#1223 Sonia Contera: Six Problems That Science Cannot Solve

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello, hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by Doctor Sonia Conterra. She's a full professor of biological physics at the University of Oxford, and today we're going to talk about her new book Six Problems that Science Cannot Solve in the Original Spanish. It's Sa Problemasquelaciencia no puede resolver. And Doctor Contero, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone.

00:32 Sonia Contera: Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. It's great to be here.

00:36 Ricardo Lopes: So, I, I mean, we're going to get into the 6 problems that you go through in the book, but first of all, which criteria did you use to select the 6 problems you claim science cannot solve?

00:53 Sonia Contera: Well, of course, there's uh endless problems that science cannot solve, um, but, uh, I think I was trying to respond to, um, some of the fundamental questions that physics starts, uh, in the 20th century and that we struggle to solve, physics and biology, mainly, and computer science. Uh, TRACK a bit their origin and why, um, they're now so central to everything that we do from quantum computers to artificial intelligence to longevity or uh studies. Why are we obsessed with these problems? And another reason. So maybe I should say which the problems are. Uh, THE problems are, uh, what is quantum mechanics? What is its meaning? Uh, WHY can't we have a theory of everything that unifies the big theories of the cosmos, general relativity with quantum mechanics after 100 and I don't know how, and, and why it still obsesses us. Um, THE third one is origin of life, which emerged naturally from these ones and again becomes important. Uh, NOW we're looking for life in other planets or people trying to make artificial life on Earth. Still not solved problem. Then the 4th comes naturally, the arrow of. Time, which is still a mystery in physics, reappears in biology as aging, and again, er, it is part of the narrative, especially of these big techno oligarchs, which they are telling us that we have to change the way we understand biology and just focus on aging. And uh more than biology, medicine, right? And this has entanglement with AI use of data, and that brings us to the next question, which is can we really uh create really intelligent machines, um, and what does it mean and why are we obsessed with it, even if Cha GPT keeps telling us the stupid things and obviously showing that it doesn't think very well. And, and then, um, so the next this brings Us to the big topic which I think is of our time after um a long chat. So uh if you want, uh, consciousness, the concept of consciousness enter physics pretty much with quantum mechanics with the problem of the observer. What does it mean that we are never outside nature, that there's always a subjective part that we need to use language. To interpret things, you know, all these ideas that in many cases came, I think, from psychoanalysis. And then, uh, but as, as biology, uh, was a little bit left behind, the, the topic of consciousness, it was sort of even seen as pseudoscience. But now because maybe of these intelligent machines and because we want to transport ourselves, our consciousness to other planets and so on. The problem of consciousness is becoming not only very central to uh computer science but also to neuroscience and all sorts of activities. So I wanted to explore not only the scientific problems, uh, in a kind of, but also their history and put them a bit in context of the last 100 years and what it tells us about science.

04:00 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, that's great. So let's start with uh quantum mechanics. So in the book, you go a little bit through the history of it and the kinds of impact it has had on science and society. So would you like to tell us about that?

04:19 Sonia Contera: Yeah, so at the beginning of the 20th century, uh, so basically, uh, Einstein gives a theory of general relativity in 1905, uh, so everybody realizes that the world is not what it looks, time is not what it looks, it can stretch or contract just to keep the velocity of life constant, which is a very weird thing to think about. Um, AND then so physics starts to change. Um, IT'S worth noticing that 1905 is also the year where a European power, Russia lost the war to Japan. It's the first time the Asian peril appears in the Western conscience, uh. And um er yes, after that, so physicists start with their experiments to be able to reach the atom or, or what might be the uh nuclear uh um the nucleus of the atom made from, so it's the experiments of Marie Curie and her husband of over a lot of um of um radiation of um. Uh, HOW do you say this, not radiation, um, yeah, the radioactivity. Um, SO then also the big experiments to smash the atoms, so using alpha particles, people start smashing the atom and realize that the, there's these electrons there and, and other problems, the black body radiation, uh, uh, uh, Einstein, um. Uses it to explain the photoelectric sets. So, basically, when you went to the very, very core of very small, um uh um parts of nature, the continuum broke, uh, so you needed to explain some of the things you were seeing with this concept of quantum. So basically things have fixed energies, you cannot have all the energies you want. And out of this uh complicated uh experience came out all these uh theories of, of quantum mechanics, first by Heisenberg and then by uh Schrodinger with a famous uh uh uh wave equation and tried to explain all these experiments and it's become a very successful theory. The main problem, uh, extremely successful, especially if you go with very small part, very small amount of particles. The main problem for it is that following quantum mechanics, you come up with very weird predictions about nature. Uh, THIS idea of things can be waves and particles, or there's this principle of superposition, you can be in all the states and only collapse in one. WHEN you do an experiment, you cannot predict what it will come out, you can only predict a probability of what might come out and even more weird, time does not behave in the same way. Um, IN general relativity, we have this thing which is our common sense, the, the idea on which reason is based, which is, um, cause and effect. Uh, IF you have a set of rules, you can have time moving forward and you have cause and effect. But in quantum mechanics it becomes more complicated and it's barely much, uh, explained by this, uh, phenomenon of entanglement. Uh, WHO is still, uh, I mean, it's the basis of the modern ideas of quantum cryptography, and it's this idea that you, you get two particles generated at the same time and you throw 11 away to the other end of the universe. If I do an experiment with this one here, I will know what happened or what state is the other one. So this seems to break with general relativity. So, and most importantly, I think from a philosophical perspective, um, the idea that how you do an experiment determines the outcome, means that we can, so, um, we cannot, uh, um Say that, um, you know, uh, subjectivity is outside science. Uh, SO this came out, that's what the interest of quantum physics on, uh, consciousness and what does it mean to do a measurement, and these are big mysteries as it is the time. So, uh, yeah, and, and I think this is the reason why now we're also making quantum computers. I think we have to hope that if we're able to make a machine out of all this, uh, maybe that, that computes, uh, maybe we learned something that escapes our, our just theoretical thinking, but, um, there's no going back to the fracture of quantum mechanics in the Western traditions of thinking. And, uh, especially the Enlightenment, I wouldn't say Western traditional thing, it's the Enlightenment, what we've been doing for the last 300 years, and, and that's why it still remains a, a central question.

08:58 Ricardo Lopes: So yeah, you've already mentioned the ways or why quantum mechanics and general rela relativity conflict with one another. Uh, DO you think it would be possible to develop a theory of everything that unifies them, and uh do we need such a theory?

09:21 Sonia Contera: Yeah, so since Einstein and Schrodinger, and this has been an obsession of theoretical physics. Uh, Einstein did not want to believe that the, at the bottom, at the very small, uh, part constituents of nature, there was a probabilistic, it was not like a certainty, but, you know, breaks this idea, uh, of determinism, which is a very Protestant idea, the idea, the, the idea of predestination, you know, God knows what is going to happen to you. There's no freedom. I think this is a bit cultural background and also German idealism. But, uh, so, um, but, uh, so, the, the main problem is that in general relativity, uh, uh, er, uh, um, gravity is the curvature of space-time. It's, it's the space-time itself, but in quantum mechanics, it doesn't match and quantum mechanics would, is a very different ontology, if you want, a very different framework. Um, AND, uh, sort of wants to make that gravity, a space-time quantum quantized, and, and, and that brings a lot of problems for, for, for general relativity. Of course, the European, or, or I would say, the Enlightenment tradition. Tells you that the reason of what things happen at higher scales, you have to find it in the constituents, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the case. I, I don't see for myself any problem of nature having a kind of gap. A, a kind of rupture between what happens on one scale and what happens at other scales, and even more, that er things at higher scale are able to access those areas of lower scale to create things like very complex behavior, um, like life. One has to remember that we are made of constituents like proteins or DNA or biopolymers which inhabit that interface between the quantum and the classical and can potentially habitate both spaces whenever it suits them. And from there, for example, we would expect uh or or would start to Uh, theorizeize or hypothesize why, for example, the brain uses 2 watts, why chat GPT and all these people need all the books of the world and all the energy of the world to be able to function. We don't function like that. And going into quantum processes and using quantum processes with much reduced the, the abilities or the toolbox that biology could have to create this amazing behavior. I think we are a little bit too arrogant with nature and with biology, trying to impose all these uh ideas. On it, but of course it's very fruitful. I think I go through um the theories of everything in the book and um it's becoming a, a very fascinatingly uh active area of research. Uh, SO, um, since, uh, and, and that gives me in a way hopes for the world. So, all these studies of fundamental problems of physics were very much abandoned after the Second World War, uh, when physics became just a geopolitical tool to make atomic bombs or energy sources and, and very practical, no, the only non-practical. Things were happening or, or mainly in, in CERN with this um standard model, which is, I also go through in, in the book, how it came about. But basically, all these fundamental questions about ontology, about what is reality, about how we use it, the weirdness of being alive, were forgotten. And especially um in, in the neoliberal part of science, which starts with the collapse of the Soviet Union when everything is uh becomes per, uh how do you call it, uh publish or perish, published all the time, not having time to think, everything is metrics, right? There comes a new branch of physics. It's not a new branch, but it's becoming extremely uh more and more important with this, this branch of uh physics and philosophy, a philosophy of physics. There's currently quite a lot of people thinking about these fundamental problems and uh that gives me hope that maybe we have again uh a. Uh, A less utilitarian physics, uh, going ahead. So, um, yeah, that, that's, that's a bit the summary of, of, of the theories of everything. We still haven't broken out of this, uh, obsession with theories of everything came out, the most successful theory and the most beautiful theory of physics, which is this standard model, which it starts with the unification of the electromagnetic fields with quantum mechanics, um, beautiful physics, which again, has a lot of gaps in it, a lot of infinities that physicists try to tame using this business of renormalization. There, they don't seem to be so obsessed with this having in complexity, incompleteness in their process. And, and also This idea by Hermann Weil, um, a, a friend of Einstein, who, who hit something amazing, which is the idea that the symmetry of the mathematics of these equations of quantum mechanics can give us a clue about, um, this, uh, how, uh, the elemental particles and how are they related to the elemental forces. Uh, I think I try to summarize a bit the history of this, uh, how, how wonderful ideas came out of physics and, and eventually crashed with a string theory, uh, which, which, uh, remains, uh, a, a kind of big failure of theoretical physics, haven't been able to, uh, unify quantum mechanics with general relativity using these ideas of symmetry with a string theory, uh, with a string theory.

15:04 Ricardo Lopes: Do you think that human consciousness could play any role here like Roger Penrose suggests?

15:13 Sonia Contera: Yeah, I think Roger Penrose has a a clever proposition. Um, HE, he, he, he, he, he mentions and, and very inspired by Godel. Godel was a German mathematician at the same time, very active at the same time a quantum mechanics, and, and, uh, he was very obsessed with problems of logic. Again, uh, this leads to this original, so basically, quantum mechanics and, and, and computer science are joined at from birth at the hip, right? So they were born at the same time because this, as quantum mechanics was defying logic. Uh, um, AND, and Godel from his theorems of incompleteness, incompleteness was showing that, uh, within a logical system in which all the parts of that system are related by cause and effect, this logical system. There are statements that you cannot say they are true or not. So basically there are limits of how much truth you can know from a logical system. People became quite obsessed to what is in the world, and what in this world can be interpreted by logic and what is outside logic, so Um, Penrose makes the argument that even we know if a statement is true or not, even if we don't follow, um, the, these logical rules, that we know this, we're able to interpret this, uh, uh, problems, no? So, it's in physics, not in logic, and he argues that, uh, um, consciousness is not a logical, uh, classical process because things don't happen with cause and effect. Um, AND that probably there's some physics underlying this, um, that is helping us to create consciousness because consciousness is, is all about being aware of many things at the same time. I'm talking to you and I remember I have to go here and there are so unifying and a lot of conscious, unconscious, again, this is all these Freudian ideas I think that intermingle with all this consciously or unconsciously, um. So, yeah, it's this idea that proteins or the structures within the brain or in the body or in, in whatever thing that becomes alive, um, are able to access this quantum properties of a scale, a very small scale that would allow us, for example, for even a bacterium, maybe not conscious but proto-conscious to As soon as it gets in an envelope, you know, as an individual separated from the universe, it feels itself as a, as an individual. And even when, uh, what defines the individual is the separation, right? So, it's all these old philosophical questions that come out to physics and it is highly likely that involves a quantum process and, and Penrose puts forward this idea of orchestrated reduction. In which we are able to hold a lot of information in a sort of unconscious quantum state and collapse it, so basically becoming uh something we can work with logic, um, as, as, as a biological process that we don't understand. So, um, he, and I also think that it's highly likely that quantum processes are involved in, in life, in general, and also in consciousness.

18:35 Ricardo Lopes: Do you think that these issues in physics that at least to a certain extent seem unsolvable, tell us something about the limits of our cognition?

18:48 Sonia Contera: Not only about, maybe of our way we're trying to do the limits of the current um paradigm of science in which we think we use reason to study all the steps. Um, I think we actually don't. For example, in the, I think the areas of science in general that have had more progress in the last 10 years, for example, are areas where we don't know what is going on. One of them is synthetic biology. We can get a bacterium or a yeast. This is beautiful from the work of David Baker, for example, they designed a protein that does not exist in nature. They put a DNA ring inside this uh organisms and produce a protein, not, not easy, not all proteins work. I'm not saying this is a factory, but we can do that. I mean, people can do that. That does not exist in nature using a black box. I mean, we understand roughly some of the processes that the cell does in order to produce proteins. That's why we can hack into its machinery, but the actual details of how it does it doesn't work. So if you what happens with um these LLMs and, and this uh um. Artificial intelligence based on, on, uh, this deep, deep learning neural network, all these, uh, um, things that are able to produce videos or they're able to talk, basically. Uh, uh, NEURAL networks are also a black box. We don't know what is happening inside them, and only when they gave them this freedom of doing things we don't know and we cannot control, this thing has started to talk a bit more realistically. And in the early models, and some models also use noise, so they were approximating biological processes, statistical processes, going again to this idea that probability more than certainty is important for create biological-like behavior. Um, IT is, is again being revealed. And another example I could give you of things that we cannot control. For years, people were trying. To cure cancer, targeting a specific proteins of a specific protein uh uh processes, then they became a bit more sophisticated and they were trying to get a few more at the same time because the cell is very smart and is able to, uh, overcome all these medications. Um, BUT in the last years, we've, we, our, the thing that works best is, um, immunotherapy. So basically we're trying to train the immune system to get rid of cancer. Uh, WITH modern vaccines and so on and so forth, but, um, we don't know how it does it. So, um, I think, um, mm, basically we, we tell this narrative that that science is a very logical process, actually it isn't, uh, we try to formalize the mathematics, but most of the practical science aren't, um, and, and, um. So, basically, I think um this insurmountable problems also come from this idea that we need to understand all the steps and maybe, and that's why we make things with them, in fact, when we fail, We try to create technologies like quantum computers. I don't know how it really works, but maybe if I managed to make something with it, with my roots, I start to figure out what can I do with it, it tells me a bit how it works. So, the process of knowledge, we use all sorts of ways into understanding how something works. And yes, one for me, all these fundamental questions I put in the book, for me, the interesting thing is that in a world without sort of religion, uh, post the sort of enlightenment world, Uh, we, they bring us to fundamental questions about the origin of, of us, our identity, what are we? What is the universe that I think we need? Um, WE need as humans, even if we cannot solve them. I think part of being alive is actually sitting on these problems that we cannot solve, um, which I talk a lot about this idea of sitting on the cracks of knowledge, right? Um, uh, THIS has always been very productive and also it's a recognition that, uh, consciousness also emerges from this crack with the, with the universe. Um, THE stories we tell to become a unity are also our needs. We need them, uh, in order to be individuals. So, it brings all these, uh, contradictions, tensions being cracked that, uh, philosophy everywhere, not only in the West, also in Asia and everywhere have been talking about for thousands of years.

23:25 Ricardo Lopes: So let's talk a little bit about the life then, so because you explore topics regarding life and its origins in your book as well. One big question is, what is life? Do you think we can answer that?

23:42 Sonia Contera: Well, again, it's this idea of holding nature with a word and trying to nature obey our word, life, you know, nature. It doesn't work like that. It's more, it's more fun, again, it's probabilistic in many ways, so it just comes up with stuff that roughly look at something. But since in our language, we cannot describe these fuzzy problems, we give them a name, and there is something behind this name. I mean, if Uh, I'm not a Platonist. I don't believe that this, this ideal forms, uh, um, but yeah, life, I mean, life is a big mystery emerges in life as far as we know about, uh, 400, 4 billion years ago or even a bit more, 4. 5, the universe is 13.4, something like this billion years old, so quite a lot of the age of the universe, almost a third has been used by life and evolution, so we, we often forget that. So the life on Earth emerges pretty early in the Earth, in Earth, on Earth, and it's um. Big mystery where it comes from. We know what it's made of, uh, it, it seems to, we, we have all these molecules at the nanoscale that assemble in very complex systems, going against the second principle of thermodynamics, uh, which tells you everything. Thing should increase entropy, but life manages to reduce its entropy by understanding somehow um its environment and created these life forms and the big mystery is how all these molecules became one. In, in an individual like bacterium or archaea or whatever, right? So it's a big mystery, we have no idea. So people I go through the book are trying to, have been looking for life and, and they're sort of finding the primordial soup for a very long time, especially after the arrival of molecular biologists, after the war, after the Second World War. And there's now a lot of people trying to replicate the origins of life in computers using AI, uh, sort of using robotic systems. So far no success, uh, I mean, it's interesting, uh, but I mean Craig Venter is trying to, or claims he has claimed he had made artificial life, which is not such. Basically he got a bacterium. That already exists in exchange for a DNA that is artificial and is still alive and replicates, but basically, he is using the machinery of the cell that is already there. If anything, what is proven is that DNA is not so central to life as some people like to think it's central, but what matters is the cell, not the DNA you have inside. Uh, AGAIN, this reductionism of trying to explain everything by the constituents that comes again, um, in the 1950s. I go through a little bit in the, uh, uh, book, and then, um, yeah, there, there's, there's something great going on at the moment which is this incredible new telescopes, uh, that, that are Have been deployed in space and they are letting us look much, much, much, much deeper, uh, like the James Webb, uh, telescope, that is amazing, the amount of information you can get from it, and I think that's gonna be the new Vera Rubin, uh, telescope that is gonna be in Chile and the Trump administration continues funding. So this is not part of any cut, um, made in Spain, uh, the telescope, um, by a Spanish company, uh, which is also interesting. Um, BUT these new telescopes are allowing us to see or predict and the composition. Or, or measure the composition of, of uh planets, of the atmosphere of planets very far away from us in a combination of great technology, as of observational technology and also a very good data analysis. So people are starting to make great um Uh, um, hypothesis about, oh my God, will that planet have life or not based on this hint information we, we are getting. But, um, there's new, um, uh, I think missions planned for Venus, uh, uh, because people also have found that there's some forms of, uh, chemically modified DNA that survives in sulfuric acid. So it brings back the question, but this question never leaves us. Are we alone in the universe? Uh, WHAT is life? And, and I think we need it and I think it's important and I think we'll continue doing it, um, at, at whatever is, is a very human need.

28:20 Ricardo Lopes: But how likely do you think that there is life and particularly intelligent life on other planets?

28:32 Sonia Contera: So, you know, there's all sorts of theories of this because, you know, by your log thinking you can reach any conclusion. Uh, MANY people think that, you know, it must be. You know, homogeneously distributed if, if it's encoded in somehow the rules of the universe that things like us, or at least bacteria emerge in, in the universe, there must be somewhere else, and this is why people are looking at Mars or, or uh the moons, the icy moons, Europa, uh, but uh so far, uh, we haven't got any luck. We have found in meteorites, um. Uh, CONSTITUENTS of proteins, amino acids, so it makes people think that the chemistry of life sort of happens in certain conditions in space, um, but, uh, we haven't found any and we don't know, um, and this is again a big mystery, are we really, really special? There was something really lucky or improbable happened on Earth and what does it mean? I have no opinion, um. I used to think that you, I, I, I don't know, uh, uh, I, I, I don't have any opinion about this. I think it's a very open question.

29:44 Ricardo Lopes: Um, IN regards to aging. I mean, how do you approach such a question of what aging is and uh what do you think about the most dominant approaches to anti-aging that we have or that people are pursuing?

30:07 Sonia Contera: I think this is a. From a molecular biology framework, which is basically, I call it rational utilitarian in the most uh Anglosphere tradition that everything is made of constituents and then there's cousin uh uh uh Sort of in a simple way and with the constituents break uh there is a way to fix them and then that's it uh we, we come up with these therapies which is the idea that you know as we grow older DNA has damaged and some therapists are trying to uh remove the age of DNA. This is uh a bit the, the, the work of Alto's lab, um, paid I think by um. Uh, Bezos, uh, and there is, uh, Juan Carlos Espulua is, uh, is trying, is, is leading this idea that they want to revert, uh, cells to a sort of pre, uh, almost a stem cell or young, um, uh, state by, uh, removing some of the tags you have in DNA. But again, what does that mean? Will that produce more cancer? Uh, WE don't know. Uh, THEN other people say, OK, the damage comes because mitochondria, which are producing the energy of the cell, maybe produced too much because as you grow old, the machinery to get rid of this extra energy is not there anymore, and people are trying to improve the membranes of mitochondria. This is another thing. There is another one, there's rapamycin, which is about controlling the immune system, but again, If you control or diminish the immune system, are you gonna die of cancer? Many of these therapies have always this problem because in humans, uh, cancer is always there lurking in the dark. The cells can revert or, or get distracted to the normal state and produce a tumor, and this is very much entangled with the way the immune system works or, or some of these processes work. Another one is the telome uh uh uh sort of as, as. As as we grow old, the, the ends of the chromosomes become, uh, which are called telomeres, become shorter and people are thinking that we can interfere with telomerase to increase uh longevity. However, this was before. A research for cancer because it's known that the length of the telomeres has also been changing cancer. So, um, people are looking at this uh molecular, uh, um, uh, targets and it's good for the model we have. It's a very capitalistic neoliberal model in which each company has a bit of a different approach so they can compete with each other. And tell you this is the best. And then, um, yeah, one of the good things that is happening in these operations, well, the, the, there is this thing that for the big technological companies is good because they can use the powers of AI to find targets and so on in all the publicly available databases of biology and so on. So it's an opportunity for this. Companies that really love monopoly, they want the monopoly of their phone, they want the monopoly of shopping, they want the monopoly of finance, and now they want the monopoly of medicine using these ideas of longevity because they use AI for looking for targets and, and so on and so forth. One good thing that is happening that these companies are going because longevity is a kind of foraging. It's a kind of new research framework, um, allows them to go to traditional, more conservative biology uh frameworks did not go before. And one good thing, for example, is that they're using AR or physicists or mathematicians to do these complex models in which there's more interconnection. So, something interesting may come. Out of, out of this. But of course, as a physic of the things we're, we're talking before, the main thing of life emerges in the universe is because it's able to create order out of the tension of the, of the tendency of the universe to create disorder. So life emerges from already a contradiction. In order, in order to create order, we need to dissipate energy. And as we create this order, in order to maintain it, it needs to adapt to the environment and change to the environment, creating this kind of entanglement of the environment through its shape. The shape of a protein that makes it stable is a, is a shape that contains the information of the environment in an analog form. So biology combines these digital ideas of the sequence and all that with analog, and in this analog form it is able to combine physics, chemistry, biochemistry, digital, analog, physics, biology, and emerge and as it dissipates energy in order to keep order and basically moves the time. Uh, ARROW forward. If we, if nothing of this were happening, we were just dispersing in the universe as particles, really, or if, or, or a static, time would not pass. With a meaningful time for us is the time that we control in order to create this cause and effect processes that allowed us to communicate or become alive. So from that perspective, being alive is aging, emerges because aging is the kind of the, the result of the contradiction of order and disorder in the universe. Again, these gaps, uh, that's why I'm not afraid of the gap of quantum and classical because we emerge from contradictions, forces that look in different directions and how we use this thermodynamic economy of the whole thing, how we use energy to overcome this different process. So, basically, being alive is using time and, and being alive means damage in your structure. Of course, some very simple organisms. Live for a very long time. There's, uh, they have a slow metabolism, so they don't, for example, some, um, I think there are some jellyfish or something that they really live for a very long time, almost 10 because they keep substituting the broken. Pieces, but of course they don't seem to have identities like we have, uh, um, the, the, the simple organisms don't develop tumors. Um, FOR humans seems very difficult, although of course we can improve longevity. Again. Uh, THE contradiction of our time. In a time when the United States, for example, the, um, life expectancy is going down because people cannot access free healthcare or, or affordable healthcare. We're just obsessed with uh living longer, really, and, and what kind of life um are we gonna have like hooked on Instagram as the big powers are, are attacking each other. I mean, it's all very contradictory what is happening these days and, and I also think. That many of these things are used as small screens. They are problems that we're interested in. They put them in front of us and they distract us from the actual important things that are going on.

37:19 Ricardo Lopes: So I, I want to ask you about uh artificial intelligence now. Um, CAN we create truly intelligent machines? I mean, what does it mean for a machine or what would it mean for it to be truly intelligent?

37:38 Sonia Contera: I think to be true intelligence is to understand a bit the effects that it's going to cause, to be ethical. Uh, WHICH is what we don't have. I mean, basically we have machines that churn things, they do clever things like, uh, I mean, clever as if able to calculate things or create a video or recognize things, but, um, it does not have the capacity, it's not conscious, therefore there's no ethics. The consciousness emerges not as individuals. When they look at other individuals, uh, so basically, I am what I am because I see someone in front of me that I recognize as someone like me or other individuals in this universe. So, so from there, that's why the, the term consciousness also means in common speech ethics or, or moral behavior because recognize myself, I have to recognize you. Therefore, there is an ethics coming out and it's very complex. Ethics as is as complicated as, as physics or more, you know, what is ethical behavior? What, what if I'm doing is good or bad, um, you know, we've been in this problem, uh, all, all history of humanity is based on this, right? There's all sorts of things and AI cannot make any of these judgments. What I mean, I don't know if you, you chat with Claude or, or Chad DBT they just turn. A lot of rubbish that makes sense, and speaks quite well, it's able to do grammar and all this is fascinating. I disagree with some people that they say they do it in the same way we are, we do it because the main key is that in order to speak, you just need to speak to your mother when you're a baby and learn from others or in order to read, you just need a book of 40 pages or less, and this engines basically need all the books in the world and, and listening to all the conversations including your phone and so on. Uh, SO it's, it's not exactly the same. So, yeah, no, our machines are dangerous. I'm not saying they're not dangerous because they're being used, uh, for example, to give you a job or not based on your CV or even worse on these drones that are deployed in war zones to identify or misidentify people using your phone or using how you breathe. I mean, they've been collecting our data in, in the phones, um. And now they're used them to kill people or I foresee very soon uh for increasingly totalitarian behavior, not just from governments but probably from uh these alliances of big tech companies, uh, which is becomes a kind of new feudalism or new East India Company or something worse, you know, so they're dangerous. I'm not saying they're not clever, but they're not intelligent. Yet, uh,

40:34 Ricardo Lopes: and when it comes to the issue of, uh, consciousness, I mean, what do you think about the ways that people have been scientifically trying to tackle consciousness and why do you think that our explorations of consciousness are so important?

40:54 Sonia Contera: So the, the main problem, one of the main problems has nothing to do with intelligent machines. It's basically medical. You, you have someone in the hospital and you don't know if they're conscious or not. Many of these patients in in the hospital might be lying back, they don't feel pain, they don't see, they don't blink, but some of them, they just come back and they're conscious again. And so that brings this huge ethical problem of can we decide if someone Is, is really um has consciousness or not. We don't know where consciousness comes from. People have been studying for a very long time brain waves and so on and so forth in hibernation state, in anesthesia, in, in, in, and it's still. We don't know where it comes from. So people um are interested in this, so I mentioned Kriek and Koch that started very much, uh, yeah, I, I don't know, after, after Crie got the Nobel Prize, probably was the 1950s, 1960s, must have been 1960s, 1970s. I start to look for a place in the brain that will hold consciousness. So far, no success, even though many people have been putting a lot of effort in this. So, there's been several theories. One of, of the most popular one is this global neuronal working space theory, which is this idea that Some information is in some parts of the body and somehow breaks this isolation and becomes sort of general, again, um people are trying to simulate this in computers and so on, uh, we don't know. Another very popular theory is this IIT by Giulio Tononi integrated information theory. Which more or less says that everything is sort of proto-conscious and we have a kind of density of this subs of this consciousness. It's about complexity, it's about geometry. Again, uh, Giulio Toon has been trying to use it in a medical context, but um, I still we don't know. So there are many theories, uh, theories that try to say that we need the, the, the brain needs to think itself, all, all sorts of meta-representations, all sorts of things and So there are many at the moment from emerging computer science and neuroscience, and recently, Uh, they were afraid in this field that everybody was coming with their own theory and they made a kind of, uh, international competition, uh, adversarial collaboration they call it, in which people will try to prove one or other theory true or not. Again, I didn't come up with any, um. Win any, any success. Uh, SO it's still a hot topic. We don't know where it's going. Um, OF course, there's the theory of consciousness of, of Roger Penrose, that somehow there is this idea that is fascinating that there, the, the quantum collapse. According to Roger Penrose, things become sort of, uh, uh, real world away from quantum mechanics when sort of Uh, uh, gravity collapses them into real, into real as in not quantum, as of general relativity real, and, and others, um, yeah, I mean, other people think that it's a consciousness field that collapses, uh, these processes. So, very much open and, and I, I, I find it also fascinating how people working in robotics are actually trying to avoid consciousness. They want robots that simulate consciousness, uh, so they can work for you as waiters and so on, but they're robots, they're not conscious. So, um, and for them it's also interesting, these theories of, of consciousness. So it's fascinating how this field that was treated as pseudoscience for decades after the war and now it's come back, um, and again, we don't know what it's gonna bring us, but, um, I think it's good. THAT we think about this because in many ways, because of this robots start and these companies that are trying to control our lives, um, being able to think, to think independently, to, to reflect on what is human consciousness becomes important, especially because All these, uh, devices we use and all our lives and the jobs and everything fracture our consciousness. Um, WE, we, we're not able to have a unified feeling of ourselves and hence people are very interested in meditation and all these things. Um, SO it's an important topic because modern life, sort of the enlightenment. Has fractured our consciousness even though it started as, you know, we, uh, uh, a cogito, right, the, the car, although I, I, I argue that it's not the car that this actually comes from the Spanish um uh Siglo de Oro, we call it the golden age of, of Spanish literature. And I think these problems of modernity and of consciousness came from both sides. On the one side, Cervantes, uh, the idea that you are, uh, go through the world without God, and, and that idealism crushes you. That's a very Spanish, uh, thought of the. Um, uh, OF the Spanish, uh, literature of the time and also Teresa de Avila, which I mentioned her, uh, who wrote the first book, very obsessed with this, um, it's very likely that uh Las Moradas, the lodgings or whatever is translated in English, which is, um, An exploration of consciousness and unconsciousness through medi through, through, uh, through going away, no, in the search for God, um, and, and I think uh it's very likely that Dec read the book because his books, uh, his book on, on consciousness also on the uh uh on the cogito is very based on the structure of Teresa de Avila's book. So I think it's a fascinating topic that links, um, to the beginning of the Enlightenment. And, and, and following the history of consciousness, I think is a, is a fascinating topic.

47:01 Ricardo Lopes: So I have 2 more questions, 2 general questions just to wrap up our conversation. You've already been, uh, telling us about this throughout our conversation, but what does the fact that these questions, these 6 problems that you chose to tackle in your book, remain unanswered? What do they tell us about science?

47:29 Sonia Contera: Because we have thought of science as something reliant on, on, on rational, logical. Understanding of reality. So basically trying to look at a world that is complex and chaotic and try to match it to a machine, something that works with cause and error, and this is not how reality works, not only because of quantum mechanics, but of probabilistic processes because of complex systems, we have behaviors that go outside logic. And we have overcome this problem in, in, in many ways. One is sort of working in analog, learning by making. I, I already said some working with things that we don't really understand. Um, BUT, um, I think for us, for the Enlightenment people has always been very difficult to admit that, um, this lack of control that even though we have fixed laws of nature, which we don't know. Um, DOES not necessarily have to lead to a deterministic outcomes. Uh, WE don't know, uh, the importance of the universe is this contingency. Things that happen locally because of all these contradictions that bring the most interesting things in the universe, order and disorder, gaps, inconsistency, and things that can go outside logic. And, um, although practicing, I'm an experimentalist, scientists, we work with those. Um, FOR theoretical frameworks has been very difficult. So we are trying to mechanize the world through our computers and so on, but the world doesn't let us. We're heating it up, global warming, all these messes we're creating. So I, in the book, I keep saying that we need to find a way, um, I think it's linked also with the way we use rationality to exploit nature and to exploit others. The colonialist history and so on, and in this moment of crisis, I think has good things which allows us to, I mean, eventually this emerges because um the model of colonialism is just sort of breaking apart and we need to have a science that I think I say in the book that not only knows and controls but goes along. Accompany the processes um that is more humble, that is able to become more analog, more accepting of how things are more realistic, more accepting the limits of things, and above all, forget all this Darwinian, uh Hovetian competition for uh uh superiority of a hegemony that doesn't seem to leave us since we started the Enlightenment. Um, WE need to go back to, we need to find other ways because otherwise we'll destroy each other. We have atomic weapons that will allow us to destroy each other. So I think the big planetary crisis is inviting science to be more practical, more human, less, uh, utilitarian in the sense of, uh, making money, um, and, and more human. I don't know if we're gonna do it or not, but, uh. This cannot continue anymore. Uh, WE see it with the extreme climate events, we've been having them in Spain and Portugal, it's been crazy, all these rains. Uh, WE have them also in the UK, this nonstop raining, and it's just gonna get worse because there's, there's a lot of humid air in the hot atmosphere, in a chaotic movement, we're breaking the equilibriums that allow us to compensate all these contradictions I was saying before. So, life emerges in a very fragile state. We only have one Earth. We cannot colonize Mars at the moment and um so that, that's inviting us to do another science um and to discuss these issues, yeah.

51:31 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, you've already ended up sort of answering my last question, but, uh, uh, I'm going to ask it anyways just to know if you have anything more to say about it. But, uh, in what ways do you look at the relationship between science and politics?

51:48 Sonia Contera: Well, it's very central. Basically, the hegemony of the West could have not happened without the industrial revolution, without the mechanization of nature. Without the weapons. So, basically, scientists, we like to say we are great and we think of progress. This progressivism, in my opinion, is also very problematic. But actually, what has made physics important was the Manhattan Project and in the First World War, chemistry became important because it was created the first weapons of mass destruction. So, uh, and, and then we have the economic power in a way, um, all these geopolitical wars are coming, biology is central to all these things, vaccine can be good, but now we're, we're seeing increasing reports of, of course, the people that make the vaccines are also. Usually the people that are making biological weapons. So, um, in a, in a world with just power, might is right, hegemony, and money are the ideology, science has become part of it. I mean, we, we are not. Allowed it's a fascinating topic, for example, why in Europe we don't have AI, you know, because we were not allowed to, um, you know, all this science is entangled with the money that pays for it. Um, THIS idea that science is neutral is ridiculous because basically in the end what matters is how it is deployed in the real world. And even if I have very good intentions in the lab, I mean, the people that pay me are the ones that are going to decide what we use my inventions for, so, um, Uh, science is, is entangled with the whole operation of hegemony, uh, but now, of course, we have new players in the field, China, uh, and first Japan, but Japan has been, uh, you know, Japan, they call themselves the Far West for historical reasons. They're very much linked to the Western world, also Korea, but we have a country that has made a massive investment in science. And it's doing it for other purposes, um, uh, and it's doing it in another way, which is China. So now everything is sort of crumbling and, um, we don't know where uh in a moment that not only Europe and the US were being industrialized, uh, to send all our industries to China because we thought we could control them, whatever they were thinking. Um, IN a way, um, also they did not invest in R&D heavily in Germany, which they live on cars, they don't have electric cars. What are you guys doing? Were you financialization this financialization of the economy, this idea that uh you don't reinvest all your profits in, in new ways of production, not having an industrial capitalism, but a finance capitalism. So all this is entangled with science, with computers, with technology. Uh, WITH all the mess we live in now. So, yeah, I mean, uh, but, but scientists, I'm sorry to say they're not rebels, uh, they, most of them, they just go along. I mean, uh, we just go where the money is. We have this, uh, so you can see that in the Manhattan Project, for example, only one person wrotebla, which I mentioned him in the book. Left the Manhattan Project even though it was becoming clear that Germany was not able to make the atomic bomb, which was the, the, the, the motivation for making the bomb. All of them continued apart from Robbla, um, because they were, and then they were pushed aside. Thank you very much, here's the bomb, off you go. We don't need you anymore. Um, YEAH, scientists go with the money, um, in most cases, we're not rebels, so we will have to expect that others in society. Will change things so we can adapt to them. Science has never been, in some cases, um, has been more rebellious, um, but uh usually it's not very rebellious.

55:54 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So Doctor Guntero, let's end on that note, and the book is again 6 Problems that Science Cannot solve. There it is in the Spanish version. Yeah,

56:06 Sonia Contera: I'm hoping it will come in English soon. Um, I'm talking my publisher told me he's talking to a few, um, companies that are interested in, in translating it, but yeah, I was my Bad Bunny moment. Let's write it in Spanish, not in English, right?

56:24 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, sure. So, uh thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you.

56:30 Sonia Contera: No, no, great. Thank you for the interview. Great.

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