Lex Friedman 访谈 Roger Penrose 意识的物理学与无限宇宙 - 中英双语

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Lex Friedman 访谈 Roger Penrose 意识的物理学与无限宇宙 - 中英双语

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罗杰·彭罗斯爵士（1931年8月8日生）是英国著名的数学家、数学物理学家、科学哲学家以及诺贝尔物理学奖得主。他是牛津大学的荣誉退休教授，曾担任Rouse Ball数学讲座教授，也是牛津大学Wadham学院的荣誉退休院士，剑桥大学圣约翰学院和伦敦大学学院的名誉院士。
彭罗斯在广义相对论和宇宙学的数学物理领域作出了重要贡献。他获得了多项著名奖项，包括1988年与斯蒂芬·霍金共同获得的沃尔夫物理学奖，以表彰他们在彭罗斯-霍金奇点定理方面的突破性工作。2020年，他因“证明黑洞形成是广义相对论的一个必然预言”而被授予诺贝尔物理学奖。

莱克斯·弗里德曼对话罗杰·彭罗斯访谈要点总结（20 点）

彭罗斯对《2001太空漫游》的喜爱: 彭罗斯认为这部电影在科学细节处理上非常严谨，远超其他科幻电影。
HAL 9000 的意识: 彭罗斯认为，电影暗示 HAL 9000 具备某种程度的意识，其消灭宇航员的行为也暗示机器可能认为自己优于人类。
计算能力与意识: 彭罗斯反对“计算能力越强，意识越容易 emergence”的观点，认为意识并非单纯的计算过程。
小脑的计算能力: 小脑拥有比大脑皮层更多的神经元和连接，计算能力更强，但其活动是无意识的，这证明意识并非仅仅依赖于计算。
大脑的复杂性: 彭罗斯认为大脑的结构并非简单的电路，其复杂程度远超计算机，不能简单地将其等同于图灵机。
哥德尔不完备定理: 彭罗斯认为该定理表明，理解能力超越了形式系统的规则，是无法通过计算程序来实现的。
理解力的本质: 彭罗斯将“理解力”定义为一种跳出当前思维框架，反思自身思维过程的能力，它对人类的生存和发展至关重要。
意识的进化: 彭罗斯认为，意识并非人类独有，其他生物，例如野狗、大象、章鱼等，也可能具备某种形式的意识。
意识的物理基础: 彭罗斯认为，意识的产生可能需要某种硬件基础，而现有的计算机结构可能无法满足这一需求。
唯物主义: 彭罗斯自认为是一个“科学家”，而非“唯物主义者”，他认为我们对物质的理解还很有限，不能排除存在着超越现有科学认知的现象。
量子力学的局限性: 彭罗斯认为，现有的量子力学理论是不完备的，它无法解释波函数坍缩的机制。
薛定谔的猫: 彭罗斯认为，薛定谔提出这个思想实验是为了指出量子力学理论的缺陷，而不是为了说明“猫不可能同时处于生和死的叠加态”。
量子引力的局限: 彭罗斯认为，现有的量子引力理论只是将量子力学应用于引力理论，而没有考虑到引力对量子力学本身的影响。
等效原理: 彭罗斯解释了伽利略提出的等效原理，即在局部范围内，自由落体运动可以消除引力场。
协调客观约简理论（Orch OR): 彭罗斯与哈梅罗夫共同提出的理论，认为意识起源于神经元内部微管中的量子过程，并涉及到波函数的坍缩。
麻醉剂的作用: 彭罗斯认为，麻醉剂可能是通过影响微管的活动来关闭意识的，这为 Orch OR 理论提供了一定的支持。
物理学理论的分类: 彭罗斯将物理学理论分为三类：卓越的、有用的和尝试性的，他认为我们目前还没有关于意识的“尝试性的”理论。
宇宙的未来: 彭罗斯认为，如果宇宙按照目前的趋势膨胀下去，最终将会变得非常“无聊”，因为所有的物质都会被黑洞吞噬，而黑洞最终也会蒸发殆尽。
共形循环宇宙学: 彭罗斯提出的宇宙模型，认为宇宙经历着无限的循环，大爆炸的另一边是前一个纪元的遥远未来。
生命的意义: 彭罗斯认为，这是一个值得思考的问题，生命的意义可能与意识的本质以及宇宙的奥秘息息相关。

莱克斯·弗里德曼对话罗杰·彭罗斯访谈中英对照全文

Lex Friedman: The following is a conversation with Roger Penrose, physicist, mathematician, and philosopher at the University of Oxford. He has made fundamental contributions in many disciplines, from the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology to the limitations of the computational view of consciousness. In his book The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger writes that, “Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us as adults to ask.” In many ways, my goal with this podcast is to embrace the inner child that is not constrained by how one should behave, speak, and think in the adult world. Roger is one of the most important minds of our time, so it was truly a pleasure and an honor to talk with him. This was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic. For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of the crisis, I’m sending love your way. Stay strong. We’re in this together. We’ll beat this thing.

**莱克斯·弗里德曼：**以下是对罗杰·彭罗斯的访谈，他是牛津大学的物理学家、数学家和哲学家，在广义相对论、宇宙学以及意识的计算观点等诸多领域做出了 foundational 的贡献。他在其著作《皇帝的新脑》中写道，孩子们敢于提出成年人羞于启齿的基本问题。在很多方面，我制作这个播客的目的是拥抱我们内心的童真，不受限于成年世界的条条框框。罗杰是我们时代最伟大的思想家之一，能够与他对话是我的荣幸。本次访谈录制于疫情爆发之前。对于所有正在经受疫情带来的生理、心理和经济压力的人们，我衷心祝愿你们一切安好，保持坚强。我们同舟共济，终将战胜疫情。

And now, here’s my conversation with Roger Penrose.

Lex: You mentioned in a conversation with Eric Weinstein on the Portal podcast that 2001: A Space Odyssey is your favorite movie. Which aspect, if you could mention, of its representation of artificial intelligence, science, engineering, connected with you?

Roger Penrose: There are so many aspects which are so amazing and how the science was so well done. I mean, people say, “Oh no, Interstellar is this amazing movie, which is the most scientific movie,” but I thought it’s not a patch on 2001. I mean, in 2001, they really went into all sorts of details regarding, you know, getting the freefall well done and everything. I thought it was extremely well done.

现在，开始我和罗杰·彭罗斯的对话。

莱克斯： 罗杰，你在和埃里克·温斯坦在 Portal 播客上的对话中提到，《2001太空漫游》是你最喜欢的电影。能否谈谈这部电影在人工智能、科学、工程方面的表现中，哪些方面让你印象深刻？

**罗杰·彭罗斯：**这部电影有很多方面都令人惊叹，而且科学方面的处理非常严谨。有些人说，《星际穿越》才是最棒的、最具科学性的电影，但我认为它远不及《2001太空漫游》。在《2001太空漫游》中，他们对各种细节都进行了精心的刻画，例如，他们非常准确地展现了自由落体运动等等。我认为这部电影的制作非常出色。

Lex: So just the details are mesmerizing.

Roger: Yes, and also things like the scene where, at the beginning, they have these sort of human ancestors, which is sort of right—sort of pre-humans—becoming monoliths.

Lex: Yes.

Roger: And well, it’s the one where he throws the bone up into the air, and then it becomes this… I mean, there’s just an amazing sequence there.

莱克斯： 所以，仅仅是这些细节就让人着迷。

罗杰： 是的，还有像电影开头的那一段，展现了人类的祖先——或者说史前人类——演变成巨石的过程。

莱克斯： 是的。

罗杰： 嗯，就是一个人猿将骨头抛向空中，然后骨头变成了……我的意思是，那一段场景的拍摄非常精彩。

Lex: What do you make of the monolith? Does it have any scientific or philosophical meaning to you, this kind of thing that marks innovation?

Roger: Not really. That comes from Arthur C. Clarke. I was a great fan of Arthur C. Clarke, so it’s just a nice plot device.

Lex: Yeah, well, that plot is excellent. Yes.

Roger: Yes.

莱克斯： 你如何理解电影中的巨石？它对你来说有什么科学或哲学意义吗？它似乎象征着某种创新。

罗杰： 并没有什么特别的意义。巨石的设定来自亚瑟·C·克拉克，我是他的忠实粉丝。巨石只是一个推动情节发展的巧妙设定。

莱克斯： 是的，这个情节设计非常出色。

罗杰： 是的。

Lex: So HAL 9000 decides to get rid of the astronauts because it—he, she—believes that they will interfere with the mission.

Roger: That’s right. No, it’s this view… I don’t know whether I disagree with that question. In a certain sense, he was telling you it’s wrong. See, the machine seemed to think it was superior to the human, and so it was entitled to get rid of the human beings and run the show itself.

莱克斯： 所以，HAL 9000 决定除掉宇航员，因为它（他/她）认为宇航员会干扰任务的执行。

罗杰： 没错。不，我的意思是……我不确定我是否同意你的说法。从某种意义上说，HAL 9000 在告诉我们，它的做法是错误的。你看，这台机器似乎认为自己比人类更优越，因此它有权消灭人类，独自掌控一切。

Lex: What do you think? Did HAL do the right thing? Do you think HAL was flawed, evil, or—if we think about systems like HAL—would we want HAL to do the same thing in the future? What was the flaw there?

Roger: Well, you’re basically touching on questions, you see. It’s just one supposed to believe that HAL was actually conscious. I mean, it was played rather that way, that somehow HAL was a conscious being.

莱克斯： 你怎么看？HAL 的做法是对的吗？你认为 HAL 是有缺陷的、邪恶的，或者——如果我们设想未来会出现类似 HAL 的系统——我们希望它们也做出同样的选择吗？HAL 的问题出在哪里？

罗杰： 嗯，你看，你其实是在触及一些核心问题。我们应该相信 HAL 确实是有意识的。我的意思是，电影就是这样设定的，HAL 在某种程度上是一个有意识的生命体。

Lex: Because HAL showed some pain, some cognizance. HAL appeared to be cognizant of what it means to die.

Roger: Yes. And therefore, had an inkling of consciousness. Yeah. I mean, I’m not sure that aspect of it was made completely clear—whether HAL was really just a very sophisticated computer, which really didn’t actually have these feelings, and somehow—but you’re right, it didn’t like the idea of being turned off.

莱克斯： 因为 HAL 表现出了一些痛苦和认知能力，它似乎意识到死亡意味着什么。

罗杰： 是的，因此，它可能具备了意识的萌芽。是的。我的意思是，我不确定电影是否清晰地表达了这方面——HAL 究竟只是一个非常 sophisticated 的计算机，还是它真的拥有这些感受——但你说的没错，它确实不喜欢被关闭的想法。

Lex: How does it change things if HAL wasn’t conscious?

Roger: Well, you might say that it would be wrong to turn it off if it was actually conscious. I mean, these questions arise if you think—I mean, AI… one of the ideas, it’s sort of a mixture in a sense. You say, if it’s trying to do everything a human can do, and if you take the view that consciousness is something which would come along when the computer is sufficiently complicated, sufficiently… whatever criteria you use to characterize its consciousness in terms of some computational criterion…

莱克斯： 如果 HAL 没有意识，那会怎样？

罗杰： 嗯，你可能会说，如果 HAL 真的有意识，那关闭它就是不道德的。我的意思是，如果你这样想，这些问题就会出现——人工智能……其中一种观点，其实是一种混合的观点。你可能会说，如果人工智能试图做人类所能做的一切，并且如果你认为当计算机足够复杂、足够……无论你用什么计算标准来定义意识，意识都会自然而然地出现……

Lex: So how does consciousness change our evaluation of the decision that HAL made?

Roger: It’s not to say that people have been confused about this, because if they say these machines will become conscious just simply because it’s the degree of computation, and when you get beyond that certain degree of computation, it will become conscious. Then, of course, you have all these problems. I mean, you might say, well, one of the reasons you’re doing AI is because you send a device to some distant planet, and you don’t want to send a human out there because then you’d have to bring it back again. And that’s cost you far more than just sending it there and leaving it there. But if this device is actually a conscious entity, then you have to face up to the fact that that’s immoral. And so the mere fact that you’re making some AI device and thinking that removes your responsibility to it would be incorrect. And so this is a kind of plot flaw in that kind of viewpoint. I’m not sure how people who take it very seriously…

莱克斯： 那么，意识的存在如何改变我们对 HAL 所做决定的评价呢？

罗杰： 这并不是说人们对此感到困惑，因为如果他们认为机器会仅仅因为计算能力的提升而产生意识，并且当计算能力超过某个特定的阈值时，意识就会自然 emergence，那么，当然，你就会遇到所有这些问题。我的意思是，你可能会说，我们研究人工智能的原因之一是因为我们可以将设备送往遥远的星球，而我们不想派人类宇航员去那里，因为那样我们还得把他们接回来，这比仅仅把设备送过去并留在那里要昂贵得多。但是，如果这个设备实际上是一个有意识的实体，那么我们就必须面对一个事实，那就是抛弃它是不道德的。因此，仅仅因为我们在制造人工智能设备就认为我们可以免除对它的责任，这种想法是错误的。所以，这种观点本身就存在着一种逻辑上的缺陷。我不确定那些真正相信这种观点的人会如何……

I’m going to have this curious conversation with… I’m going to forget names, I’m afraid, because this is what happens to me at the wrong moment. I’ve said… Douglas Hofstadter, and he’s written this book… god, I wish… I liked it. I thought it was a fantastic book, but I didn’t agree with his conclusion from Gödel’s theorem. I think he got it wrong. Well, just to tell you my story, you see, because I’d never met him. And then I knew I was going to meet him at the occasion… He was coming and he wanted to talk to me, and I said, that’s fine. And I thought in my mind, well, I’m going to paint him into a corner, you see, and use his arguments to convince him that certain numbers are conscious, you know, some integers, large enough integers, are actually conscious. And this was going to be my reductio ad absurdum. So I started having this argument, and he simply leapt into the corner. He didn’t even need to be painted into it. He took the view that certain numbers were conscious. I thought that was a reductio ad absurdum, but he seemed to think it was a perfectly reasonable point of view.

我曾经和……进行过一次很有意思的对话，抱歉，我现在想不起他的名字了，我经常在关键时刻想不起人名。我说的是……道格拉斯·霍夫施塔特，他写过那本……天哪，我希望……我喜欢那本书，我认为它很棒，但我不同意他从哥德尔定理中得出的结论。我认为他的理解是错误的。我给你讲讲我的故事吧。你看，我之前从未见过他，但我知道我将会在一个场合见到他……他要来，并且想和我聊聊，我说，没问题。我当时心想，我要用他的逻辑把他逼到墙角，你看，用他自己的论点来说服他，某些数字是有意识的，你知道，一些整数，足够大的整数，实际上是有意识的。这将是我的“reductio ad absurdum”（归谬法）。于是我开始和他辩论，但他直接跳进了我为他设的“墙角”，他甚至不需要我“逼”他进去。他认为某些数字确实是有意识的。我认为这是一种“reductio ad absurdum”，但他似乎认为这完全合理。

Lex: Without the absurdum there, yes. Interesting.

Roger: But the thing you mentioned about HAL is the intuition that a lot of people, at least in the artificial intelligence world, had and have. I think they don’t make it explicit, but that if you increase the power of computation, naturally, consciousness will emerge.

Lex: Yes.

莱克斯： 是的，他直接接受了“荒谬”的结论。很有意思。

罗杰： 但是你提到的关于 HAL 的问题，其实代表了许多人——至少是人工智能领域的人——过去和现在都持有的一种直觉。我认为他们没有明确地表达出来，但他们相信，如果我们不断提升计算能力，意识就会自然 emergence。

莱克斯： 是的。

Roger: I think that’s what they think, but basically, that’s because they can’t think of anything else.

Lex: Well, that’s right. And so it’s a reasonable thing. I mean, you think, what does the brain do? Well, it does do a lot of computation. I think most of what you actually call computation is done by the cerebellum. I mean, this is one of the things that people don’t much mention. When I come to this subject from the outside, certain things strike me that you hardly ever hear mentioned. You hear mentioned about the left-right business. They move your right arm, that’s on the left side of the brain, and so on. And all that sort of stuff, and it’s more than that. You have these plots of different parts of the brain. There are two of these things called the homunculus, which you see these pictures of a distorted human figure, showing different parts of the brain controlling different parts of the body. And it’s not simply things like, okay, the right hand is controlled, in a sense, both sensory and motor, on the left side. Left hand, on the right side. It’s more than that. Vision is at the back, basically. Your feet at the top—I mean, so it’s about the worst organization you can imagine, right?

罗杰： 我认为这就是他们的想法，但究其根本，是因为他们想不出其他的可能性了。

莱克斯： 嗯，没错。所以这是一种合理的推测。我的意思是，你想想，大脑是做什么的？嗯，它确实进行了大量的计算。我认为你所说的计算，大部分是由小脑完成的。我的意思是，这是人们很少提及的一点。当我作为一个外行接触到这个领域时，我注意到了一些你几乎从未听人提起的事情。你可能听说过左右脑分工的理论，例如，控制你右臂运动的区域在大脑的左侧，等等。诸如此类的说法，但实际情况远比这复杂。我们有关于大脑不同区域功能的图表，还有两个被称为“小人”（homunculus）的东西，你见过那些扭曲的人形图片吧？它们展示了大脑的不同区域如何控制身体的不同部位。大脑的组织方式并不像我们想象的那么简单，例如，右手的感觉和运动功能都由左侧大脑控制，左手则由右侧大脑控制，等等。实际上，视觉区域位于大脑后部，而控制脚的区域却位于顶部——我的意思是，这几乎是你能想象到的最糟糕的组织方式，对吧？

Lex: Yeah.

Roger: So it can’t just be a mistake in nature; there’s something going on there. And this is made more pronounced when you think of the cerebellum. The cerebellum has… when I was first thinking about these things, I was told it had half as many neurons or something. They’re about comparable, and now they tell me it’s got far more neurons than the cerebrum. The cerebrum is this sort of convoluted thing at the top, people always talk about. The cerebellum is this thing that just looks a bit like a ball of wool at the back, underneath. It’s got more neurons, it’s got more connections, computationally, it’s got much more going on than the cerebrum. But as far as we know, although it’s slightly controversial, the cerebellum is entirely unconscious. So the actions—you have a pianist who plays an incredible piece of music, and you think of any moves this little finger, until this key gets hit at just the right moment—does he or she consciously will that movement? No. Okay, the consciousness is coming in; it’s probably to do with the feeling of the piece of music that’s being performed and that sort of thing, which is going on. But the details in what’s going on are controlled, I would think, almost entirely by the cerebellum. That’s where you have this precision, and there are really detailed things. You think of a tennis player or something. Does that tennis player think exactly how—about which muscles should be moved in what direction and so on? Of course not. But he or she will maybe think, well, if the ball is angled in such a way in that corner, it will be tricky for the opponent. And the details of that are all done largely with the cerebellum. That’s where all the precise motions… but it’s unconscious.

莱克斯： 是的。

罗杰： 所以，这不可能是大自然犯的错误，其中一定另有玄机。当你思考小脑的功能时，这一点就更加明显了。小脑……当我最初思考这些问题时，我了解到小脑的神经元数量大约是大脑皮层（cerebrum）的一半。现在人们

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告诉我，小脑的神经元数量实际上远超大脑皮层。大脑皮层就是我们常说的位于头部顶端的那个皱巴巴的结构，而小脑则是位于后下方，看起来像一个毛线球的东西。小脑拥有更多神经元、更多连接，从计算的角度来看，它的活动远比大脑皮层活跃。但是，据我们所知，尽管这一点存在一些争议，小脑的活动完全是无意识的。例如，一位钢琴家演奏了一首非常复杂的乐曲，你想想看，他的小指是如何在恰到好处的时间点按下琴键的——他/她是有意识地控制每一个细微动作的吗？当然不是。好的，意识当然也参与其中，它可能与演奏者对乐曲的感受等等有关。但我认为，演奏的细节几乎完全是由小脑控制的，小脑负责完成这些精确的动作，以及其他一些非常细致的操作。再比如一位网球运动员，他/她会仔细思考每一个动作吗？例如，哪些肌肉应该如何运动，以怎样的力度和方向运动等等？当然不会。他/她可能会思考，如果球以某个角度落到那个角落，会给对手造成很大的麻烦。而实现这一切的具体操作，很大程度上是由小脑完成的。小脑负责所有这些精确的运动，但它是无意识的。

Lex: So why is it interesting to you that so much computation is done in the cerebellum and yet is unconscious?

Roger: Because it’s the view that somehow it’s computation which is producing the consciousness. And here you have an incredible amount of computation going on, and as far as we know, it’s completely unconscious. So why? What’s the difference? And I think it’s an important thing. What’s the difference? Why is the cerebrum, with all this very peculiar stuff that’s very hard to see on a computational perspective, like having everything have to cross over under the other side and do something which looks completely inefficient? And you’ve got funny things like the frontal lobe, and the place where they come together. You have the different parts that control… if you wanted to do with motor, and the other to do with sensory, and they’re sort of opposite each other, rather than being connected by a nuclear pie. It’s not just, though, you’ve got electrical circuits; there’s something else going on there. So it’s just the idea that it’s like a complicated computer. It just seems to me to be completely missing the point. There must be a lot of computation going on, but the cerebellum seems to be much better at doing that than the cerebrum is.

莱克斯： 那么，为什么小脑进行了如此大量的计算，却仍然是无意识的，这一点让你感到好奇呢？

罗杰： 因为有一种观点认为，意识是由计算产生的。但这里你看到了大量的计算活动，而且据我们所知，这些活动完全是无意识的。那么，为什么会这样呢？区别在哪里？我认为这是一个很重要的问题。区别是什么？为什么大脑皮层，它有着所有这些从计算角度来看非常难以理解的特殊结构，例如，所有的信息都必须交叉到另一侧进行处理，这看起来效率非常低下。而且大脑皮层还有额叶这样的特殊结构，以及额叶与其他区域的连接方式。大脑皮层中控制……例如，控制运动功能的区域和控制感觉功能的区域，它们彼此相对，而不是像我们想象的那样通过一个“神经中枢”连接在一起。而且，大脑皮层不仅仅是简单的电路，它一定还有其他更复杂的机制在运作。所以，仅仅把大脑看作一台复杂的计算机，在我看来，完全忽略了问题的本质。大脑中肯定有大量的计算活动在进行，但小脑似乎比大脑皮层更擅长完成这些计算。

Lex: So for sure, I think what explains it is half hope and half “we don’t know what’s going on,” and therefore, from the computer science perspective, you hope that a Turing machine can achieve general intelligence.

Roger: Well, you have this wonderful thing about Turing and Gödel and Church and Curry and various people, particularly Turing and I guess Post was the other one. These people who developed the idea of what a computation is, and there were different ideas of what a computation is that developed differently. I mean, Church’s way of doing it was very different from Turing’s, but then they were shown to be equivalent. And so the view emerged that what we mean by a computation is a very clear concept. And one of the wonderful things that Turing did was to show that you could have what we call the universal Turing machine. You just have to have a certain finite device—okay, it has to have an unlimited storage space which is accessible to it—but the actual computation, if you like, is performed by this one universal device. And so the view comes away: well, you have this universal Turing machine, and maybe the brain is something like that, a universal Turing machine, and it’s got maybe not an unlimited storage, but a huge storage accessible to it. And this model is one which is what’s used in ordinary computation. It’s a very powerful model. And the universality of computation is very useful. You can have some problem, and you may not see immediately how to put it onto a computer, but if it is something of that nature, then there are all sorts of sub-programs and subroutines and all… I mean, I learned a little bit of computing when I was a student, but not very much. It was enough to get the general ideas.

莱克斯： 当然，我认为人们之所以会这样想，一半是因为希望，一半是因为“我们不知道大脑是如何工作的”，因此，从计算机科学的角度来看，你希望图灵机能够实现通用人工智能。

罗杰： 嗯，图灵、哥德尔、丘奇、柯里等等，尤其是图灵，我想还有波斯特，这些人都对计算的本质做出了杰出的贡献。关于什么是计算，人们曾经有过不同的理解，这些理解也沿着不同的路径发展。例如，丘奇的方法与图灵的方法就截然不同，但后来人们证明了它们是等价的。因此，逐渐形成了这样一种共识：计算是一个非常清晰的概念。图灵做出的一个重要贡献是，他证明了通用图灵机的存在。你只需要一个有限的设备——当然，它需要能够访问无限大的存储空间——但所有的计算，如果你愿意这样理解的话，都可以由这个通用的设备来执行。因此，人们就产生了这样一种想法：既然存在通用图灵机，那么也许大脑也是类似的，它就像一台通用图灵机，它可能没有无限的存储空间，但它拥有一个巨大的、可以访问的存储空间。这个模型就是我们今天在计算机中使用的模型，它非常强大。计算的通用性也非常有用。你可能会遇到一些问题，你可能不知道如何用计算机来解决它，但如果它本质上是可计算的，那么你就可以使用各种子程序、子例程等等……我的意思是，我学生时代学过一点计算机知识，但并不多，只是了解了一些基本概念。

Lex: And there’s something really pleasant about a formal system like that.

Roger: Yeah.

Lex: Where you can start discussing about what’s provable, what’s not—these kinds of things.

Roger: Yes, and you’ve got a notion which is an absolute notion, this notion of computability, and you really address when things—what mathematical problems are computably solvable and which aren’t. And it’s a very beautiful area of mathematics, and it’s a very powerful area of mathematics, and it underlies the whole sort of… well, let’s say the principles of computing machines that we have today.

莱克斯： 这样的形式系统确实具有一种优雅的美感。

罗杰： 是的。

莱克斯： 在这个系统中，你可以开始讨论什么是可证明的，什么不是——诸如此类的问题。

罗杰： 是的，而且你拥有一个绝对的概念，那就是可计算性。你可以真正地探讨哪些数学问题是可以通过计算来解决的，哪些不是。这是一个非常优美的数学领域，它非常强大，并且构成了我们今天所使用的计算机的基本原理。

Lex: Could you say what Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is, and how does it—maybe also say, is it heartbreaking to you, and how does it interfere with this notion of computation and consciousness?

Roger: Sure. Well, the ideas—basically ideas which I formulated in my first year as a graduate student in Cambridge. I did my undergraduate work in mathematics in London, and I had a colleague, Ian Percival. We used to discuss things like computational logical systems quite a lot. I’d heard about Gödel’s theorem. I was a bit worried by the idea that it seemed to say there were things in mathematics that you could never prove. And so when I went to Cambridge as a graduate student, I went to various courses. You see, I was doing pure mathematics, I was doing algebraic geometry of a sort, a little bit different from my supervisor, Hodge, but it was an area, and I was interested. I got particularly interested in three lecture courses that were nothing to do with what I was supposed to be doing. One was a course by Hermann Bondi on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was a beautiful course. He was an amazing lecturer, brought these things alive, absolutely. And then there was a course on quantum mechanics given by the great physicist Paul Dirac. Very beautiful course in a completely different way. He was very kind of organized and never got excited about anything seemingly, but it was extremely well-put-together, and I found that amazing too. The third course, which had nothing to do with what I should be doing, was a course on mathematical logic. I got… I say, my discussions with Ian Percival…

莱克斯： 你能解释一下哥德尔不完备定理是什么吗？以及它对你来说是否令人沮丧？它是如何影响我们对计算和意识的理解的？

罗杰： 当然。这些想法——基本上是我在剑桥大学读研究生第一年形成的。我本科时在伦敦学习数学，我有一个同学叫伊恩·珀西瓦尔，我们经常一起讨论计算逻辑系统之类的东西。我听说过哥德尔定理，并且对它感到有些担忧，因为它似乎表明数学中存在一些我们永远无法证明的命题。所以，当我以研究生的身份来到剑桥时，我参加了各种各样的课程。你看，我当时在研究纯数学，某种代数几何，与我的导师霍奇的研究方向略有不同，但它仍然属于我的研究领域，并且我对此很感兴趣。我尤其感兴趣的是三门与我研究方向无关的课程。第一门是赫尔曼·邦迪教授的爱因斯坦广义相对论，这是一门非常精彩的课程。邦迪是一位非常棒的老师，他把这些理论讲得栩栩如生。第二门是伟大的物理学家保罗·狄拉克教授的量子力学。这门课程也同样精彩，但风格完全不同。狄拉克是一位非常严谨、有条理的人，他似乎从不对任何事物表现出过分的热情，但他的课程内容组织得非常出色，我也觉得这门课程非常棒。第三门课程，与我的研究方向完全无关，是关于数理逻辑的。我之所以会对这门课程感兴趣……是因为我和伊恩·珀西瓦尔的讨论……

Lex: Was incompleteness theorem already deeply within the mathematical logic space? Were you introduced…

Roger: I was introduced to it in detail by the course, by Steen, and it was two things he described which were very fundamental to my understanding. One was Turing machines and the whole idea of computability and all that, so that was all very much part of the course. The other one was the Gödel theorem, and it wasn’t what I was afraid it was, to tell you there were things in mathematics you couldn’t prove. It was basically—and he phrased it in a way which often people didn’t, and if you read Douglas Hofstadter’s book, he doesn’t, you see. But Steen made it very clear, and also in a sort of public lecture that he gave to a mathematical… I think it may have been the Adams Society, one of the mathematical undergraduate societies. And he made this point again very clearly, that if you’ve got a formal system of proof—so suppose what you mean by proof is something which you could check with a computer, so to say whether you’ve got it right or not. You’ve got a lot of

steps, have you carried this computational procedure… well, following the proof steps of the proof correctly. That can be checked by an algorithm, by a computer. So that’s the key thing. Now, what Gödel shows is that if you have such a system, then you can construct a statement of the very kind that it’s supposed to look at, a mathematical statement. And you can see, by the way it’s constructed and what it means, that it’s true but not provable by the rules that you’ve been given. And it depends on your trust in the rules. Do you believe that the rules only give you truth? If you believe the rules only give you truth, then you believe this other statement is also true. I found this absolutely mind-blowing. When I saw this, it blew my mind. Oh my God, you can see that this statement is true. It’s as good as any proof because it only depends on your belief in the reliability of the proof procedure. That’s all it is. And understanding that the coding is done correctly, and it enables you to transcend that system. So whatever system you have, as long as you can understand what it’s doing and why you believe it only gives you truth, then you can see beyond that system. Now, how do you see beyond it? What is it that enables you to transcend that system? Well, it’s your understanding of what the system is actually saying, and what the statement you’ve constructed is actually saying. Just this quality of understanding, whatever it is, which is not governed by rules, it’s not a computational procedure. So this idea of understanding is not going to be within the rules of the…

莱克斯： 当时不完备定理在数理逻辑领域已经很普及了吗？你是如何了解到它的？

罗杰： 斯蒂恩教授在他的课程中详细地向我介绍了这个定理，他讲解了两个对我理解这个定理至关重要的概念。一个是图灵机以及可计算性的概念，这些都是课程的重要内容。另一个是哥德尔定理，它并不是我之前担心的那样，告诉我数学中存在一些我们永远无法证明的命题。事实上——他用一种人们不常用的方式来表述这个定理，如果你读过道格拉斯·霍夫施塔特的书，你会发现他也没有用这种方式——但斯蒂恩教授把这一点讲得很清楚，他还在一次面向数学……我想可能是亚当斯学会，一个数学本科生学会的公开演讲中也提到了这一点。他再次清晰地阐述了，如果你有一个形式化的证明系统——假设你所说的“证明”是指可以通过计算机来验证的东西，也就是说，你可以用计算机来判断一个证明是否正确。你有一系列的步骤，你是否正确地执行了这些计算步骤……或者说，是否正确地遵循了证明的步骤。这可以通过算法，也就是通过计算机来验证，这是关键。哥德尔定理表明，如果你有这样一个系统，那么你就可以构造出一个属于该系统研究范围的陈述，一个数学陈述。通过分析它的构造方式和它的含义，你可以看出它是真的，但你无法用系统提供的规则来证明它。这取决于你对规则的信任程度。你是否相信这些规则只会导出真理？如果你相信，那么你也会相信这个新的陈述也是真的。我发现这太不可思议了，当我第一次接触到这个定理的时候，我简直惊呆了。我的天哪，你可以清楚地看到这个陈述是真的，它和任何其他证明一样有效，因为它仅仅依赖于你对证明过程可靠性的信念，仅此而已。而且，只要理解了编码的正确性，它就能让你超越这个系统。所以，无论你面对的是什么样的系统，只要你能理解它的运作方式，并且相信它只会导出真理，那么你就能超越这个系统的限制，看到它之外的东西。那么，你是如何超越它的？是什么让你能够超越这个系统呢？答案是，你理解了这个系统真正表达的含义，以及你所构造的陈述真正表达的含义。正是这种理解的能力，无论它是什么，它不受规则的约束，它不是一个可以通过计算程序来实现的过程。所以，理解的概念本身就超越了……的规则。

Lex: Within the formal system…

Roger: Yes, yes, within the rules anyway. Because you have understood them to be rules which only give you truth. There’d be no point in it otherwise. People say, well, okay, this is what this one says, the rule is as good as any other. Well, it’s not true, you see. You have to understand what the rules mean, and why does that understanding of the mean give you something beyond the rules themselves? And that’s what it was. That’s what blew my mind. It’s somehow understanding why the rules give you truth enables you to transcend the rules.

莱克斯： 在形式系统之内……

罗杰： 是的，是的，无论如何都在规则之内。因为你已经理解了它们是只会导出真理的规则，否则这些规则就没有意义了。人们可能会说，好吧，这个规则就是这样定义的，它和其他任何规则一样有效。嗯，这不对，你看。你必须理解这些规则的含义，以及为什么对含义的理解能够让你超越规则本身？这就是关键所在，这就是让我感到震惊的地方。在某种程度上，理解为什么规则能够导出真理，这本身就让你超越了规则的限制。

Lex: So that’s where… I mean, even at that time, that’s already where the thought entered your mind that the idea of understanding, or we can start calling it things like intelligence or even consciousness, is outside the rules?

Roger: Yes. Since I’ve always concentrated on understanding, you know, people say… somebody knows, well, we know… but about creativity, that’s something a machine can’t do, is create… well, I don’t know, what is creativity? And I don’t know, you know, somebody can put some funny things on a piece of paper and say, “That’s creative,” and you could make a machine do that. Is it really creative? I don’t know. You see, I worry about that one. I sort of agree with it in a sense, but it’s so hard to do anything with that statement. But understanding, yes, you can make… you can see that understanding, whatever it is, and it’s very hard to put your finger on it.

莱克斯： 所以，这就是……我的意思是，即使在那个时候，你心中就已经产生了这样的想法：理解的概念，或者我们可以称之为智能甚至意识，是超越规则的？

罗杰： 是的。因为我一直以来都在关注理解，你知道，人们说……有人知道，好吧，我们知道……但是关于创造力，那是机器无法做到的事情，那就是创造……嗯，我不知道，什么是创造力？我不知道，你知道，有人可以画一些奇怪的东西，然后说，“这是有创造力的”，你也可以让机器做同样的事情。它真的具有创造力吗？我不知道。你看，我对此感到担忧。在某种意义上，我同意这种说法，但很难用这种说法来做什么。但是理解，是的，你可以……你可以看到理解，无论它是什么，它很难被清晰地定义。

Lex: Can you try to define, or maybe dance around a definition of understanding, to some degree?

Roger: Well, I don’t often want to say too much about this, but there is something there which is very slippery. It’s something like standing back, and it’s got to be something… you see, it’s also got to be something which was of value to our remote ancestors. Because I sometimes… there’s a cartoon which I drew sometimes, showing you how all these… there’s a… in the foreground, you see this mathematician just doing some mathematical theorem. This little bit different job in that theorem, but let’s not go into that. He’s trying to prove some theorem, and he’s about to be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger as he’s hiding in the undergrowth, you see. And in the distance, you see his cousins building, growing crops, building shelters, domesticating animals. And in this light foreground, you see they built a mammoth trap, and this poor old mammoth was falling into a pit, you see. And all these people around him are about to grab him, you see. And well, you see, those are the ones who… the quality of understanding, which goes with all the… it’s not just the mathematician doing some mathematics. This understanding quality is something else, which has been a tremendous advantage to us. Not just to us. See, I don’t think consciousness is limited to humans.

莱克斯： 你能尝试定义“理解”吗？或者至少，围绕着它的定义做一些阐释？

罗杰： 嗯，我通常不想过多地谈论这个，因为它是一个非常难以捉摸的概念。它有点像跳出当前的思维框架，从一个更高的视角来审视问题，而且它必须是……你看，它也必须是某种对我们远古祖先有价值的东西。因为我曾经……我曾经画过一幅漫画，来表达我
的想法……在漫画的前景中，你看到一位数学家正在研究某个数学定理，这个定理中有一些……我们先不谈细节。他正努力证明这个定理，但他躲在灌木丛中，即将被一只剑齿虎吃掉。在漫画的远景中，你看到他的同伴们正在建造房屋、种植庄稼、驯养动物。在近景中，你看到他们建造了一个捕猎猛犸象的陷阱，一只可怜的老猛犸象掉进了陷阱里，周围的人正准备抓住它。嗯，你看，那些能够……理解的能力，它伴随着所有……不仅仅是数学家在研究数学，这种理解的能力是其他的东西，它曾经是——现在仍然是——人类的一项巨大优势，不仅仅是对人类而言，你看，我不认为意识是人类独有的。

Lex: That’s the interesting question: at which point, if it is indeed connected to the evolutionary process, at which point is it picked up?

Roger: Yes, it’s a very hard question. It’s certainly… I don’t think it’s primates, you know. You see these pictures of African hunting dogs and how they can plan amongst themselves how to catch the antelopes, in some of these David Attenborough films. I think this probably was one of them. And you can see they’re hunting dogs, and they divide themselves into two groups, and they go in two routes—two different routes. One of them goes and they sort of hide next to the river, and the other group goes around, and they start yelping at these… and bark, I guess, whatever noise hunting dogs do… the antelopes, and they sort of round them up, and they chase them in the direction of the river, and there the other ones are just waiting for them just to get… because when they get to the river, it slows them down, and so they pounce on them. So they’ve obviously planned this all out somehow. I have no idea how, and there is some element of conscious planning, as far as I can see. I don’t think it’s just some kind of… there’s so much of AI these days, they call bottom-up systems, is it?

莱克斯： 这是一个有趣的问题：如果意识确实与进化过程相关，那么它是在哪个阶段出现的呢？

罗杰： 是的，这是一个非常难的问题。当然……我不认为是灵长类动物，你知道，你在大卫·爱登堡的一些纪录片中可以看到非洲野犬，以及它们是如何互相配合来捕捉羚羊的。我记得有一部纪录片就讲了这个。你可以看到，这些野犬会分成两组，沿着两条不同的路线包抄羚羊。其中一组会埋伏在河边，另一组则绕到羚羊群的另一侧，开始对着它们大声吠叫——我想，无论野犬发出什么样的声音——它们把羚羊群赶起来，驱赶它们朝着河边的方向逃跑，埋伏在河边的野犬就在那里等着它们……因为羚羊跑到河边的时候速度会慢下来，这时野犬就会扑上去捕捉它们。很明显，它们事先计划好了这一切。我不知道它们是如何做到的，但在我看来，这其中包含了一些有意识的计划的成分。我不认为这仅仅是一种……现在人工智能领域有很多这样的东西，他们称之为自下而上的系统，对吧？

Lex: Yeah.

Roger: Where you have neural networks, and they… you give them a zillion different things to look at, and then they sort of… you can choose one thing over another, because it’s seen so many examples, and picks up on the wrong signals, which you may or may not even be conscious of.

莱克斯： 是的。

罗杰： 就是指神经网络，你给它们展示海量的数据，然后它们就能……它们可以从多个选项中选择一个，因为它已经见过了很多例子，并且能够识别出那些你可能意识到也可能没有意识到的细微差别。

Lex: And that doesn’t feel like understanding.

Roger: There’s no understanding in that whatsoever.

Lex: Well, you’re being a little bit human-centric, so…

Roger: Well…

Lex: What exactly…

Roger: I’m not with the dogs, am I? No.

Lex: No, you’re not. Sorry, I’m not… human-centric, but… I misspoke, biological-centric.

Roger: Yes.

莱克斯： 而且，那感觉不像真正的理解。

罗杰： 那里面没有任何理解可言。

莱克斯： 嗯，你的视角有点以人类为中心了，所以……

罗杰： 嗯……

莱克斯： 确切地说……

罗杰： 我又不是野狗，对吧？

莱克斯： 不，你不是。抱歉，我的意思是……我应该说“以生物为中心”，而不是“以人类为中心”。

罗杰： 是的。

Lex: Is it possible that consciousness would just look slightly different?

Roger: Well, I’m not saying it’s biological, because we don’t know.

Lex: Right.

Roger: I think other examples of… the elephants is a wonderful example too, where they… it’s just, I think this was about… that’s number one… where the elephants have to go from one part of the country to another, and at a certain point, they make a detour, and they went off in this big detour. All the troop came with her, and this is where her sister had died, and there were her bones lying around. And they go and pick up the bones, and they hand them around, and they caress the bones, and then they put them back, and they all go back again.

莱克斯： 是否有可能，其他生物的意识只是表现形式与人类略有不同？

罗杰： 嗯，我并不是说意识一定是生物性的，因为我们还不确定。

莱克斯： 没错。

罗杰： 我认为其他的例子……大象也是一个很好的例子，它们……我记得……那是一个……大象群需要从一个地方迁徙到另一个地方，但在途中，它们绕道而行，绕了一个很大的圈子。所有的大象都跟着母象一起去了那个地方，那是它姐姐死去的地方，那里还留着它的骨头。它们走到骨头旁边，把骨头捡起来，互相传递，抚摸着骨头，然后把骨头放回原处，最后一起离开了那里。

Lex: How am I doing? That’s so interesting.

Roger: I mean, there’s something going on. There’s no clear connection with natural selection. There’s just some deep feeling going on there, which has to do with their conscious experience. And I think it’s something that overall is advantageous in natural selection, but not directly to do with natural selection.

莱克斯： 我说的对吗？这太有意思了。

罗杰： 我的意思是，那里肯定发生了一些非同寻常的事情。它与自然选择没有明显的联系，那里只是存在着某种深层的感情，这与它们的意识体验有关。我认为，这种行为总体上对自然选择是有利的，但它与自然选择没有直接的因果关系。

Lex: I like that there’s something going on.

Roger: There’s something going on there.

Lex: Yeah. Like I told you, I’m Russian, so I tend to romanticize all things of this nature. That it’s not merely cold, hard computation.

Roger: Perhaps I could just slightly answer your question. You were asking me what is it… there’s something about sort of standing back and thinking about your own thought processes. I mean, there is something like that in the Gödel thing, because it’s just you’re not following the rules. You’re standing back and thinking about the rules. And so there is something that… you might say, you think about… you’re doing something, and then you think, “What the hell am I doing?” And you sort of stand back and think about what it is that’s making you think in such a way.

莱克斯： 我喜欢“那里肯定发生了一些非同寻常的事情”这种说法。

罗杰： 是的，那里肯定发生了一些非同寻常的事情。

莱克斯： 是的。就像我告诉你的，我是俄罗斯人，所以我倾向于用浪漫的眼光看待所有这类现象，我认为它不仅仅是冷冰冰的计算。

罗杰： 也许我可以稍微回答一下你之前的问题。你问我理解是什么……它有点像跳出当前的思维框架，反思你自己的思维过程。我的意思是，哥德尔定理中也包含了类似的思想，因为你并不是在简单地遵循规则，而是跳出规则之外，反思规则本身。所以，这其中包含了某种……你可能会说，你正在做某件事，然后你会突然想到，“我到底在做什么？”这时你会停下来，反思是什么让你以这种方式思考。

Lex: Just take a step back outside the game you’ve been playing.

Roger: Yeah, you back up, and you think about… yeah, you’re just not playing the game anymore. You’re thinking about what the hell you’re doing in playing this game.

Lex: And that’s somehow…

Roger: It’s not very precise, descriptive, but…

Lex: Somehow it feels very true, that that’s somehow understanding.

Roger: Yes.

Lex: This kind of reflection.

Roger: A reflection, yes.

Lex: Yeah.

莱克斯： 就像跳出你一直在玩的游戏，从旁观者的角度来观察它。

罗杰： 是的，你退后一步，思考……是的，你不再参与游戏了，你开始思考你玩这个游戏的意义何在。

莱克斯： 而且，这在某种程度上……

罗杰： 这种说法不是很精确，也不足以描述它的本质，但……

莱克斯： 不知为何，它让人感觉很真实，这似乎就是理解的本质。

罗杰： 是的。

莱克斯： 这种反思。

罗杰： 是的，反思。

莱克斯： 是的。

Roger: There is some… it’s a bit hard to put your finger on, but there is something there which I think maybe could be unearthed at some point and see this is really what’s going on, why conscious beings

have this advantage, what it is that gives them an advantage. And I think it goes way back. I don’t think we’re talking about the hunting dogs and the elephants. It’s pretty clear that octopuses have the same sort of quality.

罗杰： 这其中包含了某种……它有点难以捉摸，但我相信那里确实存在着某种东西，也许在将来的某个时刻，我们能够揭开它的面纱，并且明白这到底是怎么回事，为什么有意识的生物会拥有这种优势，是什么赋予了它们这种优势。我认为，这种能力可以追溯到很久以前，我们谈论的不仅仅是野狗和大象，很明显，章鱼也拥有类似的能力。

Lex: And we call it consciousness.

Roger: Yeah, I think so. I’ve seen enough examples of the way that they behave, and the evolution route is completely different. Does it go way back to some common ancestor, or did it come separately?

莱克斯： 我们称之为意识。

罗杰： 是的，我认为是这样。我已经看到了足够多的例子，它们的某些行为表明它们也具备这种能力，而且它们的进化路径与我们完全不同。这究竟是源于某个共同的祖先，还是它们各自独立进化出来的呢？

Lex: My hope is it’s something simple, but the hard question is if there’s a hardware prerequisite, you know. We have to develop some kind of hardware mechanisms in our computers. Like, basically, as you suggest—I’ll get to in a second—we kind of have to throw away the computer as we know it today, the deterministic machines we know today, in order to create it.

Roger: I mean, why… my hope, of course, is not, but…

莱克斯： 我希望意识的机制是简单的，但问题是，它是否存在着硬件方面的先决条件，你知道，我们必须在计算机中开发出某种硬件机制。就像你所说的——我稍后会详细讨论这一点——我们可能需要彻底抛弃我们今天所知道的计算机，那些确定性的机器，才能创造出真正的意识。

罗杰： 我的意思是，为什么……当然，我希望不是这样，但……

Lex: Well, I should go really back to the story, which in a sense I haven’t finished, because I went to these three courses, you see, when I was a graduate student. And so I started to think, okay, I’m really… I’m pretty… what you might call a materialist in the sense of thinking that there’s no kind of mystical or something around which comes in from who knows where.

莱克斯： 好吧，我应该回到之前的话题，我还没有说完，因为你看，当我还是一个研究生时，我参加了那三门课程。所以我开始思考，好吧，我确实是……我相当……你可能会说我是一个唯物主义者，因为我认为不存在任何神秘主义的东西，或者来自未知领域的某种力量。

Lex: You’re still that through your life, you…

Roger: I don’t like the word materialist because this is just… we know what material is, and that is what it is.

莱克斯： 你现在仍然坚持这种观点吗？

罗杰： 我不喜欢“唯物主义者”这个词，因为它……我们知道物质是什么，它就是物质。

Lex: It’s a bad word because…

Roger: There’s no mystical… it’s not some mystical something which is not treatable by science.

莱克斯： 这是一个不好的词，因为……

罗杰： 不存在神秘主义……它不是某种无法用科学方法来研究的神秘事物。

Lex: It’s so beautifully put. Just to pause on that for a second, you’re a materialist, but you acknowledge that we don’t really know what the material is.

Roger: That’s right. I mean, I like to call myself a scientist, but…

Lex: So beautifully put, yes.

Roger: But it means that… yes, you see, the question goes on here. So I began thinking, okay, if consciousness or understanding is something which is not a computational process, what can it be? And I knew enough from my undergraduate work. I knew about Newtonian mechanics, and I knew how basically you could put it on a computer. There is a fundamental issue which is important or not, that computation depends upon discrete things, using discrete elements, whereas the physical laws depend on the continuum. Now, is this something to do with it? Is it the fact that we use the continuum in our physics, and if we model our physical system, we use discrete systems like ordinary computers? I came to the view that that’s probably not it. I might have to retract on that someday, but the view was, no, you can get close enough. It’s not altogether clear, I have to say, but you can get close enough. And, you know, I went to this course by Bondi on general relativity, and I thought, well, you can put that on a computer, because that was a long time before people… and I’ve sort of grown up with this, how people have done better and better calculations, and they can work out black… about black holes, and they can then work out how black holes can interact with each other, spiral around, and what kind of gravitational waves can happen. There’s still a very impressive piece of computational work, how you can actually work out the shapes of those signals. And now we have LIGO seeing these signals, and they say, yeah, there’s these black holes spiraling through each other. This is just a vindication of the power of computation in describing Einstein’s general relativity. So in that case, we can get close with computation. We can get close to our understanding of the physics.

莱克斯： 说得太棒了。稍微停顿一下，你是个唯物主义者，但你也承认我们并不真正理解物质的本质。

罗杰： 没错。我的意思是，我更喜欢称自己为科学家，但……

莱克斯： 是的，说得太棒了。

罗杰： 但这意味着……是的，你看，问题就来了。所以我开始思考，好吧，如果意识或者理解不是一个计算过程，那它究竟是什么？我从本科学习中获得了一些知识，我了解牛顿力学，也知道如何用计算机来模拟它。这里有一个 fundamental 的问题，那就是，计算依赖于离散的事物，使用离散的元素，而物理定律则依赖于连续统（continuum）。那么，问题出在这里吗？是因为我们在物理学中使用连续统，而我们在模拟物理系统时使用的是像普通计算机这样的离散系统吗？我当时的观点是，这可能不是问题所在。我将来可能会改变看法，但我当时的观点是，不，你可以用离散系统来逼近连续统，虽然我不敢说这绝对可行，但至少你可以无限接近它。而且，你知道，我当时去上了邦迪教授的广义相对论课程，我当时想，好吧，你可以用计算机来模拟它，因为那是在……很久以前，而且我是在这个领域中成长起来的，我见证了人们如何进行越来越精确的计算，他们可以计算出黑……关于黑洞的一切，他们可以计算出黑洞如何相互作用、如何螺旋运动，以及会产生什么样的引力波。这仍然是一项令人印象深刻的计算工作，你如何才能真正地计算出这些信号的形状。现在我们有了 LIGO，它能够探测到这些信号，科学家们说，是的，这些黑洞确实在相互螺旋运动。这证明了计算在描述爱因斯坦广义相对论方面的强大能力。所以，在这种情况下，我们可以通过计算来接近真相，接近我们对物理学的理解。

Lex: You can get very, very close.

Roger: Now, is that close enough, you see? And then I went to this course by Dirac, you see. I think it was the very first lecture that he gave, and he was talking about the superposition principle. And he said, if you have a particle, you usually think a particle can be over here or over there, but in quantum mechanics, it can be over here and over there at the same time. And you have these states which involve a superposition, in some sense, of different locations for that particle. And then he got out his piece of chalk. Some people say he broke it into two as a kind of illustration of how the piece of chalk might be over here and over there at the same time. And he was talking about this, and my mind wandered. I don’t remember what he said. Well, I can remember, he just moved on to the next topic and said something about energy. He mentioned which I had no idea what it had to do with anything. And so I’d been struck with this and worried about it ever since. It’s probably just as well I didn’t hear his explanation, because it was probably one of these things to calm me down and not worry about it anymore. In my case, I’ve worried about it ever since. So I thought, maybe that’s the catch. There is something in quantum mechanics where these superpositions become one or the other, and that’s not part of quantum mechanics. There’s something missing in the theory. The theory is incomplete. It’s not just incomplete. It’s in a sense… that’s not quite right, because if you follow the equation, the basic equation of quantum mechanics, that’s the Schrödinger equation. You could put that on a computer too. There are lots of difficulties about how many parameters you have to put in and so on. It can be very tricky, but nevertheless, it is a computational process, modulo this question about the continuum that I was talking about before. But it’s not clear that makes any difference.

莱克斯： 是的，你可以无限接近真相。

罗杰： 但问题是，这足够接近吗？你看？然后我去上了狄拉克教授的课程。我记得那是他的第一堂课，他当时在讲叠加原理。他说，如果你有一个粒子，你通常认为它可以在这里，或者在那里，但在量子力学中，它可以同时在这里，也在那里。也就是说，存在着一种状态，它包含了粒子在不同位置的叠加。然后他拿出一支粉笔，有人说他把它掰成了两半，以此来演示粉笔如何可以同时存在于两个地方。他当时在讲这个，但我走神了，我不记得他具体说了些什么。嗯，我只记得他接着讲了下一个话题，关于能量的。他提到了一些我完全不明白的东西，我不知道它与我们讨论的问题有什么关系。从那以后，我就一直被这个问题困扰着，并且一直在思考它。也许我最好还是没有听到他的解释，因为那可能会让我平静下来，不再去想这个问题。但就我而言，我一直都在思考这个问题。所以我想，也许问题就出在这里。在量子力学中，叠加态最终会坍缩成其中一种状态，但这种坍缩过程本身并不属于量子力学的范畴。量子力学理论中缺少了一些东西，这个理论是不完备的。它不仅仅是不完备的，它在某种意义上……这种说法并不完全准确，因为如果你遵循量子力学的基本方程式，也就是薛定谔方程式，你会发现你也可以把它写成计算机程序。当然，这其中也存在很多困难，例如，你需要输入多少参数，等等。这可能会非常复杂，但无论如何，它本质上仍然是一个计算过程，除了我之前提到的关于连续统的问题之外。但目前还不清楚这是否会造成什么影响。

Lex: So our theories of quantum mechanics may be missing the same element that the universal Turing machine is missing about consciousness?

Roger: Yes, yeah, this is the view I held, is that you need a theory, and that what people call the reduction of the state or the collapse of the wave function, which you have to have. Otherwise, quantum mechanics doesn’t relate to the world we see. To make it relate to the world we see, you’ve got to break the quantum… you’ve got to break the Schrödinger equation. Schrödinger himself was absolutely bothered by this idea. He was saying it’s wrong—his own equation! I mean, that’s why he introduced this famous Schrödinger’s cat as a thought experiment. He was really saying, look, this is where my equation leads you into. There’s something wrong, something we haven’t understood, which is basically fundamental. And so I was trying to put all these things together and said, well, it’s got to be the non-computability that comes in there. And I also can’t quite remember right when I thought this, but it’s when gravity is involved in quantum mechanics. It’s the combination of those two. And that’s at that point when we have good reasons to believe… this came much later, but I have good reason to believe that the principles of general relativity and those of quantum mechanics… most particularly, it’s the basic principle of equivalence, which goes back to Galileo. If you fall freely, you eliminate the gravitational field. So you imagine Galileo dropping his big rock and his little rock from the Leaning Tower. Whether he actually ever did that or not is pretty irrelevant. And as the rocks fall to the ground, you’d have a little insect sitting on one of them, looking at the other one, and it seems to think, oh, there’s no gravity here. Of course, it hits the ground and then realizes something different is going on. But when it’s in free fall, the gravity has been eliminated. Galileo understood that very beautifully. He gives these wonderful examples of fireworks, and you see the fireworks, and they explode, and you see the sphere of sparkling fireworks. This remains a sphere as it goes up, as though there were no gravity. So he understood that principle, but he couldn’t make a theory out of it. Einstein came along, used exactly the same principle, and that’s the basis of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Now, there is a conflict. This is something I did much, much later, so this wasn’t in those days. This was much later. You can see there is a basic conflict between the principle of superposition that Dirac was talking about and the principle of general covariance… well, the principle of equivalence, gravitational fields equivalent to an acceleration.

莱克斯： 所以，我们关于量子力学的理论可能缺少了与通用图灵机关于意识所缺少的同一个元素？

罗杰： 是的，是的，这就是我的观点，我们需要一个新的理论，它能够解释人们所说的状态约简，或者波函数坍缩，这是我们必须解决的问题，否则量子力学就无法解释我们所观察到的世界。为了让它与我们所观察到的世界相一致，你必须打破量子……你必须打破薛定谔方程式。薛定谔本人也对这个问题感到非常困扰，他认为他的方程式是错误的——他自己的方程式！我的意思是，这就是为什么他会提出著名的“薛定谔的猫”思想实验。他其实是在说，看，这就是我的方程式导致的结果，这其中一定存在着错误，存在着我们尚未理解的东西，而这个问题是根本性的。所以我试图将所有这些问题综合起来，然后发现，问题的关键在于不可计算性。我记不清我是什么时候想到这一点的，但它与引力在量子力学中的作用有关，是这两者之间的联系。就在那时，我们有充分的理由相信……这是很久以后的事了，但我现在有充分的理由相信，广义相对论的原理和量子力学的原理……尤其是等效原理，它可以追溯到伽利略。如果你处于自由落体状态，你就能消除引力场。你可以想象伽利略从比萨斜塔上扔下他的大石头和小石头的场景，他是否真的做过这件事并不重要。当石头落向地面时，你会看到一只小昆虫坐在其中一块石头上，看着另一块石头，它会想，哦，这里没有引力。当然，当它撞到地面时，它就会意识到事情并非如此。但当它处于自由落体状态时，引力确实消失了。伽利略非常清楚地理解了这一点，他用烟花来举例说明，你可以看到烟花，它们爆炸了，然后你看到一个闪闪发光的球形烟花，它在上升的过程中仍然保持着球形，就好像没有引力一样。所以，伽利略理解了这个原理，但他没有把它发展成一个完整的理论。后来爱因斯坦出现了，他使用了完全相同的原理，这就是爱因斯坦广义相对论的基础。现在，我们遇到了一个冲突，这是我很久以后才意识到的，这不是我当时的想法，而是很久以后的事了。你可以看到，狄拉克所说的叠加原理与广义协变原理……或者说等效原理，引力场等效于加速度之间存在着根本性的冲突。

Lex: Can you pause for a second? What is the principle of equivalence?

Roger: It’s this Galileo principle that we can eliminate, at least locally. You have to be in a small neighborhood because, you see, if you have people dropping rocks all around the world somewhere, you can’t get rid of it all at once. But in the local neighborhood, you can eliminate the gravitational field by falling freely with it. And we now see this with astronauts, and they don’t… you know, the Earth is right there. You can see the great globe of the Earth right beneath them, but they don’t care about it. They… as far as they’re concerned, there’s no gravity. They fall freely within the gravitational field, and that gets rid of the gravitational field, and that’s the principle of equivalence.

莱克斯： 你能稍微解释一下吗？什么是等效原理？

罗杰： 这就是伽利略提出的等效原理，它指的是我们至少可以在局部消除引力场。你必须在一个很小的范围内，因为你看，如果有人在世界各地同时扔下石头，你不可能一下子消除所有的引力。但在一个局部的范围内，你可以通过自由落体运动来消除引力场。我们现在可以在宇航员身上看到这一点，他们……你知道，地球就在那里，你可以看到他们脚下的地球，但他们并不在意。他们……就他们而言，那里没有引力。他们在引力场中自由落体，这就消除了引力场，这就是等效原理。

Lex: So what’s the contradiction? What’s the tension with superposition?

Roger: Well… so we just need to backtrack for a second just to see if we can weave a thread through it all.

So you started to think about consciousness as potentially needing some of the same, not mystical, but some of the same imagination.

莱克斯： 那么，矛盾点在哪里？叠加原理与等效原理之间存在怎样的冲突？

罗杰： 嗯……我们先回顾一下之前的讨论，看看能不能把这些问题都串联起来。

所以，你开始思考，意识可能需要一些……不是神秘主义的东西，而是某种类似于想象力的东西。

Roger: See, this is a complicated story, so, you know, people think, “Oh, I’m drifting away from the point” or something, but I think it is a complicated story. So what I’m trying to say—I mean, I try to put it in a nutshell, it’s not so easy. I’m trying to say that whatever consciousness is, it’s not a computation. It’s not a physical process which can be described by computation, but it nevertheless could be.

罗杰： 你看，这是一个很复杂的问题，所以，你知道，人们可能会想，“哦，他跑题了”什么的，但我认为这个问题本来就很复杂。所以我想说的是——我尝试用最简洁的语言来表达，但这并不容易——我想说的是，无论意识是什么，它都不是计算，它不是一个可以用计算来描述的物理过程，但它仍然可能是某种物理过程。

Lex: So one of the interesting models that you’ve proposed is the orchestrated objective reduction.

Roger: Yeah, that’s going from there, you see. So I say I have no idea. So I wrote this book through my scientific career. I thought, you know, when I’m retired, I’ll have enough time to write a sort of a popular book in which I will explain my ideas and puzzles that I like… beautiful things about physics and mathematics and this puzzle about computability and consciousness and so on. And in the process of writing this book… well, I thought I’d do it when I was retired. I didn’t actually… I didn’t wait that long because there was a radio discussion between Edward Fredkin and Marvin Minsky, and they were talking about what computers could do. And they were imagining entering a big room. They imagined entering this big room, and at the other end of the room, two computers were talking to each other. And as you walk up to the computers, they will have communicated to each other more ideas, concepts, things, than the entire human race had ever communicated. So I thought, well, I know where you’re coming from, but I just don’t believe you. There’s something missing. It’s not that. So I thought, well, I should write my book, and so I did. It was roughly the same time Stephen Hawking was writing his Brief History of Time.

莱克斯： 所以，你提出的一个很有意思的模型叫做“协调客观约简”（orchestrated objective reduction）。

罗杰： 是的，这就是从那里开始的，你看，我说过我不知道意识是什么。所以我决定写一本书，记录我的科学生涯。我当时想，你知道，当我退休之后，我将有足够的时间来写一本面向大众的科普书籍，在书中我会解释我的想法，以及我感兴趣的那些难题……关于物理学和数学的那些美妙的理论，以及关于可计算性和意识的难题，等等。在写这本书的过程中……嗯，我本来以为我会等到退休之后再动笔，但我没有……我没有等那么久，因为我听到了一段广播节目，爱德华·弗雷德金和马文·明斯基在节目中讨论计算机的能力。他们设想了一个场景，他们走进一个很大的房间，在房间的另一端，两台计算机正在互相“交谈”。当你走到计算机旁边时，你会发现，它们之间已经交流了比整个人类历史上所有交流过的信息还要多的想法、概念和事物。我当时就想，嗯，我理解你们的观点，但我并不认同。你们忽略了一些东西，意识并非如此。所以我想，好吧，我应该现在就写这本书，于是我就写了。那段时间，史蒂芬·霍金也正在写他的《时间简史》。

Lex: And The Emperor’s New Mind, that’s the book you’re talking about?

Roger: That’s right.

Lex: Both are incredible books, The Brief History of Time and The Emperor’s New Mind.

Roger: Yes, it was quite interesting because he got… he told me he’d got some Carl Sagan, I think, to write that foreword. I thought, good gosh, what am I going to do? I’m not going to get anywhere unless I get somebody, so I know Martin Gardner. So I wonder if he’d do it, so he did. And he did a very nice foreword.

莱克斯： 你说的就是《皇帝的新脑》这本著作？

罗杰： 没错。

莱克斯： 这两本书都很棒，《时间简史》和《皇帝的新脑》。

罗杰： 是的，当时发生了一件很有趣的事情，因为霍金……他告诉我他请了卡尔·萨根，我想，来为他的书写序言。我当时想，天哪，我该怎么办？除非我也能找到一位名人来写序，否则我的书肯定卖不出去，我认识马丁·加德纳，所以我就想，也许可以请他来写序，结果他答应了。他写了一篇非常棒的序言。

Lex: So that’s an incredible book. And some of the same people you mentioned—Ed Fredkin, which I guess is of expert systems fame, and Minsky, of course, people know in the AI world—but they represent the artificial intelligence that do hope and dream that intelligence is…

Roger: And I’m thinking, well, you know, I see where they’re coming from, and they’re like from… it’s as I wrecked as I…

莱克斯： 那真是一本很棒的书。你提到的那些人——埃德·弗雷德金，我猜他是专家系统领域的先驱，当然还有明斯基，人工智能领域的领军人物——他们代表了那些相信，并且梦想人工智能能够……

罗杰： 我当时想，嗯，你知道，我理解他们的想法，他们就像……就像我之前……

Lex: Yeah, you’re right.

Roger: But that’s not my perspective, so I thought I had to say it. And as I was writing my book, you see, I thought, well, I don’t really know anything about neurophysiology. What am I doing writing this book? So I started reading up about neurophysiology, and I read… I think I’m trying to find out, well, how it is the nerve signals could possibly preserve quantum coherence. And all I read is that they’re sending electrical signals, which go along the nerves, create some effects through the brain. There’s no chance you can isolate it. So this is hopeless. So I come to the end of the book, and I more or less give up and just think of something which I didn’t believe in. This… maybe this is the way around it, but no. And then, you see, I thought, well, maybe this book will at least stimulate young people to do science or something. And I got all these letters from old people instead. They’re the only people who had time to read my book.

莱克斯： 是的，你说得对。

罗杰： 但那不是我的观点，所以我觉得我必须表达我自己的想法。你看，当我写那本书的时候，我突然想到，嗯，我其实对神经生理学一无所知，我为什么要写这本书？于是我开始阅读关于神经生理学的书籍，我读了……我想我当时在试图弄清楚，神经信号是如何保持量子相干性的。但我读到的只是，它们发送电信号，这些电信号沿着神经传递，在大脑中产生一些效应。你不可能把它孤立出来研究，所以，这条路走不通。所以当我写到书的结尾时，我基本上已经放弃了，我只是提出了一些我自己都不相信的假设。也许……也许这就是解决问题的办法，但我不这么认为。然后，你看，我想，好吧，也许这本书至少可以激励年轻人去研究科学。但结果我收到了很多来自老年人的来信，因为他们是唯一有时间读我的书的人。

Lex: Except for Stuart Hameroff.

Roger: Except for Stuart Hameroff. Stuart Hameroff wrote to me, and he said, “I think you’re missing something. You don’t know about microtubules, do you?” He didn’t put it quite like that, but that was more or less it. And he said, “This is what you really need to consider.” So I thought, oh my God, yes, that’s a much more promising structure.

莱克斯： 除了斯图尔特·哈梅罗夫。

罗杰： 除了斯图尔特·哈梅罗夫。斯图尔特·哈梅罗夫给我写了一封信，他说，“我认为你忽略了一些东西。你不知道微管（microtubules），对吧？”他的原话可能不是这样，但意思差不多。他说，“这才是你真正需要研究的东西。”我当时就想，我的天哪，是的，这确实是一个更有希望的研究方向。

Lex: So, I mean, fundamentally, you were searching for the source of a non-computable source of consciousness within the human brain?

Roger: Yeah.

Lex: In the biology, and so…

Roger: In the biology, yes.

Lex: What are… if I may ask, what are microtubules?

Roger: Well, you see, I was ignorant in what… I never came across them in the books I looked at. I read rather superficially, which is true, but I didn’t know about microtubules. Stuart… I think one of the things that impressed him about them is when you see pictures of mitosis, that’s a cell dividing, and you see all the chromosomes. And the chromosomes get… they all get aligned, and then they get pulled apart, and so that as the cell divides, half the chromosomes go, you know, half are divided into the two parts, and they go to different ways. And what is it that’s pulling them apart? Well, those are these little things called microtubules. And so he starts to get interested in them, and he formed the view—well, he was… his day job, or night job, whatever you call it, is to put people to sleep, except he doesn’t like calling it sleep because it’s different. General anesthetics, in a reversible way, so you want to make sure that they don’t experience the pain that would otherwise be something that they feel, and consciousness is turned off for a while, and it can be turned back on again. So it’s crucial that you can turn it off and turn it on. And what do you do when you’re doing that? What do general anesthetic gases do? And see, he formed the view that it’s the microtubules that they affect. And the details of why he formed that view is not… wasn’t clear to me. But there’s an interesting story. He keeps talking about it, but I found this very exciting because I thought these structures, these little tubes which inhabit pretty well all cells—not just neurons, apart from red blood cells—they inhabit pretty well all the other cells in the body. But they’re not all the same kind. You get different kinds of microtubules, and the ones that excited me the most—and this is… may still not be totally clear—but the ones that excited me most were the ones that… the only ones that I knew about at the time, because they were very, very symmetrical structures. And I had reason to believe that these very symmetrical structures would be much better at preserving a quantum state—quantum coherence—preserving the thing without… you just need to preserve certain degrees of freedom without them leaking into the environment. Once they leak into the environment, you’re lost. So you ought to preserve these quantum states at a level where the state reduction process comes in, and that’s where I think the non-computability comes in. And it’s the measure process in quantum mechanics that’s going on.

莱克斯： 所以，我的意思是，本质上，你是在人类的大脑中寻找一种不可计算的意识来源？

罗杰： 是的。

莱克斯： 在生物结构中，所以……

罗杰： 是的，在生物结构中。

莱克斯： 请问……什么是微管？

罗杰： 嗯，你看，我在这方面很无知……我在我读过的那些书中从未见过关于微管的描述。我读书比较粗心，这是事实，但我确实不了解微管。斯图尔特……我认为，让他印象深刻的一件事是，当你观察有丝分裂的过程时，也就是细胞分裂的过程，你会看到所有的染色体。染色体……它们会排列成一行，然后被拉开，这样当细胞分裂时，一半的染色体进入一个子细胞，另一半进入另一个子细胞，它们朝着不同的方向移动。那么，是什么力量把它们拉开的呢？就是那些叫做微管的小东西。于是他开始对微管产生兴趣，他认为——嗯，他……他的工作，或者说他的研究方向，是麻醉，但他不喜欢把它叫做“睡眠”，因为它与睡眠不同。他研究的是全身麻醉，一种可逆的过程，所以你需要确保病人在麻醉状态下不会感觉到疼痛，意识会被暂时关闭，并且可以再次恢复。所以，至关重要的是，你能够控制意识的开关。那么，你是如何做到这一点的呢？麻醉气体是如何起作用的呢？你看，他认为麻醉气体直接作用于微管，但我并不清楚他为什么会形成这种观点。但这是一个很有意思的故事，他一直在谈论这件事，我对此感到非常兴奋，因为我认为这些结构，这些存在于几乎所有细胞中的微管——不仅仅是神经元，除了红细胞之外——它们存在于人体的所有其他细胞中。但它们并不都是同一种类，微管也分很多种，而最让我兴奋的是那些……这……可能现在还不太清楚——但最让我兴奋的是那些……我当时知道的唯一的一种微管，因为它们的结构非常对称。我有理由相信，这些高度对称的结构更能够维持量子态——量子相干性——维持……你只需要维持某些自由度，防止它们泄漏到环境中，一旦它们泄漏到环境中，你就无法再维持量子态了。所以，你必须在状态约简过程发生的层面上维持这些量子态，我认为，这就是不可计算性出现的地方，这与量子力学中的测量过程有关。

Lex: So something about the measurement process, what’s going on, something about the structure on the microtubules…

Roger: Yes.

Lex: Your intuition says maybe there’s something here. Maybe this kind of structure allows for the mystery.

Roger: Yes, it just struck me that… partly it was the symmetry because there is a feature of symmetry, you can preserve quantum coherence much better with symmetrical structures. There’s a good reason for that, and that impressed me a lot. I didn’t know the difference between the A lattice and B lattice at that time, which could be important. Now, that could be something this year which isn’t talked about much, but that’s in some sense details.

莱克斯： 所以，与测量过程有关，与微管的结构有关……

罗杰： 是的。

莱克斯： 你的直觉告诉你，这里可能隐藏着我们想要寻找的答案，也许这种结构能够解释意识的奥秘。

罗杰： 是的，我只是突然想到……部分原因是对称性，因为对称结构有一个特点，它能够更好地维持量子相干性，这其中存在着合理的解释，并且给我留下了深刻的印象。当时我还不知道 A 型晶格和 B 型晶格之间的区别，但这可能很重要。现在，这一点很少被人提及，但在某种意义上，这只是细节问题。

Lex: So if we could take a step back just to say, for those who are not familiar, this was called the orchestrated objective reduction idea or OrkoR, which is a biological philosophy of mind that postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons. So that has to do with your search for where… where is it coming from? So that’s counter to the notion that consciousness may arise from the computation performed by the synapses.

莱克斯： 所以，我们可以稍微总结一下，为那些不熟悉这个概念的人解释一下，你提出的这个理论叫做“协调客观约简”（orchestrated objective reduction），或者简称为 OrkoR，它是一种关于意识的生物学哲学，它假设意识起源于神经元内部的量子层面。所以，这与你一直在探索的问题有关，意识来自哪里？它与那种认为意识是由突触之间的计算产生的观点相矛盾。

Roger: Yes, the key point here… sometimes people say it’s because it’s quantum mechanical. It’s not just that, see. It’s more outrageous than that, you see. This is one reason I think we’re so far off from it, because we don’t even know the physics right, you see. It’s not just quantum mechanics. People say, “Oh, you know, quantum systems and biological structures.” No, well, he’s starting to see that some basic biological systems do depend on quantum… I mean, look, the first place, all of chemistry is quantum mechanics. People got used to that, so they don’t count that, so you say let’s not count chemistry. We’ve sort of got the hang of that, I think. But you have quantum effects, which are not just chemical, in photosynthesis. And this is one of the striking things in the last several years, that photosynthesis

seems to be a basically quantum process, which is not simply chemical. It’s using quantum mechanics in a very basic way. So you can start saying, “Oh, well, if photosynthesis is based on quantum mechanics, why not… you have neurons and things like that, maybe there’s something which is a bit like photosynthesis in that respect.” But what I’m saying is even more outrageous than that, because those things are talking about conventional quantum mechanics. Now, my argument says that conventional quantum mechanics, if you’re just following the Schrödinger equation, that’s still computational. So you’ve got to go beyond that. So you’ve got to go to where quantum mechanics goes wrong, in a certain sense. You have to be a little bit careful about that because the way people do quantum mechanics is a sort of mixture of two different processes. One of them is the Schrödinger equation, which is an equation Schrödinger wrote down, and it tells you how the state of a system evolves. It evolves according to this equation, completely deterministic. But it evolves into ridiculous situations, and this was what Schrödinger was very much pointing out with his cat. He said you follow my equation—that’s Schrödinger’s equation—and you could say that you have two cats: a cat which is dead and alive at the same time. That would be the evolution of the Schrödinger equation. It would lead to a state which is the cat being dead and alive at the same time. And he’s more or less saying, this is an absurdity. People nod, say, “Oh, well, Schrödinger said you couldn’t have a cat that’s dead and alive.” It’s not that, you see. He was saying this is an absurdity. There’s something missing. And that the reduction of the state or the collapse of the wave function or whatever it is, is something which has to be understood. It’s not following the Schrödinger equation. It’s not the way we conventionally do quantum mechanics. There’s something more than that. And it’s easy to quote authority here because Einstein… at least three of the greatest physicists of the 20th century who were very fundamental in developing quantum mechanics—Einstein, one of them; Schrödinger, another; Dirac, another. You have to look carefully at Dirac’s writing because he didn’t tend to say this out loud too much because he was very cautious about what he said. You find the right place, and you see… he says quantum mechanics is a provisional theory. We need something which explains the collapse of the wave function. We need to go beyond the theory we have now. I happen to be one of the kinds of people… there are many… there is a whole group of people, they’re all considered to be a bit, you know, bit mavericks, who believe that quantum mechanics needs to be modified. There’s a small minority of those people, which… really a minority, who think that the way in which it’s modified has to be with gravity. And there is an even smaller minority of those people who think it’s a particular way that I think it is, you see.

罗杰： 是的，关键在于……有些人会说，这是因为意识与量子力学有关。但不仅仅是如此，你看。它比那更离谱，你看。这就是我认为我们离解开意识的奥秘还很远的原因之一，因为我们甚至连物理学的基本原理都还没有完全搞清楚，你看。不仅仅是量子力学，人们会说，“哦，你知道，量子系统和生物结构。”不，嗯，他开始意识到，一些基本的生物系统确实依赖于量子……我的意思是，你看，首先，所有的化学反应都是基于量子力学的，人们已经习惯了这一点，所以他们不再把它当作一个问题，所以你说，我们先不考虑化学。我认为我们已经基本掌握了它的原理。但是，在光合作用中，你看到了量子效应，而且不仅仅是化学反应。这是近年来最令人震惊的发现之一，光合作用似乎是一个本质上基于量子的过程，它不仅仅是化学反应，它以一种非常 fundamental 的方式利用了量子力学。所以你可以说，“哦，嗯，如果光合作用是基于量子力学的，为什么不能……神经元也可能存在着类似的机制，也许它也以某种类似于光合作用的方式利用了量子力学。”但我想说的是，我的想法比那更激进，因为那些人所说的都是传统的量子力学。而我认为，传统的量子力学，如果你仅仅遵循薛定谔方程式，那仍然属于计算的范畴。所以你必须超越它，你必须找到量子力学出错的地方。你必须小心一点，因为人们研究量子力学的方式是将两种不同的过程混合在一起。其中之一是薛定谔方程式，这是薛定谔提出的一个方程式，它描述了一个系统的状态是如何演化的。系统的状态会根据这个方程式演化，完全是确定性的。但它会导致一些荒谬的结果，这就是薛定谔用他的猫来指出的问题。他说，如果你遵循我的方程式——也就是薛定谔方程式——你会得到两只猫：一只同时是死的，也是活的猫。这就是薛定谔方程式的演化结果，它会导致一种状态，即猫同时处于生和死的叠加态。他或多或少是在说，这是一个荒谬的结果，人们会点头说，“哦，嗯，薛定谔说你不可能拥有一只同时是死的也是活的猫。”你看，问题不在于此，他是在说，这是一个荒谬的结果，量子力学理论中缺少了一些东西。状态的约简，或者说波函数的坍缩，无论你如何称呼它，是我们必须理解的东西。它不遵循薛定谔方程式，也不符合我们传统上研究量子力学的方式，一定存在着某种我们尚未理解的机制。而且，很容易引用权威人士的观点来支持我的说法，因为爱因斯坦……至少有三位 20 世纪最伟大的物理学家，他们在发展量子力学方面做出了 fundamental 的贡献，他们也认为量子力学是不完备的，其中包括爱因斯坦、薛定谔和狄拉克。你必须仔细阅读狄拉克的著作，因为他很少公开表达他的这种观点，因为他对自己的言论非常谨慎。但如果你仔细阅读他的著作，你会发现……他说过，量子力学是一个 provisional 的理论，我们需要一个新的理论来解释波函数的坍缩，我们需要超越现有的量子力学理论。我碰巧属于……有很多人……有一大群人，他们都被认为是……你知道，有点特立独行，他们相信量子力学需要修正。在这些人中，有一小部分人……真的是一小部分人，他们认为修正量子力学的方式与引力有关。而在这部分人中，还有更少的人，他们相信量子力学的修正方式应该像我所想的那样，你看。

Lex: So those are the quantum gravity folks, or what’s…

Roger: Well, you see, quantum gravity is already not this because when you say quantum gravity, what you really mean is quantum mechanics applied to gravitational theory. So you say, let’s take this wonderful formalism of quantum mechanics and make gravity fit into it. So that is what quantum gravity is meant to be. Now, I’m saying you’ve got to be more even-handed, that gravity affects the structure of quantum mechanics too. It’s not just you quantize gravity; you’ve got to gravitize quantum mechanics. And it’s a two-way thing. But then, when you even get started, so that you’re saying, and we have to figure out totally new ideas, indirectly…

莱克斯： 所以，这些人都是研究量子引力（quantum gravity）的，或者……

罗杰： 嗯，你看，量子引力并不是这样，因为当你谈论量子引力时，你实际上指的是将量子力学应用于引力理论，也就是说，我们采用现有的量子力学体系，然后让引力理论融入其中，这就是人们对量子引力的理解。但我认为，你应该更加全面地看待这个问题，引力也会影响量子力学的结构，不仅仅是你对引力量子化，你还需要对量子力学进行“引力化”。这是一个双向的影响。但即使你这样做了，你仍然是在说，我们必须找到全新的想法，间接地……

Lex: Yes.

Roger: It’s… you’re stuck. I don’t have a theory; that’s the trouble. So this is a big problem if you say, “Okay, well, what’s the theory?” I don’t know.

莱克斯： 是的。

罗杰： 它……你就卡住了，我没有一个完整的理论，这就是问题所在。所以，如果你问我，“好吧，那你的理论是什么？”我会告诉你，我不知道。

Lex: So we may be in the very early days, sort of…

Roger: It is in the very early days. But just making this point…

Lex: Yes.

Roger: You see, Stuart Hameroff says that it’s got to be a reduction of the state, and so, so let’s use it. The trouble is, Penrose doesn’t say that. Penrose says, well, I think that… no, no. We have no experiments as yet which shows that, yes, there are experiments which are being thought through and which I’m hoping will be performed. There is an experiment which is being developed by Dirk Bouwmeester, who is… I’ve known for a long time, who shares his time between Leiden in the Netherlands and Santa Barbara in the US. And he’s been working on an experiment which could perhaps demonstrate that quantum mechanics as we now understand it—if you don’t bring in the gravitational effects—has to be modified.

莱克斯： 所以，我们可能还处于研究的初期阶段……

罗杰： 是的，我们还处于研究的初期阶段。但我想说明的是……

莱克斯： 是的。

罗杰： 你看，斯图尔特·哈梅罗夫认为，意识的产生一定与状态的约简有关，所以，我们不妨采用这种观点。但问题是，彭罗斯并没有这么说。彭罗斯说，嗯，我认为……不，不。我们还没有任何实验证据来支持这种观点，是的，现在有一些实验正在计划之中，我希望它们能够顺利进行。德克·鲍迈斯特正在进行一项实验，他……我认识他很久了，他往返于荷兰的莱顿和美国的圣巴巴拉之间工作。他一直在进行一项实验，这个实验也许可以证明，我们现在理解的量子力学——如果你不考虑引力的影响——必须进行修正。

Lex: And then there’s also experiments that are underway that kind of look at the microtubule side of things to see if there’s… in the biology, you could see something like that. Could you briefly mention it because that’s really sort of one of the only experimental attempts in the very early days of even…

Roger: Yeah, I think there’s a very serious area here, which is what Stuart Hameroff is doing. And I think it’s very important. One of the few places that you can really get a bit of a handle on what consciousness is, is what turns it off. And when you’re thinking about general anesthetics, it’s very specific. These things turn consciousness off. What the hell do they do? Well, Stuart and a number of people who work with him and others happen to believe that the general anesthetics directly affect microtubules, and there is some evidence for this. I don’t know how strong it is and how watertight the case is, but I think there is some evidence pointing in that kind of direction. It’s not just an ordinary chemical process; there’s something quite different about it. And one of the main candidates is that these anesthetic gases do affect directly microtubules. And how strong that evidence is, I’m not in a position to say, but I think there is fairly impressive evidence.

莱克斯： 还有一些正在进行的实验，这些实验试图从微管的角度来研究这个问题，看看是否存在……在生物学领域，你是否观察到了类似的现象？你能简单介绍一下吗？因为这确实是早期为数不多的实验尝试之一，甚至……

罗杰： 是的，我认为这是一个非常重要的研究领域，斯图尔特·哈梅罗夫正在进行这方面的研究。我认为这项研究非常重要，因为了解意识本质的少数途径之一就是弄清楚是什么关闭了意识。当你思考全身麻醉的机制时，你会发现它非常特殊，麻醉剂能够关闭意识，它们究竟是如何做到的？嗯，斯图尔特，以及一些与他合作的研究人员，他们相信麻醉剂直接作用于微管，并且他们找到了一些证据来支持这种观点。我不知道这些证据有多么可靠，这个案例有多么严谨，但我认为确实有一些证据指向这个方向。它不仅仅是一个普通的化学反应，它一定存在着某种特殊的机制。其中一个主要的假设是，麻醉气体确实直接影响了微管的活动。我无法评价这些证据的可靠性，但我认为它们相当有说服力。

Lex: And the point is, the experiments are being undertaken with…

Roger: Yes, I mean, that is experimental… it’s a very clear direction where you can think of experiments which could indicate whether or not it’s really microtubules which the anesthetic gases directly affect.

Lex: That’s really exciting. One of the sad things is, from my outside perspective, it’s not… many people are working on this. So there’s a very… like, oh, Stuart, it even feels like there’s very few people are carrying the flag forward on this.

Roger: I think it’s… it’s not many in the sense it’s a minority, but it’s not zero anymore. You see, when we were originally serious, you know, we were just us and a few… few of our friends. There weren’t many people who think it, but it’s grown into one of the main viewpoints, yeah. There might be about four or five or six different views that people hold, and it’s one of them. So it’s considered as one of the possible lines of thinking.

莱克斯： 重点是，现在正在进行这方面的实验……

罗杰： 是的，我的意思是，这属于实验科学的范畴……这是一个非常明确的研究方向，你可以设计一些实验来验证麻醉气体是否真的直接影响了微管的活动。

莱克斯： 这真的很令人兴奋。但令人遗憾的是，从我这个外行的角度来看，似乎……没有多少人从事这方面的研究，所以……例如，斯图尔特，他给人的感觉是，只有很少的人在坚持这个方向。

罗杰： 我认为它……支持这种观点的人确实不多，它仍然属于少数派，但现在已经不再是零了。你看，当我们最初认真对待这个问题的时候，你知道，只有我们和几个……几个朋友，相信这种观点的人并不多，但现在它已经发展成为主流观点之一了。现在可能存在着四五种或者六种不同的观点，而我们的观点就是其中之一。所以，它被认为是一种很有希望的研究方向。

Lex: Yes. You describe physics theories as falling into one of three categories: the superb, the useful, or the tentative. I like those words; it’s a beautiful categorization. Do you think we’ll ever have a superb theory of intelligence and of consciousness?

Roger: We might. We’re a long way from it. I don’t think we’re even… whether in the tentative scale…

莱克斯： 是的。你曾经将物理学理论分为三类：superb（卓越的）、useful（有用的）和 tentative（尝试性的）。我喜欢这种分类方式，它非常精妙。你认为我们将来会拥有关于智能和意识的“卓越的”理论吗？

罗杰： 我们可能会。但我们离那一天还很遥远。我认为我们甚至还没有……无论是在“尝试性的”这个层面上……

Lex: You don’t think we’ve even entered the realm of tentative?

Roger: Probably not. No, I think… yeah, that’s right. You know, there’s so much controversy; we don’t have a clear view which is accepted by a majority. I mean, you say, yeah, people… most views are computational in one form or another. They think it’s some… but it’s not very clear because even the IIT people who I think of as computational, but I’ve heard them saying, they know consciousness is supposed to be not computation. I say, well, if it’s not computation, what the hell is it? What’s going on? What physical processes are going on which…

莱克斯： 你认为我们甚至还没有进入“尝试性的”这个阶段？

罗杰： 可能还没有。不，我认为……是的，没错。你知道，现在存在着很多争议，我们还没有一个被大多数人接受的清晰的观点。我的意思是，你说，是的，人们……大多数观点都认为意识是一种计算，以这种或那种形式。他们认为它是一种……但这种观点并不清晰，因为即使是那些我认为是计算主义者的 IIT（Integrated Information Theory，整合信息论）的支持者，我也听到他们说，他们知道意识不应该是计算。我会问他们，好吧，如果不是计算，那它究竟是什么？它是怎么产生的？它依赖于什么样的物理过程……

Lex: What does it mean for something to be computational then?

Roger: Well, there has to be a process which is… it’s very curious, the way the history has developed in quantum mechanics, because very early on, people thought there was something to do with consciousness, but it was almost the other way around, you see. You have to say, the Schrödinger equation says all these different alternatives happen all at once, and then when is it that only one of them happens? Well, one of the views which was quite commonly held by a few distinguished quantum physicists was, well, a conscious being looks at the system, becomes aware of it, and at that point, it becomes one or the other. That’s the role where consciousness is somehow actively reducing the state. My view is almost the exact opposite of that. It’s the state reduces itself in some way, in some non-computational way, which we don’t understand, we don’t have a proper theory of, and that is the building block of what consciousness is. So consciousness is the other way around. It depends on that choice which nature makes all the time when the state becomes one

thing or the other rather than the superposition of one and the other. And when that happens, there is what we’re saying now, an element of proto-consciousness takes place. Proto-consciousness is roughly speaking the building block out of which actual consciousness is constructed. So you have these proto-conscious elements, which are when the state decides to do one thing or the other, and that’s the thing which, when organized together…

莱克斯： 那么，什么叫做“计算”？

罗杰： 嗯，它必须是一个……量子力学的发展历史非常有趣，因为很早以前，人们就认为它与意识有关，但他们的理解几乎是相反的，你看。你必须明白，薛定谔方程式表明所有这些不同的可能性会同时发生，那么，是什么导致了最终只有一个可能性成为现实？嗯，一些杰出的量子物理学家普遍持有这样一种观点，一个有意识的观察者观察系统，意识到它的存在，在那一刻，系统的状态就坍缩成了一种确定的状态。在这种观点中，意识扮演着一种积极的角色，它导致了状态的约简。我的观点几乎与此完全相反，我认为状态会以某种方式，以某种非计算的方式自行约简，我们目前还不理解这种机制，也没有一个完整的理论来解释它，但我相信这就是意识的 building block。所以，意识的产生机制恰恰相反，它依赖于自然界一直在做出的选择，当状态从叠加态坍缩成一种确定的状态时，意识就产生了。当这种情况发生时，就出现了我们所说的“proto-consciousness”（原始意识）。简单地说，原始意识是构成真正意识的基本单元。所以，你拥有这些原始意识元素，当状态决定选择其中一种可能性时，这些元素就会被激活，然后，当它们被组织在一起时……

Lex: That’s the OR part in OrkoR.

Roger: That’s the OR part, at least, where one can see where one’s driving as a theory. You can say it’s the quantum choice of going this way or that way. But the ORK part, which is the orchestration of this, is much more mysterious. And how does the brain somehow orchestrate all these individual OR processes into a genuine, genuine, genuine conscious experience?

莱克斯： 这就是 OrkoR 中的 “OR”（objective reduction，客观约简）部分。

罗杰： 至少在“OR”这部分，我们可以理解这个理论的驱动力。你可以说，这是量子层面的选择，选择这条路，还是那条路。但“ORK”（orchestrated，协调）这部分，更加神秘。大脑究竟是如何将所有这些独立的 OR 过程协调起来，最终形成一个完整的意识体验的呢？

Lex: And it might be something that’s beautifully simple…

Roger: Could be.

Lex: …that we’re completely in the dark about.

Roger: Yeah. I think at the moment, it’s best… the thing… you know, we happily put the word ORK down there to say “orchestrated.” That’s even more unclear what that really means.

莱克斯： 也许它的机制非常简单……

罗杰： 有可能。

莱克斯： ……只是我们现在还完全不了解它。

罗杰： 是的，我认为目前，最好……你知道，我们很乐意用“ORK”来表示“协调”，但我们并不清楚它究竟意味着什么。

Lex: Just like the word material… orchestrated.

Roger: Yeah, yeah. We know, yes.

Lex: We’ve been dancing a little bit between the word intelligence or understanding and consciousness. Do you kind of see those as sitting in the same space of mystery?

Roger: Yes. You see, I tend to say you have understanding and intelligence and awareness, and somehow understanding is in the middle of it, you see. I like to say… could you say of an entity that it’s actually intelligent if it doesn’t have the quality of understanding? Nice, I’m using terms I don’t even know how to define, but who cares, really?

莱克斯： 就像“物质”这个词……“协调”。

罗杰： 是的，是的，我们明白。

莱克斯： 我们一直在“智能”或“理解”和“意识”这几个词之间徘徊。你认为它们属于同一个神秘的领域吗？

罗杰： 是的。你看，我倾向于认为存在着理解、智能和意识，而理解处于它们的核心位置，你看。我喜欢这样说……你能说一个实体，如果它不具备理解的能力，它还能被称为智能吗？很好，我正在使用一些我自己都无法定义的术语，但这无关紧要，不是吗？

Lex: They’re somewhat poetic, so I somehow understand them.

Roger: Yes. I think…

Lex: They’re not mathematical in nature.

Roger: Yes. You see, as a mathematician, I don’t know how to define any of them, but at least I can point to the connections. So the idea is, intelligence is something which I believe needs understanding. Otherwise, you wouldn’t say it’s intelligence. And understanding needs awareness. Otherwise, you wouldn’t really say it’s understanding. You say of an entity, they understand something, and unless it’s really aware of it in our normal usage. So there are three… sort of awareness, understanding, and intelligence. And I just tend to concentrate on understanding because that’s where I can say something. Okay, that’s the Gödel theorem and things like that. But what does it mean to perceive the color blue or something? I mean, that gets into much more difficult questions. I mean, is it the same if I see a color blue and you see it? If you’re something with… what’s this condition… what’s it called… where you assign a sound to…

莱克斯： 它们带有一种诗意，所以我在某种程度上能够理解它们。

罗杰： 是的，我认为……

莱克斯： 它们不属于数学的范畴。

罗杰： 是的，你看，作为一名数学家，我不知道如何定义它们，但我至少可以指出它们之间的联系。所以，我的想法是，我认为智能需要理解作为基础，否则你就不能称之为智能。而理解则需要意识作为基础，否则你就不能称之为理解。当你说一个实体理解某件事时，它必须真正意识到这件事，这是我们通常的用法。所以，这里存在着三个概念：意识、理解和智能。我只是倾向于专注于理解，因为我在这方面可以发表一些看法。例如，哥德尔定理等等，但感知蓝色意味着什么呢？我的意思是，这会引出一些更难的问题。例如，我看到的蓝色和你看到的蓝色，是同一种蓝色吗？如果你患有……那种疾病叫做什么来着……你会将声音与……

Lex: Synesthesia?

Roger: Yeah, that’s right. You get colors and sounds mixed up and that sort of thing. I mean, an interesting subject. But from the physics perspective, from the fundamentals perspective, we don’t… I think we’re way off pretty much understanding what’s going on there.

莱克斯： 联觉（synesthesia）？

罗杰： 是的，没错，你会把颜色和声音混淆，诸如此类。我的意思是，这是一个很有意思的现象，但从物理学的角度，从 fundamental 的角度来看，我们……我认为我们离真正理解它的机制还很遥远。

Lex: In your 2010 book, Cycles of Time, you suggest that another universe may have existed before the Big Bang. Can you describe this idea? First of all, what is the Big Bang—sounds like a funny word—and what may have been there before it?

Roger: Yes. Just as a matter of terminology, I don’t like to call it another universe because when you have another universe, you think of it as kind of quite separate from us, but these things, they’re not separate. Now, the Big Bang… conventional theories, yeah. I was actually brought up in the sense of… when I started getting interested in cosmology, there was a thing called the steady state model, which was sort of philosophically very interesting, and there wasn’t a Big Bang in that theory. Somehow new material was created all the time in the form of hydrogen, and the universe kept on expanding, expanding, expanding, and there was room for more hydrogen. It was a rather philosophically nice picture. It was disproved when the Big Bang… well, when I say the Big Bang, this was theoretically discovered by people trying to solve Einstein’s equations and apply them to cosmology. Einstein didn’t like the idea. He liked the idea of a universe which was there all the time, and he had a model which… it was there all the time. But then there was this discovery… accidental discovery, a very important discovery, of this microwave background. And if you… you know, there’s the crackle on your television screen, which is already sensing this microwave background, which is coming at us from all directions. And you can trace it back and back and back and back, and it came

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from a very early stage of the universe. Well, it’s part of the Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang Theory was when people tried to solve Einstein’s equations, they really found you have to have this initial state of the universe. It was… used to be called the primordial atom and things like this. There’s Friedmann and Lemaître… Friedmann was a Russian, Lemaître was a Belgian, and they independently were basically… Friedmann first. Lemaître talked about the initial state, which is a very, very concentrated initial state, which seemed to be the origin of the universe.

莱克斯： 你在 2010 年出版的著作《时间的循环》中提出，在大爆炸之前可能存在着另一个宇宙。你能解释一下这个想法吗？首先，什么是大爆炸——这个词听起来很有意思——在大爆炸之前可能存在着什么？

罗杰： 是的。在 terminology 上，我不喜欢把它叫做“另一个宇宙”，因为当你提到“另一个宇宙”时，你会认为它与我们完全隔绝，但这些宇宙并非如此。现在，关于大爆炸……传统的理论，是的。我是在……的背景下成长起来的，当我最初开始对宇宙学感兴趣时，流行的理论是稳恒态宇宙模型（steady state model），这个模型从哲学的角度来看很有意思，它认为宇宙中不存在大爆炸。它假设新的物质一直在以氢的形式产生，宇宙不断地膨胀，膨胀，膨胀，并且总是有空间容纳新产生的氢。这是一个从哲学角度来看很优美的图景。但后来大爆炸理论……嗯，当我提到“大爆炸”时，它指的是科学家们在尝试求解爱因斯坦的场方程，并将其应用于宇宙学时，从理论上推导出来的。爱因斯坦本人并不喜欢这个理论，他更倾向于相信宇宙是永恒存在的，他提出了一个模型……它描述了一个永恒存在的宇宙。但后来出现了一个发现……一个偶然的发现，但它非常重要，那就是宇宙微波背景辐射（microwave background）。如果你……你知道，你的电视屏幕上出现的雪花点，就是宇宙微波背景辐射的信号，它来自宇宙的各个方向。你可以一直追溯它的起源，它来自宇宙的极早期。嗯，它是大爆炸理论的一部分，大爆炸理论是……当人们尝试求解爱因斯坦的场方程时，他们发现宇宙必须存在一个初始状态，它……它曾经被称为“原始原子”（primordial atom）等等。弗里德曼和勒梅特……弗里德曼是俄罗斯人，勒梅特是比利时人，他们各自独立地……弗里德曼是第一个提出这个理论的人，勒梅特则详细描述了这个初始状态，一个密度极高的初始状态，它似乎就是宇宙的起源。

Lex: From the primordial atom?

Roger: That’s the primordial atom, is what he called it, yes.

Lex: Full term.

Roger: And then it became… well, Fred Hoyle used the term Big Bang in a kind of derogatory sense.

莱克斯： 来自“原始原子”？

罗杰： 是的，“原始原子”，这就是他给它起的名字。

莱克斯： 完整的称呼。

罗杰： 然后它变成了……嗯，弗雷德·霍伊尔最初用“大爆炸”这个词带有某种贬义。

Lex: Just like it was with Schrödinger’s cats?

Roger: Yes. Yes. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat, sort of… it got picked up on, whereas it wasn’t his intention originally. But then the evidence piled up and piled up. And my… one of my friends, and I learned a lot from him when I was in Cambridge, Dennis Sciama, he was usually a proponent of steady state. And then he got converted and said, “No, I’m sorry.” I had a great respect for him. He went around lecturing and said, “I was wrong. The steady state model doesn’t work. There was this Big Bang.” And this microwave background that you see… okay, it’s not actually quite the Big Bang. When I say not quite, it’s about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, but that’s what you see. But then you have to have had this Big Bang before it, in order to make the equations work. And it works beautifully, except for one little thing, which is this thing called inflation, which people had to put into it to make it work. When I first heard of it, I didn’t like it at all.

莱克斯： 就像“薛定谔的猫”这个词一样？

罗杰： 是的，是的，它有点像“薛定谔的猫”……这个说法被人们接受了，而这不是提出者最初的意图。但后来，越来越多的证据支持大爆炸理论，我……我的一个朋友，我从他那里学到了很多东西，他叫丹尼斯·夏玛，我还在剑桥读书时就认识他了，他曾经是稳恒态宇宙模型的支持者，但后来他改变了观点，并且说，“不，我错了。”我非常尊敬他，他四处演讲，说，“我错了，稳恒态宇宙模型是错误的，大爆炸确实发生过。”你看到的宇宙微波背景辐射……好吧，它实际上并不是来自大爆炸，准确地说，它来自大爆炸后 38 万年，但这就是我们能够观测到的最早的信号。但为了让理论自洽，在大爆炸之前必须发生过一些事情，并且它完美地解释了我们观测到的现象，除了一个问题，那就是所谓的“暴胀”（inflation）。为了让理论成立，人们不得不加入“暴胀”这个概念，当我第一次听到这个概念时，我一点也不喜欢它。

Lex: What’s inflation?

Roger: Inflation is it… in the first… I’m going to give you a very tiny number. Think of a second, that’s not very long. Now I’m going to give you a fraction of a second: one over a number. This number has 32 digits between… well, it’s between 36 and 32 digits. Tiny, tiny time. Between those two tiny, ridiculous seconds… fraction of a second, the universe was supposed to have expanded in this exponential way, an enormous way, for no apparent reason. You had to invent a particular thing called the inflaton field to make it do it. And I thought, this is completely crazy. There are reasons why people stuck with this idea. You see, the thing is that I formed my model for reasons which are very fundamental, if you like. It has to do with this very fundamental principle, which is known as the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics says more or less things get more and more random as time goes on. Now, another way of saying exactly the same thing is things get less and less random as things go back. If you go back in time, they get less and less random. Let me go back and back and back and back, and the earliest thing you can directly see is this microwave background. What’s one of the most striking features of it is that it’s random. It has this… what you call this spectrum of… which is what’s called the Planck spectrum of frequencies—different intensities for different frequencies. And it’s this wonderful curve due to Max Planck. And what’s that telling you? It’s telling you that the entropy is at a maximum. It starts off at a maximum, and it’s going up ever since. I call that a mammoth-in-the-room paradox.

莱克斯： 什么是“暴胀”？

罗杰： 暴胀指的是……在最初的……我给你举一个例子，一个非常小的数字。想想一秒钟，它并不长。现在，我再给你一个更小的数字，一秒钟的几分之一，这个数字的分母有 32 位，嗯……准确地说，是在 32 位到 36 位之间。一个非常非常小的时间段。在这极其短暂的时间内，宇宙以指数级的速度膨胀，体积急剧增大，而且没有任何明显的原因。为了解释这种现象，人们不得不引入一个新的概念，叫做“暴胀场”（inflaton field）。我当时认为，这完全是无稽之谈。当然，人们坚持这个理论也有一些理由。你看，问题是，我建立我的模型的理由是非常 fundamental 的，如果你愿意这样理解的话。它与一个非常 fundamental 的物理学原理有关，那就是热力学第二定律（second law of thermodynamics）。热力学第二定律简单地说就是，随着时间的推移，事物的无序程度会越来越高。换句话说，如果你让时间倒流，事物的无序程度就会越来越低。让我们让时间不断倒流，倒流，倒流，我们能够直接观测到的最早的信号是宇宙微波背景辐射。它最显著的特征之一就是它的随机性，它具有……你所说的……它的光谱，也就是所谓的普朗克频谱——不同频率的辐射具有不同的强度。这是一条由马克斯·普朗克提出的非常优美的曲线，它告诉我们什么呢？它告诉我们，宇宙早期的熵处于最大值，它从最大值开始，并且一直在不断增加。我把这称为“房间里的大象”悖论（mammoth-in-the-room paradox）。

Lex: A mammoth, yes.

Roger: It is. So people… why don’t cosmologists worry about this? So I worried about it. And then I thought, well, it’s not really a paradox, because you’re looking at matter and radiation in a maximum entropy state. What you’re not seeing directly in that is the gravitation. It’s gravitation which is not thermalized. The gravitation was in a very, very low entropy, and it’s low entropy by the uniformity. And you see that in the microwave too. It’s very uniform over the whole sky. I’m compressing a long story into a very short sentence and doing a great job, yes.

莱克斯： 是的，一头“猛犸象”。

罗杰： 是的。所以……为什么宇宙学家们不担心这个问题呢？我很担心，然后我想，嗯，它实际上并不是一个真正的悖论，因为你观察到的是处于最大熵状态的物质和辐射，你没有直接观察到的是引力。引力没有热化，它处于一个非常非常低的熵状态，它的低熵是由它的均匀性决定的。你也可以在宇宙微波背景辐射中观察到这一点，它在整个天空中都非常均匀。我正在尝试用最简洁的语言来解释一个非常复杂的问题，并且我认为我做得还不错，是的。

Lex: You’re doing a great job, yes.

Roger: So what I’m saying is that there’s a huge puzzle. Why was gravity in this very low entropy

state, very high organized state? Everything else was all random. And that, to me, was the biggest problem in cosmology—the biggest problem. Nobody seemed worried about it. People say they solved all the problems, and they don’t even worry about it. They think inflation solves it. It doesn’t, it can’t, because it’s just… just to clarify…

莱克斯： 是的，你解释得很好。

罗杰： 所以，我想说的是，这里存在着一个巨大的谜团，为什么引力会处于一个非常低的熵状态，一个高度有序的状态？而其他的所有事物都是随机的。对我来说，这是宇宙学中最 fundamental 的问题——最大的问题，但似乎没有人担心它。人们说他们已经解决了所有问题，他们甚至不担心这个问题的存在，他们认为暴胀理论解决了这个问题，但它没有，它不可能解决这个问题，因为它只是……为了澄清一下……

Lex: That was your problem with inflation, describing some aspect of those moments right after the Big Bang.

Roger: Inflation was supposed to stretch it out, make it all uniform, you see. It doesn’t do it because you can only do it if it’s uniform already at the beginning. It’s… you just have a… I can’t go into the details, but it doesn’t solve this. And it was completely clear to me it doesn’t solve it.

莱克斯： 所以，这就是你对暴胀理论的质疑，它试图解释大爆炸之后发生的某些现象。

罗杰： 暴胀理论认为，宇宙在极早期经历了一次指数级的膨胀，这使得它变得均匀，你看。但它无法解释宇宙最初的均匀性，因为它只有在宇宙一开始就均匀的情况下才能起作用。它……你只是……我无法详细解释其中的细节，但它确实无法解决这个问题，我非常清楚它无法解决这个问题。

Lex: So where does the conformal cyclic cosmology…

Roger: We were starting to talk about something before…

Lex: Yeah.

Roger: Yes. I began… I was just thinking to myself, how boring this universe is going to be. You’ve got this exponential expansion. This was discovered early in this century, 20th… 21st century. People discovered that these supernovae, exploding stars, showed that the universe is actually undergoing this exponential expansion. So it’s a self-similar expansion, and it seems to be a feature of this term that Einstein introduced into his cosmology for the wrong reason. He wanted a universe that was static. He put this new term into his cosmology to make it make sense. It’s called the cosmological constant. And then, when he got convinced that the universe had the Big Bang, he retracted it, complaining this was his greatest blunder. The trouble is, it wasn’t a blunder, it was actually right.

莱克斯： 那么，你的共形循环宇宙学（conformal cyclic cosmology）……

罗杰： 我们之前说到过……

莱克斯： 是的。

罗杰： 是的，我开始……我当时只是在想，这个宇宙的未来将会多么无聊。它正在经历指数级的膨胀，这是在本世纪初，20 世纪……21 世纪发现的。人们通过观测超新星，也就是爆炸的恒星，发现宇宙实际上正在经历指数级的膨胀。所以，这是一种自相似的膨胀，它似乎与爱因斯坦引入他的宇宙学中的一个术语有关，尽管他引入这个术语的理由是错误的。他想要一个静止的宇宙，为了让他的理论自洽，他加入了这个新的术语，它叫做宇宙学常数（cosmological constant）。后来，当他相信宇宙确实发生过大爆炸之后，他收回了这个术语，并且认为这是他一生中犯下的最大的错误。但问题是，它并不是一个错误，它是正确的。

Lex: Very ironic.

Roger: And so the universe seems to be behaving with this cosmological constant. Okay, so this universe is expanding and expanding. What’s going to happen in the future? Well, it gets more and more boring. What’s the most interesting thing in the universe? Well, there’s black holes. The black holes more or less gulp down entire clusters of galaxies. The clusters will swallow up most of our galaxy. We will run into the Andromeda galaxy’s black hole. That black hole will swallow them. They will get bigger and bigger, and they’ll basically swallow up the whole cluster of galaxies, gulp it all down, pretty well all… most of it, maybe not all, most of it. Okay, that’ll happen too. There’ll be just these black holes around. Pretty boring, but still not as boring as it’s going to get. It’s going to get more boring because these black holes, you wait, you wait, and you wait, and wait, an unbelievable length of time, and Hawking’s black hole evaporation starts to come in.

莱克斯： 这真是一个巨大的讽刺。

罗杰： 所以，宇宙似乎确实在按照这个宇宙学常数运行。好吧，宇宙正在不断地膨胀，未来会发生什么？嗯，它会变得越来越无聊。宇宙中最有趣的天体是什么？嗯，是黑洞，黑洞会吞噬整个星系团。我们的银河系也会被星系团中的黑洞吞噬，我们会撞上仙女座星系的黑洞，然后被它吞噬。黑洞会变得越来越大，最终吞噬整个星系团，吞噬一切，几乎所有东西……也许不是所有东西，但大部分都会被吞噬。好吧，这些都会发生，最终宇宙中只会剩下黑洞。这已经很无聊了，但它还会变得更加无聊，因为这些黑洞，你等着，等着，等着，再等着，经过一段极其漫长的时间之后，霍金辐射，也就是黑洞蒸发，开始发挥作用。

Lex: Just to clarify…

Roger: Finally evaporate away.

Lex: Finally evaporate away, yes.

Roger: They disappear with a pop at the end. What could be more boring? That was boring then. Now this is really boring. There’s nothing—not even black holes. The universe gets colder and colder and colder and colder and ever… this is very, very boring. Now, that’s not science, is it? But it’s emotional. So I thought, who’s going to be bored by this universe? Not us, we won’t be around. It’ll be mostly photons running around. And what do the photons do? They don’t get bored, because it’s a part of relativity, you see. It’s not really that they don’t experience anything; that’s not the point. The photons get right out to infinity without experiencing any time. It’s the way relativity works. And this was part of what I used to do in my old days when I was looking at gravitational radiation and how things behaved at infinity. Infinity is just like another place. You can squash it down. As long as you don’t have any mass in the world, infinity is just another place. The photons get there; the gravitons get there. What do they get? They’ve run to infinity. They say, “Well, now I’m here. Wait, there’s something on the other side, is there?” The usual view is it’s just a mathematical notion, there’s nothing on the other side, that’s just the boundary of it.

莱克斯： 为了澄清一下……

罗杰： 最终通过霍金辐射蒸发掉。

莱克斯： 最终蒸发掉，是的。

罗杰： 它们会在最后发出一声“砰”的一声消失，还有什么比这更无聊的？那已经很无聊了，而现在，它变得更加无聊。宇宙中空无一物——甚至没有黑洞。宇宙变得越来越冷，越来越冷，越来越冷，永远……这非常非常无聊。这听起来不像是科学，对吧？但这是一种情感上的描述。所以我想，谁会对这样的宇宙感到无聊呢？当然不是我们，因为我们已经不在了。宇宙中只剩下光子在四处游荡，光子会做什么？它们不会感到无聊，因为这是相对论的一部分，你看。我的意思并不是说它们没有任何体验，这不是重点。光子会直接到达无穷远，而不会经历时间的流逝，这就是相对论的运作方式。我以前研究引力辐射以及物质在无穷远处的行为时，就思考过这个问题，无穷远就像另一个地方，你可以把它压缩成一个点。只要宇宙中没有质量，无穷远就和任何其他地方一样。光子会到达那里，引力子也会到达那里。它们到达那里之后会做什么？它们已经到达了无穷远，它们会说，“好吧，我现在在这里，等等，那边还有什么东西吗？”通常的观点认为，无穷远只是一个数学概念，它之外什么都没有，它就是宇宙的边界。

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Lex: Just to pause… a nice example is this beautiful series of pictures by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher. You may know them. The one’s called Circle Limits. They’re very famous, one with the angels and the devils, and you can see them crowding and crowding and crowding up to the edge. Now, the kind of geometry that these angels and devils inhabit, that’s their infinity. But from our perspective, infinity is just a point; it’s a place.

Lex: Just take a brief pause.

Roger: Yes.

莱克斯： 稍微停顿一下……荷兰艺术家埃舍尔创作过一系列非常精美的版画，你可能见过，其中一幅叫做《圆形极限 IV》（Circle Limit IV）。这些版画非常有名，其中一幅描绘了天使和恶魔，你可以看到它们密密麻麻地排列在一起，一直延伸到圆形的边缘。对于这些天使和恶魔来说，它们所处的几何空间就是它们的“无穷”，但从我们的视角来看，无穷远只是一个点，一个确定的位置。

莱克斯： 让我们稍微停顿一下。

罗杰： 好的。

Lex: And the… just the word you’re saying, infinity is just a place. So, for the most part, infinity, sort of even just going back…

Roger: Yeah.

Lex: Infinity is a mathematical concept.

莱克斯： 还有……你刚才说的，“无穷远只是一个地方”。所以，在大多数情况下，无穷远，甚至只是……

罗杰： 是的。

莱克斯： 无穷远只是一个数学上的概念。

Lex: I think this is what… I think there’s an actual physical manifestation. In which way does infinity ever manifest itself in our physical universe?

Roger: Well, it does in various places. You see, it’s the thing that… where… if you’re not a mathematician, you think, “Infinity, I can’t think about that.” Mathematicians think about infinity all the time. They get used to the idea, and they just play around with different kinds of infinities, and it becomes no problem. But you just have to take my word for it. Now, one of the things is, you see, you have taken Euclidean geometry… well, it just keeps on going and going and going, and it goes out to infinity. Now, there are other kinds of geometry, and this is what’s called hyperbolic geometry. It’s a bit like Euclidean geometry, sort of different, but it’s like what Escher was trying to describe in his Angels and Devils. And he learned about this from Coxeter, and he thought, “That’s a very nice thing. I’ll try to represent this infinity through this kind of geometry.” So it’s not quite Euclidean geometry, it’s a bit like it, that the angels and the devils inhabit. And their infinity, in this nice transformation, you squash the other infinity down so you can draw it as this nice circle boundary to their universe. Now, from our outside perspective, we can see their infinity as this boundary. Now, what I’m saying is that it’s very like that. The infinity that we might experience, like the angels and devils in their world, can be thought of as a boundary. Now, I found this a very useful way of talking about radiation, gravitational radiation, and things like that. It was a trick, a mathematical trick. So now what I’m saying is that that mathematical trick becomes real, that somehow the photons, they need to go somewhere. Because from their perspective, infinity is just another place. Now, this is a difficult idea to get your mind around, so that’s why cosmologists are finding a lot of trouble taking me seriously. But to me, it’s not such a wild idea. What’s on the other side of that infinity? You have to think, why am I allowed to think of this? Because photons don’t have any mass, and we in physics have beautiful ways of measuring time. There are incredibly precise clocks—atomic and nuclear clocks, unbelievably precise. Why are they so precise? Because of the two most famous equations of 20th-century physics. One of them is Einstein’s E=mc². What’s that tell us? Energy and mass are equivalent. The other one is even older than that, still 20th century, only just—Max Planck’s E=hν. ν is a frequency, h is a constant again, and E is energy. Energy and frequency are equivalent. Put the two together—energy and mass are equivalent, Einstein, and then frequency and energy are equivalent, Max Planck. Put the two together—mass and frequency are equivalent. Absolutely basic physical principle. If you have a massive entity, a massive particle, it is a clock with a very, very precise frequency. It’s not… you can’t directly use it, you have to scale it down to your atomic and nuclear clocks, but that’s the basic principle. You scale it down to something you can actually perceive, but it’s the same principle. If you have mass, you have beautiful clocks. But the other side of that coin is, if you don’t have mass, you don’t have clocks. If you don’t have clocks, you don’t have rulers, you don’t have scale, so you don’t have space and time. You don’t have a measure of the scale of space. All you have… if that… you do have the structure that… what’s called the conformal structure. You see, it’s what the angels and devils have. If you look at the eye of the devil, no matter how close to the boundary it is, it has the same shape, but it has a different size. So you can scale up and you can scale down, but you mustn’t change the shape. So it’s basically the same idea but applied to space-time. Now, in the very remote future, you have things which don’t measure the scale, but the shape, if you like, is still there. Now, that’s in the

remote future. Now I’m going to do the exact opposite. Now I’m going to go way back into the Big Bang. Now, as you get there, things go hotter and hotter, denser and denser. What is the universe dominated by? Particles moving around almost with the speed of light. When they get almost with the speed of light, okay, they begin to lose their mass. Therefore, for a completely opposite reason, they lose the sense of scale as well. So my crazy idea is the Big Bang and a remote future, they seem completely different. One is extremely dense, extremely hot, the other is very, very rarefied and very, very cold. But if you squash one down by this conformal scale, you get the other. So although they look and feel very different, they’re really almost the same. The remote future, on the other side, I’m claiming is the Big Bang of a new eon.

莱克斯： 我认为……我认为无穷远确实存在物理上的表现形式。在我们的宇宙中，无穷远是如何表现出来的？

罗杰： 嗯，它在很多地方都有表现，你看……如果你不是数学家，你会想，“无穷远？我无法理解它。”但数学家们一直在思考无穷远，他们习惯了这个概念，他们可以自如地运用各种不同的无穷，这对他们来说没有任何问题。你只需要相信我，其中一个例子是，你看，你学过欧几里得几何……它可以无限延伸，一直延伸到无穷远。现在，我们还有其他的几何学，例如双曲几何（hyperbolic geometry）。它与欧几里得几何有些相似，但又有所不同，它就像埃舍尔在他的版画《圆形极限 IV》中试图表达的那样。他从考克斯特那里学到了这种几何，他当时想，“这太棒了，我要用这种几何来表现无穷远。”所以，它与欧几里得几何并不完全相同，但它与之类似，天使和恶魔就生活在这样的空间中。它们的“无穷远”通过这种巧妙的变换，被压缩成了一个圆形的边界。从我们的视角来看，我们可以把它们的“无穷远”看作是这个边界。我想说的是，我们的宇宙也可能是类似的，我们所体验到的“无穷远”，就像埃舍尔版画中的天使和恶魔所体验到的那样，可以被看作是一个边界。我发现，这是一种描述辐射、引力辐射等等非常有用的方法。它就像一个技巧，一个数学上的技巧，但我认为，这个数学技巧在物理上是真实存在的，光子需要去某个地方，因为从它们的视角来看，无穷远也只是一个普通的地方。这可能是一个很难理解的概念，所以很多宇宙学家都不愿意认真对待我的理论，但对我来说，这并不是一个疯狂的想法。那么，无穷远的另一边是什么呢？你可能会问，我为什么可以这样想？因为光子没有质量，而我们在物理学中有很多精确测量时间的方法，例如原子钟和核钟，它们精确得令人难以置信。它们为什么如此精确？因为 20 世纪物理学中最著名的两个方程式。其中之一是爱因斯坦的质能方程：E=mc²，它告诉我们，能量和质量是等价的。另一个方程式比质能方程更早，但也是 20 世纪的，它就是普朗克提出的能量公式：E=hν。其中 ν 表示频率，h 是普朗克常数，E 表示能量。这个公式告诉我们，能量和频率是等价的。把这两个公式结合起来——爱因斯坦的质能方程告诉我们能量和质量是等价的，普朗克的能量公式告诉我们能量和频率是等价的——你会发现，质量和频率也是等价的，这是一个非常基本的物理学原理。如果你有一个有质量的实体，一个有质量的粒子，它就是一个拥有非常精确频率的时钟。你不能直接使用它来计时，你必须把它缩小到原子钟和核钟的尺度，但它们的原理是相同的。你把它缩小到你能感知的尺度，但原理仍然是一样的，如果你有质量，你就是一个非常精确的时钟。但反过来说，如果你没有质量，你就不是一个时钟。如果你不是一个时钟，你就没有尺子，没有刻度，因此你也就没有空间和时间，你无法测量空间的尺度。你所拥有的……如果你……你确实拥有……所谓的“共形结构”（conformal structure），你看，这就是埃舍尔版画中的天使和恶魔所拥有的结构，如果你观察恶魔的眼睛，无论它离边界有多近，它的形状都是一样的，只是大小不同。所以，你可以放大它，也可以缩小它，但你不能改变它的形状，这基本上就是共形结构的概念，但它被应用于时空。现在，在非常遥远的未来，你拥有不测量尺度的东西，但它们的形状仍然存在。这就是遥远的未来，现在，我们来考虑完全相反的情况，回到大爆炸的时刻。当你回到宇宙的极早期，你会发现温度越来越高，密度越来越大，宇宙中充满了什么？充满了以接近光速运动的粒子。当它们以接近光速运动时，它们会失去质量。因此，出于完全相反的原因，它们也失去了尺度感。所以，我的想法是，大爆炸和遥远的未来，它们看起来完全不同，一个极度密集，极度高温，另一个极度稀薄，极度寒冷。但如果你通过共形变换将其中一个压缩，你就会得到另一个。所以，虽然它们看起来和感觉截然不同，但它们本质上是相同的。我认为，另一边的遥远的未来，就是新纪元（eon）的大爆炸。

Lex: And what I’m saying is that one…

Roger: Yeah.

Lex: Where the photons go, they go into the next Big Bang.

Roger: You’ve got to get your mind around that crazy idea.

Lex: Taking a step on the other side of the place that is infinity.

Roger: Yes, but I’m saying the other side of our Big Bang… now, I’m going back into the Big Bang… that was the remote future of a previous eon.

莱克斯： 我的意思是……

罗杰： 是的。

莱克斯： 光子最终会进入下一个大爆炸。

罗杰： 你必须理解这个疯狂的想法。

莱克斯： 跨越无穷远，到达它的另一边。

罗杰： 是的，但我想说的是，我们这个大爆炸的另一边……现在，我正在回到大爆炸的时刻……那就是前一个纪元的遥远的未来。

Lex: Previously on…

Roger: Previously on. And what I’m saying is that previously on, there are signals coming through to us, which we can see and which we do see. And these are both signals… the two main signals are to do with black holes. One of them is the collisions between black holes, and as they spiral into each other, they release a lot of energy in the form of gravitational waves. Those gravitational waves get through in a certain form into the next eon.

莱克斯： 前一个纪元……

罗杰： 前一个纪元。我想说的是，前一个纪元中发生的一些事件，会以信号的形式传递给我们，我们可以看到这些信号，而且我们确实看到了。这些信号……主要的信号有两个，它们都与黑洞有关。其中之一是黑洞之间的碰撞，当它们相互靠近，螺旋式地坠向对方时，会释放出大量的能量，以引力波的形式。这些引力波会以某种形式穿透到下一个纪元。

Lex: That’s fascinating, that there’s some… I mean, maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong, but that means that some information can travel…

Roger: Yes.

Lex: …from another eon.

Roger: Exactly.

莱克斯： 这太不可思议了，也就是说……如果我理解错了，请你纠正我，这意味着，某些信息可以……

罗杰： 是的。

莱克斯： ……从另一个纪元传递到我们这个纪元。

罗杰： 完全正确。

Lex: That… that is fascinating. I mean, I’ve seen somewhere described… sort of the discussion of the Fermi Paradox, you know, that if there’s intelligent life…

Roger: Yes.

Lex: …being… you know, communication immediately takes you there.

Roger: So we have a paper… I have my colleague Vahe Gurzadyan, who I’ve worked with on these ideas for a while… we have a crazy paper on that, yes.

莱克斯： 这……这太不可思议了。我的意思是，我曾经看到过……关于费米悖论（Fermi Paradox）的讨论，你知道，如果宇宙中存在智慧生命……

罗杰： 是的。

莱克斯： ……存在……你知道，我们立刻就会想到与他们进行交流。

罗杰： 所以我们写了一篇论文……我的同事瓦赫·古尔扎迪安，我和他一起研究这些想法已经有一段时间了……我们写了一篇关于这方面的很“疯狂”的论文，是的。

Lex: So the Fermi Paradox is…

Roger: Right.

Lex: So, if the universe is just cycling over and over and over, punctuated by…

Roger: Yes, yes.

Lex: …punctuated by the singularity of the Big Bang, and then intelligent, or any kind of intelligent systems, can communicate through from eon to eon, why haven’t we heard anything from our alien friends?

莱克斯： 所以，费米悖论是……

罗杰： 没错。

莱克斯： 所以，如果宇宙只是不断地循环，循环，循环，中间被……

罗杰： 是的，是的。

莱克斯： ……被大爆炸的奇点打断，并且，如果智慧生命，或者任何形式的智能系统，可以跨越纪元进行交流，为什么我们还没有收到来自外星朋友的任何信息呢？

Roger: Because we don’t know how to look. That’s fundamentally the reason, is we… I don’t know. You see, we have so little knowledge about that. We haven’t seen any signals yet, but it’s worth looking.

Lex: It’s worth looking.

Roger: It’s worth looking. And what I’m trying to say, here’s another possible place we might look. Now, you’re not looking at civilizations which got there first. You’re looking at those civilizations which were so successful, probably a lot more successful… more likely to be man… looks at things… which knew how to handle their own global warming or whatever it is, and to get through it all and to live to a ripe old age in the sense of a civilization, to the extent that they could harness signals that they could propagate through for some reason of their own desires, whatever, we wouldn’t know… to other civilizations which might be able to pick up the signals. But what kind of signals would they be? I haven’t the foggiest.

罗杰： 因为我们不知道如何寻找，这就是根本原因，我们……我不知道。你看，我们对这个问题知之甚少，我们还没有找到任何信号，但它值得我们继续探索。

莱克斯： 是的，值得继续探索。

罗杰： 值得继续探索。我想说的是，这里还有另一种可能性，我们可以尝试寻找。现在，我们寻找的不是那些首先到达宇宙尽头的文明，而是那些非常成功的文明，可能比我们……更成功的……更有可能……观察事物……那些知道如何应对全球变暖，或者其他任何问题的文明，它们成功地克服了所有这些挑战，并且在文明的意义上，活到了“ripe old age”（非常古老的年龄），它们拥有强大的技术能力，可以出于某种目的——无论是什么目的，我们不得而知——将信号传递给其他文明，而那些文明可能拥有接收这些信号的能力。但这些信号会是什么样的呢？我完全没有头绪。

Lex: Let me ask the question…

Roger: Yes.

Lex: What to you is the most beautiful idea in physics or mathematics, or the art at the intersection of the two?

Roger: I’m going to have to say complex analysis. I might have said infinities, and one of the single most beautiful ideas, I think, was the fact that you can have infinities of different sizes and so on, but that’s… anyway. I think complex analysis, it’s got so much magic in it. It’s a very simple idea. You take these numbers… okay, so you take numbers, you take the integers, and then you fill them up into the fractions, and the real numbers, you imagine you’re trying to measure a continuous line. And then you think of how you can solve equations. Then what about x² = -1? Well, there’s no real number which satisfies that, so you have to think of, well, there’s a number called i. You think you invent it. Well, in a certain sense, it’s there already, but this number, when you add that square root of -1 to it, you have what’s called the complex numbers. And they’re an incredible system, if you like. You put one little thing in, you put the square root of -1 in, and you get how much benefit out of it. All sorts of things that you’d never imagined before, and it’s that amazing thing, hiding there in putting that square root of -1 in. So in that sense, that’s the most magical thing I’ve seen in mathematics or physics, and it’s in quantum mechanics and in quantum mechanics, for that matter. You might think, what’s it doing there? Okay, just a nice beautiful piece of mathematics, and then suddenly we say, nope, it’s the very crucial basis of quantum mechanics.

莱克斯： 我想问你一个问题……

罗杰： 好的。

莱克斯： 对你来说，物理学或数学中最优美的想法是什么？或者说，是这两者交叉领域中的哪一种艺术形式？

罗杰： 我会选择复分析（complex analysis）。我本来可能会选择无穷，我认为，最优美的数学概念之一就是，你可以拥有大小不同的无穷，等等，但那……无论如何。我认为复分析充满了魔力，它的概念非常简单。你选择这些数字……好吧，你选择数字，你选择整数，然后你用分数来填充它们之间的空隙，得到实数，你可以把它想象成一条连续的线。然后你开始思考如何解方程，那么，如何求解 x² = -1 这个方程呢？嗯，在实数范围内，不存在满足这个方程的解，所以你必须引入一个新的数字，叫做 i。你可能会认为是你发明了它，嗯，从某种意义上说，它本来就存在，但当你把这个数字，也就是 -1 的平方根，加入到实数系中时，你就得到了所谓的复数。这是一个不可思议的数字系统，你只需要加入一个简单的元素，-1 的平方根，你就能从中获得巨大的收益，它打开了通往一个全新世界的大门，而这一切的奥秘，就隐藏在 -1 的平方根之中。所以，从这个意义上说，这是我在数学或物理学中见过的最神奇的概念，而且，它在量子力学中扮演着重要的角色。你可能会问，它在量子力学中有什么作用？好吧，它本来只是一个优美的数学概念，但后来我们突然发现，它构成了量子力学的基础。

Lex: So on the question of whether math is discovered or invented, it sounds like you may be suggesting that partially it’s possible that math is indeed discovered.

Roger: Oh, absolutely, yes. No, it’s more like archaeology than you might think.

莱克斯： 所以在“数学是被发现的还是被发明的”这个问题上，你似乎认为，至少在某种程度上，数学是被发现的。

罗杰： 哦，当然，是的。它比你想象的更像考古学。

Lex: So let me ask the most ridiculous, maybe the most important, question. What is the meaning of life? What gives your life fulfillment, purpose, happiness, and meaning? Why do you think we’re here on this… given all the Big Bang and the infinities of photons that we’ve talked about?

Roger: I would say, I think it’s not a stupid question. I mean, there are some people, you know, many of my colleagues who are scientists, they say, well, that’s a stupid question—meaning, yeah, well, we’re just here because things came together and produced life, and so what? I think there’s more to it, but what there is that’s more to it, I haven’t much idea. It might be somehow connected to the mechanisms of consciousness that we’re talking about, the mystery there.

莱克斯： 最后，让我问你一个最荒谬，但也可能是最重要的问题，生命的意义是什么？是什么让你的生活充满意义、目标、幸福和快乐？考虑到我们之前讨论的所有关于大爆炸和无穷无尽的光子的理论，你认为我们为什么存在于这个宇宙中？

罗杰： 我想说，我认为这不是一个愚蠢的问题，我的意思是，有些人，你知道，我的很多科学家同事，他们会说，这是一个愚蠢的问题——也就是说，我们之所以存在，是因为各种物质偶然聚集在一起，产生了生命，仅此而已。但我认为，生命一定还有更深层的意义，但它究竟是什么，我还没有答案。也许它与我们正在讨论的意识的机制有关，那里隐藏着我们尚未解开的奥秘。

Lex: It’s connected with all sorts of…

Roger: Yeah, I think these things are tied up in ways which… you see, I tend to think the mystery of consciousness is tied up with the mystery of quantum mechanics and how it fits in with the classical world. And that’s all to do with the mystery of quantum… of complex numbers. And there are mysteries there which look like mathematical mysteries, but they seem to have a bearing on the way the physical world operates. We’re scratching the surface. We have a long, huge way to go before we really understand that.

莱克斯： 这是一个很美好的想法，数学的深度可以被我们发现，但我们也必须面对哥德尔不完备定理带来的挑战，我们必须找到某种方法来克服它。

罗杰： 是的。

Lex: So, Roger, it’s a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time today.

Roger: My pleasure.

Lex: Thank you.

莱克斯： 罗杰，非常荣幸能够与你对话，非常感谢你今天抽出时间。

罗杰： 我的荣幸。

莱克斯： 谢谢。

Lex: If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman. And now, let me leave you with some words of wisdom that Roger Penrose wrote in his book The Emperor’s New Mind:

莱克斯： 如果您喜欢本期节目，请在 YouTube 上订阅我们的频道，在 Apple Podcasts 上给我们五星好评，或者在 Patreon 上支持我们。您也可以在 Twitter 上 @lexfridman 关注我。最后，我想与大家分享罗杰·彭罗斯在其著作《皇帝的新脑》中写下的一段充满智慧的文字：

“Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed ‘obvious’ that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so. This is the kind of ‘obvious’ that a child can see, though the child may later in life become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are ‘non-problems,’ to be argued into non-existence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition. Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder that we felt as children, when the cares of the ‘real world’ have begun to settle on our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that might embarrass us as adults to ask. What happens to each of our streams of consciousness after we die? Where was it before we were born? Might we become, or have been, someone else? Why do we perceive at all? Why are we here? Why is there a universe here at all, in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in

any of us, and no doubt with the awakening of self-awareness within whichever creature or other entity first came to possess it.”

“在所有这些技术性的讨论背后，隐藏着一种直觉，那就是，意识不可能像计算机那样运作，这一点是‘显而易见的’，即使很多涉及到思维活动的过程可能确实是以类似于计算的方式进行的。这种‘显而易见’是孩子都能看到的，尽管在成长的过程中，孩子们可能会被灌输这样一种观念，那些显而易见的问题其实都是“伪问题”，可以通过严谨的逻辑推理和巧妙的定义来证明它们并不存在。孩子们有时能够清晰地看到那些成年人无法看到的东西，当我们被‘现实世界’的琐事所困扰时，我们常常忘记了孩提时代那种天真烂漫的好奇心。孩子们敢于提出那些让我们成年人感到尴尬的基本问题。例如，我们死后，我们的意识会去哪里？在我们出生之前，它在哪里？我们会不会变成，或者曾经是，另一个人？我们为什么能够感知？我们为什么存在？为什么会有宇宙？为什么我们能够存在于这个宇宙之中？这些都是伴随着意识的觉醒而出现的谜题，毫无疑问，当第一个拥有自我意识的生物——或者其他任何形式的生命——诞生的时候，它也会思考同样的问题。”

Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

感谢您的收听，我们下期节目再见。

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此翻译由youtube字幕下载器下载英文字幕，由Gemini 1.5 Pro整理翻译，仅供参考

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Jesse Lau

網名遁去的一，簡稱遁一。2012年定居新西蘭至今，自由職業者。
本文采用知識共享署名 4.0 國際許可協議進行許可。簡而言之，可隨意轉發轉載，轉載請注明出處。

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