Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Bas van Fraassen: Why Science Doesn't Reveal Reality

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Professor Bas van Fraassen argues science doesn't deliver literal truth about reality, meaning unobservable physics is merely a model. He also contends the self isn't a thing and that logic permits free will, ultimately sharing how he maintains faith in God without relying on metaphysics. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00 - Reality vs. Appearance - 08:40 - Scientific Realism vs. Anti-Realism - 16:30 - The "No Miracles" Argument - 22:26 - Common Sense Realism - 27:54 - Trusting Instruments vs. Theories - 34:22 - Kierkegaard's Call to Decision - 41:50 - Determinism is a Model - 48:50 - Sartre on Free Will - 56:47 - Causation Doesn't Exist in Physics - 01:05:47 - Language of Human Action - 01:15:54 - Tarski's Limitative Theorems - 01:23:50 - "I Am Not a Thing" - 01:34:20 - Rejecting Analytic Metaphysics - 01:40:17 - Does God Exist? - 01:50:50 - Disagreement on Monty Hall - 01:56:15 - Conversion to Catholicism LINKS MENTIONED: - The Scientific Image [Book]: https://amzn.to/499SA72 - Bas's Blog: https://basvanfraassensblog.home.blog/about-me-2/ - The Empirical Stance [Book]: https://amzn.to/3MWbKEK - Bas's Published Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EBj6wCAAAAAJ&hl=en - Bas's Published Books: https://amzn.to/3L0njdw - Reality Is Not What It Seems [Book]: https://amzn.to/3YseMDe - Matthew Segall [TOE]: https://youtu.be/DeTm4fSXpbM - The "No Miracles" Argument: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/#MiraArgu - Bas On Closer To Truth: https://youtu.be/nQnQ9ndlYi4 - The Most Terrifying Philosopher I've Encountered [TOE]: https://youtu.be/BWYxRM__TBU - Curt Reads Plato's Cave [TOE]: https://youtu.be/PurNlwnxwfY - Avshalom Elitzur [TOE]: https://youtu.be/pWRAaimQT1E - Formal Philosophy [Paper]: https://archive.org/details/formalphilosophy00mont/page/n5/mode/2up - Robert Sapolsky [TOE]: https://youtu.be/z0IqA1hYKY8 - Time And Chance [Book]: https://amzn.to/4qb6tru - Aaron Schurger [TOE]: https://youtu.be/yDDgDSmfS6Q - Nancy Cartwright's Published Work: https://www.profnancycartwright.com/publications/books/ - Tim Maudlin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/fU1bs5o3nss - Elan Barenholtz & Will Hahn [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Ca_RbPXraDE - On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies [Paper]: https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/Einstein_graduate/pdfs/Einstein_STR_1905_English.pdf - The 'Twin Earth' Thought Experiment: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hilary-Putnam#ref1204773 - Yang-Hui He [TOE]: https://youtu.be/spIquD_mBFk - The Nonexistent Knight [Book]: https://amzn.to/3XWxfrs - Wolfgang Smith [TOE]: https://youtu.be/vp18_L_y_30 - Neil deGrasse Tyson Doesn't Understand What "Belief" Means [Article]: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/i-dont-use-the-word-belief-and-scientific - The Monty Hall Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem - Daniel Dennett [TOE]: https://youtu.be/bH553zzjQlI - Michael Dummett: https://iep.utm.edu/michael-dummett/ - How To Define Theoretical Terms [Paper]: https://www.princeton.edu/~hhalvors/teaching/phi520_f2012/lewis-theoretical-terms.pdf - The Model-Theoretic Argument: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-sem-challenge/model-theory-completeness.html - Remembering Hilary Putnam [Article]: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/remembering-hilary-putnam-harvard-philosopher-and-religious-jew - Hilary Lawson: https://www.hilarylawson.com/biography/ - Language Isn't Just Low Resolution Communication: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/language-isnt-just-low-resolution Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm not a thing. I'm not a thing of any kind. I'm not a physical thing. I'm not an abstract thing. I'm not something supernatural. I'm not a thing, period. Professor Boss von Frazen's 1980 book, The Scientific Image, detonated a bomb in the philosophy of science that's still reverberating to this day. The professor argues that science doesn't aim to give us true theories about unobservable reality. science just aims for empirical adequacy, full stop. So all of this truth about quarks, sway functions, space-time curvature, it's all just superrogatory. Optional.

Not the goal. Today, we turn to the self and the limits of language. Von Frazen draws on Tarski's limited of theorems and demonstrates that we can't construct a true representation of our own language, and therefore we can't adequately represent ourselves. It's logically impossible. My name's Kurt Jaimungle, and on this channel, I interview researchers about their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Most of the time is from a theoretical physics perspective, but today I have one of the legends in contemporary philosophy, one of the most cited philosophers in the philosophy of science, Professor Boss von Frazen. Questions explored today are what is real, what is science, where does free will enter, what am I slash who are you, even faith?

and what is God? Many people have a concept of quote-unquote reality, and so do many philosophers. What is that concept, and why do you think the question of what is reality is not such a great question? Well, I would say, logically speaking, everything is real,

but we can make a distinction between reality and appearance. You know, like Carlo Rovelli's book with the title, Reality is not what it looks like, I think, something like that. reality is not where it appears, we can make a distinction between how things appear to us and how we think they really are. Now, that has been a philosophical problem during the modern period. But for me, it's not a very good question because I think that what's important is exactly what appears to us. And when we try to add to this kind of, what's, say, superstructural

our substructure, we are theorizing, we're fictionalizing, we are trying to find things that go beyond our can, so to speak. And it seems to me that it has been a typical misconception of science that is what it's trying to do.

Does science always provide a model? Yes, science provides models, yes. Scientists can start models. Models are representations. I mean, you can begin with a tabletop model, right? Say, with a double helix, you can make a mathematical model,

which is what typically, of course, one does now in the sciences. It is, what the scientists do is they construct representations of the phenomena that they target. And a theory will be a kind of outline of what these representations have to be like. So the models of the theory are different possible representations of the phenomena. Then the next question is, what exactly is the relation between the representations, and a target, right? And most people immediately say, oh, it must resemble what it represents. But that is, for a long time, be regarded as a poor answer.

Because, first of all, representation, even when it does fade on resemblance, which often it doesn't, it's very selective. A subway map doesn't look like a subway. The resemblance is very selective about what exactly it represents. And I think of scientific models in the same way. scientific models do trade on resemblance to some extent, but very selectively, and not without adding anything necessary to help the theory run well. So is a model just a specific type of representation?

Yes. In other words, not every representation is a model, but every model is a representation? Yes, I would say so, yes. Now, you said that some scientific models trade on resemblance, but not necessarily. Okay. Now, the standard folklore that people hear is that it goes from, well, anything that you do,

let's suppose that's some consequence of psychology, which is some consequence of neurology, and then chemistry or biochemistry to then chemistry to then physics. Okay, so physics is supposed to be seen as the most foundational. How do you view that whole line of thinking? Yeah, I tend to think of physics as the most foundational science. Yes, I do. I do. It doesn't mean that I think all the sciences are necessarily reducible to physics.

That, I think, is an open question in many cases. But it is certainly the most basic one in the sense that different sciences will draw on other sciences. All of them eventually have to draw on physics. So, for instance, in biology, you will draw on chemistry, but in chemistry you will draw on physics as well, you see. So what's the difference there between being foundational and being reducible to? If you could translate, say, a chemical theory or a biological theory entirely into their language of physics, say, of contemporary physics, then that would be a reduction. There is no practical way to do that, and there are many theoretical objections to the idea that you can.

So, as I say, it is in many cases an open question. For example, when people talk about how phenomenological thermodynamics is reducible to statistical mechanics, well, they are talking not about a literal translation. They're talking about approximations that an agreement in the respects that they want. So, a reduction, you know, is a bit of an idealistic aim. Professor, I don't know if you know what Reddit is. Have you heard of Reddit? Yeah, I've heard of it.

I don't often look at it. Okay, so on Reddit, there are different subreddits, which are the various rooms of Reddit, and there's a great, great subreddit called Ask Philosophy. They don't suffer bad philosophy lightly. I love this subreddit. It's one of my favorites. and they have people who respond

who are credentialed scholars or people with PhDs and so forth and they answer questions that late people ask one of the questions that come up often is who are the contemporary philosophers that people will study in the future because most of the time we hear about Kant and Hegel and Plato and so forth

but those are obviously historical so the question is which living philosopher will be referenced by people of the future and three names come up often on this ask philosophy subreddit. One is Renee Gerard, who died recently, so that's no longer applicable. And then the other is Timothy Williamson. And the third name is someone named Boss von Frasen.

So, boss, I'm so excited to speak with you today. It's a huge honor. No, come on. It's an honor for me to be interviewed by you. I've seen so many of your podcasts that I've, you know, and you interview so many very famous people that I'm honored to be there. Well, okay, sir, I wish, so you're in San Francisco currently, correct? In the Bay Area.

Yeah. I wish I lived on the West Coast so I could meet up with you in person often because there's so much knowledge that you have that I want to pick your brain about. This conversation is going to tread on so many different topics. If anyone just tuned in, most likely what we're going to talk about is, well, science, because you're a scientific anti-realist, and it would be great to outline what the heck that means, which would mean outlining what is science. as well. And then I would also like to talk about the self, which seems to be another way of

phrasing, what am I? So what is the self? Is another way of asking, what are you? Who are you, the person listening? And the limitations of language, the limitations of models, the creative aspect to language, which we talked about off air. Why don't we talk about what is science? Before we outline what is scientific realism in order for you to counter that with scientific anti-realism. Well, but that's exactly the question that divides the realist and anti-realists. And when I was studying, you know, as a graduate student, one of my teachers was Wilfred Sellers, main scientific realist of the day. And my impression was that there was a total focus on the products of science, the theories that the scientists come up with. But science is an activity, it's an enterprise.

And what defines a human enterprise is the aim, the goal, the telos, as they say. So I thought that the way the question should be asked was, what is the aim of the scientific enterprise? And the only way to answer it would be to look at what the scientists actually do when they are evaluating each other. And it always comes down to empirical tests. If a theory has no empirical implications, very soon they regard it as mere metaphysics. If it does have empirical implications, they ask for what are the experiments that will tell us which way to go. So I proposed that the aim of science, the way to define science is by its aim. And I propose that the aim is to give us empirically adequate theories, theories that, you know,

work on the empirical level. And my teacher, Wilfr Sellers, had totally different answers. His answer was that it aims to give us literally through theories about what there is in detail and to explain for him the aim of the enterprise of knowledge was to be in a position where you can explain what you have. have. And so that's where the, you know, that's where the discussion began for me. Are most scientists scientific realists, or they think of themselves as a scientific realist? Well, you know, by my definition of a scientific, by my definition, a scientific list is someone who believes that the aim is to produce literally true theories about what they're

with nothing added, nothing lost. I think that most people, when they ask or are scientific view list, they think what you mean is, do you believe that the current scientific theories are true? And some scientific realist philosophers make that part of their position, the belief that our current best theories are true, maybe with some approximation, right?

Now, you don't have to be a philosopher to believe that theories are true, right? I mean, that's, you know, you believe or you don't believe, that's fine, you know. The question is, you know, what is the criterion of success for these theories? If they fail empirically, they fail. And I say, if they succeed empirically, they succeed. That's what science is. Why are you considered to be a scientific anti-realist? Oh, because succeeding on the empirical level does not imply truth.

A theory will introduce many extra things that are not directly measurable, right? Many quantities in a theory in physics specifically can only be measured via some theoretical equations in your calculations. So you have direct measurements, but then a theoretical quantity, is one that can only be measured by a theory-guided measurement, right? And success on the empirical level is success with respect to the direct measurements. So that logically leaves open the possibility that, in fact, the theory is not true

about what else there is. And that's the anti-realist position. It sounds to me like that's not anti-realist. At least in my head, when I think of anti-realist, it's as if you're saying that they're definitely not describing reality. But it sounds to me more like you're saying you're agnostic as to what's being described. Yes, yes. I'll give you an example. Like, a theist is someone who would believe in God, an atheist is someone I would consider to be an anti-theist, I mean, but that obviously has a

different connotation. But an agnostic would be someone who's undecided. So it sounds to me more like you're agnostic, and I don't know where this word anti, maybe it's historical, or maybe have a misconception of the prefix. Well, no, you could be a scientific gnostic or a scientific agnostic, right? You could, without being a philosopher, right, without worrying about what science is, just you're agnostic or an agnostic about it, right? As I say, I believe or I'm not sure, whatever. It seems to me that the philosophical issues are.

are separate from that. They're separate from belief. So I would say that if you accept the scientific theory, then you believe that it is impregly adequate. That this will be impregly successful if you accept it. Now, you could add the belief that it is true. That's up to you. But I would say it's supererogatory. Now, Hillary Lawson is an English philosopher who's known for being that either an anti-realist or a non-realist. And I'm unsure what the distinction is between those two. But either way, it's more broad than being a scientific anti- or scientific non-realist. Yes, it is, yeah.

Can you briefly outline the general view of non-realism or anti-realism to distinguish it from your scientific non-realism or anti-realism? Well, I would say to begin, I'm a common-sense realist. I mean, I have, unlike some philosophers, I have no difficulty with referring to rocks and trees and saying there is no philosophical problem about my reference to you, you know, Kurt, right, or my computer, or the rocks that I climb or the trees that I walk among, right? I'm a common sense realist. Now, there's a more sophisticated question that they can ask. They say, well, what do you think about truth and falsity? Our statements sometimes neither true nor false.

I would say, yeah, I think there's lots of examples where they're neither true nor false. But in the case of the language of a scientific theory, I say they are true or false. That's it. They're true or false. no, there's nothing to do with what we know necessarily, right? So there's the kind of realist who doubts that, and there's anti-realist, I mean, the kind of anti-ness who doubts that, right?

And there's the kind of anti-reelist who just says, no, it's false, right? And I think that they should just call them skeptics. That is not, to me, whether theories are true or false, is not a philosophical question. interesting whether theory is are true or false is not a philosophical question right it's a matter of fact and nature will decide for us uh right i believe you once said the argument for scientific realism one of the largest ones is the no miracles argument yes and for people who don't know what the no

miracles argument is i can place a link on screen to it it basically says that how else can you explain the level of predictive success of science unless it was approximately true? That's interesting. That's interesting. Shall I say something about that? Yes, please. Yeah. So the numerical argument is, look, science is so successful that if the scientific

theories must be through, otherwise it would be too much of a coincidence for the mall to give us through predictions. Now, I would say, okay, well, there's a fact to the success of science, and you're asking for an explanation of it. Now, if you look to scientists, when they explain the success of a theory, what do they do? When they want to explain the success of Newtonian theory, they say, oh, well, it gives good approximations to the answers that we now get from relativity, right? And if they want to say some of the predictions of Galileo were correct, they say, well, good approximation to Newton's laws in certain respects.

So always what they do is they explain the success of a previous theory in terms of the current theory. Okay, so now if that's the right pattern of scientific explanation, what would be an explanation of science as a whole? impossible right I mean the only thing that's left is an unscientific explanation because you can't if you always explain the success of a science by appeal to a later or better science

then you cannot do that for current science as a whole so the numerical argument really asks for an unscientific explanation because they're making an appeal to some future undetermined science some idealized final science? Maybe that's what they're doing, yeah. Are you referencing Hempel's dilemma or no?

Putnam and Boyd, yeah. I mean, Hemphill started that kind of discussion, but Putnam and Boyd gave the numerical argument. Yeah. And so, you know, they say in effect, look, can you explain the success of science? They say, we can explain it by saying that, theories are true.

Right? And I'm saying, well, look, that doesn't, that is, you're not following the pattern of a scientific explanation here. When scientists get explanations of the success of theories, they do something quite different. They always appeal to the later or better theory. And you cannot do that for science as a whole. I remember you said that a mouse doesn't have to survive to be true, it doesn't have to have a true model of the cat, it just has to survive. And so you were thinking of theories, or at least

saying that one possible explanation for the truth of theories is that we generate a variety of theories, many, if not most of them, die, and the ones that are left have survived, but that survival isn't the same as being truthful. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's how it works in science. When a theory fails an empirical test, then it's modified or discarded. That's That's natural selection, right? And so not surprising that the theories that we accept are successful theories because the unsuccessful ones, we discarded or we modified it so as to make different theories. So then what would be the best way to or best method to uncover or investigate quote-unquote reality,

if not the scientific one? Yeah, you see, I don't, I think that the theory, is about what goes beyond the phenomena, the only appearances, they are just representations and there will always be different possible representations. When you have two of them, quite often you can decide that one of them is better than the other by some test, but there would always be other possible representations of it. So, you know, no, I do not think that this... that is a way to get behind the phenomena.

No. No. I mean, not with, you know, I mean, not more than what we do. No. Can you contrast common sense realism with naive realism? Yeah, a naive realist would also say, you know, numbers exist and, uh, uh, um, colors exist and so on.

In some ways, of course, I'm saying, yeah, of course, I mean, I mean, in some ordinary way of speaking, you know, there are prime numbers, right? Some things are red and some things are blue. But the naïve realist will reify everything. Gilbert Ryle called it the quote phaido principle that, you know, if you have a word, then it has to refer to something. I think that's naive realism. and no, I resist that very much.

I resist reification very much, yeah. You know, I think it would be helpful if you outline what was Boss's journey? So where did you start off philosophically, in terms of your model of the world, in terms of your philosophy or theory, how did that change? And what precipitated those changes?

Well, you know, I'm trained as an analytic philosopher. But when I was started, when I was an undergraduate and also my first years in graduate study, I was very much into existentialism and phenomenology. I had books that I had gotten from Holland. I mean, I had emigrated when I was 15, so I knew Dutch very well.

And there's things I was interested in. I was getting some books from Holland by phenomenologists and existentialists. And when I was in Pittsburgh, as a graduate student, right nearby, there was DeCaine University, which was not analytic, and I would go to lectures there. So I think that then, of course, I got completely engrossed in analytic philosophy, logic and philosophy of science at Pittsburgh and a graduate student, right? But my somewhat external way of looking at things always remained so that mainstream philosophy of science was scientific realism. It was absolutely totally dominant and imperialistic at the time.

And naturalism was like mother and apple pie, you know, something kind of pie. And so my journey was to really work very much on the things that fascinated me in logic and philosophy of science by analytic methods, which I think are very, very good. But always with a point of view that, you know, said, this is a human enterprise. We have to think of it in terms of existential questions for us. questions in phenomenology about how it is done, what exactly people do, what do they aim at, right? So this was my way of thinking about it. Even though at the same time,

I would work on the foundations of quantum mechanics, for example, on the foundations of relativity, in just the way that every other end of philosophy would do. Okay, speaking of philosophy of science, given that you've studied that extensively, what is a mis, and I'm sure you've taught the philosophy of science as well extensively. What is a misconception

that you have to keep dispelling to students about the philosophy of science? Yeah, to focus on the contents of the theories, however fascinating they are, and they are, especially contemporary theories, you have to keep looking at them as, constructs representations that are constructed

and that involves a lot of imagination and very often the imagination draws on metaphysics on metaphysical imagery that comes to us all the way from the Middle Ages, right? But keep

looking at it that way. Keep looking at it as our construction of representations of the world And there's two different questions you can be asking. One question is, how do we fit into the scientific world picture? That's what the scientific realist is always asking. How can science explain consciousness?

How do we fit into the physical world? The other question is, what role does science play in our life and in our practice? that is a very, very different kind of question and a different kind of focus. Uh-huh. I want to understand how you see the world. Most people see the world as we have our perceptions and they're filtered through something

that generally distorts the way that the world is and there is a fact of the matter as to how the world actually is, but we never get to see it as it is, but there is that. It's over here. And then there's our perception of it. that's the most common sort of view of the world.

And of course, this view itself is a quote-unquote model and then we can just do some infinite regress of that. But broadly speaking, we have this. Is that also how you view the world? No, no, I don't. No, I think that what we see is real. And of course, it's a matter of perspective. We only see so much and only from a certain perspective

at any given moment. So, you know, you can talk about what is the sum total of the perspectives we have on a particular thing. And then you can use a good, impersonal way of describing it. For instance, I've got a perspective on the table I'm sitting in front of,

but I know about all the other perspectives, and if I ask me to draw it, I draw a rectangle, right? But nevertheless, what I see is real. the fact that the content of a perspective doesn't mean it's not real. I think that what is real is exactly what appears. Okay, so is it more like, I have a cup in front of me, maybe, I'm not sure if this can be seen. I hold this, I feel that it's solid, I have this perception or appearance of solidity.

We investigate with, quote, science, or the scientific, method and we find that, well, it's 99% of 99.99.99 or what have you, percent empty space. Thus, our perception of this solidity must be an illusion. It's false. It's not real. So what's wrong in that argument? Yeah, I mean, I think that's quite wrong. Obviously, it is solid, right? You know it's solid, right? Now, it's through that. In physics, you can represent it at a certain level. say the molecular level in a model that has a lot of empty space between points

right sure it's a good representation for many purposes but there's no question that this is a solid object there's no question that this is a what was it a beaker or a mug right I actually don't know what this is called

this is from the Oshana Sea Ventures they gave this to me yeah all right but there's no question that it is solid I mean, you would be drinking out of it if it wasn't. I mean, that's common sense. That's common sense realism. Okay, let me be a bit more clear.

Then we could say, look, what we mean by solid, what we mean, the human means by solid is something that has a certain set of properties. We think or we thought it was solid through and through. We investigate, we find out that it's not solid, it's porous, it's what have you. There's so much space inside this, empty space. Okay, yes, there's vacuum fluctual. is not truly empty space. Doesn't make a difference.

Whatever. It's not what we thought. So then we could say, well, what we think of as solidity, let's just call that something with... Yeah, you know, let me tell you about the discussion I had on this other show that you mentioned closer to truth. Yes. So we had a mug, and the interviewer said, well,

you know, I would say the mug is round, but actually there are photons traveling to my eyes and then electrical impulses going to my brain. And so there is some sort of happening in my brain that makes me say it's round. So I can't be sure that this is the truth. And I said, so you have more confidence in the theory of photons than you have in the existence and shape of this mug. And he said, yes. I said, well, it's also been through of the instruments in the laboratory where the scientists were investigating photoelectric effects and where they came up in the theory of photons. How are these instruments any different from this mug?

do you how come do you mean that you don't trust those instruments to be what they are because you've accepted the theory of photons doesn't make sense

it doesn't make sense to me so the first thing is you have to accept that what you see is real including the instruments on your laboratory table right before you start thinking

that your theories tell you that it's not true interesting now let's explore that further So am I to think in terms of degrees of realness there that the cup would be more real and then the photon would be somewhat less real or am I supposed to think in terms of confidence

that I have more confidence in the reality of the cup than I do in the photons because the photons reality depends on other instruments which are cup-like in terms of their realness and so if you're depending on something else well what you depend on is going to have to be more real? How am I supposed to think of this? Are they all real?

Even if I hallucinate, am I supposed to say that's real because that's an appearance and I'm just going to take to some total of appearances. That's going to be real. Yeah, no. Help me out. Yeah.

I'm not sure I can help you act on this. I'm not sure. I mean, I just, you know, I think there's the common sense answer that they have to trust their instruments before they can trust the theories that are based on their instruments, right? And that the instruments are things

that are visible, tactical, tactical. They are things in the world that we experience. and that's where the trust has to begin. That makes sense. So let me see if I can state what you just said. If I'm going to trust in X, but X is based on Y, then I cannot have more confidence in X than I have in Y. I would say so, yeah.

So Kurt. So, but, you know, you have been also writing things that I've been reading, you know, and I thought that some of the things that you discussed about language, for example, and about Kierkegaard, for that matter. very interesting and maybe they don't have to do anything with philosophy of science

but would you be ready to talk about those things too? Oh I would love to so just for people who are wondering what the heck was this about you mentioned off air

that you watched this video that I that I had on Kierkegaard and that stunned me because well firstly it's stunned me in two directions one because you're just such a legend

two it's stunned me because I feel embarrassed because anything that I say about philosophy I'm such a plebeian And compared to you, you're a titan in the field. So I'm just thinking I must have said 20 things wrong or incomplete or what have you. Not true.

Anyhow, okay, so why don't we talk about what is it either about existentialism or Kierkegaard that caught your attention and sustained it in that video? So Kierkegaard is a very uncompromising philosopher, right? I mean, totally when he says, you face either or. he doesn't give any leeway to people who are going to be wimpy about it right it's a call to decision that that's how he sees faith that's how he sees the New Testament it's the call to decision you know and this is the core of religious existentialism you pointed out that he sees this as he puts it in terms of three different stages of life

and that it could be in a person's own life it could be a temporal succession from a you know a purely aesthetic approach to a more moral approach to more spiritual approach to me it sounds like these are three stages of questions different questions that are faced and confronted by the person and by saying that it's a culta decision

you know it is it is sidestaving theological issues right it is saying this is how you hear God's questions you're called a decision you know like

what kind of person are you going to be right so that's what you know all this occurred to me and I was listening to you and well it occurred to me in other way other contexts of course so I was quite fascinated

I thought that it was great that you included that I know that this is a philosophy podcast or at least right now just for people who are tuning in they have no idea what is this this is called theories of everything this channel and it's about theoretical physics philosophy consciousness free will AI yeah okay i'm going to ask you an odd question for for such a podcast do you believe in the soul um the soul you know um i think that the idea of the soul is the idea of

some sort of core to the to myself right I've been struggling with the whole idea of the self now this is a of course a topic in philosophy and

you know at one point I was listening to Gailen Strausson who is one of the people who mainly writes, one of the main writers on this, and also to Beatrice Longiness, who was interested in it from a Kantian point of view. And then various people who thought they could isolate something like the core of the person scientifically. So according to one writer, it's the immune system that is really the core.

of the human person, of the biological organism, right? Other philosophers wrote about how the question is how much would survive, like if you could keep just a small part of the brain active, that means that you were surviving, you know. And all these questions seem to me to be somehow going far afield. Hmm, okay. When Plato made this distinction between the body, the soul and reason, yeah, he was giving a representation of what I am, a representation that seems to have some resonance, right? So, I think that, especially in existentialist writers, the question was taken up, again, in a radical way,

say, fine, never mind what the answers were about what the answers were that were proposed in terms of soul and spirit and body and substantial form and so on. The question is, what am I? What am I? And I was fascinated by the answers. I think that Sartre's answer is basically that I am what I will have been because my actions define me, but that doesn't stop until I die. So it's only what I am is really only answered at the very end because what I will have been, you know, depends on what I will have been doing. my whole life.

That's one aspect of it. Wait, what I will I have been? What I will have been. So, for example, he gives the example of a mayor in a French town on the German occupation. And the mayor gives a record of all the German troop movements, and he has the intention of giving the information to the Allies when they invade, right? In the meanwhile, he cooperates with the Germans.

Now, some people call him a collaborator at the time. If, in fact, he brings the information to the allies, he was not a collaborator. But if he doesn't, he was. So, you see, what he is now depends on what he, will have done later. Okay. Okay, well, it sounds to me like that's saying that I'm defined by my actions,

but my actions are subject to change or they're not complete yet until I've died, and then all of those actions are there for you to make the decision. Right. Right. And now, I mean, there are many things that cannot be undone, but nevertheless, there are things that can be put into a different light by what you do later. Are we, now we pretty far afield from philosophy of science, I guess. This is perfect, this is perfect.

So, we say that the past is fixed and the future is the one that's open. Do you think so? That the future is open, yes. What about the past? The past is settled. Yes, that's how I see it. Yeah. I mean, of course, I think it was, it's funny how, how,

indeterminism and determinism have played back and forth in physics. At the beginning of the 20th century, suddenly it seemed like, oh, physics was opening up to indeterminism, right? Ereducible probabilities in quantum mechanics. And then in the second half of the 20th century, many of the philosophical reactions and also by scientists working in foundations, we're trying to make it all deterministic again, seeing there were no-go theorems to show that a certain straightforward classical deterministic model is impossible for quantum phenomena.

But think of how many different logical leeways they found in order to somehow, you know, make it look more deterministic again. I think that to me again this is a matter of representation I think that what we did find out very clearly is that a certain kind of classical causal model cannot represent the phenomenon

I mean there are very good very definitive no-go theorems for certain kinds of interpretations, classical causal interpretations of quantum phenomena. But, logically speaking, there is an enormous amount of leeway in how theories are constructed. And so, yeah, it is possible to construct models with a kind of underpinning that is deterministic in one aspect or another.

or causal in one effect or another. Yes, certainly. But to me, it is just the typical situation of alternative possible representations of the same phenomena. Okay. Do you also think that determinism and indeterminism are labels for different types of models?

Yes, yes. So we think we're making a statement about the facts of the world, but determinism and indeterminism are statements about the facts of models. Yes, that's what I think, yes, absolutely. Interesting. Okay.

Is it the case then that determinism slash indeterminism just is not something that can't, it would be a category error to apply to the world, or we just don't know which one is applied to the world? I can make it clear for people who are wondering what the heck I meant. So take this cup. We can say, what is the electric charge of this cup? and of course it's exchanging molecules with that okay so but it has somewhat of a well-defined electric charge

we could also say what is the total electric charge of the universe but then i could i could ask you what's the electric charge of fifty five dollars and then you would say well a fifty-five bill this fifty-five dollars and i don't know i say a fifty-five dollars just and then you're like it doesn't have it's it would be foolish to give it a zero electric charge just as much as it would be foolish to give it plus 20 electron volts or minus 28 or what have you. In that case, it would be the label of electric charge to the concept $55 would just be, it would be foolish. It just doesn't apply. So what I'm wondering is, we can apply the label of determinism to a model. We can apply the label of indeterminism to a model. And then you are saying,

well, that's a model. Then there is the world, the reality. Maybe reality is not the word I should use. Can indeterminism also be applied here, or is it foolish to? It's not foolish. So, you know, the, say,

like Richard Montague said, a system is deterministic exactly with the model of a deterministic theory. Well, but you see, that makes the whole thing ambiguous, because as I see it, the notion of

determinism is broad enough you know it doesn't imply classical causation or anything that whatever phenomena come up there will be possible representations of them as deterministic and possible representations of them as

indeterministic and so the question just doesn't arise for the world it will all so So suppose that we agree with it for a moment with Richard Montague, a system is deterministic if it's a model of an indeterministic theory, right?

Okay. If it's a model of a deterministic theory. In that case, you should also have to say a system is indeterministic if it fits into a model of an indeterministic theory. And I would say in the case of real phenomena, it's always both it's always in principle both now that doesn't mean that we actually have

the other theories but there's always in principle enough logical leeway I mean look at what happened in quantum mechanics I mean the many universe theory is deterministic yeah right

I mean in certain respects you can say it's not deterministic but there are many universes together yes right In the case of David Albers' theory about the past hypothesis, you know, the world is not, it is, it looks like statistical randomness, but it is totally determined. This kind of logical alternative is always there for representation. And so to me, the only question that makes sense is, can we represent it this way? can be represented that way

and there are certainly limits but the limits are never so strict as to allow some kind of determinism some kind of indeterminism okay so if I understand what you're saying it's that there's always wiggle room to come up with some

deterministic theory that fits the data there's always wiggle room to come up with an indeterministic theory that fits the data as well it's just under determination as to whether it's deterministic okay okay Okay.

What about free will? What are your personal views on free will? Yeah, that I have free will, certainly, yes. But I also realize that it's, you know, a very difficult concept to narrow down. I was listening just quite recently in Austria. I listened to a lecture in which there was an argument that if there's no free will, then we're not accountable for anything morally, right? And so then in the question period, I raised my hand and I said,

you know, I grew up in a Calvinist country. And according to Calvinism, the doctrine of predestination, certain accountant himself, there's no free will, but their moral views are such that we are very accountable. We're all held accountable for what we do. So, and what exactly, you know, what is your philosophical enterprise here? He had said, I'm doing meta-ethics, right? And I said, here's an ethical theory that you are not you are just ruling out by fiat now mind you to begin it sounded very plausible to me what he was arguing I mean if I'm not free to do what I do then then how can you hold me accountable right but but that is just

turns out to be just one position in one ethical position it's not a logical there's no logical argument there. So, can I define three well? No. I haven't, I have not, I mean, it's not, no, it's not a part of philosophy that I have been very active in to begin.

But certainly, but I've come across, I can see the connections between accountability and freedom, certainly. But my inclination is to say, I'm convinced by arguments from start through that, You know, we are free and up to the point where we really have no rational consciousness at all. So he says, even if you are a prisoner, you're free to accept your fate or revolt mentally against it. Right.

You can live very differently as a prisoner one way and sort of revolt against your own fate and one as accepting it. So, is that still freedom? Well, don't ask me how to find the boundary there. What does Sartre mean when he said up until your rational consciousness ends? Maybe I'm misquoted right there. I mean, suppose, yeah, no, suppose that you are in such, say, in such pain that you can't really think anymore, right? Yeah, maybe then you have no choice left, right? you're not freedom, free anymore.

You're still alive. You're in pain. You're crying, you know, but you can't make choices anymore. This is super interesting because he used the word rational there. Now, Kierkegaard would say that you have a choice

and it's somehow non-rational. It's not rational. So it sounds to me these two existentialists or two people who are classified as existentialists, one is saying your choice or your choice or your free will, let's just say choice,

matters, it depends on your rationality. It sounds like Kierkegaard is saying you have a choice that absolutely does not depend on rationality and can't in principle for you to switch your value systems. So who's right? Well, I think that Sartre would agree with Kierkegaard that you cannot give a rationally compelling basis

for your choice that would hold for everyone that would hold universally ever. Okay, he says, you know, it's your call to decision, it's your decision, you will not be able to give a reason that says I could not do otherwise. You can never do that. You can never say I could not do otherwise, right? So it's not rational in the sense of based on a rational justification, but at the same time, certainly, many people all seem to do. Any philosophers don't seem to realize this, Sartre is a very logical thinker. He takes everything to logical extremes, mind you.

But, you know, he's pointing out, you know, once you see that, you have to draw the consequence that you are free. You are free. and that any way to somehow deny this philosophically is probably going to end up as a case of false consciousness. And false consciousness just means what? Well, there's two forms of false consciousness. One is to say, look, I was born this way.

I can't help myself. This is how I made. Right? And the other form of false consciousness is to say, Yeah, I know I was doing all those things, but don't look at that. I can always do... That's just my past, right? Kind of denial of the, you know.

So you either, you know, say that you are rock-bound, or you say, no, no, I'm free. My past doesn't define me. Both are false consciousness. Now, the person who denies free will by making an appeal to physics by saying, even in the example that was given about the prisoner who could accept his or her fate or reject it, whatever precipitated that choice would have been something outside of them,

it would have been physics, it would have been not within their control, and so either way, if something is not within your control, and then it's derived from that, then it's derived from something not within your control. You don't have control, unless control came from nowhere,

but then the question is, well, where? Show me that in the microscope. So would you make another argument similar to your cup argument, which was, as you mentioned, Robert Lawrence Coon, which I'll place the link on screen, was interviewing you on Closer to Truth, saying, I believe in the roundness of the cup at an intuitive level, but it can't be there because the photons are impinging and doing some sort of mental cognitive or neurological gymnastics or what have you. And then you were saying, yeah, but this photon plus the neurological gymnastics, that depends on other instruments, which you consider to be just as real. as the cup. So do you make a similar argument against those who are saying, look, free will can't exist because physics? Are you saying something similar? Were you saying, no, look, how are you going to make that appeal to physics without considering that physics to somehow be more real? But the physics also depends on something which was just as real as your free will initially, namely the instruments and so

for it. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm having, for a long time, I've been having a dispute with Nancy Cartwrights and, you know, other philosopher, right? The way she reads physics is that it really involves a lot of causal, causal statements of a sort that, you know, in the traditional sense of causal statements, right? And the way I read physics is that it does not. The models show you The models are models of what happens. There's not, the thing as compelling, you know. We talk about forces, but look, forces F equals MA. You know, a force is something that varies with mass and acceleration, right? That's all you see in the model. You see these equations that connect these different quantities together. And so I don't see causal claims in a model of physics.

I don't see them there. She said, what if you have a model of me washing dishes? I said, washing dishes is something, it's a causal activity, right? Because, and I classified that way because of your intention and your plans and your deliberations. Okay. Okay. But when it comes to, if there was a model in physics of this, they haven't done that, but suppose they did. All you would see is equations connecting quantity.

And I said, I have a good example of this. I found several articles where they model a falling cat. Why does a cat that falls always lands on its feet? You know, even if you turn it upside down. Okay. So how come this system is not rotationally invariant? How does it, right? And they gave the equations for it.

And I said, look at these equations. You see, we could describe it as the cat deliberately turned, back upside down, back from it, right side up. We talk about it in causal terms, but you look at the model that physics gives us is just an equation of motions, an equation of motion. That's all it is, you see?

So I don't see causal claims in physics. I really don't. Okay, but what were you talking about with Nancy that hinged on whether causality was in physics? Why was that a relevant factor into anything? Oh, well, you know, I think these are, so this whole, this whole subject of causation I see as being really localized in intentional action. That all the terms come from intentional action.

And that if you see something more in a physics model, you're projecting. You're really projecting the human ways of thinking. about deliberation, planning, making choices, and so on. But she doesn't see it that way. Of course, she can back it up by showing that scientists talk in causal terms a lot of the time. But then the test case comes with these examples in quantum physics where certain causal models don't work. So she said, no, I can give a causal model of violation of the Bell inequalities.

And so she did that. She gave a model, emissarily causal factors that were operative in violating Belly inequalities. Now, it's still a controversy between us. I mean, you know, she and I have been arguing about this for some time. But the way I see it, a causal reading of a physical model, a causal reading of a model in physics, is a projection. It is not the way it has to be read at all. And so then if people say, oh, your physical condition caused you to, to what, to kill your neighbor or to choose to be a student or whatever, I say, no, that's just, the wrong way of looking at it.

In fact, if the physicists were to represent your life, all you would see is equations or motions. Descriptive equations and motion. Okay. Interestingly, something that I need to study more, even though it touches on every aspect of this channel, and I still need to investigate it more, I think I've done so at a superficial level,

is the concept of causation. So it obviously touches or hinges on physics. You may not think so, but even delineating what causation is will help me clarify what physics is. And then it hinges on free will, it hinges on, in some respects, on consciousness. So when someone says that there was a non-local influence, is influence another than for causal then? Or that's fine? Yeah, yes. Right, right.

I mean, I think that you call it an influence, right? Look, I mean, let's think back to the simple case of, say, Newton and Descartes, okay? Newton introduces forces, and Descartes, in Descartes physics, there were no forces. Everything was mechanical action, right? with these forces you could have things these four in Newton's universe is a choreographed universe if a big comet hit the earth the moon would hobble at the very same time right the very same time right so it's instantaneous so that is just it's just a choreographing of simultaneous movements. How, you know, the Cartesian's, Descartes and his fellows would say, you can't call that causing or influencing or forcing because it's the same time.

It's happening at the same time. It's just choreographed, right? Okay. So the, but you see, that didn't make, for the, for the Cartesian's, has made Newton's theory a bad theory. But it's not a bad theory, right? The thing is, though, that Newtonians were describing it in causal terms. They were using the term force as something that causes, pushes, right, makes it happen.

But that's not how we have to read it. We can just say, no, Newtonian equations are satisfied by the system. That's it. So, yeah, influence, force, you know, these are all causal terms that, mind you, they help the imagination. And I don't want to diminish the practical value of how the imagination has to be helped when people are constructing theories. right no of course but I say that is all it does

it is you know it is in the end it is not part of the theory it is just part of what how we make the theory so you see these wooden planks behind me

a few days ago they fell down and they broke that light that's behind me and I have to get a new light so it's a new light okay okay now

my wife would say that I'm the cause of that because I didn't put the wood up there properly. And I would say that's the wood or it's the command strips or what have you. But we would speak in terms of a causal account. And we're making an appeal not to equations there, but we're speaking to physics because it's something falling down. It's like a block of wood and it breaks this almost like billyed ball.

Okay. So in that case, would you say that we're speaking imprecisely? We're speaking incorrectly? No. No, you are not speaking. precisely. What you are doing is you're bringing a certain amount of physics into the language of personal action, deliberation, planning, and so on. So, and accountability. So you always say, well, that's your fault, okay? And that's because she points to, you know, some interaction between

you and the word that some past, in the past maybe, right? Right. So what we do, you know, But I think causal discourse belongs in person language. Basically, it's just in personal language. And then you can draw on physics, you know, as part of what you are using and your arguments in person language, which have to do with, oh, what was the goal, what was the value, what was the bad result, what was the good result, you know, and so on. It's going to be tricky for me to ask my question without using the word reality,

which I know that we've talked extensively about in the beginning that I shouldn't use this term. Yeah, that's okay. Allow me to use the term. I think you'll know what I mean. You can, of course, correct what I mean with your version of it. People who are reductionists,

physical reductionists say that everything ultimately is just physics. Okay. Now, you're saying that causation has no place in physics, and yet we can still use the word causation at some level, at a personal level. Yes, yes. You also believe that reality is not just physics. So you believe counter to people who are reductionist to physics.

Yes. Okay. Do you believe that reality here, over here on the left-hand side, is causal, has causation to it? Because I know you're saying physics doesn't, but physics is either a separate part of reality or just some small subset of reality. But does reality as such have causation in it? What I mean to say is it's one thing to say we cannot model causation with physics or it's another thing to say we don't even know what we mean by causation

it's another thing to say causation actually exists I can't quite put my finger on what it is much like free will we can say free will exists I can't quite put my finger on it but it does exist it is real I want to know the claim that you're making okay look I speak a language that has a lot more in it than just the language of physics.

Specifically, it has a lot of human action terms in it. And when I say, for instance, that I threw the rock that broke the window, I mean, it was supposed I did, then I was speaking the truth. Now throwing is a causal verb, okay, and in fact, it didn't in the case that I was doing something intentional, I was causing the window to break, right? Now, but, you know, this is person language, right? It's language that is totally permeated by concepts like intention, deliberation, a goal, value, et cetera.

I make true statements in that language. I do. I do not think that any. language, any statement in the language of physics, narrowly taken, namely as just to describe exactly what's in the model and what's not, right? It has those words in it. I don't think it has anything in that translates these words. So, but I certainly think that what I say is true, right? Because my language is much richer

than just the language of physics. Uh-huh. Interesting. Okay. So we're talking about the richness of language right now. Yeah, yes. And over email, we talked about the limitations of language. And I was also defending the creative aspects of language. The language is, we have a view, a focus-view, that language is just there as a conduit.

I have some thought and then I just have to find my words to express the thought and that's all language is doing is just the expression of something that's pre-existing but we were also talking yes we're going to talk about the limitations

of language but to be an advocate for language on the side of language language also helps the development of something just by expressing it in language just by finding the words it's as if we're excavating and

digging into the ocean and bringing out treasure. It's not just, and perhaps even creating the treasure as it's being brought out. I want to talk about, I want you to talk about, please. The, I don't know what to call it because it's not, I want to say the benefits of language, but it's not exactly that.

And it's not exactly the creative aspects, because that gets confused with people thinking about screenplays and poetry. That's creative. Like, it's inventive. No, that's not exactly what I mean. So I can't quite get the synonym there. Whatever that word is, I think you know what I mean,

because we spoke about it over email. I want to talk about that prior to getting to the limitations of language, and then the limitations of language especially applied to the self. So the floor is yours. Kurt here in the editing, just placing a link to a substack post where I go into more detail on that on screen here and in the description. And just so you know, I write plenty on substack about a variety of topics, including all of what we've talked about today.

Consciousness, free will, belief, physics, quantum mechanics. All on substack. It's kurtjymongle.com. Yeah. Well, quite often, I don't really know what I'm going to say until I say it or when I'm, or when I write it down. It's the writing that actually brings out the ideas. And I think this has sometimes given people the idea that there's a kind of external inspiration, you know. And everybody who writes stories or theories will say things like that. They say, yeah, I. Don't tell me where it comes from. I was writing the story and wrote the story.

It's not that I had the idea beforehand. I didn't have all that in my mind already to write down. It was not just taking dictation from my mind. No. It was a creative process that indispensably involved the writing or the speaking. Language is a medium for creation. It's a medium of creation. There's a medium of creation.

But apart from that, it is something in which we are creative, so that we change, we change the language. People make up new concepts, new words all the time. And sometimes it involves a language. involves a radical change in conception. You know, when, well, the famous example is when Einstein changed what simultaneous meant, right? It was no longer a two-term relationship. It was a three-term relationship.

That was a change in the language. And after that, you can't really go back from that. Yeah, I mean, you can say, you know, at a certain level you can ignore, yeah, But the fact is you cannot go back to the previous concept anymore. But that changed the language, because the language, the conceptual structure is embodied in the language. So we have a language in which we work and in which we create, but also we have the resources for changing and enriching the language. but then eventually as I also want to say there are limitations to that

there are limits to that and it's important we're talking earlier a little bit about the self and the soul right there's no way to conceive of what we are without bringing in the fact that we have language I think all animals

have the gift of language to some extent, because they do communicate with each other. But we have the gift of language at a certain level where you have metal linguistic constructions, which I suppose that language that animals do not have. Though I'm not even sure of that in some cases. Sure. But there's no way to think that we could have a conception of what we are

without bringing in the fact that we are language-endowed creatures. And so if there are limits to language, then those are limits to what we are. They are our limits. And they have to be a very important part of how we think of ourselves. So we also think, as I mentioned, we tend to think that the role of language,

a primary role of language, is to package up what's inside here and then throw it to you and hopefully you get something similar in your brain. And then another is to reference something that's out in the world. Yes. Okay. And then there are problems with this whole act of reference in the philosophy of language.

Yes. Like the twin earth argument and so forth. Yeah. Okay. But that doesn't mean language doesn't have something to do with reality. It just means that the relationship between language and reality isn't merely reference. Okay. So this question is so important to me.

It's so, but it's so beguiling, it's, it's so tricky. The relationship between language and reality, and as we spoke about souls, as we spoke about the self, I do want to get to religious questions later. Even in the New Testament, there's the word or the logos, which has a creative aspect. Yes. We'll get to these religious questions soon, so people who are interested in those, you can keep listening, but I want you to talk about the limits of language. Yeah, this is a subject in logic or perhaps to say in metal logic, you know, where logicians especially were interested in constructing representations of language. And the question was always, can we get the representation of natural language, the language that we speak, right? and so when we make up

the computer languages they are artificial languages but they are very useful and when mathematics was formalized like you know Euclid wrote geometry in one way

but Hilbert writes it in a formal way he constructed a formal language for Euclidian geometry right? It's very useful to do that the question is To what extent is this possible? Is it possible to actually construct a representation of the language that we have? Now, there's a bit of ambiguity here because, you know, language develops historically.

So we have language now that Galileo didn't have. some of his language we probably don't have anymore some language dropped by the wayside but mostly it got enriched richer and richer and richer and richer. Today we have language in which you can express today's scientific theories

that language didn't exist in the time of Galileo right? So Oh in just a moment when you say richer you just means able to express more? Yes able to express more right so that

you know at the time I mean, there are things that we can express now that wouldn't he haven't been within the possibility of expression at the time. In one sense, namely in the sense that it wasn't in the language that he had, but

there were always the resources to enrich that language because, look, it did get enriched. It got enriched to this point where we have now. Right, right, right. Okay, so we have two things. We have the language that we have and we have the resources for enriching

language, right? Now, suppose we ask whether, in principle, we could have a language that could express anything we could think. We've got a universal language, right? What physicians find immediately is that runs into paradoxes. You run into some, you know, paradoxes. You want to say things about what is true, what is false, and what could be true, and so on. And we could go into one of these paradoxes if you like. Well, before you get into the paradox, are you saying that the paradox is with the fact that there exists

the resources to create such a universal language or is the paradox with the concept of a universal language? The problem is with the possibility of creating a universal language. We don't say that we have it now, right? But could we create

a language, could we create a universe, a language in which everything that we could think could be expressed, right? And you get a problem about self-reference there, because that means that you would have to also be able to express statements about that very language itself. And that's the question, can you code that? You know, can you, and to some extent it is possible to code metal language into object language, as they say. But are there not limits to it?

Yes, there are limits to it, yeah. That there are things, that there was Tarski, Tarski proves some of the theorems, so I talk about the limits of what you can say in the language, right? So, but, you know, we can say, okay, look, maybe there's not a, maybe you can go a little bit further. Maybe there's not one single language in which you could express everything. But we have a language that we could enrich, different ways, right? So there are many different possible enrichments of the language.

Now, couldn't we say that anything that you could ever think could be expressed in one of those, right? Okay. And that would be, you know, that seems like a more liberal conception. But no, the answer is the same kind of paradoxes arrive there, right? And the answer is no, you can't. Now, so what does does this mean that we can't have language? No, of course not. We have language, right? Or that we can, or that we cannot enrich it arbitrarily? No, we can, right? But what is, what is, what is, what is, what is, what is paradoxes show is that we could not possibly have an adequate representation of our language, period, right? I mean, take our language. as a whole, the language it is and could be, we cannot have an adequate representation of that.

And well, that means that this, that means, of course, that if we are language beings, then we cannot have an adequate representation of ourselves. In the end, we cannot have an adequate representation of ourselves. And, you know, this is, you know, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean that we are better than computers when it comes to calculating ability

or, you know, computers have finite storage, we have finance storage. They can calculate anything we can calculate. I'm not, you know, I'm not giving the kind of argument that was given in the 50s about how we are, you know, We're not outstripping. We cannot possibly outstead. These limitative theorems do not show that we are better than computers.

That's not the point. That's not the thing at all. It is rather that when it comes to representing ourselves, which is a way of trying to answer the question, what am I? We can't give an adequate answer. It's impossible. It's logically impossible.

You use the word adequate there. So we can't give an adequate representation or an adequate answer, but presumably we can give a representation or we can give an answer. It's just not adequate. So what do you mean by adequate? Okay. So, you know, you take a particular part of our language that we need, for example, say, in the insurance business.

Yeah, we can make up a good representation of that, a totally adequate representation of that language. It's part of our natural language. language, right? And we, as logicians and mathematicians and scientists, are always working in natural language. So we're using one part of natural language to construct the model of another part, and we can always do that. We can always do that, okay? But the idea that we could make, we could do this for our language as a whole, that's what's ruled out. why is it that you've become so obsessed with yourself not yourself sorry the self

yeah the self as of late well it's not really so late it started in 2004 because I mentioned that I was listening to philosophers like Galen Strausson who were lecturing and writing about the self and the conception of the self and whether we are maybe just a whole sequence of separate cells

one after the other or whether there's any kind of unity in ourselves over time things like that whether there is a

you know a long time ago Descartes gave an answer he said I am a thinking thing so I am and he meant a substance and every philosopher since then

practically has rejected that answer that I'm a bodily substance and a mental substance and they are distinct and so on but there are still views of the self that are a little bit like that and so I got very intrigued with this and maybe I became preoccupied with it

some of the time anyway and my proposal was that I'm not a thing I'm not a thing of any kind you know Wittgenstein has this phrase about something he says it's not a thing but it's not nothing you know and I was I'm not a thing but I'm not nothing

right and I mean not only I'm not a physical thing I have a body but not I am my body I'm not an abstract thing I'm not an abstract structure I'm not something supernatural I'm not if that's if supernatural things are things

I'm not a thing period take us out of the concept of thing and my and I try to illustrate it with a novel that I wonder if you know it It's by Italo Calvino, it's called the non-existent knight. Do you know that one?

No. No, it's very into, Calvino is a very philosophical writer and writes very short books. Charles Main is inspecting his troops. And there are the knights on horseback. And he comes to one knight. who doesn't raise his visor. And he says, Sir Knight, raise your visor.

And the visor says, the visor does it, and there's nothing there. There's nothing inside. And Charleneen says, you know, it's nonplussed. The knight says, I do not exist. And Charmaine says,

in that case, how do you do your duty? It is, by faith, and willpower. And Charlemagne, you know, just accepts and go. The thing is that this is the story of a knight who doesn't exist. There's just the armor, and the armor walks around and fights and so on, but there's nothing inside. And it is a contrast with his servant who is just body, who is totally body and sensation. So it's like a contrast between intellect and sensuous existence in the novel.

So, I mean, it's a fanciful sort of illustration, but I wanted to say, look, if you don't take us in, if you don't keep us in the category of things, that doesn't mean we don't exist. And I could show that logically. I could show, you know, within logic, this is a perfectly good position, even though it's an unusual position. But then nevertheless, everything else could remain true, like I was born in 1941. That remains true, see? I exist. I was born in 1941. All it prevents is the identification of me with some particular thing in the world.

So, okay, you asked me how I became obsessed with it, right? I became obsessed with it because other philosophers were saying things that I thought just didn't work. So what is a thing? Well, there are physical things, there are abstract things, that are in some metaphysics, there are still other categories besides physical things at abstracta. You just made me realize that in addition to causation, as something that I should study much more of is the notion of thing

because it's embedded in the word everything in theories of everything and I just ask well what is the thing most of the time when people think of things they think of physical things where I imagine you were going is the number five is a thing

the number six is a thing but the relation that six is greater than five is not a thing it's a relation. I don't know if you would say that, but that's where I imagined you were going. Well, some philosophers would say

that relation is a thing too. You know, it's real, right? They would count as real all the things that you would find in mathematics. I mean, the smaller and equal relationship is a relationship in arithmetic, right? And they would grant reality to all of that. I am, I did not live long enough to develop a philosophy of mathematics, okay, but I have the idea that I know where I would stand, which is close to the intuitionists who just think of it as play in the imagination, maybe the mathematics, or the nominalists who say, well, there are no abstracting.

is at all, okay? But at the same time, everyone has to agree, every philosophy of mathematics has to agree that our normal way of speaking about mathematics and doing mathematics is okay. And so, you know, in any ordinary context, I would say,

there are prime numbers, there are, some numbers are greater than other, that is a relationship between numbers, which is transitive, like left or equal to, right? I would say all those things in any practical context. Okay, so what is a thing? I don't know.

If you gave a definition, it will be circular. So the self is not a thing, but it's not a nothing. Right, it's not nothing, right? I'm not nothing. I exist. I'm not nothing in just this sense. I exist, right? And I show myself in the world.

I act. I do things. I have a body. I have a past. All that is true. Would you say it's the case that any time you can make a statement about something, then it is a thing? Now, I know I use the word something right there.

So that's circular. That's an important point. You see, in English, you know, you have the words, something and everything. And the word thing is part of these quantifiers. But that doesn't happen in every language. It's just the peculiarity of English. So, you know, instead of saying, in Dutch, if I were to say everything is beautiful, I would

say alice for everything, the Dutch word for thing is not involved in that at all. Alice is morey, right? So it's a peculiarity of English that you see the word thing in the quantifier. Yeah, the word doesn't have to be literally there, but the concept could still be inside it. Yes, yes. So is the concept of things still in everything in Dutch, or no? No, it's not. No, no.

So then would the Dutch have an easier time understanding that a, a not, thing can exist? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't know if they do or not, but, you know, they wouldn't be seduced by the word, everything, right? Or something. Because one way to say that I exist is to say I am something, right? But if you put it in logic, you get like existential quantifier X, X equals me. X is identical to me, right? Okay, give us English speakers. Give us more of an understanding as to how a nothing, or something, sorry, something that's not a nothing, but it's also not a thing, can exist. Because if we're saying it exists, even if we're pointing to that it exists, why can't we just call that, but that's a thing?

Why can't we just call it a thing? What does calling it a thing do that diminishes it and it's no longer what you're speaking about? you could you could I mean you could of course use the language that way I don't think that it is part of the language that we have at the moment right

it's but you could certainly decide that whenever anybody says X exists you're going to say X is a thing and just make it synonymous with existence you could do that but it would be something you would do inside the philosophy seminar or inside inside the podcast.

It would be a technical decision on a technical term. Logically speaking, our language does not entail X exists, therefore X is a thing. Are you a monist or a pluralist or a doolist or what? No. No. No. Wait, no to all of those, or no to... No to all of those.

Oh, interesting. Okay, so my reading of Nancy Cartwright, is that she's a pluralist. Yeah. And my reading of most philosophers is that they're a monist. Monest in what sense? They would say that either all that exists is the physical or all that exists is the mind

or all that exists as some neutral entity that somehow both come from, or maybe neutral is not the right word, but there's a term called neutral monism. Yeah, yeah. What the heck do you mean that you're not a modest, not a pluralist, not a dualist? What else could there be?

Well, you see, I think what went wrong in analytic philosophy in the 20th century is that it began in a way that was totally opposed to, well, began, I shouldn't say, but certainly there were, there was a lot of empiricism being developed in the early 20th century,

it was totally opposed to traditional metaphysics. And I come from that tradition. I belong to the tradition of Reichenbach and Carnap and say, this is metaphysics and it doesn't really make sense.

Metaphysics is something that is done in a language that is especially designed for the purpose to make no sense at all. That's my idea. So do you then experience the world and you say,

well, my experience, is real. Help me understand what is the model I can't escape the use of that word, at least for now, but perhaps there's a future word, it doesn't matter. What do you think is existing

if not one, if not two, if not multiple? Help me understand, please. When you're going through life, sure, you're just, you're living your life. But then there's also you looking out and some Sometimes just at a window, maybe it's just at your ceiling at bed and you're thinking about, what is this? Where are we? Who am I? Which we talked about a bit. And you must have some semblance. You can either, I'm sure you could go down the route and say, hmm, it's such a mystery. Okay, that's one route. You can say, well, I have a view. It's modest. It's douless, blah, blah. You already said no to that. But you have something. There's something that you land on, even if it's question marks. But what did you?

What do you land on? I think that what you're selling out is the motivation for people to become metaphysicians, right, to have a metaphysical theory. And I think that I want to reject that. I really want to reject that. I don't think that any metaphysical theory is anything more than a kind of fiction superimposed on our experience. you know, analytic philosophy has gone that way. Much analytic philosophy is a new form of metaphysics.

They develop analytic metaphysics, right? Not all of it. I mean, you know, there are many who just who work in philosophy of language and logic who think the way I do, I think. Just reject that as a kind of game that is entirely driven by its own internal problems. and so what you mentioned as monists and pluralists

of the view that everything is physical everything is spirit or something like that you know yeah

that is just a kind of you know intellectual game nothing more I reject the game I really do when you say that

the does exist. It's just that it's not a thing. But even in using the word exist, to me, exists as a metaphysical word. You must have some ideas to what it means to exist, what exists and what does not exist. So that sounds to me like metaphysics. I could be incorrect, but is it? Is it not? And how do you think about this? I know that exists is a word that philosophers use a lot more than other people. Right. I mean, you know, it's not that it is not an ordinary English word it is, but we can give synonyms. I mean, in fact, in fact, I think is real. It's probably usually a synonym for exists, right? I'm real. I exist. Right? It's, and... my, what should I say?

What would they have an example? My 10 foot tall neighbor does not exist. Okay. Okay. That's pretty clear, isn't it? I mean, yeah, in fact, I don't have, and it just means I don't have any 10 foot. There are no, there are no 10 foot, okay?

So, that are, that is, exist. It's really the same thing. But as I say, And in English, you very quickly start using the word thing. Then, you know, I am something, there is something, you know, but you don't have to. I am. Does God exist? Does God exist?

You see, that's a very traditional question, right? It's a question put in a front. I, I, look, first of all, just say yes, okay? I mean, it's. As far as I'm concerned, yes, okay. But then I want to quickly say something else, which is that whenever I've heard or talked to atheists, they always know what that means that God exists.

They have all the clear ideas about what that means and what is God and so on. And on that basis, of course, they say it's not true, right? And I'm not in that position. I'm not. I think that traditional theology leaves me cold as much as many other Christians today. The traditional theology is metaphysics, right? And that doesn't really speak to me anymore.

but that doesn't diminish faith it is just that we still in the liturgy and in the way we talk we still have the old language no question and we use the old language so that's why I say if you ask me does God exist my first answer has to be yes but then I have to say hey don't start burdening me with conceptions coming from traditional theology. Is your faith a faith because of so-and-so, or is it a sort of Kierkegaardian faith despite so-and-so? Yeah, I don't see that it is either. I don't see that this either because or despite. You see, I mean, you yourself talked about this. that in one of the things of yours that I heard or read,

that, yeah, the one about scientists who say they don't have beliefs. They identify faith with believing things that you don't have a reason for it, right? And that's why they don't want to say belief because they think it means, you know. But look, that, when we use faith for someone who's religious, that's not what it means. That's not what it means. at least not as far as I'm concerned. So when you say that you have faith in God,

firstly, has your faith changed throughout your life? Did you ever go through an atheistic phase? No. No, no, no. I think that my relationship, Yeah, yes, of course, there were different parts of my life. Like, you know, when I was a teenager, I think that, you know, already then, when I was in Sunday school as a child, I was just believing things the way that the teacher told me. you know and taking for granted and and I suppose probably also when I was a teenager I was

what I would now call a pagan Christian what I mean is a Christian who thinks of of Jesus as something like the Greek god from from the Greek mythology very similar because these Greek gods, they would come down, they would take on human form, they would do things with people. Only they would, you know, the conception of Christ would be like that, except that he is equally helping everyone at the moment and you can call on him. And look, I don't want to denigrate pagan Christians. I mean, I think, I wish I could be one really, you know, and in some ways I am. I I mean, if I get in trouble, you know, I probably play the same way that they do, okay, right? But I couldn't, you know, I couldn't stay in that kind of frame of mind.

And so, you know, in, I think it was the year 2000, I was asked to give a series of lectures at Yale jointly, by philosophy and theology. And I wrote them up afterwards, as they asked me to, in a book it's called The Empirical Stance. And the empirical stance is partly philosophy of science and partly it's a kind of coming out as a religious existentialist.

So what I took up in the last chapter is I said, I can't answer the question of what it is to be religious, but I can try to answer the question, what is it to be secular, which is sort of the opposite of religious, right? How do I see what it means to be secular? I try to answer that.

Okay. Interesting. Because after all, that's the question you would have to answer in terms of in the language of the secular themselves. Whereas if people ask you what is religion, you start using religious language, and the secular do not understand that language or reject it. Right? So I said, no, let me try and answer what is secular maybe.

But in part of doing that, I drew on three theologians, existentialist theologians. One Protestant and two Jewish. Now, I mean, I'm Catholic, but I took those because I thought they were very good examples of existentialist theologians. how did it is existentialists as opposed to traditional theologians, right? And so that's why I say it was a kind of coming out, I guess,

that I would say, okay, I'm an existentialist, fine. But look, listen to me, listen to me when I'm doing philosophy of science and, you know, ignore that part, if you'd like. So what I want to know is, how does someone like you, boss, who travels in similar circles as myself.

You're much more inconstinate than I am in these academic circles where people are extremely sharp and will just say that your notion of God, why are you even saying that there's God? You don't know what you're talking about. You just admitted it.

You're tied to something that's happened 2,000 years ago from people who were much more foolish than we were. You mentioned Galileo, didn't have the language to express GR. Well, they didn't have the language to express almost anything that we have now, and you're still believing in this book that was that there's so much evidence against and you have to cherry pick and look it's clear that you grew up in that culture so that's why you're

a Christian how do you rather than you coming to it through some rational deliberation seems like a hold over how do you deal with all of that how do you maintain your faith despite that's why I say a faith despite to me it would be a faith despite because to me there's a there's a large tension, and it's so difficult to maintain your faith. I imagine. Maybe I'm wrong, but tell me what's going on. Well, people are often too polite to say all those things, right? Um, right? Um, um, um, um, but, um, I say from the goodness of my heart. I hope Yeah, you know, I remember when it had become known that I had and became Catholic. I mean, that was a choice to, I had grown up Protestant and a certain point I became Catholic.

And so I met at the conference, I met my friend Ron Gehry, another philosopher of science. And he said, so now are you going to write a person? proofs for the existence of God? And I said, if you had just fallen in love, would you start writing a thesis about love? No. No, nothing like that, right?

That is just, he was just thinking of the wrong kind of thing. You were thinking that I had to have reasons to prove that I was right or whatever, something like that. But as for me, it was a matter of experience, something in my experience,

and not something for intellectual work. And I think that when I come across skeptical arguments, very often I think they are just right. I have a good friend in the Netherlands, Herman Phillipsy, who wrote kind of atheist manifesto, in which he took up lots of arguments for the existence of God, and show the fallacy and all of them. And I said to him, you're doing a great work for religion

because you are getting rid of all the bad stuff. You're getting rid of the fallacies. You're getting rid of the bad arguments. You see? I mean, that's how I react to it. So I think, Hermon, you know, I love your criticism. I think that you're criticizing the right things. You're getting rid of superstition

and you're not doing it of fallacies. but for me what's there is still left it's always there it's still left so I don't have a problem with that so you've heard of the Monte Carlo

the fun math experiment that blows people's minds when they hear it with the three doors yeah yeah yeah one of the ways that when I was younger that I was giving myself an intuition pump to see that it's the case that you should switch doors

is instead of thinking of three doors is to think in terms of the stars in the night sky and that one of these stars is the right star so you're asked, choose a star, and I'll tell you if it's the right star. You choose a star and I'll say, okay, before I tell you if it's the right star, I'm going to turn off all the lights in the sky

except for one other, and all the lights that I'm turning off are the wrong stars. Yeah, yeah. Now there's just two stars left in the sky, your initial star, and then one more star that I chose not to turn off. It's clear at that point.

that you should switch. Your initial start was likely wrong. Why? I don't see that. You know, this is a great argument, you know. I mean, I've been in many discussions about this. You know, in Beijing epistemology, I think this is handled correctly. And no, I don't think it's a good argument for switching. Okay, well, where I was going was that it sounds like your faith is

strong that when the atheists are providing arguments against believing in God, that it's you saying, great, thank you, turn off all those lights that are wrong so that I could see the one that is the true one. So I was saying that as an argument for what you're saying, but you don't even accept what I was saying as an intuition pump. So please, well, now I'm interested into why, okay, what is it about the Monte Carlo problem? You don't believe. You don't believe you should ever switch doors or what is that, is that another rabbit hole we should say for another conversation. No, I think that, you know, to, to, to, it's interesting. It's a very interesting subject, I think. But you should look at a similar problem where the three people are

in prison and they are condemned to death, all three of them. But the jailer comes and he says, in fact, one of you is pardoned, but I cannot tell you who. Okay. And so one of the prisoners goes to him and says, look, if one of us is pardoned, then it's certain that one of the other two guys is going to die. Right. So why don't you tell me the name of one other guy than me who's going to die? And the jailer says, I'm not supposed to give you any information. And he says, no, you wouldn't give me any information. Because I know that at least one of them will die.

So what does, what does it matter? Which one? Which one, what's the name you give me? So then the jailer gives him the name. It's like, let's say it is Abel Baker and, Abel Baker and Kurt. Okay, April Baker and Kurt, right? And he says, okay, Kurt's going to die. And now Abel says to himself, ah, no, it's just me and Abel.

That's just me and Baker. my chances have increased tremendously from, you know, two-thirds to be, two-thirds likely die to one-half. To live, I mean. Wait a one-third liable to live to one-half, right? But it's totally fallacious, right? I mean, no.

His chances have not increased at all by knowing that this, because it is really empty information. boss i don't know how you could be against the monte carlo at least in the it's traditional formulation so the one where you are are there there's something that's that's not right something almost like the there's always something tricky when you place yourself in like a sleeping beauty type paradox there's always something tricky when you're inside it but just for the three doors that's experimental you can actually test that and you'll find that you should always switch well i mean what do you think about the prisoner do you think that he really has increased

that really now it is 50% probable that you're going to live? You think so? I need to think about that some more. Okay, right. It's exactly the same problem. Yeah, it's tricky when it comes to yourself. I don't think it's the same problem. It is.

Because the first problem is experimental. You can actually do many tests and trials and find out that you should always switch. It's something you can simulate on a computer. With the first problem of the three doors and the goat and the car, Well, look, I mean, I had a discussion with someone recently, so it was in my mind. And I think that you would have to find a real difference between the prisoner case and the Monte Carlo place. Monty, what, Monty something, Monty. Yeah, I think it's Monte Carlo.

I think so. Oh, Monty Python, right. But you could use Monte Carlo on the Monty Python. It's multi something, I know that, but I didn't know which multi, okay. No, you'd have to find a difference between those two cases and I don't see them at the moment, yeah. What's one lesson in life that you learned too late? Not to give myself over unresistingly to regret. Now, that to me, from the way that I phrased that question implies that a large part of your life was spent regretting.

No, but sometimes I did just give in unresistingly to regret that was really bad, bad. But this has nothing to with philosophy, right? No, no. I'm talking now to boss, the boss boss. Yeah, okay. Is there any standard piece of advice that you give your students? Yeah, follow your own ideas. Yeah, and don't be intimidated by your teachers or the people that you're writing about.

Follow your own ideas, be critical and just, you know, work on what you love. Is there something you're consistently misunderstood about? That I am, yes, yeah. Constructive empiricism, they often think it means, as you pointed out yourself, really scientific agnosticism, like agnosticism by scientific theories, which is not what it is. It's a view of what science is, it's not a view of about the truth of falsity of theories. And what are you working on these days?

I mean, mostly doing logic, philosophical logic, recently, paradoxes, and something that's called subclassical logic, which is, you know, something supposedly, or admittedly, more basic than ordinary logic. That's, yeah, supposedly been philosophical logic recently. An association I've noticed is that people who are nominalists and anti-realists well those tend to go together and atheists so those tend to cluster together

but nominalists and intuitionists also tend to be on the more atheistic end this is just from my own sample set as a bias and what have you and I noticed that people who believe in classical logic and Platonism and

universals that they not that they tend to be religious but if they're religious they would also hold those as being true and you're here i can tell you about two discussions i had with philosophers so uran macmullen was not just a philosopher but a priest okay and a scientific realist and he said to me i can't understand how you can be a catholic and a scientific anti-realist he told me that right he couldn't understand it but then i then i I talked with Michael Dumbet, English philosopher, more famous, right?

He was a Catholic and in logic and philosophy of language, an anti-realist. And I said, I told him what MacMallet has said to me. And I said, people ask you that question too. And he said, I have no problem with it. He said, I don't have enough lives to solve all the philosophical problems there are. And that's all right. so see and he was a much more

traditional Catholic than I am what's non-traditional about your Catholicism well because I don't I don't particularly care about theology to me traditional theology is metaphysics and I reject

metaphysics when you say you reject metaphysics you mean to say that there is nothing metaphysical or that the words that we're using when we're talking about things that we think are metaphysical are just confused words?

It's a language game, I think. You know, and they are, and the people who do metaphysics are often not very careful about the difference between natural language and the language they craft in order to state our views. So the problems,

problems in metaphysics are I think self-generated problems. They don't, they're not problems that come from life outside. They are generated by the very act of doing metaphysics. So and for any problem that arises in metaphysics, there is always a solution because you can do just a bit more. I mean, I remember that I'll give you an example. David Lewis wrote an article early on that more or less vindicated the idea that all the theoretical terms in science can be defined in terms of using the terms that they had already before. And this was, you know, it looked like a very good argument.

But then there was an argument by Putnam called Potom's model-phedic argument, which became famous itself, that showed there was a fallacy in Lewis's argument. And what Lewis did was he simply, he added on metaphysics, some metaphysics. the reality of universals or something similar to that is that would do and so that for me was a very good example

of if you have a problem in metaphysics you can always solve it by adding something more in metaphysics it is so that that means that there's not a game that can be lost um okay

nothing's at stake in the end see and so that's why I say it's not a game worth playing. What do you disagree with Wittgenstein about? Wittgenstein. I don't know him sufficiently. I mean, I find lots of things that are of interest and value in Wittgenstein.

I don't know that I find... There must be something that you... That even if it's a superficial level and you don't want to commit yourself to saying something so negative so soon, but there must be something that on the face of it, you're thinking, okay, the late Wittgenstein, because he changed his mind, of course, but the late Wittgenstein was wrong about X. No, no, but I don't know the late Wittgenstein well enough.

What about Putnam? Putnam, yeah. Well, he was wrong when he was a scientific realist, it was wrong, right, in my opinion, right? And, of course, I had lots of arguments with Putnam. I mean, we would be at conferences together and we would, you know, write against each other and so on. But I've always admired him tremendously. I think Patlin was a great philosopher. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, not the Johnny one note. he wrote about many different areas in philosophy, made contributions to logic and philosophy of science, but also value theory, epistemology in general, no, but when I come to scientific realism, yeah, I had lots of arguments against him, yeah. He was also someone of faith. Yes. He said that his faith was in tension with his philosophy, and then he said, he was in tension

with his philosophy. And then he said, but he liked it that way because it made him think of great philosophy or something like that. I forget his exact words. I can find a quote. I'll place it on screen. Did you ever talk to him about faith? No. No, no, we never did, no. What was it that changed you from a Protestant to a Catholic? That was a long, slow process. I think that, um, It's very hard for me to explain, really. I mean, I started going more and more to, you know, at a time when I was not really very into being into religion. I would go to Mass first at Anglican, you know, Episcopalian churches and then Catholic churches, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone. And it was the, I think the ritual was drawing me.

And the idea that it was continuing a 2,000-year-old tradition in a very, you know, almost, what should I say, stable, standard way, the idea that the same mass was celebrated every day for more than 2,000 years, right? Well, not more than 2,000 years, but let's say 2,000 years, right? And, you know, there were these, and of course I knew all the bad things about the history of Catholicism, but I also knew the really inspiring, got more and more inspiring stories about saints who were rebellious, like St. Francis, who had, you know, was very rebellious against the establishment, and so it was all very intriguing, very intriguing for me. I think Protestantism is something that's very bare and minimalist in general, right? And but, yeah, then I, one summer I was going to go to Mexico and I thought, oh, I might go to Master and so on in Spanish, and I won't be able to follow it very well. So I went to the priest on the campus and said, do you have a copy of the Order of Mass that I could take with me? And he says, you don't know the Order of Mass?

And I said, no, but I was just like to take it with me. And I didn't want to answer him. I didn't want to talk with him, really. So he gave me a copy, and I said. But then in the fall, I saw there was every week. day, there was a little mass, a little get together with a different piece of Jesuit on the campus and I started going to it. So all I can say is that's what happened.

I let myself be drawn into it, so to speak, right? maybe for, I didn't see that it was any better to be Catholic or Protestant. I didn't see there was a better or worse about this. And maybe that's partly because I disregard it to theology. There are differences in theology between the two, but they are not what matter to me. Okay, you said you let yourself be drawn in. A criticism from some theist to some atheist to some atheism. is that, look, as an atheist in order for you to see God or to experience God, you have to

allow yourself to experience God. You have to be open to it. Is that what you mean when you said that you let yourself? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, yeah. You have to let myself be open to it. Yeah, right. And it was a kind of adventure, you know. Whenever I traveled anywhere, I would go to Mass, you know, in the morning somewhere, see how different it was, how different was in different countries. And, you know, also, you know, experience sometimes, yeah, yeah. Boss, how do you want to be remembered? Well, maybe, you know, as a philosopher who was not just talking about scientific realism.

Or constructive empiricism. Or constructive empiricism, right, yeah, right. It's been an honor to speak with you, sir. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Kurt. There was just a pleasure to talk with you. A real pleasure. Kurt here, I'm glad you enjoyed that. I'm inferring that you enjoyed that because you're continuing to watch all the way up until this point. Now, it takes a huge amount of time to prepare for interviews like this. I study the guest's papers. I study adjacent fields. I construct

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