Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - George Ellis: Hawking's Co-Author on Why Reductionism Is Dead

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

SPONSORS: - Sign up for Claude today at https://Claude.ai/theoriesofeverything and checkout Claude Pro — which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription. - I subscribe to The Economist for their science and tech coverage. As a TOE listener, get 35% off! No other podcast has this: https://economist.com/TOE George Ellis is one of those guests who makes you rethink what you thought you understood. Co-author with Stephen Hawking of the singularity theorems, he's spent decades insisting on something most physicists won't touch: that reductionism is simply — patently — false. Physics doesn't decide outcomes. Context does. The thermostat sets the temperature. The algorithm tells the electrons what to do. The physics is the servant, not the master. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/de803625-87d3-4300-ab6d-85d4258834a9 - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Reductionism is Patently False - 00:07:37 - Top-Down Causation Mechanics - 00:13:46 - Modular Hierarchical Structures - 00:21:00 - Causation at Emergent Levels - 00:26:56 - Universal Biological Principles - 00:36:07 - Critiquing Penrose and CCC - 00:42:41 - The Physics of Infinity - 00:48:50 - Agency and Physical Constraints - 00:56:08 - The Open Future - 01:07:23 - Bioelectricity and Goal-Directedness - 01:12:28 - Evolving Block Universe - 01:19:32 - Multiverse as Metaphysics - 01:24:49 - Moral Realism as Data LINKS MENTIONED: - George's Papers: https://inspirehep.net/authors/1010821 - George's Books: https://amazon.com/stores/George-Francis-Rayner-Ellis/author/B00287T2PW - Arrow of Time [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.7291 - Why Reductionism Does Not Work [Paper]: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-63187-4_6 - Recognizing Top-Down Causation [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2275 - Top-Down Causation by Information Control [Paper]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3226993/ - Causal Closure of Physics [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.00972 - Issues in Philosophy of Cosmology [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0602280 - The Music of Life [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0199228361?tag=toe08-20 - How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/3662498073?tag=toe08-20 - Large Scale Structure of Space-Time [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0521099064?tag=toe08-20 - The Selfish Gene [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0199291152?tag=toe08-20 - World Beyond Physics [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0190871334?tag=toe08-20 - Contextual Wavefunction Collapse [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.08171 - A Theory of Biological Relativity [Paper]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23386960/ - Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness [Paper]: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf - Denis Noble [TOE]: https://youtu.be/K-U-ZB3yHK4 - Michael Levin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s - Sean Carroll [TOE]: https://youtu.be/9AoRxtYZrZo - Quantum Physics, Digital Computers, and Life [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06306 - Dynamical Emergence of Biology from Physics [Paper]: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2018.01966/full - The Whole Truth [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0691231354?tag=toe08-20 - Endless Forms Most Beautiful [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0393327795?tag=toe08-20 - Topology and Cosmology [Paper]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02450512 More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The physics is enabling it to happen. We are telling the physics what to do, and the physics does what we tell it to do. The physics isn't deciding anything. Most physicists would say that everything reduces to particles obeying fundamental laws. Professor George Ellis, who co-authored with Stephen Hawking, Singularity Theorem, which extended Roger Penrose's original theorem, to cosmological settings, believes this is utter nonsense. The physics is a servant, not the master. Much like Yakir Aharnov, this is the professor's only ever podcast appearance.

My name is Kurtzai Mongol, and on this channel, I interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Today, we discuss top-down causation and why Ellis says reductionism is patently false. We also discuss his evolving block universe, what that has to do with free will, why there is no wave function of the universe, which is something Carlo Rovelli also says, and also we close with this. legendary cosmologist's views on consciousness and why evil is a matter of fact, not opinion. Professor, what caused you to think about causation? I caution you think about causation. I started off in general relativity where it's very, very simple, but I then got interested in biology, and my friend Dennis Noble and I spent a lot of time looking

at biology. And biology is much more complicated than cost biology. Physiological systems are immensely complex. They have these many, many different levels from the atomic level through atoms, small molecules, macromolecules, cells, tissues, physiological systems, and the system as a whole. And this is immensely complicated. Not only is it complicated in its structure, but in its dynamics. The way that an organism grows from a single cell into an adult is truly astonishing and immensely complex. And what is causation? What is causation? Causation is when you make a change. Either you make a physical change or you'll make a physical change or you'll make it counterfactually, and then you find that reliably a specific outcome happens. So you do

experiments and you measure what happens, and then the classic case is, apart from Galileo and dropping balls and that kind of stuff, the classic case is smoking causing lung cancer. And that has been the study of a lot of study, and it's completely reliably proven, and it's much, much more complicated than Galileo dropping a ball from the top of a tower, but in both cases, it's causation. Counterfactually, it happens if you don't actually make a change, but you can prove that the change would take place, if the thing would happen if you did it. And so you can do all sorts of calculations in theoretical physics. Well, for instance, just a simple example,

the spacecraft has just gone off and come back, and that was calculated beforehand, and then it happened exactly the way that they predicted it were. You mentioned that in causation that we have to intervene and then we're able to demonstrate that A caused B, but is intervention or an agent necessary for, causation or just necessary to determine that something was caused, but causation could have been there prior to an agent.

Causation is taking place all the time. And there's, I could explain the different kinds of causation. There's physical causation, which is due to physical laws. There's causation when there's a purpose in it. And all of biology has purposes. every single living animal and technology, and so there's purposeful causation. Then there is a symbolic causation,

and symbolic causation is what enables us to have language, to have society, and so on, and everything that we do, I'm speaking to you in a language, that's a symbol of what's happening, and symbolic causation is the basis of modern society. Then the next one is abstract, causation, and abstract causation takes place when abstract things cause things. And this is the

basis of computing. Computing is symbolic, but it's also abstract. And you're using abstract symbols to calculate things. And then computers actually have agency. For instance, there are automatic landing systems in aircraft. There are factories which are controlled by computers. So it's not just human beings and animals that have agency, it's also computers have agency. And the final form of causation is social causation, and this is when in a society, people make decisions and they cause things that happen. This is happening at this very moment in the war in Iran. People are making decisions, and that's causing stuff to happen on the ground.

But there's two very interesting further confines of social causation. And one is historical. And things that happened hundreds of years ago can cause things to happen today. And a classic example of that is the so-called troubles in Northern Ireland when things that happened 250 years ago called people to be murdered in the present day. And the final one, which is very fascinating, is imaginative causation, is that at the present day, you imagine something that could exist,

and then it comes into being. And as Stephen Jobs is the classic case, you imagine the iPhone, and then everybody on Earth basically has got an iPhone. And that's a case of causation into the future because you have imagination, and that's the third form of social causation. What is it about computer agency

that differs from human agency, other than consciousness, unless you also believe that current AI systems, for instance, have consciousness? Well, no, no, computers don't have consciousness. They are symbolic systems. A computer is a symbol processing system because all programs are symbols. Algorithms are symbolic systems. And computers, they have agency because they can do things, as I've said,

but they don't have free will. They do what they are told to do by whoever programmed them. So there's an algorithm. The algorithm is an abstract thing, and the computer is trained to step through the algorithm, step by step, do whatever it says. And this is a classic case of what I think you've heard, read me to talk about.

It's a case of top-down causation or downward causation. And computers are a very, very clear example, because in computers there are what are called a tower of virtual machines. And this is the structure version. And there's a physical one, and then there's an abstract one. And the abstract size, you have programs. And you have top-level programs, Fortran or whatever, Lisp, all sorts of things. Then you have machine code and an assembly language.

So it chains down through a series of, of languages until you get to machine codes and then that turns noughts and ones and that turns transistors on and off and then electric currents flow and then it chains back up to produce the outcome at the top. So a computer is a very, very nice example of downward causation followed by upward causation. And the thing is that this is where reductionism comes in. the electrons flowing through transistors do not, they enable it to happen, but physics enables that to take place.

But physics doesn't determine the outcome. It's an algorithm which determines the outcome. And so this is a classic case of an algorithm, in essence, telling electrons what to do. Wouldn't someone like a Sean Carroll say, Professor Ellis, the Python example over here, here, which communicates to assembly code, which communicates to machine code. When we're saying that something happens at the Python level and it doesn't, or that has

influence over the electron level, we're actually using a shorthand. We're calling it Python, but it's code, code in a different sense, it's code for electrons that are doing so-and-so with semiconductors. So if you actually look at what we mean, if someone was to say, well, what do you mean by thermostat? What do you mean by this and that causes so-and-so? will get down to some physical instantiation, and it's just physics in the end.

That's the reductionist claim. All these, you made a decision to do so-and-so's because of your neurons because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, if you say it's only physics, that's obviously false. If I tell you max those equations, okay, here's max of the equation, so what does that do? It doesn't do anything. Give you Newton's laws of motion.

Tell me what Newton's laws of motion or course. It doesn't do anything. It only does something in a context, and the context is what decides what will happen. Physics by itself simply does not decide what happened. Physics enables it to happen, but it causes it to happen in the sense that it is told what to do. But the physics doesn't decide the outcome. The context decides the outcome.

Now, the thermostat is an extremely interesting example because the thermostat is a very simple system where you can see very clearly what happens. and it's a typical feedback system. You've got a sensor which determines the temperature. You've got a goal which you set on the thermostat. You would like the temperature to be 40 degrees, and it's actually 20. You determine the difference, and then that difference sends a current round to a heater. The heater heats it up, and that makes it up.

So this is a classic example of feedback. determine what it is, find the difference, and take corrective action to make it correct. Now, this is a case of top-down action because this is all at the macroscopic scale. At the microscopic scale, what happens is that by turning at the macro scale, the dial on the thermostat, at the microscale, you cause molecules to move fast. So that's top-down action. The physics isn't determining what those temperatures should be. It's you are determining it by setting it on the dial.

So it's a classic case of top-down action. The physics is enabling it to happen. We are telling the physics what to do, and the physics does what we tell it to do. The physics isn't deciding anything. The physics is the servant, not the master. When I'm wrestling with a guest's argument about, say, the hard problem with consciousness

or quantum foundations, I refuse to let even a scintilla of confusion remain unexamined. Claude is my thinking partner here. Actually, they just released something major. which is Claude Opus 4.6, a state-of-the-art model. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow thinks with you, not for you.

Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle problems that matter to you. I use Claude, actually live right here during this interview with Eva Miranda. That's actually a feature called Artifacts and Non-Ombuds the other LLM providers have something that even comes close to rivaling it. Claude handles inter alia, technical philosophy, mathematical rigor, and deep research synthesis, all without producing slovenly reasoning. The responses are decorous, precise, well-structured, never sycophantic,

unlike some other models, and it doesn't just hand me the answers. The way that I prompted it is that it helps me think through problems. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at clod.a.ai slash theories of everything. That's clod.a.com slash theories of everything and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. I imagine a Sean Carroll, if I was to channel Sean Carroll here, would say something like, firstly, you're a physical system. Now, of course, you can disagree with that. But all of what was just said would just still be accounted for by the microphysics. entailing the macro physics.

So I imagine what Sean Carroll would say. I think he has an argument about that. I think you have arguments with him as well. But please, I'd like to hear. The problem is very simple. Sean Carroll doesn't admit the downer causation takes place. No, that's simply wrong as a matter of fact. Downer causation does take place,

and there's a variety of ways it takes place. It takes place by setting constraints on lower level variables. and which many people have written about. And so a physical law would be of the form, a function of, a constraint is an equation of the form of function of x equals a constant. And you change the constant, you change the constraint. Another very simplest one is a pendulum.

And the pendulum, you've got a bob which swings, and the length of the bob determines on what orbit it does, and you can move it up and down, and you can get different rates of stringing. So that's a very simple constraint. The constraint is a macro-level thing that determines what those micro-level particles that make up the bob do.

And of course it's physics, but physics by itself enables it, but it's a technology that the physics is incorporated in which decides what happens. Now, the human brain is a very, very large hierarchical system, and it's a basic principle. Every very, very complex system is modular, hierarchical structure. All of those words are important.

And the clearest way you can see this is by talking to computer scientists, because computer sciences are the people who have actually built really, really, complex systems. And they use those principles all of the time. So the basic principle is you've got a complex thing you want to do, and it's very, very complex. So you break it up into simpler things. And those are still very complex,

so you break those into even simpler things, and you break them down until you have a very, very simple thing that can be done in a very simple way because it's now linear. And so then you then build those back up, until you get the thing that you want to happen at the top. And so modular hierarchical structures, every living thing is a modular hierarchical structure, every technological system, an aircraft, a motor car,

the internet, they're all modular computer, they're all modular hierarchical structures. And every biological thing is a modular. So the basic principle for constructing complexity is modular hierarchical structures that are adaptive. And downward causation, takes place in a couple of ways. One is by setting constraints,

and another simple example is just an electric circuit with a battery and a light bulb and a switch. And you open the switch, you close the switch. And it allows the current to flow, or it doesn't. And when the current flows in electrons, fly, and so on, you are controlling what happens at the lower level. That's absolutely clearly top-down causation. No question about it.

Now, the other way that top-down causation takes place is very interesting. Higher levels, you've got the higher levels made up out of lower-level entities, and what higher levels do in any complicated system is they create, modify, or destroy lower-level elements, and that's the core of a huge amount of biology. gene regulatory networks are there to create proteins. So the system as a whole, the gene regulatory networks are very complicated thing which reacts to high-level conditions, and it is built in such a way that it will generate proteins.

Modifying them takes place all the time, and the classic example of that is developmental biology. which you have a set of cells, and they're all basically the same to start with, and then in the fruit fly, for example, at different places, signals get sent, positional signals, which tell different genetic circuits to turn on and off at different places, and that creates all of the body plan of a fly, a mouse, and a human being. It's where we get our backbone from. And so that is, and what happens there is cells are changing their structure. It's cell which starts off, cells start off pluripotent.

They can become anything. But these processes turn cells into specific things into blood, cells, neurons, and so on and so on. And so things are created, they're modified, and they are destroyed. And apoptosis is programmed cell death. And for instance, when our hands are developing, initially they're all joined together, and then the cells between are destroyed, and that enables our fingers to be separate from each other. And so these are three different kinds of things that take place, and they take place in physics as well, and in organizations.

These principles are extremely general, and there's an organization analogy for all of them, and the organization, one is very interesting, when an organization, let's say the Boeing aircraft companies, a huge modular hierarchical structure, very, very large. And what happens is take, for example, the employees. There's a process for letting employees join the company, and you select who's going to join. That's the process of bringing in.

Once they're members of the company, you train them. You train them into a specific task, and that means you're modifying them. By the time you've trained them, they're not the same as they were before you started training them. And then there's a process of assessment. And either they make the grade, in which case you keep them, while they don't, in which case you boot them out.

And so this process of higher levels selecting what happens at lower levels. It happens in technology. It happens in biology. It happens in organizations. As I say, these are very, very general principles which apply across the board in truly complex systems. And there's not the slightest question that downward causation is taking place in any of these cases. I subscribe to the economist. Their science and their AI coverage is among the best I've found anywhere. And I say that as someone who reads plenty of it. I'll give you some examples. They just ran an

analysis on how attitudes towards science are changing in American politics and what this means for research and funding in scientific institutions moving forward. This sort of high-quality reporting is fantastic. They even covered how dark energy may be weakening over time. Now, if that holds up, it completely changes our understanding of the universe's fate. If you watch this channel, those are exactly the kinds of questions that we explore every week. I subscribe to the economist because their science and their AI reporting regularly surprises me with how deep it goes. and they're also, of course, known for global affairs, both political and economic reporting.

They are top tier, and interestingly and flatteringly, Toa is one of the only podcasts that the Economist partners with. So as a listener, you get an exclusive 35% off. That's not a deal that they have just anywhere. Head to Economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's Economist.com slash TOE for 35% off. Okay, let's imagine we have a membrane here, and then let's say we have a salt ion over here, and then we say, well, what causes this to move from here to here? The physics story would say something about the voltage at this gate, or maybe the position and the momentum plus the voltage and the electric field and so on. That's the physics story. The neuroscientific story may be something about there are neurons over here in glial cells and modulators, and then the psychological angle

would be, well, that's because we're going through grief and the world is filled with suffering. And then maybe the sociological one would say the electron move from here to here because we're in this capitalistic system, this late stage capitalism, so on, all of these levels of explanation. Are they all equally valid levels of explanation? Okay. Okay. All right, let me, first I just want to talk about iron channels, and then I will talk about the different levels. And in terms of the huge discovery of molecular biology was that biomolecules are enormously complex and they change shape. And it's the change shape of biomolecules which causes things to happen at the molecular level. Now, in each of our neurons, there are, voltage-gated iron channels, which allows sodium and potassium to flow in and out of our neurons. And these are open and close, according to the voltage across it. And so that is a case of controlling what happens in and out through the change of shape of these iron channels.

And it's all perfectly understandable. Those are voltage-gated iron channels, and there are other ones as well. Now, the structure, the very important thing about the structure, is that you're absolutely right. The brain, the central nervous system as a hierarchical structure starting off with the brain as a whole, going down through neurons,

going down through local networks and then neurons and molecules and so on down to the bottom. And the principle which Dennis Noble and I insist on is that causation takes place at every emergent level. And the causation at every emergent level, level is necessary in order that the thing as a whole works.

And so you're thinking about something you're feeling sad because someone died or whatever. That takes place at the integral level in the brain through circuits, probably oscillatory circuits in the brain. It takes place because there are action potential spike chains. Those are enabled by electrons and protons going as we've just been discussing. and each of them is necessary for the, and right at the bottom level it happens because protons and electrons are attracting each other.

Every single level in this emergent system is needed in order that the thing is the whole works. And Dennis Noble, I think you've spoken to him. Yes, I have, yes. He's done groundbreaking work on the heart. He's written a wonderful paper on the heart and the hierarchical structure of the heart and how it is pacemaker's cells,

make control the pumping of the heart. And all the different levels are necessary for this to take place. And if we put this in a larger picture, we've got our physiological structures of our bodies with all these different levels. Well, why do they exist? They exist because evolution found it was necessary for them to exist, otherwise we wouldn't be able to function. So each level is there because evolution found it necessary for them to exist.

And there are developmental systems which construct the whole thing up. And this is an extraordinary procedure because there are these three kinds of emergence. There's functional emergence second by second. We're talking to each other. Developmental emergence where we grow up over a period of 21 years from a single cell. And there's evolutionary emerge in which takes place over 100,000 years. And all of these three are integrated into each other. they each have created and allowed the other one to take place.

And so this is a very, very complex thing. It has taken place. It's taken place because of Darwin's theories of natural evolution. Relative survival race will determine what happens through these cases. And so the developmental systems are there to create each of these different levels, to create the proteins, to create the cells. And of course, cells are the first level in which all aspects of a living system take place.

And then to tissues, and then the organs, like the lungs, the heart, the eyes and so on. And then the integral thing, us as a whole, and then society, because, of course, we don't exist on our own. We could not exist if we are our own. And it's a very important feature that in order to see this thing as a whole,

you must include the society in which we live and the language by which we talk to each other. I want to get to your work with Dennis Noble shortly and your biological relativity. Also, I'm super interested as to what you brought to the table, what he brought to the table, but we'll get to that. I have a question about these levels, an odd question. So there's an evolutionary level, maybe a societal, maybe psychological, and biochemical and biochemical and so on and so forth, is there something that's objective about these levels? Or is it that if there were aliens, they may have different levels, they may parse them out

differently, almost like a preferred basis problem? Is there a preferred basis here? Because I imagine that the physicist would just say, look, even if there are aliens in other societies, we haven't contacted, and they may parse out the world differently and come up with different explanatory levels, that if you keep asking them why enough, something they would agree on, if they all had science, would be physics. So that would be the commonality. Yes. Okay, now I have written about biology and other planets. So the first thing I insist on is that life and other planets will also be based in carbon. I think there's no question about that.

Nothing else will do the job. And I know people have said maybe silicon, but no, it won't do the job. So it's because of the extraordinary structure of carbons in particular, the way that proteins fold and control things. And it's truly extraordinary. That's the one thing. And the other thing is the way that a DNA can store information. And both of those are made possible by the structure of biology. So on our other planets, I'm absolutely certain those would be the same. I'm also certain that an animal on another planet will have all of the same needs.

The different physiological systems we have are there to meet needs. Like we have to be able to think, we have to be able to see if we're going to be able to survive, we have to be able to move. Underlying all of this is metabolism. Metabolism is one of the great things that we have to keep going. We have to take food in. We have to use it, change its form, get rid of it. And so the metabolic cycles are one of the great things.

Then feedback control is another of the great principles. And this is happening all of the time. Feedback control is determining what happens with homeostasis. And the third thing happening all the time is adaptive selection. All of the time, no matter what we are, we are adapting to the environment around us. and that happens mentally, it happens physically, it happens in all sorts of ways. So these are great principles of biology.

And those will be the same on any planet. Now, they won't look the same necessarily. They may have six legs, ten legs, whatever. In a sense, that's an irrelevant detail. But they will need to process information or they're not going to survive. They will need to make decisions about what they're going to do. do in the future. In other words, their brains must be able to look at possibilities,

decide what probably will happen, and make decisions of how to act. In other words, they will have agency. And so, well, the question is what would be called life? And this, of course, has been subject of a great deal of discussion. But, and Mark 11 has just run a whole discussion about that. Of course, Michael is a wonderful biologist. Ah, right. Yes, I've spoken to him a few times as well. But in any case, I don't think there's any point in saying this particular thing is life is the whole bundle of all of these things integrated and acting together. Tell me about your work with Dennis Noble. How did that come about? And what is biological

relativity? What did you bring to the table? What did he cause, etc.? Well, you know, I can't quite remember how. how it started, but we started talking together. I discovered his work, as he says very clearly in those two books of his, he started off as a total reductionist, and he suddenly discovered that things didn't work that way, and that came particularly, he was trying to discover the pacemaker. And his wonderful work on the heart, the pacemaker, he discovered that there was the pacemaker cell which was doing this. And incidentally, I've got a pacemaker, become alive because of a place.

Uh-huh. And things, so it became clear to him that things happen at those levels. And in fact, there's two different ways of looking at this. You can simply look at a university in a biology department, and you will find departments. There are departments that study each level, the departments of physics, of chemistry, of biochemistry. So academia has discovered that there are these levels of each of the,

have got laws of what happens at that level. And that's because this is the fact. This is the way that things happen. At each level in our bodies, there are different kinds of things happening. And they're integrated into each other. And so the first question is what are the levels? And the second is how they integrated.

And there's both upward and downward causation taking place in various kinds of ways. And I think I've indicated various ways. the downward causation takes place. So you just mentioned something super interesting about the laws at different levels. And I know this is quite a nitty-gritty topic, and I've spoken to Barry Lauer and Eddie Chan

just on this one topic for two hours, on this one topic question that I'm going to ask you, which you don't have two hours for. But do the laws of physics cause anything, or do they merely describe? So I'm sure you've heard, this is the difference between human and non-humian. Look, there's no question whatever that they describe it.

And this was Galileo's discovery. Not just that they describe it, but that in most cases they can be discovered mathematically. And of course, that's one of the big puzzles, why they can be expressed mathematically. Do they cause them? That is a subtle, philosophical question and at a certain level I don't mind what the answer is. They describe it very,

very accurately and so do they cause them or do they describe them? If they cause them, it feels as a physicist it feels to me that gravity causes things to happen. Electromagnetism causes those to happen. And I find that a very comfortable way to describe. And those are described by Newton's equations, Einstein's equations, Maxwell equations, which happen to describe them. But they are our way of describing what happens out there in the world, and there's this marvelous fit of our mathematics to what actually happens out in the physical world. And then that goes through to the emergent structures of metabolism and the, the, the metabolism and, uh, thermodynamics and all of that, first law, second law, all of that.

All of these are tested. And of course, in physics there are these emergent level of laws, like thermodynamics is an emergent level. It's not a fundamental one, it's an emergent one. And my own way of thinking about it is that they are caused by physical, well, they're caused by physically effects which we can describe by those laws. I don't know if that would satisfy you as a philosopher. I'm not a philosopher.

I'm a pragmatic physicist. But they are described very, very accurately. We tested millions and millions of times, and we rely on them all the time in engineering. When we design aircraft, we design anything, we are relying on the fact that those laws of physics describe what happens extremely accurately. You worked closely with Hawking

and not closely with Penrose but you worked in parallel with Penrose and I'm going to get to questions about that especially where you defer with Roger Penrose but Jenny Wagner who I've also had on this channel mentioned that you went from cosmology but you found cosmology boring after some time

and then you moved on to neuroscience I want to know was she right? But they well no I didn't find cosmology I did a lot of work in cosmology, which I found it very interesting, but firstly, there's just a general philosophical statement. I believe one should change what everyone is doing after a while. I don't think you should keep doing this.

I think you should change, do something different, learn something new. And it takes time, effort, and so on. So I've actually written quite a few papers on neuroscience. I've written some books on neuroscience, And I think one should change it because it does get boring after a while at doing the same old thing all the time. But it's also because cosmology moved from being a very theoretical kind of thing, which I find very interesting, to being a calculational thing and a statistical thing.

And so there are these telescopes with vast amount of data. And I'm not interested in those statistics. I'm not interested in doing what I would call engineering cosmology. And I'm not interested in doing incredibly detailed calculations. I like clear short calculations, which prove something. And I've taken part in quite a few of those. I've worked in parallel with Roger, and I'm a great admirer of the work he's done in general relativity.

He transformed the subject. Tell me, what is it about Roger that you admire most? and where do you agree with him that most others may disagree with him? And then, okay, well, how about those two? Roger is an incredibly creative person, and his work on gravitational topological structure of gravitation and black holes was absolutely transformative, and it laid the foundation for the book that Stephen and I wrote

called a large-scale structure of space time. Roger has gone on to talk about the brain and to talk about conformal cyclic cosmology. And I don't agree with him in either case, and he's also talked about quantum physics where I half agree with him. I've also written on quantum theory. I don't believe in his gravitational wave function collapse.

I think that's simply wrong. And I could explain it to you, but I mean the basic reason is very simple. And then he suggests that consciousness is based on what happens in microtubes. It's simply the wrong scale. Consciousness is based on what happens in the brain as a whole, these circuits at the whole of the integral brain, and I've talked with a lot of serious brain people,

and Roger's suggestion that it happens at the scale of microchubes. that's not the scale where consciousness happens. It's simply, from my viewpoint, simply wrong. I also, I agree with him about the problem of entropy at the beginning of the universe. I think he's got a very, very valid point that inflation is supposed to solve the problem of smoothness at the beginning. It doesn't. Inflation assumes that the universe is smooth before it ever gets going. And I think Roger is completely correct on that.

where I don't agree with him is conformal psych to cosmology. And it's a brilliant idea, just in parallel in a sense with Stephen's idea of the no wave function, no boundary proposal. In Roger's case, he doesn't actually, as far as I can see, have a mechanism from transforming from one eon to the next eon, and I don't think he has a mechanism. And the problem here is he talks about infinity, and Roger Pernet, roses conformal diagrams, you can look at infinity and you can see it there. But what that forgets, and I've written a paper about this, is that infinity is not a very large number.

Infinity is larger than any number that exists. And a lot of physics confuses that. And so Roger has an eon and a connection and another one, and he says you get events happening here. they send signals to the boundary and the signals come through. Well, the problem is he uses that symbol for infinity. If it actually is infinity, then any event down here gets diluted an infinite amount, literally an infinite amount, and the amount which gets transferred from this eon to next is precisely zero. There is no way, if it's actually infinite, it's a finite amount of information.

It could go from this eon to that one. And to me that this is a conundrum which he hasn't sorted out. It just doesn't work for me. When I'm wrestling with a guest's argument about, say, the hard problem with consciousness or quantum foundations, I refuse to let even a scintilla of confusion remain unexamined. Claude is my thinking partner here. Actually, they just released something major, which is Claude Opus 4.6, a state-of-the-art model.

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and deep research synthesis, all without producing slovenly reasoning. The responses are decorous, precise, well-structured, never sycophantic, unlike some other models. And it doesn't just hand me the answers. The way that I've prompted it is that it helps me think through problems. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at clod.a.ai slash theories of everything. That's Claude.a.i slash theories of everything and check out Claude Pro, includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. This video is sponsored by Shortform. If you want a free trial and an exclusive $50 off their annual plan,

then go to the link in my description, shortform.com slash T-O-E. If you're like me, you've encountered books that are so dense, finishing them is actually just the beginning. Shortform helps with that. Their book guides go far beyond pastiche summaries. They critique, they add context, they include interactive exercises, and connect ideas across authors. Take Gertel Escher-Bock, or the Master and His Emissary,

two of the most demanding reads in consciousness studies on the popular market. My method is I read the guide first, then the book, then I read the guide again. So it's a triptych of engagement that cements understanding, better understanding for me. The GEB Guide maps recursive structures in a way that exhibits intellectual pliotropy where one insight branches into consciousness, computation, and self-reference simultaneously. Short form covers philosophy, science, and psychology, ipso facto, the intellectual core of this channel.

They publish new guides weekly and subscribers vote on what books get covered next. Their browser extension, shortform AI, summarizes articles and YouTube videos with a single click. Go to shortform.com slash T-O-E for a free trial and an exclusive $50 off your annual subscription. That's shortform.com slash T-O-E. Can you spell out in detail what you mean when you say that physicists tend to misunderstand infinity as a shorthand for a large number? Yeah, I wrote a little paper called the physics for infinity about this. And physicists tend to use infinity as a short hand for a very large number. Now, infinity is not a very large number.

It's bigger than any number which can possibly exist. And so to take an example on the universe, 13.7 billion years old, it's going to be, in another billion years, it's going to be 14. billion years old. Now, when will it be infinitely years old? And the answer is never. It will never be infinitely years old. No matter how old it is, it's not even the first step on the road to infinity. Because infinity is bigger than any number that can possibly exist. Doesn't matter how how long you wait, how far it goes. The universe, it is always in the future, it is always over there.

I'm assuming, of course, that the universe will expand forever, I regard as highly implausible the idea is it's going to recalapse because the dark energy is far too large. I think it'll expand forever. It'll turn out to be what used to be called a heat death, which is a very strange name for something that gets colder and colder and colder. things will stay, and barons will decay, and there will just be this darkness left in the end, but it won't come to an end.

It never reaches the end, and that's the absolutely crucial point. And that's the problem with Rogers transitions between the eras. You never make the transition from this era to the next one, if that symbol infinity means what it is supposed to mean. Do you then not by the physical relevance of ADS-C-F-T, so holographic dualities? And it doesn't need to be ADIS-C-F-T. Many people will say, well, our universe is not anti. Okay, there are dissider CFTs anyhow.

So do you find it dubious because they rely on some infinity, whether it's space-like or time-like? Well, there's a couple of things to say on that. Firstly, the trouble with ADS-CFT is it obviously doesn't describe the real universe because antideicitor space has a negative cosmological constant. Now, if the dark energy is a positive constant, it's causative. So that by itself proves ADFCTs the load of bullshit. It doesn't apply to the real universe. That's the first point.

The second point is that the idea of holography, of course, is a very, very old idea in the real world holography, not ADS-C-F-T, is a wonderful thing which you can do tests in a laboratory, but in general relativity is what we call the null initial value problem. And basically this, which Ray Sachs and various other people did in the 1970s, you've got a nal cone in general relativity, you put data on the nal cone, that is a three-dimensional surface, and the interior of the NAL cone is four-dimensional,

and it's a mathematical theorem that what is the data on the three-dimensional surface determines what happens in the four-dimensional surface. That's the NAL initial value problem. And I actually wrote a paper about this with some colleagues about, and the real holography is the fact that a three-dimensional service in general relativity, data on a three-dimensional surface determines what happens in a four-dimensional surface

determines what happens in a four-dimensional space-time. That's a genuine theory of holography as pertains to general relativity. It also pertains to electromagnetism in the space-time. The data, three-dimensional boundary, the data determines what happens in the interior, nothing to do with ADA with anti-discerid space time. Do you have thoughts on the mind-body problem?

Yeah, I'm a duelist. And I think it's actually very interesting to compare with digital computers. The mind, look, the first point is that we obviously know that the mind is enabled to work by action potential spike chains traveling through and by resonant circuits. we know all of that is taking place. We haven't got the slightest idea how that actually leads to consciousness. We don't even have the beginning. Now, this is, of course, called a hard problem of consciousness.

And the strange thing is some people try to deny there's a hard problem. Well, there is a hard problem. That's a simple fact. We have no idea how I happen to be seeing you, how we taste a grape, how we feel pain and all of that. We simply don't know at all.

all how that happens. It's enabled by the brain. What we do know is that the mind can think of things, it can plan, it take decisions, and I would certainly insist that it has free will, and that's a whole other discussion which we could go into. And we certainly have agency, and I'd like to give you a simple,

a little short story about agency, Please. In a bit, in a, which this is a story which comes from Philip Ball, who's a wonderful science writer. So a very long time ago, the leaning tower of Pisa, Aristotle meant Galileo at the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. And Galileo said, gravity works like this. I've got a heavy ball and a light ball and I'm going to drop them, drops them and they fall, they hit the ground at the same time, and he says, Galileo says to Aristotle, everything

is subject to the law of gravity, there's nothing you can do about it. Everything will do exactly like that. Aristotle says, watch this, he holds out a pigeon, and he drops the pigeon, and the pigeon flies onto a neighboring roof. And he says, you see what happened there? Gravity is there. The pigeon didn't want to fall, and so it didn't fall, and it was able to do so, because it has all of the structure of the wings and all of that,

which evolution is led to because that helps pigeons to survive. But this is the whole thing about emergence. The fact that you've got those forces acting, the outcome depends on physiological structures which shape what those forces lead to. They channel causation in upward and downwards ways. And in particular, the pigeon decides it wants to land on the roof over there, looks at the roof.

It basically computes how it must fly to land there, does that, And it does that. Incidentally, I think birds are incredible. I think away they fly, they land, they fly, and I think they're amazing. And it comes back to this thing also that in each, there are these three different things. There's functional causation, which is what happens second by second. There's developmental, and the baby bird has to learn how to fly. that's the developmental process, and that's an amazing thing that happens.

The bird, they learn rapidly. And then there's an evolutionary thing that evolution learned. It's a good idea for some animals to be able to fly up to get out of the way of predators. So all of these three scales always come in, and they always work in concert with each other. Evolution, and this is something that Dennis Lotton, Noble has emphasized very, very strongly, is that ordinary evolutionary theories, theorists, many of the focus purely on molecules. Well, molecules is only a tiny fraction of what's going on.

Physiology is crucial to evolution, and Darwin knew there, Darwin's finches, they survived differently on different islands because they had different-shaped beaks because that enabled them to eat different fruit. Physiology was what was Darwin's finches were about different physiology. So physiology is central to evolution, which Dennis Noble has been pointing out. This episode is brought to you by Tellus Online Security.

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Learn more at tellus.com. Online Security, no one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. And what does this have to do with consciousness? Are you just saying that ordinarily we think that there's some interaction problem, but you're saying, no, we can have something in concert that still is distinct? Consciousness enables symbolism and enables humans to conquer the earth. So, and this is the issue in evolution of levels of selection.

and there's this whole debate in evolution. Does selection take place at the level of animals or of groups? And sometimes selection takes place because if you've got a group of animals that can run fast or they're stronger or whatever, then they're going to win. But if you have a group of animals who cooperate with each other, they can do things which individuals can't do. And then particularly if they can talk with each other, they can plan what they're going to do and they can plan technology

and they can plan, you're going to go around to the left, I'll go around to the right, and we'll catch them by surprise from behind and all that sort of thing. And so consciousness and the ability to plan gives you a huge leg up and the evolutionary race, and that's why human beings have conquered the earth. And we control all the other animals, and of course, we're destroying the earth because we're stupid, but that's another different part of the story. I'm going to be speaking to Richard Dawkins soon, and I'm wondering if you have any questions to pose to him

that you think he won't be able to answer. Well, I would like to know if he has come to reconsider his statement that genes are replicators, because as far as I'm concerned, that is simply a false biological statement. You can put DNA in a petri dish, you give it all of them, mollic stuff he needs to create new DNA or to create proteins or whatever, absolutely nothing

will happen. DNA is as a simple matter of biological fact, not a replicator. The replicators are cells. And there's an important thing about cells. They replicate everything. They replicate DNA. They replicate a lot more than DNA. And I think that's something which is simply not stated. Clearly enough, Dennis, of course, knows this. When you replicate the cell, you replicate all of the organelles, you replicate the DNA, but you replicate massive other stuff. And you replicate the metabolic systems, and those are not controlled by DNA.

A lot of what happens in the cell, the metabolic structures, proteins aren't involved. and so DNA is not involved and so that whole structure is is simply quite simply not controlled by DNA so there's a much bigger picture of biology than just DNA and to look only at the level of genes is simply missing a vast amount of what's happening in biology

This reminds me of your 2024 Foundations paper where you had holism or biological holism so are you saying that look if one was to say that the gene is what's being replicated. It's not exactly that because in order for the gene to be replicated, you need some other context. Yeah, you need the context of the cell as a whole. And one of the extraordinary things is the way when a cell duplicates, it splits, everything gets duplicated, and then the microtubules appear out of nowhere, and they organize everything, they push everything,

around, you create a new wall, and then the new cell has got a duplicate of everything, which was in the own cell. Now, that's quite extraordinary, and I'm not an expert on that at all, but I think it's a fascinating kind of thing. And these microtubes, they're like little angels, which appear out of the blue, organize everything, and then disappear again. And that's astonishing. Now, one other thing, which I think is very important, and it's a slightly different but I think it's important to say, is that it's very important to remember that the interior of cell is an incredibly chaotic place. It's the molecular chaos.

There are billions of collisions a second taking place within the cell. It's not a quietly organized place where things happen in a very organized kind of way. There's a huge amount of chaos, the molecular storm, and molecular machines have been developed which extract energy out of the molecular storm. things like Kinesen and Dinean. And so that's an absolutely fascinating part of what goes in the cell. And to think that it's a very quiet thing where things take place on a highly regular ordered place, this simply isn't the case at all.

Is the future open? Yeah. Now, this is part of the business of four. will. But Stuart Kaufman, have you ever talked with Stuart Kaufman? Yes, actually, yes. And I'll speak with him again in person. So the last time was over Zoom, but there was some connection issues. That's a great podcast. I'll place that on screen for people who want to watch. The thing about it is to make clear that the future's open. It's interesting to go to technology, because technology, evolution takes place in all of those three

processes take place in technology. There's developmental, there's functional, developmental, evolutionary processes taking place in technology. And my claim is the following. The major difference is in technology, there's nothing corresponding to DNA. And this is what Stuart Kaufman has emphasized. You can have an idea in technology, a completely new idea, which is completely unexpected. And that totally opens up completely new areas, which was simply not predictable.

And the context I like to put this into is to think about what's happening in the universe as stuff happens, in the context of the expanding universe, the Big Bang, nuclear synthesis, the large scattering surface, creation of galaxy, stars, and so on. And the question is the following. So I've got an iPhone. There's my iPhone. The question is the following. Was it inevitable that this iPhone would come into existence,

given the data on the last scattering surface? Now, I claim absolutely not. There is no way whatever that you could predict the iPhone that it exists if you knew every single thing about the last scattering surface. And the point is the following. If you take, for instance, Jim Peeble's recent book about cosmology, it goes into all of the, everything which leads to the structures on the last scattering surface. We understand all of those processes in great detail.

They lead to modulated Gaussian fluctuations on the last scattering surface. There's nothing on the last scattering surface which corresponds to a prescription that the iPhone will come into existence today. nothing. And let's ignore all of the problems that make it impossible. One of the things is supposing there was such a date on the last scattering surface, how would it get into my mind?

There's one of the things you could ask. And that is a basically impossible task if I could explain in depth. But the deeper question is the following. So let's forget all of the problems. We're going to insist that what

happens today was uniquely determined by what happened in the last scattering surface, because, or if you like at the beginning of inflation, I don't care whenever you like to say. The question is the following. Who wrote the nature of the iPhone into the last scattering? How did that get in there? And you end up with having to assume that there was some kind of, I don't know what the is, something, not physical, something with a. intelligence wrote that date into the last caption.

That's what you have to assume. If you're going to assume that the existence of the iPhone in my hand today is uniquely determined, and that by itself proves that what happens today is not uniquely determined. And it's basically also as a part of the way of seeing that we have free will, because when Steve Jobs designed the iPhone, he thought of many different possibilities for the iPhone. and he tried many different ones, the people who designed the transistors did and all the rest of it.

And this is a product of thoughtful, intelligent design. And that's what led to it. And it is not predicted by what was in the early universe. It's predicted by the fact that evolution, that the universe allows evolution to take place by setting the conditions for evolution. Evolution produces eventually human beings. human beings have intelligence and free will.

They design and build things like iPhones, computers, and all the rest. And that's the only story which makes sense to me as a way of understanding how the present-day world comes into existence. Struck Hoffman has his adjacent possibilities and you have your possibility space work. Those, to me, sound like you're both approaching the same issue from different sites. Yeah, he had the adjacent possible, but his recent, work, he emphasizes that in technology space, the adjacent possible is not continuous. You can make a sudden leap into some completely different place.

So, for instance, the CAT scanner didn't exist. The CAT scanner didn't develop as an adjacent possible to previous things like CAT scanners. It was a sudden revelation that you could have a CAT scanner, which was not an adjacent possible, So Stu's basic point that he's making nowadays is that the thing that is different, evolution takes place in technology, but it doesn't have to take place, it can jump. It can jump to completely different places.

And the same is true of the laser. The laser was a conceptual jumper to a completely new part of possibility space which simply hadn't been explored before. Now I imagine you have a response to this, that occurs to the standard physicist, which is that, okay, we can say that the last scattering surface that we cannot predict. So let's not use the word predict,

because then you have to think of the predictor, and that person or thing will have incomplete information. Okay, but that's different than saying that the initial conditions of the Big Bang or what have you, plus the laws of physics entailed the iPhone, entailed the CAT scanner. Do you disagree with that? They certainly don't entail them. They allow them. They don't entail them.

Now, if you insist on saying they entail them, so I'll write you down Maxford's equations, direct equation. Deduce for me from those, how are digital computer work. You can't do it. It's patent nonsense. And if you really insist on it,

you're assuming it's a form of intelligent design. It's assuming that there was some kind of thing which wrote that in and made it happening. It's basically a nerds form of intelligent design. I'm showing Maxwell's equations on screen or on a piece of paper and then saying, okay, how does the computer work? How does this and that work? There's a difference between some sort of pragmatic entailment that we can deduce it versus some ontological entailment. that it is produced or it is entailed? Well, if you want to believe in fairy tales, fine, go ahead. Does your anti-reductionism imply your dualism,

or does your dualism lead you to anti-reductionism, or are those to be teased apart? Are those independent conclusions? Look, reduction and emergence both take place. The problem is when people claim that only reduction takes place. They both take place. I'm not against reduction. I'm against reduction as a philosophy being the only thing that happens.

And to me that's quite obviously wrong. And just a simple example, which I've written about, deduce from a physics Darwin's theory of evolution. Okay, deduce from physics. Should be able to do it if physics entails everything. The reason you can't is because physics does not have a concept of living or death. Darwin's theory of evolution

depends on the concept of things being alive. Pick any physics textbook and you will not find on a physics textbook a definition of life. It's not part of physics. It's part of an emergent topic,

namely biology. Life exists in emergent context of biology. It does not exist in a purely physical context. It doesn't exist in a technological context. What if AI

designs better spectacles than us. Well, there's, I'm not an expert, and I do not claim to be that. A digital computer can do incredible things, but it does not have free will. It does what it's told to do. It does what their programmer tells it to do. Now, it does more than that. It can pick up new information from the outside world and react to that. it's a slight divergence,

but what I need to emphasize in talking about all of this is the crucial fact that we are open systems. And the idea that you can predict, so let's go back to Laplace's demon. I will know every single thing about every single molecule in this brain, your brain, at this moment.

Okay? Now, as a matter of fact, that is not sufficient to determine what will happen in your brain two minutes from now. And the reason is because you're an open system. And this is a simple fact. Physicists tend to not think of context. They think in just generic terms and they don't think of context. The fact that we are open systems means that new information, which we cannot predict,

is coming in all the time. In the example, I liked, there's a woman walking down the street, car accidents takes place. She's driving the car and accidents takes place. She didn't know the accident was going to take place. It takes place. Every single thing that happens in her brain from then on is different because the accident took place. And there's no way that you can predict that. Now, evolution has discovered that we are open systems and so it's made our brains predictive processing systems. And this is where Carl Fristin and all of that comes in. I believe that our brains are predictive processing. We are predictive processing system precisely because we are open systems.

It is for that reason that the placer's demon cannot predict the future of our brains. I also spoke to Carl Fristin. Now you keep mentioning people that I happen to speak to, and I want to know, is there anyone else that, since we seem to travel in the same circles, is there anyone else you think I should be speaking to regarding these topics? The most important is Michael Levin. Yes. I've spoken to him four or five. five times. This stuff is truly amazing. Yes, yes.

Well, I think elemental biology in general is truly amazing. And people like Sean B. Carroll, the other Sean Carroll, have you talked with him? No. Okay, well, talk to the biologist Carol, Sean B. Carroll. He's got this wonderful book. He talks about developmental systems and hoax genes and all of that kind of stuff. it's the bioelectricity of micro 11. To me it's a completely unexpected.

So there's the whole molecular stuff going on and RNA, DNA and all of that stuff, but he's proven conclusively. There's another level going on of bioelectricity. And the first thing, this didn't even make sense to me, and I'm still trying to understand that. But he's proved conclusively that by his experience, experiments that bioelectricity is at least as important as genetics in developmental processes. And much more than that, he's showed that there's apparent goal-directedness in some developmental

process. They seem to know, and this I do not understand, they seem to know what the outcome ought to be. Now, that goes against all that. But if he can, if he can, if he, you know, if he, he can do experiments which shows that, then I've got to change my outlook. I've got to, and this is a project I will be trying to undergo in depth soon, because it's a revolutionary kind of thing, and it's Nobel Prize winning level stuff. If developmental processes in some sense have an image of where they're going, then development isn't what we thought it was, and I think that's an incredible thing. Frozen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes.

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When I first interviewed him, the thumbnail that I placed on YouTube was the next Nobel Prize winner or something like that. Yeah. I agree, I agree. His work on Salamanders and so on where he can get them to grow second heads or whatever, it's amazing. Yeah, what is it that's so revolutionary about his work? What is it that when you read his work spoke to him that it floored you? Well, firstly, that there's a second level of control going on, which most people don't talk about,

a standard developmental biology textbook simply doesn't talk about bioelectricity as being an important part of what's going on. That's the first part. But the second point is that appears to lead, and I'm speaking very carefully, it appears to lead to goal-directed developmental processes. They know what they ought to be. Now, that's quite different from standard ones,

where we're very careful to say that the DNA isn't a plan of what will coming. It's a material used by developmental processes, and all of the magic comes from the hoax genes, the hierarchical structure of the hoax genes, which is what Sean B. Carroll talks about, and that kind of thing. But this is an area where I'm just finding my way, so I'm not going to say a great deal about it.

Can you explain about the standard argument for the block universe and then where you defer? Yeah, the standard argument for the block universe is very simple. It's a certain special relativity. You've got four dimensions, and you've got your space-like, time-like surfaces. and when you change velocity, what seems space like to you changes. So therefore, there are no preferred spatial sections in space time,

and therefore we must have a block universe because there can't be any preferred spatial sections. Now, this is wrong in multiple ways, and the first point is that a big news is that special relativity doesn't describe the university general relativity does. okay so then what people say are but that makes it even worse because of general covariance there are no preferred surfaces of time and the answer is this again is the problem of physicists who think in a context free way put it in this context every cosmological model has preferred

space sections every cosmological has preferred time sections that's what standard roberts and walker cosmologies are they've got preferred surfaces T's constant preferred time lines. And so they're simply ignoring the fact that in the real universe, real universe models, there are preferred time. And then the further point is what they're saying is completely at odds with what the plank team does. And there's that canonical picture of the origin of the universe, last scattering service. And the age of the universe is stated to be 13.87 billion years. So my model of the universe is an evolving block universe. In another billion years, that right-hand edge will have moved to the right a billion years.

Space-time itself will have grown. Space-time will have got bigger. And how will that have happened? Well, through the Einstein field equations. And one of the things which is confusing is that the basic field equations of physics can be written in various ways. The Grangean way, Hamiltonian way, but they can all be written in a way which is a time-dependent way.

In the case of gravity, it's what's called the ADM equations, the Anuette days are missing equations, and those right gravity as a space time which evolved with time. So the standard, the real view, the real situation in the universe is that space time is evolving. It started at the beginning, which was 13.87 billion years ago. At the moment, it's 13.87 years ago. It will be another billion years older in another time. Right-hand edge will have moved to the right. Now, the further, very important point is this.

This establishes a global direction of time. The direction of time passes from the beginning, which doesn't move, to the present day, which does move, and the present day is moving all the time. And there's this paradox that all of the important equations of physics are time symmetric. So where do local arrows of times come from? and the answer which I've written about is that the local arrows of time derive from the global direction of time. And one of the strange things is that at the present time

when people talk about the arrow of time they only talk about the thermodynamic one and the second law of thermodynamics, but actually there's an arrow of time for electrodynamics, for gravitational waves, for sound, for for thermodynamics, for all of them. And one of the striking things is they all point in the same direction of time,

and they all point in the same direction of time, because they all derive from the same basis, the global direction of time breaks the time symmetry. So the field equation, the physics equations are all time symmetric. Their context is not time symmetric. And so this is what I mean by a lot of physicists who think about physics in a contextless way. When you put them in the context of the expanding universe, you solve the problem. We do not live in a block universe.

We evolve an evolving block universe. We get the direction of time because it derives from this expansion of the universe. And it's actually quite simple when you look at it in that way. didn't you also say that the quantum to classical transition is a problem for inflation? Yes, that's also a problem. It's a great lacuna standard theory is that in that picture they show you quantum fluctuations on the left. All of a sudden they're classical, and there's almost nobody who writes about how does the quantum become classical. And until you've actually made that clear, the inflation is a, the way there's, the way there's,

inflation is supposed to lead to fluctuation and structure is an incomplete theory. And now, I've got a theory of, I agree with Roger Penrose that wave function collapse is real, and with my colleague Barbara Drossel, I've written papers about what we call contextual wave function collapse, and that wave function collapse is real,

but the way it happens is always determined by the context, and we give a very detailed example of that in our paper called Contextual Wayfunction Collapse. So it's an objective collapse theory? Yeah, indeed. And what that means is that essentially the Copenhagen interpretation is correct. And related to this is a further thing that I've written about

is that people, and Sean Carroll in particular, they like to talk about the wave function of the universe, and that bases a lot of Sean Carroll's stuff about. He says the multiverse must happen because of the... Well, this is obvious nonsense for the following reason. The Dirac equation and the Shradian equation are linear equations. Now, the real universe is not linear. So there's a paradox there.

How does non-linear stuff come out of a totally linear equation? and they try to say, well, it comes from the multiverse. Well, the real solution comes from looking back to general relativity. The great breakthrough in general relativity occurred when we discovered the concept of coordinate systems. You can't cover an ordinary space time by a signal coordinate system. coordinate system. You have to have a whole atlas of coordinates, and it's the atlas which covers space time,

not a single one, and that's what enabled us to discover all the topological results in neural relativity. Now, what I claim is exactly the same holes in quantum physics. There is no global wave function, that's a fantasy. There are local wave functions everywhere, and the local wave functions cover the whole space time. But there is no single wave function for a universe, which completely undercuts the whole idea of the quantum multiverse.

There's no wave function for a cat, all that's tougher. There's no wave function for a brain. And the idea that one single wave function could encompass a whole brain is purely fantasy. It's obviously nonsense, because The key fact of quantum physics, quantum physics equations are linear, and the direct and the final path integral is base in the fact it's a linear operator

on the wave function. The real physics is not linear, and the way to solve that is to have local wave functions which are not together to create nonlinear structures. You think the multiverse is nonsense. Okay, there are various kinds of multiverses. So there's an Everardian multiverse, which you referenced. There's a Tegmarcian, like a mathematical universe.

The one which, Tec marks one, the fact that something exists as a mathematics doesn't mean it's just physically, and it's just a simple misconception. I'm prepared to believe that some chaotic cosmologies will lead to different expansion. universe domains. I'm prepared to believe that. I'm not an expert in inflationary theory. But the point from, as a cosmologist, I'm a very conservative scientist. I believe that science is related to things which you can observe or which you can test. And in the case of the

multiverse, you can't see them, you can't test them. That's because there are visual horizons. You can't see any further than a visual horizon. I can say anything I want to about. I can't say anything I want to about it. You can say anything. Nobody can prove you're right. Nobody can prove I'm right. So I think you're talking metaphysics, not physics when you say we're talking about those multipases.

Now, I know this is very unpopular with some of my colleagues, but I'm a very conservative scientists in that respect because when, and I have to be, because when I'm talking about all of the stuff about emergence, I have to make sure I'm in sound theoretical and experimental basis. And all of this emergent stuff is completely so on. And so I'm very careful to stick what I say to stuff which can be tested or observed. Now, of course, the problem with cosmology is that there's uniqueness of the universe, which means we can't compare it with other universes. We can't rerun the universe, do tests on different universes. And that is, in a sense, the foundational problem. We only live in one universe and we can only view it from one space

time point on one parcel icon. That's a basic problem in cosmology. That's also part of my problem with fine-tuning arguments or anthropic principles where they assume that there's some prior distribution, probability distribution on some constants and then you wonder, well, where are we selecting this from? All we have is one example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can imagine anything you like. I can imagine anything I like. We can see up to the visual horizon, we can be influenced by stuff up to the particle horizon.

It could be, one of the interesting possibilities is space that the universe could close up on itself on a scale bigger than the horizon, in which case is definitely finite. One of the ones that I wished was the truth, but it doesn't seem to be so, is that the universe closed up on itself on a scale smaller than the visual horizon. And that's what I call a small universe. And in that case, you would see the same galaxies at different directions in the sky

at different times in their history. And I think as a philosopher, I would prefer the universe to be a small universe. Because in that case, our observation relation to the universe is completely different than in every other case. As you started to study consciousness and neuroscience, is there anything of the math from cosmology that applies or that breaks? No, I know people, I don't think there's any relation. The brain has hierarchical structures,

but it has columns, it has layers, It has different areas. It's nothing like cosmology. And I know some people try to make an analogy. I don't think there's anything there. Sir, why are we here? Okay, I've just finished a book which will shortly come out from Oxford University Press

called How We Come to Be Almost Everything that leads to our existence. And the last chapter is called, is there meaning in the universe? And then, of course, I quote Stephen Weinberg saying, the more you know about the universe, the more pointless it looks. And to me, this is such a classic example of the tunnel vision of my theoretical physics colleagues. So he looks at particle colliders and he says, I can't see any meaning there. And you look at galaxies, you say, I can't see any meaning there.

And you forget to look at your house, at your wife, at your home. you simply ignore all of the evidence from everyday life. So the question that I ask is what should count as data about the universe? And the answer is telescopes, colliders, experiments, all of that. But in addition, all of everyday life is data about the nature of the universe because we exist in the universe. And we are here. We are allowed to be here because the universe exists.

and we have consciousness, we have free will. But the much more important thing, which I will finish off with, is that I am a moral realist, and I think this is incredibly important, particularly what's going on in the world at the present time. I think that there are some things which are good as a matter of fact, not as a matter of opinion. I think there are some things which are evil as a matter of fact,

not as a matter of opinion. And so I would say part, there's a whole other thing I could go into, that what I call the deep structure of the cosmos's possibility spaces, there is a moral possibility space. Interesting. And so what is data about the universe? If you believe that moral realism is true, that is data about the nature of the universe.

And you can try to explain in various ways why that is the case. If you don't believe in moral realism, then you think it's okay. The Holocaust was okay. You believe it's okay threatening to wipe out civilizations. As someone who has spent many decades fighting apartheid, fighting oppression in this country, I'm not prepared to believe that. I can't prove it, but I believe it is the nature of the universe at a deep level, and I believe that's a fundamentally important fact about the nature of the universe.

that the unprovability is a fundamentally important fact or the moral objectiveness is an important fact the fact that there is that evil is moral as a fact the fact that moral that moral realism is true now there's just one one point that I must make clear that I distinguish in my here between ethics and morality moral realism is what is actually good or evil.

Ethics is what a particular society or person believes is good or evil. That buries with time, place, whatever. That is not absolute. It's the moral thing, the fact that threatening to kill, wipe out an entire civilization is evil. To me, it is crucial part of the nature of the universe that that is a fact. And I can't prove it, but I believe it. Sir, thank you for spending so much time with me.

Thank you. It was an honor. Okay. Hi there, Kurt here. If you'd like more content from theories of everything and the very best listening experience, then be sure to check out my substack at kurtjymongle.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episode. ahead of time, you also get bonus written content exclusively for our members. That's C-U-R-T-J-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org. You can also just search my name and the word substack on Google. Since I started that substack, it somehow already became number two in the science category.

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