Audio Player
Starting at:
Solving the Problem of Observers & ENTROPY | Stephen Wolfram
February 20, 2024
•
2:50:02
•
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
395 sentences
28,354 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 167m 10s
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.
Everyone who's watching is an observer and what you published is called observer theory. What's your latest discovery about? About observer theory. What's that about? It's about the question of sort of characterizing what it means to be an observer. We have
For example, when it comes to asking, what does it mean to do a computation? We have kind of a way of understanding that. We kind of start from Turing machines. We know they're equivalent to lots of other kinds of computational models. We have this notion of what it's like to do a computation. So I've been interested in what is it like to be an observer? Why do I care about that? I care about that because in our physics project, it's
Become an essential thing to understand what we're like as observers, because it seems to be the case that what we're like as observers determines what laws of physics we perceive there to be. So it becomes important to be able to characterize what are we like as observers? Because if we were observers that are different from the way we are, we would perceive, I think, laws of physics that are different from the laws of physics that we perceive.
So in fact i think in the end the picture is going to be that the laws of physics are what they are because we are observers of the kind we are so that's a kind of a different it's sort of a reframing of thinking about what does it mean to have a fundamental theory of physics. It's a theory of physics.
That is the theory that has to be the way it is for observers like us. It couldn't be the case that you could kind of wheel in another theory that, you know, God could have invented a different theory of the universe for observers like us. It is, I think, inevitable that the laws of physics are the way that they are. So, OK, so how do we understand what what is an observer? What is an observer like us? Right. So what is an observer like us?
So first we have to kind of ask, what is an observer doing? The world's a complicated place. We have finite minds. The goal of us as observers is to take the complexity of the world and kind of find a way to stuff it into our finite minds. And in a sense, what that's doing is it's saying there are lots of details in the world, but they're not going to fit in our finite minds. We somehow have to compress what we're seeing in the outside world
so that it fits in our finite minds another way to think about it is we've got to make equivalences between different kinds of things like i'm you know i'm i'm sitting here staring at this this camera with and you know and the retina of my eyes there are all kinds of photons falling that are kind of making some elaborate pattern there but all that my brain is perceiving is oh there's a there's a you know this this object in front of me so i'm doing many equivalences and what i what i extract
From this sort of the raw physicality of what's going on is something that is is has there many things that the many different arrangements of photons that would lead me to perceive the same thing.
What you realize is that that's a common feature, not only of us human observers, but all the measuring devices we use and all these kinds of things. It's all about there are lots of details in the world. We just want to measure a particular thing. So a quintessential example would be you've got a gas. It's got a bunch of molecules bouncing around trying to measure the pressure of the gas. How do you do it? Well, maybe you just have a piston on the side of the box.
Can you say how hard is the person pushed by the molecules in the box and there are all kinds of different configurations of molecules hitting the person and they go this way and that way and the other but all that matters in measuring the pressure is what the aggregate force on the piston is so there are all these different configurations of molecules that we equivalence together to deduce that one thing that we care about which is the force on the piston.
And so i think the four four as we think about our ourselves that the fundamental feature observer is we're doing lots of equivalency. We are taking many different states of the world and saying we don't care about the differences between these things we are just going to we're just going to extract the sort of essence of what's going on and that's what we as an observer are thinking about.
Now it's interesting to see when we imagine a computational process going on, we're always generating fresh states of the world. We're going from one state of the world, we compute the next state of the world, the next one and so on. We're always generating fresh states of the world.
On the other hand, when we are being observers, we're sort of doing the opposite. Instead of generating fresh states of the world, we're trying to equivalence together lots of states of the world. We're trying to say there are lots of things which we might think of, which in some sense are different, but we are going to treat them for our purposes as equivalent. Now you might say, how could you deduce anything interesting from knowing about these kinds of equivalences? It turns out
That those that sort of the notion of these kinds of equivalences is critical to sort of deducing what we can think of as physical laws because. In some sense a physical law is an attempt to explain some aspect of the universe in a way that we can understand with our minds.
I mean, we could say about the universe, oh, it just does what it does and it has all these little things going around in it. But we don't have any narrative explanation of what's happening. The kind of the nature of physical laws is we want to take what the universe does and we want to somehow get a description of it that sort of fits in our minds. And so, for example, when it comes to something like, I don't know, a gas with a bunch of molecules bouncing around,
The thing that fits in our minds is some aggregate description that talks about pressure and temperature and things like this, not the detailed motions of those molecules. So for us, we're talking about the gas laws for the system underneath. It's got all these molecules bouncing around. It's important that we are only able to talk about things at the level of the gas laws, because if we could talk about things at the level of molecules, we'd come to quite different conclusions about what's happening in the world.
So this is this is essential to, for example, the second law of thermodynamics, because what is the second law of thermodynamics say? It basically says things tend to get more random over time. What's the application of that? You know, if you are if you take some mechanical motion, you're sort of pushing something backwards and forwards. Well, that's a very systematic motion of atoms in the thing. But that systematic motion tends to get sort of ground down into random motion molecules that we call heat.
And once you have things as heat it's hard to get them back into systematic motion you don't find that all those molecules around me bouncing around suddenly line themselves up and start systematically pushing the block of water whatever it is so there's this tendency for things to get more random.
But from the point of view of the individual molecules, that's not what's going on from the point of view of the individual molecules. They're just following certain laws of motion. You could even reverse those laws of motion if you wanted to the molecules are just doing definite things. It's only from the point of view of observers like us.
With our kind of bounded computational capabilities that we say we don't know how to follow all of those details for us what the molecules are doing should just be considered random and always should be able to deduce is something about the average properties like the average temperature the average pressure whatever else.
So the fact that we believe that the second law of thermodynamics is right or that the gas laws are right is a consequence of the fact that we are observers of the kind we are. If we were observers who routinely traced every motion of every molecule, we would say, what do you mean that there's randomness in what's going on? There's no randomness. I can see what every individual molecule does. So in a sense that that's an example of a place where being an observer of the kind we are,
Is the thing that causes us to perceive laws of the kind we perceive if we were an observer who followed every molecule to do every computation to figure out what would happen with every molecular motion we wouldn't say oh it's just random you can only look at the averages we would be sort of concentrating on the details what was happening at the level of molecules so that so that's an example
And by the way the same exact thing seems to happen in space time and in quantum mechanics and the thing that for me is is like spectacular you know realization is in twenty century physics there were three big theories.
General relativity, the theory of gravity, the theory of space-time, quantum mechanics, and essentially statistical mechanics whose sort of prize exhibit is the second law of thermodynamics, the theory of how systems of very large numbers of components work. Those three basic kind of achievements of 20th century physics
I think one had thought that maybe the second law of thermodynamics was derivable from something lower level maybe just from the laws of mechanics you could answer mathematics you could reduce the second law of thermodynamics people thought that.
the eighteen hundreds they were kind of by the by the early nineteen hundreds they were kind of giving up on that idea and it was just like a mystery that was left hanging out there but there was some thought that the second law might be somehow derivable from something sort of more fundamental and already known for general relativity and quantum mechanics that really hadn't been the thought
The thought had been, at least as I, you know, the way I always thought of it is we just happen to get those laws of physics. We, you know, the universe we live in just, you know, for reasons we don't understand happens to have those particular laws of physics. Well, I think that I think we can say more than that now. I think we can say, and it's really surprising that we can say this, but I think we can that all three of those kind of achievements are consequences
the fact that we are observers of the kind we are that it is inevitable that we have to perceive the physical world to have those particular laws because we are observers like we are if we were different kinds of observers we would observe different physical laws but we observe those laws because we're observers like we are now okay there's there's more to say about how this all works
but the the kind of the thing that i was trying to do with sort of my efforts and observer theory is to characterize something about what observers are it's all about these equivalent things it's all about taking the complexity of the world and sort of stuffing it in a finite mind by equivalencing many different states of the world to say all we care about are these features that's that's one side of it and um
Then being able to see kind of how you flow through from what characteristics to observers like us really have. And by the way, many of those characteristics are things so obvious to us that we've never really called them out as things that we actually should say. Yes, this is a feature of us. So, so an example, which turns out to be really important is we believe we're persistent in time.
We believe that we have a thread of experience that goes from the past to the future, and it's still us. Well, really, in our models of physics, for example, at every moment in time, we're made of different atoms of space. And so in some sense, it's always a different us at every successive moment. But somehow we have the perception
that we have this continuous threat of experience. Something that seems very, very obvious to us, but is nevertheless an assumption. It's not obvious that we would have a consistent threat of experience. We could imagine being some kind of alien intelligence that was different at every moment. It was like we have successive generations of humans
And you know each one has its own separate experience we can imagine that was somehow compressed i it's very hard to think it through what it would be like to be in that situation where you know we don't have any sort of memory for ourselves i don't really know what that's gonna be.
A science fiction type scenario that will be interesting to think through but you know the fact that we believe we have this this persistent unique thread of experience for each of us is not real you know it could also be the case that we could.
Instead of experiencing things in a single thread. There could be multiple threads We could have you know, one one could sort of imagine what it would be like to have sort of multiple consciousnesses in in in the same brain So there's more Sean beast mode Lynch prize pick is making sport season even more fun on projects Whether you're a football fan a basketball fan always feel good to be around
Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdown to threes. And if you write, you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states, including California, Texas,
Would you be able to imagine what that's like or is it part and parcel of you being the kind of observer that you are that you can't even imagine it?
i think it's really hard to imagine i've been trying to imagine a bunch of these things i mean i think it's sort of a very interesting challenge to imagine sort of what it would be like to be an intelligence very alien compared to us and you know i made some attempts along those lines actually
and i would say it made a little bit of progress but i would say that's a really difficult thing to to wrap one's brain around i mean i i think one of the things this is sort of a a side side point but you know i've been you know mostly familiar with kind of the western tradition of of of of thinking about things and philosophy and so on
And, you know, I've been curious because people have been telling me for years, you know, oh, the things you're doing resonate with various kinds of Eastern philosophies and so on. And I've been curious to try to understand how that works. And, you know, my initial investigation say, yes, there are there are things there that that sound an awful lot like things that I've long been talking about, so to speak. But it's really hard for me to even at that very small distance
It's pretty hard for me to get sort of an internal feeling of what it's like to think about things in terms of let's say Eastern philosophy and you know it's it feels like the kind of thing where where it's sort of a strange thing the way we think about things is built on the sort of tower of experience and it's it's like you can you can just jump out into the kind of uncharted universal possibilities and
It's quite disorienting and quite non-human. I mean, in a sense, this is something I've done for the last 40 years or something is investigating what I would now call rule ology. The behavior of just arbitrary simple sets of rules. So, you know, you just write down some computational rules, you start running them, you see what happens.
You get all this elaborate, complicated behavior. The question is, can you humanize that? Can you kind of give a human narrative for what's going on? And it can be really difficult. It's kind of like, well, that vaguely looks like this or that. But it is a definite rule. It is a possible sort of law of physics for some kind of artificial physics. And do I have a kind of a human way to describe it? No, not necessarily.
um it's it's but in order to get to the point where you have sort of a human way to describe it you end up having to have the sort of tower of civilizational development like okay there's this weird pattern do we have a word for that if we had a word for that i'd be able to say yes you know remember that this the the squiggle do pattern you know and i know what i was talking about and you'd know what what i was talking about
But without having kind of without our civilization having reached that point in as I would call it rural space, without us having reached that point, we haven't colonized it. We haven't said we're going to put down, you know, we're going to call this the city of whatever we're going to put a word down here for this. And once we have that and we all have kind of a common experience of that, then we can start talking about it. But without that, it's really hard to have
you know it's really hard to both for us to talk about it and even for for me to do a good job of forming thoughts about it because i think you know when we form thoughts about things the way that we you know our words and language and so on seem pretty important to us forming thoughts i mean they're the way that we concretize
Our our process of thinking i mean the way i see it these days and this is again a sort of a side a side point to the main things we were talking about but but this whole question about sort of how do we communicate how do we communicate a thought something that there's something going on inside our brains it's a bunch of electrical firings or whatever else but those electrical firings somehow add up to something abstract of thought
And, you know, my electrical firings are going to be different from your electrical firings. What, you know, how do we package up a thought that corresponds to some electrical firings in my brain? How do we package it up, send it to your brain, unpack and have it correspond to something like the same thought?
And I think that's kind of the role of concepts, which we sort of concretize in words and human languages and things. We pack it up into a concept. A concept is a robust thing. It's a cat, for example. And then, you know, I can transport that concept to your brain. You can unpack it and you might have a similar view of what I'm talking about as the one that I internally have. And I think that the, I mean, in one very bizarre kind of way of thinking about things,
This is now jumping around a bit, but when we think about space-time and we think about particles like electrons and so on, what is an electron? An electron is a lump of existence that is somehow unchanged by motion through space. There's an electron here that it moves and it's the same electron in some sense. It is transporting through space and time
It's electron this its existence is being transported in some sense unchanged through space and time, even though in our models of physics, that electron is made of different atoms of space. As it moves through space, it's made of different atoms of space. It's kind of like, you know, the Eddie in the fluid where the Eddie is moving around, although it's made from different atoms at different moments in time. And so I think this this notion of concepts
is a concept is kind of like a particle but not in physical space but in what I call rural space and minds are like different exist at different places in rural space and so when we exchange when we use concepts to sort of exchange thoughts it's like sending a particle from one place in rural space to another and we have the reverse that
Sorry, could you reverse that and then also say that instead of a concept being like a particle, a particle is like a concept and the universe is talking to itself and exchanging ideas. And that's what we see as physics. Yes. Yes, you probably could. I mean, it's kind of like it. It resonates a bit with kind of the universe as the thoughts of God actualize, so to speak, which is sort of a popular Spinoza type theological view of the universe. Yes, I think that's a a
In a sense the sort of the the idea that what the universe is doing is like thinking is kind of this this thing that sort of it's all computation so to speak I've had this idea I've talked about for decades the principle of computational equivalence
The idea that that sort of you can think about all processes as computations not only are they computations there also computations of somehow equivalent sophistication so the computations are going on in our brains that we interpret as thinking are the same level of sophistication of computations as a happening in the universe where we're interpreting what's going on as physics for example.
But you know, I think I think the I mean, coming back to Gosh, well, coming back to these questions about some sort of concepts and how we think about that, you know, and you were asking, you know, can I imagine something being a sort of a different kind of observer from the one that I am? It's some one experiment I did a few months ago was the following thing. So you take a generative AI that's making pictures.
And you could tell it, you know, make a picture of a cat and a party hat. And right. Right. And I'll show the blog post on screen right now. I read through that. Right. So, yeah, that's one of these pictures is worth with lots of words type type stories. But so so, you know, so you you say. I've got to know what is how does it know what a cat and a party hat is like?
Well, it's because it's seen a few billion pictures on the web and they have captions and it can connect those things and so on. But one of the things you realize is that that when you say a cat in a party hat, that's turned into some some vector of numbers in some embedding space and so on. And you can ask questions like, well, what if I change those numbers just a little bit? I've got the cat in the party hat right here and I've got things that are sort of
Less and less cat like as i go further away and so for example you know i think i have a picture of what i was calling cat island which is the sort of island in the space of possible possible concepts in a sense that correspond to things we would identify as a cat as you go away from that sort of that place and concept space you get things that are less and less cat like and pretty quickly you get to things that we humans don't have words for
Pretty quickly you get to what I was going into concept space, kind of the analog of interstellar space or something where you're just away from everything else. It's a it's an uncolonized area of concept space. And the question you might ask is, well, what fraction of interconcept space has concepts in it? The answer is unbelievably small.
So the concepts that we humans have and even the very basic way that I had of sort of mapping out into concept space, we have 10 to the minus 600 of the volume of into concept space is full of concepts that we currently know. So there's an awful lot out there that we have not yet conceptualized, so to speak. And I mean, I went on in that in that blog post I went on and, um,
And that piece, I don't know. It's sort of blog posts, but by the time there are a couple of hundred pages, I'm not sure how bloggy they really are. But anyway, that piece of writing. I have plenty of questions about the way that you write, which will come into play later. But just as a point right now about this inter-concept space. So it's unclear to me. A question I have is how much of inter-concept space is inter BS space like Harry Frankfurt's bullshit space. And what I mean by that is like if you have
10 points on a on a 2d plane, there are an infinitude of graphs that can connect them. So you mentioned the word embedding, the concept space depends on embedding. And it's not clear to me that if you just pick another point that is something that joins these, that that is also a concept. So it could be meaningful by coincidence, like some number that seems like noise, but someone's like, oh, that's my social insurance number.
Well, those words we have to unpack a little bit. The question is, could we make meaning out of the stuff that's there? That will be, I think, a more reasonable kind of starting point. So let's give some examples. Let's say we've got mathematics.
And mathematics, we imagine to be based on certain axioms. They might be axioms of set theory. They might be axioms arithmetic. We could just look at all possible axioms of mathematics, all conceivable axioms on which we could make foundations of mathematics. And we can ask the question, the ones that we have, are they more meaningful than other possible ones? Or could we build a completely rich mathematics utterly alien to us on a different set of axioms?
I think, well, there's a complicated thing to say, but I think fundamentally the answer is yes. You can start from any basis and you can wind up with a rich set of concepts, a rich kind of story. Give you another example. Again, we don't really know in this case, but let's say proteins. You know, we humans have about, I don't know, 30,000 kinds of proteins that make us up.
you know why those ones are not other ones well you say well evolution found those ones etc etc etc but actually there's no good evidence that we couldn't have chosen completely different ones and they would fit together in some way as well and there would be maybe we'd have some of the same overall attributes that we have but with a completely different basis and my own guess would be that pretty much wherever you pick you can make a rich
story from those things this is kind of a principle of computational equivalence type idea it's something where you know pick a program it can be any kind of program it doesn't need to be a cellular automaton doesn't need to be a turing machine doesn't need to be lambda calculus can be any of these things pick it it can be even a very simple such program pick it and from it you can erect this tower that will eventually reach the same places.
so i i think it's most likely that the ones the concepts we got are the ones that
I am but but once we have concepts we build so much around them you know we have words for them once we have a word for them we can you know order it off a web store if you want to buy one we can do all kinds of things and and so we end up in this kind of loop where as soon as we kind of imagine a concept or as soon as biology picks a protein for example it starts to build a lot of stuff around it
And so for us it then seems like well how could it ever be different because look at it we've got all these things in the world you know how could we avoid having circles in the world for example how could we avoid having this. Well because we built so much around those things so i that's that's that would be my view that that i mean it's.
That we could as well build a civilization, build life, build lots of other things from very different foundations. Once we've committed to these foundations, we built a tall tower on these particular foundations and then everything else looks far away. But I don't think it's that it couldn't be built that way. It's just that for us, from our vantage point, from the tower that we've built, it looks like nothing or it looks far away.
I see. So I was going to ask the question that many people have, which is, is there any hope to communicate with aliens that is contingent on a shared conceptual space? But I'm wondering if I was going to ask if that question should have been rephrased as our aliens observers like us, because if we're if an alien is an observer like us, they would have the same conceptual space. But it sounds like you're saying no. Well, I think the way to think about it is we
I didn't talk much about this kind of concept of rural space but but essentially there are sort of different. Different kind of underlying computational rules that you can be running or that you can attribute to being what the universe is running so to speak and in some sense we can think about well we think about us different ourselves as being at a particular place in physical space.
We can also think about ourselves as being at particular places in rural space. The way I see it is that different minds are at different places in rural space. And for example, this whole point about exchanging concepts and so on is like these particles propagating from one place in rural space without change to another.
So there's this kind of whole map of minds in real space and minds with sort of common history and same cultural background and same education and so on. Those minds are fairly close together and communication is fairly easy between them. The translation from thoughts in one mind to thoughts in another is not so hard. As you take those minds further apart,
That gets more difficult. You know, let's say the mind is the mind of a dog, for example. Well, there are some things that you can communicate with dogs, maybe some emotional states, things like that. But lots of stuff is really pretty hard to communicate. And then we can say, well, well, what about something further away? What about some other kind of computational system that with the principle of computational equivalence, we can think of as being a mind like system. My favorite example usually is the weather, which people sort of might say has a mind of its own.
But the weather is pretty far away in real space from us. It has it has it does mind like things, but it's the translation from its mind like activities to our mind like activities is hard. It's distant. We won't think of it as having experiences like us when when we're looking and this is this is always a sort of interesting problem of ethics and so on. You know, when we we have certain internal experiences,
We look at other people and we say, I imagine those people are having similar experiences to mine.
And as those people get sort of further away, whether it's, you know, culturally or other things, it feels less, you know, you're less sort of, oh, yes, I can empathize with that person. I can imagine what they're thinking, so to speak. By the time you get to a cat or dog, it's pretty far away. What's the thing thinking? We can kind of make up a story about it, but it's pretty hard to to kind of get in its mind, so to speak. And I think that's
That's kind of the, you know, when we imagine sort of these, these sort of minds that are very different from ours, we just can't get in them in the same way that we can sort of get in another human mind. Now, now an interesting case is AI, because if you look at people's interactions with AI, and particularly with, oh, I was just a friend of mine just made a humanoid robot that sort of interesting because you can watch people's interactions with that.
You know it's the l l m a i plus the humanoid robot thing and it's really interesting because you know we all basically empathize with the thing pretty quickly in many ways you know it's even though we kind of know rationally it's a bag of bits more or less we still sort of treat it in some rather human way
no at some level we could think about what every brain is just a bag of neurons with a bunch of electrical activity and so on why should we treat it in some special way we treated in a special way because we empathize with it and we sort of map it into our own internal experiences i think you know in the case of a i wear an awful lot of the time.
We are going to increasingly sort of anthropomorphize it to the point where it feels like it's something like us, so to speak, just as other people feel like that. There's something like us, even though we don't have that inner experience of being them, so to speak. So, I mean, I think, uh, um, let's see, I think you, you had, you asked about what sort of communication with aliens and so on. I think that, um, uh, where I see it is.
You know, you go explore the universe. We go send out spacecraft. They get a certain distance. As a spacecraft goes out, you know, to the outside the solar system or something, it has a different point of view about the universe because it's in a different place in physical space. We could also imagine sort of sending out the analog of rural spacecraft, trying to understand the universe from different points of view like that.
And that's in a sense it's sort of that's the big intellectual activity i suppose a big intellectual journey of can we colonize rural space can we get these different points of view about how to think about things how far out can we get and i think one of the points is that that to even be able to discuss it.
We have to have all gone together to some place in real space. Otherwise, we don't have these shared words to talk about what's happening. Right. If we send out something into real space and it's sufficiently far enough, would we even be able to say that it's us that has colonized it? It's a good question. I mean, I think by the time we have, you know, I think it's like translating from one language to another. You know, if you've got some sufficiently obscure language,
There's probably no English to its dictionary. It goes through five steps or something. And that's the kind of thing one would see in that case. And so then the question would be, you know, are you translating to language X? Well, no, it went through this step, that step, that step, that step. So, you know, I suspect that's the way in which that's how it will attenuate, so to speak. What would you say is the difference between consciousness and observation? Well,
I mean, I think. Consciousness, in some sense, people imagine as some sort of inner feeling of existing and. That's. I mean, what I'm interested in and kind of the operation of observers is something that you could say
Is a is an exterior membrane to whatever you might think consciousness is that is it is asking the question? how do you take what's out there in the world and Get it into something that is processable by a mind The question of the inner feeling of the mind which I suppose is what you might think of as consciousness is Is one that I think is a very slippery concept. Let's start by saying that
It's a slippery concept, but I think we have certain feelings for what consciousness is like. For example, this continuous thread of experience is a symptom of consciousness, so to speak.
Some of this this fine interest is a symptom of consciousness I suppose that for me I've been more interested in sort of cataloging the symptoms of consciousness because they allow us to get sort of an idea of what laws of Physics we we will conclude there to be so to speak I've been more interested in that than in asking the more inward looking question of sort of what what is that thing inside that has these particular symptoms and I think
You know, an exercise I've been doing, I need to finish it. I started a couple of years ago is to just sort of write the story of what it would be like to be a computer. It's like you go from, you know, from the time you booted up to the time you crash. It's kind of like a human lifetime. You accumulate certain memory, you have certain experiences, all those kinds of things. What's that like? What will be the inner experience of being a computer?
Now, right now, we don't project much. I mean, people do and always have kind of talked to their computers and said the computer is having a hard time now. It's, you know, the computer feels X, Y, Z, but it's somehow still a little bit distant. I think it will become less distant with sort of humanoid robots and with sort of, you know, steadily better LLM type technology and so on.
But I think this, um, this sort of, what does it feel like to be a computer is, uh, and we may discover when we, you know, as we try and project ourselves into that, just as we have, you know, we have this non-trivial thing that we're all pretty decent at doing, or most people are pretty decent at doing is sort of projecting themselves into another human, so to speak, to imagine what that other human is thinking.
And we don't as much imagine what a computer is thinking yet, but we probably perfectly well could.
once we can imagine that all kinds of terrible things happen because because then you know our sort of ethical principles about other people and oh we don't want the other people to feel bad and so on as soon as we can feel like a computer so to speak we have all those issues for it too there is lots of intelligence in the universe lots every physical process all these kinds of things are examples of mind like activity the issue is those minds are far away in real space
And in a sense, what we're doing in science and natural science is attempting to make bridges across, you know, we're attempting to say there's the system in nature and it does what it does. And we are finding a way so that we can get some human connection to that system in nature. Cause otherwise we're just watching the system doing what it does. And in a sort of pre-scientific society or for many things, even today that we don't have a way to think about in terms of science, it's just, it's just doing what it does.
and it's not we don't have this kind of we haven't been able to make this kind of connection to it and that's that's kind of how we're able to say oh we we we can i mean a lot of the connections we make in science today are of the kind where we say we're going to crush this thing we're going to be able to say we know exactly what it does we can kind of imagine our minds what it's going to do rather than
It's doing what it's doing and we have to sort of relate to it in some way where we're treating it as an equal mind so speak to hours and we're merely trying to understand it it's like saying for different humans you could say i'm gonna crush this and i'm just gonna say i know how humans work that person is going to do this this and this you know i don't have them.
You know i'm everything is predictable i'm i'm but in fact with humans were quite used to the idea that you know we're doing what we're doing another human is doing what they're doing we can kind of communicate with them but they're both sort of equal mind so to speak.
with nature the kind of the conceit of a lot of science has been that we are the minds in charge so to speak that nature is just you know we can just say we know what's going to happen we've got the science that tells us what's going to happen rather than with somehow sort of uh co-equal minds with with what's happening in nature i mean there are other traditions not the the western scientific tradition where that's much more of a thing um and again you know it's it's challenging
For for somebody like me to to really, I mean, even though maybe I have a slight advantage because I've thought scientifically about these things a lot to sort of get into that that way of thinking about things. But that's what I tend to think that, you know, right around the time when people realize that AIs are not that different from us, that's around the time when people will decide there's aliens all around this kind of alien intelligence all around us, so to speak.
It is just that we haven't been able to make these bridges necessarily to be able to communicate with it. I mean, kind of an interesting thought experiment came from a pitch some people made me a few years ago about how they're going to make a company in which they're going to send interstellar spacecraft out and they're going to go out into the universe. They're going to discover extraterrestrial technology. They're going to bring it back to Earth.
They're going to accelerate our technology by a million years. Okay. So that's, I hear far out pitches all the time. That one might be the furthest out pitch I've ever heard for a startup, so to speak. But the, what's interesting about it is, is, is the sort of the philosophically unpeeling that pitch because what's it really saying? It's saying, uh, you know, when we say we go out into the universe and we discover technology, alien technology, we bring it back to earth. We accelerate human technology by a million years.
Okay, the problem is there is alien technology all around the universe. There are pulsars doing all kinds of elaborate things with magnetic fields. There are this, there's that. There's all kinds of stuff going on in the universe. The issue is what is technology? Technology is something where we have managed to reel it in to connect it to human purposes that we care about. I mean, you were asking before, is there, you know, is there meaning in inter-concept space?
Well the issue is it's got like saying is that technology to be made out of this kind of physical process. It's not the physical process is doing what it's doing the making technology out of it is can we kind of reel it in to connect it to things that we care about similar to can we sort of build meaning on top of this thing can we can we connect it to things that we care about.
What's interesting there is to realize, well, there's technology everywhere. No, there's not technology, there's the raw material for technology everywhere. But this question of, it is this very human activity of saying, oh yes, we found
A you know pizza electric material great now we can use that to make you know a piece of a clock or something i'm sure but but you know it's the thing is the thing and the question is can we connect it to human purposes and human purposes have evolved over time i mean there are there plenty of it's like you know random elements i don't know lutetium or something
When talking about observation and equivalencing, is that to be understood as the same as coarse graining, so you don't care about the details?
course grading is a version of that i mean there are there are a whole collection of different ideas that sort of are all are all versions of equivalence in course grading things being on attractors compression there's there's a bunch of different names for this i mean this is a this is a core idea that's shown up in a zillion different places but yes course grading is kind of the
The name that that gibbs invented in for statistical mechanics in the in the early part of the twentieth century for sort of a version of this that the challenge with talking about course grading and just saying oh we just do course grading and then we understand what's going on. The problem is what's a valid kind of course grading to do. That's the real question just say we bucket things together but which equivalence things can we do because there are some equivalent things that
are very ornate to do they would require a lot of computational to be able to figure out oh this is really equivalent to that.
Or you can coarse-grain so finely that you become synonymous with the system. Absolutely. So you can coarse-grain down to the level of the atoms. Right, exactly. But the question is what is that fuzziness that you're putting on there? What's the thing that the fuzzifier is able to do and not able to do? Knowing the mechanics of the coarse-graining is important.
So you have to discuss the process of equivalencing as well as just discuss the fact that you have equivalence, so to speak. Okay, that's super interesting. So would you say that observation is the fact of equivalencing or is the act of equivalencing? Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon
Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal.
Well, I mean, the output of an observation is the result of equivalencing. The process of observation is a process of equivalencing. So, for example, this becomes important. Oh, I don't know, for quantum computing, this is important. We don't fully understand this, but it's important. That is, you know, in our models of physics,
There's sort of these many possible histories that correspond to a multi-way graph of possible things that could happen in the world, so to speak. And there's branchings, there's mergings. There's continually branching and merging. I think a key observation is that just as we humans are, you could say, coarse graining, are sort of a big on the scale of atoms of space,
We're big on the scale of individual molecules and statistical mechanics. We're also big on the scale of different parts of history. So in branchial space, as we call it, the space of quantum branches, we are extended entities in branchial space. So we are effectively averaging or equivalencing different branches of history. It's a weird thing. I mean, it means that we, and this is where it's really important that we
We believe there's a single thread of experience that we have, yet that single thread of experience is actually an aggregate, I think, of many different paths of history. And that's kind of an idea that is kind of this equivalencing of different sort of paths in pieces of branchial space is sort of a
Well then there's a question of what's the mechanism by which that happens. You know if we are and this is what's important for a quantum computer it's one thing inside the quantum computer that has as many different threads of computation going on but then the question is okay humans are going to be looking at the answer.
If they were quantum observers looking at the answer, it would be done at that point. It would have these many threads of computation and there are lots of different threads and there are different places in branch hill space and everybody's happy. There's nothing more to do. But to get the thing to the point where us kind of simplistic humans can sort of absorb it
You have to equivalence together these threads of history. You have to sort of find a way to say, and this is what happened. This is the one thing that happened. We can't have in our minds the kind of multiple branches of quantum history. That's a thing that we, in our common experience, we equivalence these things together. So sort of the output phase of a quantum computer has to be this thing where we are doing those equivalence things.
Now the fact is that in the traditional formalism of quantum mechanics that really doesn't come up. In the traditional formalism of quantum mechanics, and it might be a mistake, the idea is there are all these quantum amplitudes and then oh there's this measurement operator and kaboom you just get the answer.
And I think that sort of denies the fact that actually there is a process of equivalencing that has to go on to get to the point where you have an answer, to get to the point where you can sort of connect to a human mind that believes there is a definite thread of things that happened. So I have two questions here. One is what is doing that process of equivalencing?
And then number two, you stated the word belief a few times, like we believe that we have a persistence in time and so on. So mathematically, what is meant in your model by the word belief is the belief the same as assumption, we assume so and so like, what is belief? Well, okay, so first, what's doing the equivalent saying the different cases, different things.
You know in some of these physical systems like the piston with a bunch of molecules bouncing around the what is the equivalence in there? There's more to analyze in this and there's there's about 10,000 kinds of measurements we know how to make and for every one of them you can ask what's really going on and they all turn out to be that they're actually a couple of different categories, but but they're pretty much all
Something is being aggregated. Lots of individual molecules are coming in, but there's an aggregate pressure. There's one different case, which is things like weighing balances, where you're saying, you know, there are many different ways you can make a certain weight, but at some point the balance tips over. So it's kind of a discrete output, kind of like what happens in standard quantum mechanics with qubits and so on. There is a discrete output.
Whereas in the case of measuring pressure or something you just have a continuous number out but what what's happening when you measure pressure what's happening is every time a molecule hits the piston it makes some atomic scale defamation in the in the shape of the piston.
And the but that atomic scale defamation quickly sort of you know get smeared out because the speed of sound is high and the solid it's kind of that that defamation is kind of you know the atoms are wiggling around it quickly that that quickly disappears somehow and that's that's sort of a common thing that the the process of equivalence saying
is happening on a time scale that's short compared to the the way that you observe it so you know for our brains with our millisecond multi-millisecond cycle times sort of things that happen in less time than that they are we we perceive them as being atomic things we don't perceive those as being separated if things are separated by millisecond we don't notice that they're just the same kind of thing but this again comes into well what
We have this inner experience of things happening and that inner experience has done this aggregation. And you say, what does it mean to believe something? Well, what is, what is, how does that, how does it sort of work in a, I think that the way to think about it is that the kind of the thing that you will do to make the decision about what to do next in a sense is the thing that you
operationally believe so to speak that is if you're making it's kinda like a block chain you're kinda making a succession of decisions and then you go on and do the next thing. And i think the issue is what are those atomic decisions so to speak what what are those things that.
You have, you know, you've taken lots of detail about what could be happening and you've said, I think this happened. And then you go on and say, I think this happened and so on. I think that's, that's the sense in which we mean in, in terms of kind of our attempts to build theories, this point about belief.
Is the question of what exactly can we what can we observe what can we talk about i mean it's the same thing happened in the early twentieth century when you know i'm starting was inventing relativity and things like this what i'm starting you know highlighted was what can we talk about about some of the night what can we know that things that we we just can't know and so don't worry about it make a theory in which we don't have to know the things we can't know
and we're only talking about the things we can know and it's the same same thing that i'm talking about here make a theory that talks only about things we can know and then it will be a feature of that theory that that the theory has to have certain characteristics because it's only talking about things we can know in the case of the gas for example the fact that we can't know where all those individual molecules go means that we have to concentrate on certain attributes of the gas about which we can make formulas and things like this
I'm unclear if it's your own model that dictates the laws of physics because if that was the case, this belief in the persistence of time
Then someone like Heraclitus who didn't believe that he was a continuous thread throughout time and make some arguments about that. Does he then perceive physics differently? Yeah, interesting question. I mean, I think we are all so close together in royal space that observers, you know, do the do the cats and dogs perceive physics the same? Do the do the whales perceive it the same? Does the weather perceive physics the same? You know, I'm not sure how we
as i say us humans i think are so close together in the ways that we perceive things because we all have the same sensory apparatus give or take we have many of the same ideas give or take um i think that the the the distance between sort of ways that humans could perceive it is is uh uh is not very great you know if we say what's the physics of the weather the physics as perceived by the weather
I don't know. Hugely different potentially. What's the physics as perceived by a mosquito? I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's what's important probably to the mosquito is a bunch of air currents and this and that and the other of which we have no description really. I mean, even, even if we think about, let's say dogs, which are, you know, olfactory, which were where smell is much more important sense than vision, for instance.
The, you know, imagining what the laws of physics, the smell laws of physics are like is, I don't know, it's, you know, it's a good exercise to think it, try and think through what it would be like. I mean, the fact that we perceive the laws of physics as we do is, for example, our physical size is important to the way we perceive the laws of physics. If, and for example, the fact that we talk about space as being a thing,
Is a consequence of various kinds of aspects of our size. Let me explain that the, you know, we think we look around, we say, you know, there's an extent of space and the room that I'm in is in this particular state at this particular time. And another time it may be in a different state, but we see space as a unified extended thing.
Right. So we can look around and we just say space is out there and it, it, you know, we have a state of the world, a state of space. Okay. But the reason that works is because we look around, you know, I can see maybe a hundred meters away through a window. Okay. The light that's coming to me from a hundred meters away arrives in microsecond in a microsecond or something.
That time that takes the light to arrive is really short compared to the time it takes my brain to process the scene i'm looking at so for me it is a good way of thinking about things to say that the world consists of a series of frames.
where you know a series of frames in time where is the state of space at this moment in time then the state of space at that moment in time and so on so it makes sense for me to kind of aggregate up my view of the universe in that space out there and you know things progress through time now if i was for example if my brain worked a million times faster than it does replace human neural circuitry by digital digital electronics it'll be a million times faster
what will the world seem like if we thought a million times faster well then the light that's coming to me from there i will have already i will have been able to process by the time the light arrives i can already make you know think something different so to speak so it no longer will seem the case that i it will no longer be obvious that i should aggregate space
As a thing that is at this moment in time it's something similarly if i was much bigger than i am even with the same processing speed as we have right now if we were the size of planets for example
we would you know if if one person was the size of a planet let's say then we would always be thinking about oh the speed of light we can't think about just we can't think about oh the whole solar system is just one blob of space because the different parts of it we'd always be thinking oh you know that part of the the light signal from neptune hasn't arrived yet type thing and we'd be able to think about things while we were waiting for that light signal to arrive
And again, we wouldn't be able to wouldn't make sense for us to aggregate sort of space as this blob that exists that has a state at a particular moment in time. I mean, we see that very concretely when we start thinking about, you know, reference frames for talking about, you know, the time on interplanetary spacecraft, things like that, we can see you just can't do it by the time you're talking about things on that scale with our human scale processing speeds.
we you know this idea that we sort of aggregate space at moments in time no longer works so that's an example of where sort of the because we are the way we are we choose to talk it talk about the universe the way we choose to talk about the universe and by the way i think there are a whole bunch of other aspects of us that we take for granted like that feature of us about our size and the fact that space makes sense to talk about we completely take that for granted
And, you know, here's another example of something we take for granted. We take for granted that we have a certain degree of free will. We imagine that we have free will. So, for example, we imagine that if there's a science experiment, we could just do any science experiment we choose to do. We imagine that we can take that polarizer in some quantum experiment and we can turn it to 30 degrees or 60 degrees and whatever angle we think we can turn it to, we can turn it to that angle.
We don't imagine that actually the act of turning it to that angle changes the world in such a way that next we have to turn it to some other angle. We have the belief that we have free will and that's important for a bunch of things about our perception of the world. And there's a whole chain of these kinds of things that you might, that seem obvious to us. Another good example is motion. The possibility of pure motion is non-trivial.
That is, the fact that we can take a step forward and still be the same us as when we were in a different place is not obvious. If we were made up from little eddies in a fluid, we might be able to do the same thing, but it might not be surprising to us that we can't just be moved around.
We have to be, and you know, so this idea that pure motion is possible is another kind of assumption about the world. Another thing about sort of the way that we, because we are the way we are, we sort of choose to describe the world in a certain way. I mean, the discussion about space, because we are the way we are with the scales that we're at
We can choose to describe the world in terms of space and separately time, for example. Explain. I think that the more we understand about the way we are as observers, with all the arbitrariness of the way biological evolution has taken us to where we are, technology has given us measuring devices of the kind we have and so on, with all that arbitrariness, as
as we think through what that means we probably will learn more about how physics has to be the way it is as perceived by us and you know we could have a and so i think that's you know i had always assumed that we'd be on sort of a search for what is the rule that gives us the universe as the universe is and what i've come to realize is
And this is kind of this idea of the Ruliyad that the universe is running all possible rules. It is merely that we are sampling a slice of all those possible rules. There's a slice determined by the way we are. An analogous thing. We are at a particular place in the universe physically in physical space. We don't have a theory for why we're here rather than somewhere else. I'm not sure a theory like that would make sense. We just happen to be in this galaxy.
On this planet, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that is, and so our view of the universe is based on the point of view of critters that are on this planet looking up at the sky or whatever else. And if we were somewhere else, if we lived, you know, near the center of our galaxy, or we lived somewhere completely different, or we lived at a different time in the history of the universe, whatever, we would have a different point of view about the universe.
and it's the same story with with kind of rule your space that we have a different point of view about the universe the non-trivial fact the real sort of scientific in you know bite here is that once we are observers with certain general characteristics we can make certain general conclusions about the laws of physics that we will perceive and so it's kind of what goes in what comes out what goes in is
Some characterization of us as observers what comes out as the laws of physics we have to observe and it's it's sort of interesting because it's like where the laws of physics come from well they in a sense come from the fact that we are the way we are and and that's a you know for me that was always a very confusing thing you know in the end why did we get this universe and not another and the answer i think is we got this perceived universe because we are the way we are
and why are we the way we are well that you can say well how do we come you know how do we evolve this way blah blah blah but in the end it's like asking why are we on this particular planet and not another one it's a sort of contingent fact about the world that we are here and not somewhere else and so similarly that we are the way we are as observers so to speak
Stephen, if what you're saying is that the question of why these laws and not some other set of laws is tantamount to why this planet Earth and not some other planet like some from the Andromeda Galaxy, I don't see what's non-trivial about that. Well, yeah, but the thing that's really non-trivial
Is that you say well why is general activity correct well for any observer that has these very general characteristics. Inevitably you have those precise laws that's the non trivial part if it was just saying well you know because we because of the details of the way we are you know it's there's there's a really a non trivial sort of heavy lifting piece of science.
between this impression that we have about, you know, these, these very coarse statements about the observers that we are and the precise statements about what laws of physics we perceive. So Steven, you had a variety of breakthroughs recently, especially since COVID remarkably, if you had to pin a majority of the recent breakthroughs of yours to one key insight, what would it be?
So for instance, it could be the introduction of hyper graphs or the coining of computational irreducibility or the hiring of Jonathan Gerard. Jonathan's been very helpful for sure. No, I mean, you know, the I think. Look, the first statement is sort of its computation all the way down, that you can really that computation is
The way of thinking about the world, you know, if you look at how have we formalized the world, it's some it's kind of, you know, the invention of human language is a formalization of the world. Logic is a formalization of the world. You know, mathematics is a formalization of the world. Computation is a formalization of the world. And, you know, in terms of what has allowed me to get where I've gotten to,
you know a large part of that is taking seriously that idea of computation is a way of formalizing the world and building tools you know building a whole world language technology stacker and so on around that idea of computation is a way to formalize the world now once you had that idea you start thinking about well what about physics how do i formalize that then so
The next big fact is principle of computational equivalence, computational irreducibility. Those are very closely related. That's a key intuitional idea that I originally had in the early 1980s that is a driver for a lot of other things. In more recent times, I would say that this whole business about multi-computation, understanding the RULIAD, understanding the role of observers,
This is it's kind of this idea of the relationship of sort of underlying computation and the really add the sort of entangled limit of all possible computational processes, understanding the interplay between that and what we're like as observers. The fact that you can derive science from that.
Is really pretty interesting and it did not see that coming. I mean that you know if you'd asked me Even four years ago or something, you know Did I think we will be able to derive general relativity? And well, I knew we could derive general relativity from underlying hypergraph evolution. I've known that since the 1990s I thought it was graphs back then but hyper graphs are easier. Um the the um but the concept
that there is some kind of that there's an inevitability to these kinds of laws of physics for observers like us. I really didn't see that coming and I think I'm sure that it has echoes and resonances in lots of things that people have imagined particularly a couple thousand years ago or more in sort of early thinkings about philosophy and how it relates to our descriptions of the world.
You know the main thing that we've achieved in the last couple of thousand years is you know we can run computer simulations and actually you know see how this works with some concreteness so to speak rather than having just some some sort of vaguer idea about what's going on but I would say that the the I mean for me this this kind of the role of the observer the idea of multi computation the really add the kind of you know the the inevitability of science the way it is
Those are important ideas and I think, you know, we're, I suspect that a lot of the technical detail of hypergraph rewriting all this kind of thing is a very useful way to get there. But in the end, it will be possible to state a lot of these things in terms of, it's one of these things where you can think about computation theory and
If you don't have Turing machines or something like that, you can't concretely talk about it. You're just sort of still just vaguely saying things. You need a concrete basis on which to discuss things. But in the end, the core ideas are independent of that basis. And so it is, I think, with the whole observer theory, really add sort of, you know, inevitability of laws of physics and so on story. Yeah, many of these ideas are like
fountains where other ideas cascade out of them. So you mentioned the power of computation or thinking about computation as fundamental equivalencing, computational irreducibility observers, multi computation really add. So let's, let's call those ideas fountain ideas for the sake of this conversation. What recipe would you give your former self to have some of these fountain ideas more often?
there's a whole bunch of computational irreducibility and what has what ends up happening is one tries to come up with with these things you know i think i don't think i'm batting too horribly in terms of having these ideas with some with decent frequency i mean because frankly some of these ideas if you have them too quickly there's not a lot you can do with them they they need a certain degree of of development before they're before they're very meaningful
I mean, so I think that, you know, there's a maximum rate. In fact, one of the things that has been a frustration to me recently is that there are so many of these things coming that, you know, I'm writing about all these different things. And I think some of the things I'm writing are quite, you know, important and seeds for a lot of other things, but I'm going so quickly that they don't have as much chance to develop as they probably need. So I think there's a maximum rate of generating sort of
You know, these potentially big ideas. And if you exceed that rate, it's kind of just totally confusing and you can't achieve anything. So it's not that when you saturate it, some just fall to the wayside. It's that somehow it's like spinning plates and all of them fall. No, I mean, if you do it too fast, then it's just like, well, I have this idea, but each of these ideas needs a certain development. I mean, you know, when one first, I mean,
one of the things that i personally spend a lot of effort on is sort of cleaning ideas that is when i have some vague sense of an idea it's like what is the essence of that idea what is the really simple i could say it in a sentence or two version of that idea and that takes a while i mean maybe maybe a smarter me would be able to do that more quickly but it's it's um you know taking figuring out what's what's the essence what's important what's not
i mean i've had the good fortune i suppose in my life to do that a whole bunch of times and in fact the thing i do for a living building designing and building our computational language is a kind of that
Critically relies on that skill because that's all about taking kind of all these things that one might think about computationally and kind of Crispening them down to these kind of primitives that we implement in our language and so on So that's a you know I get to do this pretty much every day and I've been doing it kind of every day for 40 years And that's that's a useful experience to have if your goal is sort of the crispening of ideas for kind of basic intellectual development so to speak
I think that's one thing. I mean, another thing for me is tools. And, you know, when I can do an experiment with welcome language, you know, I've built this whole technology stack. Well, conveniently, millions of other people use it too. But first and foremost, I kind of built it so I could do stuff myself kind of my sort of personal superpower, so to speak. And that works really well. And it's really necessary for, you know,
I could not, many, many things I've discovered, I would never have had the built-in intuition to figure out that the way they work is the way they actually work. I discovered the way they work by doing experiments, computational experiments, and I wouldn't have had the confidence actually, even if I'd imagined that was the way things might work, I wouldn't have had the confidence to say that really is the way things work without having seen them as the result of an experiment.
I think it's kind of the, I might have imagined, although I didn't, back in the beginning of the 1980s, that really simple computational rules could lead to complicated behavior. I didn't imagine that. I actually imagined the opposite. And had it not been for the fact that I had explicit computer experiments where I could just plainly see that's what's going on, I wouldn't have believed it.
so that's a necessary piece you know if it was purely i'm going to sit and think about this stuff just in my own mind i would never have got there and and it's the same with with tons of things i've been doing so i would say that the the you know probably the two things that have been important to me are the tools having built the sort of tool tower of tools that allow me to to do experiments get intuition and so on that's one thing and to even even the very act of of putting my thoughts into computational language
is a way of crystallizing what I'm talking about. It's like, well, I vaguely imagine this and that and the other. Ah, interesting. Let me write a function that does that. And it's kind of like when people say, I'm going to, I'm going to write down a mathematical proof. Yeah, it's kind of relevant to see the proof and to check you've got the right answer. But, but more important is the very fact that you're formulating things. The setup is the important part. You know, it's kind of like when, um, you know, when people are doing, I don't know, math exercises or something and they get the setup totally wrong,
that's a it's a different story than if oh they did a calculation slightly wrong and they got this this minus sign in the wrong place it's it's the kind of like can you can you conceptualize things in this formal way and by the way computation and computational language are this amazing superpower that we have you know developed so to speak for for kind of crystallizing thoughts human thoughts into something that has a lot more power and not only because
But both because it's a way of sort of formalizing what we're talking about and because then we can have a computer help us to zoom forward with what we're thinking about. But so, you know, for me, it's kind of the tools, the sort of crystallization of ideas from representing them in basically a modern language.
I'm then the actual running of it to see what happens and to get intuition that I wouldn't otherwise have had and I suppose the other thing is the the effort to sort of get to the essence of things say what is the what is the what is the core point that that that this all comes from so to speak and I suppose that for me that is somewhat related to exposition and you know I spend quite a lot of effort writing things trying to explain things
You know, doing live streams, all those kinds of things. And for me, that's a, that's a, that's a part of the process of kind of grinding things down to their essence. Like even in this conversation we've had, I've, I've said a few things that I haven't thought to say before, so to speak, that I think are useful ways to kind of crystallize some, some thoughts that I've, that I've had in the past.
And that's, you know, that is my typical experience is that, that sort of the act of exposition is an important driver for sort of getting to the essence of things. But that's, that's for me, the other, the other big thing is, is what's the, what's the essential point now, you know, this question of, uh, you know, I, I've been, I sort of carry around with me lots of things where I mean to figure this out someday. And I'm, I'm sort of gradually accumulating knowledge about those things.
part of what I, what I need to do is in any new field that you work in, there is some kind of, uh, sort of local intuition in that field. And unless you've kind of marinated in the thing for a while, it's hard to have that local intuition. I mean, you know, I've been interested in the foundations of biology, foundations of economics, uh, things about, uh, neuroscience and so on.
In each of these areas, sort of slowly over the years, I've been trying to get sort of general knowledge and intuition about these areas, because otherwise you, you really, it's very hard to, you know, when you, when you say, I'm now going to go and figure out the essence of economics, for example, unless you have some sort of, some sort of big intuitional understanding of what economics is about, it's very hard.
At least for me, it's very hard to go and do that. If you're just like, well, you know, somebody says the definition of economics is this. Okay. That's nice, but they might be wrong. And unless you've got some sort of more broader view of what that what's in that field, it's really hard to, to dig down and not sort of be channeled into the things that people already said were going on.
so that's a you know that's a slow process for me i mean i you know there are many fields where i've been following them for i don't know some of them nearly 50 years now um and uh you know slowly trying to get intuition i mean physics for example is a good example i mean the fact that you know i can make you know decent you know i can can do the things we've done in fundamental physics is i think completely dependent on the fact that you know i you know
research physics when i was as it happens pretty young and you know you can talk to me about quantum field theory or general relativity or something like that and i know all the technical stuff and that while that's not something that
We use every day in moving forward with the physics project for instance the fact that one has that background knowledge of roughly how things work i mean like jonathan and i would just just talking about some really nice stuff he's been doing with with. Using our models to do simulations of space time and you know we're talking about why do these things happen this way you see these things in the simulations why does it happen that way.
It's very important in those conversations that, that, you know, I, for example, and he also, but you know, kind of knows the, the kind of the, the whole sort of shtick of how typical general relativity works, how typical quantum field theory works and so on. Without that, you, without that, it's, it's really hard to, I think, to, you know, reason rationally
In this area, if you have to invent everything for yourself, you'll never get there.
You know, once one is sort of living in this environment of, well, there's a certain amount of ambient knowledge that's been developed, then you have the chance, if you understand that ambient knowledge well, and that's one of the issues, if you just know kind of the, oh, I read this textbook and I got this one point of view about things, that's not enough. If you want to make foundational progress in a field, you really have to understand it in some quite deep level that isn't, that's typically
Your own internalized understanding that isn't the thing that you just learned from a textbook type thing and you know for a lot of these fields it takes it takes a while to get there and it takes often for me it takes doing practical projects in these fields where you're kind of like like for example in economics you know working on things related to blockchain and distributed blockchain and so on helped me I don't think I'm there yet but it helped me to kind of get an understanding of
you know i don't know the role of liquidity and that you know what that means and the notion of of of single prices for things and so on uh to know to have that sort of practical in the weeds experience
In this area and to see sort of how things work out in practice, really important in being able to get a sort of bigger foundational theoretical idea about what's going on. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can grab last second movie tickets in 5D Premium Ultra with popcorn, extra large popcorn,
Is there a difference in how you do research now and even your philosophy of research compared to when you were in your 30s or 40s other than the technology? 30s and 40s not so much. I mean earlier than that yes. I mean I
Look, I started out doing research when I was an early teenager and the thing, I think by the time I was a little bit over 20 years old, I had cottoned on to this point about the most important thing is the essence of what's going on, so to speak, drilling down, so to speak, as opposed to sort of building the technical tower. I mean, when I was first doing things like particle physics,
You know, I was mostly, you know, if, if you look at sort of the output, I was mostly taking a tower that had already been built and adding an extra floor to it in, in one someplace or another. And I sort of an understanding the foundations of the tower was something that I, you know, it took me a few years to get to the point where I realized that was worth doing. That was a thing I could do. And.
You know, at the beginning, it seemed like that was a waste of time. It's like, let's take the tower people have built and let's build on top of that. Who cares about what's underneath because people have already established that. And I then realized that, that the greatest leverage comes from operating at the bottom of the tower, so to speak, the great in some sense, in this, in this analogy, at least it comes from, you know, if you change the foundations, just a tiny bit,
so much changes whereas if you're operating kind of at the level of of you know technical detail your your maximum sort of reach is much smaller in terms of of um no i mean i've been a uh gosh i think um um my mode of
I mean, for example, in my thirties, I spent my thirties basically writing this big book, a new kind of science. It's kind of terrible to say one spent one's whole X decade of one's life doing something. But yes, I spent that decade of my life. Why is that terrible? Because it's a long time. We don't have a lot of decades in lives. And it's kind of a big commitment to say, you know,
This is the thing I did in this decade. I mean, I'm I'm I that project had a number of features. One was. Well, there was sort of a delivery medium issue in today's world. I might have done that project differently as it was in the world of the 1990s. The only way I could see to put out a substantial body of intellectual ideas
Was you write a big book? That was the only thing you know, it's kind of like that's the way you get sort of uh, you know if if you if you write, you know paper a hundred papers, it's kind of all little micro steps and It's completely unrealistic to expect that people will piece together a hundred micro steps and say oh, yeah, I get it. I understand Yeah, so so but at the time sort of the only medium
i could come up with for for getting out big ideas was you write a big book and i also had this i i really i sort of put
I wanted to achieve a certain level of perfection and what i was putting out was like i'm i'm spending a decade on this this is i didn't know it was a decade at the beginning i probably wouldn't have done it but it became a decade of course it's like this has to be you know this is my magnum opus thing it's got to be perfect
It's got to and you know every page it's like you know if i'm lucky it was a page a day and you know every picture was every detail was kind of done very carefully.
I use what I produced every single day, pretty much. I'm using the online version of NKS, the new kind of science book, all the time. It's like I'm talking to people, I say I need an example of this. Okay, I've got a page in NKS that has that example. It's remarkable how often I end up using it. So that was not a bad investment from my point of view. In modern times, I've had a different optimization. My optimization is I write as quickly and as much as possible.
It's more a question of, you know, let me get the stuff out there because the choice is I could go and I could noodle on it for another five years and then it's not clear it will be much better, it might actually be worse, it might be harder for people to absorb. I think that the sort of style of writing that I've developed with just, you know, write it out in a somewhat conversational way, people seem to have
a good time absorbing that and and that's you know had i done the nks book that way i would probably have a better time in that decade and um it would have been longer um but it would be uh you know and maybe i wouldn't find it as uh sort of concentratedly useful as i do now um but you know that's one style that's changed is that i'm
I'm churning out some, I don't know how much it is. I'm probably, I'm probably, I don't know, I should work it out, but I bet I'm writing at least a thousand pages a year. Um, and that's, so I'm writing the equivalent of the NKS book, which was 1200 pages, you know, every year and possibly much more than that. Um, and that's, uh, you know, that that's a difference in, um, in those things. I mean, I would say in terms of tools, one of the things that is probably an underappreciated power,
Is what we call click to copy that is you know you look at one of these things i write it has bunch pictures you can click any one of those pictures you get a piece of orphan language code you can run that code unless something went horribly wrong it will make the same pictures the one that i had so it's all perfectly reproducible and perfectly buildable on
I know when we do a summer schools and winter schools and so on people all the time and people in the world at large all the time.
are like i'm just gonna take this piece of code from here and i'm gonna build on that and that's a kind of a new opportunity in research because normally people when do research and somebody writes a paper other people read the paper it's kind of like concepts as you know the the the particle concepts or something they're transmitted from one mind to another but then they have to be unpacked at the other end
What we have the opportunity to do with kind of things like click to copy code and computational language in general is You're just like here's the thought you can just use it immediately. You don't have to unpack it You don't have to do your own make your own version of it And so that's been a I think that's been a powerful thing in terms of being able to to move things forward having said that you know, there are a decent number of people now who are
You know have absorbed a lot of stuff with our physics project pretty well And and the things that have come from the physics project mathematics stuff and so on The stuff is difficult. You know, it's it's some to make real progress is technically complicated and is It's technically and conceptually complicated and I think one of the things that I've noticed it's been rather a curious observation
Is that you know i talked to lots of people about what we doing and things you talk to scientists physicists that sale other kinds of scientists. You have one experience you talk to people who've thought about you know professional or sometimes otherwise about philosophy and things like that you have a different experience the thing that i found interesting is.
the the scientists are used to technical complexity and technical progress they're not used to conceptual progress and conceptual complexity it's kind of like well just tell us you know we got another formula we can write down another you know equation more or less we can write down another whatever that stuff can get very complicated but it's very tracked in a certain way whereas what's what's ended up happening with with what we've done is
You know, it ends up being conceptually a bit different from what's gone before. And that's something which I've, I've noticed there's this strange inequality in kind of that is more easily understood by people with sort of a more philosophical bent than it is by people with a technical scientific bent interest, which is sort of an interesting phenomenon. I don't know where that ends because it's in a sense, you know, the science we have today was born out of philosophy back, you know, 400 years ago, 300 years ago, whatever. And,
And that was, you know, there was a certain set of concepts that sort of condensed onto science as we know it today. We have a somewhat different set of concepts that are condensing onto sort of a new direction in science. And there are many technical things to be done that are traditional scientific kinds of things. I mean, the things that, you know, like Jonathan and I are talking about right now have to do with kind of observational consequences of
are physics models for, you know, what can you actually observe with a telescope? What can you do, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's that's a lot of technical physics that has to be done there. But, you know, these questions about sort of the inevitability of the laws of physics, the nature of observers and so on, that's a different kind of thinking mostly, although again, it has lots of sort of technical tentacles about how does this particular kind of measuring device work and what consequences does this have and so on.
The question that many people are wondering now that you've mentioned it is where is the evidence for the Wolframs physics project? How would you respond to that? Well, gosh, I mean, it's it's not a very common thing that you get to look at the big achievements of 20th century physics and know why they're true. Never happened before. Nothing is even close to that. It's remarkable how much you get
from a rather small, you know, from a sort of a small essential set of ideas that's just huge reach in all these different directions. Now, you know, if you say, do we know it's, do we know it's our model and not model XYZ?
What is this interesting is an awful lot of things that have been developed in mathematical physics seem to plug into our models they seem to be limits of our models they seem to be you know specific cases of our models things like that so the idea it's us versus them.
It's not really the thing i suspect that essentially all of the popular mathematical physics directions whether it's you know, whether it's i don't know loop quantum gravity or whether it's spin networks or whether it's string theory or whether it's you know ADS CFT correspondence these kinds of things they all seem to plug into our models our models provide like this is why ADS CFT is true.
This is you know string theory lives in this particular corners a particular sort of case of our models maybe we don't know that for sure yet but that's what i think is gonna happen. So it's kind of it's it's not us versus them but there are fundamental things about our models that are very different from what's gone before for example the idea that space is discrete and that's the thing that.
It's kind of amusing if you look at the history, which I have only come to know much more recently, which is, you know, back in antiquity, people arguing all the time, you know, is the universe discrete or continuous? They would have said, you know, democracies would have said space is discrete. You know, other people would have said it's continuous, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They were arguing about it. Okay. Then we get people arguing about the same kind of thing for light. Then we get to the end of the 19th century.
and sort of the big fight was on about molecules and you know was matter discrete or continuous and it really looked like the continuous stuff was going to win right up until when molecules and brownian motion and things like that were discovered and at that point it's like okay you know matter is discrete and then okay light is discrete i mean einstein when he's presenting you know the photoelectric effect an idea of photons just comes right out and says we discovered that matter is discrete
Let's check out the electromagnetic field. Maybe it's discrete too. Gosh, it actually is. At the time, and this is something I didn't know until very recently, at the time, most people believed space was discrete. Even Einstein, apparently. Absolutely. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, the whole crowd, they all believed space was discrete. And I keep on finding out more and more of this history. And but
What happened is they couldn't make it compatible with relativity. And that was a technical problem. I mean, that's a problem we solve with hypergraphs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so they gave up. And so for a hundred years, people said, oh, space must be continuous. And when you said, well, wait a minute, space might not be continuous. People are like, that's just nuts. Now, you know, they wouldn't have said that a hundred years ago. People wouldn't have said that.
it's a thing which and it happens in science and other fields that people develop oh yeah you know for very technical reasons oh it has to work this way and then after a few sort of academic generations go through it's like well of course it works that way so okay is space discrete or not you know with molecules people kind of lucked out that brownian motion was visible the question is
is brownian motion is the analog of brownian motion for space detectable is it detectable in our times and that's that's a really interesting question and um you know we're working on it and uh you know maybe there are some things to do with black holes that are detailed effects and maybe there are some things that um uh i i i have the slight guess
that dark matter will end up being a feature of the microscopic structure of space. And that it will be that after we know what it is, everybody will say, how could we have been so stupid? We missed that for 50 years or whatever. But I think but we're not there yet. So I can't say that. Yeah, yeah. But but I heard a quote from you about dark matter is spacetime heat or the caloric substance of our time. Yes.
Well, we don't know that now, but but that's let's imagine you didn't let's imagine you knew it. Let's imagine you were able to drive that. Then could you also say because there's an abundance of evidence that dark matter behaves like matter. So because of that, then could you also say that some of the matter or the matter that we see is also a form of space time heat? Like if space time heat can behave like matter, what is the limit to that? Right. But OK, heat is a form of energy.
Can i get energy in a large scale motion is a form of energy it's the same sense i think here that particles ordinary particles are like a large scale motion. And where is my guess would be there's a different thing which is microscopic features of space time so for example if we look at matter we are used to macroscopic things happening with matter.
Throw a ball from here to there, that kind of thing. There's a big chunk of matter that's moving from here to there. Then we're used to the idea of heat. Heat is a microscopic feature of matter. Heat is not macroscopic. Heat is something about individual molecules. So my guess is that particles are the macroscopic, not macroscopic on our scale, but macroscopic relative to the atoms of space, macroscopic effects in the structure of space.
Whereas maybe space-time heat is microscopic effects in the structure of space and my guess that that's my guess so far is that that leads to you know that will lead to a change in the things we say about the structure of space and you say well okay one thing to understand it's a fundamental feature of well okay so Einstein's equations for example and the principle of equivalence and so on
Einstein's equations you can trade off sort of energy momentum for gravitational field you can you can kind of move things around you can say you say okay I've got a gravitational wave is the gravitational wave something which is a source of gravity a source of space-time curvature or is it just space-time curvature you can kind of trade off those two things
In our models that trade-off is more extreme because in our models everything is just a feature of the structure of space. So these particles are just sort of lumps in space. In traditional general relativity, one distinguishes things which are features of space from things which are sort of matter that exists in space. Now, for example, let's say we made a bunch of stuff out of black holes.
Then we will be in the same situation because black holes are, as they usually formulated, just a feature of the structure of space. So if we were making our sort of, I don't know, our, our, you know, planet or something out of lots of little black holes or whatever, if we could hold them apart and so on, then we have a thing which seems like it's something that's like matter, but it's really just made of structure of space. By the way, I suspect that there is a close analogy
between particles like electrons and things like black holes. They're both kind of persistent structures in space time except that black holes we have normally imagined in relativity that they're these very big things.
Whereas we think the particles are very small and subject to quantum mechanics and so on. In our models, there really isn't such a distinction. You can have kind of features of space that are on any scale. And in any case, my tendency would be to think that the concept that dark matter is like matter. I mean, this is always what happens in science and so many other things. The fact that it's called dark matter might be a big mistake.
just like people call it caloric fluid and the calling it calling heat caloric fluid the fluid part of that name was a big mistake which probably made it people just said it's you know but they thought of it as a you know a material fluid substance just as we now by the name dark matter we're thinking of it as matter and that may not be the right picture
And I don't think that the the experimental features, you know, what what's known is that it has some gravitational effects. It's not known that you can pick it up and make particles out of it and so on. Well, many people are trying to find other models that aren't matter, like how do you modify gravity to reproduce the experimental results? Yeah, yeah, right. So, I mean, that one thing about that is that the
The attempts to just sort of go and hack Einstein's equations and, you know, figure out how that works has not been terribly successful. I think one new degree of freedom that we have that's pretty important is dimension change. And because we don't have the idea that space has to be fixed three plus one dimensional thing, that provides kind of a reformulation of general relativity in terms of dimension change rather than space time curvature.
and i think that although i don't know how it works yet my intuition is that when one looks at those attempts to parameterize changes to gravity that it's just like whoops we missed that change because it didn't seem natural to us but as soon as you think about dimension change a change of a certain kind will be natural even though let's say for example if you were doing a series expansion you would never get x to the one half
is not something you get through a series expansion it just isn't you know x x plus x squared plus x cubed and so on will never make extra one half and so that's a you know it's kind of a like you you've kind of missed that by thinking about things in a particular way and so i'm sort of guessing that dimension change may be the key to seeing how you
Get an effective modified gravity, because that's what we're going to end up with. I mean, whatever happens, you may, you know, it's just like we can talk about, you know, we talk about heat as a form of energy, it has certain characteristics that are like energy. And in the end, we'll describe it in terms of the dynamics of energy. And similarly here, this will eventually be described in terms of the dynamics of gravity. It's just it will be a modified gravity, but
Gravity modified in a particular way that comes out of the structure of our models Do you think that the really at itself can be an observer? I know we're going back to observation, but I'm curious. Oh boy Not really not an observer like us see here's the thing the One feature of us and it's another implicit assumption is We're kind of small and integrated
That is, our minds, by the very idea that we have a single thread of experience, our minds are not too extended. If our minds were sort of vastly extended, we wouldn't have the same sort of sense of coherent identity.
So, you know, one picture is about the really add as we say, let's go explore the really add. Let's go look at sort of, you know, let's go colonize rural space. Let's go. Yeah. Right. Go explore further and further out. And you say maybe that's the point of civilization. Maybe that's what we're, you know, maybe that's our, maybe that should be our goal. Just like we explore physical space, we explore rural space, et cetera.
What the problem is that when you are sort of holding in your mind all of these different possible views of what's going on in some sense, but by the time you have all those different views, all stuff together in your mind, there's no coherence to what you think. And so in probably in no meaningful sense, can you say that you still coherently exist?
you are you are everything but you're also nothing so to speak in other words the the concept of coherent existence i think depends on the choice that it is there are things that are you and there's lots of stuff that isn't you if you say you are everything then in some sense there's no there's no you in that picture so to speak interesting so i think that the you know what what is necessary is that
In order to have kind of coherent existence, we have to be limited. That's, you know, it's a, I mean, a way of thinking about this and much more formal way of thinking about this in mathematics would be, well, you know, you want to prove theorems in mathematics. You know, what you care about is having a limited set of axioms, then building a tower of theorems on top of those axioms. Well, you could say, well, what if you just allowed all possible axioms? You know, then you could prove everything.
Why isn't that a good thing in mathematics so to speak you just prove everything Well, what does that correspond to in mathematics? It's kind of an old result in logic that as soon as you have something that you consider false You can deduce anything from false Implication the logical rules of implication given that you start from a false premise everything becomes true
And at that point, it's like, then, then you sort of blown up everything, you can no longer make a coherent statement in mathematics. By the time you throw into the things that you believe something which is false, then you can derive everything, then everything is, in a sense, everything is true. As soon as you know, as soon as you take as a premise, something which is false, you sort of have to conclude that everything could be derived as true. And at that point, you can no longer sort of build a coherent mathematics.
and so i think it's the same kind of thing that is as you by the time you know if if if the if by the time sort of you as an observer span the rulliad you do not in any coherent sense exist and so that that that's kind of a uh for observers like us that's kind of a downer
There are different logical systems, like there's classical logic, and then there's para consistent where you can have a and not a but not explosion. So in your really ad approach, is there something that's like the canonical logical system? So it's I don't know what logic. That's a good question. I mean, I think that in a sense, everything we've done is sort of a constructivist approach.
The idea of logic with true and false and so on, I've never thought was that great. I mean, there's an awful lot of things in the world that are neither true nor false. You know, it will rain tomorrow. That statement is neither true nor false. It's a it's a as stated now yet to be determined. Yeah, right. But I mean, as a practical matter. You know, you can try and shoehorn everything into it's got to be true or false.
But that's not the reality of most of what we talk about. You know, if I say in more than language, for example, I say X is greater than three, but I've said nothing about what X is. There's nothing I can do with that statement. It's just, well, it's a statement. X is greater than three. Maybe there's some other statement I can derive from that, but that statement does not have a truth value that does. That statement does not in any useful form have a truth value. It's just X is greater than three. We don't know. And I think that, um,
The things we're doing in physics project and the mathematics that comes from that and so on. It's all constructive. We're saying you can build a thing this in that way. We're not asking the question. We're not formulating it as what is true. We're formulating it as what can you build and that's that's a and so you don't really get into the same
you don't get into the same kind of binds you don't have to force yourself into this kind of question of what's the logic so to speak because there isn't a logic it's just what can you build you know in other words if i say what is true in the world well in mathematics you could say what's true okay i don't know whether mathematics can answer that question because in mathematics
if you think about it in typical foundations of mathematics it's like well there are these axioms and given those axioms you can derive things and you say well is this actually true well if you change the axioms you might be able to derive it you might not be able to derive it what we're concentrating on is purely what can you derive and i think that's
You know and that's similar to what can exist in the world what can be produced by physics in the world that's a similar kind of question you don't say. Is. You know is the earth true. You say more does the earth exist has the earth been produced by physics and so similarly in mathematics or in other kinds of ways we talk about things we say can this be produced.
Not as it quotes true. Earlier when you were talking about, OK, so there's one view that you can go into a field and make progress because you're bright eyed and bushy tailed and you're not you don't have the dogma of the whole history of the field indoctrinated upon you. But then there's the other view that know what you need to do is familiarize yourself with the tools, gain the intuition. You need to understand where the field is before you can make some progress. So it was my understanding that you were advocating at least for the latter.
Do you feel what is the largest myth of modern science that is preventing in your opinion some major breakthrough?
Where do you feel we're being held back most other than, hey, we should be thinking more computationally. So other than that. Yeah, right. No, I think I mean, by the way, you're sort of dichotomy between know the field deeply and don't get too dyed in the wool and the dogma of the field. That's an interesting dichotomy. And I think the main way you get out of that is, I suppose, unkindly, you could say by being arrogant or confident or something, because explain
Well, because I mean, if there's a dogma in a field and you don't, you're not really confident, you say, well, I guess that's probably true. You know, even if, even if you're, you have to have a certain look, I know that's the dogma of the field. I understand that dogma. And by the way, I think it's nonsense, right? That's a, that's a non-trivial, almost emotional thing to say.
Right. You have to be very, you have to be very, you know, it's not most people who come along and say, well, most people will come along and say, I'm just looking at this field. I don't really know much about it. It's dogma must be wrong. That's probably a lose. It's right. Most people, by the time they've learned the dogma, it's like, that's what they're living in. And they can't see anything outside of that.
And so I think, you know, in my own case, I've been lucky and that I've worked in a lot of different fields. And so I, I can kind of see a little bit from the outside, some of, you know, I've, I've learned the dogma of a bunch of fields, but I can kind of see that from the outside. And I've had the experience of seeing these dogmas just turn out to be wrong over and over again. And, you know, I think that that is a, and I've had the experience, the kind of, you know, personal arrogance experience or something.
of realizing yes i figured out correctly even though the dogma said something different and the dogma was wrong i mean that was you know i in my early life i'd you know was able to figure out a few little things in particle physics where that kind of thing happened but they were small
But gradually they got bigger because after you see, well, you know, I mean, I remember there was one thing when I was like 17 years old or something where, where, um, you know, I'd calculated a bunch of things in particle physics and there was some experiment that said what I, you know, calculated had to be wrong. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is how it has to work. Either QCD is wrong or this is how it has to work. And, you know, I kind of.
and turned out I was right and I felt kind of stupid for not having checked more about how the experiment was done and so on because I probably could have realized that that you know there was some fishiness there so to speak but it was you know that was that was a fairly small thing but after you've done a few of those things you build up a certain amount of confidence that hey you know just because everybody says X doesn't mean that X is necessarily true
And that's a super useful thing from a personal point of view to realize. And, you know, one could say, well, I think something different from what people usually think. And, you know, one may be just completely wrong. One may think that a bunch of times and one may be wrong every single time. You know, my personal experience, for whatever reason, you know, I happened to perhaps because I started smaller, I happened to have had the experience being right a bunch of times. And that really helps one to have the confidence to
think differently so to speak about the things that are you know some accepted dogma in terms of right now i don't know things that people widely think that um i think there are different kinds of issues there are places where people think that problem is too hard it will never be solved and um you know like we'll never know how
physics fundamentally works or whatever will never know how this or that works. It's hopeless. Just give up. That's one category of mistake. The other, you know, they'll never be a theory of economics that makes any sense. They'll never be a fundamental theory of biology. They'll never be, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this first thing is that's the second thing I suppose is
Often when there has been technical success in a field, things get quite locked down. I mean, you know, the belief in continuous space, for instance, is a thing which has been technically successful. And, you know, it's a good approximation. It works. You can figure out a bunch of things from it. You know, a huge amount of mathematics has been built on the idea of the continuity of space.
and uh it i mean that mathematics will still survive perfectly well even if space is not in fact continuous but it's a you know to build that tower based on on that is a you know that that's that's something you know people have ended up assuming i think there are a whole bunch of other more technical things that people assume about how quantum mechanics works etc etc etc they're more technical they're less kind of big picture um i think
The, uh, another meta observation, which I wouldn't have said until recent years is, you know, how important is the observer in deducing how science works? I would have expected that everything I could have said about science would be, you know, clearly objective, so to speak, in no way. And I don't think that anymore. I'll tell you another, another thing about a fundamental thing, which is how far is science going to get?
In other words, what kind of thing can we expect from science? There is this idea that, look, we just write down equations, we crank out the answers, we can predict everything.
You give us an epidemiological situation, we can predict for you how the epidemiology will play out. We can predict for you how this is going to happen. That's going to happen. We can predict all these things. Sometimes they get very political and so on. We can predict what's going to happen in the climate or this aspect of society or that thing or whatever. There's this idea that science provides this
Science is the kind of the freeway that lets one get get to the end, you know, without going through all the detail type thing. Computational reducibility is the story of that not being the case, but yet the absolutely uniform belief about sort of this is the kind of scientism type belief about the world is science
You know, science can explain everything. Science can figure out everything we can predict. We can see what we have to do based on science. I mean, that was a thing that led to, well, all kinds of all kinds of beliefs in the world. I think that's a thing where one will have to realize, no, there's a certain set. If you pick the right slice of computational reducibility, yes, you can figure out what's going to happen. If you can live in that slice, then you can predict what's going to happen.
Life is not so interesting if you're purely living in that slice. If you know everything about what's going to happen, it's kind of like, what does the passage of time really do for you? You know, another version of this that's going to come up, I think very big time is the sort of the computational irreducibility kind of fulcrum of AI. I mean, in other words, you've got an AI, it's doing computationally irreducible things. That means you can't predict what it will do. That means it might surprise you.
That's door number one. Door number two, let's force the AI to only behave in computationally reducible ways. Let's make sure we know what the AI is going to do. In door number two, you don't get to let the AI do the things it can do. You're constraining it. You're forcing it on this track where it can only do certain kinds of things. You're forcing it to be dumb, so to speak. So there's this big choice to be made.
Go with what the AI does. Let it be computationally reducible. Let it surprise us from time to time. Or does one say, no, we don't want that. We want to constrain the AI to only work this way. This is an important, you know, this is a sort of societal decision, I suppose, that, you know, I think will be a pretty important one in the years to come. And I think it will be, you know, it's
And it's it's look, it's a it's a it's not totally disconnected from decisions about do you try and control the world or do you just sort of let you might say in economic terms, you know, market forces or something else, some other dynamics kind of just play play out as they play out, so to speak. Do you do you do you go for constraint or do you go for just let the dynamics play out? And what do you go for?
with respect to AI. Well, I'm not, it's not going to work to just say, let's constrain it completely. Cause then we don't really have AI. We just have sort of, we just have things that behave in predictable ways. We have kind of industrial revolution style machines, so to speak. We have machines where you get to see, you know, where does every cog and lever go, so to speak. I think that's a, uh, I mean, that's a,
You know you might say gosh the world would be better off if all people behaved in completely predictable ways. I don't think that will be a terribly fun world so to speak and i think that's you know we have the same issue really with the eyes. I mean there are a lot of detailed questions about sort of how. I tend to think that a society of eyes.
is a much more robust, less fragile thing than the one giant AI in the world doesn't seem like a very good idea.
Just like the one, you know, the one government in the world probably doesn't seem like a very good idea. It's more robust. If you have multiple different, you know, if you've got this essentially ecosystem or something of different things interacting, I mean, it's a thing we see in endless examples in, in sort of physics and other places that the, the behavior of the, of the aggregate
is more robust and less likely to to sort of go crazy go extinct whatever than the one so to speak you know it's kind of um so i i i would tend to think that that's um but you know these these questions about what's better about those kinds of things this is a question of you know i have my own particular way of leading my life and you know the things i like the things i don't like whatever
Other people have different ones. I don't think there's a right answer to any of these things I think it's a I think one of the things that's tricky to me at least in thinking about ethics Another thing where kind of I'm sort of slowly trying to understand enough that I think I might have something sensible to say but one of the things about ethics is very confusing to me is I'm used to science and
Where you can do controlled experiments where you can say, I'm going to look at this one subsystem of the world and I'm going to ignore everything else. I'm going to just study this particular little quantum system or whatever it is. And the fact that all these other things are happening in the world is irrelevant. I think ethics doesn't work that way.
I think when you decide, you know, you're going to have the trolley run into the giraffes rather than the llamas or something, that decision is never a, despite sort of the apparent setup, that decision is never a local decision. That decision is in the end a decision that sort of relates to everything about humanity, so to speak, that it can't be localized in the same kind of way. So it's, in a sense, it is a
It is sort of a thing for which, and that's another kind of assumption we make as observers, related to kind of free will about doing experiments, is the notion that we can do something here that won't affect everything else in the world. And I'm not sure that's true, that ethics can be done in this kind of factored, modular, separated way, which makes it confusing when you try to think about it in terms of sort of from a science point of view.
Is the notion of observer also a local phenomenon or can you have a non-local observer? Can a collection of observers be considered an observer? An ant colony, for example. Yes, we have examples where
Look, I mean, we humans are already extended. We're not observing things at the level of one atom of space. We are aggregating quite large chunks of sort of the of of of elements of space and so on. Now, what would it be like to be in, you know, an ant in an ant colony where you have sort of a collective mind about things? I'm not sure. You know, perhaps the true organism of the earth is all of human society.
and then we're all just you know ants relative to that and you can say what is the experience of the whole of human society you know human society makes decisions as we individuals make decisions it makes decisions we watch those decisions happen sometimes those decisions are pretty confusing for us individuals so to speak you know society goes in this direction they decide that you know top hats are fashionable or something and it happens as some sort of collective dynamic
Can society as a whole be thought of as an observer with respect to some kinds of questions?
and in a sense society you know for example this whole equivalence in question you could ask that for society as a whole as opposed to individuals you could say we as individuals we believe all kinds of different things but society as a whole concludes that top hats are fashionable for example and that's just like it could very well be the case that in our brains you know one part of our brain is saying
you know i hate that color another part of our brain is saying i really like that color and in the end we come to a conclusion that is some kind of aggregate of those things where we say hey i kind of like that or whatever and i think you know society does the same kind of thing and we are in this with respect to society we are
With respect to you know we are like the individual neurons in our brains it's like if we could know what that individual clump of neurons was thinking then we would say oh my gosh the whole brain made that crazy decision you know this clump of neurons really had it right but the whole brain did something completely crazy and you know so it is i think with us individual humans relative to to all of society
So humor me for a bit. Suppose the observer theory that you have would be able to give you a quantity like IIT has phi for this, you will have 1000 units of consciousness and ant has one. Okay, suppose we could do that. Suppose we could then say that a cell inside your body has five units of it in observer theory units, and that the aggregate of you has 1000. And society actually has 10,000. Okay, suppose it was that. But then at the same time,
Earlier in the conversation, we have that the rule yet is a bit too incoherent to to give a consciousness number two. So maybe it's either zero or undefined. That would mean to me that would seem to me like there's a maximum amount of of consciousness at some point in some scale, because as you scale outward, you can get more. But if you scale too much, you get zero or ill defined. So what do you make of that? What would it be? What the heck would that be the maximum most conscious
Being I think it's it's one of these things where You sort of got a couple of parameters you've got coherence and you've got kind of the coherence of the being and What the being contains and these things are are directly related the being sort of has a broader Set of experiences paradigms, whatever else The being is also less coherent
as as it can you know have these two different points of view let's say which have certain incompatibilities it is both by extending to be able to encompass those different points of view it is encompassing more but it is also becoming less coherent in what it encompasses so i mean my own guess would be that uh i think it depends
Let's see. Usually the answer to a question like this is, it depends what you want it for. That is, if you say, which thing can make the maximum number of decisions per unit time, let's say, which thing can have the... I understand.
You know, you could have these different criteria and I think you'd end up with a different answer, which would end up being a reflection more of your criterion than of the thing itself. But I do think that, you know, it is an interesting question. So for example, the thought experiment, what if we gradually replace our neural circuitry with digital electronics? So we think a million times faster. What would that feel like? You know, our experience of the physical world will be different in that case.
You know, we'll we'll notice the individual photons coming in. We'll, you know, not aggregate space in the same way. We'll have all kinds of other funky relationships, different relationships to physics. But, you know, what would it be like to talk to an entity that was thinking a million times faster than you were? I don't know. I think it's it's a it. I suspect that the main point is
That it can be spinning around and thinking really, really fast. But what matters to us is the way in which we connect to what's going on. And so actually the perception of what's happening wouldn't be so different because what we're seeing is only those things that we can be an observer of, so to speak, all the detail about what it's thinking. It's thinking a million times faster. It's coming up with this and that and the other. It's maybe what we would perceive of it.
It's like perceiving something in physics for example where you know lots of things are happening but all we're perceiving is what we're capable of perceiving so in other words that that the that the the inner the inner experience of the million times faster thinking thing would be invisible to us and that when we talk to it it would just seem like you know all we're noticing is the things that we can notice so to speak now you know it's an interesting question if if you
You know if you take I don't know things I figured out in my life and you imagine the million times faster version of me Then you know again, it's like this connection to physics then yes, you could say the things that you know Took me You know in in The things that would take me a year to work out the million times faster me would work out in 30 seconds. Um, I
and but i think that's that interface to that is like an interface to sort of physics if viewed you know the speed of light is the speed of light we can we experience different things if we are experiencing it a different uh with kind of a different speed of thought but i don't know i mean i you know i think these are these kind of these thought experiments of of what is it like to be an alien mind i find them very interesting i have a very hard time with them
I, you know, and I, I look to kind of almost it's like, could you write a science fiction story, which had as the protagonist, you know, something that thinks a million times faster, how would it think about things? How would other people feel about it? You know, these are things which, and in a sense by writing a science fiction story, you're trying to make that humanized bridge to our everyday experience. I, you know, I wish more people were doing this. I think it's a really interesting thing to do. I think it's really hard.
Speaking about this bridge to human experience as you dabble with ethics. What if it turns out you're correct about observer theory, about the discreteness of space time, about computation underlying the fundament? What if someone's like, OK, so what? How what should I now? I'm watching. I'm listening to this podcast. As a result of this, what should I do? How should my behavior change?
Yeah I mean I think that's a you could have asked the same thing when Copernicanism came in I mean it's kind of like like okay so we know that the math is different because we think about the earth going around the sun rather than the sun going around the earth so what indeed that mathematics was a deep so what for people the um what was not the so what was our common experience is we're sitting on the earth the earth is
standing still but actually we learn from this piece of science that our common experience isn't the way things really are so that's important if you if you say well everything we know about the world we can derive from common experience that blows up that idea so in in our time interestingly enough
There's sort of a flip side of that, which is computational irreducibility kind of blows up the idea that, you know, just trust the science. It will tell you what's going to happen. So in other words, this notion that, I mean, I would say, you know, put in a, in the Copernican time, it was just trust the scientists because it's kind of like the, just because you think the earth is standing still, it isn't really right. The scientists can tell you it isn't.
Well, now we've so internalized that it's kind of like, well, science can tell you all these things. You know, you can put this scientific gloss onto everything and we understand, you know, how we feel psychologically and we understand how we do this and that and the other. And it's very science-ified and this notion that, you know, science can answer all the problems. Science can tell you what's going to happen. Science has solved it.
I think that notion is kind of blown up by computational irreducibility. That's kind of the realization that, in a sense, don't expect science to solve everything. It's not going to work that way. It's not something where you can just say, well, I'm just going to feed it to science and it's going to tell me the answer. So I think that's one kind of everyday takeaway. I think another one is
The story of the rule yard, the story of rural space, the story of different essential rule, real reference frames, the concept that again, sort of the takeaway from that is there really are different ways to think about the world. There really are different sort of reference frames with which to view reality. And so people have long had that intuition. But again, it's been kind of this, well, there's this one and it's based on mathematical science or whatever else.
That really isn't right. There are others. They will have different power, different ability to figure out particular things, but this notion that, oh, this other kind of reference frame, this other way of thinking about the world, it's just wrong, is probably not the correct way to think about it. It is a different way of thinking about the world. It can come to different kinds of conclusions, but it isn't the case that there's sort of a hierarchy and
You know, we got the right one and it's the mathematical sciences or something. So I think those are those are two kind of everyday takeaways from these kinds of things and I think I think in In a sense the To come to those conclusions it is To know that the universe is computational all the way down Is to give one no choice about those conclusions if you're still
It's just like if we think about brains and we say and we think about free will and things like that and we think about and we say there's going to be something in our brains that isn't going to be just mechanical, just rule based. We're going to find something. It's going to be quantum mechanics. It's going to be mysticism. It's going to be something else. You know, we keep on searching for that.
well if we really know that the universe is computational all the way down we can stop searching for that we know there isn't there isn't a you know it's it's and it's already enough to say that it's computational it already has those aspects of irreducibility and free will and so on we don't need any more than that what's something that's
That's stuck in your crop for a while, something that nettles at you, not mathematical, not physical. What's some problem that you're dealing with, say for the past decade? Oh, gosh. I mean, the the. You know, there are things that that one figures out where it's like the world should absorb this. But it doesn't. It absorbs a little painfully slow rate.
And sometimes it even rejects it. You know, a lot of sort of the science informed technology that I've built is, you know, I don't know, I don't know how far ahead of the world it is. I know some things that we figured out like 35 years ago, kind of people sort of just cottoned on about 10 years ago. So that was a 25 year gap. And those were I thought rather trivial things. And it's a little bit kind of
Like it's, it's fun to make artifacts from the future. It's has more leverage if they are more quickly absorbed both because then, you know, that, that very active absorption, you kind of see the reflection of how that works in the world and you can see how to go further with it. And also from a purely kind of, I don't know, personal point of view,
It's it's like, gosh, if more people understood computational language, for example, then lots of progress would get made in the world. Lots of things that are confused now wouldn't be confused. Lots of what would be an example of, let's say, in biology, something that would get overturned because they're just thinking too non computationally. What's the fundamental theory of biology?
I mean, in other words, biology has not even believed that there is a fundamental theory. Biology at best has natural selection as sort of a fundamental theory. It's not really a predictive theory in the same and it has, you know, the idea that that biology is somehow fundamentally digital and is encoded in genomics and so on. But there isn't
Whereas in physics we have sort of big theories biology does not have big theories biology fills endless books and texts and journals and so on with lots and lots and lots and lots of detail and The the idea that there might be a big theory is pretty absent in biology I mean at times in the past I would say in the 1980s there was a period of time when people were sort of like
A little bit thinking of those time in the nineteen fifties when forties and fifties when people are thinking about their own biology that i wasn't around in those days the nineteen eighties i was around so i was you know was participating in that and there was sort of a some degree of enthusiasm for that but the idea that there might be big theories in biology is really not there and that will be an example of something which if you really internalize kind of the computational way of thinking about things
That is the thing where there could be a big theory and you know, what would the consequence of that be? You know, we might be like, well, this is how aging works. This is really what's going on. This is really what's going on in, you know, sort of foundationally what's going on in, I don't know, cancer or something like this is foundationally what's going on in neuroscience. You know, we don't we don't know those things. We don't have big theories in those areas. And, you know, you asked what what's a place where people go off track?
You know, I think the assumption that there cannot be a big theory is an example of something that might be off track. I mean, you might have said about, well, lots of things in physics, for example, there couldn't be a big theory of this, but then turned out there was. And I think that's a place. So I think that, and when I say a big theory of things, sort of interesting because on the one hand, we've got computational irreducibility,
What slices of computational reducibility can you find?
The ones that, you know, our laws of physics represent a particular slice of computational reducibility that observers like us can see with respect to the whole Rulliad. And the, you know, I think that that's sort of when we look for a theory in biology, that theory might not be a theory of the same character as theories that we, you know, it might not be a theory that says still the stegosaurus will have
you know for spikes on its tail it's very unlikely to be a theory that says something like that and but it you know what kind of a thing it might say we're not sure you know natural selection is a theory that says different kinds of things than one might imagine the theory would say earlier i mean even today you know it's like what are the predictions of natural selection what doesn't really have
The same kinds of predictions in that, you know, a theory where you compute from axioms something has it. It's so I think that's the that's the challenge in some cases is the challenge is more to define the right question. Once one has the right question, for example, in biology, what what kind of a thing would the fundamental theory of biology talk about?
and and what would it and you know for example one could be unlucky it could be the case that there is a fundamental theory of economics and it's about something we just don't care about there's a fundamental theory of economics and it tells us about something to do with the correlation between transactions here and there and it just is something we humans say okay that's fun you know we can measure it it's like cool it works but we don't care
Um, and, uh, now actually it will not stay that way. If such a thing is found, just like we in engineering, uh, kind of find ways to make use of things that we can say about the world. I'm sure that anything we can say will be made use of. And just like, you know, whether it's the hedge funds arbitraging based on it, or whether it's some, some other kind of use that, um, some of us might consider more productive, but that's a different matter.
Steven Thank you for spending so much time with me. This was this was a good conversation this was you you asked a lot of very interesting questions and I I I said a bunch of things here that I Haven't said anywhere else because I only figured them out as we were talking about them. So well, that's super fun, man. It was super fun the
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like.
helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description.
Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well.
Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms. Just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts and I read that in the comments, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead re-listening on those platforms?
iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough.
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What did you get it to? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock.
Here's a bonus bit for sticking around. I'll do these more and more. So always check at the end like a mathematical physics version of the Marvel end of credits scene. Just to give an advertisement, can you hold up some of the books that are behind you so that I can include them in the description? Let me see whether I can. The real question is, can I turn around and not confuse everything? And let's see, what do I have here? I have to go find them. OK, if it's too difficult, that's all right. No, I think I think let me see what I've got.
you know what i actually don't have the current versions of some of them on that bookshelf thank you for thank you for pointing that out i've got them actually if you um uh yeah hold on and i'm i'm going to solve that problem but you have to just a second let me let me um uh just set this all right that was a fun ask of uh
Can I hold up some books? I have a big pile. This is like shopping channel, you know. All right, let's do it. So let me see. I've got I've written a whole bunch of books that actually my oh gosh, I forgot the biggest one. New kind of science. Well, that's a big line. That's fine. Don't worry. Viewers are familiar with that. Right. So then
In more recent times, you know, I had this whole run of books that started in 2016 that started to have this book called idea makers, which is about, um, it's kind of a, uh, a book of biographical, um, uh, sort of biographies of a variety of people, which I think is pretty fun. Then let's see, then we have just before.
2019 when i started the physics project i put together a collection of things which was uh this adventures of a computational explorer which kind of might have been the that's the end folks kind of uh kind of kind of story but then came the physics project and then we have uh the book of the physics project which um uh um was um uh it's kind of my uh initial writings on that subject then i had a book
That was some Kind of a book about a subject that has been obscure for a hundred years and I thought I kind of put together this book because I wanted to because it was the hundredth anniversary of the invention of combinators which was sort of the a first idea about how computation might work and I found this much more useful than I expected. This is a great
Kind of laboratory for understanding a lot of idea foundational ideas about computation. So that was that was interesting. Then then there's my book about mathematics, foundations and physicalization, which is about applying ideas from the physics project and the really add and so on to mathematics, the foundations of mathematics to understanding that
You know, Plato was right in the sense that mathematics, there's a real thing, which is mathematics. If you believe in sort of physical reality, you should also believe in mathematical reality. And then what do we have next? Then we have, this was a, this was a sort of a fun book to put together 20 years of new kind of science, partly explaining how the NKS book came to be written and so on. And some of the, the history of that, that I,
Uh was actually as is so often the case in history It was much harder to piece together and to write than I expected But it makes an interesting tale if you're interested in kind of how big projects actually actually happen Then we have my book on my book on the second law. Um, and that was uh The um, I kind of started on this book when I was 12 years old
1972 um i got interested in the second law of thermodynamics and the kind of the um uh the thing that was my kind of stimulus for that was a book cover that um uh let me see um there you go um is it uh
let's see if i hold it up that if you can see that book cover so you will notice a certain resonance between that book cover and this cover this book cover and so that that book cover was a book that i i got when i was was 12 years old and 50 years later i made this book which i hope finally explains
what the phenomenon that was that was illustrated on that that very old book cover and then that i have two small books this is unusual for me i have this book that um about uh chat gbt and um kind of how llm yeah you announced that where we met
yes possibly yeah possibly the book was really right around then yeah this was a um uh you know i i i wrote it because everybody kept on asking me how does chat gbt work what's it doing why does it work and so i thought i better write this down i wrote it down rather quickly
And then millions of people read that blog post and so on and then people said you should turn it into a book and so now there's versions of this in about 15 languages and it remains I think the only kind of high level description of what's going on and why it works. It was sort of surprising.
But as i thought about it after the fact i kind of realized that the set of things that you kind of need to know about and pull together is more unusual than than i thought i just did another book that just came out a few days ago which is some very utilitarian book but i came from in twenty seventeen
Are there was an eclipse visible from the us and i decided to write something about the history of how one could predict eclipses and also we built a website that could predict when when the eclipse would occur at any given place on the on the earth at to within one second and so okay so.
At the time of the twenty seventeen eclipse, you know, I just produced this sort of history of eclipse prediction, two days to spare from the time of the eclipse. But this time we knew the eclipse was coming because after we can predict them. And so this time my my team said, let's put out the description of this and about predicting eclipses as a book in time for the April 8th
2024 eclipse that's visible in the us so this is some this is a set of a fun story about about that that i have to say if if it was some.
i was able to write to the history of eclipse prediction in 2017 because i wasn't working on the physics project at that time but now that i've got this this whole pile of other things that i'm doing a book like that wouldn't exist but for the fact that it was already written you know the core parts of it was already written in 2017 but that's
That's all that's that's all the books. I it's a reasonably I mean, I don't know. I feel I feel like you feel like you're more productive now in your 60s than you were when you were younger there in terms of writing. Yes, actually, I should mention one more book. That's another book. That's the third edition of a book about Wolfram language, which is kind of intended as a sort of a an introduction to to how to how to use our computational language
to think in computational ways and actually i have just embarked on another book project which is a book called introduction to computational thinking. That's a rather ambitious project and i'm sort of doing it as a background project and i will probably start posting pieces of it and on the web you're asking my more productive now than i was in the past. You know it really helps that i found new mechanisms to
To sort of make use of my productivity. I mean, the fact that I can write things and post them and so on is, is there lots of things which I had energetically done in the past, but didn't really have a venue to do anything with them. So it's, it's been, um, uh, it's been nice. I think, um, um, uh, you know, uh, it, uh,
I feel reasonably productive. If you count volume of paper over the last four years, that's pretty decent. Are you typing the majority of that, like physically typing? Are you writing? Are you dictating? I'm typing.
In fact, I, I have a really crazy habit, which is that I record these video work logs of actually, you know, as I write these things and figure things out and I even post them. I don't think anybody's, nobody should watch them. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. The working sessions, the live working. No, no, no. This is much worse than that. Those are, those are interactive with other people. These are video work logs, silent me working on my own.
And the only thing that's interesting about those to me and useful to people sometimes is if there is some random thing that i said somewhere and somebody wonders why did he say that you know what he was talking about or not you know you can in principle go and find the video work log where that very sentence was typed.
And you can see you know the six versions of that sentence before the final version and you can see the you know what the the actual experiment that I was looking at that made me conclude the thing that I wrote in that sentence.
So meaning that it's a screen recording. It's a screen recording. Yeah, it's a screen recording of the only it's silent screen recording. So I had considered recording it, including sound with with me whistling to myself. But I decided that was that was too silly and too distracting. So they're just silent screen recordings. But it's it's it's I mean, I don't know. I haven't I feel like it's it's I'm kind of interested in this kind of open science idea.
You know, it's an idea that this this idea that you can you can really expose the process of doing science. And I've you know, I'm really I like that. I think it's I think it's a both for me. It's kind of. It makes it feel more meaningful doing it if one is kind of exposing the process. And I think for the world at large, I think it's an interesting thing to be able to sort of see inside that process.
And I, you know, I've been surprised that, I mean, I've been doing live streaming now of like our software design stuff for five years, six years now, maybe more. Let's see. I must've started in 2016. So, so it's, it's like seven years now. Um, and I don't think anybody else does this stuff. I think, I think it's, uh, you know, uh, you know, maybe it's, um,
Yeah, you know, I'm sort of surprised when people at universities are like, oh, you know, we everything is, you know, we're so keen on open this, that and the other. It's like, right, right. You know, how about some open science guys? That would be interesting. And people are like, I don't want to do that. I mean, I might make a mistake when I'm doing, you know, writing on my blackboard for myself. And it's like, yeah,
That's that's kind of interesting to see that happen and then then you fix the mistake and then people learn something from it and so on and i i am i mean i'm sure i mean maybe it's just a consequence of them i mean. I really you know.
i just don't care that that you know things i do put out there as an open thing it's like doesn't make any difference to me okay i made a mistake maybe somebody will learn something interesting because they'll say well i made that same kind of mistake and that's how he fixed it and i can fix it this way too and and so on so anyway that's a let's say um uh another another activity and i think um um yeah
So yes, so I'm still feeling reasonably productive, I'm happy to say. So you don't know this, but I'm working on a project about toes. So with this channel, I investigate different toes, theories of everything like string theory and loop quantum gravity, and then yours. And I was realizing that there's not much of a comparison between them. I'm in the process of exploring them with category theory, since that's the most general of all math.
But now I'm thinking, hmm, maybe I should use or at least explore thinking of loop quantum gravity and string theory in the context of of Wolfram's physics project language. I think it's the most promising possibility. By the way, I don't think you're right about category theory. Category theory is is a framework for math, assuming computational reducibility.
It's certainly closely related. So from that point of view, but I think when you think about category theory at a more down in the weeds level, the thing that is a key sort of observation in category theory is you have a morphism, you know, morphism F another morphism G and a fundamental assumption of category theory is then there's a morphism F composed G.
Yes. And. Oh, you're saying it assumes shortcuts in the. It assumes shortcuts. So what's interesting about it, I think it may be a general way of thinking about computational reducibility. It may be sort of a general formalism for that which is reducible. And it in a sense, it is structured to deny irreducibility, which is a problem. I mean, it's a problem in terms of, you know, to capture
Reduce ability in a general way is super interesting and useful, but it isn't the whole story And I think that probably what's happening when you get to the whole liad and the whole infinity groupoid and so on Is that it's it's similar to this point about observers when they get too big. They're nothing That is that by the time you're you know, by the time you're an observer who has everything in you you become sort of somehow simpler
And it is in the specificity that you get the complexity so to speak by the time you're everything you can make a simple statement about it then when you're sort of down in the weeds figuring out this particular you know mathematical theory or whatever else.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 6352,
"audio_duration_seconds": 10029.5,
"completed_at": "2025-12-01T00:16:00Z",
"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": 82.398,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 53.558,
"text": " Everyone who's watching is an observer and what you published is called observer theory. What's your latest discovery about? About observer theory. What's that about? It's about the question of sort of characterizing what it means to be an observer. We have"
},
{
"end_time": 110.572,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 82.637,
"text": " For example, when it comes to asking, what does it mean to do a computation? We have kind of a way of understanding that. We kind of start from Turing machines. We know they're equivalent to lots of other kinds of computational models. We have this notion of what it's like to do a computation. So I've been interested in what is it like to be an observer? Why do I care about that? I care about that because in our physics project, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 136.766,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 111.34,
"text": " Become an essential thing to understand what we're like as observers, because it seems to be the case that what we're like as observers determines what laws of physics we perceive there to be. So it becomes important to be able to characterize what are we like as observers? Because if we were observers that are different from the way we are, we would perceive, I think, laws of physics that are different from the laws of physics that we perceive."
},
{
"end_time": 155.794,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 137.056,
"text": " So in fact i think in the end the picture is going to be that the laws of physics are what they are because we are observers of the kind we are so that's a kind of a different it's sort of a reframing of thinking about what does it mean to have a fundamental theory of physics. It's a theory of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 183.268,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 156.101,
"text": " That is the theory that has to be the way it is for observers like us. It couldn't be the case that you could kind of wheel in another theory that, you know, God could have invented a different theory of the universe for observers like us. It is, I think, inevitable that the laws of physics are the way that they are. So, OK, so how do we understand what what is an observer? What is an observer like us? Right. So what is an observer like us?"
},
{
"end_time": 211.732,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 184.616,
"text": " So first we have to kind of ask, what is an observer doing? The world's a complicated place. We have finite minds. The goal of us as observers is to take the complexity of the world and kind of find a way to stuff it into our finite minds. And in a sense, what that's doing is it's saying there are lots of details in the world, but they're not going to fit in our finite minds. We somehow have to compress what we're seeing in the outside world"
},
{
"end_time": 242.125,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 212.585,
"text": " so that it fits in our finite minds another way to think about it is we've got to make equivalences between different kinds of things like i'm you know i'm i'm sitting here staring at this this camera with and you know and the retina of my eyes there are all kinds of photons falling that are kind of making some elaborate pattern there but all that my brain is perceiving is oh there's a there's a you know this this object in front of me so i'm doing many equivalences and what i what i extract"
},
{
"end_time": 255.35,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 242.654,
"text": " From this sort of the raw physicality of what's going on is something that is is has there many things that the many different arrangements of photons that would lead me to perceive the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 277.995,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 255.674,
"text": " What you realize is that that's a common feature, not only of us human observers, but all the measuring devices we use and all these kinds of things. It's all about there are lots of details in the world. We just want to measure a particular thing. So a quintessential example would be you've got a gas. It's got a bunch of molecules bouncing around trying to measure the pressure of the gas. How do you do it? Well, maybe you just have a piston on the side of the box."
},
{
"end_time": 303.558,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 277.995,
"text": " Can you say how hard is the person pushed by the molecules in the box and there are all kinds of different configurations of molecules hitting the person and they go this way and that way and the other but all that matters in measuring the pressure is what the aggregate force on the piston is so there are all these different configurations of molecules that we equivalence together to deduce that one thing that we care about which is the force on the piston."
},
{
"end_time": 329.821,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 304.48,
"text": " And so i think the four four as we think about our ourselves that the fundamental feature observer is we're doing lots of equivalency. We are taking many different states of the world and saying we don't care about the differences between these things we are just going to we're just going to extract the sort of essence of what's going on and that's what we as an observer are thinking about."
},
{
"end_time": 346.169,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 330.299,
"text": " Now it's interesting to see when we imagine a computational process going on, we're always generating fresh states of the world. We're going from one state of the world, we compute the next state of the world, the next one and so on. We're always generating fresh states of the world."
},
{
"end_time": 374.411,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 346.92,
"text": " On the other hand, when we are being observers, we're sort of doing the opposite. Instead of generating fresh states of the world, we're trying to equivalence together lots of states of the world. We're trying to say there are lots of things which we might think of, which in some sense are different, but we are going to treat them for our purposes as equivalent. Now you might say, how could you deduce anything interesting from knowing about these kinds of equivalences? It turns out"
},
{
"end_time": 392.961,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 374.735,
"text": " That those that sort of the notion of these kinds of equivalences is critical to sort of deducing what we can think of as physical laws because. In some sense a physical law is an attempt to explain some aspect of the universe in a way that we can understand with our minds."
},
{
"end_time": 417.21,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 393.217,
"text": " I mean, we could say about the universe, oh, it just does what it does and it has all these little things going around in it. But we don't have any narrative explanation of what's happening. The kind of the nature of physical laws is we want to take what the universe does and we want to somehow get a description of it that sort of fits in our minds. And so, for example, when it comes to something like, I don't know, a gas with a bunch of molecules bouncing around,"
},
{
"end_time": 446.34,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 417.671,
"text": " The thing that fits in our minds is some aggregate description that talks about pressure and temperature and things like this, not the detailed motions of those molecules. So for us, we're talking about the gas laws for the system underneath. It's got all these molecules bouncing around. It's important that we are only able to talk about things at the level of the gas laws, because if we could talk about things at the level of molecules, we'd come to quite different conclusions about what's happening in the world."
},
{
"end_time": 474.224,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 446.561,
"text": " So this is this is essential to, for example, the second law of thermodynamics, because what is the second law of thermodynamics say? It basically says things tend to get more random over time. What's the application of that? You know, if you are if you take some mechanical motion, you're sort of pushing something backwards and forwards. Well, that's a very systematic motion of atoms in the thing. But that systematic motion tends to get sort of ground down into random motion molecules that we call heat."
},
{
"end_time": 492.807,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 474.65,
"text": " And once you have things as heat it's hard to get them back into systematic motion you don't find that all those molecules around me bouncing around suddenly line themselves up and start systematically pushing the block of water whatever it is so there's this tendency for things to get more random."
},
{
"end_time": 508.985,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 493.131,
"text": " But from the point of view of the individual molecules, that's not what's going on from the point of view of the individual molecules. They're just following certain laws of motion. You could even reverse those laws of motion if you wanted to the molecules are just doing definite things. It's only from the point of view of observers like us."
},
{
"end_time": 526.288,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 508.985,
"text": " With our kind of bounded computational capabilities that we say we don't know how to follow all of those details for us what the molecules are doing should just be considered random and always should be able to deduce is something about the average properties like the average temperature the average pressure whatever else."
},
{
"end_time": 554.292,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 526.596,
"text": " So the fact that we believe that the second law of thermodynamics is right or that the gas laws are right is a consequence of the fact that we are observers of the kind we are. If we were observers who routinely traced every motion of every molecule, we would say, what do you mean that there's randomness in what's going on? There's no randomness. I can see what every individual molecule does. So in a sense that that's an example of a place where being an observer of the kind we are,"
},
{
"end_time": 578.268,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 554.804,
"text": " Is the thing that causes us to perceive laws of the kind we perceive if we were an observer who followed every molecule to do every computation to figure out what would happen with every molecular motion we wouldn't say oh it's just random you can only look at the averages we would be sort of concentrating on the details what was happening at the level of molecules so that so that's an example"
},
{
"end_time": 596.118,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 578.575,
"text": " And by the way the same exact thing seems to happen in space time and in quantum mechanics and the thing that for me is is like spectacular you know realization is in twenty century physics there were three big theories."
},
{
"end_time": 616.749,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 596.613,
"text": " General relativity, the theory of gravity, the theory of space-time, quantum mechanics, and essentially statistical mechanics whose sort of prize exhibit is the second law of thermodynamics, the theory of how systems of very large numbers of components work. Those three basic kind of achievements of 20th century physics"
},
{
"end_time": 631.374,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 617.602,
"text": " I think one had thought that maybe the second law of thermodynamics was derivable from something lower level maybe just from the laws of mechanics you could answer mathematics you could reduce the second law of thermodynamics people thought that."
},
{
"end_time": 653.2,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 631.681,
"text": " the eighteen hundreds they were kind of by the by the early nineteen hundreds they were kind of giving up on that idea and it was just like a mystery that was left hanging out there but there was some thought that the second law might be somehow derivable from something sort of more fundamental and already known for general relativity and quantum mechanics that really hadn't been the thought"
},
{
"end_time": 681.698,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 653.575,
"text": " The thought had been, at least as I, you know, the way I always thought of it is we just happen to get those laws of physics. We, you know, the universe we live in just, you know, for reasons we don't understand happens to have those particular laws of physics. Well, I think that I think we can say more than that now. I think we can say, and it's really surprising that we can say this, but I think we can that all three of those kind of achievements are consequences"
},
{
"end_time": 705.981,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 681.971,
"text": " the fact that we are observers of the kind we are that it is inevitable that we have to perceive the physical world to have those particular laws because we are observers like we are if we were different kinds of observers we would observe different physical laws but we observe those laws because we're observers like we are now okay there's there's more to say about how this all works"
},
{
"end_time": 732.21,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 706.22,
"text": " but the the kind of the thing that i was trying to do with sort of my efforts and observer theory is to characterize something about what observers are it's all about these equivalent things it's all about taking the complexity of the world and sort of stuffing it in a finite mind by equivalencing many different states of the world to say all we care about are these features that's that's one side of it and um"
},
{
"end_time": 757.022,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 733.097,
"text": " Then being able to see kind of how you flow through from what characteristics to observers like us really have. And by the way, many of those characteristics are things so obvious to us that we've never really called them out as things that we actually should say. Yes, this is a feature of us. So, so an example, which turns out to be really important is we believe we're persistent in time."
},
{
"end_time": 785.009,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 757.671,
"text": " We believe that we have a thread of experience that goes from the past to the future, and it's still us. Well, really, in our models of physics, for example, at every moment in time, we're made of different atoms of space. And so in some sense, it's always a different us at every successive moment. But somehow we have the perception"
},
{
"end_time": 810.196,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 785.401,
"text": " that we have this continuous threat of experience. Something that seems very, very obvious to us, but is nevertheless an assumption. It's not obvious that we would have a consistent threat of experience. We could imagine being some kind of alien intelligence that was different at every moment. It was like we have successive generations of humans"
},
{
"end_time": 826.271,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 810.196,
"text": " And you know each one has its own separate experience we can imagine that was somehow compressed i it's very hard to think it through what it would be like to be in that situation where you know we don't have any sort of memory for ourselves i don't really know what that's gonna be."
},
{
"end_time": 842.773,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 826.271,
"text": " A science fiction type scenario that will be interesting to think through but you know the fact that we believe we have this this persistent unique thread of experience for each of us is not real you know it could also be the case that we could."
},
{
"end_time": 867.892,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 842.773,
"text": " Instead of experiencing things in a single thread. There could be multiple threads We could have you know, one one could sort of imagine what it would be like to have sort of multiple consciousnesses in in in the same brain So there's more Sean beast mode Lynch prize pick is making sport season even more fun on projects Whether you're a football fan a basketball fan always feel good to be around"
},
{
"end_time": 895.538,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 868.148,
"text": " Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdown to threes. And if you write, you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states, including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 924.991,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 895.794,
"text": " Would you be able to imagine what that's like or is it part and parcel of you being the kind of observer that you are that you can't even imagine it?"
},
{
"end_time": 945.452,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 925.333,
"text": " i think it's really hard to imagine i've been trying to imagine a bunch of these things i mean i think it's sort of a very interesting challenge to imagine sort of what it would be like to be an intelligence very alien compared to us and you know i made some attempts along those lines actually"
},
{
"end_time": 967.159,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 945.794,
"text": " and i would say it made a little bit of progress but i would say that's a really difficult thing to to wrap one's brain around i mean i i think one of the things this is sort of a a side side point but you know i've been you know mostly familiar with kind of the western tradition of of of of thinking about things and philosophy and so on"
},
{
"end_time": 995.674,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 967.671,
"text": " And, you know, I've been curious because people have been telling me for years, you know, oh, the things you're doing resonate with various kinds of Eastern philosophies and so on. And I've been curious to try to understand how that works. And, you know, my initial investigation say, yes, there are there are things there that that sound an awful lot like things that I've long been talking about, so to speak. But it's really hard for me to even at that very small distance"
},
{
"end_time": 1024.019,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 995.947,
"text": " It's pretty hard for me to get sort of an internal feeling of what it's like to think about things in terms of let's say Eastern philosophy and you know it's it feels like the kind of thing where where it's sort of a strange thing the way we think about things is built on the sort of tower of experience and it's it's like you can you can just jump out into the kind of uncharted universal possibilities and"
},
{
"end_time": 1044.445,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1024.224,
"text": " It's quite disorienting and quite non-human. I mean, in a sense, this is something I've done for the last 40 years or something is investigating what I would now call rule ology. The behavior of just arbitrary simple sets of rules. So, you know, you just write down some computational rules, you start running them, you see what happens."
},
{
"end_time": 1074.514,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1044.957,
"text": " You get all this elaborate, complicated behavior. The question is, can you humanize that? Can you kind of give a human narrative for what's going on? And it can be really difficult. It's kind of like, well, that vaguely looks like this or that. But it is a definite rule. It is a possible sort of law of physics for some kind of artificial physics. And do I have a kind of a human way to describe it? No, not necessarily."
},
{
"end_time": 1099.036,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1074.923,
"text": " um it's it's but in order to get to the point where you have sort of a human way to describe it you end up having to have the sort of tower of civilizational development like okay there's this weird pattern do we have a word for that if we had a word for that i'd be able to say yes you know remember that this the the squiggle do pattern you know and i know what i was talking about and you'd know what what i was talking about"
},
{
"end_time": 1127.858,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1099.36,
"text": " But without having kind of without our civilization having reached that point in as I would call it rural space, without us having reached that point, we haven't colonized it. We haven't said we're going to put down, you know, we're going to call this the city of whatever we're going to put a word down here for this. And once we have that and we all have kind of a common experience of that, then we can start talking about it. But without that, it's really hard to have"
},
{
"end_time": 1148.319,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1128.148,
"text": " you know it's really hard to both for us to talk about it and even for for me to do a good job of forming thoughts about it because i think you know when we form thoughts about things the way that we you know our words and language and so on seem pretty important to us forming thoughts i mean they're the way that we concretize"
},
{
"end_time": 1175.725,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1148.712,
"text": " Our our process of thinking i mean the way i see it these days and this is again a sort of a side a side point to the main things we were talking about but but this whole question about sort of how do we communicate how do we communicate a thought something that there's something going on inside our brains it's a bunch of electrical firings or whatever else but those electrical firings somehow add up to something abstract of thought"
},
{
"end_time": 1194.309,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1176.357,
"text": " And, you know, my electrical firings are going to be different from your electrical firings. What, you know, how do we package up a thought that corresponds to some electrical firings in my brain? How do we package it up, send it to your brain, unpack and have it correspond to something like the same thought?"
},
{
"end_time": 1224.445,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1194.872,
"text": " And I think that's kind of the role of concepts, which we sort of concretize in words and human languages and things. We pack it up into a concept. A concept is a robust thing. It's a cat, for example. And then, you know, I can transport that concept to your brain. You can unpack it and you might have a similar view of what I'm talking about as the one that I internally have. And I think that the, I mean, in one very bizarre kind of way of thinking about things,"
},
{
"end_time": 1251.613,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1224.991,
"text": " This is now jumping around a bit, but when we think about space-time and we think about particles like electrons and so on, what is an electron? An electron is a lump of existence that is somehow unchanged by motion through space. There's an electron here that it moves and it's the same electron in some sense. It is transporting through space and time"
},
{
"end_time": 1281.032,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1251.903,
"text": " It's electron this its existence is being transported in some sense unchanged through space and time, even though in our models of physics, that electron is made of different atoms of space. As it moves through space, it's made of different atoms of space. It's kind of like, you know, the Eddie in the fluid where the Eddie is moving around, although it's made from different atoms at different moments in time. And so I think this this notion of concepts"
},
{
"end_time": 1305.708,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1281.613,
"text": " is a concept is kind of like a particle but not in physical space but in what I call rural space and minds are like different exist at different places in rural space and so when we exchange when we use concepts to sort of exchange thoughts it's like sending a particle from one place in rural space to another and we have the reverse that"
},
{
"end_time": 1335.265,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1306.852,
"text": " Sorry, could you reverse that and then also say that instead of a concept being like a particle, a particle is like a concept and the universe is talking to itself and exchanging ideas. And that's what we see as physics. Yes. Yes, you probably could. I mean, it's kind of like it. It resonates a bit with kind of the universe as the thoughts of God actualize, so to speak, which is sort of a popular Spinoza type theological view of the universe. Yes, I think that's a a"
},
{
"end_time": 1355.913,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1335.708,
"text": " In a sense the sort of the the idea that what the universe is doing is like thinking is kind of this this thing that sort of it's all computation so to speak I've had this idea I've talked about for decades the principle of computational equivalence"
},
{
"end_time": 1378.643,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1356.288,
"text": " The idea that that sort of you can think about all processes as computations not only are they computations there also computations of somehow equivalent sophistication so the computations are going on in our brains that we interpret as thinking are the same level of sophistication of computations as a happening in the universe where we're interpreting what's going on as physics for example."
},
{
"end_time": 1409.292,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1379.445,
"text": " But you know, I think I think the I mean, coming back to Gosh, well, coming back to these questions about some sort of concepts and how we think about that, you know, and you were asking, you know, can I imagine something being a sort of a different kind of observer from the one that I am? It's some one experiment I did a few months ago was the following thing. So you take a generative AI that's making pictures."
},
{
"end_time": 1433.814,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1409.804,
"text": " And you could tell it, you know, make a picture of a cat and a party hat. And right. Right. And I'll show the blog post on screen right now. I read through that. Right. So, yeah, that's one of these pictures is worth with lots of words type type stories. But so so, you know, so you you say. I've got to know what is how does it know what a cat and a party hat is like?"
},
{
"end_time": 1463.012,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1434.36,
"text": " Well, it's because it's seen a few billion pictures on the web and they have captions and it can connect those things and so on. But one of the things you realize is that that when you say a cat in a party hat, that's turned into some some vector of numbers in some embedding space and so on. And you can ask questions like, well, what if I change those numbers just a little bit? I've got the cat in the party hat right here and I've got things that are sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 1490.384,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1463.916,
"text": " Less and less cat like as i go further away and so for example you know i think i have a picture of what i was calling cat island which is the sort of island in the space of possible possible concepts in a sense that correspond to things we would identify as a cat as you go away from that sort of that place and concept space you get things that are less and less cat like and pretty quickly you get to things that we humans don't have words for"
},
{
"end_time": 1512.824,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1490.896,
"text": " Pretty quickly you get to what I was going into concept space, kind of the analog of interstellar space or something where you're just away from everything else. It's a it's an uncolonized area of concept space. And the question you might ask is, well, what fraction of interconcept space has concepts in it? The answer is unbelievably small."
},
{
"end_time": 1540.64,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1513.08,
"text": " So the concepts that we humans have and even the very basic way that I had of sort of mapping out into concept space, we have 10 to the minus 600 of the volume of into concept space is full of concepts that we currently know. So there's an awful lot out there that we have not yet conceptualized, so to speak. And I mean, I went on in that in that blog post I went on and, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 1570.384,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1541.732,
"text": " And that piece, I don't know. It's sort of blog posts, but by the time there are a couple of hundred pages, I'm not sure how bloggy they really are. But anyway, that piece of writing. I have plenty of questions about the way that you write, which will come into play later. But just as a point right now about this inter-concept space. So it's unclear to me. A question I have is how much of inter-concept space is inter BS space like Harry Frankfurt's bullshit space. And what I mean by that is like if you have"
},
{
"end_time": 1594.94,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1570.64,
"text": " 10 points on a on a 2d plane, there are an infinitude of graphs that can connect them. So you mentioned the word embedding, the concept space depends on embedding. And it's not clear to me that if you just pick another point that is something that joins these, that that is also a concept. So it could be meaningful by coincidence, like some number that seems like noise, but someone's like, oh, that's my social insurance number."
},
{
"end_time": 1624.923,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1595.572,
"text": " Well, those words we have to unpack a little bit. The question is, could we make meaning out of the stuff that's there? That will be, I think, a more reasonable kind of starting point. So let's give some examples. Let's say we've got mathematics."
},
{
"end_time": 1654.633,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1625.333,
"text": " And mathematics, we imagine to be based on certain axioms. They might be axioms of set theory. They might be axioms arithmetic. We could just look at all possible axioms of mathematics, all conceivable axioms on which we could make foundations of mathematics. And we can ask the question, the ones that we have, are they more meaningful than other possible ones? Or could we build a completely rich mathematics utterly alien to us on a different set of axioms?"
},
{
"end_time": 1681.032,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1655.555,
"text": " I think, well, there's a complicated thing to say, but I think fundamentally the answer is yes. You can start from any basis and you can wind up with a rich set of concepts, a rich kind of story. Give you another example. Again, we don't really know in this case, but let's say proteins. You know, we humans have about, I don't know, 30,000 kinds of proteins that make us up."
},
{
"end_time": 1707.961,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1681.357,
"text": " you know why those ones are not other ones well you say well evolution found those ones etc etc etc but actually there's no good evidence that we couldn't have chosen completely different ones and they would fit together in some way as well and there would be maybe we'd have some of the same overall attributes that we have but with a completely different basis and my own guess would be that pretty much wherever you pick you can make a rich"
},
{
"end_time": 1732.654,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1708.217,
"text": " story from those things this is kind of a principle of computational equivalence type idea it's something where you know pick a program it can be any kind of program it doesn't need to be a cellular automaton doesn't need to be a turing machine doesn't need to be lambda calculus can be any of these things pick it it can be even a very simple such program pick it and from it you can erect this tower that will eventually reach the same places."
},
{
"end_time": 1740.725,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1732.995,
"text": " so i i think it's most likely that the ones the concepts we got are the ones that"
},
{
"end_time": 1765.384,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1741.237,
"text": " I am but but once we have concepts we build so much around them you know we have words for them once we have a word for them we can you know order it off a web store if you want to buy one we can do all kinds of things and and so we end up in this kind of loop where as soon as we kind of imagine a concept or as soon as biology picks a protein for example it starts to build a lot of stuff around it"
},
{
"end_time": 1785.538,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1765.674,
"text": " And so for us it then seems like well how could it ever be different because look at it we've got all these things in the world you know how could we avoid having circles in the world for example how could we avoid having this. Well because we built so much around those things so i that's that's that would be my view that that i mean it's."
},
{
"end_time": 1814.394,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1786.493,
"text": " That we could as well build a civilization, build life, build lots of other things from very different foundations. Once we've committed to these foundations, we built a tall tower on these particular foundations and then everything else looks far away. But I don't think it's that it couldn't be built that way. It's just that for us, from our vantage point, from the tower that we've built, it looks like nothing or it looks far away."
},
{
"end_time": 1842.039,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1815.128,
"text": " I see. So I was going to ask the question that many people have, which is, is there any hope to communicate with aliens that is contingent on a shared conceptual space? But I'm wondering if I was going to ask if that question should have been rephrased as our aliens observers like us, because if we're if an alien is an observer like us, they would have the same conceptual space. But it sounds like you're saying no. Well, I think the way to think about it is we"
},
{
"end_time": 1870.384,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1842.892,
"text": " I didn't talk much about this kind of concept of rural space but but essentially there are sort of different. Different kind of underlying computational rules that you can be running or that you can attribute to being what the universe is running so to speak and in some sense we can think about well we think about us different ourselves as being at a particular place in physical space."
},
{
"end_time": 1888.063,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1870.845,
"text": " We can also think about ourselves as being at particular places in rural space. The way I see it is that different minds are at different places in rural space. And for example, this whole point about exchanging concepts and so on is like these particles propagating from one place in rural space without change to another."
},
{
"end_time": 1911.459,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1888.439,
"text": " So there's this kind of whole map of minds in real space and minds with sort of common history and same cultural background and same education and so on. Those minds are fairly close together and communication is fairly easy between them. The translation from thoughts in one mind to thoughts in another is not so hard. As you take those minds further apart,"
},
{
"end_time": 1941.391,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1911.698,
"text": " That gets more difficult. You know, let's say the mind is the mind of a dog, for example. Well, there are some things that you can communicate with dogs, maybe some emotional states, things like that. But lots of stuff is really pretty hard to communicate. And then we can say, well, well, what about something further away? What about some other kind of computational system that with the principle of computational equivalence, we can think of as being a mind like system. My favorite example usually is the weather, which people sort of might say has a mind of its own."
},
{
"end_time": 1969.974,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1941.817,
"text": " But the weather is pretty far away in real space from us. It has it has it does mind like things, but it's the translation from its mind like activities to our mind like activities is hard. It's distant. We won't think of it as having experiences like us when when we're looking and this is this is always a sort of interesting problem of ethics and so on. You know, when we we have certain internal experiences,"
},
{
"end_time": 1976.459,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1970.367,
"text": " We look at other people and we say, I imagine those people are having similar experiences to mine."
},
{
"end_time": 2004.923,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1977.09,
"text": " And as those people get sort of further away, whether it's, you know, culturally or other things, it feels less, you know, you're less sort of, oh, yes, I can empathize with that person. I can imagine what they're thinking, so to speak. By the time you get to a cat or dog, it's pretty far away. What's the thing thinking? We can kind of make up a story about it, but it's pretty hard to to kind of get in its mind, so to speak. And I think that's"
},
{
"end_time": 2035.469,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2005.845,
"text": " That's kind of the, you know, when we imagine sort of these, these sort of minds that are very different from ours, we just can't get in them in the same way that we can sort of get in another human mind. Now, now an interesting case is AI, because if you look at people's interactions with AI, and particularly with, oh, I was just a friend of mine just made a humanoid robot that sort of interesting because you can watch people's interactions with that."
},
{
"end_time": 2058.285,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2036.22,
"text": " You know it's the l l m a i plus the humanoid robot thing and it's really interesting because you know we all basically empathize with the thing pretty quickly in many ways you know it's even though we kind of know rationally it's a bag of bits more or less we still sort of treat it in some rather human way"
},
{
"end_time": 2080.486,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2058.763,
"text": " no at some level we could think about what every brain is just a bag of neurons with a bunch of electrical activity and so on why should we treat it in some special way we treated in a special way because we empathize with it and we sort of map it into our own internal experiences i think you know in the case of a i wear an awful lot of the time."
},
{
"end_time": 2109.633,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2080.845,
"text": " We are going to increasingly sort of anthropomorphize it to the point where it feels like it's something like us, so to speak, just as other people feel like that. There's something like us, even though we don't have that inner experience of being them, so to speak. So, I mean, I think, uh, um, let's see, I think you, you had, you asked about what sort of communication with aliens and so on. I think that, um, uh, where I see it is."
},
{
"end_time": 2135.367,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2110.265,
"text": " You know, you go explore the universe. We go send out spacecraft. They get a certain distance. As a spacecraft goes out, you know, to the outside the solar system or something, it has a different point of view about the universe because it's in a different place in physical space. We could also imagine sort of sending out the analog of rural spacecraft, trying to understand the universe from different points of view like that."
},
{
"end_time": 2155.179,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2135.64,
"text": " And that's in a sense it's sort of that's the big intellectual activity i suppose a big intellectual journey of can we colonize rural space can we get these different points of view about how to think about things how far out can we get and i think one of the points is that that to even be able to discuss it."
},
{
"end_time": 2182.824,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2155.674,
"text": " We have to have all gone together to some place in real space. Otherwise, we don't have these shared words to talk about what's happening. Right. If we send out something into real space and it's sufficiently far enough, would we even be able to say that it's us that has colonized it? It's a good question. I mean, I think by the time we have, you know, I think it's like translating from one language to another. You know, if you've got some sufficiently obscure language,"
},
{
"end_time": 2211.903,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2183.114,
"text": " There's probably no English to its dictionary. It goes through five steps or something. And that's the kind of thing one would see in that case. And so then the question would be, you know, are you translating to language X? Well, no, it went through this step, that step, that step, that step. So, you know, I suspect that's the way in which that's how it will attenuate, so to speak. What would you say is the difference between consciousness and observation? Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 2239.718,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2212.585,
"text": " I mean, I think. Consciousness, in some sense, people imagine as some sort of inner feeling of existing and. That's. I mean, what I'm interested in and kind of the operation of observers is something that you could say"
},
{
"end_time": 2267.295,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2240.247,
"text": " Is a is an exterior membrane to whatever you might think consciousness is that is it is asking the question? how do you take what's out there in the world and Get it into something that is processable by a mind The question of the inner feeling of the mind which I suppose is what you might think of as consciousness is Is one that I think is a very slippery concept. Let's start by saying that"
},
{
"end_time": 2279.94,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2267.807,
"text": " It's a slippery concept, but I think we have certain feelings for what consciousness is like. For example, this continuous thread of experience is a symptom of consciousness, so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 2307.551,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2280.196,
"text": " Some of this this fine interest is a symptom of consciousness I suppose that for me I've been more interested in sort of cataloging the symptoms of consciousness because they allow us to get sort of an idea of what laws of Physics we we will conclude there to be so to speak I've been more interested in that than in asking the more inward looking question of sort of what what is that thing inside that has these particular symptoms and I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2335.35,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2307.875,
"text": " You know, an exercise I've been doing, I need to finish it. I started a couple of years ago is to just sort of write the story of what it would be like to be a computer. It's like you go from, you know, from the time you booted up to the time you crash. It's kind of like a human lifetime. You accumulate certain memory, you have certain experiences, all those kinds of things. What's that like? What will be the inner experience of being a computer?"
},
{
"end_time": 2362.688,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2335.606,
"text": " Now, right now, we don't project much. I mean, people do and always have kind of talked to their computers and said the computer is having a hard time now. It's, you know, the computer feels X, Y, Z, but it's somehow still a little bit distant. I think it will become less distant with sort of humanoid robots and with sort of, you know, steadily better LLM type technology and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 2388.285,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2362.961,
"text": " But I think this, um, this sort of, what does it feel like to be a computer is, uh, and we may discover when we, you know, as we try and project ourselves into that, just as we have, you know, we have this non-trivial thing that we're all pretty decent at doing, or most people are pretty decent at doing is sort of projecting themselves into another human, so to speak, to imagine what that other human is thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 2396.118,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2388.797,
"text": " And we don't as much imagine what a computer is thinking yet, but we probably perfectly well could."
},
{
"end_time": 2425.862,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2396.527,
"text": " once we can imagine that all kinds of terrible things happen because because then you know our sort of ethical principles about other people and oh we don't want the other people to feel bad and so on as soon as we can feel like a computer so to speak we have all those issues for it too there is lots of intelligence in the universe lots every physical process all these kinds of things are examples of mind like activity the issue is those minds are far away in real space"
},
{
"end_time": 2455.538,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2426.527,
"text": " And in a sense, what we're doing in science and natural science is attempting to make bridges across, you know, we're attempting to say there's the system in nature and it does what it does. And we are finding a way so that we can get some human connection to that system in nature. Cause otherwise we're just watching the system doing what it does. And in a sort of pre-scientific society or for many things, even today that we don't have a way to think about in terms of science, it's just, it's just doing what it does."
},
{
"end_time": 2479.48,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2455.947,
"text": " and it's not we don't have this kind of we haven't been able to make this kind of connection to it and that's that's kind of how we're able to say oh we we we can i mean a lot of the connections we make in science today are of the kind where we say we're going to crush this thing we're going to be able to say we know exactly what it does we can kind of imagine our minds what it's going to do rather than"
},
{
"end_time": 2502.858,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2479.48,
"text": " It's doing what it's doing and we have to sort of relate to it in some way where we're treating it as an equal mind so speak to hours and we're merely trying to understand it it's like saying for different humans you could say i'm gonna crush this and i'm just gonna say i know how humans work that person is going to do this this and this you know i don't have them."
},
{
"end_time": 2517.534,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2503.268,
"text": " You know i'm everything is predictable i'm i'm but in fact with humans were quite used to the idea that you know we're doing what we're doing another human is doing what they're doing we can kind of communicate with them but they're both sort of equal mind so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 2545.401,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2517.944,
"text": " with nature the kind of the conceit of a lot of science has been that we are the minds in charge so to speak that nature is just you know we can just say we know what's going to happen we've got the science that tells us what's going to happen rather than with somehow sort of uh co-equal minds with with what's happening in nature i mean there are other traditions not the the western scientific tradition where that's much more of a thing um and again you know it's it's challenging"
},
{
"end_time": 2572.142,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2545.606,
"text": " For for somebody like me to to really, I mean, even though maybe I have a slight advantage because I've thought scientifically about these things a lot to sort of get into that that way of thinking about things. But that's what I tend to think that, you know, right around the time when people realize that AIs are not that different from us, that's around the time when people will decide there's aliens all around this kind of alien intelligence all around us, so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 2602.278,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2572.415,
"text": " It is just that we haven't been able to make these bridges necessarily to be able to communicate with it. I mean, kind of an interesting thought experiment came from a pitch some people made me a few years ago about how they're going to make a company in which they're going to send interstellar spacecraft out and they're going to go out into the universe. They're going to discover extraterrestrial technology. They're going to bring it back to Earth."
},
{
"end_time": 2632.483,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2602.602,
"text": " They're going to accelerate our technology by a million years. Okay. So that's, I hear far out pitches all the time. That one might be the furthest out pitch I've ever heard for a startup, so to speak. But the, what's interesting about it is, is, is the sort of the philosophically unpeeling that pitch because what's it really saying? It's saying, uh, you know, when we say we go out into the universe and we discover technology, alien technology, we bring it back to earth. We accelerate human technology by a million years."
},
{
"end_time": 2660.913,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2633.166,
"text": " Okay, the problem is there is alien technology all around the universe. There are pulsars doing all kinds of elaborate things with magnetic fields. There are this, there's that. There's all kinds of stuff going on in the universe. The issue is what is technology? Technology is something where we have managed to reel it in to connect it to human purposes that we care about. I mean, you were asking before, is there, you know, is there meaning in inter-concept space?"
},
{
"end_time": 2683.097,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2661.425,
"text": " Well the issue is it's got like saying is that technology to be made out of this kind of physical process. It's not the physical process is doing what it's doing the making technology out of it is can we kind of reel it in to connect it to things that we care about similar to can we sort of build meaning on top of this thing can we can we connect it to things that we care about."
},
{
"end_time": 2700.913,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2683.592,
"text": " What's interesting there is to realize, well, there's technology everywhere. No, there's not technology, there's the raw material for technology everywhere. But this question of, it is this very human activity of saying, oh yes, we found"
},
{
"end_time": 2726.067,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2701.271,
"text": " A you know pizza electric material great now we can use that to make you know a piece of a clock or something i'm sure but but you know it's the thing is the thing and the question is can we connect it to human purposes and human purposes have evolved over time i mean there are there plenty of it's like you know random elements i don't know lutetium or something"
},
{
"end_time": 2755.742,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2726.374,
"text": " When talking about observation and equivalencing, is that to be understood as the same as coarse graining, so you don't care about the details?"
},
{
"end_time": 2778.524,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2756.374,
"text": " course grading is a version of that i mean there are there are a whole collection of different ideas that sort of are all are all versions of equivalence in course grading things being on attractors compression there's there's a bunch of different names for this i mean this is a this is a core idea that's shown up in a zillion different places but yes course grading is kind of the"
},
{
"end_time": 2806.647,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2778.524,
"text": " The name that that gibbs invented in for statistical mechanics in the in the early part of the twentieth century for sort of a version of this that the challenge with talking about course grading and just saying oh we just do course grading and then we understand what's going on. The problem is what's a valid kind of course grading to do. That's the real question just say we bucket things together but which equivalence things can we do because there are some equivalent things that"
},
{
"end_time": 2813.899,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2807.244,
"text": " are very ornate to do they would require a lot of computational to be able to figure out oh this is really equivalent to that."
},
{
"end_time": 2840.555,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2814.36,
"text": " Or you can coarse-grain so finely that you become synonymous with the system. Absolutely. So you can coarse-grain down to the level of the atoms. Right, exactly. But the question is what is that fuzziness that you're putting on there? What's the thing that the fuzzifier is able to do and not able to do? Knowing the mechanics of the coarse-graining is important."
},
{
"end_time": 2866.578,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2840.811,
"text": " So you have to discuss the process of equivalencing as well as just discuss the fact that you have equivalence, so to speak. Okay, that's super interesting. So would you say that observation is the fact of equivalencing or is the act of equivalencing? Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon"
},
{
"end_time": 2890.981,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2870.162,
"text": " Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
},
{
"end_time": 2917.517,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2895.265,
"text": " Well, I mean, the output of an observation is the result of equivalencing. The process of observation is a process of equivalencing. So, for example, this becomes important. Oh, I don't know, for quantum computing, this is important. We don't fully understand this, but it's important. That is, you know, in our models of physics,"
},
{
"end_time": 2942.039,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2918.148,
"text": " There's sort of these many possible histories that correspond to a multi-way graph of possible things that could happen in the world, so to speak. And there's branchings, there's mergings. There's continually branching and merging. I think a key observation is that just as we humans are, you could say, coarse graining, are sort of a big on the scale of atoms of space,"
},
{
"end_time": 2969.889,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2942.312,
"text": " We're big on the scale of individual molecules and statistical mechanics. We're also big on the scale of different parts of history. So in branchial space, as we call it, the space of quantum branches, we are extended entities in branchial space. So we are effectively averaging or equivalencing different branches of history. It's a weird thing. I mean, it means that we, and this is where it's really important that we"
},
{
"end_time": 2998.66,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2970.333,
"text": " We believe there's a single thread of experience that we have, yet that single thread of experience is actually an aggregate, I think, of many different paths of history. And that's kind of an idea that is kind of this equivalencing of different sort of paths in pieces of branchial space is sort of a"
},
{
"end_time": 3016.886,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2999.206,
"text": " Well then there's a question of what's the mechanism by which that happens. You know if we are and this is what's important for a quantum computer it's one thing inside the quantum computer that has as many different threads of computation going on but then the question is okay humans are going to be looking at the answer."
},
{
"end_time": 3041.63,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3017.193,
"text": " If they were quantum observers looking at the answer, it would be done at that point. It would have these many threads of computation and there are lots of different threads and there are different places in branch hill space and everybody's happy. There's nothing more to do. But to get the thing to the point where us kind of simplistic humans can sort of absorb it"
},
{
"end_time": 3069.582,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3042.108,
"text": " You have to equivalence together these threads of history. You have to sort of find a way to say, and this is what happened. This is the one thing that happened. We can't have in our minds the kind of multiple branches of quantum history. That's a thing that we, in our common experience, we equivalence these things together. So sort of the output phase of a quantum computer has to be this thing where we are doing those equivalence things."
},
{
"end_time": 3087.483,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3069.906,
"text": " Now the fact is that in the traditional formalism of quantum mechanics that really doesn't come up. In the traditional formalism of quantum mechanics, and it might be a mistake, the idea is there are all these quantum amplitudes and then oh there's this measurement operator and kaboom you just get the answer."
},
{
"end_time": 3114.531,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3088.37,
"text": " And I think that sort of denies the fact that actually there is a process of equivalencing that has to go on to get to the point where you have an answer, to get to the point where you can sort of connect to a human mind that believes there is a definite thread of things that happened. So I have two questions here. One is what is doing that process of equivalencing?"
},
{
"end_time": 3143.08,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3115.06,
"text": " And then number two, you stated the word belief a few times, like we believe that we have a persistence in time and so on. So mathematically, what is meant in your model by the word belief is the belief the same as assumption, we assume so and so like, what is belief? Well, okay, so first, what's doing the equivalent saying the different cases, different things."
},
{
"end_time": 3169.002,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3143.592,
"text": " You know in some of these physical systems like the piston with a bunch of molecules bouncing around the what is the equivalence in there? There's more to analyze in this and there's there's about 10,000 kinds of measurements we know how to make and for every one of them you can ask what's really going on and they all turn out to be that they're actually a couple of different categories, but but they're pretty much all"
},
{
"end_time": 3195.794,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3169.428,
"text": " Something is being aggregated. Lots of individual molecules are coming in, but there's an aggregate pressure. There's one different case, which is things like weighing balances, where you're saying, you know, there are many different ways you can make a certain weight, but at some point the balance tips over. So it's kind of a discrete output, kind of like what happens in standard quantum mechanics with qubits and so on. There is a discrete output."
},
{
"end_time": 3211.527,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3196.169,
"text": " Whereas in the case of measuring pressure or something you just have a continuous number out but what what's happening when you measure pressure what's happening is every time a molecule hits the piston it makes some atomic scale defamation in the in the shape of the piston."
},
{
"end_time": 3234.787,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3211.937,
"text": " And the but that atomic scale defamation quickly sort of you know get smeared out because the speed of sound is high and the solid it's kind of that that defamation is kind of you know the atoms are wiggling around it quickly that that quickly disappears somehow and that's that's sort of a common thing that the the process of equivalence saying"
},
{
"end_time": 3263.882,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3235.282,
"text": " is happening on a time scale that's short compared to the the way that you observe it so you know for our brains with our millisecond multi-millisecond cycle times sort of things that happen in less time than that they are we we perceive them as being atomic things we don't perceive those as being separated if things are separated by millisecond we don't notice that they're just the same kind of thing but this again comes into well what"
},
{
"end_time": 3293.217,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3264.292,
"text": " We have this inner experience of things happening and that inner experience has done this aggregation. And you say, what does it mean to believe something? Well, what is, what is, how does that, how does it sort of work in a, I think that the way to think about it is that the kind of the thing that you will do to make the decision about what to do next in a sense is the thing that you"
},
{
"end_time": 3311.732,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3293.524,
"text": " operationally believe so to speak that is if you're making it's kinda like a block chain you're kinda making a succession of decisions and then you go on and do the next thing. And i think the issue is what are those atomic decisions so to speak what what are those things that."
},
{
"end_time": 3334.172,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3312.022,
"text": " You have, you know, you've taken lots of detail about what could be happening and you've said, I think this happened. And then you go on and say, I think this happened and so on. I think that's, that's the sense in which we mean in, in terms of kind of our attempts to build theories, this point about belief."
},
{
"end_time": 3363.609,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3334.701,
"text": " Is the question of what exactly can we what can we observe what can we talk about i mean it's the same thing happened in the early twentieth century when you know i'm starting was inventing relativity and things like this what i'm starting you know highlighted was what can we talk about about some of the night what can we know that things that we we just can't know and so don't worry about it make a theory in which we don't have to know the things we can't know"
},
{
"end_time": 3393.831,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3364.036,
"text": " and we're only talking about the things we can know and it's the same same thing that i'm talking about here make a theory that talks only about things we can know and then it will be a feature of that theory that that the theory has to have certain characteristics because it's only talking about things we can know in the case of the gas for example the fact that we can't know where all those individual molecules go means that we have to concentrate on certain attributes of the gas about which we can make formulas and things like this"
},
{
"end_time": 3422.705,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3394.326,
"text": " I'm unclear if it's your own model that dictates the laws of physics because if that was the case, this belief in the persistence of time"
},
{
"end_time": 3451.459,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3423.114,
"text": " Then someone like Heraclitus who didn't believe that he was a continuous thread throughout time and make some arguments about that. Does he then perceive physics differently? Yeah, interesting question. I mean, I think we are all so close together in royal space that observers, you know, do the do the cats and dogs perceive physics the same? Do the do the whales perceive it the same? Does the weather perceive physics the same? You know, I'm not sure how we"
},
{
"end_time": 3481.391,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3451.92,
"text": " as i say us humans i think are so close together in the ways that we perceive things because we all have the same sensory apparatus give or take we have many of the same ideas give or take um i think that the the the distance between sort of ways that humans could perceive it is is uh uh is not very great you know if we say what's the physics of the weather the physics as perceived by the weather"
},
{
"end_time": 3511.032,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3481.937,
"text": " I don't know. Hugely different potentially. What's the physics as perceived by a mosquito? I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's what's important probably to the mosquito is a bunch of air currents and this and that and the other of which we have no description really. I mean, even, even if we think about, let's say dogs, which are, you know, olfactory, which were where smell is much more important sense than vision, for instance."
},
{
"end_time": 3540.964,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3511.493,
"text": " The, you know, imagining what the laws of physics, the smell laws of physics are like is, I don't know, it's, you know, it's a good exercise to think it, try and think through what it would be like. I mean, the fact that we perceive the laws of physics as we do is, for example, our physical size is important to the way we perceive the laws of physics. If, and for example, the fact that we talk about space as being a thing,"
},
{
"end_time": 3566.101,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3541.596,
"text": " Is a consequence of various kinds of aspects of our size. Let me explain that the, you know, we think we look around, we say, you know, there's an extent of space and the room that I'm in is in this particular state at this particular time. And another time it may be in a different state, but we see space as a unified extended thing."
},
{
"end_time": 3592.261,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3566.732,
"text": " Right. So we can look around and we just say space is out there and it, it, you know, we have a state of the world, a state of space. Okay. But the reason that works is because we look around, you know, I can see maybe a hundred meters away through a window. Okay. The light that's coming to me from a hundred meters away arrives in microsecond in a microsecond or something."
},
{
"end_time": 3609.326,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3592.995,
"text": " That time that takes the light to arrive is really short compared to the time it takes my brain to process the scene i'm looking at so for me it is a good way of thinking about things to say that the world consists of a series of frames."
},
{
"end_time": 3637.773,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3609.684,
"text": " where you know a series of frames in time where is the state of space at this moment in time then the state of space at that moment in time and so on so it makes sense for me to kind of aggregate up my view of the universe in that space out there and you know things progress through time now if i was for example if my brain worked a million times faster than it does replace human neural circuitry by digital digital electronics it'll be a million times faster"
},
{
"end_time": 3660.998,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3638.268,
"text": " what will the world seem like if we thought a million times faster well then the light that's coming to me from there i will have already i will have been able to process by the time the light arrives i can already make you know think something different so to speak so it no longer will seem the case that i it will no longer be obvious that i should aggregate space"
},
{
"end_time": 3672.295,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3661.271,
"text": " As a thing that is at this moment in time it's something similarly if i was much bigger than i am even with the same processing speed as we have right now if we were the size of planets for example"
},
{
"end_time": 3701.186,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3672.705,
"text": " we would you know if if one person was the size of a planet let's say then we would always be thinking about oh the speed of light we can't think about just we can't think about oh the whole solar system is just one blob of space because the different parts of it we'd always be thinking oh you know that part of the the light signal from neptune hasn't arrived yet type thing and we'd be able to think about things while we were waiting for that light signal to arrive"
},
{
"end_time": 3729.582,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3701.186,
"text": " And again, we wouldn't be able to wouldn't make sense for us to aggregate sort of space as this blob that exists that has a state at a particular moment in time. I mean, we see that very concretely when we start thinking about, you know, reference frames for talking about, you know, the time on interplanetary spacecraft, things like that, we can see you just can't do it by the time you're talking about things on that scale with our human scale processing speeds."
},
{
"end_time": 3758.592,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3729.838,
"text": " we you know this idea that we sort of aggregate space at moments in time no longer works so that's an example of where sort of the because we are the way we are we choose to talk it talk about the universe the way we choose to talk about the universe and by the way i think there are a whole bunch of other aspects of us that we take for granted like that feature of us about our size and the fact that space makes sense to talk about we completely take that for granted"
},
{
"end_time": 3784.189,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3759.138,
"text": " And, you know, here's another example of something we take for granted. We take for granted that we have a certain degree of free will. We imagine that we have free will. So, for example, we imagine that if there's a science experiment, we could just do any science experiment we choose to do. We imagine that we can take that polarizer in some quantum experiment and we can turn it to 30 degrees or 60 degrees and whatever angle we think we can turn it to, we can turn it to that angle."
},
{
"end_time": 3811.903,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3784.599,
"text": " We don't imagine that actually the act of turning it to that angle changes the world in such a way that next we have to turn it to some other angle. We have the belief that we have free will and that's important for a bunch of things about our perception of the world. And there's a whole chain of these kinds of things that you might, that seem obvious to us. Another good example is motion. The possibility of pure motion is non-trivial."
},
{
"end_time": 3834.718,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3812.261,
"text": " That is, the fact that we can take a step forward and still be the same us as when we were in a different place is not obvious. If we were made up from little eddies in a fluid, we might be able to do the same thing, but it might not be surprising to us that we can't just be moved around."
},
{
"end_time": 3860.316,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3835.026,
"text": " We have to be, and you know, so this idea that pure motion is possible is another kind of assumption about the world. Another thing about sort of the way that we, because we are the way we are, we sort of choose to describe the world in a certain way. I mean, the discussion about space, because we are the way we are with the scales that we're at"
},
{
"end_time": 3890.128,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3860.708,
"text": " We can choose to describe the world in terms of space and separately time, for example. Explain. I think that the more we understand about the way we are as observers, with all the arbitrariness of the way biological evolution has taken us to where we are, technology has given us measuring devices of the kind we have and so on, with all that arbitrariness, as"
},
{
"end_time": 3915.555,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3890.623,
"text": " as we think through what that means we probably will learn more about how physics has to be the way it is as perceived by us and you know we could have a and so i think that's you know i had always assumed that we'd be on sort of a search for what is the rule that gives us the universe as the universe is and what i've come to realize is"
},
{
"end_time": 3944.138,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3915.794,
"text": " And this is kind of this idea of the Ruliyad that the universe is running all possible rules. It is merely that we are sampling a slice of all those possible rules. There's a slice determined by the way we are. An analogous thing. We are at a particular place in the universe physically in physical space. We don't have a theory for why we're here rather than somewhere else. I'm not sure a theory like that would make sense. We just happen to be in this galaxy."
},
{
"end_time": 3969.241,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3944.428,
"text": " On this planet, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that is, and so our view of the universe is based on the point of view of critters that are on this planet looking up at the sky or whatever else. And if we were somewhere else, if we lived, you know, near the center of our galaxy, or we lived somewhere completely different, or we lived at a different time in the history of the universe, whatever, we would have a different point of view about the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 3995.111,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3969.667,
"text": " and it's the same story with with kind of rule your space that we have a different point of view about the universe the non-trivial fact the real sort of scientific in you know bite here is that once we are observers with certain general characteristics we can make certain general conclusions about the laws of physics that we will perceive and so it's kind of what goes in what comes out what goes in is"
},
{
"end_time": 4024.65,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3995.64,
"text": " Some characterization of us as observers what comes out as the laws of physics we have to observe and it's it's sort of interesting because it's like where the laws of physics come from well they in a sense come from the fact that we are the way we are and and that's a you know for me that was always a very confusing thing you know in the end why did we get this universe and not another and the answer i think is we got this perceived universe because we are the way we are"
},
{
"end_time": 4047.483,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4025.23,
"text": " and why are we the way we are well that you can say well how do we come you know how do we evolve this way blah blah blah but in the end it's like asking why are we on this particular planet and not another one it's a sort of contingent fact about the world that we are here and not somewhere else and so similarly that we are the way we are as observers so to speak"
},
{
"end_time": 4077.176,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4047.807,
"text": " Stephen, if what you're saying is that the question of why these laws and not some other set of laws is tantamount to why this planet Earth and not some other planet like some from the Andromeda Galaxy, I don't see what's non-trivial about that. Well, yeah, but the thing that's really non-trivial"
},
{
"end_time": 4102.363,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4077.602,
"text": " Is that you say well why is general activity correct well for any observer that has these very general characteristics. Inevitably you have those precise laws that's the non trivial part if it was just saying well you know because we because of the details of the way we are you know it's there's there's a really a non trivial sort of heavy lifting piece of science."
},
{
"end_time": 4128.353,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4102.688,
"text": " between this impression that we have about, you know, these, these very coarse statements about the observers that we are and the precise statements about what laws of physics we perceive. So Steven, you had a variety of breakthroughs recently, especially since COVID remarkably, if you had to pin a majority of the recent breakthroughs of yours to one key insight, what would it be?"
},
{
"end_time": 4155.179,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4128.899,
"text": " So for instance, it could be the introduction of hyper graphs or the coining of computational irreducibility or the hiring of Jonathan Gerard. Jonathan's been very helpful for sure. No, I mean, you know, the I think. Look, the first statement is sort of its computation all the way down, that you can really that computation is"
},
{
"end_time": 4181.203,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4155.964,
"text": " The way of thinking about the world, you know, if you look at how have we formalized the world, it's some it's kind of, you know, the invention of human language is a formalization of the world. Logic is a formalization of the world. You know, mathematics is a formalization of the world. Computation is a formalization of the world. And, you know, in terms of what has allowed me to get where I've gotten to,"
},
{
"end_time": 4206.288,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4181.647,
"text": " you know a large part of that is taking seriously that idea of computation is a way of formalizing the world and building tools you know building a whole world language technology stacker and so on around that idea of computation is a way to formalize the world now once you had that idea you start thinking about well what about physics how do i formalize that then so"
},
{
"end_time": 4236.032,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4206.596,
"text": " The next big fact is principle of computational equivalence, computational irreducibility. Those are very closely related. That's a key intuitional idea that I originally had in the early 1980s that is a driver for a lot of other things. In more recent times, I would say that this whole business about multi-computation, understanding the RULIAD, understanding the role of observers,"
},
{
"end_time": 4263.729,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4236.613,
"text": " This is it's kind of this idea of the relationship of sort of underlying computation and the really add the sort of entangled limit of all possible computational processes, understanding the interplay between that and what we're like as observers. The fact that you can derive science from that."
},
{
"end_time": 4294.036,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4264.224,
"text": " Is really pretty interesting and it did not see that coming. I mean that you know if you'd asked me Even four years ago or something, you know Did I think we will be able to derive general relativity? And well, I knew we could derive general relativity from underlying hypergraph evolution. I've known that since the 1990s I thought it was graphs back then but hyper graphs are easier. Um the the um but the concept"
},
{
"end_time": 4323.387,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4294.582,
"text": " that there is some kind of that there's an inevitability to these kinds of laws of physics for observers like us. I really didn't see that coming and I think I'm sure that it has echoes and resonances in lots of things that people have imagined particularly a couple thousand years ago or more in sort of early thinkings about philosophy and how it relates to our descriptions of the world."
},
{
"end_time": 4351.51,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4323.677,
"text": " You know the main thing that we've achieved in the last couple of thousand years is you know we can run computer simulations and actually you know see how this works with some concreteness so to speak rather than having just some some sort of vaguer idea about what's going on but I would say that the the I mean for me this this kind of the role of the observer the idea of multi computation the really add the kind of you know the the inevitability of science the way it is"
},
{
"end_time": 4378.882,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4351.817,
"text": " Those are important ideas and I think, you know, we're, I suspect that a lot of the technical detail of hypergraph rewriting all this kind of thing is a very useful way to get there. But in the end, it will be possible to state a lot of these things in terms of, it's one of these things where you can think about computation theory and"
},
{
"end_time": 4406.237,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4379.292,
"text": " If you don't have Turing machines or something like that, you can't concretely talk about it. You're just sort of still just vaguely saying things. You need a concrete basis on which to discuss things. But in the end, the core ideas are independent of that basis. And so it is, I think, with the whole observer theory, really add sort of, you know, inevitability of laws of physics and so on story. Yeah, many of these ideas are like"
},
{
"end_time": 4429.787,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4407.398,
"text": " fountains where other ideas cascade out of them. So you mentioned the power of computation or thinking about computation as fundamental equivalencing, computational irreducibility observers, multi computation really add. So let's, let's call those ideas fountain ideas for the sake of this conversation. What recipe would you give your former self to have some of these fountain ideas more often?"
},
{
"end_time": 4466.135,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4437.09,
"text": " there's a whole bunch of computational irreducibility and what has what ends up happening is one tries to come up with with these things you know i think i don't think i'm batting too horribly in terms of having these ideas with some with decent frequency i mean because frankly some of these ideas if you have them too quickly there's not a lot you can do with them they they need a certain degree of of development before they're before they're very meaningful"
},
{
"end_time": 4495.93,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4466.578,
"text": " I mean, so I think that, you know, there's a maximum rate. In fact, one of the things that has been a frustration to me recently is that there are so many of these things coming that, you know, I'm writing about all these different things. And I think some of the things I'm writing are quite, you know, important and seeds for a lot of other things, but I'm going so quickly that they don't have as much chance to develop as they probably need. So I think there's a maximum rate of generating sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 4525.077,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4496.817,
"text": " You know, these potentially big ideas. And if you exceed that rate, it's kind of just totally confusing and you can't achieve anything. So it's not that when you saturate it, some just fall to the wayside. It's that somehow it's like spinning plates and all of them fall. No, I mean, if you do it too fast, then it's just like, well, I have this idea, but each of these ideas needs a certain development. I mean, you know, when one first, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 4555.486,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4525.674,
"text": " one of the things that i personally spend a lot of effort on is sort of cleaning ideas that is when i have some vague sense of an idea it's like what is the essence of that idea what is the really simple i could say it in a sentence or two version of that idea and that takes a while i mean maybe maybe a smarter me would be able to do that more quickly but it's it's um you know taking figuring out what's what's the essence what's important what's not"
},
{
"end_time": 4570.213,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4556.237,
"text": " i mean i've had the good fortune i suppose in my life to do that a whole bunch of times and in fact the thing i do for a living building designing and building our computational language is a kind of that"
},
{
"end_time": 4599.155,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4570.776,
"text": " Critically relies on that skill because that's all about taking kind of all these things that one might think about computationally and kind of Crispening them down to these kind of primitives that we implement in our language and so on So that's a you know I get to do this pretty much every day and I've been doing it kind of every day for 40 years And that's that's a useful experience to have if your goal is sort of the crispening of ideas for kind of basic intellectual development so to speak"
},
{
"end_time": 4628.49,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4599.548,
"text": " I think that's one thing. I mean, another thing for me is tools. And, you know, when I can do an experiment with welcome language, you know, I've built this whole technology stack. Well, conveniently, millions of other people use it too. But first and foremost, I kind of built it so I could do stuff myself kind of my sort of personal superpower, so to speak. And that works really well. And it's really necessary for, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4658.234,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4629.087,
"text": " I could not, many, many things I've discovered, I would never have had the built-in intuition to figure out that the way they work is the way they actually work. I discovered the way they work by doing experiments, computational experiments, and I wouldn't have had the confidence actually, even if I'd imagined that was the way things might work, I wouldn't have had the confidence to say that really is the way things work without having seen them as the result of an experiment."
},
{
"end_time": 4680.845,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4658.814,
"text": " I think it's kind of the, I might have imagined, although I didn't, back in the beginning of the 1980s, that really simple computational rules could lead to complicated behavior. I didn't imagine that. I actually imagined the opposite. And had it not been for the fact that I had explicit computer experiments where I could just plainly see that's what's going on, I wouldn't have believed it."
},
{
"end_time": 4711.135,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4681.135,
"text": " so that's a necessary piece you know if it was purely i'm going to sit and think about this stuff just in my own mind i would never have got there and and it's the same with with tons of things i've been doing so i would say that the the you know probably the two things that have been important to me are the tools having built the sort of tool tower of tools that allow me to to do experiments get intuition and so on that's one thing and to even even the very act of of putting my thoughts into computational language"
},
{
"end_time": 4740.964,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4711.613,
"text": " is a way of crystallizing what I'm talking about. It's like, well, I vaguely imagine this and that and the other. Ah, interesting. Let me write a function that does that. And it's kind of like when people say, I'm going to, I'm going to write down a mathematical proof. Yeah, it's kind of relevant to see the proof and to check you've got the right answer. But, but more important is the very fact that you're formulating things. The setup is the important part. You know, it's kind of like when, um, you know, when people are doing, I don't know, math exercises or something and they get the setup totally wrong,"
},
{
"end_time": 4771.015,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4741.271,
"text": " that's a it's a different story than if oh they did a calculation slightly wrong and they got this this minus sign in the wrong place it's it's the kind of like can you can you conceptualize things in this formal way and by the way computation and computational language are this amazing superpower that we have you know developed so to speak for for kind of crystallizing thoughts human thoughts into something that has a lot more power and not only because"
},
{
"end_time": 4787.91,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4771.596,
"text": " But both because it's a way of sort of formalizing what we're talking about and because then we can have a computer help us to zoom forward with what we're thinking about. But so, you know, for me, it's kind of the tools, the sort of crystallization of ideas from representing them in basically a modern language."
},
{
"end_time": 4816.647,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4788.234,
"text": " I'm then the actual running of it to see what happens and to get intuition that I wouldn't otherwise have had and I suppose the other thing is the the effort to sort of get to the essence of things say what is the what is the what is the core point that that that this all comes from so to speak and I suppose that for me that is somewhat related to exposition and you know I spend quite a lot of effort writing things trying to explain things"
},
{
"end_time": 4840.538,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4816.971,
"text": " You know, doing live streams, all those kinds of things. And for me, that's a, that's a, that's a part of the process of kind of grinding things down to their essence. Like even in this conversation we've had, I've, I've said a few things that I haven't thought to say before, so to speak, that I think are useful ways to kind of crystallize some, some thoughts that I've, that I've had in the past."
},
{
"end_time": 4870.452,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4840.794,
"text": " And that's, you know, that is my typical experience is that, that sort of the act of exposition is an important driver for sort of getting to the essence of things. But that's, that's for me, the other, the other big thing is, is what's the, what's the essential point now, you know, this question of, uh, you know, I, I've been, I sort of carry around with me lots of things where I mean to figure this out someday. And I'm, I'm sort of gradually accumulating knowledge about those things."
},
{
"end_time": 4897.159,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4870.879,
"text": " part of what I, what I need to do is in any new field that you work in, there is some kind of, uh, sort of local intuition in that field. And unless you've kind of marinated in the thing for a while, it's hard to have that local intuition. I mean, you know, I've been interested in the foundations of biology, foundations of economics, uh, things about, uh, neuroscience and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 4922.995,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4897.637,
"text": " In each of these areas, sort of slowly over the years, I've been trying to get sort of general knowledge and intuition about these areas, because otherwise you, you really, it's very hard to, you know, when you, when you say, I'm now going to go and figure out the essence of economics, for example, unless you have some sort of, some sort of big intuitional understanding of what economics is about, it's very hard."
},
{
"end_time": 4948.575,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4923.746,
"text": " At least for me, it's very hard to go and do that. If you're just like, well, you know, somebody says the definition of economics is this. Okay. That's nice, but they might be wrong. And unless you've got some sort of more broader view of what that what's in that field, it's really hard to, to dig down and not sort of be channeled into the things that people already said were going on."
},
{
"end_time": 4978.643,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4948.933,
"text": " so that's a you know that's a slow process for me i mean i you know there are many fields where i've been following them for i don't know some of them nearly 50 years now um and uh you know slowly trying to get intuition i mean physics for example is a good example i mean the fact that you know i can make you know decent you know i can can do the things we've done in fundamental physics is i think completely dependent on the fact that you know i you know"
},
{
"end_time": 4995.862,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4979.343,
"text": " research physics when i was as it happens pretty young and you know you can talk to me about quantum field theory or general relativity or something like that and i know all the technical stuff and that while that's not something that"
},
{
"end_time": 5021.425,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4996.544,
"text": " We use every day in moving forward with the physics project for instance the fact that one has that background knowledge of roughly how things work i mean like jonathan and i would just just talking about some really nice stuff he's been doing with with. Using our models to do simulations of space time and you know we're talking about why do these things happen this way you see these things in the simulations why does it happen that way."
},
{
"end_time": 5049.036,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5021.937,
"text": " It's very important in those conversations that, that, you know, I, for example, and he also, but you know, kind of knows the, the kind of the, the whole sort of shtick of how typical general relativity works, how typical quantum field theory works and so on. Without that, you, without that, it's, it's really hard to, I think, to, you know, reason rationally"
},
{
"end_time": 5055.111,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5049.633,
"text": " In this area, if you have to invent everything for yourself, you'll never get there."
},
{
"end_time": 5082.039,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5055.35,
"text": " You know, once one is sort of living in this environment of, well, there's a certain amount of ambient knowledge that's been developed, then you have the chance, if you understand that ambient knowledge well, and that's one of the issues, if you just know kind of the, oh, I read this textbook and I got this one point of view about things, that's not enough. If you want to make foundational progress in a field, you really have to understand it in some quite deep level that isn't, that's typically"
},
{
"end_time": 5111.681,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5082.449,
"text": " Your own internalized understanding that isn't the thing that you just learned from a textbook type thing and you know for a lot of these fields it takes it takes a while to get there and it takes often for me it takes doing practical projects in these fields where you're kind of like like for example in economics you know working on things related to blockchain and distributed blockchain and so on helped me I don't think I'm there yet but it helped me to kind of get an understanding of"
},
{
"end_time": 5125.657,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5112.09,
"text": " you know i don't know the role of liquidity and that you know what that means and the notion of of of single prices for things and so on uh to know to have that sort of practical in the weeds experience"
},
{
"end_time": 5151.903,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5126.049,
"text": " In this area and to see sort of how things work out in practice, really important in being able to get a sort of bigger foundational theoretical idea about what's going on. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can grab last second movie tickets in 5D Premium Ultra with popcorn, extra large popcorn,"
},
{
"end_time": 5182.415,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5155.503,
"text": " Is there a difference in how you do research now and even your philosophy of research compared to when you were in your 30s or 40s other than the technology? 30s and 40s not so much. I mean earlier than that yes. I mean I"
},
{
"end_time": 5212.227,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5182.602,
"text": " Look, I started out doing research when I was an early teenager and the thing, I think by the time I was a little bit over 20 years old, I had cottoned on to this point about the most important thing is the essence of what's going on, so to speak, drilling down, so to speak, as opposed to sort of building the technical tower. I mean, when I was first doing things like particle physics,"
},
{
"end_time": 5241.425,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5212.637,
"text": " You know, I was mostly, you know, if, if you look at sort of the output, I was mostly taking a tower that had already been built and adding an extra floor to it in, in one someplace or another. And I sort of an understanding the foundations of the tower was something that I, you know, it took me a few years to get to the point where I realized that was worth doing. That was a thing I could do. And."
},
{
"end_time": 5267.346,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5242.039,
"text": " You know, at the beginning, it seemed like that was a waste of time. It's like, let's take the tower people have built and let's build on top of that. Who cares about what's underneath because people have already established that. And I then realized that, that the greatest leverage comes from operating at the bottom of the tower, so to speak, the great in some sense, in this, in this analogy, at least it comes from, you know, if you change the foundations, just a tiny bit,"
},
{
"end_time": 5290.196,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5268.217,
"text": " so much changes whereas if you're operating kind of at the level of of you know technical detail your your maximum sort of reach is much smaller in terms of of um no i mean i've been a uh gosh i think um um my mode of"
},
{
"end_time": 5319.019,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5290.862,
"text": " I mean, for example, in my thirties, I spent my thirties basically writing this big book, a new kind of science. It's kind of terrible to say one spent one's whole X decade of one's life doing something. But yes, I spent that decade of my life. Why is that terrible? Because it's a long time. We don't have a lot of decades in lives. And it's kind of a big commitment to say, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 5348.558,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5319.48,
"text": " This is the thing I did in this decade. I mean, I'm I'm I that project had a number of features. One was. Well, there was sort of a delivery medium issue in today's world. I might have done that project differently as it was in the world of the 1990s. The only way I could see to put out a substantial body of intellectual ideas"
},
{
"end_time": 5378.183,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5349.445,
"text": " Was you write a big book? That was the only thing you know, it's kind of like that's the way you get sort of uh, you know if if you if you write, you know paper a hundred papers, it's kind of all little micro steps and It's completely unrealistic to expect that people will piece together a hundred micro steps and say oh, yeah, I get it. I understand Yeah, so so but at the time sort of the only medium"
},
{
"end_time": 5388.66,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5378.677,
"text": " i could come up with for for getting out big ideas was you write a big book and i also had this i i really i sort of put"
},
{
"end_time": 5408.916,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5389.855,
"text": " I wanted to achieve a certain level of perfection and what i was putting out was like i'm i'm spending a decade on this this is i didn't know it was a decade at the beginning i probably wouldn't have done it but it became a decade of course it's like this has to be you know this is my magnum opus thing it's got to be perfect"
},
{
"end_time": 5421.305,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5409.224,
"text": " It's got to and you know every page it's like you know if i'm lucky it was a page a day and you know every picture was every detail was kind of done very carefully."
},
{
"end_time": 5451.34,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5422.5,
"text": " I use what I produced every single day, pretty much. I'm using the online version of NKS, the new kind of science book, all the time. It's like I'm talking to people, I say I need an example of this. Okay, I've got a page in NKS that has that example. It's remarkable how often I end up using it. So that was not a bad investment from my point of view. In modern times, I've had a different optimization. My optimization is I write as quickly and as much as possible."
},
{
"end_time": 5480.418,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5451.749,
"text": " It's more a question of, you know, let me get the stuff out there because the choice is I could go and I could noodle on it for another five years and then it's not clear it will be much better, it might actually be worse, it might be harder for people to absorb. I think that the sort of style of writing that I've developed with just, you know, write it out in a somewhat conversational way, people seem to have"
},
{
"end_time": 5506.152,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5480.862,
"text": " a good time absorbing that and and that's you know had i done the nks book that way i would probably have a better time in that decade and um it would have been longer um but it would be uh you know and maybe i wouldn't find it as uh sort of concentratedly useful as i do now um but you know that's one style that's changed is that i'm"
},
{
"end_time": 5534.053,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5506.476,
"text": " I'm churning out some, I don't know how much it is. I'm probably, I'm probably, I don't know, I should work it out, but I bet I'm writing at least a thousand pages a year. Um, and that's, so I'm writing the equivalent of the NKS book, which was 1200 pages, you know, every year and possibly much more than that. Um, and that's, uh, you know, that that's a difference in, um, in those things. I mean, I would say in terms of tools, one of the things that is probably an underappreciated power,"
},
{
"end_time": 5556.237,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5534.684,
"text": " Is what we call click to copy that is you know you look at one of these things i write it has bunch pictures you can click any one of those pictures you get a piece of orphan language code you can run that code unless something went horribly wrong it will make the same pictures the one that i had so it's all perfectly reproducible and perfectly buildable on"
},
{
"end_time": 5564.872,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5556.476,
"text": " I know when we do a summer schools and winter schools and so on people all the time and people in the world at large all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 5587.79,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5565.128,
"text": " are like i'm just gonna take this piece of code from here and i'm gonna build on that and that's a kind of a new opportunity in research because normally people when do research and somebody writes a paper other people read the paper it's kind of like concepts as you know the the the particle concepts or something they're transmitted from one mind to another but then they have to be unpacked at the other end"
},
{
"end_time": 5614.838,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5587.79,
"text": " What we have the opportunity to do with kind of things like click to copy code and computational language in general is You're just like here's the thought you can just use it immediately. You don't have to unpack it You don't have to do your own make your own version of it And so that's been a I think that's been a powerful thing in terms of being able to to move things forward having said that you know, there are a decent number of people now who are"
},
{
"end_time": 5642.944,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5615.299,
"text": " You know have absorbed a lot of stuff with our physics project pretty well And and the things that have come from the physics project mathematics stuff and so on The stuff is difficult. You know, it's it's some to make real progress is technically complicated and is It's technically and conceptually complicated and I think one of the things that I've noticed it's been rather a curious observation"
},
{
"end_time": 5662.978,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5643.456,
"text": " Is that you know i talked to lots of people about what we doing and things you talk to scientists physicists that sale other kinds of scientists. You have one experience you talk to people who've thought about you know professional or sometimes otherwise about philosophy and things like that you have a different experience the thing that i found interesting is."
},
{
"end_time": 5690.759,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5663.37,
"text": " the the scientists are used to technical complexity and technical progress they're not used to conceptual progress and conceptual complexity it's kind of like well just tell us you know we got another formula we can write down another you know equation more or less we can write down another whatever that stuff can get very complicated but it's very tracked in a certain way whereas what's what's ended up happening with with what we've done is"
},
{
"end_time": 5720.555,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5691.237,
"text": " You know, it ends up being conceptually a bit different from what's gone before. And that's something which I've, I've noticed there's this strange inequality in kind of that is more easily understood by people with sort of a more philosophical bent than it is by people with a technical scientific bent interest, which is sort of an interesting phenomenon. I don't know where that ends because it's in a sense, you know, the science we have today was born out of philosophy back, you know, 400 years ago, 300 years ago, whatever. And,"
},
{
"end_time": 5749.394,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5720.896,
"text": " And that was, you know, there was a certain set of concepts that sort of condensed onto science as we know it today. We have a somewhat different set of concepts that are condensing onto sort of a new direction in science. And there are many technical things to be done that are traditional scientific kinds of things. I mean, the things that, you know, like Jonathan and I are talking about right now have to do with kind of observational consequences of"
},
{
"end_time": 5779.172,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5750.196,
"text": " are physics models for, you know, what can you actually observe with a telescope? What can you do, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's that's a lot of technical physics that has to be done there. But, you know, these questions about sort of the inevitability of the laws of physics, the nature of observers and so on, that's a different kind of thinking mostly, although again, it has lots of sort of technical tentacles about how does this particular kind of measuring device work and what consequences does this have and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 5810.998,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5781.442,
"text": " The question that many people are wondering now that you've mentioned it is where is the evidence for the Wolframs physics project? How would you respond to that? Well, gosh, I mean, it's it's not a very common thing that you get to look at the big achievements of 20th century physics and know why they're true. Never happened before. Nothing is even close to that. It's remarkable how much you get"
},
{
"end_time": 5829.565,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5811.425,
"text": " from a rather small, you know, from a sort of a small essential set of ideas that's just huge reach in all these different directions. Now, you know, if you say, do we know it's, do we know it's our model and not model XYZ?"
},
{
"end_time": 5845.196,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5830.111,
"text": " What is this interesting is an awful lot of things that have been developed in mathematical physics seem to plug into our models they seem to be limits of our models they seem to be you know specific cases of our models things like that so the idea it's us versus them."
},
{
"end_time": 5869.77,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5845.196,
"text": " It's not really the thing i suspect that essentially all of the popular mathematical physics directions whether it's you know, whether it's i don't know loop quantum gravity or whether it's spin networks or whether it's string theory or whether it's you know ADS CFT correspondence these kinds of things they all seem to plug into our models our models provide like this is why ADS CFT is true."
},
{
"end_time": 5894.07,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5869.77,
"text": " This is you know string theory lives in this particular corners a particular sort of case of our models maybe we don't know that for sure yet but that's what i think is gonna happen. So it's kind of it's it's not us versus them but there are fundamental things about our models that are very different from what's gone before for example the idea that space is discrete and that's the thing that."
},
{
"end_time": 5922.346,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5894.343,
"text": " It's kind of amusing if you look at the history, which I have only come to know much more recently, which is, you know, back in antiquity, people arguing all the time, you know, is the universe discrete or continuous? They would have said, you know, democracies would have said space is discrete. You know, other people would have said it's continuous, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They were arguing about it. Okay. Then we get people arguing about the same kind of thing for light. Then we get to the end of the 19th century."
},
{
"end_time": 5951.544,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5922.892,
"text": " and sort of the big fight was on about molecules and you know was matter discrete or continuous and it really looked like the continuous stuff was going to win right up until when molecules and brownian motion and things like that were discovered and at that point it's like okay you know matter is discrete and then okay light is discrete i mean einstein when he's presenting you know the photoelectric effect an idea of photons just comes right out and says we discovered that matter is discrete"
},
{
"end_time": 5978.507,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5951.817,
"text": " Let's check out the electromagnetic field. Maybe it's discrete too. Gosh, it actually is. At the time, and this is something I didn't know until very recently, at the time, most people believed space was discrete. Even Einstein, apparently. Absolutely. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, the whole crowd, they all believed space was discrete. And I keep on finding out more and more of this history. And but"
},
{
"end_time": 6005.845,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5979.087,
"text": " What happened is they couldn't make it compatible with relativity. And that was a technical problem. I mean, that's a problem we solve with hypergraphs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so they gave up. And so for a hundred years, people said, oh, space must be continuous. And when you said, well, wait a minute, space might not be continuous. People are like, that's just nuts. Now, you know, they wouldn't have said that a hundred years ago. People wouldn't have said that."
},
{
"end_time": 6029.718,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6005.998,
"text": " it's a thing which and it happens in science and other fields that people develop oh yeah you know for very technical reasons oh it has to work this way and then after a few sort of academic generations go through it's like well of course it works that way so okay is space discrete or not you know with molecules people kind of lucked out that brownian motion was visible the question is"
},
{
"end_time": 6059.087,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6029.94,
"text": " is brownian motion is the analog of brownian motion for space detectable is it detectable in our times and that's that's a really interesting question and um you know we're working on it and uh you know maybe there are some things to do with black holes that are detailed effects and maybe there are some things that um uh i i i have the slight guess"
},
{
"end_time": 6083.712,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6059.445,
"text": " that dark matter will end up being a feature of the microscopic structure of space. And that it will be that after we know what it is, everybody will say, how could we have been so stupid? We missed that for 50 years or whatever. But I think but we're not there yet. So I can't say that. Yeah, yeah. But but I heard a quote from you about dark matter is spacetime heat or the caloric substance of our time. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 6112.142,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6084.002,
"text": " Well, we don't know that now, but but that's let's imagine you didn't let's imagine you knew it. Let's imagine you were able to drive that. Then could you also say because there's an abundance of evidence that dark matter behaves like matter. So because of that, then could you also say that some of the matter or the matter that we see is also a form of space time heat? Like if space time heat can behave like matter, what is the limit to that? Right. But OK, heat is a form of energy."
},
{
"end_time": 6136.527,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6112.892,
"text": " Can i get energy in a large scale motion is a form of energy it's the same sense i think here that particles ordinary particles are like a large scale motion. And where is my guess would be there's a different thing which is microscopic features of space time so for example if we look at matter we are used to macroscopic things happening with matter."
},
{
"end_time": 6165.333,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6136.971,
"text": " Throw a ball from here to there, that kind of thing. There's a big chunk of matter that's moving from here to there. Then we're used to the idea of heat. Heat is a microscopic feature of matter. Heat is not macroscopic. Heat is something about individual molecules. So my guess is that particles are the macroscopic, not macroscopic on our scale, but macroscopic relative to the atoms of space, macroscopic effects in the structure of space."
},
{
"end_time": 6195.418,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6165.93,
"text": " Whereas maybe space-time heat is microscopic effects in the structure of space and my guess that that's my guess so far is that that leads to you know that will lead to a change in the things we say about the structure of space and you say well okay one thing to understand it's a fundamental feature of well okay so Einstein's equations for example and the principle of equivalence and so on"
},
{
"end_time": 6215.299,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6195.657,
"text": " Einstein's equations you can trade off sort of energy momentum for gravitational field you can you can kind of move things around you can say you say okay I've got a gravitational wave is the gravitational wave something which is a source of gravity a source of space-time curvature or is it just space-time curvature you can kind of trade off those two things"
},
{
"end_time": 6240.009,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6215.606,
"text": " In our models that trade-off is more extreme because in our models everything is just a feature of the structure of space. So these particles are just sort of lumps in space. In traditional general relativity, one distinguishes things which are features of space from things which are sort of matter that exists in space. Now, for example, let's say we made a bunch of stuff out of black holes."
},
{
"end_time": 6269.377,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6240.623,
"text": " Then we will be in the same situation because black holes are, as they usually formulated, just a feature of the structure of space. So if we were making our sort of, I don't know, our, our, you know, planet or something out of lots of little black holes or whatever, if we could hold them apart and so on, then we have a thing which seems like it's something that's like matter, but it's really just made of structure of space. By the way, I suspect that there is a close analogy"
},
{
"end_time": 6284.428,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6269.77,
"text": " between particles like electrons and things like black holes. They're both kind of persistent structures in space time except that black holes we have normally imagined in relativity that they're these very big things."
},
{
"end_time": 6311.732,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6284.718,
"text": " Whereas we think the particles are very small and subject to quantum mechanics and so on. In our models, there really isn't such a distinction. You can have kind of features of space that are on any scale. And in any case, my tendency would be to think that the concept that dark matter is like matter. I mean, this is always what happens in science and so many other things. The fact that it's called dark matter might be a big mistake."
},
{
"end_time": 6338.439,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6312.159,
"text": " just like people call it caloric fluid and the calling it calling heat caloric fluid the fluid part of that name was a big mistake which probably made it people just said it's you know but they thought of it as a you know a material fluid substance just as we now by the name dark matter we're thinking of it as matter and that may not be the right picture"
},
{
"end_time": 6366.391,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6339.002,
"text": " And I don't think that the the experimental features, you know, what what's known is that it has some gravitational effects. It's not known that you can pick it up and make particles out of it and so on. Well, many people are trying to find other models that aren't matter, like how do you modify gravity to reproduce the experimental results? Yeah, yeah, right. So, I mean, that one thing about that is that the"
},
{
"end_time": 6395.077,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6367.773,
"text": " The attempts to just sort of go and hack Einstein's equations and, you know, figure out how that works has not been terribly successful. I think one new degree of freedom that we have that's pretty important is dimension change. And because we don't have the idea that space has to be fixed three plus one dimensional thing, that provides kind of a reformulation of general relativity in terms of dimension change rather than space time curvature."
},
{
"end_time": 6421.869,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6395.452,
"text": " and i think that although i don't know how it works yet my intuition is that when one looks at those attempts to parameterize changes to gravity that it's just like whoops we missed that change because it didn't seem natural to us but as soon as you think about dimension change a change of a certain kind will be natural even though let's say for example if you were doing a series expansion you would never get x to the one half"
},
{
"end_time": 6443.66,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6422.159,
"text": " is not something you get through a series expansion it just isn't you know x x plus x squared plus x cubed and so on will never make extra one half and so that's a you know it's kind of a like you you've kind of missed that by thinking about things in a particular way and so i'm sort of guessing that dimension change may be the key to seeing how you"
},
{
"end_time": 6469.957,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6444.036,
"text": " Get an effective modified gravity, because that's what we're going to end up with. I mean, whatever happens, you may, you know, it's just like we can talk about, you know, we talk about heat as a form of energy, it has certain characteristics that are like energy. And in the end, we'll describe it in terms of the dynamics of energy. And similarly here, this will eventually be described in terms of the dynamics of gravity. It's just it will be a modified gravity, but"
},
{
"end_time": 6498.643,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6469.957,
"text": " Gravity modified in a particular way that comes out of the structure of our models Do you think that the really at itself can be an observer? I know we're going back to observation, but I'm curious. Oh boy Not really not an observer like us see here's the thing the One feature of us and it's another implicit assumption is We're kind of small and integrated"
},
{
"end_time": 6518.456,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6499.514,
"text": " That is, our minds, by the very idea that we have a single thread of experience, our minds are not too extended. If our minds were sort of vastly extended, we wouldn't have the same sort of sense of coherent identity."
},
{
"end_time": 6543.046,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6519.155,
"text": " So, you know, one picture is about the really add as we say, let's go explore the really add. Let's go look at sort of, you know, let's go colonize rural space. Let's go. Yeah. Right. Go explore further and further out. And you say maybe that's the point of civilization. Maybe that's what we're, you know, maybe that's our, maybe that should be our goal. Just like we explore physical space, we explore rural space, et cetera."
},
{
"end_time": 6566.032,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6543.456,
"text": " What the problem is that when you are sort of holding in your mind all of these different possible views of what's going on in some sense, but by the time you have all those different views, all stuff together in your mind, there's no coherence to what you think. And so in probably in no meaningful sense, can you say that you still coherently exist?"
},
{
"end_time": 6591.869,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6566.408,
"text": " you are you are everything but you're also nothing so to speak in other words the the concept of coherent existence i think depends on the choice that it is there are things that are you and there's lots of stuff that isn't you if you say you are everything then in some sense there's no there's no you in that picture so to speak interesting so i think that the you know what what is necessary is that"
},
{
"end_time": 6621.749,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6592.295,
"text": " In order to have kind of coherent existence, we have to be limited. That's, you know, it's a, I mean, a way of thinking about this and much more formal way of thinking about this in mathematics would be, well, you know, you want to prove theorems in mathematics. You know, what you care about is having a limited set of axioms, then building a tower of theorems on top of those axioms. Well, you could say, well, what if you just allowed all possible axioms? You know, then you could prove everything."
},
{
"end_time": 6646.903,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6622.21,
"text": " Why isn't that a good thing in mathematics so to speak you just prove everything Well, what does that correspond to in mathematics? It's kind of an old result in logic that as soon as you have something that you consider false You can deduce anything from false Implication the logical rules of implication given that you start from a false premise everything becomes true"
},
{
"end_time": 6677.005,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6647.449,
"text": " And at that point, it's like, then, then you sort of blown up everything, you can no longer make a coherent statement in mathematics. By the time you throw into the things that you believe something which is false, then you can derive everything, then everything is, in a sense, everything is true. As soon as you know, as soon as you take as a premise, something which is false, you sort of have to conclude that everything could be derived as true. And at that point, you can no longer sort of build a coherent mathematics."
},
{
"end_time": 6701.22,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6677.619,
"text": " and so i think it's the same kind of thing that is as you by the time you know if if if the if by the time sort of you as an observer span the rulliad you do not in any coherent sense exist and so that that that's kind of a uh for observers like us that's kind of a downer"
},
{
"end_time": 6729.94,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6703.029,
"text": " There are different logical systems, like there's classical logic, and then there's para consistent where you can have a and not a but not explosion. So in your really ad approach, is there something that's like the canonical logical system? So it's I don't know what logic. That's a good question. I mean, I think that in a sense, everything we've done is sort of a constructivist approach."
},
{
"end_time": 6758.66,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6730.52,
"text": " The idea of logic with true and false and so on, I've never thought was that great. I mean, there's an awful lot of things in the world that are neither true nor false. You know, it will rain tomorrow. That statement is neither true nor false. It's a it's a as stated now yet to be determined. Yeah, right. But I mean, as a practical matter. You know, you can try and shoehorn everything into it's got to be true or false."
},
{
"end_time": 6787.824,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6759.275,
"text": " But that's not the reality of most of what we talk about. You know, if I say in more than language, for example, I say X is greater than three, but I've said nothing about what X is. There's nothing I can do with that statement. It's just, well, it's a statement. X is greater than three. Maybe there's some other statement I can derive from that, but that statement does not have a truth value that does. That statement does not in any useful form have a truth value. It's just X is greater than three. We don't know. And I think that, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 6812.944,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6788.797,
"text": " The things we're doing in physics project and the mathematics that comes from that and so on. It's all constructive. We're saying you can build a thing this in that way. We're not asking the question. We're not formulating it as what is true. We're formulating it as what can you build and that's that's a and so you don't really get into the same"
},
{
"end_time": 6837.329,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6813.848,
"text": " you don't get into the same kind of binds you don't have to force yourself into this kind of question of what's the logic so to speak because there isn't a logic it's just what can you build you know in other words if i say what is true in the world well in mathematics you could say what's true okay i don't know whether mathematics can answer that question because in mathematics"
},
{
"end_time": 6859.462,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6838.183,
"text": " if you think about it in typical foundations of mathematics it's like well there are these axioms and given those axioms you can derive things and you say well is this actually true well if you change the axioms you might be able to derive it you might not be able to derive it what we're concentrating on is purely what can you derive and i think that's"
},
{
"end_time": 6888.097,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6859.974,
"text": " You know and that's similar to what can exist in the world what can be produced by physics in the world that's a similar kind of question you don't say. Is. You know is the earth true. You say more does the earth exist has the earth been produced by physics and so similarly in mathematics or in other kinds of ways we talk about things we say can this be produced."
},
{
"end_time": 6918.336,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6888.439,
"text": " Not as it quotes true. Earlier when you were talking about, OK, so there's one view that you can go into a field and make progress because you're bright eyed and bushy tailed and you're not you don't have the dogma of the whole history of the field indoctrinated upon you. But then there's the other view that know what you need to do is familiarize yourself with the tools, gain the intuition. You need to understand where the field is before you can make some progress. So it was my understanding that you were advocating at least for the latter."
},
{
"end_time": 6931.647,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6918.933,
"text": " Do you feel what is the largest myth of modern science that is preventing in your opinion some major breakthrough?"
},
{
"end_time": 6961.152,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6932.142,
"text": " Where do you feel we're being held back most other than, hey, we should be thinking more computationally. So other than that. Yeah, right. No, I think I mean, by the way, you're sort of dichotomy between know the field deeply and don't get too dyed in the wool and the dogma of the field. That's an interesting dichotomy. And I think the main way you get out of that is, I suppose, unkindly, you could say by being arrogant or confident or something, because explain"
},
{
"end_time": 6990.162,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6962.039,
"text": " Well, because I mean, if there's a dogma in a field and you don't, you're not really confident, you say, well, I guess that's probably true. You know, even if, even if you're, you have to have a certain look, I know that's the dogma of the field. I understand that dogma. And by the way, I think it's nonsense, right? That's a, that's a non-trivial, almost emotional thing to say."
},
{
"end_time": 7017.073,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6990.759,
"text": " Right. You have to be very, you have to be very, you know, it's not most people who come along and say, well, most people will come along and say, I'm just looking at this field. I don't really know much about it. It's dogma must be wrong. That's probably a lose. It's right. Most people, by the time they've learned the dogma, it's like, that's what they're living in. And they can't see anything outside of that."
},
{
"end_time": 7047.244,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7017.773,
"text": " And so I think, you know, in my own case, I've been lucky and that I've worked in a lot of different fields. And so I, I can kind of see a little bit from the outside, some of, you know, I've, I've learned the dogma of a bunch of fields, but I can kind of see that from the outside. And I've had the experience of seeing these dogmas just turn out to be wrong over and over again. And, you know, I think that that is a, and I've had the experience, the kind of, you know, personal arrogance experience or something."
},
{
"end_time": 7064.957,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7047.619,
"text": " of realizing yes i figured out correctly even though the dogma said something different and the dogma was wrong i mean that was you know i in my early life i'd you know was able to figure out a few little things in particle physics where that kind of thing happened but they were small"
},
{
"end_time": 7093.831,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7065.401,
"text": " But gradually they got bigger because after you see, well, you know, I mean, I remember there was one thing when I was like 17 years old or something where, where, um, you know, I'd calculated a bunch of things in particle physics and there was some experiment that said what I, you know, calculated had to be wrong. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is how it has to work. Either QCD is wrong or this is how it has to work. And, you know, I kind of."
},
{
"end_time": 7119.804,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7094.258,
"text": " and turned out I was right and I felt kind of stupid for not having checked more about how the experiment was done and so on because I probably could have realized that that you know there was some fishiness there so to speak but it was you know that was that was a fairly small thing but after you've done a few of those things you build up a certain amount of confidence that hey you know just because everybody says X doesn't mean that X is necessarily true"
},
{
"end_time": 7149.974,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7120.213,
"text": " And that's a super useful thing from a personal point of view to realize. And, you know, one could say, well, I think something different from what people usually think. And, you know, one may be just completely wrong. One may think that a bunch of times and one may be wrong every single time. You know, my personal experience, for whatever reason, you know, I happened to perhaps because I started smaller, I happened to have had the experience being right a bunch of times. And that really helps one to have the confidence to"
},
{
"end_time": 7176.8,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7150.35,
"text": " think differently so to speak about the things that are you know some accepted dogma in terms of right now i don't know things that people widely think that um i think there are different kinds of issues there are places where people think that problem is too hard it will never be solved and um you know like we'll never know how"
},
{
"end_time": 7202.108,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7177.637,
"text": " physics fundamentally works or whatever will never know how this or that works. It's hopeless. Just give up. That's one category of mistake. The other, you know, they'll never be a theory of economics that makes any sense. They'll never be a fundamental theory of biology. They'll never be, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this first thing is that's the second thing I suppose is"
},
{
"end_time": 7224.087,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7203.2,
"text": " Often when there has been technical success in a field, things get quite locked down. I mean, you know, the belief in continuous space, for instance, is a thing which has been technically successful. And, you know, it's a good approximation. It works. You can figure out a bunch of things from it. You know, a huge amount of mathematics has been built on the idea of the continuity of space."
},
{
"end_time": 7253.217,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7224.701,
"text": " and uh it i mean that mathematics will still survive perfectly well even if space is not in fact continuous but it's a you know to build that tower based on on that is a you know that that's that's something you know people have ended up assuming i think there are a whole bunch of other more technical things that people assume about how quantum mechanics works etc etc etc they're more technical they're less kind of big picture um i think"
},
{
"end_time": 7283.063,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7253.763,
"text": " The, uh, another meta observation, which I wouldn't have said until recent years is, you know, how important is the observer in deducing how science works? I would have expected that everything I could have said about science would be, you know, clearly objective, so to speak, in no way. And I don't think that anymore. I'll tell you another, another thing about a fundamental thing, which is how far is science going to get?"
},
{
"end_time": 7294.855,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7283.848,
"text": " In other words, what kind of thing can we expect from science? There is this idea that, look, we just write down equations, we crank out the answers, we can predict everything."
},
{
"end_time": 7323.456,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7295.282,
"text": " You give us an epidemiological situation, we can predict for you how the epidemiology will play out. We can predict for you how this is going to happen. That's going to happen. We can predict all these things. Sometimes they get very political and so on. We can predict what's going to happen in the climate or this aspect of society or that thing or whatever. There's this idea that science provides this"
},
{
"end_time": 7347.432,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7323.968,
"text": " Science is the kind of the freeway that lets one get get to the end, you know, without going through all the detail type thing. Computational reducibility is the story of that not being the case, but yet the absolutely uniform belief about sort of this is the kind of scientism type belief about the world is science"
},
{
"end_time": 7376.63,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7347.705,
"text": " You know, science can explain everything. Science can figure out everything we can predict. We can see what we have to do based on science. I mean, that was a thing that led to, well, all kinds of all kinds of beliefs in the world. I think that's a thing where one will have to realize, no, there's a certain set. If you pick the right slice of computational reducibility, yes, you can figure out what's going to happen. If you can live in that slice, then you can predict what's going to happen."
},
{
"end_time": 7406.237,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7377.193,
"text": " Life is not so interesting if you're purely living in that slice. If you know everything about what's going to happen, it's kind of like, what does the passage of time really do for you? You know, another version of this that's going to come up, I think very big time is the sort of the computational irreducibility kind of fulcrum of AI. I mean, in other words, you've got an AI, it's doing computationally irreducible things. That means you can't predict what it will do. That means it might surprise you."
},
{
"end_time": 7436.288,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7406.886,
"text": " That's door number one. Door number two, let's force the AI to only behave in computationally reducible ways. Let's make sure we know what the AI is going to do. In door number two, you don't get to let the AI do the things it can do. You're constraining it. You're forcing it on this track where it can only do certain kinds of things. You're forcing it to be dumb, so to speak. So there's this big choice to be made."
},
{
"end_time": 7463.148,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7436.664,
"text": " Go with what the AI does. Let it be computationally reducible. Let it surprise us from time to time. Or does one say, no, we don't want that. We want to constrain the AI to only work this way. This is an important, you know, this is a sort of societal decision, I suppose, that, you know, I think will be a pretty important one in the years to come. And I think it will be, you know, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 7492.261,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7463.507,
"text": " And it's it's look, it's a it's a it's not totally disconnected from decisions about do you try and control the world or do you just sort of let you might say in economic terms, you know, market forces or something else, some other dynamics kind of just play play out as they play out, so to speak. Do you do you do you go for constraint or do you go for just let the dynamics play out? And what do you go for?"
},
{
"end_time": 7518.251,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7492.705,
"text": " with respect to AI. Well, I'm not, it's not going to work to just say, let's constrain it completely. Cause then we don't really have AI. We just have sort of, we just have things that behave in predictable ways. We have kind of industrial revolution style machines, so to speak. We have machines where you get to see, you know, where does every cog and lever go, so to speak. I think that's a, uh, I mean, that's a,"
},
{
"end_time": 7542.363,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7518.677,
"text": " You know you might say gosh the world would be better off if all people behaved in completely predictable ways. I don't think that will be a terribly fun world so to speak and i think that's you know we have the same issue really with the eyes. I mean there are a lot of detailed questions about sort of how. I tend to think that a society of eyes."
},
{
"end_time": 7552.056,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7543.046,
"text": " is a much more robust, less fragile thing than the one giant AI in the world doesn't seem like a very good idea."
},
{
"end_time": 7578.814,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7552.602,
"text": " Just like the one, you know, the one government in the world probably doesn't seem like a very good idea. It's more robust. If you have multiple different, you know, if you've got this essentially ecosystem or something of different things interacting, I mean, it's a thing we see in endless examples in, in sort of physics and other places that the, the behavior of the, of the aggregate"
},
{
"end_time": 7606.34,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7579.002,
"text": " is more robust and less likely to to sort of go crazy go extinct whatever than the one so to speak you know it's kind of um so i i i would tend to think that that's um but you know these these questions about what's better about those kinds of things this is a question of you know i have my own particular way of leading my life and you know the things i like the things i don't like whatever"
},
{
"end_time": 7629.548,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7606.561,
"text": " Other people have different ones. I don't think there's a right answer to any of these things I think it's a I think one of the things that's tricky to me at least in thinking about ethics Another thing where kind of I'm sort of slowly trying to understand enough that I think I might have something sensible to say but one of the things about ethics is very confusing to me is I'm used to science and"
},
{
"end_time": 7648.797,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7629.991,
"text": " Where you can do controlled experiments where you can say, I'm going to look at this one subsystem of the world and I'm going to ignore everything else. I'm going to just study this particular little quantum system or whatever it is. And the fact that all these other things are happening in the world is irrelevant. I think ethics doesn't work that way."
},
{
"end_time": 7674.974,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7649.155,
"text": " I think when you decide, you know, you're going to have the trolley run into the giraffes rather than the llamas or something, that decision is never a, despite sort of the apparent setup, that decision is never a local decision. That decision is in the end a decision that sort of relates to everything about humanity, so to speak, that it can't be localized in the same kind of way. So it's, in a sense, it is a"
},
{
"end_time": 7702.517,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7675.094,
"text": " It is sort of a thing for which, and that's another kind of assumption we make as observers, related to kind of free will about doing experiments, is the notion that we can do something here that won't affect everything else in the world. And I'm not sure that's true, that ethics can be done in this kind of factored, modular, separated way, which makes it confusing when you try to think about it in terms of sort of from a science point of view."
},
{
"end_time": 7722.022,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7703.456,
"text": " Is the notion of observer also a local phenomenon or can you have a non-local observer? Can a collection of observers be considered an observer? An ant colony, for example. Yes, we have examples where"
},
{
"end_time": 7751.101,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7722.483,
"text": " Look, I mean, we humans are already extended. We're not observing things at the level of one atom of space. We are aggregating quite large chunks of sort of the of of of elements of space and so on. Now, what would it be like to be in, you know, an ant in an ant colony where you have sort of a collective mind about things? I'm not sure. You know, perhaps the true organism of the earth is all of human society."
},
{
"end_time": 7781.681,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7751.749,
"text": " and then we're all just you know ants relative to that and you can say what is the experience of the whole of human society you know human society makes decisions as we individuals make decisions it makes decisions we watch those decisions happen sometimes those decisions are pretty confusing for us individuals so to speak you know society goes in this direction they decide that you know top hats are fashionable or something and it happens as some sort of collective dynamic"
},
{
"end_time": 7800.845,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7782.193,
"text": " Can society as a whole be thought of as an observer with respect to some kinds of questions?"
},
{
"end_time": 7825.196,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7801.288,
"text": " and in a sense society you know for example this whole equivalence in question you could ask that for society as a whole as opposed to individuals you could say we as individuals we believe all kinds of different things but society as a whole concludes that top hats are fashionable for example and that's just like it could very well be the case that in our brains you know one part of our brain is saying"
},
{
"end_time": 7846.817,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7825.538,
"text": " you know i hate that color another part of our brain is saying i really like that color and in the end we come to a conclusion that is some kind of aggregate of those things where we say hey i kind of like that or whatever and i think you know society does the same kind of thing and we are in this with respect to society we are"
},
{
"end_time": 7872.944,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7847.739,
"text": " With respect to you know we are like the individual neurons in our brains it's like if we could know what that individual clump of neurons was thinking then we would say oh my gosh the whole brain made that crazy decision you know this clump of neurons really had it right but the whole brain did something completely crazy and you know so it is i think with us individual humans relative to to all of society"
},
{
"end_time": 7904.053,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7874.224,
"text": " So humor me for a bit. Suppose the observer theory that you have would be able to give you a quantity like IIT has phi for this, you will have 1000 units of consciousness and ant has one. Okay, suppose we could do that. Suppose we could then say that a cell inside your body has five units of it in observer theory units, and that the aggregate of you has 1000. And society actually has 10,000. Okay, suppose it was that. But then at the same time,"
},
{
"end_time": 7933.575,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7904.684,
"text": " Earlier in the conversation, we have that the rule yet is a bit too incoherent to to give a consciousness number two. So maybe it's either zero or undefined. That would mean to me that would seem to me like there's a maximum amount of of consciousness at some point in some scale, because as you scale outward, you can get more. But if you scale too much, you get zero or ill defined. So what do you make of that? What would it be? What the heck would that be the maximum most conscious"
},
{
"end_time": 7964.019,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7934.48,
"text": " Being I think it's it's one of these things where You sort of got a couple of parameters you've got coherence and you've got kind of the coherence of the being and What the being contains and these things are are directly related the being sort of has a broader Set of experiences paradigms, whatever else The being is also less coherent"
},
{
"end_time": 7993.746,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7964.48,
"text": " as as it can you know have these two different points of view let's say which have certain incompatibilities it is both by extending to be able to encompass those different points of view it is encompassing more but it is also becoming less coherent in what it encompasses so i mean my own guess would be that uh i think it depends"
},
{
"end_time": 8021.015,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7995.435,
"text": " Let's see. Usually the answer to a question like this is, it depends what you want it for. That is, if you say, which thing can make the maximum number of decisions per unit time, let's say, which thing can have the... I understand."
},
{
"end_time": 8050.947,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8021.186,
"text": " You know, you could have these different criteria and I think you'd end up with a different answer, which would end up being a reflection more of your criterion than of the thing itself. But I do think that, you know, it is an interesting question. So for example, the thought experiment, what if we gradually replace our neural circuitry with digital electronics? So we think a million times faster. What would that feel like? You know, our experience of the physical world will be different in that case."
},
{
"end_time": 8079.36,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8051.271,
"text": " You know, we'll we'll notice the individual photons coming in. We'll, you know, not aggregate space in the same way. We'll have all kinds of other funky relationships, different relationships to physics. But, you know, what would it be like to talk to an entity that was thinking a million times faster than you were? I don't know. I think it's it's a it. I suspect that the main point is"
},
{
"end_time": 8109.514,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8079.855,
"text": " That it can be spinning around and thinking really, really fast. But what matters to us is the way in which we connect to what's going on. And so actually the perception of what's happening wouldn't be so different because what we're seeing is only those things that we can be an observer of, so to speak, all the detail about what it's thinking. It's thinking a million times faster. It's coming up with this and that and the other. It's maybe what we would perceive of it."
},
{
"end_time": 8139.428,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8109.787,
"text": " It's like perceiving something in physics for example where you know lots of things are happening but all we're perceiving is what we're capable of perceiving so in other words that that the that the the inner the inner experience of the million times faster thinking thing would be invisible to us and that when we talk to it it would just seem like you know all we're noticing is the things that we can notice so to speak now you know it's an interesting question if if you"
},
{
"end_time": 8169.002,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8139.974,
"text": " You know if you take I don't know things I figured out in my life and you imagine the million times faster version of me Then you know again, it's like this connection to physics then yes, you could say the things that you know Took me You know in in The things that would take me a year to work out the million times faster me would work out in 30 seconds. Um, I"
},
{
"end_time": 8198.899,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8169.445,
"text": " and but i think that's that interface to that is like an interface to sort of physics if viewed you know the speed of light is the speed of light we can we experience different things if we are experiencing it a different uh with kind of a different speed of thought but i don't know i mean i you know i think these are these kind of these thought experiments of of what is it like to be an alien mind i find them very interesting i have a very hard time with them"
},
{
"end_time": 8228.541,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8199.445,
"text": " I, you know, and I, I look to kind of almost it's like, could you write a science fiction story, which had as the protagonist, you know, something that thinks a million times faster, how would it think about things? How would other people feel about it? You know, these are things which, and in a sense by writing a science fiction story, you're trying to make that humanized bridge to our everyday experience. I, you know, I wish more people were doing this. I think it's a really interesting thing to do. I think it's really hard."
},
{
"end_time": 8258.166,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8230.213,
"text": " Speaking about this bridge to human experience as you dabble with ethics. What if it turns out you're correct about observer theory, about the discreteness of space time, about computation underlying the fundament? What if someone's like, OK, so what? How what should I now? I'm watching. I'm listening to this podcast. As a result of this, what should I do? How should my behavior change?"
},
{
"end_time": 8288.746,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8259.77,
"text": " Yeah I mean I think that's a you could have asked the same thing when Copernicanism came in I mean it's kind of like like okay so we know that the math is different because we think about the earth going around the sun rather than the sun going around the earth so what indeed that mathematics was a deep so what for people the um what was not the so what was our common experience is we're sitting on the earth the earth is"
},
{
"end_time": 8312.961,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8289.445,
"text": " standing still but actually we learn from this piece of science that our common experience isn't the way things really are so that's important if you if you say well everything we know about the world we can derive from common experience that blows up that idea so in in our time interestingly enough"
},
{
"end_time": 8342.995,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8313.387,
"text": " There's sort of a flip side of that, which is computational irreducibility kind of blows up the idea that, you know, just trust the science. It will tell you what's going to happen. So in other words, this notion that, I mean, I would say, you know, put in a, in the Copernican time, it was just trust the scientists because it's kind of like the, just because you think the earth is standing still, it isn't really right. The scientists can tell you it isn't."
},
{
"end_time": 8369.138,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8343.558,
"text": " Well, now we've so internalized that it's kind of like, well, science can tell you all these things. You know, you can put this scientific gloss onto everything and we understand, you know, how we feel psychologically and we understand how we do this and that and the other. And it's very science-ified and this notion that, you know, science can answer all the problems. Science can tell you what's going to happen. Science has solved it."
},
{
"end_time": 8397.654,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8369.735,
"text": " I think that notion is kind of blown up by computational irreducibility. That's kind of the realization that, in a sense, don't expect science to solve everything. It's not going to work that way. It's not something where you can just say, well, I'm just going to feed it to science and it's going to tell me the answer. So I think that's one kind of everyday takeaway. I think another one is"
},
{
"end_time": 8427.21,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8397.961,
"text": " The story of the rule yard, the story of rural space, the story of different essential rule, real reference frames, the concept that again, sort of the takeaway from that is there really are different ways to think about the world. There really are different sort of reference frames with which to view reality. And so people have long had that intuition. But again, it's been kind of this, well, there's this one and it's based on mathematical science or whatever else."
},
{
"end_time": 8454.292,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8427.875,
"text": " That really isn't right. There are others. They will have different power, different ability to figure out particular things, but this notion that, oh, this other kind of reference frame, this other way of thinking about the world, it's just wrong, is probably not the correct way to think about it. It is a different way of thinking about the world. It can come to different kinds of conclusions, but it isn't the case that there's sort of a hierarchy and"
},
{
"end_time": 8483.029,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8454.753,
"text": " You know, we got the right one and it's the mathematical sciences or something. So I think those are those are two kind of everyday takeaways from these kinds of things and I think I think in In a sense the To come to those conclusions it is To know that the universe is computational all the way down Is to give one no choice about those conclusions if you're still"
},
{
"end_time": 8508.097,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8483.729,
"text": " It's just like if we think about brains and we say and we think about free will and things like that and we think about and we say there's going to be something in our brains that isn't going to be just mechanical, just rule based. We're going to find something. It's going to be quantum mechanics. It's going to be mysticism. It's going to be something else. You know, we keep on searching for that."
},
{
"end_time": 8532.244,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8508.507,
"text": " well if we really know that the universe is computational all the way down we can stop searching for that we know there isn't there isn't a you know it's it's and it's already enough to say that it's computational it already has those aspects of irreducibility and free will and so on we don't need any more than that what's something that's"
},
{
"end_time": 8561.937,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8532.619,
"text": " That's stuck in your crop for a while, something that nettles at you, not mathematical, not physical. What's some problem that you're dealing with, say for the past decade? Oh, gosh. I mean, the the. You know, there are things that that one figures out where it's like the world should absorb this. But it doesn't. It absorbs a little painfully slow rate."
},
{
"end_time": 8589.855,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8562.568,
"text": " And sometimes it even rejects it. You know, a lot of sort of the science informed technology that I've built is, you know, I don't know, I don't know how far ahead of the world it is. I know some things that we figured out like 35 years ago, kind of people sort of just cottoned on about 10 years ago. So that was a 25 year gap. And those were I thought rather trivial things. And it's a little bit kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 8614.787,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8590.128,
"text": " Like it's, it's fun to make artifacts from the future. It's has more leverage if they are more quickly absorbed both because then, you know, that, that very active absorption, you kind of see the reflection of how that works in the world and you can see how to go further with it. And also from a purely kind of, I don't know, personal point of view,"
},
{
"end_time": 8640.384,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8615.247,
"text": " It's it's like, gosh, if more people understood computational language, for example, then lots of progress would get made in the world. Lots of things that are confused now wouldn't be confused. Lots of what would be an example of, let's say, in biology, something that would get overturned because they're just thinking too non computationally. What's the fundamental theory of biology?"
},
{
"end_time": 8662.91,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8641.288,
"text": " I mean, in other words, biology has not even believed that there is a fundamental theory. Biology at best has natural selection as sort of a fundamental theory. It's not really a predictive theory in the same and it has, you know, the idea that that biology is somehow fundamentally digital and is encoded in genomics and so on. But there isn't"
},
{
"end_time": 8689.394,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8664.172,
"text": " Whereas in physics we have sort of big theories biology does not have big theories biology fills endless books and texts and journals and so on with lots and lots and lots and lots of detail and The the idea that there might be a big theory is pretty absent in biology I mean at times in the past I would say in the 1980s there was a period of time when people were sort of like"
},
{
"end_time": 8715.009,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8689.804,
"text": " A little bit thinking of those time in the nineteen fifties when forties and fifties when people are thinking about their own biology that i wasn't around in those days the nineteen eighties i was around so i was you know was participating in that and there was sort of a some degree of enthusiasm for that but the idea that there might be big theories in biology is really not there and that will be an example of something which if you really internalize kind of the computational way of thinking about things"
},
{
"end_time": 8745.128,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8715.299,
"text": " That is the thing where there could be a big theory and you know, what would the consequence of that be? You know, we might be like, well, this is how aging works. This is really what's going on. This is really what's going on in, you know, sort of foundationally what's going on in, I don't know, cancer or something like this is foundationally what's going on in neuroscience. You know, we don't we don't know those things. We don't have big theories in those areas. And, you know, you asked what what's a place where people go off track?"
},
{
"end_time": 8772.773,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8745.384,
"text": " You know, I think the assumption that there cannot be a big theory is an example of something that might be off track. I mean, you might have said about, well, lots of things in physics, for example, there couldn't be a big theory of this, but then turned out there was. And I think that's a place. So I think that, and when I say a big theory of things, sort of interesting because on the one hand, we've got computational irreducibility,"
},
{
"end_time": 8794.138,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8772.91,
"text": " What slices of computational reducibility can you find?"
},
{
"end_time": 8823.916,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8794.633,
"text": " The ones that, you know, our laws of physics represent a particular slice of computational reducibility that observers like us can see with respect to the whole Rulliad. And the, you know, I think that that's sort of when we look for a theory in biology, that theory might not be a theory of the same character as theories that we, you know, it might not be a theory that says still the stegosaurus will have"
},
{
"end_time": 8846.903,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8824.206,
"text": " you know for spikes on its tail it's very unlikely to be a theory that says something like that and but it you know what kind of a thing it might say we're not sure you know natural selection is a theory that says different kinds of things than one might imagine the theory would say earlier i mean even today you know it's like what are the predictions of natural selection what doesn't really have"
},
{
"end_time": 8871.203,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8847.415,
"text": " The same kinds of predictions in that, you know, a theory where you compute from axioms something has it. It's so I think that's the that's the challenge in some cases is the challenge is more to define the right question. Once one has the right question, for example, in biology, what what kind of a thing would the fundamental theory of biology talk about?"
},
{
"end_time": 8897.329,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8871.766,
"text": " and and what would it and you know for example one could be unlucky it could be the case that there is a fundamental theory of economics and it's about something we just don't care about there's a fundamental theory of economics and it tells us about something to do with the correlation between transactions here and there and it just is something we humans say okay that's fun you know we can measure it it's like cool it works but we don't care"
},
{
"end_time": 8927.039,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8897.739,
"text": " Um, and, uh, now actually it will not stay that way. If such a thing is found, just like we in engineering, uh, kind of find ways to make use of things that we can say about the world. I'm sure that anything we can say will be made use of. And just like, you know, whether it's the hedge funds arbitraging based on it, or whether it's some, some other kind of use that, um, some of us might consider more productive, but that's a different matter."
},
{
"end_time": 8946.817,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8928.2,
"text": " Steven Thank you for spending so much time with me. This was this was a good conversation this was you you asked a lot of very interesting questions and I I I said a bunch of things here that I Haven't said anywhere else because I only figured them out as we were talking about them. So well, that's super fun, man. It was super fun the"
},
{
"end_time": 8965.435,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8947.005,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like."
},
{
"end_time": 8982.159,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8965.435,
"text": " helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 8997.841,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8982.159,
"text": " Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well."
},
{
"end_time": 9018.558,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8997.841,
"text": " Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms. Just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts and I read that in the comments, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead re-listening on those platforms?"
},
{
"end_time": 9047.875,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9018.558,
"text": " iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough."
},
{
"end_time": 9077.79,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9048.643,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What did you get it to? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock."
},
{
"end_time": 9113.695,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9084.514,
"text": " Here's a bonus bit for sticking around. I'll do these more and more. So always check at the end like a mathematical physics version of the Marvel end of credits scene. Just to give an advertisement, can you hold up some of the books that are behind you so that I can include them in the description? Let me see whether I can. The real question is, can I turn around and not confuse everything? And let's see, what do I have here? I have to go find them. OK, if it's too difficult, that's all right. No, I think I think let me see what I've got."
},
{
"end_time": 9140.862,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9114.343,
"text": " you know what i actually don't have the current versions of some of them on that bookshelf thank you for thank you for pointing that out i've got them actually if you um uh yeah hold on and i'm i'm going to solve that problem but you have to just a second let me let me um uh just set this all right that was a fun ask of uh"
},
{
"end_time": 9166.374,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9141.118,
"text": " Can I hold up some books? I have a big pile. This is like shopping channel, you know. All right, let's do it. So let me see. I've got I've written a whole bunch of books that actually my oh gosh, I forgot the biggest one. New kind of science. Well, that's a big line. That's fine. Don't worry. Viewers are familiar with that. Right. So then"
},
{
"end_time": 9194.565,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9166.954,
"text": " In more recent times, you know, I had this whole run of books that started in 2016 that started to have this book called idea makers, which is about, um, it's kind of a, uh, a book of biographical, um, uh, sort of biographies of a variety of people, which I think is pretty fun. Then let's see, then we have just before."
},
{
"end_time": 9225.862,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9196.032,
"text": " 2019 when i started the physics project i put together a collection of things which was uh this adventures of a computational explorer which kind of might have been the that's the end folks kind of uh kind of kind of story but then came the physics project and then we have uh the book of the physics project which um uh um was um uh it's kind of my uh initial writings on that subject then i had a book"
},
{
"end_time": 9252.517,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9226.852,
"text": " That was some Kind of a book about a subject that has been obscure for a hundred years and I thought I kind of put together this book because I wanted to because it was the hundredth anniversary of the invention of combinators which was sort of the a first idea about how computation might work and I found this much more useful than I expected. This is a great"
},
{
"end_time": 9281.749,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9252.79,
"text": " Kind of laboratory for understanding a lot of idea foundational ideas about computation. So that was that was interesting. Then then there's my book about mathematics, foundations and physicalization, which is about applying ideas from the physics project and the really add and so on to mathematics, the foundations of mathematics to understanding that"
},
{
"end_time": 9312.09,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9282.21,
"text": " You know, Plato was right in the sense that mathematics, there's a real thing, which is mathematics. If you believe in sort of physical reality, you should also believe in mathematical reality. And then what do we have next? Then we have, this was a, this was a sort of a fun book to put together 20 years of new kind of science, partly explaining how the NKS book came to be written and so on. And some of the, the history of that, that I,"
},
{
"end_time": 9340.06,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9312.483,
"text": " Uh was actually as is so often the case in history It was much harder to piece together and to write than I expected But it makes an interesting tale if you're interested in kind of how big projects actually actually happen Then we have my book on my book on the second law. Um, and that was uh The um, I kind of started on this book when I was 12 years old"
},
{
"end_time": 9364.497,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9340.418,
"text": " 1972 um i got interested in the second law of thermodynamics and the kind of the um uh the thing that was my kind of stimulus for that was a book cover that um uh let me see um there you go um is it uh"
},
{
"end_time": 9396.749,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9369.172,
"text": " let's see if i hold it up that if you can see that book cover so you will notice a certain resonance between that book cover and this cover this book cover and so that that book cover was a book that i i got when i was was 12 years old and 50 years later i made this book which i hope finally explains"
},
{
"end_time": 9414.428,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9397.005,
"text": " what the phenomenon that was that was illustrated on that that very old book cover and then that i have two small books this is unusual for me i have this book that um about uh chat gbt and um kind of how llm yeah you announced that where we met"
},
{
"end_time": 9431.578,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9415.998,
"text": " yes possibly yeah possibly the book was really right around then yeah this was a um uh you know i i i wrote it because everybody kept on asking me how does chat gbt work what's it doing why does it work and so i thought i better write this down i wrote it down rather quickly"
},
{
"end_time": 9450.589,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9432.005,
"text": " And then millions of people read that blog post and so on and then people said you should turn it into a book and so now there's versions of this in about 15 languages and it remains I think the only kind of high level description of what's going on and why it works. It was sort of surprising."
},
{
"end_time": 9471.408,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9450.589,
"text": " But as i thought about it after the fact i kind of realized that the set of things that you kind of need to know about and pull together is more unusual than than i thought i just did another book that just came out a few days ago which is some very utilitarian book but i came from in twenty seventeen"
},
{
"end_time": 9491.169,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9472.022,
"text": " Are there was an eclipse visible from the us and i decided to write something about the history of how one could predict eclipses and also we built a website that could predict when when the eclipse would occur at any given place on the on the earth at to within one second and so okay so."
},
{
"end_time": 9516.254,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9491.459,
"text": " At the time of the twenty seventeen eclipse, you know, I just produced this sort of history of eclipse prediction, two days to spare from the time of the eclipse. But this time we knew the eclipse was coming because after we can predict them. And so this time my my team said, let's put out the description of this and about predicting eclipses as a book in time for the April 8th"
},
{
"end_time": 9529.855,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9516.647,
"text": " 2024 eclipse that's visible in the us so this is some this is a set of a fun story about about that that i have to say if if it was some."
},
{
"end_time": 9553.848,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9530.179,
"text": " i was able to write to the history of eclipse prediction in 2017 because i wasn't working on the physics project at that time but now that i've got this this whole pile of other things that i'm doing a book like that wouldn't exist but for the fact that it was already written you know the core parts of it was already written in 2017 but that's"
},
{
"end_time": 9582.91,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9554.121,
"text": " That's all that's that's all the books. I it's a reasonably I mean, I don't know. I feel I feel like you feel like you're more productive now in your 60s than you were when you were younger there in terms of writing. Yes, actually, I should mention one more book. That's another book. That's the third edition of a book about Wolfram language, which is kind of intended as a sort of a an introduction to to how to how to use our computational language"
},
{
"end_time": 9609.155,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9583.217,
"text": " to think in computational ways and actually i have just embarked on another book project which is a book called introduction to computational thinking. That's a rather ambitious project and i'm sort of doing it as a background project and i will probably start posting pieces of it and on the web you're asking my more productive now than i was in the past. You know it really helps that i found new mechanisms to"
},
{
"end_time": 9634.019,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9610.009,
"text": " To sort of make use of my productivity. I mean, the fact that I can write things and post them and so on is, is there lots of things which I had energetically done in the past, but didn't really have a venue to do anything with them. So it's, it's been, um, uh, it's been nice. I think, um, um, uh, you know, uh, it, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 9657.858,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9634.753,
"text": " I feel reasonably productive. If you count volume of paper over the last four years, that's pretty decent. Are you typing the majority of that, like physically typing? Are you writing? Are you dictating? I'm typing."
},
{
"end_time": 9683.285,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9658.148,
"text": " In fact, I, I have a really crazy habit, which is that I record these video work logs of actually, you know, as I write these things and figure things out and I even post them. I don't think anybody's, nobody should watch them. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. The working sessions, the live working. No, no, no. This is much worse than that. Those are, those are interactive with other people. These are video work logs, silent me working on my own."
},
{
"end_time": 9704.258,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9683.899,
"text": " And the only thing that's interesting about those to me and useful to people sometimes is if there is some random thing that i said somewhere and somebody wonders why did he say that you know what he was talking about or not you know you can in principle go and find the video work log where that very sentence was typed."
},
{
"end_time": 9717.585,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 9704.548,
"text": " And you can see you know the six versions of that sentence before the final version and you can see the you know what the the actual experiment that I was looking at that made me conclude the thing that I wrote in that sentence."
},
{
"end_time": 9747.09,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 9717.858,
"text": " So meaning that it's a screen recording. It's a screen recording. Yeah, it's a screen recording of the only it's silent screen recording. So I had considered recording it, including sound with with me whistling to myself. But I decided that was that was too silly and too distracting. So they're just silent screen recordings. But it's it's it's I mean, I don't know. I haven't I feel like it's it's I'm kind of interested in this kind of open science idea."
},
{
"end_time": 9777.381,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 9747.483,
"text": " You know, it's an idea that this this idea that you can you can really expose the process of doing science. And I've you know, I'm really I like that. I think it's I think it's a both for me. It's kind of. It makes it feel more meaningful doing it if one is kind of exposing the process. And I think for the world at large, I think it's an interesting thing to be able to sort of see inside that process."
},
{
"end_time": 9803.268,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 9777.551,
"text": " And I, you know, I've been surprised that, I mean, I've been doing live streaming now of like our software design stuff for five years, six years now, maybe more. Let's see. I must've started in 2016. So, so it's, it's like seven years now. Um, and I don't think anybody else does this stuff. I think, I think it's, uh, you know, uh, you know, maybe it's, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 9826.442,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 9803.899,
"text": " Yeah, you know, I'm sort of surprised when people at universities are like, oh, you know, we everything is, you know, we're so keen on open this, that and the other. It's like, right, right. You know, how about some open science guys? That would be interesting. And people are like, I don't want to do that. I mean, I might make a mistake when I'm doing, you know, writing on my blackboard for myself. And it's like, yeah,"
},
{
"end_time": 9843.319,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 9826.596,
"text": " That's that's kind of interesting to see that happen and then then you fix the mistake and then people learn something from it and so on and i i am i mean i'm sure i mean maybe it's just a consequence of them i mean. I really you know."
},
{
"end_time": 9868.763,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9843.541,
"text": " i just don't care that that you know things i do put out there as an open thing it's like doesn't make any difference to me okay i made a mistake maybe somebody will learn something interesting because they'll say well i made that same kind of mistake and that's how he fixed it and i can fix it this way too and and so on so anyway that's a let's say um uh another another activity and i think um um yeah"
},
{
"end_time": 9898.49,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9870.196,
"text": " So yes, so I'm still feeling reasonably productive, I'm happy to say. So you don't know this, but I'm working on a project about toes. So with this channel, I investigate different toes, theories of everything like string theory and loop quantum gravity, and then yours. And I was realizing that there's not much of a comparison between them. I'm in the process of exploring them with category theory, since that's the most general of all math."
},
{
"end_time": 9924.821,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9898.968,
"text": " But now I'm thinking, hmm, maybe I should use or at least explore thinking of loop quantum gravity and string theory in the context of of Wolfram's physics project language. I think it's the most promising possibility. By the way, I don't think you're right about category theory. Category theory is is a framework for math, assuming computational reducibility."
},
{
"end_time": 9955.452,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9925.623,
"text": " It's certainly closely related. So from that point of view, but I think when you think about category theory at a more down in the weeds level, the thing that is a key sort of observation in category theory is you have a morphism, you know, morphism F another morphism G and a fundamental assumption of category theory is then there's a morphism F composed G."
},
{
"end_time": 9985.026,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 9955.896,
"text": " Yes. And. Oh, you're saying it assumes shortcuts in the. It assumes shortcuts. So what's interesting about it, I think it may be a general way of thinking about computational reducibility. It may be sort of a general formalism for that which is reducible. And it in a sense, it is structured to deny irreducibility, which is a problem. I mean, it's a problem in terms of, you know, to capture"
},
{
"end_time": 10013.609,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 9985.333,
"text": " Reduce ability in a general way is super interesting and useful, but it isn't the whole story And I think that probably what's happening when you get to the whole liad and the whole infinity groupoid and so on Is that it's it's similar to this point about observers when they get too big. They're nothing That is that by the time you're you know, by the time you're an observer who has everything in you you become sort of somehow simpler"
},
{
"end_time": 10029.497,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 10014.087,
"text": " And it is in the specificity that you get the complexity so to speak by the time you're everything you can make a simple statement about it then when you're sort of down in the weeds figuring out this particular you know mathematical theory or whatever else."
}
]
}No transcript available.