♪ INSPIRING SYNTH MUSIC Welcome to New Frontiers, a show that's all about exploring the science, discovery, and innovation happening at the University of Arizona.

I'm your host, Erika Hamden.

And for this episode, we're meeting with philosophers and scientists who are attempting to sift fact from fiction, science from speculation, and real news from fake news.

Do you think you can tell those things apart?

Let's find out.

♪ EXHILARATING SYNTH MUSIC I'm on my way to meet with philosophy professor Hannah Kim, who studies the philosophy of fiction.

She thinks that by better understanding the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, we might learn important life lessons that will help us to navigate the world of misinformation and fake news that we find ourselves in today.

This is gonna be a fascinating conversation, so check her story out and join us after.

♪ SOFT SYNTH MUSIC ♪ (Hannah) I remember my very first philosophy class, and I remember blowing my mind.

I felt like somebody was slicing the top of my head off.

It was a high I've never felt before.

It was an intellectual high, and I think I pursued that feeling.

What I wanted to know was what's really true, and what's really real so behind the appearance behind the bustle of change and things that come and go, like what's at the foundation of it all?

And that's what first got me to major and eventually go to grad school to do more of it.

So note that they really focused on moral development.

Either human nature is good, in which case we can just lean into that fact and try to develop our already good moral nature.

I'm Hannah Kim.

I'm an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of Arizona.

But either way, Confucianism is really focused on developing yourself- (O.S.)

I teach and research philosophy of art or aesthetics as well as metaphysics and Asian philosophy.

But I also think a lot about philosophy of fiction, which is the thing I ended up focusing on.

-and they're almost doing this like, whistle blowing, double speak kind of thing, where they are telling this fictional story, but really, wink, wink, what they're saying is something about reality.

(O.S.)

So the really tricky thing with philosophy of fiction is I work with this concept called fictional truth.

You might think fiction is just what's made up.

What's imaginary?

Nonfiction is what's real, what's happened.

But some of my favorite writers, (unintelligible) and John Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, they're getting at these angsty human truths about psychology and the human condition.

So they get me to believe what's true, I think, but not because Raskolnikov is real or true, and not because Kathy Ames is a real person.

[ AUDIO FROM MOVIE CLIP ] Another thing that makes this fiction nonfiction distinction hard is that a lot of things are constructed, even history.

And some people even go as far as to say, "Look, everything is fiction for that reason, because everything is constructed."

So like, when are those situations where we make this choice not to go along with the author?

(O.S.)

This is one reason why I think philosophy fiction is really important.

Now, at a time when misinformation and disinformation is everywhere, and it's getting harder and harder to know what's real and what's not, and in the midst of that, we have this human practice of fiction-making.

And so if we can get clear on what that is, we might be able to draw a clear line of what is real, what's fiction, and what is just not real, what's a lie, what's deception.

(News Anchor) Social media platforms- (Anderson Cooper) Chat GPT- (News Anchor 2) Conspiracy theories- (News Anchor) Spread misinformation.

♪ SOFT SYNTH MUSIC (Hannah) I think I tend to resonate with really angsty literature.

works where protagonists are just unsatisfied or they're searching and so they are just trying all these things to get answers.

One kind of strand of classics in this vein is like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, right?

These women who feel like they don't quite have it all, they are searching for answers, they're searching for good life.

So any literature that asks these questions, I think that's what really speaks to me.

♪ SOFT SYNTH MUSIC [FILM SLIDES] So I grew up between two cultures.

I was born in Nevada, but I also spent my childhood in Korea But I also grew up in settings where asking questions was a form of rebellion And I was chastised a lot, for being a bad child, for rebelling all the time, for debating all the time, for just fighting all the time.

And so when I found philosophy, that was miraculous, honestly.

I think it helped me, I think it saved me.

And that's how I got into philosophy.

♪ SOFT SYNTH MUSIC (News Reporter) Concerns about spreading misinformation- (News Reporter 2) From robocalls to deepfakes- (News Reporter 3) artificial intelligence and deep learning... (Hannah) So we live in a world where we are inundated with information... (News Reporter) trained on a massive amount of data- (Anderson Cooper) ...has the ability to respond to prompts in a human-like manner.

(Hannah) But apparently that makes it harder to know what's really real and what's really true.

(News Reporter) How far the technology has come And I think this is where we get into dangerous territory now (V.O.)

Already playing a role in the 2024 election.

(Hannah) It's been interesting to see people react to AI as if it's a phenomenon we've never seen before.

Like we've seen movies like Pinocchio, we've seen fictional people who we know are not real sound as if they're real.

And so just like fictional people, they sound like real people, but AI is fiction.

(Pinocchio) I can talk!

I can walk!

(Hannah) We're going to have more and more augmented reality and more virtual reality becoming a part of just our daily practices.

Humans have come up with this phenomenal ability to keep reality and not reality distinct when it comes to fiction.

And I think that's because we've learned how to use this fiction as a piece of technology.

As a communicative technology, as an artistic technology.

And so I think we can get there with AR and VR too, right?

Once we get a grip on how to use it and what we want to use it for, then we can keep separate what's real, what's not.

And enjoy its benefits without getting delusional.

And so philosophy, has this process of carefully making distinctions, thinking through all the different categories and seeing the ramifications, doing this in this iterative process helps us clarify what really is going on when people are tempted to say things like, "Ah, it's all fiction."

Or say, "Actually, it's not."

And here's why.

♪ SYNTH MUSIC So I think philosophy matters more than ever now because of its two major guiding questions.

So one is what is real or what is true.

And second, how do you live a good life?

One of my favorite movies is Bergman's "Seventh Seal."

And this is the movie with the famous scene where a knight plays chess with death on a beach.

And the movie is about this knight who's come back from the Crusades, very disillusioned, about life, about faith, about what's good and what's bad and what's right and wrong.

And the movie doesn't give any answers.

The movie just continues to show someone's trying out different ways of thinking.

I think philosophy helps me feel more comfortable with not knowing.

I might be wrong and that's okay.

This is an ongoing process.

There's no destination I'm getting to.

It's really the- the continual search that I'm really interested in, and I think the search tells us a lot about who we are and what we value.

And I can't help but think this might be a good reflection of what life is.

This is a good life.

♪ SOFT SYNTH MUSIC (bell ringing) (Erika) Welcome back.

I'm here with Professor Hannah Kim of the Philosophy Department.

That segment was so interesting and I feel like it brings up a lot of, I don't know, fundamental questions about how we move around in the world and how we understand the information that's being conveyed to us.

So are there ways that people can kind of arm themselves in the new media that we find ourselves in?

- Yeah, I mean, I think it's inevitable that people are going to agree or disagree more likely that whether something is real or if it's worth paying attention to or if it's good.

I think the trouble comes where people say, "Okay, you find that unreliable?

Cool.

That's true for you, but for me, something else is true."

This is how breakdown of the communication happens because there's no actual eye to eye.

There's no talking on the same platform.

So I think we need to be able to come to an agreement of how we decide together intersubjectively the world is like so we can live in it together and not just get siloed into our own visions of what is true and right.

And so that's one big thing I do in the classroom where I tell students, it's not rude to question other people's opinions, right?

I mean, in fact, you should do that so you can understand it better and it's a skillset you have to train up to do.

[ So that's gonna be kind of the MO for this new small unit. ]

When my non-philosophy friends like hear us at parties, they're always like, "Whoa, why are you fighting?"

[ ERIKA LAUGHING ] You're telling each other you're not making any sense, right?

- "Thats not nice" - We're like, "I can't be right."

but we're, that's literally, it's but it doesn't cross us as not nice because that's how we show love.

That's how we try to understand each other at this deepest level.

And I wish we can all have that.

Where somebody thinks something, I can sit them down, be like, explain to me how we got from here to there and not have it be just a personal attack on them, because it's not, it's really a request for more information because I wanna connect.

- It's gonna be an interesting time for us, I think.

- That's right, yeah.

- But I'm glad that we have you here to guide us.

- Thank you for having me.

♪ UPBEAT SYNTH MUSIC (Erika) Our next story takes place here at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences with Professor Yotam Shmarghad.

He's a social network scientist who studies how social media can shape our political realities.

And with the 2024 election season upon us, his research has become more important than ever.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC (Yotam) When I graduated with my PhD, nobody called themselves The "computational social scientists."

And I think 2016 was really this turning point where an increasing number of social scientists became interested in Internet data.

Social media has become a crucial part of the political landscape.

How nonsense on one website breaks out to become a trending article on Facebook or Twitter.

(Yotam) Studies were trying to get hold of how much misinformation is out there, how many people are being exposed to it, how many people are sharing it, how big of a problem this was.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC CONTINUES For me as a social network scientist, a lot of what the web provides is information about the contexts that people are in.

If you're getting information about a video that gets you possibly information about who's shared the video, who is commenting on the video, who likes the video, and so what you can do is you can start a data collection procedure and then you can do a new round of data collection around those- that initial set of videos.

People who share messages from Democratic candidates and people who share messages from the Republican candidates are very different.

You see very little overlap.

You see very few influencers or people in general that would retweet a message from a Republican congressional candidate and a Democratic congressional candidate.

And so in addition to misinformation, what doesn't get talked about enough is misperceptions.

Social media provides a very skewed version of members of the other party.

And when you look at how people actually think about issues, And when you look at how people actually think about issues, we're not that far apart.

If you look at some of the new numbers out suggesting that we Americans agree far more than we disagree on the country's fundamental values.

(Yotam) One of the interesting bits of research that I've come across recently is a book called The Other Divide.

Typically as political scientists, we think about the divide as being between Republicans and Democrats.

And something that has emerged in this divide recently is something called effective polarization.

This idea that it's not just issues that we have differences about, but we actually dislike members of the other party.

And we've seen that kind of effective polarization grow over time, at least partly as a result of social media.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC But the other divide is between people who make politics central to their life and people who don't.

And it turns out that effective polarization really only exists among people who make politics very central to their life.

But many voters don't see politics as the main thing that they care about, the main thing that they're thinking about, the more anything that they're engaging with.

There are a host of other things that people are into that fill up their time, their energies, their enthusiasm, than politics.

And so I think a lot of these platforms do a poor job of putting politics outside of our other interests.

Where you see some glimmers of hope are in these spaces that are less devoted to politics.

One of the earliest studies about the effect that the internet has on people showed that the internet creates loneliness and depression and a host of other negative outcomes.

But that study was overturned in 2001 or 2002, where the scholars agreed that what they had found was not a result of the internet, but a result of using the internet for the first time.

It could be that as a society, we're going through an extended version of this kind of growing pain.

And that what we're seeing right now is the consequences of a sudden change to the structure of personal connection and personal relationships.

But then in 10 or 20 years, we'll look back and say, "Okay, that was a tough time, but we made it through, and now this tool is just part of our life, but maybe we'll get a little bit better at either sifting it out or creating a space for it that's not all-encompassing."

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC FADES OUT ♪ UPLIFTING SYNTH FADES UP (Erika) I'm currently at the beautiful ENR2 building on my way to meet with evolutionary biologist Mike Worobey.

He's been at the forefront of one of the more controversial subjects of the last few years, the origin of the COVID pandemic.

While much of the public still believes COVID originated in a Chinese lab leak, Worobey's research actually suggests otherwise, that it leapt from animals to humans in Wuhan wet markets.

This has been a heated issue, to say the least, so let's see if we can get to the bottom of it.

(News Anchor) Where did COVID-19 come from?

At the moment, it raises more questions than clear answers.

The head of the FBI in a brand new interview is saying the agency thinks COVID may have originated, may have started with a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

For me, I went through the process myself where I thought a lab origin was much more suspicious than now I realize it was.

(Newscaster) The theory that the virus may have escaped from a lab in China has been a heated issue.

(Michael) At the heart of this, is this idea and we can call it the Jon Stewart fallacy.

(Jon Stewart) China what do we do?

Oh, you know who we could ask?

The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab.

The disease is the same name as the lab.

(Michael) There actually is a lab in Wuhan that studies these viruses very extensively.

But it turns out our own research has shown what I would describe as decisive evidence that this market was the site where this first started spreading and likely jumped from animals into humans.

(Newscaster) Researchers now believe it's clear that the virus came from the Wuhan market and not the lab.

(Michael) That's where the science is.

The public perception is not there.

And in part, it's because there's not that many people who've spent 10 to 16 hours a day for four years trying to integrate all of the information.

And that's what you want to do as a scientist you don't want to advocate for one hypothesis or against another hypothesis you want to advocate for what the data actually tells you 50 nucleotides for the fragments because this genome that we have in 100 nucleotide fragments, we need the reverse complement.

I am an evolutionary biologist, but my area of specialty is the evolution of viruses.

And evolutionary tools like creating family tree of viruses can help you answer questions like when, where, and how pandemics begin and spread around the world, how they could be prevented.

Somewhere between the ancestor of the closest relatives in birds and cattle.

HIV and influenza have been two of my major focuses.

And so I've done work on HIV working out how that pandemic started including doing fieldwork in the Congo to collect samples from chimpanzees who have related viruses.

And then on the flu side, I developed a way of accounting for what we call local molecular clocks So molecular clocks are a way that we can look at viruses that are collected over weeks, months, years.

They evolve so have quickly that you can see this mutations accumalate in real time and it was sort of magic that you put that together and all of a sudden the confusing differences kind of snap into place.

And in many ways what I've done now with COVID is a direct parallel with that.

♪ SOFT PIANO MUSIC Okay, so fast forward to early 2020 There are reports of this virus, and people who have mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan, in China China has more than 200 confirmed cases of coronavirus, it's called, which produces pneumonia-like symptoms.

(Michael) What I knew I wanted to do was take that outbreak and model it on my computer.

We need to do these, what we call simulations.

We need to rerun the tape of this epidemic and the evolution of the virus over and over and over again.

And finally, we're able to use that same methodology to answer questions, not just about how this virus spread to different parts of the world, but how did it get into humans in the first place?

Of the 174 earliest onset COVID cases that are known, there's an astonishingly clear signal of where they lived.

Our most recent analyses show that if you take the center of those residential locations of the early cases, it's just at the entrance to a parking lot at the Huanan Market, of all the places in a city, 8,500 square kilometers.

So unlike any pandemic in history, we have the addresses of these folks.

It's incredible data.

And then the genomic information strongly suggests that there wasn't just one jump of these viruses, that there are two early lineages.

That's a scenario that makes perfect sense at a market where you have sustained infections with animals.

If you then are thinking, "Okay, someone got it at a lab and then brought it to the market," that's weird enough because there's 10,000 other places that the person could go, including their own workplace.

But then you're saying, "Okay, it happened," and then it happened two weeks later.

What we don't have is a sample from an animal at that market that had the virus.

But we were able to show that if you look where the virus was found in, in what we call environmental samples, so this is just basically like a Q-tip that you swab on a doorknob or an animal cage or a floor, and then you see, "Is there SARS-COV-2 in it?"

The real hotspot in the whole market was a particular stall that sold wildlife and the Chinese group that collected those samples, collected them in Janurary of 2020 sequenced them and had the data that, you know, raccoon dogs were there, both lineages of the virus were there.

We have an environmental sample literally from one of the cages in this stall, and it has the virus You know, we have a real, really good understanding of how this one happened, but there's almost no discussion of what are we going to do now today to stop animals that we know harbor potential pandemic pathogens from being sold in the heart of big cities.

♪ SOFT PIANO MUSIC (Newscaster) China has started to reopen it's wet markets The virus likely spilled over into humans there, And so sad, frustrating, but what do we have?

We've demonstrated that what we call this genomic epidemiology is incredibly powerful.

Millions and millions of the genome sequences of these viruses that helped us learn when a new variant was spreading.

More than half of them were sequenced using, in part, technology developed in this lab.

And so that is an example of what we call basic research.

You just want to answer a question, can then actually feed into tools that can make the world safer The world needs to know the origin of COVID-19 to prevent the next pandemic.

When I see a question that I want answered, I will find a way to answer that, whether it means going to the Congo or developing a new methodology or working with people who can help develop that.

Holy smokes.

I just wanna find the answer because that answer will help protect us from the next one ♪ MELLOW PIANO FADES ♪ (Erika) I'm here with Professor Mike Worobey.

Mike, thanks so much for talking to us.

- Thanks for coming to my lab.

- So how does it feel being, you know, a researcher trying to understand the truth about something which has become surprisingly controversial?

- It has been a very interesting experience for sure.

You know, the beautiful thing about science is that I don't care what the answer is.

If the evidence had consistently pointed away from that market, then I would be here talking about that evidence.

[ Early kits that came out for SARS-CoV-2. ]

(Erika) In addition to just like trying to determine where COVID came from, you've been doing work on COVID testing and surveillance testing.

And so I wanted to hear about whether I'm gonna get a test that works like super duper well.

- Okay, well, let's go back in time to when the university offered the PCR test.

My team and I developed that test.

- Oh, thank you.

- Yeah.

My vision is something like a tricorder from Star Trek, if you're familiar with, so on the original Star Trek, they have this little machine and basically anything you wanna analyze, you just put it in and like five seconds later, it tells you what it is.

- Yeah.

- How is he?

- Severe heart damage, signs of congestion in both lungs.

(Worobey) My goal is basically a tricorder for these viruses.

(Erika) Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

I know that you're a super busy guy running departments and saving the world and figuring out what happened five years ago.

So I really appreciate it.

And this has been just like so informative and super interesting.

- I'm honored that you would take the time to chat with me and thank you very much.

♪ UPBEAT SYNTH MUSIC FADES UP (Erika) Thanks for braving the line between fact and fiction with me on this all new episode of New Frontiers.

I'm Erika Hamden and I'll see you next time.

(Erika) Make sure to stay tuned for future episodes where we'll explore more of the incredible innovation happening here at the University of Arizona.

And if you want to know what's happening with me, follow my Instagram, @erika.hamden.