've expanded a bit since, I'm writing some stuff that you haven't even seen yet, on structure formation, it comes out of the supermassive black holes.
So as they form, the gas falls in. It's ionized, so it's turbulent, it falls closer. You get a blazing hot doughnut of gas called an accretion disk around the supermassive black hole. And those generate, then, intense magnetic fields. They're dynamos, incredibly powerful dynamos. And they generate jets of charged particles that go north and south out of the magnetic poles. And they shock the surrounding gas, and those shock waves nucleate out star formation.
So I predicted, what you should see is very rapid, very early, very compact galaxy formation in the very early universe. Not the bottom up model, which is slow: a star here, a star there, a few stars drift together, some more stars clump, drift together, till eventually the clumps clump, blah, blah, blah. And you get, eventually, something a bit like a primitive galaxy. And eventually, some of the black holes merge to form a bigger black hole…
That's not what you're going to see. You're going to see early, rapid, galaxy formation dominated by supermassive black holes.
And that's what they're seeing. That's what the James Webb eventually, when it started sending back data, started to see. It's seeing galaxies forming compact, early, rapidly – dominated by supermassive black holes. And I don't think anybody else predicted that. I have not been able to find anyone else who predicted precisely that, but that's what we're seeing. Okay?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so, for my much more simple-minded approach to this, we get these supermassive black holes, which in turn give birth to galaxies. Right?
Julian Gough:
They generate the galaxies around themselves. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Around themselves, right. And that gives us stellar mass, yeah? That's what creates the stars?
Julian Gough:
And the stars then... Yes. And then the stars, as they get to the end of the life, collapse to make stellar mass black holes. So you can see how that would've been a reproductively successful breakthrough along the history of universes.
Let's leave life out of it for a while. Yeah, great, let's do this. Let's explore it this way. There would've been early primitive universes that just did direct collapse supermassive black holes. Some of them would've left some matter over. That matter would've explored the possibility space, as lots of different child universes had different variations in those basic parameters of matter. Some of them made slightly more complicated atoms and molecules. They're all just made out of protons and electrons. It's all very simple building blocks, but they built up more complex structures. And you would've had supermassive black holes where they left over some matter.
And that matter was able to form stars that formed stellar mass black holes. A lot more stellar mass black holes than supermassive black holes. So that's a big revolutionary breakthrough in the evolutionary history of universes; more reproductive success. They explore the possibility space. They get more efficient at making stars smaller, therefore making more stellar mass black holes, star-sized black holes.
Interestingly, one of the things that you have in stars that makes them so efficient, and you can therefore make smaller ones and they can build out more matter, and so on, is carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen form the CNO cycle, which is a fusion cycle inside stars. It makes stars fuse more efficiently, blah, blah, blah. Carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are then the building blocks for the next evolutionary breakthrough, which is life. And then technologically-made black holes. But you can see what's happening here.
You have a process that we're very familiar with in biological evolution, which is exaptation. Exaptation is when you take something that was developed to do one job by evolution, and you adapt it to do a completely different job. And it performs a function that couldn't have evolved from scratch. It's just too big a jump, but it doesn't have to jump, because it's building on something complex that was already there.
The classic example in biology is swim bladders. Swim bladders are the air sacs in fish that help them go up and down, keep their buoyancy, keep their level in the water. The air goes in, air goes out, and they stay at the height they want to in the water, because otherwise, they have to swim very hard. So a swim bladder full of air helps the fish do that. Swim bladders were what was exapted to make lungs when the first amphibious fish went up onto land.
They didn't invent lungs from scratch, they exapted, they adapted, in evolutionary terms, the swim bladders to form the lung, the basis for the lungs. Likewise, the CNO cycle in stars – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen – they evolved to help make stars better at making little star black holes, star-sized black holes.
But the next breakthrough came on top of that, using carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, as the basics for biological life, which led to this next breakthrough. You don't have to invent life from scratch – which would be a hell of a breakthrough. You can build on the previous complexification, the previous more complex structures that were developed.
My version of cosmological natural selection is a kind of a three-stage version. I'm saying, our universe has three rounds of reproductive success. Each of them is an evolutionary breakthrough that happened at a different era. Each has been conserved, because it's built on by the next one. So in our universe, you see supermassive black holes. They evolve first in the history of universes, but we still have them. They come first. In the development of our specific universe, they generate the conditions for star formation and galaxy formation, and thus stellar mass black holes, star-sized black holes, of which there are hundreds of millions more than there are supermassive black holes, because there's hundreds of millions of stars in the average galaxy, which only has one supermassive black hole and hundreds of millions of stars.
And then, stars build out the periodic table and distribute it so that you can have planets, so that you can have life, so you can have technology, so that you can have us. And we will ultimately generate a hell of a lot more, many orders of magnitude more, very small back holes, and be even more reproductively successful for the universe that we're part of.
And I'm saying that the developmental process you see in our universe mirrors the evolutionary process that led to this specific universe. Does that make sense?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It does. And it would also posit, if I'm correct in my interpretation of your theory-
Julian Gough:
Sure.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It would also posit, literally trillions of exoplanets which contain life, right?
Julian Gough:
Yeah. I'm predicting very, very large amounts of life in this universe, ultimately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not finished yet! We're undergoing a developmental process. Another implication of the theory is that probably, it's likely that most of the life on... Yeah, most of the life in our universe is probably more likely to be on icy moons with liquid water oceans, than it is on exposed rocky surfaces like Earth.
Because if you look at our solar system, and assume it's relatively normal, relatively normal, you look for the liquid water. Where's the liquid water? Because life is going to need liquid water more than it needs anything else. Liquid water seems to be the most necessary chemical.
There's liquid water on the surface of the earth. Great. But the vast majority of liquid water in our solar system is under the crusts of icy moons. And the mechanism by which that water stays liquid isn't the same as the mechanism that keeps the water liquid on earth, right?
Icy moons go around big planets like Jupiter and Saturn, and as they're going around them, their orbits are usually a little bit eccentric. That means they go a bit further out at this point, a bit closer at this point. If you have an eccentric orbit, and you're going around a really big planet like Jupiter or Saturn, there's a lot of tug on the core of that moon. The planet tugs on the moon every time it goes closer and further away, it's tugged gravitationally. And that melts, that friction, that gravitational friction, melts the core of these icy moons, keeps them molten, and liquefies a lot of the ice.
A lot of these moons, you look at them… on the surface, you think, "Jesus Christ, that's frozen," because it is. The sun isn't doing jack. The sun is very, very, very, very dim in the sky if you're a moon of Saturn. But, under 10, 20, 30, 40 miles of ice, you then get to a liquid water ocean that gets warmer and warmer the further, the closer to the core you get, and that has nutrients coming up into it from the molten rocky core.
So it's got the nutrients for life coming up. It's got a massive liquid water ocean. It's protected by an incredibly thick shell of ice, that's like... Well, ice at that temperature is like steel, it's harder than steel. And there's lots of these moons. Even weirder, we discovered in the last year, by looking at a star-making region very close to us, the Orion Nebula, that, in star formation regions where stars are forming, there's also a lot of Jupiter-sized planets forming on their own, with no stars. And if those Jupiter-sized planets have moons, icy moons, they'll have liquid water oceans because of the gravitational friction involved in going around the Jupiter-sized planet. They don't need a star.
So most life in the universe might not even need a star. All the liquid water is on the icy moons! Europa's a small moon. It's got twice as much liquid water as earth. And if you look at the rocky planets on earth, Mercury has been boiled to death. It's got liquid lead puddles. It's a horrendous environment. Venus got cooked by greenhouse gases, and it's raining sulfuric acid. Earth is doing fine, kind of. We nearly got wiped out by asteroids that killed the dinosaurs. And we did turn into a snowball twice, and we have had some problems, but we're still hanging in there. We're doing pretty good.
Mars, oh no, the oceans have evaporated and its entire atmosphere has blown away. There's only one out of four have been able to hold onto life, of the four rocky planets, and have been able to hold onto liquid water. All of the icy moons are hanging onto their liquid water. It's a much more efficient way of producing liquid water oceans, and the conditions for life.
So maybe rocky planets with liquid water surfaces were an earlier, more successful way of generating life. But it looks to me like evolution is optimizing for liquid water oceans on icy moons.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And that brings us right back to the well-known Fermi paradox, right?
Julian Gough:
Yes, yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Which is, for those who don't know, and I would guess that virtually all of our listeners and viewers know about the Fermi paradox, but if you don't, it's like, "Okay, if this is all true, where is everybody? How come we're not seeing anything?" Which also leads to our good friend Nick Bostrom, with his Great Filter Theory.
Basically, I remember reading it for the first time, and I think he opens, if memory serves, he opens with, "I am praying we find no life on Mars." And I'm like, "What? What? What? What are you going on about here, Nick?" And then he makes the point, that he posits that any advanced technological civilization would have to make it past what he termed The Great Filter, right? The Great Filter is usually a cataclysmic event, which wipes life out, sometimes caused by meteors, sometimes caused by that intelligent life itself, blowing themselves up, all of those things. So where does Nick and Fermi, where do they figure into this theory?
Julian Gough:
It's a really good question, because I am predicting lots of life in this universe. So where is it? I think this, what I've just described to you, gives a possible answer to that, right? This is an interesting one. If most life is, in fact, in the liquid water oceans of icy moons, imagine what their view of the universe is. They're under a hundred miles of steel-hard ice. They develop a civilization. They have no idea they're in a universe. They don't know why the center is warm and the surface is cold. They don't know it's a surface! It's just, that's the end. They don't have stars in the sky. They don't see a sun, they can't see planets. Would they ever dig up through the ice a hundred miles and then fall into space? I don't know what the logic or the psychology of any kind of civilization that develops under those conditions is. I can't see space-faring civilizations coming out of that. I don't know. They may never leave. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I do. I do. I do.
Julian Gough:
We're stuck on the surface. We being hit by rocks. We're very aware that we're in space. They're not. They're not. And the other factor is the chemistry is just colder. It's going to take longer for life to evolve. So life could be germinating away, but it hasn't reached the intelligent technology-wielding stage on a huge number of icy moons, and in a huge number of galaxies. I don't know. I don't. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
As I listen to that though, I'm reminded of Plato's allegory of the cave. What you're basically saying is that the life that could be underneath those hundred miles of ice are like the people in the allegory of the cave in many respects. I'm calling them people. God knows what they are, but sentient beings, let's put it that way. That the sentient beings in these environments where they have no stars, they have no rocks hitting them. They're under a hundred miles of ice. They're essentially not going to ever get the idea, "Hey, do you think we should kind of drill?"
Julian Gough:
Keep digging?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, keep digging.
Julian Gough:
The trouble is that they're digging up. It's harder for them. The natural direction for them to dig is down, to work with gravity, but that's towards the rocky core, that's towards the molten core.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
They could, I'm sure.
Julian Gough:
I'm not saying they're not going to do it. I'm just trying to work out what's the logic. It's going to be of such a different reality. I don't know how they're going to navigate it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
What's intriguing-
Julian Gough:
I also don't know how the hell they do space travel, given that they have to bring liquid water with them. They live in liquid water. A lot of mass. If they're using small black holes as energy sources… this is another thing, small black holes anchor you like nothing else. If your major energy source is a small black hole, you ain't accelerating anywhere. Your power source has the mass of Mount Everest, you're not accelerating it. So it really slows down space travel. You have to use different, less efficient forms of energy to do actual space travel. Your most efficient energy source is not acceleratable.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But wouldn't this also imply that those of us who happen to be lucky enough to live on a rock that has access to seeing the stars, to seeing the galaxies, to seeing all that, wouldn't that give us an unusual advantage over life forms stuck under-
Julian Gough:
We're early and lucky. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. So what would that imply about, because the third type of black hole that you infer is those that are created by technology. And would you, under the theory that you're developing, would you expect to see an anomalous enough black hole through James Webb, for example, that could be, wow, that looks like it was not created naturally?
Julian Gough:
If we saw a lot of little ones, yeah. Can you see a lot of little ones? Are they big enough to do any kind of gravitational lensing effect that you would be able to pick up on? If it's an Everest sized black hole, it's really not bending that many photons. It's small. Louis Crane has done some work on what's the optimum size for small black holes if you were technologically producing them. And they're pretty small. They're kind of a Mount Everest sized mass shrunk to something ludicrously tiny. It's just hard to see an effect that would be detectable at the moment. That's not to say it's not possible. I mean, down the line technology gets better and better, but I don't know.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I wonder too, because we haven't even touched on where consciousness enters.
Julian Gough:
That's a big one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And that's been an obsession of mine for decades.
Julian Gough:
I think I'm going to have to do that in a second book, because that complicates everything so much. What I'm doing with The Egg and the Rock is, I am laying out an explanation, inside all the rules of contemporary science, for the material reality we experience. And I'm just explaining material reality; a self-complexifying universe that seems to develop upward into complexity over time, that ekes out its energy so as to do that, that channels its energy, so as to do that, to get to living creatures, and that contains supermassive black holes, and stellar mass black holes, and intelligent life. And I'm trying to explain all those things sheerly in terms of material reality, with no extra physics, there's no additional physics, no additional particles, nothing… and that's enough for one book.
Once you bring in consciousness, it becomes an unbelievably different book. And I would happily write that one, after I've written this one. I think it will put off too many people if I bring in consciousness now. But you are completely right that the implications are colossal.
We know consciousness is part of this universe. If this universe evolved from a line of other universes, there are also other evolutionary lines that may be far more advanced than us. We don't know if our universe is a gazelle or a whale or an amoeba or a bacterium. It could be a prokaryotic bacterium. We don't know. We are on an evolutionary line, but there could be universes far more complex than ours. And if consciousness is part of being a universe, imagine what their consciousness is like.
But can universes in any way… well, this brings in the horrible problem of, can universes communicate with each other? Can conscious universes somehow communicate with other universes? Do conscious universes care about other universes? I don't know, but that's a whole other book, and it's too big for this book. I totally agree with you though, that these are fascinating questions. Fascinating questions. I've had my own transcendental experiences, and I have my own theories on this, but that's not the book I'm writing this year, but yeah. What are your thoughts? Throw in some, what do you think?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, I'm-
Julian Gough:
The relationship between consciousness, and matter, and consciousness in the universe, is so profound and again, so badly explored by science.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You've just summarized my view, the idea that they're trying to set consciousness aside, calling it the hard problem, right?
Julian Gough:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, yeah, it's a hard problem, but you can't simply set aside consciousness because virtually what we are doing right now is predicated on the fact that we are conscious. We have no workable definition that is even been proposed around consciousness
Julian Gough:
It's fascinating. Yeah. We're lost.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so I am absolutely enamored of it and have been trying to figure it out. Talk about a rabbit hole, man.
Julian Gough:
Yeah. Oh, God.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
The idea though that we just ignore it, seems to be a bit of an oversight, to say the least and-
Julian Gough:
But it's baked into reductionist, materialist science. You can't put consciousness into the picture, even though consciousness is always part of the fucking picture. So it distorts science. It's such a distortion, and they're not even aware of it half the time. Crazy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It absolutely does. And I became absolutely fascinated with both consciousness and time, when I started reading a lot of quantum physics when I was young, because I was fascinated by it. And now they're seeing theories that say, "Oh, by the way, because of quantum entanglement" – which under Bell's theorem, everyone thought he was a madman. "Oh, that's crazy. What do you mean? God doesn't play dice," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then they proved it experimentally. But now I'm reading about the idea that they are also positing retro causality. In other words, our version of the future changes the past when doing the double slit experiments.
And so – wait a minute – that kind of calls into question our conception of time. It seems to me that if that is true, our conception of time is completely fucked and we need to-
Julian Gough:
Well, time is very tricky.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Consciousness, time… very, very tricky. So I think that they would absolutely make a great subject for a second book. You will have me as your very first read.
Julian Gough:
Good. I'll give you a highly speculative integration of the two right now… which is highly speculative! You could disagree with this, and still like a lot of what I'm saying about material reality. But entanglement, yeah, go back to John Stewart Bell. Good Belfast man…
Entanglement implies that everything in our universe is fundamentally connected at a quantum level, because at the time of the Big Bang, it was a singularity. It's coming from a singularity. The particles were all entangled at the start. No matter how much you've spread them out, they haven't stopped being entangled. So that gives you a possibility for a kind of cosmic consciousness, for a kind of knowledge of itself that the universe could have that isn't bounded by the speed of light, because everything is quantum entangled.
So the insight that the mystics get when they meditate for a few years, the insights that the Buddha had, the insights that you see in the Bhagavad Gita, that there is a transcendent consciousness that underlies it all, that connects it all, and that we are just floating nodes, little knots of localized consciousness, but we're attached to the great web of consciousness, could have completely explainable material roots in quantum entanglement. It's quite possible that we're just knots in the consciousness field, which is an entangled state of all the atoms in the universe, because they were all hyper-entangled at the singularity of the Big Bang.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And what's interesting, that's the one that I-
Julian Gough:
You talk about that, and you're treated like you're a nut, even though nobody's got a better take on it, because you're not allowed to mix consciousness and physics.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
What's interesting to me though, is Schrödinger – highly regarded in physics for many, many breakthroughs in quantum. His book, What is Life is essentially-
Julian Gough:
It's great fun, that book.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
If you haven't read it, you should read it. Because one of the things Schrödinger says is, all minds are one, essentially, right? And then you learn, well, wait a minute, he's just quoting Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.
And the other thing I find really interesting is that, you look into the lives of many of what even the least scientifically informed people would know who these folks were, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Schrödinger, Feynman, et cetera. What's really interesting to me is that they all became devotees of esoteric and eastern traditions. Einstein, right. When Einstein died, he had a copy of Isis Unveiled by his bedside. Feynman was in no way religious, but he loved Lilly tanks, which I also love. Isolation, sensory deprivation tanks, because-
Julian Gough:
Oh, yes, he did. Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And he believed that you could gain all sorts of insights that way. Oppenheimer, he's quoting the Gita when he's talking, “I am become death”.
Julian Gough:
The Gita is pretty good. I'm reading it again at the moment.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I re-read it often.
Julian Gough:
The Gita's just a fucking documentary. If you've had profound psychedelic experiences, you read the Gita and you go, "Oh my God, this is just documentary realism."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yes. Yes.
Julian Gough:
It's just shocking.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
That is absolutely, yeah.
Julian Gough:
It's like, whoa. Someone was here before me and they took notes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But what's really interesting to me is how, getting back to the fearful authoritarian view of modern science right now, these guys are your heroes and you're just conveniently avoiding the fact that they all went a very different way.
Julian Gough:
Late in life, pretty much all rationalist materialists have a little bit of a crisis, but they should. Actually Feynman's interesting. I stumbled on something recently. He did this great documentary back in 1973 or something, '75 on Yorkshire Television because I think his wife was from Yorkshire or something. He used to go there, and it's just this lovely documentary, but at the end of it, he's slightly tipsy in a pub talking to Fred Hoyle, the astronomer, Fred Hoyle, who came up with the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, the idea that stars made the elements through fusion. And they're having this great conversation about the future of physics, and they're both slightly drunk. And Feynman kind of riffs on the fact that every science except physics has a story of how you got to where you are now. Biology knows, how do you get to where we are now? Well, there's this evolutionary history… And every science has its evolutionary history. And he's saying physics is the only one that says, "This is the law. It has always been the law," and never asks where it comes from. And he's saying, "That might be the future of physics, that we really discover that there was an evolution," he says it, "an evolutionary history to the laws of physics." So in the seventies, Feynman was thinking, yeah, you’ve got to explain this thing and evolution, some evolutionary history, might be the solution. I was delighted to find he was on our team.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, he's one of my heroes. And I was aware of that view of his. I always had the image of the great and powerful Oz, right? “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” And you made me think of it when you were saying, physics says “This is the law.” It made me think of, “I am the great and powerful Oz.” What we need is Toto to pull back that little curtain.
Julian Gough:
Pull back the curtain. Where do the laws come from? Why are the laws like this? It's a perfectly valid question. And I think cosmological natural selection gives you an answer. There's a mechanism, Darwinian evolution. There's a specific way it could happen, through black holes and big bangs, through singularities, where we know that our laws don't work anymore, so that's a transition point where you could definitely get a reset that would allow this to happen.
And now at this point, we've got a three-stage model that gives you the evolutionary history of universes and shows how universes could, step by step, have iterated their way to this point. This is a very good theory, and it's insane that I'm probably the only person on earth being funded to research it. What the fuck is wrong with these people? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life doing another failed big tank of xenon dark matter experiment?
Have you looked at the history of some of those experiments? The one under the mountain in Italy, that experiment where they started off with one and a half liters of liquid xenon and it only cost a million dollars, and they didn't find any dark matter, so they buried 300 liters of liquid xenon, and that only cost $15 million. And then they didn't discover anything, and the result of not discovering anything was, they were given another $50 million to bury 3000 gallons of xenon… And there's no level of failure will get your experiment canceled if it's officially sanctioned by the church. But there's no level of success that will get your experiment funded if it's not officially sanctioned by the church.
It's just the most funny thing. And that set of experiments, by the way, which they funded up to, I can't remember, 70, a hundred million, has now hit the neutrino fog. Their instruments are now so sensitive – this was announced last week – I think that they're now picking up neutrinos from the sun through their mile-and-a-half of mountain; which means that they're never going to find what they're looking for, because their instruments are going to be fogged out by the sun's neutrinos. So they've explored the entire possibility space where you could possibly find the dark matter they're looking for. It doesn't exist, as I could have happily told them for a lot less than $70 million. And they've burned through round after round of failed experiment until they're blinded by the fog of the sun.
And that's where people's lives are going. Join the heresy, guys. If you are an astronomer, or an astrophysicist, stuck in one of these silos of despair, bail out. Talk to me, email me. You don't have to do it in public. We can talk privately, but get on the team. There's going to be a reformation. A storm is coming. Cosmology is going to get turned upside down by this, when they finally realize it's an evolved universe.
What's happening here is: they are looking at a sack of chemicals, right? And they're trying to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals, and they're using really nice, simple models to explain the behavior of the sack of chemicals. But the sack of chemicals is a dog. It's a dog, okay? Dogs do things for dog reasons, because they evolved, right? And if you're looking at the same sodium and carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen, but it's a dog, it's not just a bag of random chemicals – it just behaves differently. It develops differently over time. Look again at the universe. Is it behaving like a bag of chemicals, randomly chosen with random properties, or is it behaving like a fucking dog? It's behaving like a dog. It grows up, it bounces around the place. It gets more interesting and funny and complicated as it goes. It's a dog.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right. It reminds me of, have you read any of Howard Bloom's stuff?
Julian Gough:
The literary critic or-
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
No, no, no.
Julian Gough:
No.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
This is-
Julian Gough:
The other guy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, the other guy. I think you will love some of his stuff. Well, Julian-
Julian Gough:
I think I've read a tiny bit, but I definitely haven't read the main stuff. No.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I am getting the hook from my producers here, and we haven't even had a chance to talk about literature, and all that fun stuff so I will-
Julian Gough:
This is more fun.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I will invite you back on for furtherance of this conversation, but also I want to get into tragedy and comedy, because I, like you, think that comedy is a much richer vein to mine, and it's a shame that it doesn't seem to be so. So if you've listened or watched the podcast in the past, you'd know that our final question is always: we are going to make you the emperor of the universe for one day. You can't kill anyone. You can't throw anyone in a reeducation camp. But what we're going to give you is a magical microphone in which you can say two things.
And everyone, let's just keep it on earth. Just let's keep it to the 8 billion people on earth. But you're going to say two things into a magical microphone that are going to incept the entire population. They're going to wake up the next day, whenever their next day is, and they're going to say, "You know what? I've just had two of the greatest ideas, and unlike all the other times, I'm not going to ignore them. I'm going to act on them, and I'm going to see where that leads." What two things are you going to incept?
Julian Gough:
I actually have a very clean, simple answer to this question, because when I was a young man – it took me a long time to grow up. It really took me a very long time to grow up. But when I was a young man, I meditated a certain amount, and I had one meditation session where I somehow – even though I was a very irresponsible, silly young man who didn't know anything – I actually went pretty deep. I actually went pretty deep. I just sat there long enough that even I went pretty deep, and I heard a voice. I heard a voice, and the voice said, "Accept everything."
And I would like to incept that to everyone, because “accept everything”, I've applied it as much as I can, and it's really, really good advice. It really changes things. And because I was a greedy young man, I felt, wow, I've had this experience… And I was coming back out then, after hearing this voice saying, "Accept everything," because it had almost lifted me out of the experience, but I was greedy. So I said, as the experience was fading, "Is there anything else I should know?" And the voice added something, which I'll make the second part of my inception. The voice added, "Do not ration your love."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Oh, I love that.
Julian Gough:
Yeah, so that's what I'm going to tell everybody. If I were the emperor of the universe, I would say, accept everything, and do not ration your love.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Wow, those are fabulous. Kind of reminds me of amor fati. That falls in line very nicely with, accept everything. Julian, this has actually surpassed my expectations, which were very high coming in.
Julian Gough:
Oh, that's great to hear. Well, I love it talking about this. I just love these ideas. I love these ideas. Why aren't more people playing with these ideas? Come and play with me. It's just… why aren't more people playing with this? It's like this giant lump of gold, which for purely sociological reasons got left in the middle of the road, and I get to play with it. It's like, please just turn it into something useful, guys. This is too much gold for one guy. Take it!
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And tell our listeners and viewers how they can get in touch and play with you.
Julian Gough:
Oh, yeah. Well, I'm writing the book in public, on a website called The Egg and the Rock. The Egg and the Rock: is our universe behaving like an egg or a rock; two views of this universe. And The Egg and the Rock is just theeggandtherock.com, so come and join me. You can subscribe to it for free. All the posts are up for free. Some people pay to help me do it, which is nice. You paid to help me do it, which is nice. But you don't have to. It's all free. I want the ideas to spread. So, subscribe, but also comment. You can just comment on the site. You can email me. It’s my name at gmail.com. [Or, you know, just click on this link now.] You can get in touch. There's all sorts of channels for getting in touch with me. Use all of them. I'm on Twitter. I'm here and there. Talk to me down any channel that you're comfortable with, and give me your ideas.
This is a whole new continent to explore and nobody's exploring it, and people from outside the mainstream fields can actually make real contributions. It's this unbelievably rich frontier. But if you're a deep domain expert in any of these areas, please talk to me as well. I'm talking to an astrophysicist in two days time who's an expert in gravitational lensing, and she's got some really interesting data on the oversimplistic models they're using for gravitational lensing. The models where they are currently explaining everything through dark matter, because they can't explain why things are so magnified. It turns out that there's these complicated lensing effects, when you have light passing through complex gravitational structures like clusters and super clusters. And there's, oh my God, there's so many things are being missed in cosmology because they've used dark matter as a fudge factor to fix everything that's wrong with the underlying basis of the theory.
We live in a complicated universe that's doing complicated things, and we can't keep trying to simplifying it back to just a bunch of random gases. That's not what we're living inside. That's not what we are, and it's not what the great membrane-bound, strange structure that we're part of, that generated us, is. We're not an accident at the edge of a simplicity. We're the simplicity inside a complexity that we are completely failing to understand. We don't understand what we're looking at.
And I think an evolutionary approach liberates us to see what we're actually looking at. It's a living universe. We're just the taste buds, or the sense organs, of a living universe that is developing, that's coming into knowledge of itself. And we're the point where it's coming into knowledge of itself. We're the point where the universe gets to know who it is, what it is, and what it's going to do next. It's an amazing moment to be alive, and to have a dead-matter cosmology, with a one-shot universe that means nothing, at the core of our belief system… it's a catastrophe for humanity that that's the case. Okay. I'll stop preaching.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
No, that's the classic mic drop, which is perfect. What a perfect way to end.
Julian Gough:
Thank you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Julian, until I have you on for the second time, I have so enjoyed myself. Thank you so much.
Julian Gough:
You too, Jim. It's lovely to talk to somebody who gets where I'm coming from, and where I'm going to. It's just a joy. It's a joy.
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Listening now and you mentioned RAW right at the front - I just listened to Douglas Rushkoff and Grant Morrison with the author of a new biography about RAW Gabriel Kennedy on the Team Human podcast. I just ordered it and thought you might like!
Great interview Julian, and thanks for those inception thoughts too.
I saw an article in Aeon a couple of days ago that might be related. Biological evolutionary theory is finding a similar conundrum - life eveolved much earlier in the earth's history than would be predicted if the first organic molecules simply happened by a chance collision. https://aeon.co/essays/life-on-earth-emerged-fast-far-quicker-than-we-thought?
https://aeon.co/essays/life-on-earth-emerged-fast-far-quicker-than-we-thought?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter
Something other than chance is getting those hydrocarbons together even on a planet that is still mainly boiling magna! Ties in with your notion of a universe that has evolved to maximise the chances of intelligent life.