Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think the question there is about whether life can be described in terms of matter and physical things, or whether there is some other feature that’s not physical that actually animates living things. So for a long time, people maybe have called that a soul. It’s been really hard to pin down what that is. So I think the vitalist idea is really that it’s a dualistic interpretation that there’s sort of the material properties, but there’s something else that animates life that is there when you’re alive and it’s not there when you’re dead. And materialists don’t think that there’s anything really special about the matter of life and the material substrates that life is made out of, so they disagree on some really fundamental points. Is there a gray area between the two? Maybe all there is is matter, but there’s so much we don’t know that it might as well be magic. Whatever that magic that the vitalists see, meaning there’s just so much mystery that it’s really unfair to say that it’s boring and understood and as simple as “physics.” Yeah, I think the entire universe is just a giant mystery. I guess that’s what motivates me as a scientist. And so oftentimes, when I look at open problems like the nature of life or consciousness or what is intelligence or are there souls or whatever question that we have that we feel like we aren’t even on the tip of answering yet, I think we have a lot more work to do to really understand the answers to these questions. So it’s not magic, it’s just the unknown. And I think a lot of the history of humans coming to understand the world around us has been taking ideas that we once thought were magic or supernatural and really understanding them in a much deeper way that we learn what those things are. And they still have an air of mystery even when we understand them. There’s no bottom to our understanding.…

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