The Reverse Elephant My Plenary At Mind At Large

TITLE: The Reverse Elephant: My Plenary at Mind at Large CHANNEL: Curt Jaimungal DATE: 2026-04-22 URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Zgp2EhSk8 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Okay well hello everyone and welcome back. We’re gonna jump in straight away to our second plenary session of the day by none other than Curt Jaimungal. Many of you may be familiar with Curt’s good work. Curt is a Toronto-based filmmaker and interviewer exploring a variety of topics related to theoretical physics, consciousness, and free will through his widely acclaimed podcast TOE, otherwise known as Theories of Everything. If you are unfamiliar with that podcast, I would highly recommend you check it out and see all the good content that Curt is producing. Curt, we’re really happy to have you here with us today and we’ll turn the floor over to you now.

Thank you for the invitation, it’s an honor to be here. A special thank you to Matt, Matt Segall. Now, in keeping with the theme of this talk, I have some inconsistent ideas I’d like to present. First of all, what was this nameless Whiteheadian scholar referring to? Is this the mental or the physical pole? ‘A dynamic, self-organizing system defined by chaotic non-linear feedback loops, seeking equilibrium but constantly perturbed by external energy states, resulting in a temporary localized nexus of high-intensity friction.’ Does anyone know if it’s physical or mental or even who this scholar is? So it turns out this is Gemini explaining to me what a washing machine is. And so to me, if one can’t tell the difference between Whitehead and a Whirlpool, I think we have a problem. Now I used to be dissatisfied when I read Whitehead, but I’ve come to change my mind. I’ll get to that toward the end of the talk. Much of that’s due to Matt, Matt Segall who’s been on the podcast. For now let’s talk about some mistakes that intellectuals make. So one is saying ‘alluding’ when they mean reference. Another is applying Gödel’s theorem indiscriminately. Another is you’ll hear this the charge of so and so’s illusory because X is not fundamental, therefore X is not real. And then there’s also something that bothers me is that they’ll say that some new physics theory will come out, in the comments section someone says oh the Vedics said this thousands of years ago. Did they say it? Did the Vedics make a reference to an inner a complete inner product space with tensors and you need a Born rule for probabilities? So you can always water anything down and then make it alight something else. But you do some expense of both. So let’s see here, using ‘concrescence’ when you literally mean just ‘happening’. So this is me formatting myself, dressing up mundane terms with Whiteheadian esoteric vocabulary. One says ‘the concrescence of prehensions in this nexus is nearing its satisfaction amid misprehension.’ Well what does that mean? It means ‘excuse me I ordered the venti but you gave me a grande.’ I think we have the tendency to feel if it’s not four syllables or greater then it’s not profound. And the last mistake that only intellectuals make is that it engage in overly punctilious quibbling like I will for the rest of this talk. So this talk also could have been called, it’s called ‘The Reverse Elephant’, it also could have been called ‘Why Neither is Greater Than Both’. Part of this that I am just so antagonistic, I am an apostate. So when I hear something repeated over and over like someone posits A, someone posits B, and then some Hegelian comes along and says no no no they’re both they’re supposed to be synthesized and every you’re both right, even though that’s not Hegel that’s Fichte and Chalybäus, Matt can correct me on my pronunciations, it’s just it’s interesting the first time I the first 52 times I hear it. Then the 57th time I hear it I start to realize that these maxims or slogans that I’m passing along in a say in a forest, this tree is not is not my tree. Its roots don’t touch me. I’m not convinced of it. My kryptonite is once I’ve heard something said enough, I make a list I put it into a a document of banned words and banned phrases that I’m not allowed to say. It’s almost like the opposite of the boiling frog. To me I become more sensitive to something the more it’s repeated. So for those who are wondering who I am it’s you can take a look at this QR code and pull it up on your phone. There’s a YouTube channel there. The channel is basically answering the question of when a typical bro smokes weed and they have deep thoughts is there a non-inebriated rigorous version of this with researchers? The Theories of Everything channel says yes, and investigates well what is time, what is consciousness, what are cells, what is intelligence, what is quantum gravity, space, observers, is quantum field theory truly a theory about fields? That’s controversial. What about axiomatic quantum field theory, infinity categories? It’s like triangulating various questions about fundamental reality, whatever that means, from various perspectives. Free will, something else we cover, is it a coherent concept? What is meaning? So all of this without the munchies. We all have this this idea that we’re touching the same object but it’s but we all are disagreeing but actually it’s the same. It’s it’s this this ooziness of wanting everything and everyone to be correct. It’s warm and fuzzy, it’s like no no no we have to get along. Again I agree with that the first 68 times I hear it but then the 70th time I start to I start to question it. So what follows for the rest of this talk is a variety of observations, delineations, preferences of mine, idiosyncratic foolishness, but I don’t think this is the correct picture. So how did I arrive at this not being the correct picture? Well like I mentioned slogan fatigue I very much dislike the ‘it’s all the same parts of the elephant man’ - this says the person who has beads instead of doors. ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ and everyone’s just like ah yeah that’s so profound. Well look an example would be they’d say that a car is not just the engine you also need to think about the exhaust and the connections between them, you can’t just look at isolated parts. Yeah but engineers do that. How do you think a car is engineered? So sure, you can take singleton sets of parts but you can also take the power set of parts, which include all interactions. And so I’m not a reductionist, but maybe I’m a power-setist, that’s called a power set in math. Maybe I’m a power-setist. Then I also start to hear ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ so often that recusant part of me says okay there must be something maybe I don’t believe that, maybe I believe the opposite, maybe the whole is less than the sum of its parts. And there’s actually some Whiteheadian justification for this that comes apart that comes into play later. People will say I’m not spiritual I’m sorry I’m not religious I’m spiritual I believe in a higher power. Yeah but then the question is do you believe in a higher power or is there the higher power? Like almost no one questions a higher power. The government is a form of a higher power. Do you think there are multiple higher powers and that’s it and they’re all vying and competing or do you think there is the higher power? And if so then what’s the difference between that and God? Survivorship bias when someone says oh look at so and so’s survivorship bias then they have to tell the story in World War II there was a mathematician and it’s just oh gosh the same story over and over. And then survivorship bias has its own meta-survivorship bias because you only hear about when survivorship bias worked, and you only hear about this one case of World War II and the mathematician against the US Navy but you never hear about well when was the US Navy right and the mathematician wrong? So Wald’s story is cute for the 157th time it’s so cool. We’re a drop in the ocean or maybe an ocean in the drop it’s like oh yeah we love these reversals. This to me is has a dubious tie to the fields of quantum field theory, which aren’t exactly fields they’re operator valued distributions. And that’s not mere punctilious quibbling. Okay everyone likes unity now what are the different different forms of unity? The heavens have the same laws as the earth. There’s a gauge group unity. So heavens same laws as the earth that’s Newton. Gauge group unity is looking for a simple type of Lie group in the standard model. By the way you’re wondering why there are so many math and physics references, my background’s in math and physics so I have a a slightly different perverse perspective than many of the other presenters here. Dualities, AdS/CFT, that should have been a capital S, there’s T-duality in string theory. Wave particle duality is not a formal duality by the way. It’s just said. It’s said in the first lecture of a quantum mechanics course, it’s said in every BBC documentary, it just hits you over the head, and then it’s never brought up again when you actually study quantum mechanics. Explanatory unity where you have fewer parameters and some people make references to Occam’s razor which I find dubious but that’s a whole other talk. Reductionism which those who are anti-reductionist they may squirm at calling this a form of unity. Ontological identification, so electric and magnetic fields are seen to be the same in special relativity and Maxwell’s equations. Subject and object are the same, some people will say. The gravitational field and the structure of spacetime, that’s from GR, so Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Methodological unification, so the principle of stationary actions being used in so many settings, all over physics, even in machine learning. Far beyond that. But then what’s not explored much is disunity. Symmetry violations for instance. Conceptual disambiguation. So you can bring two concepts together or you can realize that what you thought was one concept is actually multiple. So is knowledge merely JTB? It’s a word I don’t like ‘merely’. Are there different kinds of time? I actually had a podcast two days ago about how there are at least eight different kinds of time. Essence versus energies, this is something orthodox theologians talk about. Probability versus likelihood? I have a lecture on why I’m not a physicalist and why I don’t buy the simulation HYP which could stand for the simulation hypothesis or simulation hype, they’re both unified in that I do think there’s hype about the simulation hypothesis. Entity resolution, so what you thought was one entity is actually as you inspect closer there’s multiple. And of course you can be precise with your words and have language resolution. Now this last one here is one that I’m super interested in and I haven’t seen many philosophers explore it. But mathematicians and physicists know it intimately. It’s that local agreement doesn’t mean you can extend globally. That’s the rest of this talk. Now going back to that elephant metaphor I have a book coming out and I was speaking to my my editor at Penguin, at Penguin Press, and he was telling me that my book sounds like because it’s about this, it’s about when the local can’t trivially extend to the global, and he was saying ah yes this is like the elephant metaphor. And then I thought about it and I thought no no it’s the opposite of the elephant. It’s the reverse elephant. The elephant is where everyone disagrees and then you find some global harmony. But there can be cases where all you’re doing everyone’s touching a rope. So instead of everyone’s touching a rope and then a hose and then a spear and then a so on so on, everyone’s touching a rope. You call your friend, are you touching a rope? Yeah I’m touching a rope. You call your other friend, yeah I’m touching a rope. Can you then conclude that the global object is some trivial rope object? The answer is no. Is consciousness irreducible? Well consciousness is certainly complex, so I’ll give you a preview of something that I haven’t shown anyone except Matt, I think last year. This is my mind for the past five years or so. These are the different physics theories and consciousness theories and theories of information and philosophy and cosmology and so forth that I’ve I’ve gathered and you can hover over any of them and and get more information about them. It’s Einstein Cartan theory and then let’s see here if I can find process philosophy. Twin Earth externalism that’s great. Okay we can go to scale view and start to see different theories plotted differently. This is almost akin to Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness except it’s my landscape of theories of everything with a landscape of consciousness as a as a strict subset. So I can double click into any of these let’s say quantum gravity, then it splits into different theories of quantum gravity and different topics related to it. This one I’m interested in here, if you plot theories can you see where there are lacunas? So the heat maps here are theories that have been explored or areas that have been explored ad infinitum. If you are on the nihilistic end, you tend to think that consciousness is fundamental for some reason, so that’s unexpected I wouldn’t have thought that. Ah that’s super interesting. So either there’s no cosmic mind is up here or there’s universal awareness and then there’s individual only, there’s hive mind over here, causality and space time, death and immortality. Do you continue after death? Few theories actually posit this. Extremely few. This one I’m extremely interested in. So something I’ve been working out is or I’ve been wondering is I have a suspicion that for the problems that I care about, suppose you listed out all the problems in philosophy, the top 100, all the problems in physics top 100, and then you think okay is it the case that if I solve problem number 13 that I automatically solve problem number 20 and 35? Like where do I get my largest bang for my buck? And the reason this came up was that many problems like the problem of identity, the problem of free will, many of them seemed to me to be related to the Sorites paradox. So then I wondered is it the case that the paradox of the heap if solved bleeds through, trickles down, to other problems? And can you explore that visually? Can you then see what it cascades to? So it turns out that if you solve the binding problem then you solve some of these other problems which I’m still working on this interface by the way. This is one of the reasons I haven’t talked about this much is it’s so new. The rest of you can talk to me about this after. So let’s go back to the presentation. Is consciousness irreducible? There are actually three instances that I find from conducting this podcast speaking with researchers that get conflated about irreducibility. So sense one is what I call compositional irreducibility. That is consciousness is not made of non-conscious parts. It doesn’t have a substructure. In the same way that electrons have no substructure but say a proton does. Then there’s reflexive irreducibility. This one is more about that your instrument of investigation can’t account for itself, that you’re an embedded observer and so you have limitations. Then there’s a conceptual irreducibility. More about definitions. That you can’t be defined, consciousness in this case, can’t be defined in terms of something more basic. Every definition is circular. You may hear this as you start to explain what consciousness is and then your opponent says ah but what do you mean by consciousness and then they think they’re so bright because they can recite five words over and over and think they’ve they’ve won every argument. But even here in sense three there are two different types. So there’s one that the definitional chain stops here. So there’s nothing deeper to point to. So let’s say mass in physics is like this. Mass, you can try to define mass or you can define it in terms of its role that it plays in other equations like F=ma or in symmetry breaking. But then there’s an opaque sense of irreducibility that you can’t that it can’t even be defined in the sense that I’ve just said. You can’t even pin down what it does. You can’t write down what it does, at least not coherently. And of course I have to give a shout out there’s computational irreducibility. If you know, then you know. I’m not going to linger on this. Someone will just say this is all Curt a trick of language you’re you’re parsing something out. Well I don’t think so so sorry I don’t think so because you can actually move between those three senses. Let me see if I can do that. Being compositionally fundamental doesn’t make something self referentially limited. So for instance charge in physics, electric charge is fundamental, and it involves no diagonal argument whatsoever. Hitting on the other hand a reflexive limit let’s say, doesn’t make something conceptually opaque. Arithmetic for instance, a certain kind of arithmetic can’t fully characterize itself from within, whatever that means. But an external mathematician defines a natural number via the Peano axioms without any difficulty. Block may say that he can’t define phenomenal consciousness in anything else that’s non circular, and then I’ve heard panpsychists then infer consciousness must be a fundamental ingredient of reality. But there’s the hidden premise there that if you cannot define X in terms of Y then X must be ontologically independent of Y. It’s this is never stated but it’s false. This sort of ontological fundamentality requires an independent argument. Let me explore four ways that theories can fail. Number one is what I call phenomenon D. Diagonalization. So these are Gödel’s theorems, Löb’s theorems for instance, Turing’s halting problem. Self reference in general when people say because you’re intrinsic and you’re in an extrinsic world you can’t fully account for yourself there are various paradoxes of this. All of these are by the way subsumed by something called Lawvere’s fixed point theorem. I have some writings on that which I can link to at some point. But this has been ubiquitous in philosophy for the past 30 years. Yes it’s from the 1950s these theorems but just since Douglas Hofstadter it’s so 1990s to me. Gödel’s theorem, referencing Gödel’s theorem is so 1990s. It doesn’t mean he’s false or not profound it just means I’m bored with embeddedness arguments. That’s my antagonism coming out. Okay now what about the reverse elephant? This is one that mathematicians know but it’s so difficult to find anything about this in the literature of philosophy. So when does agreement itself mislead? So if you are on the ground floor, suppose you’re an ant on earth. And you you can call your friend because you’re you’re a technological ant. You call your friend you say look friend the earth is flat near me. Is the earth flat near you? They say yes. Earth is flat. Earth is flat. Earth is flat. Earth looks flat. Every local patch looks like R^2. That’s the mathematician’s way of saying it. Does that mean that the object you’re on is R^2? The answer is no in general. In fact there’s only one case where it is R^2. So generically you’re not. It’s quite subtle to visualize this. In fact there there aren’t any easy visualizations that I found. This is the only one that somehow demonstrates it to me, but I’m still working on it. Anamorphosis. So this is where you can call your friend, does your picture look coherent? They say yes, from their perspective. Does your picture look coherent? Yes, from my perspective. But it’s globally incoherent. Despite being locally coherent. And it’s so odd because you think isn’t the global merely made up of the local? Well the branch of math that studies that is called sheaf theory. And bundle theory is an example of sheaf theory if you’ve heard of fiber bundles. Cohomology are these obstructions, so we’ll get to that. Yeah obstructions. The reverse elephant. So what I’m more interested in rather than phenomenon D is phenomenon A, B, and C. Phenomenon A is when the local does extend to a unique global object, but it’s highly nontrivial. In the case of the earth it was a sphere. You think oh that’s not terribly nontrivial. It is. It has extreme consequences in math and physics. The physics on a sphere is completely different than the physics in a plane. Phenomenon B is that you’re blocked. So you can all have your own little local accounts that agree and you can even agree on your your intersections. That’s a bit tricky to say what that means non mathematically, but you can agree on your overlaps, on the domains where you also have access to the same data. Yet a global object doesn’t exist. It’s called a section in sheaf theory, a global section doesn’t exist. So when you impose a global coherence it actually constrains parts, it doesn’t just rearrange them. Now in Whiteheadian terminology as far as I understand, concrescence is demanding that all prehensions cohere. And that’s an extreme condition. Even when every pair of prehensions is mutually consistent, you still in fact you may because of that have an obstruction to extending globally. And then phenomenon C is also super interesting. It’s a cornucopia. Because there are multiple. You have a local account, in the first one there was one unique global object. In the second there was zero. In the third there are multiple. And you don don’t know which one it extends to. This has some bearing in the video that I had about how there’s a third option. Many people say that you don’t have free will because you’re either determined or you’re non determined. If you are non determined then you are random. Therefore you don’t have free will. Yes okay but as Scott Aaronson pointed out non determinism has as a strict subset randomness because randomness means governed by a probability distribution. But there may be cases in physics where there are multiple options without a probability distribution to govern what happens. Norton’s dome is like that and also general relativity. There are multiple inequivalent extensions of solutions of Einstein’s equations. The easiest way to think about this is that you have something small, something super small drastically changes everything. Over here it was just one one letter. Of course that itself is misleading because the correct way to of saying this all is with math but I’m trying to give a flavor as to what it’s like. So can you infer from agreeing locally that you agree globally? No, at least not trivially. And I keep saying this word trivially it has a precise meaning. Next can you infer from a causal account that works in the micro that it works trivially in the macro? So another standard attack from someone who doesn’t believe in free will or who believes in determinism or what have you, even if it’s quantum indeterminism, doesn’t make a difference, is to say that your choices are governed by your psychology which is governed by your neurology which is governed by your biology and your biochemistry and your chemistry to your physics. And suppose you say okay prove that to me. Well they say firstly we don’t work in proofs we work in evidence. So okay provide me the evidence. And then they look in a local case. They say well A implies B here. And then you have to switch domains. And then you say okay well B implies C here. Okay well C implies D here. Can this chain, what you’re doing is you’re stitching together local patches. Does that mean that there is a trivial global account? No. Can you infer from every formalization of a concept… so you have some concept you want to put words to it. That you say oh this concept is coherent, that can you infer that a single formalization captures it? No. And this one is it doesn’t need fancy sheaf theory to say, but if every person is rational and every pair of people agrees and they find common ground, then is this situation resolvable? I agree with you, you agree with that person, you agree blah blah blah blah. Does that mean we have some global agreement? No. Now that can be seen without sheaf theory like I said that’s Arrow’s impossibility theorem or Efron’s dice, non intransitive dice if you want to look that up. Or non transitive dice. Then I wonder is the hard problem an example of an obstruction? Okay so what is the hard problem? Many people have their own definitions of it. I’ll say that it’s if there is some physical state then there is some qualia or consciousness that’s produced or associated with it. The mathy way of writing that is if P then Q. Now a panpsychist would say that Q is intrinsic to P. A Hoffmanian may say that no no no you have Curt you have the inferential arrow backward. It’s Q implies P. A type identity theorist would just say no P implies Q and Q implies P so there’s an equivalence there. An illusionist would say yes P implies Q but it’s a diminutive Q. Let’s say Q with an asterisk. It’s not the Q you thought of. An eliminativist would just say there is no Q. They’d probably add ‘you fool’ at the end. A functionalist would say well Q is defined as some function of the P. The functional pattern. And an integrated informationist would say something maybe they’d use fancier language and say isomorphic, and they would use a different function so that’s why I put a prime here. An epiphenomenalist would say P does imply Q, but there is never a Q that implies anything else. Unless its power comes from the P of course. That it’s merely the P, there’s that word merely again. A neutral monist would say that there’s an N that implies the P and also implies the Q. A mysterian would just say close your Zoom, you’re wasting your time, don’t waste my time. So what else may be an example of an obstruction? See the hard problem is not the only example of a gap. There is this that it’s not clear if this is look if P implies Q is not logical entailment then what sort of statement is it? Can you go from an is to an ought? Is another gap. Of course there are responses to all of this but at least on the face of it these are gaps. This is something that I’ve mentioned in my video about the Feynman path integral that you can’t always look at a formula and then say well here’s the ontology that corresponds to that formula. So just as there’s an is to an ought gap there’s a formula to an is gap. I think this is related to Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I need to think more about that. There’s a gap going from syntax to semantics. It’s not clear how you bridge any of these. Of course that’s what the symbol grounding problem is and there are responses. In quantum mechanics there’s a gap between what is a quantum state versus what is measuring that quantum state. There’s also a gap between fitness, evolutionary fitness and then a warranted belief. That’s Plantinga. You can also think of Hoffman here. Then there’s predicate to extensions. So when you’re defining something with an intensional definition, does that completely determine what it refers to? And Williamson can attest this. Now in the interest of time I am going to breeze through this because this is quite a long quite a lengthy slide. So Matt oh gosh Matt Matt invited me to this and and I’m grateful. But it kills me it kills me so much to write. Every sentence I write is just complete garbage. And then I have five minutes of material and then I think there’s no way I can fill up time. And then it’s now two hours of material and I have the opposite problem. So we’re gonna breeze through this. Definitions of circularity aren’t obviously honorable charges. Okay so what I mean here is that many people will say to you as you try to talk about consciousness, hey what do you mean by consciousness? And at that point I watch Judge Judy all the time. Judge Judy would just say you are playing dumb. Like you know what’s meant. Stop playing dumb. Then you try to give an account of consciousness. So you say okay well it’s what it’s likeness. I personally don’t like the what it’s likeness. The reason is that if you then go to ask well what do you mean by what it’s likeness, then it gets to awareness or experience which is then another synonym for consciousness so rather than it being circular at just one node of depth it’s circular at two or three nodes which isn’t much of an improvement. But notice that if someone is telling you that your definition of consciousness is circular and using that against you, then they’re not it’s not that they’ve found something it’s that they’ve demonstrated that they don’t believe consciousness is fundamental. Because they want consciousness to bottom out in something that’s non conscious. And they they don’t accept your definition until it does. So it sounds like it’s an investigation but it’s more a a presupposition dressed up as a method. Solipsism may come from non unique global extensions. It may be a mistake of thinking there is a unique global extension. Now these have to do I’m gonna breeze through this but this has to do with global skepticism arguments. Most of the time when people say hey Curt do you believe in idealism? I say what is the argument for idealism? Curt do you believe in physicalism? I say what is the argument for physicalism? I don’t deal in positions and most philosophers don’t deal in positions per se they deal in arguments. So when someone is saying some global skeptic argument, you then wonder well what is your reason for that? And whatever you’re using to doubt something else, that ax that you’re using to doubt something else is something that you hold with a higher certainty than what you’re doubting. Otherwise you couldn’t use it to throw a monkey wrench at it. Averted vision. So this I think is underlying much of much of the study of consciousness and emptiness. So people will study consciousness and then they’ll say when you try to investigate consciousness you will find that it’s it loses its grip you lose your grip to it it becomes it becomes wishy-washy. Now in in astronomy there’s a concept called averted vision where there’s a star and I tell you look at that star. And you go to look at it but it’s so faint that when you look at it it actually disappears. The only way you can look at that star is actually through your peripheral vision. I think something similar is happening with consciousness. I think much of these charges of emptiness, of the self is empty and this and that is empty, is that we’re trying to make we’re trying to put a formalization to something that somehow resists the formalization, we take that resistance to formalization as the as the fact that it ontologically doesn’t exist. So you examine a phenomenon, somehow the the examination renders it unsolid, we then mistake the lack of an explicit model for the ontological illusory nature of that. A physical analogy would be that, you can look this up I don’t have videos about this but just take a photo if you like. Everything here is just is for YouTube so it doesn’t matter, we have 20, 30, 40 participants. Yes I care that you like this, you care that you like this, but in a sense none of our opinions matter. This is all just for posterity. The comment section is all that matters. This is 20 minutes long, 1 hour long, who cares, the comment section is all that matters. Everything is for the comment section. So they can pause, they can look this up. A non-Newtonian fluid is something that looks fluid and then when you hit it it becomes hard. That’s a rough statement of it. A thixotropic one is the opposite where it looks solid but as soon as you try to grab it it actually resists it it becomes liquidy. Okay now for this definitional inversion problem, the explicit definitions are trying to capture the intuitions of the implicit. And then after a time the explicit becomes worshiped and devalues the implicit as as false when interestingly the formalization was there to serve the informal. So it’s backwards. That’s the definitional inversion problem. It’s like worshiping the idol as God. Okay the merely move I’ve referenced that I’m I’m not I think merely is one of the most dangerous words. There are four ways of solving a problem. You can solve it by solving the problem. You can solve it by dissolving the problem. You can solve it by changing the subject, you can act like youre solving the problem but you’ve changed the terms. You can solve it by fiat. Examples of fiat solutions are Lewis’s, in my opinion, Lewis’s response to Putnam’s model-theoretic argument and also what counts as unphysical. I mentioned Norton’s dome before. And then some people will say that ah yes but in this third option Curt that you’re talking about where you have something that’s non deterministic but not random, that only comes about because these situations are unphysical. But then it turns out that when you examine what they precisely mean by unphysical, it’s as if they’re assuming what they want to be true. So the same happens in in general relativity where you could say that there are that GR only unphysically admits inequivalent multiple solutions. But if you restrict to where it doesn’t then it doesn’t. Yeah okay I agree. Now you may think all this is so esoteric. There are sheaves there are bundles there are cohomologies. But every physical theory, every modern physical theory, the standard model in particular and general relativity, both are gauge theories on fiber bundles where local triviality, so the equivalence principle, local gauge invariance, you use that you combine that with global nontriviality. So space time topology, instantons, anomalies, the Aharonov-Bohm effect if you’ve heard of that. And quantum contextuality is also about this. So one of the key features of quantum contextuality is in this language of sheaf theory. I mean most physicists may not know it’s called sheaf theory but mathematicians know it’s called sheaf theory. Okay I’m going to breeze through this. What is a theory of everything? You’re talking to someone who’s has a channel about it. Wikipedia has several inconsistent definitions, unification of… you can pause here and just briefly read this and you would think why are these not the same? So many people will say that the greatest philosophical text is Plato’s Republic. I think it’s Counterexamples in Topology. And the reason is that this book shows you that so much of what you think is the same, so how can you have a space that’s simply connected but not path connected or path connected but not simply connected. Sorry that’s what I meant to say. Or connected but not simply connected and so forth. You think ah these are so fundamental, just like I said before isn’t the global merely made up of just stitching together the local? How can you ever have something that agrees locally but fails globally? What does that mean? Math, at least in books to me like Counterexamples in Topology, show you it stands out to you like a like a splinter when there are inconsistent definitions and inferences being made between them. Like I mentioned before with the different senses of irreducibility. So what is a theory of everything? There are different TOE types. A framework where the standard model and gravity are not contradictory but the standard model doesn’t uniquely fall out yet. So string theory is like this, Wolfram’s is is like this. Type B TOE is one that you claim to actually already have it. So so the standard model indeed falls out. Maybe chirality, maybe generations. Maybe dark matter or energy. Geometric Unity is like this. Causal Fermion Systems, Turok and Boyle. Then you have a more than which applies to the Whiteheadians. That you’re not just unifying entities you want to know why the universe follows laws. You also want to address consciousness. Process philosophy is over here. Some religions are like that, Kant is like that. Constructor theory, Mathematical Universe of Tegmark. Then there’s a type D TOE where people ping me off they say Curt you can’t have a channel called Theories of Everything without explaining emotions. Okay so we all have different definitions of everything. Okay so they have a theory that explains all of this plus emotions plus they economics and politics and sociology. So that’s a type D TOE. They tend to be characterized by writing in Word documents and not LaTeX. They tend to also be characterized by pressing reply to all on long email chains. This is Ken Wilber and Tyler Goldstein. Tyler Goldstein doesn’t satisfy some of these and he also told me he probably classifies as type C. So I I apologize. I need to look into that. And then there’s a type E which says no no no no no we truly want to explain everything. This would be well why does the what is the absorption rate of of Kirkland paper towel versus Bounty? Why does Curt why do I like Taco Bell so much more than than most people? Like I love Taco Bell. Why does your ex continue to text you even though you blocked her? How does that work? Those are all questions. Those are all questions in reality. And who has a type T type E TOE? This is the participation trophy of TOEs. Everyone has one. Your uncle has one. So each person in each of these types despises the other types. They think my type is the one that yields the rest, mine is the true type. So they’re all unified, interestingly, by contempt. Interdisciplinary interestingly means hating on more people. Ah okay. But now what’s even worse than we don’t have a unified definition of of everything that we agree on is that the concepts that go into everything are also contested. Some concepts that we use to build, there’s something called a thick concept in philosophy. So the word coward says that you’re timid but it’s also morally it’s a moral censure. It’s saying there’s something wrong with you. Brave is the opposite, it’s also saying there’s something good about you, you’re confident plus goodness. I also think there are phenomenally thick concepts. This is just my coining of the term. I haven’t found a term about this. So understanding. When people say that LLMs understand, I don’t think they mean what I mean by understanding. To me understanding is more than just the word of you have a model and the model works and it’s internal and you can use it for predictions. Or same with character. Many people will say in Lord of the Rings the the camera was a character in the film. Is it a character? Is it just because it’s dynamic and it can move when a character you can have point of view shots that it’s a character? To me that’s that’s not what I mean by character. And that’s that also isn’t a necessary condition for a character, it’s not a sufficient one either. Information is also like this. People will say that we’re processing information. I don’t know, it’s that that’s not exactly what I mean by information. What I mean… these seem to be loaded concepts. Measurement is also like that. Agency. When people say that this robot, this thermostat, this this and that, Karl Friston may say this, Michael Levin may say this, so and so has agency. I’m thinking is that… see you can take a concept and you can denude it and make it apply to something else but something else something is lost in that. So if you sacrifice the essence of something for its harmony, then well you have that harmony harms. Oh gosh intelligence is also like that. Sorry Michael Levin. What he means by intelligence I is not I it’s not what I mean. It’s not this pragmatic definition there’s something else there. A problem with deflation is that it’s it’s twinly inflation. So what you’ve deflated can be used to inflate something else. Say a computer is sentient we say that. Why? Because I’ve defined sentience to mean it exhibits some speech patterns, let’s say that, property S. But then that means that our sentience boils down to say speech patterns or property S. And it makes us more like the machines, more of more like whatever else exhibits that property. Now we may be, we may not be. Just know that acting as if a phenomenally thick word isn’t phenomenally thick will color your perception of of yourself, potentially false. They deflate us, they make us have a wrong conception of ourselves. Potentially. Prediction is also like that. Someone will say something predicts. People will ask me to close, 5 minutes left. People will ask me do I have any advice for people who are students or researchers? Well firstly who am I to give advice I’m just a foolish podcaster who speaks to people and the people are the experts and the audience tunes in for them and not me. But if I did have advice, it would be something along the lines of what Geoffrey Hinton told me. Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Prize winner of machine learning. He said when he was an undergrad, he was asking other brain scientists who were neural scientists, how does the brain work? And they said to him, oh here’s the the the amygdala, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and then here’s a neuron and here’s a glial cell and these are neuromodulators. And then he was like, but that’s not what I mean by how the brain works. How does the brain actually work? And that is the question that drove him to his Nobel Prize. Qualia is like that. When I hear Dan Dennett describe qualia, I’m looking at that and I’m thinking there’s something that I mean by qualia that you’re not capturing. Understanding is like that like I mentioned. Meaning is like that. I talked at this conference for this it was called the O’Shaughnessy Ventures retreat and I was saying that I don’t know what meaning is but I care about meaning. But meaning isn’t null set semantics so that you have to to point out cat, you must know what non cat is. I mean that sounds intuitive but then if you were to say that so and so is meaningless, then you have to know what meaning is, you have to have a correct account of meaning. And Noam Chomsky told me he doesn’t know what meaning is, but then he said so and so is meaningless. So I said but how can you say that sir if you also believe that you must understand the negation? I think you can detect this when you can’t even answer what sort of answer would satisfy you. So if someone went to went to Chalmers and said Chalmers what is the response you’re looking for for the hard problem? Can you even tell me the template of an answer? Geoffrey Hinton, undergrad graduate Geoffrey Hinton, what are you looking for? They can’t answer it. I can’t answer it. And I think that that that’s what drives you, that I think you shouldn’t you shouldn’t let go of that. So to ask a great question maybe you need to know 80% of the answer, at least it could be the case, I I study hard for the podcast in order to get to that point. But I think to contribute a great insight it’s the opposite. I think you need to be guided by something that’s pre-articulate, that’s not explicit. That’s an intimation. And you feel it. So I’m an odd mix of a romantic and a rationalist, like an oxymoron. And it’s a lonely it’s a lonely place. The the point of this is to say be careful of extending local observations. The closest quotation I can find is Mitch Hedberg, a comedian who said I used to do drugs, I still do, but I used to too. So be careful of what you infer from the local. I mean again this is not sheaf theoretic so you have to be careful. Gosh I’m an anti-Nietzschean in that I don’t like maxims. I don’t like people who are polished. I don’t like media trained, nothing worse than media training. There’s nothing worse than than people who speak like when they speak they speak like this with their fingers like this or like this like a like a Nona because they were they were told to. To me it just it signals that you it signals polish and not thought. And I love speakers who are working out something, not not that they have not that they have something worked out. That you see them go down tendrils, that that you see them have insights as they’re speaking. That sincerity matters far more than eloquence and and suave. To me you need to be discomforted in order to to discover. And I don’t care about your diction. I don’t care about your your your power pause, your steepling technique, whatever they teach you. So I think you should be unpolished. I think you should be irresolute. I think you should linger with that presentiment, that intimation that I referred to earlier. And I also think you should stop giving this picture as if it’s a settled picture. I think the conclusion at a conference like this is usually to say we’re all touching the same parts of the elephant, like I love you, you love me. Well I do love you. But I still feel the need to see other people. I’m suggesting that maybe we’re in a reverse elephant situation. We agree on local data, we use the same words, sure. We have the same experiences even. We make models that extend this sort of agreement. But the global structure may not be anything like we anticipate and may not even be inferable. It may not even be a single elephant at all. And I think that’s more useful than prematurely extending agreement to some totalizing philosophy. And it’s also more sincere than believing we know what the elephant looks like. Thank you.

Thanks so much. Excellent. Uh, a tour de force. You’ve exemplified something of your style of thinking and approaching these questions. Um, well, to let’s extend the analogy, you’re, uh, you were an elephant in a philosophical china shop, right? Shattering things, seeking for deeper modes of truth. Okay, we have a limited time, but there are some questions that have come in for you. I want to make sure we can get to as many as we can.

Um, I know I’m rather angelic here. I’ll try to fix that. The first one, uh, if you comment for us on Alexandria’s, uh, note here, she says, ‘doesn’t the humility of a speculative philosopher require that we say, ultimately that, ultimately that we do not know for sure?’ You know, you’re being rather humble in your statements. When you say no one comes to your podcast to listen to you, I can tell you that’s false. But, uh, you know, it’s you in collaboration with others. So humility is a part of this. But maybe you can say more about that initially.

I I don’t know. When I hear a statement like that, I hear again a maxim. And and so my mind goes to the opposite. Maybe you should be extremely confident. Maybe humility is holding us back. That’s what I think. I think my own diffidence is is not something that I it’s it’s not something I I like. It’s something I want to get rid of. My whole project is a project of trying to find my own quote Weltanschauung which just end quote, which just means it’s a German word for for the framework through which you interpret the world. So I I don’t I don’t think in terms of humility or not humility. Maybe that’s an element. I I just think that I don’t know what is and I’m so disturbed by it and I’m so I’m such a coward and I I’m afraid of what could be. I think almost all my thoughts, almost all of even this is just there because I’m afraid of something else. And I’m trying to convince myself of of of something, to not terrify me. So I think that’s what’s at the root of it.

Yeah. Matt. Thank you. Matt, go on.

Thanks, Andrew. And thank you, Curt. Um, you really I think raised the, uh, discourse to a level that was making some heads explode and I was joking in the in the chat some were loving it, love your humor, others were having some difficulty following that I joked that you are the elephant. Uh, everyone had their own sense of what they were listening to. But I have a question related to that, which is, um, you know, obviously I think one of the points you’re trying to make is that, um, often times anti-reductionists will, uh, make arguments that they’ve been making since the 90s, which weren’t so bad, come on. Um, but I get your sense of being bored with, you know, the cliche the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And, uh, I appreciated how you noted that from a Whiteheadian point of view, sometimes the parts are greater than the whole. Um, or at least we could say that the whole is just different than the parts. Mathematics gives us the ability to be very precise about what we’re saying. And in the context of physics we can then go out and test with a high degree of precision whether this particular formulation works, right? In philosophy or say in, in literature, there’s a certain virtue to vagueness where, you know, yeah we can’t precisely define what we mean and yet there could be a kind of spiritual truth that’s being conveyed. Um, and here I think again of Whitehead, uh, sorry Whitehead, who said that, uh, vagueness is not just a sort of limit of our language but has ontological significance. There’s something essentially vague about our experience of the universe. Um, and so it could be that while mathematical precision affords us the clarity and distinctness to know whether a model matches up, uh, with the nature of the physical world, there’s a need to operate at a very high level of abstraction, uh, in order to engage with reality that way and we might miss things. Um, this reminds me of something Whitehead said about the philosopher Bergson, um, who Pierce spoke about earlier today. He says Bergson phrases it so that you can never be quite sure what he means. And yet Bergson still has merit, greater than clearness, namely philosophical originality. He puts things in a way which he feels and sees whether he can make them clear or not. And so Whitehead would often also say, um, ‘there is no whole truth’, so you were speaking of theories of everything. He says there is no whole truths. All truths are half truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. So, I guess the question is, do you see the virtue in vagueness or do you think ultimately, um, that leads us in the direction of cliches and we we ought to engage in say sheaf theory or some mathematical, uh, form of articulation where we can know precisely and anyone can know precisely what we’re saying?

Okay, I’ll say that firstly, I’m skeptical of when anyone speaks at a physical or mathematical level to convey something because it’s often the case that what they’re doing is decorative. They’ll take something that’s simple, let’s say that there are thorny consequences to some issue. Okay, I don’t know, family issues, blah, blah, blah, thorny consequence. Then they’ll say, that’s like a topological knot of this and that. And then you wonder, is there anything more to your analogy than merely being an instance of the more simple case which you could have said more simply. Or you’re trying to flavor it up by making it multi-syllabic. So what I think is that there there are three cases. One that your local can’t extend to a global, that it does uniquely to a non-trivial one, and then number two that your local can’t extend to a global, so zero, there are zero objects, and number three that it’s that it’s multiple. And sheaf theory is an example of that. And then I think that the way that it’s not decorative is that sheaf theory can then come back with theorems that can inform you. Okay, I’m still working all that out. I should also make it extremely clear that I’m not saying the universe is math or only the physical or anything like that. I’m saying that the tools of physics can be used to illuminate some philosophical problems because of their structural similarity and not their equivalence. It’s extremely important to not decorate something that’s ordinary in order to embellish it and just sound profound. Now about vagueness, there’s an interesting proof against vagueness. And it goes like, let’s imagine object A and another object B and you wonder is object B the same as A? Well then you say it is indeterminate if object A is object B because of the vagueness. And then by the Leibniz principle you could say that B then has a property that A doesn’t have, therefore it is not actually indeterminate, that so they are indeed different. And there’s a simple proof against that vagueness is is existing in the world. Now of course you can always say that you can find some error in the in the mapping of those words to what reality is. I I don’t I’m not convinced by it but I’m not unconvinced by it. But the model that the model that I find interesting is to think in terms of a cloud. There’s some cloudiness. Like you’re you want to watch something on Netflix. You don’t know what you want to watch. This is super interesting. You don’t know what you want to watch. Someone says, do you want to watch Batman? You’re like, no I’m not in the mood. Do you want to watch Gordon Gordon Ramsay’s new, they’re not paying me for this, Gordon Ramsay’s new documentary? Say nah. Okay, but then they pitch something else. Do you want to watch oh gosh what’s the show? Bear. It’s not on Netflix. But then you’re like, yes I’m in the mood for that and I didn’t realize that’s what I’m in the mood for. So it’s almost like there’s a cloudiness and then you wonder, is there a solid rock in the cloudiness? Is there actually something there? I just can’t see it. Or is it that as I try to reach through the clouds, I bring up a, I create a rock? Or are there multiple rocks? So that I don’t know, but I find it super interesting that we could ever say that yes, you’ve put words to what I was saying. How the heck do we know when we’ve articulated something correctly? That’s so interesting. That’s such an interesting phenomenon. We don’t know what we mean but we start to say, we say that’s not, no no that’s not what I mean. That’s not what I mean. Ah that’s what I mean. How does that how does that happen? I think that’s I think that’s so interesting. I think it’s related and I don’t know I I don’t know if there is indeed a single rock among the mist. It seems like it, it seems like that’s the hardest case to make though. It’s much easier to make the case that you just create the rock by dredging, that’s all.

You know I’m partial to the expressivist theory of the relationship between thought and language, which suggests that we have a vague sense of what we mean, but we don’t know what we actually think until we’ve expressed it in language or in art or externalized it in some sense. And so it’s a bit like, I mean an analogy would be the thought is like the germ or the seed and the expression is like the flower. Now the flower was in the seed, but it wasn’t in the seed as a flower. And so I I do think that there’s a movement in the thinking process as it moves into expression that brings definiteness to what had been vague. So how that applies to mathematics as a special case of language I think would take a lot more time than we have right now. Uh but I do appreciate your your struggle and I just appreciate the way that you struggle with your own ideas and understanding throughout the course of your presentation. Uh it makes it it makes for very generative uh tour through your imagination. So thank you for that.

Thank you for inviting me.

Absolutely. Thank you Curt. Thank you Matt for chiming in. Uh obviously we could take this to so many different directions, but that was a lot to consider, lots to chew on. If you haven’t subscribed to Curt’s channel please do so. TOE Theories of Everything on YouTube and you can follow his good work there. So keep it up Curt and we’ll uh we’ll be in touch with you.

Thank you.

Thank you Curt. I don’t think I’ve ever geeked out as hard as seeing my name on your screen um just now. And I really appreciate the approach that what you said about thinkers that think through their position in real time. That’s something that I struggle with because I that’s how I like to think and you see these YouTube videos of like ‘you know you’re a bad speaker when you talk like this’ right. Um but the way you presented the vulnerability of your presentation and your honesty feels like permission for me to present what I’m about to present because I also feel like I’m circling the drain around an idea that I’m not quite sure how to express. And so my thought has always been kind of a mosaic of like ‘oh I like this, I like that, and I like this and this’ and they’re not obviously related, but hopefully you get a general idea of what I’m trying to say here with this presentation. So thank you Curt for kind of setting the stage for that.