Extracts from Lives Well Lived Podcast with Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Radek
Peter Singer extracted what he felt were highlights from our discussion for his own substack site. He encouraged me to repost his posting here.
Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Radek have a lovely podcast called Lives Well Lived, and I was privileged to be asked to be a guest on it. Following the podcast, Peter Singer extracted much of it for his substack page, Bold Reasoning. He encouraged me to repost his posting here. I thank him for that, and for the podcast.
is best known for his work on the origins of the universe and the limits of knowledge, as well as for his unapologetically scientific worldview. In this episode, we explore what it means to live well in a universe without inherent meaning and why, for Lawrence, that makes life more precious, not less.
We discuss his thoughts on cosmic insignificance, the rarity of consciousness, and the case for deriving ethics from reason rather than religion. Lawrence also shares his concerns about the growing threats to free inquiry in science and academia, and why he believes asking uncomfortable questions is essential to human progress.
He reflects on his personal values, the joy of curiosity, and what a life well lived means to someone who believes the universe doesn’t care, but we should.
Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
KASIA: Lawrence, you've often written and spoken about our cosmic insignificance and that we are just a tiny blip in an expanding universe. How has your understanding of the universe shaped your sense of what matters in life? What does living well mean, in a universe without inherent meaning?
LAWRENCE: For me, it makes life much more precious. It means for me that we create our meaning. Our existence has no cosmic meaning; therefore, we create our own meaning. But it also means we're fortunate to be on this random planet around an insignificant star at the edge of a galaxy, 400 billion other galaxies. And that somehow, life and intelligence have evolved on Earth. And we don't know if it's unique in the universe. I suspect it isn't, but it makes it more precious. And so for me, it means I have to think every day about how to enjoy my brief moment in the sun. And that means thinking about ways to live well, to experience all that there is to be alive.
On Cosmic Insignificance vs Human Significance
PETER: Getting back to this question of cosmic insignificance, in the very first episode that we did in this podcast series Lives Well Lived, it was with the late Daniel Kahneman, and he said, when we asked him about his work and what he had done and its importance, he said something like: "Given the vastness and complexity of the universe, I don't see how what I do during my working day can have any real significance or any relevance that's good or objectively important." And a couple of the other guests we had subsequently said something like that. So they're, in a way, feeling this undermines something, at least about their work and what they're doing. You don't feel that?
LAWRENCE: No, absolutely not. Because while humanity's existence is cosmically insignificant, it's quite significant to us. Daniel's work has also had an impact on other human beings. We must recognise that we live on a planet with almost 8 billion people, and what we do impacts others. That's a real physical phenomenon. And we are social beings. We couldn't exist on our own. And therefore, what I do impacts my neighbours and my family. Fortunately, because I like to think I have a larger impact due to my writing, it impacts others. That is incredibly significant for a harmonious existence on this planet. Now, if we all die, the cosmos doesn't care. But certainly, the people around care. It matters very much to individuals whether they're happy or sad. And if we can impact other people's state of mind and our own, that's significant in the sense that I said earlier. We create our meaning. I don't think my happiness matters to the universe, but it matters greatly. And I suspect the happiness of the people around me matters greatly to them, because I have empathy. After all, I've evolved that throughout my consciousness; therefore, I'd be foolish not to understand that and not to recognise the immediate reality of that.
On the Origins and Rarity of Consciousness
PETER: Is it unlikely that we are the only consciousness?
LAWRENCE: It's fair to say it's unlikely. On the other hand, we don't have the slightest idea. I'm very suspicious when people make claims about the existence or non-existence of life elsewhere because we don't even understand the origin of life here on Earth. We understand that we have particular special circumstances that led to life on Earth, and more than just life on Earth. Because I think, as far as we can tell from life on Earth, life evolved on Earth about as soon as the laws of physics allowed, within a hundred million years of the origin of the Earth. If you look at the evolution of our solar system, there was a late bombardment of large asteroids and comets that would have vaporised any existing oceans. And it took time for Jupiter to eat up all those or send them out into the outer solar system. Physically, any life that evolved would have been destroyed early on. But as soon as that subsided, we see, as far as we can tell, in your home country in Australia, among the oldest fossils on Earth, maybe 4 billion years old.
So, life is ubiquitous. Life forms relatively easily, if I were to guess. And I suspect there are other forms of life in our solar system, such as microbial life, probably in the oceans of Enceladus and Europa and places like that. But that's a huge leap from there to consciousness. What is true is that we needed about 4 billion years — at least — for consciousness of our type to arise on Earth. And that required a relatively quiescent period. Some impacts almost destroyed life on Earth, but they weren't life-destroying comets or asteroids. And we're in a relatively safe outer suburb of our galaxy. You can look at all the contingent phenomena — having the moon and having tides and many phenomena that suggest a unique route to life on Earth, or at least a relatively unique route.
So, in an absolute sense, one might argue that intelligence is extremely rare. Is it so rare that if you have 400 billion times a hundred billion possible locations for life, that it won't happen? And the answer is: we don't know. It's also, in my mind, a little bit disingenuous to use that kind of absolute probability argument. Because while there was one particularly strange route that took us to life on Earth, there was one particularly strange route that led me to know both of you. Just think of everything that had to happen in our lives to be together today. But we realise there could have been lots of other ways that could have happened.
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As a physicist, I like to think of maximum likelihood. The likelihood of intelligent life is extremely small. But it's also possible to say the likelihood of not having any routes that lead to intelligent life is smaller. So, even though the absolute probability of life may be one in a hundred billion, if the absolute probability of not having intelligent life is one in a thousand billion, then there are ten times more life-permitting planets than not. So these arguments are subtle. But it's an area we know very little about. We know of one example, and as I say, we don't understand the origin of life on Earth. And therefore, when people make claims one way or another, it's just talk. And we don't have any greater wisdom than just speculation. And I speculate that we're not unique, although we'll unlikely ever know of any other life in the universe. So, we will be alone.
On Philosophy, Theology, and Progress
PETER: You've said some negative things about philosophy. You've made some particularly scathing remarks about the philosophy of science.
LAWRENCE: I think people take those the wrong way. I've not been as critical as people think. Philosophy is essential. Philosophy is critical. We all do philosophy, right? It's a critical analysis. I like to think of science as evidence guided by reason. That's why science was originally natural philosophy.
So obviously, I don't dismiss philosophy. Philosophy is particularly important for science in those areas where the good questions have not been asked. Philosophers can come up with good questions that can help drive thinking, and obviously, it did early in the history of physics. What I have said, and I don't say it pejoratively, I think it's an empirical fact, is that the philosophy of science in my field of physics has zero impact on physics now, because the questions have moved away from the sort that philosophers, by means of reason and induction, can come up with. The questions require an incredible amount of intellectual baggage and are driven by experiment, because the field has progressed so far.
While it had important roots in philosophy, and philosophers of science can ask interesting questions, it's a fact that physicists just don't read the philosophy of science. We read Popper and Kuhn and those kinds of things, but physicists don't read the modern journal articles of philosophers of science. The philosophers of science talk to other philosophers, and that's okay. It's like saying my work on physics may have no impact on a literary theorist. But that doesn't make my work on physics unimportant.
I like to joke, and as you probably know, one of the first things that generated ire among philosophers was when I lumped them in with theologians when I was talking about nothing. In my book A Universe from Nothing, at the beginning, I argued that some philosophers and theologians don't like my definition of nothing, and they should know because they're experts at nothing. Anyway, it was just a joke.
On the Multiverse and Scientific Humility
PETER: Well, we are doing philosophy when we talk about whether the universe had a beginning, though, right? Because, if you're going to say that there was nothing "before the big bang,” the concept of time that most of us have is one where, if you say something happened, there must be something happening before that.
LAWRENCE: I guess that's philosophy, and you're right. And that's why it's so dubious, because I'm just talking, and you and I can have this discussion, and it's fascinating, but we don't know. And our talk is never going to resolve that question. What will resolve that question, ultimately, if we ever can, is coming up with a theoretical apparatus that allows us to make predictions that we can test, that tell us about whether time came into existence, and then how to describe a universe which had no time, for which there was no "before."
It's at the edge of knowledge; my last book is that title. We are often driven to metaphysics. But to make progress, we must look for real signatures. People have the wrong idea about science, probably due to Albert Einstein, because they think of him as this guy alone sitting in a room coming up with ideas. And that's not how he did things. He was highly dependent on observation and experiment. Science can't be done without effective observation and experimentation. And so, without having tools or the ability to test those ideas, it will likely remain metaphysical.
Peter, it's even more complicated because our universe doesn't have to be everything. The conventional picture of physics is that our universe is just one of what could be an infinite number of universes in what we call a multiverse. But that means the notion of "before" becomes even stranger. Because there's a cosmic time, and our universe came into existence one time, and other universes came into existence before, in that cosmic sense. Other universes are coming out of existence right now. And that means that even temporarily putting things in order may be very difficult.
And it is amazing, and somewhat frustrating, that physics has driven us to this notion of a multiverse. I don't like the idea of a multiverse. I'll tell you why. Because I grew up as a scientist, I hoped, as a scientist, I could explain why the universe had to be the way it is. And that was a goal, right? Why are the laws of physics the way they are? Why do things happen and why don't they happen differently?
That's what science is all about. But if our universe is just part of a multiverse, and the laws of physics are different in those other universes, then our universe is just an accident. The laws of physics are the way they are because they are. That's not a very satisfying answer, but it may be right.
PETER: When I was studying a little bit of physics in high school, and I didn't get very far with it, I understood the word "universe" to mean everything that exists. So, there's a conceptual problem in saying there are multiverses, because they would all be part of the universe, as I understood the term.
LAWRENCE: That's a good point. I'm glad you brought it up. And as a philosopher, you want a clear definition, and that's a good thing. When I was a student, "universe" meant everything that exists. But since then, we've decided that's not a good description, because it's not operationally very useful.
Einstein was a big proponent of describing things operationally. What do you mean by space and time? Well, it comes from measurement. How do I know what time it is where you are? I'm making assumptions about the speed of light and signals. I can't ever directly know what's happening somewhere else. I must make inferences based on light or other information.
So right now, we realise a much better definition of the universe is: all of space which in the past could have affected us, or which we could impact in the future, even if the future is infinitely long. So, we call it a region of space "in causal contact," or now, or will one day be in causal contact. And if some region could never impact us and we could never have an impact on it, then we say it's not part of our universe.
Our universe is the region that's causally connected. Of course, if the universe is closed, that's all of space. But you could imagine, and this is fascinating, if our universe is expanding the way it appears to be expanding, then ever faster and faster, the region with which we will one day be able to communicate is shrinking. Distant regions are separating from us faster than light. And the longer we wait, the faster regions will separate from us faster than the speed of light. Therefore, the region we can see will shrink with time if you want to call it that. In that sense, you can think of causally disconnected universes.
The simple way of picturing it, the way I picture it physically, is, let's say, that our universe has popped into existence and is expanding. And let's say another universe popped into existence independently, with no interaction with us, and popped into existence here. If the space between us expands faster than light, those two regions will never be in causal contact and, therefore, completely independent. They started independently; they’ll always be independent. And literally, they could both be closed universes, in which case, it's not even relevant to talk about space between them. They could be separate, complete universes for which all of space in those universes closes in on itself.
It's hard to picture these things in general relativity, but think of separate balls; these universes could be balls. And those balls could be expanding, but they'll never touch each other.
On the War on Science and Free Speech
PETER: I want to move from these very large and fascinating questions to the present day. You have a book coming out in July called The War on Science. You haven't written it all; you've been the editor, but you've gathered several voices warning about threats to free speech, free inquiry, and the scientific method. Please tell us why you see the need for this book, and what you see as the most serious threats to science today.
LAWRENCE: There's a lot there to unpack. I have witnessed, in my own cases and watching other individuals at universities, people not being allowed to ask questions, people being removed from their positions for asking inconvenient questions or making provocative statements. And there are many reasons for that, and we can go into them, but that, of course, is antithetical to the progress of knowledge, science, philosophy, and scholarship.
Asking questions is an essential part of the progress of civilisation, but certainly essential to scholarship. And if we're in a situation where the one place where you think any question should be allowed, namely, an institution of higher learning, if, in those institutions, professors and students are afraid to ask questions for fear of the consequences, then learning has stopped. And so that's very fundamental.
There's a good argument for that. Of course, it's not due to me, it's from John Stuart Mill. I first learned about it from Christopher Hitchens, because of my philosophical ignorance, although I've tried to improve that over time: the famous claim that free speech is important not for the person who's speaking, but for the person who's listening, because if that free speech is stopped, the person who's listening has lost the opportunity to learn that they're wrong.
So, the reason for protecting free speech is not to protect the individuals speaking but to protect your right or opportunity to find out you're wrong. Only if you can find out that you're wrong will knowledge progress. Because science and philosophy, all of scholarship, are a dialectic. It's based on open debate. You throw out ideas, and you expect them to be attacked. You don't expect to be attacked personally. And this is a big thing where people don't realise there's a difference between attacking ideas and attacking people.
But scholarship doesn't progress unless any idea is subject to attack, because then you can see how robust it is, and if it's flawed, you can learn how to develop it. And there are so many examples, which we elaborate on in the book, of individuals who've been removed from their faculty positions for asking the wrong questions or for making claims that some people didn't like.
Unfortunately, we see a generation of young people growing up to feel like victims, who feel that their sensibilities matter so much that if they're offended, it's someone else's problem. Being offended gives you no special rights.
But as we're seeing in universities around the country—maybe not in Poland yet, but maybe in Poland—I know kids require safe spaces in Australia, the States, and Canada. They don't want to hear words that trigger them, which they somehow feel will damage them by hurting their sensibilities. And that, of course, puts a kibosh on having an open discussion.
So there are lots of areas where we're seeing people being cancelled. But it's not just that. We're seeing fields of scholarship perverted because of fears of offending people. The simplest example, of course, is the gender debate right now. And sex. The ridiculous claim that you cannot say that sex is binary in humans, even though it is. Gender may not be, of course, but gender is an expression that depends on psychology, culture, many things, and a little bit of biology. But you can't even have that discussion, you could be removed if you raise the issue.
For me, one of the clearest examples of how nonsensical this can be and how it can destroy a discipline, is the American Anthropological Association, which cancelled—at their annual meeting - a panel that discussed the sex of ancient skeletons. Determining whether the skeletons were male or female, they claimed, was against their principles and anti-scientific.
This is why I will choose physics. I know all three of us are not big fans of Mr Trump. That goes without saying.
PETER: Yes.
LAWRENCE: But one thing he did do was get rid of some regulations from the education department that required judging people based on sex, gender, or race. What’s amazing is the executive order at the time, during his first presidency, quoted Martin Luther King: that people should be judged on the quality of their character, not the colour of their skin. And the American Physical Society produced a statement saying that the executive order was against the principles of the American Physical Society. I mean, come on.
PETER: Why was it against the principles of the American Physical Society?
LAWRENCE: Just because, at the time, after George Floyd was murdered, there was a reaction in the United States that led people to claim that everything, every area of human intellectual activity, was systemically racist, including science. And therefore, to counter that, we had to be "actively anti-racist," which required judging people based on their skin colour.
And the orthodoxy at the time of the American Physical Society and many scientific institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, was that science is systemically racist. It's such an anti-scientific statement, because there was no empirical evidence on which that statement was made. And science is mostly based on empirical evidence.
And so you come up with this nonsense, which stymies progress, certainly stymies merit as well. I strongly believe that academia should not be democratic. Academia should be a meritocracy. And one should rise based on the quality of one's work and nothing else.
PETER: The regulation was interpreted as saying you should not consider a person's race in making appointments? And that was what people objected to??
LAWRENCE: Yeah. Of course, one should ensure that everyone has equal access and equal opportunity. It's just not equal outcomes that one requires. And so, of course, one should scour as broadly as one can. And it's fair to say that we're all biased, and we tend to ask our friends who the good people are. And our locus of friends may be quite limited. So, it's always important in a university - and I know Kasia is a university administrator and a philosopher - to try to ensure we have methodologies that ensure people aren't being systematically excluded in any way from consideration.
That's important. And it's important to realise that it happens. But once you've done broad searches and committed yourself to the fact that those searches have been broad, any other considerations are unimportant — except for quality.
Closing Reflection: A Life Well Lived
PETER: We always ask our guests whether they live well. And we've answered that, as we often do, during the discussions. If you want to sum it up for us regarding whether you've lived well, what factors would you consider in judging whether you've lived well?
LAWRENCE: I think I've lived fortunately. I've been incredibly fortunate my entire life. And I recognise more and more, the older I get, that I have been able to accomplish some things that I want to accomplish. And I've worked hard. And in that sense, I've lived well. I've made mistakes, everyone does, and I've learned.
Despite talking about origins, I'm driven more by the future than the past. And so, for me, the more important thing is to live better. The past is done, and there's not much I can do about it. But what I can do is try to use my experience and the experience of others around me, both of you, frankly, and watch the way you behave and live to try to live better.
Every day is a lesson in how to live better. And to me, the best part of living is trying to take advantage of those lessons. I don't always do it, but that's the best lesson I can give: to use the experience and wisdom of your life and the people around you to enhance your life and those around you.
So I'm better today than I was yesterday. It's not as if I am always, but I've been fortunate. On the other hand, I've worked hard and taken advantage of many opportunities I've had or created opportunities for myself.
I'm happy I have created opportunities that have often worked, but I still have a long way to go.
I have to say, in terms of living well, that one of the joys of my life, is that it's allowed me to get to know both of you. I mean that.