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Carlo Rovelli on Consciousness, the Illusion of Time, Loop Quantum Gravity, & Philosophy of Relational Quantum Mechanics
December 17, 2021
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Carlo Rovelli is a world-renowned theoretical physicist and is one of the main developers of loop quantum gravity, the main academic competitor to string theory. Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro. It's rare that I feel such a connection with someone from the get-go
and I hope that you can feel the warmth of the relation between us as well. Today, speaking of relations, we cover the argument that relations are more fundamental than that which is being related. We also cover the only two interpretations of quantum mechanics that are consistent, at least according to Carlo, the nature of time and its ostensible arrow,
as well as how science supervenes on what's decidedly not scientific per se. That is, a largely philosophical conversation. There's only been one book that I've consistently recommended on this channel, and that is Ian McGilchrist's Master and His Emissary, and now I'm adding a second, and that's Carla Rovelli's Order of Time. Links to both of those will be in the description.
For those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics, dedicated to the explication of what are called theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature, provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us.
If you enjoy witnessing and or engaging in real-time conversation with others on the topics of psychology, neurobiology, physics, consciousness, free will, God, and so on, then do visit the Discord and the subreddit. The links for those are in the description.
There's also a link to the Patreon in the description. That is patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reason I'm able to do this full time. It would be near impossible for me to have conversations like this with any fidelity with any depth.
on topics like consciousness, loop quantum gravity, geometric unity that's coming up, string theory, non-neuro-bioelectric manipulation, and so on, if not for the patrons and the sponsors. Thank you, and again, that link is patreon.com slash KurtGymUncle.
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Brilliant's courses explore the laws that shape our world. It elevates math and science from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery. You can even learn group theory, which is what's being referenced when you hear that the standard model is contingent on U1 cross SU2 cross SU3. Those are technically called Lie groups and those are local symmetries.
Yeah, when you asked me, I looked, I decided to watch one and then I said I liked it. Oh, thank you. A physicist I knew, I think.
But I appreciate the width of your questions and the fact that you went through in detail, but in a good middle ground. You seem to know what you were talking about. Yeah, I seem to. I'm great at pretending. So Professor, why don't you explain your relational view, your interpretation of quantum mechanics?
Wonderful. Thank you, Kurt, for having me here. First of all, please don't call me professor. Everybody calls me Carlo. And that's how I feel comfortable with. All right. So relational quantum mechanics is the way I think it's I think it's more interesting to try to understand quantum mechanics. There are, as you know, Kurt, there are a number of interpretations of quantum mechanics out there.
I find them all interesting. I think that none of them is wrong. I think each one is right, but each one has a cost, a price to pay. And the question is, are we ready to pay this price? Is it useful to pay this price to go ahead and better understand the world? And I think the relation quantum mechanics, which I'm going to describe in a moment, also has a price, like everything, a philosophical price.
But I think it's the best price to pace. If we buy that, then we understand the world better. The mystery of quantum mechanics can be expressed in different manners. One way of presenting it is that what the theory gives us is what we see when we look, when we see, when we measure. It gives predictions for measurement.
And that's the way it's formulated in textbooks. Textbook quantum mechanic talks about the observer, we talk about the measurement apparatus, they talk about the outcome of the measurement. Now, this is okay if you want to use it. In fact, a lot of people use quantum mechanic, these terms and very happy period, there's no question after that.
But of course, it's not okay. If we after we realize quantum mechanics 100 years old, after we realize that quantum mechanics is actually the best thing we have for everything, for galaxies, for star for structure, for measuring the universe, for what happened inside the sun. So it's how we want to think about the world at the most fundamental physical level that we have access today. And then
What the hell is an apparatus and an observer doing into that? There are no observers in the sun or in the early universe when star formed. So something is missing, obviously, in the standard textbook presentation of quantum mechanics, which is who is observed? What is a measurement? And one way of saying that is that in the standard presentation of quantum mechanics, there are two
postulates to assumptions, which appear to be contradictory to one another. One is that if you don't look, you have a quantum system. It evolves in a way which is described by the Schrodinger equation or by unitary evolution. Things change. If you look, there is a different postulate, which is a projection postulate, that says that the state does not evolve Schrodinger evolution, but it just jumps
And the visual way of viewing this is that a particle like an electron is described like a wave that satisfies the Schrodinger equation for wave diffuses in space. When you look at it, you see in a point. So the wave collapses in a point. And when does it collapses? When there's a measurement. And when there's a measurement, when observer apparatus measure it.
No observer apparatus inside the Sun. No observer apparatus inside the distant galaxy or in all the cases we use quantum mechanics. So that's the problem. And there are many solutions on the table. Some people think that
It's always waves, so the particle never goes to a point and the reality what happened is that we ourselves are waves and we split in many different copies of ourselves. This is many more interpretation and others. Now the relational and I'll finally come to your question. The relation interpretation is idea that we can make sense of that by simply thinking that what happens between the particle and the observer
The particle and the measurement apparatus is generic and is not because of special property of the server or the measuring apparatus. It's just what happened between any system and any other system in the universe. So every time two systems, we describe the world by splitting it in systems, physical systems, like the sun, like a particle, a molecule, the earth, you, me, these are all systems from the perspective of the system.
Every time two of these interact, so exchange something, one, so to say, measure the other. So if this is a particle, when it interacts with me, the particle collapses in a point, has a position. Okay. But this is not true. This is only true, the particle's position only with respect to this system, not with respect to the rest of the universe.
So if somebody else in the universe, it's later interacting with a particle and this observer here doesn't have to take into account this collapse. So the collapse and the unit revolution are always both two good postulates for describing what happened in the universe. You just refer to different systems.
The ones which are directly interacting, what is relevant is the projective postulate. The ones which are not involved interacting, which still may have an interesting of, you know, computing what's going to happen next in the interaction to them. For them is relevant the unitary evolution postulate. So the
This is it. I mean, this solves completely the quantum mechanical problems because now we know what is a system and now what is an observer. Nothing special. All systems are systems. All systems are observable. And now we know when to use one postulate and the other. The price to pay is that the particle being in a position, it's only relative to the system it has interacted with.
not relevant to something else, with respect to something else is still spread around, still a wave everywhere. So all the variable taking values are always relative, relative to a system. So this means that when we describe the world, we describe the world giving values to variable. I mean, it's microphone is here, that color on the screen is red, you know, the sun is there. These are all variables that
Values, the variable stake, the color, the position, et cetera. These, if you buy the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, they are not absolute properties of a system. They are property of the system with respect to me or with respect to this chair, not me as a human being, me as a physical system. So that's relational. Relational because the suggestion here is don't think at reality.
as systems with properties, rather think at reality as a system that has properties where they interact with something else, only when they interact with something else and relatively to this something else. That's a solution, a possible solution of the quantum mechanic puzzle. The cost of this is accepting
Okay, so firstly, let's remove the word observer and say interaction because observer seems to imply in people's mind, a human being essentially, or something conscious. Okay, exactly. So there's that. And then what I'm wondering is,
Let's say, so I have a bedroom here and I don't know what's going on. Pretend it's much farther away and I haven't interacted with it. Something's going on in that bedroom. Now to those people who are interacting in this bedroom right now, their properties are defined. They've collapsed their wave function in a sense. Okay. That's correct. Let's say they've come up with some value and it says it could be A or B and they've come up with value A for some heads on a coin.
Is there a reason that necessarily if I was to interact with them, that it consistently comes up with the same answer? Or is that not necessarily the case? Good. Yes, there is a reason. But one has
has to be careful in formulating things properly. Namely, let's see exactly what it means. Suppose you yourself measure that property and you found A, and then you interact with them and ask them, hey, what have you seen? Then for sure you would get something consistent.
This is the precise meaning of seeing the same thing. In other words, you can compare what you have seen and what the people in the room have seen by talking to them or by asking them or by measuring them. But this interaction is quantum mechanical.
So this interaction is itself a physical interaction, not outside physics. You cannot go outside the world and somehow cheat physics circumvent and say, oh, physics is not looking. Let me ask you what you've seen. That's you cannot do. That's the point. So yes, there is consistency. And why am I am so careful in saying that?
Because quantum mechanics is tricky. As you know, if you measure the position of a particle and then measure the momentum, you destroy the information about the position. Immediately after you measure the position again, it's not the previous one. So if you measure the momentum, the position is affected. So you have to be careful, because if you ask these people a question, which is like the momentum toward the position, you might be destroying
some of the properties, and it might be therefore neither true nor false that the value is A. Like when you do a double-slit interference, if you measure the interference, you cannot ask anymore which way the particle has gone through, which slit the particle has gone through. So by asking when, there is no answer to the other one.
So the point is that when you compare what two different observables have seen, you have to be careful that there are these interference effects that might create a different, might block the possibility of identifying exactly what the two have seen. So as long as you keep asking questions,
with regard to these relations I've heard you say quite a few times relations are what are more fundamental than the things itself however to me as I'm having a difficult time understanding that because to me a relation presupposes things you can't have
a relation without having things to have a relationship with unless you have a relation between relations and then it just keeps occurring infinitely so so how is one supposed to think of relationships as fundamental see even mathematically the way that i'm thinking about this right now in model theory you have a signature and then relations you need an arity functions like how many are are going to be compared how but and then what is being compared i would call the things
and then the relation needs those things. So help someone as confused as myself understand what is meant by relations are more fundamental than the things. How is it not presupposing things per se? Yeah, well, it depends what you mean by thing. That's a subtlety. Namely, if
We are talking about quantum mechanics, so you're not talking about general philosophical view of words. I'm just saying what this interpretation of quantum mechanics requires us to do. So in this individual quantum mechanics, the basic notions are systems. So I'm not denying
It's not an information that denies that we describe the world in terms of systems. OK, if you want to call a system a thing, that's fine. Those are things. OK, this is a system, a pencil. OK. And then the relation of between systems and things that happen between systems in which pension has a color with respect to me. Now, why is a relation? Because this this
This pen is yellow, but what does it exactly mean that is yellow? Yellow is not a property of the pen by itself. It's a property of the pen that depends on the light that bounces in it, the interaction with the light and the peculiar detectors in my eyes, which do not distinguish many frequency, but do distinguish some frequency. And so in terms of this space of colors, which is not outside the world is in my head.
I call yellow the way this pencil interact with the light and with me. So the being yellow of the pencil, it's really something we only understand if we bring into the picture also the light and me and my brain and the specific three kind of detects of light in my eyes and so on and so forth. Good. So this is an example of a relation. To be yellow, it's a relation sense. Now,
Why I said, well, depending on what you mean by a thing, because if by a thing you mean an entity with a set of properties, okay, this is a pen is here has zero velocities oriented up and down with a point down. It's a certain thickness and a certain mass, a certain weight and a certain position, so on and so forth.
If by thing you mean the system with a given set of properties that it has. Then in relation to quantum mechanics, that is wrong. Because all these properties do not belong to the pen. It belongs to the interaction of the pen and whatever is outside. So in relation to quantum mechanics, there are systems and relation to a system. The properties of a system are all the relations.
But when we describe the world, we're talking about the properties, not talking about the systems. We are saying, well, the moon is there, a position. The position is relational with respect to something else. All properties are relational in quantum mechanics. So it's not that there are only relations in relation to quantum mechanics. It's that systems have no properties unless
Well, forget the system. The systems are just the
intersections, so to say, between relations. And you say this is hard for you to conceive because it's a relation required to think. That's true. But, you know, think of a network, a net, the net of a fisherman. You can say the set of nodes attached by the links, fine, but you can say it's just the links
The nodes come just as a peculiar point where the links are attached to one another. So it's the same with a graph, more abstractly. You can define a graph in two ways. You can say it's a set of points and then relation between the points. I mean, there is a link between two points. That's a relation or not. Or you can say it's a set of links. And then you say who is
which one of the link joined to the other. So you can start from the point of start from the links to think of a graph. And so in that sense, you might want to just view the systems as just nodes of networks. After all, we never see the moon, we see its properties. So our direct contact with the world is through the properties of this object from which we construct the object.
Some philosophers might want to go all that way. I have some sympathy, but I don't think that the relation interpretation of quantum mechanics requires that. Relation interpretation of quantum mechanics is in terms of systems and the relation of properties between the systems. Okay, so you said that we can describe a system or a system of a graph, let's say, in terms of treating the edges as primary or the vertices as primary, and then you can infer. Correct. Okay. Exactly. Is there a reason that
It seems like because they're interchangeable, you could place emphasis on anyone. Why is it that you're choosing or why is it that it's better to place emphasis on the relations rather than the notes, the edges? I think we can do both. I think both are doable as far as quantum mechanics is concerned. I
I think the key point is not their only relations. The key point is that properties are only relation. I see. I see. I see. So how is one is one not supposed to even vision? Like, I'm gonna ask, how's one supposed to visualize this non property laden node? Because as soon as I can visualize, I feel like I've assigned a property to it. So what is meant by this? What's meant by what's being related?
Well, thanks for bringing up the spin networks.
No, I think one thing is the interpretation of quantum mechanics. And the speed network comes from a different story, which is quantum gravity. Now, let's say you have the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is what you're asking about. It's one important point. Quantum mechanics
It's not a theory about the world. It's a collection of theories about the world. There is a quantum mechanics of a particle. There's a quantum mechanics of the standard model. There's a quantum mechanic of gravity, which is quantum gravity. You know, there's a quantum mechanic of the harmonic oscillator. There's a quantum mechanic for the molecule. There's a quantum mechanics of the early universe, quantum mechanics of what happens inside the sun. So quantum mechanics is not a list of things out there in the world.
To have a list of things of the world, you should choose a particular quantum theory, okay? Not quantum theory in general, but one particular quantum theory. So quantum mechanics says, okay, what is quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics says that any theory of the world, okay, can be formulated in this way. There's a non-commutative variable, maybe there's a Hilbert space, there's some mathematics, the structure of the mathematics.
Then you have to say which variables, which Hamiltonian, which things you describe. In that sense, quantum mechanics is like classical mechanics. Classical mechanics is not theory of particles. It's theory of anything, of a pendulum, of particles, of the electric field, of whatever. Then it's just a general framework within which
Then you have to specify your variables, phase space, Lagrangian, the equation of motion, Hamiltonian, whatever. All right. So if you want to know how do we currently describe the world, you shouldn't ask what is quantum mechanics say. You should ask what is in the standard model? What is the generativity? What are the ingredients of the world? So if I do, let's take the simplest case. If I do the quantum mechanic of a particle,
Okay, it's a Schrodinger equation of a single particle. How do I think the system? Well, it's a particle. It's just this particle. And how do I visualize a system exactly the classical way I visualize a particle, there's a particle moving there. And if I do the electromagnetic field, I think the electromagnetic field or many photons. And if I do the standard model, I think all the complexity of the field for the standard model of the particles on the model. Now, the point is,
that let's say on the part of the particle, I visualize the particle. Okay. But I have to remember that this entity, the system, the particle has a position here with respect to me in the moment is interacting with me. I should not think that it always have a position. The position is the way the particle interact with me.
So if I interact with a particle and there's a wall with two holes and I interact again with a particle the other side of the wall, I should not think that the particle always had a position and therefore had to choose one hole or the other. Particle might pass through the two holes because it doesn't have a position while it's not interacting with me.
And when he's interacting with me, it has a position. So that's it. That's the particle that I see. But in that particular moment, not necessarily with respect to you has a position, because with respect to you, it's possible that me and the particle neither have a position. Okay, in your description, we're both in a quantum superposition, different branches of universe whatever. Okay, so we're not supposed to think in terms of is, or at least it's not useful, think in terms of relations, but also at the same time, I remember in your book, you said nature is what it is.
So how am I supposed to mix it? It is nature is what it is. But then let's not think in terms of is, am I just taking that a bit too literally? Well, it is. Do I say nature is what it is? Nature is what it is in the sense that I think we often make a mistake of confusing relationality with subjectivity.
Let me make a simple example. In special relativity or in Galilean relativity, we always say the velocity with respect to one observer.
If I am on the train, the velocity of something, somebody sitting next to me is zero with respect to the observer me. But if you're outside the train, the velocity with respect to you, to another observer is different. Now we use observer there, but of course this has nothing to do with the fact that we human beings, we're thinking, right? You could say the velocity with respect to a lamp.
In quantum mechanics, I think it's similar.
The properties are relational, not with respect to an observer, not with respect to a mind. We don't need mind. We don't need to talk about minds here. We don't want to go to that. We can get there. But I don't think at all that quantum mechanics take us in that direction. It tells us that things are relational, not that things are relative to mind.
Why this is relevant to your question? Because at the light of that, I want to think that I, Carlo, or you Kurt, we're just pieces of nature. We're like tables, chairs from this perspective. Of course, very complicated. We do a lot of stuff that tables and chairs don't do. But as far as physical properties are concerned, we're just physical things. So
We want to know how nature works in general, on the basis of our experience, of course, our limited experience. That's the picture we have about nature. And we want to know how nature works with its interactions, with its relative variables. And that's in the sense that that's a universe with its relational aspects.
So for velocity, we got used to it. Nothing has a velocity by itself. Velocity is just a relational thing. Since I'm an object, I see velocity with respect to me. Fine. I see that something is not moving with respect to me. Something else is, but I don't recognize this as a special point of view. With respect to Jupiter, velocity of everything is different. Okay.
So it's a story about nature as it is not about our own picture of nature. And as always, you know, we learned that we're not special, we make a larger picture of reality, we, we think it works. And that's nature out there.
OK, let me see if I can summarize. So like you said, we take a pen or a cup and ordinarily we can assign its position and its momentum. And you're saying, well, obviously momentum is relative, even position is relative, because that's more immediate. It's two meters away from me, but it's not probably thousands of meters away from you, tens of thousands and so on.
okay now what if there are other aspects of this cup that we think are inherent in the cup so mass the amount of liquid in it the reflective properties and so on what if those are also relational and for any conceivable property it's not saying there is nothing there is no thing behind the cup it's saying that whatever we think of as this thing behind the cup is not what we i don't know if we can even have a model of it because our models are so property laden but whatever it is it's not what we
precisely think you have a book, reality is not what it seems. So reality of this cup is not what it seems. Is that correct? Yeah, it's correct. It's exactly so. Exactly. In fact, one way of seeing is that quantum mechanics idea of understanding quantum mechanics and discovery that we always knew that there are many relational properties out there, velocity is relational. But it's a realization quantum mechanics tell us that all properties are relational.
You know, firstly, I find you to be extremely philosophical and much more so than the average physics professor. I'm curious, do you see that? And well, do you see there? Firstly, is that true? Do you feel that's true? I'm happy you asked this question. And let me answer in this way, depend on what you mean the average physics professor. If you mean
Today's physical professors, the answer is definitely yes. I'm not unique. There are many other like me. I mean, I could name many that are as philosophical be or even more for me. But the very, very large majority of contemporary physics professors are far less philosophical. However, if you look at the past,
Look, I don't know, 100 years ago, in the 20s or 30s of the 20th century. And if you look, just look at the great scientists at the time, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr, de Bourdie, they were far more philosophical than me. They were inspired by philosophy, reading philosophy, talking philosophy, discussing philosophy,
And that includes Newton, includes Boltzmann, includes Maxwell, includes Faraday. So I think that the major advances in science, in physics in the past, but also in other sciences, in biology, Darwin was enormously philosophical. He was a reading philosopher. He was strongly influenced by philosophers. So I think that especially in foundational questions, of course, if you
The more you go to apply to specific system, the less you need. I mean, you do need a philosophical mind also for some some questions in more more less foundational questions. But when you're close to foundational questions, science in the past, in the past, I mean, until the 60s, not the deep past,
has been very close to philosophy questions, influenced by philosophy and talking philosophical terms. I mean, just read Einstein. Einstein, who is champion of theoretical physicists for everybody, I would say, he has read the three main books by Kant before being 16.
He was very, he read Hume, he read Schopenhauer, the philosophical writing of Poincaré, Mach as a philosopher, and it's obvious once you go into what he did that everything he did was very much affected by this philosophical thinking. So I think you're right, I am more
I belong to those scientists who are more philosophical than many others. I think it is a limitation of a part of the research today to be very technical, very mathematical, very shut up and calculating. Yeah, or
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Work in theoretical physics is a map without a territory. I think Max Tegmark, who is a thinker I deeply respect, is one of the most philosophical, even more philosophical than me.
He's a philosopher compared to me. He's a guy who wrote a book claiming that every possible coherent, mathematically described universe is as real as our actual one. That's deep philosophy. It has nothing to do with direct physics in a sense. It's wonderful speculations. Max
I mean, Max has a technical work as an astrophysicist, but has a range of wide, very philosophical speculations. I think we need more people like Max and less people who just do mathematics without really asking what is the reality I'm actually describing here.
Do you see that there's not only a lack of philosophical ideation, but perhaps a resistance to it? Do you see an aversion to it? Or do you just see it as they lack it? There's an absence of it. When I say they, I mean, let's say the average mathematician or physical or physicists. Both, both, both. Let's not forget that Steven Weinberg, who is a great scientist, of course, with major, major results, wrote a book and one of the chapters of the book, the title is Against Philosophy.
And Stephen Hawking, who is a very good physicist, of course, and he had important results, not as good as one of Weinberg, but totally very, very important. It's on the record to say many times philosophy is dead because now we have science that solve all the problems. I wish it was true, but it's wrong. It doesn't solve problems. It has a lot of problems by itself. And so
philosophy is not dead philosophy is constantly interacting with the reason is that science is not about you know you make measurement and then you write an equation and then you check your equation with the measurement if it is wrong for the way you try another one that's not the way science work the science is a constant changing of the conceptual structure you use for describing the world
You rearrange things, right? Call this together, you call this separate, you think differently, use different notions, different concepts. You know, Copernicus, instead of thinking the earth, the sky, the earth, the mountain, the stones, in the sky, the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, he just changed everything. He said, no, no, no, that's not the right distinction. The sun and the planets,
and the satellites and the planet is the earth, the moon. So it's completely different rearrangement of how to organize the world. To be able to be capable of this concept of rearrangements, you have to think what you called philosophical thinking. That's the kind of thing that Einstein did, Heisenberg did, Faraday did, Boltzmann did.
That's not what is done by a lot of theoretical physics. We just think that the only thing you have to do is to write another Lagrangian or to write
another map between Hilbert space and another Hilbert space or a new set of scattering relations and that's sufficient. Is that because they want to play it safe in a sense because when you're just theorizing mathematically it's easy to check where you're right and wrong whereas if you're philosophizing firstly you can delve into pseudoscience and not be aware that you are
And it's much easier to wildly speculate and be incorrect. Is that what's behind it? Like, what is behind the aversion that you see? I think it's cultural. I think it's cultural. I mean, many of my colleagues were raised in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, in a moment in which he became very fashionable to be anti philosophical. This is after the war.
The center of science shifted the part toward the United States from Europe, where it was before. A little bit. It's a success of the incredible success of the physics of the of the 30s, right? 20s, 30s. I mean, the first half of the century. I mean, the discovery of special activity, generativity, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory was spectacular. So good.
that then somehow it made sense to say, well, stop thinking, let's use it. Right. We have all these tools that our forefathers have discovered. I mean, that's good. Let's use it. And on the basis, think what has happened on the basis of quantum mechanics. Boom, you get, you know, nuclear physics, particle physics, from the metal condenser matter, lasers,
all sort of models, just using the equations written down by Heisenberg and company. And on the basis of special relativity, it took a little bit longer for the end of the century. But suddenly, you know, you do relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, black hole, boom, gravitational waves, fantastic, just on on the conceptual ground built in the 20s and 30s.
So the beginning of the century the physicists were so good that then... Hear that sound?
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Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories. People didn't have to think for various decades, just apply, apply, apply, apply. But then you need to stop thinking for a while, you get used to not thinking and you get used to the idea that it's just mathematical complications. So if you're sufficiently mathematically skilled,
If there's an alien, it's him.
Here's a fun question. I'm curious if you've thought much about it. So it's almost a question of definitions.
What is the universe? So one answer is the universe is everything that there is, so there cannot be an outside to the universe by definition. By the way, when I'm talking about definitions, it seems like there's no point in talking about definitions. Definitions themselves are not profound because they're tautologies. However, when I was speaking to Jorah Barnett, and I'm not sure if you know him, he was saying, Kurt, you want me to talk about proofs and theorems? What may be more important are definitions and techniques. So let's not
Let's not demean definitions. So firstly, what is the definition of the what is the definition of the universe? And then where do the laws stand? So are the laws a part of the universe? There are different definitions of the of the universe, which are useful. And it's good not to confuse them, because we can use both of them.
In cosmology, which is a great discipline, which have made very important, had obtained great results in the last decades, the universe is not the totality of things. The universe is the description of what we see around us as the largest scale that we look at it. So that universe is a very small thing.
It's just not looking at the details and what you see if you don't look at the details. But of course, the details is you and I are the details in that picture. That's very useful. It's a very strict definition of universe. And you describe it, you know, with a scale factor that grows in the galaxy density and this kind of things and dark matter and so on and so forth. And that has turned out to be very useful because in fact, we have learned
a credible story of what has happened for 14 billion years in the past. And it's a very credible story. I mean, it's very convincing once you started to say, yeah, good. We have evidence for that. But that's not the universe in the sense that you were asking, right? You were referring to a different definition of universe, which is all there is, so to say, the totality. Yeah, tantamount to reality. Yeah.
the totality of the real things, the totality of realities. I agree that definitions are not are important. Yeah, they're not trivial. They're not trivial. I think in some sense they are but they give extreme insight. Yeah, they're great insight. I mean, think of the example of I talk about Copernicus, right? If you start by definition, you know, of Earth,
and the celestial bodies, you're done. You're killed Copernicus. You have to redefine things. You have to define planets versus stars versus satellite, and then you go ahead. Without this definition, you're lost. It's a very unintuitive definition of planet. Why should I put in the same category
the earth, which I see around me, you know, with the trees, the mountain, the sky, the birds, and this little dot that move out there, which is Venus, there's a completely different things. No, they're not different things. That's the point. You can define them together. Bingo, you understand how the solar system works. So definitions are crucial. Now, the totality of thing, it's a delicate definition.
Because of relational quantum mechanics. So you see, if you buy relational quantum mechanics, you cannot ascribe properties, the totality of things, because all properties are really relative to something else. So there is no there is no properties, the universe has no property. In fact, the universe is
is not a system, because a system is something which can interact with another system to reveal its properties, to manifest its properties. So if you buy a relation quantum mechanics, you only have description of the universe from the inside, so to say. The description of the universe as a whole, you cannot have it. So if you take seriously relation quantum mechanics, and if you take seriously what several philosophers today
Telling us, I think for instance, Janan Ismail is one of them, that careful because every time we look at the universe, we're looking at universe from the inside as being part of the universe, not from the outside. And we often get confused.
Because we take it out of the picture, we think that we can see the totality of things from the outside. And that's wrong. And a lot of confusion about, I don't know, free will, or what is knowledge. It's always thinking that we're outside the universe. That's the universe with its stuff. And we are out there looking at that. That's not true. It's factually not true. So
The universe in the sense of cosmology is fine. It's a perfectly good thing. But the universe in the sense of the totality of thing, it's a notion one should be very careful with, in my opinion. For instance, one should not subscribe properties of the universe. Because how do you what do you mean? This is one reason I don't believe there's a way function of the universe doesn't make any sense.
There are many in principle problems with conceiving of the universe. Well, in principle problems with science apply to the universe as a whole, because in science we're constantly looking at interacting parts within. And so then firstly, how are you supposed to perform an experiment twice on the universe as a whole? The universe is the entirety.
What are the problems of the universe? What else are the problems? The in-principle problems, not just pragmatically, we can't interact with all of the universe. The in-principle problems with conducting science or even thought experiments about the universe as a whole. Yes, I can, but before doing that, let me reiterate the distinction between two different meanings of universe. When the cosmologists
talk about the universe. That's solid science. That observable universe is what is the observable universe. Okay. The universe is a cosmologist. It's what is it? It's the large scale properties of what we see around us. So we look at that universe from the outside, right? We have a telescope with a telescope, we count galaxies.
So the telescope and us is the observer that the galaxies countered the system we're observing. So it's fine. It's perfectly fine. We can see this galaxy. We see how much they're moving apart from us. We can trace back how compressed they were before. We have a system. We can model it. And we're observing these degrees of freedom.
From the outside, in the sense that we are not part of those degrees of freedom. We are spatially inside, but we're observing it from not being one of them. It's like if you were, I'm in this room and I study the air of this room. I can be inside the room, but I'm not there. Okay. So that's fine. On the other hand, the idea of describing the totality of thing, of ascribing a wave function, for instance, to the totality of thing,
which is common. I don't think it's a good idea. Because let's be a little specific, the wave function of an object, the wave function of this pen, it's a way of computing where this pen is going to show up with respect to me next. Right, right. So
When I'm in a laboratory and do some quantum measurement and I use a wave function, the quantum state for predicting what I'm going to see, I'm deducing this wave function from what I saw. I've seen this pen, the spin of this particle in one way goes to some apparatus and I have the
probability of the spin being this way or that way after the pen goes up. That's a typical super simplified calculation. And to do this calculation, I use a quantum wave function of this, of this, of this pen. But what is this quantum wave function is what I know about the pen. And it's a description of what should I expect of the pen to something that regard the pen and me.
It's a relative state. And the person who first has understood that when you use quantum states in quantum mechanics, we always talk about relative state is Everett. In several decades ago, Everett has understood that states are relative states. So the quantum state of an object is always relative to another object. OK, this is a state is a relational thing. And once you understand that, clearly,
the totality of thing does not does not have a quantum state. Because unless you believe there is God, then God think to quantum experiments on the but then God is not part of the universe. You have a sense you lose and go to together don't have a quantum state. Right. So the the the way function of everything of the universe in the sense of everything, I think is not something
that should enter in is not a useful notion in physics. The wave functions are relational notions that connect a system with another system considered observer. Okay, so three thoughts occurred to me, I'm going to say them, and then just so that I don't forget them, and then we can tackle them one by one.
Okay, so number one, you mentioned Everett, and I believe Everett was a proponent of many worlds. I'm not sure about that. So, okay, you nodding your head. So if that's the case, well, if he, in many ways, realized this relative notion of quantum mechanics, the relational notion, so why did he move to many worlds? So that's one, I'm going to say the others so I don't forget them. Number two, when we're speaking, even right now, just with my English language,
It seems incredibly misleading because as soon as I say I look right there I use the word I and you also mentioned as many philosophers come to similar conclusions well what is this I what is behind so soon as you start to analyze any word as soon as I say cup well what is the cup okay you we realize that every everyday language is beguiling so it can't actually describe reality now I'm wondering hmm is there something similar with math
Do you believe that math is somehow exempt from this? That math actually can describe reality? So that's my number two. Don't worry, I've got all these in my head. And the number three was, I didn't hear an answer to whether or not the laws themselves, like the rules of the game, are part of the game. Or in other words, if when one thinks of reality as a whole, is one also supposed to think of
The laws that reality operate by as being a part of reality. So let's get to number one. Why did Everett come to alternate conclusions? Yes. So the first thing you asked is you said Everett is considered the beginning of many world interpretation. That's correct.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor Everett wrote a fantastic paper in which there are a number of ideas. We also have the thesis that Everett wrote when he left physics
So one question might be what he himself actually thought about quantum mechanics, but that's not a very interesting question. What is interesting is not what actually people thought at some time. What is interesting, what can we do with their ideas and their text? And everyone has introduced this notion of relational states, which I think is spectacularly good.
And one way of developing that idea is relational quantum mechanics, namely thinking that properties are all relational. Another way of developing that idea is the many-world interpretation. So if you want from everyone, you can branch off to two possible directions of thinking about quantum theory. The many-world interpretation
It goes the opposite direction than the relation quantum mechanics, even if it has this common idea that properties are relatively, many people will say, to system into branches. The many world idea is contrary, is to take the wave function of the universe seriously and think that this is all there is, this wave function of the universe, this overall super quantum state in which we are sitting
and all the rest has to be sort of extracted from, derived from this wave function of the universe, this wave function of everything, and that's a real stuff. That's sort of the main world interpretation. It's very interesting. I don't like it very much. I think, as I said at the beginning, each interpretation is a cost, and I don't think it's a cost
that is bringing us ahead. Because, you know, if you think, if you take it seriously, the universe is sort of constantly splitting in multiple branches of this big wave function, where you and I are copied millions and millions of times. So you would think that there is the other the other the other copies of known non realized. Yeah,
You might think that way, but there's nothing wrong, but I don't think it's useful. Okay, so then number two was about the limitations of language, and then do you see any similar limitations to the language of mathematics to the degree you can call it a language, as describing the universe? I don't think mathematics alone is sufficient.
I mean, I listen and I read Max Tegmark, but nevertheless, I think that between mathematics and reality, there is a gap. I think mathematics is not out there. Mathematics is a game we play, fantastic game play, super useful that we extract from reality. But I think that if I use case, if I think case by case, the mathematics that describe a pendulum,
okay, which we learn at school when we study, you know, the differential equation of the pendulum, the solution of sine or cosine. It's beautiful mathematics, but it's not the pendulum. Okay. Now you can say, okay, because something is missing in a real pendulum. There's also this, also this, also this, but I think it stays like that. I mean, you refine your model, your mathematical model, but there's a jump between
There's always a jump between mathematics and reality. And when you do, you get to complicated theories like current physical theories, standard model, general relativity. It's even stronger. I mean, these equations need to be interpreted, need to be connected to what we see. And this connection
It's part of the story, and it's even the most interesting part of the story, so to say. It's not sufficient to have questions like that. What does it mean? You have a question, you have all space of solutions. Now, Max Stegman could say, okay, that's reality, that's all the reason we just happen to be into one. But which one? That's the connection to reality. So this means that also mathematics has the same problem that you are describing. I mean, our
Every day language might be inappropriate to describe the world. We have to refine it. We have to invent a new, new world planet, which include the Earth. But the same is true with mathematics. I mean, the fact of writing a big mathematical equations is completely insufficient unless we reinterpret its ingredients and we connect it to the world and to our experience.
So the undeterminacy of language that you were referring to, we have to struggle with or without mathematics equally, and we have to live with it. We should not think that we can, you know, get to the bottom of the story and have a perfectly logical, perfect language description of reality and everything is clarified.
The third question about the laws, which you asked before, I think that what laws are as far as we know
just regularities. So we see phenomena. We think that this is the way nature works. So phenomena are not just with respect to us, phenomena with respect to Saturn. When something hits Saturn, it's hit by a meteorite, like I'm hit by your voice.
The world, this is a fact. It's a mixture of two things, of contingent things that we have no idea how to predict, and predictable things. It's always been like that, right? I don't know who will ring my phone next, but I know that tomorrow the sun will rise, and I know exactly what time it will rise. So there's a part of the world which is incredibly easy to predict,
I mean, if I let this thing fall, I know we'll go down and not up. I can predict it, I can bet off it, and I'm going to win the bet. So there's a huge part of the world which is predictable, and there's a huge part of the world which is unpredictable. So we organize that in our science and physics in particular, and we call the predictable story the laws that we find out. Okay, this is what it is. I mean, we found some regularity, very, very good, very strong regularity, we call the laws. And we
have unpredictable part which we call initial conditions or you know, and determination in quantum mechanics, we give other names to the fact that definitely the laws are not sufficient to describe the world, right? Obviously, because a single law has many solutions. We don't know which one describes the world. As an aside,
You hear people say, well, Copernicus realized that the earth revolves around the sun. Isn't one of the points of general relativity to say that you can actually view it both ways? You can just change the coordinates, the coordinate system technically. Okay. Yeah, you're right. Yes, you're right. You're right. In fact, in fact, if you ask input this way, because I think it's interesting. If you ask the
The question is, is the Earth going around the sun or the sun going around the Earth? Let me put a simpler question. Is the Earth the centre of the universe? Is that a scientific question? Yes, of course, it's a scientific question, right? In fact, jumping out from this idea that the centre of the universe is what allowed us to do Newtonian physics, Kepler, everything. I mean, we understood so much.
But let's ask, let's think about this question. Can it be measured whether the Earth is the center of the universe or not? No. Right. There's no way to measure it. We have no way of thinking what is the center of the universe. It's not something which is directly measurable. And I think this is interesting because it shows that science is not just about measurable things.
Science, as I said before, is about organizing your thinking in some way. So if you organize your thinking as the earth is not moving, everything going around it in some way, you're just messing up your understanding. It's too complicated. You're not getting out of it. But if you start to reorganize things, first it's the sun and then say, oh, no, no, actually, it's not the sun. The sun is also moving. And then you're better again.
There's no center in the universe. There's no preferred reference frame. Some of the properties, some of the other properties. You reorganize your thinking in a better and better ways. And of course, the previous one looked a little bit naive, always. OK, it's not true that the sun is the center and the Earth going around. It's more complicated story like the one you said. It's more correct. So science is not about true or false.
I think me and you think quite alike, and I heard a hint of it when you said that there are different quantum mechanical interpretations, and in some sense, they're each right. Now, that phrase, they're each right.
I'm not driven by promoting peace, even though it seems like I'm ironic. Look, I didn't say they're each right. I said they're each coherent and possible. They're not wrong. Let me explain. So before Copernicus, Earth centered. Copernicus, no, Sun is centered. Einstein, hey, you're both right in some way. Now, I'm curious, as I investigate more philosophy, even religion, just like there was this line in your book about
up and down and it seems to make no sense, it seems contradictory until you view it from another point of view and you see, oh, well, what's up to Australians is down to us Canadians and so on. Okay. Well, I also wonder how much of religion and well, philosophy in general, but let's just take religion. It seems like
The major religions contradict with one another, but are they true contradictions when viewed from another perspective? Is there another one in which you can say, actually, that's right in some way, that's right in some other way, and that's right. Now, okay, I've just outlined, in a sense, my outlook, my personality. Do you view problems like that? Or do you see what I said as having any truth? Or is there something that I should be aware of as a limitation in that thinking?
Well, you're bringing different things together. First of all, let me separate my answer into parts. First of all, religion is a very complicated phenomenon, a very, very wide phenomenon. You mentioned the big religions. The big religions, first of all, they're different from one another.
different properties. Second, they are institutions, they are people, their history, their center of power. Sometimes the systems of beliefs, they make statement, their moral systems, their ways for people for thinking the world, their way of people getting together, you know, you go to the church and you find friends. So it's
If you isolate within religion a certain moral
aspect. Definitely, I am not religious at all. I'm an atheist. I feel perfectly sympathetic. I mean, I'm happy to fight together with some religious people for the peace in the world. I don't know. If you isolate some other aspects, like the belief that it was a creator, which is a person, I just find it wrong. I think it's wrong.
So it's a very complicated story, and I see a lot of bad in religions. I also see a lot of good religions. I don't want to enter in which one I think is strong. Now, let me zoom into your point, because you said, well, does this mean that somehow
there's always some something right. I wouldn't say always. Yeah. Okay. I would say the other way around. There's always something wrong. It's more interesting. Namely, I think that we, we humans live in a dialogue. And the good of the dialogue is that we change our mind because of what we hear from the other guy, right? That's how culture has developed. That's how science has developed. And each time so
We're always the best thinking. It's always in search of what is wrong, not what is right. Okay. What is wrong in my thinking? What is wrong in your thinking? Because that's what allows us to go ahead, right? The great step of Copernicus has not been, you know, to
to have the idea that the Earth goes around, has been to recognize that being attached to the idea that it enters the center is wrong. So it's found something wrong in the basis of the way astronomers thought for centuries. And, you know, a couple of generations later, Kepler
did the same game. He discovered that for two millennia, people try to make sense of what we see in the sky in terms of circles. And he says this is not circles, they're ellipses. Okay, so after two millennia of circles, he said, well, forget circles. So what is interesting what we are wrong. Okay. And I think there are a lot of wrong ideas in instead of all inside a lot of beautiful
moral, social, human constructions and behaviors. They're just wrong ideas in many religions. It has to be so because they are so contradictory of one another. Of course, there are some wrong ideas. They cannot be all right. So the fact that we can learn from one another and we can often take a larger point of view does not change the fact that there is a precise sense in which
The pre Copernicus system, the Ptolemaic system is just wrong, factually wrong. And Copernicus system is wrong. And Kepler is wrong because planets don't go along ellipses. They move more complicated. And Newton's theory is wrong. Because if you take Newton's theory and you use Newton's theory to compute the motion of Mercury, you just get it wrong. You miss a little correction, which comes correct with generativity. So in a sense,
I think there is to learn from different things. I think it's good to keep an open mind and to listen to different perspectives. But the interesting of the dialogue is precisely when we can step out from mistakes in one situation or the other. For me, when it comes to religion in particular, I would say up until just a couple of years ago, I was such an adamant atheist.
And I wouldn't say that I'm a theist now at all. I just wouldn't classify myself as either being pro or against. I'd say I'm undecided. The reason why I don't focus on the wrong is because to people like me and you scientifically minded people, it's fairly obvious the wrong. It's just so blatant. I find it much more interesting and difficult to see what is compatible and what is correct from another point of view.
Definitely knowing where one is wrong, even the nuances of incorrectness adds to certain correctness that gives you different points of view. So let's... I understand that. You know, speaking of what's wrong, I'm curious. Let's imagine if all properties are relative. Okay. Now, is the law that all properties are relative a property? Can you be relational with respect to the principle of relation? What does that even mean? Does that lie outside?
Do you understand what I'm saying? I know this is extremely ill-defined, but I'm always interested in what happens when a principle is applied to itself. So even, let's say, Bayesian reasoning, if you ask someone who says, I'm a Bayesian reasoner, okay, so do you believe anything with 100% certainty? They may say no, like I'm a scientist, so I doubt. Okay, do you doubt the principle of Bayesian reasoning even a little, even a tiny? Because as soon as you open a sliver there, then what happens when you, well, you get what I'm saying.
Yes, of course I get very well what you're saying. I think that one of the interesting trends in contemporary philosophy, it's what might be called anti-foundationalism. It's not a new idea. There was anti-foundationalism in
thinking in Western and also in Eastern philosophy. What does that mean? It's the idea that you don't need to hold to, not only to absurd certainty, but to anything definitive.
is sort of, is a shift, is an idea of shifting interest from what we can say for sure, what can we say from final, to what we can say interesting and valuable. In fact, this is, look Kurt, your series is about the theory of everything. I don't think we need a theory of everything.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
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As much more. I think that what I like in science and in philosophy, it's the part of them that have this attitude
which is, look, we can learn, historically, we know we can learn, we can learn more and more and more. But it's not useful. It's useful to ask, as best as we know today, what is the best organization we have of the world. And it's true that there's a remarkable coherence in our culture and our understanding of the world. But asking what is the final
Uh, ingredient of the world. What is the final rules of thinking? What is the basic substance of everything? It's just about it is a useless question. That's my take. So can we live with uncertainty? Yes. Do we have to take something as, uh, can we doubt our also our doubt? Sure. We can. Might be useful.
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I will read from your book to give people an overview. And by the way, right previous to this question, I just wrote down a wonderfully
philosophical set of sentences from you which was about Bryce and John when you met them and then you felt the pain of their absence you then wrote but it isn't the absence that causes sorrow it is affection and love without affection without love such absences would cause us no pain for this reason even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and beautiful because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life if those of you who are watching are listening
I've recommended only one book consistently, and that's Ian McGill Christ's Master and His Emissary. And I'm going to start to add a second one, and that's Order of Time. It's filled with, firstly, if you want to know about the nature of time and how time has been thought of and redefined or not, well, recontextualized is a better way of thinking about it. It's a wonderful, wonderful book, and it's quite short. So the opposite is Ian McGill Christ, which is, I think, a tome. And then yours is a compendium. It's quite
digestible. Okay, let's get to thermal time. So firstly, I want to tell you how beautiful that set of lines were. Thank you very much, Kurt. Thank you for saying that about the audio of time is it's definitely the book which is that I have written, which is more close to my to my heart, because it's a book and you know, the quotation you you mentioned shows it. It's a book in which I talk about science,
It's mostly about science and it's about the science of time. And I sort of try to summarize everything we know from science about time and also the things we don't know about time from science. So it's a big part in which I just explain as best as I understand what we've learned about time from special activity, from statistical mechanics, from Boltzmann, et cetera, et cetera, from quantum gravity.
And then also the open questions, what we think, the speculations. But it's also a book. When I wrote it, time touches us, right? Time is not a neutral thing for us, because it's what makes us living, but also what we lose. Time is losing. So time is something that touches deep us inside. So it's a book that while writing it, I had constantly this
emotional aspect about time in mind. So there's a little poetry in the verses from Horace, which is an ancient Latin philosopher, which I love, which talks about time, the time that passes the passage of time. And there's a last chapter in which I talk about death, which is the ultimate confrontation with time that we have in our in our in our life. So it's a it's a book which is science, but also
our emotional relation with time as you, as in the quotation you mentioned about, about pain and sorrow of losing people. All right. So sorry for this. That's right. In chapter 10, I think in chapter 10, it's called the mandolin. I don't recall the words that came prior to it, but it's about the Eastern mystic from the 100 years, 100 first century, sorry, second century Nagarjuna. Is that correct?
Yeah, Nagarjuna, there's a chapter, well, no, there is a chapter in Nagarjuna in Helgaland, my book on quantum mechanics. Okay, so what was being referred to in Mandolin when this person said that there is no I? Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's a famous dialogue in Eastern literature, the beginning of the Buddhist philosophy. It's a spectacular dialogue, the dialogue about the chariot, right? Who is he speaking to?
For the people who are listening, the links to Carlo Rovelli's book Order of Time as well as his latest book are in the description.
And well, what was super interesting to me is in 2022, I'll start to delve a bit more into Eastern philosophies. I've had pretty much zero, although most people's philosophies are influenced by different parts of the world to some degree. So it was fun because when I was first asking you for an interview, I used it as an opportunity for me to learn loop quantum gravity, because I've always wanted to learn some of that. So I started going through your lectures.
But then I was sidetracked in the most positive manner by order of time. I just, I just, I didn't think that you were such a philosophical person. And I thought, boy, oh boy, I don't, well, I don't know of anyone who is a theoretical physicist that is able to be so cognitively flexible in that regard. You mentioned Max Tegmark, but I haven't looked him up much. So I was just, I was thrown by that.
And I'm still super excited to be speaking with you. Thank you, Kurt. Thanks a lot. So you want to know about thermal time? So can you explain what thermal time is? This is my question. And then I had some notes. So the conventional logic for interpreting this relation is time gives you a notion of energy, which gives you a notion of a macroscopic state. Now you're saying that this can be reversed. Okay, now that's so using that as a jumping off point. And remember that the audience understands what entropy and so on is.
There are a number of open questions in understanding time. I think there are a lot of things we have understood that time doesn't work the way we usually think about. We have understood this with special activities, general activity, with statistical mechanics, but then there are some open questions.
And among the open questions, it's following. Once we go to a general relativistic description about the world, the description of the world large enough to include the relativistic properties of gravity, then the theory we use does not have a lot of variables, variable things we measure.
But none of this is naturally identified as a time variable. That's the point. And I'm not talking for those who are more learned among those who you guys will listen. I'm not talking about in a given space time, which one is time. Of course, in a given space time, there's the clocks that measure proper time along each line we know at this time.
But I'm talking about the evolution of space-time itself. I mean, the Einstein equation that evolved for gravity, space-time, matter, everything. In that evolution, this evolution is given as relative evolution of variables and not evolution in time. And then case by case, we can identify and say, well, let's call this time.
one particular variable. This works. In fact, this is the way the world is at the level of general relativity and also at the level of general relativistic quantum field theory for quantum reality. I think there is something funny, and that's a question. In our experience, it's very clear
Uh, which variable is time? It's, it's the one that clocks are connected to. Okay. The time variable is completely different than the other variables, profoundly different. And, uh, so how is it possible that from a theory in which no specific variable is temporal, then for us, uh, one variable, which is the position of the clock is definitely completely different than the others because it distinguishes past from the future in such a way.
So I worked on that and I wrote some papers, several papers on that, and a key paper with a French mathematician, a field medal, Alain Cohn, a spectacular and brilliant and good mathematician, because we got to this idea, both of us, independently, in a very different path, and we wrote this paper together. He came to that from pure mathematics. I came to that from thinking about physics.
So the idea is a speculative idea. I'm not sure it's correct. It's not something people agree upon, but I put in the book as a speculation. It's something I think in some sense should be right. And it is a following that when we distinguish the time variable from the other,
It's because of what peculiar of time, what is peculiar of time, that the past is so different from the future. The right and left are not different. Up and down are not so different, a little bit different, but we understand that. Past and future are completely different. And the big difference, there are many differences which we can write down, but the big difference is that entropy grows toward the future. And this is a reason
We remember the past and not the future. This is the reason the future feels open. This is a reason if you if you if you if you feel backward, moving backward is obviously backward and so on and so forth. So what characterized the time direction is not mechanics.
is entropy. And entropy means statistical mechanics and means that we're giving a coarse-grained description of the world in terms of temperature entropy. So we have many degrees of freedom and we are not describing all of them but only a few of them. This is what entropy is about. So there's something about the flow of time which has to do with the fact that
We don't describe the microphysics. We have this macroscopic description. Now, if it is so, then it's very tempting to reverse the story between the flow of time and the macrophysics in the following sense. We learn in physics textbook
that the time passes, okay, systems automatically equilibrate because of the second law of thermodynamics. So they go to equilibrium. And when they go to equilibrium, they go to a state which is an equilibrium state. And this equilibrium state is described in the physics as one particular state in the sense of statistical mechanics, a probability distribution of all possible configurations. Okay.
So the logic, think of the logic, time passes and this determines a particular state. Now the idea Alan and I got independently is that maybe this is the other way around. We're getting it wrong. Since in the fundamental theory there's no preferred time, but there are states, right? There are states because
because we don't see the details of the world. We have an approximate description of the world, so we give a description of the world which is a statistical state, a distribution of a possible configuration. Now, given a flow of time, it determines one particular distribution. Maybe we should view the other way around. Given a probabilistic distribution of the world, what we know about the world,
This determines the flow of time. You can mathematically compute it that way from the distribution. You can do a simple and our paper will roll down this mathematical passages. We said is the state of the world produces a time variable. And this is the idea of thermal time. And I can push this farther because
If you have a quantum mechanical system, by necessity, you have some randomness, because quantum mechanics randomness, because if you may have X and P, you don't commute, and this non commutativity implies some randomness. So one of the big, big mathematical results that Alan Cohn has obtained is that
using this randomness, he could show that any state, in the sense of quantum mechanical states, determines a flow of time. And I don't want to enter into the complication of Kant's mathematics, it's for Neumann algebra, it's complicated stuff. In some sense, this evolution is unique. In some very peculiar sense, this evolution is unique.
So what Cohn is saying is that automatically, once you have the randomness of quantum mechanics, you have a time flow. The thermal time idea is a simpler version of that. It's just if you don't know the details, your lack of knowledge of the details is such that mathematics is sufficient to pick up a specific time flow. OK, so you see, if you study generativity, the question is,
Which one of the variables do you want to call time variable? And the answer is, well, they're all purely the same. But if you don't know the details and you have a foggy version, there's one which is preferred. And let me give you, if I have one more minute on this question, Kurt, a simple version of this story. In special relativity,
You have many time variables, because if you move, if you and I are moving with respect to one another, we have different Lorentz time in the Lorentz information. There's T and T prime at different times, right? They're all the same. It's not one is better than than another. They're all the same. OK, but suppose you have a cloud which is hot when you go out in the universe and the cloud is hot. If it is hot.
If you have a number of particles, they move, there's no preferred time. But if you have a hot cloud, this is hot, and it has a temperature, which is determined by the fact that it's got an equilibrium with itself. But it got an equilibrium in one Lorentz frame, not in all Lorentz frame. It's equilibrium in the frame in which the cloud as a whole, the center of mass of the cloud is stationary.
It's only in this frame that the distribution is the distribution, is the Boltzmann distribution that you expect from the. So if you know the distribution, if you have a macroscopic description of that, you pick up a time, a preferred Lorentz time. So you see, microscopically, you don't see any preferred time, but macroscopically is one preferred time.
The idea is that that's exactly what happened in the world. I mean, we live in a world, we interact with the world macroscopically. Obviously, there is a past and a future. Obviously, there is a time direction, but that's because we use these macroscopic variables. If we were really interacting with all the degrees of freedom at the level of generativity,
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Okay, so let me see if I can understand this and then you can correct what I'm saying. Time implies energy implies macrostate, as we talked about before. And then you can reverse that, but then I see that as a trade-off between precision. So if we were more precise, we wouldn't see time. That's where Alan, which I'm going to mispronounce, but the French mathematician you mentioned, the Fields Medalist, Alan Konis, that's Elaine Konis, that's where he comes in by saying, well, clearly you can never be extremely precise anyway, given quantum mechanics. So that's why
What are their complaints?
The main complaint is that it's not developed well enough because in an equilibrium situation, you need an equilibrium situation to single out the time bar. But actually, what we really do in our life when we
Pick up a time variable is precisely because it's not an equilibrium situation. The past is different for the future. So in a sense, it would be good to extend this term of time outside the simple equilibrium case in which past and future equilibrium don't distinguish anymore. Past and future to make the story really completely coherent.
Now, Lee Smolin has a book on time as well. I don't recall the name of it. If you remember, you can just say it. Do you recall? No, I forgot. Let's forget about that. Maybe the problem with time. I don't know. He has plenty of books called the problem with, at least in my head. OK, so Lee Smolin has some views on time. And I recall him saying that it may be that time is the most fundamental. Now, it might do. Firstly, does that ring true to you? Does that? OK, great. That's what Lee thinks.
Prior to researching about you, Carlo, I was just thinking, well, Lee Smollett and Carlo Rovelli, loop quantum gravity. Great. Let me start to research loop quantum gravity. And I was thinking that you pretty much agree with Lee on everything because in my head, you both were the same as popularizers of loop quantum gravity and developers of it. However, as I read Order of Time, I saw there was a huge disconnect between you and him on this level. So do you mind explaining
Let me start by saying that Lee and I have been, I think we did the best physics together, my best physics and his best physics probably together.
So we succeeded repeatedly in collaborating well and we have always remained very good friends all through our life since our young age when we met
So I count him as one of my very, very best friends. However, in spite of that, or maybe precisely because of that, it's not true at all that we have been agreeing on ideas all the way through.
In fact, I would say even the opposite. We've been able to do physics together precisely because we disagreed through our disagreement. Interesting. Through long discussions. No, no, you're wrong. No, you're wrong. You don't see that. How can you see that? Exactly. So the beauty of our collaboration for me has been being able to learn from one another constantly, being constantly challenged by the other person.
and through that getting to write down equations, to do calculation, to put up theories and to get results. Lee also thinks this way and Lee has a very nice way of putting this story, which I love. Once in an interview, somebody asked him about the disagreement with me and Lee thought for a while and then said, well, look, if we had
had the same ideas, then one of the two of us would have been superfluous. And I think it's a great idea, right? So it's useless, somebody who agrees with you on everything. So that's the that's the premise. Now, one of the biggest disagreements, which has grown out in the last decade is precisely about time.
It's not so strong as one might think because there are a lot of common
Points that Lee and I agree. I mean, I have been quoted often to say time does not exist, but this is easily that's a slogan slogans are, you know, you can take it the way they want and it's easily misinterpreted. Time does not exist. Does not mean that we have to think about reality as just static. Nothing happening. It's the other way around. I think that, you know, a static reality is time passes and nothing happened.
But time passes and nothing happened. I think we have to think about reality as a sequence of happenings, not a set of things. Before we talked about things. But if you go into relativity, to general relativity, what we actually describe in the, it's always the evolution of things. So even an object
the object we talked about, the pen. What it really is in my eyes at the light of general relativity, it's a sequence of processes. There's something happening. It's happening now and then now and then now and then now. And it's just processes that resemble one another. And this is what we call the pen.
Sorry, to interject, when you say happenings, are they the same as space-time events? Or is that different? Yeah, if you want an event, it's something that is limited in space and time and reality is an ensemble of this. So it's an ensemble of events.
where event means a region of space time, but also means a something that is happening in that region of space time. In fact, I think what the reason space time is, it's just a happening. Right, right. Whatever happens in that region, that's what the region of space time is. And what happened is that there is a field, there is a gravitational field, there is a electromagnetic field of electrons, whatever happens there. And if there are no electrons and no electromagnetic field is still the gravitational field.
And if you take away the electromagnetic field, there's nothing happening. There's no that meter space time is not there. So this this happening view of the world is something Lee is insisting a lot. And I also agree with him completely, 100 percent. We should talk about that, this dynamical aspect of all the processes, not the entities in isolation. So that's the part we agree. It's a big part.
So all the people who talk about the static four dimensional universe, frozen time, a block universe, I think it's misleading. The block universe is just a picture in our head of an ensemble of events. If I think of the story of your life, Kurt, it's not a block universe story of your life. Things happened. It's an assemble of happenings. Good. So the same for the universe.
Now, where do Lee and I disagree? We disagree about the origin of the distinction between the past and the future. That's the disagreement. Lee holds on to the idea that the past and the future are intrinsically and profoundly different at the sort of fundamental level. So these happenings are happening from the past to the future. There's something
The past exists, fixed, it has happened, it's unchangeable, the future is generally open. That's a disagreement. I disagree with that. I think that it seems to me that our best physics is telling us that this very vivid difference between the past and the future is not in the grammar of nature, in the elementary grammar of nature. It only comes in
at the statistical thermodynamic level when we have a macroscopic description and therefore we have entropy and therefore we have things, you know, ice melting down and all the reversible phenomena. All the irreversible phenomena are macroscopic. The irreversibility characterizes the macroscopic variables. There's no irreversibility of the microscopic variable. So the distinction between the past and the future, in my opinion,
It's only for big things. An electron doesn't distinguish the past or the future. An atom does not distinguish the past or the future. A glass of water with ice and water does distinguish, but the distinction is in the picture, in the words, water and ice. It's a macroscopic description. So that's the point where we disagree. So the philosophical idea that it's a
The description of the world is about happenings and not about things, not about static. We're really on the same ground, but the orientation of this happening, is this happening oriented in time, from the past to the future, is where we disagree. I think that it comes later on, at the fundamental level, we should forget about that, the laws just don't distinguish between the two, and Lee thinks that in some sense the laws distinguish between the two.
So what does he say in response to your justification for saying that? What's the blurriness that generates time or the macroscopic states? What's his response? They say you be you. You be you, Carlo.
I'm not sure. In fact, in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to Toronto, and that's one thing I want to talk with him. I want to say, tell me exactly why do you think it's so. My reading, but he might disagree with my reading, is that the intuition of the difference between past and future for him is so strong.
That's my reading, but he might answer something else.
Julian Barber, the Janus. Oh, Julian. Yeah, no, I haven't had a chance to read his book. I started reading it. But I don't know what his theory is. I think as far as I got was just the history of thermodynamics. So what is the Janus point? What is his theory on time? And then obviously compare and contrast with yours. So a few coordinates here. First of all, Julian, it's a fantastic historian of science. He wrote
a big, thick scholarly book on the history of mechanics, which is a total masterpiece, in my opinion. Then it's known for two ideas about time, one which is mostly known for that. Some time ago, his idea that we should think at
the world in a completely timeless way, just a distribution probability as instantaneous configurations. And recently he came out with a new idea, which is this Janus point. So I distinguish three Barbos. Barbos, the historian of physics and which, you know, Chappell as the
French say, I mean, infinite respect of him. I learned so much from him. Barber as the guy denying time in the sense of his old book of time, and the third Barber, which is about this status point. So the second one, I was never convinced much because he had a complicated story about the universe being extended in space, but not in time.
which I did not find convincing. We could go into that, but we should not talk about that. We should talk about the third one. And the third one, this Janus Point idea, it's indeed quite intriguing. He's not the only one who has been recently talking about. Sean Carroll has also considered this idea. There is an increasing attention to this idea.
The idea is that we are wrong when we say that generically, if you take a system, generically most solutions of physical motion is in equilibrium, so there is no past and future. It's true that if you put the gas in a box and you close it with a fixed amount of energy,
Most possible solutions or where the gas goes in long time is in equilibrium. And in equilibrium, the entropy is constant. There is no past and future. So then we have to say why the entropy was low in the past. It seems strange. The point is that the universe is not like a gas in a box. That's the main observation.
That also sounds like when we were talking about that there are some problems with applying our limited scale physics or when we do experiments to the universe as a whole. I think that's where I got it from was reading the Janus point. He was saying the universe is not a box, so you can't apply the same laws of thermodynamics to the universe as a whole. Yes, exactly. So but there's a specific very, very specific reason for which you cannot.
That there is no equilibrium state, because if you think about the imagine the universe, just a bunch of particles in an infinite space, okay, they can spread forever. Okay, so they never get to real, to real equilibrium. So let's consider one possible configuration, okay, of these particles, okay, a generic one, they would just move somehow, maybe they come close to some point, and then they disperse.
So if you look at the future, they disperse. If you come back, there's some moment in which they're closer and then they disperse again. So the entropy in that configuration, it's up goes to a minimum and then grows. Of course, there's no preferred direction of time because both directions disperse, but there's a minimum.
So if you're on one side, the entropy is growing like that. If you're on the other side, the entropy is growing like that. So we're just on one side. And of course, the entropy is growing. If you take a mountain, any mountains, it has one direction, which is down and the other direction, which is up. So generically, there's always one direction down and one direction up.
So the idea is, well, maybe we got confused about the model of the bagasse in the box and the equilibrium, forget the equilibrium, maybe the right way is thinking that generically histories, possible history of the world evolves in some way and necessarily there is one point of just minimal entropy and then it goes one side and the other. This is the core of the idea. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it a little bit, but that's the core of the idea.
So, there are some questions about that. There are some possible doubts. I'm not sure it's really a solution of which problem, of the problem of why the entropy is low in the past. Why the time is oriented? Because in the past it was low entropy. So why in the past is it low entropy? That's an attempt to answer that question.
There is something ringing very interesting and I think there's a discussion going on right now among theoretical physicists and philosophers on should we buy this argument? Is it correct? I'm interested in the discussion and I hope that in some years it will clean up. Namely, yes, that's a good way of thinking about why entropy was low in the past, one direction which is the one we call the past,
or no, come on, we're getting confused about probabilities here. You're surreptitiously squeezing in some intuition which is not correct. I don't know. It's relatively recent that we've been thinking about that and I'm open to this idea. I found it interesting.
This minimum point, does he say that's the Big Bang, or does the Big Bang happen at somewhere on the up, so it's still relatively low to us? In a sense, that's what's called the Janus point, because Janus is this god in Rome, it's a Latin god, which is the god of the doors of the change of the year. It has two faces. It was always represented with a head with two faces. One face is this way, one face is the other way.
So the Janus point is a point where the future, you know, the one future this way, one future that way, because the future is determined by entropy going. So this is the minimum of the entropy. So entropy goes this way, and it goes this way. So whoever is here, or whenever you're here, you see the future this way, whenever here, you see the future this way. So you always see the big bang in the past, right? That's what you call the past. Yeah, interesting, interesting. Okay, now to Wolfram, which we could take out. So don't worry.
Do you have any thoughts on Wolfram's model critiques? Any? What do you find interesting? What do you find not interesting? Convincing, not convincing. I. I am not. Over excited by the idea that a simple classical.
microscopic model could reproduce the complexity of the physics that we see. Why do you call it a classical model? Because it's definite, the hypergraph is definite, or what?
It's classical in the sense that we can view this as evolution in time and at each specific moment there are steps, the fundamental variables which have a unique value. So in that sense it's classical. Quantum mechanics variables don't have a specific value. I think that to from here
to reconstruct the complexity of quantum mechanics in full has not been done yet. I have not seen it yet. And I doubt that one could actually do it unless I see it in detail. There are aspects of quantum mechanics like those captured by Cochin's spectral theorem,
What about for general relativity? I don't know if you've heard the claims or read the paper,
that the hypergraph model can reproduce. And you can tell me, just so you know, my naive assessment, I believe what they do is an ADM decomposition at some point. And so whenever I hear that, it to me, okay, so you're foliating, so then you have a preferred time and for some reason that I'm averse to that because
Space time to me shouldn't be able, at least generically is not able to be foliated. But I don't know if that's if that's just my own personal taste and I should or if that's an actual argument against or for it. This is your personal taste. But it's also my personal personal taste. But it's not an argument because if it was possible to derive all the all the theory
From a completely different point of view, namely not the point of view of general covariance, not the point of view of Einstein, but from the point of view of existing or special preferred for the Asian, then okay, we would have to confront that. But once again, there's some aspect of generativity, which has been recovered. I
I tried to read some of the papers of the recovery of general activity. You know, it's if you have something geometrical and you go at large scale, general activities come out still too hard to come out with the Einstein equations.
But once again, this is not full generativity yet. And if it is full generativity, it would predict definitely corrections to generativity, which would be testable. OK, so until I see this testing, namely that generativity is factually wrong on some short scale and we see the discrepancy,
I would say, well, this is a more complicated way of saying the same story, which is distinguishable and is based on different principles, which are not the ones which seem to be implemented in the world. Namely, in the world, it seems to be that there's no reference frame, as you say. There's no preferred foliation, as you say. So that's the kind of thing we have learned from generativity. So why do we have to give them up?
You know, let's go to Copernicus once again. After Copernicus did his model, it seemed to work very well on something. One thing it did work very well is that if you make the other planets go around the sun, you understand why the other planets have a feature of the motion, which have a period of one year, because they go around the sun. So of course they were. But the strongly counterintuitive things was the Earth move.
So some people, in particular Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer that Kepler used his data for doing his work, Tycho Brahe came out with a system which is called the Tychonic system, the system of Tycho Brahe, which was intermediate between Copernicus and Ptolemy, which was that the Earth is the center of the universe, the Earth is fixed, so there's nothing counterintuitive. The Sun goes around and all the other planets go around the Sun.
It's a brilliant idea if you want, right? Okay, you get the cake and you eat it too. So you get the advantage of Copernicus without the concept of difficulty of Copernicus. So in a sense, it was to try to recover the advantage of Copernican staying with the old mind frame, which is the Earth is fixed. Okay. Is it coherent? Yes, it's coherent. Has it been historically useful? No.
I mean we would have never got to Newton or Kepler or Galileo.
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The point of our capital was precisely that if we give up this moving, if we get out of this mind frame of we are static, we have a better way of understanding the world.
So Tico was completely wrong scientifically. Of course, we recognize it completely wrong scientifically, right? So I think that when we have learned general relativity, or when we learn special relativity, of course we can, you know, by being super smart, like Tico arranged thing that we stay with the old conceptual thing and recover the same thing with some some technicalities. But we don't learn more about the world. We just hang on yourself to
all thinking and don't accept the new thinking, which is the one that allows to go faster. The new thinking is there's move, forget about forget this intuition that my ground is not moving. So it's the same with this reconstruction quantum mechanics for underlying basically classical system. I don't believe that is impossible. I haven't seen it yet, but I suppose it's possible. But is it do we believe that this pushing them ahead is telling us that
Is this what you, in your mind, in the back of your mind, perhaps, think of Lee Smolin's idea of time? Like, Lee, you are trying to hold on. Yeah, it's the same story. It's exactly the same story. So take the take the discovery seriously, right? What Einstein did
When he did special relativity, there were these Maxwell equations that seemed to contradict Galilean relativity. Which one is wrong? Einstein's answer is neither. They're both right. Believe the physics, right? And when Einstein did general relativity, he took this idea of Maxwell of the fields,
What if Sean Carroll, who is a proponent of the many worlds, says to you, Carlo, you're trying to hold, you say that the many worlds is distasteful because look, the cost, yeah, but you're calling it a cost because you're trying to hold on to something else. So what if Sean says that to you?
I am in a discussion with Sean on a number of things. He not only takes the many-world interpretation seriously, he likes it, but he likes a particularly radical version of the Eritrean or many-world interpretation. It is not radical enough already, right? Yeah. He called it the mad dog.
Many world interpretation of the mad dog in which there is only Hilbert space and state and Hamiltonian, nothing else. So you want to extract everything from from that. I'm I'm I am
What would he say to me? I think that he belongs to a
A group of physicists that are very much in love with many worlds because they find it very simple and straightforward. It's just this wave function and out of this wave function we can extract the rest. So,
I never heard him telling me what he thinks in the relational interpretation is wrong, because when we talk about his ideas, especially this mad dog version of Everett, and I sort of tried to point out what are the technical limitations of this idea.
There is some people who learned quantum mechanics starting from Schrodinger and can only think about quantum mechanics in terms of the wave function. The quantum mechanic was not born with Schrodinger, it was born with Heisenberg and Max Born and the Gottingen
people in matrix mechanics before Schrodinger, Pauli, Dirac. And it can be thought without any wave function or without any state. And I think that by introducing the wave function, Schrodinger confused things, made calculation easier, but confused the ontology, the picture. So everybody started thinking about this wave and got confused.
I think that Sean is definitely not making the mistake of holding on to classical intuition to the opposite. He takes the Schrodinger wave function very seriously and tries to build everything from that. So he's blaming me probably what I am blaming Wolfram and Lee, namely that I want to stay attached to classical
to variables having values describing the world in terms of facts. That's probably what he would like to blame me. My answer is that I think it doesn't work to think that the world is just a wave function as a way he would like to. He would like to say it's a wave function and nothing else. There's this vector in Hilbert space and nothing else. And I think that vector in Hilbert spaces don't give me pens.
Don't give me books, don't give me the concrete description of the world. To have a quantum theory, you need much more many ingredients. So it's not clean, the pure wave function picture of the world. You need the operators, you need eigenvalues, you need eigenvectors, you need this structure. And this structure, he hopes to just take it out for the Hamiltonian,
But once again I have not seen it happening yet. So I think that this way of thinking about quantum mechanics is not going to be fruitful. We need the algebra of obstacles. Quantum mechanics about non-commutative variables. The core of quantum mechanics is pq minus qp equal i h bar. This is the core
How is he throwing that out by trying to put so much emphasis on the wave function? How is he throwing out those non-commuting operators? Oh, that's the mug, the mother dog interpretation. There are no, no, no,
There's only the way function. And then he says there is Hamiltonian. And then we don't have some structure in it. And from the structure of Hamiltonian, one can derive from the structure of the composition of Hilbert spaces in subsystems. And the subsystem from the subsystem, I can extract something which correspond to the algebra of the syllables. So it's a very indirect way of trying to
extract it from the dynamics. It's a dynamics that should give us the variables. It's a long way to go. Is there a reason that he's starting he's saying that there let's imagine the wave function of the universe seen quantum field theory and I'm not saying anything you don't know. It's
It's like operator value. It's not that people say it's field, but it's like a strange field. It's an operator value field, because it's not exactly when the mystics say it's like all like water and waves. Well, it's like an operator wave, if you want to call that. So why is he not using, why is he going, why is he going to QM and not QFT? In other words, like the wave function of Q. No, no, no, he has in mind quantum field theory. He has in mind QFT. But the particular structure that define QFT, he would like
to say that is only written in the Hamiltonian. So he would not, he would say that, you know, the fundamentalism of the world is not, QFT is a very rich structure, as you say. There are these quantum fields which are actually operated. It's these local quantum operators, a field of operators which commute, don't commute, have this, all this problem. So you have to give all this machinery to make it work. And this machinery, the operators, the fields are observable. So what we
Interact, describe how we interact with the field, right? He wants to discard all that. He wants to say there is only a big Hilbert space. A Hilbert space is just, you know, a gray thing. We don't look at anything. And Hamiltonian. Okay. Hamiltonian is just what gives the motion of the state in the Hilbert space.
But he will say that Miltonian has some structure inside it, because it's eigenvalues, have some structure, some way of combining them, and these secretly know about all the machinery of quantum field theory. It's a technical step. I don't know if I need to go into that. But he has in mind quantum field theory. In fact, the property of the Hamiltonian that
he uses is the locality of the interaction, the internet can be written as a, and the locality gives the region of space. So here's this, this extreme Everettian or extreme many walls. And my objection,
Okay, now what is your opinion on Eric Weinstein's geometric unity? Have you had a chance to go through any of the papers? No, no, I should. I'm sorry. I should, but I don't I could not follow opinion. Okay, that's fine. How about Donald Hoffman's? Have you do you know Donald Hoffman? So he has a book called
The case against reality and yours is called reality is not what it seems. Yes. Oh, this is a big philosophical discussion. He definitely had a number of very good points and some radical conclusions from from those.
I know a little bit about his ideas, but I have not read his book, so I'm not sure I have a good gauging of exactly what you want to draw from that. But let me say the core of what I think. We interact with the external world around us through our senses and through our
the way the brain interprets what we see around us. And I think it's a very good and very deep observation to recognise, to realise that what we call the objects around us are to a large extent mental constructs.
that our brain puts together on the basis of how useful this construct has been in our evolution to allow us to survive. So in
In a sense, we're seeing a movie of what is outside, which is vaguely related to what is outside, whatever is happening outside, and is deeply coloured by our reading of it. This is an observation which has been made in philosophy many times. In fact, it's one of the main things for which Kant is known.
can't consider a major philosopher in the Western tradition, but it's others before and after have made this observation. And I think it's important because what we're describing at every level is not the world, it's the world as we read it.
So the disagreement is
Now, so far I'm completed with him. Now there are two points. One is that, all right, so then what? There are two points I would not really object, but I would say how I think about this. First of all, that this does not mean that our mental world is more
solid and known that the external, because exactly the same arguments employed here for the external world, exactly the same arguments work for our mental world. Namely, there is nothing certain either in what we see as our sense of our self or perception. These are also complicated, the cultural biological construction
that our representation of the world has. So our representation of the world include a notion of myself, a notion of my representation, a notion of my representations, which are all notions that will develop culturally. So the same criticism against the existence of outside objects, I think hold for the existence of the self and my mental world. Okay.
So this leaves us where? I think, and this is my arrival point, this leaves us, in my opinion, toward the anti-foundationalism that we talked at the beginning of this story. Namely, we should not ask the wrong question. The wrong question is what is really, really, really outside there? That's a wrong question. The right question
I see a mirror. Okay. It seems to me that a chair is the other side of the mirror. Is it true or false? No, it's false. It's an illusion. The chair is not the other side of the mirror. The chair is here. Okay. The chair is really here and falsely outside of the mirror. That's correct. Okay. We can play this game step by step.
by realizing that things are not like that. We're misunderstanding there. There's a better way of understanding that they're not like that. The misunderstanding is a matter of words. If we ask the question, okay, so what is the ultimate reality independently of any representation? That's not a good question, in my opinion. That's a wrong question. Reality is that chair. Reality is that sun. Reality is that chair in the mirror.
And their relations, their relative relations. So I will jump out of this discussion. Okay. And distinguish if you want the apparent reality and the ultimate reality and forget about the ultimate reality. We're talking about this after reality. And that's what we call reality. Reality is the ensemble of this phenomena of which I am part and your part and the cherries part and all the way we
understand better and better and better. We can say they are made by atoms for fantastic. We can say the atoms are quantum mechanical objects that interact with us. Fantastic. We get more and more complexity of the phenomena. But if we ask the question, where do we ground all that? What is the ultimate reality? Forget about this. So if the case against reality,
That he's making is the case is the case against the idea of an ultimate reality out there. And in favor of an ultimate reality for our impressions, I disagree. Because there is a good way of understanding our impression as caused by the chair. That chair. Not a metaphysical chair, or if you want in Kantian terms, who cares about the noumenon?
We care about the phenomena. What we call reality is a phenomena, not an hypothetical thing behind the phenomena. That's my take on it. When I hear that, here's what I'm thinking. Okay, you said the chair is not really behind the mirror. It's really over to the left of me. Okay. Yeah. And that's what I mean. They're really
Right, we have this notion of really, we have this notion of reality. Then if I was to get you or anyone else, let's say people in general, what are some facts that of what is a part of reality? So we're trying to derive a definition from looking at, well, I say that this microphone is really in front of me. And then I may point to other objects and say that really is the case. But then, well, what if there's an inconsistency in what we call a part of our reality and not, then which one do we take as more
Why do we favor this microphone being really in front of me, but Santa Claus not really exist? No, you have you have I got I got exactly the point. I think we have to use really a coherence just which ones makes cohere together consistent. What is it? I think we have to realize that really, in reality,
It's, it can be used in different, right, right, right to use at different levels. And it's fine. We do a different level, for instance. Did Hamlet really killed his uncle? Yes, he did really kill his uncle. I mean, if you tell me, you know, Hamlet did not kill his uncle at the end of the play. I said, No, no, no, he did. He really did. Look,
I come with Shakespeare text and say, it's written here, I'm killing you uncle home. Okay. So I'm using really, okay. Okay, it's real. And now you tell me, come on, it's not real, because it's a play. So of course, not real. Okay. So when I'm right, when I say I'm real, when I say I'm both right, in both cases, I'm just meaning two different real. So real is in a context.
If you want to take a real outside the constants, what is really, really, really real behind all the context, that has no meaning. So talking about the mirror, we make a distinction between the chair on the other side of the mirror and the chair, that chair there. And that distinction, it's meaningful. And we
correctly use one to be real and one not to be real. And I can argue exactly what I mean. I mean, if I walk against the mirror, I just hit my nose against the mirror. While if I walk against that chair, I can sit down. I mean, there's a very precise sense in which one is more real than the other. Okay. And if I'm dreaming, there's a very precise sense in which I say that's not real. It was a dream. Okay.
But within the dream itself, they think which are real in the dream and not real in the dream. OK, in the dream, I can dream of somebody who is telling me, I mean, look, you thought that is so, but it's not so the real something else. So within the dream, there is a notion of reality there in the movie. There is a notion of reality there. So the question of what is real is a very slippery question. It's a context by context. It makes sense. But every time within a context,
in which we're giving something for granted and we're building them. And when I hear the argument, look, the way my brain makes sense of that chair, it's because in my brain there is a notion of sitting, there is a notion because there is a space of colors, blah blah blah blah,
And therefore, the cherry, it's, it's, it's, it's really a cherry in an illusion for me, the context is a context in which I'm giving for real a number of things, my brain, the, the, the, the, the motion, the, the, the, the, the existence of light coming to me, you're creating a context so that within that context, there's a notion of reality and, and, and, and, and illusion.
And what about that context itself? Is it real is not real? It's, I think that we describe the phenomena that we interact with. And within description, that's description is reality. That would mean by reality. And if we try to say, beyond the phenomena, what is the true ultimate reality, we're making a mistake. And this is a mistake that a lot of philosophers
have warned us against many Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Nagarjuna, a lot of phenomena say careful. I mean, you take a distinction, the chair in the mirror and the chair you see there, and you try to replay that. That's everything you know about the universe and something else, which is a real, real, real thing. That's the real thing. Forget about it. Don't don't do that game. So I would say that
We don't have a case against reality with a case for reality and against the idea that there's an ultimate reality beyond everything. When you say that, what I'm wondering is, is that because we can never know what's outside of what's knowable? So you gave Kant the phenomenon, the noumena, give that example. Is it because of that we can just not know it? Why is it that it's so foolish to talk about the foundational reality?
To the extent in which we can know something else, we may hope to know something else, we correctly put this question on the table, right? But only to the extent in which we may have a hope to know something else. I'll explain my reasoning behind the question. So when I'm speaking to some non-dualists, I don't know if you know what non-dualism is.
They would say consciousness is primary. And then I pose the question, well, how do you know? What if there's something outside consciousness? A simple question. They would say, yeah, but you can never know that. Well, it's true. I can't experience what's outside my experience by definition. But that to me doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Now, one can say that it's foolish to talk about it because it never interacts with you and you have no clue. That's another argument. But to say it doesn't exist,
Because it's outside of our experience. I don't find that particularly convincing. So that's what's behind my question. No, no, it's a good question. I see the point. What is the use of
of imagining that there is something beyond our knowledge. Okay, I think there are two uses. One is that because perhaps we may get to know it. And the other is just, you know, to recognize that, who knows, there might be or there might not be something. And these are two very different situations. Namely,
If I see a chair and I suspect that it might be understandable in terms of atoms, I can ask the question, maybe beyond the appearance of the chair, there is this atomic structure. And then I can do some science or can do some investigation or can do be Boltzmann and come up with the explanation of temperature on the basis of that.
or be Einstein and come up with a Brownian motion from the atoms explained by a motion, or then, you know, be IBM that make a microscope and see the atoms. So beyond some appearances, I suspected that there was some reality, a better, deeper description of reality. And that allowed me to get a better description of the world. That it's a situation in which it's good to say, well,
Maybe I just don't know something, which I might know it. But if the argument, like the case against reality, is that there is a reality which is in principle unknowable, that I cannot know about that, which is a completely different story, is to say maybe there is an aspect of beyond what we call reality usually, which is
in principle and accessible. And then what interest do we have on that? I mean, why should we talk about that? I mean, suppose the, you know,
to you and say, you know, I believe that this is a universe, but there's an extra another direct dimension where there are, you know, green dragons going around and speaking Chinese to one another. Okay, but they never interact with us. We never interact with them. And, and they just totally. And then you see me, how do you know about that? I mean, I don't know. But can you disprove it? No, I can't. What's the interest of this story? Zero. So I think that ultimate reality is like dragons.
speaking Chinese to one another and playing football in another dimension. We should not talk about, by reality, we mean what we interact with, with the complexity of the different layers. And we may find other layers perfectly, but we shouldn't worry about this not being the totality of things, because that's the totality of things we're interested about.
Here's what I think of when I hear that. Again, the word pragmatism comes up because you're talking about, well, what's the use of it? What's the point of it? So then I'm wondering, well, is reality or theorizing tied to pragmatism? In some sense, yes, because we're finite beings, we have to choose to do something. But then can we not philosophize for the sake of philosophizing? So that's what occurs to me then at the same time when saying, well, we don't know if these Chinese dragons are playing football in some other dimension that never interacts with us.
However, I would say it's still, firstly, it's fun to think about Chinese football playing dragons. And second, just like we were talking about in the beginning, scientists have an aversion or generally now contemporary scientists have an aversion to philosophizing. They would say, well, this is much of what you're talking about, especially when it comes to metaphysics is unfalsifiable. Science is a methodology. Let's apply that. Let's stick to our mathematics. But then you were making the great argument, which is
that leads us to plenty of places even if it seems misleading at first or even if it seems to not interact with us first so that's what else i think about it is that okay even if we say there are these non-interacting chinese dragons that play football okay let me hear you out do you truly believe that do you have some great arguments for let's hear it okay let's think about that would this be the case if that and then you can arrive someplace interesting so i'd say
First, you said it's about a point. What is the point? What is the use? Then I say, well, that's pragmatism in the sense of it has to have a use to us. And I'm saying, well, we could talk about that. But then also at the same time, there could be a use in the sense that, well, we could talk about incomprehensible, unfalsifiable notions and still lead us somewhere propitious in the long run. OK, so that's what I think. Now, I say that and I'm curious, what are your thoughts on what I've just said? Oh, I wouldn't not disagree with you.
I think there is a tradition in philosophy, so let me develop something I hinted before. There's a tradition in philosophy which is to warn, philosophy has a cure, Wittgenstein is a master of that, cure against wrong questions. What does wrong mean here? You probably would call me a pragmatist if you say wrong means useless. So
If you stay in science, science was often liberated by philosophical thinking that science often made step ahead
By getting input from philosophy that said, well, you don't have to ask this question. Certainly, this played a role, Copernicus, but played a bigger role in Einstein. Einstein got from Mark the idea that asking the question of what it's really, really meaning of two things happening at the same time is just the wrong question. We forget about that. That's not meaningful. I mean,
and also from Mark Heisenberg took the idea that the electron doesn't have a position at any time directly from this is a this is a wrong you you're you're imposing a so there is a there's a tradition in philosophy which is warning against the wrong kind of questions and I think what I'm saying here what I'm trying to say here is that
The notion of reality is good because we use it to distinguish the chair in the mirror from the chair on which I can sit to distinguish the dream from what I see when I'm awake for describing what is in a play or in a novel from what is not in a play in a novel.
you tell me that yesterday you met John and say, is that real or false? You lie. This is meaningful. We know exactly what you mean by real and false here. But then if we take this notion of real and we make it, we extrapolate it to say everything we see is not real.
Because everything we see has a level of illusion of some kind, much weaker kind of the mirror, much weaker kind, it's good that we realize that there's a level of illusion, but then we are postulating that there is an underlying reality behind that, and that postulation might be wrong, simply wrong, or at least
It's, let's put it this way, it's remarkable that size failed to get to that ultimate reality so far. So why should we expect it? What is the ultimate reality? I mean, quantum fields. I mean, we don't even know exactly what is a quantum field because of the complication of quantum mechanics. We know what is a classical field. Quantum field is something that manifests itself with particles. Okay, but particles are not real.
So we are confused on the ultimate reality, even in contemporary physics, in contemporary physics today, not to mention about in philosophy in general, what is ultimate reality? Matter, energy, God, spirits, language. Everybody comes out with an ultimate reality story and fail to convince the others. So the perspective I find it
Interesting is to de-emphasize the notion of ultimate reality. Ah, interesting, interesting, interesting. And use the word reality at level by level. I mean, it's real that there's a chair there, but it's also real that that chair is some illusory thing. It's also real. There's just a bunch of atoms. Both things are two.
Okay, I'll explain my thoughts, what occurs to me, and then we can get to rapid fire questions and answers just from the audience, because you've been so generous with your time. Thank you. Is that cool? Absolutely. Okay.
This has been a very philosophical thing, little physics, little quantum gravity, very, very good. I get basic philosophy of science and physics, understanding and the nature of reality. Let me recapitulate what you said. So I make sure that we're on the same page. There are different ways that we use the word reality, just like there are different ways we use the word time. And just like there are different ways we use the word almost any noun, essentially, depending on the context.
So let's imagine we can put these contexts in separate boxes. Much of the confusion occurs when we think, well, we mean, well, much of miscommunication is we intend it to be from box A, but you perceive it as from being from box B. So the contexts are mixed up. And what I was wondering is when it comes to reality, even within the same context, I don't see there being an internally consistent, even within the context. And by the way, you mentioned Wittgenstein,
Wittgenstein had this notion of language games. I believe the language games would be the equivalent of context here, boxes. I'm wondering if there's an internally, an internally consistent notion of reality. Okay, so, well, and then where was I going with that? Ah, ah, okay, now my, what, hear that sound?
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I think is at least I haven't seen any and anytime I try to come up with well I haven't seen any internally consistent definition of reality. Now there are a couple answers to that one is the Donald Hoffman method
Forget it. So there's no reality. It's all unreal in some sense. Then there's the phenomenological answer, the phenomenology answer, which is actually all you experience is real. It's real to you. Even if you're schizophrenic and you see a snake in front of you, that's real to you. But then you actually took a different route, which I never occurred, which is please stop using the word reality. Just let's forget about it.
So am I making a correct summary? And if I'm just correct? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Please stop using the word reality. I'm labeled and divorced of context reality. I mean, use use the word reality in each context. So it's like we should have reality sub a reality sub B. Yeah, make sure that we're in this movie. This is real. This is real. This is false.
But that's a movie. It's all false in a different sense of real. So the real has a variety of meaning in the context in which you use it. So in a context, give me a context and I give you a much better definition of reality. Okay.
In the context of the miserable written by Victor Hugo, I can absolutely uniquely see what is real and what is not real. What is real is what's written in the book. It's not real is what you write. It's not written in the book. Okay. In the context of the history of the United States, it's absolutely real. Maybe when we can make a mistake, but we know that to make a mistake. So we know what is real was not real, that, you know, George Washington renounced and becoming a king, whatever.
So, context by context, we have a clean notion of reality, which allows us to make distinction between real things and not real things. It's a unique word, real reality to reality, real, not real, outside all context, which I think is dangerous.
The information paradox, you said it's like falling in love with holography and that the entropy inside a black hole can be different than the outside. So can you explain what you mean by that? Yes. Right now in the community of physicists, there has been a separation between two communities which have completely different opinions about the black hole paradox.
One community is convinced that there is a problem. The problem is before quantum gravity, so before the end of the evaporation. And the problem is due to the fact that the black hole shrinks and people are convinced that the number of states of the black hole is bound by the area, by the Beckstein-Hawking entropy.
and therefore the problem is that the state outside seems to be thermal and impure state and for that to be possible to save unitarity information should be somewhere and the only place we could be reasonably inside the black hole but there are not enough states inside the black hole because horizon has shrunk.
And this has created a huge, a huge problem. And there are complicated solutions which are being studied today. And people are sort of getting convinced that this complicated solution are the way out. The other half of the community, which are most relativist particle physics and people like me,
just don't believe this story. Absolutely. Because to create this paradox, you have to believe quantum mechanics, which is unitary, and we all expect quantum mechanics to be unitary. You have to believe that generativity holds, and in some reasons we don't expect quantum gravity, and many of us expect that. And you have to believe an additional assumption
which is the number of black hole states inside the black hole is bound by the area. And that has no strong ground. People got in love with the idea because there are calculations that allow you to describe black hole in terms of a finite number of states bound by the area. But this is a description of what you see from the outside as long as the horizon is an event horizon, it's a horizon forever.
And the horizon black hole is not an event horizon, because at some point, the black hole becomes very small, something happens. And at that point, it may very well be that the big information which is outside comes out. Okay. And the confusion, subtle confusion here, it's that people is used to say,
The von Neumann entropy is bounded by the thermodynamical entropy. Namely, von Neumann entropy is in the amount of information due to the entanglement between the inside two things. At the thermodynamical entropy, count the number of states if you interact thermally with something. And people say, well, of course the von Neumann entropy is bounded by the thermodynamical entropy because the thermodynamical entropy count the number of states. If you don't have this state, you cannot have
But that's wrong, because if one part of the interior system is terminally disconnected, you can still have a big von Neumann entropy and decreasing thermodynamical entropy. And that's exactly what happened in black holes. And people who are sort of blinded by over excessive
taking a strong version of holography, just don't see that very basic point, and don't see that if you give a full description that includes what happened after the end of evaporation, you can have a phenomenon to be much larger than the thermodynamic entropy. Simply talking, the whole of the black hole shrinks, becomes smaller, smaller, smaller when the black hole evaporates,
But the inside remains very big. There's a lot of information there, which is not lost where the black hole ends the operation. When you say the inside, it slowly comes out the inside of the black hole. The black hole has a it's like a throat. Yeah, the horizon. And then there was an inside which is very, very big. That's the point. I mean, you can have a very, very big spatial space like surfaces are huge. OK, and that's where the information is.
And at the end of the operation, now we're in quantum gravity. And with loop quantum gravity, you can do calculations of what happened. And there's a quantum transition to a region in which the inside is still there. And slowly it leaks out all the information. So I think that there is a perfectly coherent picture which shows that it's not true that there's a black hole information problem. The belief in the black hole information problem
is based on a dogma, has become a dogma, which is not supported by anything, that the number of states of black hole computed from the outside also include the information inside. In popular science, you always hear that when someone falls into the black hole, you won't see them, well, you'll see them freeze right at the horizon. You'll see their watch frozen too.
Now, if the black hole event. Yeah. Yeah. This is we don't know that because that's the kind of quantum gravity. See, that's that's exactly the that's exactly the problem. When time goes on, OK, you see what you see, somebody is crossing the black hole. So the person crossing the black hole, of course, crosses the black hole. I mean, nothing particular happened crossing the horizon. Just normal, normal time going back.
The light rays that it emits get to you later and later and later and later. If the horizon is an event horizon, so if the horizon stays there forever, you can go to infinity and you only see the person before crossing.
But we don't know. In fact, the rise is not an event, right? The rise does not go to infinity, because at some point, the black hole becomes plankton. And that's we're in quantum gravity. And when you're in quantum gravity, there is a quantum transition after which the information outside can go outside. Okay, so if you wait long enough, you see inside the black hole. Interesting. That's the point.
When I was in my 20s, I could take a mathematically complicated paper, just sit down on a chair and read it through and I would get everything easily.
And then it slowly becomes more complicated. And now in my sixties, I've struggled, I go slow, I read less papers. So my capacity to learn is decreasing. And also, I think my flexibility of thinking is going down. I tend to know much more things before I have much more developed views before I know more things. I see when other people are wrong, because I know things they don't know. It's happened much more often than before.
I mean, it's easy to see the mistakes of the others because because I know more things, everybody getting cold and all small things. So that's why all the people are wiser. But also I am more stupid because I'm more trapped in my own thinking. I have more difficulty of coming out from my own thinking.
What would you have done differently in the development of your theory? It could be as simple as I would have spent more time going for walks with Lee than sitting down, or I would have spent more time thinking about about holography like ADS, CFD, correspondence for whatever reason, or you would have spent less time arguing with your peer. Like what is it that you would have done differently in development of your current theories? There have been situations in which
People have raised objections to things I've done. I got convinced that these objections were wrong and I just ignored that and just didn't bother respond. And I
I don't think I should have paid more attention to the objections because I did always pay very much attention to the objections that I read around. But I think it was a mistake not to respond and not to immediately sit down and try to argue in detail. I probably overestimated myself and the field as a whole thinking, oh, come on, I think that's wrong and people will figure out by themselves.
I try not to engage in debates and discussions and go my own way. Sometimes it works very well, but sometimes has created long misunderstanding. So I should have more engaged with criticism, trying to respond and be more part of the group and debating with the group.
Okay, this question comes from Stefan Alexander. He's a professor of theoretical physics and... I know, he's a great guy. Great, great. He's the writer of Fear of a Black Universe, and the link to that is in the description. Also, I'll be speaking with Stefan, so that's either out or coming up. How does time play into quantum gravity? You've mentioned it plays into quantum mechanics, does it play into quantum gravity per se? It does not.
I think that's a bottom line also in my book. Once you go to quantum gravity, you better forget entirely the word time. Just forget about it. You have a bunch of variables which describe the gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, whatever fields are around, whatever is your ingredients. As far as we know today, these are the ingredients of the world. Electrons, quarks, electromagnetic field, gravitational field.
and you have relations between these, which you think in terms of there is a quantum region, if you want a space time region, and outside, if I see something around, what is the probability of seeing that? And you don't have to say how much time has passed, which one is a time variable,
That comes out naturally because if the classical limit of the amplitudes turn out to be correct, they just give generativity. So in the classical limit, your space time's evolving and then you can, you know, time is just whatever passes around the time like world line. But in the fundamental quantum gravity theory, just forget about time entirely. Don't talk about that. Time is in the various meaning in which we
We talk about them, it's something that happens at later approximations. The space-time comes at a large scale approximation, and oriented time comes from the thermodynamics. In quantum gravity, the only temporal notion, it's very weak, is that you describe process. So what you describe is a process, a probability amplitude of some conjunction of variables taking certain values.
Okay, this question comes from Bernardo Castro. He says, Carlos says that everything is relational. You may have answered this before, but Carlos says everything is relational, nothing absolute. I agree that the physical, that is whatever is measured, is relational as experiments have shown, but that must mean that there is an absolute, some non-physical, non-measurable layer of reality underlying the physical. As you know, he's putting this in brackets, as you know to me that layer is mental.
But Carlo again says everything is relational. So what is it relations and and so on and so on that is turtles all the way down or relationships all the way down? How does the notion that everything is relational not lead to an infinite regress? It's turtles all the way down in my opinion. And I think what what I mean, I think the basic
I mean, I know, of course, Bernardo's idea, he defended a rather strong version of idealism, in which everything is mental. And I think that the mental phenomena are not more absolute, more grounded,
more basic, more universal than the physical, what we call the physical phenomena. In fact, I think if there is a dependence relation, the dependence relation is other way around. So if we want to understand mental phenomena, we understand them better, starting from physical facts and from that deriving mental phenomena.
The other way around doesn't work, in my opinion. The other way around leaves us the impossibility of doing science. We don't derive physical phenomena from mental phenomena, but the other way around we do. So, of the two, physical in a large sense, I don't mean material, I mean physics, systems interacting have a properties, more fundamental in the sense that they ground better mental phenomena. I think that
The mistake of idealism is to don't see one of the main insight in Buddhist philosophy, which is that the mental is as illusory in Buddhist language as external world. So the self is as left
less founded as this glass or this pen. When I think about myself, the Cartesian illusion, this is evident, this is immediate, this cannot be discounted, it's wrong. If there's anything, what is evident for me is this pen, it's not me. The me, it's a complicated cultural construct, social construct, cultural construct,
What I directly know about the world is that there is this pen. If you say, well, there is also you in the world, I say, oh, yeah, it's also me. And what is me? I have to I have to do through a reflection, a story of thinking. And if you read the card, who is the origin of this idea, the card never said that the self is immediate. He said, if you start doubting, then you go through a complicated cultural process of doubting.
which is due to his culture, his philosophies. And this leads him to thinking about the self and they think if I'm doubting them and thinking if I'm thinking there should be something thinking as his thinking the self, but the something thinking is not the self is an ensemble of the processes that matter does in my brain. That's why I disagree with the idea is
Why is it that the mental states and the self are, are they equivalent in your mind? In your mind? Are they equal? No, they're two different things. No, they're two different things. Of course, they're two different things. The self is a, it's a, it's a, let me not define the self. But I think that what I said applied to both. And of course, Descartes was talking about the self,
Some people talk about mental state and I think both are like chairs, complicated construction we use to describe what happens. You mentioned that science would be difficult or if not impossible to do if idealism was correct. Why can't we just say, see for me the way that I see science is that science doesn't presume a metaphysics
It doesn't actually say whether there's an immaterial or material or mental reality. It's like a method. People can disagree with the definition of science. Regardless, why can't idealism be correct and simply say there are regularities to these mental states and we see these regularities, these patterns of perception and we call that physics and we perform science just as we do or just as we currently do.
No, sure, sure. No, I agree with you in that sense. Science is neutral. But if I want to use science, what I was saying is something much more, much less philosophical, if you want. If I want to use science to make a story about how mental state can emerge from configuration of the brain, I have
I have a path that I can follow. In fact, many people are following today this path. I mean, there's a big neuroscience literature, very extremely interesting, which is precisely describing how mental states and the notion of a self
can emerge in the complicated sort of neurological, biological and evolutionary story of our brain. So science allows us to make a story which is incomplete but is in the working about how mental state emerged in the world in the same sense in which
It allows us to make a story in which how that a chair emerged in the world. I mean, how it's built by wood and built by a civilization that want to sit down and so on and so forth. So that can be addressed by science. The idealism doesn't block science in the sense to say, well, OK, I have this mental
perception or whatever, and as I described then, but it doesn't allow to do the same story to see how I can out of a pure mental stage, necessarily reconstruct the opposite world. In other words, if I'm an idealist, I don't have any other
a scientific program except the ones that are already there. I can describe chemistry, physics, but not the relation between the mental and the physical. While if I am a materialist in some wide sense, in large sense, because now materialism obviously doesn't work. I mean, the world is not made by stones. Then I have an additional program that I can do, try to make sense of mental state on the basis of physical systems.
Why can't an idealist say, we can still do that. Look, instead of saying, how does mentality or how does mind states come about from non mind states, like that's essentially what you're saying before. Why don't we just say, well, it's all mind like it's all pants like it in some manner, but certain configurations of this mind state, which you can translate as matter certain configurations of this matter, amplify the already existing consciousness. So you can still perform neurobiology and neural correlates,
in the same manner. So why does thinking of the world idealistically preclude that? I see it as just, well, you can just say, well, we want to know what configurations produce, what states of consciousness and what levels of awareness and levels of self-consciousness and so on. I don't know anybody in neuroscience that thinks it. No, that's not true. There are people in neuroscience that may think that way.
Maybe Tononi thinks in that way. Almost any of the theories of consciousness that I've found, and I've been studying this for this channel, it can be applied to the universe and then you find that there's some low-grade level of consciousness applied to the universe as a whole anyway. At least Tononi, I think he's moving in that direction. I think he said that his IIT, I believe it's called Integrated Information Theory,
Yeah.
Yeah. I hope you don't think I'm fighting with you. I'm just telling you what occurs. No, no, no, of course, of course. No, no, of course. In fact, you're you're you're right. And what you say, you're probably right. I I maybe have not talked enough about that. You're you're you're bringing idealism together with a sort of pump psychism. Right. It's a you're you're you're you're taking this in this direction here. Yes, I sort of pump psychism of that way.
Look, I'm not sure what it means to be a very weak level of consciousness. I know what it means in Tonani theory. OK, there's a quantity called phi, which have big values in the brain and slow values else.
But that quantity has a very clean quantitative value, determined by configurations of matter and the way matter might interact. So I know that Trononi himself is a sort of hidden secret idealist or even a little plant psychist.
But I'm not sure his theory is, because if his theory was so, it would not be possible to quantify consciousness on the basis of specific configuration of matter, possibility of interaction of matter. So in other words, he has a ground there, and the ground is
Remember, I was saying, I'm wondering, oh, there's some way in which that's correct, some way in which that's correct. We were talking about this ecumenical quality. When it comes to what was his name? Tony, right? When it comes to Tony, Tony,
Now I know his theory isn't this. It's not as simple as let's imagine billiard balls and they bounce off one another and certain complex interactions these billiard balls model and that creates consciousness. Let's imagine it's but let's imagine it's as simple as that. Then as you were saying, what's more fundamental the nodes or the vertices? Sorry, the edges are the nodes. Well, then I'm wondering,
Hmm. Imagine Tononis was as simple as that, that it's as simple as certain believed balls and they interact. So it's the relationship that produces the consciousness, and the balls are fundamental. But then earlier you were saying, well, you can also view it as the relationships are fundamental. So I'm wondering if in that sense... See, the non-dualists don't like when I say this. I'm wondering if in some sense, physicalism and idealism
can be brought together as twin sides of the same coin? Yes. Yes, it's a good point. Then the question is what we mean by mental, right? If I'm mental, we mean things going on in the mind of people like humans or maybe mammals or maybe
maybe all animals with neurons, which is larger than mammals, then I don't think this might be sufficient to describe what happened on a galaxy. If by mental we mean something that might going on everywhere, even when there are no animals, no neurons, nothing like that, then
Mental, it's an extremely vague notion, which I'm not sure what it means, if not just a vague analogy that somehow, that analogy might even be useful, but because again, I think the naive materialism is wrong. I mean, it has been shown wrong by science. The sort of 18th, 19th century idea
There is a perfectly full description of the world in terms of little stones moving and bouncing one another, pulled and pulled by forces. That's not science. Physics has moved away from that because of quantum mechanics, because of field theory, because of quantum field theory, and so on and so forth. So the world is far more complicated than that. And if you take, if in particular you take relation quantum mechanics seriously,
you think in terms of relations and how things affect one another. Now, you want to call this relative properties mental? You might, but then it's a name. It's a name which is I don't see what happened, what adds to our understanding and what
interpreting this. So in other words, I think I'm an a monist, a monist in the sense that I don't think there are two different kinds of phenomena. I'm a monist like in the sense of Bertrand Russell. There are mental phenomena and there are physical phenomena. Mental phenomena is, oh, I see white. And there's a physical phenomena that there's a thing moving down there. I think these are all phenomena. They all belong to the same big class.
That should be explained by, we understand more and more about all of them, but they're not two different worlds. So if you're telling me, look, at some elementary level of distinct, very, very, very general way of understanding the world, we have the distinction between the two evaporates. I'm happy. Yeah. But is that idealism at this point? Idealism is a strong way of reducing one to the other. Like, you know,
Old 19th century material has been a strong way of reducing one to the other. Yeah. Have you thought much about the heart problem of consciousness? Yeah. So what are you? They exist. All right, let's hear it. It's a confusion. I think it's a confusion. My take on the heart problem of consciousness. This is David Chalmer.
is that if you read Chalmers, the point is about, we believe that there is a heart problem of consciousness because it is conceivable for us, say, to think there is a zombie, right? So it seems there is the same physical configuration, but nobody inside. And that shows that even if we understand the physics completely, there is something missing. So this is based on what is conceivable to us. So the problem of the heart problem of consciousness
It's a problem that comes from taking strong what we find conceivable, not conceivable. So the kind of intuition we have about worldview right now. But the kind of intuition that we have about the worldview right now is exactly the kind of thing that science shows wrong every step of the way. So the
The hard problem of consciousness shows that we have some wrong intuition, because nature has produced us by solving the easy problem of consciousness, not the hard problem of consciousness. So the easy problem of consciousness, of course, is very hard, which is how the brain works. But I am deeply convinced that if you take a copy of me, okay, equal, same nose, same hair,
Same neuron, same atoms, same molecules, same photons, exactly the same position. I'm conscious, my copy is conscious. It's just no way for me to conceive that I could be conscious and the copy of me could be non-conscious. So therefore, if we understand how the thing works, we understand what it means, what I'm saying when I'm saying I'm conscious. I don't believe there's a hard problem of consciousness. I think there's a very hard, easy problem of consciousness, namely,
understanding this. You see, we don't understand thunderstorm well. If you talk to people doing climate science or meteorological science, not climate science, a thunderstorm is not yet understood. It's very complicated phenomena to understand because there's electric things, magnetic thing, chemical thing. It's all sort of rapid and hydrodynamics is horrendously complicated. So what exactly happened with a thunderstorm is not understood.
Okay. Does this mean that it is a hard problem of thunderstorms? No, it means that it's complicated thing. Okay. Does it mean that is Jupiter? You know, the flashes, the lightnings are the rage of Jupiter. I mean, no, you don't think there's Jupiter there. I think it's just we just don't understand what's going on. So I see, I don't see the difference between thunderstorms and
the human mind and consciousness. Let me see if I understand this correctly. If we were to imagine duplicating you, then you don't know or it's unclear how that duplicate would be not conscious. The reason I'm saying is that because Chalmer, one of the strong arguments
for the existence of the heart form of consciousness in his book is to say, well, imagine you have a zombie. A zombie is somebody that believes like me, has the same aspect of me, has the same neurons as me, the same synapses as me, the same physics as me, exactly the same physics, including down to the atomic level. But there is no consciousness. So he says, imagine this thing, OK?
And look, if you can imagine that, it means you can imagine that consciousness is separated from the physical, something else, something above the physical, because you can have the same physical with or without consciousness. So this proves it. So he proves that consciousness is something separate from the physical on the basis of this zombie argument. Think that there is a copy of you, which is there's nobody inside. There's no self person.
But they say there was a exact copy of me. I wouldn't have said what it means. There's nobody inside. I could talk to him. Hey, Carla, too. How do you feel? I mean, I'm the right one or you are the right one. He could fight about that. And, you know, big jokes about that, of course, wouldn't make any sense to know which is one's the right and which is the false. So he would be conscious under all possible ways that I could understand consciousness. So his proof is based on an intuition that I don't have.
the existence of zombies. Have you ever played virtual reality? Like put on a VR headset? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Okay. The reason why is I don't find it so inconceivable. I can imagine putting on a VR headset and seeing my wife or seeing you or even myself and even being able to look in someone's brain and it's generated with a computer. Of course, I would have no idea. We can just.
What's the word? Procedurally generate. So we can procedurally generate the brain as I zoom in and zoom out. I can't even do that physically, like I can't zoom into your brain physically. But regardless, I don't see it as totally inconceivable that there can be this simulated copy that itself, we would say, is not conscious and it can talk. I can touch it and see the blood fall out from wherever I'm touching with my scissors or whatever, maybe. Why is it inconceivable to consider a philosophical zombie
In VR, you could create a person.
And this person doesn't just look like a person and you touch him and blood comes out, but also answer your questions and also have a memory and also have a way of reflecting and everything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the memories and all the complexity of me. I think that whatever computer is implementing all that,
How about let's remove the memory and the reflective characteristics because there's some people who are mentally challenged by birth. They cannot develop a reflective property, even babies. So let's imagine that. We would say a baby is conscious. A baby can feel.
A baby has no memory. So let's imagine this baby has no memory. So let's simulate that then. I hope you don't feel like I'm attacking. I'm just telling you what occurs to me. I'm sorry. No, no, no, of course I like it. I like this. Okay, so feeling
It's philosophical babies instead of philosophical zombies, just the zombie babies. So you mentioned memory and reflective capabilities. I'm just saying remove that. Right. So I think that let's separate the question into if you if you have a so let's forget virtual reality for a moment. If you have a
an artificial baby that behaves like a baby and in all the complexity of a baby, I think it suffers. It would suffer. I would not hurt it. I would resist from hurting it. Of course, if you give me a little robot,
or which when are you kicking it says wow yeah okay i would kick it because i know that there's a huge difference between that robot and a baby but is the actual difference that uh establish my my believing that is suffering is not suffering if if it would uh because i think that suffering is nothing else than just you know
The baby having a body, a brain Hear that sound?
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And in all these things, and that generates offerings. So, you know, the cart is so I don't know if this is a full story or a real story, but he believed that only humans have coaches, he would kick his dog.
because he thought that, I don't know if it's true, because I read that he was very attached to his dog, so the things wouldn't go together well. But if it is true, I think it was a mistake. I don't think there is any dog suffering less real as a mental state than a human suffering. I mean, we might prefer killing a dog than killing a man, but that's a different story.
Now the virtual reality simulation of pain, you're right, that's more tricky. Because what does it mean that you have a software that simulates the entire body as a body being hurt and suffering? That I don't know. That's just puzzling.
Okay, now rapid fire again, just a few more. So this nickel NS, and he wrote the word he or she wrote the word phi econ. I don't know if that means physics economist, regardless.
He or she said, I want to thank Carlo Rubelli a lot. When I was doing my masters 14 years ago, I ended up with the similar idea as relational quantum mechanics, but I didn't have the mathematical ability to pursue it, and I've been following him since. Question 1. What is his view regarding the paper Quantum Principle of Relativity by Andres Dragan and Arthur Eckert?
Are you aware of that paper? Quantum Principle of Reality. Thank you for what he or she says. No, I'm sorry, I'm not aware of this paper. So if he or she thinks it's interesting, send me an email and I'm going to read it. I will send it to you. His question or her question number two is what is his view regarding the work of Brian Swingle?
Good Sir Knight, I love Carlo. A great man to explain complex ideas simply to a person like myself. He said before that he took psychedelics when he was young. I think it was LSD. And it was a Satori moment, which helped him think about time and physics in novel ways.
has he done psychedelic sins, and if so, has it given him any new insights or confirmed his theories in any way?
I will in the future. Nowadays things, so what the world think about psychedelics is changing, it's changing very rapidly. So things might become simpler now. It was important for me, it was a very strong experience, like many people who had it say. Do you recall your dosage?
No, but comparing to descriptions which you find in literature are certainly quite high. Oh, yeah? Wow. Yeah. Yeah, definitely high. I mean, compared to the strongest accounts of similar experience that you find nowadays easily in all sorts of literature.
You know, Steve Jobs, the head of Apple, said that taking LSD this youth was one of the two most important and strong experiences in his life. I think I could subscribe that. It was very strongly. It definitely did not, I did not get direct physical ideas by taking LSD. So I don't suggest, you know, take LSD and so you write good paper in physics. That's not the way it works.
I was young and it was many, many years from there to the astrophysics I did. However, I believe it's true that it did affect my way of thinking about reality, especially in a sort of liberatory sense. I mean, it's not about I came out, I was young again. I guess the first time I was 16.
I came out from that experience thinking, wait a minute, what we usually think about space and time and matter and energy and mind and me and the world and that, that's just one way of thinking about things. Maybe there are all sorts of other ways of thinking about that. And my brain is can view things very, very differently for a while. So it might be possible to think differently. So I came out from that experience. Maybe it was also the culture at the time.
With an extremely large a priori flexibility about possibilities, right? Right. I can imagine that in terms of, you know, political ideas, moral ideas, social ideas, but also physical idea. I mean, I. I had a distinctive sense that this organization in space and in time that we
usually perceive about the world could just change with a little chemical. So we are chemical. So, you know, why should one be better than the other? And this stayed with me. And I think that one first gave me curiosity, because when I later on 10 years later, studied physics, and read that, you know, Einstein discovered the simultaneity is not well defined. I said, well, this
I knew that things were more complicated than what they looked at the first side. And then when I studied generativity and quantum mechanics, I was ready to accept very easily the idea that the world could perhaps be profoundly different than I would imagine of it. It didn't scare me, the idea, because somehow it's an idea that I had confronted. So in that sense, I think it was very useful for this, no more than that.
Did you get to a state of a temporality where you didn't feel like there was time passing? Yeah. Or eternity like infinite time passing. Yeah, that's one of the I say more common things that people say, namely that time, it's the sense of time is completely destroyed in many ways. I mean, I would say the simplest way
Which I remember very well, very beginning is just, you know, having the sense of watching the looking at the, at the, at the watch. And then, you know, hours and hours later, watching it again, and realizing that one minute has passed. Wait a minute, I mean, all this happened in one minute. I mean, I got, which is one of the things people get scared. Right. So one of the things I mean, the only problem with LSD, if you get scared, and you
You get terrorized and it can be extremely psychologically dangerous. Yeah, it can be very bad. It doesn't happen often, but I think it's the only real problem of these things. The only real danger of these things is having a few very bad hours, which may look very long. And one of the reasons you get scared is when you realize that you feel the time is passing, but it's not passing outside you, you feel trapped. You feel, oh my God, I'm here, I'll never come out. Because here for me, time is
It's passing and outside is not passing. So that's one of the scary things. But that's extraordinarily strong distortion of the sense of how much time is passed. It's just one aspect of it because I think the sense that people talk about that it's a sense of completely destroy what it means by temporal organization of the world. And the other common thing is this distinction between yourself and the outside, right? It's a basic
And this is something which was very clear in my experiences is common in many reports of these experiences is that you use the sense of you as a self separate, distinct from from the rest is very strong. It's very physical. The LSD experience is a very it's it's a very powerful thing. In fact, I remember
Spending days and days after that sort of under the shock was not bad, but it was also disturbing, tiring. I mean, my mind had kept going back to that for what has happened. I mean, oh, my God, what has happened? Where am I? Who am I? What is not unpleasant for me was never been unpleasant. It has always been pleasant, very pleasant, extremely pleasant. I had I faced it without preparation.
But my friend was with me who had no preparation and no experience either, actually said the right thing at the very beginning and was near to me. The right thing being, don't be scared. Whatever happens, don't worry. Just let it go and just don't resist and just be aware that then you come back and whatever happens, you back yourself. So.
That's really assured, because he said exactly what I think. The moment in which I got scared, I remembered that and said, OK, trust him, let things go and let this strange experience go over you. I loved it. It stayed with me. And somehow in the moment in which I'm in deep shit, which we all go through in our life,
I remember that moment. It's calming to me. It's good. I look at my hands, the way I looked at my hands in that, and I have a sense of separation from reality and the beauty of reality. The beauty of reality in front of me, just how it is, which I remember as a gift of that particular moment that stays with me all my life. Was it a moment of utter peace or euphoria?
What would be the word that you would characterize it? These people would say positive, but there's so many different senses of the word positive. No, we're not calling peace. We're not calling serene. I was not quite euphoria either. I don't know. Emotionally, it was a completely overwhelming surprise.
and a sense of violent, almost joy at some moment. Oh, wow. Overwhelmed by the beauty of things. I like seeing things for the first time. It's a strange thing, like if I was, oh my God, I've never seen that. But this is just, you know, my hand or a tree, a leaf, anything.
um and by overwhelmed by the beauty of it and be aware that you know this is just a leaf and I could look at it as an incredibly beautiful thing it's just me and that's my heart opening up and just exploring but it's notoriously hard to describe those experiences everybody says so and now there is a growing literature because finally
scientists can study these substances after it was forbidden to study the sentence substances for 40 years. It's completely stupid because why should you know, people study poisons or, you know, heroin, why shouldn't you study the sentence? So I hope that now the regulatory body take away this silly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Forbidden studying these things.
So it didn't directly help you with physics, but it helped you with entertaining ideas that other people would consider unpalatable, such as time doesn't exist, or so and so is relational rather than real. Exactly. Exactly. So in other words, Lee Smolin, you need to give Lee Smolin some LSD to dissuade him of his ideas of the primacy. I'm going to read between the lines. Okay. Last two questions. Last two. Good to do you know who Whitehead is Alfred North Whitehead?
Okay, so this question comes from Erin Heidari says, Revelli seems to reflect a lot of the pantheist process philosophy that Whitehead talks about. I'm wondering if he's familiar with Whitehead and what he thinks of this more organic view of reality. Yeah, well, I got to know Whitehead precisely because other people already
pointed out similarities, especially thinking reality as a process, if not entities, entities with property, but happening of things, so processes before things. Definitely there is this resonance and this similarity, and I'm sure that my way of thinking might have been affected by him or by people who were affected by him.
So I read, I started reading some of his books because of that, because people pointed out this analogies, and I saw the analogies, I saw the similarities, I tried to get something useful from it, but there is a size, there is an aspect of it which I don't connect to, which is this more organic or even spiritualist
Right, somehow the way he faces the problems, I couldn't, in spite of definite similarities in this main idea that we describe the world as a process, but not, but I'm a deeply a physicist, a physicalist,
I think that the physical description of the world that we have now, it's very good as it is. It doesn't need to be reinforced by other pieces. It has to be better understood, perhaps. And I try to read what we know about the world at that level from the physics itself. And I think it's not contradictory with a higher level description of the world.
Okay, with the ones given by biology, by sociology, by psychology, by, you know, I think there's, there's coherence, we don't understand many of the intermediate steps. But there's coherent between these different pictures of the world. Of course, we need the higher level ones because, because we cannot, I cannot describe my girlfriends were using Maxwell equations, that doesn't work.
There's no contradiction between she being made by atoms governed by the Maxwell equations and, you know, she being somebody I love and she loves me and we interact on the level of our emotions. They're just different, different levels of description, some which works better, some aggregated things and some which works better. And I don't see any a priori contradiction in that. And there's no need to
to add higher level notions to the fundamental notions. When it comes to the problem of quantum gravity, or theories of everything, or grand unified theories, do you think that what's missing is a whole conceptual paradigm shift? Or is it just it's a mathematical complication, it can be solved without changing our view of what reality is much? Like, what do you think is holding us back? Which one is it?
I think there's nothing holding back. I think we have theories of quantum gravity, and that might be right. So we don't need to go look for new ideas in quantum gravity. We have to go try to figure out if the ideas we have are good or bad. I think this idea that all quantum gravity is such a mystery that we need some new idea. Why do we need some new idea? I mean, we have theories. The reason we're not sure is that we cannot test them, not because they're wrong or they're bad.
Loop quantum gravity is one. I don't want to say this is a right theory because it might be a wrong theory, like another one may be right. Or maybe we haven't yet, you know, understood the relation between this or maybe I have reasons to think that string theory is not good and loop quantum gravity is good. But for quantum gravity itself, we have decent theories of the missing stuff, the pieces we don't understand well. But I don't
share this idea, oh my God, we're missing a big idea. We're not missing a big idea. To articulate something like loop quantum gravity, you need a big conceptual shift because there's no background space, no background time. As I said before, you have to accept the idea that the fundamental of the shape of the world, you don't use a time variable. So it's already there and has been worked out. It's decades of discussions that have come out with a possible story.
We have more than one possible stories because there are other possible alternatives, as you talk to safety, the string theory and others. But we have theories about quantum gravity. What we miss is filling up details. Look, quantum gravity is hard to do calculation or scattering. String theory is hard to understand how you come down to four dimensions. Nobody really has done it yet. The schemes, ideas, but nobody goes from the big theory down to the standard model.
I would not look for other. Why should we look for other ideas that then we just, you know, put them in a drawer and we do not. We need smart ideas for checking those theories. And that's what many people doing. Working on black holes, working on early universe, trying to see if some of the theories we have can be tested.
Just so you know, that question was from Dong Hyun Yoon. I just wanted to make sure to say that. And the last, last question is Craig Reed, TCR. I'd be curious to know what he thinks of Nima Arkani Hamed's Amplitohedron and his lecture on the end of space time. I don't think I've ever heard Rovelli comment on it. Nima is great. It's a powerful thinker. He's a great mathematician. I remember a very good afternoon in Princeton talking with him.
I is a book that just came out, which is a big thick book with interviews of people in quantum gravity of all different. I can just look it up if you give me a keyword so I can tell the audience what it is. If it's sitting here, we can get it. Yeah, great. Conversations on quantum gravity. Wonderful.
edited by Jacom Armas, A-R-M-A-S, and it's a big thick book of interviews, detailed interviews of a large number of people doing quantum gravity. It's a bit boring because it's a big thing with everybody, you know, same question, so
too. But I'm going systematically through it, reading all of it, because I'm curious to actually know what about these people. And it's remarkable, they're very diverse ideas. And I read the one of Nina Arcadia made in detail, of course, because it's alphabetical order is Arcadia is a first. I'm just almost halfway past halfway through the book.
And so I'm thinking while reading the various people, I'm curious to know what all the people think, I'm reading and of course I'm checking what they say with respect to what I think and try to get the ideas that I don't know and trying to argue. So it's a very good exercise for me. Now I think that
that part of the community who has fell in love with the Maldacena idea of the bulk boundary and then later on has given sort of an ideological basis of that by an argument that says that in quantum gravity we have to go to infinity
to define the theory because there are physical reasons for which we cannot make a measurement in the book, so to say. So all the actual measurement are and in fact in the book he articulate that because it's good because he explains his deep motivations for doing that. Now I'm convinced that this argument is wrong.
Because it presupposes the space time and because it mixes the need for decoherence for making measurement of the distance in space. So I think it's technically wrong. But this has become a dogma in his world, especially in Princeton, that you can only describe things from a very large distance, from a synthetic distance.
So he's going entirely in that direction, and that's why he doesn't think that loop quantum gravity might work, because loop quantum gravity is a description of quantum space-time locally in a small region. So I'm here, I make an experiment, a quantum experiment, and I compute what comes out without need to go to a syntopia. So
You know, these people are going doing technical work, but that's the assumption on which also his work on the on the scattering amplitudes. It's good, but it's not it's not in the four dimensional generalistic world in which we live. So I don't think that the solution of quantum gravity and the property of quantum gravity is in fancy mathematics.
I think it's in just writing the things properly. I mean, there is a look at what defines scattering amplitudes. They are very hard to compute, but they're there and does that without going to the boundary inside space time. And the objection he has to look into gravity, I think they're they're wrong. I wish we could, you know, with all these people, I wish we could sit down and
Carlos, Professor, thank you so much. It's been quite a journey, over four hours. It's been long, quite a journey. You pushed me to say a lot of ideas, a lot of the things I've been thinking, so I liked very much. I love this interview.
There are two things that are absolutely true. Grandma loves you, and she would never say no to McDonald's.
So treat yourself to a Grandma McFlurry with your order today. It's what Grandma would want. At participating McDonald's for a limited time.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
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"text": " This is Martian Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks, whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, you'll always feel good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdown to threes. And if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
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"text": " Florida and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe and secure. Download the PricePix app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PricePix, it's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit PricePix.com for restrictions and details. There are two things that are absolutely true. Grandma loves you and she would never say no to McDonald's."
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"text": " So treat yourself to a Grandma McFlurry with your order today. It's what Grandma would want. At participating McDonald's for a limited time. All right, hello toe listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now."
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"text": " Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over"
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"text": " Carlo Rovelli is a world-renowned theoretical physicist and is one of the main developers of loop quantum gravity, the main academic competitor to string theory. Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro. It's rare that I feel such a connection with someone from the get-go"
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"text": " and I hope that you can feel the warmth of the relation between us as well. Today, speaking of relations, we cover the argument that relations are more fundamental than that which is being related. We also cover the only two interpretations of quantum mechanics that are consistent, at least according to Carlo, the nature of time and its ostensible arrow,"
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"text": " as well as how science supervenes on what's decidedly not scientific per se. That is, a largely philosophical conversation. There's only been one book that I've consistently recommended on this channel, and that is Ian McGilchrist's Master and His Emissary, and now I'm adding a second, and that's Carla Rovelli's Order of Time. Links to both of those will be in the description."
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"text": " For those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics, dedicated to the explication of what are called theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature, provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us."
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"text": " If you enjoy witnessing and or engaging in real-time conversation with others on the topics of psychology, neurobiology, physics, consciousness, free will, God, and so on, then do visit the Discord and the subreddit. The links for those are in the description."
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"text": " There's also a link to the Patreon in the description. That is patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reason I'm able to do this full time. It would be near impossible for me to have conversations like this with any fidelity with any depth."
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"text": " on topics like consciousness, loop quantum gravity, geometric unity that's coming up, string theory, non-neuro-bioelectric manipulation, and so on, if not for the patrons and the sponsors. Thank you, and again, that link is patreon.com slash KurtGymUncle."
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"text": " Speaking of sponsors, there are two. The first sponsor is Algo. Algo is an end-to-end supply chain optimization software company with software that helps business users optimize sales and operations, planning to avoid stockouts, reduce returns and inventory write downs while reducing inventory investment. It's a supply chain AI that drives smart ROI headed by Amjad Hussain, who's been a huge supporter of this podcast since near its inception."
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"text": " Now, Amjad has a podcast on AI and consciousness. And if you'd like to support this channel, that is the Toe channel, then please visit the description and support his channel as doing so supports this indirectly. The second sponsor is Brilliant. Brilliant illuminates the soul of mathematics, science and engineering through these bite sized interactive learning experiences."
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"text": " Brilliant's courses explore the laws that shape our world. It elevates math and science from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery. You can even learn group theory, which is what's being referenced when you hear that the standard model is contingent on U1 cross SU2 cross SU3. Those are technically called Lie groups and those are local symmetries."
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"text": " Yeah, when you asked me, I looked, I decided to watch one and then I said I liked it. Oh, thank you. A physicist I knew, I think."
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"text": " But I appreciate the width of your questions and the fact that you went through in detail, but in a good middle ground. You seem to know what you were talking about. Yeah, I seem to. I'm great at pretending. So Professor, why don't you explain your relational view, your interpretation of quantum mechanics?"
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"text": " Wonderful. Thank you, Kurt, for having me here. First of all, please don't call me professor. Everybody calls me Carlo. And that's how I feel comfortable with. All right. So relational quantum mechanics is the way I think it's I think it's more interesting to try to understand quantum mechanics. There are, as you know, Kurt, there are a number of interpretations of quantum mechanics out there."
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"text": " I find them all interesting. I think that none of them is wrong. I think each one is right, but each one has a cost, a price to pay. And the question is, are we ready to pay this price? Is it useful to pay this price to go ahead and better understand the world? And I think the relation quantum mechanics, which I'm going to describe in a moment, also has a price, like everything, a philosophical price."
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"text": " But I think it's the best price to pace. If we buy that, then we understand the world better. The mystery of quantum mechanics can be expressed in different manners. One way of presenting it is that what the theory gives us is what we see when we look, when we see, when we measure. It gives predictions for measurement."
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"text": " And that's the way it's formulated in textbooks. Textbook quantum mechanic talks about the observer, we talk about the measurement apparatus, they talk about the outcome of the measurement. Now, this is okay if you want to use it. In fact, a lot of people use quantum mechanic, these terms and very happy period, there's no question after that."
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"text": " But of course, it's not okay. If we after we realize quantum mechanics 100 years old, after we realize that quantum mechanics is actually the best thing we have for everything, for galaxies, for star for structure, for measuring the universe, for what happened inside the sun. So it's how we want to think about the world at the most fundamental physical level that we have access today. And then"
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"text": " What the hell is an apparatus and an observer doing into that? There are no observers in the sun or in the early universe when star formed. So something is missing, obviously, in the standard textbook presentation of quantum mechanics, which is who is observed? What is a measurement? And one way of saying that is that in the standard presentation of quantum mechanics, there are two"
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"text": " postulates to assumptions, which appear to be contradictory to one another. One is that if you don't look, you have a quantum system. It evolves in a way which is described by the Schrodinger equation or by unitary evolution. Things change. If you look, there is a different postulate, which is a projection postulate, that says that the state does not evolve Schrodinger evolution, but it just jumps"
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"text": " And the visual way of viewing this is that a particle like an electron is described like a wave that satisfies the Schrodinger equation for wave diffuses in space. When you look at it, you see in a point. So the wave collapses in a point. And when does it collapses? When there's a measurement. And when there's a measurement, when observer apparatus measure it."
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"text": " No observer apparatus inside the Sun. No observer apparatus inside the distant galaxy or in all the cases we use quantum mechanics. So that's the problem. And there are many solutions on the table. Some people think that"
},
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"text": " It's always waves, so the particle never goes to a point and the reality what happened is that we ourselves are waves and we split in many different copies of ourselves. This is many more interpretation and others. Now the relational and I'll finally come to your question. The relation interpretation is idea that we can make sense of that by simply thinking that what happens between the particle and the observer"
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"text": " The particle and the measurement apparatus is generic and is not because of special property of the server or the measuring apparatus. It's just what happened between any system and any other system in the universe. So every time two systems, we describe the world by splitting it in systems, physical systems, like the sun, like a particle, a molecule, the earth, you, me, these are all systems from the perspective of the system."
},
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"text": " Every time two of these interact, so exchange something, one, so to say, measure the other. So if this is a particle, when it interacts with me, the particle collapses in a point, has a position. Okay. But this is not true. This is only true, the particle's position only with respect to this system, not with respect to the rest of the universe."
},
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"text": " So if somebody else in the universe, it's later interacting with a particle and this observer here doesn't have to take into account this collapse. So the collapse and the unit revolution are always both two good postulates for describing what happened in the universe. You just refer to different systems."
},
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"text": " The ones which are directly interacting, what is relevant is the projective postulate. The ones which are not involved interacting, which still may have an interesting of, you know, computing what's going to happen next in the interaction to them. For them is relevant the unitary evolution postulate. So the"
},
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"text": " This is it. I mean, this solves completely the quantum mechanical problems because now we know what is a system and now what is an observer. Nothing special. All systems are systems. All systems are observable. And now we know when to use one postulate and the other. The price to pay is that the particle being in a position, it's only relative to the system it has interacted with."
},
{
"end_time": 889.872,
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"text": " not relevant to something else, with respect to something else is still spread around, still a wave everywhere. So all the variable taking values are always relative, relative to a system. So this means that when we describe the world, we describe the world giving values to variable. I mean, it's microphone is here, that color on the screen is red, you know, the sun is there. These are all variables that"
},
{
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"start_time": 890.265,
"text": " Values, the variable stake, the color, the position, et cetera. These, if you buy the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, they are not absolute properties of a system. They are property of the system with respect to me or with respect to this chair, not me as a human being, me as a physical system. So that's relational. Relational because the suggestion here is don't think at reality."
},
{
"end_time": 944.633,
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"start_time": 920.503,
"text": " as systems with properties, rather think at reality as a system that has properties where they interact with something else, only when they interact with something else and relatively to this something else. That's a solution, a possible solution of the quantum mechanic puzzle. The cost of this is accepting"
},
{
"end_time": 974.104,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 944.957,
"text": " Okay, so firstly, let's remove the word observer and say interaction because observer seems to imply in people's mind, a human being essentially, or something conscious. Okay, exactly. So there's that. And then what I'm wondering is,"
},
{
"end_time": 998.695,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 974.411,
"text": " Let's say, so I have a bedroom here and I don't know what's going on. Pretend it's much farther away and I haven't interacted with it. Something's going on in that bedroom. Now to those people who are interacting in this bedroom right now, their properties are defined. They've collapsed their wave function in a sense. Okay. That's correct. Let's say they've come up with some value and it says it could be A or B and they've come up with value A for some heads on a coin."
},
{
"end_time": 1024.036,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 999.224,
"text": " Is there a reason that necessarily if I was to interact with them, that it consistently comes up with the same answer? Or is that not necessarily the case? Good. Yes, there is a reason. But one has"
},
{
"end_time": 1054.48,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1024.633,
"text": " has to be careful in formulating things properly. Namely, let's see exactly what it means. Suppose you yourself measure that property and you found A, and then you interact with them and ask them, hey, what have you seen? Then for sure you would get something consistent."
},
{
"end_time": 1081.254,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1055.503,
"text": " This is the precise meaning of seeing the same thing. In other words, you can compare what you have seen and what the people in the room have seen by talking to them or by asking them or by measuring them. But this interaction is quantum mechanical."
},
{
"end_time": 1106.613,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1082.261,
"text": " So this interaction is itself a physical interaction, not outside physics. You cannot go outside the world and somehow cheat physics circumvent and say, oh, physics is not looking. Let me ask you what you've seen. That's you cannot do. That's the point. So yes, there is consistency. And why am I am so careful in saying that?"
},
{
"end_time": 1133.217,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1107.176,
"text": " Because quantum mechanics is tricky. As you know, if you measure the position of a particle and then measure the momentum, you destroy the information about the position. Immediately after you measure the position again, it's not the previous one. So if you measure the momentum, the position is affected. So you have to be careful, because if you ask these people a question, which is like the momentum toward the position, you might be destroying"
},
{
"end_time": 1162.995,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1134.565,
"text": " some of the properties, and it might be therefore neither true nor false that the value is A. Like when you do a double-slit interference, if you measure the interference, you cannot ask anymore which way the particle has gone through, which slit the particle has gone through. So by asking when, there is no answer to the other one."
},
{
"end_time": 1190.998,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1163.746,
"text": " So the point is that when you compare what two different observables have seen, you have to be careful that there are these interference effects that might create a different, might block the possibility of identifying exactly what the two have seen. So as long as you keep asking questions,"
},
{
"end_time": 1218.302,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1191.442,
"text": " with regard to these relations I've heard you say quite a few times relations are what are more fundamental than the things itself however to me as I'm having a difficult time understanding that because to me a relation presupposes things you can't have"
},
{
"end_time": 1247.193,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1218.66,
"text": " a relation without having things to have a relationship with unless you have a relation between relations and then it just keeps occurring infinitely so so how is one supposed to think of relationships as fundamental see even mathematically the way that i'm thinking about this right now in model theory you have a signature and then relations you need an arity functions like how many are are going to be compared how but and then what is being compared i would call the things"
},
{
"end_time": 1270.162,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1247.773,
"text": " and then the relation needs those things. So help someone as confused as myself understand what is meant by relations are more fundamental than the things. How is it not presupposing things per se? Yeah, well, it depends what you mean by thing. That's a subtlety. Namely, if"
},
{
"end_time": 1294.548,
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"start_time": 1271.254,
"text": " We are talking about quantum mechanics, so you're not talking about general philosophical view of words. I'm just saying what this interpretation of quantum mechanics requires us to do. So in this individual quantum mechanics, the basic notions are systems. So I'm not denying"
},
{
"end_time": 1323.114,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1295.162,
"text": " It's not an information that denies that we describe the world in terms of systems. OK, if you want to call a system a thing, that's fine. Those are things. OK, this is a system, a pencil. OK. And then the relation of between systems and things that happen between systems in which pension has a color with respect to me. Now, why is a relation? Because this this"
},
{
"end_time": 1352.449,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1323.541,
"text": " This pen is yellow, but what does it exactly mean that is yellow? Yellow is not a property of the pen by itself. It's a property of the pen that depends on the light that bounces in it, the interaction with the light and the peculiar detectors in my eyes, which do not distinguish many frequency, but do distinguish some frequency. And so in terms of this space of colors, which is not outside the world is in my head."
},
{
"end_time": 1382.022,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1353.183,
"text": " I call yellow the way this pencil interact with the light and with me. So the being yellow of the pencil, it's really something we only understand if we bring into the picture also the light and me and my brain and the specific three kind of detects of light in my eyes and so on and so forth. Good. So this is an example of a relation. To be yellow, it's a relation sense. Now,"
},
{
"end_time": 1408.353,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1383.387,
"text": " Why I said, well, depending on what you mean by a thing, because if by a thing you mean an entity with a set of properties, okay, this is a pen is here has zero velocities oriented up and down with a point down. It's a certain thickness and a certain mass, a certain weight and a certain position, so on and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 1438.763,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1410.384,
"text": " If by thing you mean the system with a given set of properties that it has. Then in relation to quantum mechanics, that is wrong. Because all these properties do not belong to the pen. It belongs to the interaction of the pen and whatever is outside. So in relation to quantum mechanics, there are systems and relation to a system. The properties of a system are all the relations."
},
{
"end_time": 1468.148,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1439.206,
"text": " But when we describe the world, we're talking about the properties, not talking about the systems. We are saying, well, the moon is there, a position. The position is relational with respect to something else. All properties are relational in quantum mechanics. So it's not that there are only relations in relation to quantum mechanics. It's that systems have no properties unless"
},
{
"end_time": 1498.609,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1469.138,
"text": " Well, forget the system. The systems are just the"
},
{
"end_time": 1526.51,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1499.889,
"text": " intersections, so to say, between relations. And you say this is hard for you to conceive because it's a relation required to think. That's true. But, you know, think of a network, a net, the net of a fisherman. You can say the set of nodes attached by the links, fine, but you can say it's just the links"
},
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"index": 60,
"start_time": 1527.09,
"text": " The nodes come just as a peculiar point where the links are attached to one another. So it's the same with a graph, more abstractly. You can define a graph in two ways. You can say it's a set of points and then relation between the points. I mean, there is a link between two points. That's a relation or not. Or you can say it's a set of links. And then you say who is"
},
{
"end_time": 1586.391,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1557.142,
"text": " which one of the link joined to the other. So you can start from the point of start from the links to think of a graph. And so in that sense, you might want to just view the systems as just nodes of networks. After all, we never see the moon, we see its properties. So our direct contact with the world is through the properties of this object from which we construct the object."
},
{
"end_time": 1616.152,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1587.346,
"text": " Some philosophers might want to go all that way. I have some sympathy, but I don't think that the relation interpretation of quantum mechanics requires that. Relation interpretation of quantum mechanics is in terms of systems and the relation of properties between the systems. Okay, so you said that we can describe a system or a system of a graph, let's say, in terms of treating the edges as primary or the vertices as primary, and then you can infer. Correct. Okay. Exactly. Is there a reason that"
},
{
"end_time": 1643.899,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1616.681,
"text": " It seems like because they're interchangeable, you could place emphasis on anyone. Why is it that you're choosing or why is it that it's better to place emphasis on the relations rather than the notes, the edges? I think we can do both. I think both are doable as far as quantum mechanics is concerned. I"
},
{
"end_time": 1671.63,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1645.384,
"text": " I think the key point is not their only relations. The key point is that properties are only relation. I see. I see. I see. So how is one is one not supposed to even vision? Like, I'm gonna ask, how's one supposed to visualize this non property laden node? Because as soon as I can visualize, I feel like I've assigned a property to it. So what is meant by this? What's meant by what's being related?"
},
{
"end_time": 1698.353,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1672.142,
"text": " Well, thanks for bringing up the spin networks."
},
{
"end_time": 1719.292,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1698.814,
"text": " No, I think one thing is the interpretation of quantum mechanics. And the speed network comes from a different story, which is quantum gravity. Now, let's say you have the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is what you're asking about. It's one important point. Quantum mechanics"
},
{
"end_time": 1749.326,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1719.411,
"text": " It's not a theory about the world. It's a collection of theories about the world. There is a quantum mechanics of a particle. There's a quantum mechanics of the standard model. There's a quantum mechanic of gravity, which is quantum gravity. You know, there's a quantum mechanic of the harmonic oscillator. There's a quantum mechanic for the molecule. There's a quantum mechanics of the early universe, quantum mechanics of what happens inside the sun. So quantum mechanics is not a list of things out there in the world."
},
{
"end_time": 1775.094,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1750.06,
"text": " To have a list of things of the world, you should choose a particular quantum theory, okay? Not quantum theory in general, but one particular quantum theory. So quantum mechanics says, okay, what is quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics says that any theory of the world, okay, can be formulated in this way. There's a non-commutative variable, maybe there's a Hilbert space, there's some mathematics, the structure of the mathematics."
},
{
"end_time": 1805.145,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1776.766,
"text": " Then you have to say which variables, which Hamiltonian, which things you describe. In that sense, quantum mechanics is like classical mechanics. Classical mechanics is not theory of particles. It's theory of anything, of a pendulum, of particles, of the electric field, of whatever. Then it's just a general framework within which"
},
{
"end_time": 1832.688,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1805.435,
"text": " Then you have to specify your variables, phase space, Lagrangian, the equation of motion, Hamiltonian, whatever. All right. So if you want to know how do we currently describe the world, you shouldn't ask what is quantum mechanics say. You should ask what is in the standard model? What is the generativity? What are the ingredients of the world? So if I do, let's take the simplest case. If I do the quantum mechanic of a particle,"
},
{
"end_time": 1862.329,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1833.865,
"text": " Okay, it's a Schrodinger equation of a single particle. How do I think the system? Well, it's a particle. It's just this particle. And how do I visualize a system exactly the classical way I visualize a particle, there's a particle moving there. And if I do the electromagnetic field, I think the electromagnetic field or many photons. And if I do the standard model, I think all the complexity of the field for the standard model of the particles on the model. Now, the point is,"
},
{
"end_time": 1889.155,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1863.524,
"text": " that let's say on the part of the particle, I visualize the particle. Okay. But I have to remember that this entity, the system, the particle has a position here with respect to me in the moment is interacting with me. I should not think that it always have a position. The position is the way the particle interact with me."
},
{
"end_time": 1911.203,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1890.469,
"text": " So if I interact with a particle and there's a wall with two holes and I interact again with a particle the other side of the wall, I should not think that the particle always had a position and therefore had to choose one hole or the other. Particle might pass through the two holes because it doesn't have a position while it's not interacting with me."
},
{
"end_time": 1941.63,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1911.971,
"text": " And when he's interacting with me, it has a position. So that's it. That's the particle that I see. But in that particular moment, not necessarily with respect to you has a position, because with respect to you, it's possible that me and the particle neither have a position. Okay, in your description, we're both in a quantum superposition, different branches of universe whatever. Okay, so we're not supposed to think in terms of is, or at least it's not useful, think in terms of relations, but also at the same time, I remember in your book, you said nature is what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 1970.265,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1941.988,
"text": " So how am I supposed to mix it? It is nature is what it is. But then let's not think in terms of is, am I just taking that a bit too literally? Well, it is. Do I say nature is what it is? Nature is what it is in the sense that I think we often make a mistake of confusing relationality with subjectivity."
},
{
"end_time": 1984.206,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1972.483,
"text": " Let me make a simple example. In special relativity or in Galilean relativity, we always say the velocity with respect to one observer."
},
{
"end_time": 2004.104,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1984.633,
"text": " If I am on the train, the velocity of something, somebody sitting next to me is zero with respect to the observer me. But if you're outside the train, the velocity with respect to you, to another observer is different. Now we use observer there, but of course this has nothing to do with the fact that we human beings, we're thinking, right? You could say the velocity with respect to a lamp."
},
{
"end_time": 2030.128,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2004.497,
"text": " In quantum mechanics, I think it's similar."
},
{
"end_time": 2055.503,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2030.589,
"text": " The properties are relational, not with respect to an observer, not with respect to a mind. We don't need mind. We don't need to talk about minds here. We don't want to go to that. We can get there. But I don't think at all that quantum mechanics take us in that direction. It tells us that things are relational, not that things are relative to mind."
},
{
"end_time": 2080.128,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2058.166,
"text": " Why this is relevant to your question? Because at the light of that, I want to think that I, Carlo, or you Kurt, we're just pieces of nature. We're like tables, chairs from this perspective. Of course, very complicated. We do a lot of stuff that tables and chairs don't do. But as far as physical properties are concerned, we're just physical things. So"
},
{
"end_time": 2105.435,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2080.657,
"text": " We want to know how nature works in general, on the basis of our experience, of course, our limited experience. That's the picture we have about nature. And we want to know how nature works with its interactions, with its relative variables. And that's in the sense that that's a universe with its relational aspects."
},
{
"end_time": 2132.892,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2106.886,
"text": " So for velocity, we got used to it. Nothing has a velocity by itself. Velocity is just a relational thing. Since I'm an object, I see velocity with respect to me. Fine. I see that something is not moving with respect to me. Something else is, but I don't recognize this as a special point of view. With respect to Jupiter, velocity of everything is different. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2153.08,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2133.524,
"text": " So it's a story about nature as it is not about our own picture of nature. And as always, you know, we learned that we're not special, we make a larger picture of reality, we, we think it works. And that's nature out there."
},
{
"end_time": 2173.473,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2154.582,
"text": " OK, let me see if I can summarize. So like you said, we take a pen or a cup and ordinarily we can assign its position and its momentum. And you're saying, well, obviously momentum is relative, even position is relative, because that's more immediate. It's two meters away from me, but it's not probably thousands of meters away from you, tens of thousands and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 2201.049,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2173.916,
"text": " okay now what if there are other aspects of this cup that we think are inherent in the cup so mass the amount of liquid in it the reflective properties and so on what if those are also relational and for any conceivable property it's not saying there is nothing there is no thing behind the cup it's saying that whatever we think of as this thing behind the cup is not what we i don't know if we can even have a model of it because our models are so property laden but whatever it is it's not what we"
},
{
"end_time": 2231.169,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2201.442,
"text": " precisely think you have a book, reality is not what it seems. So reality of this cup is not what it seems. Is that correct? Yeah, it's correct. It's exactly so. Exactly. In fact, one way of seeing is that quantum mechanics idea of understanding quantum mechanics and discovery that we always knew that there are many relational properties out there, velocity is relational. But it's a realization quantum mechanics tell us that all properties are relational."
},
{
"end_time": 2261.63,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2233.08,
"text": " You know, firstly, I find you to be extremely philosophical and much more so than the average physics professor. I'm curious, do you see that? And well, do you see there? Firstly, is that true? Do you feel that's true? I'm happy you asked this question. And let me answer in this way, depend on what you mean the average physics professor. If you mean"
},
{
"end_time": 2287.637,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2262.756,
"text": " Today's physical professors, the answer is definitely yes. I'm not unique. There are many other like me. I mean, I could name many that are as philosophical be or even more for me. But the very, very large majority of contemporary physics professors are far less philosophical. However, if you look at the past,"
},
{
"end_time": 2314.753,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2288.302,
"text": " Look, I don't know, 100 years ago, in the 20s or 30s of the 20th century. And if you look, just look at the great scientists at the time, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr, de Bourdie, they were far more philosophical than me. They were inspired by philosophy, reading philosophy, talking philosophy, discussing philosophy,"
},
{
"end_time": 2344.565,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2315.452,
"text": " And that includes Newton, includes Boltzmann, includes Maxwell, includes Faraday. So I think that the major advances in science, in physics in the past, but also in other sciences, in biology, Darwin was enormously philosophical. He was a reading philosopher. He was strongly influenced by philosophers. So I think that especially in foundational questions, of course, if you"
},
{
"end_time": 2369.411,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2345.043,
"text": " The more you go to apply to specific system, the less you need. I mean, you do need a philosophical mind also for some some questions in more more less foundational questions. But when you're close to foundational questions, science in the past, in the past, I mean, until the 60s, not the deep past,"
},
{
"end_time": 2397.432,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2369.923,
"text": " has been very close to philosophy questions, influenced by philosophy and talking philosophical terms. I mean, just read Einstein. Einstein, who is champion of theoretical physicists for everybody, I would say, he has read the three main books by Kant before being 16."
},
{
"end_time": 2422.756,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2398.029,
"text": " He was very, he read Hume, he read Schopenhauer, the philosophical writing of Poincaré, Mach as a philosopher, and it's obvious once you go into what he did that everything he did was very much affected by this philosophical thinking. So I think you're right, I am more"
},
{
"end_time": 2451.169,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2423.643,
"text": " I belong to those scientists who are more philosophical than many others. I think it is a limitation of a part of the research today to be very technical, very mathematical, very shut up and calculating. Yeah, or"
},
{
"end_time": 2481.561,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2451.664,
"text": " Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor"
},
{
"end_time": 2506.613,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2482.022,
"text": " Work in theoretical physics is a map without a territory. I think Max Tegmark, who is a thinker I deeply respect, is one of the most philosophical, even more philosophical than me."
},
{
"end_time": 2533.49,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2507.568,
"text": " He's a philosopher compared to me. He's a guy who wrote a book claiming that every possible coherent, mathematically described universe is as real as our actual one. That's deep philosophy. It has nothing to do with direct physics in a sense. It's wonderful speculations. Max"
},
{
"end_time": 2556.425,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2533.933,
"text": " I mean, Max has a technical work as an astrophysicist, but has a range of wide, very philosophical speculations. I think we need more people like Max and less people who just do mathematics without really asking what is the reality I'm actually describing here."
},
{
"end_time": 2586.732,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2557.278,
"text": " Do you see that there's not only a lack of philosophical ideation, but perhaps a resistance to it? Do you see an aversion to it? Or do you just see it as they lack it? There's an absence of it. When I say they, I mean, let's say the average mathematician or physical or physicists. Both, both, both. Let's not forget that Steven Weinberg, who is a great scientist, of course, with major, major results, wrote a book and one of the chapters of the book, the title is Against Philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 2616.476,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2587.91,
"text": " And Stephen Hawking, who is a very good physicist, of course, and he had important results, not as good as one of Weinberg, but totally very, very important. It's on the record to say many times philosophy is dead because now we have science that solve all the problems. I wish it was true, but it's wrong. It doesn't solve problems. It has a lot of problems by itself. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 2646.613,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2617.193,
"text": " philosophy is not dead philosophy is constantly interacting with the reason is that science is not about you know you make measurement and then you write an equation and then you check your equation with the measurement if it is wrong for the way you try another one that's not the way science work the science is a constant changing of the conceptual structure you use for describing the world"
},
{
"end_time": 2671.34,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2647.398,
"text": " You rearrange things, right? Call this together, you call this separate, you think differently, use different notions, different concepts. You know, Copernicus, instead of thinking the earth, the sky, the earth, the mountain, the stones, in the sky, the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, he just changed everything. He said, no, no, no, that's not the right distinction. The sun and the planets,"
},
{
"end_time": 2700.555,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2672.295,
"text": " and the satellites and the planet is the earth, the moon. So it's completely different rearrangement of how to organize the world. To be able to be capable of this concept of rearrangements, you have to think what you called philosophical thinking. That's the kind of thing that Einstein did, Heisenberg did, Faraday did, Boltzmann did."
},
{
"end_time": 2713.336,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2701.049,
"text": " That's not what is done by a lot of theoretical physics. We just think that the only thing you have to do is to write another Lagrangian or to write"
},
{
"end_time": 2738.814,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2713.558,
"text": " another map between Hilbert space and another Hilbert space or a new set of scattering relations and that's sufficient. Is that because they want to play it safe in a sense because when you're just theorizing mathematically it's easy to check where you're right and wrong whereas if you're philosophizing firstly you can delve into pseudoscience and not be aware that you are"
},
{
"end_time": 2767.551,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2738.814,
"text": " And it's much easier to wildly speculate and be incorrect. Is that what's behind it? Like, what is behind the aversion that you see? I think it's cultural. I think it's cultural. I mean, many of my colleagues were raised in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, in a moment in which he became very fashionable to be anti philosophical. This is after the war."
},
{
"end_time": 2797.927,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2768.183,
"text": " The center of science shifted the part toward the United States from Europe, where it was before. A little bit. It's a success of the incredible success of the physics of the of the 30s, right? 20s, 30s. I mean, the first half of the century. I mean, the discovery of special activity, generativity, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory was spectacular. So good."
},
{
"end_time": 2825.179,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2798.37,
"text": " that then somehow it made sense to say, well, stop thinking, let's use it. Right. We have all these tools that our forefathers have discovered. I mean, that's good. Let's use it. And on the basis, think what has happened on the basis of quantum mechanics. Boom, you get, you know, nuclear physics, particle physics, from the metal condenser matter, lasers,"
},
{
"end_time": 2850.572,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2826.015,
"text": " all sort of models, just using the equations written down by Heisenberg and company. And on the basis of special relativity, it took a little bit longer for the end of the century. But suddenly, you know, you do relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, black hole, boom, gravitational waves, fantastic, just on on the conceptual ground built in the 20s and 30s."
},
{
"end_time": 2857.841,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2851.51,
"text": " So the beginning of the century the physicists were so good that then... Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2884.923,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2858.78,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the Internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2910.981,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2884.923,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 2936.783,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2910.981,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 2962.534,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2936.783,
"text": " Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories. People didn't have to think for various decades, just apply, apply, apply, apply. But then you need to stop thinking for a while, you get used to not thinking and you get used to the idea that it's just mathematical complications. So if you're sufficiently mathematically skilled,"
},
{
"end_time": 2993.029,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2963.217,
"text": " If there's an alien, it's him."
},
{
"end_time": 3018.439,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2994.002,
"text": " Here's a fun question. I'm curious if you've thought much about it. So it's almost a question of definitions."
},
{
"end_time": 3046.698,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3018.916,
"text": " What is the universe? So one answer is the universe is everything that there is, so there cannot be an outside to the universe by definition. By the way, when I'm talking about definitions, it seems like there's no point in talking about definitions. Definitions themselves are not profound because they're tautologies. However, when I was speaking to Jorah Barnett, and I'm not sure if you know him, he was saying, Kurt, you want me to talk about proofs and theorems? What may be more important are definitions and techniques. So let's not"
},
{
"end_time": 3075.333,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3047.449,
"text": " Let's not demean definitions. So firstly, what is the definition of the what is the definition of the universe? And then where do the laws stand? So are the laws a part of the universe? There are different definitions of the of the universe, which are useful. And it's good not to confuse them, because we can use both of them."
},
{
"end_time": 3106.101,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3076.305,
"text": " In cosmology, which is a great discipline, which have made very important, had obtained great results in the last decades, the universe is not the totality of things. The universe is the description of what we see around us as the largest scale that we look at it. So that universe is a very small thing."
},
{
"end_time": 3133.814,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3106.544,
"text": " It's just not looking at the details and what you see if you don't look at the details. But of course, the details is you and I are the details in that picture. That's very useful. It's a very strict definition of universe. And you describe it, you know, with a scale factor that grows in the galaxy density and this kind of things and dark matter and so on and so forth. And that has turned out to be very useful because in fact, we have learned"
},
{
"end_time": 3161.323,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3134.991,
"text": " a credible story of what has happened for 14 billion years in the past. And it's a very credible story. I mean, it's very convincing once you started to say, yeah, good. We have evidence for that. But that's not the universe in the sense that you were asking, right? You were referring to a different definition of universe, which is all there is, so to say, the totality. Yeah, tantamount to reality. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 3191.015,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3161.749,
"text": " the totality of the real things, the totality of realities. I agree that definitions are not are important. Yeah, they're not trivial. They're not trivial. I think in some sense they are but they give extreme insight. Yeah, they're great insight. I mean, think of the example of I talk about Copernicus, right? If you start by definition, you know, of Earth,"
},
{
"end_time": 3213.336,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3191.544,
"text": " and the celestial bodies, you're done. You're killed Copernicus. You have to redefine things. You have to define planets versus stars versus satellite, and then you go ahead. Without this definition, you're lost. It's a very unintuitive definition of planet. Why should I put in the same category"
},
{
"end_time": 3238.029,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3214.087,
"text": " the earth, which I see around me, you know, with the trees, the mountain, the sky, the birds, and this little dot that move out there, which is Venus, there's a completely different things. No, they're not different things. That's the point. You can define them together. Bingo, you understand how the solar system works. So definitions are crucial. Now, the totality of thing, it's a delicate definition."
},
{
"end_time": 3266.527,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3240.93,
"text": " Because of relational quantum mechanics. So you see, if you buy relational quantum mechanics, you cannot ascribe properties, the totality of things, because all properties are really relative to something else. So there is no there is no properties, the universe has no property. In fact, the universe is"
},
{
"end_time": 3296.391,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3267.108,
"text": " is not a system, because a system is something which can interact with another system to reveal its properties, to manifest its properties. So if you buy a relation quantum mechanics, you only have description of the universe from the inside, so to say. The description of the universe as a whole, you cannot have it. So if you take seriously relation quantum mechanics, and if you take seriously what several philosophers today"
},
{
"end_time": 3314.394,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3297.125,
"text": " Telling us, I think for instance, Janan Ismail is one of them, that careful because every time we look at the universe, we're looking at universe from the inside as being part of the universe, not from the outside. And we often get confused."
},
{
"end_time": 3343.66,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3314.974,
"text": " Because we take it out of the picture, we think that we can see the totality of things from the outside. And that's wrong. And a lot of confusion about, I don't know, free will, or what is knowledge. It's always thinking that we're outside the universe. That's the universe with its stuff. And we are out there looking at that. That's not true. It's factually not true. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3366.408,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3344.326,
"text": " The universe in the sense of cosmology is fine. It's a perfectly good thing. But the universe in the sense of the totality of thing, it's a notion one should be very careful with, in my opinion. For instance, one should not subscribe properties of the universe. Because how do you what do you mean? This is one reason I don't believe there's a way function of the universe doesn't make any sense."
},
{
"end_time": 3386.698,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3366.988,
"text": " There are many in principle problems with conceiving of the universe. Well, in principle problems with science apply to the universe as a whole, because in science we're constantly looking at interacting parts within. And so then firstly, how are you supposed to perform an experiment twice on the universe as a whole? The universe is the entirety."
},
{
"end_time": 3417.363,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3387.892,
"text": " What are the problems of the universe? What else are the problems? The in-principle problems, not just pragmatically, we can't interact with all of the universe. The in-principle problems with conducting science or even thought experiments about the universe as a whole. Yes, I can, but before doing that, let me reiterate the distinction between two different meanings of universe. When the cosmologists"
},
{
"end_time": 3447.363,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3417.688,
"text": " talk about the universe. That's solid science. That observable universe is what is the observable universe. Okay. The universe is a cosmologist. It's what is it? It's the large scale properties of what we see around us. So we look at that universe from the outside, right? We have a telescope with a telescope, we count galaxies."
},
{
"end_time": 3474.548,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3448.2,
"text": " So the telescope and us is the observer that the galaxies countered the system we're observing. So it's fine. It's perfectly fine. We can see this galaxy. We see how much they're moving apart from us. We can trace back how compressed they were before. We have a system. We can model it. And we're observing these degrees of freedom."
},
{
"end_time": 3506.425,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3476.852,
"text": " From the outside, in the sense that we are not part of those degrees of freedom. We are spatially inside, but we're observing it from not being one of them. It's like if you were, I'm in this room and I study the air of this room. I can be inside the room, but I'm not there. Okay. So that's fine. On the other hand, the idea of describing the totality of thing, of ascribing a wave function, for instance, to the totality of thing,"
},
{
"end_time": 3533.387,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3507.176,
"text": " which is common. I don't think it's a good idea. Because let's be a little specific, the wave function of an object, the wave function of this pen, it's a way of computing where this pen is going to show up with respect to me next. Right, right. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3558.353,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3534.957,
"text": " When I'm in a laboratory and do some quantum measurement and I use a wave function, the quantum state for predicting what I'm going to see, I'm deducing this wave function from what I saw. I've seen this pen, the spin of this particle in one way goes to some apparatus and I have the"
},
{
"end_time": 3587.108,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3558.831,
"text": " probability of the spin being this way or that way after the pen goes up. That's a typical super simplified calculation. And to do this calculation, I use a quantum wave function of this, of this, of this pen. But what is this quantum wave function is what I know about the pen. And it's a description of what should I expect of the pen to something that regard the pen and me."
},
{
"end_time": 3617.125,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3588.353,
"text": " It's a relative state. And the person who first has understood that when you use quantum states in quantum mechanics, we always talk about relative state is Everett. In several decades ago, Everett has understood that states are relative states. So the quantum state of an object is always relative to another object. OK, this is a state is a relational thing. And once you understand that, clearly,"
},
{
"end_time": 3645.776,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3617.995,
"text": " the totality of thing does not does not have a quantum state. Because unless you believe there is God, then God think to quantum experiments on the but then God is not part of the universe. You have a sense you lose and go to together don't have a quantum state. Right. So the the the way function of everything of the universe in the sense of everything, I think is not something"
},
{
"end_time": 3667.824,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3646.237,
"text": " that should enter in is not a useful notion in physics. The wave functions are relational notions that connect a system with another system considered observer. Okay, so three thoughts occurred to me, I'm going to say them, and then just so that I don't forget them, and then we can tackle them one by one."
},
{
"end_time": 3693.251,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3668.729,
"text": " Okay, so number one, you mentioned Everett, and I believe Everett was a proponent of many worlds. I'm not sure about that. So, okay, you nodding your head. So if that's the case, well, if he, in many ways, realized this relative notion of quantum mechanics, the relational notion, so why did he move to many worlds? So that's one, I'm going to say the others so I don't forget them. Number two, when we're speaking, even right now, just with my English language,"
},
{
"end_time": 3719.428,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3693.643,
"text": " It seems incredibly misleading because as soon as I say I look right there I use the word I and you also mentioned as many philosophers come to similar conclusions well what is this I what is behind so soon as you start to analyze any word as soon as I say cup well what is the cup okay you we realize that every everyday language is beguiling so it can't actually describe reality now I'm wondering hmm is there something similar with math"
},
{
"end_time": 3745.094,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3719.94,
"text": " Do you believe that math is somehow exempt from this? That math actually can describe reality? So that's my number two. Don't worry, I've got all these in my head. And the number three was, I didn't hear an answer to whether or not the laws themselves, like the rules of the game, are part of the game. Or in other words, if when one thinks of reality as a whole, is one also supposed to think of"
},
{
"end_time": 3764.991,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3745.845,
"text": " The laws that reality operate by as being a part of reality. So let's get to number one. Why did Everett come to alternate conclusions? Yes. So the first thing you asked is you said Everett is considered the beginning of many world interpretation. That's correct."
},
{
"end_time": 3794.718,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3766.135,
"text": " Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor Everett wrote a fantastic paper in which there are a number of ideas. We also have the thesis that Everett wrote when he left physics"
},
{
"end_time": 3822.534,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3795.435,
"text": " So one question might be what he himself actually thought about quantum mechanics, but that's not a very interesting question. What is interesting is not what actually people thought at some time. What is interesting, what can we do with their ideas and their text? And everyone has introduced this notion of relational states, which I think is spectacularly good."
},
{
"end_time": 3847.073,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3824.258,
"text": " And one way of developing that idea is relational quantum mechanics, namely thinking that properties are all relational. Another way of developing that idea is the many-world interpretation. So if you want from everyone, you can branch off to two possible directions of thinking about quantum theory. The many-world interpretation"
},
{
"end_time": 3877.432,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3847.483,
"text": " It goes the opposite direction than the relation quantum mechanics, even if it has this common idea that properties are relatively, many people will say, to system into branches. The many world idea is contrary, is to take the wave function of the universe seriously and think that this is all there is, this wave function of the universe, this overall super quantum state in which we are sitting"
},
{
"end_time": 3906.254,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3878.336,
"text": " and all the rest has to be sort of extracted from, derived from this wave function of the universe, this wave function of everything, and that's a real stuff. That's sort of the main world interpretation. It's very interesting. I don't like it very much. I think, as I said at the beginning, each interpretation is a cost, and I don't think it's a cost"
},
{
"end_time": 3936.22,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3906.817,
"text": " that is bringing us ahead. Because, you know, if you think, if you take it seriously, the universe is sort of constantly splitting in multiple branches of this big wave function, where you and I are copied millions and millions of times. So you would think that there is the other the other the other copies of known non realized. Yeah,"
},
{
"end_time": 3966.271,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3936.493,
"text": " You might think that way, but there's nothing wrong, but I don't think it's useful. Okay, so then number two was about the limitations of language, and then do you see any similar limitations to the language of mathematics to the degree you can call it a language, as describing the universe? I don't think mathematics alone is sufficient."
},
{
"end_time": 3995.742,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3966.817,
"text": " I mean, I listen and I read Max Tegmark, but nevertheless, I think that between mathematics and reality, there is a gap. I think mathematics is not out there. Mathematics is a game we play, fantastic game play, super useful that we extract from reality. But I think that if I use case, if I think case by case, the mathematics that describe a pendulum,"
},
{
"end_time": 4024.94,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3996.63,
"text": " okay, which we learn at school when we study, you know, the differential equation of the pendulum, the solution of sine or cosine. It's beautiful mathematics, but it's not the pendulum. Okay. Now you can say, okay, because something is missing in a real pendulum. There's also this, also this, also this, but I think it stays like that. I mean, you refine your model, your mathematical model, but there's a jump between"
},
{
"end_time": 4049.104,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4025.606,
"text": " There's always a jump between mathematics and reality. And when you do, you get to complicated theories like current physical theories, standard model, general relativity. It's even stronger. I mean, these equations need to be interpreted, need to be connected to what we see. And this connection"
},
{
"end_time": 4078.319,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4049.718,
"text": " It's part of the story, and it's even the most interesting part of the story, so to say. It's not sufficient to have questions like that. What does it mean? You have a question, you have all space of solutions. Now, Max Stegman could say, okay, that's reality, that's all the reason we just happen to be into one. But which one? That's the connection to reality. So this means that also mathematics has the same problem that you are describing. I mean, our"
},
{
"end_time": 4109.428,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4079.48,
"text": " Every day language might be inappropriate to describe the world. We have to refine it. We have to invent a new, new world planet, which include the Earth. But the same is true with mathematics. I mean, the fact of writing a big mathematical equations is completely insufficient unless we reinterpret its ingredients and we connect it to the world and to our experience."
},
{
"end_time": 4137.312,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4110.145,
"text": " So the undeterminacy of language that you were referring to, we have to struggle with or without mathematics equally, and we have to live with it. We should not think that we can, you know, get to the bottom of the story and have a perfectly logical, perfect language description of reality and everything is clarified."
},
{
"end_time": 4167.875,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4138.114,
"text": " The third question about the laws, which you asked before, I think that what laws are as far as we know"
},
{
"end_time": 4195.06,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4168.166,
"text": " just regularities. So we see phenomena. We think that this is the way nature works. So phenomena are not just with respect to us, phenomena with respect to Saturn. When something hits Saturn, it's hit by a meteorite, like I'm hit by your voice."
},
{
"end_time": 4223.49,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4196.305,
"text": " The world, this is a fact. It's a mixture of two things, of contingent things that we have no idea how to predict, and predictable things. It's always been like that, right? I don't know who will ring my phone next, but I know that tomorrow the sun will rise, and I know exactly what time it will rise. So there's a part of the world which is incredibly easy to predict,"
},
{
"end_time": 4252.807,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4223.831,
"text": " I mean, if I let this thing fall, I know we'll go down and not up. I can predict it, I can bet off it, and I'm going to win the bet. So there's a huge part of the world which is predictable, and there's a huge part of the world which is unpredictable. So we organize that in our science and physics in particular, and we call the predictable story the laws that we find out. Okay, this is what it is. I mean, we found some regularity, very, very good, very strong regularity, we call the laws. And we"
},
{
"end_time": 4276.271,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4253.353,
"text": " have unpredictable part which we call initial conditions or you know, and determination in quantum mechanics, we give other names to the fact that definitely the laws are not sufficient to describe the world, right? Obviously, because a single law has many solutions. We don't know which one describes the world. As an aside,"
},
{
"end_time": 4304.411,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4276.783,
"text": " You hear people say, well, Copernicus realized that the earth revolves around the sun. Isn't one of the points of general relativity to say that you can actually view it both ways? You can just change the coordinates, the coordinate system technically. Okay. Yeah, you're right. Yes, you're right. You're right. In fact, in fact, if you ask input this way, because I think it's interesting. If you ask the"
},
{
"end_time": 4334.224,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4306.22,
"text": " The question is, is the Earth going around the sun or the sun going around the Earth? Let me put a simpler question. Is the Earth the centre of the universe? Is that a scientific question? Yes, of course, it's a scientific question, right? In fact, jumping out from this idea that the centre of the universe is what allowed us to do Newtonian physics, Kepler, everything. I mean, we understood so much."
},
{
"end_time": 4360.657,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4334.787,
"text": " But let's ask, let's think about this question. Can it be measured whether the Earth is the center of the universe or not? No. Right. There's no way to measure it. We have no way of thinking what is the center of the universe. It's not something which is directly measurable. And I think this is interesting because it shows that science is not just about measurable things."
},
{
"end_time": 4388.763,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4361.357,
"text": " Science, as I said before, is about organizing your thinking in some way. So if you organize your thinking as the earth is not moving, everything going around it in some way, you're just messing up your understanding. It's too complicated. You're not getting out of it. But if you start to reorganize things, first it's the sun and then say, oh, no, no, actually, it's not the sun. The sun is also moving. And then you're better again."
},
{
"end_time": 4417.073,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4389.735,
"text": " There's no center in the universe. There's no preferred reference frame. Some of the properties, some of the other properties. You reorganize your thinking in a better and better ways. And of course, the previous one looked a little bit naive, always. OK, it's not true that the sun is the center and the Earth going around. It's more complicated story like the one you said. It's more correct. So science is not about true or false."
},
{
"end_time": 4441.578,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4417.415,
"text": " I think me and you think quite alike, and I heard a hint of it when you said that there are different quantum mechanical interpretations, and in some sense, they're each right. Now, that phrase, they're each right."
},
{
"end_time": 4472.176,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4442.432,
"text": " I'm not driven by promoting peace, even though it seems like I'm ironic. Look, I didn't say they're each right. I said they're each coherent and possible. They're not wrong. Let me explain. So before Copernicus, Earth centered. Copernicus, no, Sun is centered. Einstein, hey, you're both right in some way. Now, I'm curious, as I investigate more philosophy, even religion, just like there was this line in your book about"
},
{
"end_time": 4493.882,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4472.432,
"text": " up and down and it seems to make no sense, it seems contradictory until you view it from another point of view and you see, oh, well, what's up to Australians is down to us Canadians and so on. Okay. Well, I also wonder how much of religion and well, philosophy in general, but let's just take religion. It seems like"
},
{
"end_time": 4518.387,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4494.411,
"text": " The major religions contradict with one another, but are they true contradictions when viewed from another perspective? Is there another one in which you can say, actually, that's right in some way, that's right in some other way, and that's right. Now, okay, I've just outlined, in a sense, my outlook, my personality. Do you view problems like that? Or do you see what I said as having any truth? Or is there something that I should be aware of as a limitation in that thinking?"
},
{
"end_time": 4543.933,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4520.657,
"text": " Well, you're bringing different things together. First of all, let me separate my answer into parts. First of all, religion is a very complicated phenomenon, a very, very wide phenomenon. You mentioned the big religions. The big religions, first of all, they're different from one another."
},
{
"end_time": 4568.524,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4544.343,
"text": " different properties. Second, they are institutions, they are people, their history, their center of power. Sometimes the systems of beliefs, they make statement, their moral systems, their ways for people for thinking the world, their way of people getting together, you know, you go to the church and you find friends. So it's"
},
{
"end_time": 4597.688,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4569.104,
"text": " If you isolate within religion a certain moral"
},
{
"end_time": 4627.312,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4598.029,
"text": " aspect. Definitely, I am not religious at all. I'm an atheist. I feel perfectly sympathetic. I mean, I'm happy to fight together with some religious people for the peace in the world. I don't know. If you isolate some other aspects, like the belief that it was a creator, which is a person, I just find it wrong. I think it's wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 4648.268,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4627.995,
"text": " So it's a very complicated story, and I see a lot of bad in religions. I also see a lot of good religions. I don't want to enter in which one I think is strong. Now, let me zoom into your point, because you said, well, does this mean that somehow"
},
{
"end_time": 4679.172,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4649.172,
"text": " there's always some something right. I wouldn't say always. Yeah. Okay. I would say the other way around. There's always something wrong. It's more interesting. Namely, I think that we, we humans live in a dialogue. And the good of the dialogue is that we change our mind because of what we hear from the other guy, right? That's how culture has developed. That's how science has developed. And each time so"
},
{
"end_time": 4704.445,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4680.06,
"text": " We're always the best thinking. It's always in search of what is wrong, not what is right. Okay. What is wrong in my thinking? What is wrong in your thinking? Because that's what allows us to go ahead, right? The great step of Copernicus has not been, you know, to"
},
{
"end_time": 4728.268,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4704.787,
"text": " to have the idea that the Earth goes around, has been to recognize that being attached to the idea that it enters the center is wrong. So it's found something wrong in the basis of the way astronomers thought for centuries. And, you know, a couple of generations later, Kepler"
},
{
"end_time": 4754.053,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4729.087,
"text": " did the same game. He discovered that for two millennia, people try to make sense of what we see in the sky in terms of circles. And he says this is not circles, they're ellipses. Okay, so after two millennia of circles, he said, well, forget circles. So what is interesting what we are wrong. Okay. And I think there are a lot of wrong ideas in instead of all inside a lot of beautiful"
},
{
"end_time": 4784.411,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4754.855,
"text": " moral, social, human constructions and behaviors. They're just wrong ideas in many religions. It has to be so because they are so contradictory of one another. Of course, there are some wrong ideas. They cannot be all right. So the fact that we can learn from one another and we can often take a larger point of view does not change the fact that there is a precise sense in which"
},
{
"end_time": 4814.974,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4784.974,
"text": " The pre Copernicus system, the Ptolemaic system is just wrong, factually wrong. And Copernicus system is wrong. And Kepler is wrong because planets don't go along ellipses. They move more complicated. And Newton's theory is wrong. Because if you take Newton's theory and you use Newton's theory to compute the motion of Mercury, you just get it wrong. You miss a little correction, which comes correct with generativity. So in a sense,"
},
{
"end_time": 4845.213,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4815.265,
"text": " I think there is to learn from different things. I think it's good to keep an open mind and to listen to different perspectives. But the interesting of the dialogue is precisely when we can step out from mistakes in one situation or the other. For me, when it comes to religion in particular, I would say up until just a couple of years ago, I was such an adamant atheist."
},
{
"end_time": 4870.555,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4845.538,
"text": " And I wouldn't say that I'm a theist now at all. I just wouldn't classify myself as either being pro or against. I'd say I'm undecided. The reason why I don't focus on the wrong is because to people like me and you scientifically minded people, it's fairly obvious the wrong. It's just so blatant. I find it much more interesting and difficult to see what is compatible and what is correct from another point of view."
},
{
"end_time": 4898.643,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4870.93,
"text": " Definitely knowing where one is wrong, even the nuances of incorrectness adds to certain correctness that gives you different points of view. So let's... I understand that. You know, speaking of what's wrong, I'm curious. Let's imagine if all properties are relative. Okay. Now, is the law that all properties are relative a property? Can you be relational with respect to the principle of relation? What does that even mean? Does that lie outside?"
},
{
"end_time": 4927.381,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4899.445,
"text": " Do you understand what I'm saying? I know this is extremely ill-defined, but I'm always interested in what happens when a principle is applied to itself. So even, let's say, Bayesian reasoning, if you ask someone who says, I'm a Bayesian reasoner, okay, so do you believe anything with 100% certainty? They may say no, like I'm a scientist, so I doubt. Okay, do you doubt the principle of Bayesian reasoning even a little, even a tiny? Because as soon as you open a sliver there, then what happens when you, well, you get what I'm saying."
},
{
"end_time": 4955.998,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4930.145,
"text": " Yes, of course I get very well what you're saying. I think that one of the interesting trends in contemporary philosophy, it's what might be called anti-foundationalism. It's not a new idea. There was anti-foundationalism in"
},
{
"end_time": 4982.927,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4956.698,
"text": " thinking in Western and also in Eastern philosophy. What does that mean? It's the idea that you don't need to hold to, not only to absurd certainty, but to anything definitive."
},
{
"end_time": 5012.978,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4983.865,
"text": " is sort of, is a shift, is an idea of shifting interest from what we can say for sure, what can we say from final, to what we can say interesting and valuable. In fact, this is, look Kurt, your series is about the theory of everything. I don't think we need a theory of everything."
},
{
"end_time": 5042.381,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5013.66,
"text": " Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor"
},
{
"end_time": 5069.462,
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"start_time": 5043.319,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 5089.326,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5069.462,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 5118.899,
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"start_time": 5089.326,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 5146.084,
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"text": " As much more. I think that what I like in science and in philosophy, it's the part of them that have this attitude"
},
{
"end_time": 5169.497,
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"start_time": 5146.647,
"text": " which is, look, we can learn, historically, we know we can learn, we can learn more and more and more. But it's not useful. It's useful to ask, as best as we know today, what is the best organization we have of the world. And it's true that there's a remarkable coherence in our culture and our understanding of the world. But asking what is the final"
},
{
"end_time": 5194.957,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5170.981,
"text": " Uh, ingredient of the world. What is the final rules of thinking? What is the basic substance of everything? It's just about it is a useless question. That's my take. So can we live with uncertainty? Yes. Do we have to take something as, uh, can we doubt our also our doubt? Sure. We can. Might be useful."
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"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
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"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. 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."
},
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"text": " It's also 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. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
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"text": " I will read from your book to give people an overview. And by the way, right previous to this question, I just wrote down a wonderfully"
},
{
"end_time": 5317.022,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5288.166,
"text": " philosophical set of sentences from you which was about Bryce and John when you met them and then you felt the pain of their absence you then wrote but it isn't the absence that causes sorrow it is affection and love without affection without love such absences would cause us no pain for this reason even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and beautiful because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life if those of you who are watching are listening"
},
{
"end_time": 5347.432,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5317.961,
"text": " I've recommended only one book consistently, and that's Ian McGill Christ's Master and His Emissary. And I'm going to start to add a second one, and that's Order of Time. It's filled with, firstly, if you want to know about the nature of time and how time has been thought of and redefined or not, well, recontextualized is a better way of thinking about it. It's a wonderful, wonderful book, and it's quite short. So the opposite is Ian McGill Christ, which is, I think, a tome. And then yours is a compendium. It's quite"
},
{
"end_time": 5376.834,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5348.251,
"text": " digestible. Okay, let's get to thermal time. So firstly, I want to tell you how beautiful that set of lines were. Thank you very much, Kurt. Thank you for saying that about the audio of time is it's definitely the book which is that I have written, which is more close to my to my heart, because it's a book and you know, the quotation you you mentioned shows it. It's a book in which I talk about science,"
},
{
"end_time": 5406.288,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5377.432,
"text": " It's mostly about science and it's about the science of time. And I sort of try to summarize everything we know from science about time and also the things we don't know about time from science. So it's a big part in which I just explain as best as I understand what we've learned about time from special activity, from statistical mechanics, from Boltzmann, et cetera, et cetera, from quantum gravity."
},
{
"end_time": 5433.729,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5407.039,
"text": " And then also the open questions, what we think, the speculations. But it's also a book. When I wrote it, time touches us, right? Time is not a neutral thing for us, because it's what makes us living, but also what we lose. Time is losing. So time is something that touches deep us inside. So it's a book that while writing it, I had constantly this"
},
{
"end_time": 5460.316,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5434.07,
"text": " emotional aspect about time in mind. So there's a little poetry in the verses from Horace, which is an ancient Latin philosopher, which I love, which talks about time, the time that passes the passage of time. And there's a last chapter in which I talk about death, which is the ultimate confrontation with time that we have in our in our in our life. So it's a it's a book which is science, but also"
},
{
"end_time": 5487.073,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5460.981,
"text": " our emotional relation with time as you, as in the quotation you mentioned about, about pain and sorrow of losing people. All right. So sorry for this. That's right. In chapter 10, I think in chapter 10, it's called the mandolin. I don't recall the words that came prior to it, but it's about the Eastern mystic from the 100 years, 100 first century, sorry, second century Nagarjuna. Is that correct?"
},
{
"end_time": 5514.94,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5488.08,
"text": " Yeah, Nagarjuna, there's a chapter, well, no, there is a chapter in Nagarjuna in Helgaland, my book on quantum mechanics. Okay, so what was being referred to in Mandolin when this person said that there is no I? Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's a famous dialogue in Eastern literature, the beginning of the Buddhist philosophy. It's a spectacular dialogue, the dialogue about the chariot, right? Who is he speaking to?"
},
{
"end_time": 5541.015,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5516.425,
"text": " For the people who are listening, the links to Carlo Rovelli's book Order of Time as well as his latest book are in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 5565.64,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5541.92,
"text": " And well, what was super interesting to me is in 2022, I'll start to delve a bit more into Eastern philosophies. I've had pretty much zero, although most people's philosophies are influenced by different parts of the world to some degree. So it was fun because when I was first asking you for an interview, I used it as an opportunity for me to learn loop quantum gravity, because I've always wanted to learn some of that. So I started going through your lectures."
},
{
"end_time": 5594.906,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5566.067,
"text": " But then I was sidetracked in the most positive manner by order of time. I just, I just, I didn't think that you were such a philosophical person. And I thought, boy, oh boy, I don't, well, I don't know of anyone who is a theoretical physicist that is able to be so cognitively flexible in that regard. You mentioned Max Tegmark, but I haven't looked him up much. So I was just, I was thrown by that."
},
{
"end_time": 5625.282,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5595.333,
"text": " And I'm still super excited to be speaking with you. Thank you, Kurt. Thanks a lot. So you want to know about thermal time? So can you explain what thermal time is? This is my question. And then I had some notes. So the conventional logic for interpreting this relation is time gives you a notion of energy, which gives you a notion of a macroscopic state. Now you're saying that this can be reversed. Okay, now that's so using that as a jumping off point. And remember that the audience understands what entropy and so on is."
},
{
"end_time": 5653.37,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5626.596,
"text": " There are a number of open questions in understanding time. I think there are a lot of things we have understood that time doesn't work the way we usually think about. We have understood this with special activities, general activity, with statistical mechanics, but then there are some open questions."
},
{
"end_time": 5684.002,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5654.684,
"text": " And among the open questions, it's following. Once we go to a general relativistic description about the world, the description of the world large enough to include the relativistic properties of gravity, then the theory we use does not have a lot of variables, variable things we measure."
},
{
"end_time": 5708.575,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5684.445,
"text": " But none of this is naturally identified as a time variable. That's the point. And I'm not talking for those who are more learned among those who you guys will listen. I'm not talking about in a given space time, which one is time. Of course, in a given space time, there's the clocks that measure proper time along each line we know at this time."
},
{
"end_time": 5734.633,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5709.445,
"text": " But I'm talking about the evolution of space-time itself. I mean, the Einstein equation that evolved for gravity, space-time, matter, everything. In that evolution, this evolution is given as relative evolution of variables and not evolution in time. And then case by case, we can identify and say, well, let's call this time."
},
{
"end_time": 5756.783,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5735.589,
"text": " one particular variable. This works. In fact, this is the way the world is at the level of general relativity and also at the level of general relativistic quantum field theory for quantum reality. I think there is something funny, and that's a question. In our experience, it's very clear"
},
{
"end_time": 5786.834,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5757.21,
"text": " Uh, which variable is time? It's, it's the one that clocks are connected to. Okay. The time variable is completely different than the other variables, profoundly different. And, uh, so how is it possible that from a theory in which no specific variable is temporal, then for us, uh, one variable, which is the position of the clock is definitely completely different than the others because it distinguishes past from the future in such a way."
},
{
"end_time": 5814.804,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5787.79,
"text": " So I worked on that and I wrote some papers, several papers on that, and a key paper with a French mathematician, a field medal, Alain Cohn, a spectacular and brilliant and good mathematician, because we got to this idea, both of us, independently, in a very different path, and we wrote this paper together. He came to that from pure mathematics. I came to that from thinking about physics."
},
{
"end_time": 5835.06,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5815.623,
"text": " So the idea is a speculative idea. I'm not sure it's correct. It's not something people agree upon, but I put in the book as a speculation. It's something I think in some sense should be right. And it is a following that when we distinguish the time variable from the other,"
},
{
"end_time": 5862.858,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5835.606,
"text": " It's because of what peculiar of time, what is peculiar of time, that the past is so different from the future. The right and left are not different. Up and down are not so different, a little bit different, but we understand that. Past and future are completely different. And the big difference, there are many differences which we can write down, but the big difference is that entropy grows toward the future. And this is a reason"
},
{
"end_time": 5881.476,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5863.285,
"text": " We remember the past and not the future. This is the reason the future feels open. This is a reason if you if you if you if you feel backward, moving backward is obviously backward and so on and so forth. So what characterized the time direction is not mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 5911.186,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5881.647,
"text": " is entropy. And entropy means statistical mechanics and means that we're giving a coarse-grained description of the world in terms of temperature entropy. So we have many degrees of freedom and we are not describing all of them but only a few of them. This is what entropy is about. So there's something about the flow of time which has to do with the fact that"
},
{
"end_time": 5938.353,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5911.527,
"text": " We don't describe the microphysics. We have this macroscopic description. Now, if it is so, then it's very tempting to reverse the story between the flow of time and the macrophysics in the following sense. We learn in physics textbook"
},
{
"end_time": 5966.271,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5938.558,
"text": " that the time passes, okay, systems automatically equilibrate because of the second law of thermodynamics. So they go to equilibrium. And when they go to equilibrium, they go to a state which is an equilibrium state. And this equilibrium state is described in the physics as one particular state in the sense of statistical mechanics, a probability distribution of all possible configurations. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 5993.097,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5967.637,
"text": " So the logic, think of the logic, time passes and this determines a particular state. Now the idea Alan and I got independently is that maybe this is the other way around. We're getting it wrong. Since in the fundamental theory there's no preferred time, but there are states, right? There are states because"
},
{
"end_time": 6020.572,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5993.558,
"text": " because we don't see the details of the world. We have an approximate description of the world, so we give a description of the world which is a statistical state, a distribution of a possible configuration. Now, given a flow of time, it determines one particular distribution. Maybe we should view the other way around. Given a probabilistic distribution of the world, what we know about the world,"
},
{
"end_time": 6048.285,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6020.981,
"text": " This determines the flow of time. You can mathematically compute it that way from the distribution. You can do a simple and our paper will roll down this mathematical passages. We said is the state of the world produces a time variable. And this is the idea of thermal time. And I can push this farther because"
},
{
"end_time": 6074.923,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6049.616,
"text": " If you have a quantum mechanical system, by necessity, you have some randomness, because quantum mechanics randomness, because if you may have X and P, you don't commute, and this non commutativity implies some randomness. So one of the big, big mathematical results that Alan Cohn has obtained is that"
},
{
"end_time": 6101.271,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6075.486,
"text": " using this randomness, he could show that any state, in the sense of quantum mechanical states, determines a flow of time. And I don't want to enter into the complication of Kant's mathematics, it's for Neumann algebra, it's complicated stuff. In some sense, this evolution is unique. In some very peculiar sense, this evolution is unique."
},
{
"end_time": 6131.101,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6101.988,
"text": " So what Cohn is saying is that automatically, once you have the randomness of quantum mechanics, you have a time flow. The thermal time idea is a simpler version of that. It's just if you don't know the details, your lack of knowledge of the details is such that mathematics is sufficient to pick up a specific time flow. OK, so you see, if you study generativity, the question is,"
},
{
"end_time": 6156.869,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6131.749,
"text": " Which one of the variables do you want to call time variable? And the answer is, well, they're all purely the same. But if you don't know the details and you have a foggy version, there's one which is preferred. And let me give you, if I have one more minute on this question, Kurt, a simple version of this story. In special relativity,"
},
{
"end_time": 6183.046,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6157.432,
"text": " You have many time variables, because if you move, if you and I are moving with respect to one another, we have different Lorentz time in the Lorentz information. There's T and T prime at different times, right? They're all the same. It's not one is better than than another. They're all the same. OK, but suppose you have a cloud which is hot when you go out in the universe and the cloud is hot. If it is hot."
},
{
"end_time": 6212.295,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6184.36,
"text": " If you have a number of particles, they move, there's no preferred time. But if you have a hot cloud, this is hot, and it has a temperature, which is determined by the fact that it's got an equilibrium with itself. But it got an equilibrium in one Lorentz frame, not in all Lorentz frame. It's equilibrium in the frame in which the cloud as a whole, the center of mass of the cloud is stationary."
},
{
"end_time": 6242.688,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6214.753,
"text": " It's only in this frame that the distribution is the distribution, is the Boltzmann distribution that you expect from the. So if you know the distribution, if you have a macroscopic description of that, you pick up a time, a preferred Lorentz time. So you see, microscopically, you don't see any preferred time, but macroscopically is one preferred time."
},
{
"end_time": 6265.367,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6243.131,
"text": " The idea is that that's exactly what happened in the world. I mean, we live in a world, we interact with the world macroscopically. Obviously, there is a past and a future. Obviously, there is a time direction, but that's because we use these macroscopic variables. If we were really interacting with all the degrees of freedom at the level of generativity,"
},
{
"end_time": 6281.186,
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"start_time": 6265.998,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 6299.36,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6281.647,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
},
{
"end_time": 6330.418,
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"text": " Okay, so let me see if I can understand this and then you can correct what I'm saying. Time implies energy implies macrostate, as we talked about before. And then you can reverse that, but then I see that as a trade-off between precision. So if we were more precise, we wouldn't see time. That's where Alan, which I'm going to mispronounce, but the French mathematician you mentioned, the Fields Medalist, Alan Konis, that's Elaine Konis, that's where he comes in by saying, well, clearly you can never be extremely precise anyway, given quantum mechanics. So that's why"
},
{
"end_time": 6354.616,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6330.418,
"text": " What are their complaints?"
},
{
"end_time": 6381.817,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6355.299,
"text": " The main complaint is that it's not developed well enough because in an equilibrium situation, you need an equilibrium situation to single out the time bar. But actually, what we really do in our life when we"
},
{
"end_time": 6406.63,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6382.363,
"text": " Pick up a time variable is precisely because it's not an equilibrium situation. The past is different for the future. So in a sense, it would be good to extend this term of time outside the simple equilibrium case in which past and future equilibrium don't distinguish anymore. Past and future to make the story really completely coherent."
},
{
"end_time": 6436.664,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6408.353,
"text": " Now, Lee Smolin has a book on time as well. I don't recall the name of it. If you remember, you can just say it. Do you recall? No, I forgot. Let's forget about that. Maybe the problem with time. I don't know. He has plenty of books called the problem with, at least in my head. OK, so Lee Smolin has some views on time. And I recall him saying that it may be that time is the most fundamental. Now, it might do. Firstly, does that ring true to you? Does that? OK, great. That's what Lee thinks."
},
{
"end_time": 6463.046,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6437.073,
"text": " Prior to researching about you, Carlo, I was just thinking, well, Lee Smollett and Carlo Rovelli, loop quantum gravity. Great. Let me start to research loop quantum gravity. And I was thinking that you pretty much agree with Lee on everything because in my head, you both were the same as popularizers of loop quantum gravity and developers of it. However, as I read Order of Time, I saw there was a huge disconnect between you and him on this level. So do you mind explaining"
},
{
"end_time": 6483.643,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6463.49,
"text": " Let me start by saying that Lee and I have been, I think we did the best physics together, my best physics and his best physics probably together."
},
{
"end_time": 6514.667,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6484.906,
"text": " So we succeeded repeatedly in collaborating well and we have always remained very good friends all through our life since our young age when we met"
},
{
"end_time": 6533.49,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6515.094,
"text": " So I count him as one of my very, very best friends. However, in spite of that, or maybe precisely because of that, it's not true at all that we have been agreeing on ideas all the way through."
},
{
"end_time": 6562.295,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6534.121,
"text": " In fact, I would say even the opposite. We've been able to do physics together precisely because we disagreed through our disagreement. Interesting. Through long discussions. No, no, you're wrong. No, you're wrong. You don't see that. How can you see that? Exactly. So the beauty of our collaboration for me has been being able to learn from one another constantly, being constantly challenged by the other person."
},
{
"end_time": 6592.278,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6563.029,
"text": " and through that getting to write down equations, to do calculation, to put up theories and to get results. Lee also thinks this way and Lee has a very nice way of putting this story, which I love. Once in an interview, somebody asked him about the disagreement with me and Lee thought for a while and then said, well, look, if we had"
},
{
"end_time": 6621.152,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6593.148,
"text": " had the same ideas, then one of the two of us would have been superfluous. And I think it's a great idea, right? So it's useless, somebody who agrees with you on everything. So that's the that's the premise. Now, one of the biggest disagreements, which has grown out in the last decade is precisely about time."
},
{
"end_time": 6633.558,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6622.312,
"text": " It's not so strong as one might think because there are a lot of common"
},
{
"end_time": 6663.882,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6634.531,
"text": " Points that Lee and I agree. I mean, I have been quoted often to say time does not exist, but this is easily that's a slogan slogans are, you know, you can take it the way they want and it's easily misinterpreted. Time does not exist. Does not mean that we have to think about reality as just static. Nothing happening. It's the other way around. I think that, you know, a static reality is time passes and nothing happened."
},
{
"end_time": 6686.101,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6664.599,
"text": " But time passes and nothing happened. I think we have to think about reality as a sequence of happenings, not a set of things. Before we talked about things. But if you go into relativity, to general relativity, what we actually describe in the, it's always the evolution of things. So even an object"
},
{
"end_time": 6701.323,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6686.92,
"text": " the object we talked about, the pen. What it really is in my eyes at the light of general relativity, it's a sequence of processes. There's something happening. It's happening now and then now and then now and then now. And it's just processes that resemble one another. And this is what we call the pen."
},
{
"end_time": 6724.531,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6701.715,
"text": " Sorry, to interject, when you say happenings, are they the same as space-time events? Or is that different? Yeah, if you want an event, it's something that is limited in space and time and reality is an ensemble of this. So it's an ensemble of events."
},
{
"end_time": 6754.411,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6726.459,
"text": " where event means a region of space time, but also means a something that is happening in that region of space time. In fact, I think what the reason space time is, it's just a happening. Right, right. Whatever happens in that region, that's what the region of space time is. And what happened is that there is a field, there is a gravitational field, there is a electromagnetic field of electrons, whatever happens there. And if there are no electrons and no electromagnetic field is still the gravitational field."
},
{
"end_time": 6778.712,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6754.957,
"text": " And if you take away the electromagnetic field, there's nothing happening. There's no that meter space time is not there. So this this happening view of the world is something Lee is insisting a lot. And I also agree with him completely, 100 percent. We should talk about that, this dynamical aspect of all the processes, not the entities in isolation. So that's the part we agree. It's a big part."
},
{
"end_time": 6807.705,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6779.974,
"text": " So all the people who talk about the static four dimensional universe, frozen time, a block universe, I think it's misleading. The block universe is just a picture in our head of an ensemble of events. If I think of the story of your life, Kurt, it's not a block universe story of your life. Things happened. It's an assemble of happenings. Good. So the same for the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 6837.381,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6808.507,
"text": " Now, where do Lee and I disagree? We disagree about the origin of the distinction between the past and the future. That's the disagreement. Lee holds on to the idea that the past and the future are intrinsically and profoundly different at the sort of fundamental level. So these happenings are happening from the past to the future. There's something"
},
{
"end_time": 6865.077,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6838.029,
"text": " The past exists, fixed, it has happened, it's unchangeable, the future is generally open. That's a disagreement. I disagree with that. I think that it seems to me that our best physics is telling us that this very vivid difference between the past and the future is not in the grammar of nature, in the elementary grammar of nature. It only comes in"
},
{
"end_time": 6894.957,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6865.674,
"text": " at the statistical thermodynamic level when we have a macroscopic description and therefore we have entropy and therefore we have things, you know, ice melting down and all the reversible phenomena. All the irreversible phenomena are macroscopic. The irreversibility characterizes the macroscopic variables. There's no irreversibility of the microscopic variable. So the distinction between the past and the future, in my opinion,"
},
{
"end_time": 6923.012,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6895.384,
"text": " It's only for big things. An electron doesn't distinguish the past or the future. An atom does not distinguish the past or the future. A glass of water with ice and water does distinguish, but the distinction is in the picture, in the words, water and ice. It's a macroscopic description. So that's the point where we disagree. So the philosophical idea that it's a"
},
{
"end_time": 6949.462,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6923.336,
"text": " The description of the world is about happenings and not about things, not about static. We're really on the same ground, but the orientation of this happening, is this happening oriented in time, from the past to the future, is where we disagree. I think that it comes later on, at the fundamental level, we should forget about that, the laws just don't distinguish between the two, and Lee thinks that in some sense the laws distinguish between the two."
},
{
"end_time": 6968.882,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6950.469,
"text": " So what does he say in response to your justification for saying that? What's the blurriness that generates time or the macroscopic states? What's his response? They say you be you. You be you, Carlo."
},
{
"end_time": 6995.708,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6969.599,
"text": " I'm not sure. In fact, in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to Toronto, and that's one thing I want to talk with him. I want to say, tell me exactly why do you think it's so. My reading, but he might disagree with my reading, is that the intuition of the difference between past and future for him is so strong."
},
{
"end_time": 7014.991,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6996.288,
"text": " That's my reading, but he might answer something else."
},
{
"end_time": 7041.681,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7015.606,
"text": " Julian Barber, the Janus. Oh, Julian. Yeah, no, I haven't had a chance to read his book. I started reading it. But I don't know what his theory is. I think as far as I got was just the history of thermodynamics. So what is the Janus point? What is his theory on time? And then obviously compare and contrast with yours. So a few coordinates here. First of all, Julian, it's a fantastic historian of science. He wrote"
},
{
"end_time": 7071.169,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7042.039,
"text": " a big, thick scholarly book on the history of mechanics, which is a total masterpiece, in my opinion. Then it's known for two ideas about time, one which is mostly known for that. Some time ago, his idea that we should think at"
},
{
"end_time": 7099.326,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7071.749,
"text": " the world in a completely timeless way, just a distribution probability as instantaneous configurations. And recently he came out with a new idea, which is this Janus point. So I distinguish three Barbos. Barbos, the historian of physics and which, you know, Chappell as the"
},
{
"end_time": 7128.046,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7099.684,
"text": " French say, I mean, infinite respect of him. I learned so much from him. Barber as the guy denying time in the sense of his old book of time, and the third Barber, which is about this status point. So the second one, I was never convinced much because he had a complicated story about the universe being extended in space, but not in time."
},
{
"end_time": 7157.705,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7128.951,
"text": " which I did not find convincing. We could go into that, but we should not talk about that. We should talk about the third one. And the third one, this Janus Point idea, it's indeed quite intriguing. He's not the only one who has been recently talking about. Sean Carroll has also considered this idea. There is an increasing attention to this idea."
},
{
"end_time": 7186.476,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7158.353,
"text": " The idea is that we are wrong when we say that generically, if you take a system, generically most solutions of physical motion is in equilibrium, so there is no past and future. It's true that if you put the gas in a box and you close it with a fixed amount of energy,"
},
{
"end_time": 7206.476,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7187.176,
"text": " Most possible solutions or where the gas goes in long time is in equilibrium. And in equilibrium, the entropy is constant. There is no past and future. So then we have to say why the entropy was low in the past. It seems strange. The point is that the universe is not like a gas in a box. That's the main observation."
},
{
"end_time": 7227.961,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7206.664,
"text": " That also sounds like when we were talking about that there are some problems with applying our limited scale physics or when we do experiments to the universe as a whole. I think that's where I got it from was reading the Janus point. He was saying the universe is not a box, so you can't apply the same laws of thermodynamics to the universe as a whole. Yes, exactly. So but there's a specific very, very specific reason for which you cannot."
},
{
"end_time": 7257.841,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7228.575,
"text": " That there is no equilibrium state, because if you think about the imagine the universe, just a bunch of particles in an infinite space, okay, they can spread forever. Okay, so they never get to real, to real equilibrium. So let's consider one possible configuration, okay, of these particles, okay, a generic one, they would just move somehow, maybe they come close to some point, and then they disperse."
},
{
"end_time": 7280.93,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7258.831,
"text": " So if you look at the future, they disperse. If you come back, there's some moment in which they're closer and then they disperse again. So the entropy in that configuration, it's up goes to a minimum and then grows. Of course, there's no preferred direction of time because both directions disperse, but there's a minimum."
},
{
"end_time": 7301.971,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7282.039,
"text": " So if you're on one side, the entropy is growing like that. If you're on the other side, the entropy is growing like that. So we're just on one side. And of course, the entropy is growing. If you take a mountain, any mountains, it has one direction, which is down and the other direction, which is up. So generically, there's always one direction down and one direction up."
},
{
"end_time": 7331.442,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7302.79,
"text": " So the idea is, well, maybe we got confused about the model of the bagasse in the box and the equilibrium, forget the equilibrium, maybe the right way is thinking that generically histories, possible history of the world evolves in some way and necessarily there is one point of just minimal entropy and then it goes one side and the other. This is the core of the idea. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it a little bit, but that's the core of the idea."
},
{
"end_time": 7361.561,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7332.005,
"text": " So, there are some questions about that. There are some possible doubts. I'm not sure it's really a solution of which problem, of the problem of why the entropy is low in the past. Why the time is oriented? Because in the past it was low entropy. So why in the past is it low entropy? That's an attempt to answer that question."
},
{
"end_time": 7392.21,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7362.841,
"text": " There is something ringing very interesting and I think there's a discussion going on right now among theoretical physicists and philosophers on should we buy this argument? Is it correct? I'm interested in the discussion and I hope that in some years it will clean up. Namely, yes, that's a good way of thinking about why entropy was low in the past, one direction which is the one we call the past,"
},
{
"end_time": 7419.224,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7392.841,
"text": " or no, come on, we're getting confused about probabilities here. You're surreptitiously squeezing in some intuition which is not correct. I don't know. It's relatively recent that we've been thinking about that and I'm open to this idea. I found it interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 7448.592,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7419.906,
"text": " This minimum point, does he say that's the Big Bang, or does the Big Bang happen at somewhere on the up, so it's still relatively low to us? In a sense, that's what's called the Janus point, because Janus is this god in Rome, it's a Latin god, which is the god of the doors of the change of the year. It has two faces. It was always represented with a head with two faces. One face is this way, one face is the other way."
},
{
"end_time": 7478.848,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7448.899,
"text": " So the Janus point is a point where the future, you know, the one future this way, one future that way, because the future is determined by entropy going. So this is the minimum of the entropy. So entropy goes this way, and it goes this way. So whoever is here, or whenever you're here, you see the future this way, whenever here, you see the future this way. So you always see the big bang in the past, right? That's what you call the past. Yeah, interesting, interesting. Okay, now to Wolfram, which we could take out. So don't worry."
},
{
"end_time": 7508.422,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7479.36,
"text": " Do you have any thoughts on Wolfram's model critiques? Any? What do you find interesting? What do you find not interesting? Convincing, not convincing. I. I am not. Over excited by the idea that a simple classical."
},
{
"end_time": 7528.439,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7510.538,
"text": " microscopic model could reproduce the complexity of the physics that we see. Why do you call it a classical model? Because it's definite, the hypergraph is definite, or what?"
},
{
"end_time": 7559.036,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7531.203,
"text": " It's classical in the sense that we can view this as evolution in time and at each specific moment there are steps, the fundamental variables which have a unique value. So in that sense it's classical. Quantum mechanics variables don't have a specific value. I think that to from here"
},
{
"end_time": 7587.927,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7559.753,
"text": " to reconstruct the complexity of quantum mechanics in full has not been done yet. I have not seen it yet. And I doubt that one could actually do it unless I see it in detail. There are aspects of quantum mechanics like those captured by Cochin's spectral theorem,"
},
{
"end_time": 7617.79,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7588.234,
"text": " What about for general relativity? I don't know if you've heard the claims or read the paper,"
},
{
"end_time": 7638.029,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7618.507,
"text": " that the hypergraph model can reproduce. And you can tell me, just so you know, my naive assessment, I believe what they do is an ADM decomposition at some point. And so whenever I hear that, it to me, okay, so you're foliating, so then you have a preferred time and for some reason that I'm averse to that because"
},
{
"end_time": 7664.531,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7638.319,
"text": " Space time to me shouldn't be able, at least generically is not able to be foliated. But I don't know if that's if that's just my own personal taste and I should or if that's an actual argument against or for it. This is your personal taste. But it's also my personal personal taste. But it's not an argument because if it was possible to derive all the all the theory"
},
{
"end_time": 7691.715,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7665.265,
"text": " From a completely different point of view, namely not the point of view of general covariance, not the point of view of Einstein, but from the point of view of existing or special preferred for the Asian, then okay, we would have to confront that. But once again, there's some aspect of generativity, which has been recovered. I"
},
{
"end_time": 7715.657,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7692.09,
"text": " I tried to read some of the papers of the recovery of general activity. You know, it's if you have something geometrical and you go at large scale, general activities come out still too hard to come out with the Einstein equations."
},
{
"end_time": 7745.435,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7716.169,
"text": " But once again, this is not full generativity yet. And if it is full generativity, it would predict definitely corrections to generativity, which would be testable. OK, so until I see this testing, namely that generativity is factually wrong on some short scale and we see the discrepancy,"
},
{
"end_time": 7773.49,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7746.135,
"text": " I would say, well, this is a more complicated way of saying the same story, which is distinguishable and is based on different principles, which are not the ones which seem to be implemented in the world. Namely, in the world, it seems to be that there's no reference frame, as you say. There's no preferred foliation, as you say. So that's the kind of thing we have learned from generativity. So why do we have to give them up?"
},
{
"end_time": 7805.708,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7775.794,
"text": " You know, let's go to Copernicus once again. After Copernicus did his model, it seemed to work very well on something. One thing it did work very well is that if you make the other planets go around the sun, you understand why the other planets have a feature of the motion, which have a period of one year, because they go around the sun. So of course they were. But the strongly counterintuitive things was the Earth move."
},
{
"end_time": 7836.664,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7806.971,
"text": " So some people, in particular Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer that Kepler used his data for doing his work, Tycho Brahe came out with a system which is called the Tychonic system, the system of Tycho Brahe, which was intermediate between Copernicus and Ptolemy, which was that the Earth is the center of the universe, the Earth is fixed, so there's nothing counterintuitive. The Sun goes around and all the other planets go around the Sun."
},
{
"end_time": 7865.862,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7837.654,
"text": " It's a brilliant idea if you want, right? Okay, you get the cake and you eat it too. So you get the advantage of Copernicus without the concept of difficulty of Copernicus. So in a sense, it was to try to recover the advantage of Copernican staying with the old mind frame, which is the Earth is fixed. Okay. Is it coherent? Yes, it's coherent. Has it been historically useful? No."
},
{
"end_time": 7871.886,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7866.578,
"text": " I mean we would have never got to Newton or Kepler or Galileo."
},
{
"end_time": 7898.985,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7872.824,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 7924.974,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7898.985,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 7950.811,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7924.974,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 7977.159,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7950.811,
"text": " The point of our capital was precisely that if we give up this moving, if we get out of this mind frame of we are static, we have a better way of understanding the world."
},
{
"end_time": 8006.783,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7977.927,
"text": " So Tico was completely wrong scientifically. Of course, we recognize it completely wrong scientifically, right? So I think that when we have learned general relativity, or when we learn special relativity, of course we can, you know, by being super smart, like Tico arranged thing that we stay with the old conceptual thing and recover the same thing with some some technicalities. But we don't learn more about the world. We just hang on yourself to"
},
{
"end_time": 8036.408,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8007.278,
"text": " all thinking and don't accept the new thinking, which is the one that allows to go faster. The new thinking is there's move, forget about forget this intuition that my ground is not moving. So it's the same with this reconstruction quantum mechanics for underlying basically classical system. I don't believe that is impossible. I haven't seen it yet, but I suppose it's possible. But is it do we believe that this pushing them ahead is telling us that"
},
{
"end_time": 8065.503,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8036.732,
"text": " Is this what you, in your mind, in the back of your mind, perhaps, think of Lee Smolin's idea of time? Like, Lee, you are trying to hold on. Yeah, it's the same story. It's exactly the same story. So take the take the discovery seriously, right? What Einstein did"
},
{
"end_time": 8095.555,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8066.732,
"text": " When he did special relativity, there were these Maxwell equations that seemed to contradict Galilean relativity. Which one is wrong? Einstein's answer is neither. They're both right. Believe the physics, right? And when Einstein did general relativity, he took this idea of Maxwell of the fields,"
},
{
"end_time": 8121.937,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8096.101,
"text": " What if Sean Carroll, who is a proponent of the many worlds, says to you, Carlo, you're trying to hold, you say that the many worlds is distasteful because look, the cost, yeah, but you're calling it a cost because you're trying to hold on to something else. So what if Sean says that to you?"
},
{
"end_time": 8157.961,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8128.404,
"text": " I am in a discussion with Sean on a number of things. He not only takes the many-world interpretation seriously, he likes it, but he likes a particularly radical version of the Eritrean or many-world interpretation. It is not radical enough already, right? Yeah. He called it the mad dog."
},
{
"end_time": 8176.766,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8158.439,
"text": " Many world interpretation of the mad dog in which there is only Hilbert space and state and Hamiltonian, nothing else. So you want to extract everything from from that. I'm I'm I am"
},
{
"end_time": 8202.824,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8177.142,
"text": " What would he say to me? I think that he belongs to a"
},
{
"end_time": 8222.858,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8205.657,
"text": " A group of physicists that are very much in love with many worlds because they find it very simple and straightforward. It's just this wave function and out of this wave function we can extract the rest. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 8252.415,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8225.435,
"text": " I never heard him telling me what he thinks in the relational interpretation is wrong, because when we talk about his ideas, especially this mad dog version of Everett, and I sort of tried to point out what are the technical limitations of this idea."
},
{
"end_time": 8282.927,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8255.094,
"text": " There is some people who learned quantum mechanics starting from Schrodinger and can only think about quantum mechanics in terms of the wave function. The quantum mechanic was not born with Schrodinger, it was born with Heisenberg and Max Born and the Gottingen"
},
{
"end_time": 8312.705,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8283.831,
"text": " people in matrix mechanics before Schrodinger, Pauli, Dirac. And it can be thought without any wave function or without any state. And I think that by introducing the wave function, Schrodinger confused things, made calculation easier, but confused the ontology, the picture. So everybody started thinking about this wave and got confused."
},
{
"end_time": 8343.746,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8314.121,
"text": " I think that Sean is definitely not making the mistake of holding on to classical intuition to the opposite. He takes the Schrodinger wave function very seriously and tries to build everything from that. So he's blaming me probably what I am blaming Wolfram and Lee, namely that I want to stay attached to classical"
},
{
"end_time": 8373.029,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8344.121,
"text": " to variables having values describing the world in terms of facts. That's probably what he would like to blame me. My answer is that I think it doesn't work to think that the world is just a wave function as a way he would like to. He would like to say it's a wave function and nothing else. There's this vector in Hilbert space and nothing else. And I think that vector in Hilbert spaces don't give me pens."
},
{
"end_time": 8399.292,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8373.507,
"text": " Don't give me books, don't give me the concrete description of the world. To have a quantum theory, you need much more many ingredients. So it's not clean, the pure wave function picture of the world. You need the operators, you need eigenvalues, you need eigenvectors, you need this structure. And this structure, he hopes to just take it out for the Hamiltonian,"
},
{
"end_time": 8422.295,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8399.735,
"text": " But once again I have not seen it happening yet. So I think that this way of thinking about quantum mechanics is not going to be fruitful. We need the algebra of obstacles. Quantum mechanics about non-commutative variables. The core of quantum mechanics is pq minus qp equal i h bar. This is the core"
},
{
"end_time": 8451.527,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8422.637,
"text": " How is he throwing that out by trying to put so much emphasis on the wave function? How is he throwing out those non-commuting operators? Oh, that's the mug, the mother dog interpretation. There are no, no, no,"
},
{
"end_time": 8480.759,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8451.903,
"text": " There's only the way function. And then he says there is Hamiltonian. And then we don't have some structure in it. And from the structure of Hamiltonian, one can derive from the structure of the composition of Hilbert spaces in subsystems. And the subsystem from the subsystem, I can extract something which correspond to the algebra of the syllables. So it's a very indirect way of trying to"
},
{
"end_time": 8499.565,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8481.22,
"text": " extract it from the dynamics. It's a dynamics that should give us the variables. It's a long way to go. Is there a reason that he's starting he's saying that there let's imagine the wave function of the universe seen quantum field theory and I'm not saying anything you don't know. It's"
},
{
"end_time": 8529.343,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8500.52,
"text": " It's like operator value. It's not that people say it's field, but it's like a strange field. It's an operator value field, because it's not exactly when the mystics say it's like all like water and waves. Well, it's like an operator wave, if you want to call that. So why is he not using, why is he going, why is he going to QM and not QFT? In other words, like the wave function of Q. No, no, no, he has in mind quantum field theory. He has in mind QFT. But the particular structure that define QFT, he would like"
},
{
"end_time": 8559.548,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8530.469,
"text": " to say that is only written in the Hamiltonian. So he would not, he would say that, you know, the fundamentalism of the world is not, QFT is a very rich structure, as you say. There are these quantum fields which are actually operated. It's these local quantum operators, a field of operators which commute, don't commute, have this, all this problem. So you have to give all this machinery to make it work. And this machinery, the operators, the fields are observable. So what we"
},
{
"end_time": 8584.189,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8560.094,
"text": " Interact, describe how we interact with the field, right? He wants to discard all that. He wants to say there is only a big Hilbert space. A Hilbert space is just, you know, a gray thing. We don't look at anything. And Hamiltonian. Okay. Hamiltonian is just what gives the motion of the state in the Hilbert space."
},
{
"end_time": 8611.92,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8584.821,
"text": " But he will say that Miltonian has some structure inside it, because it's eigenvalues, have some structure, some way of combining them, and these secretly know about all the machinery of quantum field theory. It's a technical step. I don't know if I need to go into that. But he has in mind quantum field theory. In fact, the property of the Hamiltonian that"
},
{
"end_time": 8638.643,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8613.012,
"text": " he uses is the locality of the interaction, the internet can be written as a, and the locality gives the region of space. So here's this, this extreme Everettian or extreme many walls. And my objection,"
},
{
"end_time": 8668.763,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8639.309,
"text": " Okay, now what is your opinion on Eric Weinstein's geometric unity? Have you had a chance to go through any of the papers? No, no, I should. I'm sorry. I should, but I don't I could not follow opinion. Okay, that's fine. How about Donald Hoffman's? Have you do you know Donald Hoffman? So he has a book called"
},
{
"end_time": 8695.657,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8669.343,
"text": " The case against reality and yours is called reality is not what it seems. Yes. Oh, this is a big philosophical discussion. He definitely had a number of very good points and some radical conclusions from from those."
},
{
"end_time": 8724.514,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8695.998,
"text": " I know a little bit about his ideas, but I have not read his book, so I'm not sure I have a good gauging of exactly what you want to draw from that. But let me say the core of what I think. We interact with the external world around us through our senses and through our"
},
{
"end_time": 8753.473,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8724.838,
"text": " the way the brain interprets what we see around us. And I think it's a very good and very deep observation to recognise, to realise that what we call the objects around us are to a large extent mental constructs."
},
{
"end_time": 8776.51,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8753.729,
"text": " that our brain puts together on the basis of how useful this construct has been in our evolution to allow us to survive. So in"
},
{
"end_time": 8803.404,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8776.988,
"text": " In a sense, we're seeing a movie of what is outside, which is vaguely related to what is outside, whatever is happening outside, and is deeply coloured by our reading of it. This is an observation which has been made in philosophy many times. In fact, it's one of the main things for which Kant is known."
},
{
"end_time": 8823.797,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8804.104,
"text": " can't consider a major philosopher in the Western tradition, but it's others before and after have made this observation. And I think it's important because what we're describing at every level is not the world, it's the world as we read it."
},
{
"end_time": 8850.794,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8824.923,
"text": " So the disagreement is"
},
{
"end_time": 8878.712,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8851.22,
"text": " Now, so far I'm completed with him. Now there are two points. One is that, all right, so then what? There are two points I would not really object, but I would say how I think about this. First of all, that this does not mean that our mental world is more"
},
{
"end_time": 8908.848,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8879.326,
"text": " solid and known that the external, because exactly the same arguments employed here for the external world, exactly the same arguments work for our mental world. Namely, there is nothing certain either in what we see as our sense of our self or perception. These are also complicated, the cultural biological construction"
},
{
"end_time": 8937.722,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8909.531,
"text": " that our representation of the world has. So our representation of the world include a notion of myself, a notion of my representation, a notion of my representations, which are all notions that will develop culturally. So the same criticism against the existence of outside objects, I think hold for the existence of the self and my mental world. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 8968.592,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8938.968,
"text": " So this leaves us where? I think, and this is my arrival point, this leaves us, in my opinion, toward the anti-foundationalism that we talked at the beginning of this story. Namely, we should not ask the wrong question. The wrong question is what is really, really, really outside there? That's a wrong question. The right question"
},
{
"end_time": 8998.012,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8969.241,
"text": " I see a mirror. Okay. It seems to me that a chair is the other side of the mirror. Is it true or false? No, it's false. It's an illusion. The chair is not the other side of the mirror. The chair is here. Okay. The chair is really here and falsely outside of the mirror. That's correct. Okay. We can play this game step by step."
},
{
"end_time": 9026.886,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8998.439,
"text": " by realizing that things are not like that. We're misunderstanding there. There's a better way of understanding that they're not like that. The misunderstanding is a matter of words. If we ask the question, okay, so what is the ultimate reality independently of any representation? That's not a good question, in my opinion. That's a wrong question. Reality is that chair. Reality is that sun. Reality is that chair in the mirror."
},
{
"end_time": 9054.821,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9027.398,
"text": " And their relations, their relative relations. So I will jump out of this discussion. Okay. And distinguish if you want the apparent reality and the ultimate reality and forget about the ultimate reality. We're talking about this after reality. And that's what we call reality. Reality is the ensemble of this phenomena of which I am part and your part and the cherries part and all the way we"
},
{
"end_time": 9082.978,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9055.35,
"text": " understand better and better and better. We can say they are made by atoms for fantastic. We can say the atoms are quantum mechanical objects that interact with us. Fantastic. We get more and more complexity of the phenomena. But if we ask the question, where do we ground all that? What is the ultimate reality? Forget about this. So if the case against reality,"
},
{
"end_time": 9113.183,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9084.309,
"text": " That he's making is the case is the case against the idea of an ultimate reality out there. And in favor of an ultimate reality for our impressions, I disagree. Because there is a good way of understanding our impression as caused by the chair. That chair. Not a metaphysical chair, or if you want in Kantian terms, who cares about the noumenon?"
},
{
"end_time": 9136.015,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9113.575,
"text": " We care about the phenomena. What we call reality is a phenomena, not an hypothetical thing behind the phenomena. That's my take on it. When I hear that, here's what I'm thinking. Okay, you said the chair is not really behind the mirror. It's really over to the left of me. Okay. Yeah. And that's what I mean. They're really"
},
{
"end_time": 9163.916,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9136.459,
"text": " Right, we have this notion of really, we have this notion of reality. Then if I was to get you or anyone else, let's say people in general, what are some facts that of what is a part of reality? So we're trying to derive a definition from looking at, well, I say that this microphone is really in front of me. And then I may point to other objects and say that really is the case. But then, well, what if there's an inconsistency in what we call a part of our reality and not, then which one do we take as more"
},
{
"end_time": 9186.903,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9165.162,
"text": " Why do we favor this microphone being really in front of me, but Santa Claus not really exist? No, you have you have I got I got exactly the point. I think we have to use really a coherence just which ones makes cohere together consistent. What is it? I think we have to realize that really, in reality,"
},
{
"end_time": 9216.032,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9187.739,
"text": " It's, it can be used in different, right, right, right to use at different levels. And it's fine. We do a different level, for instance. Did Hamlet really killed his uncle? Yes, he did really kill his uncle. I mean, if you tell me, you know, Hamlet did not kill his uncle at the end of the play. I said, No, no, no, he did. He really did. Look,"
},
{
"end_time": 9240.333,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9216.305,
"text": " I come with Shakespeare text and say, it's written here, I'm killing you uncle home. Okay. So I'm using really, okay. Okay, it's real. And now you tell me, come on, it's not real, because it's a play. So of course, not real. Okay. So when I'm right, when I say I'm real, when I say I'm both right, in both cases, I'm just meaning two different real. So real is in a context."
},
{
"end_time": 9267.278,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9241.732,
"text": " If you want to take a real outside the constants, what is really, really, really real behind all the context, that has no meaning. So talking about the mirror, we make a distinction between the chair on the other side of the mirror and the chair, that chair there. And that distinction, it's meaningful. And we"
},
{
"end_time": 9294.48,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9268.524,
"text": " correctly use one to be real and one not to be real. And I can argue exactly what I mean. I mean, if I walk against the mirror, I just hit my nose against the mirror. While if I walk against that chair, I can sit down. I mean, there's a very precise sense in which one is more real than the other. Okay. And if I'm dreaming, there's a very precise sense in which I say that's not real. It was a dream. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 9324.514,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9294.735,
"text": " But within the dream itself, they think which are real in the dream and not real in the dream. OK, in the dream, I can dream of somebody who is telling me, I mean, look, you thought that is so, but it's not so the real something else. So within the dream, there is a notion of reality there in the movie. There is a notion of reality there. So the question of what is real is a very slippery question. It's a context by context. It makes sense. But every time within a context,"
},
{
"end_time": 9353.848,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9324.94,
"text": " in which we're giving something for granted and we're building them. And when I hear the argument, look, the way my brain makes sense of that chair, it's because in my brain there is a notion of sitting, there is a notion because there is a space of colors, blah blah blah blah,"
},
{
"end_time": 9382.517,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9354.599,
"text": " And therefore, the cherry, it's, it's, it's, it's really a cherry in an illusion for me, the context is a context in which I'm giving for real a number of things, my brain, the, the, the, the, the motion, the, the, the, the, the existence of light coming to me, you're creating a context so that within that context, there's a notion of reality and, and, and, and, and illusion."
},
{
"end_time": 9412.79,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9383.507,
"text": " And what about that context itself? Is it real is not real? It's, I think that we describe the phenomena that we interact with. And within description, that's description is reality. That would mean by reality. And if we try to say, beyond the phenomena, what is the true ultimate reality, we're making a mistake. And this is a mistake that a lot of philosophers"
},
{
"end_time": 9442.722,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9413.183,
"text": " have warned us against many Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Nagarjuna, a lot of phenomena say careful. I mean, you take a distinction, the chair in the mirror and the chair you see there, and you try to replay that. That's everything you know about the universe and something else, which is a real, real, real thing. That's the real thing. Forget about it. Don't don't do that game. So I would say that"
},
{
"end_time": 9471.647,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9443.353,
"text": " We don't have a case against reality with a case for reality and against the idea that there's an ultimate reality beyond everything. When you say that, what I'm wondering is, is that because we can never know what's outside of what's knowable? So you gave Kant the phenomenon, the noumena, give that example. Is it because of that we can just not know it? Why is it that it's so foolish to talk about the foundational reality?"
},
{
"end_time": 9500.708,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9473.746,
"text": " To the extent in which we can know something else, we may hope to know something else, we correctly put this question on the table, right? But only to the extent in which we may have a hope to know something else. I'll explain my reasoning behind the question. So when I'm speaking to some non-dualists, I don't know if you know what non-dualism is."
},
{
"end_time": 9527.824,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9501.698,
"text": " They would say consciousness is primary. And then I pose the question, well, how do you know? What if there's something outside consciousness? A simple question. They would say, yeah, but you can never know that. Well, it's true. I can't experience what's outside my experience by definition. But that to me doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Now, one can say that it's foolish to talk about it because it never interacts with you and you have no clue. That's another argument. But to say it doesn't exist,"
},
{
"end_time": 9556.903,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9528.865,
"text": " Because it's outside of our experience. I don't find that particularly convincing. So that's what's behind my question. No, no, it's a good question. I see the point. What is the use of"
},
{
"end_time": 9587.261,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9557.807,
"text": " of imagining that there is something beyond our knowledge. Okay, I think there are two uses. One is that because perhaps we may get to know it. And the other is just, you know, to recognize that, who knows, there might be or there might not be something. And these are two very different situations. Namely,"
},
{
"end_time": 9612.978,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9587.619,
"text": " If I see a chair and I suspect that it might be understandable in terms of atoms, I can ask the question, maybe beyond the appearance of the chair, there is this atomic structure. And then I can do some science or can do some investigation or can do be Boltzmann and come up with the explanation of temperature on the basis of that."
},
{
"end_time": 9643.985,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9614.445,
"text": " or be Einstein and come up with a Brownian motion from the atoms explained by a motion, or then, you know, be IBM that make a microscope and see the atoms. So beyond some appearances, I suspected that there was some reality, a better, deeper description of reality. And that allowed me to get a better description of the world. That it's a situation in which it's good to say, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 9673.899,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9644.821,
"text": " Maybe I just don't know something, which I might know it. But if the argument, like the case against reality, is that there is a reality which is in principle unknowable, that I cannot know about that, which is a completely different story, is to say maybe there is an aspect of beyond what we call reality usually, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 9684.838,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9674.753,
"text": " in principle and accessible. And then what interest do we have on that? I mean, why should we talk about that? I mean, suppose the, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 9714.428,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9685.486,
"text": " to you and say, you know, I believe that this is a universe, but there's an extra another direct dimension where there are, you know, green dragons going around and speaking Chinese to one another. Okay, but they never interact with us. We never interact with them. And, and they just totally. And then you see me, how do you know about that? I mean, I don't know. But can you disprove it? No, I can't. What's the interest of this story? Zero. So I think that ultimate reality is like dragons."
},
{
"end_time": 9744.855,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9715.469,
"text": " speaking Chinese to one another and playing football in another dimension. We should not talk about, by reality, we mean what we interact with, with the complexity of the different layers. And we may find other layers perfectly, but we shouldn't worry about this not being the totality of things, because that's the totality of things we're interested about."
},
{
"end_time": 9776.869,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9747.363,
"text": " Here's what I think of when I hear that. Again, the word pragmatism comes up because you're talking about, well, what's the use of it? What's the point of it? So then I'm wondering, well, is reality or theorizing tied to pragmatism? In some sense, yes, because we're finite beings, we have to choose to do something. But then can we not philosophize for the sake of philosophizing? So that's what occurs to me then at the same time when saying, well, we don't know if these Chinese dragons are playing football in some other dimension that never interacts with us."
},
{
"end_time": 9804.77,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9777.432,
"text": " However, I would say it's still, firstly, it's fun to think about Chinese football playing dragons. And second, just like we were talking about in the beginning, scientists have an aversion or generally now contemporary scientists have an aversion to philosophizing. They would say, well, this is much of what you're talking about, especially when it comes to metaphysics is unfalsifiable. Science is a methodology. Let's apply that. Let's stick to our mathematics. But then you were making the great argument, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 9832.159,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9805.555,
"text": " that leads us to plenty of places even if it seems misleading at first or even if it seems to not interact with us first so that's what else i think about it is that okay even if we say there are these non-interacting chinese dragons that play football okay let me hear you out do you truly believe that do you have some great arguments for let's hear it okay let's think about that would this be the case if that and then you can arrive someplace interesting so i'd say"
},
{
"end_time": 9862.125,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9832.978,
"text": " First, you said it's about a point. What is the point? What is the use? Then I say, well, that's pragmatism in the sense of it has to have a use to us. And I'm saying, well, we could talk about that. But then also at the same time, there could be a use in the sense that, well, we could talk about incomprehensible, unfalsifiable notions and still lead us somewhere propitious in the long run. OK, so that's what I think. Now, I say that and I'm curious, what are your thoughts on what I've just said? Oh, I wouldn't not disagree with you."
},
{
"end_time": 9893.951,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9864.957,
"text": " I think there is a tradition in philosophy, so let me develop something I hinted before. There's a tradition in philosophy which is to warn, philosophy has a cure, Wittgenstein is a master of that, cure against wrong questions. What does wrong mean here? You probably would call me a pragmatist if you say wrong means useless. So"
},
{
"end_time": 9919.718,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9894.377,
"text": " If you stay in science, science was often liberated by philosophical thinking that science often made step ahead"
},
{
"end_time": 9947.654,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9920.572,
"text": " By getting input from philosophy that said, well, you don't have to ask this question. Certainly, this played a role, Copernicus, but played a bigger role in Einstein. Einstein got from Mark the idea that asking the question of what it's really, really meaning of two things happening at the same time is just the wrong question. We forget about that. That's not meaningful. I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 9977.193,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9948.217,
"text": " and also from Mark Heisenberg took the idea that the electron doesn't have a position at any time directly from this is a this is a wrong you you're you're imposing a so there is a there's a tradition in philosophy which is warning against the wrong kind of questions and I think what I'm saying here what I'm trying to say here is that"
},
{
"end_time": 9998.268,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9977.432,
"text": " The notion of reality is good because we use it to distinguish the chair in the mirror from the chair on which I can sit to distinguish the dream from what I see when I'm awake for describing what is in a play or in a novel from what is not in a play in a novel."
},
{
"end_time": 10025.35,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9998.507,
"text": " you tell me that yesterday you met John and say, is that real or false? You lie. This is meaningful. We know exactly what you mean by real and false here. But then if we take this notion of real and we make it, we extrapolate it to say everything we see is not real."
},
{
"end_time": 10055.981,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 10026.988,
"text": " Because everything we see has a level of illusion of some kind, much weaker kind of the mirror, much weaker kind, it's good that we realize that there's a level of illusion, but then we are postulating that there is an underlying reality behind that, and that postulation might be wrong, simply wrong, or at least"
},
{
"end_time": 10082.705,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 10056.425,
"text": " It's, let's put it this way, it's remarkable that size failed to get to that ultimate reality so far. So why should we expect it? What is the ultimate reality? I mean, quantum fields. I mean, we don't even know exactly what is a quantum field because of the complication of quantum mechanics. We know what is a classical field. Quantum field is something that manifests itself with particles. Okay, but particles are not real."
},
{
"end_time": 10112.5,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 10083.285,
"text": " So we are confused on the ultimate reality, even in contemporary physics, in contemporary physics today, not to mention about in philosophy in general, what is ultimate reality? Matter, energy, God, spirits, language. Everybody comes out with an ultimate reality story and fail to convince the others. So the perspective I find it"
},
{
"end_time": 10136.049,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 10113.968,
"text": " Interesting is to de-emphasize the notion of ultimate reality. Ah, interesting, interesting, interesting. And use the word reality at level by level. I mean, it's real that there's a chair there, but it's also real that that chair is some illusory thing. It's also real. There's just a bunch of atoms. Both things are two."
},
{
"end_time": 10166.271,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 10136.732,
"text": " Okay, I'll explain my thoughts, what occurs to me, and then we can get to rapid fire questions and answers just from the audience, because you've been so generous with your time. Thank you. Is that cool? Absolutely. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 10194.309,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 10166.92,
"text": " This has been a very philosophical thing, little physics, little quantum gravity, very, very good. I get basic philosophy of science and physics, understanding and the nature of reality. Let me recapitulate what you said. So I make sure that we're on the same page. There are different ways that we use the word reality, just like there are different ways we use the word time. And just like there are different ways we use the word almost any noun, essentially, depending on the context."
},
{
"end_time": 10224.104,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 10194.548,
"text": " So let's imagine we can put these contexts in separate boxes. Much of the confusion occurs when we think, well, we mean, well, much of miscommunication is we intend it to be from box A, but you perceive it as from being from box B. So the contexts are mixed up. And what I was wondering is when it comes to reality, even within the same context, I don't see there being an internally consistent, even within the context. And by the way, you mentioned Wittgenstein,"
},
{
"end_time": 10245.52,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 10224.497,
"text": " Wittgenstein had this notion of language games. I believe the language games would be the equivalent of context here, boxes. I'm wondering if there's an internally, an internally consistent notion of reality. Okay, so, well, and then where was I going with that? Ah, ah, okay, now my, what, hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 10272.517,
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"start_time": 10246.425,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 10292.398,
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"start_time": 10272.517,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
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"start_time": 10292.398,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 10348.063,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 10322.022,
"text": " I think is at least I haven't seen any and anytime I try to come up with well I haven't seen any internally consistent definition of reality. Now there are a couple answers to that one is the Donald Hoffman method"
},
{
"end_time": 10371.903,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 10348.968,
"text": " Forget it. So there's no reality. It's all unreal in some sense. Then there's the phenomenological answer, the phenomenology answer, which is actually all you experience is real. It's real to you. Even if you're schizophrenic and you see a snake in front of you, that's real to you. But then you actually took a different route, which I never occurred, which is please stop using the word reality. Just let's forget about it."
},
{
"end_time": 10399.65,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 10372.278,
"text": " So am I making a correct summary? And if I'm just correct? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Please stop using the word reality. I'm labeled and divorced of context reality. I mean, use use the word reality in each context. So it's like we should have reality sub a reality sub B. Yeah, make sure that we're in this movie. This is real. This is real. This is false."
},
{
"end_time": 10422.346,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 10400.896,
"text": " But that's a movie. It's all false in a different sense of real. So the real has a variety of meaning in the context in which you use it. So in a context, give me a context and I give you a much better definition of reality. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 10451.749,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 10422.807,
"text": " In the context of the miserable written by Victor Hugo, I can absolutely uniquely see what is real and what is not real. What is real is what's written in the book. It's not real is what you write. It's not written in the book. Okay. In the context of the history of the United States, it's absolutely real. Maybe when we can make a mistake, but we know that to make a mistake. So we know what is real was not real, that, you know, George Washington renounced and becoming a king, whatever."
},
{
"end_time": 10479.531,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 10452.244,
"text": " So, context by context, we have a clean notion of reality, which allows us to make distinction between real things and not real things. It's a unique word, real reality to reality, real, not real, outside all context, which I think is dangerous."
},
{
"end_time": 10511.852,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 10483.592,
"text": " The information paradox, you said it's like falling in love with holography and that the entropy inside a black hole can be different than the outside. So can you explain what you mean by that? Yes. Right now in the community of physicists, there has been a separation between two communities which have completely different opinions about the black hole paradox."
},
{
"end_time": 10541.937,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 10512.415,
"text": " One community is convinced that there is a problem. The problem is before quantum gravity, so before the end of the evaporation. And the problem is due to the fact that the black hole shrinks and people are convinced that the number of states of the black hole is bound by the area, by the Beckstein-Hawking entropy."
},
{
"end_time": 10569.258,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 10542.654,
"text": " and therefore the problem is that the state outside seems to be thermal and impure state and for that to be possible to save unitarity information should be somewhere and the only place we could be reasonably inside the black hole but there are not enough states inside the black hole because horizon has shrunk."
},
{
"end_time": 10594.292,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 10569.872,
"text": " And this has created a huge, a huge problem. And there are complicated solutions which are being studied today. And people are sort of getting convinced that this complicated solution are the way out. The other half of the community, which are most relativist particle physics and people like me,"
},
{
"end_time": 10621.766,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 10594.889,
"text": " just don't believe this story. Absolutely. Because to create this paradox, you have to believe quantum mechanics, which is unitary, and we all expect quantum mechanics to be unitary. You have to believe that generativity holds, and in some reasons we don't expect quantum gravity, and many of us expect that. And you have to believe an additional assumption"
},
{
"end_time": 10651.391,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 10622.824,
"text": " which is the number of black hole states inside the black hole is bound by the area. And that has no strong ground. People got in love with the idea because there are calculations that allow you to describe black hole in terms of a finite number of states bound by the area. But this is a description of what you see from the outside as long as the horizon is an event horizon, it's a horizon forever."
},
{
"end_time": 10676.135,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 10653.063,
"text": " And the horizon black hole is not an event horizon, because at some point, the black hole becomes very small, something happens. And at that point, it may very well be that the big information which is outside comes out. Okay. And the confusion, subtle confusion here, it's that people is used to say,"
},
{
"end_time": 10702.602,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 10676.63,
"text": " The von Neumann entropy is bounded by the thermodynamical entropy. Namely, von Neumann entropy is in the amount of information due to the entanglement between the inside two things. At the thermodynamical entropy, count the number of states if you interact thermally with something. And people say, well, of course the von Neumann entropy is bounded by the thermodynamical entropy because the thermodynamical entropy count the number of states. If you don't have this state, you cannot have"
},
{
"end_time": 10729.957,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 10703.558,
"text": " But that's wrong, because if one part of the interior system is terminally disconnected, you can still have a big von Neumann entropy and decreasing thermodynamical entropy. And that's exactly what happened in black holes. And people who are sort of blinded by over excessive"
},
{
"end_time": 10756.22,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 10730.725,
"text": " taking a strong version of holography, just don't see that very basic point, and don't see that if you give a full description that includes what happened after the end of evaporation, you can have a phenomenon to be much larger than the thermodynamic entropy. Simply talking, the whole of the black hole shrinks, becomes smaller, smaller, smaller when the black hole evaporates,"
},
{
"end_time": 10786.681,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 10756.869,
"text": " But the inside remains very big. There's a lot of information there, which is not lost where the black hole ends the operation. When you say the inside, it slowly comes out the inside of the black hole. The black hole has a it's like a throat. Yeah, the horizon. And then there was an inside which is very, very big. That's the point. I mean, you can have a very, very big spatial space like surfaces are huge. OK, and that's where the information is."
},
{
"end_time": 10816.544,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 10787.722,
"text": " And at the end of the operation, now we're in quantum gravity. And with loop quantum gravity, you can do calculations of what happened. And there's a quantum transition to a region in which the inside is still there. And slowly it leaks out all the information. So I think that there is a perfectly coherent picture which shows that it's not true that there's a black hole information problem. The belief in the black hole information problem"
},
{
"end_time": 10845.913,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 10817.363,
"text": " is based on a dogma, has become a dogma, which is not supported by anything, that the number of states of black hole computed from the outside also include the information inside. In popular science, you always hear that when someone falls into the black hole, you won't see them, well, you'll see them freeze right at the horizon. You'll see their watch frozen too."
},
{
"end_time": 10873.712,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 10846.305,
"text": " Now, if the black hole event. Yeah. Yeah. This is we don't know that because that's the kind of quantum gravity. See, that's that's exactly the that's exactly the problem. When time goes on, OK, you see what you see, somebody is crossing the black hole. So the person crossing the black hole, of course, crosses the black hole. I mean, nothing particular happened crossing the horizon. Just normal, normal time going back."
},
{
"end_time": 10891.92,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 10874.684,
"text": " The light rays that it emits get to you later and later and later and later. If the horizon is an event horizon, so if the horizon stays there forever, you can go to infinity and you only see the person before crossing."
},
{
"end_time": 10915.691,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 10893.166,
"text": " But we don't know. In fact, the rise is not an event, right? The rise does not go to infinity, because at some point, the black hole becomes plankton. And that's we're in quantum gravity. And when you're in quantum gravity, there is a quantum transition after which the information outside can go outside. Okay, so if you wait long enough, you see inside the black hole. Interesting. That's the point."
},
{
"end_time": 10939.36,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 10916.186,
"text": " When I was in my 20s, I could take a mathematically complicated paper, just sit down on a chair and read it through and I would get everything easily."
},
{
"end_time": 10969.172,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 10940.265,
"text": " And then it slowly becomes more complicated. And now in my sixties, I've struggled, I go slow, I read less papers. So my capacity to learn is decreasing. And also, I think my flexibility of thinking is going down. I tend to know much more things before I have much more developed views before I know more things. I see when other people are wrong, because I know things they don't know. It's happened much more often than before."
},
{
"end_time": 10984.292,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 10969.616,
"text": " I mean, it's easy to see the mistakes of the others because because I know more things, everybody getting cold and all small things. So that's why all the people are wiser. But also I am more stupid because I'm more trapped in my own thinking. I have more difficulty of coming out from my own thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 11016.186,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 10987.108,
"text": " What would you have done differently in the development of your theory? It could be as simple as I would have spent more time going for walks with Lee than sitting down, or I would have spent more time thinking about about holography like ADS, CFD, correspondence for whatever reason, or you would have spent less time arguing with your peer. Like what is it that you would have done differently in development of your current theories? There have been situations in which"
},
{
"end_time": 11041.22,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 11017.329,
"text": " People have raised objections to things I've done. I got convinced that these objections were wrong and I just ignored that and just didn't bother respond. And I"
},
{
"end_time": 11070.299,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 11041.596,
"text": " I don't think I should have paid more attention to the objections because I did always pay very much attention to the objections that I read around. But I think it was a mistake not to respond and not to immediately sit down and try to argue in detail. I probably overestimated myself and the field as a whole thinking, oh, come on, I think that's wrong and people will figure out by themselves."
},
{
"end_time": 11099.735,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 11070.998,
"text": " I try not to engage in debates and discussions and go my own way. Sometimes it works very well, but sometimes has created long misunderstanding. So I should have more engaged with criticism, trying to respond and be more part of the group and debating with the group."
},
{
"end_time": 11129.787,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 11101.237,
"text": " Okay, this question comes from Stefan Alexander. He's a professor of theoretical physics and... I know, he's a great guy. Great, great. He's the writer of Fear of a Black Universe, and the link to that is in the description. Also, I'll be speaking with Stefan, so that's either out or coming up. How does time play into quantum gravity? You've mentioned it plays into quantum mechanics, does it play into quantum gravity per se? It does not."
},
{
"end_time": 11159.821,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 11130.725,
"text": " I think that's a bottom line also in my book. Once you go to quantum gravity, you better forget entirely the word time. Just forget about it. You have a bunch of variables which describe the gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, whatever fields are around, whatever is your ingredients. As far as we know today, these are the ingredients of the world. Electrons, quarks, electromagnetic field, gravitational field."
},
{
"end_time": 11187.961,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 11160.623,
"text": " and you have relations between these, which you think in terms of there is a quantum region, if you want a space time region, and outside, if I see something around, what is the probability of seeing that? And you don't have to say how much time has passed, which one is a time variable,"
},
{
"end_time": 11218.353,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 11188.797,
"text": " That comes out naturally because if the classical limit of the amplitudes turn out to be correct, they just give generativity. So in the classical limit, your space time's evolving and then you can, you know, time is just whatever passes around the time like world line. But in the fundamental quantum gravity theory, just forget about time entirely. Don't talk about that. Time is in the various meaning in which we"
},
{
"end_time": 11246.323,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 11219.275,
"text": " We talk about them, it's something that happens at later approximations. The space-time comes at a large scale approximation, and oriented time comes from the thermodynamics. In quantum gravity, the only temporal notion, it's very weak, is that you describe process. So what you describe is a process, a probability amplitude of some conjunction of variables taking certain values."
},
{
"end_time": 11275.469,
"index": 422,
"start_time": 11247.892,
"text": " Okay, this question comes from Bernardo Castro. He says, Carlos says that everything is relational. You may have answered this before, but Carlos says everything is relational, nothing absolute. I agree that the physical, that is whatever is measured, is relational as experiments have shown, but that must mean that there is an absolute, some non-physical, non-measurable layer of reality underlying the physical. As you know, he's putting this in brackets, as you know to me that layer is mental."
},
{
"end_time": 11303.319,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 11276.032,
"text": " But Carlo again says everything is relational. So what is it relations and and so on and so on that is turtles all the way down or relationships all the way down? How does the notion that everything is relational not lead to an infinite regress? It's turtles all the way down in my opinion. And I think what what I mean, I think the basic"
},
{
"end_time": 11329.872,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 11304.343,
"text": " I mean, I know, of course, Bernardo's idea, he defended a rather strong version of idealism, in which everything is mental. And I think that the mental phenomena are not more absolute, more grounded,"
},
{
"end_time": 11358.609,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 11330.333,
"text": " more basic, more universal than the physical, what we call the physical phenomena. In fact, I think if there is a dependence relation, the dependence relation is other way around. So if we want to understand mental phenomena, we understand them better, starting from physical facts and from that deriving mental phenomena."
},
{
"end_time": 11387.807,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 11358.899,
"text": " The other way around doesn't work, in my opinion. The other way around leaves us the impossibility of doing science. We don't derive physical phenomena from mental phenomena, but the other way around we do. So, of the two, physical in a large sense, I don't mean material, I mean physics, systems interacting have a properties, more fundamental in the sense that they ground better mental phenomena. I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 11414.974,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 11388.2,
"text": " The mistake of idealism is to don't see one of the main insight in Buddhist philosophy, which is that the mental is as illusory in Buddhist language as external world. So the self is as left"
},
{
"end_time": 11443.592,
"index": 428,
"start_time": 11415.316,
"text": " less founded as this glass or this pen. When I think about myself, the Cartesian illusion, this is evident, this is immediate, this cannot be discounted, it's wrong. If there's anything, what is evident for me is this pen, it's not me. The me, it's a complicated cultural construct, social construct, cultural construct,"
},
{
"end_time": 11472.551,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 11443.968,
"text": " What I directly know about the world is that there is this pen. If you say, well, there is also you in the world, I say, oh, yeah, it's also me. And what is me? I have to I have to do through a reflection, a story of thinking. And if you read the card, who is the origin of this idea, the card never said that the self is immediate. He said, if you start doubting, then you go through a complicated cultural process of doubting."
},
{
"end_time": 11494.104,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 11473.063,
"text": " which is due to his culture, his philosophies. And this leads him to thinking about the self and they think if I'm doubting them and thinking if I'm thinking there should be something thinking as his thinking the self, but the something thinking is not the self is an ensemble of the processes that matter does in my brain. That's why I disagree with the idea is"
},
{
"end_time": 11521.8,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 11495.913,
"text": " Why is it that the mental states and the self are, are they equivalent in your mind? In your mind? Are they equal? No, they're two different things. No, they're two different things. Of course, they're two different things. The self is a, it's a, it's a, let me not define the self. But I think that what I said applied to both. And of course, Descartes was talking about the self,"
},
{
"end_time": 11550.998,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 11522.312,
"text": " Some people talk about mental state and I think both are like chairs, complicated construction we use to describe what happens. You mentioned that science would be difficult or if not impossible to do if idealism was correct. Why can't we just say, see for me the way that I see science is that science doesn't presume a metaphysics"
},
{
"end_time": 11578.234,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 11551.408,
"text": " It doesn't actually say whether there's an immaterial or material or mental reality. It's like a method. People can disagree with the definition of science. Regardless, why can't idealism be correct and simply say there are regularities to these mental states and we see these regularities, these patterns of perception and we call that physics and we perform science just as we do or just as we currently do."
},
{
"end_time": 11611.032,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 11582.329,
"text": " No, sure, sure. No, I agree with you in that sense. Science is neutral. But if I want to use science, what I was saying is something much more, much less philosophical, if you want. If I want to use science to make a story about how mental state can emerge from configuration of the brain, I have"
},
{
"end_time": 11631.305,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 11611.357,
"text": " I have a path that I can follow. In fact, many people are following today this path. I mean, there's a big neuroscience literature, very extremely interesting, which is precisely describing how mental states and the notion of a self"
},
{
"end_time": 11652.79,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 11631.852,
"text": " can emerge in the complicated sort of neurological, biological and evolutionary story of our brain. So science allows us to make a story which is incomplete but is in the working about how mental state emerged in the world in the same sense in which"
},
{
"end_time": 11681.254,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 11652.79,
"text": " It allows us to make a story in which how that a chair emerged in the world. I mean, how it's built by wood and built by a civilization that want to sit down and so on and so forth. So that can be addressed by science. The idealism doesn't block science in the sense to say, well, OK, I have this mental"
},
{
"end_time": 11708.797,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 11681.749,
"text": " perception or whatever, and as I described then, but it doesn't allow to do the same story to see how I can out of a pure mental stage, necessarily reconstruct the opposite world. In other words, if I'm an idealist, I don't have any other"
},
{
"end_time": 11736.442,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 11709.224,
"text": " a scientific program except the ones that are already there. I can describe chemistry, physics, but not the relation between the mental and the physical. While if I am a materialist in some wide sense, in large sense, because now materialism obviously doesn't work. I mean, the world is not made by stones. Then I have an additional program that I can do, try to make sense of mental state on the basis of physical systems."
},
{
"end_time": 11766.834,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 11738.814,
"text": " Why can't an idealist say, we can still do that. Look, instead of saying, how does mentality or how does mind states come about from non mind states, like that's essentially what you're saying before. Why don't we just say, well, it's all mind like it's all pants like it in some manner, but certain configurations of this mind state, which you can translate as matter certain configurations of this matter, amplify the already existing consciousness. So you can still perform neurobiology and neural correlates,"
},
{
"end_time": 11797.312,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 11768.166,
"text": " in the same manner. So why does thinking of the world idealistically preclude that? I see it as just, well, you can just say, well, we want to know what configurations produce, what states of consciousness and what levels of awareness and levels of self-consciousness and so on. I don't know anybody in neuroscience that thinks it. No, that's not true. There are people in neuroscience that may think that way."
},
{
"end_time": 11824.548,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 11798.473,
"text": " Maybe Tononi thinks in that way. Almost any of the theories of consciousness that I've found, and I've been studying this for this channel, it can be applied to the universe and then you find that there's some low-grade level of consciousness applied to the universe as a whole anyway. At least Tononi, I think he's moving in that direction. I think he said that his IIT, I believe it's called Integrated Information Theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 11851.391,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 11825.128,
"text": " Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 11883.985,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 11854.343,
"text": " Yeah. I hope you don't think I'm fighting with you. I'm just telling you what occurs. No, no, no, of course, of course. No, no, of course. In fact, you're you're you're right. And what you say, you're probably right. I I maybe have not talked enough about that. You're you're you're bringing idealism together with a sort of pump psychism. Right. It's a you're you're you're you're taking this in this direction here. Yes, I sort of pump psychism of that way."
},
{
"end_time": 11913.66,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 11884.582,
"text": " Look, I'm not sure what it means to be a very weak level of consciousness. I know what it means in Tonani theory. OK, there's a quantity called phi, which have big values in the brain and slow values else."
},
{
"end_time": 11940.64,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 11914.906,
"text": " But that quantity has a very clean quantitative value, determined by configurations of matter and the way matter might interact. So I know that Trononi himself is a sort of hidden secret idealist or even a little plant psychist."
},
{
"end_time": 11970.094,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 11941.084,
"text": " But I'm not sure his theory is, because if his theory was so, it would not be possible to quantify consciousness on the basis of specific configuration of matter, possibility of interaction of matter. So in other words, he has a ground there, and the ground is"
},
{
"end_time": 11997.961,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 11970.538,
"text": " Remember, I was saying, I'm wondering, oh, there's some way in which that's correct, some way in which that's correct. We were talking about this ecumenical quality. When it comes to what was his name? Tony, right? When it comes to Tony, Tony,"
},
{
"end_time": 12023.456,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 11999.121,
"text": " Now I know his theory isn't this. It's not as simple as let's imagine billiard balls and they bounce off one another and certain complex interactions these billiard balls model and that creates consciousness. Let's imagine it's but let's imagine it's as simple as that. Then as you were saying, what's more fundamental the nodes or the vertices? Sorry, the edges are the nodes. Well, then I'm wondering,"
},
{
"end_time": 12046.271,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 12023.695,
"text": " Hmm. Imagine Tononis was as simple as that, that it's as simple as certain believed balls and they interact. So it's the relationship that produces the consciousness, and the balls are fundamental. But then earlier you were saying, well, you can also view it as the relationships are fundamental. So I'm wondering if in that sense... See, the non-dualists don't like when I say this. I'm wondering if in some sense, physicalism and idealism"
},
{
"end_time": 12069.804,
"index": 451,
"start_time": 12046.681,
"text": " can be brought together as twin sides of the same coin? Yes. Yes, it's a good point. Then the question is what we mean by mental, right? If I'm mental, we mean things going on in the mind of people like humans or maybe mammals or maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 12097.654,
"index": 452,
"start_time": 12070.111,
"text": " maybe all animals with neurons, which is larger than mammals, then I don't think this might be sufficient to describe what happened on a galaxy. If by mental we mean something that might going on everywhere, even when there are no animals, no neurons, nothing like that, then"
},
{
"end_time": 12127.261,
"index": 453,
"start_time": 12098.422,
"text": " Mental, it's an extremely vague notion, which I'm not sure what it means, if not just a vague analogy that somehow, that analogy might even be useful, but because again, I think the naive materialism is wrong. I mean, it has been shown wrong by science. The sort of 18th, 19th century idea"
},
{
"end_time": 12154.838,
"index": 454,
"start_time": 12127.824,
"text": " There is a perfectly full description of the world in terms of little stones moving and bouncing one another, pulled and pulled by forces. That's not science. Physics has moved away from that because of quantum mechanics, because of field theory, because of quantum field theory, and so on and so forth. So the world is far more complicated than that. And if you take, if in particular you take relation quantum mechanics seriously,"
},
{
"end_time": 12184.906,
"index": 455,
"start_time": 12155.401,
"text": " you think in terms of relations and how things affect one another. Now, you want to call this relative properties mental? You might, but then it's a name. It's a name which is I don't see what happened, what adds to our understanding and what"
},
{
"end_time": 12211.135,
"index": 456,
"start_time": 12185.401,
"text": " interpreting this. So in other words, I think I'm an a monist, a monist in the sense that I don't think there are two different kinds of phenomena. I'm a monist like in the sense of Bertrand Russell. There are mental phenomena and there are physical phenomena. Mental phenomena is, oh, I see white. And there's a physical phenomena that there's a thing moving down there. I think these are all phenomena. They all belong to the same big class."
},
{
"end_time": 12241.493,
"index": 457,
"start_time": 12211.596,
"text": " That should be explained by, we understand more and more about all of them, but they're not two different worlds. So if you're telling me, look, at some elementary level of distinct, very, very, very general way of understanding the world, we have the distinction between the two evaporates. I'm happy. Yeah. But is that idealism at this point? Idealism is a strong way of reducing one to the other. Like, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 12264.343,
"index": 458,
"start_time": 12241.92,
"text": " Old 19th century material has been a strong way of reducing one to the other. Yeah. Have you thought much about the heart problem of consciousness? Yeah. So what are you? They exist. All right, let's hear it. It's a confusion. I think it's a confusion. My take on the heart problem of consciousness. This is David Chalmer."
},
{
"end_time": 12292.858,
"index": 459,
"start_time": 12264.991,
"text": " is that if you read Chalmers, the point is about, we believe that there is a heart problem of consciousness because it is conceivable for us, say, to think there is a zombie, right? So it seems there is the same physical configuration, but nobody inside. And that shows that even if we understand the physics completely, there is something missing. So this is based on what is conceivable to us. So the problem of the heart problem of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 12319.462,
"index": 460,
"start_time": 12293.677,
"text": " It's a problem that comes from taking strong what we find conceivable, not conceivable. So the kind of intuition we have about worldview right now. But the kind of intuition that we have about the worldview right now is exactly the kind of thing that science shows wrong every step of the way. So the"
},
{
"end_time": 12347.022,
"index": 461,
"start_time": 12319.855,
"text": " The hard problem of consciousness shows that we have some wrong intuition, because nature has produced us by solving the easy problem of consciousness, not the hard problem of consciousness. So the easy problem of consciousness, of course, is very hard, which is how the brain works. But I am deeply convinced that if you take a copy of me, okay, equal, same nose, same hair,"
},
{
"end_time": 12375.845,
"index": 462,
"start_time": 12347.312,
"text": " Same neuron, same atoms, same molecules, same photons, exactly the same position. I'm conscious, my copy is conscious. It's just no way for me to conceive that I could be conscious and the copy of me could be non-conscious. So therefore, if we understand how the thing works, we understand what it means, what I'm saying when I'm saying I'm conscious. I don't believe there's a hard problem of consciousness. I think there's a very hard, easy problem of consciousness, namely,"
},
{
"end_time": 12405.742,
"index": 463,
"start_time": 12376.323,
"text": " understanding this. You see, we don't understand thunderstorm well. If you talk to people doing climate science or meteorological science, not climate science, a thunderstorm is not yet understood. It's very complicated phenomena to understand because there's electric things, magnetic thing, chemical thing. It's all sort of rapid and hydrodynamics is horrendously complicated. So what exactly happened with a thunderstorm is not understood."
},
{
"end_time": 12433.882,
"index": 464,
"start_time": 12406.203,
"text": " Okay. Does this mean that it is a hard problem of thunderstorms? No, it means that it's complicated thing. Okay. Does it mean that is Jupiter? You know, the flashes, the lightnings are the rage of Jupiter. I mean, no, you don't think there's Jupiter there. I think it's just we just don't understand what's going on. So I see, I don't see the difference between thunderstorms and"
},
{
"end_time": 12462.432,
"index": 465,
"start_time": 12435.35,
"text": " the human mind and consciousness. Let me see if I understand this correctly. If we were to imagine duplicating you, then you don't know or it's unclear how that duplicate would be not conscious. The reason I'm saying is that because Chalmer, one of the strong arguments"
},
{
"end_time": 12490.145,
"index": 466,
"start_time": 12463.063,
"text": " for the existence of the heart form of consciousness in his book is to say, well, imagine you have a zombie. A zombie is somebody that believes like me, has the same aspect of me, has the same neurons as me, the same synapses as me, the same physics as me, exactly the same physics, including down to the atomic level. But there is no consciousness. So he says, imagine this thing, OK?"
},
{
"end_time": 12518.49,
"index": 467,
"start_time": 12490.52,
"text": " And look, if you can imagine that, it means you can imagine that consciousness is separated from the physical, something else, something above the physical, because you can have the same physical with or without consciousness. So this proves it. So he proves that consciousness is something separate from the physical on the basis of this zombie argument. Think that there is a copy of you, which is there's nobody inside. There's no self person."
},
{
"end_time": 12549.002,
"index": 468,
"start_time": 12519.036,
"text": " But they say there was a exact copy of me. I wouldn't have said what it means. There's nobody inside. I could talk to him. Hey, Carla, too. How do you feel? I mean, I'm the right one or you are the right one. He could fight about that. And, you know, big jokes about that, of course, wouldn't make any sense to know which is one's the right and which is the false. So he would be conscious under all possible ways that I could understand consciousness. So his proof is based on an intuition that I don't have."
},
{
"end_time": 12574.684,
"index": 469,
"start_time": 12549.616,
"text": " the existence of zombies. Have you ever played virtual reality? Like put on a VR headset? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Okay. The reason why is I don't find it so inconceivable. I can imagine putting on a VR headset and seeing my wife or seeing you or even myself and even being able to look in someone's brain and it's generated with a computer. Of course, I would have no idea. We can just."
},
{
"end_time": 12602.688,
"index": 470,
"start_time": 12575.367,
"text": " What's the word? Procedurally generate. So we can procedurally generate the brain as I zoom in and zoom out. I can't even do that physically, like I can't zoom into your brain physically. But regardless, I don't see it as totally inconceivable that there can be this simulated copy that itself, we would say, is not conscious and it can talk. I can touch it and see the blood fall out from wherever I'm touching with my scissors or whatever, maybe. Why is it inconceivable to consider a philosophical zombie"
},
{
"end_time": 12614.855,
"index": 471,
"start_time": 12604.172,
"text": " In VR, you could create a person."
},
{
"end_time": 12639.855,
"index": 472,
"start_time": 12616.049,
"text": " And this person doesn't just look like a person and you touch him and blood comes out, but also answer your questions and also have a memory and also have a way of reflecting and everything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the memories and all the complexity of me. I think that whatever computer is implementing all that,"
},
{
"end_time": 12664.206,
"index": 473,
"start_time": 12640.503,
"text": " How about let's remove the memory and the reflective characteristics because there's some people who are mentally challenged by birth. They cannot develop a reflective property, even babies. So let's imagine that. We would say a baby is conscious. A baby can feel."
},
{
"end_time": 12693.046,
"index": 474,
"start_time": 12667.79,
"text": " A baby has no memory. So let's imagine this baby has no memory. So let's simulate that then. I hope you don't feel like I'm attacking. I'm just telling you what occurs to me. I'm sorry. No, no, no, of course I like it. I like this. Okay, so feeling"
},
{
"end_time": 12721.817,
"index": 475,
"start_time": 12694.019,
"text": " It's philosophical babies instead of philosophical zombies, just the zombie babies. So you mentioned memory and reflective capabilities. I'm just saying remove that. Right. So I think that let's separate the question into if you if you have a so let's forget virtual reality for a moment. If you have a"
},
{
"end_time": 12749.889,
"index": 476,
"start_time": 12723.234,
"text": " an artificial baby that behaves like a baby and in all the complexity of a baby, I think it suffers. It would suffer. I would not hurt it. I would resist from hurting it. Of course, if you give me a little robot,"
},
{
"end_time": 12778.456,
"index": 477,
"start_time": 12751.032,
"text": " or which when are you kicking it says wow yeah okay i would kick it because i know that there's a huge difference between that robot and a baby but is the actual difference that uh establish my my believing that is suffering is not suffering if if it would uh because i think that suffering is nothing else than just you know"
},
{
"end_time": 12783.422,
"index": 478,
"start_time": 12779.087,
"text": " The baby having a body, a brain Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 12810.486,
"index": 479,
"start_time": 12784.377,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the Internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 12830.333,
"index": 480,
"start_time": 12810.486,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 12859.94,
"index": 481,
"start_time": 12830.333,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 12889.787,
"index": 482,
"start_time": 12859.94,
"text": " And in all these things, and that generates offerings. So, you know, the cart is so I don't know if this is a full story or a real story, but he believed that only humans have coaches, he would kick his dog."
},
{
"end_time": 12919.923,
"index": 483,
"start_time": 12890.299,
"text": " because he thought that, I don't know if it's true, because I read that he was very attached to his dog, so the things wouldn't go together well. But if it is true, I think it was a mistake. I don't think there is any dog suffering less real as a mental state than a human suffering. I mean, we might prefer killing a dog than killing a man, but that's a different story."
},
{
"end_time": 12948.524,
"index": 484,
"start_time": 12921.459,
"text": " Now the virtual reality simulation of pain, you're right, that's more tricky. Because what does it mean that you have a software that simulates the entire body as a body being hurt and suffering? That I don't know. That's just puzzling."
},
{
"end_time": 12959.343,
"index": 485,
"start_time": 12948.78,
"text": " Okay, now rapid fire again, just a few more. So this nickel NS, and he wrote the word he or she wrote the word phi econ. I don't know if that means physics economist, regardless."
},
{
"end_time": 12982.21,
"index": 486,
"start_time": 12959.787,
"text": " He or she said, I want to thank Carlo Rubelli a lot. When I was doing my masters 14 years ago, I ended up with the similar idea as relational quantum mechanics, but I didn't have the mathematical ability to pursue it, and I've been following him since. Question 1. What is his view regarding the paper Quantum Principle of Relativity by Andres Dragan and Arthur Eckert?"
},
{
"end_time": 13001.903,
"index": 487,
"start_time": 12983.234,
"text": " Are you aware of that paper? Quantum Principle of Reality. Thank you for what he or she says. No, I'm sorry, I'm not aware of this paper. So if he or she thinks it's interesting, send me an email and I'm going to read it. I will send it to you. His question or her question number two is what is his view regarding the work of Brian Swingle?"
},
{
"end_time": 13034.309,
"index": 488,
"start_time": 13006.169,
"text": " Good Sir Knight, I love Carlo. A great man to explain complex ideas simply to a person like myself. He said before that he took psychedelics when he was young. I think it was LSD. And it was a Satori moment, which helped him think about time and physics in novel ways."
},
{
"end_time": 13059.462,
"index": 489,
"start_time": 13034.667,
"text": " has he done psychedelic sins, and if so, has it given him any new insights or confirmed his theories in any way?"
},
{
"end_time": 13087.517,
"index": 490,
"start_time": 13059.753,
"text": " I will in the future. Nowadays things, so what the world think about psychedelics is changing, it's changing very rapidly. So things might become simpler now. It was important for me, it was a very strong experience, like many people who had it say. Do you recall your dosage?"
},
{
"end_time": 13119.497,
"index": 491,
"start_time": 13090.811,
"text": " No, but comparing to descriptions which you find in literature are certainly quite high. Oh, yeah? Wow. Yeah. Yeah, definitely high. I mean, compared to the strongest accounts of similar experience that you find nowadays easily in all sorts of literature."
},
{
"end_time": 13146.237,
"index": 492,
"start_time": 13120.725,
"text": " You know, Steve Jobs, the head of Apple, said that taking LSD this youth was one of the two most important and strong experiences in his life. I think I could subscribe that. It was very strongly. It definitely did not, I did not get direct physical ideas by taking LSD. So I don't suggest, you know, take LSD and so you write good paper in physics. That's not the way it works."
},
{
"end_time": 13175.708,
"index": 493,
"start_time": 13146.869,
"text": " I was young and it was many, many years from there to the astrophysics I did. However, I believe it's true that it did affect my way of thinking about reality, especially in a sort of liberatory sense. I mean, it's not about I came out, I was young again. I guess the first time I was 16."
},
{
"end_time": 13206.118,
"index": 494,
"start_time": 13176.271,
"text": " I came out from that experience thinking, wait a minute, what we usually think about space and time and matter and energy and mind and me and the world and that, that's just one way of thinking about things. Maybe there are all sorts of other ways of thinking about that. And my brain is can view things very, very differently for a while. So it might be possible to think differently. So I came out from that experience. Maybe it was also the culture at the time."
},
{
"end_time": 13231.544,
"index": 495,
"start_time": 13207.261,
"text": " With an extremely large a priori flexibility about possibilities, right? Right. I can imagine that in terms of, you know, political ideas, moral ideas, social ideas, but also physical idea. I mean, I. I had a distinctive sense that this organization in space and in time that we"
},
{
"end_time": 13261.834,
"index": 496,
"start_time": 13232.892,
"text": " usually perceive about the world could just change with a little chemical. So we are chemical. So, you know, why should one be better than the other? And this stayed with me. And I think that one first gave me curiosity, because when I later on 10 years later, studied physics, and read that, you know, Einstein discovered the simultaneity is not well defined. I said, well, this"
},
{
"end_time": 13287.995,
"index": 497,
"start_time": 13262.5,
"text": " I knew that things were more complicated than what they looked at the first side. And then when I studied generativity and quantum mechanics, I was ready to accept very easily the idea that the world could perhaps be profoundly different than I would imagine of it. It didn't scare me, the idea, because somehow it's an idea that I had confronted. So in that sense, I think it was very useful for this, no more than that."
},
{
"end_time": 13315.964,
"index": 498,
"start_time": 13289.394,
"text": " Did you get to a state of a temporality where you didn't feel like there was time passing? Yeah. Or eternity like infinite time passing. Yeah, that's one of the I say more common things that people say, namely that time, it's the sense of time is completely destroyed in many ways. I mean, I would say the simplest way"
},
{
"end_time": 13343.131,
"index": 499,
"start_time": 13317.142,
"text": " Which I remember very well, very beginning is just, you know, having the sense of watching the looking at the, at the, at the watch. And then, you know, hours and hours later, watching it again, and realizing that one minute has passed. Wait a minute, I mean, all this happened in one minute. I mean, I got, which is one of the things people get scared. Right. So one of the things I mean, the only problem with LSD, if you get scared, and you"
},
{
"end_time": 13371.869,
"index": 500,
"start_time": 13343.712,
"text": " You get terrorized and it can be extremely psychologically dangerous. Yeah, it can be very bad. It doesn't happen often, but I think it's the only real problem of these things. The only real danger of these things is having a few very bad hours, which may look very long. And one of the reasons you get scared is when you realize that you feel the time is passing, but it's not passing outside you, you feel trapped. You feel, oh my God, I'm here, I'll never come out. Because here for me, time is"
},
{
"end_time": 13401.391,
"index": 501,
"start_time": 13372.073,
"text": " It's passing and outside is not passing. So that's one of the scary things. But that's extraordinarily strong distortion of the sense of how much time is passed. It's just one aspect of it because I think the sense that people talk about that it's a sense of completely destroy what it means by temporal organization of the world. And the other common thing is this distinction between yourself and the outside, right? It's a basic"
},
{
"end_time": 13431.8,
"index": 502,
"start_time": 13402.432,
"text": " And this is something which was very clear in my experiences is common in many reports of these experiences is that you use the sense of you as a self separate, distinct from from the rest is very strong. It's very physical. The LSD experience is a very it's it's a very powerful thing. In fact, I remember"
},
{
"end_time": 13460.862,
"index": 503,
"start_time": 13432.619,
"text": " Spending days and days after that sort of under the shock was not bad, but it was also disturbing, tiring. I mean, my mind had kept going back to that for what has happened. I mean, oh, my God, what has happened? Where am I? Who am I? What is not unpleasant for me was never been unpleasant. It has always been pleasant, very pleasant, extremely pleasant. I had I faced it without preparation."
},
{
"end_time": 13488.439,
"index": 504,
"start_time": 13462.09,
"text": " But my friend was with me who had no preparation and no experience either, actually said the right thing at the very beginning and was near to me. The right thing being, don't be scared. Whatever happens, don't worry. Just let it go and just don't resist and just be aware that then you come back and whatever happens, you back yourself. So."
},
{
"end_time": 13512.125,
"index": 505,
"start_time": 13488.797,
"text": " That's really assured, because he said exactly what I think. The moment in which I got scared, I remembered that and said, OK, trust him, let things go and let this strange experience go over you. I loved it. It stayed with me. And somehow in the moment in which I'm in deep shit, which we all go through in our life,"
},
{
"end_time": 13542.654,
"index": 506,
"start_time": 13514.019,
"text": " I remember that moment. It's calming to me. It's good. I look at my hands, the way I looked at my hands in that, and I have a sense of separation from reality and the beauty of reality. The beauty of reality in front of me, just how it is, which I remember as a gift of that particular moment that stays with me all my life. Was it a moment of utter peace or euphoria?"
},
{
"end_time": 13575.998,
"index": 507,
"start_time": 13546.015,
"text": " What would be the word that you would characterize it? These people would say positive, but there's so many different senses of the word positive. No, we're not calling peace. We're not calling serene. I was not quite euphoria either. I don't know. Emotionally, it was a completely overwhelming surprise."
},
{
"end_time": 13598.422,
"index": 508,
"start_time": 13576.22,
"text": " and a sense of violent, almost joy at some moment. Oh, wow. Overwhelmed by the beauty of things. I like seeing things for the first time. It's a strange thing, like if I was, oh my God, I've never seen that. But this is just, you know, my hand or a tree, a leaf, anything."
},
{
"end_time": 13620.179,
"index": 509,
"start_time": 13598.899,
"text": " um and by overwhelmed by the beauty of it and be aware that you know this is just a leaf and I could look at it as an incredibly beautiful thing it's just me and that's my heart opening up and just exploring but it's notoriously hard to describe those experiences everybody says so and now there is a growing literature because finally"
},
{
"end_time": 13649.497,
"index": 510,
"start_time": 13620.913,
"text": " scientists can study these substances after it was forbidden to study the sentence substances for 40 years. It's completely stupid because why should you know, people study poisons or, you know, heroin, why shouldn't you study the sentence? So I hope that now the regulatory body take away this silly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Forbidden studying these things."
},
{
"end_time": 13679.224,
"index": 511,
"start_time": 13650.572,
"text": " So it didn't directly help you with physics, but it helped you with entertaining ideas that other people would consider unpalatable, such as time doesn't exist, or so and so is relational rather than real. Exactly. Exactly. So in other words, Lee Smolin, you need to give Lee Smolin some LSD to dissuade him of his ideas of the primacy. I'm going to read between the lines. Okay. Last two questions. Last two. Good to do you know who Whitehead is Alfred North Whitehead?"
},
{
"end_time": 13706.869,
"index": 512,
"start_time": 13680.367,
"text": " Okay, so this question comes from Erin Heidari says, Revelli seems to reflect a lot of the pantheist process philosophy that Whitehead talks about. I'm wondering if he's familiar with Whitehead and what he thinks of this more organic view of reality. Yeah, well, I got to know Whitehead precisely because other people already"
},
{
"end_time": 13737.602,
"index": 513,
"start_time": 13707.705,
"text": " pointed out similarities, especially thinking reality as a process, if not entities, entities with property, but happening of things, so processes before things. Definitely there is this resonance and this similarity, and I'm sure that my way of thinking might have been affected by him or by people who were affected by him."
},
{
"end_time": 13767.466,
"index": 514,
"start_time": 13738.029,
"text": " So I read, I started reading some of his books because of that, because people pointed out this analogies, and I saw the analogies, I saw the similarities, I tried to get something useful from it, but there is a size, there is an aspect of it which I don't connect to, which is this more organic or even spiritualist"
},
{
"end_time": 13792.568,
"index": 515,
"start_time": 13767.756,
"text": " Right, somehow the way he faces the problems, I couldn't, in spite of definite similarities in this main idea that we describe the world as a process, but not, but I'm a deeply a physicist, a physicalist,"
},
{
"end_time": 13820.93,
"index": 516,
"start_time": 13793.387,
"text": " I think that the physical description of the world that we have now, it's very good as it is. It doesn't need to be reinforced by other pieces. It has to be better understood, perhaps. And I try to read what we know about the world at that level from the physics itself. And I think it's not contradictory with a higher level description of the world."
},
{
"end_time": 13844.497,
"index": 517,
"start_time": 13821.391,
"text": " Okay, with the ones given by biology, by sociology, by psychology, by, you know, I think there's, there's coherence, we don't understand many of the intermediate steps. But there's coherent between these different pictures of the world. Of course, we need the higher level ones because, because we cannot, I cannot describe my girlfriends were using Maxwell equations, that doesn't work."
},
{
"end_time": 13873.626,
"index": 518,
"start_time": 13844.957,
"text": " There's no contradiction between she being made by atoms governed by the Maxwell equations and, you know, she being somebody I love and she loves me and we interact on the level of our emotions. They're just different, different levels of description, some which works better, some aggregated things and some which works better. And I don't see any a priori contradiction in that. And there's no need to"
},
{
"end_time": 13899.855,
"index": 519,
"start_time": 13874.343,
"text": " to add higher level notions to the fundamental notions. When it comes to the problem of quantum gravity, or theories of everything, or grand unified theories, do you think that what's missing is a whole conceptual paradigm shift? Or is it just it's a mathematical complication, it can be solved without changing our view of what reality is much? Like, what do you think is holding us back? Which one is it?"
},
{
"end_time": 13928.865,
"index": 520,
"start_time": 13901.084,
"text": " I think there's nothing holding back. I think we have theories of quantum gravity, and that might be right. So we don't need to go look for new ideas in quantum gravity. We have to go try to figure out if the ideas we have are good or bad. I think this idea that all quantum gravity is such a mystery that we need some new idea. Why do we need some new idea? I mean, we have theories. The reason we're not sure is that we cannot test them, not because they're wrong or they're bad."
},
{
"end_time": 13954.735,
"index": 521,
"start_time": 13929.292,
"text": " Loop quantum gravity is one. I don't want to say this is a right theory because it might be a wrong theory, like another one may be right. Or maybe we haven't yet, you know, understood the relation between this or maybe I have reasons to think that string theory is not good and loop quantum gravity is good. But for quantum gravity itself, we have decent theories of the missing stuff, the pieces we don't understand well. But I don't"
},
{
"end_time": 13984.36,
"index": 522,
"start_time": 13956.015,
"text": " share this idea, oh my God, we're missing a big idea. We're not missing a big idea. To articulate something like loop quantum gravity, you need a big conceptual shift because there's no background space, no background time. As I said before, you have to accept the idea that the fundamental of the shape of the world, you don't use a time variable. So it's already there and has been worked out. It's decades of discussions that have come out with a possible story."
},
{
"end_time": 14014.599,
"index": 523,
"start_time": 13985.077,
"text": " We have more than one possible stories because there are other possible alternatives, as you talk to safety, the string theory and others. But we have theories about quantum gravity. What we miss is filling up details. Look, quantum gravity is hard to do calculation or scattering. String theory is hard to understand how you come down to four dimensions. Nobody really has done it yet. The schemes, ideas, but nobody goes from the big theory down to the standard model."
},
{
"end_time": 14038.712,
"index": 524,
"start_time": 14015.316,
"text": " I would not look for other. Why should we look for other ideas that then we just, you know, put them in a drawer and we do not. We need smart ideas for checking those theories. And that's what many people doing. Working on black holes, working on early universe, trying to see if some of the theories we have can be tested."
},
{
"end_time": 14070.486,
"index": 525,
"start_time": 14041.271,
"text": " Just so you know, that question was from Dong Hyun Yoon. I just wanted to make sure to say that. And the last, last question is Craig Reed, TCR. I'd be curious to know what he thinks of Nima Arkani Hamed's Amplitohedron and his lecture on the end of space time. I don't think I've ever heard Rovelli comment on it. Nima is great. It's a powerful thinker. He's a great mathematician. I remember a very good afternoon in Princeton talking with him."
},
{
"end_time": 14099.36,
"index": 526,
"start_time": 14071.067,
"text": " I is a book that just came out, which is a big thick book with interviews of people in quantum gravity of all different. I can just look it up if you give me a keyword so I can tell the audience what it is. If it's sitting here, we can get it. Yeah, great. Conversations on quantum gravity. Wonderful."
},
{
"end_time": 14122.705,
"index": 527,
"start_time": 14100.606,
"text": " edited by Jacom Armas, A-R-M-A-S, and it's a big thick book of interviews, detailed interviews of a large number of people doing quantum gravity. It's a bit boring because it's a big thing with everybody, you know, same question, so"
},
{
"end_time": 14148.404,
"index": 528,
"start_time": 14122.944,
"text": " too. But I'm going systematically through it, reading all of it, because I'm curious to actually know what about these people. And it's remarkable, they're very diverse ideas. And I read the one of Nina Arcadia made in detail, of course, because it's alphabetical order is Arcadia is a first. I'm just almost halfway past halfway through the book."
},
{
"end_time": 14179.121,
"index": 529,
"start_time": 14149.224,
"text": " And so I'm thinking while reading the various people, I'm curious to know what all the people think, I'm reading and of course I'm checking what they say with respect to what I think and try to get the ideas that I don't know and trying to argue. So it's a very good exercise for me. Now I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 14206.766,
"index": 530,
"start_time": 14179.821,
"text": " that part of the community who has fell in love with the Maldacena idea of the bulk boundary and then later on has given sort of an ideological basis of that by an argument that says that in quantum gravity we have to go to infinity"
},
{
"end_time": 14233.012,
"index": 531,
"start_time": 14207.637,
"text": " to define the theory because there are physical reasons for which we cannot make a measurement in the book, so to say. So all the actual measurement are and in fact in the book he articulate that because it's good because he explains his deep motivations for doing that. Now I'm convinced that this argument is wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 14262.619,
"index": 532,
"start_time": 14233.268,
"text": " Because it presupposes the space time and because it mixes the need for decoherence for making measurement of the distance in space. So I think it's technically wrong. But this has become a dogma in his world, especially in Princeton, that you can only describe things from a very large distance, from a synthetic distance."
},
{
"end_time": 14289.411,
"index": 533,
"start_time": 14263.336,
"text": " So he's going entirely in that direction, and that's why he doesn't think that loop quantum gravity might work, because loop quantum gravity is a description of quantum space-time locally in a small region. So I'm here, I make an experiment, a quantum experiment, and I compute what comes out without need to go to a syntopia. So"
},
{
"end_time": 14319.36,
"index": 534,
"start_time": 14290.128,
"text": " You know, these people are going doing technical work, but that's the assumption on which also his work on the on the scattering amplitudes. It's good, but it's not it's not in the four dimensional generalistic world in which we live. So I don't think that the solution of quantum gravity and the property of quantum gravity is in fancy mathematics."
},
{
"end_time": 14346.869,
"index": 535,
"start_time": 14319.923,
"text": " I think it's in just writing the things properly. I mean, there is a look at what defines scattering amplitudes. They are very hard to compute, but they're there and does that without going to the boundary inside space time. And the objection he has to look into gravity, I think they're they're wrong. I wish we could, you know, with all these people, I wish we could sit down and"
},
{
"end_time": 14375.998,
"index": 536,
"start_time": 14347.227,
"text": " Carlos, Professor, thank you so much. It's been quite a journey, over four hours. It's been long, quite a journey. You pushed me to say a lot of ideas, a lot of the things I've been thinking, so I liked very much. I love this interview."
},
{
"end_time": 14407.244,
"index": 537,
"start_time": 14377.944,
"text": " There are two things that are absolutely true. Grandma loves you, and she would never say no to McDonald's."
},
{
"end_time": 14415.794,
"index": 538,
"start_time": 14407.483,
"text": " So treat yourself to a Grandma McFlurry with your order today. It's what Grandma would want. At participating McDonald's for a limited time."
}
]
}No transcript available.