演讲MP3+双语文稿:经过数十亿年的单调之后，宇宙正在苏醒

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【演讲者及介绍】David Deutsch

大卫Deutsch。物理学家,作者。量子计算和量子信息理论的先驱大卫·多伊奇(David Deutsch)现在试图界定可能和不可能之间的界限。

【演讲主题】经过数十亿年的单调之后，宇宙正在苏醒

【中英文字幕】

翻译者 Helen Chen 校对者Yanyan Hong

00:13

I'm thrilled to be talking to you by this high-tech method. Of all humans who have ever lived, the overwhelming majority would have found what we are doing here incomprehensible, unbelievable.

我很激动能通过这种 高科技的方法与大家交谈，大多数曾生活在世上的人们 可能会觉得我们现在正在做的 是不可思议，且难以置信的。

00:28

Because, for thousands of centuries, in the dark time before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, people had low expectations. For their lives, for their descendants' lives. Typically, they expected nothing significantly new or better to be achieved, ever. This pessimism famously appears in the Bible, in one of the few biblical passages with a named author. He's called Qohelet, he's an enigmatic chap. He wrote, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there something of which it is said, 'Look, this is new.' No, that thing was already done in the ages that came before us."

因为，几千个世纪以来，在科技革命和启蒙运动到来之前 的黑暗时期，人们的期望值很低，不仅对他们自己，对他们后代的生活也是如此。通常，他们从未指望 实现任何新的或更好的成就。这种悲观主义在《圣经》中很有名，是圣经中为数不多 的标注了作者的章节之一。这位神秘的家伙 叫库赫莱特 (Qohelet)。他写道，“过去的一切，便是将来，已行的事，后必再行； 日光之下并无新事。有没有什么东西可以称之为 ‘看！这是新的’吗？ 没有，那事在我们之前的 时代就已经发生了。”

01:24

Qohelet was describing a world without novelty. By novelty I mean something new in Qohelet's sense, not merely something that's changed, but a significant change with lasting effects, where people really would say, "Look, this is new," and, preferably, "good." So, purely random changes aren't novelty. OK, Heraclitus did say a man can't step in the same river twice, because it's not the same river, he's not the same man. But if the river is changing randomly, it really is the same river.

库赫莱特形容的是 一个没有新奇的时代。创新在库赫莱特看来是新事物，不仅仅是改变了的东西，而是一个有长远影响的重大改变，对此人们会真心感叹，“看啊，这是新的，”，且更倾向于认为这是“好”的。纯粹的随机改变并不新奇。赫拉克利特 (Herclitus) 曾说，一个人不能两次踏进同一条河, 因为那不再是同一条河，他也不是同一个人了。但如果河流是随机变化的，它依然是同一条河。

02:07

In contrast, if an idea in a mind spreads to other minds, and changes lives for generations, that is novelty. Human life without novelty is life without creativity, without progress. It's a static society, a zero-sum game. That was the living hell in which Qohelet lived. Like everyone, until a few centuries ago. It was hell, because for humans, suffering is intimately related to staticity. Because staticity isn't just frustrating. All sources of suffering -- famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids, and things like war and slavery, hurt people only until we have created the knowledge to prevent them.

相反，如果一个人的想法 传播到很多人的心中，改变了几代人的生活，那就叫做新鲜感。人类的生活若没了新鲜感，就像生活没了创新，不再进步，成为了一成不变的社会，零和的游戏。那就是库赫莱特生活的地狱，和每个人一样，直到几个世纪前。这就是地狱，因为对于人类，受难和不变的社会是密切相关的。固化不止令人沮丧，所以受难的根源—— 饥荒，流行病，即将到来的小行星，以及像战争和奴隶制度这样的事，只会伤害他人，直到我们 创造了阻止他们的办法。

03:05

There's a story in Somerset Maugham's novel "Of Human Bondage" about an ancient sage who summarizes the entire history of mankind as, "He was born, he suffered and he died." And it goes on: "Life was insignificant and death without consequence." And indeed, the overwhelming majority of humans who have ever lived had lives of suffering and grueling labor, before dying young and in agony. And yes, in most generations nothing had any novel consequence for subsequent generations.

毛姆的书《人性的枷锁》中的一个故事，讲述了一位古时的圣人，他将人类的整个历史总结为，“他出生了，“他受难了，和他死去了。” 他继续写道，“生无意义，死无后果。” 没错，绝大多数曾经 在这世上生活过的人类 都在痛苦和劳动中挣扎，直到在痛苦中英年早逝。没错，大部分世代的人们，都未为后代带来什么新奇的影响。

03:51

Nevertheless, when ancient people tried to explain their condition, they typically did so in grandiose cosmic terms. Which was the right thing to do, as it turns out. Even though their actual explanations, their myths, were largely false. Some tried to explain the grimness and monotony of their world in terms of an endless cosmic war between good and evil, in which humans were the battleground. Which neatly explained why their own experience was full of suffering, and why progress never happened. But it wasn't true.

可是，当古人试图解释他们的状况时，他们通常用宏大的宇宙作为术语，没想到他们的做法竟是正确的，虽然他们实际的解释，他们的神话 大多都是虚构的。有些人曾试图 用善恶之间无休止的宇宙战争 来解释他们世界的冷酷和单调，而人类就是战场。这也很好的说明了为什么 他们的经历充满了煎熬，为什么社会一直没有进步。但这不是真的。

04:36

Amazingly enough, all their conflict and suffering were just due to the way they processed ideas. Being satisfied with dogma, and just-so stories, rather than criticizing them and trying to guess better explanations of the world and of their own condition. Twentieth-century physics did create better explanations, but still in terms of a cosmic war. This time, the combatants were order and chaos, or entropy. That story does allow for hope for the future. But in another way, it's even bleaker than the ancient myths, because the villain, entropy, is preordained to have the final victory, when the inexorable laws of thermodynamics shut down all novelty with the so-called heat death of the universe.

令人惊奇的是，他们所有的冲突和煎熬 都是由于他们处理思想的方式。满足于教义和编织的故事，而非去质疑它们，然后试图对世界和他们 自己的状况做出更好的解释。二十世纪的物理学家 的确创造了更好的解释，可依然是把宇宙战争作为依据。这一次，对阵双方是 秩序和混乱，或无序。这个故事的确给予了 人们对未来的希望。但从另一方面来说，它也比古代神话还要凄凉，因为当伴随着所谓的宇宙热死亡，热力学不可抗拒的定律 阻挡了一切新奇事物的发生时，反派，无序就注定 要取得最后的胜利。

05:39

Currently, there's a story of a local battle in that war, between sustainability, which is order, and wastefulness, which is chaos -- that's the contemporary take on good and evil, often with the added twist that humans are the evil, so we shouldn't even try to win. And recently, there have been tales of another cosmic war, between gravity, which collapses the universe, and dark energy, which finally shreds it. So this time, whichever of those cosmic forces wins, we lose.

目前，在那场战争中 有一个在可持续性，也就是秩序，与浪费，也就是混乱之间 的当地斗争的故事—— 这是当代人们对善与恶的理解，通常伴随着人类是邪恶的念头，所以我们根本不应该尝试去战胜。而最近，又出现了另一个宇宙战争的传说，使宇宙瓦解的重力，与最终能把其撕裂 的暗能量之间的抗衡。所以，这次，无论哪一个宇宙势力胜出 我们都会输。

06:17

All those pessimistic accounts of the human condition contain some truth, but as prophecies, they're all misleading, and all for the same reason. None of them portrays humans as what we really are. As Jacob Bronowski said, "Man is not a figure in the landscape -- he is the shaper of the landscape." In other words, humans are not playthings of cosmic forces, we are users of cosmic forces. I'll say more about that in a moment, but first, what sorts of thing create novelty? Well, the beginning of the universe surely did.

所有那些对人类状况的悲观描述 都带着一丝真谛，但就像预言，它们都是因为同一个 原因在误导人们。没有任何一条真正 展现了人类的本质。就像布鲁诺维奇 （Jacob Bronowski）所说，“人类不是风景的一部分—— 而是它的创造者。” 换而言之，人类不是宇宙势力的奴隶，而是它的使用者。稍后我会深入讨论，但首先，什么样的东西 创造了新事物？ 当然，宇宙的诞生功不可没，

07:03

The big bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, created space, time and energy, everything physical. And then, immediately, what I call the first era of novelty, with the first atom, the first star, the first black hole, the first galaxy. But then, at some point, novelty vanished from the universe. Perhaps from as early as 12 or 13 billion years ago, right up to the present day, there's never been any new kind of astronomical object. There's only been what I call the great monotony. So, Qohelet was accidentally even more right about the universe beyond the Sun than he was about under the Sun. So long as the great monotony lasts, what has been out there really is what will be. And there is nothing out there of which it can truly be said, "Look, this is new."

大约 140 亿年前的大爆炸 创造了时空，时间和能量，所有的物体。紧接着，在我称之为第一个新世纪的时期，诞生了第一颗原子，第一颗行星，第一个黑洞，第一片星系。可是，在某个瞬间，宇宙中的创新之力消失了，也许是早在120 或 130 亿年以前，直到今天，一直没有什么新的天体诞生。我称之为“大单调”。所以，库赫莱特对太阳之外 的宇宙的认识，碰巧比他对太阳之下 的认识更正确。只要大单调还存在，那些存在的，将会一直在。也不会有别的新事物 可以被真正形容为 “看啊，这是新的”。

08:12

Nevertheless, at some point during the great monotony, there was an event -- inconsequential at the time, and even billions of years later, it had affected nothing beyond its home planet -- yet eventually, it could cause cosmically momentous novelty. That event was the origin of life: creating the first genetic knowledge, coding for biological adaptations, coding for novelty. On Earth, it utterly transformed the surface. Genes in the DNA of single-celled organisms put oxygen in the air, extracted CO2, put chalk and iron ore into the ground, hardly a cubic inch of the surface to some depth has remained unaffected by those genes. The Earth became, if not a novel place on the cosmic scale, certainly a weird one.

然而，在大单调的某一刻，有一个事件—— 当时没有什么意义，而且甚至几十亿年之后，除了它的母星之外，它什么也没有影响—— 可是最终，它可能会 引起大规模的创新。那事件就是生命的起源： 创造了第一个基因上的知识，让生物开始学会适应，学会创新。在地球上，它彻底地改变了地球面貌，在单细胞生物 DNA 中的基因 将氧气释放到空中，吸取二氧化碳，将垩和铁矿融到地里，几乎每一寸土地 在某种程度上都被 那些基因影响了，就算地球没在宇宙层面上 变成了一个新颖的地方，也至少是令人诧异的一个。

09:16

Just as an example, beyond Earth, only a few hundred different chemical substances have been detected. Presumably, there are some more in lifeless locations, but on Earth, evolution created billions of different chemicals. And then the first plants, animals, and then, in some ancestor species of ours, explanatory knowledge. For the first time in the universe, for all we know.

比如，在地球之外，只有几百种不同的化学物质被发现，据猜测，大概在没有 生命的地方还有更多，但在地球上，进化过程就造就了 几亿种化学物质。随之出现了 第一棵植物，第一只动物，然后，在我们的一些祖先物种中，出现了解释性知识的概念。据我们所知，这是宇宙中的首次。

09:48

Explanatory knowledge is the defining adaptation of our species. It differs from the nonexplanatory knowledge in DNA, for instance, by being universal. That is to say, whatever can be understood, can be understood through explanatory knowledge. And more, any physical process can be controlled by such knowledge, limited only by the laws of physics. And so, explanatory knowledge, too, has begun to transform the Earth's surface. And soon, the Earth will become the only known object in the universe that turns aside incoming asteroids instead of attracting them.

解释性知识可以用来 定义我们物种的适应性，它不同于DNA中无法解释的知识，例如，它是普遍存在的。也就是说，任何可以理解的东西，都可以通过解释性知识理解。此外，任何物理的过程，都可以由这些知识控制，只受物理法则的限制。所以说，解释性知识同样也 开始改变了地球的面貌。不久之后，地球成为了 宇宙中我们唯一所知 能把小行星拒之门外，而非吸引它们碰撞的星球。

10:37

Qohelet was understandably misled by the painful slowness of progress in his day. Novelty in human life was still too rare, too gradual, to be noticed in one generation. And in the biosphere, the evolution of novel species was even slower. But both things were happening.

可以理解，库赫莱特被 他所在时代艰难而迟缓 的发展所误导了。人类生活中的新奇事物仍然太罕见，发展太缓慢，不可能在一代人的时间里被发掘。而在生物圈，新物种的进化需要更长时间，但两件事情同时都发生了。

11:00

Now, why is there a great monotony in the universe at large, and what makes our planet buck that trend? Well, the universe at large is relatively simple. Stars are so simple that we can predict their behavior billions of years into the future, and retrodict how they formed billions of years ago. So why is the universe simple? Basically, it's because big, massive, powerful things strongly affect lesser things, and not vice versa. I call that the hierarchy rule. For example, when a comet hits the Sun, the Sun carries on just as before, but the comet is vaporized. For the same reason, big things are not much affected by small parts of themselves, i.e., by details. Which means that their overall behavior is simple. And since nothing very new can happen to things that remain simple, the hierarchy rule, by causing large-scale simplicity, has caused the great monotony. But, the saving grace is the hierarchy rule is not a law of nature. It just happens to have held so far in the universe, except here.

为什么宇宙中会有 如此大规模的单调？ 是什么让我们的星球顺从那个趋势？ 宇宙之大，其实很简单。行星也很简单，我们可以推测未来数亿年以后的样子，也可以预测它们亿年前如何形成。所以为什么宇宙如此简单呢？ 基本上，这是因为巨大的、 强有力的事物强烈地影响着 较小的事物，反之则不然。我称之为“等级制度”。比如，一个彗星撞上了太阳，太阳仍然会正常运转，而那颗彗星却会蒸发殆尽。同理，大的物体不会那么 容易受到小物体的影响，不容易受到细节影响。也就是说，它的整体行为 很简单。既然没有什么新鲜事会发生，它会一直很简单，等级制度导致了大规模的简单化，也导致了大单调。但是，令人耳目一新的是，等级制度并不是大自然的规律，是巧合让它延续至今，除了这里。

12:32

In our biosphere, molecule-sized objects, genes, control vastly disproportionate resources. The first genes for photosynthesis, by causing their own proliferation, and then transforming the surface of the planet, have violated or reversed the hierarchy rule by the mind-blowing factor of 10 to the power 40. Explanatory knowledge is potentially far more powerful because of universality, and more rapidly created. When human knowledge has achieved a factor 10 to the 40, it will pretty much control the entire galaxy, and will be looking beyond.

在我们的生物圈，分子大小的物质，也就是基因，控制着大量不平行的资源，最早出现的掌管光合作用的基因 通过引起自身的增殖，然后改变地球表面，以令人吃惊的 10 的 40 次方的规模，已经违背或扭转了等级制度。解释性知识由于其广泛性和更迅速 的创造过程而具有更大的潜力。和创造得更快。当人的智慧增加到 10 的 40 次方，基本就有能力掌握整个星系，而且会进一步探索。

13:18

So humans, and any other explanation creators who may exist out there, are the ultimate agents of novelty for the universe. We are the reason and the means by which novelty and creativity, knowledge, progress, can have objective, large-scale physical effects. From the human perspective, the only alternative to that living hell of static societies is continual creation of new ideas, behaviors, new kinds of objects. This robot will soon be obsolete, because of new explanatory knowledge, progress.

所以，人类 和其他可能存在的解释性创造者 是宇宙创新的最终代理人。我们是新事物产生的原因和方法，因为我们，新事物，创造力，知识，发展 得以对现实有客观、大规模的影响。从人类的角度来说，去改变永恒不变的 地狱社会的唯一方法 便是不断地创造新的思想，新的行为，新的事物。这个机器人很快就会过时，因为新的解释性知识和我们的发展。

14:08

But from the cosmic perspective, explanatory knowledge is the nemesis of the hierarchy rule. It's the destroyer of the great monotony. So it's the creator of the next cosmological era, the Anthropocene. If one can speak of a cosmic war, it's not the one portrayed in those pessimistic stories. It's a war between monotony and novelty, between stasis and creativity. And in this war, our side is not destined to lose. If we choose to apply our unique capacity to create explanatory knowledge, we could win.

从宇宙的角度来说，解释性知识 是等级制度建设的克星，它是大单调的终结者。因而它将是下一个 宇宙时代的创造者，人类世（Anthropocene）。如果有人可以为宇宙大战说话的话，它不会是那些悲观主义 故事中描绘的救世主，它是一场单调对抗创新的战争，一场停滞不前对抗创新改变的战争。在这场战争中，我们注定不会是失败者，如果我们能选择运用我们 独特的能力来创造解释性知识，我们就可以获得胜利。

15:00

Thanks.

谢谢。

15:02

(Applause)

（鼓掌）