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Speaker 1: Science seems to work. We can argue about the philosophical

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Speaker 1: foundations of it, and whether a photon is a particle

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Speaker 1: or a wave. We can wonder whether the universe that

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Speaker 1: we perceive out there is real or is just an

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Speaker 1: elaborate hoax like in the matrix, and how we might

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Speaker 1: ever know the difference. But in the end, what is

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Speaker 1: beyond question is that science does work. We can build

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Speaker 1: airplanes that almost never crash. We can build incredible miniature

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Speaker 1: devices that rely on the quantum properties of electrons. We

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Speaker 1: can and have sent robots to crawl over the surface

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Speaker 1: of other planets and send us back pictures. All of

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Speaker 1: this stuff works because of science. Science lets us build

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Speaker 1: and test and refine little mathematical stories about how things work,

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Speaker 1: and then confidently use those mathemas principles in totally different contexts.

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Speaker 1: Ideas that we have in the shower, then test in

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Speaker 1: basement labs. They all work inside your iPhone and on

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Speaker 1: the space station. We can confidently use what we have learned,

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Speaker 1: even if we aren't exactly sure why science works and

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Speaker 1: whether the universe out there is actually real.

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Speaker 4: Hi, I'm Daniel.

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Speaker 1: I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine,

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Speaker 1: and I want to know what's real about the universe.

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Speaker 1: I don't want to just have ideas that work. I

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Speaker 1: want to know the truth about the universe and welcome

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Speaker 1: the podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe, where our

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Speaker 1: goal is to do just that, to explore with you

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Speaker 1: what we do and don't know about the universe, how

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Speaker 1: microscopic little particles interact at the smallest levels, and how

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Speaker 1: all of their tuing and froing and buzzing weaves itself

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Speaker 1: together into the world that we know with very different rules,

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Speaker 1: which is just a small part of the larger context

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Speaker 1: of stars and galaxies and superclusters slashing around in a

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Speaker 1: web of dark matter to make this glorious and crazy universe.

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Speaker 1: My co host and friend jorgees on vacation this week,

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Speaker 1: so I'm taking the opportunity to take a bit of

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Speaker 1: a digression into the philosophy of science, together with an

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Speaker 1: exciting guest. Now, what's amazing to me about science is

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Speaker 1: that we are capable at all of understanding the universe

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Speaker 1: that jumped up apes with tiny little brains on a

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Speaker 1: little rock in an irrelevant galaxy can just by doing

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Speaker 1: a few experiments and writing down some math symbols, build

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Speaker 1: a mental model of how the universe works, and a

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Speaker 1: model that seems to work pretty well well. This model

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Speaker 1: has revealed how stars form, and how the universe expands,

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Speaker 1: and how electrons funnel through weird metals, and how the

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Speaker 1: whole universe is filled with an invisible Higgs field that

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Speaker 1: gives matter to microscopic particles. It's incredible what we have

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Speaker 1: learned about the nature of the universe. The very fact

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Speaker 1: that you are hearing this podcast right now relies deeply

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Speaker 1: on our understanding of the basic rules of the universe

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Speaker 1: and our ability to manipulate and rely on them. But

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Speaker 1: why is that possible? Why does it even work? Because

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Speaker 1: what I said a moment ago was a bit of

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Speaker 1: a stretch of the truth. For all of the successes

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Speaker 1: of particle physics, we don't actually have an understanding of

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Speaker 1: the basic rules of the universe. We don't know what

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Speaker 1: the basic bits of the universe are and what their

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Speaker 1: rules are. Are they strings? Is it a quantum foam?

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Speaker 1: Is it something completely different than we haven't yet or

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Speaker 1: maybe you could never even imagine or grapple with. What

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Speaker 1: we do have is a set of rules that work

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Speaker 1: for the experiments that we can do. But we're pretty

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Speaker 1: sure it's not the final answer, not that they're wrong

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Speaker 1: and it's all a hoax, but that it will be

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Speaker 1: eventually replaced by a deeper understanding. The way Newton's physics

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Speaker 1: worked for the experiments that could be done in his

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Speaker 1: day but were later replaced by Einstein's.

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Speaker 4: More general theory.

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Speaker 1: The way you can use f equalsma to calculate how

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Speaker 1: a ball flies through the air, and it certainly works

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Speaker 1: even if you don't understand the quantum frothing happening inside

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Speaker 1: of it. What we have in particle physics is the

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Speaker 1: same thing. We don't think it's fundamental. We don't think

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Speaker 1: it describes the basic bits of the universe. We think

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Speaker 1: it's effective, meaning that it works, but it describes things

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Speaker 1: that emerge from the fundamental pieces. But it still works

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Speaker 1: even though we don't know what the basic pieces are

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Speaker 1: and the rules that they obey. We have found the

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Speaker 1: non basic pieces and the rules that those non basic

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Speaker 1: pieces obey. For example, we have rules of economics and

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Speaker 1: they mostly work. But people in money are not fundamental

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Speaker 1: elements of the universe. You can have a universe without

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Speaker 1: people and money, and most of the history of the

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Speaker 1: universe didn't have people or money. But once people and

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Speaker 1: money emerge, you don't have to describe the economy of

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Speaker 1: a country using particle physics or string theory. You can

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Speaker 1: find basic mathematical laws that describe economics and are pretty simple,

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Speaker 1: just like F equals MA is pretty simple, but it

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Speaker 1: ignores all of the quantum details underneath. So why does

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Speaker 1: that work? Why is it possible? And what does it

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Speaker 1: mean about whether what we have learned is true and

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Speaker 1: fundamental to the universe, a real description of what's out there,

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Speaker 1: or if it's just a set of mathematical stories that

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Speaker 1: humans tell ourselves that happen to work very well. So

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Speaker 1: today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question why

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Speaker 1: does physics even work? Why is it possible to tell

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Speaker 1: mathematical stories about the universe out there without knowing the

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Speaker 1: deepest underlying truth. We know it's possible to make chicken

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Speaker 1: soup and iPhones without knowing quantum gravity, but why can

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Speaker 1: we Does that mean that the stories we are telling,

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Speaker 1: the physics ideas we have developed are not real in

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Speaker 1: some deep, true sense. Would alien scientists come up with

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Speaker 1: the same theories or have a different concept of how

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Speaker 1: to describe the universe to help us probe these questions,

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Speaker 1: I've invited an expert in this area, Professor Tim O'Connor.

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Speaker 1: Tim is a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at

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Speaker 1: Indiana University, where he specializes in these types of questions

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Speaker 1: and especially the phenomenon of emergence cases where it's possible

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Speaker 1: to describe things at a higher level without knowing the

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Speaker 1: underlying pieces. So it's my pleasure to introduce to the

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Speaker 1: podcast Professor Tim O'Connor.

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Speaker 4: Tim. Thank you very much for joining us today. Glad

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Speaker 4: to be with you, Daniel.

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Speaker 1: As well as being an expert on philosophy of science

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Speaker 1: and emergence, I see that you also claim the title

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Speaker 1: of Philo Pong World Grand Champion or the world's leading

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Speaker 1: table tennis player among properly credentialed philosophers. Tell us about

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Speaker 1: how you figure that out? How you determined that you

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Speaker 1: could claim that title?

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Speaker 4: Uh uh oh. I declared the title, And the interesting

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Speaker 4: thing is that no philosophers have disputed that I hold

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Speaker 4: the title. And I think the reason is that those

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Speaker 4: who like to play serious table tennis figured out that. Great.

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Speaker 4: Then all I have to do is beat you and

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Speaker 4: then I get to claim the title. So I have

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Speaker 4: defended the title on a few occasions, but I expect

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Speaker 4: to be losing the title the next time I go

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Speaker 4: back to China.

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Speaker 1: Well, I think it maybe says something about philosophy that

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Speaker 1: you can just declare yourself champion and then you know,

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Speaker 1: see if it stands up to scrutiny.

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Speaker 4: That's it. It's kind of like a homesteading thing. If

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Speaker 4: no one just feeds it, then at a certain point

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Speaker 4: I own it exactly.

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Speaker 1: So, when you're not winning ping pong matches, you're a

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Speaker 1: philosopher of science, tell us about that. What got you

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Speaker 1: into philosophy of science? What are the most important questions

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Speaker 1: in your mind that we should be asking about our universe?

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Speaker 4: Great? So well, I start out and still think of

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Speaker 4: myself fundamentally as a metaphysician, where metaphysics asks the really

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Speaker 4: most general foundational questions about reality, about fundamental categories like

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Speaker 4: object property, space, time. Does the physics wholly determine what

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Speaker 4: one should think about space and time? It certainly constrains

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Speaker 4: what one should say, and I'm more in the latter

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Speaker 4: camp at constraints but doesn't wholly determine how we think

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Speaker 4: about it. But the relationship of philosophy metaphysics to science

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Speaker 4: is a challenging question in its own right, and of

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Speaker 4: course these two subjects are originally refused in the history

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Speaker 4: of Western thought, going all the way back to thinkers

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Speaker 4: like Aristotle. But well on up to the time of Newton,

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Speaker 4: you had a one job title natural philosopher, which was

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Speaker 4: a description of science as we think of it, as

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Speaker 4: those philosophical questions that concern the natural world. And I

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Speaker 4: think it's beginning with Newton, who famously, when pressed for

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Speaker 4: an account or an explanation of how his theory of

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Speaker 4: gravitational attraction action at a distance, how we could it

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Speaker 4: seemed inconceivable, how it could make sense of that? He

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Speaker 4: famously said, you know about that, I feigned no hypotheses.

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Speaker 4: And he was beginning to show a certain sort as well.

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Speaker 4: You know, you might ask a certain kind of philosophical question.

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Speaker 4: But as far as doing science, which is what fundamentally

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Speaker 4: Newton was up to, the theory works beautifully, the mathematics works,

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Speaker 4: It's predictively successful, and so he was willing to go

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Speaker 4: with that.

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Speaker 1: So I want to talk to you specifically in a

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Speaker 1: bit about emergence and how the world that surrounds us

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Speaker 1: arises and how we make sense of it. At first,

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Speaker 1: I want to start with a bigger picture of why

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Speaker 1: we ask these questions. As you say, we see that

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Speaker 1: science works, we know that it does. It's the reason

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Speaker 1: that we're talking right now. So if Newton doesn't care

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Speaker 1: about questions like why does it work? Or you know,

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Speaker 1: is the universe out there real or is it just

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Speaker 1: a story in our minds, why do we care about

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Speaker 1: those questions? Why are those questions important to figure out?

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Speaker 4: Because ultimately, I think we were driven to wanting to

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Speaker 4: have a conception of reality on which it's explicable it

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Speaker 4: makes sense. I mean explicable, not in the sense necessarily

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Speaker 4: of involving purpose or anything like that, but just rationally explicable.

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Speaker 4: And so simply retreating to an instrumentalist view, say of science,

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Speaker 4: or we're saying it, science just delivers sophisticated instruments that

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Speaker 4: enable you to predict future observations and ultimately control future

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Speaker 4: patterns and stu a degree through technology. That sort of

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Speaker 4: conception leaves open, but why does it work? It can

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Speaker 4: seem like a cosmic coincidence that reality exhibits deep patterns.

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Speaker 4: If all you're willing to say is there are these

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Speaker 4: deep patterns and there's no rational intelligibility behind them, so

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Speaker 4: not everyone shares it, but it's the fundamental philosophical impetus,

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Speaker 4: I guess, to want to understand why things are as

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Speaker 4: they are, and so depending on one's conception of science,

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Speaker 4: science may or may not even give you that right.

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Speaker 4: So there are famous scientists who insisted that in a sense,

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Speaker 4: science doesn't yield explanation. I mean, Richard Feinmann did make

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Speaker 4: noises along those lines, famous twentieth century physicists and never

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Speaker 4: been others. So yeah, he's got a great quote somewhere

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Speaker 4: he says, you know, you want to understand, you know,

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Speaker 4: what reality is like, go ask a philosophy for you're

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Speaker 4: dripping with disday in me. You're saying, physics doesn't give

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Speaker 4: you that, because physics gives you these sophisticated instruments or

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Speaker 4: devices in the form of theories, powerful mathematics, mathematized theories

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Speaker 4: that are predictively successful, and that's it.

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Speaker 1: But most scientists, in my experience, they are you know,

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Speaker 1: scientific realists. They think that the things that we're probing

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Speaker 1: are really out there. I mean, the reason that I'm

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Speaker 1: a particle physicist and not a mathematician is that I

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Speaker 1: want to know what's really out there. I think of

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Speaker 1: myself as revealing the truth. And when I'm at cern

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Speaker 1: if I ask people, hey, do you think the Higgs

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Speaker 1: boson that we discovered is real? Or is it just

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Speaker 1: something in our models that lets is accurately predict experiments,

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Speaker 1: most of them would look at me like I'm crazy,

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Speaker 1: you know, like I had something bad for lunch. It

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Speaker 1: feels to me like they're doing philosophy by rejecting the question,

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Speaker 1: even though they don't imagine they're doing philosophy. Why do

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Speaker 1: you think that's sort of the natural position of most

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Speaker 1: physicists to imagine, you know, a strong philosophical argument that

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Speaker 1: everything we're out there is actually real. Why do you

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Speaker 1: think that most physicists don't consider the whole spectrum of

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Speaker 1: philosophical positions there.

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Speaker 4: I think because it's a sort of natural or default

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Speaker 4: human inclination. First of all, to be a metaphysical realist

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Speaker 4: in the minimal sense of there is a way the

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Speaker 4: world is objectively speaking, and then to go beyond that

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Speaker 4: to think if we have powerfully predictively accurate ways of

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Speaker 4: describing the patterns of our experiences, then those must correspond

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Speaker 4: to something objective. I'm being very vague here, but something

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Speaker 4: in reality is accounting for the fact that our inductions

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Speaker 4: are successful. It may not be a perfect isomorphic overlap

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Speaker 4: right between what we say either in common sense predictions

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Speaker 4: or categorizations, or even in high level theory, but there's

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Speaker 4: some degree of congruence there. We're tracking. I guess what

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Speaker 4: I'm trying to say, we must be tracking something real.

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Speaker 4: And then when you think about fundamental physics, because it's

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Speaker 4: going so deep into the foundations, the inclination, I guess

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Speaker 4: it becomes natural to think we're getting closer and closer

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Speaker 4: to it isomorphism. The categories we're using are are tracking

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Speaker 4: very directly these entities.

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Speaker 1: But it feels something more squishy than we usually find

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Speaker 1: in physics. You know, physics, we have math and calculations

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Speaker 1: and these sorts of things. Here we're talking about like

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Speaker 1: a feeling that what we're seeing out there is real,

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Speaker 1: and you know, our ideas about the universe must be real.

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Speaker 1: It feels a little bit more susceptible to you know,

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Speaker 1: cultural bias or parocoialism, or thinking the way people have

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Speaker 1: always thought. To me, one way to make sense of

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Speaker 1: this question, to make it a bit more concrete is

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Speaker 1: to imagine a scenario like we meet alien physicists and

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Speaker 1: we talk to them about the universe. If what we're

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Speaker 1: learning about the universe is real in a sense that

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Speaker 1: it's not just biased by our human conception, then we

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Speaker 1: can imagine maybe they have discovered the same things. They

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Speaker 1: also found the Higgs boson, and they have group theory

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Speaker 1: as a foundation of their description of the fundamental particles.

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Speaker 1: But if it's not, If instead we have some human

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Speaker 1: element to this understanding, or that what's out there has

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Speaker 1: no relationship to the model that we've built other than

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Speaker 1: that it works, then maybe aliens would have completely separate

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Speaker 1: ideas about physics.

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Speaker 4: You think that's.

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Speaker 1: A reasonable way to frame this question of whether what

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Speaker 1: we're probing is real, whether it could also exist in

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Speaker 1: the minds of other intelligent creatures.

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Speaker 4: Sure. I mean imagine first of all, that at some

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Speaker 4: stage in physics, clever theorists were able to come up

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Speaker 4: with two very different ways of categorizing phenomena, but they

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Speaker 4: were equally predictively successful that I think the natural conclusion

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Speaker 4: we would all draw is it's underdetermined at most one

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Speaker 4: of these if they're incompatible frameworks at most one of

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Speaker 4: these is true. Perhaps neither we need more information. But

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Speaker 4: one of the great, of course achievements of physics has

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Speaker 4: been to increasingly try to break away from a narrowly

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Speaker 4: provincially human way of looking at things. That's very difficult

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Speaker 4: to do, and at some point I expect we'll come

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Speaker 4: back to this. I think there are limits to how

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Speaker 4: far one can go with that rationally, because at the

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Speaker 4: foundation of the evidence for our scientific theories, the epistemology

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Speaker 4: of science, are scientists and the activity of science. And

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Speaker 4: we can't end up endorsing frameworks in which we cannot

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Speaker 4: locate the rational inquirer in the community of inquirers and

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Speaker 4: the activity of inquiring. And I have questions. It's very challenging.

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Speaker 4: But you know, some of the more speculative attempts to

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Speaker 4: unify fundamental particle physics and large scale cosmology, I worry

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Speaker 4: that they're butting up against these kinds of limits. That

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Speaker 4: they're positing models that we could imagine for some entirely

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Speaker 4: disconnected reality. Right, they're perfectly coherent models for describing something,

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Speaker 4: But could they describe our reality? Could we have reason

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Speaker 4: to believe? Right? You know? There we are right in

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Speaker 4: that question, could we have reason to believe that we

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Speaker 4: inhabit a world correctly depicted by this model? There's a

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Speaker 4: tricky question there at the limit.

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Speaker 1: It's certainly interesting to wonder about whether humans can imagine

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Speaker 1: what humans can't imagine, right, Can we think our way

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Speaker 1: out of our own box? It's certainly unknown. I'm really

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Speaker 1: curious about the point you made earlier about whether there

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Speaker 1: could be alternative and completely functional descriptions of the universe

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Speaker 1: that are conceptually different. Like if I describe the universe

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Speaker 1: with my theory of everything and it has squiggles in it,

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Speaker 1: and I say, look, my theory works, squiggles must be real,

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Speaker 1: and you know, you have your theory and it has

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Speaker 1: squaggles in it, and you're like, no, squaggles are totally

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Speaker 1: different from squiggles, and my predictions are just as good

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Speaker 1: as yours. And you're saying, we're faced with a question

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Speaker 1: our squaggle's reel, our squiggles reel? Is anything actually real?

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Speaker 1: Is that the basic idea? And doesn't that sound very

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Speaker 1: similar to the current situation about the nature of fundamental

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Speaker 1: particles and the questions about quantum mechanics, Right, we have

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Speaker 1: very very different conceptions of like what is real at

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Speaker 1: the smallest scale, relational quantum mechanics, boney and mechanics all

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Speaker 1: apart from the you know, sort of orthodoxical Copenhagen interpretation,

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Speaker 1: aren't we sort of in that situation.

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Speaker 4: None of those.

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Speaker 1: Theories give any real variation in their predictions, but they

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Speaker 1: have completely different stories about what's happening in the microscopic stale.

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Speaker 1: Does that mean that nothing is real or just that

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Speaker 1: we haven't found which one is real?

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Speaker 4: I think the latter, that we haven't found which one

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Speaker 4: is real. And of course you're the expert here, not me,

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Speaker 4: But I like to chat with the philosophers of physics

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Speaker 4: in the occasional particle or theoretical physicists about the conceptual

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Speaker 4: challenges in quantum mechanics and in unifying quantum mechanics with

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Speaker 4: space time theories, and so as I'm told. For example,

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Speaker 4: so you got this Bomian interpretation, one interesting feature of

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Speaker 4: which is it's a deterministic theory about the dynamics of

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Speaker 4: the universe, unlike at least a couple of the other

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Speaker 4: leading theories. Whether or not we call many universe theory

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Speaker 4: a deterministic theory is a somewhat subtle question, I think,

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Speaker 4: but I'm told that while these four frameworks all have

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Speaker 4: the same predictive consequences for the kinds of experiments we

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Speaker 4: can do now or have done, that there are imprinciple

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Speaker 4: Boemian mechanics could have different predictions, and so we could potentially,

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Speaker 4: I don't know how far off this might be, but

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Speaker 4: we could potentially have evidence that bore differentially between Boemian

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Speaker 4: mechanics and at least some of the alternatives. So that suggests, yeah,

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Speaker 4: we don't know. So then we're just right currently, you know,

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Speaker 4: but we're still interested in the question, and it may

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Speaker 4: not happen in our lifetime, So the question should we

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Speaker 4: be completely agnostic? And here the different theories have different

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Speaker 4: kinds of theoretical virtues and vices, in so far as

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Speaker 4: one is willing to say purely general characteristics of theories

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Speaker 4: in terms of simplicity of ontology and things like that,

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Speaker 4: or whether it makes you it requires you to make

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Speaker 4: certain very outlandish seeming hypotheses, whether you give that any

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Speaker 4: kind of evidential weight at all might determine whether or

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Speaker 4: not you think we have reason to lean in one

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Speaker 4: direction or the other. Even if we don't have conclusive evidence.

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Speaker 1: Well, I hope that experimentalists are clever enough to come

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Speaker 1: up with ways to test these various hypotheses and tell

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Speaker 1: us what's actually happening at the smallest scale one day.

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Speaker 1: So I have a lot more questions for you, especially

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436
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437
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438
00:25:26,240 --> 00:25:26,960
Speaker 4: When you pop a.

439
00:25:26,880 --> 00:25:29,000
Speaker 1: Piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich

440
00:25:29,040 --> 00:25:32,280
Speaker 1: spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the

441
00:25:32,440 --> 00:25:35,919
Speaker 1: environmental impact of each and every bite, but the people

442
00:25:35,920 --> 00:25:38,880
Speaker 1: in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves

443
00:25:38,960 --> 00:25:43,280
Speaker 1: some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by

444
00:25:43,280 --> 00:25:45,760
Speaker 1: twenty to fifty that's why they're working hard every day

445
00:25:45,760 --> 00:25:48,680
Speaker 1: to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources,

446
00:25:48,680 --> 00:25:52,240
Speaker 1: and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example,

447
00:25:52,320 --> 00:25:55,359
Speaker 1: most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the

448
00:25:55,440 --> 00:25:58,680
Speaker 1: same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn,

449
00:25:58,760 --> 00:26:02,439
Speaker 1: and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases?

450
00:26:02,520 --> 00:26:05,520
Speaker 1: Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from

451
00:26:05,520 --> 00:26:08,919
Speaker 1: maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and

452
00:26:09,000 --> 00:26:11,200
Speaker 1: electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice

453
00:26:11,240 --> 00:26:13,119
Speaker 1: of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that

454
00:26:13,200 --> 00:26:15,840
Speaker 1: dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the

455
00:26:15,920 --> 00:26:19,680
Speaker 1: latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy

456
00:26:19,720 --> 00:26:22,720
Speaker 1: products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy

457
00:26:22,760 --> 00:26:34,000
Speaker 1: dot com slash sustainability to learn more. All right, we're

458
00:26:34,040 --> 00:26:37,320
Speaker 1: back and we're talking to Professor Tim O'Connor, philosopher of

459
00:26:37,359 --> 00:26:41,560
Speaker 1: science and follow upon Grand Champion of the World, who's

460
00:26:41,600 --> 00:26:44,920
Speaker 1: answering my naive questions about philosophy of science and whether

461
00:26:44,960 --> 00:26:48,440
Speaker 1: we can understand what's out there and whether it's real.

462
00:26:48,720 --> 00:26:50,600
Speaker 1: I first came to read your work because I was

463
00:26:50,680 --> 00:26:54,359
Speaker 1: very interested in the question of emergence, cases where we

464
00:26:54,400 --> 00:26:57,439
Speaker 1: can describe things we see in the world using rules

465
00:26:57,440 --> 00:27:00,399
Speaker 1: that are very different from the rules of the underlying bits.

466
00:27:00,440 --> 00:27:01,800
Speaker 1: It's like if you have a set of rules for

467
00:27:01,880 --> 00:27:04,160
Speaker 1: how legos work, but once you put the legos together

468
00:27:04,200 --> 00:27:07,359
Speaker 1: into complicated objects, you're better off describing their behavior and

469
00:27:07,440 --> 00:27:09,879
Speaker 1: a new set of rules, like in a game of life,

470
00:27:10,119 --> 00:27:13,000
Speaker 1: where simple objects with simple rules come together and very

471
00:27:13,040 --> 00:27:17,000
Speaker 1: complex behavior merges. How would you define this concept of

472
00:27:17,040 --> 00:27:18,119
Speaker 1: emergence and why?

473
00:27:18,359 --> 00:27:18,840
Speaker 4: In your view?

474
00:27:18,920 --> 00:27:21,760
Speaker 1: Is emergents an important question in philosophy of science.

475
00:27:22,280 --> 00:27:26,080
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it's always been a controversial idea and emerged

476
00:27:26,160 --> 00:27:31,480
Speaker 4: in the nineteenth century people began thinking in emergentists terms.

477
00:27:31,520 --> 00:27:34,879
Speaker 4: It's a question about the relationship of science at different

478
00:27:35,000 --> 00:27:38,680
Speaker 4: levels of grain. So how does physics relate to chemistry,

479
00:27:38,800 --> 00:27:44,080
Speaker 4: chemistry to molecular biology, biology to organismic biology, and so on,

480
00:27:44,240 --> 00:27:48,520
Speaker 4: then our biology to human psychology, neuroscience, and the brain

481
00:27:48,920 --> 00:27:53,480
Speaker 4: to human psychology. And the emergentist is a person who,

482
00:27:53,960 --> 00:27:58,840
Speaker 4: in very general terms, thinks that organization of certain kinds

483
00:27:59,240 --> 00:28:05,280
Speaker 4: gives raw to new features, new patterns that have a

484
00:28:05,320 --> 00:28:09,119
Speaker 4: certain degree of autonomy with respect to the lower level

485
00:28:09,320 --> 00:28:13,320
Speaker 4: underlying dynamics. It's a new form of dynamics of patterns.

486
00:28:14,160 --> 00:28:16,840
Speaker 4: The kinds of concepts you need to describe what's going

487
00:28:16,880 --> 00:28:19,080
Speaker 4: on are different than the kind of concepts you need

488
00:28:19,119 --> 00:28:24,160
Speaker 4: to do the lower level science. And left at that that,

489
00:28:24,200 --> 00:28:28,280
Speaker 4: there is emergencies entirely uncontroversial. Right. There is such a

490
00:28:28,280 --> 00:28:31,959
Speaker 4: thing as chemistry, and chemistry can be understood to a degree,

491
00:28:32,840 --> 00:28:35,920
Speaker 4: at least at an elementary level apart from quantum mechanics,

492
00:28:35,960 --> 00:28:39,520
Speaker 4: and certainly biology can be understood without knowing anything about

493
00:28:39,600 --> 00:28:42,760
Speaker 4: quantum physics. And psychology, you know, you one can even

494
00:28:42,800 --> 00:28:48,520
Speaker 4: do psychology of various kinds, social psychology, of normal psychology

495
00:28:48,560 --> 00:28:51,760
Speaker 4: and so on without knowing anything about physics or chemistry.

496
00:28:51,960 --> 00:28:54,400
Speaker 4: So there are patterns in the world that have to

497
00:28:54,400 --> 00:28:57,480
Speaker 4: do with organized systems of a certain kind of robust patterns,

498
00:28:57,560 --> 00:29:00,520
Speaker 4: patterns where you can predict phenomena. I mean, think about

499
00:29:00,560 --> 00:29:02,920
Speaker 4: the fact that if I were to go agree to

500
00:29:03,120 --> 00:29:06,160
Speaker 4: fly out to California to meet up with you, and

501
00:29:06,400 --> 00:29:10,160
Speaker 4: three days later I show up at your office door,

502
00:29:10,600 --> 00:29:14,000
Speaker 4: and you quite confidently believe that that's going to happen,

503
00:29:14,200 --> 00:29:17,680
Speaker 4: and that involves the movement of a hunk of matter

504
00:29:18,000 --> 00:29:23,120
Speaker 4: that's coalesced in a fairly organized way, transporting itself across

505
00:29:23,160 --> 00:29:26,600
Speaker 4: a great deal of distance. And could you predict that

506
00:29:26,680 --> 00:29:31,600
Speaker 4: in terms of physics, Well, certainly not, given your given

507
00:29:31,640 --> 00:29:36,000
Speaker 4: our computational limits. Right, But you know psychology works beautifully well, right,

508
00:29:36,040 --> 00:29:38,600
Speaker 4: I mean, we can predict human behavior to a certain

509
00:29:38,640 --> 00:29:44,200
Speaker 4: degree just by attributing to people beliefs, desires and tensions

510
00:29:45,280 --> 00:29:48,600
Speaker 4: and so on. And you can be completely ignorant. People

511
00:29:48,640 --> 00:29:52,080
Speaker 4: were doing this a thousand years ago, knowing nothing about

512
00:29:52,120 --> 00:29:56,040
Speaker 4: the physical, underlying physical structure of the world. So there's

513
00:29:56,040 --> 00:29:59,800
Speaker 4: a sense in which it's obviously true that there are

514
00:30:00,080 --> 00:30:04,800
Speaker 4: emergent phenomena. So weak emergence is the uncontroversial kind week

515
00:30:04,840 --> 00:30:09,520
Speaker 4: emergence says, there are organized phenomena that have their own

516
00:30:09,640 --> 00:30:13,960
Speaker 4: characteristic forms of activity, their own characteristic features, and the

517
00:30:14,640 --> 00:30:18,160
Speaker 4: kind of dynamics for how this activity unfolds. But the

518
00:30:18,360 --> 00:30:23,720
Speaker 4: weak emergentist says, all of that is fixed, in some sense,

519
00:30:24,240 --> 00:30:29,880
Speaker 4: determined by the underlying most fundamental dynamics in our world,

520
00:30:30,080 --> 00:30:33,280
Speaker 4: the fundamental physical dynamics, whatever that turns out to be.

521
00:30:34,040 --> 00:30:38,800
Speaker 4: You know, that lies at the root of everything, fix

522
00:30:38,920 --> 00:30:42,760
Speaker 4: that across space and time, all the fundamental physics, right,

523
00:30:42,800 --> 00:30:47,200
Speaker 4: and you've thereby fixed all higher level phenomena in their patterns.

524
00:30:47,280 --> 00:30:49,200
Speaker 1: So, for example, if we're playing a game of ping pong,

525
00:30:49,320 --> 00:30:51,040
Speaker 1: we're saying that we can describe the motion of the

526
00:30:51,040 --> 00:30:54,520
Speaker 1: ping pong ball using fairly simple rules. But fundamentally, even

527
00:30:54,560 --> 00:30:57,280
Speaker 1: though we can't calculate it today, those basic rules of

528
00:30:57,280 --> 00:30:59,600
Speaker 1: the ping pong ball come from the basic rules of

529
00:30:59,640 --> 00:31:02,160
Speaker 1: its cancer. That the twing and froing of all the

530
00:31:02,160 --> 00:31:05,000
Speaker 1: particles inside the ping pung ball adds up somehow to

531
00:31:05,240 --> 00:31:09,000
Speaker 1: f equals ma that is determined by the basic elements.

532
00:31:08,760 --> 00:31:11,880
Speaker 4: Is that the idea, yes, and it's just you know,

533
00:31:11,960 --> 00:31:15,960
Speaker 4: computational limits on our part that we can't discern it. Right.

534
00:31:16,000 --> 00:31:21,480
Speaker 4: So Laplace the nineteenth century physicist mathematician, you know, famously

535
00:31:21,560 --> 00:31:27,120
Speaker 4: imagined a kind of disembodied intelligence who had was subject

536
00:31:27,200 --> 00:31:32,240
Speaker 4: to zero computational limits, right, could track all the fundamental

537
00:31:32,400 --> 00:31:36,840
Speaker 4: entities constituting space and time and their trajectories and discern

538
00:31:37,440 --> 00:31:41,959
Speaker 4: the patterns the fundamental dynamics that drive those things their interactions.

539
00:31:42,360 --> 00:31:45,200
Speaker 4: And then the thought is you could just sort of speak,

540
00:31:45,320 --> 00:31:48,680
Speaker 4: step back and see the forest for the trees, and

541
00:31:48,720 --> 00:31:54,240
Speaker 4: could also notice then that there are these structured features

542
00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:57,680
Speaker 4: of you know, more larger regions of space and time

543
00:31:57,760 --> 00:32:01,880
Speaker 4: and their interactions, and discerned they have dynamics, and could,

544
00:32:01,960 --> 00:32:04,960
Speaker 4: in a very laborious way for us at any rate,

545
00:32:05,240 --> 00:32:09,240
Speaker 4: show that these high level patterns don't disturb you might say,

546
00:32:09,360 --> 00:32:12,640
Speaker 4: or add to what's going on at the fundamental level.

547
00:32:12,760 --> 00:32:15,400
Speaker 4: There are just a structured consequence of it. It's a

548
00:32:15,480 --> 00:32:19,160
Speaker 4: surprising fact, right we could imagine a boring, flat world

549
00:32:19,240 --> 00:32:22,320
Speaker 4: where there's just fundamental physics, but there was no interesting

550
00:32:22,440 --> 00:32:26,600
Speaker 4: structured phenomena. Well, our world's not like that, and so

551
00:32:26,680 --> 00:32:28,880
Speaker 4: that gives rise to an interesting question, even for the

552
00:32:28,880 --> 00:32:32,440
Speaker 4: weak emergencies, Why is our world such that there are

553
00:32:32,880 --> 00:32:37,840
Speaker 4: not just fundamental physical patterns that fix everything, but also

554
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:43,080
Speaker 4: these higher levels structured phenomena. It seems conceivable that there

555
00:32:43,120 --> 00:32:46,560
Speaker 4: could be alternative physics where that just never happens.

556
00:32:46,760 --> 00:32:49,080
Speaker 1: So to me, that's a really fascinating question. I can't

557
00:32:49,120 --> 00:32:51,160
Speaker 1: let you go past that without exploring it more deeply.

558
00:32:51,240 --> 00:32:53,640
Speaker 1: To me, that's one of the deepest questions. Like in

559
00:32:53,680 --> 00:32:56,120
Speaker 1: the weak emergent case, where everything is determined by the

560
00:32:56,120 --> 00:33:00,560
Speaker 1: most fundamental principles, Why is it then possible to find

561
00:33:00,600 --> 00:33:03,479
Speaker 1: this structure? Why is it possible to find fairly simple

562
00:33:03,560 --> 00:33:07,360
Speaker 1: mathematical laws with hugely reduced degrees of freedom? Right when

563
00:33:07,400 --> 00:33:09,760
Speaker 1: you talk about the ping pong ball moving across the table,

564
00:33:09,920 --> 00:33:11,840
Speaker 1: you don't have to talk about all the particles that

565
00:33:11,880 --> 00:33:14,160
Speaker 1: are inside of it. As you say, there are these

566
00:33:14,200 --> 00:33:18,240
Speaker 1: simpler descriptions the structure that emerges. Is it necessary that

567
00:33:18,320 --> 00:33:21,680
Speaker 1: structure emerges? Why isn't it just the fundamental bits and

568
00:33:21,720 --> 00:33:24,600
Speaker 1: then basically chaos above that? You know, Why isn't everything

569
00:33:24,680 --> 00:33:27,520
Speaker 1: like a hurricane out of rain drops impossible to predict,

570
00:33:27,560 --> 00:33:31,880
Speaker 1: no larger structure? Why does it these simple explanations emerge.

571
00:33:31,880 --> 00:33:32,720
Speaker 1: Do we understand that?

572
00:33:32,920 --> 00:33:36,080
Speaker 4: To the best of my knowledge, no, Since I've never

573
00:33:36,200 --> 00:33:40,840
Speaker 4: encountered anyone the many thinkers, scientists and philosophers who talk

574
00:33:40,880 --> 00:33:45,040
Speaker 4: about emergents who directly address that question and give kind

575
00:33:45,080 --> 00:33:49,440
Speaker 4: of full, plausible sounding answers to it, I'm almost thinking

576
00:33:49,560 --> 00:33:55,800
Speaker 4: it's a question for a mathematician or a physicist, you know,

577
00:33:55,880 --> 00:33:59,080
Speaker 4: kind of wars dual hats as a mathematician, so you

578
00:33:59,120 --> 00:34:04,320
Speaker 4: invoke the game off. So John Conway, famous mathematician, he

579
00:34:04,760 --> 00:34:09,279
Speaker 4: described this the cellular automata which sounds complicated, but it's

580
00:34:09,320 --> 00:34:12,399
Speaker 4: actually quite simple, right. It's like it's almost like describing

581
00:34:12,880 --> 00:34:16,680
Speaker 4: a reality, a two dimensional reality that has very very

582
00:34:16,719 --> 00:34:20,319
Speaker 4: simple property, so simple, much simpler than fundamental physics. But

583
00:34:20,440 --> 00:34:24,320
Speaker 4: what's really interesting about it is he shows that depending

584
00:34:24,400 --> 00:34:26,719
Speaker 4: on the initial conditions you set, and then you just

585
00:34:26,800 --> 00:34:30,400
Speaker 4: watch how this grid changes over time, moment to moment,

586
00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:35,040
Speaker 4: patterns emerge, Structured patterns emerge that don't alter the basic

587
00:34:35,160 --> 00:34:38,719
Speaker 4: rules of life are unchanged, and yet there are these

588
00:34:38,760 --> 00:34:41,480
Speaker 4: interesting patterns that can be understood in their own terms.

589
00:34:41,600 --> 00:34:45,719
Speaker 4: That way of framing it, this very elementary mathematical he

590
00:34:46,239 --> 00:34:49,279
Speaker 4: shows it that it happens in certain life worlds. You

591
00:34:49,360 --> 00:34:53,040
Speaker 4: get these interesting patterns. And then the question is whether

592
00:34:53,239 --> 00:34:57,000
Speaker 4: it almost sounds like the territory of a mathematical proof

593
00:34:57,719 --> 00:35:02,759
Speaker 4: of certain fundamental dynamics, subject to certain constraints that can

594
00:35:02,760 --> 00:35:09,200
Speaker 4: be given a clear mathematical description, necessarily will yield over

595
00:35:10,440 --> 00:35:15,600
Speaker 4: given enough times, patterns of structured interactions. At least, that's

596
00:35:15,600 --> 00:35:18,040
Speaker 4: what I'm tempted to say. It's it's almost it's that

597
00:35:18,160 --> 00:35:18,880
Speaker 4: kind of question.

598
00:35:19,160 --> 00:35:21,759
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to me, and you know, maybe like the

599
00:35:21,800 --> 00:35:25,040
Speaker 1: weakest argument I could make to say that structure has

600
00:35:25,080 --> 00:35:27,839
Speaker 1: to emerge. Is that, well, maybe it doesn't always, but

601
00:35:28,000 --> 00:35:30,640
Speaker 1: we exist in the universe where it has, because otherwise

602
00:35:31,080 --> 00:35:34,240
Speaker 1: we couldn't. I mean, we are structure right, my mind,

603
00:35:34,320 --> 00:35:36,759
Speaker 1: my concept of myself, this conversation, all of this is

604
00:35:36,800 --> 00:35:39,560
Speaker 1: emerging structure. I'm not a fundamental bit in the universe.

605
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:40,400
Speaker 4: Neither you.

606
00:35:40,520 --> 00:35:44,480
Speaker 1: Neither's humanity, maybe not you know consciousness. So perhaps you

607
00:35:44,480 --> 00:35:46,880
Speaker 1: know there are many universes out there, and only in

608
00:35:46,960 --> 00:35:50,040
Speaker 1: ones where structure does emerge at larger scales, can you

609
00:35:50,080 --> 00:35:54,360
Speaker 1: have consciousness and podcasts and philosophy at those scales? That

610
00:35:54,520 --> 00:35:56,880
Speaker 1: seems to be sort of a very weak argument. In physics,

611
00:35:56,920 --> 00:36:00,560
Speaker 1: we have another concept, which is renormalization theory, which let's

612
00:36:00,640 --> 00:36:03,279
Speaker 1: us say, the theory we have about particle physics right

613
00:36:03,320 --> 00:36:05,920
Speaker 1: now is an effective theory. We know that we know

614
00:36:05,960 --> 00:36:08,960
Speaker 1: that electrons and quarks are probably not the answer to

615
00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:10,360
Speaker 1: the deepest question in the universe.

616
00:36:10,440 --> 00:36:12,040
Speaker 4: But we can abstract.

617
00:36:11,520 --> 00:36:13,799
Speaker 1: Away all the really high energy stuff, the stuff we

618
00:36:13,840 --> 00:36:16,200
Speaker 1: can't probe today, the smaller bits in terms of a

619
00:36:16,200 --> 00:36:20,120
Speaker 1: few parameters, and Robert Wilson's theory about reneralization and all

620
00:36:20,200 --> 00:36:22,920
Speaker 1: this stuff and the decoupling theorem. Lets us do this,

621
00:36:23,200 --> 00:36:26,080
Speaker 1: but we don't really understand to my knowledge, why that is.

622
00:36:26,640 --> 00:36:28,640
Speaker 1: It seems to work. It's sort of like science and

623
00:36:28,719 --> 00:36:30,799
Speaker 1: a larger scale. It seems to work. We have these

624
00:36:30,840 --> 00:36:33,719
Speaker 1: abilities to do this, but there's no theory as far

625
00:36:33,760 --> 00:36:35,920
Speaker 1: as I can tell, that tells us why that happens.

626
00:36:35,960 --> 00:36:38,040
Speaker 1: I mean, so another way, if I gave you a

627
00:36:38,040 --> 00:36:41,640
Speaker 1: fundamental description of the universe, could you predict whether or

628
00:36:41,640 --> 00:36:44,560
Speaker 1: not emergence comes out of it, whether or not things emerge,

629
00:36:45,080 --> 00:36:47,839
Speaker 1: or would you have to run the simulation and observe it.

630
00:36:47,880 --> 00:36:50,359
Speaker 1: To me, that's a really interesting question. You know why

631
00:36:50,400 --> 00:36:51,920
Speaker 1: this stuff emerges at all?

632
00:36:52,320 --> 00:36:55,640
Speaker 4: Yes, And then of course there is the question of

633
00:36:55,840 --> 00:37:00,440
Speaker 4: a different kind of emergence. So strong emergence, which is

634
00:37:00,680 --> 00:37:05,239
Speaker 4: non trivial, it's not trivially manifest, is a notion of

635
00:37:05,719 --> 00:37:11,560
Speaker 4: when under certain structured conditions, properties of holes arise and

636
00:37:11,600 --> 00:37:15,640
Speaker 4: they have an influence on how things behave. And these

637
00:37:15,680 --> 00:37:20,440
Speaker 4: properties do add at the end of the day, they

638
00:37:20,520 --> 00:37:23,640
Speaker 4: add to the fundamental dynamics of the world. They have

639
00:37:23,719 --> 00:37:26,800
Speaker 4: a kind of downward influence and it goes all the

640
00:37:26,840 --> 00:37:30,880
Speaker 4: way down. So it's as if it's a new force

641
00:37:31,080 --> 00:37:33,480
Speaker 4: like property or something. I mean, how exactly we might

642
00:37:33,600 --> 00:37:39,719
Speaker 4: theorize such an irreducible property, irreducible but causally effective property.

643
00:37:39,840 --> 00:37:41,600
Speaker 4: Perhaps there's more than one way we could do it,

644
00:37:41,640 --> 00:37:43,360
Speaker 4: but you know, just as a kind of rough and

645
00:37:43,440 --> 00:37:45,560
Speaker 4: ready initial start, you know, think of it as like

646
00:37:46,120 --> 00:37:50,399
Speaker 4: a new kind of structured force property or something that.

647
00:37:50,440 --> 00:37:52,920
Speaker 1: Adds to But this is sort of a shocking idea

648
00:37:52,960 --> 00:37:55,560
Speaker 1: to me, because as a particle physicist, I imagine a

649
00:37:55,680 --> 00:37:58,480
Speaker 1: reductionism works if one to understand big stuff, I go

650
00:37:58,520 --> 00:38:00,440
Speaker 1: to the small stuff, and eventually I can build up

651
00:38:00,480 --> 00:38:02,879
Speaker 1: from there if I have infinite computing power, et cetera.

652
00:38:03,000 --> 00:38:05,560
Speaker 1: And you're suggesting that's not necessarily the case, that maybe

653
00:38:05,640 --> 00:38:08,000
Speaker 1: there are rules that exist at the higher level, the

654
00:38:08,080 --> 00:38:10,840
Speaker 1: level of ping pong balls and ice cream, that don't

655
00:38:10,960 --> 00:38:14,040
Speaker 1: come out of the smallest bits, but somehow exist only

656
00:38:14,080 --> 00:38:14,799
Speaker 1: at that level.

657
00:38:14,840 --> 00:38:17,480
Speaker 4: Is that right? Yeah? And so then I want to say,

658
00:38:17,560 --> 00:38:19,680
Speaker 4: you know, it's an empirical question. It ought to be

659
00:38:19,719 --> 00:38:22,680
Speaker 4: thought of as a straightforward the empirical question of whether

660
00:38:22,760 --> 00:38:26,319
Speaker 4: there are emergent properties of that kind, emergent properties and

661
00:38:26,400 --> 00:38:31,719
Speaker 4: patterns and activity of that stronger variety. And for that

662
00:38:32,280 --> 00:38:36,040
Speaker 4: I don't think fundamental physics is the domain you go to,

663
00:38:36,320 --> 00:38:39,560
Speaker 4: or certainly not by itself. I mean, if we were

664
00:38:39,680 --> 00:38:44,960
Speaker 4: Laplacian's pure disembodied infinite intelligence, while we could we could

665
00:38:45,000 --> 00:38:48,960
Speaker 4: do it and say, well, is there any region of

666
00:38:49,040 --> 00:38:54,880
Speaker 4: space time we're running only with the fundamental dynamics breaks

667
00:38:54,920 --> 00:39:00,640
Speaker 4: down right in certain interestingly structured local regions, right, But

668
00:39:00,640 --> 00:39:05,560
Speaker 4: we're not such an intelligence. And so it's inconceivable at

669
00:39:05,600 --> 00:39:10,160
Speaker 4: present and probably forever that we could directly monitor in

670
00:39:10,239 --> 00:39:15,759
Speaker 4: real time trillions upon trillions of variables corresponding to all

671
00:39:15,800 --> 00:39:19,280
Speaker 4: the particles both in and immediately within the light cone

672
00:39:19,360 --> 00:39:21,919
Speaker 4: over an interval of time, you know, of some some

673
00:39:21,920 --> 00:39:25,640
Speaker 4: sort of organized phenomenon and calculate, you know, how we

674
00:39:25,719 --> 00:39:28,440
Speaker 4: expect all those interactions to go and see whether the

675
00:39:28,480 --> 00:39:31,800
Speaker 4: particle physics is sufficient for capturing what's going on in

676
00:39:31,960 --> 00:39:35,080
Speaker 4: say a human brain, to pick a likely target of

677
00:39:35,520 --> 00:39:38,160
Speaker 4: a strong emergence to hypothesis.

678
00:39:38,280 --> 00:39:41,160
Speaker 1: Right, And so that's a very attractive question obviously. You know,

679
00:39:41,239 --> 00:39:43,359
Speaker 1: we look at the human brain and it's a lump

680
00:39:43,360 --> 00:39:46,080
Speaker 1: of stuff. There are other lumps of stuff that don't

681
00:39:46,120 --> 00:39:48,399
Speaker 1: seem to be conscious, you know, my desk, my chair,

682
00:39:48,440 --> 00:39:50,920
Speaker 1: are also lumps of stuff that have actually the same

683
00:39:51,040 --> 00:39:53,960
Speaker 1: you know, number of protons and neutrons and electrons as

684
00:39:53,960 --> 00:39:56,760
Speaker 1: my brain does. Why is it that my brain exhibits

685
00:39:56,760 --> 00:40:00,560
Speaker 1: this crazy behavior that rocks and chairs and table don't.

686
00:40:00,680 --> 00:40:04,520
Speaker 1: So are you suggesting that, for example, consciousness might not

687
00:40:05,280 --> 00:40:08,960
Speaker 1: just emerge from the interactions of those pieces inside the brain,

688
00:40:09,040 --> 00:40:11,280
Speaker 1: but could come out at some sort of higher level.

689
00:40:11,640 --> 00:40:15,640
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so here's where I would say, contentiously, we're

690
00:40:15,719 --> 00:40:17,960
Speaker 4: kind of in the realm of philosophy, but when you

691
00:40:18,080 --> 00:40:22,440
Speaker 4: reflect on the nature of conscious experience, we seem directly

692
00:40:22,680 --> 00:40:30,239
Speaker 4: acquainted with qualities qualities of our own experiences that cannot plausibly,

693
00:40:30,400 --> 00:40:35,600
Speaker 4: perhaps even conceivably be mapped onto structured properties of the

694
00:40:35,680 --> 00:40:39,520
Speaker 4: relevant regions of our brain. So, you know, famous kind

695
00:40:39,600 --> 00:40:42,560
Speaker 4: of example. If you go into the philosophy literature talking

696
00:40:42,560 --> 00:40:46,480
Speaker 4: about this, you encounter the story of this neuroscientist Mary,

697
00:40:47,239 --> 00:40:50,720
Speaker 4: and Mary is we imagine one hundred years from now,

698
00:40:50,840 --> 00:40:54,960
Speaker 4: the science of the neuroscience of color vision is complete,

699
00:40:55,719 --> 00:41:03,200
Speaker 4: and so Mary is aidential neuroscientist of color vision. So

700
00:41:03,800 --> 00:41:08,160
Speaker 4: what that means is you put somebody under the relevant

701
00:41:08,200 --> 00:41:13,320
Speaker 4: scanning device and Mary gets some kind of interpreted feed

702
00:41:13,360 --> 00:41:18,040
Speaker 4: out from her computer telling her what's going on structurally,

703
00:41:18,560 --> 00:41:21,759
Speaker 4: and she can predict what kind of color experience the

704
00:41:21,800 --> 00:41:24,319
Speaker 4: person is having just on the basis of that. But

705
00:41:24,400 --> 00:41:26,800
Speaker 4: now here's the wrinkle you add to the story. Mary

706
00:41:26,800 --> 00:41:31,879
Speaker 4: herself has never had color experience because Mary's parents were

707
00:41:32,040 --> 00:41:35,719
Speaker 4: crazed psychologists who thought it was an interesting experiment to

708
00:41:35,800 --> 00:41:38,240
Speaker 4: raise her to be both a scientist of color vision,

709
00:41:38,280 --> 00:41:41,120
Speaker 4: but to never have So she only has monochrome shades

710
00:41:41,160 --> 00:41:44,759
Speaker 4: of gray right everything. She's locked in a room and

711
00:41:45,680 --> 00:41:49,120
Speaker 4: there's nothing that has color beyond shades of gray and

712
00:41:49,160 --> 00:41:53,160
Speaker 4: white and black. She's never cut herself. She's happily has

713
00:41:53,239 --> 00:41:56,319
Speaker 4: never cut herself. She never thought to do that. But

714
00:41:56,400 --> 00:41:58,920
Speaker 4: one day, you know, she escapes from her room and

715
00:41:58,960 --> 00:42:01,280
Speaker 4: she looks out on a bright sunny day and sees

716
00:42:01,320 --> 00:42:06,120
Speaker 4: a red rose, and she knows that when human beings

717
00:42:06,160 --> 00:42:10,080
Speaker 4: look at roses right, that they have what she calls

718
00:42:10,239 --> 00:42:13,760
Speaker 4: red color experience. But for her, it's a purely theoretical quality.

719
00:42:13,760 --> 00:42:17,320
Speaker 4: What is that the way red looks to a normally

720
00:42:17,400 --> 00:42:21,200
Speaker 4: cited human under bright, sunny conditions. So now she has

721
00:42:21,239 --> 00:42:24,640
Speaker 4: the experience, and she says to herself, so that is

722
00:42:24,680 --> 00:42:28,480
Speaker 4: what a red rose looks like. That is She's not

723
00:42:28,719 --> 00:42:32,319
Speaker 4: learning something about the color of the rose that has

724
00:42:32,360 --> 00:42:35,759
Speaker 4: to do with the surface of the rose, right, kind

725
00:42:35,760 --> 00:42:39,200
Speaker 4: of certain reflectance property. That's not what she exclaims. She's

726
00:42:39,360 --> 00:42:42,840
Speaker 4: actually talking about her own experience of a red rose.

727
00:42:43,160 --> 00:42:46,840
Speaker 4: She's saying, that's what an experience of redness is like

728
00:42:47,480 --> 00:42:49,520
Speaker 4: for a human being, you know. And we think about

729
00:42:49,520 --> 00:42:52,720
Speaker 4: that thought experiment, and we think it makes perfect sense,

730
00:42:52,760 --> 00:42:57,120
Speaker 4: and we say, right, somebody who's never experienced the color red,

731
00:42:57,400 --> 00:43:02,279
Speaker 4: you can't community it's kind of ineffable. Just this simple quality, right,

732
00:43:02,760 --> 00:43:05,720
Speaker 4: of a certain kind of deep red color, let's say,

733
00:43:05,840 --> 00:43:08,680
Speaker 4: as opposed to a blue and green. Right, These are

734
00:43:08,760 --> 00:43:11,840
Speaker 4: just they're just different. They're distinct qualities, but they're relatively

735
00:43:11,880 --> 00:43:14,279
Speaker 4: simple qualities of our experiences right now.

736
00:43:14,400 --> 00:43:17,000
Speaker 1: The physics of it, of course, is that photons hit

737
00:43:17,040 --> 00:43:20,840
Speaker 1: your eyeballs at different energies, different wavelengths, and those stimulate,

738
00:43:21,080 --> 00:43:24,520
Speaker 1: you know, different paths, at different signals up the optic nerve.

739
00:43:24,560 --> 00:43:27,160
Speaker 1: But of course there's no color in those signals.

740
00:43:27,200 --> 00:43:27,319
Speaker 4: Right.

741
00:43:27,360 --> 00:43:29,680
Speaker 1: The color you're saying is experienced by the brain. It

742
00:43:29,719 --> 00:43:32,480
Speaker 1: gets the signal and it gives you the experience of

743
00:43:32,520 --> 00:43:34,920
Speaker 1: red or the experience of blue. And you're saying that

744
00:43:35,080 --> 00:43:38,000
Speaker 1: internal experience. We don't know how to describe it or

745
00:43:38,120 --> 00:43:40,120
Speaker 1: quantify it or make it objective, but.

746
00:43:40,400 --> 00:43:43,080
Speaker 4: It's real and it's something over and above. Mary seems

747
00:43:43,120 --> 00:43:46,400
Speaker 4: to learn something new about color experience, even though she

748
00:43:46,480 --> 00:43:49,239
Speaker 4: knew what you were just describing in shorthand. Parry knows

749
00:43:49,280 --> 00:43:52,920
Speaker 4: all that stuff. She knows the neuroscience of color experience.

750
00:43:52,960 --> 00:43:55,239
Speaker 4: She knows what goes on in the visual cortex. Right,

751
00:43:55,320 --> 00:43:58,040
Speaker 4: what kind of patterns of firings of neurons are going

752
00:43:58,080 --> 00:44:00,840
Speaker 4: on when someone has an experience like that? Right, But

753
00:44:01,160 --> 00:44:05,440
Speaker 4: those seem to be all the causal preconditions, the underpinnings

754
00:44:05,480 --> 00:44:09,360
Speaker 4: of color experience, but not the experience itself, the subjective,

755
00:44:09,480 --> 00:44:14,399
Speaker 4: the simple subjective quality. So the suggestion is right, there

756
00:44:14,440 --> 00:44:20,319
Speaker 4: are these subjective qualities, qualities of conscious minds, experiential qualities

757
00:44:20,760 --> 00:44:24,600
Speaker 4: that are something over and above the physical structures and

758
00:44:24,719 --> 00:44:30,160
Speaker 4: states and processes that undoubtedly are necessary to undergo those experiences.

759
00:44:30,239 --> 00:44:33,799
Speaker 4: There's something additional. They seem strongly emergent, because now we're

760
00:44:33,840 --> 00:44:36,640
Speaker 4: not just talking about a pattern of activity. We're talking

761
00:44:36,640 --> 00:44:41,120
Speaker 4: about a new fundamental quality that can't be described in

762
00:44:41,320 --> 00:44:44,880
Speaker 4: terms of any of these sorts of processes. Even at

763
00:44:44,920 --> 00:44:47,960
Speaker 4: the neuroscientific level of description, which would seem to be

764
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:51,080
Speaker 4: the relevant level of description here, right, that's if it

765
00:44:51,200 --> 00:44:56,040
Speaker 4: is a wholly physically constituted phenomena, then neuroscience should be

766
00:44:56,080 --> 00:44:59,000
Speaker 4: the science that tells you what it is. It's that

767
00:44:59,120 --> 00:45:02,880
Speaker 4: neural structure and patterns. So you described this as an

768
00:45:02,920 --> 00:45:06,000
Speaker 4: empirical question. What is the empirical test you could do

769
00:45:06,239 --> 00:45:10,360
Speaker 4: to figure out whether consciousness or you know, even physics

770
00:45:10,600 --> 00:45:15,080
Speaker 4: of baseballs is strongly emergent or weekly emergent, whether there

771
00:45:15,080 --> 00:45:17,959
Speaker 4: really is something new at these larger scales, or whether

772
00:45:17,960 --> 00:45:20,359
Speaker 4: it's just determined by the little bits that they're made

773
00:45:20,360 --> 00:45:23,360
Speaker 4: out of. Right, Well, it would seem like we would

774
00:45:23,440 --> 00:45:27,080
Speaker 4: need a much you know, neuroscience is still in its

775
00:45:27,160 --> 00:45:30,640
Speaker 4: relative infancy. If you talk to neuroscientists, that's what they

776
00:45:30,680 --> 00:45:33,160
Speaker 4: say about the state of the science. They know a

777
00:45:33,160 --> 00:45:37,759
Speaker 4: lot about local interactions and sofa neurons and synapses and

778
00:45:37,800 --> 00:45:42,080
Speaker 4: all that, but large scale patterns is something that they're

779
00:45:42,160 --> 00:45:44,360
Speaker 4: just beginning to get a bit of a handle on.

780
00:45:44,520 --> 00:45:47,439
Speaker 4: There's a ton that they don't understand. But it would

781
00:45:47,440 --> 00:45:51,560
Speaker 4: seem like if we could envision a much more developed

782
00:45:51,960 --> 00:45:58,080
Speaker 4: systematic neuroscientific theory of neurodynamics of brains as complicated as

783
00:45:58,120 --> 00:46:03,600
Speaker 4: our brains, and you could show that you could completely

784
00:46:03,800 --> 00:46:08,319
Speaker 4: predict the unfolding of the relevant processes, say in the

785
00:46:08,400 --> 00:46:12,560
Speaker 4: visual cortex, when someone's having color experience, without recurse to

786
00:46:12,640 --> 00:46:17,680
Speaker 4: some hypothesized further quality that presumably would be doing something.

787
00:46:17,880 --> 00:46:20,680
Speaker 4: That is, if the look of a red rose really

788
00:46:20,760 --> 00:46:24,400
Speaker 4: is a quality over and above some kind of structured

789
00:46:24,480 --> 00:46:31,160
Speaker 4: neural quality, then that quality is part of what leads

790
00:46:31,239 --> 00:46:35,160
Speaker 4: me to talk about it. Right, So that means that

791
00:46:35,320 --> 00:46:38,919
Speaker 4: in principle, a neuroscientist who's paying attention in real time

792
00:46:38,960 --> 00:46:41,720
Speaker 4: what's going on in your brain when all this is happening,

793
00:46:41,760 --> 00:46:44,200
Speaker 4: you're having an experience and you're talking about it, if

794
00:46:44,440 --> 00:46:49,200
Speaker 4: the theory was sufficiently well developed and testable, could see

795
00:46:49,200 --> 00:46:53,360
Speaker 4: whether somehow there was an incompleteness. You know, if the

796
00:46:53,440 --> 00:46:56,400
Speaker 4: neuroscientist is just doing it in terms of neurons and

797
00:46:56,480 --> 00:47:00,000
Speaker 4: neural assemblies and so forth, and they can perfectly predict

798
00:47:00,160 --> 00:47:02,600
Speaker 4: the dynamics going on and the relevant portion of your

799
00:47:02,600 --> 00:47:08,400
Speaker 4: brain without recourse to some further hypothesized, holistic, strongly immerging property.

800
00:47:08,440 --> 00:47:11,120
Speaker 4: But in fact, suppose suppose that's just wrong. It's an

801
00:47:11,120 --> 00:47:14,400
Speaker 4: illusion but it's somehow hardwired into us that we have

802
00:47:14,560 --> 00:47:17,880
Speaker 4: this illusion. If there's something further that's left out of

803
00:47:17,920 --> 00:47:21,359
Speaker 4: a physical description that's a conceivable, you might say it's

804
00:47:21,360 --> 00:47:25,160
Speaker 4: a psychological hypothesis. Right, one could go looking for us.

805
00:47:25,160 --> 00:47:28,720
Speaker 4: There's something about the way our psychology has structured such

806
00:47:28,840 --> 00:47:30,520
Speaker 4: that you know, you know, we know there are visual

807
00:47:30,560 --> 00:47:35,239
Speaker 4: illusions built into our visual system, the Muller lie, the

808
00:47:35,920 --> 00:47:38,440
Speaker 4: you know, the two lines with arrows. I won't go

809
00:47:38,520 --> 00:47:41,200
Speaker 4: into a description of it. Right, there's well known visual

810
00:47:41,239 --> 00:47:44,359
Speaker 4: illusions that have to do with certain limits to our

811
00:47:44,440 --> 00:47:49,080
Speaker 4: visual system. Right, we're led to say untrue things about

812
00:47:49,080 --> 00:47:52,919
Speaker 4: what we're experiencing. Maybe there's something like this that's even deeper. Right,

813
00:47:53,000 --> 00:47:59,040
Speaker 4: we're inclined to attribute qualities to experiences that aren't actually there, right,

814
00:47:59,080 --> 00:48:01,360
Speaker 4: and so if they're not there, then boom, the problem

815
00:48:01,400 --> 00:48:04,520
Speaker 4: goes away. Okay, great. So so you know, as scientist,

816
00:48:04,600 --> 00:48:07,520
Speaker 4: you know, who's kind of reductionist minded, should be tempted

817
00:48:07,560 --> 00:48:12,200
Speaker 4: by this illusionist perspective on conscious experience. We're having experiences,

818
00:48:12,480 --> 00:48:15,480
Speaker 4: it's just they're not what they seem to us to be.

819
00:48:15,719 --> 00:48:18,160
Speaker 1: And to me, that connects really deeply with this larger

820
00:48:18,239 --> 00:48:20,719
Speaker 1: question of what's out there, and do we know that

821
00:48:20,760 --> 00:48:23,439
Speaker 1: what we are experiencing and the theories we're building from

822
00:48:23,440 --> 00:48:26,759
Speaker 1: those experiences really reflect what's real in the universe or

823
00:48:26,800 --> 00:48:29,200
Speaker 1: whether it's just a sort of game we are putting

824
00:48:29,200 --> 00:48:31,600
Speaker 1: together in our minds. And so I want to ask

825
00:48:31,600 --> 00:48:34,520
Speaker 1: you more about that. First, let's take another quick break.

826
00:48:38,920 --> 00:48:40,680
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00:48:50,719 --> 00:48:55,000
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831
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873
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874
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875
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Speaker 4: Terms apply.

876
00:51:15,880 --> 00:51:18,719
Speaker 1: Okay, we're back and we're talking with Professor Tim O'Connor,

877
00:51:19,040 --> 00:51:21,800
Speaker 1: who's telling us about how things emerge in the world

878
00:51:21,880 --> 00:51:24,080
Speaker 1: and how we can explore them and most importantly, what

879
00:51:24,120 --> 00:51:26,360
Speaker 1: that tells us about what's real out there in the

880
00:51:26,480 --> 00:51:29,680
Speaker 1: universe and to me This question of emergence is very

881
00:51:29,680 --> 00:51:33,200
Speaker 1: closely connected to the question of scientific realism, because even

882
00:51:33,239 --> 00:51:35,520
Speaker 1: if you believe that the universe is real and there

883
00:51:35,560 --> 00:51:38,360
Speaker 1: are basic bits and rules about those basic bits, if

884
00:51:38,400 --> 00:51:40,839
Speaker 1: you take the weak emergence, we haven't learned what those

885
00:51:40,880 --> 00:51:43,960
Speaker 1: basic bits are. We've only learned the emergent bits. So,

886
00:51:44,520 --> 00:51:46,879
Speaker 1: in the question of scientific realism of what's out there

887
00:51:46,880 --> 00:51:49,200
Speaker 1: in the universe, how do we know that what has

888
00:51:49,280 --> 00:51:52,799
Speaker 1: emerged is real or whether it's just sort of like

889
00:51:53,160 --> 00:51:55,799
Speaker 1: our description of it. Even if there is a real

890
00:51:55,920 --> 00:51:58,600
Speaker 1: universe out there, and if we drill down with the

891
00:51:58,600 --> 00:52:01,760
Speaker 1: biggest particle collider anybody ever build, we might find something

892
00:52:01,800 --> 00:52:03,880
Speaker 1: deep and true, how do we know that what's emerged

893
00:52:03,880 --> 00:52:04,480
Speaker 1: on top of.

894
00:52:04,440 --> 00:52:05,080
Speaker 4: That is real?

895
00:52:05,520 --> 00:52:09,000
Speaker 1: Is it possible that the way things emerge to us

896
00:52:09,239 --> 00:52:12,480
Speaker 1: might be different than the way things emerge to another

897
00:52:12,640 --> 00:52:15,440
Speaker 1: intelligent race that has a different set of senses, for

898
00:52:15,600 --> 00:52:19,800
Speaker 1: perhaps it perceives the universe through different fundamental physics properties.

899
00:52:19,840 --> 00:52:22,600
Speaker 1: How do we know the emergent pieces themselves? We can

900
00:52:22,800 --> 00:52:24,799
Speaker 1: you know, say, are actually out there good?

901
00:52:25,800 --> 00:52:29,680
Speaker 4: Right? So it seems, you know, in the abstract, it

902
00:52:29,760 --> 00:52:36,560
Speaker 4: seems conceivable that there be different but equally effective course

903
00:52:36,600 --> 00:52:39,239
Speaker 4: scrained ways. You might say of chunking up you know,

904
00:52:39,280 --> 00:52:42,359
Speaker 4: things that the level of middle sized objects and observers,

905
00:52:42,480 --> 00:52:46,839
Speaker 4: but just the categories are different. So you know, we

906
00:52:46,920 --> 00:52:49,680
Speaker 4: find it natural to group things. Let me acknowledge right

907
00:52:49,719 --> 00:52:52,040
Speaker 4: at the outset, or I think we all should acknowledge

908
00:52:52,080 --> 00:52:56,520
Speaker 4: our senses, right, Our categories are closely tied to our

909
00:52:56,719 --> 00:53:01,319
Speaker 4: perceptual senses, and our senses are geared to be good

910
00:53:01,360 --> 00:53:05,560
Speaker 4: at we know detecting features that are useful to us,

911
00:53:05,760 --> 00:53:07,759
Speaker 4: or at least we have reason right to believe they

912
00:53:07,800 --> 00:53:10,359
Speaker 4: would have evolved. And so you know, this could kind

913
00:53:10,360 --> 00:53:13,880
Speaker 4: of add scientific reason to be a little bit worried

914
00:53:13,920 --> 00:53:18,040
Speaker 4: about this question. Say, certain things get foreground in our

915
00:53:18,080 --> 00:53:21,840
Speaker 4: experience because they they're really important to us. You know,

916
00:53:21,960 --> 00:53:27,320
Speaker 4: colors are signals to us of you know, food sources

917
00:53:27,360 --> 00:53:29,799
Speaker 4: and properties for example, and probably a lot of other

918
00:53:29,840 --> 00:53:31,759
Speaker 4: things I don't even know about. But maybe to a

919
00:53:31,800 --> 00:53:35,319
Speaker 4: different kind of a non carbon based kind of inquirer

920
00:53:35,400 --> 00:53:39,319
Speaker 4: who doesn't need organic food sources, maybe color might not

921
00:53:39,400 --> 00:53:42,759
Speaker 4: be the same silent sort of property, but other properties

922
00:53:42,800 --> 00:53:46,680
Speaker 4: that do have relevance to its survival and its ability

923
00:53:46,719 --> 00:53:49,799
Speaker 4: to navigate its environment would be foreground in for us,

924
00:53:49,840 --> 00:53:52,279
Speaker 4: we don't kind of see, we don't tend to pick

925
00:53:52,320 --> 00:53:54,960
Speaker 4: out those patterns, and so it leads yeah, and then

926
00:53:55,680 --> 00:53:58,359
Speaker 4: you know, you generalize the picture. And then so then

927
00:53:58,560 --> 00:54:01,720
Speaker 4: the two different types of inquirer or the organic ones

928
00:54:01,800 --> 00:54:05,000
Speaker 4: like us and the non organic silicon based ones that

929
00:54:05,080 --> 00:54:08,880
Speaker 4: we could imagine their whole way of representing middle sized

930
00:54:09,160 --> 00:54:13,160
Speaker 4: environmental features and patterns somehow different, but they get along

931
00:54:13,160 --> 00:54:15,960
Speaker 4: well in their environment, they're able to do science. And

932
00:54:16,000 --> 00:54:20,759
Speaker 4: so suppose we're at roughly the same level of scientific advancement,

933
00:54:21,320 --> 00:54:25,840
Speaker 4: and so we have rather similar fundamental physics, but we're different.

934
00:54:25,880 --> 00:54:28,319
Speaker 4: Maybe that's what you're asking, you know, at the at

935
00:54:28,320 --> 00:54:30,880
Speaker 4: the level of kind of more emergent levels.

936
00:54:30,920 --> 00:54:32,919
Speaker 1: But there's also this a question here a scale, because

937
00:54:32,960 --> 00:54:35,120
Speaker 1: when we talk about emergence, I think you're probably thinking

938
00:54:35,120 --> 00:54:37,520
Speaker 1: about me and you and ice cream, pingpong balls. But

939
00:54:37,640 --> 00:54:41,440
Speaker 1: for the particle physicists, I'm even talking about electrons. I'm

940
00:54:41,440 --> 00:54:44,480
Speaker 1: talking about quarks, which we think are probably emerging from

941
00:54:44,480 --> 00:54:47,840
Speaker 1: something you know, mind bogglingly even deeper in the universe.

942
00:54:47,880 --> 00:54:51,200
Speaker 1: So basically everything we've ever learned is emergent. We have

943
00:54:51,320 --> 00:54:53,719
Speaker 1: no knowledge of the fundamental and we don't even know

944
00:54:53,719 --> 00:54:56,040
Speaker 1: if there is something fundamental. Maybe there isn't. Maybe it's

945
00:54:56,080 --> 00:54:59,480
Speaker 1: an infinite tower of effective theories all the way down

946
00:54:59,520 --> 00:55:01,640
Speaker 1: there is now deep truth. How do we know that

947
00:55:01,719 --> 00:55:05,279
Speaker 1: our tower will line up with alien towers or if

948
00:55:05,320 --> 00:55:07,680
Speaker 1: they have another way of looking at what you call

949
00:55:07,800 --> 00:55:10,919
Speaker 1: coarse grained theories of the universe where to me, coarse

950
00:55:10,960 --> 00:55:12,799
Speaker 1: grained could be as small as an electron or as

951
00:55:12,920 --> 00:55:14,000
Speaker 1: large as a planet.

952
00:55:14,320 --> 00:55:18,360
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know if this fully Uh, it certainly

953
00:55:18,360 --> 00:55:20,640
Speaker 4: doesn't fully address your question, but I would want to

954
00:55:20,680 --> 00:55:26,480
Speaker 4: throw out the following constraint unless we become complete systematic

955
00:55:26,640 --> 00:55:30,359
Speaker 4: skeptics about human knowledge and say, you know, I don't

956
00:55:30,400 --> 00:55:33,800
Speaker 4: even know whether or not I'm dreaming, or even more radically,

957
00:55:33,880 --> 00:55:36,640
Speaker 4: you know Descartes way back in the seventeenth century. Perhaps

958
00:55:36,640 --> 00:55:40,359
Speaker 4: perhaps I'm just a disembodied mind and I have all

959
00:55:40,480 --> 00:55:42,840
Speaker 4: false beliefs about my own past. In fact, there is

960
00:55:42,880 --> 00:55:45,719
Speaker 4: no physical world. I wasn't born, none of this, and

961
00:55:45,800 --> 00:55:49,080
Speaker 4: there's just some evil genius bent on deceiving me who's

962
00:55:49,160 --> 00:55:53,879
Speaker 4: pumping my mind with a flow of stream of experience

963
00:55:54,040 --> 00:55:59,040
Speaker 4: that I naturally interpret as my interacting with my physical environment.

964
00:55:59,080 --> 00:56:02,760
Speaker 4: But none of that's right, or you know, the matrix films,

965
00:56:03,160 --> 00:56:05,880
Speaker 4: you know, are kind of updated version of this, you know,

966
00:56:05,920 --> 00:56:09,240
Speaker 4: the way things really are, that what really lies behind

967
00:56:09,280 --> 00:56:12,600
Speaker 4: our experiences is something very different from what we naively

968
00:56:13,040 --> 00:56:15,960
Speaker 4: take it to be. Well, you can't do science under

969
00:56:16,000 --> 00:56:20,400
Speaker 4: those ground rules, right. Science has to presuppose, for example,

970
00:56:21,200 --> 00:56:25,120
Speaker 4: that we didn't pop into existence just thirty seconds ago

971
00:56:25,160 --> 00:56:27,760
Speaker 4: with a bunch of you know, built in false memories

972
00:56:27,880 --> 00:56:32,560
Speaker 4: about having had past experience. Science has to presuppose that

973
00:56:33,200 --> 00:56:37,960
Speaker 4: there's some kind of regularity to the way the world unfolds.

974
00:56:38,360 --> 00:56:41,520
Speaker 4: And if you say, well, no, science can show that

975
00:56:41,640 --> 00:56:47,719
Speaker 4: there's regularity by doing experiments and you know, corroborating results.

976
00:56:47,920 --> 00:56:51,200
Speaker 4: But that presupposes that what you're hearing when you're being

977
00:56:51,320 --> 00:56:56,600
Speaker 4: informed by another scientist about their results itself reflects the

978
00:56:56,640 --> 00:57:00,359
Speaker 4: outputs of another scientist. But why are you trusting your senses? Right?

979
00:57:00,560 --> 00:57:03,160
Speaker 4: That's a really big assumption. That your senses are even

980
00:57:03,200 --> 00:57:07,839
Speaker 4: effectively registering anything outside you is a big assumption. Well,

981
00:57:07,880 --> 00:57:10,960
Speaker 4: you can't scientifically verify that, right, because you'd have to

982
00:57:11,000 --> 00:57:13,960
Speaker 4: somehow get outside of your senses. You can't do that.

983
00:57:14,160 --> 00:57:16,560
Speaker 4: You can't get outside of your rational thinking. So the

984
00:57:16,600 --> 00:57:18,880
Speaker 4: point is, even what we think of as a paradigm

985
00:57:19,120 --> 00:57:24,040
Speaker 4: of rational inquiry. Science has to make certain foundational assumptions

986
00:57:24,080 --> 00:57:27,960
Speaker 4: about the rough and ready, at least reliability of our

987
00:57:28,000 --> 00:57:32,600
Speaker 4: basic cognitive equipment, and the rough and ready predictability or

988
00:57:32,680 --> 00:57:36,120
Speaker 4: patternedness of the world that we're seeking to describe. It

989
00:57:36,160 --> 00:57:38,640
Speaker 4: doesn't have to assume a lot more than that, but

990
00:57:38,640 --> 00:57:41,760
Speaker 4: it does have to assume at least those things. And

991
00:57:42,880 --> 00:57:46,520
Speaker 4: it has to assume if science is going to deliver

992
00:57:46,800 --> 00:57:50,760
Speaker 4: a rational set of beliefs of us, that we exist,

993
00:57:51,240 --> 00:57:55,440
Speaker 4: that we persist, that we really are interacting with one another. Well,

994
00:57:55,520 --> 00:57:58,600
Speaker 4: but once you do that, when now we've got I exist,

995
00:57:58,840 --> 00:58:02,720
Speaker 4: you exist, If we're fellow scientists, I'm part of this community,

996
00:58:02,960 --> 00:58:07,400
Speaker 4: just this distributed community. I have to assume, since I

997
00:58:07,440 --> 00:58:10,600
Speaker 4: can't do all the science myself, no scientists can do that,

998
00:58:10,600 --> 00:58:14,560
Speaker 4: that there is this rational community that's effectively managing to

999
00:58:14,560 --> 00:58:19,120
Speaker 4: communicate results and theories and descriptions and how they corroborate

1000
00:58:19,240 --> 00:58:22,600
Speaker 4: with theories. A lot is getting baked in, my point,

1001
00:58:22,640 --> 00:58:24,840
Speaker 4: I guess is what I'm getting at here has to

1002
00:58:24,880 --> 00:58:27,720
Speaker 4: be baked in for us to even ask an interesting

1003
00:58:27,800 --> 00:58:32,760
Speaker 4: question about have our theories delivered the rational goods? Now

1004
00:58:33,080 --> 00:58:38,439
Speaker 4: making those assumptions doesn't require that chemistry or biology as

1005
00:58:38,480 --> 00:58:42,960
Speaker 4: we know it is very closely tracks the truth at

1006
00:58:42,960 --> 00:58:46,320
Speaker 4: that level of description. So I'm not suggesting we get

1007
00:58:46,360 --> 00:58:49,840
Speaker 4: our emergent phenomena, but there are constraints. You can either

1008
00:58:49,880 --> 00:58:52,080
Speaker 4: be a total skeptic or you have to say there

1009
00:58:52,160 --> 00:58:59,280
Speaker 4: are enquirers that have certain capacities and certain reasonable assumptions

1010
00:58:59,320 --> 00:59:01,800
Speaker 4: that they may I'm not sure how far that gets us,

1011
00:59:01,840 --> 00:59:03,560
Speaker 4: but it gets us us certain ways.

1012
00:59:03,840 --> 00:59:06,360
Speaker 1: I think you're making the point that we can take

1013
00:59:06,400 --> 00:59:10,520
Speaker 1: our skepticism and paranoia too far and throwing out everything

1014
00:59:10,560 --> 00:59:13,720
Speaker 1: and saying we can know nothing. And it's certainly the

1015
00:59:13,800 --> 00:59:15,760
Speaker 1: case that you know, we would like to know something

1016
00:59:15,800 --> 00:59:18,600
Speaker 1: that's true about the universe. But I think the motivation

1017
00:59:18,800 --> 00:59:23,200
Speaker 1: for examining these fundamental and the foundations of our knowledge

1018
00:59:23,200 --> 00:59:25,640
Speaker 1: and how we know things is because we wonder if

1019
00:59:25,680 --> 00:59:28,160
Speaker 1: we've made it made a mistake, if we've made some

1020
00:59:28,280 --> 00:59:31,720
Speaker 1: arbitrary choices where we could have, perhaps if Plato had

1021
00:59:31,720 --> 00:59:35,240
Speaker 1: a different mood, you know, founded intellectual thought in another direction,

1022
00:59:35,400 --> 00:59:37,440
Speaker 1: and everything would have been built up and conceived of

1023
00:59:37,560 --> 00:59:39,640
Speaker 1: in a completely different way. And to me, that's what's

1024
00:59:39,640 --> 00:59:43,960
Speaker 1: exciting about potentially meeting alien physicists, or even digging back

1025
00:59:44,080 --> 00:59:49,040
Speaker 1: into ancient human knowledge and seeing how independent communities the Mayans,

1026
00:59:49,080 --> 00:59:52,240
Speaker 1: the Egyptians, the Chinese thought about the universe and the

1027
00:59:52,320 --> 00:59:55,640
Speaker 1: relationship to it, you know, separately from each other. Because

1028
00:59:55,640 --> 00:59:57,920
Speaker 1: it seems to me like it's possible, and it's fascinating

1029
00:59:57,960 --> 01:00:00,200
Speaker 1: to me that it's possible that the way we we've

1030
01:00:00,200 --> 01:00:03,640
Speaker 1: built our ideas of physics and the universe could have

1031
01:00:03,760 --> 01:00:06,640
Speaker 1: some arbitrariness to it, right, that there could be another

1032
01:00:06,680 --> 01:00:09,200
Speaker 1: way to have done this. So to me, it's excited

1033
01:00:09,200 --> 01:00:11,040
Speaker 1: to probe those and to do the impossible thing that

1034
01:00:11,080 --> 01:00:13,880
Speaker 1: we suggested earlier, which is to imagine what humans haven't

1035
01:00:13,960 --> 01:00:17,200
Speaker 1: yet or maybe cannot yet imagine. So let me ask you,

1036
01:00:17,240 --> 01:00:18,840
Speaker 1: as the last question, what do you think are the

1037
01:00:18,880 --> 01:00:20,760
Speaker 1: prospects for making progress?

1038
01:00:21,240 --> 01:00:23,280
Speaker 4: I mean, we've been talking about.

1039
01:00:23,160 --> 01:00:25,800
Speaker 1: Whether the universe out there is real or just imagined

1040
01:00:26,040 --> 01:00:31,040
Speaker 1: since the Matrix, since de card, since Plato in fact,

1041
01:00:31,280 --> 01:00:33,439
Speaker 1: so it's been thousands of years we've been thinking about

1042
01:00:33,440 --> 01:00:35,880
Speaker 1: these questions. Is it a question we'll be thinking about

1043
01:00:35,960 --> 01:00:38,440
Speaker 1: forever or are we likely to see breakthroughs where one

1044
01:00:38,520 --> 01:00:41,640
Speaker 1: day we say, oh, look, we settled that question. Plato

1045
01:00:41,720 --> 01:00:43,880
Speaker 1: was right or Plato was wrong, and then we can

1046
01:00:43,920 --> 01:00:45,080
Speaker 1: move on to other questions.

1047
01:00:45,080 --> 01:00:47,160
Speaker 4: What do you think, Well, we won't settle it in

1048
01:00:47,200 --> 01:00:54,680
Speaker 4: the sense that there's never the basis for a somewhat

1049
01:00:54,800 --> 01:01:00,720
Speaker 4: reasonable worry or skepticism that we haven't nailed it. There's

1050
01:01:00,760 --> 01:01:06,440
Speaker 4: always because we're a human inquiry generally, and science has

1051
01:01:06,520 --> 01:01:10,240
Speaker 4: a special rigorous case of human inquiry is fallible. There's

1052
01:01:10,240 --> 01:01:14,200
Speaker 4: no reason to believe they're perfect. So that's if we

1053
01:01:14,440 --> 01:01:19,720
Speaker 4: lower our sites and get away from having a perfect congruence,

1054
01:01:19,840 --> 01:01:23,280
Speaker 4: a perfect mapping of reality. Maybe we'll never get that,

1055
01:01:23,720 --> 01:01:28,440
Speaker 4: but we have a closer and closer mapping, then that

1056
01:01:28,440 --> 01:01:29,440
Speaker 4: that's good enough.

1057
01:01:29,560 --> 01:01:33,360
Speaker 1: Well, it certainly is helping us, you know, develop new technologies,

1058
01:01:33,440 --> 01:01:36,600
Speaker 1: and I hope we're revealing something that's true about what's

1059
01:01:36,600 --> 01:01:38,640
Speaker 1: out there in the universe. To me, I love these

1060
01:01:38,680 --> 01:01:42,120
Speaker 1: moments of insight and discovery where we feel like not

1061
01:01:42,240 --> 01:01:45,360
Speaker 1: just that we've developed some new tool that describes.

1062
01:01:44,880 --> 01:01:46,480
Speaker 4: The universe, but we're actually.

1063
01:01:46,160 --> 01:01:49,760
Speaker 1: Revealing its internal, its underlying mechanism. You know that the

1064
01:01:49,920 --> 01:01:52,520
Speaker 1: eggs boson, for example, is actually out there and is

1065
01:01:52,800 --> 01:01:54,680
Speaker 1: toing and froing and doing it's a bit to create

1066
01:01:54,760 --> 01:01:57,120
Speaker 1: mass for all the other particles and not just a

1067
01:01:57,160 --> 01:01:59,960
Speaker 1: mathematical description that we have in our heads, because otherwise

1068
01:02:00,360 --> 01:02:04,400
Speaker 1: my entire life's work is just much more theoretical than

1069
01:02:04,440 --> 01:02:06,920
Speaker 1: I ever imagined. But thanks very much for joining us

1070
01:02:06,960 --> 01:02:09,160
Speaker 1: on the podcast today and for thinking about these crazy

1071
01:02:09,240 --> 01:02:12,400
Speaker 1: questions and allowing me to talk about aliens and philosophy

1072
01:02:12,480 --> 01:02:13,200
Speaker 1: at the same time.

1073
01:02:13,320 --> 01:02:15,840
Speaker 4: I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. All right,

1074
01:02:15,880 --> 01:02:17,400
Speaker 4: Thanks Daniel, thanks for having me.

1075
01:02:25,160 --> 01:02:27,960
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain

1076
01:02:28,040 --> 01:02:31,320
Speaker 1: the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more

1077
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