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James Robert Brown on Thought Experiments, the reality of mathematics, and the Continuum Hypothesis
September 27, 2020
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Thought experiments in physics are pivotal for the generation of novel ideas, the dissolution of old ones, or simply for an original take on specific phenomenons that already exist. Given that fundamental physics has been stalled in the past few decades, primarily due to a lack of data as well as other factors, and I'm trying to put forth my own theory of everything and integrate it with consciousness, I thought, how far can I go with thought experiments? James Robert Brown is a professor of
philosophy specializing in the philosophy of mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto and he was generous enough to give me a few hours of his time. He's written several books which I recommend you check out and we spoke yesterday which is what you'll see first as well as at the end I'm going to append a sliver of a conversation that me and him had about two years ago but I never posted. This is perhaps the deepest dive you'll see on YouTube on thought experiments as well as Platonism
It's as if this is my first time. Alright, man.
Hello, Professor Brown. How's it going? It's going well. And please call me Jim. Okay, Jim. So Jim, what are you working on these days? I'm working on the connection between mathematics and ethics. There's some features of both that are already well known. For instance, our mathematical knowledge and our ethical knowledge don't come from sensory experience. Yeah, do you mind expounding?
Well, by sensory experience, I just mean sight, hearing, smell, taste. You don't know that there are infinitely many prime numbers because you've gone out and seen them. Right. You don't know that root two is an irrational number because you held up a ruler on a diagonal square and got an irrational number.
our mathematical knowledge is definitely not empirical, though it might be connected to the empirical world in some indirect ways, but it's certainly not like the natural sciences at all. Well, what does that have to do with ethics? Well, ethics is exactly the same. So you could see one person kill another person. That could be an empirical experience, but to judge it as an immoral act is not empirical.
You mentioned before in one of your talks on YouTube about the distinction between thick and thin concepts. Do you mind delineating that for the audience? Oh, not at all.
And this is a really interesting idea. It's fairly new inside ethics. So the idea of thin concepts are thin concepts can be anywhere. They can be in the sciences, in everyday life, and in ethics. So if I say the host is on fire, I'm using thin concepts. If I say words like mass, color, taste, those are all thin concepts.
but they're from the factual realm. Okay. And then in the ethical or evaluative realm are more thin concepts, but they're just in a different realm. So good, bad, beautiful, ugly obligation. Those duty, those are thin concepts from ethics.
Okay, so the world, it seems like, is made up of thin concepts. Some are in the factual realm, some are in the normative, evaluative, ethical realm. Now, then, a few years ago, people began to focus on a number of words that we use in daily life, and they seem to be really important in how we treat things and how we reason. And these words are called thick. And that's because they're simultaneously
fact type terms and evaluative terms. Okay, so if I say, if I say, Kurt, you are very healthy. That's actually I'm saying two things. I'm talking about your health in a factual sense, like your blood pressure is 120 over 80. All right, for instance. But I'm saying more than that when I say you're healthy. I'm saying
and it's a good state that you're in. So there's an evaluative component as well as a factual component. When I say you're healthy, if I say example beside, okay, yeah, I'll give you lots more brave, courageous, okay, courageous. If I say Mary was courageous, that's it that includes a kind of factual component, especially if
We've just seen Mary run into a burning house and save the family's pet dog. Okay, so she's pulled it out. So there's a straightforward factual component to that about Mary's action. Okay, but there's also an evaluative component, like what she did was a good thing. It's good to be brave. Well done, Mary. We're really proud of you. So brave is different. It's thick. Brave is thick.
Now, some people say you don't need fit concepts. They're very convenient. You don't need them. Because I could say this, Mary ran into the house. She brought out the family dog. And here comes the evaluative. And what she did was good. Or I can just sort of summarize it. Mary was very brave. And the word brave, courageous, those sort of terms, those are thick.
Why is the word good, not a thick concept? Because it's just thin. It's just pure evaluation. It doesn't tell you anything factual. It doesn't tell you anything factual. That's why it's thin. And if I say, Mary entered the burning house,
That doesn't tell you anything evaluative. It just gives you a factual description of something that happened. But once you get the hang of it, you see all sorts of terms are thick, loyal, liar, dastardly, untrustworthy. See, those, if I say, Kurt, you're very untrustworthy. I'm suggesting that you've cheated me on something or you've lied to other people or something like that. And it's a bad thing.
So you see how it's a thick term. Right, does it always go to good or bad on that one line spectrum? No, if we were in the artistic realm, it might be, rather than good or bad, it might be beautiful, ugly, something like that. Okay, but you can see the evaluative term from the one realm and the straightforward factual. So if I describe a picture like
Well, there's a little bit of red here and there's some blue there. Okay, that's that's the sort of that's read the RGB values. That's a thin. Yeah, that's a thin description of the painting from a factual point of view. And then if I want to say it's spectacularly beautiful, or it's charming, sorry, charming, sorry, charming would be would be a thick concept. It's beautiful, just plain beautiful. Okay, that would be a thin concept. And if I say it's charming, it's evocative,
and suggesting a combination of things that are both factual and evaluated simultaneously. Those are the thick ones. Okay, so why am I interested in that? Because that's what I just told you is sort of... Right, and how does that relate to mathematics? Exactly. Okay, that's the important question. So I've been thinking about... By the way, thick concepts in ethics, that's commonplace, okay? And everyone in ethics knows about thick, thin, and the standard views about them.
Okay, when I was thinking about ethics and math, I'm looking for all kinds of connections between ethics and math, not just the one about neither of them are empirical. Okay, our knowledge isn't empirical in either case. What are the other connections? Well, one of them might be a kind that might be an inside math and physics, a kind of thick concept.
So I don't want to talk about facts and values now. I'm just using this as an analogy. So there can be math and there can be physics, pure math. Okay. You understand pure math is just, you know, nothing but set theory and pure physics has got nothing mathematical about it. And the way math gets applied is math provides models for the physical realm. This might, what I just said is slightly contentious.
It's probably a majority opinion, but there are lots of people who would dispute it. Let's just stick with the majority opinion for now. Math provides models of the world. And what a physicist will do is look at the range of models in Plato's heaven and say, I think this one is structurally very similar to the physical realm. And we apply math in that sort of way.
That would be thin. Pure math is just thin. Those are nothing but thin concepts. Pure physics, without any math in it, nothing but pure physical concepts. Could there be a thick concept that somehow or other involves both? Not just modeling. Modeling by itself isn't going to do it. A thick concept would be a kind of really intimate intertwining of the two.
And I was sort of vaguely thinking about this and I came across a wonderful quote in a famous calculus book. The book for any mathematicians who are watching, they'll know the book. It's by Spivak. It's just called Calculus. Did you take physics and math, Kurt? Yeah. Do you know that you know the book I'm talking about? Yeah, it's a famous book. It's first year. 157.
Ah, okay. But it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful book. And the second book is also great. It's like a Dirac book where it's tiny because the first book is large and then the second book on manifold. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. It's like two pages long. Takes you a whole semester to get through that. Well, one page of exposition followed by 10 pages of gut-wrenching problems that are so hard to solve. Okay, so anyway, there was this wonderful passage in the calculus book.
So he's just doing elementary stuff and he's teaching derivatives, first derivative, second derivative. And he says, all of this stuff is really important, especially the second derivative. Why? Well, think about Newton's law, F equals ma. Acceleration is the second derivative. Okay, we got that. And then he says, next time you're in a car and you go around a corner, you can feel the second derivative.
You think about that. No, no, I feel the acceleration. Right. And it's modeled. I don't feel a second derivative. Come on. I don't feel a second derivative. Don't be ridiculous. Nobody can feel a second derivative. It exists in Plato's heaven. You can't you can't smell an infinite series. You can't taste a tangent plane and you can't feel the second derivative. Right. That's what that's what you should say.
And I, but the more I thought about it, I thought, I wonder, I wonder, I wonder if people who work with, well, with math in general, physicists and engineers in particular, who maybe have to do problems of motion where acceleration is important. And they get so used to treating physical acceleration. Think of the acceleration as an actual physical process.
and attaching it to the second derivative to calculate. It's become so internalized with them that acceleration and second derivative becomes a single concept. It's just a fused concept. This would be an example of a thick concept. And I got talking to some physicist friends about this, and they're
Now, they don't exactly understand and appreciate what I'm trying to get at, but there's enough of an understanding that they could sort of, they could sort of agree that some parts of math, not all, but some parts of math that they use, they've so internalized that to utter the math or to utter the mathless physical description, they're just so intertwined, it's become one single thing.
What else besides acceleration is there for math? Well this would be hard because I don't want to say it's all the time because I wouldn't want to say that someone in quantum mechanics who thinks about the state of the system just flips over to a Hilbert space which is how we represent states in quantum mechanics and just thinks of them interchangeably. It's a possible candidate because we do use the same notation for both. We just use a simple psi function for
vector in the Hilbert space, or for the state, meaning the physical property of a quantum mechanical system. That's a candidate, but I'd be reluctant to say that's thick. Maybe an example is a very old example, a good example, and that's real numbers and points on a line. So you know you have a line, just say the unit interval,
Right. And we just attach all the real numbers between zero and one. Okay. And we think of a real number and a point as the same thing, just back and forth. And once you, it's, well, it's the whole basis of analytic geometry. Ever since Descartes said it was 400 years ago when he just said real numbers and points on a line or pairs of numbers and points in the plane and so on.
We just, they're just completely interchangeable. Right. And you're saying that that's a thick concept because I think, I think maybe word line implies space, not line. Let's say point, point and number, point and number. They become almost a single concept. Now we can separate them. Okay. I can ask you to separate in your mind and you can do that, but they're so interchangeable. In fact, they're so interchangeable that girdle in a famous article,
What is Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis? Starts out, he says, the Continuum Hypothesis is the question, how many real numbers are there? Or equivalently, how many points are there on a line? It just takes them to be the same issue. And that's surprising for a logician who is super, super careful about making distinctions when he thinks it's appropriate.
Okay, so what's the significance of this? Why are you spending your time thinking about this? The I think it's intrinsically interesting. But for me, it can, it might actually do some work. And you know, you know, the continuum hypothesis, this is the claim that the first uncountable infinity is Aleph one, and it might be and it then the claim is
that it is the real numbers. The real numbers have size aleph one. The natural numbers are infinitely many, but there's only aleph zero of them. The real numbers are a bigger infinity. And the conjecture is that they're the next biggest infinity. So they'd be aleph one. No one's been able to prove the continuum hypothesis.
or refute it. And in fact, there's an independence proof, meaning you can't prove it and you can't refute it on the basis of existing axioms of set theory. And if you think that the existing axioms of set theory are adequate for the whole of mathematics,
What that really means is the continuum hypothesis is independent of all of mathematics. You can know everything in math, you still wouldn't know the continuum hypothesis. So you could just arbitrarily make it a new axiom that would solve the problem, but it would be very unsatisfying because why are you doing that rather than making its negation the new axiom? So we're looking around for
what you might call independent evidence for the continuum hypothesis one way or the other. What might work? Well, maybe physical analogies would work. You know, you just sort of think about it. You're not going to prove it. You're not going to have any old fashioned proof, but you might have some other kind of argument. If you are a realist or a mathematical Platonist, you're going to say it is true or it is false.
I just don't know which. Okay, now question, how much detail do you want? Oh, that's fine. Well, let's go in more. I know girdle was a Platonist and he believed it's either. Yeah, I think that he proved that it's, I don't recall if it's both either the negation or the positive. He showed that it's consistent.
The audience will keep up. Get into as much detail as you like. Let's go into a disproof of the continuum hypothesis.
Okay. You'll have to be hand wavy because we don't have papers and pens. That's right. PowerPoint slides. And this is a result a number of years ago from Chris Freiling, an American logician. And it's wonderfully clever. And it's a refutation of the continuum hypothesis. Okay, so as you say, it'll be a bit hand wavy. So for those with a math education,
They will know what, well, I'm going to start out with what's called Zermelo-Franco set theory, including the axiom of choice. Okay. Now with the axiom of choice, we can prove what's known as the well ordering theorem, which means any set whatsoever, and you can give it a well ordering. And that's to, and that means you can line it up with the ordinal numbers.
So one, two, three, four, five, and then omega, which is now the first infinite ordinal. And then you keep counting ordinals, ordinals, ordinals. And then when you get all of the countable ordinals done, you get into the uncountable ordinals. This is, this is, this, this will sound like mystical nonsense unless you've taken a course in set theory and learned about the hierarchy of infinite sets.
so anyway the well-ordering theorem says that you can put any set including the real numbers between zero and one you can line them up with the this infinite string of ordinals now they won't go in the same order as the the natural less than order they'll be jumping all over the place you know like one half might be associated it's not an intuitive ordering it's not like we we have any apprehension of it no theorem just guarantees it
Yeah, the Well-Ordering Theorem guarantees that it exists, but nobody has any idea of what a well-ordering of the real numbers would be. No one's found one yet. We've got well-orderings of the rational numbers, and they're pretty straightforward, but not of the real numbers. So technically the Well-Ordering Theorem says that the subset, that any subset is well-ordered.
It says that any subset has a first element. Right. Just to see that the ordinary ordering is not a well ordering, if I say take all the real numbers greater than one half. Sorry, can you repeat that just to say that what? Take the real numbers greater than one half. What's the first element? Right, greater than but not including one half. Doesn't have. Yeah, that's right.
It doesn't have a first element, so that's just not a well ordering. But with some other bizarre ordering, I might take them, any subset, and it would have to have a first element. Okay, so we imagine that we've got a well ordering of the real numbers, just between 0 and 1. That'll do. Okay, now comes a little statistical argument.
You and I are going to throw darts. We're going to throw darts at the real line between zero and one. It's a thought experiment. Can't do it in reality, but a thought experiment. I throw a dart and I hit a number P somewhere between zero and one. You throw your dart and you hit a number Q also on the line between zero and one. Now I'm going to make the following argument. Um, your, uh,
Your dart hit the number Q, which is going to be later in the well ordering than my dart P. Why? Because there's only a countable infinity at most of numbers earlier in the well ordering from P and an uncountable infinity after. And so, so that you might be earlier than me, but the probability is zero.
And you, your dart, you've hit a number Q and you can say exactly the same argument. You're going to say the chance that I'm earlier in the well ordering is zero and the chance that it's later is one. Now we've got an absurdity because I said you've got to be later than me. And you've argued correctly that I've got to be later than you. I have different points. Yeah.
and and we've now we've just got an absurdity and why what led to this absurdity the assumption that there are aleph one real numbers if there were aleph two it wouldn't be a problem okay why why is that because uh we might i might have landed in uh and an uncountable there might be an uncountable number of points earlier than me and an uncountable earlier than you so we couldn't argue we wouldn't be able to do that the trick is
When you've got a countable infinity of numbers, and here comes the result from what's known as measure theory, the chance of landing in there is zero. It's not impossible, but it's zero probability. Right. And that's interesting for people to wrap their head around that you can have a zero probability, but possible. That's right. It's not the same as impossible. Okay.
If anyone, just to take a slight tangent, anyone who finds that absurd, think of a roulette wheel with every real number between zero and one on it. You spin the wheel and it's going to stop somewhere. What's the chance it's going to land on, say, one half? Well, there's infinitely many places it could stop. So the chance is one out of infinity.
which is going to be zero. It can happen, but it's going to be zero probability. Okay, so you and I now have this little, we've each got this little argument and we each show that the other guy is impossible. And this is absurd. And the assumption, the background assumption that led to this, that the continuum hypothesis is true,
is in trouble. You got to throw it out. Okay. All right. Now, this is really interesting. I mean, it could be an argument, you know, that settles a continuum hypothesis, though it's not a proof in any ordinary mathematical sense. It's really different. Mathematicians who look at this are, whoa, they're very queasy, you know, they don't like this kind of reasoning
They don't mind suggestive reasoning that's outside of mathematics. They don't want to take it as real evidence that, you know, that this could be a theorem, you know, a real, a real genuine, sure to be true result. Very uneasy about it. And I'm uneasy about it. I'm also curious as how it works. I mean, I know how I can reproduce the proof. I know how it works in that sense. But why the hell does it work? You know, it shouldn't work.
As in, what is its connection to reality? How is it that we can think this and it's true? Is that what you mean by? No, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's sort of that's that's behind it all, for sure. But in particular, there are assumptions made for this little argument to go. And and here that here here are some of the assumptions. First of all, the real numbers and the points on the line correspond. OK, so the geometric line between zero and one
and the uncountable infinity between zero and one real numbers, they're exactly the same. They pair up. It's an obvious assumption to make, given the long history of analytic geometry, but I just want to make sure it's there. Second thing, when you threw a dart and I threw a dart, each of us hits a point at random. The chance of hitting any point along the line
is is no different than any other point okay it's equal probability for every point okay my that's true for my dart also true for your dart there's a symmetry between our throws in the sense that it doesn't matter if you throw first and i throw second or i throw first and you throw second or if we throw simultaneously it's irrelevant and finally independence the your result has no effect on my result and vice versa
Okay. And when you think of all of those assumptions, these are crucial assumptions. Things like probability can be captured completely inside set theory. Independence can be captured completely inside set theory. The symmetry of the two throws can be captured completely inside symmetry. How come the damn argument works? Because if I try to spell out the probability of my little argument,
or the symmetry or the independence, I tried to spell it out in standard mathematics and could get that result, then something would have gone terribly wrong. I can't get that result from ordinary mathematics. So the probability in my argument, the independence in the argument, the symmetry in the argument can't be
probability, symmetry, and independence of standard mathematics. Something else, something weird is going on. It must be a related but a different concept in each case. What do you think is going on? I think it's a thick concept. I think probability as we normally use it is a thin concept, thin mathematical concept. I think in the DART thought experiment, to refute the continuum hypothesis, I think probability has taken on a new
richness in the example, it's become physicalized in some sense. And so here's where I'm looking at the analogy with ethics. Instead of a thin concept from mathematics, or a thin concept from physics, I've got a thick, this is thick probability, it's got both physical and mathematical aspects to it. Like, like courageous is both
In set theory, we can formalize probability.
Yeah. So what's thick about this? Just throwing the dart, but we can not use the dart and say we pick a point at random. And there's obviously random variables which have nothing to do with darts. So what's thick? I don't hear what's thick about this. I don't know. Maybe I'm thick. You got to help me out. No, not at all. The thickness would come in the way the thought experiment is done. You're supposed to imagine yourself throwing a dart at an actual line.
Try to try to make it physically, even if you think of it's mathematical, it's outside of set theories. Why do you have to imagine that? Why can't you just say, pick a point at random, instead of throwing a dart? Is there a difference? Well, the dart, the dart is supposed to be a guarantee that it's genuinely at random. If I asked you to pick a real number between zero and one at random, I'm almost certain you couldn't do it.
I know, I know. What I'm saying is that you can formalize what it means to pick a number from zero to one randomly in statistics, independent of saying throw a dart, and you can formalize it with set theory, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. That's certainly true. The thing is, well, here's what here's what I am faced with, and you're faced with.
If we assume that the argument works, the Fridling argument works as a refutation, we assume it works. And it does seem to make these crucial assumptions. Well, it assumes Zermelo-Franco set three with choice, okay? And then it assumes the randomness of the dart throw, the symmetry of the dart throw, the independence of the dart throw, and the correspondence between real numbers and points on a line. It assumes that.
If all of that is just part of mathematics, existing mathematics, then we would have derived a refutation of the continuum hypothesis inside mathematics. It wouldn't have been independent after all. Since it is independent, demonstrably independent, one of those premises has to be false. And so if I just say, well, let's take the randomness one. I don't know which one is false.
At least one of them is going to be false. So the randomness one is false. There must be the randomness that we're assuming in the thought experiment cannot be analyzed in normal set theory terms. It's got to have some kind of physical component that enriches it so that we can pull off this argument.
So that's where, this is where the thick concepts come in. So it becomes not ordinary randomness in standard math. It becomes a thick randomness. It's got a physical, it's become physicalized in some important sense. Now you say physicalized with a grimace. Is that because there is, you're a Platonist and you feel like, well, if it's not a thin mathematical, by the way, is there a con, is there a connection between thin and thick and Platonism and
I don't know. Most of the people who talk about thick and thin in ethics, they often conclude that this is the end of the fact-value distinction. So if you think of facts as part of the physical realm, and if you are a Platonist about ethics, and they're declaring the end of this dichotomy between moral reality and physical reality,
Then I'm not sure about the status of moral reality when it's all over. I would like to think it's still there, and these are a kind of hybrid human-made concepts, both in ethics and in math. I was supposed to say that you would like to believe that morals are a part of a Platonistic world or a moral world? Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a moral realist. Yeah, for me, there's... I hate the distinction between
How do we get that moral fact? Where does that moral fact come from? Okay, now this gets back to the problem
simultaneous problem for both ethics and for mathematics. So most Platonists believe not only in the reality of mathematics, and if you're a Platonist about ethics or a moral realist, you believe in objective moral facts. The big problem and the thing that people who are empiricists and naturalists complain about is you have no access to these facts, even if they did exist.
because you can see, smell, touch and so on. But if these live in a realm completely separate from us, you have no contact with them, you couldn't learn about them, and so on and so on. The response from moral realists, Platonists, is to appeal to intuition. And intuition is a cognitive capacity that we have, that will give us
knowledge. So to take math, we have, everybody has, you know, scads of moral intuitions about math. Even if you had almost no mathematical training, you have a powerful intuition that two plus two equals four. And that's a moral intuition? Sorry, no, a mathematical intuition that two plus two equals four. And if I pressed you and I said, Oh, look, I just read in the newspaper today that, you know, in, in Brazil,
Some wonderful physicists in Brazil have just done some fine-tune measurements, and they have discovered that 2 plus 2 actually equals 3.95. It doesn't equal 4 after all. Right. This is actually... We're just learning. Because there was a recent controversy about 2 plus 2 equals 5. I don't know if you've heard of it. No. Okay. So I think about one side we can talk about that afterwards. No, no, no. The other side was being serious. It was...
it was because they were saying that the way that math is set up is western and it's not taking into account other modes of knowing and there are possible worlds where two plus two could equal five in different interpretations which it's true i mean if you have modulo something i'm sure you can make two plus two equal five or you can have modular you're absolutely right but it doesn't mean there may be standard interpretation and there's probably good rules of thumb in in some sciences where you
You're now not talking two plus two, you're talking about two somethings and two somethings. So if you're talking about, what is it, water, a litre of water mixed with a litre of alcohol, perhaps, doesn't give you two litres of liquid. It gives you something like 1.9 litres of liquid because of the, you know, the some atomic goings on, reduces the volume of the whole thing.
You could you might conveniently talk that way. Yeah, because you're in the lab and it's very constraint. But no, two plus two equals four. And more generally, you know, a little bit of arithmetic and I can become abstract and I can say, any number m and any number n, if I add them together, m plus n, it's going to equal n plus m. And everybody think about that for a minute and a half and say, Yeah, yeah, right. I see it.
Yes, it's true and it has to be true. That's an example of a mathematical intuition. It's not empirical, though. Math and ethics have been the two thorns in the side of empiricism. I'm going to play devil's advocate just for a second because I'm trying to wrap my head around this. When you have A plus B equals B plus A, just so that it's clear, do we not define that with the addition being commutative?
And then we make a model and say that our numbers correspond to it. We do, but people's elementary experience with arithmetic would lead them in that very direction. If they've done enough adding, they've been making change, they've been counting pebbles, who knows what? And after a while they come to realize that, whether they've been told that the commuter... Okay, you're strictly speaking about the intuition behind it, not proving it to be true. That's right.
Because to the audience see proving it to be do that's really interesting. We actually assume it in in the way that we define addition and multiplication that they're doing arithmetic in any formal sense. We typically start out with something known as the piano axioms. Okay, and they tell us how to add how to multiply, and they give us a principle called mathematical induction. And then everything in arithmetic follows. Well, I need to qualify that
Almost everything in arithmetic follows. There is a problem about completeness, but never mind that. And everybody's intuition, if you've been playing with arithmetic for a while, you'd say, yeah, this is the truth. This is how addition works. This is how multiplication works. Okay, let's not get hung up on it. Let's assume that we have a strong intuition and we prove it. Those are examples of intuitions. Now, we have the same thing in ethics. So,
If you saw somebody, if you saw some teenage kids catch a kitten, pour gasoline on it, set it on fire, you would be aghast. You would be morally outraged. You have a very strong moral intuition that that was an evil thing to do. But those kids don't. They might. They might. And they are just overwhelmed by peer pressure and gang behavior and stuff like that.
And you're right, they might not even... Now let's imagine they might not. Let's take the edge case. The which? The edge cases. Just to investigate this. So what if they genuinely don't have anything wrong with that? Like Genghis Khan, for example, said
the best life would be conquering his enemies and enslaving their women. And now we look at that and say that that's ridiculous, but let's believe him that that actually invoked pleasure in him and he thought that was morally correct. I don't know enough about him to know exactly what's going on, so I'll give you the short answer and that is we've made a hell of a lot of moral progress since
How do we make the claim that we've made moral progress without already assuming what we're trying to prove? That's an extremely difficult question. I don't want to say, well, my views have won over the long run, though they have. My view is we shouldn't have slavery, and almost everybody agrees with that now.
My view is that women should be treated equally with men and most people agree with that now that they wouldn't have a century ago. My view is that gays and lesbians and so on should be treated with equal rights and dignity and so on and so on. And I'd say at least a strong majority of Canadians if not a strong majority of the world population agree with that. So
I don't have a hard and fast non-circular argument. I can say that as people think about these things over time, they tend to change their views in the direction that we have come. Not many people were against slavery for years and years and then had an epiphany and said, I made a terrible mistake. I think we should have slaves. I think that'd be a great idea.
Okay. People don't go in that direction. Let me press for a bit. I actually agree with you, but here's what I'm thinking. Here's what pops into my head. So a social consensus, what is required? And what if 10 years from now, you know there's some evidence that people who are on the lower end of the IQ spectrum have more children? Let's just imagine that many people, and we can even demean them and say conservatives, like let's say we're aggressive liberals. I'm not saying we are, but let's say these
Foolish reactionary conservatives are the ones that populate the earth and then they like its slavery later and the majority of the earth likes slavery except those who are enslaved But they're a minority. Yeah, does that make that correct? No Okay, no, no Okay, so there's two questions Is there such a thing as objective right or wrong? Yes, I mean correct. Is there is there is there an objective shape of the earth? Yes, I think
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it's round, it's spherical. And I think we've got a ton of evidence that this is so. But if for some reason in the future, people said, No, we're pretty sure it's flat. And, and then I would say, Well, I pity that future civilization, they've got it wrong. They've made a terrible mistake. That's fact straight factual stuff. Okay, morally, if people actually said, Well, I we think we think slavery is a pretty good idea.
And I'd say, no, I would say they've made a terrible, terrible mistake. But I acknowledge the possibility that it could happen. Germany was a very, Germany is a very progressive country in the, you know, 19th and very early 20th century. And then by the time, you know, horrible calamities in the, in the 30s,
Hitler comes to power and a majority of Germans are willing to go along with some pretty horrific views. Yeah, they're just wrong. They're just wrong. 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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We can talk about that another time. Basically, my argument was this. Well, first of all, I want to make it clear to the people who are watching that I don't think low IQ people are conservative. I was just straw manning for the sake of argument. Okay, second. I thought that what you were suggesting was given that we have a line toward
something that over time people believe in a certain value, that's evidence that the value is objectively correct. And then I was saying, well, what if that reverses or we go into another direction? And then you're saying, no, that's wrong. But how does that not jive with saying that there's societal movement towards a certain direction and that corresponds to being objectively correct morally? No, no, it's this is this is a very good question. And it's very hard to answer.
I don't have a terrific answer. I only have a weak answer. And my weak answer is that it's like science. We make progress in science. It's possible that what we believe today about, let's say, quantum mechanics and relativity, a hundred years from now, people will say, I don't know, let's go back to Newton. Let's believe Newton. Okay. I think the chances of that are minuscule.
And the thing is that there's been incremental evidence. It's fallible evidence, but incremental evidence all along pushes people upwards. Okay. It makes us brighter. We know more, we're more sophisticated in physics. And I think something like that goes on in our moral and political lives too. Interesting. Okay. Now with regards to Newtonian physics becoming
We say that one is more correct because it can explain more. Is pure explanatory power what makes the theory correct? No, explanatory power is a sign, is evidence that it's correct. This much is logically possible for anyone who's a realist.
that all the evidence could point away from the truth. Everything that we count is evidence. Like, is it explanatorily powerful? Yeah. Does it, is it incredibly accurate? You know, does it make spectacular predictions to the 25th decimal place? Yeah, it might be that too. And yet, in spite of all of this, it might be false. What are your views on free will, by the way?
Do you believe in it? Yes, we've against it. Oh, interesting. Okay, now are you like Daniel Dennett, where you say, Well, I have a compatible list view. No, I have here I feel completely at sea. I speculate away, I operate. I live my life as if I have free will. I am. I eat too much. And I blame myself. I blame my willpower.
And while it would be very nice to blame something else, I can't. I just blame myself. I get angry at others. I get angry. I mean, some people I think can't help what they believe. Others I think have gone out of their way to make themselves stupid, and I blame them for that. So I'm happy to blame people for not doing what I think they ought to do. And I do think they have free will. I don't know how to live in a world where we really don't have free will.
But I may be just highly, that's not an argument for free will. That's just an argument for we have to live as if there is free will. I don't know how really to live otherwise. Now I've seen some people who are very sophisticated, you know, talk about this subject and maybe they'll be able to persuade me in the long run that we don't have
The standard view that's opposed to free will is well what caused you to make so-and-so decision and then it's your neurology okay well what caused that and you keep going until you get to a cause that's not you.
Right. Where does that chain of reductionism, because we just talked about physics being extremely powerful and more and more accurate, and there doesn't seem to be room for free will. So where does free will comport with our view of physics in the way that it's formalized currently? No, it's terrible. But it doesn't have to be quite as crude as you just put it. Here's another issue.
in which I do not have strong views, but it's sort of in the background. And this is the difference between, this is the issue of reductionism and emergence. So if you have a complete reductionist view and your world is deterministic, it's very hard to make room for free will. But if you have an emergentist view,
that is yeah physics is at the bottom but in a certain level of complexity there could emerge biological laws like strong emergence yeah and out of that could emerge psychological laws and so on and and free will would be you know something that is emerging at some higher level it's not going to it's not going to
It's not going to emerge out of elementary particle physics. I mean, sometimes people try to do that, because they take quantum indeterminacy to be, you know, this is stupid. It's just really bad arguments. But if we didn't have some kind of emergence, you might have you might have free will. Right. But again, I can't make up my mind. Okay. Yeah, where I was going to go is,
There's no evidence for strong emergence, but there's plenty of evidence for reductionism. Like there's no link in the chain that's broken in the reductionist account as far as we could tell. So then to believe that we have free will, and I'm, I'm not suggesting that I don't believe I'm just throwing something out. So to believe that we have free will seems to be counter to evidence. So how do you jive with saying that I'm a person who goes wherever the evidence leads me?
But simultaneously saying that I'm someone who believes in free will. And when I say go wherever the evidence believes, sorry, that I'm a person, I'm a person who goes wherever the evidence leads. I mean, evidence in terms of scientific evidence, because obviously you can be a spiritualist and say, well, I have the intuitions. You might appeal to intuitions, but I'm curious. So what do you say to that? Well, I do. I do count myself as somebody who's led by the evidence.
On the other hand, I don't agree with you about there's no gaps in the going from us to elementary particles. I mean, try to imagine accounting for Donald Trump's election
in terms of writing down the Schrodinger equation for the population of the world and then solving it and getting out, ta-da, Donald Trump is president. What I meant was that so far there's no link that's been shown to be false. That doesn't mean that there is. No, no, no, I completely agree with you. So there's no evidence for it. Anyway, it would be very reliable. That would be like religious people who argue for the god of the gaps. God fills in the gaps in our scientific knowledge. Yeah, it's a foolish way of doing it.
Let's talk about Platonism. Do you mind defining for the audience what Platonism is? Sure. Modern Platonism, as opposed to being a strict follower of Plato, modern Platonism is simply the view that there are abstract entities. Numbers being the most obvious example of this. They exist in some way, shape or form? Yep, they're real. They exist.
And there are facts about them, like two plus two equals four. There are infinitely many prime numbers and so on. And these objects and these facts are completely independent from intelligent creatures. So even if no intelligent life existed anywhere in the universe, it would still be true that there are infinitely many prime numbers. If you believe that,
You're a Platonist. In fact, there's a little litmus test for audience members who've never thought about it before. Ask yourself, do you think mathematicians discover new truths of mathematics or do they somehow invent or create them? Shakespeare created Hamlet. If Shakespeare or no intelligent being had ever existed, Hamlet would not exist. On the other hand, the spherical shape of the Earth
would still be a fact, even if no intelligent being had ever existed. I say math is more like the shape of the earth and less like Hamlet. That's what it is to be a mathematical realist or a Platonist. When you say something that just popped into my head was the infinite monkeys on the typewriter, and then you can make it an analogy between Shakespeare and information. So just say the works of Shakespeare is just one extremely large number, given that you can translate it to bits.
isomorphically. Okay, and that number exists. So then did Shakespeare actually invent Hamlet? Or did he? No, no, no, no, no arithmetic is rich enough that it can encode Hamlet. That's all. So technically, did he discover it? Or did he create it? Hamlet, Hamlet was created by Shakespeare, not discovered by Shakespeare. Okay. But when the mathematician discovers or
When Euclid produced the theorem that there are infinitely many prime numbers, Euclid discovered something. He discovered something that exists, that is true, independent from him. He didn't make it up. I see. It's not a cultural item of any sort. It's just a group way the world is. I see, I see, I see. But it's the abstract world. It's not a physical object. It's an abstract entity.
Yeah, now what creates this Platonic world? It's always been there, nothing created it. Yeah, so how do we talk about the Platonic world without sounding mystical, without sounding theological? It's like it's always there, it's ever-present, it is timeless, it's an uncaused cause. Yeah, well, you can imagine the universe, the physical universe, always existing, right? In fact, there's a good reason to believe that it always has,
I know we're, we're, we're, we talk about big bang cosmology and we're what 13.8 billion years old. But if, but the inflationary scenario, we're probably just one of, you know, the multiverse. And these things have been going on forever. So our mini our universe is just one of a infinite number of pocket universes. Pocket universes have always existed. And they generate more from
through this process called eternal inflation or just go back to pre-big bang cosmology where we used to believe standard physics believed that the universe was infinitely old it didn't have a beginning and it won't have an end it just is eternal not created by god this is atheists we're happy to believe this it's just this is the way things are so the platonic world was always there or even to say the word always implies
Formulating it in terms of time and it's timeless. There's an old philosophical distinction we hardly use anymore between eternal and semperternal. Semperternal? Semperternal. So semperternal means true at all times. Eternal means outside of time. So mathematics is true outside of time.
If numbers were somehow or other, which a small number of people believe, a kind of part of the physical realm, but somehow attached to the physical realm. So if the physical realm didn't exist, numbers wouldn't exist. That would be a simple eternal version. So in casual talk, we say, yeah, it's eternal. It's always the case.
But this distinction, like God, standard view of God, God is eternal outside of creation.
Whatever God created is and if God created anything that lasted forever in creation, that would be simple eternal. I see. I see. Wittgenstein had a quote about this. He said if eternal means infinite temporal length, then that would be right. If it didn't mean that, but instead meant outside of time, then anyone who lives in the present moment is living eternally. Yeah, well, that's beautiful. Also a bit mystical.
A few weeks ago, I emailed, or maybe a couple months ago, I emailed you about thought experiments. I don't recall how the conversation started, but you sent me a book on thought experiments. You didn't know that I was thinking of writing a book. I actually started, but your book was far more articulate than mine about thought experiments. I recommend people who watch this to read. It's like a spitback second book on manifolds. It's a short read and compendious.
Something I've been trying to develop is, is there a way of formulating the laws of physics from pure thought experiments? What drove me to think that was the Galileo experiment, the thought experiment with Galileo, and you had already thought about this as well. And in fact, you just started writing a book about it. It's not like you, you solve the problem. Otherwise we we'd invent plenty of new technology, but you've made what I think is progress. So let's talk about that book.
Do you think that ultimately the laws of physics can be generated from armchair philosophy, just sitting back and thinking a thought experiment? Certainly not all. In fact, not even most. But just every now and then I think we can learn something about the world in a non-empirical way. And my favorite example
is Galileo and falling objects. Galileo is a wonderful thought experimenter, maybe the best ever. He's absolutely terrific. Einstein was a very good thought experimenter too. They're probably in the same league, but if anything I think Galileo is a notch above. My favorite thought experiment of all time
And I remember hearing it when I was an undergraduate and thought it was the most dazzling thing I'd ever heard. And this is the argument for all objects, regardless of how heavy they are, fall at the same rate. So it's a thought experiment. You imagine yourself going up on the leaning tower of Pisa, if you like, and you're dropping a cannonball, which is quite heavy, and a musket ball, which is relatively quite a bit lighter. Now, the
the common sense view and the view in in Aristotle are the same. It says that heavy objects will just fall faster than light objects. And we've got a lot of experience to that effect. You know, I mean, if you do throw a cannonball and a feather, you know, you know that the cannonball is going to hit the ground a lot sooner. So Galileo says, all right, if heavy objects fall faster than light objects, let's imagine a compound object,
consisting of a cannonball and a musket ball clued together, okay, and drop it. Now we've got three things. We've got a cannonball, a musket ball, and this composite objects. Now on the principle that heavy objects fall faster, this composite object is going to fall fastest of all of the three. But unfortunately, it's not, it's going to be slowed down by the fact that
The cannonball part of the composite object wants to fall at its fast rate, but it's going to be held back by this little musket ball attached to it, who's wanting to fall at a slower rate. So it's like jumping out of a window with a little tiny parachute. It's going to slow you down. And so that's absurd. The composite object will be both faster and slower than the heavy cannonball by itself. There it's, and that was the end of common sense.
about falling objects and the end of Aristotle on free fall. But the solution, how fast do things fall, is obvious when you've reached this point. And here's where a physical intuition actually comes in. And you don't need to perform the experiment. You just think about it and you realize, oh, they all have to fall at the same rate. And that's how things fall, right?
at the same rate, regardless of how heavy they are. To me, this is still one of the most beautiful thought experiments as well. And it's what led me on the journey of thinking. I wonder how much more of physics can be gleaned by just thinking about what's consistent, what contradicts. Oh, a ton of things. Galileo's other, I think, his other very, very famous thought experiment is the inside the ship, where you can't tell
By hypothesis, he can't tell whether the ship is stationary in the port or moving across a very smooth ocean. And he says, okay, I'm inside and birds are flying around inside, front to back. And it's the same whether I'm sailing or at port. I throw a ball to my friend back and forth, same whether we're moving or in port. Fish are in an aquarium tank inside the ship.
and they swim back and forth in the tank, and it doesn't matter whether we're stationary or moving. Everything is the same on the inside. And that's his argument for what has become the principle of relativity, that inertial frames, the laws of nature are exactly the same in any inertial frame, whether it's a stationary one at rest in port or moving smoothly over the sea.
What was the impetus for him thinking of this thought experiment? Was it because he was suggesting the earth is moving and people were wondering, well, shouldn't we be moving if the earth is moving or was it something else? That's exactly right. There was another thought experiment prior, not Galileo's, but prior to Galileo. This is a medieval thought experiment, sometimes called the tower experiment. And that is if the earth is moving either around the sun or spinning on its own axis,
either way. And you dropped an object from a tower, then as the earth moved, the object would fall way behind the base of the tower. Right. It never does that. It always falls right down at the base. Right. And you can use a similar ship argument where if you're on a ship and the ship is sailing and you drop a ball, it'll fall behind the ship or where the tail end of the ship was. That's right. That's what the
equivalent tower argument would use. But Galileo says, no, no, it's not going to be like that at all. If you're, if you're just inside the ship, you can't see out, you drop a ball, it'll land at your feet. And if you're moving over the sea at 20 knots, and you drop a ball, it's still going to land at your feet, either way. Right, right. And, and, and that's the, and then more general, of course, you just make the claim, the laws of nature are going to be the same in any inertial
frame of reference. And that's the principle of relativity. That's Galileo's version. And it's the version is the only version we use. When Einstein gave us special relativity, he hung on to the principle of relativity, because it was in danger. It was in danger from Maxwell's electrodynamics, which seemed to need a universal ether as if there was a single frame
in which physics was correctly described. And anything that was moving in the etherframe, you wouldn't get the right results. That is, you'd have to take that into account. The laws of nature are best by the etherframe. Now let's get to Newton with the absolute space in the bucket.
So Newton had a thought experiment that demonstrated absolute space. Okay, so this is another extremely famous thought experiment. And this I can show a diagram from the book or from any other place I don't want to take from the copyright holder. No, no, you got it there. No, I mean, I'll show it when we're at when I'm editing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can show it from my book. Don't worry. Sure. Yeah, I grant you permission. Thank you. Appreciate that.
Now, so Newton gave two versions of this. One was the bucket, okay? And so the way you should think of it is you've got a bucket and you can twist the rope, okay? And here's the bucket and the water is very smooth on top. And you let the bucket go. And it's the only thing in the universe for this. Well, for the bucket there's Newton and there's everything around.
Okay, nevermind. Let me do the bucket and then I'll switch to the other one. Sure, sure, sure. Which is the empty universe. Okay, so at first the water is flat and the bucket starts to rotate and gradually, so initially, before anything happens, the water and the bucket are at rest with respect to one another. Then they start to rotate and they're rotating together, both the bucket and the water,
and the water starts climbing the walls and then you stop the bucket and the water is still climbing and it gradually subsides to flat again. Now the question is how do we explain the difference between the water and bucket being at rest initially and the water is flat and later on the water and bucket are at rest with respect to one another but the water is concave.
The water is climbing up the walls. How do you explain the difference? And Newton says, okay, you know what's going to happen. Here's the explanation. In the first case, the water bucket system is not rotating with respect to space. And later, when the water is climbing the walls, the whole system is rotating with respect to space itself. And then conclusion, therefore, space exists.
Not just something that we use as a convenience or something like that. Actually, let me go back and people can figure out what their instinctive view is on this. This would be the difference between a Newtonian on the one hand and a Leibnizian relationalist on the other hand. Question.
There was nothing in the whole universe. No object existed anywhere in the universe. Would space still exist? Could space still exist? And I find that when I asked my students that question, about half of them say, yeah, empty space, no problem. There could be empty space. And the other half said, that's ridiculous. There couldn't be such a thing as empty space. If there's no objects, there's just no space, period. This sounds like the tree falling in the woods.
There's no connection to that, you're right. And there's a counterpart to that for time. If I say to my class, okay, imagine that nothing ever happened. Everything was just frozen solid. Could time still pass? Half the class will say no, no events, no time. The other half will say, yeah, time's still passing, but nothing's happening.
Very different instincts people have about this. And that one's also about 50-50? Yeah, roughly 50-50. Same people? Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They're highly correlated. Okay. Yeah. So if you think empty space makes sense, and you think time without events makes sense, you're a Newtonian. You're with Newton. And if you think that no objects, no space, or no events, no time, you're an instinctive Leibnizian, a Relationalist.
And what about you? My instincts are mostly with Newton. It's also another thing that's interesting about this is that my class will be typically half physics, half philosophy students. It doesn't break along that line at all. Oh, interesting. Half the physicists are Newtonians in instinct and half of them are Leibnizians and the philosophy students exactly the same. Half of them are Newtonians, half of them are Leibnizians.
Have you done this with mathematicians? I'm curious. I do it with mathematicians for other things and often that are philosophically interesting and I am often surprised at the split in the mathematical audience exactly corresponds to the split in the philosophy audience. That is you can't tell from someone's answer whether they're a mathematician or a philosopher.
By the way, do you consider, are you a professor of philosophy of math or philosophy of physics or both? No, just philosophy. But my specialty inside is things like math and physics. I see. I mean, some philosophers are, you know, they specialize in the history of philosophy or in ethics and so on. Math and physics are my specialties inside.
As an aside, another aside, why did you end up choosing to go into the philosophy of math instead of math? Is it just purely based on what interested you or was there something else? That's a really interesting question. I think it was pretty much right at the beginning, like when you're a beginning undergraduate and then you have to pick majors and stuff like that. I thought I can do anything in the world as a philosopher.
And no one will say, yeah, you're not doing philosophy anymore. One of my first questions for this that I wrote down, it's has any philosophical question ever been solved? And this relates to that because I'm curious to know is something I've been thinking about. I searched this on Google and it's not clear. The only one that I can think of is maybe Zeno's paradox with saying, well, you're, you're only accounting for finite time, but have any major philosophical problems ever been solved?
I'd be more confident in saying a lot of views have been decisively refuted. So there's a lot of people in philosophy say, well, we know that we're making progress in this limited sense that we now know certain things are false that we didn't know were false, you know, 50 years ago or something like that. But I mean, I have lots of philosophical views.
about which I'm fairly confident and I think those might count. People would disagree with me of course, but there'd be some significant number of people who would say, yeah, we think that's right. One of the most important and oldest is Plato's refutation
for the need for God in order to have objective ethics. It's in the dialogue called the Euthyphro. And it's a very simple little argument. And it doesn't refute the existence of God. It just says, no, no, no, objective ethics, objective right and wrong is completely independent from God. God's got nothing to do with it. It's a wonderful little argument. And if you are an atheist, you're happy with the conclusion.
Right. We can have objective ethics. We don't need God. And if you do believe in God, you could say, well, I still believe in God and I believe in objective ethics. The intimate connection that I thought was there actually isn't there, but everything else is wonderful. Or someone can reject the conclusion and say, yes, God can advocate for the murder of a child and that would still be good because God advocated for it. That's the essence of the youthful argument because everyone will balk at that.
And they think something is moral because God says so. And then you say, oh, yeah, so if he told you you had to rape every woman you can see, then that would be a good thing to do. Is that what you believe? And no one will believe that. And then they realize that this is stupid. I can't. What I've been saying all along is a really stupid view. The most we can get out of God is God is a truthful reporter of objective moral rules.
Like we can trust God to tell us what the moral rules are, but God isn't making them. They have to be independent. That's a really, it's a, it's a wonderfully interesting problem. It's underappreciated. I think theologians, the theologians don't want to touch it. And there's another one that they even more don't want to touch. And that is how powerful God is. The one about ethics is a lot like what Leibniz thought about God's power. He'd say,
Leibniz, do you think God is all-powerful? Say, you betcha, he can do anything. Leibniz wouldn't say that though, because Leibniz... He'd have a qualification, which I'm going to give you in a second. Okay, okay. You say, Decart, can God do everything? You betcha, he can do anything. And then you say, well, can he make it rain? It's a sunny day right here. Can he make it rain? Sure, he can make it rain. Leibniz, could he make it rain? You betcha, he can make it rain, just like that. And then you say to Decart, could he make it rain?
and not rain simultaneously, Descartes would say, yes, he can even do that. I can't imagine what it would be like, but we can do it. And Leibniz would say, no, we can't do that. He can make it rain, he can make it not rain, but he can't pull off a contradiction. So God can do anything that's possible. That's God's power. Right. And the Leibniz view about what God can do in the physical realm is very much like
You know, when we're talking about whether or not philosophical problems have been solved, something I found online,
It's funny, it's the reason why philosophical problems have not been solved, is that as soon as they have been solved, they get relegated to something like physics or math. For example, you know, physics was called natural philosophy before. That's actually a really good point. The hardest problems stay in philosophy. The ones that are unsolvable stay in philosophy. As soon as they're solved, they get outside the realm of philosophy. And that's why philosophical problems seem to have never been solved. That's a really good point.
In fact, that's how a lot of philosophers think of their discipline as giving birth to the sciences. Once we sort something out, it takes off a life of its own. Sometimes when I talk to hardcore physicists, they don't like to deal with concepts that are maybe you might call them thick, although I might be using your terminology incorrectly. I'm going to call them ambiguous, like for example, consciousness or free will or
Yeah, yeah, those are right. And they were just saying, I don't know what it means to I don't know what that means. And so let me just stay with my rulers and protractors. But the philosophers are willing to deal with what seems meaningless and try and find meaning and then it's and concretize what's ambiguous or disambiguate what's ambiguous. And then it goes into another realm. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I don't particularly like the the this there's a dismissal that and an arrogance that comes from the purely mathematical and purely physical
Professors that I've spoken to where they don't want to deal with certain concepts that seem That are ill-defined They'll just say well, I don't deal with that and that's meaningless and so you can pursue that but that's a religious pursuit to even talk about consciousness or Or what it means to die or what it what does life mean? Well Yeah, that seems rather short-sighted because so many I mean I can understand them saying
I don't want to deal with consciousness as a physicist. I'm very happy to talk about it and think about it and reflect on it. It's probably outside the realm of physics. I'm also very interested to talk about politics and how we should organize society, but I wouldn't... Derive it from the Schrodinger equation. Exactly. Okay, now the bucket. Okay, so anyway, the bucket.
The Newton's final conclusion, water still initially, water concave at the end, what's the difference? Explanation, the bucket is not rotating, then the bucket is rotating with respect to space itself. And therefore space exists. It's meant to be an argument for the existence of space as a thing in its own right. As well as all these material objects all around us, there is also space.
It's an extra thing. Leibniz said that's rubbish. There's nothing to space except the relations among physical things. Get rid of the physical things. There's nothing left over. So Leibniz didn't agree with the conclusion of the thought experiment or he just didn't get presented with this thought experiment? No, that's really a good point. They had a wonderfully interesting correspondence back and forth. It's called the Leibniz Clark.
because Clark is very close to Newton. We don't really know whether Clark was simply taking dictation from Newton. He might have been, or he might have just talked to Newton about how to formulate answers, but there's about six letters back and forth between them, and they keep getting longer and longer. Leibniz died. It never came to an end. Leibniz just unfortunately died.
And Leibniz has wonderful answers to a whole lot of stuff that Newton talks about. Leibniz is a brilliant, brilliant person. When people are talking about the luminaries, they mention Einstein and Newton, but Leibniz is, to me, on the same category of Newton. Oh, he is. He's unquestionably one of the all-time spectacular greats. Yeah.
Okay. Okay. So anyway, but that's the bucket. But you see Newton, Newton then said, gave a second version. It's the same argument, but this is the really interesting one. So he says, you imagine two spheres connected by a cord or a rod or something, a cord, make it a cord or an elastic. And he says,
there there's a tension in the elastic okay it's stretched um the material sorry sorry is this in your thought experiment book as well that i can place it okay it'll be in the same place okay i'm just trying to visualize it right now it i'm visualizing something like it looks like a dumbbell okay so you got the two spheres and they could be made out of some massive thing that you could be would if they don't attract or retail but there's a tension
The cord is stretched. How could you explain this? There's nothing in the universe. It's an empty universe. How do you explain it? Newton says easy. The whole thing is rotating. And you see the individual objects try to move in straight lines. They try to move inertially and hence it's stretching the cord between them. And that's how you account for it.
Well, what's the cause of this inertial motion? Space itself, space is the source of inertial motion and inertial forces and stuff like that. This is the, if now, if you're, if you're, um, if you're someone like Leibniz, you're going to have real problems with this because space, you see for Newton, space has real properties. It can cause things. It causes things to move in straight lines.
That's why if you throw an object, no force on it, it'll move in a straight line. It's space that sort of guides it as it were that way. Okay. And if there were no space, there'd be no accounting for why it moves in a straight line rather than just at random. Leibniz died before he could really tackle that issue. And who knows, he might've even been won over by it. You wanted to know about how Einstein reacted to this.
Right. Einstein changed his mind, but early on, and this is in the very first couple of pages in the paper on general relativity. For the audience, just to clarify, the Newton bucket experiment demonstrated, at least for Newton, the presence of absolute space. That's right. Space is a thing in its own right. Yeah. What Einstein does is
he rejects the whole setup. So he imagines two spheres that are rotating with respect to one another, and one is perfectly spherical, and the other one's a kind of an ellipse of revolution. Okay, so it's elongated at its equator. Okay, just like our Earth spinning on its axis, it's a little wider at the equator. So Einstein imagines these two things,
In another wise empty space and he says how can you explain this and then he says you can't You must appeal to distant matter And the presence of this is this is really mocks Answer to all of this. You must appeal to distant matter that you can experience you can see it and and one of the object the the ellipse of revolution That object not the spherical one
That object is rotating with respect to that distant mass. So it's not space itself that causes the inertial motion. It's the presence of billions of distribution. Okay. Let me see if I have this correct because I don't recall this. So are you, is what you're saying something like we don't know if we're rotating unless we see stars rotating above us? Yeah. Or is this completely, is it? That's Einstein. Yeah.
Okay, what about the centripetal force or centrifugal force? So what does he say about that? It's not caused by rotation with respect to space. It's caused by rotation with respect to distant matter. In fact, this is Mark made an empirical claim about this. And I don't think it's very practical, so no one can ever do it. But Mark said, imagine that you did Newton's bucket.
in a bucket where the walls of the bucket were several miles thick. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Imagine them a hundred miles thick, incredible mass. Then you, and you rotate this thing. Yeah. Okay. So in Newton's bucket, when you rotate it, the wall, the water starts to climb the wall. Yeah. Locke said, if you've got enough mass in the bucket itself, the water would stay level.
Therefore, it's not rotation with respect to space, it's rotation with respect to external masses. Ah, uh-huh. Because it depends on that. I see. Yeah. You need such a big bucket. You know, you couldn't ask the government to pay for this experiment. They would be they would be turfed out of power in the next election, wouldn't they?
When I first heard about the Galileo thought experiment of the falling bodies, I thought that's the most wonderful thing I'd ever heard.
And then after I got tenure, I thought, okay, they can't fire me now return. I'm going to do what I wanted to do for a long time. And that's start thinking about thought experiments. And there was virtually no literature on it. There's, you know, people make the odd offhand remark. And of course there are lots of thought experiments floating around, but nobody had ever written about it. And I could hear that sound.
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Shopify.com slash theories. What's their nature? You know, how do they work and stuff like that? And I was shocked that I could read almost everything that had ever been written about thought experiments in a long weekend. It was almost nothing, a bit by mock and a bit by, you know, a few other people and that's it. And so the few people who had commented on it,
usually divided things up into the positive negative kind of thought experiments thought experiments which you know get try to give you a new theory versus thought experiments which just destroy an old theory okay so shorty nurse cat is a negative thought experiment in the sense that it's just supposed to undermine standard quantum mechanics but other other thought experiments like
Okay, you fine-tuned only the constructive part. Well, the destructive part goes down to direct. So it's like, I don't recall what direct was. And then one of the
constructives goes down to direct as well. Yeah. Um, I, I think I can't remember now whether I, I mean, there were some distinctions I didn't bother making, but might've made in passing when I was describing that taxonomy. Um, the negative thought experiments, I might've put them lumped them all together as just negative. Yeah. Um, there's probably a, an important difference between, uh, negative thought experiments that follow from the theory itself.
which just shows that they're internally incoherent and negative thought experiments, which show a clash between a theory and other more or less established knowledge. So I could fine tune there and you could probably make more distinctions. Anytime you're setting up a taxonomy, there's a kind of balance between, you know, to what extent can this be simplified and enlightening?
And to what extent do you go into so much detail, it just becomes, you get lost in, you get lost in the detail. Have you been keeping up with theories of everything? There's been a couple of new ones this year. Yeah. A little bit. Have you read up on Wolfram's or Eric Weinstein's? No. Wolfram's views, he just thinks that the world is an automaton and
He sees digital computers as answering all questions. I'm still sufficiently wedded to continuity in a lot of places that I don't, I think digitizing things is only a nifty approximation and good for solving a lot of practical problems, but I don't think it's going to reveal the deeper truth. I may be wrong, I may be wrong. I have physics friends who do believe that space-time is discrete
Yep. And if they're right, then understanding the world in as a gigantic digital computer that makes that becomes a little more plausible.
You definitely should read that paper that you sent me, which I thought that you knew Nicholas Jessen and you were completely familiar with his work. Anyway, just for the audience member. I read it at the time. I remember saying, I do remember sending it to you, but I just completely forgot it. Okay. I'm just going to give a bit of background. Yes. Send it if you have it. I'll send you a lecture from him because it's wonderful. Okay. Nicholas Jessen is a physicist who was answering a question that I was curious about, which is why I asked Jim here. I said, Hey,
Is there any other logical foundation of physics other than classical logic? Cause I'm wondering, I'm always curious, like what's holding us back from theories of everything. And I'm trying to tackle it from as many angles as I, as I can. That's what I thought. Maybe this is one. And you said, well, there is this person named Nicholas Jessen who thinks that intuitionist logic is a way to go. And now I'm getting, now it's coming back. Yes. Yes. Okay. And so what he was saying, he has a few different reasons for believing that
first of all real numbers aren't real and the reason for this is to say is because there's only a finite amount of information that can be in any finite volume so let's say it's a real number if it's an arbitrary real number then it's going to collapse into a black hole if for whatever reason the particle somehow carries that information with it okay well you can leave and leave that aside he says that
All of deterministic physics, like classical physics, actually is completely compatible with an indeterministic view. Forget about quantum mechanics. And the reason is that all we can do is test it to a certain precision. Let's say 30 decimal places. That's being a bit generous, but let's say 30 decimal place for classical physics. Then you can easily construct indeterminate
indeterminate function so here's one i can't say it because i can't say it i would just have to write the function out but let's say you have the real line so zero to one and then you you somehow stretch the real line and then you cut the real line in half i'll have to tell you what the function is but either way that real line you can describe any number as zero point b1 b2 be like the digits of yeah great
What that function effectively does is remove the first digit. So instead of it being zero point B1, B2, B3, it's zero point B2, B3, B4. Okay, now given that, given that, let's say finite, let's say non real numbers are completely compatible with classical physics, because we don't know where the
end of the error bar effectively gives a real number or if it's just cut off you understand what I'm saying sorry if I'm not explaining correctly okay given that then we can have these simple systems that actually are not just chaotic because we don't have sufficient information but because within it it genuinely is indeterminate for example that function like if you just choose an arbitrary okay so you get the idea
Okay, so then he was saying that indeterminacy is not incompatible with classical physics, even though we like to think of classical physics as being a determinant theory, you can't it's so then he goes on to say, calling physics deterministic or indeterministic is not a scientific question, because both models predict the exact same reality that we see classically forget about quantum mechanics. And then he goes on to make a connection between that and free will.
He's a proponent of free will, much like yourself, and he says it can be saved. The libertarian version of free will, not the compatibilist, that is, that I choose from the possible world. Oh, anyway, that's extremely intriguing to me. I want to, so I thank you so much for that. And I'm going to talk to Nicholas about it. Good. I'm glad you got so much out of it. My instincts are to disagree quite strongly. To start with, I'm
a realist and a Platonist about math, not a constructivist, not an intuitionist. So I think all those decimal expansion to infinity, it exists, but it exists in Plato's heaven. So I don't know how he's, I don't know where black holes would come in unless he's trying to physicalize the numbers. And then the decimal representation would require an infinite amount of ink in a very small space and collapse into a black hole. So now I'm sort of joking and say, yeah, I understand.
But the thing is, I think you need real numbers, irrational real numbers in physics. Try to imagine doing physics without pi, which is an irrational number. It's got an infinite decimal expansion. Try to imagine doing physics without the square root of two.
square root of two comes up all over the place in just in quantum mechanics. So you've got a two-state system, you know, it can it could be an up or a down and you describe the state as one over root two up plus one over root two down and then to get the probability you square that so square one over root two squared is one becomes one half and that of course you can measure accurately but you're going to always represent it as one over root two you're you're going to have to appeal to these
Now he may say, ah, but I'm only appealing to an approximation of one over root two. Like I only need five, if I went five decimal places. And so I'm really, it's really a rational number. That's all I need for complete empirical adequacy. It would be hard to argue with him over that. I think my best argument against him would be the utter simplicity of the real numbers as opposed to
truncating them and turning them into rational numbers to do physics. But from an empirical point of view, I may have to concede that there's not going to be any empirical distinction between the two. Right. Okay, I'm going to read from your book. Oh, before I get to that, you did mention that there are some examples of non-platonic forms of mathematical realism.
I can't conceive of that. So do you mind expounding? You said you said that Mill or Kitcher, Kitcher. Yes, that's right. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Sure. Okay. Mill is easy. He's the classic example. So he's he'd be you'd call him a mathematical realist. Which Mill is this? John Stuart Mill. Okay. Okay. Almost everybody who's a mathematical realist uses realism, Platonism, roughly interchangeably.
I mean, they might they might want to make some fine distinctions. And that's because almost everybody who is a realist is happy to be called a Platonist. But there is Mill is a mathematical realist who is absolutely not a Platonist. So for Mill, numbers are really just a kind of abstraction from the physical realm. They're part of the physical realm, a bit like colors. So when I say two plus two equals four,
I'm actually talking about physical stuff. So two apples, it's just a short form for a more general, it's a generalization of two apples plus two apples equals four apples. Two liters of water plus two liters of water is four liters of water, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I just, I just simplify it to two plus two equals four, but it is learned empirically and it's about the physical empirical world. That's mill. Okay. Um,
Frege made a lot of fun of him. Nobody believes Bill. They think it's preposterous view. But you see how it's realist in the sense that it's about reality and it's meant to be literally true. Yeah. I just don't see how it's not platonistic. So can you help me out? Because if it's saying that the generalities are true, what does he mean by true? Where did they exist? So if you're saying that if I said, if I said these apples are red, yeah,
Okay, that's a straightforward empirical realm. The fact that they're right here, this is it. And if I said these two apples and these two apples make four apples, it's all about what's right here. Okay, there's nothing about Plato seven in that it's all right here. Okay, it just that when I say two plus two equals four without reference to apples or liters of water or, or, or
The Platonist would say you're reflecting some other truer world and Mill would say you're predicated on this world. It's true, but it's dependent on this world, not some other world. Is that what you mean? Yeah, but Mill would say and there's no other world. It's just this one.
The closest I can think of for an analogy would be talking about colors. So I mean, I can say this apple is red, that banana is yellow. But I can say at a slightly more abstract level, but I'm still here in the world. Red plus yellow make orange. See, I'm still here in the empirical world. Yeah.
I see. Even though I'm not talking about a particular apple or a particular banana, but red plus yellow make orange. So why is that ridiculous? Why is Mills, what you said that Mills laughed at by Frege and many other mathematicians and philosophers. If the universe is finite, if we thought it was finite, if we're just standard Big Bang, the universe is finite. There's only finitely many elementary particles in it. There's only finitely many things in it. That means there's a biggest number.
And I say, oh, well, let's call it n, biggest number. That's it. I say, well, what about n plus one? Do you think n plus one is bigger than n? And of course you'd say, of course it is. And Mill doesn't know how, what's Mill going to say? There's no such numbers in plus one. You're just making it up. I see. And so it just seems preposterous.
We believe there are infinitely many prime numbers, infinitely many numbers. Mill doesn't know actually what to do with this if the universe is finite. If the world, if the universe is infinite, he got lucky and maybe he can get around that problem. He's going to have a lot of problems. Why does the universe being finite mean that there has to be a finite conceptual number? Because even with the... If you think of numbers as
As with reference to the physical world. If you think of them as independently existing in Plato's heaven, no problem. The world could just cease to exist and still all those things in Plato's heaven would be just fine.
Could you still not save it by saying for example right now on my desktop I have a few items and then there's a there's n factorial way of well not your end but a little little case n way factorial way of arranging them and then you just keep adding so no matter what even when you have okay yeah yeah you can keep doing the combinatorics um ad nauseam but you're still never going to break out of the finite realm
Because let's say we, okay, I'm just trying to grapple with this. So let's say we come up with large n, so that's your n. Then I say, well, let's still permute that a bit more. And then we get n factorial, the big n factorial. And then we say, well, that's a maximum. Then we just factorial again, and we still get infinity. So we still get any possible number can be reached with this, no? For mil, they have to be tied somehow to the empirical world. Remember, he's a staunch empiricist.
he doesn't like platonism, he doesn't like abstract entities. So if I have two apples, I can say okay one, two, and then I can bunch them together and say I can say now that's a third object.
Okay so he would have a he would have a problem with possibilities the reason why yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's right you can't they have to be concrete i have to be measuring four apples i could say that possibly you can arrange them in eight but that's because there exists something else that's i can concretize as eight sure okay okay okay that's right okay i get it i get it now i'm gonna read the last part of of your book which i found wonderful you say this my suggestion is very simple distant correlations are caused by the laws of nature
I realize this almost sounds silly. One wants to say the correlations are the laws of nature, but this, if you recall in the preceding chapters, is not true. A law of nature is an independently existing abstract entity, a thing in its own right, which is responsible for physical regularities. Okay, now this was in regards to something called the entanglement of Bell's inequality, but we can forget about that. What you're suggesting is that the physical laws themselves are
akin to entities and I haven't heard that expressed before and I think that's going to take me maybe weeks or months to fully apprehend and perhaps even contribute some of my own ideas to. It's a brazen statement and I'm a fan of audacity so can you expound on this? Yeah, I'm not sure. I wrote that quite a while ago and my views on quantum mechanics are constantly in flux so I'm not sure I would agree with that
in particular. However, with the general idea, I certainly still I still think that is true. So let me explain what I'm trying to get at. For most philosophers, they really, really like David Hume. David Hume has a view about the nature of causation and the nature of laws of nature, which is very empiricist. And what it really amounts to is that a law of nature is nothing but an empirical regularity.
So if I say, all ravens are black, or it's a law of nature that ravens are black. What it just means is that every time I see a raven, it's black. That's it. That's all there is to it. It's just the raven. A human does away with causation. Yeah, causation is like that too. Fire is, fire feels hot. Every time I stick my hand in a fire, it feels hot.
The heat doesn't cause the pain. It's just correlated with the pain. Every time I stick my hand in the fire, I feel pain. It's just this regularity. There's nothing more to causation than the regularity. There's nothing more to a law of nature than a regularity. So if I said, explain why this raven is black, Hume would have to say, all ravens are black.
This is a raven, therefore this is black. That's the only explanation he can give. His laws of nature are really just summaries of what we experience. They can't really explain anything. They don't have any explanatory power. They're like data points and then generalizations? And then the law is nothing but a summary of the data points. Okay. Yeah. There's no explanatory power there.
Okay. Now, if you're a staunch empiricist, you're happy with that. You say science is in the business of organizing experience and predicting experience, but we're not in the business of actually explaining things. Okay. Forget explanation. That's not our business. Okay. I hate that view. I think we're in the business of explaining and understanding and stuff like that.
So a lot of hard nosed empiricists would call me, oh, it's just mushy, sentimental nonsense. But I'm sticking to my sentimentality, and I want understanding and I want explanations and so on. So here's an alternative view of laws of nature. Laws of nature are not just regularities. They're actually connections between properties. So I'll stick to the Raven example, even though
It's probably a poor example, but it's very easy to understand and illustrate. So when I say, so there's properties, raven, there's the property of ravenhood. Okay. There's the property of being a raven. Being a member of a set of ravens is ravenhood? Sure. Yeah. Okay. And there's the property of being black. Okay. And so the law of nature is not the regularity that all ravens are black. The law of nature is that
The property of being a raven is connected to the property of being black. And that's the law of nature. And that law of nature forces the regularity that all ravens are black. It's the law that explains why the raven is black. Why is this raven black? It's a raven. It has the property of ravenhood and that necessitates the property of blackness.
Okay. That's it. I mean, it sounds like hokey nonsense. But the thing is, you're actually introducing something new in the world over and above the mere regularity. And that has explanatory power. Okay. So the way that I'm thinking about this is that there's a set of all black objects and then ravens are a subset of that. But I don't see what's different than what Hugh is saying.
There'll be a property, a property of ravenhood and a property of blackness. And it's not just a coincidence, but there's a kind of what's sometimes called a nomic connection. This is like a physical necessity between the property of ravenhood and the property of blackness. There's a nomic necessity between the property of electron hood and negative charge.
okay okay it's not just it's not just a an accidental correlation there's something deep yeah i guess what i'm having trouble is on for an electron it's like we define it as that which has this if we found an electron with a with negative two instead of negative one we wouldn't call it an electron we call it something else probably that's true um but that but that's
That's an evidential thing. Of course, all of this is fallible. When I say all ravens are black, it's a law of nature that ravens are black. Could be mistaken. We could find in Madagascar, you know, ravens that are green or something like that. But you're saying, okay, hypothetically, so I'm trying to understand this. So hypothetically, you're saying that a property of ravenhood is that it's black. Okay. Okay. So what does this have to do with, sorry, what does this have to do with causality?
Okay, so let me let me back up and make and make this view of laws of nature a bit more plausible. The Hume view. So you see, Hume view, it's just a regularity that all Ravens are black. Now let us suppose you're you're doing this video from your house, right or your apartment. Let's suppose that every human being who's ever been in that apartment has worn socks
Okay? Yeah. So is it a law of nature that everyone who enters Kurt's apartment wears socks? Is that a law of nature? In this house it is. Doesn't sound like a law of nature, but it's a regularity. And that apartment might be blown up tomorrow so that in its entire history, it was always true. Every time someone entered that apartment, they wore socks. See, oh, that's not a law of nature. That's just one of those accidents.
How can I distinguish a genuine law of nature, which is a regularity for Hume, from these accidental things? Hume has no answer. There's no way you can separate the two. But if you believe that laws of nature are properties, then I would say it's the law of nature about ravens being black. The property of ravenhood necessitates the property of blackness. However, the property of entering
Kurt's apartment does not necessitate the property where salt. That was just contingent. That's right. And so now, you know, it's still empirical science has to discover what are the accidental regularities versus what are the laws that can be really hard. But the thing is, there is a metaphysical difference between the two and Hume hasn't got a metaphysical difference between the two. It's just, wow, it's just a big coincidence.
Okay. So now what does that have to do with, with... Causation is just the flip coin of laws of nature. So it is the law of nature that A's are B's is the same as A's cause B's. Yes. Yeah. What I'm curious about, what I found most fascinating was that it was as if you're saying E equals MC squared is it's like an object itself that comes in and influences the world. Yeah. Yeah.
It's hard to figure out what the law of nature would be. I mean, I can say it's a law of nature, E equals MC squared. It may be hard to figure out, putting it in these metaphysical terms, the property of energy and how it's related to the property of mass and the property of speed of light and stuff like that. But on this view, there would be such a relation.
a relation of necessitation between energy as a property and mass as a property. Have you heard of Lee Smolin's principle of precedence? I know him well, and I have heard of it and I have forgotten what it is. Okay, it's it's something like that. One of the reasons the electron collapses in the way that it does or that sorry, this explains decoherence, I believe that the reason why
I don't know what to say about that.
I'm just going to have to go and review. Right, right, right. Well, what I was wondering is, I'm curious if that merges both Platonists and non-Platonists, because it's as if it's formulating something that's true and putting it into this world that we now look to, to represent reality. But it was being invented at some point. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting the way you put it. I'm inclined to think it's not.
Because as I said, I know him quite well, and we argue over the issue of Platonism all the time. He's very anti-Platonist. Yeah. Are physicists generally anti-Platonists and mathematicians are pro? No. No, they're a mixed bag on it. They're all over the place. Most working physicists, I would say, don't have strong views about the nature of mathematics. For them, it's a tool.
They use it, they just sort of grab it out of the tool bag, use what they want, and don't have philosophical views about it. If they work in fundamental physics, as Lee Smolin does, he has very strong philosophical views about the nature of physics. You know, is he a realist? Is he, you know, what, and so on. He's unquestionably a scientific realist when it comes to physics, but he's an anti-realist when it comes to mathematics. Interesting. Same with
Carlo Rovelli, who Smolin and Rovelli often work together. I've gotten to know Rovelli quite well because he now lives in London here. He's my neighbor. And he's unquestionably a scientific realist when it comes to physics, but hostile to Platonism. But this is true for both Rovelli and Smolin.
They can't quite put their finger on what it is they dislike about Platonism so much. So they're not winning the argument yet. So it's just a feeling that they have that they dislike it because it has a mystical quality to it? Not sure. Okay, Jim, thank you again so much. I appreciate it. A great pleasure.
Do you think we can derive an is from an ought or an ought from an is? That's a really hard question. The simple answer is no. Because one is an imperative sentence and the other is a declarative sentence. I mean, just logically, grammatically, they're going to be different kinds of things. We can come close. How can we come close? Well, we can come close in the sense that
Let me let me actually back up and talk about it in a very indirect way. Okay. There's a traditional view that there's a distinction between facts and values. It's the same thing. There's just a cleavage between the two. And science is totally concerned with the facts and morality and maybe religion and other things could be concerned with values. The trouble with that view
is that too many things in science, it's messy. There are all kinds of values even in just doing science itself. So for instance, I can tell you about how to find out an infinitude of facts and maybe one of them you might be interested in. So what is the distance between the tip of my nose and the center of mass of the sun? Now I'm going to move
No, I can ask you about the center of mass of your nose and the center of mass of that guy out on the street from his nose to the center of mass of the moon. You could measure all of those things and they would all be factually correct if you measured correctly. But after one or two of these, that's enough. And you're going to make a value choice that pursuing more of these is not worthwhile and that there are other things that are more valuable. So all facts aren't on a par.
Some are clearly better than others. And you as a scientist are going to make these kinds of value judgments all the time. And you're going to make methodological value judgments, which are even more important. Like you're going to say, okay, I've got two theories here. Which one should I believe? Oh, this one's simpler. Well, that's actually a value judgment that simplicity is to be preferred to complexity when you're talking about scientific theories.
So right away, so all right, so we've got these two theories, I choose this one on the basis of simplicity. And now, now I say, oh, well, the facts, according to this theory are different than the facts. According to that theory, what are the facts? Well, I've just decided on this theory. So now I found out what the facts are. But it is it is value laden in the sense that I've chosen this theory on the basis of its simplicity. So you see how
the values begin to infect the facts themselves. And once you get into fairly sophisticated science, and you're making methodological choices about how to pursue this, you'll find that there's all kinds of values that are getting tied up in there, and it's very, very hard to disentangle them. So in essence, no, it's not possible to derive an ought from an is. That's right, you can't. On the other hand, the more important
important question is, can you disentangle your oughts from your izzes? And the answer to that question is, I think, no. And so now making a big fuss about the distinction between izz and ought is probably a bad idea. So when you're looking at another scientist, don't ask, just give me the facts, because a good scientist wouldn't be able to, who had a sophisticated view of this issue, would not be able to tell you what are the clear facts
and how much the facts as presented, in fact, depended upon value decisions made along the history, the whole history of science up to that point. Now, that doesn't mean you can just say, well, I'm a racist, I'm proud of my values, and I'm going to let that guide my research, you know, from here on in. You can't get away with that stuff, though lots of people try.
But I do mean that there's going to be a lot of values that you're not even aware of. And they have they have been sprinkled through the entire history of science up until the present day. And it'll continue to be like that. What's your problem with Sam Harris? You said that you have he's a militant atheist, as am I a militant atheist. So I have no trouble with Sam Harris on that front.
The only thing I dislike about Sam Harris, and oh, by the way, he was the voice of reason in his discussion with Jordan Peterson. So you agreed with him there? Oh, completely. Yeah, yeah. Much more than I was expecting because I've seen Sam Harris before and he sort of irritates me. You don't like his views on something? Well, you see, there's a lot of militant atheists and often they're condemned as a group. Hitchens, Dawkins, you know, and Harris, Dennett,
and Sam Harris. But Harris worries me unlike the others. And the thing that worries me is that he has a special hatred for Muslims. I don't. I think Muslims have ridiculous religious views, just like Christians have ridiculous religious views, as do Hindus and Buddhists and so on. They're all just ridiculous. But I think, especially in this age, in the current conditions,
What if you're just criticizing Islam and not the Muslim people themselves? This is tricky. You can criticize Islam except that
Islam is actually the belief held by people so you can't criticize Islam without criticizing people who are Muslim. Maybe that's one of the problems is that intellectuals like yourself like I we like to debate ideas and it's difficult to detach our egos from the ideas but we know that okay when a better idea comes along we adopt that and we take a little hit to the ego but we're different than our ideas. So there is a separation between the people and then the
Sure, sure. And I have no trouble with that. The trouble is when you're talking to in a mass media and talking to a mass audience and you start railing against Islam, it just spills over to a dislike of that guy who's sitting next to you who happens to be a Muslim. Yeah, so I don't trust him. So I just want to make sure I understand. So something like when you criticize Islam, it's
easily construed as criticizing Muslim people. And then the effects of you criticizing Islam is that other people aren't going to look at Muslim people with a negative light. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I don't like Islam any more than I like Christianity. But if I had a company and I'm going to hire people, I'm not going to discriminate against Muslims. I wouldn't hire a Christian over a Muslim. That seems to me to be just grotesque bigotry.
I think religion is one of the worst things that's ever happened to us.
Humanity. Yeah. And a great deal of harm. Let's get to Platonism. Let's get to Platonism because this is your domain. This is what you are. So let's explain what Platonism is and then let's give people a test so that they can find out if they're Platonist or not. All right. Well, when I when I teach topics related to this, I usually ask my my students on the very at the very beginning whether they think mathematics is discovered or invented.
Is it discovered like physics or is it invented like the game of chess? And I'll get very mixed reactions. No, I'd say more on the discovery side, but a very sizable number on the invention side. Let's say two thirds, one third, something like that. And and then I tell them things that often surprise them. And that is that working mathematicians are overwhelmingly Platonists. That is, a Platonist is
very briefly believes that mathematics is there waiting to be discovered it's independent from us mathematical facts would be true even if no one ever discovered them even if there were no intelligent creatures in the entire history of the universe pi would still be an irrational number on the other hand chess would not exist if there were no intelligent beings okay most working mathematicians now you you were a math student
So you may have picked this up from your teachers. Most working mathematicians are, in fact, Platonists. They believe that when they do mathematical research, they're investigating something that's there waiting to be discovered. And if they get it right, they have discovered something new. Okay, so that's Platonism. That's Platonism in a nutshell.
And you're a Platonist. I'm a Platonist. So what does it mean to exist? What does that mean? Because I actually consider myself to be a Platonist. I would actually think that the game of chess does exist in some form in the sense that there are these rules and game theoretically you can construct a model of chess and so that if you can form a mathematical model of it then it exists. You're right. You're right. So my example, you can fuss with my example
But it's just meant to be a crude example for forgetting. Can we not then extrapolate it and say that everything that possibly is logical exists? Well, there is a view about possible worlds. Okay, so whenever we speak in a certain mode, like I say, there are no elephants in this room. But it is possible that there is an elephant in this room. It's not actual.
but it is possible. What does that mean? What does that even mean? Well, one view says you have to understand reality is made up of possible worlds. The actual world is one world and another world. There's another world that's almost exactly like this one. There's a counterpart. I'm in it. Multi-verse theory of quantum mechanics. Completely different. Yeah. This is a, this is a logical thing, not a physics thing.
Um, so there's another possible world that's exactly like this one, except there's an elephant over there in the corner. Okay. Otherwise they're exactly the same. That is a possible world. And when I, and for me to say it is possible that there is an elephant in this room, that is a true sentence because there exists a possible world with an elephant in it. Okay. Can we not extrapolate that to God that it's true that God exists? That's really an interesting question. And it's actually debated.
Because it sounds like well, maybe atheism is true in this world, but maybe there's another world and which there is a God That's gonna be problematic But it's but it's actually up in the air It's not clear it's not clear that it's logically tenable and that's why it's controversial because intuitively it seems like it ought to be Yeah, if an elephant can be here, then why can't we make an abstract notion of something? Yeah, there could have been a God there just isn't okay that sounds sensible
But if there could have been a God, then there will be a God in a possible world. The trouble with that is the way we conceptualize God is God is a necessary being. And that means if God exists at all, God must exist in every possible world. It's a kind of all or nothing entity because of the way God... Because omnipresence, the omnipresence of God? Not just omnipresence, but I mean in every world, whether there is a God or not,
It's not an option. It's either in no world or in every world. Mathematics is like this. See, if pi is an irrational number, then pi is an irrational number in every possible world. There's no world in which it's equal to three and a quarter or something like that. It's always irrational. And it's the same with God. Either God just can't exist. It's impossible. It's like a contradiction. How's that commensurate with the elephant, though?
Because to me, if you can construct an elephant in another world, how do you know that that elephant being true? Now we have to get to some physics. But how do you know that that elephant can logically exist? Just like logically, pi is irrational. OK, we can prove that pi is irrational. Now we're saying there's an elephant in this room and we're saying that that's possible. How do we know that's possible? How do we know that's a possibility? Just like we know for sure pi is irrational. OK, fair enough.
Prima facie, it's possible. Like, you can't think of any principle objection to there being an elephant in this room. You say, well, how did it get here? You know, answer they, it's a small elephant, they brought it up in the elevator, walked it over here, and it's been sitting here since we started talking. You can easily imagine a scenario in which, you know, something like that is the case. So the possibility of an elephant in this room is a pretty clear case of
of a possibility. But the God one, that's a really hard nut to crack, because it seems like God, because remember, God is defined in a certain way. In fact, some people even define God as the necessary being. And then anything that's necessary must be true in every possible world. This is standard logic talk about possibility. And God would have the same status as
Two plus two equals four. If it's true anywhere, it's true everywhere. Two plus two equals five. If it's false anywhere, it's false everywhere. Okay? And so God is either like one or the other. I come down on the side that God's like a contradiction, an absurdity. Well, that only disproves the Christian notion of God. So what about these Hindu notions of God? Oh, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, so then they could exist. They could exist. Yeah, you're against and
Omnipresent, necessary. Don't say omnipresent. Omnipresent just means God is everywhere in space. That's un-Christian and un-Muslim. The standard view is God is external, outside of space and time, and can observe us, cognizes us, but isn't in here participating. It might intervene for a miracle here and there, but the idea that God is one of us, like that song, God is one of us, just a stranger on the bus.
That's heresy for Christians. Wouldn't Christians say that you're made in the image of God? There's a little bit of God in you, and every time you act, God is almost acting through you. When you make a decision, it's like you're a conscious being. They're going to take that as a metaphor. I'm just debating you. What if it's not? What if that is the Christian notion of God? That actually there's a little spark. There is an external God, but also he's in you as well.
Okay, could that exist in these possible worlds? Is that commensurate with the idea of not not if it's not if it's part and parcel of a certain kind of God who can't exist in principle, but a lesser God. I mean, look, you know the difference between deism and theism. Theism is like standard religion, organized religion. God is God cares about you. God is a person. It's a personal God.
You can talk to God, he might answer your prayers, all that sort of stuff. That's a theistic view. A deistic view of God just says there is a kind of supernatural creator of all of this, but he doesn't give a damn about us. Maybe he died after he created it, maybe even he's a committee. Maybe there's 27 of them and they fought over the details and that's why a lot goes wrong.
and doesn't intervene, set things up to just run like a magnificent clockwork. That's that's a deism. Yeah. Okay. So 18th century would be atheists were often deists. And that's because Darwin hadn't come along yet. And they, they couldn't make sense of design in nature. And they thought you have to have an intelligent designer for this. They couldn't escape that. They certainly didn't believe a word of Christianity. But they did believe in some kind of intelligent creator of all of this
And that's a very common view in the Enlightenment. The American founding fathers, you know, like Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, they were deists. They weren't Christians. Americans don't even know their own history. They make a big deal of being a Christian nation. Actually, they started out as an anti-Christian nation. So you must love America. Not with Trump.
I should explain Sokol's motivation. Okay, so Sokol is very left wing, very concerned with social issues. And he was worried that, well, like me, he is also I'm also quite concerned with a whole lot of social issues. And I worry about students who who would become, you know, socially active in in a efficient and productive way.
because they're pro-science. They're willing to, you know, get the facts right and do serious investigations into the social situation and so on. The trouble with postmodernism, it becomes a bit lazy. It's given to sloganeering. It's given to analyses that
Well, I don't know. They see certain things as political that aren't political and often just pick up the wrong end of the stick. Anyway, Sokol, as you already indicated, submitted this ridiculous paper and said, I'd like to publish this. And it made all kinds of claims using quasi-technical jargon, some of the things you would know. So he said, mathematics supports a woman's right to an abortion.
It's in the form of the axiom of choice. You know this? Okay. Now you having a math background, you understand that the axiom of choice has got nothing to do with free will choice and whether you have an abortion. Um, so it was full of jargon, just ridiculous jargon like this. And the, and the editors published it. I've always had a bit of a guilty conscience about it, even though I completely support Sokol and his motivation.
I was editing a journal at the time. And when I saw the headline in the New York Times, it was on the front page. And all I could I choked. Oh, God, this could happen to me. I wonder if anybody's hoaxing me. And the thing is, in the popular press, there's all this talk about peer review. And, and they don't really understand the peer review process. And why you would ignore the process in certain cases,
and do something else. And it's not intellectual corruption. It's just something else is going on. So if you've got a journal, a physics journal, it's a very well established discipline with methodological guidelines that have been laid down. They're reliable. And if somebody follows them, they can be okay. If they violate them badly, you think, no, this is a piece of garbage. We're not going to take it seriously. But if you're starting a new field, like
postmodern accounts, postmodern accounts of science or something like that. You don't have a long tradition that you can point to and say, this is this sort of thing works. That sort of thing that you're you're you're you're in virgin territory. And people who are doing that actually need to be, you know, encouraged and given to explore. Yeah. And given a lot of free rein, don't come down on them too hard for, you know,
publishing stuff that turns out to be crap. Now, what about the grievance study? Well, I'm in I'm in favor of giving them a lot of free rein. By by grievance studies, you mean things like women's studies, black studies, aboriginal studies and so on? No, I think that came out. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know it well. I read a very short article on it. But I don't like the spirit behind attacking them. I think they do need to be attacked every now and then.
And they certainly can't, shouldn't just think that they can do any old crap at all. But often they're trying to do stuff and they don't have set guidelines to know when, when something is going to work well and when something isn't going to work well. They want to encourage a very generous and broad conversation about issues. And I think that's fair and it's intellectually healthy.
And it's part and parcel with academic freedom. The only thing I have against postmodernism, not these disciplines like women's studies or anything like that, I think it's terrific. I think we should have women's studies and so on. But I am on the pro-science side of the left, and that's because I think
Once you, if you're, if you're a serious postmodern who says, oh, truth, truth, smooth, you know, uh, facts, max, you know, whatever, um, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. It's really, really important to get things like, um, global warming right in order to, you know, to understand what's going on and to, and to tackle it, um, uh, politically to solve these problems.
I don't see that postmoderns have ever done anything useful in combating climate change. The facts about racism, the facts about the climate, the facts about the pharmaceutical industry, those things are really important that we get those things out. There might be some truth to this. So I usually back off.
and say, well, you know, some approximation to an egalitarian socialist world. And maybe some people are five times as well off as other people. But that would be such an incredible improvement over the current situation that I'd go happily to my grave, you know, if the difference between the poorest and the richest were only fivefold in wealth.
As you know, it's much, much, much, much greater than that now. I also think what I care about most of all, you see, a lot of people care about rights and they care about freedom and freedom of speech and so on. And I think those things are important. But I think human well-being trumps everything. If all humans are reasonably well off and they're happy and content
then that's the kind of world I want. If we have to sacrifice some rights, say you even limit freedom of speech to some extent for that, I'd be willing to do that. I think going to the wall for complete freedom of speech, for instance, is a complete mistake. I like Canada's laws. We have a great deal of freedom of speech here, but not complete. So for instance, we have hate laws. I'm in favor of hate laws.
I have lots of philosophical colleagues and American friends and so on who think the US is much better in this regard. There's just no constraints on your speech. I mean, you can't libel someone. You can't incite violence. Yeah, you can incite violence. But you can deny the Holocaust in the United States. You could declare that Muslims are a treacherous group of people and they ought to be oppressed and so on.
You can't say that in Canada. You could be prosecuted under the law for that. I favor those constraints on freedom of speech. And I would favor probably other constraints, too, on other kinds of things that we consider free, in exchange for an enormous increase in human well-being.
that we're happier, healthier, we have richer lives. People can intellectually develop and physically develop, you know, to the best of their abilities. That's the kind of world I want. That's a very much a left-wing view of things. I think that ought to be, you know, as far as you go, but it's going a hell of a long way. Usually when the left is attacked for going too far, it's either
They want to use a great deal of force to bring about egalitarianism. That's one way. And the other way is the political correctness. They're accused of excessive political correctness. I think that's just almost always that's a false charge. That's just a bogus charge. That's like Donald Trump, you know, complaining that millions of people are streaming across the Mexican border, murdering and raping. It's just a lie, right? It's just a grotesque lie.
Okay, there is something, we never actually talked about this, but I'm going to interject this because this is an allusion back to what we were talking about earlier. Political correctness is not a threat to the university.
We're incredibly free to do whatever the hell we want. Nobody is being suppressed inside a university. It's a remarkable. Universities are remarkable institutions. I think they're wonderful institutions. But what about what happened with Jordan Peterson where they didn't even want him to speak and they had a whole protest against him and they want to get him fired? Yeah, that's probably a bad idea. He should probably be allowed to speak.
Probably. Yeah, I will say probably, because I'm not absolutely definite. Very likely, I think. But I won't say that about absolutely everybody. So, for instance, let's take, what's his name? Spencer. Richard Spencer. Richard Spencer, who's a white nationalist. Yes. Yeah. I have serious qualms about allowing him to speak. We,
universities, that is, are in a kind of a bind here. If we let, if the universities let Richard Spencer speak, he gets a kind of prestige and cache. So you're worried about legitimizing his point of view? Yeah, just by allowing him to speak at a university. And then, but if we turn him down, then we get branded as being, as censoring him political correctness and so on.
Universities can't win and often right wingers know we can't win and often they don't even care whether they're allowed to speak or not because they know they're going to win just by either speaking or being turned down and then they go to the press and say we're being censored and then they get
They win some notoriety for this. Anyway, I don't think that real intellectual life of the university is in any way harmed by so-called political correctness. The real dangers to universities is completely tangential to this. The real dangers is the commercialization of research.
We haven't talked about that at all. And that's a really big deal, and it's an incredibly deep subject, and you probably don't want to go into it. And you have a talk about that, right? I used to do a lot of work. I haven't done much recently, but I used to do a lot of work on this. Do you have one that's public that people can go to? That people can search on YouTube? Yeah, yeah. I'm not off the top of my head, but I can find something. We'll put the links in the description. And give you a link, yeah. But the commercialization of research is having a tremendous effect.
pharmaceuticals I think are just about the worst yeah it skews research so health problems are not tackled by the best solution they're tackled by chemical solutions which might be the best solution but maybe diet exercise for depression things like exercise are at least as effective as the the best antidepressants but you but you can't yeah but you can't make you can't patent it
And so it's having an effect on what kind of research is actually carried out. That is a real worry. So if we're interested in the truth and not just the truth, but truths that are good for human beings, you know, that improves the quality of our lives, our health, for instance, then we have to really, really, really worry and get a grip. There's just far too much money coming in from industry. And they're there. In fact, often they don't give all that much money.
but they'll they top up like the government but we get money from the government funding and that's arm's length that is the government doesn't interfere with that they just give you know the National Research Council money and then they distribute it in a peer-reviewed way to physics and chemistry and so on but often individual researchers will go to will apply for money from a pharmaceutical company so they're getting a ton of money from the government and then pharmaceutical company will often give them
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You're not a fan of the FDA. The FDA is not so bad. The FDA doesn't have enough... I remember hearing a talk that the FDA's restrictions are too much, are too restrictive, because they're limiting the amount of drugs that can come into market. Oh, no, they're not restrictive enough in that sense. Drug companies will complain that they're slow and restrictive and so on. No, we need to change the FDA rules. Well, the Americans need to change them. Right now, the
They are mandated to license anything that goes through a clinical trial and is considered effective when compared with a placebo. That can be incredibly minuscule, you know, and yet billions of dollars will be spent on these drugs. And if this drug gets patented and there's only generics to compete with it, then they'll pour a ton of money into advertising.
Doctors will start prescribing this and doctors can be corrupted by their prescription habits and get money from the pharmaceuticals. Yeah, you know about the cheerleaders. Yeah, that's remarkable. Often a very old generic drug is much, much better than these newer drugs. Fewer side effects, better
positive effect, incredibly cheap to produce and so on. It's really a tragedy. It's hard to know how to combat it. I think I know how to combat it in Canada. Hard to know how to combat it in the United States because the United States economy is so structured around intellectual property rights. I've tried to figure out how much of American exports to the world is in the form of IP rights. Whenever you buy anything that's American,
I mean, you buy a piece of plastic, but its value is in the form of IP rights, mostly. And so what percentage of the economy is actually IP rights? I don't actually have views across the board on patents, but on drugs, I think it's a terrible mistake and we should eliminate patents on drugs. One of the reasons is, unlike say my new iPhone, full of patents, but I can tell whether the damn thing works.
I just turn it on and it works or it doesn't work. But in the case of almost every drug, there's no way for an individual to determine whether he or she is benefiting from this drug. All you can do is look at it in a very statistical way. And there's an incentive to produce a drug that works as long as you take it. True. And that's not good.
Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, treating chronic diseases is much better than curing something with a vaccine, for instance. Yeah, all kinds of problems like this. Anyway, commercialization, that's, I think, is the real threat to intellectual life and not political correctness, which is really, really small potatoes, even in its worst examples.
You said that you had some trouble with Jordan Peterson's point of view of truth. Oh, well, watching, uh, watching a video that you directed me to, and I'm glad, uh, this was a video, uh, a discussion between him and Sam Harris. Who you also don't necessarily like. I have special problems with Harris. Maybe talk about that later. Yeah. So this was, uh, Harris invited him on and Harris seems to be
one of these people who doesn't like political correctness and thought that Jordan Peterson might be good, a nice ally, perhaps because he too is anti political correctness and so on. But then they got bogged down on this notion of truth. And as far as I can tell, Peterson is just wacko on the concept of truth. I should just explain when people talk about truth,
They're not talking about particular truths, like we can argue whether or not the neutrino has mass. Okay, we don't know what's true and we don't know what's false. And we can argue about that and produce evidence. This is arguing about the very concept of truth itself. What does it mean for something to be true? And normal person, normal philosophers, standard philosophers, take a more or less a common sense view about truth. So a sentence, a statement,
a belief is true because it corresponds to the way things are. So the sentence, there is a recording device on the table. That's a sentence. That's a true sentence because there is in fact a table, a recording device, and one is on top of the other. It's a very simple conception of truth. There are other conceptions. Some people say, no, no,
Truth has got to be linked to evidence. So the sentence, there is a recording device on the table, is true, if and only if there's some method of gathering evidence to establish that truth. Lacking that evidence, it's not true. If you're a realist about truth as I am, then a sentence could be true, even though the evidence isn't there for it. You shouldn't believe it,
If you don't have the evidence, that's a different matter. But truth and evidence are things that you can pry apart. So what is Peterson's conception of truth as you understand it? It's a crazy idea that he calls Darwinian. And so a sentence is true if it has survival value. He's thinking of this as a very crude thing. There are some
philosophical ideas about truth that are maybe a little close to that, you know, that he might if he knew about them, he could say, oh, that's I sort of believe that pragmatism, pragmatism often identifies truth with what is workable, detectable, serviceable to life, serviceable to life, but it's more much more sophisticated than mere crude Darwinian survival value.
But you can sort of see some kinship between Peterson's view and pragmatism. Now the trouble with Peterson's crude view is there's a ton of stuff we know that's independent of survival value. In fact, may even be true contrary to survival value. So just think of all the things you know about quantum field theory that wouldn't help you in life struggle at all. If you were in
If you were in the jungle trying to, like our distant ancestors, you're not going to survive, thank goodness, based on your knowledge of quantum field theory. You could make out a Jordan type case for a lot of crude, simple beliefs, like trust your colour perception to distinguish edible things from non-edible things, that sort of level. That's fine. But to enter into
The realm of sophisticated science, which he certainly wants to participate in, he's got to have an awful lot more subtle and sophisticated view of what he's doing than his simple Darwinian view of truth.
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"start_time": 66.681,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 97.841,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 77.21,
"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."
},
{
"end_time": 127.602,
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"start_time": 97.841,
"text": " With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over 170 countries, your business has global potential. And their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. Shopify has award-winning service and has the internet's best converting checkout. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories. All lowercase, that's Shopify.com slash theories."
},
{
"end_time": 157.09,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 129.582,
"text": " Thought experiments in physics are pivotal for the generation of novel ideas, the dissolution of old ones, or simply for an original take on specific phenomenons that already exist. Given that fundamental physics has been stalled in the past few decades, primarily due to a lack of data as well as other factors, and I'm trying to put forth my own theory of everything and integrate it with consciousness, I thought, how far can I go with thought experiments? James Robert Brown is a professor of"
},
{
"end_time": 183.285,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 157.363,
"text": " philosophy specializing in the philosophy of mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto and he was generous enough to give me a few hours of his time. He's written several books which I recommend you check out and we spoke yesterday which is what you'll see first as well as at the end I'm going to append a sliver of a conversation that me and him had about two years ago but I never posted. This is perhaps the deepest dive you'll see on YouTube on thought experiments as well as Platonism"
},
{
"end_time": 209.684,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 183.575,
"text": " It's as if this is my first time. Alright, man."
},
{
"end_time": 242.5,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 214.684,
"text": " Hello, Professor Brown. How's it going? It's going well. And please call me Jim. Okay, Jim. So Jim, what are you working on these days? I'm working on the connection between mathematics and ethics. There's some features of both that are already well known. For instance, our mathematical knowledge and our ethical knowledge don't come from sensory experience. Yeah, do you mind expounding?"
},
{
"end_time": 264.002,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 242.927,
"text": " Well, by sensory experience, I just mean sight, hearing, smell, taste. You don't know that there are infinitely many prime numbers because you've gone out and seen them. Right. You don't know that root two is an irrational number because you held up a ruler on a diagonal square and got an irrational number."
},
{
"end_time": 293.968,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 264.531,
"text": " our mathematical knowledge is definitely not empirical, though it might be connected to the empirical world in some indirect ways, but it's certainly not like the natural sciences at all. Well, what does that have to do with ethics? Well, ethics is exactly the same. So you could see one person kill another person. That could be an empirical experience, but to judge it as an immoral act is not empirical."
},
{
"end_time": 324.172,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 294.428,
"text": " You mentioned before in one of your talks on YouTube about the distinction between thick and thin concepts. Do you mind delineating that for the audience? Oh, not at all."
},
{
"end_time": 353.985,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 324.497,
"text": " And this is a really interesting idea. It's fairly new inside ethics. So the idea of thin concepts are thin concepts can be anywhere. They can be in the sciences, in everyday life, and in ethics. So if I say the host is on fire, I'm using thin concepts. If I say words like mass, color, taste, those are all thin concepts."
},
{
"end_time": 377.432,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 354.241,
"text": " but they're from the factual realm. Okay. And then in the ethical or evaluative realm are more thin concepts, but they're just in a different realm. So good, bad, beautiful, ugly obligation. Those duty, those are thin concepts from ethics."
},
{
"end_time": 407.978,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 378.063,
"text": " Okay, so the world, it seems like, is made up of thin concepts. Some are in the factual realm, some are in the normative, evaluative, ethical realm. Now, then, a few years ago, people began to focus on a number of words that we use in daily life, and they seem to be really important in how we treat things and how we reason. And these words are called thick. And that's because they're simultaneously"
},
{
"end_time": 437.944,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 408.387,
"text": " fact type terms and evaluative terms. Okay, so if I say, if I say, Kurt, you are very healthy. That's actually I'm saying two things. I'm talking about your health in a factual sense, like your blood pressure is 120 over 80. All right, for instance. But I'm saying more than that when I say you're healthy. I'm saying"
},
{
"end_time": 467.159,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 438.507,
"text": " and it's a good state that you're in. So there's an evaluative component as well as a factual component. When I say you're healthy, if I say example beside, okay, yeah, I'll give you lots more brave, courageous, okay, courageous. If I say Mary was courageous, that's it that includes a kind of factual component, especially if"
},
{
"end_time": 492.892,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 467.466,
"text": " We've just seen Mary run into a burning house and save the family's pet dog. Okay, so she's pulled it out. So there's a straightforward factual component to that about Mary's action. Okay, but there's also an evaluative component, like what she did was a good thing. It's good to be brave. Well done, Mary. We're really proud of you. So brave is different. It's thick. Brave is thick."
},
{
"end_time": 522.568,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 493.319,
"text": " Now, some people say you don't need fit concepts. They're very convenient. You don't need them. Because I could say this, Mary ran into the house. She brought out the family dog. And here comes the evaluative. And what she did was good. Or I can just sort of summarize it. Mary was very brave. And the word brave, courageous, those sort of terms, those are thick."
},
{
"end_time": 552.722,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 522.961,
"text": " Why is the word good, not a thick concept? Because it's just thin. It's just pure evaluation. It doesn't tell you anything factual. It doesn't tell you anything factual. That's why it's thin. And if I say, Mary entered the burning house,"
},
{
"end_time": 582.039,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 553.097,
"text": " That doesn't tell you anything evaluative. It just gives you a factual description of something that happened. But once you get the hang of it, you see all sorts of terms are thick, loyal, liar, dastardly, untrustworthy. See, those, if I say, Kurt, you're very untrustworthy. I'm suggesting that you've cheated me on something or you've lied to other people or something like that. And it's a bad thing."
},
{
"end_time": 607.875,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 582.585,
"text": " So you see how it's a thick term. Right, does it always go to good or bad on that one line spectrum? No, if we were in the artistic realm, it might be, rather than good or bad, it might be beautiful, ugly, something like that. Okay, but you can see the evaluative term from the one realm and the straightforward factual. So if I describe a picture like"
},
{
"end_time": 638.148,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 608.2,
"text": " Well, there's a little bit of red here and there's some blue there. Okay, that's that's the sort of that's read the RGB values. That's a thin. Yeah, that's a thin description of the painting from a factual point of view. And then if I want to say it's spectacularly beautiful, or it's charming, sorry, charming, sorry, charming would be would be a thick concept. It's beautiful, just plain beautiful. Okay, that would be a thin concept. And if I say it's charming, it's evocative,"
},
{
"end_time": 667.807,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 638.473,
"text": " and suggesting a combination of things that are both factual and evaluated simultaneously. Those are the thick ones. Okay, so why am I interested in that? Because that's what I just told you is sort of... Right, and how does that relate to mathematics? Exactly. Okay, that's the important question. So I've been thinking about... By the way, thick concepts in ethics, that's commonplace, okay? And everyone in ethics knows about thick, thin, and the standard views about them."
},
{
"end_time": 694.241,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 668.609,
"text": " Okay, when I was thinking about ethics and math, I'm looking for all kinds of connections between ethics and math, not just the one about neither of them are empirical. Okay, our knowledge isn't empirical in either case. What are the other connections? Well, one of them might be a kind that might be an inside math and physics, a kind of thick concept."
},
{
"end_time": 723.49,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 694.701,
"text": " So I don't want to talk about facts and values now. I'm just using this as an analogy. So there can be math and there can be physics, pure math. Okay. You understand pure math is just, you know, nothing but set theory and pure physics has got nothing mathematical about it. And the way math gets applied is math provides models for the physical realm. This might, what I just said is slightly contentious."
},
{
"end_time": 752.705,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 723.899,
"text": " It's probably a majority opinion, but there are lots of people who would dispute it. Let's just stick with the majority opinion for now. Math provides models of the world. And what a physicist will do is look at the range of models in Plato's heaven and say, I think this one is structurally very similar to the physical realm. And we apply math in that sort of way."
},
{
"end_time": 782.619,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 753.456,
"text": " That would be thin. Pure math is just thin. Those are nothing but thin concepts. Pure physics, without any math in it, nothing but pure physical concepts. Could there be a thick concept that somehow or other involves both? Not just modeling. Modeling by itself isn't going to do it. A thick concept would be a kind of really intimate intertwining of the two."
},
{
"end_time": 806.067,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 783.166,
"text": " And I was sort of vaguely thinking about this and I came across a wonderful quote in a famous calculus book. The book for any mathematicians who are watching, they'll know the book. It's by Spivak. It's just called Calculus. Did you take physics and math, Kurt? Yeah. Do you know that you know the book I'm talking about? Yeah, it's a famous book. It's first year. 157."
},
{
"end_time": 835.794,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 806.783,
"text": " Ah, okay. But it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful book. And the second book is also great. It's like a Dirac book where it's tiny because the first book is large and then the second book on manifold. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. It's like two pages long. Takes you a whole semester to get through that. Well, one page of exposition followed by 10 pages of gut-wrenching problems that are so hard to solve. Okay, so anyway, there was this wonderful passage in the calculus book."
},
{
"end_time": 865.435,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 836.408,
"text": " So he's just doing elementary stuff and he's teaching derivatives, first derivative, second derivative. And he says, all of this stuff is really important, especially the second derivative. Why? Well, think about Newton's law, F equals ma. Acceleration is the second derivative. Okay, we got that. And then he says, next time you're in a car and you go around a corner, you can feel the second derivative."
},
{
"end_time": 895.128,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 867.193,
"text": " You think about that. No, no, I feel the acceleration. Right. And it's modeled. I don't feel a second derivative. Come on. I don't feel a second derivative. Don't be ridiculous. Nobody can feel a second derivative. It exists in Plato's heaven. You can't you can't smell an infinite series. You can't taste a tangent plane and you can't feel the second derivative. Right. That's what that's what you should say."
},
{
"end_time": 923.439,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 895.828,
"text": " And I, but the more I thought about it, I thought, I wonder, I wonder, I wonder if people who work with, well, with math in general, physicists and engineers in particular, who maybe have to do problems of motion where acceleration is important. And they get so used to treating physical acceleration. Think of the acceleration as an actual physical process."
},
{
"end_time": 951.169,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 924.121,
"text": " and attaching it to the second derivative to calculate. It's become so internalized with them that acceleration and second derivative becomes a single concept. It's just a fused concept. This would be an example of a thick concept. And I got talking to some physicist friends about this, and they're"
},
{
"end_time": 980.623,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 951.544,
"text": " Now, they don't exactly understand and appreciate what I'm trying to get at, but there's enough of an understanding that they could sort of, they could sort of agree that some parts of math, not all, but some parts of math that they use, they've so internalized that to utter the math or to utter the mathless physical description, they're just so intertwined, it's become one single thing."
},
{
"end_time": 1009.684,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 981.459,
"text": " What else besides acceleration is there for math? Well this would be hard because I don't want to say it's all the time because I wouldn't want to say that someone in quantum mechanics who thinks about the state of the system just flips over to a Hilbert space which is how we represent states in quantum mechanics and just thinks of them interchangeably. It's a possible candidate because we do use the same notation for both. We just use a simple psi function for"
},
{
"end_time": 1035.981,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 1010.06,
"text": " vector in the Hilbert space, or for the state, meaning the physical property of a quantum mechanical system. That's a candidate, but I'd be reluctant to say that's thick. Maybe an example is a very old example, a good example, and that's real numbers and points on a line. So you know you have a line, just say the unit interval,"
},
{
"end_time": 1065.128,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1036.647,
"text": " Right. And we just attach all the real numbers between zero and one. Okay. And we think of a real number and a point as the same thing, just back and forth. And once you, it's, well, it's the whole basis of analytic geometry. Ever since Descartes said it was 400 years ago when he just said real numbers and points on a line or pairs of numbers and points in the plane and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 1096.152,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1066.596,
"text": " We just, they're just completely interchangeable. Right. And you're saying that that's a thick concept because I think, I think maybe word line implies space, not line. Let's say point, point and number, point and number. They become almost a single concept. Now we can separate them. Okay. I can ask you to separate in your mind and you can do that, but they're so interchangeable. In fact, they're so interchangeable that girdle in a famous article,"
},
{
"end_time": 1123.677,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1096.681,
"text": " What is Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis? Starts out, he says, the Continuum Hypothesis is the question, how many real numbers are there? Or equivalently, how many points are there on a line? It just takes them to be the same issue. And that's surprising for a logician who is super, super careful about making distinctions when he thinks it's appropriate."
},
{
"end_time": 1150.196,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1124.292,
"text": " Okay, so what's the significance of this? Why are you spending your time thinking about this? The I think it's intrinsically interesting. But for me, it can, it might actually do some work. And you know, you know, the continuum hypothesis, this is the claim that the first uncountable infinity is Aleph one, and it might be and it then the claim is"
},
{
"end_time": 1177.09,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1150.657,
"text": " that it is the real numbers. The real numbers have size aleph one. The natural numbers are infinitely many, but there's only aleph zero of them. The real numbers are a bigger infinity. And the conjecture is that they're the next biggest infinity. So they'd be aleph one. No one's been able to prove the continuum hypothesis."
},
{
"end_time": 1197.5,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1177.756,
"text": " or refute it. And in fact, there's an independence proof, meaning you can't prove it and you can't refute it on the basis of existing axioms of set theory. And if you think that the existing axioms of set theory are adequate for the whole of mathematics,"
},
{
"end_time": 1225.401,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1197.807,
"text": " What that really means is the continuum hypothesis is independent of all of mathematics. You can know everything in math, you still wouldn't know the continuum hypothesis. So you could just arbitrarily make it a new axiom that would solve the problem, but it would be very unsatisfying because why are you doing that rather than making its negation the new axiom? So we're looking around for"
},
{
"end_time": 1255.367,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1226.067,
"text": " what you might call independent evidence for the continuum hypothesis one way or the other. What might work? Well, maybe physical analogies would work. You know, you just sort of think about it. You're not going to prove it. You're not going to have any old fashioned proof, but you might have some other kind of argument. If you are a realist or a mathematical Platonist, you're going to say it is true or it is false."
},
{
"end_time": 1278.831,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1255.794,
"text": " I just don't know which. Okay, now question, how much detail do you want? Oh, that's fine. Well, let's go in more. I know girdle was a Platonist and he believed it's either. Yeah, I think that he proved that it's, I don't recall if it's both either the negation or the positive. He showed that it's consistent."
},
{
"end_time": 1299.155,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1279.053,
"text": " The audience will keep up. Get into as much detail as you like. Let's go into a disproof of the continuum hypothesis."
},
{
"end_time": 1330.35,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1300.418,
"text": " Okay. You'll have to be hand wavy because we don't have papers and pens. That's right. PowerPoint slides. And this is a result a number of years ago from Chris Freiling, an American logician. And it's wonderfully clever. And it's a refutation of the continuum hypothesis. Okay, so as you say, it'll be a bit hand wavy. So for those with a math education,"
},
{
"end_time": 1360.725,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1331.169,
"text": " They will know what, well, I'm going to start out with what's called Zermelo-Franco set theory, including the axiom of choice. Okay. Now with the axiom of choice, we can prove what's known as the well ordering theorem, which means any set whatsoever, and you can give it a well ordering. And that's to, and that means you can line it up with the ordinal numbers."
},
{
"end_time": 1387.91,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1361.254,
"text": " So one, two, three, four, five, and then omega, which is now the first infinite ordinal. And then you keep counting ordinals, ordinals, ordinals. And then when you get all of the countable ordinals done, you get into the uncountable ordinals. This is, this is, this, this will sound like mystical nonsense unless you've taken a course in set theory and learned about the hierarchy of infinite sets."
},
{
"end_time": 1417.671,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1388.933,
"text": " so anyway the well-ordering theorem says that you can put any set including the real numbers between zero and one you can line them up with the this infinite string of ordinals now they won't go in the same order as the the natural less than order they'll be jumping all over the place you know like one half might be associated it's not an intuitive ordering it's not like we we have any apprehension of it no theorem just guarantees it"
},
{
"end_time": 1446.118,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1418.353,
"text": " Yeah, the Well-Ordering Theorem guarantees that it exists, but nobody has any idea of what a well-ordering of the real numbers would be. No one's found one yet. We've got well-orderings of the rational numbers, and they're pretty straightforward, but not of the real numbers. So technically the Well-Ordering Theorem says that the subset, that any subset is well-ordered."
},
{
"end_time": 1473.251,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1446.783,
"text": " It says that any subset has a first element. Right. Just to see that the ordinary ordering is not a well ordering, if I say take all the real numbers greater than one half. Sorry, can you repeat that just to say that what? Take the real numbers greater than one half. What's the first element? Right, greater than but not including one half. Doesn't have. Yeah, that's right."
},
{
"end_time": 1501.92,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1473.933,
"text": " It doesn't have a first element, so that's just not a well ordering. But with some other bizarre ordering, I might take them, any subset, and it would have to have a first element. Okay, so we imagine that we've got a well ordering of the real numbers, just between 0 and 1. That'll do. Okay, now comes a little statistical argument."
},
{
"end_time": 1531.561,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1502.432,
"text": " You and I are going to throw darts. We're going to throw darts at the real line between zero and one. It's a thought experiment. Can't do it in reality, but a thought experiment. I throw a dart and I hit a number P somewhere between zero and one. You throw your dart and you hit a number Q also on the line between zero and one. Now I'm going to make the following argument. Um, your, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 1561.886,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1531.886,
"text": " Your dart hit the number Q, which is going to be later in the well ordering than my dart P. Why? Because there's only a countable infinity at most of numbers earlier in the well ordering from P and an uncountable infinity after. And so, so that you might be earlier than me, but the probability is zero."
},
{
"end_time": 1592.346,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1563.473,
"text": " And you, your dart, you've hit a number Q and you can say exactly the same argument. You're going to say the chance that I'm earlier in the well ordering is zero and the chance that it's later is one. Now we've got an absurdity because I said you've got to be later than me. And you've argued correctly that I've got to be later than you. I have different points. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1621.8,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1592.79,
"text": " and and we've now we've just got an absurdity and why what led to this absurdity the assumption that there are aleph one real numbers if there were aleph two it wouldn't be a problem okay why why is that because uh we might i might have landed in uh and an uncountable there might be an uncountable number of points earlier than me and an uncountable earlier than you so we couldn't argue we wouldn't be able to do that the trick is"
},
{
"end_time": 1650.742,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1622.363,
"text": " When you've got a countable infinity of numbers, and here comes the result from what's known as measure theory, the chance of landing in there is zero. It's not impossible, but it's zero probability. Right. And that's interesting for people to wrap their head around that you can have a zero probability, but possible. That's right. It's not the same as impossible. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 1680.469,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1651.8,
"text": " If anyone, just to take a slight tangent, anyone who finds that absurd, think of a roulette wheel with every real number between zero and one on it. You spin the wheel and it's going to stop somewhere. What's the chance it's going to land on, say, one half? Well, there's infinitely many places it could stop. So the chance is one out of infinity."
},
{
"end_time": 1709.821,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1680.981,
"text": " which is going to be zero. It can happen, but it's going to be zero probability. Okay, so you and I now have this little, we've each got this little argument and we each show that the other guy is impossible. And this is absurd. And the assumption, the background assumption that led to this, that the continuum hypothesis is true,"
},
{
"end_time": 1736.425,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1710.418,
"text": " is in trouble. You got to throw it out. Okay. All right. Now, this is really interesting. I mean, it could be an argument, you know, that settles a continuum hypothesis, though it's not a proof in any ordinary mathematical sense. It's really different. Mathematicians who look at this are, whoa, they're very queasy, you know, they don't like this kind of reasoning"
},
{
"end_time": 1765.128,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1737.21,
"text": " They don't mind suggestive reasoning that's outside of mathematics. They don't want to take it as real evidence that, you know, that this could be a theorem, you know, a real, a real genuine, sure to be true result. Very uneasy about it. And I'm uneasy about it. I'm also curious as how it works. I mean, I know how I can reproduce the proof. I know how it works in that sense. But why the hell does it work? You know, it shouldn't work."
},
{
"end_time": 1793.951,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1765.538,
"text": " As in, what is its connection to reality? How is it that we can think this and it's true? Is that what you mean by? No, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's sort of that's that's behind it all, for sure. But in particular, there are assumptions made for this little argument to go. And and here that here here are some of the assumptions. First of all, the real numbers and the points on the line correspond. OK, so the geometric line between zero and one"
},
{
"end_time": 1823.677,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1794.326,
"text": " and the uncountable infinity between zero and one real numbers, they're exactly the same. They pair up. It's an obvious assumption to make, given the long history of analytic geometry, but I just want to make sure it's there. Second thing, when you threw a dart and I threw a dart, each of us hits a point at random. The chance of hitting any point along the line"
},
{
"end_time": 1853.797,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1824.002,
"text": " is is no different than any other point okay it's equal probability for every point okay my that's true for my dart also true for your dart there's a symmetry between our throws in the sense that it doesn't matter if you throw first and i throw second or i throw first and you throw second or if we throw simultaneously it's irrelevant and finally independence the your result has no effect on my result and vice versa"
},
{
"end_time": 1883.729,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1854.309,
"text": " Okay. And when you think of all of those assumptions, these are crucial assumptions. Things like probability can be captured completely inside set theory. Independence can be captured completely inside set theory. The symmetry of the two throws can be captured completely inside symmetry. How come the damn argument works? Because if I try to spell out the probability of my little argument,"
},
{
"end_time": 1909.838,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1884.582,
"text": " or the symmetry or the independence, I tried to spell it out in standard mathematics and could get that result, then something would have gone terribly wrong. I can't get that result from ordinary mathematics. So the probability in my argument, the independence in the argument, the symmetry in the argument can't be"
},
{
"end_time": 1940.606,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1910.794,
"text": " probability, symmetry, and independence of standard mathematics. Something else, something weird is going on. It must be a related but a different concept in each case. What do you think is going on? I think it's a thick concept. I think probability as we normally use it is a thin concept, thin mathematical concept. I think in the DART thought experiment, to refute the continuum hypothesis, I think probability has taken on a new"
},
{
"end_time": 1969.036,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1941.169,
"text": " richness in the example, it's become physicalized in some sense. And so here's where I'm looking at the analogy with ethics. Instead of a thin concept from mathematics, or a thin concept from physics, I've got a thick, this is thick probability, it's got both physical and mathematical aspects to it. Like, like courageous is both"
},
{
"end_time": 1972.79,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1969.957,
"text": " In set theory, we can formalize probability."
},
{
"end_time": 2003.063,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1973.285,
"text": " Yeah. So what's thick about this? Just throwing the dart, but we can not use the dart and say we pick a point at random. And there's obviously random variables which have nothing to do with darts. So what's thick? I don't hear what's thick about this. I don't know. Maybe I'm thick. You got to help me out. No, not at all. The thickness would come in the way the thought experiment is done. You're supposed to imagine yourself throwing a dart at an actual line."
},
{
"end_time": 2030.811,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 2003.78,
"text": " Try to try to make it physically, even if you think of it's mathematical, it's outside of set theories. Why do you have to imagine that? Why can't you just say, pick a point at random, instead of throwing a dart? Is there a difference? Well, the dart, the dart is supposed to be a guarantee that it's genuinely at random. If I asked you to pick a real number between zero and one at random, I'm almost certain you couldn't do it."
},
{
"end_time": 2061.698,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 2033.319,
"text": " I know, I know. What I'm saying is that you can formalize what it means to pick a number from zero to one randomly in statistics, independent of saying throw a dart, and you can formalize it with set theory, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. That's certainly true. The thing is, well, here's what here's what I am faced with, and you're faced with."
},
{
"end_time": 2089.343,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2061.869,
"text": " If we assume that the argument works, the Fridling argument works as a refutation, we assume it works. And it does seem to make these crucial assumptions. Well, it assumes Zermelo-Franco set three with choice, okay? And then it assumes the randomness of the dart throw, the symmetry of the dart throw, the independence of the dart throw, and the correspondence between real numbers and points on a line. It assumes that."
},
{
"end_time": 2119.667,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2090.247,
"text": " If all of that is just part of mathematics, existing mathematics, then we would have derived a refutation of the continuum hypothesis inside mathematics. It wouldn't have been independent after all. Since it is independent, demonstrably independent, one of those premises has to be false. And so if I just say, well, let's take the randomness one. I don't know which one is false."
},
{
"end_time": 2142.568,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2120.026,
"text": " At least one of them is going to be false. So the randomness one is false. There must be the randomness that we're assuming in the thought experiment cannot be analyzed in normal set theory terms. It's got to have some kind of physical component that enriches it so that we can pull off this argument."
},
{
"end_time": 2173.677,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2144.65,
"text": " So that's where, this is where the thick concepts come in. So it becomes not ordinary randomness in standard math. It becomes a thick randomness. It's got a physical, it's become physicalized in some important sense. Now you say physicalized with a grimace. Is that because there is, you're a Platonist and you feel like, well, if it's not a thin mathematical, by the way, is there a con, is there a connection between thin and thick and Platonism and"
},
{
"end_time": 2203.677,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2174.036,
"text": " I don't know. Most of the people who talk about thick and thin in ethics, they often conclude that this is the end of the fact-value distinction. So if you think of facts as part of the physical realm, and if you are a Platonist about ethics, and they're declaring the end of this dichotomy between moral reality and physical reality,"
},
{
"end_time": 2234.189,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2204.189,
"text": " Then I'm not sure about the status of moral reality when it's all over. I would like to think it's still there, and these are a kind of hybrid human-made concepts, both in ethics and in math. I was supposed to say that you would like to believe that morals are a part of a Platonistic world or a moral world? Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a moral realist. Yeah, for me, there's... I hate the distinction between"
},
{
"end_time": 2262.705,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2234.531,
"text": " How do we get that moral fact? Where does that moral fact come from? Okay, now this gets back to the problem"
},
{
"end_time": 2289.565,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2262.841,
"text": " simultaneous problem for both ethics and for mathematics. So most Platonists believe not only in the reality of mathematics, and if you're a Platonist about ethics or a moral realist, you believe in objective moral facts. The big problem and the thing that people who are empiricists and naturalists complain about is you have no access to these facts, even if they did exist."
},
{
"end_time": 2318.712,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2289.974,
"text": " because you can see, smell, touch and so on. But if these live in a realm completely separate from us, you have no contact with them, you couldn't learn about them, and so on and so on. The response from moral realists, Platonists, is to appeal to intuition. And intuition is a cognitive capacity that we have, that will give us"
},
{
"end_time": 2348.234,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2319.002,
"text": " knowledge. So to take math, we have, everybody has, you know, scads of moral intuitions about math. Even if you had almost no mathematical training, you have a powerful intuition that two plus two equals four. And that's a moral intuition? Sorry, no, a mathematical intuition that two plus two equals four. And if I pressed you and I said, Oh, look, I just read in the newspaper today that, you know, in, in Brazil,"
},
{
"end_time": 2375.316,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2348.643,
"text": " Some wonderful physicists in Brazil have just done some fine-tune measurements, and they have discovered that 2 plus 2 actually equals 3.95. It doesn't equal 4 after all. Right. This is actually... We're just learning. Because there was a recent controversy about 2 plus 2 equals 5. I don't know if you've heard of it. No. Okay. So I think about one side we can talk about that afterwards. No, no, no. The other side was being serious. It was..."
},
{
"end_time": 2404.872,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2376.169,
"text": " it was because they were saying that the way that math is set up is western and it's not taking into account other modes of knowing and there are possible worlds where two plus two could equal five in different interpretations which it's true i mean if you have modulo something i'm sure you can make two plus two equal five or you can have modular you're absolutely right but it doesn't mean there may be standard interpretation and there's probably good rules of thumb in in some sciences where you"
},
{
"end_time": 2431.681,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2405.333,
"text": " You're now not talking two plus two, you're talking about two somethings and two somethings. So if you're talking about, what is it, water, a litre of water mixed with a litre of alcohol, perhaps, doesn't give you two litres of liquid. It gives you something like 1.9 litres of liquid because of the, you know, the some atomic goings on, reduces the volume of the whole thing."
},
{
"end_time": 2461.425,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2432.21,
"text": " You could you might conveniently talk that way. Yeah, because you're in the lab and it's very constraint. But no, two plus two equals four. And more generally, you know, a little bit of arithmetic and I can become abstract and I can say, any number m and any number n, if I add them together, m plus n, it's going to equal n plus m. And everybody think about that for a minute and a half and say, Yeah, yeah, right. I see it."
},
{
"end_time": 2489.855,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2461.903,
"text": " Yes, it's true and it has to be true. That's an example of a mathematical intuition. It's not empirical, though. Math and ethics have been the two thorns in the side of empiricism. I'm going to play devil's advocate just for a second because I'm trying to wrap my head around this. When you have A plus B equals B plus A, just so that it's clear, do we not define that with the addition being commutative?"
},
{
"end_time": 2519.923,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2490.162,
"text": " And then we make a model and say that our numbers correspond to it. We do, but people's elementary experience with arithmetic would lead them in that very direction. If they've done enough adding, they've been making change, they've been counting pebbles, who knows what? And after a while they come to realize that, whether they've been told that the commuter... Okay, you're strictly speaking about the intuition behind it, not proving it to be true. That's right."
},
{
"end_time": 2548.814,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2520.828,
"text": " Because to the audience see proving it to be do that's really interesting. We actually assume it in in the way that we define addition and multiplication that they're doing arithmetic in any formal sense. We typically start out with something known as the piano axioms. Okay, and they tell us how to add how to multiply, and they give us a principle called mathematical induction. And then everything in arithmetic follows. Well, I need to qualify that"
},
{
"end_time": 2577.244,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2549.206,
"text": " Almost everything in arithmetic follows. There is a problem about completeness, but never mind that. And everybody's intuition, if you've been playing with arithmetic for a while, you'd say, yeah, this is the truth. This is how addition works. This is how multiplication works. Okay, let's not get hung up on it. Let's assume that we have a strong intuition and we prove it. Those are examples of intuitions. Now, we have the same thing in ethics. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 2605.384,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2577.841,
"text": " If you saw somebody, if you saw some teenage kids catch a kitten, pour gasoline on it, set it on fire, you would be aghast. You would be morally outraged. You have a very strong moral intuition that that was an evil thing to do. But those kids don't. They might. They might. And they are just overwhelmed by peer pressure and gang behavior and stuff like that."
},
{
"end_time": 2619.155,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2606.288,
"text": " And you're right, they might not even... Now let's imagine they might not. Let's take the edge case. The which? The edge cases. Just to investigate this. So what if they genuinely don't have anything wrong with that? Like Genghis Khan, for example, said"
},
{
"end_time": 2645.367,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2619.582,
"text": " the best life would be conquering his enemies and enslaving their women. And now we look at that and say that that's ridiculous, but let's believe him that that actually invoked pleasure in him and he thought that was morally correct. I don't know enough about him to know exactly what's going on, so I'll give you the short answer and that is we've made a hell of a lot of moral progress since"
},
{
"end_time": 2669.957,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2645.657,
"text": " How do we make the claim that we've made moral progress without already assuming what we're trying to prove? That's an extremely difficult question. I don't want to say, well, my views have won over the long run, though they have. My view is we shouldn't have slavery, and almost everybody agrees with that now."
},
{
"end_time": 2698.046,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2670.435,
"text": " My view is that women should be treated equally with men and most people agree with that now that they wouldn't have a century ago. My view is that gays and lesbians and so on should be treated with equal rights and dignity and so on and so on. And I'd say at least a strong majority of Canadians if not a strong majority of the world population agree with that. So"
},
{
"end_time": 2724.974,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2699.138,
"text": " I don't have a hard and fast non-circular argument. I can say that as people think about these things over time, they tend to change their views in the direction that we have come. Not many people were against slavery for years and years and then had an epiphany and said, I made a terrible mistake. I think we should have slaves. I think that'd be a great idea."
},
{
"end_time": 2753.985,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2725.691,
"text": " Okay. People don't go in that direction. Let me press for a bit. I actually agree with you, but here's what I'm thinking. Here's what pops into my head. So a social consensus, what is required? And what if 10 years from now, you know there's some evidence that people who are on the lower end of the IQ spectrum have more children? Let's just imagine that many people, and we can even demean them and say conservatives, like let's say we're aggressive liberals. I'm not saying we are, but let's say these"
},
{
"end_time": 2783.2,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2753.985,
"text": " Foolish reactionary conservatives are the ones that populate the earth and then they like its slavery later and the majority of the earth likes slavery except those who are enslaved But they're a minority. Yeah, does that make that correct? No Okay, no, no Okay, so there's two questions Is there such a thing as objective right or wrong? Yes, I mean correct. Is there is there is there an objective shape of the earth? Yes, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2811.63,
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"start_time": 2783.558,
"text": " Hear that sound? 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": 2837.756,
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"start_time": 2811.63,
"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": 2863.524,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2837.756,
"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": 2871.408,
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"start_time": 2863.524,
"text": " Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories."
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"end_time": 2901.015,
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"text": " This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way."
},
{
"end_time": 2932.978,
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"start_time": 2904.07,
"text": " it's round, it's spherical. And I think we've got a ton of evidence that this is so. But if for some reason in the future, people said, No, we're pretty sure it's flat. And, and then I would say, Well, I pity that future civilization, they've got it wrong. They've made a terrible mistake. That's fact straight factual stuff. Okay, morally, if people actually said, Well, I we think we think slavery is a pretty good idea."
},
{
"end_time": 2958.268,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2933.575,
"text": " And I'd say, no, I would say they've made a terrible, terrible mistake. But I acknowledge the possibility that it could happen. Germany was a very, Germany is a very progressive country in the, you know, 19th and very early 20th century. And then by the time, you know, horrible calamities in the, in the 30s,"
},
{
"end_time": 2985.794,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2958.643,
"text": " Hitler comes to power and a majority of Germans are willing to go along with some pretty horrific views. Yeah, they're just wrong. They're just wrong. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3007.619,
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"start_time": 2985.794,
"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,"
},
{
"end_time": 3027.637,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 3007.619,
"text": " So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 3050.043,
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"start_time": 3027.637,
"text": " Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Okay."
},
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"end_time": 3067.858,
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"start_time": 3050.691,
"text": " We can talk about that another time. Basically, my argument was this. Well, first of all, I want to make it clear to the people who are watching that I don't think low IQ people are conservative. I was just straw manning for the sake of argument. Okay, second. I thought that what you were suggesting was given that we have a line toward"
},
{
"end_time": 3095.009,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3068.49,
"text": " something that over time people believe in a certain value, that's evidence that the value is objectively correct. And then I was saying, well, what if that reverses or we go into another direction? And then you're saying, no, that's wrong. But how does that not jive with saying that there's societal movement towards a certain direction and that corresponds to being objectively correct morally? No, no, it's this is this is a very good question. And it's very hard to answer."
},
{
"end_time": 3125.367,
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"start_time": 3095.367,
"text": " I don't have a terrific answer. I only have a weak answer. And my weak answer is that it's like science. We make progress in science. It's possible that what we believe today about, let's say, quantum mechanics and relativity, a hundred years from now, people will say, I don't know, let's go back to Newton. Let's believe Newton. Okay. I think the chances of that are minuscule."
},
{
"end_time": 3153.968,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3126.032,
"text": " And the thing is that there's been incremental evidence. It's fallible evidence, but incremental evidence all along pushes people upwards. Okay. It makes us brighter. We know more, we're more sophisticated in physics. And I think something like that goes on in our moral and political lives too. Interesting. Okay. Now with regards to Newtonian physics becoming"
},
{
"end_time": 3182.619,
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"start_time": 3154.462,
"text": " We say that one is more correct because it can explain more. Is pure explanatory power what makes the theory correct? No, explanatory power is a sign, is evidence that it's correct. This much is logically possible for anyone who's a realist."
},
{
"end_time": 3212.193,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3183.677,
"text": " that all the evidence could point away from the truth. Everything that we count is evidence. Like, is it explanatorily powerful? Yeah. Does it, is it incredibly accurate? You know, does it make spectacular predictions to the 25th decimal place? Yeah, it might be that too. And yet, in spite of all of this, it might be false. What are your views on free will, by the way?"
},
{
"end_time": 3241.51,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3213.695,
"text": " Do you believe in it? Yes, we've against it. Oh, interesting. Okay, now are you like Daniel Dennett, where you say, Well, I have a compatible list view. No, I have here I feel completely at sea. I speculate away, I operate. I live my life as if I have free will. I am. I eat too much. And I blame myself. I blame my willpower."
},
{
"end_time": 3269.889,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3241.971,
"text": " And while it would be very nice to blame something else, I can't. I just blame myself. I get angry at others. I get angry. I mean, some people I think can't help what they believe. Others I think have gone out of their way to make themselves stupid, and I blame them for that. So I'm happy to blame people for not doing what I think they ought to do. And I do think they have free will. I don't know how to live in a world where we really don't have free will."
},
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"end_time": 3297.875,
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"start_time": 3270.572,
"text": " But I may be just highly, that's not an argument for free will. That's just an argument for we have to live as if there is free will. I don't know how really to live otherwise. Now I've seen some people who are very sophisticated, you know, talk about this subject and maybe they'll be able to persuade me in the long run that we don't have"
},
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"end_time": 3327.875,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3298.404,
"text": " The standard view that's opposed to free will is well what caused you to make so-and-so decision and then it's your neurology okay well what caused that and you keep going until you get to a cause that's not you."
},
{
"end_time": 3350.674,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3328.251,
"text": " Right. Where does that chain of reductionism, because we just talked about physics being extremely powerful and more and more accurate, and there doesn't seem to be room for free will. So where does free will comport with our view of physics in the way that it's formalized currently? No, it's terrible. But it doesn't have to be quite as crude as you just put it. Here's another issue."
},
{
"end_time": 3371.323,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3351.34,
"text": " in which I do not have strong views, but it's sort of in the background. And this is the difference between, this is the issue of reductionism and emergence. So if you have a complete reductionist view and your world is deterministic, it's very hard to make room for free will. But if you have an emergentist view,"
},
{
"end_time": 3394.189,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3371.613,
"text": " that is yeah physics is at the bottom but in a certain level of complexity there could emerge biological laws like strong emergence yeah and out of that could emerge psychological laws and so on and and free will would be you know something that is emerging at some higher level it's not going to it's not going to"
},
{
"end_time": 3420.145,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3394.514,
"text": " It's not going to emerge out of elementary particle physics. I mean, sometimes people try to do that, because they take quantum indeterminacy to be, you know, this is stupid. It's just really bad arguments. But if we didn't have some kind of emergence, you might have you might have free will. Right. But again, I can't make up my mind. Okay. Yeah, where I was going to go is,"
},
{
"end_time": 3447.705,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3421.067,
"text": " There's no evidence for strong emergence, but there's plenty of evidence for reductionism. Like there's no link in the chain that's broken in the reductionist account as far as we could tell. So then to believe that we have free will, and I'm, I'm not suggesting that I don't believe I'm just throwing something out. So to believe that we have free will seems to be counter to evidence. So how do you jive with saying that I'm a person who goes wherever the evidence leads me?"
},
{
"end_time": 3474.701,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3448.336,
"text": " But simultaneously saying that I'm someone who believes in free will. And when I say go wherever the evidence believes, sorry, that I'm a person, I'm a person who goes wherever the evidence leads. I mean, evidence in terms of scientific evidence, because obviously you can be a spiritualist and say, well, I have the intuitions. You might appeal to intuitions, but I'm curious. So what do you say to that? Well, I do. I do count myself as somebody who's led by the evidence."
},
{
"end_time": 3495.247,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3475.179,
"text": " On the other hand, I don't agree with you about there's no gaps in the going from us to elementary particles. I mean, try to imagine accounting for Donald Trump's election"
},
{
"end_time": 3525.538,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3496.596,
"text": " in terms of writing down the Schrodinger equation for the population of the world and then solving it and getting out, ta-da, Donald Trump is president. What I meant was that so far there's no link that's been shown to be false. That doesn't mean that there is. No, no, no, I completely agree with you. So there's no evidence for it. Anyway, it would be very reliable. That would be like religious people who argue for the god of the gaps. God fills in the gaps in our scientific knowledge. Yeah, it's a foolish way of doing it."
},
{
"end_time": 3555.35,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3525.776,
"text": " Let's talk about Platonism. Do you mind defining for the audience what Platonism is? Sure. Modern Platonism, as opposed to being a strict follower of Plato, modern Platonism is simply the view that there are abstract entities. Numbers being the most obvious example of this. They exist in some way, shape or form? Yep, they're real. They exist."
},
{
"end_time": 3585.299,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3555.674,
"text": " And there are facts about them, like two plus two equals four. There are infinitely many prime numbers and so on. And these objects and these facts are completely independent from intelligent creatures. So even if no intelligent life existed anywhere in the universe, it would still be true that there are infinitely many prime numbers. If you believe that,"
},
{
"end_time": 3615.589,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3585.981,
"text": " You're a Platonist. In fact, there's a little litmus test for audience members who've never thought about it before. Ask yourself, do you think mathematicians discover new truths of mathematics or do they somehow invent or create them? Shakespeare created Hamlet. If Shakespeare or no intelligent being had ever existed, Hamlet would not exist. On the other hand, the spherical shape of the Earth"
},
{
"end_time": 3644.889,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3616.049,
"text": " would still be a fact, even if no intelligent being had ever existed. I say math is more like the shape of the earth and less like Hamlet. That's what it is to be a mathematical realist or a Platonist. When you say something that just popped into my head was the infinite monkeys on the typewriter, and then you can make it an analogy between Shakespeare and information. So just say the works of Shakespeare is just one extremely large number, given that you can translate it to bits."
},
{
"end_time": 3674.002,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3645.23,
"text": " isomorphically. Okay, and that number exists. So then did Shakespeare actually invent Hamlet? Or did he? No, no, no, no, no arithmetic is rich enough that it can encode Hamlet. That's all. So technically, did he discover it? Or did he create it? Hamlet, Hamlet was created by Shakespeare, not discovered by Shakespeare. Okay. But when the mathematician discovers or"
},
{
"end_time": 3702.278,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3674.309,
"text": " When Euclid produced the theorem that there are infinitely many prime numbers, Euclid discovered something. He discovered something that exists, that is true, independent from him. He didn't make it up. I see. It's not a cultural item of any sort. It's just a group way the world is. I see, I see, I see. But it's the abstract world. It's not a physical object. It's an abstract entity."
},
{
"end_time": 3731.766,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3702.756,
"text": " Yeah, now what creates this Platonic world? It's always been there, nothing created it. Yeah, so how do we talk about the Platonic world without sounding mystical, without sounding theological? It's like it's always there, it's ever-present, it is timeless, it's an uncaused cause. Yeah, well, you can imagine the universe, the physical universe, always existing, right? In fact, there's a good reason to believe that it always has,"
},
{
"end_time": 3759.991,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3732.125,
"text": " I know we're, we're, we're, we talk about big bang cosmology and we're what 13.8 billion years old. But if, but the inflationary scenario, we're probably just one of, you know, the multiverse. And these things have been going on forever. So our mini our universe is just one of a infinite number of pocket universes. Pocket universes have always existed. And they generate more from"
},
{
"end_time": 3790.128,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3760.367,
"text": " through this process called eternal inflation or just go back to pre-big bang cosmology where we used to believe standard physics believed that the universe was infinitely old it didn't have a beginning and it won't have an end it just is eternal not created by god this is atheists we're happy to believe this it's just this is the way things are so the platonic world was always there or even to say the word always implies"
},
{
"end_time": 3815.913,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3791.152,
"text": " Formulating it in terms of time and it's timeless. There's an old philosophical distinction we hardly use anymore between eternal and semperternal. Semperternal? Semperternal. So semperternal means true at all times. Eternal means outside of time. So mathematics is true outside of time."
},
{
"end_time": 3844.565,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3818.285,
"text": " If numbers were somehow or other, which a small number of people believe, a kind of part of the physical realm, but somehow attached to the physical realm. So if the physical realm didn't exist, numbers wouldn't exist. That would be a simple eternal version. So in casual talk, we say, yeah, it's eternal. It's always the case."
},
{
"end_time": 3855.964,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3845.111,
"text": " But this distinction, like God, standard view of God, God is eternal outside of creation."
},
{
"end_time": 3884.48,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3856.493,
"text": " Whatever God created is and if God created anything that lasted forever in creation, that would be simple eternal. I see. I see. Wittgenstein had a quote about this. He said if eternal means infinite temporal length, then that would be right. If it didn't mean that, but instead meant outside of time, then anyone who lives in the present moment is living eternally. Yeah, well, that's beautiful. Also a bit mystical."
},
{
"end_time": 3910.179,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3884.991,
"text": " A few weeks ago, I emailed, or maybe a couple months ago, I emailed you about thought experiments. I don't recall how the conversation started, but you sent me a book on thought experiments. You didn't know that I was thinking of writing a book. I actually started, but your book was far more articulate than mine about thought experiments. I recommend people who watch this to read. It's like a spitback second book on manifolds. It's a short read and compendious."
},
{
"end_time": 3939.36,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3912.892,
"text": " Something I've been trying to develop is, is there a way of formulating the laws of physics from pure thought experiments? What drove me to think that was the Galileo experiment, the thought experiment with Galileo, and you had already thought about this as well. And in fact, you just started writing a book about it. It's not like you, you solve the problem. Otherwise we we'd invent plenty of new technology, but you've made what I think is progress. So let's talk about that book."
},
{
"end_time": 3964.838,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3941.749,
"text": " Do you think that ultimately the laws of physics can be generated from armchair philosophy, just sitting back and thinking a thought experiment? Certainly not all. In fact, not even most. But just every now and then I think we can learn something about the world in a non-empirical way. And my favorite example"
},
{
"end_time": 3991.493,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3965.247,
"text": " is Galileo and falling objects. Galileo is a wonderful thought experimenter, maybe the best ever. He's absolutely terrific. Einstein was a very good thought experimenter too. They're probably in the same league, but if anything I think Galileo is a notch above. My favorite thought experiment of all time"
},
{
"end_time": 4022.295,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3992.398,
"text": " And I remember hearing it when I was an undergraduate and thought it was the most dazzling thing I'd ever heard. And this is the argument for all objects, regardless of how heavy they are, fall at the same rate. So it's a thought experiment. You imagine yourself going up on the leaning tower of Pisa, if you like, and you're dropping a cannonball, which is quite heavy, and a musket ball, which is relatively quite a bit lighter. Now, the"
},
{
"end_time": 4052.432,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 4022.637,
"text": " the common sense view and the view in in Aristotle are the same. It says that heavy objects will just fall faster than light objects. And we've got a lot of experience to that effect. You know, I mean, if you do throw a cannonball and a feather, you know, you know that the cannonball is going to hit the ground a lot sooner. So Galileo says, all right, if heavy objects fall faster than light objects, let's imagine a compound object,"
},
{
"end_time": 4079.701,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4052.978,
"text": " consisting of a cannonball and a musket ball clued together, okay, and drop it. Now we've got three things. We've got a cannonball, a musket ball, and this composite objects. Now on the principle that heavy objects fall faster, this composite object is going to fall fastest of all of the three. But unfortunately, it's not, it's going to be slowed down by the fact that"
},
{
"end_time": 4109.548,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4080.196,
"text": " The cannonball part of the composite object wants to fall at its fast rate, but it's going to be held back by this little musket ball attached to it, who's wanting to fall at a slower rate. So it's like jumping out of a window with a little tiny parachute. It's going to slow you down. And so that's absurd. The composite object will be both faster and slower than the heavy cannonball by itself. There it's, and that was the end of common sense."
},
{
"end_time": 4138.422,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4110.043,
"text": " about falling objects and the end of Aristotle on free fall. But the solution, how fast do things fall, is obvious when you've reached this point. And here's where a physical intuition actually comes in. And you don't need to perform the experiment. You just think about it and you realize, oh, they all have to fall at the same rate. And that's how things fall, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 4165.759,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4138.729,
"text": " at the same rate, regardless of how heavy they are. To me, this is still one of the most beautiful thought experiments as well. And it's what led me on the journey of thinking. I wonder how much more of physics can be gleaned by just thinking about what's consistent, what contradicts. Oh, a ton of things. Galileo's other, I think, his other very, very famous thought experiment is the inside the ship, where you can't tell"
},
{
"end_time": 4194.104,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4166.51,
"text": " By hypothesis, he can't tell whether the ship is stationary in the port or moving across a very smooth ocean. And he says, okay, I'm inside and birds are flying around inside, front to back. And it's the same whether I'm sailing or at port. I throw a ball to my friend back and forth, same whether we're moving or in port. Fish are in an aquarium tank inside the ship."
},
{
"end_time": 4220.333,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4194.48,
"text": " and they swim back and forth in the tank, and it doesn't matter whether we're stationary or moving. Everything is the same on the inside. And that's his argument for what has become the principle of relativity, that inertial frames, the laws of nature are exactly the same in any inertial frame, whether it's a stationary one at rest in port or moving smoothly over the sea."
},
{
"end_time": 4247.398,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4220.93,
"text": " What was the impetus for him thinking of this thought experiment? Was it because he was suggesting the earth is moving and people were wondering, well, shouldn't we be moving if the earth is moving or was it something else? That's exactly right. There was another thought experiment prior, not Galileo's, but prior to Galileo. This is a medieval thought experiment, sometimes called the tower experiment. And that is if the earth is moving either around the sun or spinning on its own axis,"
},
{
"end_time": 4273.558,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4247.858,
"text": " either way. And you dropped an object from a tower, then as the earth moved, the object would fall way behind the base of the tower. Right. It never does that. It always falls right down at the base. Right. And you can use a similar ship argument where if you're on a ship and the ship is sailing and you drop a ball, it'll fall behind the ship or where the tail end of the ship was. That's right. That's what the"
},
{
"end_time": 4302.5,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4273.763,
"text": " equivalent tower argument would use. But Galileo says, no, no, it's not going to be like that at all. If you're, if you're just inside the ship, you can't see out, you drop a ball, it'll land at your feet. And if you're moving over the sea at 20 knots, and you drop a ball, it's still going to land at your feet, either way. Right, right. And, and, and that's the, and then more general, of course, you just make the claim, the laws of nature are going to be the same in any inertial"
},
{
"end_time": 4328.422,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4302.739,
"text": " frame of reference. And that's the principle of relativity. That's Galileo's version. And it's the version is the only version we use. When Einstein gave us special relativity, he hung on to the principle of relativity, because it was in danger. It was in danger from Maxwell's electrodynamics, which seemed to need a universal ether as if there was a single frame"
},
{
"end_time": 4352.125,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4328.865,
"text": " in which physics was correctly described. And anything that was moving in the etherframe, you wouldn't get the right results. That is, you'd have to take that into account. The laws of nature are best by the etherframe. Now let's get to Newton with the absolute space in the bucket."
},
{
"end_time": 4381.937,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4352.637,
"text": " So Newton had a thought experiment that demonstrated absolute space. Okay, so this is another extremely famous thought experiment. And this I can show a diagram from the book or from any other place I don't want to take from the copyright holder. No, no, you got it there. No, I mean, I'll show it when we're at when I'm editing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can show it from my book. Don't worry. Sure. Yeah, I grant you permission. Thank you. Appreciate that."
},
{
"end_time": 4411.544,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4382.602,
"text": " Now, so Newton gave two versions of this. One was the bucket, okay? And so the way you should think of it is you've got a bucket and you can twist the rope, okay? And here's the bucket and the water is very smooth on top. And you let the bucket go. And it's the only thing in the universe for this. Well, for the bucket there's Newton and there's everything around."
},
{
"end_time": 4441.834,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4411.903,
"text": " Okay, nevermind. Let me do the bucket and then I'll switch to the other one. Sure, sure, sure. Which is the empty universe. Okay, so at first the water is flat and the bucket starts to rotate and gradually, so initially, before anything happens, the water and the bucket are at rest with respect to one another. Then they start to rotate and they're rotating together, both the bucket and the water,"
},
{
"end_time": 4470.879,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4442.005,
"text": " and the water starts climbing the walls and then you stop the bucket and the water is still climbing and it gradually subsides to flat again. Now the question is how do we explain the difference between the water and bucket being at rest initially and the water is flat and later on the water and bucket are at rest with respect to one another but the water is concave."
},
{
"end_time": 4501.135,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4471.698,
"text": " The water is climbing up the walls. How do you explain the difference? And Newton says, okay, you know what's going to happen. Here's the explanation. In the first case, the water bucket system is not rotating with respect to space. And later, when the water is climbing the walls, the whole system is rotating with respect to space itself. And then conclusion, therefore, space exists."
},
{
"end_time": 4528.951,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4502.756,
"text": " Not just something that we use as a convenience or something like that. Actually, let me go back and people can figure out what their instinctive view is on this. This would be the difference between a Newtonian on the one hand and a Leibnizian relationalist on the other hand. Question."
},
{
"end_time": 4558.046,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4529.377,
"text": " There was nothing in the whole universe. No object existed anywhere in the universe. Would space still exist? Could space still exist? And I find that when I asked my students that question, about half of them say, yeah, empty space, no problem. There could be empty space. And the other half said, that's ridiculous. There couldn't be such a thing as empty space. If there's no objects, there's just no space, period. This sounds like the tree falling in the woods."
},
{
"end_time": 4586.442,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4559.599,
"text": " There's no connection to that, you're right. And there's a counterpart to that for time. If I say to my class, okay, imagine that nothing ever happened. Everything was just frozen solid. Could time still pass? Half the class will say no, no events, no time. The other half will say, yeah, time's still passing, but nothing's happening."
},
{
"end_time": 4617.022,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4587.671,
"text": " Very different instincts people have about this. And that one's also about 50-50? Yeah, roughly 50-50. Same people? Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They're highly correlated. Okay. Yeah. So if you think empty space makes sense, and you think time without events makes sense, you're a Newtonian. You're with Newton. And if you think that no objects, no space, or no events, no time, you're an instinctive Leibnizian, a Relationalist."
},
{
"end_time": 4644.906,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4618.114,
"text": " And what about you? My instincts are mostly with Newton. It's also another thing that's interesting about this is that my class will be typically half physics, half philosophy students. It doesn't break along that line at all. Oh, interesting. Half the physicists are Newtonians in instinct and half of them are Leibnizians and the philosophy students exactly the same. Half of them are Newtonians, half of them are Leibnizians."
},
{
"end_time": 4671.442,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4645.435,
"text": " Have you done this with mathematicians? I'm curious. I do it with mathematicians for other things and often that are philosophically interesting and I am often surprised at the split in the mathematical audience exactly corresponds to the split in the philosophy audience. That is you can't tell from someone's answer whether they're a mathematician or a philosopher."
},
{
"end_time": 4694.138,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4672.739,
"text": " By the way, do you consider, are you a professor of philosophy of math or philosophy of physics or both? No, just philosophy. But my specialty inside is things like math and physics. I see. I mean, some philosophers are, you know, they specialize in the history of philosophy or in ethics and so on. Math and physics are my specialties inside."
},
{
"end_time": 4724.206,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4695.077,
"text": " As an aside, another aside, why did you end up choosing to go into the philosophy of math instead of math? Is it just purely based on what interested you or was there something else? That's a really interesting question. I think it was pretty much right at the beginning, like when you're a beginning undergraduate and then you have to pick majors and stuff like that. I thought I can do anything in the world as a philosopher."
},
{
"end_time": 4752.534,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4725.094,
"text": " And no one will say, yeah, you're not doing philosophy anymore. One of my first questions for this that I wrote down, it's has any philosophical question ever been solved? And this relates to that because I'm curious to know is something I've been thinking about. I searched this on Google and it's not clear. The only one that I can think of is maybe Zeno's paradox with saying, well, you're, you're only accounting for finite time, but have any major philosophical problems ever been solved?"
},
{
"end_time": 4783.865,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4755.623,
"text": " I'd be more confident in saying a lot of views have been decisively refuted. So there's a lot of people in philosophy say, well, we know that we're making progress in this limited sense that we now know certain things are false that we didn't know were false, you know, 50 years ago or something like that. But I mean, I have lots of philosophical views."
},
{
"end_time": 4814.172,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4784.974,
"text": " about which I'm fairly confident and I think those might count. People would disagree with me of course, but there'd be some significant number of people who would say, yeah, we think that's right. One of the most important and oldest is Plato's refutation"
},
{
"end_time": 4843.114,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4814.497,
"text": " for the need for God in order to have objective ethics. It's in the dialogue called the Euthyphro. And it's a very simple little argument. And it doesn't refute the existence of God. It just says, no, no, no, objective ethics, objective right and wrong is completely independent from God. God's got nothing to do with it. It's a wonderful little argument. And if you are an atheist, you're happy with the conclusion."
},
{
"end_time": 4871.544,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4843.439,
"text": " Right. We can have objective ethics. We don't need God. And if you do believe in God, you could say, well, I still believe in God and I believe in objective ethics. The intimate connection that I thought was there actually isn't there, but everything else is wonderful. Or someone can reject the conclusion and say, yes, God can advocate for the murder of a child and that would still be good because God advocated for it. That's the essence of the youthful argument because everyone will balk at that."
},
{
"end_time": 4900.043,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4872.602,
"text": " And they think something is moral because God says so. And then you say, oh, yeah, so if he told you you had to rape every woman you can see, then that would be a good thing to do. Is that what you believe? And no one will believe that. And then they realize that this is stupid. I can't. What I've been saying all along is a really stupid view. The most we can get out of God is God is a truthful reporter of objective moral rules."
},
{
"end_time": 4930.06,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4900.589,
"text": " Like we can trust God to tell us what the moral rules are, but God isn't making them. They have to be independent. That's a really, it's a, it's a wonderfully interesting problem. It's underappreciated. I think theologians, the theologians don't want to touch it. And there's another one that they even more don't want to touch. And that is how powerful God is. The one about ethics is a lot like what Leibniz thought about God's power. He'd say,"
},
{
"end_time": 4960.077,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4930.503,
"text": " Leibniz, do you think God is all-powerful? Say, you betcha, he can do anything. Leibniz wouldn't say that though, because Leibniz... He'd have a qualification, which I'm going to give you in a second. Okay, okay. You say, Decart, can God do everything? You betcha, he can do anything. And then you say, well, can he make it rain? It's a sunny day right here. Can he make it rain? Sure, he can make it rain. Leibniz, could he make it rain? You betcha, he can make it rain, just like that. And then you say to Decart, could he make it rain?"
},
{
"end_time": 4989.821,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4960.555,
"text": " and not rain simultaneously, Descartes would say, yes, he can even do that. I can't imagine what it would be like, but we can do it. And Leibniz would say, no, we can't do that. He can make it rain, he can make it not rain, but he can't pull off a contradiction. So God can do anything that's possible. That's God's power. Right. And the Leibniz view about what God can do in the physical realm is very much like"
},
{
"end_time": 5014.394,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4990.265,
"text": " You know, when we're talking about whether or not philosophical problems have been solved, something I found online,"
},
{
"end_time": 5040.947,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 5014.684,
"text": " It's funny, it's the reason why philosophical problems have not been solved, is that as soon as they have been solved, they get relegated to something like physics or math. For example, you know, physics was called natural philosophy before. That's actually a really good point. The hardest problems stay in philosophy. The ones that are unsolvable stay in philosophy. As soon as they're solved, they get outside the realm of philosophy. And that's why philosophical problems seem to have never been solved. That's a really good point."
},
{
"end_time": 5069.377,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 5041.613,
"text": " In fact, that's how a lot of philosophers think of their discipline as giving birth to the sciences. Once we sort something out, it takes off a life of its own. Sometimes when I talk to hardcore physicists, they don't like to deal with concepts that are maybe you might call them thick, although I might be using your terminology incorrectly. I'm going to call them ambiguous, like for example, consciousness or free will or"
},
{
"end_time": 5099.753,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5070.708,
"text": " Yeah, yeah, those are right. And they were just saying, I don't know what it means to I don't know what that means. And so let me just stay with my rulers and protractors. But the philosophers are willing to deal with what seems meaningless and try and find meaning and then it's and concretize what's ambiguous or disambiguate what's ambiguous. And then it goes into another realm. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I don't particularly like the the this there's a dismissal that and an arrogance that comes from the purely mathematical and purely physical"
},
{
"end_time": 5130.555,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5101.425,
"text": " Professors that I've spoken to where they don't want to deal with certain concepts that seem That are ill-defined They'll just say well, I don't deal with that and that's meaningless and so you can pursue that but that's a religious pursuit to even talk about consciousness or Or what it means to die or what it what does life mean? Well Yeah, that seems rather short-sighted because so many I mean I can understand them saying"
},
{
"end_time": 5160.333,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5130.981,
"text": " I don't want to deal with consciousness as a physicist. I'm very happy to talk about it and think about it and reflect on it. It's probably outside the realm of physics. I'm also very interested to talk about politics and how we should organize society, but I wouldn't... Derive it from the Schrodinger equation. Exactly. Okay, now the bucket. Okay, so anyway, the bucket."
},
{
"end_time": 5189.957,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5160.572,
"text": " The Newton's final conclusion, water still initially, water concave at the end, what's the difference? Explanation, the bucket is not rotating, then the bucket is rotating with respect to space itself. And therefore space exists. It's meant to be an argument for the existence of space as a thing in its own right. As well as all these material objects all around us, there is also space."
},
{
"end_time": 5218.183,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5190.64,
"text": " It's an extra thing. Leibniz said that's rubbish. There's nothing to space except the relations among physical things. Get rid of the physical things. There's nothing left over. So Leibniz didn't agree with the conclusion of the thought experiment or he just didn't get presented with this thought experiment? No, that's really a good point. They had a wonderfully interesting correspondence back and forth. It's called the Leibniz Clark."
},
{
"end_time": 5247.398,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5218.439,
"text": " because Clark is very close to Newton. We don't really know whether Clark was simply taking dictation from Newton. He might have been, or he might have just talked to Newton about how to formulate answers, but there's about six letters back and forth between them, and they keep getting longer and longer. Leibniz died. It never came to an end. Leibniz just unfortunately died."
},
{
"end_time": 5274.445,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5248.131,
"text": " And Leibniz has wonderful answers to a whole lot of stuff that Newton talks about. Leibniz is a brilliant, brilliant person. When people are talking about the luminaries, they mention Einstein and Newton, but Leibniz is, to me, on the same category of Newton. Oh, he is. He's unquestionably one of the all-time spectacular greats. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 5303.387,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5275.316,
"text": " Okay. Okay. So anyway, but that's the bucket. But you see Newton, Newton then said, gave a second version. It's the same argument, but this is the really interesting one. So he says, you imagine two spheres connected by a cord or a rod or something, a cord, make it a cord or an elastic. And he says,"
},
{
"end_time": 5332.995,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5304.053,
"text": " there there's a tension in the elastic okay it's stretched um the material sorry sorry is this in your thought experiment book as well that i can place it okay it'll be in the same place okay i'm just trying to visualize it right now it i'm visualizing something like it looks like a dumbbell okay so you got the two spheres and they could be made out of some massive thing that you could be would if they don't attract or retail but there's a tension"
},
{
"end_time": 5359.65,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5333.558,
"text": " The cord is stretched. How could you explain this? There's nothing in the universe. It's an empty universe. How do you explain it? Newton says easy. The whole thing is rotating. And you see the individual objects try to move in straight lines. They try to move inertially and hence it's stretching the cord between them. And that's how you account for it."
},
{
"end_time": 5389.855,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5360.401,
"text": " Well, what's the cause of this inertial motion? Space itself, space is the source of inertial motion and inertial forces and stuff like that. This is the, if now, if you're, if you're, um, if you're someone like Leibniz, you're going to have real problems with this because space, you see for Newton, space has real properties. It can cause things. It causes things to move in straight lines."
},
{
"end_time": 5419.991,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5390.435,
"text": " That's why if you throw an object, no force on it, it'll move in a straight line. It's space that sort of guides it as it were that way. Okay. And if there were no space, there'd be no accounting for why it moves in a straight line rather than just at random. Leibniz died before he could really tackle that issue. And who knows, he might've even been won over by it. You wanted to know about how Einstein reacted to this."
},
{
"end_time": 5449.121,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5420.486,
"text": " Right. Einstein changed his mind, but early on, and this is in the very first couple of pages in the paper on general relativity. For the audience, just to clarify, the Newton bucket experiment demonstrated, at least for Newton, the presence of absolute space. That's right. Space is a thing in its own right. Yeah. What Einstein does is"
},
{
"end_time": 5478.404,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5449.497,
"text": " he rejects the whole setup. So he imagines two spheres that are rotating with respect to one another, and one is perfectly spherical, and the other one's a kind of an ellipse of revolution. Okay, so it's elongated at its equator. Okay, just like our Earth spinning on its axis, it's a little wider at the equator. So Einstein imagines these two things,"
},
{
"end_time": 5508.404,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5478.831,
"text": " In another wise empty space and he says how can you explain this and then he says you can't You must appeal to distant matter And the presence of this is this is really mocks Answer to all of this. You must appeal to distant matter that you can experience you can see it and and one of the object the the ellipse of revolution That object not the spherical one"
},
{
"end_time": 5537.602,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5508.797,
"text": " That object is rotating with respect to that distant mass. So it's not space itself that causes the inertial motion. It's the presence of billions of distribution. Okay. Let me see if I have this correct because I don't recall this. So are you, is what you're saying something like we don't know if we're rotating unless we see stars rotating above us? Yeah. Or is this completely, is it? That's Einstein. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 5566.186,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5538.353,
"text": " Okay, what about the centripetal force or centrifugal force? So what does he say about that? It's not caused by rotation with respect to space. It's caused by rotation with respect to distant matter. In fact, this is Mark made an empirical claim about this. And I don't think it's very practical, so no one can ever do it. But Mark said, imagine that you did Newton's bucket."
},
{
"end_time": 5597.841,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5568.029,
"text": " in a bucket where the walls of the bucket were several miles thick. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Imagine them a hundred miles thick, incredible mass. Then you, and you rotate this thing. Yeah. Okay. So in Newton's bucket, when you rotate it, the wall, the water starts to climb the wall. Yeah. Locke said, if you've got enough mass in the bucket itself, the water would stay level."
},
{
"end_time": 5626.937,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5599.258,
"text": " Therefore, it's not rotation with respect to space, it's rotation with respect to external masses. Ah, uh-huh. Because it depends on that. I see. Yeah. You need such a big bucket. You know, you couldn't ask the government to pay for this experiment. They would be they would be turfed out of power in the next election, wouldn't they?"
},
{
"end_time": 5656.613,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5627.671,
"text": " When I first heard about the Galileo thought experiment of the falling bodies, I thought that's the most wonderful thing I'd ever heard."
},
{
"end_time": 5681.34,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5657.79,
"text": " And then after I got tenure, I thought, okay, they can't fire me now return. I'm going to do what I wanted to do for a long time. And that's start thinking about thought experiments. And there was virtually no literature on it. There's, you know, people make the odd offhand remark. And of course there are lots of thought experiments floating around, but nobody had ever written about it. And I could hear that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 5708.473,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5682.329,
"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": 5736.954,
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"start_time": 5708.473,
"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 of their commerce. Shopify, by the way,"
},
{
"end_time": 5765.862,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5736.954,
"text": " powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, 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. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in."
},
{
"end_time": 5793.985,
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"start_time": 5766.067,
"text": " Shopify.com slash theories. What's their nature? You know, how do they work and stuff like that? And I was shocked that I could read almost everything that had ever been written about thought experiments in a long weekend. It was almost nothing, a bit by mock and a bit by, you know, a few other people and that's it. And so the few people who had commented on it,"
},
{
"end_time": 5820.299,
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"start_time": 5794.855,
"text": " usually divided things up into the positive negative kind of thought experiments thought experiments which you know get try to give you a new theory versus thought experiments which just destroy an old theory okay so shorty nurse cat is a negative thought experiment in the sense that it's just supposed to undermine standard quantum mechanics but other other thought experiments like"
},
{
"end_time": 5850.623,
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"start_time": 5820.964,
"text": " Okay, you fine-tuned only the constructive part. Well, the destructive part goes down to direct. So it's like, I don't recall what direct was. And then one of the"
},
{
"end_time": 5880.657,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5850.811,
"text": " constructives goes down to direct as well. Yeah. Um, I, I think I can't remember now whether I, I mean, there were some distinctions I didn't bother making, but might've made in passing when I was describing that taxonomy. Um, the negative thought experiments, I might've put them lumped them all together as just negative. Yeah. Um, there's probably a, an important difference between, uh, negative thought experiments that follow from the theory itself."
},
{
"end_time": 5908.507,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5881.067,
"text": " which just shows that they're internally incoherent and negative thought experiments, which show a clash between a theory and other more or less established knowledge. So I could fine tune there and you could probably make more distinctions. Anytime you're setting up a taxonomy, there's a kind of balance between, you know, to what extent can this be simplified and enlightening?"
},
{
"end_time": 5937.261,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5909.019,
"text": " And to what extent do you go into so much detail, it just becomes, you get lost in, you get lost in the detail. Have you been keeping up with theories of everything? There's been a couple of new ones this year. Yeah. A little bit. Have you read up on Wolfram's or Eric Weinstein's? No. Wolfram's views, he just thinks that the world is an automaton and"
},
{
"end_time": 5967.551,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5938.183,
"text": " He sees digital computers as answering all questions. I'm still sufficiently wedded to continuity in a lot of places that I don't, I think digitizing things is only a nifty approximation and good for solving a lot of practical problems, but I don't think it's going to reveal the deeper truth. I may be wrong, I may be wrong. I have physics friends who do believe that space-time is discrete"
},
{
"end_time": 5980.879,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5968.251,
"text": " Yep. And if they're right, then understanding the world in as a gigantic digital computer that makes that becomes a little more plausible."
},
{
"end_time": 6010.316,
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"start_time": 5981.374,
"text": " You definitely should read that paper that you sent me, which I thought that you knew Nicholas Jessen and you were completely familiar with his work. Anyway, just for the audience member. I read it at the time. I remember saying, I do remember sending it to you, but I just completely forgot it. Okay. I'm just going to give a bit of background. Yes. Send it if you have it. I'll send you a lecture from him because it's wonderful. Okay. Nicholas Jessen is a physicist who was answering a question that I was curious about, which is why I asked Jim here. I said, Hey,"
},
{
"end_time": 6039.77,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 6010.708,
"text": " Is there any other logical foundation of physics other than classical logic? Cause I'm wondering, I'm always curious, like what's holding us back from theories of everything. And I'm trying to tackle it from as many angles as I, as I can. That's what I thought. Maybe this is one. And you said, well, there is this person named Nicholas Jessen who thinks that intuitionist logic is a way to go. And now I'm getting, now it's coming back. Yes. Yes. Okay. And so what he was saying, he has a few different reasons for believing that"
},
{
"end_time": 6061.715,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 6040.862,
"text": " first of all real numbers aren't real and the reason for this is to say is because there's only a finite amount of information that can be in any finite volume so let's say it's a real number if it's an arbitrary real number then it's going to collapse into a black hole if for whatever reason the particle somehow carries that information with it okay well you can leave and leave that aside he says that"
},
{
"end_time": 6089.923,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 6061.937,
"text": " All of deterministic physics, like classical physics, actually is completely compatible with an indeterministic view. Forget about quantum mechanics. And the reason is that all we can do is test it to a certain precision. Let's say 30 decimal places. That's being a bit generous, but let's say 30 decimal place for classical physics. Then you can easily construct indeterminate"
},
{
"end_time": 6115.128,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 6091.152,
"text": " indeterminate function so here's one i can't say it because i can't say it i would just have to write the function out but let's say you have the real line so zero to one and then you you somehow stretch the real line and then you cut the real line in half i'll have to tell you what the function is but either way that real line you can describe any number as zero point b1 b2 be like the digits of yeah great"
},
{
"end_time": 6141.374,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 6115.674,
"text": " What that function effectively does is remove the first digit. So instead of it being zero point B1, B2, B3, it's zero point B2, B3, B4. Okay, now given that, given that, let's say finite, let's say non real numbers are completely compatible with classical physics, because we don't know where the"
},
{
"end_time": 6171.578,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6141.647,
"text": " end of the error bar effectively gives a real number or if it's just cut off you understand what I'm saying sorry if I'm not explaining correctly okay given that then we can have these simple systems that actually are not just chaotic because we don't have sufficient information but because within it it genuinely is indeterminate for example that function like if you just choose an arbitrary okay so you get the idea"
},
{
"end_time": 6199.036,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6172.227,
"text": " Okay, so then he was saying that indeterminacy is not incompatible with classical physics, even though we like to think of classical physics as being a determinant theory, you can't it's so then he goes on to say, calling physics deterministic or indeterministic is not a scientific question, because both models predict the exact same reality that we see classically forget about quantum mechanics. And then he goes on to make a connection between that and free will."
},
{
"end_time": 6227.892,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6199.718,
"text": " He's a proponent of free will, much like yourself, and he says it can be saved. The libertarian version of free will, not the compatibilist, that is, that I choose from the possible world. Oh, anyway, that's extremely intriguing to me. I want to, so I thank you so much for that. And I'm going to talk to Nicholas about it. Good. I'm glad you got so much out of it. My instincts are to disagree quite strongly. To start with, I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 6258.114,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6228.234,
"text": " a realist and a Platonist about math, not a constructivist, not an intuitionist. So I think all those decimal expansion to infinity, it exists, but it exists in Plato's heaven. So I don't know how he's, I don't know where black holes would come in unless he's trying to physicalize the numbers. And then the decimal representation would require an infinite amount of ink in a very small space and collapse into a black hole. So now I'm sort of joking and say, yeah, I understand."
},
{
"end_time": 6285.708,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6258.507,
"text": " But the thing is, I think you need real numbers, irrational real numbers in physics. Try to imagine doing physics without pi, which is an irrational number. It's got an infinite decimal expansion. Try to imagine doing physics without the square root of two."
},
{
"end_time": 6315.316,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6286.254,
"text": " square root of two comes up all over the place in just in quantum mechanics. So you've got a two-state system, you know, it can it could be an up or a down and you describe the state as one over root two up plus one over root two down and then to get the probability you square that so square one over root two squared is one becomes one half and that of course you can measure accurately but you're going to always represent it as one over root two you're you're going to have to appeal to these"
},
{
"end_time": 6345.145,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6316.135,
"text": " Now he may say, ah, but I'm only appealing to an approximation of one over root two. Like I only need five, if I went five decimal places. And so I'm really, it's really a rational number. That's all I need for complete empirical adequacy. It would be hard to argue with him over that. I think my best argument against him would be the utter simplicity of the real numbers as opposed to"
},
{
"end_time": 6371.357,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6346.391,
"text": " truncating them and turning them into rational numbers to do physics. But from an empirical point of view, I may have to concede that there's not going to be any empirical distinction between the two. Right. Okay, I'm going to read from your book. Oh, before I get to that, you did mention that there are some examples of non-platonic forms of mathematical realism."
},
{
"end_time": 6402.978,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6373.507,
"text": " I can't conceive of that. So do you mind expounding? You said you said that Mill or Kitcher, Kitcher. Yes, that's right. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Sure. Okay. Mill is easy. He's the classic example. So he's he'd be you'd call him a mathematical realist. Which Mill is this? John Stuart Mill. Okay. Okay. Almost everybody who's a mathematical realist uses realism, Platonism, roughly interchangeably."
},
{
"end_time": 6431.391,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6403.729,
"text": " I mean, they might they might want to make some fine distinctions. And that's because almost everybody who is a realist is happy to be called a Platonist. But there is Mill is a mathematical realist who is absolutely not a Platonist. So for Mill, numbers are really just a kind of abstraction from the physical realm. They're part of the physical realm, a bit like colors. So when I say two plus two equals four,"
},
{
"end_time": 6461.8,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6432.193,
"text": " I'm actually talking about physical stuff. So two apples, it's just a short form for a more general, it's a generalization of two apples plus two apples equals four apples. Two liters of water plus two liters of water is four liters of water, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I just, I just simplify it to two plus two equals four, but it is learned empirically and it's about the physical empirical world. That's mill. Okay. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 6491.101,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6462.705,
"text": " Frege made a lot of fun of him. Nobody believes Bill. They think it's preposterous view. But you see how it's realist in the sense that it's about reality and it's meant to be literally true. Yeah. I just don't see how it's not platonistic. So can you help me out? Because if it's saying that the generalities are true, what does he mean by true? Where did they exist? So if you're saying that if I said, if I said these apples are red, yeah,"
},
{
"end_time": 6519.701,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6491.493,
"text": " Okay, that's a straightforward empirical realm. The fact that they're right here, this is it. And if I said these two apples and these two apples make four apples, it's all about what's right here. Okay, there's nothing about Plato seven in that it's all right here. Okay, it just that when I say two plus two equals four without reference to apples or liters of water or, or, or"
},
{
"end_time": 6549.855,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6520.367,
"text": " The Platonist would say you're reflecting some other truer world and Mill would say you're predicated on this world. It's true, but it's dependent on this world, not some other world. Is that what you mean? Yeah, but Mill would say and there's no other world. It's just this one."
},
{
"end_time": 6575.196,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6551.015,
"text": " The closest I can think of for an analogy would be talking about colors. So I mean, I can say this apple is red, that banana is yellow. But I can say at a slightly more abstract level, but I'm still here in the world. Red plus yellow make orange. See, I'm still here in the empirical world. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 6603.78,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6575.742,
"text": " I see. Even though I'm not talking about a particular apple or a particular banana, but red plus yellow make orange. So why is that ridiculous? Why is Mills, what you said that Mills laughed at by Frege and many other mathematicians and philosophers. If the universe is finite, if we thought it was finite, if we're just standard Big Bang, the universe is finite. There's only finitely many elementary particles in it. There's only finitely many things in it. That means there's a biggest number."
},
{
"end_time": 6632.637,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6605.811,
"text": " And I say, oh, well, let's call it n, biggest number. That's it. I say, well, what about n plus one? Do you think n plus one is bigger than n? And of course you'd say, of course it is. And Mill doesn't know how, what's Mill going to say? There's no such numbers in plus one. You're just making it up. I see. And so it just seems preposterous."
},
{
"end_time": 6663.029,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6633.66,
"text": " We believe there are infinitely many prime numbers, infinitely many numbers. Mill doesn't know actually what to do with this if the universe is finite. If the world, if the universe is infinite, he got lucky and maybe he can get around that problem. He's going to have a lot of problems. Why does the universe being finite mean that there has to be a finite conceptual number? Because even with the... If you think of numbers as"
},
{
"end_time": 6679.326,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6663.916,
"text": " As with reference to the physical world. If you think of them as independently existing in Plato's heaven, no problem. The world could just cease to exist and still all those things in Plato's heaven would be just fine."
},
{
"end_time": 6704.292,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6679.633,
"text": " Could you still not save it by saying for example right now on my desktop I have a few items and then there's a there's n factorial way of well not your end but a little little case n way factorial way of arranging them and then you just keep adding so no matter what even when you have okay yeah yeah you can keep doing the combinatorics um ad nauseam but you're still never going to break out of the finite realm"
},
{
"end_time": 6735.094,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6706.869,
"text": " Because let's say we, okay, I'm just trying to grapple with this. So let's say we come up with large n, so that's your n. Then I say, well, let's still permute that a bit more. And then we get n factorial, the big n factorial. And then we say, well, that's a maximum. Then we just factorial again, and we still get infinity. So we still get any possible number can be reached with this, no? For mil, they have to be tied somehow to the empirical world. Remember, he's a staunch empiricist."
},
{
"end_time": 6753.063,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6735.538,
"text": " he doesn't like platonism, he doesn't like abstract entities. So if I have two apples, I can say okay one, two, and then I can bunch them together and say I can say now that's a third object."
},
{
"end_time": 6782.858,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6753.643,
"text": " Okay so he would have a he would have a problem with possibilities the reason why yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's right you can't they have to be concrete i have to be measuring four apples i could say that possibly you can arrange them in eight but that's because there exists something else that's i can concretize as eight sure okay okay okay that's right okay i get it i get it now i'm gonna read the last part of of your book which i found wonderful you say this my suggestion is very simple distant correlations are caused by the laws of nature"
},
{
"end_time": 6810.981,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6783.046,
"text": " I realize this almost sounds silly. One wants to say the correlations are the laws of nature, but this, if you recall in the preceding chapters, is not true. A law of nature is an independently existing abstract entity, a thing in its own right, which is responsible for physical regularities. Okay, now this was in regards to something called the entanglement of Bell's inequality, but we can forget about that. What you're suggesting is that the physical laws themselves are"
},
{
"end_time": 6840.998,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6811.459,
"text": " akin to entities and I haven't heard that expressed before and I think that's going to take me maybe weeks or months to fully apprehend and perhaps even contribute some of my own ideas to. It's a brazen statement and I'm a fan of audacity so can you expound on this? Yeah, I'm not sure. I wrote that quite a while ago and my views on quantum mechanics are constantly in flux so I'm not sure I would agree with that"
},
{
"end_time": 6869.787,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6841.459,
"text": " in particular. However, with the general idea, I certainly still I still think that is true. So let me explain what I'm trying to get at. For most philosophers, they really, really like David Hume. David Hume has a view about the nature of causation and the nature of laws of nature, which is very empiricist. And what it really amounts to is that a law of nature is nothing but an empirical regularity."
},
{
"end_time": 6900.026,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6870.452,
"text": " So if I say, all ravens are black, or it's a law of nature that ravens are black. What it just means is that every time I see a raven, it's black. That's it. That's all there is to it. It's just the raven. A human does away with causation. Yeah, causation is like that too. Fire is, fire feels hot. Every time I stick my hand in a fire, it feels hot."
},
{
"end_time": 6929.923,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6900.828,
"text": " The heat doesn't cause the pain. It's just correlated with the pain. Every time I stick my hand in the fire, I feel pain. It's just this regularity. There's nothing more to causation than the regularity. There's nothing more to a law of nature than a regularity. So if I said, explain why this raven is black, Hume would have to say, all ravens are black."
},
{
"end_time": 6960.23,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6930.828,
"text": " This is a raven, therefore this is black. That's the only explanation he can give. His laws of nature are really just summaries of what we experience. They can't really explain anything. They don't have any explanatory power. They're like data points and then generalizations? And then the law is nothing but a summary of the data points. Okay. Yeah. There's no explanatory power there."
},
{
"end_time": 6986.22,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6960.913,
"text": " Okay. Now, if you're a staunch empiricist, you're happy with that. You say science is in the business of organizing experience and predicting experience, but we're not in the business of actually explaining things. Okay. Forget explanation. That's not our business. Okay. I hate that view. I think we're in the business of explaining and understanding and stuff like that."
},
{
"end_time": 7015.333,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6986.834,
"text": " So a lot of hard nosed empiricists would call me, oh, it's just mushy, sentimental nonsense. But I'm sticking to my sentimentality, and I want understanding and I want explanations and so on. So here's an alternative view of laws of nature. Laws of nature are not just regularities. They're actually connections between properties. So I'll stick to the Raven example, even though"
},
{
"end_time": 7045.93,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 7016.084,
"text": " It's probably a poor example, but it's very easy to understand and illustrate. So when I say, so there's properties, raven, there's the property of ravenhood. Okay. There's the property of being a raven. Being a member of a set of ravens is ravenhood? Sure. Yeah. Okay. And there's the property of being black. Okay. And so the law of nature is not the regularity that all ravens are black. The law of nature is that"
},
{
"end_time": 7075.418,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 7046.288,
"text": " The property of being a raven is connected to the property of being black. And that's the law of nature. And that law of nature forces the regularity that all ravens are black. It's the law that explains why the raven is black. Why is this raven black? It's a raven. It has the property of ravenhood and that necessitates the property of blackness."
},
{
"end_time": 7105.606,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 7075.947,
"text": " Okay. That's it. I mean, it sounds like hokey nonsense. But the thing is, you're actually introducing something new in the world over and above the mere regularity. And that has explanatory power. Okay. So the way that I'm thinking about this is that there's a set of all black objects and then ravens are a subset of that. But I don't see what's different than what Hugh is saying."
},
{
"end_time": 7136.084,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 7106.135,
"text": " There'll be a property, a property of ravenhood and a property of blackness. And it's not just a coincidence, but there's a kind of what's sometimes called a nomic connection. This is like a physical necessity between the property of ravenhood and the property of blackness. There's a nomic necessity between the property of electron hood and negative charge."
},
{
"end_time": 7162.79,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 7136.817,
"text": " okay okay it's not just it's not just a an accidental correlation there's something deep yeah i guess what i'm having trouble is on for an electron it's like we define it as that which has this if we found an electron with a with negative two instead of negative one we wouldn't call it an electron we call it something else probably that's true um but that but that's"
},
{
"end_time": 7193.831,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 7164.411,
"text": " That's an evidential thing. Of course, all of this is fallible. When I say all ravens are black, it's a law of nature that ravens are black. Could be mistaken. We could find in Madagascar, you know, ravens that are green or something like that. But you're saying, okay, hypothetically, so I'm trying to understand this. So hypothetically, you're saying that a property of ravenhood is that it's black. Okay. Okay. So what does this have to do with, sorry, what does this have to do with causality?"
},
{
"end_time": 7224.087,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 7195.094,
"text": " Okay, so let me let me back up and make and make this view of laws of nature a bit more plausible. The Hume view. So you see, Hume view, it's just a regularity that all Ravens are black. Now let us suppose you're you're doing this video from your house, right or your apartment. Let's suppose that every human being who's ever been in that apartment has worn socks"
},
{
"end_time": 7255.162,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 7225.606,
"text": " Okay? Yeah. So is it a law of nature that everyone who enters Kurt's apartment wears socks? Is that a law of nature? In this house it is. Doesn't sound like a law of nature, but it's a regularity. And that apartment might be blown up tomorrow so that in its entire history, it was always true. Every time someone entered that apartment, they wore socks. See, oh, that's not a law of nature. That's just one of those accidents."
},
{
"end_time": 7284.77,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 7255.452,
"text": " How can I distinguish a genuine law of nature, which is a regularity for Hume, from these accidental things? Hume has no answer. There's no way you can separate the two. But if you believe that laws of nature are properties, then I would say it's the law of nature about ravens being black. The property of ravenhood necessitates the property of blackness. However, the property of entering"
},
{
"end_time": 7313.097,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 7285.162,
"text": " Kurt's apartment does not necessitate the property where salt. That was just contingent. That's right. And so now, you know, it's still empirical science has to discover what are the accidental regularities versus what are the laws that can be really hard. But the thing is, there is a metaphysical difference between the two and Hume hasn't got a metaphysical difference between the two. It's just, wow, it's just a big coincidence."
},
{
"end_time": 7342.79,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7315.009,
"text": " Okay. So now what does that have to do with, with... Causation is just the flip coin of laws of nature. So it is the law of nature that A's are B's is the same as A's cause B's. Yes. Yeah. What I'm curious about, what I found most fascinating was that it was as if you're saying E equals MC squared is it's like an object itself that comes in and influences the world. Yeah. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7370.947,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7343.166,
"text": " It's hard to figure out what the law of nature would be. I mean, I can say it's a law of nature, E equals MC squared. It may be hard to figure out, putting it in these metaphysical terms, the property of energy and how it's related to the property of mass and the property of speed of light and stuff like that. But on this view, there would be such a relation."
},
{
"end_time": 7399.531,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7371.596,
"text": " a relation of necessitation between energy as a property and mass as a property. Have you heard of Lee Smolin's principle of precedence? I know him well, and I have heard of it and I have forgotten what it is. Okay, it's it's something like that. One of the reasons the electron collapses in the way that it does or that sorry, this explains decoherence, I believe that the reason why"
},
{
"end_time": 7421.783,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7400.384,
"text": " I don't know what to say about that."
},
{
"end_time": 7449.104,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7422.534,
"text": " I'm just going to have to go and review. Right, right, right. Well, what I was wondering is, I'm curious if that merges both Platonists and non-Platonists, because it's as if it's formulating something that's true and putting it into this world that we now look to, to represent reality. But it was being invented at some point. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting the way you put it. I'm inclined to think it's not."
},
{
"end_time": 7475.742,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7449.582,
"text": " Because as I said, I know him quite well, and we argue over the issue of Platonism all the time. He's very anti-Platonist. Yeah. Are physicists generally anti-Platonists and mathematicians are pro? No. No, they're a mixed bag on it. They're all over the place. Most working physicists, I would say, don't have strong views about the nature of mathematics. For them, it's a tool."
},
{
"end_time": 7505.333,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7476.271,
"text": " They use it, they just sort of grab it out of the tool bag, use what they want, and don't have philosophical views about it. If they work in fundamental physics, as Lee Smolin does, he has very strong philosophical views about the nature of physics. You know, is he a realist? Is he, you know, what, and so on. He's unquestionably a scientific realist when it comes to physics, but he's an anti-realist when it comes to mathematics. Interesting. Same with"
},
{
"end_time": 7534.565,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7505.469,
"text": " Carlo Rovelli, who Smolin and Rovelli often work together. I've gotten to know Rovelli quite well because he now lives in London here. He's my neighbor. And he's unquestionably a scientific realist when it comes to physics, but hostile to Platonism. But this is true for both Rovelli and Smolin."
},
{
"end_time": 7556.561,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7535.009,
"text": " They can't quite put their finger on what it is they dislike about Platonism so much. So they're not winning the argument yet. So it's just a feeling that they have that they dislike it because it has a mystical quality to it? Not sure. Okay, Jim, thank you again so much. I appreciate it. A great pleasure."
},
{
"end_time": 7592.892,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7564.36,
"text": " Do you think we can derive an is from an ought or an ought from an is? That's a really hard question. The simple answer is no. Because one is an imperative sentence and the other is a declarative sentence. I mean, just logically, grammatically, they're going to be different kinds of things. We can come close. How can we come close? Well, we can come close in the sense that"
},
{
"end_time": 7621.186,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7593.251,
"text": " Let me let me actually back up and talk about it in a very indirect way. Okay. There's a traditional view that there's a distinction between facts and values. It's the same thing. There's just a cleavage between the two. And science is totally concerned with the facts and morality and maybe religion and other things could be concerned with values. The trouble with that view"
},
{
"end_time": 7649.906,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7621.937,
"text": " is that too many things in science, it's messy. There are all kinds of values even in just doing science itself. So for instance, I can tell you about how to find out an infinitude of facts and maybe one of them you might be interested in. So what is the distance between the tip of my nose and the center of mass of the sun? Now I'm going to move"
},
{
"end_time": 7678.387,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7650.299,
"text": " No, I can ask you about the center of mass of your nose and the center of mass of that guy out on the street from his nose to the center of mass of the moon. You could measure all of those things and they would all be factually correct if you measured correctly. But after one or two of these, that's enough. And you're going to make a value choice that pursuing more of these is not worthwhile and that there are other things that are more valuable. So all facts aren't on a par."
},
{
"end_time": 7704.872,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7679.036,
"text": " Some are clearly better than others. And you as a scientist are going to make these kinds of value judgments all the time. And you're going to make methodological value judgments, which are even more important. Like you're going to say, okay, I've got two theories here. Which one should I believe? Oh, this one's simpler. Well, that's actually a value judgment that simplicity is to be preferred to complexity when you're talking about scientific theories."
},
{
"end_time": 7731.015,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7705.384,
"text": " So right away, so all right, so we've got these two theories, I choose this one on the basis of simplicity. And now, now I say, oh, well, the facts, according to this theory are different than the facts. According to that theory, what are the facts? Well, I've just decided on this theory. So now I found out what the facts are. But it is it is value laden in the sense that I've chosen this theory on the basis of its simplicity. So you see how"
},
{
"end_time": 7761.391,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7731.51,
"text": " the values begin to infect the facts themselves. And once you get into fairly sophisticated science, and you're making methodological choices about how to pursue this, you'll find that there's all kinds of values that are getting tied up in there, and it's very, very hard to disentangle them. So in essence, no, it's not possible to derive an ought from an is. That's right, you can't. On the other hand, the more important"
},
{
"end_time": 7790.811,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7761.596,
"text": " important question is, can you disentangle your oughts from your izzes? And the answer to that question is, I think, no. And so now making a big fuss about the distinction between izz and ought is probably a bad idea. So when you're looking at another scientist, don't ask, just give me the facts, because a good scientist wouldn't be able to, who had a sophisticated view of this issue, would not be able to tell you what are the clear facts"
},
{
"end_time": 7817.517,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7791.254,
"text": " and how much the facts as presented, in fact, depended upon value decisions made along the history, the whole history of science up to that point. Now, that doesn't mean you can just say, well, I'm a racist, I'm proud of my values, and I'm going to let that guide my research, you know, from here on in. You can't get away with that stuff, though lots of people try."
},
{
"end_time": 7843.012,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7818.097,
"text": " But I do mean that there's going to be a lot of values that you're not even aware of. And they have they have been sprinkled through the entire history of science up until the present day. And it'll continue to be like that. What's your problem with Sam Harris? You said that you have he's a militant atheist, as am I a militant atheist. So I have no trouble with Sam Harris on that front."
},
{
"end_time": 7873.746,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7844.172,
"text": " The only thing I dislike about Sam Harris, and oh, by the way, he was the voice of reason in his discussion with Jordan Peterson. So you agreed with him there? Oh, completely. Yeah, yeah. Much more than I was expecting because I've seen Sam Harris before and he sort of irritates me. You don't like his views on something? Well, you see, there's a lot of militant atheists and often they're condemned as a group. Hitchens, Dawkins, you know, and Harris, Dennett,"
},
{
"end_time": 7903.37,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7874.309,
"text": " and Sam Harris. But Harris worries me unlike the others. And the thing that worries me is that he has a special hatred for Muslims. I don't. I think Muslims have ridiculous religious views, just like Christians have ridiculous religious views, as do Hindus and Buddhists and so on. They're all just ridiculous. But I think, especially in this age, in the current conditions,"
},
{
"end_time": 7928.097,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7903.865,
"text": " What if you're just criticizing Islam and not the Muslim people themselves? This is tricky. You can criticize Islam except that"
},
{
"end_time": 7957.056,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7928.831,
"text": " Islam is actually the belief held by people so you can't criticize Islam without criticizing people who are Muslim. Maybe that's one of the problems is that intellectuals like yourself like I we like to debate ideas and it's difficult to detach our egos from the ideas but we know that okay when a better idea comes along we adopt that and we take a little hit to the ego but we're different than our ideas. So there is a separation between the people and then the"
},
{
"end_time": 7986.63,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7957.568,
"text": " Sure, sure. And I have no trouble with that. The trouble is when you're talking to in a mass media and talking to a mass audience and you start railing against Islam, it just spills over to a dislike of that guy who's sitting next to you who happens to be a Muslim. Yeah, so I don't trust him. So I just want to make sure I understand. So something like when you criticize Islam, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 8010.009,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7987.415,
"text": " easily construed as criticizing Muslim people. And then the effects of you criticizing Islam is that other people aren't going to look at Muslim people with a negative light. That's right. Yeah. I mean, I don't like Islam any more than I like Christianity. But if I had a company and I'm going to hire people, I'm not going to discriminate against Muslims. I wouldn't hire a Christian over a Muslim. That seems to me to be just grotesque bigotry."
},
{
"end_time": 8026.988,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 8010.486,
"text": " I think religion is one of the worst things that's ever happened to us."
},
{
"end_time": 8056.067,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 8027.585,
"text": " Humanity. Yeah. And a great deal of harm. Let's get to Platonism. Let's get to Platonism because this is your domain. This is what you are. So let's explain what Platonism is and then let's give people a test so that they can find out if they're Platonist or not. All right. Well, when I when I teach topics related to this, I usually ask my my students on the very at the very beginning whether they think mathematics is discovered or invented."
},
{
"end_time": 8086.254,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 8056.834,
"text": " Is it discovered like physics or is it invented like the game of chess? And I'll get very mixed reactions. No, I'd say more on the discovery side, but a very sizable number on the invention side. Let's say two thirds, one third, something like that. And and then I tell them things that often surprise them. And that is that working mathematicians are overwhelmingly Platonists. That is, a Platonist is"
},
{
"end_time": 8116.698,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 8087.108,
"text": " very briefly believes that mathematics is there waiting to be discovered it's independent from us mathematical facts would be true even if no one ever discovered them even if there were no intelligent creatures in the entire history of the universe pi would still be an irrational number on the other hand chess would not exist if there were no intelligent beings okay most working mathematicians now you you were a math student"
},
{
"end_time": 8137.944,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 8116.886,
"text": " So you may have picked this up from your teachers. Most working mathematicians are, in fact, Platonists. They believe that when they do mathematical research, they're investigating something that's there waiting to be discovered. And if they get it right, they have discovered something new. Okay, so that's Platonism. That's Platonism in a nutshell."
},
{
"end_time": 8163.336,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 8138.114,
"text": " And you're a Platonist. I'm a Platonist. So what does it mean to exist? What does that mean? Because I actually consider myself to be a Platonist. I would actually think that the game of chess does exist in some form in the sense that there are these rules and game theoretically you can construct a model of chess and so that if you can form a mathematical model of it then it exists. You're right. You're right. So my example, you can fuss with my example"
},
{
"end_time": 8192.022,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 8163.78,
"text": " But it's just meant to be a crude example for forgetting. Can we not then extrapolate it and say that everything that possibly is logical exists? Well, there is a view about possible worlds. Okay, so whenever we speak in a certain mode, like I say, there are no elephants in this room. But it is possible that there is an elephant in this room. It's not actual."
},
{
"end_time": 8219.462,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 8192.329,
"text": " but it is possible. What does that mean? What does that even mean? Well, one view says you have to understand reality is made up of possible worlds. The actual world is one world and another world. There's another world that's almost exactly like this one. There's a counterpart. I'm in it. Multi-verse theory of quantum mechanics. Completely different. Yeah. This is a, this is a logical thing, not a physics thing."
},
{
"end_time": 8248.507,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 8219.957,
"text": " Um, so there's another possible world that's exactly like this one, except there's an elephant over there in the corner. Okay. Otherwise they're exactly the same. That is a possible world. And when I, and for me to say it is possible that there is an elephant in this room, that is a true sentence because there exists a possible world with an elephant in it. Okay. Can we not extrapolate that to God that it's true that God exists? That's really an interesting question. And it's actually debated."
},
{
"end_time": 8277.978,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 8249.258,
"text": " Because it sounds like well, maybe atheism is true in this world, but maybe there's another world and which there is a God That's gonna be problematic But it's but it's actually up in the air It's not clear it's not clear that it's logically tenable and that's why it's controversial because intuitively it seems like it ought to be Yeah, if an elephant can be here, then why can't we make an abstract notion of something? Yeah, there could have been a God there just isn't okay that sounds sensible"
},
{
"end_time": 8308.08,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 8278.592,
"text": " But if there could have been a God, then there will be a God in a possible world. The trouble with that is the way we conceptualize God is God is a necessary being. And that means if God exists at all, God must exist in every possible world. It's a kind of all or nothing entity because of the way God... Because omnipresence, the omnipresence of God? Not just omnipresence, but I mean in every world, whether there is a God or not,"
},
{
"end_time": 8335.93,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 8308.319,
"text": " It's not an option. It's either in no world or in every world. Mathematics is like this. See, if pi is an irrational number, then pi is an irrational number in every possible world. There's no world in which it's equal to three and a quarter or something like that. It's always irrational. And it's the same with God. Either God just can't exist. It's impossible. It's like a contradiction. How's that commensurate with the elephant, though?"
},
{
"end_time": 8363.933,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 8336.067,
"text": " Because to me, if you can construct an elephant in another world, how do you know that that elephant being true? Now we have to get to some physics. But how do you know that that elephant can logically exist? Just like logically, pi is irrational. OK, we can prove that pi is irrational. Now we're saying there's an elephant in this room and we're saying that that's possible. How do we know that's possible? How do we know that's a possibility? Just like we know for sure pi is irrational. OK, fair enough."
},
{
"end_time": 8394.514,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 8364.872,
"text": " Prima facie, it's possible. Like, you can't think of any principle objection to there being an elephant in this room. You say, well, how did it get here? You know, answer they, it's a small elephant, they brought it up in the elevator, walked it over here, and it's been sitting here since we started talking. You can easily imagine a scenario in which, you know, something like that is the case. So the possibility of an elephant in this room is a pretty clear case of"
},
{
"end_time": 8423.933,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 8395.162,
"text": " of a possibility. But the God one, that's a really hard nut to crack, because it seems like God, because remember, God is defined in a certain way. In fact, some people even define God as the necessary being. And then anything that's necessary must be true in every possible world. This is standard logic talk about possibility. And God would have the same status as"
},
{
"end_time": 8453.797,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8425.06,
"text": " Two plus two equals four. If it's true anywhere, it's true everywhere. Two plus two equals five. If it's false anywhere, it's false everywhere. Okay? And so God is either like one or the other. I come down on the side that God's like a contradiction, an absurdity. Well, that only disproves the Christian notion of God. So what about these Hindu notions of God? Oh, yeah, that's fine. Yeah, so then they could exist. They could exist. Yeah, you're against and"
},
{
"end_time": 8483.046,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8454.019,
"text": " Omnipresent, necessary. Don't say omnipresent. Omnipresent just means God is everywhere in space. That's un-Christian and un-Muslim. The standard view is God is external, outside of space and time, and can observe us, cognizes us, but isn't in here participating. It might intervene for a miracle here and there, but the idea that God is one of us, like that song, God is one of us, just a stranger on the bus."
},
{
"end_time": 8505.845,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8483.422,
"text": " That's heresy for Christians. Wouldn't Christians say that you're made in the image of God? There's a little bit of God in you, and every time you act, God is almost acting through you. When you make a decision, it's like you're a conscious being. They're going to take that as a metaphor. I'm just debating you. What if it's not? What if that is the Christian notion of God? That actually there's a little spark. There is an external God, but also he's in you as well."
},
{
"end_time": 8534.514,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8507.483,
"text": " Okay, could that exist in these possible worlds? Is that commensurate with the idea of not not if it's not if it's part and parcel of a certain kind of God who can't exist in principle, but a lesser God. I mean, look, you know the difference between deism and theism. Theism is like standard religion, organized religion. God is God cares about you. God is a person. It's a personal God."
},
{
"end_time": 8559.855,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8534.855,
"text": " You can talk to God, he might answer your prayers, all that sort of stuff. That's a theistic view. A deistic view of God just says there is a kind of supernatural creator of all of this, but he doesn't give a damn about us. Maybe he died after he created it, maybe even he's a committee. Maybe there's 27 of them and they fought over the details and that's why a lot goes wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 8590.418,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8560.435,
"text": " and doesn't intervene, set things up to just run like a magnificent clockwork. That's that's a deism. Yeah. Okay. So 18th century would be atheists were often deists. And that's because Darwin hadn't come along yet. And they, they couldn't make sense of design in nature. And they thought you have to have an intelligent designer for this. They couldn't escape that. They certainly didn't believe a word of Christianity. But they did believe in some kind of intelligent creator of all of this"
},
{
"end_time": 8617.346,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8590.811,
"text": " And that's a very common view in the Enlightenment. The American founding fathers, you know, like Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, they were deists. They weren't Christians. Americans don't even know their own history. They make a big deal of being a Christian nation. Actually, they started out as an anti-Christian nation. So you must love America. Not with Trump."
},
{
"end_time": 8651.34,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8622.551,
"text": " I should explain Sokol's motivation. Okay, so Sokol is very left wing, very concerned with social issues. And he was worried that, well, like me, he is also I'm also quite concerned with a whole lot of social issues. And I worry about students who who would become, you know, socially active in in a efficient and productive way."
},
{
"end_time": 8675.316,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8651.681,
"text": " because they're pro-science. They're willing to, you know, get the facts right and do serious investigations into the social situation and so on. The trouble with postmodernism, it becomes a bit lazy. It's given to sloganeering. It's given to analyses that"
},
{
"end_time": 8706.596,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8676.613,
"text": " Well, I don't know. They see certain things as political that aren't political and often just pick up the wrong end of the stick. Anyway, Sokol, as you already indicated, submitted this ridiculous paper and said, I'd like to publish this. And it made all kinds of claims using quasi-technical jargon, some of the things you would know. So he said, mathematics supports a woman's right to an abortion."
},
{
"end_time": 8735.367,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8707.159,
"text": " It's in the form of the axiom of choice. You know this? Okay. Now you having a math background, you understand that the axiom of choice has got nothing to do with free will choice and whether you have an abortion. Um, so it was full of jargon, just ridiculous jargon like this. And the, and the editors published it. I've always had a bit of a guilty conscience about it, even though I completely support Sokol and his motivation."
},
{
"end_time": 8764.394,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8735.896,
"text": " I was editing a journal at the time. And when I saw the headline in the New York Times, it was on the front page. And all I could I choked. Oh, God, this could happen to me. I wonder if anybody's hoaxing me. And the thing is, in the popular press, there's all this talk about peer review. And, and they don't really understand the peer review process. And why you would ignore the process in certain cases,"
},
{
"end_time": 8793.404,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8764.889,
"text": " and do something else. And it's not intellectual corruption. It's just something else is going on. So if you've got a journal, a physics journal, it's a very well established discipline with methodological guidelines that have been laid down. They're reliable. And if somebody follows them, they can be okay. If they violate them badly, you think, no, this is a piece of garbage. We're not going to take it seriously. But if you're starting a new field, like"
},
{
"end_time": 8822.227,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8794.65,
"text": " postmodern accounts, postmodern accounts of science or something like that. You don't have a long tradition that you can point to and say, this is this sort of thing works. That sort of thing that you're you're you're you're in virgin territory. And people who are doing that actually need to be, you know, encouraged and given to explore. Yeah. And given a lot of free rein, don't come down on them too hard for, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 8850.998,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8822.619,
"text": " publishing stuff that turns out to be crap. Now, what about the grievance study? Well, I'm in I'm in favor of giving them a lot of free rein. By by grievance studies, you mean things like women's studies, black studies, aboriginal studies and so on? No, I think that came out. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know it well. I read a very short article on it. But I don't like the spirit behind attacking them. I think they do need to be attacked every now and then."
},
{
"end_time": 8878.114,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8851.34,
"text": " And they certainly can't, shouldn't just think that they can do any old crap at all. But often they're trying to do stuff and they don't have set guidelines to know when, when something is going to work well and when something isn't going to work well. They want to encourage a very generous and broad conversation about issues. And I think that's fair and it's intellectually healthy."
},
{
"end_time": 8899.343,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8878.575,
"text": " And it's part and parcel with academic freedom. The only thing I have against postmodernism, not these disciplines like women's studies or anything like that, I think it's terrific. I think we should have women's studies and so on. But I am on the pro-science side of the left, and that's because I think"
},
{
"end_time": 8926.101,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8899.923,
"text": " Once you, if you're, if you're a serious postmodern who says, oh, truth, truth, smooth, you know, uh, facts, max, you know, whatever, um, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. It's really, really important to get things like, um, global warming right in order to, you know, to understand what's going on and to, and to tackle it, um, uh, politically to solve these problems."
},
{
"end_time": 8951.186,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8926.544,
"text": " I don't see that postmoderns have ever done anything useful in combating climate change. The facts about racism, the facts about the climate, the facts about the pharmaceutical industry, those things are really important that we get those things out. There might be some truth to this. So I usually back off."
},
{
"end_time": 8977.961,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8951.476,
"text": " and say, well, you know, some approximation to an egalitarian socialist world. And maybe some people are five times as well off as other people. But that would be such an incredible improvement over the current situation that I'd go happily to my grave, you know, if the difference between the poorest and the richest were only fivefold in wealth."
},
{
"end_time": 9007.125,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8978.456,
"text": " As you know, it's much, much, much, much greater than that now. I also think what I care about most of all, you see, a lot of people care about rights and they care about freedom and freedom of speech and so on. And I think those things are important. But I think human well-being trumps everything. If all humans are reasonably well off and they're happy and content"
},
{
"end_time": 9036.561,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 9007.568,
"text": " then that's the kind of world I want. If we have to sacrifice some rights, say you even limit freedom of speech to some extent for that, I'd be willing to do that. I think going to the wall for complete freedom of speech, for instance, is a complete mistake. I like Canada's laws. We have a great deal of freedom of speech here, but not complete. So for instance, we have hate laws. I'm in favor of hate laws."
},
{
"end_time": 9062.312,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 9037.022,
"text": " I have lots of philosophical colleagues and American friends and so on who think the US is much better in this regard. There's just no constraints on your speech. I mean, you can't libel someone. You can't incite violence. Yeah, you can incite violence. But you can deny the Holocaust in the United States. You could declare that Muslims are a treacherous group of people and they ought to be oppressed and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 9083.456,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 9062.688,
"text": " You can't say that in Canada. You could be prosecuted under the law for that. I favor those constraints on freedom of speech. And I would favor probably other constraints, too, on other kinds of things that we consider free, in exchange for an enormous increase in human well-being."
},
{
"end_time": 9113.473,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 9083.985,
"text": " that we're happier, healthier, we have richer lives. People can intellectually develop and physically develop, you know, to the best of their abilities. That's the kind of world I want. That's a very much a left-wing view of things. I think that ought to be, you know, as far as you go, but it's going a hell of a long way. Usually when the left is attacked for going too far, it's either"
},
{
"end_time": 9143.746,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 9114.019,
"text": " They want to use a great deal of force to bring about egalitarianism. That's one way. And the other way is the political correctness. They're accused of excessive political correctness. I think that's just almost always that's a false charge. That's just a bogus charge. That's like Donald Trump, you know, complaining that millions of people are streaming across the Mexican border, murdering and raping. It's just a lie, right? It's just a grotesque lie."
},
{
"end_time": 9158.575,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 9144.94,
"text": " Okay, there is something, we never actually talked about this, but I'm going to interject this because this is an allusion back to what we were talking about earlier. Political correctness is not a threat to the university."
},
{
"end_time": 9187.176,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 9159.923,
"text": " We're incredibly free to do whatever the hell we want. Nobody is being suppressed inside a university. It's a remarkable. Universities are remarkable institutions. I think they're wonderful institutions. But what about what happened with Jordan Peterson where they didn't even want him to speak and they had a whole protest against him and they want to get him fired? Yeah, that's probably a bad idea. He should probably be allowed to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 9216.527,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 9187.619,
"text": " Probably. Yeah, I will say probably, because I'm not absolutely definite. Very likely, I think. But I won't say that about absolutely everybody. So, for instance, let's take, what's his name? Spencer. Richard Spencer. Richard Spencer, who's a white nationalist. Yes. Yeah. I have serious qualms about allowing him to speak. We,"
},
{
"end_time": 9246.067,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 9218.217,
"text": " universities, that is, are in a kind of a bind here. If we let, if the universities let Richard Spencer speak, he gets a kind of prestige and cache. So you're worried about legitimizing his point of view? Yeah, just by allowing him to speak at a university. And then, but if we turn him down, then we get branded as being, as censoring him political correctness and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 9269.343,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 9246.988,
"text": " Universities can't win and often right wingers know we can't win and often they don't even care whether they're allowed to speak or not because they know they're going to win just by either speaking or being turned down and then they go to the press and say we're being censored and then they get"
},
{
"end_time": 9289.599,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 9269.616,
"text": " They win some notoriety for this. Anyway, I don't think that real intellectual life of the university is in any way harmed by so-called political correctness. The real dangers to universities is completely tangential to this. The real dangers is the commercialization of research."
},
{
"end_time": 9319.804,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 9290.333,
"text": " We haven't talked about that at all. And that's a really big deal, and it's an incredibly deep subject, and you probably don't want to go into it. And you have a talk about that, right? I used to do a lot of work. I haven't done much recently, but I used to do a lot of work on this. Do you have one that's public that people can go to? That people can search on YouTube? Yeah, yeah. I'm not off the top of my head, but I can find something. We'll put the links in the description. And give you a link, yeah. But the commercialization of research is having a tremendous effect."
},
{
"end_time": 9348.831,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 9320.23,
"text": " pharmaceuticals I think are just about the worst yeah it skews research so health problems are not tackled by the best solution they're tackled by chemical solutions which might be the best solution but maybe diet exercise for depression things like exercise are at least as effective as the the best antidepressants but you but you can't yeah but you can't make you can't patent it"
},
{
"end_time": 9377.5,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 9349.189,
"text": " And so it's having an effect on what kind of research is actually carried out. That is a real worry. So if we're interested in the truth and not just the truth, but truths that are good for human beings, you know, that improves the quality of our lives, our health, for instance, then we have to really, really, really worry and get a grip. There's just far too much money coming in from industry. And they're there. In fact, often they don't give all that much money."
},
{
"end_time": 9407.363,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 9377.892,
"text": " but they'll they top up like the government but we get money from the government funding and that's arm's length that is the government doesn't interfere with that they just give you know the National Research Council money and then they distribute it in a peer-reviewed way to physics and chemistry and so on but often individual researchers will go to will apply for money from a pharmaceutical company so they're getting a ton of money from the government and then pharmaceutical company will often give them"
},
{
"end_time": 9432.756,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 9407.91,
"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": 9450.93,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9433.217,
"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": 9481.442,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9451.578,
"text": " You're not a fan of the FDA. The FDA is not so bad. The FDA doesn't have enough... I remember hearing a talk that the FDA's restrictions are too much, are too restrictive, because they're limiting the amount of drugs that can come into market. Oh, no, they're not restrictive enough in that sense. Drug companies will complain that they're slow and restrictive and so on. No, we need to change the FDA rules. Well, the Americans need to change them. Right now, the"
},
{
"end_time": 9508.08,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9481.903,
"text": " They are mandated to license anything that goes through a clinical trial and is considered effective when compared with a placebo. That can be incredibly minuscule, you know, and yet billions of dollars will be spent on these drugs. And if this drug gets patented and there's only generics to compete with it, then they'll pour a ton of money into advertising."
},
{
"end_time": 9535.896,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9508.865,
"text": " Doctors will start prescribing this and doctors can be corrupted by their prescription habits and get money from the pharmaceuticals. Yeah, you know about the cheerleaders. Yeah, that's remarkable. Often a very old generic drug is much, much better than these newer drugs. Fewer side effects, better"
},
{
"end_time": 9565.043,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9536.152,
"text": " positive effect, incredibly cheap to produce and so on. It's really a tragedy. It's hard to know how to combat it. I think I know how to combat it in Canada. Hard to know how to combat it in the United States because the United States economy is so structured around intellectual property rights. I've tried to figure out how much of American exports to the world is in the form of IP rights. Whenever you buy anything that's American,"
},
{
"end_time": 9594.445,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9565.674,
"text": " I mean, you buy a piece of plastic, but its value is in the form of IP rights, mostly. And so what percentage of the economy is actually IP rights? I don't actually have views across the board on patents, but on drugs, I think it's a terrible mistake and we should eliminate patents on drugs. One of the reasons is, unlike say my new iPhone, full of patents, but I can tell whether the damn thing works."
},
{
"end_time": 9615.981,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9594.667,
"text": " I just turn it on and it works or it doesn't work. But in the case of almost every drug, there's no way for an individual to determine whether he or she is benefiting from this drug. All you can do is look at it in a very statistical way. And there's an incentive to produce a drug that works as long as you take it. True. And that's not good."
},
{
"end_time": 9641.493,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9616.578,
"text": " Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, treating chronic diseases is much better than curing something with a vaccine, for instance. Yeah, all kinds of problems like this. Anyway, commercialization, that's, I think, is the real threat to intellectual life and not political correctness, which is really, really small potatoes, even in its worst examples."
},
{
"end_time": 9678.012,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9649.206,
"text": " You said that you had some trouble with Jordan Peterson's point of view of truth. Oh, well, watching, uh, watching a video that you directed me to, and I'm glad, uh, this was a video, uh, a discussion between him and Sam Harris. Who you also don't necessarily like. I have special problems with Harris. Maybe talk about that later. Yeah. So this was, uh, Harris invited him on and Harris seems to be"
},
{
"end_time": 9707.21,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9678.473,
"text": " one of these people who doesn't like political correctness and thought that Jordan Peterson might be good, a nice ally, perhaps because he too is anti political correctness and so on. But then they got bogged down on this notion of truth. And as far as I can tell, Peterson is just wacko on the concept of truth. I should just explain when people talk about truth,"
},
{
"end_time": 9737.466,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9707.978,
"text": " They're not talking about particular truths, like we can argue whether or not the neutrino has mass. Okay, we don't know what's true and we don't know what's false. And we can argue about that and produce evidence. This is arguing about the very concept of truth itself. What does it mean for something to be true? And normal person, normal philosophers, standard philosophers, take a more or less a common sense view about truth. So a sentence, a statement,"
},
{
"end_time": 9766.391,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9737.756,
"text": " a belief is true because it corresponds to the way things are. So the sentence, there is a recording device on the table. That's a sentence. That's a true sentence because there is in fact a table, a recording device, and one is on top of the other. It's a very simple conception of truth. There are other conceptions. Some people say, no, no,"
},
{
"end_time": 9795.811,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9767.466,
"text": " Truth has got to be linked to evidence. So the sentence, there is a recording device on the table, is true, if and only if there's some method of gathering evidence to establish that truth. Lacking that evidence, it's not true. If you're a realist about truth as I am, then a sentence could be true, even though the evidence isn't there for it. You shouldn't believe it,"
},
{
"end_time": 9821.63,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9796.732,
"text": " If you don't have the evidence, that's a different matter. But truth and evidence are things that you can pry apart. So what is Peterson's conception of truth as you understand it? It's a crazy idea that he calls Darwinian. And so a sentence is true if it has survival value. He's thinking of this as a very crude thing. There are some"
},
{
"end_time": 9850.128,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9822.398,
"text": " philosophical ideas about truth that are maybe a little close to that, you know, that he might if he knew about them, he could say, oh, that's I sort of believe that pragmatism, pragmatism often identifies truth with what is workable, detectable, serviceable to life, serviceable to life, but it's more much more sophisticated than mere crude Darwinian survival value."
},
{
"end_time": 9880.009,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9850.725,
"text": " But you can sort of see some kinship between Peterson's view and pragmatism. Now the trouble with Peterson's crude view is there's a ton of stuff we know that's independent of survival value. In fact, may even be true contrary to survival value. So just think of all the things you know about quantum field theory that wouldn't help you in life struggle at all. If you were in"
},
{
"end_time": 9910.913,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9881.015,
"text": " If you were in the jungle trying to, like our distant ancestors, you're not going to survive, thank goodness, based on your knowledge of quantum field theory. You could make out a Jordan type case for a lot of crude, simple beliefs, like trust your colour perception to distinguish edible things from non-edible things, that sort of level. That's fine. But to enter into"
},
{
"end_time": 9924.565,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9911.425,
"text": " The realm of sophisticated science, which he certainly wants to participate in, he's got to have an awful lot more subtle and sophisticated view of what he's doing than his simple Darwinian view of truth."
}
]
}No transcript available.