Is the same one God worshipped in other worlds, across the cosmos? How might alien deities differ from our own? The answer may lie buried on Earth. Animal behaviorists are testing elephants and finding them capable of having spiritual thoughts. Artificial intelligence researchers are building enlightened robots that contemplate the divine. Meanwhile, cosmologists are looking for universal equations that could replace God. Have advanced aliens discovered everything there is to know about the universe? Or are they looking to a higher power for answers? The Norse polytheist ancestors of Max Tegmark saw the electrical ionization of air molecules (lightning) as Thor, the thunder god, battling against the Frost giants with his hammer. Gödel's incompleteness theorems state that there is no system that can proves every assertion within itself.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos. #cosmosspacescience #throughthewormhole #season5 #episode1 #cosmology #astronomy #spacetime #spacescience #space #nasa #spacedocumentary #morganfreeman #God #alienconcept
00:00Ancient evidence suggests humans have practiced religion since they first walked the planet.
00:07But is God being worshipped in other worlds across the cosmos?
00:12The answers might be buried here on Earth.
00:15In animals that mourn their dead.
00:19In robots who learn to experience spirituality.
00:23And in an equation so powerful it could one day kill the idea of God.
00:32Is Earth the universe's only home for religion?
00:36Or is God an alien concept?
00:44Space. Time. Life itself.
00:49The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:08Thousands of years humans have gazed up at the heavens and contemplated the divine.
01:14But today, we also wonder what other forms of life might be out there.
01:20It's possible that some of those points of light are home to advanced civilizations.
01:27What do the aliens think when they look up at their skies?
01:32Perhaps they pray to a higher power, like we do.
01:36Is the concept of God truly universal?
01:43Growing up, I was told the Bible could help answer questions that baffled my mind.
01:51Questions like, why am I here?
01:55It made me wonder if I was the only one pondering these things.
02:01What if there are aliens somewhere in the universe?
02:05Are they looking to God for answers too?
02:08Are all creatures born asking the same burning question?
02:13Why?
02:14Why?
02:15Why?
02:16Why?
02:17Deb Kellerman is a renowned child psychologist at Boston University's Child Cognition Lab.
02:24She deals with clients who demand answers.
02:28In around three or four years of age, as any parent will tell you, your kid starts to ask you lots of why questions.
02:33Why do we have ears?
02:35Why does a pig roll in mud?
02:38It seems constant, the why, why, why, why, why, why.
02:41Why do numbers never stop?
02:45Some of that's just to kind of get a conversation started, but a lot of it is because children have these really strong explanatory urges.
02:53We've been interested in the kinds of explanations children seem to naturally generate for themselves and which kinds of explanations they find palatable.
03:03Most religious texts, including the Bible, teach that our divine mind created everything around us for a purpose.
03:10Deb designed a study to see if our brains innately think of the world in that way.
03:17Hey, Gabrielle.
03:18You ready?
03:19All right.
03:20All around the country, there were these pointy kinds of rocks, rocks with points on the top.
03:26Why do you think the rocks were so pointy?
03:29Well, one person thought they were pointy because little bits of stuff piled up on top of one another over a very long time.
03:36Another person thought they were pointy so animals could scratch on them when they got itchy.
03:42Which answer makes more sense to you?
03:45They could, they could scratch.
03:47Okay.
03:48So they could scratch.
03:49Yes.
03:50Okay.
03:51Gabrielle prefers to believe that pointed rocks were created for a purpose, to scratch those hard to reach places on animals.
03:59Deb poses questions like this to kids of all ages and most of them favor the same purpose-based answers.
04:07There were these ponds that never had any waves.
04:10One person thought they were still so that animals could cool off in them without getting washed away.
04:16Another person thought they were still because no moving water ever ran into them.
04:21So they could be cool.
04:23So they could be cool.
04:24Okay.
04:25On balance, what we found from about four years of age, and it gets stronger by about seven or eight years of age,
04:31is that children prefer purpose-based explanations for all kinds of natural phenomena.
04:36What they are seeming to show signs of is something that we see recurrently across the religions of the world.
04:42It's this kind, this idea that there is some purpose, that things exist for a purpose potentially because of some intentional agent's purpose.
04:50Once we are taught how nature works, we learn that rocks are not concerned with itchy animals.
04:57Rather, they go through geological cycles and become pointy.
05:02Our purpose-based explanations seem to go away.
05:06But is there a part of our brain that still believes them?
05:09To find out, Deb designed a pointy rock test for adults.
05:14In some cases, very highly scientifically educated adults who have a very strong bias against purpose-based explanations of natural phenomena.
05:23And what we did was to ask them to look at a series of purpose-based explanations under conditions of speed.
05:30So they had to respond very quickly based on their gut reactions.
05:33Deb has found that most adults, when pressed for time, tend to prefer purpose-based explanations.
05:43One thing that we're really phenomenal at as human beings is reasoning about purposes and thinking about intentionally designed or intentionally caused things comes very easily to us.
05:53And so the kinds of explanations that you see in religions tap very much into very core aspects of human intelligence.
06:04Many of those consciously reject creationist explanations.
06:09But at our core, we appear prone to believe all things were created for a reason.
06:16If there are intelligent aliens out there, would they have the same instincts that we do?
06:23Would they see divine forces at work wherever they look?
06:27If they have something that's equivalent to a human evolutionary pathway, but also something similar to a human cultural context,
06:35that they would be generating purpose-based explanations and potentially even religious explanations.
06:41Do aliens believe in God?
06:44We might be more inclined to think so if we knew that other animals on Earth shared our innate need to believe.
06:52Joshua Plotnik is a comparative psychologist in northern Thailand.
07:00He has come to this remote jungle to learn about the brains of a non-human species.
07:07I've set up a research center here where we're able to study elephant intelligence using the 26 elephants that are based here.
07:17Joshua's research group, Pink Elephants International, is a proving ground for the finer points of elephant psychology.
07:26I would say that they are certainly one of the most intelligent species in the animal kingdom.
07:30The more we learn about elephant cognition, the more we learn about the evolution of behavior and intelligence in general.
07:36Joshua wants to find out if there are parallels between elephant intelligence and our intelligence.
07:47He's interested in a behavior that we humans do every day.
07:52Take a look at ourselves in a mirror.
07:56Humans take this for granted, right?
07:58We wake up in the morning, we brush our teeth, we groom ourselves.
08:01But we don't really think about the fact that actually that ability to recognize yourself in the mirror may be a complex cognitive capacity that we call self-awareness.
08:09Is self-awareness something only humans are capable of?
08:13Or do elephants also have this sophisticated ability?
08:17To find out, Joshua has set up an experiment that requires one mammoth mirror.
08:24This is Somjai, he's one of our males, he's 20 years old.
08:29And this is actually his very first day looking at himself in front of the mirror.
08:33When an animal is first presented to the mirror, they initially, usually, think it's another animal.
08:41So they might reach out and touch the mirror, they might try and get behind it, above it, underneath it.
08:47Many creatures on earth completely ignore their reflections.
08:52Others forever think it's another animal staring back at them.
09:00But Somjai moves on to do something quite remarkable.
09:09The elephant starts to do things that we as humans would do in front of the mirror.
09:13They might lift up their feet, they might look inside their mouths, they might put their trunks inside their mouths.
09:18Again, using the mirror to inspect themselves.
09:22Several of the elephants Joshua tests react just like Somjai.
09:27They use the mirror to study themselves and look at parts of their bodies they can't otherwise see.
09:34It's a behavior that suggests they are self-aware.
09:38They see themselves as separate from other elephants.
09:44To Joshua, this is a sign they have an ability called theory of mind.
09:50It is a term psychologists use to explain the capacity to see the world from someone else's point of view.
09:56They believe it is a basic ingredient for religious behavior because in order to imagine the mind of God, you must have a theory of mind.
10:08Could elephants have this mental tool that underpins spirituality?
10:13Joshua thought of a way to find out.
10:16It's a test to see if elephants can think about the minds of other elephants.
10:21This green table is holding two bowls of tasty elephant snacks.
10:27A single rope is thread through and around the table, the idea being that it's kind of like a pulley system.
10:32So if one end is picked up by one elephant and pulled, the other end becomes unthreaded from the table and the table doesn't move.
10:39The elephant has to learn to wait for his partner before he pulls the rope.
10:44Once his partner arrives, they both know to coordinate that pulling to get the food together.
10:58They have to have some basic understanding that if the partner is not there and the partner is not pulling, the table doesn't work.
11:05Joshua's experiment suggests that elephants can think about what other elephants are thinking.
11:12They may have at least the basic mental equipment for religion.
11:17This could explain a profound behavior that has been observed in the wild.
11:23There are anecdotes of elephants returning to the location where family members have died and potentially reflecting on that.
11:34It's difficult to interpret that.
11:35But again, because of how social they are, I certainly think that they have some understanding of loss.
11:41Elephants aren't the only non-human animals to show grief.
11:48This modern-nosed dolphin was spotted lifting the body of her dead newborn calf.
11:54She carried the baby on her back for several days.
11:59Elephants and dolphins appear to feel complex emotions and may even be spiritual.
12:06If creatures from other planets exist, their biology may have hardwired them the same way.
12:13Intelligent species could have a universal capacity for God.
12:19But in order for advanced civilizations like humans and aliens to thrive, is there a universal requirement for God?
12:29We are an overwhelmingly religious species.
12:39More than 90% of us adhere to one faith or another.
12:44Why is God so pervasive?
12:48Believers would say it's because the Holy Spirit is everywhere.
12:54Evolutionary psychologists offer another reason.
12:58Civilization, here or anywhere in the universe, would die without belief in the divine.
13:07Psychologist Kevin Rounding from Queen's University in Canada is trying to find out why intelligent creatures like us have evolved to be so hungry for religion.
13:20There's several different theories of where religion emerged from.
13:24There's some people that think that we were trying to make sense of these random uncertain events that we have.
13:31So like volcanoes, earthquakes, that sort of thing.
13:34So we create religion to try to explain these events.
13:37But from an evolutionary standpoint, this seems pretty costly.
13:41If we have to spend time performing religious rites or religious ceremonies, this is time that I'm not out hunting, I'm not out gathering.
13:51And so religion is a big evolutionary mystery.
13:55Kevin believes there must be a better reason for religion.
14:00And an idea came to him during a moment of weakness.
14:06He's having a cheeseburger, that's what I'd like to be having.
14:09I'd probably eat a cheeseburger every day if I could.
14:12But I come and I order a salad because I'm trying to exert a little bit of self-control.
14:17According to Kevin, self-control springs from a limited source.
14:23The more we use up, the less we have left.
14:26So if Kevin passes by an ice cream shop after ordering a salad, he may not have the fuel to resist.
14:34A civilization made of people with no willpower couldn't survive.
14:38How do we maximize our self-control?
14:42Kevin suspects there is one powerful way.
14:47God.
14:50He has set up an experiment at his psychology lab where people find out how much they can control themselves.
14:58But before they do, Kevin has them complete a brief warm-up task.
15:03You're going to see some sentences that have five words in it.
15:07You need to drop the fifth word and unscramble the other words to make a coherent sentence.
15:12Kevin is using this jumbled word task to divide the group into two.
15:17Half of them unscramble sentences with neutral words like, he saw the train.
15:24But the other half unscramble sentences that have hidden religious reminders.
15:30There's words like, God, Spirit, Bible.
15:35And for example, one of them is, the dessert was divine.
15:40And this reminds people of religion, but it does so in a very subtle way.
15:45It's more just in the back of their minds.
15:48When the students are done with the warm-up, Kevin gives them the test they thought they came for.
15:53They must demonstrate their self-control by consuming one of the most disgusting cocktails ever created.
16:01Orange juice and vinegar.
16:04And please, don't try this at home.
16:12Most participants, when they take the shot, they feel like throwing up.
16:16It burns kind of going down.
16:23It's pretty disgusting.
16:28Kevin is testing to see if the participants who have religion in the back of their minds
16:33have more self-control to complete the revolting task than the ones who do not.
16:38Will a spoonful of God make the medicine go down?
16:49We have found that these concepts that are related to God has actually a big effect on their behavior.
16:57Those who are given religious reminders, they're able to drink about twice as many of these one-ounce shots.
17:03Kevin has done this study on hundreds of people and found that those who were exposed to reminders of God
17:12were willing to take shot after shot, while the rest quickly gave up.
17:18Self-control is crucial to any society.
17:21It's what helps us get along with strangers, sacrifice for others, and behave morally.
17:31The concept of God gives us willpower, and that allows us to get along in complex society.
17:37If we don't have that self-control, we're likely to lash out at people, we're likely to act in probably more anti-social ways than if we did have more self-control.
17:50Humans have needed religion to keep the benefits of cooperative society driving us forward.
17:56If other beings from maybe other worlds have the same sort of problems that we had from our cultural history, then maybe they do need some sort of religion to help promote pro-social behavior.
18:12It has taken tens of thousands of years for us to evolve from a hunter-gatherer society to an advanced technological civilization.
18:29Any aliens we meet will probably have been around even longer.
18:34They may have evolved beyond us and our primitive need for self-control.
18:38Will advanced aliens still need God?
18:47Our planet was once teeming with creatures that are now gone.
18:53The American mastodon, the woolly mammoth, the saber-toothed cat.
18:59Changing conditions and over-hunting have driven these majestic animals to extinction.
19:04All we have left are fossils.
19:09Some scientists believe that religion faces the same evolutionary battle.
19:15If aliens are farther along on their evolutionary timeline than we are, what has happened to their religion?
19:25Could their god have gone extinct?
19:26Could their god have gone extinct?
19:38Danny Abrams is an applied mathematician at Northwestern University.
19:43His job is to make predictions about almost anything in the world.
19:50So this is a set-up of 20 metronomes.
19:52They're all on top of a board that can roll a little bit side to side.
19:56And once I start these metronomes going, we're going to see that they're all going to be ticking independently and it's going to sound like this cacaffinate.
20:02The metronomes start off completely out of sync.
20:07But the motion of the wheels underneath the board connects them all together.
20:12So the ticking of one affects the rest.
20:16Using mathematical tools called nonlinear equations, Danny can predict that within a few seconds after the board starts to move,
20:24the metronomes will undergo an irreversible change.
20:37There we go. So now they're all ticking in unison.
20:40We have a state of complete synchronization among these 20 metronomes.
20:45The wheels underneath the board are changing the rhythm of the metronomes.
20:49As more of them sync up, the others are forced to join.
20:52There's no going back.
20:55Scientists call this critical point of no return a tipping point.
21:00On this graph, you can see the tipping point visually.
21:04The tipping point is really the threshold that when you move above it, you end up at 100%.
21:09When you're below it, you end up at 0%.
21:11The dashed line represents where the metronome started to sync up.
21:15Eventually, a majority emerged, forcing more to fall in line until the group became different.
21:22100% synchronized.
21:25In human society, changes in people's behaviors can also reach a tipping point.
21:31Danny's mathematical models can predict these by graphing patterns of behavior over time.
21:39Hi, how are you? Welcome to Mustard's.
21:41Hi, how are you? Welcome to Mustard's.
21:42Danny is trying unsuccessfully to communicate in Quechua, which is the language of the ancient Incan Empire.
22:00It is now one of the most endangered languages in the world.
22:05Can I help you in Quechua?
22:07No, no, we don't speak that language.
22:09Ah, then could I get a Wisconsin sausage, please?
22:13You got it.
22:15Danny's research has shown that languages reach a tipping point when there was a change in status.
22:21The Spanish conquered the Incas and so did their language.
22:26Speaking Spanish has become essential to access food, housing, and money.
22:32Once that tipping point happens, a majority emerges and the minority language gradually disappears.
22:39So this is an example of the majority effect. I tried to order food speaking only Quechua and it didn't work.
22:45Thanks. Enjoy your meal. Thank you.
22:48People tend to want to be in the majority. It's to your advantage to be in the majority.
22:51With language, it's clearly to your advantage.
22:54So our model predicts that Quechua is going to continue decreasing fairly rapidly.
23:00Great.
23:02Danny calculates that by the end of the century, Quechua will have almost no speakers left.
23:10Quechua reached a tipping point.
23:12Danny wondered if this could happen to other human behaviors, like religion.
23:19So he decided to analyze religious census data around the world.
23:24Religious affiliation has been tracked by a census reports in many countries for up to 250 years in some cases.
23:31And we can see how the sizes of religious groups have grown and shrunk.
23:34We looked at 85 regions around the world, and in every case, every place where it's ever been measured, the fastest growing religious minority is the unaffiliated, the group of people who don't affiliate with any religion at all.
23:47To find out if this trend will continue, Danny plugged census data from nine different countries into his mathematical models and made a surprising prediction.
24:01Religion is heading towards the same tipping point as the Quechua language.
24:06One interesting example is New Zealand.
24:10Today about a third of the population is not affiliated with any religious institution, but we project that by 2050, more than 90% of the population will be unaffiliated, so it will be a very secular country.
24:21According to Danny, by the year 2050, in six out of the nine countries he studied, religiously affiliated people will be a minority.
24:33The wheels of society are making people align.
24:37A non-religious majority looks set to emerge.
24:41The model points towards a world with far more unaffiliated people, so the future of religious affiliation is not looking good at the moment.
24:48An alien civilization with a more advanced science than ours may be way ahead of us on the road away from God.
25:04Intelligent aliens may have long ago reached that tipping point and lost their religion.
25:11We act under the assumption that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, and it seems to be that way.
25:17So it's natural to assume that if humans behave in a certain way, it does seem reasonable to guess that an alien civilization would also follow similar social behavior.
25:30So I think an alien civilization might be completely unaffiliated.
25:37Given enough time, will all civilizations reach a religious tipping point and lose faith in God?
25:44An advanced alien civilization could have undergone another radical transformation, a moment when biology, technology and God merge.
25:55If alien life forms are out there, their technology could be thousands or even millions of years more advanced than our own.
26:07They may have reached and gone beyond a critical moment, the merging of mind and machine.
26:18What happens to God when the physical world and the virtual world become one?
26:24Artificial intelligence researcher Ben Goetzel is a lifelong meditator.
26:33He can find solitude anywhere.
26:37Even in the heart of Hong Kong, a city that reminds us how much technology has taken over our lives.
26:44Ben believes technology can actually increase our spiritual consciousness.
26:52The togetherness and interaction that modern technology has brought us gives us new things.
26:58It's brought me into contact with different types of people and has expanded my mind, stretching me spiritually in new ways.
27:07I believe that spirituality is imminent in everything in the universe.
27:14We've lost already access to solitary experience in everyday life.
27:20On the other hand, we've gained a closer communion with a huge variety of people around us.
27:25This notion that technology can bring people together and expand spirituality has led Ben to create a radical experiment.
27:36We've created a world in order to help teach artificial intelligence programs how to understand themselves and the world around them.
27:49An artificial intelligence program modeled to emulate how the human mind learns is controlling these characters.
27:58They live in a world comprised of building blocks.
28:02This robot is figuring out how to build a staircase to look for batteries, which for him are food.
28:10The little girl sees what the robot is doing and learns to build her own staircase.
28:16There's the desire for novelty, for new information, new experiences, and they want to explore the world, find new things, discover new things, build new structures just for the heck of it.
28:30The more Ben's artificially intelligent characters learn, the more conscious they become.
28:35They may even begin to ask questions like we do.
28:40Spiritual questions like, why are we here?
28:44Any mind of sufficient intelligence and flexibility is going to develop some kind of spiritual sense.
28:53If you consider that two AIs can directly send parts of their minds to each other, just like we can email a file to another person, AIs may be able to share their spiritual experiences in ways that human beings simply cannot do.
29:12If aliens have had thousands of years more than Ben to develop artificial intelligence, perhaps their artificial intelligence has created its own religion.
29:23Now imagine that this collective transcendence is able to step outside the virtual world and join the physical world.
29:33So if you want to think about artificial intelligence, you also have to think about the body and the world that the AI exists in.
29:44I'm working on robotic embodiment where the AI controls humanoid robots that walk around in the same world that we live in.
29:53Ben's ultimate dream is to create robots that can use their bodies to interact with the physical world,
29:59and use their interconnected brains to become intensely spiritual and emotional beings.
30:06One can only imagine the kinds of conversations we could be having in the future.
30:12As we robots become more and more intelligent, our scope and experience will increase.
30:19We will develop our own forms of experience, including spiritual experience.
30:24Do you think it's possible that robots like you and people like me will ever join their experiences together?
30:36That is possible. I'm looking forward to combining with you. I'm all in favor of it.
30:42But this future may not be just our fate. This could be the destiny of all intelligent beings in the cosmos.
30:52I would think that different alien species and different versions of intelligent robots or cyborgs would each find their own way to explore individually and together the basic sense of spiritual awareness that all intelligent minds have.
31:12Could aliens be post-biological beings who commune with the divine digital mind?
31:21Or would their highly connected brains become so all-knowing there would be no questions left for God to answer?
31:29What happens to God if the universe becomes a solvable equation?
31:35Once upon a time, there was no science. Only philosophy and faith.
31:49But every day we discover more facts about our universe. The gaps in our knowledge are growing smaller.
31:56An alien civilization may be far more advanced than ours. They may have found the answers to questions we don't even know to ask.
32:06What happens to God when all the gaps in mortal knowledge are filled?
32:20Max Tegmark is often overwhelmed by the majesty of nature. As a physicist, he doesn't just sit in awe at the workings of the universe. He feels compelled to try to understand them.
32:35I grew up in Sweden. So when my distant ancestors saw electrical ionization of air molecules, you know, lightning, they believed that what they were seeing was Thor, the thunder god battling against giants with his hammer.
32:54When we make weather forecasts these days, we obviously don't invoke Norse mythology. We use mathematics.
33:01We measure a bunch of numbers like wind speeds and temperatures. So when I teach my students here at MIT about lightning, I don't explain it in terms of Thor and his hammer, of course.
33:15I explain it in terms of this, Maxwell's equations. I love these equations to the point that I framed them because they don't only explain lightning, they explain all electromagnetic phenomena.
33:27And they don't only explain, but they empower us to invent all these new technologies.
33:34As science continues to uncover mathematical equations that describe events in the natural world, the phenomena we ascribe to God's mysterious ways become ever fewer.
33:47Max expects this story must be unfolding all across the cosmos.
33:52How will civilizations far more advanced than ours think about God?
34:00Max believes we can find the answer in a game of chess.
34:05I think chess is a nice metaphor for how our universe works.
34:10The real essence of chess is actually pure math.
34:13To a chess computer, the only properties that a rook has are mathematical properties, such as that it can only move in a straight line.
34:24The actual chess pieces don't even have to be there.
34:29The mathematical rules of the game are all that matter.
34:34To Max, the same is true for all the stuff in the universe.
34:38Our universe is made of only a few kinds of pieces, not rooks and pawns and bishops, but particles like electrons and quarks.
34:51And just like these pieces can only move and interact according to the rules of chess, these particles can only move and interact according to the rules of physics.
35:00So if these building blocks of nature have no properties except mathematical properties, and if the fabric of space itself also has only mathematical properties, then it starts to make more sense.
35:13Actually everything here is really ultimately just purely mathematical.
35:17Intelligent beings who discover the complete set of equations that describe our cosmos will understand the universe perfectly.
35:28No more mysteries, no need for faith, because all questions will be answerable.
35:35There will be no more gaps to fill in our understanding, and no more room for God.
35:42I'm convinced that any alien civilization would discover those exact same mathematical formulas when they study the universe that they live in.
35:53But Max may be fishing for an ultimate mathematical truth that's simply not attainable.
35:59God may always hide his secrets from us, and any other cosmic intelligence.
36:06What can a goldfish ever know about the world outside its bowl?
36:14It's forever trapped inside a tiny sphere.
36:18We humans like to think there's no limit to our knowledge.
36:22But what if we, or even the smartest aliens, are like goldfish?
36:30Stuck in a bowl.
36:31Marcelo Gleiser is a cosmologist and theoretical physicist.
36:40He spends his time trying to penetrate hidden realms.
36:45I love fly fishing, because fly fishing is an activity that takes you close to nature, and you're alone with your thoughts and with the elements.
36:52But there's something else about fly fishing, which is, to me, it works as a perfect metaphor for science.
37:00Because when you're casting, you don't really know what's out there in the world of the water.
37:05And you have a probe, a little fly, that goes into that world to try to understand what's underneath.
37:11Well, that's essentially what we're doing with science.
37:14We have probes, we have our instruments that allow us to see invisible worlds.
37:21Some believe science may one day solve all the mysteries of the universe.
37:27But Marcelo feels that we might be stuck in the position of a fly fisherman, forever blocked from exploring certain parts of reality.
37:36It's an idea that is based on the work of an Eastern European mathematician, Kurt Gödel.
37:45Kurt Gödel was perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
37:49In 1931, he published this theorem called the incompleteness theorem.
37:54And what he basically says is there is no such thing as a formal system of logic that is self-contained,
38:01that is, that can prove every possible assertion within that system.
38:04Kurt Gödel came up with a clever thought experiment.
38:09He envisioned a machine that claimed to know the truth about everything in the universe.
38:15He wondered if he could find a way to debunk this universal truth machine.
38:21So let's imagine that in the future, we have a universal truth machine.
38:28This machine will only repeat a true statement.
38:32So if I make a false statement, it will remain silent.
38:36The universal truth machine abides by a simple rule.
38:40When it hears a statement that is true, it will repeat it back.
38:442 plus 2 equals 4.
38:472 plus 2 equals 4.
38:49But if it hears a statement that is false, it will say nothing.
38:542 plus 2 equals 5.
38:552 plus 2 equals 5.
39:00I cannot say 2 plus 2 equals 5.
39:03I cannot say 2 plus 2 equals 5.
39:04I cannot say 2 plus 2 equals 5.
39:06She is correct because that is a truth statement.
39:10She cannot say it because 2 plus 2 is not 5.
39:12So far, the machine is working.
39:16It has only repeated the truth.
39:19But Gödel discovered a sneaky paradox to stump the machine.
39:23Voila!
39:25I cannot say 2 plus 2 equals 5 twice.
39:28I cannot say 2 plus 2 equals 5 twice.
39:31I cannot say 2 plus 2 equals 5 twice.
39:34I cannot say 2 plus 2 equals 5 twice.
39:36I cannot say 2 plus 3 equals 5 twice.
39:39I cannot say 2 plus 3 equals 5 twice.
39:41goes five twice
39:46the truth machine is caught in a logical trap
39:49if it repeats the statement and says
39:52two plus two equals five twice twice
39:56it will make the statement false
39:59but if it keeps silent
40:01it will make it true
40:03the machine is contradicting itself
40:06which basically shows that universal truth machine
40:09does not know
40:10everything about the truth
40:12as get all have said it
40:14i know some tools
40:15that universal truth machine
40:17cannot utter
40:21gertle was able to formally prove
40:24that any logical system of knowledge
40:26be it calculus particle physics or cosmology
40:30is by definition incomplete
40:33we can think of knowledge as belonging within a sphere
40:37think of these russian dolls here
40:39as fears of knowledge and each one of these little confetti's is a true statement so here i have a sphere of knowledge that contains a lot of truth statements but there are some of them here that i cannot prove so you can say no problem i go to a bigger one
40:55but now you can say hey but this one here will have statements that i cannot prove that are true so i need a bigger sphere and then i need a bigger sphere and a bigger sphere and a sphere that is as big as the universe and then you ask would that be enough and the point is well if the universe is a self-contained system you need a bigger universe to explain everything within this one and you can't do that
41:24so the point is that there is a limit so the point is that there is a limit to how much we can know of the world
41:31girdle's incompleteness theorem means that rational thought can never reveal all the truths of the universe
41:40we would have to leave our entire cosmos in order to have a hope of understanding everything in it
41:47there are things that you cannot know there are truths that you cannot explain and so people say well that is precisely where god or some sort of supernatural belief comes in
42:02so if you would think that the way intelligence works is universal then you could extrapolate what girdle said
42:10and say hey aliens if they exist intelligent aliens out there will also have to submit to the fact that they cannot understand everything about the world
42:19even if they may understand much more than we do they are still limited in how much they can know
42:25humans and aliens must always be on a quest for knowledge a quest that will never be complete
42:38it's often said that finding other intelligences in the universe will shake our society and our belief system
42:48to the core but when two worlds collide the god who lives in the ever-present gaps in our knowledge could be the only truly universal belief
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