This week, Computational Cognitive Scientist Vanessa Ferdinand provides us with her skeptical take on the very premise of Roadside Picnic. Given her research on cultural evolution, and how cultural artifacts are changed by the cognitive systems that perceive them, she had quite a few problems with the idea of finding and using an object created by an alien lifeform. She explains her reasoning, but she eventually suspends her disbelief, settles comfortably into the fiction, and describes an alien artifact that she believes will alter our understanding of ourselves, each other, these aliens, and the universe itself.
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**please note that this is a robo-generated transcript. It will soon be replaced by a human-edited version.
Hello everyone. And welcome back to alien crash site. This is the Santa Fe Institute, speculative science fiction podcast, where we ask individuals from our broad community to imagine a world altering alien object, that they would risk their lives to possess. This podcast is inspired by the 1970s, Soviet science fiction, classic roadside picnic written by Boris and our Katie
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00:00:47
Her work focuses on the dynamics and the mechanics of cultural evolution, and she pursues how cultural artifacts are changed by the minds that perceive them. So given the premise of the book and the aim for this podcast, I was eager to hear what Vanessa's take was on how an alien artifact would change when an earth from an alien crash site and perceived by a human stalker. What you're about to hear as a cultural cognitive scientists, informed criticism of roadside picnic, central plot, namely that objects made by an alien life form would never persist on earth long enough for us to find it, let alone determine its function. She makes a compelling argument as she trounces all over this beloved novel, but she does eventually become a perfect example of cognitive estrangement when she sets her skepticism aside and reveals to us what her ideal alien artifact would be.
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So with that, let's ready ourselves for the zone. Assuming it even exists. I'm Caitlin McShane and this is alien crushed.
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00:02:09
In the other room. Hope she doesn't scream loud.
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00:02:13
Hey Vanessa, how are you? I'm fine. How are you doing? I'm good. You are doing us the great service of zooming in all the way from the future to talk about cultural artifacts on this podcast, which is really
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00:02:24
Exciting Wednesday in Australia. And I think you're stuck in Tuesday.
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00:02:28
That's right. But you did me the service of sending me those lottery numbers and I really appreciate it.
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00:02:33
Oh yeah, no problem.
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So for those of us who are tuning in who haven't met Vanessa before Vanessa used to be an a mid-year postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute at the same time that I started working in interplanetary, but now she is continuing her research in Melbourne, which is why she's so far away. And she is doing research and specifically what
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00:02:52
Cultural evolution,
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00:02:54
Cultural evolution. And what do you mean by cultural evolution?
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00:02:58
Hmm. Well, I'm really interested in what kind of information cultural artifacts contain and what kind of information people's heads contain when they are embedded in a cultural system. And I want to know, like, how did that information get there? Why is it there? What is it? What kind of information is it? Well, what the hell a cultural artifact
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00:03:18
Is? Okay. So, but what do you mean by information?
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00:03:21
Oh man, I actually don't know what, I'm your bad information.
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00:03:26
That's what that question write up. What you're curious about is like how information is transmitted and how it got there.
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00:03:31
How to get there. I can talk about that. Cause it's it's design and evolution.
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00:03:35
Okay. When I think of evolution, I obviously think about the way that life forms and populations evolve. And I wonder if there's, is it implicit in something like cultural evolution that culture evolves and according to like Darwinian principles?
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00:03:50
Yes, that definitely could be the case. So I wouldn't want to start out with that analogy to Darwinian evolution. If you think about it all life on earth has been subject to Darwinian evolution, but they all, all life on earth contains one thing in common, which is based on DNA. And maybe there was an RNA world too, but everything, all living organisms do have one common ancestry point, which was the origin of life. But cultures are really different things. There are so many different types of cultural artifacts and cultural systems like think about human language and whale song and how the patent office works and how cars were invented.
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00:04:32
These are separate systems, human language and whale song are not interacting systems like the structure of human language. Isn't due to the structure of whale song in any way. Like these are separate evolving systems. And also the material is different. Like as we have like all DNA on the biology side and culture, we have very different physical and representational forms that evolve over time. So think about language and how you learn language from your parents. They had some sort of grammar in their head that was generating pressure waves in the air. And you are somehow able to take in these pressure waves in the air and create a similar grammar in your own head, which is ultimately implemented in neural structure.
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00:05:12
So there's no way that your neurons are directly accessing your parents' neurons. So culture goes through these different representational spaces. And Dan Sperber talks about this. He talks about public and private representational spaces. So we can take that concept and twist it around and say, well, there's public and private, private replicators, and culture. And there's just so many different types of them. Like the public ones, aren't always pressure waves. They could be like stone tools that you're trying to chip off and make, according to some motor program, you can't access from someone teaching you how to make a stone tool. So there's like all this stuff going on in culture, which I think makes it a very special system. The fact that it like toggles between this private and public space, it's almost like it has two distinct life phases.
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00:05:54
Okay. And so the medium through which this information is, it seems like, so you use neurons, you use something like stone tools, the patent office, et cetera, language of course is somewhat immaterial, but the use of neurons makes it somewhat instantiated. Physically. Does it seem as though? Okay, so culture depends on some sort of a physical exchange.
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00:06:14
Oh yeah. Yeah. And I would even say my favorite definition of what a cultural artifact is, is anything that requires a cognitive system to replicate. So part of the zigzag process is that these artifacts can't replicate themselves. They require a cognitive system to perceive their structure, process it, and then produce it again. So that's what cultural replication is. It has to go through this very complex cognitive bottleneck that has all sorts of biases that could push it all around in all these different directions. So to come back to your question about Darwin and evolution, we're in a very different space than this blind mutation and natural selection paradigm. So like, I wouldn't say, yeah, don't reinvent the wheel.
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00:06:56
If you're studying evolution and Darwin already did it a hundred years ago. Yeah. Borrow some concepts, but try to break them on your new problem. Like, don't start with this assumption, that culture is going to be Darwinian. That would just, I think just put some blinders on. So theoretical blinders on that would prevent you from seeing the beautiful complexity that's in culture
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00:07:17
And that's fair. But do you think that there is culture beyond individuals who possess something like a genetic memory molecule? Yeah. You'd need to have a memory. Wait, you have to have memory. Right. And like, it seems like we all have some sort of a similar shared memory device, but the prac the process through which the stuff that we make evolves doesn't necessarily behave the same way that we, the stuff maker is evolved.
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00:07:46
Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. Yeah. And people talk about this as like a dual inheritance, like when here in our genes, but we also inherit cultural information and these are two separate channels. So culture can evolve without being in any way, genetically inherited as well. You can just see that in terms of how fast culture evolves. Like we've already seen like the memes on the internet and all this stuff, we witnessed this in our lifetime. So obviously this isn't impacting our fitness in a way that's also impacting the fitness of the memes really quickly. So yeah. These are separate
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00:08:17
Maybe a psychological fitness depending on how often you're engaging in these wonderful, horrible ways. Yeah. Okay. Well, so just to kind of summarize why I thought it would be so fun to have this conversation with you on this podcast is because the podcast takes its premise from a fictional culture. That is the consequence of an alien invasion. Not so much, they just came, they had maybe a little lunch, went to the restroom, cleaned out their car and then moved on to better greener pastures, but they left all of this stuff behind. And the culture of this city essentially evolved as a consequence of all the stuff that got left behind. And of course it, it, it's simple things. It's golden hoops, it's lumps of ooze.
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00:08:57
It's a weird black coal pieces that sometimes sparkle just strange material objects, but the entire city's economy revolves around the black market of these or the research of these. And I wanted to know what you could say about how a culture adapts to an artifact. If it's not that culture is artifact. And so you're totally welcome to get speculative because of course it's aliens and humans. So that being the premise, what do you think? I think
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00:09:24
The promos is slightly problematic. I just think a probability to any cultural artifact from an alien civilization is going to work on earth. Meaning that humans are going to be able to reverse engineer some aspect of whatever was intended or that, or some aspect of the information that went into that artifact. I think that's so low. And actually I think it's low on kind of for two different reasons and not even the reason that the probability of aliens existing is level. Let's forget about that. Say aliens do definitely exist. The probability that they're going to leave artifacts on earth is really low because that artifact needs to basically fight two types of entropy to get its cultural information to a human brain.
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00:10:08
It needs to fight thermodynamic entropy, which is like, it needs to solve the problem with physical persistent center. And it also needs to fight cybernetic, entropy and solve that problem with information transfer from a mind that is absolutely different to ours via some sort of physical medium.
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00:10:26
Okay. So let's, let's break that down. Let's start with the physical entropy, the thermodynamic entropy, which is kind of the classic entropy that I'm familiar with. Let's go with that before we get to this cybernetic entropy, which we're very excited to hear about.
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00:10:38
Yeah. So this is the thermodynamic entropy. That's the idea that physical structures or anything complex or far from equilibrium will just move towards equilibrium or degrade over time. So organisms are constantly fighting entropy. And what they're doing is fixing their bodies all the time using like high energy from the photons, from the sun to just put themselves back in place. But obviously we always fight. We always lose that any organism will lose that fight in the end and just die. But life is a, is a way to just temporarily fight thermodynamic entropy. So let's take an example to understand the low probability of artifacts like fighting that thermodynamic entropy let's like take an example of an artifact actually from earth that probably wouldn't be able to fight that entropy.
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00:11:24
So like, I think, I don't know if when you are kids, you heard about this like really large dragon fly that was like flying around 300 million years ago. It was like called Megan neuros. Yeah. It was like two feet long wingspan and really popular in the Carboniferous. So I think you can picture this dragon fly, like visiting earth right now and flying around and how wonderful that would be. Well, basically what happened is that dragon fly would crap out and just a couple minutes and die because it evolves in a time where unearth, where there was 35% oxygen in the air. And that's actually one of the reasons that allowed the insects to get so large. And now we've only got about 21% oxygen in the air.
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00:12:04
It wouldn't even be able to survive on its own planet 300 million years later. So why would we think that an artifact from 300 million light years away were able to survive on earth? Like physically? I just think that it wouldn't even know if there was oxygen on earth or not. Like maybe that would just completely corrode whatever thing was made up. We just don't know.
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00:12:25
I was just talking to somebody about this and as I understand it again, I'm not like Darwinian, I'm not obsessed. It's just the framework that I have as a biologist. But I'm under the impression that some Relic of it like that might've been the last common ancestor of the dragonflies, but the dragonflies that exist are geologically still related to that. They're just much smaller. There was something about the efficiency of being small and that oxygenated environment that allowed them to survive and yada, yada yada. Yeah. Okay. So I almost want to draw a connection between that and Moore's law. And so I wonder about like the sort of optimal question, like, it seems like the dragon fly was optimized eventually as his technology, by getting smaller and smaller. So how do I ask that question, but about alien
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00:13:06
Yeah. Optimization and culture. So that's the Darwinian ideas that natural selection optimizes organisms to survive better in their environment. Yeah. For culture, like culture is really optimizing itself to survive well through that cognitive passage, like languages adapt to our own brains. We words don't exist that are too long for us to remember period. So there is that kind of selection process you could say going on, but we, it could be a wild or more interesting selection process that the natural selection. But yeah, you can say culture is adapting to the minds of the people who use it. Yeah. Yeah. But I want to talk, I want to really unpick that and say that these artifacts have to fight two things.
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00:13:47
They have to fight, like solve the problem with physical persistence and then solve the problem of information transfer.
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00:13:54
I see. So we're not even yet talking about the, unlike the low likelihood that the, that the object might persist and be understood by humans already life elsewhere. Isn't going to stay long enough for a picnic on earth. Oh,
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00:14:06
Oh, I didn't even think of that. No, I am thinking that like an artifact wouldn't present, but yeah. Especially, yeah, these aliens just accidentally as it happened by earth. I really don't think they're going to have, I don't think they're going to be prepared for every possible planetary atmospheric environment and be able to cope with that. Like yeah. That was my example. Like, yeah. Even if like a dragon fly can't survive on its own planet just later on, like why would we expect some, yeah. Some organisms to survive, but also just the physical things they have, like the materials that their artifacts are made of might just disintegrate when they come in contact with Earth's atmosphere. So I think that probability is low, but let's say that the artifacts do luckily persist on earth.
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00:14:49
We have this whole second problem to is like, okay, there's an artifact there that was made by an alien mind. And we know that during cultural transmission, we never have direct access to the other. Individual's mind everything. We have to reverse engineer everything via like the physical representation of culture. So the fact that our minds are so different, kind of comes up against this problem of affordance. So there's this interesting idea in design that people kind of use in cultural evolution is that if you see something like a chair and look at it, a chair affords particular behaviors and interactions like the F the fact that seats nice and, but shaped in place you to sit in it.
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00:15:31
But it requires that you have like a, but similar to the person who made the chair. Right? So if like an alien head seems to be like, but shaped, maybe they're going to be like, yeah, let's wear this. This maybe looks like a hat. So we're going to wear a chair as a hat. So the fact that our bodies can be so different in unimaginable ways from an alien's body, it means that the whole affordance problem is going to be completely messed up. Like, so what an alien would use an artifact for, we might not be able to even, we might interact with, look at it and interact with it in a completely different way that would just prevent that information from somehow passing through the artifact into our own minds. Okay.
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00:16:10
And is that the cybernetic?
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00:16:12
Yeah, I think that the cybernetic kind of information transfer problem. Okay.
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00:16:18
Just does not connect. Can not compute. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm fine with this. I do. Hmm. Okay. X-ray I have to stand up in sex and I know that you did play along eventually we'll get to your artifact. Like you're not just completely, you're not burning the text. You're not, you know, picketing outside of a theater, that's playing soccer, but you're thinking through the likelihood of this. And I think that's important because you know, we're doing a lot of exploratory missions in space. And of course I've been trying always to tether this fiction to the interplanetary exploration that we're doing in contemporary time. And we are littering different planets with our own artifacts all the time, but they so far persist. I don't know if you have anything to say about that.
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00:16:59
Is it just that, like these places we go to, we only go to, because they're similar enough that we get over this thermodynamic and Tropic fear, what do you think?
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00:17:07
Well, yeah, I guess they are similar because it's the same solar system, but also the scientist who created the Mars Rover, they really studied conditions on Mars before then design the Mars Rover for those conditions. So I think that's why the Rover's working, but also in the end say that they just leave it there as trash. It is just pieces of metal. And as soon as any kind of corrosion occurs, the device is going to stop working because that device can't repair itself. So very quickly, it would just become pieces of metal, which in this it's fairly good physical persistence, like a rock has a good physical persistence quotient, I guess in metal does as well.
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00:17:47
Like these are just like basic elements. So that would be the kind of trash that would be found. And I guess some alien finding the Mars Rover might be able to look at its structure and kind of infer what it was for. See the wheels and say, okay, if it has any concept of what a wheel is, my realize that it would help the thing move over the terrain. I'm not sure,
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00:18:12
But okay. Because what I wonder about is, you know, you were talking about the researchers who make the rovers, who had to research the conditions on Mars so that they have a robust machine rolling around on Mars, down linking all of their information. There is also this whole realm of something like material science, where people are inventing new types of rubber, new types of plastics, you know, invincible objects. I wonder if it's possible that even if something that was left behind by an alien, in an alien crash site on earth, eroded tremendously, even from its impact, let's say, but it was special enough and knew that we would still be able to glean some kind of, even if we didn't know its function, we would find a new function for it. It's almost like the opposite of your affordance.
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00:18:53
It's like the misuse of something based on a misunderstanding, but still practical, like an application.
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00:18:59
The fact that the artifact contains interesting structure and novel structure would just set our imaginations off and we might find a new use for it. Right. So, yeah, I would believe that that is possible, but that original intent would be very hard to recover. So that would mean that cultural transmission failed in a sense, but the artifact itself just provoked a bunch of creativity in us. So I can see that, especially if it's a new material and then we're able to actually look at the arrangement of the molecules in it and discover something new that we could use here on earth.
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00:19:36
Right, right, right. But so getting back to the idea of affordances in the plot of this text, obviously this alien species is roughly human sized. If it's landing in our city and not destroying our city terribly, but like eating in the city, it's clearly intelligent. It can travel, let's call it interstellar travel. Cause you're right. It does. It seems unlikely that these aliens come from our solar system and they have stuff and they, and they are negligent of the stuff, but we can hold it. We can research its molecular structure and maybe we find new use from it. So that means that we have to have some sort of a similarity in the support instructor that you're talking about. Right.
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00:20:12
Yeah. I'd say so. Okay.
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00:20:15
Hmm. I'm kind of losing the thread. Let me see if it's true that we find a piece of material and we examine its molecular structure and realize that there is some application that we can use with this new thing. We retro engineer it and use it in new applications. You say that's a failed transmission of culture. Although there is a transmission of some sort of information. Is that fair?
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00:20:38
Yeah. No, that is fair. Yeah. Yeah.
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00:20:41
So then the only way that a cultural transmission is successful in your opinion is if the original message is, or it doesn't degrade in some way, like a game of telephone. Yeah.
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00:20:51
Yeah. That's such a good example of iterative learning and cultural transition right there. I don't know. I could talk about kind of that cultural transmission process and how strange it is. Yeah. You can't have transfer of information, but do you, the question is, do you have transfer of the intended information? So there's different kinds of cultural copying regimes. Like as I said earlier, culture, cultural artifacts can't replicate themselves. So if you think about a library full of books, you might think, well, that contains so much information, but all that information is basically dead on arrival. If nobody ever goes into that library again, the books would just start, decane fall victim to thermodynamic entropy, and all that information would be gone forever and never, never able to be recovered at all.
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00:21:33
So obviously books can't copy themselves and throughout history books were copied by scribes. So this is one mode of just like replicating that information is that scribes was sit down with one book and actually transcribe it onto a new book that was less decayed and then allow those books to persist over time. But you might think, oh yeah, no cultural artifacts can replicate themselves. What about a photocopier? So like, yeah, I could take a book, put it on a photocopier, but the thing is the book's not going to walk over to the photocopier, still needs a person to like invent the photocopier and then photocopy it. But that might give you a better copy than what a scribe does. But let's think about that further. I don't know if anybody back in the eighties ever played with a photocopier or you're like photocopy something and then you photocopy that copy and you photocopy that copy going on.
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00:22:22
That's kind of what's going on there, but with the photocopying of a photocopy, what's happening is you just adding noise and eventually you end up with like a black page or a white page, depending on the bias on your photocopy. You just add noise and add noise until you can't read the original print anymore. So that's a kind of bad example of cultural transmission. In the other case with the scribe, a scribe is transcribing a book and then another scribe, 50 years later, transcribes that book, that process doesn't end up with ink all over the pages and illegible way you get actually a high persistence of information, but it does change over time with the biases of the culture that's transcribing it, but you don't get noise in the end.
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00:23:04
So you get this mutational change that still has this incredibly rich source of information and an incredibly rich message that is fairly coherent, but these are two very different processes. We actually really don't know much about this transmission process in culture. Like we don't know what constitutes replication and culture does culture even replicate anything at all? Or is it all this bias wild mutation? And if it's all biased mutation, how does information ever accumulate over time? That's like that Darwinian kind of thought process there. So we could do an experiment right now. I could draw a bunch of lines out a piece of paper, and then the show that to you and say, Hey, Caitlin, copy these lines.
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00:23:47
And then you can just like, look at it and copy it. And then we can measure the mutual information between our drawings. And that should be the information that got from my drawing into your drawing. So that's an inheritance of cultural information if the cultural artifacts like this little drawing. Okay. And I can also be like, Hey, Kaitlin, let's both just draw a smiley face right now. Like I draw a smiley face and you're not looking at me and you draw a smiling face. I'm not looking at you, but we can measure the mutual information between those things and actually be quite high. But the thing is, you didn't look at my smiley face and copy it. So that's like, oh, that's a weird thing. The culture does is there's this like third causal element. This fact that we both acquired this category for what a smiley face looks like.
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00:24:31
And we're able to just create things that have high mutual information with one another. So that second case feels like, oh, there's not actually any cultural transmission going on between those artifacts. There there's some other higher level, weird transmission that went on when we both learned these categories. So cultural replication is quite a messy space like that. And it does allow for things like photocopies of photocopies, of photocopies that degrade to know information, but also allows for things like the biased remaking of culture over generations.
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00:25:01
Right? So it's interesting to me. And I know that this is a science term, so maybe you might want to parse out what you mean by this and based on what I'm about to ask, but it seems that your copier example is problematic in its transmission because it introduces noise. Whereas the cultural scribe, the scribe of every 50 years, that is sort of a representation of its culture in that time almost introduces something like a cultural Relic into the copy. And I wonder why that's not also why that isn't noise. Is it just that some, some small finite amount of the original, like you could view it
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00:25:36
As noise, but it doesn't create something illegible in the end. It creates something, even though it has errors in it, these errors get humans really don't like cognitive dissonance. They don't like things to not make sense. So if somebody sees an error, they'll kind of, I don't know, accommodate it with the other stuff so that it all makes sense in the end. So you do get a consistent signal about something, even though that something has changed over time due to these kind of errors. So I think that's, that's what the difference is that there, yeah. You do have a case where there's a high amount of information retrain retained versus a lower information retained due to the noise process.
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00:26:15
Okay. Okay.
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00:26:18
So aliens.
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00:26:21
Exactly. I don't know. I wonder if there's something to be discussed about your opinion about the fact that the aliens don't factor, right? Like they're not in the story. We're just looking at 13 years later, all the people who were like trying to retro engineer these, these artifacts. And so for instance, when I read the beatified scribe version of a story, that's 50 years, a hundred years later, or whatever, the, the information that is retained is that almost like this categorical leap, like you and I possess the same category by virtue of occupying the same sort of world and having the same grammatical structures. And I mean, obviously we share the same language. So if you make a joke, I get it because I can categorically exist in the same sort of collective cultural spaces.
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00:27:03
You, yeah, it does make sense. Can you explain what I mean by that? Like, can you talk a little bit about the collective cognition, the collective nature of the site, the type of cognition that allows for artifacts to evolve in culture? Yeah.
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00:27:19
Yeah. So you're basically saying that we have very similar mental programs and that we understand each other. Yeah. But we can never be sure, like, meaning we know if I say red and you think of red and I'm like, oh, look at that red thing. And then you're looking at that red thing. Are we looking at the same thing? Are we looking at it in the same way? Like we think we've just understood each other and transmitted something, but we can only ever realize that we've properly understood something via like the physical way that we react to each other where, which is like, oh yeah, I see it. Oh yeah, I see it too. But we could be looking at completely different things and both have said, yeah, I see it. And then think that the other person saw what we saw. So there's these like kind of fuzzy boundaries where if we just both land within that same area, then we think we've understood what we're talking about, but maybe nobody actually completely understands that everybody else is talking, talking about, because like we do have fuzzy categories and those can probably, those are those fuzzy categories just like allow us, I think, to think we all know that we agree
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00:28:21
And then move on. But
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00:28:23
So some sentences, like we do have those, we have the same category structure. The boundaries might not be all perfectly aligned with one another. The prototypes might not be all in the same place, but still we have a similar enough structure that we're able to transmit enough information to get by in life and feel like we've we've communicated. So I think that's kind of what's going on with, with culture and cultural transmission is that the majority of the information that was intended to be an artifact will be recovered by the next person, but maybe in a slightly biased way. And when you iterate that over and over that bias kind of comes out. But overall, if we are transmitting the core information,
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00:29:06
Do you think there is such a thing as a perfect communication, a perfect transmission. Yeah.
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00:29:11
But it would have to be something you witnessed in like a computational model where you can actually like crack open the skull of your learning algorithm and see that it has in fact, and for the exact same probability distribution over data points as the other algorithms. So like in natural systems, I don't think we can, we can know that for sure.
3
00:29:31
And so, but these, these computer systems that you're cracking open your skulls, that you're cracking open, aren't those essentially models of natural systems. Yeah. They're models of natural systems and therefore they can be perfect. Yeah.
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00:29:43
Well they, yeah. Cause they're highly abstracted away from all of the annoying realities. Yeah.
3
00:29:50
Okay. Well, so to sum it up, the fact that all of these Russians are making use of these objects is preposterous in your eyes because of a variety of increasing elements of fuzziness, increasing disparities and material, the absolute unlikelihood probability of zero linguistics sort of categories that are shared can't happen. Yeah. Okay. Oh yeah. That's very, this premise,
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00:30:21
The premise is flawed, but I promised myself, I wouldn't say that.
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00:30:27
Yeah. I mean, I figured that you would have a lot of criticisms about this. Of course, it's one of those, you know, with fiction, you want to suspend your disbelief. You want to kind of allow yourself to get a little muddy, to engage in the narrative and see what arises. And there's this other sort of interesting relationship that exists in the, in the narrative because the zone was alien occupied. At one point, it seems to behave very differently from other places on earth that weren't occupied by these aliens. They have like these weirdo, new, physical properties, they are both dangerous and both comfortable. So you never know what's going to go on when you go in there. And it seems like they actually do have some impact on the genetics of the individual stalkers who go in because the protagonist has a perfectly healthy, intelligent Russian speaking daughter, but she has a tail and a short pelt of blonde for, and they call her the monkey affectionately.
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00:31:16
But over the course of the novel, she starts losing her capacity to speak the same language. And so you've got this alien human interface and then you've got this, you know, animal human, but alien animal human interface either way. And you find that there's still somehow this like loving communication between the parents and that daughter or the stalkers and the aliens they never met, but are enamored by. So it seems like even if culture isn't transmitted culture changes as a consequence of a misunderstanding sometimes, and I won't have you. Okay. So I, can you talk a little bit about your opinions on something like that? Why is this your area of interest?
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00:31:56
What took you to a focused study on the process, through which information is transmitted via archetype from cognitive system to cognitive system? Why is that your interest? Oh
2
00:32:09
Man. I just remember ever since I was a kid, I just looked at the amazing things in the world around me. And I was just like, I wanted to know how that complexity got there. So the more and more I thought about like what life was. I was just think organisms have so much information when they're, when like a birds looking around for food outside. Like there's so much information about where to look when, and I just wanted to know how does that information get there. So, and it gets there in two ways, like through the evolutionary process, but through learning. So I was always just fascinated by evolution and learning together. And then kind of eventually realized that there was this other kind of evolution that resulted from learning.
2
00:32:49
And then that's what culture was. So it was this other amazing channel of communicating information through generations
3
00:32:57
Makes sense. I mean, there's this survivalist thing, right? Like in order to survive and to function for as long as one can, you must learn. But then there's also the cultural element. When I say with like a capital C culture as a lay person outside of the work that you're doing, the production of beautiful things and the, and the archiving of the history of the production of those beautiful things and recognizing causality across individual behaviors all the way up to war and politics and the production of a beautiful thing, whatever. So it seems like learning is somehow imperative for the creation of an artifact. Like without learning there would be no artifact. Do you agree with that statement?
3
00:33:38
Yes. Or is it that the artifact precedes? What you see? What I mean? It's like chicken egg. It's like, I see the thing I want to understand it. I learned now I do, or I've learned something. I want to express it. I create an artifact, et cetera.
2
00:33:51
Yeah. Oh man. Yeah, no, the chicken and the egg thing, I mean, that fits into the evolutionary story is like, which came first, the chicken or the egg, the answer is the egg because the egg and the chicken are the same organism, but then the chicken makes a new kind of scrambled DNA sample of itself. They're scrambled. So it was just like when you allow for things to slowly evolve over time, like you can have this chicken, chicken, egg stuff
3
00:34:13
It's been answered people. But no, I just wonder in this process, if we think about how important learning is to cultural evolution as is the exchanged artifact, cognitive system, the cognitive system, they seem, they seem codependent, but it's unclear whether or not one has to preempt the other. Yeah.
2
00:34:30
Actually, there's this huge literature about that. Like an imitation and social learning that I actually can't do justice to. So I'm like kind of, I don't want to talk about that because I think I'm just gonna put my foot in my mouth.
3
00:34:39
So then why don't I just ask you about the artifact, if we could see how that points to this question that seems unanswerable. So regardless of the fact that you think that this premise is flawed or it's preposterous, what have you, you were a good enough sport to come up to the podcast and do your homework. So Vanessa at the risk of imprisonment, great personal injury, even death, what alien artifacts do you hope to uncover from the zone? Well, I hope to uncover
2
00:35:03
An alien artifact that would realize my childhood fantasy of being able to experience the cognition of other organisms, animals, plants, maybe even try out a rock, see what happens and other people, when I was a kid, I used to just dream, I just become this tiny little clear little sphere and just float around and float into anything I wanted and then just experience what it was like to be that thing. So I would love to uncover some sort of artifact. I have no idea what it would look like, but an artifact that could accomplish that direct connection between mine's
3
00:35:38
Like a clear sphere
2
00:35:43
That seems so stereotypical, but well, yeah, so it would accomplish this direct connection between minds, which would allow, I think that would really impact you in society because then that would really change the course of the dynamics possible and cultural revolution. It would allow complete information to be transferred from one mind to another. So it solved the reverse engineering problem. It would eliminate all the biases associated with that problem and allow you to just have one access to 100, a hundred percent of the information that was intended to be transmitted to you as is. And then we could really we'd find out like, oh, are we actually communicating? Or I don't know, it would just be so amazing to create these new pathways for cultural evolution.
2
00:36:22
But at the same time, the thing is there is this alien artifact that is accomplishing that. So it's actually there still as an artifact. And that story mediating, that direct connection between mine. So as a scientist, I'd want to study, what the heck is that artifact? Like, what are, what is the mechanism it's using to accomplish that? And I think that would be incredibly enlightening. So it would be kind of like the super, the super artifact that could accomplish any type of cultural transmission. Yeah. I don't know. I think that would be really cool.
3
00:36:55
Really cool. I think it's, I think the premise is then first of all, it seems like there would have to be some sort of a translational work, right? Let's say you hand it, I dunno if you hand it to someone or you just float near, you said you have a parrot. What if you want to understand the cognition of your parent and you like float near it, as you say, there's, there's this big gap, this huge, I don't know, Rio Grande, a Gorge between what you know and what, what's your, what's your parents name, potty, what patchy knows. And so the device, the device, not only in its capacity to retain the perfect message, like retain the original intent of the message, but it can, it knows every language.
3
00:37:35
It knows every linguistic method of mediating communication to every species, every non-living thing, it's a lot of information to hold, but it would have to do that. Right. You can't just occupy the mind to paci.
2
00:37:45
Well, it could contain all of the information possible to make every translation possible, but I bet I wouldn't wouldn't work like that. If this was some revolutionary technology from the superior being, and I also hate the colonialism involved in like alien conquest, but they just littered. Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry. Maybe it's actually its power lies in the fact that it's gone to the causal root of what an information transfer is. And it doesn't need to just from some huge memory store, all the possible translations, but instead it, the way to translate information, any type of information into any other type of information through whatever its medium
3
00:38:28
Is. Okay. I'm really glad you answered the question the way you did, because that gets me to ask my second question, which is about the type of modeling investigation research that you do. So you find this thing, we don't know what it's called. We should come up with a name, but it's a clear sphere and it performs this function very well. The thing that you're most excited about is essentially cracking it open and figuring out how exactly it accomplishes this seemingly impossible transmission. Do you risk destroying it? How confident are you you'll get one shot? Like would you risk destroying the object in order to understand
2
00:39:03
Competent in that I would not mess around? No, no, no, no
3
00:39:06
Thing that you love about it, which is the information it could provide you about how information is transmitted is invisible to you. So you just get to it. Is
2
00:39:13
He a vector of thermodynamic entropy if I even tried to open the thing, so I would, I would just use it to experience the cognition of absolutely everything and just enjoy. I mean, there's two reasons we do science, like for example, like I did a PhD in language evolution. There's like the joy of like trying to figure out how language might have evolved, but not like, I mean, that was fun. But if I could, if someone was like, just Vanessa, here's a time machine. You want to just go back in time and see how language evolved of like, yes, I would, I'll just go look at how language evolve and then go do something else, like conservation biology. Like I just wanted to know how language evolved. So in this case, like I just want to know what the cognition of other organisms is like. So I would just go out and enjoy that as much as possible.
2
00:39:54
So,
3
00:39:55
But then don't you also, as a scientist, want to express what you learn? Like you're the only one who has this magic thing, because you were brave enough to go into the zone and you made it out alive. Good for you. And now you go around the world, engaging with the consciousness of whatever it is that you choose to commune with. Note, you also want to like archive that or does it allow you to communicate it clearly to the, to the lay masses? Does this device, the scientists communicate
2
00:40:23
That puts me in the same wheelhouse that I already am in. I'm studying systems that I can't ever really crack open and understand. So there's like, yeah, there's total methodologies for doing that. Like you can still just go around experience all this stuff, log it down, synthesize it into whatever you think the overarching principles are and then like write a paper about that or a book or whatever. So yeah, like I would think I would just use that to go explore and experience all of these different translations and then try to reverse engineer myself what that artifact might be doing. And without risking being a vector of thermodynamic entropy and destroying
3
00:40:59
Your hammer. Yeah, no, I think this is good because camera was on earlier in the series and we were talking about how computational social science allows her to do stuff that keeps her out of the field work, which is like observing civilizations for long periods of time. Literally just observing and then gleaning some sort of view from outer space Blas about the behavior of an individual, unlike yourself. So you just occupy that temporarily, but then once you're out of that occupation, I guess maybe occupation is not the right word we want to use either. But however it is that you're able to, to understand what is going on in this other beings, consciousness, perhaps, perhaps there's communication flowing both ways too, right?
3
00:41:40
It's not you just trying to be them perceiving, maybe you're are you, are you literally communicating with them? Yeah.
2
00:41:46
Yeah, because I think part of the original question is like how, how would this artifact revolutionized life on earth or revolutionized human society? I think the fact that we would be able to establish that direct communication between whatever two beans are communicating like that, that would be revolutionary because it just creates that that pathway of really knowing everything that somebody else is thinking and knowing where you've misunderstood them before you're using that device. So that would just accomplish such wonderful communication. Of course it would be an idealist about this and think it would solve all sorts of like racism problems and everything. If we could just actually know what everybody else was feeling, it would create this. I think it would create a wonderful empathy in the human experience, but it might also just create other ways that people could exploit other people because then you'd know exactly what they were planning to do.
2
00:42:33
And so it actually could totally backfire.
3
00:42:36
It is, it is somewhat voyeuristic. And you know, I do want to say it's funny because I've had such a diverse group of guests on the podcast and something like this has come up once or twice. Like it seems that we human beings who care about it sort of empathic existence on earth are sort of converging on something like this. But yeah, one, one thing to think about is like, is this too voyeuristic? Is this easily exploited in, in whose hands? You know, if you have it, I think that it's yeah. It's only one
2
00:43:02
Article. That's what I was thinking. I was thinking that I would actually, if I wanted to create empathy among people in the world, I wouldn't want them to all just be experiencing communication with me. That would be a mess. They should all be experiencing communication with everybody. So everybody should get to use it with everybody.
3
00:43:16
Right. Or you would hope that you could distribute many of them, but in order to do that, you would have to reverse engineer it. You would have to risk destroying it. And therefore there's one and maybe it travels the world on some sort of like an ambassador world tour. I'm not sure. Yeah.
2
00:43:30
Maybe it would be able to offload his information to some hive mine. So like every time anybody connected to it, they'd be communicating with the other person, but also everybody that that person communicated with so far. Cause in that person's memory, shouldn't be the memory of all their communication partners. See what I'm saying? Oh yeah. Maybe it could just be one artifact that gets passed around. If, when you interact with that artifact, you have complete access to this other person's mind to actually previously interacted with another person whose mind they had complete access to. And so you just kind of build up this huge archive of the hive mind and that way everybody can experience everybody else's cognition, all it's kind of like doing the witches.
3
00:44:08
Okay. So this sort of like memory lineage that we all as living beings possess become sort of connected in a network as this item moves from feeler to feel easy or right. So I guess you're, you're still in possession of it, but you are from the center building out this network of every single human interaction that every other human or other animal that you convene with has had, and therefore the network expands and that's like the cloud, but it's like a, it's like an immaterial neural network of, of social connections.
2
00:44:42
Yeah. And actually I liked this more because, because the, the original way I described it, I'd get to see the synchronic variation among cognition. So I'd get to see like how everybody differs, but right now would actually really prefer to get to experience some lineage of organisms, like say humans over time, back to the origin of language. And I could witness things about, I could actually witness cultural evolution and how it happens and how the origin of language happens and how it continued to evolve. So I think I like the hive-mind idea more cause I can go across my current timeframe to see how the cognition of different organisms differs. But I could also go back in time to see how these differences evolved from maybe some kind of common origin point or whatever.
3
00:45:26
I think that's a little convenient, I think
2
00:45:29
Convenient. I think
3
00:45:32
I'm fine with the fact that there is this sort of like sensate immaterial network that's built from the, you know, from the relationships that every individual that you encounter species regardless might possess. But I don't know that that also gives you the opportunity to experience the entire lineage of every single memory. I
2
00:45:49
Think it definitely does. This is my dream artifact. This is what I want to find in that crash site as well.
3
00:45:55
Screw that, like, let's say you, let's say you convene with me, you and I completely understand each other by virtue of this spirit, this clear sphere of whatever we want to call it. And you want to trace, maybe I'm the first human being that you've encountered since I'm covering this from the zone and you want to trace something like the evolution of language. Then at least for me, I would be the splinter of a very long lineage that is very quite particular. And it might lead to a universal origin for human language in general, but you would experience it through a very particular path that is like my, you know, Anglo, Irish ancestry, et cetera. You know what I mean? So you would have to do that a lot to get the actual truth of how language distributes itself across the world, for instance.
3
00:46:37
Yeah.
2
00:46:38
That would be awesome. It'd be awesome. If I could have access to every possible human in the world and their experience of their own language and then just like put that all together and be like, okay, yeah, this is an actual convergence.
3
00:46:52
So what you need really is to go back into the zone and find some sort of like a time freezer because you can't do it in a lifetime, but it would be really great. If what is it now? Eight and a half billion individuals alive on this planet. Yeah. You might need a little time also. And then would you, you would write the paper and then you would hold the clear sphere to the paper and make sure that the paper was actually accessible to anyone child rock open source, open source. Yeah. Maybe it's like the clear sphere archive, right? It's something like it's there, it's accessible. Y'all it's right there, the high, the arc hive. Okay. So then my final question is more of like a, just a fun cultural thing, but it's great for you because you have to provide us with a cultural artifact and then all of our listeners will potentially learn something about you as a result.
3
00:47:39
But I've been trying to ask individuals as they psych themselves up to enter into the zone, which is very dangerous, but also with the hope of finding something cool, there's two songs essentially that like would motivate you to get in and out. There's something like a pump up, do it song. And then there's the focus and exit song. Can you tell me what two songs are on your zone? Enter exit playlist. It could be exactly what you're listening to now, but which song is going to get you in and get you out safely with this clear sphere are hive.
2
00:48:08
Yeah. So probably something by point of views to social club, maybe Sean, Sean
3
00:48:41
Okay. I'll be sure to link it to the show notes so that people can attempt to experience your total consciousness, even though you haven't yet actually uncovered this alien artifact, because as you spent the last hour telling us it's impossible, Kaitlin, this book is ridiculous. This movie is ridiculous. It could never happen. But if it did, I would want to do this.
2
00:49:02
Yeah. Thanks so much, Kaitlin.
3
00:49:04
Hey, thanks so much for coming on. And for applying your expertise to what is a fiction, it was a fiction after all, but it's good because now we have a better sense of what's at stake when we think about an artifact of the future. So I really appreciate it.