Speaker 1: We shouldn't be surprised that stories can help us interpret
Speaker 1: the mathematical explanations of the physical world that are at
Speaker 1: the basis of physics.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: You know those moments when you're absolutely certain you know
Speaker 3: why your partner did something that is driving you crazy.
Speaker 3: What if quantum physics proves you can't be that certain
Speaker 3: about anything? Today? Philosopher William Egginton joins me to discuss
Speaker 3: his book The Rigor of Angels, where a physicist, a philosopher,
Speaker 3: and a storyteller all stumbled upon the same unsettling truth.
Speaker 3: We mistake our model of reality for reality itself. What
Speaker 3: really stuck with me in this conversation is how quantum
Speaker 3: mechanics doesn't just challenge what we know about particles. It
Speaker 3: challenges what we think we know about ourselves and each other,
Speaker 3: and as it turns out, learning to live with that
Speaker 3: uncertainty might just be the key to feeding the good
Speaker 3: wolf within us. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the
Speaker 3: one you feed. Hi, Bill, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hey, Eric, it's good to be here.
Speaker 3: I'm excited to have you on because we're going to
Speaker 3: be discussing your book, which is called The Rigor of
Speaker 3: Angels Borjaes Heisenberg, Kant and the Ultimate Nature of Reality,
Speaker 3: which is pretty heavy stuff for the one you feed,
Speaker 3: but I'm pretty certain we're still going to make a
Speaker 3: great conversation out of it. But before we start, I'd
Speaker 3: like to start by asking you about the parable that
Speaker 3: we use. And the parable goes like this. There's a
Speaker 3: grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life,
Speaker 3: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 3: at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 3: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 3: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 3: and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it
Speaker 3: for a second. They look up at their grandparent and
Speaker 3: they say, well, which one wins, And the grandfather says,
Speaker 3: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 3: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 3: your life and in the work.
Speaker 1: That you do. The beautiful parable. And I'll honestly tell
Speaker 1: you I had not heard it before, but I find
Speaker 1: it very meaningful. It resonates with some of the biggest
Speaker 1: philosophical influences for me, in particular psychoanalysis Freud, this idea
Speaker 1: that we have that the self is not unitary, that
Speaker 1: the self is divided, and some of the ideas that
Speaker 1: I work through in the rigor of Angels is not
Speaker 1: only is it not unitary, but that we are down
Speaker 1: at the deepest core of ourselves relational, and without those
Speaker 1: relations we wouldn't even be a self in the first place.
Speaker 1: So often we have, in what we call Western metaphysics,
Speaker 1: this idea of at the core of ourselves some kind
Speaker 1: of a unified identity that then fights its way out
Speaker 1: into the world, and you can think about descartes this
Speaker 1: idea of a thinking substance that works its way out
Speaker 1: and influences the world of things, of extended substances in
Speaker 1: the world, and what you're parable. And my reference to
Speaker 1: psychoanalysis tries to remind us all the time is that
Speaker 1: that thinking substance isn't a substance, not a one thing.
Speaker 1: It's a set of relations at all times, and that
Speaker 1: it can never really be closed and become one. I
Speaker 1: also like the side of parable where the child is
Speaker 1: asking which side wins, because really we are always struggling.
Speaker 1: The great French philosopher Jacques delhi Da the last interview
Speaker 1: or one of the last interviews he gave with the
Speaker 1: Le Monde actually gave its titles justus on I'm at
Speaker 1: war with myself and I do find who we are
Speaker 1: often at at our heart and some sort of an
Speaker 1: expression of a struggle, struggle between impulses, struggle of which
Speaker 1: of ourselves is going to win out in the end.
Speaker 1: And the fact that that's where your title your podcast
Speaker 1: comes from.
Speaker 3: That's a great and beautiful response. And I'm tempted to
Speaker 3: dive right into the deep end of the pool there
Speaker 3: around what the nature of the self. But I'm going
Speaker 3: to resist, but we're going to get there. I want
Speaker 3: to start though, by talking a little bit about your book.
Speaker 3: And in your book you are bringing together three different thinkers.
Speaker 3: Tell us about who the three different thinkers are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the book really is sort of a braided,
Speaker 1: if you will, intellectual biography of three extremely important people
Speaker 1: to me. The Argentine poet and short story writer Jute
Speaker 1: Luis Borges, whose life spanned the twentieth century, his almost
Speaker 1: exact contemporary, the German physicist Van Heisenberg, who first was
Speaker 1: the main force behind the invention of quantum mechanics, and
Speaker 1: the eighteenth early nineteenth century philosopher Manuel Kant, who's in
Speaker 1: some ways the most important figure of modern European philosophy
Speaker 1: just because of the number of areas that he touched.
Speaker 1: And the story behind this book was an idea, if
Speaker 1: you will, that all of these three great thinkers from
Speaker 1: three radically different fields philosophy, poetry and literature, and quantum physics,
Speaker 1: so the hardest physics of the natural world, all converge
Speaker 1: upon this idea that when we are trying to understand
Speaker 1: the world, what we're trying to truly understand is a
Speaker 1: model of the world that we make ourselves as humans,
Speaker 1: and that we can be led astray by the belief.
Speaker 1: And yet it's coreb that returns over and over again
Speaker 1: that in fact, we're not understanding some image we make
Speaker 1: of the world as humans. We're understanding the world itself.
Speaker 1: And as simple a mistake as that seems, it can
Speaker 1: have enormous consequences.
Speaker 3: You say in the book that this book is in
Speaker 3: many ways a cautionary tale about the danger of assuming
Speaker 3: that reality must conform to the image we construct of it,
Speaker 3: and the damage that our fidelity to such a seductive
Speaker 3: ideal can reak. So I want to just make sure
Speaker 3: we put a fine point on what this danger is.
Speaker 3: And you say elsewhere that these three thinkers shared an
Speaker 3: uncommon immunity to the temptation to think they knew God's
Speaker 3: secret plan. So talk to me about what you mean
Speaker 3: when you say our attempts to understand actual reality and
Speaker 3: the limits to our knowledge.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. So, I like the idea of cautionary tale. I
Speaker 1: think I got that ultimately from Bories, since he's a
Speaker 1: tale teller, and I, after years and years of reading,
Speaker 1: began to realize that there was a common theme to
Speaker 1: many of Bores's stories, and that common theme was a
Speaker 1: searcher is out trying to find some sort of an
Speaker 1: ultimate answer, and he's tempted by this ultimate answer, drawn
Speaker 1: towards it, and then ultimately either falters in that quest
Speaker 1: or in fact thinks he It's often he succeeds in
Speaker 1: that quest, but that success leads to the destruction of himself,
Speaker 1: the destruction of the world. And what Boras is trying
Speaker 1: to show us over and over again is that knowledge
Speaker 1: is inherently faulty. Knowledge of the world is inherently limited.
Speaker 1: The shortest parables since we started this show with a parable,
Speaker 1: it was a beautiful He has also parables. He has
Speaker 1: a beautiful one called the Parable of the Palace that
Speaker 1: I sometimes cite, but this one is just called a
Speaker 1: rigor in science. I have a recording. In fact, it
Speaker 1: takes him fifty five seconds in his old age and
Speaker 1: his faltering, slightly wheezy voice to read this story. And
Speaker 1: it just tells of an emperor who has control over
Speaker 1: an entire realm and sends out his cartographers to map
Speaker 1: the realm, and the first time they come back with
Speaker 1: an enormous map, say the size of a small city,
Speaker 1: and he says, it's good map, but it's just it's
Speaker 1: not accurate enough. So he sends them out again, and
Speaker 1: then they come back with a much bigger map, and
Speaker 1: this covers the size of a state in his realm,
Speaker 1: and he says, this is really a much better map,
Speaker 1: but it's still not as accurate as I want. And
Speaker 1: when they come back the third time, they come with
Speaker 1: a map that point for point corresponds in actual size
Speaker 1: to the realm itself. And then Bordes finishes the tale
Speaker 1: by saying the map and in fact the realm itself,
Speaker 1: are nothing but the dusty remnants that blow across the
Speaker 1: desert of what was. So the idea that knowledge what
Speaker 1: we're seeking of the world can't be perfect, because if
Speaker 1: it's perfect, it's as useless as a map that corresponds
Speaker 1: point for point and actual size to the realm that
Speaker 1: it's supposed supposed to be mapping. You know, the old
Speaker 1: days we used to go on road trips and carry
Speaker 1: paper maps. Will imagine you're doing a trip of the
Speaker 1: United States, but your paper map is the size of
Speaker 1: the United States. Not very helpful. It's completely debilitating in
Speaker 1: every possible way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how does that tie to or does it tie
Speaker 3: it all to what we're starting to see in the
Speaker 3: world today, which is that information has become in many
Speaker 3: ways almost infinite to us, Right, you know, the number
Speaker 3: of things that we can I'm going to use this
Speaker 3: word loosely, no, is almost infinite. And it sounds a
Speaker 3: little bit like what you're saying, because I think at
Speaker 3: a certain point, all this information that we keep absorbing
Speaker 3: and consuming is a useless map at a certain point.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good way of thinking about it.
Speaker 1: Because Boys is just such a great author to think
Speaker 1: through these issues with. And I'm far from the first
Speaker 1: one to make this comparison, but he had this story,
Speaker 1: the Library of Babbel, which is again it's a kind
Speaker 1: of a parable, but it's a parable about information. And
Speaker 1: the idea of the Library of Babbel is it sets
Speaker 1: up a scenario in which every possible book exists in
Speaker 1: the library, only one copy of every possible book exists,
Speaker 1: and every possible book is the result of a generative
Speaker 1: mechanism that involves the twenty two in the case of
Speaker 1: the Spanish language, letters of the Spanish language and a
Speaker 1: certain number of constraints, how many shelves and the library,
Speaker 1: and in each room of the library, etcetera, etcetera, and
Speaker 1: so forth. But the idea there is you can imagine
Speaker 1: a scenario which a very limited set of signs conspire
Speaker 1: with each other, mix with each other, intermingle with each
Speaker 1: other to create every possible word, every possible meaning, every
Speaker 1: possible story we've ever told. But of course, within all
Speaker 1: of that maze, and it's inconceivably large. And I talk
Speaker 1: about the size of this library in the book, truly
Speaker 1: inconceivably large, to give you a sense, our actual known
Speaker 1: universe would be about the size of a proton in
Speaker 1: comparison with the universe that Botes imagines. But it's not infinite.
Speaker 1: So it's an absurdly large maze of rooms upon rooms
Speaker 1: upon rooms filled with books. You can actually find, in
Speaker 1: theory every meaningful sentence ever created by the history of humanity,
Speaker 1: conceivably in every possible language as well. But the chances
Speaker 1: of any one person finding a book that from beginning
Speaker 1: to end makes any sense whatsoever are calculable at zero,
Speaker 1: because the vast, vast, vast vast majority of the books
Speaker 1: will be jumples of science that don't mean anything at all.
Speaker 1: And I think in some ways, you know, as I said,
Speaker 1: I'm not the first to say this, but the world
Speaker 1: of information, of just raw data that's out there and
Speaker 1: available and that we comb through it on a daily basis,
Speaker 1: is in some ways like that library. It's just jumbles
Speaker 1: upon jumbles of I don't even want to call it information.
Speaker 1: That's why we distinguish right between information, which has applicability
Speaker 1: and utility, and data, which is this sort of empty mess.
Speaker 1: But we're surrounded by profits, by interpreters who take it
Speaker 1: upon themselves to point the way to us, or point
Speaker 1: out what in this jumble should be paid attention to
Speaker 1: what is meaningful. And of course those profits, more often
Speaker 1: than not now are in fact algorithms that are programmed
Speaker 1: to be the profits, that guide towards certain sets of
Speaker 1: data and identifies this as information and hence useful to us,
Speaker 1: but under which definition as determined by whom, usually by
Speaker 1: corporations who are intending to get profit out of our
Speaker 1: following that way. And I think that's exactly right, that
Speaker 1: we are being guided at all times. And the raining
Speaker 1: ideology behind this is that we're touching ground on something
Speaker 1: real when the vast, vast majority of the time, we're
Speaker 1: not touching reality at all. What we're touching is someone's
Speaker 1: take on reality, someone's interpretation of reality. I think that
Speaker 1: go back to this cautionary tale that I'm describing the
Speaker 1: book as. This is also a cautionary tale about that.
Speaker 1: It's about our relationship to and our belief in, our
Speaker 1: faith in all of the different stories that are coming
Speaker 1: our way across these screens on a minute by minute
Speaker 1: and by second basis.
Speaker 3: That parable ties in perfectly. I love that you've given
Speaker 3: two sort of parable slash stories so far. Let's go
Speaker 3: a little bit deeper here into what all three of
Speaker 3: them sort of intuitd and Heisenberg more or less sort
Speaker 3: of proved on a level, right, is that there is
Speaker 3: a limit to our knowledge, limit to human perception. So
Speaker 3: talk to me a little bit about the limits to
Speaker 3: our knowledge, and how is quantum physics showing us that
Speaker 3: there are limits to that?
Speaker 1: Absolutely? So, Heisenberg did a lot of great science in
Speaker 1: his life, but he was respectively twenty four going on
Speaker 1: twenty five and twenty seven when he made his two
Speaker 1: greatest discoveries, and those discoveries intimately linked.
Speaker 3: That blows me away by the way a twenty five
Speaker 3: year old did that. It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: Oh and it's extraordinary. And as I make pains to
Speaker 1: point out in the book, he's was not just a
Speaker 1: wundikind in math and science, which he absolutely was, but
Speaker 1: he was well read. It could have been a concert pianist,
Speaker 1: incredible abilities in music and in language. His father was
Speaker 1: a professor of Greek, so he could read philosophical classes
Speaker 1: as the original Greek. Well, so he's you know, and Einstein,
Speaker 1: which is who is another great character in the book.
Speaker 1: You know, these were what we would call as well
Speaker 1: great humanists. Yeah, right, and you know they play interesting
Speaker 1: I think roles in this book and in history as
Speaker 1: being at odds around this fundamental philosophical question. And obviously
Speaker 1: I come down hard on the side of Heisenberg, but
Speaker 1: there's no lack of just adoration and respect on my
Speaker 1: part for everything that Einstein did.
Speaker 3: And you make the point with Einstein that although he
Speaker 3: may have been perhaps on the wrong side of the debate,
Speaker 3: his insight into the questions to ask moved the whole
Speaker 3: field forward. He was still a genius in the way
Speaker 3: he thought through these questions and the challenges that he posed.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. No one could formulate a thought experiment
Speaker 1: with more clarity than Einstein, and he would do so
Speaker 1: to poke holes in what was emerging as the consensus
Speaker 1: around what ultimately then is proven over the century of
Speaker 1: science since then to be the case, which is the
Speaker 1: weirdness of the quantum world. But his attempts to poke
Speaker 1: holes and use of these thought experiments, in fact, as
Speaker 1: you just said, very correctly, drove the whole enterprise forward
Speaker 1: in a way that perhaps it never could have gotten
Speaker 1: without his constant provocations. So he played an enormous role
Speaker 1: in this. He was born at the beginning of the century.
Speaker 1: Eisenberg was so, respectively in nineteen twenty five in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven the papers that he published. What they respectively
Speaker 1: did was, on the one hand, show that every attempt
Speaker 1: to extract knowledge from the world involved an active intrusion
Speaker 1: on the world and the part of the know or
Speaker 1: in a way that registered itself in the events that
Speaker 1: were being measured, and that this could be mathematically shown.
Speaker 1: And in fact, what he had to come up with
Speaker 1: was for him a new kind of mathematics. It turned
Speaker 1: out that the mathematics actually existed we call linear algebra,
Speaker 1: but he created matrix mechanics. And one of the mathematical
Speaker 1: curiosities is, unlike in the normal algebra or normal arithmetic
Speaker 1: that we learn of addition, for example, and multiplication, which
Speaker 1: have a property that's known in math is commuting, these
Speaker 1: are commutative operations. What that means is that whatever you
Speaker 1: do in one direction, you can reverse and do it
Speaker 1: in the other direction. In matrix mechanics, multiplication does not commute.
Speaker 1: It means that A times B does not equal B
Speaker 1: times A, which is mathematically weird. But to very quickly
Speaker 1: translate this into the philosophical point that's at hand, What
Speaker 1: it also means is that if your first operation A
Speaker 1: and your second one B has to do with a
Speaker 1: measurement of either, for example, position or momentum of a particle,
Speaker 1: what you choose to begin with actually affects the outcome
Speaker 1: and a half. And this is extremely important because it
Speaker 1: means that the choice of the observer effects the outcome
Speaker 1: of this could be as simple a choice as which
Speaker 1: operation am I going to measure first? Is going to
Speaker 1: have an indelible outcome, an irreversible outcome or effect on
Speaker 1: the outcome of the observation. So this is weird enough
Speaker 1: to begin with the nineteen twenty seven paper, which then
Speaker 1: ended up introducing into physics this term ung give his
Speaker 1: heights or ung nawi kite, so unblurriness, indeterminacy, and ultimately uncertainty,
Speaker 1: which is how it's translated in the common parlance, becomes
Speaker 1: the uncertainty principle. And there he actually comes up with
Speaker 1: a number, basically, and that number is essentially the distance
Speaker 1: that we can drill down into reality, the closeness that
Speaker 1: we can get to measuring something before we lose all
Speaker 1: control on it. It's an equation that actually Paul de
Speaker 1: Rack derived from all of this complex mechanics. But I
Speaker 1: like to put it up on a board when I'm
Speaker 1: giving talks about it and call it Heisenberg's poem, And
Speaker 1: he does one of the nineteen twenty five theory. But
Speaker 1: Heisenberg's poem, the uncertainty principle is written out in an equation,
Speaker 1: and I like to think about it as a kind
Speaker 1: of pivot. What it does is it takes two values,
Speaker 1: which is the difference in your measurement of momentum and
Speaker 1: the difference in your measurement of position and it says
Speaker 1: if you reduce the differences down to zero, which would
Speaker 1: be in essence, knowing exactly where something is or knowing
Speaker 1: exactly how fast something is going, and you multiply them together,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get zero. And that's a very
Speaker 1: strange thing in mathematics again, because as we know from
Speaker 1: high school math or from junior high school math, anything
Speaker 1: multiplied by zero should be zero. But you can, in fact,
Speaker 1: in this new mathematics that's required by the universes discovered
Speaker 1: by Heisenberg, you can reduce the difference in positions in
Speaker 1: theory of where a particle is to zero and what
Speaker 1: you're going to have on the other side of the
Speaker 1: equation when you multiply it by The difference in measurements
Speaker 1: of momentum is a number that, as long as there's
Speaker 1: a positive value on one side or the other, is
Speaker 1: always very very small. Is why we don't see it
Speaker 1: in normal measurements. But if you reduce your difference to
Speaker 1: zero on the part of the position, which means you
Speaker 1: know with exactitude, hyper exactitude, absolute reality where something is,
Speaker 1: you now know absolutely nothing about its momentum, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: If you know exactly with absolute precision how fast something
Speaker 1: is going, You have no idea where it is. It
Speaker 1: could be literally anywhere in the universe. And what this
Speaker 1: means is that the vast majority of the time we
Speaker 1: know roughly where things are and how fast they're going,
Speaker 1: but it is actually physically impossible to know exactly how
Speaker 1: fast they're going and also know where they are, or
Speaker 1: know exactly where they are and how fast they're going.
Speaker 1: And again it's something that we don't usually run into
Speaker 1: because we live in this macroscopic world in which we
Speaker 1: don't need to know reality exactly. But it gets back
Speaker 1: to the parable from Borges. What Heisenberg showed, as you
Speaker 1: pointed out, with scientific exactitude of its own, is where
Speaker 1: the limit is how close we can get to reality.
Speaker 1: No matter how precise our instruments are, we're ultimately not
Speaker 1: going to get a picture that gets those delta's, those
Speaker 1: changes down to zero, because then we'll ultimately know nothing.
Speaker 1: Or to go back to the parable of the map,
Speaker 1: the map that's absolutely perfect will ultimately not be a
Speaker 1: map at all. It won't show us anything.
Speaker 3: So if we at a fundamental level can't understand, we
Speaker 3: can only get so accurate in our view of what
Speaker 3: reality actually is. This is what Heisenberg is showing, Borjes
Speaker 3: is telling us that through some parables, and then Kant
Speaker 3: is sort of bringing this together from a philosophical position,
Speaker 3: and ultimately where I want to tie this back to
Speaker 3: the sort of work that we do here at the
Speaker 3: one you feed is this idea that you know you're
Speaker 3: talking about the cautionary tale of when we assume we
Speaker 3: know what reality is and what that does to our science.
Speaker 3: Right in our day to day life though, I think
Speaker 3: the same principle applies, which is when we think we
Speaker 3: are seeing reality as it is, we are in trouble.
Speaker 3: Very often. I think we're likely to wander into some trouble.
Speaker 3: Right if I go home and I assume that I
Speaker 3: know exactly why my partner did a certain thing, Yes, yes,
Speaker 3: I'm in danger of really messing things up. And so
Speaker 3: talk to me a little bit about this idea that
Speaker 3: we're always seeing everything through some perspective.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. That perspective or that filter that we
Speaker 1: carry around with us necessarily carries biases with it. We're
Speaker 1: going to try to do our best to diminish those biases.
Speaker 1: But the absolute certain way that not diminishing biases, but
Speaker 1: rather buying into them completely. Is to think that you
Speaker 1: don't have any to assume that your knowledge. Take the
Speaker 1: example that you are giving what another person is thinking
Speaker 1: or feeling. You're in repretation in a moment of conflict
Speaker 1: with nails it. You got it right. There's no more
Speaker 1: room for questioning I know exactly what this person's intention
Speaker 1: was or something like that. Yeah. Right. And so Kant's
Speaker 1: view of the world was we're always going to be
Speaker 1: tempted to think of the world this way, and that
Speaker 1: we need to have in fact. This is why he
Speaker 1: called his philosophy on the great three volumes that formed
Speaker 1: the core of it, the critical philosophy, and they consist
Speaker 1: of three critique of pure reason, of practical reason, and
Speaker 1: the power of judgment. These critiques are all about trying
Speaker 1: to find one hundred years ahead of the fact, or
Speaker 1: a little bit more of one hundred years ahead of
Speaker 1: the fact, that version in moral philosophy, in scientific philosopher philosophy,
Speaker 1: the real and aesthetics, that version of what Eisenberg will
Speaker 1: ultimately run into as this kind of limit of what
Speaker 1: human reason can do, the limit of our ability to
Speaker 1: know the world, and Kant's in a similar way to
Speaker 1: board cases, realizing through kind of pure thought thinking his
Speaker 1: way through these problems as opposed to wrestling with you know,
Speaker 1: turning into equations the result of the observations of nature.
Speaker 1: He's going to realize that, yes, those limits are there,
Speaker 1: but also those limits are fundamentally necessary to being the
Speaker 1: kind of creature that we are. So the kind of
Speaker 1: creature that we are is a creature that is dilogic,
Speaker 1: that is in relationship with other creatures, that's trying to
Speaker 1: know the world, albeit imperfectly, and trying to make the
Speaker 1: best decisions possible in the world. And one of the
Speaker 1: surefire ways of mistaking the world, of getting it wrong,
Speaker 1: of falling into error, or even more dangerous than error.
Speaker 1: For fanaticism, fundamentalism is precisely to make that category mistake,
Speaker 1: where we think that our knowledge isn't a picture, isn't
Speaker 1: through a filter, isn't through mirror darkly, but rather is
Speaker 1: the world it self. We're always tempted by that, and
Speaker 1: at the same time most likely to be led astray
Speaker 1: when we fall to that temptation.
Speaker 3: What we know about cognitive biases is that just knowing
Speaker 3: about them doesn't necessarily make them go away. And I
Speaker 3: hear that argument, and I believe it, and yet I'm
Speaker 3: convinced it's still better to know about them than not.
Speaker 3: I teach about perspective a lot, and one of the
Speaker 3: things I teach is you can't not have a perspective.
Speaker 3: Don't expect that you're going to come from a completely
Speaker 3: unbiased perspective. Is not possible. So if we just start there,
Speaker 3: which is just, then we can open ourselves up to
Speaker 3: maybe I don't know the answer, you know, And a
Speaker 3: question that I love is, you know, kind of what
Speaker 3: am I making this mean? And what else could it mean?
Speaker 3: Like that question? And I think you can take that
Speaker 3: at what's happening with my partner, or you could take
Speaker 3: that down to the core scientific level, right like, even
Speaker 3: when you get to quantum mechanics, there are people who
Speaker 3: are interpreting what all this means. And I think that
Speaker 3: the math ends up being sort of undisputed, but the
Speaker 3: question of what it means has been disputed for a
Speaker 3: long time.
Speaker 1: That's so important to point out. Stephen Hawking very famously
Speaker 1: said at one point we don't really need philosophy anymore
Speaker 1: because we have fundamental physics and the answer to the
Speaker 1: world are all in physics. And as my friend and
Speaker 1: one of my influences in terms of my understanding of
Speaker 1: the physical world, the great Italian cosmologist and physicist Carlavelli
Speaker 1: once wrote about that is. The problem with that point
Speaker 1: is that Hawking wasn't making a scientific point. He was
Speaker 1: making a philosophical point, right, So he's entered the world
Speaker 1: of interpretation already. Philosophy is the world of interpretation. Literature
Speaker 1: is the world of interpretation, and yes, scientists interpret the world.
Speaker 1: Einstein was entering into the world of interpretation when he
Speaker 1: was dialoguing and debating with Heisenberg and those of the
Speaker 1: school of interpretation of quantum mechanics about what their discoveries meant,
Speaker 1: how best to understand their discoveries. There's something along the
Speaker 1: lines of seven sort of dominant interpretations of quantum mechanics
Speaker 1: that are out there today. You know, there's no final decision, right.
Speaker 1: These are all pictures of the world that try to
Speaker 1: make sense of what is ultimately a very difficult picture
Speaker 1: of the world to make sense of. And one of
Speaker 1: the sort of points that I'm trying to make in
Speaker 1: this book is you can be a scientist You can
Speaker 1: be a physicist and have these interpretations, or you can
Speaker 1: be a non scientist who's done his best to understand
Speaker 1: the mathematics and the physics behind it and learned from
Speaker 1: my fellow intellectuals and physicists about how to understand it
Speaker 1: and then use, for example, philosophical perspectives or even literature
Speaker 1: and stories to come up with and to reason your
Speaker 1: way to one or another interpretation. We shouldn't be surprised
Speaker 1: that this is the case, considering that the greatest physicists,
Speaker 1: in particular Einstein, used stories to come to the truths
Speaker 1: that they discovered about the physical world in the first place.
Speaker 1: Right so I'm famously told himself stories in order to
Speaker 1: understand to have the breakthrough that led to relativity, especially
Speaker 1: nineteen oh five paper Special relativity, and then general relativity
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifteen. His happiest thought was what became known
Speaker 1: as the equivalence between gravity and acceleration. Occurred to him
Speaker 1: when he thought about a story, which is, he put
Speaker 1: into his mind an image of a person in an
Speaker 1: elevator like box or chest being accelerated at a constant
Speaker 1: through space outside of a gravitational field, and realize that
Speaker 1: for their perception there would be no distinction between that
Speaker 1: and being in a gravitational field, and needed some very
Speaker 1: similar work to lead to its breakthroughs with special relativity.
Speaker 1: So we shouldn't be surprised that stories can help us
Speaker 1: interpret the mathematical explanations of the physical world that are
Speaker 1: at the basis of physics.
Speaker 3: Yep. As I was reading, I couldn't help but think
Speaker 3: about how all this ties to areas that I've probably
Speaker 3: done the most study, which is Zen Buddhism, and then
Speaker 3: also Taoism and Zen Buddhism is basically what happened when
Speaker 3: Daoism met Buddhism, right that Zen emerged out of that,
Speaker 3: and these same insights are all the way back in
Speaker 3: those traditions, and largely the way those conclusions were reached
Speaker 3: was by people trying to very much this is me paraphrasing,
Speaker 3: but slow down the processes of the mind enough through
Speaker 3: meditation to apprehend things in a slightly different way. And
Speaker 3: I would say Taoism in particular, which then went on
Speaker 3: to influence Zen, has this idea at the core of
Speaker 3: it that our field of experience is always construed from
Speaker 3: one perspective or another. As I've heard someone say about
Speaker 3: Taoism before, and I just love this line, there is
Speaker 3: no view from nowhere right right? And I just love
Speaker 3: the fact that we can sort of tie those things
Speaker 3: in as well. And I think that in Zen there's
Speaker 3: also an idea of emptiness, right, and emptiness as we
Speaker 3: hear it in the West, we think it means nothingness,
Speaker 3: but it more means that everything exists in relation to
Speaker 3: something else, to everything else. And this is what you
Speaker 3: mentioned when you just mentioned Carlo Ravelli, who I believe
Speaker 3: his interpretation of quantum physics is called relational. And so
Speaker 3: let's talk about this idea that everything only exists in
Speaker 3: relation to something else.
Speaker 1: That's right, And this idea we can tie that back
Speaker 1: to the one that you just mentioned, that there is
Speaker 1: no such thing as a view from nowhere, I mean
Speaker 1: one of the whole sections. In fact, the book The
Speaker 1: Rigor of Angels is divided into four sections, and each
Speaker 1: of those sections is based on one of the four
Speaker 1: fundamental ways that we can get things wrong by overstepping
Speaker 1: the bounds of reason. According to Kant, I give them
Speaker 1: different names. These are called antinomies in his work. But
Speaker 1: one of those, the way my interpretation of it for
Speaker 1: the sake of this book is called the question or
Speaker 1: the imperative not being God. So one way of thinking
Speaker 1: about this is that we have an idea that there
Speaker 1: is a way the world is in and of itself,
Speaker 1: and it exists kind of as if it were an
Speaker 1: object that could be seen by an all knowing, all
Speaker 1: seeing being. But that implies an outside to everything, and
Speaker 1: there is no such thing as an outside to everything.
Speaker 1: The universe is everything, so there is no outside to it,
Speaker 1: which means that any of us at any time can
Speaker 1: only ever be positioned within the universe, and that also
Speaker 1: means in relationship to other beings in the universe. So
Speaker 1: the idea that somehow there is a self that is meaningful,
Speaker 1: that is consistent, that is self contained, and then enters
Speaker 1: into relationships to other cells and then develops out of that.
Speaker 1: If you think about that very carefully, that implies that
Speaker 1: if you took all of those other things away and
Speaker 1: imagined just nothing, you could still have that self, that entity.
Speaker 1: But the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics that I fully
Speaker 1: buy into, and that is Rovelli's, actually denies that. It says,
Speaker 1: if you accept the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. Everything
Speaker 1: results from what is at core a relation. So a
Speaker 1: measurement is a relation, an observation is a relation. It
Speaker 1: always involves coming together of things. But the things that
Speaker 1: are coming together don't precede any logical or chronological sense
Speaker 1: the coming together, because that would imply that there is
Speaker 1: such a thing as a view from nowhere of you
Speaker 1: from outside. But since there isn't, Since all there is
Speaker 1: is this network of relations. That is why at core
Speaker 1: there are relations rather than things. And this, in fact,
Speaker 1: despite Einstein's resistance to accepting it, this is highly compatible
Speaker 1: with his theory of relativity, which says the same about
Speaker 1: velocity and time and simultaneity. That there is no such
Speaker 1: thing as God's clock that's ticking away in the background,
Speaker 1: Ali Newton. That tells us that no matter when you
Speaker 1: see it or her, how long the information took to
Speaker 1: get to you and someone else, that there was a
Speaker 1: time when this event took place. No relativity says there's
Speaker 1: only time is measured by you in a particular inertial
Speaker 1: framework in relation to whatever was happening. And the same
Speaker 1: thing with gravity and with as I say, the biggest
Speaker 1: question of where the universe is the great poet Dante's words,
Speaker 1: it has no other weare than here, and his here
Speaker 1: was the eternal mind, of the mind of God. But
Speaker 1: the here there is that the universe holds itself, It
Speaker 1: contains itself. There is no outside from which to look
Speaker 1: at the universe as if it were some object and
Speaker 1: say and measure it and weigh it against something else.
Speaker 1: You are only ever in It is an outside that
Speaker 1: you are only ever in itself. There is no outside
Speaker 1: to it. And this is exactly what general relativity allows,
Speaker 1: in fact demands, which is that there's no framework from
Speaker 1: which to measure everything in the universe and say, and
Speaker 1: everything else exists or is measurable with regard to this.
Speaker 1: There's no standard perfect framework fits itself immobile. Every measurement everywhere,
Speaker 1: including of acceleration, including of gravity, always is in relationship
Speaker 1: to other things. So again it's the same thing as
Speaker 1: with that one particle. If you took away everything else
Speaker 1: in the universe, we can't even say that the particle exists.
Speaker 1: The same thing with this wonderful thought experiment would is
Speaker 1: Newton's bucket, where Newton imagined a bucket of water spinning,
Speaker 1: and if we spin a bucket we know that the
Speaker 1: water is going to light up the sides because of
Speaker 1: a centrivigal force. And then Newton asked this really excellent question,
Speaker 1: which was, well, what happens if that bucket is just
Speaker 1: spinning in the middle of nothing? How does the bucket
Speaker 1: know that it's spinning? And his answer was because it
Speaker 1: spins in relationship to absolute space, and so yes, it
Speaker 1: will feel it. And Einstein's answer was exact opposite, which
Speaker 1: was Einstein said, no, it spins in relationship to everything
Speaker 1: else in the universe. So if there is no everything
Speaker 1: else in the universe, it's not going to feel it.
Speaker 1: It's not going to know it. Any There is no
Speaker 1: such thing as spinning if there's no other object to
Speaker 1: spin against.
Speaker 3: Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask
Speaker 3: you something. What's one thing that has been holding you
Speaker 3: back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried to
Speaker 3: push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way.
Speaker 3: You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major
Speaker 3: saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt,
Speaker 3: emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's
Speaker 3: the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put
Speaker 3: together a free guide to help you spot these hidden
Speaker 3: obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can
Speaker 3: use to regain control. Download the free guide now at
Speaker 3: oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step
Speaker 3: towards getting back on track. I think that we can
Speaker 3: take this really small and then kind of back up
Speaker 3: to the everyday level. On the really small level, you
Speaker 3: sort of just addressed it. But when you get down
Speaker 3: to a small enough level, the quantum level, one of
Speaker 3: the implications of quantum mechanics is, as you said, until
Speaker 3: you measure the thing in a sense, it's not quite there,
Speaker 3: which makes no sense, but yet again seems to be
Speaker 3: the truth. And that measurement, as you said, is is
Speaker 3: a relation. You know, we talk a lot in the
Speaker 3: quantum world about an observer, and again, an observer observing
Speaker 3: something creates a relationship between those things. And then we
Speaker 3: can sort of jump all the way kind of back
Speaker 3: up to the day to day level with this and
Speaker 3: realize that we often think that we or let's just
Speaker 3: go back to a discussion with me and my partner.
Speaker 3: I think that I bring who I am to those discussions,
Speaker 3: and I think she brings who she is to those discussions.
Speaker 3: But the reality is we are a certain way in
Speaker 3: relation to each other. I relate to you differently than
Speaker 3: I relate to her. It's not saying I'm fake that
Speaker 3: I have like multiple faces. It's just a simple fact
Speaker 3: that the relationship between you and me is a different
Speaker 3: thing than my relationship between me and her. But we
Speaker 3: often don't take that into account. We think that what
Speaker 3: we see from someone is who they are, without realizing
Speaker 3: that who they are in that moment is partially because
Speaker 3: of who we are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've said it very beautifully, and I think that
Speaker 1: it is very legitimate to make this comparison between the
Speaker 1: quantum level and the relational level at the human level
Speaker 1: as well, despite the fact that one is as macroscopic
Speaker 1: as you can get, the other is as microscopic as
Speaker 1: you can get. Heisenberg had a very famous sentence in
Speaker 1: a letter to both Gong Pauty as he was working
Speaker 1: out the uncertainty principle, and he said, basically, the result
Speaker 1: of this is the following the path that a particle
Speaker 1: in this case, an electron takes doesn't exist until we
Speaker 1: measure it and there's a revolutionary statement. And that's precisely
Speaker 1: the statement that for the rest of his life Einstein
Speaker 1: couldn't accept. Just think about it a little bit. What
Speaker 1: is a path? What is the path that something takes?
Speaker 1: It only exists over time, right, and it only exists
Speaker 1: from some kind of a perspective. So a path without
Speaker 1: a measurement, it's an empty category. It's a non sensical things.
Speaker 1: So anything that has a path, it's a connection, if
Speaker 1: you will, of dots through space, time of moments or
Speaker 1: or right that then retrospectively, necessarily retroactively connects certain dots.
Speaker 1: Heisenberg figured that out, right. Heisenberg's figured out the mathematics
Speaker 1: of it, but he also figured out in some ways
Speaker 1: the philosophy of it. And he said, we're always applying
Speaker 1: some kind of a theory, a bias of the world,
Speaker 1: in order to decide in advance what kind of a path,
Speaker 1: what kind of an entity we're producing after the fact.
Speaker 1: So your connection to who we are when we're in
Speaker 1: a relationship with another person is exactly the same. What
Speaker 1: is a personality. Personality has potentially some consistency, but it's
Speaker 1: only a consistency that, if you will, is constructed among
Speaker 1: the various relationships that we are in now. They're very complex,
Speaker 1: they last over a long period of time. We have
Speaker 1: many different manifestations that go back from our youngest ages,
Speaker 1: our earliest memories, our earliest encounters with other human beings,
Speaker 1: with other places and things. But that infinite, intricate and
Speaker 1: complicated network over space time that we then ultimately call
Speaker 1: a personality. The hubrist to then think that this is
Speaker 1: just some sort of a self contained pure essence that
Speaker 1: then expresses itself differently over time, I think that's in
Speaker 1: a way part of the problem. We have to recognize that, no,
Speaker 1: we actually are constantly constructing it and having it constructed
Speaker 1: for us by all of these infinitely complex web of
Speaker 1: relations that constitute us over time and in our lives.
Speaker 3: So let me ask you a question about that in
Speaker 3: relation to psychoanalysis, because on one hand, psychoanalysis is, like
Speaker 3: you're saying, it's making the point that we are not unitary. Right,
Speaker 3: There's a lot of stuff going on, and yet it
Speaker 3: tends to sort of make a story out of something.
Speaker 3: You're this way because of this thing, right. You know,
Speaker 3: Freud famously kicked us off right by telling us all
Speaker 3: these that we now know are kind of crazy theories
Speaker 3: that like we're this way because we have penis envy,
Speaker 3: or we're this way because we have whatever right. And
Speaker 3: it's often seemed to me that at a certain point
Speaker 3: in my life, I think recognizing and making stories out
Speaker 3: of how what happened in my childhood turned me into
Speaker 3: who I am could be useful. But I also at
Speaker 3: a certain point started really wrestling with this idea that
Speaker 3: you're talking about, which is that I am made up
Speaker 3: of countless causes and conditions, and to say that I'm
Speaker 3: this way because my father was that way is in
Speaker 3: many ways a vast oversimplification of a lot of variables
Speaker 3: that we don't know. And so I'm just curious how
Speaker 3: you think about that and psychoanalysis, because I kind of
Speaker 3: go back and forth with my feelings about it as
Speaker 3: an approach.
Speaker 1: There's no question that the idea that somehow our identities
Speaker 1: are set in stone at an early age, I think
Speaker 1: is highly problematic. I think also it's very likely that
Speaker 1: certain relationships early on have a kind of precedence that
Speaker 1: may set us in a certain way. But the idea
Speaker 1: to overcome that we can't change that we in fact
Speaker 1: not in fact changing all the time is also ultimately wrong.
Speaker 1: I think that new relationships can overcome old relationships, they
Speaker 1: can build on, or change or transform the imprint of
Speaker 1: early relationships. At the same time, Freud, I think, was
Speaker 1: a visionary, but also Freud had his own limitations, like
Speaker 1: any human who invents theory, and those theories are always
Speaker 1: subject to revision. I'm more influenced by a post Freudian psychoanalyst,
Speaker 1: a Frenchmen by the name of Jacques Lacan, but then
Speaker 1: he himself, you know, when I read Lacon's writings, which
Speaker 1: are famously difficult and themselves intentionally, I would say, subject to,
Speaker 1: you know, necessary interpretation. My version of it is going
Speaker 1: to be slightly or in some cases very different from
Speaker 1: interpretation of others. And there's no question that my interpretation
Speaker 1: of this particular kind of psychoanalytic philosophy is itself going
Speaker 1: to be subject to the variety of relationships that have
Speaker 1: created me as the interpreter and reader and thinker that
Speaker 1: I am. So yeah, I do believe there's primordial relationships
Speaker 1: and experiences that are going to perhaps be more formative
Speaker 1: than others as sure. Absolutely, leveling of formative experiences and relationships,
Speaker 1: but I also believe that there's a good deal of
Speaker 1: change and fungibility that happens over time. We talk about
Speaker 1: plasticity and neuroscience as well, right that the brain is
Speaker 1: an extraordinarily plastic and changing and evolving organ as all
Speaker 1: of our embodied Attributes's.
Speaker 3: Pivot to what I believe is the last of CONTs antinomies.
Speaker 3: He talks about free will versus determinism. We just touched
Speaker 3: on it a little bit here right in what we
Speaker 3: were just talking about, which is, you know, to what
Speaker 3: extent am I the way I am because of things
Speaker 3: that came before, and to what extent am I making
Speaker 3: free choices? Talk to me about CONT's view on this, though,
Speaker 3: and what view emerges from the work that you did
Speaker 3: in this book about free will and predetermination.
Speaker 1: One of the best ways that I think and often
Speaker 1: is challenging. A way of thinking about and challenging our
Speaker 1: notions of what it means to be a free agent,
Speaker 1: an agent who decides in the world is to ask
Speaker 1: the question could you have decided otherwise? That seems to
Speaker 1: be kind of the bellweather for understanding whether it being
Speaker 1: is a free be We say a rock that falls
Speaker 1: off a cliff could not have decided otherwise, it rolls
Speaker 1: down with the force of gravity. Then perhaps we look
Speaker 1: at an antelope running from a cheetah and the cheatah
Speaker 1: following in certain ways and either getting or not getting
Speaker 1: the antelope, and we say, could the cheatah have decided otherwise?
Speaker 1: And perhaps we decide no, they didn't. And in legal jurisdiction,
Speaker 1: what we say, was someone acting, you know, under the
Speaker 1: influence of for example, chemical or drug or perhaps a
Speaker 1: mental illness, Yeah, they couldn't have decided otherwise, and as
Speaker 1: a result, they were less responsible if they were legally
Speaker 1: inebriated while they were you know, who was the person
Speaker 1: who decided to take the drug that inebriated them led
Speaker 1: to the articular so homicide for example, Well, that makes
Speaker 1: them then responsible. So we asked this question, could you
Speaker 1: have decided otherwise? And if we say in a big
Speaker 1: philosophical sense, well, no one could have decided otherwise, because
Speaker 1: from the beginning of time until the end, we live
Speaker 1: in a physical universe, and every single one of our
Speaker 1: atoms is subject to the laws of physics, right, and
Speaker 1: so many of the arguments against free will take precisely
Speaker 1: that side that that form say, well, free will's a
Speaker 1: complete camara, How could it possibly exist where physical world
Speaker 1: we're inserted in the mechanistic chain of being in the universe,
Speaker 1: so we could not have decided otherwise. The content perspective
Speaker 1: is to say, well, sure, in some kind of a
Speaker 1: vast metaphysical sense, that may be true, because Kant did
Speaker 1: not believe in the idea of a kind of dios
Speaker 1: ex machina deciding soul who sits behind our eyes and
Speaker 1: makes these decisions, says well, now you go left, now
Speaker 1: you go right. And how would that solve As Daniel
Speaker 1: Dennett famously asked, how would that solve the problem? Anyways?
Speaker 1: Because what's deciding what that decider decides? Right? Right? That's
Speaker 1: not the point. CONT's point is how overwroughtly metaphysical can
Speaker 1: you get then to assume that there is an answer
Speaker 1: or someone who knows who could have decided otherwise, right,
Speaker 1: because that person or that perspective would precisely have to
Speaker 1: be standing outside of the chain of being, would have
Speaker 1: to be situated at the beginning of time, outside of
Speaker 1: time and space. And to say, oh, well, in this universe,
Speaker 1: Eggington would have made a different decision, or could have
Speaker 1: made a different decision, but in this one he didn't know.
Speaker 1: Consp point is, like all other beings, we are in
Speaker 1: time and space, and some beings, namely beings endowed with
Speaker 1: what we call reason, we hold responsible for their decisions.
Speaker 1: And the great story that I find as a way
Speaker 1: of explicating exactly how Kan goes about this comes from
Speaker 1: hundreds of years earlier than Kan, and it's the story
Speaker 1: of Boethius in his cell awaiting execution, who's asking the
Speaker 1: exact same questions. And what Boethius asks is the question
Speaker 1: that the theologically minded ever since him and before him
Speaker 1: Augustine was asking as well. If God knows everything from
Speaker 1: the beginning of time to the end of time, If
Speaker 1: God knows ahead of time every single decision that I'm
Speaker 1: going to make, how can it possibly be that I'm
Speaker 1: making free decisions? And the answer is the realization that
Speaker 1: when we imagine God having that kind of a perception,
Speaker 1: that God, who's having that kind of perception, isn't inhabiting
Speaker 1: time the way that we do. He's collapsing time. There's
Speaker 1: no difference between before and after all of eternity is
Speaker 1: smashed down into one a moment. But if all eternity
Speaker 1: is smashed on into one moment, then everything that I've
Speaker 1: decided has already been decided. But that doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: I wasn't deciding. When I was doing the deciding right,
Speaker 1: I'm still in space and time making those decisions right.
Speaker 1: And this is really from a theological perspective, from a
Speaker 1: very old theological perspective. They already worked out the problem
Speaker 1: and said, there actually is no incompatibility between something like
Speaker 1: your supposition or your imagination of what a perfectly knowledgeable
Speaker 1: infinite being knowing everything that you have done or will
Speaker 1: have done, and free will. And if that's the case,
Speaker 1: if not even a perfect your imagination, your ideology of
Speaker 1: a perfectly omnipotent and omniscient god, if not even that
Speaker 1: contradicts free will, then certainly AI is not going to
Speaker 1: contradict free will. Certainly, all the electrodes we put in
Speaker 1: your brain and tell us that our decisions, big surprise,
Speaker 1: take time because we're beings in space and time. That
Speaker 1: doesn't contradict free will. Right, Predictability doesn't contradict free will.
Speaker 1: It just means that some decisions take time and occur
Speaker 1: in embodied wet brains. That's all that that tells us.
Speaker 3: It's a fascinating question because it sounds like, if I
Speaker 3: understand what Kant is saying, I'm going to vastly oversimplify this.
Speaker 3: He's basically saying, look, that perspective that could know everything
Speaker 3: and know the way things are going to unfold doesn't
Speaker 3: really exist. So this question just doesn't even make sense.
Speaker 1: Exactly, imposing one way of thinking about the universe on
Speaker 1: a different way of making talking about the universe. The
Speaker 1: language of freedom is the language that pertains to our
Speaker 1: beings as deciding ethical beings in the world, not the
Speaker 1: language of mechanistic determination. R right. It simply does. And
Speaker 1: it's a dangerous way of thinking about the world because
Speaker 1: then you start saying that you don't have responsibility for
Speaker 1: your actions, when in fact, you should have responsibility for
Speaker 1: your decisions.
Speaker 3: And we've talked about how everything is relational and that
Speaker 3: we are indeed the result of countless causes and conditions.
Speaker 3: And so I think about this question a lot because
Speaker 3: I sort of would be a little bit more like
Speaker 3: Kant and say, you know what free will, whether we
Speaker 3: have absolute free will or no free will, seems to
Speaker 3: me you can't know the answer to either of those things.
Speaker 3: Really and so let's be more practical, right, And so
Speaker 3: the practical side is, you know, how much choice do
Speaker 3: we have? And I think about this. I'm a former
Speaker 3: heroin addict, right, and I think about the amount of
Speaker 3: choice that I had once upon a time in picking
Speaker 3: up drugs and the amount of choice I have now.
Speaker 3: They feel radically different. And I think we all fall
Speaker 3: somewhere in this spectrum. And I think this what gets
Speaker 3: to be sort of so hard because on one hand,
Speaker 3: if you buy that there's no free will, then like
Speaker 3: you said, there should be no consequences for anything, because
Speaker 3: you couldn't have chosen differently. And yet it seems like
Speaker 3: in our justice system we have sort of tried to
Speaker 3: wrestle with this question by saying, well, if you're insane,
Speaker 3: we're not going to hold you responsible in the same way. Right,
Speaker 3: how do you think about this in a day to
Speaker 3: day since the degrees of freedom that we actually have.
Speaker 1: Degrees of freedom, Eric, are a terrific way of thinking
Speaker 1: about it, because I think from this content perspective, you're
Speaker 1: absolutely right. What it does is it basically says these
Speaker 1: absolute extremes are irrelevant to the actual question at hand.
Speaker 1: The extreme of on the one hand, you are some
Speaker 1: sort of a disembodied ghost in the machine who has
Speaker 1: perfect ability to decide everything at all times is a
Speaker 1: fantasy that has no impact in the real world. And
Speaker 1: the idea that you're simply a cog in the machine
Speaker 1: at any particular moment is a scientifistic view that assumes
Speaker 1: a god's eye view that has no relevance for what
Speaker 1: am I going to do right now? Right? What is
Speaker 1: the right thing to do given the situation that I'm
Speaker 1: faced with right now? What is very relevant is the
Speaker 1: question of how much duress am I under? What are
Speaker 1: the circumstances that are constraining my actions right now? Something
Speaker 1: like addiction is going to be one that has a
Speaker 1: great deal to tell us about the range of freedom,
Speaker 1: the degrees of freedom of our actions. Something like coercion
Speaker 1: would be one as well. Right, you're perfectly free when
Speaker 1: given the choice of your money or your life, But
Speaker 1: really it's a forced choice. Right, If you choose your money,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get your money, You're going to
Speaker 1: lose your life as well. Right, So, under those situations,
Speaker 1: it's a so called false choice. And there's many such
Speaker 1: situations right in life where we're presented with something as
Speaker 1: if it were a choice, when it's not a choice
Speaker 1: because in fact, under duress, under coercion, under the influence
Speaker 1: of something. So then the question becomes when, And obviously
Speaker 1: standards change over time, absolutely right. Legal jurisprudence wrestles with this,
Speaker 1: as it should. It's extremely important the standards change over time.
Speaker 1: What used to be called the reasonable battered woman standard
Speaker 1: has become the reasonable battered person standard because it carried
Speaker 1: a certain bias to it that was highly sexist, misogynist,
Speaker 1: for example, that only a woman would be battered, but
Speaker 1: that a man under similar circumstances in an abusive relationship
Speaker 1: would clearly have the agency and spine to be able
Speaker 1: to make decisions that would be different. So the very
Speaker 1: language that we convey these standards in tells us some
Speaker 1: of the biases that come along with it. But you
Speaker 1: said the right thing. There are degrees of freedom, and
Speaker 1: I think if we take a Sam Harris view about
Speaker 1: human freedom, that's simply a negational view, that it's a
Speaker 1: straw man, that there's no such thing as a free will,
Speaker 1: and let's sort of get rid of it. What you've
Speaker 1: done is you've thrown out the baby of actual notions, meaningful,
Speaker 1: pragmatic notions of responsibility and freedom with a bathroom water
Speaker 1: that you wanted to get rid of, some sort of
Speaker 1: metaphysical idea of an ultimately free agent, which I think
Speaker 1: anyone who's thinking about these things in a rational, reasonable
Speaker 1: way never really bought to begin with.
Speaker 3: Is there anyone in the philosophical world or that you
Speaker 3: know of that is sort of talking about these degrees
Speaker 3: of freedom in a useful and coherent way?
Speaker 1: Totally? In fact, I quote her in my book, but
Speaker 1: my colleague here at Johns Hopkins when I was actually
Speaker 1: writing the book, she wasn't yet here, but we hired her,
Speaker 1: and I'm delighted for that. Jannanne Ismail, who's that philosopher
Speaker 1: of science whose book How Physics Makes Us Free? In
Speaker 1: her book she makes a really really good argument to
Speaker 1: a bunch of really good arguments that I find, you know,
Speaker 1: highly sympatico with my own view, and I just couldn't
Speaker 1: agree more with.
Speaker 3: Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Speaker 3: Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
Speaker 3: didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe
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Speaker 3: I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a
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Speaker 3: oneufeed dot net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen
Speaker 3: starting today one you feed dot net slash ebook. All right,
Speaker 3: I'm going to ask you to end with something that
Speaker 3: is an example you give in the book about understanding
Speaker 3: the relation of space time to each other. Which is
Speaker 3: the first time that I feel like I was able
Speaker 3: to sort of see in some way this relation of
Speaker 3: space time which constantly I read about and I just
Speaker 3: feel like my mental picture is blank. I'm like, I
Speaker 3: don't get this. Give me that example, just because I
Speaker 3: found it so useful, maybe our listeners will too.
Speaker 1: When you think about relativity's on how fast we can
Speaker 1: go in the following way, that there's this ultimate speed limit,
Speaker 1: and the speed limit is the speed of light, but
Speaker 1: that if something is in fact moving the speed of light,
Speaker 1: like photons do. Photons are the only things that can well.
Speaker 1: Massless particles like photons can move at the speed of light.
Speaker 1: They're not experiencing time, so time isn't actually taking place
Speaker 1: if you're, in theory moving at the speed of light.
Speaker 1: And the way to think about this, and I believe
Speaker 1: that some version of this I borrowed from Brian Green,
Speaker 1: so giving credit where it's due, I think he helped
Speaker 1: me understand this as well is to think about my
Speaker 1: image was a cart like a golf cart that you're
Speaker 1: driving down It has a maximum obviously much slower velocity
Speaker 1: than the speed of light, and it's trying to get
Speaker 1: from one end of a football field to the other.
Speaker 1: And if you think about that one end of the
Speaker 1: football field to the other as being one of the
Speaker 1: axes of space time and the other being sort of
Speaker 1: the width of the football field, and you have this
Speaker 1: maximum velocity, you soon realize that if you're trying to
Speaker 1: veer off the straight line with a maximum velocity, you're
Speaker 1: going to make less progress. You might get more. So
Speaker 1: if you called the width of the football field speed
Speaker 1: for example, if you wanted to maximize your speed, you
Speaker 1: can veer off in the direction of the other line,
Speaker 1: but you're not going to make any progress in space,
Speaker 1: So I think about that or the other way around, right,
Speaker 1: So I think about the photon traveling at the speed
Speaker 1: of light is like the cart veering completely off in
Speaker 1: one direction and not making any progress anymore in time,
Speaker 1: but crossing vast distances of space, right, And you can
Speaker 1: choose and do one or the other. And of course
Speaker 1: most of us are making some progress through space and
Speaker 1: progress through time simultaneously. But if we keep on increasing
Speaker 1: our speed, and we can't because relativity tells us that
Speaker 1: we become more and more massive the closer we get
Speaker 1: to the speed of light. But you can still accelerate
Speaker 1: massive objects. The more you accelerate them, the slower they're
Speaker 1: going to perceive time from their perspective.
Speaker 3: I just found that a really helpful way of thinking
Speaker 3: about it. Can go either straight ahead or straight to
Speaker 3: the side, and those are sort of the maximum the
Speaker 3: speed of light. But once you want it to do both,
Speaker 3: those things start to I'm using the.
Speaker 1: High velocities, they start to impact each other exactly, and
Speaker 1: like with quantum mechanics, we don't really notice it because
Speaker 1: the vast majority of our time we're not living at
Speaker 1: high velocities, all.
Speaker 3: Right, last question, how do particles become entangled?
Speaker 1: Anything that interacts with each other as the possibility of
Speaker 1: being entangled. I restate that this isn't more important to
Speaker 1: get particles to be entangled in the sense that they're
Speaker 1: separated way apart from each other, and then you affect
Speaker 1: one infect the other after their initial relationship to each other.
Speaker 1: They have to be kept in Christine isolation from anything else.
Speaker 1: I see. Anything else comes in contact, then that entanglement
Speaker 1: breaks and.
Speaker 3: Ah, okay, perfect. I've always wondered quantum entanglement is one
Speaker 3: of the weirder quantum physics things. Listeners, you can look
Speaker 3: that up, but I've always been curious how they become entangled.
Speaker 3: All right, Bill, thank you so much. I had a
Speaker 3: great time reading the book and preparing for this and
Speaker 3: talking with you, so I appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 1: Thanks. Eric was great to talk to you as well.
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