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Matt O'Dowd: Free Will, Consciousness, Spacetime, and Dualism
December 23, 2022
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That whenever you grant perspective, you grant power. We've buried our heads so deeply, you know, we're sort of all
We're all playing our own little mini games. We like to organize the world into these simplified little systems of elements and simple rules and we sort of organize these mini games of life and then we try to win them.
Today's episode is about free will. Is there even a theory of everything and the physics of idealism? That is the notion that consciousness is fundamental and only. We also touch on interpretations of quantum mechanics where the observer has a privileged role in creating the universe.
Matt O'Dowd is a science communicator and an astrophysicist, a professor at the City University of New York, involved in gravitationally lensed quasars, which touch on the crisis in cosmology, which is something that we'll speak about in this episode, and for sure in the next one at length. Matt is also the host of PBS Space Time, which has over 2 million subscribers, I think it's 2.8, and they're the largest physics and space show on YouTube.
And in case you're wondering who I am, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I have a background in mathematical physics, and this channel is Theories of Everything, which is dedicated to the theoretical physics endeavor of understanding gravity and quantum field theory, but as well as we investigate consciousness and the fundamental role it may have.
If you're watching this, you'll see that I'm in a new location and all of this, I can't wait to tell you more about in a Day in the Life episode. We're filming a Day in the Life and you can expect to see that in the next couple of weeks. You can also expect many changes behind here, many different angles. We're still setting it up. You can also expect three sponsors in today's episode. That is Rocket Money, Henson and ExpressVPN. Again, that'll be around the 20 minute mark and then another one at the 40 minute mark.
Thank you so much and enjoy this episode with Matt O'Dowd. Matt.
Matt, Matt, Matt. I've been watching you for years, so this is a treat. This is an honor, man. It's good to speak with you. Well, it's my pleasure. I've been watching you for months. Right, right. I really enjoyed your stuff, dude. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so I want to talk about PBS Space Time, which is what I know you from, but that's not all you do. It's not your full-time job.
Firstly, let's get people who are unacquainted with you acquainted. So what is PBS Space Time and how did you get involved? OK, so PBS Space Time, it's a YouTube show, a PBS YouTube show, PBS Digital Studios. We do near weekly episodes a few times a month and we explore
A huge range of topics by now because we've been doing it for seven years and we've gone pretty deep in, you know, topics of space and time. And, you know, so physics, astronomy, astrophysics, but this encompasses a huge amount of stuff, of course. Physics is enormous, but we tend to explore topics in
Right, which makes it much different than the content that at least used to be out on YouTube and television.
which was much more watered down and mystifying, playing up the aspect of the wave and the particle and pretty much just staying at that and saying there could be extra dimensions without showing many, if any equations. Yeah, I mean, and we actually don't show too many equations, but we do show some. I think our philosophy is more that, you know, people have been consuming science media for many decades now, you know, since
Since before Carl Sagan's Cosmos and it's like people have been in school for five decades and we decided that some wanted to graduate to stretch an analogy. But we know we have the philosophy that our audience is smart. People are smart. And and you know, the only difference is that they didn't make poor decisions about staying in
university for way too long and so they have the same level of specialized knowledge but they do have good brains and perhaps more to the point they have fantastic bullshit detectors and so they're very highly tuned to when they're being talked down to. So that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to bring maybe a peek behind the curtain of
We talked before this and we realized we have several commonalities. So one is we both research physics.
The next is we distill that physics or that research down to something that's consumable while correctly portraying the phenomenon. So that is not being patronizing about it. And then number three is filmmaking. So why don't you tell the audience and myself about this film and why it's important to you? Sure. OK, so so, you know, to
In answering this question, to also partially answer your last question, which I missed, I didn't start out planning to make film. When I was a kid, I wondered a lot of weird stuff. Where did the world come from? What happened before the universe? I still have the same questions I had as a kid. This documentary will lay out our best modern understanding of what the universe really is. I started out
As an astrophysics researcher, I'm a professor at City University of New York. You know, I teach physics. I do physics. I have a research program in astrophysics. But around seven years ago, I well, I have a friend, so my friend,
Gabe Perez, who's a New York cosmologist at the time, was doing this little show with PBS called Space Time. He did several really out of this world episodes, but had decided to move on. And so there was a bit of a scramble in the New York astrophysics community because we'd all grown up on Carl Sagan. And, you know, we all had this little
desire to um not fill your shoes but we saw the importance of the mission you know there's no point learning how big the universe is if you don't tell anyone about it and so so it tends to be you know a a pattern among uh particularly among people in astro that we like to talk about this stuff so so i jumped in um and for
Whatever ridiculous reasons I ended up stepping into Gabe's shoes and that was seven years. And what do you mean that there's no point in learning about it if you don't talk about it? Oh, so I guess I mean that, you know, a bunch of ivory tower academics knowing how amazing the universe is and, you know, talking to each other about it, but never
Never, let's say, leveling up humanity's collective reality in that way. It is a more beautiful thing. It's objectively more beautiful if more people have a more expansive understanding of the crazy universe that they live in. Particularly in astrophysics, we don't produce a lot of industry value.
know, we don't make a lot of the new useful nanomaterials, for example. And so the primary use of the field is perspective. Okay, so the story of my life. So I was no. So we really dug into space time. And it was successful beyond what we imagined could be
could be possible. And really what had happened is that we'd, you know, maybe let's say we can credit ourselves with a little intuition here, but I think there was also some luck that we tapped into a very hungry market for for much more authentic science journalism. And so, you know, we I mean, you know, you need to go and look at our
our video library on YouTube and there's a lot. Yeah, there will be an overlay right now for the audience and I highly recommend you subscribe to PBS FaceTime. But it also, over that time, took the little spark of passion that I had for science communication, which had previously been expressed, you know, doing public talks and
You know, doing observing nights for the public and things like that. And I realized that, wow, there's really something big that can be done. And so. So this film, it's actually not a PBS production, it's a production with my PBS team, as well as
My partner, Bahar Gulipur, who is a science journalist specializing in neuroscience and AI. And so this is this is this is our collective mission, but in a way it's the culmination of our our efforts. And so. I mean, I can tell you a little bit about the film. Yeah, I would love to hear.
So, uh, so the idea, I mean, the film is called inventing reality and the idea is, you know, as I said, it's a synthesis, um, not just of what we've learned, but, um, it's an attempt to sort of put it together, step back, take stock and look for paths forward. So, so maybe a simple way to say it is that it's a movie about humanity's search for what is fundamental.
and of course there are many ways that we seek truth but the focus of this film is the pursuit of the most fundamental levels of reality through particularly physics but also science in general and okay so you know it's about the question what is reality but it's also about the meta questions
So digging into the potential answers to the question itself, but also to question that question. So physics is insanely successful, most unbelievably successful in its predictive power about nature. But there's a sense, and I think a growing sense, that physics has stalled in, I think, what some once thought was this final sprint to a theory of everything.
to neatly tie up reality in a bow, have this final equation that described everything. And so now many physicists are asking, how do we approach the question differently? And not just physicists, a lot of the thinking is reaching across into other disciplines, drawing on other disciplines. OK, can you give an example of that? Because you said you'd like to investigate fundamental reality.
from not just a physics perspective, but a science perspective in general, what would that look like if not physics? Great question. So I guess there's many ways to answer that, but let's just use one. So quantum mechanics is weird beyond comprehension in a very literal sense. We still don't get it.
Um, but it's clear that there is a, an uncanny and fundamental link between the observer and the nature of the observed, the so-called measurement problem. And this is a, an unresolved, uh, um, conundrum, um, that was sort of swept under the rug, you know, back in the 1920s, uh, when we realized that there was some kind of
In between observations there is a level of indeterminacy to nature in which nature appears to occupy multiple states at once or no state and is only defined on observation and all of this beautiful weird stuff and there was a lot of debate about
you know, basically swing between a type of idealism and a type of realism, questioning the reality of reality and how fundamental the observer is. But this was pushed aside because quantum mechanics was incredibly successful at predicting the behavior of the universe. And so, you know, the old adage shut up and calculate really drove the philosophy of how quantum mechanics evolved
in that we just used it. We used it to make amazing predictions. I think it's reasonable to say we used quantum mechanics to build our modern world, you know, transition. And the shut up and calculate mindset is what? It is. Yeah, yeah. So for quite some time, it was considered career suicide for an academic to ask questions like, but what does quantum mechanics actually mean?
What is happening between measurements? For example, what we call the interpretation of quantum mechanics. So the equations work, the Schrodinger equation or the equations of quantum field theory, they work incredibly well. But asking the question, what do these equations mean? What is the physical story that they imply about the world?
I'm not sure if you've seen the interview on Toe with Tim Maudlin. I have not seen that one yet. Okay. Well, he would say, so he's a philosopher of physics and he would say quantum theory, they don't teach you quantum theory. They teach you a method of calculating and a true theory should give you an account of ontology. So a true theory is a combination of math and metaphysics, or at least like suppose that account of the metaphysics. And he said that's what most interested him in physics. And they would talk about that on the first lecture.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
For all of physics, even though physics wasn't coined until fairly recently, but since even Newton wanted to know what the heck is going on, it's one of the reasons why. And Newton acknowledged that he didn't know what his so-called theory of gravity meant. He acknowledged that it was not ontological in any way, it was descriptive. And in the same way as, you know, his
Newton's law of universal gravitation is descriptive of gravity. It doesn't explain why gravity happens. Quantum mechanics is descriptive of the behavior of subatomic particles, but doesn't explain the why. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can grab last second movie tickets in 5D Premium Ultra with popcorn, extra large popcorn,
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I've almost never had a problem with superposition because I see the math as a description. And then it's only an issue if you try and make some correspondence between that math and say, what the heck is going on? So some people would say, yeah, but it's not as simple as if you have two goats. So two plus two goats equals four goats. That I understand. However, even there, two plus two equals four, but two plus two also equals five plus minus one.
just as easily. And so you can say, well, what the heck is five goats and then a minus one goat? Does it live in a superposition of five and a minus one? So unless you have a problem with even ordinary addition, then to me, I don't have a problem with superposition. I just see it as, okay, this is a description. So what do you think about that? What do you make of that? I think it's a great example. And it conveniently gets to the point that I was rounding on anyway, which is that we have
an intuition about mathematics, we have our own inbuilt math engine in our brains. And it's, you know, we know that that our intuitions about math do not encompass all math. For example, we don't have an intuition about imaginary numbers. But imaginary numbers are perfectly serviceable mathematical tools. And in a sense, they're real in that they're important for understanding quantum mechanics. But the
The worlds that we describe, the subjective world, which is a model, and our scientific models are so heavily influenced by what we intuitively think is possible, but we shouldn't necessarily trust what we think is possible based on
You know, the math and physics engine that evolution gave us. And so this is one interdisciplinary area. We need to maybe talk to neuroscientists and, you know, people who are to cognitive scientists and even people who are working in AI to understand what some of the biases might be in how a neural network like our own constructs its reality.
So that's what you meant when you said there is physics to understand fundamental reality. But if we also want to understand what do we mean when we say fundamental reality, we can use tools of neuroscience to understand our own biases. Well, that's so that that aspect of understanding ourselves is important. What are our biases? Also, if we want to approach things like the measurement problem, I think, you know, maybe
understanding how we construct our subjective reality won't get us there, maybe it'll be helpful, but I feel like there are areas in, for example, well, statistics, probability theory, I mean, you know, these things physicists are pretty quick to draw on, for example, various Bayesian interpretations of quantum mechanics, but
I also think that we can draw on what you might broadly call systems theory, so how complex systems emerge to understand the different hierarchies of complexity. There are so many rabbit holes that I'm avoiding leaping right down. I'm happy to go down them one by one, but they're deep.
Do you find that you're having a terrible amount of fun when you're delving into the more metaphysical side of physics and interpretations, so this film in particular, than you are with your own research? It's funny, yeah. So, you know, I pursued astrophysics because it mostly just seemed like the most fun asking big questions about really big things.
but over time I've become more and more interested in the fundamental and making space-time has been a big part of that also and so I have no regrets. The universe is awesome and it's really fun to solve big problems about the universe and also the
the skills I picked up doing that sort of work, I'm able to bring to bear on some of these other questions. That said, you know, I'm not a quantum theorist. I'm not even what, you know, most people would call a theoretical physicist, which means there are there are some skills that I'm going to have to work harder on. And so this movie is about, you know, in a way, it's a personal journey.
in that I really want to take stock of the field and the fields and to sort of get a sense of where humanity stands in this question and what the paths forward could be. And yeah, so there's that personal level, but I also feel like it's
A contribution, I think, at some level. It's, you know, we're by no means the only people talking about this stuff. But I think there's a rising collective interest in this big picture, asking questions like, you know, what are we doing anyway? What is the goal of being human and asking questions about the world and
You know, I think anything we can do to sort of bring that collective curiosity together is useful, especially these days. Help me understand how one goes from physics or even science, which is to be a description again. How does one go from that description to an ought? Well, I think the easy answer is just that whenever you grant perspective, you grant power.
Um, you know, it's the same reason we do science communication on YouTube. Um, and, uh, you know, I feel like it's no secret that we are a deeply factionalized species right now. Fractionalized. Yeah. Yeah. Factionalized. Factionalized. Yeah. Um, and, and, you know, we've, we've,
We've buried our head so deeply. We're all playing our own little mini games. We're overwhelmed by the buzz of all media, by just the stuff going on in the world right now. We like to organize the world into these simplified little systems of elements and simple rules.
organize these mini games of life and then we try to win them, like whether we're winning games of political dynamics at work or trying to just stay solvent and collect enough retirement or the game of empowering your chosen in-group. So we diminish the world so that we can handle it. And I guess the thing that
science can do is that it can show us, it can show us bigger landscapes, right? We are only able, so if you can imagine the infinite landscape of possible ways to live your life, possible things you can do, ways to be, we tend to blinker up and define these manageable sub landscapes and we navigate those little spaces.
Um, but of course we inevitably come to believe that our chosen metal sliver is the world as it really is. Okay. We, we, we mistake the sub game for the game and our compactification of reality in our minds becomes reality. And, um, and I am as guilty as most in that, um, but really
I'd say any type of education, Braun's perspective, and shows us grander games, and that there are enormous landscapes of possibility, you know, outside whatever rut we happen to be in. And so, so, you know, exposing people to new information is usually always good. Okay, there are exceptions, but science, I find particularly important and powerful, because it's
In a way, it's general. So it's not science isn't about the subject matter. It's about the methodologies. Okay, the methodologies, if you like, of truth finding. And those methods can be applied, at least at some level to any question or any field in ways that improve our ability to explore the landscapes of that aspect of reality. And so so
I mean, granting people the access to some of the just the things we've learned in science that are incredibly powerful. The methodologies, the ways of thinking, even just the habits of thought are just super powerful tools for improving how people even live their lives because these ideas become embedded, become subliminal.
And I guess maybe the way I think about science is that it's like a formalization of how our brains work naturally. If you think of our minds as tools for navigating the world, and that's the physical world, the social world, and worlds of arbitrary abstraction. And so cognition, which is the process of asking questions,
seeking evidence, formulating models and hypotheses and making choices, which sounds more like science. And, you know, in our brains, that's all happening constantly and mostly subconsciously. And also, I guess an important thing is that we don't just do this individually. So we age in this sort of collective cognition.
You know, through discussion with each other in an explicit way, but also you could argue that we are cogitating as a society through art and religion and politics. And, you know, so we can think about culture, I guess, as this collective cognition. And even a. You know, I like to think of culture as a search algorithm for truth.
Okay, so if part of culture is a world model, okay, and every culture has its consensus reality, then then, you know, that that little kind of local minimum in the possibility space of what the world is and how to live is something that that culture found. And so cultural evolution, I guess, sort of navigates the landscape of possible ways to
think about the world and about ourselves and so if science then in some way systematizes cognition and can make us better at it individually or collectively then we get better at mapping the landscape. Here's the thought that occurs to me. If science is
the epitome of making systematic what is our cognition and what we're trying to do or what you're up to with this documentary is not only investigating reality but trying to avoid some of our own cognitive biases but I imagine if science is modeling the way that our brains work but our brains have a bias then how does one scientifically not have this bias built in? It's super hard and science is no guarantee against this but I guess the
The one to me, one of the most incredible things about the scientific revolution is that it gave us at least the potential for meta awareness of the fact that there even is a possibility landscape, you know, versus a singular ground truth.
um and the potential for the awareness that there's a distinction between reality versus a model of reality philosophy also okay so so i think you know i'm i'm maybe mixing together the the the um breakthroughs of of enlightenment and um and and you know so so these
fields of rational thought allow us to, at least in principle, know that biases are possible. This might be inaccurate. So you know, I talk about culture as a search algorithm for truth. So I feel like science allows us to upgrade that search algorithm so that we're
less likely to get stuck in a local minimum because we introduce exploration into the explicit ability to explore to our little search algorithm robot, whatever it is, a little valley crawler. And it also allows us to explicitly incorporate uncertainties into whatever the loss function of that search algorithm. So it's like
Another thought that occurs to me is this is not a viewpoint that I have necessarily, but it's one that I'm sure that someone or some people who watch may have thought.
We have a cultural model of reality. Every culture has this. When we have science, we have something that we believe is a cultural. So it's non-cultural. It's objective. However, they would say, yeah, but that's a Eurocentric way of thinking because we're of course, we're going to say our culture is the one that has the objective method. So what would your response be to that? I really value this being brought to
attention, because it's true that that, you know, when we talk about science, it's not one thing. Okay, so there sort of is a Eurocentric culture that comes onto the label of science. But that's not all. That's not all that science is. And so science is also a
revolution in our ability to cogitate on many levels and that is bundled with other cultural factors in some ways, for instance, but it also has its independent existence and the value of the kind of
The raw upgrade that science gave us is that in principle, and I've been careful to say in principle, in principle, it allows us the type of meta awareness that can lead us to those sorts of biases. And, you know, I don't want to say that the Western scientific method is how brains work. It's absolutely not as simple as
But there are correlations that are powerful and that I think are trans-cultural and that there are wisdom traditions that talk about these things in very different ways that we should spend more time trying to translate between. Yeah, that's my
Well, firstly, one is to say that science is not all in the sense that, well, this is not only my point of view. Hilary Putnam said something similar and same with Feynman. He had this famous quotation about logic is not all that one needs hearts. And secondly, that to call science Eurocentric is to not recognize the contributions from many other cultures.
Yeah, I was echoing your language a little bit there. The fact is that a bunch of old white European men dominated science for quite some time and there's still that influence in some of the institutions of science.
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Just make sure to add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Curious if you think a theory of everything exists. Firstly, secondly, if we could know it. So that presumes that there exists one. Yeah, well, so, uh, so,
It depends what you mean by a theory of everything, I guess. Is there a single equation that drives all of reality and that knowing the equation would be enough to make a new universe if you could implement it? I really don't know the answer. It's possible. I am
less and less inclined to get behind the idea that there is a single most fundamental description that can be wrapped up in a way that a human brain can comprehend. I was talking about the idea that we necessarily
only see a subset of reality and only model a set of reality in the world that we walk through, that we inhabit our own subjective experience and the network of relationships that we think govern the world, both in our own mental constructions of the world, but also in each separate academic field. These are slices
and we see that that these regularities emerge from whatever's really there and in in very particular ways we can capture those regularities and turn them into an academic field or whatever and so what physics has said is that all right this is what we've been doing for all of the history of you know human inquiry is trying to
find these different ways to slice reality into different networks of relationships. We think that all of it emerges from a single most fundamental rule, essentially. And that might be true, but I don't think it's clear that it's true. I think
You know, that might be one of the biases we've trained ourselves to believe that that might be the case. But, you know, there's even some emerging ideas that really put to question the notion of what fundamental really means. For instance? So, you know, the
The reductionist philosophy that we can first physically seek smaller and smaller elements of reality, then seek deeper levels of causation until we find the bottom. We know it should be ultimately the most simple, ideally. So
There are cases where it's not true that the most simplest description of reality is the most fundamental. OK, so if you want to model, say, fluid flow, please use Bernoulli's equation rather than quantum field theory, even though in principle you could use the latter. The latter is in principle more fundamental.
So these regularities arise and prove simpler than their substrates, the rules governing the substrates if you wanted to do a particular calculation in them. So as you go up in size scale or in other scales also, complexity scale, you see things simplify and then un-simplify. But in a way,
That means that these, what we would call these layers of, say, emergent complexity are not in any way predictable from the lower layers. So Stephen Wolfram talks about the idea of computational irreducibility. OK, there are things about the universe that you can't predict without literally running the universe, and that includes some of the
incredibly beautiful and regular patterns that emerge that, you know, for example, fluid flow or life that you could never predict by looking at a quark. So, so that's the first point that that the I guess what what was this
You might call this Newtonian paradigm where once you know how all the little billiard balls are moving around, you can predict the universe is only sort of true, but in a meaningful way, it's not true. There are examples like, all right, so let's dig down to
something closer to the fundamental. Let's get into physics, highly speculative physics. So like take the ADS-CFT correspondence, right? So the holographic principle. So this is the idea that, well, let me give you the sort of popular media view. And the idea is that our universe could be a hologram
that's projected inwards from something happening on the 2D surface of the boundary and therefore our universe is an illusion and it's that surface out there that's real and it's more complicated than that obviously the number of dimensions and the curvature of the interior but anyway the idea is usually presented is that
that we are a hologram and whatever is real is out there. That's absolutely not what ADS-CFT is saying. What it's saying is that in what we call the bulk, which is the volume, which in this case would be our universe, it's explained by a gravitational theory, general relativity. And the surface is explained by a field theory, a conformal field theory. And it's not that
one causes the other. What ADS-CFT is saying is that they are dual to each other, so they are called a duality. They're equivalent descriptions of exactly the same thing, and neither is more fundamental than the other. That to me is part of the problem of the common purveyors of science trying to mystify the public by saying that the universe is unreal and is holographic.
Well, you just said there's a duality. What makes you think that the boundary is more fundamental than the bulk space? You can't say that one is more than the other if there's a dual. Exactly right. And sometimes one does look more real. For example, I mean, ADS-CFT is a hugely useful paradigm, even if it may not apply directly to our universe, because it's much easier to do computations
In one of these representations than the other in some cases, and in other cases, the other representation is the one that's tractable. Okay, so in the the strong interaction limit of one where you can't do
calculations. You can't use, for example, perturbation theory to do calculations like inside a black hole. On the other side, in this case, if you have a black hole in the bulk in our universe, then its representation on its surface is some weakly interacting structure that you can do computations with. OK, and so neither is more fundamental. Just sometimes one is useful and sometimes the other is useful.
And this isn't this isn't a fringe example. It's just a cool example, but these dualities, which is not the sense of duality or dualism in philosophy at all. It means that the two seemingly different descriptions
like wildly, even contradictorily, different descriptions represent the same thing. Two different stories describe the same thing. So string theory is rife with dualities, like at the limit of the energy scales, we see elementary strings and emergent strings sort of morph into each other. But also in more accepted physics, like in quantum mechanics, the idea of complementarity is a duality.
so you know usually encapsulated or summarized in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle but the idea that we can represent all of matter as either a linear combination of quantum fields in position space or their vibrational modes in position space okay and that's a representation of the universe or equally equivalently we can do the same thing in momentum space and
They're very different stories about what the world looks like, but they're equivalent. And no one would argue that one is more fundamental than the other. Well, there are some people who, again, on the more esoteric end, who like to emphasize that it's all vibrations and it's all waves. Yeah, you can Fourier transform. So you can make it discrete again. Yeah, exactly. And then let's not even get started on
S matrix or the amplitude hedron which are ways to describe the interactions between particles which don't even require space and time and waves and fall out in which you can summarize pages and pages of calculation with a few lines of calculation which implies that these things should be more fundamental.
But I don't think that's clear. I think that their stories about what's happening that have incredible mathematical utility, what they are as a regularity that we've discovered. You sound like Bernardo Castro. Have you watched much of his talks or his podcasts? I think I watched your interview with Bernardo, actually. I think I agree with some of what he says and I disagree with some others.
What are the agreements that you think are seen as controversial? So I like his characterization of minds as dissociative boundaries or agents in dissociative boundaries. So my understanding is that Bernardo rates consciousness as the most fundamental
And so you talk about the universe as this thing made of consciousness, and then consciousness arises in the universe. And so the idea of dissociative boundaries is that if you had your own internal dissociative boundaries, you could maybe have something like a split personality, or you wouldn't remember things that you'd done and things like that.
It's a nice characterization. What I don't buy is that baseline statement that the fundamental element of the universe is consciousness. I don't see why it's needed and I don't think there's a good justification. Yeah, we could go further.
You want to go further as to your disagreements or your agreements or something else? Okay, well, just in the context of what we're discussing. So I think, you know, we're talking about these dual descriptions of the world. So, you know, I would say that our minds are a
like a dynamical causal system. Okay, so something describable with a set of dynamics, dynamics of, you know, thoughts basically, okay, that that that cause and influence each other and you could and you know, the the field of psychology, you could imagine as
An extremely early version of some field where you came up with the the internal dynamics of the mind. OK, but but still. So so if you describe the mind as this dynamical system where there's. Like genuine causal power. In within that system defined within that system, then
then the the dual to that would be a you know our brains where you have this dynamics of neurons and action potentials okay and so um so i so you know my my uh feeling on the matter is that that well i can't believe i'm saying what i think consciousness is but because i'm i'm horribly unqualified but but i but
Who's qualified? Yeah, right. Anyone with it. So let's go. So either feeling that, and plenty of people have said this before, that consciousness is what a type of information flow feels like. More particularly, I think it's what a type of
data structure feels like when it tells itself a story about itself. Yeah. Do you see a circularity there? Because we're defining consciousness in terms of so-and-so-and-so feels like and then the question is, well, what does it feel? Right, right. So the hard problem, let's
Let's solve it. I have someone, by the way, who's premiering in two hours from now, named Terence Deacon. He believes he's solved the heart problem. Several people believe they've solved the heart problem, and usually it means that they have a completely different ontology. I'm looking forward to watching it. You know Terence Deacon? Have you heard of him? His name's familiar, but no. He's a linguist. Well, he's a neuroanthropologist, and he studied under Chomsky.
He says he disagrees with Chomsky about everything except politics. He's extremely, extremely bright and has an extreme, what I call a Weltanschaung. It's an all-encompassing worldview such that it's a framework through which you interpret the world. So it's more than simply a worldview. It's this philosophy that you have such that you can pose virtually any question to someone. Someone who has a Weltanschaung is someone like,
That can be a useful thing, but don't you think in a way it is being stuck in part of the landscape? Maybe a very useful part of the landscape. So right, you mentioned it's extremely useful. Yes. So when you don't have one, at least for myself,
It's a destabilizing place to be. You're in constant, you're tentative, you're rudderless. But you're also not kidding yourself. Well, I don't know. I don't know because then that depends on, so does our model of reality create reality? So it doesn't mean that if you have a model, it just is. So there's something called phenomenology. So my thought is that I think it's clear that
At some level, information that is undergoing a certain dynamics itself, it feels like something. And I think it is maybe enough for that data structure to inspect itself, keep a story of itself,
you know, as it, as it computes its way to its next state and its next state and at neck and its next state, it, it has, it has this self monitoring capability, uh, and, and ends up telling itself that it's conscious. Okay. Because it, it, it inspects its own inspection of itself, uh, at infinite. Um, and so, so if, um,
If information can be conscious in some way and the universe is in at least some sense informational, it can be thought to encode information. Any particle encodes some type of information, even if it's only about its own existence, then you can imagine this spectrum of consciousness. And so Bernardo's sort of
The version of panpsychism is one in which he says that the consciousness is the most fundamental element, not the material. I think you can be a panpsychist and not say that. Back to our discussion of dualities,
You can have two completely different stories about the world and completely different mathematical frameworks for describing its dynamics, but they are ultimately describing the same thing. And I think that's the case with consciousness. I think you can take, for example, a conscious human mind, which
We can't argue has it has consciousness and you start taking things away. You scale down its ability to tell stories about itself, to self-inspect. OK, you can, for example, go on a meditation retreat and learn to be purely in the moment and only aware. And you can learn to suppress all of the chatter, all of the internal dialogue. You can suppress all cognition
you know, essentially periods to a point where you are only perceiving. Okay. So you, you still have a qualia, but you're not telling yourself a story about that, about that. You're just, you're essentially just being the data structure that your brain has assembled about the outside world without, without analyzing it. Okay. So, you know, this,
It's clear that our subjective worlds are informational. All of this is decoded. Is there anything special about that information structure that suggests the output of your visual cortex, et cetera, et cetera, that presents you this image of the visual world? Is that data structure conscious?
or that data structure plus your attention module. So you can really pair things down so that you only have the minimum amount that you can possibly have and still be a person and it seems that that is still conscious. So what's the difference then to the data structure that represents your
the subjective world that your brain assembled and a data structure that contains similar information that's not in a person. Well, the difference is that it's not constantly telling itself a story about what it sees and it has no memory. Imagine, for example, that the entire universe was conscious and was aware of itself. It told, oh, that was a star that exploded. I just made a galaxy
But then you take away that story and it just is the data structure of all this stuff. What will be the difference between it just being matter, unconscious matter and this completely memoryless, conscious thing? And my argument is that there's no difference. And the thing that has no memory or capacity to self-inspect
isn't really conscious, but that at least gives you a way to have a spectrum of consciousness. Like as soon as something starts to have both a model of the world and can tell itself a story about its model of the world, then it can start telling itself it's conscious. And by the way, that's not an illusion. The whole idea that consciousness is an illusion, I think, is as bad a fallacy to saying that the
you know, the holographic principle bulk is an illusion and the boundary is not. In that case where the universe is conscious and it's not conscious of anything, you're saying that it's as if there's two states of consciousness, one that's about something and then one that is just conscious, pure consciousness, and that's something that you can access when you're in meditation? Well, I feel like, you know, consciousness, I think,
I think it's a poorly defined concept. It really emerges when we get to start telling ourselves that we have it. We can observe our own consciousness because we literally are part of the data structure that this consciousness is. It's not like we're
a separate, you know, homonculus observing the the data structure that our brains synthesize. We are that data structure. OK, we that literally is what we are. And inside that data structure, there's a model of ourselves. OK, which we can also inspect. And so I think consciousness is just it is in this sense an emergent phenomenon.
But there's no very hard line, I think, for when it emerges. I started all this saying I'm no expert and then gave you super long treaties as though I know anything. But this is the picture that feels the least contradictory to me. So then in this view, is there such a thing as free will?
In this view, yes. Correct my misunderstanding. The way that I understand it is that there are some atoms moving around and occasionally that is something we call information processing. That information processing is much like there's a lamp right here that is casting onto the wall. That wall is now the feeling of consciousness. That is the effect and something is happening here. Now that wall doesn't cause anything with this light. The light will move around.
Right now it's stationary, but the light can change colors, it can get brighter, it can get smashed on the ground, and that wall would change. But I wouldn't say that that wall has any causal influence on that. So that's what I mean when I say that it sounds like there is no free will in what has just been outlined. So please correct my misunderstanding. Okay, so let's try to talk about free will. So first of all,
So Baha, my partner, she's a science journalist and has written a lot about these topics. I encourage you to check out her article in the Atlantic, which debunks some nonsense on the topic. But she always reminds me to think about these things in the context of their historical development.
So pre-enlightenment, there was this idea that free will and meaning and mind were inextricably attached to notions like God and the immortal soul. OK, so when when those ideas started to be questioned was the same time that the materialist paradigm arose. So the Newtonian worldview of, you know,
Atoms bouncing around in the void, perfectly predictable clockwork. So at the same time that we discarded or started to discard the spiritual and in that gap we inserted this sort of very first and perhaps naive mechanistic determinism
notions like free will which were conjoined with God and the soul got thrown out with the bathwater and were replaced by the idea that these things are epiphenomena of a call mechanistic universe. So that's one gripe. What it is, it's a gripe with the
What I think is an oversimplification of the approach to thinking about free will, but all other things related to the mind also. So let me explain why my view doesn't suggest that free will is an illusion. And so what does it mean? Free will means that your choices are your own.
They're not forced on you by something else. And for any choice you make, you could have chosen otherwise. And the standard argument is that your choices are not yours because they're determined by the particles that you're made of. You couldn't have chosen otherwise. So this is the argument that you hear. I won't mention any names.
So you couldn't have chosen otherwise because the whatever the exact position and velocity of all of your subatomic particles set and had to evolve according to the laws of physics, or that, you know, if that, you know, if those particles have some fundamental randomness, then the randomness is still not free will. Okay, so that's the argument. And
First of all, let me say that that, you know, that picture of physics is, you know, it's right in the sense. OK, so I. I believe that that. Subatomic particles evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, et cetera, and the subatomic particles have no idea that they're in a brain or that they're part of a choice or they represent a data structure that's part of that data structure feels as part of a choice.
But the problem with this reductionist argument is that it's messing up its definitions, and in particular its definitions of causality. So if we think about the world as having these kind of layers of complexity, okay, you have
physics driving the atoms and chemistry driving the molecules and biology driving the cells then you could you could say something like so if you want to talk about causality here in terms of the hierarchies of of emergence then you could say that that quarks and electrons cause atoms atoms cause molecules cause cells cells cause apples and brains and brains cause minds right but this is
a type of causation and it's like this cross hierarchical causation. But I would argue that there's a real fundamental difference between that type of causation to what you might call an intra hierarchical causation that defines the dynamics within a given layer. Can you give me an example? All right. So you can say that there's this causal power whereby
a cell is or a neuron is caused by the molecules that it's formed of. It is an epiphenomenon of those molecules, which in turn are epiphenomena of their atoms, etc. But it's also entirely meaningful to say that an action potential in a neuron causes a downstream neuron to fire.
Right. So that's, that's a reasonable statement. Okay. And you're on fires, one that's attached to fires and you can, you can, and it makes total sense. And in a real sense, it's true to say that the first neuron caused the firing of the second. It's less useful to say that like the wiggle of a quantum string on the Planck scale caused a downstream neuron to fire, even if the
even if the quantum string is the, let's call it the hierarchical cause of one of the electrons in the first action potential. That's like a roundabout and relatively inane approach to talking about causation. So there's this kind of bottom up causation in which different levels in the scale of physical scale or complexity scale are
generated by the lower layers, but there's a different type of causation within the layer. And within each of these hierarchical layers, you have a dynamics that is, in a sense, independent of the layer below that generated it. So you can
I mentioned Bernoulli's equation, fluid flow. So you have this whole field of hydrodynamics, which is beautiful. And in a sense, it's causally closed, like you can predict anything about the behavior of fluids using these rules. And it does matter what the properties of the particles in that layer are. And those properties of those particles
are generated by the layer below, but once you know the properties of those particles, you don't care about the detailed physics of the level below. You are in that layer and the rules of that layer are, in a sense, closed and independent. So brains have a dynamics of neural activity. It's a physical system. They behave
like some type of neural network, we can even simulate it. Okay, current neural networks miss an awful lot, but in principle, we'd be able to run the dynamics of the brain with a different substrate. We can run them, we could run, we one day probably will be able to run these in silico and that dynamical system, the system of
of neural activity will be independent of the substrate once we figure out what that dynamics is. I don't know if you realize we say such controversial statements at saying in principle. So for instance, you say, in principle, we could simulate the brain substrate independence. Who knows? I mean, well, that's like a huge open. I'm going to grapple over the expression in principle, I think, because
I'm happy to put myself out there. I think we will be able to simulate the brain, but it might be a really long time away because there's so much that goes on. The point is that once we figure out those dynamics, it'll be independent of the substrate, silicon or meat.
In the case, maybe we can agree that the dynamics within a layer are their own thing. And the idea of cause within one of those layers is different to the cause that generates one layer from the layer below it. I see what you're saying. OK. OK, so you have this dynamics of cause and effect in
In biology or in an ecological system, it's true that reintroducing wolves to the Yellowstone National Park caused the deer population to become under control. That's a totally meaningful statement and it would be absurd to try to do the same thing with quarks.
So you have these dynamical systems and the cause in that sense is like we should have a different word for it. So we're mixing our definitions of the intrasystem versus the intersystem causation. So we're still not at free will yet. So our conscious experience
may be emergent from the actions of our neurons. It probably is in some sense. But in another sense, it is dual to our, the actions of our neurons. Okay. So the, the, our neurons have a dynamics, which, you know, you can at some level explain their behavior, but the,
And they generate this pattern of information that tells a story about itself, etc. And so in a way, our minds or the description of our minds is just another way of casting new dynamics that is essentially a duality. It is a dual to that system.
But in a way, you could argue that it's more fundamental, right? So if in the broadest sense, our minds are the result of a computation, then then our minds are also a dynamical system, independent of the substrate. So a set of elements, in this case, thoughts linked by a set of rules. And, you know, and
and thought of symbolic representations. And so you can come up with a language that manipulates the symbolic representations and tell stories with them. OK, that's, you know, in a sense, kind of what a mind is and a bunch of other stuff. OK, so in a sense, psychology is the science of understanding the dynamics of that system. And it's to some extent mappable, maybe never completely.
but you could write down the dynamics of the mind without referencing neurons, just as you could write down the dynamics of the neurons without referencing electrons. And the reason I said that, in a sense, the way of looking at neural dynamics, which is the
the dual of it, which is the subjective experience, is more predictively powerful than the neural dynamics themselves. And in some way of looking at it, that's more fundamental. There are things you can predict about what a brain will do and how an organism will behave that you could only get by looking at the
the thought dynamics, like the mental dynamics, and you could never get by trying to look at a few neurons and guess what they're going to do. Okay, so is this not a difference between what we can do and what is? I don't think so. So. All right, so. So we so first of all, let's, you know,
would have been in the idea that the mind is this, its own dynamical system, potentially independent of its substrate. And understanding the dynamics of the mind is better than understanding the dynamics of neurons for many, many things. But does that mean that, like you said, is the mind
Is this just our impression that we can't do this? We can't, for example, predict someone else's detailed behavior, their inclination to fall in love with particular
types of people based on looking at their neurons or looking at their quarks. Okay. But, okay, so now we get to this idea of in principle. Yeah, okay. That's the title of the podcast. Is it even in principle possible to do so? And I would argue there are also no
It's in principle possible to predict some human behavior by trying to model the physical aspect of the brain. But I don't think it's possible to... So here things get a little bit messy. So you could predict someone's behavior just by knowing them well. Does that mean they have no free will that they couldn't potentially do otherwise? You could predict someone's
Inclination to certain types of behavior by knowing, you know, about any neuropathologies that they might have. Okay. So, so for sure we aren't, uh, you know, the epitome is a free will. We, we often fail to exercise free will or we are predictable, but the idea that free will is an illusion because brains are mechanistic.
I think is a little fallacious and and the reason is that so so if a brain because of that dual notion well not not even I think we can go to to physical here like there are physicalish reasons here so so the brain the idea is that that your actions are predetermined and predictable because
They're entirely determined by the configuration of physical matter and so on. But then I want to ask, to whom is the brain predictable and predetermined? To what observer and what reference frame? So if you have any sufficiently complex system, like the brain, the dynamics
are coupled across multiple physical scales. So, for example, an important part of the decision mechanism in the brain is the so-called Bryshark potential, which is just the way the brain
Basically, the correlated noise and brain signal that the brain actually uses as a sort of a tiebreaker in decision making and it partially drives the dynamics in ways that we don't very well understand that all because it's super new that we figured out. Can you repeat the name of the potential? It's the Bryshark potential. It's also called the readiness potential. Okay. Yeah. And you want to look at
Aaron Sherger's work and actually Baha wrote an article on this. I'm just mentioning that because I'm super familiar with it now, but it's just one example of how you have dynamics influence. In complex and even pseudo chaotic systems, you have these dynamics linked across multiple scales of these hierarchies and
In that case, it becomes essentially impossible to predict behavior based on the smallest elements of the substrate, whatever the atoms. Okay, so you have this system that is in
you're partially chaotic. And it's well known that these things can't be predicted by one without without infinite computation. Okay, I think I think this is a manifestation of this computational irreducibility also. Okay, so. Okay, so. So my question is, what observer or what reference frame could predict your actions perfectly by knowing the
exact state of all the quantum fields in your brain. So you could imagine some super advanced alien that could somehow perfectly scan your brain and get that and then run a simulation of your brain at the same time. But even that, I think here, the very nature of quantum mechanics makes that challenging. So
So you literally need to track every bit of quantum information in the most complex systems to make a perfect prediction. So maybe you can make some predictions, but it's not even practically impossible. It's probably even in principle impossible. So you have things like the no cloning theorem, which forbids you from making a perfect copy of quantum information, which is what you would need to do to make a perfect prediction.
So I think in a meaningful way it's in principle not possible for any possible observer to perfectly predict your choice. It is possible for impossible observers like Laplace's demon who knows the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe
So from the perspective of Laplace's demon, you have no free will, but Laplace's demon is a mythical entity. And like other mythical entities, I don't think we should rate something an illusion because a mythical entity could in principle predict your behavior. So there's this guy named David Walpart. I don't know if you know him, but he's in Santa Barbara, I believe.
and he has the limits on inference machines, which says that even Laplace's demon in Newtonian mechanics can't exist. I agree that Laplace's demon cannot exist. I think even relativity forbids Laplace's demon because there's a limit to how quickly it could. Anyway, this is another topic. So, long story short, I think free will is
Real in a meaningful sense, like going down the definition of real is like a whole other podcast, but free will is real in a meaningful sense because choice is a fundamental, dynamical component in a particular dynamical system whose behavior is independent of its substrate and whose behavior is not fully predictable in the context of its substrates by
mapping at substrates in a way that is possible for any entity that could exist. But if you choose to not believe in free will, then at least you have that choice. Yeah. Okay, great. Man, there's so much that we can talk about.
Okay, how about instead of delving more deeply into, I'll just tell you the one thought, I'll just tell you one of the thoughts. Why is this notion of to who important? For instance, we can say there is a computer here. We consider that to be an objective fact. We don't say this computer is here to who, unless you are someone who believes that the observer creates the reality. So let's
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from his school? I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us.
Yeah, I mean, we live in a relative universe. Particles have a relative existence, you know. Hawking radiation.
only exists if you're a certain distance away from a black hole. Unruh radiation only exists if you're accelerating. So I mean, there is a sense in which the frame of reference is critical. And for like non-noisy. So there's something noisy about the radiation and the Unruh.
I think maybe I do, I don't know, but there is something non-trivial about the relativity of existence in terms of matter, for sure. This is something I don't think we've properly wrapped our heads around. Maybe it's as confusing as the measurement problem, the idea that
The universe can look, can and does look radically different depending on your frame of reference. Um, and the only thing that is consistent is the self consistency of the universe itself. Like no, no matter what changes, you know, based on a frame of reference, how you choose to make measurements, for example, in
You know, things like a Bell test. These things can radically change what universe you see. The one thing that never changes is that the universe remains self-consistent for all observers. OK. Can you explain what that means? And is that different than the statement that the laws of physics are the same?
So in the case of, well, I mean, the simple case of relativity, let's take the simple case of the twin paradox where, so this is this thought experiment in relativity where a pair of twins, one jumps in a spacecraft and zips off at a large fraction of the speed of light and, you know,
Okay, so from the point of view of the traveling twin, they didn't think that their clock was ticking. Okay.
They you know, they were looking back home and they thought that at home the clock was ticking fast and and from But that no wait on No, I should know this stuff so the the so so so this is a pet this is a So-called power you should go you should watch this PBS space-time The way it works is that that that
When you observe a clock that's traveling at some speed, that clock appears to tick slow. So fast moving objects, the time slows down. So both twins see each other's clock as ticking slow because the spaceship is moving fast. But then for the astronaut twin, Earth appears to be moving backwards quickly because velocity speed is relative.
There's no preferred inertial frame of reference. So if it races away, that twins clock seems to slow down. And yet when the twin gets back home after that long trip, the twin who stayed at home, so it has to end up inconsistent, which one aged more than the other. And the answer is that there is an answer that there is a self-consistent answer. When they get home, both of them agree that the twin who stayed home aged more. But how can that work?
Both of them saw the same change in each other's clock. And both of the twins have an answer for that. And their answers are different, but they lead to the same conclusion. The twin who's at home sees the traveling twins clock tick slower and so that the traveling twin ages less.
and gets home. Meanwhile, the one at home is waiting and getting older and his twin comes back much younger. Okay, because less time passed. But for the traveling twin, they watch the twin at home and they watch the twin at home's clock tick slower. So in fact, the traveling twin feels themselves aging faster until the moment that they turn around.
Okay, so in order to turn around and come home, they have to accelerate. And the other thing that Einstein's relativity tells us is that if you are deep in a gravitational field, your clock ticks slower. So the amount that that twin has to accelerate in order to return home causes their clock to slow down enough that from their perspective,
the twin who was at home, not only caught up to them, but aged a lot more. Okay. They both have different stories about why they both agree that the traveling twin is younger than the stay at home twin. And so, Kurt, how did we get to this? This was in service of a point.
OK, so firstly, I was asking about what does it mean to be self-consistent? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the universe will always conspire to be self-consistent and that observers will ultimately agree. I have so many questions here. That's even the case with particles. Like if you see unre-radiation, I don't know what the solution to this one is.
someone else doesn't see unruh radiation but they see yeah it's like if you if you accelerate fast enough then you you'll be incinerated by what what's the equivalent of hawking radiation it's a type of horizon radiation you'll be but someone who is not accelerating doesn't see your unruh particles and yet does see you incinerated
So why does the person who's not accelerating see you incinerated? I think the answer is they see you being incinerated by something else like the drag on the quantum fields or something. I don't recall, but there's a neat answer to it. Like the universe keeps conspiring to give us these neat answers that everyone ultimately is going to agree, even if the universe that they
think they live in looks wildly different to the universe of the next person. The consistency conspires to always be there. And I think there's a mystery there and I don't know what... Okay, so Matt, a couple of questions occurred to me. So one, when we use the word self-consistent to apply to the universe, I mean, why can't we just remove the word self and say the universe is consistent? So that's number one. And then number two, what would it look like if there was inconsistency?
Does it mean that there'd be disagreement between us because there already is disagreement? And then if we're saying no scientific inconsistency, well then science by its nature is intersubjective agreement, which means we've had disagreements, we push them aside. And so it's like saying we agree because I've removed the disagreements. So why do we use the word self-consistent? Secondly, what the heck would it ever look like to be inconsistent? Right. So by self-consistent, I mean internally consistent.
Which means that, I mean, you can imagine consistency is inconsistent with someone's beliefs about what the universe should be, but that's not the case. The universe, when, you know, to, for carefully made measurements and it is always, it always obeys its own rules.
But the particular rule that it seems to be obeying may be different for one observer or another, but that all observers will obey, will see that the universe obeys its rules, its own rules. So in the example of the twin paradox, the one twin observes the universe obeying the rules of time dilation due to
due to special relativity, and the other observes inviterating the rule of time dilation due to acceleration by the equivalence principle general relativity, at least in one way of framing that paradox. In the case of the Anhu radiation, everyone sees the accelerating person incinerate, okay, and so it's not like one person
Sees them survive in the other person sees them and accelerate it. Okay, so which would lead to a paradox. Okay, so the universe never generates paradoxes it always You will always find that that it has obeyed its own
It's laws of nature. If it doesn't, then it's us who haven't figured out the right laws of nature. But the thing is two observers may see it doing that in different ways. And the original example of this is good old electromagnetism where a moving electric charge generates a magnetic field.
But we know that motion is relative. So if you're moving with the electric charge, you should see no magnetic field. But that magnetic field has an effect. It causes other charged particles to move. And so it would be inconsistent if one person saw a moving charged particle generate a magnetic field and the effect of that magnetic field, you know,
Resulting in the motion of yet more particles and person traveling with the magnetic field sees that sees no such thing. That would be an inconsistency and a paradox in a sense, because there would be an irreconcilable disagreement about their observations. But the reality is that the person traveling with the charge does see a force on the
Surrounding particles, but to them they they would argue that the force was from the electrostatic field, which is the force that that you know the the So so the put the so that that's an example, but but nonetheless the universe has obeyed its own rules It's just the different observers would disagree on which rule which rules that obeyed And and no paradoxes interesting
So that's what I mean by that. What would it look like to be inconsistent? And then also when we say that the world is consistent, like I mentioned, we do have disagreements and there is such a thing as someone seeing something that you did not see, and we generally consider those to be mental illnesses, but I'm sure there exist other cases that are not so extreme, though none come to mind. And in which case would that be an
I mean, ultimately to test consistency, the result from both observers has to come back to one observer. So one observer needs to test the consistency and that consistency check
would be that ultimately all of the incoming information agrees. So in the twin paradox, both of them agree that the stay at home twin aged and the astronaut twin stayed young, but they won't know that until they talk to each other about it. And then each of them independently has
self-consistent model of the world. Oh, my brother returned and is younger to my vision and also tells me that they agree with that assessment. Okay. So, so if your, your, your brother came back and told you that, wait, no, I feel myself as being old and you look young.
then that would be an inconsistency. The data that's coming into your head has to line up and it should line up and maybe this is just an axiom of science that the universe is internally consistent or self-consistent and I think it's reasonable to say that it is one of the axioms that we
just have to start with but it is stunning how the the range of circumstances where it demonstrates itself to be correct in ways that you know the number of paradoxes seeming paradoxes that have arisen and have not had a clear solution but infallibly a solution appears.
Speaking of consistency, does Gödel's incompleteness theorem have anything to say about physics or the existence of a toe? Yeah, it sure feels like it should, doesn't it? How does it go again? No system of axions. Is it no self-consistent system of axions, no formal language? And prove all of the truths
that it can represent. Yeah, there will always exist at least one truth that's unprovable from the set of axioms if it's consistent and it's strong enough to encode the basic arithmetic that we take for granted. Yeah, I mean, I would say maybe. So I mean, the idea. So let's assume that there is a ground truth to reality, that there is a
a baseline fact about reality that explains why there's something rather than nothing, why it behaves the way it does, et cetera, et cetera. In any formal language that we can come up with, including math, there's no guarantee that
that that that ground truth is is provable, because there are always some that are not. But yeah, I don't see it as a reason to be too despondent. Because if a a truth is not provable in one form or system, then it may be in others. And
Yeah, so I'd say the risk more is that we either that singular ground truth doesn't exist. Okay. So it may really be that there's this sort of relativity of frameworks and there's no singular framework in which we can
express this sort of what people have wanted to find, the idea of this final theory that there's in a sense no ultimate theoretical ground beneath our feet, which is to me both terrifying. It gives me vertigo to think about it. Yeah, I just had some of that as well.
It's also cool, man, because then when you think about what we are in such a universe, you know, where it's like where this layer of emergent complexity that's bootstrapped up from nothing. And, you know, it's now to us to explore this crazy phenomenon of reality and try to characterize it
as best we can with no, you know, like the idea there's no ground truth. There's certainly no fundamental meaning in that picture. There's only the meaning that we impose on it. That if you think about humans as explorers, you know, we have broken free from our bounds.
On so many levels, and for most of our history, it was physical balance. We explored the world, then we left the world and went to other worlds, well, the Moon. But with our science, we've explored the physical universe to its boundaries. But there's also this other type of exploration that you don't think about. So we kind of live in these day-to-day subjective worlds, which are these
Like these mini games that I sort of talked about, the idea we just try to find the regularities that are convenient enough. And those are imposed on us by evolution too, like where we believe in a world where there's space and time and hierarchies of objects and there are relationships between these things, forces, et cetera, which is just one very selective
way of casting reality but it's also very natural and it's the one that we were born into in the same way we're born in a country but we have broken free from that bound too and we're capable of like literally arbitrary abstraction and exploring all of the ways to frame reality and none of them are better than any other in terms of more fundamental
So we are adrift. And you mentioned this earlier, but it's really a terrifying thing. How do you choose a world view? How do you anchor yourself down and say, right, this is my world view. This is how I'm going to interpret everything and choose my actions. I would say that double down on
the power of this relativity on the power that you have of having cut yourself loose from these, you know, these, the bonds of the framework that you are born into your, your, you know, your, uh, surfer impossibility space. Um, to me, that's actually, uh, something you can put an anchor in. Um,
Explain that what you can put an anchor in the fact that you are in the in the so in your in you can take pride in your knowledge in your ability to you know have this meta awareness that that a worldview is at some level an arbitrary choice and
And you can see that there are many possible worldviews and you know, so I'm not saying that I can do this, but I can see that this could be an admirable type of existence is to see these different local minima in the landscape, each one a different belief system and worldview and
idea about what reality is, but knowing the landscapes there and even at some level being free to move is just damn cool, man. I think it's a unique quality of human beings. It's what makes us, I think, true general intelligences
Although we have deep constraints and we have to fight a lot of our inclinations to do one thing over another in many cases, we still have the capability to see all this stuff, to see all of the different frameworks in which the universe can be seen and to in some way explore them.
Is this one of the reasons you started the film? And by the way, your film is called Inventing Reality. So I imagine that several of the themes we talked about will be covered in the film. What was the impetus behind the film?
So Bihar and I were planning to make a show together. So she's a science journalist and I'm an emerging science communicator. And two million subscribers and is emerging, geez.
Well, in terms of my skills, maybe. And so we were planning to make a show, it was going to be called The Reality Show. And it was going to be a riff on reality, reality TV, but really interesting, interesting. Yeah, it was going to be a fun way to look at how people are exploring the nature of reality. And this was this was like five years ago. So when you say you were working on a show, you mean a show like on TV or Netflix or we know it was
We were brainstorming many things. It was maybe going to be a YouTube show, because that's what I knew. Whatever stuck. And then we got distracted. I got distracted by my research program, and it became possible to do that in space time. Which we can talk about next time when we speak, which is the crisis in cosmology, because there's so much that I would love to know about that. Absolutely.
And so that was something that we have been talking about for a long time and also talking about these questions and speaking into these together. But also on the other side with
Andrew Cornhaber and Eric Brown, who are the producers of Space Time. We've been talking for a long time about doing something big in terms of reaching a bigger audience and what we would want to say to a bigger audience and how we can just do something, you know,
really cool with what we thought was this affordance we uncovered, which is the appetite for depth and some level of authenticity. So these two projects merged into this film, Inventing Reality. And we
We were very lucky to have a fan of the show, but now a friend offered to match funds up to $400,000, actually. Great. Time to try to crowdfund this. The reason we wanted to do that, the reason we didn't want to
I mean, you know, PBS is awesome, but this kind of had to be something independent because we wanted absolute, absolute creative freedom. They're a great partner for Space Time, but we wanted this one. It had to be absolute creative freedom. And we also realized that the appetite for this could
actually let us fund it. So that's what we're doing. So what's the website? So we have a Indiegogo crowdfunding. Indiegogo, if I was to search inventing reality, it would come up. Sure, hope so. Let me do so right now. Yeah, OK, I see it. I see it. Matt, I'm going to be donating to this.
Well, I want to see this made. We're going to do our best. We're one day into the campaign. By the time I guess this video is out, we'll be a little more than that. Let me read some of this, if you don't mind, because this is interesting to the listeners. Are space, time and particles even real? Hey, if you thought Donald Hoffman was allowing your mind to be untrammeled in a positive or negative sense, then
Is reductionism a dead end? Can physics ever hope to find ground truth?
Even in this conversation of there are, there may not be ground truths. Even that statement alone may be a ground truth of sorts. So it's such a tricky statement to make that there are none and that we can say that there are none of a certain class. So that's why I like this phrasing here. There are no physics ever hope to find ground truth. And for people who are fans of the Toll podcast, something I talk about frequently is abi-genosis, which means how do you combine
Basically, science has evolved. It's not the same that it was 300 years ago. So then the question is, what is it evolving to? And can other modes of knowing, quote unquote knowing, be integrated with science? And so I call that in a tongue in cheek manner, abejanosis, which is gnosis of the West and abej, forget the root word of the East. But it's not as if that's the only two, maybe there's four, maybe there's five different ways.
of integrating knowledge. Anyway, so if you're interested in that, can physics ever hope to find the ground truth? That'd be interesting to you. What is the role of the observer in quantum mechanics? Okay, that's like a central theme. What did you do, man? Did you just copy all the, did you go to the toe description and create the ideal movie? No, man, we just have the same curiosities because
I know, I'm just kidding around, man. Yeah, exactly. These are the questions. I have a personal question for you. As you start to investigate this further and further, do you find that you're questioning... At first, we're thinking, how do I unify quantum mechanics or quantum field theory with gravity? It's like, okay, that's the most fundamental question. Then you get to ideas of what the heck does it mean to cause? What does it mean to be real? What does it mean to mean? Do you find that that's the case for you? It's paralyzing.
I guess you have to power through, of course. Yeah, I think it's important. I mean, the key is once you do that staying on track, you know, you can't follow one line of reasoning and and well, you can follow one line of reasoning and be diverted at every definition. And, you know, this is what makes smart people smart is they're able to construct these these chains of reasoning and, you know, flag their
potential, you know, uncertainties, biases, definitional, definitional uncertainties along the way, and then come back and build, build the edifice of their understanding that it's, it's, it can be really paralyzing for sure. What does mean even mean? I thought that one, but now I will. Here's something that I asked Noam Chomsky. It's a similar question that I asked you.
It's that in order to know what something means, do you have to know what it doesn't mean? So in order for you to understand what a cat is, does that mean you have to point out instances of non-cats? He said yes. But then to me, there's something defeating about that. And it's defeating in the sense that he says we don't have a definition of meaning. So how are we supposed to know if something is meaningless without presupposing that you know what meaning is? 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
Yeah, right. I mean, meeting is about a correlation between
two things, and in particular between some informational representation and the thing itself, I suppose. In a simple sense, this word means this animal, and both of them have some informational correlate in your brain.
And so it's the pointers between these. Interesting. But I am sure that Noam Chomsky has thought all through this in a lot of detail and means something deeper when he says we don't know what meaning means. I think it's the case that Noam Chomsky, whatever people think about him politically, I think he's absolutely sharp, like a sharp as a thumbtack at 92.
Sharper than most people are at their prime, and he's 92 or 93. I was even talking to Terrence Stephen who disagrees. Verified genius, no question. Yeah, so just as an ending statement, there's the hard problem of meaning, at least this is what I call it. There's something called the symbol grounding problem, so you can look this up. It means, how is it that when we say the word pen, we mean pen? How does that word point to a pen? What does the pointing mean?
That's something that yeah, doesn't get much attention. My feeling is so ultimately it has to be to something in your, you know, in your brain or in your conscious experience. And it's really hard to pin down because you know what you have a single neuron whose firing means you've thought of pen. That's that itself is not very meaningful because the neuron is, you know,
Tentacly lipid layer structure, it doesn't mean pen. So the meaning has to arise in a different way. And I think the only way to me that makes sense is that the representation of pen in your head has its entire existence in
the connection of all of the things that you relate to pen-ness and its function and its shape and all of these have representations elsewhere in your head and it's in the combination of these that you get the notion of the pen. But then you ask for each of those other things like, okay, you need to connect ink
What about ink? How does ink? No, that itself is also this connection of representation. So once you strip away all of those representations, the pen vanishes. There isn't even a
a single neuron left that meant pen that now has no qualities, that there's nothing. And so that's what it feels like, which is, again, an ungrounding notion that meaning only exists in the relationship between the properties that
Yeah, so so that's my now that word ungrounding. Did you would you use that purposefully? Because I called I mean, because I referenced the symbol grounding problem. Or did you just use that word? I didn't mean to copy you, but I know it's not copying me. It's actually the word that is appropriate. And but it's there's also a technical meaning of that word. And the conversation with Terrence Deacon, which is actually premiering in about an hour or so talks specifically about that.
As far as I understand, grounding is something physical. And so what's meant by the word pen is ungrounded is that there's nothing that you can see from the symbols of the word pen that grounds it to the word pen, but it has something to do with it being grounded in something physical.
Matt, thank you. Thank you so much, man. Listen, Kurt, it was an absolute pleasure. And based on who you've had on this podcast and and the brilliant conversations you've managed to get out of them also, which is no mean feat, it's an honor. So the honor is mine, man. Like I've been watching you for years. I watch you as I go to sleep. That sounds creepy. I watch it before I sleep. Yeah.
And I've been doing that for years and I learned from you and perhaps the majority of the audience has plenty to credit to you in terms of their knowledge, so thank you. Well, I was just communicating it, so glad I got some across.
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on 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. 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. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theories of everything dot org. 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. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you.
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"text": " That whenever you grant perspective, you grant power. We've buried our heads so deeply, you know, we're sort of all"
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"text": " We're all playing our own little mini games. We like to organize the world into these simplified little systems of elements and simple rules and we sort of organize these mini games of life and then we try to win them."
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"text": " Today's episode is about free will. Is there even a theory of everything and the physics of idealism? That is the notion that consciousness is fundamental and only. We also touch on interpretations of quantum mechanics where the observer has a privileged role in creating the universe."
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"text": " Matt O'Dowd is a science communicator and an astrophysicist, a professor at the City University of New York, involved in gravitationally lensed quasars, which touch on the crisis in cosmology, which is something that we'll speak about in this episode, and for sure in the next one at length. Matt is also the host of PBS Space Time, which has over 2 million subscribers, I think it's 2.8, and they're the largest physics and space show on YouTube."
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"text": " Thank you so much and enjoy this episode with Matt O'Dowd. Matt."
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"text": " Matt, Matt, Matt. I've been watching you for years, so this is a treat. This is an honor, man. It's good to speak with you. Well, it's my pleasure. I've been watching you for months. Right, right. I really enjoyed your stuff, dude. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so I want to talk about PBS Space Time, which is what I know you from, but that's not all you do. It's not your full-time job."
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"text": " Firstly, let's get people who are unacquainted with you acquainted. So what is PBS Space Time and how did you get involved? OK, so PBS Space Time, it's a YouTube show, a PBS YouTube show, PBS Digital Studios. We do near weekly episodes a few times a month and we explore"
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"text": " A huge range of topics by now because we've been doing it for seven years and we've gone pretty deep in, you know, topics of space and time. And, you know, so physics, astronomy, astrophysics, but this encompasses a huge amount of stuff, of course. Physics is enormous, but we tend to explore topics in"
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"text": " which was much more watered down and mystifying, playing up the aspect of the wave and the particle and pretty much just staying at that and saying there could be extra dimensions without showing many, if any equations. Yeah, I mean, and we actually don't show too many equations, but we do show some. I think our philosophy is more that, you know, people have been consuming science media for many decades now, you know, since"
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"text": " university for way too long and so they have the same level of specialized knowledge but they do have good brains and perhaps more to the point they have fantastic bullshit detectors and so they're very highly tuned to when they're being talked down to. So that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to bring maybe a peek behind the curtain of"
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"text": " The next is we distill that physics or that research down to something that's consumable while correctly portraying the phenomenon. So that is not being patronizing about it. And then number three is filmmaking. So why don't you tell the audience and myself about this film and why it's important to you? Sure. OK, so so, you know, to"
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"text": " Never, let's say, leveling up humanity's collective reality in that way. It is a more beautiful thing. It's objectively more beautiful if more people have a more expansive understanding of the crazy universe that they live in. Particularly in astrophysics, we don't produce a lot of industry value."
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"text": " know, we don't make a lot of the new useful nanomaterials, for example. And so the primary use of the field is perspective. Okay, so the story of my life. So I was no. So we really dug into space time. And it was successful beyond what we imagined could be"
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"text": " could be possible. And really what had happened is that we'd, you know, maybe let's say we can credit ourselves with a little intuition here, but I think there was also some luck that we tapped into a very hungry market for for much more authentic science journalism. And so, you know, we I mean, you know, you need to go and look at our"
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"text": " our video library on YouTube and there's a lot. Yeah, there will be an overlay right now for the audience and I highly recommend you subscribe to PBS FaceTime. But it also, over that time, took the little spark of passion that I had for science communication, which had previously been expressed, you know, doing public talks and"
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"text": " You know, doing observing nights for the public and things like that. And I realized that, wow, there's really something big that can be done. And so. So this film, it's actually not a PBS production, it's a production with my PBS team, as well as"
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"text": " My partner, Bahar Gulipur, who is a science journalist specializing in neuroscience and AI. And so this is this is this is our collective mission, but in a way it's the culmination of our our efforts. And so. I mean, I can tell you a little bit about the film. Yeah, I would love to hear."
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"text": " So, uh, so the idea, I mean, the film is called inventing reality and the idea is, you know, as I said, it's a synthesis, um, not just of what we've learned, but, um, it's an attempt to sort of put it together, step back, take stock and look for paths forward. So, so maybe a simple way to say it is that it's a movie about humanity's search for what is fundamental."
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"text": " and of course there are many ways that we seek truth but the focus of this film is the pursuit of the most fundamental levels of reality through particularly physics but also science in general and okay so you know it's about the question what is reality but it's also about the meta questions"
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"end_time": 880.179,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 850.503,
"text": " So digging into the potential answers to the question itself, but also to question that question. So physics is insanely successful, most unbelievably successful in its predictive power about nature. But there's a sense, and I think a growing sense, that physics has stalled in, I think, what some once thought was this final sprint to a theory of everything."
},
{
"end_time": 907.483,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 880.589,
"text": " to neatly tie up reality in a bow, have this final equation that described everything. And so now many physicists are asking, how do we approach the question differently? And not just physicists, a lot of the thinking is reaching across into other disciplines, drawing on other disciplines. OK, can you give an example of that? Because you said you'd like to investigate fundamental reality."
},
{
"end_time": 937.261,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 907.91,
"text": " from not just a physics perspective, but a science perspective in general, what would that look like if not physics? Great question. So I guess there's many ways to answer that, but let's just use one. So quantum mechanics is weird beyond comprehension in a very literal sense. We still don't get it."
},
{
"end_time": 967.21,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 937.585,
"text": " Um, but it's clear that there is a, an uncanny and fundamental link between the observer and the nature of the observed, the so-called measurement problem. And this is a, an unresolved, uh, um, conundrum, um, that was sort of swept under the rug, you know, back in the 1920s, uh, when we realized that there was some kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 991.954,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 968.609,
"text": " In between observations there is a level of indeterminacy to nature in which nature appears to occupy multiple states at once or no state and is only defined on observation and all of this beautiful weird stuff and there was a lot of debate about"
},
{
"end_time": 1019.36,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 992.278,
"text": " you know, basically swing between a type of idealism and a type of realism, questioning the reality of reality and how fundamental the observer is. But this was pushed aside because quantum mechanics was incredibly successful at predicting the behavior of the universe. And so, you know, the old adage shut up and calculate really drove the philosophy of how quantum mechanics evolved"
},
{
"end_time": 1046.186,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1020.094,
"text": " in that we just used it. We used it to make amazing predictions. I think it's reasonable to say we used quantum mechanics to build our modern world, you know, transition. And the shut up and calculate mindset is what? It is. Yeah, yeah. So for quite some time, it was considered career suicide for an academic to ask questions like, but what does quantum mechanics actually mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 1072.278,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1046.647,
"text": " What is happening between measurements? For example, what we call the interpretation of quantum mechanics. So the equations work, the Schrodinger equation or the equations of quantum field theory, they work incredibly well. But asking the question, what do these equations mean? What is the physical story that they imply about the world?"
},
{
"end_time": 1100.316,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1073.029,
"text": " I'm not sure if you've seen the interview on Toe with Tim Maudlin. I have not seen that one yet. Okay. Well, he would say, so he's a philosopher of physics and he would say quantum theory, they don't teach you quantum theory. They teach you a method of calculating and a true theory should give you an account of ontology. So a true theory is a combination of math and metaphysics, or at least like suppose that account of the metaphysics. And he said that's what most interested him in physics. And they would talk about that on the first lecture."
},
{
"end_time": 1117.5,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1100.316,
"text": " Yeah. Yeah. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1144.582,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1118.2,
"text": " For all of physics, even though physics wasn't coined until fairly recently, but since even Newton wanted to know what the heck is going on, it's one of the reasons why. And Newton acknowledged that he didn't know what his so-called theory of gravity meant. He acknowledged that it was not ontological in any way, it was descriptive. And in the same way as, you know, his"
},
{
"end_time": 1173.268,
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"start_time": 1145.094,
"text": " Newton's law of universal gravitation is descriptive of gravity. It doesn't explain why gravity happens. Quantum mechanics is descriptive of the behavior of subatomic particles, but doesn't explain the why. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can grab last second movie tickets in 5D Premium Ultra with popcorn, extra large popcorn,"
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{
"end_time": 1185.469,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1176.869,
"text": " TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes Payday unexpectedly human."
},
{
"end_time": 1209.48,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1188.097,
"text": " Internet privacy is a growing concern as we mostly live our lives online. However, there are many ways that we can be attacked or monitored. I personally don't go online doing what's sensitive without attempting to use a VPN. The reason being that many internet service providers can view what you're viewing or view the websites that you visit and in addition sell your information to other people."
},
{
"end_time": 1234.019,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1209.48,
"text": " ExpressVPN is an app that reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers so your ISP can't see the sites that you visit. With 100% data encryption, you can allow ExpressVPN to run seamlessly in the background with a single tap of the button. And their software is one of the best that money can buy, with compatibility across virtually every single device, whether it's your phone or your computer."
},
{
"end_time": 1256.101,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1234.019,
"text": " ExpressVPN keeps all of your information 100% encrypted with the most powerful encryption available. Protect your online activity today with the VPN rated number one by Business Insider. Visit the TOL exclusive link expressvpn.com slash theories of everything and you can get an extra three months off for free off of the one-year package."
},
{
"end_time": 1266.118,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1256.101,
"text": " That's expressvpn.com."
},
{
"end_time": 1292.602,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1266.903,
"text": " Most of us share in the problem of being so digitally active that we overconsume or overproduce content, which in turn leads to an overwhelming amount of monthly monetary subscription. This channel's theme is exploration, at least one of the main themes, and it's difficult to peregrinate when we're handling the more routine and monotonous items. This is exactly why we're partnering with today's sponsor, Rocket Money, formerly known as Truebill. Rocket Money automates the process of financial saving."
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},
{
"end_time": 1358.353,
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"text": " I've almost never had a problem with superposition because I see the math as a description. And then it's only an issue if you try and make some correspondence between that math and say, what the heck is going on? So some people would say, yeah, but it's not as simple as if you have two goats. So two plus two goats equals four goats. That I understand. However, even there, two plus two equals four, but two plus two also equals five plus minus one."
},
{
"end_time": 1388.456,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1359.07,
"text": " just as easily. And so you can say, well, what the heck is five goats and then a minus one goat? Does it live in a superposition of five and a minus one? So unless you have a problem with even ordinary addition, then to me, I don't have a problem with superposition. I just see it as, okay, this is a description. So what do you think about that? What do you make of that? I think it's a great example. And it conveniently gets to the point that I was rounding on anyway, which is that we have"
},
{
"end_time": 1419.019,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1389.258,
"text": " an intuition about mathematics, we have our own inbuilt math engine in our brains. And it's, you know, we know that that our intuitions about math do not encompass all math. For example, we don't have an intuition about imaginary numbers. But imaginary numbers are perfectly serviceable mathematical tools. And in a sense, they're real in that they're important for understanding quantum mechanics. But the"
},
{
"end_time": 1447.346,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1419.548,
"text": " The worlds that we describe, the subjective world, which is a model, and our scientific models are so heavily influenced by what we intuitively think is possible, but we shouldn't necessarily trust what we think is possible based on"
},
{
"end_time": 1476.203,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1448.404,
"text": " You know, the math and physics engine that evolution gave us. And so this is one interdisciplinary area. We need to maybe talk to neuroscientists and, you know, people who are to cognitive scientists and even people who are working in AI to understand what some of the biases might be in how a neural network like our own constructs its reality."
},
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"end_time": 1502.5,
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"start_time": 1476.817,
"text": " So that's what you meant when you said there is physics to understand fundamental reality. But if we also want to understand what do we mean when we say fundamental reality, we can use tools of neuroscience to understand our own biases. Well, that's so that that aspect of understanding ourselves is important. What are our biases? Also, if we want to approach things like the measurement problem, I think, you know, maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 1533.268,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1503.336,
"text": " understanding how we construct our subjective reality won't get us there, maybe it'll be helpful, but I feel like there are areas in, for example, well, statistics, probability theory, I mean, you know, these things physicists are pretty quick to draw on, for example, various Bayesian interpretations of quantum mechanics, but"
},
{
"end_time": 1561.766,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1533.712,
"text": " I also think that we can draw on what you might broadly call systems theory, so how complex systems emerge to understand the different hierarchies of complexity. There are so many rabbit holes that I'm avoiding leaping right down. I'm happy to go down them one by one, but they're deep."
},
{
"end_time": 1591.203,
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"start_time": 1562.637,
"text": " Do you find that you're having a terrible amount of fun when you're delving into the more metaphysical side of physics and interpretations, so this film in particular, than you are with your own research? It's funny, yeah. So, you know, I pursued astrophysics because it mostly just seemed like the most fun asking big questions about really big things."
},
{
"end_time": 1614.582,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1591.578,
"text": " but over time I've become more and more interested in the fundamental and making space-time has been a big part of that also and so I have no regrets. The universe is awesome and it's really fun to solve big problems about the universe and also the"
},
{
"end_time": 1643.626,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1615.418,
"text": " the skills I picked up doing that sort of work, I'm able to bring to bear on some of these other questions. That said, you know, I'm not a quantum theorist. I'm not even what, you know, most people would call a theoretical physicist, which means there are there are some skills that I'm going to have to work harder on. And so this movie is about, you know, in a way, it's a personal journey."
},
{
"end_time": 1668.473,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1645.111,
"text": " in that I really want to take stock of the field and the fields and to sort of get a sense of where humanity stands in this question and what the paths forward could be. And yeah, so there's that personal level, but I also feel like it's"
},
{
"end_time": 1696.425,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1669.121,
"text": " A contribution, I think, at some level. It's, you know, we're by no means the only people talking about this stuff. But I think there's a rising collective interest in this big picture, asking questions like, you know, what are we doing anyway? What is the goal of being human and asking questions about the world and"
},
{
"end_time": 1727.125,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1697.5,
"text": " You know, I think anything we can do to sort of bring that collective curiosity together is useful, especially these days. Help me understand how one goes from physics or even science, which is to be a description again. How does one go from that description to an ought? Well, I think the easy answer is just that whenever you grant perspective, you grant power."
},
{
"end_time": 1754.889,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1727.5,
"text": " Um, you know, it's the same reason we do science communication on YouTube. Um, and, uh, you know, I feel like it's no secret that we are a deeply factionalized species right now. Fractionalized. Yeah. Yeah. Factionalized. Factionalized. Yeah. Um, and, and, you know, we've, we've,"
},
{
"end_time": 1779.292,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1755.367,
"text": " We've buried our head so deeply. We're all playing our own little mini games. We're overwhelmed by the buzz of all media, by just the stuff going on in the world right now. We like to organize the world into these simplified little systems of elements and simple rules."
},
{
"end_time": 1808.592,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1779.991,
"text": " organize these mini games of life and then we try to win them, like whether we're winning games of political dynamics at work or trying to just stay solvent and collect enough retirement or the game of empowering your chosen in-group. So we diminish the world so that we can handle it. And I guess the thing that"
},
{
"end_time": 1838.507,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1809.241,
"text": " science can do is that it can show us, it can show us bigger landscapes, right? We are only able, so if you can imagine the infinite landscape of possible ways to live your life, possible things you can do, ways to be, we tend to blinker up and define these manageable sub landscapes and we navigate those little spaces."
},
{
"end_time": 1865.196,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1838.831,
"text": " Um, but of course we inevitably come to believe that our chosen metal sliver is the world as it really is. Okay. We, we, we mistake the sub game for the game and our compactification of reality in our minds becomes reality. And, um, and I am as guilty as most in that, um, but really"
},
{
"end_time": 1895.162,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1865.589,
"text": " I'd say any type of education, Braun's perspective, and shows us grander games, and that there are enormous landscapes of possibility, you know, outside whatever rut we happen to be in. And so, so, you know, exposing people to new information is usually always good. Okay, there are exceptions, but science, I find particularly important and powerful, because it's"
},
{
"end_time": 1925.725,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1896.186,
"text": " In a way, it's general. So it's not science isn't about the subject matter. It's about the methodologies. Okay, the methodologies, if you like, of truth finding. And those methods can be applied, at least at some level to any question or any field in ways that improve our ability to explore the landscapes of that aspect of reality. And so so"
},
{
"end_time": 1954.838,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1926.101,
"text": " I mean, granting people the access to some of the just the things we've learned in science that are incredibly powerful. The methodologies, the ways of thinking, even just the habits of thought are just super powerful tools for improving how people even live their lives because these ideas become embedded, become subliminal."
},
{
"end_time": 1980.998,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1956.135,
"text": " And I guess maybe the way I think about science is that it's like a formalization of how our brains work naturally. If you think of our minds as tools for navigating the world, and that's the physical world, the social world, and worlds of arbitrary abstraction. And so cognition, which is the process of asking questions,"
},
{
"end_time": 2006.783,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1981.493,
"text": " seeking evidence, formulating models and hypotheses and making choices, which sounds more like science. And, you know, in our brains, that's all happening constantly and mostly subconsciously. And also, I guess an important thing is that we don't just do this individually. So we age in this sort of collective cognition."
},
{
"end_time": 2034.94,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2007.159,
"text": " You know, through discussion with each other in an explicit way, but also you could argue that we are cogitating as a society through art and religion and politics. And, you know, so we can think about culture, I guess, as this collective cognition. And even a. You know, I like to think of culture as a search algorithm for truth."
},
{
"end_time": 2065.299,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2035.452,
"text": " Okay, so if part of culture is a world model, okay, and every culture has its consensus reality, then then, you know, that that little kind of local minimum in the possibility space of what the world is and how to live is something that that culture found. And so cultural evolution, I guess, sort of navigates the landscape of possible ways to"
},
{
"end_time": 2090.845,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2066.22,
"text": " think about the world and about ourselves and so if science then in some way systematizes cognition and can make us better at it individually or collectively then we get better at mapping the landscape. Here's the thought that occurs to me. If science is"
},
{
"end_time": 2120.469,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2091.101,
"text": " the epitome of making systematic what is our cognition and what we're trying to do or what you're up to with this documentary is not only investigating reality but trying to avoid some of our own cognitive biases but I imagine if science is modeling the way that our brains work but our brains have a bias then how does one scientifically not have this bias built in? It's super hard and science is no guarantee against this but I guess the"
},
{
"end_time": 2144.48,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2120.981,
"text": " The one to me, one of the most incredible things about the scientific revolution is that it gave us at least the potential for meta awareness of the fact that there even is a possibility landscape, you know, versus a singular ground truth."
},
{
"end_time": 2173.131,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2145.026,
"text": " um and the potential for the awareness that there's a distinction between reality versus a model of reality philosophy also okay so so i think you know i'm i'm maybe mixing together the the the um breakthroughs of of enlightenment and um and and you know so so these"
},
{
"end_time": 2199.138,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2174.121,
"text": " fields of rational thought allow us to, at least in principle, know that biases are possible. This might be inaccurate. So you know, I talk about culture as a search algorithm for truth. So I feel like science allows us to upgrade that search algorithm so that we're"
},
{
"end_time": 2228.933,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2199.548,
"text": " less likely to get stuck in a local minimum because we introduce exploration into the explicit ability to explore to our little search algorithm robot, whatever it is, a little valley crawler. And it also allows us to explicitly incorporate uncertainties into whatever the loss function of that search algorithm. So it's like"
},
{
"end_time": 2250.435,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2229.633,
"text": " Another thought that occurs to me is this is not a viewpoint that I have necessarily, but it's one that I'm sure that someone or some people who watch may have thought."
},
{
"end_time": 2279.957,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2250.947,
"text": " We have a cultural model of reality. Every culture has this. When we have science, we have something that we believe is a cultural. So it's non-cultural. It's objective. However, they would say, yeah, but that's a Eurocentric way of thinking because we're of course, we're going to say our culture is the one that has the objective method. So what would your response be to that? I really value this being brought to"
},
{
"end_time": 2308.933,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2280.64,
"text": " attention, because it's true that that, you know, when we talk about science, it's not one thing. Okay, so there sort of is a Eurocentric culture that comes onto the label of science. But that's not all. That's not all that science is. And so science is also a"
},
{
"end_time": 2338.148,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2310.384,
"text": " revolution in our ability to cogitate on many levels and that is bundled with other cultural factors in some ways, for instance, but it also has its independent existence and the value of the kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 2366.459,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2338.677,
"text": " The raw upgrade that science gave us is that in principle, and I've been careful to say in principle, in principle, it allows us the type of meta awareness that can lead us to those sorts of biases. And, you know, I don't want to say that the Western scientific method is how brains work. It's absolutely not as simple as"
},
{
"end_time": 2394.224,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2367.312,
"text": " But there are correlations that are powerful and that I think are trans-cultural and that there are wisdom traditions that talk about these things in very different ways that we should spend more time trying to translate between. Yeah, that's my"
},
{
"end_time": 2419.002,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2394.565,
"text": " Well, firstly, one is to say that science is not all in the sense that, well, this is not only my point of view. Hilary Putnam said something similar and same with Feynman. He had this famous quotation about logic is not all that one needs hearts. And secondly, that to call science Eurocentric is to not recognize the contributions from many other cultures."
},
{
"end_time": 2442.466,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2420.162,
"text": " Yeah, I was echoing your language a little bit there. The fact is that a bunch of old white European men dominated science for quite some time and there's still that influence in some of the institutions of science."
},
{
"end_time": 2473.012,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2443.012,
"text": " Henson Shaving is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover. And now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. So here's a personal story. I gave the razor to Sam who's working behind the scenes here at the Toll Podcast. I didn't tell him who it was from. I just said, do you need a razor? He said, sure. Then I asked him, hey, how was that razor the next couple of days later? He's like, Kurt, that is the best razor I have ever used."
},
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"end_time": 2501.049,
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"text": " And then I said, by the way, that's a sponsor, Henson. And he said, that is fantastic. And he looked it up and they're an aerospace engineering company. So that's an aside story. That's a true story. It's packaged extremely carefully. The handle looks beautiful. The assembly takes 10 seconds. And the blade is as precise as I've ever seen in a commercial razor. By using aerospace grade CNC machines, Henson makes metal razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair."
},
{
"end_time": 2511.971,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2501.049,
"text": " That means it's a secure and stable blade with no vibrations. So the razor has built-in channels and it evacuates hair and cream which makes clogging virtually impossible. You blow it out and it's cleared."
},
{
"end_time": 2540.828,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2512.517,
"text": " That's what she said. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business. So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence. And it's extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free."
},
{
"end_time": 2568.643,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2541.084,
"text": " Just make sure to add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Curious if you think a theory of everything exists. Firstly, secondly, if we could know it. So that presumes that there exists one. Yeah, well, so, uh, so,"
},
{
"end_time": 2599.172,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2569.667,
"text": " It depends what you mean by a theory of everything, I guess. Is there a single equation that drives all of reality and that knowing the equation would be enough to make a new universe if you could implement it? I really don't know the answer. It's possible. I am"
},
{
"end_time": 2627.722,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2599.804,
"text": " less and less inclined to get behind the idea that there is a single most fundamental description that can be wrapped up in a way that a human brain can comprehend. I was talking about the idea that we necessarily"
},
{
"end_time": 2657.739,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2628.063,
"text": " only see a subset of reality and only model a set of reality in the world that we walk through, that we inhabit our own subjective experience and the network of relationships that we think govern the world, both in our own mental constructions of the world, but also in each separate academic field. These are slices"
},
{
"end_time": 2687.056,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2658.336,
"text": " and we see that that these regularities emerge from whatever's really there and in in very particular ways we can capture those regularities and turn them into an academic field or whatever and so what physics has said is that all right this is what we've been doing for all of the history of you know human inquiry is trying to"
},
{
"end_time": 2712.193,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2687.585,
"text": " find these different ways to slice reality into different networks of relationships. We think that all of it emerges from a single most fundamental rule, essentially. And that might be true, but I don't think it's clear that it's true. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2736.664,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2713.2,
"text": " You know, that might be one of the biases we've trained ourselves to believe that that might be the case. But, you know, there's even some emerging ideas that really put to question the notion of what fundamental really means. For instance? So, you know, the"
},
{
"end_time": 2763.763,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2737.841,
"text": " The reductionist philosophy that we can first physically seek smaller and smaller elements of reality, then seek deeper levels of causation until we find the bottom. We know it should be ultimately the most simple, ideally. So"
},
{
"end_time": 2787.295,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2765.162,
"text": " There are cases where it's not true that the most simplest description of reality is the most fundamental. OK, so if you want to model, say, fluid flow, please use Bernoulli's equation rather than quantum field theory, even though in principle you could use the latter. The latter is in principle more fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 2813.882,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2787.517,
"text": " So these regularities arise and prove simpler than their substrates, the rules governing the substrates if you wanted to do a particular calculation in them. So as you go up in size scale or in other scales also, complexity scale, you see things simplify and then un-simplify. But in a way,"
},
{
"end_time": 2841.288,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2814.224,
"text": " That means that these, what we would call these layers of, say, emergent complexity are not in any way predictable from the lower layers. So Stephen Wolfram talks about the idea of computational irreducibility. OK, there are things about the universe that you can't predict without literally running the universe, and that includes some of the"
},
{
"end_time": 2871.425,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2841.92,
"text": " incredibly beautiful and regular patterns that emerge that, you know, for example, fluid flow or life that you could never predict by looking at a quark. So, so that's the first point that that the I guess what what was this"
},
{
"end_time": 2895.674,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2872.142,
"text": " You might call this Newtonian paradigm where once you know how all the little billiard balls are moving around, you can predict the universe is only sort of true, but in a meaningful way, it's not true. There are examples like, all right, so let's dig down to"
},
{
"end_time": 2924.36,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2896.578,
"text": " something closer to the fundamental. Let's get into physics, highly speculative physics. So like take the ADS-CFT correspondence, right? So the holographic principle. So this is the idea that, well, let me give you the sort of popular media view. And the idea is that our universe could be a hologram"
},
{
"end_time": 2954.377,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2924.991,
"text": " that's projected inwards from something happening on the 2D surface of the boundary and therefore our universe is an illusion and it's that surface out there that's real and it's more complicated than that obviously the number of dimensions and the curvature of the interior but anyway the idea is usually presented is that"
},
{
"end_time": 2983.951,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2954.616,
"text": " that we are a hologram and whatever is real is out there. That's absolutely not what ADS-CFT is saying. What it's saying is that in what we call the bulk, which is the volume, which in this case would be our universe, it's explained by a gravitational theory, general relativity. And the surface is explained by a field theory, a conformal field theory. And it's not that"
},
{
"end_time": 3009.241,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2984.787,
"text": " one causes the other. What ADS-CFT is saying is that they are dual to each other, so they are called a duality. They're equivalent descriptions of exactly the same thing, and neither is more fundamental than the other. That to me is part of the problem of the common purveyors of science trying to mystify the public by saying that the universe is unreal and is holographic."
},
{
"end_time": 3036.032,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3009.497,
"text": " Well, you just said there's a duality. What makes you think that the boundary is more fundamental than the bulk space? You can't say that one is more than the other if there's a dual. Exactly right. And sometimes one does look more real. For example, I mean, ADS-CFT is a hugely useful paradigm, even if it may not apply directly to our universe, because it's much easier to do computations"
},
{
"end_time": 3056.169,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3036.51,
"text": " In one of these representations than the other in some cases, and in other cases, the other representation is the one that's tractable. Okay, so in the the strong interaction limit of one where you can't do"
},
{
"end_time": 3086.834,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3056.834,
"text": " calculations. You can't use, for example, perturbation theory to do calculations like inside a black hole. On the other side, in this case, if you have a black hole in the bulk in our universe, then its representation on its surface is some weakly interacting structure that you can do computations with. OK, and so neither is more fundamental. Just sometimes one is useful and sometimes the other is useful."
},
{
"end_time": 3105.606,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3087.312,
"text": " And this isn't this isn't a fringe example. It's just a cool example, but these dualities, which is not the sense of duality or dualism in philosophy at all. It means that the two seemingly different descriptions"
},
{
"end_time": 3135.691,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3106.391,
"text": " like wildly, even contradictorily, different descriptions represent the same thing. Two different stories describe the same thing. So string theory is rife with dualities, like at the limit of the energy scales, we see elementary strings and emergent strings sort of morph into each other. But also in more accepted physics, like in quantum mechanics, the idea of complementarity is a duality."
},
{
"end_time": 3165.52,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3136.323,
"text": " so you know usually encapsulated or summarized in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle but the idea that we can represent all of matter as either a linear combination of quantum fields in position space or their vibrational modes in position space okay and that's a representation of the universe or equally equivalently we can do the same thing in momentum space and"
},
{
"end_time": 3195.435,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3166.305,
"text": " They're very different stories about what the world looks like, but they're equivalent. And no one would argue that one is more fundamental than the other. Well, there are some people who, again, on the more esoteric end, who like to emphasize that it's all vibrations and it's all waves. Yeah, you can Fourier transform. So you can make it discrete again. Yeah, exactly. And then let's not even get started on"
},
{
"end_time": 3222.142,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3195.913,
"text": " S matrix or the amplitude hedron which are ways to describe the interactions between particles which don't even require space and time and waves and fall out in which you can summarize pages and pages of calculation with a few lines of calculation which implies that these things should be more fundamental."
},
{
"end_time": 3250.418,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3222.278,
"text": " But I don't think that's clear. I think that their stories about what's happening that have incredible mathematical utility, what they are as a regularity that we've discovered. You sound like Bernardo Castro. Have you watched much of his talks or his podcasts? I think I watched your interview with Bernardo, actually. I think I agree with some of what he says and I disagree with some others."
},
{
"end_time": 3279.77,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3250.896,
"text": " What are the agreements that you think are seen as controversial? So I like his characterization of minds as dissociative boundaries or agents in dissociative boundaries. So my understanding is that Bernardo rates consciousness as the most fundamental"
},
{
"end_time": 3309.889,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3280.469,
"text": " And so you talk about the universe as this thing made of consciousness, and then consciousness arises in the universe. And so the idea of dissociative boundaries is that if you had your own internal dissociative boundaries, you could maybe have something like a split personality, or you wouldn't remember things that you'd done and things like that."
},
{
"end_time": 3337.261,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3310.265,
"text": " It's a nice characterization. What I don't buy is that baseline statement that the fundamental element of the universe is consciousness. I don't see why it's needed and I don't think there's a good justification. Yeah, we could go further."
},
{
"end_time": 3365.128,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3338.097,
"text": " You want to go further as to your disagreements or your agreements or something else? Okay, well, just in the context of what we're discussing. So I think, you know, we're talking about these dual descriptions of the world. So, you know, I would say that our minds are a"
},
{
"end_time": 3390.913,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3367.654,
"text": " like a dynamical causal system. Okay, so something describable with a set of dynamics, dynamics of, you know, thoughts basically, okay, that that that cause and influence each other and you could and you know, the the field of psychology, you could imagine as"
},
{
"end_time": 3419.258,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3391.203,
"text": " An extremely early version of some field where you came up with the the internal dynamics of the mind. OK, but but still. So so if you describe the mind as this dynamical system where there's. Like genuine causal power. In within that system defined within that system, then"
},
{
"end_time": 3448.063,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3420.879,
"text": " then the the dual to that would be a you know our brains where you have this dynamics of neurons and action potentials okay and so um so i so you know my my uh feeling on the matter is that that well i can't believe i'm saying what i think consciousness is but because i'm i'm horribly unqualified but but i but"
},
{
"end_time": 3473.575,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3448.575,
"text": " Who's qualified? Yeah, right. Anyone with it. So let's go. So either feeling that, and plenty of people have said this before, that consciousness is what a type of information flow feels like. More particularly, I think it's what a type of"
},
{
"end_time": 3491.169,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3473.968,
"text": " data structure feels like when it tells itself a story about itself. Yeah. Do you see a circularity there? Because we're defining consciousness in terms of so-and-so-and-so feels like and then the question is, well, what does it feel? Right, right. So the hard problem, let's"
},
{
"end_time": 3518.012,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3491.51,
"text": " Let's solve it. I have someone, by the way, who's premiering in two hours from now, named Terence Deacon. He believes he's solved the heart problem. Several people believe they've solved the heart problem, and usually it means that they have a completely different ontology. I'm looking forward to watching it. You know Terence Deacon? Have you heard of him? His name's familiar, but no. He's a linguist. Well, he's a neuroanthropologist, and he studied under Chomsky."
},
{
"end_time": 3540.725,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3518.234,
"text": " He says he disagrees with Chomsky about everything except politics. He's extremely, extremely bright and has an extreme, what I call a Weltanschaung. It's an all-encompassing worldview such that it's a framework through which you interpret the world. So it's more than simply a worldview. It's this philosophy that you have such that you can pose virtually any question to someone. Someone who has a Weltanschaung is someone like,"
},
{
"end_time": 3567.159,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3541.152,
"text": " That can be a useful thing, but don't you think in a way it is being stuck in part of the landscape? Maybe a very useful part of the landscape. So right, you mentioned it's extremely useful. Yes. So when you don't have one, at least for myself,"
},
{
"end_time": 3596.51,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3567.534,
"text": " It's a destabilizing place to be. You're in constant, you're tentative, you're rudderless. But you're also not kidding yourself. Well, I don't know. I don't know because then that depends on, so does our model of reality create reality? So it doesn't mean that if you have a model, it just is. So there's something called phenomenology. So my thought is that I think it's clear that"
},
{
"end_time": 3620.828,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3596.954,
"text": " At some level, information that is undergoing a certain dynamics itself, it feels like something. And I think it is maybe enough for that data structure to inspect itself, keep a story of itself,"
},
{
"end_time": 3650.026,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3621.357,
"text": " you know, as it, as it computes its way to its next state and its next state and at neck and its next state, it, it has, it has this self monitoring capability, uh, and, and ends up telling itself that it's conscious. Okay. Because it, it, it inspects its own inspection of itself, uh, at infinite. Um, and so, so if, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3681.118,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3651.288,
"text": " If information can be conscious in some way and the universe is in at least some sense informational, it can be thought to encode information. Any particle encodes some type of information, even if it's only about its own existence, then you can imagine this spectrum of consciousness. And so Bernardo's sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 3710.452,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3682.585,
"text": " The version of panpsychism is one in which he says that the consciousness is the most fundamental element, not the material. I think you can be a panpsychist and not say that. Back to our discussion of dualities,"
},
{
"end_time": 3740.623,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3711.067,
"text": " You can have two completely different stories about the world and completely different mathematical frameworks for describing its dynamics, but they are ultimately describing the same thing. And I think that's the case with consciousness. I think you can take, for example, a conscious human mind, which"
},
{
"end_time": 3770.128,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3740.879,
"text": " We can't argue has it has consciousness and you start taking things away. You scale down its ability to tell stories about itself, to self-inspect. OK, you can, for example, go on a meditation retreat and learn to be purely in the moment and only aware. And you can learn to suppress all of the chatter, all of the internal dialogue. You can suppress all cognition"
},
{
"end_time": 3795.265,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3770.316,
"text": " you know, essentially periods to a point where you are only perceiving. Okay. So you, you still have a qualia, but you're not telling yourself a story about that, about that. You're just, you're essentially just being the data structure that your brain has assembled about the outside world without, without analyzing it. Okay. So, you know, this,"
},
{
"end_time": 3821.596,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3795.845,
"text": " It's clear that our subjective worlds are informational. All of this is decoded. Is there anything special about that information structure that suggests the output of your visual cortex, et cetera, et cetera, that presents you this image of the visual world? Is that data structure conscious?"
},
{
"end_time": 3850.606,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3822.09,
"text": " or that data structure plus your attention module. So you can really pair things down so that you only have the minimum amount that you can possibly have and still be a person and it seems that that is still conscious. So what's the difference then to the data structure that represents your"
},
{
"end_time": 3879.701,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3851.305,
"text": " the subjective world that your brain assembled and a data structure that contains similar information that's not in a person. Well, the difference is that it's not constantly telling itself a story about what it sees and it has no memory. Imagine, for example, that the entire universe was conscious and was aware of itself. It told, oh, that was a star that exploded. I just made a galaxy"
},
{
"end_time": 3908.831,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3880.299,
"text": " But then you take away that story and it just is the data structure of all this stuff. What will be the difference between it just being matter, unconscious matter and this completely memoryless, conscious thing? And my argument is that there's no difference. And the thing that has no memory or capacity to self-inspect"
},
{
"end_time": 3936.22,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3909.428,
"text": " isn't really conscious, but that at least gives you a way to have a spectrum of consciousness. Like as soon as something starts to have both a model of the world and can tell itself a story about its model of the world, then it can start telling itself it's conscious. And by the way, that's not an illusion. The whole idea that consciousness is an illusion, I think, is as bad a fallacy to saying that the"
},
{
"end_time": 3962.637,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3936.886,
"text": " you know, the holographic principle bulk is an illusion and the boundary is not. In that case where the universe is conscious and it's not conscious of anything, you're saying that it's as if there's two states of consciousness, one that's about something and then one that is just conscious, pure consciousness, and that's something that you can access when you're in meditation? Well, I feel like, you know, consciousness, I think,"
},
{
"end_time": 3991.254,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3965.538,
"text": " I think it's a poorly defined concept. It really emerges when we get to start telling ourselves that we have it. We can observe our own consciousness because we literally are part of the data structure that this consciousness is. It's not like we're"
},
{
"end_time": 4022.227,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3992.312,
"text": " a separate, you know, homonculus observing the the data structure that our brains synthesize. We are that data structure. OK, we that literally is what we are. And inside that data structure, there's a model of ourselves. OK, which we can also inspect. And so I think consciousness is just it is in this sense an emergent phenomenon."
},
{
"end_time": 4052.449,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4023.131,
"text": " But there's no very hard line, I think, for when it emerges. I started all this saying I'm no expert and then gave you super long treaties as though I know anything. But this is the picture that feels the least contradictory to me. So then in this view, is there such a thing as free will?"
},
{
"end_time": 4081.596,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4054.514,
"text": " In this view, yes. Correct my misunderstanding. The way that I understand it is that there are some atoms moving around and occasionally that is something we call information processing. That information processing is much like there's a lamp right here that is casting onto the wall. That wall is now the feeling of consciousness. That is the effect and something is happening here. Now that wall doesn't cause anything with this light. The light will move around."
},
{
"end_time": 4107.039,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4082.056,
"text": " Right now it's stationary, but the light can change colors, it can get brighter, it can get smashed on the ground, and that wall would change. But I wouldn't say that that wall has any causal influence on that. So that's what I mean when I say that it sounds like there is no free will in what has just been outlined. So please correct my misunderstanding. Okay, so let's try to talk about free will. So first of all,"
},
{
"end_time": 4133.029,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4107.688,
"text": " So Baha, my partner, she's a science journalist and has written a lot about these topics. I encourage you to check out her article in the Atlantic, which debunks some nonsense on the topic. But she always reminds me to think about these things in the context of their historical development."
},
{
"end_time": 4158.695,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4133.746,
"text": " So pre-enlightenment, there was this idea that free will and meaning and mind were inextricably attached to notions like God and the immortal soul. OK, so when when those ideas started to be questioned was the same time that the materialist paradigm arose. So the Newtonian worldview of, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4179.582,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4160.299,
"text": " Atoms bouncing around in the void, perfectly predictable clockwork. So at the same time that we discarded or started to discard the spiritual and in that gap we inserted this sort of very first and perhaps naive mechanistic determinism"
},
{
"end_time": 4208.609,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4180.435,
"text": " notions like free will which were conjoined with God and the soul got thrown out with the bathwater and were replaced by the idea that these things are epiphenomena of a call mechanistic universe. So that's one gripe. What it is, it's a gripe with the"
},
{
"end_time": 4237.722,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4209.036,
"text": " What I think is an oversimplification of the approach to thinking about free will, but all other things related to the mind also. So let me explain why my view doesn't suggest that free will is an illusion. And so what does it mean? Free will means that your choices are your own."
},
{
"end_time": 4264.292,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4237.927,
"text": " They're not forced on you by something else. And for any choice you make, you could have chosen otherwise. And the standard argument is that your choices are not yours because they're determined by the particles that you're made of. You couldn't have chosen otherwise. So this is the argument that you hear. I won't mention any names."
},
{
"end_time": 4289.974,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4264.974,
"text": " So you couldn't have chosen otherwise because the whatever the exact position and velocity of all of your subatomic particles set and had to evolve according to the laws of physics, or that, you know, if that, you know, if those particles have some fundamental randomness, then the randomness is still not free will. Okay, so that's the argument. And"
},
{
"end_time": 4320.384,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4290.435,
"text": " First of all, let me say that that, you know, that picture of physics is, you know, it's right in the sense. OK, so I. I believe that that. Subatomic particles evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, et cetera, and the subatomic particles have no idea that they're in a brain or that they're part of a choice or they represent a data structure that's part of that data structure feels as part of a choice."
},
{
"end_time": 4344.855,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4321.374,
"text": " But the problem with this reductionist argument is that it's messing up its definitions, and in particular its definitions of causality. So if we think about the world as having these kind of layers of complexity, okay, you have"
},
{
"end_time": 4375.794,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4346.22,
"text": " physics driving the atoms and chemistry driving the molecules and biology driving the cells then you could you could say something like so if you want to talk about causality here in terms of the hierarchies of of emergence then you could say that that quarks and electrons cause atoms atoms cause molecules cause cells cells cause apples and brains and brains cause minds right but this is"
},
{
"end_time": 4405.862,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4376.101,
"text": " a type of causation and it's like this cross hierarchical causation. But I would argue that there's a real fundamental difference between that type of causation to what you might call an intra hierarchical causation that defines the dynamics within a given layer. Can you give me an example? All right. So you can say that there's this causal power whereby"
},
{
"end_time": 4432.739,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4406.288,
"text": " a cell is or a neuron is caused by the molecules that it's formed of. It is an epiphenomenon of those molecules, which in turn are epiphenomena of their atoms, etc. But it's also entirely meaningful to say that an action potential in a neuron causes a downstream neuron to fire."
},
{
"end_time": 4462.551,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4433.524,
"text": " Right. So that's, that's a reasonable statement. Okay. And you're on fires, one that's attached to fires and you can, you can, and it makes total sense. And in a real sense, it's true to say that the first neuron caused the firing of the second. It's less useful to say that like the wiggle of a quantum string on the Planck scale caused a downstream neuron to fire, even if the"
},
{
"end_time": 4491.647,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4464.206,
"text": " even if the quantum string is the, let's call it the hierarchical cause of one of the electrons in the first action potential. That's like a roundabout and relatively inane approach to talking about causation. So there's this kind of bottom up causation in which different levels in the scale of physical scale or complexity scale are"
},
{
"end_time": 4520.043,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4493.319,
"text": " generated by the lower layers, but there's a different type of causation within the layer. And within each of these hierarchical layers, you have a dynamics that is, in a sense, independent of the layer below that generated it. So you can"
},
{
"end_time": 4547.056,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4520.452,
"text": " I mentioned Bernoulli's equation, fluid flow. So you have this whole field of hydrodynamics, which is beautiful. And in a sense, it's causally closed, like you can predict anything about the behavior of fluids using these rules. And it does matter what the properties of the particles in that layer are. And those properties of those particles"
},
{
"end_time": 4573.831,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4547.517,
"text": " are generated by the layer below, but once you know the properties of those particles, you don't care about the detailed physics of the level below. You are in that layer and the rules of that layer are, in a sense, closed and independent. So brains have a dynamics of neural activity. It's a physical system. They behave"
},
{
"end_time": 4599.923,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4575.35,
"text": " like some type of neural network, we can even simulate it. Okay, current neural networks miss an awful lot, but in principle, we'd be able to run the dynamics of the brain with a different substrate. We can run them, we could run, we one day probably will be able to run these in silico and that dynamical system, the system of"
},
{
"end_time": 4628.268,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4601.135,
"text": " of neural activity will be independent of the substrate once we figure out what that dynamics is. I don't know if you realize we say such controversial statements at saying in principle. So for instance, you say, in principle, we could simulate the brain substrate independence. Who knows? I mean, well, that's like a huge open. I'm going to grapple over the expression in principle, I think, because"
},
{
"end_time": 4658.234,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4628.268,
"text": " I'm happy to put myself out there. I think we will be able to simulate the brain, but it might be a really long time away because there's so much that goes on. The point is that once we figure out those dynamics, it'll be independent of the substrate, silicon or meat."
},
{
"end_time": 4687.568,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4658.626,
"text": " In the case, maybe we can agree that the dynamics within a layer are their own thing. And the idea of cause within one of those layers is different to the cause that generates one layer from the layer below it. I see what you're saying. OK. OK, so you have this dynamics of cause and effect in"
},
{
"end_time": 4708.148,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4687.944,
"text": " In biology or in an ecological system, it's true that reintroducing wolves to the Yellowstone National Park caused the deer population to become under control. That's a totally meaningful statement and it would be absurd to try to do the same thing with quarks."
},
{
"end_time": 4735.947,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4709.326,
"text": " So you have these dynamical systems and the cause in that sense is like we should have a different word for it. So we're mixing our definitions of the intrasystem versus the intersystem causation. So we're still not at free will yet. So our conscious experience"
},
{
"end_time": 4764.872,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4736.886,
"text": " may be emergent from the actions of our neurons. It probably is in some sense. But in another sense, it is dual to our, the actions of our neurons. Okay. So the, the, our neurons have a dynamics, which, you know, you can at some level explain their behavior, but the,"
},
{
"end_time": 4791.886,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4767.142,
"text": " And they generate this pattern of information that tells a story about itself, etc. And so in a way, our minds or the description of our minds is just another way of casting new dynamics that is essentially a duality. It is a dual to that system."
},
{
"end_time": 4818.166,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4792.244,
"text": " But in a way, you could argue that it's more fundamental, right? So if in the broadest sense, our minds are the result of a computation, then then our minds are also a dynamical system, independent of the substrate. So a set of elements, in this case, thoughts linked by a set of rules. And, you know, and"
},
{
"end_time": 4847.21,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4818.439,
"text": " and thought of symbolic representations. And so you can come up with a language that manipulates the symbolic representations and tell stories with them. OK, that's, you know, in a sense, kind of what a mind is and a bunch of other stuff. OK, so in a sense, psychology is the science of understanding the dynamics of that system. And it's to some extent mappable, maybe never completely."
},
{
"end_time": 4869.531,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4848.336,
"text": " but you could write down the dynamics of the mind without referencing neurons, just as you could write down the dynamics of the neurons without referencing electrons. And the reason I said that, in a sense, the way of looking at neural dynamics, which is the"
},
{
"end_time": 4898.592,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4870.23,
"text": " the dual of it, which is the subjective experience, is more predictively powerful than the neural dynamics themselves. And in some way of looking at it, that's more fundamental. There are things you can predict about what a brain will do and how an organism will behave that you could only get by looking at the"
},
{
"end_time": 4927.363,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4899.258,
"text": " the thought dynamics, like the mental dynamics, and you could never get by trying to look at a few neurons and guess what they're going to do. Okay, so is this not a difference between what we can do and what is? I don't think so. So. All right, so. So we so first of all, let's, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4957.585,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4929.104,
"text": " would have been in the idea that the mind is this, its own dynamical system, potentially independent of its substrate. And understanding the dynamics of the mind is better than understanding the dynamics of neurons for many, many things. But does that mean that, like you said, is the mind"
},
{
"end_time": 4979.138,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4958.37,
"text": " Is this just our impression that we can't do this? We can't, for example, predict someone else's detailed behavior, their inclination to fall in love with particular"
},
{
"end_time": 5005.896,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4979.804,
"text": " types of people based on looking at their neurons or looking at their quarks. Okay. But, okay, so now we get to this idea of in principle. Yeah, okay. That's the title of the podcast. Is it even in principle possible to do so? And I would argue there are also no"
},
{
"end_time": 5035.896,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5006.596,
"text": " It's in principle possible to predict some human behavior by trying to model the physical aspect of the brain. But I don't think it's possible to... So here things get a little bit messy. So you could predict someone's behavior just by knowing them well. Does that mean they have no free will that they couldn't potentially do otherwise? You could predict someone's"
},
{
"end_time": 5065.725,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5036.493,
"text": " Inclination to certain types of behavior by knowing, you know, about any neuropathologies that they might have. Okay. So, so for sure we aren't, uh, you know, the epitome is a free will. We, we often fail to exercise free will or we are predictable, but the idea that free will is an illusion because brains are mechanistic."
},
{
"end_time": 5095.879,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5066.118,
"text": " I think is a little fallacious and and the reason is that so so if a brain because of that dual notion well not not even I think we can go to to physical here like there are physicalish reasons here so so the brain the idea is that that your actions are predetermined and predictable because"
},
{
"end_time": 5125.23,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5096.357,
"text": " They're entirely determined by the configuration of physical matter and so on. But then I want to ask, to whom is the brain predictable and predetermined? To what observer and what reference frame? So if you have any sufficiently complex system, like the brain, the dynamics"
},
{
"end_time": 5150.401,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5126.169,
"text": " are coupled across multiple physical scales. So, for example, an important part of the decision mechanism in the brain is the so-called Bryshark potential, which is just the way the brain"
},
{
"end_time": 5179.445,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5151.186,
"text": " Basically, the correlated noise and brain signal that the brain actually uses as a sort of a tiebreaker in decision making and it partially drives the dynamics in ways that we don't very well understand that all because it's super new that we figured out. Can you repeat the name of the potential? It's the Bryshark potential. It's also called the readiness potential. Okay. Yeah. And you want to look at"
},
{
"end_time": 5209.974,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5180.572,
"text": " Aaron Sherger's work and actually Baha wrote an article on this. I'm just mentioning that because I'm super familiar with it now, but it's just one example of how you have dynamics influence. In complex and even pseudo chaotic systems, you have these dynamics linked across multiple scales of these hierarchies and"
},
{
"end_time": 5236.152,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5210.503,
"text": " In that case, it becomes essentially impossible to predict behavior based on the smallest elements of the substrate, whatever the atoms. Okay, so you have this system that is in"
},
{
"end_time": 5266.664,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5236.852,
"text": " you're partially chaotic. And it's well known that these things can't be predicted by one without without infinite computation. Okay, I think I think this is a manifestation of this computational irreducibility also. Okay, so. Okay, so. So my question is, what observer or what reference frame could predict your actions perfectly by knowing the"
},
{
"end_time": 5294.889,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5267.295,
"text": " exact state of all the quantum fields in your brain. So you could imagine some super advanced alien that could somehow perfectly scan your brain and get that and then run a simulation of your brain at the same time. But even that, I think here, the very nature of quantum mechanics makes that challenging. So"
},
{
"end_time": 5324.718,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5295.623,
"text": " So you literally need to track every bit of quantum information in the most complex systems to make a perfect prediction. So maybe you can make some predictions, but it's not even practically impossible. It's probably even in principle impossible. So you have things like the no cloning theorem, which forbids you from making a perfect copy of quantum information, which is what you would need to do to make a perfect prediction."
},
{
"end_time": 5354.445,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5325.691,
"text": " So I think in a meaningful way it's in principle not possible for any possible observer to perfectly predict your choice. It is possible for impossible observers like Laplace's demon who knows the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe"
},
{
"end_time": 5384.548,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5355.077,
"text": " So from the perspective of Laplace's demon, you have no free will, but Laplace's demon is a mythical entity. And like other mythical entities, I don't think we should rate something an illusion because a mythical entity could in principle predict your behavior. So there's this guy named David Walpart. I don't know if you know him, but he's in Santa Barbara, I believe."
},
{
"end_time": 5412.534,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5384.804,
"text": " and he has the limits on inference machines, which says that even Laplace's demon in Newtonian mechanics can't exist. I agree that Laplace's demon cannot exist. I think even relativity forbids Laplace's demon because there's a limit to how quickly it could. Anyway, this is another topic. So, long story short, I think free will is"
},
{
"end_time": 5443.063,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5413.609,
"text": " Real in a meaningful sense, like going down the definition of real is like a whole other podcast, but free will is real in a meaningful sense because choice is a fundamental, dynamical component in a particular dynamical system whose behavior is independent of its substrate and whose behavior is not fully predictable in the context of its substrates by"
},
{
"end_time": 5465.333,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5444.053,
"text": " mapping at substrates in a way that is possible for any entity that could exist. But if you choose to not believe in free will, then at least you have that choice. Yeah. Okay, great. Man, there's so much that we can talk about."
},
{
"end_time": 5488.183,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5465.776,
"text": " Okay, how about instead of delving more deeply into, I'll just tell you the one thought, I'll just tell you one of the thoughts. Why is this notion of to who important? For instance, we can say there is a computer here. We consider that to be an objective fact. We don't say this computer is here to who, unless you are someone who believes that the observer creates the reality. So let's"
},
{
"end_time": 5516.937,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5488.797,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from his school? I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us."
},
{
"end_time": 5546.852,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5517.415,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, we live in a relative universe. Particles have a relative existence, you know. Hawking radiation."
},
{
"end_time": 5576.135,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5547.619,
"text": " only exists if you're a certain distance away from a black hole. Unruh radiation only exists if you're accelerating. So I mean, there is a sense in which the frame of reference is critical. And for like non-noisy. So there's something noisy about the radiation and the Unruh."
},
{
"end_time": 5605.384,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5576.698,
"text": " I think maybe I do, I don't know, but there is something non-trivial about the relativity of existence in terms of matter, for sure. This is something I don't think we've properly wrapped our heads around. Maybe it's as confusing as the measurement problem, the idea that"
},
{
"end_time": 5634.821,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5606.561,
"text": " The universe can look, can and does look radically different depending on your frame of reference. Um, and the only thing that is consistent is the self consistency of the universe itself. Like no, no matter what changes, you know, based on a frame of reference, how you choose to make measurements, for example, in"
},
{
"end_time": 5662.892,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5635.213,
"text": " You know, things like a Bell test. These things can radically change what universe you see. The one thing that never changes is that the universe remains self-consistent for all observers. OK. Can you explain what that means? And is that different than the statement that the laws of physics are the same?"
},
{
"end_time": 5691.408,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5664.855,
"text": " So in the case of, well, I mean, the simple case of relativity, let's take the simple case of the twin paradox where, so this is this thought experiment in relativity where a pair of twins, one jumps in a spacecraft and zips off at a large fraction of the speed of light and, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 5722.056,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5692.312,
"text": " Okay, so from the point of view of the traveling twin, they didn't think that their clock was ticking. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 5751.971,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5722.398,
"text": " They you know, they were looking back home and they thought that at home the clock was ticking fast and and from But that no wait on No, I should know this stuff so the the so so so this is a pet this is a So-called power you should go you should watch this PBS space-time The way it works is that that that"
},
{
"end_time": 5779.94,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5752.5,
"text": " When you observe a clock that's traveling at some speed, that clock appears to tick slow. So fast moving objects, the time slows down. So both twins see each other's clock as ticking slow because the spaceship is moving fast. But then for the astronaut twin, Earth appears to be moving backwards quickly because velocity speed is relative."
},
{
"end_time": 5810.179,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5780.606,
"text": " There's no preferred inertial frame of reference. So if it races away, that twins clock seems to slow down. And yet when the twin gets back home after that long trip, the twin who stayed at home, so it has to end up inconsistent, which one aged more than the other. And the answer is that there is an answer that there is a self-consistent answer. When they get home, both of them agree that the twin who stayed home aged more. But how can that work?"
},
{
"end_time": 5835.589,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5810.759,
"text": " Both of them saw the same change in each other's clock. And both of the twins have an answer for that. And their answers are different, but they lead to the same conclusion. The twin who's at home sees the traveling twins clock tick slower and so that the traveling twin ages less."
},
{
"end_time": 5865.384,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5835.964,
"text": " and gets home. Meanwhile, the one at home is waiting and getting older and his twin comes back much younger. Okay, because less time passed. But for the traveling twin, they watch the twin at home and they watch the twin at home's clock tick slower. So in fact, the traveling twin feels themselves aging faster until the moment that they turn around."
},
{
"end_time": 5894.684,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5866.22,
"text": " Okay, so in order to turn around and come home, they have to accelerate. And the other thing that Einstein's relativity tells us is that if you are deep in a gravitational field, your clock ticks slower. So the amount that that twin has to accelerate in order to return home causes their clock to slow down enough that from their perspective,"
},
{
"end_time": 5922.824,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5895.572,
"text": " the twin who was at home, not only caught up to them, but aged a lot more. Okay. They both have different stories about why they both agree that the traveling twin is younger than the stay at home twin. And so, Kurt, how did we get to this? This was in service of a point."
},
{
"end_time": 5954.241,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5924.548,
"text": " OK, so firstly, I was asking about what does it mean to be self-consistent? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the universe will always conspire to be self-consistent and that observers will ultimately agree. I have so many questions here. That's even the case with particles. Like if you see unre-radiation, I don't know what the solution to this one is."
},
{
"end_time": 5984.172,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5955.52,
"text": " someone else doesn't see unruh radiation but they see yeah it's like if you if you accelerate fast enough then you you'll be incinerated by what what's the equivalent of hawking radiation it's a type of horizon radiation you'll be but someone who is not accelerating doesn't see your unruh particles and yet does see you incinerated"
},
{
"end_time": 6013.183,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5984.906,
"text": " So why does the person who's not accelerating see you incinerated? I think the answer is they see you being incinerated by something else like the drag on the quantum fields or something. I don't recall, but there's a neat answer to it. Like the universe keeps conspiring to give us these neat answers that everyone ultimately is going to agree, even if the universe that they"
},
{
"end_time": 6042.637,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6013.695,
"text": " think they live in looks wildly different to the universe of the next person. The consistency conspires to always be there. And I think there's a mystery there and I don't know what... Okay, so Matt, a couple of questions occurred to me. So one, when we use the word self-consistent to apply to the universe, I mean, why can't we just remove the word self and say the universe is consistent? So that's number one. And then number two, what would it look like if there was inconsistency?"
},
{
"end_time": 6072.056,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6042.944,
"text": " Does it mean that there'd be disagreement between us because there already is disagreement? And then if we're saying no scientific inconsistency, well then science by its nature is intersubjective agreement, which means we've had disagreements, we push them aside. And so it's like saying we agree because I've removed the disagreements. So why do we use the word self-consistent? Secondly, what the heck would it ever look like to be inconsistent? Right. So by self-consistent, I mean internally consistent."
},
{
"end_time": 6093.746,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6072.944,
"text": " Which means that, I mean, you can imagine consistency is inconsistent with someone's beliefs about what the universe should be, but that's not the case. The universe, when, you know, to, for carefully made measurements and it is always, it always obeys its own rules."
},
{
"end_time": 6123.985,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6094.599,
"text": " But the particular rule that it seems to be obeying may be different for one observer or another, but that all observers will obey, will see that the universe obeys its rules, its own rules. So in the example of the twin paradox, the one twin observes the universe obeying the rules of time dilation due to"
},
{
"end_time": 6154.002,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6124.735,
"text": " due to special relativity, and the other observes inviterating the rule of time dilation due to acceleration by the equivalence principle general relativity, at least in one way of framing that paradox. In the case of the Anhu radiation, everyone sees the accelerating person incinerate, okay, and so it's not like one person"
},
{
"end_time": 6175.828,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6155.435,
"text": " Sees them survive in the other person sees them and accelerate it. Okay, so which would lead to a paradox. Okay, so the universe never generates paradoxes it always You will always find that that it has obeyed its own"
},
{
"end_time": 6201.135,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6176.22,
"text": " It's laws of nature. If it doesn't, then it's us who haven't figured out the right laws of nature. But the thing is two observers may see it doing that in different ways. And the original example of this is good old electromagnetism where a moving electric charge generates a magnetic field."
},
{
"end_time": 6228.387,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6201.493,
"text": " But we know that motion is relative. So if you're moving with the electric charge, you should see no magnetic field. But that magnetic field has an effect. It causes other charged particles to move. And so it would be inconsistent if one person saw a moving charged particle generate a magnetic field and the effect of that magnetic field, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6257.108,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6228.865,
"text": " Resulting in the motion of yet more particles and person traveling with the magnetic field sees that sees no such thing. That would be an inconsistency and a paradox in a sense, because there would be an irreconcilable disagreement about their observations. But the reality is that the person traveling with the charge does see a force on the"
},
{
"end_time": 6286.51,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6257.5,
"text": " Surrounding particles, but to them they they would argue that the force was from the electrostatic field, which is the force that that you know the the So so the put the so that that's an example, but but nonetheless the universe has obeyed its own rules It's just the different observers would disagree on which rule which rules that obeyed And and no paradoxes interesting"
},
{
"end_time": 6313.848,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6286.664,
"text": " So that's what I mean by that. What would it look like to be inconsistent? And then also when we say that the world is consistent, like I mentioned, we do have disagreements and there is such a thing as someone seeing something that you did not see, and we generally consider those to be mental illnesses, but I'm sure there exist other cases that are not so extreme, though none come to mind. And in which case would that be an"
},
{
"end_time": 6344.155,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6314.224,
"text": " I mean, ultimately to test consistency, the result from both observers has to come back to one observer. So one observer needs to test the consistency and that consistency check"
},
{
"end_time": 6374.172,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6344.753,
"text": " would be that ultimately all of the incoming information agrees. So in the twin paradox, both of them agree that the stay at home twin aged and the astronaut twin stayed young, but they won't know that until they talk to each other about it. And then each of them independently has"
},
{
"end_time": 6404.838,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6375.026,
"text": " self-consistent model of the world. Oh, my brother returned and is younger to my vision and also tells me that they agree with that assessment. Okay. So, so if your, your, your brother came back and told you that, wait, no, I feel myself as being old and you look young."
},
{
"end_time": 6434.292,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6405.196,
"text": " then that would be an inconsistency. The data that's coming into your head has to line up and it should line up and maybe this is just an axiom of science that the universe is internally consistent or self-consistent and I think it's reasonable to say that it is one of the axioms that we"
},
{
"end_time": 6461.015,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6435.043,
"text": " just have to start with but it is stunning how the the range of circumstances where it demonstrates itself to be correct in ways that you know the number of paradoxes seeming paradoxes that have arisen and have not had a clear solution but infallibly a solution appears."
},
{
"end_time": 6491.647,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6461.783,
"text": " Speaking of consistency, does Gödel's incompleteness theorem have anything to say about physics or the existence of a toe? Yeah, it sure feels like it should, doesn't it? How does it go again? No system of axions. Is it no self-consistent system of axions, no formal language? And prove all of the truths"
},
{
"end_time": 6522.278,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6492.91,
"text": " that it can represent. Yeah, there will always exist at least one truth that's unprovable from the set of axioms if it's consistent and it's strong enough to encode the basic arithmetic that we take for granted. Yeah, I mean, I would say maybe. So I mean, the idea. So let's assume that there is a ground truth to reality, that there is a"
},
{
"end_time": 6551.937,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6523.422,
"text": " a baseline fact about reality that explains why there's something rather than nothing, why it behaves the way it does, et cetera, et cetera. In any formal language that we can come up with, including math, there's no guarantee that"
},
{
"end_time": 6580.52,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6552.756,
"text": " that that that ground truth is is provable, because there are always some that are not. But yeah, I don't see it as a reason to be too despondent. Because if a a truth is not provable in one form or system, then it may be in others. And"
},
{
"end_time": 6609.053,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6582.449,
"text": " Yeah, so I'd say the risk more is that we either that singular ground truth doesn't exist. Okay. So it may really be that there's this sort of relativity of frameworks and there's no singular framework in which we can"
},
{
"end_time": 6638.797,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6610.572,
"text": " express this sort of what people have wanted to find, the idea of this final theory that there's in a sense no ultimate theoretical ground beneath our feet, which is to me both terrifying. It gives me vertigo to think about it. Yeah, I just had some of that as well."
},
{
"end_time": 6668.387,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6638.985,
"text": " It's also cool, man, because then when you think about what we are in such a universe, you know, where it's like where this layer of emergent complexity that's bootstrapped up from nothing. And, you know, it's now to us to explore this crazy phenomenon of reality and try to characterize it"
},
{
"end_time": 6698.114,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6668.814,
"text": " as best we can with no, you know, like the idea there's no ground truth. There's certainly no fundamental meaning in that picture. There's only the meaning that we impose on it. That if you think about humans as explorers, you know, we have broken free from our bounds."
},
{
"end_time": 6728.2,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6698.422,
"text": " On so many levels, and for most of our history, it was physical balance. We explored the world, then we left the world and went to other worlds, well, the Moon. But with our science, we've explored the physical universe to its boundaries. But there's also this other type of exploration that you don't think about. So we kind of live in these day-to-day subjective worlds, which are these"
},
{
"end_time": 6754.172,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6728.558,
"text": " Like these mini games that I sort of talked about, the idea we just try to find the regularities that are convenient enough. And those are imposed on us by evolution too, like where we believe in a world where there's space and time and hierarchies of objects and there are relationships between these things, forces, et cetera, which is just one very selective"
},
{
"end_time": 6782.961,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6754.428,
"text": " way of casting reality but it's also very natural and it's the one that we were born into in the same way we're born in a country but we have broken free from that bound too and we're capable of like literally arbitrary abstraction and exploring all of the ways to frame reality and none of them are better than any other in terms of more fundamental"
},
{
"end_time": 6812.619,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6783.49,
"text": " So we are adrift. And you mentioned this earlier, but it's really a terrifying thing. How do you choose a world view? How do you anchor yourself down and say, right, this is my world view. This is how I'm going to interpret everything and choose my actions. I would say that double down on"
},
{
"end_time": 6841.766,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6813.439,
"text": " the power of this relativity on the power that you have of having cut yourself loose from these, you know, these, the bonds of the framework that you are born into your, your, you know, your, uh, surfer impossibility space. Um, to me, that's actually, uh, something you can put an anchor in. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 6869.872,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6843.933,
"text": " Explain that what you can put an anchor in the fact that you are in the in the so in your in you can take pride in your knowledge in your ability to you know have this meta awareness that that a worldview is at some level an arbitrary choice and"
},
{
"end_time": 6901.664,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6872.432,
"text": " And you can see that there are many possible worldviews and you know, so I'm not saying that I can do this, but I can see that this could be an admirable type of existence is to see these different local minima in the landscape, each one a different belief system and worldview and"
},
{
"end_time": 6931.049,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6902.773,
"text": " idea about what reality is, but knowing the landscapes there and even at some level being free to move is just damn cool, man. I think it's a unique quality of human beings. It's what makes us, I think, true general intelligences"
},
{
"end_time": 6961.971,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6932.381,
"text": " Although we have deep constraints and we have to fight a lot of our inclinations to do one thing over another in many cases, we still have the capability to see all this stuff, to see all of the different frameworks in which the universe can be seen and to in some way explore them."
},
{
"end_time": 6992.91,
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"start_time": 6963.217,
"text": " Is this one of the reasons you started the film? And by the way, your film is called Inventing Reality. So I imagine that several of the themes we talked about will be covered in the film. What was the impetus behind the film?"
},
{
"end_time": 7015.896,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6993.985,
"text": " So Bihar and I were planning to make a show together. So she's a science journalist and I'm an emerging science communicator. And two million subscribers and is emerging, geez."
},
{
"end_time": 7045.862,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 7016.135,
"text": " Well, in terms of my skills, maybe. And so we were planning to make a show, it was going to be called The Reality Show. And it was going to be a riff on reality, reality TV, but really interesting, interesting. Yeah, it was going to be a fun way to look at how people are exploring the nature of reality. And this was this was like five years ago. So when you say you were working on a show, you mean a show like on TV or Netflix or we know it was"
},
{
"end_time": 7074.94,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 7046.186,
"text": " We were brainstorming many things. It was maybe going to be a YouTube show, because that's what I knew. Whatever stuck. And then we got distracted. I got distracted by my research program, and it became possible to do that in space time. Which we can talk about next time when we speak, which is the crisis in cosmology, because there's so much that I would love to know about that. Absolutely."
},
{
"end_time": 7097.244,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 7076.135,
"text": " And so that was something that we have been talking about for a long time and also talking about these questions and speaking into these together. But also on the other side with"
},
{
"end_time": 7124.821,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 7098.2,
"text": " Andrew Cornhaber and Eric Brown, who are the producers of Space Time. We've been talking for a long time about doing something big in terms of reaching a bigger audience and what we would want to say to a bigger audience and how we can just do something, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7153.916,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 7125.299,
"text": " really cool with what we thought was this affordance we uncovered, which is the appetite for depth and some level of authenticity. So these two projects merged into this film, Inventing Reality. And we"
},
{
"end_time": 7178.524,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 7154.633,
"text": " We were very lucky to have a fan of the show, but now a friend offered to match funds up to $400,000, actually. Great. Time to try to crowdfund this. The reason we wanted to do that, the reason we didn't want to"
},
{
"end_time": 7206.92,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7179.326,
"text": " I mean, you know, PBS is awesome, but this kind of had to be something independent because we wanted absolute, absolute creative freedom. They're a great partner for Space Time, but we wanted this one. It had to be absolute creative freedom. And we also realized that the appetite for this could"
},
{
"end_time": 7236.152,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7207.363,
"text": " actually let us fund it. So that's what we're doing. So what's the website? So we have a Indiegogo crowdfunding. Indiegogo, if I was to search inventing reality, it would come up. Sure, hope so. Let me do so right now. Yeah, OK, I see it. I see it. Matt, I'm going to be donating to this."
},
{
"end_time": 7261.988,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7236.596,
"text": " Well, I want to see this made. We're going to do our best. We're one day into the campaign. By the time I guess this video is out, we'll be a little more than that. Let me read some of this, if you don't mind, because this is interesting to the listeners. Are space, time and particles even real? Hey, if you thought Donald Hoffman was allowing your mind to be untrammeled in a positive or negative sense, then"
},
{
"end_time": 7283.524,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7262.705,
"text": " Is reductionism a dead end? Can physics ever hope to find ground truth?"
},
{
"end_time": 7311.101,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7284.872,
"text": " Even in this conversation of there are, there may not be ground truths. Even that statement alone may be a ground truth of sorts. So it's such a tricky statement to make that there are none and that we can say that there are none of a certain class. So that's why I like this phrasing here. There are no physics ever hope to find ground truth. And for people who are fans of the Toll podcast, something I talk about frequently is abi-genosis, which means how do you combine"
},
{
"end_time": 7338.2,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7311.323,
"text": " Basically, science has evolved. It's not the same that it was 300 years ago. So then the question is, what is it evolving to? And can other modes of knowing, quote unquote knowing, be integrated with science? And so I call that in a tongue in cheek manner, abejanosis, which is gnosis of the West and abej, forget the root word of the East. But it's not as if that's the only two, maybe there's four, maybe there's five different ways."
},
{
"end_time": 7359.753,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7338.524,
"text": " of integrating knowledge. Anyway, so if you're interested in that, can physics ever hope to find the ground truth? That'd be interesting to you. What is the role of the observer in quantum mechanics? Okay, that's like a central theme. What did you do, man? Did you just copy all the, did you go to the toe description and create the ideal movie? No, man, we just have the same curiosities because"
},
{
"end_time": 7389.087,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7360.367,
"text": " I know, I'm just kidding around, man. Yeah, exactly. These are the questions. I have a personal question for you. As you start to investigate this further and further, do you find that you're questioning... At first, we're thinking, how do I unify quantum mechanics or quantum field theory with gravity? It's like, okay, that's the most fundamental question. Then you get to ideas of what the heck does it mean to cause? What does it mean to be real? What does it mean to mean? Do you find that that's the case for you? It's paralyzing."
},
{
"end_time": 7419.616,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7389.684,
"text": " I guess you have to power through, of course. Yeah, I think it's important. I mean, the key is once you do that staying on track, you know, you can't follow one line of reasoning and and well, you can follow one line of reasoning and be diverted at every definition. And, you know, this is what makes smart people smart is they're able to construct these these chains of reasoning and, you know, flag their"
},
{
"end_time": 7448.865,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7420.213,
"text": " potential, you know, uncertainties, biases, definitional, definitional uncertainties along the way, and then come back and build, build the edifice of their understanding that it's, it's, it can be really paralyzing for sure. What does mean even mean? I thought that one, but now I will. Here's something that I asked Noam Chomsky. It's a similar question that I asked you."
},
{
"end_time": 7477.995,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7449.189,
"text": " It's that in order to know what something means, do you have to know what it doesn't mean? So in order for you to understand what a cat is, does that mean you have to point out instances of non-cats? He said yes. But then to me, there's something defeating about that. And it's defeating in the sense that he says we don't have a definition of meaning. So how are we supposed to know if something is meaningless without presupposing that you know what meaning is? 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"
},
{
"end_time": 7509.599,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7480.111,
"text": " Yeah, right. I mean, meeting is about a correlation between"
},
{
"end_time": 7538.473,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7510.572,
"text": " two things, and in particular between some informational representation and the thing itself, I suppose. In a simple sense, this word means this animal, and both of them have some informational correlate in your brain."
},
{
"end_time": 7565.964,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7538.626,
"text": " And so it's the pointers between these. Interesting. But I am sure that Noam Chomsky has thought all through this in a lot of detail and means something deeper when he says we don't know what meaning means. I think it's the case that Noam Chomsky, whatever people think about him politically, I think he's absolutely sharp, like a sharp as a thumbtack at 92."
},
{
"end_time": 7595.879,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7566.476,
"text": " Sharper than most people are at their prime, and he's 92 or 93. I was even talking to Terrence Stephen who disagrees. Verified genius, no question. Yeah, so just as an ending statement, there's the hard problem of meaning, at least this is what I call it. There's something called the symbol grounding problem, so you can look this up. It means, how is it that when we say the word pen, we mean pen? How does that word point to a pen? What does the pointing mean?"
},
{
"end_time": 7623.968,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7596.476,
"text": " That's something that yeah, doesn't get much attention. My feeling is so ultimately it has to be to something in your, you know, in your brain or in your conscious experience. And it's really hard to pin down because you know what you have a single neuron whose firing means you've thought of pen. That's that itself is not very meaningful because the neuron is, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7649.94,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7624.77,
"text": " Tentacly lipid layer structure, it doesn't mean pen. So the meaning has to arise in a different way. And I think the only way to me that makes sense is that the representation of pen in your head has its entire existence in"
},
{
"end_time": 7680.64,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7651.032,
"text": " the connection of all of the things that you relate to pen-ness and its function and its shape and all of these have representations elsewhere in your head and it's in the combination of these that you get the notion of the pen. But then you ask for each of those other things like, okay, you need to connect ink"
},
{
"end_time": 7697.619,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7681.049,
"text": " What about ink? How does ink? No, that itself is also this connection of representation. So once you strip away all of those representations, the pen vanishes. There isn't even a"
},
{
"end_time": 7724.718,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7698.473,
"text": " a single neuron left that meant pen that now has no qualities, that there's nothing. And so that's what it feels like, which is, again, an ungrounding notion that meaning only exists in the relationship between the properties that"
},
{
"end_time": 7755.213,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7726.561,
"text": " Yeah, so so that's my now that word ungrounding. Did you would you use that purposefully? Because I called I mean, because I referenced the symbol grounding problem. Or did you just use that word? I didn't mean to copy you, but I know it's not copying me. It's actually the word that is appropriate. And but it's there's also a technical meaning of that word. And the conversation with Terrence Deacon, which is actually premiering in about an hour or so talks specifically about that."
},
{
"end_time": 7785.742,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7755.794,
"text": " As far as I understand, grounding is something physical. And so what's meant by the word pen is ungrounded is that there's nothing that you can see from the symbols of the word pen that grounds it to the word pen, but it has something to do with it being grounded in something physical."
},
{
"end_time": 7815.896,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7786.305,
"text": " Matt, thank you. Thank you so much, man. Listen, Kurt, it was an absolute pleasure. And based on who you've had on this podcast and and the brilliant conversations you've managed to get out of them also, which is no mean feat, it's an honor. So the honor is mine, man. Like I've been watching you for years. I watch you as I go to sleep. That sounds creepy. I watch it before I sleep. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7833.456,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7816.305,
"text": " And I've been doing that for years and I learned from you and perhaps the majority of the audience has plenty to credit to you in terms of their knowledge, so thank you. Well, I was just communicating it, so glad I got some across."
},
{
"end_time": 7854.753,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7833.882,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on 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. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 7881.715,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7854.753,
"text": " It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theories of everything dot org. 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. Every dollar helps far more than you may think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.