Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Anand Vaidya: Vedic Philosophy, Epistemology, Counterfactuals

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BPLcuHnS_AThis is a banger. Prof. Anand Vaidya of philosophy specializes in Vedic philosophy, epistemology, and we talk about God, free will, mathematics, Kripke, and even the ego as both an illusion and real.NOTE: The perspectives expressed by guests don't necessarily mirror my own. There's a versicolored arrangement of people on TOE, each harboring distinct viewpoints, as part of my endeavor to understand the perspectives that exist.- Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!)- Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE- PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt- Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs- iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast...- Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b9...- Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeveryt...- TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerchLINKS MENTIONED:- On Certification (Anand Vaidya): https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/5/article/89...- Podcast w/ Susan Schneider on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmQXp...- Podcast w/ Anand Vaidya on TOE: https://youtu.be/RNmusKn6t_U- Reality Plus (David Chalmers): https://amzn.to/473AKPw- Podcast w/ Susan Blackmore Λ Bernardo Kastrup on TOE: https://youtu.be/jrVnAWP2XEs- Podcast w/ Dave Chalmers on TOE: COMING- Raymond Smullyan's Dialogue on Free Will: https://youtu.be/P-jh6tRh3Jw- Kripke's Naming and Necessity: https://amzn.to/3SbCNMZTIMESTAMPS:- 00:00:00 Introduction- 00:02:36 Indian theories of knowledge and sentience- 00:08:00 Hedonic Tone and the mathematics of pleasure- 00:18:15 Exploration of non-dualism vs. unity with God & absence of subject-object distinction- 00:35:00 Misconceptions about non-dualism and the importance of rationality and logic- 00:46:41 Materialism in Indian philosophy- 01:56:00 Time, impermanence, and suffering- 01:15:01 Truth, falsity, and the ineffable- 01:35:19 Shankara philosophy and Dan Dennett's rebut against Mary- 01:47:00 Chomsky's vs. Kripke regarding reference and naming- 02:03:00 Metaphysically possible worlds- 02:31:10 Inflationary and deflationary approaches- 02:47:07 The Integration Challenge and the paradox of mathematical knowledge- 02:57:06 Donald Hoffman's perception theory- 03:07:04 Free will and determinism- 03:21:43 Grounding and grading of moral standing- 03:33:35 Modal logic- 03:43:02 Belief in belief

To say that something is real is to say that it doesn't change in time, that it's permanent in time. So the idea that the self is an illusion, what is meant by that claim is it's not permanent in time. Anand Vaidya is a professor at San Jose State University and focuses his research on areas where analytic philosophy meets Indian philosophy. Today we discuss several topics, one of them being modal epistemology epistemology is justified belief or the study of knowledge, and modal epistemology is the possibility and necessity of such knowledge. Sometimes people reference possible worlds in this discussion, yet Anand's research indicates that if we rely solely on Lewisian semantics for such discourse, well, it can

be limiting. In other words, what do non-Lewisian modal semantics for such discourse, well, it can be limiting. In other words, what do non-Louisian modal semantics, as seen in some Indian philosophical traditions, bring to the table? The point of Toe is not to cover people who are guaranteed views because of their large name, but rather to unearth to the public hidden gems like Michael Levin or Gregory Chaitin. That is, these titans in the academic world, but little known outside it. It reminds me of a comedian Patrice O'Neill or an early Larry David, say in the 80s, names that comics knew and respected, but not much of the public knew about. Anand is one such individual.

So many times in this conversation I was in awe with Anand's ability to cite such a variety of sources and such a disparity of concepts, weaving them together with dexterity and inventiveness. Anand is someone who will become a staple on toe. The notion of phenomenal consciousness is dominant in contemporary Western philosophy, but Indian traditions introduce us to reflexive awareness, so that is perceiving stimulus versus inward-looking understanding. We talk about this distinction and several more, including dispelling myths about Vedic

philosophy and religion. We talk about philosophy of language, we talk about consciousness, we talk about this distinction and several more, including dispelling myths about Vedic philosophy and religion. We talk about philosophy of language. We talk about consciousness. We talk about AI. We talk about free will. We talk about math. We talk about God. We talk about morality.

We talk about virtually every subject that we talk about on different episodes of the Toe Podcast, but all together in one. I don't think that's ever happened before. This is one for the books, and I'm so excited for you all to hear this or watch it. I almost forgot, if you're new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal, and this is a podcast called Theories of Everything, where we explore different toes, different theories of everything, primarily from a mathematics slash physics perspective, but as well as taking a philosophical one and attempting to understand the role consciousness has in constitutive law or emergent law. You should also know that every single book, every single article, every video, everything that's been mentioned will be in the description,

and this is standard in every single Toe podcast. We meticulously take timestamps, and we meticulously take show notes. Enjoy this podcast with Anand Vaidya. Welcome, Professor. It's an honor to speak with you again. We met about seven months ago. It's been quite a while in the making. Yep. Thank you very much for having me on. I'm really happy to be here. All right. What are you working on these days and what excites you about it?

So currently I am enjoying a sabbatical, which academics pretty much like because they get some time off to do their own research. So I've been away for six months from the U.S., traveling all over Europe, and I'll eventually be going to Hong Kong and India. And I'm working on basically two projects. The main project for my sabbatical is an investigation of classical Indian theories of knowledge, in particular perception, and how they relate to 20th century analytic philosophy debates about perception. So the book is currently titled On Certification, and it's a development and engagement with the 14th century Navya Nyaya thinker Gangesha and how his research is important for looking at contemporary debates in the 20th century between top figures in epistemology, such as Tyler Burge, John McDowell, Timothy Williamson,

Christopher Peacock, people like that. So basically the goal is to sort of show people how doing cross-cultural philosophy across Indian philosophy and analytic philosophy leads to a very engaging conversation where we get to see similar ideas discussed in a different way and different ideas brought to bear on things we thought they wouldn't be brought to bear if it just came from one frame. So that's the substantive project which I'm working on. And I've been working on those ideas for over a decade, traveling back from India to the United States every year to work with people in various parts of India and in research institutions in America as well. Then the other project I'm working on is kind of a separate interest that led to how we met each

other, actually. It was Susan Schneider at MindFest who sort of invited me to come out and talk about consciousness and Indian about consciousness and Indian philosophy and in particular Jain philosophy. But I had reached out to her to talk to her because I'd been working on this crazy idea that machines can have emotions and it's obvious how machines can have emotions. And everybody's just simply like forgotten that there was this theory that if we explored in more detail and developed, it would lead to a substantive argument for why machines can have emotions. So I've now developed that research in detail, and I'll be going to Hong Kong in November to present my research to an AI group there. And in relationship

to that, the side project is that I'm trying to give an account of why we should think of artificial intelligences, large language models, machines in general of a certain kind I can define, as having some kind of moral standing independently of the fact of discussing sentience, and I instead focus on other properties that are relevant for moral grounding. And I've been working on this view also for two years. So these are the kinds of things that actually Susan and I were talking about when we met, and then I also explained to her about the Indian philosophy stuff, and she liked that. And so I came out, and that's how we met, Kurt. So so those so those are all going on right now project on indian epistemology and analytic epistemology and sort of this deep kind of like side project that i just like a pure passion project where i just really want to get it out there about this thing about machine emotions and moral standing in artificial systems it doesn't

depend on the standard criteria of sentience. So machines can have moral standing independent of if they can feel, and if they can feel is the synonym for sentience? I think for me, sentience is not actually a very useful term. There are two fundamental terms that I think are more useful. It's the distinction between affective and phenomenal consciousness. I typically take it that when people are discussing sentience, for example, people like Peter Singer, that it's kind of the same as just the notion of affective consciousness. So yes, my view is that it's kind of interesting because I'm saying machines can have emotions, but they don't have affective consciousness in terms of feelings,

but they still have moral standing. And so when you say that, people are like, wow, that's kind of not the result I would think someone could come up, wow, that's kind of not the result I would think someone could come up with, but that's kind of what I'm working on. What's the difference between affective and phenomenal consciousness? Oh, so typically what we say is that the phenomenal consciousness has to pertain

to there being a subjective, what it's like aspect to the experience. The most common way of explaining this is through contrast. So there's something it's like to see red that's different from what it's like to see green. There's something it's like to hear F minor versus to hear G minor. So those contrasts give us this sort of like, there's something it's like. And then affective consciousness is typically argued to be when we have phenomenal consciousness plus what's known as hedonic tone. So there's some kind of pleasure or pain that is related to the actual what it's like experience. So in some sense, if you think

affective consciousness can occur, you think that almost every phenomenal state, if not all of them, has some sort of hedonic tone to it. So this is the question of separability. Can there really be what it's like to experience red without any sort of hedonic tone whatsoever? Is it possible that that could happen? So one view says, yes, this is the view that David Chalmers has argued for in his book Reality Plus. And there's other people who say, no, like some Buddhist philosophers would say, no, every sort of what it's like correlates with some amount of hedonic tone in it. And so that's the difference between the two definitions. I would have thought that it would be the opposite where Indian philosophers would say,

no, you can have phenomenal consciousness without hedonic tone because you can get to states of feeling like nothingness except maybe quote unquote being, but that's not the same as being pleasure. I don't think that's very insightful, and I think that's correct. So I think maybe I misspoke. I just meant to say that there are some Indian schools. I see. A specific Buddhist school that would, I think it's the Abhidharma school, to be more specific, that actually has written about the relationship between affective states and phenomenal states. So I might be incorrect in labeling Abhidharma or Buddhism, but in general, there are some schools, I think, that will say that there's a one-to-one relationship between that. And there are other ones that might say it is possible to be in a full-blown phenomenal state without any affective tone. I can even think of some examples and

reasons why, but you're correct. I think it's important just to stay clear with the fact that there are roughly nine, if not up to 28, identified schools of Indian philosophy philosophy so i tend to like cut try to be a little bit more than generalizing yeah now to be a bit more pedantic use the word one-to-one and so both you and i we have training in math correct i mean mathematical logic for me particularly that's my yeah uh-huh so when we say one-to-, did you mean to say that there are some schools of Eastern thinking or Indian thinking that in this hedonic tone, firstly, let's just imagine it as one-dimensional and pain is here and pleasure is here, even if that's false, just for the sake of this, that red gives you five units of pleasure. Okay. So that's one way we can have the map.

But further, if I was to say to you, you have experienced something that gave you five units of pleasure, you can then infer that it was right. Oh, no, right. That's, that's, I get what you're saying. Yeah. No, I don't mean to use the notion of a bijection between two sets. Right. So that's right. There's a surjection and there's an, yeah, that's a surjection and injection. And that would be a bijection. And that's usually, that's called one-to-one and onto, right? So you were using the injective notion. That's correct. No, actually, that's a very interesting thesis, Kurt. I never thought about the one where you would infer from the quantity of the hedonic tone that it must have been in this range of phenomenal experiences.

That's a very interesting thesis. It would be a very difficult one to make make i think it would be hard to establish and that you have to be super discerning yeah but i think the more general one is that that i'm going for is that phenomenal states have hedonic character as part of them it's never really that you're forget about if it's positive for me and with and negative for you—it's never that you're experiencing something that it's like without any bit of hedonic tone one way or another. That's the one I recall certain Buddhist schools questioning, that whether or not you could just have this pure what it's like without any hedonic tone. But as David in his book nicely gives an example of, he wants to say, just as

he created the notion of a philosophical zombie, a character that's physical duplicate of any given human being but lacks phenomenal consciousness, there are philosophical Vulcans, creatures which are physical duplicates of Vulcans in the sense of physical duplicates of humans in a certain sense, but they lack all affective states. So they have phenomenal consciousness, but no affect. So obviously, it's not really good to think of Spock this way, I would think, because of the character and the way he plays out in Star Trek or even Data.

But the idea is to create a kind of thought experiment in which we can explore the idea of some kind of hedonic neutrality in our experience, but there's still something it's like, right? I think one way you can also come to see this, if you want to see it more in terms of neuroscience or psychology, if you want to see it more in terms of neuroscience or psychology, is by thinking about the already well-known phenomenon of pain asymbolia, where a person doesn't have the ability to have rich phenomenology for pain sensation, right? In such a case, I mean, you might think, oh, I could find a way to imagine from this actual case someone for which certain phenomenal

states they have don't have any tone to them, positive or negative, because the person has pain asymbolia. I mean, there's obviously a couple of steps more that are required there, that when you have pain asymbolia, it correlates with some other inability to have hedonic tone in some way. But there's a way to sort of start to think and reason that a creature could be constructed in such a way. Uh-huh. Now, this hedonic tone, if I'm saying that correctly, the positive side is pleasure and negative side is pain.

Is it as simple as like that one-dimensional case? Or can it be that certain types of pain are more pleasurable? Can you clarify so for instance there's some people who algolignia okay okay get sexual gratification from inflicting or experiencing pain and then there's the dostoevsky and quote which says i've only in my life carried to an extreme what you haven't dared carry even halfway and what's more you found comfort in deceiving yourself and mistaking your cowardice for good sense perhaps after all there's more more life in me than in you and something along the lines of just a moment oh yeah resentment why does purification a most stinging and painful consciousness the feeling of insult will elevate and purify the soul. So I ask you, which is better, exalted sufferings or cheap happiness? So in other words,

pain to him, in some cases, in some characters, can be more pure than general positive affect. And this pureness is somehow more pleasurable yeah more worthy yeah so i was going to say that it sounded to me like um there are two ways you can analyze this sort of dostoevsky and phenomenon one of them would be to say that the value metric associated with the affect being positive or negative can pull in the opposing direction so that sufferings which have a negative hedonic tone can sometimes have a higher value and in virtue of the anticipated higher value or knowledge of the higher value the subject can have a sort of an emergent phenomenon of pleasure on top of the suffering i'll give you a really really odd example but maybe this is correct i mean i used to lift

weights a lot and sometimes when you're in the weight room and you're doing what's called a maximum press for the week, like you're trying to test what's your maximum bench press, it can be pretty painful. But there's this moment when you feel like, oh, I might actually hit 225 today. So I don't know if that's the exact, I don't know, it doesn't seem like what Dostoevsky would be talking.

No, that was a long time ago, thanks. But yeah, I think there is something related to that. And in the opposite direction, I think that the sort of like low, the fleetingness of the spike in the high hedonic tone of pleasure can be fleeting in a way where the value – same value metric would say it's not – and we should make this clear. Although we started with me talking about some stuff about Buddhism, I mean, Jeremy Bentham had a rich theory of pain and pleasure in relationship to value in his utilitarian calculus, which Mill eventually developed in more detail.

But the other thing I would say that's really interesting here is there was a period of time where one of the big debates was concerned about two theses. One thesis was known as the distinction between higher and lower pleasures. So that there were certain kinds of pleasures, such as reading Dostoevsky over drinking 50 beers, which just intrinsically, in virtue of what it is, was just a higher pleasure. And there was no way to say, if you drank 100,000 beers, that would be the same as reading Crime and Punishment. way to make sense of that sort of the fact that they seem to be both pleasures but there is no quantitative basis in which one can equal the other in any way that became a complicated question and utilitarianism then the other one was related to the scale you mentioned it was about the fact

so not the fact the question of whether or not the scale is one-dimensional with going increasing in one direction and decreasing or whether or not there are two different things. So at one period in time, there was a notion of a hedon and a dolor. So a dolor was a unit of negative, like pain, and a hedon was a positive thing, and they didn't have to be on the same scale. like pain and a heat on was a positive thing and they didn't have to be on the same scale then the other view was kind of like the way in which we say there really isn't cold it's just the absence of heat right there really isn't pain there's just the absence of pleasure right or there isn't really pleasure there's just the absence of a certain degree of pain right so this So this understanding of light and darkness, hot and cold, and also pain and pleasure at one period in time was something that was discussed within utilitarian philosophy in terms of its ethical theory and how calculations were supposed to be done. I haven't kept up personally with this literature for a long time, but some of the questions you're asking are interestingly exploring that important area of these theories. You mentioned up and down, or hot and cold, or good and bad, pleasurable and pain, and

there are some schools, well, some major schools of Indian thought that suggest that that's some illusion. So can you please explore that and the quote that I gave you via email of David Loy, who delineated different types of non-dualism. And I know you said you weren't able to get the source of that. Neither was I. I don't know where I copied that down from. However, some commenters suggested that no, multiple of these are the same. Like if you do not have that distinction between subject and object, then that is the same as unity with God. It's probably useful for me to delineate what I meant.

I had written down these notes on non-dualism from what David Loy had suggested, that there are five different attributes of them. So, number one, monism, that all separate objects are indeed of one vellum. Number two, advaita, the subject and object are the same. Number three, non-negation, or non-negation. That is, one isn't supposed to think in terms of good, bad, up, down, or any pair of opposites, but rather that they're supposed to quote-unquote transcend the pair. Number four is advaya. That is, that there's no difference between the relative and absolute truths as defined in Zen and other Buddhist-inspired traditions. And number five, mysticism. In other words, unity with God. Often we think of non-dualism as being the same,

but there are different sects that do not see overlap and in fact will accept two or even one and reject the others. Anand Vaidya also talks more about this in his solo talk on theories of everything which is linked in the description on going beyond non-dualism in the Indian tradition. Something to note is that the Zoom call of Anand was out of sync with mine, and so there were quite a few overlaps where I wasn't sure if he was done speaking, so I interjected and he did the same for me, and it sounds like we're interrupting one another, but that's merely due to that pesky technology called the internet. Okay, okay, so it might be useful because that information isn't available to everyone right this moment.

I just draw a distinction at the outset that can help clarify some of the issues in the taxonomy that he offered. So the distinction I would say is helpful in the beginning to start thinking about duality. duality is duality due to language or conceptualization in the human mind and duality that is in nature right so i so the reason why i think like this is because so the reason why i think this is useful is because it is part of the argumentation of even some of these ind Indian traditions as well as Western traditions to think that what's going on is that the mind is operating by creating dualities and that it's imposing those dualities on things which may or may not be dualistic in themselves. So we can think about a transparency thesis and an opacity thesis. And I'm using these terms generically, not in terms of how they're defined in the philosophy of language. that there are goods and bads in nature itself. And an opacity thesis would say something like,

the fact that we conceptualize something in terms of hot and cold doesn't mean that in nature there's both hot and cold. Because as we already know, it's just the absence of kinetic energy in one direction. And then we can complexify things by saying the global version is that it's all like the hot-cold case. It's all opaque.

We're doing this all. And then we can have the moderate case, which says, no, actually, sometimes when we are using dualities, there's a duality in nature. It's not just a function of our language and then there's the further one which probably is the least plausible of all of them is that all the dualities that we create are real to some degree it's just a matter of figuring out what is the level of reality so that one depends on a levels-based theory of reality as well as the

fact that we can't really be getting things wrong when we create dualities. Our mind doesn't impute things in such a horrible way that it distorts things. There must be something out there that it's capturing, even if we're misdescribing the duality. So for example, it could say in the hot and cold case, what's going on is that we thought that there was two underlying phenomena, but we found that there was one underlying phenomenon, but then our distinction just is mapping different gradients on that one line, but it's still mapping something.

It's just not mapping the fundamentally, so we were mistaken. So those are the three different ways I would say you can think about this general distinction about the language, sort of dualism caused by language or concept use. And then let's go to the other side now, dualism in nature. So someone like Descartes, who's classically identified as a dualist, I'd be hard-pressed to think that anything he said has to do with the fact that he, you know, spoke multiple languages and read in those languages he's not making a linguistic thesis he's making a claim

about the fundamental nature of reality in terms of the essential properties and arguments that are telling us that what is going on in one case is that you have a substance that's identified by the essential property of rage cause you to us thinking and another one that's identified by the essential property of rage, causitas, thinking, and another one that's identified by the fundamental property of extension, which is then given also the idea that it can be infinitely divisible. And those divisions are something that pertain to it, but doesn't pertain to thought. And so he's not telling us something about language as much. I mean, I'm sure there's some critics who think that there's a linguistic background to the way in which he comes to it, but I don't think his thesis is about language as much as it is about the way the world is. Now, if we take this into opposition with some Buddhist schools, they would pretty much be saying, oh, these things are basically,

we're creating dualisms based on our language, basically. What comes out as fundamental in nature is not dualistic in this way. We are imputing the dualisms through the fact that we make concepts, and concepts are, in a way, creating boundaries between things that don't exist, right? So there's a way of articulating this. They're not the only ones that say this, and not all of them say it the same way. We have to be careful here. But it is an idea that I think is useful in relationship to whatever Loy is picking out. Because what we're trying to say here is that there's kind of a thesis that has to do with language, and then there's a thesis that has to do with what language is ostensibly about, usually, which is something external to it. Language isn't self-referential. Although we can talk about words in a meta-language when we talk about,

for example, is running is a predicate, that's not the same kind of thing that's going on when we're talking about dualism in the world. So we sometimes say in philosophy that there's the metaphysics of reality in which some people occupy a dualist position, such as Descartes and the Sankhya school of Indian philosophy. And then there are other people who would say, but then there's also another type of thing where people are talking about duality created by language. And they're really just talking about how language works and the way in which it divides. I think actually, although I'm not an expert or even that knowledgeable about it, divides. I think actually, although I'm not an expert or even that knowledgeable about it, I think various people in continental philosophy have explored the version of using duality in the

structures of language. People like Derrida and others have used this to explain and understand how language works and what we're doing with language. So I think it's available in multiple schools. If one was to say that all the dualities that we perceive are created by us, and it's not intrinsic in nature, but then at the same time believe that nature is mind, so that we're one with nature, then how can those two be made consistent? Because if you're saying, look, it's just made up in my mind, it's not reflective of reality, but then at the same time say reality is mind, so then in some sense the dualities are inherent in nature. So how does one make sense of that? Or can they not with language? Okay, okay. So maybe we sidebar the ineffability thesis for a moment, because I think you're

gesturing at that, and it's very important to talk about. But I first want to get into the first part about the tension claim, that there's something in tension. Yeah, so let me try and run the argument this way. Mind and nature are one and the same. Mind creates

conceptual dualities, but because mind and nature are one and the same, those conceptual dualities exist in nature. Correct. Yeah, nice. I like that argument. That's actually cool.

Yeah. So, when we say, and this goes back to answering actually part of your other beginning question about these schools and Indian philosophies. I'll answer that about God and unity now. I'll try and bring that back in. So, when someone says premise one, for example, that mind and nature are one and the same, at least one way in which it's articulated in the Advaita Vedanta school is to talk about the difference between the true self, the Atman, and the felt embodied feeling of a self that occupies us when we reflect on it. So I feel like I'm the agent of my choices.

I feel like my body is separate from your body. I feel like my body is separate from the things I'm sitting on and looking at in my environment. I feel like an agent, right? Those are things that are part of the felt sense of self, or what we can say, yeah, the felt sense of self and things we attributed to it. And then what Advaitins will say, like Shankara,

is that there's also an Atman, the true self. And so when we're saying thesis one, premise one, the mind is part of nature, what is being asserted there is that the true self is identical with the one and only thing that exists which is brahman and that is the thesis of how he would understand mind is identical to nature and we say number two mind creates conceptualizations we've now moved from the true self to the embodied true self with a felt sense of self acting, sorry, as an actor in the empirical world, in the world in

which there are presented to us other things of diversity, right? It's that one that is making those things. So then when we draw the conclusion, we have here the fallacy of equivocation between the true self and the felt sense of self. And the only way to avoid the equivocation is to say that the true sense of self plays some role in that felt sense of self doing what it does. And I think in there, in that move right there, there's a lot of interesting things to be explored. And there someone could push the claim that actually, yeah, they're still part of nature in some way. So what's going on here in terms of these issues about God, because it's part of what you asked, I want to address that clearly,

these issues about God, because it's part of what you asked, I want to address that clearly, is that there isn't really an automatic need to say that if the true self is identical with the universe or the one true thing, it's in union with God, because there is a theistic and an atheistic interpretation of the identity claim. So, actually, I wrote a paper on this recently for a book coming out. So, the thesis is Atman is Brahman, which is defended by, sorry, is interpreted by two different thinkers in the Vedantic tradition. One is Shankara of the Advaita Vedanta school, and another is Ramanuja of the Vishistha Advaita Vedanta school, a later school that criticized the earlier school. So the earlier school is called non-dualism, Advaita, literally non-dual,

and the other one is called Vishishta Advaita, which means qualified non-dualism, or I have a different way of interpreting it, but the main thing is it's not the non-dualism of Shankara. Sorry, before you continue, when you say qualified non-dualism, do you mean to say it's not as non-dual as the common way in which if you looked it up or talked to most scholars of religion, they would explain to you what the word vishishta advaita means in English. However, in my work and in my papers, I have avoided using that term precisely for actually the reason you asked. I don't think that that's going to help people by saying, oh, it's like a lesser degree of it. No. There's another way, which is called, which has to do with the internal braiding

of the relationship between the one and its parts. This is actually the one that's closer to the idea I like. And it's tied to a notion that Ramanuja discusses, which is called apratak siddhi. So this is a very important metaphysical notion

in uh ramanuja's work but before we get too far let me just finish yeah the first kind of part i think that that is useful here is that within the tradition there are ways of understanding who is going to be or what is going to be god so brahman is God, and Brahman is the only real thing because it's permanent in time and unchanging in Shankara's system. And when you discover that your true self is one in the same with this thing, that's the claim of the non-duality. The non-duality is that what you are and what this is is one and the same thing. Now, that would automatically imply something about a union with God or a non-separation from God or a true identicalness

with God if it is the case that you had a specific interpretation of Brahman as a certain kind of thing that is God. This is the issue here that's technical in the literature, is that some people want to have a very robust kind of personalized sense of God, like a God as a person or a thing of that kind. And in Shankara's system, that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to be like Brahman is this vast field of fundamental consciousness, and it doesn't have any person-like qualities to it. Its only essential property is that it's anand, it's bliss. That's basically what it is. And so Ramanuja doesn't like this idea, and so he has more of a personalized conception of God,

where Brahman is kind of like the supreme person in a way and so there's that thing so that's why i said to you when you asked me this question i said i would not say that you are forbidden from distinguishing between the union thesis and the theistic thesis so i think you can say a is b atman is Brahman, but what that means is not a union with God. And you can say the other one, Atman is Brahman, and what that must mean is a union with God. And basically, so some people might want to argue specifically about then who are using the terms Brahman, or what schools are they coming from, and what do we mean? But in general, I think just the thesis of identity shouldn't apply something

about god because i think someone who for example has a certain atheistic sort of view of the universe might still think that what we fundamentally are is part of the one and only thing that is the universe right i see that's right and there's a lot of ways to work out that secondary thesis uh so it shouldn't be off the table for an atheist to take it. So that takes care of that sort of question about whether or not we should see union theses as always ones relating us to God. Now, it turns out that in a lot of cases, this will be true, that something like this is being argued for. But I don't think it's required. Mm-hmm. When we met, you mentioned that there was an Indian prime minister who said, we're going to make non-dualism the pizza of India. So can you talk about that and also talk

about some of the misconceptions that many people in the West have about non-dualism? Okay, I remember this conversation because I was recently just having dinner with my uncle. I was having dinner with my uncle in London, and he was asking me to teach him some stuff about Indian philosophy, and I actually explained to him this very same thing, because it's a very good thing to understand. So for lack of a better analogy, I'll say it the same way I said it to you, basically, and I hope your audience finds it humorous, but I think it would be really bad if we walked around

thinking the greatest contribution of Italian cuisine to the world was pizza and pasta, because there's so many wonderful things in Italian food that just don't have to world was pizza and pasta. There's so many wonderful things in Italian food that just don't have to do with pizza and pasta. For example, I was watching a show yesterday about Umbrian lentils and how interesting it is and what you can do with Umbrian lentils and making Italian salads. I found it totally fascinating and super interesting to think about making for myself. So it's the same thing. Radhakrishnan, the first sort of major figure of philosophy to step into the global space, he was the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions at Oxford in the early part of the century,

at one point kind of made a decision that he kind of needed to like explain sort of what's the big contribution that Indian philosophers are making to the world and he tended to have an advice and idea about it he was kind of like well this is the one thing we've got this non-dualism it's in this one school

and he kind of presented it's not like he didn't know about the other schools for example let me just make that clear. He very much was one of the main people who put together an actual book, a source book in Indian philosophy with Charles Moore

that contained all these texts and everything. So he was vastly knowledgeable, highly skilled rhetorician, an outstanding scholar, but he made some choices about what to present, and he decided that this was one of the things that he, first of all, specific. So Advaita Vedanta has become synonymous with Vedic thinking in a lot of the places outside of in India and even in India. That's all that people know. That's completely wrong. There are several schools of Vedanta. The one I work on is actually the one from Ramanuja, which is called Vishistha Advaita

Vedanta. There's Abheda Beda, there's Dvaita, there's Madhva, there's a whole, I mean, it just goes on. It literally just goes, there's like a lot of these little sub-schools, and they have very different views about what's going on in the Vedic tradition. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is that Advaita Vedanta became kind of a lens where people would then look at the philosophy of the yoga school and try to interpret it through a Vedic lens when its actual roots were in the Sankhya tradition. It's a sister school of the Sankhya tradition, and so Sankhya and Vedanta are not the same in a lot of ways. Even many of the schools of Vedanta are different than Sankhya. But there was a tendency to try and like

interpret even Sankhya in relationship to yoga through Vedic eyes. And so this became this large enterprise. And one of the things that came along with this was kind of this idea that razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars rover. Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible.

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slash everything and use the code everything. This school is highly spiritual. And so this is like the vast depth of the spirituality of the Indian tradition coming forward. And there was little attention paid to the fact that Indian philosophers had other attributes as well that were also interesting and good. And what did some of those things have to do with? Well, one of the things that they had to do with was rationality and logic. That, for example, is very important. The other thing that it had to do with was theories

of knowing. The other thing it had to do with was realism about the world as opposed to idealism about the world. So I predominantly work on what's known as the Nyaya school, which is a realist school, and it's an opponent of various forms of Buddhism. And I work on Ramanuja because he's a realist, actually, unlike Shankara, who's either an illusionist or a relative realist. So I tend to think that the Indian schools that were engaged in realism had something to offer as well. And they have interesting ideas and debates with these schools that are more idealistic, and they offer contributions that are less well-known. And sometimes, so it's like the thing, like, oh, we're going to go get pizza,

because we're going to an Italian restaurant. We're going to go study some Indian philosophy. We're going to learn some Vedanta. That's basically kind of what I told. And I want to make it clear, I don't know enough about the political situation of the time period in which Radhakrishnan was coming. I know he's an extremely erudite scholar, and I don't blame him in any way for what he did. There might have been political

issues going on with the birth of India that made him think, hey, this is something that's important because I can put the spirituality of Advaita in. So he wrote this book where he talked about how spirituality is consistent with science. He actually has the title of the book, Science and Spirituality. And so he was concerned with wanting to, you know, make things, you know, better. But the person who replaced him at Oxford, Bimalam Kishnamatilal, was a Nyayaka. And so he, for the next longest time, basically expounded on the Nyaya school and the relevance of it to debates and contemporary epistemology and logic. He studied with V.W.O. Quine at Harvard University and was a contemporary of P.F. Strawson at Oxford. He wrote perhaps my favorite book in Indian philosophy, Perception, an essay on classical Indian ways of knowing,

which is a phenomenal work that engages a lot of analytic philosophy of the time period as well as Indian philosophy and is also the inspiration for my continued efforts to follow by developing theories of perception in Indian philosophy along with analytic philosophy now. So that's a little bit of like the storyline that I think is common among scholars to know that there was this change of sort of things. And now there's become like a reemergence almost of interest in Advaita Vedanta because of the contemporary debates on theories of consciousness.

So in that field, what has happened is, as you saw when I came to MindFest at Susan's conference, airfield what has happened is, as you saw when I came to MindFest at Susan's conference, there is a growing interest in the fact that some of the most contemporary moves being made in debates about consciousness, such as the panpsychist versions of theories promoted by lots of people nowadays, have strong resonances with very important trends in Indian philosophy. And so there's a lot of work being done now to understand how that conversation can unfold as well. Boy, you said like a litany. That's just fascinating. Thanks.

There's quite a few threads. So one of them is, there are some people who watch videos like this, and they're in the West, and they feel like they know plenty about the East or Buddhist traditions or Vedic traditions because they've watched Alan Watts or maybe read a couple books and done psychedelics, and they have this insight that's fairly prevalent in these circles that rationality and logic are the opposite of what you need in order to get some handle on the truth or reality. And you just mentioned that rationality and logic is something that wasn't advertised as coming from the East as more the non-dualistic vita vidanta

that was. So can you please expound on that? And then also, there may be a couple terms that come up that when they do... Just to clarify, you want me to expound on what the relationship is between the development of rationality and logic in India and its relationship to these other non-dualistic ideas?

Yeah, the fact that you can understand, not just with irrationality and experience, but something analytic, something logical. When I say understand, I mean get to know oneself or get to know reality or get to know God or religion or spirituality. Because it's generally seen as two approaches. One is more experiential and one is's more analytic and the west is seen as more analytic and the east is seen more experiential i'm painting broad strokes i'm just saying yeah i'm sure you see this as well yes okay and while you're explaining this some terms may come up like illusionist or idealist or realist or relative realist when they come up naturally, explain them, please. Okay, sure. Thank you. That's a very good question. And I think it's something that I think my experience in writing and in research can sort of shed some light on in an insightful way. So one of the things I think that is a nice place to start is by looking at a common interpretation and presentation of Buddhism in the West.

It's also found in India, but where a lot of what is the standard sort of thing to talk about there is mindfulness meditation. It is taken to be something that has spent, sort of undergone a lot of neuroscientific investigation. I even know some of the people who work on that stuff it's also something that has attracted a wide audience various

different types of people and there's something about mindfulness meditation that's healing it clearly has this property for lots of people and there's a tendency to want to be industry in this component of Buddhism not negatively in the sense of like, I'm just going to put everything else away, but just, you know, that's the thing, that's the pizza for Buddhism, basically. One of the things that I have found in my research, and I actually wrote a fairly large piece on this, actually, because I've spent so much time thinking about it, was that it is not historically accurate at all to think that Buddhists were involved in the development of logical ideas or that they themselves did not engage in some of the most vehement arguments with their opponents. So Dharmakirti is considered to be, Dignanga and Dharmakirti are considered to be two of the most important Buddhist philosophers after Nagarjuna and the Buddha himself, obviously. And they spent a lot of time thinking about the rules for proper reasoning and about ways

of knowing about the world. the rules for proper reasoning and about ways of knowing about the world. Their work is not so much presented in the discussion and conversation about meditation and how to live one's life as you might find, for example, with people who talk about Shantideva. So, Pema Chodron has a nice book about Shantideva, and I think a lot of people go to these kinds of works or they go to the works that are talking about what to do with the stuff that arises in consciousness in terms of living a life and being compassionate. And I want to make it clear to your audience, in no way am I disparaging that. I have spent time myself meditating. I used to go to a Buddhist center like two times a week. I've done Vipassana in India and everything.

He's on LSD right now. So, but the thing I want to say is that it is just factually incorrect that they weren't engaged and thought logical reasoning was very important. The evidence is just too much. you just to one 780-page book by Daniel Perdue, which is a study of reasoning methods within the Buddhist tradition, within the Madhyamaka and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. It's an extremely powerful book. It might not be accurate about everything that they came up with, but it definitely shows the rigorous, the analyticity, so the analytical nature of their minds. And I think it's very clear that actually learning to argue and learning to understand your own emotions through meditation and emotion regulation

are two things that Buddhists care about. I think that the thing that pushing the one line is an incorrect thing. But that doesn't mean that, for example, you can't be like, well, the thing I'm coming here for is to get some peace and comfort. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I just think that, like, yeah. So I think that's one place where you're going to find this sort of incorrect representation of, like, you know, how rationality is present in the one thing. Like, people will be like, oh, but the Buddhists had it all right, because it's like, all the conceptualization and everything in our mind and all that analytic stuff

is really bad. Well, sure, there is that storyline, but I mean, there is also this other stuff where like they're sitting there arguing with other schools, trying to figure out what is the best way to make a logical argument. There's a debate between the Jains and the Buddhists about what is a proper way to understand valid inference. It's a very intricate debate. It's very wonderful. So it's just not – so that's number one, I would say. Number two that's directly sort of like the showstopper oftentimes is this idea that idealism is prevalent or more prevalent in Indian philosophy

and materialism or reductionism is not. And that is just factually incorrect. Okay, that's interesting. The Charvaka School is a very prominent school of Indian philosophy that's in conversation with various Hindu schools, of the six of them roughly that there are, the Jain School and the Buddhist School, and they're around for quite some time. I don't have the exact records correct, but I have a friend, Ethan Mills, who worked on Charvaka, and he probably can inform us about the exact correlation of when they were around and they debated people. And they totally have a hardcore materialist theory of the mind in the sense of, I mean, I don't want to use illusionism,

which I'm going to talk about soon, to describe them, but maybe there's a version of the kind of illusionism that you find in contemporary philosophy floating around. Rather, what I think they have is this sort of tuning thesis that it's just because you sort of get the neurons and the chemical things in the right way to mix in the same way that you get the thing up here, right? to mix in the same way that you get you get the thing up here right it's just it's like purely determined by that thing and i think the example

they give is making beer i think that's the one that like when you put the right ingredients in the right order the beer just comes that just is that it's just like an emergent property but it's just coming right out of that thing i think that's kind kind of what that, so I'll tell you, Gennardin Gennari has an excellent paper about emergentism in ancient Greek philosophy and in the, um, Charvaka school in Brasapati. I teach this paper all the time. It's a wonderful read. It's so interesting to see how he portrays the sort of importance of this school. And then you can see, wow, it's, I will never ever again say that there is no kind of like strong

materialism or something in that school. So that's number two. And then the third one, I think I already mentioned, is the fact that there are various schools. So there are two schools of Mimamsa, the Prabhakara and the Bhatta. And then there's another realist school, which is called the Nyaya. And then there's the vaisheshika also. So of those schools, some of them, the nyaya at least, and the prabhakara mimamsa, are realist in some sense, more than being idealist.

So what do we mean by realism here in the context of classical Indian philosophy? I think that perhaps the easiest notion to go with is the idea that there are objects in the world independently of our mind, and that our minds come into contact with them. And most importantly, at least in my understanding of it, is that those things we come into contact with constrain the way in which we can think. The things out there are constraining in some ways the way in which we can think. The things out there are constraining, in some ways, the way we think. The idea that we have a complete free play of imagination and a capacity to impute whatever is of the fancy of our mind onto anything is more of a kind of idealist sort of move.

And it's one that is resisted strongly by the Nyaya school. That is not their sort of way of thinking about things, and so they have a lot of interesting ideas in that area. So let's bring in illusionism now. So illusionism, at least in contemporary analytic philosophy, is kind of defended and articulated by Keith Frankish. And it's kind of the idea that the phenomenal properties in my experience are illusory. And the claim is, or at least what we need to understand is, in what sense is the what-it's-like aspect,

the phenomenal properties of seeing red, for example, an illusion? So in what sense is that an illusion? So that's kind of like the illusionist thesis in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. Illusionism in Indian philosophy can be understood differently, and it has to do with a different idea. It has to do with a different idea it has to do with time okay okay so things that are said to be illusory oftentimes are said to be those things which are not permanent in time right this is extremely true so so we have this like i wrote this book review of um david chalmers book reality plus where he defends the idea that digital things are not illusions.

They're real also. But I brought it into conversation with Shankara because I thought that Shankara's definition of what is real was one of the definitions of real that David's book didn't really address. He was addressing more common sense notions that are found both in Indian philosophy and in Western philosophy, such as that to be real is to be a difference maker, to have causal power, right? That's like a common notion of what we mean. If you have causal power, you're real in some sense, right? You can cause things, right? Yeah, but in Shankara's system, and also in other ones, to say that something is real is to say that it doesn't change in time, that it's permanent in time. So the idea is, for example, in Buddhist philosophy, that the self is an illusion because what is meant by that claim, at least one of the main claims is meant by it, is it's not permanent in time. This is super interesting like everything you're saying geez louise there's been like 10 over the course of the last 10 more than that over the course of the just this one answer right so you want to elaborate on this one yeah so but just a moment it sounds like there's so

many mistranslations happening it's as if even, even with the word God, so when we say unity with God, the Christian may say, oh, okay, so they're talking about my God. But it's not as if those two concepts are they even know about one another. And then when they say, yeah, the world is pens. The world is just made up of pens. And you're like,

okay, well, it's made up of this, but then they mean quills. And that's a poor example, but you get the idea. Real is impermanent. So this cup is not real because maybe it'll melt one day but it's real in another sense it's real we're holding it and then another sense science may use the word real as fundamental but then there are also notions so that's where i was going to go right now i'm glad you brought that up that's precisely the relevant difference. So what is going on, if you want to see a very nice contrast, is it has explanatory power, right? Those are two things about saying, and so in a lot of parts of contemporary analytic philosophy, to say that something is real, it's like you're kind of banking on saying it's fundamental, has explanatory power, and it's not

reducible to something else. So when someone says that your phenomenal properties are an illusion, at least part of what they're saying is that they're not fundamental and they don't really have that much explanatory power, given a certain range of things that we want to say and explain. But in Shankara's system, that is not relevant, right? To be fundamental is one thing, but to be permanent in time is the important property of being fundamental. So Brahman is real, it is also fundamental, but what's marking its fundamentality is that it's permanent in time and not changing at a certain level of explanation.

That's the thing. So you're right, there is a kind of difference that has to do with this thing about fundamentality and um temporality that's kind of the contrast between those two notions now i know these are from different areas what i'm about to say but did this notion of impermanence have any relation did it lead them to come up with some notion of platonism oh so plato would say like look so mathematical statements are timeless there's a notion of timelessness and impermanence sounds like timelessness so would the and i've forgotten

the person's name narujana not arjuna yeah yeah i can't okay right so let's let's get the idea no no i i think i i see i see a connection. So, yeah, so let's get to the Plato thing in a minute after we just clarify a couple of things about this little area of, yeah, I think it'll be useful to do this distinction. Please. think it'll be useful to do this distinction please so the hindus and the buddhists when they are debating the nature of the self and one of them is saying it's permanent in time and the other one is saying it's impermanent there are actually logically two different interpretations that you can take of the notion of impermanence. So, number one, something is impermanent when it is momentary. Something is impermanent when it's semi-permanent. Semi-permanent means there's a time in which the thing comes into existence,

and there's a time in which it goes out of existence. So cups and you and I are semi-permanent things. Before we get too philosophical under this sort of everyday definition. So momentary has two definitions also. Something is momentary if it has no duration in time, or its duration in time is fleeting. It's so small that it's not worth discussing. But at least in Buddhist philosophy,

there are two different notions of this. So now you can see what's going on. Many Hindu schools of philosophy are saying that the self is permanent in time. And then many Buddhist philosophers are saying, well, given that we're constructed out of these five things the skandhas, and each of these things change

it's got to be the case that the thing you're talking about is changing and therefore it can't be permanent so it's impermanent, and then they can go down the road of saying it's momentary it has no duration in time, but it has a causal succession in a series between each individual moment, like a line of things. Or each duration has

a fleeting millisecond. It's like they actually try to figure themselves out mind moments, actually. What is the actual thing? But there's two different ways. It has no duration or it has some very small duration. And then the other thing I'm introducing is that there's just another way of thinking about temporality, where you talk about things being semi-permanent. But this

notion of being semi-permanent doesn't really show up in the debate. So the Hindus and the Buddhists are mostly debating this issue about two definitions of momentariness and a definition of permanence. Okay, so that cleans up now the temporality aspects of that debate. Now, there's this issue you brought up about mathematics and Plato, where you were trying to talk about the fact that in Plato's system, there are some things that are out of time, okay? Right, so someone might say in a platonic theory of mathematics, Right? So someone might say in a platonic theory of mathematics, mathematical objects are timeless. And again, we have to make two different distinctions here.

There is one is being out of time and being for all time. Yes. Eternal. Right. Okay, right. So there some causal relationship to us. So because of this kind of causal inertness of a certain kind that we said. So we always distinguish between eternality and timelessness. Now, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of looking at Indian philosophy, it is oftentimes hard to find a place where there are deep discussions about the philosophical nature of mathematical truths. So that part of the question, I have actually asked one of my

friends who was a philosopher of mathematics who was interested in Buddhism kind of like 10 years ago. I was like, hey, I've always been curious, what do you think the philosophy of mathematics is in Buddhism? And he was like, I don't really know. I'm not saying there isn't any. I know in the Nyaya school there is actually some philosophy of mathematics, but I'm not sure that it relates to time. However, the other aspect of it is correct.

The timelessness component does come up. If my recollection serves me correctly, I think actually that Brahman in Shankara's system is outside of time, because it's the ground of time. Right, so it's outside of time. So it would be something like the timelessness of mathematical objects. That would be the connection or the relationship but

again it's not the same thing because at the same time although there's this timelessness that's there there's this issue about the fact that you know um what is the kind of thing that they are saying is timeless is the thing that's so yeah it's hard i almost feel like i've got myself in contradiction because because it's permanent in time which is what makes, yeah, it's hard. I almost feel like I've caught myself in a contradiction because it's permanent in time, which is what makes it real, but it's timeless because it's the ground of time. But again, it's one of those things where I would just say, yeah, there are complicated aspects to the theory. I wouldn't be surprised if actually this is already something that's well-known in the

literature on this topic. Go. When you were speaking, and it's difficult to not get tripped up because of the words we're using and earlier we had talked about rationality and logic that they do have a place in indian philosophy and buddhist philosophy what about conceptuality and language as well because those are also seen tied in with rationality and logic as being repudiated in the east the conception in the west is that they're repudiated in the East. Yeah, so right.

So again, this is— A misconception. No, no, no, no. I won't—we'll let that part go for now, and I'll just say about the positive thing that you're actually touching into. There is a rich history in Indian philosophy of debating the same topics that we talk about in Western philosophy that come under the heading of philosophy of language. How does language work? how do we understand sentences what are the ways in which we have primary meanings and secondary meanings what's the difference between connotation and denotation

how is it that we understand each other when we're speaking to one another what's the ways in which our minds are able to grasp the meaning of a sentence? What is the role of semantic intuition in understanding? All of these topics are very prominent. And also because Sanskrit grammar itself is such an interesting, powerful thing, there are all these pundits like Panini and Bharatarari in the 5th century who have all these interesting things to say about syntax and semantics and pragmatics. So almost all of the major things that we want to talk about or have been talked about and debated in Western analytic philosophy concerning philosophy of language, they find correlates of discussions, and maybe some of

them are cashed out in different ways. So this answers the part that says, is there a presence of discussion of the way language works in relationship to reality to be found deeply in Indian philosophy? Absolutely. Almost every school is heavily invested in giving some account of how language works. Now, you might, as you did, ask, well, what does that have to do with this other thing about whether or not overcoming how language controls the way we understand reality leads to some kind of liberation. And you are absolutely correct. These things are going to be related.

They are. And I'm going to give you a wider explanation of why they're related. In Indian philosophy, across the board, there is a general tendency to give a theory of something because it pertains to this other big question. How do I get out of suffering? Okay, so like what's the going question back in the history when all this stuff gets off the ground? Well, the question is life sucks.

How do I get out of the suffering? Okay. suffering okay so if i'm giving a theory of knowledge or a theory of language those things will be expected to be tied at some level in my school or in my debates with people to these questions about liberation right so something in the buddha's thinking is telling him that if we recognize the impermanence of the self, we can release ourselves from a kind of suffering. If in the Jain system we can understand the many-sidedness of things, we can come to see the nature of reality and truth in a way that maybe can ease our suffering, right? Now, sometimes that connection is made very explicit sometimes

it's not made very explicit but is there an expectation within these systems and by the way they're called darshan and it stands for world view because they're supposed to be comprehensive uh systems of propositions that are networked together and mutually support each other as a way of understanding reality and putting us as a place in there where we can where we can see how our so this is like like this is the way things are this is my world view and as a consequence of that i can understand how to get out of my my suffering so yes it is correct now some specific ones now i'll go very specific for example i'll first mention shankara will say

something like the the kind of thing that's going to get you to really understand release in a lot of ways is to see an identification between the true self and brahman and i think the term in sanskrit is brahmagyana which is like sort of the insight of this Brahman. And so this becomes interesting because now we're going to get into a very important argument here in his view, is that knowledge of this kind cannot be in the subject-object structure. cannot be in the subject-object structure. So, ordinary experience in the world has a subject-object structure, but because of the identity between the true self and Brahman, the knowledge of that cannot have a subject-object structure. As a consequence, this gets to your ineffability issue,

nothing I can say in language could, strictly speaking, be correct if it's articulated in the positive form. Because if I say it in a positive form, I apply a predicate to a subject that puts it in a subject object structure, but it fundamentally isn't a subject object structure. So there is some kind of ineffability about, and now we can actually, if you want me to, I can go into three different kinds of ineffability found in Indian philosophy. But the idea is that the experience is non-dual, although most Western philosophers following Brentano, like this is what I talked about at MindFest, would say that experience is essentially subject-object. Consciousness is always conscious of something.

That's the very famous line that you get from Brentano. And so what would it mean to say I have a non-dual experience? Actually, Kurt, can you hear the oddity? What would it mean to say I have a non-dual experience? Right, so this is the kind of thing. I can't articulate what this is because it's non-dual. So then there are questions about whether or not those experiences are valid. Are they forms of knowing?

Because if someone argues that knowledge is always subject-object, but this school is saying that there's a kind of knowledge that is non-subject-object, subject-object, but this school is telling that there's a kind of knowledge that is non-subject-object. Is there a way for us to rationally assess something that transcends the way in which logic can be applied as an evaluative metric? Because logic applies evaluatively to things in a subject-object structure. And this thing you're saying, so what is the way to that? And this gets us into discussions. So one of the terms that you might have heard before is yogaja pratyaksha, which is a special insight of the yogin to see something.

It's kind of like an intellectual seeing, but then again, it's not a seeing, but seeing as a subject-topic structure. And so there are other terms that are used in Sanskrit to talk about it. And the basic idea is that there are experiences that just don't have a dualistic structure. And that leads to a certain kind of ineffability. Okay, so I'll let you ask me a question unless you want me to explain more. You want me to keep talking about ineffability theories? Sure, please. Yeah, I can give you two different versions of ineffability.

Or three, I think there is. Okay, so I'll give it to you in a very simple way you can understand. So suppose my experience, this is a very easy example, I think. That's why I like this example. Suppose my experience is rich in the following sense. Anytime I describe it to you, were you or I or an ideal version of me to reflect longer, we could describe it in more detail that's still true, right? So like I start now and I say, okay uh my experience right now is of a two screen a screen that's split in half with on and on one side and current on the side like okay true and then i say

oh but it's also of uh kind of one color on the left side and one color on the right side true it's also of the color hue magenta on the left side on the right side white on the right side, white. You see, we can keep getting deeper and deeper and deeper. Right, right, right. Okay, so on this view, experience is rich, and every time we give a description, we can find another description that's more precise and true. But both descriptions are true. Now, why is experience ineffable?

Because we can never get the complete description. This is called ineffability by completion, incompleteness. I can never give the infinitely rich description of my experience, even if at every level of describing it, it's true. It's not the case that I'm going to exhaust it and get to that infinite description. So this is- Sorry, is this argument in principle argument or like a practicality argument like in principle you know so that's

a very good question i think actually the way it's run is in principle i do not think it's run in terms it's not like oh we're going to get tired in 100 hours and basically then on it's like no so there's kind of two versions in the in principle one and in the imprint it's definitely not the practical one it's the in principle one but then there's also of two versions in the in-principle one. It's definitely not the practical one. It's the in-principle one. But then there's also two versions of it. It's that there are an infinite number of descriptions, and we're never going to exhaust that because we're finite creatures.

And also that there are a bunch of descriptions. We don't even know what those are yet that we could discover them and make it. Right, so there's one that's a discovery version of it. We're discovering more and more about our experience. Another like they already exist, all the concepts is we're never going to do it. Right. So those are two different versions of the in principle one. But I want to bring to your attention the fact that this seems to be about truth being present in the description of my experience, but never being able to complete it. So what is ineffable is the complete true description. Okay, that's one version. Now let's go for another completely different version. There's another version that says, no, what's going on is that

every time I describe my experience, I put it in language. The language makes it appear as if it has a certain structure inherent in it. It doesn't have that structure. Because it doesn't have that structure, what is literally said is false of reality. Sorry, it doesn't have the structure of reality? Like language has a structure to it? Yes. Right. So I'll give you a specific version of it. When I say there is a horse in front of me, I use the universal horse and apply it to the animal in front of me. That might make it seem like there are these things called universals in reality.

But, as some Buddhists will argue, there are no universals out there in reality. There are only particulars, svalakshana. There's only these particulars out there in reality. And because there are only particulars in reality and no universals, when we express things in language such that a universal, it deludes us into thinking that there are these things there. And what we say in some sense is just literally false, right? There is no universal out there. There's just a particular, right? And so on this version, the true nature of reality is in some sense ineffable,

because when we put it in language to speak it, we falsify what's there. Do you recall where you were? Just continue. representation of what is in reality in language falsifies what's really in reality. And so what we mean when we say it's ineffable, it means that this structure of language just distorts in a way where it does not express what's really there, and we don't have any other way to do it. It's not saying, like in the first one, that it could be the case that our descriptions are all true. We just can't finish it, and therefore it's ineffable because it's unfinishable. It's saying that it's ineffable because the structure of the thing we put it in always falsifies it, right? And so, yeah, that's the second version. Now, between these two versions, there is another version which doesn't have to do with falsity and incompleteness, but it has to do in part with the difference between truth and falsity. On this version, it's ineffable

because some of the things we'll say about our experience are true, and some of the things we'll say about our experience are false, and when you conjoin something that's true and false by the rules for conjunction, you get a false statement.

So the second one was kind of saying, no matter what we say, it's going to be the case that it's false because language fundamentally puts something there that isn't there. And the first one said, in those cases where we're truly doing it, we're never going to get to the complete one. The third one says that more often than not, we're saying things that are true, but also we're saying some things that are false, and because the truth and falsity conjoin together, that ends up with the false conjunct.

I see. That last one sounds super subtle. So that one has a name? I definitely call them the one by completeness, incompleteness, that's the first one. Then the second is the one by the falsity of the structure of language. And the third one is by the mixed cases, the truth and the falsity. By the fact that descriptions conjoined together in sentences form a conjunction, and conjunction requires all conjuncts to be true. Yeah, that's what it is. So now, again, you wanted to sort of get into where the spirituality aspect of this can be seen.

Sure. is that if you constantly are stuck in the analytical mind and you're thinking, you're constantly trying to understand your reality in a way that is inherently full of dichotomies that will make things seem true to you that are in fact false, and that by reducing your analytical tendencies and focusing on something non-analytical or stopping the conceptualization in your mind is a way to get to a form of peace and liberation. Okay, so that's one way I can see a connection here that's definitely propounded in some of these schools. And actually, you know, it's useful for me to point out that I'm intentionally not giving names to all of these ideas like, oh, this is this person from the 8th century who said this, precisely because I think these ideas are straightforwardly understandable. Like, nothing I said I believe is something so complicated. I mean, you can see there's a difference between incompleteness, falsity by structure, and mixed

cases. Like, that's all we need. Yeah. Okay. Three questions. I'll throw them both out. I'll throw them all out, I mean. And then you'll just tell me which one you want to answer most. Okay. Okay. So one is about suffering. And much like we use the word real as sometimes meaning impermanent or sometimes meaning fundamental or sometimes meaning something else, does the word suffering in the way that it's being used in these Indian traditions and Buddhist traditions doesn't mean the same that we think of here?

So when they're saying we must eliminate suffering or this is in order to eliminate suffering or this aids the elimination of suffering, is it the same kind of suffering? So I'll put that aside. I've written these down, but I want to say them so you have time to think about them as well. Another one is about the incompleteness argument. them as well. Another one is about the incompleteness argument. And that reminds me of Daniel Dennett, who said that Mary in Mary's room could have the experience of qualia if you were able to explain everything to her. So the thought experiment is that she's blind. I believe it's that she's blind and you have to explain what blue is. And Daniel Dennett said, yes, you can. If you give enough facts, it becomes isomorphic to the experience of blue. And I've

forgotten that argument. But if you know that argument, then I wanted to hear your take on it. If you don't, then we can forget about it. And then number three was about Chomsky. Chomsky was saying that most of the words that we use, we think they're referencing something in external reality, but they're not. They're referencing something in mind. So for instance, he uses the word river. And then he talks about the river that's near him. It's now empty. There's no water flowing through it, but we still call it a river. And if they paved over it, they may still call it a river. And so the word river can refer to it, but it's not exactly this flowing water that we think it is. It can have multiple aspects. But then he said, but that doesn't mean that it's not real. It just

means that it's not referring to something external and that there's a reality to the words that we're referencing in our mind. So for instance, there is a painting behind you. And just because we can't explicate what a painting is precisely, doesn't mean that painting is not real. Like we have some intuition that we're conveying with one another that maybe that intuition is correct or real. And doesn't mean your wife isn't real. Doesn't mean your kids aren't real, your father, just because they're not fundamental and so on or just because they're not independent of mind those were the three the number one the suffering doesn't mean the same number two daniel dennett and number three chomsky well i'm gonna do all three i like all three all right i think

that's i think that's that's a really good question. So the first one, the word in Sanskrit I believe that's most commonly used is dukkha. That's the term actually I believe that the Buddhists are also using. I think that there are connotations, sorry, theoretical considerations in certain traditions when they talk about dukkha that don't occur in the mind of English speakers when they are using the common sense notion of suffering. So I'll give you the one that I most often discuss. I'll ask this as a question. I'll ask this as a question. If you were exalted and happy right now because something wonderful that you've wanted for a long time in your life happened,

just imagine that particular thing, whatever it is. It doesn't have to be money or whatever you want, but that thing happens now, and Kurt has it, and Kurt is flooded with happiness, exaltation, tears of joy. Would you say that in the moment when that's happening, you're also suffering? Hmm. No.

That's right. So I think the English use of the word suffering would think that that is a bit incoherent. Right, right. So I think the English use of the word suffering would think that that is a bit incoherent. Right, right. I do think that there are some Indian traditions that would say that in those moments, there is a way in which you're suffering because you're clinging to the temporal duration of the sensation, which is essentially impermanent. You will not feel that exaltation forever. Yet in virtue of having that joy, tears of happiness,

or whatever is going on, the ineffable happiness of Kurt's moment, whatever is going on, the ineffable happiness of Kurt's moment, there will be some clinging psychologically to its future continuedness, which essentially can't happen. And the clinging involved in the feeling of happiness is suffering itself, because it is essentially going to be frustrated. Okay, so that, I think, is clearly a way in which the concept of suffering via dukkha is used in certain Indian traditions that is not what we're talking about when we're talking about suffering in um in the english context and i another way to put it is that oftentimes in english when we're using the word suffering we already recognize the difference between uh accepted and unaccepted suffering so when i'm bench pressing and it hurts i accept the suffering as a necessary good, a necessary pain for the good that I want. Unaccepted suffering.

When somebody goes and smacks me over the back of my head and I'm in pain and I don't see what's going on at all. So we already accept that. And when we use the claim and we say we're suffering in english we almost always mean it's of the unaccepted kind right we're never right so our uses will go that way i think that's commonly what we mean and i don't think that that we take into consideration the idea that this idea of clinging to the future continuation of an exalted state of pleasure is a form of suffering. And I do think Buddhists have a lot of interesting things to say about that. In other words, it's a synonym of clinging to suffering, which is why they have an emphasis on letting go, which is the opposite of clinging.

I see what you're saying. I don't think it's synonym, it's not the relation that comes to my mind. I think maybe more the idea that suffering doesn't apply just to the temporal moments. It applies to the relationship between the temporal moments of the state of mind and its future uh like what's going to come next right so then to them in principle like if there was a way that you could feel happy forever so you got whatever it is you get or maybe getting doesn't matter to you it's just some state someone waved a magic wand and you like this moment that you like this bliss that you feel it's a it's an infinite mdma pill an eternal mdma pill then would they call that suffering if in this thought experiment god can do whatever god wants

god waved the magic hand and or the magic wand and said this is never going away you don't need to worry then would they still call that suffering if they they're just based, I'm just saying, this is so hypothetical. Maybe they don't even think about this. No, no, I, it's, um. I just want to know, because I'm trying to drill down on, would that still be considered? Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think, I think it's also, first of all, I think it's admissible. That's the main thing that's important.

And what I mean by that is that sometimes cross-cultural philosophy leads to inadmissible questions. I think this is totally admissible. I see. We're going to learn something about what they're thinking about temporal duration and the causal relationships between moments of pleasure and their future productivity. So one idea is that, I'm going to now dress up your argument in language I would use.

It's just a contingent fact that it goes away there's no essential property to the pleasure in relationship to me that it's going to go away so it does go away and you guys are picking up on that it's impermanent that's not that's a contingent property what if it was the kind that was permanent uh then how would your argument apply that we're suffering in those moments? Yeah, so I think it does apply. I do think it does apply. And I think the answer is probably,

I mean, strictly speaking, the answer is going to be it's just not permanent. I mean, obviously, that's going to be the argument that's going to be used. It's in the nature of these kinds of things

to be momentary. So they would say it's essential to it um yes no sorry it's in its nature no no no no so whatever i mean yeah no that's a good point very good point i think i meant essential to the kind right that that they're going to go away the fact that one of them has a longer temporal duration of pleasure before it hits pain is the contingent thing but yes you're right the kind it's in the nature of the kind of pleasure and pain that they will go away um yeah so i think that that's right so it'll be a disagreement about you know what properties of them are essential or not that's correct i think that's that's right i mean yeah we're going to get to chomsky

and dennett but let's linger here just a moment longer yeah sure our discussion started with this hedonic tone of pleasure and pain and then you were saying some schools of thought see the pain as an independent access of the pleasure so it sounds to me like they're saying it sounds to me in my western mode it sounds to me like they're saying that if you're on this pleasure axis that you're inevitably in some positive value on the negative on the pain axis like you're inevitably suffering is that the case no not is that the case like in reality but is that what they're saying so in order to drill down into that we need

to go to a specific text and person and see exactly what the theory so i think i think generally we can say about what they are saying in a general sense yeah that's useful and we're talking primarily about buddhism here what we can say about it in general is that um you gave an explanation and say by saying, okay, there's a scale, right? It's this way, and if you're on this side, it's the pleasure thing, and if you're on this side, it's the pain thing, and there's not these two different things.

So we can analyze this two ways. We can say, is it the hedon-doloric model, or is it the heat-cold model, and how does that pertain to its temporality, right? And I think that's totally reasonable, right? And I don't think either of them actually is going to help with the position that their duration is fleeting and they will go away. But if you want an argument that actually supports this, that I think they would give, the Buddhists, and I also think other people would give is, when have you or heard of anyone experiencing any type of pleasure that didn't have a duration? An argument by induction seems warranted here, right?

I, for example, know that all my pains and pleasures have passed in time. Everyone I've talked to is such that their pains and pleasures have passed. We're all relevantly similar in this respect, so it's reasonable for me to believe that pains and pleasures pass in time. But it's our empiricists, after all. I mean, they're very empirical in their reasoning. I wouldn't be surprised if they're like, hey, this is a very good reason for you to believe. Maybe there's some wacky argument about how you can derive it from first principles but hey from our experience it sounds like this is what's going on you know and actually this is the argument for why the self is impermanent

in time i notice that my conscious state states change i notice as a child my body has grown i notice that my intentionalities change from moment to moment i notice that sometimes i have pleasure sometimes i have pain so the five skandhas are constantly changing. What's the evidence for that? What's empirical observation, right? Like that seems like, so I don't see, I don't think they wouldn't think that that's a good argument. Now, would someone who is interested in the possibility of it through imagination say, well, we can imagine, like you did in the thought experiment, such a property being such that it was held. And in that case, would we be led to the conclusion that the person is still suffering on this model? And I think, yes, it would be harder to say that because, in fact, the clinging is never frustrated.

It's always satisfied. But then again, I think it might break with the fundamental idea of these. Okay. So I'm going to provide a counterexample to what I said, and then I'm going to counter my counter, and I want to hear what you think. When you gave your presentation, you said that the canvas is bliss,

meaning that when you remove everything, the feeling that's left is actually a positive one, or at least that's one way of interpreting it. And then someone said, yeah, but isn't bliss a qualia if you're removing qualia? Like someone had to raise their hand and ask that question. And I forgot what your response was, so forgive me. But anyhow, that would seem to indicate that you can just be on the pleasure axis. So that's my counter, that you can be. But then my counter to that is saying, you can be, quote unquote. You're putting some identity there. Whereas in order to get to that state, it's extremely self-effacing to the point of nirvana or not being a person or not having an eye.

So anyway, I don't know if what I said was towards, but which we should discuss, which is, is the experience in an Advaita system of having the knowledge that you're one, even though it's non-dual knowledge, one with the Brahman, isn't that a form of eternal bliss, which is not going to be taken away in any way in time in the world. And also, isn't it precisely the case that it won't have this temporal duration problem because it's not in the subject-object structure?

It's outside of the subject-object structure, and time applies in the subject subject object structure. So yeah, I think that could be a very solid difference between the notion of dukkha and sukha, which is the opposite, in these two schools. I mean, roughly, I don't... I put less stake in nailing things down to specific people, because

we're playing with an idea that obviously we can work out analytically. And what we're saying is that in one system this experience of non-dual identity with the one and only thing whose essential nature is ananda why wouldn't it lead to it yeah actually i'm going to give you two more things on this that are really interesting i have my other friend swami Medananda, who has written about Sri Ramakrishna's mystical experiences. My recollection serves me correctly. When Sri Ramakrishna had some of these experiences, he wandered around all the time laughing like a child and being really happy.

As if he was on the permanent MDMA or something like that. So I don't know. There could be some kind of actual examples of the testimony of people who observed his behavior. And then in addition, I think what's relevant about your question, maybe we should clarify for your audience because they won't know what happened at the talk. So it's true that in Shankara's system, Brahman is nirguna,

without qualities, and in Ramanuja's system, Brahman is saguna, with qualities. So if Brahman is nirguna, without qualities, then what does it mean to say that Brahman is sac-cit-itananda, where ananda is bliss, and bliss seems like quality. Okay, so what I said was this, and I'll unpack it. This is a way of trying, again, this is a way of trying to understand it in language. So analogies are the best I can do here. So one way I think about it is that there's a color that a canvas has, and the color that the canvas has is white or off-white, let's say. But clearly the purpose of the canvas is such that other things are supposed to come upon it,

and that is what's really the painting. The canvas's color is irrelevant in a way. By analogy, the quality of Brahman is ananda, which, by the way, is is not happiness which is a phenomenal state that we instantiate but is this is a bliss in a spiritual sense like you should not think that bliss as ananda applied to brahman is like you know you being like super happy that's like not the way to understand what ananda is but um so what happens is this is that the the as you strip away the layers of paint the canvas is revealed to be off light

as you strip away the illusory experience and identify as one with the ultimate brahman it's fundamental what's revealed is just pure bliss right so that's that's the way that's that was what i was was telling you and that's the response i typically give it is literally in the literature on this view that there is this kind of contradiction that like oh it's supposed to be quality unless it seems like to be a quality i i do think that that is a problem for shankara i'm not a big fan of all the moves he makes but I do think that this way of explaining what might be going on works and also it works well with the idea

that in the subject object structure of experience we're going to have a very hard time explaining what this is like and that's why it's ineffable so yeah nicely you've sort of set up a way in which we can see sukha understood in a be like a more classical buddhist framework as involving this clinging that always leads eventually to more suffering and so yeah that's like and then this other system where it's different but again to answer the basic question i think there are ways in which it's different from the kind of way in which we use suffering in ordinary English.

And so maybe the last thing I'll say about this before we move to the other question is this. In my own recent work, when I'm going to, for example, Hong Kong to present stuff on machine emotions and the moral grounding problem, I have argued that there is a different type of suffering

in English, and that's called cognitive suffering. Cognitive suffering occurs when there is no phenomenal suffering, but there is a suboptimal satisfaction of preferences. So my view is that we can properly say of an artificial system or a creature, like an amoeba or a plant, that it is cognitively suffering when its preferences aren't satisfied, and in virtue of its preferences not being satisfied, there's a clear sense in which it would be better off if its preferences were satisfied. So the example I oftentimes use are these little creatures where they need to be in oxygen-rich water in order to survive. And they use a detector for magnetic north and south in order to find the oxygen-rich

water. So if I put put a dummy magnet over it, I can pull it down into this horrible environment. But if I let it do its own thing with the regular polarity, it will find its way to the right thing. Now, these are very rudimentary creatures. They're organisms. But I don't think that it's really clear that they're phenomenally conscious. But it's clear to me that things would be better off if they were an oxygen-rich

environment than were they to be a non-oxygen-rich environment in terms of their continued survival. So I would say that they are cognitively suffering, and what I mean by that is that there are clear preferences that are there for how their system functions, which would be satisfied in one environment as opposed to another one. And this cuts against the English notion of suffering, where people say, in order to suffer, you must have some feeling of pain. That's what it means in English. And I think that even if it does mean that, there's a very clear notion of suffering in English, where we would say, even if the person is having sort of hedonic pleasure, they're suffering. This is oftentimes what we say of many drug addicts, right? In fact, the analysis with Buddhism is actually pretty clear. Being high on drugs just means you're

going to have a clinging and attachment to wanting more, of which you're going to suffer more, because objectively your body is not functioning properly, right? So that same notion that we do there, I think just leads to the idea that there's a very serviceable notion in English of cognitive suffering, and I think it can be applied to machines for which there is no phenomenal consciousness, but there are states of the machine for which it is functioning better than it would be in another environment. So let's close the suffering one. But I think that you can see – I would definitely say not only in English is there a different way to do it, but there are different ones in the other. Okay, so now on to Dan Dennett. Okay, so I don't know this Dan Dennett argument.

But I do know what is going on here in terms of the fact that, like, there are two things going on in the Mary Vaughn experiment. going on in the Mary thought experiment. One is that she's supposed to know all of the facts about color vision in red with respect to, actually all colors

red in particular. She's supposed to know in particular like what typical objects are red, like tomatoes and fire trucks are red. What is the, you

know, sort of properties in terms of wavelength reflections and environments to make scarlet versus red? This, you know, all the different colors. And she's a sighted person, right? So, but she's just grown up in a room that's black and white. Ah, okay, right. Right. So, because she's grown up and been, you know, it's like some evil IRB problem.

An institutional review board would never approve Barry's imprisonment. But yeah, so she just studies all this color vision stuff. And, you know, and then the question is, if it just amounted to knowing all these facts, then when she sees red, she should learn nothing new. But clearly everyone has the intuition that when she's allowed to leave the room and sees a tomato, she learns what it's like to see red. So all the physical facts don't suffice for all the facts. I used to have a nice way of presenting this.

It's that all the physical facts don't suffice for all the facts about Red because the phenomenal fact of what it's like to see Red is not entailed by all of the physical facts. That's basically what the experiment is. And actually, this is a great thought experiment. I have no problem crediting Frank Jackson for wonderful work. I think it's in Bertrand Russell before, though, where he talks about a blind man can know everything but clearly the blind man doesn't know what it's like to see you know green or something like that and that's even a quicker and easier way to say like could it a super smart blind person just

literally study everything and be like yeah tell me what's going on but obviously they're missing something what are they missing what it's like to see red so now the jackson thought experiment just inverts it by saying well she can see but she's grown up in an environment where she's been deprived of this but she can't derive it from yes so what it sounded like to me you were saying is that in this version that Dan Dennett explores, he says, well, actually, it's incorrect to say that she has all the physical facts. In fact, if she had all the physical facts, she can come to derive what it's like to see red. That sounds like the move that's being done. And there is, so for example, this thought experiment has been so heavily studied and debated that there are many many different um variants going about it what oh never there

are lots of different ways of approaching so one thing is that well um she does know what it's like to see red she just doesn't know what it's like to see red under this description right so there's the redness mode of presentation right but she actually does know what it's like to see red. So there's this move about, well, what is the kind of fact that she doesn't know, and what level does it sit at? So Dedek could easily be operating in the space of saying one of these things. So in general, without getting into the details of what he specifically says, because as I said, I don't know,

I think the standard line for me and where I stand on this is in agreement that I don't think phenomenal facts can be known absent access to phenomenal properties. So if you're not in contact with phenomenal properties, then you don't know the what it's like thing. But it is still consistent to say, along with that, that there's a bunch of things you do know that could make it the case that your behavior is indiscernible from someone that does see phenomenal red like you can't think of the right thoughts for right now but i would say that i understand my view probably goes much closer to wanting to say that what's being done in these kinds of arguments is that we're isolating the phenomenal property

and then i'm going to concede that like yeah like if you don't have contact with it you don't know what it's like to see it. But I'm also going to say that that doesn't mean that your behavioral tendencies are going to be completely impoverished. There could be other ways of engaging in the behavior that's appropriate for when someone sees red, given a society that attributes certain actions to red-like behavior or whatever. I would think that that's closer um to where i would go one thing i would think that dennis argument probably doesn't do and this might be the thing where like if he does do this i'd be like okay that was i don't think it's the argument that says that if you give them more information, somehow by thinking and reflecting on the information, the qualia appears in your mind. That I don't think is what's going on, right? So

there would, some people could say, hey, Mary does have phenomenal qualia, phenomenal qualia. She doesn't have, like, she hears auditory sounds, by the way, in the room, right? So she has, like, you can understand, Mary is not phenomenally deprived. She's not in a sensory deprivation chamber, right? She's just not in a place where there's color, right? So a person could try to argue that if you feed more information, there's a way in which they can use through reflection and the phenomenal qualities that they have, an inkling of what it's like to see red. So for example, she sees edges, she sees shapes, she sees black and white, she knows that the color red is in the color spectrum, she knows what those things are. So if you can imagine and you have vision and your imagination is rich, you might be able

to come to an inkling of what it's like to see red. And maybe one way to think about this is a very famous example from David Yume. You take a color wheel with shades of blue, and then all of a sudden we just cut one shade of blue in the color wheel let's say it's going from like light blue towards like purple let's say and we cut one at exactly 50 50 percent of the way there and then he asked well can you come up with the missing shade of blue this is like i can't remember whether he's trying to argue against us or for this but i think he's trying to say you can come up with sure and we can we can think that this is something that like mary might be able to do although it's hard because the difference between seeing and hearing and

seeing in black and white and in gray which could be derived from black and white seems to be a big leap to get to red but this is a kind i don't think that that would be the argument that dennis is talking about because i don't think dennis puts much weight on qualia in the first place in some sense he is actually the premier illusionists of all kinds probably what he's putting weight in is the fact that there's a bunch of things that are associated with redness that have to do with behavior, and those things are things that someone who has this much information can successfully carry out.

So that's my take on that. I don't know much about death or actuality. So the Chomsky thing, actually, I do know a lot about. That was really interesting that you brought that up because I actually studied with the leading externalists in philosophy of language for eight years. I did my undergraduate education and my graduate education with the pioneers of what is known as semantic externalism, which is precisely what you're kind of pushing against in chomsky's voice so i have much more to say about the river example which is in fact um a direct uh um kind of riff on uh saul kripke's example of the river dart for

dartmouth in the beginning of naming a necessity his lecture from from 1971. So I don't think, if Chomsky gave you that example, that isn't an accident at all. The river example actually is what Saul Kripke is actually talking about in his lectures. It's one of the most famous examples and discussion pieces in all of philosophy of language in the

20th century. It's the very famous, the river example. He begins his lectures that way. And so I think it's interesting to talk about this thesis because I'm wholeheartedly a semantic externalist. I don't even think, unless we get more details on the table, what is actually being said. So I think, like, is it the case that, in in your opinion what's going on here is that we're never referring to things out in the world because if that's the thesis digesting that's just in the system with my core commitments in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language

it's my understanding chomsky says that most of the time we're not referring to external and that outside of science it's 99 of the time that we're not and we had to painfully develop science to refer to the external world and it uses even a different structure than the way that we have sentences so formal systems okay so i think most of the time we are referring to the external world whether or not the way in which we refer to the external world is via something that is a representation that is internally accessible to us. Let me put an asterisk on that. I think Chomsky would say that we think we're referring to the external world and we're attempting to, but what we're actually referring to is within mind or something mind-like. or something mind-like. Right, so maybe we should do this by using a distinction that's helpful

between direct and indirect reference. So I can say that I use the word Kurt, and Kurt refers to Kurt in the world, but it doesn't do it directly. It does it in terms of a representation or a way of thinking that's particular to me in my mind that then picks out uh kurt and uh and then there's another one that says no i mean when i use the word kurt given how i learned the word kurt it's the case that kurt refers

to you in the world doesn't refer via anything in my mind. It might be true that I also have all these beliefs about Kurt, you know, there's a canon and stuff like that, but it's not finding its way to Kurt through those things. Right. So Kripke is an opponent of what's known as direct reference theory. It's one way of, like, so there was a huge debate for, like, a huge tradition, like, starting with Frege and Russell going through the works of Cyril and Strawson.

And we call them description theory. And the idea was that each speaker has associated with a given name, such as Kurt Aranin, a set of descriptions. or Anand, a set of descriptions. And if you want to know what they mean when they use that word, just look at the descriptions that are in their mind, and then whatever those things pick out, that's what the word refers to. This is the indirect

route. The idea is that I can't remember exactly who it was. It might have been Russell. But under this view, names like Kurt and Anand are just abbreviations for longer descriptions, which are sets of descriptions of the person who lives in Toronto, who met Susan, who on this day did that. Those are all in my – so when I say Kurt, I just mean this assemblage of descriptions in my mind. It's a shorthand.

Yeah, right, abbreviation. So I think that was more associated with Russell than it was with Fraga. And then other people came along later on, they say, no, it's not just a description, it's like a weighted cluster, like there's a bunch of descriptions in there and then some of them I'll be like, oh, if this doesn't turn out to be right, then I'm not referring to Kurt. It's got to be that Kurt is living in Toronto, that Kurt is living in Toronto, that Kurt is a podcaster, or that's secondary.

Or maybe I'm the person who says, Kurt's got to be a podcaster. I don't care where he lives. Maybe I was wrong about where he lives, but my term, Kurt, doesn't refer to anyone who isn't a podcaster. And so there's a weighting, a probability distribution. I'm referring to this as long as this one is maximally satisfying.

I think this was the the weighted cluster conception that was kind of discussed by Kripke but is found in the work of sure in rudimentary form Cyril and Strauss and so Kripke refuted all of these views in my opinion he took them down in 1971 pretty cleanly between the early part of January and

the end of January so and most people in the tradition I study with think that that is correct. So on my view, we are referring to reality. And in fact, it's even worse than that because I'm a pretty strong externalist. I think it's that it's in virtue of the fact that we're in contact with objects in our environment that we are referring at all. Referring is not something that's primarily about anything in the mind. That's just, it's the back one. As a consumer of language and a producer of language,

my goals with reference are to get things in my environment that are part of my community onto those things, not things in my mind. I don't need them to think about what's in my mind. I need them to see that I'm lying. Don't be thinking about what's in my mind. Think about what's out there, the common object. It's something that's a predator for us, so we need to run. So I think it's because of my realism that I think, yes, reference is about getting onto things in the world primarily and secondarily there's a practice of referring to episodic experiences like i can refer to like i had this dream last night clearly i'm referring to what's in my head at that point so i think that's right so i'm not sure

my impression is that probably you know when when when he articulated this chunks he might have been saying that in fact the the revolution in semantic externalism is partly mistaken. But there are lots of ways to see the mistake. So, for example, David Chalmers does think that there is a correction that Saul Kripke's view should undergo, and that's by distinguishing between primary and secondary intentions and meaning and doing what's called epistemic two-dimensional semantics. So you can be revisionary. You can think, okay, direct. So one of my teachers, Nathan Salmon, who was my dissertation advisor,

is like one of the key proponents of direct reference theory, right? Where like, you know, it's just the descriptive content and all that stuff is just not playing any semantic role. It could be playing a pragmatic role. That's a different aspect of language that has to do with communication. But it's not playing any semantic role. The names are directly referential.

They're tags. Millionism is sometimes called the tag view. Kurt tags this particular thing. I learned this use of the word Kurt by interacting with you when I was introduced to you through Susan. That makes the causal chain in my mind that leads back to you. My use of Kurt is about you because it's a causal chain directly going from you to my mind. It's about a causal theory of reference. That's basically the view Kripke announces. But it's okay for someone to say

that I accept that we are referring to external things in the world, but I deny the thesis that it's direct as much as the degree to which some proponents of millionism, the tag theory, or the causal theory of reference think it's direct. I think it's a little bit more indirect or at least if there's this other way that things go on and it wouldn't surprise me if um chomsky is also sympathetic to the idea that sometimes i guess what i what i'm thinking is is i can't i can't sort of sort of get my head around is when i say kurt let's say your wife says kurt yeah okay let's take two clues is very good this is a classic example from lock i think actually um so when i say kurt

i'm referring to the descriptions in my mind and when your wife says kurt she's referring to the descriptions in her mind like as opposed to we're both referring to you, but what we associate with the word are two different sets of descriptions because we learn about you in totally different contexts and we have a different relationship with you. So I'm more inclined to say the second one accurately describes the behavior of human beings

and how we actually learn language and in particular proper names for objects in our environment, is that we associate things with them. And that's completely natural because we have different experiences with the things and beliefs about the things. But the proper names are to refer to these things

and not to just get us back into our head. Otherwise, if we all come to believe this then when i'm talking to your wife she's like yeah interesting like uh you have these you know they're referring to your brain and she's referring to her brain so that okay so that's so that's what i'm saying like i think a let me clarify it's okay to maybe not go in for the strong, directly referential, when you say, Kurt, you're referring to this person. And you think that something else is going on. I think that's okay. But I think I prefer to describe it by saying that, no, when you use a name, there's a causal link that takes that name to the person.

And it's true also that you associate things with that person, maybe via thinking about the name too, but that doesn't mean that the name is referring to those thoughts as opposed to the person and those thoughts are about the person also. Yes. Okay, good. So, yeah, so briefly you might want to know what is the distinction between one-dimensional semantics and two-dimensional modal semantics concerning names and kind terms. So the classic example to be discussed is the example that water equals H2O. So water is a common general term for a substance in our world. H2O is a chemical term for a compound that captures a substance in our world. And it was an empirical discovery that what we meant by water in the common term is identical to h2o now first of all before we go further into

the actual difference between the two views nothing i'm saying depends on whether or not it's true that water equals h2o like there's some people who get really hung up on the fact that actually in chemistry it's not true that these pure samples of water and water equals H2O. So all we're saying, we're talking about a common term in a language and a theoretical identification. That's the important thing that's at stake. Okay, so Kripke thinks that basically it's necessary that water equals H2O. And the reason why he thinks it's necessary

and a posteriori is because water, the word water, is a rigid designator that picks out the same substance in every possible world. Okay. So there's like a range of possible worlds. Okay.

And water, as used by human beings on Earth, were part of the practice of using this term of water that turned out to be H2O, are using it as a rigid designator. They don't mean the word to change depending on what possible world we're in. So water is a rigid designator, and H2O is a rigid designator. And the definition of a rigid designator is a term that does not change its reference depending on what world we're evaluating it in. So if we now imagine a set of possible worlds, W1 through W6,

water refers in that world, and H2 Water refers in that world, and H2O refers in that world, in those worlds, only if, say, water and H2O are present, the things that are here. And also, as long as there's worlds in which water is H2O, and maybe some worlds where water doesn't exist, we can say that it's necessarily true that water is H2O, because either it exists where water doesn't exist, we can say that it's necessarily true that water's H2O, because either it exists in the world or it doesn't. And if it exists in the world,

then it's identical because of the way we're using it here on Earth, or it doesn't exist. So in all worlds in which there is reference, water's picking something out and that thing is H2O, it's going to be true. So it's necessary that water equals H2O because it's true in all possible worlds in which water and H2O refer. And in addition, we discover this a posteriori because we confer on water as H2O a priori. So this was a magnificent major moment in the history of philosophy in the 20th century that there are truths that are necessary and a posteriori, because it destroys the Kantian thesis that what is necessary is a priori. Okay, so Kant famously made the claim that necessity and a

priori are related to each other, and Kripke destroyed that thesis by showing that there are truths that are a posteriori that are necessary. Now, the difference between Dave's view and Saul's view comes from, kind of like there's a relationship to this Chomkyz discussion, so I want to say that there's a relationship to the Chomkyz name, and associated with it is a definite description. And what is that definite description? The local potable liquid that flows in 60% of— Sorry, it flows in all the rivers and covers 60% to 70% of the earth,. Quenches thirst is the thing that is in most of our bodies. It's like a description of the characteristics of water as we use the word.

Yes, yes. As we use the word as consumers of water, we do have a common description that is associated with it. And so we'll just suppose we can call that D1. Sure. Okay. And so we'll just suppose we can call that D1. Sure. Okay. So David's view is that when we evaluate a possible world, we can evaluate it in two dimensions.

We can evaluate it with respect to its primary intention and its secondary intention. Okay. Okay. and its secondary intention. When you evaluate water is H2O according to its secondary intention, you get the exact same result that Saul Kripke gave us. The result that water equals H2O, and it's necessary because water's a rigid designator, H2O's a rigid designator,

and they're identical in the actual world, so they're identical in every world in which they both refer but Kripke doesn't have what's known as a primary intention and the primary intention in David's view roughly for this example is just D it's this description so if we go to another possible world and we ask what is picked out by description d the local potable

liquid that fills up 60 of the planet's surfaces in most bodies and is also drinkable and stuff like that and it turns out that over there it's xyz or wrt then it turns out in that world that water picks out, or water is equal to x, y, z. Okay? So that result, so on David's view, it's primary possible that water equals x, y, z, although it's secondarily impossible that water equals xyz it's secondarily necessary that water equals h2o but it's primary impossible that uh water equals xyz so the idea and actually i spent my dissertation in six years of my life working on this theory to understand it it's it's a really fun mathematical theory but you've got to really wrap your head around some deep modal logic to get this stuff going yeah it's yeah there's a lot of moving parts

to the actual theory but i'm simplifying a lot of ways just to make clear what the differences in the results are but the thing is like there are two ways to look at a possible world and this was a great insight that dave had i really liked this thing you can look at a possible world from the perspective of it being the actual world or you can look at it from the perspective of it being a counterfactual world so Kripke's analysis is all counterfactual

Earth is the actual world and on Earth, water equals H2O and these words are rigid designators so in every other possible world, considered from the perspective of the Earth as an actual world, water equals H2O, and if there's anything else there, XYZ and no

H2O, then water doesn't refer in that world. In Dave's view, though, we can look at the world from two perspectives. We can say, what if this world where there's XYZ, is the actual world? In this world, if XYZ satisfies the description of the local potable liquid, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

then we must be rationally compelled to the conclusion that on this planet, water refers to XYZ. Why are we rationally compelled? Because the hypothesis is that this information set is the actual world. And now we're looking at the word water relative to what it would refer to given this information set. And so it's basically almost like a Bayesian calculation. Basically, you're like, okay, given that the description D is associated with water, and this is the information, the probability of what's going to be the referent

of water is going to be x, y, z, because x, y, z satisfies the description, right? Okay, so there's actual world evaluation and counterfactual world evaluation. Actual world goes along with the primary intention. Counterfactual goes along with the secondary intention. Interesting. There's a lot of cool mathematical things to learn. It's called floating point semantics sometimes. There's this other guy, Pablo Ticci, who came before David. We did some really excellent work on this. It's to david kaplan's work on demonstratives there's a lot

of cool stuff that's going on here i mean when i was growing up in like grad school like this was like all technical philosophy of language philosophy of logic stuff that we talk about it's really fascinating and stuff but his real insight was to give this nice little epistemic interpretation i mean two-dimensional semantics using modality was already there, but the epistemic interpretation is unique to Dave because he's talking about the fact that you can have an actual world evaluation and a counterfactual world. And based on this, you can actually say it's possible that water equals XYZ

because it's conceivable that water equals xyz how is it conceivable that water equals xyz well consider this possible world as actual and take the primary intention of water equal to description d d is this long description and what is the probability of xyz satisfying d in this world? It's 100%. So we're rationally compelled to then conclude that water is XYZ. So it's conceivable on the primary intention analysis that water equals XYZ on W3. Therefore, W3 is a witness to the fact that there's a possible world in which water is XYZ. So it's primarily possible that water equals XYZ.

So sometimes people say that in Dave's view what's going on is that there are one space of worlds and two intentions to look at the world. I can look at it as this is the actual world, or I can look at it as this is the counterfactual world. If I look at it as the actual world, I'm taking the information set into itself. If I look at it counterfactually, I'm looking at relative to another world. I'm saying W1 relative to W2, and in the actual world, I'm saying W1 taken as W1 into itself. So if he's one space of worlds, this is actually called the thesis of modal monism, that there's only one space of possible worlds, but is actually called the thesis of modal monism, there's only one space of possible worlds, but there's two intentions. The opposing view is that there are multiple

spaces of possible worlds and one intention, right? So that's the view that says that... Sorry, the first one, it was called what? Modal realism? Modal monism? Monism, monism. Modal realism is a separate thesis I can explain if you want, but modal monism is a thesis that there is one space of possible worlds. And then you can add to that the thesis that there are two or more intentions for evaluating any sentence across the space of possible worlds. Dave takes two intentions. And then you can have this other view that says, no, there are two different spaces of possible worlds. There are multiple. Some of that's called the onion model.

There's the physically possible worlds, the metaphysically possible worlds, and the logically possible worlds, and these form a proper subset relations. But there's all this one space. The metaphysically possible worlds and the logically possible worlds aren't the same on this model. That's called modal dualism. And yeah, so that's kind of the difference. So I would say Kripke advanced a one-dimensional semantics that used counterfactual evaluation.

And he also, in some sense, gestured at modal dualism. And after his work, people who were working in metaphysics heavily were interested in what kind of modal dualism or modal pluralism followed metaphysically from the theory he had advocated. So there's a big debate on that. So just to clarify one distinction, the last thing you said, modal realism is the thesis that possible worlds are real entities of some kind. There are two versions of this. So one version is the Lewisian thesis, which says that possible worlds are concrete particulars just like our universe,

and the only difference between any two possible worlds is basically the individuals that inhabit them and the fact that they're spatially and temporally not related to one another, so there's no causal relationship between any two possible worlds. But they're real, just as this is real. is real okay and then um the other version of modal realism is the set theoretic universe account which holds that basically a possible world is a certain kind of set it's a set of sentences that's uh maximal with respect to every other property so you so basically you use a proof you use this thing called uh called Lindenbaum's lemma from MetaLogic that shows for any consistent set, you can build a maximally consistent set by ordering the propositions and then going relative to the initial set.

Is it consistent? Is it not? If it's consistent, put it in the container, throw it out, and it blows real loud. So it's Lindenbaum's lemma. Very important proof for doing the compactness proof and metalogic. Right. But it's applied in the work of Alvin Plantinga to explain the theory of modal realism in terms of sets. So there's an infinite plurality of sets, of maximal consistent sets.

And possible worlds are these sets of sentences. And the actual world is different from the possible worlds because it's concrete. It's not just a set of sentences, it's a set of sentences that obtains, right? And that's a very different view than Lewis's view, where what makes two possible worlds different in terms of actuality is just that when we say actuality here, we're referring to our world, and when they say actuality, they're referring to their world, just that when we say actuality here, we're referring to our world and when they say actuality, they're referring to their world, just as when you say I, you refer to you, and when I say I, I refer to me.

Yeah, okay. Those are the main distinctions that are going on. So Dave is a modal realist, I believe. And a modal monist? And a realist, or at least a moderate modal realist. He's a modal rationalist, modal monist, and a and a realist of a certain, at least a moderate modal realist. He's a modal

rationalist, modal monist, and a moderate modal realist. Okay, so we have a plurality of descriptions, different definitions, and in our world they all refer to the same object, but I could imagine that in different worlds each one of them could refer to something else. So given that Dave says that there's a secondary intention based on a description, well, based on which description? To me, it sounds like as soon as you open up a secondary intention, you open up a plethora of definitions. So a plethora of descriptions. So let's work through this carefully to show two results on the side. results on the side um okay so and this is kind of even in the echoes of like a lot of what kripke argued about when he said that he didn't really think the definite description view was even an

accurate description of human mental life like people don't really have definite description. So I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on this example, like Joan of Arc. So my friend goes to class one day and falls asleep in French history class, and a bunch of stuff about Joan of Arc is said. And then I call her, what did you learn in French history class? And she says to me, I learned about Joan of Arc. I'm like, what did you learn? French history class? And she says to me, I learned about Joan of Arc. I'm like, well, what did you learn? She's like, brr, I don't remember anything. So is it going to be the case that when my friend said Joan of Arc, her utterance had no reference because she didn't get a description

of any kind in her mind? Or even suppose she said, I learned that it's the ice cream parlor across the street. Now, given that she learned Joan of Arc in a classroom from a history professor who was teaching it to her, we should say her utterance is caused by the utterance of the teacher. And whatever the teacher is referring to is the best explanation of what she's talking about. Because that's the only

thing, only source it's not like she has another competing source for john of arc so one of the things that kripke was trying to point to i think to that's really kind of important here is that is it actually true that we all have substantive descriptions for all of the terms that we use like there's a lot of terms that we know how to use and people would say that's a correct use or utterance of the terms that we use. There's a lot of terms that we know how to use, and people would say that's a correct use or utterance of the word, for which we don't really have much. My other favorite example is, what's a transistor?

I'm pretty sure that there's something called a transistor radio. But unlike my wife, who knows a lot about electrical engineering, can explain what a transistor is, and a capacitor is, I'm lost. I don't know what a transistor is and a capacitor is. I'm lost. I don't know what a transistor is. Am I not referring to transistor radios? No, I'm clearly referring to transistor radios because I learned it from people who defined these things and talked about them.

There's this kind of phenomenon that Hillary Putnam and Gareth Evans talked about and were contemporaries of Kripke called the semantic division of labor. Different people are producers of terms, and then we all consume them in a causal network where we learn from each other. So when Dave introduces this idea of saying, well, we can take a primary intention analysis, understand that is by thinking that a given description that's associated with a term like water is going to be now used instead of water itself, because it's a case in which we're considering the world as actual. I think all that's meant to be done there is to show us that there is a different kind of evaluation, right? There's an evaluation that does not take the semantic content at the actual world,

but instead uses a descriptive device to go help us find what's in another world, right? So it's like asking, we know that water is H2O here, but given how we found water over here by thinking about this description and then investigating it, what if we use that description in another possible world uh what would we have to say is the thing that is picked out by that so now we introduce the idea well hey what if we switch from the local potable thing to every sports player's favorite drink after a basketball game. Sure.

Right. Okay, well, maybe it turns out that on this planet there are no basketball players. So it turns out that that description doesn't lead to any discovery whatsoever. Right. So we can have a plurality of descriptions. We can acknowledge that there is a relativity to our answers and there's a plurality of descriptions without in any sense violating the insight of the model. Because the model is saying that there's a dependency relation based on going primary versus secondary. And in addition, it's relativized to the description we're using. But the fact that there are other descriptions we could be using doesn't invalidate the model.

It just means that there will be different results given different inputs, right? So it's just like, it just means that there will be different results given different inputs it's saying that there's two functions we can use to analyze things and now if you tell me that one of the functions has a different range of input than the other one so I don't know the technical thing about what he might say about

why we don't suffer from a relativity of descriptions. That's a good question, Kurt. I'll probably ask him next time I see him. But I do think that, to me, I wouldn't be worried if I was him. I'd be just like, yeah, that's fine. That's exactly what my theory should allow for. It should say, when we went to the primary intention, what we were looking at was some kind of description

that guides our seeking behavior. Clearly, there are different descriptions that we can associate with it. But it does turn out that even if Kripke is right, that most people don't have these descriptions in their mind, or they have very different ones in their mind based on how they learned something, that when it comes to certain kinds of concepts, there is established communities that are identifying causal roles associated with a given thing. So remember, a lot of this debate was not about common terms that don't play a role in what's known as theoretical identification. We want to know what light is.

We want to know what heat is. We want to know what water is we want to know what heat is we want to know what water is we're looking to theoretically understand so this is why the chomsky thing you were saying about learning about science and not doing something that's why that's relevant i would think because in fact kripke was talking about that he was talking about um theoretical identifications towards uh i think two and and 3, Electris 2 and 3. So I think that is what's going on. Now, if you say to me that the dominant descriptions that control investigation of theoretical kinds like Boson, Fermion, are so open to wide variation, the way in which something like,

you know, Kurt might be, I'd be a little bit shocked. Yeah. I would think that there's a little bit more agreement. So in that sense, I think that we can, that there's a way in saying,

well, the model is open to the plurality of descriptions that could be used in a primary intention analysis, but, but, but, but, and it would be relativized to the results of each of those, that doesn't invalidate the model. But by the way, it also turns out to be the case that concerning theoretical identifications for common terms for these kinds of scientific kinds,

like tiger and things like that, there is more or less something that is in common that we would want to do the analysis with. We would want to know, given the description of tigers here that we used actually to discover what the underlying nature of tigers are, what happens if we go to this other planet? What are we rationally led to conclude

in this other possible world? Even in Kripke's definition, primary definition of water is H2O, this brings me... Don't say primary. So he doesn't use primary and secondary. So all he's saying is that water equals H2O is true,

and we discovered that a posteriori. And I guess if you want to say definition, you could say that what defines water is being H2O. That might be it. Okay, so Kripke would say that what defines water is H2O and that that can pick out water in different worlds. Does that not presume that the laws of physics are the same in other worlds?

And when I was looking at your modality distinctions, there's this hierarchy where you have the physical world and you have the metaphysical world outside of that. So physics is nested in metaphysics and metaphysics is nested in logic. So it seems to me, if all of these are possible worlds, let's imagine that you can even view that set, the supersets as different worlds. What Kripke is saying is even a subset of physics, the set of physics that is the same as us, which is the set of physics of all possible physics, which is within the set of

metaphysics, which is within the set of logic. Yeah, so this is extremely relevant. This is actually what I spent... This is the kind of stuff that I sort of, when I was 22 to 26, would think about every day for years on end like I spent all my time working on this kind of thing because a lot of what's going on here Kurt is that Kripke

sort of introduced us to the idea that there might be a partition between the space of possible worlds defined as having the same laws of physics as we have in the actual world, and those possible worlds defined by obeying some logical system, such as first-order classical logic. And he introduced this idea by telling us that there's something called the space of metaphysically possible worlds, which is such that certain metaphysical laws, he didn't say the word metaphysical laws certain metaphysical laws obtain but there are variation in physical laws what does it mean for

a law to obtain um it's a good question i mean i don't really do a lot of like um i don't think about it in terms of obtaining in like the philosophy of science or what people mean when they say a law of physics it obtains i think probably what i just mean is that it's the one that's governing right so if um okay so governed by yeah i got it yeah so i think the way i it. So this is where my sort of mathematical, logic-y way of understanding things comes out. I literally have more of like, okay, well, there's a theory, T. And T has a set of theorems and axioms,

and those exhaustively codify some specific version of quantum mechanics. And when I say that this range of possible worlds is physically possible, I just mean that that T governs what holds in terms of physical possibility in those worlds. So one of the first papers I wrote was not about this one, but about logical possibility. I said, well, you can say the logical possibility is constructed out of paraconsistent logic. You can say it's constructed out of intuitionistic logic. You can say it's constructed out of first-order classical logic. I mean, there's lots of different ways. So, example, if you're building maximal consistent sets, you can use different relations to build

those things. Those entities can be constructed. There's lots of ways to construct them. And so if you think that possible worlds are just these abstract objects that are real and concrete in a sense, sorry, real and particular, not concrete because they're abstract, then we can talk about them in terms of a really important set-builder relation or a logical relation. So I would say the same thing. If you can tell me two different theories of physics, string theory and many-worlds interpretation, and that those two things have very different

fundamental things that they say as part of the core of their theory, then I can say that this set of possible worlds is physically possible in virtue of the fact that it satisfies T for string theory number one. This one satisfies the many worlds interpretation. And so I'm basically labeling these spaces based on what theory they are basically consistent with or satisfying. That's what we mean. Now, the part of your question that is

on everybody's mind, and Dave spent a lot of time doing amazing work in this area, along with other people before him, is that there is this post-Kripkean tendency to either inflate or deflate. So let me explain that. So inflation takes it the case that the physically possible worlds inflate to the metaphysically possible worlds. So that what happens is that there is no notion of metaphysical possibility

that just isn't physical possibility. And that idea is just the idea that there really are no metaphysical laws that aren't physical laws. All we're talking about is that physical possibility just is metaphysical. And actually, Kripke had a sentence, I believe it's in Lecture 3, towards the end of the book, where he said it might turn out to be the case that physical possibility is a possibility to core I think that's

the actual meaning that core to core meaning like it's it's the absolute one like that's the one that so I think the idea is for me as I read it back then was just that physical possibility might just turn out to be what metaphysical possibility is. There's nothing more to talk about metaphysical possibility other than physical possibility. So once you have your correct

physical theory, let's say it's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics plus whatever you need to do other fancy things, then you just know that all the metaphysically possible worlds are just the ones that are consistent with that theory in physics. Would it be alright if you gave an example of what someone would think this is a metaphysically possible world but it's not a physically possible one so that they can see the distinction absolutely absolutely yes yeah so this i've been because i'm a proponent of the distinction i've been asked this question several times by people who have tried to,

to, um, to push me on it and, to make you an inflationist. No, in one way or the other, I didn't explain deflationism, but I'll give you the example anyway,

the beginning. So, um, you know, I always forget the name of this person. I feel so bad if he published this paper in a very famous journal, the journal of philosophy. Um, and it has to do with something in physics actually but um the examples i remember is that um there's a certain kind of particle decay where what

happens is that the particle spins either left left or right and mathematically everything is equivalent it could just spin the other way. And so what the idea is is that there's a metaphysically possible world where all the mathematical things are exactly the same as it spins in the physically possible worlds consistent with our physics, but it just spins the other way.

That's the actual. And I think that is probably the least investigated example in this debate, but I think that example that was published in the early 2000s is, I think his last name is Mario, his first name is Mario Buscolio.

He's an Italian guy. I just thought it was a brilliant example. But the idea is that you have mathematical, structural, explanatory similarity, but you have the opposite spin direction from the particle decay. It just goes in another way. So that's like an easy example. So the idea is generally that something in the physical case is staying the same, and I'm sorry, in the physical laws is staying the same, but something else is occurring. Now there there are other types of examples, too. Those are examples where we say something is metaphysically necessary, even in worlds where the laws of physics are

different. So here's an example of that. Someone could say that it's metaphysically necessary that water has a capacity to be at least a liquid, vapor, and a solid. So even if the laws of physics are different, nothing's going to be water if it doesn't have space properties. That's going in the other direction. That physical laws can change, although something has—so for us to be talking about, to be referring to water, it's a bit more controversial. Is that not just conceptual modality rather than metaphysical? Okay, yes. It's useful if I explain the deflationary approach.

Sure, sure. Right, because that's the two sides of the coin. Okay. So the inflationary approach is to take the things that are physically necessary, just say that's just exactly what the metaphysical. So again, it's an onion, physical, metaphysical, logical. Inflation, physical to metaphysical, one-to-one, right? There's no difference. physical to metaphysical one-to-one right there's no difference yes deflation is to basically take the metaphysical into the logical right okay sorry so now that logic is nested in metaphysics

no no no no the the metaphysical correlates one-to-one oh correlates one oh i see i see yeah so now it's so so first it was physical inflates to uh logical to metaphysical and now logical deflates to metaphysical yeah yeah that's going down right and so then so in both cases what's really happening is we're getting rid of metaphysics it's called skepticism about metaphysical modality grand priest has a really nice paper about this now in, in this move, this other one, the deflationary one, is wherein lies the move about conceptual possibility. So there's two notions of logical possibility. One is called narrow logical possibility, and another one is called broad logical possibility. So narrow logical possibility has to do with logical possibility that's solely determined in terms of the theorems and axioms of the system itself.

So for example, in first order logic, you might have the law of excluded middle. That's explicitly an axiom of the system or a theorem or a law of the system. of the system, okay, or a theorem or a law of the system. Broad logical possibility means something like logical possibility in the narrow sense plus all the conceptual truths. Can you repeat that once more, please? So logical, broad logical possibility means logical possibility in terms of the narrow sense

of just talking about the laws of a specific system, but then you're adding to it a bunch of conceptual truths and you're applying the logical system to all of the conceptual truths. So a classic example that was debated was like, it's a conceptual truth that bachelor equals unmarried male.

Okay? So now we add that as like a theorem. Like all the conceptual truths become like little theorems after we have the law of excluded middle and you know something like modus ponens then we add in oh here so now this notion of logic is the kind of logical possibility and necessity is the kind that's telling us that well the conceptual truths are just additional pieces of information for logic to operate on, but they are in some sense a priori, right? So logic is a priori, independent of sense experience, and the conceptual truths are just these sorts of things that we add in. So one conceptual truth that someone might talk about in the case of water is that water is a liquid or that's a gallon.

So they might put that in there. But water is H2O. There's a question. Is that a conceptual truth? It's definitely not a priori. It's a posteriori. Okay, so this is how we get into things. So when you want to talk about conceptual possibility, people could say P is conceptually possible if and only if P is consistent with the relevant logic that's being used and the set of concepts in question. So in each case, we're relativizing the modality to a kind of thing that determines or adjudicates the possibility or the necessity claim.

So physical laws, metaphysical laws, conceptual truths, and stuff like that. By the way, there's a really great paper on this issue by one of my favorite philosophers. His name is Kit Fine. He teaches at NYU. He wrote a very famous paper called The Varieties of Modality. He wrote a very famous paper called The Varieties of Modality, and in that paper he discusses a lot of these important issues in a nice way and talks about different ways in which you can talk about it. So this is a very important debate in an area called the metaphysics of modality, which is a subset of the philosophy of modality. But yes, so there's three different kinds, four different kinds you can talk about. And then also, by the way, there's other ones. Some people say, well, isn't there a notion of technological possibility?

Right, right. What's technologically possible now is not what's technologically possible in the future, or what was in the past. So there's various specific, and then there's a further debate about what then are the basic kinds of modality. So like they they will say there's a plurality

of modalities are any of them joint carving like are we all making them up in our head is it is all this stuff like is it real these distinctions or are they artifacts of our mind so dane's view is very much focused on um i mean like i'll say what the the thing is that i think is going on but um uh i don't want to be too forceful in saying like this is the only way to interpret it sure i think on his view the space of metaphysically possible worlds just is the same as the space of logically possible worlds. Metaphysics isn't really, metaphysical possibility isn't really something differentiable. So he's a deflationist.

Would that be called being deflationary? In my terminology, it is. In the way I write about it, it is. But I mean, other ways of talking about it is just that he thinks that metaphysical possibility amounts to logical possibility, broad logical possibility, involving the conceptual truths.

And someone like me or other people might think, well, metaphysical possibility has something to do with something that goes beyond concepts and what's involved in our concepts. And you use the word broad logical possibility because you're not just relegating to classical logic. No, that's a good one too. Sorry, maybe I'll clean that up too. By saying broad logical possibility,

it's whatever logical system you have in mind, that could be classical or paraconsistent or intuitionistic, but you have to add something else to it, which is the conceptual truths. So broad doesn't mean that, it's not the important part isn't what is the base logic it's the conjunctive claim the claim that you don't have just a base logic you have another

thing conceptual truths that you're putting together right and so right so right so um i think dave is a first order logic plus conceptual truth yeah person and someone like you know if grand priest or franz berto was doing this they'd be like well no it's para consistent logic and then maybe we add the conceptual truths and so there's all these different players in this area tim williamson has a different view too and how it's done but yeah that's kind of like um that's that's sort of the the difference between those kinds of things now now one of the things that is the reason why this is done, and this is pretty much clearly the important move, is that we've always had this fundamental question of like, how do we know that something is possible? How do I know that something is – this is like a very interesting question because what we mean by possibility here is not that it's something that's actual and therefore possible, because what is actual is possible, but something that we what was being claimed is that it's possible for that's how we get to know it it's possible so there's this idea that how because you're not experiencing any zombies in your life

anytime soon or would if we ran into one we really know what to think about its internal states so someone is saying it's possible for there to be such things and that that's significant so how do we know it's possible yeah well know it's possible because we can conceive it. So conceivability is an important idea that has been around in Western philosophy as a way of knowing about possibility. So this is why this is logic and metaphysical thing is this thesis is important about how you inflate or deflate

because it tells a relational story to how you know. Is what you're saying controversial? That it's possible because it's conceivable? And the reason I say that is, again, going back to Dan Dennett, I believe he or someone, I'm sure you can imagine, you could conceive of someone who would say that it's inconceivable that they're philosophical zombies. If they were to act like us in every single way and down to the cells and so on, they would feel like us. It's just impossible for it not to. Yeah, no, this is very, I mean, so there's two things that are controversial here, and you've touched on both of them, one very explicitly and the other one less explicitly. So the explicit one is whether or not the claim that zombies are conceivable is true or false, okay? And the second one is, who cares if it's conceivable? Why should

conceivability give us an assurance or knowledge that something is possible okay so both of those are relevant i particularly spent and still spend time working on the second question i'm less concerned with whether or not zombies are conceivable yeah i'm more concerned with this way in which our mind uses something like imagination conceivability counterfactual reasoning intuition deduction theory-based deduction in order to come to know these claims so So I mean, but it is absolutely controversial, and you're right, Dan Dennett would say one thing about the conceivability of zombies. For example, the conceivability of zombies in a very clear sense

depends on how much information about the actual or the hypothetical zombie do I have to have to be in a position to make a judgment that i've conceived successfully conceived notice like like so you know there's a you know a famous you know example of um by peter van inwagen about purple cows. I mean, like, if I draw a picture in my mind of a cow and paint it purple, does that count as a conception of a purple cow? I mean, I've done none of the details about how cows could have evolved from what they are,

actually have the pigmentation that is purple. I mean, like, what is... Like, if i just stick something in my head and paint it i mean if i take it that's interesting wings on it and don't put her touching the ground is that a flying is that a conception of a flying pig right so this is the this is the issue is that how does i want to say something that's hilarious many people will will say, I invented that. I invented that app like six years ago. I had the idea for that app. Yeah, but did you think about the inner workings of that app?

Did you come up with a business plan for that app? Did you hire people? It's a variation of that. It is. And also, this is the reason why it's related is because we call this issue the problem of relevant depth. So what we say is that there are ways of conceiving or imagining certain things where the depth of the imagination and conception isn't sufficient

to make it the case that your conception really counts for anything, right? Yeah. So I could say, you know, I had this idea for this app many years ago. Basically, people would get on and post things about their life and share pictures and things like that. Did I conceive of Facebook? Exactly. So it's a relevant depth issue. Except in your case, a little bit of what's going on is the aspect of having credit for the idea.

In this case, what's happening is whether or not the depth is sufficient to epistemically justify a belief that something is possible. Should I go around believing that there are purple cows because I can paint pictures of cows in my head purple? I don't know, man. It doesn't sound like that's really good evidence to me. So that's kind of the way I think about the problem in that case, yeah. Is that what's behind when some people say, look, it's possible that the laws of logic don't apply.

Like, it's conceivable that they don't apply. And maybe some people say that when they've had some experiences, there are some ways you can get to experiences like this with psychedelics or meditation. That's a... had some experiences there are some ways you can get to experiences like this with psychedelics but then the counter would be well how do you even know like what does it even mean it doesn't make sense quote-unquote make sense someone else may that's usually the intellectuals retort to anything that doesn't make sense i don't understand it well one second well can we just look at the that one was cool because i like that um no I don't think you have to be backing off from this in a way of saying you're generally skeptical

I think that it's conceivable that the laws of logic don't apply to this it's interesting because to me what I get hung up on is well what do you mean

about the word uh apply i mean if it applies or doesn't apply isn't that because you've used some logical reasoning to test whether it applies or it doesn't apply so you're saying to me it's conceivable ineffable then it's not conceivable? Yeah, okay. Yeah, there's a different relationship between—no, actually, let me think for a second. There is a relationship between inconceivability and ineffability in at least the following sense. If it's conceivable that P, then it should be effable that P. And if it's inconceivable that P, there should be a sense in which it's ineffable that P, right?

Yeah, that does make sense. I was just worried about the use of the word application in that other case. That's a little bit hard for me to understand. But I do think people do want to say things like it's conceivably the case, I don't know why they would have to say that, but they could say it's conceivably the case that in this domain of experience, logic is inapplicable.

Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, and one of the ways to see this is with the argument about, can God perform a contradiction? And some people would say some people oh yeah like the stone paradox yeah yeah and so some people would say no because the laws of god the laws of logic bound god and other people would say he can maybe he just doesn't or she doesn't or it doesn't but it's possible yeah i mean this is usually this is usually like in that area where people say things about, can I rationally understand what God can do? So God can make it the case that he can lift a stone that's so heavy that no one can lift it by making it the case that he changes the laws of logic because he has the power to do that because he created us and created logic. because he created us and created logic.

Or people can say, all that's happening here is that logic is like that kind of language thing that blocks me from understanding what is the total space of possibility, because all I understand about possibility is limited to me by my ability to reason. Yeah, that's not an uncommon way of thinking. So, can you explain the integration challenge? Oh, oh, okay. Oh, wow, okay. Okay, so integration challenge comes from Christopher Peacock in a book called Being Known in some earlier papers.

And the reliability challenge comes from kind of Robert Nozick, but it can be found elsewhere too. comes from kind of Robert Nozick, but it can be found elsewhere too. So the integration challenge is the challenge of harmonizing or integrating the metaphysics and epistemology of modality. And so the idea was that there was a problem in the philosophy of mathematics that existed in its own way in relationship to integration. And then Peacock kind of applied it nicely into the space of the philosophy of modality. So if you have a Platonistic theory of mathematics,

then mathematical objects are causally isolated from us. But most theories of knowledge think that if you're knowing about something, you should have a causal connection to it in some way, either directly or indirectly. But given that these platonic objects are causally isolated, we can never come to know them. causally isolated, we can never come to know them. So that platonic theory of mathematical objects, along with a causal constraint on knowing, is a non-integratable theory of the philosophy of mathematics. We can't say that all knowledge requires causal contact and mathematical objects are causally inert and expect to get an integrated functioning theory of both the metaphysics semantics and epistemology.

How is the word integration being used here? Integration is being used in the sense of harmony, in the sense that they work, they make sense together. Not in the sense of integration and calculus. It means that the theory of knowing makes sense in conjunction with the theory of what those objects are that they are so for example one of my friends who i worked with for a long time would have argued yeah it's clear that what's going on here is that if you have a

theory of mathematics you ought to say that causation in those cases isn't related to knowing knowing doesn't require causation in the case of mathematics. It does in the case of ordinary concrete particulars in the world, such as perceptible objects, but it doesn't work in that case. Okay, so that harmonizes well. So now in the philosophy of modality, the claim was that how we know about possible worlds ought to be kind of consistent with what they are. If you can't tell a theory of what they are such as that we could know about them. So if you're David Lewis and you think they're like these causally isolated objects like the mathematical

objects in Plato's thing except concrete particulars are causally isolated, then how would we come to know about them? I mean, like, what would be the epistemology of them? So that's the integration challenge. Harmonize both the metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics of the domain of modality. And then the reliability challenge is, I mean, I kind of had like a big thing about this, you know, back in around 2002 and 2004. I worked a lot on this particular one, more than the integration challenge.

So one version of it is kind of easy to sort of tell the story of. It's like, okay, so evolution gives us certain pressures on our ways and methods of knowing. So there's like a pressure. Like you've got to get certain kinds of things right. If you're not able to detect edges of cliffs reliably enough, you're just going to like not be able to stop yourself and you're going to fall off the cliff.

Or if you're not able to reliably detect the color of a tiger, you're going to just get eaten by one. So these are the kinds of considerations which are sloppily sort of just thrown about in this debate. But yeah, that's roughly the idea. So then the thing is like what is the modal detecting faculty in your brain? Why would we have evolved to get something right in all possible worlds when possible world variation is so extreme? I mean I can build possible worlds in terms of different laws of logic. I can build – Right.

Why would there be an evolutionary pressure to get all of these things right? So the reliability challenge is to explain the way in which our minds could be reliable with respect to the acquisition of necessary truths and merely possible truths. Truths that are possible but not actually true, and truths that are true in all possible ways are necessary truths. And so these two terms were used more recently by Amy Thomason to sort of argue for new theories of modality, but they separately derive from Nozick and Peacock. I see. Yeah.

What's a way around that? It sounds ironclad to me. Oh, sorry. So right, right. You mean about the second one? Yeah. So, oh yeah, there's an easy way around this. I mean, I basically wrote one of the chapters of my dissertation around this.

I think it's, I didn't know this is wrong. It's obvious. Yeah. So there's something in evolutionary theory called a Spandrel effect. That is when you aim to produce one thing explicitly, you have a side effect. So it comes from the Spandrels that are in these little things, and I think it's a famous church, right? Where if you have two arches that cross each other, the intersection of those arches will create four spaces. All that was being done was we were creating two arches,

but we got for free this extra thing. It's called Spaniel effect. There is no evolutionary pressure to get things right in all possible worlds, but there is an evolutionary pressure for a certain kind of thinking that can take us to reasoning about possibility. This, I in my way is the inside of timothy williamson's view because he says that the cognitive capacity that's used is not imagination itself nor conceivability itself but is based in a reasoning capacity that is essential for human survival as called counterfactual reasoning or survival. It's called counterfactual

reasoning or suppositional reasoning. So counterfactual reasoning is basically the ability to suppose something and reason from it. The classic example is, if the tree hadn't been there, the rock would have ended up in the lake. That's an example from his actual book. But I mean, that's like totally relevant. If we couldn't reason like that, if I don't move to the left a little bit, the tiger will be close enough to jump and get me. If I move to the right, my spear trajectory will be a lot better.

Like naive physics in terms of hunting and all this stuff requires counterfactual reasoning. So then the way I think I use Williamson's view to defend or respond to Nozick because I say, well, once I have counterfactual reasoning, I can reason my way to truths about metaphysical modality.

And now there's, Williamson actually offers a very rigorous mathematical proof of the ability to get modal truths within counterfactual conditionals. It's a big part of his book. But we can suppress that for a moment. Thank you for me. The proof works. But the idea is that, okay, evolution

will have given us the capacity for counterfactual reasoning, but it's implicated in everything we do. Scientific reasoning, ordinary reasoning, hunting, gathering, everything. There is a relationship mathematically and provably between metaphysical modality and counterfactual conditionals. Ergo, there's a pathway from those into getting that. So bye-bye the challenge of evolutionary pressures. There remains a challenge about explaining

why it's reliable, which is actually something I work on right now in terms of my own research still in this field. I try to explain how the reliability will be better or worse. So we can take the first version of the criticism to be the pathway problem. What is the path even to get there if they're causally inert and isolated from us? And then the other one is not about the pathway being, as I've been saying, the pathway is present. The question is, okay, once you have a pathway, what will account for the reliability, uh, so that we can be saying we're making reliable judgments about modal facts. And so that's kind of what I work on now, but yes, there is a way, but let's talk, let's make

sure we're not forgetting the other things. So they're related. So the idea is that this is like the hard problem of consciousness which i think you've heard of before right these aren't problems in the sense of like what is two plus two and there are problems in the sense that you must give a satisfactory theory by obeying the constraints of integration and reliability that's the way that they're used so there are many different theories. So Amy Thomason defends a modal normativist theory, where modality ends up being about norms of a certain kind. Other people offer, I'm an essentialist, I defend an essentialist theory in this camp. People offer like lots of different views, but they're not problems in that, like,

how do you solve it like that? They're more like, what do you have to say about the hard problem of consciousness? Otherwise, like, I don't really think you've given me a theory, right? That's the kind of thing, like, you've got to say something here. And some things are more satisfactory than others. I don't particularly take the reliability challenge as

seriously as I take the integration challenge as I think you can. Considerations from evolution that don't specify a specific problem beyond the recognition of a spandrel effect seem to me not that valuable. Have you heard of Donald Hoffman? Yes, I know who Donald Hoffman is.

I believe he talks about how our perception of the world makes it the case that it's no reality or something. Yes, well, the fact that it's no reality or something yes well the fact that you would be mirroring reality is the probabilities zero essentially yes that your perceptions would mirror reality does that not put a monkey wrench in the reliability challenge um well i mean the other side of this coin is, has to do with, you know, yeah, I'm not going to share his sympathies. I mean, I just have a different theory of perception, and I think that it's not going to be consistent with what he wants to say.

And there are a lot of moving parts. So the other aspect of my research is that I work on, like I said, two things. I think about how we know what's possible and how we know what's actual. Dominantly over 25 years of my life, I've worked in both of those areas. So I'm concerned with how we have knowledge of non-actual possibilities that are not given to us through perception. If I see a cup, then I know it's possible for there to be a cup there. That's an actual possibility, that actual fact that verifies a possibility fact. But what about your, you know, potential sister or brother you could have had that doesn't exist? Then I think about how we perceive the world, ordinary objects, and how that gives us knowledge of the world.

And so I'm not pretty much, I don't think we need to mirror the world in order to, I mean, that's not the language I would use. I'm sort of a direct realist, and I think perception puts us directly in content with the objects. Again, so that whole idea in Chomsky, if we now bring it out in perception, that's not kind of where my sympathy lies. I don't think in language we're referring to things in our head, and I don't think in perception we're talking about representations in our brain. I just don't think that's the... That's like a confusion of a certain kind to me, a levels confusion.

What's a levels confusion mean? Oh, it means that something that is... Like a category error? Yeah, that's, I mean... No, no, no, no, it is, no, no, no, no, no. It's okay to use the famous example of a category mistake from philosophy of mind to help understand what a levels confusion,

and in some sense, it is. So yeah, it is a category mistake in that sense, but there's other things that could be going on there. It's a way of saying that what is a correct way of talking at one level doesn't really apply at another level. Category mistakes sometimes are a lot more severe than that. There's like saying, if I say the number 16 has parents from Missouri, that's a category mistake because the parent relationship literally understood isn't a relationship that numbers have, right? So there's a relationship between that, but you're right, levels of confusion involves sometimes category mistakes. philosophy that is useful is that the term pratyaksha, which is a common translation from Sanskrit into English as perception, can be used both to

refer to the process that starts with certain kinds of things going on with your retina or with contact with objects in your environment all the way up into consciously saying things, but it can also refer to the product of the all the way up into consciously saying things. But it can also refer to the product of the process, which is like the state of perceiving the cup in front of me. And so I think sometimes in the philosophy of perception, we tacitly engage in making claims from one level to talking about things at another level,

not maybe a level's mistake or confusion, but at least we're transplanting things. And this goes right back to the Buddhists. level to talking about things at another level, not maybe a level's mistake or confusion, but at least we're transplanting things. And like, this goes right back to the Buddhist, like, they're going to say things like, well, you know, the perceptual processing involves a lot of stuff from your mind being imputed to create your conscious perceptual experience of seeing the cup on the table. And all that perceptual processing is something you're imposing that isn't really in the world out there so you know as far as your conscious perception is concerned you're not

tracking the world you're not mirroring the world at all i mean the thing that's relating you to the world in the initial instance where your system comes into contact with the world that might be you know tracking something or i guess they wouldn't use mirroring either, but it's clearly not mirroring it at the level of conceptual imputation. So that's a thing. So I don't know exactly where Hoffman lies on these issues, but there's a family of people in neuroscience and in the philosophy of perception

who like to think of us as basically wet prediction machines. That's a term I like to use for this. So, I know Seth is one kind of person who thinks of us as wet prediction machines for a large part. Yeah. I think Hoffman is a little bit in that camp. I think Friston is a little bit in that camp. I mean, at least they talk that way, and I don't know how much they want to load beyond

that. I'm not a wet prediction theorist. I don't think that's the right way to understand the epistemological status of conscious perceptual states. It might be a way of talking about some components of modeling perceptual processing, but I'm not sure I see it as the right way to think about the epistemology of conscious perceptual states in which we make various claims about the external world in order to justify beliefs and engage in argumentation with one another about the structure of reality. I'm having a difficult time. Help me boil this down to an argument of

against Don or against Anil. Yeah, sure, I can. I think, first of all, I think maybe the reason why we're having a hard time is I haven't given an argument about agreeing or disagreeing with any of these people. My position is not, I haven't laid anything out. from V1 to V8, if you want to talk in terms of those things, or retinal stimulation up into the application of beliefs and concepts in the mind, or what the Indians would just talk about, perceptual contact versus, or indeterminate perception versus, I'm actually writing a paper on this,

indeterminate versus determinate, or what's called nirvikalpaka pratyaksha versus samikalpaka pratyaksha, two different types of perception, one with concepts and one without concepts, or what analytic philosophers call non-conceptual versus conceptual content in perception. Yes, I think there's a very important way in which we must look at the evidence about the brain and how it works in perceptual processing. to say that when we have the conscious experience of seeing a cup on a table, it just is somehow nothing over and above or has no value epistemologically over and above what is going on with the perceptual thing. So for example, I would resist the claim that there are no cups out there in the world that were justified in

believing in based on the fact that all our system does is predict based on our prior experience with objects what would be the most likely thing in our visual field and feeds that up to our conscious perception so I only see a cup because the template in my perceptual stream is a prior exposure has bayesianly codified however you want to say this for um for uh you know this thing coming up i don't um i don't think that that's a good inference from one to the other. And I will admit, though, that there is a lot of pressure to see it that way. There is a lot. Yeah, explain that, please. That's super interesting.

There's a lot of pressure to explain it that way because we have come to understand a certain model of our mind as engaging in the world as kind of like it's odd actually in some ways. Maybe this way of sharing it with you will be insightful and valuable. We want to draw this distinction between us and large language models for example. But when we talk this way that we're prediction machines, I feel like we're prediction machines, I feel like we're like, what is the big difference that basically, unlike large language models that may be doing things

more on the basis of syntactic manipulation versus semantic understanding, we're the same. We're prediction machines in terms of doing something like that. So I don't see that that analogy really works. On the one hand, it makes us much more

closer to the thing that everyone keeps on saying we're fundamentally different from. And at the other time, it seems like we're forcing an inference from facts about how a perceptual process works when it's computationally modeled in a certain way to what is the value of the experience.

And it's not like there aren't any debates about whether or not these sorts of models are the best way to think about it. So there's inactivist theories of perception, there's indirect realist theories of perception, there's realist representationalist theories there's a lot of different things out there on the model and so I think that actually the scientific research is very valuable and probably

one of the most important things as a philosopher you have to pay attention to I'm heavily influenced by Tyler Burge's work who has spent a lot of time making sense of the neuroscientific data and perception to give an account of um perception but I'm not sure like this story really ends there for me like I think there's there's more of a story that you have to tell and so I tend to want to go in that direction as well what are your thoughts on free will um what are my thoughts on free do you feel like there's pressure to go in the direction of there is no free will um what are my thoughts on free do you feel like there's pressure to go in the direction of there is no free will no it's actually the opposite i had this really interesting dinner with richard swinburne one of the leading philosophers of religion in the world and i

had a dinner with him and my wife in um romania and uh we ended up talking about free will and i just told him like i never got into the problem of free will because I think I just was full blown committed to the idea that free will and determinism are incompatible and we have free will otherwise I can't make sense of maybe I'll repeat the same sort of thing I said to him that I say to all my students and everybody

when they ask me about free will. There's two things about free will I care about. One is the thing I'm about to say, and the other is the relationship, again, between artificial systems and freedom in artificial systems and free will. So I'm very interested in those. So here's the first one. I think speaking a language and communicating with someone is an agential activity involving free will at some level and degree of freedom in the choice of constructing sentences and embedding them with meaning to communicate them. So that if we don't have free will, I'm not talking right now. No, there's nothing. It's a parrot.

There's nothing going on there, right? Right? So parrots are merely under one understanding, simply repeating sounds that they've heard without any sort of choice about it in terms of the free construction of meaning. So if I don't have... about it in terms of the free construction of meaning. So one way to make it clear is some people think about free will only in relationship to bodily action. I think about free will in terms of its relationship to mental action. Speaking is a mental act. So if I don't have free will, I don't have any mental actions. If I don't have any mental actions, then I'm not speaking because speaking is a mental action. That's the first point I care

about in terms of free wills. I bring this up a lot. So yeah, then the other one that I bring up is that I'm not so sure that there's some kind of free will that we have that machines are incapable of having because they're so-called quote-unquote programmed in some way and in fact i just saw this wonderful episode of star trek it was in the voyager uh-huh uh fluff where they in fact had a discussion between the doctor who is a hologram and one of his assistants, and the doctor said to the assistant, well, I don't choose anything when I give a diagnosis. I've been programmed to give the diagnosis based on these vast amounts of information that I've been trained on. Like, this is the hologram who's a doctor talking to their assistant about a patient that they have and expressing himself that he doesn't have choice or free will in diagnosis and that he simply takes the data that's been given to him, runs it through all the data he has known before or been given, and then spits out a diagnosis. And then she says this brilliant response. She says, well, what's the difference? I mean, I went to medical school and I studied all this stuff. And basically,

when they give me the information, I try to look at all the information in my head. And maybe the difference is that it's more easily accessible to you because your memory is so free flowing with all its information and mine is forgetful. But isn't the fundamental nature? I thought this was one of the most insightful philosophical episodes of Star Trek because of how this was expressed. And so I thought, yes, I do worry about that issue too, about the degree to which we really can run the Charles Babbage, Lady Lovelace objection against machines' creativity because it's all programmed in.

As the initial objection goes, the Turing responds to in his famous paper. Yeah, so those are my two thoughts about free will. But I'm not a free will expert, and I know there are many people who talk about it in terms of quantum indeterminacy and things like that. I probably should withhold without talking about it. Sure. Is there something about free will that makes it sufficient for something to have moral standing? Oh, I don't think it's a necessary condition.

I think it could be in a condition. So, yes, I think. Yeah, so maybe this is something we can get from free will into the other thing that we kind of wanted to talk about standing and moral grounding yeah so i'll just sort of paint the picture you know please sort of synaptically what the difference is between this is something i actually do have something to say i i like i have a positive thesis more than just picking apart things i don't like and writing papers like i definitely have strong feelings here so i don't think well you're so well articulated that when you say that you don't have something to say it's leagues beyond what most people say when they say i have something to say

oh so your threshold is so above yeah maybe my threshold's too high then uh no so yeah i think my view is that i don't yeah i, I don't think that consciousness is the grounding property. So on my view and my research right now, I think that there's another property that's important. It is not free will though either. It's not free will. So we might say that free will is a sufficient condition for having moral status, but not a necessary condition. But I think the property I'm going to talk about

now is more basic, and it's the one that can explain what's going on with free will, maybe, when I explain the whole theory. So the property I think is relevant is computational intelligence that's goal-directed and tied to preferential states. So this goes back to the example of the creature in the water

who can detect the magnetic north and south and tries to get oxygen-rich water by going in one direction. Yeah, and you call that cognition. And to me, when I think of cognition— I used to call it cognitive suffering. Yeah, sorry. When I hear the term cognitive, I think of a nervous system, and I assume that that's not what you

mean. I don't mean that. No, I don't. So again, let me explain here what's going on. So I think that there are lots of different, like I was always trying to find this word and I never can find it, like the word that properly applies to biological and non-biological creatures. I think sometimes I just want to call them natural versus artificial systems. I mean, a human is a natural system, and a bug is a natural system, and an AI is an artificial system. But I don't really like that. Anyway, you get the point.

There's like these two different kinds of systems, at least, and there are many different versions of each kind. So many different artificial systems and large language models are different than domain-specific chess-playing games and different types of creatures, right? Yes. So the thing that I think makes something have, that gives something moral standing, is that there is a kind of intelligence in it that involves computations, and that intelligence is goal-directed, and the system has preferential states.

So the little creature I was talking about prefers to be an oxygen-rich environment opposed to an oxygen-low environment. It has a detector for getting itself to that thing. It's not the greatest detector, but it does its job. And I can mess with it by putting a magnet over it and then killing it. But the thing is,

that detector is giving it information that has to be computed then to move that it goes in a certain direction. Now, I don't know if the thing has phenomenal consciousness. I don't know if there's something it's like for the thing to detect north or south with that thing.

But I don't want that. But that doesn't matter. Yeah, for me it does. Because the thing is, it definitely prefers to be in the oxygen-rich environment over the low oxygen. Yeah. And so that should be enough to say of that. Now, look, let's go further so you understand. Like, plants have computational intelligence that's goal directed

that involves preferences uh lots of animals and insects above them have the preferences are different than tendencies is that correct that's a good question that's a good philosophical question because sometimes people say that tendencies are, this is related to the free will thing, tendencies are a little bit more automatic and preferences require rational endorsement. I don't really think I need to use preference in that way. This has a tendency to just want to stay at the minimal position. So if I raise it, am I causing harm to it

this doesn't have moral standing because it doesn't meet the artificial life form yeah i get what you're i get this is good exams i get clearly exactly like how it's challenging um i don't know i'm not trying to challenge i'm just no no well i mean it's the right kind of corner case to think about is what i mean i mean sense. Yeah, I definitely think the answer is no, that that thing actually does not satisfy my definitions. But I think the reason why it doesn't satisfy my conditions has to do with the fact that none of the things that are going on with it have to do with anything internal to the thing. I mean, obviously it's gravity and mass alone that account for the tendency. I mean, obviously it's gravity and mass alone that account for the tendency. So the use of the word tendency is eliminable completely.

There's no tendency at all within the object. There's just the application of the laws of physics to things that have mass. It would be one thing if it could have a tendency or could resist yes yes now raymond smullion you must know raymond smullion i don't know him personally but i definitely know who he is yeah the magician yeah yeah yeah he had this dialogue of man with god and free will it was man arguing with god saying hey why did you give me this free will it's this huge imposition you did this to me like take away my free will then god's like okay if i do that then you're gonna commit maybe you'll commit horrible crimes do you still want me to take it away and the man's like no because i'll be culpable now if i do that but but you did this to anyway the conversation then comes down to after lines and

lines and lines god says you think of determinism as somehow the world is so strong that it just determines your actions but what's the difference between you and the world what's the difference between you and law so if we were to take that argument we could say yeah okay well look it's just law of gravity the law law of gravity, or some minimization principle. Yeah, but what's the difference? Like, where's the border between this and the minimization of action? I don't know if this is well-formulated. No, no, this is relevant.

No, it is, because it's about the boundary of what constitutes the system and the creature. Actually, I read this dialogue by Raymond Smullyan on this channel, along with commentary, Link in the description. If you're someone who has this – there's multiple levels to get at this, and I do think it's completely relevant, but I just want to get into it from at least two different levels. So I guess here in this debate, I'm really just concerned with a practical question. I'm not being very philosophical. And so I'm inclined to say that this is a metaphysical question about what makes something an independent entity such that we can ascribe moral standing to it. And why is this relevant? You did it in terms of like this way of talking about the imposition and the boundaries.

But there's another way of blowing apart the whole debate about moral standing. If you're a Buddhist and you believe in relational metaphysics and you think everything is related to everything else, then what does it mean to talk about any one given thing having moral standing and something else not having moral standing given that everything's related to everything else, right? Oftentimes, when I go to these Western debates about moral standing, I have to point out to people because I've studied non-Western philosophy that pretty much nothing they're talking about makes any sense in relational metaphysics. I mean, if everything is related to everything else, then if any one thing has a moral standing, everything else has moral standing, maybe a diluted small drop of it.

Yeah, okay, different degrees. Right, right. So this is the boundary question now dressed up in the moral status thing. So I'm assuming, because in order to debate these people, you have to assume that some form of attribution of intrinsic moral worth to something makes sense. So the example I was given is that, yeah, you know, the pig and the trough is related to a whole bunch of other things.

It's got a little micro gut organisms too. But look, it seems pretty clear that we can talk about the suffering of the pig and it has some moral standing and some moral worth. We can kind of cut it away a little bit and our cutting away allows us to discuss it in this way. And so I think that's wrong. So I think

in order to play this game, we have to table the obvious objection that may even turn out to be the fundamental truth. Because here I think relational metaphysics has a lot going for it, and the Buddhists have cornered the market on some of this.

I'm willing to take that as an objection. But in terms of the way the debate's proceeding, my main goal is to show that sentience, defined in terms of affective consciousness or phenomenal consciousness, depending on whether you're a narrow or broad theorist, is just not really the grounding property. So this part of my view is important for me to pick out. So I distinguish between what's called a grounding property and a grading property. So a grounding property says what it is in virtue of that some system, biological or not, has moral standing in the first place. A grading property says, how do you grade it relative to other things that have moral standing? So there are two views here. If X and Y both have moral standing, then they have equal

moral standing because there is no notion of degrees of moral status increasing and decreasing. Number two, if X and Y have moral standing, then it could be the case that X has greater than Y or Y has greater than X. That's the grading view. So the grounding property for me has nothing to do with consciousness at all. It has to do with computational intelligence that's goal-directed and tied to preferential states that are objectively measurable in terms of the survival of the organism or system, whatever you want to say. And so now the grading properties, this will get you back to free will, by the way, are properties like, well, above having this computational intelligence, does that phenomenal consciousness? Does that affective consciousness? Does that free will,

long-term rational planning? Does that have emotional states? In addition, which one of those does it have as a collective cluster? Like, does it just have emotional states and access consciousness, but no phenomenal consciousness? Does it have some degree of free will tied to its phenomenal consciousness, but not a lot of free will? Does it have low phenomenal consciousness, but something else on a high thing? So it called a cluster view so the view is that grounding is computational intelligence goal-directed tied to preferential states and then grading is done in terms of clusters so every system will instantiate some cluster above the computational intelligence and those clusters then are metricized against each other such that having one cluster puts you at one level of moral standing, having another cluster puts you at another level of moral standing, and so there's a gradation. So it can

be the case that artificial intelligence is much more intelligent than us and has a capacity for emotions on my view as well. But because they lack some other thing that we have, it turns out that our cluster marks us as having a higher moral standing than their moral standing. It could also turn out that some large language models have greater moral standing than some insects, even though those insects are conscious.

Or lobsters, for example, may have the marking properties for affective consciousness, the ability to feel pain. But no large language model can. It'll still be the case, on my view, that we can metricize them because of the cluster they instantiate. Maybe some kind of creatures have a high degree of free will because they're biological. And some machines have a low degree of free will. But those same creatures can't do certain other so you see the idea so the idea grounding is computational intelligence not consciousness so i disagree with all sentience theorists and then grading is done in terms of

clusters and each cluster contains at least two other properties, and those clusters then are weighted against each other, and they typically involve emotionality, affect, feeling, phenomenal consciousness, rational planet. Yeah, that's the general structure that I've been working on for two years, something like that. Anand, what motivates you to think about the subjects of morality and possibilities? And what motivates you to think about the subjects of morality and possibilities? So there are several possibilities of what you could be interested in, in the realm of math, logic, philosophy, language. This is a personal story that might, I think, answer the question, but also be quite revealing in a way that might trip you out a little bit. I became interested in studying about how we know about what's possible

really early on, like in 1990, well, in 1996 when I was an undergrad. And it kind of came to me as just like this problem that Barclay, you know, the famous, you know, can you conceive of a tree unconceived by anyone? That's a modal argument, actually, based on conceivability. And so I was like, you know, modern philosophy class, that was really cool and an interesting idea and sounded like some problem and I was fascinated by it. And then I worked on it for a long time. I was trying to

really, really understand, like, all this stuff. It was only 10 years ago or maybe 12 years ago that I realized that I have aphantasia. Same with Dan Dennett and Josje Bak. Yeah, so aphantasia is basically, in some sense, and this applies to me, is very low mental imagery for imagination and states of mind in that sense. And although I, I obviously must say I've been eating a lot of cheese in England and I,

sometimes my mental imagery pops right back. Oh, great. I don't know about that. I don't know about that. No internal voice or is that, you do have one. Yeah.

No, no. I see. That's interesting. Yeah. So then I realized like, wow, it does make sense in some weird twisted way.

Why I was so interested in these theories of how imagination gives us knowledge of possibility. Because a lot of them, except for Dave's, thought about the way in which we know about possibility through imagination through a pictorial theory of imagination. And I must have been perplexed as a child how that could make any sense. Because I was like, I don't know if I'm having any picture of a pig with wings. What are you talking about? A purple cow in my... Nothing is going on. How could this theory

possibly... Dave was one of the main people to distinguish between objectual imagination and objectual conceiving and propositional conceiving. He has several distinctions. Oh, he has a lot of good distinctions. He's a great philosopher. And so I think that distinction that

when I saw it, I became fascinated with what it could do, because even though I didn't know I had some condition, it turned out that actually that explained sort of like I was digging for how would I be someone who could understand possibility if I don't have this pictorial imagination so I think the motivation for that historically and

the other one though is a little bit different sorry it's a lot different and the reason why it's a lot different is because some of what motivated me to start thinking about this problem about machine emotions and moral grounding was the sense that we were not thinking critically. So I started hearing people talk. I live in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and I would listen to people on podcasts and discussion groups.

The height of the amount of not arrogance or negligence to think clearly about what the claims they were making started to irk me a bit that I started to just in my free time away from my main philosophy I started to think about this moral grounding problem and then I realized like that there was a gaping hole in the claim that machines can't have emotions and that they can't have any moral status because they're not conscious, as I did more and more work.

And then recently I've discovered that there are other people actually who are working on this problem who also think the same thing I think. I just didn't know about them. So I've recently been in contact with Herman Capellan, who's writing a new book on the topic of agency and AI. He and I share a lot of the same views about whether or not AI can have emotions and maybe even like about how they have moral standing.

So that sort of is how I got into that. I mean, I have a longstanding interest in the philosophy of economics as it relates to moral philosophy, but that's a different thing. This particular interest came just from kind of being tired of hearing people talk and actually quite knowledgeable theorists in the ai research community were making these claims and i and i just found myself thinking like this just can't you can't be saying so quickly that they can't have emotions because they can't feel that's a naive view of the philosophy of emotions which has been going on across multiple cultures for over 2 000 yes years like what do you why would you possibly assert that unless you arrogantly assumed that there's only one theory of emotions

and only one way to talk about it's like everything is about feeling and everything's about phenomenal consciousness there's nothing else to talk about here and so because they're made of silicon and silicon things can't realize these states there's nothing more to talk and i just became like flabbergasted by the the like i'm not even sure i believe completely the machines can have emotions but i have a really good argument that can show exactly a pathway to it you don't see it so flippantly dismissed i don't think we should be flippantly dismissing it i don't think we should be yeah You don't see it so flippantly dismissed. I don't think we should be flippantly dismissing it. I don't think we should be. Yeah, I don't think that's good. That's bad critical thinking when we're constructing and building something that potentially has massive ramifications

in our everyday lives, as is already seen by what they can do. Well, when the machines take over, you're going to be on their good side. That's for sure. Maybe they'll be like all that on and by the guys like this. He was rooting for us. No, well, like all that on and by the guys. Like he was rooting for us. No, well, yeah, I'm theoretically thinking it through, but yes, there is something to it.

No, that's basically, yeah, those are the two sides of those two coins. Man, we touched on consciousness. We touched on AI, morality,

free will, physics, math, God, Indian philosophy, Western philosophy, modality. This is every topic on the theories of everything

channel in one podcast did i do did i do a theory of everything talk do i actually talk about almost everything you did a toe podcast without actually explicating a toe so that's the first oh that's yeah i'm that thing is above my pay grade i don't think i'm gonna get there. I'm sort of like in the theory of everything by touching on everything. I'm a different toe. Yeah. I'm not a theory of everything. I'm a touch on everything. Aha, great, great.

And next time we can talk about constructor theory. I know you're going to delve into that. Oh, yeah. I've been reading about that. We'll do some constructor theory next time. Yeah, yeah. And just for the audience, the reason is that you study modalities and counterfactuals. So possibilities, impossibilities necessary.

Yeah, the other one you're going to like is in the future, we should talk about this theory that has been floated around recently. That back when I was in grad school in the 90s, people kind of knew about this, but they didn't really work on it. And I don't know why, but now it's more available. And I don't know why, but now it's more available. And that's the idea that the philosophy of physics that is closely related to actual physics in terms of working is just the philosophy of modality. So Alistair Wilson, I think, has written the most recent book sort of articulating this. but it was something we kind of already kind of thought about like the many worlds interpretation in terms of looking at um possible world semantics yeah yeah like it was so next time we can probably try and like work through some of that yeah and i think you'll find that that's actually probably in some way related to the constructor theory stuff yeah when i heard that if you didn't

attach the name allister to it i wouldn't have thought it was that person. I would have thought it was Chiara Marletto. I don't know that person. Chiara Marletto is the founder or developer of constructor theory along with David Deutsch. Oh, right. So I'm not mentioning constructor theory. I'm mentioning the theory of philosophy of modality that could be related to the idea that philosophy of physics and philosophy of modality are very closely, intimately related, in that both of them are trying to tell us something about possibility in a very important way. Yes, they are related to constructor theory heavily.

Here's something that I was thinking about. So in modal logic, it looks to me like there's so much symbol manipulation. Like there's these squares and Ps and there's something called Loeb's theorem or Loeb's theorem. Anyhow, the proof for Loeb's theorem or Loeb's theorem, it's quite contrived. I don't have an intuition for it. I can follow it with the symbols.

Like, okay, these are the rules. And it seemed to me like modal logic or doxastic logic is done in a different way than regular math. And I wanted to know like modal logic and or doxastic logic is done in a different way than regular math. And I wanted to know if my perception is correct as an outsider. So regular math is done where you walk and you think about subjects and you relate them. Then you have some insight. You go back to the blackboard and you try and find the words to put to the ideas and see if it matches the words meaning the symbol sorry now in modal logic it looks like category theory to me where there's it's

the opposite it's the symbol pushing and then at the end then you're like okay now what does this actually mean okay now is that perception correct or no okay so there are... It could become more complicated than it needs to be, but I'm going to do the version that's very straightforward given the way you described it. But you understand what I'm saying. Oh, I understand something that is extremely relevant here that's studied.

It's the difference between proof theory and model theory. That's the difference, as I understand. So the difference between how I'll articulate is that there is nothing that says I have to think when I'm doing stuff in modal logic proof theoretically versus... So let me explain what that means. Proof theoretically means I'm thinking about more or less proofs and symbol manipulation. I don't care what these things, symbols on the board, means. They're just, I'm moving around boxes and squares and diamonds,

boxes and diamonds, and parentheses based on rules given in the axiom system. If I'm in an S4 modal logic system, I have transitivity. If I'm in a B system, you know, I'll have symmetry, but I won't have transitivity. And I'm in an S5, I'll have the Euclidean property. And these are the rules. And model theory, I'm thinking about something more semantic, more meaning-related, right? And so I can approach doing my logic in these different ways. And different theorists in the history of the philosophy of logic have preferred one of these over the other.

They have preferred to be proof-theoretic people as opposed to model-theoretic people. Or they've seen a value in each of them. Right, so I definitely think that's correct. But what I don't think is a correct perception is like as if, like I wouldn't say that there's some way in which you're moving around these symbols and then you're forced to ask only at the end, what does this mean? There is a way in which when you started by saying modal logic and doxastic logic, I did understand this claim claim so let me clarify that

I can follow a system as five as it relates to proving things and I can do proofs and then I can ask myself at the end,

if the box means metaphysical modality, what have we shown? If the box means no and the diamond means believe, then what have we shown? Because boxes and diamonds, I mean, I guess I learned this a little bit, the language I use is called,

there's like an algebra. There's an algebra of how to move these things around. But then I can take that algebra and I can interpret it. There's an operator algebra. How can I use the box and what can I do? And then there's, what can the box mean? So for example, in deontic logic, we don't always use boxes and diamonds. example in deontic logic we don't always use boxes and diamonds we use like the

letter O capital letter O for obligation and another letter for permissible but ducks but deontic logic is about the modality concerning should and should not it's about the moral it's not about the metaphysically modal so a leftic modality and doxastic is about belief, knowledge, doxastic states. So in general, we have this idea that there are certain theorems that a doxastic logic will satisfy,

while a modal logic that's about metaphysical, for example, will satisfy something else, and deontic logic. And so I typically use the word Alephic modality to signify the kinds of things that I'm talking about. But I wouldn't say that other thing you said about, like I don't know, I mean maybe unless there's something about category theory, I don't really know a lot about it. At least in terms of my studying of modal logic,

there's one that says I have to, like I can start my proof and say, oh, box P means it's necessary that p and diamond p means it's possible to p and i've worked through the whole proof and think about it that way and in fact i might even have more insights about how to think about proving it based on having it mean something as opposed to just figuring out how to do it uh with symbols yeah so yeah that's my the simple way of me understanding what's going on there and so i wouldn't say like there's some difference with the oh maybe the way you're categorizing the difference between how you

do certain things in mathematics and how you do certain things in logic is that there's a level of abstraction that's a little bit more removed in the logic case actually i think that actually might be accurate because the domain of what you're talking about so when you're talking about logic in a lot of ways in terms of certain things you're talking about rules of logic which basically i'll give you the name it's called the the fun conception of logic unfortunately the word fun probably doesn't mean what you think the logic isn't fun for a lot of people. The fun conception of logic means that logic is formal, universal, and topic neutral.

It's a way of thinking about what logical truths are about. So A or not A is fun because it's formal, applies to everything, universal, and topic neutral. It's neutral about what topic it is. The fun conception of logic is that level of abstraction back that might be something that you don't find in a lot of error. Like, you know, topology is probably about spaces of some kind, and whatever, I'm not a mathematician, but you get the idea. This is a little bit higher up in abstract.

However, I will say this. Although I was taught and trained under the view that logic is fun in a sense, I don't agree with that view at all. I'm more in line with the kind of views that Timothy Williamson has argued where logic clearly is making substantively important claims about what's going on. It does have some infection into the things. The fact that the symbols of the system have a property of being permutation invariant

over various domains, this permutation invariance isn't really making it fun. So that's a big topic in philosophy of logic. But yes, the way in which you're saying it could be different because of how you think about what you're doing and what you're operating with in terms of having a level of abstraction, I mean, that can be understood this way. So I have another large question that I'll just say. And if you could say it shortly, then state your answer shortly. But if not, we'll save it for the next time. Is there a view of both deflationary and inflationary?

So that is that physics is equivalent to metaphysics, which is equivalent to logic. So Max Tegmark maybe says that physics and math are the same. Same with Wolfram, maybe. Right, I got it. So is there someone who's saying, no, not as I understand the space of how this is debated, that they are one in the same. Nor would I be that much inclined to think that what Max and Stephen are saying is directly related to, for example, what David, I, Sidney Shoemaker, and Brian Ellis are talking about. Because it's not about a generic, wider notion of mathematics. It's very specified to a certain understanding of logical systems, the notion of conceptual truth,

the notion of what is it trying to get at when we say metaphysical modality and Kripke's naming and necessity and what actually makes sense. So the collapse paper by Graham Priest where he argues for skepticism about the reality of metaphysical modality is kind of like a really good place to look to see what are the kinds of ways in which people push back on this sort of idea that metaphysical modality cards a joint in the space of possible worlds that's distinct from logic and physics. But there is a relationship of people wanting to say this other thing, which you might have wanted to say, where they're saying there's two ways of looking at it, right? So if I look at it one way, I can see the physical possibilities just are the metaphysical possibilities. And if I switch my orientation, I can see that they're just the logical possibilities. That hasn't really been developed because it hasn't been relevant in the debates so far. But I mean, if someone wanted to go anti-realist and say that really whether something turns out to be physically possible

or metaphysically is all relative to the orientation or the framework we put upon it, that's an anti-realism that they could go for. I'm not that kind of anti-realist, but yeah, that would be a way to do it. Last question. Doc's asked a question. If you believe P, do you then believe that you believe P? Oh, no. No, I don't think that's true. Yeah, no, definitely not. Because, and that's an important principle

that I think reveals a lot, and it's very useful that you ask that specific version of the S4 iteration principle, because that doesn't make sense iteratively at all. So the reason why I don't like that principle is for two reasons, basically. It's applied to belief. The F-square axiom is applied to belief. It's because if you believe that P, it might be the case that the requirements for belief have never been exercised such as to generate that you believe that you believe that P.

So that's the first thing. Like, if I believe that water is wet, what does it take to generate the belief that I believe that water is reflected? Do I just still think about water being wet and whether I believe that? Or do I have to think about whether or not I believe that water is wet? It seems like I have to embed the first-order claim, and I don't know what the generation conditions are,

or that we often enough do that. So it could be because I believe that p but I just never bothered to reflect on whether I believe as opposed to doubt that I believe that p so there's an interesting argument to be had there which makes me resist wanting to endorse it but more importantly as I as I argued as I as I endorsed my professor's view when I was an undergrad, I just don't think iteratively it makes sense. I'm very much against the idea that it makes sense that there's something going on when I say that I believe that I believe that I believe that I believe in P. I actually had this argument and debate with Timothy Williamson one time where we were talking, and he's like, yeah, doesn't it iterate? Isn't there an obvious sense in which we can say

that it iterates up to that many? And I was like, I don't think it makes any sense. I think it makes sense to say you believe the P. And maybe it makes sense to say you believe that you believe the P. Once you get to the third one, I'm thinking everything after that just collapses down to the first one. And so there's this idea also that in S4 modal logics, iteration collapses. But it seems to me that that cuts in the other way because believing that you believe that P does seem to be substantially different than believing that you P.

Yes, I understand. So it's a nice one. I think it's a good object lesson when we're teaching how modal operator algebra of boxes and diamonds can be interpreted differently to get different results because look there's the famous t-axiom says box p then p if you interpret box to be belief that's clearly false if you believe that p doesn't follow p is true but if you interpret box to be necessity well if it's necessary that p then p is true that seems like analytically and obviously true. So your lesson is an extremely important one

because it teaches people to realize that unless you have a model of an understanding of what the boxes are, you're going to get different theorems that are perfect. That's right. That makes perfect sense. Speaking of believing in P, I haven't used the washroom in a while.

So got to get going and also i think that the bp implies bbp is central to the debate between jordan peterson and sam harris i think that's what they're jordan peter so if you believe p then you believe that you believe p oh bbp then the bbp oh sure implies BBP. Oh, sure. I think that's false. As far as my understanding is, Sam Harris says yes, that's obvious, and Peterson says no, that's not obvious. That's false.

Wait a minute. Sam Harris says that BP... No, no, no. This is my inference from their debate. Yeah, I don't. I don't. All right. And even actually, we can do the other one if you believe that you believe that P do you believe that P

maybe that one seems a little bit more like I could step my foot into it although I still think there could be issues about the release from the belief to the belief that P but if you believe that P you believe that you believe that P man that's probably a person's

dissertation in my opinion if it hasn't already been written all right and then it was so much fun four hours thank you four hours like it went by like this you ask great questions you know what you're doing man it's a fun time what can i say thank you and you give great answers thank you okay take care all right the episode is now concluded. If you like this episode, I encourage you to check out the Lawrence Krauss episode on cloud entities, what it takes to live forever. Physically speaking, it's a Dysonian thought experiment

about can we in principle live forever despite the heat death of the universe? It's the most technical interview Krauss has ever done. That's what he said on air. And this is a huge compliment, considering he's done over 400 interviews. There's also the Josje Bak and Ben Gortzel podcast. That one's on AI consciousness and AGI timelines.

And of course, there's part one with Anand Vaidya, where he gives his talk on moving beyond non-dualism and integrating Indian modes of thought, as well as concepts from the Vedic tradition, into the AI-slash-consciousness conversation. Thank you. YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for Theories of Everything, where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. Last but not least, you should know that this

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