Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal's Presentation at Polymath

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Curt Jaimungal was asked to give a presentation at a new "thinkubator" called ekkólapto® for their event, titled "Polymath" (Feb 2024). It was an exclusive event that wasn't recorded but someone captured it with their cell phone and with permission is being released here. Thank you to : - @Tyfoods4Thought (Ty Roachford) for recording this. - Amjad, Bijou, Brad, Curtis, Dan, David, Kristine, Matthew, and Zach for your comments on the first draft of the talk - Importantly, thank you to Adam Cha for putting on such a fantastic inaugural event, and distinctive incubator (technically a "thinkcubator"). More information is here: https://ekkolapto.org and Insta https://www.instagram.com/ekkolaptoTIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 Introduction - 00:00:23 Curt's Speech at Polymath THANK YOU: To Mike Duffey for your insight, help, and recommendations on this channel.Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE- PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE- TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerchFollow TOE: - *NEW* Get my 'Top 10 TOEs' PDF + Weekly Personal Updates: https://www.curtjaimungal.org- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofe...- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeve...- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt- Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs- iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast...- Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b9...- Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeveryt... Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWI...

I was asked to give a presentation for an event called Polymath by a new incubator, Ecolapto. This wasn't a recorded event, but someone in the audience did film it with their cell phone, and I have permission to release this here. Forgive the audio, as there were over a hundred people at this event, and there was a large buffet section on this side of people unrelated to the event. I want to talk about what's fundamental. But first, I want to talk about a problem that I've been thinking about for some time and is relevant to this crowd.

We have this event here called Polymath, but then where are all the polymaths? Where are the Da Vinci's and the Benjamin Franklin's and the Weibnizesses of our time. What is preventing this syncretic integration of previously dissimilar fields? Who am I? My name is Kurt Jaimungo and I have this podcast here called Theories of Everything. It's a channel where I interview some of the brightest minds, some of the most well-researched people top of their field, and I speak to them for four hours long, and I go into these in-depth podcasts. You can search it on your phone, and I've noticed a few problems. So number one, the state of current scientific research. It's one of incremental progress, where as a student, you're disincentivized from large ideas.

So there's this lack of paradigm shifts. Another issue is that even when you're no longer this bright-eyed, bushy-tailed student, and now you're a tenured professor, you have this reliance on this big daddy grant agency, and you better want what the grant agency wants, or convince yourself that you want what they want. Another issue is that we have this fragmentation and siloing, so over-specialization, and people in fields that are neighbors to one another, can't understand one another, and in my bailiwick of theoretical physics, you have this parroting of technical jargon, which is thrown at you like a beguiling nematode. And you just apply more and more Greek letters,

and that ascribes credence to your theory. You don't even say, oh, let me change this by a little bit. You say, let me change that by an epsilon. Let me add a delta here. And then what happens, again, this is an archetype. There's reality, and you can go straight, or you can go to the right to go to straight theory. That's what's happening. And that's where all the physics students are going.

Except this guy. So, problem number two is that we lack a unified framework. We lack a, in physics, a unified framework is called a theory of everything. It means how do you take the quote-unquote theory of the large gravity and then merge it with the theory of the small. We don't have this, and that's why we don't know what's going on inside a black hole or

the singularity or before the Big Bang. Can you say before the Big Bang if that's when time started? These questions we don't have answers to because we lack a unified framework in physics. What is a unified framework of biology? People don't even ask

questions like that. What's a unified framework of philosophy? Or of chemistry? Or of architecture? Or of well, of all of these combined? And because we lack that, we lack a way of comparing people or their theories. The top-sighted neuroscientist in the world is Carl Friston.

He has a theory called the free energy principle. What does it mean to compare him to the top-sighted linguist of all time? What does that even look like? It's apples and oranges, people would say. That's a compound. Okay, so we like to think that it's all these different perspectives because we're these hippie, pro-social, liberal people that don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. So no, no, you have some element of the truth. You're not wrong, you're partially wrong, you're

touching the same elephant. Yeah, okay, this is just, this is just an over-trodden metaphor that people replicate and you want to sound profound with your front and pose it. So maybe some people are actually facing a wall. Maybe some people are just, they're unfortunate, you don't want to replicate that. Also, you should be on the inside of the elephant because we're on the inside of the universe. You should be in the spleen of the elephant because we're in the inside of the universe. You should be in the spleen of the elephant. There's no boundary to an elephant as well because it's the universe.

There's many problems here. So instead what happens is we form our own bespoke Veltan Shalini. So you think, okay, I like what I see from this person and I like what this person has to say. I don't like that. And you form your own little plate at a buffet table like you pick and choose. Or alternatively, you can take a psychedelic and then you can

just go to the psychical kaleidoscopic void and emerge enlightened self-assuredly, which is an oxymoron. So I think what we require is an umbrella review. At first what I was thinking is a meta-analysis, but a meta-analysis isn't a whole summary of a field, it's a summary of a subfield of a subfield, and it's a snapshot at a particular time. A meta-meta-analysis is something called an umbrella review. And if you look this up on Wikipedia, it's two paragraphs.

They're just two, because to me this is one of the most topics of our time two paragraphs Kanye West beefing with Taylor Swift has more paragraphs than this and it also says in medical research

it's just fascinating that this isn't a topic in philosophy or in physics it's just relegated to this now because of all these problems we're just locally inefficient, maybe even insufficient. So there's hope though.

Because at the boundaries of these fields there's insights and there's low-hanging fruit, even within the subdivisions inside a field and the boundaries within there. So for instance, in math there's something called category theory. It's supposedly the most abstract of all math and subsumes all the other fields. Actually it's just a way to translate between fields.

Okay, so a project I'm working on is using this, using category theory to solve some of the previous problems of umbrella reviews and relations, at least to what can be rigorously defined. This is another project of mine I'll talk about at another point. Maybe off air. I saw egg points. Yeah, we'll talk about those later. So, okay, the idea is that people don't like to be labeled. Don't label me, bro. But

actually, you don't mind being labeled. You just don't want to be prematurely and falsely labeled. You don't mind if you're dynamically labeled or more correctly labeled. So something you can do is without your preconceived notions, give it to a computer and say, you generate to me some labels and you give me a scheme. That's effectively what unsupervised learning is. It's literally called unlabeled data. But there's another problem.

So this is a metaphysical problem that I think about of arrogance. How do we avoid the arrogance that characterized the Tower of Babel? So this looks like a joke, but it's a deep, deep, deep problem. And I think there's three ways out of this. One is instead of simplifying, people will say, why don't you tell me your theory, Will, in the language of a five-year-old? Yeah, but so much is lost in the sieve of simplification. Rather, what we require is a Rosetta Stone, a translation between different fields.

Another issue is we're thinking about, well, where does science go? Not many people think about this. We tend to think that science is this static, scientific method in sanity. This is false, by the way, but this is what's taught to you as science. I think about, well, where is science moving toward?

I call it Abbage Gnosisgnosis. Abhij means the knowledge of the East and the knowledge of the West is gnosis. And I'll end with something else that needs to be thought about. The whole enterprise has to have values in it. So what's fundamental

to a polymath? Well, we think it's what's fundamental to a regular person. Maybe it's the particles that comprise you or the laws of physics. Or maybe it's computation. Some people think that. Or it's consciousness or it's math at the fundament. Or some people think, hey, maybe it's love. Caring and attention, that's interesting. That comes from Heidegger. Heidegger thought attention came before consciousness. So I've been thinking, maybe instead of fundamentalities, it's best to think in terms of

necessary and sufficient conditions like the mathematician's axioms. And a necessary condition, it seems to be something aspirational, something hopeful. So look, you came here, you're hoping that this is going to be worth it for you. You hope that when you do science that you're doing something truthful and you hope that that truth is tied to something nourishing. You hope that when you love someone

that they love you back, you hope that the hurt inside is a little diminished over time. And you hope that maybe there's something more to this whole place. It's not just when we die, that's it. Or if you believe that, then you hope that hopefully this is sufficient,

what we have here. There's this phrase, there's this phrase in our culture, there's such cynicism, you're without hope, or hope is for the weak. I think hope is for the strong. It's so hard to be hopeful.

And Leonardo da Vinci and Leibniz and Benjamin Franklin, they all were. It's a hope. It's literally a hopeless place to be without hope. Feynman talked about this in a quote that's not talked about much, which is different words. He said, logic is not all. One needs heart to follow an idea.

If people are going to go back to religion, what are they going to go back to? Meaning that we're modern people. Are we going to go to the Catholic Church or this mosque or this temple? It doesn't appeal to me. But yet we need this. How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars,

logic and heart, of Western civilization so that they may stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid. Is this not the central problem of our time? Thank you.