Hawkings Co Author On Why Reductionism Is Dead

---TRANSCRIPT--- The physics is enabling it to happen. We are telling the physics what to do and the physics does what we tell it to do. The physics isn’t deciding anything. Most physicists would say that everything reduces to particles obeying fundamental laws. Professor George Ellis, who co-authored with Steven Hawking Singularity Theorems, which extended Roger Penrose’s original theorem to cosmological settings, believes this is utter nonsense. The physics is the servant, not the master. Much like Yakir Aharov, this is the professor’s only ever podcast appearance. My name is Kurt Jaong, and on this channel I interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Today we discuss top-down causation and why Ellis says reductionism is patently false. We also discuss his evolving block universe, what that has to do with free will, why there is no wave function of the universe, which is something Carlo Relli also says. And also we close with this legendary cosmologist’s views on consciousness and why evil is a matter of fact not opinion. Professor, what caused you to think about causation? What caused me to think about causation? Um, I started off in general relativity where it’s very very simple. But I then got interested in biology and um my friend Dennis Noble and I spent a lot of time looking at biology and uh biology is much more complicated than cosmology. Um physiological systems are immensely complex. They have these many many different levels from the atomic level through uh atoms, small molecules, macroolecules, cells, tissues, um physiological systems and the system as a whole. And this is immensely complicated. Not only is it complicated in its structure, but in its dynamics. uh the the way that a an organism grows from a single cell into a adult is is is truly astonishing and immensely complex. And what is causation?

What is causation? Causation is when you uh make make a change either you make a physical change or you make it counterfactually and then you find that reliably a specific outcome happens. So you do experiments and you measure what happens and then the classic case is um apart from Galileo and dropping dropping balls and that kind of stuff the classic case is smoking causing lung cancer and that has been the study of of of a lot of study and it’s completely reliably proven and it’s much much more complicated than Galileo dropping a a a ball from the top of time. But in both cases, it’s causation. Counterfactually, it happens if you don’t actually make a change, but you can prove that the change would take place if if if that the the thing would happen if you did it. And so, um, you can do all sorts of calculations, um, and theoretical physics. Uh well for instance just a simple example this the spacecraft that’s just gone off and come back and that was calculated beforehand and then it happened exactly the way that they predicted it. You mentioned that in causation that we have to intervene and then we’re able to demonstrate that A caused B. But is intervention or an agent necessary for causation or just necessary to determine that something was caused but causation could have been there prior to an agent? Causation is taking place all the time. And there’s I I could explain the different kinds of causation. There’s physical causation which is due to physical laws. There’s um there’s causation when there’s a purpose in it. And um and uh all of biology has purposes. Every single living animal and technology. And so that there’s purposeful causation. Um then there is a symbolic causation and symbolic causation is what enables us to have language to have society and so on and everything that we do I’m speaking to you in a language that’s a symbol of what’s happening and symbolic causation is the basis of modern society then the next one is abstract causation and abstract causation takes place when abstract things cause things and this is the basis of computing. Computing is symbolic but it’s also abstract and you’re using abstract symbols to calculate things. And then um computers actually have agency. For instance, there are automatic landing systems and aircraft. There are um factories which are controlled by computers. So it’s not just human beings and animals that have agency. It’s it’s also computers have agency. And the final form of causation is social causation. And this is when in a society um people make decisions and they cause things to happen. Now this is happening at this very moment in the war in Iran. People are making decisions and that’s causing stuff to happen on the ground. But there’s two very interesting further C kinds of of social causation. when is historical and uh things that happened hundreds of years ago can cause things to happen today. And a classic example of that is the so-called troubles in Northern Ireland when things that happened 250 years ago called people to be murdered in the present day. And the final one which is very fascinating is is is um imaginative causation is that at the present day you imagine something that could exist and then it comes into being and Steven Jobs is the classic case. to imagine the iPhone and then everybody on earth basically has got an iPhone and that’s a case of causation into the future because you have imagination and that’s the the third form of social causation. What is it about computer agency that differs from human agency other than consciousness unless you also believe that current AI systems for instance have consciousness? Well, no no computers don’t have consciousness. They they they are symbolic systems. A computer is a symbol processing system because uh all programs are symbols. Um algorithms are symbolic systems and computers um they have agency because they can do things as I’ve said but they don’t have um uh they don’t have free will. They they do what they are told to do by the whoever program them. So there’s an algorithm. The algorithm is an abstract thing and the computer is trained to step through the algorithm step by step do whatever it says and this is a classic case of what I think you’ve heard read me talk about it’s a case of top- down causation or downward causation and computers are a very very clear example because in computers there are what are called a tower of virtual machines and this is the the structure and there’s a there’s physical one and then there’s an abstract one on the abstract size you have programs and you have um top level programs forran or whatever list all sorts of things then you have machine you it machine code and an assembly language sorry you have a you have it it chains down through a series of of languages until you get to machine code and that then that turns not and ones and that turns um it turns transistors on and off and then electric currents flow and then it chains back up to produce the outcome at the top. So a computer is a very very nice example of downward causation followed by upward causation. And um the thing is that this is where reductionism comes in. The electrons flowing through transistors do not they they enable it to happen but but but physics enables that to take place but physics doesn’t determine the outcome. It’s the algorithm which determines the outcome. And so this is a classic case of an algorithm in in essence telling electrons what to do. Wouldn’t someone like Ashan Carroll say professor Ellis the Python example over here which communicates to assembly code which communicates to machine code when we’re saying that something happens at the Python level and it doesn’t or that has influence over the electron level. We’re actually using a shorthand we’re calling it Python but it’s code code in a different sense it’s code for electrons are doing so and so with semiconductors. Yeah. So if you actually look at what we mean, if someone was to say, well, what do you mean by thermostat? What do you mean by this and that causes so and so? We’ll get down to some physical instantiation and it’s just physics in the end. That’s the reductionist claim. All these you made a decision to do so and so is because of your neurons, because of blah blah blah blah blah. Well, if you say it’s only physics, that’s obviously false. If I tell you Maxwell’s equations, okay, here’s Maxwell’s equations. So what does that do? Doesn’t do anything. I give you Newton’s laws of motion. Tell me what Newton’s laws of motion will cause. Doesn’t do anything. It only does something in a context. And the context is what decides what will happen. Physics by itself simply does not decide what happen. Physics enables it to happen. But it it it causes it to happen in the sense that it is told what to do, but the physics doesn’t decide the outcome. The context decides the outcome. And um now the thermostat is an extremely interesting example because a thermostat is a very simple system where you can see very clearly what happens and it it’s a it’s a typical feedback system. You’ve got a a sensor which determines the temperature. You’ve got a a a goal which you set on the thermostat. You would like the temperature to be 40° and it’s actually 20. you determine the difference and then that difference sends sends a current round to a heater. The heater heats it up and that makes it up. So, so this is a classic example of feedback. Um, determine what it is, find the difference and take corrective action to make it correct. Now, this is a case of top- down action because this is all at the macroscopic scale. At the microscopic scale, what happens is that by turning at the macro scale the dial on the thermostat at the micro scale, you cause molecules to move fast. So that’s that’s top down action. The physics isn’t determining what those temperatures should be. It’s you are determining it by setting it in on on the dial. And so it’s a classic case of top down action. The physics is enabling it to happen. We are we are telling the physics what to do and the physics does what we tell it to do. The physics isn’t deciding anything. The physics is the servant, not the master. I imagine a Sean Carroll, if I was to channel Sean Carroll here, would say something like, “Firstly, your physical system.” Now, of course, you can disagree with that, but all of what was just said would just still be accounted for by the microphysics entailing the macro physics. So, that’s I imagine what Sean Carl would say. I think he has an argument about that. I think you have arguments with him as well, but please, I’d like to hear. The problem is very simple. Sean Carol doesn’t admit the downward causation takes place. That’s simply wrong. As a matter of fact, um dominant causation does take place and there’s a variety of ways it takes place. It takes place by setting constraints on lower level variables um and uh which many people have written about. And so a physical law would be of the form a function of uh a constraint is an equation of the form a function of x equals a constant. And you change the constant you change the constraint. Um and now the very simplest one is is a pendulum. And the pendulum you’ve got a bob which swings and the the the length of the bob determines on what orbit it is. and and you can move it up and down and you can get different rates of swinging. So that’s that’s a very simple constraint. The constraint is a macrolevel thing that determines what those microlevel uh particles that make up the book do. And of course it’s physics, but physics by itself enables it, but it’s it’s it’s it’s a technology that the physics is incorporated in which decides what happens. Um and now the human brain is a very very large hierarchical system and it’s it’s a basic principle. Every very very complex system is modular, hierarchical, structure. All of those words are important. And um the clearest way you can see this is by talking to computer scientists because computer scientists are the people who have actually built really really complex systems and um and they they use those principles all of the time. So what the the basic principle is you’ve got a complex thing you want to do and it’s very very complex. So you break it up into simpler things and those are still very complex. So you break those into even simpler things and you break them down until you have a very very simple thing that can be done in a very simple way because it’s now linear. And so then you you then build those back up until you get the thing that you want to happen at the top. And so modular hierarchical structures, every every living thing is a modular hierarchical structure. every technological system, an aircraft, a motor car, the internet, they’re all modular. Computer, they’re all modular hierarchical structures and every biological thing is a modular. So the basic principle for constructing complexity is modular hierarchical structures that are adaptive and um downward causation takes place in a couple of ways. One is by a can setting constraints and uh another another simple example is just an electric circuit with a battery and a and a light bulb and a switch and you open the switch you close the switch and it allows the current to flow or it doesn’t and when the current flows and electrons flow and so on you are controlling what happens at the lower level. That’s absolutely clearly top- down causation. No question about it. Now the other way that top down causation takes place is very interesting. Higher levels you you’ve got the higher levels made up of out of lower level entities. And what higher levels do in any complicated system is they create modify or destroy lower level elements. And that’s the core of a huge amount of biology. um gene regulatory networks are there to create uh uh proteins. So so the the system as a whole a gene regulatory network is a very complicated thing which reacts to high level conditions and it is built in such a way that it will generate proteins. Um, so modifying them takes place all the time. And the classic example of that is is developmental biology in which you have a set of cells and they’re all basically the same to start with and then in the fruitly for example at different places signals get sent positional signals which tell different genetic circuits to turn on and off at different places and that creates all of the bo the body plan of of of of a fly a mouse and a human being. It’s where we get our backbone from. And so um that that is and what happens there is cells are changing their structure. It’s cell which starts off cells start off pur potent. They can become anything but these processes turn cells into specific things into blood cells, neurons and and so on and so on. And so things are created, they’re modified and they are destroyed. And epoptosis is programmed cell death. And for instance, when we’re when our hands are developing, initially they’re all joined together and then the cells between are destroyed and that enables us our fingers to be separate from each other. And so these are three different kinds of things that take place and they take place in physics as well. And and in organizations these principles are extremely general. Now there’s an organizational analogy for all of them and the organizational one is very interesting one an organization let’s say the Boeing aircraft companies it’s a huge modular hierarchical structures very very large and um what happens is uh take take for example the employees there’s a process for for letting employees join the company and you select who’s going to join that’s a process of bringing in once they’re members of the company You train them. You train them into a specific task. And that means you’re modifying them. By the time you’ve trained them, they’re not the same as they were before you started training them. And then there’s a process of assessment. And either they make the grade, in which case you keep them, or they don’t, in which case you you boot them out. And so that this this process of higher level selecting what happens at lower levels. It happens in technology. It happens in biology. It happens in um in organizations. As I say, these are very very general principles which apply across the board in truly complex systems. And there’s not the slightest question that downward causation is taking place in any of these cases. I subscribe to The Economist. Their science and their AI coverage is among the best I found anywhere. And I say that as someone who reads plenty of it. I’ll give you some examples. They just ran an analysis on how attitudes towards science are changing in American politics and what this means for research and funding in scientific institutions moving forward. This sort of highquality reporting is fantastic. They even covered how dark energy may be weakening over time. Now, if that holds up, it completely changes our understanding of the universe’s fate. If you watch this channel, those are exactly the kinds of questions that we explore every week. I subscribe to The Economist because their science and their AI reporting regularly surprises me with how deep it goes. And they’re also, of course, known for global affairs, both political and economic reporting. They are top tier. And interestingly and flatteringly, TOE is one of the only podcasts that The Economist partners with. So, as a listener, you get an exclusive 35% off. That’s not a deal that they have just anywhere. Head to economist.com/e to subscribe. That’s economist.com/oe for 35% off. Okay, let’s imagine we have a membrane here and then let’s say we have a a salt ion over here and then we say well what causes this to move from here to here. The physics story would say something about the voltage at this gate or maybe the position and the momentum plus the voltage and the electric field and so on. That’s the physics story. The neuroscientific story may be something about there are neurons over here and gleal cells and modulators. And then the psychological angle would be well that’s because we’re going through grief and the world is filled with suffering. And then maybe the sociological one would say the electron moved from here to here because we’re in this capitalistic system, this latest stage capitalism and so on. All of these levels of explanation, are they all equally valid levels of explanation? Okay. Um, all right. Let me firstly I just want to talk about iron channels and then I will talk about the different levels. And in terms of the the the huge discovery of molecular biology was that biomolecules are enormously complex and they change shape and it’s the change shape of biomolelecules which causes things to happen at the at the molecular level. Now in each of our neurons there are voltage gated ion channels which allow sodium and potassium to flow in and out of our neurons and these are open and close according to the voltage across it. And so that is a case of of controlling what happens in and out uh through the change of shape of these ion channels. And it’s all perfectly understandable. Um those are voltage gated ion channels and there are other ones as well. Um now the structure the the the very important thing about the structure is that you’re absolutely right. Um the the brain the the the the central nervous system has a hierarchical structure starting off with the brain as a whole going down through neurons going down through um local networks and then neurons and and molecules and so on down to the bottom. And the principle which Dennis Noble and I insist on is that causation takes place at every emergent emergent level. And the causation at every emergent level is necessary in order that the thing as a whole works. And so um so you’re thinking about something you’re feeling sad because someone died or whatever that takes place at the at at the at the integral level in the brain through through circuits probably um oscilly circuits in the brain. It takes place because there are action potential spike chains. Those are enabled by electrons and protons going as we’ve just been discussing and each of them is necessary for the and right at the bottom level it happens because protons and electrons are are attracting each other. Every single level is in this emergence system is needed in order that the thing is the whole works and Dennis Noble um I think you’ve spoken to him. Yes I have. He’s done groundbreaking work on the heart. He’s written a wonderful paper on the heart and the hierarchical structure of the heart and how it is pacemaker cells which make control the the pumping of the heart and all the different levels are necessary for this to take place. And and if we put this in a larger picture, we’ve got our physiological structures of our bodies with all these different levels. Well, why do they exist? They exist because evolution found it was necessary for them to exist otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function. So each level is there because evolution found it necessary for them to exist and there are developmental systems which construct the whole thing up and through this extraordinary procedure because there there these three kinds of emergence. There’s functional emergence second by second we’re talking to each other. developmental emergence where we we grow up over a period of 21 years from a single cell and there’s evolutionary emergence which takes place over 100,000 years and all of these three are integrated into each other they they each have created and allowed the other one to take place and so this is a very very complex thing that has taken place it’s taken place because of Darwin’s theories of natural evolution relative uh survival rates will determine what what happens through through these cases. And so the developmental systems are there to create each of these different levels to create the the the the proteins to create the cells. And of course cells are the first level in which all aspects of a living living system take place and um then to tissues and then the organs like the lungs, the heart, the eyes and so on. And then the integral thing us as a whole and then society because of course we don’t exist on our own. We could not exist if we are our own. And it’s a very important feature that in order to see this thing as a whole, you must include the society in which we live and the language by which we talk to each other. I want to get to your work with Dennis Noble shortly and your biological relativity. Also, I’m super interested as to what you brought to the table, what he brought to the table, but we’ll get to that. I have a question about these levels, an odd question. So there’s there’s an evolutionary level, maybe a societal, maybe psychological and biochemical, and so on and so forth. Is there something that’s objective about these levels, or is it that if there were aliens, they may have different levels, they may parse them out differently, almost like a preferred basis problem. Is there a preferred basis here? Because I imagine that the physicists would just say, “Look, even if there are aliens and other societies we haven’t contacted and they may parse out the world differently and come up with different explanatory levels that if you keep asking them why enough, something they would agree on if they all had science would be physics. So that would be the commonality.” Yes. Okay. Now I have written about uh the biology on other planets. So the first thing insist on is that the life on other planets will also be based in carbon. I think there’s no question about that. Nothing else will do the job. And I know people have said maybe silicon but no it won’t do the job. So it’s because of the extraordinary structure of carbons in particular the the way that proteins fold and control things and and the it’s truly extraordinary. that that’s the one thing and the other thing is the way that a DNA can store information and both of those are made possible by the structure of biology. Um so on our other planets I’m absolutely certain those would be the same. I’m also certain that um an animal on another planet will have all of the same needs that the the the different physiological systems we have are there to meet needs. like we have to be able to think. We have to be able to see if if we’re going to be able to survive. We have to be able to move. Underlying all of this is is metabolism. Metabolism is is one of the great things that we have to keep going. We have to take food in. We have to use it, change its form, get rid of it. And so the metabolic cycles are one of the great things. Um then then feedback control is another of the great principles. And this this is happening all of the time. Feedback control is determining what happens with homeostasis. And um and and the third thing happening all the time is adaptive selection all of the time. No matter what we are, we are adapting to the environment around us. And that happens mentally, it happens physically, it happens in all all sorts of ways. So these are great principles of biology. And those will be the same on any planet. Um, no they they won’t look the same necessarily. They they may have six legs, 10 legs, whatever. They in a sense that’s an irrelevant detail, but but they will they will need to process information or they’re not going to survive. They will need to make decisions about what they’re going to do in the future. In other words, their brains must be able to look at possibilities, decide what’s probably will happen, and make decisions of how to act. In other words, they will have agency and um and so I well well the question is what would be called life and and this of course has been subject of a great deal of discussion but um and and Mark 11 has just run a whole discussion about that. Of course, Michael is a wonderful biologist. Um, ah, right. Yes, I’ve spoken to him a few times as well. But, but in any case, I don’t think there’s any point in saying this particular thing is life is the whole bundle of all of these things integrated and acting together. Tell me about your work with Dennis Noble. How did that come about? And what is biological relativity? What did you bring to the table? What did he cause, etc.? Well, you know, I can’t quite remember how it started, but we started talking together. Um, I discovered his root, as he says very clearly in those two books of his. He started off as a total reductionist and he suddenly discovered that things didn’t work that way. And that came particularly, he was trying to discover the pacemaker. and his wonderful work on the heart, the pacemaker. Um, he discovered that there was the pacemaker cell which which which which was doing this. And incidentally, I’ve got a pacemaker. I’m alive because of the pacemaker. Um, and things so so it became clear to him that things happen at those levels. And in fact, there’s two different ways of looking at this. You can simply look at a university in a biology department and you will find departments. There are departments that study each level the departments of physics of chemistry or biochemistry. So so so academia has discovered that there are these levels of each of them have got laws of what happens at that level and that’s because this is the fact this is the way that things happen at each level in our bodies. There are different different kinds of things happening. um and and they but but but they’re integrated into each other and so the first question is what are the levels and the second is how they’re integrated and there’s both upward and downward causation taking place in various kinds of ways and I think I’ve indicated various ways that downward causation takes place. So, you just mentioned something super interesting about the laws at different levels. Yeah. And I know this is quite a nitty-gritty topic, and I’ve spoken to Barry Lowour and Eddie Chen just on this one topic for two hours on this one topic question that I’m going to ask you, which you don’t have two hours for, but do the laws of physics cause anything or do or do they merely describe? So, I’m sure you’ve heard this is the difference between human and nonhuman. Yeah. Um, look, there’s no question whatever that they describe it. Um, you and this was Galileo’s discovery. Not not just that they describe it, but that in most cases they can be discovered mathematically. And of course, that’s one of the big puzzles why they can be expressed mathematically. Um, do they cause them? Um that is a subtle philosophical question and at a certain level I don’t mind what the answer is. Um they describe it very very accurately and the so do they cause them or do they describe them? if they cause them. It feels as a physicist, it feels to me that gravity causes things to happen. Electromagnetism causes things to happen. And I find that a very comfortable way to describe and those are described by Newton’s equations, Einstein’s equations, Maxwell equations which happen to describe them, but they are they are they are our way of describing what happens out there in the world. And there’s this marvelous fit of our mathematics to what actually happens out in the physical world. And then that goes through to the to the emergence structures of um uh metabolism and and thermodynamics and all of that. Uh first law, second law, all of that. All of these are tested. And of course in physics there are these emergent level laws like thermodynamics is an emergent level. It’s not a fundamental one. It’s emergent one. And I my own way of thinking about it is that they are caused by physic well they’re caused by physical effects which we can describe by those laws. Um I don’t know if that’s would satisfy you as a philosopher. I’m not a philosopher. I’m a pragmatic physicist. uh but but they are described very very accurately. They’ve been tested millions and millions of times and we we rely on them all the time when in engineering we when we design aircraft we design anything we are relying on the fact that those laws of physics describe what happens extremely accurately. you worked closely with Hawking and not closely with Penrose but you worked in parallel with Penrose and I’m going to get to questions about that especially where you defer with Roger Penrose but Jenny Vagner who I’ve also had on this channel mentioned that you went from cosmology but you found cosmology boring after some time and then you moved on to neuroscience. Yeah, I want to know was she right? But both well no I didn’t find cosm I did a lot of work in cosmology which I find it very interesting but firstly there’s just a general philosophical statement uh I believe one should change what everyone is doing after a while I don’t think you should keep doing this I think you should change do something different learn something new and um it takes time effort and so on but but so I’ I’ve actually written quite a few papers on neuroscience I’ve written some books on neuroscience and I think one should should change it because it does get boring after a while doing the same old thing all the time but it’s also because cosmology moved from being a very theoretical kind of thing and which I find very interesting to being a calculational thing and a statistical thing and so there there these telescopes with vast no amount of data and and I’m I’m not interested in that statistics I’m not interested in doing what I would all engineering cosmology and so and and and um and and I’m not interested in doing incredibly detailed calculations. I like clear short calculations which prove something and I’ve taken part in quite a few of those. I’ve worked in parallel with Roger and and I’m a great admirer of the work he’s done in in general relativity. He transformed the subject. Tell me what is it about Roger that you admire most and where do you agree with him that most others may disagree with him and then Okay well how about those two? Roger is an incredibly creative person and his work on gravitational topological structure gravitation and black holes was absolutely transformative and it laid the foundation for the book that Steven and I wrote called the large scale structure of spaceime. Roger has gone on to talk about the brain and to talk about conformal cyclic cosmology. Um, and I don’t I don’t agree with him in either case. And he’s also talked about quantum physics where I half agree with him. I’ve also written on quantum theory. I don’t believe in his uh gravitational wave function collapse. I think that’s simply wrong. And I could explain it to you, but I mean the basic reason is very simple. And then he he he suggests that um that consciousness is based on what happens in microtubers. It’s simply the wrong scale. Consciousness is based on on what happens in the brain as a whole. the these these the these circuits at at at the whole of the integral brain and I’ve talked with a lot of serious brain people and Roger’s suggestion that it happens at the scale of of of microtubers that’s not the scale where consciousness happens is simply from my viewpoint simply wrong um I also I agree with him about the problem of entropy at the beginning of the universe I think he’s got a very very valid point that inflation is supposed to solve the problem of smoothness at the beginning. It doesn’t. Inflation assumes that the universe is smooth before it ever gets going. And I think Roger’s completely correct on that. Where I don’t agree with him is is conformal cyclic cosmology. And it’s a brilliant idea just in parallel in a sense with with Steven’s idea of the no wave function, the no boundary proposal. In Roger’s case, he doesn’t actually, as far as I can see, have a mechanism from transforming from one eon to the next eon. And I I don’t think he has a mechanism. And the problem here is he talks about infinity and Roger Penrose’s conformal diagrams. You can look at infinity and you can see it there. But what that forgets, and I’ve written a paper about this, is that infinity is not a very large number. infinity is larger than any number that exists. And a lot of physics confuses that. And um so so Roger has an eon and a connection and another one. And he says you get events happening here. They send signals to the boundary and the signals come through. Well, he but he you the problem is he uses the symbol for infinity. If it actually is infinity then any event down here gets diluted an infinite amount literally an infinite amount and the amount which gets transferred from this ear to next is precisely zero. There is no way if it’s actually infinite that a finite amount of information could go from this to that one. And to me that this is a conundrum which he hasn’t sorted out. And I it it just doesn’t work for me. When I’m wrestling with a guest’s argument about, say, the hard problem of consciousness or quantum foundations, I refuse to let even a centilla of confusion remain unexamined. Claude is my thinking partner here. Actually, they just released something major, which is Claude Opus 4.6, a state-of-the-art model. Claude is the AI for minds that don’t stop at good enough. It’s the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow, thinks with you, not for you. 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IPSO facto, the intellectual core of this channel. They publish new guides weekly, and subscribers vote on what books get covered next. Their browser extension, Short Form AI, summarizes articles and YouTube videos with a single click. Go to shortform.com/e for a free trial and an exclusive $50 off your annual subscription. That’s shortform.com/e. Can you spell out in detail what you mean when you say that physicists tend to misunderstand infinity as a shorthand for a large number? Yeah, I wrote a little paper called the physics of infinity about this and physicists tend to use infinity um as a as as a shorthand for a very large number. Now infinity is not a very large number. It’s bigger than any number which can possibly exist. And so to take an example on the universe is 13.7 billion years old. It’s going to be um in another billion years it’s going to be 14 billion years old. Now when will it be in infinitely years old? And the answer is never. It will never be infinitely years old. No matter how old it is, it’s not even the first step on the road to infinity because infinity is bigger than any number that can possibly exist. Doesn’t matter how how long you wait, how far it goes. Uh the universe um it is always in the future. It is always over there. I’m assuming of course that the universe will expand forever. I regard as highly implausible the idea is it’s going to recolapse because the the dark energy is far too large. I think it’ll expand forever. It’ll turn out to be what used to be called a heat death, which is a very strange name for something that gets colder and colder and colder. Things will stay and barryons will decay and there will just be this darkness left in the end. But it won’t come to an end. It is never reaches the end. And that’s the absolutely crucial point. And that’s the problem with with with with Roger’s transitions between the eras. You never make the transition from this era to the next one if that symbol infinity means what it is supposed to mean. Do you then not buy the physical relevance of ads CFT? So holographic dualities like and it doesn’t need to be ads CFT. Many people will say well our universe is not anti. Okay there are ditter cfts anyhow. So do you find it dubious because they rely on some infinity whether it’s space-like or timelike? Well, there there’s there’s a couple of things to say on that. Firstly, um the the trouble with ADS CFT is it obviously doesn’t describe the real universe because anti-itter space has a negative cosmological constant. Now, if the dark energy is a positive logical constant, it’s positive. So, that by itself proves ADFC is a load of It doesn’t apply to the real universe. Um that’s the first point. The second point is that the idea of holography of course is a very very old idea in the real world holography not adsft um is a wonderful thing which you can do tests in laboratory but in general relativity it’s what we call the null initial value problem and basically this which ray saxs and various other people did in the 1970s you you’ve got a null cone in general relativity you put data on the null cone That is a three-dimensional surface and the interior of the null cone is four-dimensional and it’s a mathematical theorem that what is the data on the three-dimensional surface determines what happens in the fourdimensional surface. That’s the enal initial value problem. And then and and um I actually wrote a paper about this with some colleagues about and the the real holography is the fact that a three-dimensional surface and general relativity date on a three-dimensional surface determines what happens in a four-dimensal spaceime. That’s that’s a genuine theory of holography as pertains to general relativity. It also pertains to electromagnetism in in a spaceime. The data threedimensional boundary the data determines what happens in the interior. Nothing to do with ADA with antidus spacetime. Do you have thoughts on the mind body problem? Uh yeah, I’m a dualist. Um and I think it’s it’s it’s actually very interesting to compare with digital computers. Um the the the the mind the the first point is that we obviously know that the mind is enabled to work by uh action potential spike chains traveling through and by resonant circuits. We know all of that is taking place. We haven’t got the slightest idea how that actually leads to consciousness. We don’t even have the beginning. Now this is of course called the hard problem of consciousness. And the strange thing is some people try to deny there’s a hard problem. Well there is a hard problem. That’s a simple fact. We have no idea how I happen to be seeing you. How we taste taste a a grape how we we we feel pain and all of that. We we simply don’t know at all how that happens. Um it’s enabled by the brain. What we do know is that the bra the mind can think of things. It can plan it take decisions and I would certainly insist that it has free will and that’s a whole another discussion which we could go into. Um and um and it we we certainly have agency and I’d like to give you a simple a little short story about agency please. in a in a which this is a story which comes from Philip B who’s a wonderful science writer so very long time ago the leaning tower of Pisa Aristotle meant Galileo at the top of the leaning tower of Pisa and Galileo said gravity works like this I’ve got a heavy ball and a light ball and I’m going to drop them drops them and they fall they hit the ground at the same time and he says Galileo says to Aristotle everything is subject to the law of gravity there’s nothing you can do about it. Everything will do exactly like that. So then Aristotle says, “Watch this.” He holds out a pigeon and he drops the pigeon and the pigeon flies onto the neighboring roof and he says, “You see what happened there? Gravity is there. the the pigeon didn’t want to fall and so it didn’t fall and it it was able to do so because it has all of the structure of the wings and all of that which evolution has led to because that helps pigeons to survive and but but this is the whole thing about emergence. The fact that you’ve got those forces acting the outcome depends on physiological structures which shape what those forces lead to. They channel causation in upward and downwards ways. And in particular, the pigeon decides it wants to land on the roof over there. It looks at the roof. It basically computes how it must fly to land there. It does that and it does that. Incidentally, I think birds are incredible. I think the way they fly, they land, they plan. I think they’re they’re amazing. And and it comes back to this thing also that in each there are these three different things. There’s there’s functional causation um which is what happens second by second. The bird there’s um developmental and the baby bird has to learn how to fly. That’s the developmental process and that’s an amazing thing that happens. The bird they they learn rapidly and then there’s the evolutionary thing that evolution learned it’s a good idea for some animals to be able to fly up to get out of the way of predators. So all of these three scales always come in and they always work in concert with each other. Um evolution and this is something that Dennis Noble has emphasized very very strongly is that ordinary evolutionary theories theorists that many of them focus purely on molecules well molecules is only a tiny fraction of what’s going on. Physiology is crucial to evolution and Darwin knew that. Darwin’s finches they s they survived differently on different islands because they had different shaped beaks because that enabled them to eat different fruit. Physiology was what was Darwin’s finches were about different physiology. So physiology is central to evolution which Dennis Noble has been pointing out. And what does this have to do with consciousness? Are you just saying that ordinarily we think that there’s some interaction problem but you’re saying no we can have something in concert that still is distinct consciousness enables symbolism and enables humans to conquer the earth. So um and and and this is the issue in evolution of levels of selection and there’s this whole debate in evolution. Does selection take place at the level of animals or of of of groups? And sometimes selection takes place because if you’ve got a group of animals that can run faster or they’re stronger, whatever, then they’re going to win. But if you have a group of animals who cooperate with each other, they can do things which individuals can’t do. And then particularly if they can talk with each other, they can plan what they’re going to do and they can plan technology and they can plan. You’re going to go around to the left, I’ll go around to the right and we’ll catch them by surprise from behind and all that sort of thing. And so consciousness and the ability to plan gives you a huge leg up and the evolutionary race and that’s why human beings have conquered the earth and we we control all the other animals. And of course, we’re destroying the Earth because we’re stupid. But that’s another different part of the story. I’m going to be speaking to Richard Dawkins soon, and I’m wondering if you have any questions to pose to him that you think he won’t be able to answer. Well, I would like to know if he has come to reconsider his statement that genes are replicators because as far as I’m concerned, that is simply a false biological statement. You can put DNA in a petry dish. You give it all of them mole stuff it needs to create new DNA or to create proteins or whatever. Absolutely nothing will happen. DNA is as a simple matter of biological fact not a replicator. The replicators are cells. And there’s an important thing about cells. They replicate everything. They replicate DNA. They replicate um a lot more than DNA. And I think that’s something which is is is simply not stated clearly enough. Dennis of course knows this. Well, when you replicate the cell, you replicate all of the organels, you replicate the DNA, but you replicate um massive other stuff or and and that you you you replicate the metabolic systems and those are not controlled by DNA. a lot of what happens in the cell the met metabolic structures uh proteins aren’t involved and so DNA is not involved and so that whole structure is is is simply quite simply not controlled by DNA. So there’s a much bigger picture of biology than just DNA and to and to look only at the level of genes is simply missing a vast amount of what’s happening in biology. This reminds me of your 2024 foundations paper where you had holism or biological holism. So are you saying that look if one was to say that the gene is what’s being replicated? It’s not exactly that because in order for the gene to be replicated you need some other context. Yeah. You you need the context of the cell as a whole. And one of the extraordinary things is the way when a when a cell duplicate is splits everything gets duplicated and then the the the um microtubules appear out of nowhere and they organize everything. They push everything around. You create a new wall and then the new cell has got a duplicate of everything which was in the old cell. Now, that’s quite extraordinary, and I’m I’m not an expert on that at all, but I think it’s a fascinating kind of thing. And the these micro tubes, they’re like little angels which appear out of the out of the blue, organize everything, and then disappear again. And and that’s astonishing. Now one other thing which I think is very important and it’s it’s a slightly different tact but I think it’s important to say is that it’s very important to remember that the interior of cell is an incredibly um chaotic place. It’s it’s the molecular chaos there billions of collisions a second taking place within the cell. It’s not a quietly organized place where things happen in a very organized kind of way. There’s a huge amount of chaos the molecular storm and molecular machines have been developed which extract energy out of the molecular storm that’s things like kines and dian and so that’s an absolutely fascinating part of what goes in the cell and the to think that it’s a very quiet thing where things take place on a highly uh regular ordered places simply isn’t the case at Is the future open? Yeah. Um, no. No. This this is part of the the the business of free will and but Stuart Kaufman, have you ever talked with Stuart Kaufman? Yes, actually. Yes. And I’ll speak with him again in person. So, the last time was over Zoom, but there were some connection issues. It’s a great podcast. I’ll place that on screen for people who want to watch. The thing about it is to to make clear that the future’s open. It’s interesting to go to technology because technology uh evolution takes place in or all of those three processes take place in technology there. There’s developmental there’s functional developmental evolutionary processes taking place in technology. And my claim is the following. The major difference is in technology there’s nothing corresponding to DNA and this is what Stuart Calfman have emphasized. You can have an idea in technology a completely new idea which is completely unexpected and that totally opens up completely new areas which was simply not predictable. And the context I like to put this into is to think about what’s happening in the universe as stuff happens in the context of the expanding universe, the la the big bang, nuclear synthesis, the last scattering surface, creation of galaxies, stars and and so on. And the question is the following. So I’ve got an iPhone. There’s my iPhone. Mhm. The question is the following. Was it inevitable that this iPhone would come into existence given the data on the last scattering surface? Now I claim absolutely not. There is no way whatever that you could predict the iPhone would exist if you knew every single thing about the last scattering surface. And the point is the following. Um if you take for instance Jim Peele’s recent book about cosmology, it goes into all of the everything which leads to the structures on the last scattering surface. We understand all of those processes in great detail. They lead to modulated Gaussian fluctuations on the last scattering surface. There’s nothing on the last scattering surface which corresponds to a prescription that the iPhone will come into existence today. Nothing. And let’s ignore all of the problems that make it impossible. Well, one of the things is supposing there was such a date on the last scattering surface. How would it get into my mind is one of the things you could ask. But there’s a and and that is a basically impossible task for if I could explain in depth. But the deeper question is the following. So let’s let’s forget all of the problems. We’re going to insist that what happens today was uniquely determined by what happened in the last scattering surface because or or if you like at the beginning of inflation, I don’t care. Whenever you like to say the question is the following. Who wrote the nature of the iPhone into the last scattering? How did that get in there? And you end up with having to assume that there was some kind of I don’t know what the something not physical something with intelligence wrote that data into the last captain. That’s what you have to assume if you’re going to assume that the existence of the iPhone in my hand today is uniquely determined. And that by itself proves that what happens today is not uniquely determined. And it’s basically also as a part of the way of seeing that we have free will because when Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, he thought of many different possibilities for the iPhone. He tried many different ones. The people who designed the transistors did and all the rest of it. And this is a product of thoughtful intelligent design and that’s what led to it. And it is not predicted by what was in the early universe. It’s predicted by the fact that evolution that the universe allows evolution to take place by setting the conditions for evolution. Evolution produces eventually human beings. Human beings have intelligence and free will. They design and build things like iPhones, computers, and all the rest. And that’s the only story which makes sense to me as a way of understanding how the present day world comes into existence. Strok Hoffman has his adjacent possibilities and you have your possibilities space work. Those to me sound like you’re both approaching the same issue from different sites. Yeah. Yeah. He had the adjacent possible but his recent work he emphasizes that in technology space the adjacent possible is not continuous. You can make a sudden leap into some completely different place. So for instance um the CAT scanner didn’t exist. The CAT scanner didn’t develop as an adjacent possible to previous things like cat scanners. It was and the same as to um it it was a sudden revelation that you could have a CAT scanner which was not an adjacent possible. So Stu’s basic point that he’s making nowadays is that the thing that is different evolution takes place in technology but it doesn’t have to take place. It can jump. It can jump to completely different places. And the same is true of the laser. The laser, the laser was a conceptual jumper to a completely new part of possibility space which simply hadn’t been explored before. Now I imagine you have a response to this that occurs to the standard physicist which is that okay we can say that the last scattering surface that we cannot predict. So let’s not use the word predict because then you have to think of the predictor and that person or or thing will have incomplete information. Okay, but that’s different than saying that the initial conditions of the big bang or what have you plus the laws of physics entailed the iPhone entailed the cat scanner. Do you disagree with that? They certainly don’t entail them. Um they they allow them. They don’t entail them. Now, if you insist on saying they entail them, um it so I’ll I’ll write you down Max’s equations, direct equal work. You can’t do it. It’s a it’s it’s it’s patent nonsense. And if you really insist on it, what you’re assuming it’s it’s a form of intelligent design. It’s assuming that there was some kind of thing which wrote that in and and made it happen. It’s it’s basically a nerd’s form of intelligent design. I’m showing Maxwell’s equations on screen or or on a piece of paper and then saying, “Okay, how does a computer work? How does this and that work?” There’s a difference between some sort of pragmatic entailment that we can deduce it versus some ontological entailment that it is produced or it is entailed. Well, if you want to believe in fairy tales, fine, go in. Does your anti-reductionism imply your dualism or does your dualism lead you to anti-reductionism or are those to be teased apart? Are those independent conclusions? No, look, reduction and emergence both take place. The problem is when people claim that only reduction takes place. Um they both take place. I’m not against reduction. I’m against reduction as a philosophy being the only thing that happens. And that’s to me that’s quite obviously wrong. And um ju just just a simple example which I’ve written about um deduce from a physics Darwin’s theory of evolution. Okay. deduce from physics should be able to do it if if physics entails everything. The reason you can’t is because physics does not have a concept of living or death. Darwin’s theory of evolution depends on the concept of things being alive. Pick any physics textbook and you will not find in a physics textbook a definition of of life. It it’s not part of physics. It’s part of emerging topic namely biology. Life exists in emerging context of biology. It does not exist in a purely physical context. Doesn’t exist in a technological context. What if AI designs better spectacles than us? Well, there’s I am not an expert on I I do not claim to be that. Um, a digital computer can do incredible things, but it does not have free will. does what it’s told to do. It does what a programmer tells it to do. Now, it does more than that. It can pick up new information from the outside world and react to that. It’s a slight divergence, but what what I need to emphasize in talking about all of this is the crucial fact that we are open systems and the idea that you can predict. So, so, so let’s go back to um uh Lelass’s demon and he I I will know every single thing about every single molecule in this brain, your brain at this moment. Okay? Now, as a matter of fact, that is not sufficient to determine what will happen in your brain 2 minutes from now. And the reason is cuz you’re an open system. And this is this is a simple fact. Physicists tend to not think of context. They think in just generic terms and they don’t think of context. The fact that we are open systems means that new information which we cannot predict is coming in all the time. And the example I like there’s a woman walking down the street. A car accident takes place. Uh she’s driving the car and accidents takes place. She didn’t know the accident was going to take place. It takes place. Every single thing that happens in her brain from then on is different because the accident took place. And there’s no way that you can predict that. Now, evolution has discovered that we are open systems. And so, it’s made our brains predictive processing systems. And this is where Carl Fristen and all of that comes in. I believe that our brains are predictive processing. We are predictive processing systems precisely because we are open systems. It is for that reason that a plus demon cannot predict the future of our brains. I also spoke to Carl Fristen. Now, you keep mentioning people that I happen to speak to and I want to know, is there anyone else that since we seem to travel in the same circles, is there anyone else you think I should be speaking to regarding these topics? The most important is Michael Leven. Yes. I’ve spoken to him four or five times. His stuff is truly amazing. Yes. Yes. Well, I think developmental biology in general is truly amazing. And um people like Sha B. Carol, the other Sha Carol. Have you talked with him? No. Okay. Well, talk talk to the biologist Carol Sha B. Carol. He’s got this wonderful book. He talks about developmental systems and and um hawk genes and all of that kind of stuff. It’s the bio electricity of mic 11. It’s a to me it’s a completely unexpected. So there’s the whole um uh um there’s the whole molecular stuff going on and RNA, DNA, and all of that stuff, but he’s proven conclusively there’s another level going on of bio electricity. And at first I this didn’t even make sense to me. And I’m still trying to understand that. But he’s proved conclusively that by his experiments that bio electricity is at least as important as as genetics in in in in developmental processes. And much more than that, he’s showed that there’s apparent goal directedness in in in in in some developmental process. They seem to know and this I do not understand. They seem to know what the outcome ought to be. Now that goes against all but if he can if he can do experiments which shows that then I’ve got to change my outlook. I’ve got to and that this this is a project I will be trying to undergo in depth soon because it’s it’s a revolutionary kind of thing and it’s Nobel Prize winning level stuff. Um, if developmental processes in some sense have an image of where they’re going, then development isn’t what we thought it was. And I think that’s an incredible thing. Yes. Actually, we both think the same. I when I first interviewed him, the thumbnail that I placed on YouTube was the next Nobel Prize winner or something like that. Yeah, I agree. I agree. um his his work on salamanders and so on where he can get them to grow second heads or whatever. It’s amazing. Yeah. What is it that’s so revolutionary about his work? What is it that when you read his work spoke to him that it floored you? Well, firstly that there’s a second level of control going on which which most people don’t talk about. A standard B developmental biology textbook simply doesn’t talk about bio electricity as as being an important part of what’s going on. That’s the first point. But the second point is that appears to lead and I’m speaking very carefully. It appears to lead to goaldirected developmental processes. They know what they ought to be. Now that’s quite different from standard ones where um we’re very careful to say that the DNA isn’t a plan of what what will coming. It’s it’s it’s it’s it’s a material used by developmental processes and all of the the magic comes from the hawk genes the hierarchical structure of the hawk genes which is what Sean B. Carroll talks about and that kind of thing. Um, but this is an area where I’m just finding my way, so I’m not going to say a great deal about it. Can you explain about the standard argument for the block universe and then where you defer? Yeah, the standard argument for the block universe is very simple. It’s in special relativity. You got four dimensions and you’ve got your space-like timelike surfaces. And when you change velocity, what seems space-like to you changes. So therefore there are no preferred um spatial sections in spaceime and therefore um we must have a block universe cuz there can’t be any preferred spatial sections. Now this is wrong in multiple ways and the first point is that the big news is that special relativity doesn’t describe the universe general relativity does. Okay. So then what people say ah but that makes it even worse because of general coarian there are no preferred cir surfaces of time and the answer is this again is the problem of physicists who think in a contextf free way put it in this context every cosmological model has preferred space sections every cosmological has preferred time sections that’s what standard Robertson walker cosmologies are they got preferred surfaces tiers constant preferred timelines and So they’re simply ignoring the fact that in the real universe real universe models there are preferred time things s and then the further point is what they’re saying is completely at odds with what the plank team does and there’s that canonical picture of the origin of the universe last scattering surface and the age of the universe is stated to be 13.87 87 billion years. So my model of the universe is an evolving block universe. In another billion years that right hand edge will have moved to the right a billion years. Spacetime itself will have grown. Spacetime will have got bigger. And how will that have happened? Well through the Einstein field equations. And one of the things which is confusing is that the basic field equations of physics can be written in various ways. The Grunchian way, Hamiltonian way. But they can all be written in a way which is a timed dependent way. In the case of gravity, it’s what’s called the ADM equations, the onit demiss equations. And those write gravity as as a spaceime which evolves with time. So the standard the the real view the real situation in the universe is that spaceime is evolving. It’s at it started at the beginning which was 13.87 billion years ago. At the moment it’s 13.87 years ago. It will be another billion years older. In another time the right hand edge will have moved to the right. Now the further very important point is this. This establishes a global direction of time. The direction of time passes from the beginning which doesn’t move to the present day which does move. And the present day is moving all the time. And it is and there’s this paradox that all of the important equations of physics are time symmetric. So where do local arrows of times come from? And the answer which I’ve written about is that the local arrows of time derive from the global direction of time. And one of the strange things is that at the present time when people talk about the arrow of time they only talk about the thermodynamic one and the second law of thermodynamics. But actually there’s an arrow of time for electronamics, for gravitational waves, for sound, for um um for for for for thermodynamics, for all of them. And one of the striking things is they all point in the same direction of time and they all point in the same direction of time because they all derive from the same basis. the d the the global direction of of time breaks the time symmetry. So the field equ the the the physics equations all time symmetric their context is not time symmetric. And so this is what I mean by a lot of physicists who think about physics in a contextless way. When you put them in the context of the expanding universe you solve the problem. We do not live in a block universe. We evolve in evolving block universe. we get the direction of time because it derives from this expansion of the universe and it’s it’s it’s actually quite simple when you look at it in that way. Didn’t you also say that the quantum to classical transition is a problem for inflation? Uh yes, that’s also a problem. It’s a great lacuna standard theory is that in that picture they show you quantum fluctuations on the left. all of a sudden they’re classical. And there’s almost nobody who writes about how does the quantum become classical. And until you’ve actually made that clear, the inflation is a the way that inflation is supposed to lead to fluctuation in structure is an incomplete theory. And um and now I’ve I’ve I’ve got a theory of I agree with Roger Penrose that wave function collapse is real and with my colleague Barbara Dussell I’ve written papers about what we call contextual wave function collapse and that wave function collapse is real but the way it happens is always determined by the context and we give a very detailed uh example of that in our book called in our paper called contextual wave function collapse. So it’s an objective collapse theory. Yeah. And what what what that means is that um is that essentially the the the the the Copenhogen interpretation is correct. Um and and related to this is a further thing that I’ve written about is that people and Sean Carol in particular they like to talk about the wave function of the universe and that bases a lot of Shan Carol’s stuff about he says the multiverse must happen because of the well this is obvious nonsense for the following reason the dq equation and the the shr equation are linear equations now the real universe is not linear so There’s a paradox there. How does nonlinear stuff come out of a totally linear equation? And they try to say, well, it comes from the multiverse. Well, the real solution comes from looking back to general relativity. The great breakthrough in general relativity occurred when we discovered the concept of um of of of coordinate um coordinate systems. they you can’t cover an ordinary space time by a signal coordinate uh uh co coordinate system. You have to have a whole atlas of coordinates and it’s the atlas which covers spaceime not a single one and that’s what enabled us to discover that all the topological results in general relativity now what what I claim is exactly the same holes in quantum physics there is no global wave function that’s a fantasy there are local wave functions everywhere and and the local wave functions cover the whole spaceime but there is no single wave fun no single wave function for a universe, which completely undercuts the whole idea of the the quantum multiverse. There’s no wave function for a cat and all that stuff. There’s no wave function for a brain. And so the idea that one single wave function could could encompass a whole brain, it’s purely fantasy. It’s obviously nonsense because the key fact of quantum physics it’s it’s quantum physics equations are linear and of the direct and and the finement path integral is based in the fact it’s a linear operator on on on the on the wave function. The real physics is not linear and the way to solve that is to have local wave functions which are not together to create nonlinear structures. You think the multiverse is nonsense. Okay. There are various kinds of multiverses. So there’s an Everadian multiverse which you’ve referenced. There’s a TEG Markian like a a mathematical universe. There is the one the one which tech marks one the fact that something exists as a mathematics doesn’t mean it exists physically and it’s just a simple misconception. Um, I’m prepared to believe that some chaotic cosmologies will lead to different expanding universe domains. I’m prepared to believe that. I’m not an expert in inflationary theory. Um, but the point from as as a cosmologist, I’m I’m a very conservative scientist. I believe that science is related to things which you can observe or which you can test. And in the case of the multiverse, you can’t see them. You can’t test them. That’s because there are visual horizons. You can’t see any further than a visual horizon. I can say anything I want to about it. You can say anything. Nobody can prove you’re right. Nobody can prove I’m right. So, so I think you’re talking metaphysics, not physics when you say talking about those multiverses. Now, I know this is very unpopular with some of my colleagues, but um I’m I’m a very conservative scientist in that respect because when and I have to be because when I’m talking about all of this stuff about emergence, I have to make sure I’m in sound theoretical and experimental basis. and all of this emergence stuff is completely sound and and so I’m very careful to stick what I say to to stuff which is can be tested or observed. Now of course the problem with cosmology is that there’s uniqueness of the universe which means we can’t compare it with other universes. We can’t rerun the universe, do tests on different universes and that is in a sense the foundational problem. We only live in one universe and we can only view it from one space-time point on one pass like that’s a basic problem in cosmology. That’s also part of my problem with fine-tuning arguments or enthropic principles where they assume that there’s some prior distribution probability distribution on some constants and then you wonder well where are we selecting this from? All we have is one example. Yeah. Yeah. You can imagine anything you like. I can imagine anything I like. We we can see up to the visual horizon. We can be influenced by stuff up to the particle horizon. It could be what one of the interesting possibilities is space that the universe could close up on itself on a scale bigger than the horizon in which case it’s definitely finite. One of the ones that I wished was the truth, but it doesn’t seem to be so is that the universe closed up on itself on a scale smaller than the visual horizon. And that’s what I call a small universe. And in that case, you would see the same galaxies at different directions in the sky at different times in their history. And I think as a philosopher, I would prefer the universe to be a small universe because in that case, our observation relation to the universe is completely different than in every other case. As you started to study consciousness and neuroscience, is there anything of the math from cosmology that applies or that breaks? No, I know people have I I don’t think there’s any relation. Um the the the brain has hierarchical structures but it has columns. It has it it has uh layers. It it it has different areas. It’s it’s nothing like cosmology. And I know some people try to make an analogy. I don’t think there’s anything there. Sir, why are we here? Okay, I will I’ve just finished a book which will shortly come out from Oxford University Press called How We Come to Be Almost Everything That Leads to Our Existence. And the last chapter is called, “Is there meaning in the universe?” And then of course I quote Steven Weinberg saying, “The more you know about the universe, the more pointless it it it looks.” And to me, this is such a classic example of the tunnel vision of my theoretical physics colleagues. So he looks at particle colliders and he says, “I can’t see any meaning there.” And you look at galaxies, you say, “I can’t see any meaning there.” And you forget to look at your house, at your wife, at your home. You forget, you simply ignore all of the evidence from everyday life. So the question that I ask is what should count as data about the universe? And the answer is telescopes, colliders, experiments, all of that. But in addition, all of everyday life is data about the nature of the universe. Because we exist in the universe and the we we are here. We are allowed to be here because the universe exists and we have consciousness. We have free will. But the the much more important thing which I will finish off with is that I am a moral realist and I think this is incredibly important particularly what’s going on in the world at the present time. I think that there are some things which are good as a matter of fact not as a matter of opinion. I think there are some things which are evil as a matter of fact not as a matter of opinion. And so I would say part uh there’s a whole other thing I could go into that what I call the deep structure of the cosmos’s possibility spaces. There is a moral possibility space and interesting and so so what is state about the universe? If you believe that moral realism is true that is data about the nature of the universe and you can try to explain in various ways why that is the case. If you don’t believe in model realism, then you think it’s okay. The Holocaust was okay. You believe it’s okay threatening to wipe out civilizations. As someone who has spent many decades fighting a partate, fighting oppression in this country, I’m not prepared to believe that. I can’t prove it. But I believe it is the nature of the universe at a deep level. And I believe that’s a fundamentally important fact about the nature of the universe. That the unprovability is a fundamentally important fact or the moral objectiveness is an important fact. The fact that there is that evil is moral as a fact. The fact that moral that moral realism is true. Now there there’s just one one one point that I must um make clear that I I I distinguish in my here between ethics and morality. Moral realism is what is actually good or evil. Ethics is what a particular society or person believes is good or evil. That varies with time, place, whatever that is not absolute. It’s the moral thing. The fact that threatening to kill, wipe out an entire civilization is evil. To me, it is crucial and part of the nature of the universe that that is a fact. And I can’t prove it, but I believe it. Sir, thank you for spending so much time with me. Thank you. It was an honor. Okay. Hi there. Kurt here. If you’d like more content from Theories of Everything and the very best listening experience, then be sure to check out my Substack at curtjongle.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episodes ahead of time. You also get bonus written content exclusively for our members. That’s cur ji mu n.org. You can also just search my name and the word Substack on Google. Since I started that Substack, it somehow already became number two in the science category. Now, Substack, for those who are unfamiliar, is like a newsletter, one that’s beautifully formatted. There’s zero spam. This is the best place to follow the content of this channel that isn’t anywhere else. It’s not on YouTube. It’s not on Patreon. It’s exclusive to the Substack. It’s free. 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