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Reality, God, Consciousness | Donald Hoffman Λ Philip Goff
December 19, 2023
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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.
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Every scientific theory is only a projection of the truth. It's never the truth. No scientific theory can ever be a theory of everything. What does it mean as a philosopher interested in the ultimate nature of reality that our basic science is just equations? We're not seeing the truth. Evolution is an artifact. Our basic science isn't really telling us that much about what fundamental reality is.
Professor Donald Hoffman and Professor Philip Goff are both renowned in their respective fields of cognitive science and philosophy. Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who has put forward a theory called the interface theory of perception, which states that human perceptions are akin to some user interface, shaped more by evolutionary survival imperatives,
then by an accurate representation of the external world. Thus, according to Hoffman, reality as we know it is some illusion. In contrast, Professor of Durham University, Philip Goff, is known for panpsychism, and so there's plenty of contrasting agreement in different words in today's theolocution,
as well as disagreements, primarily around the universe's fine-tuning for life, as well as suggesting that, hey, they both agree consciousness is fundamental, but that doesn't mean that what's derived from consciousness is illusory. Quite the contrary. Philip has just published a book called Why? The Purpose of the Universe, and the links to that are in the description, as well as his previous works, Galileo's Error and Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.
Even though Professor Goff is known for panpsychism, his views are best described as Cosmopsychism. This means that the universe itself might be a conscious entity with its own goals. My name's Kurt Jaimungal. If you're new to this channel, this is Theories of Everything, where we explore theories of everything, primarily from a physics perspective, that is, an analytical one, but as well as trying to understand, okay, if there is no toe, if there is no theory of everything, why? That to me counts as its own.
a limiting theory of everything, or perhaps a theory of a thing, what constitutes something as separate from another thing, we've explored that with Karl Friston and Michael Levin, as well as what is free will, how do we know if we have it, what are alternatives to compatibilism and libertarian notions, and of course, how are we conscious?
that is the hard problem of consciousness solutions to that is it idealism is there something to cartesian dualism or some other form of dualism how about a triadic model all of these are explored in depth with rigor on this channel by interviewing some of the top intellectuals in this space if that sounds interesting to you then feel free to subscribe as we have two hour three hour four hours sometimes even
Okay, well, it's an honor to host you both. Thank you, Professor Goff. Thank you, Professor Hoffman, Hoff and Goff. Thank you, Kurt. Prof Hoff and Prof Goff. Great to be here. So Prof Goff,
You have a book that's recently been released called Why? What is it about? And please tell myself and the audience the relevance of it for this discussion. Brilliant. Good question. So yeah, this is a book I would never have imagined myself writing about about five years ago. It's been quite a journey. I think so many people in the West think they have to fit into the dichotomy of
Either you believe in the God of traditional Western religion or you're a secular atheist. It feels like you've got to say, whose side are you on, Richard Dawkins or the Pope? And I was raised Catholic and decided I didn't believe in God when I was about 14 and gave that one up and was quite happily on team secular atheists for over 20 years. But just recently, I've slowly come to think that
Both of these worldviews are inadequate. Both of them have things they can't explain about reality. And ultimately where I think the evidence points is to what I call cosmic purpose, namely some kind of goal directedness at the fundamental level of reality, but existing in the absence of the traditional God.
so so yeah so basically in this book that's why the purpose of the universe got a very cool cover actually i'm quite pleased with what they did with that and um i argue for this position and then discuss its implications for the meaning and purpose of human existence so yeah so just basically very brief overview um you know one one of the
One of the things I think the traditional atheist picture of a meaningless purposeless universe struggles to explain is the fine-tuning of physics for life, the recent discovery that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to be against improbable odds just right. And, you know, for a long time I thought the multiverse was the best explanation for this, but I've just been slowly persuaded by philosophers of probability
that there's some dodgy reasoning in the inference from fine-tuning to a multiverse, that it commits what's called the inverse gambler's fallacy. And so I've just been led to think that actually in our standard Bayesian ways of thinking about evidence, the fine-tuning just is evidence for cosmic purpose, for this kind of goal-directedness towards life. And that's kind of weird. And I think as a society,
We're sort of in denial about this at the moment because it doesn't fit with the picture of science we've got used to. It's maybe a bit like in the 16th century when we started getting evidence that we weren't in the center of the universe and people struggled to accept that because it didn't fit with the version of reality they got used to. And now we sort of scoff at those people and we thought, oh, they're stupid religious people. Why didn't they just follow the evidence? But I think every generation
absorbs a worldview it can't see beyond and i think something like that's going on uh with fine tuning right now um so it's not it's not it's not just fine tuning on my case for cosmic purposes built on there's also chapter on consciousness and the mind body problem connecting to ai and the science of consciousness and i think certain things in this area also point to cosmic purpose although the argument there is a little bit takes a little bit longer to lay out
So that's the case for kind of cosmic purpose. Now most people arguing for cosmic purpose go for God. God's fine-tuned the universe or something. But I don't like that hypothesis either. And here it's the familiar reason that the difficulty of reconciling an all-loving omnipotent God with the terrible gratuitous
suffering we find in the world. It doesn't make sense to me that a loving God who could do anything would create a universe with so much pain. So basically I think atheists can't explain fine-tuning and some consciousness stuff. Theists can't explain suffering. We need a hypothesis that can account for both of these data points. And just very, very finally, just the style of the book is
You know, so my first book, which is somewhere here, was an academic book. My second book, Galileo's Era, was aimed at a general audience. So this book I'm trying to do both. So it's with a academic press, Oxford University Press, so it's kind of properly peer-reviewed. But it's also set up as a trade book, so it's reasonably priced unlike academic books. But also each chapter has a more accessible bit.
And then a digging deeper bit, which goes into some of the more technical details and all the objections and so on. So, yeah, so maybe it'll please no one, but I'm trying to uniquely trying to appeal to both of those audiences. But yeah, that's about it, really. Sorry, that was a bit long winded. Wonderful. And what is it that you appreciate about Don's work? Oh, I'm a huge I'm a huge fan of Don's work. I mean, I think Don is a radical pioneer.
You know, I think humans always think that at the end of history and, you know, that the current paradigm is basically established and the task is just to fill in the details. And I think in every period, most people go along with that. Largely because people look at you funny if you don't. But I think, you know, Don has come up with some profound challenges to our prevailing materialist paradigm. And he's done so not just with
science and mathematics, but also I think with engagement with philosophy. You know, I think we're living in a sort of scientific period where people think all questions can be answered with experiments and they've forgotten the role of philosophy, the very important role of philosophy in the project of finding out about reality. And I think especially with consciousness, it's so important for science and philosophy
Well, I actually wrote a little blurb for his wonderful new book and I think it's an outstanding book.
easily accessible to an average non-scientist, non-philosopher, but it's also something that a scientist and a philosopher will find quite grabbing and challenging. It's brilliant to be able to write about such deep issues in a way that the average non-scientist and philosopher
can understand and yet engages everybody else. So hats off to Philip for a remarkable book and for doing that and also just for the way he engages with very difficult questions and is not afraid to go against the standard views where he thinks he needs to go against them and that's not easy to do in academia. It's just not easy to do.
And especially in philosophy, it's very, very difficult. In science, you might be able to say, well, I've got a theorem. So you come at me because I've got a theorem, whereas it's a little harder. I mean, sometimes you can have a logical proof in philosophy, but short of that, then it just is a lot of bravery to go out there and say, here's a different point of view, and then to take all the comers. And so hats off to Philip for doing that. And I must say that I really enjoyed
Learning a lot about the philosophical issues in his latest book why so that that's very very helpful and you know one thing that philosophers do is. Remind scientists to think about our basic core concepts to look at the logical structure of what we're thinking about.
Not just jump in with the mathematics and go off and compute and so forth and derive consequences, but to think at a fundamental level about the very concepts that we're using at the foundations of our theories and to think about that conceptually.
I know you both have several questions for one another and I'll just state one of them to you Don and then we'll hear your answer and then you'll ask the same question to Philip. The question is about neurons and whether they exist prior to
So you'd like me to answer my own question first? Yeah, what is your point of view on that and then we'll get Phillips answer. Right, so first I'll say what I think the standard view is so I can contrast my view with the standard view which most of my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience just take it for granted that of course neurons exist when they're not perceived and that neural activity and you know brains more generally are
responsible for conscious experiences in humans and perhaps other animals as well. And maybe if you have the right programming and circuits and software of some AI, it'll eventually be conscious as well. So these, this approach to consciousness that says neurons exist when they're not perceived and neural activity is responsible for the generation of consciousness, I think runs afoul of modern science.
The Nobel Prize in 2022 last year was awarded to three physicists for confirming experimentally what quantum theory seems to predict theoretically, that local realism is false. The local realism is the claim that
Well, locality, realism is a claim that objects have definite values or properties like position and momentum and spin when they're not observed. So the electron has a position even if no one looks. And locality is just the particles obey Einstein's space-time laws and things can travel faster than the speed of light influences. So local realism is false. And I think that we should
Recognize that local realism is false. Neurons simply don't exist. They don't have any position when they're not observed. And if something doesn't have a position, it's not there. If you don't have a position, you're not there. So I would say that right now, I don't have any neurons. And someone who's hearing my argument might say, yes, I completely agree with you now that you don't have any neurons.
But I'm saying I don't have any neurons. If you opened up someone's skull, you would find neurons, but you would be creating them on the fly when you observed. And that's again in line with what quantum theory says is that these particle properties emerge in the act of observation and they're a result of the observation, but they do not exist prior to the observation. And there are, by the way, in quantum theory cases where you can set up
empirical experimental situations where you can prove that the if you make a certain measurement you'll get a certain certain outcome with probability one and you can also prove that that outcome could not possibly be there until you made the observation so I'll say that again you can prove in these special and if you want to see the paper on this it's Chris Fuchs
It's a 2010 paper on quantum Bayesianism. He goes into this, so you don't have to rely on me. You can read that paper and read for yourself. A quantum experiment that gives you a case where you can prove that you will, if you make this particular measurement, get a certain value with probability one. But you can also prove, given the detailed setup of the situation, that it's impossible, logically impossible, that the value of that outcome existed prior to the measurement.
So this is what you can set up in quantum theory, and that's why a lot of people realize that local realism is false. And it took the Nobel committee decades before they gave the Nobel Prize for it, because this is a big one, right? So they had – Klauser did a lot of work decades ago, and then they were tightening, tightening, tightening, closing the loopholes and so forth, and finally the Nobel committee said, okay, what can we do? This is pretty – so I think that it's just in
keeping with what physics is telling us to let go of local realism for neurons and so I would say no. Neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. Philip? Yeah, so I think Don and I have more in common than that divides us. Crucially, our fundamental starting point is that consciousness exists at the fundamental level of reality.
Well, I don't know if it's a starting point, but it's a crucial aspect of our view. I suppose where this first question gets to the heart of maybe where we disagree, namely on the status of physical reality. So I think Don, he can speak for himself, but defends a view that philosophers have traditionally called idealism, which usually comes with the idea that the physical world is
illusory in some sense or not fully real whereas I guess I'm more inclined to the view that the physical world is entirely real and independent of our minds you know this this Batman cup is really out there in the world and lights bouncing off it and you know it's made up of particles or fields or whatever it's just that
those particles and fields are ultimately made up of consciousness in ways we could perhaps get into but um and i suppose that the reason i'm there is yeah i mean i'm totally open to don's so i suppose my view sort of i suppose i'm in in a way a middle i always go for the middle ways a middle way between the physicalist or materialist position and the idealist position um i'm open to don's position but i suppose i'm just not
Totally as yet persuaded by his arguments, as intriguing as they are, Don often appeals to these speculative theories in, oh, you know, popular, not fringe at all, popular theories in theoretical physics, according to which space and time don't exist at the fundamental level of reality. They're rather emergent. But
I well we recently I organized a conference on panpsychism in the states and Don kindly gave a talk and Sean Carroll was the in-house skeptic of all this business and Sean's response to Don that I kind of agree with is you know just because space and time don't exist at the fundamental level of reality doesn't mean they're not real, right?
You know, we discovered atoms are not fundamental. They're made up of, you know, quarks and electrons. That doesn't mean we say, oh, there's no atoms. You know, we just say that they're not fundamental. So, yeah, so I'm not on the local realism. I mean, this is going to quickly get outside of my skill set. But, you know, my understanding, talking to people like Tim Magdalen,
is that, yeah, none of this rules out for the Bohmian view, for example, although I know that's not an incredibly popular view. But even if you go for a more popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, yeah, I mean, we don't have to crudely think particles are the fundamental things. It could be, you know, the wave function is the fundamental physical reality. Sean Carroll tells me, believes in
The fundamental reality is a vector in high dimensional Hilbert space. So we could have some, some esoteric fundamental physical reality, but which, which three dimensional space and time merges from, you know, this is a heated debate in, in philosophy of physics. How do the, the popular view, I think, is that which people like David Albert, Alyssa Ney, try to make sense of
three-dimensional spatio-temporal mind independent reality being real and genuinely emerging from some the more non-space-time esoteric maybe quantum wave function reality that physicists currently are inclined to think is at the fundamental level of reality so yeah so maybe the normal world we perceive is is real but emergent Don it would be useful at this point to characterize the definition of real
Great points, Philip. Of course, great, great, great points. So, um, the word real, right? We use the word real in a couple of different senses. Um, and so maybe want to distinguish a couple of senses of real. So one is one version of real is, um, something is real if it exists, even when it's not perceived and that, that think that's what perhaps you were saying, but there's another sense in which something is real. Um, um, for example, if I have a headache,
I complain about this nasty headache that I've got. That headache wouldn't exist if I didn't perceive it. My headache isn't real in the sense that I just gave before that it would exist even if it weren't perceived. Nevertheless, someone might say, well, if you don't say my headache is real, I beg to differ you, my headache is real. There's a sense in which something is real if it's a real subjective experience. In that case, we know that the word
We're saying something's real not because it exists even when it's not perceived, but rather it exists in my perception. The question about are neurons real is I'm really asking are they real in the sense that they would exist even if they're not perceived. I think your answer is yes, they are real in the sense that they would exist even if they're not perceived. I'm saying no.
that they're only real in the sense they are subjective experiences that we have and so they exist while we have the experience and they don't exist otherwise. Okay so just that notion real because people can wobble on that and get confused on what we're discussing. So then my take on it is of course physicists are going to debate and Sean Carroll doesn't think that we need to worry about space-time is doomed.
We'll have to see where the physics goes in this, but here's what I see happening in the last 10 years for the high-energy theoretical physicists who are working on this. They're finding that space-time, so what they argue is that space-time is doomed because it has no operational meaning at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, the Planck scale. It's not that there are pixels at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters.
is that its space-time makes no sense anymore. There's nothing you can do operationally with it. From my point of view, it's a fairly shallow data structure. It falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Not 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters, just 10 to the minus 33, and it's useless after that, and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. Not 10 to the minus 43 trillion seconds, 10 to the minus 43. So it's a fairly shallow data structure
And so in the last 10 years, physicists have been saying, well, what happens if we let go of space-time completely and also quantum theory completely and look for some deeper structures beyond space-time and quantum theory? Can we find anything that can actually do work, like predict scattering amplitudes of particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider and so forth? And in the last 10 years, so this is all relatively new, they've discovered that yes, you can, that you can
There are these new structures like the decorator permutations and amplitohedra that lets you compute actual scattering processes in space-time. And they have two advantages, what they've discovered are two advantages over space-time physics. One is that first if you do it inside space-time using quantum field theory, just to compute one interaction like two gluons hitting each other and four gluons spraying out,
is hundreds of pages of algebra and millions of terms. It's a mess because you're doing it all on quantum fields in space-time. You're enforcing quantum theory and relativity theory. When you let go of space-time and these new structures, you can do what was millions of terms in three or four or five terms. You can compute it by hand. So the math all of a sudden becomes simple. Well, simpler. Physics is never easy, but simpler.
And the second thing is you see new symmetries. There's something that they call the infinite Yang-Yin symmetry, which you cannot see in space time. But when you let go of space time, all of a sudden you see not only does the math become simpler, but you're seeing new symmetries that are true of the data that can't be seen inside space time. So what seems to be emerging is that space time, which we've taken to be the fundamental reality, looks more and more like a, frankly,
Pretty shallow, tired data structure that is a really bad framework. We're sort of stuck with this data structure in terms of our perceptual, will we perceive the world? And so what physics is doing is now realizing we can actually, we don't have to be stuck with either quantum theory or special or general relativity. We can go beyond them and we can then project back into those space-time data structures and get answers
Much more easily and see deeper symmetries. So it's in that sense that I'm thinking Space-time is like flat earth. It's good for some things, but if you're trying to build a space program Flat earth isn't going to do it and if you really want to understand the nature I mean and and space-time is great for certain things but if you really want to understand the nature I think of consciousness and of reality more deeply and
Okay, Philip. Well, I suppose again, I think all of what you've said builds a case and I couldn't get into the physics of debating that case.
a case that space-time is not fundamental. The fact that our models seem to collapse below certain levels suggests they're of limited applicability and hence that they don't exist in the fundamental story of reality. I mean you said Sean Carroll's not sympathetic to space-time being doomed. Well I think he is if by space-time being doomed
That's just a sort of poetic way of saying it doesn't exist in our fundamental story of reality. And but yeah, I still think I mean, there's I mean, suppose we think, you know, space time is emerging and what we have at the fundamental level is is the wave function. I mean, there's going to be, I presume, a sort of mathematical mapping from the wave function to any state of affairs in
ordinary quote-unquote three-dimensional reality and so on that basis we can perhaps make sense of some kind of emergence relationship or philosophers tend to call this grounding. Scientists tend to talk of emergence but yeah I guess I don't see why this means neurons can't exist unperceived. Why can't we just say they exist unperceived but they're
The their existence when unperceived is ultimately rooted in a more fundamental story that is not so not spatial temporal for all the reasons you've raised. But yeah, I suppose I suppose that's what I think. Okay, great. That's a good response. I would say a couple things on the quantum theory aspect of it. What these
High-energy theoretical physicists are saying is that not only is space-time doomed, but quantum theory is doomed, so that we're not going to get space-time emerging from wave functions. And the new structures that they're finding, like the amplitude hydron, the physicists will say, look, there are no Hilbert spaces here. These new structures, there's no Hilbert space anywhere to be seen.
But we can show you why quantum-like features like unitarity emerge from these deeper structures. So these deeper structures don't care a bit about Hilbert spaces or quantum theory, but you can show how these give rise to unitarity and other quantum-like features at the same time that they give rise to the space-time kinds of features. And another thing about the quantum theory is
When you look at the weirdness of quantum theory, for example, the no cloning theorem, you can't copy quantum bits and things like superposition and entanglement, sort of the weird aspects of quantum theory. There are a number of physicists who pointed out that these properties of quantum theory can really be understood as just arising from lack of information.
It's in some sense just due to partial information and you can prove that that alone is responsible for these weirdnesses. That makes sense if space-time is just a data structure that humans use
to navigate the world. And we can talk about the evolutionary arguments that I have for that. But that data structure is there to simplify, right? That's the whole point of an interface is to simplify and throw out information. So all the weirdness of quantum theory is pointing again to the fact that space-time itself is a very shallow and information-losing data structure.
And so when we when we let go of space-time, we're also going to have to let go of quantum theory because quantum theory is really a symptom of the limitations of space-time. I mean, I didn't mean to say, you know, this fundamental theory is going to be quantum. I mean, I was just to use the wave function as an example. I suppose just I mean, what you what
What you capture in terms of, well, it's just a data set, it's just a sort of headset we're wearing. I mean, I don't see why we couldn't instead of that use the other very detailed theories of emergence people have talked about that often are to do with
losing information and a less fine-grained picture of reality or maybe involving what Dennett calls real patterns or some kind of functional story. David Albert and Barry Lohr developed some kind of functionless story of how we get three-dimensional reality out of more esoteric structures. It's almost like you think the only way of making sense of
the non-fundamental is is this sort of data structure business but I mean maybe that's that's one possibility but there's also other models of emergence and so it could be neurons are real but they are they're emergent from these bizarre structures like the I can never pronounce this what is it the amputated hedron or something you know so that they're just their existence is dependent on those more fundamentally stoke structures so
Yeah, I mean, I guess I just think of these as different models of the non-fundamental and I would be looking for an argument as to whether to go your way rather than David Alberts or Tim Magdalen or whatever. But yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. I would say that. So far, the other kinds of attempts haven't, for example, unified gravity with quantum theory, right? So they
There are promissory notes that haven't yet been fulfilled. So we can't point to a success yet in the emergence. Hold on Don, they're different fundamental theories. I'm not advocating a fundamental theory in physics, I'm just talking about
Different views of the non fundamental and the relationship between the non fundamental and the fundamental It seems like you think your conception of the non fundamental is always like it's a it's a data structure But there there it is I'm not a physicist or even a philosopher physics either I don't know what fundamental physics is gonna look like but I guess I'm not seeing why we can't whatever it looks like is
Even if it's the AmpliHedrons that I can ever pronounce or whatever, I should have rehearsed this, shouldn't I learn how to pronounce that? It's basically like amplitude, just forget the D, amplitude and then just say Hedrons. AmpliHedrons. Oh, thank you. Now, why didn't I ask you that before we went live? Anyway, everyone thinks I'm an idiot now. Yeah, but those people don't have any neurons, so don't worry about it.
So, yeah, whatever fundamental physics is, whatever kind of funny structures are at the bottom of that, I don't see why we can't make sense of space time as emergent from those non-spatial temporal structures. But we can in the same way that we can get some kind of relationship between, for example, Einstein and quantum theory versus Newton. Right. And we can show that Newton is a special case of Einstein.
If you let the speed of light go to infinity or if you let Planck's constant in the case of quantum theory, if you let Planck's constant go to zero, then you can get, you know, versions of Newton as special cases of the deeper theory. And that's the sense in which I'm thinking about these structures beyond spacetime is that we'll find that spacetime emerges as a special case of a much, much deeper. So, I mean, for example, we can still... I'm happy with everything you just said.
That's another step in the sense of going with the local realism being false. There I'm saying the Nobel Prize was just given last December
for local realism being false and so I believe the physics local realism is false end of story that's that's that's the way now there are some physicists who will disagree there's some some who will say there's super determinism as a way out so look we you know we can have if we keep we can keep local realism if we assume that there's super determinism or something like that so so there are there are issues about this but
But there's something I think that we might have in common here that I'd like to push on, and that is the physicists who are looking for structures beyond space-time are right now just finding geometric objects. The abstrahedron is not a polytope, but it's a geometric structure, and decorative permutations are combinatorial data stream mathematical structures. But there's no dynamics, and ultimately we're going to have to say when we step outside of space-time,
Physics likes dynamics and we're going to be talking about dynamical entities beyond space-time, not inside space-time, not curled up inside space-time, dynamical entities outside of space-time. Now, here's the perfect place for you and me to say, hey, well, what about consciousness, right? What about conscious entities entirely outside of space-time? And that's, see, that's where I'm working with my own theories and saying, okay, let's just go with this.
The Nobel Prize was correct. Local realism is false. Space-time is not fundamental, and we need to find dynamical entities entirely outside of space-time. They will project into space-time, of course, just like Newton is a projection of Einstein and quantum theory. But it'll be a special case of some deeper structure. So why not go after a theory of consciousness, a dynamics of consciousness that's not tied
to space time physics, but has the important constraint that whatever theory of consciousness we come up with outside of space time, whatever dynamics, we must with mathematical precision show precisely how space time arises as a special projection and all the dynamics of particles and all the dynamical laws of physics inside space time emerges as a very, very special case of a far more general dynamical system of consciousness.
and that would turn the whole tables around instead of saying we're trying of course we know that space-time is you know objects in space-time are real and and the laws and we're trying to fit consciousness into that to say no no no no that is the relatively trivial thing the deeper thing is consciousness itself we can get a mathematical theory of consciousness qua consciousness
and show
The point of agreement between us that there's
Consciousness at the at the fundamental level. Maybe we have slightly different stories to fit this in. What do you think? Should we move on to some of the other questions or should we continue on back and forth? So I would prefer that we not stick to the physics, but instead stick to the philosophy. Philip, if you don't mind, Don, I have some quick objections just from a physics point of view.
Because I just can't let them go. So number one, when someone says the physicists are finding these phenomenon, it's not the physicists, there are maybe 30 of those physicists of the 30,000 that exist that follow NEMA's program. Like it's a minority, maybe 25 people do. And then number two is that the amplitude hedron doesn't capture non-perturbative effects. So confinement isn't there. And almost all of the world is non-perturbative. We don't know how much is perturbative.
A number three is that just because something simplifies calculations, even if drastically, it doesn't imply an ontological reality to the ingredients that go into the simplification. For instance, there are two billiard balls that bounce off one another. We can model that with trillions and trillions and trillions of calculations and pages that take into account all the subcomponents and substances inside this billiard ball and the paint and the reflections, or we can just take their center of masses and
and have them bounce off one another. That doesn't mean the center of mass is more real than all the components that make it up. And now number four is that the Nobel Prize was given because of local realism or disproving realism or local realism. However, this is just something that's said in the popular press. And when you interview the people who have won the Nobel Prize, they're not anti-realists. In fact, they'll say that
Bell's theorem doesn't assume realism because Bell's theorem is a mathematical theorem, any more so than Stokes' theorem assumes reality or the triangle equality assumes reality. There's no axiom of reality. The positive geometry of NEMA assumes not only supersymmetry, which is dubious, but extended supersymmetry, so a perverse form of an N equals 4 if I'm not mistaken.
And furthermore, you mentioned that the theories don't incorporate gravity, well, neither does NEMA's. Okay, lastly, if we're to take it to be the case that if we are to probe the Planck length, then we'd create a black hole. Well, one, what's wrong with creating a black hole? Black holes exist. Number two, if that was to mean that somehow the Planck length doesn't exist, well,
That's an operationalist view on reality in the same way that we can say the inside of a black hole doesn't exist because we can't observe it. There are many other views on what existence is other than operationalism. So I'm done. Those are just some quick objections. Don, I'd love to hear your thoughts. But I think that those are all very, very good points. So, for example, the amplitude hydron assumes n equals four super Yang-Mills. So it's supersymmetry.
It's only for massless, that particular one is only for massless particles and you're right that doesn't extend gravity. So this is fairly new work. There's some papers in the last couple of years where NEMA has gone to all masses and spins. So it's not just, but I think it still involves supersymmetric ideas and that may end up being false. We'll have to see. What's interesting though is this has only been at it for a decade.
You
This is
And that is interesting when we talk about dynamics of entities outside of space-time. What kinds of entities are those? What are we going to put there as the entities?
That's ultimately what I'm exploring here is what happens if we start with entities that we take just to be consciousness and we get a precise mathematics and we can show that we can boot up all of space-time and quantum theory from that. We wouldn't prove that this is the right framework, but it sure is intriguing, right? As a scientist it would be very, very intriguing and it would raise deep philosophical issues. I mean, what kinds of entities
Beyond space time, we'll be talking about here. These are no longer physical entities. They're not in space time. What are they? Ultimately, if we find a physics beyond space time and it's a dynamical system, we're going to have to have a theory about what those entities are like. What are they about and why is there this dynamics going on? Of course, it'll be open to us to give a non-conscious approach, of course.
Philip, I have a question. When Don was saying, look, the neurons don't exist, which I'm just going to pick up this pen and say this pen doesn't exist prior to looking at it. Sorry, prior to observation. And then you were saying, no, no, it can exist. But at the same time, this is made out of consciousness. Can you not reconcile those two views by saying the pen is observing itself because the pen is made up of subjective experiences? Like, is there a way to make the objective from the subjective? Well, I wouldn't say that.
i wouldn't quite put it that way that the pen is observing it well i mean maybe i could talk a little bit more about the um i mean the inspiration for the contemporary panpsychist resurgence which very much draws on um crucial work from the 1920s by Bertrand Russell
and it was sort of the sorry to interrupt it also be helpful if you were to distinguish it from idealism panpsychism yeah yeah sure sure let me do that so so uh it's very much the the somewhat rediscovery of this crucial work from russell particularly in the analysis of matter that has made panpsychism in the last decade go from something that was laughed at insofar as it was thought of at all to being
a serious academic option that's taught to our undergraduates published on and so on. So right, so I think this connects a lot to what Don was saying as well. So what Russell was thinking very hard about in the 1920s was that the fact that our fundamental science physics is just purely mathematical, right? Something we kind of take for granted. And of course that's very useful if you're a working physicist, you get very precise predictions and so on.
but Russell's thinking what does it mean as a philosopher interested in the ultimate nature of reality that our basic science is just equations and what Russell concluded is that what it means is that our basic science isn't really telling us that much about what fundamental reality is it's merely describing its mathematical structure and so as far as physics is concerned
fundamental reality could turn out to be anything as long as it has the right mathematical structure you're going to get physics out of that that's all physics cares about so the contemporary Bertrand Russell inspired panpsychists exploit this and the idea is that
what we have at the fundamental level of reality are very simple conscious entities networks of simple conscious entities interacting in very simple predictable ways through their interactions they realize certain patterns and mathematical structures and then the idea is those mathematical structures just are what we call physics so we sort of get physics out of
underlying facts about consciousness so i don't think you can get consciousness out of physics but i think you can get physics out of consciousness i think we know that can be done i think russell i think we should think of russell as the darwin of consciousness i think he essentially solved all the mysteries here um so so really but but what this ends up as and this is where i think it maybe contrasts with
What I think of as Don's idealism is that there's a kind of identity between consciousness and physical reality. As I sometimes put it, matter is what consciousness does. Really there's just consciousness stuff, but physics is the mathematical structure of that consciousness stuff. As Stephen Hawking said on the last page of A Brief History of Time,
Physics doesn't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe. For the Roselian panpsychist it's consciousness that breathes fire into the equations. So just connecting it to what Don was saying, I mean Don seems to have this idea that like this physics he's attracted to or this new physics makes it more problematic
um to you know we need to look elsewhere than space time we need to look for new entities but from my perspective my birch and ruff birch and russell inspired perspective physics has never told us ever what reality is like it's just a bunch of maths it's it's not unless you go for max tegmark's view and think you know the universe is made up of maths
then physics just is not in the business of telling us what has never been in the business. So it doesn't matter whether, you know, the amplitohedron ends up being the right stuff or whether we get Bohmian space time. It's all it's just maths and we'll always need something to fill out that mathematical structure, something to breathe fire into the equations. And for the panpsychist, well, the most parsimonious answer
is consciousness because we know consciousness exists. I think there are good reasons to think if you put just mathematical structure at the fundamental level, you're not going to be able to get consciousness out of that. But we know it can be done the other way around. And so that seems to me the more plausible view. So yeah, so that's kind of how I think about things. Does that make sense? Yeah, and everything you've said, I agree with. So the only place where I would sort of
Go take the next step is to say, why just the laws of physics? Why not the consciousness? Why should we restrict our imagination to say that the laws of physics that we happen to know are all that consciousness has done?
Why not say that there are an infinite number of other quote-unquote physics that consciousness chooses to play with? This is just one. Space-time physics is one perhaps more trivial kind of physics that consciousness has chosen to make. Why should we put ourselves in a conceptual straitjacket and only work with the physics that we've seen?
It is parameterized by three integers, N, K, and M, and M is basically an integer that dials up the different universes that you might choose. So with the amplitude hadron, you can have our four-dimensional space-time as the projection of this deeper structure, but you can also have an eight-dimensional space-time. You can have space-times of 23rd.
The you can already with the new physics that they're finding outside of space time you can choose which kind of space time universe you want to create and in our 4d one is just one of an infinite number of possibilities and so so already the physics in just the first decade of stepping outside of space time is saying whoa space time the space time projection of this deeper physics is clearly just one of an infinite number of projections
I'm saying, okay, let's go with what the math is saying. Consciousness is not in the space-time straight jacket. It's free to have an infinite number of completely different kinds of physics with different kinds of laws and for us to be wedded to the space-time one is to limit our imagination about what consciousness can really do and what it really is.
I suppose I'm very, I mean, very strictly an empiricist on this point. People might find that surprising, given my philosophical views. But as I say, for the panpsychist, there's a kind of identity between, so the panpsychist will say, you know, sometimes people say to me, you know, well, what's the kind of mathematics of your theory? And my answer is, ask a physicist, right? So for the Bertrand Russell style panpsychist, it's the job of physics.
to identify what Russell called the causal skeleton of reality. The job of physics is to identify the mathematical structure of reality, the dynamics, and then our philosophical interpretation of that is that that mathematical structure is filled out by consciousness, because I think it's the best solution to the mind-body problem.
But it's just a question for physics or more broadly an empirical question. You've talked about the dynamics of consciousness and the dynamics of physical reality. For me, they're just the same thing. These infinite
Causal structures of consciousness, maybe they're possible, but I'm going to want empirical reason to think they're actual. I'm going to look for empirical grounds from physics to tell me what the dynamics of consciousness are, which for me is just equivalent to the dynamics of physical reality, the reality physicists are trying to articulate. Of course, I'm on the same page. Whatever theories we propose about dynamics of consciousness outside of space time and if I propose all these other kinds of
I agree with you on that. It's just that I don't think that we should a priori rule out the possibility that there are many, many more ways that consciousness can give rise to physics than the one that we happen to know. As we start to think out of that box, we may be able to find clean empirical
I'm finding it difficult to see where you disagree. It sounds like you all agree at your fundament that consciousness is at the fundament, but then Philip you believe Don is making a jump from there to something speculative and doing so with confidence or is it not that?
It's just that I suppose I'm happy to say this pen exists when we're not observing it. And I would say all the things about it a normal physicalist materialist would say, you know, there's light bouncing off it hitting our eyes. And yeah, I'm not this talk of it's a data structure that it's a headset we wear.
I'm not fully seeing the motivation. Maybe we should talk about the evolution stuff as well briefly, which I guess is the other point where we disagree. Maybe I'll just say one thing just because of what you said, just brought up another way that I might get at this. Drink some wine. That is to say that if you think of consciousness as fundamental and that I'm having conscious experiences, so I'm having an experience as of a pen. You held up a pen.
And I don't as a, if I take conscience to be fundamental, uh, I can say, I definitely know that I have the conscious experience as of a pen. Now, someone might come along and say, but you know, in addition to your experience, there really is, I, there is a pen and not just your experience of a pen, there is a pen. And, and I say, well, um, I don't know what the evidence is for that.
I don't really need it. I can completely do my physics without any assumption that there's anything but the experiences and I can write down the equations. So I don't see why I need this extra ontological baggage of the real pen. There is a pen when I pound the table. There really is a pen. Well, I have an experience and that's all I really need. So why do I need the real pen? Why don't I just say
Local realism is false. There is no real pen. And but there is a real experience and that's all I really need. And as Einstein put it, the laws of physics just basically are there to show us how we can predict new experiences from old experiences. Yeah, well, I suppose that we want we want a theory that fits together the the story we're getting from physics and the reality of consciousness. I suppose they're the two data points for me. But
I mean, maybe we could agree on the fundamental story. I suppose I just think a lot of philosophers and philosophers of physics have come up with detailed and rigorous theories of emergence where we can make sense of the pen, not as a sort of extra thing in the ontology, just something
Maybe just to take Dennett's view that it's a sort of a real pattern or something in the more fundamental. What is a real pattern in Dennett's view? So we've got the, you know, you could know all of physical reality at the level of fundamental physics, all that detail. But that's not very useful for many practical purposes for many. And I mean, maybe this connects with what you were saying, Kurt, about, you know, sometimes
It's not the fundamental thing that gives you the more information with less axioms or what have you. You know, some kind of ways of carving up reality. Dennett talks about the intentional stance when you treat something as an agent with thoughts and experiences or the design stance when you treat something as a designed object. They can be more useful structures for
Prediction, uh, rather than trying to, you know, work out from fundamental physics, you know, when your alarm clock is going to go off or whatever. But, um, but maybe, maybe it would help to, uh, to connect to the evolution stuff. Should I, should we go there now? Yeah, please. And then also you mentioned the word useful here. And I imagine I don't want to speak for Don, but the Don would agree that sure it's useful, but useful is a different statement than is it true or does it exist? I don't know. I don't want to put words in your mouth. Don't sorry. Oh, that's, those are good.
Yeah, yeah, so then it starts it starts to get tricky to see to see see where the difference is perhaps but Yeah, anyway, so they so this is I guess coming to Don's other argument and we'd be back and forth with this a little better on my mind chat podcast so so Don's evolutionary argument that Get just very roughly don can articulate it for himself but the given that our senses are are evolved for fitness rather than truth and
We shouldn't trust them to tell us that. In fact, I think Donna said the zero chance that they're telling us the truth about reality. Well, I'm still a bit hung up with an objection. It's not my objection raised by a philosopher. Jeffrey Bagwell is actually published in quite prestigious philosophy journal Synthes.
A paper called, what's it called now, debunking interface theory. So what Bagwell presses on Don is that there's sort of something self-defeating about his argument, right, because if our senses have evolved for fitness rather than truth so we can't trust them, how do we know we evolved? We only know we've evolved because we can use our senses, you know, look at fossils and things. So this is something self-defeating about this argument and
Yeah, I mean, I'm not totally persuaded by this, but I'm still a little bit taken by this objection. Go on, Don, what do you reckon? Yeah, so yeah, I've read Bagel's paper and I can summarize his objection myself. It says that Don's using the mathematics of evolutionary game theory to show that
fundamental ideas in Darwin's theory, namely that there are physical organisms competing for physical resources in a physical space and time. He's using evolutionary game theory, which is supposed to model Darwin's theory to actually show that fundamental ideas in Darwin's theory aren't correct. So now the argument goes, so now either the mathematics of evolutionary game theory
is a faithful model of Darwin's ideas, or it's not. If it's not, then Hoffman shouldn't use it to try to disprove things about Darwin's theory. And if it is a faithful model, it would never give you any reason to dispute the fundamental things that Darwin's theory is assumed, physical objects and space time. In either case, Don's in an unfortunate dialectical situation, right?
So now my reply is quite simple. This fundamentally misunderstands the nature of scientific theories and what they do. Fundamental misunderstanding. Let's go to Einstein's theory of space time, gravity. So Einstein's idea was that gravity is his big idea was that if I'm standing on a scale in an elevator,
I'm weighing myself and all of a sudden the cable is cut and I'm in free fall, I would go to zero, I'd weigh zero in space time. And it took him several years, better part of a decade, to turn that idea into mathematics. But he finally, so his idea about, so he's thinking space time is real, it's fundamental. And he writes down these mathematical equations.
Later on, we find out from his equations and also from another equation he wrote down, when you put those two together, you find out that his idea of space-time, first number one, it has a beautiful scope to the theory. It's incredible the scope of Einstein's general theory of relativity. It is one of the marvels of all time. But also the mathematics tells us the limits of that theory.
Einstein's theory of space-time is great until you get to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and then his own mathematics tells you that those concepts are no longer coherent. So what happens is when we take a mathematical theory in science, in every single case you will get not only the scope but also the limits of the fundamental concepts that were mathematized. So what I'm doing is not some kind of ad hoc weird thing. This is the way science has to work.
No theory is the theory of everything in science. Every theory makes certain assumptions and you then make those assumptions precise with mathematics and then if you've done it right you find the scope, the explanatory scope of those assumptions and you find the explanatory limits of those assumptions and that's what makes science much better than non-mathematical ideas. With non-mathematical statements it's hard to know
Where your theory stops? What are the limits of your theory? In science with mathematics, we can say Einstein's ideas are great at 10 to the minus 32 centimeters, they're great at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Nope, they're not. There's the scope and the limits. And so so Bagwell's argument, if taken seriously, would be an argument against any of basically the way science actually progresses, where we take
So here's what we do in science. We take our ideas, our assumptions, we mathematicalize them, we find the scope and we then look for the limits. And as soon as we find the limits, we go hooray. Now let's find a deeper set of assumptions and new mathematics. And this is the way we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. So Bagwell has sort of taken as a problem what is in fact the central strength of science. Yeah. Yeah. So two points on that. I'm not entirely convinced by that response.
I mean, one thing is, yes, I totally agree with what you've just said about scientific progress. I share that sort of, you know, the standard view in philosophy of science is that in physics, at least, it's important to distinguish, you know, different sciences. In physics, we discover that the old theory is only works in a certain domain.
of applicability and then maybe it breaks down or we look to a broader theory so maybe you gave a great example of general relativity or maybe Newton's law of gravity works in a certain domain but not outside of it but Bagwell's critique is not qualified in that way it's not saying your argument fails in a certain domain of applicability
It's not qualified in that way, it's just saying the argument cannot succeed because it's self-defeating because the argument relies on the assumption that we evolved but it also tells us that
We wouldn't be able to know that we evolved. So so itself and it's not it's not it's not it's not saying that it's not qualified in the way we could, you know, raise this problem with general relativity. Oh, it doesn't work in this domain of inquiry, our domain of applicability. That's not what it's saying. It's just saying it doesn't work, period. So again, the way I think about it is that
What I'm doing is I'm saying, let's assume for sake of argument, Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection. Just like I did with Einstein, let's assume for sake of argument, Einstein's theory of gravity. We say, if we assume that that's true, then we get the Einstein field equations. And then we can ask the question, assuming that Einstein is right, we get these field equations, then we can ask. So, Einstein assumed that space-time is fundamental.
Can we use his mathematics to confirm his point of view? We find out, well, it is not fundamental. It stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Now, are we being self-refuting by saying, let's assume with Einstein that space-time is fundamental.
We get the field equations. Now let's look at those equations and say, now what do those equations say about space-time? Well, they say it falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. So now I'm using the same logic with evolution. I'm saying, OK, we have Darwin's theory of evolution. It talks about organisms in space-time competing for resources. And now we have, you know, John Maynard Smith has made evolutionary game theory. He's turned Darwin's ideas into mathematics. So now we can say, OK,
We have this really good mathematical model. We can now ask, what are the scope and limits of the fundamental ideas? For example, should we believe that our perceptions are telling us the truth about objective reality or not? Well, it turns out we can answer that question using evolutionary game theory, for better or for worse. We may not like the answer, but the answer is that the probability is precisely zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see any true structures of objective reality. That's an implication of
Maynard Smith's Mathematization of Darwin. So that means that when I see physical objects in space-time, what I'm seeing almost surely is not the truth. And that means that the assumption that objects in space-time are the fundamental reality is almost surely not the truth on Darwin's own theory. Just as with Einstein's case,
We start with assuming that space-time is fundamental and then we use its own mathematics to say it can't be because it falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Same logic. But I'm pointing out again that this happens not just in these two cases, this happens in every good
precise scientific theory, we will always find the limits of those concepts. When we have a set of concepts, they will always have a limit. And we're trying to find in science what the limits of those concepts are. But what is the analog in your argument of domain of applicability? If that's the right terminology that like the problem that you're identifying that this limitation with Einstein's theory that it doesn't it doesn't it breaks down in a certain domain.
But it still works in a certain domain, but it breaks down in this other domain. But this objection, as I say, there's nothing analogous to that. It's just saying, if your argument works, we don't know we evolved. So your argument doesn't work. So there's no analog of the domain of applicability. I mean, maybe the objection fails for reasons I haven't thought of yet. But if the objection works, it doesn't say your argument, we can still use evolution in this limited domain. It just says,
The argument doesn't work. You know, what's the analog of domain of applicability here? Well, in Einstein's case, the fact comes out that space time isn't fundamental.
So Darwin's theory is not fundamental, but neither is Einstein's theory is fundamental. What we can do then is ask, is there a deeper theory? But it still works in a limited domain of applicability. Oh, absolutely. What's the analog of the domain of applicability in this evolutionary argument? For all practical purposes, for example, in my book, The Case Against Reality, I spent half of the book
exploring the power of Darwin's theory. I use it with companies to help them sell products and make jeans that make you look better and so forth. I use Darwin's theory in great detail to actually do practical things. I think that is a wonderful theory inside space-time, just like Einstein's theory is a wonderful theory inside space-time. Within the framework of space-time, Darwin's theory works wonderfully. But this argument isn't saying
It's self-defeating unless you're in the domain of space-time or something. It's saying it's self-defeating. The argument doesn't work. If the argument works, we don't know we evolved, so the argument doesn't work if it works. It means the whole thing just... It means the argument doesn't work, period. I don't know. I can't... Yeah.
I don't know, I'm repeating myself. In case I'm repeating myself, can I raise it like a slightly different way of thinking about it? Natural selection is a very different scientific theory to theories in physics. I don't agree with Richard Dawkins on a lot of things, but I like him on evolution. I agree with Dawkins that we need natural selection
to explain the apparent design, right? And I know it's slightly complicated because you don't necessarily believe in the physical world, but you believe in our conscious minds. And I think our conscious minds exhibit apparent design, you know, the way their functioning is so structured and coherent and logical. And we have the capacity to reason that needs an explanation of where that apparent design comes from.
Natural selection provides it. So I think we need the theory of evolution by natural selection to be true, to be true. Whereas. You know, if you seem to have an argument that we can't that it can't we can't know it to be true, it can't be true, because if it's yeah, so so I think we need it to be OK, so I can I can say what the next step is in my own way of thinking about things. So
And then you'll see why I'm still maintaining that this is not a problem. So we have this Markovian dynamics of conscious agents outside of space time. And it turns out when you look at this Markovian dynamics, the entropy in the dynamics does not need to increase. It's easier for us to write down dynamical system of conscious agents, which the entropy is not increasing. So there's no arrow of time in terms of an entropic arrow of time in these dynamics.
But it's a theorem, a very simple theorem, that if you take a projection of this dynamical system that loses information, say using conditional probability, so you get a new dynamical system which is a projection of the deeper dynamical system that has no arrow of time. The new projected system will necessarily have an arrow of time. The entropy will increase because of the loss of information. So the idea is then that the arrow of time
That you experience in this projected dynamics is not an insight into the true nature of the deeper dynamics. It's entirely an artifact of the projection process. Now, now to the evolution. What is the fundamental limited resource in evolution? It's time. If you don't get food in time, you die. If you don't made in time, you don't reproduce. If you don't get water in time, you die. What I'm saying is if we have, we can have a dynamical system of consciousness outside of space time.
that has no arrow of time. We take a projection by a conditional probability and we get a new dynamical system inside space-time in which there is an arrow of time and which now there appears to be limited resources and organisms fighting in time, surviving, reproducing in time. And it turns out that all of that is an artifact
of loss of information and projection from a deeper dynamical system in which there is no arrow of time. So what we would get then is, and this is how science works, I would find a new framework in which the arrow of time doesn't exist. There are no limited resources. There is no competition. But when you take a projection of it, you get Darwin's theory of evolution of a natural selection precisely. You get evolutionary game theory precisely in that special domain of projection.
So then we would explain why Darwin's theory was so successful in its domain and why we could use Darwin's theory itself to predict that it would not be ultimately successful because it had limited concepts. So this is again, I'm trying to show how science works. So ultimately we take our theories, every theory will have its assumptions, they necessarily, there isn't
I make a bold statement. There is no scientific theory that will ever be published that does not have a limit. And its own mathematics better tell you the limit or it's not a good theory. That's the way science works. And when you do that, then you'll get a deeper theory and explain why that new, for example, why evolution seems to be so powerful in this domain and where the theory comes from and how it's an artifact of a deeper theory.
So now you seem to be saying that, OK, natural selection is true, but it's not fundamental. But that your argument from fitness beats truth. Does not is not an argument that, you know, evolution is not part of the fundamental story or it's it's only in the domain of space time. It's it's saying.
Given that our senses evolved, we can't trust them to tell us about reality. But if we can't trust them to tell us about reality, we don't know we evolved. Period. We don't know we evolved. It's not just we don't know evolution is true in some deep fundamental sense and there really is space and time out there. If your argument works, we do not know we evolved. Period. But if we don't know we evolved, then
A, the argument doesn't work and so it's self-defeating, but also we can't explain the apparent design in our conscious minds. I think so. I think evolution we does. Yeah. So, so, so yeah. So that's the problem. I think you seem to be interpreting your own argument in a way that is not. It doesn't seem to me accurate because you seem to interpret the argument to say like we didn't evolve in, you know, in
Can I see if I understand it correctly and then you all can correct? Sure. So Einstein's theory of gravity doesn't say anything about the Planck length or not being able to go to it. Only if you combine Einstein's with quantum mechanics do you get this limit of like a general relativity is consistent. With this theory of the photoelectric effect, if you put an E equals h nu, then you get it. Yeah, though that's not GR. That's GR in combination with quantum mechanics.
Right, right. Okay. You do get black holes out of GR though. Sure, sure, sure. So the point is that, look, in a theory like, let's say GR, or whatever, whatever theory, it would say, you can't exit through all of these doors, there are 300 doors, maybe there are 10 of them which you can't exit. So it's showing some limits. Those are the scientific theories that point out their own limits. But Philip, it sounds like you're saying Don's theory is akin to A implies B implies not A.
Which is different. Yeah, which is not saying the theory doesn't work like inherently contradictory as a whole. Yeah. So is that what you're saying? So it's different than pointing out that there's some doors we can't go exactly exactly that. That's that. That's a good way of putting it. Okay. So Don, then your response to that. So I replied that every scientific theory is not the truth. There is no scientific theory, which is the truth.
Every scientific theory
and it's not deeply true. Einstein's theory of space-time is a wonderful theory and it's not deeply true. We're going to let go of space-time altogether. We will find new frameworks entirely. There is no theory of everything. My big point here is there is no theory of everything. There cannot be. Therefore, every theory will ultimately be false. It can be a good projection
I'm saying that if
If we want to say that I've caught myself in a terrible self-contradiction, this is what's going to happen with every single scientific theory and in the same way that I'm doing it with evolution. It has to. It's true or it's deeply true. I think that gets a precise meaning in terms of these theories in physics where we can say, well, it's true in a domain of applicability, but it's not true
Okay, how about this? Did we evolve
Yes or no, and then I want to hear both of your answers to that. OK, great. I would say yes. Yeah, I mean, I take the standard scientific view of this. Yeah. No, and I would say that when we look at reality through a particular space time headset. It looks like we evolved, but but the evolution framework
takes time as a fundamental entity. I don't think time is a fundamental entity. I think time is an artifact. It takes objects in space-time as fundamental. It takes space-time as fundamental.
I think space time doesn't even work beyond 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Speaking of Daniel Dennett, he said that the fundamental unit of natural selection is one that undergoes replication, variation and selection. Now, this selection mechanism can be abstract. It doesn't just have to be with respect to time. It can be any resource. So given that does evolution or natural selection indeed reference time? Or would you say, yeah, there's an implicit time parameter because of steps?
Well, when you go more abstract and evolutionary game theory, you still have a time parameter, right? For example, the success of generations gives you essentially a time parameter. I see. So I'm saying that this is a ubiquitous feature about how science works. Each theory will have its own set of concepts like organisms competing in time for resources and dying and having reproduction. It will have its domain of applicability.
And by the way, most theories we come up with have no domain of applicability. They're just useless. We have these rare theories that really are wonderful in a domain like evolution of a natural selection is beautiful in this domain, but it's not deeply true. I think that time isn't deeply true. And so the foundational concept of evolution in time
is fundamentally flawed. What's beautiful about the theory of evolution is that its own mathematics allows you to predict its own limits. That's not self-contradiction, that is the glory of scientific theories that the theories predict their demise. I've got a slightly different way of trying to make the point. You don't think evolution is true in some deep sense.
But you think it's true in some more lightweight sense in some domain of applicability. Okay, and I'm struggling to articulate that difference. But just take that for granted. How do you know we evolved in that more lightweight sense? How do you know? Agreeing we're talking about that more lightweight sense. How do you know we evolved?
Oh, well, I would say that from this deeper point of view, we know that we didn't, but it's a useful framework within space time, it's a very useful framework to think about it as evolution. It's true in some sense, right? It's true in this projection or whatever. Well, it's like if I'm playing Grand Theft Auto in virtual reality. Oh, great point. Trailer just got dropped for Grand Theft Auto 6. Oh my gosh. Fantastic.
If I say, you know, there's some supercomputer I'm interacting with and all I see is Grand Theft Auto, right? And so I'm playing, I'm racing in my car. So I can say I'm racing in a red Ferrari and my car can go faster than your green Mustang and so forth. And those may be true statements in the game.
But ultimately, they're only true of the game. And if I say, but I'm going to go now to a bigger framework, I'm going to look at outside of the Grand Theft Auto world. What is that? Well, some supercomputer. Well, now is it really true that there's a red Ferrari and a green Mustang? Well, no, if you actually look inside the supercomputer, you won't find anything like red Ferraris or green Mustangs anywhere inside there. You'll find bits and so forth. But within the context of the headset, sure,
that's the best theory and that's what you should do but a good theory of grand theft auto would actually tell you you know there's more to life than grand theft auto it won't tell you that there's a supercomputer but it will tell you that grand theft auto can't be the whole story and that's all i'm doing with evolution is not the whole story i'm trying to focus on that that from within the grand theft theft auto world from within the headset the sense there's got to be some sense in which
The creationist is wrong, that the earth is 4000 years old, that we didn't evolve by natural selection. There's some sense in which the creationist is wrong. Okay, it's not a deep sense. My question is, how do you know, how do we know that the creationist is wrong and the Darwinian is right in that, in that headset relative context? And surely you've got to say, well, it's we used our senses. We used our senses to find out that the creationist is wrong.
I don't think you can say that if your argument works because if your argument works our senses evolve for truth not fitness not truth. We don't know. We don't know if the creationist is right or wrong. This is the key point. We don't need to believe any of our theories.
I'm a scientist. I create theories and I evaluate theories. All I do is I take the theories and I'm not stuck inside my theories. I'm the one that creates them and evaluates them. I just look at evolution by natural selection and say here's the mathematics, the mathematics entails the probability of zero that I have any true perceptions. That's what that theory says. Now what I believe about my senses is something different. I may still say
I don't believe that implication of evolution. It's nevertheless an implication of evolution. So I can say that I love evolution, it has all this power, but my senses are not limited. For example, I might say that the mathematics of evolutionary game theory says that they are limited. Aha! That's what that theory entails. Maybe I want to say that there's a point where I disagree with evolutionary theory. I love it for all this other stuff. But on the other hand, I may say, you know,
Maybe it's when it says we shouldn't take our perceptions literally, maybe we should interpret that as pointing to this as just a headset. And if that's the case, then I would say, yeah, wow, evolution actually pointed to space time as just a headset and don't take it literally. In which case I would give it a big thumbs up and say, but it doesn't tell us what's next, right? Just like Einstein doesn't tell us what's outside space time.
The new physicists are having to make broad and bold leaps outside of space-time. You have to really go out there but what you do is you write down your new ideas and of course most of them are not even worth it. Most of them are wrong but every once in a while you get a good idea and then what you have to do is show that it projects back into space-time and gives you answers that we can test inside space-time. So whatever we come up with outside space-time
Better project into space-time and it better give us Einstein and it better give us evolution by natural selection as the projection. If my theory of conscious agents outside space-time, when I projected into space-time, doesn't give me physics, Einstein's physics, quantum theory, and it doesn't give me evolution by natural selection as the projection, then I'm wrong. So evolution is an absolute acid test on my deeper theory.
One more time, one more time and then I'm going to, I'm going to probably we're not going to convince each other. That very thing you said then that my theory had better give me natural selection as a projection. That's a constraint. They better give me that. How do you know it had better give you that through using your senses, you know, through using your senses has obviously given you empirical reason to think your theory had better give you that as opposed to what the creationist would constrain the theory with.
And I think if you're if your fitness bits truth argument works, you can't trust your senses. And so, yeah, anyway, God, that's the see, I don't believe evolution. Evolution says that we shouldn't. But you did. I was focusing on the specific claim you just made. So evolution. So all I'm doing as a scientist is I'm just telling you what this theory entails. And I don't have to believe it. I can say it works over here and I don't believe this part of it.
I'm not caught in my theory, I'm an evaluator of the theory. The argument by the way is actually quite simple. There are fitness payoff functions. Fitness payoff functions are functions that go from whatever the world is, the state of the world, into the payoffs, say from 0 to 100. You can ask a simple technical question, what is the probability that a generically chosen payoff function
would be a homomorphism of any structure in object of reality, like a total order, a partial order, a metric, whatever it might be, a topology. And in every case, the answer is precisely zero. Because for a fitness function to be homomorphism, it has to satisfy certain equations. Almost no randomly chosen fitness payoff function will satisfy those equations. It's just that simple.
All I have to do is say evolution by natural selection is incredibly powerful theory but it entails almost surely with probability one that no sensory system has ever evolved to see the truth. Now once I've taken that from evolutionary theory I can say what could that mean? Well maybe it could mean that my senses are just a headset in which case I could be looking beyond this and ask for
for what's beyond my space-time headset.
It doesn't mean that I'm caught in evolution because I have this deeper theory that shows that evolution is an artifact, that even time itself is not an insight into the deeper realm. It's an artifact. So Philip, why can't Don be saying that Darwinian evolution is some approximation? It's not exactly correct. There's neo-Darwinism and there's EES. So there are various agglomerations or pieces added to Darwinism afterward.
In other words, some biologists would agree that tradition, the way we traditionally view natural selection, isn't the only mechanism by which we evolve. OK, so why can't Dawn say, hey, look, evolution didn't happen in the exact way that we thought? If it did, then it would lead to a contradiction. It could happen in some approximate way. And there could be some underlying mechanisms that are slightly nuanced that produce the wonderful variety we see. And I also don't know, Dawn, if that's what you're saying. I don't mean to speak for you, by the way. I'm just saying, why can't that be an argument?
Well, I suppose in the domain in which we're talking about our senses and our conscious experience and the apparent design that seems to be in our conscious experience, we need to appeal, I think, I agree with Richard Dawkins, you know, we need to appeal to the truth of natural selection in order to explain that apparent design. But
But if this argument works, then. We can't do that, we can't. Because we can't trust our senses to find out that empirical information that we did evolve through natural selection. So so the whole thing doesn't get off the ground. Don, do you have another analogy other than the supercomputer? Because the computer itself implies computation, computation implies step by step, in which case you can have
If we're going to abstract time to say that successive generations can also be time, then the supercomputer that we could potentially be part of could also have time in the computational steps. So do you have another analogy? Well, the example that's not an analogy but is in fact what we're working on is this Markovian dynamics in which there is no error of time. So this is a literal mathematical system.
We actually at the end of the paper raised this issue. We point out that our dynamical systems don't need to have an arrow of time, but then we give the proof. We actually have a three or four line proof that any projection will give you an arrow of time from our system. So what we would love to do
is to come up with a dynamical system with conscious agents that projects into space-time. And that's the paper I'm working on right now. That's exactly what I'm working on today is that mathematical projection. We're making really good progress. And my intent is to show when we get that projection that we can get evolution by natural selection
In our projected version. So we'll have a theory in which there are no limited resources. There are no organisms competing, no nature red and tooth and claw. But when you take this projection and you lose information, it looks like nature red and tooth and clock. It looks like there's an arrow of time and all of that is an artifact of the projection. And I'm saying, I'm saying this, there's nothing special about this. This is the way science works. We go from Newton to Einstein.
We get Newton as a special case but there are things Newton can't do and there's things that Einstein can explain why you can't do them but you can do them on Einstein and then you see Newton as a projection. With C goes to infinity, you get Newton as a projection. That's what I'll get Darwin, all of evolution by natural selection as a projection when I let go of space-time. Can I make one quick physics point? I would say it's the opposite. I would say that it's with Einstein that you have the limitations. In fact, with Newton, you can do anything.
I suppose I could put it as a sort of dilemma. If we're just saying natural selection is not fundamental, that it's just true in some non-fundamental story of reality, well then I don't think that gets around the
Don's argument isn't saying, you know, appealing to what
I don't know if we'll make much progress on this one point and I'm sure there are at least two more points that you all could talk about. So I'm going to try my best to
Rephrase it actually paraphrase John Vervecky and I want to see if Philip if you agree with this and Then we'll see if we can make headway here, but if not, then we can move on to something else So John said and it was either to you Don or John said this to Bernardo Castro up John Vervecky said if the level from which we do our science is illusory Then how does that not undermine all the claims of what we're making from that level?
So in other words, if we're claiming science is somehow illusory, but yet we're using science to make that claim, how does that not undermine itself? So is that what you're saying, Philip or no? It sounds it sounds related. Yeah, I mean, I suppose that, again, that's why I suppose my position is a middle way between
The opinions rendered herein are those of the guests, and not necessarily those
I'm less and less reductionist as I get older actually. I started off in my academic book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality really trying to be very reductionist and there are certain great panpsychist philosophers like Luke Roloff who try to be very reductionist. But actually the more I've talked to neuroscientists and some condensed matter physicists as well, I just think
I sort of think the reductionist idea is a bit of a dogma that we've, you know, we don't know anywhere near enough about the brain to know whether everything that goes on in there is totally reducible to underlying chemistry and physics and you've got interesting views like the assembly theory, the very kind of non-reductionist theory or Kevin Mitchell in neuroscience arguing for sort of strong emergentism about consciousness. So yeah, I'm less and less convinced that we need a very reductionist story
But still, I'm a hardcore realist about physical reality as physicists describe it to us. It's there when we don't look at it. But that's just mathematical structure. So we need something to fill out that mathematical structure. That's where consciousness comes in. But yeah, I'm not so persuaded that we need to think
Everything that goes on in the brain or in living systems is just a product of the basic laws of physics. I think that's kind of a dogma that fits with the zeitgeist of the moment, but it's not actually something empirically proven. So Don, would you characterize yourself as a reductionist? And by reductionism, I mean that there are individual components that somehow in their interaction give rise to all the complexity we see
And these components, these are constituent phenomenon that could be something simple like cellular automata or Rubik's cubes or emoticons at the Fundament. And somehow these underived components spawn everything else. No. So by reductionism, I would mean that as you go to smaller and smaller scales of space time, you find more and more fundamental entities
And I think that
In certain cases, that's been very useful like in thermodynamics and so forth. That kind of approach has been very useful. But again, many high energy theoretical physicists are saying that reductionism is doomed because the Planck scale is the end of the whole story for smaller and smaller scales. If you try to go to even smaller scales, what happens is you get a reversal
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What if by reductionism, someone doesn't mean anything to do with space time, but just that there are some more simple elements, whether it's cellular automata or Rubik's cubes that are at the fundament and that breed life when they interact in some way to give rise to all the complexity we see. And that if you were to break down, break down, quote unquote, break down, whether in scale, like with microscopes or whether in some other scale, time or something else, that everything we see here can be predicted from these tiny elements.
these underived elements. So what if that's what is meant by reductionism? Are you both reductionists then? Do you think there's something more than that? I had a recent article in Scientific American people could look up. I think there's a good argument and this is something I explore in the consciousness chapter of the book, which is probably the most challenging chapter of the book. It comes with a warning at the start, but I think it's I hope some of the more original bits of the book
I think there's a good challenge to reductionism, precisely as you just defined it, Kurt. From the need, we come back to evolution, from the need to make sense of the evolution of biological consciousness. And the thought is that natural selection only cares about behavior, right? Because it's only behavior that matters for survival. But with the rapid progress in robotics and AI, I think it's become apparent that you can have incredibly complex
information processing and behavioral functioning without any kind of subjective experience at all. So then this gives rise to the question why didn't natural selection make
survival mechanisms, you know, very complicated mechanisms that can mechanically track features of their environments and initiate highly survival conducive behavior but without having any kind of subjective experience at all. I think this is a really deep challenge. Why did consciousness evolve? Given the
complicated mechanisms without consciousness could in principle have survived just as well so I think there's a really deep neglected puzzle here and I think part of the solution has to be that consciousness makes a behavioral difference that systems with unified consciousness and conscious understanding of the world around them that this opens up radically new forms of behavior
Well, so my framework is a little bit different on this point. So I would say that
Space-time is just, and the laws of physics are just one particular headset that consciousness can use, one of countless many, and there's nothing particularly interesting about space-time or special about it. What's interesting about it is probably one of the more trivial data structures that consciousness can use, not one of the more deep structures.
I can only imagine three-dimensional objects. I can't even imagine a four-dimensional or five-dimensional object. That's a real impediment to a lot of the research I'm doing. I need to imagine, you know, objects that are of much higher dimension. I can't do it. I only have three kinds of color receptors. Manta shrimps have 10 or 11 or whatever. In many ways, I feel like my space-time headset is a really, I got a really cheap version of it and the laws of physics are really
Put it this way, we're not seeing the true causal structure of anything. In Grand Theft Auto, I have the appearance of causality, I turn my steering wheel, my car goes down the streets and so forth, but the appearance of cause and effect in space-time, I would claim, is utterly an illusion. It's a useful illusion, but it's utterly an illusion, the same illusion as in a VR game.
It looks like the steering wheel turning is causing my car to turn. Nothing of that sort is happening. The steering wheel has no causal powers. None. And there are no causal powers inside space-time whatsoever. So you can see my framework is entirely different. But what I have to do is then show, who am I then that's doing this? I'm not an object in space-time.
I'm not a small consciousness inside space-time and I didn't ultimately evolve inside space-time. I'm not in space-time. Space-time is in me. Space-time is a little data structure in me and it's not the only one that I could possibly use. So it's a complete reversal of the whole picture.
What I meant by reductionism doesn't have to have causation. I just mean that you can understand the whole by analyzing its constituent parts. If that's the definition of reductionism, do you still subscribe to it or you don't subscribe to it? Well, again, if you think about the headset approach, ultimately when you look at smaller and smaller scales inside the headset or parts, you get down to pixels and in some sense,
You don't really explain anything. I mean, my steering wheel can't be explained by the pixels out of which it's made, right? This is just not going to explain it. So ultimately, my feeling about scientific theories is that every scientific theory ultimately is only a projection of the truth. It's never the truth. It's a very limited. So no scientific theory.
can ever be a theory of everything, and every scientific theory will automatically have its necessary limits. And ultimately, my feeling is that every scientific theory, my own included, scratch probability zero depths of reality. In other words, reality, whatever it is, will infinitely transcend any scientific theories attempts to explain it.
And that's just the way it is. So there will never be a theory of everything. And the simple argument for that is, look, every scientific theory makes assumptions. Those assumptions are the miracles of the theory. You're not explaining those assumptions. You're assuming them. You can say, well, I can get you a deeper theory that explains those assumptions. You can't. Your deeper theory will have its own assumptions. And this goes on ad infinitum. Ad infinitum. And that means that we're infinitely far.
Right now, we're infinitely far from a theory of everything and we will always be infinitely far from a theory of everything. And that includes Hoffman's theory is infinitely far from a theory of everything. So deep humility is required at every step in our scientific theory building, very, very deep humility. And it raises the question, who am I? Who am I? That I transcend space time. Space time is a little data structure in me. I'm not a little object in space time.
Space-time is a little data structure that I use and it's one of many that I could use. Who am I that is doing this? It raises a very, very deep question. In that sense, I take the idea that consciousness is fundamental, very, very seriously, that it transcends space-time completely. Space-time is trivial. It's a non-entity compared to the depth of consciousness. It's a complete non-entity in terms of its complexity.
We transcend it, whatever we are completely transcends it. And when we die, we'll just drop, we'll drop that headset and we'll find out who we are. Is it time to talk about the meaning of life? I think it's getting deep. That's the other part of your book, right? The other part of your book. What is the meaning of life, Philip? Yeah, so but you know, most of this
Most of this book is just a sort of cold-blooded scientific and philosophical argument for cosmic purpose, arguing that there is reason to take seriously this idea of goal directedness at the fundamental level of reality. Weird as it sounds, I just think that's
where the evidence is pointing to and we have to face up to that. I annoy people on Twitter by suggesting that Bertrand Russell would have believed in cosmic purpose because he followed the evidence where it led, but it just wasn't there when he was alive. But so, so yeah, most of the argument is that just cold blooded up case for that. But I suppose in the first and last chapters, I'm thinking about the implications for human existence and
Yeah, so I don't want to be kind of too dogmatic about what is the single way of living a meaningful life. You know, I suppose I'm interested in suggesting options that are maybe different from the familiar options of traditional religion on the one hand and secular atheism on the other. But yeah, overall,
I think there's a defender kind of middle way ground here really on the one hand you get some religious philosophers like William Lane Craig who say you know if there's no point to the universe it's all pointless you know we might as well just rape and kill each other you know it's all totally pointless and meaningless the other extreme you get you know the familiar secular atheist position that probably there isn't cosmic purpose but if there is
it's totally irrelevant we make our own meaning whatever so I try to defend the middle way that yeah you can have perfectly meaningful life without the put being a purpose to the universe you know by pursuing kindness and creativity and knowledge and so on but if there is a purpose to the whole of reality then
Maybe there's a potential for our lives to be more meaningful, you know, if you can contribute in some small way to the purposes of the whole of reality. That's huge. You know, we want to we want our lives to make a difference. That's about as big a difference as you could imagine making. So, yeah, and just finally, I suppose, you know, just speaking for myself, I feel
Starting to live as a cosmic purposivist, you know, this living in hope that there's a greater purpose to what's going on here. A cosmic what? purposivist, cosmic purposivist. I see, I see. Live sort of living in hope of a greater purpose to what's going on. I have found to be a deeply kind of meaningful form of living. I think most of all, I think it has brought me a sense of
a deep sense of peace in some way. I was talking to my wife about this just this week. Because I guess I'm quite kind of career driven. I think I hope partly through pure motives, you know, like I really believe in the things I'm arguing for and I want to persuade the world. Probably there's a bit of ego there as well, you know, I want to kind of make my mark or whatever. But I found that cosmic purposivism has made me less bothered about those things.
not because I don't think they're important but because I'm conceiving of them as part of some much bigger thing that's going on that I'm inevitably just a tiny part of and hence my task is just you know to do the best I can to contribute to this much bigger thing going on and conceiving of those things in that way I suppose makes me less bothered about my own personal successes and failures and
frees me up to enjoy life a little bit more, enjoy playing in the snow as I was with my family this weekend. Not that I wasn't happy before, but maybe bought a deeper sense of happiness. So, yeah, so I suppose I'm just trying to suggest options that aren't the familiar options for thinking about the meaning of life. OK, how do you argue that, by the way? So you just outlined some views, but how do you argue that those views are correct?
Well, that's the that's, I guess, going back to the starting point. So part of it is the fine tuning of physics for life, which I think just in our standard Bayesian way of thinking about things just is evidence that there is some kind of goal directedness towards life in the very early stages of the universe. And I think we're sort of in denial about that because it just doesn't fit with how we've got used to thinking about science. As I said, there's
Um, you know, I used to think the multiverse option was the obviously more plausible option for a long time. Cosmic purpose sounded very silly to me, but I've been persuaded that there's some dodgy reasoning going on in trying to explain fine tuning in terms of the multiverse. I could talk about that if you want. Um, yeah. And, um, well also
the evolution of consciousness that we started talking about then.
The emergence of conscious understanding, which I think belies our current scientific paradigm and the fine tuning of physics for life. Most people think, oh, well, God is the alternative. But I think there is a middle ground, a neglected middle ground here between the traditional atheist picture of a meaningless, purposeless universe and the traditional Western God on the other hand. Don, what is the meaning of life to you? And feel free to comment on anything that Philip has just said.
Well, first on the point of agreement, I believe in a version of conscious purposiveness, whatever the word was. So I think it's not the standard physicalist framework that nature read in Tooth and Claw and there's really no meaning of purpose and it's pointless. I think that that's just taking the headset literally when we shouldn't take the headset literally as the final word.
My own view on purpose comes with who I think we are. I don't think I'm a 160-pound object in space-time. I think that space-time is a tiny data structure inside me and inside you. I think that I am and you are consciousness that transcends any scientific theory, that I am
the deep reality and you are the deep reality of consciousness you are that consciousness and in fact there's only one so in fact my view is that right now consciousness in a Hoffman avatar a Philip Goff avatar and a Kurt Gavatar is talking to itself the one infinite consciousness and what is doing is finding out about itself in some sense the infinite consciousness knows itself by knowing what it's not it plunges itself into
This little headset loses itself, thinks it's a little object in space time, and then slowly wakes up and realizes, no, I transcend this headset. And that's how it knows what it is, by knowing with countless headsets what it's not. So the purpose is, from my point of view, is consciousness is here to know itself by waking up to what it's not.
And the fundamental thing that comes out of this is that some religions say love your neighbor as yourself, but I'm saying your neighbor is yourself. And that is the foundation for true love, is to recognize that that's just me under a different avatar. Even my cat is me under a different avatar. And so from this point of view, the whole purpose of life is
I'm this infinite consciousness that is finding out who I am. And it's a theorem that it'll never be done. It's a mathematical theorem that no system can ever truly know itself because in the very act of knowing yourself, you build a model of yourself and you become more complicated. So now you have to get a new model of yourself with the more complicated model and so forth. So this is the one consciousness, the infinite consciousness, posing as a philosopher
As a scientist, as a podcast interviewer and learning about itself and waking up and eventually takes off this headset and tries on a less cheap headset than this one and goes through the same process in a different way. So that's sort of my guess about what it is. Can I just add something to that? I mean, I guess it's another point in which I value Don's work and which we're trying to do something similar that
I think there's a huge demographic, a huge proportion of the population that identify as spiritual but not religious, but in general academics
Don't cater for that group in academic philosophy. I would say most people are secular atheists. There's some really good quality philosophy of religion, but it tends to be very traditional Christians, few Jews. There's one very good Muslim philosopher of religion in the analytic tradition that's emerged recently.
and then i think from that we get this perception that spiritual but not religious is fluffy thinking and not very thought through but i think that's just the contingent circumstances that you know academics haven't put rigorous work into developing philosophically scientifically supported options here so this is one thing i'm trying to do with with this book and i've got a three-year templeton project on
trying to work out if the universe is conscious that's kind of related to this stuff that funded this conference where the dawn came to where I debated Sean Carroll on whether consciousness is fundamental people could check out on YouTube if they're interested in but yeah so I think that's very exciting that this whole new I mean it's always been there to an extent but is connecting up this whole new kind of academic area of trying to make rigorous sense of
between traditional religion and secular atheism and just you know having expanding the debate is always is always really interesting and adds new challenges although I just I don't I don't like this idea that we're all the same person I guess I guess I'm I'm a little bit more Western in my thinking than Eastern on this regard I sort of feel like the value of love and self-sacrifice right is that you're not me and I'm still
You know, sacrificing myself for someone that's not me, that's the other and I find that's what's beautiful about love and when it's like, oh no, it's just me, it's all me, that kind of depresses me. Sex is just masturbation. That makes it even worse now, you put it that way. But that's not an argument, that's just a sort of gut, ethical, primal, ethical response
Many of these claims come down to gut intuitions. So Don, I'm curious about the neurons not existing, but the cat existing. So the cat is an avatar that has its own perspective. Then if we were to scale that down into the perspective of a neuron, then does a neuron still technically exist if you're not there because the neuron has its own headset? Or even let's just say the cat. Well, or the cat, right. So ultimately, it's consciousness looking at itself through a headset. And
And so sometimes it sees itself... So what does a headset do? A headset dumps things down, right? That's what a headset does. It deletes lots of information. So from this point of view, I should be very, very clear. The distinction that we make between living and nonliving things is not principled. And the distinction between conscious and unconscious objects is not a principled distinction.
in my
From this point of view in which space-time is just a headset, the distinction we make between living things like cats and non-living things like rocks is entirely an artifact of the limits of our headset. I'm always interacting with consciousness, always, and I'm always interacting with an equally complicated one
Infinite consciousness. I'm always interacting with that so there's not like stupid consciousnesses No, I'm always interacting with the one infinite consciousness But my my interface because it's an interface dumbs things down. So so when I'm interacting with the cat I'm interacting I am this this one consciousness interacting with itself through a headset and look looking at so so I getting a cat image of myself and or a
You know, bacteria image of myself, whatever it might be. These are all perspectives of myself. They're not, they're just perspectives. They're not the truth, but I'm always interacting with the one infinite consciousness. Now, in the paper that we're about to write on this, we actually have an idea about how to talk about the one.
We found a partial order on consciousnesses. So it's a mathematical structure. It's a non-Boolean order on consciousnesses. It's a completely mathematically rigorous thing. And so it turns out it's non-Boolean and there's no ultimate top to the one. So when I talk about the one, typically we think there's some guy at the top or something like that. No, the mathematics of this is far more complicated. It's a completely non-Boolean structure. And so when I talk about the one, I haven't wrapped my head around
Conceptually, what that could possibly be, it's too complicated. Also, to wrap your head around it, you'd have to go all the way up Cantor's Hierarchy and beyond Cantor's Hierarchy. This is a partial order that goes all the way up Cantor's Hierarchy and so forth. When I talk about the one, it's not a trivial thing.
The mathematics is complicated and I'm sure this complicated mathematics is trivial compared to the structure of the one. So whatever this one is, it's truly impressive and is looking at itself through cats and rocks and so forth. But I'll just repeat again, the distinction between living and non-living is not principled.
There's no deep distinction there and the distinction between conscious and unconscious is not principled. All of them are artifacts of the limitations of our headset and nothing deeper than that. I think we're probably coming back to some agreement again with the distinction between
Living and nonliving, conscious and non-conscious. I'd like to ask Don, I don't know if we've ever run out of time, you know, what you think about the fine-tuning of physics for life. But before I do that, actually, Kurt, would it be all right to say, you know, what's wrong with the multiverse? Would that be permissible? Because, no, I'm sorry, I'm really excited about this, actually, because this has been an argument that's been in the academic journals about probability for decades since 1982. But
In a typical case of academics talking to themselves, nobody knows about it outside of academic philosophy, despite huge interest in fine-tuning and some physicists arguing for the multiverse, some theists arguing for God and so on. So I'm really excited to get it out to a broader audience. So yeah, the basic claim is that the inference from fine-tuning to a multiverse commits the inverse gambler's fallacy.
Right so suppose Don and I go to a casino tonight and we walk in and the first thing we go into a small room and we see someone what there's just one guy having this incredible run of luck at roulette it's just winning and winning and winning and you know and I turn to Don and say wow the casino must be full tonight
And Don says, what are you talking about? We've just seen this one guy. And I say, well, if there are tens of thousands of people playing roulette in the casino, then it's not so surprising that someone's going to have an incredible run of luck. And that's just what we've observed, someone having an incredible run of luck. Now, everyone agrees that's a fallacy, right? Our observational evidence is just this one individual having an incredible run of luck. And no matter how many people are playing roulette in other rooms in the casino,
It has no bearing on the likelihood of this one particular person we've observed. It's related to the more familiar gambler's fallacy, you know, you think, oh, I've had a terrible look all night, I'm bound to win big now. So everyone agrees that's a fallacy, but it looks, to my mind, indiscernible to the reasoning of the multiverse theorists, at least if they're arguing from fine tuning. You know, you look around and think, oh my God, the numbers in physics are just right for life.
There must be loads of other universes with terrible numbers, right? Well, our observational evidence is just this one universe we've observed, no matter how many other universes there are, has no bearing on the likelihood of this one universe we've observed getting the right numbers. It's just like postulating other people playing casino elsewhere, sorry, other people playing roulette elsewhere in the casino to explain the one individual we've observed. Now, there are all sorts of, I mean, there's the anthropic principle people bring up.
There's the scientific case for the multiverse. I'm also excited that even though this particular objection to the multiverse has been discussed for decades in the journals, no one's connected it to the actual scientific discussion based in inflationary cosmology of the multiverse. So that's what I try to do in the book. So I think
Even once you take into account the anthropic principle and the scientific evidence for eternal inflation and so on, I still think the basic problem survives, that it's just fallacious, demonstrably fallacious reasoning. And so we're stuck with cosmic purpose. So what if someone says, well, it's not a fallacy because in that example with observing the person winning over and over,
You could potentially see other people not winning. Whereas in the case of the fine tuning of the universe, a better analogy would be that we're in the office where people come in to get their check for winning the lottery and we keep seeing people there and we're like, Oh, everyone's winning the lottery. Yeah, but you're only able to see the people who are winning the lottery. So that would be the better analogy. Good, good. Yes. So that's, yeah, that's kind of appearing to anthropic principle. Well, two things. I mean, one,
We could just add to the analogy, suppose there's a sniper at the back of the room waiting to blow our brains out as we walk in if the first person isn't winning big. So we create a kind of artificial selection effect. So now it's just like real-world fine-tuning. In that scenario, the only thing we were able to observe is someone winning big, but that still doesn't mean the fallacy goes away.
But at a deeper level, I think, and this is what I go into in the book, we know what's going on behind this fallacy. It's rooted in a very important principle in probabilistic reasoning called the requirement of total evidence, which is the principle that you're obliged to always work with the most specific evidence you have. So suppose, you know,
Don's on trial for murder and the prosecution says to the jury, Don always carries a knife around with him. When the reality of the situation is Don always carries a butter knife around with him. The prosecution has thereby misled the jury.
But they haven't lied. They just they've misled them by not giving the most specific information we have, which is not just that he carries a knife, but that he carries specifically a butter knife. So this is a very important, well accepted principle. This is what the multiverse theorist violates, because they they can sue that the evidence of fine tuning is
some universe is fine-tuned, and then that's made more likely by a multiverse. But we have more specific evidence than that, namely that this universe is fine-tuned. Just like in the casino case, our more specific evidence is this person has
played well and we're obliged by this principle to work with that more specific evidence and once we do then a multiverse is not going to explain fine-tuning I mean maybe I could just I've talked a lot already but the case you gave is what Roger White who wrote the classic paper on this in the year 2000 it's what he calls a converse selection effect right the example you gave where we're in the office where if someone plays big
Someone plays well, we're going to observe them, right? So that's like, with the real world selection effect, the real world selection effect is that if we exist, the universe must be fine-tuned. But it's not the other way around. It's not if there's a fine-tuned universe, we're going to be in it. That's the converse selection effect.
so white makes that clear with a sort of sci-fi analogy imagine we were once disembodied spirits floating through the multiverse looking for a fine-tuned universe and if it once we find a fine-tuned universe we go into it in that case there'll be a converse selection effect right not only if we exist then the universe is fine-tuned but if there's a fine-tuned universe we're going to exist and be in it right so that's a converse selection effect and that's what's modeled in the very example you gave
If someone plays well, we're going to observe them. But that's not the real world selection effect. The real world selection effect is captured by my sniper example. As you see, that doesn't remove the fallacy. Sorry, that was very long winded, but it's a it's a big and fascinating discussion. My view on the fine tuning is is this of the universe is this. The one consciousness is fundamental, this infinite
Unbounded consciousness that you and I are is fundamental. And space time is just a headset, one of countless headsets that it's using to look at itself. So when it projects itself, it is life itself. And when it projects itself, the projection, sometimes parts of the projection make clear what is living and sometimes it doesn't, right? Sometimes things look like rocks. Sometimes things look like living organisms.
And there's an arrow of time that's part of the projection. There is no time in the one infinite consciousness. So all of this, the notion of time, the notion of a big bang, an arrow of time, an evolution from less complicated to more complicated things, all of that is an artifact of the headset. The fundamental reality is this infinite life, infinite consciousness, looking at itself through a headset.
And so the reason why there's the appearance of fine-tuning is because the universe is nothing but a headset of an already existing living thing that's looking at itself through the headset. So a consistent projection will be consistent with life. Can I just interrupt? Sorry, the discussions just get interesting, but my little six-year-old daughter has just come in and it's quarter to one and I think I might have to
That's no problem. It was a pleasure and I hope to host you both on again either together or individually. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you both. Always a pleasure Kurt and Phil. Thanks Don. So always so stimulating and thanks Kurt for probing questions and for hosting us. The links to what everyone has mentioned, whether it's a debate between Philip and Don on Philips channel,
or whether it's the books of Don or of Philip or articles will be in the description. All right. Thank you all for coming. I better dash guys. Thanks so much. Thank you. Take care. Take care. Bye bye. All right. If you enjoyed that episode, then I recommend watching the Donald Hoffman episode with Yoshi Bach. That was another Theolocution. There's another one with Donald Hoffman and John Vervecky. There's a solo Donald Hoffman. That is where we go into the technical details of his fusions paper and the interface theory of perception.
As well as Philip Goff will likely be coming on one on one and most likely there will be a part two to this with Donald Hoffman and Philip Goff. So again, if you have any questions, leave them in the format query in the comments section below so that I can pose it to them, citing your name.
If you'd like to see these podcasts happen with more frequency and even greater depth, then consider donating at patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. We've been having a significant problem getting sponsors for this channel with monetizing, and that's a large part, a large, large part of any creator on YouTube. It may seem like this channel's this huge success, but it's decidedly not in the financial domain. And so your donations help
Tremendously especially if you do it over paypal where the creator takes more of a cut and even more especially if you do it monthly over paypal but again whatever you like whatever you're comfortable with my wife and i both thank you the editor thanks you and anyhow welcome to the new year there are several large plans for theories of everything can't wait to announce them thank you.
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.
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"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."
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"text": " Every scientific theory is only a projection of the truth. It's never the truth. No scientific theory can ever be a theory of everything. What does it mean as a philosopher interested in the ultimate nature of reality that our basic science is just equations? We're not seeing the truth. Evolution is an artifact. Our basic science isn't really telling us that much about what fundamental reality is."
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"text": " Professor Donald Hoffman and Professor Philip Goff are both renowned in their respective fields of cognitive science and philosophy. Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who has put forward a theory called the interface theory of perception, which states that human perceptions are akin to some user interface, shaped more by evolutionary survival imperatives,"
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"text": " then by an accurate representation of the external world. Thus, according to Hoffman, reality as we know it is some illusion. In contrast, Professor of Durham University, Philip Goff, is known for panpsychism, and so there's plenty of contrasting agreement in different words in today's theolocution,"
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"text": " as well as disagreements, primarily around the universe's fine-tuning for life, as well as suggesting that, hey, they both agree consciousness is fundamental, but that doesn't mean that what's derived from consciousness is illusory. Quite the contrary. Philip has just published a book called Why? The Purpose of the Universe, and the links to that are in the description, as well as his previous works, Galileo's Error and Consciousness and Fundamental Reality."
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"text": " Even though Professor Goff is known for panpsychism, his views are best described as Cosmopsychism. This means that the universe itself might be a conscious entity with its own goals. My name's Kurt Jaimungal. If you're new to this channel, this is Theories of Everything, where we explore theories of everything, primarily from a physics perspective, that is, an analytical one, but as well as trying to understand, okay, if there is no toe, if there is no theory of everything, why? That to me counts as its own."
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"text": " a limiting theory of everything, or perhaps a theory of a thing, what constitutes something as separate from another thing, we've explored that with Karl Friston and Michael Levin, as well as what is free will, how do we know if we have it, what are alternatives to compatibilism and libertarian notions, and of course, how are we conscious?"
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"text": " that is the hard problem of consciousness solutions to that is it idealism is there something to cartesian dualism or some other form of dualism how about a triadic model all of these are explored in depth with rigor on this channel by interviewing some of the top intellectuals in this space if that sounds interesting to you then feel free to subscribe as we have two hour three hour four hours sometimes even"
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"text": " Okay, well, it's an honor to host you both. Thank you, Professor Goff. Thank you, Professor Hoffman, Hoff and Goff. Thank you, Kurt. Prof Hoff and Prof Goff. Great to be here. So Prof Goff,"
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"text": " You have a book that's recently been released called Why? What is it about? And please tell myself and the audience the relevance of it for this discussion. Brilliant. Good question. So yeah, this is a book I would never have imagined myself writing about about five years ago. It's been quite a journey. I think so many people in the West think they have to fit into the dichotomy of"
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"text": " Either you believe in the God of traditional Western religion or you're a secular atheist. It feels like you've got to say, whose side are you on, Richard Dawkins or the Pope? And I was raised Catholic and decided I didn't believe in God when I was about 14 and gave that one up and was quite happily on team secular atheists for over 20 years. But just recently, I've slowly come to think that"
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"text": " Both of these worldviews are inadequate. Both of them have things they can't explain about reality. And ultimately where I think the evidence points is to what I call cosmic purpose, namely some kind of goal directedness at the fundamental level of reality, but existing in the absence of the traditional God."
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"text": " so so yeah so basically in this book that's why the purpose of the universe got a very cool cover actually i'm quite pleased with what they did with that and um i argue for this position and then discuss its implications for the meaning and purpose of human existence so yeah so just basically very brief overview um you know one one of the"
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"text": " One of the things I think the traditional atheist picture of a meaningless purposeless universe struggles to explain is the fine-tuning of physics for life, the recent discovery that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to be against improbable odds just right. And, you know, for a long time I thought the multiverse was the best explanation for this, but I've just been slowly persuaded by philosophers of probability"
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"text": " that there's some dodgy reasoning in the inference from fine-tuning to a multiverse, that it commits what's called the inverse gambler's fallacy. And so I've just been led to think that actually in our standard Bayesian ways of thinking about evidence, the fine-tuning just is evidence for cosmic purpose, for this kind of goal-directedness towards life. And that's kind of weird. And I think as a society,"
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"text": " We're sort of in denial about this at the moment because it doesn't fit with the picture of science we've got used to. It's maybe a bit like in the 16th century when we started getting evidence that we weren't in the center of the universe and people struggled to accept that because it didn't fit with the version of reality they got used to. And now we sort of scoff at those people and we thought, oh, they're stupid religious people. Why didn't they just follow the evidence? But I think every generation"
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"text": " absorbs a worldview it can't see beyond and i think something like that's going on uh with fine tuning right now um so it's not it's not it's not just fine tuning on my case for cosmic purposes built on there's also chapter on consciousness and the mind body problem connecting to ai and the science of consciousness and i think certain things in this area also point to cosmic purpose although the argument there is a little bit takes a little bit longer to lay out"
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"text": " So that's the case for kind of cosmic purpose. Now most people arguing for cosmic purpose go for God. God's fine-tuned the universe or something. But I don't like that hypothesis either. And here it's the familiar reason that the difficulty of reconciling an all-loving omnipotent God with the terrible gratuitous"
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"text": " suffering we find in the world. It doesn't make sense to me that a loving God who could do anything would create a universe with so much pain. So basically I think atheists can't explain fine-tuning and some consciousness stuff. Theists can't explain suffering. We need a hypothesis that can account for both of these data points. And just very, very finally, just the style of the book is"
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"text": " You know, so my first book, which is somewhere here, was an academic book. My second book, Galileo's Era, was aimed at a general audience. So this book I'm trying to do both. So it's with a academic press, Oxford University Press, so it's kind of properly peer-reviewed. But it's also set up as a trade book, so it's reasonably priced unlike academic books. But also each chapter has a more accessible bit."
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"text": " And then a digging deeper bit, which goes into some of the more technical details and all the objections and so on. So, yeah, so maybe it'll please no one, but I'm trying to uniquely trying to appeal to both of those audiences. But yeah, that's about it, really. Sorry, that was a bit long winded. Wonderful. And what is it that you appreciate about Don's work? Oh, I'm a huge I'm a huge fan of Don's work. I mean, I think Don is a radical pioneer."
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"text": " You know, I think humans always think that at the end of history and, you know, that the current paradigm is basically established and the task is just to fill in the details. And I think in every period, most people go along with that. Largely because people look at you funny if you don't. But I think, you know, Don has come up with some profound challenges to our prevailing materialist paradigm. And he's done so not just with"
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"text": " science and mathematics, but also I think with engagement with philosophy. You know, I think we're living in a sort of scientific period where people think all questions can be answered with experiments and they've forgotten the role of philosophy, the very important role of philosophy in the project of finding out about reality. And I think especially with consciousness, it's so important for science and philosophy"
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"text": " Well, I actually wrote a little blurb for his wonderful new book and I think it's an outstanding book."
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"text": " easily accessible to an average non-scientist, non-philosopher, but it's also something that a scientist and a philosopher will find quite grabbing and challenging. It's brilliant to be able to write about such deep issues in a way that the average non-scientist and philosopher"
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"text": " can understand and yet engages everybody else. So hats off to Philip for a remarkable book and for doing that and also just for the way he engages with very difficult questions and is not afraid to go against the standard views where he thinks he needs to go against them and that's not easy to do in academia. It's just not easy to do."
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"text": " And especially in philosophy, it's very, very difficult. In science, you might be able to say, well, I've got a theorem. So you come at me because I've got a theorem, whereas it's a little harder. I mean, sometimes you can have a logical proof in philosophy, but short of that, then it just is a lot of bravery to go out there and say, here's a different point of view, and then to take all the comers. And so hats off to Philip for doing that. And I must say that I really enjoyed"
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"text": " Learning a lot about the philosophical issues in his latest book why so that that's very very helpful and you know one thing that philosophers do is. Remind scientists to think about our basic core concepts to look at the logical structure of what we're thinking about."
},
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"text": " Not just jump in with the mathematics and go off and compute and so forth and derive consequences, but to think at a fundamental level about the very concepts that we're using at the foundations of our theories and to think about that conceptually."
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"text": " I know you both have several questions for one another and I'll just state one of them to you Don and then we'll hear your answer and then you'll ask the same question to Philip. The question is about neurons and whether they exist prior to"
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"text": " So you'd like me to answer my own question first? Yeah, what is your point of view on that and then we'll get Phillips answer. Right, so first I'll say what I think the standard view is so I can contrast my view with the standard view which most of my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience just take it for granted that of course neurons exist when they're not perceived and that neural activity and you know brains more generally are"
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"text": " responsible for conscious experiences in humans and perhaps other animals as well. And maybe if you have the right programming and circuits and software of some AI, it'll eventually be conscious as well. So these, this approach to consciousness that says neurons exist when they're not perceived and neural activity is responsible for the generation of consciousness, I think runs afoul of modern science."
},
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"text": " The Nobel Prize in 2022 last year was awarded to three physicists for confirming experimentally what quantum theory seems to predict theoretically, that local realism is false. The local realism is the claim that"
},
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"start_time": 861.596,
"text": " Well, locality, realism is a claim that objects have definite values or properties like position and momentum and spin when they're not observed. So the electron has a position even if no one looks. And locality is just the particles obey Einstein's space-time laws and things can travel faster than the speed of light influences. So local realism is false. And I think that we should"
},
{
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"text": " Recognize that local realism is false. Neurons simply don't exist. They don't have any position when they're not observed. And if something doesn't have a position, it's not there. If you don't have a position, you're not there. So I would say that right now, I don't have any neurons. And someone who's hearing my argument might say, yes, I completely agree with you now that you don't have any neurons."
},
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"start_time": 919.206,
"text": " But I'm saying I don't have any neurons. If you opened up someone's skull, you would find neurons, but you would be creating them on the fly when you observed. And that's again in line with what quantum theory says is that these particle properties emerge in the act of observation and they're a result of the observation, but they do not exist prior to the observation. And there are, by the way, in quantum theory cases where you can set up"
},
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"start_time": 948.268,
"text": " empirical experimental situations where you can prove that the if you make a certain measurement you'll get a certain certain outcome with probability one and you can also prove that that outcome could not possibly be there until you made the observation so I'll say that again you can prove in these special and if you want to see the paper on this it's Chris Fuchs"
},
{
"end_time": 1002.056,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 975.128,
"text": " It's a 2010 paper on quantum Bayesianism. He goes into this, so you don't have to rely on me. You can read that paper and read for yourself. A quantum experiment that gives you a case where you can prove that you will, if you make this particular measurement, get a certain value with probability one. But you can also prove, given the detailed setup of the situation, that it's impossible, logically impossible, that the value of that outcome existed prior to the measurement."
},
{
"end_time": 1031.681,
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"start_time": 1002.91,
"text": " So this is what you can set up in quantum theory, and that's why a lot of people realize that local realism is false. And it took the Nobel committee decades before they gave the Nobel Prize for it, because this is a big one, right? So they had – Klauser did a lot of work decades ago, and then they were tightening, tightening, tightening, closing the loopholes and so forth, and finally the Nobel committee said, okay, what can we do? This is pretty – so I think that it's just in"
},
{
"end_time": 1056.169,
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"start_time": 1032.125,
"text": " keeping with what physics is telling us to let go of local realism for neurons and so I would say no. Neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. Philip? Yeah, so I think Don and I have more in common than that divides us. Crucially, our fundamental starting point is that consciousness exists at the fundamental level of reality."
},
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"text": " Well, I don't know if it's a starting point, but it's a crucial aspect of our view. I suppose where this first question gets to the heart of maybe where we disagree, namely on the status of physical reality. So I think Don, he can speak for himself, but defends a view that philosophers have traditionally called idealism, which usually comes with the idea that the physical world is"
},
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"text": " illusory in some sense or not fully real whereas I guess I'm more inclined to the view that the physical world is entirely real and independent of our minds you know this this Batman cup is really out there in the world and lights bouncing off it and you know it's made up of particles or fields or whatever it's just that"
},
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"text": " those particles and fields are ultimately made up of consciousness in ways we could perhaps get into but um and i suppose that the reason i'm there is yeah i mean i'm totally open to don's so i suppose my view sort of i suppose i'm in in a way a middle i always go for the middle ways a middle way between the physicalist or materialist position and the idealist position um i'm open to don's position but i suppose i'm just not"
},
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"text": " Totally as yet persuaded by his arguments, as intriguing as they are, Don often appeals to these speculative theories in, oh, you know, popular, not fringe at all, popular theories in theoretical physics, according to which space and time don't exist at the fundamental level of reality. They're rather emergent. But"
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{
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"index": 46,
"start_time": 1161.442,
"text": " I well we recently I organized a conference on panpsychism in the states and Don kindly gave a talk and Sean Carroll was the in-house skeptic of all this business and Sean's response to Don that I kind of agree with is you know just because space and time don't exist at the fundamental level of reality doesn't mean they're not real, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 1208.49,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1188.422,
"text": " You know, we discovered atoms are not fundamental. They're made up of, you know, quarks and electrons. That doesn't mean we say, oh, there's no atoms. You know, we just say that they're not fundamental. So, yeah, so I'm not on the local realism. I mean, this is going to quickly get outside of my skill set. But, you know, my understanding, talking to people like Tim Magdalen,"
},
{
"end_time": 1232.722,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1209.104,
"text": " is that, yeah, none of this rules out for the Bohmian view, for example, although I know that's not an incredibly popular view. But even if you go for a more popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, yeah, I mean, we don't have to crudely think particles are the fundamental things. It could be, you know, the wave function is the fundamental physical reality. Sean Carroll tells me, believes in"
},
{
"end_time": 1257.91,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1233.404,
"text": " The fundamental reality is a vector in high dimensional Hilbert space. So we could have some, some esoteric fundamental physical reality, but which, which three dimensional space and time merges from, you know, this is a heated debate in, in philosophy of physics. How do the, the popular view, I think, is that which people like David Albert, Alyssa Ney, try to make sense of"
},
{
"end_time": 1286.766,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1258.865,
"text": " three-dimensional spatio-temporal mind independent reality being real and genuinely emerging from some the more non-space-time esoteric maybe quantum wave function reality that physicists currently are inclined to think is at the fundamental level of reality so yeah so maybe the normal world we perceive is is real but emergent Don it would be useful at this point to characterize the definition of real"
},
{
"end_time": 1316.305,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1288.285,
"text": " Great points, Philip. Of course, great, great, great points. So, um, the word real, right? We use the word real in a couple of different senses. Um, and so maybe want to distinguish a couple of senses of real. So one is one version of real is, um, something is real if it exists, even when it's not perceived and that, that think that's what perhaps you were saying, but there's another sense in which something is real. Um, um, for example, if I have a headache,"
},
{
"end_time": 1345.367,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1316.988,
"text": " I complain about this nasty headache that I've got. That headache wouldn't exist if I didn't perceive it. My headache isn't real in the sense that I just gave before that it would exist even if it weren't perceived. Nevertheless, someone might say, well, if you don't say my headache is real, I beg to differ you, my headache is real. There's a sense in which something is real if it's a real subjective experience. In that case, we know that the word"
},
{
"end_time": 1373.131,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1345.708,
"text": " We're saying something's real not because it exists even when it's not perceived, but rather it exists in my perception. The question about are neurons real is I'm really asking are they real in the sense that they would exist even if they're not perceived. I think your answer is yes, they are real in the sense that they would exist even if they're not perceived. I'm saying no."
},
{
"end_time": 1403.302,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1373.609,
"text": " that they're only real in the sense they are subjective experiences that we have and so they exist while we have the experience and they don't exist otherwise. Okay so just that notion real because people can wobble on that and get confused on what we're discussing. So then my take on it is of course physicists are going to debate and Sean Carroll doesn't think that we need to worry about space-time is doomed."
},
{
"end_time": 1432.619,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1403.524,
"text": " We'll have to see where the physics goes in this, but here's what I see happening in the last 10 years for the high-energy theoretical physicists who are working on this. They're finding that space-time, so what they argue is that space-time is doomed because it has no operational meaning at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, the Planck scale. It's not that there are pixels at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters."
},
{
"end_time": 1459.565,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1432.807,
"text": " is that its space-time makes no sense anymore. There's nothing you can do operationally with it. From my point of view, it's a fairly shallow data structure. It falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Not 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters, just 10 to the minus 33, and it's useless after that, and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. Not 10 to the minus 43 trillion seconds, 10 to the minus 43. So it's a fairly shallow data structure"
},
{
"end_time": 1489.804,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1459.974,
"text": " And so in the last 10 years, physicists have been saying, well, what happens if we let go of space-time completely and also quantum theory completely and look for some deeper structures beyond space-time and quantum theory? Can we find anything that can actually do work, like predict scattering amplitudes of particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider and so forth? And in the last 10 years, so this is all relatively new, they've discovered that yes, you can, that you can"
},
{
"end_time": 1519.514,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1490.299,
"text": " There are these new structures like the decorator permutations and amplitohedra that lets you compute actual scattering processes in space-time. And they have two advantages, what they've discovered are two advantages over space-time physics. One is that first if you do it inside space-time using quantum field theory, just to compute one interaction like two gluons hitting each other and four gluons spraying out,"
},
{
"end_time": 1544.258,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1519.718,
"text": " is hundreds of pages of algebra and millions of terms. It's a mess because you're doing it all on quantum fields in space-time. You're enforcing quantum theory and relativity theory. When you let go of space-time and these new structures, you can do what was millions of terms in three or four or five terms. You can compute it by hand. So the math all of a sudden becomes simple. Well, simpler. Physics is never easy, but simpler."
},
{
"end_time": 1572.79,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1544.753,
"text": " And the second thing is you see new symmetries. There's something that they call the infinite Yang-Yin symmetry, which you cannot see in space time. But when you let go of space time, all of a sudden you see not only does the math become simpler, but you're seeing new symmetries that are true of the data that can't be seen inside space time. So what seems to be emerging is that space time, which we've taken to be the fundamental reality, looks more and more like a, frankly,"
},
{
"end_time": 1601.015,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1573.387,
"text": " Pretty shallow, tired data structure that is a really bad framework. We're sort of stuck with this data structure in terms of our perceptual, will we perceive the world? And so what physics is doing is now realizing we can actually, we don't have to be stuck with either quantum theory or special or general relativity. We can go beyond them and we can then project back into those space-time data structures and get answers"
},
{
"end_time": 1626.169,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1601.323,
"text": " Much more easily and see deeper symmetries. So it's in that sense that I'm thinking Space-time is like flat earth. It's good for some things, but if you're trying to build a space program Flat earth isn't going to do it and if you really want to understand the nature I mean and and space-time is great for certain things but if you really want to understand the nature I think of consciousness and of reality more deeply and"
},
{
"end_time": 1655.981,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1626.647,
"text": " Okay, Philip. Well, I suppose again, I think all of what you've said builds a case and I couldn't get into the physics of debating that case."
},
{
"end_time": 1681.613,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1656.51,
"text": " a case that space-time is not fundamental. The fact that our models seem to collapse below certain levels suggests they're of limited applicability and hence that they don't exist in the fundamental story of reality. I mean you said Sean Carroll's not sympathetic to space-time being doomed. Well I think he is if by space-time being doomed"
},
{
"end_time": 1711.305,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1681.92,
"text": " That's just a sort of poetic way of saying it doesn't exist in our fundamental story of reality. And but yeah, I still think I mean, there's I mean, suppose we think, you know, space time is emerging and what we have at the fundamental level is is the wave function. I mean, there's going to be, I presume, a sort of mathematical mapping from the wave function to any state of affairs in"
},
{
"end_time": 1738.319,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1711.664,
"text": " ordinary quote-unquote three-dimensional reality and so on that basis we can perhaps make sense of some kind of emergence relationship or philosophers tend to call this grounding. Scientists tend to talk of emergence but yeah I guess I don't see why this means neurons can't exist unperceived. Why can't we just say they exist unperceived but they're"
},
{
"end_time": 1767.073,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1738.763,
"text": " The their existence when unperceived is ultimately rooted in a more fundamental story that is not so not spatial temporal for all the reasons you've raised. But yeah, I suppose I suppose that's what I think. Okay, great. That's a good response. I would say a couple things on the quantum theory aspect of it. What these"
},
{
"end_time": 1795.998,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1767.671,
"text": " High-energy theoretical physicists are saying is that not only is space-time doomed, but quantum theory is doomed, so that we're not going to get space-time emerging from wave functions. And the new structures that they're finding, like the amplitude hydron, the physicists will say, look, there are no Hilbert spaces here. These new structures, there's no Hilbert space anywhere to be seen."
},
{
"end_time": 1825.145,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1796.664,
"text": " But we can show you why quantum-like features like unitarity emerge from these deeper structures. So these deeper structures don't care a bit about Hilbert spaces or quantum theory, but you can show how these give rise to unitarity and other quantum-like features at the same time that they give rise to the space-time kinds of features. And another thing about the quantum theory is"
},
{
"end_time": 1853.456,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1825.418,
"text": " When you look at the weirdness of quantum theory, for example, the no cloning theorem, you can't copy quantum bits and things like superposition and entanglement, sort of the weird aspects of quantum theory. There are a number of physicists who pointed out that these properties of quantum theory can really be understood as just arising from lack of information."
},
{
"end_time": 1882.568,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1854.514,
"text": " It's in some sense just due to partial information and you can prove that that alone is responsible for these weirdnesses. That makes sense if space-time is just a data structure that humans use"
},
{
"end_time": 1910.964,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1882.892,
"text": " to navigate the world. And we can talk about the evolutionary arguments that I have for that. But that data structure is there to simplify, right? That's the whole point of an interface is to simplify and throw out information. So all the weirdness of quantum theory is pointing again to the fact that space-time itself is a very shallow and information-losing data structure."
},
{
"end_time": 1939.701,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1911.34,
"text": " And so when we when we let go of space-time, we're also going to have to let go of quantum theory because quantum theory is really a symptom of the limitations of space-time. I mean, I didn't mean to say, you know, this fundamental theory is going to be quantum. I mean, I was just to use the wave function as an example. I suppose just I mean, what you what"
},
{
"end_time": 1964.565,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1940.572,
"text": " What you capture in terms of, well, it's just a data set, it's just a sort of headset we're wearing. I mean, I don't see why we couldn't instead of that use the other very detailed theories of emergence people have talked about that often are to do with"
},
{
"end_time": 1995.316,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1965.538,
"text": " losing information and a less fine-grained picture of reality or maybe involving what Dennett calls real patterns or some kind of functional story. David Albert and Barry Lohr developed some kind of functionless story of how we get three-dimensional reality out of more esoteric structures. It's almost like you think the only way of making sense of"
},
{
"end_time": 2023.695,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1995.64,
"text": " the non-fundamental is is this sort of data structure business but I mean maybe that's that's one possibility but there's also other models of emergence and so it could be neurons are real but they are they're emergent from these bizarre structures like the I can never pronounce this what is it the amputated hedron or something you know so that they're just their existence is dependent on those more fundamentally stoke structures so"
},
{
"end_time": 2052.125,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2023.695,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, I guess I just think of these as different models of the non-fundamental and I would be looking for an argument as to whether to go your way rather than David Alberts or Tim Magdalen or whatever. But yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. I would say that. So far, the other kinds of attempts haven't, for example, unified gravity with quantum theory, right? So they"
},
{
"end_time": 2074.394,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2052.654,
"text": " There are promissory notes that haven't yet been fulfilled. So we can't point to a success yet in the emergence. Hold on Don, they're different fundamental theories. I'm not advocating a fundamental theory in physics, I'm just talking about"
},
{
"end_time": 2099.548,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2076.203,
"text": " Different views of the non fundamental and the relationship between the non fundamental and the fundamental It seems like you think your conception of the non fundamental is always like it's a it's a data structure But there there it is I'm not a physicist or even a philosopher physics either I don't know what fundamental physics is gonna look like but I guess I'm not seeing why we can't whatever it looks like is"
},
{
"end_time": 2124.565,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2100.043,
"text": " Even if it's the AmpliHedrons that I can ever pronounce or whatever, I should have rehearsed this, shouldn't I learn how to pronounce that? It's basically like amplitude, just forget the D, amplitude and then just say Hedrons. AmpliHedrons. Oh, thank you. Now, why didn't I ask you that before we went live? Anyway, everyone thinks I'm an idiot now. Yeah, but those people don't have any neurons, so don't worry about it."
},
{
"end_time": 2153.49,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2125.026,
"text": " So, yeah, whatever fundamental physics is, whatever kind of funny structures are at the bottom of that, I don't see why we can't make sense of space time as emergent from those non-spatial temporal structures. But we can in the same way that we can get some kind of relationship between, for example, Einstein and quantum theory versus Newton. Right. And we can show that Newton is a special case of Einstein."
},
{
"end_time": 2182.398,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2153.712,
"text": " If you let the speed of light go to infinity or if you let Planck's constant in the case of quantum theory, if you let Planck's constant go to zero, then you can get, you know, versions of Newton as special cases of the deeper theory. And that's the sense in which I'm thinking about these structures beyond spacetime is that we'll find that spacetime emerges as a special case of a much, much deeper. So, I mean, for example, we can still... I'm happy with everything you just said."
},
{
"end_time": 2206.51,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2182.705,
"text": " That's another step in the sense of going with the local realism being false. There I'm saying the Nobel Prize was just given last December"
},
{
"end_time": 2232.363,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2206.852,
"text": " for local realism being false and so I believe the physics local realism is false end of story that's that's that's the way now there are some physicists who will disagree there's some some who will say there's super determinism as a way out so look we you know we can have if we keep we can keep local realism if we assume that there's super determinism or something like that so so there are there are issues about this but"
},
{
"end_time": 2262.295,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2233.592,
"text": " But there's something I think that we might have in common here that I'd like to push on, and that is the physicists who are looking for structures beyond space-time are right now just finding geometric objects. The abstrahedron is not a polytope, but it's a geometric structure, and decorative permutations are combinatorial data stream mathematical structures. But there's no dynamics, and ultimately we're going to have to say when we step outside of space-time,"
},
{
"end_time": 2291.971,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2263.029,
"text": " Physics likes dynamics and we're going to be talking about dynamical entities beyond space-time, not inside space-time, not curled up inside space-time, dynamical entities outside of space-time. Now, here's the perfect place for you and me to say, hey, well, what about consciousness, right? What about conscious entities entirely outside of space-time? And that's, see, that's where I'm working with my own theories and saying, okay, let's just go with this."
},
{
"end_time": 2320.879,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2293.046,
"text": " The Nobel Prize was correct. Local realism is false. Space-time is not fundamental, and we need to find dynamical entities entirely outside of space-time. They will project into space-time, of course, just like Newton is a projection of Einstein and quantum theory. But it'll be a special case of some deeper structure. So why not go after a theory of consciousness, a dynamics of consciousness that's not tied"
},
{
"end_time": 2351.152,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2321.544,
"text": " to space time physics, but has the important constraint that whatever theory of consciousness we come up with outside of space time, whatever dynamics, we must with mathematical precision show precisely how space time arises as a special projection and all the dynamics of particles and all the dynamical laws of physics inside space time emerges as a very, very special case of a far more general dynamical system of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 2373.797,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2351.493,
"text": " and that would turn the whole tables around instead of saying we're trying of course we know that space-time is you know objects in space-time are real and and the laws and we're trying to fit consciousness into that to say no no no no that is the relatively trivial thing the deeper thing is consciousness itself we can get a mathematical theory of consciousness qua consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 2396.664,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2373.985,
"text": " and show"
},
{
"end_time": 2417.688,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2396.937,
"text": " The point of agreement between us that there's"
},
{
"end_time": 2440.077,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2418.541,
"text": " Consciousness at the at the fundamental level. Maybe we have slightly different stories to fit this in. What do you think? Should we move on to some of the other questions or should we continue on back and forth? So I would prefer that we not stick to the physics, but instead stick to the philosophy. Philip, if you don't mind, Don, I have some quick objections just from a physics point of view."
},
{
"end_time": 2467.244,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2440.811,
"text": " Because I just can't let them go. So number one, when someone says the physicists are finding these phenomenon, it's not the physicists, there are maybe 30 of those physicists of the 30,000 that exist that follow NEMA's program. Like it's a minority, maybe 25 people do. And then number two is that the amplitude hedron doesn't capture non-perturbative effects. So confinement isn't there. And almost all of the world is non-perturbative. We don't know how much is perturbative."
},
{
"end_time": 2497.381,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2468.131,
"text": " A number three is that just because something simplifies calculations, even if drastically, it doesn't imply an ontological reality to the ingredients that go into the simplification. For instance, there are two billiard balls that bounce off one another. We can model that with trillions and trillions and trillions of calculations and pages that take into account all the subcomponents and substances inside this billiard ball and the paint and the reflections, or we can just take their center of masses and"
},
{
"end_time": 2525.145,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2498.012,
"text": " and have them bounce off one another. That doesn't mean the center of mass is more real than all the components that make it up. And now number four is that the Nobel Prize was given because of local realism or disproving realism or local realism. However, this is just something that's said in the popular press. And when you interview the people who have won the Nobel Prize, they're not anti-realists. In fact, they'll say that"
},
{
"end_time": 2554.787,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2525.503,
"text": " Bell's theorem doesn't assume realism because Bell's theorem is a mathematical theorem, any more so than Stokes' theorem assumes reality or the triangle equality assumes reality. There's no axiom of reality. The positive geometry of NEMA assumes not only supersymmetry, which is dubious, but extended supersymmetry, so a perverse form of an N equals 4 if I'm not mistaken."
},
{
"end_time": 2579.48,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2555.64,
"text": " And furthermore, you mentioned that the theories don't incorporate gravity, well, neither does NEMA's. Okay, lastly, if we're to take it to be the case that if we are to probe the Planck length, then we'd create a black hole. Well, one, what's wrong with creating a black hole? Black holes exist. Number two, if that was to mean that somehow the Planck length doesn't exist, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 2606.613,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2580.213,
"text": " That's an operationalist view on reality in the same way that we can say the inside of a black hole doesn't exist because we can't observe it. There are many other views on what existence is other than operationalism. So I'm done. Those are just some quick objections. Don, I'd love to hear your thoughts. But I think that those are all very, very good points. So, for example, the amplitude hydron assumes n equals four super Yang-Mills. So it's supersymmetry."
},
{
"end_time": 2633.012,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2606.937,
"text": " It's only for massless, that particular one is only for massless particles and you're right that doesn't extend gravity. So this is fairly new work. There's some papers in the last couple of years where NEMA has gone to all masses and spins. So it's not just, but I think it still involves supersymmetric ideas and that may end up being false. We'll have to see. What's interesting though is this has only been at it for a decade."
},
{
"end_time": 2652.039,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2633.234,
"text": " You"
},
{
"end_time": 2682.944,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2652.944,
"text": " This is"
},
{
"end_time": 2696.8,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2684.718,
"text": " And that is interesting when we talk about dynamics of entities outside of space-time. What kinds of entities are those? What are we going to put there as the entities?"
},
{
"end_time": 2727.176,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2697.278,
"text": " That's ultimately what I'm exploring here is what happens if we start with entities that we take just to be consciousness and we get a precise mathematics and we can show that we can boot up all of space-time and quantum theory from that. We wouldn't prove that this is the right framework, but it sure is intriguing, right? As a scientist it would be very, very intriguing and it would raise deep philosophical issues. I mean, what kinds of entities"
},
{
"end_time": 2757.568,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2727.841,
"text": " Beyond space time, we'll be talking about here. These are no longer physical entities. They're not in space time. What are they? Ultimately, if we find a physics beyond space time and it's a dynamical system, we're going to have to have a theory about what those entities are like. What are they about and why is there this dynamics going on? Of course, it'll be open to us to give a non-conscious approach, of course."
},
{
"end_time": 2785.606,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2758.336,
"text": " Philip, I have a question. When Don was saying, look, the neurons don't exist, which I'm just going to pick up this pen and say this pen doesn't exist prior to looking at it. Sorry, prior to observation. And then you were saying, no, no, it can exist. But at the same time, this is made out of consciousness. Can you not reconcile those two views by saying the pen is observing itself because the pen is made up of subjective experiences? Like, is there a way to make the objective from the subjective? Well, I wouldn't say that."
},
{
"end_time": 2805.452,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2786.8,
"text": " i wouldn't quite put it that way that the pen is observing it well i mean maybe i could talk a little bit more about the um i mean the inspiration for the contemporary panpsychist resurgence which very much draws on um crucial work from the 1920s by Bertrand Russell"
},
{
"end_time": 2829.787,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2805.879,
"text": " and it was sort of the sorry to interrupt it also be helpful if you were to distinguish it from idealism panpsychism yeah yeah sure sure let me do that so so uh it's very much the the somewhat rediscovery of this crucial work from russell particularly in the analysis of matter that has made panpsychism in the last decade go from something that was laughed at insofar as it was thought of at all to being"
},
{
"end_time": 2857.91,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2829.787,
"text": " a serious academic option that's taught to our undergraduates published on and so on. So right, so I think this connects a lot to what Don was saying as well. So what Russell was thinking very hard about in the 1920s was that the fact that our fundamental science physics is just purely mathematical, right? Something we kind of take for granted. And of course that's very useful if you're a working physicist, you get very precise predictions and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 2884.974,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2858.234,
"text": " but Russell's thinking what does it mean as a philosopher interested in the ultimate nature of reality that our basic science is just equations and what Russell concluded is that what it means is that our basic science isn't really telling us that much about what fundamental reality is it's merely describing its mathematical structure and so as far as physics is concerned"
},
{
"end_time": 2902.449,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2885.981,
"text": " fundamental reality could turn out to be anything as long as it has the right mathematical structure you're going to get physics out of that that's all physics cares about so the contemporary Bertrand Russell inspired panpsychists exploit this and the idea is that"
},
{
"end_time": 2930.282,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2903.183,
"text": " what we have at the fundamental level of reality are very simple conscious entities networks of simple conscious entities interacting in very simple predictable ways through their interactions they realize certain patterns and mathematical structures and then the idea is those mathematical structures just are what we call physics so we sort of get physics out of"
},
{
"end_time": 2953.37,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2930.606,
"text": " underlying facts about consciousness so i don't think you can get consciousness out of physics but i think you can get physics out of consciousness i think we know that can be done i think russell i think we should think of russell as the darwin of consciousness i think he essentially solved all the mysteries here um so so really but but what this ends up as and this is where i think it maybe contrasts with"
},
{
"end_time": 2977.432,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2953.831,
"text": " What I think of as Don's idealism is that there's a kind of identity between consciousness and physical reality. As I sometimes put it, matter is what consciousness does. Really there's just consciousness stuff, but physics is the mathematical structure of that consciousness stuff. As Stephen Hawking said on the last page of A Brief History of Time,"
},
{
"end_time": 3003.302,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2977.927,
"text": " Physics doesn't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe. For the Roselian panpsychist it's consciousness that breathes fire into the equations. So just connecting it to what Don was saying, I mean Don seems to have this idea that like this physics he's attracted to or this new physics makes it more problematic"
},
{
"end_time": 3026.305,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3003.882,
"text": " um to you know we need to look elsewhere than space time we need to look for new entities but from my perspective my birch and ruff birch and russell inspired perspective physics has never told us ever what reality is like it's just a bunch of maths it's it's not unless you go for max tegmark's view and think you know the universe is made up of maths"
},
{
"end_time": 3054.991,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3026.732,
"text": " then physics just is not in the business of telling us what has never been in the business. So it doesn't matter whether, you know, the amplitohedron ends up being the right stuff or whether we get Bohmian space time. It's all it's just maths and we'll always need something to fill out that mathematical structure, something to breathe fire into the equations. And for the panpsychist, well, the most parsimonious answer"
},
{
"end_time": 3084.189,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3055.469,
"text": " is consciousness because we know consciousness exists. I think there are good reasons to think if you put just mathematical structure at the fundamental level, you're not going to be able to get consciousness out of that. But we know it can be done the other way around. And so that seems to me the more plausible view. So yeah, so that's kind of how I think about things. Does that make sense? Yeah, and everything you've said, I agree with. So the only place where I would sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 3103.114,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3084.428,
"text": " Go take the next step is to say, why just the laws of physics? Why not the consciousness? Why should we restrict our imagination to say that the laws of physics that we happen to know are all that consciousness has done?"
},
{
"end_time": 3133.729,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3104.07,
"text": " Why not say that there are an infinite number of other quote-unquote physics that consciousness chooses to play with? This is just one. Space-time physics is one perhaps more trivial kind of physics that consciousness has chosen to make. Why should we put ourselves in a conceptual straitjacket and only work with the physics that we've seen?"
},
{
"end_time": 3154.684,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3134.633,
"text": " It is parameterized by three integers, N, K, and M, and M is basically an integer that dials up the different universes that you might choose. So with the amplitude hadron, you can have our four-dimensional space-time as the projection of this deeper structure, but you can also have an eight-dimensional space-time. You can have space-times of 23rd."
},
{
"end_time": 3181.715,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3155.06,
"text": " The you can already with the new physics that they're finding outside of space time you can choose which kind of space time universe you want to create and in our 4d one is just one of an infinite number of possibilities and so so already the physics in just the first decade of stepping outside of space time is saying whoa space time the space time projection of this deeper physics is clearly just one of an infinite number of projections"
},
{
"end_time": 3204.411,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3182.039,
"text": " I'm saying, okay, let's go with what the math is saying. Consciousness is not in the space-time straight jacket. It's free to have an infinite number of completely different kinds of physics with different kinds of laws and for us to be wedded to the space-time one is to limit our imagination about what consciousness can really do and what it really is."
},
{
"end_time": 3234.138,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3205.06,
"text": " I suppose I'm very, I mean, very strictly an empiricist on this point. People might find that surprising, given my philosophical views. But as I say, for the panpsychist, there's a kind of identity between, so the panpsychist will say, you know, sometimes people say to me, you know, well, what's the kind of mathematics of your theory? And my answer is, ask a physicist, right? So for the Bertrand Russell style panpsychist, it's the job of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 3260.043,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3234.428,
"text": " to identify what Russell called the causal skeleton of reality. The job of physics is to identify the mathematical structure of reality, the dynamics, and then our philosophical interpretation of that is that that mathematical structure is filled out by consciousness, because I think it's the best solution to the mind-body problem."
},
{
"end_time": 3278.456,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3260.879,
"text": " But it's just a question for physics or more broadly an empirical question. You've talked about the dynamics of consciousness and the dynamics of physical reality. For me, they're just the same thing. These infinite"
},
{
"end_time": 3307.739,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3278.933,
"text": " Causal structures of consciousness, maybe they're possible, but I'm going to want empirical reason to think they're actual. I'm going to look for empirical grounds from physics to tell me what the dynamics of consciousness are, which for me is just equivalent to the dynamics of physical reality, the reality physicists are trying to articulate. Of course, I'm on the same page. Whatever theories we propose about dynamics of consciousness outside of space time and if I propose all these other kinds of"
},
{
"end_time": 3338.387,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3308.592,
"text": " I agree with you on that. It's just that I don't think that we should a priori rule out the possibility that there are many, many more ways that consciousness can give rise to physics than the one that we happen to know. As we start to think out of that box, we may be able to find clean empirical"
},
{
"end_time": 3364.172,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3338.643,
"text": " I'm finding it difficult to see where you disagree. It sounds like you all agree at your fundament that consciousness is at the fundament, but then Philip you believe Don is making a jump from there to something speculative and doing so with confidence or is it not that?"
},
{
"end_time": 3391.118,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3365.486,
"text": " It's just that I suppose I'm happy to say this pen exists when we're not observing it. And I would say all the things about it a normal physicalist materialist would say, you know, there's light bouncing off it hitting our eyes. And yeah, I'm not this talk of it's a data structure that it's a headset we wear."
},
{
"end_time": 3421.715,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3391.834,
"text": " I'm not fully seeing the motivation. Maybe we should talk about the evolution stuff as well briefly, which I guess is the other point where we disagree. Maybe I'll just say one thing just because of what you said, just brought up another way that I might get at this. Drink some wine. That is to say that if you think of consciousness as fundamental and that I'm having conscious experiences, so I'm having an experience as of a pen. You held up a pen."
},
{
"end_time": 3450.384,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3422.722,
"text": " And I don't as a, if I take conscience to be fundamental, uh, I can say, I definitely know that I have the conscious experience as of a pen. Now, someone might come along and say, but you know, in addition to your experience, there really is, I, there is a pen and not just your experience of a pen, there is a pen. And, and I say, well, um, I don't know what the evidence is for that."
},
{
"end_time": 3478.558,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3450.879,
"text": " I don't really need it. I can completely do my physics without any assumption that there's anything but the experiences and I can write down the equations. So I don't see why I need this extra ontological baggage of the real pen. There is a pen when I pound the table. There really is a pen. Well, I have an experience and that's all I really need. So why do I need the real pen? Why don't I just say"
},
{
"end_time": 3508.387,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3479.155,
"text": " Local realism is false. There is no real pen. And but there is a real experience and that's all I really need. And as Einstein put it, the laws of physics just basically are there to show us how we can predict new experiences from old experiences. Yeah, well, I suppose that we want we want a theory that fits together the the story we're getting from physics and the reality of consciousness. I suppose they're the two data points for me. But"
},
{
"end_time": 3526.766,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3509.462,
"text": " I mean, maybe we could agree on the fundamental story. I suppose I just think a lot of philosophers and philosophers of physics have come up with detailed and rigorous theories of emergence where we can make sense of the pen, not as a sort of extra thing in the ontology, just something"
},
{
"end_time": 3554.735,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3527.79,
"text": " Maybe just to take Dennett's view that it's a sort of a real pattern or something in the more fundamental. What is a real pattern in Dennett's view? So we've got the, you know, you could know all of physical reality at the level of fundamental physics, all that detail. But that's not very useful for many practical purposes for many. And I mean, maybe this connects with what you were saying, Kurt, about, you know, sometimes"
},
{
"end_time": 3582.637,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3555.077,
"text": " It's not the fundamental thing that gives you the more information with less axioms or what have you. You know, some kind of ways of carving up reality. Dennett talks about the intentional stance when you treat something as an agent with thoughts and experiences or the design stance when you treat something as a designed object. They can be more useful structures for"
},
{
"end_time": 3611.715,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3583.422,
"text": " Prediction, uh, rather than trying to, you know, work out from fundamental physics, you know, when your alarm clock is going to go off or whatever. But, um, but maybe, maybe it would help to, uh, to connect to the evolution stuff. Should I, should we go there now? Yeah, please. And then also you mentioned the word useful here. And I imagine I don't want to speak for Don, but the Don would agree that sure it's useful, but useful is a different statement than is it true or does it exist? I don't know. I don't want to put words in your mouth. Don't sorry. Oh, that's, those are good."
},
{
"end_time": 3641.237,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3612.432,
"text": " Yeah, yeah, so then it starts it starts to get tricky to see to see see where the difference is perhaps but Yeah, anyway, so they so this is I guess coming to Don's other argument and we'd be back and forth with this a little better on my mind chat podcast so so Don's evolutionary argument that Get just very roughly don can articulate it for himself but the given that our senses are are evolved for fitness rather than truth and"
},
{
"end_time": 3663.524,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3641.8,
"text": " We shouldn't trust them to tell us that. In fact, I think Donna said the zero chance that they're telling us the truth about reality. Well, I'm still a bit hung up with an objection. It's not my objection raised by a philosopher. Jeffrey Bagwell is actually published in quite prestigious philosophy journal Synthes."
},
{
"end_time": 3690.401,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3663.882,
"text": " A paper called, what's it called now, debunking interface theory. So what Bagwell presses on Don is that there's sort of something self-defeating about his argument, right, because if our senses have evolved for fitness rather than truth so we can't trust them, how do we know we evolved? We only know we've evolved because we can use our senses, you know, look at fossils and things. So this is something self-defeating about this argument and"
},
{
"end_time": 3716.084,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3690.759,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, I'm not totally persuaded by this, but I'm still a little bit taken by this objection. Go on, Don, what do you reckon? Yeah, so yeah, I've read Bagel's paper and I can summarize his objection myself. It says that Don's using the mathematics of evolutionary game theory to show that"
},
{
"end_time": 3745.009,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3716.357,
"text": " fundamental ideas in Darwin's theory, namely that there are physical organisms competing for physical resources in a physical space and time. He's using evolutionary game theory, which is supposed to model Darwin's theory to actually show that fundamental ideas in Darwin's theory aren't correct. So now the argument goes, so now either the mathematics of evolutionary game theory"
},
{
"end_time": 3774.565,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3745.691,
"text": " is a faithful model of Darwin's ideas, or it's not. If it's not, then Hoffman shouldn't use it to try to disprove things about Darwin's theory. And if it is a faithful model, it would never give you any reason to dispute the fundamental things that Darwin's theory is assumed, physical objects and space time. In either case, Don's in an unfortunate dialectical situation, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3803.353,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3775.128,
"text": " So now my reply is quite simple. This fundamentally misunderstands the nature of scientific theories and what they do. Fundamental misunderstanding. Let's go to Einstein's theory of space time, gravity. So Einstein's idea was that gravity is his big idea was that if I'm standing on a scale in an elevator,"
},
{
"end_time": 3828.643,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3803.933,
"text": " I'm weighing myself and all of a sudden the cable is cut and I'm in free fall, I would go to zero, I'd weigh zero in space time. And it took him several years, better part of a decade, to turn that idea into mathematics. But he finally, so his idea about, so he's thinking space time is real, it's fundamental. And he writes down these mathematical equations."
},
{
"end_time": 3854.804,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3829.036,
"text": " Later on, we find out from his equations and also from another equation he wrote down, when you put those two together, you find out that his idea of space-time, first number one, it has a beautiful scope to the theory. It's incredible the scope of Einstein's general theory of relativity. It is one of the marvels of all time. But also the mathematics tells us the limits of that theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3884.616,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3855.299,
"text": " Einstein's theory of space-time is great until you get to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and then his own mathematics tells you that those concepts are no longer coherent. So what happens is when we take a mathematical theory in science, in every single case you will get not only the scope but also the limits of the fundamental concepts that were mathematized. So what I'm doing is not some kind of ad hoc weird thing. This is the way science has to work."
},
{
"end_time": 3913.456,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3885.094,
"text": " No theory is the theory of everything in science. Every theory makes certain assumptions and you then make those assumptions precise with mathematics and then if you've done it right you find the scope, the explanatory scope of those assumptions and you find the explanatory limits of those assumptions and that's what makes science much better than non-mathematical ideas. With non-mathematical statements it's hard to know"
},
{
"end_time": 3940.435,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3913.848,
"text": " Where your theory stops? What are the limits of your theory? In science with mathematics, we can say Einstein's ideas are great at 10 to the minus 32 centimeters, they're great at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Nope, they're not. There's the scope and the limits. And so so Bagwell's argument, if taken seriously, would be an argument against any of basically the way science actually progresses, where we take"
},
{
"end_time": 3970.52,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3940.93,
"text": " So here's what we do in science. We take our ideas, our assumptions, we mathematicalize them, we find the scope and we then look for the limits. And as soon as we find the limits, we go hooray. Now let's find a deeper set of assumptions and new mathematics. And this is the way we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. So Bagwell has sort of taken as a problem what is in fact the central strength of science. Yeah. Yeah. So two points on that. I'm not entirely convinced by that response."
},
{
"end_time": 3995.691,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3970.896,
"text": " I mean, one thing is, yes, I totally agree with what you've just said about scientific progress. I share that sort of, you know, the standard view in philosophy of science is that in physics, at least, it's important to distinguish, you know, different sciences. In physics, we discover that the old theory is only works in a certain domain."
},
{
"end_time": 4023.848,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3996.271,
"text": " of applicability and then maybe it breaks down or we look to a broader theory so maybe you gave a great example of general relativity or maybe Newton's law of gravity works in a certain domain but not outside of it but Bagwell's critique is not qualified in that way it's not saying your argument fails in a certain domain of applicability"
},
{
"end_time": 4044.07,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4024.428,
"text": " It's not qualified in that way, it's just saying the argument cannot succeed because it's self-defeating because the argument relies on the assumption that we evolved but it also tells us that"
},
{
"end_time": 4073.729,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4044.753,
"text": " We wouldn't be able to know that we evolved. So so itself and it's not it's not it's not it's not saying that it's not qualified in the way we could, you know, raise this problem with general relativity. Oh, it doesn't work in this domain of inquiry, our domain of applicability. That's not what it's saying. It's just saying it doesn't work, period. So again, the way I think about it is that"
},
{
"end_time": 4103.916,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4075.759,
"text": " What I'm doing is I'm saying, let's assume for sake of argument, Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection. Just like I did with Einstein, let's assume for sake of argument, Einstein's theory of gravity. We say, if we assume that that's true, then we get the Einstein field equations. And then we can ask the question, assuming that Einstein is right, we get these field equations, then we can ask. So, Einstein assumed that space-time is fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 4120.828,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4104.411,
"text": " Can we use his mathematics to confirm his point of view? We find out, well, it is not fundamental. It stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Now, are we being self-refuting by saying, let's assume with Einstein that space-time is fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 4148.422,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4121.254,
"text": " We get the field equations. Now let's look at those equations and say, now what do those equations say about space-time? Well, they say it falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. So now I'm using the same logic with evolution. I'm saying, OK, we have Darwin's theory of evolution. It talks about organisms in space-time competing for resources. And now we have, you know, John Maynard Smith has made evolutionary game theory. He's turned Darwin's ideas into mathematics. So now we can say, OK,"
},
{
"end_time": 4178.951,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4149.087,
"text": " We have this really good mathematical model. We can now ask, what are the scope and limits of the fundamental ideas? For example, should we believe that our perceptions are telling us the truth about objective reality or not? Well, it turns out we can answer that question using evolutionary game theory, for better or for worse. We may not like the answer, but the answer is that the probability is precisely zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see any true structures of objective reality. That's an implication of"
},
{
"end_time": 4203.848,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4179.258,
"text": " Maynard Smith's Mathematization of Darwin. So that means that when I see physical objects in space-time, what I'm seeing almost surely is not the truth. And that means that the assumption that objects in space-time are the fundamental reality is almost surely not the truth on Darwin's own theory. Just as with Einstein's case,"
},
{
"end_time": 4222.483,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4204.462,
"text": " We start with assuming that space-time is fundamental and then we use its own mathematics to say it can't be because it falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Same logic. But I'm pointing out again that this happens not just in these two cases, this happens in every good"
},
{
"end_time": 4251.732,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4223.268,
"text": " precise scientific theory, we will always find the limits of those concepts. When we have a set of concepts, they will always have a limit. And we're trying to find in science what the limits of those concepts are. But what is the analog in your argument of domain of applicability? If that's the right terminology that like the problem that you're identifying that this limitation with Einstein's theory that it doesn't it doesn't it breaks down in a certain domain."
},
{
"end_time": 4281.92,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4252.483,
"text": " But it still works in a certain domain, but it breaks down in this other domain. But this objection, as I say, there's nothing analogous to that. It's just saying, if your argument works, we don't know we evolved. So your argument doesn't work. So there's no analog of the domain of applicability. I mean, maybe the objection fails for reasons I haven't thought of yet. But if the objection works, it doesn't say your argument, we can still use evolution in this limited domain. It just says,"
},
{
"end_time": 4293.524,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4282.654,
"text": " The argument doesn't work. You know, what's the analog of domain of applicability here? Well, in Einstein's case, the fact comes out that space time isn't fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 4318.336,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4294.155,
"text": " So Darwin's theory is not fundamental, but neither is Einstein's theory is fundamental. What we can do then is ask, is there a deeper theory? But it still works in a limited domain of applicability. Oh, absolutely. What's the analog of the domain of applicability in this evolutionary argument? For all practical purposes, for example, in my book, The Case Against Reality, I spent half of the book"
},
{
"end_time": 4348.49,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4318.729,
"text": " exploring the power of Darwin's theory. I use it with companies to help them sell products and make jeans that make you look better and so forth. I use Darwin's theory in great detail to actually do practical things. I think that is a wonderful theory inside space-time, just like Einstein's theory is a wonderful theory inside space-time. Within the framework of space-time, Darwin's theory works wonderfully. But this argument isn't saying"
},
{
"end_time": 4374.155,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4348.746,
"text": " It's self-defeating unless you're in the domain of space-time or something. It's saying it's self-defeating. The argument doesn't work. If the argument works, we don't know we evolved, so the argument doesn't work if it works. It means the whole thing just... It means the argument doesn't work, period. I don't know. I can't... Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 4398.029,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4374.497,
"text": " I don't know, I'm repeating myself. In case I'm repeating myself, can I raise it like a slightly different way of thinking about it? Natural selection is a very different scientific theory to theories in physics. I don't agree with Richard Dawkins on a lot of things, but I like him on evolution. I agree with Dawkins that we need natural selection"
},
{
"end_time": 4425.674,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4398.712,
"text": " to explain the apparent design, right? And I know it's slightly complicated because you don't necessarily believe in the physical world, but you believe in our conscious minds. And I think our conscious minds exhibit apparent design, you know, the way their functioning is so structured and coherent and logical. And we have the capacity to reason that needs an explanation of where that apparent design comes from."
},
{
"end_time": 4453.899,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4426.374,
"text": " Natural selection provides it. So I think we need the theory of evolution by natural selection to be true, to be true. Whereas. You know, if you seem to have an argument that we can't that it can't we can't know it to be true, it can't be true, because if it's yeah, so so I think we need it to be OK, so I can I can say what the next step is in my own way of thinking about things. So"
},
{
"end_time": 4482.551,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4454.292,
"text": " And then you'll see why I'm still maintaining that this is not a problem. So we have this Markovian dynamics of conscious agents outside of space time. And it turns out when you look at this Markovian dynamics, the entropy in the dynamics does not need to increase. It's easier for us to write down dynamical system of conscious agents, which the entropy is not increasing. So there's no arrow of time in terms of an entropic arrow of time in these dynamics."
},
{
"end_time": 4510.657,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4482.961,
"text": " But it's a theorem, a very simple theorem, that if you take a projection of this dynamical system that loses information, say using conditional probability, so you get a new dynamical system which is a projection of the deeper dynamical system that has no arrow of time. The new projected system will necessarily have an arrow of time. The entropy will increase because of the loss of information. So the idea is then that the arrow of time"
},
{
"end_time": 4541.391,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4511.391,
"text": " That you experience in this projected dynamics is not an insight into the true nature of the deeper dynamics. It's entirely an artifact of the projection process. Now, now to the evolution. What is the fundamental limited resource in evolution? It's time. If you don't get food in time, you die. If you don't made in time, you don't reproduce. If you don't get water in time, you die. What I'm saying is if we have, we can have a dynamical system of consciousness outside of space time."
},
{
"end_time": 4567.875,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4541.8,
"text": " that has no arrow of time. We take a projection by a conditional probability and we get a new dynamical system inside space-time in which there is an arrow of time and which now there appears to be limited resources and organisms fighting in time, surviving, reproducing in time. And it turns out that all of that is an artifact"
},
{
"end_time": 4595.026,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4568.166,
"text": " of loss of information and projection from a deeper dynamical system in which there is no arrow of time. So what we would get then is, and this is how science works, I would find a new framework in which the arrow of time doesn't exist. There are no limited resources. There is no competition. But when you take a projection of it, you get Darwin's theory of evolution of a natural selection precisely. You get evolutionary game theory precisely in that special domain of projection."
},
{
"end_time": 4622.381,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4595.367,
"text": " So then we would explain why Darwin's theory was so successful in its domain and why we could use Darwin's theory itself to predict that it would not be ultimately successful because it had limited concepts. So this is again, I'm trying to show how science works. So ultimately we take our theories, every theory will have its assumptions, they necessarily, there isn't"
},
{
"end_time": 4647.21,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4622.688,
"text": " I make a bold statement. There is no scientific theory that will ever be published that does not have a limit. And its own mathematics better tell you the limit or it's not a good theory. That's the way science works. And when you do that, then you'll get a deeper theory and explain why that new, for example, why evolution seems to be so powerful in this domain and where the theory comes from and how it's an artifact of a deeper theory."
},
{
"end_time": 4674.872,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4648.37,
"text": " So now you seem to be saying that, OK, natural selection is true, but it's not fundamental. But that your argument from fitness beats truth. Does not is not an argument that, you know, evolution is not part of the fundamental story or it's it's only in the domain of space time. It's it's saying."
},
{
"end_time": 4704.616,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4676.203,
"text": " Given that our senses evolved, we can't trust them to tell us about reality. But if we can't trust them to tell us about reality, we don't know we evolved. Period. We don't know we evolved. It's not just we don't know evolution is true in some deep fundamental sense and there really is space and time out there. If your argument works, we do not know we evolved. Period. But if we don't know we evolved, then"
},
{
"end_time": 4735.23,
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"start_time": 4705.964,
"text": " A, the argument doesn't work and so it's self-defeating, but also we can't explain the apparent design in our conscious minds. I think so. I think evolution we does. Yeah. So, so, so yeah. So that's the problem. I think you seem to be interpreting your own argument in a way that is not. It doesn't seem to me accurate because you seem to interpret the argument to say like we didn't evolve in, you know, in"
},
{
"end_time": 4765.094,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4736.22,
"text": " Can I see if I understand it correctly and then you all can correct? Sure. So Einstein's theory of gravity doesn't say anything about the Planck length or not being able to go to it. Only if you combine Einstein's with quantum mechanics do you get this limit of like a general relativity is consistent. With this theory of the photoelectric effect, if you put an E equals h nu, then you get it. Yeah, though that's not GR. That's GR in combination with quantum mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 4794.224,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4766.152,
"text": " Right, right. Okay. You do get black holes out of GR though. Sure, sure, sure. So the point is that, look, in a theory like, let's say GR, or whatever, whatever theory, it would say, you can't exit through all of these doors, there are 300 doors, maybe there are 10 of them which you can't exit. So it's showing some limits. Those are the scientific theories that point out their own limits. But Philip, it sounds like you're saying Don's theory is akin to A implies B implies not A."
},
{
"end_time": 4820.572,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4795.35,
"text": " Which is different. Yeah, which is not saying the theory doesn't work like inherently contradictory as a whole. Yeah. So is that what you're saying? So it's different than pointing out that there's some doors we can't go exactly exactly that. That's that. That's a good way of putting it. Okay. So Don, then your response to that. So I replied that every scientific theory is not the truth. There is no scientific theory, which is the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 4850.998,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4820.998,
"text": " Every scientific theory"
},
{
"end_time": 4880.043,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4851.305,
"text": " and it's not deeply true. Einstein's theory of space-time is a wonderful theory and it's not deeply true. We're going to let go of space-time altogether. We will find new frameworks entirely. There is no theory of everything. My big point here is there is no theory of everything. There cannot be. Therefore, every theory will ultimately be false. It can be a good projection"
},
{
"end_time": 4910.111,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4880.674,
"text": " I'm saying that if"
},
{
"end_time": 4940.555,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4911.084,
"text": " If we want to say that I've caught myself in a terrible self-contradiction, this is what's going to happen with every single scientific theory and in the same way that I'm doing it with evolution. It has to. It's true or it's deeply true. I think that gets a precise meaning in terms of these theories in physics where we can say, well, it's true in a domain of applicability, but it's not true"
},
{
"end_time": 4969.155,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4941.988,
"text": " Okay, how about this? Did we evolve"
},
{
"end_time": 4998.797,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4969.565,
"text": " Yes or no, and then I want to hear both of your answers to that. OK, great. I would say yes. Yeah, I mean, I take the standard scientific view of this. Yeah. No, and I would say that when we look at reality through a particular space time headset. It looks like we evolved, but but the evolution framework"
},
{
"end_time": 5014.582,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4999.65,
"text": " takes time as a fundamental entity. I don't think time is a fundamental entity. I think time is an artifact. It takes objects in space-time as fundamental. It takes space-time as fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 5044.07,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5015.026,
"text": " I think space time doesn't even work beyond 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Speaking of Daniel Dennett, he said that the fundamental unit of natural selection is one that undergoes replication, variation and selection. Now, this selection mechanism can be abstract. It doesn't just have to be with respect to time. It can be any resource. So given that does evolution or natural selection indeed reference time? Or would you say, yeah, there's an implicit time parameter because of steps?"
},
{
"end_time": 5074.838,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5045.623,
"text": " Well, when you go more abstract and evolutionary game theory, you still have a time parameter, right? For example, the success of generations gives you essentially a time parameter. I see. So I'm saying that this is a ubiquitous feature about how science works. Each theory will have its own set of concepts like organisms competing in time for resources and dying and having reproduction. It will have its domain of applicability."
},
{
"end_time": 5096.34,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5075.23,
"text": " And by the way, most theories we come up with have no domain of applicability. They're just useless. We have these rare theories that really are wonderful in a domain like evolution of a natural selection is beautiful in this domain, but it's not deeply true. I think that time isn't deeply true. And so the foundational concept of evolution in time"
},
{
"end_time": 5125.776,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5096.988,
"text": " is fundamentally flawed. What's beautiful about the theory of evolution is that its own mathematics allows you to predict its own limits. That's not self-contradiction, that is the glory of scientific theories that the theories predict their demise. I've got a slightly different way of trying to make the point. You don't think evolution is true in some deep sense."
},
{
"end_time": 5147.022,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5126.015,
"text": " But you think it's true in some more lightweight sense in some domain of applicability. Okay, and I'm struggling to articulate that difference. But just take that for granted. How do you know we evolved in that more lightweight sense? How do you know? Agreeing we're talking about that more lightweight sense. How do you know we evolved?"
},
{
"end_time": 5175.623,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5147.688,
"text": " Oh, well, I would say that from this deeper point of view, we know that we didn't, but it's a useful framework within space time, it's a very useful framework to think about it as evolution. It's true in some sense, right? It's true in this projection or whatever. Well, it's like if I'm playing Grand Theft Auto in virtual reality. Oh, great point. Trailer just got dropped for Grand Theft Auto 6. Oh my gosh. Fantastic."
},
{
"end_time": 5192.705,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5176.34,
"text": " If I say, you know, there's some supercomputer I'm interacting with and all I see is Grand Theft Auto, right? And so I'm playing, I'm racing in my car. So I can say I'm racing in a red Ferrari and my car can go faster than your green Mustang and so forth. And those may be true statements in the game."
},
{
"end_time": 5221.664,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5193.609,
"text": " But ultimately, they're only true of the game. And if I say, but I'm going to go now to a bigger framework, I'm going to look at outside of the Grand Theft Auto world. What is that? Well, some supercomputer. Well, now is it really true that there's a red Ferrari and a green Mustang? Well, no, if you actually look inside the supercomputer, you won't find anything like red Ferraris or green Mustangs anywhere inside there. You'll find bits and so forth. But within the context of the headset, sure,"
},
{
"end_time": 5248.848,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5222.278,
"text": " that's the best theory and that's what you should do but a good theory of grand theft auto would actually tell you you know there's more to life than grand theft auto it won't tell you that there's a supercomputer but it will tell you that grand theft auto can't be the whole story and that's all i'm doing with evolution is not the whole story i'm trying to focus on that that from within the grand theft theft auto world from within the headset the sense there's got to be some sense in which"
},
{
"end_time": 5277.227,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5249.923,
"text": " The creationist is wrong, that the earth is 4000 years old, that we didn't evolve by natural selection. There's some sense in which the creationist is wrong. Okay, it's not a deep sense. My question is, how do you know, how do we know that the creationist is wrong and the Darwinian is right in that, in that headset relative context? And surely you've got to say, well, it's we used our senses. We used our senses to find out that the creationist is wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 5293.217,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5277.756,
"text": " I don't think you can say that if your argument works because if your argument works our senses evolve for truth not fitness not truth. We don't know. We don't know if the creationist is right or wrong. This is the key point. We don't need to believe any of our theories."
},
{
"end_time": 5321.015,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5293.78,
"text": " I'm a scientist. I create theories and I evaluate theories. All I do is I take the theories and I'm not stuck inside my theories. I'm the one that creates them and evaluates them. I just look at evolution by natural selection and say here's the mathematics, the mathematics entails the probability of zero that I have any true perceptions. That's what that theory says. Now what I believe about my senses is something different. I may still say"
},
{
"end_time": 5350.896,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5321.578,
"text": " I don't believe that implication of evolution. It's nevertheless an implication of evolution. So I can say that I love evolution, it has all this power, but my senses are not limited. For example, I might say that the mathematics of evolutionary game theory says that they are limited. Aha! That's what that theory entails. Maybe I want to say that there's a point where I disagree with evolutionary theory. I love it for all this other stuff. But on the other hand, I may say, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 5376.237,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5351.664,
"text": " Maybe it's when it says we shouldn't take our perceptions literally, maybe we should interpret that as pointing to this as just a headset. And if that's the case, then I would say, yeah, wow, evolution actually pointed to space time as just a headset and don't take it literally. In which case I would give it a big thumbs up and say, but it doesn't tell us what's next, right? Just like Einstein doesn't tell us what's outside space time."
},
{
"end_time": 5404.258,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5376.886,
"text": " The new physicists are having to make broad and bold leaps outside of space-time. You have to really go out there but what you do is you write down your new ideas and of course most of them are not even worth it. Most of them are wrong but every once in a while you get a good idea and then what you have to do is show that it projects back into space-time and gives you answers that we can test inside space-time. So whatever we come up with outside space-time"
},
{
"end_time": 5433.507,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5404.616,
"text": " Better project into space-time and it better give us Einstein and it better give us evolution by natural selection as the projection. If my theory of conscious agents outside space-time, when I projected into space-time, doesn't give me physics, Einstein's physics, quantum theory, and it doesn't give me evolution by natural selection as the projection, then I'm wrong. So evolution is an absolute acid test on my deeper theory."
},
{
"end_time": 5461.971,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5433.677,
"text": " One more time, one more time and then I'm going to, I'm going to probably we're not going to convince each other. That very thing you said then that my theory had better give me natural selection as a projection. That's a constraint. They better give me that. How do you know it had better give you that through using your senses, you know, through using your senses has obviously given you empirical reason to think your theory had better give you that as opposed to what the creationist would constrain the theory with."
},
{
"end_time": 5490.401,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5462.483,
"text": " And I think if you're if your fitness bits truth argument works, you can't trust your senses. And so, yeah, anyway, God, that's the see, I don't believe evolution. Evolution says that we shouldn't. But you did. I was focusing on the specific claim you just made. So evolution. So all I'm doing as a scientist is I'm just telling you what this theory entails. And I don't have to believe it. I can say it works over here and I don't believe this part of it."
},
{
"end_time": 5518.746,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5491.169,
"text": " I'm not caught in my theory, I'm an evaluator of the theory. The argument by the way is actually quite simple. There are fitness payoff functions. Fitness payoff functions are functions that go from whatever the world is, the state of the world, into the payoffs, say from 0 to 100. You can ask a simple technical question, what is the probability that a generically chosen payoff function"
},
{
"end_time": 5546.954,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5519.36,
"text": " would be a homomorphism of any structure in object of reality, like a total order, a partial order, a metric, whatever it might be, a topology. And in every case, the answer is precisely zero. Because for a fitness function to be homomorphism, it has to satisfy certain equations. Almost no randomly chosen fitness payoff function will satisfy those equations. It's just that simple."
},
{
"end_time": 5575.094,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5547.193,
"text": " All I have to do is say evolution by natural selection is incredibly powerful theory but it entails almost surely with probability one that no sensory system has ever evolved to see the truth. Now once I've taken that from evolutionary theory I can say what could that mean? Well maybe it could mean that my senses are just a headset in which case I could be looking beyond this and ask for"
},
{
"end_time": 5598.592,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5575.555,
"text": " for what's beyond my space-time headset."
},
{
"end_time": 5626.493,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5599.053,
"text": " It doesn't mean that I'm caught in evolution because I have this deeper theory that shows that evolution is an artifact, that even time itself is not an insight into the deeper realm. It's an artifact. So Philip, why can't Don be saying that Darwinian evolution is some approximation? It's not exactly correct. There's neo-Darwinism and there's EES. So there are various agglomerations or pieces added to Darwinism afterward."
},
{
"end_time": 5656.852,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5626.988,
"text": " In other words, some biologists would agree that tradition, the way we traditionally view natural selection, isn't the only mechanism by which we evolve. OK, so why can't Dawn say, hey, look, evolution didn't happen in the exact way that we thought? If it did, then it would lead to a contradiction. It could happen in some approximate way. And there could be some underlying mechanisms that are slightly nuanced that produce the wonderful variety we see. And I also don't know, Dawn, if that's what you're saying. I don't mean to speak for you, by the way. I'm just saying, why can't that be an argument?"
},
{
"end_time": 5687.295,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5658.387,
"text": " Well, I suppose in the domain in which we're talking about our senses and our conscious experience and the apparent design that seems to be in our conscious experience, we need to appeal, I think, I agree with Richard Dawkins, you know, we need to appeal to the truth of natural selection in order to explain that apparent design. But"
},
{
"end_time": 5717.517,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5688.183,
"text": " But if this argument works, then. We can't do that, we can't. Because we can't trust our senses to find out that empirical information that we did evolve through natural selection. So so the whole thing doesn't get off the ground. Don, do you have another analogy other than the supercomputer? Because the computer itself implies computation, computation implies step by step, in which case you can have"
},
{
"end_time": 5742.79,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5718.302,
"text": " If we're going to abstract time to say that successive generations can also be time, then the supercomputer that we could potentially be part of could also have time in the computational steps. So do you have another analogy? Well, the example that's not an analogy but is in fact what we're working on is this Markovian dynamics in which there is no error of time. So this is a literal mathematical system."
},
{
"end_time": 5771.613,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5743.302,
"text": " We actually at the end of the paper raised this issue. We point out that our dynamical systems don't need to have an arrow of time, but then we give the proof. We actually have a three or four line proof that any projection will give you an arrow of time from our system. So what we would love to do"
},
{
"end_time": 5792.142,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5772.09,
"text": " is to come up with a dynamical system with conscious agents that projects into space-time. And that's the paper I'm working on right now. That's exactly what I'm working on today is that mathematical projection. We're making really good progress. And my intent is to show when we get that projection that we can get evolution by natural selection"
},
{
"end_time": 5819.616,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5792.602,
"text": " In our projected version. So we'll have a theory in which there are no limited resources. There are no organisms competing, no nature red and tooth and claw. But when you take this projection and you lose information, it looks like nature red and tooth and clock. It looks like there's an arrow of time and all of that is an artifact of the projection. And I'm saying, I'm saying this, there's nothing special about this. This is the way science works. We go from Newton to Einstein."
},
{
"end_time": 5850.009,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5820.503,
"text": " We get Newton as a special case but there are things Newton can't do and there's things that Einstein can explain why you can't do them but you can do them on Einstein and then you see Newton as a projection. With C goes to infinity, you get Newton as a projection. That's what I'll get Darwin, all of evolution by natural selection as a projection when I let go of space-time. Can I make one quick physics point? I would say it's the opposite. I would say that it's with Einstein that you have the limitations. In fact, with Newton, you can do anything."
},
{
"end_time": 5879.565,
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"start_time": 5850.589,
"text": " I suppose I could put it as a sort of dilemma. If we're just saying natural selection is not fundamental, that it's just true in some non-fundamental story of reality, well then I don't think that gets around the"
},
{
"end_time": 5885.196,
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"start_time": 5879.923,
"text": " Don's argument isn't saying, you know, appealing to what"
},
{
"end_time": 5914.548,
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"start_time": 5885.93,
"text": " I don't know if we'll make much progress on this one point and I'm sure there are at least two more points that you all could talk about. So I'm going to try my best to"
},
{
"end_time": 5939.07,
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"start_time": 5915.026,
"text": " Rephrase it actually paraphrase John Vervecky and I want to see if Philip if you agree with this and Then we'll see if we can make headway here, but if not, then we can move on to something else So John said and it was either to you Don or John said this to Bernardo Castro up John Vervecky said if the level from which we do our science is illusory Then how does that not undermine all the claims of what we're making from that level?"
},
{
"end_time": 5959.974,
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"start_time": 5939.616,
"text": " So in other words, if we're claiming science is somehow illusory, but yet we're using science to make that claim, how does that not undermine itself? So is that what you're saying, Philip or no? It sounds it sounds related. Yeah, I mean, I suppose that, again, that's why I suppose my position is a middle way between"
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"text": " I'm less and less reductionist as I get older actually. I started off in my academic book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality really trying to be very reductionist and there are certain great panpsychist philosophers like Luke Roloff who try to be very reductionist. But actually the more I've talked to neuroscientists and some condensed matter physicists as well, I just think"
},
{
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"text": " I sort of think the reductionist idea is a bit of a dogma that we've, you know, we don't know anywhere near enough about the brain to know whether everything that goes on in there is totally reducible to underlying chemistry and physics and you've got interesting views like the assembly theory, the very kind of non-reductionist theory or Kevin Mitchell in neuroscience arguing for sort of strong emergentism about consciousness. So yeah, I'm less and less convinced that we need a very reductionist story"
},
{
"end_time": 6054.804,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6030.555,
"text": " But still, I'm a hardcore realist about physical reality as physicists describe it to us. It's there when we don't look at it. But that's just mathematical structure. So we need something to fill out that mathematical structure. That's where consciousness comes in. But yeah, I'm not so persuaded that we need to think"
},
{
"end_time": 6084.48,
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"start_time": 6055.589,
"text": " Everything that goes on in the brain or in living systems is just a product of the basic laws of physics. I think that's kind of a dogma that fits with the zeitgeist of the moment, but it's not actually something empirically proven. So Don, would you characterize yourself as a reductionist? And by reductionism, I mean that there are individual components that somehow in their interaction give rise to all the complexity we see"
},
{
"end_time": 6110.691,
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"start_time": 6084.753,
"text": " And these components, these are constituent phenomenon that could be something simple like cellular automata or Rubik's cubes or emoticons at the Fundament. And somehow these underived components spawn everything else. No. So by reductionism, I would mean that as you go to smaller and smaller scales of space time, you find more and more fundamental entities"
},
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"start_time": 6110.913,
"text": " And I think that"
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"text": " In certain cases, that's been very useful like in thermodynamics and so forth. That kind of approach has been very useful. But again, many high energy theoretical physicists are saying that reductionism is doomed because the Planck scale is the end of the whole story for smaller and smaller scales. If you try to go to even smaller scales, what happens is you get a reversal"
},
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"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
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"text": " What if by reductionism, someone doesn't mean anything to do with space time, but just that there are some more simple elements, whether it's cellular automata or Rubik's cubes that are at the fundament and that breed life when they interact in some way to give rise to all the complexity we see. And that if you were to break down, break down, quote unquote, break down, whether in scale, like with microscopes or whether in some other scale, time or something else, that everything we see here can be predicted from these tiny elements."
},
{
"end_time": 6255.776,
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"start_time": 6227.551,
"text": " these underived elements. So what if that's what is meant by reductionism? Are you both reductionists then? Do you think there's something more than that? I had a recent article in Scientific American people could look up. I think there's a good argument and this is something I explore in the consciousness chapter of the book, which is probably the most challenging chapter of the book. It comes with a warning at the start, but I think it's I hope some of the more original bits of the book"
},
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"text": " I think there's a good challenge to reductionism, precisely as you just defined it, Kurt. From the need, we come back to evolution, from the need to make sense of the evolution of biological consciousness. And the thought is that natural selection only cares about behavior, right? Because it's only behavior that matters for survival. But with the rapid progress in robotics and AI, I think it's become apparent that you can have incredibly complex"
},
{
"end_time": 6296.237,
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"start_time": 6285.947,
"text": " information processing and behavioral functioning without any kind of subjective experience at all. So then this gives rise to the question why didn't natural selection make"
},
{
"end_time": 6319.36,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6296.732,
"text": " survival mechanisms, you know, very complicated mechanisms that can mechanically track features of their environments and initiate highly survival conducive behavior but without having any kind of subjective experience at all. I think this is a really deep challenge. Why did consciousness evolve? Given the"
},
{
"end_time": 6347.756,
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"start_time": 6320.23,
"text": " complicated mechanisms without consciousness could in principle have survived just as well so I think there's a really deep neglected puzzle here and I think part of the solution has to be that consciousness makes a behavioral difference that systems with unified consciousness and conscious understanding of the world around them that this opens up radically new forms of behavior"
},
{
"end_time": 6377.517,
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"start_time": 6348.131,
"text": " Well, so my framework is a little bit different on this point. So I would say that"
},
{
"end_time": 6396.305,
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"start_time": 6378.268,
"text": " Space-time is just, and the laws of physics are just one particular headset that consciousness can use, one of countless many, and there's nothing particularly interesting about space-time or special about it. What's interesting about it is probably one of the more trivial data structures that consciousness can use, not one of the more deep structures."
},
{
"end_time": 6424.002,
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"text": " I can only imagine three-dimensional objects. I can't even imagine a four-dimensional or five-dimensional object. That's a real impediment to a lot of the research I'm doing. I need to imagine, you know, objects that are of much higher dimension. I can't do it. I only have three kinds of color receptors. Manta shrimps have 10 or 11 or whatever. In many ways, I feel like my space-time headset is a really, I got a really cheap version of it and the laws of physics are really"
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"index": 245,
"start_time": 6425.503,
"text": " Put it this way, we're not seeing the true causal structure of anything. In Grand Theft Auto, I have the appearance of causality, I turn my steering wheel, my car goes down the streets and so forth, but the appearance of cause and effect in space-time, I would claim, is utterly an illusion. It's a useful illusion, but it's utterly an illusion, the same illusion as in a VR game."
},
{
"end_time": 6473.985,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6448.08,
"text": " It looks like the steering wheel turning is causing my car to turn. Nothing of that sort is happening. The steering wheel has no causal powers. None. And there are no causal powers inside space-time whatsoever. So you can see my framework is entirely different. But what I have to do is then show, who am I then that's doing this? I'm not an object in space-time."
},
{
"end_time": 6496.323,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6474.531,
"text": " I'm not a small consciousness inside space-time and I didn't ultimately evolve inside space-time. I'm not in space-time. Space-time is in me. Space-time is a little data structure in me and it's not the only one that I could possibly use. So it's a complete reversal of the whole picture."
},
{
"end_time": 6519.957,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6496.886,
"text": " What I meant by reductionism doesn't have to have causation. I just mean that you can understand the whole by analyzing its constituent parts. If that's the definition of reductionism, do you still subscribe to it or you don't subscribe to it? Well, again, if you think about the headset approach, ultimately when you look at smaller and smaller scales inside the headset or parts, you get down to pixels and in some sense,"
},
{
"end_time": 6549.991,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6520.333,
"text": " You don't really explain anything. I mean, my steering wheel can't be explained by the pixels out of which it's made, right? This is just not going to explain it. So ultimately, my feeling about scientific theories is that every scientific theory ultimately is only a projection of the truth. It's never the truth. It's a very limited. So no scientific theory."
},
{
"end_time": 6580.247,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6550.299,
"text": " can ever be a theory of everything, and every scientific theory will automatically have its necessary limits. And ultimately, my feeling is that every scientific theory, my own included, scratch probability zero depths of reality. In other words, reality, whatever it is, will infinitely transcend any scientific theories attempts to explain it."
},
{
"end_time": 6609.121,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6581.51,
"text": " And that's just the way it is. So there will never be a theory of everything. And the simple argument for that is, look, every scientific theory makes assumptions. Those assumptions are the miracles of the theory. You're not explaining those assumptions. You're assuming them. You can say, well, I can get you a deeper theory that explains those assumptions. You can't. Your deeper theory will have its own assumptions. And this goes on ad infinitum. Ad infinitum. And that means that we're infinitely far."
},
{
"end_time": 6636.937,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6609.633,
"text": " Right now, we're infinitely far from a theory of everything and we will always be infinitely far from a theory of everything. And that includes Hoffman's theory is infinitely far from a theory of everything. So deep humility is required at every step in our scientific theory building, very, very deep humility. And it raises the question, who am I? Who am I? That I transcend space time. Space time is a little data structure in me. I'm not a little object in space time."
},
{
"end_time": 6665.538,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6637.551,
"text": " Space-time is a little data structure that I use and it's one of many that I could use. Who am I that is doing this? It raises a very, very deep question. In that sense, I take the idea that consciousness is fundamental, very, very seriously, that it transcends space-time completely. Space-time is trivial. It's a non-entity compared to the depth of consciousness. It's a complete non-entity in terms of its complexity."
},
{
"end_time": 6691.459,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6666.288,
"text": " We transcend it, whatever we are completely transcends it. And when we die, we'll just drop, we'll drop that headset and we'll find out who we are. Is it time to talk about the meaning of life? I think it's getting deep. That's the other part of your book, right? The other part of your book. What is the meaning of life, Philip? Yeah, so but you know, most of this"
},
{
"end_time": 6710.674,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6691.766,
"text": " Most of this book is just a sort of cold-blooded scientific and philosophical argument for cosmic purpose, arguing that there is reason to take seriously this idea of goal directedness at the fundamental level of reality. Weird as it sounds, I just think that's"
},
{
"end_time": 6736.288,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6710.998,
"text": " where the evidence is pointing to and we have to face up to that. I annoy people on Twitter by suggesting that Bertrand Russell would have believed in cosmic purpose because he followed the evidence where it led, but it just wasn't there when he was alive. But so, so yeah, most of the argument is that just cold blooded up case for that. But I suppose in the first and last chapters, I'm thinking about the implications for human existence and"
},
{
"end_time": 6760.845,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6737.415,
"text": " Yeah, so I don't want to be kind of too dogmatic about what is the single way of living a meaningful life. You know, I suppose I'm interested in suggesting options that are maybe different from the familiar options of traditional religion on the one hand and secular atheism on the other. But yeah, overall,"
},
{
"end_time": 6789.872,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6762.466,
"text": " I think there's a defender kind of middle way ground here really on the one hand you get some religious philosophers like William Lane Craig who say you know if there's no point to the universe it's all pointless you know we might as well just rape and kill each other you know it's all totally pointless and meaningless the other extreme you get you know the familiar secular atheist position that probably there isn't cosmic purpose but if there is"
},
{
"end_time": 6814.889,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6790.299,
"text": " it's totally irrelevant we make our own meaning whatever so I try to defend the middle way that yeah you can have perfectly meaningful life without the put being a purpose to the universe you know by pursuing kindness and creativity and knowledge and so on but if there is a purpose to the whole of reality then"
},
{
"end_time": 6837.892,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6815.879,
"text": " Maybe there's a potential for our lives to be more meaningful, you know, if you can contribute in some small way to the purposes of the whole of reality. That's huge. You know, we want to we want our lives to make a difference. That's about as big a difference as you could imagine making. So, yeah, and just finally, I suppose, you know, just speaking for myself, I feel"
},
{
"end_time": 6866.032,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6839.019,
"text": " Starting to live as a cosmic purposivist, you know, this living in hope that there's a greater purpose to what's going on here. A cosmic what? purposivist, cosmic purposivist. I see, I see. Live sort of living in hope of a greater purpose to what's going on. I have found to be a deeply kind of meaningful form of living. I think most of all, I think it has brought me a sense of"
},
{
"end_time": 6894.121,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6866.425,
"text": " a deep sense of peace in some way. I was talking to my wife about this just this week. Because I guess I'm quite kind of career driven. I think I hope partly through pure motives, you know, like I really believe in the things I'm arguing for and I want to persuade the world. Probably there's a bit of ego there as well, you know, I want to kind of make my mark or whatever. But I found that cosmic purposivism has made me less bothered about those things."
},
{
"end_time": 6922.944,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6894.343,
"text": " not because I don't think they're important but because I'm conceiving of them as part of some much bigger thing that's going on that I'm inevitably just a tiny part of and hence my task is just you know to do the best I can to contribute to this much bigger thing going on and conceiving of those things in that way I suppose makes me less bothered about my own personal successes and failures and"
},
{
"end_time": 6948.558,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6923.575,
"text": " frees me up to enjoy life a little bit more, enjoy playing in the snow as I was with my family this weekend. Not that I wasn't happy before, but maybe bought a deeper sense of happiness. So, yeah, so I suppose I'm just trying to suggest options that aren't the familiar options for thinking about the meaning of life. OK, how do you argue that, by the way? So you just outlined some views, but how do you argue that those views are correct?"
},
{
"end_time": 6980.469,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6950.998,
"text": " Well, that's the that's, I guess, going back to the starting point. So part of it is the fine tuning of physics for life, which I think just in our standard Bayesian way of thinking about things just is evidence that there is some kind of goal directedness towards life in the very early stages of the universe. And I think we're sort of in denial about that because it just doesn't fit with how we've got used to thinking about science. As I said, there's"
},
{
"end_time": 7003.302,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6980.794,
"text": " Um, you know, I used to think the multiverse option was the obviously more plausible option for a long time. Cosmic purpose sounded very silly to me, but I've been persuaded that there's some dodgy reasoning going on in trying to explain fine tuning in terms of the multiverse. I could talk about that if you want. Um, yeah. And, um, well also"
},
{
"end_time": 7014.07,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7005.367,
"text": " the evolution of consciousness that we started talking about then."
},
{
"end_time": 7044.326,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7014.445,
"text": " The emergence of conscious understanding, which I think belies our current scientific paradigm and the fine tuning of physics for life. Most people think, oh, well, God is the alternative. But I think there is a middle ground, a neglected middle ground here between the traditional atheist picture of a meaningless, purposeless universe and the traditional Western God on the other hand. Don, what is the meaning of life to you? And feel free to comment on anything that Philip has just said."
},
{
"end_time": 7076.067,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7046.425,
"text": " Well, first on the point of agreement, I believe in a version of conscious purposiveness, whatever the word was. So I think it's not the standard physicalist framework that nature read in Tooth and Claw and there's really no meaning of purpose and it's pointless. I think that that's just taking the headset literally when we shouldn't take the headset literally as the final word."
},
{
"end_time": 7105.538,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7076.51,
"text": " My own view on purpose comes with who I think we are. I don't think I'm a 160-pound object in space-time. I think that space-time is a tiny data structure inside me and inside you. I think that I am and you are consciousness that transcends any scientific theory, that I am"
},
{
"end_time": 7134.718,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7105.93,
"text": " the deep reality and you are the deep reality of consciousness you are that consciousness and in fact there's only one so in fact my view is that right now consciousness in a Hoffman avatar a Philip Goff avatar and a Kurt Gavatar is talking to itself the one infinite consciousness and what is doing is finding out about itself in some sense the infinite consciousness knows itself by knowing what it's not it plunges itself into"
},
{
"end_time": 7164.77,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7135.196,
"text": " This little headset loses itself, thinks it's a little object in space time, and then slowly wakes up and realizes, no, I transcend this headset. And that's how it knows what it is, by knowing with countless headsets what it's not. So the purpose is, from my point of view, is consciousness is here to know itself by waking up to what it's not."
},
{
"end_time": 7193.541,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7165.282,
"text": " And the fundamental thing that comes out of this is that some religions say love your neighbor as yourself, but I'm saying your neighbor is yourself. And that is the foundation for true love, is to recognize that that's just me under a different avatar. Even my cat is me under a different avatar. And so from this point of view, the whole purpose of life is"
},
{
"end_time": 7222.039,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7193.933,
"text": " I'm this infinite consciousness that is finding out who I am. And it's a theorem that it'll never be done. It's a mathematical theorem that no system can ever truly know itself because in the very act of knowing yourself, you build a model of yourself and you become more complicated. So now you have to get a new model of yourself with the more complicated model and so forth. So this is the one consciousness, the infinite consciousness, posing as a philosopher"
},
{
"end_time": 7249.07,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7222.295,
"text": " As a scientist, as a podcast interviewer and learning about itself and waking up and eventually takes off this headset and tries on a less cheap headset than this one and goes through the same process in a different way. So that's sort of my guess about what it is. Can I just add something to that? I mean, I guess it's another point in which I value Don's work and which we're trying to do something similar that"
},
{
"end_time": 7260.162,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7249.548,
"text": " I think there's a huge demographic, a huge proportion of the population that identify as spiritual but not religious, but in general academics"
},
{
"end_time": 7281.271,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7260.93,
"text": " Don't cater for that group in academic philosophy. I would say most people are secular atheists. There's some really good quality philosophy of religion, but it tends to be very traditional Christians, few Jews. There's one very good Muslim philosopher of religion in the analytic tradition that's emerged recently."
},
{
"end_time": 7304.326,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7282.585,
"text": " and then i think from that we get this perception that spiritual but not religious is fluffy thinking and not very thought through but i think that's just the contingent circumstances that you know academics haven't put rigorous work into developing philosophically scientifically supported options here so this is one thing i'm trying to do with with this book and i've got a three-year templeton project on"
},
{
"end_time": 7330.469,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7304.326,
"text": " trying to work out if the universe is conscious that's kind of related to this stuff that funded this conference where the dawn came to where I debated Sean Carroll on whether consciousness is fundamental people could check out on YouTube if they're interested in but yeah so I think that's very exciting that this whole new I mean it's always been there to an extent but is connecting up this whole new kind of academic area of trying to make rigorous sense of"
},
{
"end_time": 7358.575,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7331.493,
"text": " between traditional religion and secular atheism and just you know having expanding the debate is always is always really interesting and adds new challenges although I just I don't I don't like this idea that we're all the same person I guess I guess I'm I'm a little bit more Western in my thinking than Eastern on this regard I sort of feel like the value of love and self-sacrifice right is that you're not me and I'm still"
},
{
"end_time": 7385.708,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7359.104,
"text": " You know, sacrificing myself for someone that's not me, that's the other and I find that's what's beautiful about love and when it's like, oh no, it's just me, it's all me, that kind of depresses me. Sex is just masturbation. That makes it even worse now, you put it that way. But that's not an argument, that's just a sort of gut, ethical, primal, ethical response"
},
{
"end_time": 7415.179,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7386.203,
"text": " Many of these claims come down to gut intuitions. So Don, I'm curious about the neurons not existing, but the cat existing. So the cat is an avatar that has its own perspective. Then if we were to scale that down into the perspective of a neuron, then does a neuron still technically exist if you're not there because the neuron has its own headset? Or even let's just say the cat. Well, or the cat, right. So ultimately, it's consciousness looking at itself through a headset. And"
},
{
"end_time": 7442.125,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7415.896,
"text": " And so sometimes it sees itself... So what does a headset do? A headset dumps things down, right? That's what a headset does. It deletes lots of information. So from this point of view, I should be very, very clear. The distinction that we make between living and nonliving things is not principled. And the distinction between conscious and unconscious objects is not a principled distinction."
},
{
"end_time": 7471.783,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7442.654,
"text": " in my"
},
{
"end_time": 7494.531,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7473.131,
"text": " From this point of view in which space-time is just a headset, the distinction we make between living things like cats and non-living things like rocks is entirely an artifact of the limits of our headset. I'm always interacting with consciousness, always, and I'm always interacting with an equally complicated one"
},
{
"end_time": 7523.336,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7494.872,
"text": " Infinite consciousness. I'm always interacting with that so there's not like stupid consciousnesses No, I'm always interacting with the one infinite consciousness But my my interface because it's an interface dumbs things down. So so when I'm interacting with the cat I'm interacting I am this this one consciousness interacting with itself through a headset and look looking at so so I getting a cat image of myself and or a"
},
{
"end_time": 7543.865,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7523.575,
"text": " You know, bacteria image of myself, whatever it might be. These are all perspectives of myself. They're not, they're just perspectives. They're not the truth, but I'm always interacting with the one infinite consciousness. Now, in the paper that we're about to write on this, we actually have an idea about how to talk about the one."
},
{
"end_time": 7573.882,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7545.009,
"text": " We found a partial order on consciousnesses. So it's a mathematical structure. It's a non-Boolean order on consciousnesses. It's a completely mathematically rigorous thing. And so it turns out it's non-Boolean and there's no ultimate top to the one. So when I talk about the one, typically we think there's some guy at the top or something like that. No, the mathematics of this is far more complicated. It's a completely non-Boolean structure. And so when I talk about the one, I haven't wrapped my head around"
},
{
"end_time": 7593.968,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7574.411,
"text": " Conceptually, what that could possibly be, it's too complicated. Also, to wrap your head around it, you'd have to go all the way up Cantor's Hierarchy and beyond Cantor's Hierarchy. This is a partial order that goes all the way up Cantor's Hierarchy and so forth. When I talk about the one, it's not a trivial thing."
},
{
"end_time": 7617.551,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7594.872,
"text": " The mathematics is complicated and I'm sure this complicated mathematics is trivial compared to the structure of the one. So whatever this one is, it's truly impressive and is looking at itself through cats and rocks and so forth. But I'll just repeat again, the distinction between living and non-living is not principled."
},
{
"end_time": 7635.435,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7617.927,
"text": " There's no deep distinction there and the distinction between conscious and unconscious is not principled. All of them are artifacts of the limitations of our headset and nothing deeper than that. I think we're probably coming back to some agreement again with the distinction between"
},
{
"end_time": 7665.555,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7636.22,
"text": " Living and nonliving, conscious and non-conscious. I'd like to ask Don, I don't know if we've ever run out of time, you know, what you think about the fine-tuning of physics for life. But before I do that, actually, Kurt, would it be all right to say, you know, what's wrong with the multiverse? Would that be permissible? Because, no, I'm sorry, I'm really excited about this, actually, because this has been an argument that's been in the academic journals about probability for decades since 1982. But"
},
{
"end_time": 7695.316,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7666.288,
"text": " In a typical case of academics talking to themselves, nobody knows about it outside of academic philosophy, despite huge interest in fine-tuning and some physicists arguing for the multiverse, some theists arguing for God and so on. So I'm really excited to get it out to a broader audience. So yeah, the basic claim is that the inference from fine-tuning to a multiverse commits the inverse gambler's fallacy."
},
{
"end_time": 7718.422,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7695.555,
"text": " Right so suppose Don and I go to a casino tonight and we walk in and the first thing we go into a small room and we see someone what there's just one guy having this incredible run of luck at roulette it's just winning and winning and winning and you know and I turn to Don and say wow the casino must be full tonight"
},
{
"end_time": 7749.582,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7720.111,
"text": " And Don says, what are you talking about? We've just seen this one guy. And I say, well, if there are tens of thousands of people playing roulette in the casino, then it's not so surprising that someone's going to have an incredible run of luck. And that's just what we've observed, someone having an incredible run of luck. Now, everyone agrees that's a fallacy, right? Our observational evidence is just this one individual having an incredible run of luck. And no matter how many people are playing roulette in other rooms in the casino,"
},
{
"end_time": 7776.817,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7749.582,
"text": " It has no bearing on the likelihood of this one particular person we've observed. It's related to the more familiar gambler's fallacy, you know, you think, oh, I've had a terrible look all night, I'm bound to win big now. So everyone agrees that's a fallacy, but it looks, to my mind, indiscernible to the reasoning of the multiverse theorists, at least if they're arguing from fine tuning. You know, you look around and think, oh my God, the numbers in physics are just right for life."
},
{
"end_time": 7807.227,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7777.227,
"text": " There must be loads of other universes with terrible numbers, right? Well, our observational evidence is just this one universe we've observed, no matter how many other universes there are, has no bearing on the likelihood of this one universe we've observed getting the right numbers. It's just like postulating other people playing casino elsewhere, sorry, other people playing roulette elsewhere in the casino to explain the one individual we've observed. Now, there are all sorts of, I mean, there's the anthropic principle people bring up."
},
{
"end_time": 7829.002,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7808.097,
"text": " There's the scientific case for the multiverse. I'm also excited that even though this particular objection to the multiverse has been discussed for decades in the journals, no one's connected it to the actual scientific discussion based in inflationary cosmology of the multiverse. So that's what I try to do in the book. So I think"
},
{
"end_time": 7855.998,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7829.599,
"text": " Even once you take into account the anthropic principle and the scientific evidence for eternal inflation and so on, I still think the basic problem survives, that it's just fallacious, demonstrably fallacious reasoning. And so we're stuck with cosmic purpose. So what if someone says, well, it's not a fallacy because in that example with observing the person winning over and over,"
},
{
"end_time": 7882.841,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7856.578,
"text": " You could potentially see other people not winning. Whereas in the case of the fine tuning of the universe, a better analogy would be that we're in the office where people come in to get their check for winning the lottery and we keep seeing people there and we're like, Oh, everyone's winning the lottery. Yeah, but you're only able to see the people who are winning the lottery. So that would be the better analogy. Good, good. Yes. So that's, yeah, that's kind of appearing to anthropic principle. Well, two things. I mean, one,"
},
{
"end_time": 7911.425,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7883.473,
"text": " We could just add to the analogy, suppose there's a sniper at the back of the room waiting to blow our brains out as we walk in if the first person isn't winning big. So we create a kind of artificial selection effect. So now it's just like real-world fine-tuning. In that scenario, the only thing we were able to observe is someone winning big, but that still doesn't mean the fallacy goes away."
},
{
"end_time": 7935.828,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7911.425,
"text": " But at a deeper level, I think, and this is what I go into in the book, we know what's going on behind this fallacy. It's rooted in a very important principle in probabilistic reasoning called the requirement of total evidence, which is the principle that you're obliged to always work with the most specific evidence you have. So suppose, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7953.404,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7936.425,
"text": " Don's on trial for murder and the prosecution says to the jury, Don always carries a knife around with him. When the reality of the situation is Don always carries a butter knife around with him. The prosecution has thereby misled the jury."
},
{
"end_time": 7972.176,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7953.899,
"text": " But they haven't lied. They just they've misled them by not giving the most specific information we have, which is not just that he carries a knife, but that he carries specifically a butter knife. So this is a very important, well accepted principle. This is what the multiverse theorist violates, because they they can sue that the evidence of fine tuning is"
},
{
"end_time": 7990.435,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7972.841,
"text": " some universe is fine-tuned, and then that's made more likely by a multiverse. But we have more specific evidence than that, namely that this universe is fine-tuned. Just like in the casino case, our more specific evidence is this person has"
},
{
"end_time": 8019.138,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7991.101,
"text": " played well and we're obliged by this principle to work with that more specific evidence and once we do then a multiverse is not going to explain fine-tuning I mean maybe I could just I've talked a lot already but the case you gave is what Roger White who wrote the classic paper on this in the year 2000 it's what he calls a converse selection effect right the example you gave where we're in the office where if someone plays big"
},
{
"end_time": 8043.046,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8019.753,
"text": " Someone plays well, we're going to observe them, right? So that's like, with the real world selection effect, the real world selection effect is that if we exist, the universe must be fine-tuned. But it's not the other way around. It's not if there's a fine-tuned universe, we're going to be in it. That's the converse selection effect."
},
{
"end_time": 8072.705,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8043.285,
"text": " so white makes that clear with a sort of sci-fi analogy imagine we were once disembodied spirits floating through the multiverse looking for a fine-tuned universe and if it once we find a fine-tuned universe we go into it in that case there'll be a converse selection effect right not only if we exist then the universe is fine-tuned but if there's a fine-tuned universe we're going to exist and be in it right so that's a converse selection effect and that's what's modeled in the very example you gave"
},
{
"end_time": 8099.172,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8073.046,
"text": " If someone plays well, we're going to observe them. But that's not the real world selection effect. The real world selection effect is captured by my sniper example. As you see, that doesn't remove the fallacy. Sorry, that was very long winded, but it's a it's a big and fascinating discussion. My view on the fine tuning is is this of the universe is this. The one consciousness is fundamental, this infinite"
},
{
"end_time": 8128.643,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8100.52,
"text": " Unbounded consciousness that you and I are is fundamental. And space time is just a headset, one of countless headsets that it's using to look at itself. So when it projects itself, it is life itself. And when it projects itself, the projection, sometimes parts of the projection make clear what is living and sometimes it doesn't, right? Sometimes things look like rocks. Sometimes things look like living organisms."
},
{
"end_time": 8154.462,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8129.104,
"text": " And there's an arrow of time that's part of the projection. There is no time in the one infinite consciousness. So all of this, the notion of time, the notion of a big bang, an arrow of time, an evolution from less complicated to more complicated things, all of that is an artifact of the headset. The fundamental reality is this infinite life, infinite consciousness, looking at itself through a headset."
},
{
"end_time": 8180.196,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8154.77,
"text": " And so the reason why there's the appearance of fine-tuning is because the universe is nothing but a headset of an already existing living thing that's looking at itself through the headset. So a consistent projection will be consistent with life. Can I just interrupt? Sorry, the discussions just get interesting, but my little six-year-old daughter has just come in and it's quarter to one and I think I might have to"
},
{
"end_time": 8210.384,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8180.452,
"text": " That's no problem. It was a pleasure and I hope to host you both on again either together or individually. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you both. Always a pleasure Kurt and Phil. Thanks Don. So always so stimulating and thanks Kurt for probing questions and for hosting us. The links to what everyone has mentioned, whether it's a debate between Philip and Don on Philips channel,"
},
{
"end_time": 8239.445,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8210.794,
"text": " or whether it's the books of Don or of Philip or articles will be in the description. All right. Thank you all for coming. I better dash guys. Thanks so much. Thank you. Take care. Take care. Bye bye. All right. If you enjoyed that episode, then I recommend watching the Donald Hoffman episode with Yoshi Bach. That was another Theolocution. There's another one with Donald Hoffman and John Vervecky. There's a solo Donald Hoffman. That is where we go into the technical details of his fusions paper and the interface theory of perception."
},
{
"end_time": 8254.497,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8239.445,
"text": " As well as Philip Goff will likely be coming on one on one and most likely there will be a part two to this with Donald Hoffman and Philip Goff. So again, if you have any questions, leave them in the format query in the comments section below so that I can pose it to them, citing your name."
},
{
"end_time": 8279.838,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8254.497,
"text": " If you'd like to see these podcasts happen with more frequency and even greater depth, then consider donating at patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. We've been having a significant problem getting sponsors for this channel with monetizing, and that's a large part, a large, large part of any creator on YouTube. It may seem like this channel's this huge success, but it's decidedly not in the financial domain. And so your donations help"
},
{
"end_time": 8299.531,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8279.838,
"text": " Tremendously especially if you do it over paypal where the creator takes more of a cut and even more especially if you do it monthly over paypal but again whatever you like whatever you're comfortable with my wife and i both thank you the editor thanks you and anyhow welcome to the new year there are several large plans for theories of everything can't wait to announce them thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 8324.462,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8300.435,
"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 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."
},
{
"end_time": 8342.466,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8324.462,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 8367.619,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8342.466,
"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? iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use."
},
{
"end_time": 8392.534,
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"start_time": 8367.619,
"text": " If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash curtjymungle 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."
}
]
}No transcript available.