#203 – Interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation (Peter Godfrey-Smith on The 80,000 Hours Podcast)

We just published an interview: Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.

Episode summary

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Peter Godfrey-Smith — bestselling author and science philosopher — about his new book, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World.

They cover:

• Why octopuses and dolphins haven’t developed complex civilisation despite their intelligence.
• How the role of culture has been crucial in enabling human technological progress.
• Why Peter thinks the evolutionary transition from sea to land was key to enabling human-like intelligence — and why we should expect to see that in extraterrestrial life too.
• Whether Peter thinks wild animals’ lives are, on balance, good or bad, and when, if ever, we should intervene in their lives.
• Whether we can and should avoid death by uploading human minds.
• And plenty more.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Highlights

Thinking about death

Luisa Rodriguez: The final chapter of your book considers whether death is something we should accept, and I guess that’s desirable. How do you think about death?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: “Desirable” is too strong a word, because that makes it sound like there’s a completely open slate of possibilities here: never dying, dying soon, dying in a long time — what’s the desirable thing?

Something that I want to emphasise in that last chapter is that, although one can think of oneself and one’s fate in a very disembodied way, as a thought experiment, it’s also possible to think about our actual place in the physical world as parts of the endless processes of recycling, as part of animal evolution, as part of ecological change. The way that the molecules in our bodies pass into totally different systems after we’re gone, the way that we came out of materials of very different kinds through these recycling processes, we can think about our place there.

And I like life very much, and have no interest in dying in the near future. But I do look at the whole system, and at the role of bodies like mine, ours, our bodies in the whole system, and I think it’s fine to pass in and out of existence. You know, it makes sense that we will. It’s something that I think is very hard for it not to happen. There’s a passage we might discuss about uploading ourselves as software into the cloud and things like that. I don’t think that’s going to happen; I don’t think that’s feasible.

Once we think of our lives in a kind of grounded way, and also think of ourselves as, in a sense, sort of taking up slots that can be filled by others in the future, other living beings, then the coming into existence and going out of existence seems to me to be… It’s not that I’ll welcome it when the day comes, I don’t think. But looking at the whole. I think it’s fine as a whole, you know? I’m fine with that general picture.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think the closest I got to your position was when you brought in Derek Parfit’s view of the self, which I’m going to butcher, but is something like our attachment to ourselves as individuals is probably not actually really reflective of what the self is like. Probably over time we are many different selves as we change. And we have this kind of illusion, if you will, that we are one self over time, but the picture is probably more complicated than that.

If I kind of adopt that perspective, then the boundary between my self continuing and another self living does feel more like one that I can accept and embrace — because the boundaries are just softened between me and other beings, and I feel more excited about other lives and not just about my own.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: That’s my understanding of Parfit’s picture, so that’s not at all butchered. And yeah, I have some of the same thing. Now, Parfit’s making the point in a way that starts from a negative argument, which is that there’s less of a self there than you think; there’s less of a kind of enduring whole core to yourself than you realise — and once you move away from a kind of excessive reification of a continuing self, you’ll see that concern for other beings is not so different from concern for the future version of you, for example. And I basically agree with that.

But I want to add the idea that it’s not just a negative point. You can make a positive case based on the way in which the materials that make us up have been recycled and run through these processes that unify life as a sort of historical object on Earth. It’s possible to see a more positive kinship as well as the kind of fragmenting move that Parfit wanted to make.

Uploads of ourselves

Luisa Rodriguez: One kind of assumption there is that there are finite slots. And I think you grant that, even just going forward — because of changing fertility rates, and population growing slower and maybe even declining at some point — it might not be the case that there are finite slots.

Another way there might not be finite slots that you’ve just mentioned is the potential for uploading our brains and creating digital-mind versions of ourselves. But you’ve just hinted that you don’t believe this is feasible. Why are you doubtful that we could create uploads of ourselves?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: The view that I think is most justified — the view I would at least put money on — is a view in which some of what it takes to be a system with felt experience involves relatively schematic functional properties: the way that a system is organised in relation to sensing and action and memory and the internal processing and so on. And some of those, what are often referred to as functional properties, could exist in a variety of different physical realisations, in different hardwares or different physical bases.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story: I think nervous systems are special. I think that the way that nervous systems work, the way that our brains work… There are two kinds of properties that nervous systems have. There’s a collection of point-to-point network interactions — where this cell makes that cell fire, and prevents that cell from firing, the spiking of neurons, and the great point-to-point massive network interactions.

And there’s also other stuff, which for years was somewhat neglected I think in these discussions, but which I think is probably very important. There are more diffuse, large-scale dynamic properties that exist within nervous systems: oscillatory patterns of different speeds, subtle forms of synchronisation that span the whole or much of the brain. And these are the sorts of things picked up in an EEG machine, that kind of large-scale electrical interaction.

And I didn’t come up with this myself. There’s a tradition. Francis Crick thought this, neuroscientists like Wolf Singer, a number of other people have argued that this side of the brain is important to the biology of conscious experience, along with the sort of networky, more computer computational side of the brain: that both sets of properties of nervous systems are important. And in particular, the unity of experience — the way in which brain activity generates a unified point of view on the world — has a dependence upon the oscillatory and other large-scale dynamic patterns that you get in brains.

Now, if you look at computer systems, you can program a computer to have a moderately decent facsimile of the network properties in a brain. But the large-scale dynamic patterns, the oscillatory patterns that span the whole, they’re a totally different matter. I mean, you could write a program that includes a kind of rough simulation, where you’d know what was happening if the physical system in fact had large scale dynamic patterns of the relevant kind, but that’s different from having in a physical system those activities actually going on — present physically, rather than just being represented in a computer program.

I do think there’s a real difference between those generally, and especially in the case of these brain oscillations and the like. You would have to build a computer where the hardware had a brain-like pattern of activities and tendencies. People might one day do that, but it’s not part of what people normally discuss in debates about artificial consciousness, uploading ourselves to the cloud and so on.

People assume that you could take a computer, like the ones you and I are using now, with the same kind of hardware, and if you just got the program right — if it was a big powerful one and you programmed it just right — it could run through not just a representation of what a brain does, but a kind of realisation and another instance or another form of that brain activity.

Now, because I think the biology of consciousness is just not like that — I think that the second set of features of brains really matter — I think that it will be much harder than people normally suppose to build any kind of artificial sentient system that has no living parts. It’s not that I think there’s a kind of absolute barrier from the materials themselves — I don’t know if there is — but I certainly think it would have to be much, much more brain-like. The computer hardware would have to be a lot more brain-like than it is now.

I mean, who knows if we could build large numbers of these, powered with a big solar array, and replicate our minds in them? I think it’s very unlikely, I must say. Now, whether that’s unlikely or not, I don’t think I should be confident about. The thing I am a bit confident about, or fairly confident about, is the idea that there’s lots of what happens in brains that’s probably important to conscious experience, which is just being ignored in discussions of uploading our minds to the cloud and things like that.

Against intervening in wild nature

Peter Godfrey-Smith: You get a lot of discussions that emphasise predation, the “red in tooth and claw” side, and that can become almost obsessive in some discussions. The fact that the animals in question also get to lie in the sun and have companionship and have a lot of other positive experiences, that sometimes gets left to the side. So as a first move, I wanted to just put back into the foreground positive animal experiences in wild nature.

Then it’s natural to say, let’s try to do some accounting: let’s try to work out whether the positive outweighs the negative. And here I really ran into some difficulties, because I came to think that the accounting is more problematic — even in principle, let alone in practice — than I had thought at the start of this.

This has to do with the application to animal lives something that I think we’re pretty familiar with in human lives: the fact that a person might have a difficult life in many ways — with many hours, days, years spent in difficult circumstances — but there are such things as experiences and events and achievements that redeem the difficult stages, such that a person reaching the end of their life might say, “I wouldn’t change a thing. It was hard for years, but in the end I did something that I think is completely valuable, worthwhile, and redemptive in relation to those difficult experiences.”

Now, in the human case, I take it this is not an unfamiliar thought. It would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, “I had +4 level of experience for this hour, then I had -2 for the next hour, and then I had -1” — and you sort of sum to try to work out the total.

That would not be appropriate in the human case, and I came to think that something like that will be applicable in some of the animal cases as well. That, in the case of some animals — and here we’re talking probably about mammals and birds and neurally complex animals for the most part; I don’t know how far I’d extend this argument — there are achievements, there are experiences, there are things that can be done in the face of difficulty that might be seen as having the same kind of redemptive role, as casting into a different light the difficult events that led up to it.

The example I use in this part of the book is watching some birds, not far from where I am right now, actually, successfully raising some young, fighting off a couple of rather aggressive parrots of another species that wanted to fight them, prevailing against difficult odds — and doing so in a way that was so wholly successful. It seemed to me that if you wanted to do an accounting of how things had gone for those birds, you would not want to do the naive thing of just counting up difficult and less-difficult hours. There’s something special about what’s achieved at the end of that process.

Eliminating the worst experiences in wild nature

Luisa Rodriguez: Part of me does have this sense that the hard things I’ve experienced do get kind of reinterpreted over time as valuable, as leading to growth, as adding a diversity of experience to my life that I value. On the other hand, I hope to have children. If I have a child, I wouldn’t wish the depression that I’ve experienced on them. I would love actually just for them to be in great health, for them to go through life without the hardship that to some extent I, but much more so other people, experience.

And so I feel at least sympathetic to the idea that we have this psychological mechanism that encourages us to do kind of sensemaking in a way that is maybe beneficial, in ways that are a bit complex, but that don’t actually reflect the true goodness and badness of our experience. So maybe we’re telling these stories, we’re reframing things, but that’s kind of instrumentally valuable in itself, and so we do it. But it doesn’t actually mean that, on the whole, those experiences were all good and worth having and we’re better off for them. Do you feel sympathetic to that at all?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: It’s not that we should look back on the bad parts and say, “No, actually that was good.” The bad stuff can be bad. But with respect to at least some of the negative elements, the bad side arises as part of a struggle, as part of an attempt to pursue projects that are intrinsically contingent and difficult and risky and put lots of demands on us.

And then when things go wrong, it’s still that things went wrong; it’s not that I think we should find ways to reinterpret the genuinely bad stuff as straightforwardly good. I think that in some cases it does make sense to see it as being outweighed even by briefer periods of great significance that come downstream. To some extent, it’s the kind of naive, hour-by-hour accounting that I want to immediately push back on.

Now, one of the examples that you used of a negative experience is ill health, including depression. It’s hard to see something positive in that, even in the kind of context that I’m trying to put on the table here, because it’s debilitating. It makes it harder to pursue the stuff that might wind up leading to achievements that redeem and rebalance everything. There’s not much good that one can say, I take it, about depression.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. OK. It sounds like we’re at least closer to a similar position there than I thought. I think neither of us think that the bad things are actually good. We might differ a bit in degree about how many bad things, and how they’re outweighed by the positive things that come about through culminations.

I guess it brings me to another potential point of disagreement, which is that ideally, I’d love to just cut off some of the bottom and not cut off the top end. And I at least think that there are ways to do that for wild animals — for example, trying to eliminate some of the worst, most painful diseases that wild animals suffer from. Do you think we disagree on things like that?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Yeah, that’s a good case to think about. In this discussion, in the philosophical debates that I make contact with, it’s mostly predation that people contemplate intervening on, and also overproduction of young — you know, just producing countless thousands of young who’ve got no chance of making it.

Disease is a different kind of case. It’s hard to deny. It’s hard to see the downside, I must say. I mean, I think we’re talking about a very difficult, very far-fetched hypothetical scenario here, but that doesn’t really bother me.

It’s hard to see a downside in trying to reduce, just as it would be great to eliminate all kinds of viral diseases or greatly reduce their prevalence in human populations. Suppose we’re doing that, and it turned out that the method that we had come up with was readily extrapolatable, and would not be too hard to implement, and it would just reduce the viral burden on life in wild nature.

Now that you ask that, I find myself thinking that that’s not a bad idea.

To be human or wild animal?

Luisa Rodriguez: One argument that feels like it could potentially be compelling to me is: if I were a little soul floating out in the universe, and the Earth existed, and I could either be born as a human or I could be born a random wild animal — probably, to actually make progress on this, we should pick specific wild animals — but even if I just say a random wild animal, I’d rather be born as a human. That fact makes me think we should feel OK about more humans existing at the expense or trading off against wild animals existing. What’s your reaction to that?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Yeah. I would probably rather be a random wild… It’s not obvious to me, actually. Now, in some ways, this is, of course, an extremely unconstrained, all-over-the-place thought experiment. But I can’t just push it away, because at several points in the book, I make use of thought experiments that have this rough form. The one that I put a lot of emphasis on is a thought experiment involving factory farming, where you have the choice of reincarnation as the bad cases of industrialised pig farming and industrialised chicken farming — you could come back as a factory farmed pig or chicken — or not come back at all, not have a reincarnation event at all. And I would rather not come back at all than have those lives.

Whereas something that marks a big contrast, for me, between industrialised farming of those kinds and the best kinds of humane farming is I’d quite happily come back as a cow on a humane farm. So those kinds of reincarnation and floating-soul-gets-anchored-somewhere thought experiments are ones that I can’t push away when they’re inconvenient, because I make use of them.

OK, so would I, as a floating soul, come back as a random…? Well, a random wild mammal or a person around now? I think I would choose to be a person around now. And I’m not sure to what extent that reflects just a familiarity and an affection for the human mode of life, and to what extent it reflects something more than that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I agree that element makes it really hard for me to personally feel like I could answer this question in some way that I really actually buy. But the fact that I have that intuition and that it lingers when I really try to picture even idyllic lives in wild nature feels moving to me.

And maybe it gets at another reaction I have: I feel like when I read the chapter and one of your take-home points is like, it’s kind of ungrateful, kind of negates or rejects or takes for granted this evolutionary history that has created all of this rich diversity and led us to become a who we are, that does feel compelling to me. And then I have the thought, but if I were a wild animal, and I could choose to be a human instead, I just think I would.

So then, on principle, we shouldn’t be ungrateful, and so we should kind of keep the balance as it is — but if there are some wild animals who wouldn’t keep the balance as it is, I feel like it’s a bit rich to maintain that balance on this principle.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: I’m just back a week or so ago from a trip to central Australia. I went on just a solitary, brief wildlife trip, and I spent nearly all the time hanging out with some birds, wild budgerigars — the little parrots that are often kept in cages these days. I found a spot where there were thousands of them, and spent almost all the time I had available just hanging out there. That’s how I tend to do wildlife things: I tend to go back to the same places and stay in the same place, and just try to get a sense of the rhythms and the passage of a day for the animals in that place. What it’s like.

They looked to me to be having a fantastic time, I must say. They zoom around. They will not stop yelling at each other. They didn’t seem under much threat from anybody. There were some birds of prey around, a couple of big kites. But the budgerigars did not seem remotely scared of these large birds of prey — just because the budgerigars, I think, are much faster. So they were even hanging out beside the nests of the kites some of the time, and just rocketing around, interacting, yelling at each other all day. And that’s part of wild nature. It’s not just the tough stuff, that’s a real part of it.

Challenges for water-based animals

Peter Godfrey-Smith: If you look at the evolution of bodies and behaviour going way, way back — hundreds of millions of years back — there’s a trio of animal groups or collections of species, a trio in which you have what a guy called Michael Trestman christened “complex active bodies”: bodies where you can move a lot, you can manipulate, you can target your behaviours on other things; you have good senses, including image-forming eyes that can present objects in space and so on.

The three groups of animals that have some species with complex active bodies are our group, the vertebrates: you know, mammals and birds; arthropods, the group that includes insects; and that weird renegade group of mollusks: the octopuses and to some extent the cuttlefish. So you’ve got three kinds of animals with complex active bodies, all of which had pretty much that kind of body for quite a few hundreds of millions of years.

But suppose we list three features that involve further refinements within that idea. One is the capacity for manipulation: being able to sort of fiddle with things, and transform raw materials into new objects. Manipulation is number one. The second one is a kind of behavioural open-endedness: being able to do things that are relevantly different than what’s been done by other members of your species, being able to act in genuinely novel ways. That’s number two. And the third one is having a centralised control system: having a nervous system that is quite centralised and can then become the basis for a certain kind of intelligence when that brain, that central nervous system, becomes big.

So we’ve got those three properties. Now, if you look in the sea at various kinds of animals, you see lots of animals that have two out of the three, but not three out of the three. For example, octopuses are great at manipulation, and they’re very behaviorally open-ended. They can do new things, but they don’t have a centralised control system.

Fish have a centralised nervous system, but there’s not much that they can do; there’s not much scope for manipulation with the fish body. There’s some. I mean, the jaw was a great invention for fish, and I’ve occasionally heard the fish’s jaw described as a kind of a Swiss army knife on your face. But it’s not really very accurate, because there’s not that much you can do with it. So open-endedness of manipulation is not really a factor there either.

Then you’ve got arthropods: animals like crustaceans — crabs and lobsters and things like that — and they really can manipulate all sorts of things; they’re continually evolving appendages for doing weird, manipulative stuff. But they’re not very open-ended animals. It’s hard for an arthropod, given the machinery it has, to behave in genuinely novel ways, even if it wanted to. That’s a feature of the kind of specialised hard parts that their appendages are.

And I mean, if you’re going to talk about Swiss army knives, an arthropod’s whole body is like a Swiss army knife. And in two senses: a Swiss army knife can be used to do all sorts of stuff, but only the stuff that’s sort of pre-programmed or pre-specified. All the parts have a specific purpose.

OK, so in the sea, you have various animals with some combination of one or two of these features, but no one has all three. It’s on land, with the evolution of land vertebrates — especially after the Triassic, and especially in the case of mammals and birds — that you have all three together.

You have a centralised system, because we inherited our neural design from fish. You have lots of scope for manipulation, because you’ve got appendages of really an ideal kind for that. But those appendages are a bit more like octopus arms than arthropod appendages, because they’re more able to do genuinely new stuff; they’re not as circumscribed by their special purposes.

Now, dolphins are stuck with kind of a fish body, basically: manipulation, transformation of materials, there’s only so much of that you can do, and not very much, if you’re a dolphin. So I think that’s an important thing that distinguishes us from them. Unlike the octopuses, they’re very social and they can learn by imitation. They have a sort of cultural style to them, but there’s only so much they can physically do in action. Octopuses can do tonnes of stuff with all those arms, but culture is miles away from what they can manage.