Audio Player
Starting at:
Barry Loewer Λ Eddy Chen: The God Crutch: Do The Laws of Physics Exist?
June 16, 2025
•
2:16:00
•
undefined
Audio:
Download MP3
⚠️ Timestamps are hidden: Some podcast MP3s have dynamically injected ads which can shift timestamps. Show timestamps for troubleshooting.
Transcript
Enhanced with Timestamps
315 sentences
20,218 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 134m 8s
The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region.
I'm particularly liking their new insider feature was just launched this month it gives you gives me a front row access to the economist internal editorial debates where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers and twice weekly long format shows basically an extremely high quality podcast whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics the economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines.
Ford Blue Cruise hands-free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control.
We have to acknowledge that we don't fully access the physical reality. These are metaphors that have gone crazy. This seems like a very historical debate. Nature cannot violate the laws of God. Why not?
The laws of physics as something that constrains or even causes the world around us is as fundamental a concept as anything. That's what I investigate on this channel. However, do laws like this even exist in this manner? Do what we call the quote laws of physics actually compel reality? Or do they describe patterns that we observe?
Professor Barry Lauer of Rutgers University champions the Humean view that laws are sophisticated summaries, not these primitive governing forces. Professor Eddie Chen of UC San Diego defends the opposing position through minimal primitivism, that is, that laws are fundamental metaphysical facts that genuinely constrain physical possibilities.
A special thank you to Barry as he had just come off of a 12-hour flight. You'll notice the playful camaraderie between these two, and that's because Barry, along with David Albert, were Eddie Chen's PhD supervisors. Stick around until the end as we get to questions of free will and ultimately whether the mathematical structures physicists discover reflect mind-independent features of nature or are projections of human pattern-seeking onto brute facts.
To me, the stakes extend beyond academic philosophy. It's about how we understand the laws that shape our conception of science, causation, and you, yes you, your place in the universe. I'd like to talk about a phrase that we use often, and it's so often that it's become second nature to us all. What is it that we mean when we say the laws of physics? Laws.
So this channel is called theories of everything. We explore various unification attempts and laws of physics, but we don't talk about, well, what is a law and what is its role in ontology and causation? So I know you all have different views on this. Various technical jargon will come out like humanism and primitivism and so on. Metaculous. If, if we get to that as well, best systems, et cetera, those will all be defined. But for now, as an introduction,
For me, laws of nature are fundamental facts.
They discover the universe. They are not part of something else. They are not reduced to what goes on in the universe. So laws of nature, in some sense, are laws of physics, something like laws of mathematics and laws of logic.
They just be and govern. They constrain, they explain. And lots of physics have less robustness than lots of mathematics and lots of logic, but they're still part of the fundamental goings-on of the universe. And in that sense, they are primitive facts. They are facts that exist in the world. They don't depend on anything else.
And one crucial element of this governing business is that laws constrain what's physically possible. So there is the actual world, the universe we live in, the universe in which, you know, the big bang happens and here's us and there's the maybe big crunch and there's all that goes on in the universe and lots of nature constrain the possibilities for this universe.
So what could have been the case? The kind of actuals, the possibilities and necessities. So, laws governs the universe by allowing certain possibilities to unfold and certain possibilities to not be the actual world. The actual world is one element of the many possibilities allowed by the laws of nature. OK, Barry, why don't you spell out your view on what laws are?
Okay. Well, first thing I want to say is that it meant much of what Eddie said. I can agree with at least those words, but I think I would mean a little bit different things by many of those words, but I can, I can agree that law is constrained under a certain understanding of constraint. I agree that they support the support counterfactuals. I have a whole theory of counterfactuals. Maybe we'll want to get to it and so on. Um, so I agree with the words.
But there's something I don't agree with. I don't agree that laws are what Eddie called primitive facts. Now, I'm not exactly sure what primitive facts are. So I think it's useful to go back with a little history. Do you mind that? Sure. You do mind it? No, no, please do. Okay. I think it's very interesting about the history of the concept of laws. First most interesting thing is no one has written a history of the concept of laws of nature.
There's one book that kind of comes a little bit close, but nobody has really done it. If I were a historian, I would think that that's, you know, right. We're just right on the tree ready to be plucked off. People have written histories of probability and chance, a closely related notion. No one's written necessarily the concept of law. So the concept of law in the modern sense really has a father.
I want to ask you to guess who the father was. It is father's day today, isn't it? Hmm. Oh, okay. Maybe we should celebrate this guy. All right. He's a pretty French flood. Famous, pretty famous French philosopher. I bet you know what I'm talking about. Rousseau? No.
Come on. He was interested in breaking the laws. Much more famous than Rousseau. The most famous man. The one that every... Descartes? Yes. If you will go into Paris, you walk down Route Descartes. Okay. Descartes. So Descartes was the father, really. I mean, this is a little bit of an exaggeration, but the father of the concept of, modern concept of laws of nature. He had a vision. His vision was that there could be a few
principles that can be expressed in mathematics, which are not primitive facts at all. What they do is they describe how God moves matter around. Descartes had the view that all activity in the universe was due to God. So Descartes had this view that what the laws were were they describe how God moves things around. It was God who did the constraining.
God who did the enforcing, God who moved things around. So he described how God constrains things, but they weren't primitive facts. They described what God was doing. They had two important features. One was what Eddie was calling the constraining or what's usually called the governing feature. And the other was the unifying feature. They unified all of nature. And of course, they're also mathematical. And you know why Descartes
knew that the laws had to be mathematical, because he thought God must be a mathematician, because he was a mathematician. Okay, this is the history, really, honestly, the history of when the Nelson Law originated. And if people have written about it, I can give some references of scholars, a guy named Peter Harrison, another person named John Milton, not the poet, another
The philosophy was written close to a history as a person called Walter Ott, but he doesn't really do it. So it would be an interesting thing for somebody to do. Okay. So the concept of laws started, I'm going to stop in a minute. The concept of laws had these two aspects at the very beginning, the unifying or organizing aspect and the constraining aspect. What Eddie has done is picked up on one of the aspects.
I've picked up on the other aspect. The reason I've done that is I find the constraining aspect absolutely un-understandable. What does it mean for the laws to constrain? How do they do it? Is there a super law that's appealed to to make them constrain or does it just happen automatically because they're laws?
I mean, there's a third alternative here. Some people think that the things in nature themselves have powers and they produce the laws. Aristotle kind of had a view like that, but he didn't have it as a mathematical view about laws, but other people in contemporary times have taken up that view. It doesn't work very well in contemporary physics. Okay, but these are the main three views or a few other views around. So Eddie and I are here to battle.
Unifying versus constraining. Eddie might want to say both. I say jettison the constraining because once you have the unifying, you got everything you need. Okay. So when you said super law, is there a super law that governs the regular laws? The analogy to Descartes would be the super law is God and God is the one governing. Absolutely. You got it. Okay. So the way that I see the disagreement between you both is that
We can think of traffic laws as an analogy. And most of us would say that traffic laws cause the motion or orchestrate, at least the motion of the cars. But then there's also something like a weather report where we're just documenting patterns that we observe. So it sounds like Eddie, you're more on the traffic laws are the laws and then Barry or more on we're just summarizing. These are just descriptions of what's occurring. You're really good, Kurt. That's a very good way to put it.
Okay. Thank you. Please. It's very favorable to my point, but I mean, notice this in the other room, I can come out, um, because I, I've driven just once in Budapest. I managed to get a ticket at one time. So it's, you can violate the laws of man. Nature cannot violate the laws of God. Why not?
Well, that's a really good question, isn't it? Why not? Well, maybe because laws just unify nature. So there's nothing there to violate. I think there is this question of what's explaining the no exception clause for summary's view. So suppose we don't think laws govern laws constraint. Suppose we think that laws merely summarize and unify.
What's about the laws of nature that, um, they have no exceptions. They apply to almost everything or everything literally in the universe. Yeah. They unify everything. Isn't that interesting? We live in, well, first of all, we don't really know that because, uh, general relativity and quantum mechanics has not been unified. As I was reminded last night with my string theorist friend, I mean to that, um, uh,
And I didn't have to be reminded of course, but, um, but the hope is Einstein had this hope. Einstein, many people fully think of as a, at some point in his life, he became a believer in God. I've read Einstein pretty closely. I don't think that's true. I'm not absolutely certain, but he did express faith. He expressed faith that a scientist has to have that nature will be unified.
And so science works under the assumption that you can find a unification or she can find the unification of nature. And so far it's working. In fact, let me make another historical note, which I find astonishing. After Descartes proposed his project for the next millennia, finding the mathematical laws of nature, he wrote a few down. They were
abysmal failure actually as laws of nature. They didn't, well, he kind of got, so it came close to inertia, but he didn't, he wasn't very good at it. A long 80 years later, another guy came along, the Frenchman's arch enemy, Isaac Newton. And he basically satisfied Descartes dream up to a point. If Descartes had lived to see Newton,
I don't want to go into what I'm about to say couldn't be broadcast. I mean, it's amazing to think about what he would think. Newton came up with a few simple laws and a scheme for laws, which looked like it was going to unify all of nature. And many people thought for a long time that it did. It's not until he got into more careful examination that they discovered it didn't. But it does, it works very well.
If you want to get your pendulum clock working or your cannon balls flying in the right direction, Newton's laws are very good.
Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been in Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit bigdealevent.com for more details.
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.
So I want to hear from Eddie about where he agrees in contrast with your earlier views. So Eddie, please. Yeah. Um, so that's very helpful, Barry. I think that the two roles of laws are both important and unifying role is one we try to, we're motivated and aspire to find in the laws of nature. Um, but without this considered the basic constraint, um, it's, um,
It's not clear how the unifying thing does any explanation. So I think it's taken for granted in many scientific communities that the laws and principles we find in the end can explain, and they constrain or govern somehow. They explain how things fall in the same way, how things move in the same right way, and of course people focus on the unifying part.
And they say, okay, what is the simplest way and most natural way and most unifying way we can find laws of nature write down principles and equation write down that explains things. Of course, people are not very explicit about how laws explain and there will be debates about this and there'll be two ways to cash out how people think about laws of nature. But I do think that the majority of scientists, the naive view, the flat-footed view is the view that
That's what you say. Now, Eddie, about your talking about taking advice from scientists, do you take advice from the general scientists about what you want to think about quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is a difficult case. Shut up and calculate, Eddie. Shut up and calculate.
You do not. Of course, what scientists have done is they bought into Descartes' general picture and they started to using this language of governing. That's the language they're using, governing and constraining, as though they somehow couldn't do without it. It's like you had a crutch that you don't need anymore. You never used, it never held you up.
So maybe maybe we should clarify the view of constraining and summarizing and just to for the audience. Maybe you should say I. Well, you put summarizing in my mouth. I did not say, OK, OK. How about I summarize and also explain summarizing? I'll do so with an analogy again for people who are educated in physics. So maybe a germane analogy. You can tell me if this is germane or not is the action principle.
So we extremize action. Now one could argue that the universe is genuinely extremizing its action. It's lazy if we're doing least action principle. Alternatively, someone can contend that that's just the stationary action principle is just an elegant way of summarizing what nature is doing. The principle itself isn't causative. It doesn't drive anything. It just encapsulates the behavior in a concise summary. So that's
one way of viewing or at least one way that i view the difference between a law of nature causing something now what i'm confused about barry is is there some meta principle that says that the laws of physics are even describable by something simple so you say that it's all unified or it could be
There's something in algorithmic information theory called Kolmogorov complexity. We also know it well. And it could be conceivably that the universe is not compressible. It could be. It doesn't seem like that. I mean, it seems like we're able to write down something relatively short and do some predictions. So is there in your mind some meta principle that suggests that the universe is indeed compressible outside of initial conditions? And we can also talk about initial conditions. We can. So a couple of things here.
One is, I like the way you put things. I think it's good. Um, we're talking about the universe being compressible. You have to think about which parts you're going to compress and the parts you're not going to compress, comogorov complexity has a lot to do with too, because along in the 19th century, along came a couple of people who figured out how to supplement the laws of nature.
Probability.
I have very definite views about how to think about probability as well. Eddie and I were having a long conversation. I don't know, when was it, Eddie? My brain is gone. When do we have this long conversation? We thought we might actually almost be in agreement about thinking about objective probability. That's one of the big, that's what got me into philosophy, in fact, and it's one of the big questions about giving a good account of what objective probability is.
It's really fascinating that physicists, mathematicians, biologists, they know how to use the notion of probability pretty well. They don't know what they're talking about. Bertrand Russell had the most wonderful thing. I'm sure you know this, that Bertrand Russell is great. If you want to go get some one-line quote to use for something, you go to Russell. He said, probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially since nobody knows what it means.
And that's verbatim. Yeah, there are many of these quips where someone says that so and so when no one knows what it means entropy, for instance, I think von Neumann said that. Yeah. So yeah, but I, well, I know what entropy means is screw fun. He knew what it meant to. Okay. I don't believe that. Okay. So Eddie,
What does it mean to explain?
They say, okay, can you explain to me how do I get to the CN Tower? I'm in Toronto. So let's say explain to me how I get to the CN Tower. They say, okay, you go forward from here, you make a left, etc. But they don't say something like you take infinity categories and you just like that's not an explanation to them because they don't know what infinity categories are. So explaining has something to do with meeting the person where they are and then providing a line of justification. But that's colloquially. And you're obviously speaking about the laws of physics. I don't imagine our demonic understanding of
Explaining is what you mean. So what do you mean? Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away
Don't be like the economy, instead read the economist. I thought all the economist was was something that CEOs read to stay up to date on world trends. And that's true, but that's not only true. What I found more than useful for myself personally is their coverage of math, physics, philosophy, and AI, especially how something is perceived by other countries and how it may impact markets.
For instance the economist had an interview with some of the people behind deep seek the week deep seek was launched no one else had that another example is the economist has this fantastic article on the recent dark energy data which surpasses even scientific americans coverage in my opinion they also have the charts of everything like the chart version of this channel it's something which is a pleasure to scroll through and learn from.
Links to all of these will be in the description, of course. Additionally, just this week there were two articles published. One about the Dead Sea Scrolls and how AI models can help analyze the dates that they were published by looking at their transcription qualities. And another article that I loved is the 40 best books published this year so far. Sign up at Economist.com slash TOE for the yearly subscription. I do so and you won't regret it. Remember to use that TOE code as it counts to helping this channel and gets you a discount.
Now, the economist's commitment to rigorous journalism means that you get a clear picture of the world's most significant developments. I am personally interested in the more scientific ones, like this one on extending life via mitochondrial transplants, which creates actually a new field of medicine, something that would make Michael Levin proud. The economist also covers culture, finance and economics, business, international affairs, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, China, Asia, the Americas, and of course, the USA.
Whether it's the latest in scientific innovation or the shifting landscape of global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage and it goes far beyond just headlines. Look, if you're passionate about expanding your knowledge and gaining a new understanding, a deeper one of the forces that shape our world, then I highly recommend subscribing to The Economist.
I subscribe to them and it's an investment into my into your intellectual growth one that you won't regret as a listener of this podcast you'll get a special twenty percent off discount now you can enjoy the economist and all it has to offer.
Demonic understanding of
Explaining is what you mean. So what do you mean?
And I don't think it's a big difference. There might be differences in terms of things we invoke to explain, whether I'm invoking the absence or the presence of some, you know, a person to explain something falling or breaking. But the kind of explanation I think is continuous. And even ordinary life explanations, they are backed by something. Insofar as they're accurate or they are faithful, they should be tracking some kind of general laws
Maybe about human nature, maybe about human psychology, economics, and then all the way back to deeper and deeper principles. So for me, explanation is by some simple constraint. And this is the view of lots of nature developed with Charlene Goldstein, a metaphysicist at Rutgers University. So we call this view minimal primitivism.
Right. So for us, the laws are basic. They underline everything. So they're not reducible to something else. They're not summarizing. They're not unifying, merely reunifying. They can be nice summaries. They can be nice unifying simple features. But they are fundamental features of the universe. They coexist with the universe, the mosaic. And they can give rise to some kind of causal explanations.
how a causes b and b causes c but causation is not fundamental to the picture and the example you used earlier was very helpful the least action principle was one of the examples that motivate us to
to think about this more general picture of governing laws. Some people think that, well, if you have real laws in nature, governing things, there must be causal laws. So A at T1 causes B at T2, and that's the way the universe moves, step by step, moment by moment, generating. But think about general relativity, think about modern physics, think about quantum mechanics, at least action principle, Lagrange mechanics, all of this simple away from this step by step production picture.
So I remember you have Emily Atlin on the YouTube channel before, and she was also suggesting this all at once picture. So we have very similar ideas of time and laws. So for us too, the laws govern the whole universe, the entire space time and its contents. And in a sense, all at once. For me, explanation has to be not just any constraint,
But it has to be some simple constraints, so simple laws of nature. The least action principle, quantum mechanical Schrodinger equation, Einstein field equations, they are not simple in the sense that they're not like something we learn from elementary school, but they're simple in the sense we can build up on simpler principles and develop sophistication
There's some fancy words that
Probably will come up that haven't I'm surprised they haven't so far like non-humane, which is not to be confused with non-human although Very yourself staunchly humane that that's not true You may say that to be non-humane is to be not I'm gonna I'm gonna correct that in a little while to tell you what my real my actual view is and
But Eddie knows why we're laughing and I don't think I can repeat the story because it's at the expense of a colleague. Okay. But confusing you mean with human can make a big. Okay. Okay. And the word mosaic also came up. So I think this is a great time for you, Barry, to define what mosaic is so that the audience can also follow. But also at the same time, while doing that, please explore the relationship between boundary conditions and laws.
Okay, so a lot to do here. First of all, given what Eddie just said, as I said before, I can agree with a lot of what he said and a lot of the words that he said. I don't want to make it sound as though I don't. Of course, I think that in some sense, the law is a constraint. Of course, I think they explain. Of course, we have a different spin take on many of these notions, which we may want to get into if we want to get into the fine points here. Okay, now,
In contemporary writing, while some philosophers have thought about what laws of nature are, David Hume had a little bit of a thought, not much, Kant thought about it in some sense, and others did, it wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that a few philosophers cooked up some things, and then all of a sudden there was an upsurgence
Of people with views like Eddie's, because Eddie doesn't want to be tarred with these people, I think, but they're definitely in the same group. David Armstrong, Michael Tooley, and Fred Jetsky. And they thought that laws were relations between properties, primitive facts, which were relations between properties, but primitive relations, which constrain or govern events. And another philosopher
There are two other philosophers who looked at that and said, they scratched their head so they could do that. How do they do that? How do they do this governing? How do they do this constraining? I know how the laws of man govern the laws of man. We have the courts and the prison system and so on that helps do it. And then of course what people want and desire and believe.
I thought maybe we don't need this constraining business. And David Lewis came up with a very interesting idea. Now I'm going to expound David Lewis's view. It's not my view since other people will see this. I've published a book recently about this and about to publish a second book about it. So, you know, I guess people care about their books. I'm not sure I do. Did I do a little bit now? I'll place a link to both of your books on screen and in the description right now.
One of us is a much better publicist than the other one, I have to say. At any rate, I haven't done anything about it. My book has the cooler title. We can maybe come to that later. Now, about your actual question. What should I say here? Here's David Lewis's view. David Lewis thought that all the primitive facts
were primitive properties instantiated throughout all the space time. So there was an arena, the space time arena. He wasn't very explicit because he left it open. How many dimensions does it have? He thought probably time just one dimension, you know, maybe space has many dimensions. He didn't really say.
He saw that the fundamental properties were probably instantiated by point-like individuals, like particles maybe, or maybe just by points, because the properties themselves were sufficient to make for there being materiality. And the properties might be things like mass, charge, spin, those are examples he gave, silly example to give spin there, but he did. Um, and,
It's the season for all your holiday favorites. Like a very Jonas Christmas movie and Home Alone on Disney Plus.
Then Hulu has National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. We're all in for a very big Christmas treat. All of these and more streaming this holiday season. And right now, stay big with our special Black Friday offer. Bundle Disney Plus and Hulu for just $4.99 a month for one year. Savings compared to current regular monthly price. Ends 12-1. Offer for ad-supported Disney Plus Hulu bundle only. Then $12.99 a month or then current regular monthly price. 18 Plus terms apply.
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast! And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.COM today to save on your first order.
There'll be these properties. So imagine a mosaic filling in the tiles. So when God created the universe on the Eumian view, David Lewis's Eumian view, all God had to do, God doesn't exist in time, so God doesn't have to do anything in time. Just created the universe all at once. He created
the whole of expanse of space and time and filled it up with fundamental properties. Lewis called them perfectly natural properties, instantiated at points or at point like individuals throughout all these space and time. And since there was a space and time, these point like individuals or points had spatial and temporal relations to each other. Then Lewis said, you know what Eckhart was really after?
He wanted the best systematization of this thing I put down here. Now you guys may think it's a complete mess. It looks like that at first, but if you're clever enough, I've made you a key. If you learn mathematics, you will be able to learn it. And then our job, according to Lewis, is to find the best systematization of this. He used the word systematization. He did not use the word summary. Other people have used it for him.
I like the word unifying better, the best unifying counter. I quickly want to add that this is not my view. My view is a little bit more complex and maybe we want to get to that later, but this is in the neighborhood of my view. I like the part that it does not have the laws govern or constrain in a literal sense and does not have laws as being primitive facts. So here's two places that Eddie and I absolutely disagree, which is great.
because philosophy would not exist if it wasn't for disagreements. This is what makes it go around. Okay, that's Lewis's view. Now the question for Lewis is, well, how do you give an account of explanation? Right. Okay. Okay. And I can come to that in a second. Then other questions like, how, where does probability fit into that? Lewis said a view and I have a view about that. There's also kind of a
I guess a basic question, Barry, for Louisville and the view of humanism that at the bottom level, there's nothing that enforcing the pattern, there's nothing that making things happen. There's nothing that, you know, setting a boundary in what's possible, what's not possible. So no, that's not true. That's totally not true. Well, there's not. There's a mosaic. The mosaic is all there is in reality, right? That's all there is. You're hankering after something more.
But in fact, there is something that, as you say, enforces. The laws of nature enforce, in a certain sense. So, I can say, just with you, that because of the laws of gravity, and the laws of second law of motion, and the size of the earth and the size of the moon, that the moon will follow in an elliptical orbit, and that one side of the moon will be bulging out.
from the moon as the moon goes around the earth that was a tide on the on the on the moon all of that is going to be up to us all of that because explain and notions of explanation we because how we think about the universe how we come to interact with it is not because there is something you know basic that does the explanation
Well, this is what you're hankering after. You still would want God. And I understand. I mean, you may really want God. I want laws. That's a different issue. Okay. Okay. Okay. But you don't need law. Okay. Okay. This is what maybe the coup de gras. What would happen, Eddie, if God came and he whispered in your ears and said, you know, Eddie, there are no primitive law facts. All I did was to make a mosaic and I put a lot of patterns in it.
Would you give up explaining then? Well, what about if God tells you that actually there are primitive laws and they do explanation? Well, I know what I would say to God, what I did when I was 13 years old. Which is? Well, it's not something for the public. Okay, I see.
Let's talk about summaries versus best systems. So right now Barry, you're being recorded.
I don't know if that's a surprise to you, but the audience is seeing you. OK, not live, but they're going to see you at some point. So in some sense, this is a summary of you, of what you've been doing. OK, I wouldn't say that explains what you've been doing. And I don't know if I don't know what the difference is then in terms of this video versus a best system. So like the video is a summary. We can agree on that. Is it a best system? Why is it not a best system? How the heck can best systems explain?
This is not the best of best systems. Here's the heck how best systems can explain. They unify. They unify all. I'm not speaking for Lewis. They unify all of the mosaic. That's how they explain. Because they unifiers. Let me give you an example. Something I think may be eye-opening to you. People for a long time looked at various phenomena. They looked at ice cubes melting.
They looked at smoke dispersing in the air. They dropped some ink and water and it dispersed. They looked at people and they got old. All of these things, they have nothing to do with each other, right? But all of them involve there being particles of matter moving around and more or less in accordance with Newtonians. Not exactly Newtonians, but more or less in accordance with the laws.
And a certain probability distribution over all of these that unifies all of this. That's what explains it. Once we see that these are all connected with each other, we have one of those aha experiences. Now I see how it is that growing old and smoke dispersing in the air are really the same elk. Could it be that the laws of nature are not unified? Well, in my view,
I mean, unification is a matter of degree. It could turn out, maybe this will be the case, that no one will discover, and maybe because there isn't a real unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. I very much doubt that. I think one of those has got to go, and I think I know which one is going to change. But people will still be looking. But yeah, when you have faith,
You have to know that it's faith. Science is based on faith. That's a really important point. What do you mean? I mean, scientists have to assume that there's order in nature.
Now, in order to make themselves feel better about it, they like to posit there being these primitive facts that enforce the order. But in fact, they'll need another primitive fact to connect their primitive facts to the ordinary facts, and I'll need yet another primitive fact to make for their primitive facts. So they have primitives coming up out of their whatever. Okay, so there's something called the Munchausen trilemma. I think it's also known as the Agrippa trilemma, something like that.
Which is that to give any explanation you either have you have three options you have the foundational ism so you start with some axiom which it can't be justified because if you're making an appeal to something else that something else would be the axiom so some unjustified axiom or you have an infinite regress or you have circularity okay so you just pointed out that there's an infinite regress but that is also a potential option
Maybe the universe is in infinite regress. Now, Eddie, I'm not trying to say that you believe that, and maybe you don't believe that, but if you don't, please comment on anything that Barry's just said. Yeah, so I like the setup you just mentioned, Kurt. So in terms of foundationalism versus infinite regress, I think for lots of nature, lots of physics, the view I have,
um and developed with shawty ghosting is kind of foundational picture it's kind of a flat-footed foundational picture trying to capture what physicists have in mind what um the non-human philosophers have in mind which is there is something in the world there are laws of nature they govern what happens in everything every room every particle every field and um these laws are kind of the fundamental axioms in the theory and they are not summary of what happens um so unlike the humane picture
The actions you are real actions the action to the fun of the metaphysical sense of real this and there are the foundational actions real actions are the pianos actions real actions i agree but then the best system actions. They are you know they super being on the mosaic the laws are at the basic level of reality.
Well as I've said a few times I expounded David Lewis's view not my own view I don't know whether we want to come to that at all
Yes. My own view is, okay, I can explain it. It's a little bit, in some ways, a little bit, certain respects, closer to Eddie's. Because what I do think is fundamental is reality, nature. It's fundamental.
But I also have a funny view about reality, but can I come back to the trilemma? Is there something in mind about that? Another quote, this time not from Russell, but from Otto Neurath, and he's been quoted especially by Quine. I'm sure you know this quote from Neurath that Quine uses. He said, science is like a ship at sea that we have to rebuild
while at sale. There's no dry dock, no foundational place to bring it into, to put it up on whatever you put it up on and to redo it. We've got to redo it at sea. Nurath really had it right, I think. He was responding to the foundationalists of the Vienna school. I'm not very far from Vienna. I'll be there in not so long. Budapest, Vienna, we're near each other.
So it's a kind of circularity, but it's circularity with a purpose. It's a circularity aiming to coming up with a better and better and better ship. So there is a guiding light what science should be like. It should be as simple as could be, as comprehensive as can be, as informative to human beings as can be. So it needs a lot of different parts and scientists have been
Fairly good not understanding what they're doing. I don't think is good at that, but they're very good at doing what they're doing Understanding what they're doing. That's the job for Eddie and me to do It sounds like you're talking about science what science is like and what scientists are like, but what is nature like? We're trying to find out yes now
I know Eddie earlier, and I don't want to butcher what you said, but earlier you were saying, look, these are then tied to our descriptions. Like you said, something like that. There's something then subjective to Barry's view if I was understanding you correctly. So feel free to comment. Maybe I misunderstood. Yeah, the thought was that, um, um, the human view on the Louis kind of best system view, best summary view, what laws are, um,
which propositions, which sentences are laws, which sentences are counterfactuals, which sentences express what we can do, what we cannot do, are basically tracking what we mean by simple and informative summaries, which can be very much up to us. So suppose I somehow convince the scientific community to change our standards of, say, simplicity.
then it could be the case that the laws could change to change a different set of laws. Right. And that doesn't seem like what we mean by laws of nature, laws of nature, lots of physics seems like something completely objective and independent of us, our interests, our situations, our political allegiance and so on. So it doesn't shouldn't be so dependent on what we think and what we do. I agree with Barry that there is an important part of how we do science.
What is the rational procedure to carry out the method to carry out science that might be tracking our interests? And that's kind of a big mystery on both sides, on humanism and non-humanism. But minimal primatism and non-human view, I like. The laws are what they are in themselves. The laws don't change in response to our interests. The laws don't shift just by changing our standards of
Do you think I disagree with that? I think you disagree with that, right Barry? Wrong. Suppose, let me ask you Eddie. Suppose someone said I have no idea for baseball.
What we do is we play baseball in a teacup. And what we do in playing baseball is instead of having innings, we just have teabags. And the way we play baseball is it depends on how many times we dip the teabag into the tea. What do you think about that? That's not a very good rule for baseball. It ain't baseball. Well, if somebody changed the rules in the way you're talking about, it would not be good rules for laws.
Now, why is that? Well, tradition and history and the fact that it's been successful in the past. You don't need a crutch to stand on. You just keep looking for a crutch. Okay. I mean, I'm attributing this to you. I was going to complain a little while ago that you were attributing mysteries to Umians, which they don't have because you shouldn't do that. I shouldn't do that to you. But, but if you can, you understand that from my point of view, you're constraining is kind of like a, like so we're hankering after God. You don't need it.
What about the laws of mathematics and laws of logic? They're not mere summaries. What about them? They seem to tell me what, what are they constrained? Logical realities and mathematical realities that one plus one is two is not three. You know, of course I agree that one plus one is two and not three. I'm glad we are, we are in agreement about that, but how do they do the constraining?
I'm not saying I'm not putting a view about them. I find this the deepest of mysteries that I know about. I agree that it is a fundamental primitive and the way we understand the primitive notion like, you know, in mathematics we have primitive notions. I did not say that. Yes. Okay. Let me say, you know, how one might remove some mysteries.
One can remove some mysteries by drawing connections or define things in terms of those primitive notions. We can define kind of factuals, causal relations, notions of time and dependence in terms of the laws. And then we see, okay, how laws do things in the world is by making certain things true, making certain things happen. And then we just kind of talk about things we are familiar with, like how tables and chairs depend on each other on configurations.
I'm trying to clarify this point that I'll lose view on traditional humanism before moving to so bearish your view new view of package deal account and traditional humanism there is this worry about idealism.
The law seems idealistic. They seem dependent on our interests and our wills. And too much so that one might worry whether they deserve the name laws. Lewis himself had that worry. He called it ratbag idealism. Right. So I started thinking, I knew it came from down under because Lewis liked to go visit Australia a lot. I knew it must be from Aussie, Australian or New Zealand. And in fact it is. And I thought at first that a ratbag was a bag that
Rats carry the cheese around. Yeah, it sounds like something negative, but it doesn't. It sounds like something attributable to a person like you call you are a rat bag or you have rat bag qualities. Yeah, that's exactly right. It was just you got to the chase, whereas I want to have a little fun with it first. So, so then I thought maybe no, maybe it's it's a bag that the rat catchers carry their rats around in, but it's neither. I spoke to Al Hayek, who's my Australian
source on stuff and he said it just means disreputable. So you went right to the chase Gert, just means disreputable. So Lewis was afraid that people might think his view is idealist, just like, and he thought that would be bad. Then he argued that it wasn't and I devoted many pages of my book arguing that my view and Lewis's view too is not idealist in any bad sense. Now to say that there is not as
One philosopher called it the mark of the serpent all over our concepts like the concept of laws. That philosopher was Hilary Putnam, who was one of my heroes. So Hilary Putnam had a view that he called realism with a human face. I call my view realism with a scientific face because science attributes a certain goal or aim to what we want by way of unification
by way of simplification, by a way of informativeness, by way of symmetries, and a bunch of other things like that. And if we try to satisfy that, maybe nature will oblige. So on this view, Barry, it is the ideal scientific practice. And in that limit of inquiry, that when science is completed, that kind of standard, that is the rational standard for choice of how we evaluate laws of nature on the best system account or on the package deal account.
and that the trend that's saying is not as subjective as I thought before because now there is a standard and unique standard doesn't change it is whatever it is just like baseball has its standards but you know Barry there is kind of a worry about circularity here right what we mean by ideal a good scientific practice and you know what we evaluate that to be the fixed point depends on what we think about kind of actuals and probabilities and
People's abilities and people's actions, interactions in a community, the social aspects, and all of them are modal concepts that imbue with a lot of nature. So usually we understand those notions in terms of laws. So if we cash out laws in terms of that and that in terms of laws, there seem to be a big maybe kind of distance circle, but still it's a circle. You could call it a circle if you want, but it's a virtuous circle if it's a circle. There is a kind of
All of it hanging together kind of a, a, a feel to it, but it does all seem to hang together. Okay. And that's what's important about it. If it didn't, we'd be in trouble, but so far so good. And philosophers have been working to spell out theories of what probability is, what kind of factuals are so that it does hang together. And scientists and, and you know, the standards have changed over the history of science.
Aristotle had different standards than Newton had, and Einstein had different standards than Newton had, and quantum mechanics and temporaries had different standards, and the mathematics used to express the laws of nature have changed over time. And what counts is a simple account has changed over time. So these things do change over time, but of course they change in orderly ways, still with the aim of coming up with a kind of account of the
Nature of reality.
Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?
Okay, so I want us to be more
analytic and less colorful. So when we use words like this is a rat bag or this is God and I assume God is a synonym for magic, like you're evoking magic. I'm evoking a human face, a scientific face, a virtuous circle. That's like poisoning the well because it's saying that firstly, well, it's giving the impression to the audience like these are the ideas that are foolish and these are the ideas that are more. So let's be more analytic. Explain what reality is and what nature is.
Barry, I want to hear what you think it is. I can't explain what reality is. That's what science is doing. It's doing its best job at coming into account of reality. In my view, reality is describable more or less by quantum mechanics. To get into an account of what quantum mechanics is about is a different subject matter, but that's what we think of as the fundamental cause because that's turned out to be
What a mathematical way of expressing a big chunk of the best systematization of our world. It systematizes the periodic table, for example. Sorry, are you all in agreement in terms of philosophy? For instance, realism versus idealism or anti realism or song. Do you all agree on some broad outlook?
Or do you disagree? Like is one of you an idealist and others a materialist? I think Barry and I, if I'm correct, we are roughly in agreement on the general methodology and the realist picture of metaphysics. Maybe some differences in the details about how realist we are. I'm a realist with, as Hillary says, a human face or a scientific face, but I'm definitely on the realist side of this discussion.
I do think that there are people, and if there were no people or creatures, intelligent creatures, there wouldn't be science. So you need intelligent creatures so there would be science. But I don't think that makes me an idealist.
Yeah. So, on my view, what's real, so I'm a realist too, and on my view, what is fundamental and what is real in the universe are two things. The first thing is the mosaic kind of thing, the universe, the space-time manifold. It could be space-time in general relativity, or maybe quantum gravity kind of manifold, or maybe more general kind of string theoretic description of the universe. But that by itself is not complete. If I write down the theory of everything in terms of
the space-time manifold, then it is missing the most important ingredient, which is the laws of nature. So it's going to be the second part, which is a lot of physics, laws of nature, the fundamental laws that govern the universe. And when you capture both parts, then the theory is complete at the fundamental level. And this should entail all the important regularities order we see around us about gas in a box, about cells, about galaxies, about tables,
And this might include, the law might include deterministic laws of temporal evolution, boundary condition laws like path hypothesis, plus probabilistic laws such as stochastic processes or genuine randomness, or maybe some probabilistic boundary conditions.
And together this will give us, I hope, a very unifying and simple and powerful theory that can explain a lot of regularities. So on the methodology part, we should still strive for describing this in terms of simple, informative, unifying descriptions.
I think you should put that off for a little bit if you want to get to it, because I want to deal with two things.
One is, of course, I can agree with a lot of what Eddie just said in words, but I did want to say that if he were to write down every last event in the mosaic, what happened is his arm would fall off way before he got to the end. And in fact, his arm and what's going on, it would be in the mosaic someplace where there's circularity. Right, it's a self-reference. That's a self-reference. Okay.
So I'm not suggesting anything like that, of course. What I think is that what science is aiming at, or what Lewis is suggesting, I'll expound my view if you want in a minute. Please. I think what Lewis is aiming at is a best systematization of the mosaic. And he hopes that there is one. It is a matter of faith. And Newton, in fact, did come up with something that looked like something pretty close to it. Wasn't quite right.
When Maxwell came along and improved how to put light and electromagnetism into it and improved things a lot, but created a big problem. That big problem was solved by, one of the big problems was solved by special relativity, but some other big problems remained. One of them was how to talk about the structure of matter. That problem was solved to a large extent by quantum mechanics.
So the system got more and more complicated as it encompassed more and more of reality. And all along, something stayed the same, what Arthur Eddington called the Supreme Law of Nature. He didn't mean it to constrain incidentally, but he called it the Supreme Law of Nature. It's the second law of nature. And what he meant by it was not just that entropy doesn't decrease.
What he meant by it is the probabilistic assumption that Boltzmann used in order to entail the probabilistic version of the second law. He said no matter how the dynamical people's proposals for what the dynamical laws are changes, they get better and better. This will stay. And this is very interesting. And the reason is, is that it provides the connection between macroscopic phenomena
and microscopic phenomena. It's always a probabilistic connection. Given the microscopic state, let's say the fundamental quantum mechanical or Newtonian state, of course, if you're given it, you can say exactly what will happen. Laplace famously told that to Napoleon. But nobody is ever given the fundamental state of the world at a time.
What you can do is only come up with a probabilistic account of it. You could say it's just as likely to be this kind of state is that kind of state. We give some sort of probability distribution of the states. Turns out Boltzmann assumed the simplest of all possible probability assumption. It looks like he was right. And then when Eddington said that that's the supreme law of nature, he knew what he was talking about because that has survived. That's right.
I don't see any contradiction between what you're saying, what Eddie believes, because the laws themselves, in my understanding, could be probabilistic. Maybe you believe they aren't. Oh yeah, there's no contradiction there. The contradiction is how we understand the word constrain. I don't think it's doing any work. I think constrain just means satisfies. That's all. What Eddie thinks constrain is some sort of like semi causal notion. It makes things happen.
Okay. So then would you say that the dispute hinges on theories of causation here? Well, I think Eddie would reject my saying that the laws does anything, but it was assured, but they're doing something like that. They're making things happen. He used that language before. Right, right, right. I don't mean making things happen in time in a causal way. I do mean that. So the notion of constraint here is a primitive, right?
And insofar as it's a primitive notion, I cannot define a primitive in terms of other things in my theory. Otherwise, it's not going to be a primitive. It's like you said, the foundational kind of hierarchy. If I really have a foundational hierarchy, being honest, I've got to tell you my axioms and primitive vocabulary and trying to elucidate the connections by drawing connections to things we understand. But if we say, OK, if we don't understand the primitive notions from the other point of view, I can try to convince them. Maybe it is something familiar.
Maybe it is something that can elucidate things we understand anyways. So the causal explanations can be understood in terms of boundary condition laws plus deterministic evolution with stochastic evolution. And those things are familiar. It seems like familiar things about A causing B can be understood in terms of the primitive constraint. Even though constraint is not temporal, it's not like something that producing things in time.
Yeah, okay. So from my, let's focus on that in just a minute. But from my point of view, what you're doing is running together issues about ontology with issues about what might be called ideology or conceptualogy. Axioms have to do with how you formulate your concepts. So for example, real number theory can be axiomatized in a lot of different ways.
God didn't say what the right primitives are. Geometry, Euclidean geometry can be axiomatized in a bunch of different ways. God didn't say these are the right axioms. Same with number theory. There are many ways of axiomatizing. Same way with the laws of nature for that matter. Is it Lagrange's principles? Hamilton's principles? Or what?
Okay, so I think these are matters of ideology or conceptualogy, how you formulate the best systematization. I think that is to a certain extent a free, not free, but I mean it's something that can be done in different ways. Matters of ontology have to do with what exists and what the relationships are among the things that exist. I think
David Lewis thinks, again, I haven't really come to my view, David Lewis thinks that what exists is the mosaic and laws are propositions all right, but they're propositions that are made true or false by the structure of the mosaic. They don't need a special truth maker other than the mosaic and the rules for what it is to be a law. So I don't think I'm running over the distinctions, Barry.
My view of ontology is more expensive than usual. I allow properties and relations to be part of ontology too, and laws to be part of ontology. I don't like that, but I don't mind properties and relations being part of ontology. I think somebody could say, I think there are these things, I'm going to name them, I call them laws or nomoses. And I say, well, what do they do? And how do they do it? And I think you're going to be dumbfounded.
So Barry, are you in the minority? Are you suggesting I'm a physicist and there are no laws of physics, technically speaking? What you mean is that nobody has discovered the laws of physics. You don't mean that there are no laws of physics, do you? No, no, no, I'm asking what do you mean? Do you mean to say that people speak about laws of physics? There aren't actually laws, they're just best systems or hopefully we will get to the best system. I don't know what this just business is. This is a big deal.
Okay. It's not a just, it's a big deal, but I'll come to my view now. I don't have Lewis's view. I want to have even less than he has in some sense, more than another sense. I think what there is fundamentally is reality. I think the view I have, the philosopher who's most like the view I have, I believe, although you're going to find this very weird, is Spinoza.
You know, he's a fellow traveler. Okay. Okay. Okay. Spinoza thought that what there was was reality and he called it the mind of God. I can do without that, but there's reality. Reality can be described in a lot of different ways. Reality can make true or false. The descriptions that we come up with. Now you might ask what are the descriptions and how do we come up with those excellent questions? That's for another session, I think. And I've written about that as well.
Reality can be described in various ways. Among the ways they can be described is ways that satisfy certain goals that people have come up with in their life. The goals of understanding their world and which they've articulated more and more along, wanting to have a simple comprehensive
Systematization that can account for things like the motions of the planets and the motions of the shooting stars and the motions of projectiles and pendula and many things that begin with the word P. Planets, peculiar people, all sorts of things that begin with the letter P1 have accounts of their motions. So motion became a very important notion in physics. We wanted to account for their motions by systematizing the motions of things. That's what I was talking about when I was talking about ice
Melting and smoke dispersing and inked. Yes, diffusion. Okay. Oh, this is motion and it's systematized by the molecular theory of matter and the Fundamental dynamical laws maybe the Newtonian and maybe they're more sophisticated and an electromagnetic or me and maybe and I mean you're gonna need a probabilities probability assumption that Boltzmann added to
That systematizes all that and shows their connections. For me, that's what explaining is. So what is fundamental on this view, Barry? It is the macroscopic theme's emotion. That's fundamental or something just called reality with no description, no joints, no carving, no structure in the sense that I cannot even describe. It's like a county and numena. That thing in itself, if I have any description, it's going to be bringing it closer to us. No.
First of all, just reality. Just reality. Let's listen to those words heading, just reality. That sounds like a lot to me. Now, when you say it doesn't have any description, quite the opposite. It has many descriptions. The science satisfying the goals of science is one way of describing reality.
Maybe there are other ways of describing aspects of reality, maybe artistic ways of describing aspects of reality that satisfy different criteria, which don't match those of science. Maybe there are other ways. Sometimes people have wondered whether the way we describe human beings in terms of beliefs and desires can be fit in with the way we describe the motion of objects and mechanics. I think it can be, but you've got to think about it.
Some people think it can't be like Donald Davidson and some other philosophers, maybe quite. Putnam as well. So Putnam, one of your heroes, said that the sooner that we understand that the realm of knowledge that encompasses reality isn't just the sphere of science, that there are other spheres like ethics and Aristotle thought that as well, the sooner we'll come to a saner view of ourselves and of science. I'm all for that. But it doesn't mean that it all can't be fit together.
As far as the motions of things are concerned, their physics is the king. So if a motive or a desire moves you,
It's ultimately you got to be accounted for in terms of neurons firing in your brain or something like that. Now, I don't know how to do it. Nobody knows how to do it. But the hope is that people will figure out. People have made progress towards understanding how it is that the brain makes people move when they have beliefs and desires and fitting beliefs and desires into this picture. One of the great heroes of Red Rutgers, was he gone by the time you came, Eddie, Jerry? Jerry was still teaching. Yes.
So Jerry Fodor, unfortunately Kurt, you can't interview him. He would make the greatest of interviews. And if you could interview him, it would make the greatest of the greatest interviews. But he tried to make contributions to the visceral subject that we're talking about.
and that's interesting. So the reality has many guides, it has many descriptions. All of them are equally valid, but there's no fundamental. What's this word valid? What happens with valid group in there? Okay, so they're, they're all going to go descriptions. They're all descriptions. All right, the many description and there's no fundamental unique descriptions of the in terms of perfectly natural properties was fundamental in the world that's not going to be privileged by this package deal account. Well,
It's going to be privileged by the package deal account. I mean, there may be more than one of them, actually. There may not be one that's privileged. I do think we have a good reason to believe that already. But that's a little dispute within the thing. But the thing that you're focusing on is the package deal account, it pays attention to the criteria that science has evolved over the history of science.
and and and trying to mesh those and fit those together and those are ever evolving they're evolving as of now out of fit new methods of mathematics i mean do you can you use algebraic topology and and physics people argue about that and the laws would change as we the standards evolve laws don't change
What happens is that we have to change our criteria. I mean, I don't know if you want to say baseball changes or we have a new game or what, but I do think we could say that we were mistaken before. We've come up with a better account of what the most- We're mistaken about what laws are or what laws there are. Okay. Someone asked what the laws are. They want a list of things. They want Schrodinger's equation maybe or
Or F equals MA or the law of gravity or Einstein's field equations or something like that. These are what the laws are. They're equations, things written down. What the laws are is the kind of thing we've been engaged in, a philosophical account about what it is to be a law. Okay, now I haven't really given my package deal account and I don't know whether the time has come to do it. Has it come? Sure. Okay, so I don't like Lewis's account because it too, I think, rests on a crutch.
His crutch is perfectly natural properties. I threw away my crutches. Okay. There's like two crutches. You're throwing away, right? First of all, the fundamental law, the constraint or govern and second is fundamental mosaic. Right. The mosaic. I don't, I don't have those questions. It's like, I believe in both of them. I believe mosaic and laws are fundamental. You believe neither is fundamental. Right. Okay. You keep using the word fundamental. It can be used in a lot of different senses, but anyway,
So what I think is where we start is where science started. They started by noticing things like when you throw rocks, they move in a certain kind of path, kind of similar path to the way a projectile moves when you shoot a cannon. Maybe a similar path in certain ways to the way a shooting star moves when you see it go in a parabola.
Maybe in a similar way to we might think of a planet moves if the parabola doesn't close and becomes an ellipse. Okay. So you note these similarities about these things and we want to unify them. What we discover is that in order to unify the macroscopic, we have to introduce the microscopic things we can't see. We introduced them like in my case, I was given with the ice and the ink and the smoke.
that if we think of these things as being made up out of little particles, we see the connections between all of these behaviors in accordance with certain principles. Eddie might call them fundamental laws. I just call them attempts at a best systematization of reality. And we try to come up with that. And in fact, we've done, not me, I haven't done
I did a little bit. I've published two scientific papers in my life, so I'm not a very good contributor to this, but it's not something that human beings have done. They've come up with a pretty good systematization, which involves introducing unobservable microscopic things in order to help systematize the macroscopic. So in some sense, the macroscopic plays a kind of fundamental and epistemologically fundamental way, but it's not ontologically fundamental.
What distinguishes reality from another world that isn't reality?
Leibniz used this notion, and some people thought then that he should be burnt as a heretic for using the idea of possible worlds. David Lewis, one of the heroes of the story, he made a big deal out of possible worlds. He wrote a whole book on possible worlds. He wrote a lot of them and he thinks the actual world is one of them. And you know what distinguishes it from the other ones? Just one thing. It's you, right? You. Me.
Tito's Handmade Vodka is America's favorite vodka for a reason. From the first legal distillery in Texas, Tito's is six times distilled till it's just right and naturally gluten-free, making it a high quality spirit that mixes with just about anything.
From the smoothest martinis to the best Bloody Marys, Tito's is known for giving back, teaming up with non-profits to serve its communities and do good for dogs. Make your next cocktail with Tito's. Distilled and bottled by 5th Generation Inc. Austin, Texas. 40% alcohol by volume. Savor responsibly. So all the world's and Louis's view are similar in certain respects. Now my view is very different from that.
Lewis wanted there to be possible worlds because he wanted to give an account of metaphysical possibility and metaphysical necessity. I think also you should probably see that I'm a somewhat deflationary philosopher. I think that these are two philosophical nightmares, metaphysical. I'm not understanding. Would you then say that every single set that can be constructed exists if it has a member to that set? Like you said that other possible worlds exist
If there are people in them, I don't understand. No, no, no. I was speaking the talk of possible worlds. I don't believe in possible worlds like that. I believe in stories that we can tell in our world, but I don't think that there are other possible worlds like Lewis believed. I agree with Lewis more or less on his account of laws, not exactly, but I do not agree with his account of metaphysical modality. I don't think he needs it.
Cause he just doesn't really need it for his account account of factuals or the kind of laws or anything else useful. It just creates headaches for him. Okay. Actually I said, all right, I see what you're saying, but I don't think I do. So are you saying that Lewis believed possible worlds existed in some sense? And you were saying, no, no, no, they're just, they're just our, our hypotheticals. Yes, more or less. That sounds good to me.
So to Lewis, then possible worlds is just, is a misnomer. There's somehow existent worlds that are possible. Yeah, but that's the right nomer because then they exist, but they're possible because they're not actual to us, to their inhabitants. So the actual ones actual for him is what he calls an indexical. So Lewis thinks that literally those possible worlds exist as space time manifolds say here's one space manifold that we are having this conversation.
Okay, okay, let's get to something related, seemingly related configuration space. So Eddie, you and I had this conversation off air that you believe the configuration space is too large to be a fundamental arena. And that maybe space time or whatever is
Yes, I think there can be lots of developments in future quantum theory, quantum gravity, about what is fundamental. But what should be fundamental is some kind of low-dimensional manifold.
maybe 20 some dimensions, but it should not be 10 to the billions of billions dimensional configuration space. The space of possible configurations of the particles or the field variables. That space is a huge space. It's hard to recover the ordinary life of tables and chairs, you and me from that huge space, but it's much more straightforward. And to start with a low dimensional space,
Now, to do this, we have to think about quantum mechanics in a slightly new way. So there are different interpretation quantum mechanics, de Broglie-Bohm, GRW, many worlds, but all of them postulate this wave function. And the wave function lives in this high dimensional configuration space. And to be a realist,
like us, it's natural to be tempted to be a realist about the wave function and the configuration space it lives on, and take that to be the fundamental space, and everything else is derived, illusory or something. I think that we should start with the ordinary space and see how can we make sense of quantum mechanics. One way to use think the wave function or the quantum state as
Like a law of nature, so coming back to the question of laws of nature, well, we know there are many things we write down as laws, Hamiltonian function, Lagrangian, they also live on a high dimensional space. They are functions of, say, the classical phase space in classical mechanics. So that is a high dimensional space too. So if you think of the wave function, the law, encoding some kind of interactions by telling things how to move, then the wave doesn't have to be something concrete.
like a particle or a field, but a wavelength can be a law of nature telling things how to move. And this tradition of developing this school of thought of nemological interpretation of wave function, that's, I think, facing some of the crucial tasks in whether we can get this to be a simple description.
And that's why I can depart from the traditional school. I think, okay, maybe we can think about the density matrix and that's a bit more coarse grained and just right, um, simple enough to be a law of nature. And that's the other view I've been developing. I thinking about called the one calculus view, the density matrix is a fundamental law of nature. Um, and you can have everything else, ordinary stuff, living ordinary space time, or, you know, a more generalized manifold.
Why didn't you call it the Chen tech case? If someone else calls it that. So we strayed onto another subject matter and you really want another guest to be debating Eddie on this subject. I can do it because I'm interested in it, but I don't have a firm opinion
about this issue about what the fundamental space and space time is. But I can, I do understand why someone might think it's a very high dimensional configuration space. And I don't know who Eddie is to tell reality that it can't have that as its fundamental space. But Eddie may know better than reality, I don't know. But it might be that that's the best way of systematizing the world. And in fact, I think as the person I'm thinking about, you know what I'm talking about, Kurt?
Jacob Barnes? David Albert. Ah. Yeah. So I, I don't mean, I, I'm sorry to do this silly guessing game thing. My wife was downstairs. She always was a whack me over the head for doing that to her. You know, but that's the least of her reasons. So I'd give her that reason. So anyway, so anyway, so
There is a dispute within quantum mechanics, but we were almost on another topic which you didn't quite complete, which is very interesting for you. And that is the nature of metaphysical necessity and metaphysical possibility. And whether you really need the notion of concrete possible worlds, as Lewis called them, what you called realities. You were sort of shocked because you said, do you think they really exist?
And the reason you said that is because you think exist should be just confined to actually exist. But no, lewis.exist has a more general use. It exists in this very general sense as Eddie explained.
Okay, that's what Lewis thought. I don't need that. I don't like that. I don't think the notion of metaphysical possibility and necessity is very useful. The only thing anyone has used it for to use is to prove the existence of God in a fallacious proof called the ontological proof, but it's not a good notion.
What Barry would move you closer to Eddie's view? And Eddie, what would move you closer to Barry's? Now, Eddie did accept that if God came down and spoke to him, Eddie would change and say, I was wrong about metaphysics. Barry, you said, well, when I was 13, well, we're going to talk about that off air. So if God can't convince you, Barry, what is it like? How movable is your view? How amenable is it to evidence? I could bring myself to understand what actually could be meant by the laws constraining.
Over and above the laws the the events to satisfy the laws of nature that would move me But now I've no one's ever been able to explain it to me. Maybe I'm dense But no one's ever been able to explain it Now in fact Eddie is on our view are much closer together. For example, we have a colleague and friend Tim Maudlin another good interviewer you may maybe have you interviewed him several times Yeah, I'll place the links on screen and in the description as well for that Okay. Okay. So Tim
has a view in the Eddie Ballpark, but he thinks the laws are just dynamical. They're what he calls floats, fundamental laws of temporal evolution. They take the state of the world at a time and produce subsequent states and they keep doing the producing, the producing, the producing, the producing, the producing. Now I kind of understand what producing is, except I don't know what laws, how these things called laws can do the producing. Wait, you understand producing without constraining?
It's a good point. No, I understand what constraining is when I'm constrained to drive, you know, less than a hundred kilometers an hour. I understand what that means. Okay. But I don't understand what it is for the laws to constrain. That's right. I know what it is for the factory to produce more potato chips, but I don't know what it is for the laws to produce anything.
I use the metaphors that have gone crazy. Wittgenstein had a nice phrase. Mostly I don't appeal to Wittgenstein, but I like this phrase of his. He says sometimes language goes on a holiday.
This is an example. Let me push back a little bit. Well, so Barry, you're talking about the conversions. I will come back to that. But in terms of the meaning of constraining, or even many of production is a situation on my camp, the non-human camp, where there are different views about wild loss, harvest, carbon, I think one can make sense of the primitive in maybe just understanding what a theory says, right?
If the theory says you can understand kind of factorials, causation, maybe probabilistic dependencies in terms of the laws, then we somehow implicit understand the laws, how they constrain. I know that you are going to agree on the metaphysics, but the metaphysics, the notion of constraining can be understood by how we understand other things, right? Suppose someone says I want to kick it away.
Have they kicked away the counterfactuals then? Did they kick away and say, you know what, I'm going to do without, one day I'm going to throw away my crutches, I'm going to walk on my own. Do I have to throw away the counterfactuals too? In my view, yes.
But I'm not on my view. I don't see why. I understand counterfactuals pretty well. I don't think your understanding of counterfactuals is any better than mine. So I see what you're talking about. Sorry, I didn't interrupt you, Barry. You were talking about the production versus Mimpy and BSA. Yeah. So among the people who have so-called non-Yumian views are the Shelley Goldstein, Eddie Chen view, the Tim Maldon view, and I referred earlier to David Armstrong and another crew. Emily Atlan, for example, too.
Yeah, right. So there's a fair number of people who think they still need the crutch. Okay. It's okay. You know, it's not up to me to take the crutch away. I wouldn't do that. I really don't think anybody would topple over, but they wouldn't hold on to it. It's okay. All right. But I don't want it. I'm sure I don't need it. So the main difference between the maudlin view
And Eddie Chen, Shelley Goldstein view is that Chen and Goldstein, the laws constrain all of reality. It's sort of a sense all at once. Now it's a bad metaphor because it's not at once. It's not a temporal notion. It's timeless. Whereas on Mordland's view, time comes into the story very centrally, very important. He has to have time as a primitive notion as well.
Eddie doesn't have to have it. He may want it. I don't think so, but he may want it. I don't want it. I know I don't want it. So time is not primitive to me. I think I can get an account of what time is, but in terms of my general scheme, but I mean, time's direction, right?
Time's direction. Well, I think time is, in systematizing the world, we want to come up with the best systematization of the world as we see around us. And we see our world in space and time. We may modify our conceptions of space and time. Whoever would have thought that the things that can happen that are not simultaneous with each other. Or no one coming before the other. That's true. But yeah, so we've changed our mind about exactly we, I mean,
Einstein changed people's minds about or some people's minds of actually this is people still argue over this and funny way. I'm going to get into that, but, um, sure. It's okay. It's okay. So I think we start with us with them. Wilfred Sellers, another hero of mine's philosopher. Uh, you can't interview him yet anymore either. Uh, he, he liked to use the phrase, the manifest image of the world and the scientific image of the world.
We start with the manifest image of the world, the way the world appears to us when we start moving around in it. We develop a vocabulary for talking about it in terms of macroscopic objects, in terms of mental, you know, items that we talk about in terms of the being stars and planets and clouds and weather and rain and plants and so on. And we noticed a system
that these seem to be a system that plants grow bigger and then they die. Well, that happens to my kitten too, and to human beings too. There must be something in common about all of this. What could that be? Okay, well, it took a lot of discovery to come up with a decent account. I'm not sure it's quite done yet, but it all ultimately boils down to what we're calling before the second law of nature.
I don't mean to simplify, but that's a big part of it. It unifies all of these processes. So that's what I think is involved in what explaining is and what laws do.
So you have the manifest image and the scientific image. And Wilfrid Sellers said the biggest job for philosophy in the 20 and 21st century is to reconcile the manifest and the scientific image. I think I completely agree, Barry. I think this is something that... Oh, I sure you would, would you not? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Sure. Of course. But what I'm saying is that we're starting with the manifest image. That's enough for us to have as
building rebuilding the ship at sea. We don't need an ontological. Yes, I agree. But oncologically, is it ontologically? All we got was reality. We don't need an additional crutch. We don't need there being these primitive laws. We don't need that being primitive laws of temporal evolution. We don't need that being primitive constraints. We don't need it being a mosaic. You mean mosaic. Okay, we just need reality. So
When I was asking about Barry what would move you closer to Eddie you said it would be to understand what it means to constrain over and above satisfying. Now when I speak to people who are not libertarian free will people and are more on the compatible list and actually they aren't even compatible list.
They would say free will is a meaningless concept. I don't even know what it means. So usually people don't buy into something because they not because they disagree, but they don't even know what that position means. I know you have several papers on free will Barry. So I'll link to them on screen right now. Now, Eddie, I'm going to ask you to explain what it means to help Barry along. And hopefully Barry, you'll say, okay, I get that now. I'm I'm understanding still don't agree, but I'm understanding more your position, Eddie.
But I'm also curious if there aren't constraints, then are we free in your view, Barry? And does free will have anything to do with that? Or are you asking me? I know I'm asking you about free will now, because if you don't believe in constraints, so you'll be happy to know that I've written papers of free will, which will be happy to send you have views about that as well. And I think the important thing is a philosophical point. And that is the many concepts that we inherit from our ancestors.
Just aren't quite right. They need to be modified. Sometimes they just need to be jettisoned completely. There are concepts like that. Think about the ether, whatever they call it, the ether. Should it have been jettisoned or should it have been identified with a field? I don't know. Probably jettisoned. But free will, I think we want to keep. Causation is a great example. I think what people think about causation
Is very screwed up needs to be modified. Bertrand Russell, the great quota. He said, what do you say about causation? He said causation is like the British monarchy. People keep it around because it's mistakenly thought to do no harm. Okay. That's what Russell said. Now I don't agree with Russell. I think we need the notion of causation, but it's not primitive. It's not fundamental. It's going to fit into my general overall account. And I do fit it in.
um, to my general overall account via the notions of counterfactuals and correlations and stuff like that. Okay. So I think there is something like free will, but I'm more in a school of what you'd call a compatibilist. I think there are fundamental laws of physics. Um, a friend of mine, another good interview, Jenanne Ismael, I'm speaking with her shortly. Oh, great. Okay. She wrote a book called how the laws of physics make us free. Right.
When she told me the title, I thought she said, how the laws of physics make us flee. I'm just remembering her physics classes, but knows how they make us free. Because in fact, and I agree with her, that the laws of physics contain within it the secret for how to make for a compatibilism. And I could give, we could give you a whole session on that if you wanted to sometime. Jen and I don't see the exact same views about that, but we both agree about being compatible. So I think
Okay. So Eddie, firstly, I'm curious about your view on free will since we're on that subject. And then also it would be great to explain the difference between constraining and satisfying.
Yeah, so on the constraint and satisfying question, I think that gets to the heart of the debate.
between humanism and non-humanism. And one of the motivations Shirley Ghost and I had when writing the paper, developing the view, was to really sharpen the disagreement. And when it's such a decent production with temporal evolution, with time's direction, then it looks like really we are at a case where the only difference is between whether you have this notion that's playing a metaphysical role only or just a semantic role of making truth conditions.
For us, it's a metaphysical role, and it's hard to kind of give a knockdown argument for this view, but it's just something that we think is very natural, given how we do science, very natural how we think about, you know, explanations and grounding kind of factuals in science. And we can give axioms, say, you know, if something constrains something else,
If the law L constrains mosaic M, then M satisfies the law L. But besides that, since it is a primitive, we cannot explain this in more illuminating fashion by appealing to other more fundamental, more primitive notions. So if someone understands our view, they see what we're saying. If someone says, well, we don't accept the view, we cannot convince them by saying, OK, here is a primitive and you have to accept the primitive. That's not going to be convincing either.
I do think that a lot of practice and think about theories and models and how laws explain they don't fit into the human picture. A lot of cases when we think of, for example,
A simple example, a Newtonian particle is flying around in one straight line in empty space. No forces on it, so straight line, so three kilometers per second. And that universe, this universe by itself, is compatible with Newtonian laws, is compatible with the law that everything moves in this velocity and forever.
And for us, we think that both are possible laws given the same universe, but the human would deny that. So that's kind of one test case where we think, okay, yeah, in scientific modeling, in scientific testing, we have this kind of non-supervenience intuition we're trying to capture for laws of nature. And so we are now getting intuition. But have you done the test?
Okay, I know that Barry would disagree on the notion intuition and testing intuition. Okay. Of course, you can get that not on the test. So don't make it sound like when you use we be careful about the world. We're thinking about actually, you know, the conceptual test broadly construed, we tend to think about a conceptual framework to accommodate what I disagree with. I disagree with you.
You get into a discussion with a physicist, they get all confused and many of them want to be Umians. They just can't abide your notions of constraint the way you want to understand it. That's my experience as a physicist. I do want to relay a story though, which probably is helpful here. I was once in another debate with another philosopher who sort of started out somewhat in Eddie's camp, not the same view exactly, a different version of it.
And, um, we stayed up all night at a hotel in Geneva, I think, and we were arguing about this stuff. And then I went back to the United States. The next thing I knew. He not only became a human, he became what he called a super human. At first I thought it was just to embarrass me, but no, he was serious. His view is no good too. So I'm not going to get into it. Okay. But so I'm not a super human.
On this point, I want to come back to maybe an earlier question Kurt asked, which is, what would move me to close out humanism?
I'm always very sympathetic to humanism. I learned humanism from Barry and from Dave and others. One of my first papers was defending humanism against quantum entanglement and this wave function thing that's too high dimensional, how to make it reconcile with the no dimensional mosaic and its density matrix. I do think that non-humans have a lot to learn from humans because
They constantly judge us on all the crutches we seem to rely on production times direction and so on. Of course, we disagree on the fundamentals. We're going to want to hold on to the primitive notions of they say laws or the relation of governing, but there's a flexibility humanism that's making this a very illuminating view that I always try to
I put my human head on and think about a question, and put my non-human head on and think about a question, and see if I'm making, am I appealing to intuitions that may be extraneous to the question at hand. And I sometimes feel whenever I'm appealing to intuitions that are in common, so I don't, I know Beto doesn't like the word intuition, but think about considerations in common to humanism and non-humanism and a work out solution. Somehow it's more robust solution. I think,
As one example, if a current joint work with Jeffrey Barrett at UC Irvine, we're thinking about probabilities as constraints that are getting very, very close to certain human views of laws and probabilities. They're kind of implicit and maybe not quite precise, but when we make sense of them in a precise way we want in terms of randomness, then things become very much
neutral between humanism and non-humanism. And that's I think how metaphysics of laws, metaphysics of science should proceed is to find the common ground and to solve problems in light of the common ground and see if you can transfer back to the different views. But of course, there'll be ultimate disagreements about the metaphysics status of the solutions. But I think I'm always drawn to
The rat baggage free account, yeah.
Well, I have structures too. And who can reject common ground? I'm more in favor of common ground too. Okay. But we should sharpen our disagreement. I think bringing into the discussion, not about what physicists should do, we don't disagree about that.
and not about how they should practice. We don't disagree about that, I guess. We might, in places, disagree with, unless they disagree with it among themselves. What we do is we disagree about, as you said, the metaphysics of laws. I have the view that we can give an account of what laws are, not what the laws are, but what laws are, without bringing in notions like constraint as the fundamental, or notions like temporal evolution.
As the fundamental or notion like production as a fundamental. I think we can give an account of that. Now we of course do have some basic axioms and basic thoughts or basic concepts. Everybody does. And we start and I don't think you really reject them because in the end of the day, you want to have the same unification view I have. It's not like your view. I don't know. What would you say if God said, you know, there are a lot of constraints, but they're incredibly complicated.
Add so complicated fact is only actually doesn't it's not complicated is another guy is really it is just one constraint. The constraint is that any never gives up non human that's the constraint everything else is no law.
It does well there is a happened on human views to you on your view to you if the mosaic so vast and so huge and so many levels we have access to only in what's in front of us the macroscopic domain. Reality let's say reality has a lot of red is huge.
and has lots of facts we don't we have access we can agree on that at most one percent of all the facts okay that's even that is generous right so in that case we have lots of epistemic limitations of physical reality these even beyond the metaphysical laws it's like suppose you have a package deal account or the best system account or minimum primitive system account then
Absolutely. I completely agree with that. Nothing about my view that says that can't happen.
No, no, no, no, no, I didn't. I like I made perfectly clear. I don't think your view is incoherent. There's no logical contradiction in your view. There is for me a kind of like understanding problem and understanding what the word what constraint can really amount to other than the metaphor that's left over from the, the, the, the cards idea of the laws being enforced by God. But you may have something in mind and so more power to you. I just don't think
Scientists really need this crutch and the scientists could pick and choose their philosophies of science They will go around doing science the same way whether they've go for me or for you about this as you say and that's right So this is a philosophical dispute and like people often say folks have philosophical disputes are the most useless in a certain way But in another way, they're not useless because we understand things better when we have a discussion like this
I do think that it can be fruitful philosophically too and scientifically thinking about non-humanism, minimalism and constraints because you are really at this level you have to, if you want to think of probability for example, then there will be
Comprehensiveness Simplicity Probabilistic laws
How we think about the principal principle, how connection between credences happen to chance, all of this. Oh, very important. Oh, very important because I go along with all of that. When you sharpen a disagreement, I think there's going to be convergence of the views, but also there's going to be open questions on how we fill out the details of various views. Perhaps you have a lot of details for package deal account, but you know, primitivism, there are questions, a lot of questions about, you know, probabilities and chances and credences.
Um, that I get going to get very exciting and open, open questions. Yeah. Well, Louis is self-addressed. Just speaking for Louis's view, Louis addressed how probability fits into his account into the best systematization account. And it's been written about a bit by me among other people and, um, trying to explain what Louis was up to. Cause Louis thought that one way of systematizing, maybe you might notice this because you brought up comogar complexity earlier.
Take a long sequence of H, T, H, T, H, T, T, T, T, H, T, T, T, T, T, it goes on for a long time. You might say, what a headache. How can I systematize that? But then you notice that in any segment of 20 or 30, you get about 10 or 15 heads. Furthermore, if you just were to pick them out in that group, just pick them out, so to speak,
I'm going to use the phrase at random, but you know what I really mean because we're talking about algorithms here. Um, uh, we just pick them out. We'll also discover that there'll be, unless we pick them out according to the rule, just pick out H's or pick out T's or something like that. Well, also, as long as we don't use a rule like that, we'll also get about half. And that indicates that these are what one might say independent events.
Each with probability one half. And that gives a lot of information about that sequence. It tells you what degree of belief to have in any big long sequence. It tells you if you had a sequence of a hundred of them, your degree of belief should be just about one that you get between 48 and 52 H's. You won't go wrong with that.
I disparaged my account of things by calling them merely semantic earlier. You know, my account of factuals are merely semantic because the account of factuals connects them with other things. My account of laws is merely semantic. It's word merely semantic. I have a question for Eddie. Is money merely semantic? When you go to the bank, you say, can you give me a little semantic, please?
No, it's not merely semantic. Money is not merely semantic. Merely semantic hides a lot. It's a term that we've created in order to characterize an aspect of reality. So reality comes into the story too, both in money and in a complicated way, that's what I'm going to go into, and with laws and objective probability.
So speaking of semantic, I want to linger here, Barry with you, please. And then I would like to hear Eddie, your view as well, about how philosophical disputes can be both useless and fruitful. And the reason is that many of the people who are watching the audience comprises faculty in computer science, math, physics and philosophy, and also a general audience. I've been among them. And they will
both be frustrated
That's an excellent question. So it's a very good present thought provoking question. It's really good. So what I think is this, I definitely know that there are useless disputes in philosophy for me. I can give an example of one in a minute and probably give an example of many. This is not one of them, although it's a used up dispute.
To some extent, I'm not sure there's going to be much new on the horizon after the package deal account, but who knows what other people come up with. I didn't think I would come up with that. So it's not useless, but it might be used up. Okay, now here's the useless one. Maybe you've interviewed some of the people about it. Some people have argued of how many objects are there in this bowl. Well, you have a bowl.
There's a ball bobbing up and down in the water. Is there one object, the ball? Two objects, a ball in the water. Or a lot of objects, because of all the molecules. Or maybe many more objects, because they're all the photons. And many, many more, all the particles. I think this is completely useless, the how many objects dispute. But grown philosophers have banged their heads against the wall about it. Some have thought it's useless, but it is useless.
On the other hand, the issue between so-called humanism, non-humanism, it was useful to me because it caused me to come up with the package deal account, which I think is a better, a better deal. So it's useful to me. I know, of course, people can say individually what's useful to them. That's a very deep question. So I'm thinking about how do you, speaking from my experiences, I think that in thinking about intellectual history,
of laws of nature for example and problems of induction, Hume's problem, Gouman's problem, and contemporary debates about the future of physics, foundations of quantum mechanics, foundation set of mechanics, all of these things get intertwined. Can we make sense of probability is tied to can we make sense of
entropy. What kind of entropy is it? Is it Boltzmann entropy, Gibbs entropy, von Neumann entropy? And then how do you make sense of laws is tied to how to make sense of the wave function and quantum state and also the minimal, sorry, the basic mosaic structure is a high dimensional structure, a low dimensional structure. So some many things are at stake and I think the convergence of views where it convergence of clarification of disagreements
um sharpen those arguments give us some kind of fixed point to refer back to that if we disagree about this it means we may be disagree about this too so it's traced back to the fundamental what laws are what probabilities are what explanations are and if there are no scientific difference between say barry's view and my view when we come to sunny practice we can rest a bit more assured that um the differences in those fundamental notions don't
That's a really good point, Eddie. Do you know of any? You gave an intuition before but that's not the same thing.
Which could tell the difference in your view and my view. I don't think there is an experiment. Right. But I think in answer to your question, that's why I thought it was a really good question. I don't think there's any practical difference between our views, which is why I think you could say we don't need to crunch.
I think you can be agnostic about the existence of crutch but not say there is no crutch or there is crutch based on just practice and empirical experiences and that's the kind of more a conservative inference from that.
I just wanted to share this thought, if I may, with Kurt. So regarding laws of nature, this seems like a very historical debate going back to hundreds of years. But if you think about the contemporary developments of machine learning or AI, there are many side effects of this are really harmful and, you know, we have to be careful. But one of the marvelous achievement is that AI has become really good at picking up some patterns
simple patterns that are informative across the board, not just on training data, but also across test data. So you can see new things and you can still perform well. What is that? It's a form of induction. And what is the ground for that induction? Or some people say, well, some kind of uniformity principle, some kind of things happen in the same way over and over again. And we know that's not true because nature is not uniform. What is really out of mind, underlying all of that is this kind of
simple, informative laws of nature that can be uniform in some cases, maybe not be uniform in all cases, but this is a manifestation of laws of nature give rise to effective descriptions. They're still very lawful. And I think so all this achievements in AI can be thought as a foundational way as connecting back to this conceptual questions of laws of nature, how they relate to induction and explanation and what is different between pure prediction
and understanding.
And what science is looking for is looking for the uniform D in the right respects. And that's what these AI programs are constructed to try to build to. And they've gotten pretty good at it in certain areas. So if we're interested, I know with some programs, for example, in finding patterns of chemical recombination, they're good at doing that because they start out with a vocabulary of chemical recombination, given a lot of examples. They're trained, they're trained maybe by using
The implicit biases here are very implicit.
And I'm not saying this is an argument for non-humanism over humanism. They're saying that it brings together questions about metaphysics of laws and epistemology of laws with contemporary practice in machine learning. There are lots of open questions here, understanding why AI is working so well. And it seems like when we don't build in something explicit by hand, it's a transformer model. Still, they're doing really well.
So it seems. Now I also distinguish epistemology from metaphysics, but you're right that my metaphysics is a closer friend to my epistemology.
And people who have you like yours, I always have a big problem making it make friendship up between epistemology and metaphysics. Okay, but mine start out, my metaphysics starts out already by nature friendly to epistemology. I think there is going to be the same gap on your metaphysical knowledge just as on minimal primitivism, we have the partially similar kind of epistemological principles that connect
I think it's guaranteed.
But I think as the history is shown, it looks like it's gotten better and better and better. Maybe we're wrong. Maybe I know something. So is there a difference between MinP and your view of loss, Apache account that brings the piece of biology closer to the metaphysics that given the metaphysics, we're more likely to be successful in the limit of inquiry in science on your account. And MinP is minimal primitivism.
Use the word min P, which is something that we know, but the audience doesn't have minimal primitivism. That's his view. Yeah. Minimal primitivism versus package deal account. Right. Right. So, so Eddie didn't come up with this catchy name like I did. You know, I'm very good at naming. I'll sell you a name, Eddie. So. Mentaculous. Mentaculous. Well, it's not mine originally, but, um,
We're not going to get into that. You can do another session if you want. You can do that one with Ethan Cohn if you want, actually. My favorite film is No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, both released in the same year. Great, great, great movies, but Serious Man is where that term comes from and that's also a good movie for physicists especially.
Okay, I'd like to end with a question to both of you that's more human, not humianism, not humian. Clearly you have different views and I want to know what it's like Barry to teach and guide someone because you were Eddie's PhD supervisor for those who just skipped forward and didn't watch the introduction. So what is it like? Do you try to foster that tension or do you try to convince your student that
their dissent must stem from a misunderstanding because obviously you, you know what you're talking about and the student is, but I don't think, I don't think that, but with, with first things about Eddie is if there ever was a self motivated student, a self motivated philosopher, Eddie is it, he's much more motivated than I was at his stage and much more accomplished than I was at his stage. So he has motivation all over the place. He's very well motivated.
He knew what he wanted
As far as teaching Eddie, I had him in classes and I interacted with his dissertation, but he really motivated what he was doing. He had a co-director and he knew exactly what he was doing. He knows exactly what he's doing today. It was no problem. The problem I have is with students who are not motivated. I do have some students like that and it's so hard to get them to get
You know, they just worry that that's not right. That's not really in tune, right? Eddie just decided to have a view and he wants to defend it. I think that's great. Now, Eddie,
How is it that you didn't succumb to because you're a student to just believing or conceding to whatever your elder wants and your elder holds your academic fate? Well, I mean, you hold in some sense the future of Eddie in your hands. So Eddie, tell me about that process, what it's like to still retain your original point of view, maybe even sharpen it or increase that divide with your supervisor. Yeah, so it was a very special environment for me.
When I was doing a PhD at Rutgers, interacting with Barry and Davey Albert, my co-supervisors, and Charlie Goldstein in the math department, Tim and other people at Princeton and CUNY. It's a very diverse intellectual environment. And I felt very, you know,
I tried to embarrass you at first and I tried to read everything and understand everything from the inside out and I think for a few years I was a human and I for a few years I believe in even the high dimensional view but I realized you know there are arguments for against and I wasn't quite sure if my arguments were so worked out so it's during those years I try to develop my own views trying to
defend those views and try to work out you know what i should think about laws and quantum mechanics and probability i never knew i would write on laws of nature because i know it's hard and it's a deep issue and for this read discussions it's very hard to resolve them by empirical experiments right you cannot do experiment to test them um so all of this boiled down to some kind of the central arguments that
really hard to resolve. But I realized when I tried to develop my views on quantum mechanics, I had to say something about system mechanics and the past hypothesis and the laws of nature and vagueness and everything come together into one thing. So I realized later on that I'm a non-Humian and I had this non-Humian inclination anyways and try to develop view as scientifically motivated as can be and also as minimal as can be.
I gave you the minimalism and you gave me the encouragement to develop this too and all the best arguments and objections. I think what really helped me was all these objections from Barry and David.
The criticism is a blessing and a curse because in the moment you don't like it but then even when you're on your own, at least for me, as soon as I have a thought, I play out all the criticisms from different figures in my head. Yeah, that's very helpful.
It sometimes can be paralyzing, but sometimes because Barry is so nice, the objections and questions you raise are just very wonderful and helpful. So Eddie, it sounds like you had her on the road to Damascus moment. You started out as a Umian, you're on the road to Damascus. Let me tell you, it's always possible to come back. To the darker side. Okay, but at least you didn't become a super Umian. That would have been a disgrace.
So Kurt, do you like philosophical musicals? Musicals?
I don't think I like regular musicals. Well, I don't. What about Gilbert and Sullivan? I don't think so, no. Well, I was in Gilbert and Sullivan when I was in the sixth grade, so I remember that H&M has been before. So I sort of like Gilbert and Sullivan, but I'm thinking that we could have a philosophical humian saying that everyone is born a little humian or a little non-humian. I'm not going to break out of this song because then your audience will flee as fast as they could go.
It does what it sounds like to me, sort of Gilbert and Sullivan. I appreciate you both spending so long with me. Thank you so much, Barry and Eddie. It's great talking with you, Kurt, and hopefully we can meet in person someday. You're a cool guy, and it was a lot of fun. Thank you.
I like your channel a lot. Very, very rare to see someone engage so deeply with philosophy, with physics, with everything. New update. Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts, as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future.
Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist.
Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,
Which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, et cetera, it shows YouTube. Hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts.
I also read in the comments
and donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier.
Every dollar helps far more than you think either way your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 2232,
"audio_duration_seconds": 8047.62,
"completed_at": "2025-11-30T21:25:32Z",
"segments": [
{
"end_time": 26.203,
"index": 0,
"start_time": 0.009,
"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
},
{
"end_time": 53.234,
"index": 1,
"start_time": 26.203,
"text": " I'm particularly liking their new insider feature was just launched this month it gives you gives me a front row access to the economist internal editorial debates where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers and twice weekly long format shows basically an extremely high quality podcast whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics the economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines."
},
{
"end_time": 78.951,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 53.558,
"text": " Ford Blue Cruise hands-free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control."
},
{
"end_time": 106.698,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 80.077,
"text": " We have to acknowledge that we don't fully access the physical reality. These are metaphors that have gone crazy. This seems like a very historical debate. Nature cannot violate the laws of God. Why not?"
},
{
"end_time": 130.316,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 109.889,
"text": " The laws of physics as something that constrains or even causes the world around us is as fundamental a concept as anything. That's what I investigate on this channel. However, do laws like this even exist in this manner? Do what we call the quote laws of physics actually compel reality? Or do they describe patterns that we observe?"
},
{
"end_time": 150.674,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 130.708,
"text": " Professor Barry Lauer of Rutgers University champions the Humean view that laws are sophisticated summaries, not these primitive governing forces. Professor Eddie Chen of UC San Diego defends the opposing position through minimal primitivism, that is, that laws are fundamental metaphysical facts that genuinely constrain physical possibilities."
},
{
"end_time": 177.619,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 150.794,
"text": " A special thank you to Barry as he had just come off of a 12-hour flight. You'll notice the playful camaraderie between these two, and that's because Barry, along with David Albert, were Eddie Chen's PhD supervisors. Stick around until the end as we get to questions of free will and ultimately whether the mathematical structures physicists discover reflect mind-independent features of nature or are projections of human pattern-seeking onto brute facts."
},
{
"end_time": 202.125,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 177.995,
"text": " To me, the stakes extend beyond academic philosophy. It's about how we understand the laws that shape our conception of science, causation, and you, yes you, your place in the universe. I'd like to talk about a phrase that we use often, and it's so often that it's become second nature to us all. What is it that we mean when we say the laws of physics? Laws."
},
{
"end_time": 231.135,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 202.415,
"text": " So this channel is called theories of everything. We explore various unification attempts and laws of physics, but we don't talk about, well, what is a law and what is its role in ontology and causation? So I know you all have different views on this. Various technical jargon will come out like humanism and primitivism and so on. Metaculous. If, if we get to that as well, best systems, et cetera, those will all be defined. But for now, as an introduction,"
},
{
"end_time": 248.643,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 231.596,
"text": " For me, laws of nature are fundamental facts."
},
{
"end_time": 265.469,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 249.07,
"text": " They discover the universe. They are not part of something else. They are not reduced to what goes on in the universe. So laws of nature, in some sense, are laws of physics, something like laws of mathematics and laws of logic."
},
{
"end_time": 287.654,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 266.135,
"text": " They just be and govern. They constrain, they explain. And lots of physics have less robustness than lots of mathematics and lots of logic, but they're still part of the fundamental goings-on of the universe. And in that sense, they are primitive facts. They are facts that exist in the world. They don't depend on anything else."
},
{
"end_time": 313.712,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 288.456,
"text": " And one crucial element of this governing business is that laws constrain what's physically possible. So there is the actual world, the universe we live in, the universe in which, you know, the big bang happens and here's us and there's the maybe big crunch and there's all that goes on in the universe and lots of nature constrain the possibilities for this universe."
},
{
"end_time": 342.363,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 314.189,
"text": " So what could have been the case? The kind of actuals, the possibilities and necessities. So, laws governs the universe by allowing certain possibilities to unfold and certain possibilities to not be the actual world. The actual world is one element of the many possibilities allowed by the laws of nature. OK, Barry, why don't you spell out your view on what laws are?"
},
{
"end_time": 371.152,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 342.978,
"text": " Okay. Well, first thing I want to say is that it meant much of what Eddie said. I can agree with at least those words, but I think I would mean a little bit different things by many of those words, but I can, I can agree that law is constrained under a certain understanding of constraint. I agree that they support the support counterfactuals. I have a whole theory of counterfactuals. Maybe we'll want to get to it and so on. Um, so I agree with the words."
},
{
"end_time": 401.954,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 372.039,
"text": " But there's something I don't agree with. I don't agree that laws are what Eddie called primitive facts. Now, I'm not exactly sure what primitive facts are. So I think it's useful to go back with a little history. Do you mind that? Sure. You do mind it? No, no, please do. Okay. I think it's very interesting about the history of the concept of laws. First most interesting thing is no one has written a history of the concept of laws of nature."
},
{
"end_time": 427.483,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 403.029,
"text": " There's one book that kind of comes a little bit close, but nobody has really done it. If I were a historian, I would think that that's, you know, right. We're just right on the tree ready to be plucked off. People have written histories of probability and chance, a closely related notion. No one's written necessarily the concept of law. So the concept of law in the modern sense really has a father."
},
{
"end_time": 447.466,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 429.241,
"text": " I want to ask you to guess who the father was. It is father's day today, isn't it? Hmm. Oh, okay. Maybe we should celebrate this guy. All right. He's a pretty French flood. Famous, pretty famous French philosopher. I bet you know what I'm talking about. Rousseau? No."
},
{
"end_time": 477.705,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 448.217,
"text": " Come on. He was interested in breaking the laws. Much more famous than Rousseau. The most famous man. The one that every... Descartes? Yes. If you will go into Paris, you walk down Route Descartes. Okay. Descartes. So Descartes was the father, really. I mean, this is a little bit of an exaggeration, but the father of the concept of, modern concept of laws of nature. He had a vision. His vision was that there could be a few"
},
{
"end_time": 506.357,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 478.08,
"text": " principles that can be expressed in mathematics, which are not primitive facts at all. What they do is they describe how God moves matter around. Descartes had the view that all activity in the universe was due to God. So Descartes had this view that what the laws were were they describe how God moves things around. It was God who did the constraining."
},
{
"end_time": 536.408,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 506.732,
"text": " God who did the enforcing, God who moved things around. So he described how God constrains things, but they weren't primitive facts. They described what God was doing. They had two important features. One was what Eddie was calling the constraining or what's usually called the governing feature. And the other was the unifying feature. They unified all of nature. And of course, they're also mathematical. And you know why Descartes"
},
{
"end_time": 561.101,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 537.108,
"text": " knew that the laws had to be mathematical, because he thought God must be a mathematician, because he was a mathematician. Okay, this is the history, really, honestly, the history of when the Nelson Law originated. And if people have written about it, I can give some references of scholars, a guy named Peter Harrison, another person named John Milton, not the poet, another"
},
{
"end_time": 590.077,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 561.647,
"text": " The philosophy was written close to a history as a person called Walter Ott, but he doesn't really do it. So it would be an interesting thing for somebody to do. Okay. So the concept of laws started, I'm going to stop in a minute. The concept of laws had these two aspects at the very beginning, the unifying or organizing aspect and the constraining aspect. What Eddie has done is picked up on one of the aspects."
},
{
"end_time": 614.411,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 591.357,
"text": " I've picked up on the other aspect. The reason I've done that is I find the constraining aspect absolutely un-understandable. What does it mean for the laws to constrain? How do they do it? Is there a super law that's appealed to to make them constrain or does it just happen automatically because they're laws?"
},
{
"end_time": 642.381,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 615.316,
"text": " I mean, there's a third alternative here. Some people think that the things in nature themselves have powers and they produce the laws. Aristotle kind of had a view like that, but he didn't have it as a mathematical view about laws, but other people in contemporary times have taken up that view. It doesn't work very well in contemporary physics. Okay, but these are the main three views or a few other views around. So Eddie and I are here to battle."
},
{
"end_time": 671.391,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 643.78,
"text": " Unifying versus constraining. Eddie might want to say both. I say jettison the constraining because once you have the unifying, you got everything you need. Okay. So when you said super law, is there a super law that governs the regular laws? The analogy to Descartes would be the super law is God and God is the one governing. Absolutely. You got it. Okay. So the way that I see the disagreement between you both is that"
},
{
"end_time": 701.783,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 672.193,
"text": " We can think of traffic laws as an analogy. And most of us would say that traffic laws cause the motion or orchestrate, at least the motion of the cars. But then there's also something like a weather report where we're just documenting patterns that we observe. So it sounds like Eddie, you're more on the traffic laws are the laws and then Barry or more on we're just summarizing. These are just descriptions of what's occurring. You're really good, Kurt. That's a very good way to put it."
},
{
"end_time": 729.531,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 702.654,
"text": " Okay. Thank you. Please. It's very favorable to my point, but I mean, notice this in the other room, I can come out, um, because I, I've driven just once in Budapest. I managed to get a ticket at one time. So it's, you can violate the laws of man. Nature cannot violate the laws of God. Why not?"
},
{
"end_time": 756.237,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 731.288,
"text": " Well, that's a really good question, isn't it? Why not? Well, maybe because laws just unify nature. So there's nothing there to violate. I think there is this question of what's explaining the no exception clause for summary's view. So suppose we don't think laws govern laws constraint. Suppose we think that laws merely summarize and unify."
},
{
"end_time": 783.66,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 756.732,
"text": " What's about the laws of nature that, um, they have no exceptions. They apply to almost everything or everything literally in the universe. Yeah. They unify everything. Isn't that interesting? We live in, well, first of all, we don't really know that because, uh, general relativity and quantum mechanics has not been unified. As I was reminded last night with my string theorist friend, I mean to that, um, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 812.619,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 784.172,
"text": " And I didn't have to be reminded of course, but, um, but the hope is Einstein had this hope. Einstein, many people fully think of as a, at some point in his life, he became a believer in God. I've read Einstein pretty closely. I don't think that's true. I'm not absolutely certain, but he did express faith. He expressed faith that a scientist has to have that nature will be unified."
},
{
"end_time": 838.882,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 813.814,
"text": " And so science works under the assumption that you can find a unification or she can find the unification of nature. And so far it's working. In fact, let me make another historical note, which I find astonishing. After Descartes proposed his project for the next millennia, finding the mathematical laws of nature, he wrote a few down. They were"
},
{
"end_time": 865.572,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 839.565,
"text": " abysmal failure actually as laws of nature. They didn't, well, he kind of got, so it came close to inertia, but he didn't, he wasn't very good at it. A long 80 years later, another guy came along, the Frenchman's arch enemy, Isaac Newton. And he basically satisfied Descartes dream up to a point. If Descartes had lived to see Newton,"
},
{
"end_time": 893.899,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 866.101,
"text": " I don't want to go into what I'm about to say couldn't be broadcast. I mean, it's amazing to think about what he would think. Newton came up with a few simple laws and a scheme for laws, which looked like it was going to unify all of nature. And many people thought for a long time that it did. It's not until he got into more careful examination that they discovered it didn't. But it does, it works very well."
},
{
"end_time": 902.039,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 894.548,
"text": " If you want to get your pendulum clock working or your cannon balls flying in the right direction, Newton's laws are very good."
},
{
"end_time": 931.22,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 904.633,
"text": " Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been in Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit bigdealevent.com for more details."
},
{
"end_time": 961.51,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 932.739,
"text": " This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state."
},
{
"end_time": 986.869,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 962.739,
"text": " So I want to hear from Eddie about where he agrees in contrast with your earlier views. So Eddie, please. Yeah. Um, so that's very helpful, Barry. I think that the two roles of laws are both important and unifying role is one we try to, we're motivated and aspire to find in the laws of nature. Um, but without this considered the basic constraint, um, it's, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 1012.329,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 987.5,
"text": " It's not clear how the unifying thing does any explanation. So I think it's taken for granted in many scientific communities that the laws and principles we find in the end can explain, and they constrain or govern somehow. They explain how things fall in the same way, how things move in the same right way, and of course people focus on the unifying part."
},
{
"end_time": 1041.817,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1012.671,
"text": " And they say, okay, what is the simplest way and most natural way and most unifying way we can find laws of nature write down principles and equation write down that explains things. Of course, people are not very explicit about how laws explain and there will be debates about this and there'll be two ways to cash out how people think about laws of nature. But I do think that the majority of scientists, the naive view, the flat-footed view is the view that"
},
{
"end_time": 1072.278,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1042.517,
"text": " That's what you say. Now, Eddie, about your talking about taking advice from scientists, do you take advice from the general scientists about what you want to think about quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is a difficult case. Shut up and calculate, Eddie. Shut up and calculate."
},
{
"end_time": 1096.63,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1072.824,
"text": " You do not. Of course, what scientists have done is they bought into Descartes' general picture and they started to using this language of governing. That's the language they're using, governing and constraining, as though they somehow couldn't do without it. It's like you had a crutch that you don't need anymore. You never used, it never held you up."
},
{
"end_time": 1122.995,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1097.21,
"text": " So maybe maybe we should clarify the view of constraining and summarizing and just to for the audience. Maybe you should say I. Well, you put summarizing in my mouth. I did not say, OK, OK. How about I summarize and also explain summarizing? I'll do so with an analogy again for people who are educated in physics. So maybe a germane analogy. You can tell me if this is germane or not is the action principle."
},
{
"end_time": 1149.65,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1122.995,
"text": " So we extremize action. Now one could argue that the universe is genuinely extremizing its action. It's lazy if we're doing least action principle. Alternatively, someone can contend that that's just the stationary action principle is just an elegant way of summarizing what nature is doing. The principle itself isn't causative. It doesn't drive anything. It just encapsulates the behavior in a concise summary. So that's"
},
{
"end_time": 1166.459,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1150.009,
"text": " one way of viewing or at least one way that i view the difference between a law of nature causing something now what i'm confused about barry is is there some meta principle that says that the laws of physics are even describable by something simple so you say that it's all unified or it could be"
},
{
"end_time": 1197.125,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1167.773,
"text": " There's something in algorithmic information theory called Kolmogorov complexity. We also know it well. And it could be conceivably that the universe is not compressible. It could be. It doesn't seem like that. I mean, it seems like we're able to write down something relatively short and do some predictions. So is there in your mind some meta principle that suggests that the universe is indeed compressible outside of initial conditions? And we can also talk about initial conditions. We can. So a couple of things here."
},
{
"end_time": 1223.558,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1198.285,
"text": " One is, I like the way you put things. I think it's good. Um, we're talking about the universe being compressible. You have to think about which parts you're going to compress and the parts you're not going to compress, comogorov complexity has a lot to do with too, because along in the 19th century, along came a couple of people who figured out how to supplement the laws of nature."
},
{
"end_time": 1244.07,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1224.155,
"text": " Probability."
},
{
"end_time": 1272.073,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1244.428,
"text": " I have very definite views about how to think about probability as well. Eddie and I were having a long conversation. I don't know, when was it, Eddie? My brain is gone. When do we have this long conversation? We thought we might actually almost be in agreement about thinking about objective probability. That's one of the big, that's what got me into philosophy, in fact, and it's one of the big questions about giving a good account of what objective probability is."
},
{
"end_time": 1301.664,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1272.5,
"text": " It's really fascinating that physicists, mathematicians, biologists, they know how to use the notion of probability pretty well. They don't know what they're talking about. Bertrand Russell had the most wonderful thing. I'm sure you know this, that Bertrand Russell is great. If you want to go get some one-line quote to use for something, you go to Russell. He said, probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially since nobody knows what it means."
},
{
"end_time": 1323.37,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1302.5,
"text": " And that's verbatim. Yeah, there are many of these quips where someone says that so and so when no one knows what it means entropy, for instance, I think von Neumann said that. Yeah. So yeah, but I, well, I know what entropy means is screw fun. He knew what it meant to. Okay. I don't believe that. Okay. So Eddie,"
},
{
"end_time": 1339.155,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1323.677,
"text": " What does it mean to explain?"
},
{
"end_time": 1369.411,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1339.701,
"text": " They say, okay, can you explain to me how do I get to the CN Tower? I'm in Toronto. So let's say explain to me how I get to the CN Tower. They say, okay, you go forward from here, you make a left, etc. But they don't say something like you take infinity categories and you just like that's not an explanation to them because they don't know what infinity categories are. So explaining has something to do with meeting the person where they are and then providing a line of justification. But that's colloquially. And you're obviously speaking about the laws of physics. I don't imagine our demonic understanding of"
},
{
"end_time": 1377.159,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1369.753,
"text": " Explaining is what you mean. So what do you mean? Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away"
},
{
"end_time": 1400.896,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1377.671,
"text": " Don't be like the economy, instead read the economist. I thought all the economist was was something that CEOs read to stay up to date on world trends. And that's true, but that's not only true. What I found more than useful for myself personally is their coverage of math, physics, philosophy, and AI, especially how something is perceived by other countries and how it may impact markets."
},
{
"end_time": 1424.923,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1400.896,
"text": " For instance the economist had an interview with some of the people behind deep seek the week deep seek was launched no one else had that another example is the economist has this fantastic article on the recent dark energy data which surpasses even scientific americans coverage in my opinion they also have the charts of everything like the chart version of this channel it's something which is a pleasure to scroll through and learn from."
},
{
"end_time": 1451.578,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1424.923,
"text": " Links to all of these will be in the description, of course. Additionally, just this week there were two articles published. One about the Dead Sea Scrolls and how AI models can help analyze the dates that they were published by looking at their transcription qualities. And another article that I loved is the 40 best books published this year so far. Sign up at Economist.com slash TOE for the yearly subscription. I do so and you won't regret it. Remember to use that TOE code as it counts to helping this channel and gets you a discount."
},
{
"end_time": 1481.92,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1451.92,
"text": " Now, the economist's commitment to rigorous journalism means that you get a clear picture of the world's most significant developments. I am personally interested in the more scientific ones, like this one on extending life via mitochondrial transplants, which creates actually a new field of medicine, something that would make Michael Levin proud. The economist also covers culture, finance and economics, business, international affairs, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, China, Asia, the Americas, and of course, the USA."
},
{
"end_time": 1501.971,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1481.92,
"text": " Whether it's the latest in scientific innovation or the shifting landscape of global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage and it goes far beyond just headlines. Look, if you're passionate about expanding your knowledge and gaining a new understanding, a deeper one of the forces that shape our world, then I highly recommend subscribing to The Economist."
},
{
"end_time": 1516.613,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1501.971,
"text": " I subscribe to them and it's an investment into my into your intellectual growth one that you won't regret as a listener of this podcast you'll get a special twenty percent off discount now you can enjoy the economist and all it has to offer."
},
{
"end_time": 1536.118,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1516.886,
"text": " Demonic understanding of"
},
{
"end_time": 1552.125,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1536.476,
"text": " Explaining is what you mean. So what do you mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 1580.35,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1552.125,
"text": " And I don't think it's a big difference. There might be differences in terms of things we invoke to explain, whether I'm invoking the absence or the presence of some, you know, a person to explain something falling or breaking. But the kind of explanation I think is continuous. And even ordinary life explanations, they are backed by something. Insofar as they're accurate or they are faithful, they should be tracking some kind of general laws"
},
{
"end_time": 1603.456,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1580.469,
"text": " Maybe about human nature, maybe about human psychology, economics, and then all the way back to deeper and deeper principles. So for me, explanation is by some simple constraint. And this is the view of lots of nature developed with Charlene Goldstein, a metaphysicist at Rutgers University. So we call this view minimal primitivism."
},
{
"end_time": 1630.179,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1603.916,
"text": " Right. So for us, the laws are basic. They underline everything. So they're not reducible to something else. They're not summarizing. They're not unifying, merely reunifying. They can be nice summaries. They can be nice unifying simple features. But they are fundamental features of the universe. They coexist with the universe, the mosaic. And they can give rise to some kind of causal explanations."
},
{
"end_time": 1642.551,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1630.52,
"text": " how a causes b and b causes c but causation is not fundamental to the picture and the example you used earlier was very helpful the least action principle was one of the examples that motivate us to"
},
{
"end_time": 1669.65,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1642.995,
"text": " to think about this more general picture of governing laws. Some people think that, well, if you have real laws in nature, governing things, there must be causal laws. So A at T1 causes B at T2, and that's the way the universe moves, step by step, moment by moment, generating. But think about general relativity, think about modern physics, think about quantum mechanics, at least action principle, Lagrange mechanics, all of this simple away from this step by step production picture."
},
{
"end_time": 1696.323,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1669.889,
"text": " So I remember you have Emily Atlin on the YouTube channel before, and she was also suggesting this all at once picture. So we have very similar ideas of time and laws. So for us too, the laws govern the whole universe, the entire space time and its contents. And in a sense, all at once. For me, explanation has to be not just any constraint,"
},
{
"end_time": 1715.503,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1697.159,
"text": " But it has to be some simple constraints, so simple laws of nature. The least action principle, quantum mechanical Schrodinger equation, Einstein field equations, they are not simple in the sense that they're not like something we learn from elementary school, but they're simple in the sense we can build up on simpler principles and develop sophistication"
},
{
"end_time": 1744.821,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1715.794,
"text": " There's some fancy words that"
},
{
"end_time": 1769.411,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1745.367,
"text": " Probably will come up that haven't I'm surprised they haven't so far like non-humane, which is not to be confused with non-human although Very yourself staunchly humane that that's not true You may say that to be non-humane is to be not I'm gonna I'm gonna correct that in a little while to tell you what my real my actual view is and"
},
{
"end_time": 1798.729,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1769.804,
"text": " But Eddie knows why we're laughing and I don't think I can repeat the story because it's at the expense of a colleague. Okay. But confusing you mean with human can make a big. Okay. Okay. And the word mosaic also came up. So I think this is a great time for you, Barry, to define what mosaic is so that the audience can also follow. But also at the same time, while doing that, please explore the relationship between boundary conditions and laws."
},
{
"end_time": 1825.879,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1799.172,
"text": " Okay, so a lot to do here. First of all, given what Eddie just said, as I said before, I can agree with a lot of what he said and a lot of the words that he said. I don't want to make it sound as though I don't. Of course, I think that in some sense, the law is a constraint. Of course, I think they explain. Of course, we have a different spin take on many of these notions, which we may want to get into if we want to get into the fine points here. Okay, now,"
},
{
"end_time": 1852.875,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1827.278,
"text": " In contemporary writing, while some philosophers have thought about what laws of nature are, David Hume had a little bit of a thought, not much, Kant thought about it in some sense, and others did, it wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that a few philosophers cooked up some things, and then all of a sudden there was an upsurgence"
},
{
"end_time": 1881.135,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1853.49,
"text": " Of people with views like Eddie's, because Eddie doesn't want to be tarred with these people, I think, but they're definitely in the same group. David Armstrong, Michael Tooley, and Fred Jetsky. And they thought that laws were relations between properties, primitive facts, which were relations between properties, but primitive relations, which constrain or govern events. And another philosopher"
},
{
"end_time": 1909.667,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1881.817,
"text": " There are two other philosophers who looked at that and said, they scratched their head so they could do that. How do they do that? How do they do this governing? How do they do this constraining? I know how the laws of man govern the laws of man. We have the courts and the prison system and so on that helps do it. And then of course what people want and desire and believe."
},
{
"end_time": 1936.647,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1910.913,
"text": " I thought maybe we don't need this constraining business. And David Lewis came up with a very interesting idea. Now I'm going to expound David Lewis's view. It's not my view since other people will see this. I've published a book recently about this and about to publish a second book about it. So, you know, I guess people care about their books. I'm not sure I do. Did I do a little bit now? I'll place a link to both of your books on screen and in the description right now."
},
{
"end_time": 1967.005,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1937.381,
"text": " One of us is a much better publicist than the other one, I have to say. At any rate, I haven't done anything about it. My book has the cooler title. We can maybe come to that later. Now, about your actual question. What should I say here? Here's David Lewis's view. David Lewis thought that all the primitive facts"
},
{
"end_time": 1989.394,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1967.688,
"text": " were primitive properties instantiated throughout all the space time. So there was an arena, the space time arena. He wasn't very explicit because he left it open. How many dimensions does it have? He thought probably time just one dimension, you know, maybe space has many dimensions. He didn't really say."
},
{
"end_time": 2017.244,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1990.077,
"text": " He saw that the fundamental properties were probably instantiated by point-like individuals, like particles maybe, or maybe just by points, because the properties themselves were sufficient to make for there being materiality. And the properties might be things like mass, charge, spin, those are examples he gave, silly example to give spin there, but he did. Um, and,"
},
{
"end_time": 2026.118,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2018.729,
"text": " It's the season for all your holiday favorites. Like a very Jonas Christmas movie and Home Alone on Disney Plus."
},
{
"end_time": 2048.763,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2027.381,
"text": " Then Hulu has National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. We're all in for a very big Christmas treat. All of these and more streaming this holiday season. And right now, stay big with our special Black Friday offer. Bundle Disney Plus and Hulu for just $4.99 a month for one year. Savings compared to current regular monthly price. Ends 12-1. Offer for ad-supported Disney Plus Hulu bundle only. Then $12.99 a month or then current regular monthly price. 18 Plus terms apply."
},
{
"end_time": 2078.166,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2049.172,
"text": " Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast! And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.COM today to save on your first order."
},
{
"end_time": 2100.503,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2079.258,
"text": " There'll be these properties. So imagine a mosaic filling in the tiles. So when God created the universe on the Eumian view, David Lewis's Eumian view, all God had to do, God doesn't exist in time, so God doesn't have to do anything in time. Just created the universe all at once. He created"
},
{
"end_time": 2127.824,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2100.657,
"text": " the whole of expanse of space and time and filled it up with fundamental properties. Lewis called them perfectly natural properties, instantiated at points or at point like individuals throughout all these space and time. And since there was a space and time, these point like individuals or points had spatial and temporal relations to each other. Then Lewis said, you know what Eckhart was really after?"
},
{
"end_time": 2155.964,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2128.541,
"text": " He wanted the best systematization of this thing I put down here. Now you guys may think it's a complete mess. It looks like that at first, but if you're clever enough, I've made you a key. If you learn mathematics, you will be able to learn it. And then our job, according to Lewis, is to find the best systematization of this. He used the word systematization. He did not use the word summary. Other people have used it for him."
},
{
"end_time": 2186.049,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2156.323,
"text": " I like the word unifying better, the best unifying counter. I quickly want to add that this is not my view. My view is a little bit more complex and maybe we want to get to that later, but this is in the neighborhood of my view. I like the part that it does not have the laws govern or constrain in a literal sense and does not have laws as being primitive facts. So here's two places that Eddie and I absolutely disagree, which is great."
},
{
"end_time": 2212.637,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2186.647,
"text": " because philosophy would not exist if it wasn't for disagreements. This is what makes it go around. Okay, that's Lewis's view. Now the question for Lewis is, well, how do you give an account of explanation? Right. Okay. Okay. And I can come to that in a second. Then other questions like, how, where does probability fit into that? Lewis said a view and I have a view about that. There's also kind of a"
},
{
"end_time": 2242.108,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2213.251,
"text": " I guess a basic question, Barry, for Louisville and the view of humanism that at the bottom level, there's nothing that enforcing the pattern, there's nothing that making things happen. There's nothing that, you know, setting a boundary in what's possible, what's not possible. So no, that's not true. That's totally not true. Well, there's not. There's a mosaic. The mosaic is all there is in reality, right? That's all there is. You're hankering after something more."
},
{
"end_time": 2273.2,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2244.019,
"text": " But in fact, there is something that, as you say, enforces. The laws of nature enforce, in a certain sense. So, I can say, just with you, that because of the laws of gravity, and the laws of second law of motion, and the size of the earth and the size of the moon, that the moon will follow in an elliptical orbit, and that one side of the moon will be bulging out."
},
{
"end_time": 2295.811,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2274.002,
"text": " from the moon as the moon goes around the earth that was a tide on the on the on the moon all of that is going to be up to us all of that because explain and notions of explanation we because how we think about the universe how we come to interact with it is not because there is something you know basic that does the explanation"
},
{
"end_time": 2325.623,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2297.005,
"text": " Well, this is what you're hankering after. You still would want God. And I understand. I mean, you may really want God. I want laws. That's a different issue. Okay. Okay. Okay. But you don't need law. Okay. Okay. This is what maybe the coup de gras. What would happen, Eddie, if God came and he whispered in your ears and said, you know, Eddie, there are no primitive law facts. All I did was to make a mosaic and I put a lot of patterns in it."
},
{
"end_time": 2347.227,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2326.288,
"text": " Would you give up explaining then? Well, what about if God tells you that actually there are primitive laws and they do explanation? Well, I know what I would say to God, what I did when I was 13 years old. Which is? Well, it's not something for the public. Okay, I see."
},
{
"end_time": 2374.138,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2348.558,
"text": " Let's talk about summaries versus best systems. So right now Barry, you're being recorded."
},
{
"end_time": 2403.507,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2374.906,
"text": " I don't know if that's a surprise to you, but the audience is seeing you. OK, not live, but they're going to see you at some point. So in some sense, this is a summary of you, of what you've been doing. OK, I wouldn't say that explains what you've been doing. And I don't know if I don't know what the difference is then in terms of this video versus a best system. So like the video is a summary. We can agree on that. Is it a best system? Why is it not a best system? How the heck can best systems explain?"
},
{
"end_time": 2433.217,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2404.445,
"text": " This is not the best of best systems. Here's the heck how best systems can explain. They unify. They unify all. I'm not speaking for Lewis. They unify all of the mosaic. That's how they explain. Because they unifiers. Let me give you an example. Something I think may be eye-opening to you. People for a long time looked at various phenomena. They looked at ice cubes melting."
},
{
"end_time": 2462.329,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2434.292,
"text": " They looked at smoke dispersing in the air. They dropped some ink and water and it dispersed. They looked at people and they got old. All of these things, they have nothing to do with each other, right? But all of them involve there being particles of matter moving around and more or less in accordance with Newtonians. Not exactly Newtonians, but more or less in accordance with the laws."
},
{
"end_time": 2492.056,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2462.824,
"text": " And a certain probability distribution over all of these that unifies all of this. That's what explains it. Once we see that these are all connected with each other, we have one of those aha experiences. Now I see how it is that growing old and smoke dispersing in the air are really the same elk. Could it be that the laws of nature are not unified? Well, in my view,"
},
{
"end_time": 2521.937,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2492.705,
"text": " I mean, unification is a matter of degree. It could turn out, maybe this will be the case, that no one will discover, and maybe because there isn't a real unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. I very much doubt that. I think one of those has got to go, and I think I know which one is going to change. But people will still be looking. But yeah, when you have faith,"
},
{
"end_time": 2539.548,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2523.166,
"text": " You have to know that it's faith. Science is based on faith. That's a really important point. What do you mean? I mean, scientists have to assume that there's order in nature."
},
{
"end_time": 2567.705,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2540.196,
"text": " Now, in order to make themselves feel better about it, they like to posit there being these primitive facts that enforce the order. But in fact, they'll need another primitive fact to connect their primitive facts to the ordinary facts, and I'll need yet another primitive fact to make for their primitive facts. So they have primitives coming up out of their whatever. Okay, so there's something called the Munchausen trilemma. I think it's also known as the Agrippa trilemma, something like that."
},
{
"end_time": 2591.032,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2567.944,
"text": " Which is that to give any explanation you either have you have three options you have the foundational ism so you start with some axiom which it can't be justified because if you're making an appeal to something else that something else would be the axiom so some unjustified axiom or you have an infinite regress or you have circularity okay so you just pointed out that there's an infinite regress but that is also a potential option"
},
{
"end_time": 2609.65,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2591.459,
"text": " Maybe the universe is in infinite regress. Now, Eddie, I'm not trying to say that you believe that, and maybe you don't believe that, but if you don't, please comment on anything that Barry's just said. Yeah, so I like the setup you just mentioned, Kurt. So in terms of foundationalism versus infinite regress, I think for lots of nature, lots of physics, the view I have,"
},
{
"end_time": 2639.599,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2609.65,
"text": " um and developed with shawty ghosting is kind of foundational picture it's kind of a flat-footed foundational picture trying to capture what physicists have in mind what um the non-human philosophers have in mind which is there is something in the world there are laws of nature they govern what happens in everything every room every particle every field and um these laws are kind of the fundamental axioms in the theory and they are not summary of what happens um so unlike the humane picture"
},
{
"end_time": 2663.439,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2639.599,
"text": " The actions you are real actions the action to the fun of the metaphysical sense of real this and there are the foundational actions real actions are the pianos actions real actions i agree but then the best system actions. They are you know they super being on the mosaic the laws are at the basic level of reality."
},
{
"end_time": 2693.456,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2663.916,
"text": " Well as I've said a few times I expounded David Lewis's view not my own view I don't know whether we want to come to that at all"
},
{
"end_time": 2713.677,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2694.002,
"text": " Yes. My own view is, okay, I can explain it. It's a little bit, in some ways, a little bit, certain respects, closer to Eddie's. Because what I do think is fundamental is reality, nature. It's fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 2738.899,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2714.906,
"text": " But I also have a funny view about reality, but can I come back to the trilemma? Is there something in mind about that? Another quote, this time not from Russell, but from Otto Neurath, and he's been quoted especially by Quine. I'm sure you know this quote from Neurath that Quine uses. He said, science is like a ship at sea that we have to rebuild"
},
{
"end_time": 2768.012,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2739.394,
"text": " while at sale. There's no dry dock, no foundational place to bring it into, to put it up on whatever you put it up on and to redo it. We've got to redo it at sea. Nurath really had it right, I think. He was responding to the foundationalists of the Vienna school. I'm not very far from Vienna. I'll be there in not so long. Budapest, Vienna, we're near each other."
},
{
"end_time": 2798.012,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2769.428,
"text": " So it's a kind of circularity, but it's circularity with a purpose. It's a circularity aiming to coming up with a better and better and better ship. So there is a guiding light what science should be like. It should be as simple as could be, as comprehensive as can be, as informative to human beings as can be. So it needs a lot of different parts and scientists have been"
},
{
"end_time": 2819.531,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2798.524,
"text": " Fairly good not understanding what they're doing. I don't think is good at that, but they're very good at doing what they're doing Understanding what they're doing. That's the job for Eddie and me to do It sounds like you're talking about science what science is like and what scientists are like, but what is nature like? We're trying to find out yes now"
},
{
"end_time": 2845.179,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2820.333,
"text": " I know Eddie earlier, and I don't want to butcher what you said, but earlier you were saying, look, these are then tied to our descriptions. Like you said, something like that. There's something then subjective to Barry's view if I was understanding you correctly. So feel free to comment. Maybe I misunderstood. Yeah, the thought was that, um, um, the human view on the Louis kind of best system view, best summary view, what laws are, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2867.449,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2845.503,
"text": " which propositions, which sentences are laws, which sentences are counterfactuals, which sentences express what we can do, what we cannot do, are basically tracking what we mean by simple and informative summaries, which can be very much up to us. So suppose I somehow convince the scientific community to change our standards of, say, simplicity."
},
{
"end_time": 2896.186,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2867.892,
"text": " then it could be the case that the laws could change to change a different set of laws. Right. And that doesn't seem like what we mean by laws of nature, laws of nature, lots of physics seems like something completely objective and independent of us, our interests, our situations, our political allegiance and so on. So it doesn't shouldn't be so dependent on what we think and what we do. I agree with Barry that there is an important part of how we do science."
},
{
"end_time": 2920.981,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2896.493,
"text": " What is the rational procedure to carry out the method to carry out science that might be tracking our interests? And that's kind of a big mystery on both sides, on humanism and non-humanism. But minimal primatism and non-human view, I like. The laws are what they are in themselves. The laws don't change in response to our interests. The laws don't shift just by changing our standards of"
},
{
"end_time": 2945.316,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2921.357,
"text": " Do you think I disagree with that? I think you disagree with that, right Barry? Wrong. Suppose, let me ask you Eddie. Suppose someone said I have no idea for baseball."
},
{
"end_time": 2972.654,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2945.776,
"text": " What we do is we play baseball in a teacup. And what we do in playing baseball is instead of having innings, we just have teabags. And the way we play baseball is it depends on how many times we dip the teabag into the tea. What do you think about that? That's not a very good rule for baseball. It ain't baseball. Well, if somebody changed the rules in the way you're talking about, it would not be good rules for laws."
},
{
"end_time": 3002.995,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2973.217,
"text": " Now, why is that? Well, tradition and history and the fact that it's been successful in the past. You don't need a crutch to stand on. You just keep looking for a crutch. Okay. I mean, I'm attributing this to you. I was going to complain a little while ago that you were attributing mysteries to Umians, which they don't have because you shouldn't do that. I shouldn't do that to you. But, but if you can, you understand that from my point of view, you're constraining is kind of like a, like so we're hankering after God. You don't need it."
},
{
"end_time": 3029.394,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3003.37,
"text": " What about the laws of mathematics and laws of logic? They're not mere summaries. What about them? They seem to tell me what, what are they constrained? Logical realities and mathematical realities that one plus one is two is not three. You know, of course I agree that one plus one is two and not three. I'm glad we are, we are in agreement about that, but how do they do the constraining?"
},
{
"end_time": 3047.927,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3029.889,
"text": " I'm not saying I'm not putting a view about them. I find this the deepest of mysteries that I know about. I agree that it is a fundamental primitive and the way we understand the primitive notion like, you know, in mathematics we have primitive notions. I did not say that. Yes. Okay. Let me say, you know, how one might remove some mysteries."
},
{
"end_time": 3075.418,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3048.217,
"text": " One can remove some mysteries by drawing connections or define things in terms of those primitive notions. We can define kind of factuals, causal relations, notions of time and dependence in terms of the laws. And then we see, okay, how laws do things in the world is by making certain things true, making certain things happen. And then we just kind of talk about things we are familiar with, like how tables and chairs depend on each other on configurations."
},
{
"end_time": 3097.363,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3075.93,
"text": " I'm trying to clarify this point that I'll lose view on traditional humanism before moving to so bearish your view new view of package deal account and traditional humanism there is this worry about idealism."
},
{
"end_time": 3127.637,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3097.892,
"text": " The law seems idealistic. They seem dependent on our interests and our wills. And too much so that one might worry whether they deserve the name laws. Lewis himself had that worry. He called it ratbag idealism. Right. So I started thinking, I knew it came from down under because Lewis liked to go visit Australia a lot. I knew it must be from Aussie, Australian or New Zealand. And in fact it is. And I thought at first that a ratbag was a bag that"
},
{
"end_time": 3156.101,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3128.251,
"text": " Rats carry the cheese around. Yeah, it sounds like something negative, but it doesn't. It sounds like something attributable to a person like you call you are a rat bag or you have rat bag qualities. Yeah, that's exactly right. It was just you got to the chase, whereas I want to have a little fun with it first. So, so then I thought maybe no, maybe it's it's a bag that the rat catchers carry their rats around in, but it's neither. I spoke to Al Hayek, who's my Australian"
},
{
"end_time": 3183.234,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3156.493,
"text": " source on stuff and he said it just means disreputable. So you went right to the chase Gert, just means disreputable. So Lewis was afraid that people might think his view is idealist, just like, and he thought that would be bad. Then he argued that it wasn't and I devoted many pages of my book arguing that my view and Lewis's view too is not idealist in any bad sense. Now to say that there is not as"
},
{
"end_time": 3212.346,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3183.882,
"text": " One philosopher called it the mark of the serpent all over our concepts like the concept of laws. That philosopher was Hilary Putnam, who was one of my heroes. So Hilary Putnam had a view that he called realism with a human face. I call my view realism with a scientific face because science attributes a certain goal or aim to what we want by way of unification"
},
{
"end_time": 3242.79,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3212.841,
"text": " by way of simplification, by a way of informativeness, by way of symmetries, and a bunch of other things like that. And if we try to satisfy that, maybe nature will oblige. So on this view, Barry, it is the ideal scientific practice. And in that limit of inquiry, that when science is completed, that kind of standard, that is the rational standard for choice of how we evaluate laws of nature on the best system account or on the package deal account."
},
{
"end_time": 3272.705,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3243.251,
"text": " and that the trend that's saying is not as subjective as I thought before because now there is a standard and unique standard doesn't change it is whatever it is just like baseball has its standards but you know Barry there is kind of a worry about circularity here right what we mean by ideal a good scientific practice and you know what we evaluate that to be the fixed point depends on what we think about kind of actuals and probabilities and"
},
{
"end_time": 3302.671,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3273.131,
"text": " People's abilities and people's actions, interactions in a community, the social aspects, and all of them are modal concepts that imbue with a lot of nature. So usually we understand those notions in terms of laws. So if we cash out laws in terms of that and that in terms of laws, there seem to be a big maybe kind of distance circle, but still it's a circle. You could call it a circle if you want, but it's a virtuous circle if it's a circle. There is a kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 3332.261,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3303.166,
"text": " All of it hanging together kind of a, a, a feel to it, but it does all seem to hang together. Okay. And that's what's important about it. If it didn't, we'd be in trouble, but so far so good. And philosophers have been working to spell out theories of what probability is, what kind of factuals are so that it does hang together. And scientists and, and you know, the standards have changed over the history of science."
},
{
"end_time": 3361.305,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3332.722,
"text": " Aristotle had different standards than Newton had, and Einstein had different standards than Newton had, and quantum mechanics and temporaries had different standards, and the mathematics used to express the laws of nature have changed over time. And what counts is a simple account has changed over time. So these things do change over time, but of course they change in orderly ways, still with the aim of coming up with a kind of account of the"
},
{
"end_time": 3383.097,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3361.937,
"text": " Nature of reality."
},
{
"end_time": 3411.442,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3384.582,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 3432.039,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3411.92,
"text": " Okay, so I want us to be more"
},
{
"end_time": 3461.937,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3432.739,
"text": " analytic and less colorful. So when we use words like this is a rat bag or this is God and I assume God is a synonym for magic, like you're evoking magic. I'm evoking a human face, a scientific face, a virtuous circle. That's like poisoning the well because it's saying that firstly, well, it's giving the impression to the audience like these are the ideas that are foolish and these are the ideas that are more. So let's be more analytic. Explain what reality is and what nature is."
},
{
"end_time": 3486.34,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3462.295,
"text": " Barry, I want to hear what you think it is. I can't explain what reality is. That's what science is doing. It's doing its best job at coming into account of reality. In my view, reality is describable more or less by quantum mechanics. To get into an account of what quantum mechanics is about is a different subject matter, but that's what we think of as the fundamental cause because that's turned out to be"
},
{
"end_time": 3506.254,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3486.596,
"text": " What a mathematical way of expressing a big chunk of the best systematization of our world. It systematizes the periodic table, for example. Sorry, are you all in agreement in terms of philosophy? For instance, realism versus idealism or anti realism or song. Do you all agree on some broad outlook?"
},
{
"end_time": 3533.831,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3507.159,
"text": " Or do you disagree? Like is one of you an idealist and others a materialist? I think Barry and I, if I'm correct, we are roughly in agreement on the general methodology and the realist picture of metaphysics. Maybe some differences in the details about how realist we are. I'm a realist with, as Hillary says, a human face or a scientific face, but I'm definitely on the realist side of this discussion."
},
{
"end_time": 3555.998,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3534.633,
"text": " I do think that there are people, and if there were no people or creatures, intelligent creatures, there wouldn't be science. So you need intelligent creatures so there would be science. But I don't think that makes me an idealist."
},
{
"end_time": 3586.698,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3557.193,
"text": " Yeah. So, on my view, what's real, so I'm a realist too, and on my view, what is fundamental and what is real in the universe are two things. The first thing is the mosaic kind of thing, the universe, the space-time manifold. It could be space-time in general relativity, or maybe quantum gravity kind of manifold, or maybe more general kind of string theoretic description of the universe. But that by itself is not complete. If I write down the theory of everything in terms of"
},
{
"end_time": 3616.51,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3587.193,
"text": " the space-time manifold, then it is missing the most important ingredient, which is the laws of nature. So it's going to be the second part, which is a lot of physics, laws of nature, the fundamental laws that govern the universe. And when you capture both parts, then the theory is complete at the fundamental level. And this should entail all the important regularities order we see around us about gas in a box, about cells, about galaxies, about tables,"
},
{
"end_time": 3635.538,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3616.51,
"text": " And this might include, the law might include deterministic laws of temporal evolution, boundary condition laws like path hypothesis, plus probabilistic laws such as stochastic processes or genuine randomness, or maybe some probabilistic boundary conditions."
},
{
"end_time": 3653.575,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3636.101,
"text": " And together this will give us, I hope, a very unifying and simple and powerful theory that can explain a lot of regularities. So on the methodology part, we should still strive for describing this in terms of simple, informative, unifying descriptions."
},
{
"end_time": 3678.012,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3653.575,
"text": " I think you should put that off for a little bit if you want to get to it, because I want to deal with two things."
},
{
"end_time": 3706.408,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3679.104,
"text": " One is, of course, I can agree with a lot of what Eddie just said in words, but I did want to say that if he were to write down every last event in the mosaic, what happened is his arm would fall off way before he got to the end. And in fact, his arm and what's going on, it would be in the mosaic someplace where there's circularity. Right, it's a self-reference. That's a self-reference. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 3736.323,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3706.971,
"text": " So I'm not suggesting anything like that, of course. What I think is that what science is aiming at, or what Lewis is suggesting, I'll expound my view if you want in a minute. Please. I think what Lewis is aiming at is a best systematization of the mosaic. And he hopes that there is one. It is a matter of faith. And Newton, in fact, did come up with something that looked like something pretty close to it. Wasn't quite right."
},
{
"end_time": 3765.589,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3736.903,
"text": " When Maxwell came along and improved how to put light and electromagnetism into it and improved things a lot, but created a big problem. That big problem was solved by, one of the big problems was solved by special relativity, but some other big problems remained. One of them was how to talk about the structure of matter. That problem was solved to a large extent by quantum mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 3795.657,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3766.288,
"text": " So the system got more and more complicated as it encompassed more and more of reality. And all along, something stayed the same, what Arthur Eddington called the Supreme Law of Nature. He didn't mean it to constrain incidentally, but he called it the Supreme Law of Nature. It's the second law of nature. And what he meant by it was not just that entropy doesn't decrease."
},
{
"end_time": 3824.77,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3795.93,
"text": " What he meant by it is the probabilistic assumption that Boltzmann used in order to entail the probabilistic version of the second law. He said no matter how the dynamical people's proposals for what the dynamical laws are changes, they get better and better. This will stay. And this is very interesting. And the reason is, is that it provides the connection between macroscopic phenomena"
},
{
"end_time": 3853.456,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3825.094,
"text": " and microscopic phenomena. It's always a probabilistic connection. Given the microscopic state, let's say the fundamental quantum mechanical or Newtonian state, of course, if you're given it, you can say exactly what will happen. Laplace famously told that to Napoleon. But nobody is ever given the fundamental state of the world at a time."
},
{
"end_time": 3881.408,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3853.677,
"text": " What you can do is only come up with a probabilistic account of it. You could say it's just as likely to be this kind of state is that kind of state. We give some sort of probability distribution of the states. Turns out Boltzmann assumed the simplest of all possible probability assumption. It looks like he was right. And then when Eddington said that that's the supreme law of nature, he knew what he was talking about because that has survived. That's right."
},
{
"end_time": 3911.357,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3881.749,
"text": " I don't see any contradiction between what you're saying, what Eddie believes, because the laws themselves, in my understanding, could be probabilistic. Maybe you believe they aren't. Oh yeah, there's no contradiction there. The contradiction is how we understand the word constrain. I don't think it's doing any work. I think constrain just means satisfies. That's all. What Eddie thinks constrain is some sort of like semi causal notion. It makes things happen."
},
{
"end_time": 3941.203,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3911.903,
"text": " Okay. So then would you say that the dispute hinges on theories of causation here? Well, I think Eddie would reject my saying that the laws does anything, but it was assured, but they're doing something like that. They're making things happen. He used that language before. Right, right, right. I don't mean making things happen in time in a causal way. I do mean that. So the notion of constraint here is a primitive, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3971.681,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3941.715,
"text": " And insofar as it's a primitive notion, I cannot define a primitive in terms of other things in my theory. Otherwise, it's not going to be a primitive. It's like you said, the foundational kind of hierarchy. If I really have a foundational hierarchy, being honest, I've got to tell you my axioms and primitive vocabulary and trying to elucidate the connections by drawing connections to things we understand. But if we say, OK, if we don't understand the primitive notions from the other point of view, I can try to convince them. Maybe it is something familiar."
},
{
"end_time": 3997.773,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3972.039,
"text": " Maybe it is something that can elucidate things we understand anyways. So the causal explanations can be understood in terms of boundary condition laws plus deterministic evolution with stochastic evolution. And those things are familiar. It seems like familiar things about A causing B can be understood in terms of the primitive constraint. Even though constraint is not temporal, it's not like something that producing things in time."
},
{
"end_time": 4021.92,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3998.422,
"text": " Yeah, okay. So from my, let's focus on that in just a minute. But from my point of view, what you're doing is running together issues about ontology with issues about what might be called ideology or conceptualogy. Axioms have to do with how you formulate your concepts. So for example, real number theory can be axiomatized in a lot of different ways."
},
{
"end_time": 4043.592,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4022.329,
"text": " God didn't say what the right primitives are. Geometry, Euclidean geometry can be axiomatized in a bunch of different ways. God didn't say these are the right axioms. Same with number theory. There are many ways of axiomatizing. Same way with the laws of nature for that matter. Is it Lagrange's principles? Hamilton's principles? Or what?"
},
{
"end_time": 4071.237,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4044.019,
"text": " Okay, so I think these are matters of ideology or conceptualogy, how you formulate the best systematization. I think that is to a certain extent a free, not free, but I mean it's something that can be done in different ways. Matters of ontology have to do with what exists and what the relationships are among the things that exist. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 4101.288,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4072.671,
"text": " David Lewis thinks, again, I haven't really come to my view, David Lewis thinks that what exists is the mosaic and laws are propositions all right, but they're propositions that are made true or false by the structure of the mosaic. They don't need a special truth maker other than the mosaic and the rules for what it is to be a law. So I don't think I'm running over the distinctions, Barry."
},
{
"end_time": 4130.776,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4101.51,
"text": " My view of ontology is more expensive than usual. I allow properties and relations to be part of ontology too, and laws to be part of ontology. I don't like that, but I don't mind properties and relations being part of ontology. I think somebody could say, I think there are these things, I'm going to name them, I call them laws or nomoses. And I say, well, what do they do? And how do they do it? And I think you're going to be dumbfounded."
},
{
"end_time": 4161.237,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4131.766,
"text": " So Barry, are you in the minority? Are you suggesting I'm a physicist and there are no laws of physics, technically speaking? What you mean is that nobody has discovered the laws of physics. You don't mean that there are no laws of physics, do you? No, no, no, I'm asking what do you mean? Do you mean to say that people speak about laws of physics? There aren't actually laws, they're just best systems or hopefully we will get to the best system. I don't know what this just business is. This is a big deal."
},
{
"end_time": 4188.899,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4162.073,
"text": " Okay. It's not a just, it's a big deal, but I'll come to my view now. I don't have Lewis's view. I want to have even less than he has in some sense, more than another sense. I think what there is fundamentally is reality. I think the view I have, the philosopher who's most like the view I have, I believe, although you're going to find this very weird, is Spinoza."
},
{
"end_time": 4220.009,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4191.647,
"text": " You know, he's a fellow traveler. Okay. Okay. Okay. Spinoza thought that what there was was reality and he called it the mind of God. I can do without that, but there's reality. Reality can be described in a lot of different ways. Reality can make true or false. The descriptions that we come up with. Now you might ask what are the descriptions and how do we come up with those excellent questions? That's for another session, I think. And I've written about that as well."
},
{
"end_time": 4243.285,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4220.589,
"text": " Reality can be described in various ways. Among the ways they can be described is ways that satisfy certain goals that people have come up with in their life. The goals of understanding their world and which they've articulated more and more along, wanting to have a simple comprehensive"
},
{
"end_time": 4273.166,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4243.558,
"text": " Systematization that can account for things like the motions of the planets and the motions of the shooting stars and the motions of projectiles and pendula and many things that begin with the word P. Planets, peculiar people, all sorts of things that begin with the letter P1 have accounts of their motions. So motion became a very important notion in physics. We wanted to account for their motions by systematizing the motions of things. That's what I was talking about when I was talking about ice"
},
{
"end_time": 4303.336,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4273.729,
"text": " Melting and smoke dispersing and inked. Yes, diffusion. Okay. Oh, this is motion and it's systematized by the molecular theory of matter and the Fundamental dynamical laws maybe the Newtonian and maybe they're more sophisticated and an electromagnetic or me and maybe and I mean you're gonna need a probabilities probability assumption that Boltzmann added to"
},
{
"end_time": 4333.148,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4304.172,
"text": " That systematizes all that and shows their connections. For me, that's what explaining is. So what is fundamental on this view, Barry? It is the macroscopic theme's emotion. That's fundamental or something just called reality with no description, no joints, no carving, no structure in the sense that I cannot even describe. It's like a county and numena. That thing in itself, if I have any description, it's going to be bringing it closer to us. No."
},
{
"end_time": 4356.067,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4333.814,
"text": " First of all, just reality. Just reality. Let's listen to those words heading, just reality. That sounds like a lot to me. Now, when you say it doesn't have any description, quite the opposite. It has many descriptions. The science satisfying the goals of science is one way of describing reality."
},
{
"end_time": 4386.015,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4356.459,
"text": " Maybe there are other ways of describing aspects of reality, maybe artistic ways of describing aspects of reality that satisfy different criteria, which don't match those of science. Maybe there are other ways. Sometimes people have wondered whether the way we describe human beings in terms of beliefs and desires can be fit in with the way we describe the motion of objects and mechanics. I think it can be, but you've got to think about it."
},
{
"end_time": 4415.333,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4386.34,
"text": " Some people think it can't be like Donald Davidson and some other philosophers, maybe quite. Putnam as well. So Putnam, one of your heroes, said that the sooner that we understand that the realm of knowledge that encompasses reality isn't just the sphere of science, that there are other spheres like ethics and Aristotle thought that as well, the sooner we'll come to a saner view of ourselves and of science. I'm all for that. But it doesn't mean that it all can't be fit together."
},
{
"end_time": 4424.94,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4415.538,
"text": " As far as the motions of things are concerned, their physics is the king. So if a motive or a desire moves you,"
},
{
"end_time": 4453.404,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4425.486,
"text": " It's ultimately you got to be accounted for in terms of neurons firing in your brain or something like that. Now, I don't know how to do it. Nobody knows how to do it. But the hope is that people will figure out. People have made progress towards understanding how it is that the brain makes people move when they have beliefs and desires and fitting beliefs and desires into this picture. One of the great heroes of Red Rutgers, was he gone by the time you came, Eddie, Jerry? Jerry was still teaching. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 4475.145,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4453.848,
"text": " So Jerry Fodor, unfortunately Kurt, you can't interview him. He would make the greatest of interviews. And if you could interview him, it would make the greatest of the greatest interviews. But he tried to make contributions to the visceral subject that we're talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 4504.002,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4475.657,
"text": " and that's interesting. So the reality has many guides, it has many descriptions. All of them are equally valid, but there's no fundamental. What's this word valid? What happens with valid group in there? Okay, so they're, they're all going to go descriptions. They're all descriptions. All right, the many description and there's no fundamental unique descriptions of the in terms of perfectly natural properties was fundamental in the world that's not going to be privileged by this package deal account. Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 4530.35,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4504.565,
"text": " It's going to be privileged by the package deal account. I mean, there may be more than one of them, actually. There may not be one that's privileged. I do think we have a good reason to believe that already. But that's a little dispute within the thing. But the thing that you're focusing on is the package deal account, it pays attention to the criteria that science has evolved over the history of science."
},
{
"end_time": 4554.241,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4531.015,
"text": " and and and trying to mesh those and fit those together and those are ever evolving they're evolving as of now out of fit new methods of mathematics i mean do you can you use algebraic topology and and physics people argue about that and the laws would change as we the standards evolve laws don't change"
},
{
"end_time": 4584.07,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4556.186,
"text": " What happens is that we have to change our criteria. I mean, I don't know if you want to say baseball changes or we have a new game or what, but I do think we could say that we were mistaken before. We've come up with a better account of what the most- We're mistaken about what laws are or what laws there are. Okay. Someone asked what the laws are. They want a list of things. They want Schrodinger's equation maybe or"
},
{
"end_time": 4613.012,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4584.497,
"text": " Or F equals MA or the law of gravity or Einstein's field equations or something like that. These are what the laws are. They're equations, things written down. What the laws are is the kind of thing we've been engaged in, a philosophical account about what it is to be a law. Okay, now I haven't really given my package deal account and I don't know whether the time has come to do it. Has it come? Sure. Okay, so I don't like Lewis's account because it too, I think, rests on a crutch."
},
{
"end_time": 4642.483,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4613.66,
"text": " His crutch is perfectly natural properties. I threw away my crutches. Okay. There's like two crutches. You're throwing away, right? First of all, the fundamental law, the constraint or govern and second is fundamental mosaic. Right. The mosaic. I don't, I don't have those questions. It's like, I believe in both of them. I believe mosaic and laws are fundamental. You believe neither is fundamental. Right. Okay. You keep using the word fundamental. It can be used in a lot of different senses, but anyway,"
},
{
"end_time": 4667.261,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4643.046,
"text": " So what I think is where we start is where science started. They started by noticing things like when you throw rocks, they move in a certain kind of path, kind of similar path to the way a projectile moves when you shoot a cannon. Maybe a similar path in certain ways to the way a shooting star moves when you see it go in a parabola."
},
{
"end_time": 4695.196,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4667.773,
"text": " Maybe in a similar way to we might think of a planet moves if the parabola doesn't close and becomes an ellipse. Okay. So you note these similarities about these things and we want to unify them. What we discover is that in order to unify the macroscopic, we have to introduce the microscopic things we can't see. We introduced them like in my case, I was given with the ice and the ink and the smoke."
},
{
"end_time": 4719.599,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4695.759,
"text": " that if we think of these things as being made up out of little particles, we see the connections between all of these behaviors in accordance with certain principles. Eddie might call them fundamental laws. I just call them attempts at a best systematization of reality. And we try to come up with that. And in fact, we've done, not me, I haven't done"
},
{
"end_time": 4748.933,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4720.247,
"text": " I did a little bit. I've published two scientific papers in my life, so I'm not a very good contributor to this, but it's not something that human beings have done. They've come up with a pretty good systematization, which involves introducing unobservable microscopic things in order to help systematize the macroscopic. So in some sense, the macroscopic plays a kind of fundamental and epistemologically fundamental way, but it's not ontologically fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 4778.985,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4749.326,
"text": " What distinguishes reality from another world that isn't reality?"
},
{
"end_time": 4809.326,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4779.377,
"text": " Leibniz used this notion, and some people thought then that he should be burnt as a heretic for using the idea of possible worlds. David Lewis, one of the heroes of the story, he made a big deal out of possible worlds. He wrote a whole book on possible worlds. He wrote a lot of them and he thinks the actual world is one of them. And you know what distinguishes it from the other ones? Just one thing. It's you, right? You. Me."
},
{
"end_time": 4829.974,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4810.026,
"text": " Tito's Handmade Vodka is America's favorite vodka for a reason. From the first legal distillery in Texas, Tito's is six times distilled till it's just right and naturally gluten-free, making it a high quality spirit that mixes with just about anything."
},
{
"end_time": 4853.848,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4830.077,
"text": " From the smoothest martinis to the best Bloody Marys, Tito's is known for giving back, teaming up with non-profits to serve its communities and do good for dogs. Make your next cocktail with Tito's. Distilled and bottled by 5th Generation Inc. Austin, Texas. 40% alcohol by volume. Savor responsibly. So all the world's and Louis's view are similar in certain respects. Now my view is very different from that."
},
{
"end_time": 4883.558,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4854.36,
"text": " Lewis wanted there to be possible worlds because he wanted to give an account of metaphysical possibility and metaphysical necessity. I think also you should probably see that I'm a somewhat deflationary philosopher. I think that these are two philosophical nightmares, metaphysical. I'm not understanding. Would you then say that every single set that can be constructed exists if it has a member to that set? Like you said that other possible worlds exist"
},
{
"end_time": 4912.09,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4883.78,
"text": " If there are people in them, I don't understand. No, no, no. I was speaking the talk of possible worlds. I don't believe in possible worlds like that. I believe in stories that we can tell in our world, but I don't think that there are other possible worlds like Lewis believed. I agree with Lewis more or less on his account of laws, not exactly, but I do not agree with his account of metaphysical modality. I don't think he needs it."
},
{
"end_time": 4936.442,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4912.671,
"text": " Cause he just doesn't really need it for his account account of factuals or the kind of laws or anything else useful. It just creates headaches for him. Okay. Actually I said, all right, I see what you're saying, but I don't think I do. So are you saying that Lewis believed possible worlds existed in some sense? And you were saying, no, no, no, they're just, they're just our, our hypotheticals. Yes, more or less. That sounds good to me."
},
{
"end_time": 4962.295,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4936.971,
"text": " So to Lewis, then possible worlds is just, is a misnomer. There's somehow existent worlds that are possible. Yeah, but that's the right nomer because then they exist, but they're possible because they're not actual to us, to their inhabitants. So the actual ones actual for him is what he calls an indexical. So Lewis thinks that literally those possible worlds exist as space time manifolds say here's one space manifold that we are having this conversation."
},
{
"end_time": 4991.101,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4962.415,
"text": " Okay, okay, let's get to something related, seemingly related configuration space. So Eddie, you and I had this conversation off air that you believe the configuration space is too large to be a fundamental arena. And that maybe space time or whatever is"
},
{
"end_time": 5010.964,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4991.63,
"text": " Yes, I think there can be lots of developments in future quantum theory, quantum gravity, about what is fundamental. But what should be fundamental is some kind of low-dimensional manifold."
},
{
"end_time": 5036.954,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5010.964,
"text": " maybe 20 some dimensions, but it should not be 10 to the billions of billions dimensional configuration space. The space of possible configurations of the particles or the field variables. That space is a huge space. It's hard to recover the ordinary life of tables and chairs, you and me from that huge space, but it's much more straightforward. And to start with a low dimensional space,"
},
{
"end_time": 5059.428,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5037.329,
"text": " Now, to do this, we have to think about quantum mechanics in a slightly new way. So there are different interpretation quantum mechanics, de Broglie-Bohm, GRW, many worlds, but all of them postulate this wave function. And the wave function lives in this high dimensional configuration space. And to be a realist,"
},
{
"end_time": 5080.538,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5059.701,
"text": " like us, it's natural to be tempted to be a realist about the wave function and the configuration space it lives on, and take that to be the fundamental space, and everything else is derived, illusory or something. I think that we should start with the ordinary space and see how can we make sense of quantum mechanics. One way to use think the wave function or the quantum state as"
},
{
"end_time": 5106.493,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5081.442,
"text": " Like a law of nature, so coming back to the question of laws of nature, well, we know there are many things we write down as laws, Hamiltonian function, Lagrangian, they also live on a high dimensional space. They are functions of, say, the classical phase space in classical mechanics. So that is a high dimensional space too. So if you think of the wave function, the law, encoding some kind of interactions by telling things how to move, then the wave doesn't have to be something concrete."
},
{
"end_time": 5124.514,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5107.142,
"text": " like a particle or a field, but a wavelength can be a law of nature telling things how to move. And this tradition of developing this school of thought of nemological interpretation of wave function, that's, I think, facing some of the crucial tasks in whether we can get this to be a simple description."
},
{
"end_time": 5151.954,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5124.94,
"text": " And that's why I can depart from the traditional school. I think, okay, maybe we can think about the density matrix and that's a bit more coarse grained and just right, um, simple enough to be a law of nature. And that's the other view I've been developing. I thinking about called the one calculus view, the density matrix is a fundamental law of nature. Um, and you can have everything else, ordinary stuff, living ordinary space time, or, you know, a more generalized manifold."
},
{
"end_time": 5177.875,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5154.292,
"text": " Why didn't you call it the Chen tech case? If someone else calls it that. So we strayed onto another subject matter and you really want another guest to be debating Eddie on this subject. I can do it because I'm interested in it, but I don't have a firm opinion"
},
{
"end_time": 5207.432,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5178.422,
"text": " about this issue about what the fundamental space and space time is. But I can, I do understand why someone might think it's a very high dimensional configuration space. And I don't know who Eddie is to tell reality that it can't have that as its fundamental space. But Eddie may know better than reality, I don't know. But it might be that that's the best way of systematizing the world. And in fact, I think as the person I'm thinking about, you know what I'm talking about, Kurt?"
},
{
"end_time": 5231.561,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5208.575,
"text": " Jacob Barnes? David Albert. Ah. Yeah. So I, I don't mean, I, I'm sorry to do this silly guessing game thing. My wife was downstairs. She always was a whack me over the head for doing that to her. You know, but that's the least of her reasons. So I'd give her that reason. So anyway, so anyway, so"
},
{
"end_time": 5255.794,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5232.039,
"text": " There is a dispute within quantum mechanics, but we were almost on another topic which you didn't quite complete, which is very interesting for you. And that is the nature of metaphysical necessity and metaphysical possibility. And whether you really need the notion of concrete possible worlds, as Lewis called them, what you called realities. You were sort of shocked because you said, do you think they really exist?"
},
{
"end_time": 5268.814,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5256.305,
"text": " And the reason you said that is because you think exist should be just confined to actually exist. But no, lewis.exist has a more general use. It exists in this very general sense as Eddie explained."
},
{
"end_time": 5288.558,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5270.23,
"text": " Okay, that's what Lewis thought. I don't need that. I don't like that. I don't think the notion of metaphysical possibility and necessity is very useful. The only thing anyone has used it for to use is to prove the existence of God in a fallacious proof called the ontological proof, but it's not a good notion."
},
{
"end_time": 5318.558,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5290.009,
"text": " What Barry would move you closer to Eddie's view? And Eddie, what would move you closer to Barry's? Now, Eddie did accept that if God came down and spoke to him, Eddie would change and say, I was wrong about metaphysics. Barry, you said, well, when I was 13, well, we're going to talk about that off air. So if God can't convince you, Barry, what is it like? How movable is your view? How amenable is it to evidence? I could bring myself to understand what actually could be meant by the laws constraining."
},
{
"end_time": 5348.643,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5318.848,
"text": " Over and above the laws the the events to satisfy the laws of nature that would move me But now I've no one's ever been able to explain it to me. Maybe I'm dense But no one's ever been able to explain it Now in fact Eddie is on our view are much closer together. For example, we have a colleague and friend Tim Maudlin another good interviewer you may maybe have you interviewed him several times Yeah, I'll place the links on screen and in the description as well for that Okay. Okay. So Tim"
},
{
"end_time": 5374.889,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5349.019,
"text": " has a view in the Eddie Ballpark, but he thinks the laws are just dynamical. They're what he calls floats, fundamental laws of temporal evolution. They take the state of the world at a time and produce subsequent states and they keep doing the producing, the producing, the producing, the producing, the producing. Now I kind of understand what producing is, except I don't know what laws, how these things called laws can do the producing. Wait, you understand producing without constraining?"
},
{
"end_time": 5405.879,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5379.036,
"text": " It's a good point. No, I understand what constraining is when I'm constrained to drive, you know, less than a hundred kilometers an hour. I understand what that means. Okay. But I don't understand what it is for the laws to constrain. That's right. I know what it is for the factory to produce more potato chips, but I don't know what it is for the laws to produce anything."
},
{
"end_time": 5418.66,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5406.937,
"text": " I use the metaphors that have gone crazy. Wittgenstein had a nice phrase. Mostly I don't appeal to Wittgenstein, but I like this phrase of his. He says sometimes language goes on a holiday."
},
{
"end_time": 5445.981,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5420.282,
"text": " This is an example. Let me push back a little bit. Well, so Barry, you're talking about the conversions. I will come back to that. But in terms of the meaning of constraining, or even many of production is a situation on my camp, the non-human camp, where there are different views about wild loss, harvest, carbon, I think one can make sense of the primitive in maybe just understanding what a theory says, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 5472.961,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5446.647,
"text": " If the theory says you can understand kind of factorials, causation, maybe probabilistic dependencies in terms of the laws, then we somehow implicit understand the laws, how they constrain. I know that you are going to agree on the metaphysics, but the metaphysics, the notion of constraining can be understood by how we understand other things, right? Suppose someone says I want to kick it away."
},
{
"end_time": 5491.681,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5473.439,
"text": " Have they kicked away the counterfactuals then? Did they kick away and say, you know what, I'm going to do without, one day I'm going to throw away my crutches, I'm going to walk on my own. Do I have to throw away the counterfactuals too? In my view, yes."
},
{
"end_time": 5523.097,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5493.2,
"text": " But I'm not on my view. I don't see why. I understand counterfactuals pretty well. I don't think your understanding of counterfactuals is any better than mine. So I see what you're talking about. Sorry, I didn't interrupt you, Barry. You were talking about the production versus Mimpy and BSA. Yeah. So among the people who have so-called non-Yumian views are the Shelley Goldstein, Eddie Chen view, the Tim Maldon view, and I referred earlier to David Armstrong and another crew. Emily Atlan, for example, too."
},
{
"end_time": 5553.456,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5524.07,
"text": " Yeah, right. So there's a fair number of people who think they still need the crutch. Okay. It's okay. You know, it's not up to me to take the crutch away. I wouldn't do that. I really don't think anybody would topple over, but they wouldn't hold on to it. It's okay. All right. But I don't want it. I'm sure I don't need it. So the main difference between the maudlin view"
},
{
"end_time": 5583.2,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5554.002,
"text": " And Eddie Chen, Shelley Goldstein view is that Chen and Goldstein, the laws constrain all of reality. It's sort of a sense all at once. Now it's a bad metaphor because it's not at once. It's not a temporal notion. It's timeless. Whereas on Mordland's view, time comes into the story very centrally, very important. He has to have time as a primitive notion as well."
},
{
"end_time": 5600.862,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5584.462,
"text": " Eddie doesn't have to have it. He may want it. I don't think so, but he may want it. I don't want it. I know I don't want it. So time is not primitive to me. I think I can get an account of what time is, but in terms of my general scheme, but I mean, time's direction, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 5631.22,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5602.756,
"text": " Time's direction. Well, I think time is, in systematizing the world, we want to come up with the best systematization of the world as we see around us. And we see our world in space and time. We may modify our conceptions of space and time. Whoever would have thought that the things that can happen that are not simultaneous with each other. Or no one coming before the other. That's true. But yeah, so we've changed our mind about exactly we, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 5659.991,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5631.869,
"text": " Einstein changed people's minds about or some people's minds of actually this is people still argue over this and funny way. I'm going to get into that, but, um, sure. It's okay. It's okay. So I think we start with us with them. Wilfred Sellers, another hero of mine's philosopher. Uh, you can't interview him yet anymore either. Uh, he, he liked to use the phrase, the manifest image of the world and the scientific image of the world."
},
{
"end_time": 5687.295,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5660.503,
"text": " We start with the manifest image of the world, the way the world appears to us when we start moving around in it. We develop a vocabulary for talking about it in terms of macroscopic objects, in terms of mental, you know, items that we talk about in terms of the being stars and planets and clouds and weather and rain and plants and so on. And we noticed a system"
},
{
"end_time": 5716.374,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5687.739,
"text": " that these seem to be a system that plants grow bigger and then they die. Well, that happens to my kitten too, and to human beings too. There must be something in common about all of this. What could that be? Okay, well, it took a lot of discovery to come up with a decent account. I'm not sure it's quite done yet, but it all ultimately boils down to what we're calling before the second law of nature."
},
{
"end_time": 5728.336,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5716.732,
"text": " I don't mean to simplify, but that's a big part of it. It unifies all of these processes. So that's what I think is involved in what explaining is and what laws do."
},
{
"end_time": 5755.179,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5728.609,
"text": " So you have the manifest image and the scientific image. And Wilfrid Sellers said the biggest job for philosophy in the 20 and 21st century is to reconcile the manifest and the scientific image. I think I completely agree, Barry. I think this is something that... Oh, I sure you would, would you not? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Sure. Of course. But what I'm saying is that we're starting with the manifest image. That's enough for us to have as"
},
{
"end_time": 5784.07,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5755.657,
"text": " building rebuilding the ship at sea. We don't need an ontological. Yes, I agree. But oncologically, is it ontologically? All we got was reality. We don't need an additional crutch. We don't need there being these primitive laws. We don't need that being primitive laws of temporal evolution. We don't need that being primitive constraints. We don't need it being a mosaic. You mean mosaic. Okay, we just need reality. So"
},
{
"end_time": 5800.811,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5784.735,
"text": " When I was asking about Barry what would move you closer to Eddie you said it would be to understand what it means to constrain over and above satisfying. Now when I speak to people who are not libertarian free will people and are more on the compatible list and actually they aren't even compatible list."
},
{
"end_time": 5828.575,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5801.118,
"text": " They would say free will is a meaningless concept. I don't even know what it means. So usually people don't buy into something because they not because they disagree, but they don't even know what that position means. I know you have several papers on free will Barry. So I'll link to them on screen right now. Now, Eddie, I'm going to ask you to explain what it means to help Barry along. And hopefully Barry, you'll say, okay, I get that now. I'm I'm understanding still don't agree, but I'm understanding more your position, Eddie."
},
{
"end_time": 5857.841,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5829.241,
"text": " But I'm also curious if there aren't constraints, then are we free in your view, Barry? And does free will have anything to do with that? Or are you asking me? I know I'm asking you about free will now, because if you don't believe in constraints, so you'll be happy to know that I've written papers of free will, which will be happy to send you have views about that as well. And I think the important thing is a philosophical point. And that is the many concepts that we inherit from our ancestors."
},
{
"end_time": 5888.012,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5858.916,
"text": " Just aren't quite right. They need to be modified. Sometimes they just need to be jettisoned completely. There are concepts like that. Think about the ether, whatever they call it, the ether. Should it have been jettisoned or should it have been identified with a field? I don't know. Probably jettisoned. But free will, I think we want to keep. Causation is a great example. I think what people think about causation"
},
{
"end_time": 5917.5,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5889.48,
"text": " Is very screwed up needs to be modified. Bertrand Russell, the great quota. He said, what do you say about causation? He said causation is like the British monarchy. People keep it around because it's mistakenly thought to do no harm. Okay. That's what Russell said. Now I don't agree with Russell. I think we need the notion of causation, but it's not primitive. It's not fundamental. It's going to fit into my general overall account. And I do fit it in."
},
{
"end_time": 5945.128,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5918.131,
"text": " um, to my general overall account via the notions of counterfactuals and correlations and stuff like that. Okay. So I think there is something like free will, but I'm more in a school of what you'd call a compatibilist. I think there are fundamental laws of physics. Um, a friend of mine, another good interview, Jenanne Ismael, I'm speaking with her shortly. Oh, great. Okay. She wrote a book called how the laws of physics make us free. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 5975.162,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5945.452,
"text": " When she told me the title, I thought she said, how the laws of physics make us flee. I'm just remembering her physics classes, but knows how they make us free. Because in fact, and I agree with her, that the laws of physics contain within it the secret for how to make for a compatibilism. And I could give, we could give you a whole session on that if you wanted to sometime. Jen and I don't see the exact same views about that, but we both agree about being compatible. So I think"
},
{
"end_time": 6004.514,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5975.418,
"text": " Okay. So Eddie, firstly, I'm curious about your view on free will since we're on that subject. And then also it would be great to explain the difference between constraining and satisfying."
},
{
"end_time": 6012.756,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6005.128,
"text": " Yeah, so on the constraint and satisfying question, I think that gets to the heart of the debate."
},
{
"end_time": 6040.077,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6013.097,
"text": " between humanism and non-humanism. And one of the motivations Shirley Ghost and I had when writing the paper, developing the view, was to really sharpen the disagreement. And when it's such a decent production with temporal evolution, with time's direction, then it looks like really we are at a case where the only difference is between whether you have this notion that's playing a metaphysical role only or just a semantic role of making truth conditions."
},
{
"end_time": 6067.244,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6040.077,
"text": " For us, it's a metaphysical role, and it's hard to kind of give a knockdown argument for this view, but it's just something that we think is very natural, given how we do science, very natural how we think about, you know, explanations and grounding kind of factuals in science. And we can give axioms, say, you know, if something constrains something else,"
},
{
"end_time": 6096.135,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6067.483,
"text": " If the law L constrains mosaic M, then M satisfies the law L. But besides that, since it is a primitive, we cannot explain this in more illuminating fashion by appealing to other more fundamental, more primitive notions. So if someone understands our view, they see what we're saying. If someone says, well, we don't accept the view, we cannot convince them by saying, OK, here is a primitive and you have to accept the primitive. That's not going to be convincing either."
},
{
"end_time": 6110.589,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6096.271,
"text": " I do think that a lot of practice and think about theories and models and how laws explain they don't fit into the human picture. A lot of cases when we think of, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 6132.363,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6111.237,
"text": " A simple example, a Newtonian particle is flying around in one straight line in empty space. No forces on it, so straight line, so three kilometers per second. And that universe, this universe by itself, is compatible with Newtonian laws, is compatible with the law that everything moves in this velocity and forever."
},
{
"end_time": 6154.394,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6132.688,
"text": " And for us, we think that both are possible laws given the same universe, but the human would deny that. So that's kind of one test case where we think, okay, yeah, in scientific modeling, in scientific testing, we have this kind of non-supervenience intuition we're trying to capture for laws of nature. And so we are now getting intuition. But have you done the test?"
},
{
"end_time": 6177.449,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6155.606,
"text": " Okay, I know that Barry would disagree on the notion intuition and testing intuition. Okay. Of course, you can get that not on the test. So don't make it sound like when you use we be careful about the world. We're thinking about actually, you know, the conceptual test broadly construed, we tend to think about a conceptual framework to accommodate what I disagree with. I disagree with you."
},
{
"end_time": 6206.596,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6177.773,
"text": " You get into a discussion with a physicist, they get all confused and many of them want to be Umians. They just can't abide your notions of constraint the way you want to understand it. That's my experience as a physicist. I do want to relay a story though, which probably is helpful here. I was once in another debate with another philosopher who sort of started out somewhat in Eddie's camp, not the same view exactly, a different version of it."
},
{
"end_time": 6237.739,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6207.79,
"text": " And, um, we stayed up all night at a hotel in Geneva, I think, and we were arguing about this stuff. And then I went back to the United States. The next thing I knew. He not only became a human, he became what he called a super human. At first I thought it was just to embarrass me, but no, he was serious. His view is no good too. So I'm not going to get into it. Okay. But so I'm not a super human."
},
{
"end_time": 6256.118,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6238.677,
"text": " On this point, I want to come back to maybe an earlier question Kurt asked, which is, what would move me to close out humanism?"
},
{
"end_time": 6281.152,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6256.51,
"text": " I'm always very sympathetic to humanism. I learned humanism from Barry and from Dave and others. One of my first papers was defending humanism against quantum entanglement and this wave function thing that's too high dimensional, how to make it reconcile with the no dimensional mosaic and its density matrix. I do think that non-humans have a lot to learn from humans because"
},
{
"end_time": 6303.848,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6281.152,
"text": " They constantly judge us on all the crutches we seem to rely on production times direction and so on. Of course, we disagree on the fundamentals. We're going to want to hold on to the primitive notions of they say laws or the relation of governing, but there's a flexibility humanism that's making this a very illuminating view that I always try to"
},
{
"end_time": 6333.319,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6304.616,
"text": " I put my human head on and think about a question, and put my non-human head on and think about a question, and see if I'm making, am I appealing to intuitions that may be extraneous to the question at hand. And I sometimes feel whenever I'm appealing to intuitions that are in common, so I don't, I know Beto doesn't like the word intuition, but think about considerations in common to humanism and non-humanism and a work out solution. Somehow it's more robust solution. I think,"
},
{
"end_time": 6356.374,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6333.695,
"text": " As one example, if a current joint work with Jeffrey Barrett at UC Irvine, we're thinking about probabilities as constraints that are getting very, very close to certain human views of laws and probabilities. They're kind of implicit and maybe not quite precise, but when we make sense of them in a precise way we want in terms of randomness, then things become very much"
},
{
"end_time": 6381.22,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6357.039,
"text": " neutral between humanism and non-humanism. And that's I think how metaphysics of laws, metaphysics of science should proceed is to find the common ground and to solve problems in light of the common ground and see if you can transfer back to the different views. But of course, there'll be ultimate disagreements about the metaphysics status of the solutions. But I think I'm always drawn to"
},
{
"end_time": 6411.288,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6381.8,
"text": " The rat baggage free account, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 6433.029,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6411.766,
"text": " Well, I have structures too. And who can reject common ground? I'm more in favor of common ground too. Okay. But we should sharpen our disagreement. I think bringing into the discussion, not about what physicists should do, we don't disagree about that."
},
{
"end_time": 6461.442,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6433.746,
"text": " and not about how they should practice. We don't disagree about that, I guess. We might, in places, disagree with, unless they disagree with it among themselves. What we do is we disagree about, as you said, the metaphysics of laws. I have the view that we can give an account of what laws are, not what the laws are, but what laws are, without bringing in notions like constraint as the fundamental, or notions like temporal evolution."
},
{
"end_time": 6489.497,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6461.937,
"text": " As the fundamental or notion like production as a fundamental. I think we can give an account of that. Now we of course do have some basic axioms and basic thoughts or basic concepts. Everybody does. And we start and I don't think you really reject them because in the end of the day, you want to have the same unification view I have. It's not like your view. I don't know. What would you say if God said, you know, there are a lot of constraints, but they're incredibly complicated."
},
{
"end_time": 6509.718,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6489.957,
"text": " Add so complicated fact is only actually doesn't it's not complicated is another guy is really it is just one constraint. The constraint is that any never gives up non human that's the constraint everything else is no law."
},
{
"end_time": 6530.162,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6510.247,
"text": " It does well there is a happened on human views to you on your view to you if the mosaic so vast and so huge and so many levels we have access to only in what's in front of us the macroscopic domain. Reality let's say reality has a lot of red is huge."
},
{
"end_time": 6552.193,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6530.52,
"text": " and has lots of facts we don't we have access we can agree on that at most one percent of all the facts okay that's even that is generous right so in that case we have lots of epistemic limitations of physical reality these even beyond the metaphysical laws it's like suppose you have a package deal account or the best system account or minimum primitive system account then"
},
{
"end_time": 6577.432,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6552.961,
"text": " Absolutely. I completely agree with that. Nothing about my view that says that can't happen."
},
{
"end_time": 6607.534,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6579.77,
"text": " No, no, no, no, no, I didn't. I like I made perfectly clear. I don't think your view is incoherent. There's no logical contradiction in your view. There is for me a kind of like understanding problem and understanding what the word what constraint can really amount to other than the metaphor that's left over from the, the, the, the cards idea of the laws being enforced by God. But you may have something in mind and so more power to you. I just don't think"
},
{
"end_time": 6637.995,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6608.183,
"text": " Scientists really need this crutch and the scientists could pick and choose their philosophies of science They will go around doing science the same way whether they've go for me or for you about this as you say and that's right So this is a philosophical dispute and like people often say folks have philosophical disputes are the most useless in a certain way But in another way, they're not useless because we understand things better when we have a discussion like this"
},
{
"end_time": 6661.032,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6639.497,
"text": " I do think that it can be fruitful philosophically too and scientifically thinking about non-humanism, minimalism and constraints because you are really at this level you have to, if you want to think of probability for example, then there will be"
},
{
"end_time": 6677.568,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6661.493,
"text": " Comprehensiveness Simplicity Probabilistic laws"
},
{
"end_time": 6705.811,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6677.568,
"text": " How we think about the principal principle, how connection between credences happen to chance, all of this. Oh, very important. Oh, very important because I go along with all of that. When you sharpen a disagreement, I think there's going to be convergence of the views, but also there's going to be open questions on how we fill out the details of various views. Perhaps you have a lot of details for package deal account, but you know, primitivism, there are questions, a lot of questions about, you know, probabilities and chances and credences."
},
{
"end_time": 6734.718,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6706.271,
"text": " Um, that I get going to get very exciting and open, open questions. Yeah. Well, Louis is self-addressed. Just speaking for Louis's view, Louis addressed how probability fits into his account into the best systematization account. And it's been written about a bit by me among other people and, um, trying to explain what Louis was up to. Cause Louis thought that one way of systematizing, maybe you might notice this because you brought up comogar complexity earlier."
},
{
"end_time": 6763.012,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6735.213,
"text": " Take a long sequence of H, T, H, T, H, T, T, T, T, H, T, T, T, T, T, it goes on for a long time. You might say, what a headache. How can I systematize that? But then you notice that in any segment of 20 or 30, you get about 10 or 15 heads. Furthermore, if you just were to pick them out in that group, just pick them out, so to speak,"
},
{
"end_time": 6793.439,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6763.49,
"text": " I'm going to use the phrase at random, but you know what I really mean because we're talking about algorithms here. Um, uh, we just pick them out. We'll also discover that there'll be, unless we pick them out according to the rule, just pick out H's or pick out T's or something like that. Well, also, as long as we don't use a rule like that, we'll also get about half. And that indicates that these are what one might say independent events."
},
{
"end_time": 6819.428,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6794.036,
"text": " Each with probability one half. And that gives a lot of information about that sequence. It tells you what degree of belief to have in any big long sequence. It tells you if you had a sequence of a hundred of them, your degree of belief should be just about one that you get between 48 and 52 H's. You won't go wrong with that."
},
{
"end_time": 6849.94,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6820.862,
"text": " I disparaged my account of things by calling them merely semantic earlier. You know, my account of factuals are merely semantic because the account of factuals connects them with other things. My account of laws is merely semantic. It's word merely semantic. I have a question for Eddie. Is money merely semantic? When you go to the bank, you say, can you give me a little semantic, please?"
},
{
"end_time": 6876.817,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6851.596,
"text": " No, it's not merely semantic. Money is not merely semantic. Merely semantic hides a lot. It's a term that we've created in order to characterize an aspect of reality. So reality comes into the story too, both in money and in a complicated way, that's what I'm going to go into, and with laws and objective probability."
},
{
"end_time": 6905.469,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6878.217,
"text": " So speaking of semantic, I want to linger here, Barry with you, please. And then I would like to hear Eddie, your view as well, about how philosophical disputes can be both useless and fruitful. And the reason is that many of the people who are watching the audience comprises faculty in computer science, math, physics and philosophy, and also a general audience. I've been among them. And they will"
},
{
"end_time": 6932.773,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6906.34,
"text": " both be frustrated"
},
{
"end_time": 6958.609,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6933.319,
"text": " That's an excellent question. So it's a very good present thought provoking question. It's really good. So what I think is this, I definitely know that there are useless disputes in philosophy for me. I can give an example of one in a minute and probably give an example of many. This is not one of them, although it's a used up dispute."
},
{
"end_time": 6985.759,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6959.121,
"text": " To some extent, I'm not sure there's going to be much new on the horizon after the package deal account, but who knows what other people come up with. I didn't think I would come up with that. So it's not useless, but it might be used up. Okay, now here's the useless one. Maybe you've interviewed some of the people about it. Some people have argued of how many objects are there in this bowl. Well, you have a bowl."
},
{
"end_time": 7013.37,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6986.34,
"text": " There's a ball bobbing up and down in the water. Is there one object, the ball? Two objects, a ball in the water. Or a lot of objects, because of all the molecules. Or maybe many more objects, because they're all the photons. And many, many more, all the particles. I think this is completely useless, the how many objects dispute. But grown philosophers have banged their heads against the wall about it. Some have thought it's useless, but it is useless."
},
{
"end_time": 7039.514,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7014.155,
"text": " On the other hand, the issue between so-called humanism, non-humanism, it was useful to me because it caused me to come up with the package deal account, which I think is a better, a better deal. So it's useful to me. I know, of course, people can say individually what's useful to them. That's a very deep question. So I'm thinking about how do you, speaking from my experiences, I think that in thinking about intellectual history,"
},
{
"end_time": 7059.855,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7040.043,
"text": " of laws of nature for example and problems of induction, Hume's problem, Gouman's problem, and contemporary debates about the future of physics, foundations of quantum mechanics, foundation set of mechanics, all of these things get intertwined. Can we make sense of probability is tied to can we make sense of"
},
{
"end_time": 7086.032,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7060.145,
"text": " entropy. What kind of entropy is it? Is it Boltzmann entropy, Gibbs entropy, von Neumann entropy? And then how do you make sense of laws is tied to how to make sense of the wave function and quantum state and also the minimal, sorry, the basic mosaic structure is a high dimensional structure, a low dimensional structure. So some many things are at stake and I think the convergence of views where it convergence of clarification of disagreements"
},
{
"end_time": 7114.991,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7086.937,
"text": " um sharpen those arguments give us some kind of fixed point to refer back to that if we disagree about this it means we may be disagree about this too so it's traced back to the fundamental what laws are what probabilities are what explanations are and if there are no scientific difference between say barry's view and my view when we come to sunny practice we can rest a bit more assured that um the differences in those fundamental notions don't"
},
{
"end_time": 7144.991,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7115.452,
"text": " That's a really good point, Eddie. Do you know of any? You gave an intuition before but that's not the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 7163.968,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7145.316,
"text": " Which could tell the difference in your view and my view. I don't think there is an experiment. Right. But I think in answer to your question, that's why I thought it was a really good question. I don't think there's any practical difference between our views, which is why I think you could say we don't need to crunch."
},
{
"end_time": 7182.227,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7166.783,
"text": " I think you can be agnostic about the existence of crutch but not say there is no crutch or there is crutch based on just practice and empirical experiences and that's the kind of more a conservative inference from that."
},
{
"end_time": 7208.49,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7182.227,
"text": " I just wanted to share this thought, if I may, with Kurt. So regarding laws of nature, this seems like a very historical debate going back to hundreds of years. But if you think about the contemporary developments of machine learning or AI, there are many side effects of this are really harmful and, you know, we have to be careful. But one of the marvelous achievement is that AI has become really good at picking up some patterns"
},
{
"end_time": 7234.787,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7209.172,
"text": " simple patterns that are informative across the board, not just on training data, but also across test data. So you can see new things and you can still perform well. What is that? It's a form of induction. And what is the ground for that induction? Or some people say, well, some kind of uniformity principle, some kind of things happen in the same way over and over again. And we know that's not true because nature is not uniform. What is really out of mind, underlying all of that is this kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 7265.503,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7236.032,
"text": " simple, informative laws of nature that can be uniform in some cases, maybe not be uniform in all cases, but this is a manifestation of laws of nature give rise to effective descriptions. They're still very lawful. And I think so all this achievements in AI can be thought as a foundational way as connecting back to this conceptual questions of laws of nature, how they relate to induction and explanation and what is different between pure prediction"
},
{
"end_time": 7286.323,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7265.794,
"text": " and understanding."
},
{
"end_time": 7315.913,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7286.971,
"text": " And what science is looking for is looking for the uniform D in the right respects. And that's what these AI programs are constructed to try to build to. And they've gotten pretty good at it in certain areas. So if we're interested, I know with some programs, for example, in finding patterns of chemical recombination, they're good at doing that because they start out with a vocabulary of chemical recombination, given a lot of examples. They're trained, they're trained maybe by using"
},
{
"end_time": 7341.425,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7317.09,
"text": " The implicit biases here are very implicit."
},
{
"end_time": 7365.282,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7341.988,
"text": " And I'm not saying this is an argument for non-humanism over humanism. They're saying that it brings together questions about metaphysics of laws and epistemology of laws with contemporary practice in machine learning. There are lots of open questions here, understanding why AI is working so well. And it seems like when we don't build in something explicit by hand, it's a transformer model. Still, they're doing really well."
},
{
"end_time": 7387.841,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7365.606,
"text": " So it seems. Now I also distinguish epistemology from metaphysics, but you're right that my metaphysics is a closer friend to my epistemology."
},
{
"end_time": 7417.995,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7389.497,
"text": " And people who have you like yours, I always have a big problem making it make friendship up between epistemology and metaphysics. Okay, but mine start out, my metaphysics starts out already by nature friendly to epistemology. I think there is going to be the same gap on your metaphysical knowledge just as on minimal primitivism, we have the partially similar kind of epistemological principles that connect"
},
{
"end_time": 7440.759,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7418.353,
"text": " I think it's guaranteed."
},
{
"end_time": 7467.142,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7441.203,
"text": " But I think as the history is shown, it looks like it's gotten better and better and better. Maybe we're wrong. Maybe I know something. So is there a difference between MinP and your view of loss, Apache account that brings the piece of biology closer to the metaphysics that given the metaphysics, we're more likely to be successful in the limit of inquiry in science on your account. And MinP is minimal primitivism."
},
{
"end_time": 7494.701,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7467.722,
"text": " Use the word min P, which is something that we know, but the audience doesn't have minimal primitivism. That's his view. Yeah. Minimal primitivism versus package deal account. Right. Right. So, so Eddie didn't come up with this catchy name like I did. You know, I'm very good at naming. I'll sell you a name, Eddie. So. Mentaculous. Mentaculous. Well, it's not mine originally, but, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 7519.531,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7495.811,
"text": " We're not going to get into that. You can do another session if you want. You can do that one with Ethan Cohn if you want, actually. My favorite film is No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, both released in the same year. Great, great, great movies, but Serious Man is where that term comes from and that's also a good movie for physicists especially."
},
{
"end_time": 7547.892,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7520.401,
"text": " Okay, I'd like to end with a question to both of you that's more human, not humianism, not humian. Clearly you have different views and I want to know what it's like Barry to teach and guide someone because you were Eddie's PhD supervisor for those who just skipped forward and didn't watch the introduction. So what is it like? Do you try to foster that tension or do you try to convince your student that"
},
{
"end_time": 7575.606,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7548.251,
"text": " their dissent must stem from a misunderstanding because obviously you, you know what you're talking about and the student is, but I don't think, I don't think that, but with, with first things about Eddie is if there ever was a self motivated student, a self motivated philosopher, Eddie is it, he's much more motivated than I was at his stage and much more accomplished than I was at his stage. So he has motivation all over the place. He's very well motivated."
},
{
"end_time": 7593.831,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7576.084,
"text": " He knew what he wanted"
},
{
"end_time": 7617.688,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7594.821,
"text": " As far as teaching Eddie, I had him in classes and I interacted with his dissertation, but he really motivated what he was doing. He had a co-director and he knew exactly what he was doing. He knows exactly what he's doing today. It was no problem. The problem I have is with students who are not motivated. I do have some students like that and it's so hard to get them to get"
},
{
"end_time": 7627.995,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7618.319,
"text": " You know, they just worry that that's not right. That's not really in tune, right? Eddie just decided to have a view and he wants to defend it. I think that's great. Now, Eddie,"
},
{
"end_time": 7658.592,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7628.712,
"text": " How is it that you didn't succumb to because you're a student to just believing or conceding to whatever your elder wants and your elder holds your academic fate? Well, I mean, you hold in some sense the future of Eddie in your hands. So Eddie, tell me about that process, what it's like to still retain your original point of view, maybe even sharpen it or increase that divide with your supervisor. Yeah, so it was a very special environment for me."
},
{
"end_time": 7677.773,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7659.036,
"text": " When I was doing a PhD at Rutgers, interacting with Barry and Davey Albert, my co-supervisors, and Charlie Goldstein in the math department, Tim and other people at Princeton and CUNY. It's a very diverse intellectual environment. And I felt very, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7704.155,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7677.773,
"text": " I tried to embarrass you at first and I tried to read everything and understand everything from the inside out and I think for a few years I was a human and I for a few years I believe in even the high dimensional view but I realized you know there are arguments for against and I wasn't quite sure if my arguments were so worked out so it's during those years I try to develop my own views trying to"
},
{
"end_time": 7729.343,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7704.155,
"text": " defend those views and try to work out you know what i should think about laws and quantum mechanics and probability i never knew i would write on laws of nature because i know it's hard and it's a deep issue and for this read discussions it's very hard to resolve them by empirical experiments right you cannot do experiment to test them um so all of this boiled down to some kind of the central arguments that"
},
{
"end_time": 7759.07,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7729.77,
"text": " really hard to resolve. But I realized when I tried to develop my views on quantum mechanics, I had to say something about system mechanics and the past hypothesis and the laws of nature and vagueness and everything come together into one thing. So I realized later on that I'm a non-Humian and I had this non-Humian inclination anyways and try to develop view as scientifically motivated as can be and also as minimal as can be."
},
{
"end_time": 7775.572,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7759.428,
"text": " I gave you the minimalism and you gave me the encouragement to develop this too and all the best arguments and objections. I think what really helped me was all these objections from Barry and David."
},
{
"end_time": 7797.995,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7775.879,
"text": " The criticism is a blessing and a curse because in the moment you don't like it but then even when you're on your own, at least for me, as soon as I have a thought, I play out all the criticisms from different figures in my head. Yeah, that's very helpful."
},
{
"end_time": 7827.073,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7798.336,
"text": " It sometimes can be paralyzing, but sometimes because Barry is so nice, the objections and questions you raise are just very wonderful and helpful. So Eddie, it sounds like you had her on the road to Damascus moment. You started out as a Umian, you're on the road to Damascus. Let me tell you, it's always possible to come back. To the darker side. Okay, but at least you didn't become a super Umian. That would have been a disgrace."
},
{
"end_time": 7854.735,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7828.131,
"text": " So Kurt, do you like philosophical musicals? Musicals?"
},
{
"end_time": 7884.753,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7855.196,
"text": " I don't think I like regular musicals. Well, I don't. What about Gilbert and Sullivan? I don't think so, no. Well, I was in Gilbert and Sullivan when I was in the sixth grade, so I remember that H&M has been before. So I sort of like Gilbert and Sullivan, but I'm thinking that we could have a philosophical humian saying that everyone is born a little humian or a little non-humian. I'm not going to break out of this song because then your audience will flee as fast as they could go."
},
{
"end_time": 7900.964,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7885.026,
"text": " It does what it sounds like to me, sort of Gilbert and Sullivan. I appreciate you both spending so long with me. Thank you so much, Barry and Eddie. It's great talking with you, Kurt, and hopefully we can meet in person someday. You're a cool guy, and it was a lot of fun. Thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 7926.135,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7901.254,
"text": " I like your channel a lot. Very, very rare to see someone engage so deeply with philosophy, with physics, with everything. New update. Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts, as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future."
},
{
"end_time": 7946.937,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7926.135,
"text": " Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist."
},
{
"end_time": 7971.578,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7949.189,
"text": " Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,"
},
{
"end_time": 7997.602,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7971.578,
"text": " Which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, et cetera, it shows YouTube. Hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 8017.585,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7997.602,
"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
{
"end_time": 8040.998,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8017.585,
"text": " and donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier."
},
{
"end_time": 8047.619,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8040.998,
"text": " Every dollar helps far more than you think either way your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much"
}
]
}No transcript available.