Hello, and thank you so much for being here for another episode of Regarding Consciousness. I am Jennifer K. Hill, the c e o of Opti match and host of this show. It is a pleasure to bring to you today a very special guest who I have the privilege of knowing and getting to know over the last three years that I've been living in Lisbon, Dr. Miguel Ribeiro, who is not only an. Author of a wonderful book that we're gonna be talking about today called Beyond Darwin. He is also an incredibly talented photographer who I believe just finished an exhibition in New York and is a traditional MD as well. Miguel, thanks so much for being here with us.
Thank you very much for hosting me.
It is my pleasure, God, as we say here in Portugal. So we are gonna be talking today about Miguel's book. So Miguel and I first connected when I moved to Portugal about three years ago, and I happened to mention something around the idea of consciousness and the shows that I was doing with Deepak and Don at the time.
And Miguel pulled aside and said, oh, Jennifer, I'd love to talk to you. About a book I wrote called Around the Program Hypothesis. So I was just really interested and fascinated and Miguel graciously gave me a copy of the book and I'm excited to share a few tidbits with it with you from it today. And Miguel, I thought it would be helpful to start off with maybe a little backstory of how you became inspired to write the book Beyond Darwin and what is the program hypothesis?
How could I begin? I was most, most interested in photography and, but in thousand six, somehow I I was going to, for some. Subscription and bought a National Geo Geographic magazine In it, there was a, an article by Carl zma, which translated to Portuguese. This is a port edition.
Translated to English would be something like the Finn, the Limb and the Wing. And there I learned that the fi. Sp precursor species already had the genetic machinery for structures that they didn't have. So what this means in, in, with an example, is that the fish precursor of land animals already had the genetic machinery for limbs and digits.
Although they had fins, and this struck me reconcilable with the Darwinian evolution with the di the randomness of Darwinian because of the intrinsic anticipation in evolution. And I. Thought about it for a day or two and and then it just went off my mind.
I was then busy with mind photography and medicine. And then in 2008, so I have a friend, good friend that is a well-known composer of contemporary music. And we decided to do some films, short films with music. And for that I started sequencing photographs. So I had to scan hundreds, so I was developing black and white photographs and started scanning hundreds and hundreds, actually over thousands negatives.
And during the, I was used not to ever see television. Started seeing films of National Geographic discovery and that kind of thing and became interested in science. Started reading books. And and that was in about 2008. In 2010, I was reading a book by Paul Davis with the Goldilock ma'am.
And in it. He was dismissing, went after the other, the various possibilities of a universe by chance. And and suddenly it just occurred to me that if we replace randomness with the program, everything would be instantly solved. And I was quite excited with the idea revive the National Geographic.
Magazine article of and started writing on the idea that That pro the mutation was programmed rather than random. And why the why? Biology for a random universe because if a universe hosts life, The most complex thing known that appeared by accident and evolves by a random mutation, by D n a copying errors, then that universe has to be random and and that's the beginning of the story.
And the initial idea was in fact that the, so we in, in the human genome, only 2% are genes. And genes are dedicated to the synthes of proteins, so that the big bulk of the human genome is what they call junk, t n a and and junk, t n a had to be junk for evolutionists because it doesn't go by natural selection.
It's independent of natural selection. We have an in enormous amount of d n A that is independent of the natural reaction. If that that d n A evolves in a coherent manner then that surely would challenge the, that that principle and purposeful purposelessness and randomness and and so I started exploring the idea went on to, to search for that possibility of people that thought that gen t n a could host the program in the genome, because there must be a program to control the activity of genes.
And and then suddenly I realized with with great disturbance, the personal dissent, because I was a Darwinian until then and after all my life not all my life, but since late adolescence that a programmer. Is implicit in a program. And so this would be a creationist explanation, and we all know that although believers are a hundred percent creationist, the term creationist has a terrible connotation and is really bad news.
And and that's disturbed me for almost a month, almost physically. And then I decided from then on that I was going just simply to try to go over any preconceptions and try to make the case of a theory just based on facts, on data gathered by scientists irrespective of interpretation, because that's where we are.
I e essentially differ from conventional. Science conventional, what you say, mainstream interpretation. So basically I play that stat.
I found it fascinating, Miguel, when I was reading the book, I didn't realize this, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you said something in there that one of the many reasons that Darwinian evolution by natural selection is an impossibility, which is something that Deepak and Don and I have also spoken about in our episodes, is that it violates the second law of thermodynamics.
Am I remembering that correctly about things getting you can't go from uncertainty to certainty. Correct. Something along those lines.
Yes the, in fact we the problem of mainstream science, mainstream I thinking is that we start with a random universe. The initial soup of particles according to us and Felda is just that it's a structural plasma of particles.
And and Penrose calls it system internally equilibrium. Which is the maximum of this organization. And yet so to go from there into a complex thing is impossible, theoretically, because of the second law of thermodynamic that dictates the opposite direction of things. And so the claim that gravity is the ingredient that can make the difference, which I that would take too long now here for as an explanation, but you can find why it's a fix rather than a sound.
Principal and but the central idea of this the book is actually that randomness cannot generate complexity and and so we live in a complex universe and questionably, so it's made up of layers of structures all interconnected by, Codes, protocols, hierarchies of feedback, regulations also like program constructions.
It, they, it's modular and it has integrated outcomes and it evolves in a meaningful way. So random systems, totally random systems only have random outcomes. And and Which is something totally different from what we have. So it doesn't, nothing fits in with that ex except I, I could possibly say that.
And I think that's one of the problems of Darwinism is that I think most modern science has born out of the contestation of the religious explanation. So in fact the Earth doesn't have 6,000 thou 600,000 years. It's not the center of the universe. The astro bodies are not magically or by miracle in, in, in equilibrium in the in, in the fair moment, but thereby universal laws of physics.
And then d came with a theory that is plausible. And that dispenses the way the presence of a God. So it, it tells us that we descend from bacteria and not, and we are not created on the image of God. So with these premises s we eventually they say religion is wrong. Any obstacles that come to this explanation, this scientific explanation, will eventually be solved.
And this has basically been the position of science. On the other hand, we have to remember there were only two players on the table, the religious explanation and Darwinism mode, the Darwinian way of thinking, that extended tool of science. And so what this brings us. To the next player on the table, which is the program hypothesis, because now we can mention a few, but Darwinism is just plagued with contradictions.
So it's no longer just purposeless and randomness because most even life from the beginnings is instilled with purposefulness.
Yeah I find this so fascinating. One of the other things that I wanted to highlight in the book is you gave reference in the book to a couple of different types of coincidences that couldn't be explained by Darwinian evolution.
Do you wanna talk maybe about that and how that ties in as well to dark matter and the multiverse?
So one of the u usual explanations for the laws of the cosmic coincidences, so the exact recipe of laws of physics and and and parameters is the multiverse. But, so there are infinite universal, so you can get also sub substrates, the substrates of this universal particles and radiation.
And then for this would enable the, this theory all sorts of laws of physics and constants of nature that could then explain just this coincidence of ours avenue. Maybe I can tell you the problems of that in just by Telling you my view. So in this view and then we'll go backwards to that.
So in this view, the universe is information and energy and information is what I call the program of the universe. You can call it consciousness or whatever but and this program prompts energy to yield. The 17 fundamental particles. In other words due to the equivalence of energy and mass or meta, you get from the, these exact recipe of particles, which include the electron.
The porks the various types of porks the glue ones that bind porks into nucleons and nucleons into nucle the Hs Boone that gives particles, mass, the photon, et cetera, et cetera. And and then armed with the laws of physics possible algorithmic structure, this program.
Following a predefined blueprint writes the story of the universe. So if we don't accept a program the implication is that we have to have these incredible coincidences, meaning the by chance to have. All these exact particles and to have these precise laws, et cetera. Another obstacle is that this multiverse assumption for the origin of the diverse laws implies that laws are object with the autonomous existence.
Which is nonsense because no laws are specifically designed to control the interaction and actions of the agents in the system. So they made specifically for systems. They don't exist by themselves. Also, laws lack causal power. Meaning even if you have all the right ingredients, so you have exact particles, the precise laws the, all the parameters, the mathematical equations that also entered the scheme.
Even then, you need an inciting agent. You need a program to do, to put everything in action pre, for example. You can't expect, so you don't expect the rules of chess to, to spark off a game or the grammar to to write a text. Those are the and or the laws of movement. To induce movement. So you have to have a program an outside agent to to do the thing.
It's basically that's the situation. Yes. No, you can't explain the universe of the wise. So it's not only the exact components all the exact ingredients, but you need an inciting agent for it.
Yeah. You gave a great example in the book too of like traffic laws. You said traffic laws.
It's not like physics laws and traffic laws are similar. I just thought that was so interesting. Yes. It sounds like we've just convoluted science at the time that when that Darwinian evolution by natural selection emerged, it was because of the fact that you had, to your point, religion and then you had, oh, not religion, Darwinian evolution.
And yet we've learned so much and it's, from what I understand from a lot of my scientists friends, is it's not just Darwinian evolution by natural selection that's defunct. It's that even things like. Einstein's theory of relativity, Newtonian physics are coming into question because you can't measure things below the plank scale.
And so that's why I think whole new ways of thinking, which may be explained by your program theory have to be considered in order to explain how these coincidences or these occurrences are happening in the universe.
The program idea is. Just overall it is overarching and the idea that behind this is that the world starts quantum and the macroscopic world, the world of the physical world is.
Is an emergent from the quantum world. So we can do an, a trace analogy with a computer. And so what we have is a quantum world that doesn't define an error time. Everything can be done in undone as some peculiar properties. And then through quantum wave collapsed DOD convenance, it goes into the macro world of that is the world where.
Where we move and this world is, has entirely different properties. It fall it abides by the causality rule. It defines a matter of time. It's a deterministic action and reaction repeatably reproducible given the similar circumstances. And so there are two different rooms and this is why you can't join Quantum and Gravity.
And so it, it's just like that. And that's why the pursuit of a quantum gravity is a failed thing. It's and so these are just I have some similar analogy which is with a computer. You, with the computer you have a flow of electrons. So if we just reduce to the bare minimum the workings of a computer, you have electricity coming into hardware and software that's that's essentially a flow of electrons, which is completely random.
And the program converts that into electric signals in patterns of electric signals significant. And then those electric signals are converted by the other arm of the program into some. Display on the monitor, for example with the, possibly the nearest analogy with is with the computer game.
Likewise with the universe, you start with you can with with a random quantum real. And this program converts it into significant patterns, so the patterns of patterns. That are the basis of our reality and which the brain of animals, the second arm of the program in the in the other, the computer analogy con transforms into the intelligible real.
That's where we, that is our reality. So the tangible thing that we can understand, because, atoms are mostly empty space, an atom the nucleus of an atom. If an atom is the size of a football of football stadium is like a nut in the center of the field and the the electron is a pinhead.
Orbiting in the last row of seats. Wow. So Anto is also barely detectable. In an immense void. And and so this would be, this in unintelligible construction is actually the real substrate of our universe. So what we see and here and feel is just a cons is a construction of our brain.
It doesn't really exist. And and for this construction made simply of atoms to be to have consistency to to be meaningful and to evolve in a meaningful way. It has to be programmed and also pro and also it's converted into an again, and another meaningful thing, which is the world of perception.
So I, I can program is in that sense.
I appreciate all this though. I can hear the question in our listeners and viewers minds. The question on everybody's mind is, what about death? If there is just one big program running all of this, I know you touch on this in the book, in the idea that I believe it's Adams in the universe they don't change when you die, that they still exist.
Can you explain for people out there who might be grappling with what does that mean if we as a human being die? This is just a computer
program. So take for example, water. You have it's made up of two components, oxygen and hydrogen. They are inflam gas flammable gases.
At room temperature, water is a liquid and it's against, it's anti combustible. In what this means is that you get two entirely different in two compound two chemicals and the from the, you get by emergence, something else, something new with entirely new properties. Now, What is life from this point of view is the emergent feature from the independent evolution of nucleic acids and nucleotide chains and cytoplasm.
And then you get something from the SM merging that is entirely new properties. So this is life. What is the. The life defining feature. It's not reproduction, metabolism, the control management of energy. It's a CI program. So what comes out from this merger is this central control that is capable of maintaining metabolism.
Can ma and I call it sentient program because it can sense the interior of the cell. And maintain its composition that is homeostasis within the extremely narrow limits compatible with life. And it's sensors. They have the outside the environment and can take adaptive action and is able to detect nutrients flight from noxious e environments find mates, et cetera.
So essentially this change from in inner chemistry to life it's it can be, you can possibly grasp that, the magnitude of the jump by thinking that in inner chemistry means a structure that is in the power of the physical and chemical influences of the environment. And and a living creature is one that has causal power, meaning.
It's it is capable of controlling the taking advantage and moving and changing the environment to its own advantage. So this is from the, on the onset of life. As opposed to food, WiMo thinks that human action is the only thing with purpose in the universe. Actually life is instilled with.
Survival instinct and these per purpose, purposeful action, right from the outset. And and then yeah it's basically that you, we can go then on. So this is the core of every living, living creature. And so eventually with, perhaps with with a Cambrian explosion.
So at, with the Cambrian and the evolution of since organs and and neural networks, a new form of emergence appeared and consciousness was born from there. And finally, humans developed self-consciousness. But, so these probably had the great markers on the evolution. And yeah, according to this idea, now you mentioned death.
When a cell so cells in the tissues, they are in cooperation. And so sometimes cells have to die and they receive orders from the environment. For a something called apoptosis. And what they do is they open pos and they lose their electrical potential and they rapidly die. So it's like life is dependent on the maintenance.
So unstoppable maintenance. Of electrical potentials. And for that it requires all the meta metabolism, so a person living creature as a certain chemical composition. And but with death is exactly the same composition, and the idea is not. That the sole left is its organism, but simply his metabolism is me.
It's metabolic machine. He was now incapable of sustaining this, these electrical potential across membranes and life just disappears instantly.
Fascinating. I guess the final question I have for you today, Miguel is there free will, if this is all programmed, what's Estop Usol? Why even have free will if everything is already pre-programmed?
Obviously it the idea here is that's a predefined story that that is following the blueprint is already laid out, and so it's a deterministic universe. And probably no free will. And in fact Ben Libert in the eighties showed that there's no free will in the strict sense of the world.
The world. So meaning if you have self-awareness Is has no executive function, so it serves as observers and commentators of the of ourselves and the environment, but is not is has no executive. Thing, and this was confirmed by Christophe Cork very few years ago with functional magnetic resonance, and imagine that you have a subject being tested and the person that doing the.
The magnetic, the functional magnetic presence can know if the person being tested is going to press the green or red button before. The person being tested knows what it's going to do, because there is an action from the non-conscious area of the brain that takes the decision. Then that impulse reaches conscious areas of the brain, and then the mo the cortex that determines the, and so you can trace.
That there's this action from non-conscious actions of the non-conscious portion of the brain takes a little lag of time and, but the observer from the F M R I can say is going to do that now, and it'll be this movement. And so before, and the person only has consciousness of what's going to happen when the impulse reaches the conscious area of the brain.
And what happens is we get an illusion, Eva urgency when when this impulse reaches because we think that this is when we decide to do something and that decision is within, it's. Our is our decision. Now, this is in the strict sense. Obviously there's no free will in that sense, but why is there a personal responsibility?
Because the impulse came from the same self, from a different layer of the individual, but it's the same individual. So responsible. I don't know if I was clear in the subtlety. But
I think I understand what I'm hearing you say, Miguel, just to repeat this back, is on a biological standpoint, technically there's not free will, according to the program hypothesis.
However, at a agent, if you wanna call it that standpoint, the individual level, it does resonate or it does come from emerge from the individual that is then provoking the action. Is that
correct? Yes. But imagine that you have a big colony and that big colony has certain you, so you are a programmer and that big colony is going to evolve in this way, and if after so many thousands of generations evolving in some other insect, et cetera.
Everything stipulated is that on an individual level strict as it appears, probably not because this is likely an algorithm based program where which the averages are the important thing. So you many bees can be killed and others are blown out by the winds, et cetera.
But the program so these little sideways. The importance is that this converge into the avenues of the program and eventually things. So there may be a so we, we don't know, but it's not impossible that everything is stipulated like in any PC program, but it's likely that there is some freedom.
It's not maybe freedom of choice. Yeah. Perhaps and that but the average of large numbers bring everything into the fulfillment of the what was preplanned.
Wow. Thank you so much, Miguel. It's been a very insightful and stimulating conversation and I invite us all, it's always interesting to reflect on our beliefs, reflect on what we think we know, just like we thought we know for, we knew for millennia that.
Evolution by natural selection or that this or that was legitimate. And yet, science is always making these new leaps and bounds and we are discovering new things all the time. And that's the beauty, in my opinion of consciousness, is getting to choose what we put our energy, what our attention goes into.
Whether it's a free will choice or not, is T B D according to Miguel Ribeiro who's been here with us today. So Miguel, any closing thoughts from you before we wrap today?
No. Perhaps one one interesting thing, but probably would take too long to explain was why mutation is not random.
Can I have a minute just for that? Although I'm not sure if it'll be sufficient, but for example, Darwin in evolution is thought to be gradual and and due to point mutation, which is a random phenomenon on contrary to that, most mutations happen as a secondary feature.
After after mod epigenetic modification. So what happens is there is initial epigenetic modification with hundred percent lamark, and then after two, three generations that it, it seems beneficial and appropriate for the environment, for, in, in terms of adaptation and mutation comes later.
So not only mutation is not the primary factor, but mutation. Falls in hotspots, not in, in, in the entire by a chance. In in, in the entire snow in the specific hotspot with something that ranges from one nucleotides to a bit, some, a bit over a hundred. So it's a tiny minute speck of the genome.
And in addition, Darin mutation, this kind of mutation is Also just for fine tuning. That's not the major thing. In addition, there is adaptive mutation described by John KEMs in the eighties, over 30 years ago. Still d debated by some evolutionists. It's absolutely empirically demonstrated and it's not that she's just incompatible with random mutation.
It is. It is, they're mutually exclusive. It doesn't make sense to have random mutation and that mutation. Then the other kind of mutation is through transposition. It was described in the, in, in the forties, late forties by Lin talk, and totally repressed by, by Darwinism because they wanted to remove all intentionality from the biology.
And she, she earned the later Nobel Price in 30, 30 years later in the eighties. Now this is visually interesting to. The, this kind of mutation transposition is equivalent to cut off a little page from a million page book. Because remember the number of characters in the genome is the human genome journal is 3 billion and it at random in another page.
And gets an improvement not only of, not only a, a meaningful passage, but an improvement in the entire book. That was, that's what the impact of transposition has in biology. And after that, there was, there's also the meaningful Gen d n A it then came the algorithms. So elderly valiant can make the idea that the organism is a computer and run by algorithms, the consciousness is another, et cetera.
So we could go on forever here, but but so the all the time if, whenever, when asked a biology, so how the evolution goes. Random mutation, natural selection. Natural selection. On the other hand, it selects for traits, which implies in computation. And doesn't select traits and not proteins and traits imply computation.
So actual natural selection supports the sational views of the program. Hypothesis, where the evolution that is important is of traits. I want.
At the moment, I'm Oh yes I'm, now I listen to you.
Yeah. That is pretty incredible. I was, I just realized I was on mute. I was saying that we're all gonna have to go back and re-listen to this because what you just said was so powerful. And I do remember reading about that in the book, that analogy of having this million page book and then just randomly tearing a piece out and putting it back in, and how that is the equivalent of.
Darwinian evolution by natural selection. I think that there's always so much more for us to learn out here. Miguel and I just deeply appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us today.
Many thanks, Jennifer.
Yes. Thank you my friend. And I believe the best place for people to go to find out about you and your photography as well as the book is miguel rivero.com, correct?
Or right. Let me see here. It's Miguel Ribeiro. I have,
it's miguel river
net, sorry, miguel rubo.net. So we'll be sure to go ahead and include that in the notes. And we deeply appreciate you for joining us today. Thank you very much. Yes. Thank you so much and intending that everybody out there maybe learn something new or thought of something new.
I know I learned a lot of new things when I read Miguel's book and I'm so grateful that you joined us today, my friend. Thank you for being here.
Thank you very much.