Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: Reality Is Bloody Terrifying

Starting point is 00:00:00 Right now, for a limited time, everyone's part of the Buick team, even you. Buick's employee pricing for you event is on now. Get a purchase credit of up to $3,168 on a 2026 Buick Envision. Surround yourself with signature Buick refinement from an available massaging driver's seat to an expansive panoramic moonroof and a stunning ultra-wide 30-inch diagonal screen. Don't miss Buick's employee pricing for you event. Visit buick.com.ca for more details. Recently, I spoke with Slavoy Zhijak on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:00:33 What separates you, the recent Slavoy Zhijsik of the past decade interested in quantum mechanics? From a Hagealian Deepak Chopra. It was an extremely fun podcast. You could check it out. One of the reasons he chose to come on The Thories of Everything podcast is because this is a podcast on the nature of reality, which is a notoriously vague phrase. What is reality? And what does someone mean by nature? Let's briefly define terms.

Starting point is 00:01:01 When I say that I'm investigating the nature of reality, other than this being an extremely deep pickup line, I usually mean that I'm exploring something fundamental about existence, truth, and the structure of the universe. Almost every single one of those words is important from fundamental to structure to exploring. In terms of topics, philosophically, it means that we have metaphysical questions, like what is real? So the famous debate between realism and anti-realism lands squarely here. Do objects exist independent of perception? That's an idealism, materialism debate, for instance. And what is the nature of space, time, causality?

Starting point is 00:01:42 This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Now physics, when people speak about fundamental physics, they usually mean fundamental laws governing reality or governing physical reality, such as quantum theory or the standard model or relativity, usually general relativity, cosmology also. Something like chemistry, even though it's derived from physics, is not considered to be fundamental. On the mathematics end, we're investigating whether mathematical structures are discovered or invented, whether they underpin physical reality. So mathematical platonism versus formalism, actually we talk much more about the foundations of math in this episode with Harvey Friedman here,

Starting point is 00:02:17 who's the inventor of something called reverse mathematics. In cognitive science, fundamental questions means studying perception, consciousness, how the brain constructs reality, questions like subjective versus objective reality, and is there a third option? Is there something like transjective that mediates between these, or is not expressed by any of these? Now, in theology and also in mysticism, it means to explore reality that extends beyond, potentially beyond a physical, including concepts of God, spirituality, non-material existence. Then there's also an entire class that I just call why the laws, a more meta question, which is, why does the universe follow laws at all? And if it's even well defined to think of the universe as a single set, perhaps reality is patchworked with consistency in overlapping regions, but yet it's inconsistent somehow globally.

Starting point is 00:03:07 I talked about that in this reverse elephant lecture for the Mind at Large conference. That is, maybe it's ill-defined to think of reality as a total, like capital R reality, as in here it is, here's reality. You also get into questions of fundamentality as distinct from reductionism. So often people will conflate what is most fundamental to what is at the most reduced layer. Like they may point to some subatomic particles as being fundamental. Well, it's useful to define reductionism. In order to study some object or structure, you could potentially completely do so by analyzing the parts and the interactions between the parts. That's reductionism.

Starting point is 00:03:51 Fundamentality may seem like it's about the smallest part. However, you could be fundamental about space time. and space time itself is decidedly not small. No one fat shames the bulk. But fundamentality is different. Something is fundamental if its existence isn't in virtue of anything else. So what does this mean? Well, the laws of nature themselves may be fundamental,

Starting point is 00:04:15 but it's not like they're a part of something else which you break down and then you get little pieces of the laws of nature. That's why I was insisting to Slavoy-Zsijsac that when I study what's fundamental, I do so withholding judgment as to whether reductionism is true or false. I find many people on the idealist end, so those who take consciousness as primary, or even on the materialist end, that they apply a reductionistic framework and find that everything is made out of consciousness or everything is made out of the physical and form their philosophical

Starting point is 00:04:45 substance abutment there. Many people also conflate fundamentality with reality and say that if something isn't fundamental, then it's not real, but that would be quite odd because that would imply that almost all of what we mean by real, the word real loses its meaning. So the mountain is not real, the grass is not real, because the world is not made up of mountains and grass. There's also a similar issue going on with people who say that it's all information, that reality is merely information. This is something that I speak about with John Norton, so you can feel free to watch this podcast for more. It's difficult to conceive of what's fundamental as completely disembroiled from reductionism. But it is necessary because reductionism may be incorrect as a guiding principle toward

Starting point is 00:05:30 understanding the nature of reality, despite reductionism's clear practical success. Remember, practicality also doesn't imply fundamentality or reality or what have you. These are all distinct concepts. Of course, different fields approach the question with different methods, and there's empirical science, which uses logical reasoning, and then there's phenomenology, there's meditative drug-induced introspection, there's hermeneutics, There's even art. That last one, art is super interesting.

Starting point is 00:06:00 Even though this podcast is aimed towards researchers in cognitive science and logic and math and physics and computer science and so forth, it's extremely technical. It has a large following of artists. And art is something that I may explore more directly on this channel. It's all indirect, and so I'm grateful to all you artists who are watching. I actually talked about that here in this interview of me

Starting point is 00:06:22 with Shalaj from No Time. If you're interested, it's in the description. I realized that recently because at the Institute for Arts and Ideas, there were a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds, and many artists came up to me talking about that they liked that the podcast focuses on the nature of reality and fundamentality. Now, much of this video is circling around a term that metaphysicians call grounding. When someone says something holds in virtue of something else, like I said earlier,

Starting point is 00:06:51 then it's grounded by that something else. this is a distinct notion from dependence, it's distinct from causation, it's distinct from logical entailment, which is covered more in this girdle's Incompleteness theorem video that I have about the misuses of it. Now, X is true in virtue of Y means X is grounded in Y. So an example would be the ball is colored, is true in virtue of the ball is red, or the theories of everything channel is great, that holds in virtue of my perfect jawline. Now this leads us to a clean definition of fundamental. Fundamental is what's ungrounded. You may find this strange, but there may be no ground at all. There are many philosophical ideas of

Starting point is 00:07:37 emptiness, and you could also think of if there exists some bottom layer, then that means that there's nothing beneath it anyhow. In topology, you learn that there are only four distinct connected one manifolds. There's the circle, there's the infinite line, there's, there's There's the interval, and then there's the ray. The ray for my purpose here is going to be the same as the interval, because at any point it has another point that's smaller than it, unless you're at the base level. So I'll just collapse these to three on screen.

Starting point is 00:08:08 There's the circle, the infinite line, and the interval. This is Muchhausen's Trilemma, made topological, meaning that if you ask for justification for something, you're presented with three options, either that there's circularity. So that is, if I ask you, why do you say X holds? You're like, because Y holds. Okay, why do you say Y holds? Because Z holds. Why do you say that Z hold? Because A holds. And then I ask you again, and you say, because X holds. Well, you would call that circular reasoning. You wouldn't accept that.

Starting point is 00:08:39 There's also an infinite regress, which is the child who asks Y infinitely over and over and over, which you could just say there's always some other fact that so-and-so is true in Virtua. Or you could say there's a base layer in reality, you have to just admit is unjustified.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: Reality Is Bloody Terrifying

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